The Hungry Tiger

Links and things

Cooking Issues: Two hundred apples a day. I love apples, and want very very much to have this experience for myself.

Item: Steve is beside himself with delight that, after a brief breaking-in period in which it looked as if he would be deeply disappointed, the replacement gasket he tracked down for our leaky stovetop milk steamer has made it work again. Hooray!

3191 Miles Apart: Naomi's Quinoa Muffins. Since our house is all about eating quinoa all the time, I think I ought to give these a try.

Orangette: Oatmeal Pancakes. We already love making these in big batches to snack on. Because they're nice and hearty, and also delicious, the leftovers are very nice. For snacking, I like them naked or spread with a little jam, either cold or hot. For the latter, reheating in the toaster oven is the way to go.

Box Vox: Long Egg Packaging. I was familiar with egg presses that will turn your hard-boiled egg into a cube, but this is something else again. I don't even know what illustrative selection to quote. Just go and see it for yourself. (Thank you, Finn.)

Berry cake in winter

When it's February, sometimes I want to pretend that it's summer, or at the very least that summer isn't a long, long way away. You can make this cake with beautiful fresh berries, when they're available, but—fortunately for me and my heaps of dirty snow—frozen berries will also work. You don't even have to thaw them first.

This is a dandy everyday cake, somehow both light and sturdy, and fluffy without being at all dry. It would hold up well in a picnic basket or packed lunch. (Please excuse me as I go on fantasizing about warm weather and sunshine.) It is also well suited to my favorite way of keeping cake, sitting on the counter under its glass cover, ready to slice with coffee or tea.

Blackberries, especially frozen ones, are a little heavy, so they'll end up closer to the bottom than to the top of the cake. Nothing wrong with that.

The original recipe makes a thin cake in which the fruit is just held together with the batter. I like that kind of cake, too, but the crumb and overall effect are both quite different when you change the proportions, as I've done here. See what you think.

Crispy spiced nuts

Everyone else on the internet has amply covered the mechanics and aesthetics of most of the gifty foods I've been making this season. Fleur de sel caramels? Check. Spoon cookies? Most assuredly. Chocolate-covered butter toffee with almonds? Oui oui. But the recipe for my holiday spiced nuts belongs to no one but me. I've written about it before, but it's buried so deep in history that you cannot turn it up even with a Google search -- and so, I think, I can safely write about it again.

I would choose these over any other salty-sweet spiced pecan, walnut, or almond, and I have eaten many that are very good. I'm sure your favorite recipe is perfectly tasty. It's just that these are better. The ingredient list is not intuitive, but the resulting combination of flavors is highly addictive. The coating clings beautifully, thanks to the egg whites, and its texture after cooking is light and crisp. One recipe's worth generally covers about 6 cups of whatever sort of nuts you like best, and it is easy to make batch after batch if you want more.

Obviously these are bold, rather than dainty, but unless you are cooking for a bunch of supertasters, everyone should be able to enjoy them just fine.

BEST SPICED NUTS

Lots of raw, unsalted walnuts, pecans, and/or almonds
2 egg whites
1 T. olive oil
3/4 c. white sugar
2 t. salt
2 t. garam masala
1 T. paprika
1 t. hot sauce (I recommend Sriracha, aka Magic Rooster sauce)
1 t. soy sauce
baking parchment (CRUCIAL -- your pans and sanity will thank you)

1. Preheat oven to 325° F.

2. Beat egg whites in a very large bowl until foamy, but not holding a peak. Add the other ingredients, except for the nuts. The result will be a reddish brown, slimy goo. Mm!

3. Add as many nuts as will comfortably fit in the bowl and mix very thoroughly with your hands, a spatula, or a wooden spoon.

4. Line two cookie sheets with parchment. Spread the nut mixture on these sheets in a single layer, leaving behind any extra coating that has puddled at the bottom of the bowl. Add more nuts to the bowl and coat them until all the goop is used up.

5. Cook for 30 to 40 minutes. Remove from oven and slide parchment and nuts onto the counter to cool. When they are COMPLETELY cool, and not before, break the clusters apart and store in an airtight container. They should keep well for a couple of weeks, but warm or damp weather will tend to make them soft before their time.

