Recipes of the Damned

More gas-station comestibles! A pit stop along the Long Island Expressway yielded up Wonka Tinglerz. “What,” you say, “the 1959 horror movie starring Vincent Price?” Sadly, no. Wonka Tinglerz are essentially chocolate-covered Pop Rocks, and yes, they are just as weird as that sounds.

The package

The candy spilling out. Should candy look like rabbit droppings? I think not.

The candy in my hand

There’s a strong cheap-chocolate smell when you first open the package. The chocolate is middling, but you tend to forget it’s even there once the candy starts popping.

The first couple of nuggets I tasted didn’t actually have any pop to them, making me wonder if I was wrong and this was just a chocolate-coated crispy rice candy. But the next few went off dramatically, popping and pinging against my teeth in that peculiar way that Pop Rocks have. I offered some to my husband to taste; he also found them weird, especially the rather unpleasant knocking effect you get if you bite down on one.

“I’d probably like these if I were five,” he concluded. “For a day.”

Not recommended (especially by dentists, I am sure), but oddly compelling.

I’m off to a funny start: This weekend is my first after the conclusion of my late work schedule, but I had parties both evenings and so did not make dinner at home. I did bring homemade cupcakes to last night’s gathering and a layer cake to today’s, both devil’s food with peanut-butter frosting. Yum.

Tomorrow Scott gets cooking duty, since I am on call, but starting Tuesday I am in the kitchen for real. The menu features two dishes from the current issue of Everyday Food, Asian Beef and Lettuce Wraps, and Sauteed Chicken with Herbed Soba; the recipes don’t seem to be online yet. I’m also making Thai green curry with tofu on Thursday night (it can simmer and be available for Scott when he gets home from his class), and pizza on Friday. I neglected to make pizza crusts over the weekend, but I can do that after dinner on one of the other nights this week so they’re ready to pull out of the freezer on Friday when I get home. We should also have enough leftover veggies to do a stir-fry on Saturday, incorporating whatever leftover protein we have the most of from the other meals. I plan to take photos and post them. Here is a picture of Scott’s dinner creation from Friday night: chicken breasts cooked on the Foreman grill, with roasted asparagus and leftover polenta, and a drizzle of homemade chili-flavored mayonnaise. Not bad, huh?

I think it’ll be good to have something already ready to cook on Saturday, because I’ve found that at our local grocery store it’s a lot better to do the week’s shopping on Sunday morning than on Saturday afternoon. Much less crowded, fewer crazy people. I didn’t have much choice yesterday, though, since I needed ingredients for the cakes.

Whenever I bake a cake or cupcakes for a gathering, there’s always at least one person who says, “I’m no good at baking.” I think that’s kind of sad; baking isn’t really that difficult, but it does require attention to detail, and it is something that you can do badly if you don’t understand the principles in the construction of a cake. Cake batter shouldn’t be overmixed, and cake shouldn’t be overbaked; you also want to be attentive to consistency and be prepared to add a touch more flour or liquid as necessary. The cake mix companies have done a fine job of persuading the public that this is all far too difficult and that we should turn to box mixes instead. But scratch cakes invariably taste better. If you must use a mix—and it’s an understandable temptation, since they’re basically engineered to be foolproof—you should bump up the flavor and interest with tips from The Cake Mix Doctor.

This post has been moved to Recipes of the Yum; come check it out!

As I get ready for the return of a normal schedule and my chance to cook real dinners on a weeknight, I’m going to lay out the elements of my planning here.

Because cooking does require planning. This is very easy to overlook. I certainly didn’t think about planning when I was in eighth-grade home ec, and we had to do cooking plans with every recipe. Since we were not cooking very complicated foods, it seemed ridiculous. “Step 1, 2:30: Pour milk into pan. Step 2, 2:33: Return milk carton to fridge and put milk pan on stovetop; turn to medium heat.” And so forth. One of my friends and I did a parody of the whole thing during an afternoon study session. “Step 1, 3:15: Walk to freezer. Step 2, 3:15:30: Open freezer. No, not yet, you still have 10 seconds! OK, now! Step 3, 3:15:45: Remove ice cream carton from freezer.” But though I’m still a smart-ass, I’m also older now and have enough cooking experience to know that if you’re making a meal with two or more dishes, it can be very useful to have thought it through in advance, at least enough to know that you should start the pasta water boiling earlier than the time you are hoping to put plates of spaghetti on the kitchen table.

So I’m doing a few things ahead of time to get ready for next weekend, and I’ll talk a little bit about them in the next few days. Today I want to talk about the rules for my January efforts.

1. Cook real food. This is pretty straightforward. No powdered sauce mixes, no imitations, no instant things.

2. Keep the use of processed ingredients to a minimum. So, for example, if I want to make Thai green curry chicken I can use the green curry paste from a jar and a can of light coconut milk as the basis of the sauce for my chicken and vegetables, but not one of those boxed mixes that have dried vegetables, sauce and noodles for you to just liquefy, heat and serve.

