something queer going on

Yesterday I finally baked the boiled-orange cake I've been wanting to try. I used Nigella Lawson's clementine cake recipe, more or less, and although I made a ridiculous number of modifications it turned out very nice.

First of all, instead of clementines (out of season here and not to be had in the market) I used two valencia oranges, and therefore used the slightly larger amount of sugar recommended in the note at the end of the recipe.

Next, I was worried about those six eggs. I like eggs, but I don't like sweet things that taste of eggs, and six eggs sounded like a formula for an orange-flavored omelette. So I used four eggs, and as a substitute for the other two, I used about 6 tablespoons of olive oil and two tablespoons of water. Honestly, given all the moisture from the oranges, I think the cake would have been fine with just four eggs and four tablespoons of oil.

Finally, as I don't own a springform pan of the right size, I used an 8x8 inch (21x21 cm) square glass pan. Because glass pans tend to form a heavy crust, I set the oven at 325 F rather than 375 and cooked for . . . oh, probably almost an hour and a half. When I took the cake out, the skewer was still not coming out clean from the center, but the edges of the cake were browning and pulling away from the pan, so I didn't want to wait longer.

With all those changes it shouldn't have worked, but it did. The result is a gorgeously moist, gorgeously orange-tasting cake. It's fairly heavy and crumbly-textured because it uses almond meal instead of flour, but I'm developing a real fondness for that style of rustic cake. This is in part because I live up in the mountains, and altitude (plus my lack of either a mixer or the strength of arm and character needed to beat together butter and sugar for long periods of time) makes light, delicate cakes difficult to produce. So I'm making a virtue of necessity, but it's a tasty virtue. Both the orange cake and the lemon-almond-polenta cake I made some time back have the power to make delicate cakes seem insipid.

I should note that the cake does have a little bit of a bitter edge to it, like marmalade. But fortunately not as bitter as marmalade, which would have been too much for me. Next time I make this--and it's a cake I definitely plan to make repeatedly--I might try the clementines or some other kind of tangerine, since they have thinner peels and less of the bitter pith.

In other cooking news, I managed to snag some frozen fava beans at Trader Joe's, yay! I've never seen favas there before, and since I've also never seen favas at any local supermarket (except the fresh ones that are a pain in the ass), I was thrilled. So the other night I made some polenta, which I cooked in a new way, by baking. Now that I know that you can just chuck some polenta meal and water in a pan and stick it in the oven for 45 minutes, instead of standing by the stovetop and stirring and anxiously watching in case it scorches for 45 minutes, I will be eating more polenta. Anyway, to accompany the polenta I diced a small (about 2 ounces) Spanish-style chorizo and cooked it in olive oil along with a shallot, then added some favas, bits of sun-dried tomato, and a little chicken stock and simmered for five minutes or so, until the stock was mostly evaporated. I topped the polenta with the fava mixture, grated some Asiago over the whole thing, and enjoyed very much. It was an oddly wintery meal considering it's spring here, but the weather has been pretty cool and I love polenta.

I thought I'd post the results of Project Pizza right away rather than waiting for the next Recipe Friday, partly because I want to note all this while it's fresh in my mind and partly because I thought you might be curious.

My overall reaction is: yum. This makes good pizza, with all the ingredients very flavorful and distinct. I wasn't even using top-of-the-line ingredients, just supermarket-brand canned tomatoes, supermarket-made bulk Italian sausage, and whole milk mozzarella from Trader Joe's. It makes me wonder how poor-quality the ingredients in typical commercial pizza must be.

Anyway, now for my notes.

1) I added two cloves of finely-chopped garlic to the tomatoes (note that I was halving the recipe), which makes for a very garlicky result. Fine with me, as I like garlic.

2) The browned, crumbled, drained bulk sausage worked fine.

3) Drain the tomatoes well. Really really well. I had a bit of a problem, once the pizza was sliced, with tomato juice soaking into the crust.

4) When I was shaping the crust, the dough tended to spring back and it was hard to form the little walls at the edge, even after 2+ rests. This created a further problem, in that while the dough was resting, it was also rising. So when I put it the crust into the oven to blind bake it for 10 minutes, I got OMG oven spring and had to poke the crust lots and lots with a fork to get the inside to lie flat so I could put the toppings on. Next time less yeast (I did use less than the recipe calls for, because of the altitude, but I'll cut it down further next time) and I might try executrix's suggestion of putting some semolina in the dough to make it more cooperative.

