Ddukbokki Success

Here's a recipe I created for ddukbokki, a Korean spicy rice cake dish that also has fish cake and veggies. It's perfect on a cold winter night, and provided that you have an Asian market nearby, relatively quick and easy to make.

Ingredients

4 cups water
7 dried anchovies, heads and intestines removed

2 big spoonfuls of gochujang
2 tablespoons minced garlic
1/2 cabbage, sliced
1 onion, sliced
2 T soy sauce
fish sauce to taste
pinch of salt
pepper to taste
1 T sugar
pack of fresh rice cake
1/2 pack of frozen fish cake, mixed variety (oden)

7 green onions, cut into 2 inch pieces

Bring 4 cups water to a boil and add anchovies. Simmer lively for 10 minutes. Remove anchovies and bring to a boil.

Add gochujang, garlic, soy sauce, fish suace, salt, pepper, and sugar and stir until combined. Add onions an cabbage and bring to a boil. Add in the rice cakes and fish cake and cook for about 20 minutes. Add the green onions about half way through the cooking time.

Check the seasonings and adjust accordingly. Serve hot.

Christmas Cookie Baking Begins

It's the most wonderful time of the year! Christmas cookie baking commenced yesterday with:

 Traditional peanut butter cookies. Crispy, buttery, salty-sweet, and utterly addictive. These are my secret recipe. Sorry, but not even my family members know about it...

Oatmeal raisin cookies, an acceptable breakfast this time of year. I prefer them with pecans added, but these are nut free.

I made these flourless peanut butter cookeis on a whim last night, based off of this recipe here. It takes about three minutes before you have them in the oven. I used natural peanut butter instead of the regular variety and cooked them on silpats at 325. If I were to make them again, I might experiment with using a mixture half white sugar and half brown sugar.

What is a "Snack," Exactly?

I'm on a bus, stuck in traffic. And, boy, am I wishing I'd packed a snack. You know, like some almonds, a banana, some apples with peanut butter?

At least, that's what I always thought a snack was. But, this week, I've come across a couple of articles that have me wondering if maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I don't know exactly what a snack is anymore.

First, there was this Zagat piece, listing among other things, Baltimore's sinfully-rich, cloyingly sweet Berger cookie as one of the 12 Best Regional Snack Foods. I don't know about you, but I think I'd call that a dessert. Then, there's this piece from USA Today, which explains the eating habits of Americans, and reveals that only about 10% of people eat three square meals a day. The rest of the population? Apparently, they're chronic snackers.

But, the article goes on to explain that these snacks constitute nearly anything: chicken nuggets, a cupcake, a bowl of cereal, a big bowl of rice. Are these really snacks?

The dictionary definition of "snack" is as follows: a small amount of food eaten between meals. So, I guess technically, any of the above could be described as such. But, aren't some of them actually meals in and of themselves? A bowl of cereal is breakfast, and could theoretically be lunch or a really depressing dinner. Rice is a side dish. And, again, a cupcake is a dessert.

So, I can't help but wonder: am I just a big food prude? Can a snack really be anything? Could it be a porterhouse steak? An order of chocolate mousse? Maybe for some. But, whatever it is, it's definitely not a Berger cookie. Because any food that requires several hours of recovery time after just a few bites is what I'd call a serious time investment. And that's the antithesis of "on the go."

Meringues with Creme Chantilly, Fresh Berries, and Raspberry Sauce

Tonight was my mom's birthday. And while I forgot to take a birthday photo with her, I did manage to snap a few shots of this fantastic dessert before we devoured it.

It's my take on Ina Garten's Meringues with Chantilly creme. My version is less sweet, and in my opinion, even better than the original. Here's how you make it.

• For the meringues:
• 6 egg whites, at room temperature
• 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
• Pinch of salt
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla 
• 
  

Directions

Preheat the oven to 200. Line 2 baking sheets with a silpat.

In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, beat the egg whites, cream of tartar, and salt on high speed until frothy. Add 1/2 cup of the sugar and continue beating on high speed until the egg whites form very stiff, shiny peaks. Fold in the remaining 1/4 cup sugar and the vanilla. Do this quickly and confidently, as Nigella Lawson says. Don't fear the egg white! 

Make little shells using a proper pastry bag, or the makeshift kind. no one will care what they look like because you cover them in whipped cream and berries. Relax.

Bake for 2 hours, or until the meringues are dry and crisp but not browned. Turn off the heat and allow the meringues to sit in the oven for at least 4 more hours. It's best to make these first thing in the morning.

For the sauce:

1 bag frozen raspberries

squeeze of fresh lemon

1/4 cup water

2 tbsp sugar

Directions:

Bring all ingredients to a boil in a sauce pan. Lower heat and simmer 5 minutes. Pass through a food mill. Return to pan and boil 2 minutes. Chill in the refrigerator.

When ready to serve:

Make a big pool of raspberry sauce on center of plate. Place meringue in the center. Fill generously with cream. Top with fresh fruit. Serve immediately.

Are cookbooks obsolete?

As some of you might know, I make my living as a writer in the Advertising, Marketing, and Communications industry and part of my job, as I describe it, is to "know everything" when it comes to trends, culture, consumers, and marketing. Right now, everyone in my line of work is obsessing over digital, so it's no surprise that when I came across headline, I instinctively honed in on it: "Are Apps Making Cookbooks Obsolete?"

My reflexive answer was a resounding NO. How could an app replace a cookbook? In my mind, they're not even remotely interchangeable. And this is from someone who uses cooking apps and gets annoyed when a cooking site I like isn't optimized for mobile. I'm not a tech Luddite. In fact, I really, really like technology. But, there's something unique to cookbooks that makes them different from all other media, and because of that, therefore immune to a total digital takeover. Or at least, I hope so.

