My New Favorite Soup

Sugar Dew

While we were at Sam's Club today on a critical Simulac run NDM pointed this baby out to me. I admit, I was pretty excited. Coke is much better made with cane sugar -- i.e. Mexican Coke -- so how could sugar Mountain Dew fail to be excellent?

Well. There is a way.

Compared to HFCS Dew, sugar Dew is a little flatter, a noticeable step down in sweetness, with a much more pronounced medicinal aftertaste.

It is hard to believe that the difference is solely due to the difference in sweetness between sucrose and HFCS's cocktail of fructose and glucose. Under the fuzzy lens of can ingredients labeling the products are otherwise identical. Yet, there it is.

Wall-E Cake

Here is the result of our visit to the cake shop. NDM produced this for a coworker's son's fourth birthday.
Everything was edible except for the wire holding up the stars.
My favorite parts were the roaches, which the children misidentified as crickets. I was not permitted to correct their identification.

Thanksgiving (Chow)

We need to start having more people over for Thanksgiving. This year, despite the hardships of our rather crappy new kitchen with few if any workspaces for real cooking, we managed to turn out entirely too much food that we had no chance of consuming. Besides the turkey, it stuffing, and a separate vegetarian mushroom stuffing, we had a crusty creamed spinach, mashed cauliflower, baked potatoes and yams, roasted brussel sprouts, scalloped potatoes, home-made cranberry sauce, two roll variations, and some curried yams. I think that covers it.
Not to mention the obligatory French onion soup I have to make but wouldn't touch if you paid me. And then of course the leftover dishes...turkey chili, risotto, etc. Can't wait until our parents live close enough to eat some of this stuff!

Addax Cake (Chow)

NDM turned out another cake for work this week. This addax even had moving parts.
Pulling the tongue triggered a recorded message utilizing the repurposed innards of a greeting card.
Other than the tongue-mechanism and two wires used to support the rice krispie treat horns the entire cake was edible. Or so I am given to understand -- I never get to eat these cakes :-P

Flamingo Cake (Chow)

NDM made this flamingo cake for a co-worker's birthday this week. If she had her way she would have made it genuinely three-dimensional, but sanity and lack of time prevailed.
Some additional fondant manufacturing was required due to a particularly naughty (and tall) puppy, who made off with a Ziploc bag full of illegal fun.
The insides are the same red velvet cake I made for this V-day.
I'm not sure what particular genus of grass the Phoenicopterus is loitering in. NDM is clearly prejudiced against plants.

VD Cupcakes (Chow)

Made these red velvet cupcakes for Valentine's. The recipe is on the Kitchenarium. Yes, I'm a horrible, horrible froster.

The Tenth Day of Giftmas (10 of 12)

To balance out the Ukrainian food from the previous day, on Christmas our meal was a tsimmes. The women collaborated on it using sweet potato, squash, prunes, carrots, and potatoes. It didn't really match up with the Hebrew calendar, but it was still really good.

The Fourth Day of Giftmas (4 of 12)

So this was our Christmas Eve table, served on actual Ukrainian china from the vast dusty recesses of our basement. I think that my stand-out favorite was actually the beet borscht. 2008 was my Year of the Beet -- I cooked with it and ate it a lot, especially compared to its near-zero incidence in prior years. Anyway, NDM's borscht was fantastic.

The Third Day of Giftmas (3 of 12)

NDM made a slew of different kinds of varenyky for a traiditonalesque Ukrainian meal on Christmas Eve. There were potato varenyky, sauerkraut varenyky, and plum varenyky. These are basically pierogi, except less Polish. They were all boiled, but some were also fried afterward.
LEM helped NDM with the construction of the kolach. Alright, the all-knowing Wikipedia pidgeonholes this as a pastry, but for our purposes this Ukrainian bread is more like a babka. The girls constructed it from a series of braids...
...which were laid into some springform pans, and eventually produced...
...a massive tower of baked goods. Sorry about the exposure. For future reference, it is impossible for 6 people to come anywhere near to consuming something like this over the course of a week.

The Second Pictures of Giftmas (2 of 12)

There was lots and lots of baking -- so much that I was barely allowed in the kitchen. My only role was to pinch hit for kneading the bulichka. I've been merciful and chosen a fairly innocuous photograph. The manufacture of this sweet roll calls for squishing pats of butter into a huge mass of dough by hand, and I have some really unappetizing closeups of that which illustrate the strange sensibilities of my photographer.

