Jim's Ultimate Night!

Hello Senors and Senoras!  It's Jim's night tonight, and it might (spoiler alert) be our LAST cooking club, so we're going with a BEST OF night!  And to help us celebrate and commemorate, Janet is here to help cook!
We'll be revisiting the recipes our grading system marked out as our all-time favorites: our cheddar biscuits, the seitan tacos with barbecue sauce, our roasted squash, and the seis leches cake.

Menu links:
Crispy Seitan Bacon can be found at  http://recipes.hewus.com/Show_Recipe.pl?ID=553

Our Cheddar Biscuit recipe can be found at http://www.bravotv.com/foodies/recipes/mini-cheddar-biscuits-with-homemade-cinnamon-apple-sauce

Flour Tortillas come from http://allrecipes.com/recipe/homemade-flour-tortillas/

For the beginning of our Seis Leches cake go to http://www.bravotv.com/foodies/recipes/pan-de-tres-leches-with-candied-cocoa-nib-and-tequila-caramel-sauce, but note we are putting in 4 eggs, 1/2 cup sugar, 2 Tbs vanilla, 1 cup milk, 1 cup cream, 1 cup 1/2 and 1/2, 1 cup condensed milk, 1 cup evaporated milk and 1 cup coconut milk. Oh, and also we're skipping the candied cocoa nibs.  Oh, and where they say the top should be brown, we went for more of an amber color.  But apart from that it's just like this recipe!

To kick off the biscuit making, Jim has bought SEVEN KINDS of cheddar cheese!

So much cheese it can't fit in a single photo!

 We, of course, have to open them all and have a taste-testing. They're all mild and nice and decent, so after scoping out them all we decide Alex will do the Reserve Cheddar.  Deb is chopping challah into crouton-esque chunks for the cake, Janet is barbecue saucing, and Jim is tackling the tortillas.  I'm alliterating! 

This post is being brought to you by Newcastle Werewolf Blood Red Ale, by the way, and a tiny bit by Rocky Top, a cocktail I drank at noon and am still a little buzzed by at 7, because I have no natural tolerance for moonshine apparently.

Your Humble Blogger

I feel like as this might possibly the last cooking club night--Alex and Jim are moving to the West Coast soon, which will make future meetings more tricky (the mise en place alone will be a nightmare)--we should be making this post special. 

A holiday gift idea for Alex, for those of you looking to cross him off your shopping list: condensed milk is "my favorite thing of all the things."

He is also accepting gift cards towards getting this tattoo.

While we talk about cartoonist Allie Brosh's suicide plan of finding a puddle on a cold day and lying down in it until she died of hypothermia (never carried out, thankfully), Alex is cutting up butter for the biscuits.  Janet faces the fact that in place of bacon bits and Tony's, we have fake bacon bits and tapotio.


Like the first time, the actual printed out recipe for Seis Leches is actually for Tres Leches, and we have to guesstimate how to reduce and increase the proportions to add the three additional milks (sweetened, condensed and evaporated, for those of you playing along at home).  Thin ice, meet our skates!

The Mighty Six!

Janet is now frying the tortillas...or, okay, heating the pans for the tortillas to eventually be fried in.  It's all good.  We have a holding pattern for the oven; biscuits need to go in first, for twenty minutes, before the cake can go in for its 45-50 minutes. 

Talking about seitan leads Janet to remember that she used to have a friend who was offended by the satanism inherent in deviled eggs.  We research the etymology and learn they've also been called Angel eggs, Russian eggs and dressed eggs.  Jim mis-hears this as "breast eggs" and is now not sure HE wants to have any.

I can see how you'd be suspicious.

Alex declares that it is time to do a little bit of clean-up.  Jim, meanwhile, takes his little paring knife and begins peeling apples for the applesauce that will complement the biscuits.

At this point the cake is ready to go, Deb is taking over the apple peeling process, Janet is still tortilla-ing, Alex is biscuiting and Jim is...um...doing everything else.  Alex is concerned he might have worked the dough too much; he apologizes in advance.

Tortilla Action Shot

I make a JOKE and ask if we have any condensed milk left that Alex can dip the Chocolate Candy Cane cookies into.  (Janet brought them, btw, credit where it's due.)  EVERYONE LOOKS AT ME AS IF I JUST CURED CANCER.

