Brown Sugar Bacon... wait for it... Waffles.

In one of my recent two hour browse-and-drool sessions with Tastespotting, I came upon a link to this post from Joy the Baker and its accompanying recipe for brown sugar bacon buttermilk waffles. Yes, you read that right: all of those things ultimately serve as adjectives to modify waffles. Now, I've never been a sucker for the whole bacon craze meme; I haven't sprinkled bacon salt on anything, haven't covered bacon in chocolate, haven't... I don't know, woven anything out of the stuff. Bacon's fine, it's cool. It's meaty and salty and I can't protest that sort of thing, but I am certainly not dedicating my life to its production. But something about this recipe really got me. I mean, I've often enough eaten bacon alongside a waffle, have occasionally mopped up a smudge of errant syrup with the flat side of a slice, why not combine the two officially? It certainly seems streamlined, like the way that the cartoons imagined eating in the future, a tiny pill that contains everything loved and familiar about modern sustenance but in a simpler form. There's something appealing about combining the whole meal into one dish. Something so theoretically cosmopolitan, so easy.

But here's the thing about that line of thinking: it's what gave us casseroles, what gave us one pot meals, what gave us Hamburger Helper for God's sake! Combined does not always mean better. And bacon, however much it is the most fad-alicious of all breakfast meats, is strong stuff. The waffles, after I'd sugar coated and baked and chopped and stirred and pressed and everything else the recipe required, were great!
They were fantastic, actually!

Except for the bacon floating like little fatty depth charges among the ridges and valleys. Every forkful that did not contain a clump of bacon (the bacon, recently candied with brown sugar, stuck together and made it into the finished waffle in crowds instead of shards--this might have been part of the problem) was light and airy and delicious with the slight tang of buttermilk. But every heavy dark baconed forkful I lifted to my mouth unfolded the same way. Here's my thought process every time: this isn't so bad, it's got a little bit of chewiness, a little sweet to go with the maple syrup, a little salt. Oh. A lot of salt. A lot of salt, now, and now every tastebud is overwhelmed and all my fond memories of crisp airy waffles are ruined, stomped into the ground beneath the iron boot of bacon flavor.
Oh, and even six hours later I swear I was still prying bacon-grease candy from my molars. In case you were confused, this is not a pleasant activity.

This is, I readily admit, probably more an issue with my bacon than the recipe itself. A less heavily cured, (ahem...) antique bacon than the one the local grocery store marks down for immediate sale is probably called for here. And I'm sure with a light thin artisanal bacon taken from pigs that had never even seen a fence and cured in the tears of pixies this could be amazing. But that's not what I had and that's not what the recipe called for so I didn't think through the necessity of going fancy on its ass. So here's what I'm going to do next time.

I'm going to take the print-out I have of this recipe and white out everything that says bacon on it. With the result, I'm going to make some of the best waffles I've ever made at home. Waffles that are rich and flavorful enough to stand up to syrup yet light enough to absorb it. And when I'm eating them I'm never going to dread a forkful for its lingering obliteration of my tastebuds, never going to crack a blackened spiderweb of baked brown sugar and bacon grease from a cookie sheet, never going to mistakenly believe that just because something is popular it must be good folded into one of my favorite foods. Well, okay, honestly, I will probably do that last one again and again and never learn but I am definitely going to make some normal waffles before I restart the cycle.
If you don't believe me--and I've always encouraged every new semester's worth of students not to--then you can find the recipe and instructions here:

Get the recipe!

If you find them more palatable, I would love to hear what I did wrong.

Chocolate Angel Food Cake Fail

The overwhelming theme of my baking projects this week is failure. Justin and I stopped in at the Stanislaus County Library on Thursday and came home with a huge stack of cookbooks: Moosewood New Classics, Moosewood Restaurant Celebrates, Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads and Buttercup Bakes at Home. So far we've tackled a recipe from each of them, but the most tantalizing of the books, by far, was the last one. "More than 75 new recipes from Manhattan's premier bake shop," it sang to me from the front cover. "Tempting homemade sweets," it purred. Even as it dragged me down, I could not resist its siren song.

