Food News

I did that thing tonight where I baked something from scratch.  It happens on occasion, and always results in my kitchen counter and my clothing being covered in flour, but also results in tasty homemade baked goods.  Tonight's baking adventure: pumpkin scones, with glaze and everything.  I followed this recipe, and it went very well.  That is, besides one ill-fated moment when I decided to use my hands to mix ingredients together instead of "stirring" and got the unexpectedly sticky batter (which had not yet become dough) all over my right hand, and felt a striking likeness to those guys covered in sea barnacles in the second Pirates of the Carribean movie.  There's an image that's not often associated with baking.  Anyway, after scraping the sticky batter off my hand with a knife (most of it, anyway), I tipped the batter out onto the counter and with the help of more flour kneaded it into actual dough, formed it into two circles, and cut it into slices because this is apparently how scones get shaped like wedges.  Somehow I always pictured them forming those little triangles by hand.

Then I set the pieces on a cookie sheet and brushed milk over the top, popped those babies in the oven for 13 minutes, whipped up a glaze of powdered sugar, milk, and pumpkin pie spice, and bam!  Pumpkin scones :)

They're all kinds of delicious.  The scones themselves aren't super sweet, but the sweetness of the glaze complementing the more subtle flavor of the bread just makes them taste heavenly.

In other food-related news, today I discovered that my inability to cook good rice is not because I'm a rice-cooking failure, but because I'm a rice-buying failure.  Inspired by my continuing association with Filipino people, I bought jasmine rice at the store today (as opposed to instant rice), and lo and behold, it was marvelous.  And, ironically, not that much harder than instant rice...same general procedure (boil water, pour in rice), it just takes 20 minutes instead of 5 minutes.  And I'm totally willing to wait an extra 15 minutes for really good rice.  For dinner I topped the rice with the remaining ratatouille and topped the ratatouille with goat cheese.  Let's just say it was a fancy and delicious dinner.  Even better, I improvised crock pot ratatouille to use up the remaining vegetables from the real ratatouille...it's obviously somewhat soupier than the oven version, but seems promising.  Looking forward to more tasty ratatouille/rice meals for dinner this week :)

And then I'm going to eat large quantities of chicken and dumplings, because I was feeling sick this morning and chicken and dumplings seemed like an appropriate sick-person food when I was making up my grocery list.  The recipe I have makes a ton of it, but at least I won't starve if snow flurries close down Dallas later this week.

Hooray for cooking!

Peeling Grapes in the Name of Pie

"Maybe I'll make a pie tonight...," said the foolish girl.

Yeah, that would be me.

It was approximately 6:30, and while I wasn't yet hungry for dinner I also wasn't doing much of anything worthwhile and thought that I might as well make a pie in the meantime before I ate dinner in about 45 minutes or so.  A good way to pass some time, and then I could eat pie.  It's a win-win situation.

Earlier this morning, I had decided to try my hand at making a grape pie, like my grandpa once made.  I mentioned this in an earlier blog post, but I really liked that pie (all my grandpa's pies, really), and I've wanted to recreate it now that I own a pie pan.  Making a grape pie seemed like an extra serendipitous decision, since the bag of grapes I bought at the store this week were running a bit sour on their own.  Might as well add a bunch of sugar to them in pie-form.  The recipe was straightforward enough, and after a quick jaunt to the store to buy pie crust and oats, I had all the ingredients.  Time to make me a pie.

Step one, and I quote, was to: "Squeeze the end of each grape opposite the stem to separate skins from pulp."  Easy enough.  Reading that sentence, it sounds like the inside of the grape will just pop right out of it's little skin shell, and you'll be done in no time.  

Yeah.  Not so much.

Instead, I spent about 45 minutes peeling grapes.  I don't know if you've ever peeled grapes, but it is not an easy task.  Each one takes just about 30 seconds or so to peel, but when you have 2 lbs of grapes, the time adds up.  Furthermore, grapes don't particularly lend themselves to being peeled - by the time I was finished there was grape juice EVERYWHERE, including, but not limited to, my eyes, my forehead, my hair, my shirt, my shoulder, my arms, the counter, the sides of the bowl, the nearby coffee pot...it was a bit chaotic.

