AW80D - Scones, Two Ways

You didn't think I was kidding when I said I would just post scone recipes, did you?

Actually, I was.  (Hopefully.)  But that doesn't mean that a scone or two can't wend its way through this little experiment, right?

I have already written extensively and ramblingly about scones before, but they are a fairly important part of my baking repertoire, so I think it is acceptable to talk about them again.

Generally speaking, I am not much for baking.  I am fairly incompetent when it comes to fruit-based desserts (your pies, crumbles, crisps, etc.), and I dislike baking cookies (I don't like the batch concept — I only enjoy baking if everything can fit into the oven at once, a preference that becomes a necessity in the desert summer when the temperature inside the oven is roughly equivalent to that outside my building and opening the oven door becomes physically dangerous).  My baking style favors breads (both of the quick and not-so varieties).  Fortunately for my cookie-enjoying self, The Husband picks up my baking slack, being both a tough cookie and the baker of tasty ones.

So, scones are essentially my only contribution to the bake-o-sphere that is our apartment, especially given that it is getting a bit too warm to crank the oven up to bread-baking proportions (sigh).

The first batch of scones, a chocolate chip-blueberry blend, was made using my standard scone recipe:  the cream scone recipe mentioned in my earlier sconepost.  They were tasty, go read that other post and make some, etc. etc.

The second batch was a riff on an oatmeal scone recipe I found in The Best International Recipe, one of those best recipe books from Cook's Illustrated where they make a dozen of everything, with tiny tiny tweaks to each recipe, until they've wasted enough food/found the perfect version (depending on your worldview).  I am always on the lookout for new and exciting scones, but oatmeal scones have a special place in my heart (and cookbook), being the first type of scone I ever baked myself (thanks, Joy of Cooking).  I fancied these up a bit with chocolate butter and cocoa nibs, which offset each other nicely and also made me feel quite posh and fancy, which lasted until the cat threw up (probably) and I was jolted from my reverie and had to go scrub the carpet.

Cocoa Nib Chocolately Oatmeal Scones

Preheat your oven to 450º F.  In a large bowl, mix 1 1/2 cups oatmeal (your standard rolled oatmeal will do nicely), 1 1/2 cups flour (I used 1 cup spelt flour to 1/2 cup all-purpose), 1/3 cup sugar, 2 teaspoons baking powder, and 1/2 teaspoon salt.  Add cocoa nibs to your liking, perhaps 1/3 cup?  Dice 10 tablespoons of butter, then mix it into the dry/nib ingredients with your hands, smushing and rubbing the butter until the mix resembles crumbs.  (It is really quite important that you use your hands, here, because it's the best way to ensure that all the butter gets fully integrated into everything.  However, don't muss about at this all day, because the butter shouldn't be so kneaded that it melts.)

In a separate bowl, beat together until well mixed 1/4 cup milk, 1/4 cup heavy cream, and one large egg.  Add this to the flour-oatmeal-butter-nib concoction, then mix it all together, starting with a fork and eventually using your hands.  It should be fairly moist, but still a bit shaggy 'round the edges.  Scoop everything out onto a well-floured board, then pat into a circle roughly one inch tall.  Cut into wedges, pop into the over for about 12 to 14 minutes, then remove to a cooling rack.  Attempt to resist the temptation to tuck in until they have completely cooled, otherwise they will still be rather soft and will probably fall apart (though you could certainly sneak a small taste, if no one is looking — you have to make sure they are acceptable, of course).

fancypants oatmeal (for me) on the left, commoner cream (for the husband) on the right

(By the way, the first scone I ever ate was a scone called Sconehenge, which I purchased at the snack bar at Stonehenge when I visited it in 2002.  It was huge and expensive and rather disappointing.  Stonehenge was cool, though.  Unrelated, I have also visited Foamhenge, which is somewhere in Virginia.  They didn't have any scones there, but hornets had made nests in pretty much every one of the foam blocks.)

EVERYBODY GETS BEES!!!!!!