To be honest, that nectarine tart debacle kind of shook my confidence. I'm not a professional baker by any means, but I like to think I kind of know what I'm doing in the kitchen. I was tentative, but optimistic, when I picked out the Chocolate Angel Food Cake recipe from Buttercup Bakes at Home. Angel food cake is a little challenging, but as long as you sift the ingredients enough and get the egg whites sufficiently stiff, you're good, right? At least, this is what I thought going into it. Below is the recipe, which tasted amazing, but with which I have one very, very large disagreement. See if you can spot it based on the pictures.

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Chocolate Angel Food Cake from Buttercup Bakes at Home

3/4 cup cake flour
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (I tend to go for Scharrfen Berger)
1 1/2 cups sugar, divided
13 or 14 large egg whites (~2 cups)
1 1/2 teaspoons cream of tartar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon salt

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Set out an ungreased 10-inch tube pan.

In a medium bowl, combine the flour and cocoa powder with 3/4 cup of sugar. Sift these together three separate times. Set aside.

Place the egg whites in a standing mixer bowl and, using the whisk attachment, turn mixer to lowest speed. After 1 minute, add the cream of tartar, vanilla, and salt. After another minute of beating, turn the mixer to medium speed and gradually add the remaining 3/4 cup sugar. Stop and scrape the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula when all the sugar has been added. Resume beating until the whites are stiff but moist, about 3 to 5 minutes. Transfer the mixture to a large bowl.

Sift the flour-sugar mixture a fourth time over the egg white mixture and gently fold until all the dry ingredients are mixed in.

Fill the pan immediately and smooth the top with a rubber spatula. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes. Test for doneness at 30 minutes; if tester comes out clean with no traces of batter, it is done. The cake should be lightly browned and spring back when pressed gently with finger. Remove from the oven and allow to cool in the pan for 30 minutes. Remove the pan and cool completely on a wire rack (place the pan upside down on an empty bottle for easier removal).

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The aftermath?

Ungreased tube pan? Ungreased?! Maybe if you have some special I-can-get-sticky-things-out-of-ungreased-cake-pans skill, something that I am not, apparently, blessed with. And the book's advice didn't help that much: "place the pan upside down on an empty bottle for easier removal." Seriously? I didn't really see the point of this exercise, beyond that an upside down cake inside a pan on top of a coke bottle is kind of amusing. You know, in a terribly defeating sort of way.

So I guess I'll pose a question to you all: how do you guys get sticky things out of pans, if not by greasing and flouring them? Obviously I'm in need of help. This was a very promising recipe - the broken chunks were definitely tasty - but it's just not workable, for me, as is.

Moosewood; Quick Cinnamon Biscuits

In Ithaca, it's easy to take Moosewood for granted.

I mean, it's just there in the DeWitt Mall rain or shine, this deceptively little restaurant with its short daily menu and inexpensive lunches. It's a restaurant like any number of vegetarian places around the country, just like them, in fact. Like, archetypally like them. But you don't think about it, really. It's fresh good food a lot of the time and you love it but occasionally you'll get a stinker, a test recipe, and you'll swear it off for a couple of weeks. You come back, yeah, but because it's cheap and convenient as much as anything. It's just a place. But occasionally, while sitting at one of the grooved wooden tables devouring the soup of the day, you hear someone gush to a waitress that he drove ten hours to eat here, or that she'd dreamt of coming here for half her life. And suddenly you get an inkling of just what kind of place you're taking for granted, just what a restaurant around the corner from your apartment might mean to the food community.

