Second Holiest!

So I was really nervous and contemplating my dish all day, “Is it too one-note?”, “Do people know about parsnips?”, “Will all the DC foodies come and judge me?”, and it turned out that all my negative thoughts were ‘gunisht’ as my Mama would say. Out of the 16 chefs, all of whom created fabulous potato dishes, I placed second! I won my first ever full-body apron and also a gift certificate for a strange place called Potato Valley. How fitting.

Anyways, below is the recipe I used, tweaked a bit from its original form.

3 yukon potatoes, peeled and chopped
6 parsnips, peeled and chopped
2 small onions, chopped
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley leaves

6 oz. unsalted butter, preferably organic
1 qt.minus 1/2 cup vegetable stock
1 1/2 cups apple cider
1/3 cup heavy cream

1/2 tsp Oregano

Salt and Pepper to taste

Holy Chef: Battle of the Spuds

I am super excited to announce that I have entered into my first ever cooking contest. Hosted by the uber-hip synagogue cum church cum synagogue Sixth and I, the “Battle of the Spuds” takes place this coming Sunday, December 13th, at 7 pm inside the shul’s lovely walls. I have chosen to prepare a Potato Parsnip Apple Bisque because I’m fascinated with parsnips and am still clinging to the Autumn season (what can I say, I’m from California and do not understand cold weather), and I think a warm dish will feel excellent in the bellies of the foodies traveling from all over to attend the event.

Usually a baker, I was stumped in thinking of a dish that would showcase “potato-ey goodness” (my own rephrasing of the cooking prompt). Also the dish must be prepared inside my kitchen, so the idea of re-heating a quiche or a phyllo dough creation in a microwave made chills run down my spine.

Tonight I am having friends over to “test” the dish and give suggestions for improvement. I hope they have discriminating taste buds because I’m out to win!

More updates on the cooking process tonight. Wish me luck!

Photos from the test batch are below:

Baby’s First Thanksgiving- Day 2

I stayed up too late last night watching “How To Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It)”, a film about the author/filmmaker/options trader/lady’s man Melvin Van Peebles, on instant netflix. What a man! Seriously, he began working on Wall Street because he lost a bet to a friend, and then became so successful he wrote a book about it. I felt very unaccomplished after watching this film, so I decided to jumpstart my Day 2 prep at 1 am. I chopped up a bunch of celery finely for the stuffing, and then I got sleepy so I retired.

Here is the plan of attack for the day! Eat time is tentatively 5 pm. Since my turkey, who I’ll name…Shazam, is only 10.5 lbs, he only needs to cook for about 2 hours. I don’t want to make him too early because then he’ll get cold early, so I think he will enter the oven fully stuffed at 2 pm, so I can carve at 4:30ish/5. I should make my stuffing at noon and then begin the procedure of dealing with Shazam’s innards. Maybe I’ll go buy gloves.

Since it’s only 10 am now, I can’t do much for another hour or two, so I believe I will go back to snuggling in bed, since my other half is still inside.

12 noon update: I’ve made the stuffing, and it tastes AMAZING. So few ingredients, yet so succulent already. I cubed and toasted hot dog buns as bread crumbs, since Safeway didn’t have pre-packaged crumbs, and Serious Eats said it was a good idea. I chopped up two onions quickly with the aid of Colin’s safety goggles, and threw them with the celery in a buttered sizzling pan. Add some salt, fresh pepper, and THYME, apparently the other secret ingredient of my family’s traditional Thanksgiving, and cook until translucent. I tossed that mixture over the toasted hot dig bun bread crumbs and voila! Now it is sitting in a bowl and waiting for me to begin working with Shazam. Apparently I need more like 3 hours to cook, so I better get a move on!

Baby’s First Thanksgiving- Day 1

Here I am, Wednesday morning, still doe-eyed from our first night of hamster-sitting, yet strangely moved to begin Thanksgiving preparations. This will be only the second or third time I have contributed to a Thanksgiving meal in a non-place setting capacity, and I am going all out. Here’s the plan: Turkey, Stuffing, Cranberry Relish, Gravy, Sweet Potatoes with Marshmallows, and a Pecan Pie.

