Sandwich Bread- failure

This is what happens when you're too impatient to finish the second rising- your bread rises quickly in the oven and splits on the side. I know that, and yet I still mess it up.

Seeded bread- Failure!

This was supposed to be one of those German ryle loaves- dark and dense and studded with all manner of seeds.

Well yours truly shot right past dense and hit rock hard.



On the plus side, spray painted gold it might make a nice decorative doorstop.

Roasted Sweet Potatoes

-Pre-heat oven to 400
-Cut Potatoes into wedges, rise and then dry thoroughly. (the rinsing and drying is clutch! don't skip that step!)
-Toss in a bowl with two tablespoons olive oil and two teaspoons salt.
-Line wedges up on a cookie sheet
-Bake for 10 minutes, flip, bake for ten more. If wedges aren't done, lower heat to 350 and continue baking until cooked through.

Spicy Broccoli and Tofu stir fry

Cheaper than Chinese take-out. Faster than pasta night.



Make the sauce, throw it in a frying pan with cut up broccoli and tofu. dinner is served.



Sauce:

All the ingredients are to taste. Feel free to add a little more or a little less.


3/4 c white wine (something sweet and cheap is fine)
2 Tablespoons soy sauce
2 cloves minced garlic
1 Tablespoon minced fresh ginger
2 whole dried red peppers, or 1 teasp crushed red pepper
1 tablespoon cornstarch, mixed with 1 tablespoon water.

Bring ingredients to a boil. Sauce is ready. add to broccoli and tofu and fry until broccoli is al dente.

How to win friends in 30 minutes or less.

People love ice cream. People love cookies. Give the people what they want.



On the way back from an impromptu Peabody Essex museum visit (shoutout to the Chinese house exhibit!), we made plans for potluck taco night one hour after we got back. Everyone offered something, and I heard myself saying:

"Oh, I'll make an ice cream cake."
"Yeah, sure I'll just throw it together"
"Ok, see you in an hour."

By the time I got back to the apartment and got my act together, making a layer cake and remolding the ice cream to fit as a layer was out of the question. So it was down to a MacGuyver-style how can I fool my friends into thinking I actually made something.

If you ever find yourself in a similar dessert situation, here is what I suggest:

1. Buy a block of cheapo ice cream, the kind that comes in the square cardboard box.

2. Crush a bunch of store bough cookies- I did layers of Oreo and gingersnaps. (Shout out to Mi-Del gingersnaps)

3. Cut ice cream horizontally into four layers. press cookies between each layer and all over outside of cake. Return the cake to the freezer.




4. Whip two egg whites with 2 tablespoons of sugar or so. Set aside. Whip a cup of cream with sugar, vanilla, and cinnamon to taste. Mix the beaten egg whites and the whipped cream. This is your "frosting."

5.Cover the cake with the frosting, using a spatula, a pastry bag or a spoon. Freeze until serving. Once frozen, this cake can survive a 1/2 mile walk to your friend P.'s house for taco night.



The (effort) to (adoration from friends) ratio with this dessert is amazing. I highly recommend it.

(Caveat: it's not that cheap, because you're buying pre-made stuff)

Holey Chewy Pizza

I'm all for thin crust Neapolitan pizza with "leopard spotting," but sometimes I want a pie with some heft and some chew. And I always love big bubbles.

(Tangent: When I used to work at a pizza place we had a five foot long two prong fork to pop the bubbles. I never used the thing. Although it had the nice effect of making it look like a vampire had attacked the pizza. Which was hilarious if it was a garlic pizza. Oh no! vampires are developing garlic resistance! its the MRSA of the food world! )

There are three million recipes for pizza dough out there, but this is the one I like for chewy crust because :
-you make it in one afternoon.
-you don't need bread flour.

it's on the sticky end of the spectrum, but not a Jim-Lahey-style ball of goo that's unmanageable.

Ingredients: flour, water, yeast, salt. fin. *


Helpfully, I have bolded the parts which I think are important or interesting. If you have made pizza before, you probably only need to read the bold parts.

1. Mix: 1 1/2 c flour, 1 1/2 c warm water , 2 teasp yeast, 2 teasp salt (in the bowl of a standing mixer if you've got one.)

2. Let stand for as long as you can bear it. At least 20 min. The warm water helps quick rising if your apartment is as cold as mine.

3. Using mixer or sturdy spoon, add flour until the dough starts to pull away from the bowl, about 1 1/2 cups. Knead/mix until you are bored, try to stay unbored for at least 5 min.

