Winos and Painting Glasses

My roommate (who has requested to be called Steamboat Willie) and I went to a class to learn how to paint wine glasses tonight at the Lakeville Art Center. I think I expected this to be harder than it was, but it ended up being no harder than normal painting (which is still plenty hard for me!). We each made a glass and got to drink a few glasses to help "inspire our creativity." I have to say, they turned out better than either one of us expected.

To make things a little bit easier, our teacher had printed out some patterns for us that you could tape onto the inside of the glass. This gave me some good ideas, but I ended up not using it much--the paper was straight while the glass was curved, which threw off my depth perception. Truthfully, I think I painted better on the bottom of the glass, without the pattern. But, it's a comforting way to start and it helps with placement of each thing on the glass, and she said it is pretty easy to find patterns just through a Google search. I'm not finding a lot, but you could also just use stencils or a line drawing you find anywhere.

The glasses had to be washed thoroughly, then primed with something that smelled absolutely terrible, and then finally painted. I guess a lot of paints require that you bake the glass in the oven after you finish, but the kind we used just needs to sit for 10 days before being used. After the 10 days, we'll also wrap a string of beads around the stem of the glass.

The glass on the left with the grape vines is Steamboat Willie's, and the glass on the right with the daisies is mine. Not bad for our first attempts--next up will be the margarita glasses for our upcoming tequila party!

Food experiments: Mad Men (cont.), green beans and mashed potatoes

While green beans and mashed potatoes certainly don't fit with my dessert experiments theme for the month, I learned some great information in my Mad Men class that I'd like to share. In particular, some tips for great mashed potatoes and an incredibly easy recipe for the best green beans I've ever eaten (and thankfully, it has nothing to do with green bean casserole!). I really do want to give credit where it's due, and thank Kevin Ryan for a great class and a lot of knowledge.

I always thought that mashed potatoes were a pretty simple, self explanatory food. Cook potatoes, smash them up and add various unhealthy things for flavor. When you add science (as I suppose you can't help doing if you have a Ph.D. in food science), it becomes a lot more complicated and a lot tastier. The tips I learned:

• Potatoes are usually overcooked (at least mine are!); they are done if you can stick a knife in the potato, lift it up and it slowly slides off. If you can't lift it up well, it's definitely overcooked.
• When the potatoes are done boiling, put them back in the dry pan over heat for a short time to dry out the water. This will give you a richer flavor, since it won't be watered down by the residual moisture.
• Never mash potatoes in a food processor--it breaks down the starches and turns them into the texture of wallpaper paste. (I've never done this, but I'm sure at some point in my life I would have been tempted. Disaster averted.)
• Add all your liquids and most of your seasonings to the potatoes BEFORE you add the butter. The butter coats the potatoes so thoroughly that they won't be able to absorb the rest of the ingredients. You can still add ingredients after the butter if you don't want them absorbed by the potatoes--sort of the equivalent of salting food that's already finished as opposed to salting food and then cooking it. Adding the seasonings after the butter is going to add it on top of a finished product.

The green beans recipe is remarkably simple--I don't know why I haven't tried this or how it turned out so good, but it did. This can also be used on most other vegetables.

Roasted Green Beans
These are seriously amazing. This recipe serves about 8.

Ingredients
2 lbs green beans, ends trimmed off
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar (optional)--this speeds up the roasting process, but you won't taste it. It's optional here, but he highly recommended using it if you make broccoli in this way.

Directions

1. Adjust the oven rack to the middle position and preheat the oven to 450.
2. Line a rimmed baking sheet with aluminum foil (for easy cleanup) and spread the beans on the baking sheet.
3. Drizzle with oil, and toss them to coat. Sprinkle with 1/2 teaspoon of salt and sugar if used, and toss to coat.
4. Spread the beans evenly on the baking sheet. Give them some room and don't let them touch, or the beans will steam rather than roast.
5. Put in the oven and roast 10 minutes.
6. Pull the baking sheet from the oven and use tongs to redistribute the beans. Put them back in the oven and continue roasting until the beans are browning in spots and have started to shrivel, 10 to 12 minutes longer.
7. Add any additional salt and pepper as desired, and serve.

