Whatcha been up to?

cowboy shirt, originally uploaded by Chinkypin.

I get asked that sometimes. Mostly I say " Oh, you know. This and that." Here's some of the this n that. I made this shirt for a fella. I showed him the plaid and he looked hesitant, then cautiously enthusiastic. I showed him the cowboy shirt pattern and he perked up and said "Awright!" He approved the pearl buttons. I told him that the cuffs would have to be green on the inside because I ran out of cloth and he was taken aback. But he said "Baby, make it however you want." And when I was done with it, he put it on and said "Man! This is a sweet-ass shirt! This is gonna be my new shirt for wearing out!"

So, you see why I like it so much.

I'm Martha Stewart, Bitch!

...but really, I did use a recipe out of her pie book. It even looks like it worked. It seems to have worked so well that I'm still suspicious. I don't even know why I fixated on this recipe, maybe because to me, it looked like an impossible pie. I'd used the crust recipe before, here it is:

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
2 sticks butter
3 T sugar
2 egg yolks
1/2 tsp salt
4 T very cold water

Cut the flour, sugar, salt and sugar together until the biggest butter globs are about the size of rice grains. I mix the water with the egg yolks before adding it to the flour, but it's not crucial. Don't over-work the wet dough! Just smash it together enough to get it all evenly combined. There's enough butter in it to make it act just like play-doh. This makes enough pastry for a 2-crusted 11 inch pie. I only have an 8 inch pan, so I've got some extra. You can make the dough ahead of time and chill it until you need to use it, if you want.

Ok, well and good. But the filling sounded too simple to be true. It goes like this:

2 lemons
1 1/2 cups sugar
4 eggs and 1 egg white

Cut one lemon into paper thin slices, rind and all. Cut the rind and pith off the other lemon, and slice it as thin as you can. Toss the lemons with the sugar and cover, leave it in the fridge for about 24 hours. The next day, preheat the oven to 450. Roll out your crust, beat the eggs and mix them with the lemons & sugar, and pour it into the pie shell.  Weird, huh? There's no fat or starch in the filling, it's all about the eggs.

I can't say I had high hopes about this. I was sure the filling would do something awful. But it seems to have set up, unlike many other pies I have attempted in the past. I will say though, that you need to use a mandoline to prep the lemon with the rind on it. Don't try to make pretty slices, nobody will see it anyway. The idea is for the long period of soaking in their own juice to de-bitter the rinds. A good sharp knife is fine for the other lemon.

Top it with another round of crust. I cut the slashes in the crust before putting it on the pie, the filling is totally liquid so if you want decorative cuts you gotta do it first. Bake at 450 for 15 minutes, turn down the heat to 375 and cook for another half hour. I lay a sheet of tinfoil over mine after the first 15 min because this crust recipe tends to get burn-y faster than crusts without added sugar.


It's like a big lemon bar, with a little texture. Next time, I'm gonna add some herbs. I bet lavender flowers, or rosemary, or mint would be pretty good.  Maybe even oregano.

I've been pre-occupied

I have not been cooking anything photogenic. Potato Leek Soup is still just a bowl of grayish goop, no matter how tasty it is.

Sunchoke chips are pretty yummy too, but they look just like potato chips, in any case, they didn't sit around long enough to get a picture. It's the weather. It has been so lovely out, and my plants are doing lots of interesting things.















I have figured out a couple things since last year:








Mustard grows very quickly, but is no fun to eat. Radishes are at least as fun to grow, and the eating part is much more satisfying.


These were the sweetest, tenderest radishes I can remember ever having eaten.



Cilantro starts slowly. Very slowly. But you better give it its own pot, because it gets enormous.

Does anybody know what is making my spinach do this? The ones on the right are looking strangely anemic. Spinach is also very satisfying to grow; it starts early and grows vigorously. Hopefully, I will like to eat it more than mustard.












Speaking of vigorous growers, here are my borage plants. I read that "you won't need more than one" and boy, they were right. On the left, you see that in an optimistic spirit, I planted five.

