tray magnifique
...if i do say so myself.
not shown: holiday cookies #googolplex and #goodgodijustburnedmyselfout (same as previous years).
December 17, 2005
December 16, 2005
holiday cookies #umpteen and #infinity
to round out the pack, we have a winner and a loser.
citrus cookies, from an old recipe mom made yeeeears ago. i've added the innovation of rolling the dough log in colored sparkling sugar before slicing. it adds a lovely crunch and makes them even more realistic looking. the orange are better than the lemon, and they look better, too — it was easy to tint the orange dough just enough to differentiate it from the rind but not so much that it looks fluorescent; the yellow was harder to work with.
the loser are these peppermint cheesecake squares from a grocery store magazine. they taste very good, although peppermint and cheesecake is kind of a weird combination and you don't want more than one or two, but they look horrible: the black cookie crumbs from the crust got all over everything as i sliced them, and the red is just too vivid. these are the closest thing to a failure i made this year, but i'm including them anyway because, as this year's motto proclaims, it's only cookies, for crying out loud.
December 03, 2005
holiday cookies #11 and #12
first up, cranberry pecan tassies. it's a cream cheese dough mashed down into mini muffin cups, filled with brown sugar, egg, pecans, chopped fresh cranberries, and orange extract.
yum.
every year i wish i'd made more of them, so this year i doubled the recipe. it might be the most labor intensive cookie i make, more so even than the linzers, which pack a greater visual punch. with one thing and another, this ended up being a two-day batch. so please eat them slowly.
(last night i was packing up cookie tins to take to the nice ladies who ran the preemie playgroup. paul helpfully brought in the cookies from the freezer, "but not," he said, "the tassies or the pretzels." "why not?" i asked. "because more for me." i told him i'd give the ladies my portion, not his. he grudgingly agreed: "okay. but then i fully intend to put a sign on the tray saying, NONE FOR JULIE.")
we also have these funky chocolate/mint bars. i shouldn't say this in front of people who might eventually be eating them, but this is the only batch so far that's been a disappointment. year before last i got these nice andes mint chips — andes candies cut into tiny bits for baking. because my grocery store doesn't carry them, i tried to replicate them by chopping the regular mints into flinders. but they were still too big for this recipe, which calls for mini chocolate chips, so the dough tore in spots, revealing the filling.
speaking of the filling, it's a white chocolate concoction flavored with mint extract. the recipe called for two to three drops of food coloring "to tint it a faint pastel green." since i am no fool, i added one drop, which turned the whole batch this unfortunate neon color.
look, they taste good, i promise. just close your eyes and pretend they're lovely.
November 20, 2005
holiday cookie #10
these come from regan daley's in the sweet kitchen, the brownie version of her chocolate cherry toffee cookies.
instead of using chocolate chunks, on a suggestion from terry i used nestle's chocolate/caramel morsels. i colored white chocolate with powdered food coloring to festive up the tops. and all i have to say is this:
do not eat them. they are poison. please, i beg of you, leave them untouched on the platter. then return them to me for safe and proper disposal.
remember: poison! do not eat!
this has been a public service announcement.
holiday cookie #9
behold the mighty pretzel! these are made from a recipe for light spice cookies in the king arthur flour cookie companion. the dough rolled and cut beautifully, and if my pretzel cookie cutter clung a little bit too stubbornly to the interior scraps where there should have been holes, i was in a forgiving mood. (i'm pretty sure i was high as a kite from the stupefying waft of anise and cinnamon.)
i brushed each pretzel with egg white, then sprinkled them all with coarse white sanding sugar. i wanted them to have the look of real pretzels. unfortunately, the sugar wasn't as opaque and white after baking as pretzel salt would have been. maybe i'll use that next time instead.
special bonus cookie: after rolling and cutting four dozen pretzels, i was pretty sure i had enough, so i used the remaining dough to make animal cutouts. i doubt they'll get decorated any more than this, but what's not to like about a giraffe with a necklace?
