Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Food
Farsumauro (meat-stuffed meat. It’s meatylicious!)
The concept is so simple: use a thin sheet of meat to wrap a filling of one sort or another. Brown, braise, and serve.
I adapted this from a recipe I found in the last Italian cookbook you’ll ever need, Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. Like all the recipes I’ve tried from this book, farsumauro rocks.
Don’t miss the contest (next post down). After you enter the contest, meet me below the fold for some meat-stuffed meat.
Kate has a contest
I expended my evening’s creativity on those 400 words, so if you want something to read, you know where to find it. And you’ll see lots of our friends among the entries — Sam, Dean, microsoar, and a few folks I haven’t met.
Live blogging tonight, but I’m not sure when. Depends on the leg o’ lamb. And oy, I’m tired; I think I’ve been cooking and cleaning continuously since noon. Aside from the lamb, I made some kind of eggplant dip, dough for a focaccia, tiramisu, and a pumpkin sweet potato pie. Oh, and I made breakfast for the fam, too.
Check in around 8 PM PST . . . hopefully I’ll be here.
D.
Tiramisu
Who cares if it’s the quintessential 1990s dessert. (What will be the quintessential dessert of the new millennium, I wonder?) It’s still one of the most die-and-go-to-heaven treats there is, and, more to the point, I’ve never blogged the recipe.
I thought about adapting the recent Cook’s Illustrated version, but they skip the zabaglione step and use raw egg yolks. RAW EGG YOLKS! What am I, Rocky? (Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky, not Bullwinkle’s.) So I went back to a more traditional, and admittedly more labor intensive recipe.
Below the cut: Tiramisu, the Photo Blog.
Ferrets ‘n cookies
We bought a new ferret today. Bought him used*, so he wasn’t quite as expensive as Zappa. Zappa is the darker one in the background; the new boy is in the foreground. He’s creamy white with faint dark markings down his back and tail — an inverse skunk.
Any suggestions for names? I like “Ghost,” but I’m in the minority here. Can’t think of what might work well with “Zappa.” “Hendrix,” perhaps? How about a name-that-ferret contest?
Oh, and I made chocolate chip cookies today!
I wanted to use the Tollhouse recipe, but in searching for it, I found this site, which claims to improve on Tollhouse. Suggestions I followed: I used melted butter instead of softened butter, 1 tablespoon of vanilla instead of 1 teaspoon, and 1/2 cup of oats instead of 1 cup of nuts. The melted butter made for an easier cookie dough (no sore arm from stirring), the vanilla improved the flavor slightly, and the oats were a BIG improvement over the generic Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookie. I like the flavor of oatmeal cookies, though, and Jake objects to nuts in his cookies, so the success of the oatmeal addition doesn’t surprise me.
Hmm. Maybe I need to run a “fatten up my family” contest — we can get readers to post their favorite fattening recipes. God knows I need to fatten up my family.
Don’t forget — live blogging tonight. Soon. My pork roast has to get up to temperature.
D.
*His previous owner took him back to the store; she was allergic to him. He’s six months old and as sweet as can be. I thought Zappa was good-natured, but this fellow is even better.
PS: Here’s something different. Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy . . . backwards.
This cracks me the hell up. And where is everyone tonight? You have to save me from myself.
Challah!
Enter my Challah baloo contest (scroll down a bit, you’ll find it) and you, too might win Baking with Julia, the best baking book ever written. As an example of its awesomeness, I’m going to give you Julia’s challah recipe.
Julia calls challah “Eastern European brioche.” Egg bread, in other words. Few breads have a richer taste, save perhaps a good pumpernickel. Challah isn’t great sandwich bread — it’s a bit too sweet for that — but it’s unsurpassed for bread-and-jam, French toast, bread pudding, or dessert panini. (For my dessert panini recipe, see the comment thread for the contest.) It’s also my bread of choice for just plain eating, no adornments, although I wouldn’t sneeze at a shmear of butter.
In addition to the ingredients below, you’ll need parchment paper, a pizza peel (or a cookie sheet without a raised edge), a food-safe paint brush, an instant read thermometer, and lots of loved ones to share with. This recipe makes TWO big loafs.
Challah baloo: a contest
I wish I could show this to you in Smell-O-Vision.
Nothing smells as wholesome and welcoming as freshly baked egg bread. I use the recipe from Julia Child’s Baking With Julia, which is about as idiot-proof a bread recipe as there is. Julia’s bagel recipe also provides reliably delicious bagels. I keep kicking myself that these are the only two recipes I’ve tried from Baking With Julia; no doubt many of the others excel. I’d like to make the pumpernickel loaf, for example, except I don’t know where to find prune butter.
So here’s the contest:
1. Between now and next Sunday (September 30, at midnight), blog about baked goods and include at least one recipe.
2. In your blog, pimp this contest with a link-back.
3. Let me know in the comments to this post when you have posted. I’ll provide a link-back to your post, too, much as we do for the Thirteens.
