Never too many vegetables

My dear friend, the clever Molly Wible, gifted me a Vegetarian cookbook this past Christmas. I have made a few of the recipes in it, but today's experiment deserves a blog all of its own. It was a toss up between the Eggplant Lasgna and the Pasta Primavera for dinner, but I decided upon the latter. It sounded easier (and faster) to make. I've been trying to walk more, and the need to pick up some fresh vegetables at my (very) local grocery store was also enticing. So, off I toddled with my totebag to procure some zucchini, asparagus, and penne pasta (whole-wheat, for those who-know-who-they-are). Upon returning home, I discovered that the vegetable stock I thought resided in the pantry was actually a figment of my imagination. I busied myself with preparing my other ingredients before setting out once again. I got some excellent vegetable stock, and fresh thyme. I figured, heck, if I'm going out, I might as well go all out!

Now that I was finally ready to get cookin', I will lay out the original recipe for you folks:

1 1/2 cup vegetable stock

2 sprigs fresh thyme

salt

1/2 cup peeled and diced carrot

1 cup asparagus tips, each about 1 inch long

1/2 cup diced zucchini or summer squash

1/2 cup shelled fresh or frozen peas, or snow peas

1 lb penne pasta (or other cut pasta)

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil or butter

freshly ground black pepper to taste

1 1/2 cups freshly grated parmesan cheese

While boiling the pasta, one is supposed to cook the vegetables in the boiling stock in a sequential order. Once the pasta is about done, you add in the olive oil, remaining stock, and toss it all together with the parmesan.

I would like to note that I purposefully went easy on the pasta and heavy on the vegetables. Here is what I did:

a bunch of stock ('Imagine' brand, no fat or MSG), because the large amount of vegetables I had needed more liquid

2 dealies of fresh(?) thyme

no salt

4 small carrots, peeled and sliced

the tips from 2 bunches of asparagus

one whole diced zucchini

a package of frozen peas

a bunch of broccoli

12 oz. of whole wheat penne

a bunch of olive oil

no pepper (I like pepper, I just didn't add any)

a lot of freshley grated parmesan

one bottle-cap-full of lemon juice (I just felt crazy!)

I would like to say here and now that the vegetable stock was delicious. The broccoli florets absorbed much of its flavor, and that was a good thing. The cooking sequence goes: boil stock with thyme (ha!), add carrots for a couple of minutes, add asparagus (and broccoli) and cook for a bit, add zucchini and (surprise!) cook for a bit, and end with the snow peas. You aren't supposed to end up with a lot of stock left over, and I kept adding more because a) like I said, my amounts were all wacky and b) I like sauce. Depending on how long it takes your pasta to cook, take the veggies off the heat until the carbs are done. Finish them up on the heat with olive oil and some more stock for a few minutes. Toss together, add cheese, and voila! You will feel rewarded for the one hour of walking you did over the course of two trips to the grocery store.



This is what it looked like in my bowl, shortly before death by mastication.



In the words of another, hunger is the best spice. This stuff was tasty.

This has nothing to do with baked goods.

I believe that the focus of this 'blog' will change a couple of times in the next few months. I have been very busy these past few months with school, work, and an upcoming inter-continental move. My soul has been racked with guilt for not having had made/blogged about anything. I haven't mentioned the peanut butter cake I made for Molly's birthday, or much of anything else.
So for now, or at least very soon, I will chronicle all of my culinary endeavors. This can include restaurants, foods that I cook, and baked goods. In the fall, this may turn into a vehicle to keep friends and family updated on life and times in Germany. I am not sure about that, because my internet situation will probably be much more unreliable and slower than it is here.

Until then, my activities are not unlike that of a chicken whose head has been swiftly removed.

Response!

Well, all but two of the cone thingies were eaten by the folks at work. I'm guessing that means they are good.

Cupcakes!

Today's subject was a bit of a cop-out. I had been skimming through some cupcake cook-books recently, and I saw a couple of recipes for cupcakes- baked inside of ice cream cones. I thought this idea was cool, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, no annoying paper cup-thingie that just rips the cupcake apart. Secondly, if you really, really got detail-specific you could probably trick people into thinking these actually contained ice cream. Thirdly, I think they look cute. Nowly...er...Now, I would have preferred making these with some cake batter made from scratch. The chocolate cake recipes I was seeing sounded delicious, but their baking times were a bit too long for my time frame today. I just used a box-mix. The brand is Duncan Hines: Moist Deluxe- Butter Recipe Fudge.

