The Windkey and the Lamplighter

This story on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning nearly made me start crying in the car.

Lopez Lomong, a former Sudanese “lost boy”, was kidnapped at age 6 by a militant group “recruiting” child-soldiers. He escaped with three older boys and spent 10 years in a refugee camp in Kenya before making it to the US and into a foster home. While in Kenya, he watched the Sydney Olympics and decided he wanted to run fast. In the US, he ran in high school in NY and then in Arizone, and is now a sophomore at the University of Arizona. He became a US Citizen last summer, and made the US Olympic team this summer. He is a member of “Team Darfur”, an activist athelete’s group, and has his own website. He was reunited with his birth-family in 2007, who had believed him dead, and with them joyfully dug up the grave they’d closed 17 years before. (This is the part where I nearly cried. I can’t imagine how his mother must have felt.)

Lomong was selected by his teammates to carry the American flag in the opening ceremony of the Olympics. NPR reports that “On Friday, he struggled to describe what the moment means: ‘I don’t even have a word for it. I’m just so happy — very happy.’”

Lopez Lomong carries the American flag in the opening ceremonies of the Bejing Olympics

I’ve now tried three times for sour hard candy, and since I’ve twice made the same mistake, I think I know what it is: Despite the citric acid being a crystalline ingredient, I should really be adding it once the sugar has reached ~310F/160C.

The first time I thought I’d just used far, far too much citric acid. (Which I had. The face one of my guests made when she tried it, even after being warned that it was not fit for consumption by those over the age of 14, was enough to cause another guest to get out *her* camera.)

The second time, though, I used rather less (still too much) and had the same issue—browning of the candy at ~250F. More online research suggests I should add the acid and any flavors after the candy has been removed from the heat. Guess I’ll try that next time.

Edit: I tasted the results this morning. Totally burnt. I’ll try tonight adding the flavor after getting the sugar to hard-crack.

Meanwhile, pictures.

Despondent at the news that not only did Hershey buy Jolly Rancher, but they closed the Wheat Ridge factory and got rid of Lemon Jolly Ranchers, I decided to create my own candy.

I got some Lime Oil from my local confectioner (who happened to have some that needed using soon) and combined a tablespoon of it with four cups of sugar, half a cup of water, and an eighth teaspoon of cream of tartar.

The resulting candy was hard-crack when I took it off the heat—both the thermometer and the cold water test indicated so—but when I poured it into the paper “moulds” (greased baking cups and some paper plates when those ran out) it crystallized a bit. It *was* hard-crack, though, since the drops on the stove and the table were perfect little clear drops. Next time I will go buy some parchment paper and grease it more, and then drop the candy by small spoonfuls onto the paper, so I get proper lozenges. At least now I know that it’s not sour enough, and I want some citric acid to add. We stuck some small cookie cutters in the soft candy as it cooled—I will probably try that again. I think it also needs either more lime or more citric acid—or both!

I’ve been experimenting with variations off my grandmother-in-law’s lemon bar recipe lately. It started relatively innocently! Although I’d never seen her do it, her recipe had an option to replace most of the lemon juice with lime, so I tried it. Meanwhile, in the lemon recipe (since I needed lots of bars to bring to a pot luck) I tripled the juice and then reduced it to the right volume of liquid. These both turned out great, though the crusts were a little bit too crumbly for my taste and I used too much lime zest in the first batch. The second batch of lime got less zest and less juice, so they were weak but okay.

So, this week I decided to experiment with grape bars. I bought some grape juice, and decided to try a peanut-butter cookie crust. I used the Joy of Cooking recipe for classic peanut-butter cookies, and started with 1/2c of grape juice. That wasn’t very grape, so I added more—eventually, 2 cups. (It was too late to reduce it, by this time, so I just hoped it would boil off.) 25 minutes later, I had something that looked a lot like brownies—from the top. It was very dark, so though it was purple it could’ve easily been mistaken for brown. The underlayers, though, are very clearly brown, and full of bubbles like a bread pudding. Here is a UFO-spotting quality picture:

It is, alas, almost entirely peanut-butter flavor. The grape is only detectable if you have a very subtle palate, or if you eat some of the top purple layer alone. Otherwise, it’s mostly peanut-butter.
Where did I go wrong? My guesses:

• I didn’t bake the crust enough: If the peanut butter cookie was still quite soft, the liquid would have soaked in rather than staying on top.
• Too much liquid: There are supposed to be four eggs per 1/2c of liquid. Maybe if I use 2c of liquid, I need 12 eggs?
• Pasteurized juice: I used fresh lemons for the lemon bars, and fresh limes for the lime bars. Maybe pasteurized grape juice is missing important enzymes?
• Acidity: Grape juice is way less acid than lemons, and the lime bars have one part lemon to six parts lime. Maybe that matters? I can try half grape and half lemon…
• Sugar: The lemon and lime bars call for 2c of granulated sugar. I left that out because the grape juice is so much sweeter than lemon or lime. Maybe I needed those crystals?

My test audience (gamers will eat anything) seemed to quite like it. One even asked for seconds!
So I will probably try this one again, especially since it lands me with half a batch of peanut butter cookies even if the recipe itself is an epic failure. (I also bought 100% cranberry juice, which I will certainly use the sugar with, and probably cut with fresh lemon juice. I will also not put that over peanut butter. Ew.)

I love cookies. This weekend, I made oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, after not making any for a long time.

When I went to put in the brown sugar, I realized that it was one big lump. YARGH!

I wasn’t able to measure, so I might’ve gotten more sugar than usual. 1c ~ 1 not-quite-full box, right?

Anyway, after a minute in a moist paper towel in the microwave and another minute of Slasher-Movie-Action with a butter knife, I got it to the point where my KitchenAid was able to beat the sugar into submission with the butter.

Side effect: the butter and sugar mixture was much, much more creamy (I left it mixing while I went to the basement to move laundry) and the cookies came out much more flat.

I am constantly amazed at how much I can “adjust” a recipe and still get something tasty. (My snickerdoodle cookies are probably an even better example: JoC calls for like 1.5 c of flour, which makes buttery, flat, crinkly cookies, but I use like 4c to get puffball, nearly round cookies like my mom made for us. Whatever! They all taste good.)

My migraine (and other headache-suffering) friends and I have long noticed a correlation between eating spicy foods and a cessation or reduction in pain symptoms, especially headache pain. Now, Science (specifically, scienceblog) says that not only are we right about that, but those same pain receptors may be involved in learning and memory.

“activation of TPRV1 receptors can trigger long-term depression, a phenomenon that creates lasting changes in the connections between neurons…believed to be the cellular basis for memory making.”

So (maybe) eating spicy foods will cure your headaches and improve your grades? I think I will have to watch the Brown University Research Team to see where their research leads, but it sounds good so far. Pass the pepper, please.

That was the best meal I’ve had in a really long time.

We went to [Amelia's Trattoria][]
We started with fried calamari, piled onto a puck-shaped bed of lemon risotto, with
garlic aioli on top. I don’t always even like calamari, but it was
absolutely amazing. I think I really like risotto, too—I haven’t
had much of it, but you can do really neat things with it.

My entree was why I’d picked Amelia’s: gnocci, with butternut squash
and fried sage. In addition to the butter and parmesan in which the
gnocci were served, the dish had some sort of onion-family grass on
top. (This may have been their all-purpose spring garnish, Brian’s
seafood dish had the same thing.)

The gnocci was the best I’ve ever had–lighter and more pillowy. I’d
expected the sage and squash to be good—my favorite salad last fall
at [Za][] was built around butternut squash, with a fried sage
garnish—and it was. The real surprise was the onion-y garnish,
which was light enough not to bother the other flavors, while being
present enough to be a nice distraction from the very rich dish. The
whole thing was nicely but not too heavily spiced, with warm fall-ish
spices. (At least one was paprika, I suspect cinnamon and nutmeg, and
have no idea what the others were. ) It was absolutely perfect for
this cold spring day.

We also got dessert. I don’t usually like Tiramisu, but I’m really
glad Brian got it rather than sharing my panna cotta. I have never
seen or tasted a cream like that before. The top layer of the
tiramisu wasn’t just whipped cream. It was a lot more flavorful.