Plantation Pie?

My grandmother is pining for a '40's confection which she remembers as "Plantation Pie" -- two chocolate-covered graham crackers with marshmallow between. My father remembers the next generation of the cookies as "Marshmallow Shockabsorbers". What the heck are these things?

As far as I can tell, plantation pie can refer to almost any type of actual pie, sweet or savory, with little linking the recipes together. I could find no trace of Plantation Pie as a trade name for a cookie.

A search on marshmallow shock absorber, on the other hand, basically turns up bras.
Is it as simple as the venerable Moon Pie? It is a marshmallow sandwich. It has graham cracker cookies. It is dipped in chocolate. There are both normal cookie-sized versions and hockey puck versions. It was invented around 1917, so was definitely around in the '40's. It tends to have a third interior cookie, but I think that is a later addition.
There aren't many other possibilities. Nabisco used to make a "marshmallow sandwich", but I think it is post-War origin.

If it is actually a Moon Pie, there are recipes available online. But they should also be at every supermarket and convenience store in California.

Visit Vittles (Chow)

The parents came for a visit last week and gave us an excuse to cook a few things we haven't for a while. The first night we made a deep-dish pizza with spinach and zucchini. It might look a little Abby-normal because of how the real buffalo mozzarella melts. Unfortunately, I went a bit overboard saucing it during construction so it was a little messy to eat.
After LEM left for California, leaving only seafood lovers in the house, NDM made fantastic fish 'n' chips out of some tilapia fillets. These are as good as any fried fish I've ever had.
We finished up with some seafood gumbo made with scallops, shrimp, krill, mussels, clams, and tilapia.
For desert one night NDM whipped up some cashew brittle. This is the second time she's made it and she has it down pat -- delicious.
To welcome LEM back at the end of the visit we made some household-first caramel corn. First NDM threw about a half cup of popcorn kernels in a covered bowl and microwaved it for about 4 minutes on high until they were almost all popped. Then she made a caramel sauce on the stove out of brown sugar, butter, and corn syrup and brought it to the soft crack stage. The sauce and popcorn went on a baking tray in the oven for an hour, allowing the sauce to bubble and cover all of the popcorn. I'm not one for caramel corn myself, but it was certainly the best I've ever had.

Mustard Verdict (Chow)

I finally got around to making a small loaf of fresh bread so we could try my first stab at mustard. The verdict is in, and NDM and I both give it a thumbs up. I was afraid from the aroma after preparation that this would be far too vinegary, and maybe a little thin as well -- but neither fear was realized. The Frankenrecipe I created from trolling 100 different online mustard recipe resources produced a well-balanced, slightly sweet, moderately spicy mustard with a deep complexity of flavors. Mmm! I think I have my basis from which I can eventually manufacture any number of weird mustards.

Just to be sure, I'm going to take the jar up to my parents this weekend and see what they think.

Mustard Theory (Chow)

So I figured I'd take a stab at home-made mustard. Google suggests there are just a few simple stages to making a mustard, once you forgo the addition of eggs in a double-boiler.

1. The soak. Whole mustard seeds soak in rougley equal parts of cold water or a 1:1 vinegar and wine mixture for at least 3 hours and as long as "overnight".
2. Optionally, the boil. In water, vinegar, or vinegar and wine boil down some dry mustard, salt, any sugars or honey, and whatever other flavors you want -- garlic, tarragon, allspice, peppers, etc. Usually this is strained so that only its liquid moves forward to the next stage.
3. The blend. The soaked mustard and all of its liquid, together with everything else, gets pulsed in the blender into the requisite degree of coarseness.
4. The sit. Into the refrigerator it goes until the next day.

So keeping it simple, and the recipe size small...

My soak, which I refrigerated for two days, because my wife is a slave-driver:

• 2T of Morton & Bassett's brown mustard seed.
• 1T of Colman's double superfine yellow mustard flour.
• 2T of white wine vinegar.
• 2T of 2006 Smoking Loon California merlot.

My boil, which I simmered until it was reduced by half:

• ½t allspice.
• ¼t mixed peppercorns.
  
• ½t ground sumac berries.
  
