News You Can Bruise

It's difficult to search for casserole recipes on the web because most of the recipes are full of mushroom soup. So I went with my gut and did the following egg bake thing for dinner last night. I guess I could have checked the Julia Child, but my gut was closer.

• 2 chopped up zucchini
• 2 chopped up leeks
• 1 cup milk
• 4 eggs
• shredded hard cheese
• bread crumbs

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Saute the leeks. Beat together milk, eggs, and cheese. Stack the zucchini in a 9-inch baking pan, mixed with the leeks. Pour the milk mixture on top and put bread crumbs on top of that. Bake for 50 minutes. It turned out great!

I make this for Sumana a couple times a week.

• 1 can black beans
• 2 chipotle peppers
• 4 eggs
• 8 corn tortillas

Drain beans and mash with peppers. Scramble eggs. Serve on warm tortillas. Add anything that you would put on a burrito: salsa, yogurt, cheese, greens, guacamole, etc. It's filling and tasty.

By popular demand the couscous recipe.

• 1 box firm tofu
• 2 cups vegetable broth
• 2 tsp olive oil
• 2 cups couscous
• 1/2 red onion, chopped
• 1 cucumber, chopped
• 2 tomatoes, chopped
• 1 bunch parsley, chopped

Okay. Drain the tofu, slice it into rectangles, fry it in peanut oil, slice it into strips.

Boil the olive oil and broth. Pour it on the couscous and fluff with a fork. Dump in all the other ingredients and mix it up some more.

Tastes like a particulate Cobb salad or something.

This recipe is derived from a really complicated recipe for a non-chili black bean soup from a Greens cookbook. I got rid of most of the complicated steps and now it's made almost entirely from things that come in cans. The other recipe is worth making but it's not hearty like a chili, and it's really inconvenient to make without a food mill.

Saute a diced onion and 1 t oregano in 2 T olive oil. Add 2 chipotle peppers with sauce and 2 chopped serrano peppers and 3 chopped cloves garlic and 28 ounces canned diced tomatoes with juice. Simmer this for a while.

Then prepare in a big pot: 2 cans drained kidney beans, 2 cans black beans with juice, 1 package fake ground beef, and 2 cups vegetable broth. You could substitute the kidney bean juice for the vegetable broth, but I've never trusted kidney bean juice. You could also omit the vegetable broth altogether. Heat this up a little so it'll be about the same temperature as the stuff in the skillet.

Then dump the skillet contents into the big pot and cook a little longer. Puree some of the chili and/or add crushed up tortilla chips to make it thicker. Eat with avocado/chopped tomatoes/sour cream/etc. This is pretty hot; the hotness dial is the serrano peppers if you want to change it.

I was going to make a potato-leek soup similar to Ultimate Chowdah, but the cream in the fridge had gone bad. So I came up with the idea of using blue cheese to thicken the soup instead of cream. It was definitely one of my better ideas.

• 1 tablespoon butter
• 2 onions worth of aromatics
• Salt
• 5 cups broth
• 2 lbs potatoes, quartered
• 2 ears corn, removed from cob
• Oregano
• Thyme
• 4 oz blue cheese
• Pepper

Melt butter in soup pan. Add aromatics and salt, and sweat. Add broth, potatoes, corn, and herbs. Cover and cook, stirring occasionally, for 25 minutes. Get out the stick blender and blend it. Stir in the blue cheese. Add pepper to taste. Yum.

For the record, the aromatics I used were one onion, part of a leek, and two stalks of baby garlic. Yes, it's Clean Out The Fridge Daze here at Leonard's house.

It turns out the recipe I gave for the cold remedy yesterday was actually Sumana's garbled recollection of the recipe. Here is the real recipe, from her mother:

Start by melting 1/2 t butter or thuppa (ie. ghee) in a pot. Then add:

• 1/4 t turmeric
• 1/2 t ground pepper
• 1/4 t fresh or ground ginger
• 1/2 t cumin (optional)
• A few whole cloves (optional)
• 4 cups water

Boil down to 2 cups and drink with honey. Or add salt and serve it with rice.

Sumana also got me a copy of Make. If I were good at making things I'd be all over that magaine. As it is, I'm only partially over it.

Ie. the recipes from Sumana's mother. This is a cold/sore throat remedy that really surprised me. You grind pepper into a saucepan full of water and boil the water. Then you grate ginger into it and drink it. Shocking!

From Sumana's mother, Nagalakshmi, who wants me to come to India and says if I do she'll teach me how to cook Indian food.

• 2-3 teaspoons peanut oil
• 1 teaspoon mustard seed
• 1 teaspoon turmeric
• small amount of grated ginger

Heat the oil in a pan. When it's hot, add the mustard seed, turmeric, and ginger. Then add:

• Vegetables cut into bite-sized pieces (in my experience, 3/4 head cauliflower and 5 quartered new potatoes suffice)
• 1/4 cup water

Close the lid and leave for 5-8 minutes. Then add:

• Curry powder
• Salt
• Lemon juice
• Coconut powder (!)

Serve with rice or naan or whatever.

My problem was, I was using too much liquid and my curry always was soupy.

I revently bought a bunch of spices mail-order (more on this later) but I didn't get any turmeric. I thought the only reason people used turmeric was for color, to fool diners into thinking you'd put saffron into the food when actually you were too cheap to buy saffron. Sumana and her mother think this is a hilarious misconception of mine.

You come up with a great name for a dish and then it turns out someone else came up with it in 1998. They provided no recipe, though, so this is still groundbreaking stuff. I made this tonight for my "secondhand-eponymous dishes" mini-dinner party (also on the menu: Caesar salad and bananas Foster).

Basically you are going to put oyster mushrooms at the bottom of a ramekin (to simulate an oyster in its shell), and then fill it up with your favorite Oysters Rockefeller topping, except a little goopier to make up for the lack of oyster liqueur. Then you bake it and broil it. Here's the recipe I synthesized which tastes good, though I have no frame of reference to compare it to. It makes 4 ramekins worth.

• MUSHROOMS
  • 4 oz package mushrooms
• FILLING
  • 1 T butter
  • 2 cups fresh spinach
  • 1/2 onion, chopped
  • 1 T or more chopped parsley
  • 1/4 cup breadcrumbs
  • 1/4 cup shredded cheese
  • Zest of 1 lemon
• WHITE SAUCE
• A little less than 1 T butter
• 1 T flour
• 1/4 cup milk

Chop the MUSHROOMS and put them at the bottom of ramekins.

Saute the spinach and onion in the butter until the onion is a little brown and the spinach has wilted. Put the mixture in the food processor, add the rest of the FILLING ingredients, and process.

Make a white sauce out of the WHITE SAUCE ingredients, using the pan you just used for the spinach and onion. (Quick mini-recipe to make white sauce: melt butter, add flour and stir, when it's brown add milk and stir and reduce to a sauce.) Pour the white sauce in the food processor and process again. You are basically making a weird pesto with white sauce instead of olive oil. Then scoop it into the ramekins and smooth it out flat.

Bake for about 12 minutes at 350 degrees, then garnish with more breadcrumbs and finish it by broiling for 2 minutes. Garnish with chopped parsley, hot sauce, lemon juice, or whatever. Tasty!

This is an incredibly easy soup that you can make when you're sick. I made it up when Sumana was sick and then tried it myself when I was sick earlier this week. The general idea comes from my mother. It's actually cheaper than most canned soup nowadays.

Ingredients

• 1 can broth
• 1 bunch soba noodles (sold at Trader Joe's or in the Asian foods aisle of supermarkets that have one)
• Salt, or whatever else you need to make the broth stop tasting like broth.
• lime juice and hot sauce (or eliminate the middleliquid and use Floyd's Famous HotLime Sauce, which is great)

Procedure

Dump everything except the lime/hot stuff into a pot and heat until it boils. Simmer until the noodles are soft. Pour into a bowl and add lime/hot stuff until it's hot enough to clear your sinuses. The microorganisms won't know what hit them!

