worryingly jolly batman

So tamarillow wrote up last year's Wellington on a Plate and this inspired me to do the same thing for this year! I'm going to try to go weekend by weekend and here's a post for this last weekend. At some point in the near future I might do a life stuff update too?! Anyway. Click on the links in posts below for menus and arysteia's food photos.

( Friday! Foxglove )

( Saturday: Mishmosh )

( Sunday: El Matador and Little Beer Quarter )

Next weekend: the Epic Weekend of stickmarionette's visit, with Fratelli, Cafe Polo, Coco at the Roxy, Duke Carvell's, Ti Kouka and Basque. We might die.

I am not by nature a frugal person. In fact I'm a bit of a spendthrift, inasmuch as someone on my budget can be. However, in one area I am pretty cheap, and that area (naturally) is cooking. I don't buy brand name olive oil, I eat canned tomatoes 9 months of the year, and I don't remember the last time I cooked a meat like steak at home (and since steak at home would be a serious event, you better believe I remember it most of the time). I save that extravagant eating for when I'm not home (even though, reasonably, that's much less cost-effective). I am the past master at substitution, I hate doing a shopping trip specifically to try a recipe and will avoid for ages cooking something that I can't make from the typical contents of my pantry.

All this being the case, it will not surprise you to hear that separating eggs makes me crazy. Yes, there are many things that one can do to use up egg whites or egg yolks, but frankly in the moment I rarely have the time or inclination to do these. Who wants to make meringues on top of whatever it was you used five egg yolks for? And egg yolks are even worse: I do like custard, but there are seasons in which it just isn't appropriate. Plus yolks don't freeze like whites do, and I have all these icing recipes that ask for one egg white. It makes me go a little wild-eyed (OK, not an unusual expression for me.) So one of my ongoing life quests is to find many recipes that pair well with each other, in glorious culinary polyphony. Here's a pairing I came up with this weekend that's going straight into my repertoire.

Summer Pasta & Chocolate Meringue Melts

I think these recipes go with each other rather nicely as a summer menu, although admittedly I think pretty much anything goes with these biscuits. It'd be a nice date meal (I think. What's dating like? It's been so long I barely remember.)

These two recipes are what I made for dinner today. I made the biscuits and then decided to do something with the yolks, which I think is a pretty convenient order. I very slightly adapted the biscuits from Brownie Points, who originally got it from Alice Medrich.

( guh-orgeous )

The pasta I MacGuyvered a bit. Yesterday I made fresh pasta for the first time in my life, inspired by these really good videos, and I pretty much made it to that recipe. I liked it because it's not focused on specific quantities, but on the right textures; use one egg for every person you're serving, salt in proportion to the eggs, and play the flour by ear. I'm guessing that, like bread, this method means that different humidity levels are easily accommodated. I also really liked that it didn't call for a pasta machine - as it happens we do have one, but I dislike the concept of requiring a machine for something people have been doing by hand for a very long time. Apart from anything, I don't have the cupboard space for a pasta machine, an icecream machine, a pastry blender, a food processor, a Kitchenaid, etc etc. Anyway, so this is what I made yesterday, and it was very very tasty, although slightly thick.

Today I was looking at my two left-over egg yolks and I thought, I wonder if you can do pasta with just yolks. I googled and hit Seven-Yolk Pasta Dough at the Smitten Kitchen (I love Deb, so should you), which seemed pretty promising. So I went ahead and made pasta with two egg yolks and two eggs. I can't give you exact quantities, but I probably started with a mound of about a cup and a half of flour? Maybe two cups? I did use the pasta roller for this lot, although I actually found that I didn't like the end result so much - I think I went a little too thin for my taste, and the pasta ended up kind of unforgivingly thin, meaning it cooked really REALLY rapidly. This was a big pain. However, the pasta itself was still delicious and totally worth the effort, and it was faster than rolling by hand. I urge you guys to watch the videos, read the recipes, and have a play; it's no more time-consuming than making bread and just as fun. I started making the pasta after 7:30, and was eating by ten to nine.

I made farfalle (bow tie) pasta, which is really super easy and looks cute, as well as some fettucine that is sitting in my fridge.

Bizarrely, I got my sauce recipe from some weight-loss forum, I guess because cottage cheese is a diet food? Apparently? (Really? IDK. It is delicious, though.)

- Side anecdote: after reading a series of posts at THM by Maia (and one or two by Anne Else, a food blogger I also love) on "Good" Food "Bad" Food (start 28 August) in which she makes the salutory point that a food by itself doesn't count as good or bad, I felt pretty weird reading a bunch of posters sent to a Labour party electoral office made by primary school students in which they thanked the LP for fruit in schools, saying things like "fruit is good because eating it makes you skinny." And not once or twice: three or four times on each of three posters, made by three different rooms - Room 2, Room 4 and Room 5. Really? This is what we want to teach our seven year olds - that "fruit makes you skinny"? That that's what important about a balanced diet? I found it pretty sickening. I am a fan of fruit generally and like every good freedom-hating liberal I'm a fan of educating people about the relative merits of different foods, but I'm not sure "it's good cos it makes you skinny" is the right message - in fact, I know it's not. The word "skinny" was specifically used more often than the word "nutrition" and about as often as the word "health". This is a bit of a problem (apart from anything else, eating fruit is not going to magically make you skinny! At all! That's just not true!) Oh well, another generation with a dysfunctional relationship to food, par for the course, I suppose. (Note: I feel like as a fat feminist I need to disclaimer this stuff: I don't think that people who are slim have a dysfunctional relationship to food and I don't partake in that "real women" bullshit. I have a dysfunctional relationship to food all on my lonesome (not the kind that makes you slim).)

