Reading around I found exactly what I was looking for in the UPnP AV specification: a role called a “Media Renderer”.  It essentially is a player that takes commands from other devices. But it turns out a device or application that ACTUALLY fulfills the role of “UPnP Media Renderer” are the endangered species among UPnP AV devices! There are plenty of “Media Server” applications that house and share out media and most of the major devices are “UPnP Media Players” which means they can connect to a UPnP Media Server and play music but CANNOT be controlled remotely (not with a UPnP Control Point at least!).

Ideally, I would have loved to have a small box with an embedded linux distro that had a UPnP Media Renderer built into it.  Audio out on the back, along with a network cable and I would have been happy but it didn’t work out quite that way.   First of,  I was looking for functionality in a short amount of time over ideal implementation this time.  This is/was a project for to get me AWAY from screens and there is something about spending more time in front of screens to compile and make it all happen that the word ironic would start to describe. 

Anyway,  I did get a windows based device working within 36 hours of starting my search and here is the basic recipe:

Old Laptop + Windows XP + FooBar2000 + Foobar2000 UPnP Plugin + Windows 2k3 Resource Tool Kit = headless music upnp renderer solution

Essentially, I setup FooBar2000 to run as a service on a laptop that stayed on when the lid was shut and I could wake it using Wake-On-Lan. 

On the laptop I…

1. Installed of clean version of Windows XP and patched the heck out of it.
2. Installed Avira anti-virus as a lightweight AV option.  
3. Installed FooBar2000 and the UPnP Plugin

At this point I had a working UPnP Renderer (as long as I turned off the Windows Firewall, was logged in, and launched FooBar2000). The rest of the steps are my ways of making it clean and essentially unmanaged/headless.

1. Downloaded and Installed the Windows 2003 Resource Kit (To get Srvany.exe and Instrsrv.exe)
2. Used Srvany.exe and Instrsrv.exe to run FooBar2000 as a Windows Service (Like This)
3. Set the services to run as SYSTEM and Allowed to Interact with the Desktop
4. Changed the Power Management Settings in windows for “When the Lid Closes” for the laptop to do “nothing” instead of going to sleep
5. Set a scheduled task to shutdown the computer at midnight each night
6. Enabled WOL in the bios

Now I have a laptop that sits on a shelf that I wake with a WOL packet, that I can control via ANY UPnP Control Point (Currently using the Samsung “allshare” app on my Android phone and KinskyDesktop Control Points).  It works really well as long as FooBar2000 shuts down nicely, sometimes I have to flip open the laptop and click “Start Normally” for it to open and be seen by the control points. 

This is by no means my ideal solution but it works, fills my criteria, and was a pretty quick build/poof-of-concept. I’d still love to find a linux based “one install” solution but for now… I can listen to my music without staring at a screen: SUCCESS!

Build Comments / Notes / Warnings to Others:

The hardest part of this project was finding a software application that would run as a true media renderer. There were lots of players out there but VERY few software products that even HINTED at being a renderer.  FooBar2000 was by far the simplest and most straight forward of all the ones I played with/googled and so I went with it.  The rest of the build isn’t technically hard at all (making it a service is a bit but there are plenty of step by step directions out there) and in fact was really simple.  

I even went down the road of looking at purchasing a new device to do this role and got stumped there too.  So many DVD players, embedded video players for TV, etc can SEE UPnP servers and play their content but almost none of them were a true rendered. The only products that were renderers were old and no longer on sale.  Eventually, (after my build was done), I found the the WD TV Live Plus actually is a Media Renderer (with some glitches) but I still haven’t jumped the gun yet and bought it just yet. It seems like there should be some software solution out there but what I did was the best I could find. I’d love it if anyone can point me to the obvious thing I missed that fit my criteria!

I’ll probably consider working on a linux version over time but linux suffers from the same ‘lack of renderers’ problem of windows to start with and the few packages / applications that SEEM to be candidates haven’t been simple to test yet.  I’d love to build a UPnP Renderer on Puppy Linux, repackaged it, and upload it for others to use but alas I’ll see if time and effort prevail.  Of course if I were to do that it might be audio only since that is my goal.

Tools / Prototyping Bits

I wanted to make testing the buttons as simply as possible so I found so FlexCable to breadboard adapters made by Technological Arts. They were the only brand I could find and could only find them being sold on their site and RobotShop.com.  I eventually settled on RobotShop.com as my supplier because they sold those adapters and a few others even though the shipping and handling was a bit steep.  Anyway, so I’ve ordered:

830 Tie Breadboard – Since I don’t actually own one right now. Sad isn’t it.

14 pin IDE Cable to Breadboard Adapter – For the LCD screen connection which is a 14 pin IDE cable.

16 pin Flex Cable to Breadboard Adapter – For the knob controls (which also house a IR reciever of some sort)

24 pin Flex Cable to Breadboard Adapter – For the main button and LED’s panel

Male Breadboard Pin to IC Hooks – These will allow me to easily grasp my multimeter probe and then move them around the breadboard. Since that is pretty much what this entire phase the project is about I decided it was worth the few dollars for them.

Right now I am waiting for the parts to show up and then I can start mapping the buttons, LED, and IR receiver pins.

Prototyping Rig

Scoping Considerations

I’ve been batting around this project for the past few days and there are 2 ‘realities’ I have work within:

1) I don’t have the best hardware for the project long term.

– My Mini-ITX board’s onboard VGA is blown but with a cheap PCI card it works
– There is no parallel port which will likely be needed to drive the LCD
– No digital IO pins/etc (Not surprising but it would be ideal)
– No power supply to run it outside of a mini-ITX case I have (see #2 why this matters)

and

2) I don’t want to spend a lot of money on the project. Not yet. Right now I’d need…

– Digital IO board
– Power supply
– Parallel Port adapter

So where does that leave me? Prototyping only!

I think I’ve managed to scrap up most of the things I need to create a proof-0f-concept EASILY based on windows at the moment. Ideally, I would like to make it run embedded Linux basically but I know myself and if I make the project to hard or cost to much up front I will just not do it. And that is pointless. So I think it is better to scale my own expectations to making a franken-computer proof-of-concept that in no WAY will fit or mount inside the AudioTron’s case at this moment BUT will at least confirm what I think can be done.  Once a Windows, Franken-Computer, messy proof-of-concept is working well enough I can look at acquiring the most perfect hardware, etc.

Proof-Of-Concept Hardware

AudioTron - Where it all started.  My intention right now is to use the buttons, LEDs, LCD, knob, and the enclosure. If I am lucky I will also be able to reuse the power supply but I’m less immediately hopeful on that one.

Morex 3677B Mini-ITX Case - This is being used for the power supply and the power button more than the normal ‘containing’ feature a case normally provides.  Because my board needs a pci video card to work I can’t truly mount the board IN the case at this time. But providing the power is no small need to overlook.

VIA EN15000G Mini-ITX Motherboard -  This is the Lazarus of the group or the prodigal child if you will.  Over a year ago I declared the board dead and set it aside because the video stopped working reliably (and other quirks). But after clearing my mind for a year I was able to get it up and working last night IF I had a PCI video card installed.

Jaton Video-118PCI Video Card – A necessary evil because the EN15000G hates it’s onboard video. But honestly, doing the same thing repeatedly right now is good enough for me.

1.8″ Hitachi TravelStar C4K40  Hard Drive -  I pulled this from my old Creative Zen Touch MP3 Player when it died. It is particularly nice because it sports a standard 2.5″ IDE connection on it :)

Digital I/O Card – I’m still working on borrowing a digital I/O card for a proof-of-concept but I have some leads on a Phidgets board I’m hoping will pan out.  I believe it will dump switch actions as HID events that my software can EASILY see. The main concern outside of price for me on a digital I/O board is how do I easily monitor it.  I’m only trying to watch for closed switches and running 3 LEDs at the most. I don’t need an overly complicated digital I/O board / communication language. I have a few good candidates depending on what OS direction I choose.

Proof-Of-Concept Software

Windows – It is what I know best and so prototyping will be easiest here.  I have software that I already use that should be able to do what I need it to do with little coding and so that is of value to me.

SqueezeSlave – A command-line SqueezeServer player that runs on both Windows and Linux

EventGhost – A ridiculously simple and robust software that allows to set actions to incoming events.  In this case the actions will be button pushes and the events will be SqueezeSlave media player commands.  EventGhost is the main reason this project is even tangibly easy for me.  As long as I can get the IO board to dump out actions in a form EventGhost can see them the proof-of-concept is solid.

Proof-Of-Concept Goal

To get the button’s working on the AudioTron’s case to change the state of the SqueezeSlave player.  My initial idea is simply to connect the AudioTron’s buttons to the digial I/O board, monitor that board with EventGhost, and when EventGhost sees a button pressed it will send the corresponding CLI command to SqueezeSlave.

A secondary goal would to get the 2×40 LCD screen on the AudioTron to display the ‘Now Playing’ information.  Right now with a lack of parallel port to drive the build in display this is pretty much more effort than it is is worth.

Next Phase:Implimentation

Once the proof-of-concept is up and running well the next phase will be to make the hardware so it all fits inside the AudioTron case and it can seamlessly be used in a stack of stereo equipment.  Not only will this require hardware revisions but based on what hardware is selected ideally this would involve changing the OS over to Linux and running off a small solid state device.  At that point EventGhost can no longer be the middle-man software and that role will have to be rehashed.

This phase may or may not ever really happen based on the amount of money and time it will take. Of course only prototyping will tell. Onwards!!!!

StarDock’s ObjectDock 1.9 Plus

A simple to use program that allows me to create big ass icons in the middle of the screen organized well. Did I mention it was simple? Oh good…. I had considered writing my own ‘Big Button’ UI but decided it was too much effort and always leaned towards just using a standard windows desktop icons because it was SIMPLE.  But ObjectDock has won my heart. It won it so well that I actually paid the $20 to upgrade to the Plus edition JUST to get tabs to make it even cleaner.

So why did ObjectDock win my heart? Well lets look at the follow screen capture of my ‘home’ screen….

ObjectDock UI Disks Tab

Notice how there is no Windows Task Bar across the bottom? It’s a check box in ObjectDock.  If ObjectDock doesn’t launch guess what… the Task Bar comes back. It’s a beautifully simple fall back plan that makes any UI based emergency NOT exist.  My roommate can easily use Windows to play her DVD.  Notice how there are big buttons that clearly say DVD and one that has a musical note on the Disks tab.  One click and the disk type of your choice starts playing. Lets continue looking at the screen caps as I review what I like about ObjectDock…

UI Web Content Tab

This next easy to use tab contains my programs for streaming web content: Clicker.com (for videos), Pandora, and Enhanced SHOUTcast Player.  Do you know how I got them there? I right clicked and said ‘Add Shortcut’… and then exactly like in Windows I browsed to the path of the executable file. And if I wanted to add a nice icon I clicked ‘change image’ and navigated to a PNG I got from the internet.  Done. That is it for each icon.  Simple. Next…

UI Server Media Tab

Oh on the Server Media tab you can see the fancy built-in setting that shows a nice large description of an icon when you hover over it. In this case my cursor (you can’t see it) is over the green transmitting button which calls a WOL program with the correct parameters to … wake up my server to play music off of.  Those white words sure reflect that usage really well and easily… and built-in…. so convenient!

UI Misc Tab

Ah the Miscellaneous Tab. Where else would I put the Standby button (see Power Management post to understand how cool and simple this button REALLY is) and the weather button… which is a built-in part of ObjectDock so I kept it.

UI Admin Tab

And the last Admin Tab where there is a ObjectDock specific button to launch the Start Menu, Open my Server Folders, Launch my Home Server Admin Panel, and Search Google.  A few tools I either use infrequently or mostly for troubleshooting. Right there. In a tab. Easy to use and yet out-of-the-way. Simply amazing!

When it comes down to ObjectDock allowed me to make a custom, big icon, simple to use UI with a single app configuration panel, adequate/simple built-in skin options, AND some Windows Shortcuts. It fits so perfectly into my easy to support and easy to use re-framing its a bit ridiculous honestly. In fact, finding this app is what precipitated me to redo my entire HTPC setup and bail on Boxee because I finally found a way to make a ‘Front End’ to all my other apps that work better than the all-in-one solution of Boxee.

The Best Part?

Only a day after I finished setting the UI up my roommate was using the DVD playing feature. I had given her maybe a 30 second overview of how to work this iteration and she was already using it without asking any new questions.  Proof to me that it worked because she never once used Boxee to play DVDs. Not that she couldn’t have learned but she wasn’t using the device because she needed to ask a question about it and now with no questions/qualms she was using it … success!

1) DVDs (Actual Disks)
2) CDs
3) Not Site Specific Streaming Video Options
4) Server Based Music Library

DVD’s

My main concern for this one is supported formats. I have a few PAL DVDs that I would like to not have to think about
“which player to use” when playing them.  The UI isn’t terribly important for this category but there are a few UI “niceties” I was looking for in the DVD player — such as if it gets minimized I just want folks to be able to maximize it, a way to close the application, and an obvious place to click to get to other commands.

Winner – VLC + Blissta Skin

From a content playing perspective VLC is always my preference for video playing because it does pratically…play everything.  Or at least anything I’ve tried to throw at it thus far.  The skin choice took a bit more work but I was happy to find the Blissta Skin as shown below.

VLC Blissta Skin (1. = Fullscreen Mode, 2. = Close Application, 3. = Other Commands)

The functionality in the Blissta Skin is perfect and the only remote downside is that it looks a little bit like Windows Media Player but honestly that isn’t such a big deal.

CDs

I originally was going to use VLC to play CDs to but when I started playing with the remote control setup I quickly realized it was going to make more sense to have 2 sets of controls (ie – stop on DVD returns to the main menu while CDs its a true stop playing completely).  The easiest way to do that is to use 2 different apps.  My goal at that point was a CD player that would show album art, CDDB the track titles, and be simple to use (CD only not too much music library oriented apps).  Nothing really stand out came up in my Googling so I resorted to…

Winner – Windows Media Player

Ironically WMP meets all my goals and it is already installed.  I don’t really like WMP for any sort of digital music management but for playing a CD it does great.  The album art is on the right hand side with the CDDBed tracks below it and to boot it has a nice visualization in the middle of the player.  So it won this spot for now.

Not Site Specific Streaming

Winner – Clicker.com in a web browser

Clicker.com Website

A simple reality is that I don’t have any one show or station I watch all the time.  When it comes to streaming media for the moment it’s all about what I feel like right now and what I feel like searching. Hulu is great but not everything is on it.  Clicker.com is a great streaming video aggregate website. It tells me how many episodes are available online, how many are free, how many are paid, and where each is located. It’s entirely a click-through site so if I search there a few clicks later I’m on whatever Flash based website is hosting the video and I’ll just click full screen on their browser-based player.

What this gains in flexibility for one stop video streaming window shopping is the ability to do start/stop/play/pause remote control.  I’ll still be able to control Windows volume or the TV’s volume but the rest is lost.  For the amount I use it right now that is an acceptable trade-off. If I find myself wishing I had it I’ll install Hulu’s desktop app and go from there (or something similar when the time comes).  It also means I’m using a 3′ UI for media selection but that falls into my scope of my HTPC project.

Server Based Music

This was by far the hardest one to come up with. This is the category many of the all-in-one media center apps fall short in my experience or at least for my expectations.  Also my favorite media player fell short because I couldn’t find any skins that were even a hybrid 10′ and 3′ UI.  ALL of the ones I found I liked were good 3′ UI’s but still nothing wowed me.  Enter…

Winner – SongBird

For its ‘region’ based skinning mechanism.

SongBird Skinnable Regions (Native Skin)

SongBird allows you to apply a Feather (aka – skin) to the player but it also allows you to change the Media View Area.  This let me pick a skin that I like player placement, album art placement, media view location that I liked but also choose a better Media View that is closer to a 10′ view.

SongBird w/Murphy Feather and Ideal Media View -- GridView

For the overall Feather I choose Murphy because I like the location of the Player Controls/Info better. I don’t know if you can see it but on the native skin (1st image) the currently playing info is across the top and quite tiny.  In the Murphy Feather the text is larger and even if the space isn’t as long to accommodate long file names I’d rather have it cut out and/or scroll so I can see it a bit farther away. I also placed the Album art square at the bottom to display the album art of what is currently playing.

For the Media View I had to compromise.  I want to use GridView which is what is paired with Murphy in the image above.  It stacks all the album art from each artist into a stack and presents it in a grid format.  Across the top is an alphabet to jump to that location in the artists.  However, this Media View is not compatible with the most current SongBird v. 1.8. I played with older versions and decided I would stick with the new version and use a different media view for now hoping GridView will be updated. We shall see. For the moment I settled on MediaFlow…

MediaFlow Media View in a Different Feather

It shows the album art in  line with the center focus being large. I can click on album art in the distance and it will bring it to the front or I can click on tracks below and it will bring their album art to the center.  If I do a search for say a string ‘The Beatles” it will only list the tracks that fit that search and subsequently only the albums of that search result will be displayed above. This isn’t perfect but it is significantly better than a text only option so I’m rolling with it for now.

I’ll update this as I add more media types and their players but for now this is what I am working with.

[Update] Added Media Players….

SHOUTcast Player

This was a hard category to even find contenders worth looking at.  Ironically after loading Pandora I remembered an internet radio station I listened to in college that I enjoyed because it was super eclectic! I checked it out and sure enough it is still around. What I wanted was a lightweight ShoutCast player that I could basically put favorites into.  I don’t do a lot of searching around for new shoutcast stations so something simple that would just play streams and I could save any ones I come across I wanted to listen to regularly.  This immediately ruled out Winamp AND SongBird because they play so many other media types.  And because those and iTunes play ShoutCast streams and have built-in directories there weren’t a plethora of options in my google searches.  But I did find a few…

Winner — Enhanced ShoutCast Player

ESP Main Player

Ironically I actually passed this player up because I couldn’t get it to work the first time because the SHOUTcast website had changed and was no longer compatible…. or so I thought. ESP uses the website as the directory service and grabbing the stream location/information from the directory when you select it.  The NEW SHOUTcast website pops up a flash-based player instead of passing the pls stream file so ESP had nothing to work with and I was bummed. Well it turns out SHOUTcast’s website has “Settings” where you can choose if you want to use the flash player or “Save the pls stream location file.” Once I changed the setting ESP worked like a charm! And with that little heart I can save my favorite stations so it’s now part of my HTPC.

My goals on building my HTPC can be summed up in 2 parts: 1) Usability and 2) Support.  In the past I tried to accomplish much of these two goals with a common process: a single media center application that does it all.  However, this approach doesn’t seem to be meeting my goals when I look back over the past few months. 

During those same few past months I’ve been learning a lot about Usability of Systems in conjunction with a users skill set.  This sounds a lot more technical than it is but it boils down to: sometimes the simplest answer is the one that is closest to what a user already knows.  This leads directly into the other thing I’ve learned: When a process is more in line with a users skill set support is considerably less.  This sounds really obvious but in IT experience there is a tendency to want the ‘technically superior’ solution and belief that users need to ‘learn the new system’ and that is that.  Much of the time this is 100% accurate but I am learning there are times when this isn’t the best approach often this involves when many users will be using a common system infrequently.  While written documentation can really help in this scenario it can be overwhelming and discarded easily. 

Another thing I’m experiencing/learning is that supporting things that I already know is much simpler than having to switch my mindset into another application/method. In one way this is really obvious but what I’ve learned is that there are different methods to accomplish this. In this case I know Windows. I know windows shortcuts, I know TweakUI, My roommate and I know Windows, and we both know Media Players.  Learning new ways to make shortcuts in a speciality one fits all app isn’t bad but it isn’t a no brainer for me.

With this experience and usage data I’m ready to try another approach to my same goals: use action specific applications with simple windows icon based ”HTPC UI”.  The standout benefit of this approach is I can select and/or ‘install’ any and all applications I decide I want to play media.  My decision on media player may be UI based (SongBird vs Winamp), content availability based (using clicker.com instead of Hulu), or content access based (streaming content vs local server content) but as programs and experiences change through time I can easily ‘integrate’ any new program or content into the setup; no need to wait for someone (or myself) to write code to load into a pre-defined framework like Boxee. Additions are as easy as installing the app and creating a shortcut to it. 

The second stand out benefit is one the support side is that  any “HTPC Specific UI” failure never results in an emergency support situation/a non-usable device state and makes it a relatively easy fix when I get to it. There are 2 main UI tweaks that could fail: the icon/shortcut based UI and the remote control setup. If the icon setup fails the standard Windows Task bar reappears and if the remote control doesn’t work the keyboard and mouse hard-corded to it works fine.  That gives any user the ability to fall back on a known skill set (windows) and continue to use the pc minus the value added HTPC control options. The easy of fixing comes from a consolidation of customizations tools that have easy to use GUIs for configuration, can back their own settings up, and be re-imported settings upon a failure.  This will give me 3 distinct places to check for the majority of settings in a failure/rebuild situation. 

How to Implement The Above Theory…

One observation that refocused my method for my goals was the realization that I wouldn’t use a true 10′ UI in some cases.  For example, a 10′ UI is considerable more limited and therefore more effort than using a standard music library application with mouse based UI. That realization allowed me to broaden my range of applications to choose from.  I still wanted 10′ start/stop/next track and DVD Menu selecting to work but choosing what music or putting in a DVD would still require me to visit the device so why worry about finding a UI that I wasn’t going to use.  So I settled on a mixed 3′ and 10′ UI scenario depending on the action.

I’m working on this in 3 major steps (from the necessary to more optional/value added steps):

1) Media Applications / UI — Install and Configure the media players to my UI liking
2) “HTPC UI” — Install and Configure a large icon Media Center UI
3) Remote Configuration/Automation – Get the value added 10′ control working and any other media center automation tasks setup.

I think I’ll document the process in 3 posts detailing each one of the above steps for the moment and 1 post summarizing what I am carrying over from the past configurations.

Bacon, Egg, in a MUFFIN

I just tasted our first one of these and they are amazing!! I love biscuits and I’m pretty sure I would just eat these as biscuits even without the egg in them honestly although the egg adds a nice touch.  These came to be via Australia, a lot of nothing, and then a ferry ride! Basically my travel partner and I ran into this type of egg-in-a-biscuit-muffin at a cart in Cairns, Australia in the mall and they were fabulous.  At the time I wondered how they got the egg in muffins exactly and wished to make them at home but never really investigated that thought until I was on a ferry and saw a complimentary issue of our local edible magazine. Flipping through the pages low and behold I found a recipe for them! WHAM! So we made them finally.  And they were totally worth it!!!!

They are chives, bacon, and Parmesan cheese biscuit batter surrounding a cooked whole egg.

From the July / August 2010 Edition of an edible Communities Publication (pg 39):

Bacon and Egg Muffins
Serves 6 | Start to Finish: 1 hour

Stuffed with a half pound of crumbled bacon, chopped chives, Parmesan cheese, and an egg baked right into the center, these biscuity muffins aren’t the kind that leave you hungry an hour later.

• Nonstick vegetable oil spray
• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1/2 lb thick-cut bacon, cooked crisp and finely chopped
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh chives
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
• 1 cup whole milk
• 7 large eggs (we used medium)
• 5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted (we used margarine)

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees
2. Grease 6 jumbo muffin tins (or 1 cup ramekins) with the oil spray and set aside
3. Whisk the flour, salt, baking powder, sugar, bacon, chives, and cheese in a large bowl. Combine the milk and one egg in a small bowl, and add to the dry ingredients, along with the melted butter. Fold the ingredients together gently until no dry spots remain.
4. Spoon about 1/4 cup batter into each of the muffin tins. Using a soft spatula spread the batter up the sides of the tins a bit, leaving a depression in the middle of the batter.  Crack an egg into the center of each cup, and divide the remaining batter between the cups, making sure you cover the yolk. (It’s easiest if you work with small dollops of batter.)
5. Bake the muffins for 20-25 minutes, until the visible egg white is set and the muffins are just barely beginning to crack (they will not be very brown.) Cool 5 minutes, then run a small knife around the edges of each muffin to release. Serve hot.

I had an opportunity to look at the impact on badly matched power supplys in my stepwise process of building my home server.  I first built it in a standard ATX case with a standard ATX power supply (350 W I think?) but I used low power Atom board and hard drives (1 2.5″ PATA and 1 3.5″ Green Series WD)  running Windows Home Server 1.0.  After using it in that configuration I moved it into a Chenbro ES34069 with a 120 W power supply that was more efficient at lower loads.  I took advantage of that opportunity and took some notes about energy consumption.  The following are the measurements in 4 different power states, the energy consumption of the 2 configurations, and the percent change between the two:

In all states the power consumption decreased.  In the off and standby states the drop is really negligible but in the load and idle states the reduction is fairly impressive considering the only thing that changed was the efficiency of the power supply in the setup.  After looking at the numbers I wondered how they compared to if I was to run a desktop in the similar setup.  So I measured the usage of my 1 year old Dell Vostro 220 system to throw into the mix.  I did the same measurements but unlike the other two setups the consumption was highly variable.  To account for that I decided to use the consumption specifications that dell provides because they were right in the range I was measuring.  Here is the beautiful graph I made…

Graphical Representation of Measured Energy Consumption

Eventually I’d like to take this data and expand it to energy usage in 1 year but for now here are the immediate measurements and comparisons.

Power Saving Boxee Box: Is it really this hard?

Goal: To have a media center box that goes to sleep while it’s not in use and comes back on quickly when needed.

Boxee doesn’t make that easy, or at least not that I can find.

Problems with Boxee and Power Savings:

1) It overrides Window’s Power Settings so you can’t just set the box to go to sleep after a period of Idle time.  This process worked fine for the old setup but not for Boxee.

2) It doesn’t include anyway to do this within Boxee. It does have a sleep mode but that only goes for the monitor it is attached to.

3) Boxee does NOT come out of sleep well.  In face it basically freezes and after a Ctrl+Alt+Del kill it will work again.

Solution:

1) Don’t use sleep; use shutdown instead.  I set the computer to auto login (with Tweak UI), wake the server, and auto start Boxee with each boot so its easy. It takes a little longer than sleep but not terribly long.

2) AMP WinOFF — I tried a few other shutdown apps to monitor on network traffic, etc but none of them seemed to really fit my needs.  I had to change directions and this one came up amazing. I set it to immediately start a 3 hour countdown to shutdown when the computer boots. I hide the window and when that 3 hours are up it pops a window with 2 options:

a) Restart Timer – It will start another 3 hour countdown from that point and repeat the cycle
b) Cancel Shutdown – This stops the timer and the computer will be on until you turn it off

If neither of those options are chosen it will shutdown.

For an apartment of 2 people it means AT MOST it will be on for 6 hours a day IF someone turns it on walks away and someone else is using it mid 3 hour point.  The likelihood of that happening with its usage is very small in my living situation. Most days it doesn’t get turned on and when it does 95% of the time it will turn itself off in 3 hours. Not a perfect energy-saving plan but better than the alternative of leaving it on all the time accidentally.

Chenbro ES34069 Dreamy Case

That’s a lovely stock photo and perhaps I’ll get a photo of my build up there, but the key to that photo is that it is 5″x10″x10″. TINY for 4 full hot swappable drives and 1 2.5″ PATA space.  I had already speced out my parts I was using in a hope to one day upgrade to the Chenbro case I sought after so I was theoretically ready to go to just move my parts.

And it worked! On the first boot of the new case install everything came up and worked correctly. It was awesome! Many sites by this point have gone over the Chenbro case but here are a few starter things for folks who might have just stumbled across this:

1) The case is tight! To pack everything in there isn’t a lot of space for cables. For example my IDE cable for the 2.5″ PATA OS drive pretty much takes up an entire corner to wrap it around and into.

2) The case isn’t difficult to get apart but it isn’t intuitive either: read the directions.  Getting the bezel off is the hardest part and I found once I could hing it 15 degrees (as the pdf directions tell me to do) I could actually get to the tabs from the front side of the bezel with a small flat head screw driver and push them down to release.  I got one undone by the published directions (I had to google for them under “Chenbro ES34069 manual”) and then the second one I could get to release by the screwdriver method.  I’m not sure if you can do both with the screwdriver from the start but I don’t see why not.  Give it a shot.

3) Sadly the case has more fancy lights than my motherboard has headers. This isn’t a big deal but I get the standard 2 lights on the front: Power and HDD Activity. No separate lights for each NIC or a fault light.  It’s really okay as I’m sharing a bedroom with it :)

Over the next few days I’m going to try to put together a case study for the energy savings of my setup.

