Chihaya's Kitchen: Things Learned by Trial and Error

• Salt is absolutely necessary for a pot of lentils/beans with garlic and onions and ginger and herbs/spices to taste good.
• When working with sweet onions, chop them larger and let them sizzle in oil until caramelization starts before adding other stuff.  It will be worth the wait.
• Recipes usually say to start garlic first, but if you're going to just dump everything into one pot, start with the thing that takes the longest to fry (usually the onion) and add other stuff in order of time it will take to cook.
• Be patient with bread.
• When freezing liquids, don't make containers airtight until phase change has occurred, especially with glass containers.  Picking shattered glass off frozen soup stock was interesting, but not something I'd care to repeat.
• Never, ever, ever leave your pot of boiling beans on a hot stove and go run errands.  Even if you don't burn the house down, the smell of scorch is permeating and persistent and scrubbing charcoaled beans out of a pot is hard work.  
• If you like your cookies thick and soft, sticking the tray and uncooked dough in the freezer for ~3 minutes right before putting them in the oven helps.  

Cake and Roses

For my birthday, garishly fuchsia roses and a peanut butter and chocolate cake.  Decorated with chopped up Reese's cups arranged in the shape of the Blue Oyster Cult cross.

Autumn Leaf Apple Pies

Perhaps not as much fun as last year's apple pies, but very seasonally appropriate for temperate deciduous forests in the northern hemisphere:

Lovecraftian Horror

In silence and in darkness and in cold the horrid unspeakable thing lay, growing, growing, growing, over the slow and patient crawling of time not measured by puny humans, until, at last, it burst the chains laid on it by its long-lost makers and crawled into the world of men...

***

I speak, of course, of my potato rosemary bread dough, which I left in the fridge to rise overnight.  While mixing this batch I got lazy and just dumped in all the potato water instead of measuring 3 cups, and the increased volume overflowed the bowl: 

But of the ancient mysteries of oxygen-and-sugar-burning, carbon-dioxide-and-ethanol-producing organisms that are yeast, I must not speak.

Triple Orange Spice Cookies with Buxtehude And Gloomy Ruminations In the Cold Dark End of Winter

Put on Buxtehude's ciaccona en mi (BuxWV160) and grate enough orange peel for about 2 tablespoons (2-3 oranges).  Squeeze said oranges for 1/4 cup of juice.  Sigh longingly in remembrance of the heat of the summer sun.

Start Buxtehude's passacaglia en re (BuxWV161) and cream 3/4 cup of shortening and 1 cup brown sugar.  Move on to sonata III en sol (BuxWV261) and mix in 1 egg, 2 teaspoons baking power, 1/4 teaspoon salt, orange peel, orange juice, 1/2 teaspoon orange extract, 1/2 teaspoon cloves, 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, and 1/8 teaspoon cardamom.  Blend in 2 and 1/8 cup white flour.  Meditate on how Europeans and Americans (non-native) destroyed the peoples of more than half the world in making these spices cheap and readily available and let the chill seep into your soul and your dough (alternatively, use a refrigerator).  Chill dough thoroughly (but do not freeze solid unless you are storing it for later). 

The wealth of the orient.

Start oven heating to 375 F.  Start this playlist of Buxtehude at 3:45, because baroque canons rock.

Roll dough into balls about 1 inch in diameter, dip one side in white sugar, and place about 2 inches apart on an ungreased baking sheet.  Bake for 8 minutes or until just barely browning on bottom.  Angst that you will cook the cookies either too much or too little, hovering anxiously before the oven and wringing your hands inside their oven mitts.  Cookies should still be very soft (although not gooey) when taken out of oven.  Allow to cool for about 5 minutes before removing from baking sheet.   

Eat, reveling in samsara.  For better karma, share.  

Apple Pies of Fiery Doom and Space Lobsters

I am totally in awe of a Peace Corps friend of Elisheba's, who does masterworks such as the black goat with a thousand blueberries.  I tried my hand at food coloring painting, to produce:

Fiery Doom!  They kinda look like dinosaurs, if you squint.

Space lobsters!  And our solar system.  The black edge is supposed to be the Oort Cloud.  Most definitely not to scale.  Note Earth is barely avoiding collision with the comet. 

