Rosemary Cream Sauce

    Ingredients:

½ cup butter                                                        6 oz. freshly grated parmesan cheese

1 (8 oz.) pkg cream cheese                               1/8 tsp black pepper

2 tsp garlic powder                                            1-2 tbs dried and crushed up rosemary

2 cups milk

Directions:

Cut up one stick of butter and melt in a medium, non-stick saucepan over medium heat.

Cut up cream cheese and add it to the pot with 2 tsp garlic powder and whisk until smooth.

Add 2 cups milk a little at a time, whisking to smooth it out.

Stir in parmesan and pepper.

Leave on medium heat and stir fairly often to avoid sticking.

Modified from keyingredient.com.

Easiest, tastiest pasta recipe ever

This recipe won me two boys' hearts in a single day. I use "recipe" loosely, as it's barely complex enough to earn the title. It's much like a simple scampi sauce, but a bit lighter.

4-6 cloves garlic, depending on preference
1/4 c extra virgin olive oil
1 tbs lemon juice
1/2 lb spaghetti
1/2 - 1 c freshly grated parmesan cheese

Put water on to boil the spaghetti. The rest of the process will be done before the spaghetti is cooked. Peel the garlic and cut each clove into halves or quarters. You want the garlic to brown, so don't crush it or cut it too small. Put the oil in a pan and put the garlic in the oil. Heat on medium-high until the garlic has a brown outline and looks generally roasted. Remove from heat and quickly add the lemon juice, stirring to mix thoroughly. When the pasta is done, drain it and put it back in the pot or a big bowl so you can toss it with the oil mixture. Serve with copious amounts of parmesan. Eat it before the cheese starts to melt, and your mouth will love you.

Serves 2-3

Cream cheese icing and Death By Chocolate cake from The Grit

Though The Grit's cookbook has been out for many years now, it's oddly difficult to find its recipes online if, say, you can't currently find your copy.

So here are recipes for a phenomenal vegan cake called Death by Chocolate and the very un-vegan cream cheese icing.

Death by Chocolate

• 4 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 3 cups sugar
• 1 cup cocoa powder
• 1 tablespoon baking soda
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 1 1/2 cups vegetable oil
• 2 tablespoons pure vanilla extract
• 3 cups strong brewed coffee
• 1/4 cup cider vinegar

Chocolate Icing

• 1 (12 ounce) packages firm silken tofu
• 3 cups semisweet vegan chocolate chips (many semisweet brands contain no dairy)

Directions:

Prep Time: 25 mins
Total Time: 50 mins 

Cake:

1. Preheat oven to 350. Grease 3 (9-inch) round cake pans, dust with flour, and line bottom with parchment or wax paper.
2. Sift together dry ingredients in a large bowl. Add oil and vanilla extract. With electric mixer on low speed, blend until fully combined. With mixer on medium speed, gradually blend in coffee. When mixture is smooth, add vinegar and blend on low speed just until combined.
3. Divide batter evenly into prepared pans. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes or just until a knife or toothpick inserted in the center of layers comes out clean.
4. Remove from oven and cool 15 to 20 minutes on a wire rack. Remove from pans and allow layers to cool completely before icing.

Chocolate Icing:

1. Drain excess fluid from silken tofu, crush and place in a medium saucepan with chocolate chips.
2. Stir together over medium heat until chocolate is very soft. Transfer to food processor and puree until fully blended.
3. Cool to spreadable consistency and frost between layers, and top and sides of cake.

 

Cream Cheese Icing

• 2 (8 ounce) packages cream cheese, slightly softened and cut into small pieces
• 1/2 cup butter, at room temperature
• 4 cups powdered confectioners' sugar, sifted
• 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract  

Directions:

1. Using an electric mixer, beat cream cheese in a large bowl until smooth.
2. Add butter and beat until smooth, creamy, and fully combined.
3. Add powdered confectioners' sugar and vanilla extract and beat slowly until sugar is incorporated.
4. Beat until consistency is extremely smooth and fluffy.

This is what eight dozen cookies looks like

That's four dozen chocolate chip, and four dozen skulls or pears or alien heads.

