Wasting Time and Ingredients: My New Hobby

Today I vowed I was going to get the last of the holiday-type baking done. I had grand plans.

Now it’s 2.15 and I’m conceding the race; I’m also thanking God that because I have leftover Cincinnati chili in the fridge, I don’t really have to worry about cooking dinner, because if I try to make anything else today I am positive it won’t come out right.

I was going to make caramel-covered shortbread. This is the kind of thing I can normally do almost in my sleep. Because I couldn’t resist messing things up, I decided to try a new shortbread recipe, and I have to say it is a very good recipe but boy you have to watch those pans like a hawk because the cookies will burn in a nanosecond. (The trick is to use oatmeal you’ve whizzed up in the food processor and confectioner’s sugar and cornstarch along with the flour and butter. The result is wonderful thing very similar to an English digestive biscuit.) I found the recipe at the Serious Eats website but I’m not going to bother posting a link because I basically ignored the recipe beyond thinking, “Oh, adding oat flour, that’s a good idea.” Go find whatever shortbread recipe you like and take out a little bit of the regular flour. Substitute in two parts oat flour and one part cornstarch for whatever amount of white flour you took out. Whizz everything together in the mixer for an incredibly long time. It seems like this will never turn into a cohesive dough but after about ten minutes in the mixer at medium speed, it will come together. This is a very soft dough, you have to be gentle with it, but the texture of the baked product is wonderful.

The caramel, however, was my downfall. I’m not going to say too much about it but I will tell you that it is imperative that you pay attention to this detail. After you have dissolved your sugar in your water, and cooked it until it is the shade of gold you want, and you are ready to add in your vast quantity of heavy cream — do NOT just pour the heavy cream into the pot assuming that all is well.

Because I currently have, sitting on my stove, a big Le Creuset pot filled with caramel made with cream that’s gone bad. I am taking this pretty well; I haven’t thrown anything in anger. I’ve washed all the other dishes and things that need washing, I’ve wiped down the counters, I’m ready for the next thing. But I can’t yet just pour this into the trash. I’ll wait till five p.m. today, I think, before I admit total defeat. And tomorrow I will make caramel with a can of sweetened condensed milk, which, in my experience, is never, ever off.

December 21, 2015 0

Baking Can Be Discouraging

Even when you think you’ve got it nailed, even when you are sure you can get it right, things happen.
The other day, I thought I had rugelach down. I produced these. They looked perfect and they tasted perfect.

Then this morning I made more rugelach. Granted, the filling was slightly, slightly different. But I used the exact same technique and this is what happened.

The good news is twofold. One: the burnt chocolate filling smells and tastes great. Two: no one in my family will mind eating these.
The bad news is, the failure means I had to come up with something else to bake, fast, to mail to people this week. Fortunately, I was able to put together the Chocolate Crunch Shortbread from last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, and I’ve baked them, and they came out of the oven looking the way they’re supposed to. So I can wrap and ship this afternoon, once they’ve cooled.
I think I’ll stop baking for a couple of days. I think I need a break.

December 17, 2015 0

The Sad Story of the Grape-Nuts: How Some Things are Worth Making at Home, and Others are Not.

