Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Food
‘kay, this is pretty damned decadent
Wherein I improve upon the original.
STICKY. TOFFEE. PUDDING. (Only not.)
A word about how this differs from the original. The Udny Arms STP is a date muffin with a toffee topping. There’s nothing pudding-y about it, but again, I suspect this is a Brit thing, some deranged interpretation of the word “pudding.” It’s a cake. This version, if you do it as I did it, will yield a moist enough result that pudding is not an utter misnomer. If you want something more cake-like, then use diced dried apples instead of fresh apples, and follow the original recipe (but add the spices, too).
Adding pie spices (I used cinnamon, ginger, and clove; nutmeg or allspice would have been good, too) did great things for the flavor. The original? Might as well be angel food cake — no flavor at all, save for the dates.
. . . And off we go!
Pudding
1/2 cup butter, softened, plus an additional tablespoon of butter to saute your apples
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon powdered ginger
1/8 teaspoon ground clove
2 Granny Smith apples, diced into 3/4 to 1 inch chunks
1/3 cup golden raisins
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 cups water
Sauce . . . which I cut in half — yes, the original called for a full pint of whipping cream. And even this is too much.
1/2 cup butter
1 3/8 cups brown sugar
1 cup whipping cream
1. Peel and chop your apples, and then saute the apples and raisins together in a tablespoon of butter. I tried to brown the apples a bit, and I was consciously trying to drive off as much moisture as I could. As noted above, if you use dried apples, you’ll end up with a more cake-like pudding. Set aside the apples and allow to cool.
2. Cream together the sugars and the butter. Add the eggs and mix well.
3. Add baking powder to the flour and stir well. You can add your spices here if you like, or at the final step of making the batter.
4. Add one cup of flour, stir to combine. Then add one cup of water, stir to combine. Repeat. Finish with one cup of flour. (You’re alternating the flour additions and water additions, right? Standard stuff.)
5. Pour into a buttered 9 x 13 inch baking pan and bake at 350F (177C) for 45 minutes.
6. For the record, I again diverged from the Udny Arms recipe by letting my cake cool in the refrigerator overnight, then reheating it in a 225 degree F oven (107C). I’m not sure it makes a difference. In any case, while the cake is baking (or the next day, whatever) prepare your sauce. Combine butter, cream, and brown sugar, and bring to a boil.
7. Poke lots and lots of holes into your cake, then pour the sauce over the cake. You’ll only use about half the sauce. Now, one advantage of having cooled the cake overnight is that it shrunk a bit, pulling away from the pan. That allowed the sauce to penetrate all around the sides. Reserve whatever sauce you don’t use because if you are thoroughly committed to your heart attack, you’ll spoon some hot sauce onto your cake prior to topping it with a heap of whipped cream. But I’m jumping ahead. After putting a layer of sauce on the cake, I fussed with it for several minutes, because the sauce wanted to collect around the sides and I kept transferring it to the top with a spoon. But gravity eventually won.
8. BROIL this puppy until it’s all brown and bubbly.
9. Cut a square, top with whipped cream (unnecessary) and more sauce (really unnecessary).
Enjoy.
D.
Re sleep deprivation
I’ve gotten into this rut lately: work, eat, World of Warcraft, sleep. Repeat. My desire to write is nil, and whatever interests I have in that regard are satisfied by reading the latest Game of Thrones installment (1000+ pages is whipping by way too fast . . . and I’m sorry, but I had to skip ahead to find out what had become of Arya).
Ours is a family with a thoroughly messed up sleep cycle. My insomnia arrives whenever it will, often for no identifiable reason. By minimizing caffeine and chocolate consumption and trying to exercise regularly, I’ve improved things to the point that I am off Benadryl — finally! after years! — and am having less trouble, but less trouble does not equal no trouble. It doesn’t help when I get calls at 4 AM for things that I really, really did not need to be called about. My partner and I have the same problem, by the way: when we get these early morning calls, no matter how simple they are to resolve, it takes us an hour or two to get back to sleep. And neither of us is getting any younger, and it’s not like we did well with sleep deprivation back in training. We only told ourselves we were doing okay.