Finally, I had my prize: a bowl of grape skins, and a pot of skinless grapes.

Victory.

While I stood there peeling the grapes, thinking about how redundant and endless the task seemed to be, I was reminded of my Prayer and Spirituality class last semester.  We talked a lot in that class about historical spiritual figures, like Brother Lawrence (a French Carmelite monk) and Thich Nhat Hanh (a Buddhist monk), who had mastered the art of contemplative prayer, or practicing the "miracle of mindfulness."  Both of them cooked a lot, and both of them were really adamant about how mindless activities are perfect opportunities for meditation.  Thich Nhat Hanh went on in his book for about 20 pages about how "when you're cutting the onions, you must be cutting the onions", and not jumping on to the next thing.  I think you could easily exchange "peeling the grapes" for "cutting the onions" in that sentence.  Once I got past the annoying realization that my "quick" pie-making adventure was going to be very time consuming, it was actually a really good time of thinking.  I tend to be very technology-oriented when I'm just hanging around my apartment, and always have my laptop or my TV on to cover the silence and pass the time.  And even though I did have music playing, it was unusual for me to spend a prolonged amount of time just in personal thought, with no distractions.  I probably ought to do more of that.

Back to the pie, the rest of the recipe went by very quickly: boil the grape pulp, mix it together with the skins and pie-filling-esque ingredients (sugar, flour, lemon juice, salt), and dump it in a pie shell (I was actually pretty bad at rolling out the pie crust).  Then I whipped up a topping of oats, brown sugar, flour, and butter, and sprinkled it on the top, and popped it in the oven for 35 minutes.

And let me tell you...that is one TASTY pie.  It's SO good.  Like, seriously.  I was a little bit discouraged when I took it out because the edges were burnt, but the pie itself is fantastic.  And, since this is my first real made-from-scratch pie (crust excluded), I was pretty proud.  As usual, here are some photos...I'm starting to get better at this whole cooking thing!

Pie with filling, pre-baking

Completed Pie, with Topping, pre-baking

The finished pie!  The edges are burnt, but the filling was perfect!

"Slice" of the pie...it may be an ugly piece, but it was SO delicious

This has been a good week of cooking adventures, between the crepes, Mahi Mahi, and now my grape pie!  I've been eating GOOD this week!

And since I've been eating good, I also did some Wii Fit stepping tonight while watching 500 Days of Summer.  Because, you know.  I DID bring a lot of pie into the house...

"Can I just have the one Mahi, because I'm not that hungry?"

I made Mahi Mahi for dinner.

The recipe I had called for flounder or sole fillets, but oddly enough the store didn't seem to sell these very generic-sounding fish (at least not in the frozen variety), but had Mahi Mahi in abundance.  Since my recipe was simply for "Oven Fried Fish Fillets", I figured that fish was fish and went for the Mahi Mahi, along with a package of Pacific Cod to stretch one recipe into several meals.

Happily, I was very pleased with the finished result...

Here's something that is true about me:  I LOVE fish.  I love seafood in general, really.  Yet I very rarely cook my own seafood.  I will probably make this recipe a lot in the future, though, because it was super easy - just coating a piece of fish with low-fat mayonnaise, dredging it in a bread crumb-parsley-paprika mixture, and baking it for 12 minutes.  There, now you can go make it too.  It's also a good recipe because it mainly uses stock ingredients and you can make it in individual servings...finding such recipes are huge victories for me, a single woman living on a budget.  Tonight I went ahead and baked the whole package (two fillets), but I'm saving the other Mahi for later.  (House Bunny reference, anyone?)

Besides my cooking adventures (which were really not all that adventurous), I had a fantastically lazy day.  I survived my 8:30am Greek I final with success and was back to my apartment by 10:00 - an exciting accomplishment, since I'm generally in class until 12:30 every day.  Since I'm starting Greek II on Monday (and therefore still have much homework over the weekend), finishing the first term is rather anticlimactic.  Still, in the name of post-finals celebration, I named today my vacation day, and spent it making hummus, napping for 3 hours, doing some laundry, watching A Goofy Movie, The Secret Garden, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and just generally de-stressing.  The only work I did all day was the paid kind, and that mostly just consisted of responding to emails from people looking for a church to attend in France.  Yay for mini-vacations!