Fried Squash Blossoms

 What we learned tonight…. use squash blossoms RIGHT AWAY.  Ours were a bit more wilt-y than we would have liked them. The sous chef did an amazing job of removing the stamins and stuffed them in these tough wilted situation.  We stuffed them with a mixture of goat chevre, basil, thyme, garlic powder, and white pepper.  They got battered in a simple beer batter and fried for 30 seconds on each side.  They were yummy but not blow my mind amazing. Not this time anyway… and here they are BEFORE we lathered them with goodness and dipped them in hot oil!

Stuffed but not battered and friend squash blossoms

We've been eating, I swear!

Clockwise, starting with the top left:

1) chocolate rhubarb bread with pear

2) curried potato-corn burgers with avocado mango salsa

3) smoked salmon (fresh from the farmer’s market!) pot pie gloriously using up leftover fiddleheads, carrots, potatos, and with lots of dill

4) bacon, avocado & tomato sandwich; spread made of cream cheese, shredded goat cheddar and fresh garlic; toasted up like a grilled cheese

5) poached eggs on toast with avocado and tomato slices

6) lime yogurt cake, sprinkled with powdered sugar

7) sweet potatos, tomatillos, refried beans and salsa in a delicious tortilla!

8) the beginnings of a soup using purple cabbage, potatos, andoille sausage from the farmer’s market…DELICIOUS.

The Chef is once again out of town. It is my hope that he’ll put up some posts soon regarding the 1950′s bike repair project, but also – if you see him – ask him about his lemon basil iron chef adventure! If only I had access to the sorbet in the freezer at his apartment….!

My enthusiasm for fiddleheads wanes when it’s time to prep them for cooking. They come with lots of “feathers” you have to clean off, and it’s not easy. You really need running water to do it effectively, and since using hot water would partially cook them, you have to use COLD water – and your fingers freeze off. Also, it’s hard to fit more than one person in front of the sink at a time, so one person has to do it solo and it takes FOREVER. I think, in general, they aren’t necessarily worth the trouble – for me, anyway.

But, it was not too much effort for the Chef, and in his excitement, he blanched a batch of these bad boys toward the end of fiddlehead season and we put them in the freezer to enjoy over the winter.

Two or three weeks ago, fresh fiddleheads returned to the farmer’s market. And the frozen ones were still in my freezer. The Chef, to his credit, hasn’t tried to buy any fresh ones yet, but I would have refused to let him – not until the ones in the freezer are used up.

Awhile ago, he suggested a fiddlehead quiche, and I latched onto this brilliant idea, and waited til the time was right. Last night, I made it happen.

CHOMP.

Over at Parsnips Aplenty, the blog where I found this post’s recipe, fiddleheads are referred to as a “recently yuppified foraging treat”. At our farmer’s market, we have one vendor that deals in foraged goods – a rotating cast of mushrooms, fiddleheads, stinging nettles, knotweed, miner’s lettuce, etc. Foraged goods just cost more in general. They are, however, mostly delicious. Parsnips Aplenty doesn’t care how yuppified or expensive they are – Parsnips Aplenty buys them anyway. (And so do we.)

This recipe is adapted from the other blog, which is funny because that recipe is also adapted from somewhere else. Sometimes cooking from internet recipes feels like a game of telephone.

One reason a quiche was a perfect idea is that it meant using the fiddleheads in something, rather than serving them alone: they didn’t survive well in the freezer after a whole year (and I wouldn’t expect them to). They were freezer burned and, after thawed, pretty mushy. NOT TO WORRY! First, we chopped them roughly and sauteed them in a pan with approximately 2tbsp of chopped leeks, then we put them in a tasty egg mixture and cooked them up in a fancy egg pie. No need for crunchy!

As far as the game of telephone goes: we used soy milk instead of half and half, replaced the cheddar cheese with goat cheese, didn’t bother buying parsley and completely forgot to put in the parmesan. And as much as I’d have loved to make it in my tart pan, I had no designs on making my own crust – thus it was baked in a store-bought pie crust.  I also added what turned out to be quite a bit of green garlic from the farmer’s market.

It was at this point that I realized I completely forgot the tomatillo I wanted to put in.

I’m a fan of the finished product. It’s deliciously garlicky and goat-cheesey. Honestly, I can’t taste the fiddleheads – they don’t really have a strong flavor to begin with, and when you start adding strong ingredients like garlic and goat cheese, combined with the fact that the fiddleheads were WAY past their prime – that’s to be expected, I think. But as a green veggie filler they were excellent. Otherwise the quiche would probably just have broccoli in it. BORING!

Additionally: I’m not sure I’d actually choose this recipe/preparation for fresh fiddleheads. They are so much damn work that if I am going to make them, I want to be able to TASTE them, rather than bury them. Although it’s entirely possible that, when fresh, they’d be able to hold their own against the garlic and goat cheese.

The chicken potholder really enhances the baking experience

Chocolate is in all of them!

Man I’m still cooking but blogging about it is becoming longer and longer between the cooking and the writing.  The longest still is Thanksgiving of last year that isn’t done yet. So in some cases I’m starting to adopt a less verbose or detailed posting style just to keep myself moving. At the bare minimum I’ll post a final photo, a short review, and a link to the recipe if it is on the web.  So this one is about 2 weeks late but enjoy:  

What do you do when you have lots of dark chocolate bars around your apartment, a dinner scheduled with your teacher, and a teacher who weekly has been using Facebook to get her chocolate fix? You act on that idea you’d had for a while: Chocolate themed dinner.  I scoured the web for recipes that use chocolate that aren’t a mole sauce and aren’t someone boring like a salad with chocolate nibs in it. Cooking boring I guess. I wanted to have to do SOMETHING with the chocolate besides just crush it up and sprinkle.  That was NOT easy; especially for a main course. So what did I come up with? A four dish meal (and a bonus dessert!):  

• Appetizer – Grilled Figs with Dark Chocolate and Sea Salt Bruschetta
• Main Dish #1 – Catalan Beef Stew
• Main Dish #2 - Homemade Spelt Ravioli with Lemon-Soy Ricotta Filling served with a Chocolate Sauce – Naturally made with spelt for my wheat-free guest and with my homemade soy ricotta for the dairy allergic me.
• Planned Dessert – Chocolate Covered Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Balls
• Bonus Dessert – Orange Flavored Chocolate Cups with Orange Slices to Garnish

Sadly we didn’t get to the make the Grilled Fig with Dark Chocolate and Sea Salt Bruschetta because we couldn’t get figs that particular day but we did pick up a bonus dessert! So how’d it go? AWESOME!  

Catalan Beef Stew  

Catalan Beef Stew served over Rice

Where’s the chocolate?:  There is about 2 ounces in the sauce along with orange peel and cinnamon stick! It has a great deep flavor and lovely burst of orange if you got some of the peel.  It was delightful served over rice. And for the 10 lunches afterwards. :)  

The only problem? I left the cinnamon sticks in to big of chunks and it looks EXACTLY like the beef when it starts to pull apart; only its still kinda hard.   

Homemade Spelt Ravioli with Lemon-Soy Ricotta Filling served with a Choclate Sauce  

Savory on the inside; Sweet on the outside!

Where’s the Chocolate?: In the sauce. Duh. Which is just melted dark chocolate, some soy cream, and coconut cream.   

This is a great example of tweaking a recipe so folks can eat it. Instead of normal wheat flour we used spelt to make the pasta. Instead of regular ricotta I made it with soy cream cheese and tofu.  Flavored it with lemon zest and a bit of powdered sugar per the instructions and off we went.  It turned out great! Slightly sweet on the inside but mostly savory with a sweet sauce. Totally worth it. If you make it cut the sauce in half; we still have chocolate sauce in the fridge!  

Chocolate Covered Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Balls  

Chocolate Inside; Chocolate Outside. What more could you want?!

Where’s the Chocolate?: Outside and inside. QED.  

These were made with spelt again and also sans egg for that whole raw-eating-not-killing-you thing.  The texture of the dough was a bit off for me but I think that had to do with the recipe being different from my normal chocolate chip cookie dough.  Next time I’ll use my standard dough sans eggs and let it chill for an hour before I roll it out. These were still REALLY good just not perfect.  

Orange Chocolate Cups with Orange Slices  

Mmmmmmmmmmm

Where’s the Chocolate?: You need to ask?  

This is what happens when you have quite a bit of melted dark chocolate left over from dipping the dough balls.  We also had 1/2 of an orange zest left so we finished that off and stirred it into the chocolate. Lined muffin tin with muffin paper cups and filled them up with what we hoped would be orange flavored chocolate.  And then we had these left over slices so we stuck 1 in the top of half the chocolate cups.  Boom! No chocolate waste.  

How’d it go over? Really, really well! Not only was the food good but the company was great and the sous chef had a good time making it; even in the day fraught with annoyances :)  

****

BONUS:  

Alternate beggining written while I was searching for recipes:  

People love to give me chocolate more than I love to eat it. Don’t get me wrong I love eating chocolate but it isn’t part of my normal craving cycle and so it often goes uneaten for a period of time. At his point I have 4-5 bars of various dark chocolate types at my house. I thought of the idea of doing a chocolate themed dinner and the time has come because one of my guests for this weekend dinner is a self proclaimed ”Not Chocaholic”… which translates to she can’t get enough.  :) So this post starts earlier in the process than usual: finding a recipe.  

Things this search has solidified for me: 1) Most chocolate recipes are for deserts 2) If they are main meals they are either mole sauce, chili, or a cacao rub for meat.  None of those mail meal options are where I want to take the meal for no apparent reason so I’m searching for something else and I’m not finding much. At all.  

I’m looking for a 3 course meal plan that in each dish the chocolate is some how incorprated in a unique way.  I’ve found salad recipes with nibs of chocolate on top which sounds good but feels more like “assembling” a meal than cooking a meal. My preference for this meal is for the chocolate to disappear into the dish or at least change forms from broken up bar.

Sweet Potato and Sausage Soup

This is truly a tag team effort! This morning I mentioned to the sous chef that I was thinking we could make a soup out of lonely sweet potato we had left over. I was headed to class and we were going to the farmers market right after that so the power was left up to her and she rocked it! She came back with 2 recipes and we selected this one from her now favorite food blog (which isn’t this one?!.. sadly its true): Smitten Kitchen.  But the recipe was great because not only did it use the sweet potato but also a few other extras we had lying around: frozen garlic cubes, 7 tiny ozette potatoes, and spinach. We got some Andouille sausage, leeks, and a sweet potato at the farmers market and we were off!

What an amazing soup! The slightly spicy sausage goes great with the 1/2 lightly mashed sweet potato. And even the wilted spinach was not too much for me (which is surprising).   The texture was thick but not smooth and the contents were nice and chunky; just the way I like soup!

The sous chef MADE me take this picture. Thank her later!

This was a quick salad we took to a friends for dinner one night. I hadn’t told the sous chef that we were taking anything because it wasn’t confirmed yet so I just it upon myself to provide the salad I promised.  The only idea I had was to  do something with spinach (’cause I love it) and make a salad dressing from some honey a co-worker gave me from someone who harvested it in their or a friends backyard (can’t remember how long the chain of people is?) but I forgot the honey and wasn’t going to go back to work to get it before dinner.  So what did I do? Went to the grocery store, stepped inside, and saw the strawberries on sale and immediately knew what I had to do.

I got the spinach, strawberries, and some herbed goat cheese.  Done.   Except the dressing. So I went looking for something pre-made (French my personal stand-by wasn’t going to cut it one this one) but I managed to find some Fig Walnut Dressing which was really good. But honestly the huge chunks of goat cheese with the spinach and strawberries was all it needed in my opinion.  And any salad that doesn’t need a dressing is AMAZING because I think I like dressing more than I like greens. Sadly. I loved how the goat cheese acted like a nice glue to hold my strawberry  to my pile of spinach without any tine action.  It was wonderful!

Lemon Lime & Bitters Fixin's and Soda

A few months ago I traveled to Australia and my travel partner and I stumbled across a lovely drink called Lemon Lime and Bitters. It was made by a few recognizable companies and a few ones we had never heard off.  Every time I drank it I liked it that much more. I’d place it in the genre of Ale 8-1 or ginger ale type sodas. Not exactly but that same light taste with some sort of twist or tang to it.  Obviously, a taste I like! In this case the twang was the bitters. We took photos of the bottles hoping to order/find some when we got back to the States.  But my local grocery store had other plans for me.  When I was walking down the aisle I looked up and saw a bottle of bitters and I thought of the name again: Lemon Lime and Bitters.  That doesn’t sound complicated I bet I could make that… I have lemon lime soda at home… and now I have bitters. DONE! So I bought it and tonight I made it.

And it pretty much tastes exactly like what I had in Australia. Light and refreshing with a bit of a tang to it. Yum!

Thank you internet for this recipe (which is reprinted below in American vernacular):

Lemon Lime and Bitters

• Splash of bitters
• 5 parts Lemon Lime Soda
• 1 part Lime Juice or Lime Cordial

1. Splash a few drops of bitters onto the ice in glass
2. Cover with 1 part Lime Juice and 5 parts Lemon Lime Soda
3. Enjoy!

A tiny green forest inside.

The Chef isn’t really a fan of brussell sprouts, and who can blame him? They are a totally unpopular vegetable. I myself had never eaten a single sprout until I moved to Seattle. But, it’s all about preparation, and after this post, the Chef mentioned he could probably get behind trying sprouts prepared this way – with a crap-ton of butter and, this time, BACON.

Ready for baking, just add olive oil.

Since I knew that I was going to be loading on the butter and olive oil when I sauteed the brussell sprouts, I decided against frying these ozettes, choosing instead to bake them with some garlic chunks, drizzled with olive oil. I’m solidly pleased with that choice – it took only 25 minutes (in a 350 degree oven) for these to be completely done and delicious.

Behold! The glory of the fresh bacon!

GUYS FOR REAL. I finally caved and bought fresh bacon from the farmer’s market – Sea Breeze Farms has their usual meat counter, and they had the bacon hanging from an honest-to-god meat hook. They cut their slices THICK, so half a pound of bacon was a grand total of 4 slices, and set me back nine bucks. I don’t even regret it.

We’ve reached the point in the cooking adventure wherein I ran to Facebook and said: “This is not your usual bacon. Calling for backup.” I’m a total newbie when it comes to cooking regular bacon from the store – the thin, cheap kind. Either it’s been cooked FOR me or it’s been cooked in between layers of paper towels in the microwave.  (Midwest holla!) So cooking this thick-cut bacon was seriously like trying to fry up a steak. Eventually I didn’t know if I’d be able to tell when it was done or if I’d burn it, so I pulled it off the stove and texted the Chef for backup. Half of it we chopped up and mixed with the sprouts on the stove, and we each took one of the remaining two pieces to eat alone.

My spiraly pink plate is pretty awesome, right?!

OVERALL: Satisfactory meal. The sprouts were not as mindblowing as the first time I made them, which was disappointing considering I was trying to sell the Chef on this vegetable. Where I fell short this time around was that, upon reading the recipe, I realized it was meant for a pound and a half of sprouts. And while I was not sure how much I had, I knew I didn’t have THAT much, so I cut out some of the olive oil and butter. I also cooked the sprouts too hot in the olive oil, and they were browned way before they should have been.  Still, they were tasty – just not AWESOME.

The potatoes were excellent – could have used a wee more salt. Unfortunately we did end up burning the bacon.  So, I’ll probably do all of these things again, but next time I’ll be sure to give the cooking the care and attention it needs.

It was great to have access to easy breakfast all week, until the pear muffins were gone. And wouldn’t it be great to do something like that every weekend? Bake something – or cook something, or whatever – every weekend, so that I have something all week? (This week I hardboiled a batch of eggs for breakfast eating, but that’s probably not advisable long term considering the Sous Chef’s inherited legacy of bad cholesterol.)

Peeled and delicious! 3 varieties of Washington apples.

Apples are pretty much the only other fruit, aside from pears, that you can get at the farmer’s market right now – so apples it was. Incidentally, you probably already know that Washington is a huge apple state. That’s what we grow here. Like Iowa has corn, and Idaho has potatos, we have apples. I clearly remember the first time I heard a commercial for apples on the radio. I was like really? You have a commercial to tell me to eat Pink Ladies? There are dozens of apple varieties, and I wanted to mix mine up. I got a Granny Smith (the recipe I followed used them), a Galaxy Gala and a Braeburn. (I looked for some Jazz apples, which I’d tried at the farmer’s market before and loved, but saw none.)

Baking is easy! And then you spill.

A little googling introduced me to this guy named Pete, who bakes! There were dozens of recipe websites that came up in the search results, but I liked Pete’s writing style, and his recipe looked simple, so I found a great guide for my bread (and a new food blog to follow!).

This was the first use of the bundt cake pan. As the Chef correctly pointed out, it’s much easier to travel with this stuff in muffin form, but I was decided. The pear bread was supposed to be bread, and so was this. Plus, I was just imagining how AWESOME it was going to look with sifted powdered sugar on top!

The recipe didn't call for vanilla. I called shenanigans.

The story actually goes like this: I pulled out all the ingredients and put them on the kitchen table, where the mixing/magic was to happen. As I added and stirred and this and that, I realized I’d pulled out vanilla on autopilot, and there was NO vanilla in the recipe! I didn’t even hesitate: I whipped out my measuring spoons and added maybe a tablespoon of vanilla. Snap! (Sorry, Pete.)

Conveniently, the afternoon of this adventure I ended up with not one, not two but THREE guests in my apartment who were willing guinea pigs for my baking adventure. One was on study break, one was pirating my wireless (it’s not really pirating if they have permission, is it), and one was the Chef. Imagine me basking publicly in the glory of this beautiful bread.

CHOMP

If I’d had any forethought at all I wouldn’t have turned it over onto an orange towel, but what’s done is done. I took some photos and then my friends and I ate nearly half of this in one sitting. Thankfully I had enough left for my breakfasts.

I can’t wait until more fruit is available at the market – the summer will explode with baking!

The Main Ingredients

Sous Chef reporting! Another Smitten Kitchen obsession… and yet another chance to showcase pears, the winter fruit of champions. (Don’t worry, there will be another post to highlight apples, so don’t be sad!) It took me a bit longer that I intended to try this recipe, even though I bought the pears at the farmer’s market almost immediately after discovering it.

I mean, pears and eggs and chocolate – how can this go wrong?!

My hesitations were thus: 1) A certain fluffiness was required of the eggs, meaning I’d need a motorized mixer to make it happen, and I’d need to be careful not to lose volume, and 2) it involved browning butter – at the same time as you’re beating the eggs, no less – and I was pretty sure leaving me in charge of browning anything would result in blackening it instead.

For awhile I thought, I need to wait for the Chef to be available to aid and oversee this process. But as time wore on and the pears became more in danger of going to waste, I convinced myself that I could do it. More importantly, I realized there was very good chance this cake would be delicious whether or not I managed to successfully fluffify the eggs. And with that mindset, I moved forward.

As it bakes, the batter rises up and envelopes the pear and chocolate.

I borrowed a handmixer from the Chef, but in the end, it just didn’t have enough power. The recipe said if you had a commercial stand mixer it would take 5 minutes, and if you had a home model it would take 9 minutes. I’m pretty sure she actually meant if I had a home model of, say, a super-fancy Kitchen Aid. 9 minutes of mixing with the handmixer did not produce the desired results, and really it hadn’t increased in volume since 4 minutes, so I knew extra mixing wouldn’t help. However, I didn’t let it faze me – it just meant I didn’t have to worry about over-mixing and losing volume, because I didn’t have the volume to begin with. No problem!

Browning the butter worked out pretty well. At first I wasn’t sure if I had the heat on high enough. What was interesting is I turned my back for a few seconds, and when I turned back it had gone brown in like an instant. I immediately removed it from the burner and voila, perfectly browned butter – totally on accident.

(I turned my back in the first place because I realized that, in the process of browning the butter, I was melting my spatula. Thankfully I am confident that no evil toxicness leaked into the butter, so I went ahead and used it – but the spatula unfortunately went into the trash.)

As you can see from the photo above, once you pour the batter into the pan, you add the diced pear and bittersweet chocolate chunks (I used Ghirardelli) on top, and the batter bakes up around them.

The delicious, delicious finale.

After the pear muffin adventure – it was originally slated to be pear BREAD, in a bundt cake pan like this, but I had no bread pan of any kind – I found one at Goodwill and thought, here’s something I can use and reuse to make my breads look more impressive! I am all for that. Before using it for this adventure, I made sure to check with the internet – a pan conversion site assured me that this bundt cake pan, with its specific measurements, was a satisfactory replacement for the springform pan for which the recipe called, baking-wise.

The final product, fresh out of the oven, was orgasmically delicious. Although I’m certain the final cake should have been springier – which would have happened had I been able to get the eggs right – I absolutely don’t miss it.

The sad side effect of not having the appropriate springform pan is that there was no way of getting the cake out of the pan, for proper (and prettier) presentation. When I last baked in the pan (which I’ll tell you about when I write the apple-bread post) I was able to turn it over and dump it right out – however, this cake has a solid layer of just fruit and chocolate, and turning the pan over just made the top layer of cake and all the pear chocolate layer fall out, with the rest of the cake inside.

Ooops.

I put the top back in, and have since been serving it with a scoop. It still tastes just as delicious. (To me, anyway. I was flabbergasted to hear the Chef say he’s on the fence about pear and bittersweet chocolate in the same food. He tried a bite of it, and has left the rest of the eating to me. Hopefully I’ll be able to share some with friends this weekend, so as to not have eaten it all by myself.)

Turns out you have to turn off the “allow this device to turn off to save power” check box in the network card adapter settings. DONE!

Double file line.

Apparently, I like to bake now. Who would have guessed? I especially like to bake when the Chef is out of town, because I actually have a ton of downtime in my own apartment that I can spend on baking.

Also, I’ve got Smitten Kitchen in my Google Reader, and everything I bookmark from that blog is a sugary food of some kind.

Local pears from the neighborhood farmer's market.

This pear bread recipe was one I knew I wanted to try as soon as possible. Obviously bananas are NOT grown here, and as it’s winter, the whole fruit thing is pretty sparse – just tons of pears and apples at the farmer’s market, and a stack of satsumas at the grocery store. I picked up four pears one weekend and put them in the fridge as prep for my 3 day weekend without the Chef.

The recipe was incredibly easy to put together – the most difficult part is grating the pears. My pears were probably a bit more firm than they should have been, but that may have also made them easier to grate.

The recipe called for 2 cups of grated pears - I threw in a little extra.

You’re also supposed to peel the pears before you cut them, which I of course forgot on the first one, and begrudgingly did with the rest. I have a tendency to not a) wash or b) peel most fruits or vegetables. For some reason it feels like unnecessary, painful effort. But, I reminded myself what the Chef said, which is that you should follow a recipe to the letter at least once, to give it a chance to be good on it’s own – and after that you can tweak it to your tastes, if you want to.  So I heaved a heavy sigh to no one but myself, and peeled the pears. With a carrot peeler.

Later, I may or may not have accidentally doubled the amount of cinnamon in the recipe, which started a great conversation on Facebook about whether or not you can actually have too much cinnamon, or if there’s no such thing.  (Cinnamon, incidentally, is actually really good for you. Several days after all this went down I was in the drugstore buying vitamin D and saw you can actually buy cinnamon pills.)

As you can see, I didn't exactly make "bread".

Since I’m – as I said before – totally new to this interest-in-baking thing, I have very few actual baking accoutremants. I have zero bread pans (although I picked up the pretty pan Smitten Kitchen uses at Goodwill this weekend), but I recently acquired two muffin tins from the remains of my paternal grandparents’ things, and decided that would do – reminding myself to adjust baking time to accommodate different size/thickness of pan. (Woo! Learning is fun!)

They turned out fantastic. If there is such a thing as too much cinnamon, this ain’t it. They have the same texture and “vibe” of banana bread (if that makes sense) but with a delicious pear twist.

Voila!

Having these guys around for breakfast this weekend has been brilliant, and I’m heavily considering doing some kind of baking endeavor every weekend that could provide me with easy,  carb-based breakfast throughout the week. (I’m also kind of excited to try out the new pan!)

The rest of a sliced pear went into the blender the next day with some yogurt, a handful of blueberries, and two chocolate strawberries. I am never returning the Chef’s Magic Bullet blender.

Poulty Stew

Poultry stew you ask? Well the stock is homemade turkey stock from our Thanksgiving turkey but the meat was chicken from the grocery store.  It was either double bill them and have to decide which one was going to be the headliner or lump them all together into a generalization that marginalizes both of them equally.  The latter was easier so it was what I did.  Anyway this is a “made for the internet” post that was inspired by real posts (read google and other recipes). 

I had the idea to do a turkey stew with chicken already but googling for a recipe landed me the idea of dumplings; which adding carbs to a stew is pretty much my MO so baking them on top of it and with it just seemed perfect for the day.  Anyway, so idea in hand I googled some more and landed on a recipe page which I lost with a computer crash.  Technically I could look it up in the browser history but as it is just a minor point in this post it was a better idea to type two extra sentences than to hit a few hotkeys to just post the link. Anyway, I found this website and used it mostly to bounce my ingredients I had off of it and see if I should add anything.  It said no. Very politely. So off I went forging my own way.  And now I will journal my own way (read recipe) in prose because I don’t have it distilled to bullet points yet. I haven’t sold out. Yet. So without further ado a story that will make you dinner if you follow along with it at home… or technically breakfast depending on when you start. Details!

Part A – Chicken Prep

Well it turns out that using pre-cooked poultry gives you that freshly torn feel rather than the “chunked and dunked” feel of cubed poultry pieces.  I supposed you’d probably cooked it before you cubed it but anyway.  I followed the technique from last nights dinner:   

1. Put 1 Tablespoon olive oil and 2 Tablespoons butter in a frying pan and melt
2. Cook 2  chicken breasts about 4 minutes on each side until they are nice and seared (read looking kinda like they got grilled) 
3. Pour/place enough thawed/frozen stock in the pan until they are sitting in approximately 1/2 ” of stock.  I started with 1/4″ of stock and ended up adding about 6 “ice cube” pieces of frozen stock to the pan over time (this is approximately 1.5 cups of stock)
4. Place lid on the frying pan and let the chicken cook about 15-20 minutes until it is done through
5. Remove from pan with a slotted spoon, let cool, and “pull”/tear into chicken pieces.
6. Let them hang out until they are ready for their cameo in the cauldron shot.

Part B - Stock Prep

1. Put 10-12 cups of frozen stock cubes or thawed actual stock
2. Heat until melted and warm to cauldron scene level (read boiling). Slowly.

Part C – Potato And Onion Prep

1. Cut 14 Ozette Potatoes in half-lengthwise
2. Chop 1 onion into bits the size of your choice.  — Now honestly after I did this I realized I was using homemade stock and the onions already did their bits there. And I also realized I was going to end up with onion bits floating around in my stew; which was not appetizing to me.  Eventually I saved them from the cameo cauldron shot and put them into a cut scene bowl… SO if you don’t like onions like me. Skip this part. If you like onions. DO IT!
3. Melt 2 Tablespoons of butter in that very same frying pan we had our chicken in.
4. Put all 28 pieces of potato face down into the beautifully bubbling butter and enjoy the “Psssss” sound of the water in the potatoes hitting the oil for a few seconds before you cut yourself off from the sound by covering the pan.
5. Give the potatoes 3-4 minutes of alone time in the frying pan and then add the onions on top of the potatoes checking to make sure you aren’t going to set the smoke alarm with your potatoes.  If they are passing the no smoking/no burning test then cover them with onions.   And give them their private time with the lid on.  If you want to keep an eye on the kids use a clear lid like the sous chef owns.   They will steam it up good though be warned!
6. Let the onions and the potatoes have their private room for a few more minutes with the lid on before interrupting them by spatulaing the crap out of them until they are all mixed up and facing all kinds of directions.
7. Cook them for another 4-5 minutes until the onions are looking translucent and the potatoes seem nice and golden. Yum! Try not to eat it right now.  The onions should be enough of a deterrent for you but if they aren’t then remember: STEW!
8. Check the cauldron and make sure it is ready for its cameo and then pour in the onions and potatoes into the bubbling and boiling stock! MUAHAHAHAHA – Part I. Goto Part E in about 5 minutes after you start Part D now.

