Yuck

Made Tuna Noodle Casserole from the cookbook of a famous chef who in the interest of charity will remain nameless and it was extremely mediocre. If such a thing is possible. Do you think I shouldn't have used unsalted tunafish?

Sifting

"Mrs. Bentley never sifts." This has been mantra in our house since my sister and I were old enough to read Mrs. Bentley's cookbooks. Virginia Bentley was a childhood friend of our grandmother's and her books were treated like the oracle of Delphi in our kitchen.

Well, Mrs. Bentley would have sifted if she had encountered the box of cocoa that I tried to make into brownies. The recipe is for Supremely Fudgy Brownies from Chocolate Chocolate by Lisa Yockelson. As an aside, this book rocks your chocolate world. Ask Margaret about the OMG Brownies.

All went well until the part where you add the dry ingredients. All the dry ingredients but the cocoa went in smoothly. The cocoa stayed in lumps, unwilling to associate with those lesser dry ingredients, the flour and baking powder, let alone with the eggs, butter and sugar. I had to taste the batter many times to ensure that this was not going to cause a problem, and eventually dtermined that it would be all right.

After I baked them up the lumps still showed on the surface. After I ate them up - no more lumps. Maybe that's how Mrs. B. dealt with them.

enough with all the baking, how about an easy dinner?

Made a soup. First you put 2 cans of chick peas, a can of coconut milk, half a can of tomatoes, a large handful of cilantro and a splash of apple juice in the blender and puree it. Put it in a pot, add 2 tsp garam masala and a 1 tsp of ground ginger, heat it through. I then added salt and some sugar. It takes garnishes well, avocado, sauted bananas, raisins, yogurt, green onions, more cilantro. Very healthy, quick, easy. What's not to like!

what is it w all the coconut?

It was Easter and I had been resisting the urge to make cupcakes for several weeks. I missed the friend's birthday window of opportunity and was waiting for an Occasion. Easter was just me, so not sure it counted as an Occasion but I had all the ingredients, a few hours, and Pandora tuned to Krishna Das with Aria as variation (why is Trance music so suited to baking?) The recipe I have been reading daily for nearly a month is from Bon Apetite. Coconut vanilla bean cupcakes.
First you have to reduce the coconut milk. This requires a high sided pot b/c the coconut milk boils up and over. The recipe said that it would and it did. Then it took nearly half an hour to reduce by half and then it had to cool, in a bowl. Unlike my sister, I'm not a clean as you go person, so I just grabbed the first clean bowl I saw on the counter to hold the reduced coconut while it cooled. After the bowl was filled and waiting in the fridge, I realized/remembered that the bowl was clean b/c I had eaten my lunch out of it and then put it on the floor for the dogs to lick clean. Hmmm. It just smelled like coconut milk, and my dogs are healthy. So I left it alone.
The cake is a butter, sugar, eggs, seeds scraped from a vanilla bean cake. Only baking powder for leavening and dry is added in 2 parts alternating w the reduced coconut milk, all mixed just until combined. Don't overfill your litttle cupcake liners.
The frosting is butter, conf sugar, more seeds scraped from another vanilla bean and the rest of the reduced cocnut milk. The consistency was wallpaper paste and the taste was insipid and sweet. I added some lemon juice to soften the consistency and brighten the flavor. I then waited 24 hours bc after all that frosting tasting, I just didn't want cupcakes any more.
Really really good. I might try sour cream or cream cheese in the frosting next time. The lemon overwhelms the coconut flavor. I also want to try it as a cake, but it is quite moist and dense, so it may be too much as a whole cake. But I want to make it for a friend's birthday, to serve with Moroccan Chicken pie. And cupcakes some how seem like a party cop out.

Respite

In the midst of packing craziness and needing something to take my mind off the mountain of boxes that has taken over the apartment and the even more upsetting mountain of small, oddly shaped, random things that don't pack easily but rather reside in slumping piles.

Dinner tonight - skirt steak marinated in lemon juice, olive oil and garlic. Cold artichokes. Leftover mashed sweet potatoes. And wine. Possibly lots.

vegetables are good for you, right?

I've been sick a lot this winter so am turning my attention to things that putatively increase health. Fruit, kumbuchu, cruciferous (that always makes me think of a brocoli stalk splayed out on a cross) vegetables and ginger tea.

When a friend introduced me to the blog Orangette the first thing I latched onto was a recipe for Sweet Potato Pound Cake. Have your cake and eat your vegetables too. The sweet potatoes at WFs have been super good, so I baked a few and banged out the cake pretty quickly. The directions were a bit odd. It's a basic cream the butter and sugar together, add the eggs one at at time, beating well after each addition kinda cake, but when you got to the part where you were alternating the dry ingredients with the milk, she only wants you to mix until just combined. I should have followed my instinct and beaten well, cuz the texture is a little odd. Not a great crumb.

If i'm feeling generous, I say it's good, but a bit sweet. Next time I'd use 1/2 c less sugar and make it all dk brown to increase the brown sugar taste. If i'm not feeling generous, I'd say that it's not really heavy enough to be a pound cake. And no matter which way I'm feeling I'll definitely have a piece after dinner. Gotta eat my vegetables.

A little more about What I baked

OK, Wyatt got lost the night before New Year's Eve, so if I baked anything, it has been blotted out with the rest of that dreadful 16 hours, the way a person can't remember the time leading up to or after a severe head trauma. I probably made more brownies, just "to keep ma strenth up."
We had the eight days of Chris. Chris is training in earnest and only wants protein and vegetables. I wanted a coconut cake. His party was party por deux. Martha Stewart has a very involved and well reviewed coconut cake. It involves, a coconut custard filling-- corn starch based, and a simple syrup and 3 layers that are each sliced in half for a six layer cake. There is a cream cheese frosting and toasted coconut. It is a show stopper as well as a time suck extraordinaire. Elise said, Its a lot of time to put in and then be disappointed. I thought that was sound advice and went with the cake bible all butter cake and cream cheese frosting and mounds of sweetened shredded coconut between the 3 layers. I made 1 1/2 times the recipe for 3 9" layers. I added some coconut flavor to the cake and the frosting. It was a little crumbly but definitely improved with age and also, too was a perfect balance of cake and frosting, not always easy to achieve.
Then, we had a dinner party and I made the Cake Bible dense flourless chocolate cake. Only bittersweet chocolate, butter and eggs. Baked for 20 minutes in a water bath. The baking was dodgy but it was actually done, although who knew from how it looked and only 20 minutes. The raspberry sauce overflowed the measuring cup in the microwave and I was forced to reduce it on the stove which Rose LB warms will impart and off flavor and she was right. Essentially a butt load of work for a strangely flavored raspberry sauce. Again, whipped cream is a cover for a multitude of off flavors, time and temp misjudgments and ill advised "experiments." Cake was actually good that night, although maybe it was the vodka combined with all the adrenaline that had flooded my system in response to the roast that refused to stop mooing. It was not good the next day.
As a consolation, I baked a winter spice cake with caramelized apples. Apples cooked and then put in pan, caramel sauce made (one cavil is that caramel sauce is better with just sugar and cream, the addition of butter to the caramelizing sugar, makes the whole thing greasy, but I was brave about it) dribbled over apples, spice cake baked on top of that, whole turned out for an upside down apple topped cake. And it was just right.
Now we are on to super bowl-- ham, chili, biscuits, and probably more OMG brownies.