November 13, 2005
holiday cookie #8
all hail martha stewart! but all hail terry even harder. it was she who introduced the innovation of maple to martha's cream cheese walnut cookie recipe, an improvement that deserves some fanfare.
you replace some of the sugar with maple sugar in a straight 1:1 ratio, and add maple flavoring instead of vanilla. in addition, with a generous assist from paul, who built a mold, i sliced the cookies into rectangles instead of the usual rounds, since i needed a different shape in the mix. i did not, as martha suggests, roll the dough in chopped walnuts before baking, since cookie #5 had already had that treatment. but i am toying with the idea of adding a drizzle of maple glaze (as seen here) to punch up the maple flavor a bit, as it's currently pretty subtle.
November 12, 2005
holiday cookie #7
these beauties come from martha stewart's jaw-dropping holiday cookie magazine — not only is it bursting with dozens of recipes i wish i had time to try, it's gorgeous to look at. its finest asset is its two indexes, one sorted by cookie category and one alphabetical, both of which feature pictures of the cookies so you can decide at a glance which look most appetizing.
these cookies. oh, these cookies. they're made by pulverizing roasted, salted cashews with oil, then doing the whole butter/sugar/flour thing, mixing in some additional chopped nuts, and baking. you flatten the cookies halfway through their bake time, and finally drizzle the cooled cookies with a mixture of melted caramels and cream.
yum.
i was initially worried that they'd taste like nothing more than glorified peanut butter cookies, but they're unspeakably delicious.
wait a minute, so are peanut butter cookies. but you get the idea, anyway.
i didn't do a very good job with my drizzle. the recipe called for letting the caramel cool after melting, and i let it cool too long. i was going for a thin stripe like in martha's picture; while my results aren't as pretty, they might taste even richer with the extra payload of goo. the only drawback is that the caramel is fairly soft even after it sets. to store the cookies, i froze them on cookie sheets to harden the caramel, then packed them between layers of parchment. as i packed, i worked in the garage where it was cold, hence the dark green hood of our car visible in the photo.
never let it be said that i am not a world-class baker with access to state-of-the-art facilities and technology.
August 15, 2004
julia child, 1912-2004
Julia worked hard in preparation for the shows, always determined to direct her efforts toward the home cook, but on camera she was, as Paul [Child] said, "a natural clown" as much as she was a teacher and chef. She improvised, she joked, she dropped food and utensils. In one of her best-known television episodes, she flipped a potato pancake in the air and, instead of landing in the skillet, it plopped on the table. Julia simply looked straight into the camera and said, "You just scoop it back into the pan. Remember, you are alone in the kitchen and nobody can see you."— a los angeles times review of a julia child biography
thank you, julia, even if you never did drop an entire side of beef on your filthy kitchen floor.
muffin says lovin' like something from the oven
in the oven right now there are blueberry muffins, made with shockingly delicious local blueberries. there are two reasons this pleases me:
- it is a very satisfying state of affairs when you have in your cabinets and pantry the ingredients to whip up...well, almost anything...at a moment's notice. the blueberries were the only thing i bought fresh. everything else was ready at hand.
- the kitchen is clean long before the muffins even come out. i can't say i love cleaning the kitchen, but i do love the feeling of being ahead of the game when every dish is washed and every counter is wiped before whatever i'm making is ready to eat.
- muffins!
March 30, 2004
maple-licious
yesterday i made maple cookies for my grandfather, recipe courtesy of terry. if you like maple (which means not you, betty), they're delicious.
March 15, 2004
yum, cake
rose levy beranbaum's banana cordon rose cake, made possible by a suggestion from terry, a cake pan from tim, a parchment circle from mom, and pistachios from paul.
February 15, 2004
i can't believe i ate the whole thing.
in case you weren't here to enjoy my birthday feast, please sample it vicariously:
- snacks. betty, please note red plate. homemade canape bread with pesto cream cheese rosettes, pumpernickel with port salut and apple-smoked ham, and crispbreads (not shown) with boursin and truffled paté.
- lobster bisque. i used a recipe from bon appétit with a few substitutions (thickened it with puréed lobster meat instead of corn starch, no sliced tomato because february in vermont isn't exactly the season, added a big dollop of cognac before serving). it was fantastic, delicious, insanely good. in hindsight, for maximum visual impact i should have added the lobster claw and chunks of tail meat after ladling the soup into the bowls, but it was fine.