Belgian pears, not from Belgium

This weekend I finally made a batch of Fiona's lovely Belgian pears. Apparently they have nothing to do with Belgium, in fact, but so what?

These pears are very slowly poached in nothing more than sugar, vinegar, and their own juices. The ingredients and cooking times are a little disconcerting -- vinegar? Six hours? But the recipe is absolutely right. (Well, unless your pears are really enormous, I would say that you can stop after a mere five hours.)

By the end they have turned a beautiful rosy color, the poaching liquid has developed a sophisticated, slightly boozy flavor without a hint of vinegar about it, and the whole house smells gorgeous.

The pears produce a lot of liquid -- this is actually enough to cover all the pears in there, but they kept bobbing to the surface. You can turn them to make sure they cook and color evenly, but be very gentle.

The pears shrink. Six pounds made enough to fill two .75 liter jars and one .5 liter jar, and left a cup of extra syrup, which I put up in its own jar. You wouldn't want to use regular Ball jars for this -- even the wide mouth is not wide enough to accommodate whole pears without injury. This kind of bail-wire jar, with rubber gasket, works better.

Then I processed them in my brand-new canning pot: 20 minutes in a boiling-water bath.

Pumpkin bread

Here in America, November marks the time when canned pumpkin appears in profusion in every store. I myself am extremely fond of pumpkin pie, and especially like a slice the morning after Thanksgiving, chilly from the refrigerator. But what about times other than Thanksgiving, and what about sources other than the can?

Apparently there is a shortage of the canned stuff this season, brought on by bad weather a year ago. Fortunately producing your own is a snap, provided you don't use the pumpkins sold for jack-o-lanterns, which are weak and watery. Sugar or pie pumpkins are dandy, but my favorite is the good old reliable butternut, so smooth and easy to cut in half. In fact, the "pumpkins" that fill all those Libby's cans are a varietal that's more closely related to butternut squash than it is to the usual Halloween specimen. 

Just remove the seeds and roast until soft. Then scoop out the flesh, and send it through a food mill, ricer, or a trip in the food processor. The results freeze just fine. I often turn the bulb end of a butternut into puree this way while I'm using the neck for something else, and build up a nice little stock with hardly any trouble.

Then whenever you feel the need for a slice of reliable, unpretentious, autumnal cake, you can use a cup from your reserves to make pumpkin bread. I like good old Fannie Farmer for this sort of thing (especially with a couple of adjustments penciled in the margin) and I am always impressed at just how mindless it is to put a batch together. Before you have fully registered that you're engaged in an act of baking, you have put something delicious in the oven that will go admirably with a cup of tea or coffee, or that your child might hold in her tiny fist as she runs off to jump in the neighbor's pile of leaves.

Tarte au Sucre

In Canadian French, "tarte au sucre" means a real sugar pie: flaky pie crust with a sweet filling, along the lines of shoofly pie. In France, though, it's the name of a yeasted cake with sweet topping. To make one, first you make a brioche dough and pat it into a buttered springform pan. Then you spread the top with soft butter, and sprinkle sugar over that. In the oven, the sugar and butter melt into a crunchy sweet crust over a tender but substantial base.

Despite the name, it's not excessively sweet, and it makes an excellent breakfast or teatime snack. After the first day, I like to cut a wedge, then warm it in a toaster oven. (Keep an eye on it lest you burn the topping.) This magically restores it to soft freshness and adds a little bonus toasty flavor. With toasting, the slices we ate on Thursday were as good as the ones we'd had on Sunday.

Of course yeast doughs take a little extra planning, but this one is pretty straightforward, with its long cool overnight rise. I plan it like so: Start the dough on Friday or Saturday evening, then pop it into the fridge. The next morning, take it out first thing and go about your business showering, having breakfast, and so on while it comes to room temperature, or take it out after breakfast and go run a few errands. Then you can bake it up around lunchtime and have your first taste as an afternoon snack. Instructions below assume a stand mixer.

Links: Things to make

Bottled Fruit: Belgian Pears.

A truly delectable sounding recipe for special (but not complicated) poached pears, from The Cottage Smallholder.

