Archive for In the Kitchen and Foodstuff
August 5, 2008 at 9:03 am · Filed under Food Holidays, 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 Food Holidays, 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 Food Holidays, 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 Food Holidays, 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 Food Holidays, 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.
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