DELICIOUS cancer!

Jim is mixing mustard into the sauce for the cabbage coleslaw that'll be part of the tacos.  As one does.  There's some pondering of whether tofu should be blended into it to mellow the flavor, but that seems over the top.  Deb, on the verge of sitting down, is roped into working with the seitan and turning it into "pulled pork", crumbling it to maximize the surface area.

Yes.  To vegetarians this is what pulled pork looks like.

Alex and Jim have leapt in to help Deb with her "pork pulling".  Deb is appalled at the speed they're going; Alex explains that he is just making pieces that are "Jim-sized", which leads to a bit of mockery.

The biscuits come out!  They look yummy! 

Janet is helping the cake and milk mix evenly.  Alex is trying to sell us a Neutral Milk Hotel ticket; apparently they were on hiatus for so long that a lot of people didn't know they were still touring, which happens when your lead singer decides to go off and join the circus for a while.

We are creating the water bath for the cake, only it is called a "bain marie" because we are fancy fancypants.  Yes.

The seitan is being grilled!

The last thing that needs to be made is the caramel tequila to pour over the top of the cake.  The squash has sat out for a while, so we're warming it up again, but we're moooostly done with the cooking part! This makes me quietly wonder if the biscuits will need re-warming, but we'll cross that bridge later.

One meal and one mind-blowing episode of Orphan Black (omg such a good show) later:

GRADING!
Biscuits: A! A! A+! A! and "pretty good" from Alex, who thinks the applesauce really makes the biscuit.  On the other hand Deb felt like the sauce got in the way of the tasty biscuit, and Janet felt the two tastes weren't really complementary.

Squash: A! A! A! A! and "some parts were a little burnt" from Alex, so B+ from him.  This causes Janet to change her grade to a B+...she thinks she wanted it to be crispier.

Tacos:  A!A!A!A! and...drumroll please...A from Alex too!

Beaucoup des Leches Cake:
Brian: It's ready at 10:17.  Ten. Seven. Teen.  Yes, some of us were late getting here tonight, but that's still a cooking club record for how long it took something to be ready.   A little bland, too?  B
Janet:  I'm suffering the Full Deb phenomenon.  I'm going to say B.  It was good but it wasn't amazing.  (...and my tummy feels so bad...)
Deb:  I'm going to act on 8 years of self-knowledge and grade mine an A!  I'm raising it up a letter grade because I don't want to be a Full Deb grader!
Alex:  (while eating his second serving)  A-.  The texture is custardy and creamy and very nice.  I really wanted that tequila caramel sauce to reduce and be thicker.  Maybe there should have been something else...sugar?  Cinnamon?  Vanilla?
Jim:  I would give it an A-, because I too wanted the tequila sauce to be more caramel-y. 


Jim would say the high point of cooking club, for him, was when he caught the sesame seeds on fire.  Cooking club is all about drama, and for him that was the biggest dramatic moment we've faced.  Wisdom, my friends, wisdom.

Alex feels that for a him a high point has been the phase where he bought us the artisan breadbook and we proceeded to make almost everything in it, and it was almost delicious. Wait, no, he said ALWAYS delicious.  Bit of a slip, there.

Janet's high point was the first cooking club she came to!  (Which means it's been nothing but downhill since then.  I can see that.)

For Deb the high point was the first time that Jim admitted that a vegan dessert was good!  Neither Deb nor Jim remember exactly when this was, but he remembers it was tasty.

As for myself...gah, people, I've had this part of the blog open for an hour and I still don't know what to say. George Bernard Shaw said "There is no sincerer love than the love of food."  Over the last years we've challenged this love on some nights--stretched it to almost the breaking point once or twice, in fact--but it's always been a labor of love.

Thank you for reading, folks.  I hope you eat well.

  

Cooking Club de los Muertos

Hello folks and welcome to the first cooking club in a while!  It’s 11/2, Dia de los Muertos, and we have guest cook Katherine from Alex’s co-op housing.

Our kitchen in spirit, if not in reality.

