Improved Tamales

The first time I made tamales, I fell into the trap of thinking that it had to be difficult to make them, because they are delicious, and mysterious, and somewhat exotic to me. In hindsight, this was a pretty silly thing to assume, because like all really good comfort food, tamales are what poor people with few resources in terms of time or equipment make to feed themselves with. I'm sure the procedure outlined in my first attempt is just fine, if you want to make things hard on yourself, but this is easier, and comes out better. You do not need a mixer, just a big bowl and a spoon or spatula. You don't need to whip the shortening first, and then add little bits of this and little bits of that, just whack it all together. And for crying out loud, just use baking powder. No one in their right mind is going to turn their nose up at your tamale because it is too fluffy and delicious!

Start by putting half a package of corn husks in very hot water to soak. Weight them down with something so they stay submerged. This will make 10 to 15 tamales depending on how big you want them.

Then take

3 1/2 cups masa for tamales
2 1/2 cups nearly boiling water

Mix these 2 ingredients thoroughly, until the masa is evenly moistened. Cover and set aside for about 45 minutes to hydrate while you assemble whatever you want to put inside them. I used little sticks of cheddar and a half jar of roasted green peppers that was in the freezer. When you're ready to assemble things you will need:

More warm water
1 Tablespoon baking powder
2/3 cups shortening- I used about half butter and half bacon fat.
salt
Aluminum foil


Break up the hydrated masa and mix in the shortening and baking powder.. A wooden spoon or something else firm is good for this. When the shortening is well incorporated, gradually add enough water to give the mix a soft play-doh consistency. Salt to taste.

Take about half a cup of dough and squish it onto the center of a corn husk. Form it into a square about 4" across and put few bits of filling down the center. Roll the whole business up, fold over the narrow end of the husk and leave the other end open. Tear a off rectangle of aluminum foil and firmly wrap the tamale with it.

To cook, fill a stock pot or other deep cooking vessel with about 4" of water. Put the tamales in the pot so that the open ends of the tamales are pointing upwards. Boil for about 45 minutes or until the cheese explodes out of the wrapper and makes a mess.

 Notes:

1. Remember to keep track of which end is the open end of the tamale! I folded the foil wrappers so the ends were easily distinguishable.
2. Use fresh masa. Mine was rather old, and while the texture is great, the taste is a little disappointing.
3. You can use any type of shortening, even cooking oil, I bet.
4. Likewise, you could use stock instead of water. I was just trying to keep things simple.
5. Use enough salt. Tamales don't even have to have fillings, it's really about the steamed masa, so make sure that stuff is well seasoned.
6. Try to keep the filings well encased in the masa. Tamales expand significantly during cooking, which puts a lot of pressure on the insides. 

Expansion is why you leave one end of the tamale open in the first place. If you wrap the whole thing up as tight as possible, you're just setting yourself up to have the husks rupture and make a giant gloppy mess in the cooking pot. It's better to leave one end open to give it a little extra room at the outset. Foil wrapping helps too. It eliminates the need to use little strings to tie up the husks, and keeps excess water out of the tamales while they're boiling.

This recipe is so much simpler than the previous one that I am again considering making my own tamales regularly.

Jam Tart

  

 

The filling is just a layer of store bought jam, so there's nothing amazing about that, but the crust is quite remarkable.

3/4 cups butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups flour (about 200 grams)
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
1/8 teaspoon salt
sliced almonds
jam

optional: 1/3 cup marzipan

Pre heat the oven to 350.

Cream the butter & sugar with the salt & almond extract until the mixture is fluffy and light colored and the sugar grains are dissolved. Gently mix in the flour. Put 1/2 cup of the dough in a bowl in the freezer to stiffen up. Press the rest of the pastry into a tart pan; be sure to make the crust as even a thickness as possible. Spread a thin layer of jam over the crust. Take the reserved crust out of the freezer. If you're using marzipan, use a pastry cutter to combine it slightly with the reserved dough. Break the mixture into crumbs and sprinkle it over the jam, then add a few almond slices. Bake until the crust is lightly browned, 40 to 50 minutes.

1. I over cooked mine. I didn't want it as brown as the picture. It was also a smidge tough.
2. The original recipe says to use a 9" pan. Mine is bigger than that, which is why I decided to use a little marzipan in the topping to spread it out a little.
3. Real butter. Not margarine. Not shortening.
4. Do not skimp during the part about 'cream butter & sugar until fluffy'. This is all-important!
5. I used blackberry jam, but I bet it would be really good with marmalade, or figs, or plum jam.