They're like the Rorschach of cookies.

Brownie bites with fondant and hearts

I was dying to try this recipe I found for fondant that actually tasted good and didn't cost a fortune, so I did. I had no reason to be baking, nowhere to go, and no one in particular to feed them to (except, of course, for myself and my hunny), but that didn't stop me. I used my classic brownie recipe to make brownie bites and the fondant recipe here on Bake at 350. The fondant was sticky and messy, but way cheaper than buying gumpaste or fondant at the store, and tastier too. I made the hearts by cutting a (new, clean) pencil-top eraser into a heart (which I've done a few time for paper stamps) and dipping it into gel food coloring. I think liquid food coloring might work better because it would be less bunchy. I used corn starch to make it less gel-ish and more stampable. I brought these little nomables to my friends at Honey's Salon, which I have decided is my new experimental test kitchen.

 

So that plate. It's a random plate my partner picked up at a thrift store eons ago. We have no idea who Carla is, and it's a little creepy that it's positioned so perfectly to look like some Carla-person made the brownies.

Love Cakes

I keep wanting to pre-cook food for the week ahead, and we've slowly been doing that. We made black bean cakes for lunch using a modified recipe from the Flying Biscuit cookbook. Flying Biscuit serves them with a garnish of raw red onions, tomatillo salsa, feta cheese, and sour cream. We modified them by adding cheese, then ate them as burgers with melted cheese slices and ketchup/mustard. FB also serves them with eggs and potatoes for breakfast. Prep time is about 20 minutes because of all the mashing, but they cook up in about 5 or so minutes.

Servings: 8 burgers, 16 small patties (served two per person)

Ingredients:

• 2 (15 ounce) cans cooked black beans
• 2 tablespoons canola oil                                                                        
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 2 tablespoons minced yellow onion
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup medium white cheddar (or similar)
• 1/4 cup masa de harina (finely ground corn meal)

Directions:

• Rinse and drain black beans in a sieve.
• Sauté 1 tablespoon of the canola oil over medium heat and onion, garlic, cumin, and salt until onions are translucent.
• Combine drained beans, cheese, and onion mixture in a bowl and mash with a potato masher until well combined.
• Gradually add masa, allowing mixture to absorb it before adding more. You’ll want to do this mixing with your hands, as I’ve never found another combine it well. Keep adding masa until dough doesn't stick to your hand and holds the shape of a ball.
• Divide dough into 16 small balls or 8 medium balls and flatten into cakes. Warm the remaining tablespoon of canola oil and sauté cakes until lightly browned on each side, about 3 to 5 minutes per side.
• Garnish and enjoy. Patties should freeze well, but we'll find out later this week when we try out the ones we've frozen.

Lo mein om nom nom

Knowing very little about traditional Asian foods of any sort, it took some doing not to trip over myself when googling "how to make homemade chinese lo mein noodles from scratch" and various iterations thereof. Since the google* only came up with various recipes that don't involve making the actual noodles, I asked the facebook. And the facebook had an answer. A guy that was a friend of a friend in college sent me a link to the video embedded below. It was amazing. The recipe is also listed, but the woman's technique is interesting to watch. Also, the username is "cookingwithdog," which makes more sense when you note the tiny adorable poodle sitting on the counter throughout the whole video. When the recipe was recommended, I was told that Bread Flour for Bread Machines has the same protein content and count be substituted for the udon flour. I ended up using unbleached all-purpose flour because my bread flour is whole wheat.


You can see the original recipe at the link, so here's how I did it. (Yes, I weighed/measured my ingredients and then poured them into measuring things to figure out the U.S. measurements.)


1 1/2 cups flour (preferably flour with 9-9.5% protein content)
1 tbs salt
1/2 cup water
Corn starch to sprinkle liberally


Dissolve salt into water. Measure flour into a separate container. Add the water about 1/3 c or so at a time. It will get flaky, then the last bit of water should get it into a dough. I was afraid that mine was way too watery, but after kneading it for a bit that took care of itself.


