Filipino Brunch: Tortang Talong

Went to brunch this afternoon with Sekhar at Bistro Luneta, a Filipino place in downtown San Mateo. I ordered Tortang Talong, which is layered eggplant tempura with sauteed ground pork, scrambled eggs, banana (flavored) ketchup. It was delicious.

Chocolate Roll-Out Cookies and Nutty Wheat Bread

This post consists of two baked goods: one full of nuts and healthiness, the other full of cocoa and deliciousness.

1. "Brownie Roll-Out Cookies"

Borrowing this recipe from the great smitten kitchen blog, I embarked upon a dark chocolate journey. These cookies demand to be soaked. Milk is great, but ice cream (as in, ice cream sandwiches) are even better.

2. Whole-Wheat Bread with Sunflower & Flax Seed

This one came from a peer-rated recipes site that I like to visit. The recipe called for 1/2 wheat flour and 1/2 bread flour. However, I wanted to make this whole wheat for my diabetic father.

I tried increasing the yeast to 2 teaspoons, and decreasing the overall amount of flour to 2 1/3 cups. Apparently this was not enough, since it was still rather dense and didn't taste as much of yeastiness. I'd try an entire yeast packet and 2 cups of wheat flour next time.

The too-dense batter. Looks like bread already!

Oh well. It was very nutty, as my parents like, so I'd consider this a step towards success. (Rather than a complete failure.) I would have tried to make it better, but I was packing and ready to leave for Swarthmore!

I want to try to make more bread! It's fun and rewarding. My little sister points out that it's not very cost-efficient (as it is for other baked goods), but what the hell. It's vastly more delicious than store-bought bread.

I Ain't No Challah-back Girl

Or maybe I am.

Pepper Bhajis

1. Slit the banana (or bell) peppers and soak in tamarind water to make them less spicy and give them a tamarind flavor.
2. Mix a wet dough using water and besan (chickpea) flour and dip pepper halves.
3. Then fry in oil till golden.
4. Top with onions, lemon juice, and salt. Spicy, salty, sour, deep-fried deliciousness!

Graham Crackers!

These are profoundly delicious, thanks to the molasses, cinnamon, shortening, and other goodies that go into them. It's also fun to poke holes in them with a fork before baking.

Let me know if any of you want the recipe! My recipe calls for the addition of rye flour, but I just used white & whole wheat and they turned out really well.

Bread

To distract myself from my disappointment, I made a loaf of bread! Isn't it beautiful? The photo is ostensibly for scale, but actually just gave me a chance to be really sketchy with a loaf of bread. :)

The ingredients are:

1 scant Tbsp yeast (mixed with warm water & a pinch of sugar and left to sit)
1 heaping Tbsp brown sugar
1 Tbsp vegetable oil
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 cups white flour
1 tsp salt (VERY important)
3/4 cup milk (or possibly water)
herbs! if you want

You have to knead it quite a bit, then let it rise and punch it down several times before baking it for 40-45 minutes at 350˚. I was also inspired to brush the top with a leeetle bit of egg white before baking, to give it that classy shine.

I'm liberal! (surprise, surprise)

I'm not sure why granola is associated with liberals but I have learned to love it so much (after eating way too much of it this past semester when I first discovered it) that I made some myself.

eat. eat. sleep. cook (occassionally). eat. itch. sleep. repeat.

Greetings from the West Coast! I said that I probably wouldn't post anything else but my hungry thumb (ha ha..no...) was itching to cook when I made it back to a real kitchen in my house. So here goes!

My first venture of the summer was SPINACH & LENTILS! I ate some of Urooj's mom's and then some of Urooj's and every single time I ate them, I nearly keeled over from excitement...so I decided to try it out and needless to say, I didn't do as good as a job as both of them. (attempting to replicate Urooj's sad rabbit) I did make a tasty dish but I just couldn't replicate the flavor(s). One reason may be that I used minced garlic instead of

chopped garlic and a different type of lentils. Nevertheless, here is a picture of it.

So tasty but not what I expected. I'm going to try to obtain the correct lentils and make this dish until I get it right so that I can feast on fiber-laden lentils all semester long...yay

And here comes dessert! So I made cheesecake from a recipe that I obtained last summer from Jordan/family. Did I succeed? maybe..it was fantastic but not perfect...but then again, cheesecake is one of those things that pretty much needs to be perfect. Here are the pics..

HELLO, HOMEMADE CRUST! (I <3>

Hello, cheesecake that is not quite ready yet but straight out of the oven so that it smells amazing and deserves to have a couple pictures taken of it.

Hello, slice of cheesecake, that will bring me much joy in the next two days (or perhaps less)!

Chocolate Chip Cupcakes with Dark Chocolate Frosting

Chocolate cupcakes with chocolate chips and chocolate frosting. Yeah, you need a high chocolate tolerance for these. I made the cupcakes with Niki and the frosting with Arik.
The plain "before" cupcake:
Here's the cupcake recipe. Tip: we put in a whole 2 cup bag of chocolate chips. Do it.
After frosting:
We sort of made up the frosting by taste as we went along. Arik assured me that nothing would go wrong if we just kept mixing in different delicious ingredients and taste-testing the results. I was skeptical but he turned out to be right-- the chocolate frosting is really rich and delicious.

Start by melting the chocolate in a bowl over simmering water, and slowly add butter, cream, sugar, and cocoa powder. Keep stirring until it thickens and let it sit in the fridge until it has frosting consistency.

Ingredients
1/2 stick butter
3 squares unsweetened baker's chocolate
1 cup heavy whipping cream
1 1/2 cup confectioners sugar
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
Just one was enough to put me into a blissful chocolate coma.

More Peru

I wish I had pictures now, but I suppose y'all will just have to wait for that. Here is the latest update from Peru, this time from the heights of the Andes. Enjoy!