5) The crust didn't come out quite as crisp and brown as it should have, even though I ended up baking it for considerably longer than the 25 minutes the recipe suggests. I should have baked it at 450 F (partly because of the altitude, again, and partly because of my oven). Also, next time I'll blind bake the crust in the lower third of the oven as I did today, but then raise the rack to the center for baking the topped pizza so that the top browns better.

6) No doubt I'd get better results with a real pizza pan instead of a springform, because the springform is very thin, which isn't conducive to browning and crispness. Most things you bake in a springform pan, you don't want to brown or develop a crisp crust. On the other hand, using the springform does make it simple to transfer the pizza from the pan to the rack. I'm glad I didn't try to make the pizza in a 9x13 baking pan, which was my original plan before I thought of the springform. I'd never have gotten it out in one piece to cool.

7) I should also mention that I used Asiago-style cheese (from Trader Joe's and quite inexpensive) rather than Parmigiano for the cheese topping. In my case it was a matter of my budget not stretching to Parmigiano right now, but actually I think the Asiago may be a better choice. Parmigiano has subtle, rounded, nuanced flavors that would get lost in a pizza, whereas the Asiago is brasher and more pizza-y. Using Parmigiano-Reggiano here would be a waste of money, I think.

Something I've cooked recently: I haven't done a lot of cooking over the last week because I've had a cold. Not a bad cold, but my energy levels have still taken a hit, and I'm not a terrifically energetic person to start with. Mostly I've relied on leftovers and bread.

Last Friday, when the cold was just starting, I did bake a lemon syrup loaf cake from a recipe in Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess. It's not bad but something about it doesn't quite work for me. The cake is fairly eggy, and I have weird issues with egginess. I like eggs themselves, but I don't want things like cakes and breads to taste of eggs. And there's something about the combination of the quite eggy cake with the very lemony syrup that puts me off. I like the syrup but I want to try it on a different cake.

Last week's semolina bread experiment turned out okay but not great, as the bread was pretty dense. My semolina has been in the cupboard a while (how long? I'm not sure) which no doubt didn't help the texture or the flavor.


Something I have concrete plans to cook in the near future: Today I'm going to make some chicken soup, which as we all know magically conquers the cold virus. It'll be a vaguely Mexican-style soup using the rest of the dried posole I had on hand, plus tomatoes, chiles, green beans, zucchini/courgettes, maybe a potato, lots of garlic, and some cilantro at the end. If you're thinking "that's more of a stew" you're right. I like a soup with presence; I don't bother cooking thin delicate brothy things.

And I'm going back to first principles with this week's bread. I'll be baking Jim Lahey's basic no-knead bread (although using Lahey's later, modified recipe that calls for a little less water) because I want to remind myself what the texture of that bread is like, and then in the coming weeks I'll see if I can keep that texture as much as possible while using more interesting flours and combinations of flours. Essentially I want to see if I can merge the best aspects of Lahey's bread with the best aspects of Nancy Baggett's Kneadlessly Simple breads, and then start developing more variations. I did add a stage to Lahey's recipe: I mixed the dough yesterday morning and let it pre-ferment in the fridge for about 10 hours before removing it to the counter for the first rise. I think the pre-fermentation is largely responsible for the superior flavor of Baggett's breads, whereas the larger quantity of water and the higher oven temperature are probably behind the better texture of Lahey's. Yes, it seems I am planning to do science for GREAT BAKING JUSTICE.


Something I idly plan to cook someday: I'm still longing for the lemon-polenta-almond cake and the semolina-cardamom-rosewater cake I've been talking about. I think that, considering I live at a high altitude, don't have a great oven, and don't own a mixer, I'll have more success with cakes like those that are supposed to be flatter and denser rather than with American-style light layer cakes. Also, the flavors are so much more interesting.

Something I've cooked recently: Earlier in the week I made pork vindaloo in one of Raghavan Iyer's gentled-for-the-westerner versions (#2 in 660 Curries), which has cashews and coconut milk as well as garlic, chiles, and vinegar. On another day I cooked Spicy Potatoes and Spinach With Blackened Chiles and Coconut Milk, for which the recipe is under the cut: ( click here )

Since panch phoron is so aromatic and lovely, today I cooked a dal of chickpeas using basically the same dried chiles + panch phoron + coconut milk spicing as the potato dish, but with some shredded dried coconut (soaked in water for a few minutes to rehydrate) and some tamarind concentrate for sourness. Result = very good, although I may have overdone it a bit with the panch phoron, as the fenugreek seeds can be a little bitter in large quantities.

