Not So Fast!

Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the kitchen...

After watching the cupcake episode of Good Eats, I decided to try my hand at Alton's chiffon cupcakes. Sure, the recipe called for separating five eggs, but what's so hard about that? I've made angel food the required separating a full dozen. I jumped right in.

About nine eggs later, I had finally managed to separate five egg whites from their yolks without any contamination. I guess it could have been worse, but man I sucked at separating eggs today. This used up all the eggs I had, btw.

A little annoyed, I proceeded with recipe and immediately proceeded to whip the eggs whites with the 5 oz of sugar... but OH CRAP that was the egg yolks I was supposed to combine with the sugar. Fail.

At this point, I'm out of eggs, but I don't give up so easily. I race down to the grocery, grab a fresh dozen eggs, and race back home. Where are my keys? I don't have my keys. Ok no biggie. We keep a spare hidden by the door. Where is the spare? OH CRAP it's not there. Ok I'll just call Amy but wait Amy left her cell phone at home today. In fact, I could probably hear it ringing through the locked door as I try to call her.

It's actually pretty warm in Seattle today (90º... ok not that warm by NC standards, but whatever). Both me and the eggs are sweating at this point so I make an executive decision to break into the house. This involves diving head first through the bedroom window and basically doing a belly-flop onto the bed. I execute this about as gracefully as you might imagine.

All this for cupcakes. They'd better be tasty.

winners?

i guess we don't suck at cooking anymore?

Creamed Spinach

I'd taken some veal out of the freezer, but it hadn't fully defrosted for dinner tonight, so I had to scramble to come up with something to make.

I decided to reheat some leftovers and make some new veggie sides. My crisper was pretty empty - I missed the Farmer's Market in favor of Emily's bachelorette party. Martin and I had gone to the grocery store but only bought bare bones supplies, barely enough to last until Sunday, when I could replenish at the next Farmer's Market day.

Based on that, I came up with creamed spinach and tomato gratin. Take a guess at which you think the disaster was. :)

I picked this recipe because it was the only decent looking one I found that did not call for heavy cream, which I didn't have on hand. Everything was going fine until I threw it all into the food processor.

The line that says pulse until creamy? Yeah, it'll never become that. Instead, you'll get a weird, lumpy, grainy, watery green mixture. It's not appetizing at all. :)

Thinking about it now, I think where I went wrong was adding chicken broth to the mixture. I spent a long time squeezing all the water out of the spinach, to make sure that it wouldn't make anything watery. But then I went and added the chicken broth, thereby undoing all my good.

Coconut Ice Cream?

Tommy and I had a bad culinary week last week. I wanted to make some more ice cream, so I chose coconut ice cream. I like coconut, both the flavor and the texture of the flakes. Tommy insisted on buying REAL coconuts and harvesting the coconut flakes and coconut cream from the REAL coconuts. Awesome. We proudly walked out of the grocery store with 3 REAL coconuts. When we got home, we drilled into one of the eyes to drain the liquid (is it called coconut milk at this point?). Then I baked them for about 10 minutes. Tommy took a hammer to them and we took off the bark and then the second layer of bark. The flesh went into the food processor. Finally, coconut flakes! I sweetened them up and proceeded to make the coconut ice cream using the coconut, heavy cream, half and half, and some sugar. The result? Flavorless white ice cream with tons of coconut flake (those were flavorless too). Oh, and the ice cream has this strange crystall-like texture that doesn't resemble ice cream at all.

Pasta, green and clumpy

Is it considered cooking if the only step involved is boiling salted water? Pasta's pretty easy but plain old pasta gets boring. I wanted something different. Maybe something wide, or squiggly. Whole Foods was not up to the challenge. They had gnocchi but I was not in a gnocchi mood. So I went with fresh pasta; I had seen it many times before and it always intrigued me. Store-bought fresh pasta? Then is it really fresh? It's more expensive, maybe it's better.

Wrong.



I was skeptical from the start. After all, it looked like one big green blob of spinach fettuccine, formed into a nice rectangular brick. It turns out that the impressive powers of boiling water had no hope of pulling those strands apart. I poked and prodded it for ten minutes and all I ended up with was clumps.

Cake!

Our oven is sadly, out of order, which only intensifies my need for dishes that require an oven, like... cake. I knew, with the ingenuity that exists in the world, that someone had to have a recipe for some cake-like-creation that could be made either stovetop or in the microwave. Correct I was! Chocolate cake! Before we even start, let's detail the pitfalls associated with this course of action:

• Microwaved cake? Gross. Crazy times make crazy minds.
  
• Allrecipes? Why did I go there? I've never had a good recipe come from Allrecipes.
  
• It's worth repeating - cake in a microwave? Only Betty Crocker and her many preservatives seems to have found a way.
  

As you might expect, this was mostly nasty. While it had a vague chocolatey flavor and sweetness, it was dry in the middle and had a mostly chalky taste that was somehow reminiscent of baking sugar free goods, despite the real sugar I added.

We fight on, looking for non-oveny desserts.

I just want to point out

that I haven't had a cooking disaster in almost a month! Go me!

Nor has anyone else! Go everyone!