Pop rocks

The retro candy confection known as Pop Rocks are made by bubbling carbon dioxide through a solution of molten sugar (mixed with some color and flavorings), which traps the gas as the sugar hardens. It was invented in 1956 as a potential mix-in for Kool-Aid, but didn't work very well and so sat on the metaphorical shelf until the 1970s, when someone had the unprecedented idea of just shoving the damn things in your mouth.  And the rest is history.

Bear with me, there's a milkshake at the end.

Long time no read!

So, stuff.  First, administrivia.  I've been kinda busy lately, what with dog and work and life and broken refrigerators and, well, stuff.  This blog isn't dead-- I have several partial posts backed up.  But they may come rather sporadically for a few more weeks.

Next-- Exercise!  Penn Jillette, on his podcast (Penn's Sunday School), was talking a couple weeks ago about the "7 minute workout" that's the latest fad.  And he was saying how, you know, he's always felt that he'd exercise if he somehow could only do it in less than 10 minutes.  And so he tried it, because he said he would, after all, and then gave up in horror because it was Teh Hard.

But he's a big fat guy, right, and I'm at least vaguely in shape.  Maybe I can do it!  I downloaded one of the free apps to help you through it, and tried it on Sunday.  And here's a useful tip--

When they say 7 minutes?  That's true-- you're only exercising for about that long, depending on variations.  But that doesn't include setup (minimal, actually), or stretching, or convincing the dog to leave me alone for 7 goddam minutes, or the hour or so I spent after my first session sitting on the floor waiting to die.  Seriously, this is a ROUGH routine.  At least at first.  Allot a bit of extra time.

I've done it a few mornings, now, before my shower.  My legs are killing me, but I'm mostly still making it through (tomorrow may or may not happen, because ow).  We'll see 1) if I can keep it up, and 2) if it actually does me any good.

Oh, and I promised you milkshakes!  So-- boil sugar in white wine to make a syrup.  Add a cup of chopped fresh basil.  Steep, strain, cool-- you now have basil syrup.  Cut the kernels off of 2 ears of fresh corn.  Simmer gently in a little water (or, if you're more like me, accidentally burn) for about 5 minutes.  Combine corn, 6 Tbsp syrup, and 8 scoops of good vanilla ice cream in blender, scraping sides as needed.  Voila-- sweet corn and basil milkshake.  Quite good, really.

ETA: Oh, and milkshake recipe is courtesy of Adam Ried's Thoroughly Modern Milkshakes.

Flying Pringles

Most people realize that Pringles brand potato crisps (not chips) are fairly artificial.  After all, it's hard to find potatoes that grow in such a regular shape.  Although imagine if they did-- they'd look like jelly beans. Huge, potato-y jelly beans.

And now I want jelly beans.  Sigh.

Anyway, it turns out that the shape is not just a marketing decision, to make them look like duck lips when you eat them in pairs.  Proctor and Gamble (former owners of the Pringles brand) studied the shape very carefully, even going so far as to run the chips (sorry, crisps) through a wind tunnel-- at least virtually.  The digital models of the airflow allowed the company to redesign their production line to move the crisps through even faster, while keeping them from achieving full lift and taking off like little airfoils, something that would undoubtedly interfere with the manufacturing process.

Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=high-powered-computing-heralds-digital-industrial-revolution

Berbere

In other news, one teaspoon (possibly less if it's fresh) of the Ethiopian spice blend berbere added to a box of brownie mix is a very Good Thing.  Like many spice mixes, the exact contents and proportions can vary, but the one I used was (according to the label), "cayenne red pepper, garlic, ginger, fenugreek, cardamom, cumin, black pepper, allspice, turmeric, cloves, Ceylon cinnamon and coriander."  In that order.

More malt

Banana malt vanilla milkshake...

Did not work.  Do not attempt unless you are a trained professional.

Honestly, I'm not quite sure what went wrong.  Despite reducing the amount of milk I added, it came out kind of watery, and the malt and the banana just did not work well together.  Alas.

Date night

I return from an unexpected hiatus with a completely banal food post!  Oh well.

So my wife came home the other day with a traditional Spanish cookbook (that is, a cookbook of traditional Spanish recipes, not a cookbook written in traditional Spanish).  Most of the recipes were either not especially surprising (patatas bravas, paellas, etc) or impractical for the typical American cook (jugged hare, partridge pâté).  However, one recipe caught my eye, and I just had to try it out.  The name was Tortilla de Dátiles-- Date Omelet.  It gets weirder than that, though.

Basically-- 2 eggs, a couple of chopped dates, a bit of chopped ham, and 4 medium shrimp, sauteed(!).  Lots of butter.  Mix ingredients in the egg and then dump everything into the pan, cook, fold and plate (or plate and fold if that's easier).  Top with a spoonful of tomato sauce.

Definitely peculiar, but oddly compelling, too.  I may actually make it again, although I may try the alternate "cook the eggs by themselves and then fill" technique.  It was also extremely full, so I might try 3 eggs for a slightly larger portion but with better balance.

