iced tea
some bites of english muffin, too old now I think
mango bread
chicken taquitos with salsa
white wine, oysters, oyster shooters in bloody mary shots, and 'lobster croutons' at lure fishbar. (affirmed that I do, in fact, like oysters)
hamburger with guacamole and fries at silver spurs
peanut butter cookie

black tea
one doughnut hole
english muffins with butter and peanut butter
sprite, roll and fried chicken from bonbon chicken
whole food's 'two-bite brownie'. forgot to count bites actually taken
more doughnut holes...
nori
corn on the cob
iced tea
peanut butter cookie

black tea
hummus and crackers
red currants
dunkin' donut munchkins
bread and jam, eggs, salad, hash browns and sausage from bread tribeca
mango bread made by my popo
cob on the corn
brooklyn pennant ale
homemade english muffins with butter, jam and peanut butter

Wotcher, muffins

I have had my eye on this recipe for English muffins for quite a while. I've been cast-iron skillet-less for a while though, so I never attempted it. But since I got a skillet for my birthday (thanks, Mom) I finally have all the requisite tools. Now, the temptation to do this post with an English accent or a British theme is nearly irresistible. However, accents don't work as well written out. (Or perhaps they do, at the very least, better than my English accent...) How do people come up with gimmicks for every blog post? I'll just assume that making English muffins from scratch is novelty enough. My del.icio.us shows that I bookmarked this recipe back in April 2005. Back then, I was still in Chicago (*sniff*) about to graduate from college. I can't remember if my thesis was due before or after then, which probably says something about my thesis. Which, actually, brings us to our first picture. This is the milk, shortening, sugar and salt cooling down. Blobs of oil can be seen on the liquid-air interface, which was (more or less, in an excruciating paraphrase) what my thesis was on. Mmm, appetizing.
Possibly even more appetizing is the yeast proofing, shown here for your enjoyment. Sorry. I took the picture, so I'm obligated to share. This picture has nothing to do with my thesis.
Here are before and after rising pictures, as I'm always amazed at how bread actually rises. My apartment is incredibly humid and warm, making for ideal rising conditions, even if it meant I was about to pass out while kneading.

The following picture does not do justice to the kneading/post-kneading situation of the kitchen (and myself) covered everywhere with flour.
Judging by the blurriness of this picture, this is showing cut-out fetal English muffins trying to escape. Their lack of legs prevents this from being a viable option for them, they all ended up staying on the cutting board. I had to re-roll the dough once, which didn't seem to make any difference during the second rise. They were cut with the mouth of a large mug, the nicer looking once being the second go round after I realized I really had to slam that mug down. This is half the dough, and easily made 9 muffins and a baby muffin. (I already called them fetal, so baby doesn't really make sense. So by baby I actually mean runt.)After a second rise, here they are being born. I mean cooked. Same difference. The original recipe is infuriatingly vague ("They're done when they look done."), but...I can't really help. It was very play-by-ear, especially as I kept on adjusting the flame. Cutting one in half was an easy enough test, and I could then eat it immediately. Here're the finished muffins (minus the two I ate while they were cooking.) They look sort of like pancakes, but they're much thicker, with a more cake-y (dare I say, muffin-y) texture. Ah, this reminds me I once knew of a girl at my school who was in 2nd or 3rd grade, about 6 grades below me, whose name was Muffin. This strikes me as meaning she either has very, very cruel parents, or parents with no forethought and little idea that their child might grow up some day. I'm sure she's, uh, fine now. I'm also assuming this little anecdote is un-Googleable.
With my terrible cameraphone, one might think by this photo that I am presenting a store-bought English muffin! (Except for that fact that that would be incredibly boring.)
As the recipe noted, one half of the dough can be made into a loaf of bread. I gently rolled it out after the first rising, then rolled it up into a log for the second rising. Although it looks very promising, I actually don't know how it tastes, because I ate way too many muffins and am mildly over-full. It's now in the freezer, waiting patiently for me.

