pierogi, hoska, and babka

I made this loaf of hoska and the "babka" cake for an event I ran on Monday. We used pins and wax to decorate blown (empty) eggs for Easter, a tradition from Eastern Europe and Russia, but also, as I learned in the past few weeks, done in places like Germany and Italy. Last year, there were only 8 or so participants for this "Kraslice" party, but this year we got 12! Little by little, the tradition will catch on, methinks.



Thanks for the recipe, Grandma!

I made sauerkraut-mushroom and onion-garlic-potato pierogi this time.

Happy Day... *heart*

Hey, hey! I hope y'all had a spiffy Valentine's Day. I did... this month Masses are switched to the evening (while Masses in a city hours south of here get switched to the morning), so I slept in until 9! Then I kicked myself and started cleaning the apartment. It's amazing how dusty floors get, how much dishes can pile up, and how much laundry there is to do at the end of a week. And that's only with one person. I think it's a good thing families grow slowly, at a natural pace. Otherwise I don't think the poor parents, or at least parents who are neat-freaks, could handle it.

Well, I made something chocolate, in a way for Valentine's Day, but more for myself and the fact that I haven't had some good chocolate cake with lip-smackingly good frosting in a long time. I just happened to also share some of the goodness with people around me.

Fairy cakes.

Mmmm.

Sounds so much more magical than "cupcakes," which is already quite a lovely word.

of pudding

This afternoon I tried to make a sort of Indian pudding called badam phirni, which seemed quite simple. First, I mixed up a small package of ground almond powder with 4 tablespoons of rice flour and 1/2 cup of milk. In a saucepan, I brought 2 more cups of milk to a boil, and when it was boiling, added 5 tablespoons of sugar. I took out some of the milk to mix with 10 strands of saffron. Then I added the almond-rice paste and the saffron mixture to the simmering milk and stirred for several minutes, until it thickened to a pudding-like consistency. Then I sprinkled in a teaspoon of cardamom and took it off the heat.

Only problem was, the pudding was lumpy.

Should I have dissolved some of the hot milk in the almond-rice mixture before adding it all to the simmering saucepan? Or is it just luck whether or not your pudding turns out smooth?

I don't mind lumpy pudding, myself. It reminds me of one time my dad took some of us canoeing in Canada, and we made instant chocolate pudding over the campstove with powdered milk. It was delicious, especially the lumps. (This was perhaps the third or fourth day of camping.) Absolutely tasty.

But most other people despise lumpy pudding, so I need to figure out how to make this properly.

a trend

Do you sense a trend with the blog these days? Nahhhh...

I made the cauliflower soup and whiskey-glazed carrots from Pioneer Woman's blog tonight! No, I'm not systematically working my way through all her recipes, but I am planning to feature these two dishes in a cooking class later this month, so I figured it would be best to have some direct experience with the pots and pans and white sauce (which took longer than I'd imagined to thicken).

Also, the cold has been making itself felt more than ever, and it's a good motivator. Since summer I just haven't felt like cooking or baking anything, so everything I do make is an accomplishment of sorts.

I am just hoping, with regard to the soup, that the supermarket has enough good heads of cauliflower when we go to buy the ingredients. I stopped there on Saturday, and the four saran-wrapped parts of cauliflower they had were a bit too mushy for my peace of mind. The other night, though, they had more and fresher vegetables, though it was the middle of the week. Anyone know why they would leave the broccoli out in the open air, but saran-wrap the cauliflower?

.....

A big, big thank you to my wonderful family and my awesome aunt and uncle for sending me, the chocolate monster, sweet sweet chocolate for my birthday! :) It won't be long in this world, I say!

sweet chocolate

Chocolate. Cake.

Mwahahahahahaha! As a matter of fact, it's the sheet cake recipe from Pioneer Woman's blog. Just the cake recipe, though, because I improvised my own frosting. The original called for something like a pound of powdered sugar, and anybody in these parts knows that the stores only sell about 1/2 cup, little, fancy packages of powdered sugar for, I don't know, decoratively sprinkling on some fancy little cake. I'm not really sure what you'd call the frosting I made (I call it delicious), but here's how I made it...

I decided to go for a caramel-like base, so I melted about half a stick of butter and added a few generous tablespoons of brown sugar when it was bubbling, then I kept stirring that until the sugar was all melted down. Then I added maybe a tablespoon of cream and kept stirring the lightening, bubbling, frothy mixture. When I thought things had gone far enough, I dropped in some squares of baking chocolate and stirred them around until they'd melted. For some extra flava, I added a few spoonfuls of hazelnut liqueur (the syrup you add to lattes and such) and a wee bit of vanilla. Finally, I stirred in my little 1/2 cup package of powdered sugar until it reached a smooth, albeit thick, consistency.

The recipe said to frost the cake while it was still warm, so that's what I did. The taste was amazing, and still was a couple of days later. The frosting cooled and though it didn't get hard, it firmed up to a nice, fudgey consistency.

So what would you call this frosting?

two words

Chicken. Soup.

