Archive for In the Kitchen and Foodstuff
August 17, 2008 at 4:12 pm · Filed under In the Kitchen and Foodstuff
On July 7th Eric emailed me this blog post detailing an experiment in mixing two delicious things: bacon and chocolate chip cookies. In the subject line he asked, “wanna bake some cookies?”. Yes, of course I did. Various summer going-ons delayed our cookie date but yesterday we finally got the chance to try this experiment ourselves.
Muffin was so great at documenting her experience so I’ll try to give the recipe without too many embellishments. We started with your standard chocolate chip cookie dough recipe:
3/4 cup butter (She suggests trying 1 cup because her cookies may have been a bit dry. I only had 3/4 of a cup in the fridge and did find the dough a bit too dry so added a smidgen of vegetable oil.)
2/3 cup packed brown sugar
2/3 cup white sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract (She uses 1/2 tsp as well as 1 tsp of hazelnut extract. I didn’t want to introduce other complicated flavours and only used vanilla.)
2 1/2 cups flour (If you are only using 3/4 cup of butter, I would reduce the flour to maybe 2 cups…?)
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips (She uses 1 cup of white chocolate and 1 cup of semi-sweet chocolate but Eric and I both agreed the white chocolate would be a bit too festive.)
2 cups of bacon bits - the real-deal bacon bits, not simulated
We bought two jars of these bacon bits at Stong’s, each having just under 1 cup of bits:
The cookie dough was assembled like any other cookie dough and the bacon bits were mixed in at the end (at the same time as the chocolate chips):
This is the finished dough:
Doesn’t it look wonderful? A taste test left me drunk with cookie anticipation while we rolled the dough into small balls:
Each pan went into the oven at 350 F for 10-11 minutes. In the meantime, we fried the topping bacon. We used a whole package, I don’t know how many pounds it was, but your standard package size of bacon:
Baking cookies in the oven and frying bacon on the stove might not be the most comfortable activity for a hot, humid day in August. Luckily the sun was going down and we were gifted with a beautiful, calm and cooling sunset sky:
While the cookies and bacon cooled a little, we prepared the maple glaze. Muffin was so smart to include the maple glaze. It acts as both a adhesive for the bacon topping and a bridge between salty savory bacon and the sweeter cookie. The glaze was made with:
2 cups icing sugar
1 1/2 tablespoon maple extract
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
some cinnamon
milk to make a thicker glaze (She uses water but I didn’t feel right about that.)
We spread the glaze on each cookie and topped with a piece (or a few) of the fried bacon. The results:
The conclusion: these are some of the most incredible cookies that I have ever eaten. The salty bacon compliments the cookie and chocolate so well. The layers of flavour leave you feeling like you have just eaten a delicious breakfast meal in cookie form. I have never had such satisfaction out of a cookie as I do with these. I can’t imagine anyone who is not a vegetarian not liking these cookies. Make them. Eat them.
August 7, 2008 at 8:52 pm · Filed under In the Kitchen and Foodstuff
Not much to be said here. Raspberries and cream, whipped cream. The perfect compliment to raspberry tartness.
Raspberries and cream day is like a finishing nod to the raspberry season so it’s a little sad. I’ve eaten pints and pints of berries and cherries in the past few months and will miss them come fall.
August 6, 2008 at 9:15 am · Filed under In the Kitchen and Foodstuff
Having recently celebrated ice cream soda day, I wasn’t really up for a root beer float even with leftover root beer and ice cream at my disposal. To be honest, I don’t really like soda/pop hence think floats are kind of a waste of ice cream. Maybe that’s what A&W was thinking when they started selling bottled ice cream floats. Pushing it a little. Not really a float anymore is it? The Great Root Bear probably didn’t have much of a say in making bottled floats. In fact, I wonder how much they ever listened to his opinion. They keep him around because the kids love bears and that jingle but we can’t even begin to imagine the agony of hearing ba-dum-dah-dum everywhere you walk.
August 5, 2008 at 9:03 am · Filed under In the Kitchen and Foodstuff
Good morning! It’s a happy day indeed - it’s waffle day!
Some waffle facts:
Waffles date back to the middle ages when thin, crisp cakes were baked between two iron plates connected together with a hinge and imprinted with a design, sometimes the waffle grid we know today.
Eggo had/has a 65% share of the frozen waffle market (I’m assuming both in the States and Canada).
