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?

Following the ideas of this post, I have come to realize that no matter how much of a stretch something is, you can call it a taco if you put in quotes.  Rather than justifying my reasoning for calling it chili, I decided it was easier to put into quotes.

I started with this recipe for vegan white bean chili, and realized I had no white beans, so I used black beans and pinto beans instead.  I had some garbanzos I wanted used up, so I threw them as well.  And halfway done, deciding I wanted it thicker, I threw in some lentils, figuring they would be tasty and dissolve into something thicker.

Without further ado, here is the ingredient list:

• Black beans
• Pinto beans
• Green lentils
• Garbanzo beans
• Two serrano peppers
• Two anaheim peppers
• One yellow onion
• Garlic
• Celery
• Carrots
• White onions
• Frozen okra
• Frozen corn
• Frozen snozzberries (just kidding)
• Three bell peppers
• Five scary dried red peppers
• Oregano
• Paprika
• Chili powder
• Sliced peppered salami that a friend gave me
• Some corn flour
• Some other spices to taste

I soaked the garbanzo, black and pinto beans from the night before - well, actually, I soaked the garbanzo beans about a month ago and didn’t use them and they’ve been living in my freezer ever since.  That’s why I was using them.  I drained the beans, then I blended one and a half bell peppers, the spicy peppers, half the onion, and half the garlic, and put that green soup in the pot with the beans.  I set that to boil for an hour or two, added the spices, and worried that I’d added too much.

I drank a lot of wine and chopped the other vegetables into little pieces.  The wine is why I can’t remember exactly what spices I put in.  At some point I was figuring the chili wouldn’t thicken appropriately, so I added lentils (there was still enough cooking time that they would dissolve into tastiness) and corn flour (I read that on the chili recipe linked above).  This did thicken it enough that it was appropriate.  I added some carrots at this point too.

Further towards the end I added all the vegetables.  I kept finding random things to add; it kind of got out of hand.  I had a bag of frozen okra in the freezer, frozen corn, at some point it felt like I kept digging further back and I kept finding odder things (though I did use up all the turnip greens on a non-Sunday cooking day; those would have been in here too but I found an empty bag instead).

At the very end I added the salami which I carefully cut into quarter-circles.

While it was very spicy, and I did kind of go wrong with “too much spices such that it didn’t taste like anything”, I think if I hadn’t said “I’m afraid it’s too spicy”, I think people wouldn’t have thought it quite too spicy.  The spicy-eaters are fond of everything spicy and gobbled it up without yogurt and sour cream; the non-spicy-eaters feasted on the spinach salad instead.