SCIENCE!

This post has nothing to do with anything chemical, biological, or physical beyond the normal spectrum of baking. Alright, baking has everything to do with chemistry, but I'm not going to talk about that. This is an exploration of the scientific method:

1. Define a question: How can a person make risotto rice pudding without whole milk?

2. Gather information (via survey): "So, Sarah, I want to make rice pudding; how would it taste with skim milk?" Answer: "Shitty."

The rice pudding would be made anyway, but the researcher soon gathered that not only was there no whole milk, there was very little skim milk.

3. Form a Hypothesis: "Screw this, the rice pudding will at least be interesting if I throw whatever I can find in there."

4. Experimentals: 1/2 cup arborio rice, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp salt and 7-8 cups of available milk-ish products (in this case, 1.5 cups of evaporated milk, 1/2 cup heavy whipping cream, 1/2 cup half and half, 1/2 cup skim milk, 2 cups water, 2 cups vanilla ice cream) were placed in a large heavy-bottomed saucepan set over medium-high heat until boiling. The temperature was then reduced to medium, and the mixture simmered (stirring every 5 minutes) for about 45 minutes.


The milk became thicker and the rice tender. 2 egg yolks mixed with 1/2 cup half and half were added, and the mixture was allowed to cook for another 2 minutes.


The mixture was removed from heat and 1 Tbsp vanilla extract was added. The mixture was allowed to cool and then refrigerated until cool [O'Connor 2007].

5. Results: Outside sources (my mother) and the experimenter both found the rice pudding to be tasty. The texture was not as firm as some other rice puddings (but more enjoyable this way); the flavor was custardy with a background note of cinnamon.

rice pudding layered with cajeta (goat's milk caramel sauce) and topped with dried sour cherries
(sorry about the blurry photos)

6. Conclusion: Rice pudding may be made without whole milk, and various ingredients which work to replace the milk may include: evaporated milk and ice cream (though some other liquid should be added to thin these out so the rice may absorb them). Also, arborio rice (the rice used for risotto) seems to provide a better consistency for rice pudding than long-grain white rice because of the release of the starches (making a creamier dish).

Further study will include use of coconut milk as a milk substitute and black rice instead of arborio.

a little treat: poof/cosmic creepers/the best boy/prince fluffykins/silver fox/monkey face/the cat with 1000 names

Spring Veggie Pasta

It's really spring. That means veggies - and soon veggies from farmers markets (yay!). So in honor of the wonder of produce, I made a veggie pasta yesterday afternoon with some misc items laying around my kitchen.

Spring Veggie Pasta

1/4 box of whole wheat pasta (I used penne ... you don't have to use whole wheat I just had some in my pantry)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/4 onion, diced (a shallot would work too, I just had a white onion that needed to be used up)
2 cloves of garlic
1/3 cup chopped asparagus (chop each spear into thirds or quarters approximately)
1/3 cup peas (I cheated and used frozen because thats what I had)
3 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice (again, total cheater we had a bottle in the fridge and no real lemons laying around)
Salt
Black pepper
Red pepper flakes (because I put them on everything. Seriously. Not necessary to this recipe.)

Key ingredients: peas, asparagus, onion, basil, and lemon juice.

Do the pasta in the boiling water thing - about 10 minutes. Careful with whole wheat pasta, it can overcook easily.

In a pan, heat the olive oil, add the two chopped cloves of garlic and the diced onion. Cooking them until soft but don't burn them or you'll never get rid of that burned taste.

Add the peas and asparagus and cook until tender.

Drain the pasta, turn the heat of the saute pan, and dump the pasta into the pan with the veggies. Add the lemon juice, salt, black pepper, and red pepper flakes to taste.

Sprinkle the top with fresh chopped basil.

Notes:

Pretty delicious. Could have lots of variations. Feel free to try it, change it, and comment on this post telling everyone ways to improve this dish.

Eat up!

-Robin-

It's Almost Summer

Pittsburgh has a notoriously short spring. It's cold, then its all pretty and flowers for like a week, then its summer. Biz and I were able to capture a moment of this transition and wanted to share it with you.
Biz, in park, eating soy ice cream (Black Raspberry if I remember correctly) from Maggie's Mercantile on S. Craig Street, enjoying the sunshine.

My beloved brown Rocket Dog flip flop, which I wore a hole through by walking one too many time to campus from my apartment (my apartment, which looks pretty awesome in this photograph). I have subsequently thrown out these flops and replaced them with a new pair of black Nikes.

We at the UCC hope you're enjoying the increase in temperature as much as we are.

-Robin-

Spicy Spinach

I LOVE it when people cook for me. Jonathan made me Spicy Spinach a few weeks ago.

