August 30, 2017

Empanadas

My level of preparedness here is shockingly out of character
Mankind has, throughout its storied history of expelling gasses with varied effects on the immediate environment, struggled with one all-important goal. Delicious food that you can carry with you and eat on the go without getting your hands full of crap. Many different solutions to this eternal search have been tried. Burgers are too messy. Burritos had promise, but towards the end they can be even worse than burgers. Moms across the world put in a bid for fresh fruit, but most fruit leaves you carrying some form of garbage with you afterwards until you can find the nearest trash can (a problem made even more severe by the fact that throughout most of human history the trash can hadn't been invented yet). Fortunately, the great minds of a generation got together and decided it was a good idea to just stuff delicious meats and vegetables and whatnot inside some flaky pie dough and call it a day. It's in their crumb-littered footsteps that we follow.

Ingredients:

3 Cups All-Purpose Flour
6 oz. Vegetable Shortening
1 Egg
Roughly 1/3 a Cup of Water
1 lb. Ground Beef
1 Green Pepper
1 Red Pepper
1 standard-issue Onion
4 oz. Crimini Mushrooms
4 Cloves Garlic
1 Cup Vegetable Stock (Sure, you could use store-bought stock that tastes like nothing. Or you can make an entire pot of vegetable stock even though you only need a cup of it, and freeze the rest. You know, like a winner)
1 TBSP Balsamic Vinegar
1 TBSP Ground Cumin
2 tsp Dried Oregano
1.5 tsp Smoked Paprika
1/4 tsp Cayenne Pepper
Vegetable Oil
Salt

Yes, that's a lot of ingredients. I know that I usually try and make recipes without long and daunting lists of things you need to buy and/or prepare, and that the sight of this may be a bit of a shock to some of you. I can offer you this solemn advice, given to me by my grade school administrator in the aftermath of the debacle that ensued when a teacher tried to physically restrain me from getting an inhaler when I was having an asthma attack in class:

Get over it

And sure, from the mouth of that administrator it may have been criminally negligent, but here it's pretty appropriate. You're making two things, a dough and a filling. It's not like I'm asking you to make a dipping sauce, a side salad, and a vegetable puree to go with it. Now that I've sufficiently asserted my dominance, let's get started. Use a whisk or a fork to mix your flour and a large human's pinch of salt. Add in your vegetable shortening and mix it together with your hands, kind of squishing it as you go, until all the flour is incorporated, and everything is crumbly bits. Kind of like food sand. Mix in your egg and then stir in water slowly until a loose dough forms. Cover your dough with plastic wrap, and throw it in the fridge for 1/2 an hour. After 15 minutes it's traditional to suddenly remember that you forgot to add in an egg and then frantically grab the dough out of the fridge and add it in, hoping that it won't make too much of a difference. But that part is optional.

Told you. Whole damn pot of vegetable stock.
While your dough is relaxing in its chilled isolation chamber, start working on your filling. Start by chopping your onion, peppers, mushrooms, and garlic into tiny little bits. Remember, this is all going inside a handheld pastry, so you don't exactly want giant bits of anything making it hard to eat. Get a pan good and hot, then coat it in oil and throw in your ground beef (Being more Jewish than most people in the world, I use kosher meat, which already has a fair amount of salt in it. If you don't, because you're...you know...normal, add in a pinch of salt).  Brown it as best as you can, and remove it from the pan, preferably with a spoon or other hand-tool, but if need be with your bare hands. You know, like a man. Then add in your onions along with a pinch of salt. Cook the onions until they just start to get some color and then add in your mushrooms, peppers, and garlic, along with another pinch of salt. Cook everything down until the peppers start to soften and the mushrooms shrink down to the point that you wonder if you forgot to add them in the first place, but you check your fridge and there are definitely no mushrooms there so you start to wonder if the entire memory of buying mushrooms was a false memory your brain provided to cover up some trauma. Then add in your vegetable stock, vinegar, cumin, oregano, paprika and cayenne, stir that mess together, making sure to scrape up any brown crusty bits from the bottom of the pan to join the party, and keep cooking it until your meat mixture is nice and saucy, but when you take out a spoonful no liquid runs in to fill the gap. Turn off your fire, and let that whole mixture cool down to room temperature.

The hardest part of this recipe was not eating these long
enough to get a decent picture. 
 Now it's time for the fun part, and by "fun" I mean "mind-shatteringly frustrating." Roll out your dough until it's about 1/8 of an inch thick. It should be thin and easy to work with, but still sturdy. Cut out rounds using a cookie cutter, a drinking glass, or the perfectly round hole in your soul, and start stuffing them with your meat mixture. Add in too little and you'll end up just eating dough, but add into much and they'll break and explode everywhere, and all of your friends will laugh at you. Have fun! Basically, you want to dollop some of your mix into your dough disc, and then bend one end over to form a kind of dumpling with a meat pocket inside. Press down along the edge with a fork to seal it (Fun fact: pressing on it with a fork is also how the US government seals many things, most notably foreign trade agreement), and repeat until you run out of dough, run out of innards, or give up in a cloud of rage and inadequacy. In any case, grease a baking pan and throw your empanadas into a 350 degree oven for about 30 minutes, or until they start getting golden brown and look incredible. Then just wait for them to cool, give up, eat them, and burn your mouth. Totally worth it.