This crust is both amazing and very strange. Essentially what you do is make a buttercream frosting, then mix in enough flour to make a kind of heavy spackle which you then coat the inside of your pan with. Conventional pastry has a tendency to shrink and toughen when it is cooked, but this stuff does not shrink, and at least when it isn't overcooked, stays tender and shortbready. I suspect that the reason for the lack of shrinkage is the fact that when you cream the butter & sugar, what you're doing is whipping minute bubbles into the fat. It takes quite a long time if you do this by hand, but the result is unlike anything else. The air bubbles expand in the oven, and since there is no added liquid in the recipe to evaporate out and cause shrinking, the crust retains its size and shape as it solidifies.

I used this crust recipe for a quarkkuchen a little later, with a little vanilla and lemon zest, and it was fantastic.

Chocolate Cheese Cake

  

  
Jej mades a mighty delicious chocolate cheesecake. This is not exactly the recipe she used, because she has an even harder time following a recipe than I do, but we started with the same source material, and I added cocoa powder the same as she did. You will need a springform baking pan.

Pre heat the oven to 325.

crust:

2 cups peanut butter cookie crumbs
1/4 cup butter

Grind the cookies to a powder and put them in a microwavable bowl with the butter. Zap it for about 30 seconds, then mix the butter and crumbs thoroughly.  Press the mixture into the bottom of your pan and up the sides about an inch. Set aside.

Filling:

2, 8-oz things of cream cheese
3 eggs
1 cup sugar
2 cups greek yogurt
1/4 cup cocoa powder
teaspoon vanilla extract

If you have a food processor that is big enough to do the whole recipe at once, put everything in it and process it until it's smooth. (I don't have such a thing, but I do have a blender, which worked but was not too happy about it. ) Pour the filling into the crust and bake for an hour. See note #1! It will be still a little jiggly when it comes out of the oven, that's ok. Let it cool at room temperature for an hour, then stick it in the fridge over night and it will set up.

1. My oven is known to cook very unevenly. To compensate for this, I baked mine for 25 minutes, turned it around, and baked it for another 25 minutes. Remember, every time you open the oven, your cooking time increases by a few minutes so take that into account if you need to do the same.
2. Heating the cookie crumbs as well as the butter softens the crumbs. You need less butter to hold them together than you would if you were using crackers because cookies already have a high fat content.
3. Use full fat yogurt if you can get it. The original recipe calls for sour cream, so stop worrying about the fat content. It's a cheesecake for crissakes.

So why do I keep putting greek yogurt in things if I'm not worried about the fat content? Because sour cream is not a multi-tasking ingredient. I make my own yogurt because it's cheap that way, so that's always what there is in the fridge. In most recipes, you can use greek yogurt and sour cream interchangeably, but I can't eat a bowl of sour cream and cereal for my breakfast. Blerg. Yogurt is more tart than sour cream (which I like), and you have to be careful adding it to hot dishes because it can curdle, but mostly it's easier for me to use that than planning ahead and buying a whole other thing that doesn't go in anything else. I'm lazy, basically.

Wow, it works!

  

  
I made a Rube Goldberg Machine, and it actually works! I've been knitting a lot lately, and given that decent yarn is terribly expensive, I took a notion to recycle the yarn out of sweaters from Goodwill. Which is all well and good, but it takes forever using a drop spindle.

Back when I did my initial experimentation, I had tried to figure out a method for using my treadle machine base to spin yarn, but my engineering was for crap and I abandoned the idea for several months. I was even seriously considering buying an actual spinning wheel to speed up plying the yarn I got out of secondhand sweaters, until I came across plans for building your own.

That's when I learned about scotch tension. See, when you spin yarn, 2 things need to happen. First, it has to get twisted. Second, the twisted yarn has to get wound up onto a spool or something. With the most basic type of spinning mechanisms, you spend a couple seconds twisting, than stop twisting while you wind up the string you just made. Scotch tension is a method for getting these 2 things to happen simultaneously!

As you can see, the gadget above has a spool (bobbin, in the parlance) mounted between 2 arms. The thing with the arms is the flyer. The flyer has a little wheel stuck on it, and the belt from the treadle table goes over the wheel and turns the flyer. This is what twists the yarn.