I like to think that in our time in Ithaca we took full advantage of Moosewood. Of the restaurant, I mean, because it's only now that we've moved away from it that we're truly starting to appreciate the oeuvre the name is truly synonymous with: the cookbooks. If you know cookbooks at all, you know the ones I mean. Whether it's Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant or Cooks at Home, if you like vegetarian food there's probably a good chance that you've held one in your hands. We've had the Book of Deserts for a while and I know we've posted a couple of recipes from it but a recent trip to the Modesto Public Library resulted in a whole armful more in our kitchen.

I made breakfast from New Classics this weekend--an interesting and easy if not (in my estimation) totally perfect recipe for cinnamon biscuits that took almost no time to put together--and today, our first calm day alone in quite a while, we put together a lime frozen yogurt that was really quite tasty. Since the biscuits were a slightly more problematic dish, I've been rolling it over in my mind since I made it, trying to figure out what could go better. Here's the recipe with my proposed changes.
Quick Cinnamon Biscuits (makes 9) derived from Moosewood Restaurant New Classics

Cinnamon Sugar Mix
1/4 cup brown sugar, packed
2-1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 cup toasted pecans

Biscuit Dough
2-1/2 cups flour
2 Tbsp brown sugar, packed
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1-1/2 cups heavy cream (plus 1 Tbsp reserved)

Icing
3 Tbsp powdered sugar
2-3 tsp milk
1/4 tsp vanilla extract or 1 tsp maple syrup

Combine the cinnamon sugar mix ingredients and set aside. In a separate bowl, stir together dry ingredients, add cream and stir until the dough forms a ball and all loose bits are incorporated.

Turn dough out onto lightly floured surface and pat into a 1/2 inch thick rectangle (about 9 x 13) Brush the surface of the dough with the reserved cream then sprinkle evenly with the cinnamon sugar mix.

Starting from the long side, roll the dough into a cylinder and then slice into 9 equal rounds. Place the rounds in an oven-safe dish and bake until lightly browned. Drizzle with icing and serve warm.

The problem I had with the recipe in its original form is one that I've often had with Moosewood recipes. I found it a little... flat. And, as I think we've discussed before in this forum, I'm not a big fan of nutmeg. Here I've adjusted the balance of nutmeg with the other flavors, thrown in some nuts for textural contrast, and added a couple of suggestions to the icing to hopefully bring out a little more of the zip I was looking for. Keep in mind, though, that this recipe's ease--and it is fabulously, decadently easy--is due in part to its adherence to the biscuit formula rather than a familiarity to a yeasted bread. So while this cancels out the need for a rise time, it doesn't produce the exact texture I expected from a breakfast baked good. But once I got past that hurdle, I found these biscuits lovely and, partially due to their quick near-effortless construction (I managed to do this pre-coffee Saturday morning) I'm certain I'll make them again.
Look for more Moosewood in the next couple weeks as we plow through the cookbooks we've borrowed in order to return them in time. It's going to be a lot of veggies and tofu and cheese in our future and it should be tremendous fun.

Martha Stewart's Nectarine Tart, a.k.a. My Slow Descent into Madness

I've spent a lot of time on this blog praising Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook. Oh Martha, that biscotti was heavenly, Martha, your recipes are foolproof, you could never do me wrong.

Well, I take it all back. Every bit of it. What follows, today, is the story of a woman, a man, and the nectarine tart that threatened to destroy them.

For the past few weeks, the nectarine tree on my in-laws' farm has been producing obscene amounts of fruit. We've picked literally dozens of the things, eating some, giving most away to friends, grudgingly throwing the rotting ones in the compost bucket. I knew the best use would likely be some kind of baked good, but I was afraid. The convection oven at our new place gleamed at me from the kitchen, a heartless, unforgiving monster forged from tears and stainless steel. I was intimidated. And frankly, there just aren't that many nectarine recipes out there.

So I did what any rational baker would do: I gathered my courage, grabbed my go-to cookbooks and started looking for recipes. Nothing in Moosewood Desserts or Silver Palate, but just when hope was failing, the pages of Martha's Baking Handbook revealed a nectarine tart I could not resist. Those perfectly pink nectarine rosettes, that browned butter filling, the flaky crust... irresistible, right? I was so innocent then, unaware of the horrors to come.