Food Experiments: Mad Men and Grasshopper Pie

I've been slacking on posting my experiments and adventures lately...I wish I could say it was because I've had so many, but really I've just been lazy. Now it's time to catch up!

Henry and I took a cooking class on Wednesday that my parents gave us for Christmas. It was themed around 1960s food and the show Mad Men, and took place at the Cooks of Crocus Hill. I love their cooking classes--they usually have fantastic food, very knowledgeable and personable chefs and more information than I know what to do with. In this class, I learned more than I ever thought I'd learn about mashed potatoes (which I'll share later--first I need to write about the dessert experiment!) and also about food anthropology. (Yes, there is such a thing--the chef went to school for it!)

The chef leading the course was named Kevin Ryan, and he was pretty much fantastic. I should have expected it--my mom and roommate went to one of his classes last fall, and this Christmas my mom was still singing his praises for helping her figure out one of her biggest candy-making challenges. He could not only explain how to make every dish we tried, but also exactly what was happening chemically otherwise to make the food the way it was AND the history how this food had been eaten. I was impressed. And, by the time I left, absolutely stuffed. (And today I learned that he has a book, which I'm going to have to check out soon...)

Kevin Ryan also taught me why my grandma, as well as most people's grandparents, so dearly love bringing some sort of jello to every family occasion. He pointed out that powdered gelatin is really a surprisingly new phenomenon, so in my grandma's day, bringing a jello dish somewhere meant you cared enough to spend a couple of days boiling down cow hooves to make it. Unfortunately, that feeling of jello being a luxury hasn't translated into our generation...until this class, I never really understood that the strawberry jello filled with shredded carrots meant "I love you enough to slave all week in my kitchen over cow hooves."

Anyway, for today I would like to post his recipe for grasshopper pie. To those who have been making this for a long time, maybe this isn't revolutionary BUT--in my experience, making grasshopper pie pretty much meant mixing some booze with ice cream and crunching up some Oreos. Without the ice cream, this was much, much better.


Kevin Ryan's Grasshopper Pie
Delicious, light and creamy. Makes 1 pie. This recipe should be made the night before you iintend to eat it to make sure it has plenty of time to chill and set.

Ingredients

Crust
16 Oreo Mint n' Creme cookies, broken into rough pieces (this still leaves half a box for snacking, as he pointed out--hurray!)
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled

Filling
3 large egg yolks (the whites can be frozen and used later--they fit nicely in ice cube trays!)
1 envelope unflavored gelatin
1/2 cup sugar
2 cups heavy cream
pinch table salt
1/4 cup green creme de menthe
1/4 cup white creme de cacao

6 oz. bar semi-sweet chocolate, shaved

Instructions

Crust

1. Make sure your oven rack is in the middle position and preheat the oven to 350.
2. Grind the cookies in a food processor to make them fine crumbs. Transfer them to a bowl, drizzle with the butter and toss well.
3. Press crumbs evenly into the bottom and sides of a 9-inch pie place (using a ramekin can help, apparently!) abd refrigerate crust until firm, about 20 minutes.
4. Bake until set, 8 to 10 minutes. Cool completely on a wire rack.

Filling

1. Beat the egg yolks in a medium bowl. Combine the gelatin, sugar, 1/2 cup of the cream and salt in a medium saucepan and let sit until the gelatin softens, about 5 minutes. Then cook it over medium heat until the gelatin dissolves andthe mixture is very hot but NOT boiling, about 2 minutes. (The gelatin will break down if it's boiled.)
2. Whisking vigorously, slowly add the gelatin mix to the egg yolks. (Go very slow so you don't heat up the eggs too fast and scramble them. I've also tempered the eggs before by slowly pouring half the hot mix into the eggs, then pouring the eggs back into the hot mix.)
3. Return the mixture to the saucepan and cook, stirring vigorously, until it's slightly thickened, abouot 2 minutes.
4. Remove from the heat and add the creme de menthe and creme de cacao.
5. Pour into a clean bowl and refrigerate, stirring occasionally, until wobbly but not set, about 20 minutes. It should be about the consistency of mayonaise.
6. Beat the remaining 1 1/2 cups cream with an electric mixer to stiff peaks. Whisk 1 cup of the whipped cream into the gelatin mixture until it is completely incorporated. Using a rubber spatula, fold the gelatin mixture into the remaining whipped cream until no streaks of white remain.
7. Scrape the mixture into the cooled pie shell, smooth the top and refrigerate until firm. This will be at least 6 hours but would be better overnight.
8. Serve, topping with chocolate curls if desired.

