Easier Than Falling Off a Log
Archive for October, 2009
October 31, 2009 at 5:55 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
I had a couple of sweet potatoes left over from the failchips, because for some reason I had been thinking I was doubling the recipe when I was at the store. I wanted to make soup anyway; not that I adhere to these rules, but it was “soup weather.” So I went through my soup file to find one that would help me use up these sweet potatoes, and I found this one, from Cooking Books. I could say something horrible here like “synergy!” but then I would have to kill myself, so let’s not.
I unfortunately had to skip the green pepper, because Matt hates it, and obviously if it’s simmering away in the soup, it’ll flavour up the whole thing with green-pepperiness. Which, to me, would be a plus. But part of being married is sacrificing things you like when your partner doesn’t like them, is it not? Am I being profound, or just a 50s cliche? Does it matter? The point is that if you can, you should put the green peppers back in. They’ll really enhance the visuals of the soup as well, in fact. In her original post, Andrea of Cooking Books said it’s supposed to be a primarily orange and green soup. But I found that it made a rainbow – red tomatoes, orange broth and sweet potatoes, chickpeas stained yellow from the turmeric, and green celery. It didn’t hurt that I cooked it in a blue pot, either.
Gypsy Soup
Ingredients
1 onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, smashed with the flat of your knife
2 medium-sized sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped
3 stalks celery, sliced
2 tomatoes, diced
1 1/2 cups cooked chickpeas, or 1 cup dried chickpeas, soaked and brought “back to life,” so to speak – p.s., I was so proud of myself for figuring out how much to use all on my own
4 cups water
2 tsp paprika
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp dried basil
1 tsp salt
pinch cinnamon
pinch cayenne
2 bay leaves
1 tbsp soy sauce
Method
Heat the oil in the bottom of your soup pot.
Saute the onions, celery, garlic, and sweet potatoes for 5 minutes.
Add the water and all the spices – paprika, turmeric, basil, salt, cinnamon, cayenne, and bay leaves. I guess salt isn’t a spice but let’s move on.
Simmer, covered, for 15 minutes.
Add the tomatoes and chickpeas (and the green pepper, if you’re using it – chop up one, in case you’re wondering how much) and continue simmering for another 10 minutes, or until the vegetables are tender.
Stir in the soy sauce right at the end, and serve.
I suspect Matt agreed to eat it in the first place because it is gypsy soup, and who doesn’t think gypsies are cool? Well, actually, tons of people, and they get horribly persecuted, but I guess what I mean is what good person doesn’t think gypsies are cool?
October 29, 2009 at 11:07 pm · Filed under food, meals
This was the main dish from the latest filmmaking Saturday. It was a big hit, which could have been because it was delicious, or it could have been because I was frying up the bacon when people arrived, so our apartment – indeed, our whole hallway – smelled like bacon. This is a good way to get people to be kindly disposed towards you. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the actors liked them because they were legitimately delicious.
I scaled up the amounts a little to serve 5 instead of 4, but I’m going to leave the recipe more or less as it was, because my changes were very seat-of-the-pants – in fact, I wasn’t sure if I was going to be cooking for 5 or up to 8, so I was prepared to double it. There was one change I made, though. The original recipe made them into healthy lettuce wraps. I (correctly) assessed the target audience of this meal, and recognized that they would not be into some food that looked like it was trying to be good for you, despite containing bacon and being slathered in mayonnaise. Shush. You could have a deep-fried stick of butter in a lettuce wrap and it would look like it was supposed to be health food. Anyway, I just slapped these on hamburger buns and didn’t look back.
Turkey and Bacon Burgers
Ingredients
1 lb ground turkey
6 strips bacon
3 slices bread
1 tbsp thyme
4 tbsp parmesan
zest and juice of 1 lemon
salt and pepper
olive oil for frying
Method
Fry up the bacon, drain it on paper towels, and break it up into little pieces.
