Gardening: Flexing the Growing Muscle

I've tried growing tomatoes in giant pots for the past few years with mixed results (mostly dependent on whether my current apartment gets sunlight or not), and I've finally settled in a great place that has no sunlight. That means: no tomatoes. Well, very tiny tomatoes at the veeeery end of the growing season, small in number and size.

So, when a coworker decided to divide and give away strawberry plants, I figured, what the heck, give it a shot. So, into the tomato pot with the strawberry plants! The plants look pretty healthy, for their non-direct-sun-locale. And just look at what they've given me!

My, how big and tasty!

Oh, yes! strawberries for me! I may have mentioned before that I have a two-week period every summer of gorging myself on berries. (Recipe for best dessert evah: strawberries dipped in sour cream dipped in brown sugar. MMMM!) So, please feast your eyes again on my summer garden bounty!

Wait, is that a dime?

Okay... they're teeny! And, there's only four of them for the entire year. But they are tasty and sweet, for about 2 seconds. Sigh. Maybe the plants wil be more established next year?

Sewing: The rehearsal dress

Last summer, I got married. For the rehearsal dinner, I tried to find a nice red sundress, or a dress with red in it, partly because I like red and look good in red, but mostly because my fiance was Chinese, and it would be good to have a good-luck-red dress. There were no red dresses to be found, because last summer was the Year of Salmon Pinkness. I have a strong dislike (hate is such a powerful word) for pink, so this would not do. The obvious solution: despite not having a successful dress in the past, make my own dress! Of course!

The first challenge, find a fabric. Like I said, last year was the Year of Salmon, and there were no red fabrics to be found (other than silk, obnoxiously bright brocades, or sparkly prom-dress sateens). I found this nice red-and-white-flower-on-black print. Okay, yes, it's cotton quilting stuff, and I know you're not supposed to use it for clothing, but it was the first sorta-red thing I found and didn't hate.

This could work. I hoped it was red enough. There was certainly more red in it than any other pattern I'd seen. Maybe I could add a trim? No, it'd never match. I'll just do that fabric, and hope it's red enough. And not too black.

After taking far too long to make the fool thing (New Look #6885, view A), it turned out pretty cute!

Hooray!

Just before the rehearsal dinner, this was approximately my stream of thought: Is it red enough?! too black? my future mother-in-law will think I'm bringing death to the family with the white flowers and/or the black! My own mom will think I'm depressing! Am I channelling my inner-high-school-girl? It's too short! It's too tight, but not fitted enough! The stitches are far too wimpy and will break while I'm sucking in my tummy riiiiiip! and I'll be embarrassed and have to cancel the wedding and never see my lovely fiance again and and and...

So I wore a store-bought dress.

I did wear this little thing a few weeks later, and was actually complimented on it. Score!

Complaint: Shopping

Have I mentioned that I hate shopping? It's one of the most frustrating and body-image-problem-creating ventures ever invented. You drive to an over-priced department store (because the cheap-o places have crappy clothes that fall apart after the first washing), and wander through strangely shaped aisles of racks upon racks of gaudy-colored shirts that somebody thought were a good idea. There's a cute little sundress, pretty much just like the one you wanted, but no! your size isn't there. Well, try on the neighbor, which is the wrong color but the right size, and wait in line for a teeny fitting room that smells of feet, and of course it fits you on top, but most definitely not on the bottom, so you put it back, because it's what your mom taught you to do because the salesclerks will chatter and roll their eyes at you anyway. So much for looking up-to-date or trendy or... new. You wander over to the clothes that you always wear: nice, safe t-shirts and maybe a nice shirt for work. They mostly fit, and it's fine because the people who will see you in them the most is your stay-at-home-cat, and he doesn't care as long as you scratch him behind the ears for 5.6 minutes before he swats at your hand.

Why anyone actually goes shopping to relax or as a reward is beyond me.

Can someone please explain to me the benefits of such actions?

Kitchen Gods

I love food. While my eating habits should be supplemented with a little more exercise, there's very little better than cooking and baking and sharing a good meal with friends.

I'm not a religious person, but I really do appreciate a good explanation into how things work. For this reason, I have a list of Kitchen Gods, each useful in their own way, and I know they'll help me fix whatever mess I've gotten my food into. I also have a list of Lesser Kitchen Deities, to whom I look for guidance and recipes. I get recipes from all over (lots of cookbooks, and periodic web searches), but there are a few I go to consistently.

Here are my Kitchen Gods:

• Alton Brown. C'mon. He's funny. He's informed. He makes me forget how much I hated living in Atlanta. He has food anthropologists and food historians on his show. And sock puppets. And he's on tv. What more could you ask for?
  
• Harold McGee. The guy who wrote THE book on how food works. It's not a cook book, it's literally how food works. Not a quick read, but definitely an informative one, backed up with peer-reviewed scientific papers on the history of dairy products, possible health benefits, and protein denaturing.
  
• Joe Schwarcz. While not strictly a Kitchen God, he has some great but why? books out there. As one of the head honchos at McGill University's Office of Science and Society, he gives talks and has a call-in radio show that tries to explain current scientific knowledge to anyone who asks about anything. I met him once and was almost fan-girl speechless. Sad. But Dr. Joe is awesome.
  

And the Lesser Kitchen Deities:

• Seriously Good. KD Weeks is a Tennessee-turned-Oregon-turned-Tennessee chef and all-around experimenter with foods and stuff. He's got interesting recipes with everyday materials, especially when the farmers' markets are in full-swing.
  
