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.