Part D – Carrots, Parsnips, and Celery Root Prep

1. Cut 2/3 lbs of carrots into 1″ pieces
2. Cut 2 medium parsnips into chunks approximately 1.5″ cubed in volume, not shape necessarily
3. Cut a medium celery bulb into actual 1″ cubes… and what ever size pieces are left over from that.  No need to peel it or anything.
4. Place Celery Root in that frying pan that is seeing all the action with about 1.5 cups of stock
5. Cook the celery root in the stock covered until it is nice and soft
6. Now that the celery root has been nice, you need to punish it by putting it all in with the stock into a MagicBullet (Read blender!) and make it into tiny, tiny, tiny pureed bits. TAKE THAT CELERY ROOT! The goal with this was to use it to thicken the stock in lieu of corn starch and/or flour. 

Part E – Cauldron Cameo (To bad we aren’t at “Eat” for Part E — Now that’d be some  serendipitous alliteration!)

1. Add the carrots and parsnips to the boiling madness and trap them in with the lid for a bit. You know how ever long you feel like punishing them until they get soft and give in.  Probably around 20-30 minutes for the average tough guy carrot and parsnips!
2. Remove the lid and see how its going in there. This is when I got onion regret and fished them all out with a slotted spoon but if you are feeling good about your choice forge ahead.  Forge ahead my dear readers with your onion love. I couldn’t fake it anymore!
3. Add the chicken and let it cook for a bit longer. You know like another 10  minutes or so.
4. Add the celery root puree!!! And hope that it thickens the soup into stew.
5. After letting it boil for 10 minutes and you just aren’t feeling the thickening  in the room mix 3-4 Tablespoons flour in a mug and add 1/2 cup of the boiling stock to dissolve the flour into.  Turns out my meanness to the celery root back fired and it  refused to thicken anything but the tension in the room. :/ Sad; cooking isn’t supposed to end this way!
6. Once you have a nice flour-y soup in a cup pour it back in and share with everyone in the soup!
7. Stir and let it go until it starts to thicken up.  This will take some more hope as mine never got terribly thick.  But once you are done waiting and ready to eat….

Part F – Favorite Dumpling Recipe

Locate your favorite recipe for dumplings and make it happen.  Ironically, the recipe I used from my best bread cookbook was called ”My Favorite Dumplings” and the batter looked just like Bisquick drop biscuits… and right then I knew that book had won my heart again!

Anyway, mine called for using parsley but I had fresh Thyme so we went that direction and it called not to peak but trust the recipe on the cooking time. We followed that one to the T and well dumplings were birthed just as promised!

So yeah make some dumplings… with some… herbs. Yeah. Copyrights and such. Yeah make this part…. ummm boring. Moving on!

Part G – EAT!

1. Invite over a friend who just made homemade bread to share with you and give her some soup/stew like this in return.
2. Recover a dumpling with a slotted spoon for each bowl and move enough stock and chunks into the bowl to balance the massive amount of amazing bread-product we placed there first.  And then make people eat it.
3. They will like it. Like it. Share it! Like it!

Part H – Blog about it!

1. Log into WordPress and write what you just did.
2. Then sit back and think to yourself “Holy Crap that is a lot of steps to write out but when you are in the throes of it it seems like nothing!” and now go to bed! I insist!

Apple Cider Braised Chicken and Avocado Pasta with Pumpkin Sauce (Photo levels adjusted)

I’m all backed up with posts so we are going to go with “pictures say a 1000 words” and keep my words to a minimum to get myself back on track. The chicken was actually going to be served on the pasta but when I got home it just seemed better served on the side and I had bought some apple cider from the grocery store.  So a google search later I ran across this recipe and went with it. I didn’t use any apples and I changed from just thyme to Herbs de Providence but other than that it was pretty much the same.  The chicken turned out tender and delicious!

The pasta on the other hand was a dinner long time coming. I bought the pasta months ago at an import shop because it was avocado flavored and looked like leaves but I was saving it for the perfect meal and anytime I save something like that I never use it.  Anyway,  so after months of not using it we made the pumpkin soup and that special idea came around: make pumpkin sauce from the left over soup. What a perfect use for some fancy pasta.  My original idea was to put some roasted red peppers in the pasta as well and go with it.  Well the sous chef had preserved some roasted red peppers but they had a problem and became unusable so we just went ahead without them.  I reheated maybe 2 cups of pumkin soup in a sauce pan and added some pepper and Herbs de Providence.  Maybe 1/2 teaspoon of pepper and 1.5 Tablespoons of Herbs de Providence.  Heated it and poured it over the avocado pasta.  The sauce didn’t cover the pasta as much as I imagined so I served it with some grated soft white cheese we had left over.  The resulting cheese, avocado, and light pumpkin flavor worked great together into a nice full flavored savory pasta side dish that went great with the chicken.

Squash Ravioli in Brown Butter and Hazelnut Sauce

This is another one of those recipes “we’ve meant” to make; as in we bought the ingredients 3 weeks ago and haven’t done it yet. The biggest hold up? Making pasta dough from scratch without a pasta press. Lucky for us when I actually read the recipe I found online on tiny pocket internet while at the farmers market used won ton wrappers instead of actual pasta! The bonus? We can buy them pre-made and they are also nice and thin and already rolled out.  The con they aren’t exactly pasta.  I think our guest put it best when she said they were benign; they don’t really add or subtract from the dish they are just sort of there.  So was it worth it? In this case yes because otherwise we wouldn’t have made the dish and the veggies would have gone bad.  Ideally fresh pasta or even store-bought rolled pasta would be used.  I looked in a few stores where  I was for sheets of pasta but I couldn’t find any.

The won ton wrappers were only containers for the amazing butternut squash filling and tasty hazelnut sauce.  The filling was simply fresh herbed goat cheese, spiced onions, and mashed butternut squash. Not many ingredients or steps but very tasty.  The sauce was simply browned goat butter with toasted hazelnuts from the farmers market. It wasn’t to over powering for my taste but we also made the raviolis VERY large so perhaps it was a ratio of filling to sauce that made it so good.  I would definitely do this recipe again only I’d try harder to have pasta instead of won ton wrappers but in a pinch I’d use the won ton wrappers again. And now for some action shots:

(Top to Bottom) Baked Squash, Mixed Filling, Filling the skins, Filled Raviolis

(Dark to Light: L to R) Grsidale Goat Cheese, Cecilia Goat Cheese, and Pepperonis Hiding under the cheeses!

Thanks to the farmers market and Trader’s Joe for making the most expensive and cheapest pizza at the same time! We bought 2 kinds of semi-soft goat cheese at the farmers market (they didn’t have enough of the one we liked better) which I think cost about 17 dollars for the cheese… or maybe 24 dollars! Anyway, then we bought some fresh pepperoni and decided to pick up a crust at Trader Joe’s for $2.00 or so.  A few minutes later we had a wonderful pizza with 2 distinct colored sides and different tastes. The darker side (Grisdale) has a bit of a bite to it that was really yummy. The lighter side (Cecilia) was a bit more mild but tasty as well. The pepperonis were certainly good if not a little large in diameter for my own taste.  And best of all I could digest it better than its cow counterparts so my stomach AND my taste buds were happy.

Goat Cheeses

Farmers Market Pepperoni

Ham Corn Casserole (Photo Autoleveled)

There is nothing more appropriate to ring out the old year than a cornbread casserole? Why do my 4′s of readers ask? Because this blog’s first food related entry (and the last of last year) was 1/2 about cornbread so it bring us all full circle together.  It wasn’t planned and I didn’t even think about when I found this recipe on Sunday but when Thursday came around I knew it was the overly dramatic RightThingTM to make that evening.

We omitted the peppers and the cheese and ended up with as expected semi-dry cornbread like crumbled with ham in it. At first this was to dry and had to many onion bits in it for me to like. However, after melting some butter into it (just like my normal corn bread ritual) it was actually really good and I was surprised.  A great way to use some leftover ham and to start a new year.

Skyline - So far from home...

Two chili cheese sandwiches, no mustard, no onions.  There isn’t anything else to say about this one except: Hmmmmmmmmmm.

Swedish Christmas Ham with Stucco Croutons

This was one recipe I can’t figure out. Either the cook book printed it wrong, I don’t understand the word glaze, they don’t understand the word brush, or I really, really, really missed something.  We used a smoked ham from the store as our base and I cooked it according to the directions that came with the ham instead of the recipe since the recipe mostly differed at the glaze part. And it is the glaze part that went terrible confusing.

The directions were simple: mix all glaze ingredients together and brush on the ham and cook some more.  Ok fine. No problem. I mixed everything together and it ended up the consistency of spackle and/or stucco.  There was no way to brush this mixture no matter how hard I tired.  I figured I must have done something wrong so I double and triple checked the ingredients list with what I used and it was dead on.  I had the sous chef check the ingredients. As best I can tell it all matched up.  I just starred.  So I watered it down with some water run through the mustard bottle until it was at least a wet mixture; around the consistency of chocolate chip cookie dough before you add the flour.  It still wasn’t brush-able by my standards nor a glad but I was a bit to concerned to take it farther towards a liquid.  I wishfully hoped it would melt some in the oven so I spackled it onto the ham the best I could before I cooked it for another 15 minutes or so.

No dice.  The stucco just hardened some and got a crisp; now I had ham croutons.   I served it up and everyone loved the ham and seemed to really like the croutons too so it wasn’t a disaster but it certainly was no match to the picture in the cookbook. I have no idea what I missed or the cook book missed but this was certainly one recipe that I didn’t master as written.

"Glazing" the ham with the "stucco" glaze

Split Pea Soup - a bit on the thick side

Man this reusing food thing is actually happening and its pretty cool.  For Christmas Eve dinner we ‘made’ a Swedish Ham; which was just a Western Family Smoked Ham with a Swedish ‘glaze’.  Anyway, I took what was left of the ham and cut off all the meat I could get (which certainly is less than someone with any experience would have been able to do) and used the ham ‘carcass’ to make some homemade split pea soup with ham. YUMMY!

Anyway, I think this is the best split pea soup I’ve ever made.  Part of it has to be the fact that I used most of a whole ham and that I let it cook for about 6 hours without turning it into mortar right out.  It was a bit of a in-between-lots-of-things cooking adventure so there aren’t many pictures so instead I’ll include the recipe!  Anyway, the soup is fairly thick but still soupy when warm with a hint of smoke flavor from the smoked ham. The potatoes and carrots are done enough and just starting to fall apart but still holding shape while the ham eventually just fell off the bones. I also cut a bit more the leftover ham into chunks and threw it in for good measure.

EDIT – The taste is great for this soup but it is a little on the too thick side.  I think next time I would lean more towards the 3:1 ratio of water:split peas but for this batch its easy enough to resolve with a reheating with some more water.  So it ended up more like concentrate :)

One Full Pot Of Split Pea Soup

Split Pea Soup

• 16 cups water
• meaty ham bone – I used the bones with meat still attached from our Christmas ham
• 3 bay leaves
• 4 cups dried green split peas
• 3 russet potatoes – 1″ cubes
• 4 carrots – sliced
• salt and pepper to taste (I usually leave it very low salt and then when I am serving it let folks salt it to their own preference)

Note: This is only a guideline for the amounts of ingredients.  The most important thing is that there is enough water to cover the ham at least and then for each 4 cups of water you use put in 1 cup of dried split peas.  I used a 4:1 ratio because I like it thicker but if you like a thinner soup use a 3:1 ratio.

1. Place meaty ham bone in middle of pan and cover with water.  Add bay leaves and split peas and bring to low boil.
2. Let boil until the peas have started to dissolve into the water and the ham meat is starting to fall off the bone making sure to stir occasionally to prevent burning to the bottom.  I think this took about 3-4 hours.
3. Throughout the cooking when the water drops about 1″ in the pan fill it back up to the original line with tap water.
4. Add the potatoes and left cook for another 30 minutes or so and then add the carrots.
5. Let cook for another 2 hours-ish or until you can’t wait any longer.
6. 20 minutes before you want to eat it cube any extra leftover ham you have and put it into the pot.  This will assure you have a few bigger chunks of ham floating around if like that.
7. Cool to “not burning your tongue temperature” and serve.

Note 1: The cooking times here are extreme approximations.  Once the peas are dissolved to your liking the soup can be done. So if you like to have some of the peas still around put all the ingredients in at the beginning  and just cook until the meat falls off the bones.

Note 2: I don’t think there is a wrong way or amount of time for making split pea soup that from my experience the longer the ham bones cook in the soup the better it will be and the longer the peas have to fall apart and create a creamy soup the better.

Note 3: The only other thing to consider is how you like your veggies in your split pea soup. If you like them chunky like me add them later in the cooking process and use firmer potatoes like russets but if you like them to cream into your soup more use softer potatoes and add them all earlier.

Note 4: The biggest culprit of split soup ruination is burning the soup. Since it is such a thick soup with nice potato and carrot chunks floating around it is very susceptible to burning to the bottom of the pan so make sure to keep the heat as low as you can to keep it boiling and stir often. I think I stirred mine every 30 minutes or so and it seemed to work out well.  The bigger the pot the less often you have to sir and it gets more important later in the cooking process when the peas are starting to break down.

Ham Bones san Meat after a 6 hr bath in soup

Unglazed Rum Poached Pear Tart still in the tart pan

After a very successful pear hazelnut tart we made in October the sous chef wanted to do it again so we were planning on making it for Christmas day dinner with a friend of ours.  The only problem was that we didn’t have any white wine and it was Christmas day so shopping was out of the question.  We had planned to use some leftover red wine to poach the pears in but instead use some spiced rum! I have no idea if it tasted that different but the smell was incredible in the apartment while the pears were poaching.

The other unexpected ‘suprise’ in regards to making this tart was that we don’t own a tart pan. The past ‘tart’s we’ve made I did in pie pans in a way that allowed me to life them out and serve them sort of like a tart.  This worked fine and was our plan again until the sous chef opened her Christmas gifts and low and behold an 11″ tart pan appeared out one of the wrapping paper bundles!  Let me repeat the important part of that story – 11″.  That is one HUGE tart pan!

As the recipe made an 8″ or 9″ tart I have to 1.5 times the crust dough and the filling to make sure we had enough.  The filling was no problem but the tart crust this time around was very sticky and I difficult to roll out into 1/8″ sheet.  I think part of that was because we used margarine for the crust and partially because how much bigger I had to roll the dough out to get to 11″ inches.  Either way it was a bit rough but once I got it into the tart pan and patched the ripped spots with leftover dough the tart cooking and tasting went perfectly fine.  The above picture is before we glazed it with melted apricot jam; which sealed the fruit in and gaze it a shiny appearance.  And the picture below is showing the beautiful crinkly crust edge the fancy new tart pan gave us; a bit of a step up in looks from the pie pan tarts I was making but totally equal in taste.

Tart Crust Close Up

St. Lucia Bread

According to our Scandinavian Cookbook these breads come to us from a Swedish tradition on the feast of St. Lucia involving daughters and saffron bread. I claim no real knowledge of how St. Lucia’s feast day is celebrated in Sweden but I do have some experience with bread and these certainly fall into the tasty category and not terribly difficult to make either.

Anyway, its a standard mix dry and wet ingredients separately and then together to make a dough.  In this case the main difference was the dry ingredients had raisins in it and the wet ingredients were infused with 1/8 ounce of saffron; or in my case however much I put in till I stopped because I didn’t know how much saffron I had… about 2 big pinches of it.  I think I should have used more but I didn’t.  Anyway, once it was all mixed and kneaded into a dough it got to rise for an hour before the dough was divided into 22 parts and rolled and twisted into the “S” shape of the finished bread/roll product.  The kicker to that? Each end of the ‘S’ got its own special raisin placed in it before it was rolled. Awwwwww………

Prepping the Bread: kneading, dough after rising, rolling out the spirals, finished "S" dough

One they were all rolled out we let them rise for another 30 minutes and then did an egg wash on them. They went into the oven for 25 minutes and they came out looking BEAUTIFUL!

Baking Sheet Full of St. Lucia Saffron Rolls

In this case let their looks deceive you as they tasted just as good or better than they looked.

Taco Tray Salad

There isn’t anything special about what we put in the tacos. In facts its just taco powder, ground beef, diced roma tomatoes, spinach and some ground up cheese. Oh and some lovely canned re-fried beans. BUT that doesn’t mean they have to be served like good old fashion American grocery store tacos. No siry!  We bought Taco Trays! For when you want a beautiful taco salad but Tostado shell are to voluminousness for your taste you can turn to Taco Trays to save the day.  Holding a mere 2 tacos worth of filling (instead of the 12 of a tostada bowl) its easy to impress your guests with beautiful taco salads displayed on single bed of taco shell shaped into a shallow bowl .

Close-up of The Trayness!

Homemade Turkey Pot Pie

HOLY TACOS this was good! What do you do with left over turkey bits and a left over frozen pie crust after Thanksgiving? If you are lucky about a week after the fact you stand in your kitchen and go “holy taco: we should make a turkey pot pie!” Then you text the sous chef if it sounds good to her and she responds with “YES!” and we are off to another dinner and another post!

In what seems to be the theme of November and December I was busy Sunday morning so the sous chef headed to the farmers market alone to acquire the allotted ingredients for this pot pie recipe she found online.  I think she even went to the grocery store to get the celery that is WAY out season around here.  Anyway, armed with the veggies, frozen pie crust, leftover turkey, and our secret weapon (homemade turkey stock and meat  from VERY SAME TURKEY) we were ready to create a masterpiece.  Ok DorkMomentTM: as a biologist by training that last sentence made me very happy to know that our stock and meat where from the same bird so they wouldn’t reject each other.  Har har :/ Now moving on.

Top: Veggies! Bottom: Homemade Turkey Stock

So we followed the directions except we replaced 1 potato with a sweet potato, used thyme instead of parsley, put a bottom crust in to make a pie, and added 2-3 more tablespoons of flour to the liquid before we poured it into the crust.  Baked it for 30 minutes or so and out popped not only an amazing tasting pot pie but also a gorgeous looking pot pie! AMAZING!

Top to Bottom: Filling the potpie, Filled potpie, Capped with crust, BEAUTIFUL finished product

Consider me back in the saddle again of cooking and posting! Although the sous chef deserves much of the praise as well because she did much of the prep/research work that made this dish possible. GO SOUS CHEF! And now the for the individual serving shot:

Single Served Pot Pie

BONUS ROUND: So what do you do with leftover pie crust? After a quick google I rolled it out, spread some boysenberry jam on it, rolled it back up, sliced it into spirals, and baked. Behold!

Boysenberry Desert

Finished Turkey Stock

In keeping with our traditional of making turkey stock I’m writing this pretty late at night and kind of falling a sleep. Did you get the bad joke? Probably not because I’m tired and it made sense to me which means it is probably to subtle for anyone else! explanation? We were up late last night making our first batch ever of turkey stock soooo the tradition is last night.  And we were up late then. And I’m up late now. There you have the bad joke. I don’t ask that you find it funny; just that you ‘get’ it. That is all.

Anyway so turkey stock…. This year for Thanksgiving we roasted an on-the-bone turkey breast using a Scandinavian Roasted Chicken recipe. And like most folks who go a bit more traditional at the end of it we were sleepy and had a turkey carcass with bones, a bit of meat (maybe too much because this is my first time carving a bird), and all those other bio-bits left on the carcass which this year for the first time screamed “STOCK!” to me. In the past generally the bird bits have been fairly quiet to be honest.  So we froze the carcass and took it home with us where I gave it a nice nitch in my freezer until it was stock making time.

Frozen Turkey Carcass

The sous chef headed this recipe up again as I was distracted by my weekend plans.  Her googling turned up this recipe for turkey stock written by engineers for engineers. Very detailed and specific with charts and photos. Perfect!  The sous chef acquired the needed veggies from the farmers market and the grocery store while I was in class on Sunday and I made the call to acquire a pot big enough for our bird and veggies bits to float around in.

I’d like to say that making stock is hard but it isn’t. Making amazing stock may be but right now I wouldn’t know the difference.  Anyway, I thawed the turkey in the microwave and then dumped it into the bottom of the fancy pot we borrowed. It is one of the double deckers that has a strainer basket inside of it so at the end we just lifted it up and ended up big bits free stock! Magical.  Anyway, after the bird was in place we put in rough chopped carrots, celery, onion, and some herbs in. Covered it all with water and then a plate and simmered for 4 hours.

Stages of Stock

After of 4 hours of simmering and adding water 2 times we split the stock (get the bad finance joke in there?!) into the stock and the chunks.  We cooled the stock in 2 pans with a very cold water bath in the sink and an immersion cooler of a metal water bottle filled with cold water.  The stock amazingly enough cooled to room temperature in about 15 minutes.

Split Stock

We put the stock and carrots in the fridge for later use.  The rest of the former bird and bits were thrown away this marking after having done a job well done.

Evidence this was once a bird: vertebrate

Our stock is cloudy which either is because we let it boil rather than simmer or that we didn’t do the final small particulate strain because we didn’t have a fine mesh strainer at the time. Likely it’s both reasons.  And the hardest thing about making stock? Starting at 8pm when you know it takes AT LEAST 4 hours. We we really lucky that we got the stock cooled down in only 15 minutes so we could get to bed around 12:45 am.  All for a potpie the next night. And it was totally worth it!

The biggest challenge now? What to do with around 2 gallons of stock. We used 1 quart the next night a potpie; other than that we have no plans and only 1.75 gallons of stock left.

I (sous chef, here) came across it a month or so ago, and became almost immediately obsessed with the idea of making it. First, I thought I’d make it just in time for the chef’s return from his two week vacation, as  welcome back surprise. When that didn’t pan out, I wanted to make it the week before Thanksgiving, but there really wasn’t time.

As the days went by and frost covered the grass and everyone’s windshields in the morning, I began to despair. What if plums were out of season already? What if they were still in season, but the frost ruined them all and I’d never find them again? Yesterday, in a fever of sudden desire to bake, I visited two grocery stores – I figure grocery stores always have out-of-season or non-regional fruit, grown in secret labs or shipped in from South America – surely I could find some plums! However, I found none. Had I totally missed plum season? What, was it like two weeks long? Was I going to have to wait a whole year to make my plum cake?!

Today, the farmer’s market pulled through. After several loops around the market, I spotted them: pluots.

Beautiful bowl of pluots in the window, where the light is good.

Pluots are – fairly obviously – a blend between plums and apricots. You can learn more here. They aren’t entirely plums, it’s true, but this is all there was, and I was sold. (Thanks, Tiny’s!) I picked out 8 pluots, paid the friendly vendor, and went on my way.

There were a few other minor hurdles standing between me and my cake. The recipe called for an 8 x 8 cake pan, which I did not have. Although I could have been patient and waited for the chef to be available so I could borrow something, I instead decided to buy a cheap one-use guy from the grocery store. It being the week after Thanksgiving, however, they were short on all one-off pans — in the end I bought an oblong pan and hoped it would work. Additionally, the recipe I was using called for everything to be blended with a mixer, which I don’t have. Obviously things can be mixed by hand, but it takes a lot longer – and I was worried I wouldn’t get everything mixed together well enough.

Top: mixing by hand! Below: making a mess!

As usual, I managed to get flour all over myself and all over the floor. No surprise there! The recipe makes a pretty small amount of batter, and as I poured it into the pan I really started to feel concerned. It was very thin, and when I put in the plum slices, they were taller than the batter. However, my brain reminded me that the batter would expand and rise as it baked. The recipe called for baking it about 30 minutes, but since the pan was larger, the batter more spread out, I knew to be careful for quicker baking. I checked at ten minutes, then at twenty, and in the end it was done at about 25 minutes.

The finished cake!

It’s a little browner on top than the one in the picture, and thus not quite as beautiful, but it still turned out pretty attractive! At this point I was still worried about the pluots – had the baking dried them out? After letting it cool, I sprinkled the top with a little powdered sugar.

From reading the recipe and some comments on it, and talking to the chef, I think the challenge with this cake is making sure your plums – or whatever fruit you use – is good and juicy. These pluots are definitely ready for eating, but a little firm – when you cut into the cake with a fork the fruit is still firm enough that it sometimes just slides right out of the cake rather than easily slicing. It sounds like pluots are always like that.

The batter here is very simple: the standards of flour, eggs and baking soda, combined with brown sugar, orange zest and vanilla. It’s a great cake for eating with coffee, I’d wager! The chef and I agree, the cake is tasty. Finally, success!

Have a slice!

Tortillas inside, tortillas outside. And some casserole to boot!

So how do you get back into the food blogging after you’ve been running around on another continent for 2 weeks? A midwest casserole is how. Every ingredient almost comes out of a can or a bag and to boot it goes into the crock pot! Heaps of easy to get back into the swing of things (and give me more time to sort through my vacation pictures!). 

So this afternoon while taking a break from photo-sorting/computer upgrading/watching Lightroom instructional videos I noticed my vegetarian crock pot cookbook and thought to myself ‘hmmm that would be easy for dinner’ but I didn’t find anything of real interested in it.  So I turned to the internet. After a few false starts and minor ‘leads’ I ended up the idea of a casserole in the crock pot which was very exciting because soup, stew, and large chunks of meat weren’t calling my name today.  A few searches later I came across this Tortilla Casserole recipe.  I was on my out of the house so I wrote down the proper canned ingredients I would need for dinner.  For some reason I can’t remember now I decided not to stop and buy the food; eventually the Sous Chef called and we decided it was a go.

The only problem was this mythical “Hunts Special Sauce” listed in the ingredients.  Everything else we found in their respective cans / bags but even pocket internet didn’t yield any help with what is was and if it still existed. In the end we decided to bring home a Prego jar of spaghetti sauce (sticking with the midwest theme). However, when we got home big internet told me it was more a kin to hot sauce than spaghetti sauce.  Huh.  I ended up using maybe a few tablespoons or teaspoons (its hard for me to tell) of Tabasco sauce and to add liquid to it some Iowa’s own Cookie’s BBQ Sauce.  Besides this the only divergence I made from the recipe was to add 1 delicata squash into it. The sous chef finely diced it and we put it in with the meat filling.  The BBQ added a bit of flavor but also gave enough sauce to cover the extra squash.

Anyway the assembly was easy. Brown ground beef and onions. Add sauce, ‘special sauce’ 1/2 can of green chilis,  a packet of taco seasoning, and in our case squash. Mix and simmer for 5 minutes.  Layer in a crock pot with white flour tortillas in a tinfoil lined crock pot.  Cook on high for 2 hours.  HIGH being the key word.  Turns out I had turned it to low for 2 hours.  I had to flip it to high and cook it for another hour.  And we had to wait to eat dinner :/

The last step was to make a cheese sauce to go over the top.  The first thing was to make a roux (butter flour mixture to thicken things) in a pot and then add 2 cups milk (we used soy) and then forget to let it sit long enough to thicken.  Opps. And add 2 cups cheese and the rest of the cans of chilis.  Heat and mix until it melts together.  Well we did this when we thought it was going to be done and let it sit on a cool burner for an hour while the casserole actually finished.  I was expecting to have to reheat/remelt it before I served it but oddly enough an hour later there was just a small film on the top and the sauce was still quite warm. 

It didn’t come out of the crock pot in slices but rather in piles that I served with the sauce and some fresh tortilla slices. Yum! The spicy level was just right but I doubt I can do it again as I didn’t measure the Tabasco AND the Western Family Taco cheese we used had jalapenoes in it? So I have no idea how much of what really went it.  Overall this was a good, easy, filling, and warm meal that tasted a bit like a pile of tacos with some zip to it.  One of my friends has a great tortilla casserole recipe for the crock put and now I am itching to try it!

Thanks to the magic of Google Reader and the ability to share reader items, a friend shared this article – “How to Milk an Almond” – and I thought to myself, “Wait… this looks easy!”

Soaked overnight and ready to rock.

I had it starred in my reader for awhile… then I bookmarked the original page in my browser… then I actually asked a friend if I could borrow a food processor or blender… then I got sick. The original plan to make this last weekend didn’t happen, but the dream was still alive. Finally I came home with a borrowed food processor in a bag and, having properly prepared by soaking the almonds overnight, I went to work.

Of course I should have known it wouldn’t be as easy as the internet made it look – especially considering I don’t really understand some of the basics of things like food processors. The first thing I did was put in too much at one time. First water leaked out the bottom, then when I started the blending it exploded out the sides. Awesome!

It doesn't look like much of a disaster because water is clear.