AW80D - United Kingdom + Ireland

For the purposes of this little internet experiment in international cookery, singling out the British Isles for some sort of special focus seems an odd choice.  After all, those little islands aren't particularly well-known for being culinary hotspots; in fact, they are actually known for being culinary wastelands — foodie laughingstocks, the butt of many a tasty joke.  If I really want to highlight a country, why not pick a one with a long, storied food tradition, like France, that mecca for food lovers?

Well, there a few reasons.  For one, I find French food — or, more accurately, people who like to talk about French food — almost unbearably pretentious.  Not all of them, of course, but as a whole, people who bring up French cuisine in food-related discussions always seem desperately insufferable.  I also don't much care for French food; in my experience, it's not terribly vegetarian-friendly, but even when it is, I find it all very dull.  I love watching Julia Child, but I don't know if I've ever seen the finished product of one of her shows and thought, "Yes, eating that seems like a very good idea."

Of course, the same thing could be said about the Two Fat Ladies, originators of both one of my all-time favorite cooking shows and some of the most terrifying foods every committed to film.  Seriously — peas with lettuce?  Lobster and mayonnaise?  Jugged kippers?  You should not be allowed near a kitchen if your recipe for a delightful breakfast dish is, "get smoked herring, put herring in a jug, pour boiling water over said herring, let sit, drain, serve."

NO.  THAT IS NOT ACCEPTABLE BEHAVIOR.

Not all British food is terrible.  It's true that, during my semester abroad in London, I subsisted primarily on corn flakes, clementines, digestives, and Cadbury caramels, but that's just as much a product of preferring to spend my limited money on sightseeing as it was quality of food.  Yes, things like black pudding are horrifying, but pasties (which I've discussed before) and shepherd's pie and fish and chips are perfectly tasty things.  I had a delicious cock-a-leekie soup on the Orkney Islands, and the haggis I had in Edinburgh was...all right; it wasn't bad, but I was surprisingly unimpressed and don't really feel the need to visit that stop on the Sheep Innards Express again any time soon.

One of the things that the British Isles excels at, in my opinion, is anything to do with fruit, specifically jams and desserts.  The climate is perfect for an abundance of brambleberries (blackberries, raspberries, loganberries, etc.); the best blackberries I have ever eaten were those gathered along the side of the road during a hike in the Scottish highlands, wherein I stumbled into two different thunderstorms and got lost (all was well in the end, though — I found my bus stop and got to ride back to town with a belly full of berries).  I just may get over my fear of baking fruit-based desserts for the purposes of this challenge.

Maybe it was my love of all things British that inspired me to set these countries apart.  Perhaps this is my way of correcting my past food mistakes from back when I was in the UK.  Or maybe I'm just a masochist who enjoys a challenge.  But that's kind of the entire point of this little exercise in food geography:  to explore new dishes, to abandon my culinary comfort zone and preconceived notions and try something new.  Maybe I'll discover a wealth of treasures hidden amongst the organ meats and gravied vegetables that populate British food.

Or maybe I'll just get weirded out by all the herring recipes and bake five different types of scones.

Around the World in 80 Dishes - An Introduction

If you actually visit the site to read this humble blog, you may have noticed something a little different, perhaps even new and exciting, happening.  (For those of you who read this via Google Reader or some other blaggregator, you should go to the site and look at it; I did not futz around with the widget creator for over an hour so that you could just ignore my hard work.)

I will wait.

(Did you look yet?)

Ok, ta-da!  My new (and overly ambitious) blog conceit, Around the World in 80 Dishes, is up and running!  Or, at least, the filing system is.  16 regions x 5 dishes = 80 magical meals.  Hopefully seeing all those little headings along the side will inspire me to get cooking, now that I have a public shaming system in place where everyone can see my progress (or lack thereof).  I am aiming to add a post or two per week to the tally, but that is highly dependent on a number of variables; however, given our previous experience with said variables, that's looking like a pretty manageable goal.  My plan is to make each post something more than just ingredients and recipes, to also explore the region and culture and cuisine as a whole.  Ideally, each region will get its own mini-introduction, which will talk about the food and flavors, as well as give an idea of what to expect from the dishes themselves. 