August 25, 2017

Dark And Stormy

Southern Illinois: where you learn that the sun was really
just the dark lord Sauron after all. 
I'm not an expert in irony, but when a fairly rare celestial event comes knocking on your door and invites you to get excited about it, only to have it be cloudy and rainy, well it's clear that we're being messed with. Not me, mind you. I was in southern Illinois for the total eclipse, and the sky was clear. It was awesome. But it seems statistically likely that you experienced nature trolling you. So your desire to drink your troubles away is understandable. And, if you're gonna drink until you can't feel feelings anymore, you may as well drink something good, and preferably a punny reference to all of the disappointment you experienced because you probably couldn't see the ridiculously cool thing that I totally saw, or at least couldn't get a very good view of it.

Ingredients:

Dark Rum (According to the people at Gosling's Rum, Gosling's is the only acceptable rum to make an authentic Dark 'n' Stormy. They seem objective.)
Ginger Beer
Limes
Ice

So, as you probably already know if you're from Bermuda, know literally anybody from Bermuda, or know any hipster snobs who only drink things out of mason jars, the Dark 'n' Stormy is kind of the national drink of Bermuda. Go figure. Lots of people claim it was invented there, but none of that has much to do with how to make it, so who really cares (historians, probably)? The first thing you're gonna need to do is learn the fine differences between ginger beer and ginger ale. Because one is a spicy, occasionally alcoholic, drink with a light and complex flavor. The other is a sweet fizzy drink with a hint of ginger flavor. Which is fine, but they aren't the same thing. Once you've learned about the fine distinctions between things, take your ginger beer and pour it over ice, preferably into a glass of some sort, until it's about 3/4 of the way filled. Then gently top it off with your dark rum. Add in a squeeze of lime juice, and garnish it with a lime if you're feeling fancy (I, apparently, was feeling fancy. A fact which flies in the face of my carefully crafted reputation as basically a hobo), and you're done! You should have a glass of dark liquid kind of swirling majestically on top of a sea of lightness and carbonation that it's slowly devouring. Which looks awesome, but if you drink it will just taste like one ingredient and then the other. So mix that sucker up if you know what's good for you.
So this, my 4th attempt, was more "dark" than "stormy."
But in my defense...sue me.

You can adjust the amounts of everything here to your personal taste, but I like it with this distribution (that's 3/4 ginger beer, 1/4 dark rum, and a squeeze of lime juice, for the slow class). The spiciness and crispness of the ginger beer lightens up the kind of burnt molasses flavors in the dark rum, and the lime juice kind of brings it all together. It tastes vaguely tropical, and kind of pirate-ey. Which technically isn't a word, but it's a pretty accurate description of the emotional response to drinking these, and I've already had a couple of them so it's a word now. Make sure to tune in next week, when I continue to make the written and spoken word my unwitting servant.



August 15, 2017

S'mores Cookies

I think my favorite part about this picture is the pierogi stand
towards the back, because it seems so out of place.
It's kind of funny. Last week I worked so much that I didn't have time to post. A non-stop stream of 12-hour shifts, it seemed. This week, I'm working even more because apparently my current employers don't understand the concept of a regular schedule, but that's besides the point. The point is that, despite being overworked to the point of exhaustion/thoughts of sweet sweet vengeance, I managed to make it to a county fair last week. It's one of those things I've always heard about and seen on TV, but never actually experienced myself. And it was pretty awesome. People playing the stupidest games of "chance"you can imagine, rickety rides that were clearly put together wrong by the carnies running them, and food stands selling the most ridiculous foods you can imagine. Deep fried everything, random bits-'o-beef, and even one place that just called themselves "hot Wisconsin cheese," which sounds wrong on at least 3 levels. So I got to thinking about random foods you could make in weird ways. And since s'mores are never far from my mind during the summer (Or winter, or fall. Don't ask about spring.), I got to thinking about how to combine all of that s'morey goodness into something easy the snack on that doesn't require you to have a campfire immediately available. I also got to thinking that I'm avoiding the state of Wisconsin for a while.

Ingredients:

2 sleeves Graham Crackers
1 cup Powdered Sugar
1 cup Chocolate Chips
1.25 sticks Butter
2 Eggs
1 tsp Vanilla
1 largish human's pinch of Salt 
Mini Marshmallows

The first thing you're gonna need to do is stop drooling. Because let's face it: even the concept of S'mores Cookies is enough to set off a pavlovian reaction in any creature with taste buds and the capacity for memory. Once you've got your various excretions under control, unceremoniously shove your graham crackers into a ziploc bag and crush the life out of them with a rolling pin, frying pan, or series of well placed karate chops. Now take a large bowl and throw your butter, which should be room temperature, into it along with your powdered sugar. Realize that you forgot to let your butter warm up, and wait the approximately 3 days that it takes for it to do that. Then beat it together with your sugar until it forms a cohesive paste that already kind of smells awesome. Then take the remains of your Graham Crackers and mix them in. Once the mix gets cohesive, and kind of sludgy, mix in your eggs one at a time, and then your salt and vanilla. Once the whole thing comes together, gently stir in your chocolate chips, and then scoop the cookies out on to a baking sheet (about a teaspoon of cookie dough for each cookie, and leave room because these suckers will totally expand outward trying to escape the terrible heat of the oven you shove them into. Isn't baking fun?)

