Pecan Pie

Pecan pie happens to be one of my favorite deserts - after carrot cake, of course. I made my first one yesterday. Lots of recipes call for corn syrup, which apart from being really bad for you, is also the poster child for everything wrong with the food industry, so I made one with honey instead!

Berry Good Pie

Two pies! Above - the raspberry-strawberry-rhubarb pie that I made last week. It was runny and I had to resort to desperate measures that involved performing extensive drainage operations. But, I'm pleased to say that this is the first pie where I'm happy with the crust. The key to good crust (for me): vodka. (What I lack in skill I make up for in exotic ingredients but there's a nice scientific explanation for using vodka - it evaporates quickly!) Having rhubarb in a pie was something I had to do having read about rhubarb and heard about it all my life. Turned out to be a nicely tart combination. Below - I made this 'largely blueberry pie' today with the berries we had left in the fridge and freezer. To circumvent the runny insides, I used a corn-starch filler recipe, and for double insurance, made a crumb top so that the juices could evaporate.

Recent Kitchen Exploits

Just messing around with the slideshow function in Picassa. So 1. I made quiche just so I could experiment more with pie-crusts. Making good pie crust has become the Holy Grail of my baking endeavors. This attempt wasn't great - too crumbly. 2. That's almost entirely homemade bruschetta. The bread was sliced and toasted from a homemade baguette, the basil and tomatoes were from the plants we've been nurturing since May. Now if only I could get a cow to fit on the balcony then we'd have homemade cheese as well ... but this was excellent smoked cheddar from the MSU Diary Store. 3. More bread - focus on the pan, not my strange "I'm-trying-to-look-pleased-with-my-efforts" semi-grin. Crusty dinner rolls this time, superb with any kind of stew!

"They're GREEN ... but chewy ..."

So, I decided to do something different after the moderate success of the fruit tart (which is still sitting in the fridge, tempting me to pack on the calories every time I open it ...) Edna likes chewy oatmeal raisin cookies, and I figured that to increase my chances of making something that she would find palatable (and thus not end up eating everything myself), I'd make those.
To add to the interest value of the project, I decided that I'd substitute butter with avocado. As every avid reader of SHAPE magazine knows, avocado is supposed to be a great substitute for butter -- and Edna reminded me. However, we didn't remember which issue actually had a recipe, and instead of flipping through a year's worth of magazine's, I decided, totally arbitrarily, that

1 Avocado = 1 stick of butter

So, the first instruction was something like "whip butter until creamed ..." and I'm like, ok, how does one do that with two somewhat mushy avocados? I ended up cutting them into small bits with my now trusty pastry cutter, and stirring them vigorously. Despite having religiously done bicep curls and miscellaneous arm moves for a while now, my forearms were getting tired with the whisk I was using (Someone should work out the Cook's Work Out). An amazing thing happened, however, after I added sugar and continued stirring vigorously: the mixture actually did become a little fluffy! Which was the very moment when I realized that I'd forgotten to buy the OATS from Meijer ... Thankfully, oats ARE a low-cost convenience food and I managed to walk out to a nearby gas-station and get a tub of good old Quaker Oats (who says gas-stations only stock junk food ....)

Anyway, the cookies are great, even if their odd shape illustrates how aesthetically challenged I am. As Edna put it, some of them are monstrously large - but at least now I can eat just one cookie and say that it was satisfying ... They don't taste too rich, because there isn't any butter in them and they're extremely moist and chewy. Of course, they are really quite green!

Getting Flaky?

Having recently finished a chapter of the dissertation, I decided to do something different for the next few days before starting up again. I ended up making a fruit tart today. I was pretty keyed up to do this - I even went out and got a pastry cutter to make sure that I wouldn't smear the butter. It turned out quite nicely, except that my inexperience with pie crusts meant that it definitely could have been much more flaky - I think I added too much water in trying to get the dough to "come together" cause I don't think I worked it too hard. But I've done my homework (by watching videos on crust making technique - though it's pretty unbelievable how these people get the dough to stay together with the tiny amounts of water they use ... ) and I'm going to try this again ... soon! And I'll make sure I do fancy edges the next time! Still, the tart IS really yummy - at least Edna thinks so!

Paella!

I finally took the plunge and tried cooking paella last night. I'd been fascinated by the dish since my first encounter with it in a Cuban restaurant in mid-town Manhattan. It was really a slice of heaven -- great tasting rice with sausage and seafood on top, all served in a huge platter. I was further intrigued by the fact that saffron is required to make it, saffron being that really expensive spice. Anyway, the paella I made ended up okay ... not spectacularly flavorful or anything but still something I was pretty pleased with. (And by the way, that glass of pink juice in the background, is grapefruit. It's our drink of choice now since we can get 18 pound bags -- about 20 + grapefruit -- for five bucks ....)

Those burnt bits of rice from the bottom of the pan are supposed to be highly prized .... Given that connection, I now tend to think of paella as a Spanish version of claypot chicken rice. I guess that's one way to navigate around a world of food ....

There we have it -- the world's most expensive spice. I managed to get this one gram jar for about 5 bucks. Which means an ounce of the stuff costs well over 100 dollars ...!

Sinfully Singaporean

This blog has seen just about everything: the blues, attempts at literary and cultural criticism, frustrated rants, ecstatic verbal experiments, nasty comments, and even ruder rebuttals, flurries of readership, no readership, strange ideas, funky pictures, and even songs about dogs. But nothing will prepare you for what is about to be unveiled.

Since John is visiting from Chapel Hill, where he hasn't had much of an opportunity to eat Singaporean food (and faces half a year more of meal-plan fare when he goes back), I became obsessed with the idea that we should make something sinfully Singaporean. While he's been here, we've done Hainanese Chicken Rice, regular Chinese stir fry stuff, Assam fish curry, herbal chicken soup, and a range of different noodles .... So it only seemed natural that we cook the ultimate male-Singaporean fantasy: Kong Bak Pau.

The run up to the Kong Bak Pau. Under Edna's directions (and a phone call home to her mom), I decided to stew the thing overnight. So the Kong Bak project became strangely tied into the Bak Kut Teh he had the night before. I cooked both simultaneously, but the photos really concentrate on the Kong Bak.

The Bak Kut Teh:
Easy and yumy. Just tossed in lots of garlic with the packaged mixes and spare ribs. We tossed in chicken (for Edna, who was thoroughly disgusted with all the pork being processed for consumption ...)and some taupok squares. We managed to find Yu Teow (which were packaged as "chinese doughnuts") at the Oriental Mart and though they were a little dense, they worked nicely with the Bak Kut Teh.









The Kong Bak.
So, the pictures pretty much speak for themselves. I had a great time cooking it, especially grossing everyone out with how much fat there is on belly pork. I managed to hew away quite chunk, and also scooped away lots of fat that coagulated on the stew. The seasoning was easy -- some dark soy sauce, cloves of garlic, two cinnamon sticks, and a splash of five-space powder. And the thing just stewed ...



















Preparing the sum jium bak. And soaking the dried mushrooms.
Sourdough swooning over the possibilities ...










The Kong Bak after several hours of stewing and refrigeration. The white stuff is all coagulated lard that needed scooping up. I think it looks like Chai Dao Kway.













Scraping away yet more fat. John getting ready to dig in -- or is it really a look of apprehension and fear of clogged arteries? Kong Bak Pau!