Cooking On Sundays

We’ve got a a triple hitter here, especially with the salad being bigger than the entree, and the cake being fancy enough to impress everyone….

We started with salami and mushrooms.  Really, my friend made these, and it literally was just fancy salami and some portobello and criminy mushrooms.  The ingredient list is already done!  It was just stirred fried in olive oil, and that was that.  We kind of didn’t make enough, despite usual cooking style, although I suggested we throw everything else in there too, we didn’t.  Also, I almost forgot to mention, we boiled some pasta to go with this.

I made a salad where I did live up to my reputation of “everything goes in it”.  I planned on following this butternut squash salad recipe, but in the end, I only used the salad dressing.  In this salad I put:

• Garbanzo beans
• String beans
• Green cauliflower (I think it’s advertised as “broccoflower” or something)
• Half a red onion
• A bunch of cilantro
• Green bell peppers
• The remains of a small red cabbage

I steamed the cauliflower just a little, boiled the garbanzos enough that they were cooked, but I just did this so that they were soft enough to eat, and I did this ahead of time so that it was a cold salad.

And I made a tahini dressing out of:

• Tahini (in a jar) (I didn’t make it)
• Finely chopped garlic (one of these days I’ll get a press)
• Some of the onions above got into the garlic, so they were finely chopped as well
• The juice of three lemons
• Olive oil
• Salt

I mixed with the quantities in the dressing until I feared that I wouldn’t have enough lemon juice to balance it if I added any more tahini, and while straight the salad dressing was not the best.

Then the cake.  I didn’t really make the cake, I just helped pour and such, so I might suddenly hand the keyboard to raven, but the cake, if I remember, started something like this:

• Half a block (not stick, like two sticks) of butter
• A block of fancy dark (60%) chocolate (9.7 oz, I think)

I’m stealing this.  So the recipe came off the inside of the chocolate wrapper, because I had planned to make this cake and been thwarted by Stanza’s kitchen.  (You might have noticed that he doesn’t seem to go in for precisely measuring things; he doesn’t have a measuring cup, and there’s no way I’m making imprecise buttercream by hand.)  I needed an emergency easy recipe.  Fortunately for all of you, Scharffen Berger (the Co-op had fancy chocolate, what can I say) puts the recipe online.  You need:

• One brick of chocolate, 9.7 oz, give or take a smidge
• 7 oz of butter. (Half a brick, equivalent to 7 tablespoons.)
• Five eggs
• A cup of white sugar

I whacked the chocolate into little pieces with a knife that was probably bigger than was wholly safe (I’d recommend a hammer instead; this was one thick brick of chocolate.) Then I melted the butter and the chocolate together - they recommended a double boiler, but I was feeling lazy and this chocolate has enough cocoa butter that it was okay in the microwave.  The eggs and sugar went into another bowl until the liquid chocolate was done, at which point they all got mixed together.

The recipe is one of those chocolate cake recipes that tells you to bake it in another pan full of water.  We tried this and found - panic panic! - that our newly acquired springform pan leaked, so I dried the batter out as best I could while Stanza tried to see if the pan could be made non-leaky.  Finally we gave up and cooked the thing without the second pan of water, but with a piece of tinfoil underneath just in case.  Three-fifty for an hour and a half.

The finished product was not the best looking cake ever, since it was kinda flat, so I thought I’d make it prettier by covering the whole thing in homemade whipped cream.  I halved the amount of sugar I normally put in whipped cream and added a little vanilla, because the cake was really sweet.  There was some old nutella in the cabinet, so I mixed a little milk into it and spread that on top.  (The cooking style around here is perilous and catching, let me warn you.)  Then I covered it in whipped cream and chopped some hazlenuts up for the top.  Done, and it even looked fairly impressive.  Everyone certainly said it was tasty enough - but how can you go far wrong with that much  chocolate involved?

I’m visiting a friend who really likes mushrooms, and so I tell her, I figured out how to make a tasty mushroom soup that you’d really like.  I didn’t mean this to be a Sunday, but it just happened to be on a Sunday, so it works out.  She lives with a friend who is a fancy cook, and Saturday, he made us poisson cru (tahitian raw fish salad), hawaiian rice, and skewers with spam (sorry, “cured ham”) and pineapple.  So anyway, I was expecting that while I am in town, that I would be shooed from the kitchen and not allowed any where near his pots.  Well, I’m not allowed near some of them.

Anyway, on to the mushroom soup.