SO ANYWAY. I did find this recipe on a diet site but it is a pretty delicious summer recipe and since fresh tomatoes are finally a) a decent price b) ripe in the supermarkets, I absolutely had to make it. With some variations.

Summer Pasta
Serves a very hungry 1, moderately hungry 2, 3 or 4 as a side, I suppose.

Ingredients
2 tomatoes
fresh basil
1 clove of garlic
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 cup cottage cheese
salt & pepa
pasta

( method )

More vids! I don't think I'm going to be very talky today, though.

Day 10 - A vid that makes you laugh
United States of Pop, by llenka
Community; dance moves; warning for very fast, very highly-lit cutting that even I, who have no vision issues, find a bit difficult to watch; spoilers for the whole season
( Read more... )

Day 11 - An AMV you love
This one was tough for me because I'm not at all into anime and the only AMV I've ever really liked is Failed Experiments in Video Editing, which is really good and funny and I'm sure if you're a vidder you'd find it even funnier.

However, I don't really feel that's enough of a sample for me to rec AMVs with authority, so instead I'm going to rec a vid that I love that I could fit into one of these categories:

Big City Life, by lithiumdoll (You can get it here, I couldn't find a vidpost.)
Dark Angel; Max; spoilers for the whole show; violence.

( Dark Angel spoilers )

Day 12 - A relationship vid you love
( three under cut )

And one thing about food:

So the other day I prepared and froze some World Peace Cookies, except I stupidly left out the chocolate chips so I was like, wow, they're gonna suck. (protip: even without the chips these biscuits are still pretty great, I was just making excuses.) BUT then I was thinking about something I was reading on Debbie Does Edmonds the other day about yoyos and thinking how GOOD the icing that sandwiches together a yoyo is, and I thought - ooh, yeah. That would be awesome.

And it was.

Butter Icing

50g butter, very soft
1/2 C icing sugar
2 T custard powder - USians and other non-Commonwealthers, I believe the standard sub is vanilla instant pudding mix, although that's usually in Nanaimo bars and IDK how it'd work here.

1. Beat all together
2. Enjoy on delicious cookies.

A highly recommended combination, although you really can only eat one.

I made this recipe up a few weeks ago* and it's just been recipe-tested by my flatmate (who did a tremendous job reading my handwriting considering a) my handwriting is awful and b) she speaks English as a second language and c) her first language is Japanese, which obvs doesn't even have the same alphabet.) Anyway, this was a great success and we like it very much. This recipe is vegetarian-friendly, but I don't think it would be too easy to veganise because of the pastry, filling, etc. Gluten-free people: is wheat-free pastry even possible?

*I am not the first person to think of leek and potato pie, obviously. I believe some people also put chicken in, which I think would just be kind of bland unless you used SMOKED chicken in which case it could be delicious. But not vegetarian any more.

Ingredients
A sufficient quantity of flaky or puff pastry, depending on how much time/energy/butter you have, to make a pie bottom and top crust. Or you can just buy sheets. Puff pastry is one of those things that it's not necessarily worth making at home, IMO.
Three large-ish potatoes
Two leeks
50g + 25g butter
Two eggs
Half a cup of milk
Salt
Pepper

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 200 C/400 F.

2. Peel potatoes and slice into small pieces - cubes or slices are both fine, but the pieces should be small.

3. Boil potatoes in salted water for 10-15 minutes, or until fork-tender. Drain.

4. Meanwhile, clean and slice the leeks - into rings or julienned are both great. Melt 50g butter in a wide saucepan and saute the leeks in the butter with a little salt (Or not if you use salted butter!) until shiny and soft.

5. Grease your pie dish. Lay out a sheet of pastry over the bottom and press in per usual. (Just as seen on TV, in films, etc!) Scatter drained potatoes over the bottom and top with soft, shiny leeks.

6. Melt 25 g butter in microwave (be careful about this, butter is dairy and dairy goes nuts when heated. Melt slowly on a low temp.) Whisk eggs, milk, salt and pepper together with the butter and pour over leeks and potatoes. DON'T RINSE THE BOWL OUT.

7. Top the pie with the second sheet of pastry. Use the leftover egg-milk mix in the bottom/on the sides of the bowl to brush the top of the pie. Bake for about 30-40 minutes - sorry, not so sure about that time, but the top of the pie should be all crispy and it should all look, you know... cooked. (Sorry, there are learn-to-cookers on my flist and this isn't very clear! Never mind!)