If you're not sick you might be able to think about adding some other stuff, like chopped parsley or random spices.

More dang recipes. Why not? I just got a melon baller from Sur La Table thanks to a gift card I got for my birthday (thanks, Andrew/Claudia) and it's great. Now, no melon is safe from my circular scalpel. I made the following recipe and tried to sell them to Sumana as "fake Dippin' Dots". She didn't buy it, but the liked the results. It is a simple yet ritzy appetizer, at least if my notions as to what is 'ritzy' are accurate, which they probably aren't.

Ingredients

• 1 ripe canteloupe
• 1-2 tablespoons sugar
• Coarse ground pepper
• Balsamic vinegar

Procedure

Cut the canteloupe in half, remove the seeds, and take the melon baller to it. Whee! Put the canteloupe balls on a cooling rack and put the cooling rack on a parchment-paper-lined sheet pan. Sprinkle sugar over them and put the sheet pan in the freezer for at least half an hour. (Note: the cooling rack and sheet pan are just a thing I made up so the canteloupe balls won't come out embedded in frozen canteloupe juice. You can just put them in a bowl but it'll get a little messy. Maybe you could set something up with a strainer over a bowl.)

So flavor #1 is the canteloupe. Flavor #2 is the pepper and flavor #3 is the balsamic vinegar. The important events in the life of any given canteloupe ball are a) being formed from the primordial canteloupe; b) having a toothpick jabbed into it; c) being frozen; d) being rolled in pepper; e) being dipped in balsamic vinegar; f) being eaten. How exactly you put them together depends on the scenario. The constraints are that you want the canteloupe to be as cold as possible when eaten, and that I don't think balsamic vinegar will freeze well.

For a party scenario you might do it a-b-d-c-e-f, providing a dish of vinegar for people to dip the canteloupe in. Or if it turns out balsamic vinegar freezes well, you could do it a-b-e-d-c-f and omit the need for a separate dish of vinegar.

The way I eat it is a-c-b-d-e-f, reusing the same toothpick for every canteloupe ball. Also, I'm usually standing over the kitchen counter while I'm doing it. Even though I got good at cooking, I'm still a slob.

This is a controversial recipe, and not all people accept it. Sumana does not like the cracked pepper, and thinks it should be omitted from the recipe. This might argue for a party-time preparation of a-b-c-d-e-f, providing a dish of cracked pepper as well as one of vinegar, so as to satisfy picky people like her.

Note about balsamic vinegar: the best kind is the generic brand sold at Whole Foods, which is really good and really cheap. Also, you can make balsamic vinegar taste twice as expensive by putting it in a saucepan and reducing it by half. I learn things from cooking shows and give you the important bits.

More generally, recipe mania. Sumana asked me to type up this recipe for a friend at work, so I might as well share it with you. This is my the brownie recipe that lives in my head and makes pretty good brownies. In its composition it is based on recipes on the backs of baking chocolate boxes and in my box of family recipes. The procedure for baking them so you don't have to cut them in the pan comes from Alton Brown. In its combination of disparate parts it is my own invention.

Ingredients

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 t salt
• 1 to 2 T powdered cocoa (optional)

• 1 stick butter, cubed
• 4 ounces (2 packages) Nestle baking chocolate, chopped [nb. the brand name is not a back-of-baking-chocolate-box relic. I specify Nestle here because Baker's baking chocolate is no good, and Nestle's is both readily available and good for baking. Scharffen Berger is noticably better than Nestle's but even more noticably expensive.]

• 1 1/2 cups white sugar
• 1/2 cup brown sugar

• 4 eggs
• 1 T vanilla
• Mystery ingredient (optional)

• 1 cup chopped nuts (optional)

Procedure

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Cut some parchment paper to fix a 9x13 pan including up the sides. Put the parchment paper inside the pan; I use butter spray on the pan to make the paper stick.

Sift together the dry ingredients and set them aside.

In a large bowl over a pot of boiling water (double boiler style), melt the butter and baking chocolate. Once it's melted, remove from the heat and stir in the sugars. Stir in the eggs, one at a time, then the vanilla and the mystery ingredient (about which more anon).

Finally, fold in the dry ingredients. Add a batch of half to a third of the dry ingredients to the batter, and mix to combine. Repeat until it's all in there. Don't stir this more than you have to or the flour will get glutinous and you'll have a cake. If you want nuts, put them in now.

Pour the batter into the paper-lined pan, spread it out, and bake it for 30 minutes (use toothpick test to see when it's done). Once it's done you can grab the parchment paper and just pull it out of the pan and put it on a cooling rack. Once it cools you can cut it up with a knife or pizza cutter, without having to worry about cutting within the pan.

These are good as is, but if you like marshmallows you can do what Alison wrote about, and put mini marshmallows on top of a brownie, then broil it for a minute or two.

So, about the mystery ingredient. This is where you can turn "brownies" into "x brownies" by adding to the batter a small amount of something strongly flavored. I like a teaspoon of mint extract, or a couple tablespoons of peanut butter warmed in the microwave, or some espresso powder. When I was much younger I liked to put chocolate chips in the brownies I made, but now that seems kind of gauche.

I guess I should post this since I already got a request for it. This is the recipe for mashed sweet potatoes mentioned in the Salon article. It's based on an ATK recipe but the requestor couldn't find the recipe on the ATK site for whatever reason, and mine's a little different anyway. It's really simple, so here it is in 1-2-3-4 form:

• 1 tablespoon brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons heavy cream
• 3 tablespoons butter
• 4 medium sweet potatoes (about 2 pounds' worth), peeled and sliced

Dump everything in a pot. Cover and cook for about 30 minutes, stirring frequently. Mash and serve with pepper.

I have a nonstick pot, so even though I was lazy about stirring and some of the potato slices got burned on the surface, it just enhanced the flavor with Maillard reaction products. Laziness wins again!

I remember the ATK recipe using white sugar instead of brown. I'm sure they tested it both ways but using white sugar with sweet potatoes just seems wrong to me.

On behalf of Kevin. Attention, West Coast and chain restaurants! We know you think you know the recipe for biscuit gravy. You think it goes like this:

1. Make white sauce
2. Fry some crappy sausage
3. Put some crumbled sausage in the white sauce

Unfortunately white sauce is not biscuit gravy. White sauce is made from butter, and biscuit gravy is made from sausage grease, verily, the same sausage grease you created while frying the crappy sausage and then dumped into the grease pan or whatever happens to grease in restaurants. Contrary to popular opinion it is not neccessary to be a lovable Southern stereotype to make good biscuits and gravy. It is simply neccessary to not start off with a dang white sauce.

When I was younger I sometimes tried to make choux puffs and put pudding or ice cream in them for a dessert. But since they always came out flat it was difficult to put things in them. For my birthday party back in July I made savory choux puffs with cheese, and Sumana loved them so much that I kept making them, and eventually I had paid my puff-making dues and my puffs started actually coming out puffed.

Sumana wanted me to put up the recipe even though there's nothing special about my recipe, so here it is. Maybe I can help with technique.

The recipe uses my patented "1 of everything" measurements. I call them Rustic because to save time I dole them out with a spoon instead of a pastry bag, so they are a little lumpy. As all restaurant-goers know, Lumpy equals Rustic and vice versa.

• 1 cup water
• 1 pinch each salt and pepper
• 1 stick butter (only half a cup, but at least it's 1 of something)
• 1 cup flour
• 4 eggs, at room temperature (nb. since a large egg is about 2 ounces this is 1 cup of eggs! But you probably won't remember that.)
• 1 cup semisoft cheese, grated

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Put the butter, salt, and pepper in the water and boil it. As soon as it comes to a boil, dump the flour in and stir it into a big ball. Transfer it to the mixer bowl, or use a hand mixer, because you're really going to need to clobber this dough. I'm pretty sure that insufficient clobbering was the cause of the flatness of my earlier attempts (my other guess is cold eggs; I haven't yet run an experiment to see which it is).

