Deb's Night: Mysterious Meal of Mystery, or "It'll be great! Shut up!"

Hello, dear friends, and welcome to another cooking club post!  Happy Groundhog Day!  This is Brian, claiming journaling duties tonight because I'm SICK with the DEATH FLU and I should not touch food for fear of spreading my HORRIBLE CONTAGION (which, granted, has only manifested so far with a sore throat and grogginess, and it might even be argued that I'm acting like a baby and milking this for all it is worth, but I know the symptoms of horrible plague when I feel it).

Anyhow.

Tonight's menu:

Appetizer: ???
Main Course: ????
Side Dish: ?????
Dessert: ??????

It's Deb's night to plan our menu, and after contemplating and rejecting the idea of a meal of nothing but finger food we are instead going for....well, it's a surprise. As in, she hasn't informed any of us, and has even hand-written out the recipes and fragmented them up so that folks will only know what the dishes are when everything comes together at the end.  Based on what she brought back from the store I see sweet potatoes, coconut, a big bag of what looks like kale, an unopened bottle of wine...

Oh!  Buns!  I know that buns are involved, which implies some sort of sandwich, because already I've caused a kitchen breakdown by missing the alarm and letting the dough rise too long.  (Blame the death flu!)  They're rising again, having been divided into eight little lumps of whole wheat goodness.

Jim and Alex arrive! Deb points out that it's bad for my liver to mix wine and Nyquil, and that there's nothing that *necessarily* says I have to wait until bed to drink Nyquil. Which...is beautiful, golden outside-the-box thinking.  This post is going to go askew quite quickly, I think.

Deb passes out 'recipes', and shows people their 'stations', at least 7 or 8, with ingredients and cooking times. Alex suspects this is all a clever plot to prevent him from changing anything or even critiquing tonight's plans.  Deb laughs!  For it is to laugh!  And calls him paranoid! Ho HO!  How about that sports team! And quickly changes the subject.

One might even suspect Deb's choice of note paper contains a hidden message...

Jim, at Station 1&2, is chopping cabbage; Alex is at Station 4A.  (These are apparently not numbered in order of priority. Of course.)

Deb is sifting flour; Alex is still trying to guess.  Sloppy joes?  No. Whatever it is will have vital wheat gluten, for she is pulling out all the vegan stops.  Veggie burgers, he finally figures out by reading ahead...but wait, another revelation: Deb has CHANGED the RECIPE.  DOWN IS UP ALL GUIDEPOSTS ARE LOST.

The conversation rolls around to Valentine's Day, and what is and isn't expected for that day.   Deb falls along the line of "you get a cell phone call if you're lucky, but a text is more likely". As for me, I too have very moderate needs:

(Each of these people are delivering chocolate.)

We gather around the recipe for the barbecue sauce (we think), which Deb has modified because she refuses to use agave nectar, because environment.  Being the cooking geniuses we are, we roll with this new challenge of agave substitution.

Alex deviates from his recipe; his called for him to measure out an amount of pepper, but we just have a peppercorn grinder and the thought of  measuring using that?  FEH.

Jim has completed Station 1!  He questions the terms--why 'station' instead of 'step'?  Is it a Catholic thing?  Because each station contains multiple steps, is the answer.  We contemplate using 'module' instead.  While we do that, Jim begins chopping the sweet potatoes into french fry wedges.

It only looks like Jim is healing this bowl with magic, but actually he...um...okay, maybe it IS magic

"It'll be great!  Shut up!"  There's a strong advocacy that this be the title of the episode.  Or for the full title: "I won't tell you what we're cooking, and it'll be great! So shut up!"

We have fresh pineapple juice; Alex, spotting this, proposes that it go in the slaw.  Which is how I discover we're having slaw tonight.

Alex is preparing the veggie patties and is actually done, and beginning to heat up the oven to bake them.    The bread also bakes for 30 minutes, but Alex points out that bread traditionally bakes at a much higher temperature...we scurry to find the recipe.