coffee
granola with milk
mimosa, green salad and quiche lorraine at cheryl's.
red currants
peanut butter cookie
leftover pork, chicken and potato
cob of corn from the greenmarket
ginger ale

black chai tea
puffed corn cereal
peanut butter cookies (they just won't stop)
pasta with pesto
ginger ale
bad leftover chili
weak mojito
chicken gyro, pork souvlaki, lemon potatoes, greek salad and tzaziki with pita at teddy's
edy's crunch 'dibs' courtesy of roommate

peanut butter cookies
brie and crackers
banana waffle with jam
black chai tea
sour cream and onion potato chips
orange vitaminwater
ginger ale
nori
trader joe's chicken taquitos and salsa
cracks and hummus

black tea
peanut butter cookie
last 1/4th of pizza
subway turkey and provolone sandwich
orange fanta
lay's jalapeno chips
burger and onion rings and fries from royale with brookyln lager

black tea
hummus and brie with water crackers
peanut butter cookies
starbucks lemonade iced tea
starbucks chicken tarragon sandwich
ginger ale
1/4th of that pizza margherita
bread with jam
pasta with pesto

coffee
yogurt, granola and honey
peanut butter chocolate cookies
crackers with hummus and brie
canned chili
ginger ale
more cookies
black tea

iced chai tea
easy-over eggs, hash browns and toast. they were all bland and nasty, i don't know why.
black tea
black raspberry juice
bites of granola, hummus and crackers, nori, chocolate chips
trader joe's pizza margherita. also not very good.
peanut butter chocolate chunk cookies. good, finally.
a peach. also good.

Anti-depressant peanut butter chocolate chunk cookies!

I'm in a foul mood. I haven't needed nor really wanted to leave the apartment all day, I read the new Harry Potter in about 6 hours and now it's all over, and I've spent far too much time on the internet. Everything I've eaten today has been bland and unappetizing, and just thinking about food now is slightly nauseauting.
Which means if I want something good to eat, I'll have to make it myself. Peanut butter chocolate chip cookies should do the trick. I already took out the stick of butter once to warm to room temperature, only to decide I didn't really want to make cookies and placed it back in the fridge. But now it's four hours later, and although I'm still not convinced I really want cookies, I've taken it out of the fridge again. Because even if I don't eat these cookies (well, I'm sure when the time comes, I'll step up to the challenge), my enterprising roommates will.
Here we begin with exhibits A and B, The Joy of Cooking, 1964 edition, and a stick of warming butter. Mmm. As I have a multitude of cookbooks, I consulted Bakers Illustrated (they wanted ground peanuts, requiring a food processor, so for once let me down) my Joy of Cooking, my roommate's JoC, 1997 edition, and the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. Strangely, the simple recipe from JoC (1964) is different from a more complicated version in JoC (1997.) Since the first recipe is no longer in print, I'll post an adapted version of it here. It claims it makes "sixty 1.5 inch cookies." All cookbooks are liars. This made about 27 cookies, perhaps 2 inches across.
Preheat oven to 375^oF.
Cream one stick of butter, add 1/2 cup brown sugar and a 1/2 cup white sugar and beat. Add 1 egg, 1 cup peanut butter (I used chunky), 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1/2 tsp vanilla and mix. The JoC says you should "sift before measuring" 1.5 cups of all-purpose flour. Sifting flour for cookies is absurd. Who knows, maybe they would have been even more delicious, but there's really no reason I can for it. Anyway, add that and mix it all together.
I then took it upon myself to add chocolate bits, from the giganto-block-o'-chocolate from Trader Joe's. Hand included in picture for scale.
I broke off a fourth of this and alleviated some angst by chopping it into small bits, reducing a once formidable chunk of chocolate into this:
It was between 3/4 and 1 cup of chocolate, and got mixed in. Place balls of dough on a greased or parchment-ed baking sheet, and press fork tines down orthogonally. (My roommate did wander in while they were baking and said they smelled wonderful. Although he enjoyed eating them, he wondered why there were fork impressions in the cookies . I am led to assume that he's never had peanut butter cookies before, as making the criss-cross and eating it is one of the best parts about these cookies. He's also the same one who didn't know that one did not have to bake Rice Krispie treats, so he may not be the best go-to person for this sort of thing. That said, I guess you don't really *have* to flatten the cookies with a fork, you could do it with your palm or the bottom of a glass, but why wouldn't you? Gah.)
Aw, I sometimes wish they could stay this way; uncooked, young, innocent, free from worries and the heat of the oven/world. (Hmm. See previous posts about killing myself with bacteria. Into the oven they go.)
Bake for 12-15 minutes until light golden brown, and let cool on sheet to finish baking slightly to your taste.

