yes, it's spelled "jucy"

This is complete blasphemy. The Jucy Lucy is Minneapolis' revered burger (Matt's Bar, holla!), and my god, it is good.

My version, while good, is (gasp) vegetarian*. Not because I have the audacity to claim that mine is better, but because I'd already eaten all the beef in my house and am too lazy to go to the grocery to pick up some ground chuck. Also, I had slices of sharp cheddar, not american cheese, so yeah, this is going into seriously yuppie territory.

Black Bean Jucy Lucy
1 onion, minced
olive oil
2 cans of black beans, drained (or a couple ladelfulls of cooked black beans, which is what I used)
1 cup of bread crumbs (approximately. I used panko crumbs b/c that's what I had in the cupboard)
a healthy dash of chili powder, or whatever seasonings sound good
cheese of your choice: about 2 oz per burger
burger stuff, duh: buns, mustard, etc.

Sauté the minced onion in a glug of olive oil. While you're doing that, smoosh up the black beans into a chunky paste: I used a pastry mixer for this, but you could use a fork or a food processor. Whatever works! Mix the sautéed the onion, chili powder, and bread crumbs into the black beans. Form into smallish patties and flatten.

Take a chunk of cheese and place it in the center of one flattened patty: I find this works best with a cube-like chunk of cheese, rather than a flat slice. Place another flattened patty on top and form into one cohesive, thick patty of goodness.

If you have a grill, grill it. The black bean patty really does hold together well.
Otherwise, you can bake the black bean burger in the oven (400 degrees) for about 10-15 minutes, and finish it under the broiler or in a lightly oiled pan to get a really good outside crust going on.

If you're a fan of overkill, as I am, top the burger with a slice of cheese. What? A Jucy Lucy is no exercise in moderation.

Makes about 6 burgers, depending on how large you form the patties

*Hell, you could make this vegan if you used nondairy cheese, but let's not go nuts here.

pancake house

MM FOOD.
(Ask me about last night's Mos Def / MF DOOM show and you will get an earful. Promise.)

My kitchen is a wreck, and there might be a pool of brown butter on the floor, but I am sated and pleased.
I have been thinking about polenta lately, and how absurdly delicious it is. That led to some searching for breakfast polenta options outside the normal poached eggs + polenta + cheese, which led to the polenta pancakes recipe from the Times. (I think this would be even better as waffles, but I was not about to procure a wafflemaker.)


I followed the Times recipe, and then topped the pancake stack with a dollop of plain greek yogurt and some slivered almonds that I spiced with chili oil and black pepper. As I ate these, I had a moment of glorious wonder where I asked myself "why do these taste so freakishly amazing?". I then looked over and saw that I'd bought salted butter, rather than unsalted, and that about half a stick of salted butter had been used to make my breakfast.


Yeah, that's why they were so good.

peanut butter jelly time

There's the ridiculously specific (and lengthy) list of foods I do not allow in my apartment simultaneously in the hopes that I will stop doing things like creating impromptu pastries at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday and then eating the entire thing before the morning. Apparently, peanut butter is now added to that list. Tonight, in further proof that a significant part of my brain wants me to die of a heart attack before the age of thirty, my "solution" to the wicked craving I had for peanut butter was to eat the whole jar.
(The jar was, um, 3/4 full.)

See, if the jar of peanut butter was just sitting there in the cupboard, it would tempt me! And I'd know it was there! And then I'd eat it every night!
But if I sat down and ate the entire jar in one burst of legumey gluttony, then it would be gone. And then I wouldn't eat it any more! Solution!

By the by, chunky peanut butter rolled in cocoa krispies is really freaking delicious.

gaga, ooh la yum

I love Lady Gaga (much to the consternation of my little brother, who I forced to listen "The Fame Monster" three times during our epic drive to Iowa on New Year's Day).

I love cookies.

I love, love, love, love this.

celebratory

Merry Christmas (eve), lovelies.

Awesome panel-skirt dress, vintage; pumps, Elie Tahari; wine, Chateau Ste. Michelle blanc de blancs sparkler.

