When I was in 4th grade, my dad was in one of his rare uncoupled phases. He was a cop with two kids who worked the night shift, so my older brother took care of both of us; he did the laundry, made sure I did my homework, and made dinner. And because it was simple to make, my dad often bought those packages of frozen hamburger patties for us to make for dinner. We started to get sick of hamburgers almost every night, until one of us spotted the big twirling spice rack on the counter and decided that it wasn’t just decoration. Since we were kids, the combinations of spices that we doused our patties with were peculiar …but invariably quite good, as long as we restricted ourselves to less than five spices. It really opened my eyes to the possibilities of spices.

In a way, that’s what Brad and I are doing.  Except that we actually know what the spices taste like before throwing them together.  And we didn’t actually use very many spices in this recipe.  But it’s still the same sort of idea!

So this week, I went with a big ol’ sirloin steak from our local meat store plus, on a whim, purple potatoes. The woman who checked me out at the grocery store assured me that purple potatoes are just like regular potatoes, and she was right. What she didn’t tell me, though, is that they are a deep, deep purple all the way through and even the juice is purple! It’s a little freakish, after nearly 30 years of potatoes with pale innards, to be cutting up this little eggplant-purple alien.

(Doesn’t that just look like it might grow a little razor-lined mouth any minute and decide to eat YOU?!)

Brad suggested we make a sort of hash of the potatoes and fry them in a pan. Since I was craving cooked onions, we threw those in too. Then, because no fried potato hash is complete without bell peppers of some kind but Brad doesn’t like green peppers, we decided to include a red one. It wasn’t until we were on our way home with the onions and bell pepper that I even realized how colorful this meal would be.

Sirloin and Purple Potatoes

• 1/4 tspn of oil
• 3 purple potatoes, chopped
• half of a red bell pepper, chopped
• a little less than a quarter of a white onion, sliced thin
• salt
• pepper
• garlic
• 1/2 tspn of butter

• 1 sirloin steak
• salt
• pepper
• 1/4 tspn of oil

• 1 frying pan and 1 grill pan -or- 2 frying pans

We started the potatoes with salt and pepper in the oiled frying pan on medium high, since we knew they would take longer to cook. We were pleasantly surprised to find that, just like regular potatoes, they change color slightly as they cook; these ones seemed to get more blue-ish (though still purple) as they cooked. Once they had changed color completely on the outside – about 15 minutes or so with my 1/2 inch-sized chunks – we turned the heat down to medium and added the bell pepper and onion, then let it sit more, just stirring occasionally. You should keep in mind that smaller pieces of potato will cook faster!

Brad prepared the sirloin with a very simple sprinkle of salt and pepper on both sides. Then he laid in in the grill pan – you can use a frying pan if you don’t have one – and turned the heat to medium high. After it had browned well on one side, he flipped it over and let the other side cook. Since Brad was the one who determined when the meat was done, and neither of us was really sure how to know, I will now refer you to an article from someone who does.

Getting the timing of the two parts of the meal right so that they will both be ready to eat at the same time is tricky, and I can’t tell you what it is exactly because we didn’t get it right. It also depends on how much you want to cook your sirloin; Brad left ours a bit pink in the middle, but I wouldn’t have minded more of a sear on the outside and a little less pink on the inside.

Once it is done, it is ready to eat!

But I stumbled across an article in the New York  Times that is Experiments in Baking-style: the writer gave a chef couple a 19th century candy recipe and asked them to reinterpret it in their own way. I think it has an excellent explanation of the thought patterns that bring about new recipes (even for me, which is surprising since I have absolutely no formal training). It really demystifies what has been built up as something that only the Gordon Ramsey’s of the world can do, and reminds us that the only things we really need are taste buds and some imagination.

The three ingredients that had to be included in the dish were honey, turmeric, and banana.

I started off by thinking of what might go with the individual ingredients. I came up with all kinds of things that could go with honey or banana but was rather stumped on the turmeric so I kind of ignored it until I absolutely had to deal with it.