Spicy Spinach

2 packages of frozen spinach
1 teaspoons salt 2 tablespoons butter (Jonathan used olive oil so I could eat it- because he's great)
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup coconut milk
½ cup unsalted roasted peanuts - chopped
1 tablespoon chopped chilies or red hot pepper flakes

Cook spinach until tender. Squeeze until dry, chop coarsely.

Melt butter in skillet. Add onions and chilies, stir frequently until soft - do not burn.

Stir in coconut milk and peanuts. Bring to simmer. Reduce heat to low, stir. Cook 2-3 minutes.
Add spinach and cook 3-4 minutes. Serve.
Plated Spicy Spinach. Mmmmm.

-Robin-

Herb White Bean Dip

One of the things I want to work on is using all the items in my kitchen (this is also because I will be moving in less than a month and don't want to transport lots of stored food stuffs). So I made note of what was in my kitchen last week and scanned my recipe book for things I could make that would use up some of the things I have laying around. Spinach and white beans topped the list (see Too Hot for Wendy Soup as part of this kitchen-purging exercise).

As a fan of hummus, I thought this recipe was worth trying (and I have rosemary growing on my windowbox, so it was win-win).

Herb White Bean Dip

2 tablespoons rosemary
2 tablespoons sage
1 teaspoon black pepper
2 cloves of garlic
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 can white/cannellini beans, rinsed and drained

Now this recipe said something about chopping or mincing or something like that - I'm lazy (as anyone who reads this blog knows) so I literally just threw everything into the food processor and pulsed it until it was smooth. Done.

I served it with celery, because there was some in my fridge, but it would work well with lots of things. If I had been home more this week I may have used it as a spread in a veggie wrap, but unfortunately, I was not.

Quick, easy, stores well in the fridge for about a week. Worth making.

-Robin-

Too Hot for Wendy Soup

Just because it is spring does not mean that I give up my love of making big pots of soup. This evening I was Italian-inspired (perhaps this can be attributed to hanging out with my very Italian roommate/UCC contributing editor Wendy Lloyd). This recipe for Italian White Bean Soup has its origins in Cooking Light, but with my own unique modifications it made it onto tonight's table.

Too Hot for Wendy Soup

1 ounce of dried shiitake mushrooms - I used 1 cup of diced baby portabellas, because that's what I had in my fridge
2 cups boiling water (omit if you used non-dried mushrooms)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 white onion, diced
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 bag fresh baby spinach
1 teaspoon chopped rosemary - in this case, fresh from my urban windowbox!
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 can white beans/cannellini beans, rinsed and drained
4 cups chicken stock - obviously, I used vegetable stock

Heat the onion and the garlic in olive oil, I used the bottom of Wendy's big caste iron pot so I could use make the soup in the same pot. In a separate pot, I dissolved two vegetable cubes in 4 cups of water (obviously if you use vegetable stock or chicken stock, you can skip this step).

Once the onion and the garlic are soft, add the mushrooms, and herbs (rosemary/thyme/pepper). Once the mushrooms are cooked down, add the vegetable stock from the other pot, then the spinach and the white beans.

Let everything incorporate and heat for about ten minutes, then serve.

Notes:

Crusty bread is very good with this soup!

It's really strong in flavor, as Wendy learned, so if that's not your bag, this isn't the soup for you!

-Robin-

Robin's Typical Lunch

In my never ending quest to eat well (including switching my morning breakfast routine to lots and lots of fruit as well as eliminating anything containing high fructose corn syrup from my apartment) I have become a salad-for-lunch eater.

Salads are quick to make, easy to eat, and flexible enough I haven't gotten bored yet.

I make my salads the night before usually and take them with me. I can generally be found munching my leaves around Posvar in between work and classes, reading the Pitt News.


This is a "sample salad" that I made to take with me tomorrow, where I will wolf it down after Sociology of Religion, before I head to work.

I tend to buy pre-cut bags of salad. Mostly, because I'm lazy. I tend to buy whatever is on sale, so it could be romaine one week, a radicchio and endive the next, etc. Sometimes I will buy endives or bibb or Boston if they look good and chop them up myself. Whatever seems easier that week.

I have gotten pretty creative with what I throw in my salad. The salad above has chopped up tofu that was marinated in lemon and pepper that I bought and needed to use. I also threw a handful of trail mix that I made (containing pumpkin seeds, dried cranberries, and slivered almonds) over the top as well.

I often throw in artichoke hearts, olives, different kinds of nuts, various fruits (pecans and orange or apple and walnuts combinations are delicious)l. I've decided you can put pretty much anything into a salad.

In terms of dressings, sometimes I make my own, combinations of apple cider vinegar or balsamic, Dijon mustard, olive oil. Or I buy a low-cal all natural dressing and keep it in my fridge. (To prevent my salad from getting yucky - I take it in a small reusable container that I keep separate from my salad until its ready to be eaten.)

