Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

They have two items in their spice section that I highly recommend.

First is their Black Garlic. This stuff is fermented, making it slightly candied and VERY yummy! You can eat it by itself - in small quantity - for a little nibble. Good on all sorts of things, though it may discolor some stuff like eggs.

Next is their powdered mushrooms, labeled as Mushroom & Company: Multipurpose Umami. I normally don't like mushrooms, but this stuff is very useful for adding flavor and lets you sneak it in for people like me who don't like the appearance and texture of mushrooms. Sadly, I thought I'd bought another bottle of this the last time I was in Phoenix, but either I didn't or I can't find it. Either way, I'm pretty much out. Oh, well. We'll be back in Phoenix in February if not sooner.

The bundle includes two books by Dianne Kennedy, a woman who was considered a very deep expert on the food of Mexico. She spent several decades of her life driving a beat up pickup through little villages in Mexico, talking to people, learning recipes. She was very devoted to their cuisine.

Many books on tacos, salsas, books on vegan cuisine, TexMex, etc. Heck of a collection, IMO worth it just for the Kennedy books. Sadly, she passed away at a ripe old age a year or two ago.

As usual, the books are DRM-free and in epub format. The charity for this bundle is the Global FoodBanking Network, and will be available for another twenty days.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/mexican-cooking-books

This is a heck of a bundle! As usual, the books are DRM-free and in this bundle are provided in PDF format, which is not my favorite as they're so much bigger than epub, but it is what it is.

All proceeds go to "Direct Relief, a humanitarian organization on the ground in Ukraine providing medical supplies, emergency field kits, and insulin."

Cuisines included are: Puerto Rican, world sauces, New Orleans, Japanese, American Barbecue sauces, Filipino, Southern Keto, Southern Diabetic, Italian, Scandinavian baking, Italian, Lebanese, Asian, pressure cooker curry, Indian vegetarian, Portuguese, French, Creole and Cajun, Middle Eastern, dumplings, Mexican, Asian pickles, South Indian, Spanish, German, Jewish, Jewish baking, vegan Indian, Southern BBQ, British baking, more Italian, InstaPot Vegan Indian, Korean BBQ, Vegetarian Indian InstaPot, Hot Pot, Chinese Hot Pot, Vegan Japanese, Vegan Chinese, another Cajun, and an American BBQ Smoker cookbook.

That's a lot of topics! These books are by Callisto Media and will be available for just under three weeks (20 days and 21 hours from this post).

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/cooking-around-world-callisto-media-books

Friday is our little holiday potluck at the library since it's our last day until January 2! It's the last day of one of my co-workers period: she's retiring and on the second I'm starting full-time! We're having lasagna, green chili enchiladas, you know: traditional winter holiday food.

And I made my flourless chocolate cake!

And I frosted it with an icing that I cobbled together based on an eggnog icing from the Trader Joe's web site. Based on experience and my (lack of) skill at frosting/decorating cakes, I doubled the recipe.

Which produced the question: what to do with the cake now that it was frosted.

Zero fridge space. Can't put it back in the freezer, where it had stayed the last 12 hours, because it was decorated.

So I put it in my car!

It's 25f out there, and it's in a sealed plastic cake carrier, so it'll be fine. It will be fairly frozen when I get to work, but it'll sit out for an hour, so it should be perfect to serve.

But there remains a problem with the excess icing. You see, under New Mexico law, or so I just made up, you can't keep excess icing - you have to use it or trash it. So I guess I'm just going to have to dig out some crackers and my iPad and have a bit of a snack and read some more Project Skinhorse!

DARN! :-)

It's not like I discovered it - I wish! I subscribe to Milk Street Magazine, Christopher Kimball's revenge for being unjustly turfed from America's Test Kitchen. I received a recipe in email recently that looked interesting, but it also included an article link about a "great substitute for buttermilk: kefir".

Color me interested!

As far as I'm concerned, since I don't live near a good dairy, there is no more such a thing as good buttermilk. (most people would argue that there has never been such a thing as good buttermilk!) I loved the buttermilk that I had as a kid and wanted it for certain applications, but the garbage they sold in the stores here was just that - garbage. The stuff they sell today is milk with an added enzyme culture that is just gross.

Well, Kimball's people had an epiphany and did some testing, substituting kefir 1:1 in recipes that called for buttermilk, testing it against a horror that some people use where you mix 1 tablespoon of white vinegar into a cup of 2% milk and let it sit for 5 minutes. They made biscuits, pancakes, yellow cake, and cornbread. The kefir worked perfectly in all applications, the only case where there was a noticeable difference was in the yellow cake where it was a bit denser but still had good flavor. The vinegar abomination was a fail in everything except the cake - go figger.

