Omnomicon

Part of the reason for my lapse in posting has to do with the whole rigamarole of planning something at least moderately unique and replete with a set of photographs. If this site had no photos, I’d update like, every day.

But I’ve been concocting all kinds of late-night improvisational meals and desserts and sharing only with my closest friends. Omnomicon’s mission statement is really to share dinner parties with the Internet-at-large, and so I feel like I’ve really been leaving some important guests off the list. The improvisational nature of these goodies really impede their shareability—I’m most creative around midnight, substituting everything for what I have on hand with guests gracing my living room, and I never know if it will truly come out. To photograph would be rude, and seems to jinx my success anyway.

So despite a lack of photographs, I have to share what turned out to be my most incredible late-night cheese platter to date. Use your colourful imagination to pretend that my house is impeccably kept and my serving platters not chipped. Imagine also the excellent company eccentrics such as Dano and myself might keep, and you’re probably right on.

World’s Most Incredible Improvisational Cheese Platter
intended to be served at least two hours after dessert, between the hours of 12am and 3am

Please amend according to your own stockpile of cheese & emergency guest crackers. I’ve paired the components together in the manner in which they are intended to be enjoyed, but of course experimentation is bound to occur.

1 box Water Crackers
8 oz whipped Neufchatel cheese mixed with 2 tbsp pesto concentrate (found in the fancy part of the pasta aisle in a paint-tube)

Leftover cheese from dinner, in this case, fresh mozzarella
1 tbsp leftover fig paste (just dab the mozzarella in there…this stuff can be overpowering)

Lindt Excellence Dark Chocolate Chili Chocolate bar, each square cut into four pieces
Cold tart green grapes, to cool the mouth after each piece of chocolate

Babybel cheese (the delicious little round things in red wax, just because they are hell of fun)

Ideas for variations:
Whole sugar-toasted almonds
Frozen sliced Ho-Hos (don’t laugh, they’re surprising and delicious)
Some kind of meat and earn yourself the right to call it charcuterie
Apricot jam substituted for fig paste
Make a cheese ball of the pesto cream cheese: roll in pine nuts & stick on dried cranberries

 

If you don’t hear from me in the meantime, Happy Holidays from Omnomicon! Treat yourself to something delicious on my behalf.

<3,
Aleta

While absence might make your lover’s heart fonder, I’m not so sure how it works with blogs. I’ve been especially internet-absent as of late, and in line with my apologetic nature, I’d like to assure everyone that everything’s peachy and no bizarre accidents or illness has befallen me. It’s just that

a) I’m not usually very talented at any one hobby, which is why
b) I rarely hold onto any hobbies for very long.

For example, once I made enough doilies for every appropriate surface in my parents’ house, I pretty much called it quits on crochet, and while I may make a hat every now and again, I’m no longer the lady always working on something like a Charlie Brown scarf.

I feel like I’ve missed a lot of food-related stuff in the last few months, like the opportunity to subversively bitch about Food Inc, or even consider attending the Foodbuzz Festival thing. And to think, I could right this very moment have a cabinet bulging with spice mixes & condiments I would never buy! C’est la vie, as I hear they say in France.

If you’ve been following along, you already know that every time I make a site plan, I can’t stick to it, so no promises here in terms of schedule, or regularity of posting, or anything I have to actually make good on. But I think I will be offering a bit more random commentary here and there between posts, because I prefer my recipe posts to be self-contained and non-referential, but at the same time I feel like I have a bunch of internet food buddies and talking like it’s the first time anyone’s ever been to the site is getting to be a kind of strain. I’m not even sure if that makes sense to sane people, but I’m a woman and my feelings don’t have to be sensical, so there. [side note: I don’t actually believe this; it is merely a convenient sentiment at the moment]

So thank you for reading, and thanks for keepin’ on comin’ back, and hey! I can’t skip a November Recipe Round-Robin—we have Thanksgiving coming up! Look for an announcement some time next week.

In the meantime, check it out. It’s a little boat of husk cherries bravely navigating the husky waters of their own protective little pods.

Hehe.

So I got a little momentum on this project in, like, August or something, except I had some sore disappointments, all in a row, that kinda scared me off for another several months, apparently, and I just haven’t really found my way back into the kitchen for much other than chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese.

