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!

Super Crispy Tortilla Pizza

Pita bread doesn't like me: when I try to make it poof up, it just sits there; when I try to make the tortillas crispy by baking them at 450 for a few minutes before adding pizza-y toppings, the tortillas fill up their lungs to sing. Molto strano.

They got what they were asking for: a violent and crunchy punching down. Then they got a liberal covering with tomato slices, basil leaves, cheese, lots and lots of dried basil and dried oregano on top, and a spoon-controlled drizzling of olive oil.

Back in at 450 for 10-15 minutes, and devoured. Delicious!

P.S. I also roasted the tomatoes before hand, which I think helped. The cookie sheet wasn't too happy though...

The Hunt Continues...

The hunt continues for the perfect super basil-y tomato sauce. Breakspear made a huge donation, but it was ultimately somewhat disappointing, though beautiful.

This was store-bought tomato sauce heated on the stove with a small mountain of fresh basil leaves (torn, I think). I need a way to blenderize the basil better; I think liquid nitrogen would help. :)

Impromptu Banana Bread

The secret to banana bread is to measure the amount of mashed banana you have. Since this interesting fellow

somehow magically refused to freeze during his night in the freezer, and then squirted out of its sausage case-like peel the consistency of baby food, I had no choice but to make banana bread immediately. Poor me.

This is why you always keep the recipe handy, with the half and quarter recipes already written out. Or you just memorize it. :)

Moosewood Mediterranean Cannellini Patties

Another recipe-following success! Not so much a pattie-sticking-together success, but they were yummy!!!

First you saute 2 c minced onion and minced garlic in warm olive oil with a tsp of salt, then after 5-10 minutes you add 1 c chopped bell peppers and 2 tsp cumin, and cook for 5 more minutes. Turn off the heat. In a mixing bowl, mash 4 c cooked canellini (or other white beans) by hand. It got messy!

You then stir in 1 c minced fresh parsley, 1 tbsp fresh lemon juice, 2 c cooked brown rice, and black pepper to taste. Introduce sauteed veggies, and mix well. Shape into patties (the recipe says you get 18 but it depends on the size) and cook on medium heat 5-10 minutes a side, until golden brown. If you're lucky, they'll stick together (I wasn't, but they were super yummy nonetheless!).

You can eat them straight up, with yogurt tahini dressing, or as part of a pita sandwich. I imagine you could also make them with lots of other spice and veggie combinations, and maybe garbanzos instead of white beans.

Roasted Tomato Sauce!

Here's one good reason to be crazy about taking pictures of the food you're cooking: when you forget what time something went in the oven, the camera can tell you. Thanks, Giovanni!

So the cool thing about this sauce, with helpful hints from teh interwebs, is that the entire sauce is roasted (meaning you don't roast just the tomatoes, but everything). Normal tomato sauce involves sauteing garlic and onion then adding tomatoes and spices. Normal tomato sauce with roasted tomatoes involves using roasted tomatoes instead of fresh or canned ones. When the whole sauce is roasted, magic happens.

Spread halved tomatoes (romas are best) cut side up in a pan with fairly high sides and cover with a generous sprinkling of minced fresh garlic, dried basil and oregano, salt and pepper to taste, and a drizzle of olive oil (the easiest way not to spill is to pour a bit of olive oil in a spoon and use that to drizzle; even if you dump the whole thing out on accident it's still less than a slip of the bottle).

Roast at 450 for 30-45 minutes (take them out before you see signs of burnage). Blend, either in the blender or in a pot with the imersion blender. Boil some water off it's too thick (mine ended up the perfect sauce consistency).

Mix pasta into sauce over low to medium heat to warm; garnish with fresh basil to serve.

Granola Bars

Like (almost) everything else, this was an experiment. It was partially successful.

Like experiments, there were multiple conditions--two different methods of trying to make the granola bars stick together. One worked better than the other, but neither worked well. The mix was: 2 c rolled oats, 1/3 c wheat germ, 1/3 c wheat bran, 2 tbsp sunflower seeds, 2 tbsp sliced almonds, 3 tbsp brown sugar, 1.5 tbsp ground flaxseed, 2 tbsp melted butter, 1 tsp vanilla. A trick I learned from the KAF blog is to everything in a different place as a visual check of what you've added so you don't forget anything.

I mixed all this good stuff up and then split the batch in half. One half got a beaten egg white, the other 3 tbsp mashed banana. (This was based on a lack of critical thinking, as usual: I somehow managed to reason that since egg holds stuff together and is also something that adds moisture, something else that holds moisture should also hold things together. Don't ask.) Each half got pressed into a loaf pan. (Below, I think the egg version was the full one.)

After 25? minutes at 350 and 7 minutes to cool in the pan, I turned each out on the cutting board. The egg pan stuck together better than the banana pan, but neither stuck particularly well. I also realized that sunflower seeds don't really belong in granola bars. It's too bad but I've become quite a fan of the processed "food", sugar, oats, and chocolate chip version.

So, who has a granola bar recipe to share that doesn't have loads of sugar for holding everything together?

Moosewood Tomato Wine Sauce with Fennel

Tonight's experiment was another miracle in actually following recipes. I couldn't taste the wine at all, though I might not have recognized it anyway. The fennel makes it slightly interesting, but otherwise it's a gentle tomato sauce.

The Moosewood cookbook says to saute 1 c chopped onion, 2 minced garlic cloves, and a sprinkle of salt in warm olive oil for 5-7 minutes, then add 2 tsp ground fennel, 1 tsp dried oregano, and 1 tsp dried basil and cook for another minute. Then you add 1/3 c red wine and boil everything. Add a 28 oz. can of tomatoes pureed (you can buy tomato puree or buy whole tomatoes and dirty your blender) and simmer the sauce for about 20 minutes, seasoning with salt and pepper to taste.