Chocolate Chip Sour Cream Coffee Cake

Everybody knows Smitten Kitchen is the bomb, and this recipe is no exception. I halved it to bake in an 8″ square pan (though I can’t remember now if I actually used 1.5 eggs or just rounded up to 2), but it’s so awesome that you should really just make a full batch.

Lemon Curd Thumbprint Cookies

I made these cookies last summer, partially for Julie’s defense and partially as a way to use up some lemon curd that was leftover from the éclairs Julie and Sergio made for my birthday (thanks guys!).

Cookies are usually my least favorite thing to bake – too much effort to make, divide, and shape the dough – but this was a pretty simple recipe. They turned out well, not too dry, and somewhat like shortbread without being excessively buttery.

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Cherry Clafoutis

I first made this recipe last year and was thinking of revisiting it as a way to use up some of the many berries stockpiled in my freezer. Clafoutis is one of my favorite desserts and falls somewhere between a flan, custard, and Dutch baby pancake.

The original recipe by Julia Child calls for 3 cups of cherries and for the cherries to be sprinkled with a full 1/3 cup of sugar – I only had 2 cups of cherries at the time, and it seemed like a lot of sugar, so the following recipe includes some small modifications. I also used a combination of almond and vanilla extracts because I think the almond flavor complements the cherries nicely (fun fact: I’ve read that cherry pits can be used to make almond extract). With other fruits, I would probably just follow the original recipe and use 1 tbsp vanilla extract. Read the rest of this entry »

Gnocchi with Corn, Squash, and Goat Cheese

Still backlogged on posts. This is just like my lab notebook, I have to keep going or else I’ll never catch up with it.

Today’s dinner recipe: Gnocchi with Corn, Squash and Goat Cheese, courtesy of The Kitchn. No pictures because I am lazy and just need to write it down for future reference.

– Two ears of corn >> 1 cup corn kernels
– Didn’t use parsley
– Do slice zucchini/squash thinly
– Reduce amount of butter for cooking veggies, maybe 2 tbsp MAX
– Maybe throw in some halved cherry tomatoes next time

Have I been eating Pringles wrong my whole life?

For some reason, a lot of people I know think Pringles are all that and a bag can of chips. I’ve always found them to be meh, just okay. After stumbling upon this article on Serious Eats, I may have identified the problem. According to the author, most people* eat Pringles in the upside-down saddle orientation. I think I actually eat them in the right-side-up saddle orientation. Am I the only one who does this? If I’m jamming a whole chip in my mouth, this orientation makes more sense as it allows your tongue to nestle into the groove on the underside of the saddle. The upside-down saddle is uncomfortably angular and there are too many ways to poke your mouth with sharp chip edges.

Unfortunately with my way, the salt and seasoning is apparently not on the side contacting my tongue. Perhaps this is why I don’t find Pringles to be more delicious. There are other problems, too, like the fact that they are not very potato-y in likeness or texture but instead a weird potato-cardboard composite which has been stamped into a shape out of my calculus textbook. But maybe I’ll give them another shot now that I know there is a preferred orientation.

* Not scientifically proven.

The Perils of Cooking with Pinterest

So I’m a couple of posts backlogged here – you can see why my previous attempts at keeping a blog have failed miserably. But my dinner today was such a complete disaster that I feel the need to rant a bit.

First things first. I will admit that Pinterest is one of my guilty pleasures. It’s good for killing time, looking at food porn, and gathering inspiration for your non-existent fairytale wedding and your non-existent mansion/ski chalet/summer home with a gourmet kitchen and a wine cellar and built-ins everywhere – all of which will be paid for, of course, with your non-existent money.  Of all the recipes I’ve pinned though, I’ve actually made maybe a handful of them.

Second thing you should know about me if you didn’t already: I’m obsessed with my cast iron skillet. It’s a vintage Wagner skillet that I scored from Seattle Goodwill’s eBay store for $15 and carefully stripped and re-seasoned, and it is one of my most prized possessions (aside from the obvious choices – laptop, camera/lenses, and KitchenAid standmixer, naturally). It’s just fantastic to cook and bake with, and I’m always looking for recipes that would be particularly suited to cast iron cooking.

At least twice a month, I use my skillet to make a Dutch baby pancake. If you’ve never had one, a Dutch baby is kind of like a cross between a crêpe and a popover. It’s fast, very filling, and uses stuff I almost always have on hand (egg, flour, milk, and butter), so I often eat them for dinner when I come home from lab hungry and too lazy to get groceries or cook.

While browsing Pinterest earlier today, I noticed a recipe for a blueberry Dutch baby. The pictures looked so delicious, and I happened to have some blueberries on hand, so I figured I would give it a shot. The results were so awful that I cannot in good conscience link the recipe, but here’s the gist.