Not pictured: me writhing on the floor at the taste explosion
going on in my mouth after eating these.
Now comes the fun part, and by "fun" I mean "the heavy burden of decision-making." So I tried these suckers a couple different ways. I tried stirring the marshmallows into the batter, which didn't even kind of work well. Then I tried partially baking the cookies and then shoving marshmallows on top for the second half. And finally I tried completely baking them, then adding marshmallows on top and shoving that whole mess under a broiler for like 30 seconds. The last two ways both worked pretty well. I'd recommend either really, although I think I slightly preferred the half-baked, marshmallowed, and then rest-of-the-way-baked version. In any case, the cookies bake in a 375 degree oven for about 10 minutes. So make them however you choose. Or follow my advice and make them the way I said I prefer. You know, because you ostensibly came here for advice on how to make these things in the first place. Or you came here by mistake thanks to my deceptive advertising. Either way, you're welcome.


August 4, 2017

No-Bake Mint Cheesecake

Mint leaves: making nature kind of worth the hassle
For a long time, I considered no-bake cheesecakes to be in the same classification of hipster-nonsense as waxed moustaches, drinking gin out of mason jars, and judging others for not living a "sustainable" lifestyle while you yourself are living off of a trust-fund. Not much has changed. All right, maybe it's changed a little bit. It takes forever to set up in the fridge. That's a lot of free time. Which can totally be used by unemployed hipsters practicing their ukelele solos for the open mic next week, but can also be used by people who have actual jobs, and not that much free time. Given the right preparation, this can totally be the dessert version of a crockpot dinner. Just get it going in the morning, and enjoy it when you get home at night. I, for one, am totally in favor of taking the hipster nonsense and using it against them like that. Now I just need to find a productive use for kale.

Ingredients:

16 oz. Cream Cheese, softened (You "soften" cream cheese by letting it get to room temperature. You do this so that your cheesecake doesn't have gross lumps running through it, causing your friends and family to rightly shun you at all social gatherings)
14 oz. can Sweetened Condensed Milk
2 pouches Graham Crackers 
1 cup Mint Leaves
1 cup Sour Cream
1/2 cup Unpacked Light Brown Sugar (Typically, brown sugar is measured in one of two ways. "Packed," meaning you measured it out and then smashed it down to take up less space for no discernible reason, and "unpacked," meaning you decided that just measuring it out once like a normal person was all you had time for today)
1.3333333333 sticks Butter
The juice from 1/2 a lemon
Free time

The first thing you're gonna need to do is get rid of that uneasy feeling you have in the back of your brain about making a no-bake cheesecake. I get it. Theres something vaguely unsettling about a cooked food that you don't actually...well, cook. But fear does not exist in this dojo, so get over it. Now that your existential worries have been quenched under a torrent of repression and cautious optimism, take out those uncomfortable feelings on your graham crackers by crushing them in to tiny bits as a warning to the other ingredients. Mix in your brown sugar, and then get to melting your butter. Add your melted butter in with your sugar and the crushed bodies of your graham crackers, and stir it all together. Take about 2/3 of your mixture and dump it into a springform pan (A springform pan is essentially a pan with a clasp that you can release to loosen the sides and take it off. If you don't have one, you can use a pie tin and things will still be mostly ok. But your parents may not love you anymore. I don't make the rules, I just dispassionately inform you about them). Pack down your graham cracker sugar sand into a firm layer along the bottom, and throw that sucker in the fridge while you work on your cheesecake guts.

Bonus points for failing to slice all the way through the crust,
making it impossible to the see the bottom crust deliciousness
So this next part is gonna be complicated. You ready? Ok. Take the rest of your ingredients and...mix them together. Sure, you've gotta choppity chop your mint first, and if you want to make your life easier you'll start this whole mess by mixing the sweetened condensed milk slowly into the cream cheese before adding everything else in. But that's really it. Just mix it all together. Then take your crust out of the fridge, slap that mess on top of it, and top it off with the rest of your graham cracker mix. Then throw that sucker in the fridge for...a long time. I mean a long time. At a conservative estimate, I'd say 2 presidential administrations. You will check on it multiple times, and each time be shocked that it's not ready yet. I just warned you about it, but you will still do this. Eventually it'll set up, and it'll be solid enough to cut pieces of and eat pretty much like a real cheesecake. And it kind of is a real cheesecake. Or, at the very least, an extremely thick milkshake. Enjoy!