And an early Christmas present for me: I got the first item on my wishlist. Why yes, I did get a job. Cheers!

curry slurry

I tweeted the other day about my what-to-make-for-dinner dilemma--

wait, we can stop right there. That is perhaps the ultimate in Stuff White People Like: twittering about food. Or perhaps the White Whine of the day: "oh no, I have an esoteric assortment of ingredients in my cupboards, please tell me what to cook".
Moving on.

-- and my friend and former boss Stacey replied, with this "recipe" into 140 characters or less. It's less a recipe than a list of ingredients and a suggestion, and it worked out very well. Here, then, is my slightly more specific recipe for Stacey's abundantly healthy dinner suggestion.

You want about a 3:1 ratio of liquid to lentils, regardless of how many servings you're making.

3 cups stock (I used homemade chicken stock) or water or other tasty simmering liquid
1 cup dried lentils
lots and lots of curry powder to taste (I used about 2 tablespoons, I think. I just kinda dumped it in.)
a good dash of ginger just for fun (I used about 1/2 teaspoon, I think.)
3 small-to-medium apples

Rinse the lentils a few times and remove any rocks or other unappetizing bits by straining them.
If you've got a crock pot (and I highly recommend that you acquire one- I love my crock pot), put the lentils in there with the liquid and the spices, and simmer on low heat for six to eight hours. Walk away, get things done, etc.

If you're doing lentils on the stove, put them in a pot with the liquid and spices and simmer, covered, over low heat for about 30 minutes.

Core and chop the apples. Add the chopped apples to the crock pot and continue to cook for about an hour, or if you're doing this on the stove, add them to the pot and cook, covered, for about 5-10 minutes, depending on how mushy you like your apple pieces.


Serve hot or cold. Makes, I don't know, four servings? Depends on how hungry you are.
(Bonus: inadvertently vegan if you swap out the chicken stock for veg stock or water or something, y'know, vegan.)

glutton for...

My fondness for butter, bacon, cheese, and other sundry cholesterolicious delights has not gone unremarked upon, either here on the blog (bacon chocolate chip cookies, what what), or while standing at my closet this morning and realizing that many of my clothes no longer fit over my Hibernation Belly.
Oops.

And this weekend, a friend said "no, I don't really like bacon". No, he's not a vegetarian, either.

In the interest of proving myself to be more than a one-trick high-fat pony, I made an accidentally vegan side dish for Thanksgiving, and damned if it's not really tasty, despite the lack of pork products or cheese or, I don't know, foie gras.


It was far more photogenic when made on Wednesday evening, btw.

Roasted Beets with Hazelnuts and Lemon
3 lbs. red beets
3 lbs. yellow beets
1 cup hazelnuts, lightly toasted, skins removed
2 meyer lemons
2 tablespoons olive oil
salt & pepper to taste

If you've got to toast the hazelnuts yourself, put them on a jelly-roll pan (y'know, a cookie sheet with sides. What, am I the only person who calls it a jelly-roll pan?) and pop into the oven at about 350 degrees until they're lightly browned: about 10 minutes. Let them cool a little bit, and then roll them around with your hands in a kitchen towel so the skins will peel off.

While the hazelnuts are toasting, peel the raw beets. Cut off the stalks and any tough spots, and use a vegetable peeler to remove the skin. If you peel the red ones first, and then the yellow ones, you'll minimize the eventual magenta tint of your palms.
If you really want to go for the bi-color effect (which is why I got two different colors of beets, after all), you'll want to keep them separate until after they're cooked. If you don't care, put all the beets in a large bowl and prep them to roast all at once. If you really don't care, just get one color of beets and roll with it.

Otherwise: take the two meyer lemons and juice them. Take half this juice and mix it with salt & pepper to taste and half the olive oil. Toss the red beets in this mixture, and put them in a large enough pan for roasting. Cover the pan with foil, and roast at 400ish degrees for about 40 minutes. Remove the foil, and roast for about 20-30 minutes more, depending on how large the beets are, and how tender you like them.
Set the beets aside to cool.