I've bought decent buttermilk from Sprouts in Las Cruces, but I don't get there very often and it doesn't last forever, so I added kefir to my shopping list, and tonight I went shopping. And I found some! It was actually a plain, unsweetened kefir 'smoothie' and it has a taste not unlike buttermilk - somewhat sour/astringent. My test recipe: Zatarain's cheddar garlic biscuit mix! I have a special butter recipe to make them quite a bit like Red Lobster biscuits.

And the recipe came out perfect. The biscuits were great, rose perfectly, flavor was excellent. I think the kefir adds a bit of zing, which is what I wanted. And smothered in the butter they are appallingly good! I finished off the gazpacho that I made last week for dinner, having perhaps a biscuit too many, which sometimes happens right after I make them.

So if you're like me and you sometimes need buttermilk but can't find a good one, try plain, unsweetened kefir! I don't know if it'll work in all applications, but it definitely worked for this biscuit mix.

https://www.177milkstreet.com/2019/02/buttermilk-substitute-kefir

I have a refrigerator magnet in my line of site from where I'm sitting right now that I got from Penzey's Spices that reads Love People, Cook Them Tasty Food. I really like that, and I enjoy cooking, which some people find it weird for a guy to say. So what. It started with an addiction to Good Eats, then progressed to America's Test Kitchen before they foolishly fired their founder, Christopher Kimball. It's always risky incorporating, but sometimes you have to lose some control in order to fund growth. Now he's founded Milk Street and I'm sure will be cannibalizing and gutting ATK over the next few years.

Cooking-wise, I didn't really delve in to many new recipes as my old standards are just fine. I did learn that you don't need to pick the leaves off cilantro - just chop up the stems after a good wash, but remove any yucky leaves/stems before doing so. HUGE time-saver, so I expect to make chicken tacos throughout the year rather than saving them for the New Years Eve taco bar.

I did some taco experimentation this year with existing tacos, experimenting with my ground beef recipe. I made it with ground pork, chicken, and turkey, and all configurations work just fine and all taste great. But more importantly, I pulled over a component from my pork tacos and REALLY pumped up my beef tacos (regardless of what meat that I use).

The beef tacos are very straight forward: onions & garlic, cooking liquid, spices. The chicken tacos are quite a bit more complicated and unique, I won't get in to them. The pork tacos are unique in two ways. Aside from chili powder, the spice base is cinnamon and cloves, so it's a very different flavor profile. Quite good, my wife loves them. But they have one other very unique thing: toasted slivered almonds and chopped up raisins. I only use golden raisins as I really don't like the taste of the other types, I chop up 3-4 tbs fine and they go in with the cooking liquid to simmer. The almonds are toasted as the first cooking step, but they're not added until after the cooking is over to preserve their crunch as much as possible.

I started adding the almonds and raisins to the beef tacos. Words cannot describe how much I like this addition. Now, when I do the NYE taco bar, I don't do this to keep a stronger delineation between the three preparations, but at home: raisins and almonds every time.

The other recipe that I did for the first time is Ysabette's mango ham, which was crazy easy. Build a sweet mango puree basting sauce spice mix, apply said mango puree to ham, tent it, throw it in the oven. Baste every hour. Cook to temperature. MUCH easier prep than my normal ham prep, Alton Brown's City Ham, which I'll continue making occasionally and is crazy good. But it's nice to have more than one ham recipe in your repertoire.

I would like to experiment this year with making enchiladas, but also with making my own enchilada sauce. We shall see if I get around to this.


Baking-wise, I did a fair amount in the last couple of months of the year. Our local diner has an amazing pie. Sadly, it's amazing for its design and concept, not for its taste. It's a flourless chocolate cake covered by a chocolate mousse. In their implementation it also has a layer of whipped cream, but do you really need to add empty calories to what should be fabulous chocolate? Gilding the lily.

I knew my mousse was leagues better, and I was confident that I could do a better chocolate cake, so I did. Successfully made two of them with a recipe from a recently acquired revised edition of the Joy of Cooking. Nice and easy recipe, which is one of my criteria of recipe selection, though not a deal beaker. After having made it twice and knowing that I wasn't going to add a layer of mousse to an 8" round, 2" thick cake, I bought a 6" cake pan and successfully reduced the recipe to produce a 6"x1". I was going to do the mousse the next day, it took me two days, yet eventually we had my final product.

