12/1: Ikea and nuts and True Blood, Oh My

12/1/12, Almost a Palindrome but NOT

Hello gentle readers; welcome to another entry.  The Fort Point contingent is not even here yet and we're already in trouble.

Let me back up.  Tonight is Deb's night! (This, I should note, is NOT why we're in trouble.)  Being in the mood for hearty food, our menu is Sweet Potato-Vegetable Lasagna, a side dish of Roasted Vegetables Tossed with Kale, and a vegan Chocolate Raspberry Hazelnut Cake for dessert.  So far so good...except apparently in this particular lasagna recipe, instead of making a tomato sauce they just call for us to dump in two jars of spaghetti sauce.  This is a) a slap in the face of the whole concept of Cooking Club, and b) impossible unless we want to run out into the night and buy some Ragu.  So instead Deb is texting her family and trying to get someone to tell her how to make her Dad's sauce recipe.  (Which I don't remember much about, but I DO remember sausage is a key ingredient, so already there's trouble.  But still less trouble than Ragu.)

Two of our co-chefs arrive!  They bring a bag of apple chip snacks!  Alex immediately jumps in to work improvising his own tomato sauce a la veggie food co-op. (Which is to say, no sausage.)  There's a quick scurry to chop up red onions and add them to the tomato sauce before Jim arrives and poo-poos the idea...but no, Jim arrives seconds after those words are spoken and claims he's never in any way said or thought anything negative about red onions!  He loves them!  If he had a sister he'd be okay if she dated one!

Jim leaps into knifing action chopping the root vegetable for the roasting platter.  We compare notes about our Thanksgivings, and seem to agree that long travel times bad, the actual holiday good.  Deb and I got to renew our old acquaintance with I-95 in a 10 hour drive up the east coast, and Jim and Alex missed their original flight, spent two hours in the Boston airport waiting for another flight, got re-routed through Denver later, had a layover AND a 3 hour flight delay before getting to SF, and then had a turbulence-filled trip to Newark on the way home.

All four of us have seen Lincoln, so we compare notes:  Deb confesses to tuning out all the family drama bits, I confess that every now and then Daniel Day-Lewis's voice sounded like Grampa Simpson, and Alex confesses to being suspicious of all the Oscar contenders each given chances to make Oscar-worthy speeches...and yet we all liked it!!  Just wait 'til we critique a movie we despised, folks.  Your computer screens will weep actual tears.

Sarah arrives! With wine!  She leaps into action chopping up the kale.  She joins the renewed travel conversation, noting that nothing flies to Oshkosh, so finding an airline that goes nonstop Boston to Milwaukee is epic.

We compare notes about Ikea; Alex hates it, Deb and Jim love it and can spend three hours wandering happily, Sniffins falls in the midde, and I think from personal experience that calling in a pizza pick-up order right before going into an Ikea 'just for a couple minutes, to kill time until the pizza's ready' is a Flawed Plan.  Be warned, folks.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Little did we know that even as we chatted about this, a few hundred miles to our north a small monkey and an Ikea store were about to have a date with destiny.  This post is dedicated to you, little Ikea Monkey.  You and your awesome coat.

Deb and Alex are checking the recipe and planning their game plan for the lasagna--nutritional yeast is going to make an appearance, apparently, and the sauce is getting Interesting.  How interesting?  They're turning cashews into paste!  Alex feels this is his default cooking state:  putting random shit into a food processor.  Just think, before food processors he would have had to take those cashews outside and run them over with a car.  This is progress, folks.

Paste, sweet paste

Jim's Choppenating continues--he's chopped everything that needs to be chopped for the roasted vegetables and has moved on to chopping the sweet potatoes that need to go into the lasagna.  (Lasagna craziness part 3.)

We discuss possibly going to see The Hobbit and whether or not we should dress up.  Folks, people should dress up for EVERY movie.  All or nothing.  Tuxes for James Bond movies, very tall hats for Lincoln, and of course stylin' coat and mask combos for the new Batman movie.

Ikea Monkey: the gift who keeps on giving!

Sniffins warms Deb's heart by asking for her advice about avoiding gluten.  It makes people feel bloaty, apparently, and as soon as you eat some you get hungrier.  I sit here in between the beer bread appetizer and the spinach puff appetizer, thinking that we might be in trouble.  C'est la vie.

Sniffins, meanwhile, cleans and prepares an epic amount of spinach, pauses to catch her breath...and sees two MORE bushels of spinach that need to be prepped.  Dismay.  Sad dismay.

Before the salad spinner, we would've had to put the spinach in our washing machine.

