Dog-approved Cookery

I don’t think I’ve mentioned here that I recently gave up caffeine.  It really does improve my productivity, but I don’t like being addicted to things.  Especially things that give me a raging headache if I don’t have them.  The actual stoppage occurred  while I was at CERN.  It wasn’t so hard there because, contrary to popular belief, European coffee is not good.  At least not the kind they serve to particle physicists.

So we’ll see how long that lasts.  Another addiction I have that I’m not ready to give up is cookbooks.  I have a lot, and recently went on a little cookbook-buying bender.  Most recently, I acquired “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,”  because I watched “Julia and Julia” and if you were able to watch that movie and not want to own that cookbook and make Beuff Bourguignonne then you are a stronger person than I.  And I am a vegetarian.

Also, this summer I heard one of those features on NPR where they bring on a famous author and have him/her say what their favorite book is.  This one featured Elizabeth Berg and she said her favorite book was a cookbook called “Beat This!”  I figured since I am the kind of person who likes to sit around and read cookbooks, and since a literary person chose this cookbook as her favorite book out of all the books in the world, I really had to have it.  And it didn’t dissapoint.  I actually stayed up late one night reading it because I couldn’t put it down.

Oliver apparently got bored of Julia’s discussion of mushrooms:

but is looking forward to all the buttery baked goods.

 

Laundry and Ice Cream

Surely I’ve mentioned here before that I’ve got major issues with Laundry.  At some point while writing my thesis, I stopped wearing socks because I didn’t have time to find matching pairs.  These days, I have a little more time, but the laundry still builds up in huge piles that have to threaten the pets’ safety before I get around to dealing with them.

But I’m not sure why.  Laundry time is always fun in our house.  Look what it results in:

* Today’s photo processing brought to you by Laura’s laziness and Picassa’s “I’m feeling lucky” button.

There are several interesting features in the bottom photo:

• Do you see that Lucy is actually leaning against Oliver!?!
• The money on the dresser: about $40 that was washed with my laundry.  Howard says he would be worried if $40 was missing from his wallet.  I say life is better when you don’t remember that $40 is missing from your wallet.  And then when it shows up in the laundry, it’s like a bonus.
  
• Howard’s hair: that’s not just the flash — he’s going grey!  I think his salt and pepper hair is nice, though.

After laundry time, it was ice cream time, also a very exciting event:

I didn’t have an ice cream.  I was too full of the sweet and savory pies I made this weekend.  They were really yummy.

 

Failure, Flowers and Trans Fat

When I first started this blog, nobody knew it existed, and I could say anything I wanted.  These days, I feel a little censored, given that it might be read by my family, my boyfriend’s family, long lost friends, long lost not-so-friends, and current or prospective employers.  So, without going into all of the gory details, I shall just say that this week a lot of circumstances, including but not limited to: bugs in my code, ignorance what does or does not constitute “black tie”, and the cat peeing on the carpet have all combined make me feel like a bit of a failure.

I even still pretty much suck at cake decorating.  But I did manage to make this is class the other day:

The icing may not be smooth, and the shell border may be a little wobbly, but the flowers look pretty, no?  I had the prettiest flowers in my class, but it wasn’t because of any skill on my part.  If anybody else out there is trying to make buttercream roses and having trouble with the petals breaking, here is the secret: you have to buy store-brand shortening.  Unlike Crisco, the store brands still contain trans-fat.  And trans fat may be bad for you, but it’s good for making roses!

 

Decorating Diversions

I have been meaning to take a cake decorating class for years now, and this month I finally stopped traveling for five minutes and signed up for a Wilton course at the local Michael’s.  I think they are taught at at craft stores all across the country.  If you have one nearby and have any interest in cakes, I highly recommend them.  The three classes I’ve had so far have been lots of fun.

I don’t recommend that you take a picture of your cute little cupcakes

And then leave them unattended for half a second

See that extra sheen there?  That’s dog slobber.  Really enticing, no?

 

Is it for Making Meat Cakes?

