Simple Breakfast at Home

For breakfast, I had ciabatta rolls, with almond butter and datil/raspberry jam, and pumpkin spice coffee to drink.

These cute little things are actually homemade sourdough ciabatta rolls from (again) "Ideas in Food". It's due back at the library (again) this week, and I just don't want to let it go. Perhaps a book I'll be buying.

The rolls need improvement, flavor-wise. There's not enough sourdough in the recipe to be noticeable, and I used all white flour for texture reasons, so the result is really bland. But beautiful. And they were relatively easy to make, and about on par with the ciabatta rolls I'd buy at Trader Joe's.

On to the good stuff.

I covered said ciabatta in almond butter and this stuff. It was kindly brought back from Florida for us by our friends Brian & Stephanie, and is unbelievably delicious. Especially for something I'd never heard of before. Datil peppers are pretty spicy, but have a nice round, fruity flavor that goes perfectly with the raspberries. This jam has way more depth than most pepper jams, and is really fabulous with almond butter. Dangerously delicious, indeed.

The coffee, Trader Joe's pumpkin spice blend, is odd. The first time I made coffee with it, I used the recommended 2 tablespoons per cup, and it nearly killed me. I've toned it down since, but the flavors are just really strange. I think it's intended for people who add lots of sugar and cream to their coffee; maybe then the flavors would be mellow. Black, it's extremely astringent and bitter, with heavy overtones of nutmeg.

Finally, a cooking note.

I don't care what any cookbook says, everything gets cooked on my pizza stone (left) from now on. I've had a few bread mishaps lately, so put my ciabatta head to head on metal baking sheets and the pizza stone to test whether that was the issue. The pizza stone bread is fully cooked, with a crisp bottom, while the baking sheet bread is just cooked, yet burned on the bottom. Pizza stone wins.

Making a Map

This week, I had more cooking ideas floating around in my head than usual. I blame Ideas in Food.

Ordinarily, I shop for groceries for a specific dinner. Pretty much every day, if I'm going out of my way to cook a halfway decent dinner. Yes, this is pathological. I've even been known to visit three grocery stores for hard-to-find ingredients, though that's somewhat rarer. I like to grocery shop, just as much as some people loathe it (hi, mom). Regardless of how busy my life is, I like to preserve the illusion that I'm a Parisian who simply must visit individual purveyors every day.

But this week, I decided to be different. To facilitate my crazy ideas, and to see if it results in decreased food waste, decreased expenses, or more general happiness. Out of curiosity.

First, I brainstormed all the crazy ideas floating around in my head into a nice little map of related ideas. And then went shopping. My loose plan, if you can't tell from the pretty colored pencil ravings above, was to make fesenjan one night, Rick Bayless' tomatillo sauce another, a veggie risotto a third, maybe some lentil burgers a fourth, then make a few minor dishes, and make some things to stockpile for later (ie, stock).

My initial experience was pretty awful. I found it stressful to have to keep so many required ingredients straight at the grocery store (even though I had a list. What can I say, I'm a little ditzy). Plus, one of my grocery store neuroses is that I refuse to use a cart. They're cumbersome and ridiculous, and I'd rather develop wire-shaped bruises from a handbasket (yes, this has happened before...and may have happened today) than be chained to a ridiculous cart and hemmed in by slack-jawed and slovenly shoppers, carts piled high with frozen dinners. I still had to visit two grocery stores, but was faced with the additional obstacle of volume. I found myself fantasizing about those handcarts middle-aged European ladies schlep to the market, but somehow managed to get everything upstairs in one go.

The food, however, has been ok so far. Tonight, I made foccacia from Ideas in Food. The texture was gorgeous, the flavor pretty good. Next time I'd try using the pizza stone so as to not slightly burn the whole mess.

To go with it, I used up some cannelini beans that have been tormenting me from the pantry for months. I simmered them in some chicken stock and wine until tender, then smushed in the food processor with some olive oil and salt.

Then the main dish, the scariest tofu you've seen in awhile. Except I forgot to upload an image. You're lucky I forgot. It looked pretty awful. Basically, I made a batch of Rick Bayless' quick tomatillo sauce, then casseroled it with tofu cubes and chopped gordita tortilla chunks, all covered in cheddar and parmesan. It miraculously ended up tasting pretty good, though the dish was really intended to be my passive-aggressive protest against the megapacks of tofu Jon keeps buying at Costco. We have two more packs to go through before they expire in a week. Somebody help me.

The Chocolate Pudding Caper, part I

This week, I've been reading Ideas in Food. Finally, I've found people as crazy as me.

I've roasted pasta...I've pre-soaked it in tomato water...The book is gloriously experimental, with a ton of interesting ideas. This morning, I decided to make their Crispy Chocolate Mousse.

My mother has a recipe from the 1960s built on the idea of a meringue/cookie hybrid, and it makes the most fabulous cookies ever. However, she hates to cook, and periodically loses said recipe. I haven't seen it in fifteen years, so I decided to try baking these in the hopes they'd be similar. They actually take five hours to bake, so I'm not sure how they are yet. (And in the process of writing this, I've realized I forgot to add the vanilla) But if noshing the leftover pudding-like batter directly out of the bowl is any indication, they're kind of awesome.

That said, it's the first recipe I've made in months that makes me remember why people hate to cook. It's a meringue and not a meringue at the same time, so lots of finicky egg pampering is required. Because egg whites require an absolutely clean bowl for proper whipping, and because the yolks are mixed with something hot, a minimum of three large bowls are required. And that's all before you have to scoop the whole mess into a pastry bag/ziploc for piping. The process of transferring between bowls has left me with a variety of delicious leftover chocolate goos to surreptitiously sample, but there's a lot of waste. And I'm covered in chocolate byproducts and feel about five.