Start clobbering and add the eggs one at a time. Once the mixture looks thoroughly clobbered, add another egg. Then add the cheese and clobber some more.

Scoop with a spoon onto a cookie sheet and bake for 20 minutes. Parchment paper or a Silpat mat on the cookie sheet help a lot. Knife the puffs when they come out of the oven so they don't get soggy. Then either eat them or let them sit a while, cut them open, and fill with something. My favorite filling right now is duxelle (basically sauteed mushrooms and onions) and MORE CHEESE. I am trying to think of something with kalmata olives. For truly lowbrow cheese puffs you could just fill them with Cheez Whiz.

This makes 24 cheese puffs, or 2 cookie sheets' worth.

This is my reverse-engineering of a dish by that name that Seth had heard about when he was young. I'll present it in lovely CfE format.

3 yams, peeled and diced	Bake on sheet for 30 minutes at 325 degrees		combine
1 cup mixed dried fruit (eg. cranberries, raisins)
1 cup nuts (eg. walnuts)	toast
2 Walla Walla or other sweet onions, diced	saute in olive oil
ground cinnamon
cumin
2 cloves garlic, diced
2 cups water or broth	boil	combine and fluff
2 cups couscous

Discussion: I added more stuff to the recipe than to the dish I actually made, because the awesome expansion power of couscous made the end result look like a desert of couscous which expeditions of yams and cranberries had unsuccessfully tried to cross. Couscous can hold a lot of other stuff. I also added some garlic to the recipe because the couscous I made was too sweet and lacked bite. Put in the garlic when your saute is almost done so it doesn't burn; that's just a general rule of garlic. I used Hawaiian sweet onions because I couldn't find Walla Walla onions.

Not bad, for a first couscous recipe. And until I find a better one, I declare that this has the best name of any dish ever created.

By request, here are recipes for the things I served at my Sunday night dinner party:

• Pasta: regular penne with a pesto sauce. See pesto post passim.
• Corn: corn soaked in water and then grilled on my tiny charcoal grill.
• Dip: based on this recipe. I used Fontina instead of Monterey Jack because I think Monterey Jack has no flavor, even though it's the only cheese named after a place in California. I used garlic instead of garlic powder because I don't have any garlic powder. I didn't use salsa because I find that idea kind of creepy, and also I wanted to make everything from scratch. Not having a slow cooker, I baked it in the oven for about 30 minutes.
• French bread: sliced very thin and served with the dip. I used the recipe from The Baker's Apprentice, which is pretty basic. The secret the book taught me is to make half the dough the day before and let it ferment in the fridge, then mix it in with the other half. It presents this as two separate recipes due to the structure of the book, but that's what it boils down to.
• Salad: this was a disaster so I did not assemble it and we did not eat it. However I was able to salvage part of it later in the evning, when I baked the jicama slices in the oven and made jicama chips which were much tastier than raw jicama. I've had jicama in restaurant salads and it was delicious, but they must marinade it or something because when I tasted it raw it was disgusting. Let's move on.
• Ice cream pie: Graham cracker crust made using the America's Test Kitchen recipe where you toast unsweetened coconut and whirl it in the food processor along with the graham crackers. I used chocolate graham crackers. You don't see enough graham cracker crusts. I think it's better than a pastry crust for just about any kind of pie (and it's certainly easier), but maybe that's my American cook heresy.

  Two batches of ice cream: chocolate on the bottom (flavor stuff = 1 cup grated chocolate), and butter pecan on top. Also hot fudge sauce, where I abandoned my family's traditional fudge sauce for a recipe I can't find at the moment, but it thickened the sauce with flour, like a roux. I was a little dubious about this but I like the extra thickness.

  As we were eating the ice cream pie we started talking about Dr. Graham and his crackers. Seth said that Graham was ahead of his time. "He said you should eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, and whole grains, and not eat sugar." There was a long pause, and then Riana raised her bowl full of hot fudge ice cream chocolate graham cracker pie. "Here's to Dr. Graham!" she said.

As a test of the automatic aggregation, I'll post the most recent recipe I've made. I'm having a little dinner party tomorrow and tonight I made butter pecan ice cream. This is a good time to formally state the pound-cake-like Generic Ice Cream Mneumonic I've come up with:

• 1 cup cream
• 1 cup milk (whole cow milk in this case)
• 1 cup sugar (brown sugar in this case)

I'm experimenting with heating the sugar along with the cream and milk. It worked out well this time, so heat all that up in a pan.

Now, the rest of my mneumonic (patent pending) is '1 cup flavor stuff'. However, the flavor of butter pecan ice cream depends in large part on the brown sugar we're using, so that kind of counts as 'flavor stuff' and we actually want less than 1 cup. What I used was:

• 1/3 cup chopped pecans
• 1 tablespoon butter

If you're offended by the idea of deviation from the mneumonic I made up, then 1) that's kind of weird, and 2) you can probably do 1 cup of nuts and 3 tablespoons of butter without ruining the ice cream.

Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the pecans and toss to coat. Toast the pecans. I dunno when you stop exactly; generally you stop toasting nuts as soon as you smell the oils being released, but something is wrong with my sense of smell today so I just stopped when they looked right. Dump the nuts and butter into the cream/milk/sugar mixture. Stir in The Old Standbys:

• 1 or 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 1 teaspoon salt

When you've got nuts and sugar and cold, you know there's got to be salt.

There's your mix. Let it cool and then machine it. Very tasty.

I made this out of Planet Organic leftovers that I've been too lazy to cook the past few weeks. It is delicious (there is a huge amount left). Sumana says "It's the best chowdah I've ever had." I think it is too.

Ingredients

• 4 Russet potatoes, diced (do not peel!)
• 2 ribs of celery, chopped
• 3 carrots, peeled and chopped
• 3 ears corn, cut from the cob
• 1 can creamed corn
• 2 cans vegetable broth plus water to cover
• 2 large leeks: soaked, chopped, soaked again (this is to get rid of any dirt or sand)
• 1 cup cream
• Tarragon
• Thyme
• Salt and pepper

Procedure

Put everything except the leeks and the cream in a pot and start a-simmerin'. Saute the leeks in butter and put them in the pot. Once the potatoes and the corn are cooked (maybe 30 minutes), mash the soup with a potato masher. If you want, blend it a little with a stick blender. At the last minute, stir in the cream to turn it into a chowdah.

This is the only recipe I know of that is both a potato-leek soup and a potato-corn chowdah. That's right, it's two soups in one. Step right up!

PS about stick blenders: they cost about $30 except for one particular brand (I forget which) that costs $10. It's not worth $30 to have one but I think it is worth $10. So get the cheap one. It is useful for: soups, whipping cream, light drink-mixing duty.

PPS: Susanna, I made your ninety-minute rolls this morning and they were so good that I made another batch in the evening.

It's madness, but it works. Make fondue and then add some pesto to it at the last minute. I made it last night and it was more of a cheesy pesto dip because I lost control of the cornstarch, but it tasted great. Also good on toast.

Let's say you just made some pesto, but in doing so you used up all your culinary energy for the day. You can't bring yourself to boil water for pasta or make a sauce out of the pesto.

What to do? Slice some bread, spread pesto on it, put it in the broiler, and you've got pestoast! It's like Vegemite toast, but not gross. Also a good way to revive old bread because the olive oil in the pesto revitalizes it.

I bought a bunch of strawberries thinking I would make that Italian dessert with strawberries and balsamic vinegar. Then I remembered how much I like strawberry ice cream and I decided to make strawberry ice cream instead--with balsamic vinegar! Ha! Here's the recipe:

• 1 pint strawberries, hulled and chopped
• Juice of 1/2 lemon
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
• 1 tbsp vanilla extract

Macerate[0] the strawberries in the juice/vinegar/vanilla for an hour. You can add any other flavorings you want; I tried a little almond extract because I have this huge thing of almond extract I bought and I'm trying to figure out what it's good for. Once it's good and macerated, add:

• 1 cup milk
• 1 cup heavy cream

Mix well. Smush with a fork or potato masher if you want. Put in an ice cream maker, and there you go. No cooking. Strawberry seeds are very small so you don't have to worry about seeds in the ice cream.