But the one that I really latched onto was honey. I used to work in a cafe that make oat groats as an alternative to oatmeal for breakfast. The chewiness and nuttiness of the groats is a perfect accompaniment to the gentle, almost tangy sweetness of clover honey. From there, the concept grew as I worked…

I also dragged out all of the spices I thought might work in the dish so that I would have them on hand right then. Some, I had to smell or taste to remember what they were like, but I came up with a pretty good selection.

• 1 cup of water
• 1/2 cup of oat groats (other groats might work nicely too if you want to try them)

uncooked oat groats

Bring the water to a boil. Pour in the groats and make sure they are completely covered by the water. Simmer, covered, stirring occasionally. If you need to, you can add a little more hot water so that they don’t burn but typically they should be done when the water is mostly gone. This takes about 10-15 minutes in my experience. The goal was to get them chewy.

Once they were cooked, I added

• 1 tspn of butter
• 4 tspns of clover honey
• 1 tspn of cornstarch
• 1/2 tspn of turmeric
• 2 Tbspns of wheat flour

Since my idea was to make a sort of crust similar to a graham cracker crust on a cheesecake, but the groats aren’t small enough to clump together on their own, I had to add the cornstarch and wheat flour. The turmeric really caused problems here, since it cut into the sweet flavor of the honey and left a weird (not good) aftertaste. So I put a little of the mixture into a tiny bowl and started testing some of my potential spices on it. From reading the side of my turmeric bottle, I learned that it is a member of the ginger family, so after a few bad attempts, I put in some ginger.

It was lovely, but still didn’t take away enough of the turmeric aftertaste. I knew nutmeg would go with ginger, and sure enough it did. I added a little cinnamon to round out the classic trio of pie spices:

• 1/4-1/2 tspn of ginger
• 1/2 tspn of freshly ground nutmeg
• 1/4 tspn of cinnamon

Finally, it tasted right, strong but exactly what I was looking for. I sprayed my silicone muffin cups with some butter Pam and carefully spread the mixture across the bottom. Then I heated the oven to 425F and baked the groat crust for about 10 minutes. It came out like a little chewy, bendy, spicy cookie – delicious!

While that was cooking, I started to throw together some other ingredients without any clear idea of how they would work together but hoping that whatever it was would be creamy and subtle.

• 1/2 cup of egg whites from a carton
• 1/4 tspn of lemon peel
• 2 tspns of white sugar

• 3 Tbspns of ricotta cheese
• 1 Tbspn of coconut milk

• 1 mashed-up, overripe banana

• 1 tspn of cornstarch
• 1/4 tspn of baking powder

First, I beat the egg whites, lemon peel, and white sugar until it was frothy. I thought it would be fun if I could manage to make a meringue but was perfectly satisfied with the indestructibly foamy mixture that I got instead. In another bowl, I whisked the ricotta and coconut milk together, then added it into the foamy mixture and whisked again. Then I mashed the banana as much as I could (which wasn’t hard since I had defrosted it from the freezer and they are very soft and slimy that way) and mixed that into everything else. A little concerned about how liquid it was and whether or not it would hold together, I added the cornstarch. The baking powder, I hoped, would help it stay fluffy.

When all of this was mixed together, I poured it into the muffin cups that still held the groat crust. There were two crusts that I didn’t have anything to put over so I took them out. Then I baked the whole thing for 15 minutes at 400F; I knew they were done when the tops got slightly brown spots and a fork through the middle came out clean.

I let them cool a little bit, then pulled one out – which required a little work around the edges and under the crust to keep the crust and the top from separating – and took a bite. It was perfect!

Though I think they’re delicious just like this, Brad wanted some brown sugar sprinkled on the top of his. We even burnt some sugar on, since we’d just found a little culinary torch today while going through our house trying to find stuff to put in his grandma’s garage sale next weekend. The caramelization was wonderful, too.

I am so excited about my wonderful little invention, and I hope the directions I have here aren’t too confusing so that you can replicate them if you want to.