I used black chickpeas (kala chana) in the dal, since I have some dried and I'm trying to make use of the stuff that's in my pantry. In dried form they look quite like little dark brown rocks. As Iyer recommends, I washed them, covered them with hot water, and let them soak overnight at room temperature. Then I stuck them in the slow cooker yesterday morning before work, in which they cooked, and cooked, and cooked, and cooked. They were in the slow cooker for almost 30 hours altogether, until about 11 this morning, and honestly I don't think another 12 hours would have done them any harm. They were cooked through, certainly, but they still had a chewy texture and a tough skin. I don't know if those are just inevitable features of this type of chickpea, or if it's to do with how hard it is to cook beans at my altitude (about 7000 feet or 2100 meters).

To accompany the dal, I made rotis! That's a first for me--I get nervous about anything requiring dough to be rolled out. But they actually weren't difficult at all, just time-consuming. This is another recipe from 660 Curries. ( recipe under the cut )

Also, although I hesitate to call this cooking, I, er, assembled these no-bake chocolate peanut butter bars. I didn't add any peanut butter to the chocolate layer, and because the brand of peanut butter I use (Trader Joe's) is pretty soft, to get the right consistency I ended up using more graham cracker crumbs and a bit more sugar. I probably didn't need to, because once refrigerated the peanut butter layer firms up like whoa, but the extra graham cracker crumbs in particular are not a bad idea. These are delicious in their incredibly middle-American way, and console me for the failure of the peanut butter brownies I tried to bake the other week. (Said brownies are reposing in the freezer, as I hate to throw food away and hope they can be salvaged, crumbled, as an ice cream topping.)


Something I've got concrete plans to cook soon: I'm thawing out some ground pork for pork and soft tofu with preserved vegetable, which I plan to cook tomorrow. I don't actually have any szechuan preserved vegetable on hand, but I have kimchi, which I'm sure will work fine.

In the fridge I have bread dough fermenting, to rise overnight and be baked tomorrow. This week it's County Fair White Bread, again from Kneadlessly Simple. Last week's buttermilk bread was nice, but the buttermilk powder was hard to incorporate into the fermented dough. I thought I'd done okay, but there turned out to be some clumps of buttermilk powder in the finished bread. And the salt on the crust attracted moisture that soon made the crust soft. Next time I'll skip the salt topping and be more careful about the mixing.


Something I idly plan to to cook in the future: I keep thinking of things I can cook with what I have in the pantry, which is good because due to unexpectedly large bills this month, I have no money for the next three weeks. Luckily I have a good supply of staples such as rice, beans, flour, and noodles, plenty of spices, and some meat in the freezer. Red beans and rice are still a plan, as is a potato and corn chowder, maybe some chicken soup, maybe some polenta, and Iyer has a recipe for papads in yogurt sauce that I want to try, and etc. etc.

Something I've cooked recently: Yesterday, which for me was a weekend (I have Thursdays and Fridays off), I cooked an actual Western-style meal with several components, which is the sort of thing I don't usually bother with. I'm typically more more the "one pot meal plus rice or bread" type. But yesterday I marinated some chicken in olive oil, garlic, and lemon zest, then oven-roasted it over some lemon slices (the chicken was nice, but the pan juices were bitter from all the lemon); oven-roasted diced potatoes with smoked paprika and smoked salt; and boiled some brussels sprouts until just tender and then briefly sauteed them in bacon fat and topped them with crisp bacon pieces. Num.

Also recently I made some curried squash soup with half a leftover butternut squash, mashed up, plus some Thai red curry paste, water, a bit of Japanese instant dashi crystals for more flavor, fish sauce, coconut milk, a few shrimp, and a few dried shrimp (cooked in oil until brown and crisp) on top. Dishes like this are why I try to keep a decently stocked pantry. It wouldn't have been possible without the things I just had around: the curry paste (Mae Ploy brand), the dashi crystals, the fish sauce, the dried shrimp, and even the regular shrimp, of which I bought a frozen bag on sale a few weeks ago and which I've been using sparingly ever since. And actually the squash had been in my cupboard since Christmas, at least, until I finally remembered it was there and that I'd better use it before it went bad. I feel weirdly guilty about the pantry sometimes, as though it's an unjustifiable luxury. But the truth is that I almost always buy on sale or in (relative) bulk, which is cheaper, and thus I have a good stock of things that I will eventually need and use.


Something I have concrete plans to cook in the near future: Today's plan is mac and cheese with bacon and tomatoes, topped with crumbs (from the stale bread-end I have in the freezer) and baked. And a half batch of these peanut butter chocolate bars, which I've never made before but which sound great. (ETA: Don't use that recipe. What a disaster. Unfortunately my NoScript blocked the reviews of it; if I'd seen them first I would never have tried to make it.)

