It's That Time of Year!

Settembre always means it's dorm food o'clock, for better of for worse. Giovanni will have a break from the heavy food photography for some other work, and I'll have a break from cooking. The need for creativity never dies, though, especially in the dining hall. Until next time, goodbye, and thanks for all the fish!

Espaghetti Esquash

Good luck cutting the guy open. I wondered if just throwing it at a tarp would have been easier and safer. Our esquash was extremely estubborn. In revenge, I scraped out (with a big espoon), all it's flesh and seeds. Its seeds I further tortured with washing, oiling, and salting, and then baking at 300 F for about 15 minutes (stirring every 5 minutes). Yummy!

After my esnack, I eslathered the esquash with olive oil and s&p and baked it at 350 for what was supposed to be 40 minutes (cut side down) and ended up being a secret, due to the fact that oven didn't tell me when it beeped and then kept right on cooking. (The nerve!!!) When you take it out, you see that magic has happened:

You can pull on the flesh and, viola, estrings!

At this point, you can do many things: eat it plain, throw it at the ceiling, feed it to the dog (the dogs in this particular kitchen didn't deserve any...) but I cooked it in some sauteed garlic and leftover tomato sauce (which I was too lazy to post about; sorry) with some sherry. It basically looked and tasted just like regular espaghetti, so I'll have to do this again sometime for further research!

Chocolate Zucchini Cake!

Most people's reaction to my saying I was planning on making a chocolate zucchini cake with chocolate ganache and strawberries was "Chocolate and zucchini? Ew!" Naturally, they weren't invited. And naturally, they missed out! Chocolate and zucchini turned out to be a very happy couple, making delectable and succulent, and the chocolate chips added little chocolately explosions in the mouth; warm out of the oven the chocolate chips had lost their shape somewhat, and thus weren't so much distinct vertices of chocolate as extra little kicks of flavor. It was perfect.

Teh interwebs surprisingly have many recipes for chocolate zucchini cake, but I chose one from the Chocolate & Zucchini blog. The first thing I did was to process our handsome zucchini so I had two cups of chopped zucchini. (Ok here's the secret: you can't taste it, obviously, but the zucchini makes the cake super moist and delectable.) Set the zucchini aside, or if you're processing it the day before, put them in the fridge. 

In a medium bowl, mix together 1.5 c flour, 1/2 c cocoa, 1 t baking soda, 1/2 t baking powder, and 1/2 t salt. Then, in the bowl of my new best friend, the Kitchen Aid mixer, cream together 1/2 c butter, 1 c brown sugar, 1 tsp vanilla, 1 tsp instant coffee, and 3 eggs (I used 1 whole egg and 2 whites). Take the time and mix it well after each addition (cream the butter well before adding the sugar; mix well between adding eggs). All it takes is an extra minute and the mixer does all the work. The batter should be fluffy before the eggs and speckled afterward.

Then you mix wet and dry, and while that's mixing, quickly stir 1/2 c flour and 1 c chocolate chips into the chopped/processed zucchini, and then fold this into the chocolate batter. Doing it this way really highlights just how much moisture the zucchini adds: before, the batter stuck to the paddle like stiff frosting, while afterward it was smooth and more runny. This recipe makes enough for a 10" spring form pan, but you can experiment with other shapes. Since we liked the slightly crusty edges so much, I'm considering doing it as cupcakes next to maximize the amount of edge that each serving has. I'm sure the size of your chopped zucchini pieces matters, but note that you can't really see the zucchini (click the picture to enlarge).

Bake at 350 for 30-35 minutes, and here you have to use the edges' pulling away, color, and texture as a measure of doneness; a toothpick never quite came out clean but burned chocolate zucchini cake would have been a tragedy, so we played it safe. The cake was a gorgeous dark brown.

When the cake is almost cool, heat half a cup of heavy cream on medium heat until it's just about to boil. Then pour over 4 oz. of really, really amazing darkish chocolate, chopped, and as it melts the chocolate, whisk everything together to form a smooth covering that requires all of your self control to not pour down your throat. I added a tbsp of butter and about 1/2 t instant coffee for added flavor, but there's lots of variation in ganache recipes, so you can't really be wrong. Let it cool until it's at a consistency you think is optimal for spreading, and pour - don't spread - over the cake. Using a spatula makes not-super-smooth lines; we had good luck carefully tilting the cake and the cooling ganache spread itself. I garnished it (very amateurishly; I blame the paring knife) with strawberries, and then we dug in.

