Brandon Eats

Bad Food, Part II

It really does take a crack on the head or a knife in the gut to make me pay attention.

So, I made this terrible quiche. It wasn't the first gluten-free baking that I've done, but it does symbolize all of the kitchen disasters that  I've been having lately.

Fear has crept into my cooking. Or is it despair? A who-cares-what-I-make attitude that sums up the spoiled, gluten-free brat I've become? Or fear + despair - attention = crap food?

That freakin' quiche up there. All of it's creamy custard made out of backyard eggs and milk fresh from the cow (not mine, someone else's) was absorbed by the stupid, yet tasty gluten-free crust. Oh, but wait. First this happened.

Every recipe I scanned for advice said to use a tart pan. ALL OF THEM. I'd never used a tart pan before when making quiche, but I had one and figured I'd give it a whirl. Wrong. The hateful gluten-free crust was too soft, and you can see (kind of — I quicky grabbed my phone, and I think it was steamed up from the ridiculously hot temperatures in the kitchen that other day) what happens when quiche liquid melts big, gaping holes in a crust in a tart pan with a removable bottom.

So much for quiche lorraine. The ingredients were now gone, gone to the trash when I tossed the whole thing away. I could have scraped the bacon and onions out, maybe added a little cheese and a new custard mixture, right? No. Not at all. The crust somehow dissolved during the time that I took my picture, called in the dogs to clean the floor, and snatched up the tart-pan-with-the-removable-bottom. Besides, who wanted quiche lorraine anyway?

Me.

(more after the jump)

Maybe Magical Meals?

Desperate, desperate nights. Nights when dinner seems impossible but everyone's hungry. Half the family wants to go out and the other half thinks that it's a crazy idea. Rifling through the cupboards and rummaging through the freezer. Can you make dinner out of frozen corn and that jar of black bean garlic sauce you bought at the Asian market? No? Are you sure?

This seems to be every night at our house, especially since I went back to work. I kept thinking that I would magically figure out how to work AND provide my family with meals and clean clothes but I still haven't gotten the hang of it. Pete Wells, editor of the New York Times Dining section wrote a wonderful piece about a similar inability to magically make meals happen every, single night at home.

I can't believe it's true — I love to cook but I don't want to cook because I'm too tired.

More after the jump

Thanksgiving Is Really And Truly Almost Here; or The Best Pumpkin Pie Ever

I'm going to publish this post every single year until every last one of you make this pumpkin pie. Keep me updated. Originally published November, 2006.

I don't have time for this; I can't blog because the 27 members of my husband's immediate family (no aunts, cousins, grandparents, no, no, just the nuclear family with parents, wives, husbands and offspring) will arrive Thursday and that's only three days away.

So, in between finally finishing the kitchen, cleaning out a jam-packed trunk room so I can fit other, equally unnecessary stuff from all over the house into it, the Salvation Army has seen a spike in donations, and my curtains met water for the very first time.  This is serious cleaning, my little poults and writing is a luxury.

However, I would be seriously remiss if I didn't share a few Thanksgiving secrets — you know, things like brine your turkey (a bucket on the back porch works great this time of year as temperatures plunge nightly, but make sure you weight the lid so the urban wildlife doesn't help themselves to a midnight snack — I kept that particular secret to myself last year), make your own cranberry sauce, etc., etc.  Except that every other food magazine/cookbook/blog tells you to do all of those things too (except the animal part — that's gleaned exclusively from my particular experience).  They don't, however, give you the perfect, the only, the ultimate pumpkin pie recipe to cherish and share.

The Un-Grilled Cheese, or Comfort Me with Chocolate

I'm feeling a little under the weather, ducklings, so here's a post dating back from September 5, 2005 to keep you going until I write again:

Sleep is precious, fragile, and so easily broken. For those of us who have problems sleeping, the night can stretch on endlessly, while at the same time, daybreak will arrive like an unwelcome guest, inducing panic and dread. What to do to wile away those endless hours awake and alone, to stave off the inevitable anxiety that the lack of sleep engenders? Have a treat, I say—a delicious, ridiculous, guilty pleasure in the middle of the night.

Most doctors (including mine, if I ever admitted to it) would counsel against eating in the middle of the night, and probably would advise even more strenuously against eating food containing chocolate when attaining sleep is the goal.

