Objective three: Find more cookbooks to love

Marcia January 17, 2010 Banter, Cookbooks 0
Oatmeal Corn Meal Bread, from The Book of Bread by Judith and Evan Jones

Oatmeal Corn Meal Bread, from The Book of Bread by Judith and Evan Jones

While composing the opening paragraph for a post about my favorite cookbooks I realized I had only two cookbooks that I really really loved, at least in my current collection, plus a handful of hardy go-to books, the recipes and advice of which result in many a speedy or satisfying meal, but don’t possess the material or artistry or style to bring them from 4-star (like it a lot) to 5-star (love it!) status.

The two books I own that I will happily curl up with to read and eagerly anticipate what recipe I shall try next are The Book of Bread by Judith and Evan Jones and White Chocolate by Janice Wald Henderson. It’s not just that I love kneading and shaping and baking and eating bread, or am delighted by the ivoryness, creaminess, and subtlety of white chocolate, but that these are the only two cookbooks I own about foods that I adore and through which I allow myself an occasional flight of fancy.

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Nix the chix breast, briefly

Marcia January 8, 2010 Banter 0
The weeklong "no-chicken-breast" challenge will soon begin!

The weeklong "no-chicken-breast" challenge will soon begin!

A recent run-in with a pile of sawdust-dry chicken breast (thank you, Blue Shirt Café) has seriously maddened my chixbreastphiliac taste buds and they are rebelling — as are my teeth that had to chew, and my throat muscles that labored to swallow the tasteless mass — leaving me no choice but to ban the substance, at least for a week, so . . .

Chicken breast is dead to me (!) at least through Saturday, January 16. Most other parts of the chicken are welcome. Gary’s on board with this, too, and looks forward to a dinner of fine chicken thighs. And I’m planning meals around eggs and pork tenderloin.

It’s probably a very good thing, since chicken breast has dominated my diet for decades. It’s time to break loose and enjoy other meats and proteins for a little while. Wheeeee! I’m such a daredevil !!!!!!!!!

The no-whining dining wine list

Marcia January 5, 2010 Drink, wine 0

I know next to nothing about wine–how to sip it, how to describe it, nor why anyone would drink anything with “leathery undertones.” Still, I’ve decided to have a few sips of red wine (3 ounces or thereabouts) with my suppers for some far-out health reasons. But what the hell.

Here’s a running list of what I’ve sipped and what I thought about it. If I learn anything more about the stuff I’ll add some flowery descriptive prose to the entries.

Wines NWD would buy again

  • 2008 Yellow Tail Shiraz (South Eastern Australia) ($7.99, Berman’s Wine & Spirits, Lexington, MA)
  • 2008 La Vieille Ferme Côtes du Ventoux Rouge (Rhône Valley, France) ($7.99, Berman’s Wine & Spirits, Lexington, MA)
  • 2007 Red Diamond Merlot (Washington State) ($10.99, Downtown Wine & Spirits, Somerville MA)
  • …

Wines we’d drink but not necessarily buy again (except maybe for cooking)

  • 2006 Ravens Wood Vintners Blend Merlot (California) ($10.99, Downtown Wine & Spirits, Somerville MA)
  • 2003 Glen Ellen Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon (California) ($5.99, Berman’s Wine & Spirits, Lexington, MA)
  • …

Never again . . .

  • …
  • …

Objective two: Relearn how to cook

Marcia January 3, 2010 Uncategorized 0
The Art of Simple Food

The Art of Simple Food

What I mean by “relearn how to cook,” is learn and understand enough cooking and baking basics so I am no longer at the mercy of other people’s recipes. I want to be able to look in my fridge and kitchen cupboards and have some inkling how I can combine certain items to create a dish or a meal without consulting a cookbook or Googling anything.

