De Baking Psychopath

So I have mentioned my boycott of Facebook.* The idea of it scares me in many ways. First, the idea of people from my past who I don't remember having a close relationship with, or I don't remember anything personal about them at all, finding me and pestering me to Friend them scares me just as much as going on AIM does these days...although not so much as a year or two ago, because now all the people I graduated with are generally too busy to go on AIM or have moved on to Gtalk. But, one might say, there are many ways to block everyone but those you want to see your profile, etc etc. But doesn't that defeat the purpose of Facebook to begin with? No, I'm afraid there is little space or purpose to be found in Facebook or Myspace for semi-anti-social introverts like myself who would rather just communicate with the people I want to communicate with, for which I do not need such networking services. Furthermore, I find that the endless drivel of mostly-meaningless comme...

I've been making this buttermilk pancake recipe from Martha Stewart for years, and it's always been the favorite of my family. The full recipe asks for 3 cups of buttermilk, but since I only had one cup left to use up today, I scaled down the recipe to a third of the original. Unfortunately, the full recipe also asked for 2 eggs, and 2/3 of an egg is quite hard to measure, so I just used a full egg. The resultant pancake was a little different than usual--lighter and fluffy and spongy, as opposed to the more tender and moist and delicate like the original recipe. Michael really, really enjoyed the new version, best he's ever had in fact , so I thought I'd share the modified recipe. 2/3 cup all-purpose flour 2/3 tsp baking powder 1/3 tsp baking soda 1/6 tsp salt 1 tbsp granulated sugar 1 large egg 1 cup buttermilk 1 1/3 tbsp melted and cooled butter Combine all the dry ingredients together in a large mixing bowl. Whisk together all the wet ingredients, pour into dry i...

Tonight's dinner was inspired by Culinary in the Desert (see My Favorite Blogs on the right hand bar). Joe (the blogger) and Jeff have pizza every Friday, and their whole wheat pizza dough is the preferred substrate upon which to create culinary delights. We tried their dough recipe (found here ) and found it to be a sturdy thin crust but still retained a good chew without being dry. Michael, who is sometimes not a fan of whole wheat in things not classically made with it (such as pizza), said that it turned out better than he thought although he would like more rise and wants to play with the yeast and flour ratios. We used leftover vodka sauce that Michael had made for a dinner party he threw for some of his law school friends while I was in New Orleans , Italian sweet sausage bought from another Joe (the Trader), defrosted frozen spinach that had its water squeezed out, and a sprinkling of shredded mozzarella cheese. Figure 1. Right out of the oven Figure 2. Right before ent...

Throughout the entire trip, everyone laughed at and teased me for taking pictures of everything I ordered before I started eating. But to me, food is so central to a trip and to life in general, I love to remember the food with as many senses as possible. And I think the following series of photos validates my travel photojournalism methods. Don't you wish you ate all these things and came back a couple kilos heavier like I did?? =D The pictures designated "FQF" were from food stands at the French Quarter Festival , which happened to be going on during the weekend and was conveniently near the Convention Center. Figure 1. Chicken and Andouille Gumbo--of the lighter soupy variation (at FQF) Figure 2. Cafe au lait and beignets at Cafe Beignet Figure 3. Close-up inspection of delicious beignets Figure 4. The famous Pat O'Brien's Hurricane --a lot o' rum! Figure 5. Muffaletta sandwich--jam-packed with Italian goodness (at FQF) Figure 6. Alligator sausage on a...

Hi everyone! I'm in N'awwwlins! So, sorry for lack of posts lately. Lots of food and things to post about! Here's a first taste: Crawfish Bread! More to come soon! Stay tuned!

Wow, rave reviews for both cookies =) Very many happy seminar attendees and labmates. My favorite quote of the day, from one of my labmates after polishing off an oatmeal cranberry cookie, "I like working here!" My second favorite was, "So I guess no more cookies for a week, huh?" from another labmate, since I am going out of town from tomorrow to next Wednesday. One of my friends and a couple members of my lab who have had both the CI chocolate chip cookie and the Tate's one said today that the CI cookie is the best I've made thus far. This is quickly escalating up to a match-off!! I think the previous feedback from my friends saying Tate's was better may have been skewed because of the inaccurate texture (too crunchy), so Take 2 may be the more accurate feedback? The funny thing is that my rendition of Tate's cookies has an "inaccurate" texture as well--the cookie is supposed to be thin and crispy, but I think I use too large of a coo...

When these cookies came out in the May/June issue of Cooks Illustrated, you should have seen the excitement that spread like wildfire through the baking blog system. Everyone was abuzz with the cookie recipe that claimed perfection. When a couple of people were able to get posting rights from CI, it instantly hit Recipezaar and were posted proudly on blogs. Here is where I got the recipe, and since I did not change anything both times I made these, I feel better about sending you to the recipe on the blog of someone who got official permission from CI. The interesting things about this cookie are two-fold: 1) you melt and brown the butter, and then toss in another chunk of butter into the hot butter, and this sizzling bubbly reaction occurs that results in a creamy, butterscotch-smelling, golden liquid, and 2) once you combine said butter with the sugars and eggs, you successively whisk (30 sec) and rest (3 min) the mixture three times, which gets you a caramel-brown, smooth satin ...

I have recently discovered a food blog that has quickly become one of my favorite blogs of all time: Oatmeal CookieBlog . Oatmeal Cookie Guy (I believe his real name is Greg) lives in New York City and has created dozens of creative, delectable oatmeal cookie recipes, and this one actually won him a local food contest award. Judging by the feedback from his reviewers, there's not a recipe on his site that isn't worth trying... But let's start with the award-winning one. This and the CI "Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie" (see next post) was made tonight in preparation for my program's monthly seminar. Due to the tightening of purse strings lately, the standard free dinner to go with evening events has been indefinitely suspended. So I started making cookies to tide people over until they can get home to dinner. Since I followed the recipe verbatim except for baking time, here is the link to the original recipe on Oatmeal Cookie Blog. My dough came out very wet...

Thanks to IDS for the wonderful instructions on how to modify the Rounders 2 template for Blogger! Now I have better utilization of space. Check out IDS's site for such template modifications of a bunch of different templates!

After several weeks of re-discovering old beloved food blogs and discovering a slew of new ones, I had come to a juncture of deciding whether to jump headlong myself into food blogging as a fruitful endeavor. If I decided not to, I needed to find another suitable excuse for the vast amounts of time I have spent reading other people's blogs. As Michael started his own blog recently, which has been quite enjoyable for us both, and since I have successfully maintained my Facebook boycott, this additional method for communicating with family and friends had its perceived benefits. When I decided upon my blog title and subtitle, all pretense for finding additional excuses was gone. What remained was excitement to bring our food journeys into a forum where peers/family/friends could share and enjoy with us. I am not a newbie, per se , to blogging, making my debut in 2003 with Xanga. But this is my first attempt at a more public contribution to the WWW, and presumably I will be attemp...