I have had the ice cream but I am not sure how it tastes. I just don't know! Is the balsamic vinegar good or bad for the flavor? Would it be better as just a standard strawberry ice cream? It's a very complicated flavor and I need more time to decide.

I think my final verdict will be it's good for small dishes on the veranda but not for big pints that you eat while watching Sex in the City and generally being a big stereotypical chick. Ususally I wait to post up a recipe until I know whether or not I actually like it, but Sumana is doing a taste test and she always wants me to have the recipe put up in advance.

Other recipes coming up: pestoast, vegetarian risotto.

[0] This is cook-speak for 'soak'. I don't know why there are so many cooking terms that mean the same thing. "Marinade" and "macerate" imply different types of soaking substances, but since you have to say what the soaking substance is, I don't know why they don't just say "soak" except in those really terse recipes that are really just descriptions like you see in those pocket French cookbooks: Strawberries macerated in balsamic vinegar, made into ice cream. Here "vinegar" implies a marinade, but "macerated" makes you know that you have to add sugar and rare liquers and whatnot.

I made some hummus for Mark's birthday party, which I'm going off to after I post this. It turns out you have to start it in the food processor, unless you have a monster diesel-powered blender. I really do recommend finishing it in the blender, though. I added some sesame seeds and it's got a little different taste from the other batch of hummus. I think that's mainly because I used a different brand of garbanzo bean. Still good, and I managed to get the consistency right.

It's been over a week since one promise fed into another. I promised Alyson I'd try to figure out how to make smooth, creamy hummus like they serve in Middle Eastern restaurants. She and I are tired of the grainy stuff you get in a tub from the store. So join me in the Test Kitchen You Can Bruise, as I uncover the secrets of great hummus.

I looked at eight different hummus recipes on the web and tried to factor out the commonalities and tally the differences. I came up with the following generic set of ingredients:

Generic Hummus

• 1 12-ounce can garbanzo beans
• Juice of 1/2 lemon
• 1 or 2 cloves garlic
• 2 tablespoons tahini
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• pinch salt
• pinch pepper

Process all ingredients except for olive oil in food processor or blender. Use water or reserved garbanzo liquid to lubricate the hummus if the blade won't catch. Slowly drizzle olive oil (as though making pesto) into the vortex until hummus reaches desired consistency.

Simple enough. Then there were the secret ingredients: cumin, soy sauce (?! But it was in two of the eight recipes!), ground sesame, oregano, paprika, chopped parsley, chopped chilis, coriander, plain yogurt, cayenne, turmeric, and cilantro.

I decided to use yogurt instead of water or reserved liquid, because it would both lubricate the hummus and add the tangy flavor you get at a restaurant. I bought cumin and coriander to put in the hummus, but I am a spice spaz and I couldn't find the coriander. I used marjoram instead, because it smelled nice.

What I got was pretty good. It's smooth (a little too smooth, actually; I used too much yogurt) and tasty. Since I got it pretty close, I think my one experiment entitles me to take a guess at the two secrets to smooth hummus:

1. Add 2 or 3 tablespoons of plain yogurt to the generic recipe.
2. Use the blender, not the food processor.

I started the hummus in the food procesor (a teeny 2 cup model that makes me work in stages; wedding gift overflow from an anonymous source), but I wasn't happy with the consistency so I moved it to the blender to finish it. I'm almost certain you could get the exact same result by just dumping everything in the blender.

All the herbs and spices affect the way it tastes, not the consistency. I do not claim to have made the tastiest hummus in the world; just one that has a good creamy consistency. As for flavor, I have not tried this, but adding a tablespoon or two of peanut butter might be good.

You might balk at buying plain yogurt just so you can use a little bit of it in hummus. The solution is to buy a lot of plain yogurt and make tzatziki with the rest; then you've got the complete Pita Fun Pak.

Incidentally, after smelling my post-hummus breath Sumana wants me to make it clear that a little garlic goes a long way in this recipe.

I should be sleeping off my NewsBruiser triumph, but instead I'm writing this because I promised Sumana to demystify pesto tonight. So let me tell you that I made pesto on a whim without ever having made it before and it was great. I made it out of less-than-fresh basil and it was great. I made "Panic Pesto" out of whatever vaguely relevant ingredients I had lying around, and it was great. It's hard to screw up pesto. With that in mind, let me clear up some common misconceptions about pesto and its manufacture.

Myth: Pesto is just olive oil and basil.
Fact: Pesto is also three other things.

To make pesto you combine basil, nuts, cheese, and garlic in a food processor, then, with the food processor on, drizzle in olive oil until the mixture becomes semi-liquid. There should be a lot of basil, the same amount of nuts as cheese, and garlic to taste.

You can add pepper if you want. I wouldn't add salt if I were you. There's plenty of salt in the cheese, and if you are some kind of salt vampire or humanoid deer you should just keep your freakish lifestyle to yourself. There is no room in the blues for your petty sentimentality!

Myth: You must use hand-carved pine nuts.
Fact: That doesn't even make sense.

You can make pesto with any kind of nut. Panic Pesto was made of half pine nuts and half walnuts. Does it make a difference? Sure. In the way it tastes. Not in whether or not it's pesto. It still tastes fine.

Myth: Only Parmesan cheese is acceptable.
Fact: The previous statement is a myth, whereas this one is fact.

Panic Pesto was made of 1/4 Parmesan and 3/4 Jarlsberg fondue leftovers. If Jarlsberg works, then any white hard or semi-soft cheese should work. Maybe bleu cheese would work. Maybe even cheddar would work.

Myth: The non-use of basil in pesto will anger the pesto king.
Fact: The pesto king is an imposter and a fraud. So who cares?

I have only ever made pesto with basil, because both Sumana and I are crazy about basil. But you could make it with parsley instead, or spinach, or anything that's leafy and green with some flavor. You could even make mint pesto, though I wouldn't put it on pasta.

Myth: Blah blah blah.
Fact: Just put whatever you want in pesto. Make it with walnut oil. Substitute some other aromatic for garlic. Make hummus instead. You could probably come up with a combination that is awful, but my feeling is you'd have to ignore some other common-sense rule of cooking to do it.

I have reached that annoying (to you) stage of culinary skill where I can kind of make food on the fly, but I can't precisely recreate a recipe after the fact. I just can't envision the quantities. However, the secret of cooking is that recipes are very flexible so long as you're not making a cake or anything. So although the quantities I put down below are estimates, they should come out fine. If you run out of filling, just make more. That's what I did.

With that in mind, here is my baklava recipe. This is not at all like traditional baklava, which I think I've mentioned I don't really like. It's really dry and I can't help but think it is a complete waste of an opportunity to use figs or dates. The consensus from the salon.com tasting lab is that these are like brownies, so I dub them Baklava Brownies. They are probably healthier than fudge brownies, because they're basically made of dates and nuts, the sort of things that if you cornered a doctor and asked if it was healthy to eat a lot of them, the doctor would give sort of an equivocal answer versus a straight "no".

The goal of this recipe is to prepare FILLING, put it between sheets of BUTTERED PHYLLO, and bake it before adding TOPPING. First, preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Then start assembling the

FILLING

• 2 cups walnuts
• 12 dates, pitted
• 1 chocolate bar, shaved

Chop up everything in a food processor. You should have a big sticky mass. This is going to have a browniesh consistency and taste, but it's not going to have any structural integrity. That's why you're going to employ it as filling in a

BUTTERED PHYLLO ASSEMBLY

I'm not going to get into the mechanics of buttering phyllo dough. Suffice to say that you need:

• 5 sheets of phyllo dough, cut in half
• About 3/4 a stick of melted butter

Layer three sheets (actually half-sheets) of dough on the bottom and spread half of the filling on top. Layer three more sheets on top of the filling and put the rest of the filling on top of that. Top with three more sheets. Butter every side of every sheet of phyllo dough.

