Friday, June 20, 2008

Hopskip

This drink is a tribute to my Cornell days, and comes with a long and storied tradition. It was developed in Risley, the Cornell performing arts dorm and my residence for all four years on campus, as a way of making extremely cheap alcohol taste palatable. It soon migrated to Cornell's Debate Team via Cornell Debate alum (and minor CDA legend) Emmanuel Schanzer, where it has gained a reputation across the Ivy League as the absolute best way to get completely sloshed on a budget. Such is its magic that even experienced drinkers will have problems knowing how much is too much. It tastes innocently like lemonade, and it packs the kind of punch that leaves unsuspecting debaters waking up in foriegn locations and searching vainly for their pants.

I stumbled across a recipe for it a few days ago, while sorting through a few of my school things. I was tourney director for the Cornell Debate Tournament for two years while I was on the team, and one of the duties involved was planning the party. Apparently I wrote down the hopskip recipe at some point for that, perhaps to remind myself to get supplies. Anyway, here's a remnant of my college days. I preserve it mostly for nostalgia's sake, as god only knows when I'll next be called upon to provide drinks for two hundred plus people. It's suitable for service at most parties, but should not be served without some sort of warning to guests, as most people drink themselves stupid the first time they encounter it. (I told you, it was invented to disguise the taste of bad booze. It does this, admirably. Perhaps too admirably as people don't realize how much they've actually consumed.)

Hopskip

1.75 liters vodka (this must be the absolute cheapest you can find. If you're paying $10 for two liters, it's too expensive)
6 cans lite beer
4 liters sprite or your local generic equivalent. Being Cornell, we used Wegmans' generic: W-up (pronounced "wup").
1/3 liter lime juice (eyeball it)
2 cans frozen concentrated pink lemonade

Find a large container and mix ingredients thoroughly. At Risley, there is an official 35-gallon tub that acts as the hopskip vessel (to be absolutely true to Risley tradition, someone's arm was the stirrer in lieu of spoon, but this is not strictly necessary). For Cornell Debate events, it is frequently served out of a trashcan, although a new bag (or two or three) is strongly recommended for this method of service. This basic recipe makes about eight liters, but can readily be doubled, trebled, or quadrupled to fit a given crowd size.

Servings: How much a single recipe serves has always been a matter of debate, and attempts at scientific tests have yielded different results based on the respective participants' alcohol tolerances. Nonetheless, eight people is a conservative estimate (and those eight people will be really drunk), while fifteen or twenty is a more likely number.

Turkey Meatballs

Holy crap, these are good! I'd never tried cooking with ground turkey before, but when I noticed at my grocery that it's both cheaper and healthier than ground beef, I thought I'd give it a go. Orangette provided a recipe for me to riff on, and I was ready to cook.

And oh man, these are fabulous. Even my red-meat-and-potatoes parents loved these. They're fast, easy, and delicious. What more could I ask of a first experiment with turkey? I think I'll be using it more often.

Turkey Meatballs

1 lb ground turkey meat
1 medium onion, diced
2 eggs
2 tbsp fresh basil, shredded
1/2 cup toasted pine nuts
1/2 cup golden raisins
1/2 cup plain fine bread crumbs
1/2 tsp salt
Pepper
Cumin (a few shakes. I probably used 1/2 tsp, all told)
Olive oil

Mix everything except the olive oil together in a large bowl. Use your hands and get it all gooey, but try to avoid overmixing, since that just makes the turkey tougher. Make little balls about an inch wide (lean towards the smaller here; larger take too long to cook and the bottoms might get burnt) out of the mix. Heat a thin film of olive oil to just over medium heat, and saute your meatballs in batches so they don't get too crowded (too close together and they steam instead of sauteing, which ruins the consistency). Turn them as they color on the bottom so that all sides get evenly cooked. When they're done (check one with a fork if in doubt), drain them on a plate with a paper towel to catch any excess oil.

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Cure for a Sore Throat

For the last week, I have been sick, sick, sick, and miserable. My throat sometimes feels so large I swear it's about to crawl out of my body and go find adventures of its own. During one of these occasions, I turned to the internet for sore throat remedies, and discovered that everything that helps a sore throat apparently tastes awful. When I couldn't sleep for a second night for coughing, I resolved to try a few of them anyway, using ingredients I had lying around in my kitchen. So, after a few days of trial and error, here is my recipe for a sore throat remedy that works wonders for me. I'm posting it here so that I don't forget it, and should I (god forbid) ever get this bad again, I can make more.

Sore Throat Remedy

2 1/2 tbsp white vinegar
1 tbsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp chili powder
Salt
Water
Yogurt

Mix together the vinegar, lemon juice, chili powder, and a few shakes worth of salt in a microwaveable measuring cup. Add about a cup of water, and whisk it all together. Microwave for 20 seconds and whisk again, to get all the chili powder to go into solution. Microwave for another 30 seconds or so, and test with your finger to see if it's warm, but not so warm it might burn your tongue. If it needs a few more seconds in the microwave, go ahead.