Five. Seeds. The lefthand picture is from the 18th, the righthand picture, from the 26th. I had to pull out 2 of them, I'm calling the lettuce in the same pot a loss. Borage is very spiny, we had a windstorm and the prickers on the borage leaves savaged the lettuce while flapping around in the breeze.


But that's all right, because lettuce is another of the things I realized that I don't care enough about to bother growing. Some people say that you should grow things that are unusual or that would be expensive to buy. To some extent, this is true, but I think that one should grow the things that one is likely to eat. Yes I could buy spinach, and radishes, but it's also true that I actually do buy them sometimes. Which means that I like eating them enough to go the effort of growing them.  I never buy lettuce.

And this is my tea plant. I don't guess that I will ever be able to harvest any amount of tea from it. But I like the idea.

Oriental Field Trip

Chinese grocery stores are still very fascinating to me. Fubonn is the good one within convenient driving distance from me, and on Sunday I got a whole bunch of goofy things. I went partly because I was out of rice and vinegar, and soysauce, and partly in a spirit of adventure, and I acquired some stuff I don't usually get.

The little round cake at the left is palm sugar. I have never used it, but hopefully I will now. It tastes less sweet than brown or white sugar, is a little malty, and almost fruity. I could eat it like candy, it's quite tasty.

Pineapple cakes!!! I love these. Somebody brought us some when I was a kid, and I have had an inordinate fondness for them ever since. The cake part is very crumbly and sort of coconutty. I don't think the package is telling the truth when it says they are made with soybean oil. And when it says 'pineapple jam' it doesn't have a subset of ingredients for that. Very cryptic, if you ask me. I was super excited when I found a recipe online to make them. I haven't yet tried it, but I keep thinking about it.

Haw flakes. I got them because the first time I had them, I thought they were totally nasty, and I wanted to share how gross they were. But I find that they aren't nearly as repellant as I recall. They are slightly sweet, slightly fruity, in a tart, apple-ish way, and because they seem to be composed mainly of sugar, they are almost crunchy and granular at the first bite. Plus, they come in that super oriental paper wrapper.

Fish snacks. I actually like the ones that are made of raw dried fish and glazed with a sweet soy-based marinade. These may be pre-cooked, and they have a chili powder seasoning on them. Most charitably described as pungent. Fairminded persons would say they are totally foul. I like them on soup.

Vegetarian Mushroom Fluff. How could I pass up something that says that on it? It is delicious. From the picture, I would guess that it is made of shiitake mushrooms, seasoned and deep fried to a crisp, then pounded into a fibrous mass. In function, I think it is related to the japanese rice seasoning mixes which usually have a combination of seaweed and fish flakes in them. If the package does not lie, it is a vegan product. The flavor reminds me of a really good beef & mushroom stock, with some crispy nutty things going on as well.

Sesame paste. I hope I got the right kind. Sesame paste can be made of either raw or cooked sesame seeds. I wanted raw, but I haven't tasted it yet. It's pretty much just tahini, but the texture is a little finer. It goes in salad dressing, meat dishes and on noodles. And some baked things too, probably.

Dried shiitakes. Gotta have 'em for making soup. And chinese tamales.

Rice vinegar. Again for the salad dressing. It's milder and less pungent than cider vinegar, which is an acceptable substitute. But it really is better for seasoning sushi rice.

I got some chopsticks. These are the chinese kind. I don't like japanese style ones, they're too pointy.

Buckwheat soba. They have a grassy taste, and the texture is more assertive than plain wheat noodles. I got some fresh ones out of the refrigerator case one time, and I just didn't eat them up fast enough. The dried ones are just fine. They make a great cold salad for hot weather with green onions, ham slivers and a vinaigrette with a little hot pepper.

A couple things didn't make it into the picture: a bag of wide rice noodles, (yummy) the package of  pandanus flavored candies, (ick) and the mango drink which had little gelatinous chunks of baby coconut floating in it (woah). And a bag of basil seeds. I got an indian cookbook for 4 bucks, and it's got a recipe for a basil seed dessert drink. It looks like little tiny frog spawn once it's hydrated, how cool is that?

