Sakura of DOOM

commodorified's Cooking for People Who Don't blog carnival is up!

I've been skimming over some posts to try to get back into the habit of cooking. So far, I've done two holiday-meal-ish things since November and promptly remedied that by eating out all the time or scrounging.

I started cooking a lot more Chinese food in the winter of 2010, and though I read a fair amount on cooking, I had to figure out a lot of shortcuts from my sister because there aren't that many English-language resources online that have good "quick Chinese cooking" advice. So... maybe some of this will be useful to someone?

I tend to be shorter on time and energy than money, which is reflected in the tips. I also only cook for one to two people at a time, and I've discovered that I'm absolutely terrible at things like buying in bulk and then storing in single-serving containers in the freezer unless I am 100% on in terms of mood and energy.

This also assumes having the basic ingredients and tools for basic Chinese cooking and relies heavily on the freezer and the microwave.

( A very random assortment of tips )

I've been playing around with my subscriptions and juggling things between what I read on DW and what I read via my RSS reader. It is so sad that I feel like I can't even keep up with less than 100 people, but so it goes. As usual, every day here is de-subscribing/ungranting access amnesty day.

Also, eventually I will start to talk about books again! Possibly when I start reading again, ahahaha. I'm still trying to figure out why my attention span still feels shot for fiction; I haven't been able to hang onto manga or fiction, although apparently Mythbusters and non-fiction about germs and parasites are right up my alley. I wonder if it is because I am socializing more offline and thereby using up more of the part of my brain that keeps track of people there? No clue.

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( Ratling babble! )

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( General cooking and recipe notes )

( Recipes: sweet and sour pork ribs, nappa cabbage and fen si, meat and veggie dumplings )

Haha, hopefully all this typing in Chinese will eventually make me faster than the ten-second hunt-and-peck I do for every word right now.

I so missed my giant food processor those two years in grad school!

My sister and I have not been doing very holiday-y things, largely because I have just been stressing about my Yuletide story (I WILL NEVER TRY PLOT AGAIN), most of our friends are in other places, and we mostly just feel like bumming around and watching kdramas. I keep saying I will put up the Christmas tree that has been mouldering in storage for the past two years, but so far we have both proved too lazy to do so. Maybe we will put it up on Christmas and then take it down the day after! (As you can tell, we see Christmas as an opt-in holiday. Sadly, I realized this was not true for most other people while stopping by the mall yesterday. BAD IDEA.)

Also, I am making gingerbread for the first time, so we went and bought cookie cutters. I have a gingerbread guy and a gingerbread girl and a Christmas tree, and I couldn't find a star of David, but instead, they have been joined by... a unicorn!

SISTER: The unicorn looks weird.
ME: Awesome and sparkly!
Sister gives me a skeptical look.
ME: Unicorns! Appropriate for many seasons! (then) Ooooo, should we get a stegosaurus too?

I was tempted to buy pink sparkles for it, but I don't actually like sparkles on my cookies (or frosting, or icing, or anything that has that much sugar. Light sprinklings of powdered sugar are acceptable.)

Also also, it would be nice if all my baking urges didn't happen at 10 pm. At least my kitchen is well stocked enough that I don't have to make midnight Safeway runs or very strange substitutions, though the well-stocked-ness mainly consists of me going, "Hrm. I have had this molasses since 2007. Hopefully it is still okay!"

Does anyone know the origins of "プリン" (flan)? I know パン is from Portuguese, but I remember being confused by プリン when I was there.

Now that Najika's in the prestigious Seika Academy to find her Flan Prince (as one does), she must battle all the people who think she has no place in the special class! Sadly, the battles are not literal, although there are a few cook-offs involved.

And then there is a plot twist at the end of volume 5/beginning of volume 6 that was extremely unexpected. It briefly made me think this would not be quite as typical of a shoujo cooking series as it seemed, but things appear to have gone back to normal by volume 7. Maybe.

( Spoilers are actually surprising )

I'm not reading for deep characterization or surprising plot. The assorted food battles and espousing of food philosophy—"Best ingredients! Fancy plating! Exquisite taste!" vs. "COOK FROM THE HEART!"—are what make the series for me, and as the series continues to talk about food a lot, I will continue to enjoy.

Also, I am now so hungry for omurice and Japanese curry! And Japanese-style Italian pasta with an egg on top!

Wow, I'm late in writing things up! This year's Thanksgiving was held at the apartment of one of my sister's friends; my sister, her two friends, and I made most of the food. Thankfully, this year we did not have to battle lumpy cream or curtains as oven mitts, but there were other catastrophes instead!

I took the opportunity to make salty egg and pumpkin (really kabocha squash, but Chinese doesn't seem to distinguish between pumpkin and squash). Alas, this resulted in my nearly chopping off my finger... twice! The first time, I escaped with only a bit of skin nicked, but the second time, the knife went fairly deep, I bled all over the place, and my sister and her friend had to make an emergency run to see what drug stores were open on Thanksgiving to buy rubbing alcohol and bandaids. Gah. I think this is not my year, medically. At least I now have a scar on my left index finger to match the rat bite scar on my right index finger?

After we ate dinner, I went back to the kitchen to attempt lemon souffle! I know I can make chocolate souffle fairly consistently (at least, when I remember to turn on the oven...), but I haven't tried any other kind. Of course, there weren't enough ramekins or ramekins of the right kind. And my sister's friend's apartment was woefully underequipped. ("Do you have a spatula?" "Uh. We have a wooden rice scooper." "How about a zester?" "Zester...?" "... A grater then?" "Er...")