(My panna cotta was good, but the jam on top overpowered the vanilla
and other spices, and the texture was unusually curd-like. When I
scraped away most of the jam, it was a lot better.)

I have to learn to cook like this. I wonder how you do that…

I got some neat AirBake cookie sheets for a wedding present, so I’ve
been using them almost exclusively since then. It has been a series
of interesting failures—all tasty, but none cohesive.

The first set were much too soft—my usual oatmeal cookie recipe with
fresh cranberries instead of rasins or chocolate chips. They came out
like partially-cooked dough, and all stuck together in the cookie jar,
even though I waited for them to cool on the rack.

The second set, made with apples and wheat instead of white flour
(I thought we were out of white flour, and found it too late) turned
out pretty soft, too. I cooked these in three batches, with three
pretty different results:

350F, 12 minutes
This is the high range of the usual time, but the cookies
came out too soft to even stay stuck together. I ended up
rebaking some of them.
350F, 15 minutes
Still soft, but darker—bottom still not burned, which is
supposed to be the magic of airbake.
375F, 12 minutes
Better, but still really sticky. Some are still gooey
375F, 15 minutes
Still sticky, but quite thoroughly cooked—I have no raw egg
worries with these.

I suspect the stickyness has something to do with the flour. The
Internet tells me [whole wheat flour makes baked goods denser and
coarser in texture][], and that I should replace no more than half of
my all-purpose flour with whole wheat. It does not say why, though.
Another site tells me "whole-wheat pastry flour is milled from a
soft, or low-protein, variety of wheat that doesn’t form much gluten
(strong, elastic strands of protein) when it’s mixed."
But I did not have pastry flour, I had normal wheat flour.
It is pretty finely milled, though, so that is still my going theory.

This recipe is from the Vegetarian cookbook we got from Borders. It’s
really good, but they totally lie about how long it takes to make.
I found that, without any lollygagging, it took about an hour before
everything went into the oven, so 105 minutes total. I bet you could
shave off a few minutes if you started cooking the eggplant while
doing the onions and garlic, but that requires using two frying pans.
I make this using one saucepan, one frying pan, one cutting board, and
one baking dish. (And an old cookie sheet, to catch drips when we
realized it was bubbling over in one corner)

    4 oz dry lentils
2.5 cups vegetable stock
bay leaf

Simmer the lentils in the stock, covered, with the bay leaf, for ~10
minutes or until tender but not mushy. Drain the stock, and keep hot
(i.e. leave the lid on but the fire off)

1 lb eggplant

Slice the eggplant. If you’re using italian eggplant, that’s all you
have to do. If you use the big ones, stack them in a strainer, rinse
and salt, then let sit 30 minutes to "remove the bitter juices". Rinse and pat dry before frying.

1 onion
1 clove garlic (or more, but I broke the garlic press on the second one)

Saute the onion and garlic in 1 tbsp oil, for 5 minutes.

14 oz can crushed tomato (we used fire roasted with basil)
2 tbsp tomato paste
1 can chickpeas ("garbanzo beans", says the can)
oregano, salt and pepper

Add the spices, tomato, tomato paste, and chickpeas to the lentil mixture.
Add the onion and garlic to the lentil mixture.
Cover and cook ~ 20 minutes (until the eggplant is done frying)

Meanwhile, fry the eggplant in batches in a small amount of oil. A
spritzer works well, since you can re-oil the pan between sets. Fry
3-4 minutes and then flip to get both sides sealed and a little
browned.

Alternate layers of eggplant slices and the other mixture until you run out.

5/4 cup yogurt
3 eggs
salt and pepper

Whisk together the yogurt, eggs, and salt/pepper, and pour over the top of the casserole.

cheddar cheese

Grate cheddar cheese (4 oz seems to be enough) generously over the top.
Bake 45 minutes at 350 degrees.
It may puff and spill juices over, so watch it or put a baking sheet underneath.

I have learned something. The thing I have learned is that 3 teaspoons
of brown sugar is not enough to make a cranberry-apple pie not too
tart, even if the apples sweeten when they cook.

The whole-wheat yogurt crust turned out amazing, though. I may make
more of that and turn the remaining cranberries into tarts or something.