I built my baklava on a cookie sheet, but it should be small enough and would be more in keeping with the brownie theme to put it in a brownie pan. Anyway, according to some online sources you should cut squares out of the baklava before you bake it--just cut the top layer of dough, don't cut into the filling. I did this and it turned out fine.

You've got a half-sheet of phyllo dough left. Cut it up, butter it, and smush it along the sides of your assemblage so that the filling doesn't run out when you bake it. Then bake it, for about 10 minutes. While it's baking make the

TOPPING

You really shouldn't trust my recipe here, because my topping never reduced and thus didn't turn out too well. But it's equal parts honey and sugar (about 1/4 cup of each), reduced in an equal amount of water with a tablespoon of lemon juice. Spoon it over the baklava when you take it out of the oven.

Like brownies, you can eat this hot or let it cool. It's good either way.

Sumana likes them, I think they are mediocre. I will concede they are very good for a food that combines two completely different culinary concepts solely for the sake of a funny name. Sumana took the leftovers to work for a taste test. Results to be published in an update.

Filling:

• 6 Samoa Girl Scout Cookies
• 1.5 bananas
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 1 tablespoon shredded coconut
• dash vanilla

Dough:

• 3 sheets phyllo dough
• 1 tablespoon melted butter

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Mash up the bananas. Chop up the cookies. Mush everything together.

Spread 3 sheets of the phyllo dough out on a cookie sheet. Brush each layer with melted butter and cut into 4 triangles. Distribute the filling between the triangles and fold into a vaguely samosoid shape with the filling in the middle. Brush top with butter and sprinkle with sugar. Bake for about 10 minutes. Makes 4 samosas.

---

This is a scaled-down recipe. We actually made 6 samosas with 2 bananas and 8 cookies. We used 1 more sheet of phyllo dough to fashion the other 2 samosas. It's complicated so I didn't put it in the recipe. Just eat the other banana half.

I still have 14 sheets of phyllo dough, and it's not as hard as I'd feared to work with. Maybe I'll make some weird baklava or warbat (warbat!).

Sumana and I made Samoa Samosas. They are not insanely great but they're edible. They'd be more edible if instead of taking the premise literally and using real Samoa cookies I used flavors that resembled those found in Samoa cookies, like chocolate and coconut. Recipe coming tomorrow, for completeness.

This is an easy and tasty soup. I made it tonight to run some experiments before posting the recipe. To make it you stew ROASTED SQUASH AND THE LIKE in BROTH, blend it in the blender, and then add DAIRY and SEASONING. I didn't keep track of the time, but it probably took half an hour to 45 minutes.

ROASTED SQUASH AND THE LIKE

• 3 large squash or more than 3 smaller squash
• Pepper
• Brown sugar

This can be any kind of squash or any other vegetable that's stringy and fleshy and you didn't like when you were a kid. The more squash you use, the heartier the soup. Tonight I used a butternut squash, some other kind of squash I don't know what it's called (it's yellow and shaped like a Keystone Kop's billyclub; it might actually be a zucchini), and two sweet potatoes.

Peel the squash and bisect them so as to maximize the exposed surface area. Scoop out any seeds and sprinkle the squash with pepper and brown sugar. Bake them on a cookie sheet in the oven until they're hot and you're sick of waiting. If you don't peel the squash you'll just have to scoop out the flesh once you remove them from the oven, when they're hot enough to ignite human flesh. There's no need to bake the squash skin! Anyway, once the baking is done you are ready to chop up the squash and dump them into the simmering

BROTH

• 3 cups of vegetable broth, more or less

I use two 14-ounce cans of vegetable broth. Using less broth is another way to increase the heartiness of the soup. I don't think any other kind of broth makes sense for this soup. While the squash cooks in the broth, mash it up with a potato masher. When it's good and mashed, transfer a few cups of it to the blender and blend it. Pour back into the soup pot and repeat until the soup is the consistency you want. If you're like Adam and Kim and you have one of those fancy hand blenders, by all means, use the fancy hand blender. Once you have a good thick soup you are ready to add the

DAIRY

• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1 cheese rind or 1 cup shredded cheese or whatever (I use the heel of the Jarlsberg from the most recent time I made fondue).

The cream is a double-edged sword. It adds richness (because of the fat) at the expense of heartiness (because of the liquid). It's fine to use less cream, or none. I add the cheese because I like the flavor of a Swiss cheese in the soup, and I also like getting rid of old cheese.

SEASONING

• Pepper
• Nutmeg
• Grated ginger

I like a lot of different flavors, so every time I make this soup I add more stuff. Last time it was the cheese. This time I added toasted sesame seeds, which worked pretty well. Toasted squash seeds would have been more thematic. I bet you could also add garlic. (Side note to self: come up with dessert involving sesame seeds baked in brown sugar.)

Stir it all up, and you have soup! Serves 6, I guess (me + Sumana + Housemate 1^TM + Housemate 2^TM + me or Sumana having seconds + me or Sumana having a bowl for some other meal).

Next time: I am actually going to make Samoa Samosas. I have the ingredients and everything.

I made up a recipe for a college student (Rachel) to eat without having to leave her house. Unfortunately it did not work because yes, she has no bananas, but she did like the recipe. "you should be a CHEF with your own cooking show", says she. Well, I am a CHEF of sorts, but unfortunately my proposal for a cooking show was rejected by ESPN.

I call this "Bisected Banana". Take a banana, peel it, and split it lengthwise. Spread creamy peanut butter on one of the banana halves and use it to glue the banana back together. Sprinkle the banana with a little sugar. The end.

I had a big bag of dried cranberries from the "I didn't get enough Thanksgiving food" post-Thanksgiving food preparation mania, which I think was a big failure which is why I haven't shared my recipes with you. Anyway, a few of these cranberries had gone into a stuffing (which would have been great if I knew how to make stuffing), but I had an enormous number of them left and was at a loss as to how to dispose of them. Then it occured to me to use them instead of raisins in chocolate chip cookies. And they are great; much better, I would say, than raisins. You'll never eat chocolate chip cookies the same way again!

Update: The Crummy.com Test Kitchen You Can Bruise informs me that you eat these cookies the same way you ate cookies previously; they just taste different. My testers also add that you can alter the taste even more by partially rehydrating the cranberries in rum or other medicinal spirits.

Last night I tried my hand at making blackberry cobbler. I just combined a couple recipes off the web (filling and buttermilk biscuit crust (ATK link requires registration)), so I won't give you a whole recipe, just some lessons learned.

• This is some really expensive cobbler because--stay with me here--blackberries are not exactly cheap in the middle of winter. I should have used frozen blackberries; if they're going into the oven it probably doesn't matter whether or not they're fresh.
• Don't mash up the blackberries to get them to absorb the sugar. Okay, maybe one application of the masher, ONE. If you mash them up too much, as I did, the cobbler becomes runny.
• Use all of the dough to bake biscuits, even if you have to make two trips to the oven. Alternatively, make the biscuits much bigger than you think they should be.

I think the cobbler turned out very well for a first attempt. Future cobblers will be more effective in their consistency and tastiness.

The name's Derek Lask. It says "Private Eye" on the door, but I'm actually a gumshoe. On that particular day, I was peeling and pitting five peaches. A dame walked into my office just as I finished scraping the peels into the compost bucket.

"I heard you were a gumshoe," she said, setting her purse on my Formica countertop. I started blending three of the peaches with a quarter-cup of lemon juice, and mashed up the other two with a potato masher.

"You heard right, sister," I said, tossing my chewed-up cigar into the wastebasket. You can't chew cigars with a classy dame like that around--just one of the pillars underlying my general anti-classy-dame policy. "What can I help you with?"