Sartorial Cream of Cthulhu Soup

Food and clothing are my two main obsessions, and mostly this post is about clothes. This vest, in particular. It must be the ugliest damn thing I've ever made. But it reminds me of a phenomenon I usually encounter when cooking; that of using up leftovers. Which brings me to the soup of the title.

Alas, no pictures were taken of the soup. It was a thing for the ages. For those of you who do not know the story of the cream of cthulhu soup, it was something my dad made when I was in high school. It was a cream soup. It otherwise consisted mainly of turkey feet and squid heads.

No foolin.

It was the color of a dirty eraser, was slightly curdled, opaque, and had claws and tentacles rising up out of it. I think nobody but my dad and Pete had the balls to actually try eating it. It was, as dad said, "a little strange". It has nothing whatsoever to do with this vest, except the similarity in mode of manufacture. Not so long ago, at a family dinner, something recalled the infamous soup to me, and as usual I said something rhetorical-'what could he have been thinking?' blah blah. Pete, who witnessed its birth, so to speak, described a cascading series of accidents and errors the result of which was so startling, and bore so little resemblance to the original concept that the finished product acquired a near mythic stature.

Now, I don't think my vest has anything like that degree of verve. The thing is, I could not tell you what I thought this was going to look like when I started out. I liked the plaid. The cloth has a nice feel, I thought the colors would go well with the rest of my clothes. And I had a good-ish bit left from making a skirt. But then it seemed that there wasn't quite enough to make a vest. Unless I cut it out on the bias. But then there really wasn't enough to match any of the plaids. Oh well. And then there were the darts, which changed the direction of the stripes halfway down the front. And I had to cut the back in 2 pieces, not one, so there was yet another seam. Then I thought that patch pockets would be so much easier, and maybe they would look cool if I cut those on the diagonal as well... And after that, what the hell, giant gold buttons and red topstitching? Might as well go with it.

Do I think it was waste of my efforts? No way. Do I like it? Hell yes. I have worn it in public 3 times now, and each time it has inspired me to pull together the goofiest outfits and wear them with aplomb. Clothing should be fun, and sometimes it should be downright funny. This stupid vest cracks me up. I'm gonna wear it until everybody who knows me is sick of it. Maybe someday I will wear it to pick up my nieces at school, and it will embarrass them. And if by some miracle, it survives that long, in some far distant time, maybe one of them will be a stylish young woman digging through my old crap and she will pick up my ugly vest any say Holy shit! I remember this thing! Can I wear it?

That's how I got my pants.

'Stolen' Apple Pancakes

Which is what the handwritten recipe in my mom's recipe notebook says.

I associate a childhood trip to chicago with this recipe. There was a pancake restaurant. I think I was in first grade, and I did not appreciate it. I have never been a good traveler, nor a person who enjoys meeting strangers. Going to Chicago was something I wanted to do not because I actually enjoyed the experience, but because like all children, I didn't want to miss out on anything that might be fun. How was I to know at that age that I was destined to be a curmudgeon? I was six.

The pancake restaurant was noisy, crowded, I was at a table with many strangers, and I don't remember what I ordered. Waffles, maybe. With strawberries, because we never had such exotic things at home, but I don't think they lived up to the expectations I had of them. Somebody else ordered the apple pancakes. I don't know if that was when dad first had them or what, but evidently they made a great impression on him, because this recipe showed up in mom's cookbook. 'Stolen' I assume because dad had to approximate the originals on his own.

On the other hand, while thinking about this recipe brings up memories of some very uncomfortable family excursions, the pancakes themselves, and the making of them, impart a feeling of great wellbeing. Even, I hate to admit it, of nostalgia! This was a special occasion breakfast to begin with, and later on, Dad would just decide that he wanted apple pancakes from time to time. Sometimes the tai chi group would come over, Dad would make a bunch of these things, and the house would smell like hot cooking oil and sugar all day.

The pictures are not that great, but I plead ravenous impatience to eat breakfast.