- beeves after baking. the puff pastry decorations were magnificient. the hearts all held their shape, and everything turned a lovely golden brown.
- beef and asparagus. i served the wellingtons cut in half — i'd carefully placed the decorations so that none of them spanned the middle of the package — with a bundle of steamed asparagus rolled in lemon butter, crunchy salt, and black pepper.
- individual molten chocolate cakes. (this picture is the pits, alas.) i used a recipe of nick malgieri's, courtesy of terry, and perched each cake in a puddle of crème anglaise with a zigzag of raspberry coulis. they were really, really good, crispy on the outside, molten on the inside — and yet it's really not my favorite dessert. next year we're having my old birthday standby. (i was going to make a pretty pattern in the puddle of sauces, but everyone was standing around watching so i felt too self-conscious to be quite that anal in front of people.)
today's menu: bread and water. and leftover lobster bisque.
February 11, 2004
beef. it's what's for dinner.
the beeves wellington have been constructed and are resting in the freezer for this weekend's dinner party. enjoy them vicariously in their embryonic state:
- mise en place
- mid-assembly (layers of spinach, caramelized onion, beef, portabellos, and more spinach)
- cloaked in puff pastry, unbaked
February 10, 2004
clam! bam! thank you, ma'am.
if you've never had the pleasure, you might not know that to get into a bottle of clam juice, you have to use a bottle opener. this could be a hindrance if you're really thirsty. i hope they consider the more convenient twist-off caps. i felt like i was kicking back and cracking open a frosty beer on a summer afternoon (as i so often do). only...much clammier.
(lest you think i keep a six-pack of clam juice at the ready for unexpected guests, let me assure you that it was a special purchase — tonight i made lobster bisque.)
February 09, 2004
sweet valentine
just because i'm not eating sweets these days doesn't mean i'm not baking.
not as pretty as terry's cookies, but pretty enough, and i imagine they're delicious. i'm counting on paul to report back (and to tip the scraps into the garbage before i succumb).
December 20, 2003
cookie monster
the bakery is closed.
the cookie baking and packing is entirely finished. because i found two kinds of cookies i'd baked earlier in the year socked away in the bowels of the freezer, i was able to send off a dozen different kinds. (click the tiny tupperware to admire my assembly line.)
here's the tray i took to the vet when we dropped off a yowling thermos this afternon. the platter itself is hideous — a jolly, bloated-looking snowman — but i am hoping everyone will be so gobsmacked by the beauty of the cookies that they will welcome a little ugliness when they get to the bottom of the pile.
i am now out of:
- baking powder
- butter
- eggs
- milk
- almonds
- flour*
__
* actually, i think we have another fifty pounds in the basement, but my upstairs container is down to dust and weevils.
December 19, 2003
holiday cookie #10
these are sort of linzer cookies. "sort of" because linzers are traditionally made with hazelnuts and filled with raspberry jam. mine are made with pecans and filled with apple and plum jelly.
what can i say? i don't like raspberry and i had no hazelnuts.
last year when i made these i tinted the apple jelly green. big mistake — according to mom, she didn't even try those because she was sure they were filled with mint jelly.
holiday cookie #9
these were supposed to be pressed cookies. i printed out martha stewart's recipe, which has served me well in the past, assembled my pampered chef cookie press, and...nothing.
the dough was soft enough to be pushed through the die with no problem, but it wasn't detaching from the press worth a damn. i didn't struggle with it for long at all. instead, i took terry's suggestion and made plain old cookies instead, rolled in colored sugar and mashed into discs.
simple, sparkly, and done.