Do the same thing with the yellow beets in a separate roasting pan, if you're fussy enough to keep your food sorted by color. Except! While the yellow beets are roasting still covered in foil, cut up the meyer lemons you've already juiced. Yeah, you're basically cutting the rind into pieces, and it's not pretty, but so what. If you're hell-bent on making them pretty, though, get two new pristine meyer lemons and cut those up. Add the lemon slices to the pan of yellow beets to cook, uncovered, for that last 20-30 minute stretch of roasting.
Cool the yellow beets.

Slice each color of beets once they're cool and layer them together in a pretty pattern in a serving bowl (or your sole 9x13" casserole dish, if you're me). Sprinkle the hazelnuts between some of the layers, and on top.

Hey! It's vegan! I totally didn't plan it that way, either.
It pretty much fills a 9x13" pan, so it's however many servings you think it is. I don't know: I have no way to gauge how much you like to eat your vegetables.

it's amazing that i'm not yet morbidly obese.

Unofficially, I have a rule for myself.
I'm not allowed to have eggs, flour, sugar, and butter in the house at the same time. This is for my own good, as if I have pastry basics lying about (do you know how many times I've made late-night-drunken pâte à choux or pâte brisée? yes? you've seen this in action? then you understand), I will start pulling out mixing bowls and looking for some heavy cream and suddenly I've made a tower of cheese puffs or cookies or an apple tart and eaten the whole thing while standing up in the kitchen and eyeing the pile of dirty dishes guiltily.

That is to say: I'll do things like this.


That is a plate of bacon chocolate-chip cookies, and it pleases me. I stole the idea wholesale from Mindy Segal at Hot Chocolate, where magic happens. (I live too close to Hot Chocolate for my own good.) The internet, as always, guides me: I used the recipe from Pete Bakes!, as my mother's chocolate chip cookie recipe, though amazingly delicious in its own right, involves margarine and vanilla pudding mix, and that just seemed wrongful in this context.

Essentially a batch of Pig Candy chopped up and mixed into the Toll House cookie recipe, this is damn good. But it could be better, oh yes. I'd cook the bacon for slightly less time so it doesn't flirt with overly crisping when baked with the cookies, and also pour the reserved bacon fat into the cookie dough before putting in the chocolate chips and bacon chunks. Hell yes, bacon fat plus cookie dough. I did that for this batch, and yeah, I pretty much freaked out with joy.


Next time- and oh, there will be a next time!- I'm going to use the 72-hour chocolate chip cookie recipe and then add in my own layer of bacony extravagance.

To bastardize the ironic-punk-rock slogan seen on bumper stickers of my youth: bacon's not dead, it's just really cool now.

hit me up

I had the whole day "free" today. Originally, the plan was to spend the day in a blissful whirlwind of cooking projects, augmented by yoga and other self-improvement pursuits, before heading out for the night.
Life gets in the way, though. Like when life, two days prior, decides that my stress level dropping below "panic" was unacceptable, and that new stressors must be introduced accordingly.
Something, like, say, this.

Well, shit.

On my way to the grocery this week, I got rear-ended by someone who overlooked the left-turn signal, the turn lane, and my clear intention to turn once the oncoming traffic cleared.
Other than having to deal with the hassle of calling the cops, the insurance agents, and several auto-body-repair shops, that also put a total cramp in my day. All the errands I was to run on the day I got hit were then shafted over to this morning and afternoon, and my god, doing five hours of errands in the car will sap your will to live just a little bit.

At times like this, I need a seriously calming and pleasant diversion. Since killing off the vodka in my freezer before 2 pm on a weekday isn't really socially acceptable, I chose a less-incapacitating pastime for the afternoon.


Bless you, Julia Child. (And bless you, small-town-Nebraska antique store, for stocking a first edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and selling it to me for $2. Yes, $2.)
I spent the day roasting a chicken with garlic, beets, carrots, and parsnips, and am now spending the evening sniffing the chicken stock now simmering on the stovetop.
Of course, when roasting a four-pound chicken for one person, concessions must be made. I cannot, for example, wear anything that might indicate how much butter was involved in making and eating this chicken. New favorite flowy shirt to the rescue!