Well,  if the bobbin is sitting on the flyer, that means the bobbin is turning at the same speed as the flyer, and if all the flyer does is twist the yarn, how do you get the yarn wound up?

It is ridiculously easy: all you do is loop a little piece of string over the end of the bobbin, causing a teensy bit of drag. The bobbin will then turn just a little slower than the flyer, so that not only does the flyer twist the yarn, it rotates around the bobbin, thus winding and twisting at the same time.

The first time I read about how that works I thought well dang, that is just brilliant. I'd been looking at plans for spinning wheels that work using complex arrangements of drive belts and wheels with multiple grooves in different diameters calculated to cause various ratios of twist and take up, and it was all just too daunting. Scotch tension is so perfectly low-tech it's foolproof. Want your yarn less twisty? Tighten the string. Want your yarn to be more twisty? Loosen it. Want to make yarn faster? Pedal faster, silly!

Edit! Featured Instructable! Squeeee!!!!

This should have peppers

I saw a short, annoying video about how to make shukshaka, which is a north african dish. The woman in the video had such irritating mannerisms that I'm not going to link to it. I'll just tell you about the food instead, which was just like this, but with bell peppers in the sauce. I have no peppers today and I don't have much else in the house either. This was quick and uses the kind of things that are left at the end of the week after I've eaten everything else, but before I go shopping.

1 onion
a generous amount of olive oil
a bunch of salt
lots of black pepper
some smoked paprika, maybe half a teaspoon?
a bay leaf
a sprig of rosemary

some garlic
1 /2 large can chopped tomatoes, or a whole small can if you have that.

a number of eggs

Pre heat the oven to 450.

Thinly slice the onion, and saute it in an oven safe skillet with the oil, salt, pepper, paprika and herbs. When the onions are a little brown and caramelized, chop up as many garlic cloves as you prefer. I used 2. Add those to the pan and let them cook for about a minute. Add the tomatoes, cover the pan and simmer for about 5 minutes. Taste for seasonings, give it a stir, and crack on some eggs. Mine is a 10 inch pan, and I used 4 eggs, but the number is up to you. Bake for 6 minutes, serve with some bread or something. If you put some greens on the plate, it will look a lot fancier.

notes:

1. Don't put the garlic in the pan at the beginning with the onions. It will just burn and taste bitter.
2. The original recipe says to saute some red bell peppers in with the onions, but I kinda like it this way. It's simple.
3. I made toast to go with it, but I bet it would be good over noodles too. Or rice.
4. When they come out of the oven, the whites will still be a little jiggly. If you like them that way, eat them at once, otherwise, let them stand for one minute. The sauce is so hot it will continue to cook the eggs for quite a while, just dish them up when they reach the stage you want.
5. In the summer when fresh tomatoes are cheaper, you could use those and I bet it would taste great. You might have to cook them a little longer before you add the eggs though.

I think the smoked paprika is key to making this recipe come out right, especially since there are no bell peppers in it. Smoked paprika is usually mildly spicy, but not cayenne level hot, and you can still distinctly taste the sweet pepper flavor too. You can be fairly generous without overpowering everything else in the dish. The smokiness of different batches varies somewhat, I've discovered, so you'll need to adjust the amount you use based on how much smoky flavor you want relative to how much spicy and how much bell pepper flavor. It's interesting stuff.

Merry %$#@#ing Blah Blah!

&%$#$!

I am bah humbug, but David really wanted a hermit crab. I will name it Hubert.

Seriously?!?!

Hubert expresses my mood, which, while not exactly disagreeable, is not at all festive.

Well this is just humiliating.

 I do not like this kind of sillyness, but I am willing to acknowledge that other people do enjoy such things.

C'mere an say that t'ma face, son!

I don't wish anybody ill of the season, I just want you to know that I find most of the usual ceremonial observances terribly off-putting.

Does this butt make my shell look big?

I offer to encourage you in your particular enjoyment, in exchange for being allowed to go on much as I do any other day of the year. With more sleep. And more cookies, probably more cookies.

this message approved by the admiral.

Happy Christmakwanzaakha.

The Most Frustrating Project in the World

grrrrr....

Among other things that Mom sent me last year was a large piece of coral-peach colored silk chiffon. It's just the most lovely stuff ever. I have a pattern for a blouse that is probably from the mid 1960's, and I thought it would be perfect for that, what with the ruffles and all. The chiffon is super soft, and the shade of pink is flattering, I was all excited.

Yup. Sheer.