1 large apple, 2 would have been better
1 or 2 T cooking oil, canola or like that, not olive.
a teensy pinch of salt

a generous handful of brown sugar
punkin pie spice or cinnamon, if you like

I have no idea what the pancake recipe was on that card. I know that it used only white flour. It had a bunch of eggs in it. I was feeling lazy, and just used pancake mix: TJ's multigrain. It makes a fluffier, lighter dough than the ones Dad made, but I like things to be less heavy than he did. Also, do not attempt to make this in a flimsy pan or one with a non-stick coating.

1 1/2 c pancake mix
1 egg
1 cup water
a dab of oil

Pre-heat the oven to 475.

Peel and slice the apple into 1/4 inch pieces or so. Get the oil pretty hot in a well seasoned all metal skillet and throw in the apples and a sprinkle of salt. The salt is very important, it makes the apples sweat, and keeps them from being one dimensionally sweet. When the apples are a teensy bit brown, turn them once and sprinkle the brown sugar and spice over them. The sugar will begin to caramelize very rapidly.

Mix up the batter ingredients up really fast, and don't worry about a few lumps. You will actually only need to use about 2/3 of the batter. Pour the batter over the apples and cover for a few seconds. When the caramel begins to ooze up around the edges and through any little holes, remove the cover and put the skillet in the oven to finish cooking.

When the pancake is just barely done and is starting to brown at the edges, take it out, cover it and let it sit for about 3 minutes. This lets the pancake finish cooking, and allows the apples to steam loose from the pan a bit. Turn the pancake out onto a plate and poke any apple bits back into it that have got stuck in the pan. Eat with scrambled eggs and cheddar cheese.

Definitely, this is for eating with company. It will taste just as delicious by yourself, but it would be a terrible pity to have nobody to enjoy it with.

Chicken Piccata

Maybe there are 2 t's in that? Piccatta? Is it Italian? Who cares. This is lunch in 20 minutes.

3-5 chicken tenders
some butter
some flour
salt and pepper
1 or 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
half cup of chicken stock
some capers
parsley

served with papardelle and peas

Dude! This recipe has no cheese! That puts it in the minority of non-asian dishes I find satisfying. No onions or garlic either; that's something.

I prep the chicken tenders a few days in advance because I start with frozen. I salt & pepper the frozen chicken, drizzle on a dab of olive oil and leave it covered in the fridge until I want it.

Start the water for the noodles.

Pull the tough white things out of the tenders if you like. Makes them easier to eat. Heat a skillet to medium-high. Roll the chicken in flour and melt a pat of butter in the pan. Brown the chicken on each side. Tenders will take about 1 minute for each side!

Somewhere in here, the water will boil. Throw in the noodles. I cooked 'em til they were about 3/4 done, then dumped in the peas too. Less clean up.

When the meat is cooked, set it aside, and add the stock, capers and lemon juice to the pan, along with another little pat of butter. Taste it- if it is too sour for you, add a little more stock to thin it, and a tiny pinch of sugar. Bring it to a boil and it should thicken up. Turn the heat off and wait for the noodles if you need to. If you don't, then just before you serve it, chop up the parsley and add it to the sauce. If you're by yourself, I wouldn't blame you if you were to throw the noodles and chicken into the pan and eat from the skillet. I assure you, it is just as tasty that way, but I did want a slightly fancier picture to show you all.

Notes: fresh lemon juice. I keep lemons frozen for practicality, but nuking them to get the juice out also gets a lot of the bitter oils from the rind into the juice. It's ok, but given my druthers... Don't be tempted to put the parsley in too soon. The acid in the lemon juice will start to make it go all brown after about 9 seconds. Really.  When  flouring the chicken, really press it in. You want a good coating; enough to give a bit of crispyness but not enough to resemble breading. The flour that falls off and stays in the pan is what thickens the sauce later. And dagbone, I meant to brown some mushrooms in it! Oh well, next time.

"...I love my chicken...You got to know your chicken..."
 

And Happy Mardi Gras!

Cake.

I've had discussions with several people, on totally unrelated occasions about the particular magic of the word 'cake'.  I agree. Cake is a good word. It implies so many wonderful things that when somebody says "Oh, it'll be cake" they mean it'll be too good to be true, possibly better than you deserve, and in any case, there will be lots of fun and goodness to be had.