December 11, 2003
paul takes the cake
December 09, 2003
holiday cookie #8
modifications on last year's cranberry pecan tassies. this year i used walnuts and candied orange peel instead. because the tops were not so attractive (no red cranberry peeking out), i drizzled them with white chocolate. thanks for the idea, t., gleefully stolen.
the dough for these is a bitch to work with. it's a whole lot of cream cheese, a whole lot of butter, and just enough flour to hold it together. it's very sticky and melts instantly when i try to jam it into the mini-muffin tins. worth it, though, i think.
holiday cookie #7
number seven is a chocolate mint bar cookie. basic toll house dough converted to chocolate and spiked with andes mint chips — a tip of the hat to terry, who alerted me to their existence.
however, a whack on the head to terry, who also suggested their diamond shape. they look great, but there was a lot of waste incurred in cutting the diamonds. i will gain at least five pounds from eating the scraps, and it's all terry's fault.
holiday cookie #6
after a brief hiatus to, you know, have a life, i'm back, hunching over the mixer to produce another holiday cookie. this time it's cranberry/white chocolate chip.
these are very good — a tablespoon of brandy sees to that — but they're just a little sweeter than i'd like. i may be the only person in america who likes her cookies not-so-sweet. the dried cranberries add a welcome tartness, though, and you can chew them for days.
basic toll house dough, really. next time i'll add nuts, because i like to live dangerously.
December 02, 2003
holiday cookie #5
lemon poppyseed slices, a light, simple, crisp little cookie.
the recipe comes courtesy of the nice ladies on the recipe boards at work. every year they do a virtual cookie exchange — each member posts her favorite cookie recipe. this one's a winner, though if i made it again i'd add a hint less sugar and a hint more lemon.
November 25, 2003
holiday cookie #4
these dainty lovelies are a combination of nick malgieri's dark chocolate sabl�s and his french vanilla sabl�s spiked with peppermint.
if i had them to do over again, i'd make them much smaller. i didn't take the spread of the dough into account, so they're much larger than i'd intended. a good lesson to learn when monkeying with other people's recipes.
holiday cookie #3
these are the much-vaunted citrus slices. mom first made these, oh, about a century ago, and i've loved them ever since. the recipe comes from the december 1983 issue of good housekeeping, if that's any kind of clue.
i made an innovation of my own this year: i rolled the "rind" in colored sugar. another alteration i made was to this instruction from the recipe:
Into half of dough, knead orange extract, grated orange peel and enough yellow and red food color to tint a pretty orange color.
i, uh, added approximately three times as much red and yellow food coloring as i should have. the orange cookies are, how you say, vivid.
they're a nice companion, though, to the lemon cookies, which look suspiciously like slices of hard-boiled egg.
November 24, 2003
holiday cookie #2
on a whirlwind visit to terry's, i was introduced to the finest cookie in the universe.
cuccidati. buttery, tender dough wrapped around a filling of figs macerated in strong spirits, smeared with an anise-spiked glaze and sprinkled with those tiny, colorful nonpareils. magnificent.
it must be said that terry did the lion's share of the work while i sat at her kitchen table and watched. and ate the rejects.
two down, ten to go!
November 19, 2003
okay, okay, i'll take some
today at the co-op the lady behind the cheese counter greeted us exuberantly: "my favorite customers!"
we hadn't planned to buy any, but it seemed churlish to disappoint her.
November 16, 2003
pied beauty
today i made a pie. an apple pie. an apple pie with a peek-a-boo top.
it is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. or rather a joy for the next three hours, which is how long i predict it will last around here.
November 12, 2003
holiday cookie #1
last night i baked a batch of almond shortbread from fine cooking's holiday baking issue. they're delicious, if a bit less almondy than i'd hoped — that's what i get for using last year's almonds (which i had hermetically sealed and stowed in the freezer). to remedy that, i dipped each cookie in callebaut semi-sweet, then sprinkled with chopped almonds. if i'd had almond oil on hand i would have added a few drops to the chocolate.
i experimented a little bit with the dipping. i like the dipped corner better than the dipped half, but that required a very deep pool of chocolate. so the first half of the cookies got the corner, and, as the depth of chocolate in my bowl decreased, i moved to the half. (click the tiny picture to compare.)
one cookie down, eleven to go.
November 07, 2003
what's cooking, good looking?
things i have cooked in the last few days:
- a million meatballs. four pounds of meat and a one-inch scoop — you do the math. i told emily on the phone that i was making a million meatballs. "you can't do that," she said incredulously. "how many do you think i could make?" i asked. she thought. "maybe...ten?" i said, "more like 100." "you can't do that!" indeed i can; i counted 102 of the larger size and 36 tiny ones, marble-sized, for soup.
if i had made a million one-inch meatballs and lined them up single file, they would stretch almost 17 miles. the 102 i actually did make would only go about 8.5 feet.