The regions are fairly arbitrarily determined:  I essentially broke each continent down into manageable chunks, trying to keep regions united based on my preconceived notions of geography, culture, and cuisine.  I could be totally wrong on some of these; only time will tell.  Each region will be represented by five dishes, which I am hoping to make as diverse as possible.  The only real outlier here is the British Isles, which I included because I am a huge Anglo-/Scotsophile, and have no problem with all five dishes being varieties of scone or whisky tastings.

Also, in an attempt to make this as much of a family affair as possible (without any hateration or holleration in this dancerie), The Husband has been placed in charge of selecting good music to accompany the preparation and/or consumption of each dish.  I hope he remembers that we discussed this way back when and reading this paragraph doesn't surprise him too much.

Also, does anyone know if there are any Scandinavian dishes that do not include jellied, fermented fish?  Seriously.  I'm a little scared of that one.

We Now Return to Your Regularly-Scheduled Blogging

(This is a blog post I started writing way back in January, right after we'd returned from our Christmas/India vacation.  The point of it was to summarize our entire trip, but it was just as the sickness and doctor's visits were starting, and so I was frequently distracted and never got around to finishing it.  I've considered attempting to restart the story, but my memories of the trip are dimmer, now, and I sort of like this little snapshot in time, saved right at the point where we knew something was afoot, but had no idea what it could be.  So I'm leaving this as is; perhaps at some point I'll go back and record my impressions of India for posterity [maybe a little prosperity].  For now, enjoy a short story about our cat and a brief glimpse into home life in New York.)

So, rather than prattle on about the intricacies of The Husband's gastrointestinal tract, let me instead share some stories about family, holidays, and the joys of traveling with an angry cat.

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Given that we would be gone for over a month and didn't have anyone to cat-sit the little hellbeast for us, we decided to bring Pannekuchen to New York, where I could foist him off on my mother while we did our little bit of globetrotting.

Now, I have to give Pancakes credit, as he wasn't absolutely terrible to fly with.  In all fairness, he was probably less trouble than many children.  Once we got him onto the plane and stowed safely underneath the seat in front of me, he calmed down, only howling uncontrollably during takeoff, landing, whenever we encountered turbulence, and anytime he could either see or hear us.

After the Dark Times of flight were over, Pannekuchen got to enjoy all that winter in New York has to offer, including snow (consensus:  he is not a fan), indoor puddles of melted snow (also not a fan), my younger cousin (probably a fan, given how much they chased each other around the house, possibly encouraged by my suggestion that Pancakes likes to eat children), and, most importantly, other cats.  After a rough start and much growling (a noise I wasn't aware he could make), he eventually reached a truce with two of the cats and actively befriended the third, Algaecat.

BFFs

We also got to enjoy all that winter in New York has to offer, including snow, cold, limited internet access, and nothing but Christmas songs on the two radio stations that work (thank goodness for my mother's new car and the free Sirrius radio, which was still always set on one of its 20 Christmas stations).  There were Champion of North America Wii bowling tournaments and I repeatedly bested my mother in pretending to play music while also pretending to be a Rabbid.

One of the best parts about going home during the winter is the fact that hearty, winter fare tastes much better when it's blizzarding out, so we made chili and vegetable barley soup and mushroom risotto and Brussels sprout salad and bruschetta and spiced gingerbread and Christmas cookies (the only time of year my mother consents to bake).  I ate my requisite bag of cheese puffs and learned that sourdough pretzels are fantastic with hummus.  We snagged some lovely, new, hard anodized pots and pans (which I have used and love) and an enameled cast iron dutch oven (which brings our total of heavy-cast-iron-dishes-that-will-be-a-pain-to-move to five).  And then we left.

Life, Interrupted.

I don't generally like poetry, but to start off my first blog post in several weeks, I'd like to quote one of my favorite poems, "To a Mouse, On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough," by Robert Burns:

The best-laid schemes o' Mice an' Men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought be grief an' pain,

For promis'd joy!

