Some day, my spring will come

Hey Kathryn,

I don't know when this winter will end! This Thursday, it snowed in Grinnell, and it was not a smattering, but a full two inches, which came down during my Museum Studies Class. No siree, I am not ready to get rid of my winter coat, my boots, my down comforter, or my supply of canned food.

So when this nasty weather hit, my first instinct was to make a soup - I know, how cliché. But this soup is really easy to make, makes use of common pantry items, and tastes just like this Tuscan Tomato Soup that is served at one of the best soup places in Iowa City called the Bread Garden. I swear, you will never need to eat another can of Campbell's tomato soup after eating this, well, unless you are having an Andy Warhol party.

Mmm Mmmm Better Tomato Soup
Adapted from Deborah Madison's Creamy Tomato Soup

Ingredients:
1 1/2 tbsp butter
1/2 onion, roughly chopped
4 cloves of garlic chopped in half
1/4 tsp dried basil
1 1/2 tablespoons flour
1 can of diced tomatoes
1 cup vegetable broth
3/4 - 1 cup milk
Buttermilk

Sauté the butter, chopped onions, garlic in a pot on medium heat until onions are soft and fragrant (about 3-5 minutes). Add the basil and salt and pepper to taste, and then add in the flour. Stir the mixture around, and watch for the flour to toast up and turn brown. Slowly add in the vegetable broth and tomatoes, and cook until just about ready to serve. Blend the soup with an immersion blender, and pour in the milk off the heat. Pour into bowls and finish with a dash of buttermilk or if you prefer sour cream.



Look - the buttermilk makes cool tadpoles in the soup.

So, stay warm Kathryn, and maybe, just maybe, spring will arrive!

Love,
Allison

Yum, Fake Bacon!

Hi Allison!

Lately, I've been craving something expressly forbidden... a delicious sandwich oozing with mayonnaise and topped with crunchy bacon, crisp lettuce, and juicy tomatoes. I know Veggie bacon is hardly a substitute for the real thing but, since it's the only thing I'm permitted, I decided to give it a try.

The following sandwich was constructed in the kitchen of our rental house on the beach in Port Aransas, Texas, where I spent a week over spring break hanging out with my parents, reading,

The exciting part of this cooking experiment was making the homemade mayonnaise recipe featured in Molly's column in this month's Bon Appetit!

I won't reproduce the recipe here since I've linked to it, but I felt very old-fashioned and adventurous as I slowly whisked the mayonnaise together and emulsified the the oil.



My mayonnaise came out a little runny, but very delicious!

Next step: Fake Bacon! I cooked my bacon on the stove top in a little oil over medium heat. I think it would probably be just as successful, and easier, to do this step in the microwave, but I wanted to feel authentic.

Vegetarian bacon is not so appetizing before it's cooked (notice the ice crystals clinging to the strips of vaguely bacon-patterned soy):



Once the bacon was nice and crispy, it was time to assemble the sandwich. I used toasted oatmeal bread as a base, and added spinach, thick tomato slices, my homemade mayonnaise, and the warm and crispy fake bacon:


We at these sandwiches with sweet potato strips that had been roasted in the oven at 400 for about 30 minutes, after being coated in olive oil, salt & pepper. All in all, this was a delicious meal. Luckily the photos of it were recoverable from my camera's memory card after I dropped my entire camera into the Gulf of Mexico!

Bon Appetit!

Tradition

Hey Kathryn,

I hope that your spring break is going well - I heard about how you lost your camera in the Gulf of Mexico, and I'm really sorry for your loss. I recently looked through a children's book, which is illustrated by David Wiesner called Flotsam.  Wiesner, who also illustrated Tuesday, imagines the life of a camera after it was lost in the ocean, snapping pictures of undersea life and passing from beach-goer to beach-goer throughout the years.  I only hope that your camera can have such a future.