To greet the Fall and the spirits of our departed, we are creating ricotta-kale tartlets with squash foam on top (!!), an apple/red onion slaw, a squash gougere, and a fig tart dessert Deb describes as “like a giant open-faced fig newton”.   It’s Alex’s night!  

This is what our kitchen actually looks like.  More bustling, fewer skeletons.

Katherine hits the garlic (because we ALWAYS need garlic), Alex is grating the havarti, Deb is hooking up Mog to play Neko Case and going on to scoop out ricotta, and Jim is working on the dessert, getting the pine nuts pulsed. (Recipe at ‘Fig Tart With Cheeses’ on the Top Chef Home Edition website) Deb is critiquing the Neko Case concert we went to last night, which was...challenging for someone unfamiliar with her lyrics and the shortness of her songs.  Deb suffers from a Long Attention Span, so any song shorter than 2:45 is *dead* to her.  DEAD.  She describes the band as “four Duck Dynasty guys and a stand-up comic from Atlanta, and Nick, the hardest working roadie in show business”.  

On the other hand, she performed for NPR dressed in a gorilla suit.  This automatically wins her lots of points.

Alex is critiquing Deb’s kale chopping abilities.  Katherine is chopping MORE garlic (see previous paragraph, re Alex’s night), we have onions browning on the stove and roasted squash cooling off to the side.  

Deb returns to an oft-debated question about a local restaurant:  Is Live Alive the place that serves the best food in the universe, or a place that sells vegetarian glop that’s on a level with pretty much any veggie food co-op?  Katherine falls somewhere in the middle; she’s had smoothies there and they were mostly okay until she hit the big solid chunks in the bottom.  I guess that’s the equivalent of a B grade?

Here’s the fun part: almost all the recipes are on post-it notes, sometimes multiple ones for a single recipe, and they’re already scattered around the countertops!  Lemme transcribe:

Squash Cream recipe

puree ⅓ cup squash

⅓ cup mascarpone

sage, smoked salt, roasted garlic.   Pass through sieve/tamis.  Mix with ⅔ cream, add to magic thing and chill.

Ricotta Pie

mix 1.5 cups ricotta

4 minced garlic cloves

½ cup grated havarti

2 eggs

one chiffonate kale bunch,

1 t salt

large pinch herbs du provence

Put in oiled ramekins and bake @425 until done (25 min)

In stand mixer, 2 gougeres, add 4 eggs, one at a time, beating until smooth.  Add in 1 cup milk, ⅔ cup squash, ½ cup buttter, 1t salt, 1 gougeres.  Bring to boil over medium heat.  At 1c + 4T flour, stirring constantly, until a ball forms.  Cook a few minutes, stirring constantly.  Transfer to stand mixer with paddle.  Beat on medium 1 minute.

Scant ½ cup milk  (add in fat)   ⅓ cup squash   ¼ cup butter  ½ t salt  Bring to a boil over medium heat  Add ½ C  ?????

Cryptic, right?  I know!  Have fun with this, scholars and researchers!

Deb is ramekinning the kale creation while Katherine is cooking the gougere flour concoction...I’m running out of verbs.  She’s concocting?  Flouring?  I hope these pictures tell you the story, folks.

The fig jam is “just as a garnish, so I omitted it” says Alex.  There is a momentary consultation on whether its awesomeness means we should try to tackle it, but the consensus is not tonight.   Alex, meanwhile, is resorting to stuffing the foam-to-be into the spray cartridge with a chopstick, because it’s not running down the funnel on its own.  

It made the foam!  Eggs, meanwhile, are going in the gougere!  Excitement!  

We are carefully, cautiously asking Alex details about his trip to California for a job interview.  That’s right, folks, the Cooking Club might be going bi-coastal!  We face the future with braveness and open minds, especially since the alternative is hiding under our beds and howling.

Deb is done with her job (and ate no lunch), so Alex assigns her the task of creating deep-fried kale chips to be a garnish on top of the cream (and also a snack!)   

Deb has never had fresh figs, and fresh figs were the only ones Jim could find for the dessert tonight, so it’s sampling time.  Shock and revelation, it tastes like a fig newton!  Except without the doughy bit.  And a little crunchier.  And not as sweet….okay, okay, it’s a *little* like a fig newton.

