Imprecision Cooking: Frosting

I hate most store frosting. Also, I can only take from-scratch cooking so far. See the chocolate heart on the cupcake above? I bought a huge block of fancy baking chocolate, thinking that I'd temper it and make hearts, easy-peasy. I ended up making a huge mess and wasting 3/4 of this block (into my face!), with chocolate decorations that still melted. I asked my best friend, who is a home economics pro, and she said, "Just mix the fake chocolate melting wafers into real chocolate. It's impossible to temper chocolate."

So there. Only five hours down the drain.

I also hate baking. It usually takes too much precision.

My daughter recently turned one, so to pretend I know what I'm doing, I bought unfrosted cupcakes and a small cake from Sam's Club, and then decorated them myself. Came out pretty good, I think:

But, as everyone knows, a cupcake is only the vehicle for frosting, so a good frosting is key. Here is the best best best frosting:

-Whipped cream, 1 1/2 cups (if you have a really good blender, you can use half and half, or even regular milk--just wrap a blue cooler pack around the cup part when you do this)

-Instant pistachio pudding, 2-3 Tablespoons (some sites say to use the whole packet; resist!)

-Almond or vanilla extract, 1/4 teaspoon

-Green food coloring, couple drops

Pour it all in the blender. Blend! In about 45 seconds, you have awesome frosting that is light, delicious in a sophisticated way, and holds its shape even when it's warm.

You want the pink kind?:

-Whipped cream, 1 1/2 cups

-Instant strawberry jello, 2-3 Tablespoons 

-Red food coloring, couple drops

-Niceties, in this case being orange extract or some other unexpected extract

Pour it all in the blender cup, stir, and let it sit in the fridge for a few minutes to dissolve. Then, blend! This will take a little longer (I don't know why), and is more look and smell than taste, but still quite light.

Imprecision Cooking: Lu'au Leaf

So this is an uniquely Hawai’i problem: we are having a bumper crop of kalo. We (that is, Sol, with me hovering in a completely useful and unannoying way) had moved some stuff around in our garden, and made some raised beds. I planted seeds (basil, tomato, lettuces, green onions, cilantro, eggplant), fertilized with Pro-Em (which is amazeballs, by the way), and in just a few weeks, we had… kalo?!

In my loud but completely unscientific opinion, the kalo bits had gone into hibernation and we awoke them by tilling the soil. There’s kalo everywhere, even in the compost heap!

Most folks know kalo for using the corm for poi and the lu’au leaf for laulau. This kalo, since it’s grown in the garden, have small corm and huge leaves, so no poi for us. And we don’t have an imu handy, so no old-school laulau.

But we make do. Here are three ways to cook lu’au leaf, that don’t require an imu:

1.       Stew lu’au

This is a favorite of my in-laws and about as easy as it gets.

Ingredients

-Meat, 2-4 lbs. Sol likes pork. I like beef. He’s doing the buying and cooking, so pork it is.

-Lu’au leaf, a bunch as big as two or three cats. I said it was imprecise! It will cook down.

Here’s the key: cut up the leaves small, like the sized of your phone, or smaller. Not only will they cook faster, they will fit on your spoon. Lu’au is already a food that non-ethnic people find intimidating and gross; having pieces twice as long as your utensil is like a caricature.

Ok, so cube your meat, fry up in a big pot. Add lu’au leaf. Add water so that the meat is covered. Add salt to taste. Hang out for a while so everything cooks down. Eat!

2.      Slow cooker special

Ingredients

-Ti leaves, 8-10. You might want to take the midribs out.

-Lu’au leaves, 10-15. You can cut them up if you want.

-Meat, a pound or so. Or fish. Or not. I don’t like having meat all the time.

-Coconut milk, two cans. Or one can if you're scurrred.

-Sweet potato, cubed.

-Garlic, to taste. I use about 15 cloves, because I’m a garlic head.

-Salt, at least a tablespoon. I undersalt stuff.

-Niceties, to taste, if you like. Some niceties include: cumin, chili, cilantro, chopped onion.

First, the ti leaves line everything. You could just put everything in one of those plastic, slow cooker bags, but I freak out about plastic, so I’m going with leaves where I can. Make a layer of lu’au, then one layer of meat rubbed in salt and a splash of coconut milk, another layer lu’au. Then chop up your lu’au stems really fine, and make a layer of coconut milk, salt, garlic, sweet potato, and stems. Then, another layer of lu’au, then the meat layer, then lu’au, then garlic layer, and so on. When you reach the top, put a layer of ti leaves, throw that baby on high, and walk away! Set it, and forget it! He he he. Cook maybe 6 hours, but who is gone from home at work only 6 hours? No one. Eight hours is fine.

3.      Just add to stew

Ingredients

-Lu’au leaves, a bunch the size of a cat.