Sheer flowy shirt with rhinestone buttons, vintage; skinny jeans, Uniqlo; favorite grey flats, Steve Madden.
Yes, I am wearing a camisole under this sheer shirt, don't worry. It just happens to be a near-perfect flesh tone for me.

Rhinestone button detail: left shoulder only. Swoon.

thirty before thirty

I really should have thought about this, say, five months ago, when it would've been thirty months to my thirtieth birthday. Thinking about it now means that my list is now compressed into twenty-five intense months that will very likely be unable to contain all these crazy goals, but in the spirit of Maggie's Mighty Life List and Sarah (of Yes and Yes)'s 31 New Things, I'm going to put it out there anyway and dive right in, because why the hell not?
Let's check some shit off, baby. I've got twenty-five months to attempt the following:

• Learn to drive a stick shift
• Have a season subscription to the opera, a theater, and a dance company*
• Attend a real masquerade
• Surprise someone with a lavish, extravagant present for no reason at all other than that I love them*
• Travel somewhere completely new, solo*
• Take a serious wine-tasting class*
• Be able to give really good career advice to someone
• Can/preserve some food
• Get acupuncture for my wonky shoulder, hips, ankle, back, omg I am broken*
• Complete a mini-triathalon*
• Pick up the tab at the grocery store for someone who needs it*
• Learn to surf*
• Be able to ice-skate backwards
• Try a regional/ethnic cuisine that I have zero familiarity with (Inuit? Dutch? Egyptian?)*
• Go on a camping/biking trip that crosses at least two states in one day (Admittedly, this is relatively easy in Chicago: one can bike to Indiana or Wisconsin via trails that are structured for rather leisurely cycling.)
• Visit the catacombs*
• Visit my sister in Hong Kong*
• Grow orchids*
• Invest $50 in a stock*
• Watch a game in the new Yankee Stadium*
• Attend one of those “secret” dinner parties (yeah, they were trendy a few years ago. So what? I still think a secret dinner party sounds like a good time.)*
• Actually decorate my apartment, rather than just putting all my stuff in it and hoping that it might not be too terrible-looking*
• Get my Slouching Towards Bethlehem tattoo*
• Learn to snowboard*
• Spend two weeks eating a Raw Foods diet*
• Attend a yoga retreat or one of those intense weekend-long yoga workshops*
• Learn basic conversational Spanish
• Read a book in French (and no, rereading Huis Clos/Le Petit Prince/anything I read in high school or college for French class doesn’t count)
• Donate to an arts organization I love*
• Finally be able to parallel-park with confidence

*(The asterisks denote those things that require money to do.
So maybe I'll start from the free stuff and work my way up.)

Ready. Set. GO.

dia de los delicious

I walked by Vosges yesterday.

The fabulous fancy candy skulls of my dreams (and more than a little obsession) are baaaaaaaaaaaaack, and it's hitting every single one of my WANT buttons:
chocolate
fancy fancy salt
almonds
shaped like a disembodied head

"consume within six months", ha. As if these would last longer than six minutes in my presence.

if I'd have known you were coming, I'd have baked a cake

The following is, without a doubt, the gayest cake known to mankind: so much so that it's now referred to as "gayke".

I've wanted to make this since the moment I saw Helen's blog on rainbow foods- but what occasion calls for a six-layer rainbow cake? ALL OCCASIONS, actually. This weekend provided an especially festive diversion with two houseguests, so I decided to take the rainbow cake one layer further and top it with bright pink meringue buttercream for extra ridiculousness.


Step one: use every single bowl in my house to divide batter and tint with food coloring. (Things I should've done here: measured out the batter in truly equal increments between the six bowls, and not just eyeball it after several glasses of wine. Oops.)


Step two: make huge batch of meringue buttercream. Frost cake. Run out of frosting halfway through and scamper to make another batch of meringue buttercream to finish the icing shellacking.