A final word of advice: as you can see, it doesn't make a ton of cake. Your best bet is to make extra if you've got many unrelentless chocolaholics around, or you can make it for just me (I won't tell anyone ;)), and then you'll only have to make a single recipe's worth. Store it in the fridge if you've got a fruit fly problem - the last thing you want is rotten strawberries spoiling your beautiful ganache! And please send pictures if anyone makes cupcakes!!!

Chocolate Heaven

If my sleepy brain remembers correctly, I know some people who think they have a dessert with this name. However, tonight was born proof that they need a new name. This "tart" is 72845042859% Ghiradelli semisweet chocolate chips, so no doubt it was amazing.

Brownie "tart" from the crazy Barefoot Contessa. First you melt 2 c chocolate chips (the quality really, really, really matters so splurge and get something good!) and 6 tbsp butter in a double boiler until things are thick and creamy and you almost want to jump in and bathe in the stuff. With the kitchen aid workhorse, mix up three eggs (your choice as to how many whites and yolks you want to use; I used one whole egg and two whites) with 1 c sugar, 1/2 tsp vanilla, and 1 tsp instant coffee. (Use the coffee! If you don't want the caffeine, use decaf like us; if you don't like coffee, don't worry, you won't taste it--it just enhances the chocolate flavor; if you don't like chocolate, get out!). Turn the mixer on low and leave it on while you stir together 1/2 c flour (we actually used almond flour because we were out of all-purpose, 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1/4 tsp salt, and another cup of your awesome chocolate chips. (Flouring the chocolate chips is supposed to help them not sink to the bottom. I forgot this step, but I'm not sure if they sunk or not, because it didn't really rise so there wasn't really a bottom or a top.) Put the dry ingredients in the wet, then add the chocolate and butter mixture. (If it's before dinner, don't do what I did and eat half the chocolate-butter mixture because it's the best thing you've ever tasted. Not that I'm allowed to talk.) Mix well and pour into a tart pan, or a 9" round, your mouth, etc. If it survives until the oven, bake at 350 for 35 minutes. Inside is gooey chocolate heaven, so don't expect a toothpick to come out completely clean.

My advice is to do this when you can be sure you'll be by yourself; it's not the kind of thing you'll want to share. :) And no, there are absolutely NOT pictures of the final thing! Would you have been wasting time taking pictures when you could have been eating it?! Of course not!

The Perfect Muffin

Today I reached for the stars and left them in the dust. I've been wanting to do this for so long!

I chose a recipe impulsively from the comments on another recipe website, and it worked out perfectly. I proved that hard work and not taking shortcuts is important for getting where you want in life: lacking orange juice, I squeezed my own from an orange, had a first impromptu solo flight with a super cute mini food processor, poured muffin batter from one paper cup to another, and trashed the kitchen. And then took about fifty pictures, they were that good (the muffins were good; in defense of taking so many pictures, many of the pictures were crap, which explains why I take so many. I'll stop taking so many pictures if someone wants to donate a digital SLR... :P).

It was SO worth it. Even people who ate zucchini loved it. They rose perfectly, were the best possible brown, were moist, delicious...I need to go eat another right now! Here's the recipe:

Zucchini Carrot Spice Muffins

1.5 c flour (I used 1/2 c white, 1 c wheat)
1.5 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp allspice
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 egg whites
1/6 c canola oil
1/2 c honey
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 c orange juice
1 c zucchini, grated or finely chopped (yay food processor!!!)
1 c carrot, grated or finely chopped (double yay food processor!!!)

Mix wet and dry well individually, then mix together just to moisten. Fold in orange juice and veggies only until combined. Bake at 370 for 15-20 minutes until beautiful brown and a tester comes out clean.

That's my batter at the last step; the puddles on the right are the freshly squeezed orange juice. I'm taking this success as a sign it's gonna be a great fall!

Baked Garlic Fries

I don't really read magazines, but apparently my foodie-ism has gotten so bad that a promise for a recipe for garlic fries on a cover can delay my getting in the shower, even if I'm really sweaty. In reality, maybe it's silly to even be taking the shower before making these, because having the oven on 450 has a way of necessitating another shower....

