Fancy drinks for the destitute!

My best friend in college used to always order the same thing at every coffee shop. She called it a "Florentine," which is the fancy name for a drink that is half hot cocoa and half black coffee. When we were at a coffee shop in Madrid, NM last summer, she asked for a Florentine and the guy behind the counter had no idea what she was talking about, so she explained. When he heard what it was he laughed and said "We've always called that a poor-man's mocha!"



Well folks, I've just figured out the poor-girl's MATCHA!! The office I'm working at right now has an electric teapot (GODSEND) and a stash of tea, but no stash of sweeteners save a grubby box of confectioners sugar (wtf?) and some of that powdered coffee-mate crap. I found by accident today that if you make a hot cup of strong green tea and mix in powdered sugar and coffee-mate, it actually tastes just like powdered MATCHA, at a fraction of the price!! Try it, kids!



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Bread!

I made my first loaf of bread at altitude today! It came out positively divine, and I documented the entire process so I could share. I took a recipe from here and altered it, since I had hi-gluten bread flour but not just "gluten" like so many recipes called for. I also divided it in half since we're not actually huge bread-eaters in this here household, so it was a very experimental loaf. Usually when baking, I like to follow the recipe to a T at least the first time through and make my alterations from there, but maybe I'm getting more adventurous lately. Here's my recipe, with photos interspersed:



I call this my "Perfect Wheaty Bread" recipe. It's a simple yeast bread baked at altitude and it rises beautifully to provide a nice crust, and a soft, even texture inside.

YOU WILL NEED:
1 1/2 cups warm water
1 packet active dry yeast
2 1/2 tablespoons sugar
2 cups whole wheat flour
2 cups hi-gluten bread flour
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 teaspoons salt

Firstly, you want to make sure the yeast is active. To do this, combine the water, yeast, and sugar in a large bowl, and let it sit for about five minutes. Yeast doesn't like any kind of shock, including being cold. (I took the cold water first and put it in a big pyrex bowl, then microwaved that for about a minute or so before adding the yeast so that the yeast would stay warm and comfortable.) It will begin to eat the sugar once you add it and will bubble and mix with the water. If it doesn't bubble, start over with fresh ingredients. Cloudy beige water means yeast-fail (either it's dead, or the water was too cold or too hot). Mine looked like this:



Next, add the flours, oil, and salt all at once. I mixed it with my hand and didn't remember to take the picture until after I was thoroughly sticky. Fortunately, I have two hands:



Mix until everything is integrated, and dough forms a nice soft ball



Then turn the dough on to a clean countertop and knead for five minutes. In the house where I'm staying, there are chilly tile countertops so after cleaning them, I blasted the tiles with a hairdryer for a while. I don't honestly know if the chilly countertop would have been enough to shock the yeastie-beasties, but I prefer to work on a warm countertop anyway :P
If you're a real beginner and you don't know how to knead dough, it's super simple: just press the heels of your hands in to the dough and smush it forward, then grab the far end of it with your fingers and pull it toward you. Turn it about a quarter-turn and repeat it all. You want to fold a lot of air inside the dough so the bread will rise and get fluffy. I don't have any pictures of this part because I was busy kneading.
After five minutes, put the dough back in the bowl and let it rest for about ten minutes. It will get slightly larger:



Then knead it for another five. Return the dough to the mixing bowl and cover loosely with a dish towel. Put it in a warm place (I put it in the oven with the door closed; no heat, but on top of the fridge works too. If your house is toasty then it doesn't matter, but it's chilly here). Let the dough sit and rise for about an hour. it should be about doubled in size when the timer goes off.

I took the time while it was rising to prepare some trail mix to fold inside. A long time ago, some friends of mine were moving and they gave me a lot of food, including a bag of tasty trail mix. It had raisins in it, dried dates, sunflower seeds, pepitos, cashews and peanuts. I forgot about it and when I finally found it in the back of the pantry a few weeks ago, everything was dried enough to break your teeth, but was otherwise still good. I simmered it all in a pan for a while until the grapes were reconstituted, then let everything drain on a paper towel for a while. Before mixing it all in to the dough, I toasted everything on a skillet over low heat with a little wheat flour tossed on top to keep them from sticking to the pan.



When the hour is up, take the bread out and punch it down. If you're not adding anything to it, it's ready to go in the pan. This is when I added the trail mix; I just stretched the dough out like pizza dough, scattered the trail mix in it, and folded it all inside the bread. There might be better techniques for this, as it made air pockets in my final loaf. If you're not adding anything, don't worry about it; just punch it down, shape it in to a loaf, and set it in the pan.