We don’t eat meat cakes around here, so I used it to make a chocolate cake.  The cake came out of the pan, except for a big chunk in the middle that stuck to the “meat” imprint”

Here’s somebody who thinks I should spend all my time baking him meat cakes:

Sorry for the dearth of stuff on this blog lately.  I’m still working on trying to get the paper on my graduate research out the door, and my “real” job is crazy busy.  I don’t know why there is such a rush to study a detector that won’t be built for 10 years!

 

Orange Cake

In case anybody else out there has come into possession of a Kaiser 8 1/2″ Bundt pan (through perhaps a well-intentioned but misguided boyfriend), and learned the hard way that some standard Bundt cake recipes will bubble out of the pan and end up on the floor of your oven, this orange cake recipe fits nicely.  And even if you aren’t looking for uses for a weirdly-sized pan, it is a very easy and very yummy cake that can be baked in a variety of pans.  I recommend doubling the orange zest.

Special note to Gram: I used some of the oranges you sent me.  They are so yummy!!!

Special note to anyone wondering why I am worrying about orange cakes rather than my thesis defense: Sssshh!  Don’t make me think about it!

 

Coconut-y Vanilla Rice Pudding

I haven’t posted many recipes, but those that I have are the most visited posts on this blog, mainly by people wondering what the heck to do with eye-of-the-goat beans or how you make vegetarian sausage.    So I thought I would tell you about my adventure with rice pudding, which was highly approved by both my boyfriend and my dog.

It started this evening, when I wanted something for dessert.  The scene outside the house looked like this:

So going out for ingredients was totally out of the question.  I wanted to try to make rice pudding, but the only dairy we have is 2% milk (because the world as Howard knows it would come to an end if I bought skim, 1% or whole milk).  However, we do have an extremely large quantity of unsweeted dried coconut, left over from an unfortunate attempt to make coconut macaroons before christmas.  I consulted “How to Cook Everything” by Mark Bittman, which told me that it is actually very simple to make coconut milk from dried coconut.  So I used that with some of the 2% and one of the vanilla beans I’ve had kicking around the house for ages and have been meaning to put to good use.  The pudding recipe is vaguely based on the one in “How To Cook Everything”, but I changed the flavorings and increased the milk/rice ratio because I like my rice pudding very milky, like Indian kheer.  Anyway, like I said, it was gobbled up by me, Howard and the doggie.

• 3/4 cups long grain white rice
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 2+1/2 cups water
• 1 cup unsweeted dried coconut
• 1+1/4 cups milk
• 1 vanilla pod (vanilla extract would probably work, but I highly recommend the bean)
• 5 cardamom pods
• 1/2 cup sugar

Bring the rice, salt and 1+1/2 cups of the water to a boil, then cover and cook on low heat for about 15-20 minutes, until most of the water is absorbed.  Meanwhile, heat the remaining cup of water until it’s very hot and combine with the coconut in a blender.  Carefully blend it for about 20 seconds (the hot liquid will want to explode out of the top of the blender, so keep the lid on tight).    Set aside for a few minutes, then strain through a strainer, extracting as much liquid as possible.  You should be left with about a cup of coconut milk.  Discard the coconut solids.  Combine the coconut milk with the regular milk.  Split the vanilla pod, scraping the seeds into the milk, and then tossing the whole pod into the milk, along with the cardamom pods.  When the rice is done, add the milk mixture and sugar to the rice.  Cook, stirring occasionally for about 15 more minutes.  Then scoop out the vanilla and cardamom pods and serve immediately or chilled.

Yummy!

 

Holiday Review

This holiday season proved once and for all that I am really, really spoiled.  It started a couple weeks ago, when Howard’s new flat-screen TV arrived.  I wasn’t sure how keen I was to have such a huge TV in our house, but since it arrived, I’ve found that I really like it.   Isn’t it pretty:

And do you see that little white box sitting to the left of the TV?