(For those of you not up on your Scots dialect, "gang aft agley" means "often go wrong." Which is a terribly fitting start to this post.)

You may have noticed that this blog has been under a bit of silent running lately. And if you are reading this blog, you probably already know why. Suffice it to say, there has been...upheaval...as of late, and our best-laid plans have ganged aft agley to no end.

I tried to write about everything before, but couldn't find the words. And I've tried again more recently, but the words I found then weren't the ones I wanted; they were the words of someone too close to the situation, someone who couldn't see the forest for the trees and didn't know what she really felt. I had been running on auto-pilot for some time, pushing aside thoughts and feelings that distracted from the task at hand; now that the dust was settling and life was returning to normal, I finally had a chance to let all those repressed feelings come out. And since no one represses good feelings, everything I wrote reflected that. They were writings of sadness and fear, a sadness and fear that, now that more time has passed and I've had the chance to be more logical and reflective, I no longer feel.

To be sure, there are changes — big changes. And when I say that things are returning to normal, I mean they are returning to our new normal, whatever that ends up being. This new normal is a strange thing — so similar to the old normal that it's easy to forget that it isn't the old normal, but with enough differences that it's clear things are not as they were, and that they will not easily, or ever, go back to being the same.

But such as it is with life. Life goes on, and so we go on with it. And while we may have lost some things, we have found even more. We have discovered a strength that neither of us knew we had. We have found a new perspective on life, and an appreciation for the promise and opportunity that every day affords us. We are reminded that we are loved, and that we are truly blessed by the people in our lives. And we have been reminded that, all things considered, we incredibly, incredibly lucky people.

Happily, one of the things that comes with normalcy is more time for blogging. I just started up a pottery class, and so tales of clay and wheels will soon follow. And while we have had a slightly altered relationship with food, there should still be plenty of tastiness to share. We are quickly (more so than I would like) coming up on that part of the Arizona year where turning on the oven is a significant hazard, so I am trying to squeeze in as much fun cooking as possible before it becomes physically impossible to operate any heat-based appliances larger than the toaster oven. I have also decided to get into sandwiches for this very reason, and am contemplating a pickling binge soon.  All my original schemes and plans are still in the works, too, so I am expecting great things from this newfound sense of foodly purpose.

Since I'm at a loss for a way to end this, here is an artsy iPod photo of Saguaro National Park. One of the positive aspects of all that's happened is that we'll get to drive through this park more often, usually right as the sun is setting, which is a pretty fantastic way to end your day.

All in all, life is good. 

A Quick Question/Rant

Hi all.

I have been working on a proper new blog post, one full of tales of adventures and glamorous photographs and anecdotes about the cat.  However, this compelled me to write.

If you're too lazy/uninterested/technologically outdated to click on the link, it's a blog post from the food/cooking/designer-kitchen blog The Kitchn, talking about how difficult it is to eat a salad.

Really.  This is apparently a problem?

I will be honest:  I have been eating salads like mad lately.  They are quite tasty, and they are especially tastier if you add kale to them (I would suggest Red Russian kale, as it is my favorite of kales, and also because it's a lighter version than your standard curly kales).  I have eaten salads, of one variety or another, for several years now; I have never found the practice all that complicated.  Hell, even if I had just discovered the concept of salads, I think I could handle it.  Apparently, this makes me some sort of wizard, as, at least at the time of this posting, the Kitchn's article has 26 comments from people who are also unable to comprehend how to eat food.

To be fair, the post does specify that the issue is eating salad gracefully.  Perhaps I am just uncouth, but unless you are rooting around in your salad bowl like some sort of artiodactyl or snorting up the leaves in lieu of chewing them, you're probably going to be OK.

Of course, because this blog is written entirely by women, with an audience overwhelmingly comprised of women, there isn't any chance that the choice of the word gracefully has any deeper meaning, right?  It wouldn't suggest that, at least in public (especially in public), we who are in possession of ladyparts (at least when said ladyparts attach to a ladybody that is well-to-do, or at least not poor) should always maintain an aura of respectability that is almost entirely predicated on our ability to be dainty?