Books: City of Thieves

I found out about City of Thieves from Kevin Slowey's blog. Based on my experience with the last book I read on his recommendation, I was a little nervous, but I really enjoyed this book. Actually, I guess "enjoyed" might not be the best description--City of Thieves is set in Russia during World War II. In particular, a large part of the story takes place in Leningrad (or Stalingrad or St. Petersburg, at different times in history) while it was under siege by the Nazis. I never went much farther with history than what I learned in school, so before this I wasn't really fully aware of what that meant--starvation, terror, abandonment and death, in a nutshell. So I can't say I enjoyed reading it, but I am glad that I read it, and I would highly recommend it.

City of Thieves follows two young men who have been caught and thrown in prison for minor crimes. They are taken out of prison and given a task by a powerful colonel--bring him a dozen eggs within a week to make his daughter's wedding cake, and they will be absolved of their crimes rather than being shot. In a city where people have been eating bread made of sawdust and not much more for half a year, this is quite a task. To make things a little more interesting, the men are polar opposites--the narrator is younger, more reserved and inexperienced, while his companion is an outgoing, arrogantly likeable playboy.

City of Thieves is well written, fascinating and hard to put down. The story draws you in continually, and along the way you learn quite a lot about WWII Russia. It is not a pretty story by any means--it's filled with death, sex, war crimes and starvation. It is narrated almost completely by a seventeen-year-old boy, and his thoughts and opinions are as politically incorrect as any teenage boy. But it's hard to put down--I finished the book in two days--and now, three days later, it's still on my mind. Read it. Don't expect to laugh the whole way through, but expect to learn a lot and be entertained, if sometimes a little horrified.

Food experiments: Flan!

I love flan. I suppose that’s no surprise…I love custards, creme brulee, or even custard-filled donuts. They’re delicious. But flan has always seemed to me to be one of those things like cheesecake—really delicious, but something you normally eat at a restaurant because it’s too hard to make.

So, in the spirit of experimenting and adventure, I decided to try making flan this week. And, while it was definitely fussy and took a long time, it turned out on my first try! So that’s one more difficult recipe that I can honestly say has been much easier for me to pull off than a batch of brownies.

Because I was intimidated, I used Alton Brown’s recipe. I’ve generally found that his recipes are good for scared people, because he adds a lot of tips to the sides of them and because they’re written down to help you learn to cook. That and I have 3 of his cookbooks, so I usually figure I should use them! This recipe is also available on the Food Network website, with a few more of his details and recommendations.

Alton Brown’s “Flandango”

In his ingredients, he calls for the sauce to be made from caramel sauce, preserves or any other sauce you’d like to try. I experimented with caramel and apricot preserves, and I can heartily vouch for the caramel. The apricot I found to be way to overpowering for the flan itself, so I’d recommend sticking with milder flavors for the sauce. I also used caramel ice cream topping to save time. This tasted fine, but next time I want to try homemade caramel sauce to experiment with textures. The ice cream topping was pretty runny and didn’t really meld well with the flan.

You also need 8 4 oz ramekins (or the equivalent), a big roasting pan, a fine strainer, some pots, a whisk, and your life will be a lot easier if you can get ahold of a pitcher with a spout.

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups whole milk
• 1 cup half-and- half
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup sugar
• An assortment of jams and sauces for toppings (e.g., Butterscotch ice cream topping, hot fudge ice cream topping )
• 6 eggs

Directions

1. Ensure that your highest oven rack is in the middle position. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. I would do this right away and leave it to bake so that the temperature will even out—you’re going to need all the heat you can get, because when you leave the oven open long enough to pour in the water bath later, a lot of heat is going to escape.
2. Place a kettle of water on to boil—the larger your roasting pan, the bigger your kettle. This will become your water bath. (I had to fill my pan up twice—luckily the hot water heater was turned up a little higher than it probably should be, so I had quick access to very hot water!)
3. In a saucepan, combine the milk, half and half, vanilla extract and sugar. Bring to a bare simmer over medium-high heat. As soon as this is achieved, remove from the heat and set aside. This takes a long time. I was able to prepare all the other ingredients and still read a few pages of my book.
   