One of these disappointments was maraschino cherries, since the fruit was in season (at the time, now so long ago) and it was another one of those posts that were supposed to be MY MASTERPIECE. And while I ended up with a whole array of beautiful photos, I also ended up with salty, inedible and downright gross cherries.

I found two recipes on the internet for these, one of which called for salt as a brining agent, the other which had just a little bit of salt and alum. Then I thought “hey, what’s all this dye about,” and set up a little Latin Square experiment testing the different combinations. Unless you’ve recently studied that especially titillating branch of Mathematics called Statistics, the last time you probably thought about a Latin Square was in Sophomore year of high school when your biology teacher taught you all about Mendel’s experiments. Here’s what mine looked like:

After a laborious three-day process of brining, rinsing, parboiling & refrigerating, I ended up with salty cherries, poorly preserved, and not a thing like the fluorescent red maraschino babies you find at the grocery store. And that’s not in a good way, either, like “oh man, these are WAY better than store-bought cherries!” No no, it was like “how could so much effort & care end so very badly.”

So while I hate to update for the first time in months with a fail post, the pictures really are awfully pretty, and maybe someone who has done this before can tell me where I went wrong.

It all starts with cherry pitting, which is made easier with this Iron Maiden-like device. And just in time for Halloween!

At this point, our cherries are still not only edible, but delicious what’s more!

After one day of brining, we have the alum solution on the left and the salt solution on the right. The alum really pulls its weight as a superior preservative and brought out a truly beautiful color from the cherries.

After three days of brining & rinsing, the alum-treated cherries are looking rather lovely…

…particularly when compared to the salt-treated cherries, which resemble nothing so much as wounds resulting from grievous kitchen accidents that have been under a bandaid for two days.

But we forge onward, draining, rinsing, new brine.

And then I used my patented “covering any old bowl” technique for keeping flies, dust & curious cats’ paws out of the stuff overnight. Incidentally, I do this for pretty much anything that would be annoying to saran wrap.

Then some finalized draining happened.

Then I made a simple syrup, which was WAY too sweet, but syrup is really fun to make. It’s just sugar and water that starts out all swirly and then ALL OF THE SUDDEN it transforms into a clear solution that will definitely burn you in a bad way because it’s super hot because [blah blah blah chemistry blah blah]. I could probably explain but I’ll save it for another time when I’m actually discussing a recipe.

Put the cherries in the syrup.

And finally, we have our latin square, realized & stylized.

I can’t even tell you which one had the dye, because it is so clearly unnecessary. So that was my single finding. But in a shallow white bowl, you can see the slight variations in color that resulted.

And those are some nice looking glasses too.

At this point, though I had tasted these a bit, I tried making a Shirley Temple. And that was when the saltiness really hit me. These may look pretty, but they are awful.

Failure. It’s the pits.

The mimosa. A delicious blend of fruit & alcohol that transforms even the most mediocre of brunches into an experience nothing short of magical. But alas, there are times where maybe perhaps a little bit of drinking might not be in the cards. Perhaps your hangover dictates brunch, but the thought of another drink, well, let’s just say you don’t want to think about another drink.

The solution is simple: Faux Mimosa. In addition to the dilemma above, it can be applied to a number of other problems as well. Perhaps you have that teetotaler friend, or worse, a decidedly non-teetotaler friend who gets whiny and annoying. Maybe you have a sister or niece *just* shy of 19 and you want to be the cool older sister (or cool aunt) without all the baggage of being arrested for serving alcohol to someone underage. How cool would you be to have her pals over, as you bemusedly observe the pitch and slurredness of their gossip rise over the course of the evening, so sure they are that this is the real deal. I would warn that you might end up providing crash space.

So imagine my delight in finding this recipe:

Side note: while the Fish House Punch looks like it might be pretty good, you’d think they could come up with a better title. Really. Or just run with it and garnish with fish heads.

This gem comes to us via that 1977 classic Sharing Our Best, a collection gathered by the Devil Worshipping Green Mountain Deputies Association of Vermont. The Devil Worshipping part isn’t explicitly addressed, except for THAT HUGE UPSIDE-DOWN PENTACLE ON THE COVER, which couldn’t possibly be a gross oversight.

