Cacao and Potatoes

Well, it looks like it's been a long time since I wrote in here last. Please forgive me: I've moved across the Pacific, and I'm still getting settled.

Having said that, this is my first entry in a new kitchen! Yes, it is very exciting. It's also my first time doing my own cooking in a gas-powered kitchen. I much prefer electric for its simplicity: only one bill each month, its predictability: I know how hot a certain setting is on the stove, and finally, for its speed: that's right, I like electric precisely because it takes longer to cool down. If I want to completely remove the heat, I'll move the pan. Finally, gas stoves make me uncomfortable because they can blow up. Electric stoves don't have that feature.

Well, like it or not, I'm stuck with a gas stove. So what do I do with it? I start out with some highly-flammable cooking of course. 


Cacao

Okay, so there are two major chains of supermarket near my house: Ralph's and King Ranch. Ralph's is your typical middle-class white person's supermarket, and King Ranch is your typical middle-class Mexican person's supermarket. By that, I mean that there are a lot more Mexican foods and Mexican people at King Ranch, and the added variety of food makes it fun to visit.

On a recent trip to King Ranch, I found a bag of cacao beans. Now, I've heard that making chocolate is hard to do, so I wondered why you could buy unprocessed cacao beans in a supermarket, but I wasn't about to not buy them, so I didn't not buy them.

The instructions on the bag are somewhat unclear: "Roast beans, remove skin, add cinnamon and sugar to taste and grind. Add 1 tsp to 1 cup of boiling water or milk." So I guess it's for making hot chocolate. I had to do some research online to find out how to roast cacao beans, but it doesn't look hard.

I tasted the beans first, they taste vaguely chocolatey, but nothing special. Then I roasted them for 30 minutes at 300 F. That's a bit hotter and longer than I'd read, but most sources say that they should start popping when they're ready, and I heard no popping, so I don't know what's up with that. I took them out after 30 minutes anyway, and figured they were done. I think I might have over-roasted them a bit.

Cacao beans pre-roasting

So my previous comment about making flammable things has to do with the shells of the cacao beans. Apparently, they're very flammable, and you're advised not to prepare them in a gas oven. I ignored that for the most part, but I was vigilant for any fires that could have destroyed my new home. There were no fires, so I was forced to remove the shells after roasting the beans. That was the most annoying part. They say the shells are supposed to be easy to remove, but it was still a lot of work separating them one by one. If I never roast cacao beans again, it'll be because I don't want to shell them again.

Shelling beans: On the top are the skins, the beans are on the bottom.

After shelling, which took forever, I added a little more than sugar and cinnamon. I added cane sugar, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, vanilla, and cayenne pepper. Probably too much seasoning for my first attempt, but I was still a little worried it might taste burned from my over-roasting. I threw all that into a Magic Bullet to grind it all together, and the picture you see below is the result:

This looks and smells a lot like cocoa powder, which it basically is, but it's a lot more sticky and oily than cocoa powder. You see, cocoa powder is this, but with all the cocoa butter removed, which is one of those parts that is extremely complicated. Anyway, this stuff is pretty good.

Finally, I heated up some milk, hazelnut milk in this case, because I'm experimenting with the various types of fake milk, and added a bit of my new powder to it. The end result was pretty good. It tastes just like hot chocolate, but with all those extra spices I added. To be honest, I probably added a little too much cayenne pepper, but hey, I likes it spicy.

On a final note, I think I'll strain the hot chocolate in the future. There are still too many bits of cacao nibs floating around in there.


Potatoes

Well, it's also been a long time since I made a recipe from the internet. I'm not really sorry to say this; but I didn't bring the appetizer book with me, so I won't be making any of those overly-complicated recipes any time soon. Sorry to all those people still looking forward to the shellfish I promised though.

This recipe is for Idaho sunrise potato bowls. Basically, they're hollowed-out baked potatoes with egg, bacon, and cheese baked inside. It's a pretty simple recipe, but I wanted to do it right, so first, I looked into how to make a proper baked potato. I followed these directions, and baked my potatoes at 350 F for 60 minutes. They still weren't done, so I baked for another 20 minutes, and to be honest, I think they probably would have been better with another 15 minutes on top of that. Whatever, maybe my potatoes were too big (or, and I'm just throwing this out there, the oven temperature is messed up, because it's a gas oven).

Anyway, the potatoes were fine, and I hollowed them out to the best of my ability with a spoon. The insides made some fine mashed potatoes along with all the leftover ingredients.

