Blintz Onion Soup

Blintz onion soup is what you make when you have goat cheese and lots of green onions lying around. Initially, it was going to be onion soup and blintz. But the onion soup was quite strong, so we cut up the blintz and put them in the soup. The cheese melted into the soup and the blintzes acted like noodle/dumping things. It was quite yummy.

Crepe from pancake mix

Now, if you actually have ingredients, you should just go get yourself a real crepe recipe. Or you can just use a pancake recipe and leave out most of the levening and add extra water.

Mix pancakes as directed, only add half again as much liquid. For me, this meant 2 cups pancake mix, 1 1/3 cup water, and another 2/3 cup water. Let it sit until the bubbles dissipate a bit. Pancake mix has more levening than crepes ought to have, so waiting a bit will make them crepe-like instead of pancake like. Of course, if you were actually making pancakes you'd want to cook them right away to make them fluffy. But we're making crepes, not pancakes.

Heat a pan to medium heat. How can you tell if it's medium heat? Your crepes won't be screwed up. You can splash the pan with water and it should bubble and fizzle instead of just drying up quickly. Unless you're lucky, you should just expect your first crepe to be screwed up. Today my first crepe wasn't screwed up, but that's pretty abnormal.

Pour batter into the center of the pan and shift the pan around so the batter spreads to thinly cover the bottom of the pan. I sort of pour it slowly into a widening spiral as I turn the pan to get it to cover evenly. Cook it until the surface dries up and the edges shrink back a lot and start to peel up from the edge of the pan. Then flip it and cook it a bit more. It should be brown on the first side and white with brown spots on the second side.

Blintz

Set out the cheese before you start making the crepes; it's best at room temperature. Smoosh together a whole bunch of coarsley ground black pepper, some dried onion flakes, some basil, and some goat cheese. Spoon it in a line on a crepe. Roll the crepe like a burrito. Stuff as many crepes as you'd like to eat, then put them all back in the frying pan for a few minutes. It will soften the cheese a bit and brown the crepes a little.

Onion Soup

Get some stock out of your fridge. You should have some leftover from thanksgiving. Or just make some broth. Since our stock was condensed, we added some water and vermouth. After it heats up, add a ton of sliced green onion. Let it wilt a bit, then you're done.

Blintz Onion Soup

Spoon the onion soup into bowls. Cut the blintzes into 1.5 cm wide slices and drop the slices into the soup. Eat.

Fudge

It's the time of year when everyone realizes that hanging out in a hot kitchen, although sometimes unpleasant in the summer, is a great winter activity. I've been itching to make fudge for a while now---ever since someone told me that he actually liked fudge, even though he's been against all my previous fudge-making proposals.

When I was growing up, we usually only made fudge in the summer... after we'd been to the fair and seen the fudge makers and been told that fudge at the fair was overpriced and if we behaved we could make some. We always made it with marshmallow creme. Which is easier than the conventional method, but I wanted to try the old-school way. Marshmallows contain gelatin. And, unfortunately, we don't know anything about gelatin. It might have dead cows in it, or it might have dead pigs in it, or it might have something less objectionable in it, but still dead. By now, given all the corn subsidies, I bet they've come up with a completely unobjectionable corn-based product... I mean, exactly how many products are there left that don't have a corn alternative? There's corn-based fuel, corn-based packing peanuts... I bet someone has a corn computer. But labels never tell you what the gelatin is made from. Maybe it's 100% safe, but they won't tell you. I couldn't serve it to vegetarian friends. I wouldn't want to serve it to Jewish or Muslim friends, because it might have pork in it. And I wouldn't be comfortable eating it myself, since it might have beef in it. I wouldn't mind small quantities of poultry or pork, but I still wouldn't be able to share it. So sad. Making labor intensive deserts is all about sharing. They're fun to make, and fun to eat, but you don't want to eat the whole thing. So I decided to figure out how to make vegetarian fudge.

I used Alton Brown's chocolate fudge recipe since I knew he'd be thorough but didn't really know anything about the makers of the other recipes. I substituted brown sugar for white sugar, because we didn't have enough white sugar.

