Travel Thoughts

I've been incredibly quiet lately. 2012 marked my worst year ever (with this blog at least, it definitely was not my worst year of life.) And I know I cooked. And I know I ate food. And I know I did little in the way of creative cooking this past fall, eating a few simple staples, and the occasional "let's see what's in the kitchen that isn't my roommates that I can turn into an edible meal." And by occasional, I mean that's really all I did when it came to making food. For example, dinner tonight was eggs and salsa with toast. And then a few hours later I finally tried that microwaved brownie in a cup I've been seeing all over for years - my sweet tooth needed satisfied, and a clementine just wasn't doing it for me.



But that's not what I wanted to talk about. Travel. Travel is glorious, and a perfect time for trying new foods. Like unassuming Burmese food in Burlingame, California or a delicious quinoa-based veggie burger in London, England.

Meals can be memorable. Or forgettable. And, to be honest, most of them are probably more on the forgettable side. I think I remember the oysters I ate in San Francisco more because it was just a lot of fun to spend the day with my dad than because of the fact I actually ate oysters and they weren't entirely unpleasant.



But, I think what I'm trying to say is that I like food. I like cooking. I like eating. I like trying new things. I hope I continue to have opportunities to do these things.

And I really want to find a Burmese restaurant in this part of the country. And return to London so I can try the Veggie Table's Heavenly Halloumi burger with their onion jam.

Oops... I Did It Again

I'm back in St. Louis again. St. Louis. I don't know what else to say about it. Other than since moving here for school I've been neglecting this thing terribly. And I guess it took my friend mentioning a strategy I taught her to make me realize just how much I miss this. And that maybe I do actually cook more than I think I do, though considering dinner last night was four ingredients - dried pasta, frozen broccoli, mushroom alfredo sauce, crushed red pepper - and definitely not something to write home about, I'm not sure I have much to share. I don't even like alfredo sauce, so why I bought a jar of it is somewhat of a mystery.

"
This nonsense needs to stop. I'm not even sure when the last time I baked something was. Though, if I count that disastrous casserole I made myself for dinner following a trip to the second-run cinema in nearby Illinois for a showing of Men In Black 3 a couple of weeks ago, it's only been a few weeks.


But I digress. Or not. I'm not sure what all constitutes a digression anymore. I mean, what is the point of this if not to go out on somewhat related tangents and vent about all the food-related things in my life. Which, in all honesty, at this point might be more beverage-related. I may be going a little overboard with the whole being-21 thing. Beer is tasty. Cocktails are magical. Wine is... well, it's just not as new and exciting to me as the previous two. And the fact that Cicero's Beer School exists just makes it all even better. That, and well, ice cream martinis are a thing, so don't even try to tell me I shouldn't be enamored.

So, in reality, life just involves a lot of pasta. And pasta salad. And beer. And maybe one of these days I'll figure out exactly what I'm doing and share it with you. Actually, I sort of know what I'm doing with the pasta salad - it's wonderful, and an idea I stole from something I used to get from dining services all the time my sophomore year. But I never keep track of what I'm doing, so I'm not quite sure how to articulate the making of it.

And that failure of a casserole... well, I'm determined to make it work. And when I do, you'll probably hear more about it. But, in the mean time, just know I'm probably eating embarrassing food. Or drinking out of a metal lens mug.

A Winter Break Adventure

What? You say that doesn't look like a winter adventure?

And I'll be honest, there is nothing adventurous about rice krispy treats dipped in chocolate and sprinkles, or even making them. But the adventure is what led me to even consider making them, inspired by what I saw in the dessert case at Foodlife.
I'm sure dipped rice crispy treats on sticks are common. I'd just never seen one before, and it seemed like a neat concept. Other than the jaw pain I endured today trying to eat one straight out of the fridge (please, learn from my mistakes.)

I realize I still sound like a bore. But foodlife was not a part of the plan at all. It was merely that my friends and I decided we wanted to go ice skating, so I suggested we make it even cooler since the weather was warm (yes, 40 degrees is warm) we go ice skating in Millenium Park. Two hours later, we were on our way there. And pleasantly surprised to see that it wasn't too crowded.