            I haven't had this much fun with my food since making gingerbread people of Doom! 

The Opera Cake of Infelicitous Ratios

An opera cake is supposed to end up about the size of a brownie, height wise, but the receipt I followed produced a massive amount of filling.  Anyway, it's two white chocolate mousse layers and a layer of honey buttercream, separated by almond biscotti layers that have been soaked in a honey sugar syrup.  

It's enough sugar to make me happy. 

Apple Pie With Dinosaurs

I borrowed Elisheba's dinosaur rolling pin:

More contrast needed.  Food coloring in some form is indicated.

Remember, dinosaurs are extinct in large part because they didn't have a space program. 

Sunset Over Lake Michigan

 There weren't exactly any grey stones I could stand by while a thrush knocked, but we did bring along blueberry pie that we had made earlier in the day.

Ia Shub-Niggurath!  The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Blueberries!

Michigan was fun.  I refuse to consider going there in winter.

Summertime and Strawberry Everything

A roll cake filled with strawberry mousse.  Plus strawberry tea.

An Adorable Cake in an Adorable Mug

I have this problem where I've moved out on my own and I have little to no kitchenware of my own.  Granted, my darling sister is moving in with her darling kitchenware in about two weeks, but in the meantime, I want to bake.  I want to bake things with whipped cream, but I have no mixer, and I'm not whipping cream by hand.  I want to bake things that involve many steps of preparation, but I have exactly one sauce pan and 3 bowls. So I'm making microwave mug cakes.  This is a recipe I found here and while it is better than most microwave mug cake recipes I've seen in that it prescribes melted butter rather than vegetable oil, cocoa powder is still no substitute for chocolate melted in cream. Nonetheless, while not particularly attractive as a creation, it is in a sheepie mug.  And there's peanut butter.  So there's that.

Poetry Month: Bread Baking with Rumi

If you are ever in need of a kiss, bring to mind the smell of fresh bread

And taste again a touch you once loved or are hoping for.

Following this recipe, I've spent the last few days making croissants.  I made them once before, following the old Joy of Cooking I got from my late and beloved grandmother.  I think the Joy of Cooking version tasted better but this version is so flaky! 

Happy Pi Day!

I made a grasshopper pie, following a recipe I found at The Brown Eyed Baker.

Anyone else making/eating something thematic today?

Versus Cheesecake Stuffed Strawberries: Victory!

I was sent this reddit page, which demonstrates how some of the best ideas can be found on the internet.  I've been experimenting with bite-sized cheesecakes recently anyway, but making individual cheesecakes in tiny little cupcake papers is a LOT of work and usually results in the crust stuck to the paper, and cutting up a big cheesecake into bitesized cheesecakes is messy.  Fortunately, the internet has the solution of putting a no-bake version of cheesecake into strawberries.

It's really really simple to do, and fast even for someone like me who refuses to make cheesecakes that simple (I always mix ricotta and cream cheese and add white chocolate melted in cream).  Granted, I didn't bother to mush graham crackers for the top, but I was feeling lazy.  It was a little difficult getting the strawberries to stand up to be filled, but I have lots of mini-muffin pans and problem solving skills.  I don't have a pastry bag, but I do have a cookie press with a nozzle sort of attachment, which would have worked except I took too cavalier an approach to thoroughly melting the white chocolate (who cares if there is a piece of white chocolate unmelted inside a strawberry?  It's a piece of chocolate inside a strawberry!) and as it turns out, unmelted chocolates can and will jam inside nozzles.  I resorted to messily spooning cheesecake batter into strawberries, but it still wasn't that messy.

Coring strawberries: easy and fast.  

Small quantities of ingredients mean no need to use non-dishwashable bowls.  

Strawberry which is also a bite-sized cheesecake.  Win.  

Oatmeal-Raisin Cookies of +2 Deliciousness (Raisins Optional)

The first batch of oatmeal raisin cookies I made turned out as very respectable bricks.  Since then I have prayed and meditated upon receiving the mystery of the oatmeal cookie, and lo!  The Invisible Pink Pony (may Her holy hooves never be shod) appeared until me and said, "Empiricism for the win!"  So I did some research (reading Serious Eats blog) and experimentation until I got an oatmeal cookie that made me happy.