4. Place 1 to 2 tablespoons of the toppings in the bottom of each ramekin—it shouldn’t be very deep. Probably less deep than mine was!
   
5. Separate 3 eggs, reserving the whites and keeping the yolks for use in the flan.
6. In a mixing bowl, combine the 3 remaining whole eggs with the yolks. Whip with a whisk until the eggs are thickened and slightly lighter in color.
7. Continue whisking the eggs while you mix in about 1/4 of the milk mixture. Then whisk the egg mixture into the saucepan with the rest of the milk mix. (This keeps the eggs from cooking with the heat of the milk.)
   
8. Put the mesh strainer over a pitcher with a spout. Pour the egg mixture through the strainer to get rid of any cooked eggs or particles.
   
9. Set the custard cups in the roasting pan. Evenly distribute the egg mixture in the custard cups.
   
10. Place the roasting pan on the middle rack of your oven. Pour the water from your kettle into the roasting pan to create the water bath—it should stop just below the level of the custard (NOT the ramekins).
    
11. Cook for about 40 minutes, or until the flan wiggles slightly when the pan is shaken.
12. Take the ramekins out individually, either with tongs or (if you are more skilled with oven mitts than with tongs, as I was), with oven mitts. Leave the pan with water in the oven to cool before you throw the water out. (I don’t know why, but I figure I don’t need to find out why by wrecking something, so for once I’ll listen!)
    
13. Now this is the hardest part for me—first, leave the flan to cool to room temperature. Then, put them in the fridge to cool before eating them. (Ok, the ramekins are small enough that this only took about 2 1/2 hours, but on top of the two hours it took to make these, it was hard!)
14. Try to share. It’s hard. They’re good.

Learning to be a little brother

I’m going to commit one of the capital sins of writing today and write about something that has nothing to do with the topic of this blog. This wasn’t an adventure for me, but it did make my life just a little bit brighter—and it’s just really darn cute.

My little nephew turned two in December; he is learning how to be a true little brother, complete with taunting his brother! They both have a lot of energy and since Christmas, this has been the result if you won’t chase Nate around the house.

Food Experiments: Chocolate Fondue

Since there are still pumpkin bars sitting in the kitchen from last week's experiment, I decided to try to make something I thought would be a little smaller this week: chocolate fondue. I've been wanting to try it since I found an incredibly easy recipe on the A Year of Slow Cooking blog, and decided that it was time.

Maybe if I had thought things through a little more, I would have realized that a cup and a half of chocolate chips, mixed with various tasty things and used just as a dipping sauce is not actually a small amount of food. I'm very full, and it was very, very good! This recipe is still available in the archives of the Year of Slow Cooking blog (which I highly recommend if you like easy, good food) but I will re-post it here to keep my recipe experiment collection complete.

She notes that a small crockpot is best for this recipe, but you can also put the ingredients into an oven-safe container inside a large slow cooker to heat the ingredients in the same way as a small one.

Chocolate Fondue
I made this in a 1.5 qt. crockpot, the kind that only has an On and Off option, no temperature settings, and made it with semi-sweet chocolate and a splash of Captain Morgan. We tried it with pound cake, banana slices and marshmallows. Strawberries would also probably be quite nice. Really, I'm pretty sure anything short of beets or asparagus would be good with this--what doesn't benefit from being dipped in molten chocolate?

Ingredients
1.5 cups chocolate chips (semi-sweet, milk chocolate or white chocolate)
1/2 cup cream
1 tsp vanilla

(optional)
1 T Grand Marnier
1 T rum
1 T peppermint schnapps
1 T Irish cream
1 tsp. peppermint, orange, etc. extract

Directions

1. Put chocolate chips into a small crockpot.
2. Add cream, vanilla and any optional flavors.
3. Turn slow cooker to On or Low for about 1 hour.

This has been a slow month for adventures and experiments...I blame the influence of February. It's a bad month up here, and it's usually around now when I feel like winter has been here forever and I start to have a hard time remembering what the world looked like when it was green. But, I'm trying to do my best to fill the rest of my winter with some interesting stories, so hopefully things will pick up soon.