A Strange Little Snack

A while ago, we bought butter crackers for out beet green gratin, which is something we never do--having crackers in the house is like an invitation for me to binge. But this time, I was pretty good about rationing them, and along the way, I created my new favorite breakfast/lunch/snack.

You see, I went through this phase a couple weeks ago where I was craving eggs. I don't know why--other proteins just didn't seem to cut it. So one day I scrambled up a few, and it occurred to me that I had this wonderful havarti cheese in the fridge, and the crackers in the cupboard, and... voila. Topped it with a little ketchup (I know this makes the whole thing sound silly but it needs a little acidity to cut the richness of the eggs, cheese, and crackers--it's also delicious with green chili sauce). Oh my goodness. Silly, but good.

Wilton Flower

Last night I went to my very first cake decorating class and made my very first frosting stars on some sugar cookies (I realized later that I should have tried a new recipe for this, since I had the opportunity, but I have found that very few recipes provide truly flat cookies to decorate and so I went with my tried and true unleavened holiday sugar cookies). It was an interesting experience, one designed to get me out of the house and among other living, breathing human beings (the people in my TV set apparently don't count). It was also designed to teach me a few things about decorating cakes, which I did, though I also had to sit through a lot of babble about things I already knew and resist the urge to snark about the decorating frosting being called "buttercream" when it contained no butter (except the Wilton butter flavoring) and choke when the instructor said things like "I don't put salt in any of my food" and "I'm not an icing person, even if it's really good icing."

Needless to say, this class was not at Le Cordon Bleu. It was in the break room at Michael's. I had five classmates, none of whom would speak (except the two college girls who whispered incessantly to each other), forcing me to be the nerdy kid who reads the instructions as the teacher demonstrates. But, like I said, I did learn to make little frosting stars. I also learned a couple of interesting things, some of which I have to take the teacher's word for (until I get a chance to test them) and some I saw in action.

1. Many off-brand powdered sugars are made with beet sugar (I believe that), which changes the consistency of frosting (needs testing).
2. When filling cakes, make a dam out of frosting to keep the filling in. (So simple, but a lightbulb clicked on!) This means you should pipe a thick line of frosting around the bottom layer of the cake, then fill inside that, then add the top layer.
3. Shortening used to contain Trans Fat, but it doesn't anymore. This means older shortening-based recipes might need adjusting with the new product.
4. When filling a piping bag, here's a very handy technique: make a "sausage" by putting the frosting in plastic wrap and twisting the ends. Cut off one of the ends and place that end toward the tip of the bag. This makes for super easy clean-up and no frosting on your hands!

Heirloom Tomato on Toast

I had my first ever heirloom tomato today (no, I don't remember which variety... I was so excited to find them at the farmer's market that I forgot to write it down). This isn't really a new recipe, exactly, as I kind of made it up based on what I had in the fridge, but it was a yummy and satisfying lunch. Even my tomato-hating husband liked it (or pretended he did). Here's what it was:

Toasted bread (I used my homemade sourdough that isn't really very sour) rubbed with a cut clove of garlic, spread with neufchatel cheese (the low-fat cream cheese), sprinkled with balsamic vinegar, topped with a hefty slice of tomato, sprinkled with salt.

Yum, yum, yum.

Beet Green Gratin

When I buy beets, I often tell myself I'm going to use the greens, but inevitably they end up in the trash. Which is a shame, really, because they're a viable food--chard is actually a form of beet stem, according to Alton Brown (I tend to believe him). But like celery tops or fennel fronds, I often save them until they wilt or take up too much refrigerator real estate, and then, since I haven't thought what to do with them, they get tossed out with the trash.

But not last night. Oh no--this time, I had more use for the greens than the beets themselves. In fact, I have two beets leftover, waiting to be roasted some night this week. This time I found a recipe in my Good Eats cookbook--a beet green gratin. I had to modify it a bit--I didn't have a full pound of beet greens so I rounded out the filling with some finely diced potatoes and the flesh of two beets (which, of course, turned the mixture pink, even after several rinsings--I am convinced that beets' pinkiness could be parlayed into enticement for little girls to eat their vegetables--pink potato puree!). Together with some sauteed mushrooms and garlic and a ricotta cheese mixture to bind it, this was a delicious and hearty vegetarian dinner. Good eats, indeed.

Kohlrabi

Day before yesterday, I had my first kohlrabi--I also prepped it, though Ian did the actual cooking on the grill. I had read that it tasted like broccoli stems, but I didn't expect it to taste EXACTLY LIKE BROCCOLI STEMS. Strange to buy a spiky reddish purple thing at the farmer's market and discover you could have simply bought broccoli.

Carbonara

Tonight, I made my first real spaghetti carbonara. I've made pasta dishes that call themselves carbonara before, but they've involved bechamel type white sauces instead of the saucy eggs the traditional recipe calls for. I have to say, I was nervous about that part. I expected the eggs to scramble or curdle on me and make a big old mess. But, magically, the pan was the right temperature as I swirled in the eggs and it created this lovely creamy sauce, just as planned. Of course, my dish wasn't perfect... I used turkey bacon instead of pig bacon, so it wasn't really crispy and there wasn't that real bacony flavor, which, for a recipe with so few ingredients, is pretty important. But it was still tasty in a slightly less fattening way, and super quick. This will definitely grace my table again.

Kettle Corn Innovation

I have this recipe in a low-cal cookbook for maple kettle corn, and today I decided to try it. Except I didn't have the maple sugar the recipe called for. I did have maple syrup and white sugar, so I used a combination of the two. I don't think this is the only reason for my kettle corn failure, but I think it's a big one.

The biggest reason I think my kettle corn didn't turn out is that I didn't heat the oil before throwing in the corn kernels and sugary stuff, which meant it all blended into a caramel far too soon. The second reason is that I used a liquid sugar which, again, formed a premature caramel. This caramel trapped the corn kernels, keeping most of them from popping. The kernels that did pop were trapped within the unpopped kernels, and by the time a few handfuls have popped, the caramel was burned.

So there was that.

But that's how you learn, right? You make a mistake, you learn from it. Next time I try kettle corn, I will not make these mistakes.