How not to be angry

After much poking around the web and reading reviews of recipes, I've concluded that fudge makes people angry. If a recipe works, people are fine. But if it doesn't---and apparently it doesn't a lot---people get pissed. They complain loudly about lost ingredients... they're probably more upset about lost time, though, and the fact that they were all ready for a bite of fudge... In any case, there are a lot of extremely angry people out there, and they're either mad because their fudge didn't set, or because their fudge came out like a solid rock. I didn't want that to happen to me, so I researched it heavily, just what makes fudge come out like a solid rock as opposed to creamy, chocolatey goodness?

I've concluded (and of course I have no evidence) that the problem is that people didn't do enough research. So I did a lot of research in hopes of avoiding the major mistakes. I concluded that you should never just follow the recipe. You should follow the intent of the recipe.

What in the world is the soft ball stage?

Every fudge recipe out there says to boil the concoction until it reaches the soft ball stage. They tell you that means ~235 degrees Farenheight. This is really hard for people. Soft ball stage tells you something about the sugar concentration. This is different from temperature. Now, I've made condensed stock before, so I'm pretty confident that you can get rid of a lot of water without being at a rolling boil. It stands to reason that if you top out at 230 degrees F for a long time but never make it up to 235, you're still above boiling and will be losing plenty of liquid. This is just a guess, but I bet this is what happened to all the people who ended up with brick-like fudge despite using their thermometer properly and following the recipe slavishly. There are a surprising number of these people out there, and they're very, very angry.

The temperatures in candy recipes should be used as guidelines. They're the temperatures that usually happen to correlate with appropriate sugar concentrations if you are losing water at a certain rate. Altitude is going to affect this, humidity is going to affect this, and having "medium" on your element not be the same as "medium" on the element of the person who gave you the recipe will affect this. In short, thermometers are probably good things, but the thermometer isn't actually measuring the thing you want to know about; it's measuring something that's usually correlated with the thing you want to know about.

I actually didn't use a thermometer. My candy thermometer is 3000 miles from here, and it was supposed to snow for 12 hours today (it didn't) so I thought I'd leave the driving to the Albanians and keep my southern Californian self off the road. I used the cold water test, which actually tests the sugar concentration. I have absolutely no idea if I ever got anywhere near the target temperature. Everyone says the soft ball stage is when the chocolate syrup forms a ball when dribbled into cold water, but that isn't adequate information when you're trying it for the first time without a thermometer as backup. I found this kick-ass web page that had really thorough explanations of the various sugar stages as well as video to complement the verbal description. Check out the science of candymaking web page if you plan on trying this at home. I ended up testing it about 5 times in a ramekin with ice water in it until I got the right temperature. I rinsed out the ramakin each time to make sure I wasn't mixing the old drops with the new drops and messing up my results. I left 2-5 minutes between each test. I think my stove runs cold compared to most stoves (which is odd, given that the oven runs about 200 degrees hotter than it ought to).

I took the pot off of the heat the minute it was clear I had a soft ball. I reasoned that I'd rather have something too soft than something too hard. There's an urban myth that someone had to throw away the pot because the chocolate solidified and there was no getting it out. Probably false, but I'd prefer storing it in the fridge (or freezer) and still having it melt in my mouth to having something rock-like, which a lot of people complained about in fudge recipe reviews. Bottom line: if you have too low a sugar concentration, it will be runny; if you have too high a sugar concentration, it will be hard.

What about sugar crystals?

No one actually complained about sugar crystals, but from what I've read, they can really screw up any sort of candy making process. I used one of those new fangled spoonula things that is supposed to be safe at candy-making temperatures instead of a wooden spoon. I wanted to be able to scrape the bits of the mixture that got up on the side of the pot back into it so that there wouldn't be undisolved sugar on the side of the pan.

What do they mean by matte?

I don't know. In one review of some recipe or other, someone said that when she stirred it until it was matte, it solidified in the bowl and she couldn't get it into the pans, but she tried it again and stopped stirring before that point and it worked perfectly. The stirring process at the end of the fudge making is supposed to encourage the development of lots of little sugar crystals. They're what make the fudge thicken up properly. I stirred mine until it had lost the really wet-looking sheen, but it still had plenty of sheen. I wouldn't call it matte, it was simply matter than it was when it started out. I payed more attention to the texture. It got really viscious towards the end. I had to stir for a long time, but without a thermometer I'm not sure I had cooled it to some ideal temperature before I started stirring. When I declared it done, it had reached the point where it was mildly tiring to pull the spoon around the bowl, and when I flipped a spoonful of fudge from the edge into the middle, it took a while for the fudge to ook back down to cover the bottom of the pot. I think I stirred it the right amount, because the stuff that was left in the pot after I'd poured the fudge off into the pan had pretty much set to an appropriate fudge consistency by the time I got myself settled in a comfy chair to lick out the pot.