I scooped out about half of the almonds (I started with a pound), dumped some water, and started over. At this point I had absolutely no idea how much water was left in there. I’d already had some confusion reading the recipe and figuring out how much water I should have. So really, the water was the big wild card here. However, the good thing about this is you can always add more – so I opted for less to start.

After two batches through the food processor, I lined a large bowl with cheesecloth, scooped the the mix into it, and squeezed.

At this point I really did feel like I was milking an almond.

The first and second strainings.

The first straining is done with cheesecloth; for the second the website recommended a wire mesh coffee filter, and I borrowed an extra from the office. I soaked that coffee filter in soapy water even longer than I soaked the almonds, just so the milk wouldn’t pick up any weird flavors. As you can see I had to rig up something weird, because it wasn’t cone shaped and didn’t fit neatly into any of the containers I had. That’s a chopstick it’s hanging from.

I set all the meal aside for the time being and poured the milk into a glass jar, and added about a cup and a half more water.

Almond milk, pre-"blooming".

Now, the waiting. The instructions call for letting it “bloom” in the fridge for 24 hours. It does some settling, but you give it some shakes and you keep it covered and then you add pinches of salt and flavoring of your choice. I planned to add some vanilla, depending on what it tasted like then. I did taste it before stowing it in the fridge, but it was just funny-tasting water at that point.

Drying the meal!

I rounded out the first phase of the adventure by toasting the almond meal in the oven for later, undetermined baking uses. I overtoasted some of it a little, but still ended up with quite a bit of good, usable meal.

Over the next 24 hours I did the shake-and-wait.

Here it is, in the fridge, doing exactly what it's supposed to do.

Once 24 hours had officially passed, I added a bit of vanilla and two pinches of salt. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what I’m trying to get to! Funny that I should be so excited about making my own almond milk, when I don’t even drink it on a regular basis.

DONE!

I think it’s good in terms of water level… and I don’t want to add too much sweetener, so it can be used for more things. I don’t want to add too much salt because I’m afraid of over-salting it… but maybe it hasn’t hit that “perfect” state yet. I shall keep experimenting today. :)

Tower o' cookies!

Awwww yeah… somebody pass me that delicious tower o’ cookies, right?! Everybody all together now: “You baked?!?”

It’s true, and your shock is completely warranted. I mean, the first obvious point of shock is that I had all the ingredients to bake cookies in my kitchen. (Point one for the Chef.) The second point of shock is that I actually utilized them.

Here’s the thing: I’ve been sick. As I was getting all geared up for a three day weekend, I apparently let my guard down and in crept… sinus pain. I’ve spent the last three (full) days in bed, and even today, though I’m feeling pretty okay, moving around a lot makes me tired and I subsequently have not left the house.

So I guess it was the boredom that led me to such insane levels of domesticity. I’ve already watched a dozen movies and played (and lost) about a thousand games of solitaire, and when you’ve run out of blogs to read, what else can you do?!

Who needs chocolate chips?!

This “recipe” was originally done by the Chef and his roommate – who decided to replace the chocolate chips with a tub of mini peanut butter cups from Trader Joe’s. Of course they were insanely good, so I actually kept an eye out for them at TJ’s for awhile. Either they weren’t in stock or they were hidden – but I didn’t find them until just recently. I bought a container of them and put them in the cupboard for exactly this eventuality – that they’d become cookies.

This spoon was meant for cookies.

Incidentally, I feel it important to mention that this wooden spoon was meant for chocolate chip cookies. I took this spoon from my dad’s house recently, because I was moving into my own place and actually needed my own kitchen stuff. And when I started using it in my apartment I started seeing it, in my head, covered in dough and chocolate chips just like this. My mom made cookies with it all the time! So it’s finally achieved its destiny in Seattle, and it is to make me some damn cookies.

OMNOMNOM

Unfortunately it was at this point in the story that Our Hero discovered her sense of taste was totally jacked from being sick. However, I do remember how awesome they were last time, hence the “it’s a winner!” tag for this post.

CHOMP!

1. Cook? For myself? No comprende.
2. The Chef does such a good job of meal-planning for the week, and we have so many leftovers, it rarely makes sense for me to cook a meal for myself!

However, with the Chef safely in another hemisphere,  I transitioned from oggling the chanterelles to purchasing the chanterelles rather quickly. (The German word is pfifferlinge, which I think is better. Thanks to my favorite ex-pat blogger!)

Chanterelles, on first glance, are a bit sticker-shock-inducing. $10 a pound?! But then you slow down, breathe a minute, and remember you’re cooking for yourself. You don’t need that many! You hand-pick a few and escape with a $1.50 bill.

Most suggestions for preparing said chanterelles involved cream sauce – but making cream sauce was more than I was up for, and I didn’t want to compromise the pfifferlinge with mediocre Trader Joe’s alfredo sauce. But, I probably did need something like pasta to eat with them. In the end, I kept it simple. After washing the mushrooms, I sliced them in half and sauteed them in butter and fresh garlic. I then cooked a small amount of wheat spagetti noodles, added a tiny bit of olive oil and fresh ground pepper. Dumped on the shrooms, grated some gruyere on top… voila!

On Flickr the title of this image is: "You know as well as I do the pasta is just a vehicle for the mushrooms."

C’est magnifique!

(As an aside, that garlic – a fancy Killarney Red – was very nearly the same price as the handful of chanterelles. A brief web search turned up an online store selling the stuff for $16/lb. It is good, but I’m still on the fence about fancy garlics. Because I’m always cooking them with something else, I don’t notice the difference in taste, heat, etc.)

The other featured food item this week, in the theme of I-love-but-Chef-does-not-love, is brussel sprouts. Truth: I never ate a brussell sprout until moving to Seattle. Once I tried them, prepared a specific way, I continued preparing them in the exact same way for, oh I don’t know, four years? Because that was how I knew to cook them, and they tasted good that way, so why not? (For reference: steamed, then served with a mustard/butter sauce. That’s it.)

I based my preparation of the sprouts on this recipe. First, the shocking confession: although the recipe calls for bacon, I did not use bacon. My excuses are – it was dark when I got off work and I didn’t feel like going to the store. However, in my defense, I think it’s probably best that I started slow on this one – it was very, very good, and if I had included the bacon I may very well not be alive to write this post. No, seriously.

Sprouts, cleaned and cut.

After quartering the brussel sprouts, I put 4 tsp. of olive oil into a pan with 2 cloves of crushed garlic and some leftover green onions, chopped. (The recipe I linked calls for caramelizing onions, and while I did have an onion, I wasn’t sure I wanted to eat that much onion. You can’t caramelize green onions apparently, so I just sauteed them to use them up, since they were about to die.) I let the oil heat, then threw in the sprouts, and added salt and pepper. You cook this until the edges start to brown just a bit, then you throw in half a cup of water and – I’m not even kidding you here – 3 tbsp of melted butter (or more heart-friendly approximation). UM YES LET’S JUST BOIL THEM IN BUTTER.

YES. BOIL THEM IN A VAT OF BUTTER.

Ahem. Keep cooking until most of the liquid has boiled off. Then you eat them. And let me tell you, anything cooked with that much butter is going to be AWESOME. The moral of this story is that I think it would be one hundred percent worthwhile to try the whole recipe sometime, with the caramelized onions and especially with the bacon. When that happens, I will probably die of happiness. Next time I am definitely adding the bacon.

Perfectly browned!

What is that orange business over there in the corner, you ask? I found two large carrots in the fridge that were getting a little sad, so I cut them, boiled them, and stirred in goat butter and brown sugar. Mmmm….!

(Since I’m here… can I show you how I totally roasted a red pepper all by myself? The Chef is totally going to be like WTF because I kind of hate roasting red peppers, and also I don’t really like to eat peppers all that much. But this was all about saving the pepper from otherwise certain death! One thing about this sous chef is that she hates wasting food. So, better to roast it and save it for a bit longer than to see it wilt and mold and have to throw it away. I followed this guy’s advice and roasted the thing whole in my oven with the broiler on.

Oh yeah, lookin good...

I let it sit under a towel for twice as long on accident, then peeled it, cut it in half, pulled out the seeds. My coworker told me I could store it in a jar of oil and it would be good in the fridge for a few weeks. Facebook folks gave me some great suggestions on how to use it when I’m ready – mostly involving mashing it up with things like FETA and GARLIC and spread it on crackers. Yes, please!

Swimming in oil in a nice, pretty jar.

Plenty of time for the chef to return and eat them! Oh happy day. Another food death averted.)

Sous chef OUT!

This was a race against time. Some of the leftovers had already been in the fridge for over a week. Sure, in two weeks I could probably handle ingesting a good chunk of those leftovers, but how was I going to do it before they went bad?! And what happened when I just didn’t feel like eating beet salad? Make mac n cheese – but then I have MORE leftovers!

When I tried to eat leftover onion & potato salad for lunch – without the arugula (too soggy!) and the onions (too much!) and the duck eggs (all gone!) – and discovered several instances of what may or may not have been pink mold, I ended up deciding to throw the whole thing out (there were easily 3 servings left) and I went into full-on anxiety mode. Then: a flash of brilliance. FREEZE IT!

Good thing I have a big freezer!

Some quick internet searches advised on the best way to freeze beets. I had three beets leftover that we’d cooked but not used for salad – I sliced those. Then I picked the endive out of the leftover beet salad and dumped the diced beets onto a cookie sheet with the beet slices and put the whole thing in the freezer for 30 minutes. Then took them out, bagged them up, and put them back in.

Though the internet advised against freezing potatos – we had a meatloaf and roasted veggies meal that hasn’t appeared here yet – I did slice the meatloaf chunk in half and freeze one part, leaving the other for everyone’s favorite, meatloaf sandwiches. (At least it seems to be everyone’s favorite, considering how many times people have mentioned it since I came into possession of said leftover meatloaf.)

So, I found myself standing at the fridge, looking inside and thinking “What else can I freeze? This is fun!”

Last weekend, I had the good fortune to visit a small farm that a friend worked on this summer. The farm did produce for summer CSA boxes, and were growing a very small amount of winter veggies, even though they weren’t really employing too many people. There were still a few tomatoes on the vine, and I came away with a quart of sun golds. I knew it might be a challenge to use them, but considering how much we loved them this summer, I couldn’t say no.

Unfortunately, the week came and went and the sun golds stayed in my fridge. Today, I zeroed in on them and thought, what about a sauce? I could make a sauce, and then FREEZE IT!

While looking for a recipe, I came upon something slightly different: sungold nuggets. Described as a “January mental-health remedy”, this blogger goes on to claim that sun golds actually ward off Seasonal Affective Disorder. Well shite! Sign me up because by February I’ll have gone mad from another long, gray Seattle winter!

This blog also uses the cooking phrase I dread the most: “Use your judgement.” Still, even without very specific instructions I was determined to move forward.

The first step is easy: slice the sun golds in half and scoop out the seeds! My blog-guide suggested feeding the innards to the chickens, but when I found myself without a source of hungry chickens, I fed the innards to my garbage can.

Next up, mix parmigiana and olive oil and salt and pepper and garlic and thyme. Well… no parmigiana on hand, so I replaced it with shredded gruyere, since I had some in the fridge from the pumpkin soup adventure. No thyme, or oregano, so I left that out altogether.

Next, bake for a million years. No, seriously, I actually have no idea how long I baked them. This is where the “use your judgement” part came in – I got a temperature range to cook at but no time frame. My only guide was that hopefully at the end they would look like tomato raisins.

Well, not exactly. I suspect too much olive oil. Some of them looked ok, some of them were getting there, some were burned. I checked them every 10/15 minutes, eventually deciding I didn’t want them to burn anymore, even if I didn’t think they were all quite done. Still, they look pretty tasty… I will definitely enjoy eating them with SOMETHING. Probably they won’t end up a sauce, but they’d be delicious on a pizza!

The quart-box of sun golds yielded a half-size jar of “nuggets” (sorry, I can’t be more specific on size, I know nothing about standard jar sizes). And now I’m FREEZIN’ EM!

Thus, our in-the-freezer-for-winter inventory is:

• 4 bags of pumpkin soup.
• Half of our meatloaf leftovers.
• One mid-sized tupperware of chili.
• One larger-sized tupperware of veggie soup we made when we were about to lose some veggies to not-so-freshness if we didn’t ACT QUICKLY!
• 2 small bags of sliced beets.
• 2 small bags of seasoned/diced beet salad.
• 1 large bag of fiddlehead ferns the Chef blanched and froze in the early summer when they were in season.
• 2 maple-bacon waffles I stole from the Chef’s freezer because he can’t eat them while he’s overseas! Snap!

Whew! So, it’s not your typical end-of-summer stash. I didn’t can/freeze/process a bunch of fresh summer veggies. BUT, it’s a respectable bunch of meals we can eat when we are feeling lazy. As long as we remember to look in the freezer.

The fancier name is Three-Beet Caviar with Endive and Goat Cheese, and tonight it was an experiment in making-it-up-as-you-go-along.

The recipe called for three different beets: Red, Golden, and Chioggia (which is a pink and white concentric-circle-striped beet). When we were browsing the market, I was initially concerned that we wouldn’t find beets individually – only in bundles of a zillion extra beets we didn’t need. Thankfully, that was not the case. We picked up one large red and one large chioggia, and two small goldens. (The recipe called for six beets but we weren’t feeding an army!)

We LOVE the goat cheese from Port Madison Farm; of course we went straight there once we decided to go for this recipe. It comes in these awesome fat little cheese pucks – which doesn’t sound appetizing BUT IT IS, I promise you. I could eat it like a dinner roll.

The hardest part was steaming the beets: should I steam them all? How long will it take? Are they done yet? Am I overcooking them? Are the red beets staining the rest of the beets? Etc, etc. After they’re steamed, I peeled off the skin just like I learned to peel potatoes at my first job in a restaurant when I was, like, 16. Chop into small pieces!

This is where some of the substitution comes in. The recipe says to toss 3 tablespoons of white wine vinegar with a finely diced red onion. We had: pear infused balsamic vinegar, two green onions and two tiny scallions. So I figured, hey what the hell, these should work! Then, you toss each bowl of beets with 1/3rd of this mixture, taste for salt & pepper, then toss again with 2 tablespoons chopped parsley or chervil. Had no parsley, had no idea what chervil even IS – left it out entirely. (The chef suggested replacing the parsley with oregano, but I was skeptical and chose to overrule this suggestion.)

So you make pretty piles! 3 beet varieties, one pile of chopped endive (we had both green and red endives, to further maximize the color variety in this meal), and one pile of tasty, tasty goat cheese. Drizzle the cheese and endive with olive oil, pepper, and SERVE!

All the pictures that end up this blog are usually very gorgeous and the clutter has all been moved somewhere else. TRUTH: COOKING IS MESSY! Especially in a tiny kitchen. It’s okay, everyone, I promise total messes are TOTALLY NORMAL.

Once you’ve taken a sufficient amount of pictures, you’ve given your beets sufficient time to cool! Theoretically you are supposed too chill this dish and eat it cold, but I was having NONE of that. Serve it pretty, eat it messy: mix your piles together into a tasty, red pile of delicious:

One of my main fears with this dish was that I had added too much vinegar. In fact, a short story: I kept getting Easter flashbacks, because the smell of the vinegar coupled with the dark red beet juice everywhere was triggering memories of dying Easter eggs. However, my fears proved unnecessary. This dish is AWESOME.

Not too vinegary, not too oniony. Each beet variety has a distinct flavor: the golden is the richest, the red is the sweetest. The endive lends a refreshing crunch and the goat cheese is the zinger! Dudes, this one is awesome, no joke. Not hard either! I mean, here’s the thing: I MADE IT MYSELF! Yes, the chef was in the vicinity and I asked him a bunch of questions. But I probably could even have done it without him around! And that, my friends, is the true test of an easy recipe.

Sous chef OUT!

Since making soup from a 13 pound pumpkin is quite an undertaking, we left the very small side project of roasting seeds for another day. I put them in a tupperware and stuck them in my fridge, and earlier this week I decided to go ahead and get them roasted!

We’d looked at a few seed-roasting recipes on the internet, knowing that in general roasting pumpkin seeds is pretty simple and doesn’t involve too many ingredients. One was still up in my browser, so I went with that one by default.

Pre-roasted pumpkin seeds.

When we first cut open the pumpkin, we were pretty surprised at how few seeds we pulled out. (As it turns out, the Cinderella pumpkin is pretty much all “meat”.) As I took them back out to clean them, I ended up measuring and all told we had half a cup of pumpkin seeds. Not a lot, but enough to satisfy the craving for roasted pumpkin seeds.

The recipe I used called for boiling the seeds in salt water for ten minutes before baking them. 2 cups of water for every half cup of seeds, and 1/2 tablespoon of salt for every cup of water. So the seeds get salty BUT they don’t get salt all over your fingers when you eat them: brilliant!

These guys baked on the topmost shelf of the oven for about 18 minutes total – though I checked them every five minutes so as not to burn them. The recipe advises 10-20, to your preferred roasting level.

The enticing photo I texted to the chef.

Once I pulled the seeds out of the oven to cool, I immediately took a photo with my cell phone and texted it to the chef as proof of my accomplishment!

The recipe I used gave us very solid, traditional pumpkin seeds: salty and delicious! In the event that I once again find myself roasting pumpkin seeds, I think I’ll get a little more creative with the spices and try my hand at “gourmet” pumpkin seeds.

Stay tuned for part three of the Cinderella pumpkin extravaganza!

The chef is holding me to that off-handed comment, so here I am.

WEEK ONE!

Look at all the colorful veggies!

The chef, I know, has already kind of talked about the process: we make several loops around the market each time we go. It’s really his process – if left to my own devices I tend to get very excited and buy everything within the first two or three stands – then finish my loop and discover I missed out on a few things.

One of my favorite parts about eating this way is discovering fruits or vegetables I’ve never seen before, or things I’ve never thought about buying. The chef’s fantastic farmer’s market cookbooks are a total prize in this regard, especially if we have them with us: we can see something interesting and immediately find a use for it.

We've discovered hazelnuts!

One produce stand had fresh, locally grown hazelnuts for a few weeks. As you can see, the chef is busily consulting a cookbook for uses of hazelnuts. We bought several cups worth of them that week, and used some of them for a pear hazelnut tart, the rest for roasted yams in hazelnut butter. The chef had more ideas; unfortunately we did not see any this past weekend.

Fighting some guy for garbanzo beans!

That was also the weekend we spotted fresh garbanzo beans! I, for one, had no idea they came in tiny little individual pods. Later we discovered that some pods will have two or three garbanzo beans in them. Fresh, undried garbanzo beans are green like peas, but almost with the consistency of fresh, undried/unroasted peanuts. Again, the window for these was tiny – the next weekend we were hoping to buy a few more so we could make a decent sized batch of hummus, but they were nowhere to be found. Our batch of hummus was, therefore, miniscule. Miniscule but delicious.

Zero beauregards. The chef is cleanin' 'em out.

We got the bottom of the bucket on these Beauregards, but we cleaned ‘em out.

They sell meat!

We’ve never purchased anything from this stand (so far), but I am always kind of wishing we could get some bacon. Today the chef discovered they have chicken and beef stock. Made a mental note!

See? It's cute because they use pumpkins for vases.

The market has gorgeous flowers year-round, and I am pretty much always lusting after a bouquet, although I rarely buy them. It’s amazing to go through the summer and watch flowers come in and out of season – daffodils, tulips, lilies. Right now we’re reading the end of the fresh summer flowers – dahlias and sunflowers are both late summer flowers – and vendors are moving into dried bouquets for the winter. I’ll admit I don’t like them as much as fresh ones, but they still come up with brilliant ways to make them exciting, and put things in flower bouquets I’d never imagined, such as decorative kale.

Raw Corn

Gypsy Cello

Music! The farmer’s market is NEVER short on buskers playing for dollars and selling their self-pressed CDs. Miraculously, they always managed to be spaced out just enough that they aren’t trying to play over each other, and you always hear JUST the music you’re nearest. Lately these are two of my favorites: at the top, Raw Corn, a two-man cover band singing classic rock to guitar and accordion only (their cover of “Wish You Were Here” is to die for, for realz) and at the bottom, Gypsy Cello, always haunting and gorgeous. (He’s not too bad to look at, either! Ooooh snap!) Not pictured is a Ballard favorite, our local square dancing band the Tall Boys.

German-style pretzels and apple cider.

A few more “montages” of great stuff from the farmer’s market – German style pretzels from the Tall Grass Baker (we had another one today, NOM!) and a bucket of chilled apple cider. The cider stand sells these small chilled jars, plus large jugs of cider, bottles of apple wine, apple cider vinegar, etc etc. In the summer they have a slushie machine. In the winter they sell it hot.

Radishes and GIANT PARSNIPS.

I wish I’d included something for scale in the case of those parsnips. Because seriously, they are MASSIVE.

Tomatillos and purple broccoli.

I am really starting to love the tomatillo. Also, overheard at the market: the purple broccoli stays purple when you cook it, unlike most purple vegetables. If you put lemon juice on it, however, it turns pink. No lie. The lady selling it said so, so it MUST be true. If the purple broccoli is still in season when the chef gets back from vacation, I think we’re gonna use it for a soup.

The final haul (official photo).

WEEK TWO!

Taste testing the smoked fish.

Including a second week is a great way to show you the amazing variety you can find at our farmer’s market, and also the variety of what we’ll buy there. The next weekend we went through, we had seen a recipe for a salad that involved smoked albacore – and lo & behold, we found some. As you can see, this place sells smoked fish as well as canned.

Tastes like...

As you can see, the sign indicates that their fish tastes like happy. Who could say no to that content little shark guy?!

The Chicken of the Pacific Northwest?

A few stands down… are you asking yourself, what the…?! That, my friends, is a geoduck, pronounced GOOEY duck, the largest burrowing clam in the WORLD, sometimes known as the king clam. The geoduck is the mascot of Evergreen State College in Oregon. China, Korea, and Japan highly favor eating this thing. Some of us do, too – but I don’t think the chef and I will be trying it anytime soon. These are not often at the farmer’s market, and when there is one, it definitely causes a ruckus!

Line up the squash!

Winter is obviously squash season, so we’re seeing a LOT more of these guys. But this is also to allow you to fully appreciate just how fantastic the displays are at the farmer’s market. Not only does everything look delicious, but sometimes it looks like it’s having a party. Hey squashes, can I come too?!

Cash or carrots accepted here!

I have no idea whether or not the carrots were actually offered as a form of payment/appreciation for the performance of these buskers, however, I LOVED the fact that they were there at all. This photo was taken by the chef, because by that time I had an armful of beautiful Cinderella pumpkin that I was hauling around. (But I did ask him to take it.)

Rat City Rollergirls promote eating locally this Thanksgiving!

File this one under “You Never Know What You’re Going to Find at the Farmer’s Market” – two dozen or so Rat City Rollergirls showed up that Sunday to help promote eating locally for Thanksgiving. Teaming up with a handful of folks dressed as carrots, RCRG was asking folks to sign a pledge that they would eat at least one thing for their Thanksgiving meal that was locally raised/grown. Camera crews were everywhere as the girls (yes, on stakes) made their way through the market, chanting. The chef and I, being pretty massive fans, were TOTALLY STOKED.

The Haul in its Natural Habitat

In the end, we had some time to kill before a friend met us at the market, so we decided to take the weekly photograph of the haul, this time in its natural habitat – the farmer’s market! It probably seemed strange to passers-by that we were photographing our food on the street… but that was pretty unimportant to us. I arranged the haul, but the chef got the idea to photograph it from far enough away that we could catch the market in the background as well.

This week, we had so much food that we didn’t need to buy ANYTHING to feed ourselves the rest of the week. I used this chance to spend the cash on a Raw Corn CD. Woohoo!

Posted in Cooking Creations Tagged: 5 - Its a winner! WILL repeat this one., Farmers Market Find ]]> http://techdabble.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/a-morning-at-the-market/feed/ 3 deceivery fmarketcollage hazelnuts garbanzo basket yams meatstand pumpkinflowers music1 music2 pretzelcider radsnip tomabroc IMG_0140 tastetest happyshark geoduck squashlineup cashorcarrots rcrg thehaul http://techdabble.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/sunday-lunch-sandwhiches/ http://techdabble.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/sunday-lunch-sandwhiches/#comments Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:53:48 +0000 techdabble http://techdabble.wordpress.com/?p=1284 ]]>

Sunday Lunch Sandwich

The sous chef creates! It’s late in the day but for lunch but neither of us really has eaten since breakfast and in fact neither of us really ate breakfast either I don’t think.  Both of us were sort of hovering over the fridge looking at our leftovers and debating if we should just snack till dinner or actually eat something more substantial.  I was headed down the leftovers route when the sous chef came up with easy, quick, and tasty sandwich idea.  It was especially nice because it used bagels the sous chef had, a tomato she got from a friend’s farm that we didn’t have a plan for, some of the fancy cheese we have from my work perk, and avocado left over from our breakfast burritos from yesterday.  All things we have and all things we needed something to do with them soon!

Sunday Lunch Sandwiches

Ingredients

• Bagel, we used an everything bagel
• Heirloom Tomato, sliced
• Cheese, sliced
• Avocado

Directions

1. Toast the bagel
2. Spread the avocado on one side
3. Place slices of cheese on the other side
4. Put the tomato slices in the middle
5. Assemble and eat

The biggest flaw in these sandwiches? Our cheese.  One of the two type of cheese we used is great on crackers but its taste overpowers the tomato and avocado.  The second lighter cheese matched the rest of the flavors better.  Both were good the lighter cheese was just better :)

Left to Right: Rockridge Orchards Honeycrisp Cider, Minea Farms Granny Smith Cider, Jerzy Boyz Farm Honeycrip/Heirloom Apple Juice

My search continues for a comparable apple cider thanks to the farmers market and the sous chef.  First up….

Rockridge Farms Honeycrisp Apple Cider

Rockridge Farms at the year-long farmers market defacto apple cider people. I’ve already tried their Strawberry Apple Cider on accident.  This time I was going to try their ‘standard’ apple cider and made sure to find a cap that was unmarked but the woman at the stand pointed out that the ones with the “H”s on top where honeycrisp which peaked my interest.  I haven’t formally reviewed their standard apple cider but my experience is that it isn’t a match for Hollmeyers but perhaps the honey crisp was…so Ibought some!

So how did the Honeycrisp cider stack up? Colloquially: A sweeter version of Rockridge’s standard apple cider.  Very good but no Hollmeyers.  And on the formal scale? It is light in color, medium to heavy opacity, but still doesn’t taste like liquid apples.  A step up from the strawberry but not a step to the top. Sadly not a surprise to me.

Minea Farms Granny Smith Cider

The sous chef picked this up at the heeding of a friend when they were out trampsing through a corn maze.  Evidentially there were 3 kinds: Aurora, Granny Smith, and a mix of the two.  The sous chef choose the Granny Smith variety to bring home for comparison.

The color is getting on the nice brown end of the spectrum (but not deep brown) and the opacity is good.  So far it is boding well.  And how about the liquid apple taste test? Yes it does taste like liquid Granny Smith apples!!! Its got the same bite the Granny Smiths have when you bit into them and it even has a bit of a delay like a Granny Smith.  It starts sweet and ends up bitter? I’m not sure the word to use there exactly. [EDIT - the sous chef wins the word I am looking for is: tart]. If you like Granny Smiths this is the cider for you! For me though I’m looking for something between the tang of the Granny Smith Cider and the really sweet ciders. Overall a very good cider just not what I am looking for.

Jerzy Boyz Farm Honeycrisp/Heirloom Apple Juice

Visually this one has the most promise which is ironic because they call it juice and to me visually it is squarely in the apple cider category.  Anyway, this is from my local farmers market today and I almost missed it.  There was a single half-gallon jug on the table behind people but it caught my eye quick enough. Ironically, the folks at the stand didn’t know how much they were supposed to sell it for so even though I was ready to buy it right then I had to make a lap round the market to purchase it.  They made the phone call and I got my cider to try.  They also gave me a small sample before I made my lap and I knew at that point it was a strong contender.  Now let’s get “official”…

The color is a great dark brown and it is very opaque.  Right on target! Smell has not been in my formal review but this ones smells great too so far: not to sweet but VERY full of apples in its bouquet. Actually its entire bouquet is apples. Ironic? I think not. And what about taste? Liquid apples: check. Not to sweet but not to tart: Check.  Finally a cider that is a worthy contender for the Hollmeyer’s throw down!! Without having them right next to each other I can’t say which one I would like better (but I have to say if it comes down to tasting equal I’m going with my childhood memories and voting for Hollmeyers).   Congrats to Jerzy Boyz Farm for being the first Washington apple cider to make it to the final round with the Ohio apple cider. Ironic statement I know.