It also means something is easy, which cake isn't, always, except for the eating part. But with the aid of modern technology, cake is really not that daunting an achievement. And damn, sometimes I do miss celebrating mardi gas.

King Cake

For the dough:

1/2 cup water
15g dry milk
10g instant yeast
about 4 1/2 cups flour- I used all purpose, but I wonder now if I should have used bread flour.
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tsp punkin pie spice
10g salt- this is about a scant teaspoon
1 tsp vanilla
3 whole eggs
4 egg yolks
1 stick of butter

the filling:
about a cup each of lightly toasted pecans and whole dried dates, 1/2 cup brown sugar and 1/4 cup oatmeal. Chop everything in a food processor. The oatmeal is really just to keep the dates from turning into paste. It should be slightly chunky.

I put the dough ingredients in my bread machine. I had to add quite a bit of flour when it started kneading; I think I measured the flour wrong to begin with... But don't worry! It'll be fine. This dough should be about 25% softer than a dough you make regular bread with. You may think that it will be too sticky to work with, but there is so much butter in the recipe that it really isn't a problem.

I just let the dough machine do its thing, and when it beeped to tell me the first rising was done, (that's about an hour) I floured my counter, turned the dough out onto it, and rolled it out into a rectangle about 15x24 inches. Then I took the filling and pressed it firmly into the dough, right up to the very edges. It's ok if some falls out the sides, but you probably don't want any unadorned patches in your cake. You can eat the bits that fell out while you wait for the thing to rise.

Roll the dough up along the long axis of the rectangle. As you roll, flour it a bit so it doesn't stick back down on the counter. The middle of the roll will probably be rather thicker than the ends, so gently stretch the dough out. You need your cake roll to be at least 2 feet long. Have a greased sheet pan ready, as well as a small oven-safe dish, also oiled. Put the little dish on the sheet pan and wrap the cake roll around it. This will keep the ring shape from closing back up. Tuck the ends in and let it rise for about another hour.

The recipe this is based on said to bake it with the little dish in place to keep the ring shape, but upon reflection, I decided to take the thing out before baking. I also slashed it and gave it a bit of an egg wash, which I'm very glad I did because it made it so pretty I was literally taken aback.

Bake at 375. Mine took almost an hour. If you can make yourself refrain from flapping the oven door open the way I do, it will take less time, but you should cover the cake with a sheet of foil once it's nicely browned or it will get burnt. I'm pretty happy with how it tuned out, but I think I overcooked it. Other notes: I read a recipe for boiled frosting, which tastes good, but just slid off the cake. Just do the thing where you mix a couple tablespoons of lemon juice with an enormous quantity of powdered sugar and it'll do better. This dough seems to be a nice all-purpose brioche. I bet it would make a great french toast loaf. And the filling is not traditional. Almond paste may be what is supposed to go in it, but I liked this an awful lot. Fill it, or not, with whatever you like.

Yappy Hoo Near!

Wikipedia has an entry about Tang-Yuan that seems to pretty much line up with what I remember about them.

Last year I made some of these with mochi flour and a rather poor approximation of mung bean filling. This year, I got a bug in my ear and decided to go from scratch. And I managed to remember that when I was very small and was eating them for probably the first or second time, the ones with plum filling were my favorite. The ingredients are simple, the procedure is not complicated, but it is time consuming and labor-intensive in parts. Do not  attempt the filling recipe unless you are willing to literally stir constantly for about 40 minutes. Your arm will get tired.

Here's what you need:

2 or 3 cups sushi rice, in a large pot big enough to fit that plus about 5 cups of water.
a blender, a large colander and a piece of muslin big enough to line it with.

3/4 lb of prunes
2/3 cup cooking oil or shortening. Saturated fats will make the finished produce easier to work with.Lard is traditional, dad used duck fat when he had it.  Chicken, maybe not.
possibly a half cup of sugar, but I didn't this time, I wanted it to be a little tart.

a very heavy 2 qt cooking pot, and NOT a non-stick one.
This recipe will make enough for a whole party of squeamish people, or for a small number of afficionadoes. They are even more weird and ethnic than mochi.