And it was good.

I've since made the 8" cake, sans mousse, one more time for the observatory for the Christmas dinner, but the Double Death By Chocolate (DDBC) (tm pending) is reserved for special occasions. One thing that I learned was that if you're going to do the flourless chocolate cake inside a chocolate Oreo pie crust, that you should probably smear a thin layer of mousse where the cake will go to ensure a good bonding between the two. And the next time that I make one, this I shall do.

When I make the straight flourless chocolate cake, I grease the pan, then I crush up a chocolate Oreo pie crust and press it in to the bottom of said cake pan to give it a nice bottom layer. I think it's a good touch. My next step in this concoction may be to acquire a PushPan and work on a cylindrical version of the DDBC. There's also another recipe or two that I'd like to try for flourless chocolate cakes, and then I have to try and reduce them to 6"x1" in order to make a DDBC. So I have some work ahead of me on this one.

I've also made one other alteration to flourless chocolate cakes that I expect to carry forward. The recipe calls for one pound of bittersweet chocolate. That's what I did the first time that I made it, and it was good. I'm a literalist when I make things the first time, adhering as closely as possible to the original recipe. If it comes out great once and we like it, then I'll start tinkering. While the cake was good, it was a bit too bitter for my taste. The second time that I made it we were in Phoenix at my parents for Thanksgiving, and I went about 60:40 bittersweet to semisweet chocolate, of course it was Ghirardelli. And I thought it was a tremendous improvement. So that's what I'll be doing with these going forward.

I made one minor alteration to my chocolate mousse. I had always thought that I had not yet reached the fabled Maximum Chocolate Point yet, and I might have done it. I couldn't add more chocolate chips to the melted chocolate as then I'd have to increase the amount of whipped eggs and whipped cream, which would increase the overall volume. And I didn't want that. So what if I sidestepped that a bit? The cooking process for making a chocolate mousse pie is really simple. Melt chocolate and heavy cream together over a double boiler (large glass bowl over boiling water). Whip egg whites in to stiff peaks. Whip more heavy cream in to stiff peaks. Fold together. Pour in to chocolate Oreo crust (Keebler chocolate crust is not as good IMO), refrigerate for 3-4 hours, done. Pretty simple. But if you increase the volume of the pie, you're going to overflow the volume capacity of the pie shell! So I tried adding a tablespoon of cocoa powder WHEN I WHIPPED THE HEAVY CREAM! And it worked. Interestingly, it whipped to stiff peaks more quickly, but with a lower volume. I'd already tweaked this recipe by reducing the number of egg whites from 3 to 2 to reduce the volume of the pie and increase its density, and thus its chocolate concentration. This chocolaty whipped cream adds more chocolate flavor and further increases density by reducing the volume a little bit more!

I may have achieved Maximum Chocolate Point. It was VERY good.


In other baking areas, I've normally only made one cookie: my Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Macadamia Nut cookie. It is amazing, if I do say so myself. I've been tweaking this recipe for over 30 years, and I made another tweak over a year ago: add a tablespoon of molasses! I came across a recipe in Milk Street Magazine for an "adult" chocolate chip cookie, and the recipe didn't interest me but the inclusion of molasses intrigued me. And adding a tablespoon had an amazing effect on my cookie: it added another dimension of flavor and also made them a bit more chewy. A definite hit.

But this isn't about my cookie. This year I made three more cookies that I'd never made before. Two were eggnog cookies, a white cookie and a chocolate cookie. I had issues with both initially with temperature and cooking times, but I sorted those out quickly. And the white eggnog cookie just doesn't make the grade with me: not enough eggnog flavor, and doesn't hold my attention overall. But the chocolate eggnog cookie? That's a killer! When I was researching eggnog cookie recipes before I started baking, I found one by King Arthur Flour that contained no eggnog! It used their King Arthur Flour Eggnog Extract for their eggnog flavor, which I thought was a bit of a cheat and was definitely not what I wanted. But the base chocolate eggnog flavor, while tasting much better than the white eggnog still didn't have enough eggnog flavor - so I ordered a bottle of the eggnog extract! And it is good.

The chocolate eggnog cookies have a distinguishing characteristic: you dust them with cocoa powder before putting them in the oven. Fortunately I had an empty Penzey's bottle that was easily pressed in to service for this duty. And this brought to mind something that the white eggnog cookie did do well: before those went in to the oven, you dusted them with a little nutmeg. So what if I also put nutmeg on the chocolate eggnog cookies? BINGO! And another killer cookie was born.