Hold your nose, take a sip, and gargle. It doesn't taste as vile as you might think, and once you gargle with about two sips of it you'll fall in love, because it makes your throat feel about 80% better almost immediately. Keep gargling sips until your throat no longer feels like a survivor of trench warfare. Finally, eat a few bites of yogurt slowly to nullify the taste. The yogurt completely cuts the chili and vinegar taste out of your mouth, so there's no bad aftertaste, just a better throat.

Repeat every two hours or so, or as often as you need to.

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Fancy Strawberries

I should have posted this weeks ago. This is the dessert that I did for Mother's Day, and I was pleased with how it came out. It's not complicated, but it tastes good and I like simplicity when it come to my desserts. The lemon and mint infusion in the syrup gives this a hint of sophistication, and the handmade whipped cream is a nice homey touch. Overall, it's something that can be made ahead of time and stuck in the fridge until you need it, at which point it's impressive. My kind of dessert.

Fancy Strawberries

1 lb fresh strawberries
1 1/4 cup sugar
Zest from 1 lemon
Zest from 1 small lime
4 fresh mint leaves (No, extract won't do. It's got to be fresh mint on this one, but pretty much any kind of mint will work.)
1 1/2 cup heavy whipped cream

Start by making a simple syrup: combine 1 cup of the sugar and 1 cup of water in a saucepan over medium-high heat, and stir it until all the sugar has gone into solution. Turn the heat down to medium, then add the zest from both the lemon and the lime, and the mint leaves. Let these infuse for 5 minutes or so, and then run the whole thing through a strainer covered with cheese cloth to get out the mint leaves and zest scraps. The syrup should be clear (DO NOT let it caramelize. If it caramelizes, you've got your heat way too high), and you should taste both the citrus and the mint if you sample it.

Wash your strawberries, and slice them horizontally into 1/4 inch circles, discarding the leafy tops. Dump your sliced strawberries into your syrup, and sit it in the fridge to chill out until you are ready to serve it.

When you're ready to serve, add the remaining 1/4 cup sugar to the 1 and 1/2 cups heavy cream in a large mixing bowl. Taste this mixture. It should taste pleasantly sweet, like cool whip in liquid form, except better. If you like your whipped cream sweeter, add more sugar. This is a to-taste thing, there's no science to making whipped cream. When the mix of cream and sugar tastes right to you, use a whip to beat it into fluffy peaks. This should take about 3-5 minutes of rapid whipping. It's really not that difficult, I'm not sure why so many people seem intimidated of making their own whipped cream.

Serve the strawberries by spooning them into bowls, and drizzling syrup over them. Spoon some whipped cream on top, and drizzle a little syrup over that too. Serve immediately.

Servings: I have no idea. 8-10, probably.

Shrimp, Squash, and Asparagus Linguine

This is a quick dish that I made last week when I was at a loss for dinner ideas. It turned out really good, so I thought I'd jot it down for future reference.

Now, I don't usually cook with shrimp. Especially recently, when all food seems expensive, but meats and particularly seafood seem very expensive. But for this one I forgive myself. A pound of cooked medium cocktail shrimp was $13, but that will stretch for at least three meals, and I comfort myself with the knowledge that this will give me something a little special in my repertoire for the next few weeks at less than $4.50 a meal, which seems more reasonable.

This recipe was also a good excuse for me to use a new birthday present: a mandoline. This is basically an inclined plane with a blade embedded in it, which you can adjust to make various thicknesses of slice. You just slide your veggie (or item-to-be-sliced) across it, and it very quickly renders thin, perfectly uniform slices. I love it. It's no substitute for real skill with a knife, of course, but in cases where you need things thin and fast, it's perfect.

This pasta was very good, by the way. I'm a big linguine fan, I like it better than spaghetti, and this is a simple way to really let the fresh summer vegetables that are just coming into season shine. Despite the presence of the shrimp, it's the asparagus and squash that really make this dish, and a simple cream sauce sets them all off perfectly. This tastes like something you'd pay a good bit for at a restaurant, but it comes together in about 20 minutes, and the hardest thing about it is making sure the pasta is al dente. Perfect for those nights when you want to cook, but don't need a huge production in the kitchen.

Shrimp, Squash, and Asparagus Linguine

1/3 lb linguine (whole grain is good if you can find it)
1 tbsp olive oil
1 scallion
1/2 bunch slender green asparagus, washed with tough ends snapped off
2 medium squash, washed
2 cloves garlic
1/3 lb shrimp (I used 1/3 of a frozen bag of already-cooked, but you could use fresh if you wanted)
3/4 cup heavy cream
2 tbsp chopped chives
Salt
Pepper

Start by putting water on to boil for the pasta. Toss a palmful of salt in there with it to season the pasta, and add noodles when it starts to boil.