- onion soup. the onion soup recipe in mark bittman's how to cook everything is sublime — props to terry for telling me about it. here's the basic idea:
- slice a bunch of onions thinly.
- cook them in butter until they're very soft and beginning to brown.
- add chicken stock, thyme, and a hit of cognac.
- drink by the gallon.
- pasta sauce. i don't usually bother, since we like barilla spicy pepper flavor just fine, but something came over me in the tomato aisle of the grocery store. i make no apologies, because the outcome is delicious.
- chicken stew. there is a chicken perched atop mirepoix in the crock pot even as we speak. i have plans to strip its carcass bare, then convert it to individual pies by way of frozen puff pastry sheets.
i'm not quite sure what i'll cook today, but it had better be something small — the freezer door is beginning to bulge in a very alarming way.
November 03, 2003
tastes like chicken
last night i made this delicious thing for dinner: parmesan crusted chicken breasts in a white wine/butter/sage sauce. (click on the tiny picture for the centerfold.)
the recipe came from cuisine at home. it's a nice magazine — each issue includes an article about a basic technique (in this case, crusting chicken breasts) and then a couple of recipes that introduce variations. besides the parmesan, this issue also has pecan-crusted chicken breasts. think i'll be trying that one?
i hope the copyright police don't come after me as i reveal the secret to good crusting: you have to let the crusted meat dry for half an hour or so to help the crust set so that it doesn't fall off immediately upon meeting the pan.
the sauce was the result of serendipity. not only did i happen to have heavy cream — which, believe it or not, i don't usually — i had half a bottle of dry white wine and a brand-new log of sage butter in the freezer, made with the final yield from our backyard plant. i was able to make the sauce exactly as the recipe required, with no pre-planning necessary.
next time i do this, and there will be a next time, i'm going to scrap the mashed potatoes, which were the path of least resistance last night, and perhaps serve it with some kind of orzo-full-of-stuff.
October 31, 2003
cheese. it's what's for dinner.
the other night paul and i went to the main street grill. it's one of the restaurants run by neci, the local cooking school. because the menu mirrors the coursework, you can usually count on a fairly diverse array of choices — but because the table-waiting is performed by students, you can usually count on spotty service, too.
i had the meat loaf with mushroom sauce, mashed potatoes, and fried onions. alas, when it came out of the kitchen the food was merely tepid, and once i'd had a couple of bites i discovered that the center of the meat loaf was cold. not lukewarm, but cold. i sent it back.
of course our waiter was apologetic — so apologetic that he brought me a cup of soup to eat while we waited for my dinner to be returned to me. right answer. (the soup was delicious, and lava-hot: cheddar/potato/bacon.)
when my plate was returned, it was not only sizzling hot, but it was an entire new serving; they didn't just throw my old plate into the microwave. this meant i had the pleasure of even more crispy fried onions, and this time they were hot.
paul had the cider-marinated pork chops with red cabbage and mashed potatoes — i think it had some sort of wine sauce, maybe port. his food was entirely too sweet for me, but he liked it quite a lot.
but the whole point of my writing about this is to tell you about the appetizer we split: vermont cheddar in phyllo served on a tomato/bacon/onion coulis. it was basically a fancy grilled cheese sandwich. delectable. i'm going to try to make it here. here's my plan:
- cook some canned tomatoes, onions, and bacon together.
- puree.
- cut cheese into small triangular slices.
- wrap it in phyllo dough triangles, liberally buttered.
- bake until cheese is oozy.
- scarf.
