Paper Cranes for Father's Day

When I was about four, the man my mother was dating came over and showed my siblings and I how to make origami paper cranes. My siblings each made one, but I refused to finish mine: I loved the diamond shape that the paper makes just before it's folded flat into the final crane shape. The man strung the cranes on to a string, with my diamond at the bottom.

The string of cranes came with us on our cross-country move from New Jersey to New Mexico, and so did the man. He married my mother and became my dad.

I came across a packet of origami paper in my partner's desk this week, which triggered the memory. I sat down and began folding.

Four cranes, one for each of my siblings, and the diamond at the bottom for me.

That sounds far more egotistical than I mean it to! But I still do like the in-between diamond stage of the cranes the best. The cranes fold flat, and I tucked the mobile into a card to send for father's day with a note about how I still remember that craft we made together, twenty-five years ago.

There's a great WikiHow tutorial here on how to fold paper cranes. If you want to string them like I did, you'll need a heavy needle and embroidery floss (any sturdy string will do.) You need to stitch the top of the diamond together - I did this by weaving the thread in and out. Then you will simply string the thread through each crane - tying a small knot under the crane so it won't slip down - and after they are all strung you make a loop to hang. It's a very easy little gift.

Groceries: June 10 - 16

This week I got a smaller, more leafy farmer's market haul:

That's arugula ($3), arugula micro greens ($2), purple carrots ($3), cat grass ($3), dinosaur kale ($3.50), beets ($3.50), and a pint of strawberries ($3.50). $21.50, not bad at all! I won't need to buy kitty grass every week - they last about three weeks if I rotate them.

I also had to buy a bag of sugar, dish soap and more popsicles at the regular store, which cost $9.88. This means the week's grocery total was $31.38, about $10 less than last week. That's pretty good. I didn't have to buy much this week because I didn't eat all that much last week...I was hit with stomach flu on Sunday and Monday. Yuck! So I still have those turnips and green garlic to work through.

I split the arugula with my neighbor. This is one problem with being on my own right now...I can't necessarily eat all the produce I bring home, especially leafy stuff like this. I will be having lots of sandwiches with the tasty bolillo rolls I made last week.

I have special plans for the beets. My partner doesn't like beets, you see. I never have in the past...but there's all sorts of exciting beet cupcake and beet donut recipes floating around these days! I want to make them. Yummy.

Adventures with Yeast: Bolillo Rolls

Yeast. Oh dear, yeast. You know those problems I had with cake? Imagine them tenfold, with yeast. For most of my cooking life, anything I made with yeast came out like a rock. It never rose! I eventually decided I must be cursed.

Then one day my sister asked me something very simple. "Don't you bloom the yeast?" she said.

Bloom? What was this strange ritual? And with these instructions, my baking horizons opened. Ever since I learned of this procedure, I've not had a yeast recipe fail. Blooming is something referenced in older cookbooks, but it seems to have disappeared from most non-specialty books over the last few decades. This is because commercial yeast is generally good - meaning it's alive when you buy it - and can be trusted to work. But blooming is more than just making sure your yeast is alive. It also gives a kickstart to the leavening process, allows flavor to develop, and makes it easier to combine the dough.

So here's what you do.

First, get the milk or water for your recipe hot. I'm making bolillo rolls; I need just over one cup of water. Mix it with the sweetener from your recipe; for this, I'm using honey, which is why the water is yellow. You must use some kind of sweetener when using yeast: it's what the yeast eats! Then, stick your thermometer in the liquid and water, and check to see that the temperature is about 90-105 degrees Farenheit (32 to 41 Celsius.) It is really important to get the temperature right: yeast dies at 120 degrees F (50 C) - and you don't want to kill the poor little yeast!

The next step is to sprinkle your yeast on top. Some people say to mix it in, some don't; I've never noticed a difference, so I just let it sit. Cover the bowl with a tea towel and let it be. Seriously, leave it alone for at least five minutes. You can walk away, or you can do what I do, which is to sing the yeast a little song.

Grow little fungi!

Grow grow grow!

Bubble and fart, fart and burp

Grow little fungi!

Grow grow grow!

Ahem. Anyway, after five minutes, your yeast should have gone from looking dry and grainy to soft and pillowy. The one on the top is the yeast just after adding; the one on the bottom is the bloomed yeast.

After this, it's really simple. Add your flour, add your salt, and whatever else is in the bread. Bolillo rolls have oil which makes them very soft and pliable. After the dry ingredients are added, the dough will look "shaggy." Really, you'll know it when you see it. Different recipes have different instructions for how long to knead and let the dough rise, so be sure to check your recipe. The recipe below is for bolillo rolls, which are great for pretty much everything, including eating on their own.

Bolillo Rolls

2 1/2 cups flour

1 cup plus 1 tsp warm water

1 1/2 tsp yeast

1 1/2 tsp honey

1 tsp salt

1/4 cup vegetable oil

1/4 cup water mixed with 1 tsp salt, for brushing

Cornmeal

Baking pan and boiling water, for the oven.