Jerzy Boyz Farm Apple Cider Label - Simple and Tasty!

Lesson Learned About Apple Cider: Apple variety matters!

Intellectually, I probably would have said that different apples make apple ciders with different properties and tastes. But I had NO IDEA how tuned my preference was to a certain variety. A mystery variety at that since I have no idea what apples Hollmeyer’s use in their cider but I sure want to ask next time I’m there.

Potato and Onion Salad with Smoke Albacore

Simple! So simple the sous chef asked if she should keep cooking and realized that there was nothing more to cook after she started boiling the potatoes and eggs, and had cut the onions.  That was it. The smoked albacore tuna we found at the market flaked easily and was delicious on its own (in fact I like it better than smoked salmon!).  The onions and tuna got tossed with pear infused balsamic vinaigrette and salt. In fact it turns out we were supposed to add olive oil too, I just realized this while writing this post.  The word oil and olive are right next to each other in the directions. I omitted the olives on purpose but the oil must have gotten caught up in my mental filter! Good thing we have leftovers to right this with. Anyway, once the potatoes were done they were cubed and the arugula was ripped up. All this went into the bowl and viola! Salad! 2 duck eggs quarters to garnish and we were ready for photos and more importantly ready for eating.

How did it go despite my total omission of olive oil? Pretty darn good.  The onions were sweet walla wallas and I actually didn’t hate them. Normally the sous chef and I aren’t raw onion people but both of us found them quite yummy although our limit for them less than the other items in the salad.  The yellow finn potatoes we used were more crumbly than I expected but tender and creamy none the less.  The warm potatoes next to the cool onions and smoked tuna was really good.  Perhaps next time we will add the olive oil and see how it really is supposed to be.

Food post script – The sous chef wants me to highlight our egg cooking method: hard-cooked eggs vs hard boiled. Turns out to hard cook an egg you place it in cold water and once it starts boiling you remove it from the heat for a certain amount of time. In the case of chicken eggs the cookbook says 6-7 minutes and in the case of duck eggs 10-12 minutes.  Not only are duck eggs larger but the whites are contain more protein so they are a bit more solid than chicken eggs.  I love the taste of duck eggs but I’m not sure about them hard-cooked.  It took me 25 years to tolerate chicken egg whites so I’m not surprised that 3 experiences with duck eggs hasn’t been enough for me to really get myself around duck egg whites. Oh well.

Smoked Albacore

Packaging from the duck eggs and smoked albacore tuna

Pumpkin Soup Double Feature: Left - Original Style, Right - Complete Pumpkin Style

 Short Version: We made pumpkin soup!

Longer Version: We made pumpkin soup in a pumpkin!

They say a picture is worth a 1,000 words so I am going to try something different with his post by making it photocentric. By the end of this post you will have gotten 22,000 worth of words in only a few short feet of web page and as a bonus I’ll throw the words in between the photos for free (and I’m even going to use sections if you order now!)

Introduction

Pumpkin soup was NOT in our plans. It wasn’t even on our radar when we arrived at the farmers market on Sunday.  In fact even after we made our customary first round it wasn’t on our mind.  Even after the first cookbook consultation it wasn’t on our mind. Not even a fleck on our minds even. The second cookbook consultation though, those glossy full page photos of pumpkins made me stop, for a brief second but long enough for my eyes and mind to linger.  Pumpkin soup IN a pumpkin it said.  Its October and there were pumpkins at the market.  All kinds but we were after a Cinderella pumpkin as Ms. Deborah Madison had instructed us to find.  And we found it.  I was buying some arugula when the sous chef yelled from outside the other end of the stall: “Chef! I think I found the pumpkin we need. Its behind that guy [stand worker] so you can’t see it!” 5 minutes later and one bewildered worker later we had paid our $6.50 for our beautiful 13 lb Cinderella pumpkin.  It was so beautiful that as the sous chef carried it for the rest of our market time numerous people complimented her on her gorgeous pumpkin! You would have thought she had a baby or an adorable puppy the way folks loved her pumpkin from afar.

Prepping the Pumpkin to Go Into the Oven

Prepping The Pumpkin

The first major step was prepping the pumpking and getting it ready to go in the oven.  The main two steps as illustrated in the beautiful montage above (made in Irfanview – thanks sous chef for the tip!) was gutting the pumpkin and then making the pre-soup to fill it with.  The cinderella pumpkin is much squatter than I am used to so gutting it was a bit on the acrobatic end of pumpkin gutting. I started using a flat ice cream scope to pull the strings and the seeds out but it wasn’t nimble enough to reach the far corners of the squat pumpkin.  Eventually I moved to using a combination of my own hand and a soup spoon. I was able to scrape small sections, sweep the innards to the center, and then pull them out in a clump.  Scrape, Grab, Repeat. 

As for the pre-soup, the recipe casually mentioned (there weren’t really explicit directions, in fact it was much like my past blog posts)  that you would need about 2 quarts of milk for a 5 lb pumpkin. Strangely enough it turns out we only needed about 2.5 quarts of soy milk to fill a 13 lb pumpkin. Who knew?!  The soy milk was heated over the stove with a handful of sage leaves, some pepper, and salt.  Once it was the pre-soup was heated and ready to go it got poured into the pumpkin and capped with a combination of foil and pumpkin hat. The ~20 lb pumpkin (it was retaining water!) was ready for the oven.   

“Making” The Pumpkin Soup Proper

Making the Soup

After 2 hours of roasting we pulled the pumpkin was soft to the touch and ready for its next duties: fall apart into soup! The recipe recommend just reaching into the pumpkin pit of boiling soy milk and gently ‘drawing’ the pumpkin into the milk to make soup.  I turned to the trust ice cream scoop and started to pull the pumpkin from the side. Well it turns out drawing the pumpkin doesn’t translate to making ‘pumpkin icebergs’ with an ice cream scoop like I was doing. I had huge chunks 1″ deep and 3″-4″ square floating around in the soy milk. It wasn’t really soup yet and the hot soy milk presented an entirely new problem:  reduced visibility with scalding hot conditions.  I was concerned about puncturing the pumpkin skin and spilling all my pre-soup into the roasting pan.  Eventually I had to turn to the recipe’s backup plan to create soup from this mess I was creating: blending.  Not only did it reduce the huge icebergs into pumpkin icee but it also allowed me to drain the pumpkin so I could see/feel how much of the pumpkin I was scooping out.  That little bit of security went a long way and allowed me to be a bit more aggressive with my pumpkin scraping.  In contrast to the icebergs, the pumpkin I was scraping out towards the end was very, very moist and probably would have mixed right into the soup so I only blended out the big chunks. And left much of the rest to be mixed in by hand.

 Once it was all blended and ready to go I poured it back into the pumpkin to serve for dinner but low and behold I had more soup than I did space in the pumpkin! I ended up with about 3-4 bowls of soup left in the holding pot.  I suspect the top of the pumpkin sagged, reducing the volume of the cavity in the pumpkin.   The last step for soup prep was putting in 2 handfuls of grated Gruyere cheese into the pumpkin hatch and into the lowly overflow pot.  With a ladle and gravity the cheese just melted and mixed into the soup.

Serving the Soup

Serving

 
This part is mostly pictures! I used a ladle and put into bowls with a bit of Gruyere on the top and we sliced up sourdough rye from a local bread place at the market to serve it with.  But perhaps this is the place to talk about how it tasted finally?  Shall we? Ok!

Sweet.  Actually the soup was considerable sweet and not as “pumpkin-y” as I expected it to be.   I believe the cinderella pumpkin is a fairly sweet pumpkin but it seemed there was more sugar than the pumpkin could have provided. Turns out I was right: we had used sweetened soy milk.  Not a big deal but on first serving it was noticable to me.  Others at the table didn’t notice it all though.  Oh well. As for the pumpkin taste it certainly tasted like pumpkin just not like “liquid pumpkin” as I expected it to.

Even with these two “faults” the soup was hearty, warm, and delicious! The sourdough rye was a perfect pairing for the soup and all 4 folks eating it just kept eating and eating it.  Delicious!

Cleanup and Hidden Treasure

Clean Up and Treasures

You know what I never considered before? How to empty soup from the inside of a pumpkin after the ladle is no longer effective.  The answer? Cut a drainage hole in the side of the pumpkin! After I drained the pumpkin completely of liquid (and ironically after the sous chef had already filled 3 pint mason jars and 1 quart juice bottle with soup) I cut open the pumpkin to find almost an 1″ of pumpkin flesh still lining our shell! So with the precision of a sushi chef and the clumsiness of me cutting cantaloupe out of the rind I removed all the edible flesh from the skin.  I ended up with a big bowl and small Tupperware FULL of pumpkin. The small Tupperware traveled with our dinner guests but the rest got blended back into the soup; re-soiling the blender that had already been cleaned.  In the end the second round of soup was a heck of a lot more pumpkin-y AND much, much less sweet.  And not surprisingly we ended up with another 1.25 quarts of left over soup!!!!

And last but not least what “I learned from making pumpkin soup in a pumpkin”:

• Check for sweetened soy milk when making soup and don’t use it
• The more you scoop out the better the soup will be but the more likely it will be to fall in on itself; the quest for perfect soup requires these two to be balanced. Perfectly.
• The more pictures you take, the less you want to post due to the time to sort them. Consider this carefully in  how fast you want to post. (this has taken 3 days to create)
• pumpkin soup is a lot like squash soup. No surprise!
• Sweet pumpkin soup goes well with sourdough rye bread
• Buy the 13 lb pumpkin at the end of the farmers market trip. Not the beginning.
• A good pumpkin can bring more compliments than a cute child or dog; just make sure to carry it outside a bag!
• 13 lbs of pumpkin makes a lot of friggin’ soup
• Emptying the pumpking of the scaling liquid helps you to gauge how far you can push scooping the flesh out without puncturing the shell; even if the texture of the soup is right and no blending is needed.
• Flat ice cream scoops are great pumpkin/squash cutting tools
• When in doubt a measuring cup is a great size to scrape the inside of a pumpkin (1/3 cup I believe)
• Taking pictures before you’re guests arrive is brilliant, waiting to figure out that your soup can still be better until after all the dishes have been done and all the photo opportunities go away is not as brilliant.

Footnote: This actually took place on Oct 18th but since links were already made I don’t want to change it.

Fresh Green Garbanzo Bean Hummus

Introducing the worlds smallest batch of hummus made with nature’s own bubble wrap! That’s right garbanzo beans in the pod pop like bubble wrap and are super fun to shell; almost to a point of absurdity! But what about this claim of the worlds smallest batch of hummus? Well I’m probably exaggerating but it was a tiny amount none-the-less. 

Last weekend the sous chef and I found raw, fresh, in shelled garbanzo (chickpeas) beans at one of the stands at the farmers market.  Having never seen much less cooked with them we decided to make hummus with them.  I asked the folks at the stand and they said you can use them just like normal garbanzo beans so we decided it wasn’t a terrible idea. I bought a red pepper and had intended to make roasted red pepper hummus  but today plans changed. 

After we shelled all the beans to the beat of their own ‘pops’ we had 1 cup of beans that we steamed for 20 minutes.  In the mean time I scaled the rest of the recipe to 1/3 of the original amounts and mixed everything in the blender; just waiting for the steamed beans to make it happen!  In they went and on the blender went but it turned out the 1 Tablespoon of olive oil and tahini weren’t enough the hummus. I ended up doubling each of them (2/3rds of the original recipe) and then the texture turned for the better.

Top to Bottom: Fresh Garbanzo Beans In Shell, Miniature Plant Brains, Shelled Garbanzos, Steamed Garbazos

And the result? It was delicious.  A slightly different flavor than normal hummus but tangy none the less.  The main thing was that it looked like guacamole but it  wasn’t.

Garnet Yams And Hazelnut Butter

“Oh Man! These are AMAZING!” were the first words I heard from the sous chef after I served her these yams. And I was a room away, with the door shut, changing from my cookin’ pants into my eatin’ pants.  After my pants situation was all settled and I got to take my first bite. I couldn’t agree more!

I love yams. I love yams and brown sugar. I love yams with so much melted margarine that the yams literally could float away on it. And I loved candied yams from cans.  All forms of yams I grew up and by no means am I dismissing those recipes; like I said I loved them and I still do! But luckily the word “hazelnut” has taken me an entirely different direction and added to my ability to work with yams on a symbiotic level.  They give me amazing taste and I give them a reason to have lived and grown. Check. 

Anyway, this week at the farmers market I had found hazelnuts and was flipping through the cook book to make final plans for the week. As a side note the sous chef and I’s farmers market game plan almost always goes like this: 1) do some research on the farmers market blog and in the cookbooks/internet for some general genre ideas for the week, 2) walk around the entire farmers market once to see what they have, 3) consult cookbooks, the internet, and our own ideas to make a menu plan for the week, 4) walk around the farmers market as many times as it takes to find all the ingredients or until the sous chef or I gets grumpy (whichever comes first), and 5) then head home stopping at the grocery store for any supplementary ingredients we may need. So this week one of the things I knew I saw was the hazelnuts and in the back of my mind I swore I saw one stand with the word “Beauregard” on a sign; which conveniently was a type of yam* listed in the cookbook.  So off we went in search. Luckily while we were on the home stretch of the farmers market booths I saw the sign and saw the yams.  3 lbs later of yams I had basically wiped them out and I was a happy kid. Of course I picked up the hazelnuts and the green onions too but those weren’t all that interesting to talk about :)

So back to the recipe at hand: it was simple! Peel and wedge the yams, toss with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and bake at 400 degrees F for 40 minutes.  In the mean time grind the roasted hazelnuts and mix them with butter.  Once the yams are soft and tender mix with 1/2 of the hazelnut butter and top with some green onions. Done. The sous chef said that it was so simple even she could do it alone! (For the record she is a good cook so there are many things I think she could do alone so I had no doubts about this one.)  The best part was that while I was cutting the yams into ‘wedges’, which ended up being quarters because the thin yams I had, that the pan looked like I was cutting up carrots.  It was pretty funny to me for no apparent reason. 

Either way at the end the yams were delicious at the end and not solely spruced up with some form of sugar. They were tender and the hazelnut better complimented the earthy flavor of the yams themselves. I’d have to say as much as I love candied yams, right now this recipe has won my heart for the ‘favorite yam’ category.  Admittedly, it is a small category but that shouldn’t diminish the achievement of the ‘Garnet Yams and Hazelnut Butter Recipe.’

 ******

* Disclaimer – I realize sweet potato and yams aren’t the same and that “Beauregard” are more technically on the sweet potato side. However, the cookbook calls them yams for this recipe so I’m sticking with it until I personally and truly understand not only the technical difference between sweet potatoes and yams but also the ‘marketing’ difference that seems to have causede the problem in the first place. Ms. Ivy Manning tried to explain it to me as a foot note in the recipe but I honeslty didn’t try to hard to figure it all out.

Mural of Flavor Breaded Pork Chops

What do you do when you’ve got plans for yams and frozen pork chops in the freezer? Step 1 – Remember you have them and then make no exact plans to use them until right before you should be cooking them! Check.   Oh the real answer? Look in your cupboard and make a plan! Step 2 – Determine the cooking method to base plan off of: well yams are already in the oven and there is another rack. Baked pork chops: Check! As a departure from the norm I’m going include a real recipe on what I actually did to them tonight but I should note that they were very tasty.  Moist, and not dry. The breading was crunchy and full of flavor BUT I still think my favorite way to eat pork chops is with apple sauce.

Oven Baked ‘Mural of Flavor’ Breaded Pork Chops

Ingredients:

3 – 3/4 in thick pork chops
1 egg
1-2 Tablespoons of water
~6 Tablespoons flour
1 cup of panko bread crumbs (regular bread crumbs probably would have worked just as well but panko tend to stay crunchier and when breading for the oven the more help I can get to stay crunchy, the more I’ll take!)
0.3 ounces (1/2 small jar) of Penzey’s Mural of Flavor

Directions:

1. Trim any fat from the pork chops, rinse with water and set aside 

2. Beat the egg in a small mixing bowl with the water, and set aside

3. Mix the bread crumbs and ‘Mural of Flavor’ in a small bowl until the spices are evenly distributed among the bread crumbs

4. Cover each pork chop with a layer of flour, dip in the egg mixture, and lay on the breading mixture. Pat the breading into each side and the edges of the pork chop until thoroughly covered.  Place on a lightly greased baking sheet (I used spray oil to cover the pan). 

5. In a 400 degree F oven; bake 10-12 minute uncovered and flip the pork chops. Bake another 10-12 minutes or until the chop is cooked to your liking and/or all the way through.  This will depend on the thickness of your pork chops and how you like them. 

6. Remove from oven, let cool, serve, and enjoy the Mural of Flavor covering your pork chop.

Video Playback

It took two lines for my VLC settings in Xlobby:

1) DVDs -
Extensions: ifo,video_ts
Command Line Switches: %path% –fullscreen

2) Video Files
Extensions: mov, avi
Command Line Switches: %file% –fullscreen

Now Xlobyy will open DVDs from disk, Full DVD Copies on my NAS, and MOVs. Which thus far are the only files I’ve tried to play.  I did notice that Xlobby didn’t automatically recognize MOVs as ‘Video’ files and didn’t import it into the library. So I had to go manually add it to the Library but once I did everything works fine.  This process was amazingly simple compared to gettng all my audio things worked out :)

General UI Tweaks

So now that I’m actually using the HTPC more s a home theater system than I am building it. I decided its time to do some of those final tweaks to how it works.

1) Autologin – Using TweakUI I set the correct media playing user to automatically login.  That way when the power button is pushed comes up into windows and no need for a keyboard to login.

2) Autolaunch of Xlobby2 and WOL Packet – I put the Xlobby2 shortcut in the ‘Startup’ folder so it will automatically launch upon login and therefore boot as well.  The WOL program I used was ‘wolcmd’ its free to download and use. I created a batch file to wake the media server and put it into the ‘Startup’ folder.  I found out to make the the batch file work the path to the program needs to be in quotes but the parameters can’t be. So my line looks like this:

“C:\Program Files\wolcmd\wolcmd.exe” MACMACMAC IP.IP.IP.IP Subnet.Subnet.Subnet.Subnet Port

3) Screensaver – Off

4) Pwer Settings – Windows doesn’t make this easy.  I wish I could say if this program is running do this and if this program is running do this. For now I set it to go into Standy in 2 hours. Enough watch a movie in one sitting.  I’m going to have to work on this one though but I need something now because the home server power down is dependnt upon the oer comptuers statuses.

5) Ialso enabled RDP and enabled my restricted user to RDP in so I could configure the HTPC from my laptop :)

Bacon IN the Waffles

Honestly, I can’t believe I found a recipe for this idea.  In fact, it sounded similar to the ‘monkey brain’ biscuits my dad made a long time ago: they sound great on paper but in real life it should never be tried! (The monkey brain biscuits were the child of the thought “I put grape jelly on my biscuits when I eat them. Why not just put it on/in BEFORE I bake them.”  Great idea but the grey biscuits that looked like monkey brains were a bad, bad execution and thankfully never tried again!)  I thought for sure the ‘Bacon IN the waffles” idea I was having was along those same lines so I did what my dad couldn’t do all those years ago in the dark ages: asked the internet.  And what did it tell me? Not only had people done it before but they posted recipes and other people liked it.  That did it. We were doing it; IF I had bacon at home. Which I did.

So what can I say now that I’ve experience bacon in my waffles and not as a side dish?  Mostly “wow there is bacon in here!” We used 4 strips of thick bacon that I cut into chunks and then crumbled after that.  Some bits of bacon were small and others were rather large like the one in the photo above.  The variation made for a subtle and yet pronounced bacon experience with every bite of the waffle. Amazingly enough there wasn’t anything wierd about it nor really stand out about it. Literally there was just bacon in the waffle and that was that.  The waffle was still the right texture and flavor. The bacon was still crisp and a bit salty.  In fact the salt/sweet balance was probably the biggest addition to flavor.  These waffles already had some maple syrup in the batter but I could hardly taste it but I do wonder if it toned down the salty bacon some.  I added plenty of syrup as an aftermarket addition and it was great but the plain bacon-in-waffles were also really pleasant to just munch on by themselves.  Not AMAZING but I wasn’t craving anything like syrup, butter, or orange juice to go with them. Just munch, munch, munch. Mmmm waffle. Mmmm bacon.

So there you have it. Bacon in your waffle isn’t out of the question and it isn’t bad either.  So go for it and give it a shot and see how you like it. If you try it I’d be interested to hear your experiences/options of the buried bacon treasure in the carb heartland!

Squash Tacos

This pictures isn’t justice for this dish. To be fair I didn’t bring my nice camera tonight but more importantly I stopped taking photos before I got a great shot because I REALLY wanted to eat these. Bad. As the sous chef and our guest’s reviews were taunting me. So tonight I let the photo go to grainy and called it a dinner!

And it was worth it! These tacos were filling and warming. They were exactly as our friends had describe them even though we didn’t use their exact recipe.  For once it was my stomach that stoped me from eating more and not my mind/emotions! And the complexity of cooking to yummyness ratio wasn’t even on the scale as hard. At all!

This dinner started as a verbal idea from a friend of ours while at the farmers market this weekend. We picked up the major ingredients he mentioned: squash (actually the sous chef had that), onion, and tomatillos. All brilliant until we went to make them tonight and didn’t get any of the details on how, what, when, anything. The internet has to stand in for friends at that point.  But let it be known we did try and call before we turned to the impersonal library that is the internet.  One google later I came across a taco recipe on a blog entitled dietporn; that was almost enough right there for me to use that recipe. But honestly the recipe spoke for itself.  And ironically we had almost all the needed ingredients either as plan or leftover from our chili earlier in the week.

When we started preping it our guest decided to go home and get her knife to cut the squash with and in the process also brough back the black beans we lacked.  At first glance I had just gotten rid of them in the recipe but when it came to eating time it was AWESOME that she went and got them.  I’m not going to get into to many details on prep today because I’m actually going to post a recipe on here today.  Tonight’s internet recipe was based off of another internet recipe and I made some changes I thought I’d post in detail.

Three of the major differences were that a) we used Delicata squash, b) We used tomatillos, and c) we made a blackbean/tomato/salsa mix instead of just beans. The orignal recipe called for cooking the tomatoes down, adding the black beans with liquid, and then serving drained beans.  Something didn’t sit right with me so instead we reduced the tomatoes a bit, added 1 can of drained beans, and reduced them together into a lovely tomato/black bean salsa like sauce. Yum! And now for the recipe and inline pictures!

Delicata Squash Tacos with Spicy Black Bean Salsa

1 Delicata squash, cut into ½ inch cubes with skin on
3/4 white onion, chopped

3 medium tomatillos, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
3 tablespoons olive oil

1 ½ teaspoons cumin

1 ½ teaspoons coriander

2 teaspoons plus 1 tablespoon chili powder

1 teaspoon salt

2 cloves garlic, pressed
~1.5 cups diced tomatoes, we used heirloom tomatoes that had been diced 3 days prior
1 15-ounce cans black beans

1 jalapenos
1/2 avocado, cubed
some flour tortillas and some hard taco shells
shredded cheese of choice

Cook jalapenos until the skins are charred. (Either broil or on a hot skillet.) Set aside.

In a large bowl, toss squash, onions, and tomatillos together with 2 Tablespoons olive oil. Add cumin, coriander, 2 teaspoons of the chili powder, and a teaspoon salt. Toss until well coated. Roast for 20 to 25 minutes, or until the edges of the squash and onions begin to brown. Rotate the pan(s) and stir halfway through cooking. (The tomatillos mostly ‘disappeared’ from the baking tray; all that was left was the skins and a bit of flesh.  But when they cooked down the squash must have absorbed them because there was no more liquid in the pan besides the original oil!)

Squash, Onions, and Tomatillos before being baked

Tomato and Bean 'Salsa'

Poached Pear and Hazelnut Tart

This tart from start to finished smelled or tasted amazing every step of the way! This is one of those recipes that I drooled over every time I opened up Ivy Manning’s cookbook. And today we finally gave it  a shot.y? Because we found hazelnuts at the farmers market. Teh sign said organic but I’m not 100% sure they are grown locally although I hope they are.  Anyway, I asked the woman how many unshelled hazelnuts did I need per cup of shelled hazelnuts nad she guessed/told me 2:1 ratio.  I needed hazelnuts for 2 recipes this week so I guessed not only the volume but also the weight I needed.  I ended up buying about 3/4 lbs of unshelled hazelnuts.  The pears were easy to find this time of year and I was ready for tart baking!

The first part of the tart to tackle was the crust.  Which as you can see is slanted more than a normal tart because I am still using foil lined pie pans to make my tarts in accordance with the don’t bring more crap into my kitchen to store if there are other things I  ”>cna use to do it :) We did use an electric mixer to crumble the butter into the flour mixture but after that I just stuck my hands right in to knead.  The dough is very flaky and barely sticks together by the time you put it into the fridge to rest for an hour. I was actually concerned that when I went to roll it that it wasn’t going to stay a crust of any type at all.  Luckily, my concern was unfounded.  The one thing I will say about this tart crust recipe is that the uncooked dough is delicious! Now I love dough. I can’t explain why but I do.  This tart crust tasted like a sugar cookie dough so much that when I had left overs I just baked it like a cookie. Even the sous chef, whom makes fun of my dough eating affinity, started to nibble on the dough and like it by the end of the process.

Next up the pears! We used 3 Bosc pears which we learned felt hard initially but were actually just perfectly ripe for this recipe.  With Bosc pears you want them to be firm and the part just around the stem to give a little.  Also, the firmer the pears the better for baking.  We had both so we were good to go.  The peeled, cored, and quartered pears were simmered/poached in a liquid made up of: water, Chardonnay, orange zest, sugar, vanilla, and orange juice.  Holy crow did the kitchen smell good while they cooked! I’m surprised we actually got to the tart making part and didn’t just eat them on the spot right then. After they had cooked until a paring knife slid through them easily we let them cool to room temperature.

Last but not least we made the hazelnut filling.  The first thing we had to do was crack them all open and then roast them.  Both the recipes this week wanted us roast them so we did them all at once.  We only had one nut cracker so I found a mostly useful second way of cracking the nuts open: pliers.

(top to bottom) Unshelled Hazelnuts, Nut Cracker, Pliers

 Once the nuts were free from their shells we roasted them in the oven at 400 degrees F for 10 minutes.  They were brown and the skins had cracked and we didn’t burn them so we were happy until we went to de-skin them.  Usually roasted things the skins fall right off. Not hazelnuts.  We asked the internet for any advice and the most it gave us was that it was a dreaded task among bakers. Crap.  It did have one idea to put the roasted hazelnuts directly out of the oven into a towel and let them steam themselves some.  By this point we had already cooled them down so we pu them back into the warm oven (not on) for 10 minutes and tried the steam method: no luck. So we decided to leave the skins on and  I couldn’t have bene happier with the results.

So now that we had raw material to make the hazelnut filling with it went pretty smoothly.  The hazelnuts were ground to a fine powder with sugar in my magic bullet.  Then butter was added and eventually 1.5 eggs, vanilla, and a bit of flour were mixed in making this amazing hazelnut paste that the sous chef just wanted to spread on toast! But I didn’t let her thankfully and the tart was better for it.

All that was left was assemble. The dough was let to rest at room temperature for 5 minutes before it was rolled out into an 1/8″ thick sheet, placed in the tart pan, trimmed, and put into the freezer for 30 minutes.  Once it was done we pulled it out, warmed the ceramic dish we froze it in (so we wouldn’t crack it putting it directly into the oven), and filled it with hazelnut goodness.  Then the pears were arranged on top best I could make them fit and the whole thing was sprinkled with a cinnamon/sugar mixture. Into the oven it went for 25 minutes.  When it came out it was removed from the pie pan and glazed with melted apricot preserves.

5 minutes into the photo shoot our guests showed up and we all were ready to eat the little sucker. Astoundingly good is the best way to describe it.  The flavors were full and rich, the pears were juicy and moist and EVERYONE loved it.  After we all ate our piece we just sat in a super pleasant tart coma for a while.  It was just another check in the box of tarts are really awesome and I need to keep making them.  This one there was no doubts about at all. It was as close to perfect as I can imagine without having a golden yard stick pf pear tarts to compare it to.