I was not one of those people who automatically liked Grape-Nuts. As cold cereals go, it is not friendly. These are hard little pellets that look like nothing so much as crumbled bits of hamster poo. They taste like vaguely sweet yeast pellets. But when I was about twenty years old I decided I really liked them and that they were worth the expense — because, for reasons I don’t really understand, they are distinctly more expensive than most of the cold cereals out there. And then I married someone who also likes Grape-Nuts. This means that we’re capable of going through a rather alarming number of boxes of Grape-Nuts in the space of a week. So it’s a splurge. Cold cereal as splurge: a sad state of affairs, but so it goes.
There was a time when I was in an Expect Discounts store and saw Grape-Nuts on sale for $1.50 a box. I bought seven boxes of them. My husband was appalled when he saw that our cabinet had been filled with nothing but Grape-Nuts, but I said, “What’s your problem? They were cheap, and they’ll get eaten!” Which they did, in a shockingly short time frame.
Now, during the days when I was pregnant and working part time and then working even less than what I’d always thought of as respectably part time, it became clear we were going to have to trim our household costs a little. To that end, I thought, “What if I could make my own Grape Nuts?” Since the internet had been invented, I was able to Google up some recipes, and I hit on one that sounded plausible, and one day I set to making homemade Grape Nuts. This involved lots of mixing and types of flour normal people don’t keep around the house (I think graham flour was involved) and baking and crumbling up slabs of unappetizing brown baked stuff and then baking some more and crumbling some more. It was labor intensive. But I had the time, and I’m the sort of person who, when determined to do something like this, will see it through to the bloody end.
The bloody end, in this case, resulted in a strange nubbly bin of stuff that even I wouldn’t eat. It was horrid. It was so horrid that we had to just laugh at how horrid it was. I attempted it a second time, if I remember correctly, and it came out inedible a second time. And then the inedible horror grew mold. Cold cereals aren’t supposed to grow mold. It was clear that this was something that was just beyond my ability. Our trash was rich with the spoils of my noble attempts.
By this point in our relationship, my husband had gotten used to my kitchen misadventures and was pretty cheerful about it, but this particular episode was so bizarre he began to tell people at his office that I was going around trying to make homemade Grape-Nuts. Naturally, everyone clucked, “Well, women who are very pregnant get odd ideas in their head. It goes with nesting.” “No, no,” he would say. “You don’t understand: she’s like this anyway.” And they’d look at him with an expression that said something like, “wait, you married this person? Because it seemed like a good idea?”
Well, making homemade Grape-Nuts is not a good idea. But making homemade granola is. Making your own pain de mie is a very good idea. Making your own Twix bars is a very good idea. This week we’ve established that making your own Almond Joy bars is a good idea. It’s not that I think everyone should drop whatever they’re doing and go make these things: it’s that if you happen to be the sort of person who likes to kill a few hours in the kitchen doing something really tasty that doesn’t directly relate to what you’re having for dinner, these are things that are really good if you make them yourself. They are even, according to my husband, better than the versions you’d buy at the store.
So, my husband has pointed out to me, it should follow that since I’m someone who wouldn’t bat an eye at making Grape-Nuts or Twix Bars or Almond Joy bars, I might as well try my hand at making croissants from scratch. I’ve now spent some quality time with the King Arthur Flour recipe for making croissants, and have decided that when the weather cools down (it’s 95 degrees outside today), I will give it a shot.

I will let you know if it turns out to be a good idea.

August 18, 2015 0

Really gross, but seven years after I expected it.

When my daughter was a newborn we ordered from Target a stack of these cotton cloths that were marketed as diapers, but which were not diapers at all. They were these loose-woven cotton towels that no one in their right mind would use as diapers. They were very very useful, however, since they were perfect for mopping up all sorts of messes, and you could bleach the hell out of them, and I never regretted buying them. For the last five years I’ve kept them in the kitchen, where they stand in for cheesecloth, and I’ve used them to make cheese, to cover bowls of bread dough rising, and all sorts of small tasks. We used them when we attempted to clean 40 years of crud off of a copper-topped table we got last year — that meant that we poured ketchup, vinegar, and salt on a table top and scrubbed and scrubbed for about three hours. These towels have been filthy, but they always laundered completely clean and white, and I am very loyal to them.

Two days ago, I decided to make ginger juice, and so I whizzed a big piece of ginger in the food processor and then dumped the contents through a colander I’d lined with one of these diapers, and then I wrung out all the liquid. The cloth got a pale yellow stain on it and I thought nothing of it. Today I did laundry and when I took everything out of the dryer to fold, I noticed that the cloth still had a stain on it. What’s more, it looked exactly like pee. It’s taken seven years but finally one of these diapers has a pee-type stain on it, which isn’t even pee, it’s ginger juice, but — how would I explain that to anyone who was visiting us, and might grab this towel to dry their hands or something? (Not that they’re supposed to do that — towels for that are kept in a separate, more accessible, stack, right on our bread box.)

Ginger juice: I might make it again, but if I do, I better use this same cloth again, or come up with a different system.

May 15, 2015 2

But I Used an Egg Wash! Or, Why the FUCK can’t I get Hamantaschen to work right?

I am going to be 45 years old this year, and I’ve been attempting to make perfect hamantaschen irregularly since I was a teenager and discovered that you could buy cans of poppy seed filling in supermarkets. Prior to that, I’d assumed it was a big secret thing that only Jewish bakeries could do. Well, I’m a middle-aged kitchen hack now, and I’m still convinced that there’s something about hamantaschen that only Jewish bakeries know how to do.

