The spice pantry

Because I'm culinarily bored with my own cooking, I've recently acquired the following spices: garam masala allspice a random curry chipotle chili powder ground cardamom I will do something with these soon, maybe torment some hacked apart chicken body parts and appendages. Spices are pretty cheap if you don't buy them from a national or regional supermarket chain. Depending on where you live, you're much better off buying spices from a local ethnic market. They'll be fresher and less expensive. Ralphs grocery store, for example, sells cardamom powder for $16/spice bottle. It's not really a high traffic spice like cinnamon or allspice. So it's priced so that it never makes it off the shelf, or whatever. At an ethnic market you can find ground cardamom for about $3-4, and the quantity will be more than enough. If you don't live near a dense ethnic (non-white) area, the next best places to shop for spice are Whole Foods market and Cost Plus World market.

KItchen Notes: Mmm, that sauce packet

I'm pretty close taste-wise to deconstructing the ingredient ratio for Annie Chun's udon soup (sold at Trader Joe's). Ok, so what's in the soup is printed on the container which reads: naturally brewed soy sauce, shitake mushroom, sea vegetable, evaporated cane juice, rice wine, and yeast extract. When you pour it out of its packet, it's a dark liquid with no dangly bits and isn't murky. So, the sea vegetable is probably a standard grade seaweed like kelp or kombu; both of which are common to asian soups. I suppose I really don't have a reason for doing this other than it's a personal quest this year to make homemade udon noodles and a good soup base to go with it. Sea vegetable and shitake mushroom exists in the Annie Chun recipe as a dashi. The yeast extract won't make it into my soup base recipe since it's pretty much MSG. A basic dashi recipe is that you take a dried ingredient and rehydrate it with water, usually by boiling it until the ingredient softens. The reserve liquid is the dashi and is used in soups and sauces. A lot of meat/vegetable/potsticker dipping sauces will call for a 2:1:1 ratio of soy sauce, vinegar/wine, water. 

This might be as easy as: 

2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp rice wine
1 tbsp dashi. 

Adding sugar to a sauce is generally to taste by its maker, so this recipe would probably include no more than 1 tsp of unbleached cane sugar.

Float me

The original recipe comes from Alton Brown. I didn't have peach preserves so I might just have to make another batch to see what it tastes like. I'd imagine it'd be slightly sweeter. Last weekend it was pretty warm. I think southern California pretty much skipped spring and hopped along into early summer. I thought I'd make a rootbeer float, except I didn't have any ice cream.. ooh, but I did have the ingredients (half and half, heavy cream, sugar, vanilla bean) and an ice cream maker. 

It's a rather easy recipe: 

2 cups half and half 
1 cup heavy cream 
1 cup sugar, minus 2 tbsp 
1 vanilla bean, halved with seeds scooped out 

In a heavy bottomed saucepan, combine all ingredients and cook to simmer (do not boil). 

I don't have a cooking thermometer to tell me when the mixture has reached 170 degrees F, so another way to tell that it's done cooking is to see if it coats the back of a spoon like a thick creamed soup. When it does, turn the heat off. 

Strain it into a container and refrigerate for at least 10-12 hours. Alton says that the mixture won't set in an ice cream maker, and that part is pretty much true. There aren't any coagulants like cornstarch in the mixture to help it set or thicken. Anyhow. 

Once the ice cream gets to the soft serve stage, scoop it all out to a clean container that can hold 1 qt of liquid and freeze it until firm. It seems like a rather long process just to make a rootbeer float, but it's well worth it and very tasty. I'm not sure I would have liked the peach preserves flavor in my rootbeer float. 

Hehe. That's an experiment for another day.

A tofu trick

Ever not have deep fried tofu around? Well, here's tofu you can keep in your freezer until it's needed. Buy a "firm" package of tofu, preferably the one that doesn't come in a vacuum seal. Any brand will do. Put it in your freezer until it freezes. Then thaw it out, drain all the water and squeeze out as much water as you can from the tofu without breaking it. Slice the tofu brick into 4 equal portions. Each portion is about a serving for one person. I am usually cooking for one, so put the rest of the portions into a ziplock bag and back into the freezer.

The portion that remains, slice that into smaller pieces. Put those pieces into your soup. This tofu will soak up much of the flavor in your soup and be very tasty.

Dark chocolate brownies

Probably the most expensive ingredient for this dessert is the butter or the chocolate that's used; but it's still a fairly inexpensive dessert to make for work--depending on the quality of ingredients. Of the three times I've made chocolate brownies in my lifetime, this is the first batch that didn't come out badly; and by badly, I mean to say nearly inedible.

I made a few edits to the original recipe, but not many. Instead of 1 1/2 cups of sugar, I used 1 cup; and instead of 6 oz of butter, I used 4 oz (1 stick). The order of operations is the same.

Ingredients

6 oz dark chocolate, chopped
1 stick of unsalted butter, sliced into 1 tbsp chunks
3 eggs
1 c. flour
1 c. sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract

This batch makes very short brownies if baked in a 9 x 13 baking dish. Instead of relying on the lightly buttered and floured baking dish method, I used silicone-treated parchment paper. No mess there and when the brownies cool, they remove easily without the bottoms sticking to the pan or the paper.

Directions

1. In a separate bowl, whisk eggs and vanilla extract together. Set aside.
2. Using a double boiler method, whisk together the chocolate and butter until the chocolate is melted and glossy.
3. Turn off the heat, but leave the mixing bowl where it is (assuming you used the double boiler method to melt the chocolate). Whisk in the sugar, a little at a time until it is all incorporated.
4. Whisk in the egg mixture, a little at a time so it doesn't curdle or get scrambled.
5. Sift and whisk in the flour until it's blended in.
6. Pour the chocolate mixture into a prepared 9 x 13 baking pan.
7. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes or until a toothpick tester comes out clean from the center.
8. Cut into bars when completely cooled.

This is one of the reasons why my co-workers aren't losing weight with their diets. :)