dumpday 2010!!

So we had a dumpling party. I almost want to let the pictures speak for themselves...

Snacks:

 

Assembling the ez-make dumpling assembler:

Going to town on some dumpling ingredients!:

 

Yeah, matt's "that guy". The mustached guy creepin in your picture, smilin from the corner. haha

 

Our hair is a swingin! Go dumplings GO!

 

I'm not really sure who JT is giving the L for Loser. But i'm sure they're crying about it D: 

 

Sarah's pretty ferocious. Like lion.  Certainly not the one crying about John!

 

First you put the dumpling wrapper in the machine. Then you flip it off.

 

Then you put filling on the dumpling.

 

Then you flip it off.  

Even molasses can be a filling! These were awesome: molasses (grandma's, no less!), apples, and spinach. DEE LISH.

  

We also had two kinds of tofu. Cause we rule.

  

The green stuff is sauteed cabbage. Which smelled terrible while cooking, but tasted AMAZING with shrimps and garlic.

  

So you have your dumpling wrapper and filling, and you turn the crank, AND....

  

BOOM. You flip it off.

  

 BOOM

  

BOOM. FRY IT.

  

BOOM FRIED.

  

BOOM EATEN.

  

BOOM DELICIOUS. Flip it off.

  

So many dumplings! JT is pointing to the top of the pile! it's ALL THE WAY UP THERE!!!!

  

Mer is getting into the nitty gritty, right before she bounced citing "school" as a reason ... psssht. shoulda been studying the fine art of dumpling making, that's where the money's at!

  

They're on a dumpling high!

 

The last dumpling maker. So brave. So diligent. So many dumplings!

There'd be more pictures of dumplings if we hadnt eaten them all immediately. BOOM.

Red lobster Biscuits

I love shrimp. They are delicious and I wish I was eating some right now. However, during my most recent visit to our friendly neighborhood red lobster for endless shrimp, it occurred to me that the garlic cheddar biscuits are even better than my favorite Crustacean. One google search later, homemade awesome red lobster-ish biscuits. Boom.










http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Recipes/story?id=2788706

I ate 8 of them and had a pretty bad stomach ache, definitely worth it and plan to do the same thing very soon.

p.s. shrimp are a vegetable, so they are OK to eat.

Lets make some BREAD PUDDING

 

I'm not much of a recipe writer-downer. i like to take little notes about whatever i'm currently going to cook or bake and write them down on scraps of paper. if the food turns out good, it means i put the scrap of paper somewhere in the kitchen, usually on the fridge - YAY! it also means that i have about 45 scraps of paper which all have some sort of variation on X cups of sugar, X tbsp butter, X cups of milk, splash vanilla, bake at 350 for 35 min. So I rarely know if my recipe is for cookies or cupcakes or whatever. Which is why, in order to keep this recipe special and out of the "scrap o paper pile" - i wrote it on a netflix return envelope. I love this recipe. It was handed down from my great grandmother and has been a favorite of mine for my whoooole life! But apparently my great grandmother was like me, and didnt put any sort of descriptions on her recipes because here is the entirety of her notes:

4 cups milk

2 cups old bread

1/4 tsp salt

3 eggs

3 tbsp melted butter

1/2 tsp vanilla

2 sq unsweetened chocolate

1/2 cup sugar

Make custard. Pour over bread.

I mean, did everyone in the 30's just KNOW how to make custard? cause i have no idea. all the joy of cooking says is "it is imperative to not overcook the custard or you will obtain an undesirable texture". good grief, way to be super unspecific. so i did some research on the intertubes and sort of wung it (past tense of wing it, winged it? i like wung it) and the rest is history. i tend to make this about once a month, or whenever matt and i have enough leftover crusts of french bread to make this delightful and delicious dessert.

 

so you make the custard. this involves pouring milk (although i like to use light or heavy cream. it's more tasty. and keeps the fat on that keeps me warm during these cold NJ-stormed nights!) into a sauce pan on med-low or low heat, add the butter and the sugar and the eggs. whisk so that the eggs are incorporated into the milk, and keep whisking as the butter melts, about once a minute or so. in the mean time, chop up the chocolate.

I like to use Bakers chocolate because it's the perfect size squares and is pretty cheap and pretty good quality. also, because it harkens back to my g-gramma's time so you know that it's time-tested YUM

So while your chopping in between your whisking, the butter will melt all up into that deliciousness and then you're ready to throw in the chocolate. the point is to keep whisking as the chocolate melts and as the milk and eggs slightly cook so that it gets thick. so you can either start with warm milk and eggs and butter, or all of them cold and heat them up at the same time (the lazy way). once you've chopped the chocolate, its time to start chopping bread!

chop chop chop

fill up a casserole dish with chop chop. throw in all the crumbs!

 

the custard should look like this and be kind of thick. if it's not thickened, dont worry, keep going. just make sure that all of the chocolate is incorporated into the mixture (not stuck to the bottom of the pan or unmelted or whatever) 

pour pour pour

 

see how it didnt get on all the breads? get to smushing the bread into the custard. smush smush smush

 

bake bake bake. about 350 for something like 45 minutes or so. put on a lower rack or else the top breadies will get a bit toasted and you'll have to pick them off later (unless someone in the house likes burned chocolatey bread! it's pretty tasty, acutally. leave em on. dont pick em off)

 

All done. Pay no attention to the dirty oven.