So far, I’ve made the pie crust, my first ever crust (aside from pizza) made in the food processor. What a wonderful tool. The buttery disc is now chilling in the fridge, and I will bake the pie around 3 or 4 this afternoon. The recipe comes from Dorie Greenspan’s “Baking”, and she says the pie is most flavorful when room temperature. I just boiled my sweet potatoes and peeled the skins off. I’m preparing them the same way my Mom used to: this way. I will put everything in the dish and top with with the lil white fluffers, and wait to bake it until about 4 pm tomorrow.

I’ll be updating with pictures as I go, so be on the look out!

As of 3 pm today, I have all but baked the sweet potato dish. It was fairly easy to make, and had relatively few ingredients, so that one’s all set! Unfortunately, this Pecan Pie is giving me hell! Well, the crust is. I’ve always been “on the edge” with crusts (pun?), and I thought I would have a great time using the processor to make the dough, and it would be a cinch to roll out and bake with. Not so! The processor yielded so many butter clumps (as you can see), but I wasn’t worried because Dorie Greenspan said “this was okay” in her book. I rolled it out with minor difficulty, patted it into shape into my glass Pyrex 9 inch pie pan, left it in the freezer for 30 minutes, and then took it out to bake. When I placed it in the oven for just five minutes, I opened the door to find a soggy, oily mess of a crust, shrunken down into the bottom, perhaps out of terror?

My guesses what what happened: Pre-baking at 425 degrees is too hot. Maybe I left it in too long, about 6 minutes? I didn’t use my pie weights. The glass material when slightly frozen was not conducive to a pre-bake. These are all just ideas, so I’m not really sure why this happened. Whatever the issue was, I obviously had to make a new crust. I turned to my old faithful recipe. I’ve now rolled it out and placed it in the pan, and am considering not pre-baking it at all, just because I’m kind of terrified of this happening again. Pictures below and an update in a few hours:

7: 40 pm Update: After yet another semi-failed crust, I decided that the most important part of Pecan Pie is the filling. And so, I poured the gooey pecan-y (and semi chocolatey!) mixture into the second crust, hoping that with 35 minutes in the oven, magic would happen. I won’t be able to tell you if the pie is a success until tomorrow, but it looks pretty good now.

The last dish I made tonight the Cranberry relish, a side which has no real recipe but is rather a mixture of 5 ingredients in my family tradition. Cranberries, oranges, water, sugar, and SURPRISE!!!! Cherry Jello??? How strange. I am a little grossed out to know that this was the secret taste lurking in my taste buds for the past twenty years, but so be it. It came out a little on the liquidy side, but given that the Fifth Element is a gelatinous agent, I’m sure it will firm up in a few hours.

The rest of tonight will be cleaning the apartment, since the Luv Dungeon will have 6 guests for dinner and 4 more for dessert!

 

Pizza: A Rising Star in My Kitchen

I essentially decided to make pizza because of Tori Amos. Here’s what happened. My internship at AAM in New York two summers ago provided me some sweet hook-ups with free concert tickets, cds, etc. I even had the chance to meet a few bands while there, an opportunity I relished. I learned here first that being in the music industry was a dream of mine, and I’ve held fast to this goal with my work at WVAU and in my internship with Carpark Records. But back to Tori…

When I left AAM and returned to school, I had become friends with my boss, who was very sweet underneath his hard ass exterior. Ok, he was never a hard ass. But it makes for a better sounding character, doesn’t it? Dave and I have corresponded back and forth over the year, and a few weeks ago he called me out of the blue. “Please, find somebody to take these two Tori Amos tickets off my hands!”

Ordinarily, Dave and AAM work to promote awesome artists, most of whom I’d love to see in concert. However, on the occasion, they have to scratch the backs of untalented bands who utilize their services. Such was the case in the opening band for Tori Amos.

Colin and I put on our thinking caps and scratched our heads until we could think of who among our groups of friends would possibly want tickets to Tori Amos and Co. It dawned on Colin that his uber-feminist Vegan friend Laura might want it. When he called, she was absolutely thrilled with the opportunity and snatched up both tickets quickly.

As a thank you for our generosity (my luck and in with the music biz), Laura had both of us over to her apartment for dinner. And thus, the connective tissue of the story: her husband Zac made
us all pizza that was out of this world delicious (and vegan!)

I was so impressed that he made literal pizza, a food I only associate with cardboard boxes and late night cravings, that I convinced myself I should try as well. My kitchen is twice the size of theirs, and I had the luxury of using  animal products. Truth to be told, making pizza was a cinch. The biggest obstacle is the obsessive kneading and the waiting time it takes for the dough to rise.