Once dough is doughlike (smooth, cohesive, not watery), sprinkle corn starch on it if necessary and put it in a freezer bag or between pieces of cling wrap. Roll it out with a rolling pin as much as you can, then coil the cough up like a jelly roll, turn it, and do it again. This is basically a way of kneading it. Do that several times (I think I did about 5), then shape it into a ball and leave it in the plastic bag. Fold over the end of the bag, but do not seal it. I let it sit for about 20 minutes (but you'll see the recipe suggests much longer). The dough had a different texture than other pasta doughs I've made, but it wasn't too tough to work with.


After it rests, roll it out again (and be generous with the corn starch). I used my hand-crank pasta machine to make it as thin as I could, then sliced it into strips. Watch her method for this -- it involves folding the dough on itself (with help from more corn starch) and slicing off the ends. This worked well, but they came out more like linguine than I was hoping for.


Boil water for the noodles, but reduce the heat to a parboil (about medium) before putting the noodles in. They cook pretty fast, but I was so occupied making constant batches that I don't really know how fast. I had some dough left over, so I'm going to try to freeze it. We'll see how that goes.


Since I was scooping the pasta out instead of straining the whole pot (I wanted to keep it boiling to do more batches), I dried the noodles out by putting them in a cast iron pan on low heat. Since I was ready to cook with them, I added a bit of oil and soy sauce, and they lost the extra water. I cooked some chicken in teriyaki sauce and a spoonful of garlic-ginger paste, then added the noodles back in. Delish.





*Yes I'm aware of what it's called. My partner's gramma often asks him "What's the google" and I think it's funny.

Cupcakes!

I made cupcakes for my friend Emily's birthday/farewell party on Saturday night. I used her grandmother's cake recipe for the cupcakes and a basic cream cheese icing recipe* for the icing. I also got an icing caulk gun for about $9 from Target (a cheaper version of this one) and used princess theme cupcake papers with pink sugar sprinkles. The cupcakes were a giant hit, and everyone got to try a small one before we sang happy birthday and ate the big ones.

The picture is blurry because I accidentally dipped the camera part of the phone in the icing on the ride over...and then licked it off.

Then I cleaned the camera off and took this hilariously intense picture. There are also several pictures of people eating cupcakes gleefully.

Success!


*Beat 8 oz. cold cream cheese (not rock solid, but it means you can use it straight out of the refrigerator) with 5 Tbsp. softened butter and 2 tsp. vanilla until combined. Gradually add 2 c. powdered sugar that has been sifted after measuring. Continue to add more sifted powdered sugar until you reach a consistency and sweetness that fits your taste.

Bagels!

I made bagels tonight! E and I tried to make some a year or so ago, and they did not work out well. We haven't tried since. But tonight, I wanted a bagel. There are no bagel places in town now that the recession took out the local family-owned bagel shop, and store-bought bagels are an entirely different food. So I found this recipe and decided to give it a go. Here's how it went.

4 cups bread flour

1 Tbls sugar

1 1/2 tsps salt

1 Tbls vegetable oil

2 tsps instant yeast

1-1/4- 1-1/2 cups of warm water

We put all the ingredients into the bowl of my stand mixer, attached the dough hook, and mixed it on "stir" speed. I added the extra 1/4 cup of water and pushed the speed up one level. The mixer is a pretty good one, but it wasn't liking the stiffness of the dough, so I kneaded it in there for about five minutes and then took it out and kneaded it by hand for another three or four. It got to the smooth point, and I cut it into eight equal sized balls. The plan was to let it rest for 15 minutes, but one thing led to another and I didn't get back to it for about an hour and a half. It had a slight crust over it, which may have happened even without the extra time, so I'm going to try putting a towel over it next time. Anyway, we followed the rest of the instructions:

Pre heat your oven to 425.

Now, take each of the dough balls and using two hands, roll it into a little snake on the counter. When the snake is longer than the width of your two hands, wrap it around your dominant roiling hand. The dough rope should be wrapped so the overlapping ends are together at your palm, near the start of your fingers. Now take the two overlapping ends, and use your palm to squish/roll these two ends together.

Let your bagels rest on the counter for about 20 minutes, and meanwhile, bring a pot of water to boil, and grease a large baking tray lightly. You can just rub a splash of vegetable oil and rub it around.