We stopped, on a whim, at a chinese store/mall/etc place called Kam-Man, in Quincy, MA.  I was noting the mushrooms were really cheap (portabellas for $2.99/lb, shiitakes at $3.99/lb).  The response I got to this was “hey weren’t you going to make soup?”

So we got mushrooms, mushrooms, a few potatoes, two leeks, ginger candy, durian candy, sesame seed candy, banana pocky, some chocolate cookie things that reminded me of jaffa cakes, and a duck.  A duck?  Well, the aforementioned cook, who is known as Ickabod, who will play a more prominent role in this story, had always wanted to get a hanging duck from a chinatown window, and though this was not chinatown, he got a duck.

The ingredient list here was much smaller due to me not cleaning out the fridge.  I wonder if it made it less tasty.

• Four yukon gold potatoes
• Two leeks
• A pound of portabello mushrooms
• A pound of shiitake mushrooms
• Salt

So, I asked him which soup pot I could use (”any one but the red one”), and I took his largest pot and put some water in it and put the heat on.  I started chopping potatoes and threw them in the water.

“Hey stanza you’re already making your first mistake in the kitchen!  You always boil potatoes from cold water!”  Turns out that putting potatoes in boiling water does something to the molecule chains in them, whereas cooking from cold water doesn’t mess up that molecular structure.

I hadn’t heard this before.  Anyway, I chopped and cut the leeks.  Ickabod introduced me to a method of washing leeks much easier than what I had done before (leeks are a pain to clean due to dirt everywhere).  Since I learned something, I might as well share–I always cut the leeks into “rounds”, little discs.  He said cut lengthwise, so you have two halves, then cut the slices the way I did–then throw the half-discs into a bowl of water.  Swish them around a bit, and that should rinse anything off you may have missed–and since dirt hides everywhere on a leek, this is much easier than peel off a leaf, rinse, peel off another leaf, etc.

I objected when he tried to throw out the green bits.  On the heat, boil boil boil.

I chopped up half the mushrooms, sauteed them in butter and salt (only unsalted butter in this house, which is a detail I should have noted in my previous sauteeings (I always used salted butter)), and threw them in the pot.

Then began a heated argument over whether to put the soup through a blender.  Ickabod says it must go through a blender to become soup.  Me and Raven much prefer chunky soup.  We compromised, and blended the half of the mushrooms that were already in the pot, and did not blend the second half of the mushrooms that I sauteed in butter and salt as well.

Then came the great argument of the thickness of soup.  I like a thick soup.  They argued that soup should not be thick enough to eat with a fork.  I went along with them, and watered down the soup to the point you could no longer make sculptures with it.

And there was a duck!  I didn’t pay much attention to the duck, I was pretty oblivious to the duck, until I announced “I’m done!” Ickabod’s reply was “get out of my way” and a cooked duck appeared!  So, I asked how duck was made (only one ingredient, a duck).

It was already roasted at the store.  (Oh.)  It was wrapped in tinfoil and stuck in the oven.  Shortly before dinner time, it was unwrapped, and cooked some more, to make the outside crispy.  Crispy duck!

The duck was well received.  The soup did not go over quite so well as the last time, but I will note that blending the mushrooms into it spread tasty mushroom flavor throughout.  I did forget garlic, and I didn’t use any boullion or soup stock.  We also skipped on the orzo.  But it was tasty nonetheless, and I think the addition of perhaps onion, garlic, and/or boullion would have gone a long way.  The next time I attempt this, I would try for the first version of the soup, but blend half the mushrooms.

The sign said “30lb cabbage, $1.85″. I saw that, I carefully dug through my wallet for $1.85. Yes! Exact change!

So, what to do with 30lbs of cabbage?

Well, of course, first question is, is it really 30lbs of cabbage? All our methods of determining this say that this is a no. It’s much closer to about 5-6 lbs. It is bigger than your head (well, maybe not your head if you have a particularly large head, but I did describe it as a cabbage “bigger than your head”). Our three methods of weighing it (how is it no one has a scale?) were simply lifting it, and guessing “4-5lbs?”, going to the store and weighing similarly sized cabbages (5-6lbs?), and, thank you raven I entirely blame you, making a balance beam (hey let’s not use my diabolo next time, and our planks are substandard), putting books on the opposite end, and looking it the weight of such books on amazon.com. It weighed about as much as “Road to Reality”, by Roger Penrose, 3.4lbs, and “AI Game Programming Wisdom 2″, edited by Steve Rabin, 3.3lbs, combined. Actually the books were heavier, but my army of choppers were impatient, so my attempts at stacking a bunch of small paperbacks with Penrose were aborted.