For tart crust one, I followed the instructions in Martha's Baking Handbook, made the whole thing in the mixer, patted it into a pretty little disk, covered it in plastic wrap and popped it in the fridge. After the two hour chill time was up, I pulled out perhaps the driest dough known to man. My rolling pin and I could barely force the thing into submission. Though I did manage to get it into a passable shape, it crumbled as soon as I tried to put it into the tart pan. I have since realized that the refrigerator at this new place dries everything out... something I would have loved to know before I began this process, but alas. I kept going.

The next morning, I attempted crust number two, which came out similarly dry. I was sneaky this time, though, and enlisted Justin's help to flip the cutting board upside down - in my mind, this scenario would lead the dough to kind of gently fall into the tart pan, where I would use my nimble fingers to form it into something resembling the picture in Martha's book.

In practice, the whole thing landed in the stack of dirty dishes in our sink, and I created all sorts of new swears, such as "goddamn fucking tartfucker." I guess that counts for something.

For tart dough three, I gave up on Martha's crust and instead used a recipe from The Silver Palate. This one was hand-mixed with a pastry blender, rather than the Kitchenaid, but after two hours in the fridge, it also came out dry. Far past the point of caring, I jammed pieces into the tart pan and called it a day. It came out looking okay, actually:

But then, oh then, came the rosettes.

According to Martha, you simply slice the nectarines thin, create a pretty little circle out of the first slice and add more "petals" until the thing transforms itself into a rose. Easy, right? I wish.

If the slices are too thin, even by a few millimeters, they break in half, and absolutely will not form a pretty rosette shape, no matter how much wishing, or cursing, or flailing, or crying you do.
If you slice them too thin, they become translucent, slimy little things that are impossible to pick up. Justin cut ten nectarines into slices this way, just for my benefit. According to him, he's never chopped that much of anything in his life. As for me, I developed an excruciating neck cramp from hunching over the cutting board for an hour, creating dozens of these things, and then threatening each of them with bodily harm every time I transferred one to the pan.

And yes, the end product was beautiful. And yes, it tasted amazing. The sauce was browned butter and vanilla and what must have been ambrosia, or unicorn tears - even Justin's parents, who we served this evil, evil masterpiece to, agreed. But come on. Someone needs to sit down and ask themselves: can a mere mortal create this dish without self-destructing? If the answer is no, well, don't put it in the goddamn cookbook, okay?

Mexican Pizza... but not like Taco Bell's Mexican Pizza, y'know?

This is what it's like to keep this blog: I had this big post planned for tonight. I'd been sitting on it all week while we were pulled hither and yon (yeah, I said that) by friends and family and... you know, life. But I was really going to do it up right when I got the time to sit down and do it. The pictures were all shot and I had all kinds of witty metaphors percolating inside my head. But then the day was slipping away again and before I sat down and put my fingers to home row, I had to make dinner.

And that's when it happened. That was when the whole train of thought got diverted. Because in our preparations for dinner I found something that I had to write about, which I could not even consider not writing about. I put together the following pizza:
A light pizza crust (recipe from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook again, which is quickly becoming our go-to dough for its ease [it comes together in seriously five minutes tops] and its hands-off approach to flavor [it imparts just the tiniest hit of saltiness and a fresh floury oomph that really suits summer veggie pizzas] ) topped with fine local extra virgin olive oil; half an organic yellow onion sauteed with diced jalapeno, garlic, and cumin; a light scattering (maybe half a cup? 3/4 of a cup?) of a blend of pepper jack and medium cheddar; and slices of a variety of heady, ripe heirloom tomatoes layered on raw.

We popped it onto the pizza stone which had been heating in our oven and we waited, half-crouched to keep an eye through the oven door and maybe, if we were lucky, to catch a whiff of the flavors melding inside.