Also like a deflated munchkin.  Or a dried ear from a 'Body Worlds' exhibition.

There’s a pause while I go on a tour of the nearby neighborhood with Rommie, local guide and faithful canine.  I return to get told that deep-frying kale (which turns out to be full of water--who knew!)  turned out to be fraught with danger, so for a few minutes the whole group was standing several feet away and trying to toss the leaves into the hot oil without getting burnt!  You just have to imagine this, folks.

You can't spell KDANGERL without k-a-l-e. 

The gougeres have been in the oven for what feels to us, instinctively, like a long time.  We pull them out and take a look at them while there’s still ten more minutes to go, and WOW they’re done like done things!  

GRADES!

Gougeres:

BRIAN: A!  Tasty dough-cheese nuggets!

JIM:  B+...I think they needed a dipping sauce or something.  They were a little dry.  But tasty.

ALEX:  I give them a B+.  I liked them.  I think I really wanted the salt to be a little more on the insde--my attempts to to sprinkle salt on the outside were not successful.  Also, the amount of time the recipe said to bake them made no sense.

KATHRYN:  I would give them an A-, mostly because I made them.  They were a little well-done.  They were maybe too small--we made more than 40!  

DEB:  I liked them too; I’d give them a solid A.  

Coleslaw:

JIM:  C+.  I think it needed more dressing, and it needed to sit together and mix a little longer.

ALEX: I give it a B+.  I liked the dressing; Jim might be right that more dressing would have been good.  The apples are really nice!

KATHRYN:  I’d give it a solid A!  It was very very enjoyable.

DEB:  I liked it; the slices could have been a bit thinner.  So I’d give it a B+.

Ricotta Kale Tartlets:

pre-garnish

post-garnish!

JIM:  I give it a good strong B.  I think there was too much kale for a higher grade.  The flavor was good, the espuma was awesome.  

ALEX:  Was there any salt in it?  No?  IT NEEDED SALT.  I missed salt!  It tasted totally flat.  So I give it a B as well; it had potential to be pretty good.  The squash topping wasn’t a particularly good pairing for it.  

KATHRYN:  It was very great.  I’m going to give it a B+ (I’m grading it with the foam...I wasn’t sure about it.  It was thick and dense and not what I expected).

DEB:   It was kind of a B+ territory for me too.  I’d suggest a mushroom sauce would have been good.

Fig Pie:

JIM:  I’d give it a B, but after I put some marscapone mixed with honey and used it as a dipping sauce, then it became SO much better...maybe an A-.

ALEX:  As served, I would give it a B-.  I do not understand why that cheese is supposed to go with it.  It’s like an order of magnitude saltier than the pie, which made things tricky.  The pie was good but a little soft .  (I liked the honey marscapone a lot--I’d give that a B or B+.)  I liked the crust but it was kind of subtle.  Nice, but subtle.

KATHRYN:  I’d give it an A-.  I really liked it with the honey.  I’m a sweets fiend.

DEB:  C+.  It was okay.  Needs something serious like I think I should have tried the honey cheese mixture on top.  Definitely not a fig newton, man. 

Time to Thai One On (Ugh, that was awful, I'm sorry)

Helloooo everyone!  As the sky gets dark in the eastern skies of the Post Office parking lot outside our window, we gather again (with special guest/newest member Sarah, aka Sniffins) and, this week, tackle her custom-designed menu of Thai food!  We're making spring rolls, Tom Kar Gai soup (the centerpiece!), pad thai, brussel sprouts, and cake!

This is the pensive look Alex and Sarah get when we're cooking together.  It's also how they look when they're figuring out where to hide a body.

Recipes can be found in the following places:

For our Thai Coconut Soup, aka Tom Kha Gai: http://www.healyrealfoodvegetarian.com/tom-kha-gai-thai-coconut-soup-vegan/

Our Pad Thai recipe comes from here: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Vegetarian-Pad-Thai-240960

Spring Rolls originated with this recipe http://allrecipes.com/recipe/vietnamese-fresh-spring-rolls/ , BUT we substituted cucumber for the shrimp and instead of the fish sauce we created our own veggie substitute with seaweed water, fresh garlic, soy sauce and miso.  Y'know, like you do.