Prepare your baking pans with parchment paper sprinkled with a little amount of cornmeal.

Follow the instructions above to bloom the yeast. After the yeast is bloomed, mix in the flour and salt; when mostly combined, add oil and mix until "shaggy." (You will know it when you see it!) Turn the dough out on to a floured surface and begin to knead. Knead the dough for about ten minutes, until it comes together in a ball.

PICTURE

Put the dough back in the bowl, cover, and let rise in a warm place for about one hour, or doubled in bulk. It will look something like this:

PICTURE

Bolillos are a very soft, airy roll, so handle the risen dough gently. Don't punch it down - just turn it out on a lightly floured surface and shape into a circle. Cut the dough into eight more or less even peices. Shape each piece into a circle, then fold the circle in thirds. Roll the dough until it looks a bit like a flattened football, like these:

PICTURE

Put them on the prepared baking pans and let rise for about another hour, until again doubled in bulk. About halfway through the second rise, turn the oven to 425 degrees to preheat. Put the baking dish with boiling water on the bottom rack of your oven (this will create steam.) Then brush rolls with the saltwater mixture, and cut a slash in the top of each roll.

PICTURE

Bake for fifteen minutes, or until they are the golden color you like best. These keep quite well.

Nemesis Cake

I have no idea what to say about this cake.

It's purple. And orange.

The frosting is applied in a two-layer-thick zigzags.

The sprinkles on the top glow unhealthily.

Did I mention it was purple and orange?

I made this cake for a friend's son. He was turning thirteen, and it seemed the sort of event worth marking with something elaborate. The color scheme was his request. I had actually meant to have the outside be frosted in a very subdued, simple, white Swiss Meringue Buttercream...the better to show off the colors of the insides...but I think it got to me. After stacking the layers and putting down the first coat, I found myself giggling maniacally and whipping up another batch of the buttercream.

You see, I have no success with from-scratch cakes. They come out heavy, or burnt, or half-cooked, or dry, or so uneven that they can't be stacked. I once accomplished a chewy cake. And then there was the time I pulled an Anne Shirley and forgot the flour. I've learned to keep a box of cake mix on hand to comes to my rescue. Cake is my Kahn.

But somehow things fell in to place with this cake. It came out fluffy and even, just slightly domed. I followed Smitten Kitchen's Best Birthday Cake recipe exactly - I wasn't about to experiment with something that had been so difficult in the past! One important tip, though, if you want to dye the cake layers: mix your food coloring (gel colors are best) into the liquid ingredients - the butter, sugar, eggs, and in this case, milk. You'll want to slightly over-saturate the color, because once you add the flour it will lighten. But by mixing the color into the wet ingredients, you don't run the risk of over mixing the batter and creating too much gluten in the flour. (That will make the cake chewy.)

And the frosting! Amazingly, I made two batches of the stuff and they both came out perfectly. I would have liked the purple frosting to be a bit darker, but I ran out of red gel coloring. For this, I used Whisk Kid's beyond amazing recipe. You know what's so amazing about Whisk Kid? She doesn't treat a stand mixer as an essential kitchen ingredient. I don't have one - and even if I did, I don't have the counter space! This recipe might be slightly easier if you have one; your hand won't get tired from holding the hand mixer - but really, you can do it! Just remember that this recipe comes from a time before electricity - those egg whites had to be beaten by hand.

I'm not going to reproduce her recipe and technique here - I could not improve her tutorial. I did change one ingredient: rather than using regular granulated sugar, I used superfine sugar (known as caster sugar in the UK.) Superfine sugar, having smaller granules, will dissolve more readily in the egg yolk. But it's not at all necessary to do this. This buttercream is deliciously light and has more depth of flavor than standard buttercreams. It doesn't form a crust, but it holds up beautifully to being piped.

I've not yet conquered cake. But I have won this battle!

Mush!

I must confess it...not all of my cornbread muffins came out perfectly. Quite a few stuck to the pans, in whole or in part, resulting in a sad little bowl of imperfection.

What exactly can you do with these sad little imperfect muffins? They're too crumbly to spread butter on!

Well, I don't know about you, but I crumble them up even more. Until they bread bits are the size of the cranberries that filled them, and the cranberries are off on their cornmeal-dusted selves.

Then I perform alchemy!

A splash of milk, and then you have a delicious amazing bowl of cornmeal mush. I like to eat this while feeling sorry for all the people who will never experience such deliciousness. (The muffins don't have to be imperfect for this, either...although I do feel a bit silly crumbling up perfectly good muffins to make this!)

Groceries: June 3-9

This week was the first outdoor farmer's market of the season! I am lucky to have a great market three blocks from my back door. It's been a cold spring and it's still early, so the stalls are still just getting started. Here's what I got:

Well, not the cat. That's Millie, our seven-year-old rescue. She wanted to know why I was taking pictures of the cat grass, instead of putting it out for her. A fair enough question! The cats understand that Sunday is the day they get their special treat.