Then I decided the pattern needed fixing. I originally thought I'd be able to use a single layer of fabric, but I didn't like the idea of having all the seams show, because the material isn't just slightly sheer, it is totally transparent. So I thought that I'd use a double layer. So, twice as much cutting.

Then I decided that I don't like the straight ruffles that the pattern came with. I wanted circular ruffles. So, cutting bias shapes. Twice each.

Finally, I decided that if I was going to double layer the material, I might as well get rid of the button front and make it a pull over. That may well have been my only wise decision.

Cutting silk chiffon is a bitch. It wiggles around on the cutting board like a sea salp with palsy. It sticks to itself. It is so fine that it is nearly impossible to pick up. It takes static cling like you wouldn't believe. You have to iron it with extreme caution, or you will cook it to death. And the thing that made me want to wear it the most, the drapey, soft, squishy texture, makes it nearly impossible to be sure that when it's laying down, the grain of the cloth really is straight.

I think this vexed thing has been in pieces on my table since late July or early august, and it is only just now beginning to look like a shirt.

There is one thing that I am still pretty geeked about though. I figured out a method for making the bust darts in 2 layers of this most irritating material.

1. Using a fine, slippery thread, baste down the center line of the dart.

2. With the same kind of thread, baste across the width of the dart, making sure that each stitch is the same length on each side of the dart, as in the picture.

3. Grab both ends of the basting thread and pull it taut.

The description doesn't make a lot of sense, so here is a little video.

Ta Dah!

Pellets! With Lemons and Leaves!

This summer, David and I had this approximate conversation.

Him: I'm interested in learning how to cook those...pellets. 

Me: (elipsis)

Him: You make indian food out of them... You boil them...They turn into soup...

Me (further elipsis)

Him: They're little, and round. I don't know what they are.

Me: You mean beans?

Him: No! They're flat.

Me: Lentils. (hysterical laughter) "Pellets"!

Him: Whatever. They come in different colors.

Now I tease him by saying I'm going to feed him pellets for dinner. This is a good recipe for soup made out of pellets which I made because there is a cafe downtown that serves something very similar to it. It's particularly nice on a rotten rainy day. I eat it with bread and butter.

1 cup of pellets, the orange kind

1 onion, cut up rather fine

1 bay leaf

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon fresh ground pepper

1/4 teaspoon turmeric, optional, but fun

1 small carrot, cut into 1/2 inch bits

1/2 cup user-defined* leaves

juice of a lemon

Put the pellets in a large-ish pot. Rinse them several times to get rid of any dust or foreign objects. Add about 8 cups of water, the onion, bay leaf, cumin, turmeric, and salt & pepper. If you want a slightly richer flavor, add a pat of butter or a couple tablespoons of olive oil.

Bring to a medium boil for about 20 minutes, or until the pellets start to dissolve, then add the carrots and leaves. Taste for salt. Boil until the pellets are totally dissolved, and the soup is as thick as you want it. If it starts getting too thick, just add a little more water. 

Right before serving, add the lemon juice.

*User-defined leaves: I have used frozen chopped spinach, and leftover "baby power greens", whatever those were. Spinach is usually what is found in lentil soup, but there is no reason you could not use kale, chard, baby bok choi, arugula, lambs quarters, purslane, or any number of other things, as long as you remember that some leaves take longer to cook and have slightly more pronounced flavors.

Chicken and Hominy Stew

  

  
I had something like this at a very fancy wedding reception. I was initially put off by the squash, because usually things with squash in them are made too sweet for my taste (except for pie, and sometimes even then). But I changed my mind, and here is my version.

1 butternut squash
salt, pepper, olive oil

1 onion
1 carrot
2 celery ribs
1 or 2 garlic cloves
1 large or 2 small chicken thighs

dash of salt & olive oil

1 tsp cumin
1 tsp dried oregano
1 pasilla pepper (less spicy) or 2 jalapeno peppers (more spicy)
1 chili in adobo

1 can hominy

More salt to taste

Peel, seed, and slice the squash into pieces about 1/2" thick. Toss with salt, pepper and olive oil, and arrange in a single layer on a baking sheet. Bake at 400 until a little brown around the edges. This will take a while, so in the meantime,

Chop the onion, celery, carrot, and garlic. Saute them on medium heat with a dash of oil and salt in a large, heavy bottomed saucepan. Mine is about a gallon size. When the onions are starting to go transparent, add the chicken. It's fine to use frozen, I always do. Poke the chicken to the bottom of the pan and let it brown a little, then fill the pot about 1/2 way up with water. Bring to a boil, then add the cumin, oregano, and chop the peppers and add them too. Cook until the chicken is done through, then drain and add the hominy. Boil gently until the chicken is starting to fall apart and you can mash it into bits with a wooden spoon.