It's kind of surreal that I'm halfway through the summer term...it's one of those phenomenons where the days pass slowly but the weeks pass quickly.  Only three more weeks until the real vacation starts!

Cooking Adventures: La Crêperie de Celia

Aujourd'hui, je suis plus française qu'hier.

In other words, today I am more French than I was yesterday.

Why, you ask?

Because today I successfully mastered the art of crepe-making.

Heck yes.

As anyone who has spent time in France will tell you, one of the best side effects of la vie francaise is the abundance of crepes that suddenly become available in one's life.  They're the quintessential Parisian street-food, with creperies popping up all over the place luring tourists and natives alike to their windows with enormous jars of Nutella and a batter-strewn pan steaming from its latest creation.  It's like walking by dessert heaven; it would be a sin not to eat one.

Even better than the crepe stands, though, was when my French host mother would serve up crepes for dinner.  My housemates and I dubbed this recurring practice "crepe-night", and would talk in excited anticipation about its imminent arrival and eat as little as possible throughout the day in preparation of the main event.  A three-course affair, crepe night began with a stack of crepes, eggs fried over-easy, flash-fried ham slices, and fried goat cheese rounds, sitting enticingly in the middle of the table waiting for us to assemble our do-it-yourself dinner crepes.  Next came the baguettes with Camembert and Comte cheeses (hello, it's France).  The best part of crepe night, though, was the dessert course, when Madame would reveal from her kitchen all sorts of sweet spreads and fruits and ice cream and bid us build the crepe of our wildest imaginations.  Nutella, bananas, peanut butter, whipped cream, ice cream - they all made an appearance at this course.  On one memorable night, Madame emerged from the kitchen with a tray containing no less than NINE containers of ice cream, ordering us to use up what was left in our crepe fancies.  The evening always concluded with laughter as Madame forced us to eat all the crepes so there wouldn't be leftovers, offering the last crepe from one girl to the next as we protested and begged her to have mercy on our stomachs.  Somehow, I usually ended up with that last crepe...they're rather hard to resist, you know.

Since returning from Paris, I've wanted to be able to recreate Madame's crepe dinners, if on a smaller scale.  My sister and I attempted to make crepes back in the summer of 2009, right after my return to the States, only to be thwarted in our efforts by old pans that had lost their non-stick capabilities, leaving us with a mess of half-cooked crepe pieces and general frustration.  The failure was so spectacular that I never attempted to make crepes again.

Until now.

In my birthday card from my parents, my mother included a crepe recipe that she found in a cooking magazine.  Having vowed to get back into the cooking experimentation over the summer, and having my own kitchen and good-condition frying pan at my disposal, and looking for a cheap and tasty meal, I decided to try my hand at crepe-creation again.  So I turned on some music, heated up the frying pan, and set to work.

The first crepe was about as disappointing as those of the 2009 fiasco.  Small, misshapen, and half-cooked, my prospects weren't looking so good.  But, upon reevaluating the situation, I determined that I hadn't put enough batter in the pan, that the batter hadn't spread around well enough because of its small quantity, and that I hadn't let it cook long enough.  So I got a bigger scoop, plopped the batter in the middle of the pan, twirled it around with somewhat greater finesse, and watched it nervously as it cooked.  I flipped it over a couple times, letting each side brown up a bit, and then slid it onto my cooling pan.

That was my first victorious crepe.

After that, I whipped up about 10 more crepes with ease.  Then I fried up some sliced ham, fried an egg (ironically, that was the part that gave me the most trouble of the whole ordeal), and assembled the two on a crepe before sprinkling it with mozzarella cheese and rolling it up.  Grabbing another crepe, I sliced up half a banana, tossed the pieces in the middle, scooped a bit of Nutella over the top, rolled it up, and placed it next to the other crepe on my plate.  Then I wandered over to my couch and watched TV while enjoying my crepe-victory.

It was basically my best cooking adventure ever.

And now enjoy some photos of the crepe process!

First Crepe vs Second Crepe Comparison

Going well!!

I was all excited...

My crepe bounty

And yes Mom, I will still be able to get my deposit back on my apartment when I move out...the crepe-making adventure didn't cause that much destruction ;)