The list of dishes I can create in the absence of guidance is limited and includes French toast, scrambled eggs, tuna salad, various stir-fries, basic baked fish or chicken, smoothies, and sauteed vegetables. There’s also a short list of self-created concoctions I make more often than other dishes, such as The Marcia Mash (mash together one can black beans, one ripe avocado, and one cup jarred salsa; serve with tortilla chips or just eat it straight) and Cauliflower Surprise (combine or cook together all or most of the following ingredients: Thai-flavored tofu, one small head caulifloer, one can chick peas, a handful of raisins, peanut sauce to taste, curry powder to taste [optional]).

Ironically, if I want to be able to cook without constant guidance, I’ll need some guidance. To that end, I’ve selected Alice Waters’s The Art of Simple Food as my cooking primer. I’ve already read the first few pages; it looks like the first issue I’ll address will be replacing many items already residing in my fridge and cupboards.

Objective one: Stop eating crap

Marcia January 1, 2010 Western diet 1
In Defense of Food

In Defense of Food

Last month I embraced the key directives of ditching the Western diet as explained by Michael Pollan in his book In Defense of Food and embellished in Food Rules. It’s a simple mantra: Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.

For starters I swore off Cool Whip, instant pudding, diet soda, and frozen dinners, threw away my desk-drawer stash of Slim-Fast bars, and vowed to cook more of my own foods and shun processed or manufactured foodstuffs (“edible foodlike substances” in Pollan’s terms) to the extent practical.

This month, this nonscientific experiment of mine will fully, if slowly, set in and hopefully take hold. This year I’ll learn if I will really have the time, energy, desire, or wherewithal to cook most of my meals, including bag breakfast and lunches, or if I’ll deem the endeavor impossible and give up within months. I’ll find out if I really will or can bake my own pita bread. I’ll discover how long I can last before succumbing to York Peppermint Patties or microwaveable popcorn. But most notably, hopefully, I’ll experience the joys and sorrows, rewards and frustrations, of making and eating real food.

I’ve still some to-be-banished items lurking in my kitchen cupboards and I haven’t decided if I’ll just toss any of it my husband isn’t interested in, or if I’ll slowly consume the items, deep-six them before long, or let the product’s expiration dates make the decision for me. Probably it’ll all be decided item by item. I face dilemmas such as: should I make hot cocoa from scratch (rather easy) and toss the rest of the Swiss Miss with Marshmallows even though I paid $2.79 for several packs of brown powder and crunchy white pellets?

The Swiss Miss with Marshmallows brings up another issue I hope to address this year: disturbingly excessive food packaging. One quick example of this: My box of Swiss Miss “Sensible Sweets” “Fat Free Marshmallow Lovers” eight-serving box actually came with 16 packets — eight packets of instant cocoa, eight packets of instant marshmallows. You’re supposed to add the marshmallows after you’ve mixed the instant cocoa with the water. I guess to keep the white pellets crunchy as long as possible? Anyway, now you’ve got two pouches for each six-ounce cup of cocoa.

I’m leaning towards tossing the remaining three (er, six) packets. The net cost: about $1.50. The benefits: a bit of modified whey, sugar, and corn starch I won’t be drinking, plus about 112 cubic inches of shelf space.

Rallying for Roll-ups! Part 4: Pinwheel Cookies

Marcia April 3, 2009 Baking, Banter, Recipes 0
Tableau: My imperfect but pleasantly spicy Cardamom Almond and Black Pepper Chocolate Pinwheel Cookies

Tableau: My imperfect but pleasantly spicy Cardamom Almond and Black Pepper Chocolate Pinwheel Cookies

Of all the planned rolled offerings on my HUGE menu (see Part 1 of this series), I became most obsessed with pinwheel cookies. I’ve never made them before, nor did I imagine I’d enjoy them more than my usual cookie favorites (I’m a chewy bar and drop cookie gal), but the need to serve something visually interesting sent me wildly searching the Internet for options.