So despite heating things up, these couldn't be easier. I made them once with minced fresh garlic, but found that using garlic powder worked better as it could spread the garlic flavor around more completely. You can cut them in any shape; I used thick matchsticks, which were also fun because they were a novelty and left room for lots of chewy potato on the inside. Then you toss them with a tablespoon or two (don't measure) of olive oil, and salt, pepper, and garlic powder to taste before spreading on a greased cookie sheet and baking at 400 or 450 F until you can't wait any longer (by this I mean watch them; because smaller potatoes take less time to cook, and the last thing you want is burned potatoes).

Smitten Cake

Yet another impulsive cake. One of the best impulsive decisions ever. The recipe comes from the Smitten Kitchen blog, which I was perusing (this time on a Sunday at 5 pm) and was so captivated by the photos I had to make it amoebiately. Lessons learned involved following directions, not just ingredient lists, and again, learning to take things out of the oven in time. The cake ended up too dry because I baked it too long, but it's better to learn from experience than threats, so I'm not too unhappy. Anyway, ten seconds in the microwave and some ice cream work wonders.

You start by creaming a stick of butter until it's super smooth. I let it first soften at room temperature until it was soft, and then let the Kitchen Aid mixer go to work. Normally I would have stopped after a minute, but there were still lumps, so I decided to see what would happen if I let it mix for longer. What happened was perfect, smooth butter. Guess who's never melting butter in the microwave again! Then you add 1 c packed brown sugar and 1/2 c white sugar. Hey, it's less sugar than the Hershey's Holiday chocolate cake!

The directions said to beat three minutes, or until fluffy. I had no idea what she meant by fluffy, but when I checked a few minutes, later, things were fluffy! I added an egg, then a 1/2 c plain nonfat yogurt, and 1/2 c skim milk (in lieu of 1 c buttermilk), and 1 tsp vanilla. I was reminded to keep reading the directions when I saw they said not to worry if things were uneven, because I had been worrying that things looked uneven. I added the dry ingredients (1.5 c flour, 3/4 c Dutched cocoa, [note: if your cocoa isn't dutched, leave out the baking powder and use 1/2 tsp baking soda] 1/4 tsp baking soda, 1/2 baking powder, and 1/4 tsp salt), and the result was beautiful:

Waiting for it to bake (an hour!, at 325 F) was hard, but worth it. Next time I'm gonna try to not take fifty pictures.

So the Kitchen Aid mixer is my new best friend. Her and the treadmill!

Last Night Kitchen Adventures

The only appropriate way to celebrate one's last night in a hot apartment is to have the oven on for a few hours, so that's what we did. I'd been wanting to try making chocolate oatmeal butterscotch cookies without the chocolate for a while, and had frozen blueberries and two frozen bananas to use up before moving, so I did some experiments. The verdict was another failed attempt at blueberry banana muffins (they were too healthy...), yummy smoothies, and another reminder to stop second guessing myself when it's time to take things:

out of the oven (using half the fat is ok as long as you eat everything the same day and don't exacerbate the drying out problem by overcooking them). This experiment was a success however; there was plenty of sugar, butterscotch is always a winner, and I really love oats in cookies.

You have to use your imagination to pretend this is muffins; the muffin pan was MIA and there weren't the paper cups so the experiment on using two to make a muffin without a pan will have to be postponed. It was pretty, but needed more sugar to compensate for all the fiber. Next time I'll use a real recipe.

Zebra Beans #2

It worked!

While the black beans faded somewhat in soaking and cooking, they were not allowed to tarnish the white beans as both were cooked separately. Also, being impatient, I simply boiled the hard dry beans, changing the water after an hour. Next time I'll change the water sooner, to mimic the soaking water, and add salt for the last 45 minutes. It's nice to know that instead of making cooking dried beans a 16+ hour process, you can do the whole thing in two hours, if you're willing to have the stove on the whole time and supervise things. There's no big difference in taste between the colors of beans; but since the white beans are much bigger than the black, they take longer. (Note to self: This means that if you cook the black beans for as long as you cook the white beans, you'll overcook them and that's no fun.) Then you add the beans to the sofrito, and viola, zebra beans! The sofrito is the most fun when you use four colors of peppers. :)

Quinoa Bean Stew

This was another successful cleaning-out-the-fridge stew, and also a success for cooking improvisation. I typed up the general procedure I followed, but it's very flexible to anyone else's modification. Epic win!

