Ladder Kitty (Pets)

There don't seem to be many opportunities to get shots of the kitties being cute these days, since they are continually horribly oppressed by evil puppies. When I had to lock the dogs in the mud room this morning, it didn't take Scylla two minutes to find a ladder I'd just put out and zip to the top, the ladder teetering dangerously aware from the cabinets her whole way up. There were lots of cuter missed shots before and after this one -- this is why I normally rely on the wife for cute pet photos.

Sweet Potato Adventures (Chow)

The sweet potatoes we bought this Thanksgiving were unusually large. And then NDM's father turned up with two emergency backup sweet potatoes for some reason. The end result was three ginormous leftover sweet potatoes. (I put a quarter in there for context.)

Dish One
First, I thought I'd try a stab at sweet potato cookies.
I creamed ½c butter and ¼c granulated sugar and mixed in ¼c honey, 1t freshly grated nutmeg, 1t lemon peel, and 1 egg.
I grated one half of one of my smaller sweet potatoes, raw, about 1½c, and mixed that in.
Then I mixed together a dry bowl of 2½c all-purpose flour, 1½t baking powder, ½t baking soda, and ¼t salt and blended the whole mess together into a moist cookie dough.
I initially placed rounded balls about the size of walnuts on an ungreased cookie sheet. I baked them for 10m in a 350°F oven. When they were done I removed them to a wire rack for cooling.
When I saw how the first batch looked during cooking, I began to worry about the cookies ending up a bit raw in the center. Subsequent batches, I squished down the balls to make a more traditional cookie shape and to reduce the spherical interior volume.
As it turned out, it didn't make much difference. All of the cookies turned out about the same. They are only slightly sweet and have a delicate sweet potato flavor. They are very moist but have a fairly light consistency. Somewhere between a roll and a cookie, you could probably munch them any time of day. Yummy, but due to their high moisture content even after cooking I doubt they will keep long at all.

One sixth of my sweet potato problem down!

Dish Two

The next day NDM told me she wanted a spinach pasta dish of some kind for dinner. I of course assumed, unvoiced, was the request to jam as much sweet potato in there as humanly possible. Could I stuff all five sixth of my remaining sweet potato problem into a single dinner?

I started out by peeling my remaining sweet potatoes, slicing them up, and jamming them all into my pressure cooker with some water. In about 10 minutes they were done, and I decanted and mashed them and set them aside for cooking.
I decided to try two things, the first being a sweet potato roll to go along with the main dish. To make sure my yeast was mighty, I took ½c 110°F water and dissolved in 2¼t (1 package) active dry yeast and 1T granulated sugar. I let that stand 5m.
While I was waiting, I mixed up 3T melted butter, an additional 3T granulated suagar, 1t salt, and 2 eggs. I added 1½c cooked sweet potato.
After 5m the yeast had made a nice thick bubbly mixture that I folded into my proto-dough.
I added 3c of flour to make a sticky dough, then turned it out onto my counter to knead it a bit. I had miscalculated, and the dough was much too sticky for proper kneading, even with oiled hands. However, I was reluctant to add a lot more flour -- I think I might have even had to double it for a kneadable dough -- and throw off the balance of everything else in the dish. The roll suddenly became easier to make!
I used a scraper to move the dough into an oiled bowl, and manipulated it as well as a could with my club hands to get it greased all over. I covered the bowl loosely with plastic wrap and put it in a warm place to rise for 1h. Then I punched it down and let it rest for a few minutes.
The dough was very sticky and elastic, so I used two teaspoons to shape balls to drop into a small-chambered muffin tray that I normally use to make meatballs. There was a bit too much dough for one tray, so I also made some larger rolls in a normal muffin tray. I sprayed the trays first with an olive oil spray to aid in releasing the rolls.
I baked them in a preheated 375°F oven for 20m. The rolls were slightly difficult to remove and place on a wire rack; I had to use a teaspoon to help me disengage them from the trays. Probably should have used a release agent with some flour in it. The rolls ended up looking gorgeous, and they were delicious.