4. If you don’t have a blog, write up a post anyway and send it to me. I’ll post it to Balls and Walnuts — and give you credit, of course. This will count as your entry.
5. The prize: need you ask? On Monday, October 1st, I will randomly choose one lucky winner to receive a copy of Baking With Julia. (If you already own it, let me know, and I’ll send you another cookbook of similar value.) You’ll need to provide me with your snail mail address when the time comes.
Per Lyvvie’s question:
6. Yes, multiple recipes/pimpages (on separate days) = multiple entries.
Any questions?
Lyvvie’s Upside Down Apple Pie Cake
microsoar: How Not to Bake Bread
sxKitten’s twofer: Toffee, Pecan, and Mango Crisp; Gingerbread
Tam makes Whatever Crisp
Jess’s Chocolate Cake
D.
Yum
That last post was too much of a downer, or too self-indulgent, or too something. No way I’m leaving it at the top of the blog.
These are amazing.
On that website, those soft drinks look great, too, but I can’t see paying $16 for a $9 product. I think I’ll whine at my local supermarkets first.
D.
Brain fry
Serendipity in the blogosphere:
Trying to find an image for “tacos cerebros,” I found The Steam Monkey, a Spanish/English blog — mostly Spanish — filled with provocative images (why, there’s one right now!) Not safe for work. Not safe for most of my readers, for that matter. But still . . . Steam Monkey’s July 24th post on obscenity is the most powerful and effective thing I’ve read on the thesis that war is the true pornography — and he proves his point primarily through images. NOT for the faint of heart, people. I’ve seen some horrible things in my career, but Steam Monkey’s second war casualty took my breath away.
And you know, it was all a mistake, too, because “brain tacos” would be “tacos sesos,” not “tacos cerebros,” I think. But there you have it. I search for the wrong thing and find a blogger with some wild sensibilities. I wish my Spanish were better!
Anyway, back to brain fry.
Subtitle: Why You’re Not Reading a Thursday Thirteen Right Now.
It’s work, of course, like always. But rather than wallow in self pity, I thought it would be more fun to search the web for actual brain fry recipes. Mostly, these are pasta & red sauce cunningly designed to look like brains. Boring! But here’s one for calves’ brains that’s the real thing:
Soak brains in cold water for 2 hours. Remove thin outer skin. Soak again in cold water for 3 hours.
Place brains in large saucepan. Cover with cold water. Add salt, onion studded with a clove, bay leaf, thyme, and peppercorns. Bring to boil. Cover and simmer for 20 minutes. Keep brains in cooking liquid until ready to use in recipe. Then remove brains and drain them.
Okay, so that’s a brain boil, not a brain fry; but the same website has a recipe for Beef Brain Curry (Indonesian: Gulai Otak) and Beef Brain Sauteed in Spiced Sauce – (Semur Otak). Those count.
I’ll bet even The Sneeze’s famous Steve wouldn’t eat this stuff.
Anyway.
I had a Thirteen planned for today. I even wrote the first three items this morning. And then work happened.
But now I have a four-day weekend, and there’s always the Friday Fourteen.
***
Even if I’m not doing a TT, Darla’s courtship post deserves a shout. Go. Read.
D.
Rude fruit
Don’t make me explain this.
Live Blogging starts sometime between 7 and 8 PM PST tonight. See ya soon!
D.
Lemon squares
I misread my friend’s recipe and added two TABLEspoons of lemon zest — doh! And while Jake declared they were too lemony, Karen and I thought they were perfect.
I need to take a class in digital photography.
Essentially, this is lemon curd baked over a shortbread crust. They kick ass over the store-bought lemon square mixes, so don’t even go there.
1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/4 cup powdered sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons grated lemon peel
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
Heat oven to 350 degrees. Mix flour, butter, baking powder, and powdered sugar. (I processed these ingredients in the food processor. Easy.) Press in ungreased square pan, 8x8x2 or 9x9x2 inches, building up 1/2 inch edges. Bake 20 minutes. Beat remaining ingredients about 3 minutes or until light and fluffy. Pour over hot crust.
Bake about 25 minutes or until no indentation remains when touched lightly in center; cool. Sprinkle with powdered sugar if desired. Cut into 1 1/2 inch squares.
Makes 25 squares, 90 calories per square.
I baked mine for 30 minutes, and I suspect I could have baked it a few minutes longer.
I should mention that I’m not sure where she got this recipe — off the web somewhere, no doubt. She went searching for a recipe reminiscent of the one she used back in high school, and this is what she came up with. In my opinion, yes, these are the real deal, just like I remember.
I’m feeling better today, thanks to an unbroken eight hours of sleep. I’ll try to show up this evening around 7 to 8 for live-blogging. See ya soon!
D.