Because no one wants to be seen as unladylike; why, it's only a slight jump from using your fork to scoop up lettuces to ending up a slovenly guttersnipe in some sort of Dickensian workhouse, drinking gin and swearing and yelling at soot-covered urchins.

If you'll excuse me, imma go eat some salad as messily as possible.  Now, where's my trough?

With Apologies to Benny.

Gentle readers!  I have been sorely remiss in my blogging, but I have a reason(s), sort of!

See, I am taking the GRE next week, and between pretending to learn math and getting angry at practice tests, I have had neither the time nor energy nor inclination to engage in anything culinarily (a word I just made up) exciting.  Also, The Husband and I leave soon for our four-week New York/India Holiday Extravaganza, so we have enacted a moratorium on new food purchases and are forcing ourselves to work though the fridge and freezer stocks as much as possible before our departure.  As you can imagine, this complicates starting up all the exciting new blog things I had planned.

However, we still have to eat, and what better way to use up old vegetables than stir-fry?

I used to hate making stir-fries.  They never tasted right, things didn't cook properly – for something that seemed so easy to throw together, it was remarkably difficult.  That is, until we got our wok.  Our glorious, 14-inch, cast iron, solid-as-a-friggin'-rock wok.

gracias, ben y alé!

Seriously, it's pretty awesome.  It may weigh somewhere in the area of a metric tonne (imperial weight) and take forever and a day to heat up, but it works like a charm.

Now, I've always thought that pieces of specialized, single-function equipment – things like woks and bread makers and rice cookers and pastry cutters – were entirely unnecessary, and that a good cook could easily improvise and make good food without them.  I still believe that about most things, but the wok has converted me.  I am a wokist.  All hail the mighty wok and its ability to cook food.  Thou shalt not mock thy wok.  Wok wok wok.

like this, only with woks (also I am not a tiger)

Anyway, so:  stir-fries.  After some rummaging around in the fridge (which is still packed to the gills with dairy products), I found the following: shallots, garlic, ginger, hatch chiles, red peppers, zucchini, carrots, broccoli slaw, peas, bok choy, and tofu (full disclosure: I might have actually gone out and purchased the tofu and choy, but that was only because we needed some protein and who doesn't love bok choy and don't judge me).

Once everything was chopped, I heated up some grapeseed oil and, once it was hot, added a couple of teaspoons of Gunpowder green tea leaves and let them fry until they began to open up (for those of you unfamiliar with Gunpowder tea, the leaves are tightly rolled little balls that uncurl when you cook or steep them).  Then, add the onions, garlic, ginger, and chiles; once they have become fragrant, mix in the tofu and a bit of Chinese Five Spice powder and cook until golden brown.  Next come the snap peas, then the red pepper and zucchini.  The carrot and broccoli slaw follow (broccoli slaw is this awesome pre-made mix of shredded carrots and broccoli stems that they sell at both Fresh and Easy and Trader Joe's, which has become a fixture in my salads).  The bok choy goes in last, and once it has wilted and become tender, you're basically done.

"But Heather," you might be saying, "what about the flavor?  Your dish seems to be lacking in tasty essences."  And herein lies the trouble I usually had with stir-fries:  it turns out that I don't really like soy sauce.  In small quantities, sure, but I find it very easy to be overwhelmed by the flavor (and using it as a dipping sauce for gyoza or similar just plain terrifies and confuses me).  But I do really like teriyaki sauce, which is what I used here (I added a small amount after the red pepper and zucchini, then some more after the bok choy), so go figure; I also added a bit of Trader Joe's sweet chile sauce (which, incidentally, is what I use for dippings of gyoza or dumplings, etc.).  Oh, and at some point you should tell The Husband to cook up some black rice/somen noodles and then throw them in at the end, and also chop up some pickled peppers if you want some extra kapow.

Et, voila!

noodles!  they are EVERYWHERE.

You can also do basically the same thing again tonight, using homemade seitan in place of tofu and peanut satay sauce/seitan cooking liquid in place of teriyaki and brown rice instead of noodles, and maybe adding some dilly beans too if you're truly mad.