Milkshake recipe

By weight (use a scale!):

One (1) part malted milk powder.

Three (3) parts milk.

Six (6) parts ice cream.

This makes a nice, medium thick, strongly malty shake.  From here you can adjust as per your own individual tastes.  The actual measurements I ended up with were 33 g malted milk, 100 g milk, and 200 g ice cream, because that was about the minimum for the stick blender to handle effectively.  It was a little on the large side, though.  I ended up splitting it with the wife.

Oyster? I hardly know 'er!

Oyster crackers.  They're fairly ubiquitous, especially in New England.  I've been eating them for years, especially in chowders and the like.  Eventually, it occurred to me to wonder why they're called oyster crackers-- they're certainly not made from oysters, after all, the way oyster sauce is.

It turns out that the etymology of the name is actually somewhat opaque, lost in the mists of time.  But the general consensus seems to be that they are not named so because they look like closed oysters (they don't, really), but simply that they were originally very popular in oyster stew¹.

¹http://books.google.com/books?id=6N8XAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA346#v=onepage&q&f=false

(Shell)Fish Monday

I tried stir-frying scallops for the first time last night.  Bay scallops, the little ones, not the big real ones.  I don't think those would stir-fry very well.  But the little ones work really nicely in a stir-fry.  Some pea pods, some mushrooms, a little teriyaki sauce, and Bob's your dinner.  Definitely something to consider again if there's a good deal on them (not that they're terribly expensive, just that they're not always that fresh in our local market).

Corn Tortillas

This was a completely accidental discovery-- no research or intent beforehand.

Dinner tonight was a simplified fish taco, which called for the traditional small corn tortillas.  The package had two sets of instructions for heating, to wit:  1) toast on a hot griddle for 20-30 seconds per side, or 2) microwave in a damp towel.  Being lazy (and the cast iron pan being unavailable), we nuked 'em¹.

When we bit into the tacos, the corn tortillas promptly split apart and started creating a largish mess.  This was a source of some surprise and no small disappointment, but we ate them anyway, for we were hungry.

After, I was not quite full, and there were plenty of leftovers, so I figured I'd try a little experiment.  I cleaned the cast iron pan, and heated another tortilla according to the other method.  And boy howdy, did it make a difference.  The tortilla was warm and soft, but not vaguely damp like the microwaved one was, and held its structural integrity with a great deal more ease.

So take it from me-- not all heating instructions are created equal.  If you don't have a flat hot surface, a toaster oven probably would work.  But whatever you do, don't microwave the tortillas².

¹It was the only way to be sure.
²Unknown whether this rule holds for flour tortillas as well.

Pizza...esque

Last night I learned that if you make a double batch of pizza dough but then forget and leave the second half in the bottom of the meat drawer for a few days, it is absolutely still "usable."  However, the extremely long rise/fermentation will do a couple of things-- it will make the dough smell disconcertingly beery, and it will super-upsize the gluten production.  It was REALLY hard to stretch out, and ended up being more of a pizza-flavored foccacia than an actual pizza.  Still tasty, though.

Weekend random

This weekend I learned two things--

First, that if you see the abbreviation "geth." in a German music score, it's an abbreviation for "getheilt" and means "divided."

Second, Cotswold makes a damned fine grilled cheese sandwich.

It's been an odd weekend.

Mayocicle

This morning I learned not only that it is a bad idea to accidentally freeze your jar of mayonnaise, I learned why it is a bad idea.

Upon thawing, it will separate (or "break", in foodie jargon).  Bleah.

Chicken McShapes

The four canonical shapes for Chicken McNuggets are the Boot (an angle), the Ball (round), the Bone (rectangle), and the Bell (a kind of oval shape). All McNuggets should be one of those four basic configurations, having been formed into those shapes during the manufacturing process.

http://m.flickr.com/photos/jakeisbadman/3721610125/lightbox/
For a picture of the McNugget Extruder and the four shapes.

Cookies

Quick tip for chocolate chip cookies-- try browning some or all of the butter. That is, cook out the water and let the milk solids brown a bit. It adds a nice sort of deep caramel-y flavor to the cookies.

What is bubblegum flavor?

Everyone knows what bubblegum tastes like.  Or at least a lot of people.  Ok, a lot of Americans.  Anyway, we've all* tasted the ice cream, or the cotton candy, or chewed the gum itself.  But what, exactly, is it?

Turns out, nobody really seems to know.  All right, that's not quite true.  I mean, the people at Hubba Bubba presumably know, right?  And Wrigley.  And a bunch of others.  But each of these has their own proprietary combination of flavorings, and no one's talking.  It's a little bit like the formula for Coke-- we can make a few guesses as to some of the obvious components, but the exact proportions and some of the minor additives we can only guess at.

So here's what we do know.  Ethyl methylphenylglycidate is one of the flavors.  That's a common artificial "strawberry" flavoring.  It does not appear to be in actual strawberries, but it is fruity and berry-y and the government has classified it as Generally Regarded As Safe.

