I’m having e-mail problems, so I have to potspone the sending of the first newsletter until next week. This will also give anyone who didn’t know about it or was hesitating to join the list before it goes out. Just fill out the form in the sidebar for the mailing list. 
Categories: No Photos · Site-Related
If you’re currently on the mailing list, you got an e-mail last week explaining how I intend to have a trial run of writing a bi-weekly newsletter to the list. It won’t necessarily be food-related, but whatever I happen to feel like writing about every other week. If it seems to get a positive response, I might make it weekly.
So I’m going to give all my visitors the chance to sign up now before I send out the first “issue”–press time being set for this coming Friday. Just fill out that there form in the sidebar to the right to subscribe to the mailing list and get my newsletter. Oh, and be sure to add my e-mail address–melody@liquidstar.org–to your whitelist to make sure it doesn’t get filtered as SPAM, if you have such mail filters.
Categories: No Photos · Site-Related
As if I needed even more sweet, bready, browned lumps of dough, tonight I baked up a batch of apple coffee cake muffins. I actually do need them, though–to take with me to a party tomorrow. The professor for the drawing class I’ve been a TA (teaching assistant) for this semester likes to turn the final critiques for her classes into food parties. Since there’s a lot more space in the ceramics studio for a nice buffet spread, we really go all out in there with everything from appetizers to dessert all brought in by the students. However, the drawing studio has basically just one small stand we could put food on, plus it doesn’t get thoroughly scrubbed top to bottom like we do to the ceramics studio before the final crit, so bringing a lot of food isn’t really…safe.
So we’re just having a small breakfast party. One student is picking up bagels, another cream cheese and butter, Toby (the professor) is bringing orange juice and utensils, and I offered to bake muffins. Starting with a recipe from my now-beloved Martha Stewart Baking Handbook–no joke, I’ve been turning to this book whenever I’m looking to bake something because if she hasn’t included a recipe for what I want, she’s at least offered some tips on how to make it perfect–I modified it to use a fruit that is actually in season: apples. The result?
A nice big tub full of mini apple coffee cake muffins. 
One suffered severe decapitation during my attempt to remove it from the muffin pan, so in its beheaded, dual-part state, it succumbed to the wrath of my tummy. These muffins can be very well summed-up in one word: fantabulous. While not quite like a coffee cake, they definitely have the flavors of one, and they bake up with such a light, delicate, airy, and very moist crumb that I could’ve easily devoured more if it wasn’t for the fact that they are already spoken for. It’s sad that food has to have a designated purpose for me to not eat it. Like the two remaining Portuguese sweet muffins all wrapped up and metaphorically labelled “Robyn’s” for when I see her on Friday. Otherwise they’d be swimming in my tummy with more maple syrup. Mmm.
So hopefully my students will like these tender little morsels as much as I do. Mostly because I really don’t need to be bringing home a ton of super-yummy muffins tomorrow that no longer have any kind of reservation placed on them… ;x
For some reason, I’ve apparently had a need for sweet bread-type things this past week. Last Wednesday, I made some sweet Indian roti, I mixed them up again on Friday, and today I cooked Portuguese sweet muffins. At this point, though, I can say that I am quite thoroughly breaded out. Oi. However, I did reach this point of sweet bread saturation quite deliciously, as you’ll see.
The roti is really nice to quickly satiate a sweet bread craving attack. Flour, salt, water, and sugar is all you need along with a little bit of time to mix the first three into a dough, roll them, sprinkle with the sugar, fold up, and roll out again before pan-grilling. They come out chewy and light, with fabulous layers of gooey sugar. For variation on Friday, I added a tiny bit of sugar to the flour and salt for the dough along with some oil before the water. The oil makes for a more tender bread that is easier to flatten. However, for some reason the sugar-laminating doesn’t work quite as well. Some seems to get…absorbed by the bread and it starts to brown before all of the sugar gets a chance to become melty. I think I like them without the oil better, though maybe if I’m particularly wanting a tender bread, I’d go with the oil.
As for other tender breads, today’s Portuguese sweet muffins were a fantastically fun and delectable adventure! I’ve had a packet of yeast lying around since I bought one from my sister over a week ago, and I just couldn’t decide what to make with it. Today, it came to me in a sudden craving for the Portuguese sweet muffins my dad used to regularly buy from Trader Joe’s (a natural foods supermarket chain). After searching high and low–or really, just a few minutes at AllRecipes.com–I came upon this recipe that, aside from a lack of lemon, looked like it would at least come pretty close.