Dish Three

I had at least 4c of mashed sweet potato remaining for my main dish, and a pack of whole wheat gnocchi in the cupboard. This needed to combine with the two bags of pre-washed spinach I had picked up at the grocery. By this point I was getting a bit burnt out on cooking so I wanted to do something easy.
I raided the freezer for 1 strip of the bacon my wife keeps on hand for when I'm an unusually good boy and diced it fine. I also used a microplane grater on 5 cloves of garlic. I also started a large pot of water boiling for my gnocchi.
I poured about 3T of olive oil in a dutch oven over medium-high heat and threw the bacon and garlic in. I cooked it until just before the garlic was going to smoke; in retrospect, I should have put the bacon in earlier by itself so I could get it even crispier without endangering the garlic. In my defense, I was also wrangling sweet potato rolls at the same time.
Into this I threw handfuls of spinach and wilted it down until all the spinach was in the pot. I love watching spinach reduce and turn bright green! When it was all ready, I melted an extra 2T butter into the pot and then spooned in every last drop of my remaining mashed sweet potato seasoned with about ¾t salt and ½t freshly ground black pepper. I quickly boiled the gnocchi, drained them, and tossed them into the dutch oven as well.
So this was the spinach pasta meal I ended up serving. The store-bought gnocchi was surprisingly good, but the whole pasta dish itself I'd have to say was simply OK. It probably would have been greatly improved by more bacon more cooked, and perhaps some parmesan cheese as well. The sweet potato rolls were awesome.

And that is how easy it is to get rid of sweet potatoes!

From Paper To PDF

At the request of the wife, here is a quick OCR how-to.

1. The first thing we're going to get is some OCR software. There are lots and lots of different possibilities here, but we're going to go with something that also has a Twain engine to handle our scanning. We'd also like something that has fairly accurate translation. My choice: FreeOCR, which uses Google's open source Tesseract OCR engine. Click here to download the software.
   
2. Using FreeOCR is fairly simple. Make sure your scanner is set up properly. Click the Scan button to scan a page of your document; the scanned image will show up for verification in the left panel. If you like what you see, click the OCR button and the software will in due course display your text results in the right panel.
3. There is an option in the File menu to save the results out as text, or you can copy it to clipboard.

Not so hard to get some text onto the computer without spending any money. Other possible software choices include Microsoft's MODI, which most current Office users will already have, or SimpleOCR. Of course, if you're going to be trying to translate complex documents with lots of columns or layout issues, or perhaps something in Japanese, you'll need more specialized (and commercial) software.

But what if you need to scan something -- let's say a veterinary journal article -- and your goal is for it to end up as an editable PDF document. Well. There are a number of commercial packages that claim to do something like this. For money. All are very thin on examples of their effectiveness (and one detailed exampled confirmed my suspicion that no OCR actually takes place in its PDF conversion), but except for Acrobat they offer trial downloads. Since I don't happen to have a scanner connected to my computer, I'm forced to stop here. Sorry, wife!

Flowering Cactus

My cactus (mostly just succulents of course) have fallen on hard times over my last two moves, each house providing a progressively worse environment for them. Of course, when they are at their unhappiest, they are most likely to bloom. This one is just starting to bud out. I'm hoping my grandfather can help reidentify it for me from this picture.

Playing Catchup (Chow, Pets)