It’s my new Wii!!!!  It was my Hanukkah present from Howard.  See what I mean about the being really spoiled?  So far, we just have the games that came with it.  I wanted to rush right out and buy “Super Mario Galaxy,” which my friend Erin, who sometimes reads this blog (Hi Erin!), recommended, but I realized that Best Buy on December 23rd was about the last place on Earth I wanted to be.  Instead we have a rented copy Super Mario Galaxy, and Howard and I are both totally hooked.

And then, for Christmas, I was spoiled even more, with bubble bath, spa gift certificates and baking gear from Howard and my mom.   Since I am a still a bit tired of Tofurkey from Thanksgiving, I decided to bake a cheddar-cheese and onion pie from a recipe I clipped out of Gourmet magazine a few years ago.  It has a lot more cheese and butter and took more effort than most of the stuff that gets made around here, but it seemed suitable for Chistmas.  And boy-howdy was it good:

It tasted just like one of the cheese-and-onion Cornish pasties I used to buy in England.  And the baking went surprisingly smoothly.  It was my first success with an all-butter pie crust, and didn’t even require pre-baking.  AND, the leftovers gave me an opportunity to use the cute little pie-keep my mom sent me:

I seem to get a lot of pie-related presents.  Howard told me I’ve been pigeon-holed, but I told him that I’m happy to be in this particular pigeon-hole.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

 

A Peaceful Thanksgiving

It was a quiet but nice thanksgiving here at Casa Fields.  A few months ago, my advisor said “you should at least write a paper draft before you graduate.”  Two weeks ago, we got the go-ahead to start writing the paper that will present the details of my thesis research to the rest of the world.  And two days ago, I sent the paper draft to my advisor.  It was a frenzied two weeks of non-stop writing, and I’m grateful that it is done, at least for the moment.  Here are some other things I am grateful for:

Update: For the people curious about the food above: cranberry sauce and gravy on the left, then stuffing, green beans and tofurkey.  I love, love, love tofurkey.  It is great for thanksgiving, and the tofurkey leftover sandwiches are even better.  The green beans are from a recipe that Howard and I both heard on NPR during our separate drives home from work last week: Molly Katzen’s “dramatically seared green beans”.  Basically they are cooked on very high heat for two minutes, then tossed with salt, garlic and chile, and they were very very yummy.  In fact, everything was very very yummy.

 

Pizza Pizza

I don’t have much to say this week other than “I hate my job, I hate particle physics and I hate particle physicists.” But since that doesn’t really need more saying, here is the deep dish pizza I made over the weekend:

It was definitely my best attempt ever at making pizza at home — it turned out really yummy. The recipe was from America’s Test Kitchen (annoying registration required — use bugmenot).

We really don’t eat unhealthy food all the time around here. We are quite healthy actually, but it seems only the hugely unhealthy things turn out good enough to be blogged about. Anyway, it’s one of the benefits of having a slightly too skinny boyfriend — you can make yummy and caloric foods, eat a reasonable portion of them and then pawn the rest off on him. Not that he complained about having to eat the pizza — he seemed very happy to do that.

Speaking of my slightly too skinny boyfriend, he has been very nice to me this week. He has listened to all my complaints about my job and been very supportive. Also, he just bought us a new window air conditioner for our bedroom. Our house was built in some peculiar age around the 50’s or 60’s when people thought that freakishly small windows were all bedrooms needed. Our tiny windows would not fit a traditional window A/C, so we previously used one of those “portable” air conditioners that sit inside the house and have exhaust tubes that goes out the window. It was pretty awful — it only barely cooled the room, kept us up all night and regularly poured a gallon of water into the carpet. Fun! Anyway, last night we installed a “slider/casement” air conditioner, which is basically a window unit that is strangely shaped to fit narrow sliding windows. (When I say “we installed,” I actually mean that Howard installed it while I sat around like a bum). Air conditioners are not strictly necessary in Ithaca. There are usually only a few weeks of the year when you want one, but those few weeks are pretty insuferable without one. Apparently the temperature is supposed to be in the 90’s tomorrow, so we’ll get to find out how this sucker works.