Chocolate, Coffee, Beer Chili

1 coworker, 1 internet search, and 1 farmers market made this chili happen! It’s that time of the year when hearty soups and stew start to creep into my cravings. My coworker spoke about chili last weeke and mentioned that once he made a chili with chocolate, coffee, and beer in it that was amazing. Well that was that and I wanted to make chili.  I originally thought I would make it without the farmers market at all last week but by today I still hadn’t made it so I took a second look and was pleasantly surprised to find that most of what I needed I thought I could get at the farmers market.  For me chili was always made with things from cans and I loved it. But today I realized that mostly it was the tomatoes and beans that came from cans. Both things I can get at the farmers market fresh so why not!

I had found this recipe on the internet that I was hoping to use and based me recipe off of it.  My shopping list didn’t veer from it too much as I made my laps around the market.  I was happy that I did find my fresh shelled beans at Alms Hill today.  The beans aren’t dried but they are shelled which seemed like a nice compromise today in the realm of how much energy I wanted to put into getting approximately 4 cans of beans from shells.

Fresh shelled black and cannellini beans from Alms Hill Farm

When I asked the woman at the stand how much I need to approximate 4 cans she  ”>recomened 2 containers worth which confirmed what I was thinking so I got 1 of each: black beans and cannellini beans.  Ironically, cannellini turns out to be another name for white Italian kidney beans, which are closer to the kidney beans that the recipe calls for than I expected them to be. Anyway,  the women asked what I was doing with them so I told her chili and she offered some second/slighty bruised heirloom tomatoes at $2/lb to me.  A good deal for heirlooms! She didn’t have a ton right then so I told her we would make a lap and see what she had then. It took us 45 minutes to come around again but it was worth it! I bought twice as many second tomatoes as I needed but I also go a Cherry Bomb chili pepper and 2 jalapenos as well.  (This was also the stand that had hazelnuts as well which you will see later).  I picked up an onion and a loaf of bread and we were in business. We stopped at the grocery store on the way home to get the ground beef and sirloin steak.

I had intended to put my exact recipe on here because I was altering the original a bit but it turns out that I didn’t. I only used 1 onion, instead of 2, and omitted the cayenne pepper due to my stomach’s dislike of spicy.  I had actually reduced the chili powder at first too just to be on the safe side but as it cooked I thought something was missing. It was the chili powder. So I put all it called for in and low and behold it tasted like chili! But I suppose we should talk about the headlining ingredients just a bit.

Making the secret sauce (stout beer, strong coffee, and cocoa powder)

Yes that is a bottle of stout going into the chili. In fact a stout we knew nothing about but liked the name and label, something to do with Rasputin but as it turned out one of our beer drinking friends told us it was good beer. So we still used it.  And yes that is a cup of strongly brewed coffee going into the chili. And last but not least that is high quality cocoa powder being dropped into the chili. It really happened. And it really tasted like chili.

All in all at the end of 5.5 hours it tasted like chili. The spice level was just right for me where my nose was starting to run but eating it with a piece of bread was perfectly fine but alone I could taste a bit of heat.  The sous chef gave it her highest compliments as well! The real test will be in the left overs tomorrow.  I cooked so much today that by the time dinner came along I had snacked and so I ate very little of dinner proper, saving room for desert which was also just as excellent.

Rockridge Orchard Cider

This is my farmer markets standard yummy apple cider that stated the whole rivalry/throw down.  The only problem is today I bought the Strawberry Apple Ci der instead of the plain. However, I’m doubtful it will really sway my preference too much either way because I’ve had both varieties from Rockridge Orchard so much.

I think now its important to identify my personal apple cider scale and /or cider qualities I look for. I think there are 3 main qualities I look for in apple cider: 1) color, 2) pulp content, and 3) the liquid apple taste. One end of the scale is the standard apple juice of the grocery store that is light yellow, no pulp (and therefore is very clear), and tastes more like water than apple.  On the gold standard end, Hollmeyer’s cider is dark, dark brown, filled with apple bits and therefore is very opaque, and tastes like liquid apple.  I think for me where it goes from apple juice to cider is when the pulp content increases and appears less filtered.  This is more of an observation about my own preferences than it is scientific classification for the record.

So how does Rockridge stand up in my more formalized system? It is brown, starting to get opaque, and has a strong apple taste but not quite liquid apples yet.   I would say this ‘cider’ squarely straddles the juice/cider divide in my book leaning more towards a light cider.   Rockridge Orchard’s Cider is well worth drinking but it doesn’t have the body/pulp content that I think leads to the taste of my favorite apple cider.

Country Cider Mill Apple Cider

Since my trip home I’m sort of inspired to look harder to see if any comparable apple cider exists here that challenges the local orchard at my parents.  I found this ‘local’ cider (its from Olympia, WA – 2 hours away) in my grocery store and decided to give it a try.

The first thing I noticed is that there was settling in the bottle. This is a good thing as my Gold standard for apple cider had it as well.  The color looked closer and the it was less transparent. All good things on the surface. So how did it fair in the taste test?

To sweet. The body was there and it was like drinking liquid apples; just very, very sweet liquid apples. To much for me. It says no sugar was added but I think the variety was probably different. I’ll keep looking.

**UPDATE: My back review of this cider using my ‘new’ rating system is as follows: The deep brown color and opacity is right on for the gold standard apple cider search and even the taste is strong like apples. BUT its still to sweet.  Evidentially when I say it has to taste like apples it has to taste like ‘not as sweet apples.’  This cider almost tastes like there is extra sugar in it even though there isn’t.  IF you like sweet apples and cider this one is for you, but I’ll keep looking. So close, so close.

Findlay Market & Hollmeyer's Orchard Haul

I’m visiting my parents this weekend and we went to two important places: 1) A Historic Market and 2) A local orchard.  The orchard we frequented as a kid and the apple cider there is to die for. It is basically drinking liquid apples.  Now, currently I live in an apple producing state and there is some nice apple cider they sell at our local farmers market but it can’t touch what my parent’s local, in the middle of suburbia, orchard produces.  It just can’t.  That isn’t to say somewhere there isn’t good cider but I haven’t found it yet. 

You can see the cider and the apples in the back of the photos. The cider is thick, smells like apples, dark in color, and unpasteurized.  It isn’t to sweet but it is hearty. 

The rest of the haul here is from the historic market I have never been to all my years growing up. So on the day of my arrival and after a nap my parents and I went off to explore it!  And we had a blast. My dad was like a kid in a candy store trying new things and buying everything to match.  Usually I am the instigator for trying all kinds of things but this time all I had to do was sit back and watch.  We came home with:

Sweet Potato Pie
New Red Potatoes
Green Grapes
Squash
Garlic
Salt Rye Bread
Ciabbata Bread
Ground Sumac
Fresh Cottage Cheese
Roasted Turkey Leg (which was ironic we were making a whole turkey for dinner the next day)
Fresh Eggs
Fresh and Shelled Lima Beans
Goat Milk Gouda
Some other Cheese
Reubenwursts
Locally Roasted and Seasoned Beef
Locally Roasted Coffee
Pistachio Gelato

All in all most of the food was gone in the 2 days I was home and we had a blast. I hope my family goes back once in a while and I hope I can make it back too.  But for the cider?

I’m coming back. No worries.

It is as you feared: I, the sous chef, have been left to fend for myself.

There are a few successes amidst a few frozen pizzas that I can report to the food blog. First off, I was very proud of myself for having the flash of brilliance to up the ante on my box of Annie’s mac n cheese by adding a can of tuna. Instant protein, am I right?! I also managed, on a Sunday afternoon, to dice up and fry up a huge potato (from the farmer’s market!) for work lunches. I ate a lot of good old fashioned PB&J’s for lunches this past week. For the record: honey wheat bread from the nearest Great Harvest Bread Company, almond butter which is supposed to be a little better for the ol’ ticker (almonds have good cholesterol!), and boring strawberry jam not from anywhere special. STILL: delicious.

However, it is clear that my crowning achievement of the week MUST be this:

mmmm sammich

CHECK IT OUT! So, I had a few random slices of good ol’ American cheese – you know, the cheap kind – and the aforementioned loaf of bread. I also happen to have the good fortune of a produce stand right across the street (a good fortune I rarely capitalize on). I was walking past on my way home, and had some change in my pocket, and on a whim, I detoured through the veggie stand, dropped a whopping 50 cents on the most perfect avocado ever, and this glorious sandwich was born.

I fed myself two of these beauties over the course of last weekend – half an avocado per sandwich. And yes, I did use the honey wheat – but the honey is so subtle that once you slather on butter and melt cheese and fry it up, you can’t taste it at all. Yes, I dipped it in ketchup. It. Was AWESOME.

Last week/weekend, I was far more ambitious than I am now. (Yes, I call that ambitious.) I also have access to some things I didn’t have access to last weekend: when the chef left for his conference, I completely forgot to confiscate a few pickled items from his refrigerator. He has yet to post about the sour dill pickles we made, so I won’t say too much about them except that they’re getting on in age and this weekend I am eating as many as I can before their time is up. I also nabbed a jar of the pickled carrots.

this is totally nutritious i promise

Finally: the chef inherited a very, very large amount of “fancy cheese” from his conference, and I confiscated that too. I have no idea how long cheese lasts, only that it would take a large party with nothing else to eat to get rid of all this cheese. The only groceries I’ve bought so far included two boxes of crackers, to help me eat CHEESE. (Which is NOT good for the ol’ ticker – bad cholesterol!) You can see my pickled smorgasbord in the background. See… veggies… dairy… it’s totally solid eating.

But let us not forget the junk food! As an unhealthy eater, I intake a pretty solid chain of high-sugar items. Lucky for you, I also take pictures of them.

the pumpkin maple

I introduce to you: the leaf shaped sprinkle. It would appear that this time of year I can only eat highly-sugary bakery goods that are topped with maple leaf shaped sprinkles. THIS beautiful cupcake comes from Cupcake Royale, and I highly suggest you eat one if you are anywhere near a Cupcake Royale. No, really.

breakfast is the most important meal of the day

For realz.

Posted in Cooking Creations ]]> http://techdabble.wordpress.com/2009/10/03/what-ive-been-eating-while-the-chef-is-away/feed/ 1 deceivery IMG_0190 cheesencrackers cupcake donut! http://techdabble.wordpress.com/2009/09/16/fresh-wild-king-salmon-with-corn-sun-gold-tomato-and-artichoke-saute/ http://techdabble.wordpress.com/2009/09/16/fresh-wild-king-salmon-with-corn-sun-gold-tomato-and-artichoke-saute/#comments Thu, 17 Sep 2009 05:59:26 +0000 techdabble http://techdabble.wordpress.com/?p=955 ]]>

Salmon & Saute

I have to start this post by saying I was not impressed by this at all BUT it was also cold by the time I stopped cooking / taking pictures so I’m certain that had a lot to do with sadly.  I also need to start by saying the first salmon steak I made was by far the most perfectly beautiful. I had hoped as I cooked more I could repeat and refine it but alas it was no to be and so the blackened edges adorn our photo tonight. 

This is a story about a fish, friends, and end of a season. The sous chef was having a dinner party with a friend this week and I was on duty to get food for this dinner while at the farmers market.  The sous chef had seen that it was the last week for fresh salmon at the farmers market and with this knowledge tucked in the back of my brain off I went.  But before I went I checked my cookbook and saw this recipe and tucked that also in my brain.  When I got to the market I made my usual lap with a friend and decided that even at $21.99/lb the King Salmon as a very rare treat made sense.  So I sauntered up and opened a cooler.  I started at the unmarked fillets and eventually found one even in thickness and asked the fisherman how much he thought it weighed.  My goal: 1 lb.  His answer: 1.2 or so.  He handed it to the next guy who said 1.5 and dropped it onto the scale where it read: 1.52. He won the weight game and he won my money when I decided to go ahead and do.  $33 dollars later I had a hunk of the freshest salmon I could buy and a bag of ice to support it.  We already had the corn and I made a few more laps for the sun golds and the basil. I looked at the artichokes twice but totally forgot to buy one.  So later that day on a bike ride I picked up from the fruit and veggie stand.

I got home and put it in the fridge with the ice but eventually something made me ask the internet how to store the fish. It told me only on crushed ice.  Only.  I didn’t have any ice. I didn’t have any crushed ice. And it was later than I wanted it to be and didn’t really want to go out.  Just as I started making plans I came across a website that was my answer: blue ice cold packs.  Specifically the ice cube like ones.  Sandwich the fish between those and rotate every 24 hours. I had 2 of them right there so I swapped them with the melted ice and called it good until the next day when I got a blue ice pack replacement to keep the cycle going for 2 days.

 2 days passed and it was time to cook.  Our first challenger was the artichoke.  I have never cooked and artichoke and the directions weren’t exactly clear how much was the heart or how much was the tougher/softer leaves we were supposed to be using. In the end we went with the heart more than anything but boy did I get a good introduction on what I don’t know about artichokes.  Chalk that one up to the research I need to do category.  But we managed to get through it and we cooked the bacon, rendered the fat, and then sauteed the three veggies in it fora few minutes to make the side dish.

At this point the only left to do was cook the salmon. The directions were straight forward: 3 minutes on the skinless side to sear it and enough to cook it to medium on the other side, approximately 3 minutes.  The first steak did exactly as it was supposed to and it was served to our guest. It was beautifully seared and cooked.  The guests review was that it was amazing before the second steak even got off the frying pan line.  The next steak was almost twice as thick and took much longer to cook. Eventually I cut it in half to see if it would cook faster and I think it helped some. The third and forth weren’t that much better; thick and unclear to me. In the end everything was enough but not the prettiest nor the ugliest we had seen.

1/4 of the Raw Salmon -"What's left before I forget to take a picture"

Cooking Salmon Shrouded in Mystery!

The guest and the sous chef loved the salmon and the saute but I spent so much time cooking and taking photos tonight that it was quite cold before I got there.  It tasted good but not stand out in its cold state.  Hopefully next year I will cook some salmon before the season is over and I don’t necessarily have to cook it better just eat it faster and it may be amazing.  Here’s to trusting the sous chef and guest’s palate more than mine tonight!

Kosher Dill Pickles

Lets start off with “I’m Sorry” evidentially this post which is from 3 weeks ago never got written. I started one line and then my life deviated from cooking to scrounging for food at a conference and then a quick trip home.  So here we go.  We decided we wanted to try sour pickles as well.  Turns out they aren’t considered quick pickles so scratch my former ‘quick pickle only’ interest title.

I found this awesome recipeonline and bought some cukes at the market the least time I was there.  I don’t remember details now but we used some spices and dill and stuff like the recipe called for. :)  The crazy part is since they are sour they a) have no vinegar and b) have to ferment.  So we covered them and left them in the sous chef’s closet. Man in short order it was smelling like pickles! So the firsat day of testing came (you let them ferment ‘to taste’) and we opened them and…

There was some mold on top of pickles that weren’t submerged and the liquid was very cloudy.  Oh shit. We were a little uncertain on exactly how this was supposed to work so we put them in the fridge and went straight to the authority: the internet! After a bit of googling I determined that the cloudy was normal nad the mold we could probably remove and be ok. So we took the chance and bit into a pickle.

It was a pickle! We got scared though and stopped the fermentation that day when we think later we would have let it go another day or so.  Due to my schedule the sous chef has done most of the eating but I can say they are very yummy.

Left To Right: Chioggia Beets, Golden Beets, Mixed Colored Carrots

So with the ease of pickling last week the sous chef was gung ho for more pickling. She was not at the market with me so it was up to me to make important cooking decisions.  The first decision I made was we were only going to cook 1 or 2 dinners this week and with our usual 3rd cooking night dedicated to pickling things.  So I picked up a bag of colored carrots, a bunch of chioggia beets, a bunch of golden beets, a few handfuls of wax and green beans, and 8 more pickling cukes.  At the market it seemed like a great idea but when I got home to the internet I quickly got overwhelmed! 

Why? Because I kept falling into canning instead of pickling.  Turns out one of the goals this year has been to cook what is there. Not focusing on preserving or anything past leftovers.  Eating seasonally and actually using the food.  The problem with pickling is that it very easily crosses the line into canning and preserving.  Nothing is wrong with this except time dedication and recipe locating.  I’ve canned before (200 lbs of apples once) and I enjoy it but it wasn’t what I was trying to get myself into, nor the sous chef.  After a bit I finally came back full circle and realized what I wanted to do was focusing on the pickling itself and proper canning was secondary. In fact I really just wanted to do “quick pickling” where the pickled products get eaten within a month of them being done.  Also, I already knew I was focusing on small batch preserving. 

Now onto recipe  selection. 1/2 the beets was easy. The Scandinavian Cookbook had a recipe for beets so that would do for the “red” beets.  As for the golden beets I wanted to try a different brine and I found one online I planned to use.  And I found of for carrots that also looked good. And finally I settled on doing the cukes and the beans with the same brine.  Tonights goal was just both beets and the carrots!

We went shopping and got all the spices, etc we needed and realized I didn’t really have enough pots to: 1) boil the jars, 2) boil golden beets, 3) boil red beets, and 4) make brine. I have 3 pots, not 4. We decided to get one more from the sous chef’s house but she forgot her keys.  So instead we realized we could pre-cook the beets by steaming them in my roommate’s steamer.  Since we only had 1 bunch of each (3 beets each for a total of 6) we peeled them and put them in the steamer for around 40 minutes probably?  Which worked out great because we could combine them in a single cooking place and not have the red ones taint the golden ones. 

So while I was talking on the phone the sous chef picked up the lead and cut up the carrots and got the carrot brine and the Scandinavian Cookbook brine all mixed up and ready to go.  By the time I got off the phone the jars were ready to go and we packed the carrots in and topped it with the brine.  We almost forgot the garlic and so its a little on the out of the water side.  We will just flip the jars daily for a bit and hope it works out :) Oh the carrot brine recipe!!! Here it is! 

Now onto the beets.  First we did the chioggia beets which have lovely rings of red and white alternating when they are sliced crosswise.  Amazingly enough all 3 beets fit into one jar no problem and we used 1/2 of the Scandinavian Beet Brine to pour over it.  At this point we decided to forgo the golden beet brine and just use the rest of the red beet brine.  We filled them up and then put the lids on.  The best part of the beets? The floating anise on the top before we closed them:

Star Anise Floating -- Doesn't the chioggia beets look like watermelon here?

In the end we got 1 jar of each of the beets and 2 jars of carrots. A perfect amount for small batch quick pickling.   For now that is all we know and the beets take a week, the carrots a few days. Until then enjoy my dry post about part II of pickling and look forward to part III! Oh in case you were wondering… this is the recipe I was going to use for the golden beets.

But I digress.   Time and food. Time and eating.  The seed for tonights re-framing came from another blog I was reading.   Her words crystalized my words into this: cooking is like a project. And project managers say you can have 2 out of 3 but not all 3 of: time, quality, and cost.  This guideline applies to food and cooking as well.  Obviously there are exceptions to all this guideline but it certainly seemed like a starting place to investigate my own eating habits.

For example, the sous chef and I have been cooking almost exclusively out of the farmers market this summer.  It’s actually REALLY cool to think about how I only go to the grocery store to get crap food that I crave or need because I forget my lunch.  The crap part isn’t the good part in of itself but the part where maybe 1% of our dinner is coming from there.  Anyway I’d personally say that our meals have quality but lack in the time category as we spend a few hours cooking every other day.  That leaves us with cost.   A woman at the farmers market asked me once whether we were saving money by shopping there.  Honestly, I wasn’t really paying attention to the cost as that hasn’t been a driving factor in any of this so far.  But today it occurred to me that I’m probably spending more money but not because the veggies are more expensive but because I’m actually buying veggies, and herbs, and fruits.  Before the farmers market time I would just buy processed carb products; which were cheap and yummy.  I bet I’d be saving money if I had been buying the same kind of food at the grocery store and especially the same amount.  So in the end I’m spending more money but I’m actually eating quality food.  Or to continue in the faux business terms my gross cost is higher but my adjusted net cost is probable less.  Go figure.

Back to the project management metaphor I’m exploring here. In that case I’d give cost to the farmers market side so we’d end up +cost, +quality, – time.  2 out 3.  It’s easy to imagine the +cost, +time, -quality version where I only at mac-n-cheese, frozen pizza, and pb&j all the time; house brands only of course.  But what about the +time, +quality, -cost side.  Perhaps that is eating out at a good restaurant. Or paying someone to cook for you. Or buying quality pre-pared food.   The challenge is most people want +cost, +quality, AND +time.  Of course there are ways to get closer to that with many “quick healthy recipes” but many of them are -cost at some level. 

This is by no means a proclamation of the adage fitting but a starting point to examine my own eating habits using this “categorization” scheme.  In the end I suspect that all three combinations will have their moments to shine and the key to eating well is using them all in an accurate way.  Another form of food balance.

The cons of Windows Home Server are mostly power and cost related.  The cost is about $100 for a retail copy of the product.  Power wise though spinning down disks sounds like it isn’t going to be possible.  This is where the Green Drives I’m buying are a huge boon.

The original plan was to use FreeNAS on a Solid State 512 Memory module.  I believe this model used about 0.25 W of electricity or maybe less or a bit more I’m not sure I don’t have it in front of me.  So the real differences in the WHS setup is that I can’t spin down the storage disks and the the install partition needs to be 80 GB at least…which means a HD. I can’t justify $300 for a SSD large enough for that.

So where does that leave me?  I have two options:

1) Install the the OS on the 500 GB Green drive – The down side to this is that then there is NO hope that I can spin down the storage disks at all.  And this is assuming that WHS doesn’t spin them down already past idle and into standy…but I can’t imagine it does.

2) Install it on an OS specific HD – This is my choice.  In the short run it will take a bit more power but if I can successfully spin down data disks or reduce read/writes to them it could be a savings.

To keep with my “one day we will make it into the Chenbro case” I ordered a PATA 2.5″ disk that is 160 GB.  That should be plenty for the OS, add a second level of HD redundancy with only data drive and most importantly leave open the whole 4 SATA ports for data drives in the Chenbro case. The HD according to specs uses 2.1 W at Read/Write, 0.6 W at idle, and 0.25 at standy.

So what about this energy thing? Lets look at some numbers.

***

Its been a few months since I started this post and actually have had the Windows Home Server up and running since mid-June I think on the downloadable demo copy.  In the next month I am going to have to buy the full copy and migrate soon.  Since I’ve been running on it I have some reviews of it but for right now lets stick with the power conversation.

There are two ways to save power: 1) reduce the amount that each device draws and 2) reduce the time that draws it.  With Windows Home Server the easiest thing for me to focus on is #2: making sure it is one when I am using it and off when I am not.  I don’t use the server as a 14/7 on box instead opting to use WOL and timed sleep modes to turn it off and on when needed.

In the 3 months I’ve had it online it has used a total of :17.81 kWh.  That’s about the same as leaving a 100 W light bulb on all day and night for a single week.   And the amount used by a CFL in a month.  So basically that comes down to being less than the 200 W the light bulbs in my room use that I only use at night  Iwould guess.  I don’t have that exact measurements but it seems it would be accurate.  Since I live in an apartment and we use electricity for heat and hot water I’d be curious how much of the energy we use is my server. 

So I’d say it is a success. I think WHS does throttle down the drives when they are not in use which is helpful.  The other part of that story is that is 17.81 with an in efficient power supply.  If I put it onto a mini-ITX powersupply I bet it would drop more because the load is always around 38W and peaks at 41W when ALL drives are spinning.  I suspect there is some power loss in conversation that I could cut out.

I went to nVidia’s website to get the newest driver and it failed because it claimed there was no supported hardware on the machine.  I doubled checked that the website recommended the 71.89 driver was recommended for my ancient Riva TNT2 Model 64 video card with 16 MB of RAM.  It said it was. I even used nVidia’s tool to identify on my machine what driver to download and it came up with the same one.  The driver would “install” by creating a folder at the root of C: and unpacking many files.  At some point though I wanted to know if any OpenGL was installed and I found and used the GPU Caps Viewer.  It let me know that no OpenGL was installed so that was helpful.

Eventually I was able to go to the properties of the video card and tell it I wanted to select the driver from a list.  I pointed it at the .inf files in the C:/NVIDIA folder and it saw a driver for my video card unlike every time I point it there to look itself. It installed it, rebooted and BAM OpenGL 1.5.3 was installed. Great!

So I fired up Boxee, it launched, it opened, I logged in … and it was SLOW! Not only did Hulu not work (which is quite resource intensive in its flash player that uses no GPU or hardware acceleration and instead only uses CPU cycles) but the Boxee interface was slow enough on its own.  It was so slow that it was unusable really. Now I could probably fix this by upgrading my graphics card but lets be honest here I don’t want to spend anymore money and my goal was to reuse the hardware I have already.  So next software option…

At this point I realized what I really needed it do right away was play music and DVDs.  So I played around with the idea of using VLC skinned for an HTPC but couldn’t find anything obvious. Checked WinAmp. Nothing. And then was playing the idea of writing my own shell to launch different programs for different tasks.  Like the play DVD button will launch VLC through the command line to open and the play Music button will launch some audio program.  In that search I found:

MediaPortal – It claims to be an open source Media Center type application that looks like it is based on Windows Media Player.  Not ideal but I’m installing it to see if it works and how it looks. I just got .NET 3.5 SP1 installed and now I am off installing MediaPortal. I’ll be interested to see if it plays DVDs out of the package or if I will need to download a codec. Luckily, I know of an open source DVD codec that plugins into Windows Media Player.

I’ll report back soon.

UPDATE 1: Turns out I already have that DVD Codec installed (DScaler5)… so I might have to remove it to test my theory.

UPDATE 2: Turns out the MediaPortal and Boxee share a parent product: XBMC. Who knew…

UPDATE 3: The initial pass it didn’t turn out so well. It gets to a blue splash screen that says “Initializing DirectX” and just sits there.

UPDATE 4: I never got past that splash screen so I moved on for now.

1) Play DVDs
2) Play Music and be able to sort by ID3 tag info prefferable
3) Use a remote

Software Starting Points:

1) GREmote – This is a pretty cool sofware that turns a Windows Mobile Pro device into a remote for a Windows based box. There is a free and a pro version.  I played with it and got it working on a differnet machine a while ago and it seems very promising so I’ll start there for remote sofware.

2) Boxee – They recently released an alpha for Windows so the remote and the media program would run on the same platform which is REALLY helpful.

Lets see where this goes.

So right now I am waiting for .NET 3.5 SP1 to download.  So why an HTPC and why now?  Well I’ve been interested in one ever since my co-worker introduced me to Boxee.  Its really cool and most importantly I like to listen to music.  I have an Audiotron by Turtle Beach that plays my music off of a share no problem but the screen is tiny and hard to use far away.  The ideal situation would be to use the TV as the interface. Bingo! And so the seeds of “change” were planted.

Problem #1 – My roommates TV doesn’t have any sort of computer/digital input AT ALL.
Problem #2 – Boxee really needs a good graphics card + processor (if you want to run Hulu … stupid flash player!)

So it basically boiled down to I have no computer hardware that will play it well and I don’t have a TV that could take a signal anyway.  Obviously something changed, actually 2. But what?

The first thing that changed was that I got some broken hardware from work.  We had a P4 3.4 GHz machine that’s video would randomly drop.  Since it was a one off machine out of warranty it was headed to the dumpster so I re-routed it to my home to see if I would have any luck with it.   I put in a “new” (really old 16 MB) PCI video card just to test to see if was an on board video problem.  The first night I had it the video didn’t drop at all, the second night it dropped like 5 times.  At this point it wasn’t looking like a good candidate to replace my aging 2.4 Celeron main machine.  Not stable enough!

However, my girlfriend’s computer died and I gave it to her to test burn it for me.  I think out of the few weeks its been there it has only dropped the video once or twice but still I was in the middle of something kind of important and lost some data.  The uptime was pretty good but the random dropping of the video still removed it from being a good contender for replacing my main computer.

The second thing that changed was a Dell sale.  I had been rummaging around the idea of building a new computer with some used parts I had or buying a new one to replace the function but aging and slow home computer of mine.  I had been successful in talking myself out of spending any money on any new parts or new computers until this past weekend.   Dell had a sale where I could buy a low end business computer (plenty for my needs) and a 24″ ViewSonic LCD HDTV with computer in for a total of $577 including shipping and tax.  The computer alone I could talk myself out of and the TV alone I could have talked myself out of but essentially for $80 over the cost of the normal price of the computer I got a 24″ HDTV with VGA input.

