the wombatcave

Trader Joe's uncrystallized candied ginger finally reappeared, a bit after I'd bought a huge bag of fresh ginger from Costco to scale up the candying recipe.

Tonight I finally embarked on a multi-step process to deal with all of the fresh ginger, though I'm still not entirely certain what to do with it in the end.

The ginger itself has been peeled, sliced into ~1/4-1/2" slices, and is simmering on the stove until it gets tender. All of the ginger peel scraps are simmering in a neighboring large pot with cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, and peppercorns to start a new batch of chai concentrate. Once the ginger slices are tender, I'm going to drain them, reserve ~1 cup liquid, and pour the rest of the ginger liquid into the chai concentrate batch. Everything then gets to sit in the refrigerator or at room temperature overnight (there's no sugar involved yet and everything's going to get brought back up to boiling again).

Tomorrow, I'm going to add tea and sugar to the chai concentrate, bring it back to a boil, and then strain it into a pitcher. The semi-depleted chai spices will then go into a large stockpot with several bags of scraps and bones fom the freezer to make stock. (Last week, after I noticed that the wombat-consort had stopped drinking the existing batch of chai concentrate because it had gotten to the fine spice-particulate sediment level at the bottom of the pitcher, I impulsively chucked the sediment into the oxtails I'd just started stewing, since the pho-related seasonings I'd already put in were pretty similar. The result resembles a five-spice mixture with a touch of orange, which is what cardamom strongly resembles to my palate. And the freezer bags already contain all of the oxtail bones from that as well as some assorted roasted pork knuckle bones, so I think it should work out pretty well.)

As for the ginger itself... it seems superfluous to candy it at this point, though OTOH it's a pretty easy process and easy to store afterward. I could try turning it into ginger-lime marmalade, except that would take up room and we'd never eat it all (esp. since the wombat-consort still shies away from bread most of the time). I'll figure something out.

Meanwhile, once the chai concentrate is done, some of it can get funneled into re-making that chai chocolate custard from a while back. Eventually.

And all the poor wombat-consort did tonight was suggest making custard. Custard will appear eventually. But not tonight.

Bookmark for future reference.

Working notes:

This is an almost suspiciously easy recipe, esp. if the first step is transposed to microwaving a glass measuring cup. I was worried about the non-uniform chocolate dispersal, since it doesn't fully disssolve into the aqueous chai concentrate to begin with, and then solidifies into lots of small granules when added to the milk. The granules also sink to the bottom of the milk mixture and subsequent egg batter, and need to be vigorously stirred/scraped when transferred.

However, when actually baked and cooled, most of the chocolate rises to the top to create a firm dark layer on top, almost like a creme brulee except with a somewhat spongier, more aerated texture. It is tasty.

The actual custard layer has limited residual chocolate content, but I'm thinking of tweaking that by adding some cocoa powder to the first step. At least after we finish this initial batch of six servings-- I made a 1.5x upscaled batch, and also used ~2 oz of unsweetened chocolate instead of 1.5 oz because of the limitations of my kitchen scale.

It's also pleasantly not-too-sweet, at least when made with our homebrew chai concentrate. I've been making the latter with only about half as much sugar compared to commercial chai syrups, at least in proportion to the quantities of tea and spices-- conversely, I've been using less water to end up with a more concentrated concentrate in the interest of minimizing the fridge storage footprint.

The wombatcave's usual nominal festivities:

1.) Bake cookies.
2.) Eat them.

Interestingly, the wombat-consort's ancestral orange cookies[*] seem to be relatively obscure in most of the US. I don't know where the recipe originally came from, but he grew up in Western Pennsylvania and there are multiple variants in Pittsburgh-local cookbooks. This one was his granny's, from the stash of handwritten index cards in his mom's kitchen. They look very similar to the ones shown here; some of the reviews there would probably also apply to these.