I rejected Alton Brown’s Chocolate Peppermint Pinwheel Cookies because I don’t like mint getting too cozy with my chocolate and some of the reviewers thought the cookies came out dry. Date Pinwheel Cookies from about.com intrigued me, but I wanted something with chocolate to balance the spice and fruitness I thought I’d have in my kreplach. The cookies in the photo of Gale Gands Pinwheel Cookie Dough on epicurious.com looked like winners, but reviewers didn’t think the difficult recipe warranted results worthy of their labor.

My pinwheel-cookie search also turned up tempting recipes for coconut pinwheels, peanut butter and chocolate pinwheels, fig pinwheels, and the I’ll-revisit-this-in-the-fall pumpkin pie pinwheels. But the search came to an abrupt halt when I stumbled upon Danielle E. Sucher’s food-blog entry describing her Cardamom Almond and Black Pepper Chocolate Pinwheel Cookies.

Search for pinwheel cookie recipe: Done.

The test-batch cookies tasted better than they looked. I had difficulty rolling the dough into equal rectangles (moving the fragile rectangles was tricky, too), then did not roll the rectangles together with an even hand, so, though pretty in a way, the finished cookies were far from geometrically correct swirls. I also thought the cookies were a little too hard (as I said, I like my cookies chewy) and I’d err on the side of a little too much almond extract and cardamom next time.

So, for the next batch: little more almond extract, little more cardamom, chill the dough a bit before rolling, careful picking up and moving rolled-out rectangles and be sure to place on a flat surface while I roll the second rectangle. (I had placed my first rectantle on a stovetop burner, which tore the dough a bit.) Also cut the cookies thicker, don’t bake them as long, or both.

The second batch had a slightly better taste and a much better texture, and the sweet-spicy balance was very pleasant. A winner! I’ll make these again — may my swirls look less . .  er . . . psychedelic each time.

With roll-ups out of my life for the time being, I’ll bookmark this entertaining post on rugelach pinwheels.

Rallying for Roll-ups! Part 3: Rugelach

Marcia March 31, 2009 Banter, Recipes, Restaurants 0

A year or two ago my friend Kate presented me a shoe-box-sized plastic container of rugelach. She said it was so easy to make; she found the recipe in a magazine — no-fuss rugelach via refrigerated pie crust dough!

In a word: EVIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  I thought her rugelach was rich, flaky, and fruity — it took much effort to NOT devour the entire containerful in one day. Gary agreed it was mighty tasty.

So, onto my roll-up-only menu it went. I found what I believed to be the right recipe on realsimple.com. Now you read that recipe and tell me what to do with the walnuts and raisins, because the recipe certainly doesn’t. Interestingly, the same recipe at realsimple television does say what to do with the nuts and raisins, but for some reason says the yield is 12 rugelach, though the original recipe says 22. Does anybody proofread or test these recipes?

This is Real Simple's photo; my pastries went straight to the trash bin. . .

This is Real Simple's photo; my pastries went straight to the trash bin. . .

Anyway . . . the sprinkling, unfolding, rolling, spreading, sprinkling, rolling, and slicing steps went well. Except that for one log I forgot to add “half” each the walnuts and raisins, and, oh yes, I had also decided that one-sixth of a cup of jam did not cover a the dough very well AT ALL, so I put on about twice as much each time. What harm could that do?

After the rugelach baked for barely five minutes, the jam oozed out of the swirls, congregated on the cookie sheet, and bubbled into a dark, gooey glue. I had to wait for the rugelach to cool before attempting to scrape/cut/trim the black, crispy lacquer from each piece while maintaining its structural integrity. It didn’t go well.

Well, I thought, at least there would be YUM. But actually there was no YUM. Not YUCK, just YAWN. This rugelach tasted sorta like jam baked in refrigerated pie dough. I’d have to ask Kate for the recipe she used. In the meantime, time was scarce, so we headed to Whole Foods to seek sweet rolled-up anythings, preferably freshly baked. Failing that, it would be off to the convenience mart for HoHos.

At Whole Foods, in the spirit of stubborn menu stick-to we passed over a couple of nice-looking jelly or swiss rolls in favor of prepackaged rugelach. Though this rugelach tasted better than the trash-bin inhabitants–we could detect some butter and cream cheese in these somewhere–they were still disappointing. Not the WOW we were looking for.