-Beef stew. Or whatever stew you like.

Chop up your lu’au leaves (see directions above). Parboil them while you are prepping your stew ingredients, then drain. Start making your stew. After meat, add lu’au leaves, then make the rest of the stew like normal. That’s it.

And don’t forget to test your food, to see if it makes your throat itchy. If it does, just let yourself get lost in looking up stuff on YouTube, and when you’re done, it will be ready.

No dairy=Happy

So, I’ve been trying to cut out dairy from the family’s diet, for a variety of reasons that I’ll mention briefly here and perhaps expand upon in a later rant. Some of these reasons are pseudo-science based, and pseudo-economics based, which I fully acknowledge before you question my conspiracy-theorist-sounding use of the nefarious “they.” Dairy is bad because:

-Hormones. They (see? “They”!) pump the cows full of hormones so that they will lactate  and the hormones go into our milk. I didn’t think about it much until I was a nursing mother, and saw firsthand how what I ate affected the milk I produced.

-The cattle/dairy industry is not humane. Read “Skinny Bitch” (or a host of other books) if you want to give yourself a complex.

-It causes inflammation. Here’s the pseudo-science part, not because it doesn’t make sense but because I am not good at articulating these kinds of things. Inflammation—where a localized part of your body swells, usually in response to injury or sickness—is bad when it’s chronic. So, if you eat dairy all the time, then you are always inflamed, and that is bad. For little kids it’s especially bad because their parts are small. When they stopped having dairy all the time, my kids stopped having ear and sinus infections (caused by sinus inflammation and trapped liquids in their inner ear tubes, etc.).

-Milk allergies. I saw an article (that of course I can’t find now) that milk allergy is the most common and most undiagnosed allergy for toddlers in the U.S. Milk allergy is different than lactose intolerance, which is also unpleasant.

-It makes me mucus-y. Maybe that’s part of the inflammation point above.

-Cheese poops. Powerful and wretched.

So, absolutely no milk, not even Lactaid (which tastes like milk blended with Tums). Sometimes yogurt, which I like to make myself from the organic milk from Costco. We also like to get froyo. But my biggest weakness is cheese. One of my college roommates ate a lot of good cheese and passed on the addiction to me—but nowadays, we get a block of Tillamook Medium Sharp Cheddar once a quarter or so. I also adore brie and gouda, and that goat cheese where they soak the rind in wine. I made myself drool on the keyboard. Damnit.

All of the above has been a longwinded introduction to what I really wanted to talk about: The Uncheese Cookbook by Joanne Stepaniak, and the only recipe from that book that I like, Parmezana Sprinkles (Note the “z.” It’s that kind of book. I was surprised that it wasn’t “Sprinklez.”).

This book seeks to create a non-dairy equivalent to any occasion you should have to need cheese, usually using some combination of beans, nutritional yeast, tofu, lemon juice, pimiento, nuts, oats, and salt. You also need a blender and a transcendent act of imagination. It is my opinion that anyone who thinks these recipes taste anything like cheese (I tried five recipes in this book, but have blocked out most of them) either is quite imaginative/delusional, or hasn’t had actual cheese in so long that they can’t accurately remember the taste.

Here I will note that negative reviews of this book on Amazon.com have received aggressive responses from Ms. Stepaniak. I appreciate how she is protective of her work, but “You’re a fat pig who’s going to die from a heart attack” (not a real quote, but approximate) is not an appropriate response to “I don’t like your book.” Just sayin’.

But this book led me to nutritional yeast. Yes, it’s a fungus. A dry, mustard-yellow powder (or flakes) that smell cheesy/nutty/yeasty. It’s supposed to be super nutritious, and is not to be confused with brewer’s yeast, or any of the other yeasts you may already know. In NZ, it’s called “savory yeast” or “savory yeast flakes” (for Claire, who may or may not read this blog but who definitely lives in NZ).

Here’s my version of the Parmezano Sprinklez (couldn’t resist). I put it on popcorn and spaghetti. What’s really awesome is that I find I like it better than cheese. How often does that happen?

Sprinklez

-Handful of blanched almonds, dry, skin taken off

-1 Tablespoon nutritional yeast (you can add more later, but start with less)

-Pinch of Tony Chachere’s Original Creole Seasoning or chili pepper flakes

-Pinch of salt

-Pinch of brown sugar (not mandatory)

Blend. Sprinkle on stuff. Eat. That’s it.

References:

http://my.clevelandclinic.org/symptoms/inflammation/hic_inflammation_what_you_need_to_know.aspx

www.skinnybitch.net

http://www.webmd.com/allergies/guide/milk-allergy

http://www.amazon.com/Uncheese-Cookbook-Creating-Dairy-Free-Substitutes/dp/0913990426

http://vegetarian.about.com/od/glossary/g/nutyeast.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutritional_yeast