So it has been about two weeks since my last post, due to a combination of wifely vacation, guests, medical stuff, Thanksgiving, and laziness. Most of the really good dog-snoozing snaps are on the high-tech Canon SLR that only NDM operates, but I've also got some pictures from the Camera For Dummies. There's no chronology here...
Our dogs are still cute. 'Dolon is finally allowing Mag to touch him when he's sleeping.
Unfortunately, as it happens, the man who is allergic to everything but dogs and feathers is now allergic to dogs as well. This kind of snuggling is part of what has been shutting my respiratory system down.
My allergist tells me I even have a sort of food allergy! When my lips and tongue swell up after eating kiwi, it is apparently oral allergy syndrome. My lazy plant pollen antibodies are getting confused by the proteins in raw kiwi. Luckily I was still able to gorge on the blueberry muffins NDM made.
Our dogs have been total nightmares with visitors; their lack of training is a sad indictment of our failures as parents. However, when nobody is around and they have slept and eaten, we can occasionally squeeze a calm photo opportunity out of them. This is what counts as victory in our household.
Let's see... Turkeys are huge, and we only had NDM's father and our friend SAM for our Thanksgiving gorging, my parents having blinked in and out the weekend before. With the leftovers NDM made two risottos, I made some turkey chili, and we did the usual carcass-into-stock transformation. NDM won the wishbone pull.
When my parents visited we had some fantastic home-made pumpkin tortelloni in an alfredo sauce.
My mother helped me make some more faux sourdough. Here her hands are, after much cajolling, elegantly presenting the loaves.
Recently 'Dolon has stopped coming up to bed with us, which given my newly diagnosed dog allergies is probably a good thing. Mag accompanies us upstairs but 'Dolon can't be bothered to get off the couch. Sometimes he'll come up in the early morning as the hunger pangs set in -- our dogs approach dangerously near to starvation at about 5am.
Mag is growing more cuddly, but is no better behaved. Her couch-back behavior, which was really cute a few months ago, has of course metamorphosed into unacceptable roughhousing that we are having a difficult time combating. When she drapes over the couch she is still cute, but she also vaults over it and attacks 'Dolon from a position of tactical superiority up high on the couch's back.
Our Thanksgiving meal was great. We cooked the turkey in a bag to keep it nice and moist, and squeezed some extra stuffing in the bag wrapped in cheesecloth. The cheesecloth stuffing turned out well -- crispier and drier than the interior stuffing, providing a nice textural counterpoint. We also had mushroom stuffing cooked in a casserole dish, dilled carrots, sweet potatoes, butter horn rolls, and creamed spinach. I made a "mashed cauliflower" dish out of cauliflower, Neufchâtel, and a little butter; it wasn't as much like mashed potatoes as I thought I'd be able to get it, but was still greeted enthusiastically. I also broiled Brussels sprouts and purple pearl onions with crushed garlic and some white truffle oil my parents gave us. Finally, NDM made some fresh cranberry sauce. NDM made scalloped potatoes but we ate before they were done.
Here's NDM's turkey-free meal.
Then, there were the deserts. A couple different pumpkin breads, a pumpkin cheesecake, and an apple pie with a delicious streusel top. I whined about the apples being diced too small in the pie, which meant slices didn't hold together very well, but the pie was still great.
So, it had been ages since I made a good meat chili. Not much call for it eating just with the veggie wife, after all -- I left my major impeti for cooking it, JPQ & EJB, in Champaign-Urbana. But we happened to have some frozen stew meat left over from the Ukrainian borscht NDM made last month, along with a ton of turkey to dispose of, so I made something up.
I seared the stew meat in some oil with garlic, and then braised it with red wine before throwing in the already-cooked turkey.
I used chipotles to further season the turkey, and then a bunch of jalapeño powder I got as a gift for some additional flavoring on top of all the normal stuff I do. It came out nice and spicy, with very different textures than my normal ground beef meat chilis.
And that's all the pictures I dug out of the sleazy camera -- hope everyone had a good turkey day!

Pac Man Chart (Reblog)

Kitchenarium Updates (Chow)

Some Kitchenarium updates from this weekend's cooking.

• Faux sourdough bread.
  
• Seafood gumbo.
  
• Vegetarian chili.

Because my wife is bread-crazy, she also had me make a Basque bread, which means we now have 18 times as much bread as we can eat instead of just 6 times as much. I played around with embossing the top with an "N" this time, using tinfoil on the lid to make the shape. Note that I'm not smart enough to reverse the letter :-)
We had this bread with borscht, which I think of as a cold pureed vegetarian soup, but NDM made shredded with big chunks of stew beef. Alas, I haven't put a recipe up for the borscht.