On to the next question. How do you cook thirty pounds, I mean about six pounds, or at this point more frequently said, a cabbage larger than your head, in such a way that is tasty?

Well, let’s start with the soup. Not cabbage soup, let’s start with the huge bag of mushrooms I got at the farmers market.

Three varieties of mushrooms: shiitake (in front), maitake (on right), and oyster mushrooms (on left).

The mushrooms came with several recipes. I decided a mushroom soup recipe, and then decided it was too much a cream-and-flour recipe, so I added potatoes and leeks to that recipe. And forgot to put in paprika. And pretty much everything else it suggested. And it’s soup, so I added everything not nailed down.

• 3 large baking potatoes
• 6 leeks
• Half a thing of orzo
• Some chicken bouillon
• Some salt
• Little bit of garlic (only because it was getting so late before it went in, it would have been more)
• Half an onion (again it went late, but it was tasty, there were still identifiable bits of onion in it)
• One apple (what else am I going to do with that apple?)
• Plate full of mushrooms sauteed in butter
• Lots of water

I chopped up the leeks and potatoes, and put them in boiling water. Really, everything should have gone in except the orzo and mushrooms, but it took me so long to get everything going that this went over a long period of time. I saved some of the green ends of the leeks towards the end so there were visible green bits in the soup, but let everything else dissolve into white mush soup. Then the orzo and the leeks went in. The mushrooms were sauteed in butter, but that’s about it.

For the next dish, I tried to follow this carrot kinpira recipe and failed miserably. It was an interesting experiment, though. I forgot to get sesame seeds.  I almost forgot to add soy sauce. I added cabbage core and bok choy stems.

• Carrots, cut thin
• Cabbage core, cut thin
• Bok choy stems, cut thin
• Sesame seed oil
• Ginger
• A pinch of Three arbol peppers, ground
• Way too much parsley (reconsider buying when you see bunches that big)
• Soy sauce

Well, it was tasty, but not quite kinpira. I heated the ground peppers in sesame seed oil, and stir fried the veggies and ginger almost as fast as my assistants could chop them, and grumbled about my lack of sesame seeds, while chopping and adding parsley.  At the very end, only because someone mentioned it, I added the soy sauce.  Not bad, but not what I was expecting, and due to the quantity I was making, not very well cooked, but not bad for a salad.

The bulk of the cabbage was basically a stir-friedish-thing.  One assistant was mostly charged with it.

• As much cabbage as could fit in the pan
• A bunch of bok choy
• Some ground beef
• The other half of the onion
• Garlic
• One habanero
• Mustard

I’m not entirely certain what else, because on occasion my back was turned, and odder things were put in there.

I started by sauteeing garlic, onion, and habanero.  Then all the cabbage and bok choy was thrown in (about 3/4ths of the cabbage).  It was continually stirred, with odd things mixed in, the only one I’m certain of is the mustard, which I could taste (it gave a very sweet taste) and pretty much else no one noticed.  Some commented the flavour of the habanero stood out, some commented the spiciness of the habanero stood out. I’m going to revisit this, because I need to ask what else went in while back was turned.

Ah yes and I also made rice with some cumin thrown in the pot on the side.  I use a little rice cooker, and this I did not know–I really should have made two pots of rice.

The clear winner here was the soup.  Everyone loved the soup.  The rice was devoured in seconds–I made another pot, but the time the second pot was done, no one was hungry anymore.

The cabbage went over well–I think most people’s reactions were “um…  interesting” but it was well devoured.

The “almost kinpira” was also devoured–those who don’t do spicy said it was way too spicy, but that really was only one person, whereas everyone else said it needed more “something”, with the something suggested ginger, or sesame seeds, or…  well, something.  Funny, as my new technique with ginger is to make sure it is fresh, chop it fine, and use a ton, otherwise the flavor doesn’t come across as well.  I thought I did use tons, but it didn’t quite come through.

This fed eight, with barely-almost-some left over. I felt like I succeeded–the leftovers weren’t there because people were still hungry, but there was something left over. There wasn’t any soup left over, but that’s because people kept eating it, even if they weren’t hungry anymore, because it was tasty. There was barely one bowl full of cabbage left. There was half a bowl of kinpira left over, and it would have been eaten had there been room left. There was a pot of rice left over, but when it was done, no one was hungry anymore.

Seriously, for the soup, while doing dishes, I saw there were about five spoonfuls left, went to find a spoon, and when I got back to it they were gone. The other dishwashers beat me to the last five spoonfuls. I will repeat that recipe sometime soon.

Edit: typos fixed throughout.  And lists given bullets.