[*: The term "orange cookie" is somewhat misleading for this recipe, in that the dough a.) actually produces soft cakelets instead of the more typical crispy/crunchy cookie texture, and b.) (in the wombat-consort's recipe) does not actually contain any orange-type components. The cakelets are fairly bland by themselves, but they provide a great platform for the zingy orange frosting. They need to be assembled at least several hours in advance of serving, but will store for at least a week if they survive uneaten for that long.]( Read more... )

After remembering that we had a partially-used bag of Trader Joe's almond meal in our pantry and some bags of poppy seeds in our freezer (from the former walk-in sales days of a local gourmet food wholesaler that travelingtiger pointed us to), I wondered if I could find a recipe that could use both ingredients. Answer: Yum.( Read more... )

Excavated a bag of dried cherries from the cupboard a few weeks ago; the sugars seemed to've crystallized, so I dumped them into an airtight container with some brandy for partial rehydration while figuring out what to do with them.

Found an excellent cake recipe to use them in, though they may've been somewhat more cherries than the recipe actually calls for (and I used ordinary brandy instead of the clear raspberry brandy suggested). The result is certainly tasty, although I'm sure the quality mostly depends on what sort of chocolate you use. Another bonus is easy cleanup-- one small saucepan for simmering the dried cherries with brandy, one large mixing bowl for pretty much everything else (and a pot of water to put under it, for melting the chocolate and butter at the start), one cake pan, one whisk, and one spatula.

The wombat-consort has been home sick all week-- nothing serious, just a low-level debilitating flu-like thing. As a semi-consequence, I decided to try making pho at home according to this recipe, since beef back ribs were on sale at Safeway and I was getting bored with chicken soup.( Read more... )

Overall, it's hard to say whether the recipe was worthwhile-- yes, the result is very nice, but the time/ingredients just aren't very cost-effective if you have several local places to just walk in and get a big bowl of pho for less than $10. OTOH, I do like having LOTS of this broth to play with.

And as a random note, I believe that this comment from a Cassie Edwards defender is one of the finest examples I've ever seen of Not Getting It. "Ms. Edwards writes about Nature in a very beautiful way", egads.

While out shopping to replenish my miso supply (various types of instant miso soup, as well as a plain tub o' miso; still have plenty of instant dashi granules to go with the latter), I saw some koji on the fridge shelf-- rice that's been pre-inoculated with the proper fermentation thingies for making miso from scratch-- and snapped it up to take home and read the directions. I figured I'd have to buy soybeans, but wasn't sure how many; looks like I'll need about a pound, as well as a ~1-gallon wide-mouthed container that can be closed off in a non-airtight manner. Glass sounds ideal, in terms of being able see what's going on in there without disrupting the process.

Depending on which miso procedure I try-- red miso has a higher soybean-to-koji ratio, but takes longer; I don't think there's enough koji in this container to scale up the white miso ingredients in the way they suggest-- I may have some koji left over; otoh, they also provide directions for making amazake, a rice-based beverage that only needs to ferment overnight, just long enough to break down most of the starch into simple sugars without producing much ethanol. The main hurdle there will probably be figuring out how to sustain the proper incubation temperature; a thermos would probably work, but it would have to be a BIG thermos. I don't think a gas stove's pilot light would be warm enough, and our stove is electric anyway.

jennifer3dtd brought over some yummy heirloom-tomato salsa from her local farmers' market last weekend, toward the end of her trip. It lasted for two days before we ended up forlornly licking the empty container :)( Read more... )

About to head out on vacation for a week or so, requiring a purge of perishable food. One item was an entire package of lavash flatbreads from Trader Joe's that had been sitting around for several days but hadn't even opened yet. By experience, TJ's preservative-free baked goods are fiendishly vulnerable to molding within a very short time; these were still okay, but there wasn't much chance I'd eat them all before we leave. So I made them into snack chips.( Read more... )

I have a vague memory of reading that during the first century or two of tea's introduction to the West, it wasn't unknown for people to take steeped-out tea leaves and eat them like any other boiled vegetable, seasoned with salt and butter. (Apparently fresh tea leaves were sometimes consumed as a vegetable back in China, so the categorization wasn't completely without precedent.)

This morning, I decided to make some green-tea concentrate; I couldn't get the pantry to cough up the spices I'd had in mind for green tea chai, so limited the extra flavor agents to a few lightly pestled pods of black cardamom and rather a lot of rose-flavored raisins which I hadn't been able to think of much else to do with. Afterward, I had a strainer full of the usual dead tea leaves and less usual bloated raisins, and remembered the above anecdote. Hmmm, I thought. I may not want to eat tea leaves straight, but at the least they've got to have some useful digestive fiber.( Read more... )