Turns out, the recipe I had tried WAS the recipe Kate swore by. She’d made it so many times, in fact, to so many rave reviews she had at the ready her list of preparation tips:

  1. Line the cookie sheet with aluminum foil.
  2. Spray the foil with a nonstick cooking spray (Pam)
  3. Sprinkle the cinn/sugar mix all over the foil
  4. Use Pillsbury pie rounds.
  5. Use a thin layer of jam/preserves
  6. Use a lot of raisins/walnuts
  7. Cut the log at a slight angle

This should help. There is always a lot of goop that comes out. It’s so yummy though. Good luck!

I’ll be taking votes: Should I try the Real Simple recipe again, or next time attempt a full-scale decadent cream-cheese laden version?

Rallying for Roll-ups! Part 2: Summer Rolls (Sort of)

Marcia March 29, 2009 Uncategorized 0

My rationale for making the sort-of summer rolls can be found in the post Rallying for Roll-ups! Part 1: Sushi.

I’ll make this short and sweet:

1. I wanted another light roll-up thingie to add to the HUGE menu. Found Five-Spice Turkey & Lettuce Wraps from EatingWell.com.

2. The prepared filling had a nice level of spice (I used Chinese Five Spice Powder from Penzeys Spices). Cooking the turkey in the sesame oil and using the five-spice combo yielded a delicate sweet-spicy nuttiness to the mixture. The only bummer was the turkey, which had bits of bone or gristle or something. I’m not sure if this is the nature of ground turkey or if the brand (Nature’s Promise of Stop & Shop) could do better.

3. I was so focused on roll-ups that I failed to understand that wrap doesn’t necessarily mean roll-up. I even overlooked the photo in the recipe, which had filling in lettuce-leaf cups, not filling rolled in lettuce leaves. Even so, the Boston lettuce leaves we were using were so fragile they’d disintegrate if we looked at them the wrong way — let alone if we tried to enclose or wrap anything. So, the lettuce became a side salad instead. We liked the filling so much, though, we decided to try again, but this time roll the filling in small spring-roll wrappers. This seemed to work, at least when Gary was the one doing the rolling up, so we added our “five-spice turkey summer rolls” to the HUGE menu. I called them “summer” instead of “spring” due to my potentially incorrect assumption that summer meant the roll was fresh and not fried and that all spring rolls were fried. (In other words, we didn’t plan to fry anything.

4. So, the recipe changes were:

  • Use small spring-roll rice wrappers instead of Boston lettuce to hold the filling
  • Shred some iceberg lettuce to add to roll before rolling up (for added crunch, even though the water chestnuts added some texture already)
  • Don’t chop the herbs; just use whole leaves (we used mint and basil) as seen in “real” summer rolls
  • Offer a dipping sauce. We used Ellie Krieger’s Vinegar Dipping Sauce, which is part of her own http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ellie-krieger/soft-asian-summer-rolls-with-sweet-and-savory-dipping-sauce-recipe/index.html. We also tried to follow Krieger’s instructions for wrapping summer rolls, but we had a very hard time with it nonetheless, as the photo of roll-up rejects, below, can illustrate.
The summer roll-up rejects were not pretty, but they were pretty tasty.

The summer roll-up rejects were not pretty, but they were pretty tasty.

Lessons learned:

  • Don’t ignore a photo that comes with a recipe. It can clue you in to certain characteristics of the finished product if you’re too lazy to read the recipe itself.
  • If you’re going to rely on your husband to wrap summer rolls an hour before guests are due to arrive, make it on a day he’s not already scheduled to be rolling maki.
  • If you don’t like the smell of vinegar, do not make a vinegar dipping sauce.
  • If you’ve never rolled summer or spring rolls before, find a cookbook or Web site, such as cooksillustrated.com, that has illustrated directions.

Stay tuned for Rallying for Roll-ups! Part 3: Rugelach