Homemade Croutons

With finals I eat a lot of salads and stirfry due to their immediacy and quickness. A few trips to the local yogurt shop isn't unheard of either. Still, I did find time to make some croutons with some day old bread. Simple and easy with little real work on my part. Perfect for snacking on on a salad if they actually make it to that. The recipe comes from my grandmother's recipe boxes, another winner in my opinion.

Garlic Croutons
Preheat the oven to 350F. Take day old bread and cut into one-inch cubes. Toss with a few glugs of olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Arrange in a single layer on a jellyroll pan covered in foil. Toast for about 10 minutes or until golden. Allow to cool. Serve or store in an airtight container for up to a week.

Okay, back to finals for me. I'm a bad blogger this week. =(

A Pause for Raspberry Sherbet

I turned my face away from the pastel magenta explosion coming from the counter and thanked my lucky stars that I actually put on the stupid kitchen apron. It had been a purchase I had long put off but now that I had finally paid out for one I always forgot to put the damn thing on. Luckily, a load of wash was saved and one of my favorite lay-around shirts was spared (only, of course, to be destroyed an hour later by an orange highlighter falling out of my mouth).

I looked down at my raspberry-milk slurry which would soon be churned into raspberry sherbet a la David's recipe, albeit with a bit of orange water and mandarin blossom vodka added. As I poured it into the well chilled bowl I began to think again of how I could utilize Sarah O'Brien's argument that the swamp in Hemingway's Big Two-Hearted River precipitates the eventual "machine in the garden" dilemma of pastoral escape and apply that to the manufactured food Nick eats during his lunch in the story.

Damn, stupid brain. "Stop thinking!" I thought to myself. All I wanted was to make something sweet. Instead my mind kept wandering back to papers I had to write.

With the looming knowledge that my summer vacation would be devoured by endless research, reading, and writing; and my current situation with final papers and thesis proposal, every last square inch of my living room and bedroom were buried in books and papers and notes. More than a few pieces of clothes had been ink stained and Mace was constantly stalking my printer should is show signs of loud ferocity again in it's unending effort to print more sources for me to glean over.

For those curious, my thesis is on the underlying problems in the rhetoric of the slow food movement. By slow food I do, indeed, mean the ACTUAL Slow Food Movement started by Carlo Petrini, but will also discuss a bit of the whole green, organic, local diatribes that people go into. Not to say that I don't agree with what they say, but sometimes the arguments don't take in the whole picture or are a bit too utopian (or in this case Watersian).

Furthermore with finals this year, in order to double up my reading, I ensured that my papers were all food related so I could read books I would could use for my thesis. The ritual of the meal as an indicator of societal values is the paper for my Cultural Studies class, the other on the use of food in Hemingway's novel "Farewell to Arms" and short story "Big Two-Hearted River" as a way to demonstrate the food and eating scenes as a form of escapism and thus a way to psychologically analyze the characters. The irony of the sherbet situation here was I was using food to escape the paper about food as escapism (I wonder if I can work this post in somehow...?).

As you can see I'm drowning in food theory, rhetoric, and psychology. It seems I have laid out my future as a food-focused sociologist of sorts.

But yes, the sherbet. We've gone off topic a bit. I needed to simply escape reading and writing about the blah blah blah of food and actually sit down and make some and eat it. Remind myself why I actually give a damn about it all.

The sherbet was perfect. More than perfect. It was rejuvenating. I picked up some of the books off the couch and plopped down with a ramen bowl of the ice cream. Cid and Mace curled up next to me and I pressed play on the DVD remote to start the Sex and the City DVD start up where I left it. A quick pause in the day to relax and rekindle my fires with a chilly treat, refreshing myself and recalling why all this food study crap is just so much fun.

Leetle Beebee Lemongrass

So many people told me how un-killable rosemary was. How hearty it was. Strong and resilient. A model plant.

Well, I showed them. I killed the hell out of plenty of them. So when people kept telling me how tough lemongrass was I decided to try it out and prove them wrong. Luckily, I work with not only a proficient cook, but a talented gardener named Marco.

When I asked Marco about lemongrass he told me how a tiny sprout had completely taken over his yard without his doing a thing. All he had to do was keep the ground around it a little wet. I asked him if he could possibly cut a piece or two off for me and get them going. Like any happy gardener, more than eager to preach the green gospel, he readily agreed.

