cupcakes - a really old endever.

First things first: i made these the week before thanksgiving. i shoulda posted then but i was embarassed that i hadnt figured out anything clever to do for ben's MSB challenge so i sat on this post until, oh, about now. sorry ben.

I really wish that i had a "before" picture of these cupcakes - it was pretty cool to see how easy it is to disguise a special treat for kids! if you can see, the icing is just plain white, the decorations are snow caps (white on dark chocolate) and the wrapper is silver. which meant that they looked like plain ole boring ole stupid ole cupcakes. TRICK!

this one kid took one bite and said "OMG OMG OMG OMGOMGOMG!!!!! RAINBOWS!!!"
and then he asked me what they were made of and i said "magic!" but matt told me i should have told him 'clown blood'. DARN. i totally missed that opportunity.





they're really easy to make, just make white cake (from a box is fine - the point of this recipe is to look good, kids dont care if it's boxed cake or a gourmet recipe) . divide the icing into 6 bowls and dye the crap out of each bowl with food dye. the colors will get less brilliant during baking, so really just go wild. then transfer the contents of each of the six bowls into one ziplock baggie for each color. line the cupcake tins and tilt the whole shebang by setting one end of the cupcake tray on a thick cookbook (this will make layering the colors easier) and start piping in a solid line of each color. try to not fill the cupcakes more than 1/2-way full, or you may get overflow and overflow toasts a brown color and then you've just used a bunch of food coloring for nothing because it turned brown in the end.

anyway, yum. go cupcakes!

Improvised kitchen tools

Ben saw in America's test kitchen that you can use the top of an onion as a steamer for vegetables. Naturally, Ben extended this to eggs. Benedicts to be exact. These are their stories:

First, the onion layers were sized and buttered.

Egg One (the first one was much better than the second, much like with siblings):


Ben thought it would be a good idea to see what a beaten egg would do. Egg two was not as delicious. We ended up having to add some water around the onion to get it to cook evenly.


WHOOOAAAA MONTAGE EGG BENDER!


Here's what I made. Poached style. I am less adventurous.

The end.

recipe minimalism

I made my own tomato sauce. I hate tomatoes. I respect tomato sauce conceptually, but have only met one or two versions that didn't make me gag or at least where I could hold off picking around for the first few bites. As I've gotten older, I've grown out of my childhood preference for perfectly smooth sauces that are basically watered down tomato paste, which don't cut it texture-wise, though they do have the advantage of not having any offensive tomato pieces or skins.
I decided now that I don't have 20398542 things to do every second of every day, I could try to tackle this thing in a responsible way. Basically, I made my own sauce and it was pretty great. The end.

Part of the reason for this sauce story is that when I was puttering around the house running this entry in my head, it occurred to me that, much is the style here generally, transmitting a recipe on a blog for people who already know how to cook doesn't require much more than a list of ingredients and cooking method. Variation is inevitable whether ther is a proper recipe or not, but personally, I end up changing it anyway (unless it's dessert/baking). Sooooo, I was flipping through this guy recently:

The recipes are paragraphs outlining what's in the dish and anything notable about the process. For people who are into cooking and reading about cooking in this way, check out this and everything else that Mark Bittman ever does. I remember reading in one of his "101" recipes collections a "recipe" that was something like "take x and wrap it in bacon."

shepherd's pie doesn't photograph well

Also, this is a little blurry, I think because the glass of wine pictured was not my first of the evening. This was the night before an exam, after a snowstorm, and the only overlap of free time that Kerensa and I had pretty much for the whole break.

So! Veggie Shepherd's Pie! This is an adaptation of another Klein Kid Non-Recipe. The things that we generally throw in here are lentils, carrots, pearl onions, and other usual suspects, with a red wine sauce. I also added butternut squash and shallots, seasoned with cinnamon, cumin, salt/pepper, and coriander. No mushrooms this time, but I like to do a mushroomy version sometimes. Leeks or fennel are also a nice addition. Also, we don't keep milk in the house, but Kerensa had made some red velvet the night before, so we put some of the leftover buttermilk in the pototatoes. OMG. To round things out, I did a combination collard and beet green sautee on the side.