Okay, fine, they did cheer me up. It's what cookies do best.

In which I tempt fate yet again

My newly made jam is crying to be eaten. Biscuits are clearly called for. But...the buttermilk in my fridge has been sitting there for a few weeks. The expiration date is June 29th. However, the good people of the internet seem to agree that buttermilk is really okay after the date, especially if you're just cooking with it, not drinking it. Since it seems to be liquid still, more or less, biscuits with buttermilk being the title ingredient in order.

If I don't update tomorrow, I'm probably dead from a one-two combo of botulism and salmonella. But I feel fine now, after eating three biscuits. The recipe is from Baker's Illustrated, as usual. Their tip for making biscuits sans food processor was to grate frozen butter into the dry ingredients with a cheese grater. This worked out really well except for the last bit of butter, which started to melt in my hands, so I quickly chopped it up when I couldn't grate anymore. I made a half recipe, for 6 biscuits, which I really should have just turned into 4. Still, they came out charmingly and delicious.

Fresh from the oven.

With jam and brie.

granola with yogurt and honey
hot dog with sauerkraut and mustard
nine dollar beer (michelob amber bock at yankee stadium)
buttermilk biscuits and jam
trader joe's chicken and bean burrito
black raspberry juice

buttermilk biscuits with jam and brie
iced chai tea
black raspberry juice
last of the lomi lomi and rice, finally
nibbled on granola while making it
chicken and mozzarella sandwich with fries and a glass of white wine at florent
altoids (cinnamon)

brie and crackers
black tea
lomi lomi and rice
peaches and cream ice cream from the brooklyn ice cream factory. it might well be the best ice cream i've ever had. top five at least.
tasting raspberry and peach jam while making it, subsequently followed by raspberry and peach jam on a cracker.
nori, black raspberry juice
samosas, chana paneer and naan at the new indian restaurant

Botulism-free (day one, at least)

This post was written for me. I am both terrified of killing myself with botulism and also way too lazy to do all the boiling steps needed to can things and not, you know, kill myself with botulism. So the idea that you can just make up a small batch of jam and store it in the fridge was very appealing to me. I went to the greenmarket at Borough Hall to buy a half-pint of raspberries and peaches, as seen below. Although you can't tell from the picture, 3 of the peaches are superripe and 2 of them were bought at a different stand and were pretty hard. This ended up not making a difference by the end, which was my hypothesis to begin with. Probably the ripe ones were the way to go though. All of that, which was probably just a little less than 2 pounds of fruit, was roughly peeled and pitted went into the pot, with a shake a salt, a few splashes of lemon juice and a cup of sugar.
Since Pim's recipe was 2 cups of sugar and she was already being conservative, I thought I would be on the safe side. But the jam ended up a little bit too sweet for my tastes, and I should have started with just half a cup of sugar or less. Simmered and stirred for about an hour. Halfway through, it was still very watery with whole pieces of fruit, and no jam-soul. Below, you see the finished product, thick and melded together with definitive glowing blue jam-soul present.

Repurposed a pickle jar by staring at the fridge and figuring out what could be easily transferred to the cheap tupperware.