October 23, 2003
it was green and i ate it anyway.
so i made some carrot cake a while back. i had too much batter for the pan i was using, so i poured it into some mini loaf pans, baked, and threw the little ones into the freezer.
i took one out last night to thaw and cut into it today, only to find that it's flecked here and there with green.
but i have a theory! the recipe contained minced ginger. ginger is well known to change color when cooked, depending on the other ingredients. (no! really! it is! it turns blue-green if you, say, roast it alongside lemon slices tucked inside a chicken. stop looking at me like that.)
so my theory, such as it is, is that something happened to the ginger in the cooking and freezing process to turn it green — something harmless, i am certain. do not try to convince me otherwise, for i have already eaten the cake.
paul has the poison control center on speed dial just in case. if you don't hear from me for a few days, blame the cake and send me flowers.
montpelier's test kitchen
last night as sort of a warm-up for holiday cookie baking, i baked a batch of fall cookies using my maple-leaf cutter and nick malgieri's accidental cookie dough recipe. not fragile, handles cutting well, and actually tastes decent — hat trick. note to terry: i used a small maple leaf cutter for this instead of a bigger one, and am happy with that aspect of the results. i based my efforts on this method found on the gma recipe boards at work:
Use your favorite sugar cookie dough recipe. Divide in thirds. Use 3 colors, one for each division (orange, green and yellow or red). Tear off 3 sheets of waxed paper. Place dollops of each color sporadically on each piece of waxed paper, but not touching. Cover the dough with another piece of waxed paper. With rolling pin, roll to desired thickness (1/4"). (Final result is a marble effect.) Place in fridge for several hours or overnight. The next day, remove one dough at a time. Remove top sheet of waxed paper, sprinkle a little flour over top; flipover and do the same. Using a leaf cookie cutter, cut out shapes and place on cookie sheets. Bake according to your recipe. Makes beautifully colored leaves.
the first batch i baked according to the method above, putting globs of dough on a silpat and just rolling them all together. the resulting cookies were very cute, but the colors didn't blend at all — no marbled effect whatsoever. they're still pretty, and rather festive, but not quite the effect i was going for. (and right off the bat it became pretty clear that including brown instead of, say, orange was a big mistake.)
i wasn't entirely satisfied with the first batch; i'd been hoping for a more...grown-up-looking leaf. so for the second round, i took the scraps left from cutting the first batch and kneaded them in my hands until i felt they looked suitably marbled, then rolled them out and cut them. the resulting cookies look very realistic, if a bit muddy here and there. (i place the blame for that squarely on the brown dough, which was nasty from the outset.) the question remains whether artistic realism is something you actually want in a cookie. i think they're nice, and would be nicer still laid alongside a scoop of, say, cinnamon ice cream, but i realize some might find them unappetizing. here's a close-up so that you can savor the kitchen magicTM.
October 20, 2003
coming soon to a cookie tray near you
okay, it's official: holiday baking season is upon us. i know this because my copy of fine cooking's special issue has arrived in the mail, just bursting with recipes.
last year i baked, i think, nine different kinds of cookies. this year i'm shooting for a dozen. i need to get organized, so here's a first stab.
holdovers from last year:
- citrus slices
- linzer cookies
- cranberry pecan tassies
- spritz cookies
recipes i am gleefully stealing from others:
- mom's stripey mint ones (i may interpolate a chocolate stripe instead of just a plain vanilla one)
- mom's fruitcakey tollhousey ones
recipes i'm trying with terry:
- maple cookies
- the revered cuccidati
other possibilities:
- brown sugar and oatmeal shortbread cookies
- some kind of chocolate-based cookie, maybe with candied orange peel (based on last year's not-entirely-successful chocolate cherry toffee cookies — the batter was excellent, but the add-ins were only okay)
- maybe a lemon-poppyseed something
- maybe a peanut butter something
- cinnamon cinnamon cinnamon something...but what?
October 12, 2003
the only apple i'm not mad at right now
the crust turned out magnificently — thank you, nick malgieri. i didn't do a very pretty job on the fluting, because i'd already had the dough out for long enough that i was worried that the butter was melting, but it baked into tender/crisp flakes exactly as advertised.
October 10, 2003
pied beauty
in the oven right now is an apple pie, made possible by three things:
- the peter kump pie class i took ages ago with terry. the two most valuable things i got out of it were the conviction that mixing pie crust by hand is dead easy and nick malgieri's recipe for flaky pie crust.