Quinoa Bean Stew

1. Saute lots (2 tbsp) minced garlic in ample olive oil
2. Add 2-3 c total chopped onion, carrots, celery, and potato, with a pinch of salt.
3. Add 3 roma tomatoes, chopped and 1 8 oz. can tomato sauce
4. Add 3 c water
5. Add 1 c rinsed quinoa and 2 c cooked white beans and the corn cut off an ear of corn (next time I'm using more because I love corn so much)
6. Add 2 chicken bullion cubes, 1 tsp basil, 1 tsp oregano, 3/4 tsp thyme, 1/2 tsp rosemary, 1 large bay leaf
7. Simmer for a long time, blend at some point if you want. Taste and adjust spices if necessary.
8. Reheating is best done on the stove, on low heat to avoid burning things, with extra water if it gets too thick.

(Guys, seriously, this is why I need a digital SLR. Giovanni is fantastic but I really need to be able to focus things myself, cuz zoom + flash + macro mode = tearing hair out. And last I checked, hair isn't something you want in stew.)

Purple Broccoli

My broccoli turned purple. I googled this surprising discovery and was surprised to discover that some broccoli is purple. Mine is a bit old, so I don't think it's supposed to be purple. If anyone knows a good private detective to investigate this, please let me know.

Update: I cooked it. I'm now not sure if it's purple or brown. Either way, it was fine.

Roof Cake

Every kitchen project recently seems to be on impulse. This one began on a Sunday at 4 pm when I had work the next day. Fortunately, my brother can be bribed with cake to drive me home. :)

I'm the only one who calls this roof cake, because that's what it looked like to me. I wanted to make a chimney, but it was Sunday afternoon, and I only know how to do gingerbread chimneys, so we settled for flags. On them were written various silly reasons for having the cake, like the fact that the car was clean, that a certain overachiever had already finished several college application essays, etc. Since the cake was a surprise, we made the inside a surprise too, by frosting between each layer with a different color of frosting (left over from this; see comment on that post about having lots of frosting colors laying around). The picture below should give you an idea of how it was constructed; this worked much better than using upside down cake hearts, which fell apart due to a pan-greasing (or lack there of...) error....

One perk of having cake in crazy shapes is that it's hard to tell how much you've eaten, which is easy with, say, a normal round cake. And then people get to eat extra at the end so I can get pictures like the one below. No wonder Giovanni's got so many friends. :)

Apple Cinnamon Fun

When you wake up on Saturday at noon to a bunch of Cubans escreaming, this is what you should do.

Put 2 c all-purpose flour, 2 tbsp sugar, 3 tsp baking powder, 1 tsp salt, 3 tsp cinnamon in a bowl. Mix in 1.5 c milk, 2 egg whites, and 1/4 c canola oil. Then stir in a large granny smith apple cubed, and cook on low heat so the apples get cooked too. Even a mumsy who didn't think she would like them couldn't help exclaiming over the pancakes' excellence.

And then after that, you should do this:

Put 1.5 c rolled oats, 1/2 c packed brown sugar, 3 tsp cinnamon, and 2-3 tbsp melted butter in a bowl and then add half of it to a bowl with 3 large granny smiths chopped (note: I highly recommend peeling the apples, and then you eat the peels as a fun snack). Put the apple mix in a baking pan (8x8, 9x9, whatever), and then spread the remainder of the dry stuff over the top and bake at 350 for 20-30 minutes until the top is crispy brown and the apples are cooked. Remember to smell it before you indulge!

Tie-Dye Cake

This family sure likes to make cake! And pudding:

Mumsy poured the warm (homemade!) pudding into the cake pans to harden, then flipped them onto the cake layers as everything was assembled. Since the cakes had shrunk slightly while baking, the pudding was trimmed, the process repeated, and then everything frosted. It's easiest to do all this when excessively-frequently cake making means you have several colors of frosting living in the back of the fridge, and when you somehow have four 9" round cake pans. Here's my favorite picture:

Peanut Butter Brownies

There are unfortunately no pictures, for a few reasons. First, this is the kind of thing that you begin shoving in your mouth with reckless abandon the second they come out of the oven, and don't stop until the pan is empty (or your heart stops beating, whichever comes first). Second, they weren't that photogenic because they had to travel from a hot apartment to movie night in the air conditioned library, and Giovanni wasn't around anyway. Finally, part of the point of pictures is education and motivation, and these brownies frankly are too good to be made. If you do make them, however, be sure to give them to me before you taste them, otherwise you could end up in the hospital. Good thing the library we ate them in was right next to the ER!

