Omnomicon

Revealing my disinterest in ice cream always draws a lot of incredulity on the behalf of the listener. Sometimes the reaction is decidedly offended, as though ice cream were treasured family moment I just figuratively dismissed with a bored wave of my hand. Other times it’s complete confusion. What did you just say? What do you mean, you “don’t like ice cream?” You must like some kind of ice cream. And it’s not like I hate the stuff, it’s just that I don’t care much for it, and if I’m going to down a thousand calories in the span of 10 minutes, I’d rather it be noodles I drag from takeout carton to pursed lips with some bamboo sticks.

But every now and again, I have this crazy craving for a banana split. And you know, I’m a simple girl in that respect: banana, vanilla ice cream, walnuts, chocolate bits, butterscotch and of course, a maraschino cherry. With this in mind I present a take on blondies that is a little lighter than usual and reminiscent of a banana split.

I’d like to use this opportunity to let you know, in case you didn’t, that a kitchen scale is a wise investment because then you don’t have to pack brown sugar, which is one of those things that just seems to completely interrupt the flow of my baking process. Similarly, you don’t have to sift your flour in order to measure it only to sift it again into the mixing bowl. And your scale has other uses that will no doubt come up in future recipes as I loudly bang the “really, just get a kitchen scale already” drum.

I thought that these bananas looked rather . . . conversational.

By now we all know to use very ripe bananas in our baking, and by necessity I often end up freezing them too, in an attempt to salvage that lone straggler at the end of the week. This is a convenient circumstance, as freezing then thawing the fruit bursts cells and brings out as much flavour as is possible from it. At least, that’s my understanding, but the actual fact that pre-frozen fruit is better for baking, for whatever reason this is the case, is confirmed by on Mr. Alton Brown who was rambling on in his weird way about it one Sunday afternoon a couple years ago as I nursed a hangover on the couch.

Wheat germ is one of those things I haven’t experimented with very much, but it has an unobtrusive nuttiness that avoids being too earthy. Of course, I’ve only had opportunity to pair it with quite a bit of sugar, so maybe this is different in other contexts. Also, walnuts and chocolate chips.

I polka dotted the top with some maraschino cherries. Because they really do scream ice cream, and it was the cutest thing I could think for a garnish.

Before:

After (all gummy from baking, yum!):

I find that full-on brownie size (more than 3″ on a side!) is just way too big, and really, after the first half I’m eating it because I don’t really want to hold onto the rest. With this in mind, I cut to the chase and halved the usual size. Triangles seem to make the split look more deliberate and less “shit, too many people showed up.”

These had just the perfect brownie-imitative texture. They weren’t too cakey, but had a lovely rise to them, avoiding the heavy greasiness of some blondie recipes. Of course, sacrificing that greasiness also sacrifices that amazing chewy crustiness, but the edges on these things are still quite satisfying.

And while the intention was to have a bar that really embraced a banana split all on its own, I would be seriously remiss if I had not tried it with a simple vanilla ice cream.

Banana Split Blondies

1/2 c butter (1 stick), softened
2/3 c sugar
2/3 c light brown sugar (147g)
2 tsp vanilla
4 very ripe bananas (previously frozen is best), mashed
1 egg
1 c whole wheat flour (125g)
1 c white flour (125g)
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 c wheat germ (optional)
1/2 c chocolate chips
1/2 c chopped walnuts
24 maraschino cherries, drained

Preheat oven to 350^o.

Cream butter & sugars, add vanilla, bananas and egg. Sift wheat & white flours along with the baking powder into the mix, then combine. Stir in wheat germ, chocolate chips and walnuts.

Spread into well-greased 9×13 metal baking pan—a glass pan will bake differently, so be aware. Dot with staggered maraschino cherries, three to a row, eight to a column.

Bake 35 minutes, and allow to cool completely before cutting. To get the triangle thing going on, first cut into a 3×4 grid (12 pieces), then cut each rectangle diagonally so each piece has one cherry.

nutrition summary: (1 of 24 bars) 174 calories, 7g fat, 1g fiber; about 4 weight watchers points

Is it just me, or do intact jalapeno seeds kind of look like those old lady swim caps?

More than any other photo I’ve snapped, this is one of the most enticing. It just makes me want to enjoy the world’s hugest chocolate cupcake with the goofiest happy face every time I look at it. Pictured is one of my best friends’ son enjoying a self-decorated cupcake on his third birthday. And cupcake aside, how gorgeous are those eyes? Somewhere, there is a 3-year-old girl who is going to fall HARD for this kid in about 15 years. I guarantee it.

Our local farm opened on Friday. It’s like a farmer’s market, but with better hours.

Alrighty, kiddos! Today we’re making hot sauce. Yusssss! I did a bit of research, paired it with existing knowledge, and came up with this little spot of education.

Turns out that making hot sauce is a pretty inexact art, which makes it very easy to customize to your own liking. Different methods include aging, fermentation, starting with a mash, and then what I picture here, which requires thinking ahead a scant 2 hours instead of 3 years. With my lacking “planning ahead” skills, this is the only method that could possibly prove useful to me. Also, this makes a very thoughtful but inexpensive gift for most dudes.