Deb: Are you getting a lot of good quotes for the blog?
Me: I'm trying, but you people are pretty fast and loose tonight.
Sarah: Fast and loose!
Jim:  The Sarah Giffen story!

We begin exchanging Powerball fantasies--Jim has his dream kitchen with fossilized granite countertops and a special photo area with perfect lighting for cooking club photos.  Deb: "I'd just build my tiny house and travel around the country."  "We'd still have cooking club, RIGHT?"  "Sure, in my yurt next door!"  Alex and Sniff 'don't play that game', they say.  I don't either.  But if I DID...

Don't Worry, You're All Invited

The lasagna is going to be divided into sides--one side will have broccoli and peppers, and the other side is having a little cheese.

We quiz Deb about how a tiny house differs from a camper, since they're both mobile and very small.  She replies that a tiny house isn't mass-produced and is custom-designed and built by the future owner, as a labor of love.  Let me illustrate:

Mass-produced camper van

Custom-designed tiny house

Sarah mashes the sweet potatoes, and we move on to chopping the spinach into tiny pieces while Alex wrestles with the lasagna recipe.  The sautee'ing begins--garlic first, then spinach.  Jim continues to actually make the whole damn meal--Sniffins points out he has the only decent chopping surface, every other flat area taken up by raw ingredients or random stuff.

We now pause and try to describe the concept of Paris is Burning-style Vogue-battles to Sarah.  While Nick Cave's on in the background, for maximum cross-genre confusion.  Do any of us think to actually show her what we're talking about?  This is silly talk of silliness.

That said, it can be a little hard to describe

The roasted vegetables are about to come out and be tossed with the kale...which is problematic, since we haven't put the lasagna in the oven yet.  Jim begins to put together the cake, getting the flour out.

Deb: How long do you cook hazelnuts until they're done?
Jim: You cook them until they're ready but NOT on fire!

We debate whether or not to call the vegetables 'roasted' when there was no oil involved.  We seem to decide it's better than calling them 'vegetables that sat in the oven for a while'.

Deb tag-teams her way into working on the cake while Jim checks on the hazelnuts...and then we're paralyzed for a second or two as we try to figure out whether a 9" diameter cake pan is about the same volume as an 8" square cake pan.  While we do that, Jim takes cake co-ordination back, cutting the parchment paper to the right size.

Like a BOSS

But wait, Deb takes over from Jim in the cake-making! Alex and Sniff are trying to make Spinach Chips with leftover spinach, sprinkling sea salt over it and crossing their fingers.  And kale chips, too!  Rarely has our oven had so many different things in it.

(When I was a small child, my Nana would probably have tried to get me to eat that by calling it a 'green potato chip'.)

(I have trust issues.)

"You know, this recipe was in cups for the first five ingredients and then it suddenly started calling for fluid ounces!"--Deb  "Vegans do it in fluid ounces!"--Alex

The kale chips are out!  And...well...we agree that the crispy bits are very tasty.  Unfortunately, about 80 percent of them are more chewy and damp than crispy...think seaweed jerky, folks.  If you weren't already.

The spinach chips come out!  Sniff and Alex check them out--they're crispier than the kale, but still need some more time in the toaster oven.

While we kill the last ten minutes waiting for the lasagna to be done, folks crack open a gift canister of tea that Alex and Jim brought back for Deb, and show Deb how to prepare it OLDE TIMEY TEA CEREMONY STYLE, waking it up with the spoon, throwing the first cup away, all that.  "So many rules!  Just dump the damn stuff in the thingie!"--Very Appreciative Deb.  "It cleans you out, so it's good to drink at the beginning of the day and the end of the day"--Jim, AFTER Deb has taken her first drink.  Nice.

Lasagna out!  Photo time!

"That is the ugliest lasagna I have ever seen"--Deb
"It's not in a good light!"--Alex

We're gonna throw this one out to you, dear readers.

Note: that's not cheese on top, it's cashew paste.

We debate frosting with an intensity usually only seen in the Keebler board room on firing day, folks.  We don't have enough butter OR cream cheese for most of the frosting recipes that we know.  We could cobble together a simple chocolate ganache frosting......but since the cake's vegan, it's felt the frosting really should be too.  Stymied!  We make a thick chocolate sauce and call it good.

Scoring!

ROASTED VEGETABLES
Sarah:  C-: Boring.  Too bland.  Unimpressed.  The texture was mediocre.
Jim: B-.  They just needed cheese, or some more spicing, or to be roasted until they were crispy.  They were just like boiled vegetables with a little bit of garlic (and that was after I added a whole lot more spices than the recipe called for).  Recipe fail.
Deb: I would agree that they were a little bit soggy and could be a lot crispier.  It's almost an A because I would make it again, but with some variations...so B+.  (My grading system has nothing to do with deliciousness.)
Brian: C+...it seemed like a LOT of work to wind up with the same old cubed potatoes that you could get at any diner for 99 cents. 
Alex: C-...it tasted like plain potatoes. 