I got turnips ($3) and a mix of red/white potatoes ($4) - the potatoes are winter storage potatoes, but I was glad to have them. A pint of strawberries ($3.50), heirloom lettuce ($3), green garlic ($3), asparagus ($4) two small heads of broccoli ($2) and the cat grass ($3). A total of $25.50, which was a nice haul!

Obviously, I can't buy everything I need at the market. (I know some markets are more complete and sell things like flour, but our farmers are smaller operations.) So I did have to stop by the conventional grocery store, too.

The cats had no interest in this! I'm not going to go item by item here, but the total was $17.22. I didn't have to buy meat or eggs this week. I should have dish soap, but the store was, weirdly enough, sold out. (I do almost all of the non-produce shopping at Aldi's, where there is usually only one type of each item available. It's much cheaper than most other stores.) I have enough to last to next week. Those popsicles in the front are my secret vice...I eat an entirely ridiculous number of them every day.

$42.72 isn't all that bad for week's worth of groceries, but I really would like to see that number come down. I know that some of this food will last for more than a week (really, I can't eat two pounds of turnips and five pounds of flour in a week!) - but I'm aiming to have my groceries be more in the $30 range between the market and Aldi's. It will be fun to keep track over the weeks!

Lemon Souffle

My friend Erin visited last week, I've known Erin since we were both undergraduates - she was my roommate senior year (but not the one who refused the fruity cornbread.) I don't remember cooking that much when we lived together. The main memory I have is making salmon croquettes with a side of peas and mashed potatoes - a delicious little meal I still rely on when I need something tasty and fast. There's also "forgotten cookies" - crisp little meringue cookies with chocolate chips. Those are worth an entry of their own.

When Erin comes to visit, we do two things: eat our way across Chicago, and experiment with overly elaborate cooking feats. Last time we made friend chicken - golden and crisp and absolutely amazing. This time we decided to try something a bit more refined. We decided lemon souffle would make a perfect breakfast food.

Because, think about it: a souffle is mostly just eggs, whipped light and fluffy and mixed with delicious flavorings. Although these souffles have a certain amount of sugar, there's not much more than you'd find in a generous spoonful of jam spread on toast. These came out with a particularly good texture: I sprinkled sugar on the inside of the ramekins after they were buttered. The sugar caramelized slightly, but still provided a bit of crunch to contrast with the lightness of the souffle itself.

This was my first time making lemon souffle, but I've made cheese souffle several times. One thing that is really important for the success of a souffle is to cook them in a water bath. The hot water - which should come about 1/3 of the way up the side of the souffle dishes - does two things: it helps the souffle set evenly, and keeps the bottoms from burning. Plus, having the dishes in the pan will make it easier to take them out of the oven safely.

The dishes I used were slightly too large for the amount of souffle that my recipe made. Too large is better than too small: too much souffle will sadly bubble over the top and collapse. Best results will be achieved by filling the souffle dish just over 2/3rds full. You can use pretty much any oven safe dish for these: straight sides will rise better, but the souffle will be fluffy no matter what.

This was a really fun thing to be doing with Erin. Souffle really is something that needs two people, and Erin is great to cook with. It's nice to still be making new memories with an old friend!

Lemon Souffle
This recipe is a combination of ingredients and techniques from The Pleasures of Cooking For One by Judith Jones, and Frugal Granola's Lavender-Lemon Souffles for One. This recipe will make two ten ounce souffles.

1 tbsp butter for ramekins
1 tsp. sugar for ramekins
2 large eggs, separated (these should be room temperature; take out of refrigerator at least twenty minutes before beginning. If you think enough ahead, leave the eggs out the night before.)
1/4 cup sugar
2 tbsp lemon juice
Boiling water for baking pan

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Smear butter on the insides of the ramekins, then sprinkle sugar on the insides (just like preparing a cake dish.) Wipe away the butter and sugar from around the rim. Put ramekins in refrigerator while you prepare the souffle.

Beat the egg yolks and 1/4 cup sugar until slightly frothy, then add lemon juice and beat again until the yolks are light yellow. Set aside.

Beat the egg whites until they form soft peaks when you lift the whisk or beaters. The tip of the peak should fall over.

Take the ramekins out of the refrigerator and place in the baking dish. Beat the egg yolk again briefly to make sure the lemon and sugar is combined. Use a rubber spatula to mix a small amount of the egg white into the egg yolk - this is to lighten the yolks. Begin adding the remaining egg whites in small batches: be gentle in combining them - fold, don't stir. (Julia Child's technique in the souffle episode is, of course, perfect.) Don't be concerned if there are still some streaks of egg white in the mix when you are done.

Spoon souffle mix into the prepared ramekins. Place baking dish into the oven, and then add the boiling water. Cook for about twenty minutes: honestly, at about fifteen minutes you should start checking them, and when the tops are browned, they are done.

Remove from oven and enjoy!