We begin our Champagne Mocktail odyssey.

I like to buy local whenever possible. Turns out Polar makes its soda, like, 10 miles that way, so it’s extra fresh and better retains its vitamin content. That’s how that works, right?

I decided to squeeze my own orange and grapefruit juice, since I really don’t drink these things anyway and didn’t want to surrender the fridge space. These are also locally-grown oranges and grapefruit. I just love going orange-picking, they have this great farm right in Westborough.

I’m just kidding. Citrus plants don’t grow in New England.

In an awkward proportion, to get a cup each of orange and grapefruit juice, it took 3 oranges and 1.5 grapefruit. I think this probably changes depending on season, specific varietal and origin of your oranges, though the grapefruit proportion seems as though it would be a little more reliable. As a frame of reference, 1 orange = 1/3 c juice and 1 grapefruit = 2/3 c juice.

The easiest way to get juice out of citrus is with a citrus reamer. They’re cheap, extremely effective, and feel like way less of a pain in the ass than one of those little cup things. Also, you can strain the juice as you make it, which is convenient. Just poke it in your fruit there, mess up the insides, then let the juice drip into the sieve, and presumably the bowl underneath. Last step is to squeeze the orange/grapefruit around the reamer and rotate.

Get out your finest $5 Ikea pitcher.

And pour your non-alcoholic champagne.

Looks like a nice witbier, eh?

But mimosas are for girls. Girls with names like Kelli and Brittany. Let’s girl this up a bit, shall we?

Well, that’s nice, but Kelli and Brittany would kinda feel like you aren’t trying. Put some fruit in there, bitches love that shit.

Okay, we’re getting close. Let’s just go all out.

Drink on, ladies, drink on.

This was a bit sweet for my tastes, so I recommend excluding the extra sugar—it just felt so sticky sweet, it was much more refreshing after I diluted a bit with seltzer water. I also think there’s a little room for experimentation here down the seltzer water path, it makes for a dryer-tasting “champagne.” This inordinate sweetness is why you’ll notice I went from making Mock Champagne to Mocktail Mimosa. It just describes it better.

Faux Mimosa
from Sharing Our Best by the Green Mountain Deputies Association (1977)

Feel free to make this low-sugar or sugar-laden according to your preference. Serves 8.

1 liter ginger ale
1 c grapefruit juice (1.5 grapefruit if fresh-squeezing)
1 c orange juice (3 oranges if fresh-squeezing)
1 c water

Mix. Chill. Text Kelli and Brittany and see if they’re doing anything.

nutrition summary (1 serving with diet ginger ale): 23 calories, no fat, no fiber; about .5 weight watchers points

Let’s get all healthy on your ass.

I’m not really good at veggie-centric recipes, mostly because I think they’re very good all by themselves simply steamed or roasted or even fresh. There are a few standbys for combining veggies—salads, soups, mixing them with oil and tossing with pasta—but I never come up with anything particularly noteworthy, and so here I am, writing a blog with an audience no doubt suffering from a collective vitamin deficiency. Sorry about that.

I’ll make it up to you by sharing a method for oven-roasting veggies that I found in my new favourite reference book Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini. It’s one of the few reference books that hold up against Wikipedia and Internet-at-large, and even though it cost more than a Physics textbook, I highly recommend it.

So here’s what I learned. Grab some veggies you have lying around, perhaps the hardier vegetables from your CSA share that survived the last 6 days of neglect. Perhaps also some mushrooms because it makes a nice little faux-sauce.

Clean a leek.

How to do this: slice lengthwise about an inch from the base, then rinse all the dirt out in a tub o’water by separating the leaves and rubbing out any dirt under there. Leeks trap dirt very easily, so rinsing is pivotal in preventing that gritty bite of dirt that momentarily makes you wonder if you broke a tooth. If you’ve ever broken a tooth before, otherwise it’s just gross.

The green parts are usually reserved for soups, but I usually throw them in too.

Next, mince some mushrooms. Toss with thyme, salt and a smiiiidge of sugar.

Now we build the packet. Drop a teaspoon of oil on about a foot of foil, then spread to coat.

And layer the veggies.