Dutch Apple Cheese muffins.

"I make these once or twice a week. Lord help me, but when I'm pregnant I make them every other day or so." 

"Red espresso".

Rooibos tea ground to be used in an espresso machine or moka pot. Via Ask Metafilter. I have no idea if this is any good, but it's intriguing.

Miso, tahini, and nut paste.

A toasty topping for roast vegetables or a vegan filling for onigiri, from Just Bento.

Things to have in the middle of lessons

I have a very definite fixed idea that the truly civilized life consists of engaging in scholarly activities all day, punctuated by walks outdoors and little snacks accompanied by nice things to drink. Unfortunately, I do not manage to make this happen nearly often enough, even though it would actually not be very difficult at all. (As I once said here on a related subject, "this fantasy is so much like what my life could easily be, if only I were a better person, that it is kind of depressing." But no matter.)

In any case, I have no doubt that my notion of the proper morning version of this fantasy comes from a passage in Noel Streatfield's fine children's book, Ballet Shoes:

Our favorite chocolate bar

A little note here on something we have been eating regularly that I have no part in preparing whatsoever.

I am sure there are some among you who will hate me at least a little bit when I tell you this, but what S. and I really like to do with chocolate bars is to buy just one and eat it very slowly, over the course of a week or two between the two of us, just doling out a square apiece here and there.

The Vosges Naga bar is excellent for this, but not readily available in our usual shopping circuit, so we often purchase something by Ritter Sport instead. There are many fine flavors of Ritter Sport, but none compares to the Rum Trauben Nuss.

While I am not particularly a fan of rum raisin ice cream, I am passionately dedicated to these Ritter Sport bars of milk chocolate with rum, raisins, and hazelnuts. I love the smell as you snap off a square: a literally intoxicating mixture of the chocolate, hazelnuts, and LOTS of lovely rum.

The ingredients list indicates that these bars are flavored with a healthy dose of real rum, rather than feeble old rum flavoring. The raisins have an excellent texture (unlike, in my view, what happens to them in rum raisin ice cream) and taste as if they've been soaked in the rum for a week. The hazelnuts crunch nicely and seem to be toasted. The proportion of nuts and raisins to chocolate is quite high. Come to think of it, Rum Trauben Nuss is sort of like a vastly improved and more slender Chunky bar.

With so much actual booze inside, these seem like the sort of thing you wouldn't be able to find in the US, but here they are, though unfortunately not at Trader Joe's, which offers a smaller selection of less delectable Ritter Sports instead. I think we've found them at World Market and a number of smaller shops with a decent selection of European imports. For example, the Mediterranean shop at Cleveland's West Side Market has them, as does the candy shop on Forbes Avenue in Squirrel Hill, in Pittsburgh. And of course, they are also available online, including from Indian Gift Portal, which I mention because they so accurately describe them as "extremely pleasing." Many other chocolates may be "delectable" or "tasty," but only Rum Trauben Nuss pleases in the extreme. Just so!

Cake! with bittersweet chocolate frosting

I was very pleased with the "Dressy Chocolate Loaf Cake" from Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours. (We have some leftovers: I'll try to remember to take a photo of the next slice I eat.) It's a dark, tight-crumbed sour cream chocolate loaf cake, split into three layers and filled with raspberry jam, then frosted with a particularly good and easy bittersweet chocolate frosting.

The frosting is simplicity itself: rig up a double boiler and melt five ounces of chopped semi-sweet chocolate. Then, still working over the hot water, add half a cup of of room-temperature sour cream. Stir gently until the chocolate and cream are thoroughly combined, glossy, and smooth. That's it: no extra sugar or milk or butter or anything of the adulterating sort. The chocolate may seize up at first if your sour cream is chilly, but if you keep stirring, it will sort itself out.

Then you frost the cake with this icing while it's still warm. It's very easy to work with, plenty to cover a largeish loaf cake, and as it cools it firms up into something dense, fudgy, tangy, and not at all insipid or overly sweet. A+. I was thinking that it would be stylish and tasty to make the same cake with a lemon batter rather than all chocolate. Milk chocolate and lemon are sort of blah together, but (as I learned from Italian gelaterias) dark chocolate and lemon are great, and the raspberry would fit right in. What do you think?