It surpassed Trader Joe’s by galaxies. While I would appreciate the addition of some lemon in these muffins, it certainly isn’t necessary. I can’t imagine it being removed from the Trader Joe’s version because it needs the freshness of the flavor to make up for the lack of freshness in the muffin. Seriously, now that I’ve gotten very confident in my bread-making ability with these muffins, I will never, ever buy packaged breads again. I so rarely get cravings for bread that it’ll be worth the time to spend baking my own. I get cravings for cakes and pastries much too often to completely exclude packaged stuff, though, as much as I prefer homemade. ;x
Being moist by nature, these muffins wind up with a completely different texture when packaged. The muffin becomes uniformly moist with tougher tops and bottoms in a package, whereas the fresh ones I made had a more extreme, pleasant contrast between the doughy, soft interiors and firm, dry tops and bottoms. Toasting is absolutely necessary for the Trader Joe’s muffins because the chewiness of the exteriors is just unpalatable right out of the bag, but I wound up eating my muffin sans toasting today. I think it could very well be enjoyed toasted, and at the same time, it isn’t a detriment to devour it as-is.
I didn’t quite consume it “as-is,” though. 
After tasting a small piece to see how it was plain, I had the sudden idea to top it with a little maple syrup and a pat of butter instead of my usual toasted-and-buttered treatment for the Trader Joe’s sub-pars. This concoction thus satisfied not only my desire for a sweet bread but also pancakes. While Portuguese sweet muffins are certainly not like a pancake, I almost exclusively have maple syrup on only either French toast or pancakes, so the association between “syrup” and “pancakes” is very strong in my mind. I’d never consider dressing a Trader Joe’s sad-excuse-for-a-muffin in this manner, though. I think I’ll stick to having those toasted-and-buttered.
So the moral of the story for all my bread-making recently is that if bread is on my mind, it’s time to whip out some mixing bowls, flour the table (the only flat surface large enough for kneading here–unfortunately), and heat up the stove or oven. Store-bought goods just aren’t worth it.
Categories: Breads · Breakfast Foods · Food Musings · Indian · Photos · Portuguese · Recipes · Side Dishes
More than any other cookie, my sister loves what are called either rainbow cookies or six/seven-layer cookies. Considering that, I had the idea to make her a rainbow cookie cake for her birthday today.
If you’re ever going to make these cookies–either in actual cookie form or a cake–I have one piece of advice for you: make sure you’ve invested in a good electric mixer first. Between thoroughly blending the almond paste with the sugar, then creaming the sugar-almond mixture and butter, and then beating egg whites to stiff, glossy peaks, I spent all morning yesterday from 7am until nearly 11 baking the layers for this cake. Let me tell you, bakers from the pre-electricity days must’ve been forces to reckon with, and I’d never want to run into one on a bad day. I’m more sore today from all that manual work than I’ve ever been after even the most serious strength-training workout.
Not only did I have to endure hours of hard mixing and beating, but less than two minutes into the baking adventure, I was left with a battle wound from the sharp edge of the can lid from the almond paste. Damn, that stuff is TOUGH and doesn’t like to come out of the can in the least! At the same time, it’s incredibly tasty, and I might just have to get more to make other things with, since it’s on sale at Waldbaum’s this week and all. Though, if I decide that what I’d really like is marzipan, I actually would just buy it instead of making it, despite what I said to a friend to the contrary recently. ;x After what I went through mixing the paste and sugar yesterday, I’ve decided it really is worth the extra twenty cents or so to pay for someone else to mix in the sugar and egg and corn syrup to make marzipan for me. I don’t need any more wounds anyway. ;P
So after going out to dinner at Red Lobster with my family (I had their Dockside Shrimp and Chicken entrée, which was very yummy and satisfying after purposely skipping my usually-late lunch in order to be sure I had an appetite for what was supposed to be an unusually-early dinner), we came back to the apartment to have the cake. My mom had brought with her candles, since I’d previously told her we didn’t have any here, and these were the niftiest candles ever! They came attached to glow stick candle holders! Even before the candles were lit the cake was all fancy and glowing! It was pretty.
Because there were friends having cake with us that needed to catch a train in short order, the dessert was cut and served quickly, and I received many compliments. Most importantly, my sister absolutely loved it, even before tasting any she was thoroughly impressed by just the concept. I have to say that even I am really pleased–I normally am not a fan of the cookie version, I think because packaged ones are often too dry, a common problem with cakes of this type. European sponge cake has a tendency to get dry quickly, but since these layers are intentionally underbaked–and because I am clearly an excellent baker ;]–in order to preserve their color and not get browned, they stayed really moist.