First of all, unlike my usual recipe, this recipe inexplicably contained NO milk. Not a typo, the author confirmed this in a response to a commenter. The batter was essentially 2 eggs + 1/2 cup flour, which obviously makes for a ridiculously thick batter. How often do you see pancake, crêpe, etc. recipes without any milk or liquid other than the eggs? Against my better judgment, I went along with it anyway.

The other thing that was off was that this recipe called for 3/4 tsp each of cinnamon and nutmeg. That seemed like a lot to me, so I rounded down to 1/2 tsp nutmeg and a heaping 1/2 tsp cinnamon. Maybe the author’s measuring spoons are mislabeled, because even having altered these amounts, there was so much spice (and so little liquid) that my batter was light brown even before baking. But somehow, in the pictures accompanying the original recipe, the author’s finished pancake is a lovely pale golden color. I’m going to guess there was some heavy Photoshopping involved.

Overall, this Dutch baby came out disappointingly hard and dense, not light and custardy like the ones I’ve been making. The cinnamon flavor was also a little too overpowering still. Blech. Next time I’ll just throw some blueberries into my usual recipe.

Lesson learned. Never again will I make a pancake without milk unless you can give me a damn good reason why. You should also take recipes you find via Pinterest with a grain of salt – there are definitely some interesting ideas out there, but in the future I’ll be sure to cross-reference them against recipes from trusted sources first. After all, any idiot with a computer (including myself) can slap a made-up recipe and some Photoshopped pictures on their food blog and proclaim it to be the best thing everyone and their grandma ever tasted.

I ain’t no Challah back girl, super BLTs, and French toast failure

Last Saturday, I made my first entry in the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge, a loaf of challah! This is actually the 6th formula (they are called formulas and not recipes) in the book so I’m slightly out of order, but I really wanted that challah. This was kind of a test run to see if I wanted to commit myself to making lots of bread for a year, and fortunately (or unfortunately?) it went well. I won’t reproduce the entire recipe here since it’s fairly lengthy, but I will make some notes on the process.

This was my very first time making bread, so I figured it might be a good experience for me to knead the dough by hand, even though I have a standmixer with dough hook. I watched a couple of YouTube videos on how to knead, thought it looked simple enough, and decided to go for it. I quickly regretted this – the initial dough was extremely sticky and kept sticking to my hands and the counter, and I really didn’t think I would survive the kneading process. I had to sprinkle in a lot more flour to make the dough manageable. As a second issue, the instructions said to knead for ~10 minutes and that the dough would register about 80°F afterward. I didn’t have an instant read thermometer, only a borrowed probe thermometer for meat which didn’t work too well. Even after kneading for close to 20 minutes (including a lot of sticky flailing at the beginning that I wouldn’t necessarily call kneading), the dough never read 80°. However, it passed the “windowpane test” for gluten development, so I decided to move on anyway.

Ready to rest!

After resting the dough for 1 hour, I was supposed to punch it down and knead it briefly. At this point, the dough was a lot easier to work and felt much smoother. Then back in the bowl to rest for another hour.

After the second hour, the dough had risen quite a bit – roughly 1.5 times its original size as the instructions described. The dough was now nice and soft, and also noticeably warm. I divided the dough into 3 even parts (for 3 strands of a braid), shaped each into a boule, and let them rest briefly before rolling them out into strands. This part was unexpectedly challenging because the dough was fairly soft, so it felt more like I was flattening and stretching it rather than actually rolling out logs.

Braiding dough is kind of fun! Here’s the loaf after shaping, brushing with egg white, and proofing for another 70ish minutes (during which time it continued to rise), and right before I stuck it in the oven.

Although the instructions said to bake for 20 minutes, rotate, and continue baking for another 20-45 minutes, by the time I went to rotate the pan the bread already looked quite browned and done. I left it in the oven for only ~5 minutes more to get to an internal temperature of 190°F (based on the not-so-instant thermometer).

The finished product! Yes, that is an upside-down muffin tin because I didn’t have a cooling rack.

Based on how much bigger it got in the oven, and the amount of white you see on the top of the loaf (where the strands are pulling away from one another/where it didn’t get brushed with egg wash), I think the bread was either a little underproofed (should have let it rest for longer than I did before putting it in the oven) and/or braided too tightly (reference).

Obligatory crumb shot. This loaf was soft and pretty good. It had a very bread-y taste to it, which I know is a weird way to describe bread and hard to explain.

On Saturday evening, after the loaf had cooled, we used it for a late dinner. What we had originally planned to be BLTs ended up escalating into some epic sandwiches – we lightly buttered and toasted slices of bread and piled them with bacon (from the fantastic Dot’s Deli), spring mix greens, tomato, chipotle mayo, avocado, a bit of aged cheddar, and a fried egg. YUM.