I love oat-based things, because oats are naturally sweeter than wheat, and the texture will be more fluffy and less bread-y, how much so depending on how you prepare the oats.  Fresh-ground oat flour is sweet enough to lick off your fingers raw, whereas raw white wheat flour tastes like dust.  I'm not yet sold on whole-wheat flour for cookies, but if you want to convince me, bake me your tastiest attempt and I'll see what I think.     

Today I made a batch of my favorite oatmeal-raisin cookies, and I got to thinking about cooking and order.  Most foods will survive if you just throw everything together, stir, and expose to high heat.  But for truly tasty results, method does matter, often as much as the recipe.  I first discovered this when I took the trouble to sift flour properly for a cake, instead of just dumping the flour straight into the batter.  The cake then turned out extra fluffy-and-delicious. 

For most modern cookies, you start with some sort of fat (some people swear by butter, but shortening or lard may work better for texture) and some sort of sugar, and you cream them.  I wonder, what did people do before electric mixers?  Seriously, how was this handled?  Pie dough is pain enough.*  Using a cutter on shortening (or solid butter) and sugar until you get a roughly uniform consistency would not be fun.  Did everyone melt the fat and add it as a liquid?  Because that makes the difference for oatmeal cookies: if you want soft cookies, mix all dry ingredients first, then melt all fats to liquid form and add.  (Elisheba does this anyway, because she cooks with flair and tastyness, but I am sometimes too stuck on a set of rules.)

That gets you as far as +1 deliciousness (notice I'm biased toward soft cookies.  In my world, pickles should crunch, cookies most definitely should not.)  For +2 deliciousness, you need spices.  Lots of them.  Do not scrimp!  This lesson I also learned from Elisheba: whenever a sweets recipe calls for spices, you should add a heaping amount, not a level amount, of whatever called for.  Desserts should not be subtle.  When you eat a dessert, you should know that you have eaten dessert, by jingo!  If your taste buds are not happy, what's the point?   

The spice combination I currently use came from a recipe on Serious Eats blog: (this one, but I use the water my raisins have plumped in for any extra liquid, not chai tea.)  I go extra heavy on the cardamom and cloves, because those are my favorite spices.  Then bake until just set, and wait for 10 minutes or so before scarfing, so you don't burn your mouth. 

High Altitude adjustments: Currently I'm living at about 2,000 m (~6,000 ft) above sea level.  My first cookies here melted into crispy little puddles with all the sugar caramelizing.  I'm starting to get a better feel for the needed adjustments: cut the fat and sugar content by 1-2 tablespoons each (sugar by more if needed), add 1-4 tablespoons flour, make up any needed liquid with water, chill dough thoroughly before baking, and lower oven temperature by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit.  Key is to keep the dough cold enough, and the sugar content low enough, that cookies bake through before the sugar can liquify and they melt.  Cold cookie sheets help: stick them in the freezer for a minute or two if the house temperature is warm.



*And if you use pre-made pie dough, you should just admit your inferiority and make cobbler instead.  And if you use a premixed biscuit dough for your cobbler, you need to re-think your life. 

In Which I Lose vs Apricot Pie

Story of my life with food recently, losing.

Whatever, I wanted to make a pie, with fruit, and apricots are an underappreciated fruit.

Standard pie procedures, add sugar and spices to the fruit, and struggle to make pie crust flaky.

I love my lobster cookie cutter. It's one of the stranger things
I was sent in a care package, but it's wonderful.  

So far so good, except apricots apparently have way more juices when cooked than when raw, so the finished pie was more stew than pie.  

I'm not saying it's necessarily bad, but it could use more structural integrity.  

In Which I Lose Versus Chocolate-Covered Cherries

I found a recipe for chocolate-covered cherries at Chocolate Covered Katie, a website which I like but have artistic differences with since I deeply believe that the secret ingredient is butter.  The secret ingredient is always butter.  Fortunately, shortening to butter is a straightforward 1:1 conversion and she gives an alternative to coconut oil and cocoa powder that involves actual chocolate.  

Nonetheless, I ran into problems.  First, getting the pits out of my cherries.  

I've heard devices exist to remove cherry pits.  I have a knife
and my fingers.  

Life is just a bowl of slightly mangled cherries.  