• Chocolate and Zucchini. Clotilde is a French woman who loves to cook and bake. She messes with recipes and gets delicious results, especially her desserts. Besides her eloquently-worded stories to the recipes, the pictures are scrumptious.
  
• Manjula's Kitchen. I found her while looking online for Indian recipes. I can't get enough of her delicious vegetarian tasties! And watching Manjula make bread doughs on her YouTube stream is like magic.
  
• Herbivoracious. He's vegetarian and into haute cuisine, like super-fancy amuse bouche and molecular gastronomy. I've never made any of his recipes, but the mixes of flavors is intriguing.
  
• Post Punk Kitchen. Found while trying to to figure out how to eliminate eggs from various recipes (and yes, they tell you how). They also have some suggestions for other dietary limitations.
  
• Epicurious. A great search engine for looking up recipes. Following the user reviews is pretty reliable, although there aren't many people who are adventurous eaters.
  

Who are your Kitchen Gods?

Baking: Wedding cake results!

Question: When you take the cakes and raspberry-ganache from the last post and assemble them, then keep in mind the patterns from the friend's wedding invitations (see above picture), what do you get?

Answer:

Um, yes

And here's a shot at the wedding, with the professional baker's cupcakes, and the bride's hand-painted topper:

Baking: Wedding cake

(Note: today's exercise appears to be using as many hyphens as possible.)

My best friend is getting married tomorrow. About a year ago, she (after serving as an amazing maid-of-honor for me, as well as support network and champion-logistics-navigator and compromise-queen) asked if I'd be willing to make her wedding cake. Not a whole monster huge, multiple-layer behemoth. Just a simple flourless chocolate cake for the two of them while the rest of the wedding guests ate cupcakes. Flattery gets you oh-so-far, so I agreed.

She wanted the cake to be about 6" wide (to look like a top tier of a wedding cake), to be flourless (less gluten and dairy), and taste good (chosen over looking wedding-cakey). No problem!

Finding a recipe (and not just "a recipe" but "THE recipe") is actually harder than you'd want to think. Instead of making a range of desserts for dinner guests over the past year, they were all subjected to chocolate cakes and drilled for opinions on consistency, texture, and chocolate-ness. I explored different recipes, baking times, and percentages of cocoa, from 50% to 78% and mixtures thereof. By the way, 78% cocoa did not work well: there wasn't enough fat to incorporate all of the butter and left an oily blob on top of the cake, along with the fact that a 1/2" slice was not finish-able after a nice dinner.

The recipe I'm using is from Baking Illustrated, from the Cook's Illustrated people, and lovingly nicknamed "The Anal Cookbook" by another friend because of the extremely-particular directions and ingredients and explanations for such details. Despite its decidedly non-food-ish moniker, every recipe I've tried really works and tastes great (although I admit to enhancing their peanut butter cookies... not enough peanuts).

Sadly, one of my the triumphs in my head with the Anal Cookbook's flourless chocolate cake recipe was determining that one 9" cake was enough batter (go-go-geometry skills!) for two 6" cakes. Totally works. Makes the conversions much easier, even non-existent.

So why is TWO layers of 6" flourless chocolate cake important? Because it was determined (English teachers cringing at the passive voice?) that it would be nice if the cake looked, ya know, wedding-cake-ish. Tall. And the 6" wide still. And maybe it could be decorated...

Enter a lucky break: BakeWise, a present sent from a fellow foodie-couple. I'm currently in love with this book. Unlike the Anal Cookbook, which has determined the exact single recipe that everyone should love, BakeWise lists several similar recipes and explains not only the differences between them, but which ingredients make it so. Like the ganache recipe I'm using. This book lists five FIVE! ganache recipes, and tells you how to change between the silky-smooth and the satin-smooth.

This, my friends, is what you get from two pounds of chocolate, a whole lot of eggs and butter, and a full-on baking afternoon.

So now to drive down to the wedding locale, frost the cake (is it still called "frosting" the cake if it's ganache?), and decorate it. Oh no, you can't see a picture yet, because the almost-bride might be watching! And, I haven't done it yet. It will come (and hell yes, I'm getting pictures!)

Things that get me going

Cleverness and tradition. For the most part, these terms are probably considered unrelated and/or exclusive.

A friend posted an article containing furoshiki links to her Facebook page (which I will re-post here).

So, waaay back when, just what did they use instead of kerbillions of plastic bags? Why, cloth! Such a novel concept! And sooo eco-friendly! And when you've unwrapped your present, you can stuff your new handkerchief in your pocket and use it to wipe your nose.

I'm not sure why this simple square of fabric has its own name (furoshiki), but it probably means it won't be your next snot-wiping hankie. They also seem to be pretty large, thereby making a useful bag once tied. There's a tutorial for sewing the edges of furoshiki (I might keep this in mind for sewing a set of napkins). The Japanese environmental ministry has a pdf of how to fold furoshiki for various-shaped contents. And there's YouTube videos demonstrating tying the bags (this one shows three ways).

Am I the only one who thinks that a length of black satin could turn into an evening bag?

Baking: summer

I love farmer's markets and u-pick farms. I live for summer foods, fresh from the field, rather than "fresh" from the grocery store. In winter, I dream of the fresh fruits and vegetables, especially the berries. Every summer, there's a two-week period, where the bulk of my diet consists of strawberries (possibly diluted with some ice cream at night).

Why, hello, my pretties! What to do with a whole flat of raspberries?!

What's that? You want to be made into a pie? Well, if you insist!

The Rainier, Bing, and Tieton cherries were jealous of the raspberry pie. I try to please.