Results

Well, we tried the fudge. I used roasted walnuts in it, which I think are a little too potent. Some people say they taste like bacon. I think they taste good and nutty, but a little overpowering. The fudge itself set up pretty well. It was a little on the soft side when I tried it, but I hadn't put it in the refrigerator or anything. It was sufficiently hard that it maintained its structure for several hours at room temperature after pieces were cut out of it. All in all, I'm pretty happy with it.

Why deconstructed bangers and mash?

Today I was overcome with that seasonal, irrational desire to make old family recipes. It turns out, all of my old family recipes are norwegian deserts. But I dutifully sat down and compiled a list of things I'd like to make, both old and new. Then I realized that everything on the list was completely sensible, except for hardangar lefse, which requires, among other things 11 cups of flour plus 2 more cups of flour for rolling. Yeah right. It also requires a specialized rolling pin and grill, both of which are currently 3000 miles from here. So I decided to make potato lefse, which is a more savory sort of thing that my family, apparently being sweettooths, didn't go for.

Lefse is a Norwegian flatbread. Hardangar lefse is a very flat, crispy flatbread-- more like chapati than naan or tortillas. It is sprayed with water to make it flexible, then buttered and sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, and finally folded together and cut into strips, which stay flexible because of the butter. (Sorry about that sentence; I got a little carried away.) Potato lefse, as I understand from my cultural tourism, is a more savory thing that gets rolled up and stuffed with... something. A google image search will return exactly one image (well, two; the same one shows up twice) of potato lefse as it's supposed to be served. It has something rolled up inside it. They never tell you what is rolled up inside it.

So we decided to just make something up. We settled on deconstructed bangers and mash. You get your mash in the form of a soft flatbread, and a plate with fake sausage patties and vegetables.

Lefse Recipe

I found this recipe on some web page or other, but I can't find the web page again. I modified it, anyway, because I didn't like the idea of letting it chill overnight. That just wouldn't meet my instant gratification needs.

Ingredients:
3 cups instant mashed potatoes. I used hungry jack instant mashed potatoes because everyone and their mom says that if you use instant mashed potatos in lefse, this is the only brand to use. It could be that all good norwegians own Hungry Jack stock and they want to see a profit. Or there could be something special with their potato flake process. In any case, I don't want to get beaten up by a bunch of old norwegian ladies, so I did what they told me to. Oddly, the recipe I followed the most didn't care, so maybe it doesn't matter. It could be that instant mashed potato technology has advanced since the recipes were carved in stone.

1/4 cup butter. I used unsalted, and I really used butter. Margarine is bad for you; you're better off eating lard than margarine. And butter is solid at higher temperatures, which might be relevant here, since the dough gets really crumbly if it isn't cold enough. Any experimentation is at your own risk.

1 cup evaporated milk. Any old milk would probably do, but we had evap in the cupboard and no milk in the refrigerator.

1 cup flour for the dough, and another cup for rolling.

1 cup water.

process:
Melt the butter. Add the water to the butter. Dump in potato flakes. Work them with a fork until it's smooth. It will take longer than you're used to, because typicall you'd be mixing the flakes with a lot more liquid. Add the milk and 1 cup of flour. Stir together until smooth. I threw it in the fridge for good measure, since everyone said it needed to be cooled overnight. I patted the dough around the edge of the bowl to maximize surface area per volume. I don't think it needed to be cooled; we just needed time to figure out what else we were doing for the meal.