There was a time when I thought I'd never make this. It turned out so lovely and warming, though. Fresh parsley and sage, lots of ginger, lots of garlic, lots of chicken, and carrot, celery, turnip, leek, and onion. Also, a dash of salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper for luck. :)

Thanks for the idea, Mom!!!

Baking Day

Yum. A lovely, soft, freeform rosemary focaccia bread fresh from the oven. It's half whole wheat bread flour, which is a lot more than I've ever found in storebought breads here. (Thanks for the inspiration, Sue!) 

As long as I had the oven going, I thought I'd whip up some brownies.... mmmm.

Wish you were here!

FOOD! From the "old country."

Doing all that research on Czech, Slavic, Bohemian, and otherwise Eastern European things made me really want to go out to a restaurant specializing in that kind of fare... even though I am for the most part vegetarian. The Czechs, it seems, have little use for leafy things, preferring instead to deck their tables out with bread, beer, and lots of meat. 

(From somewhere comes a sound bite of John Rhys-Davies as Gimli the Dwarf: "Roaring fires! Malt beer! Rrrrrred meat off the bone!!")

Of course, to be fair, I once had a Czech penpal who wrote about being vegetarian and interested in studying Buddhism at uni. That was a long time before I became vegetarian or took classes like "Buddhism and Literature," but a short time before our correspondence, for whatever reason, dried up. Pity.

Anyway-- there aren't any Slavic restaurants in these parts, but that never stopped the originators of the Slavic recipes in their humble kitchens, so I was determined not to let it stop me in mine, either. I decided to make gulas (goulash) - though it was developed in Hungary, it spread through Eastern Europe - and hoska.  I was going to make knedliky (dumplings) for soaking up the gulas, but wanted to get dinner on the table before 8pm, and something in that recipe mentioned letting the yeast rise for an hour or two. Yeah, right. 

I made two braids of the hoska, but my oven is too small, so they just sort of pushed together. They separated easily enough, though, when I brought one to my event to thank the participants for signing up. I've been working on the other one since, and it's quite good, though it dries out rather quickly. 

As for the gulas, I think I used almost the entire mini-canister of paprika for it, which amounted to maybe 3 tablespoons. There's also cumin, chili pepper, coriander, pepper, and salt spicing up some beef, 3 diced onions, a can of tomatoes, a small bulb of garlic (from Aomori, no less), green peppers (piman), and potatoes. I forgot if I put anything else in there... :D

the joys of roasted eggplant

Try making a roasted eggplant sandwich one of these days. If you haven't had eggplant in a while, you'll probably wonder what else you could have been eating for so long!

After you roast that eggplant-- here, I cut it into rounds, but you could just as easily slice the vegetable lengthwise to get a more sandwich-conducive oval-- using olive oil, black pepper, and some herbs, take that crusty old half-loaf of bread that's been sitting in the bread basket and toast it with just a touch of olive oil and some complementary herbs like thyme, rosemary, or dill. Then put the two together and there you have something savory and nutritious. 

I put cumin and paprika on these rounds, tarragon and thyme on some others. 

I suppose, if you wanted to dress it down for Lent, you could just roast the thing in the olive oil and slap it on some dry toast. But while you're at it, you might just slice it up and put it on a piece of bread raw... although I'm not sure if that would be safe. 

Raw onions are safe. You could stack some of those on some bread and call it a Friday! ;)

experiment

Avocado growers around the world are sitting on a potential gold mine, methinks. 

So I read about how you can substitute avocados for whipping cream in some recipes, and decided to try it out. This is, by the way, part of the planning stage in a dastardly plot for one-of-a-kind desserts come Easter. I don't have a lamb cake mold, and even if I did, it probably wouldn't fit in my oven. Therefore-! cupcakes. But I'm getting ahead of myself. 

What I wanted to try with the avocados was...

Chocolate Mousse!

Went out and got a couple at the store; lamentably, every shopper for the last week must have been squeezing the avocados. Nevertheless, I managed to find some fairly good ones and hie me home. 

Next, I  set out these simple ingredients next to my blender (which at 1200 yen was a steal,   although, I have to say, the machine is simplistic-- only an "off" and "on" setting). 

Avocados

Cocoa powder

Agave syrup

I blended the green guys first.

Then I added a heaping teaspoon of cocoa powder and a couple teaspoons of agave. Blend away.

Then I got inspired to add a banana I had on the counter. 

When I had it in the bowl I decided to mix in a half teaspoonful of instant coffee.

My final addition was a teaspoon of hazelnut syrup. 

WAHAHAHAHA!!!

In making this, I thought along the lines of some of Sr. Mary Martha's recent advice, and concluded that if it didn't turn out, it would be a nice penitential food. As it is, I have some good data for my cupcake plot, and a bowl of banana-mocha mousse freezing in the icebox. 

What's one of the best things about it?  No soy!! Plus, simple ingredients. If I didn't happen to have agave syrup, I'd just go with maple syrup or maybe powdered sugar. If your blender isn't as sketchy as mine, I guess you could use dates or some other sort of naturally-sweetening fruit. 

I wonder if this was in that book about sneaking vegetables into your kids' food... it was a hot, hot seller back in fall/winter '07.