Throw your bread into a food processor and process it until it is in crumbs. Or rip it to shreds with your bare hands if you’re all RAWR for some reason.
Mix all the rest of the ingredients (except the oil, obviously) together in a bowl.
Form into patties.
Heat olive oil in a pan.
Cook the burgers for about 3 minutes, then flip them – carefully! – and do another 3 minutes on the other side.
Then you can flip them as often as you want until they’re done all the way through. I think that first 3-minute stretch was just to get a nice browning on them.
Serve them with tomato-basil mayonnaise, which… here it is!
Tomato-Basil Mayonnaise
Ingredients
1 tomato, roughly chopped – and be sure to excise the juicy seedy portion, I didn’t and my sauce was WAY too watery
a handful of basil leaves
1/2 cup mayonnaise
Method
Just chuck it all in the food processor until it’s combined.
October 28, 2009 at 10:04 pm · Filed under food, side dishes/appetizers
It was movie-making time for Matt again a couple of weekends ago, which means it was craft services time again for me. I tried to make these sweet potato chips and their associated miso dip, but the chips didn’t really turn out right. They tasted great, but they wouldn’t crisp up. And the problem with that is that you can’t dip a floppy chip, so the delicious miso dip that cost me a zillion dollars to make because apparently you can only buy miso paste at the expensive organic store in a $15 jar went more or less uneaten. Oh well, at least miso keeps forever. Oh, and I didn’t have mirin, so I changed it a bit.
Miso Dip
Ingredients
1/2 cup miso paste
2 tbsp chopped chives
1 tbsp rice wine vinegar
1 tbsp white wine
1 tsp sugar
1 tbsp toasted sesame seeds, lightly crushed
Method
Just mix everything together!
If you do want to make the chips, I suggest clicking the link I provided up at the top. Obviously something I did wasn’t quite right. They’d either be floppy or burnt, sometimes on the same baking sheet.
P.S., here are my failchips. They don’t look like they fail, right? And tastewise, they don’t – the spice mix is great.
October 27, 2009 at 11:25 pm · Filed under food, meals
This was something I made to use up leftovers after Canadian Thanksgiving (which I keep referring to all particularly like that – or occasionally as “fake Thanksgiving”… I know). I had leftover mashed potatoes, which Matt doesn’t like because he doesn’t care for the texture, and we had a ham the size of a baby. So I decided to throw them together, with some cheese, because ham loves cheese and so do potatoes, bread them, and fry them up in a pan. I will pat myself on the back a little here and say that it was a good idea. I even got them to hold together not terribly! Imagine!
Of course, this is going to be one of those “bit of this, bit of that” type recipes. And, as with all leftover recipes, you have to actually have all the parts on hand. Which, when I read these recipes on other people’s sites, I never do. Still, if you already have ham, I suppose you could make the potatoes. Anyway, here’s how to make one, repeat as necessary. Except that obviously you can fry up more than one in the pan at once. Unless you’re using a tiny wee pan, I suppose. Or making the biggest croquette known to man.
Ham and Cheese Croquettes
Ingredients
mashed potatoes – ours were garlic-flavoured! Always a plus!
cooked ham
cheese of your favourite kind
panko breadcrumbs
oil for frying
Method
Take a wad of mashed potato and flatten it out a bit, with a dent in the middle. The idea here is to make a sandwich where the “bread” is the mashed potato, and the ham and cheese are… ham and cheese. And then to squish the overhanging edges of the potato shut around the filling. So make a ham-shaped dent and leave a generous border.
Place some ham and cheese in the middle of the potato, making sure there’s potato extending past it on all sides.
Cover the ham and cheese with more potato, pressing the top layer and the bottom layer together all around the edges.
Roll the croquette in panko.
Heat some oil in a frying pan. Not a lot.
Pop the croquette into the pan and let it get golden brown on all sides. You don’t want to move it around too much, though, because there’s a serious threat of it coming apart. Or at least there was with mine.
Do you love my plate? It was a dollar or something at the drugstore.