And then there was a slight problem. An hour-and-a-half long problem that is. At 6:30 at night, ice skating is popular. There was a long line that we somehow failed to notice, attributing to onlookers or just ignoring. So ice skating was postponed.

The next day, arriving half an hour before the rink opened proved to be a much quicker solution. And three hours later we were off the ice and ready for lunch. Which is when I saw the rice crispy treats on a stick dipped in chocolate and then dipped in coconut. Mmm...

Neither my friend nor I were hungry enough for dessert, so when I got home, after making a nice fish dinner that, in order to be cooked perfectly, was eaten cold, made my version of the treats, sans sticks. I ran out of coconut, but it is my favorite of the toppings I used.


Dipped Rice Crispy Squares
makes 36

1/4 cup (1/2 stick, 2 oz) butter
1 (10.5 ounce) bag marshmallows
6 cups cripy rice cereal (Rice Krispies)
6 ounces milk chocolate (or semi-sweet)
1 to 2 cups assorted things to dip (shredded coconut, chopped nuts, sprinkles, etc.)

Line or grease a 9x9 square pan.
Melt butter in a heavy pan over medium heat. Stir in marshmallows, stirring until melted. Remove from heat and stir in cereal. Press into prepared pan and chill for 30 minutes.

Cut into squares (6x6, or other size). Melt chocolate, either over simmering water on the stove, or in the microwave on medium in 30 second increments until melted. Dip squares into chocolate and then coconut. Set upright on a baking sheet lined with wax paper. Repeat for remaining squares.
Chill until set.

Mice for Christmastime

My grandmother has been making mice for about a decade.
Yes, I said mice.
Like the one in the picture above. Except she didn't make it. Keri and I did. It was a team effort.


She taught me how to make them about six years ago, and the following year my friend Keri and I made them together. I'm not sure if we've made them since eighth grade (when I made a step-by-step tutorial, but this year we finally got around to making them again. And they're so adorable and fun to make!

Keri and I don't see all that much of each other. We see each other at lunch and in history, which is most all through high school, but it was fun to get together. And so the mice took four hours. But don't let that scare you. We easily could have been done in an hour, but we talked, ate lunch, and found fun ways to use the leftover chocolate- we crushed up candy canes to mix in and then poured the chocolate into molds.



Chocolate mice sort of instructions:
I have no clue about quantities, but we used 3 10-ounce jars of maraschino cherries, a 17.6 ounce bar of milk chocolate, part of a 12-ounce bag of slivered almonds (the smallest size should be fine, we needed 204 almond slivers that looked nice), 1 1/2 bags of Hershey kisses (the 11 ounce ones, or 102 hershey kisses), and part of a tube of red gel icing. The numbers were based on how many cherries with stems we ended up with, and that's what we ended up with.
Melt the chocolate, dip the cherries in, push the kiss on, stick in the almonds. Repeat. Place in fridge to harden up for a while, and then dot on eyes. For better instructions, see my how-to from eighth grade.


Last three pictures by Keri. She was having fun with the camera.

Brownie Points

When I was little there was the brownie, and then there were all those other things that I wasn't quite sure what they were. Until I was nine or ten, those other things got my attention because they were devoid of nuts. Though I liked nuts, sometimes. Like in white chocolate macadamia cookies; I thought macadamia was the fancy name for white chocolate chunks. They were my favorite cookies. And I liked walnuts in my chocolate chip cookies too. Just like the brownies.

Then, the brownies started being in different varieties. There were the "original" ones - a fudgy brownie loaded with walnuts, raspberry brownies, and orange brownies. The orange ones then became my favorite, cool out of the freezer with their orange zestiness and smooth nutless texture. One brownie would last me a week.

Then, suddenly, the brownies stopped coming. I was shipped down to Arkansas with a box of brownies ("don't bring me any of those weird ones. I don't like them") for my grandmother's freezer, and never saw any again.