Sorry, pickles.Hello, jam!

granola with yogurt and honey
black tea
coffee
toasted sesame bagel with butter
italian wedding soup with oyster crackers
milanos
pork tacos and a dos equis from chipotle

granola with greek-style yogurt and honey
black raspberry juice
chicken and bean burrito (trader joe's)
mango coconut pudding
lomi lomi and rice with a brooklyn lager
mango sherbert

took bites of: saltwater taffy, brie and crackers

iced chai tea
hummus and crackers
cranberry orange walnut muffin
leftover mutter paneer and rice
black raspberry juice
black raspberry jello
lomi lomi salmon and rice

nibbled on nori and granola

Lomi Lomi Salmon

1 tomato. Mine was nearly a pound. I bought it at a farmer's market and assumed 1 tomato equals, I dunno, a third of a pound. This is not true, but the tomato is forgiven for being so expensive by being so delicious. I was really hoping to avoid that correlation.
Smoked salmon. I went to three grocery stores before finding a 4 oz piece of smoked salmon. NOT lox or anything like that. A whole chunk of salty goodness is needed.
Onion. My mother uses green onions, which add a nice bit of color but not all that much taste. Apparently, she only makes it this way because my dad is allergic to normal onions. So I used half of a white onion I had on hand.

Slice slice, dice dice, and sort of crumble/shred the salmon into a bowl. Shake on some salt, and add a few ice cubes. Stir together. (Hold up, wikipedia says the whole point is to massage the ingredients together, as this is what "lomi lomi" means. Alright, kinky. Me, I think just stirring, maybe some slight mashing, is enough. But figure out your own level of comfort.) Cover and place in fridge to let ice melt and everything to soften together. Eat with rice.

J-E-L-L-wait, is this trademarked?

I had some packets of gelatin left over from a marshmallow making experiment (Okay, it turned out fine, and the marshmallows made excellent s'mores. I think I looked at a few different recipes and combined them somehow. Okay, here's a picture.)

On the back of the box, Knox promotes Fruit Juice Knox Blox. Or, as I like to call it, Generic Gelatin Dessert. It is as simple as Jell-o, just sub out water for juice. Ingenious! Black raspberry juice from Trader Joe's led to these rather gothic looking animals. The cookie cutters were a gift from a roommate, despite the fact that he rescinded the frog almost immediately. I found it in his room however and freed it. Long story. The pig, because it's the year of the boar, and the squirrel because I have a thing with squirrels. Note the squirrel on the plate, a gift from the other roommate. They taste strangely rich and fatty, but not as sweet as Jello, so more 'grown-up.' Because if there's one thing that screams grown-up, it's squirrel-shaped generic gelatin dessert.

Now that i have a phone-pc connection, I can retroactively talk about foods I've eaten. Please, don't fall off the edge of your seats.
First up is MY birthday cake, which turned out just okay. I've realized that storing cakes in the fridge really takes something out of them, rather than having them fresh from the oven. Again, shocker. Still, it was very pretty and very "American" as a non-American friend put it. It was inspired by birthday cakes I had as a child.


The raspberry curd is from this recipe. I didn't mix it with whipped cream as suggested, although that probably wouldn't have been a bad idea. The frosting is here, which was my attempt to not have a butter-based frosting but instead...whipped cream. N.B., let the cream cheese be completely softened before mixing it into the whipped cream. If you don't, you get...large cream cheese chunks. So I'm not sure I would make this frosting again even though it probably didn't turn out well because of my own impatience. Plus, it was really rich (duh) and made me feel sort of ill. Finally, the cake is from the old go-to Baker's Illustrated. The cake was very light and fluffy out of the oven. Weighing it down with cream cheese and drying it out in the fridge did not help it much.

