Not Baking

I haven't been posting, but I have been baking. Most recently I discovered the joy of Deb El Just Whites, and I've been making meringues like they've been going out of fashion. No separating! No egg yolks to use up! It's awesome.

Tonight, however, the egg whites are at home, and I am at college, so there are no meringues. There is, however, a very simple, delicious meal. Mushrooms, sautéed in butter, with sourdough toast and cheese. It's killer. If I had a camera, I'd take a picture and make you all drool.

Best of all, it is really ridiculously simple:

Take some mushrooms. I had button mushrooms, and since there was only one of me and I wanted a light meal, I sliced up three of them. I probably could have done four and it wouldn't have been too much.

If you, like me, have no toaster, go ahead and put a pan on the stove and throw a slice or two of bread in to toast while you clean and slice your mushrooms. Finish slicing and check the bread. If it's warm, throw a little butter in the pan and rub the slices around in the butter a bit on both sides. (You may add more butter during this operation. That is perfectly acceptable, and I won't tell if you don't.) Let the bread brown up a little bit on each side as it takes in the butter. Once it's done, put it to the side.

If you do have a toaster, ignore all that. Except please don't, because bread that's been cooked in butter like that is delicious. But if you must use a toaster, go ahead and feel virtuous for taking in that much less butter.

Ok, now that you've got your pan hot, throw in some more butter. Look at it. Throw in a little more. Don't be shy. Let it melt down and bubble a little--not enough to brown, just to get hot.

Throw in your mushrooms. Try to give them space. If you are me, with one tiny frying pan, you will fail. The Julia Child in your head will scold you for crowding the mushrooms. It's ok. Put a little more butter in, because some of those mushrooms still look lonely. Once that butter melts and you've stirred the mushrooms around in it, salt them well and leave them to sit and reduce.

Eat one of your slices of toast. It's ok, you're only going to have enough mushrooms for one anyway.

Once the mushrooms are reduced as much as you like (I like mine cooked until they're brown and a little crispy around the edges, but still meaty in the middle), pour them and any remaining butter and juices over the piece of toast you didn't eat. Perhaps grind a little pepper over the mushrooms. Slice off some cheese to eat on the side. I chose a local creamery's asiago.

Take a bite. Swear to keep mushrooms in the house all the time from now on.

Sugar Lust

Aaaaand we're back. Temporarily, at least.

I've spent the past few days going through food blogs (oh, so many food blogs), and it has rekindled my desire to get into the kitchen and mess around. Last semester I was ridiculously busy, and I had to give up Daring Bakers almost as soon as I started. My drawing class sucked up all my creative energy, even though it was loads of fun, and so I just never got into the kitchen that much. I made a few bean soups and a sort of spiced cheese and cornmeal cracker/griddle cake, and got back into the kitchen over winter break just long enough to make a batch of my Famous Perfect Fudge and a lovely cranberry orange cake.

That has to change. Partly, I want to take up baking more seriously again to control just what I eat. My father has a truly terrible habit of bringing home bags of M&Ms and miniature candy bars and all sorts of other temptingly bad goodies loaded up with high fructose corn syrup and who knows what else whenever he feels we're low on dessert in general and chocolate in particular. If I keep us stocked up on satisfying homemade desserts, I'm less likely to snack on Milky Ways all day long. I would much rather have one slice of pie or a few cookies than 15 mini candy bars. This week I made Oatmeal Pie from Pie Every Day. It's pretty good, but I feel like the oatmeal got too dry during the recommended hour of baking, rather than staying moist like I hoped it would. The lovely combination of molasses, egg, and spices that forms the syrup/custard/whatever-you-call-it is really delicious, though.

I also want to expand my horizons a bit--incorporating ingredients or techniques that I haven't used before, or improving things I've tried before that were only partially successful. For instance, last winter I made cream puffs. It was my first attempt at choux pastry, and I waited impatiently for a dry spell to take it on, as my recipe recommended. I had a few stumbles--we only had jumbo eggs in the house, while the recipe called for large, and despite my attempts to compensate the dough was still rather too wet to start with. Then, tiny weakling that I am, I didn't do the greatest job of stirring the dough over heat to dry it. My arm got tired well in advance of what probably would have been the best point to stop. Those things together meant that my puffs didn't puff as well as I might have liked, but about 2/3rds of them still puffed up enough to admit my lovely vanilla custard. (The custard, by the way, was absolutely gorgeous. I ate the extra with a spoon, and didn't regret a single calorie. Smooth and thick and rich and delicious.) The last thing that I'd do differently is my method of uniting pastry and custard. Last winter, I opted to puncture the bottom of the puffs and pipe the custard in through the hole. This time around I would probably go for the simpler expedient of cutting the puffs open and spooning the custard into them, partially for the sake of simplicity, partially so that the beautifully speckled custard could have a more prominent feature, and partially so that they don't have to be stored upside down to prevent leakage.

I'd love to give cream puffs another shot sometime soon, but it has been a pretty wet January, and I don't expect an improvement anytime soon. Also, I clearly need to spend some time at the gym before attempting to stir a the giant hunk of dough again. Instead, I'm taking a stab at the ridiculously delicious Derby Pie my mother made for Thanksgiving. Pecans, chocolate, booze, sugar. It's pretty much impossible to go wrong with that combination. I may even manage to charge my camera's battery and take a picture of it before it's totally gone.

May Challenge

The May Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Linda of make life sweeter! and Courtney of Coco Cooks. They chose Apple Strudel from the recipe book Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Cafés of Vienna, Budapest and Prague by Rick Rodgers.

Ok, so I was soooo nervous about this one- the idea of stretching that dough out in a kitchen with two very interested cats was not a fun one. Luckily the cats were obliging enough to sleep through the whole process. I'll be updating with pictures once I've had a chance to edit them (no process, unfortunately- turned out my camera battery was D-E-D dead when I started), but I just wanted to go ahead and post about how it went.

I only did a half recipe, since my mother baked a cake last night and there's only three of us to eat all these lovely sweets. The dough was a snap- I did it by hand, since we don't have a stand mixer, and it came together into a rough ball with just a little stirring. Stretching it was complicated a little by the fact that we don't have any tablecloths I was willing to rub flour into. In the end I used a large scrap of clean muslin out of the Scrap Box of Doom, which turned out to be just the right size for my counter and the amount of dough I had. I bypassed the apple filling and went with a simple cream cheese filling (8 oz of american neufchatel, 1/2 cup of sugar, and some vanilla bean), which turned out to be delish.

Unfortunately, I forgot to slash the top so that steam could escape (oops), so one end kind of… exploded a little, as you'll see when I get the pictures up. Still, the end product is very tasty, despite its cosmetic imperfections. Making strudel was so much less scary than I thought it would be- in fact, it was so easy that I expect I'll be making it again!

With the slashes this time ;).