By this time the squash is probably done. Take about 1/3 of the cooked squash and coarsely chop it. The rest can be used for something else. Add the chopped squash to the soup, taste for salt, and cook until the soup has thickened slightly and all the flavors have blended, about 15-20 minutes.

You should really eat this with tortillas and fresh cilantro, but I didn't have the energy to make tortillas today, and I was out of cilantro. More thoughts:

1. The original version of this used port rather than chicken, and I think I like that better. If you use pork, use a nice fatty cut.
2. You have to use enough salt. All the veggies add a lot of natural sugars, and the salt balances it out.
3. Skip the carrot? I ended up thinking it was unnecessary with the squash.
4. Consider using a different squash. Butternut is very easy to use, but it is quite sweet, which increases the need for salt. Kabocha or Hubbard squash might be a better fit.

I am still computerless, so I have no photos, but I got a message from Office Max saying my order has shipped, so I am excited.

*12/8/13 I now am have computer! So Excite. Picture enabled!

Ok, ok, the hoopla is accurate.

I don't have a picture right now because my computer died and the process of trying to replace it so I can get a decent pic uploaded is unspeakably irritating.

But but but! It really is true that you can make amazing bread without kneading it. You stir it with a spoon for a minute then stick it in the fridge overnight. Recipe:

425 g bread flour
350 g water
4 g  yeast
7 g salt

Put everything in a biggish bowl and stir it up until all the flour is incorporated, maybe a minute. Cover bowl and stick it in the fridge until tomorrow some time. Or the next day or the next. It's not that important.

When you want to use it, pre-heat the oven to 465. Not a typo. That's about halfway between 450 and 475.

Dump a handful of flour onto a cutting board and spread it out a bit. Dump the dough out of the bowl onto the flour. Grab the edges of the sloppy dough puddle and fold them in to the middle in about 4 or 5 places, until it is vaguely loaf shaped. Should take 30 seconds. Grab the loaf and plop it onto a metal cookie sheet or a loaf pan with the folds on the bottom so they stay put. Wait about 45 minutes. Slash the top of the loaf if you feel fancy, bake it for 35 minutes.  Ta dah!

The internets are swarming with rave reviews of this recipe. I am always skeptical of anything that gets that much fuss, and I have encountered in person several purported 'no knead breads' that were not all that good. In fact they were pretty blah. Sheer laziness made me try this. I got my procedural advice from several  different sources. The one claiming it is easy enough that a 4 year old can do it gives me hope that I can make David do it, since he is the primary bread eater in the house at the moment.

I think all of the advice offered is valid, but I have some opinions of my own, of course.

1. Use bread flour. Duh. I have no idea why there are recipes out there that say to use all purpose.
2. You don't need a pizza stone, or anything else. Just use a thin metal pan. Not one of those insulated ones.
3. You don't need to put a pan of water in the oven to encourage the crust to get crispy either. If you really want crust, just leave it in 5 minutes longer.
4. Ignore all the fussy things about using parchment paper and pastry cloths, and damp towels and blah blah blah room temperature blah what. It just doesn't matter.
5. The only things that do seem to matter are that you need to make the dough very wet, almost like batter to start with, and then leave it to sit for a long time.
6. Don't bother washing the mixing bowl. You know you're going to want more bread in a couple days, just mix the next batch. So what if there's a little leftover dough in the bowl?
7. Ovens vary. If your bread is too dry, cook it 5 minutes less. If your bread is too gummy, cook it more. Simple!
8. I hate parchment paper. Totally unnecessary. Just another thing that gets thrown away.


But what does it taste like? It tastes like all those expensive $5.00 'artisan boules' you can get at 'boulangeries' and Whole Foods. But even fresher. No foolin'. Back when I was messing around with complicated procedures trying to get my baguettes to turn out like the ones that you buy from fancy bakeries, I should have been doing this instead. It's crunchy, and chewy, and the inside has the right amount of holes, and it's this beautiful slightly golden color.

I'm going to try mixing multiple batches of dough at once and keeping them in the fridge, apparently that's perfectly feasable.