So get creative - post any and all salad-inspired tips you'd like to share.

Happy munching!

-Robin-

Jonathan Believes in Being Monogamous with Jelly

In the South Side on Friday, Biz bought the cookbook Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey by Jill O'Connor. I snatched it from her over dinner at Kassab's and made a modified version of a recipe in the book that evening.

P. 90 "Blackberry Jamble Shortbread Bars" are now "Jonathan's Strawberry Shortbread Bars"

1 lb/4 sticks unsalted butter (room temperature) - I used vegan margarine, worked fine
1 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon salt
3 3/4 cups flour
1 cup almond flour - I took a cup of whole, raw almonds (because that was what was on my shelf) and pulsed them through the food processor until they were ground, it worked well
1 1/2 cups blackberry preserves - now, Jonathan ONLY likes strawberry preserves/jelly/etc. (he is very monogamous) so I used strawberry preserves, but really any fruit preserve would work well for this recipe
1/2 cup chopped almonds - I used slivered, worked fine
Confectioners sugar if you want to be fancy and dust it ... I didn't, not my style

Cream together butter and sugars (I used a hand mixer). Add in vanilla and salt.
Beat in flours until a soft dough forms (has the consistency of peanut butter cookie dough roughly).
Spray a 9 x 13 baking dish, spread 2/3 dough evenly on the bottom and cook at 325 degrees for 20 minutes.
Refrigerate the remaining 1/3 dough while the rest is baking.
Remove the pan after 20 minutes, spread the preserves over the almond shortbread.
Crumble the refrigerated 1/3 dough over the top, so it makes a nice topping.
Sprinkle almonds over the dough topping.
Bake for an additional 30 minutes on 325 degrees.

Notes:

I highly recommend cutting the bars while the pan is still warm, waiting until its cool means that the shortbread is hard and much more difficult to cut.

-Robin-

Throwing Things in a Pan

scallop, edamame, and spinach dinner

I actually made this dinner last week, so this post is a little late in coming. Surprising because I was thrilled with the result and want to share.

I was trying to figure out something light for dinner with a good source of protein and a way to use the spinach in my fridge. I found these mini frozen scallops I had bought from Whole Foods and frozen edamame (great source of protein) and figured, what the hell, what's the worst that could happen...

Apparently awesomeness! Even with my horrible impromptu cooking skills (we've covered that I like to follow recipes), this was really tasty with well-balanced flavors.

Scallop, edamame, and spinach throw-down:

1/2 a bag of Whole Foods frozen scallops (lightly seasoned with butter)
1/2 cup - 1 cup frozen edamame
1-2 cups baby spinach (as much as you can fit in the pan)

1. Heat a pan on the stove over medium heat, add the scallops and let them warm-up for a about a minute (if your scallops don't have flavoring, use a little olive oil or butter at first and some salt and pepper towards the end of the cooking process.)

2. Add the edamame and stir it up.

3. When it seems like the scallops are starting to get cooked through (they'll start to get a more solid white color rather than that raw translucence), add the spinach and let it wilt in the pan, mixing it up when there's room to do so without projecting spinach leaves across your kitchen.

4. Eat the awesomeness and feel good about yourself in the process.

~*'Biz'*~

Friday Afternoon on the South Side

I have been wanting to get my cartilage pierced for a long time. Last Friday, the time came. And it involved a wonderful afternoon-long trip to the South Side with Robin.

Our first stop was the storefront of my great-grandmother's old chicken store where I reminisced about Easter chicken noodle soup and Robin looked at me like I was crazy.

Next was the tattoo parlor/piercing studio: Angry Moon. The studio was very clean, and the people were friendly. I had heard that getting your cartilage pierced was pretty painful, but it definitely was not as bad as I thought it would be.
Even right afterwards, I felt like the piercing had always been there - it just felt natural.

We went to the Beehive for some coffee and some nosh. Robin got a soy latte and vegan monkey bread while I ordered a coffee and a pear. (see below)

After the Beehive, we went to a vintage clothing store (we both got dresses); stopped by George's (my Busia's next store neighbor) store, The Culture Shop; and went 0n a quest for refriferator magnets for Jonathan (famous via the monogamous jam post). This was a lengthy and exhausting journey, leading us up and down South Side proper, and after which we were quite hungry. So we went to Kassab's!:

from top: Biz's grilled chicken salad, Robin's grape leaves, Biz making a little pita/chicken salad sandwich, and atmosphere at Kassab's.

This was only the second time I had been at Kassab's. The first, I got shish kabob which was delicious (I love the sauces) but a lot of food for one person. I ended-up having it for a couple of days. I like the salad option because you can get the same house dressing, ask for red sauce, and it comes with pita - so if you want a little pita sandwich, you can go ahead and make one.