And just to build suspense, let me add a little sidebar about our oven. The house we moved into a few weeks ago had recently had the kitchen remodeled by my parents. One of the appliances they put in is a GE Profile stove and convection oven. Now, I've had a convection toaster oven that I use all the time but there's just something a little bit... well, intimidating about the real thing. So while we've been using the stove daily, the oven has done no more than keep a set of (weird weird weird) soy pancakes warm while I cooked bacon last weekend. This was, for all intents and purposes, the maiden voyage of this little beast. Our first foray into high heat and moving parts. I can honestly say, watching the crust puff and brown and the tomatoes steam in maybe half the time it would have taken in a conventional oven, that I did take a step toward conversion.
After it came out of the oven looking gorgous, we topped the steaming tomatoes and cheese with crumbled queso fresco (which we got from this great store in Fresno called Vallarta which my original post was going to be about), and roughly chopped cilantro. And then sliced it up and took bites.
Let me tell you. Without exaggeration. It was damn good.

Given the fortuitous combination of good ingredients on hand, a bad ass oven, and some "what would happen if we..."s, we haphazardly threw together one of our top five best dishes ever. Maybe top two. I don't know. I'm stoked, though. And I could have eaten the whole pizza by myself. I love California Pizza, and I didn't think I could make it on my own, but there it is. Proven. Now how long until I get to make another one?

California Changes

Justin and I expected our food escapades to change when we moved across the country, but I don't think either of us really anticipated how much. When we last lived in California, we were poor, we couldn't cook, and we really weren't that discerning about what we put in our mouths. Pad thai from a box? Sure! That's a staple that we should make once a week, at least. Pita bread with store bought deli meat and medium cheddar cheese stuffed inside? Mmm, sounds like dinner. For three nights in a row. We really didn't notice or care what sort of stuff was available at the supermarket.

I'm not sure what it was about Ithaca that made us interested in cooking. As I mentioned in a previous post, part of it was our addiction to Mexican food, and Ithaca's complete lack of such cuisine. Part of it, I'm sure, was the long, cold winters. It became totally and utterly normal to spend an entire Sunday indoors baking bread. We're talking nine hours straight here. And the more we did this sort of thing, the better we got, and the more fun it became.

So, the first thing you'll need to know about Modesto, the town we just moved to, is that it's in the Central Valley of California, which puts it smack in the agricultural center of the state. Considering California is one of the big agricultural centers of the world, that's saying something. Modesto itself is fairly suburban, but if you drive in any direction out of town, you hit farmland. Justin's folks grow almonds on their farm, which is about fifteen minutes from us, and their neighbors grow peaches, plums, walnuts, all sorts of stuff. My in-laws also have an acre or two of land where they grow fruits and vegetables for personal use, everything from nectarines to grapes to eggplant to pumpkins. You name it, they're growing it, plan to grow it or have grown it already.
We've gotten our fair share of food from the farm, including a big bag of nectarines that we split with some friends. But even without this resource, just walking into the produce section of the grocery store is redonkulous: bags of limes for $2, huge ripe peaches for a dollar a pound, and the tomatoes? Justin ate a piece of one a few days after we moved here and swore he hadn't eaten a real tomato in four years. Yes, they're that good. We basically don't know what to do with ourselves.

So that's the backstory for this adventure. For the last couple weeks we've been gallivanting around, painting our house, hauling furniture back from IKEA, and eating fresh everything. The only thing I haven't been able to find in grocery stores here is arugula, which is a shame, but it's also not the end of the world. Plus, I'm convinced we'll find it somewhere. And if not, well, those tomatoes can make me forget just about anything.

Bonus Pictures:Opening a bottle of wine without a corkscrew

This past weekend, when our friends Sol and Curtis came by to see our new place, we pulled out a bottle of wine but realized we hadn't yet unpacked a corkscrew.
It was Curtis' brilliant idea that gave us this really basic solution.

Wine bottle + actual screw + pliers = homemade corkscrew! Wine for everyone!