"It's about this slightly-more-than-a-cup of sugar," said the dame, opening her purse to reveal an overful measuring cup. "It's such an odd measurement; whatever can I do with it?"

"Just leave it to me, babe," I said, stirring it into the mashed peaches and pouring the puree on top. "I'll use it as an ingredient in a peach-flavored ice cream that will melt your troubles away."

"Then... that explains the two cups of milk and cream simmering on the stove," she said breathlessly, almost swooning over the counter.

"You catch on quick, toots," I replied in a businesslike manner, picking the pot off the stove and pouring the mixture atop the peaches. "Care to help me stir?"

"Only if I can add a couple drops of orange extract to the mix," purred the aforementioned dame.

"Add orange juice if you want," I told her. "Just remember: it's a simple recipe. There's no need to dress it up."

Time for the weekly (as in, there was one last week and there's one this week) ice cream recipe. The latest addition to the cookbook harnasses the great taste of mango for the most Roguelike ice cream yet (slime mold ice cream not forthcoming). If I had the Ben and Jerry's marketing sense I would call it "It Takes Two To Mango" or something, but instead I have a obsession with obscure nerdish in-jokes. (Note that my conception of having "marketing sense" is merely to be obsessed with obvious mainstream in-jokes.)

Ingredients

• 1 ripe mango, peeled and diced
• 2 small ginger roots, peeled and grated
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 cup milk
• 1 cup cream
• 1/8 cup orange or tangerine juice
• Lemon juice (probably optional)
• Large pinch salt
• Cardamom
• Saffron
• Almond flakes or almond extract

Preparation

Put the diced mango and the ginger into a bowl with 1/4 cup of the sugar. Cover it and let it macerate for an hour or two, then apply a couple squirts of lemon juice.

Heat up the milk and the cream, blah blah blah. Stir up the mango/ginger concoction and pour in the dairy and the citrus juice. Add all of the other ingredients and stir. Let it cool, put it in the ice cream maker, and mango!

Discussion

I did not have any cardamom, saffron or almond because I have a bad habit of making up these ice creams when I'm in Trader Joe's and purchasing only the main ingredients, in this case mango and ginger (not that Trader Joe's is likely to have cardamom or saffron). However, Sumana's mother says they are mandatory.

I heard from various sources that freezing ice cream makes it less sweet because the cold deadens your taste buds. Well, it must also do something else because the mixture for this recipe and even the freshly churned product tastes sort of bland, not like mangoes and with a weird aftertaste; but the frozen ice cream itself is very good and mangoey (still a tiny bit bland without the spices, though). I'm interested in hearing how this happens.

Each mango conceals an enormous pit, ready to spring out at you. If you have never cooked with mangoes before, beware! Even experienced mango wrasslers are sometimes overcome by the size of the mango pit and thrown to the linoleum. OK, I just made that part up. But mangoes do have very large pits.

"What I need for a dessert for my expensive theme restaurant," I told my chef, "is a combination of some chi-chi dish like poached pears, and a dish of the people like ice cream."

My chef, who is also me, cried out, "You're mad! Mad, I tell you! You've never even had poached pears and you have only the vaguest idea of what a poached pear is! Also, what theme restaurant?"

"I call it 'Foods You Can Bruise: The Interactive Restaurant Experience'," I told the chef. You know, I think of him as the son I almost had. "It will serve never-before-seen fusion cuisine, made with only the freshest ingredients, except where we can get away with it."

"Maybe you should call it something like 'The Lowdown,'" said the chef.

"Silence, chef-self! The longer the name, the longer the line out the door! The First Rule of Restauranteering never fails... to fail! Now, while I write the description for the menu, find a poached pear recipe on the Internet that can be turned into an ice cream!"

Ingredients

• 2 pears, peeled, cored, sliced in half
• 1/4 cup brown sugar plus a little more
• 1 cup cream
• 1 cup milk
• Orange or tangerine juice
• Maple syrup
• Honey
• Cinnamon
• Salt
• Vanilla (optional)
• Lemon oil or juice (optional)

Preparation

Put a tiny bit of brown sugar in the pear seed cavities and put them cavity-down into a dish. Put a tiny bit of salt on each pear half, then spoon some maple syrup on top and put a little more brown sugar on top of that. Cover with plastic wrap and microwave for 8 minutes or until soft. (You could probably add cloves or something to the mix, but do I look like a clove-haver?)

Your pears are now microwave-poached. While you were waiting for them to be poached you put the cream and the milk into a saucepan and heated it to almost boiling. Now chop up the pears, put them in a bowl, and pour the milk/cream mixture over it. Add the sugar and the cinnamon. Stir. Add a little tangerine or orange juice and stir some more. If it doesn't taste sweet enough, add some more maple syrup or be ready to add more honey. If you want, add a tiny bit of vanilla and/or lemon oil. Then cool it, daddy-o.

Now it's ready to go in the ice cream machine. At some point during the ice cream making process, add some honey to the mixture. You now have poached pear ice cream!

Notes

I made this last night and it's delicious, but I made it way too sweet, which overpowers the taste of pear; indeed, overpowers your very sense of taste. I don't know why I kept putting sugar into it when it already had so much of so many kinds of sugar. The delta between the published recipe and what I actually made was 1/4 cup of white sugar and maybe 1/8 cup of brown. The recipe as published should be sweet but not too sweet. Let me know if I actually removed too much sugar. Oh, also the stuff I made had no cinnamon because I forgot to get cinnamon.

This is the metadessert recipe for which I asked Alton Brown's advice. For the record, he said that both honey and cinnamon would work well, but to be careful with the honey because it can affect the way the ice cream sets.

I wanted to get rid of the Nutella I had left over from when I made Nutellamisu. I figured it would be very good mixed into chocolate ice cream. I knew that Mondo Gelato had a Nutella-flavored gelato, so it should be possible.

I assumed that if I put the Nutella in the ice cream maker after the ice cream had taken form, it would be formed into nice swirls like you find in the Ben and Jerry's that the kids like so much. But what actually happened was it stuck into a huge blob on the mixer blade and I had to sort of scrape it off and use it as a topping. Clearly there is some trick for getting swirls into ice cream that I don't know about (what is it? I don't want to have to buy a book).

What I should have done was melted the Nutella in the microwave and added it to the chocolate before pouring in the hot cream. If I'd let it sit in the cream/milk mixture as it cooled, it probably would have bonded with the chocolate and the dairy, or something.

Here in this universe, I wanted stir-fry. But, I had never before in my life made stir-fry. What's more, I was young and brash, and I felt it was foolish to make stir-fry from a bag of frozen vegetables, or indeed read instructions of any kind about how to stir-fry. No, I would derive a tasty stir-fry from first principles![0]

What goes into a stir-fry? Two things: cooked rice and stir-fried vegetables. Cooking rice is easy enough if you have a rice cooker: just put x amount of rice and 2x+y amount of water in the rice cooker, and push the "cook" button. Because I have an obsession with putting more stuff in than is neccessary (qv. still-unwritten entry), I also added some salt and chopped parsley.

That's easy enough. Now, the stir-fried vegetables. When other people make stir-fry they put in disgusting vegetables like water chestnuts, those loathsome pickpockets of the briny deep. Ships pick them up in ballast water off the coast of Hong Kong and they come as stowaways to the bustling port cities of the world, where they infiltrate bags of frozen stir-fry vegetables and lie in wait, seeking to trap unwary eaters with their fingernails-on-chalkboard texture. Because of this, and because I am cranky, there could be no bagged stir-fry vegetables for this stir-fry. I would do it with fresh vegetables.

I could not find any baby corn (possibly my favorite vegetable of all time, and a great addition to stir-fry) at the store, so I did without. I got a bag of baby carrots, a head of broccoli, and some Chinese snap peas. I also got an onion and some ginger (the ginger cost only eight cents! Such a deal!).