Even “quick method” hot sauce is versatile. You can add ground spices, different mixes of peppers, unique vinegars, and create different textures all according to your preference. I went with a very simple recipe that uses jalapenos, as they are the most readily available hot pepper in my area, roasted garlic because it’s delicious, and red wine vinegar to give it some personality. My aim was a sauce with the simplicity, texture and versatility of Tabasco Sauce, but different because why else would you make your own, am I right?

To begin with, we need to lay down some food safety rules. This is not the kind of food safety where we worry that we might undercook the egg the 1 time out of 20,000 that it contains salmonella. No no, we’re talking the kind of sure fire situation where “you’re doing it wrong” quickly becomes “fuck, my eyes!” so you want to be a little careful.

Here’s some totally excellent, completely free advice.

Vinyl, unpowdered gloves which can be found by the hundred at your local drug store. I use these any time I cut a hot pepper ever since that time I had to dunk my nose in yogurt after a mistouch mishap. They’re cheap and disposable and well worth the investment. Without gloves, I find that fieriness has made its way under fingernails, on eyelids, in the corner of my mouth . . . pretty much anywhere I ever get a little itch. You’ll find yourself far less likely to itch with the gloves on, and when you’re done your nail beds won’t burn either. Be sure to be wearing these when you clean the knives and cutting board you use, and clean these well. End advice.

Now that we have that boring bit out of the way, we roast garlic, which takes about 45 minutes. I don’t think I have to tell you that roasted garlic is always better than garlic of any other kind.

It makes your house smell good and your breath smell bad. Interesting dichotomy, garlic.

Now crank on up to broil and burn up some jalapenos! Five to ten minutes each side under the broiler should do the trick, but what you’re really looking for is the skin to blister, turn black, and pull away from the body of the pepper ever-so-slightly.

Roasting the jalapeno brings out a little more flavour in addition to deepening the efficacy of its spiciness, and is worth the effort. After doing so, don your gloves, peel the skin, remove the seeds, and artfully arrange with the garlic head in a florally-reminiscent display of Springtime enthusiasm.

Okay, you don’t have to do that really, but it’s an option. What you do need to do is chop these veggies up and dump them in a pot with some vinegar.

The story doesn’t change much for the next hour, while the mix simmers slowly with the cook’s eye upon its liquidity. If it gets too chunky, add more vinegar. In all, I used 1.5 – 2 cups of vinegar. And here’s the result.

Strain as much as you like, if at all. I strained with cheesecloth in a mesh strainer 3 times for the texture pictured.

And here’s our final product. The flavour is mild (about Tabasco strength), but pronounced. It comes on quickly, then recedes almost immediately, with practically no lingering. If any hot sauce enthusiasts happen to be reading, feel free to correct my terminology.

Oh, and what good is making your own hot sauce without a little sassy branding?

Variations

Think of this as more of a method than a recipe. You can effectively make any variety of amendments to the ingredients, add extra things and substitute others. This is just a jumping-off point. Here’s a sample list of ideas—think hot sauce fusion.

“Sweet But Not Innocent” > Habanero, mango, white vinegar
“Italian Stallion” > Basil, Italian peppers (mild), cherry peppers, tomato, balsamic vinegar
“The Asiatic” > Thai chili peppers, rice vinegar (mirin), dash soy sauce

So tell me, what would your signature hot sauce be? Make it interesting. Give it a cutesy name. Any neat packaging ideas? And if you follow through and make it, let me know, I promise I’m dying to hear about it.

 

 

Aleta’s Bad Breath Hot Sauce
brought to you by Omnomicon’s own singular ingenuity

1 head garlic
10 jalapeno peppers
1.5 c red wine vinegar
1/4 tsp sugar
1/8 tsp salt (two pinches? I did two pinches)

Roast the garlic by drizzling with 1 tsp oil, wrap tightly in foil, then bake at 325^o for approximately 45 minutes. If you have a better way to roast garlic, then by all means, do it that way.

Char the jalapenos. Immediately after removing the garlic from the oven, flip the heat up to broil, then char each side of the jalapenos for 5-10 minutes. See pictures for reference, but the goal is black skin that is wrinkly because it has pulled away from the pepper.

Moving along, peel and de-seed the peppers, being sure to remove the light green veins to which the seeds cling. This prevents the seeds and veins’ bitterness from marring your lovely lovely batch. Pop the roasted garlic from its papery head, using a fork or toothpick, and chop, along with the cleaned peppers.

Dump peppers and garlic into a small pot with vinegar, sugar & salt. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and lightly simmer, uncovered & on low, for about an hour. If the sauce begins to look too chunky, add more vinegar, but note that the more you do this, the more diluted the flavour will be. If it’s cooking down too quickly (like you want to add vinegar after the first 15 minutes), try lowering the heat further.