In non-birthday related news, I made a blueberry buttermilk tart as I had some extra buttermilk leftover from that chocolate cake posted below. I also chucked in some frozen raspberries I had languishing. Come to think of it, I think I did make this for a friend's birthday a few years ago. The crust is slightly burnt, I should have kept it wrapped in foil. It's very hard to put foil on mid-way through the baking process and leads to burnt fingers and smoking pieces of dough on the oven floor.

marshmallowy chocolatey goodness

So, for my roommate's birthday, I baked her a cake. This (bookstore-) famous cake.
The recipe was kindly online here, although I am considering buying the book (or making someone buy it for me. 162 days til Christmas!)
We start with the mise en place, as inspired by the probably insane French Laundry at Home.
Fairly standard stuff. Which means this was probably a pretty boring picture for you too look at. You may instead marvel at my other roommate's bizarre paper towel stand. Moving on.
Dry and wet ingredients are combined separately, then joined by chocolate chips and buttermilk in steps to prevent a flour-cocoa explosion in my kitchen. Although that happens to me now matter how slowly I add them.
Now, I have problem in that I only have one cake pan.
"But Donna!" you say, "Cake pans are so cheap, why don't you just buy another one?"
Because I have anxiety attacks when I spend money. I also have anxiety attacks when I can't properly split cake batter into two equal portions, and when the Latter-Baked Cake comes out Mormon. I mean, doesn't rise as much as the first one. In any case, I used one cake pan and things came out more or less all right.
See? Although, indeed, the second one was not as tall as the first. However, the recipe calls for cutting each layer in half, making four layers, with the fourth crumbled up for outside decoration. I assumed this was not as crucial, and could be skimped on slightly. This was (foreshadowing) a minor mistake.
Persevering on! I made the frosting. There are no pictures of this as it was very hot and sticky, and my cell phone does not appreciate such things. In ALL senses of the phrase. It was very exciting however, pouring boiling sugar syrup into fluffy egg whites and then beating them some more. By exciting I mean traumatic. (In 7th grade, I got a really bad blister on my hand between my thumb and forefinger from caramelized sugar the week we had to play racketball in gym. Also, when I made marshmallows a few months ago, I did about the same thing and nearly killed my handheld mixer in the process.) I probably could have whipped it up a little more. I ended up not having quite enough in the end, although I should have just reduced the amount between the layers. Which, conveniently enough, are shown below. It's so pretty, I almost wanted to stop here.
But no, there were sides to frost! And crumbled cake to press on! I should add here that marshmallow frosting is incredibly sticky. The crumbled cake...I should have let the cake half dry out a little before crumbling in order to get smaller crumbs and a more even covering. Which was, as I alluded to earlier, already sort of in a dire position with me skimping on the size of the cake "half." With a moderate amount of effort, we present this.
You can see there's some white patches. It adds character, okay? C'mon.
Now it needed some birthday-ification-tion. Guess how old she's turning! Guess! Guess!
Fine, don't guess. The number 23 and the fuzziness of the picture had been brought to you by viewers like you. And strawberries and mint leaves, which were carefully arranged after about ten minutes of staring at a strawberry.
Long story short, she loved it and I'm the best roommate ever. However, cutting it was sort of difficult as large chocolate chips were in the cake. If they got caught on the blade it got messy and the layers started to shift. As seen here.
Next time I would use mini-chocolate chips or chocolate shavings, as I think was originally in the recipe. Also, I really need a cake dome to store in the fridge, but the cake held up pretty well for a week with a large pot covering it. I would make/eat this again, although I probably wouldn't because it wasn't the best cake I've ever tasted in my entire life, and there are so many cake recipes still out there.
That's a boring way to end this post. Here, instead is a picture of frosting and cake that I didn't work in earlier. If you're not already overwhelmed by excitement/diabetic shock.

over a year? what?

so. it's, uh, been a while. once i figure out a way to transfer photos from my phone, (ie, give motorola money. at least it's better than giving at+t money, right?) i'll blog some recipes. but for now, since i seem to be gaining weight...

coffee
mimosa
pancakes with berries and cream
iced chai tea latte
"Patel's" mutter paneer with rice
coconut pudding with mango, which is just okay. shoulda used the full fat coconut milk, perhaps.

and i nibbled on hummus with crackers and nori and granola.