Lindsay's Irish Cabbage

My dinner tonight is fantastic! I'm giving the blog spotlight to the cabbage.

Now, I'm Irish-American, and my research into the subject of traditional Irish cabbage preparations was half-assed. But WHATEVER it is that I'm eating, that I just made, is great.




Here's what I did:

Preheat the oven to 350 f.

Sauté 2-3 slices of bacon in at least 1/4" of olive oil the bottom of a soup pot until crispy. Remove bacon and the bacon-olive-oil, and set aside.

Quarter a head of cabbage and peel off the icky outer leaves. Fill the bacon pot with water and boil the cabbage until soft. Maybe 20 mins? I didn't keep track. You know how to boil cabbage.

Once the cabbage is cooked, put in a roasting pan. Drizzle a little of the cooking water over top, to keep it from drying out in the oven. Drizzle the bacon-olive-oil over the cabbage and crumble the bacon over the cabbage.

Roast at 350 f for about 40 minutes. It's done when it starts to brown and the edges start to crisp. Salt before eating.

Fantastic.

Toad-in-the-Hole, Girl Scout Eggs, etc...

Making breakfast for myself while my husband sleeps in means that I can have whatever I want, without collaborating along the lines of what he's in the mood to cook or eat.

Today, right at this very moment in time, I am having one of my favorites: Toad-in-the-Hole, aka Girl Scout Eggs.




Step 1: Cut a hole in the bread.

Step 2: Fry an egg in the bread.

Step 3: Make her open the bread. And that's the way you do it.

Wait, what?

Back to topic.

Normally, I butter the bread a little before pan-frying, but today I just used a lot of olive oil. A LOT of olive oil. It is oilier than a donut. It's crunchy and greasy and very heavy. I am so full, guys, omg.

This is good because, on occasion, I love a seriously greasy breakfast and olive oil is one of the better greases for serious ingestion.

This is also good because I want to feel as full and sated as possible without actually preparing very much food, because I want to postpone my next trip to the grocery store for as long as I can.

One egg and one slice of bread (170 calories together, ungreased) are magically transformed into a huge meal by frying 'em up in olive oil (120 calories per tablespoon, and my bread absorbed somewhere between two and four tablespoons--I drizzled generously without measuring).

410 to 650 reasonably health-like calories for under $0.25, and I feel so fed that my next meal can just be lightly salted vegetables boiled in a nice broth for all I care.

Nice.

Hello Panda, I love you

Hello Panda is one of my favorite brands of commercially produced cookies.





I like them enough that my husband will actually point them out in the grocery store when he wants to get an immediate, cheerful response out of me. "Hey Lindsay, they have Hello Panda!" "Yeah they do! I love those things." I'll even drop whatever I'm talking about to acknowledge them, which makes these cookies a useful way for people around me to initiate fast changes in conversational topic.

(Other, similar strategies include pointing out nearby small animals--"Hey Lindsay, there's a dog across the street!"--fish tanks, Doctor Who paraphernalia, novelty socks, etc. I try to keep a lot of conversational eject buttons conveniently placed in my behavioral programming, because they do tend to come in handy. Now back to the subject of cookies.)

It's true that I am at least a little biased by how TOTALLY ADORABLE the cartoon panda on the box is, but the cookies inside are also lovely independent of their cute marketing strategy.

Hello Panda Cookies Are Nicely Portioned

Each little cookie is modestly sized, approximately 1" x 1" x 0.5" which makes portion control much easier than with many other delicious, commercially produced, boxed cookies.

The internet (whom I am tentatively trusting, because Nabisco's website only gives Oreo calorie information by the gram, not by the cookie) states that a single Oreo cookie contains 70 calories. Quite a lot of cardiovascular exercise and/or austere eating elsewhere is needed to offset a stack of Oreos, making them something of a special occasion cookie.




Hello Panda cookies are 20 calories each, and eating 3.5 of them (70 calories) feels like considerably more cookie time than a single Oreo does. While they are still genuinely cookies for cookies' sake, they're still a more manageable choice for cookie time in normal life.

In defense of Oreos, Hello Panda cookies are not as suitable for dunking in milk. But different cookies are best for different situations.

Hello Panda Cookies Have a Lovely Balance of Textures and Flavors

I likened Hello Panda cookies to Oreo cookies because the flavors and textures are reasonably comparable. They're quite different foods, but familiarity with one can help build a fuller imaginary representation of the other.

Both cookies have wonderful, crunchy exteriors and pleasing (if a little confusing) creamy middles.

Both cookies have chocolate-themed elements that are not actual chocolate, and both seem to be full of sweetened, mildly dangerous shortening. (IS it shortening? It is shortening, isn't it. Is it? Is it?)







Hello Panda cookies have a perfectly crunchy and mild biscuit exterior, and they are filled with a creamy, not-actually-ganache "choco cream."

The consistency of the biscuit layer is similar to that of the snack food style of small, hard pretzels. (Which I am making a little too much effort to distinguish from the larger, soft, baked, traditional pretzels.)

The Hello Panda outer cookie is slightly more brittle than a pretzel. It's less tough, less salty, and is a little thicker and sweeter, without being too sweet. The biscuit exterior gently cracks and snaps apart when bitten, and does not bend under pressure. The flavor resembles shortbread, but is less greasy and intense. (Shortbread isn't particularly intensely flavored, but these cookies are still milder.)

As mentioned before, the cookies have a delicious, chocolate-themed filling, similar to ganache but more shelf-stable. Like the outside, the filling is not overly sweet. To liken it to other chocolatey products found in many American grocery stores, the texture is slightly harder than Nutella but slightly softer than the inside of a a Lindt truffle.