I grated the ginger and chopped up the onion, carrots and broccoli. Then I prepared the stir-fry sauce, not to be confused with fry sauce, which consisted of... olive oil. Wait! I'll get to the other stuff later. I dropped in the onion and the ginger, let that saute a bit, then put in the carrots. Carrots contain carrotene, a fibrous substance that makes the vegetable take forever to cook. This is why I chopped up the carrots very finely and put them in first. After a few minutes I put in the broccoli. You must constantly be swishing the food around the wok or skillet, or instead of "stir fry" you will have "leave alone fry".

Then it was time to add my flavorings. I keep a variety of liquids on hand for just such an occasion. Today I used rice vinegar, soy sauce, and sesame oil. Just dump it in and let it form a puddle for the vegetables to pass through as you stir.

This went on for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, until I tasted a carrot and it was acceptably tender. At the last minute I added the snap peas. The high surface area of snap peas means they cook very quickly. Also, I am just making all this stuff up. I dressed with some sesame seeds (courtesy of Sumana) and voila: great stir-fry!

My only mistakes: the rice was a tiny bit undercooked because I was starving and unwilling to wait for it to finish cooking. I should have put in the ginger at the very end so the taste would be more noticeable. Also, despite hours of drudgery in my youth, I forgot that pea pods have to be peeled before they're cooked or you'll be stuck peeling them afterwards. This does, however, have the cool side effect that while cooking the pea pods fill with hot air and expand like Girl Genius-esque dirigible balloons.

[0] I actually asked Sumana for advice, but her advice confirmed what I thought was right, so technically I still did it from first principles.

By now you have probably noticed that my fondness for the meta extendeds even to my culinary adventures. Dessert is the main playground of the meta in my cooking, because it's safer: the concept of "dessert" pretty much has transitive closure. You can take n desserts, apply some transformation to them, and you will probably still have a dessert. So I like to play with desserts that incorporate or are based on other desserts (eg. tiramisu or the world-famous Nutellamisu).

A few days ago, I made Impulse Buy Cookies. They are like chocolate chip cookies, but instead of chocolate chips they use the equivalent amount of whatever junky candy stuff you want to buy when you're in the supermarket. I got a Kit Kat bar, a Nestle Crunch bar, and some little chocolate-covered balls of peanut butter.

I must say that Impulse Buy Cookies are a great idea, so long as you can reliably yet impulsively buy chocolate chips. Otherwise, I have my doubts. Probably it's because I bought candy I don't actually like very much; I mainly bought the peanut butter candy because Sumana likes peanut butter candy, and the other stuff because it seemed suitably impulsive. The Kit Kat bar was a horrible idea; the heat of the oven made it tough and leathery. Plus, I forgot to put the egg in the cookies, so the dough was a little weird.

However, last night I redeemed the meta-dessert world with Ganache Cookies. Why ganache? Because I like ganache. Ganache has panache. Also, I had purchased way too much whipping cream and way too much block chocolate for my disastrous Chocolate Mousse Cake meta-dessert, so what better way to use it than in a substance made entirely of whipping cream and block chocolate?

For completeness, here is how you make ganache: take a half-pint of whipping cream and bring it to a boil. Add some flavorful thing like jam or vanilla or liquer. Chop up about 8 ounces of chocolate and put it in a bowl. Once the cream boils, take it off the heat and pour it over the chocolate. Mash everything together with a whisk and stir it. You now have ganache.

To make your cookies into Ganache Cookies, just make whatever kind of cookies you like as you would normally make them. Do not put anything hard like chocolate chips in the cookies, as the cookies need to be refrigerated and it's not pleasant to eat cold hard things. After the cookies have cooled a little bit, take each one by the edge and dip the other edge in the ganache. Then let them cool on wax paper. Keep them refrigerated unless you want a mess. Note: you will get a mess whether or not you want one. However, the cookies are very good.

Kevin and I speculated whether you could make an even more meta-dessert out of the cookies, the dessert equivalent of the turducken. Well, it's not that hard. Any time you have cookies you can use the cookies as the base of an ice cream cake or ice cream sandwiches. Then you can bake a regular cake, cut a hole in it, and put the ice cream cake inside like a file. Then you could use the entire thing to represent a single sugar molecule in a pecan pie the size of the earth, topped with moon-flavored ice cream (a tip: if you are pressed for time, you can substitute the actual moon).

Question for ganache experts: is there something I can add to the ganache to make it harder when cool, so that the cookies don't need to be refrigerated?

Update: Sumana says: "People who have snacked on your cookies uniformly pronounce them wonderful. You brought our receptionist to speechlessness."

Amazing meta-dessert recipe entry coming tomorrow. Don't miss it!

I gotta say, I am a culinary genius! (So is Nick Moffitt, who came up with this idea.) I present for your delectability the ultimate European dessert:

Nutellamisu!

This is like my Mormon Tiramisu, but instead of being tiramisu-flavored it will clobber you over the head with the great taste of hazelnut. As before, there are three main parts:

1. The filling
2. The soaked cookies
3. The interlayer topping

Filling

• 1 cup marscarpone cheese
• 1/2 cup Nutella
• 1 egg yolk
• 2/3 cup heavy cream, whipped with powdered sugar and vanilla
• 1 egg white, whipped

Mix the cheese, Nutella, and egg yolk. Mix in the cream. Mix in the egg white. Add a little more Nutella because Nutella is tasty. Keep adding Nutella until it tastes like you want. The filling should have the consistency and color of chocolate mousse.

Soaked cookies

• 1.5 cups milk
• 2 packages hazelnut-flavored instant cocoa
• 24 dipping cookies (NOT ladyfingers!)

As previously discussed, ladyfingers are tiramisu's own worst enemy. Instead of ladyfingers, use those Italian butter cookies that you're supposed to dip into your drink. You'll be dipping them into a drink, all right--a drink of nutellamisu! Those cookies would cost about $1.50 for two at a coffee shop, but I got a package of 24 for $3.50 at the grocery store. Maybe you could even use biscotti, if you can afford/make it. Before I found the Italian cookies, I was about to use some shortbread cookies which were much more expensive; that probably would have been good too.

Heat up the milk and add the cocoa mix. Use an eggbeater to get it properly mixed up. Then pour some into a bowl on top of some cookies. Flip the cookies to get them soaked. Butter cookies soak faster than ladyfingers, so watch out.

Interlayer topping

• 1/8-1/4 cup hazelnuts
• 3 squares chocolate from a candy bar

Chop the hazelnuts very finely. If you want a crunchier nutellamisu, use more hazelnuts. Shave the chocolate with a chocolate shaver or cheese grater. Interosculate chocolate shavings and hazelnuts.

Assembly

You can assemble the nutellamisu as in my Mormon Tiramisu recipe, but this time I made two small bowls of nutellamisu using a base of 4 cookies each. This let me use all of the cookies, and the result is easier to transport. As before, assemble the nutellamisu with a layer of soggy cookies, then filling, then interlayer topping; then repeat that; then do another layer of cookies and filling.

Topping the whole thing with cocoa powder is not a good idea from a presentation perspective, because the Nutella makes the filling brown and there's no contrast. So what I did was I chopped up some of those little spiky hazelnut chocolates that look like typewriter balls, and put that on top. You could instead top it with more chopped hazelnuts.

"Beats any tiramisu I've had before." --Muthu Krishnan

I was going to unveil this recipe this afternoon at a gala event at Seth's house, but I never heard from Seth or Nick, so I'm unveiling it now and I'm going to eat all the nutellamisu myself. (Actually I am giving some of it away at work.)

Prior art: Hazelnut Tiramisu Parfaits and Tiramisu Alla Nutella, which according to Babelfish incorporates "a beautiful one manciata of the most fine tritate nocciole".

As regular NYCB readers will know, I like tiramisu. But, I don't really like coffee. And I could do without the gallons of booze that go into restaurant tiramisu. So on Saturday I made

Mormon Tiramisu

The goal of this recipe is to make and then combine three things:

1. Marscapone filling
2. Shaved chocolate
3. Soggy ladyfingers

It is based on this recipe for root beer tiramisu by Mitchell Rohrbach, whose mother apparently lets him eat anything he wants for breakfast.