I followed the recipes for the dough and the sauce from Baking Illustrated, which is probably my favorite cookbook in my still infantile collection. I carry many types of flour in my pantry, but I have never used bread flour before. I am still unclear on the differences in flours, but owning this one adds more possibilities for my kitchen experimentations! I used my food processor for the dough, which came together in just ten pulses. The dough, which is of course yeasted, grew to double the size within two hours, and a simple downward punch deflated it into a workable mass for stretching into a pie. Although the book recommends to make your pizza in circular form, I opted for the ever more radical triangle-rectangle shape.

The red sauce was super easy to make. I processed a can of diced tomatoes (probably could have used regular tomatoes too), threw that in a saucepan of heated garlic and oil, and let heat and think out for 15 minutes. Simple.

I topped the first pie with carmelized onions, the second with red bell pepper and whole garlic cloves, and the third with all three toppings. I used the same mix of mozzarella and parmesan cheeses, mostly because Colin doesn’t fancy Ricotta and it is expensive.

Needless to say, the pizzas were a spectacular hit, and I look forward to being more inventive with toppings and perhaps even with dough. Mini pizzas, anyone?

The frosting gods are against me!

I don’t know why, but every time I make a cake or cupcake, I make a terrible accompanying frosting. Sure, it looks shiny, but it’s usually gross. I’ve made everything from cream cheese frosting to buttercreams, even a sour cream- based chocolate for tonight’s birthday cake (both recipes from the famous blog Smitten Kitchen)! I think I need to watch a master baker at work and learn the secrets, because whatever I am doing is failing. Pictures below from aforementioned celebration cake.

Flaurie and the Giant Peach (Thief)

My darling mother Flaurie popped on over to the East Coast (least coast) this past week for a splendid visit. I enjoyed her company very much, and I wined and dined her all over town to my favorite eating establishments (Open City, Busboys & Poets, Dos Gringos, Founding Farmers). Her visit coincided with the birthday of my dear friend Leslie, to whom I had vowed to make a peach pie.

I rather enjoyed the process of baking with peaches. For one, they are so juicy and their “natural essence” really spreads. Secondly, it was fun to blanche a fruit. I’ve blanced veggies and nuts, not never a fruit. The process of blanching makes even the hardest peaches soft, and it allows for easy skin removal. Below are pictures of the naked fruits. I used a mix of Yellow and White peaches, all purchased from Eastern Market. I thought the White peaches were especially spectacular looking.

Tragedy struck, and my crust baked itself. I was using my faithful Butter Crust recipe (which I used because it gives directions for a stand mixer, and I only recently bought my food processor), which calls for a double crust. I only want the bottom crust, so I halved the recipe. Inevitably, the proportions weren’t correct, and the crust melted to the bottom of the pie pan and oozed its buttery bad self. When such events take place, it is important to always have brown sugar and oats on hand! Right then and there, it became COBBLER TIME.
The following photographic journey captures the afternoon event.

Two white on the left, four yellow peaches on the right. Just like apple pie, recipes call for 7-8, but you only need 5-6.

Flaurie In all Her Glory (ie looking up the weather on her iPhone)

Peaches, sugar, corn starch (which made it kind of gelatinous)

RIP Crust

Ghost of Ty Cobb(ler)

Leslie eats the first slice

Summertime, Livin is E-Z

Hello, faithful readers! How odd that the time this here blog began one year ago is the time I would drop completely off the face of the blogosphere (well, blogs that require more than 140 characters). Anywho- it is high time I began to showcase my baked goodies once again. At this exact moment, I have my second ever yeast bread in the oven, my first Brioche. A brioche is a traditional French sweet bread famous for its high egg and butter content. Although I’ve been baking my fair share of Vegan delights, this one is impossible to replicate without the help of some animals. I’ll let you know how it comes out as an edit later.

Aside from this bread, I enjoyed a baking renaissance over the weekend, the all-American July 4th. I obviously bought a bag of 12 apples, and knew that whatever I made would come out patriotically delicious. I stumbled upon this recipe for Mini apple pies, and thought it was just about the cutest thing I’d ever heard of. I love the idea of making miniature versions of normally larger nom-noms. I used my crust dough and made 4 inch and 3 inch cut-out circles, creating the mini-crusts, and filled each with two tablespoons of appley goodness. Most of mine came out delicious, if not a little strange-tasting. You see, I did not have any butter in the house, and I compromised by baking with the 3 leftover sticks of Vegan butter I bought to make a coconut pie for my pal Benji’s birthday. I think that maybe only I could tell something was off in the taste, because party-goers ate them up without question.