After the 20 minute wait, your bagels will start to look puffy, and it's time to get them boiling! Add them as many at a time as you can to your boiling water without crowding them. Boil for about a minute, turn them over, and boil for another minute. Take them out a let dry for a minute and then place them on your oiled baking tray. Repeat until all the bagels are boiled.

Add the tray to the oven, and after 10 minutes, flip the bagels over, bake for another ten minutes; and they're done!

Let them cool for at least 20 minutes.

You can add any toppings you like to these. To make sesame, onions, poppy seed, caraway etc. etc. bagels just have a dry plate ready with the seed or spice topping spread out on it. After the bagels have come out of the boiling water, place them face down onto the seeds, and then place the seed side up onto the baking tray. Bake and flip as for plain bagels. 

I timed the boiling for precisely one minute on each side because that seems to be where we went wrong last time. We made four plain, two with dried onion and garlic, and two with cinnamon-sugar. The toppings didn't go so well. They all burned, and turning them over at the halfway point didn't work. Our oven rack was also too close to the bottom, so most burned a little. There was a round cake pan left in the oven from another recipe that requires a water-filled pan to be underneath the bread, and we just never got around to taking it out. The bagels that cooked over that pan didn't burn on the bottoms.

Anyway, they're amazing. And if I don't go ahead with the other six businesses I really want to start, I'm totally going to start the Fort Snuggle Bagel Bakery. (Fort Snuggle is what we call our house. The Fort Snuggle Auxiliary Extension is what we call our chicken coop.) Come to think of it, we're going to a garage sale tomorrow that a bunch of friends are having... I should whip up another batch...

New Years Revolution

I spent most of January thinking about my New Years resolutions, and I've got my work cut out for me. I'm already working on some things with emotional stability, jealousy (as in, have less), and independence, but those are my constant life's work. Ditto with trying not to plan the future so much that I ignore the present. (If that were a marketable skill, I would have my pick of the job market.) Here are the things that are going to be my real things this year:

-Reduce/eliminate overdraft fees. This is embarrassing as hell, but in 2008 I lost about $3,000 to overdraft fees. Last year was less, but was still over $1,000. Some of this is bad bank practice, but if that was the only problem, I'd be under $100. I'm good at budgeting, but I get avoidant when I think my balance might be getting low. Time to keep to my budget instead of just having one, no matter how pretty the budget is.
-Keep up with birthday and special occasion cards. I have a slew of cards that I've gotten from work over the last few years, and it's time that I start keeping up with my cousins and good friends. Got the first two done -- my friend Brooke and my cousin Cheryl both had birthdays in January. I asked for addresses when I was doing holiday cards, and I've been putting birthdays in my calendar.
-Make more bread. I learned to make bread about a year ago, but I want to be able to do it regularly and with variation. I don't have a bread machine, but maybe I'll ask for one for my birthday. Ditto a standing mixer.
-Perfect a vegetarian version of Italian wedding soup. Chickpeas, fake meatballs, vegetable stock, fake-beef stock, fake-chicken stock, whatever. I got close a few years ago, but I really really want to figure it out. And when I do, I'll make it for the holidays this year!

sweet and sour sauce

I'm craving sweet and sour sauce, and this isn't a rare occurrence. I found several recipes that I plan to smoosh together. After much trial and addition (didn't scrap it at all), here's what I came up with:

2 tbs green onion (the white part), chopped
1/4 c white vinegar
3/4 of a green bell pepper, chopped
2 tbs tomato paste
1/2 c water
1 tbs garlic-ginger paste
3 tbs brown sugar (packed)
1 tsp granulated
1/2 c soy sauce
2 tbs lemon juice

This went far enough to cover chicken and faux abelone-seitan and rice for five people. It took a while of adding things for it to come out good and strong, so it ended up with a slightly smoky flavor. Ideally, I'd rather not overcook it, and I would use pineapple juice instead of lemon.

For the chicken and seitan, I chopped them into bite-size pieces and dipped them in beaten egg and then in flour, then fried them in just enough oil to cover the bottom of the cast-iron pan.