3. Keep weeknight kitchen time to one hour or less. Note that kitchen time the night of the meal is not the same thing as labor time for that meal. More labor might be represented if I’ve gotten something ready over the weekend (such as pizza crusts that I can pull from the freezer for homemade pizza).  Less labor might be represented if a particular night’s meal involves bringing water to a boil, adding noodles or vegetables, and letting them cook.

4. Eat as healthfully as possible. Nachos are a fun occasional meal, but they should not be a weekly staple.

5. Remember that the most important thing is to have a good meal, have fun cooking it, and have fun eating it. In other words, I shall not kick myself if I don’t get it perfect every time.

I will probably develop some more guidelines as I go along. Later we’ll be talking about how to most effectively plan for weeknight cooking.

As the old year winds down I offer up three things that I think we would do well to leave behind us as we turn to new resolutions and opportunities.

Cool Whip in a Can
From a Sunday coupon circular from earlier this fall, we see Cool Whip in a can. I haven’t looked for it on my grocer’s shelf, but I do wonder: does the spray version manage to retain the weird gelatinous consistency of the tub version?

Of course actual whipped cream is incredibly easy to make, and while I’m not sure what the Cool Whip can retails for I’m fairly confident you could produce a comparable amount of the real stuff for a lot less money and only a few minutes with a hand mixer. Of course regular whipping cream is not exactly low in fat, though its fat load generally doesn’t include trans fats. But which do you suppose is better for a healthy lifestyle: a small, controlled portion of a real food that you can savor, or larger and more frequent helpings of sugar-free and fat-reduced processed foods that encourage you to build your appetite for sweets and additives? (I couldn’t find product information about the canned variety on the Cool Whip site, so I couldn’t check whether it has the same ingredient list as found in the tub, which includes such yummy-sounding items as palm kernel oil and guar gum.)

Ore-Ida Steam n’ Mash

Well, at least this isn’t Potato Buds. Peeling and chopping potatoes is certainly more tedious than whipping cream, but if you’re that pressed for time are you really making the kind of meal that calls for mashed potatoes? I’m not a big fan of microwaving potatoes, but I tend to think that you could peel and dice potatoes yourself during the weekend, throw the cubes into the freezer, and then toss the cubes into a pot of boiling water if you want quicker-prep potatoes. Plus you’d get to control the amount of added salt.

The top section of the ad (cropped out) notes that this product is “already a Sandra Lee time saving favorite.” Ah, yes, the diva of Semi-Homemade products, aka shilling for processed foods with recipes that you could just as easily make yourself with real food. We’ll be getting to those in a future post.

Finally, it loses points for punctuation. n’ is not a contraction of “and.” Or perhaps the product’s full name is “Steam no Mash”?

Hershey’s Kisses Mini Cookies
I picked these up at a gas station in June (thus violating Michael Pollan’s eminently sensible guideline, “Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does”), but I couldn’t bring myself to open them and see what they were like. When I got home from my trip I set the bag on my desk to write about. Now it’s late December. I strongly suspect they’re just as palatable as they would have been in June, but I’m not going to find out.

I think that if you want Hershey’s Kisses you should eat them. I think that if you want chocolate-chip cookies you should find fresher ones from a bakery, or make them yourself (they’re probably the easiest cookie to make and customize). I think that if you take me on a road trip and don’t get me access to decent coffee within the first hour, you’re going to find that I make silly purchases like this one.

In 2008 I have been consumed by a difficult work schedule, one that got me home at 9 pm most nights. As a result I haven’t been able to cook on a regular basis. And I am beginning to have some sympathy for those who fall prey to the allure of packaged food–we’ve had a few Boboli pizzas and more than a few diner meals this year–but I’ve also become doubly determined to get cooking on a regular basis as soon as I can.

That time is finally coming. My work schedule is changing effective Monday, January 5, and I will be leaving work at 6 pm. I was doing some calculations and determined that I could spend a full hour working in the kitchen and we’d still have dinner on the table earlier than I had usually been walking in the door.

So I have set myself a challenge. In January 2009 I am going to make a concerted effort to cook good, nourishing, non-Damned food, and I will blog about it. I will share what works and what doesn’t, and will offer any guidance I can find, and any warnings to help others avoid the mistakes I will inevitably make.

I will be doing other subject posts as well.  (Cooking isn’t the only thing that’s suffered from my schedule!) So stay tuned!

Also, the new blog format should allow easier commenting and participation. Now that I own the domain I will be able to do some customization, so please let me know if there are things you’d like to see added.

Happy holidays, and I’m looking forward to a wonderful new year.

–Amy

This page will be home to the Recipes of the Damned blog in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, please continue to visit http://recipesofthedamned.blogspot.com.