Another compound is isoamyl acetate, also known as isopentyl acetate.  This is another common flavoring, generally used as an artificial banana flavoring, although it reportedly also tastes a bit like pear.  It's dead simple and cheap to make-- I'm pretty sure it's the stuff we cooked up in high school in AP Chemistry.  Unlike the strawberry flavoring, it is an actual component of real bananas, although in the actual fruit it's only one part of a much larger collection of naturally occurring chemicals.

There are some other likely components-- most versions probably contain vanilla (or more likely vanillin), as well as methyl salicylate (wintergreen-ish), and of course some sort of sweetener (sugar, HFCS, stevia, whatever).  But the exact formulas remain a mystery.

*as previously disclaimed

Pupusas

We discovered some time ago that the local pizza place, run (inevitably) by a family that couldn't be less Italian, occasionally offered Latin American dishes in addition to the standard pizza and pizza-related items.  Sometimes when we went in, there would be a handscrawled sign taped to the wall that simply said, "Tamales" and a price.  We finally tried them a while back, and they're fantastic.  Substantially sized, filled with braised pork, and the tamale dough itself is highly seasoned.  Sometimes we put a little salsa on top, but it really doesn't need it.

Anyway, as time passed, the tamales moved from the scribbled sign to a permanent place on the actual menu, and appearing alongside them was something called a "pupusa."  Well, we were curious, so we threw in an order the next time we got some pizza.  It turns out that pupusas are primarily an El Salvadoran dish (finally giving the last clue to the actual ethnicity of the proprietors).  They're somewhat like arepas, if you know what arepas are, but using the finer masa harina instead of just corn meal.  If you don't know what an arepa is, it's sort of like a thick, filled corn cake.  The equivalent Mexican/Tex Mex dish is the gordita.  Anyway, they're typically filled with the same pork, but also include some cheese and possibly beans (versions vary, naturally).  And they're also extremely good.  It's starting to get to the point where I'm going to make my own pizza, and just go there for the latin food...

And speaking of, the Food Lab recently put up instructions for cooking pizza in a cast iron pan instead of on a stone.  And it's AWESOME, especially in a home oven that doesn't get that hot.  Not exactly authentic, but really tasty.

And just because I'm throwing out random food bits-- the Pagoda Express Sesame Chicken frozen entree is terrible.  Really awful.  Do Not Buy Under Any Circumstances.

Fish Monday - Green curry

Still plugging through that cookbook, trying new things.  This time we had milk-poached halibut in green curry sauce with a side of bok choy.

Except that the store didn't have any halibut, even frozen, so we used mahi-mahi.  And they had neither kaffir lime leaves nor lemongrass (not that I really expected them to), so the curry sauce was a little on the weak/simple side.  And like most recipes in this book, the whole operation took me over 2 hours, what with the various bits and bobs that needed assembling.  The result was tasty, certainly, but I have to say that it just wasn't really worth the effort.  I probably won't make it again, although I might steal the curry sauce and use it on something else.  Actually, I made more than we needed, so I'm already going to have to think of some other use for it.

Wintershin

This one goes out to lietya, for reasons.

The name "wintergreen" is applied to a variety of plants, because once upon a time it just meant "plants that stay green in winter."  These days, many of those plants are called "evergreen" instead.  One set of these plants, although sadly not the ones that produce the wintergreen flavor (methyl salicylate) are in the genus Pyrola, "commonly" called shinleaf.

Adventures in Baking

So the other night, I was having some cravings for a confection that our local bakery calls "grasshopper brownies."  They're a dense fudgy brownie with a layer of mint buttercream (with some sort of candy mixed in, either mint or white chocolate), and topped with a layer of ganache.  They're very good.  But, of course, the bakery wasn't open at 6:30 on a Saturday night.  So I thought to myself, "Self," I thought, "I know how to make brownies.  And I'm pretty sure I can make buttercream, or at least I'm pretty sure I know what went wrong with the last batch I tried to make*.  And ganache is dead easy.  I should try to make my own!  How Hard Can It Be?"

Well, there were some stumbles.  For one thing, I always forget that when you're baking you have to allow time for things to cool once they're out of the oven.  If you don't, you either burn yourself trying to eat it, or in this case the layers will melt and collapse.  So the whole operation took about 4-5 hours, which was rather more than I had expected, but at least kept me out of trouble for an evening.  Also, I set the oven to the wrong temperature, so the brownies took extra time.  And we didn't have any mint extract, so I used crème de menthe.  Which actually did work, although the mint flavor was pretty mild.  Also, the box that I had thought was a second box of confectioner's sugar turned out to be superfine instead, so I ended up having to MAKE MY OWN confectioner's sugar† to get enough to work with so that the buttercream wouldn't be hopelessly grainy.

And after all that?  They actually turned out pretty damned good.

The color's pretty washed out in that photo, but the buttercream actually is green-- I found some old food coloring in the back of the pantry, and three drops was just about right.

*I did know-- the butter had been too cold.  I let it warm up enough this time, and it worked much better.

†put 1 cup of sugar and 1 tsp cornstarch into a spice grinder or blender and process it for at least a minute, possibly two or more.