“L’Eggo my Eggo” has been used by Eggo since 1960.
I have been called “Meggo my eggo” since 1981.
Belgian waffles are made with yeast-leavened batter, North American waffles are leavened with baking powder.
My laptop is named Waffles. This is because breakfast is the most incredible meal of the day. It is also because of Gir.
My house does not have a waffle iron :( so I ate frozen waffles this morning. I have not eaten them since a period of time in high school when I had Eggo waffles every morning. So I had a crazy wave of déjà-manger.
Waffles are incredible.
August 4, 2008 at 8:05 pm · Filed under In the Kitchen and Foodstuff
Chocolate chip day celebrated with one of my favourite varieties of chocolate chip baking:
The banana chocolate chip muffin. The ones at this café were missing the bananas it seems.
So get this - chocolate chips were not produced until 1939. Can you imagine it? So much history with no chocolate chips?
In 1933 the owner of the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts, Ruth Graves Wakefield, altered a batch of butter drop cookies by adding cut-up chunks of a Nestlé semi-sweet chocolate bar. The cookies were a success at the inn and Nestlé offered Wakefield a lifetime supply of chocolate in exchange for permission to print the cookie recipe on the chocolate bar packaging. They sold the bars with a little tool for cutting them up but soon enough, they began to sell the chocolate in “morsel” form. Story from Nestlé here.
Now chocolate chips are put in everything baked (and not): muffins, cake, cookies, ice cream, loaves, bagels, waffles, cheesecake, brownies, other squares, etc. and they are not always chocolate. Bless the souls who invented butterscotch chips.
Finally, in case you were wondering, chocolate chips came after Hershey’s Kisses. So did Hershey start the standard chocolate chip “drop” shape using mini Kisses machines? Because I never see Nestlé chocolate chips in the grocery store. Only Hershey’s and Baker’s. Hmmm…someone needs to tour a few chocolate factories…
August 3, 2008 at 8:39 pm · Filed under In the Kitchen and Foodstuff
A summer icon but odd looking without the seeds.
Summary of my seedless watermelon production googling:
A chemical called colchicine is used to double the number of chromosomes of a normal watermelon. If colchicine were used on us, we would probably die but the watermelons are cool with it. It actually makes them bigger and stronger so colchicine is often used in watermelon breeding. If these watermelons with extra chromosomes are crossed with normal watermelons, a sterile offspring is produced. This offspring can be used to produce seedless watermelons but the normal watermelon is still needed to provide pollen that the sterile watermelon lacks. Oh and you also need a lot of bees.
Next time I’ll buy a seeded watermelon but if I make watermelon bombe, I may make it seedless. I was never a fan of frozen chocolate chips in my sherbet.
I’ve been reading other things about watermelons: they are not actually melons in the proper melon sense (like honeydew, cantaloupe, and cucumber), there is a breed called “cream of saskatchewan” that I can’t believe I have not tried, and there are southeastern European folk legends of vampire watermelons.
According to tradition, watermelons or any kind of pumpkin kept more than ten days or after Christmas will become a vampire, rolling around on the ground and growling to pester the living. People have little fear of the vampire pumpkins and melons because of the creatures’ lack of teeth.
It’s a good thing watermelon gets eaten up so fast.
August 3, 2008 at 10:01 am · Filed under In the Kitchen and Foodstuff
Yikes, falling behind on the food holidays already! Yesterday was ice cream sandwich day:
I could make my own but they are more satisfying bought individual at a store and devouring before the ice cream melts. Maybe another weekend when I’m not still working on a pie.
August 2, 2008 at 9:07 am · Filed under In the Kitchen and Foodstuff
Yesterday was raspberry cream pie day and the day before was raspberry cake day. I kind of cheated and combined the two and well, it’s not cake but pie is like cake and I made the pie on raspberry cake day so the spirit was there.
A close up of my un-photogenic raspberry cream pie:
What it lacked in looks it made up for in personality!! Though it’s that kind of personality you absolutely love but can only handle in small doses. This was a learning lesson and next time I’ll be prepared to make the most charismatic pie.
To start with a pie meaning well: I used this recipe for a Raspberry-Chocolate Tart from Epicurious. I don’t believe in tarts with a chocolate-crumb crust - it’s really a pie. The filling was made with pureed raspberries, whipping cream, and mascarpone cheese. I had never used mascarpone before but it’s an Italian cream cheese that gaves the filling a light, velvety texture with a bit of cream cheese sourness, enhanced by the tartness of the raspberries, but with none of that cream cheese rubber/process-y-ness if that makes sense.
