Geek Soup

Comments are now all unscreened by default! I realized it was curtailing the conversation a little, especially since I keep...forgetting...to unscreen. *facepalms*

Thank you for your patience!

Back when we were more broke than we are these days (not to say we aren't still broke to some degree, and isn't everyone?), my job was to research the ultra-cheap. Alas, that's not always the ultra-convenient, though your mileage may vary when it comes to that. It was a self-given profession. I had the internet, I had kids, and I had a duty to keep myself from packing the diaper bag whenever I could avoid it. I made mayonnaise from scratch one time just to avoid packing both kids and the bag into the car to drive a mile to the grocery store. I made tortillas for the same reason. That, kids, was a disaster. But let me tell you, I learned a lot in those years about creating things I couldn't have before. Hell, I learned how to make paper out of dryer lint.

That was probably the line.

But since I've lost my own original links to those pages, those recipes, I am going to present to you, wholesale, this great web page dedicated to homemade cake mix and variations. The mix makes several cakes, and that's what I'd shoot for. If you have to pull ingredients out every time, then just make cake from scratch right? So here you go:

Cake mix and variations.

This is so good. If you make your own gnocchi, you could probably incorporate some spinach into it. Otherwise...

For this one, a stick blender is nice.

1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp minced garlic (about 2-3 cloves)
1 cup milk
4 oz cream cheese, cubed
2 cups rinsed baby spinach
salt to taste
1/4-1/2 cup fresh-shredded parmesan cheese
1 pkg prepared gnocchi (12 oz to 1 lb)

Bring 4 qts salted water to a boil.

Saute the garlic in butter. Add the milk. Bring to a boil.

Stir in spinach. Mix in cream cheese. You will have lumps.

Allow to thicken and reduce. When it tastes the way you want it to, put the stick blender to it and get it creamy.

Boil gnocchi for about 4-5 min according to package directions.

Add parmesan to sauce.

Serve immediately. I defy you not to eat the whole mess while dunking your bread in the sauce.

Not quite a white pizza. Pictures to come later. This is a no-frills method for an AMAZING pizza.

( Green Pizza )

I say cheating because I'm supposed to be presenting you with my ideas. However, this is something I dug up because it's the best-looking of the bacon-maple-muffin variety. It has oatmeal in it, which will make it more substantial (and the oats maybe ameliorate some of the bacon? Maybe?) I will skinny this up later, have no fear. Right now I'm thinking good, honest-to-goodness uncured turkey bacon, maple sugar and whole wheat flour, maybe some whole, raw sugar as well. As it is, I think Rob's chef might say that it's everything that's wrong with American cuisine. We have no restraint. But damn, it tastes good.

Maple Bacon Oatmeal Muffins

I will share with you a conglomeration of the ways to make candied bacon. This one worked pretty well for me. I only had thin bacon on hand, though, so watch your cook time if that's the case. These came out black but still surprisingly tasty. You want them to be more of a coffee brown.

Now that I've said all that? Here we go. Get as much thick-sliced bacon as you want to use. Get a pan of brown sugar. Less is best to start with, so you don't contaminate a whole bag and only end up using half. I suppose you could use the brown sugar, though, to make the muffins? Anyway. You have to mash the bacon down into the sugar. Really cake it on there, then give it a light wiggle when you pull it out. Lay the bacon strips on a wire rack. Bake at 350 for about 20-30 minutes, less if it's thin-cut. They will still be floppy when you pull them out; it's okay. They turn into solid sticks of bacony goodness soon enough.

Let cool. If you eat this straight out of the oven, it's like licking a volcano. You WILL hurt yourself. There, that's your bacon safety PSA for the day. If desired, crumble when cool and sprinkle atop the uncooked batter with a little maple sugar before you bake your muffins.

You'll be seeing a lot of muffins out of me for a while. I'm experimenting. This particular one is a result of that: a gooey, cakey muffin that doesn't look or feel like any I've tried. It isn't even like a cupcake. Want to know the secret?

Tortilla mix.