Sometimes though, the calming act of cooking is all it takes to relax a little and to allow sleep to silently sneak up on you when you finally go back to bed. Cooking however, clearly leads to something on a plate that needs to be eaten; maybe it's just a bite or maybe it's the whole thing, depending upon what you whipped up there at the darkest moment before dawn.

I always find myself turning to what I think of as my guiltiest of guilty pleasures: a grilled chocolate sandwich fried up in lots and lots of butter. It might be the endorphins the chocolate triggers or it might be the fat slowing the crazy carbs surging into my bloodstream but this sandwich always enables me to go back to bed, sleek and satisfied, and to drift off effortlessly in my already sleeping household.

Grilled Chocolate Sandwich

1 slice of good bread (not sandwich bread--firm, European varieties only)
Semi-sweet chocolate pieces to cover half a slice (Scharffen Berger is my favorite)
1-2 Tb. Plugra (or any other European-style) unsalted butter

Cut your piece of bread in half (moderation, remember?). Melt the butter in a heavy skillet over low heat and swirl each half of the bread, one side only, in the butter. Place a piece of bread, buttery side down in skillet. Layer with chocolate pieces. Top with the other piece of bread, buttery side up and raise heat. Cook exactly as you would an ordinary grilled cheese sandwich, pressing down on the bread occasionally and flipping after the first side browns. Remove when the second side is golden brown and the chocolate has melted. Cool slightly and eat. Clean the kitchen carefully and never confess to your late night culinary excursion.

 

Virtuously Vegan

Mark Bittman could tell me to how to eat worms and I'd probably follow his instructions to the letter. Fortunately, all he wants me to do, in Food Matters, is veganize my menu before 6:00 pm, and then he cuts me loose after that.

I can mostly follow that. I've got a weakness for dairy--oh, the siren song of yogurt at 4:00 in the afternoon--but I'm getting along pretty nicely. Helpful in my transition to a lesser-meat lifestyle is a book about which I can never say enough nice things. Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero, created in their book, Veganomicon, a meatless compendium even the most dedicated of carnivores can love. Really.

Along with Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, you can revolutionize the way you eat and not even notice it. There's more chopping to do, yes, and granted, I still bitch about that and probably always will. However, a lot of my complaining in the past has been because the pay-off never seemed worth it in the end. My lackluster, tamari-laced meal,* the result of at least a solid hour of chopping and sauteing, rarely felt like the effort involved was rewarded.

Not so with Veganomicon (or Bittman). Below you'll find a recipe that my entire family ate without a blink, without a shudder, without even a tiny, sad sigh. Shock ensued when I informed them that it was vegan. This was clearly and definitively a success, Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. I don't know if it's your three names each that make you so magical with the culinary plant life, but I have to hand it to you--you've won me heart and stomach.

*Vegetarians sometimes seem to think that if they pump up the umami with a little tamari, anything will be palatable.

Recipe after the jump

Spritz

Summer decided to make it's second appearance this spring and although the temperatures in Virginia are supposed to slide back into the normal range, that's no excuse not to whip out the Aperol and Prosecco and try to speak in an amusing-only-to-you Italian accent. It's a dry, light, and slightly bitter drink that goes down effortlessly as the humidity goes up.

When I was graciously invited to Pizza Club (here's a link if you'd like to read more about it), the lovely Victoria Deroche introduced me to my new favorite cocktail. She said that during the summer, all over Italy, an Aperol spritz is thrust into your hands wherever you go. Over here, sadly, if you don't know Victoria, you'll have to thrust a spritz into your own hand.

Gallons — unfortunately, it's easy to drink gallons of this spritz. On the flipside, however, it's very low in alcohol, so, for at least a little while, larger than normal quantities can be consumed with few ill effects.This is key, I think, to summer drinking. At least for me. Too much wine and I have to go home when I'd much rather last through the sunset and into the moonrise, gazing at the stars, cocktail in hand, while I languidly and in a cliché-ridden Southern way, slowly fan myself while I slap away the mosquitoes.

Here you go (with one caveat: this is probably the dumbest recipe you'll ever read, but you know, someone had to tell you about it):

The Perfect Summer Drink (otherwise know as a Spritz)

• Prosecco (I confess I buy the cheap stuff when I know I'm not going to drink it straight)
• Aperol
• Soda water
• Orange slice

Fill a glass with ice, add Prosecco until it's about 3/4 of the way up, splash in some soda water, and pour in the Aperol until you like the orange-y shade, and you've achieved sufficient bitterness to your taste. Drop in an orange slice. Drink and then drink some more. Share generously.