The problem is, now the stores no longer have Southern Comfort Eggnog, so I can't make any more or experiment with other tweaks, which I don't think any more are needed. Still.... Well, next weekend is a three day weekend with the federal holiday, so I'm going to start trying to make eggnog! I've been researching recipes, and it's not really difficult. There is a fine line where you risk curdling the eggs, but that's a matter of refining technique. I've identified three or four recipes that look to be worth trying, so it should be fun. And best of all: they don't use a lot of milk products, so you're not wasting a lot if the end product doesn't taste very good! A common theme is that the taste improves as they sit in the fridge, but I'm not sure that I'll be able to let them mature if I'm planning on using them for baking. We shall see.


I also want to perfect my technique for making peanut butter cookies! I have a great recipe: one cup of peanut butter, one egg, one cup of sugar. That's it. As I said, I like simple recipes. The first time that I made them, they tasted fine, but they were overdone and pushing burned. It's going to take some experimenting to get the temperature/time down right. Then perhaps I'll experiment with the recipe a bit, like possibly adding some chocolate chips to them. After all, isn't everything better with chocolate? My wife has a PhD, and she'd certainly agree.

Chocolate Eggnog Cookie from Seriouseats.com. Their recipe was very poorly re-written which lead me to make two mistakes, but both were recoverable and a fine cookie emerged. The second recipe was very sparse and also needed a re-write. Neither cookie delivered the amount of eggnog flavor that I was looking for, but I may have a solution. When I was searching around for recipes, I found one at King Arthur Flour. Now there's a reputable source, thought I. I was rather shocked to find out that it didn't contain actual eggnog! Instead, they used King Arthur Flour's Eggnog Flavoring. So I think I'll order a bottle of the stuff and add a teaspoon or so the next time I make the chocolate eggnog cookie recipe.

While neither had the eggnog flavor that I was coveting, the chocolate flavor of the first recipe and the texture of the first was better. That's not to say that the second cookie is bad, the nutmeg flavor is excellent and it does have good flavor, though I think it might benefit from a slightly longer baking time or perhaps an increase in temperature. It was just a little soft for my taste.

I don't have numbers for how many cookies the chocolate recipe produces, but it's looking like something on the order of seven dozen.

Also note that the chocolate cookie recipe uses salted butter, if you are used to baking with unsalted butter and adding salt then you'll have to make some adjustments.

Here's the recipes:

Chocolate Eggnog Cookies

2½ cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg, or to taste
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon, or to taste
2 tablespoon baking cocoa

1¼ cups white sugar
1 cup salted butter, softened
¼ cups semi-sweet chocolate chips

½ cup eggnog
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large egg yolks

Preheat oven to 325. Melt chocolate chips with butter, cool for 10 minutes or so in the refrigerator until it is a soft solid. While then chocolate butter is cooling, combine the dry ingredients in a bowl. Combine the eggnog, egg yolks, and vanilla extract in a cup, a 2 cup measuring cup will do.

In the mixer bowl add the sugar and melted chocolate, mix in the sugar at low speed until creamed together. Add in the eggnog mixture, beat until smooth. Add in the flour mixture gradually, beat at low speed until just combined.

Using a cookie sheet with a wire rack covered with a sheet of parchment paper, drop rounded spoonfuls or use a scoop, dust tops with cocoa powder. Bake for 23-25 minutes, rotating half way through. Remove from cookie sheet and let cool completely

From http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2010/12/chocolate-eggnog-cookies.html

---

Eggnog Cookies

1¼ cup sugar
¾ cup softened butter

½ cup eggnog
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 egg yolks

2¼ cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp cinnamon
½ tsp nutmeg
½ tsp salt

You’ll need two bowls in addition to your mixing bowl, I suggest a 2 cup and 4 cup measuring cup or bowls of similar size.

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Combine flour, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt in the 4 cup measuring cup. Add the eggnog, vanilla extract, and egg yolks in to the 2 cup measuring cup.

Cream together sugar and butter in a large bowl. Add in eggnog, vanilla and egg yolks. Mix until smooth.

Mix dry flour mixture into the wet mixture. Stir together until just combined.

Drop in rounded 1 tbs balls onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Sprinkle tops lightly with nutmeg. Bake for 18 minutes, rotating trays half-way through, until cookies just barely look done. Leave cookies on cookie sheet for 2 minutes before removing them to a cooling rack to cool completely.