For next week, my plan is to use up the things in my freezer, which include chicken soup, mung bean and coconut milk stew, and a couple of containers of some kind of dal. And then it will be payday!


Something I'm idly thinking about cooking in the future: I still want green chile stew. Made with tomatillos--I've been craving tomatillos for some reason.

I've discovered that the place to go for hard-to-find ingredients for some things I've wanted to make is, shockingly, WalMart. I don't like giving them my money, because I feel like I'm contributing to exploitation (and more than that, to the exploitation of my own class, which really leaves a bitter taste in the mouth). But I can buy beef feet there to use in stews, and I've never seen them elsewhere. And everything is so much cheaper than anywhere else. It's the trap of capitalism: if you don't have a lot of money you have to buy cheap, and thus you contribute to the cycle of low wages. *sigh* (Note: Please don't come back at me with suggestions that I buy at the farmer's market--which in my town is hugely expensive, and which is also only open during hours I'm working--or whatever. I have explored the options, trust me. I have a ridiculously detailed knowledge of where to get the best bargains on various kinds of groceries. I know my budget, too, and my tastes. The bind I am in re: cheap shopping depresses me, but I am genuinely in it, and I don't have the heroic virtue necessary to live only on organic fair-trade lentils. If I want a varied and interesting diet, and I do because I love food and because frankly there's not enough pleasure in my life that I can afford to eliminate a source of it, then I have to make compromises in order to afford it.)

Okay, so that got a bit more intense than Recipe Friday is probably supposed to. But it's hard to talk about food and cooking without talking about the economics of it. At least it is for me, because when I post about cooking and eating nice things, I worry that people look at those posts and think, "But doesn't Kit talk elsewhere about crappy job/no money? What a lying hypocrite!" Which is partly a result of my own issues about money and food, but it's partly our toxic culture about both money and food, and how if you're poor you're not supposed to eat nice things even though you will also be browbeaten for supposedly not cooking and not eating good/healthy things. And I've seen enough horrible, horrible internet vileness on the subject that it's not surprising I'm wary.

Anyway. Beef feet. Crucial ingredient, apparently, in tripe a la mode de Caen, which I really want to try, and whose ingredients, although obscure, are mostly inexpensive apart from the Calvados. If I cook it, I will definitely post about it.

Doing my bit to make recipe Friday a thing, because st_aurafina said so. A lot of my cooking doesn't involve recipes, unless it's a dish I'm unfamiliar with, but I'll try.


Something I've cooked recently:

Calling it cooking may be an exaggeration, but I tried this recipe for coconut-ginger "tea" and liked it a lot. I didn't have honey so I just used regular sugar and a bit of turmeric (it colors the tea, which is a ghostly white otherwise). Nicely coconutty and gingery. Next time I think I may add a crushed green cardamom pod to the infusion.


Something I've got concrete plans to cook soon:

Today, once my bread (a yeasted cornbread) is out of the oven (or more specifically out of the pot I bake it in, which I'll need for the soup), I'm going to cook a chicken soup vaguely based on this one for white chicken chili with quinoa. By "vaguely based" I mean "I'll add quinoa to the Mexican-style chicken soup I was planning to make anyway, but I'll use chickpeas instead of white beans, chipotles in adobo instead of jalapenos, and no salsa verde since I don't have any, and also omit the tortilla chips since I don't have those either." Instead I'll put lime peel and orange peel into the soup for a nice citrus kick and eat the soup with some cornbread. I may top it with the avocado that I bought on one of those bizarre "it was so cheap" impulses (I like avocado, but avocado does not like me--I think I have oral allergies to a couple of foods and avocado makes my throat feel all ooky and weird).

Also, at some point this week, skud's kimchi pancakes. I've cooked them before, substituting preserved vegetable for the kimchee, and they were yummy, but now I have actual kimchee and I'm looking forward to trying them again.


Something I'm idly thinking of cooking in the future:

I want to get back into cooking Indian food regularly. It's a bit tricky because a lot of Indian food is complicated to cook, and I just don't seem to have a lot of energy these days. Most Indian dishes aren't difficult in a technical sense, but they require a lot of steps and a lot of time, not to mention dirtying a lot of dishes. Well, I guess that's what weekends are for. Maybe I'll cook a pork vindaloo, which is simple and has the meaty heartiness I've been craving in this cold weather.