We ponder how many fries are *enough* fries...Deb maintains that she's never found that platonic ideal.  So while it might look like 4 sweet potatoes are an excessive amount (and it does, dear readers, it does, from here it looks like that scene from Close Encounters where he sculpted the scale model of Devil Mountain, only out of sweet potato fries), if it means that she for once in her life gets her fair share then it'll be worth it.

Either my leg is falling asleep or the Nyquil's really just now kicked in.  Maybe both.   Station 4 is done; we ponder coordination of the meal, and Deb double-checks the recipe to reveal that the buns actually DO bake at 350.  So put them in at the same time as the patties at 350 or put them earlier so they have a little time to cool in the air afterwards?  Deb's a same time-advocate, Alex feels they should go in earlier, and carries the day with his logic. 

Deb reveals that she hates cookie butter, because "it's like eating liquid sugar".  "Like honey?"  That leads to a discussion of whether honey's antiseptic properties are because of something unique to honey or whether any sugar would work...in other words, if we're missing something by not putting jam or nutella on our wounds.

Jim, having been worked like a dog (one who works, that is, like a sled dog; I on the other hand am working like an overweight puggle who's just flopped over on his favorite warm cushion) takes a little break while Alex turns out the patties--instead of the 8 the recipe calls for we have 4 plus a little more....for a loaf!

Deb reveals her dessert plan: CARROT WALNUT COCONUT CAKE.  Alex jumps to get some greens going; collard greens and spinach will be sauteed for a quick vitamin hit.

Deb is about to put the coconut-walnut vegan cake in the cake pans.  Frosting gets mentioned, which, hmmm.  On the spot she whips up an appropriate frosting which she describes as "your usual vegan frosting"--coconut milk, vanilla and confectioners sugar, pretty much.  She's adding flakes, for a very chunky look and feel.

The line between cake and peanut brittle can be deceptive

"The idea was to have a light dinner so I could have a giant dessert"--Deb, being very honest.

"Do you still have cashews?  I was thinking about making a little fake cheese to put on top of this thing"--not a normal sentence heard when talking about a 'meat'loaf.

We find cheese!  Which would ruin the 'vegan' nature of the meal...but, Alex points out, the loaf wasn't a planned part of the meal anyhow so ALL RULES ARE GONE.  Aaaaaaaanaarchy!

The scent of baking sweet potato fries begins to fill the room; they're examined and folks try to decide whether they need more time or are ready.

Remember the mystery menu?  The pieces have fallen together!

Appetizer: Chips (very very spicy chips!) and hummus
Main Course: Veggie burgers in homemade buns, with optional coleslaw topping
Side Dish: Greens; also, sweet potato fries
Dessert: Coconut-walnut vegan cake


At this point the Nyquil really kicks in, and I somehow find myself in the living room with a plate of food in one hand and True Blood on.  I think the main character's having a dream about elves?  Who are doing that thing elves in tv and film backgrounds always seem to be doing, which is swanning about doing vague modern dance moves?  YOU'RE IMMORTAL, PEOPLE, GET A HOBBY. Where's the Elf who's, like, "I decided to spend 30 years learning how to be the world's best balloon sculptor, cuz why not? IMMORTAL"  Oh wait we've actually been talking about the food while I typed this.

RATINGS

Veggie Burger and Bun:
Deb: I loved the veggie burger! B+!  Well....maybe A-.  But the bun, I never want to see again.  So.  Maybe that brings it back down to a B+.
Alex: C.  As far as veggie burgers go, this is not good.  The issue is the TVP, which is terrible.  TVP tastes like TVP, this bizarro processed thing, and then this got mixed with wheat gluten, which also has its own distinct taste and flavor.  In order to overcome that, you have to push pretty hard.  The delicious parts of this burger were the garlic and oil, and a LOT of ketchup.  The texture was good, though.
Jim:  C+--it definitely needed more flavor.  Whether that's herbs and spices, more stuff, maybe blended things mixed in, but it wasn't that bad to me.  It had the best texture of a fake hamburger.
Me: B-...for a veggie burger, it was normal.