4. Let stand again for 30 min or so (leave it in the bowl. No need to oil the bowl, just scrape the dough out if it sticks.) Start preheating pizza stone, if you have one. This is also a great time to assemble your toppings.

5. Scrape dough out of bowl. Divide into two pieces. Gently fold into ball shape (this is important if you want your pizza to be round. The dough "remembers" the shape it rests in, so if you let it rest in a whacked out quadrilateral shape, you will get a whacked-out quadrilateral pizza). Let rest for a few minutes.

6. Roll or stretch dough into a circle. Put some flour or cornmeal on a peel or an upside down cookie sheet. Place dough on the peel/sheet , add sauce, cheese toppings. Don't press down your toppings or the dough will stick to the peel/ sheet.

(I use whole canned tomatoes instead of sauce. I've always been contrary)

7. Your pizza stone is hot now. Don't have a pizza stone? get out your cast iron skillet. put it on the stovetop on high for five minutes or until you smell smoke. Viola- instant preheated "pizza stone" Put it in the oven, crank the oven as high as it can go.

8. Scootch the pizza from the peel/sheet onto the stone/skillet. Ten minutes later, eat pizza.

(mushroom / potato-rosemary pie. Go try a potato pizza right now. It will change your life)

*fin means end in French. don't get excited. this is not another ingredient.

Haymarket Success

(No, this is not an out-of focus picture of organ meat. Read on and you will discover what I was attempting to show)


I went to Haymarket, Boston's outdoor produce market, on Saturday just before closing. The prices (already low) drop drastically at the end of the night. If you're prepared to fight through crowds of Abuelitas and Grannies with sharp sided carts, you just might find a produce seller who will call you sweetie and give you two pounds of grape tomatoes for $1.

Being cheap by nature, I never buy these in the store, so to have two pounds of them is awesome. After eating the good ones, I roasted the rest. As my co-worker Luis says:

"Sale, pepe, olio di olivo*, an' thas' it. "

These are good eatin': alone, on pizza, in a quiche. I of course, froze them, because I have an unnatural fear of running out of food. (In the event of a zombie apocalypse, we will be doing fine here in the apartment).



*yes, I know this is not Spanish. Luis half-translates for us gringos.

Failure (s) of the week - Twofer!

A. First, I can't get rid of the top picture, which is sideways. Yes, I have tried simply deleting it. No, I don't want to hear about how to fix it.

B. These bars are a perfect way to use up that container of caramel sauce you froze because you didn't follow a recipe and added too much butter and then the sauce separated.

1.Take the sauce, warm it up, add three eggs, salt and some vanilla.

2. Add the right amount of flour and then (key step!) --> Keep adding flour until the batter is thick, doughy, and pasty. Taste it and see how floury it is.

3. Ignore the bad, floury taste. Bake at 350 for twenty minutes.

4. Try a corner of the bars. They should be bland, floury and hard.


Blond brownies. Keeping me humble since 2010.

Freezing Rain Turkey Soup

This morning began with my roommate, J. saying "Hey I think it's hailing."

I replied with "Hey I think I'll e-mail my internship and ask if I can switch my hours to any day but today."

Which lead directly to:

-"Hey I think I'll spend the day lazing about the apartment, trying without success to read several different library books,"
and
-"Hey maybe I should get a cat. Or volunteer in Haiti."
and
"Hey, maybe I should make soup"

Ingredients:

-Leftover turkey, preferably dark meat with bones that has been in the freezer since Thanksgiving.
-Onions, carrots, celery, frozen peas.
-barley or brown rice.
-salt, pepper, cheap white wine.


1. Throw the frozen turkey into a pot with just enough water to cover. If you put any more, your soup will be watery. Turn on high.

2. Twenty minutes later, take out the turkey pieces and pick meat off bones. set meat aside.


3. Put bones back in pot, add half of the carrots, onions, celery, in huge chunks. Include onion skins and celery leaves. Add a dash of cheap white wine, and lots of coarsely cracked pepper (crack in a mortar in pestle, or with the back of a spoon)



3. Twenty minutes before you want to eat, strain out all the stuff from the broth. Add barley (which expands a LOT. Try one cup or less for soup for four) and carrots and celery cut up bite size or smaller. Cut onions pole to pole in thinnish slices. Put the meat back in a bout five minutes before serving, along with frozen peas if desired.




4. Freeze in containers, preferably ones that take up the same amount of space as the leftover turkey did. This will erase any temporary sense of accomplishment you have.

Variation: add lemon and sage (fresh or dried). Half a lemon was enough to make my soup very lemony-perhaps too lemony.