October 20, 2009 at 11:34 pm · Filed under food, side dishes/appetizers
One of the vegetables we had at the Canadian Thanksgiving dinner was this sesame broccoli from Savory Sweet Life (the other one was my mom’s carrots and mushrooms sauteed with paprika, which she made and I had nothing to do with, other than guzzling it). Holy cats is it ever easy. I forgot the salt, but nobody complained. In fact, mom made a point of discussing how so many things these days have ridiculous amounts of salt in them – and that there’s MORE in the Canadian versions! Canadians – and I can say this because I am one – spend a lot of time being holier-than-thou with regard to Americans. Food and diet are no exceptions; we are deeply invested in acting all shocked at the huuuuge portions you get in American restaurants, and how there are so many deep-fried things, and how someone invented the Turducken, and blah-dee-blah. Americans are so fatty fat fat and unhealthy and we’re soooo different from that. Except that that is categorically not true. I mean, sure, in Vancouver, where you can get socially ostracized for not engaging in outdoor sports more often than you change your socks, but Vancouver does not have that much in common with the rest of the nation. And if you’re looking at the mainstream packaged foods, they are not only loaded down with salt like they are here, but they’re actually a higher percentage of your daily allowance of sodium than the same food here. Maybe it’s because food manufacturers are responding to preferences ingrained back in the day, when everyone was more or less a hardy settler in an inhospitable, wintry land, and everything was salted to death for preservative reasons, or maybe we just all hate our arteries, but there you have it. So the long and the short of it is, I forgot the salt and nobody cared.
Sesame Broccoli
Ingredients
Broccoli
Sesame oil
Sesame seeds
Method
Steam the broccoli.
Drizzle with sesame oil.
Sprinkle with sesame seeds.
Toss to disperse seeds and oil evenly.
And that’s it! Then you eat it!
October 18, 2009 at 11:08 pm · Filed under dessert, food
First off, I was going to say “Apple-Pear Pie,” but I had to stop myself, because it’s not made with apple-pears… although that might be delicious. Hmm.
Anyway, so last weekend my parents were in town, and since it was Canadian Thanksgiving, I made a big old dinner – the first time I’ve made the big holiday meal! Thank you, new apartment with a full-sized oven! I made a ham, because I didn’t want to risk having a repeat of my FAILchicken, particularly on the scale of a turkey, and serving rare poultry to my family wasn’t on the plan. I didn’t take any pictures of it, but imagine 8 pounds of pig sitting in my oven slathered with mustard and orange juice and studded with cloves. It worked out well, and Matt and I ate ham sandwiches for a week afterwards. But I also made this pie, which is essentially the same as Culinary Cory’s apple and pear pie, except that I didn’t do a lattice top – Matt kept saying how easy it was and how he did it in high school and so on, but I didn’t do it, not because I thought it was too hard, but because I didn’t have time! Oh, and I also used the zest and juice of a whole lemon instead of measuring how much to use, and so I think I wound up using more than Cory’s recipe. Not a bad thing. This pie had a fantastic lemon flavour mixed in there. I could have just eaten the filling without even putting it into the crust and baking it. I’m not going to say I didn’t sample some, either. Oh, and I didn’t do the egg wash or sugar topping; again, no time, and anyway I don’t think it wound up being necessary.
I also taught my mom how to make pie crust, apparently. Since this was a 2-crust pie, I made one in the food processor and one with my pastry cutter. She says she has both pieces of equipment. She has not, historically, been a baker of pies, but if she was being held back by crust, now she knows how and that it’s super easy. And since my grandma can’t bake pies anymore because her decreased mobility has made rolling out dough out of the question (never mind using a pastry cutter!), so maybe mom can now be the bringer of pies to family dinners. Because that’s what I’m about: making more work for my mom.