A tip: do not overfill the cones with batter. Although, if this happens, you can just say that the "ice cream got all melty". It adds to the authenticity. Yeah!


I decided to frost half of the batch with chocolate icing, and the other half with vanilla. For the chocolate, I used a recipe called "Quick Fudge Frosting". Unless I made it wrong, which I probably did, it's not very fudgy and is mostly runny and soft. It hardened well, though.


For the vanilla frosting, I just made a run-of-the-mill buttercream icing. I decided to tint it green, to give a minty look. Why? I like the color mint. I considered using sprinkles, but I don't think I have any. I really piled it on, because the icing was stiff enough. I think it gives a nice scoop-effect as well. My sister approved.


Here is a photo of me trying to show contrast between something white and the green-ness of the frosting. I believe that I have failed. Oh well. It's green-ish, I promise.


These are for the cats at work. Reviews will follow.

Italienisches Brot

Lately, I've been making that chocolate chip cookie recipe like it was a second job. There were a couple of days where classes were cancelled because there was much snowfall. I never, ever though I would live to see a day, or even two consecutive days, when IUPUI shut down the campus. Truly amazing. However, that is not the subject for today.

After a disappointing experiment with rolls made of whole wheat flour that we shall never speak of again, I discovered a recipe on the back of a dried yeast package. It was called "Italian Bread", and was made with whole wheat flour. I was homeward bound that day due to the weather, so I decided to give it a go despite my despair over the failed rolls. That was the best decision I made that entire week. This stuff is fabulous! It rose phenomenally (think of "The Blob"), tasted wonderful, and made excellent toast. I prefer dipping chunks of it into olive oil with cracked black pepper, but I could live on that combination for the rest of my life. I know others have different tastes than I.


Here we have the finished product(s). Let me just say, this photo does not do their size(s) justice.

As for the recipe, here is what I can remember (my written copy is downstairs, and.....no, I will not go retrieve it).
I used two packets of Fleishmann's Active Dry yeast. You dissolve those suckers in two cups of warm water(110-120'F), in one large bowl. This will involve stirring. You must also add three tablespoon's of sugar to proof (which is, as best I can tell, a fancy way of saying 'make the yeast begin to grow at an alarming rate'), followed by two-thirds a cup of olive oil. That could be one-third, but I'm fairly certain the former is correct. Now, you add a little over three cups of whole wheat flour. Next, you let the stuff (referred to in the recipe as 'the sponge', straight out of a B-horror flick) rest for twenty minutes. You can take this time to add...a measurement I really can't remember. Downstairs I go. Ugh.

Ah yes, a ten minute search has yielded the recipe book which was in this room the entire time. Glorious. So anyway, while 'the sponge' slee- I mean, 'rests', in another small bowl you should add the following: two teaspoons salt, three fourths a cup of grated parmesan, two teaspoons of garlic powder, two teaspoons of dried basil, and one teaspoon of dried oregano. Mix 'em all up. Go do something else for fifteen minutes. Then, mash the sponge about a tad bit, and stir in the parmesan/herb mixture. Add around one cup of bread flour next, just enough to make the dough easy to handle. Now for the fun part! Knead the dough, always on a lightly floured surface, for about ten minutes. If you have not kneaded bread dough before, you should know that you will find it necessary to re-flour the surface every so often. Unless I'm doing this wrong. If you do not, it will stick to your countertop. That is not fun. After you are done kneading, divide the dough into two round loaves and let them rise on a couple of baking pans for forty-five minutes. I only used one, but it got a wee bit crowded.
Now that you have occupied yourself while the bread rose, it must now bake inside of at oven at the Fahrenheit temperature 350 for the duration of thirty/thirty-five minutes.

Be warned, this is very aromatic stuff. It is also really, really good.

Hail those of you who are about to bake. We salute you!

SMASH! BLAMMO! KER-POW!

