booze clues

Lesson learned: scotch freezes much less well than gin does. My first batch of scotchsicles turned out to be individual servings of scotch slush (tasty, but not the ideal way to drink Laphroaig); the second batch barely held onto the popsicle sticks and base before slushing up. I continue undaunted, however, in my quest for scotch-flavored popsicles!

This batch: per 1 cup of volume in popsicle molds, I used 4/5 of a cup of water, mixed with about a tablespoon of honey. This water base should eventually get tweaked to firm up the popsicles, but apparently a 4:1 ratio isn't quite it. I used 1/5 of a cup of scotch (the aforementioned Laphroaig, because I don't believe in cheap scotch).

I think a 5:1 ratio of honey water to scotch might be enough to create a solid popsicle, but I fear that it will still melt rather quickly into a puddle of slush. I need to get all scientific up in here to figure out the ideal ratio that allows both freezing and delicious booze flavor. (Helen? Guidance?)

laid back

I am a goddamn genius.

This, friends, is a gin-and-lime popsicle, and I might not eat anything else today. My annoyingly involved errands from last week to find popsicle molds have yielded me a freezer full of treats, and my un-air-conditioned apartment just got a whole lot more awesome.

To make six popsicles in my molds, I used 3 parts lime juice- I used a frozen bag of lime pulp from the mexi-grocery with just a tiny bit of sugar mixed in- to one part gin. This came to about 18 oz. of lime juice, 6 oz. of gin, and a tablespoon of sugar. It's super-tart: definitely more like sucking on limes from your gin and tonic than it is a limeade. Oh, and it's pink because the gin in my freezer is bluberry-infused gin that's been sucking up blueberries for about a month and a half now.

in the navy

Do you know how many stores I had to go into today before I found popsicle molds? SIX, that's how many. And I paid far too much money for the popsicle molds, naturally, but by then I was exhausted and laden down with shopping bags from my errands, and I was ready to lie down and throw a tantrum in the aisle if I was not able to find my damn popsicle molds right then already.
Thankfully, no such toddler behavior was deemed necessary.

I'm off to Seattle for four days, where frozen treats are not a substitute for meals/air conditioning, but when I get back, I have seriously ambitious plans for fancy homemade freezer pops.

Worn today on those interminable errands:

Jersey sundress, Express; belt, J Crew; tote bag, Target; sandals, Aldo; scarf as headband, vintage;
sunglasses, no idea where I got these but I love them and their little orange crocodile case.

mex-i-can

I am trying to break my Mexican take-out pattern.

This is a good start.

Slaw:
1 head each red and white cabbage
1 largeish carrot
1 lb. jicama
salt
ponzu marinade (necessary? probably not, but I have a bottle of ponzu marinade in my fridge from the Japanese grocery, and why not use it here?)
apple cider vinegar

Clean and shred both heads of cabbage. Peel the carrot and shred as well. Cut up/shred the jicama. Toss all together with about a teaspoon of salt, a big glug of yuzu marinade, and two big glugs of apple cider vinegar.
Is this accurate or specific? No, but that's how I made it. Glug to taste, people.

Slow-cooked black beans:
black beans + water + liquid smoke. Put in crockpot, cook on low for like 12 hours. I don't know, I tend to wing it.

Spicy roasted pork:
4 lbs. or so of pork shoulder (I used bone-in), fat/skin removed as much as possible
1 can of chiles in adobo
four or five tomatillos

Put the can of chiles and the tomatillos in a food processor and blend up til it's mostly puréed. Pour this over the pork shoulder in a crock pot. Cook on the low setting for about 8-10 hours. Let sit overnight, and then shred with your fingers, or, if you're dainty, forks.

Layer slaw, black beans, and shredded pork, and top with avocado. Repent of your $7 takeout chorizo quesadilla habit.

vital information for your daily life

I learned something really important today:

You can make bloody mary slushies*.
Note: do not leave the pickle/olives/etc. in the bloody mary before you put it in the freezer, though, or you'll bite into frozen garnish, and that's just wrongful.

*Mix up your bloody mary- I like a dab of mustard in mine, along with sriracha and maybe some liquid smoke- and pop it into the freezer without any additional ice cubes. Leave it there for an hour or so to slush up, and then mix to a pleasantly even consistency using either a blender or a fork.

hot hot heat

It is a gloriously sunny eighty-six degrees out right now, I have steak marinating in the fridge for afternoon grilling, and I have stocked my freezer with a fresh batch of Otter Pops. Memorial Weekend is in full swing.

