Mishalak

I made six cookies tonight. The last time I made pecan sandies the cookies came out weird shapes and ran together. A cookie does not have to be perfectly round to be good, but I did want to see if I could make a prettier cookie. Also ones that baked very evenly. I did manage to do both of those at the expense of taking far too much time in the getting the cookies onto the baking tray. I was able to make them round using a cookie cutter as a guide and packing the dough into shape. Then giving them a bit of a touch up after easing them out. Far too much work, really.

I could put up with uneven or misshapen cookies if they were really easy to slice and bake, but they're a bit of a pain due to my too warm kitchen or some other error that makes the dough as soft as whipped cream. Perhaps I ought to scoop it into a bag and then pipe it into shape. Or maybe some sort of guide for making even slices would be the ticket.

NOPE. I've lost track of experiment numbers because I was lazy about keeping up my experimentation journal. But food experiment no. something or other is a failure. Kentucky Coffee is as uncoffee like as the people who mocked it said. I am very unlikely to keep trying because I wanted a totally caffeine free drink that was warm, dark, and flavorful and mixes well with milk. The Kentucky coffee tree's roasted beans produces a dark drink that is somewhat vegital (that is so a word), mildly flavorful, and coagulates milk.

My procedure was to roast the washed and cleaned beans at 150C for two hours in cast iron skillets. Left over night to cool they are quite darkly colored and at twice the weight per unit of measure of water as coffee grounds it produces a beverage that could be mistaken for coffee visually. The flavor is not actually terrible, but it has a flavor like well cooked baked beans in with the roasted flavor. This might be overcome with the right procedure in roasting or something, but I'm not going to continue the experiments because when I added milk it went "funny". Since I have often been accused of liking coffee flavored milk this is a fatal flaw in this as a coffee substitute.

USDA plant guide Kentucky coffee tree

I have just just started testing Experiment 241. I had allowed the yellow summer squash in my garden to get too old to simply stir-fry and eat so I conceived that I would try making a soup out of two of them.

500 g (1 pound-ish) of onions
vegetable oil
1 tablespoon butter
2 over the hill yellow summer squash
2 tablespoons more of butter, oil, or lard
3 cloves of garlic
1 liter (4 cups) vegetable broth

First I started as nearly every soup should start: by frying onions. I cut up the equivalent of about four medium onions into nice strips and put them into my cast iron dutch oven greased and then a tablespoon of butter scattered over them. Then into a 200°C (400°F) oven with the lid on. 20 minutes later I stirred the onion and cracked the lid. Repeated stirring every 20 minutes for another hour until a nice fond was starting to develop. Then onto a medium-medium high burner to finish making it the brown of a beer bottle in sunlight. Removed the onion after deglazing with a little left over mead and yeast left at the bottom of a bottle.

While the onion was still cooking in the oven I peeled off the hard skin and then I cut each fruit in half. A nice sharp spoon (I keep one sharpened for just this sort of thing) made short work of seeding each one and I reserved the seeds later experimentation. Then I chopped the thin bit of flesh into 2 cm squares (not terribly precisely). Once the pot was free I put in about a tablespoon of oil and browned one of the squashes in it without crowding the bottom of the dutch oven. Deglazed with water and then repeated with the second half, throwing the minced garlic in for the last 30 seconds. Then everything including the broth went in my blender. Blended on high until smooth. It tastes pretty good already, but it needs spices of some sort... Thyme? Cumin? Parsley?

Today I took my usual two-thirds cup (2/3) of thick rolled oatmeal (From Vitamin Cottage, they are a great bargain if you live in Denver, and no they did pay me to say that.) and I put it in a small cast iron pan over a medium flame without any water. I did not stir quite fast enough or else the pan I selected was too small so there was a bit more browning than I planned upon. None the less, when I put it in the usual quart bowl and microwaved it with one cup (1) of water the result was very nice. Two-minutes and forty-four seconds (2:44) of cooking and then another thirty seconds (0:30) somewhat later when it looked a little undercooked and it was wonderful. It had a flavor that I associate with baked bread or the smell of my mash when I am making beer. I think I should do this again with more careful experimentation.

Six carrots sauteed in goose fat with a clove of garlic is heavenly when paired with a wheat beer. This was also the maiden voyage of my new cast iron skillet and it works wonderfully on high heat. It was ever so slightly crowded in the pan, but it still browned fairly well and only needed the smallest dash of salt to be a perfect after work dish along with some pistachios and a square of chocolate.

