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To Bake a Wedding Cake, Part III: To Do

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Previously: Part I: A Prologue & Part II: Um, So, What Are We Doing?

Those of you who know me well know I live by lists. Lists of lists. They help me stay focused, complete teeny tasks I might would definitely otherwise forget were they not written down. My BFA in stage management was, in large part, composed of and achieved by making calendars, schedules, and lists.

The little wedding cake (ha) I’m making sure feels a lot closer from this side of my trip home than it did from the other. I am not a professional baker and therefore do not have a mass of trusty recipes and finely honed techniques in my pocket ready to be whipped out a few days before the wedding. With that in mind, I’m spending much of my time over the next ten weeks (gulp) testing recipes, practicing decorating techniques, adapting recipes I like to high altitude (just in case I wasn’t nervous enough about how the cakes will turn out), and ensuring that I’ll have everything I need to I fly across the continent to take over my mother’s kitchen for several days of cake madness.

But hey, I have a plan. And for you fellow list-aholics – you know who you are – I couldn’t help but share.

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How To’sdays: A New Series of Kitchen Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials

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Brulee!

When I started this blog, I knew that a huge part of the story would reflect my growth and learning in the kitchen, through successes and failures. I’ve learned, sometimes through trial and major error, to make pie crust, homemade cheese, fresh yogurt, beef jerky, canned tomato sauce… the list goes on and on.

And I’ve loved sharing these stories with you. But every once in a while, I am reminded that not everyone is learning the same things at the same time that I am. On one of my earliest posts, someone asked for clarification on how to separate an egg. Other readers have asked for advice topics ranging from tempering chocolate to selecting produce, from substituting ingredients to finding equivalents in other countries.

Flattening

I don’t profess to be a master of all kitchen knowledge, but in a lifetime of baking and cooking, I’ve picked up quite a few tips and tricks that I now take for granted when I step into the kitchen to start a project. Why should I keep them all to myself?

So without further ado, I am pleased to introduce How To’sdays! Each How To’sday post (which I’ll publish only on Tuesdays, for obvious puntabulous reasons) will be just what it sounds like: a How-To tutorial of some little kitchen tip that may make your life easier, more delicious, or more manageable.

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Fresh Baked Peaches

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In a moment, I’ll show you how to make this tasty dessert. It’s easy. It’s delicious. It’s summer in a ramekin. I’m horrified that I’ve never made it before.

But first, a public service announcement.

Don’t be scared of ugly fruit.

A blemish, a torn bit of skin, or an asymmetrical shape do not a bad fruit make. Just like a frizzy hair day (read: every day I spend in the South) doesn’t make me a bad person. Contrary to what grocery stores would have you believe, not all squash produce pops out of the ground coated in wax and uniform in shape and size. Embrace variety.

“Seconds”, as you’ll see and hear them called, can provide an extremely economical way to buy fresh, local produce in bulk. While Grade A  (code for pretty freakin’ perfect) produce is usually sold at the farmers market by the quart, pint, or pound,  seconds are usually sold in bulk for a very low price so the farmer can avoid trucking home boxes of excess, super-ripe produce.The first batch of peaches I bought this season (about a month ago, amazingly… NC peaches ripened in mid-May) were seconds, and instead of paying $5 a quart, I paid $2 for an entire bagful that is now mostly sliced and in the freezer. This week was even better: the peach lady only had seconds available by the time I made it to the market, asked me how many I wanted, and wouldn’t let me pay her a dime for the eight peaches she placed gently in a bag.

Not too shabby, right?

If you frequent farmers markets or buy directly from farm stands, keep your eye out for seconds. Some vendors will have a seconds section, others keep them to the side until the Grade A produce is sold. If you don’t see any, ask! Chances are you’ll get a sweet deal.

End of announcement. On to dessert.

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Money Where Your Mouth Is: February 2012

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It’s update time.

Just to re-cap, I started the new year with a goal: I wanted to learn just how I spend my money on food. Do I trade it with local culinary artisans? National corporations?

After some debate over which delineations mattered, I made a list of categories into which I would divide my purchases —  both for groceries and for restaurants — and began the semi-tedious task of tracking every single receipt. My first month of tracking gave me some results that were expected, and some that surprised me.

Here are the results for February:

On this front, the numbers are almost identical to January. I did have a few extra runs to the big box grocery store close to my apartment this month, and to be totally honest, I’m not exactly sure why. Other than I must have really planned meals poorly that week. My goal for this month is to only hit the grocery store once a week, which should save food dollars, gas dollars, and time dollars. Yes time dollars.

But look! Grocery dollars may have been the same, but restaurant dollars show major improvement! I had friends in town one weekend and my parents in town for almost a week, which gave me opportunities to go outside my normal restaurant box and show off Durham’s local flavor. We’ll see how it keeps up when I am not entertaining guests…

So on goes the tracking. And finally, as promised, if you want to track as well, I’ve uploaded the spreadsheet I’m using. You can download it at the link below… it’s pretty smart and makes all your numbers turn into graphs. Poof! Time to get excited.

Food Dollar Graphs

Happy tracking!

Smoky Adobo Salsa

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Adobo Cilantro Salsa

Over the last few years, I’ve grown out of my delusions of I’m-young-and-can-eat-whatever-I-want and now do boring things like pack salads for lunch and box up half of my pasta when we go out for Italian. Le sigh. But there continues to be one thing that, when placed in front of me, I have absolutely no control or willpower to stop myself from eating.

Chips and salsa.