Applesauce Spice Cake

Over the weekend I baked up a pan of applesauce spice bars from Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours. I pronounce them delicious, though I did a couple of things that I regret. I didn't have any corn syrup, so I substituted honey in the glaze. This worked fine, but I think that honey is more hygroscopic than corn syrup, making the glaze grow stickier over time.

I also put the bars in an airtight container in layers (with parchment between), in the refrigerator. I think that this also made the glaze gooier than it was supposed to be, and the lower layers especially got a bit gloppy. Still, very good, with a nice balance of sticky gooey treat and wholesome afterschool snack. (Or breakfast, in actual fact.) I wonder if I can find a nice 9" x 13" storage container for future batches.

The snacks of Britain

How exciting! The Phileas Fogg snack line has been relaunched. The offerings seem a bit more pedestrian this time around, though -- too many tortilla chips for my taste, though one does have poppy seeds, which is certainly not the norm.

In other snack news, we'd noticed recently that the shelves of our local convenience store had been positively overflowing with various "limited edition" versions of chocolate bars and other sweets. It seems that business reporters have noticed the same thing, as there were pieces about the phenomenon in both the New York Times magazine and the Wall Street Journal this weekend. The WSJ article goes into more detail, particularly on the basic failure of the gambit for KitKat in the UK.

Chocolate buttermilk cake

It is not often these days that I make a cake, but for the occasion of S.'s birthday, we wanted something dark and rich and damp. This cake, adapted from one in a 1999 issue of Gourmet, fits the bill to a T and was a great hit with everyone who ate it. The amount of batter made is a little more than I needed for two adorable 6" rounds. It would make one 10" round or perhaps two 8-inchers.

You could frost it and make it into a layer cake, but I think that rather detracts from the pure, velvety blackness of the cake itself. Whipped cream seems to me to be the order of the day. Baking times are always approximate, but all the more so when you play around with cake pan sizes. The 6" rounds took about 45 or 50 minutes in our oven; the 10" is supposed to take from an hour to an hour and 15 minutes. Keep an eye on it and take it out as soon as a tester comes out clean. If the middle caves in a bit as it cools, well, just serve it upside down and no one will be the wiser.

Small, soft peanut butter cookies

There's nothing particularly novel about these, but I threw them together by the seat of my pants and they turned out well, so thought I should record them for semi-posterity. Though it's not at all culturally homogenous, I think they go very nicely with Mariage Frères Marco Polo black tea. (As a side note, I just got some of the Marco Polo Rouge as well, and it's delicious. I've taken it to the office, where I've been going through it at an embarrassing rate.)

PEANUT BUTTER COOKIES

1/4 lb. butter
3 T. natural, salted peanut butter (or unsalted plus a fat pinch of salt)
3/4 c. white sugar
1 egg
1 1/4 c. flour
1/2 t. baking powder
Peanuts for garnish

Preheat oven to 375° F. Cream butter and sugar together. Beat in egg and peanut butter. With mixer on low, add dry ingredients. Make sure everything is mixed thoroughly, then roll the dough between your hands to make balls about 1" across and arrange on a cookie sheet. Press half a peanut, domed side up, into each ball. Bake until just lightly browned and still a bit soft, 8 to 10 minutes. Cool on a rack.

The prune is like a cake

Those who are close to me know that I have a certain fondness for the dried fruits of the plum tree, despite their unfortunate associations with old people and their bowels. I even adore stewed prunes, which is right up near the top of least appealing food names. They are excellent with cream, however, and taste dark and mysterious and comforting all at once. I would love to find a perfume that smelled just like a plump, fresh prune. And so on.

This love leads to dialogues such as the following, which took place on a walk home from the grocery store:

ME: Prunes are the perfect fruit! It is the queen of fruits! A prune is like a cake. It is so delicious. Why do people not appreciate the prune? They will eat a dried apricot! They will eat a raisin. But a dried plum is superior to both! It is so damp and rich a fruit! A prune... is like a cake.

S: Are you a spokesperson for BIG PRUNE?

ME: No. But let me tell you more about prunes. Have you tried today's modern prune?