Cake and brussel sprouts were improvisational!  Yay, improv!

"Madison Wisconsin is much less intense than Nairobi", says Sarah,  who has biked in both places.  Biking seemed like a better choice than taking the Mutatus, the chaotic busses, but transit was still an interesting adventure.

Sarah says something is "up Deb's alley", which to Deb has all sorts of scatological connotations that all began a few weeks ago when she looked up what "up the wazoo" refers to.  Cringe! Cringe!

As Jim has the artist's eye, he's torn in two directions as people want him to both assemble a sample spring roll and work on the soup.  Jim's gearing up to teach a pottery class in the next week or so, molding (heh) young minds.

Even though we only cooked the noodles for 30 seconds, we're concerned at the way they seem to have congealed into one lump.  Yet it's not TOO congealed; we ponder the pasta and pensively plan to perpetuate our plot.  (Also, Alex pours cool water on them and rescues them.)

Sarah has assembled the spring roll manufactory!  I photojournal the whole process!

Like watching a caterpillar become a butterfly (but with fewer legs)

We hit a TEENY TINY snag with baking the cake, which is that halfway through, the oven somehow got turned off.  TINY snag.  Alex and Deb keep it a secret from the rest of us until it's almost fixed, and I have total faith that it's going to turn out totally fine.  Totally.

As the pad thai cooks in shifts, Deb and Sarah team up for the tofu/shallot frying process.  There's a little concern that so many scallions got chopped up for the pad thai that we might not have enough left for the soup, but we'll cross that tiny green onion when we come to it.

The soup is pretty much ready to go, Sarah says; we just have to put the final two ingredients (mushrooms and somethingsomething) in, and that should only be right before we're ready to serve.

As the tofu grills, Alex has made the buttercream frosting and finishing up the cake; after that the plan is for him to make the sauce.  It's time for the brussel sprouts to begin to be...stir fried?  Roasted?  We check the recipe, and it looks like stir fried in oyster sauce (nom!)  

Everyone pauses to praise the tofu, which is looking more like Chinese restaurant tofu than any we've ever made before.  Yay for wok frying!

This week's tofu

How our tofu has looked in other weeks

Jim stops at 10 spring rolls (two apiece).....plus one crude little deformed one for him to taste test.  Because chef, is why.  Deb and Sarah are preparing to wok side by side, Sarah doing the sprouts, Deb doing first the pad thai eggs, and then the rest of the pad thai ingredients.  The tamarind-brown sugar "muck", as Deb calls it, is ready to go into the boiling water.

After Jim bangs his leg on the open dishwasher, we learn that when Jim *really* hurts himself, we'd know because he's a yeller.  As we learned from Alex's arm burn last week, either he takes burns very well or he's verbal about pain but not LOUD verbal, if you get the difference.

Finally our meal is complete:

GRADING!

SPRING ROLLS

Alex: I give them a B+; they were fine.  The filling didn't make me love it to death, but it was solidly executed and I don't know what I would have done differently.
Jim: I'd give them a B.  The basil was too strong, too much.  It would have been nice to have tofu in there or something similar.
Deb: I'd give them an A, I like them.  The sauce was fabulous.
Sarah:  A!  I thought the paper was too sticky on the outside, but everything else was perfect.  And I'm not just saying that because I chose the recipe and shopped them.
Brian: B...the basil was a bit tough and chewy, and it's weird to have to use a toothpick for a spring roll.

PAD THAI

Alex: B+ also.  The sauce was not quite sweet enough, the balance wasn't quite right; the recipe is shitty.  The noodles, on the other hand, were the perfect texture, the fried tofu was perfect.  In my perfect world pad thai has peanuts on top, which this didn't have.  So, solid effort but with room for improvement.
Jim:  I would give it an A.  I liked it!  Better with peanuts, I'd agree, but it wasn't really greasy, it had that delicious egg taste, I thought it was delicious overall.
Deb: I give it a B+.  I loved it, but it needed more vegetables.  It was also kinda oily, but it was damn tasty.
Sarah: B-.  I think it varied from batch to batch, and that mine was too greasy.  I think I want peanuts, more vegetables, more variety of texture.
(We pause to debate whether or not pad thai traditionally has a wide variety of vegetables.)
Brian: B...the noodles and egg were great, the bean sprouts were meh.