Problem number two came when I realized I have no double boiler, and now I'm wishing I had used a recipe calling for lots of cream that I could melt and then pour over the chocolate.  I'm nervous about melting chocolate directly over a stove.  It's really hard not to burn it.  

I added sugar because unlike the
recipe, my chocolate is unsweetened.

After all that angst about melting chocolate, I succeeded only to have my chocolate sauce be way to sticky to be sauce.  Possibly the adding of the butter was a mistake.  I tried adding milk, got too much in, and turned to my dear friend cornstarch to fix it.  

Despite my completely unfounded belief that cornstarch will fix my problems, the resulting sauce was too thin to really stick to the cherries.  Or I didn't give it long enough to cool first, or something.

Dipping cherries one at a time is just way too much work.  

The result was not so much chocolate covered cherries as cherries with a slight chocolate tinge.

Well, I still have a glass of wine, slightly chocolatey cherries, and the world cup.  It's not that bad a loss.

Fibers, Morality of

Politicians in the U.S. have a tendency to engage in slightly overwrought prose about whatever it is they don't like eroding or destroying the moral fiber of the nation.  Dedicated to precise definitions as I am, I asked a very talented seamstress (my mama) what, in her opinion, were the least and most moral fibers.

She replied that any fiber that is made out of liquid that comes out of the ground and used to be a swamp is immoral, while fiber from currently grown plants in non-swamp conditions are moral.  This makes sense, as swamps are creepy places full of mosquitoes, angsty gothic types, and sometimes overly large dogs covered in glow-in-the-dark paint.

So while I am willing to accept that synthetic fibers are immoral while your cottons, linens, and whatever is made from sisal are moral, I do wonder about fibers which are covered with sequins.  Sequins, the cheap kind, are plastic, but I deeply believe that sequins are moral.  On the other hand, I have the moral and aesthetic sensibility of a magpie.

It is also possible that such politicians are referring to fiber in the sense of nutrition.  But I'm not really sure how, even in a society that likes to label foods as good vs bad, fiber can be mapped onto morality.  If you don't eat any, the GI tract will suffer, and if all you eat is fiber, you will die of starvation.  There is a Chinese legend about vermicelli, which is rather fibrous, becoming magically transformed into chains in someone's intestines, helpfully recounted by E.T.C. Warner (and freely downloadable from the Gutenberg Project) thusly:

Sun Hou-tzŭ, the Monkey Sun, the rapid courier, who in a single skip could traverse 108,000 li (36,000 miles), started in pursuit and caught her up, but the astute goddess was clever enough to slip through his fingers. Sun Hou-tzŭ, furious at this setback, went to ask Kuan-yin P’u-sa to come to his aid. She promised to do so. As one may imagine, the furious Page 222race she had had to escape from her enemy had given Shui-mu Niang-niang a good appetite. Exhausted with fatigue, and with an empty stomach, she caught sight of a woman selling vermicelli, who had just prepared two bowls of it and was awaiting customers. Shui-mu Niang-niang went up to her and began to eat the strength-giving food with avidity. No sooner had she eaten half of the vermicelli than it changed in her stomach into iron chains, which wound round her intestines. The end of the chain protruded from her mouth, and the contents of the bowl became another long chain which welded itself to the end which stuck out beyond her lips. The vermicelli-seller was no other than Kuan-yin P’u-sa herself, who had conceived this stratagem as a means of ridding herself of this evil-working goddess. She ordered Sun Hou-tzŭ to take her down a deep well at the foot of a mountain in Hsü-i Hsien and to fasten her securely there. It is there that Shui-mu Niang-niang remains in her liquid prison. The end of the chain is to be seen when the water is low.

That could conceivably be immoral fiber.

Your thoughts, my indefatigable boozers?

White Chocolate and Pineapple Cheesecake

Made pineapple syrup to pour in this, with candied pineapples to decorate.  It's more subtly flavored than I had hoped.  I am not a fan of subtlety in cooking.  Still yummy, though.  

In Which I Aspire to Rainbows and Settle for Mangos

 A dear friend sent me a link to this, a rainbow roll cake that I should absolutely make, but I have neither the skills or the equipment as yet.  So I made a roll cake with mango sorbet inside and attempted to make the cake a matching orange, but it's more of a salmon pink.  I have much to learn of the ways of food coloring.