Category: minutiae

And now, links.

Japanese Katamari Damacy commercial (bottom link). It’s for the first game, and you’ve probably already seen it. I don’t care. Download it again! It made me laugh a lot.

MST3K on Cheap Seats (bottom link, “Creative Breaking Championships/K-1 Fighting”). Cheap Seats is a show on ESPN Classic that, unfortunately, kind of sucks (which is very sad to me, because I have enjoyed the Sklar brothers’ stand-up in the past). They’re having Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett on as guests, which is awesome, although it doesn’t negate the fact that the show isn’t all that good. I do like the episode description, though. “Cheap Seats also welcomes a few very special guests to the show to give some commentary of their own. It’s a mystery that is grounded in science but full of theater. ” This is just a preview, I’m going to watch the episode over at Jon and Ryan’s because I don’t get ESPN Classic. I hope it’s good.

Jon made me a batch of starter last night, so that means I can now make kick-ass sourdough bread just like him! Well, hopefully. I’ll be posting the recipe and technique, but I don’t know how starter is actually made. There’s an article on it in the latest Cook’s Illustrated, I believe, but I just took a shortcut.

The dough rises in loaves overnight. Jon had said that he sometimes has problems with them spreading too much. One solution, I guess, would be to buy those wave-like pans and rise the loaves in there. What I did was cut up a 2-liter soda bottle into two tube halves. Hopefully they’ll stay stiff enough when the dough’s in them. We’ll see. I’ll be baking tomorrow morning, I think.

Now that I actually have a job, I can post about this, originally written at the end of February.

At the end of March or the beginning of April, I’m either going to have a party to celebrate the one-year anniversary of this blog and my 25th birthday, or move. (Probably not going to have a party- it’s a little late now.) Yes, I’m thinking about leaving Menlo Park for the sunnier climes of Mountain View. It puts me farther away from my brother and sister-in-law, but closer to my other friends (well, except Lydia and Zack, this’ll add another ten miles to the trip to the East Bay). So I’m browsing through the apartment listings online, and I am just astounded by how poorly laid-out many of these kitchens seem to be. Clearly, they were not designed by anyone who actually cooks. It’s like you don’t actually need counter space to work on, nonsense! I mean, look at this picture. There’s two square feet of usable counter space. With a mixer and food processor, there’s approximately zero. This doesn’t even count as a kitchen. I think my cutting board alone would overfill that tiny little bit of space.

I should find out about the job on Thursday. (Still holding myself back on the excitement and celebration.)

I made a braciole last weekend and finished it up tonight. Yum. I made it once before, back in September. This time I wasn’t so sure about the salt content of the stuffing. I thought it tasted a little bland. However, it tasted great with the saltiness of the tomato sauce. I didn’t really take time to make a tomato sauce. It was the reduced liquid from a couple cans of the Muir Glen Fire-Roasted Tomatoes, an extra can of tomato sauce, some white wine, olive oil, salt, pepper, fresh oregano, and hot pepper flakes. Maybe a little bit of vinegar, balsamic or red wine, I can’t remember. Anyway, it was quite tangy and salty, and really complemented the stuffing and flank steak. I still suck at getting the flank steak pounded thin enough.

Jon’s been making sourdough bread. It’s totally frikkin’ amazing. It’s incredible that he could make it. That’s not what I mean. It’s incredible that a human with a normal kitchen could make that. He says it costs him about thirty cents a loaf. It’s the kind of bread you’d pay four bucks for in the market. And it’s GOOD. I love this bread. I’m really looking forward to the day he gives me starter and teaches me how to make it.

Sweet Milk Scones with Dried Cherries
Cook’s Illustrated The Best Recipe

2 cups AP flour
1 tsp cream of tartar
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1-2 Tbsp sugar, plus extra for sprinkling
1/2 cup dried cherries or other small dried fruit
4 Tbsp unsalted butter, chilled and cut into 1/2-inch pieces
3/4 cup whole milk

Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 450. Allow the oven to come up to heat before making dough.

Place flour, cream of tartar, baking soda, salt, and sugar in a food processor and pulse to combine. Add the cherries and butter and pulse until the mixture resembles coarse meal with a few slightly larger butter lumps.

Add the milk and puolse until dough just starts to gather into a rough ball. Do not overprocess or scones will be tough. Turn dough onto a well-floured work surface.

Quickly press dough to a thickness of 1/2 inch. Use a lightly greased and floured 3-inch biscuit cutter (or whatever, I used a wine glass with a diameter or 3 inches) to stamp dough with one decisive punch, cutting close together to generate as few scraps as possible. Reassemble scraps and cut more scones. Place dough rounds 1 1/2 inches apart on a baking sheet lines with parchment. Sprinkle the tops with a little bit of sugar. Bake until scones are lightly browned, 10 to 12 minutes. Serve immediately.

Whoops. I had dinner over at Jon and Ryan’s tonight. I made the Apple-Rutabaga Soup and Jon made tacos. They really didn’t go together, but whatever. Anyway, I got home just now and was unpacking the rest of my groceries when I… took out a bag of apples. Yeah, I forgot to put them in. Damn it. Sometimes I’m really dumb. The soup was still tasty.

