Cheese Danish and Marching Band

I feel sometimes that every time I turn on the oven I'm just finding a new way to hate myself. If that's true, I'm also some sort of kitchen masochist, but I guess I should just embrace that and move on, the way I've embraced my fear of walking anywhere barefoot or my blind and reasonless hatred for Nellie Furtado.

Today's adventure in culinary inadequacy involved mom's super easy, no-fuss cheese danish recipe, which I decided to bring to the game today. Reading the recipe, and seeing how little actual cooking is involved, you'd wonder how it could possibly be screwed up, but somehow I managed.

Mom's Cheese Danish:

2 tubes crescent roll dough
2 8 ounce blocks of cream cheese, room temperature
1 egg
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
cinnamon sugar

Clearly, this is not a diet recipe. Nothing that takes this:



and this:



and puts them together:



could possibly involve dieting. As if that wasn't sugary enough, mom's alternate recipe involves mixing a can of pie filling into that, too.

Anyway, the directions are, like I said, pretty easy:

1) Preheat oven to 350 F.
2) Open one tube of dough and unroll it into the bottom of a 9 inch by 13 inch baking pan or dish. Use your fingers to press all the seams closed.



3) Mix cream cheese, egg, sugar, and vanilla. I also mix in some of the cinnamon sugar, but mom does not.
4) Spread the filling on top of the layer of dough in the pan.
5) Unroll the second tube of dough onto a sheet of plastic wrap or parchment paper. Put another piece of wrap or paper on top and then press or roll the dough until it is the right size to cover the layer of filling.
6) Sprinkle the top with cinnamon sugar.



7) Bake 18-22 minutes until top is golden brown. This is where I ran into trouble. I baked for 22 minutes, opened the oven to see if the top was golden brown, and discovered that my top shrank:



"Hmmm. This never happens when mom cooks it."

"Yeah. You must suck."

That is, of course, one possibility. On the other hand, I am reminded of the story in Martha, Inc. about how the young Martha Stewart, when asked for recipes, would cheerfully give them out, but leave out some key ingredient or process so that it would fail and not turn out as perfect as hers. I'm certain my mother would never do such a thing, but my danish didn't come out like hers does, and my rice cakes didn't come out quite like hers do, and my cake box cookies never seem to come out like hers, either. I'm not trying to fingerpoint a super-dramatic "J'accuse!", but there was this exchange on the phone earlier:

"How did your danish come out?"

"It tasted good, but the top layer shrank when I baked it."

"Oh. That's never happened to me."

"I think I let the dough get too warm while I was doing the rest." I've learned from the Food Network that you have to keep pastry dough cold. "I left the tube out on the counter while I was doing the other layers."

"Oh, yeah, you have to keep that tube in the fridge until you use it, so it stays really cold. I forgot to tell you."

J'ACCUSE!

I mean, you know, thanks for the tip, mom.

Nobody at the game seemed to think there was anything wrong, since they polished off the entire pan and two of them cut the last piece in half because neither one would let the other have it. They could have just been really, really hungry, but I'll choose to view it as a compliment instead.

Speaking of the game, we beat the hell out of Georgia. I didn't watch any of the actual game, but I went and peeked into the stadium at halftime to see the bands. Theirs wasn't bad:



but ours was awesome:





They did some kind of circle move which everyone around me was talking about and seemed to think was a huge deal:



I was pretty impressed, and clapped when they took their bow at the end:



Also, Nick Lachey was at the game somewhere, but we didn't see him.

beet salad

In the July issue of “Martha Stewart Living” (which I feel like I actually got about an eternity and a half ago; July was a long-ass month this year) there was an article about special burgers with special sides. I ignored most of the burgers, but there was a side salad of green beans (Martha, of course, refers to them as “haricots verts” because she’s from the French part of Jersey), golden beets, and goat cheese that looked delicious. I’ve been meaning to make it for a while, and this weekend I finally got around to it.

(There was an abortive attempt last weekend which will never be spoken of again. Suffice it to say, if Martha says to roast the beets in parchment paper and you have no parchment paper, you should not try to wing it. Do what Martha says, or disaster beyond your imagination will occur, possibly brought on by Martha herself through a form of recipe blasphemy witchcraft that I cannot prove but completely believe she practices.)

As it was a fairly simple salad, I was able to find all of the ingredients except the beets at Food City. For those, I had to go to the Fresh Market, a store that intimidates me mostly because it is in the fancy shopping plaza where the SUV set flings money about with wild abandon. Now that I’ve been to the Fresh Market, though, I may never go back because I won’t be able to stop myself from buying sixteen different kinds of cheese at the cheese case. If that cheese case is a bug zapper, then I’m a moth, and you know how that story ends.

I got my golden beets home, but since they came from the Fresh Market they were a little more natural than my usual beets, which I pour out of a can, are:



After I attacked them with my kitchen scissors and potato brush, though, things were looking better:



They turned out to be a lot more colorful than I thought they would be. Regular beets always look kind of blandly monochromatic, so I assumed golden beets would just be yellow, and was pleasantly surprised by how pretty they were. I responded to this sudden glimpse of beauty by wrapping it in parchment paper, then foil, and then destroying it in the oven for an hour.



It didn’t occur to me until just now that I could have probably wrapped all the beets together in one packet instead of individually. On the other hand, if my kitchen were a restaurant I could put “individually roasted beets” on the menu and make them sound much fancier. After they cooled for about an hour, I unwrapped them so that I could peel and dice them:



I had the vegetable peeler out, but they were so tender and slippery that the skin peeled right off in my fingers. I can add “hand peeled” to my fancy menu, too, which might make up for cutting the green beans with scissors instead of a knife like a real chef does.