My wife doesn’t do too badly, compared to my son or me. Jake is the real hard case, though. And I think it goes way back to his toddlerhood, when we used to have trouble getting him to bed any time earlier than our bedtime (usually around midnight). I suspect he needs a completely inverted wake/sleep cycle, but that, sadly, is not compatible with attendance at high school. Or college. Perhaps he’ll get a medical degree and become a night-shift ER doc?
In other news, I’m futzing around with a variety of different desserts. I successfully reproduced a dessert we’d had at Black Cat in Cambria, which involved sauteed nectarines, homemade pound cake, and a browned butter sauce; and I made this recipe for Sticky Toffee Pudding, which is one of those British puddings that isn’t a pudding (oh, those clever Brits, when will they learn to speak English?) I’m going to try making it again, this time subbing sauteed apples for the dates and adding the usual apple spices. Ultimately, this ceases to be Sticky Toffee Pudding and becomes Apple Muffins with Sticky Toffee Pudding sauce, but I suspect my gang will like it better.
Less than two months before my 50th birthday. Maybe that’s what’s screwing with my muse.
D.
Guess what this is.
Your only clue is this image:
Is it a sea urchin? A tribble? Scrotum of the Red Howler Monkey?
Answer below the fold.
Coastal eating, one for two
I’ve mentioned Hoppe’s before (see #9), site of our Best Meal Ever. They’ve moved from Morro Bay to Cayucos, so on our first night on the coast we decided to stay in Cayucos and indulge in Hoppe’s. Well, they’re not Best Meal Ever territory anymore, I’m afraid. We think the son must have taken over from the father, since one of the menu listings (my main course last night, matter of fact) was “My Father’s Roast Duck.” And the son is not the father.
One of the things we liked about the old Hoppe’s was their consistency. Bread, appetizers, main courses, even the side vegetables were all spot-on excellent. The new Hoppe’s, not so much. Our appetizers (a cheese platter and raw scallops in a spicy sauce) were great, but the main courses . . . um. My roast duck was tasteless. Sort of a duck confit, inasmuch as it seemed like someone had simmered the duck in duck fat for a few days, but not tasty like a confit. Honestly, it didn’t even taste like duck. Karen had pheasant, and it was tasteless too. Even salt didn’t help. Jake had the only hit of the evening, a perfect bouillabaisse.
The dessert was kinda sorta interesting — a baumkuchen, which sounded a lot more interesting in its Wikipedia entry than it was to experience up close and personal.
You can’t go home again, or at least you cannot count on it. Kinda like my experience with La Pergola’s, a North Beach restaurant that had amazing scampi in 1982 or 1983, and just so-so scampi by the last 80s. Haven’t been back since.
So we were oh-for-one last night, and we went to Cass House tonight with some trepidation, since it’s more than a bit on the pricey side AND we had just been burned by Hoppe’s. But we needn’t have feared. Everything was perfect tonight (although the watermelon consomme “palate cleanser” wasn’t really to my taste), and I’d have to say I enjoyed tonight’s four-course price fixe than The French Laundry’s twelve-course lunch, which lacked only a vomitorium.
I’ll add some specifics on the meals, maybe in the comments. Time to relax into this food coma.
D.
I suppose there are worse things to worry about
Jake is a scant two years away from college, and if things proceed in typical fashion he’ll no doubt be at a school where “dorm living” (an oxymoron, that) is mandatory for the first year. “Dorm living” requires “dorm eating,” sad to day. And that’s what Karen brought up tonight. How will a kid who has been raised on my cooking manage to survive dorm food?
She has worse memories of dorm food than I do. She recalls “fish patties” where the chef forgot that bit about gutting the fish before using it as a food stuff. I remember decent meals at International House during my freshman year, but I’ve conveniently blocked out my sophomore (dorm) year. Although I do recall that the most special thing about Special Dinner was that it was edible. We had one per semester, if I remember correctly.
Jake likes peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I hate to think what nutritional deficiencies one would develop by subsisting entirely on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Oh, and pizza, of course. Is there any readily available fast food that is also wholesome? We had a Good Earth in Berkeley, and one of the first meals I had in Berkeley was a vegie burger at Good Earth. We had a delicious vegetarian Chinese restaurant, too, and they made the most amazing sweet and sour walnuts. (But Jake hates it when I cook with nuts. So strike that.)
