RatCreature's Journal

musesfool prompted: what's your favorite thing to bake or cook?

That's a hard question. I don't actually do either as a hobby, really, and since I live alone most of my cooking is utilitarian, like stews that reheat without fuss, so I can cook once and eat it several days, without doing complicated meal planning for optimal ingredient utilization. I'm not bad at it, and I can cook more complicated things (vegetarian ones at least) but I usually don't bother.

It's more fun when somebody else also eats the food, but I have no practice at complicated timing for elaborate menus and that gets stressful fast, so I have no real interest in hosting dinner parties.

So I guess I'm going with Christmas bakery. I usually bake a fair amount of classic Christmas cookies that are well received by family and friends, and most years I also make stollen. My personal favorite are probably Elisenlebkuchen. I just use the recipe that came with my food processor. I posted a translated recipe some years ago, it's the first of the two in this post, though recently I've mostly made them chocolate covered rather than lemon glazed.

(If you want to prompt me there are still open days.)

Currently I jot down the expiration dates for foods I buy in a notebook every time I put away new groceries, because I figured it would be easier to notice foods that are close to expiration date by looking through a notebook every now and then rather than going through my pantry shelves. But this method isn't very convenient either.

I don't use a spreadsheet, because I want to do the entry in my kitchen as I put away groceries. So I don't want to do tedious data entry afterwards. But it occurred to me that doing this with a phone app could possibly work with scanning codes, and not take that much longer for the entry, and get me to a sortable inventory with expiration alerts.

However I do not want an app that collects and monetizes my grocery shopping data with their company and then shows me personalized grocery shopping ads, or tracks my shopping habits and then sells data about pantries or such (even in aggregate or "anonymized"). I want an app that keeps a database of my food strictly on my phone and doesn't use it for anything. I don't intend to manually do the work of a surveillance "smart" fridge for anybody.

Are there such apps? The popular ones like "Out of Milk" seem to be the convenience in exchange for consent to surveillance type...

So that mishap where you are not attentive enough before trying to use a fairly expensive fruit and it turns out not to have fully ripened yet, and thus your fruit isn't the tasty anticipated treat, but just hard and gross and full of disappointment. Which is sadder, ending up with an unripe mango or an unripe avocado?

I bought myself an Instant Pot, because I've seen quite a lot of slowcooker recipes around, and many people who are enthusiastic about that method. And also I eat a lot of grains and pulses which thus far I've just cooked the old fashioned way, but figure this device ought to make more convenient.

Anyway, because for years I did not own such thing I of course failed to bookmark all the applicable recipes I've seen around. Do you have favorite recipes?

I've just seen US-style processed "cheese" in a spray can sold for the first time in a supermarket here. Granted it was part of some special display dedicated to American foods and not their normal range of products but still.

The most bizarre thing was that it apparently was produced by a Wisconsin company that calls itself "Old Fashioned Foods Inc." which is just-- though maybe it's meant to be ironic.

ETA: Also now that I'm thinking about spray can cheese (and calling that an "old fashioned" food), I don't think I've ever read a fic where Steve Rogers when adjusting to the future/present isn't going the Farmer's Market route, but instead (or additionally) is totally thrilled with all the modern convenience food developments, because "scientific"/"hygienic"/"modern" food is awesome to him. I mean, I think he is of the generation that initially brought us the stuff like TV dinners and spray can cheese and food technology in general in the post war period, that only then in the backlash got its current bad reputation, because now "natural" is fetishized as the best and healthiest food.

When I make thicker, fluffy pancakes, instead of the thin crepe-style ones, I rather like adding stuff to the batter. Some chopped nuts work well, as does mashed banana, but I always fail when I try adding blueberries. Either the blueberries burst open and the surrounding area gets soggy, or the pancakes brown unevenly due to either blueberry juice getting out and caramelizing faster than the rest of the batter or intact blueberries sticking out making for an uneven surface, but I never get nice texture with blueberries in a fluffy pancake that is evenly browned. The online recipes I've found seem to imply that adding blueberries to pancake batter ought to work like regular pancakes in a straightforward way, yet it doesn't for me.

This morning I considered trying for blueberry pancakes again, but ultimately shied away from it, because my previous attempts never worked, and I'm not sure what I can do differently to make them not fail. I mean, the banana-pecan pancakes I made this morning were tasty too, but it would be nice to be able to make blueberry ones, so I wondered whether anyone has mastered this and could give advice?

So how many tries does it typically take to get the knack of this technique? After consulting online instructions I just tried it for the first time, and the result was not encouraging. I mean, it was edible and had the characteristics of poached egg in that the yolk was warm but still runny and the egg white was cooked, so not a total fail, but I didn't manage to make the egg white adhere to the egg yolk, and instead had to fish out most of it in bits from the water.

My dinner tonight was a sweet and sour butternut squash, lentils, and apple combination that I served with baked sweet potato (regular potato would have worked as well), and I found the mix of sweet pumpkin and apples with the lentils quite pleasing.

( recipe )

It didn't look that attractive because it is more or less a mush, but I liked the taste combination.

Discovering that the unopened bag of mung beans in my storage drawer was crawling with tiny black beetles when I wanted to use some. On the bright side, as far as I could see in my quick check of the rest of the drawer they hadn't yet managed to gnaw through the plastic and infested the rest of my food stores. I guess it can always happen that some egg or beetle slips through in the processing and the bag had been in my drawer for two months or so, so they had time to multiply, but still, gross!

Since I only noticed after I opened the bag, I also had to rewrap the thing in a new plastic bag I could tie closed before throwing it away to lessen the likelihood of beetles venturing outside the trash bag before I can take it out. I still think I'm going to take that thrash bag out even though it is not yet full to get rid of the crawling cohort that turned my kilo of mung beans into their habitat. Obviously the beetles have been there for quite some time, and not in the trash even, so it's kind of irrational to feel so grossed out now, but vermin always feels worse once you become aware, I guess.

Seriously, neither of the two supermarkets nearest to me had any plain white sugar when I tried to buy some this week. Last year before they raised the sugar price there were signs in the supermarkets that they wouldn't sell more than five kilo to a customer, because some people were apparently hoarding sugar, either in anticipation of a price increase or to resell it in neighboring countries where sugar prices were already higher, but at least it was still available. And of course now it's been selling at the higher price of 85¢/kg for some time. When it's available, that is, which apparently it is not right now as far as my nearest supermarkets are concerned. I ought to have hoarded some too. (Or I guess I could walk around to other supermarkets further away, looking for a place that has sugar, but I'm lazy.) >:(

It's a good thing I didn't throw out the sugar that got a little wet and clumped in its package when I accidentally spilled water on it some weeks ago, but rather dried it out, so at least I still have some clumpy sugar, even if I almost used up the rest.