Step three: cut into cake while jumping up and down with excitement. Eat cake for every meal.

Notes: I used a basic white cake recipe from The Joy of Cooking for this, and split the batter between six 8" pans rather than the 3" pans called for in the recipe, and reduced cooking time accordingly.
I froze the layers for a few days, which is totally the way to go when frosting a cake. It was practically crumb-free when I spread the frosting over it.
I wanted something fluffier than a standard buttercream, so I used this Sweet Melissa Patisserie meringue buttercream frosting recipe from Epicurious and dumped in red food coloring until the proper level of ridiculous pinkness was achieved. The first batch of frosting used those pasteurized egg whites you can get in a carton, and although they're convenient, they take foreeeeeeeeeeever to whip. The second "oh shit I ran out of frosting" batch of icing was made using egg whites I separated, and it came together much faster.

millions of peaches, peaches for me

I stopped by Findlay Market yesterday, and was immediately seduced by the gigantic basket of Georgia peaches for $1.50/lb. Since embarking on the cleaning-out-the-cupboards quest, I realized that I was eating my way to scurvy, and that fruit needed to happen in the very near future, lest I become a malnourished sailor.

I've already eaten all the ripe peaches, but between yesterday's D-Day programs on NPR and the bowl of peaches on the counter, I've been thinking about my grandparents, and about how I only see them once or twice a year and that's not enough, and about my grandma's amazing peach pie. The crust on this is so, so good, and so, so easy. (No, it's not fancy. But it is so pleasingly Midwestern and delicious and sometimes that's exactly perfect.)

Grandma's Fresh Peach Pie

Crust:

1 1/2 c. flour
2 tsp. salt
2 tbls. milk
1 tbls. sugar
1/2 c. vegetable oil

Combine flour, sugar and salt. Mix oil and milk; stir into flour mixture. (It will be crumbly). Press into pie pan and bake til golden brown. Grandma left no temperature or time instructions here, so just wing it.

Filling:

1 c. water
1 c. sugar
2 tbls. cornstarch
3 tbls. dry orange or peach Jello
3 c. sliced fresh peaches

Combine water, sugar, and cornstarch, and cook over medium-low heat until clear. Add dry jello. When cool and slightly thick, pour over the sliced peaches. Mix well, and add this filling to the pre-baked pie crust. Serve with whipped cream. This will keep several days without getting soggy.

road trip

Fueled by 48 ounces of sugar-free energy drinks (because when pouring a bunch of neon and potentially toxic chemicals into my body, I can't add sugar to that mix!) and the birthday tribute to Biggie Smalls I found on an Indiana radio station, I made it to Chicago by 1:40 a.m. on Friday morning, immediately following my Thursday night class.

Spending Memorial Day weekend with friends in Chicago was a great idea, but was made considerably less fun by the constant parade of potential apartments I needed to see, make notes on, and judge in fifteen minutes or less. In three days, I saw eighteen apartments, and fell in love with only one.
That one, naturally, was rented to the next person who saw it, because I was too afraid to commit to an application and a month's rent without seeing every single other apartment on my list. Dammit. Those people who enjoy going to open houses for apartments on Sunday mornings and comparing real estate listings are clearly the people who do not plan on moving any time soon, because it's a massive pain to look at places with the looming threat of having to move one's worldly possessions into a new space (will the bookcase fit onto this wall? can the bed fit in this room if I open the closet? why are there no outlets in the kitchen? does that unsupervised toddler come with the apartment?), and also to have to delicately explain to potential landlords that no, I don't exactly have employment yet, and no, I might not have a paying job, but please ignore that for the moment and accept my application for this apartment.

However, Ruth made amazing strawberry scones, so there's that. Perhaps I'll just live out of the Honda Civic with the cat and my cellphone plugged into the dashboard charger and my shoes in the trunk, and show up at Ruth and Tim's house each morning for brunch until they change the locks and ignore the buzzer.

libation

Geekout: Isaac Mizrahi on The Splendid Table. (Listening to this show while on the elliptical trainer at the gym is beyond torture- please talk to me of mac and cheese while I work out.)