Greens:
Deb: Soft, very well-cooked, not bitter at all.  B+.
Alex: I'm with Deb on this one--they turned out surprisingly well.  Given that I mixed two things with radically different cooking times, especially.  The liquid smoke was a nice touch. B+.
Jim: B--I didn't taste a lot of the liquid smoke, so they were nice greens.  Nothing that exciting about them.
Me: B+ --they sort of melted in my mouth. 


Coleslaw:
Deb: C-, too barbecuey.
Alex: Not very good at all.  I would say it was bad.  C.
Jim: I give it a B+.  I don't like coleslaw.  I don't usually even like cabbage.  But I liked this, and got seconds even.


Fries:

Lost due to Nyquil fugue.  Very thin fries, which were baked and managed to slowly, barely become a little crispy.  Deb prefers her fries thicker, which can take us to a slippery slope question of "when does a fry stop becoming a fry and simply become a potato wedge?  When does a potato wedge stop becoming a wedge and just become 1/4 of a potato and, more importantly, can you still dunk it in ketchup?"

Cake:
Even more lost due to Nyquil fugure, ohmigosh.  I *can* say that it came out less of a cake and more of a crumble.  Which some people really enjoyed.  Especially the one who figured out she could dump spoonfuls of crumble in the frosting mixing bowl and stir it all up together.

Brian's Night: If it's foreign, I like it

Greetings, Internet!  Alex here, blogging to you live from the planet of Brideb Debri and things are already feeling delightfully otherworldly:

"How could you have forgotten that pizza dough takes time to rise?"

And that, my friends, is how you transform pizza into crepes!

So our meal will apparently consist of...crepes, Gratin de Potiron, Spinaci con Pinoli, and Besan Laddu.  For those of you that don't speak uh...French, Italian and Hindi, that means we're making a winter squash casserole, spinach with pine nuts and chickpea flour sweets.

Anyway, as everyone is starting to figure out what we need for our various recipes, Jim is still glowing from his nascent negotiations with Menton.  They are commissioning a series of plates from him to serve their "modern yet lavish" cuisine.  Modern yet lavish sounds just like Shea Pottery!  And of course, our fancy pants food blog!

Deb is chopping mushrooms on this cutting board, which is worth mentioning for two reasons.  First off, this cutting board is designed for persnickety chefs like myself who say things like "No!  I said brunoise!  Come ON!" and has a little chart of what things like brunoise mean along with graph paper (graph cutting board?) with little measurement squares.  Second, Deb apparently learned how to chop backhand, which is something I didn't even realize was possible.  Way to go, Deb!

Brian is working on the squash cassero- I mean Gratin de Potiron.  This involves a great big pile of squash and...uh...I don't really know what else.  In fairness, Brian seems much more pleased with his recent accomplishments as a scholar, working with a Pullitzer Prize nominee to research Boston circa 100 years ago.  (Personally, I hope that this book will be called Not Fucking Around, but what do I know).

Meanwhile, Bri and Deb saw Django Unchained, which in addition to being superb also spurred that age old discussion of "does Quentin use the N-word too much?"  Read all about it here!

Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Spike Lee's on your ass all the time about using the word "n----r." What would you say to black filmmakers who are offended by the use of the word "n*****r" and/or offended by the depictions of the horrors of slavery in the film?

Just for Spike.

By the way, Professor Gates doesn't seem to shy away from the word, but it's been told to me that I definitely can't quote him in print on the blog!  The world is a confusing place sometimes.

What is not confusing, however, is how freaking amazing Ghee smells when it's used to cook mushrooms and zucchini.  Yum.  You can chew on that Spike and Quentin.  Literally!  You're both invited!

So, it occurs to us that our blog might have a lot more hits if we were to take some inspiration from this character.

 

You can always lick your tool if you have too much on there.  Ahem.

The blogger's view of cooking club.

Don't make me pose!

Behold, my egg!

Hey, I'm cooking!