My spring break travels took a less exotic turn.  I spent the week visiting my relatives who live in the east coast.  We spent one day at my grandmother's house in Philadelphia, where I embarked on my first major cooking project since the Cowboy Cookies.  Seeing as it was Shabbat, I wanted to impress my relatives and make them my challah.  For those of you who have never had challah, it is a braided egg bread that opens the Shabbat meal, and one of the only things that my family of vegetable-averse, flavor-averse, and meat-averse people can eat together.  My cousin Sarah before I even set foot inside a kitchen expressed extreme doubt: "Why are you even going to make challah?  Homemade ones taste too much like yeast."  Oh Sarah, you really don't know what it's like to be a Jew roughing it in the Heartland.  She probably has never had to deal with not being able to buy challah on Friday.  Learning to make a good challah in Iowa is more than a traditional gesture - it's a necessity.  In Grinnell, I learned how to make it with the help of Deborah Kaiser, and since then I have adapted her recipe and made it even sweeter.  Like a good medium rare steak, I undercook the bread so that it is still doughy and gooey in the center.  I am very proud of my challah recipe, and  I thought it would be easy to prove Sarah wrong.  

It came out looking the same as my other challahs and had my trademark sweet, dessert like taste, but it definitely wasn't my best challah.  The dough took a long time to rise, which made me anxious to have it bake up as quickly as possible.  I set the oven for 350 degrees, and let it bake for around an hour.  However, I forgot to account for my grandmother's dark metal pans.  I had cooked it for too long; the bottom of the challah burned, and the inside was dry.  My family was really nice and still complimented my bread, but throughout the meal, I kept singing in my head: "If I could turn back time."  Anyways, here is the recipe, and I wish all of you the best of luck if you try to make it.  

Sweet-as-Babkah Challah

Ingredients

5 tsp yeast (or two packets worth) of active dry yeast
1 1/2 cups warm water
1 cup plus 1 tbsp sugar
1 cup oil
5 eggs plus 
1 tsp of salt
7-8 cups all purpose flour

Add 1 tbsp of sugar, the yeast, and the warm water in a large bowl, stir to dissolve the yeast and let stand until a tan layer of foam appears on the top.  Add the rest of the sugar, 4 of the eggs, the salt, the oil, to the bowl and mix until well combined.  Start adding the flour, one cup at a time, and once it becomes to hard to stir, lightly flour your countertop or cooking surface, and knead the dough while also adding in more flour until the dough is no longer sticks to the countertop or to your hands.  Wash and lightly oil the bowl, and place dough in the bowl covered with a damp dish cloth.  Set aside for a couple hours until the dough has risen to at least double its original volume.  If the dough is not rising properly, warm up the oven for a minute, and then place the bowl in the oven and continue to let it rise.  Once it has risen, punch the down so that all the air bubbles deflate, and divide the dough in half, and then each half into three strands. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Braid the two loaves, and set on a pan.  Beat the egg with a tablespoon of water in a small bowl.  Brush the challah with the egg wash, and place in the pans in the oven to bake for 40 minutes to an hour, or until the bread is golden brown.  

Serve after saying the Hamotzi, like the good Jew in all of you.  

Possible add-ins for adventurous eaters:

- raisins

- nuts

- chocolate chips

- shredded coconut

- M&Ms 

Anyways, Kathryn, good luck with all your spring break cooking endeavors.  I look forward to posting about successful cooking experiments in the next couple of days.

Cheers,

Allison

Everybody's Gonna Love Today

Hey Kathryn,

I'm sending you and our readers all of my love, especially in light of the tragic events that have happened this past week. Two Sundays ago, a Grinnell student had her dorm space vandalized and graffitied with homophobic slurs. After the campus rallied together in solidarity against forces of intolerance, a second incident occurred in which 34 students who are active in the queer community received anonymous hate mail in their campus mail. I am saddened and incredulous that such outrageous demonstrations of bigotry happened on this campus, which prides itself on being a progressive and accepting community.

In spite of these awful things, this weekend was surprisingly restorative and filled with inspirational Amanda Bynes movies, love mail, a visit from Meredith, a raucous game of flippy cup, and of course, cooking. Meredith and I set off to make something comforting, and we settled on a rather humble recipe for Cowboy Cookies. These were rustic but toothsome chocolate chip oatmeal cookies, a perfect mixture of resolve and hope.