After chilling overnight, the pie got a little too excited. I had visions of 3 layers of brown, pink, and white perfectly holding each other together like a neopolitan cloud. Instead of following the recipe topping of fresh raspberries and raspberry preserves, I made whipped cream and spread it on top. That was probably my first mistake. Freshly whipped cream is probably at its best dolloped onto dessert immediately before serving.
Then I went further and figured that chocolate sauce should be drizzled over the pie to balance out the chocolate bottom. I made a sauce that was probably more a ganache and dripped/globbed/mixed it over the whipped cream. Then there was the dipping of raspberries and the placement of more raspberries and the drizzling of more sauce and then ooooh…the pie was just messy.
Next time I may or may not include the chocolate sauce. If I do, it will be drizzled onto the raspberry filling. That will be stored in the fridge and immediately before serving I will place a dollop of whipped cream and bouquet of raspberries on each individual serving.
That whole lesson being said, it was still an incredibly tasty way to learn.
Pie was followed by Blocus and I think while I slept raspberry, chocolate, and cream Blocus pieces danced in my head.
July 31, 2008 at 9:26 pm · Filed under In the Kitchen and Foodstuff
It’s a bean, there’s jelly inside with candy roots back to Turkish Delight, and there’s the harder shell.
Actually, I’m a bit depressed/cranky tonight and as much as I want to keep going with this food holiday thing - I’m just not feeling the jellybean. My mood is currently such that when I think jellybeans, I think that to all of life’s wonderful variety you still have to deal with disgusting black licorice in the mix. And I forget and, upon encountering a new batch, hope for black currant. Maybe they could learn from winegums.
But no. Black licorice. You can taste it on the neighboring beans too. Then there are those green mint flavoured beans. Ewww…let’s not get started. This girl has got to get some sleep.
July 31, 2008 at 9:37 am · Filed under In the Kitchen and Foodstuff
The most fitting start to cotton candy day. I woke up this morning and my blinds were glowing an electric pink. I opened them to see the most gorgeous cotton candy sunrise. The blue and pink standard cotton candy colours * must * be inspired by this kind of sky.
Before this morning I was planning on drawing cotton candy as I don’t see myself getting to the fair or a circus today but this sunrise says it all for me.
Still, cotton candy is a pretty cool thing. From Wikipedia:
It was introduced in 1904 by William Morrison and John C. Wharton, at the St. Louis World’s Fair as “Fairy Floss”[1] with great success, selling 68,655 boxes at the then-high $0.25 ($5.70 in 2007 dollars), half the cost of admission to the fair.
The center part of the machine consists of a small bowl into which sugar is poured and food coloring added. Heaters near the rim melt the sugar and it is spun out through tiny holes where it solidifies in the air and is caught in a large metal bowl.
It’s called Barbe à papa (Papa’s beard) in French - so is Barbapapa actually a cotton candy man?
July 30, 2008 at 9:57 pm · Filed under In the Kitchen and Foodstuff
A woman at work made us the most amazing cheesecake I’ve ever had last week. I don’t think anything I could eat today would ever compare so a drawing:
Cheesecake is interesting in that it’s been around foooorever and so many cultures have their own versions of it. Perhaps it is just something that humans need.
My favourite kinds are pumpkin cheesecake and a pistachio no-bake cheesecake that my mother makes. Your basic New York-style is good too but if I have it, a lot is riding on the crust and toppings.
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According to wikipedia, there is a “Vancouver-style” cheesecake.
Vancouver-style cheesecake is a light, airy style made without a crust, primarily in vanilla and chocolate and often served refrigerated with various local fruit toppings such as British Columbia strawberries, raspberries and cherries.
I wasn’t totally aware of that but while discussing places to eat cheesecake in the city today, a coworker mentioned most of them having a lighter cheesecake. But no crust?? I don’t know. One of the most incredible characteristic of desserts is layers.
July 29, 2008 at 7:06 pm · Filed under In the Kitchen and Foodstuff
I’m a little late but with reason. Last night there were BBQ and glacier slideshow going-ons at the Kommune. Faron was doing field work in the Yukon and the gathering was for the group who had been there to share pictures and stories. Amazing photographs and great to see how well a projector works in our backyard.