 

Eat with a ton of whipped cream. fucking YUM.

yum yum yum

Work Potluck 1

At work there are 3 of us every Thursday. We decided it would be nice for us to all bring in a dish from now on if we're all here. We invited the CSO's to join us as well, but theyre all lazy assholes.

Originally I was going to do fried stuffed risotto balls but there was no way I was waking up early enough to do that in one day so I made chipotle, cheddar and chive mashed sweet potatoes. I tried to make them a little less spicy than normal but who am I kidding. Those bitches gotta be hot. This pushed Jess out of potato territory and into salad and cookie land. Loretta made a Hungarian chicken dish I cannot for the life of me spell or pronounce.
Below: plated up!

Below: the containers


All in all successful. We are doing another this week where I WILL wake up in time for risotto.

This reminded me of Ben. Also Vanessa.

You can make "chocolate" out of anything. This one is ketchup.

can someone fix this

I'm getting feedback from multiple sources that our bylines are hard to see. Does anyone feel like doing something about it?

Sorry, Ben.

Looks like you got yours drank again by our friends at the New York Times.

dumplingoff

coming soon. ben's house. bc vanessa and i have this.

omg you guys. are you guys chocolate lovers? i really like chocolate - but mostly just dark chocolate (milk chocolate is wussy and should only be brought out at easter) (unless it's filled with something badass like salted caramel or bacon)

so, that's my segue to this: http://www.womansday.com/Articles/Food/8-Curious-Chocolate-Covered-Creations.html

read it. and want chocolate covered squid, bacon, carrots, and fritos - all on one plate - because that's what i'm doing right now. instead i'm prolly going to eat cereal for dinner. poop.

also, this: automatic mini cupcake maker 
i know what you're thinking. DUH VANESSA THE OVEN IS AN AUTOMATIC CUPCAKE MAKER! DUH! but hold on! here's whats awesome about this one: it cooks mini cupcakes in 5 MINUTES. THATS RIGHT FIVE.  i want this and i want to put it on my dresser in my room. i could fill it up at night and set it to turn on when my alarm goes off, and by the time i'm done brushing my teeth i could have a full complement of cupcake breakfast goin on in my mouth. BUHM.

and in other news, french onion soup is easy and addictive. when i make more, i'll document the perfected process!

how do I work this thing

Okay, so uh my cousin V invited me to join this after I posted a picture of my Thanksgiving dinner on my LiveJournal but I don't really know what I'm doing or whether this post is appropriate for this blog or anything. In short, oh god how did this get here I am not good with computers.

Here is a good meal, photographed shittily.

It's shallot-garlic sautéed asparagus and whole wheat spaghetti (we were out of fettuccine, which by the way oh my God it has two "c"s? no wonder Bookworm doesn't think it was a word, dammit I was so pissed about that) with pumpkin alfredo sauce. The recipe called for evaporated milk (?) but we were out so I cobbled together something from it and the alfredo recipe from Joy of Cooking and it turned out pretty good, if a little less rich than I might have wanted because I didn't want to use a cup of heavy cream and settled for a mix of milk and half and half instead. Certainly better than it looks in the picture, which turned all orange for some reason and that certainly doesn't help with the contrast when half of your dish is orange in the first place.

Did I do it right?

French Onion Soup

Any of you guys have recipes for French Onion Soup that you would swear by? I'm lookin to do some cookin!

Ben's going to say "put an egg in it"

So we tried to make some Soup. you know, The Soup. well, maybe.

Matt and I watched "Ramen Girl" (you know, that brittany murphy movie about how she's a rich little girl who doesnt know what to do with her life so she moves to japan with her boyfriend who really doesnt like her all that much so he moves to china somewhere and she gets really bored and finds a ramen house and decides she wants to make ramen so she endures the brusque japanese personality of the ramen house owner and she doesnt speak any japanese but in the end she moves to america and makes soup. you know, THAT movie) and we got inspired.

so we took some ramens and threw out the flavor packets and boiled em up in some water. also, we took some dried mushrooms and reconstituted them in about 4 cups water on the stove and while they were cooking threw in some frozen green beans and carrots and shrimpies to cook (pulled 'em out when they were done and put to the side), and microwaved some spinaches. to the broth i also added about a tbsp of soy sauce, at big tbsp of miso, a tsp of balsamic vinegar, a big shake of garlic powder, and just for kicks, some brown sugar.

we assembled the whole thing and started to chow down and guess what. guess frickin what. it was bland as all get out. omg so bland. i put in so many things! the broth tasted AMAZING until we put the noodles in. matt resorted to adding some of the flavor packet but it just didnt seem to help. now we know what brittany had to go through and why the old japanese man threw out her broth time and time again.

poop. at least it looked pretty. and the shrimps were DELICIOUS.

any suggestions? especially you Soup connoisseurs?

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.