I had some sad-looking basil leaves that were about to kick off, so I put a bunch in here to lend some complexity of flavour. Of course, you can mince whatever fresh spices you have to get rid of in with the mushroom, but I was going for subtlety for once.

Fold over and pinch like a turnover.

. . . and 20 minutes later, you have veggies with dinner. I did this in the oven at 400^o, but it would work just fine on the grill if you have the spare real estate beside your steak tips.

Serve with rice, meat, or another packet of veggies.

And that’s how Omnomicon is updated after way too much time off.

Oven-Steamed Veggies
as discussed in Elizabeth Schneider’s masterpiece, Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini.

This would work for pretty much any combination of veggies you love, but the mushrooms replace a traditional sauce and lend a level of satisfaction you might miss.

2 small leeks (or more), washed & cut into 1″ slices (about
6 small carrots, peeled & cut into 1″ slices (about 1/2 a lb)
4 oz mushrooms, minced finely
3 tsp olive oil (or other oil of you choice)
a sprig of fresh herbs you like
1/2 tsp thyme
1/2 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1/8 tsp pepper

Preheat oven to 400^o. Toss mushrooms with thyme, sugar, salt & pepper. Add in 1 tsp olive oil.

Cut two 12″ lengths of aluminum foil and coat half of each with 1 tsp olive oil. On each, layer half each of leeks, carrots, mushroom mixture and top with a sprig of your favourite herb on the oiled half. Fold over and pinch around to close, as though sealing a turnover. Place on a cookie sheet and bake for 20 minutes.

nutrition summary (1 serving, 1/2 of recipe): 145 calories, 7g fat, 4.5g fiber; about 3 weight watchers points

FACT: Omnomicon has lain dormant for some time. Months, even.

To all concerned: everything’s fine and great! I’m not dead, and hey, I even had time to get all engaged and thinking about a wedding. I’m just you know . . . not busy updating my website.

You see, I’m the kind of person with A LOT of hobbies. Well, a lot of [short-lived] hobbies. So the fact that I managed to go almost six months before lapsing is just remarkable! But in time I need a little bit of a break because if I’m going to burn myself out, I should probably save that for normal stressors like work and personal relationships rather than a website named after a nonsense word.

The lament continues: I’m really not feeling the food blog scene these days. I scroll along my rss feed daily, catching tidbits on Julie and Julia and free samples of rice wine vinegar and Tuesdays with Dorie and seasonal desserts and the culinary scene in upper Peoria, but I skip past most because I kinda just don’t care at the moment. That’s not to say I don’t have a lot of respect for food bloggers (hey, I got friends), but a lot of us are all saying/making/photographing the same stuff. And while it’s not a competition, if I’m not really bringing anything special to the table, why do I feel this overwhelming sense of obligation?

Aren’t you glad I came back to whine a little bit? You missed that, admit it.

The good news is, I’ve no intention of discontinuing Omnomicon, so I won’t make you beg me to keep posting. The not-as-awesome news is that I do not have this huge backlog of stuff to share like I wish I did, so I have to start generating more content. I’m working on it. Hoping to announce a new Recipe Round-Robin soon (and also send out old prizes, my GOD am I behind).

Cute little nose wrinkles,
Aleta

Weeks 2 & 3 of our CSA harvest were pooled with everyone else’s share because we were in California. But week 4 we had all to ourselves, as Heather & Jon (our share partners) were still in California on pick up day, so that’s almost like only missing the one share, hooray! Here’s what it looked like:

WE HAVE (roughly left to right)

• 1 bunch dill
• 10 radishes (1/2 lb), with leaves
• 2 pints peas
• All the nasturtiums I cared to pick (did not find out they were edible flowers until they had been wilting in a vase for awhile)
• 1 head bibb lettuce
• 1 lb bok choy
• 8 garlic scapes,garlic chives, or whatever your farmer’s market or CSA calls them
• 1 bunch cilantro
• a big old buncha collard greens
• 1 bunch scallions
• 2 kohlrabi
• 1 head red lettuce

Our cost for a half share is $14.20. Half of the above is worth about $15.03, or $17.53 if you count the flowers, which I do because I buy flowers for the house regularly. It should also be taken into consideration that these are organic vegetables (which drives up the price of the share) and I’m comparing to conventional vegetables at grocery store prices (which is what I’d most likely be buying if I didn’t have a share). We haven’t yet broken even, as I miscalculated the last share, but I think we’ll get there.