I had a weird dream last night. About Sandra Lee. I was sitting at a computer in a library, and I found all these horrible modeling pictures of her- there was one where her hair was all crimped and fro’d out and she was wearing some bizarre plaid thing. Anyway, I was chortling and copying down the web addresses so I could post them somewhere (probably here) and also writing myself some notes on a piece of scrap paper. Anyway, Sandra herself was about twenty feet to my right, heard my giggles, recognized me, came over, and picked up the piece of paper. I immediately tried to talk my way out of it and snatched the piece of paper back from her. She was glaring at me and decided we were going to a restaurant that made dishes a la Semi-Homemade. (Ew.) She goes back to her terminal and gets her stuff, including a small hatchet which she puts in her handbag. We then exit to a garage. She has a Mercedes sedan, metallic tan, with either a sun or moonroof. There’s a Tivo sticker on it. Her license plate and side mirrors have AOL decals on them. She starts the car before unlocking the doors so I can get in (I hate it when people do that). And then my alarm went off. So at least I didn’t have to go to this Semi-Homemade restaurant OR get chopped up into bitty pieces by Sandra’s hatchet.

Keckler updated The Grub Report with a new article about work, Sandra Lee, and a restaurant in San Francisco called Suppenküche which sounds REALLY good. Anyone up for a trip to the city for German food?

I think I got the job at Stanford. Eeeeeee! (No, Sarah! No celebration until there’s paperwork in front of you!)

I don’t mean to harp on about this… actually, I think I do. Anyway, I’m watching this morning’s new Sandra Lee. She’s making what she calls a “crepe omelet.” First off, not crepes. She’s using flour tortillas (who knew you could substitute one for the other?). Secondly, not an omelet. It’s a scramble. Basically, what she’s making is a breakfast burrito. That’s fine. Scrambled eggs and ham in a tortilla? I can get on board for that. However, she decides, of course, to go the extra gross step and makes a sauce for the dish out of store-bought guacamole that she’s pushed through a fine-mesh sieve (just to make absolutely sure it looks like something babies spew) and to which she added heavy cream. Ew, ew, EW. Always have to go that extra disgusting step, don’t you, Sandy? Leave well enough alone. And call things by their right names.

Oh, I shouldn’t blog while watching the show. “Quick water”? What the hell is that?

Argh, the comments are being wonky again. You know how they get, it’s like one post in twenty that starts acting up, either not being able to be read in Mozilla or IE. Anyway, here are the comments for the March third post. I don’t know why it’s saying that I have negative thirteen comments. Or perhaps that’s absolute value negative thirteen.

mm
It is such a mess when fat is spattering all over the kitchen. Even with a spatter guard you can count on a mess. One product that works pretty well on the grease is Fantastic(k?) spray.
My response
When I was stirring the not-cracklings, I had to lift off the spatter guard, and I got grease all over myself (I love aprons). Also, I burned myself twice. In the same place.

Mary Beth
Thanks for taking on FN and the Semi-Homemade travesty! My reviews of several recipes (which I did make, and didn’t just slam the host) were also scrubbed some time ago. I included better alternatives from other FN shows, which may just be why they were scrubbed…
My response
Oh, it really annoyed me when all her reviews jumped from two to five-stars. People need to be informed that her recipes are bad, bad, BAD. Your thought about how your reviews were deleted because you advocated alternatives is an optimistic idea, but I don’t have that kind of faith in the Food Network. (And thanks for the shout-out on the TWoP forums!)

Lydia
ooh, which job? good luck with that 🙂 and how’s the scarf coming along?
My response
It’s a receptionist position at Stanford. And the building it’s in is right next door to where Ryan and Jer work. That’d be keen. I will need to look up how to start a new ball o’ yarn later today. The scarf’s at about three feet.

Had an interview yesterday. Woo! I would really like to get this job.

Food Network is scrubbing clean the one-star reviews of Sandra Lee’s recipes. Two of my reviews were deleted. Now, I can partly understand this. A lot of the reviews were mere bashing of Sandra and her recipes. These reviewers had never made the recipes and were just commenting on how horrible it looked. Conversely, many of the five-star reviews were over-the-top flattery of Sandra and bashing of the one-star reviewers. These people had also not made the recipes. Lots of name-calling from both sides. Food Network has deleted the one-stars and kept the five-stars, presumably to get the Semi-Homemade average up. Her show had the lowest average rating of the Food Network shows, generally around two or three stars for a given recipe.

I had written three reviews of recipes I made- the Raspberry Cooler, Mozzerella Nuggets, and Oriental Pork Wrappers. The Raspberry Cooler and Mozzerella Nuggets were both one-star reviews. The Oriental Pork Wrappers I gave a two. The two-star review has remained, the other two are gone (or rather were, since I rewrote them this afternoon). It’s incredibly annoying to me that they are only scrubbing half of the off-topic reviews as well as reviews from people who made the recipes and didn’t like them. It’s unfair to the writers (of the real reviews, not the flaming) and to the people who are going to be misled into making this crap.

Tried something from Jacques Pepin’s Fast Food My Way today, just as an experiment. I bought three chickens from Costco, and after I was done separating them into carcasses and edible bits, I cut up the skin and fat and rendered them in a hot pan to get cracklings. Jacques had done this, and it looked really good. What a mess. Do not try that unless you have a spatter guard. Also, drain the fat when you’re done into a heatproof container. Don’t be a moron and put it into heat-sensitive plastic. That stuff melts FAST. And then you have hot fat everywhere. As for the cracklings themselves? Bland, bland, bland. And crunchy. Maybe I should have salted them before putting them in. Probably I should have. They ended up a little burnt as I left them in the pan while running around cleaning up the fat mess. Good times.

Yum, lemon curd. I think if I were to make this again, I would cook the lemon zest with the curd and then strain it out afterwards. It’s a little distracting to the smooth texture. I was so happy that it didn’t curdle. Really quite proud of that.

I did make scones a while ago, and they were excellent, but I just haven’t gotten around to copying down the recipe yet.