I presume that we all have those days where you just, for lack of a better phrase, want to break things. Today was one of those days. This afternoon while I meandered online, I discovered something called cookie bark. You essentially just take a box of OREO's, smash them to bits, mix them into a bunch of melted chocolate, refridgerate, and BINGO. Cookie Bark. You could use any kind of cookie or chocolate, but in the pantry we had some Trader Joe Joe's (organic oreos), 14 oz of white candy chocolate and then a 10 oz package of nestle "holiday swirls". Again, these are just the ingredients that I chose for culinary Mayan sacrifice, you can name your own victims.
I had read the recipe a few hours ago, and I was a bit too...well, I wasn't in the mood to search through a few thousand recipes on allrecipe.com to find it. Besides, that meant going upstairs. Onward I forged, despite my extremely unreliable memory! I crushed the cookies with my bare hands for the first batch, and I used a spoon for the second. I prefer the first method, it is most satisfying for cookie destruction. Then I melted the white chocolate with my laser vision. You mere mortals could use a microwave, I suppose, or melt them on the stove top. Then...you mix them together. I didn't measure the oreo's out into the chocolate, I just kept adding handfuls and stirring until I didn't think there was enough chocolate left to coat anymore cookies. You just dump the goop out onto a cookie sheet (no greasing or wax paper necessary, it doesn't stick), sort of spread it out, and chill it for a while. It will cool faster than you think. It is probably done when you can't leave a mark, or indentation, after punch- er, pressing it. For the finale, hack the stuff to bits with a spoon or a spatula. Lots of vigorous stabbing motions, mind you. Then, you can eat it. The stabbing process results in lots of little chocolate/cookie bits that are similar to those delightful little bits of fried batter at Long John Silvers.

Cookie bark on the edge, man!



As you can see, they did not sustain the fall. I'm kidding, I used a spatula. note: cookie bits ala Long John Silver's in the foreground.


Red, green, and white make brown when you melt them. I never mastered the color wheel, and I was surprised when this happened.

Shortly after this photo was taken, the cookie bark was found dead. Some crazy broad stabbed him until he was virtually unrecognizable. The remains were deemed unfit for this blog.

I will admit, the white chocolate produced better bark than the holiday swirl things. Both were too sweet for my personal tastes, but I didn't really care. I'm not the one eating this stuff, I just wanted to crush some cookies.

This One, for the Theatre

I recently found out that these particular cookies were beloved by some of my co-workers. I have mostly been making peanut butter cookies lately, so I thought I would shake things up a bit and bring these into work on Friday. They are ridiculously easy, and they're drop cookies so that means I'm not up until 2am making cookie dough just so's I can get up at 7 to bake the suckers. Huzzah! Here, on your left, is one of these cookies.





I added extra orange zest this time, as per the advice of a friend. They all seem to like the orange factor, but they don't seem able to identify it. Everyone was asking me what "it" was. I haven't had one myself, so I can't give my opinion. Orange gives me a headache. Zesting 1 Tbsp worth was fun, let me tell you. At least it wasn't a clementine. I don't think I'll ever even try a recipe with clementine in it, unless someone really wants me too. Orange is the enemy.




This is only 2/3 of the batch. I ran out of the glaze, so the last sheet was plain. I just wanted to illustrate something with this photo; 7 people ate this many cookies before 6pm on Friday. As for the glaze, you may have noticed that there is a progession in texture from left to right in the photo. I will explain. The glaze is made on the stove top. You melt some butter, add vanilla bean paste (lots), and then you add 2 cups of powdered sugar. It is really hard to not make a mess, because the powedered sugar poofs all over the place. This is like making the thickest gravy ever, only it burns faster and is more difficult. I made the glaze in between batches, and when it is warmer (or fresher) it is spoonable and it drips everywhere. However, it had been sitting for a bit before I got to the next sheet of cookies. I had to spread it with a knife. Lesson learned? Bake first, glaze last.

Here is one last photo, because I liked the way it came out. This recipe comes from a Betty Crocker cookbook. I'm not sure how old, or which edition, the book is. I'd guess late seventies/early eighties, but I am just going on all of the suggestions for wheat flour and the way the photos look. There are about 8 different versons of this drop-cookie recipe in there, and I intend to try them all. Especially the brown sugar ones. That sounds very tasty. I will also try topping the pumpkin cookies with chocolate sauce sometime. I think I know a few people who would enjoy that.