While your pasta is doing you thing, slice the veggies. I used my new mandoline on the squash, which made the slicing fun and novel, but a knife would be fine. Just go for thin slices. Slice the asparagus into bite-sized pieces. If you're using frozen shrimp, run water over them for a few minutes to defrost them, and remove the tails. Dice the garlic finely. Slice the scallion thinly.

In a large saute pan, pour in the olive oil and add the squash. Add salt and pepper to taste. Let the squash cook over medium-high heat for 3 or 4 minutes, then add the garlic and scallion. Let that cook another 2 or three minutes, until the scallion is starting to turn translucent. The squash should be starting to get soft by this point. Add a little more olive oil if you need to so that nothing sticks. Add the shrimp and asparagus. Let that cook for another 2-3 minutes. The asparagus should be just starting to get bright green and a little softer, and the shrimp should be heated through.

By this point, the pasta should be done. Dump 1/2 cup or so of the pasta water into the saute pan with your veggies and shrimp, then drain the rest of the pasta and add it to the saute pan while it's still hot. Add the cream and the chives. Stir it all around a little, and reduce the heat to medium-low. Let it simmer, stirring so that the cream doesn't stick, until the sauce thickens up appropriately. If you want to speed that process along, add a few pinches of cornstarch to the sauce, and stir vigorously to incorporate it. When it's been simmering for about 5 minutes, you should see the sauce really start to stick to the pasta, and it's done. Taste it, then add salt and pepper to season to taste. Remove from heat, and serve immediately.

Servings: 4

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Not a recipe

This isn't cooking-related, but I had to post it.

Today, the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality. Barring an improbable Constitutional amendment in November, California is now the second state in the union that allows gay marriage with full and equal rights.

There's an old adage that as California goes, so goes the nation. God willing, it's true.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Quiche

This recipe is designed for a deep-dish quiche. I use a deep pie dish when I make my crust, and that gives me enough room to just barely manage to fit all the filling in. A shallower dish would still make a good quiche, but you'd have some egg mix left over, and you'd miss out on the unique texture the custard in the quiche takes on when you get it to a certain thickness.
Quiche

1 Simple Pie Crust, set and cooled to room temperature
Filling Ingredients, cooked until ready (i.e.: if you want your quiche to be a mushroom and onion quiche, you would need to saute the mushrooms and onions. For ham, you'd need to cook the ham)
5 eggs
2 cups heavy cream
1 cup milk
2 tsp salt
Pepper to taste (a little less than 1/4 tsp is generally what I use)
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp pure vanilla extract
Approx. 3 cups coarse grated cheese, loosely packed (I like a mixture of cheddar and Jarlsberg for this)



Preheat the oven to 325F.

Begin by scalding the cream and milk. Heat them in a pot over medium heat until a thin film forms on top of the mixture, then remove them and let them sit for 10 or so minutes to cool (if they're too warm they'll cook the eggs when you try to mix them).

In a large mixing bowl, combine the eggs, milk mix, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and vanilla. Whisk as quickly as you can for three minutes. The goal here is to produce a fluffy quiche by incorporating as much air into the egg mix as possible. Let the egg mix rest for a few minutes, and saute your filling. When the filling is finished with its saute, collect the egg mix, the pie-dish with the crust, the cheese, and the filling in one location.

Assemble your quiche. Sprinkle about half the cheese evenly over the bottom of the crust. Top this with about half your filling ingredients. Whisk the egg mixture vigorously for another two minutes or so, then pour in enough of the egg mixture fill the crust half-way. Sprinkle most of the remaining cheese in another layer, followed by all the remaining filling ingredients. Pour on enough egg mixture to completely fill the crust. You may not use all the egg mixture, but get as much of it in as you can. Sprinkle the remaining cheese on top of the whole thing.

Carefully put your quiche in the oven, on a rack in the center. Bake the quiche for 7 minutes. The fillings and egg mixture should settle and deflate a little, so pull it out and fill it back up to the top with any of the remaining egg mixture. Again, you may not use all of it, depending on things like the thickness of your crust and the depth of your pie-dish. Slide the filled quiche back into the oven, and cook for another 1 hr and 15 minutes. The quiche is finished when the top is an even, deep golden color, and the center is set relatively firmly (it should only jiggle a very little when you wiggle the dish).

When the quiche is finished, remove it from the oven and sit it on a cooling rack for 15 or 20 minutes. It will deflate a little, this is to be expected. Serve warm, or (if you're making this in advance) refrigerate and serve chilled later.

My Favorite Filling Ingredients, and how to prepare them:

- Shitake mushrooms (approx 10 large mushrooms) and red bell pepper (1 pepper): Wash the mushrooms and remove the woody stems. Slice the mushrooms into 1/4 inch strips. Remove the seeds from the bell pepper, and slice it into quarters lengthwise. Slice each of the quarters into 1/4 inch thick strips, then cut these long strips into more bite-sized pieces (aim for the pepper pieces to be the same size as the mushroom strips). Saute the mushrooms in 3 tbsp olive oil for 5 minutes (or until soft), then add the peppers and saute for another 3 minutes.

Servings: 8-10