• ¼t turmeric.
• 1t kosher salt.
  
• 1T brown sugar.
  
• 2T water.

I didn't actually strain my boil, since the only solids it contained were peppercorns, easily ground up with the mustard seed. The results? Won't know until tomorrow, or the next time I bake bread, whichever comes last.

Leftover Food Photographs (chow)

Looks like I've been tardy with some recipe action. Here are a few things we've cooked and eaten that never made it off the hard drive... First up, a zucchini parmesan. Oh lordy have we had some zucchini this year. Feel free to drop by if you want some.
A little bok choy stir fry...
I made a coconut curry with some fresh coconut. Apparently I didn't photograph the actual meal, but was pretty pleased with myself for splitting the coconut into perfect halves. After scooping out the coconut I gave the halves to the puppies, who had a field day.
Oh man, was this good. Gnocci with fried real buffalo mozzarella slices together with a spicy red sauce.
NDM's production here -- her always fabulous hot and sour soup.
This was a delicious made-up whatnot that I threw together when my parents were visiting. A warm salad of roasted celeriac with fennel and olives.
A cold side-dish of spicy cabbage to eat with stir fries.
A zucchini boat. This was in fact the first dish that I ever cooked for the wife, way back when she was a pre-wife, a decade or so ago. Scooped out the zucchini and cooked it with pasta, cheese, and sundries before throwing the mixture back in the zuke for baking in the oven.

Cottage Cheese Bread (Chow)

I tried a dill-heavy, onion-light variation on Peggy's cottage cheese dill bread today, throwing it into a French bread mold. Very tasty, although also very soft and delicate. The wife feels the dough would have lived out a happier life in roll rather than loaf form.

Evil Cheeses (Chow)

I love cheese. Every kind of cheese, from the pungent aged Asiago I added to a vanilla-butter sauce for the lobster ravioli we had last night to the homely Kraft American slice (which melt well in scrambled eggs).

Or so I thought.

Here are some cheeses I will never seek to eat.

• Maggot cheese. You are apparently advised to wear protective eyewear while eating these cheese lest the cheese fly larvae injure you by jumping into your eye...although frankly that sounds preferable to undigested larvae boring holes in your intestine.
• Mimolette, a French cheese intentionally infested with cheese mites to gain flavor from their excrement, dander, and corpses. There are actually lots of variations of these mite cheeses across Europe, such as the German Spinnenkäse.

Mm. To take that taste out of my mouth, here are some recent things I've done with acceptable cheese...
Above is the vanilla-butter sauce with Asiago we had last night, topped with lobster ravioli and some fresh sage. It was fun cooking with a real vanilla bean, which I've never done before. The Baltic Red 4 year Asiago was the last bit from our cheese party.
This is a nice ricotta sauce we had just before NDM's trip to Rome.
Some fried buffalo mozzarella slices NDM prepared for me to use in a gnocchi dish a while ago.

Finally, with the last of the Shropshire blue from our cheese extravaganza I made a cauliflower and cheese soup similar to one I've made before but much, much more pungent.

First Soup Of This Spring (Chow)

I made another experimental soup to foist off on AM while he is recovering from his last hospital adventure. This is a bunch of celery and a large leek reduced to tiny components and stewing in a little white wine, vegetable stock, and garam masala. Wow, this makes an aromatic soup! After cooking it down I hit it with the immersion blender to give it a nice, smooth, slightly thick consistency just a step or two shy of a split pea soup.

The leek, which is something I don't cook with much (because it is really just another evil onion trying to masquerade as food), had a synergistic effect with fresh pepper I did not expect which made the soup end up a bit more peppery than I had intended. But it was still quite good, unexpectedly so given the only modestly appealing ingredients I used.

Of course at the time I had not yet been informed that AM does not like celery. Luckily, he was too weak from his surgery to prevent my forcing the soup upon him anyway.

Last Soup Of This Winter (Chow)

My dinner last night was perhaps my biggest kitchen disaster in this house -- a failed carrot soup that tasted like overcooked canned carrots coupled with a lentil and fruit dish where the red lentils fell apart into a mush and the whole thing tasted mostly like limp baked apples. So, here is a photograph of a yummy vegetarian soup I made last week from some sweet potato and butternut squash, along with a little herb garlic bread.