Category Archives: cooking

Butter and Whipped Cream

Posted on October 9, 2001 by Pamela

Well, I was going to do some stuff online tonight but now that I’m here I don’t want to do anything. I’m going to finish my soccer game and do some ironing and watch Angel at 9.

One good thing that happened is that my sister was picked to be a torchbearer for the Olympics in SLC. It was Mom’s idea but I wrote the nomination so I’m pretty excited about this.

Also I forgot to tell this earlier but I made this dish this weekend with sweet potato and apple which you cook and puree with butter and whipped cream. It was amazing. I ate bowl after bowl and convinced myself it was because I need the yellow vegetable vitamins.

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Manapua Cobbler

Posted on May 26, 2001 by Pamela

Yesterday I tried to make manapua and I’m no expert on the correct names and origins of this food but generally I think you could also call this hum bao or bao buns or steamed buns. I have never made this before or seen anyone make it, but my cousin Lisa told me she made them once and it was easy.

So I made the filling and that went fine. I didn’t like the recipe’s filling so I invented my own which was chicken and pressed tofu baked in homemade bbq sauce and then minced carrot, turnip, onion and mushroom sauteed in a bit of bbq sauce and mixed with the tofu/chicken.

Then I made the dough and that actually turned out okay too except it seemed to need an awful lot of flour and I had a tough time getting it all mixed in and the recipe said to be careful not to knead too much because you didn’t want gluten to form.

I did all the steps, did the dough rise, rolled out my dough, filled em up and here’s where the problem came in. The recipe guy said he steamed them in a bamboo steamer in his wok. Since I don’t have a bamboo steamer or a wok, I decided to use the steamer insert in my soup pot. He said he did 12 at a time, two layers of six, but as I made mine I thought, “Hey, I can fit 12 at a time, in two layers,” and I packed them all in elbow to elbow.

So when I did the rise, the buns all fused together into a giant lump of dough and then when I did the steam/cook part, the only part that cooked was the bottoms and along the sides. Then when I took them out, the individual buns were all stuck together and when I tried to separate them, the filling flew out. So bascially I ended up with a manapua dough cobbler. We threw them on a cookie sheet and baked them in the oven and salvaged them somewhat. But I was quite disappointed as this was a fairly labor intensive meal. At least I know what I did wrong for next time.

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Wrap Up

Posted on May 10, 2001 by Pamela

I wrote this earlier and my blog got eaten. What a world.

SNACKS
Bob and I have been talking about cleaning out our shop for months. The “shop” is a room off the garage that’s a handy place for throwing empty boxes, broken chairs, old moldy tarps – you get the picture. We never seem to get around to it so I decided to schedule a time. Last Friday I taped a sign to the microwave that said, “Sunday Shop Cleaning 2-4pm, Featured snack: vegan chicken nuggets with dipping sauce.” Bob thought this was hilarious. I explained that I thought a snack would ensure participation.

CINCO DE MAYO
For Cinco I made a bunch of festive foods. I tried a Sunset magazine recipe for Green Chili Rice which came out great even though I didn’t have some of the ingredients and I didn’t follow the directions very well. The recipe said to add to make 3 cups of liquid but I accidentally put in 4 cups of liquid so I just threw in some more rice and we didn’t have long grain so I used short grain — if you enjoy eating it that’s all that matters, right? Then I made sweet potato quesadillas which sounds like a yuppie restaurant food, but we liked it. Next time I’d mash the sweet potatoes better. The last thing I made was chicken posole soup and I used the slow cooker which turned out to be a mistake. But we added green chili rice and salsa to our bowls which perked up the boring soup.

GARDEN
I’m behind in the garden. I got one row of greens in a month ago and now that the sun’s come out they’re growing like crazy. I put in two more rows last weekend and bought my tomatoes yesterday. Earlier I reported that I’d planted about 60 peas and only about 3 have come up — the slugs eat them as soon as they show their faces. Next year I’ll sprout them inside first.

CUSTOMER SERVICE
I hesitate to even write this because that goofy guy from SW Airlines is probably going to come back and beat me up again for having my panties in a wad and wanting the world to run my way. (Well, we all do, don’t we?) But since when did customer service turn into employees running over to you the instant you pause in a store to ask, “Can I help you find something?” Yeah, it’s nice to see there are employees around who can help you if you need it and if I need help I will ask for it, but sometimes you just like to look at the salad dressings to see if there’s a new one to try or you need to stand there for a minute to remember what you need and you’ve got some employee interrupting you and saying, “You look like you need some help.” Sometimes I want to hand them my shopping list and just go wait in the car with a magazine and some cookies. The latest that got me going was this goofy guy in this bookstore downtown who says across the entire store in his priggy voice, “May we help you?” when I very clearly did not need help.

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IFOSM

Posted on April 11, 2001 by Pamela

I’m learning a lot about buttermilk. Yesterday I was making some pancakes and my freshly purchased buttermilk with an April 23 pull date had little white grainy blobs in it — which after my last experience with questionable buttermilk — made me quite nervous. So I called my cooking consultant, Auntie Janet to ask her (after the last time she said I had a family malady called IFOSM (“intense fear of sour milk”) and her answer was basically, not sure about the lumps but there should be no problem with it.

I decided to call the dairy. Phil, in the lab, had almost the same answer which didn’t increase my confidence. “How do you know if buttermilk is bad?” I asked. “The same way you can tell if other foods are bad, taste and smell,” he says, helpfully. I pointed out that buttermilk was a little funky to begin with not to mention that people with IFOSM are not about to be drinking buttermilk. He agreed that most people use buttermilk in cooking and don’t know what it’s supposed to taste like.

I made the pancakes anyway. We ate them and they tasted great.

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