Cowboy Cookies For the Grinnell Soul
-adapted from Cowboy Cookies III on allrecipes.com

Ingredients
1 3/4 c. flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1 c. butter
2 eggs
1 c. granulated sugar
1 c. brown sugar
2 1/4 c. oatmeal
1 c. chocolate chip cookies

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees, and grease a baking sheet. Sift dry ingredients into a medium sized bowl. Cream together butter and eggs, add in both sugars, and then the dry ingredients. Stir in oatmeal and chocolate chips just until combined. Scoop out tablespoon sized balls of dough and place on cookie sheet. Bake for 12-20 minutes, or until light golden brown.

Making these cookies was a true exercise in Grinnell ingenuity and charity. Meredith and I forgot to buy butter at the store. Emily happened to have a stick of butter left over from a baking project in her dorm, and we exchanged her stick of butter for the use of our remaining eggs. We stole 17 butter packets from dining hall for the remaining half cup of butter. We definitely had enough to make our cookies:


Voila, homemade cookies:

I definitely reconnected to the Grinnell community by making these cookies and sharing them with Grinnellians. Forces of divisiveness and hatred definitely don't stand a chance against these cookies or my friends. Thanks Grinnell - I love you all the more.

XOXO,
Allison

Semi-Homemade and Semi-Vegan

Imagine: You get an email telling you to rendezvous at a specific time with a mysterious stranger. You show up, enter a room pulsing with bad dance music and twenty-year-old anxiety, and approach a table staffed by harried students. They introduce you to your mystery date... and then handcuff you together. At Grinnell, this is how Valentine's Day is celebrated: with a dance called "Chains," where your friends can anonymously set you up with your true love match... or with a total stranger.

Allison and I thought, what better way to pre-party for Chains than with a small soirée for a few of our closest friends? Because we're super-busy, but also creative and charming, we decided to throw a 1950s-kitsch-themed party using almost exclusively pre-prepared and processed foods. Delicious! Or at least fast.

Our menu was:
strawberry and chocolate cupcakes with semi-vegan buttercream frosting
Lipton's onion dip
Sour cream salsa dip
assorted chips
almond-covered cheese ball with Ritz crackers
reduced-to-clear Valentine's Day candy
punch with sherbet and strawberries

Unfortunately, the spread disappeared before we could get good photos of the food. But you can see from this photo of the carnage that the party was a success - thanks Bryan for the fabulously composed pictures.


Classy! We even had requests for the cheese ball recipe. So, here it is!

Awesome Cheese Ball

(Adapted from the "Heavyset Cheese Ball" in I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence by Amy Sedaris)

Ingredients:

8 oz pkg of cream cheese
1/2 c REAL Mayonnaise
salt
pepper
dried dill weed
garlic powder
3 tbs coarse grain mustard
1/2 c whole natural almonds, roasted in the oven

Directions:

Cream together the cream cheese and Mayonnaise. Season with spices to your taste, mix in the mustard, and refrigerate the whole concoction for a few hours. When it has become more firm, form it into a log-like shape on a plate, and cover it with the almonds, which should be arranged to evoke the idea of a pinecone. Don't ask me why.

The other major home-made success was our buttercream frosting, which we have decided, because it involved soymilk, is almost vegan.

Semi-Vegan Frosting

Ingredients:

2 sticks of butter (no, really)
A whole bunch of powdered sugar (probably five or six cups)
1/4 cup or so of soymilk (add more to achieve spreadability)
food coloring optional

Directions:

Cream the butter in a large mixing bowl with a spoon. Once it's soft, add about a quarter of the powdered sugar and a splash of soymilk, mixing everything together to create delicious frosting. Keep adding the powdered sugar and soymilk alternately until all the powdered sugar has been used. Feel free to personalize this recipe by tinting the frosting hot pink (like we did!), or any other appropriate color.


So, if you want to throw a fabulous party, the main ingredients are:

Delicious unhealthy food
The soundtrack to American Graffiti
"Apples to Apples"
Festively attired guests

Until next time, remember:

Keep it simple, keep it kitschy, and always semi-homemade!

These scones are delightful!

Let me tell you, Allison, my winter break wasn't very eventful. Mostly I sat around agonizing about my future for hours on end. Or watching Project Runway. Anyway, there were a few bright points to my vacation, one of which was a delightful tea party I went to at a friend's house. In honor of merry old England (from which I had just returned), I decided to make scones! But I made cranberry orange scones, which is kind of a fake American scone variety.