Make 2" diameter balls from the dough. You can do this in advance, but you'll want to roll them and cook them as you go. I found that using a rolling pin was a fiasco. Granted, we have a psycho rolling pin here (It's not even cylindrical!), so maybe a proper rolling pin woud be ok. But I patted it out by hand. I did this by squashing the ball into a disk, flouring the counter, and patting the disc around with my hand, thinning it out. Then I flipped it and repeated the process until it was about 10-11" across. Each time I flipped it, I worked in a bit more flour. If I let it get too thin, it tore, but it wasn't a big deal to just squoosh it back together.

Cook in a frying pan on medium heat. It will get bubbles in it. When it gets bubbly, flip it and cook the other side. It will be brown wherever there were bubbles against the pan, and whiteish everywhere else. You should have worked enough flour into it that it's pretty dry; it shouldn't stick to the pan at all. If it does, for some bizarre reason, add more flour or chill it or something. You should be able to roll one while the previous one cooks.

You might, at some point, decide to break the glass flour container. This might be a good time to decide you've made enough lefse and put the rest of the balls back into the refrigerator for another meal. Avoid getting the glass-infested flour on them. Sweeping the floor would be clever.

Deconstructed Bangers and Mash Recipe

Get someone else to julienne a bunch of carrots. They might add lemon juice, olive oil, onion flakes, salt, and pepper. Let that sit while you roll & cook the lefse. Realize that you're covered with flour and tell that someone else to finish cooking everything while you go outside to brush off. It doesn't matter if it's freezing outside and snow is all over the ground; you don't want that in your house. Besides, if you're brushing it off energetically enough, you won't actually feel cold. If your timing is appropriate, you can probably show up just in time to watch the rest of the work get done.

Someone else might also make patties out of fake sausage while you make the lefse. Lefse is pretty time consuming. When you're done with the lefse and are saving your household from being overwhelmed by flour dust, they can use the pan you made the lefse in to fry up the patties. Then they can fry up the carrots. They might make you slice some tomatos to go on the side, but that's no big deal.

Presentation

Whenever you deconstruct a dish, presentation is really important. We each had a plate with patties up one side, tomatoes up the other side, and carrot in the middle. The stack of lefse went on another plate in the middle of the table. We just ate the tomatoes straight-up; they were more of a garnish. To eat the rest of it, pick up a lefse, fill it with carrots and sausage pieces, and wrap it up and eat it like fajitas.

We made soup from the capon carcass the other day. We actually made the stock the day after thanksgiving, froze it, then made soup with some of it later.

Stock

You'll need a big pot of some sort. You don't actually need a big pot; last year we didn't have a big pot so we broke the carcass up into a couple of absurdly small pots & it still turned out ok. But a big pot helps. This year, we had a big pot. We got a dutch oven after discovering that a good quality stock pot costs several hundered dollars more than a good quality dutch oven of the same capacity. The dutch oven could double as a roasting pan as well, which a stock pot wouldn't be able to do. Maybe if we made soup all the time, a stock pot would be worth it. But given that we make it only several times a year, it wasn't worth it. Don't get a crappy stock pot, either, because that would be silly. We could have gotten a crappy stock pot for much less than the dutch oven, but it wouldn't have worked properly. Good ones have an aluminum core that goes up the sides; crappy ones have an aluminum core just on the bottom, or nothing. We have a small pot that just has an aluminum core on the bottom and you can't just turn down the heat and let it simmer because the heat won't get to the top of the pot; it's a problem for 2 people's worth of soup. I can only imagine how bad it would be in a stock pot with 4-5 times it's volume.

Stick the carcass and giblets in the pot along with coarsley chopped celery, onions, carrots, and a handful of black peppercorns. I think we used 2 onions, 6-8 carrots, and a comprable amount of cellery. Fill the pot with water so that the carcass is under water. If the carcass sticks up, just break it up so it gets underneath. You can do this with your bare hands and feel very primal. Grunting helps, as does using telegraphic speech. Actually, it's just easier with your hands than to go pull out a cutting board and a cleaver. You're welcome to do that, though, since I recognize that cleavers have their own appeal.

Let it ook on low heat for 3-6 hours; if you have a crappy pot, you'll want to use a higher heat. It should be at the low end of simmering. Every 15-20ish minutes, go skim the foamy stuff off the top. When foamy stuff stops forming, you can ignore the pot for longer. But check on it periodically because it's bad to leave something completely unattended on the stove for hours. You never know when a badly aimed mind-control-laser might be directed at the pot, causing its entire contents to sublimate. Then you'd want to turn the stove off.