But earlier in the day I did get the chance to celebrate Lasagna Day. A co-worker recently stumbled upon a little Italian catering business / café nestled in the middle of our nowhere land company box park - taste of italy catering (website coming soon). It’s a great little places, the staff are smiley and friendly, all main items are between $5.00 and $7.00, and they taste yummy and fresh. If you are ever in Richmond, lost among the featureless boxes of the East side, hope that you might stumble across this little place.
I ordered the Lasagna al Forno:
Whenever I eat lasagna I think of Garfield and then I wonder - how Italian is lasagna really? Has anyone tried lasagna in Italy? The only thing I know is that their lasagne does not have ripply edges.
Yesterday was also “Cheese Sacrifice Purchase Day”. “Sacrifice” and “Purchase” seem a little contradictory so I wasn’t quite sure what to do here. This was the best explanation I found:
Today is Cheese Sacrifice Purchase Day. Apparently if you wish to get rid of mice you have to sacrifice some cheese and today is the day you purchases the cheese to sacrifice to the mice.
But I wasn’t entirely convinced. Neither did I connect with that definition in any way, not having ever lived with mice (that I know of). So I did the first thing I figured I had to do: I bought my favourite cheese: applewood smoked cheddar. On the way home I thought about making a cheese shrine or sacrificing the cheese to the carpenter ants or saying that I’m a mouse and hoarding the cheese to myself. In the end I sacrificed the cheese to the BBQ:
Not really a sacrifice at all. Besides, mice are not that into cheese anyway…but would they go for cheesecake? Stay tuned…
July 28, 2008 at 11:06 pm · Filed under In the Kitchen and Foodstuff
This could have been a much more spectacular day but I spent 10 hours of it coding a prototype and felt that a good old vending machine chocolate bar would be suitable for celebrating chocolate in its milk/sugar goodness. But what happened to you aero bar? I remember you being so melty on my tongue and now you seem slightly waxy. Chocolate down in quality? My roommate suggests that maybe they started using a different kind of air for the bubbles.
Oh well, lesson learned. Things in my Aero bar:
MILK CHOCOLATE (SUGAR, MODIFIED MILK INGREDIENTS, COCOA BUTTER, UNSWEETENED CHOCOLATE, LACTOSE, SOYA LECITHIN, POLYGLYCEROL POLYRICINOLEATE ARTIFICIAL FLAVOUR).
July 27, 2008 at 9:10 pm · Filed under In the Kitchen and Foodstuff
Try making crème brûlée! It’s not too hard, the ingredients are basic, it’s fun and nobody can say they don’t like the brûlée. I made it following instructions from both Cooking for Engineers and the WikiBooks Cookbook.
My advice to add to those recipes:
Use vanilla beans. I made a small practice batch using vanilla extract and the taste difference is very noticeable.
Use the lower middle rack in your oven. I started my practice ones on an upper rack and they didn’t seem to get very cooked until I moved to a lower rack.
Some recipes say to use demerara sugar. I used that dark brown demerara sugar (sits with brown sugar on the grocery store shelf) for practice and it catches fire quite easily. My first brûlée was a bit too burnt. I didn’t know that demerara is also the name for raw or turbinado sugar and when I tried this type, it worked much better.
Mmm…I don’t know what else to say except…yum.
This will be made again. In the meantime, I’m brainstorming on other things I can do with ramekins and a kitchen torch.
July 26, 2008 at 11:10 pm · Filed under In the Kitchen and Foodstuff
Coffee milkshake? Day?
Yes. And there are even greeting cards for it. (Be careful of that link, there’s a seizuriffic gif at the top of the page.) Wasn’t even sure what a coffee milkshake was. I imagined ice cream-milkshake flavoured with coffee but I guess it’s like an iced latte but with more (eggs). Found a recipe and made one today:
100 ml Chilled strong coffee
1 egg, well beaten
200 ml Cold milk
50 ml cream
tsp sugar
some vanilla extract
ginger biscuits to decorate —–>
It was so-so. I like my coffee hot and black. And in retrospect, I can’t believe I drank a glass of coffee with an egg in it. The all-in-one breakfast. Kind of a waste because I would appreciate milk, cream, coffee, and egg so much more if they were consumed individually. Finally, I wouldn’t recommend putting those ginger snaps in it. They melted into the coffee milkshake and became soggies from hell.
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