Also I now record my quick and dirty salad dressing of three spoonfuls of mayonnaise with half or less of horseradish, about one of mustard, a little honey, a few dashes of Worcestershire Sauce, and some poppy seed is pretty darn good. I ate it some days ago, but my memory is still accurate.

I believe in good food and I think I shall take salad as a large portion of my food for the trip down to Albuquerque.

Okay, this was actually just one fish, but the wonderful incorrectness of 'fishes' just begged me to use it.

1 medium onion, diced
1 apple, diced
1/2 tablespoon honey
1/2 teaspoon dried spearmint (approximate)
Salt
1 very clean and scaled fresh trout
Olive Oil
Vegetable Oil
Flour

First fry the onion in the olive oil until nicely browned. Then combine with the diced apple, the honey, crushed spearmint, and salt to taste. Take your perfectly scaled trout and dry it. Then give a nice liberal coating of flour to its skin and stuff it with your apple and everything else mixture. You'll have a lot left over, don't worry you'll put it over the trout later. Have your skillet heating up with a good layer of vegetable oil over a nice medium high heat. Put in the tout and cook until nicely brown and crispy on both sides. Starting from the tail separate one side from the other and serve immediately with the rest of the mixture on top. Serves 2 or one very hungry person. I like this experiment and think it is well on its way to being a full fledged recipe.
 

One Pyrex (or other borosilicate glass) Loaf Pan
One pound very good quality Wild Salmon.
Olive Oil
2 Cloves of Garlic
1/2 to 1 Tablespoon of Butter
1 Tablespoon of Marmalade
2 Teaspoons of Honey

I scaled the fish and then put it in the loaf pan while heating the oven to 350 degrees. I put a little olive oil on the fish and then proceeded to mince the garlic very finely and mix it up with the butter, marmalade, and honey. I had trouble getting the butter to combine with the other ingredients so I heated everything up in the microwave for ten seconds before pouring it over the thickest part of the salmon fillet. It cooked for between 15 and 20 minutes and was perfect.

It was a very, very good fish as it was one of the Alaskan Cooper River salmon run and pretty fresh. Delicious. I've already adjusted the amounts as needed from what I prepared given that I felt it had too much butter and garlic, but only a little too much. I served it with stir fry vegetables from Costco done in my nonstick pan with olive oil and a little toasted sesame seed oil. V. good.
 

Experiment #229: Ongoing

Every morning is a new opportunity for experimentation. I am slowly closing in on the best method of cooking oatmeal in a microwave. Particularly the thicker oatmeal that I prefer. The ultimate goal is easy steel cut oats with lots of texture done easily for breakfast. I am not bothering with instructions from the packager (oats cannot be said to be manufactured) as they are useless. Right now I'm tending towards using much less water than recommended as it seems genuinely unnecessary in a microwave. Though a ratio of 2-1 or even 3-1 is traditional for cooking grains on a stove top my results have been perfectly tender using as little as 1½-1 water to oatmeal in the microwave. Less chance of boil over and less time as well.

The experiment, to see if I could combine two flavors which I am lovink into a cookie: olive oil and honey. Initial results were soft and fluffy, but not sweet enough. So I increased the amount of honey slightly. The results are good, but not yet perfect.

¼ Cup Olive Oil
⅓ Cup Honey, scant. (halfway betwen the ⅓ and the ¼ mark)
½ Cup and 1 Tablespoon Unbleached White Flour plus
⅛ teaspoon baking soda.

Bake 20 minutes in a glass pan at 175°C (350°F). This produces a fairly flat cookie like a snikerdoodle. My next attempt will be using a tablespoon more flour to see if it firms the cookie up without making it too floury. If too floury I shall increase the amount of honey to a full ⅓ cup as it clearly has enough oil from the way the dough leaks. Experiment results so far have been tasty, though not perfect.

I have added 250 ml of plain white sugar to my very red half liter of vodka from which I removed the half pound of chopped up cranberries. Very tasty and still tart enough.

My new experiment that I plan on running for a few weeks is a small one. 150 ml of toasted buckwheat soaking in an equal amount of vodka. I think it will give a nice toasty rich flavor that I plan on complementing with just a touch of honey. We'll see if it is any good in, say, two weeks.