Every year when I go down to visit, Granma's friend asks me when I'm going to give her the recipe and Granma wants to know if they'll ever be made again. Dad told me the recipe once (I stopped listening when he got to 48 eggs), and the enormity of it overwhelmed and discouraged me. He told me it was straight from The Professional Chef. I looked through the book and never found it, and then, this past January, I found it. In the Professional Pastry Chef, that is. I e-mailed it to myself from his desk and then never did anything about it. Sixteen by twelve inches sounds a lot more intimidating than it really is.

So yesterday I decided I was finally going to tackle these little bad boys. And yes, they are bad. In the best possible way. I bought enough stuff to make a half-portion of the recipe, and then realizing I had no adequate pans, changed my mind and bought the rest of the ingredients I needed to make a whole recipe (which is actually 1/6 of the recipe my dad recited that had scaredme so much) and then didn't do anything about it. Until dinner time. We were all ravenous by the time we sat down to eat because I just had to get those brownies in the oven.

The sheer enormity of it all though meant dad had to do most of the heavy lifting. And stirring. And pouring. I'm glad we have an outrageously large metal mixing bowl, which we thought at first was too large. It was just right.

And the brownies. Well, they weren't quite as I remembered them, but they probably are. Partially because I was too impatient to let them cool (well, it is past my bedtime) and because some of the walnuts on top burned. Maybe for once nostalgia doesn't really make things taste better.

I can't wait until I see Granma's face on Christmas now.

Figuring it out

Not having power for 67 hours gave me time to do some thinking.

Actually, I'll be honest. That had very little to do with the thinking. I was walking home from the store this morning with aseptically-packaged milk and some figs, and instead of paying attention to where I was going, I was thinking about, well, a lot of stuff.

One being, why do I have a blog?
I suppose that Just My Dinner is the only thing I do that can not be classified as a chore or schoolwork, no matter how hard you try. Cooking, well, everyone has to eat, and that is just about my only other hobby.
This also serves as an organizational tool. Without it, if I lost the scratch piece of paper I scrawled random ingredient measurements without any details on it for the almond-cherry cheesecake ice cream I made last week, I wouldn't be able to make it again, which I will probably be doing since my dad's friend called to tell me I should. Make it again that is, not lose my papers. He also told me it was runny and he had to freeze it, so I'm sure how much of it he'd had when he said that. We gave it to him since it had been slowly melting in our freezer over the 29 hours before we gave it to him. It seemed like a better plan than throwing it out.

The other reason being that this is my creative outlet. It allows me to, for however small of an audience, display my "work". Mostly, I just like looking back at it, especially when wanting to make something familiar, and it gives me a chance to flex my finger muscles. No, seriously. I quit playing the piano when I was ten; this really is my finger workout. I don't write much, or at least very little for myself anymore, like I used to when I was in fourth or fifth grade. In seventh grade, when I started my first blog, I wrote little. And it was a recount of my day, almost like a diary lacking those details a person would want to remember looking back at it, because I feared a crazy stalker.

When I went to Iran last summer, I temporarily abandoned my blog in favor a newer one just for that purpose. I felt less restricted, it had no history to tie it down and I was freer. Mom said my history teacher had rubbed off on me and I was writing better. I still think I ramble like I'm trying to cover the state in roads, but maybe it has gotten better.

Now, this is the only blog I tend to, and when I'm pressed for time or ideas, or just sleepy, it is evident. The posts are short and dull. Usually those are ones that I've meant to be so rich, writing them in my head as I walk home from the store or school or take far too long in the shower because I forget to wash my hair because I'm so enraptured by the post I'm mentally writing in my head. Of course, by the time I make it to a computer, I've long forgotten it. Much like this post. I wrote it this morning around nine o'clock, but I'm not quite sure what I meant to say.

This is longer than I've meant it to be. And is missing half of what I wanted to say. But we now have our power back. And lots of thawed meat. Not to mention that school is back in session and back pain is once again upon me. Enjoy these days of summer, and if you want something cool to eat, I really do recommend the almond-cherry cheesecake ice cream. Even though I only had a scoop of it before we lost power in the nasty storm on Thursday.