Strain a few times with a cheesecloth-lined mesh strainer into a small bottle. I used a Johnny Walker sampler for mine, and it looked just darling. For gift-giving purposes, nip bottles make excellent, cheap packaging, with the added bonus of a shot that first requires your sip. If strained, this should last a solid 3 months—I’d recommend refrigeration just to be safe.

Makes enough for one household over the course of 3 months, a few ounces or so. As a frame of reference for larger batches, my 10 jalapenos weighed about 10 oz.

This shit is bananas. Too obvious? Too soon?

I try pretty hard to feature original ideas for my food, and the cost is a lot of failure. Buckets of the stuff. Ugh. And as I move away from tried and true recipes toward completely new ones, it gets harder and harder to have a backlog of material if something doesn’t work out. This, coupled with my procrastinatorial nature, leads to a lot of fruitless nights.

Let’s discuss food philosophy a moment. Tastiness is tantamount. That’s one quality I can never bring myself to sacrifice. But the economist in me is always trying to balance out two other priorities: cool factor, calorie control & time to cook. Okay, three other priorities. Anyway, back to my point, sometimes something really REALLY satisfying and light doesn’t look like much of anything, and it’s worth it, because, well, it’s really REALLY tasty and hello skinny (like my homely Shrimp Surf ‘n Bake). Other times it’s just too heavenly NOT to share, and I cite as evidence the most amazing food Crisco can make (spoiler: it’s whoopie pies).

My recent neglect of calorie control has manifested itself in the form of an additional five solid pounds, a development that in itself is not a big deal, but I find that five pounds quickly becomes 40 for me, so my attention is important. To that end, I tried to return to my weight watching roots and had this great reinterpretation of Huevos Rancheros. I have exactly one problem with this recipe, and it makes it such that this will never work: eggs take for-freakin-EVER too bake inside a tomato. Forever. After 50 minutes of baking, the egg white was woefully inedible. I can’t justify spending any more time baking something just because it’s a neat way to do it.

I’ll admit that this photo really looks quite tasty. And I’m sure it would be, too, if it didn’t so cavalierly scoff at safe food handling practices. It’s tough to illustrate the slimy clear uncooked egg white smeared all over this dish, but I assure you it’s there.

 

This cake pan, where I threw all the salmonella-laden refuse, shows a clearer picture of the dinner’s inedibility.

There might be some merit to cooking the salsa properly, then frying an egg and serving it in a roasted tomato shell like that, but I felt the tomato flavour was just way too pronounced and difficult to overcome with what I threw into the salsa there. I did try making a tomato tube (instead of a tomato cup), throwing the egg at the bottom and salsa on top, but after 30 minutes it became clear that the egg white was rising and doing its whole “stubbornly not cooking” thing.

So that’s what I did last night. All I have to offer in terms of actionable food is not so much a recipe as it is an idea: fruited oatmeal is never as sweet as it should be and always seems to require additional sugar to balance the tartness. So I made a mango puree—one mango seems to do it for about 1 cup dried oatmeal, or four servings. I’ve dubbed it “Mangoatmeal,” because it’s vegan and I wanted to give it a name that made it sound decidedly non-vegan and even possibly cannibalistic. Also, because that was just the most obvious portmanteau.

Some visual notes.

Hopefully this weekend I will be cooking up a storm so I have something to report other than “my cooking skills cannot keep up with my creativity.” I have to say, though, I actually find most of my failed creations to be quite amusing. They say you learn more from your failures, and it’s true. Luckily I’m also quite adept at laughing at my own folly; it genuinely amuses me. So no need for consolation. I got a good laugh and a good lesson out of this deal.

Sometimes far-fetched (hopefully clever) ideas will grab me at some point between my iced coffee and lunch, then grow like a bacterial colony in my petri-dish mind til I burst with a spattering of about a thousand words into notepad. This is, for example, how the Recipe Round-Robin was born. It’s not the most methodical strategy, but it hasn’t failed me yet.

I bring this up as a reminder to submit your killer meatloaf recipe or comment to be a Tastebud (Tastebuddy? Is that any better? Are these names just awkwardly degrading?) by tomorrow at 5pm. Several excellent-sounding recipes already languish in my inbox, awaiting delicious employment. Details.

Daily Nom: it is my qualified opinion* that mushrooms are the most rewarding vegetable to sautee, probably because there are stages. Pictured: “when the mushrooms release their liquids.”

 

*matter of fact: my opinion is in no way qualified.

I think this is batch 3 or 4 of the Lemon Meringue Cupcakes‘ extensive research, a point at which I was still baking the meringue on top of the cake, at that point unmastered and quite dense, and the lemon curd concept was still in the coming. These cupcakes were good; I ate the shit out of them. They were just not very *presentable*.

I can’t even begin to say how nice everyone was in their comments on that last post. Really. I thought the internet was full of douchey trolls and angry 14-year-olds . . . my my we’ve all grown up.  My five-year-old self would be thrilled to have such a generous audience (side note: audiences are not kind to five-year-olds making up endless stories).

Also, nobody should worry that my regular schedule will be undermined; it shall merely be added to. Last week was an exception and not the new thing.

And here’s your daily nom.