*The Royal Foodie Joust is run by The Leftover Queen from her very awesome forums, where you should go and vote for me!

But I was commissioned to bake dessert for tomorrow’s Father’s Day celebration, so I finally had a chance to try something I have been wanting to do for a couple of weeks: a cherry pie.

I’ve never baked a cherry pie before but I figured my old blackberry pie recipe would easily work.

In my early teenage years, when I was otherwise miserable, I would visit my Uncle Dale and Aunt Elaine. They had 9 acres of mostly wooded property in a secluded area where they intended to build their dreamhouse. There were many plots of land nearby that were simply fields or alder forest; hardly anyone else lived out there. So we frequently went exploring and picked the fruits of the fallow land, including the invasive and impossible to eradicate blackberry vines. One late summer day, we picked about 8 coffee cans full of blackberries so my aunt decided that we should bake a pie. The crust recipe she found in her dusty old cookbooks was amazing, and of course the fresh blackberry pie was absolutely heaven. Thus began my obsession with blackberry pies.

But moving to a different region, where the blackberries ripen in a completely different season, I often miss them. There were blackberries on sale a few weeks ago at my local Whole Foods but when I returned to buy them, they were back to their normal outrageous price again. Instead, I went with cherry pie.

The next obstacle in the cherry pie drama was actually finding the recipe that my aunt had given me. I’ve written it on various loose pieces of paper and placed it in various “I’m sure I’ll remember it’s here” places over the years, but this time I couldn’t find it. Dejected, I turned to the sole “dusty old cookbook” that I own, Adventures in Good Cooking and sure enough, there was a similar crust recipe within! I had to adjust a few things but how would this be Experiments in Baking if I didn’t?!

Cherry Pie

Preheat oven to 450F.

crust
2/3 cup of vegetable oil
2 1/2 cups of regular flour
1 tspn of salt

approx. 3 Tbspns of cold water

With a pastry blender or a fork, blend the first three ingredients. Sprinkle the cold water on and blend some more; you may need to add a little more or a little less. Divide the dough in half, since this makes two 9-inch diameter crusts.

I roll out my crust between two pieces of waxed paper, which makes it easier to clean up than a counter and rolling pin covered in flour dust and just easier to handle in general. Plus, if you don’t want to make the pie right then or wish to save the crust for later, you can just throw it in the fridge on the flattest spot you can find. Then, when I’m ready to put the crust in the pie plate, I peel off the top layer of waxed paper, place the plate upside down on the crust, and carefully edge it off the counter with one hand underneath before flipping it over. This way, I can aim the crust exactly where I want it and don’t have to deal with it trying to peel itself off of the waxed paper.

Repeat with the other half of the dough.

It’s easy at this point to patch any holes and make sure that the edge is about even (if you wait too long, I discovered today, the dough becomes crumbly and hard to manage). You want to leave a little dough on the top of the rim so that you’ll have something to attach the top to, but you can easily rip off the edges that are too long and squish them into spots that don’t go high enough since the dough is about the consistency of PlayDoh.

filling
3 3/4 to 4 cups once-frozen cherries that have been thawed
1 cup of sugar

Stir the sugar and cherries until all of the cherries are coated and all of the sugar is red. I only put 3 3/4 cups of cherries in but I wish it had been a little more full. Then I poured the cherries into the crust.

With the other half of the dough, I simply cut strips with a butter knife. I’m tempted to say that I laid the strips on top in a lattice pattern but there was no “laying” about it since I had left the dough sitting out while waiting for the cherries to thaw enough. The dough was crumbly and kept breaking up. I still managed to get a pretty successful lattice pattern but I wouldn’t call it pretty. Another option, if you don’t want to go through all of that work, is to simply place the whole second section of rolled-out dough on top, pinching the edges all the way around to keep it closed, and then stab it several times with a fork so some of the liquid can vent.

One of the difficulties of baking with Adventures in Good Cooking is that only a couple of the pie recipes actually have a baking temperature, so I had to steal mine from a recipe for apple pie: Bake for 15 minutes in a 450F oven. Then turn the oven to 250F and continue baking for 35 to 40 minutes.