LASAGNA:
Sarah:  B-, the sweet potatoes and corn were delicious touches.  It wasn't a dynamic enough flavor.  Also, lasagna needs cheese--something stringy and fatty and you really can't replace that with fake cheese.
Jim: B/B+, right on the cusp there!  I thought it looked horrible, but I thought it tasted pretty tasty.  I think it needed cheese, but I was surprised at how tasty it was.
Deb:  I would like to make this again, but with variations.  B, B-.  All the vegetables were the best part.  Maybe B-.  I liked it a lot actually, but it needs work.  Wait, B. 
Brian:  B without the mix of pureed tofu and nuts, especially the layer on top.  C- with that mix, though.  When you walk along the ocean outside the Gillette plant you see this nasty scum on top of the water, and it looks exactly like that cashew/tofu paste.
Alex:  The important thing about grading is that when you talk to Jim about pizza he has an idea of what pizza should be, and when it deviates from that ideal he gets cranky.  If I do a similar thing, eating this and comparing it to lasagna, it fails.  If my goal was to make a vegan, vegetable-based lasagna, it was pretty good!  I don't know what I would have done differently to make it much better.  Working within THOSE constraints, I give it an A-.  Outside of those constraints?  If I'd gotten this at a fancy restaurant?  C.  It had things going for it.

True Blood Season 2, Episode 11, "Frenzy":

Sarah:  D+ --I'm thinking of it in context of hating this season.  I do not like the way the Queen is cast; I find her kind of shallow, and without any real power; it's bad casting.  Something about her bothers me.  Also, I really don't like the whole Maenad thing.
Jim: A- just because of Jason, and Eric with the 'teacup humans'. 
Deb:  I'm getting excited that the season's ending, and it was a funny episode, so C+.  Good episode in a season I hated.
Brian: A.  The writing for Eric and Jason was *awesome* this episode, Sam too, and it was the first and only episode of the season where it seemed like the characters were given a chance to actually TALK with each other and catch up on all the crazy events they've had inflicted on them this season. 
Alex:  I'll give it a B...there are things I like about it, like every scene with Jason in it, but there are a lot of things I didn't like too.  I agree that the whole Maenad thing is stupid, and the whole 'it's true if you BELIEVE it's true' plot device is really stupid.

Cake
Deb:  For a vegan cake....nah, I'd still give it a C+.  It was a little dry.  Without the frosting that would've been a disaster.  Also, we can skip the nuts next time.  What we should've done was grind up a bunch of hazelnuts into the frosting.
Alex: I'd give it a B.  I thought...maybe I'm just really easy with desserts...it had a really nice flavor, that the raspberries really popped.  I didn't think it was too dry, I thought the nuts were okay.  It wasn't memorably delicious, but I thought it was pretty good.
Jim: I'm gonna have to give it a C-.  I thought it was too dry.  I didn't like the big whole pieces of hazelnut.  It needed something to replace the egg.  If it had been moister it could have been one of the better vegan baked goods that I've had.
Brian: It had a big buncha nuts. I do not like nuts, and was still reeling a little from the nutty lasagna, so to find big chunks here, and then the walnut oil too...it just Did Not Work for me.  The chocolate glaze was surprisingly good for something made with soymilk, which is why this gets a D+ instead of a lower grade.  Or, to put it another way:

This is how nuts in my dessert makes me feel.  

True Blood Season 2, Episode 12, "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'"

Brian: B-!  Clunky, awkward in parts, funny in certain scenes...added points for just being the last darn episode of the semester and wrapping up plotlines.  Season end, woot!
Deb:  I'm so glad it's over!  It was kind of interesting, I'll give it a B+.
Alex:  I'll give it a B.  I thought it was kind of silly to have so much mop-up after the climax, and there was all this downtime where all these loose ends I don't really care about got dealt with.  The whole Eggs thing was kind of stupid anyhow, and the director seems to really hate Tara.
Jim:  I'd give it a B.  I do think there were too many loose ends tied up.  I was glad there was a cliffhanger, but it took too long to get there.

Sookie's facial expression matches the one I had a lot this season.

After this we drift into talking about various nerd-things, like how long it's going to take the next season of Sherlock to come out because of The Hobbit and the casting of Benedict Cumberbatch in the next Star Trek movie...but that gets us to a level even too geeky for this blog (if you can believe that).