This is a really truly delicious meal during winter and works really well to get rid of those leeks you bought last week because they were super cheap at the vege market and then realised that you were sick of leek and potato soup. On the other hand, I find that, especially straight out of the oven, it doesn't hold together super-well and is likely to fall all over your plate. (When it's been in the fridge for a night this is not such a big deal.) This doesn't bother me because well, I'm just not that picky/obsessive about plating. But I know it would bother some people.

Also! A request! New Zealanders! Go to UKTV NZ and vote for your favourite Doctor Who episodes? I really want some people to vote for Blink (You can only pick 3, and I picked The Empty Child/Doctor Dances, Partners in Crime, and Sound of Drums/Last of the Timelords - but I really really wanted to do Blink too.) Anyway they're doing a marathon over the June long weekend, so! If you go and vote you should come over to my place that weekend and we'll watch Doctor Who and eat baking, it'll be awesome. I'll make pie and everything.

So I must tell you all about what I made for dinner tonight: 40-clove garlic chicken, roasted vegetables, toasted bread and broccoli. The centrepiece is a bit of a heartstopper but, really, it's not that bad, no added fat except the extra-lite olive oil, and boy oh boy, was this delicious.

( roast veges )

( chicken )

I prepared the vegetables first and popped them in the oven, then the chicken. Plan to take the chicken out of the oven ten minutes before you serve the meal, and put thick slices of good french or artisan bread on the oven racks to toast while you carve the chicken and steam broccoli (although actually, this would be better with a salad, it's just that we finally killed the Jesus broccoli today.) (Um, it was the second coming of broccoli to these particular planets.) Then you drizzle the chicken with reduced juices from the pan and squeeze the garlic cloves over the bread which is just, ugh, to DIE.

good things about this meal: vegetarians and vegans hate it, but it's good for most other intolerances depending on what vegetables you use (i.e. I wouldn't use potatoes cooking for my friend - though FTR, the recipe called for serving the chicken with rice, I just think that's weird). No casein or lactose, no gluten or wheat or grains, no soy. Obviously, though, you need to like garlic.

I'm rather proud of dinner tonight even though it didn't come out quite perfect, so have a recipe! But please take note: a significant part of this recipe is an unduplicable work in progress, and I'm at least partly recording it for my own note-making purposes, so. Also, I didn't come up with the concept, I stole it from a friend.

( pumpkin and kumara curry )

Here are some good things about this recipe: it's vegetarian, and it could be made vegan pretty easily by using extra coconut milk instead of milk, but it doesn't taste like a vegetarian meal. That would make it dairy-free, too. Use plain rice and it's gluten-free and wheat-free and egg-free and soy-free (BUT CHECK YOUR STORE BOUGHT CURRY PASTE) and potato-free, which I bet you thought was a -free you didn't have to worry about, but my BFF is intolerant to all of those things. It's hard to screw up - put just about anything in coconut milk and simmer for half an hour and it tastes fine, trust me. Use light coconut milk and it's pretty healthy - especially if you use brown rice. It's quick and low-maintenance - there's plenty of opportunity to check your email or fix your makeup. And it's great for rainy days, which today is. GO TO AUSTRALIA, RAIN.

It is so hot. SO HOT. I can't deal. It's september, it has been this hot on and off since the beginning of september which is like, THE FIRST DAY OF SPRING. It was a warm enough winter, so it's not that surprising, but if it doesn't cool down every now and then I'll... buy some cooler clothes so I'm not wearing jeans and suffering all the time, I guess, sigh. It's so hot that, get this, I already started cooking so I'd have time to make potato salad and not have to spend an hour in the kitchen with the sun setting directly in the window at five thirty. Also, of course, potato salad is refrigerated and therefore not hot, which I can get behind. (I have never made potato salad before, as "salad" usually says to me "lettuce and spinach." However, despite the summery heat, the vegetables have not yet caught up to the fat that we need salad greens at lettuces are $3.50 a head.) (On the other hand, just don't talk to me about broccoli right now. $5/kg? Seriously?)

Of course, it's still freezing the second it gets dark so I will have to wear jeans to D&D tonight. Plus side, that means I don't have to shave, minus side all my jeans are dirty except the pair that are too small. Pout!

New plan: drop out of university to become cake baker and pastry chef. Become world famous without this cruddy learning thing.

So give me a recipe to try tomorrow, because otherwise I have to go buy buttermilk or cream cheese to try a pound cake recipe and they look kind of pricey (LOTS of eggs, see sixth_light I told you they'd be useful, and several cups of sugar we may not actually have, I told you so again...) Or red velvet cake looks kind of cool...

*sulk* I want cake now. But cool things I found out this evening: so I never knew what bundt cake was (or pound cake, come to think of it) until this evening. But! Bundt cake is apparently just cake cooked in spiral tins like this one. And pound cake is a yellow cake, name coming from the fact that it was originally cooked with a poung each of butter, flour, sugar and eggs.

I find this all fascinating. Oh, America, you are so culturally ubiquitous in the bad way.