This amount of dough makes one loaf. Lightly oil a loaf pan and sprinkle a little flour around the sides to keep it from sticking. Some people like to use cornmeal for this part, and some people don't bother using flour; it probably doesn't matter.



I also made a dent in the top of the bread, as I read somewhere that if you split it then there's more space for the bread to rise as much as possible. Cover the pan and put it back in the warm place to rise for another 30-45 minutes.



Preheat the oven to 425. (If the dough was rising in the oven, take it out before you begin preheating. This is duh, but just in case.) Once it's ready, bake the loaf for about a half hour. It will get nice and brown on top. Once it smells like really hot bread, it's probably ready to go. You can tell when it's done if you tap on the top and it sounds hollow.



Remove it from the pan immediately and place on a cooling rack for about ten minutes before you cut it.



We smeared it with a little butter and chowed down even though we'd both just had lunch. It was delicious!! I'm excited to toast it with butter, and maybe cinnamon sugar, and I'll definitely be making this exact recipe again.

Vegan Cream of Mushroom Soup

I've been craving cream of mushroom soup for weeks now, but haven't been excited at the prospect of trying to make a vegan cream soup for the first time. Well, our cupboards are bare except for a pound of mushrooms, and I still had the craving, so today seemed like the day to give it a shot, and it was surprisingly easy! Seems like making any cream soup would be the same: sautee veggies in earth balance, add a couple tablespoons of flour, and some salt & pepper, then add vegan milk and cook it and you're done!

Our food supply was literally so low that we're out of ONIONS today, so this was about as bare-bones as it could possibly be. I also didn't have any unsweetened vegan milk, and ended up using a vanilla flavoured almond milk. It was edible (and really not that bad!) but I think I'll use unsweetened vegan milk next time.

Ideally, for just one serving, it would go like this:
Chop 1/2 pound veggies (some onion and mushrooms would be fine)
Heat 2 tablespoons earth balance in a saucepan over medium heat
When earth balance bubbles, add veggies, stir and cover.
Cook until onions are translucent; about 5 minutes
Add 2 tablespoons flour and toss
Stir in 1 1/2 cup unflavoured vegan milk and increase heat to med-high
Heat until boiling, then remove from heat, cool, and serve immediately.

I'm excited to play around with spice blends and other vegetables in the future, but for today a nice simple soup was perfect comfort food and I'll definitely try it again in the future.

Also: I have a bag of expired flour in the pantry that I keep around strictly to use for thickening, or tossing frozen blueberries around in pre-muffintime so they don't sink to the bottom of the muffin. Expired flour is useless for anything else, but great for soups and gravies!

Dance Movies

I'm completely obsessed with dance movies. That ridiculous Center Stage movie is one of my biggest guilty pleasures; I've probably watched it fifteen times, no lie. The acting is terrible, the characters are one-dimensional and not believable at all, the story is insipid: ballet dancers can not act to save their lives. At the end there's this epic dancer performance with unbelievably fast costume changes, which could have been made believable by cutting out a couple of the short scenes (to make the story less heavy-handed) and stick with the two longer and more impressive ones. At the end, our blonde and apple-cheeked midwestern hero gets everything she ever wanted, even though from the beginning her turnout sucked. TURNOUT. How do you get in to the most prestigious ballet academy in the US with poor TURNOUT? Anyway.


one of the better scenes

So I'm on a mission now to find more movies about dance. I'm scouring the internets to make a list, then running the list through netflix to see what I can get on the instant streaming. Here is my list so far:

Center Stage
The Red Shoes
The Turning Point
Billy Elliot
All That Jazz
White Nights
One Last Dance
Fame

And there are at least ten or twelve on my first list that don't come up on instant, including

The Company
A Chorus Line
The Tales of Hoffman
Strictly Ballroom
Shall We Dance
Honey
Tango
Flashdance
Ballroom Bootcamp

Not all of them are about ballet because my interest runs far and wide, but I'm looking for more ballet movies. I saw Save the Last Dance when it was in theatres eons ago (I was a huge fan of Julia Stiles as a teenybopper) and I really want to see it again. I doubt if I'd appreciate it now, and I heard her technique actually sucks.

I'm also kind of looking forward to Black Swan, even though it looks like it has some problematic female interactions which I hate in movies. The exceptions I'll make to what I'm willing to watch are incredible when it comes to ballet movies.

Sick Brew

Well, I'm sick. First nastiness of the season: my throat is killing me and I've got some nasty yellow phlegm going on. And an interview tomorrow, which I'm thinking I'll cancel this afternoon just to play it safe. Going in for an interview all hungover on theraflu is not the greatest idea. Today, I'm sitting around in my bathrobe drinking hot tea with lots of honey, and forcing myself to eat raw minced garlic (with lots of water!) because that helps both to kick colds in the butt and also ward off vampires.