- the freezer. i know, i know, you've heard it before. but i was able to pull out a container of crumb topping from may and sprinkle it atop the mound of apple filling without turning a hair.
- the apple machine. this is a gizmo that peels, cores, and slices apples in a single pass — overkill for a single apple, but very useful when you're processing three pounds. it performed beautifully on the granny smiths, which are firm, but not so well on the macintoshes, which are...kinda squishy.
die, apples, die
October 09, 2003
chip off the old *blargh*
just so you know, i am well aware of how gross this is.
last night at the grocery store, there was a 2-for-1 sale on potato chips. because i am the adventurous sort, i seized the opportunity to try a new flavor: lay's dill pickle. what the heck, i figured...they're free!
now, i am not one to throw away perfectly good food. but this is not perfectly good food. this is horrible, horrible food that not even the starving children in cambodia would deign to choke back.
it could be worse, though. through the magic of the internet, i have learned that it could be much worse, in fact. at least i didn't buy:
- hot dog flavored chips
- roast lamb and mint sauce flavored chips
- octopus dumpling or fried chicken cartilage flavored chips
- sour cream and clam flavored chips
i feel certain i've dodged more than one crispy, salty bullet, and gotten an invaluable learning experience to boot.
September 24, 2003
i bet i'd like this way too much.
beef. it's what's for dinner. and snacks. and dessert! from the new york times:
If the National Cattlemen's Beef Association has its way, beef will not be just for dinner anymore.
Looking to emulate the success of Chicken McNuggets and fried mozzarella sticks, the group is hoping to inject some red meat into the American snack food diet with cheeseburger fries. The fries, which look like a squat version of standard French fries, are made of a meat-and-cheese compound that tastes — as the name suggests — like a cheeseburger.
Breaded, then deep-fried and served with ketchup or barbecue sauce, cheeseburger fries have found their way onto menus in several states including Nebraska, Minnesota and Texas since June. There is also a version being made available to public school cafeterias.
"The challenge is getting people to think of other ways to eat beef," said Betty Hogan, director of new product development for the association.
[...]
The fries themselves are surprisingly light, weighing only about one ounce each. The meat, so that it holds together, is firm like a meatball. And while the taste is not distinctly beef, biting into one does impart the lingering flavoring of processed cheese.
Looking for other avenues into the American diet, the beef industry noticed that restaurants sell over 900 million portions of chicken strips and fried cheese sticks, many of them as appetizers.
"You just don't see beef-based appetizers," Rob McLaughlin, vice president for product management at the Advance Food Company in Enid, Okla., which is manufacturing cheeseburger fries.
[...]
All this, of course, pleases the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. "We want beef in dessert if we can get it there," Ms. Hogan said.
August 10, 2003
for harold
from an intrepid friend of ours comes...
(also visit eggs benedict new york, a culinary endeavor from which my left ventricle has not yet recovered.)
August 09, 2003
fake cake
last night we went to dinner at the home of some friends in burlington. only after i volunteered to make dessert did i learn that the husband is diabetic and has to limit his sugar intake. so i decided to experiment.
i made the buttermilk country cake, the finest cake in my repertoire, replacing half of the sugar with splenda. splenda is a sugar substitute, and, believe it or not, it's not half-bad. unlike sweet 'n' low or equal, it has no artificial taste whatsoever — it's just sweet.
unfortunately, it doesn't have the same properties as sugar when it comes to structure, tenderness, or browning. the cake rose about 3/4 as high, and i don't think it browned as beautifully as it has when i've used the full measure of sugar (just a cup, for the record). additionally, it was slightly drier than the original, as the splenda people recommend you supplement it with a bit of dry milk in cake recipes; my theory is that that sucked up some of the moisture.
that said, the cake tasted good, looked nice, and satisfied even our friend who has to watch his sugar intake. an acceptable compromise, and a successful experiment.
July 16, 2003
god save the queen
the ap is reporting that britain may have invented lasagna.
now who's going to cop to balut?
July 04, 2003
summertime, and the cookin' is easy
paul's sister, niece, two nephews, and a friend are visiting this weekend. here is the menu:
friday dinner: burgers, chicken breasts, a