I won’t know until tomorrow how successful I was, since it would be rude (though hilarious) to show up with a pie that I’ve already eaten a part of, but it looks beautiful and the tiny bits of crust that I’ve picked off taste great.

Next time: Adjust the amount of oil; it seemed like too much. Let the cherries thaw completely first – and drain them before adding the sugar. Add a little flour or cornstarch to the filling. Paint the top with a little egg or milk to encourage more browning.

—

Update: The pie was actually pretty good. After a careful trip to Brad’s parents’ house, where I then siphoned off as much of the juice with a turkey baster as I could, we cut up the pie and proceeded to eat it. Everyone agreed that the flavor was delicious; it was the textures that were a little off. (Don’t we sound like a family of food critics? He he.) The bottom crust was so soaked with juice, it “felt like it wasn’t cooked”, to quote Brad, and there was no lovely cherry syrup to complete the filling along with the cherries. The cherries, however, popped nicely in your mouth and the saltiness of the crust was an excellent compliment.

Perhaps next time I will bake the bottom crust alone, cook the cherries into a syrup-y mass on the top of the stove, and then combine the two.

The first week, Brad and I took a lovely trip to Madison, Wisconsin, and Chicago, Illinois. If you are so inclined, you can see the whole tour in pictures.

The second week, there was piles of procrastinated work to do and our own bed to sleep (late) in.

The third week featured our birthdays. Since the only gift I received was an expensive piece of musical equipment that I have been drooling over for years (literally), I spent more time playing with that than thinking about baking. And of course, the two (!) birthday cakes were formed by the loving labor of my mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law, rather than me.

But next weekend is our “friend” birthday party (as opposed to our family one, which was tonight and featured wonderful, shoddy VHS footage of various embarrassing scenes from Brad’s childhood), for which I have already agreed to make dessert, so I will have to concoct something sweet and edible and possibly baked again very soon.

The rest of the summer promises to be full of non-baking events, but of course desserts must always be had and must often be baked. The true test of my ability to bake-and-blog will be in the fall, when I start grad school – without any alleviation of my work duties at home. Yikes.

I accidentally bought an extra can of Ovaltine a few weeks ago, so I’ve been wanting to make it an extra ingredient in something.

1/2 cup of white sugar
1/4 cup of brown sugar tightly packed
1/4 cup of margarine
1 tspn of vanilla
2 Tbspns of egg-in-a-carton

1/2 cup of white flour
1/2 cup of whole wheat flour
1/2 tspn of baking soda
1/4 tspn of salt
2 Tbspns of Ovaltine

1/2 cup of chocolate chunks

1/8-1/4 cup of white flour (if necessary)

Preheat oven to 375F. In a medium-sized bowl, mix the first five ingredients together. Add everything but the chocolate chunks and extra flour, and mix it in too. It may seem like a great shortcut to just mix everything together at once but every time I’ve done that (on accident), I’ve come out with flat cookies. Fold the chocolate chunks in.

Cover a cookie sheet with parchment paper. By the teaspoonful, place the dough an inch or two apart on the cookie sheet. Bake the cookies for 8 to 10 minutes. Since two of my three cookie sheets are otherwise occupied at the moment, I spooned cookie dough onto a separate piece of parchment paper while one batch was baking; when the first were done, I simply slid them off and slid the uncooked dough on. Then the cooked cookies could cool a little on the counter while the next batch started.

After the first batch, I noticed that my cookies were coming out flat,

My flat, kind of crunchy Ovaltine cookies.

I determined the amount of Ovaltine to put in it by how much liquid there is in the recipe: not much – just the vanilla and egg. Since the Ovaltine can says to add 4 Tbspns per 8 oz. of liquid, I originally only put 1 Tablespoon in, but when I tasted the dough (I know you aren’t supposed to when it has raw egg in it but I can never resist), I couldn’t taste anything so I added another Tbspn. The extra flour made the fluffier cookies a lighter color, which made them look like dirty cookies, but other than that, I couldn’t tell any difference at all.