We're in the Andean mountains now, staying on Lake Titicaca at 13,000 feet. [Note: On the Bolivian side of the lake is where Chipaya is spoken. If they were there, Jasper could make use of the one Chipaya word he knows--hwala, or "llama". What a pity, all that drilling for nothing...] The altitude is awful, but a nice combination of coca tea, water and advil are finally making me feel less lethargic. On our domestic flight, they served us a little snack in an awesome looking box. It featured a yummy sweet cake and some crackers, all very neatly arranged in the box. I liked the food, although the Irish couple sitting next to me didn't, which they blamed on their altitude medicine. Fortunately, the snack survived our two landing attempts in Cuzco (the pilot had to pull up at the last second before we hit a ditch by the runway due to the winds). At our hotel, I tried alpaca, which is really tender and lean (apparently also cholesterol free!). [Alpaca yarn is also really soft and lovely. They're the miracle animal!] Coca leaf tea tends to dull your hunger (along with pain and altitude sickness). As a result, when we went into Puno for a late night dinner, I couldn't even finish my soup even though it was so good. I think it had couscous or a similar grain, a big potato, cheese, and some other Andean ingredients. My parents had a trout and potato sampler, which they really enjoyed. Just wait until I can send the photos to Amy for uploading!

Peru

Well, gang, Jasper is in Peru now, and after one day there has already done more for the food blog than I have in the past month. But since I'm posting it, can we give me a little credit? Just enough that you all don't pelt me with rotten squash when I see you for not posting at all. Now, I may be a little bit biased, but this post is so much funnier than anything I could ever write. I should probably just give my spot on the food blog committee to Jasper, but then again, he didn't make any of this food and so has no official food blog cred. Keep that in mind at the next group meeting, should a vote arise. I told him he should write for the Phoenix, but he took that as an insult (I just figured he should start small!) and proceeded to tell me that his parents were once featured in the NYT food section. I'm investigating the legitimacy of this claim...But enough of my ramblings. Enjoy!

Peruvian food varies widely. The coast is nothing but seafood, while the Andean people enjoy llamas, guinea pigs, alpacas and other adorable creatures. Not dogs though. Peruvians are civilized enough to not eat dogs. [Thanks for the shout-out, dear.] South America is where corn, peppers and potatoes come from, and in our first day we've already had several forms of each that I had never heard of. Another popular food in Peru is called "Chifa," which comes from the Mandarin word for to eat rice. It's a Chinese-Peruvian hybrid created by Chinese immigrants, and many of the dishes are to Peru what pizza is to Americans.

Dispatch One: 30,000 feet above Cuba, heading from Atlanta to Lima

On the airplane ride down, we were privileged enough to sample some of the cuisine of the Delta people. I had a delightful piece of chicken on a bed of gently mashed potatoes. The grainy yet watery texture nicely complimented the "vegetables," whose fall-apart-in-your-plate tenderness made the terrorism-proof knife hardly necessary. The real star of the meal though was the piece of bread with a "butter-like spread." Also, there was a slice of cheese from Amy's home state. I can now say that Oregon is easily in the top 50 states for cheese, though it's place there is jeopardized by the possibility of Puerto Rice becoming a state. The cookies were super though - Milanos. I later pocketed two additional cookie packs while waiting to use the lavatories for my after-dinner smoke.

Dispatch Two: Lima (photos when I return!)

For lunch we went to an awesome ceviche place near our hotel. On each table was a small bowl of "popcorn" - roasted kernels of corn that hadn't popped, but still had a nice crunch. We started with a mixed plate of ceviche, featuring delicious octopus (my first time eating this!), squid (my brother ate all of it), shrimp (o so good), and various types of fish (all melted in my mouth). The plate also came with some sort of sweet potato or yam that was rich enough to be a dessert and a super-hot pepper that my mom and I tried. It tasted like bungee jumping, except without a bungee cord. My main dish was tuna, which was maybe cooked a few seconds too long, in a pepper sauce with a yellow rice and mushroom risotto. It was all awesome food.

For dinner, we went to a restaurant that is right next to an archeological site. Part of the proceeds from every meal go towards the restoration and archeological work on the pyramid there. The restaurant was awesome, although my brother, Elijah, questioned their choice to buy so many bottles of wine when situated in earthquake territory. My dad and I split an appetizer sampler. It had four appetizers: scallops on shells with some sort of fried onion or potato (my mind is blanking from tiredness), a stuffed meat dumpling, a potato with ceviche on top, and fried guinea pig (at Amy's insistence). The guinea pig tasted a tadbit like chicken, which may either disappoint or delight you. For a main course, I had an Argentinean steak with potatoes. Strips of potatoes had been stacked to form a rectangular cube that looked so cool that I felt bad taking the first bite. Elijah had a Chifa inspired beef dish, my mom had something awesome involving fish, and my dad had ... something else. I seem to have left my memory in the northern hemisphere. Sadness. Dessert was chocolate volcanoes for me and my brother, a dish involving rice pudding for my mom, and a dessert we had never heard of for my dad. His dessert was some sort of pastry, with a chocolate covering and some sort of paste on the inside. We theorized that it might be some sort of sweet potato or yam, since it was orange/sweet potato colored. We also enjoyed pisco sours, whose taste made paces drinks seem like child's play. The waiter also paired the 3 of age (18 is drinking age!) diners' dinners with wines. My parents had white, while I had an Argentinean red wine. Fortunately, I did not pull a Mark Sanford and pair the Argentinean steak and wine with an Argentinean soul mate.

Tomorrow, we head up to 13,000 feet to start getting acclimated for our trek. Whenever I next get internet I'll send in the latest on Andean food and coca leaf tea. Happy winter and thanks for making me a guest blogger!