So now I have fairly decent hardware (still a crappy video card but we will get there) that sometimes drops video and an HDTV that has VGA input. NOW I can start playing with an HTPC for real…

Summary of Hardware:

* HP Compaq dc5100mt with a 3.4 GHz P4 and 2 GB of RAM

* 24″ ViewSonic HDTV

* Old Cingular Windows Mobile Pro phone with wireless (to hopefully use as a remote control)

I swear there is cream cheese in there! Photo credit: Sous Chef

Well the sous chef was taking me to a party and we needed to take a side.  For some reason I didn’t make deviled eggs; probably because the word make was in there. It was a lazy Saturday afternoon and the sous chef was leaning towards a bag of chips.  I had a thing of cream cheese in my hand for our salmon sausages and somehow the idea of the salami rolls popped into my head.  The recipe is well established in the midwest where I come from it just occurred me to do it. So the sous chef agreed and I bought some salami.

After debating how much cream cheese to put in each roll (I was on the more side; the sous chef was on the ’1/2 of what I would put on for me’ side) finally I got making them.  And I lined them up. And I started stacking them up like logs. And the next thing I know I am all about the pyramid.  I actually  re-engineered it so it would have 7 rolls on the bottom instead of the 10 I had.  This really reduced the number I needed to create ‘THE PYRAMID’. 

Pyramid

Which was lucky because at the end of it I only had 4 or so pieces of salami.  1/2 lb is about a pyramid with 7 as a base. Go figure. Anyway, they were a hit at the party. Some folks had never had them and thought they were the best idea, others just tried them, some dipped them in the mustard sauce.  At the end of the night there were only 3 left which I ate the next day.  I don’t think they were THE hit at the party but many more of them got eaten than the home made pickles we brought; so they were a hit among our food.

Deviled Eggs

Not much to say here but tried and true.  It was Labor Day weekend and where I come from that means family picnic with deviled eggs so I made some the way I love ‘em with powdered mustard in the filling and paprika across the top! The accompanied the sous chef and I on a lovely 3 mile hike this afternoon with a lovely picnic lunch send off.

Boiled Raw Peanuts

The time has come, one of the stands at my local farmers market has raw peanuts. Straight from the ground uncooked, un-dried, unsalted, un-roasted and that means boiled peanuts time: the right way.  The one women at the stand knows us by now because we’ve been going there for months and every time she would remind us when the raw peanuts were coming: September.  Technically it was the last weekend of August when they showed up and when I found them I let out an entirely too audible excited noise. 

Now that we have raw peanuts the important question is what do they taste like raw? The answer? A bean. Which makes some sense when folks reminded me that in fact peanuts are legumes and technically are a bean. Lets look closer:

Raw Peanuts: Not the pink coloration and the thick membrane around the halved bean/nut

The first thing about my raw peanuts is that there was some pink coloration around the nuts themselves. They are quite soft (for a peanut) but still firm but with a more spongy texture: they give a little before they break.  Actually most of that give I think is in the outer membrane on the peanut. If you look at the nut I cut in half you can see that there is a membrane that runs around it. I think this is what ends up as the brown skin we all recognize in roasted peanuts but here it is thick, spongy, and white.  You can sort of see the white inside of the shell in the picture which is also the same spongy texture.  In some of the finished boiled peanuts the nuts were very small and most of the shell was taken up by that white spongy membrane filled with water making a small nest for the tiny nut.  I tried to find an example of this in the before peanuts but couldn’t. To me the inside of the nut smelled like green bean. To some people it smelled more like dirt.  Overall the texture and taste weren’t even in the ballpark of what I thought a raw peanut would taste like. In fact it didn’t taste at all like a peanut, not even a hint, and much more like a tradition legume.  I actually went on a small mission to share the experience of a completely raw peanut with as many people as I could; not because they tasted good or even bad really but just that it was SO different that no one would expect it.  Most folks were a bit skeptical at first but either ended up liking them or at the very least being extremely surprised and fascinated with the taste and texture of a raw peanut.  This experience really, really reminded me how far down the line we are in terms of process, food, and when we eat it.  I had no idea this is why we started dry roasting them and it was really interesting to find that out.

Not back to the boiling.  My uncle was the one who got me hooked on boiled peanuts and is also my mentor in my apprenticeship to cook them.  I emailed him right away asking for his most prized and coveted cooking secret: the crock pot “recipe.” But I was impatient and started with a response.  I found a site online that suggested the best amount of salt was 1/2 cup for each batch. So I went ahead and divided my peanuts up into two batches (because they wouldn’t all fit in my crock pot at once), added 1 to the crock pot, covered them with water, added the 1/2 cup of salt, and turned it on low.   They were off!

Then my uncle emailed me back and saved the day with his mentorship.  He recommended the perfect ratio of 1/4 cup of kosher salt to 7 cups of water.  I found out that my 1/2 cup of table salt equated to 1 full cup of kosher salt.  I was at the sous chef’s place at the time so we made a stop at home and swapped out the brine with the mentor’s amounts.  Salty disaster averted!

The third most important aspect to boiled peanuts is time.  How long do you boil them for? On the stove I did it fora few hours.  My uncle says he likes them for 2.5 days in the slow cooker and if he was patient he would have gone for 3.5 days.  My goal was to match his patience and go beyond: 3.5 days.  The trick to overcome the temptation was to leave the house and not try any along the way for fear of being tempted.  I eventually made it to 3.17 days but I found out that was to long.

Through the cooking processes I found out that even on low my crock pot keeps the water boiling which also keeps the peanuts floating.  The later is important because I found out that the sign of boiled peanuts being boiled is that they sink in the brine.  When the cooking process itself is keeping them floating it doesn’t help to gauge the process very well.  So twice I turned my crock pot to warm instead of low once to make sure they weren’t overcooking.  And of course I kept track of the cooking schedule:

At 5:30 pm I turned off the crock pot and let them for some period of time in the crock pot cooling off.  This was mostly because I didn’t want to put them in the fridge until I ate them so I think I let them for a few hours. And how were they? Mushy.  The taste was saltier than I like them and the peanuts varied between holding together when you opened their shell or falling apart into strands.  They were good but not the addiction I have experienced with past batches of boiled peanuts.  So I emailed my uncle (actually before they were done) asking about how he defined done boiled peanuts.  Because I was using his guidance and I know what I like in a boiled peanut but not exactly sure the end goal of his recipe was.

I got my answer: they are boiled when they sink and then the mushy level is up to taste.  He defined his personal taste which he confided in me so to respect his privacy I shall not share it for it is of a personal nature.  However,  it became clear to me that I was fixed to much on the time of the first batch and not so much on the end goal BUT this is a learning experience.  I suspect three differences that may have caused the difference in cooking times:

1. Freshness of the Peanuts – My peanuts were still wet and very moist since they were just picked this week out of the ground on  the other side of the state.  I suspect that my uncles raw peanuts have farther to go his home and even if they don’t roast or dry them in a heater they probably still lose some of their moisture en route.  The decrease in moisture translates to longer cooking times for him and inversely my more moist peanuts required less cooking time for the hot, salty water to permeate and cook my peanuts.
2. Slow Cooker Temperature – My slow cooker has water boiling even on the low setting which honestly doesn’t seem right but that is how it is.  I suspect my uncle’s slow cooker is less hot and therefore can cook longer with less “cooking” action happening.
3. The Boiled Peanut Vision – After reading my uncles vision of the perfect boiled peanut I suspect he *may* like them mushier than me BUT using his own definition I still like boiled peanuts (I was concerned the level I like them may not truly qualify).  If that is true than he would probably want to cook them longer than me.

Wednesday morning I took some early to work and changed from the raw peanut preacher to the boiled peanut preacher. Five out of the seven people who I let try them actually liked them! And one wants to make her own.  I’m honestly surprised at how many folks liked them on their first try.  And one person even missed them from being in Thailand where they evidential boil them just in water (which explains me finding them at our Asian grocery store this past year).  To me they were good but they still had more potential.

So batch #2 got underway! I used the same salt:water:peanut ratio but this time they only cooked on low in the crock pot for about 20 hours or so. And the results? Addiction city!!!! They were plump, moist, boiled, and just right.  I turned the crock pot to warm when I got home from work, left for a few hours, and came back to make sure that they had sunk and were done. Boy were they.   Even the sous chef says they are starting to grow on her with this second batch.

Cucumbers en route to being Pickles

This adventure is a product of two things: the Nordic Heritage Museum and the Farmers Market.  The sous chef and I have been the museum before and found a very nice looking Scandinavian Cookbook that I was really leaning towards. It was still there this time AND I realized it was divided into months for seasonal cooking! But I was hemming and hawing about it until the sous chef just bought it for me.  When flipping through it I saw a recipe for pickling cucumbers and didn’t really think to much of it.  Until we went to the market.

The morning of the market it was raining and we had lots of left overs/extra veggies that we needed to use.  We already had about 3 meals and we usually only do 3-4 per week so with the addition of rain we were on the fence about going or not. But we went with the idea of just buying a few things, mostly eggs (which we didn’t find!).  On my passes through the market I saw cucumbers and thought of the recipe. Eventually I found a stand that had them labeled as pickling cucumbers and I decided to do it! The key to past canning adventures has been size: 200 lbs of apples, a couple flats of berries, etc.  but this time I didn’t want to be on the city-size canning adventure.  So I bought about 13 cucumbers.  6 big enough that were long enough to fit into pint jars and wide enough to make spears out of. Then I got 7 or so nice and small ones to pickle whole. And then went and picked up some dill hoping the pickles in the cookbook were dill pickles!

Two-in-One Whole Cucumber

makin' spears

Dill

Lucky for us the recipe in fact was a dill pickling recipe! The recipe is so simple the sous chef asked out loud why she hadn’t been pickling all these years? I don’t know! Anyway, like all good canning recipes we had to sterilize the jars for 5 minutes in boiling water.  I don’t intend these to be super-actually canned lasting for years so I was actually surprised it called for that. Anyway,  looking at my cucumber amounts I decided I was going to try for 4 pints of pickles.  So 4 jars, lids, and bands were set aside to boil.  While I was waiting for the water to boil and for them to sterilize I decided I was going to do some hamburger chips as well:

"Hamburger" Chips

There were two reasons I decided to diversify: 1) The recipe calls for making chips so the times and credibility are on the line for the author and 2) it seems I could pack more into a jar this way.  Anyway, the next step was to prepare the brine for pickling.  It was essentially white vinegar, sugar, salt, peppercorns, and lemon juice.  We decided to splurge and use multi-colored pepper corns so the table spoon cost us $0.80 cents instead of $o.40 cents for just black or green. But it was worth it.  We boiled it until the sugar dissolved and then set it aside to cool while we sterilized the jars.

Pickling Brine Cooling

Once the jars were sterilize it was time to pack them with the cucumbers and the dill.  The recipe is for a single quart jar of pickles and 1 sprig of dill so we just put about a 1/4 of a sprig of dill into each jar but I think we went more than that. Of course it depends on how big of a sprig they were imagining so we don’t really know yet.

Packing Chips

Packing Spears

We ended up with 2 jars of spears, 1 jar of chips, and 1 jar of whole cucumbers.  Once we got all our cucumbers into the jars it was time to cover them with brine and close the lid.

Covering with Brine

Covered and Ready to Close

Closing the Jars

This is when we lined them up and took pictures! The recipe calls to leave them for 2 days and they are ready. I suspect that will be the case for the chips and the spears but I’m doubtful for the whole pickles.  So right now I have nothing to report on taste until we open them up! Wish us luck!

Golden Pepper And Yellow Tomato Soup

 This soup was as hearty as it looked.  Made mostly of its name sake of yellow tomatoes and peppers this soup turned out so well the sous chef actually whole heartedly approved of a pepper based dish! That doesn’t happen often.  For once we didn’t have to roast the peppers which was nice and probably added to the sous chef’s pleasure.

The most complicated part of this soup was blanching the tomatoes to peel them. Its a step I usually skip because I’m lazy but I was reminded how easy it really is.  10 seconds in boiling water and the skins slipped right off.  We used 2 yellow heirloom tomatoes and 1/2 of a normal red tomato just to make it go away.  One of the stranger parts of the recipe is that once you blanch the tomatoes you use those same 2 quarts of water to cook the rice and then drain the water off of the rice and put it aside until serving time.  This pleased the sous chef because the rice wasn’t as soft as it is when it is cooked fully in the soup.  And for me I enjoyed straining rice out of water; I don’t do that much.

Back to the soup… An onion, some paprika, and 3 diced peppers were sauteed in the bottom of the soup pan until the onion was translucent.  Then the diced tomatoes, a pinch of saffron (I finally got to use mine!!!), some salt, and some water went in for a few minutes.  After that 4 cups of veggies stock was put in and left simmer for 25 minutes.  At first the soup looked really thin but as the tomatoes broke down and some of the water boiled up it thickened right up! By the time it was ready to eat it smelled delicious and reminded me of something I really liked although I couldn’t place that smell.

To serve I followed Ms. Madison’s suggestion and mounted up a pile of rice in the  center of each bowl and poured the soup around it and garnished with slivered basil. Then I took 35 photos of it while the sous chef finished hers before I got to eating mine.  

The paprika combination with the peppers gave it a slightly spicy flavor but certainly not overpowering.  The rice started soaking up what little broth there was until 15 minutes into my slow eating ritual it had changed to a thicker stew consistency.  The soup was very flavor with the tomatoes and peppers balancing each other very well.  It wasn’t like a red tomato soup at all and in fact was a bit more mellow on one hand but more pungent with flavor on the other.  According to the cookbook it lacks the acid of the red tomatoes and the bite of green peppers found at the peak of the summer season. I suspect that is what I was tasting but I honestly couldn’t tell you from my own taste buds.

Overall it was a great soup and one that works well both warm-hot and at room temperature which means hopefully I will be more likely to eat the leftovers than not.

(Clockwise) Stuffed Patty Pan Squash, Tomato, Eggplant, and Pepper

The things that happen when someone hands you a giant patty pan squash for free!!!! Well my same friend gave me a patty pan and I had no idea what to do with it for a few reasons. A) I’m not very versed in squash besides the typical bake it with some oil/butter and B) most things online talked about tiny patty pans, you know like ones you steam whole for 15 minutes… not this one. 

So after our lap around the market the sous chef and I were struggling with ideas when this one came up from the cookbook (which we carry with us at the farmers market sometimes) for 2 reasons.  A) Our squash was certainly big enough to stuff and B) because it called for herbs de Provence! Which happen to be a spice the sous chef inherited and we had never really used before: score! So off we went selecting our produce of choice to use in it.  As we picked everything up it became quite clear that we were going to have LOTs of food and only two of us. So later that day I hatched a plan and invited three folks over to join us.  1 had previous plans but we gained two people (and side dishes)  in the process. 

Overall the recipe was really simple and can be summarized as: hallow all veggies out, saute the middles, add some spices and bread crumbs to the sauteed middles, scope the mixture into the center and put back into the oven.  Our middles got a bit interesting because the recipe called for bacon and bread crumbs and we had a vegetarian and a wheat sensitive person in the crowd.  So instead of putting the bacon in all of it we used precooked bacon pieces and added them to approximately 1/2 of the stuffing.  After last wheat-free adventures using crushed tortilla chips as eggplant breading I was a little gun shy to really deviate from the known bread crumbs; partially for my own taste but also because I like doing recipes the way it is written once to give it a fair shake.  Anyway though our wheat sensitive guest found some wheat free bread at the grocery store which we made into crumbs/chunks that was actually pretty good.  It was normal white bread but the texture and taste was good enough to use for all the stuffing! So we thawed up the bread, chopped it up, and added it to the middle mixture.  In addition we reduced the number of veggies we used.  The recipe called for 2 eggplants and we were 1 short because I used it early in the week in the tomato sauce and had intended to replace it by tonight.  Luckily, with only 4 people instead of 5 we decided to forgo an extra one. Also, we reduced the number of squash from 2 to 1 since it was so dern giant!

Now the one other thing that isn’t apparent yet is that we acutally had to precok the eggplant and the squash shells.  The recipe called to precook the eggplant shells for 20 minutes but I included the squash in those 20 minutes. After the eggplant was done and we were waiting to fill everything I let the squash go in the oven because it was so big.  Id say it got an extra 30 minutes during that time for a total of 50 minutes maybe before it got stuffed. 

Patty Pan Squash stuffed and baked!

Once we got the filling ready I just scooped it into each shell of a vegetable until they were all nice and full:

Ready for the oven - The long bread sticks indicate they are vegetarian

Once filled they all went back into the over for 30 minutes and out they came and onto our plates they went!

In my opinion the stuffed tomatoes were very good.  The stuffing could have had more flavor to it (perhaps not cooking it all in bacon grease reduced some of that) but it went well with all the veggie shells.  Also, the squash was cooked and edible but I think it could have benefited from some more time in the oven alone before it was stuffed.  One of my favorite thins is that I actually was able to slice down the center of the eggplant’s stem as well. It just makes me happy.  Overall it was a great dinner and very yummy.  Next time maybe bacon grease of even more of the spice mixture the dish is named after.  The options are endless!

While the food was rightfully on the good side the company was on the great side! People make meals, veggies just make food.

My first Tart!

I’ve never made a tart before.  So why today? Because I had pears.  Now that makes sense doesn’t it since there isn’t a pear in this post anywhere?! Well today we bought a 1/4 flat each of blueberries and raspberries on top of the 4 pears we have left from last weeks farmers market trip.  One of my cookbooks has a recipe for a hazelnut pear tart that looks amazing and I was considering making it but you have to poach the pears; and today that was enough to make me not want to do it.  So I was looking at other things and realized I had a ton a berries that needed to be eaten and were at the peak of their ripeness today! So why not put them in a tart? But I didn’t one to replace the pears as they needed to be used. So what happened next? I found a pear torte recipe.  One tart and one torte this week was enough to quell my fears about using all my fruit.

The Local Flavors cookbook has a recipe for the tart shell I used and I had fruit but I wanted something in between them so I turned to the trusted internet to find me this cream cheese tart filling recipe. Only two problems had to be over come now: 1) I don’t have a tart pan and/or a springform pan and 2) my roommate bought me herbed faked cream cheese instead of plain and that just wasn’t going to do with fruit.  The second was easy to fix with a trip to the grocery store the former was a bit more technically challenging. But all it took was a pie pan, tin foil, rice, and a cheese slicer to overcome the challenge.  I lined the pie pan with the tin foil and only pressed the dough up about a 1/2 inch on the side of the pin plate.   When all was said and done I was able to life the tart out of the pin pan using the foil and cheese slicer to slide it off the foil and onto the serving dish.  It was now a nice low profile tart as if it had come out of a spring form pan perfectly.

But what about the food part of this recipe?  Well the tart crust was simple but I used goat butter I had left over from a previous adventure and mixed all the dough by hand instead of with an electric mixer of any kind.  At first I was concerned about that I hadn’t added enough water to hold the dough together but my first instinct had the corner on the right market and it held its shape and tasted great.  The only problem with the dough was I couldn’t get the lip in the pie pan quite high as I had hoped.  But I cooked the tart crust using rice as weights.  I poured in the cream cheese filling but didn’t fill it as high as I should because I was concerned about it going over the top of the very short crust edge. But the filling cooked up good with only a minor scar when the broiler was involved trying to speed up the garlic bread we were cooking at the same time.  It set nicely and tasted great.  I covered the cream cheese custard filling with raspberries and blue berries shortly after it came out of the oven and served it.

And? Complete success! The berries rolled off because I didn’t glaze them on and the custard filling was a bit thin but the taste was great. The crust was flaky and crispy.  All in all a delicious tart!

The Whole Tart

End-of-the-Summer Sauce

This one was much harder to get a good photo of it than it was to taste it! I should have left out the garlic bread in the picture and I think it would have done so much more justice to it.  So why does it need more justice? Eggplant.

This was a time intensive but relatively simple recipe.  It started off with roasting eggplant and peppers in the oven.  For once the peppers actually worked really well and I got 4 pepper halve with their skin nicely removed and their flesh in tact.  The eggplant on the other hand was a little more… finicky. As in a piece of eggplant only caught fire once! The sous chef was doing a great job of peeling, slicing, and roasting the 3 different kinds of eggplant we got today until we forgot to check it while it was roasting on the first side. Some of the eggplant coins got a little blackened but not to bad.  Then she flipped ‘em and we forgot again.  The next time the oven opened the sous chef found one of the smallest pieces on fire and smoldering in the oven! So she pulled them out and we lost of a few to the great eggplant fire of 2009. 

Anyway, enough about fire lets talk about oil. So the assembly of the sauce got started with some olive oil, onions, the roasted peppers, garlic, and parsley being sauteed for 5 minutes or so.  Then into the pot went the broiled eggplant that had been sliced up, 2 lbs of roma tomatoes I actually peeled and diced (but did not de-seed), and a 1/2 cup of water. Some salt and pepper and 1 Tablespoon of capers jumped in there too. The next 30 minutes while it focused on reducing to a nice sauce I concentrated on stirring it to make sure it didn’t burn.  I think we both succeeded pretty dern well.

The other 1/2 of the equation was the pasta: which one to use. I had originally intended to use some leaf shaped pasta I had bought months ago but I couldn’t find it anywhere when it came time to use it.  We don’t remember using it but have NO idea where it is.  The next obvious option is spaghetti as we both had some and it was what the recipe called for but I’m not a fan of spaghetti in general.  So eventually we decided to do the grocery store and get something else, but what? It took us a long time but we eventually settle on campanelle. It was large and curly enough to hold some significant sauce but wasn’t colored.  I’ve never cooked with it but I really liked it.

But how did it turn out? Great! The taste was very bold and strong. The texture was very thick but not chunky I was quite surprised.  I used roma tomatoes which have a firm flesh and I was a bit concerned they wouldn’t release enough juice to really boil down into a sauce but the eggplant had a surprise up its sleeve.  The tomatoes boiled down but so did the eggplant.  Usually tomatoes sauces get soupier before they get thick again but not this time. It went from chunky tomatoes and eggplant to nice and smooth but thick sauce that was delicious! Go eggplant!

And what about that garlic bread? We used a loaf of some sort of Rosemary Sourdough we bought last week for a sandwich we haven’t made yet. So we got a new loaf for the sandwich and used this bread as the base for a very tasty garlic bread.

Quiche heavy with veggies with the Ozettes in the background and even propping up the crust that broke! The white in the front is the melted chevre.

This is a quiche with a past. That isn’t really true at all.  More or less we were looking for another meal at the market and I remembered this quiche I had seen. BUT I had forgotten that cookbook.  So I found a TINY “head” (really a single stalk 4 inches tall with a 3 inch diameter head) of broccoli I bought, a handful of sun gold tomatoes,  and planned on using some herbs I was certain to have left over.  Oh I also had a squash a friend grew so I was planning on using some of that as well. 

When I got home and consulted the cookbook tonight I learned really the 3 “recommended” veggies were roasted red peppers, 2 cobs worth of corn kernels, and onion.  Luckily, I had a corn of cob left over from last weeks meal and some onion left over from this weeks meal. So 2 out of the three sitting around not to bad! And the recipe also called for soft goat cheese which we had purchased this week from the market for the salad we had on Sunday, so really we went above and beyond the cook book with out even knowing it. Go us!

We cut up some of the squash, broccoli, and onion and friend them up in a pan. Than we added the corn to that pan for maybe a minute more (it was already cooked) and then all the veggies went straight into the frozen and cracked pie crust we’ve had in the freezer for some time now.  The last filling part the sous chef did was to top it all off with the soft goat chevre.   The egg part got a little hair raising after I didn’t measure the soy milk and it looked a little to thin for me.  I had already added some powdered soy milk to the mixture because the recipe called for 1/2 and 1/2.  So I added another egg, beat in a little nutmeg, and poured it over the veggies in the pie tin.  To top it off I dropped on halved and quartered Sun Gold tomatoes and in the oven it went. 

At the end of the 25 minutes it still seemed a bit liquidity and even though the recipe assured us it would set that way I let it cook for another 10 minutes. I was concerned about the 1/2 and 1/2 being replaced with soy milk essentially and the addition of another egg so I wanted to error on the side of “more firm.”  And boy did I error “right!”

The quiche was VERY filling and not to egg-y or strange in texture.  The egg did its job of holding all the veggies together and adding some great taste/texture to it but as soon as the fork found a fissure between the egg and the veggie the veggie side just split off making these nice slabs of quiche rich in veggies and flavors.  Usually with quiches my favorite part is clearly the pie crust (carb addict) and the filling is ok and I hope I finish it. In fact this is why I like those mini quiches for appetizers so much better than full sized quiche: more crust! But this one the filling gave the crust a run for its money.  The crust was an integral part of the quiche but I just kept eating both of them.  And with two bites left my full meter on my stomach popped to full. 

Heirloom Ozette Fingerling Potatoes

So what about those ozette potatoes I mentioned. Well it turns out they are the only native potato to Washington State, according to the very excited guy who sold them to us.  He recommended we boil them in salted water for a bit but not to long, and then cut them in half and brown the cut side with some olive oil in a frying pan.  He told us they had a nutty flavor and the sous chef agrees! I’ve never really been able to discern the “nutty” flavor but they were really good either way! Unfortunately, by the time the quiche was done they were a little on the cold side.  But the cooking times were very good and the potatoes were nice and soft with a slight crunch to the pan fried side with a creamy, nutty flavor.  Very very good!

Cherry Muffins

This recipe is funny for three reasons.  1) It is the recipe that I see EVERY time I open up Ivy Manning’s cookbook and want them. Right now. And I have yet to make them.  And 2) because the sous chef had cherries from a few weeks ago that were still good that caused us to make them.  And 3) because this was the fourth recipe we cooked today AND we already have apricot muffins left over. 

The best part was the sous chef equated pitting cherries to hard labor and was lamenting that if only we had a cherry pitter we would use them. Ms. Manning to the rescue! In the recipe she recommends throwing them into a plastic bag and squishing the pits out. Plain and simple.  With that hurdle out of the way we only had the almond hurdle to get over. We didn’t have any almonds.  We had the extract but no almonds.  But since I don’t like nuts in my muffins I was ok without having them on top too.  Then I was talking to a friend on the phone and asked her to bring a handful over of whole almonds because she had some.  So we were in business. And then we ended up going to the grocery store for an emergency birch beer run and ended up getting our sliced almonds anyway.

From here on out the baking was smooth sailing and they tasted great! Just as we expected them too and will be enjoying cherry and apricot muffins for the week to come!

Baked Apricots

Simple. Elegant. Yummy. And easy if you don’t smash them before you start! We bought 6 apricots at the market today to bake and by the time we got to baking them only 2 had survived gravity. So sadly we had to resort of buying some more from the fruit stand across the street from the sous chef’s apartment. 

The recipe was basically half the apricots, sprinkle with sugar, butter, and lavender and bake in a parchment paper packet.  The hardest part was trying to figure out what the recipe meant when it was giving directions on how to close the parchment paper around the apricots. In the end I just went the calzone route and called it a day.

The small apricots we got at the market were  much tarter than the larger ones we got at the fruit stand. Other than that they all were very flavorful and the texture was cooked just enough to be warm but still slightly firm.  The lavender added a nice flavor to them and the melted butter was the hit among the sous chef.  Overall they were really good and exciting to use apricots so much this week. Especially since I’ve basically never cooked them before in my life.

Black Beans to the left; Salad to the right!

So the sous chef and I were looking through Ms. Madison’s cookbook this morning and the tomato and avocado salad jumped right out.  You know IF everything was at the market (which was really likely considering this time of year) but the best part was how the black beans came to be.  The sous chef was also checking out our local farmers market blog and had noted that one stand had fresh shelling black beans today.  At the time I didn’t really think much of it until Ms. Madison noted that to make a complete meal she served it with warm corn tortillas with black beans spread on them.  That was convenient the market had fresh black beans and we needed those to make  a salad a meal!

The only things we didn’t get for the meal from the farmers market were the corn tortillas, avocado, and a cucumber that a friend of mine actually grew and gave to us! Everything else was from our bounty haul this morning.  I was in charge of the beans while the sous chef tackled the salad all on her own.  First task was to shell the beans.  We had maybe 1 lbs of beans to shell.