A regular chocolate chip cookie (bottom) and one made with Ovaltine.

Next time: Determine amount of Ovaltine to put in the recipe according to how many ounces of ingredients there are, rather than ounces of liquid. Make sure the dough is about the consistency of Play-do before starting baking.

We first met Tuffy when she was just a duckling herself, and she earned her name by being the only survivor of her mother’s batch that year. Her mother completely ignored her, yet she dodged and ran between all of the big duck’s feet and pecking beaks in order to get a little of the cracked corn we throw to them, growing into adulthood in spite of her mother rather than because of her. She’s fearless; while most of the other ducks keep a certain distance, she will eat out of our hands with no compunction. So first she was just “tough duck” and then eventually she became Tuffy. And now she’s got a brood of her own. (I know, I should have taken pictures. Soon, I will!)

All of this is to say that my experiment with minty hairspray seems to be have been successful so far. I’ve seen wasps while we’re out and about, but none have come charging at my face or attempted to not-so-discreetly investigate my hair. While observing Tuffy’s babies – still so new that they couldn’t figure out that they were supposed to eat the corn we were throwing them like Tuffy was – a wasp was buzzing around a little clump of flowers but never decided that I was a more interesting flower instead.

Dare I say that it actually works?

Previous entries:
Experiments in Wasp Repellant, Day 3
Experiments in Wasp Repellant

2 ripe bananas

1 cup of whole wheat flour
2 tspns of baking powder
cinnamon
nutmeg

3/4 cup of skim milk
1 egg or 1/4 cup of egg-beaters (I used half regular and half egg white since I ran out of the regular egg stuff)
1 Tblspn of vanilla

1/4 cup of whole-wheat flour (optional)

chopped walnuts (optional)

powdered sugar

I mashed the bananas into a big bowl, which wasn’t as easy as it should have been since they weren’t as overripe as they looked, so there were still big chunks of banana that I was too impatient to mash all the way. In another bowl, I sifted together the dry ingredients with a fork. Then I added them to the mashed bananas and mixed until the flour was moist; I didn’t mix it all the way since that would have taken forever with the large bits of banana I was dealing with. I poured the skim milk, egg and vanilla in. Then I stirred it until it was as smooth as I could get it. It seemed really watery to me, and both Brad and I like our pancakes pretty thick, so I added another 1/4 cup of whole wheat flour.

After heating a big pan that had been sprayed with butter spray, I poured some of the pancake batter on. The “secret” to knowing when to flip a pancake the first time is to watch the bubbles that form and break in the top; when the ones near the edge break and don’t fill in right away, you should be able to flip it without splattering it everywhere. Once the cooked side is facing up, I watch the sides to see how solid they are, since that’s a pretty good indication of how far the heat has penetrated into the pancake. Of course, you can always just slide your spatula underneath and peek at the bottom if you aren’t sure.

Once the first pancake was done, Brad and I of course had to try it immediately. We found the syrup and banana flavors mildly conflicting with each other so we went with powdered sugar instead, which added the little bit of extra sweetness that the pancakes needed.

Near the end of the batter, I added a few chopped walnuts and cooked a tiny bit of the batter by itself just to taste it (I was putting the rest of the pancakes from there in the freezer for future breakfasts). It was really good, adding another dimension of taste.

Next time: Make sure the bananas are soft and even more ripe so they are easier to mash and sweeter. Maybe try maple syrup in the recipe instead of vanilla. Add chopped walnuts to more pancakes.

There is not a lot of experimentation to be done with chocolate chip cookies that hasn’t already been done.

(Plus, the kind I make come from a copyrighted recipe, no alterations. I don’t want anyone stealing my work so I won’t do that to anyone else either.)

Tomorrow, the plan is to stir it up a little again and make banana pancakes.

But not a single dive-bombing wasp in sight.

Perhaps they are still in hiding or were killed off by the recent sudden dips in temperature but I am hopeful…

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