When you think it's ooked for long enough, take out the carcass and throw it in the trash. Then use a sieve or collander, remove the smaller chunks from the liquid and throw them out. Skim the fat off of the top and throw it out too. Since a dutch oven has a very high surface area, skimming the fat was hard because it didn't make a very thick layer. So I dipped a mug into the pot and let the top layer of stock fill the mug. I skimmed the fat from the mug (which was now a quite thick layer) and then repeated the process until the great majority of the fat was gone.

We had a much higher volume of stock than we had containers, so we condensed it to about 1/4 the volume by just letting it simmer without a lid for a while. Then we stuck it in a container in the refrigerator. When refrigerated, it had the consistency of jello. When it became apparent that we weren't making soup any time soon, we split it up into freezer boxes and froze it.

soup

Remove stock from the freezer. Stick it in a pot... you can even use your small crappy pot. Add some water if you condensed your stock. Add a bunch of brussel sprouts and perl onions. Ack!. I've been hanging out with too many programmers. You can use pearl onions if you don't like scripting languages. I'm more of a c person, myself. Add some salt (since we didn't add any to the stock) and other seasonings if you feel so inclined. I don't remember what I used because I was slightly irresponsible and didn't post about the soup in a timely fashion.

Let it ook for about half an hour. The important thing with brussel sprouts is to let them ook properly. People often think they don't like them because they haven't had them cooked properly. Remember, if you take the ook out of cook, all you have is c. Or something like that... um... nevermind. But ooking is important.

I made gingerbread and cranberry chutney again today. The rest of the day was pretty uneventful---processed foods and pizza. I don't think I've been eating properly. Tomorrow I'll eat something healthy.

Gingerbread Recipe

ingredients:
1 1/2 cup flour
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup warm water
1/4 cup butter
1 TBS lemon juice
~1 tsp baking soda
~1 tsp baking powder
~1 TBS powdered ginger
~1 TBS cinnamon
~1 tsp allspice
x tsp nutmeg, where 1/8 < x < 1/2
y tsp corriander, where 1/8 < y < 1/3

I payed more attention this time, aren't you proud of me?

procedure:
People who know what they are doing will mix up the wet ingredients first then add the dry ingredients. However, people who know what they are doing will have to plan ahead and be more organized than you need to be for this recipe; they might even use more dishes. Incidentally, brown sugar counts as a wet ingredient.

Make a pot of tea. Be sure to make more water than fills the teapot. Some of this water, naturally, you'll want to use to preheat the teapot. But measure off half a cup and dump the butter into it. (Um... that would be the measured off portion, not the bit that you're going to drink.) The butter will melt nicely and you won't have to worry about mucking around with a microwave, or worse, planning ahead enough to leave it out to soften ahead of time.

Pour the lemon juice into the dry ingredients. It's important to do this first because it's exciting... remember the vinegar/baking soda volcanos? Less impressive, but lemon juice still bubbles a little when it hooks up with the baking soda. Now add the water and butter and stir it up. You could do it all at once, but you'd miss some excitement. Don't wait too long, though, because you want the bubbles to be inside the dough, not used up while you were watching them fizz.

Mix the dough up and stick it on a floured baking sheet. Smoosh it out so it's pretty flat. It should be maybe 1/4" thick. It will rise a reasonable amount; I think mine doubled in thickness, maybe a little more.

Bake for ~10 minutes at ~350 degrees F. I started mine with the knob turned to 250, which was really 350. I thought I'd appropriately compensated at the time, but no. I didn't realize quite how psychotic this oven is because I don't use it enough. Did I mention that you shouldn't trust your oven and should get a supplemental oven-safe thermometer so you know what's really going on? When I checked on it after about 7 minutes, the gingerbread was mostly done, but the oven had decided that it should actually be 450. It wasn't quite done so I left it another 2 minutes with the oven turned off, so maybe it cooled down to the 350 range by the end, but who knows? In short, the cooking time/temperature is pretty flexible. In any case, you can tell if it's done by pushing down in the middle with your finger. If it's done, it will spring back up. If it's not done, it will make a dent.

Top with cranberry chutney.