Sunday night was round 2, and we were making challah French toast. I actually thought the bread itself tasted even better this day compared to Saturday. Unfortunately, the French toast was a flop (and I don’t have any pictures of it). We followed a recipe from the America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook which has been reproduced here. Basically, the batter consisted of 1 cup of milk, 1 egg, and 1/2 cup of flour. The ratio sounded off to me, but they claimed that the use of flour would produce a crisp outside and moist inside, and ATK rarely fails me. Sadly, once we sat down to eat, we found that the batter really hadn’t penetrated into the bread at all and we were just eating toast that was sort of flavored. We also tried soaking the bread in the batter for longer (increasing from 30 seconds per side to 1 minute per side and 2 minutes per side), but this didn’t seem to help much. I’m still not sure if it was an issue with the bread or with the batter, but next time I’d opt for a more standard eggy batter.

And so concludes the first adventure in my bread baking chronicles. I’ll be picking out my second loaf soon!

The Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge

It all started with 6 pounds of granola.

About a month ago, I saw on Slickdeals that Amazon was selling a pack of four 24-oz cartons of granola for less than $12. Being the cheap Asian I am, I thought, Hey, that’s less than $2 a pound! Why not?! I still maintain that it was an awesome deal. But there’s only so many times you can eat granola as breakfast cereal or granola as a mid-day snack or granola with yogurt before you start wondering what else you can do with your remaining 3.33 cartons of granola. Then I remembered some delicious granola-crusted French toast I’d eaten at Portage Bay Café once, and I figured I could definitely make that myself. But if I was going to make French toast, I would need some challah bread, too.

Slightly wary of the quality of bakery breads at my local grocery store (seriously, worst baguette EVER), I took to the internet to see if I could make my own challah. To my surprise, I ended up finding lots of resources and a huge community of people who were into baking bread (for example, The Fresh Loaf), something I’d never given much thought to. I decided to check out The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart, one of the most recommended books for amateur bread bakers. As I dug further, I found a whole group of bloggers who had done a “BBA Challenge”. And I wanted to do it, too.

This is the challenge: For the next year or so, I will be attempting to bake every single bread (some 43 recipes) in the book. That works out to about one bread every week. There are a number of reasons why I’ve decided to do this:

1. I like working toward defined goals. Especially if they seem kinda crazy. It’s the same reason why I run races.
2. In theory, bread is very simple. Flour, water, yeast, and salt, with a few other ingredients if you want to get fancy.
3. Bread intimidates the crap out of me. I consider myself to be a pretty decent baker, but I’ve never attempted to make bread, not even the no-knead kind. Something about yeast and kneading and rising has always made breadmaking seem really scary and inaccessible.
4. It sounds kind of like science, I think. You know, sponges and sourdough starters and all that stuff I don’t know anything about yet.

So, I’m pretty excited about this challenge. Of course I’ll be documenting each bread I make here, along with how I use them afterward (French toast, sandwiches, bread pudding…). Since I live by myself and probably shouldn’t subsist on 1+ lb of bread every week for the next year, my friends Julie and Sergio will be helping me out with incorporating bread into meals. And to my other friends, I’m warning you now: if you invite me to a potluck sometime in the next year, I’ll probably be bringing bread.

Fungus Amongus

I grew something edible for the first time! Last month, Sergio, Julie, and I went to an event called Mushroom Maynia at the Burke Museum that was all about mushrooms. Although we went primarily to attend a talk on foraging for wild mushrooms, there was also a booth where you could make your own oyster mushroom kits. Essentially, you mixed some kitty litter/cellulose-type growing media, mushroom starter (unfortunately I can’t remember the technical term for this), and water, and stuffed it all into a plastic bag. When I got home, I cut a few slits in the bag and stuck it in a dark area (my closet) while the bag became colonized with mycelium, the white threads that typically form the fungi’s underground network. After about 3 weeks, I realized that primordia (baby mushrooms) were starting to grow out of the slits, which meant it was time to move it to a well-lit area. Once I did this, it was actually slightly alarming how quickly they grew. As the instructions promised, they roughly doubled in size every day – actually, it seemed like they got bigger every time I looked at them. Photos after the jump »

Blueberry Crumb Bars

Today’s recipe comes from one of my all-time favorite food blogs, Smitten Kitchen. I’ve been eyeing her blueberry crumb bars for a while now, and it just so happened that blueberries were on sale this week. I halved the recipe and made it in an 8×8 pan (slightly awkward since that used half an egg, but I ended up using the other half for a late night snack of pasta carbonara). Other than that, my only intentional modification was to replace half of the white sugar in the crumb mixture with light brown sugar. I realized the next day that I also forgot to halve the lemon zest and lemon juice, but it turned out well as the citrus flavor added a nice touch in the finished product.

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