This week’s harvest brought a few new veggies to my kitchen, which was the real draw of this little experiment, and I suspect I’m not alone in this. I’d been itching to get my hands on garlic scapes ever since our farmer mentioned them at the orientation two months ago (those weird circley vine-looking things at the top . . . just to the right of the center . . . don’t see them? Yeah, they don’t really stand out) and they are incredible! They taste pretty much like chives, except with a garlicky bite that doesn’t even leave an aftertaste. Totally refreshing! I tried cooking with them here and there, but I found that no matter how much I added, their flavour seemed to wash out. Moving forward, these are being used like regular chives—chopped and sprinkled atop.

The other new veggie was kohlrabi. This is a funky-looking veggie, and I had high hopes for its flavour to be equally funky, but alas, it works like water chestnuts or cucumber or other bland veggies. Still, one cup has like 35 calories, 5 g fiber and 140% of your vitamin C. So whoah, it’s good for you.

Lettuce is lettuce, but yay for fancy lettuce!

We’re finally starting to get some herbs and I’m so excited about this. I love love fresh herbs. Love them. So much. Mmm!

And though radishes aren’t the most flavourful of vegetables ever, the purple ones had this beautiful sheen on them, like a purple satin with a golden sheen as it moves. Really, so beautiful.

But the biggest surprise were peas. Now anybody who’s known me any length of time knows I hate peas, but as it turns out, fresh-from-the-vine peas out-of-the-pod are incredible. They taste, not like the mushy gross woody-tasting crap I remember from my childhood, but unbelievably sweet, like fresh sweet corn. It was, to reuse a word, unbelievable. Of course, in like, two days, they’d become gross woody-tasting crap I remember.

And those are vegetables! Dano really liked this shot, but I thought it was harder to make everything out than the one at the top. My compromise was to include it at the end.

So tell me, which veggie shot do you like better?

Say CHEEEEESSSEEEEE.

So I’m back in the kitchen, but I’m gonna ease into it slowly. I like this “free time” thing I’d forgotten about and summer is awesome. Expect daily noms (natch) and a weekly update after some fashion on some day or other. Eventually I’d like to get back to my twice-a-week deal, on a schedule even. Yeah!

I’m back! Didja miss me? Vacation was vacation, I won’t bore you with details, but I did meet Steffany from Dinner Love, and she’s a dear.

But hey check it out, while I was glutting myself daily on hotel breakfast Danish, there were 45 Tastebuddies trying out 11 different recipes in a valiant effort to determine which would qualify as THE BEST CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES there are. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, welcome to Omnomicon! Here’s where you can read about our monthly Recipe Round-Robin contest.

And here, let me show you what the best looks like, beginning to end.

That up there is all the stuff that goes into these suckers. It’s hard to tell, but there are a couple secret ingredients in there.

The white stuff is ground oatmeal, and the brown crumbs are grated Hershey bars. Specifically Hershey bars. Except instead of grating, I thought I’d try getting the job done with my food processor.

And what do you know, it totally worked.

And then stir that into all the other stuff with some nuts and, naturally, chocolate chips.

The batter is extremely tempting, but be sure to save some for the cookies, they’re worth it.

So do you recognize these? They were Bubbe’s Fantastic Chocolate Chip Cookies, code named Recipe L, and many big thanks to Hallie for letting us give them a try! Here’s what she had to say about ’em:

Here is my bubbe’s fantastic recipe for Chocolate Chip Cookies. They’re definitely not low-fat, but they’re the best I’ve ever made (and I’m a pastry chef!).

So these are both pastry-chef and Tastebuddy approved. I knew you’s guys had great taste. My guess is that the groundedness of the oatmeal gives these more texture without being so suggestive of oatmeal cookies. I also have a theory on how the Hershey bar plays into things: usually a chocolate chip cookie is a sugar cookie with bitter chocolate chips here and there, but little to tie these two elements together. Maybe the grated chocolate creates a gentler transition from cookie to chip? Even if my theory is right (and I’m open to the alternative, I know what I don’t know), my word choice is not even remotely technical, so Hallie, please feel free to jump in with your expertise.