Salt Lake City

From Fort Collins, Colorado, the road took us back into and all the way through Wyoming along the 80. Let's assume, for the sake of comedy, that you haven't spent many hundreds of man hours staring at the scenery of the 80 through Wyoming. Allow me to set the scene: on your right, perhaps as much as five whole universes away, there are mountains, there are cliffs, there is difference. To you, these things are nothing more than purple smudges jutting through the haze and cloudcover. Impossibly distant both in miles and in conception. Near you, there is only desert. Not sand dunes and buzzards desert but desert just the same, 400 miles of identical, unmemorable scrub brush punctuated occasionally by rusting barb wire fences, oil derricks, the moon-eyed faces of cattle destined, inevitably, for slaughter.
Proceeding vertically from the top edges of those impossibly distant smudges of mountains, track your eyes across the sky. It's something like 300 degrees from one horizon to another, the sky blue and white and vast as anything you've ever experienced in your life, as if every sky that has ever been has coalesced here in order to force away the land. In front of you, far ahead but growing closer, you can see Utah. You can't actually see Utah, you understand, what you can see is the ending to a long long day in which you would cross both the halfway mark and the 2/3 way mark, but you can see something shimmering out there like water, and you swear to the steering wheel, the gearshift, anything you can get your hands on, that Joseph Smith had this promised land thing right all along.

This is how I spent my 29th birthday, how I welcomed another year of life: a long, fugue-like drive into Utah and a night at a hotel in Salt Lake City. And for all this it was an awesome time.

See, it wasn't just any hotel. What Dana had been keeping secret for a month or more before our trip was that the room we were staying in that night was titled Dodge City, a themed affair, one of many themed rooms in this complex called The Anniversary Inn which is apparently a big thing in Utah. (Note from Dana: it's where Mormons go to have crazy fantasy sex!) Our hotel room sported a bed shaped like a (very convincing) covered wagon, a mirror nestled into the worn center of a yolk, swinging saloon doors between the bedroom and bathroom, and a huge two-wall mural of a western scene. Also some creepy-ass pictures of frontiersman all over the walls but I'd just as soon forget about those, thanks.
And, okay, the enormous bathtub was equipped with what I can only describe as the coolest shower of all time. The water for the shower flowed from a set of antique bottles which I originally thought had been discarded precariously above the tub. So you're showering from a bunch of whiskey bottles. That's so friggin' old west! Tell me truthfully: does this not kick ass?
In addition to being a kick-ass surprise hotel to stay the night at, The Anniversary Inn was also apparently a bed & breakfast! So at 7am (remember we'd been gaining hours as we passed through time zones all along the way) the staff there knocked on our door and left us a huge plate of really decent food including these great yogurt parfaits (highlight!), a huge cinnamon roll (good, but I wanted it to be better), a ham & cheese croissant (eh), and coffee (blessed, blessed coffee). Really, a decent showing.
After checking out of the hotel, Dana and I wandered over a couple of blocks to a Whole Foods we'd spotted the night before. Okay, call me an uncultured slob or... I don't know, a bumpkin? Call me what you will, but I have to admit this: before last week, I'd never been into a Whole Foods. I've lived in towns with Whole Foods, I've watched dozens of Top Chef contestants shop at them (between food porny shots of piled up apples and blatant branding, obviously) I'd even been in their parking lots, but I'd never walked inside. So tell me, is every Whole Foods the most awesome place in the world or is it just this random one in Salt Lake City? I'm leaning toward every one but I just want to be sure.

We picked up a couple of righteous salads (to offset the beating our stomachs had been taking with all the road food), some snacks, and (accidentally) a couple of energy drinks, but I was nearly in tears at the idea that a place with this much healthy beautiful food exists in the world and I do not have regular access to it. I'm seriously considering driving back to Utah and setting up a tent in the parking lot, just to get more of their house-made tortilla chips. I mean, they are good chips. That's not so crazy, right?