Whenever I dine at a Mexican restaurant, it’s a sure bet that I’ll eat my weight in free chips and salsa before my meal arrives. I know that I’m gonna feel like I’m dying within a few hours, but I just can’t help it. Too spicy? Doesn’t matter, I’ll cry through the pain. Not hungry? That’s literally not a thing.

Typically, when I make salsa at home, they are collections of diced vegetables and herbs. But sometimes I just want a nice, runny, completely blended, restaurant-style salsa.

The ingredients gather

This particular recipe includes a crap-ton of cilantro and a couple of chipotles en adobo. The combination of bright, herb-y flavor from the cilantro and the deep, smoky spice of the chiles creates a unique spin on the classic restaurant salsa.

Perhaps the best part of this salsa is that it’s SO FAST to put together. Once the onion and cilantro are chopped, everything else gets tossed in a food processor and whirled into salsa in just a few seconds flat.

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Container Garden: Learning Lessons

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When we moved to North Carolina, I had some plans for our apartment on which I was unwilling to budge:

1. I would obtain a dining table and chairs.
2. I would paint some wall, any wall, some pretty color other than white.
3. I would grow some food on my dang porch.

Quick trips to Ikea and Home Depot made it easy to accomplish the first two goals, but it took me a couple of months to figure out the best way to complete the third. For one thing, I still, still, after two years of low-sun apartments in DC, struggled to get direct beams to my balcony for more than a few hours a day. To complicate matters further, the lovely lattices on our porch railings broke up what little sun that did reach the balcony: an excellent situation for lounging on the porch without getting too hot, but not so great for keeping plants alive.

Containers on the railings had to be the key. But alas! Every style I could find at stores in my area was designed with a bolt or a screw or some other attachment mechanism I’m sure our property managers would not appreciate.

But then.

I found them online! Two feet wide, six inches deep, and adjustable to whatever width of balcony railing you want to hang them on.  I bought some lettuce, some mums (to feel fancy!), and plopped ’em into some soil. By the tim spring rolled around, well, I had expanded my little fleet to the size it was when I first introduced this hodge-podge little garden last April.

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Strawberry Jam, Part I: Pick-Your-Own

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Strawberry jam: the first recipe in food preservation cookbooks, the poster child for all things homemade, and glistening ruby red in quilted glass jars and wrapped with a ribbon of twine.

And you can make it with tools you probably have in your kitchen already.

Now, baskets of still-earthy vegetables from the farmer’s market seem to provide the standard imagery for the local food movement, but my goal is to eat as locally as possible all year long, which involves learning how to preserve food when it is plentiful to get through months when it is not. And while jam is not the most necessary of foods, it is a great starting point if you want to learn to can. Which I do.

I’m sure you can tell where this is going: I made some jam! Okay; I made a lot of jam. So let’s rewind from this spoonful of crimson goodness, and I’ll tell you all about it.

Pick-Your-Own Strawberries

A key ingredient of strawberry jam, as you might imagine, is a hefty amount of fresh strawberries. You can go about procuring these berries however you want, but I chose to find a local farm where I could pick them myself.

The premise of a pick-your-own farm, or a “u-pick”, as they are commonly called, is simple: a grower plants their crop, then instead of harvesting it and selling it in turquoise paper baskets, they invite customers to the farm to pick it themselves at a much lower price. While most pick-your-owns also offer some pre-picked goods for sale at the farm stand, the labor burden is significantly reduced since the majority of harvesting is done by the customers themselves. They get free labor, you get a good price on berries, it’s a pretty sweet deal.

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To Bake a Wedding Cake, Part II: Um, So, What Are We Doing?

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Previously: To Bake a Wedding Cake, Part I: A Prologue

A couple months ago, I introduced you to Sierra & Sean, some of my closest friends who, in just under six months, will be returning to our hometown to get married. A weekend in the mountains with close friends & family, beautiful Colorado autumn, and stellar meals are on the docket for their October wedding: it’s going to be a blast. And in addition to participating as a bridesmaid, I’m tackling a wedding project that Sea and I have talked about for years: I’m making their wedding cake.

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To Bake a Wedding Cake, Part IV: Testing 1, 2, 3

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Previously:
Part I: A Prologue
Part II: Um, So, What Are We Doing?
Part III: To Do

I’ve spent the last two months baking inordinately large quantities of cake to prepare for the wedding cake I begin baking in t-minus ten days. The flavors of fall permeated my apartment long before the weather did as I tested recipes for sugared pecans, maple cream filling, pumpkin cake, almond cake, and more. Thankfully, I work at a university with a veritable army of cake-loving, high-metabolism college students ready to sample these cakes as they positively burst from my kitchen.

I must admit, overall, I’ve been pretty lucky with first attempts. I, and all of my faithful testers, were over the moon for the very first pumpkin cake recipe I tested, along with the experimental maple cream filling that went with it. I’d already made the almond cake, so I really didn’t need much adjustment there, and a vanilla cake that will compose the tiny top layer (for guests with nut allergies!) was easy enough. There were, however some unfortunate discoveries.

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Last Day to Win Strawberry Jam!

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Don’t forget to enter to win a free jar of freshly made strawberry jam! Straight from my kitchen to your breakfast. You have until midnight!

How to Enter
1. Leave a comment on this post answering this question: Which recipes or types of food would you like to see on 30 Pounds of Apples?
OR
2. Like-a-dee-like 30 Pounds of Apples on Facebook.
OR
3. Do both, and enter twice!

Enter before midnight on Friday, May 20, or you’ll turn into a pumpkin and you’ll have no jam. Winners will be announced on Saturday, May 21.

 

More recipes to come this weekend… the glory of a weekend with hardly any shifts at work!

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