Leave the rice in the water for up to a week, and at least 3 days. Unless you want to risk having it ferment, stow it in the fridge. The rice grains will absorb water to the point where they start to disintegrate. Pinch one in your fingers and you'll see. It'll crush into a coarse mush. Then line your colander with the muslin, and put the rice through the blender, using only as much water as needed to keep it liquid enough for the blender to cope with it. This will take a while. Get it as finely ground as possible, and pour it into the muslin lined colander. Tie up the cloth and let the liquid drain out (this is likely to take at least 24 hours, so put it back in the fridge), and the mass of rice paste is your dough. You should freeze it if you aren't going to use it within a couple days. I found that after draining, freezing and thawing once, it was still coarser than I wanted, so I put a glob of it back in the mini-process and ground it again, with very good results. I suspect that the freezing helps break down the grains.

For the filling, put the prunes in the heavy pan with enough water to cover them, and bring them to a boil. After about 8 or 10 minutes, they should be tender enough to put in the blender, again using as little water as possible. Return the pureed prunes to the pan and add the oil and the sugar if you want it. From now on, be prepared to stir. With the heat at medium, use a wooden spoon to methodically scrape the bottom of the pot. The correct temperature for cooking will make the puree sizzle gently but quickly as you expose the bottom of the pan when stirring. You are going to cook all the water back out of the prunes which you just put in. After about half an hour of stirring, the paste will begin to form a coherent mass, and some of the oil will begin to sweat back out of it. It's done when it is very dark and has a consistency about halfway between Jif and Play-Doh. Turn off the heat and keep stirring until the paste stops sizzling against the pan, then refrigerate it in tupperware until you want to use it.

You know, lots of fruits can be treated this way. Dad used pineapple one year, which was good, and once, there was a batch made out of dried chinese red plums. That didn't go over so well, it was full of tough, splintery fibers. It tasted good, but the texture was decidedly sinister. Very pokey. Good lord, that must have been in like, 1979 or something. Don't feed things like that to your kids, they'll never forget. Anyhoo, the thing is, after all that cooking, anything you use will have a tendency to taste similar. It's the caramelization.

What to do with it:

Take the rice dough, pinch off pieces about 2 tablespoon sized, and roll them onto balls. If the dough was drained long enough to make it too dry, just add a little water back into  it. Make little balls out of the filling, about 1 teaspoon sized. Hold one of the dough balls in your palm and poke a hole in it about down to the middle, and push one of the filling bits into the hole. Gently roll the dough in your palms to re-form it into a solid ball with no filling showing. The whole business should end up about the size of a ping-pong ball. Continue until you have as many as you want.

Bring a large pot of water to a boil and drop the tang-yuan into it. Stir them once so they don't stick to the bottom. Wait for the water to boil again. Once the water boils, turn it down to a simmer. When the tang-yuan are done, they will float to the surface. As the rice starches expand, they become more buoyant. The side that is immersed in the hot water will eventually become so much less dense than the top that they will flip themselves over if you poke them gently. Don't cook them any longer than that, the dough will just disintegrate.

Traditionally, these are served in a generous amount of the cooking water. I think that just makes them watery-tasting, so I usually don't do that. However, I have to admit that cooking them from scratch makes the cooking water actually pretty appealing. The freshness of the rice flour is orders of magnitude more delicious than frozen store-bought, and the texture is both firm and tender. You would think something made out of just rice would be boring, but that doesn't have to be so. Rice should taste like rice, and things made out of it should be yummy.

Lastly, I used olive oil in my filling. It's ok, but I don't really recommend it. The oil oxidizes or something in the cooking, and even if you use the most boring kind, the taste becomes more pronounced at the end. Like I said, ok, but definitely not traditional. Use peanut or canola or corn oil if you can't bear to use lard.

It's spring

Yes, yes, it is not even President's Day. But I have proof. Pictures, even.

My strawberry started blooming around the first of the month.

So did my rosemary.

 

And it looks like my tarragon plant is going to look really respectable. It was pretty undersized last year.

Yup, I got spring fever. Feels nice.