That's right. In my husband's culinary endeavors, he has developed a need to keep cake flour on hand. Alas, cake flour is beastly expensive next to regular flour, and I just resent the extra packaging. Well, when he was shopping last night, he started checking the protein content per serving of tortilla flour against other flours (he'd read that tortillas have to be made with a super-low protein flour or you end up with rubber pucks).

He brought some home only to find that it was mezcla, not flour. It already had fat, salt, and leavening in it. When we really got to thinking about it, we decided there really couldn't be much wrong with that, right, with the exception of the added fat. The last muffins I made were a bit dense, a bit chewy, so I thought maybe this mix would ameliorate that chewiness without adding too many calories.

Um. Not so much on point number two, there.

This one is made up out of whole cloth. I mean, I have adapted tons of recipes, but never just made a baked good out of nowhere. This is an incredibly tender, surprisingly rich muffin. I'm stunned at how good these are. Good thing the recipe makes a super large batch...

( Double Chocolate Peanut Muffins )

Tastes just like fried:

Marinate chicken pieces in buttermilk overnight. Salt and pepper, then dredge in panko bread crumbs. Bake at about 400 until done, about 45 min depending on the size of the pieces.

This is HALF the calories of fried chicken. HALF. Even less if you use breast meat and pull the skins off, but for me the skins are love and unicorns wrapped in cotton candy.

I'm stepping outside the boundaries of Geek Soup again to post something I literally tripped on. It's so good, though, and it would make an excellent holiday-time dish.

It sounds a little odd, even to me; I think of butternut as being creamy and sweet, not complimentary to wine at all, and generally speaking, I don't like sweet with meat. But I bought a butternut squash, and it ended up so big that hubby conconcted a risotto with it in addition to the pork loin dish and finally smearing the other half of the squash with butter, brown sugar and Chinese five-spice powder.

( Here's the meat dish. )

So I've been planning burgers for a few days now. I had to wait until I felt better (I have an upper respiratory infection and was apparently on the beginnings of a sinus infection). Tonight, I felt pretty good, so I thought I'd do it.

Now, when we do burgers around here, we don't really do anything like a fast-food thing. If we're going to this thing, I do chuck, angus or, when we can afford it, bison. If you've never had bison and can swing it, DO IT. It's lovely. It tastes like hamburgers used to taste, mostly because it's primarily free-range and antibiotic- and growth hormone-free. Anyway. Bison good.

For the veggies in the house, there are portobello mushrooms.

The next rule about my burgers is I avoid regular buns for the most part. The plainest I've been known to use is a big wheat bun or a bollilo-style roll, though I prefer onion rolls or sourdough, or best of all, ciabatta. Yum, ciabatta.

Condiments for these burgers are as widely varied as there are people eating them. I've used horseradish, brown mustard, aioli, homemade barbecue sauce...it almost doesn't matter. You can grill the buns if you like (aioli makes a lovely spread if so, or garlic butter). A panini press would work if you want the inside toasty and the outside soft; you just put the buns with their backs to each other, buttered/spreaded side to the grill, and gently close the press without pushing down.

ETA: I left out greens! If you need salad on your burger, don't do iceberg lettuce. Please. Use butter lettuce, spinach, alfalfa/radish/broccoli sprouts, arugula, spring greens...anything but iceberg.

( One of our favorite things is caramelized onions. )

When you're done, you will have a thick, lovely substance you can practically spread. Goes gorgeously with a creamy, melty swiss cheese. Would mix well with sliced, sauteed mushrooms.

Nngh. Enjoy.

I got so caught up in the wakame that I forgot to talk about the black garlic! Its expense is due to the length of time and intense conditions under which it is fermented. I have seen different methods, but the prevailing one seems to be storing the garlic at between 120 and 140 degrees F for just over a month.

What happens is the cloves turn soft and chewy and very, very black. The skin has, by this point, turned more like parchment and less like paper and peels away easily. The cloves slice like butter and have a sweet, savory, only slightly garlicky taste. They're incredibly sticky (which is why I tossed them with the chive slices because otherwise you'd have a clump of garlic pieces rather than a sprinkling). I don't know who thought it would be a good idea to ferment something in heat and call it edible, but you know, as many times as it's been done, I don't know why I question anymore.