Anyway, due to some pizza to crepe challenges, we have encountered the problem that the Gratin will be done way later than the crepes.  Whoops!  Jim is starting the Besan Balls, which consists of even more ghee and calls for one teaspoon of cardamom.  After knocking over things in five different locations, we have accomplished the following:

1. Turning off Destroyer
2. Finding bizarro black cardamom pods that smell like Bac'os
3. Finding green cardamom pods that smell like cardamom

   

   Jim's crepes.  They got better!

4. Extracting the black seeds from the cardamom pods
5. Determining that the coffee grinder is gone and cannot turn our seeds into powder
6. Determining that the mortar and pestle are gone and cannot turn our seeds into powder
7. Discovering that we have cheese cloth and can wrap the cardamom in it and soak it in the besan goo
8. Pondering whether washing the cheese cloth will cause the besan goo to become besan clumps
9. Finding the coffee grinder
10. Finding the pen which you can stick into the coffee grinder to make it grind
11. Making ground cardamom!

Note to careful chefs: some of these steps may be omitted without adverse effect.  Use your best judgment.

10 minutes to go!  Time to start the spina- Espinaci!  And Jim, the crepe guy in spite of his not-so-very-French heritage, is doing his best!

The Espinaci consists of toasting pine nuts and adding spinach to it.  It's simple and seems like it's going to work without a hitch!

Besan Ladoo Not Try This At Home.
Adding besan to the ghee.

I would like to mention, however, that one thing that may have collected a few hitches around the way is the besan ladoo.  Deb thinks it smells like "burnt carrot...maybe...mixed with us...sawdust...dirt.  Burnt carrots mixed with dirt."  It also has the unfortunate quality that it has not yet congealed.  And it's eventually supposed to turn into a ball!  Right now it's kind of just a puddle that may congeal as it cools, but, given that it still smells like burnt carrots and dirt...yeah.

While we wait for it to cool, we assemble our photogenic meal:

 

Interestingly, the Besan Ladoo is actually cooling!  It's a little uneven, the bottom is quite settled, while the top is still liquid-y, but Jim tasted it, and he even said that he liked it!  Imagine that!  And what does it look like, you ask?  These are the firmest of the bunch.

Besan Ladoo times two.

	Alex	Brian	Deb	Jim
Crepes	B.  They were alright.  I really liked the goat cheese, but the overall impact was a bit forgettable.	A-.  They were tasty, bite sized.  We could have had a variety, but since our initial plan wasn't for crepes at all, we did pretty good!	B+.  They were delicious.  They could have used more herbs or a wine sauce, but they were quite satisfying!	B+.  I think they needed a sauce of some sort, but I thought they were pretty darn tasty.  And the crepe itself was beautiful!  Dammit!
Espinaci	A-.  I thought the pine nuts were a really good addition and even though it was cold, I still quite enjoyed it!	B.  We let it cool too much.  If we'd eaten earlier, might have been A,A- range.	B.  It was spinach.  We needed 8 times as much.  It was tasty.	B.  It was pretty good in the crepe.
Gratin	B+.  The bites on the top (with the cheese and breadcrumbs) were amazing.  The bites at the bottom that tasted like mushy squash, were kind of C bites.	A.  I'm pretty pleased!  Bread crumbs and cheese were a great combo!  I'm going to put them on every vegetable I eat for the next month.	A-.  I wonder if a NUT CRUST would have been just as nice...	A-.  I think it needed a little more cheese - really pretty tasty!
Besan Ladoo	B-.  It's not my favorite thing, but it tastes unique and I kind of like it!	F.  I did not know what chickpea flour tasted like, and know I know.	F-.  Burn it with fire.  Kill it with fire.  Burn it sounds stupid, just kill it with fire.	F+.  The first little bit tasted OK, then it went south.

Ho Ho Ho, its TofuFauxPho

Hello gentle readers! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and Happy Whichever Additional Holidays you've celebrated (Yule, Solstice, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Rendlesham Forest Incident Day); we hope all of them were happy, and that your forest stayed UFO-free and peaceful. It's Brian again, bopping along to disco on a Friday night as the four of us wash off the grime of a long work week (mental grime--it's not like we're covered in diesel fuel) by cooking Asian food!