Overall, an eventful and lovely day.

From Easter

Almond Praline Ice Cream Torte

This isn't a formal post, just a review of a dessert recipe I made for Easter dinner at my house and a photo of the result.

I normally peruse the vast realm of epicurious.com weeks before a holiday to get the menu just right (or rather, my charge of the menu, the desserts.) This past Easter, the holiday snuck-up on me, and I was just not on my game. I pulled this recipe out of the hat last minute because I was in the mood to attempt something with a meringue. (Preferably not with cake or icing - I'm not a fan of the combo of icing and meringue.) And who doesn't love ice cream?

You can find the recipe here:

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/14027

It was a rather intense but fun process. I liked the almond praline butter but thought it was a little too sweet for my taste (and this was after 1.5ing the almonds.) Maybe letting the caramel get a little darker would have given it more flavor to overcome the sweetness. I also 1.5ed the ice cream overall (following a suggestion in the recipe reviews.) I would have doubled the ice cream, but there wasn't enough room in my spring-form pan.

Overall, the ice cream torte was uniformly sweet. I thought it needed more differentiation in taste, though the texture of the meringue against the ice cream was nice. I might try the method again, adding another flavor.

~*'Biz'*~

Biz's Baking Extravaganza!

So why, on a Monday night, was I baking at 10pm?
2 reasons:
1. Presentation for Organic Chemistry Lab (the presenters, my roommate and me, had to bring in food.)
2. I had to go home to bake because there's not enough room in my apartment to make this much of a mess:

(and this was after half had been cleaned-up)

To be fair, I had a lot of help. My mom made the brownies before I even showed-up. (I was a little disappointed because I have a special connection with that recipe - the barefoot contessa's "outrageous brownies" - but it helped me out a lot in the long run.) She also made the dough for the oatmeal raisin walnut cookies, the recipe of which I am not giving you!!! Because I am a spiteful person/the recipe is on a notecard in Wexford. (If you want it, leave a comment.) However, here are some of my favorite moments in the process:

floury goodness stage (the best time to taste the batter)


mama chaps mixing it up :)


next morning dough balls


finished oatmeal raisin cookies


close-up of oatmeal raisin cookies and brownies


i dolci con le noci
(I made a some oatmeal cookies w/o walnuts for George (see below), my roommate (Zaz), and her boyfriend, so the note was there to differentiate.)

Now to get to the real subject of today's post:

Pumpkin White and Milk Chocolate Chip Cookies

This is a recipe taken from the food network's website:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,,FOOD_9936_35182,00.html
with some slight modifications.

Every time I make a combo of desserts with these included, these go first and I always get asked for the recipe. This is when I write down the URL on a slip of paper and hand it to the questioning chef. They are officially George Bandik's favorite cookie (of which I am very proud.) I would describe them as everything you might want in a chocolate chip cookie. They're soft, moist, and almost fluffy (depending on how long you bake them), and because of the pumpkin, they have a subtle flavor that makes them better than a plain-jane cookie with just a flour base.

Here is the recipe (again, almost verbatim from the one on foodtv.com by George Duran):

1 cup (2 sticks) butter
1 cup white sugar
1 cup light brown sugar
2 large eggs (I used one large, one extra large)
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 cup canned pumpkin puree (I have also used butternut squash puree - the cookies are less fluffy this way, a little more moist and dense)
3 cups all-purpose flour (I don't fill the cups all the way, leave just a little room)
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 (rounded) teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 (rounded) teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 (rounded) teaspoon ground cloves
1 cup milk chocolate chips (do NOT use semisweet, it does not go well with the pumpkin)
1 1/2 cups white chocolate chips

1. Beat the butter with a mixer until it's smooth, and then add the sugars. This is what it will look like:

2. Do NOT stop mixing the butter and sugar when it is thoroughly combined. This is too soon. Let the mixer run until it is light and fluffy as seen below (sorry about the yellow, something was going on with the camera). By the way, I have done the mixing by hand, and it is a huge pain in the ass.

3. Beat in the eggs, then the vanilla, then the pumpkin puree.

after pumpkin puree added (camera still being a ridiculous, but it should be kind of orange)

4. In a separate bowl, mix the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and spices with a whisk. Then slowly incorporate this mixture into the pumpkin mix. (Don't overmix, but make sure it's well combined. Overmixing = tough cookie.) Mix in the chips, and you're done with the batter!

after chips added

At this point you can either bake the cookies right away or stick them in the fridge overnight and make them in the morning. I like to do second because the dough is easier to work with that way, and I think the cookies hold together better in the oven.

Bake the cookies at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 12-17 minutes on baking sheets lined with parchment paper.

And you get these:

the pumpkin parade of deliciousness!

This post just made me really hungry for cookies... I wonder what excuse I can make them for next...

~*'Biz'*~