Apple and Pear Pie
Ingredients
two pie crusts, however you like to make or buy pie crust (my pie crust recipe is here)
2 1/2 cups apples (about 2 biggish apples), peeled and chopped
2 cups pears (1 reasonable-sized pear), peeled and chopped
3/4 cup sugar
2 tbsp flour
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
pinch salt
juice and zest of one lemon
1 tbsp butter, diced
Method
Make your pie crust and throw it in the fridge until you’re ready with the rest of it. Or, y’know, go to the store. Whatever. I am not going to judge.
Preheat oven to 375.
Mix all the filling ingredients (that’s everything but the crust and the butter) together until the fruit is coated more or less evenly.
Roll out your pie crust and press one of them into the pan. Or just get your pre-made pie crust out – again, whatever.
Dump the filling into the crust.
Dot with tiny butter cubes.
Roll out the second crust and drape it over the top, sealing the edges together in whatever decorative way suits you. I don’t know how this step works with pre-made pie crusts, but if that’s what you’re using, presumably you know what to do. So do… that.
Bake for 40 minutes, or until it looks about right.
Allow to cool slightly before serving; it tastes fantastic warm, and you get the meltiness with the (vital) vanilla ice cream, but letting it cool a bit ensures that you’ll be able to get slices out without them falling apart on you.
October 17, 2009 at 11:31 pm · Filed under dessert, food
It was my friend’s birthday recently, at work, and so I baked her a cake (which she elected to eat for breakfast, and why not?). A few other people brought her in goodies as well, so she ended up with a cake, whoopie pies, sugar cookies, and something that may have been a tray of brownies – I don’t mean it was unrecognizeable, just that it was covered and I thought it would be rude to peek! But yeah – that’s what happens when you are not only loved, but loved by a department full of nurses who all bake. And me, who is not a nurse at all.
So yeah, this cake came from Baking Bites, although I didn’t split each cake and do the 4-layer thing – no time, no skill, and probably not enough icing – and since I don’t like cream cheese icing, I made a maple buttercream instead. Which was so completely easy that I feel like that was the real accomplishment. You guys, I made an icing, and it covered the entire cake (much to my surprise, as you can see with my stinginess between the layers… turns out I could have put more there, oh well), AND I didn’t totally savage the cake while spreading the icing on. That is accomplishment enough for me for one day. I’ll leave splitting layers for another day. Although I did do the shaving off the rounded top of the bottom layer thing, to make the first stack better. My mom just leaves the bottom layer upside down (after getting it out of the pan, right) and somehow the curve just… absorbs into the cake and doesn’t make the “bottom” (which is now the top, keep up) pop up in a curve if its own. I don’t understand how this squares with physics, but it works for her. Maybe it’s like cartoon characters running out over the edge of the cliff – once you start thinking about it, it stops working. P.S., I chose which layer to put on the bottom based on which flavour Matt wanted to sample, because the shaved-off part was ours to eat right away, still warm.
So since there are two layers that are different, you’re going to need 4 bowls here. But the good thing is that the vast majority of ingredients are the same for both, in the same amounts and everything. It is only in the details that they differ. So when you’re measuring out flour or what have you, you can just do the same thing twice instead of having to keep consulting the ingredients list for amounts and whatnot. I did both dry-ingredients bowls and then both wet-ingredients bowls, mixed one flavour, mixed the other flavour, poured each out into their respective cake pan, and then baked them at the same time. Hooray for a normal-sized oven!
Pumpkin and Chocolate Cake with Maple Buttercream Icing
Ingredients
for the pumpkin layer
1 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt
2 eggs
1/4 cup oil
1/4 cup butter, melted and cooled
3/4 cup pumpkin puree
1/2 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
for the chocolate layer
1 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
2 tbsp cocoa powder
2 eggs
1/4 cup oil
1/4 cup butter, melted and cooled
3/4 cup pumpkin puree (this is not a mistake! There’s pumpkin in the chocolate layer, too!)
1/2 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 oz bittersweet chocolate, melted
Method
Preheat the oven to 350.