But more about the Asian food:  Alex has leapt into gear by making a yummy dipping sauce before we even got here, blending up chickpeas and adding ketchup, brown sugar, soy sauce, sriracha and ninety-nine other ingredients, turning them into something that looks like hummus and tastes like what cats think catnip tastes like.  YUM.  I'm on it like a history geek with the new Churchill biography by William Manchester, which is volume III and covers his life between 1940 and 1965, which--ten year gap between Volume II and Volume III, people, Volume II ended just as WWII was about to start and *talk about a cliffhanger*, so...what's that?  I'm getting too nerdy even for this blog?....it's a very, very good dipping sauce, is what I'm saying.

True fact: 2/3 of all babies look like Winston Churchill to me.

Anyhow.

We're heavily in Asian comfort food mode tonight, with faux-pork ('faurk'?) dumplings from http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/steamed-pork-buns-char-siu-bao-10000001734314/, real-scallion scallion pancakes from http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2011/04/extra-flaky-scallion-pancakes-recipe.html, pho (faux-pho, we call it, because it's hella fun to say out loud) from http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/noodles-spicy-lemon-grass-broth-10000000653548/, and for dessert, well, we started out with the intention of making fried bananas with vanilla ice cream and a saffron-infused caramel, but by the time we got past the dumplings and pancakes and pho we realized we'd have no room for dessert.  It's a holiday miracle!

Deb's been assigned the dumpling role, though she's helped along by having the faurk already simmering away on the stove. 

It hits us--we bought extremely gourmet tea last week, and extremely gourmet tea would go really well with this meal!

Opinion poll time:  for a spicy broth we have three peppers, a banana pepper, a serrano, and "a red one"...which to put in?  All of them??  It's decided to prep them, have a little taste test, see how hot they are, put burn cream on our tongues and then go from there.  Red is three times spicier than the others, we determine.  With just a tiny bit of work we could turn this into a Sesame Street skit.  About BURNING.


"If the recipe has 'spicy' in the name, then it should definitely be a challenge for Bri."


Jim is making the pho, which has involved prepping lemongrass, and now chopping up cilantro.  Alex is getting started with the pancakes;  Deb is making anti-French recipe remarks and hastening to explain that it's not the FRENCH part she dislikes, it's the recipes themselves.   She's not xenophobic, folks, she's recipophobic.   While she does that she's chopping a metric ton of ginger, which makes Alex want to share the fact that he recently heard about 'figging', which....look it up, folks, just look it up.  It's something they do to bulls when they want them to move more quickly.  That's MY story and I'm sticking to it.

Since we're already past a PG rating for this entry, parents reading this, let's talk the whole Elf on a Shelf phenomenon.   You realize that this is the stuffed animal version of your own personal Catholic saint telling St. Peter about your childrens' sins, right?  If you're cool with that I am.  But what are you doing now that Christmas is over?  Will the Elf be reporting to the Groundhog, so that every time your kids misbehave winter lasts a little longer?

We're still talking about ginger, which leads to wondering if medieval folks used it for figging, which leads to Jim calling on his SCAdian past, which leads to Deb hearing the word as Acadian, which leads to massive confusion and meanwhile, we're still eyeing the ginger dubiously.  (It "tingles".  Suuuure.  THAT's the sensation, I'm so sure.) 

"Salt salt salt, oh my god salt?"--someone who is not Deb being asked to taste test something.

We discover, to our sadness, that the Mog "Disco (Chansons Inspirees Du Film)" channel is not, actually, French disco.  Still, they're doing an upbeat dance mix of "Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", so we can't get too sad.

"Roll the pastry up like a jelly roll, then coil it into a spiral, then flatten back into an 8" disc--then sprinkle scallions, roll it up AGAIN, and coil it into a spiral AGAIN, and then flatten into a SEVEN inch disc!!"--Alex is boggling at this hitherto-unexpected scallion pancake instruction.  I confess, I don't associate scallion pancakes with spirals either.  But us?  Mock a recipe?  It is to laugh!