And no, those figs have no recipe attached to them. I was just excited to see some semi-affordable ones and my hopes were dashed by the blandness. But what did I expect. This is the midwest.

I'm No Domestic Goddess, but with an Afternoon of Tea comes Domesticity

Today is (was?) my birthday. And it was a good day. There's no sob story coming from me about my sixteenth birthday. I couldn't have asked for a better day. (Not the weather, but I was inside and it was cool out, so the rain doesn't matter.)

My birthday cake, which I was originally going to make, was the Devil's Food Cake with Mint-Chocolate Ganache from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook, but my cousin Tiff wanted to make me a cake for my birthday, so I told her what I was going to make (definately a decadent treat) and she made it for me. And it was rich.

As for the tea itself, we had tea sandwiches (salmon, chive & cream cheese on white; prepared LMG curried chicken salad, and watercress on pumpernickel; cucumbers with lime, mint-chile butter, on thin white) that Mom made with a little help from Maddy and me, freshly baked scones, angel-food cake bites with lemon curd and raspberries that Granma helped assemble, and pea salad cups that Granma and Maddy put together for me.
It makes me feel like I almost didn't have to do anything. And it was relaxing, with all the help my family put in.

My aunt even made a gorgeous poster of a tea pot for a game of "put the lid on the teapot", a spinoff of "pin the tail on the donkey" that was a hit.

And now that I have a cart to go shopping, and an apron prettier than most of the clothes I own, I can go to the grocery store and venture to the kitchen with even fewer limits.

These Are a Few of MY Favorite Things

And no. They do not include crisp apple strudels or schnitzel with noodles.

What they do include are reading good young adult books and not-so-great teen romances, my camera, Sandy.
Oh, and I forgot to mention: apple-oat muffins and khoresh-e karafs.

When two of your favorites are as diverse as those two, it probably isn't the best idea to try to combine them. But as I mentioned before, the celery in the fridge was calling to me, our stove died (a new one's coming soon) and I don't want to use the scary looking ones upstairs or the burner on the grill (it's hot out and khoresh takes forever!), and Bababozorg is coming in a week, and he is the king of khoresht-e karafs. There's no point in even trying (though maybe I can watch him like a hawk and learn to make it, but I'm impatient.)

So I decided to try to take the flavor of khoresht-e karafs and put it into a muffin. Now using rice instead of oats would have made it better (more like the real deal?), but rice requires the stove... plus, why add an extra cooking step to the muffins?

The only parts of khoresht-e karafs that made it into the muffin are the celery and the parsley, because to be honest, I'm not quite sure what goes into khoresht-e karafs other than that, meat, salt, pepper, and some more green stuff (mint? but I overtrimmed what was growing in the backyard).

But I'll hurry it up and say that Karafs Muffins are yummy. And worth the hour to make them. Though I wouldn't eat them for breakfast necessarily...

Karafs Muffins
makes 10 to 12

2 cups diced celery (about 4 stalks)
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole-wheat pastry flour
1 cup rolled oats (quick might work, but I've never tried. It might make them mushy)
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon allspice
1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper
pinch turmeric
1 cup plain yogurt
3 fluid ounces (6 tablespoons or 1/4 cup + 2 tablespoons) milk
1 large egg
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/4 cup finely chopped parsley

Preheat oven to 400ºF and grease 12 muffin cups.

In a large bowl combine flours, oats, brown sugar, baking powder, baking soda, allspice, cinnamon, salt, pepper, and turmeric.

In a small bowl whisk together yogurt, milk, egg, oil, and parsley until smooth.

Make a well in the center of the flour mixture. Pour in yogurt mixture and stir until moist. Stir in celery until combined. Be careful not to over mix the batter.

Using a size 12 scoop (or not), divide batter among prepared cups. Bake for 15-18 minutes or until lightly browned and the indentation made when lightly pressing on the top of the muffin springs back.