I would like to note that making lemon zest without a grater is extremely annoying and I nearly sliced off another bit of finger while doing so.

When I started my recipe, I melted some butter over the stove and started stirring in 3/4 cups of flour. As it clumped and started turning into what presumably would be roux, my sister's friend C turned to me and asked, "Er. Are you sure it's supposed to look like this?"

"Maybe I add more liquid later?" I asked. After we had stirred in a cup or so of milk, only to have it be rapidly soaked up by the flour with no noticeable difference in texture, I decided there may have been some mistake. I mean, I know the souffle is thick, but that doesn't mean it should be solid! I couldn't find the recipe online, so I eventually had to go for a new recipe.

Thankfully, the souffles ended up doing well... or at least 75% of them! The fourth souffle had deflated into a sad, slightly lemony hockey puck, and while the texture was somewhat cake-like, it was dense, unflavorful, and not at all light and fluffy with melty lemon curd at the bottom like the rest.

Every single time I make souffle, I wonder why I go through all the trouble, because really, can flavored batter and egg whites taste so good as the make it worth the effort? And every time I take a successful souffle out of the oven, I remember why I do it (aside from the challenge and ensuing self-congratulations, of course, provided that I turn on the oven...). The lemon souffles were delightfully light and delicate on top, with a tiny crust of caramelized sugar (from buttering and sugaring the insides of the ramekins), and the texture gradually gets denser and more liquid until you get to the bottom, which is rich and buttery and eggy and very much like a hot lemon curd. They are amazing, and I am going to try them again for Christmas.

... Of course, this will be very interesting, as I have no idea as to how equipped or underequipped our kitchen is for making French desserts. And we have no ramekins. And I will have to convert everything to metric.

But this time, I will turn on the oven and only put in a teaspoon or so of flour!

( Giant Thanksgiving pictures )

( Giant rat pictures )

For personal reference and archival purposes...

( Lemon curd )

( Chocolate souffle )

OMG. My feet are so, so, so tired. Got up at 8 in the morning to come back from SF and forgot to pick up a pie on the way -- not that it really matters, as we are so not short on dessert. Then I took Ren to the vet to get his stitches removed. It was a mad house! Clearly everyone else thought it would be empty on Christmas Eve as well, or everyone's pets just got sick at the same time.

Ren has decided that he hates me forever and sulked in the corner of his cage on the drive home. Well, for rattie values of "sulk," that is, as he immediately trots over to lick my fingers if anything tasty is on them.

I also braved the wilds of Whole Foods around 11. Insanity! Utter insanity! I keep forgetting how crazy the holidays are around here. My dad called in the afternoon -- it's Christmas for them in Taiwan, everyone's at work and nothing's going on.

Then, cooking!

Today's menu consisted of: beef noodle soup Taiwan-style, made by my sister's friend. The beef chunks and tendon were simmered in broth for about five hours, then she briefly boiled some baby bok choy and noodles right before dinner. Me and my sister scrambled about making the tiramisu, by which I mean, my sister took over after I did a poor job of separating one egg and broke another in the bowl. Siiigh. So I went and made latkes instead. I heart my food processor grater thing so much. I am sure it is not as tasty, but it also mean bits of my fingers don't get included in the food, which I think is a good thing. We also had potstickers, salad (mixed greens, pomegranate seeds, oranges, jicama, completely random dressing thrown together by me), and La Brea rosemary olive oil bread.

I just made raspberry sauce for the souffle tomorrow and started on yogurt sauce; I think I will now collapse and indulge in tiramisu.

ETA: Hrm, the tiramisu tastes very odd! We sort of very deviated from the recipe and made it with a layer of butter pound cake and a layer of chocolate pound cake. I think if we had soaked more coffee into them, it would have tasted more "normal." Still, it is insanely good, and I am tempted to make it like this again.

Am still at work and not sure when I will be heading home. Am also going to have to work through the weekend, sigh. Well, I knew this was happening, but it is still not fun.

Also, I have discovered today that samosas are flammable.

In other words: I would highly advise against reheating samosas in your toaster oven at 200 deg F while you go restart your computer. I finally noticed that the small popping noises and the faintly acrid smell of smoke wafting through the halls could not mean anything of the good. I ran to the kitchen, only to find the front glass door of my toaster oven completely blackened, smoke pouring everywhere. I'm rather amazed that no fire alarms were set off.

After staring slack-jawed, I vaguely remembered that you're not supposed to pour water on an electrical fire and reached over to unplug it. Popping noises continued to come from the sooty innards of the toaster oven. I freaked out. I didn't have anything large enough to cover the toaster oven with to cut off the air supply, and despite Alton Brown's multiple extortions to keep a fire extinguisher in the kitchen... you all know the end to that sentence.

I then timidly opened the door of the toaster oven to find two very blackened samosas, one of which was merrily blazing away. I put it out with some water and thereby saved the house from burning down and me from having to answer embarrassing questions: "So, how exactly did the fire start?" "Well, you see, there was a samosa..."

In conclusion: samosas = flammable.

For rachelmanija, who's been requesting cake-from-scratch recipes

I think I found this from some recipe website a few years ago. It's the very first cake I baked after I moved to California!

This is a pretty forgiving recipe; I've forgotten stuff or randomly substituted things when I ran out of ingredients, I've made it non-dairy and dairy, I've tried it in different pans for different thicknesses. Though, unlike cofax7, I haven't accidentally left it in the oven for another hour, so it may not be quite that forgiving. (also, I need more recipes like that, given my extreme absent-mindedness!)

( Recipe as follows )