The crumb was nice and dense from the weighting process (the assembled layers are refrigerated at least 8 hours with a weight on top), but since it was formed with a sponge cake, there was still a certain lightness to it. Of course there was an almond flavor, but despite having both almond paste and almond extract, it was rather mild. Just enough to be noticeable but not confuse you as to why you are eating almonds but finding no actual nuts. The recipe called for apricot preserves, but since the apricot only came in 10-ounce jars instead of the 12-ounce jar called for, I wasn’t about to buy a whole other ten ounces when I only needed two more, so I subbed peach preserves, which did come in a 12-ounce size. A less punchy flavor, yes, but along similar lines and color, so it worked. Maybe next time I’ll make a half-recipe as cookies and buy the actual apricot.
As for the chocolate on top, that’s usually my least favorite part of these cookies-turned-cake, despite being a chocolate fiend. Mostly because I don’t care much for the texture of a bar of chocolate coupled with cake layers. Chocolate chips, chocolate flakes, or other such small pieces of solid chocolate are okay, but whole sheets of it just doesn’t appeal to me on a cake. However, I’d mixed in a little butter when I melted the bars of Lindt semi-sweet surfin chocolate with the intention of it keeping the coating slightly soft and thus easy to cut through without cracking all over the place. My idea worked beautifully, and I actually enjoyed the slightly softened texture with the cake. It wound up with a consistency somewhere between ganache and solid chocolate, so it didn’t defer too much from the traditional cookie but at the same time was more functional for a cake topping and more palatable to me.
All in all, I’d say this cake marks another fabulous baking success to add to my collection.
Yesterday, I was really feeling like chicken, and I still have quite a few onions left from the 5 pound bag I got on sale insanely cheap a few weeks ago, so I made them for dinner last night.
I took a couple of the onions (they’re small), peeled and sliced them, and sautéed them in a little butter. When they were getting caramelized, I added a little sesame oil and tossed in chunks of chicken breast. I seared that well and then finished cooking it all. Once I was confident the chicken was done, the pan was removed from the heat, and I added teriyaki sauce to deglaze the pan. Oh, deglazing…getting all those little browned bits off the bottom of the pan. You don’t get that with non-stick pans, oh, no. You need good stainless steel pans for that. And let me tell you, those tiny caramelized flecks of yumminess make me confident my $400 investment in a set of Calphalon pans was well worth it. :yum:
It was torturous giving it some time to rest and cool a bit, but it was so good I was bouncing while I ate it once I did. I’m incredibly proud of my ability to cook the chicken just right–all the way through, but still fantastically juicy and tender. And the onions…oh, the onions. I can–and have–been perfectly satisfied with a meal of caramelized onions. Balance, what? I don’t care. There’s nothing on the face of the earth like soft-but-al-dente onions that have been cooked until their natural sugars are in full force, browned and rich. It’s a guiltless treat, I say–they’re vegetables! And sweet like dessert! Woo!
Inspired by Robyn‘s recent ramblings, complaints, research, and so on about her paper on Japanese snack foods and their “kawaii” quality, I’d been wanting to try the banana-flavored Koala’s March cookies my sister had about a week ago but couldn’t bear to save any for me to try they were so delicious.
Suffering the higher cost here at the campus convenience store, I had a box in my possession after class yesterday. After opening the package, I was immersed in the scent of artificial banana flavoring. For someone highly allergic to and yet also highly fond of bananas, it’s about the closest I can usually get to eating them (cooked banana is okay, but since they have to be very thoroughly cooked, I tend to err on the side of caution and only eat even cooked ones when I’ve done the cooking and can be sure it’s well enough).
The first bite of one assured me that I would be fully satisfied with banananess and yummy-cookie-ness. The Japanese have an incredible knack for making cookies that are just a million times better than American packaged cookie products. And their creme fillings are perfect–in consistency and flavor–every time. For a processed, packaged food, they seem to come the closest to what I call the “realness” quality of homemade foods. When I eat an Oreo, it feels and tastes like I’m eating something that was pumped out by some machine in a factory. When a happy little Koala jumps in my mouth, it tastes fresh and yummy and delicious and oh, how I wish I could make these myself!
Today is my sister’s birthday. She’s turning 21 already, which means I will no longer get requests for bottles of vodka or beer or anything else when I’m going shopping. We’re going out to dinner with the rest of my family tonight, and she’ll be able to order a drink for herself instead of just tasting mine. And after we get back, dessert will be had here, in the name of an amazing creation of mine that took four and a half hours of manual labor and the suffering of blisters, a deep cut on my finger, and impossibly sore arms this morning to produce. I’m sure it will be worth it, though, and you can bet photos will be forthcoming.