The combination of crunch with smooth, of flour-based flavors with chocolate-like candy/frosting flavors, is very nice. Perfectly suited to the not-quite-a-baked-good, also-not-candy role that I have for crunchy, commercially produced, boxed cookies.

That, and, did you see how cute the cartoon panda is?!?! Wow.

Homemade Ice Cream & Murdered Merangue

Two posts in one day! I just wanted to give a quick nod to last weekend.

My sister has decided to make a specialty of homemade ice cream. Her first concoction was the perfect execution of this recipe for blueberry ice cream. The lightly crushed and occasionally intact, fresh, raw blueberries were shockingly good--enough to disrupt some of my stereotypes about putting fruit in ice cream. (Like "the fruit must always be cooked first" and "the fruit will taste a little mediocre" and "raw blueberries are too sour for this.")

Her second concoction, the second night I crashed on her couch, was a recipe of her own invention. Apple crisp ice cream. She made a spiced apple compote in a saucepan, using fresh apples, and chilled it. She made a toasted, crunchy crumble out of oats, flour, butter and brown sugar. Both were stirred into the completely from-scratch vanilla ice cream batter, and froze right into it. It was amazing, and I hope to publish the recipe later if she'll write it down for me.





While my sister assembled the yolk and milk mixtures, I was left with two nights worth of egg whites. I stood in the kitchen with her, but my help was infrequently required. I decided to attempt a simple mousse without reading any mousse recipes.

Unfortunately, the available resources were a bit scant, so I found myself whipping the bowl of egg whites with a salad fork, for want of a mixer or whisk.

Check it out:


Actual, standing egg whites whipped in an absurdly low-tech way. I think it took me two hours.

Unfortunately, I made a fatal mistake immediately afterward. I folded the beautiful meringue into hot, sweetened, chocolatey milk without removing the scalded milk mixture from the stove. The egg whites cooked far too much (they actually boiled!!!), and my would-be mousse developed an unfortunate texture, a bit like it was full of tiny, sand-like grains of rubber.

Here is a photo of my dashed dreams and public shame:


Woe is me.

Luckily, my sister's ice cream was ready around the same time that I concluded that I could not keep eating my experiment. We watched Community and all was well.

Punk Rock Comfort Food

Practically everybody I know has their own different definition for what punk rock is, and there are frequent disagreements over the details when the subject comes up.

However, this is my blog, and I will write from my perspective. To me, punk must be vulgar. It must be, or appear to be, remedial. Not necessarily due to a lack of advanced ability, but due to an ethic that a sloppy half-effort is a liberating and equalizing effort. Punk also ought to set the stage for creating social links to other oddballs--a sort of mixed-up social slurry, a strange cultural catch-all for misfits. A supportive punk family/tribe/scene/whatever can make an essential lifeline in times of crisis, something that I have gratefully experienced firsthand.

Beyond this sociological understanding, there are also specifics regarding the punk rock art movement in its different stages over the last 40 years. These deserve thorough analysis at another time, in something other than a food blog.

Anyway.

I finally watched the movie Repo Man for the first time today.

I decided to eat a big meal while watching the movie, to help prepare my body for my scheduled blood donation this afternoon. Because of the movie, I was feeling proud of how playful, rebellious and vulgar I naturally am. I wanted to revel in my own not-giving-a-damn-about-the-rules-ness in a tangible and appropriately disgusting way. So this is what I did:







I hacked off part of a raw cabbage, covered it in shredded cheese and microwaved it for two minutes. It tasted like bad ideas and freedom.

I will definitely do this again, but with more cabbage and less cheese next time, so I don't clog my blood recipient's arteries too badly.*

Salut! To your health! Happy eating! Bon voyage!


*An interesting side note for those who may be curious: I was rejected by the blood bank for having a head cold today. I will try again next week. I hear that donating blood is a great way to get really, really drowsy, and while I already love naps and I sleep ok at night, I haven't had a proper knocked-right-out, serious sleep in a while. Maybe I'll be up to it next week!

Happy Welch Rarebit Day!

Somewhere between exercise and brunch this morning, I checked Facebook and was delighted to learn from the British Cheese Board (of COURSE I follow them on Facebook) that today is National (in the UK at least) Welch Rarebit Day!

Lacking the ingredients to make the recipe they provided, I decided to experiment a little. This wonderful brunch is what I came up with:





I sliced the heel of a baguette so that the bottom of a little baking dish was lined with bread.

I mixed about 2-3 heaping tablespoons of neufchâtel cheese with a drizzle (about 1/2 tsp) of A1 steak sauce with a smaller drizzle (about 1/3 tsp) of spicy brown mustard. When combined, this mixture had the approximate color of French vanilla ice cream.

After spreading the seasoned neufchâtel on the bread, I sprinkled a layer of shredded, sharp cheddar on top and broiled the whole thing until the cheese had melted and just started to evenly bubble and brown.

The result is fluffy, creamy and toasty with a slight crunch on the outside. The texture reminds me a little of roasted marshmallows.

When preparing this again, I will need to shift the neufchâtel to sharp cheddar ratio a little, in favor of more cheddar and less neufchâtel. I could stand to have more greasy crunch next time.

But all-in-all, I am satisfied. This was a wonderful Blue Monday brunch!

Holiday Food Highlights

Mind you, during the mad holiday shuffle of the last two days, I did not decide to photograph every amazing food that I was lucky enough to partake in. But I did snap some quick pictures during two quiet moments:

Decorating my creatively shaped gingerbread cookies
with my two nieces at my husband's parents' house.
What's more festive than the Batman logo?

My dad's brie en crute. Brie cheese wrapped in puff pastry,
with a layer of dried cherries and fresh rosemary from his
garden between the cheese and its top crust. Fan-tastic.