At about 18:27, Lynne asks Isaac, "What do you think makes a gathering work?". His answer- be still my heart- "Booze."

gettin' lucky in kentucky

I have seen the aforementioned Zappos outlet, friends, and it is gooooooood.

I went in thinking of three specific shoes I hoped to find: closed-toe black leather d'orsay pumps with a heel under 3", Hunter wellies, and my Seychelles cone-heel pumps in black leather.

Instead, I found the Corner of Fancy Shoes, and after trying on gorgeous tri-tone satin Marc by Marc pumps, I walked around the store clutching them to my chest and trying to find a way to afford them. The price tag was down to $163 from $325, but there was a black sticker on them, so I went to ask/beg a sales associate about a "black sticker discount" that would bring them down to a reasonable price for a satin-shoe-deprived grad student.
"The black sticker means 20% off", she said, "but since these are part of the sale, that doesn't count. They're 70% off."
"70% off the $325?", I asked. "Maaaaaybe I can do that. They're so pretty, after all..."
"No- they're 70% off the lowest sticker price. That whole Corner of Fancy Shoes is on sale for 70% off the discount price."

I almost fell over on my stampede back to the Corner of Fancy Shoes to grab up every single shoe I could remember trying on that had fit me even a little bit. My god! 85% off all the gorgeousness I could stuff my feet into!

I was forced into self-restraint due to the sizing of most of these- why do all clearance sections have an abundance of size 7 1/2, and a dearth of size 9?- but came away with two gorgeous pairs of satin shoes. Is satin a terribly practical material for footwear? Of course not. But perhaps you didn't realize just how fucking gorgeous these shoes are.



And no, I never found my d'orsays, my cone-heel Seychelles, or my Hunter wellies. Though I plan to drive to the middle of nowhere, Kentucky at least once more before leaving Ohio to plunder that clearance corner.

back in black

I have a crush on this dress. And not just because it seems to have plenty of room for the cookies and champagne I'm planning for Saturday night. (But that definitely helps.)

Looks like I've finally cured my aversion to ruffles, eh?

you should love xkcd.com, too

This is pretty much how I decided to make every dinner, ever, for about two years.

Mmmmm, nachos.

things I failed to retain from the Metric Unit in 3rd grade math

Last week, in anticipation of making ganache for my cake, I stopped by the grocery with the simple mission of buying 24 oz of semisweet chocolate, and 24 oz of heavy whipping cream. Fancy chocolate in the cart, I moved down to the dairy case.
Shit. Heavy whipping cream is sold, inexplicably, by the half-pint. Also listed on the carton is the volume in milliliters. Neither of which is helpful in any way to me. OK, there are 8 oz in a cup. But I do not know how many ml are in a cup, because metric is like Latin in that no one knows anything about it and we ignore it. How many cups are in a gallon? Are there two pints per cup, or three? Or is it four cups per pint?

(If you're smacking your head and saying "hey, THINK OF A PINT OF BEER! and measure from there!", you have a point. But I was confused and the only context I have for "how many ounces are in a pint of beer?" is the vague knowledge that an American pint and a British pint are actually different amounts, so really that line of thought would amount to more confusion.)

I ended up buying four half-pints of heavy cream, which was quite a bit more than needed, but meant that I used the "leftover" carton for an impromptu fancy pasta dinner. Also, this proves that I really, really need an iPhone for situations like this.

the word "need" is not strong enough here

WAIT A MINUTE.

You're telling me that someone out there has taken my childhood Scooby Doo dreams of things like trapdoors and revolving bookcases, combined this with my wine lust, and created a trapdoor spiral wine cellar?

Oh my god, I need to find a way to get $30,000 for the installation and $80,000 or so to purchase the bottles that will fill said trapdoor spiral wine cellar. TRAPDOOR SPIRAL WINE CELLAR!
(Now, with student loan debt and my current employment prospects for 2009, it will only take me... 413 years to save up enough money for this project! Oh, and I suppose having a house would help too. Make that 562 years until this can come to fruition.)