Marscapone filling

• 1 cup marscapone cheese (marscapone is named after Mars Capone, the space gangster)
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 2/3 cup of whipping cream, whipped up with powdered sugar and vanilla
• An egg yolk
• A whipped-up egg white

Put the cheese, brown sugar, and egg yolk into a bowl. Mix it up. Mix in the whipped cream. Mix in the egg white.

Shaved chocolate

• 4 squares chocolate from a candy bar

Shave the chocolate with a grater or zester.

Soggy ladyfingers

• 1.5 cups milk
• 2 packages instant cocoa
• 24 ladyfingers

Heat up the milk. Add the cocoa and mix well. Pour the hot cocoa into a shallow dish and put ladyfingers into it. Turn them over to make them all soggy, but not so soggy that they fall apart when you try to pick them up.

Assembly

As you soak the ladyfingers, you will also be assembling the tiramisu, because there's nowhere to store soggy ladyfingers except in the actual tiramisu dish. I used a 9-inch circular dish and arranged the ladyfingers like so:

          ===
         |===|
         |===| (top view)
         |===|
          ===

(Note that this arrangement will leave you with 3 leftover ladyfingers. Either cram an extra ladyfinger in there per layer, or dispose of the remaining ladyfingers safely at a recycling center. Ladyfingers are not good for anything except being turned into tiramisu, or possibly being fried in cheese sauce and turned into giant Cheetos (I have not tried this, but it should work). Under no circumstances should you eat a raw ladyfinger. Keep out of reach of children.)

After arranging one layer of ladyfingers, apply the marscapone filling and shaved chocolate. Do two more layers. If you have leftover hot chocolate, dump it on top of the last layer of ladyfingers. Dust the top layer of marscapone with cocoa powder, because it looks cool. Chill for several hours. You now have tiramisu!

"You've ruined the tiramisu!", you might say, clutching your opera glasses to your chest. That may be true, but how come almost all of my tiramisu is gone, and your tiramisu still sits under plastic wrap in a display case next to the fruit salad, a lonely gold leaf adorning each forlorn square slice? Because my tiramisu tastes better, that's why! Also, you made the mistake of trying to sell your tiramisu in a restaurant for $4.50 a slice, while I was giving mine away.

Tiramisu is really just a trashy cake, like eclair cake (recipe for eclair cake, from Susanna, coming soon) which works by reappropriating some other, store-bought dessert (stipulating for the moment that ladyfingers can be considered a "dessert"). This fact is disguised by the fancy cheese, coffee and booze it contains. But once you look at tiramisu in this light, a wide range of variants become visible. For instance, if you wanted a specifically Rocky Mountain Mormon tiramisu rather than an ideologically-compatible Mormon tiramisu, you could use Nila wafers instead of ladyfingers, and, I don't know, cream cheese instead of marscapone.

There are all sorts of store-bought junk foods with which you could replace the lady fingers, and many of these foods have flavor. For instance, I used to like dipping those Nutter Butter peanut butter cookies into hot chocolate. Why not use them as the soak base in a peanut butter tiramisu? Or those big Pepperidge Farm cookies. Put Twinkies in there for a surefire rich-uncle-killer. Or, and this is where it becomes too crazy to even contemplate: instead of buying, bake chocolate chip cookies, then include those same cookies in a tiramisu. Your refrigerator will explode![0]

[0]With flavor.[1]

[1]I hope.

Dear Leonard,

I really like shredded coconut, but I feel strange eating it. It's as though it's fish-flake food for humans and there are powerful aliens sitting on their perches in another dimension watching me eat it. Can you help?

Signed,
Observed in Omaha

Dear Observed:

The aliens will lose interest if you stop eating the shredded coconut in big handfuls directly from the bag, and include it as an ingredient in food where they can't see it. Try my

Chocolate Pudding a la Way Too Much Shredded Coconut

• 1 box instant chocolate pudding
• 1 3/4 cups milk
• Way too much shredded coconut

Prepare the pudding as per the instructions on the box, but use less milk than it calls for. Instead of remaining milk, substitute coconut. Chill and serve. Serves n.

Ingredients:

• 1 large tomato
• 1/2 blue styrofoam tray store-bought mushrooms
• 4 green onions
• Some pecorino
• Some pasta
• Olive oil
• Basalmic vinegar

Heat up water for pasta. Chop up onions. Chop up tomato. Chop up--aah! The mushrooms are rotten! They are deformed, twisted into mockeries of their former shapes! What kind of mold preys on a fungus? Shouldn't a fungus be able to hold its own? Uh-oh, the water is boiling! Quick, throw in the pasta! Now, quickly find

• A can of olives

Open the can, drain the olives. Chop up half of the olives. Heat up the olive oil in a saucepan. Stir the pasta! What if you had just mushed up the remaining olives and used that instead of olive oil? Would it work? Would it taste better? If you made olive oil out of canned olives, would it cancel out the cannedness? For that matter, does store-bought olive oil count as "canned" food? Put the tomato, onions and olives into the olive oil and swish them around to cook them. Stir the pasta again. You forgot the garlic! Get

• 2 cloves garlic

Chop them up and put them in the saucepan. Grate the cheese! The pasta is done! Drain it. Add a splash of vinegar to the pasta sauce and cook a little more. Serve the pasta with the sauce and cheese. Halfway through eating it, decide that it needs some basil.

• 1 pinch basil

Add the basil. Enjoy the remaining portion.

Axis of Pasta update: consensus is that cheese is the missing third ingredient, though this has yet to be verified in field tests.

By the way, here is another Crummy.com pasta recipe:

Ad Hoc Pasta Working Group

Ingredients:

• 1/2 bag pasta (any non-spaghetti variety)
• 1 can soup (any chunky non-condensed variety)
• Pepper to taste

Instructions: Boil water and cook pasta. Heat up soup in microwave or on stove. Drain pasta and put into big bowl. Dump soup over pasta. Serves one, for two meals.

Note: do not make this for other people or they will think you are a slob.

Yesterday Sumana came over and I made a dish for dinner which I like to call "The Axis of Pasta". You heat up frozen green-beans-with-garlic-sauce and you cook pasta and you dump the former over the latter. Sumana and I agreed that it needs a third ingredient, but we couldn't figure out what. I think bacon would work very well, but I'd like the Axis to be vegetarian.

Here is a recipe for the dish which made up the majority of my diet for my last two years of college:

Super-Carbohydrate Trader Joe's Monopoly Pasta

Ingredients:

1. 1 bag Trader Joe's Amber Durum Wheat Cavatappi or Zini pasta (nb. apparently no longer sold)
2. 1/4 bag Trader Joe's "Il Trio" shredded cheese
3. 6 slices Trader Joe's Cracked Wheat Sourdough
4. 1.5 Trader Joe's Roma tomatoes
5. 1 tbsp Trader Joe's olive oil
6. Trader Joe's basil (optional)

Boil water. Put pasta in water and cook. While cooking, dice tomatoes. Drain pasta and shake up with olive oil and tomatoes. As needed, put cheese on top and heat in microwave to melt cheese; also toast bread. Shake basil on top (optionally). Alternate between eating pasta on bread and eating pasta not on bread. Serves one, for about two days.

---

Another popular recipe 'round my place:

Very Cheap Three-Bean-And-One-Grain Salad

Ingredients:

1. 1 can kidney beans
2. 1 can garbanzo beans
3. 1 can green beans
4. 1 can corn kernels
5. 1/4 cup red vinegar
6. 1/4 cup olive oil
7. Dill to taste

Drain all canned items and put into big bowl. Use blender to blend vinegar and olive oil into makeshift vinaigrette. Pour makeshift vinaigrette onto hill of beans. Add dill and shake well. Serves one, for about a day and a half.