Grease 2 8 or 9″ cake pans (the original recipe says 8″, mine were 9″, the world didn’t end, whatever).
for the pumpkin layer
In a large bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients – flour, sugars, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt.
In a smaller bowl, whisk together the wet ingredients – eggs, oil, melted butter, pumpkin puree, milk, and vanilla.
Stir the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients until combined.
Pour into one of your pans. I just typed “pants.” You’re welcome.
for the chocolate layer
In a large bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients – flour, sugars, baking powder, baking soda, cocoa powder, and salt.
In a smaller bowl, whisk together the wet ingredients – eggs, oil, melted butter, pumpkin puree, milk, vanilla, and melted chocolate.
Stir the wet ingredients into the dry until combined.
Pour into the other pan.
Bake for 30 – 35 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.
Cool completely on wire racks before frosting wiiiiiith…
Maple Buttercream Icing
Ingredients
4 tbsp butter, softened
1/4 cup maple syrup
3 cups icing sugar
Method
Using a stand mixer with the paddle attachment, cream together the butter and maple syrup.
Gradually mix in the sugar until desired consistency is reached. Note: it will be sticky!
Slather all over your cake. Hooray!
Oh, and I too was affected by the NATIONAL PUMPKIN SHORTAGE that is causing panic in the streets (in case you hadn’t noticed). I thought the first grocery store I went to was just out of canned pumpkin. Then I complained about it online that night, and someone filled me in. Fortunately, I tried again the next day and found it – and restrained myself from being the kind of antisocial person who buys ALL the cans just because there might not be any more. Don’t be that guy.
October 3, 2009 at 9:10 pm · Filed under food, meals, pasta
I’ve never been to Berlin. I’ve never been to Germany at all, actually. I do have a cousin who lives there with her family, and a friend who went to Berlin and, by all accounts, had a wonderful time. This is the extent of my connection. Oh, and we also watched an episode of “No Reservations” where Bourdain goes to Berlin, during which time he had some currywurst from a street vendor. I flashed on the memory of that when I read this post on Bitchincamero. I couldn’t remember whether the genuine article had involved pasta or not; I figured it probably did just because it sounded like such a perfect match. Turns out that’s not so, but Germany, take note: combining pasta with your sausage and curry sauce is a genius idea whose time has come! Direct your thanks to Mel of Bitchincamero!
I think if I made this again, I’d up the curry factor and diminish the mustard. It was very delicious as it was, but the first thing you’d think of upon tasting it was mustard, not curry. I did third the recipe to serve 2, since the original served 6, although not having a 1/3 tsp measure, I had to fudge it a bit. I ditched the cabbage (even though that’s super-German, I know) because neither of us care for it. But this recipe got me to bite the bullet and buy some fennel seeds, because I love fennel and it had become a bit silly that I was ignoring recipes that contained it just because I didn’t want to buy any more spices.
Currywurst
Ingredients
enough pasta for 2 people – I used the remains of my large macaroni
3/4 tsp olive oil
1 shallot, minced
4 oz kielbasa (that’s a quarter of one of those U-shaped ones from the supermarket), sliced
something under 1/4 cup white wine
2 tsp mustard – I used Polish beer mustard
2 tsp tomato paste
let’s say a heaping 1/4 tsp fennel seeds
and let’s say a somewhat shy 1/4 tsp curry powder
1/3 cup of the pasta-cooking water
Method
Cook the pasta until just shy of al dente. Remember to save 1/3 cup of the water before you drain it.
While the pasta is cooking, heat the oil in a pan.
Add the shallots and saute until translucent, about 4 minutes.
Add the kielbasa slices and continue sauteeing until the slices are browned on both sides.
Remove the shallots and kielbasa from the pan.
Deglaze the pan with the wine.
Now throw everything but the noodles into the pan – the mustard, tomato paste, fennel seeds, curry powder, pasta water, and the shallots and kielbasa.
Stir until it forms a cohesive sauce.
Now chuck the noodles in and stir for about a minute, during which time the noodles will absorb most of the liquid.