Potato fillings

The insides were filled with one egg, a bunch of bacon, some Colby cheese, and a mixture of parsley and coriander. Back in the oven for 35 minutes, even though the recipe calls for 20-25 minutes (I'm still going with the cold oven theory), and I've got myself one potato for dinner, and another for breakfast:

In the end, this took forever. Baking takes too long. Also, I think I had room for another egg in these potatoes, or I could have put some of the filing back in as mashed potatoes, or I could have added more bacon. Whatever, they were pretty tasty, but I'm not sure I'll make them again any time soon.

Savory Breakfast Muffins

Wow, so the last update was in January. That's a long time ago. I've been making plenty of things, I've just been too lazy to post any of them. Well, I made these lovely Savory Breakfast Muffins last weekend, and now I'm finally ready to write about it. These guys are colorful, tasty, and make for a good breakfast.  Plus, they've got vegetables, so they must be good for you.

So the recipe's pretty easy to follow, and it tastes good. I made a few changes to the recipe though, based on what I wanted and what I had:

First of all, who keeps whole-wheat flour around?  Probably a few people, and I don't judge them, they're probably healthier than me, but I don't.  Instead, I did a little switch and replace action.  Instead of two cups whole-wheat flower and one cup all-purpose flour, I used two cups all-purpose flour and one cup fine semolina. I would rather use corn meal, but semolina makes a nice stand in when you don't have any (good replacement for making grits, too).

Second; buttermilk: didn't have any.  Yogurt makes a good replacement, so that's what I used.  I don't know who these people are that keep buttermilk lying around for baking, but I've always needed to go to the store for that stuff. Buttermilk only seems useful for baking things, and it doesn't keep long enough between baking projects.  I'm not about to run to the store for some buttermilk when I'm making breakfast, so it's a good thing yogurt works so well.

Finally: I didn't have any Canadian bacon (who does?), so I used some chorizo that had been sitting in my refrigerator for a couple weeks. Chorizo keeps forever, and it's spicy.  I think it's another good substitution.

I also made two tiny mistake, but was able to correct them thanks to the fact that my oven doesn't hold a full-sized muffin tin. I've got to use a little 6-muffin tin, so I was able to spot and correct my mistakes over a couple pan-fulls.  The recipe says it makes 12, but I got 18 out of it.

So the recipe says to add 1 1/3 cups buttermilk.  I don't know what I was smoking, but I read that as one, 1/3 cup measure of buttermilk.  Definitely my mistake, and one I didn't make anywhere else in the recipe.  I did think it looked a little weird when I tried to put the following into the muffin tins:

 Yeah, it shouldn't be that dry.  Well, after basically throwing out that first batch of six, I re-read the recipe and found my mistake.  So I added the extra yogurt (I actually ran out and went with a yogurt-milk mixture), and put the next batch in the oven. It was then that I remembered that the recipe was also supposed to have Cheddar cheese.  Damn, how did I forget that?  So it wasn't until the last batch of six that I actually had everything.  Luckily, the batch without cheese was still pretty good.

 Fin.

Chocolate + Bacon = Goodness

So, I was reading some Calamities of Nature, a wonderful webcomic, and I was inspired by the cartoon in that link.  I'd never had a chocolate cake with bacon in it before, and I wondered what it would be like.  Luckily, the internet came to my rescue with this recipe, Dark Chocolate Bacon Cupcakes.  This was great, because I could easily dole them out to my coworkers to make them like me more. 

It's a quick and easy recipe, and I suggest that everyone try it.  The cake itself is delicious and moist, and the bits of bacon add some great texture and some welcome umami.  Even if you forgo the bacon, the cake recipe is great, so use it for your regular chocolate cakes too.  For the frosting, I just whipped up a quick chocolate cream cheese frosting.  There's no real recipe for that, just use your hand mixer to cream together a couple tablespoons of butter, maybe six tablespoons of cream cheese, about 3/4 cup of powdered sugar, and 1/4 cup cocoa powder.  My butter wasn't soft enough, so you can see little flakes of butter in the frosting.

Since my last update, I've also made a few other things, but they're not that exciting. 

Some Pakora:

Some Spam musubi:

Okay, the Spam musubi is pretty cool, you basically marinate some spam in teriyaki sauce, fry it, and put it on some sushi rice, wrapped with a bit of nori and a drop of wasabi.

Finally, we opened up our first bottle of homebrew last night.  It looks and tastes like real beer.

It's a wheat beer, and it's still got a few weeks left to age in the bottles, but we wanted to try this one, just to make sure everything is going well.  It seems to be.