Brownies:

Whitney says to add things in three phases:

1) 1 c butter, melted; add 1 c cocoa
2) 2 c sugar; add 3 eggs (we used a whole egg and 2 egg whites); add 2 tsp vanilla
3) 1 c flour; add 1/2 tsp salt

Bake at 350 F in a 9x13 pan for 25-30 minutes (I think ours took longer?). The middle will be gooey and chocolately and soooo good...*faints*.

The original recipe is half this and makes an 8x8 pan with 2 eggs. For a jelly roll pan, use 1.5x the recipe.

Frosting:
1 stick butter, slightly soft
1 # powdered sugar
1/2 c peanut butter (could use more)
whole milk to consistency (can use another kind of milk, or probably half & half, etc.)

Zebra Beans #1

The plan was to use some of the super pretty bell peppers (I bought a bunch on sale, chopped, and froze them to simplify things in the future :) ) to make zebra beans - white and black beans mixed. The first lesson was that when you soak black beans with white beans, the color that comes out of the black beans and otherwise ends up down the drain, gets adopted by the white beans and makes super ugly gray beans. The second was that (probably because of a size difference) white and black beans take different times to cook. They still made good Cuban beans, but don't ask for a picture. Since they weren't heavenly as Cuban beans usually are, I'm wondering if there's something about the white beans that doesn't work so well. Anyone can has informations?

Stay tuned for experiment take two!

Frenchish Bread Roll

This was this, take 2, and without the heat, because it was super nice out and the heroic air circulator fan managed to not fall off the window sill enough to keep the kitchen cool despite having the oven on 425 for a loooong time.

Since last time the second rise was mostly a sideways instead of lengthwise expansion, this loaf got rolled out and rolled up, in an attempt to prevent a reoccurrence of the Big Sideways Blob Problem. It didn't rise as much as it needed to have to not look silly, but BOY you should have tasted it! Giovanni's batteries died before I could get a picture of the crumb, but the rolling that created the silly flap in the picture above was actually visible in the crumb of the bread, and for many slices, you could actually unroll it! The crust, due to the special treatment discussed here, was nice and hard, and the middle felt like a pillow. If only we could have a bathtub full of bread insides to sleep on!

Hummus Quesadilla

The pinto beans were a bit elderly and not quite feeling up to being eaten, so the hummus bravely offered up itself. The result was so delicious I couldn't do anything else while I ate but taste.

Spread a generous layer of hummus on a (whole wheat, what else?) tortilla, then cover with lots of (red leaf) lettuce, tomato slices, carrot slivers (when this guy isn't busy trying to kill me, it does a great job with the carrots), and hunks of sharp cheddar. You gently fold it in half and microwave until the cheese is quite melty.

Devour distractionless. :)

Grand Canyon Cake

It's Grand Canyon Cake Timeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

This was the best cake I have ever had in my entire life. The trans fat (store-bought) frosting had a lot do to with it, but the colorfulness had even more to do with it, and getting to watch the canyon be split open definitely didn't hurt! (Email me for the video.)

Every white layer was dyed a different color, as was every layer of frosting. And at 8 layers of frosting, that's a lot of color:

The chocolate layers were of course the Hershey's holiday cake recipe. The outside was frosted my favorite combination, swirly yellow and green. We left some windows (not enough imo) just to be silly.

More, please, and hurry!!!

Tomato Basil Soup

All the tomato basil soup recipes I found online involved more complication than I felt like dealing with, so I did what I always do and made it up. It ended up being sauted garlic, boiled tomatoes, lots and lots of fresh basil leaves, and 1/2-3/4 c (I didn't measure) half and half.

I ate it with a piece of Italian bread at the bottom of the bowl, soggified and tomato-basilified by the soup. Delizoso!