SOUP:

Alex: On my first bite of soup, I thought it wasn't that good, but then on bite 8 or 9 I thought it was great.  I didn't enjoy the mushroom part of it, though.  (The stems were tough.)  So A-...I liked it, I'd make it again.
Jim:  It was really rich.  If we make it again I'd use white mushrooms and slice them razor thin.  A-, and I agree with Alex.
Deb: I didn't have a lot of it, it seemed kind of sweet, so B-.
Sarah:  B+.  I wanted it to have more complex flavoring...more lime-y sourness to it.  And I agree, the mushrooms were not quite right.  But it was real close to how I wanted it.
Brian: B....the broth was great, but the mushrooms did nothing for me.  (I also ate it last, so my full belly might have something to do with this grade.)

BRUSSEL SPROUTS

Alex:  C+.  I like them in general; however, they suffer a little bit from One True Wayness, where if they're not the one way I like them (roasted with some sweet thing) they suffer.  These were wilty and mushy, with a little of that overly brocolli-y flavor.  So.  If I was going to do it I'd roast it and toss it in a sauce afterwards.
Jim:  I give them a D...which is a pretty high grade considering that they're brussel sprouts!  I ate half, and the outer part with the skin had some really nice flavor that disguised the vegetable itself.  I didn't throw up in my mouth at all!
Deb: A-.  I loved them, except they were a little too greasy.  I thought the flavor was delicious.
Sarah: C-.  I also want mine to be crunchy on the outside, either fried or baked to an almost blackened state.  This was the dumbest recipe I've ever seen--it called for a 1/2 cup of vegetable broth!
Brian: B, solid.  I thought the stir fry nature actually worked well with the pad thai.

CAKE!

Alex:  B+.  I thought the texture was pretty good; it was light and fluffy.  A little dry, but I had a gigantic piece, really thick.  There wasn't enough frosting, but there was really nice.
Deb:  C-.  There's something crazy about that texture, and it did not taste like restaurant or bakery cake, it tasted like ohmigod what the fuck happened cake.  It was edible!  Sometimes you get a cake-cake that tastes like CAKE, and that's not what this was.  You know, a NORMAL kind of cake.
Jim:   B+.  I really liked the cake, I thought the texture was good, and the icing was good but I would have preferred a cream cheese icing...heavier and more.
Sarah:  B+.  Mostly it would have been perfect if it was a little more moist, and I wanted twice as much frosting if not a little bit more.  Plain in kind of a delightful
Brian:  A-!  The cake was a little dry, and more frosting (or maybe ice cream, oooo) would have bumped it up to an A+.

Deb's Night - Engine 2 (Joyful and Exciting!)

Greetings, ye readers of blog.  We're here at Bridebville, making a vegan Mexicanish meal inspired by the Engine 2 diet.  This diet is the plant-based superdiet championed by hot firemen.  When I think about hot firemen, well, I'll use the result from a google image search for you:

Suffice to say, this man did not write a cookbook.

Today, Deb is going to take the Engine 2 diet's first FAQ, and try to address it.  Here we go, internet...

IS EATING PLANT-BASED FOODS JOYLESS AND BORING?

Tonight's meal, well, we're going to really taste the flavors!  Things aren't going to be muddied by oil, not one bit!  But don't worry, you'll get your fat from the avocado...

Hmm.  We shall see.  So here's our menu!

• Guacamole
• Salsa
• "Tapas" (they might have been called nachos in a cheesier life...)
• Enchilada casserole
• The Great Wooden Bowl Salad
• Berry cobbler

Joyless and boring?  Well, do these tomatoes look joyless and boring?

That's what I thought.

So...cobbler.  Well, in Deb-ville, we've been having a communication...uh...learning.  So, when you see a crossed out thing in the recipe, you might think "Hey!  That's crossed out!  I'm not going to put that in!"  But actually, you should have thought, "Hey!  Deb didn't need to buy that at the store!"  Therefore, maple syrup should go into the cobbler.  Great!  In fact, since the cobbler topping got mixed into the berries, we're just going to...uh...make another one!  There you go!