They were delicious! We ate them with clotted cream and Barefoot Contessa brand strawberry jam!


As you can see, there was quite a lavish spread--we also had custard tarts with an edible flower and raspberry garnish, fancy imported cookies, cucumber and salmon finger sandwiches, two kinds of tea, and plenty of ambiance. Most importantly, we had the necessary nourishment to sustain us through an epic gossiping situation.


Because really, what's the point of coming home from college if not to gossip about every single person you went to high school with? And with the help of Facebook, nobody can keep any secrets.

Scrumptious Cranberry-Orange Scones

(From Baking Illustrated: A Best Recipe Classic by the editors of Cook's Illustrated Magazine. I love this book because it has great diagrams and very clear directions for every basic baked item you could possibly think of)

Ingredients

2 c. unbleached all-purpose flour
1 tbs baking powder
3 tbs sugar
1/2 tsp salt
5 tbs cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/4 cubes
1 tsp grated orange zest
3/4 c dried cranberries
1 c heavy cream

Preheat oven to 425.

Place four, baking powder, sugar and salt in a large bowl, or the work bowl of a food processor fitted with a metal blade. Whisk together or process with six one second pulses.

(I used the food-processor method, and it worked perfectly)

If making by hand use two knives, a pastry blender, or your fingertips and quickly cut in the butter until the mixture resembles coarse meal with a few slightly larger butter lumps. If using the food processor, remove the cover and distribute the butter evenly over the dry ingredients. Cover and process with twelve one-second pulses.

(At this point, the mixture should resemble coarse, wet sand)

Add the currants and quickly mix in or pulse one more time. transfer the dough to a large bowl.

Stir in heavy cream with a rubber spatula or fork until the dough begins to form, about 30 seconds. Transfer the dough and all dry flour bits to a counter top and knead the dough by hand just until it comes together into a rough, slightly sticky ball, five to ten seconds.

Cut the scones into eight wedges. (There's a secret, special technique for getting the wedges perfect: press the dough into a lightly greased or buttered 8" round cake pan, then invert the pan on a plate or cutting surface. Presto--a perfect circle of dough to cut with a sharp knife)

Place the wedges on an un-greased baking sheet. Bake until the scone tops are light brown, 12-15 in. Cool on a wire rack.

Eat with clotted cream, God's gift to mankind. And of course plenty of jam!

Cheers,

Kathryn

The Wonders of Glutinous Rice Balls

Dear Kathryn,

It is a little strange that it has taken me so long to write about my favorite food category of all time, which, drumroll please, happens to be the humble legume. Oh, beans! They are Bon marché (French for dirt cheap), Earthy, Adaptable to many recipes, Nutricious, and Sinfully silky. True to their adaptability, beans can even be for dessert. A couple days ago, Alison had me over for a tea party, and we prepared some Glutinous Rice Balls with Red Bean Filling that she had purchased at one of our three chinese grocery stores in town (god bless Iowa City for being one of the more diverse cities in Iowa.) The package indicated that within 6-8 minutes, we would have a "delicious and convenient" dessert ready for us to eat.



I was a little skeptical. I had tried moon cakes once at a friend's sleepover in seventh grade, and while I appreciated her mother having made these especially for us to eat, I did not like the bean paste filling. I was too embarassed to admit that I didn't like it, so I stashed it in my pocket, waited until everyone had fallen asleep, and then discarded it underneath the couch. Christine, if you are reading this, I must send you my very long overdue apologies for any inconveniences (ant, mold, rat infestations?) that I might have inadvertently caused.

Well, I decided to give bean desserts another try, and this time, I did not have to craft an elaborate scheme to discard them. In fact, they were quite tasty despite their exploding-larvae like appearance. The shell was soft and gummy, and yielding to the rich and lightly sweetened rice bean filling. They were even better dipped in sesame seeds.



These glutinous rice balls definitely packed a punch - after eating a couple of them, Alison and I felt a little more than full. However, it is impossible to feel guilty by overindulging in these healthful desserts. If there ever was such a thing as a superfood, I think these would have to be it.

It is way too late for me to continue waxing poetic about glutinous rice balls - good night.