Here’s the word I got via email results:

• Our house votes for recipe L. It had lots of chocolate and grinding the oatmeal was a great idea because it made for flatter and less dry cookies. Recipe L was nice and chocolaty! After we made our decision we did our own taste test with friends and recipe L definitely won hands down.
• Far and away, I and my 3 co-tasters chose Bubbe’s Fantastic recipe as the best of the two. The finely ground oatmeal added a nice substance to the cookies without giving it the graininess of an oatmeal cookie. They baked up nicely–no flat cookies here–and the ground Hershey’s chocolate gave the cookies a beautiful brown color and a little extra chocolate kick. I used hazelnuts since it said you could add your choice of nuts–not a huge fan of nuts in cookies, but they tasted great in this recipe.
• The texture was very nice; the oatmeal provided more substance to the cookie and even though some of us had hesitations about whether oatmeal belonged in a traditional chocolate chip cookie, it was quite good.
• So good. If you’re including technique suggestions, rolling these guys into balls really helped.
• Who knew oatmeal could help so much?

And here’s the word on the web (leave a comment with a link if I missed your post!):

• Domestic Ambitions has a writeup
• Steph of Obsessed With Baking goes into great detail as well!
• Natalie at Oven Love reviewed her favourite of the two she tested.

And here’s what they looked like in other people’s kitchens:

Ruth made Bubbe’s

And Jeff also made Bubbe’s

Then Domestic Ambitions made the Friendly Choco-Chippers . . .

. . . and also Sheila’s (nice collage-work, btw).

Next up are the Kitten-Free (calls for exactly 0 kittens in the ingredient list, and the cleverness was simply adorable) as compared to the Family Secret recipe, the latter which did not seem to work out for Carly, who may have been too busy with Sunday’s NYTimes crossword to care.

And lastly, there was the recipe that ended in “Mmm. Eat.” and Ruby’s Plan ahead cookies. I want to give Lisa mad props for this photo, it’s gorgeous.

And there you have it! Yet another Recipe Round-Robin, now with 200% more reader participation. Hooray! So I’m announcing a savoury recipe for July . . . any suggestions? I’m thinking summer-time BBQ dishes—pasta salad, seasoned hamburgers, probably not potato salad because there’s a huge tendency toward grossness and grossed-out taste-testers—but I bet comfort food will work regardless of the time of year. We’ll save fruitcake for December.

Thanks again to everyone for participating. Really, I mean it! I’m so psyched that this works out every month because people are saying they had fun and because I like reading about it, and giving stuff away is fun too.

And last but not least, here’s Hallie’s winning recipe.

Bubbe’s Fantastic Recipe for Chocolate Chip Cookies
yields about 3 dozen cookies

1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
2 cups flour
2 cups oatmeal, ground to mealy texture
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
12 oz chocolate chips [2 cups]
4 oz grated hershey bar [this amounts to 18.5 rectangles from the Big Bar, but use your algebra to figure it out if you can manage . . . I food processored those suckers, and it seemed to do the trick. If grating by hand, however, one Tastebuddy recommends freezing the bar first so it doesn’t melt in your hand.]
~1 cup chopped nuts of choice (I usually use pecans or walnuts) [editor used pecans, and they were fabulous]

Cream the butter and sugars together.
Add the eggs and vanilla and beat until fluffy.
Mix the dry ingredients and add to egg mixture.
Stir in the chips, nuts, and hershey bar.
Drop by rounded tablespoons onto a lined cookie sheet and bake at 375 for 6-8 minutes. [editor’s note: mine took about 10 minutes, and one Tastebuddy had reported 11-12 minutes. Final recommendation is check in at 6 minutes, and then every two minutes after that until you can see a little bit of browning happening on top].

nom nom nom!

nutrition summary (1 of 36 cookies yield): 220 calories, 12g fat, 1.5g fiber; ~5 weight watchers points

Left coast, here I come!

Am I like the industrious ant, who steadfastly collected food photographs and scheduled posts for my week away? No, I am the lazy-ass grasshopper who realized too late her vacation was approaching, said “fuck it” then blew out of town. I probably won’t be answering email in this time either.

Meantime, check out this meandering fruit.