Beans to Shell and cell phone for size

The trick is to figure out how much/many beans we will end up after they are shelled. Today I think we did pretty well.  The most amazing part was that not all the beans were black.  Some were a light green color, some more purple, some a deep black, and even neater looking were the ones that were black in one spot and it appeared the purple was slowly taking over the light green parts. I realize these were all just different stages of black bean growth but it was still cool to see because I had never thought about it.

Black Beans Shelled

After they were shelled they went into boiling salted water and immediate turned the water pitch black.  Ok it took 30 seconds but I turned around for about 3 seconds and turned back and it was black.  So I cooked them for about 12 minutes, strained them, and smashed them with a fork.  I added some salt and lemon juice and mixed it all about into a nice spread.  The lemon juice added a nice little tang to the beans and complimented the salad nicely.  We friend up the corn tortillas and served them with the beans on top.  Even though I’m not a normal bean eater they were good. I wouldn’t say amazing but very good. I ate my entire tortilla of them although they were a bit on the dry/boring side alone.  I put some of the extra goat cheese in them and it really helped a lot. 

Now onto the salad. This salad was high in chunks and low in lettuce.  I didn’t make it but it had pepper, tomatoes, onion, avocado,  cucumber, and maybe one other vegetable all coarsely chopped and mixed together.  2 cups of lettuce pulled it all together with probably close to 4 cups of chopped veggies.  The dressing was olive oil with oregano, mint, cilantro, jalapeno pepper, and probably salt and pepper all mixed together.  We served the dressing on the side so the left lovers would keep longer. In addition to the dressing on the side we served the chevre on the side and the garlic stuffed olives on the side.  The cheese strictly because the dressing wasn’t on yet and the olives because I don’t like them. 

The salad was great too. Our guest commented she didn’t like tomatoes or onions and like the salad so it must be doing something right.  If a salad could be hearty this would be it.  A great meal on a warm summer night. Cool and crisp served with a side of flavorful. 

I almost forgot the guy at the market selling the lettuce was REALLY excited about this kind, although I can’t remember what kind it is.  We actually were looking at another head that was rather small (we don’t do well with left over lettuce) and he told me what it was but then started talking about how much he liked this other kind. So we went with that. SOLD!

Eggplant Jam

This recipe is one of those because I didn’t get to it fast enough plans.  We had seen a few eggplant based dips in the cookbook that looked good but they didn’t really fill the nitch of dinner so we passed on them.  Last week I had 4 eggplants (small, long, and lighter colored) left over that I was going to use to make the nuggets. However, they were a little squishy so I bought 4 more to cook and planned to use them in this “jam” which is really a dip/spread. 

Then a whole other week went by and they were now two weeks old.  On the soft side but since they were going to get mashed up anyway we went for it. We didn’t deviate from the recipe to much but by using the smaller eggplants the cooking times were dramatically reduced! It called for 15 minutes to brown both sides of the eggplant coins and I think ours took MAYBE 7 minutes.

Eggplant Coins in the Totally-Stick Pan

I also used one non-stick pan which caused some of the coins to burn quite more past the browned phase but we used them all anyway! As you can see the eggplant was striped of some of its skin so about 1/2 was left on.  The sous chef didn’t actually have a veggie peeler but the cheese slicer she had totally worked!   It was about the time the eggplant started to blacken that the sous chef rushed in to save the day! First she found the spatula which was hiding in her kitchen while I walked around looking for it with a pan of burning eggplant in my hand.  Then she dropped what she was doing to get the garlic and the cilantro prepped and ready to go.  I thought I was going to have a few minutes to prepare those myself but I was wrong! So after everything was browned the crushed garlic, cumin, and coriander went into the pan with some water.  The eggplant got mashed with a fork and mixed all around with the spices.  This was another let it cook for 15-30 minutes that took ours about 3 because it was pretty much cooked and mashed already.  A tablespoon or so of lemon juice and a few tablespoons of cilantro went it.  It all got mixed up and salt and peppered to taste.  I actually ended up adding more cumin and coriander somewhere in there as well.

Since this is actually for tonight we tasted it but didn’t really eat it all yet.  On the surface it tastes good and goes well with the salty tortilla chips we have.  The real test will be tonight but there is great hope for it.

Apricots!

Nope its not eggs I promise.  I started to make the standard sweet streusel muffins from the Wooden Spoon Cookbook but found out I didn’t have baking powder. I tried to figure out an alternative option but in the end decided to go to the store and get some.  When I got there I saw the nice, PNW grown apricots. I had a pastry with apricots halves across the top recently and decided I wanted to try it.  So I picked up 2 apricots.  I ended up halving 1 and placing the halves on top of 2 of the muffins. The other apricot got quartered and placed in the center of 4 muffins and 6 muffins were plain, ymmy streusel muffins.

The apricots inside were really good.

The photogenic side of the soup.

One thing I’ve gotten better about over this past year is using the extra veggies. You know the extra carrots when you only need 2 out of 6 from the bunch, etc.  The kohlrabi I had other plans for that I just didn’t do. In the past not using veggies was one of my biggest downfalls in my home cooking. And honestly it still is. I made a huge effort to buy veggies for specific meals because I do actually use them that way. Or most of them anyway.  But those extra veggies used to always go bad in my fridge and end up in the worm bin.  But this year I’ve actually been finding things to do with them, doing it, and they aren’t turning out all that bad.  This soup is one of those meals. 

This one started with the sous chef going to boil 4 floppy multicolored carrots from the market last weekend.  I had intended to use them in a spur of the moment salad but I left that lettuce go bad and the salad ship had sailed. So the carrots just got floppier.  But at the same time she was getting ready to do that I discovered I had to many tomatoes, basil, green onions, etc left over from the last soup and so we decided to make soup anyway. We also had used the last of the bouillon cubes I stole from roommate because I already used all my veggie soup base I usually have around.

So we made this soup with no base and from scratch and it turned out pretty good.  Our plan is to freeze it and thaw it sometime in the winter to serve to friends or something.  So what did we do?

I sauteed some fresh garlic and the rest of the green onions in olive oil for a bit. Then I filled the pot with water and let it boil. I added the extra cup or so of heirloom tomatoes; juice, seeds, and all. And about 5 tomatillos we had left over from 2 weeks ago and some extra shallots I had around.  I let those boil for a while and then we put it sliced carrots, quartered baby turnips, and slice kohlrabi.  The tomatoes were boiling down into an ok base but I decided to throw about a Tablespoon and a half of some home mixed chili powder in to add some flavor.  It might have been to much :/  I let that boil for a few minutes and then put in 3/4 cup of dry Jasmine rice. I envisioned the end soup to be a little more on the thick/stew side than the broth-y side and the rice would do the trick.  Eventually I turned off the heat and threw a handful of fresh basil and cilantro and stirred it up.  To compensate for the extra heat from the chilies I threw in a tablespoon of soy sour cream. 

At that point I took a photo and it was still a bit on the liquid side but when I came back after eating dinner tonight that rice had soaked up a lot of the juice and it was a nice thick stew like soup!  We added some salt and pepper and our taste tests indicate it is pretty good. We will have to see how tomorrow we feel about it but overall I’m pretty happy with how it turned out given we had no base and no plans.  And we used the veggies. Even if they didn’t turn out perfect its more than I had done in the past. Progress.

Onward!

Corn Bread Tower!!! The only way to store corn bread.

There isn’t much to say about this one besides Marilyn M. Moore knows her bread products. This cookbook has never produced one even “good” bread product for me; they all have been outstanding! The only changes I made were using powdered soy milk + water + lemon juice in exchange for the buttermilk due to my milk allergy and putting whole, fresh corn kernels from one cob of corn.

The real delight wasn’t building the above corn tower and taking photos of it (which was a blast) but was eating it.  Warm with some butter on it…. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. Good.

Sweet Corn Chowder with Tomato and Basil

This is a classic didn’t quite read the whole recipe before I leaped.  This time it wasn’t detrimental though! I picked this one because it had corn in it and sounded good. I picked up 4 ears of corn, one heirloom tomato, basil, and green onions from the market.  I already had extra green pepper from last week, extra onion from last week and with that I was ready to go.  Oh I almost forgot I got the potatoes from my roommate who grew them on our tiny porch in a big tupperware container. No joke. GO ROOMMATE!

Anyway.  So my lack of reading was in the tomato. I bought a fairly large tomato because I was thinking you can’t have to many tomatoes when it comes to a soup.  Well it can if you are only using it for garnish and it isn’t the base of the soup! Opps! We were supposed to have 1/2 cup of tomato and we ended up with about 1.5. Luckily, we decided to make another soup in the same night but it would have been ok anyway!

Lets start with the reviews first: FANTASTIC! This soup was great, I ate an entire bowl after cooking 2 pots of soup, corn bread, and doing dishes.  Normally by this time my uncooperative stomach has kicked in and I eat very little.  Not this time. I ate my entire bowl which really says something for it. It has great falvor and body. The chowder wasn’t to thin nor was it like stew. The last bite was just the right combination of liquid and corn to fit on one spoonful. Just delightful in texture.  The tomato, basil, green onion garnish added a nice flavor to it but the soup entirely stood on its own (which is good because we had more left over soup than we did left over garnish!)

I’m totally excited to eat the leftovers!

Eggplant Nuggets

This is one of those recipes that I had a picture in my mind that was beautiful and the execution just didn’t quite make it for a few reasons.  I had originally envisioned breading and baking the eggplant slices with panko bread crumbs but the night I finally decided to make it I invited a friend over who doesn’t do wheat.  So instead we used corn flour and crushed up sesame corn tortilla chips to bread them.  Secondly, I envisioned an heirloom tomato salad on top akin to the panzanella we made a few weeks ago.  Big chunks of tomato with a nice gentle sauce on them served over top of eggplant nuggets (named for the chicken nuggets resemblance!) Well the tomatoes didn’t pan out because I waited to long to cook them and they were more tender and very ripe than I had anticipated.  Although, after I cut them and started saucing them I finally noticed they would have been alright the first time. Oh well.

So I have my vision and turned to the internet for a bit of direction because honestly, me and eggplant aren’t the best friends at home. I don’t think I’ve ever successfully cooked eggplant. I feel like it has a 5 seconds window of done-ness where it goes from not cooked enough to entirely overcooked to mush.  Maybe it is just me but I enjoy eggplant so I’m always willing to give things a go! I found this website with directions I ended up using for the eggplant. Than I turned to ask the internet for some ideas for the tomatoes and came up with this post for simple summer heirloom tomato sauce, all things I had or wanted so I used it as a template.

The eggplant was easy to do and turned out pretty good.  The corn chips were a bit on the big side and maybe added to much flavor, overpowering the eggplant a bit.  But the eggplant was cooked to perfection and they certainly looked like nuggets! Which really was the goal of this dish.

The sauce was also very good but I ran amok a bit of the guide.  It wasn’t in recipe form and I had read it before and misremembered it a bit.  I remember it saying just cut the tomatoes up, hang a branch of basil into it and boil down. EASY! Evidently there were a few more things to it like saute some garlic in the bottom of the pan. Actually  a LOT of it.  And add some olive oil and I don’t remember what else.  Well I didn’t do any garlic, and added the olive oil at the end and it wasn’t terrible.  I certainly think garlic would have added to it but heirlooms have so much flavor on their own it actually worked even more basic than the guide’s version of basic. 

Put them together though and they were good. The eggplant tasted great with the heirloom sauce.  My only disappoint was my vision was far from standard eggplant parmesan served with red sauce but my execution was closer than I had hoped for. All in all though a good meal!

You can see the squash and the carrots...

This one was the sous chef’s idea.  She was cutting up some lovely squash for our fried rice and wondered outloud if we could make bread out of it like zuchinni.  I didn’t really want it all to go into the fried rice so I jumped on the idea. After some googling I found this recipe.  Originally we kept out 1 cup of shredded squash and planned to make a 1/2 recipe. 

Than the ++ part of the recipe happened. We had more shredded carrot than we needed. And more corn kernels than we needed. Obviously these all needed a home in bread too! So we uped the recipe to a full one and threw them all in.  The dough was much thicker than I expected and MUCH sweeter.  It tasted like chocolate chip cookie dough almost only better because of the cinnamon.  The veggies once folded in almost ruined it :/ But not really.  We poured it all into a bread pan and set the timer for 40 minutes….. 2 hours later it is done.  And huge! We clearly filled the pan to much and should have split it between two bread pans.  Oh well.

So moist! This bread is slightly sweet and very mosit.  It is going to be great with some butter for breakfast in the morning. I can’t really cut a piece off of it very well as the bread knife just sort of makes the hard parts rip off of the soft interior.

Fried Rice

What do you get when you have a chef that has wanted Fried Rice all week? Fried rice is what you get! I based this fried rice off of this online recipe.  Basically I added chicken tenders cut up more and lots of veggies from the market! Lets see we added carrot, corn, baby turnips, purple bell pepper (which turned white), and frozen green peas I found at the last minute.  The only changes I made were I used veggie broth instead of chicken broth and I think by adding 3x the amount of veggies I didn’t add enough soy sauce at the end. I added an extra tablespoon but I think I needed one more. 

Overall? It was great! It made a ton of food and the left overs will be easy to eat.  This did exactly what I had hopped for!

Quantity Shot

This really hit the spot....

The chef had planned to do a redux of the goat cheese tortillas from the night before but on his way home from class all his brain could yell was PIZZA! So I picked the sous chef up and off to Trader’s Joe we went.  I used the Herb Pizza dough from Trader Joe’s and found a pre-shredded bag of goat cheese mozzarella!!!! Usually I shred goat cheese gouda or cheddar which is good but it also takes some elbow grease to shred.  This was already shredded and it was very welcomed this night.  Oh I also got some salami.

The pizza was assembled from the herb dough, spaghetti sauce (left over), goat milk mozzarella, goat milk chevre (left over), tomatillos (left overs), and diced salami. It was AWESOME!  It hit the spot, tasted like pizza, and didn’t make me to sick.  One of the tricks I’ve found with Trader Joe’s dough is to precook the dough for 8-10 minutes before adding the toppings.  It lets the dough cook all the way through without me freaking about over cooking the toppings.  That last part is probably not a worry of most people but for some reason I don’t like REALLY melty cheese and so I don’t cook there often.  Its pushing my comfort of cooking. Oh well.

The beans were of similar fate in that they were not cooked yet but were extra that weren’t used in earlier recipes.  I believe we had dragon beans, yellow wax beans, green beans, shelling peas, and maybe one more something.  Basically they were stir fried with some garlic and then I put some soy sauce and Worcester sauce on them.  They were also good but not quite as good as the pizza.

Soft Taco... yuuuuuum.

This recipe was really simple.  First roasted and de-skin a few green peppers.  This was the hardest part as the peppers we bought didn’t have a lot of meat to them so sometimes pulling off the skin pulled to much flesh with it.  We also probably didn’t roast them long enough to make the skins slip off like they should.  The next “step” pretty much gets us ready to eat:heat up a tortilla in a pan, add a layer of peppers, add chevre, and I added some diced tomatillos to boot.  Heat and fold the tortilla over and server.  I happen to have some mango & papaya salsa from Trader’s Joe that I served with them.

So good! The chevre had softened just enough to offset the crunchy tortilla. The tomatillos added a nice zing to the soft tacos with the salsa adding just a little bit of sweet to the whole package.

Chilled Sun Gold Soup

Deborah Madison knows her shit.  This soup really is a simple soup my only mistake was not listening to Ms. Madison when she said it was a good appetizer soup when I tried to serve it as a main course (that is what I get when I don’t really fully read stuff before I make plans for it!)  I’ll get to why in a minute.

So what is in the soup? The base is a shallot and 2 pints of sun gold tomatoes basically boiled down, strained, and chilled.  Its the orange part you see.  The “garnish”, which in Ms. Madison’s recipes pull everything together and just happen to look good doing it in the process and are necessary, is olive oil, vinegar, a shallot, a serrano chili, basil, and diced avocado tossed all together and placed in the middle of the bowl before serving.   That’s it.

The soup was exactly as advertised: sweet and tart! And that is exactly why it was great in small quantities but wasn’t quite filling enough for a full meal.  Luckily, I had a few straggling potatoes I boiled and mashed as course #2 this evening.  All in all the soup was fantastic but with the tang and slight heat of the chili I couldn’t eat a whole dinner portion worth.  A nice small miso soup bowl size would be great in front of so many other foods. And I think it would be lovely served next to a crunch bread dish like bruschetta as appetizers it was a little to much and a little to little at the same time to be a meal unto itself.

Aqua Fresca

This one was….interesting.  It started along the lines of the farmers market blog said cantaloupes were in season and I had a cucumber at home I needed to use.  And honestly it sounded delicious on a hot summer day which today and the past few days certainly have been!

The cantelope from the market was awesome. Super fragrant, orange, juicey and very flavorful so my hopes for this drink kept growing.  Then into the blender went the cucumbers and melon. This is where I think the drink starts to go down hill.  One word: chunks.

I don’t think I blended it enough.  The sous chef and I decided this would be fine and moved on.  Added the lime juice (maybe to much), simple syrup (maybe not enough), and a handful of diced mint leaves.  And left it to chill in the fridge. 

When serving it you mix it with sparkling mineral water and serve.  When the mineral water went into the jug it totally looked like a science experiment as it bubbled up but the colorful liquid stayed down in a beaker like container it was in.

 The taste was pretty good and refreshing but the chunks just sort of got in the way.  Eventually I re-blended it all much smoother including the mint chunks and it tasted much better.  So we will see how we do drinking it over the next couple of days in the remixed phase.

Peach Shortcake

There isn’t much to say to this one except YUM! I decided upon this today at the market because there was so much fruit in abundance.  I had lots of veggies already but wanted to use the fruit there for something other than pies. And all I needed for this was peaches and candied ginger!

 The shortcake has small chunks of candied ginger which I expected to be overpowering but in fact were quite subtle. The shortcakes recipe looks a bit complication but it took a whole 20 minutes to make and 15 minutes to cook. 

Split open the cakes and pour cut up peaches over it with some peach juice. YUM!

Custard!

Corn flavored custard? Really? YES! So this recipe was picked for two reasons: 1) It would allow me to use raspberries in not a pie fashion so I could justify buying a half flat of them and 2) it has corn in it which was not only at the market but ALSO the sous chef’s favorite food group.  The biggest challenge with this recipe was figuring out how to cook the custard when I didn’t have proper custard dishes.  The recipe called for about 50 minutes of baking in real custard dishes and I was concerned how long it would take to set if I did it in a larger pan.  So what do I do? Use muffin tins and a cake pan! We will get to that in a second.

So anyway this recipe was exiting too because I got to use a part of a whole vanilla bean I had at my place. It starts off with almost 2 cups of milk and a 1/3 pod of vanilla stepping together for a bit.  I used goat milk to help lessen the blow to my dairy allergy and off we went. Next, you take the corn and blend it together with a bit of flour and then the hot milk mixture.  That all gets blended and strained. Than some eggs get beaten and the corn-milk mixture is mixed with that and strained again.  Than it just gets poured into cups and baked in the oven to set! I’ve made other custards that just seemed way more difficult than this one so it was a pleasant surprise.  So how did the muffin tins work you ask? Pretty darn well!

"Custard Cups"

So the funny thing about using the muffin tins is that they had to be sitting in hot water in the oven.  The recipe calls for custard cups to be set in a pan of hot water. Not to hard when each cup moves on its own.  So I found that my muffin tin, at least those 8 holes, not only fit into the cake pan but also would stay level that way.  Staying level was important for the custard to not be invaded by the hot water.  I filled them up, and put a whole TON of hot water into the cake pan and into the oven they went.  Because the muffin cups were so shallow the custard went a lot farther and I ended up with extra and actually had to fill a “fancy” cup with the custard and make its own hot water bath.  Any way the muffin tin ones cooked faster than expected and so they didn’t have the dime size unset center like they were supposed to but instead had a uniform crustier top.  See..

Custard with Crust

The one in the fancy little bowl cooked a bit slower but also had the solid top.  I was going to use it for the pretty picture but the muffin tin ones came out so nicely and I could get a side of shot them I went with that.  The raspberries were tossed with some brown sugar and just served on top the custard. And how was it? EXCELLENT with a hint of corn.

Tomato Stew

The hardest part of this recipe labeled “Lazy” was figuring out what they intended by having us “milk” the corn.  The instructions literally read something like “cut 2/3rds of the kernels off the corn and then flip your knife over and scrape the milk out of the corn.”  My first problem with these directions was I thought it said only cut off the top 1/3rd of the kernels.  You ever try to control how much of the kernels you cut off of the cob? Not easy! The second challenge was I thought they just wanted me to use the corn milk and not the kernels so I was being WAY more careful than I needed to be about mixing the “milk” and the corn together! Oh well. 

Anyway this one is toted as easy and good warm, room temperature, or cold.  I can vouch for the first two! The stew was nice and chunky but had a light flavor overall.  We didn’t have yellow Taxi tomatoes so we just used normal red ones for the base but we were able to find the Sun Gold tomatoes for the top! (They are the little orange ones cut in half in the picture). Other than that the only thing I changed from this recipe was adding some left over heirloom tomatoes from last week and a small bit of purslane which actually added a nice zing to the stew. So a nice summer stew of purple scallions, summer squash, tomatoes, corn and corn milk, purple basil, and Sun Gold tomatoes that really added rounded out the whole stew. Oh and the directions are basically layer things in the pot and cook for 15 minutes!

Summer Veggies In Their Own Juices

This recipe was the MAJORITY of the bounty haul this past week and in fact was cooked that night.  Out of the items we bought 12 of the items were for this. BUT it was totally worth it.  The picture in the cookbook has been tempting me since I first saw this book last November. Its a full page glossy print of amazing looking veggies that it happens to fall open to pretty much any time I use the cookbook. So last week while the sous chef was getting her free massage I took the time to look around at the market and the cookbook to really find something to make and this was the first one I found and I was excited! Not only could I make it ALL the items we needed were currently at the farmers market which I always love.  Which turns out to not entirely be true because I got to excited and didn’t read. We were supposed to use shelling beans and we used shelling peas. Oppps! But they said shelling on them and looked like green beans. It didn’t matter.  Actually it was the farmer who was selling us the peas that saw the cookbook and called the recipe food porn :) In fact numerous people saw us using the cookbook last week and wanted to buy it after we showed it to them.

Anyway so how did this all turn out? Amazing but with a few hitches.  I had two people over for dinner and I made them wait to long to eat! The recipe says to put a dutch oven on the stove over low heat and it will cook in 50 minutes. I didn’t have a dutch oven and my aluminum pan was FILLED with food and it just didn’t seem like enough heat would get in there to cook everything but I gave it a shot anyway. I should have listened to myself.  After 50 minutes some of the veggies were still cold so I ended up switching it to a glass casserole dish and putting it in the oven at 350 for 40 minutes. Much warmer but still not done.  Crank that bad boy up to 450 and 40 minutes later it was done and it was SOOOOOO good!

The veggies made so much juice it actually almost looked like soup by the time it was done but everything was so tender and flavorful. I actualyl drained some of the juice off for the photo above because it looked like soup.  Everyone was happy they waited although we ended up not doing the custard that night like I had planned. Oh well.  We ate and went striaght to bed full of yummy veggies. Now I just have to get myselsf to eat the left overs in this heat we are having this week. Not so easy :)

The Final Cooking Vessel

Heirloom Tomato Panzanella - This was actually unto itself. So good!

This meal was actually conceived last week before I went to the farmers market; or at least part of it.  I saw the tomato panzanella recipe in my fancier farmers market cookbook and just noted that if I could find everything I needed this would be a good one.  Shallots and tomatoes were pretty much the hard part.  So last week at the market we found one stand with heirloom tomatoes at it for $5.45/lb.  Now this is where my father would die when I tell him I spent $11 on tomatoes for a single meal! Actually they ended up becoming two but heirloom tomatoes are SO worth it! Besides the pretty colors they come in the taste is out of this tomato world! I love tomatoes but heirlooms just have so much flavor that varies its amazing. I can’t describe it really.  So onto the recipe…..

 So this recipe. Yes. Its actually really simple. Basically its take a loaf of bread (we used garlic rosemary), cube it, toss it with olive oil, salt, olives, and pepper and toast it for 20 minutes tossing once.  This creates the lovely croutons you see above.  Then the heirloom tomatoes are cored and sliced. Each plate is lined with tomato slices.  That makes the bed. 

The “meat” of the panzanella is the stuff on top of it.  We used the rest of the tomatoes diced up and some spinach (instead of the arugula it called for). This tomato mixture is tossed with the croutons and a simple dressing and served over the bed of tomatoes.  The dressing is minced shallots, mustard, olive oil and balsamic vinegar mixed together.  Ironically I didn’t think I had any balsamic vinegar so I decided to use some pear infused vinegar I had and low and behold it was white balsamic vinegar infused with pear. PERFECT!

Man was this good.  The heirloom tomatoes are so tasty that this was pretty much our whole meal that we finished before the chicken even came out of the oven.  They have so much body and juice in them but are so flavorful! The pear vinegar added a tang of sweetness and the croutons sucked all the awesome juice and dressing up until they got a bit squishy and super yummy. 

So what about that chicken and purslane? Oh here it is…

Chicken and Purslane

So the idea was to use basil and purslane to make a pesto like mixture to cook the chicken in.  Now purslane was a new find at the market last week.  It is the leafy thing in  the picture above and you can see that the stalk is plump.  Turns out you eat that too and it all has sort of a lemony flavor to it.  They guy at the booth said they like to just put it into a salad more or less whole and chomp away.  I decided I would kind of do both and then basically failed on both accounts.  I ended up stripping most of the stalks of the leaves and mixing them with a handful of basil. This all got made into a pesto mixture with olive oil and pine nuts rounding it all out.  I cut the chicken into stripes and coated it with the pesto mixture. Sadly I touched the spoon to the raw chicken and then into the pesto so I couldn’t keep any for a non-cooked meal.  I coated it and baked it. Originally I had intended to serve and/or cook the chicken over the  purslane leaves but forgot to cook them that way and then basically didn’t plate it at all.  When it came out of the oven we had eaten so many tomatoes that we decided to taste the chicken and leave it for left overs.  So I throw a sprig of the purslane in for the photo and there you have it.  I also was going to cook the stalks with the chicken but forgot to. So we chopped those up and put them into a raw salad with our leftover spinach, tomatoes, and croutons from earlier in the night.

When we tasted the chicken it was good and moist. It had a nice light flavor where you may or may not be able to taste the purslane directly but it was a lovely light dish.  How it goes tomorrow and the next day will really tell the tale of how good this made up dish was.

PS – The 5 is for the tomatoes and the 3 is for the chicken :)

Look at all the good stuff for this week.....

I almost didn’t go to the farmers market today.  Boy am I glad I drug my bum out of bed to go! I was reluctant to go because last week it was lots of familiar veggies and I didn’t really have a good plan as to what to make.  So yesterday I stopped and picked up my cookbook I let a friend borrow (my farmers market one) and THAT was a good idea as well.  So we went around the market once and than ran into someone I knew and offered the sous chef a free massage. So while she was off getting a massage I got to spent some quality time with my cookbook and came up with 3 AWESOME recipes that sounded amazing AND everything we needed was at the farmers market (SUPER BONUS!). So once she was done we were off and collected the above bounty for 3 new recipes for this week…. One of them I had to find to justify the berries purchase (which were on sale for $10 for the 1/2 flat instead of the usual $15). We stopped by on the way out and I got a free massage; boy was that relaxing!

So stay tuned for the amazing recipes that will hopefully come!  Oh and we forgot to include the garlic flower in the above picture so it gets a close up…

This is what happens when you let a garlic scape keep growing. It tastes like garlic too!

BBQ Chicken And Beans with Roasted Red Peppers

What happens when you go to the farmers market without a plan? You end up with this simple but awesome meal.   Basically I got to the market and there was lots of good stuff but I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I decided to google wax beans for some reason and came up with this recipe.  So off we went. We stopped on the way home to get some chicken that was on sale at the grocery store too. 

So the hardest part of the wax bean medley was roasting the red peppers; which honestly wasn’t that difficult and REALLY good. 

The chicken was even simpler. I just cubed up the chicken breasts, marinated them in a mixture of BBQ sauces I had in the fridge and pan fried them. DONE!

Both the chicken and veggies were very yummy but not to complex to have lots to say. Also, I got sick so I’m posting from over a week so take what you can get :)