There's hushed consultation about the lemongrass broth, which just is tasting bland.  We ponder adding salt and maybe more lemongrass

"I like chunky dumplings!"--Deb, either talking about the food or planning her Hobbit Name.  (Myself, I favor 'Peach Pureleaf').

I jump onto Google to try to help the broth by seeing what OTHER people have done to improve it.  cursedvegan.wordpress.com added basil....okay, they added a LOT of funky things, but basil's the only ingredient we actually have here.  So in it goes.  We think about the blandness of the tempeh and add lime juice, then a tiny bit of brown sugar for sweetness.  We ponder some more, then remember it's going to taste amazing when it's surrounded by dough.  Then Alex thinks of honey, which kaZAM is the ingredient that works!

All of these ingredients AND MORE can improve a broth.  Hypothetically.

None of the fresh noodles have the word 'pho' attached to them, because it was a Chinese grocery, so we have two types of packaged noodles to choose from: 'lomei', which is quite thin, or 'Twin Marquis Plain Noodle (thick)', which is about 2-3 times as wide.  Deb and I vote for the thicker one.

Our talk gets personal as we discuss two people who've recently broken up, who were apparently together for ten years despite, or maybe because of, both being named Dave.  (People told them apart by calling them "The Dave We Like" and "The Dave Who Talks Through a Puppet, And We All Had To Address the Puppet Like Another Guest In the Room, Wow That Was Weird").   Dave, if you're reading this, it wasn't you, it was ANOTHER Dave with a puppet.

I typed 'disturbed man + puppet' in Google, and this came up.

"It's lost the tempeh flavor, and that's good.  Now it tastes like something else."--Deb, evaluating the tempeh---"She doesn't like it!  But she doesn't know why!"--Alex, evaluating Deb.  We're now adding five spice powder to the tempeh, which works...we think...again, we're pinning some of our hopes to the deliciousness of the bun.

Deb moves on to the fry batter for the banana....and then reveals that she tossed out some of Alex's ginger because how much MORE could he possibly NEED, bwahahaha!....and sheepishly offers to replace it, since he actually needed it to make the dipping sauce. 

Talk turns to freaky religious backgrounds.  I have my 'evils of rock and roll' Sunday School story where the minister lectured us on backmasking and subliminal messages (readers too young to remember LP records, google it), but Jim tops me with his tale of how he got invited out for "roller skating" by an evangelical youth group, and spent 3/4 of the time sitting down in the middle of the rink with all the other kids, learning how evil hellbound girls wore "The Devil's Paint!" on their skin.  Hot Topic, feel free to use 'The Devil's Paint' as a new product name.  You're welcome.

Alex is working on the scallion pancake by spiralling, then pressing, then scallioning, then rolling again. The broth has lost the lemongrass flavor entirely, Jim reports with dismay.  Deb thinks there's still a hint of it. 

Rommy reports, with desperate urgency, that there is a CAT. In the HALLWAY.  And we need to take DRASTIC ACTION.  We take this under advisement.  He despairs for our souls.

Rommy wards off danger with his mental powers

"It's gonna look great once it's fried up!"--Deb, doing her best to be positive as she watches Alex's pancake.

The tofu for the pho is in the oven on 350.  Which means, yes, we are now working on TOFU FOR FAUX PHO.  Alex has created his scallion pancake and has walked away in disgu...um, has decided to give each of us a turn to create our own personal pancake.  Yes.  That is the story.  RIGHT, SHELF ELF?

The disco channel has gotten into a Donna Summer medley, btw.  It makes an odd backdrop to Jim lamenting the fiendish and deceptive timer of the online test he took for Organizational Behavior this week as part of his course. He went 33 minutes over, with 1 point off the test for each minute, and meanwhile "Celebration" is playing as he tells us this.  Bad DJ, bad.

...and now we've got a Village People medley.  "You Can't Stop the Music" indeed, people. 

My turn comes to make my own scallion pancake.  By flouring the heck out of it and mayyybe putting a little less oil and scallions than Jim and Alex, I wind up with something that...well, it's a LITTLE different.  I'm not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad one.  I've never seen a scallion pancake that looks like a giant comma before, is all I'm saying.