There’ve always been issues. First off, I’ve never found the right cooky recipe. Most hamantaschen recipes call for a dough I find completely unacceptable because they require orange juice, to which I reply, “Over my dead body.” But then, there are other issues. Sometimes the dough results in just some hard, not too sweet thing that is, frankly, strong enough to hold the filling in place, but otherwise has nothing to recommend it.

I’ve spent years hunting for hamantaschen recipes, always thinking, “it’s out there, the perfect recipe it out there, I just know it.” And I am pretty sure that in 2014, I scored, with the Smitten Kitchen hamantaschen recipe. http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2008/03/hamantaschen/

This, minus the orange zest, natch, is the thing I think I used last year, and it was wholly successful. I believe this because I remember that I gave hamantaschen to people, even people I didn’t know very well; I even mailed cookies to people. I wouldn’t do that if I hadn’t thought they’d come out beautifully. Right? Right?
So this year, I dug up the recipe again and I set them up and I did an egg wash around the circle of dough before I closed the triangles and then I did an egg wash over each cooky and I pinched shut and I thought, “we are good to go!” I ran out of poppyseed filling and took a gamble, I admit, by filling the last three circles of dough with some leftover hot fudge sauce I had around — that was stupid, even I will admit. But I thought, “If the cookies stay closed, the filling will bubble up and maybe burn a little but it’ll hold still in the cup of dough and it’ll be okay.”

Well, let me tell you. These are some uglyass hamantaschen.

February 26, 2015 2

Cooky Failure: Good intentions, poor results

I suppose it could be worse; I could have applied this methodology to something actually important, like running a business. That would have been bad. In my case, I was just making cookies on the fly.

My daughter wanted oatmeal for breakfast. Nothing fancy, she said, just oatmeal with toppings. Toppings meant, in this case, sliced banana, cream, and cinnamon sugar. So, fine, I made her oatmeal, and she ate it. But I made a little too much oatmeal, and by the time I thought to sit down and have some myself, it was looking…. unappealing. It had congealed in the pot. I could have added more water and run with it, no harm no foul, but instead I thought, “You know what, I was going to bake today, I’ll just bake some cookies with this.” I could have baked bread, but no, cookies.

So I thought about it a little and went to work. I added to the pot some dark cocoa powder, some regular cocoa powder, some vanilla powder, some coconut oil (instead of butter), and some water: I let this cook a few minutes and stirred to let the congealed oatmeal break up. “Making pudding?” my daughter said hopefully, peering in to the pot. “Cooky batter,” I said.
Then we added an egg, once the mixture had cooled, and combined it with flour, some baking soda, some baking powder, some coconut, and sugar. The batter looked nice, it smelled chocolatey, and I was feeling optimistic. Not very optimistic, mind you, but decidedly more optimistic than pessimistic.

I baked the cookies and it was, sadly, clear to me by the time the first batch had baked that these were just not what I’d had in mind. The cookies puffed nicely, and looked dark and rich; but when I tasted a cooled cooky, it was just deeply uninteresting. I quickly realized that I should have put in a lot more sugar — like, a cupful more. It’s a sad thing when chocolate oatmeal coconut cookies don’t turn out well. These are so bland that even my daughter won’t eat them. The ten leftover cookies have been put into a plastic bag; in due time, I will whizz them in the food processor to make chocolate crumbs to use in making other things (and they’ll be useful in that context, I have no doubt).
In the meantime, we are without cookies, which is not good. I will probably bake something tomorrow, and when I do, I will follow a nice recipe from one of the zillion cookbooks I’ve got on hand. Right now, I’m focusing on the brisket I’m doing in the oven…. for which I prepared by reading five recipes and then more or less ignoring all of them. Wish me luck….

February 20, 2015 0

For future reference, please remember:

1. If you have a tub of egg whites sitting in your freezer, from the time that your husband decided to make ice cream and it was fine but it meant that he had a lot of leftover egg whites, it’s totally fine to thaw the egg whites and use them to make meringues.

2. However, it is VERY IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER that you own only one oven, and that it has only two racks.

3. Which means that you cannot possibly bake, in timely fashion, all of the meringue batter you assemble when you blithely say, “Well, I’ve got enough egg white, I’m just gonna double the recipe.”

DOUBLING RECIPES: sometime a great idea. Sometimes, really, really not. Please remember this, Balabusta, the next time you get ambitious about shit like this.

December 11, 2014 0