You may need to adjust oven temperature or cooking times for your kitchen.

Makes about 4-5 dozen cookies.

https://lmld.org/eggnog-cookies/

Number One is a 6" flourless chocolate cake. The normal flourless chocolate cake is in an 8" pan, this one is in a 6" pan because I'm reducing the recipe to 40% of the normal proportions! I needed a narrower and shorter cake for Bake 3. And to make it a little easier, I partially converted the recipe to metric. Instead of 16 ounces of chocolate, 182 grams. 1 tablespoon of sugar becomes 5 grams. 5 eggs and 10 tablespoons of butter require no conversion: just crack two eggs and use four tablespoons of butter and the cutting guide is pre-printed on the butter wrapper!

The nasty bit was reducing a quarter teaspoon of Cream of Tartar: my scale can't measure 0.42 grams! So I grabbed my 1/8th teaspoon and put in just a wee bit. The whites whipped well, so I think everything is OK.

What was really convenient was the water bath: I used an 8" round cake pan! I accidentally put in too much water, causing the 6" pan to float because of the lower density of the chocolate cake vs the density of water, a spoon and a little bailing soon took care of that.

After this is done baking and cooling for a bit, it'll go in to the fridge to chill for four hours or so.


Bake #2 is eggnog cookies! I've never done this before, should be fun. I'm looking forward to the result. Even though eggnog has been available for several weeks now, I waited until last weekend to pick some up. And I couldn't find the Southern Comfort nog! So I bought a brand that I thought that I could trust, and it was terrible. THEN I found the SC, dumped the previous brand down the drain, and got the bug to make cookies.


Bake #3 is the peece du resisterance. After the cake has cooled, I'm making a chocolate mousse. Then the cake goes in to the center of a chocolate Oreo cookie crust, and the mousse is applied on top. Unfortunately it will require another 3-4 hours of fridge time to set. If my wife is a good girl and gets some work on the first quarter science schedule done like she's supposed to, then we might go see Coco, and the final product should be done when we get home....


My one concern is the bake on the cake. Normally it requires a 30 minute bake, but I'm dealing with 40% of the mass of the cake! The normal recipe and 30 minute bake, the top is solid but soft and jiggles when you wiggle it. I checked it at the 20 minute mark and the top had not yet baked, so I'll check it again at 5 minute intervals. I'm very concerned about over-baking it, but perhaps the water bath makes that not a concern?

I love Madelines. I used to always buy them at Trader Joe's in Phoenix, but they stopped carrying them. A woman there suggested I buy them in bulk at World Market, but I (A) don't want larger madelines, and (II) don't want them in bulk.

So I bought a gorgeous medeline pan from Williams-Sonoma. I found a great recipe from Food Network, and it works quite well for full batches. But a full batch is 40some small cakes, far too many for my wife and I, so last weekend I halved the recipe.

And it failed.

Here's the full recipe, in short:
4 large eggs
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 teaspoon unsalted butter, at room temperature plus 1/4 pound (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled
2 teaspoons plus 1 cup bleached all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon orange zest, finely minced

I used a lemon instead of an orange for the zest, but since I'm just grating the rind for the skin and oil, I don't think that would make a significant difference.

The failure was that instead of getting a nice soft small cake, the cakes fell and I ended up with crisps. They still tasted quite good. My wife noticed one difference: larger bubbles in the crisps than you'd see in a proper madeline. She thinks that half a teaspoon of baking powder was too much and that with the lower mass of the mix itself, that I should try a third or quarter teaspoon. I was leaning towards half a teaspoon was too little and I should use two thirds, though I'm leaning towards her observation. Unfortunately I won't be doing any baking today, maybe some evening next week or on to next weekend.

I was wondering if any experienced bakers out there might have an observation?

I've always had problems with massive tearing while cutting onions. The most successful defense that I've found is to cut them next to a gas burner on high, the convection air current pulls in the escaped gas that causes tearing and incinerates it. But we have an electric range, so no can do. I've tried slightly freezing onions, and that improves things, but it's not a solution.

Today I found one.

Ski goggles.

:-)

I have considering buying a single burner camp stove sort of thing, which could also be useful in the event of a power outage, so maybe I'll still buy one. Today I'm making beef stew, and I went to cut my onion, and just cutting it in half almost wiped out my vision. Then it occurred to me that I have a pair of ski goggles in the car.

Worked a treat!