A couple of friends reminded me of the sick-brews you can make to help ward off colds or send them packin if prevention didn't do the trick. Here's the recipe I like to mix up:

YOU WILL NEED:
2 cups water (plus 1 cup for a second batch)
1 clove garlic
As much grated fresh ginger as you have, or powdered ginger in a pinch
Lemon juice
Salt
Cayenne pepper
Honey (or maple syrup if you're a hardcore vegan.)

THE METHOD:
In a small saucepan, boil the 2 cups water with just a dash of salt.
Chop up the garlic. You don't have to mince it, but get it in to chunks. Peel the ginger and chop that up too (if using powdered ginger, hold off on that). When the water is boiling, toss in the garlic and fresh ginger, and boil for five minutes.
Remove from heat and add about 1 teaspoon lemon juice (give or take--more never hurts), and a tablespoon of honey (the more the better, but I find a tablespoon is about right). If using powdered ginger, add a teaspoon of that too, and just a pinch of cayenne pepper. To measure the cayenne pepper, I usually take me 1/8 tsp measure and scoop up just half of that. It gives it a nice kick without giving you heartburn. Stir it up and let it cool for a few, then pour it carefully in to a mug. I usually try to avoid getting too many of the chunks in my mug, so some powder and shreds of garlic and ginger will be left in the pan. for a second batch, pour one cup of water in to the pan with the leftovers, boil it for another five minutes and add all the extras just to taste.

Drink it up, the hotter the better. If you can really pound it while it's still scalding hot, it will burn whatever's going on right out of you and it works like a charm. The cayenne will also keep you nice & sweaty which is also good for a cold. The honey is soothing and all the acids help scour you out.

Other things that are great when you're sick are kombucha, apple cider vinegar in water (about a tablespoon of AVC per glass) and lots of tea and water. I also devour honey like crazy because of the soothing effect; usually I put just a little in my tea but when I'm sick I help myself to gobs of it.

Might also make my first barley soup this afternoon, stay tuned!!

Mulled Wine

My latest favourite winter tradition is Mulled Wine. I'd seen recipes for traditional mulled wine and always worried that I might ruin it. All those expensive spices! And it can't boil! And knowing me, I'd let it boil and the whole batch would be ruined, and all those pricey spices would be completely wasted. Well, an amazing friend of mine spent the first 8ish years of her life in Germany, and a couple weeks ago she got the recipe for traditional German mulled wine from her mom. We've been brewing batches up at least once a week, and it's been so much fun!!



NOTES:

Wine: You will want to get the cheapest, crappiest Merlot you can find! Good wine is wasted on this recipe, what with everything you add to it. It's a great way to get rid of a bottle of wine left open in the fridge for too long. We have been going to Trader Joes and buying the $3 bottles of Merlot which is really the only good use to put them to in my eyes.

Crockpot: Having a crockpot is the easiest way to do this. If you don't have one, don't fret: it's still possible, but it's a little bit higher maintenance. You don't want your mixture to boil, so just keep the heat on the stove really low. On a crockpot, you can turn it on low and let it sit and get drunk and never pay attention to whether or not it's simmering.

Spices: To keep things cheap, we have not been using whole vanilla beans or green cardamom pods. You can omit the vanilla and cardamom, or use 1/2 tsp vanilla extract, and a pinch of powdered cardamom. We have tried many variations therein and each has a distinctly different flavour, so play around with it and have fun!

THE METHOD:
Per two bottles of wine, do it kind of like this:
Empty 2 Bottles of Cheap Merlot in to a pot
Slice 1 Navel Orange in to about five slices
Puncture the slices with a total of 8 to 10 Whole Cloves
Toss the oranges in to the wine along with
1/4 to 1/2 a cup Rum
1 cup Sugar
About 3 Whole Cinnamon Sticks, chopped if you like
About 4 Whole Cardamom Pods if you have them
1 crushed vanilla bean pod which is a waste of a vanilla pod, imo

If you're using a crock-pot, heat it on high for the first 30-40 minutes just to give it a boost, then reduce heat to low and let it sit indefinitely. I guess the Germans like to drink it scalding hot, but if it's just warm that's fine by me.

If you're using a pan on the stove, watch it carefully, because if it gets hot enough to simmer you're burning the alcohol off. We have never done this so I don't know how it affects the taste, but it will destroy the alcoholic properties which would be a bummer. just watch it and if you see more than just a few tiny bubbles, kick the heat down a little lower.

Drink, and enjoy!

Global Cafe ~ Incredibly goofy post :)

A friend of mine is going to school to be a chef. He's attending one of the two-year programs at the community college and is learning all kinds of run stuff about cooking and tasting and presentation and cuisine in general. I'm wildly envious! They get the coolest field trips and classes; I want to take a couple myself.