Categories: Appetizers/Snacks · Food Musings · Main Meals · Photos · Poultry · Vegetables
My sister and I baked cinnamon rolls today, and I think I’ll just let the photos do all the talking…
My sister did most of the work–mixing, rolling, filling, cutting… I did the manual labor–kneading. And she was distracted at the critical point of just-out-of-the-oven-ness for the icing, so I was designated the Icer of the Rolls.
Today’s kitchen adventure has inspired me to do some of my own yeasted bread baking, so I think I’ll be getting some yeast for myself the next time I’m at the supermarket. It’s becoming quite apparent that my sister and I have completely opposite preferences when it comes to the mouthfeel of various foods, so it’ll be good for me to make some breads of my own. She made what she called a foccacia earlier in the week, but really it was a foccacia-turned-chewy-bread-as-per-Crystal’s-likes. ;P Not airy and light with a nice crust. And then there are our divergences on the topics of frosting amounts, cookie textures, and so on.
So I’m going to be baking some breads in the near future.
Finally, I figured I should balance out my day with something a bit more healthful, so after having probably one too many cinnamon rolls, I later made myself some sautéed onions with soba noodles for dinner. At least I found room for some veggies today, if it wasn’t anywhere near my normal level of vegetable consumption.
After I was done with work today, I went over to Waldbaum’s to buy the weirdest thing ever: three pounds of butter and a package of yeast, and I followed up that stop with a visit to the local Asian supermarket. For what, you may ask, was I in need of so much sweet dairy fat, dormant microorganisms, and non-Western goods?
I actually have no immediate need for such a large quantity of butter, but Waldbaum’s has it on sale this week for buy one get two free. That is an insanely amazing price for butter, so I figured I’d stock up. I enjoy baking, and that generally requires butter for the best-tasting results, so it’ll be useful to have around. I’ve got two of the pounds in the freezer, so they’ll keep for months yet. It’s all about getting good deals on pantry staples. ;]
As for the yeast, my sister’s been wanting yeast for a while now, and she kept forgetting to tell me so whenever I was going food shopping recently. I was thinking about it today, so I got it for her. I’m curious to see what exactly it is she needs microscopic fermenting factories for, but I guess I’ll find out soon enough!
Finally, the Asian grocery store was basically just for killing the 30 minutes I had left after my food shopping until the next bus back to campus would be going by. However, what began as an innocent visit to do a reconnaissance of what the store has as compared to what is contained in my growing knowledge of Asian foodstuffs became a TARO PURCHASING TRIP OF DOOM.
While passing by the refrigerated cases on the right side of the store, I came upon the so-labelled Steamed Taro Buns I’d spotted the last time I was there but forwent buying because I was on a mission to find sweet red bean paste or adzuki beans. This time, on the other hand, I had no such goal in mind, and so the last, lone package of hulking taro buns was quickly removed from it’s chill-house of solitariness into my possession for impending consumption.
The bus took seemingly forever to get to the stop I was waiting at, but that was certainly because I was impatient to steam up these buns and taste the taro-y goodness lurking inside. Almost as soon as I got back to my apartment, I set up a pot to steam them, and put two buns inside–one for me, and one for my sister’s friend Terry. Ten minutes later, we were both very happily devouring soft, moist, steamy buns of taroness.
When I say these buns are hulking, I mean they’re hulking. After it was steamed, the thing was easily the size of my fist. I wasn’t complaining, though! I certainly got my money’s worth with six of these insanely large buns for $2.75. After removing the paper lining from the bottom of the bun, ready to introduce it to my tummy, I was overwhemingly overjoyed to discover IT WAS ROLLED LIKE A CINNAMON BUN. I could PEEL IT APART INTO A SPIRAL.
So of course I did. ;D
Combined with the novelty of de-laminating the bun, the deliciousness of the barely-sweet, just-enough-taro-flavor mound of dough in front of me made this the most enjoyable non-cake-bread-eating experience I can remember. Forget about dinner rolls. Move over regular bread. Give me taro buns or give me…no bread! ;P
Once that entire hunk of taro bun delight was being submerged in tummy juices, I decided the steaming of another was in order. That’s how the trip to the Oriental Grocery became a Taro Purchasing Trip of Doom. While one bun was absolutely wonderful, two was…well, one too many, heh. I am so stuffed right now, but at least I am STUFFED WITH DELICIOUSNESS!!
Categories: Appetizers/Snacks · Breads · Chinese · Photos
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Twenty-something. Painter. Writer. IT Support Analyst by day, completely unpredictable by night. After spending a very character-building year... (read more »)