I also decided to make an apple crumble, also with Vegan butter in place of the real stuff. I’ve made crumbles a few times, and this was THE BEST one yet. I think I finally perfected the ratio of flour, oats, and brown sugar. The secret is: the more oats the better.

I’ll post more topic-ally soon, just wanted to revive this puppy before I lost it to the internet devils or whatnot.

Delectable pie with surprise orange zest!

Banana Wheat Germ Muffins

Lost Coconut Cream Pie (vegan)

Mini pies without top crusts

TOO CUTE TO EAT???

Flaky and scrumptious!

First ever Chocolate Chip cookies VEGAN STYLEY with walnuts, also note the use of Jacques Torres chocolate chips

Brioche temperature-taking. FALSE ADVERTISING. Was gooey in middle despite high temp.

What a beaut. Good enough for eating.

If you go to Baltimore for the weekend, you’re gonna return to stale bread. Brioche french toast is the answer!

Brioche temperature-taking. FALSE ADVERTISING. Was gooey in middle despite high temp.

What a beaut. Good enough for eating.

If you go to Baltimore for the weekend, you're gonna return to stale bread. Brioche french toast is the answer!

Community Cookbooks

As my final project for my Contemporary Ethnographies class, I’d like to share my experiences as a baker exploring new recipes. We just finished reading Triple-A all-star/ hottie Setha Low’s most recent publication “Behind The Gates”, an ethnography which explores the lives, lifestyles, and fears of those who chose to live in gated communities all around the country. While not my favorite reading for the course, it explores vital issues such as the significance of safety and security and the meaning of community.

I attempted to find a cookbook that a gated community published, and my inquiries led me to the Hollywoodland Homeowners Association, who made a “unique” product for sale at $15.00. Professor Williams was kind enough to purchase it for me, but it did not arrive in time to be able to cook from it.

Instead, I will be bringing in delights from what I consider to be the antithesis of the gated community: the cooperative. Co-ops have various meanings, but the best summation, courtesy of Wikipedia, is an “autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise”.

In co-ops that I am familiar with, such as the Park Slope Food Co-op, or the Stanford student house, the “Enchanted Broccoli Forest”, there is a definite sense of community because every member works and participates to ensure the proliferation of a common good.

For my project, I baked my first cornbread ever from Mollie Katzen’s famous “Moosewood Cookbook”, the original cookbook of the Moosewood collective in Ithaca, NY. She has gone on to write many more books, including “Enchanted Broccoli Forest”, which the Stanford house gets its name from. I also baked Vegan Chocolate Crinkles, a recipe which linked from Eco-Vegan, a site which documents the culinary trials of  a vegan organic co-op. It’s worth noting that their website is easy to find, and shares its recipes for free, proving an emphasis on shared knowledge rather than exclusionary practice

Pictures to come!

Of owls and ponytails

The last month or so has reaped some notable occasions which have deserved creative efforts in baking and decorating. WVAU, my beloved radio station, held its final Capitol Punishment show in late March. We brought together Mittenfields (local DC band), Screaming Females (New Brunswick trio with riotgrrrl frontwoman), and Ponytail (art rock quartet from Baltimore). It was by far our best show all year, and I was pleased with our audience turnout, a mix of crust punks and musaq fans. I decided to commemorate the event by baking a chocolate sheet cake and painting my version of Ponytail’s most recent album cover on it. Ponytail was impressed and delighted by my efforts; the bassist’s girlfriend even works at Ace of Cakes!

Another date I wanted to celebrate was the birthday of my dear friend Allison, aka “Gaffney/Gaffers/Gaff/Owlisson”. To make a long story short, I had to bake her something relating to owls. I finally mustered up the courage to use my Hello, Cupcake books, and used their baby and mama owl design to create a menagerie of talon-ed friends. I used oreos for eye balls, junior mints for the eyes, banana runts for the nose, and general frosting piped everywhere for ears, hair, and tufts.

I had to use so many food coloring combinations

Owly faces before they're on cupcakes

Triplet sibling owls without beaks- hoot hoot hoot

The whole family in their nest