I collect cookbooks--I have a whole bookcase full of them. They're some of my most prized possessions, and not just for the recipes. For me, cookbooks aren't just instructional manuals with beautiful photos and illustrations. They're repositories of memory.

Each one, stained with olive oil or housing year-old flour in the crevices, contains not just lists of ingredients, but a story that is my own. Not written by a cookbook author, but by me in my very own kitchen. They hold my memories, the happy times, times when I was discovering how to cook and learning about myself. There are the Molly Katzen cookbooks stolen from my dad, used during the four-year stretch of time when I was a teenage vegetarian. (I had very patient parents.) There's Nigella Lawson's How to Be a Domestic Goddess, which won me lots of friends in college. There's Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, to me forever an "I'm sorry" gift, given to me after one of the worst fights I've ever had. And there are all of the Barefoot Contessa cookbooks, from which there have been countless birthday dinners, scene-stealing desserts, and wistful reveries. In the magical realist novel Como Agua Para Chocolate, the main character imparts her emotions into the food she cooks. I think some of mine are housed in the pages of my favorite cookbooks.

When I was five years old, my next door neighbor, Mrs. Stone gave me my first cookbook. It was from the publisher Klutz, and it was called Kid's Cooking: A Very Slightly Messy Manual. It had a recipe called the "Happle Bagel Sandwich"--basically a half a bagel, topped with a slice of apple, and a piece of cheese that you broiled in the oven--and I used to make it for my mom. Her reaction to it, which looking back on it as an adult was I'm sure overly-enthusiastic for my benefit, filled me with joy and gave me my first taste of what would be a life-long passion for cooking. I still have this book. It's old, stained, and well-worn from years of making "Disgustingly Rich Brownies." And when I look at it, I can still feel myself, seven years old, standing in my mom's kitchen happily looking on as she ate my cooking.

And that feeling... well, there's no app for that.

Instant (Emergency) Pumpkin "Mousse"

There comes a time in every woman's life when she needs dessert and she needs it right now. For me, that time was last night, when I couldn't get the thought of pumpkin mousse out of my head. I scoured the web for recipes, all of which seemed more time consuming (i.e. not instant) than I could deal with. So, what did I do? I improvised. And the results? Well, at least in my hungry and tired state: delicious.

I had:

• A jar of pumpkin butter. 
• Leftover heavy whipping cream. 
• Pecans.

Here's what I did to make my instant pumpkin mousse, which, who am I kidding, is sort of just pumpkiny whipped cream...

 Beat 1/4 cup heavy whipping cream to soft peaks. Add in two tbsp pumpkin butter and beat until incorporated. Transfer to a serving dish, and sprinkle with crushed pecans. Devour.

Cinnamon Rolls from Scratch

Let me begin this post with a word of warning: if you have no intention of getting married anytime soon, do not make these. Because no matter who you make them for--even if it's just yourself--you will end up on the receiving end of a proposal. "Why can't I be married to me??" I distinctly remember thinking as I pulled these out of the oven. Why can't I indeed.

So, upon making these little guys, I learned two things:
1. Cinnamon rolls are not nearly has hard or laborious an endeavor as the folks at Pillsbury might have you believe.
2. I need a wife. (Will need to work on the whole being attracted to women thing, though.)

Okay, enough of my neuroses. On to the baking! Here's how you make 'em.

Ingredients:
1 packet yeast, dissolved in 1/4 cup warm water
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup milk
2 eggs, beaten
6 tbsp very soft butter

1 stick melted butter
1/2 cup sugar
2 tbsp (approximately) cinnamon (I used the saigon variety)

special equipment:
a 9 inch round cake pan
rolling pin
pastry brush

Dissolve yeast in 1/4 cup warm water until foamy, about 5 minutes. Add to flour and stir to combine. Using a dough hook on your mixer, add in the sugar, salt, milk, and eggs and mix over medium-low until the dough is no longer super sticky and pulls away from the sides of the bowl, to gather mostly around the hook. This will probably take about 7 minutes or so. If it looks too tacky, add a bit of flour until it's the consistency you want. Remove the dough from the mixing bowl and transfer it to a large, buttered bowl. Cover in plastic wrap and let it rise for 90 minutes in a warm place.

Okay, now's the good part!!! Punch down the dough and place on a floured work surface and slap it into a ball, sprinkling it with a tiny bit of flour as you go. Then, begin kneading in the softened butter, until it is thoroughly combined. (If you find this difficult, you can use the mixer, but I highly recommend the whole slathering your hands in slathered butter thing. It is oddly pleasurable.)

Now, put it back into the buttered bowl, cover with plastic wrap and let it rest overnight.

Go to bed and dream sweet cinnamon coated dreams.

Wake up!

Remove dough from the fridge and roll out into a 9x16 rectangle.

Brush GENEROUSLY with melted butter, sprinkle with 1/2 cup sugar and about 2 tbsp cinnamon.

starting with one long side, roll as you would a jelly roll toward the opposite side. Cut off the funky ends and then slice into 8 even pieces. Place in a buttered 9 inch cake pan and cover with well buttered plastic wrap. Let rise for one hour.

Preheat oven to 350.

Brush tops of cinnamon rolls with butter, sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon and bake atop a jelly roll pan for about 30 minutes.

Remove from oven and top with glaze made from 1 cup confectioners sugar, 3 tbsp milk, and 1 tsp vanilla extract.