Shiny Cooking

A few months back, Jodi from the California Strawberry Commission told me they were creating an iPhone app comprised of 50 strawberry recipes, and could she have permission to include my strawberry and feta salad recipe. After I picked myself up off from the floor, I said, go for it. continue reading…

That funny looking thing that looked like a cross between a post-nuclear-holocaust carrot and an anime tentacle monster?

Horseradish. It grows in the front of my yard near the ditch, and in Mom and Dad’s in a little “patch” near the field. All I know is it grows on its own and it’s nearly impossible to kill.

Every year before Christmas, Dad digs up the horseradish roots and makes the condiment we call horseradish. Not to be confused with the plant itself. Except for the whole sharing-a-name thing.

It starts out like this, a pile of gnarled, muddy roots.

Dad puts them on the low screened table I use to cure onions.

Then, hook up the power washer! continue reading…

My dad prepared this mystery food just before Christmas. Some of it wound up as gifts.

Tomorrow I’ll be offering up one of those gifts to you, dear reader, in the first ever Shiny Cooking Giveaway Extravaganza™.

In the meantime, take your best shot in the comments as to just what this tentacle-y mystery food is.

Let me warn you, I’m slapping these in the “600 calorie death spiral” category ASAP. Nanaimo bars are sweet. Tooth-achingly, sugar coma-inducing sweet. Guess how much butter this recipe packs into an 8 x 8 pan?

Okay, you guessed two. I’ll give that to you, because it was obvious. How about this? What is that yellow, creamy middle layer 90% comprised of?

Drat, you guessed a stick of butter. And you were right.

Nanaimo bars — I keep wanting to call them Nanowrimo bars —are a Canadian invention, intended to nourish moose hunters in the frigid Yukon winters much like the Eskimos gained their needed calories from whale blubber. It’s common for moosers (as the great Yukon moose hunters call themselves) to fabricate dozens of batches of Nanaimo bars in the fall, pack them in their own dogsled, and thus haul the sweets with them throughout their winter hunting on the tundra.

quit making things up already

There were two required parts to this Daring Bakers Challenge: make your own graham crackers, preferably gluten-free, and make the Nanaimo bars. The gluten-free grahams recipe called for several specialty flours, and I didn’t look forward to a) hunting them down or b) spending $30 on flours I literally would never use again.

Instead, I made a graham cracker recipe I’ve made before: Whole wheat graham crackers from King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking. As always with crackers, I had trouble rolling the dough thin enough (read: I couldn’t). However, even the crackers that came out thick and cookie-like were tasty, of course. How could they not be? Crackers are made using the same cutting-solid-fat-into-flour method as pie crust. Don’t expect homemade crackers to be similar to store-bought. They are very rich in comparison — not the kind of cracker you can eat a few dozen of easily.

Nanaimo bars are three layers: bottom is crushed grahams, cocoa, chopped nuts, coconut, butter. The butter middle layer is basically butter, with some powdered sugar and custard powder. I can only imagine those dry ingredients are added to the butter to stabilize it, because they don’t add much flavor. The top layer is melted chocolate chips with…guess. Come on, guess. Butter!

As you also may have guessed, Nanaimo bars aren’t quite my cup of tea. I found them cloyingly sweet (and I like sweets) with little going on other than chocolate and butter. The nuts, coconut, and grahams are entirely lost, and I have no idea what the custard powder is supposed to taste like because the layer it’s in simply tastes like a stick of butter.

However! Linda and Dad really liked them. Mom thought they were too dark chocolate-like. So I’m likely the weirdo here, missing out on something amazing.

whole grain graham crackers

continue reading…

We love seaweed, how about you?

People were confused when I told them my aunt Linda and I would be making sushi for January’s 24, 24, 24 event. “Isn’t that raw fish?” they asked, knowing I’m not a huge fan of animal foods. Technically, sushi is rice that’s been specially prepared with vinegar and a little sugar, and topped with or rolled with…something.

It could be a shaped piece of rice with a slice of lightly steamed bias-cut carrot on top, tied with a scallion. This is nigiri sushi.

It could be a fat roll of rice bound in nori (seaweed) and filled with imitation crab strips, tamago (japanese omelet), scallion, and cucumber. This is futo maki.

It could be an inside out roll, with the rice outside the seaweed, all enveloping imitation crab, avocado, and pickled beets. This is uramaki. But everyone calls it inside out roll.

It could even be dessert.

Other forms of sushi include battleship roll (gunkan), which we didn’t make, temaki, which we didn’t make, and hosomaki, or thin rolls, which we did make, but I didn’t get any closeups of. Thin rolls use half a sheet of nori and are filled with only one or two ingredients besides the sushi rice.

what’s in this post, and what isn’t

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How about a nice bowl of cheery orange-colored soup to warm your tummy on a cold winter night? I only recently began to appreciate soup, having been too lazy to properly appreciate it in the past — soup isn’t often stick-to-your-ribs fare and I’m pretty side-dish impaired, as far as getting out bread or making a salad to go with the soup. continue reading…

The December 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.

This post dedicated to the memory of Aunt Alice, who made a gingerbread house and brought it to family Christmas (Mom’s side) every year. And every year the kids gleefully demolished it. continue reading…

i mean, merry christmas

Clearly, there’s no Festivus pole here!

Wishing all of you a lovely holiday. May you be warm and cozy this Christmas, with good food and good company.

Image courtesy Min Thu and Smashing Magazine.

Time now to quit with the endless family stories and begin slamming out these cookie recipes. Today I made progress on this month’s Daring Bakers Challenge. It’s a secret, to be revealed on the 27th. Which is a shame, because it’s sort of festive. :p

Also began filling the chocolate mint cookie sandwiches. Damn, those little chocolate disks taste just like Oreos. And I learned why Grandma made them so honkin’ big (I made them about 1-1/2 inches round instead) — the recipe made approximately 270 cookie halves. Yes, that’s 135 sandwiches. I’ll post a final total when I finish and get the recipe up. Of course, it will be a tad off due to shrinkage. Shrinkage in this case being little (and big) hands snatching them up and popping them into mouths during the filling process.

bake, gingerbread man, bake

And tomorrow evening I’ll be decorating these chewy oatmeal cutouts with Justin and Maggie. What a pleasant surprise these were. Thumbs up from kids and adults alike, and that was just the ones I tossed cinnamon sugar onto. Crispy on the edges, chewy in the middle, easy to roll and a good deal of whole grains inside. continue reading…

Man, the Christmas cookie recipes and pics are piling up. Hmm, I seem to have developed an obsession with them this year.

I had some trepidation about posting this particular Christmas cookie. As I wrestled with rolling out endless walnut-sized lumps of dough, making crescents seemed a lot fussier to me than it did last year. I distinctly remember the dough being a joy to work with: smooth and pliable, not like silly putty, but better. continue reading…