Waterfall tank, Development by Erica Davies; tube bra, American Apparel;
pencil skirt, American Apparel; heels, Urban Outfitters.

"What to wear under this tank?" has vexed me for some time, so today I'm testing out the tube bra option at a friend's barbecue. Also, I realize, as I am biking to that barbecue across town, I will be testing out this bra's ability to not slide down my torso while I am on my bike. I apologize to Belmont Avenue in advance for the awkward shifting-around I may have to do.

worth a thousand words

Bratwurst, garnished with mustard and a big slick of red lipstick that I forgot I was wearing.

This photo sums up so much about my life, really.

balanced meal

I made the most delicious riff on peanut butter & jelly tonight, y'all. A peanut butter whoopie pie with homemade strawberry-balsamic jam: the ultimate in bourgeois re-appropriation. (Keller and Achatz aside, obvs.)

dinner.

I used the King Arthur Flour recipe for the peanut butter cake components, using a full cup of peanut butter rather than the 3/4 cup called for in the recipe. (Note: it made me sad to buy creamy peanut butter for this recipe. I know that extra-chunky would have been a trainwreck for making these cakes, but it still makes me sigh, as extra-chunky peanut butter is so clearly superior to creamy.)
For the jam, I will have to be a bit more vague. I had a huge box of overripe strawberries from the grocery that I cleaned, sliced, and mixed with about 2 tablespoons of brown sugar and about 1/4 cup of balsamic vinegar. I stewed that together over low heat for a long while, and then added about a teaspoon of gelatin to help it set up into a somewhat jammy consistency.

After I polish off another whoopie pie or five for dinner tonight, I should take the leftover jam and stretch it out with a vanilla mousse of some sort to fill the rest of the pies.

(Stuff like this happens in my apartment on Sunday nights. You all should come over.)

a little off

I'm putting together a playlist called Creepy/Sexy. Recommendations? (Truculent, SBJ, Lipstick Librarian- I know you all have opinions on this. Dish.)

Thus far, the creepy/sexy tracklist is:

Johnny Cash, "Personal Jesus"

Haley Bonar, "Devilish Man"

Tom Waits, "Sea of Love"

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, "Do You Love Me?"

Chris Isaak, "Baby Did A Bad Bad Thing"

Requirements for consideration: songs must be both highly sexy (dude, have you heard Nick Cave sing "Do You Love Me?" rrrrowr!) and also unrepentantly creepy (dude, have you heard Nick Cave sing "Do You Love Me?" frightening!). Augment my playlist with recommendations, please.

it is not cute when you use the wrong word

I can't believe I even have to clarify this, but I swear to god I heard a grown-ass adult refer to these:

sprinkles! or, if you're from Wisconsin and insist on being difficult, "jimmies"

... as "sparkles".

No.
Sparkles are for drag queen lip gloss and homemade valentines and for teenage me to mix into hair gel to really rock the David Bowie look. (Yes, there are photos of that. I maintain that I looked awesome as a femme-Bowie, though.)

These:

(photo from Ate Your Kangaroo via DeviantArt)

are sparkles.

Different, yes? One is edible and the natural topper for soft-serve, and one is made of metallic shreds that you really shouldn't chew on.

You're on your own with the silver dragees, though. I still insist on eating them, potential health hazards be damned.

lemon fresh scent

Earlier this week, I decided to take myself off the grid for a few days to actually get real-life things done after traveling for what was essentially three weeks of nonstop running around the eastern seaboard and the upper midwest.
(Yes, I noted this via Twitter. Shaddup.)

I should not even be online right now, but I wanted you all to know that one of those real-life tasks has broken down as follows:

go grocery shopping
find huge bin of Meyer lemons on sale for 99 cents/lb
buy something like six pounds of Meyer lemons
take microplane, zest all six pounds of lemons
freeze zest for future awesomeness
juice all six fucking pounds of lemons by hand, because I do not own a fancy automatic juicer

go grocery shopping again
buy a huge bag of limes
juice all limes by hand, again, noting reasoning above

mix lemon and lime juices
mix in simple syrup
create baddest-ass homemade sour mix known to man (2 parts simple syrup: 2 parts lemon juice: 1 part lime juice)
kiss a glass of bourbon with said sour mix

die happy.

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.