Anyway, five times a semester, they offer seats at a "Global Cafe" they set up downstairs in one of the buildings with little tables and linens and everything, and all the students get to practice being head chef and waitstaff. My chef friend asked me about a month ago if I'd like to reserve a spot, telling me it would probably fill up by tomorrow and I pounced on the chance. It finally rolled around this evening, and I'm just hugely grateful to him for offering us the chance. The experience was fantastic and delicious.

Since I didn't bring the camera, I'm going to do the goofiest thing possible and post pictures I drew up in MS paint (inspired by Allie Brosh) of what our dinner was. I know it's ridiculous, but I've got the time to kill ;)

First, our pretend-waiter asked what we'd like to drink. They offered coffee, iced tea, or hot tea and we both ordered hot tea, so he brought us mugs of hot water, and a whole box of assorted teas. I took a tazo herbal, the "refresh" with peppermint, spearmint and tarragon. The mugs were small enough and the tea was strong enough that I got two refills on hot water before the bag was spent. Yum.

The first thing they brought out was the amuse; the "gift from the kitchen." It was a fried won-ton noodle that looked like a tortilla chip, with just a smear of guacamole and a little rolled up piece of ginger sticking up at the top. So tasty! Just one little bite of deliciousness. I thought it was going to be wasabi and was pleasantly surprised to taste avocado instead. Delicious.

Next, we got our appetizers. J got the Gyoza and Kakuni which was one little dumpling and a cube of slow-roasted pork belly which sounded disgusting and looked about as bad. I'd ordered the Tempura Platter which was a pile of fried things with a soy-mirin sauce that had little shreds of diakon in it. I got two large sweet onion rings, two pieces of asparagus, and three large slices of something that I think was asian pear. The sauce was delicious and when I was done with the Tempura pieces, I picked all the diakon out and ate that too.

Next, we got our soup and salad. I got the Green Bean Salad that was pretty much just green beans rubbed in red miso with some crunchy curly orange things on top, and J got the Udon Noodle soup that came with some red chile peppers so hot enough that eyes were watering, and a little over-easy quail-egg on top which was adorable.

Next came the Intermezzo; a home-made black cherry sorbet. It had a really strong flavour and was delectable if rock solid at first. We ate it in tiny bites while we waited for our entrees.

I got burned out on drawing the little things in paint, so the entrees were the only things I didn't draw. I hope this doesn't cause any undue heartbreak. I'd ordered the Sesame Salmon; a large salmon fillet pan-roasted and placed on top of a little square of soba noodles mixed with three cabbages and white sesame seed sauce. There was also a little smear of edamame coulis on the place which was buttery and delicious, and an oily and relatively flavourless black sesame seed sauce sort of dribbled on the side. It added an ok visual element to the plate, but also looked kind of gritty and gross and didn't have an exceptional flavour. My salmon was also so rare that it was a little squishy in the middle and I had to leave my last few bites. J ordered the Miso-braised short-ribs tempura even though the Grilled Pork sounded more delicious to both of us. (I'll eat fish every once in a while, but certainly not pork.) The ribs were disappointing, but they came with gingered sweet potatoes and a warm asparagus and mushroom salad around the edges of the plate and both were yummy.

Next came the desserts. We had the option of a "Tokyo Cheesecake;" a plate with three lemony confections including a tart, a mousse cup and a scoop of homemade lemon ice cream; and a matcha mousse cup with sake-infused cherries. J ordered the lemony plate leaving me torn between the two second-best options. As intrigued as I was by the notion of sake-infused cherries, I chose the cheesecake and was delighted to find that my dessert was the best choice of them all! It came out on a big thin cracker shaped like a crescent, on a crunchy rice cookie crust, with a little pile of macerated plums on the side and a too-sweet plum sauce on the other side. It was divine. I sampled each of J's lemony treats which were ok, but the mousse was terrible; had an odd crust on top and was nothing but pudding underneath. I was glad I hadn't sprung for the matcha mousse.

My culinary-student friend was able to come out and visit with us during dessert. Some of the other chefs sat down with their friends to chit chat and eat a little, but I guess my guy was the supervising chef for the evening. He seemed a little over-taxed, but managed to hang out and shoot the shit with us a little before schmoozing onward to say hello to his other guests. I was super psyched to have been able to enjoy the opportunity, and I hope I can make it to their future dinners!



We left $25 total and got a couple of truffles on our way out the door, which were a level past divine, but too much sugar for the evening. I managed to finish mine, but J couldn't, so I wrapped up the last one and stuffed it in my purse for later. I'll definitely be looking forward to it ;)