Even as a freshman, I tried to make wholesome food for myself. I had to fend for myself on the weekend, and I honestly don’t know what I did with my electric frying pan. Russ, my roommate, went home to Novato on the weekends. His reputedly awesome-cook-mother took care of him. But I had to take care of me. I remember only one of the meals that I made for myself, mostly because it was so very disastrous. I bought a big hunk of fish and breaded it and fried it. Which would have been fine, had I not decided that bran cereal would make a fine material with which to bread fish.
I do remember eating out. A lot. One of my favorite memories from Berkeley was the time I ate three hot dogs at Top Dog. I’m quite sure that today, this would kill me. But back then it only left me with a warm spot in my heart and a glistening smear of grease on my upper lip.
Once Jake gets an apartment, he can cook for himself. I intend to teach him enough about cooking to take care of himself. But what will he do during that dorm year? Worst comes to worst, I suppose we can give him enough money to live on restaurant food . . . which is not a particularly healthy option, but it may beat the alternative.
D.
The art of the chicken hoagie
This is one of those (nearly) infinitely variable recipes that is quick, easy, delicious. Just gotta build it right.
The bread: bolillos or hoagy rolls, toasted on the barbecue or under the broiler. You can toast them unsliced, so that they’re crispy on the outside soft on the inside, or you can toast ’em open-faced, crispy all over.
The chicken: breast meat, of course. I prefer breasts that have been sliced so as to make them thinner. “Un-thinned” breasts don’t cook quickly enough and tend to ball up as they cook. Too much of a mouthful.
The additions — a few of the following: provolone cheese, fried onions, onions grilled on the barbecue, bacon (essential), avocado, tomato, sauteed mushrooms. You can even get a little clever — pineapple cooked on the barbecue, chorizo, jalapenos, blue cheese.
The preparation: two ways to do the chicken. Begin by sprinkling both sides with ground pepper and salt.
1. Brown the chicken breasts on both sides in a frying pan. Cast iron, if well seasoned, works best.
2. Grill on the barbecue. Tonight, I laid bacon on the grill and cooked the chicken on top of the bacon until the bacon started to burn. Great way, though, to keep the chicken from sticking to the hot grill.
Then just put it all together. In my opinion, there’s no need for mayo. The sandwich is moist enough that you don’t need gimmicks like that.
It occurs to me that an identical sandwich substituting grilled shrimp for chicken would be very tasty indeed.
D.
Food fight
This one caught my eye over at Daily Kos: What is the most bizarre thing you’ve eaten?
I suspect that anyone who had pica as a child (as I did) can beat the entries to webranding’s diary. My favorite non-food edibles as a child: wood (my bed frame, mainly), chalk (including some sort of concrete-like deposit in our back yard), and the tar off a telephone pole.
So what else do the folks at Daily Kos have to offer? Some interesting ones: warthog sausage (ain’t that just a toothy pig?), fresh termites (and a variety of other arthropods), chocolate-covered worms, baby rat kebabs, live baby rats, kangaroo, and puffin. Odder still are some of the things people THINK are unusual: eel, sea urchin, octopus (all standard sushi fare), a variety of snakes, gators, jellyfish. Two things I tend to crave from time to time are jellyfish salad and ankimo (monk fish liver).
But I think my old pica habits have ’em all beat.
How about you — any odd offerings?
D.
The week in food
In our family, vacations are all about the food. One of our favorite vacations, an early 90s trip to New Orleans, rawked because of the food. That one of our best friends was getting married, that was just window-dressing. And our one trip to Maui (also in the early 90s) suffered for the lack of a single decent meal.
By the only metric that counts, this vacation has been a success. And without any further ado, here is our week in food.
Night one in Las Vegas: Firefly (link to our first trip there, in 2009), a tapas restaurant on Paradise (menu here). We love this place. This time around we had gazpacho, stuffed dates, baked tetilla, chorizo, and I’m not sure what else. We had a couple of drinks, too, and the bill came to around sixty. What a deal!
Night two in Las Vegas: Claim Jumper to make my parents happy. My dad has his usual: beef dip au jus. Mom and I had rotisserie chicken, Karen had a seared ahi tuna salad, and Jake had some sort of nondescript pasta dish.