Not how you picture a scallion pancake at any point

Bun, undone

We're ready to make the buns and steam them!  Deb's having a little bit ("squelch!") of trouble with her pancake, which is sticking to table, rolling pin, her hands and somehow even itself as she tries to prep it.

Jim sends me the recipes, though we note that Alex has changed ALL THE THINGS!  Which starts up a conversation about how good Hyperbole and a Half is (hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com), and how we hope that its creator, who has dropped off the face of the earth, is doing well.  (And might someday see this while she's Googling.  Hi there.)

Not quite the quote, but still very relevant

We get ready to steam, using Jim's bamboo steamers.  While he's digging them out he finds wasabi peas, a relic from the last time we made steamed buns!   There is great celebration.  It, like Proust's madeleine, inspires a flashback in Alex as he remembers the buns we made...it was one of our very first meetings of the club, and the first week he had his Smartphone and he went nuts taking pictures and videos, and life was good.

  "I love it while you're doing kitchen things, and as you're doing them you think 'Oh No!  This is a stupid thing! Stupid thing!' but it's too late and you can't stop"--Alex.  It's a little bit too long to be the new name of this blog, but it's so tempting...

Alex is taking the tofu out, and we're preparing to boil the noodles--interestingly, they get boiled first and THEN added to the broth.  (He leaves the tofu right next to me to cool.  FOOLISHNESS. I just have to wait until their backs are all turned....oh for another tiny kitchen fire...) 

The combined group talks me into trying the wasabi peas.  Which...are not bad.  WHICH IS BAD, because now they're *encouraged* to get me to try even stranger foods in the future, aggh.  Should! not! give! them! positive! reinforcement! "Hey Brian, put this thing that looks like yak fur in your mouth.  No, don't ask what it is, just do it."  Argh.  This is now my inevitable future.

We realize the missing ingredient in the broth--it has no fat!  The hunt begins for a vegan fat that is suitable (leaving the tofu unwatched A CUBE IS MINE), and a dollop of coconut oil gets mixed in.  Jim suggests bacon grease, but the vegetarians just smile and shake their heads sadly.  (razzinfrazzin vegetarians razzin...)  Alex finds butter, which also hops into the broth.  He ponders dried mushrooms, which also find their way inside...now it's less adding fat and more just 'futzing with the recipe'.  It's 8:33, peoplez, LESS FUTZING MORE PUTTING FOOD IN MY PIEHOLE. 

We remember the snow pea pods!  Hello side dish we're just thinking of now!  Deb begins to get some garlic ready for a quick sautee. 

One quick departure for a dog walk, during which the other three folks here act like effin' Noel Coward and Dorothy Parker and....a third witty person.  Robert Mitchum?  Wait, was he the guy who dared you to knock a battery off his shoulder in the old commercials?  Anyhow, apparently I missed a big Stevie Wonder-inspired quest to figure out which crime show opens with the bass line for "Living for the City".  We YouTube Hill Street Blues, Homicide, NYPD Blue and CSI--apparently the answer is "frickin none of them", until we finally find "Law and Order"...which is credited to Mike Post.  We wonder if Stevie Wonder got paid anything.  (If Stevie Wonder googled himself and found his way here, hello.  They owe you $$$.)

While all this research is going on, the scallion pancakes and the buns are all getting actually cooked!   The hot broth is ready to have the noodles go into it, and the supply of tasty tasty tofu cubes is slowly dwindling nom nom nom nom.

The (lack of ) salt in the broth is pondered.  It's pointed out that there's soy sauce, which should do the trick.  We hope. 

Besides musical research, the non-dogwalkers apparently also hit upon WHY this cooking club exists: we're trying out recipes for Alex's hypothetical future food truck.  Deb's going for "would people buy this for lunch?"  I immediately leap to "could this be cooked in a limited space without going insane?" and start making plans to have little barricades up at MY next cooking night that we can't step outside of, just to recreate the full 'cooking in a food truck' experience.  (I can also use them for our THE KITCHEN FLOOR IS LAVA theme night.)