Two weeks later he gave me this pot of soil with three sprouting heads of lemongrass inside. The sprouts were itsy-bitsy, nothing more than scions of citrus smelling grass with long blades sprouting tall out of them. Now, unlike previous gardening experiments I planned to keep this pot out on the back patio at my work, away from my shady side yard where the fig tree lets no light in. There I can care for it nearly every day and should something seem amiss I can easily ask Marco for some advice. I figure if I have a tutor nearby the plant has a much better chance at living, a sort of guardian angel against me, the Jason Voorhees of house plants.

Soon, I will attempt mint and thyme as well. My hope is that soon I can actually have a small herb garden at work and that I won't murder the whole lot of it. Sure, it won't be out my window, mere steps away from the kitchen. The point here is to learn to keep these little bastards alive and then take the lessons with me when I'm in a space where I can keep them at home.

Neat Little Bundle

Just an image. Sorry folks but been incredibly sick the last few days and have finals cracking down on me. =P
Photo by Elise Bauer. She always does such cool work.

The Cupcake That You Never Saw

"I had forgotten about this story. You know, I never told it on the blog because it was so embarrassing at the time but now it's just funny."

I related all this to Kate over dinner at Formoli's as we slurped down a delicious Italian style onion soup. We were at our now regular dinner date where we would play catch up over the past few weeks.

"So what was it?" she inquired.

Sadly, things don't always go as planned. During the days previous to what I call the Cupcake Disaster of Flames I had been obsessed with a new cupcake recipe I had been working on. The premise was that I would create a light and fluffy lemon cake that tasted of sunshine and unicorn giggles filled with blueberry curd so silky that you would melt into a puddle of joy. The whole thing would then be covered in a fine layer of meringue, doused in blueberry vodka and then lit aflame - a burst of sweets and fire of such tasty spectacle that druids would end up dancing nude in my kitchen in awe of it.

In my mind, I tend to exaggerate outcomes. Good and bad.

As I sat down to work, I began to whip together my blueberry curd, a recipe I had created from some raspberry curd one I saw on the interwebs. "A perfect switcheroo," I thought. As I whipped in glob after glob of butter, then a few globs more, I began to think that this recipe was beginning to not seem so right. It was a lot of butter. In fact, curd should not have a pool of oil swashing about listlessly upon the surface. To remedy the problem I whisked the ever-lovin' fuck out of that curd. Seriously, my strong arm was wiped out after that.

The next day the curd tasted like, well, like butter. Funky butter. With a hint of blueberries. Actually, that's a lie. It tasted like oily butter, but blue colored. No berry.

"Okay, so this needs work. Maybe," trying to convince myself, "it will taste better with the cake."

The lemon cake went well enough, but it was dense. I mean dense. Weapons grade, hard as diamond, bludgeon a man to death with my lemon cupcake of skull crushing doom dense. Still, at least it tasted like lemon cake.

"It's still photographable. I can work on the recipe later!"

Luckily, the meringue went off without a hitch. The flambe? Yeah... After about a thousand tries getting it to frickin' light I finally got it lit. The images came out great. I even got video! Yeah! All right! Go me! Cupcakes ablaze, now bring on those nuddie-druids to dance about my skull crushing cupcake of fire!

As I got up to reach for the camera case I then smacked the plate so hard it flew across the room. Bits of flaming egg white streaked across my carpet.

"Shitshitshitshitshit!!!" As I ran with a wet cloth screaming across my apartment attempting to put out the blazing sugar. Lucky for me the flames died out quickly leaving no scorch marks on my carpet and saving my deposit.

After the fire drill, I sank over the kitchen and, with detest, threw the rag into the sink. I looked over at the now mangled blue butter centered, skull crushingly dense cupcake with not destroyed semi burnt meringue. I picked it up and lifted it to my mouth. The smell was okay, the appearance was off-putting. I opened my mouth and decided to take a big bite, but only after a moment of hesitation.

"And that's the story of how an entire batch of cupcakes made it into the trash. The end."

Kate and I clinked our glasses together and dove into the whiskey burger that had been set before us. Sometimes, it's just better when you aren't the one cooking.