Joyful and Exciting!

Our enchilada casserole is filled with hash browns (the recipe actually calls for starting from frozen) and some fat-free spinach and mushrooms.

These came from a bag.  Hm.

It's Janet!

Um, in the meantime, we went ahead and read the Engine 2 Diet guy's motivation spiel.  Which included losing 7 toenails from running an Iron Man triathlon.  Deb, by the way, yells at me when I exercise for like, forty minutes, and thinks that I should probably just embrace being a pedestrian for better health.  Mr. Rip Engine 2 Guy went ahead and exercised for like 8 hours without stopping.  AND HIS TOENAILS FELL OFF.  And now, she takes nutrition advice from him.  I find this really...uh...unexpected.

Also unexpected is the amount of chili powder called for in this recipe, at 2 tablespoons (!) - so Brian is crying a little bit.

Collaborative Enchiladas! Joyful!

Enchiladas, pre-oven

Janet is here just in time to prepare tofu for the salad.  As Brian says, "Memphis-style tofu"!  We'll dry-rubbing the tofu with garlic powder and nutritional yeast.  The recipe calls for dredging, but massaging, well, that's the order of the day.

Memphis-style tofu

Pan-fried tofu!

We are making "Tapas", which we're calling instead of Nachos, because, well, they look like this.  Maybe they're kind of like baked tacos?  It's really ambiguous what these are.  Brian doesn't like beans, and Jim doesn't like peppers, so...uh...here we go.  Afterwards, we're going to put the guacamole and salsa on them.

So, while things are cooking, there is a Toronto mayor that uh...smoked crack in a drunken stupor.  This is pretty outstanding in an internet sense.  Furthermore, there was a video leaked with this fine quote:

"When he's down, I'll rip his fucking throat out," Ford says. "I'll poke his eyes out. I will, fuck, when he's dead, you help make sure that motherfucker's dead."

As if that weren't good enough, there is another scandal attributed to Rob Ford called, simply "Assgate".  Oh dear.

Oh hey!  Food is ready!

Tapas and enchilasagna!

Tapas

Deb - They were a little limey and fell apart, so...it was very bitter.  They had potential but we did the tortillas wrong somehow.  Maybe we should have fried them in oil... C-

Janet - B.  I thought they were my favorite things, but I wanted more avocado.

Brian - C-.  I will say that I was pleasantly surprised by how they tasted!

Jim - B-.  I put plenty of guacamole.  When I put some of Brian's cheese on it, it was so much better.

Alex - C.  It was hard to eat, the guac was just ok, it tasted plain and wanted cheese really badly.  Or lard.

Salad

Deb - I loved the salad.  A-.  I used green goddess and liked the apples.

Janet - C- I usually love salads.  This bored me.  It tasted like lettuce.  No oil in the dressing?  Fuck that.

Brian - NA

Jim - C.  It was a salad.  It was like unto every other salad.

Alex - B-.  I like the dressing.  It was mustardy and nice.  I thought the tofu, while bland, was a nice complement.  And it could have used some nuts (like the recipe calls for) or maybe even some grapefruit...

Enchilada

Deb - Kind of a bitter taste somehow...I'd say B-.  It was...y'know...it's healthy.

Janet - I felt like it was tasty enchilada with no cheese, so it was too sweet from the tomatoes and sometimes too salty and some nuts or cheese or avocados would be good.  I liked the corn tortillas!  B-.

Brian - B-.  It was bland.  Maybe even a little joyless, but...it was more potatoey than I expected, and I like potatoes.

Jim - C-.  I thought it was murky.  I was shocked at how salty it was.

Alex - C.  I thought it had potential, but it tasted mostly really healthy.  I didn't love the sauce.

Cobbler
Deb - B-.  I think it was...um...the idea was great.  Execution was not perfect.
Janet - B.  Healthy desserts make me feel good about myself.  And then I eat a lot of candy.
Brian - NA
Jim - C-.  It needed more sugar.  And it was undercooked.
Alex - D+.  It needed more sugar.  The topping was terrible.  It was not delightful.

Why did you give me that candy?