Food's coming out!  Our pancakes are in various stages of brown and crispy, the buns are PUFFY, and there's a heck of a lot of green leaves floating in the tofufauxpho  (if they were alive, there'd be tofufauxphophotosynthesis...okay, I'm done).  The buns are actually SO puffy it's hard to get them out of the steamer until we turn the whole thing upside-down and shake.  (I've worn pants like that, so I can't judge.)

"Oh, this is going to be one of our best meals!  I don't think we've ever made anything this good before!"--Hungry Deb, right before the meal.  Alex and Jim DEMAND this quote be documented so we can contrast it to Full Deb's grades in a half hour.

The grading!

BUNS
Jim: A+!  I was really pleased with how fluffy the dough was, and the tempeh was sweet and tangy just like a barbecue pork bun.
Alex: B+...the first bite of the first one that I had made me so pleased, because the bun came out just right. But the second bun--I'm not sure if it was because I was more full, or the bun was cooler, but it was just like, I got a little bit more of the bitterness of the tempeh in that one.  Tempeh's such a struggle!  So I would make it again but with something other than tempeh.
Deb: It's annoying going after Alex cuz I would have said that too.  I'd give it an A, but that tempeh is not perfect.
Brian: A.  We need to use that dough again and again.  And I have a high tolerance for tempeh!

SCALLION PANCAKES
Deb: Those were good, but I can't remember them. A little bit hard and could be fluffier; I liked that they weren't too salty.  Probably A-.
Jim: A-...they were flaky, a little chewy, and I didn't taste a lot of the sesame.  But they were pretty darn good.
Alex: A!  I thought they were delightful.  They were salty and crispy.
Brian: A-...mine could've been cooked a tiny bit longer to make it crispier; the chewiness kept it from an A+.

FAUXPHO
Alex: I'd give it an A-.  I thought the broth was quite delicious; the noodles were tasty, everything was good.  It's best if you don't call it pho; it tasted like a very nice vegetable soup.
Jim: We probably should have done the skinny noodles, and even they might not've been the right ones.  A-...I realized as I was eating it that one of the recipes I looked at suggested charring some of the vegetables before adding them to the broth, and that might have added a nice smoky flavor that this one was missing.
Deb: I'd give it a B, because I didn't like the tofu. I liked everything else, though.  I loved the broth, the noodles were too thick...I did eat this last, though, and was already pretty full.  If I was starving this would be an awesome soup.
Brian: B+/A-...eating a soup with big thick wet noodles using chopsticks?  Challenging!  Filling!  But very tasty.

PEAPOD STEMS
Deb: I ate a lot of them. I didn't like them!  C-.
Jim: They were too acidic.  Not enough garlic, not enough oil.  B-
Alex: C+...what they said.
Brian:  Abstain!  (I actually forgot they were here)

TRUE BLOOD Season 3, Episode 1, Bad Blood:

 
Brian: Werewolves!  Cast scattering off in all directions!  It feels like a lot of ingredients, but I'm not sure how they'll gel.  B+?
Jim: I think this had some of my favorite one-liners ever.  I'd give it A-.
Alex: I'll give it a B+.  There were good scenes, we had a big reveal, we got to see Jason's "conscience off, dick on!" motivational scene, 
Deb:  I guess it was a B+...it wasn't terrible, it wasn't exciting. 

It's worth noting that a) this was the most carb-heavy meal we might have ever made, b) this meal got EVERY dish in the kitchen dirty, and I'm escaping the clean-up by blogging this, and c) we've decided that the dough was so good that our imaginary hypothetical food truck should be nothing but different flavors of dumplings.  Since they're called Bao, the names Take a Bao and Bao Bao Wow are proposed..."or we could be all abstract and call it 'Curtain Call'" says Jim, which, as names go, is still better than the tequila bar off Copley Square named Lolita's.  (If someone from Lolita's is googling their name and sees this...dude. DUDE.  Ew.)

"Or it could be a goth lunch truck, and we could call it DisemBAOeled!"--Alex, getting the last word.

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).