Night three in Las Vegas: Buca di Beppo, a really fun family/Italian place. We had chicken parmigiano and gnocchi. About the best gnocchi I’ve ever had . . . I’m not usually a fan of gnocchi, but these were light and tasty.
Night four, our first night in the Bay Area, we went to a sushi place somewhere near San Jose. Don’t remember the name but it was fine sushi. (Seems to me the trick is finding lousy sushi in the Bay Area.)
Night five: Aziza, an uber-trendy one-Michelin-star Moroccan place in San Francisco. For appetizers, Jake had the lentil soup. Karen, Karen’s mom and I had the various spreads and the duck bisteeya. (Interesting take on bisteeya — definitely gave me a few new ideas.) Karen had the yellowtail appetizer as her entree, I had the squab, my MIL had the snapper, and Jake had the chicken with black trumpet mushrooms. Karen and I shared about the strangest cocktail ever: concord grape, elderflower, peat smoke, and laphroaig scotch. Fun desserts, too.
Tonight, we went to Amber India with Karen’s sister and her family. Lots of appetizers and velvet butter chicken and lamb tandoori and three different kinds of breads, lentils and some spicy greens. We floated away.
Tomorrow, it’s back to Bako. See ya!
D.
Of editors and gunsels
From The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiel Hammett (1929):
“Another thing,” Spade repeated, glaring at the boy: “Keep that gunsel away from me while you’re making up your mind. I’ll kill him.”
The word “gunsel” made it into the script for the 1941 film with Humphrey Bogart, Sidney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre. The various editors — Joseph T. Shaw for Black Mask, where the story was first serialized, and whomever Warner Bros. employed to parse scripts — apparently figured the word was slang for “gunman.” Has “gun” right there, don’t it? But in fact, “gunsel” was a brilliant sleight-of-hand showing why, when it comes to words, you should never screw with a writer.
Erle Stanley Gardner writes in “Getting Away with Murder,” The Atlantic, Vol. 215 No. 1 (1965):
Hammett wrote a story which contained an expression that gave Shaw quite a jolt. He deleted it from the manuscript and wrote Hammett a chiding letter to the effect that Black Mask would never publish vulgarities of any sort.
Hammett promptly wrote a story in which he laid a deliberate trap for Joe Shaw.
One of the characters in the story, meeting another one, asked him what he was doing these days, and the other shamefacedly admitted that he was “on the gooseberry lay.”
Had the editor known it, this meant simply that the character was making his living by stealing clothes from clotheslines, preferably on a Monday morning. The expression goes back to the old days of the tramp who from time to time needed a few pennies to buy food. He would wait until the housewife had put out her wash; then he would descend on the clothesline, pick up an armful of clothes, and scurry away to sell them.
Shaw had the reaction which Hammett had expected. He wrote Hammett telling him that he was deleting the “gooseberry lay” from the story, that Black Mask would never publish anything like that. But he left the word “gunsel” because Hammett had used it so casually that Shaw took it for granted that the word pertained to a hired gunman. Actually, “gunsel,” or “gonzel,” is a very naughty word with no relation whatever to a bodyguard, a gunman, or a torpedo.
(Full excerpt here.)
So what’s a gunsel? From Wiktionary,
gunsel (plural gunsels)
1. A young man kept for homosexual purposes; a catamite .
2. (street and prison slang) A passive partner in anal intercourse.
I first encountered that word in The Maltese Falcon, and all these years I assumed it meant a gunman, or a hired punk with a gun. I was going to use it today, and googled it merely to check the spelling. Imagine my surprise. And think of all the writers who use it as a synonym for “gunman,” propagating Hammett’s little joke for generations to come.
It’s stuff like this that makes it all worthwhile.
D.
Rerun
I don’t feel like blogging today, but I’ve been enjoying my tiramisu photoblog, so you might, also.
Yesterday — Valentine’s Day — I discovered an amazingly decadent dessert: creme brulee cheesecake. Vanilla-intense cheesecake topped with the classic brulee. Jake ate 98% of it, but I was able to touch the smidgen that had smeared onto the sides of the styrofoam container. Fabulous.
Eat any good sweets lately?
D.