They were still very pretty once they were peeled and diced:



Once the beets were ready, the beans only took about two minutes, and the dressing maybe another minute. I tossed it all together with the goat cheese and compared it to the original:



I think I did pretty well, and, more importantly, it was delicious.

No, I'm not dead, but my idea for that tart almost is

I know I should be writing more. I never finished talking about my vacation. I didn't talk about going downtown for the 4th of July this year, or seeing "The Seven Year Itch" at the old time theatre downtown a couple weeks ago, or describing the way work has pretty much consumed me for the past couple months.

When not working, I've been trying to cook, which has been frustrating, and can be summed up by two problems:

1) I cannot find Sterno for my fondue pot.

My mom is slowly cleaning out the house, and now that I have a semi-permanent home I am laying claim to things and taking them with me. When I was home on vacation I was down in the basement collecting some cake pans that Mom doesn't use anymore and we were both shocked to discover a complete fondue set, still in the box and never used.

"You want that, too?"

"Sure."

I like cheese. Just today, my grocery list included five different kinds of cheese for various purposes. What could be better, then, than a pot of hot, bubbling cheese just waiting for you to dip things into it? Somehow, in my head, the fondue pot ran on a tea light, rather than a can of Sterno. This may have been because I didn't bother reading the instructions in the box before I went to get cheese and cubed a loaf of bread, but that's just one possibility of many. I ended up making fondue anyway, on the stove, but still, I want the full fondue pot experience.

My only experience with Sterno is that drinking it kills the Andromeda Strain, but a search online revealed that it can be purchased at K-Mart, so I went to my local K-Mart, right around the corner, and tried to find it myself. Unable to do so, I asked for help.

"Do you have Sterno?"

Blank stare. "Ster....no?"

"It comes in a little can? You burn it? I need it for my fondue pot."

Blink. Blink. "Fondue pots are in housewares."

"I already have a fondue pot. I need Sterno. For the pot."

"Pots are in housewares. I don't think we carry any by Sterno."

I left K-Mart without Sterno. Maybe I'll have better luck at Wal-Mart.

2) I cannot perfect my recipe for an olive and feta cheese tart.

I don't remember what put this tart idea into my head, but it was probably inspired by something I saw in "Martha Stewart Living". Somehow, many months ago, I got it into my head that this would be savory and delicious, if I could just work out how to make one. How hard can it be, after all, to come up with a recipe for something? I see people on the Food Network all the time in the challenges talking about how they came up with the recipe for this or that and perfected it in their kitchen right there at home.

I will never be one of those people.

I have tried using just the olives and feta. I have tried a variety of olives. I have tried herbed feta. I've mixed in red pesto. I've stirred in finely diced tomatoes. I've left the olives whole. I've diced the olives. I've pasted the olives. I've cubed the feta. I've sprinkled it with basil, oregano, balsamic vinegar, and chopped sun dried tomatoes. I've crumbled the feta. I've left the tart open faced. I've closed it up like a pot pie. I've prebaked the shell. I've baked it all at the same time.

It has yet to come out the way I think it should.

I tried again today, and it's closer, but it's still not there. I only try it about once a month because I have a food budget, and can't be splurging on good olives and feta cheese all the time. I'm not giving up, but I might take a little break. I have this idea for a blue cheese and bacon pasta that I want to try.

How hard can that be?

quiche

Once again I have challenged the recipe section of “Martha Stewart Living” and emerged triumphant.

I used to be really intimidated by the recipes in the magazine, especially after I made this really good pasta pie that took hours and was so labor intensive that I swore never to make it again even though I saved the recipe. I realize now that part of the problem was my uncertainty, but most of the problem was my old kitchen. For starters, it didn’t have counters. It also only had three burners, only one of which was full sized, on the stove, and the oven was so small I had to buy pans and baking dishes because normal ones wouldn’t fit in it. Now that I’ve moved here and have counters, a full sized oven, a refrigerator in the same room (in my old apartment the refrigerator was in the room next door because it didn’t fit in the room where the kitchen was), and a dishwasher, I’m having a lot more fun cooking.

It was almost as fun buying food after work on Friday, because Food City has a display in the front where they’ve built a stadium out of twelve-pack boxes and are playing out a Superbowl:



It looks like beer is about to run in a touchdown against vitamin water, but there’s still a chance for the water to turn it around.

Anyway, fully outfitted at the grocery store, I set to work this afternoon by getting out everything I would need:



See, right there, that’s where having kitchen counters is wonderful. In my old kitchen I had to run back and forth to the fridge and the pantry, or else get everything out and set it down on the floor. Also, to the right of the TV tray, you can see I got that knife set I wanted for Christmas, which is also wonderful.

Anyway, the first part of making the quiche was baking the crust, which I kind of cheated on. The recipe had long, complicated directions for making dough and chilling it and blind baking it filled with dried beans and doing all the other things Martha Stewart berates an assistant into doing, but I figured crust is crust and bought premade refrigerated pie crust dough.



I pressed it into the springform pan I got at an estate sale (I’m going to get back into going to those this summer), generously pricked the bottom with a fork until it was pretty much perforated, and baked it.



The top got a little brown, but overall it seemed fine. I didn’t know if the quiche filling would rise during baking, so I made the crust fairly tall. After that, I had to make the bacon, which has long been a challenge to me. I like super crispy bacon, so I always made it in the microwave, and never really learned how to make it on the stovetop. Every time I try I end up with tiny, badly burned scraps of carbon that used to be meat, but this time I followed advice from my friend MegaBigEye (obviously not his real name) and started with a cold pan, cold bacon, and low heat:



It came out perfect. Once the bacon was down, I had to simmer the onions until translucent in the bacon drippings and some olive oil:



Once I cooked the hell out of the onions, I added the maple syrup:



I used real maple syrup from home, a stocking stuffer from my mom that I brought back in my suitcase. The maple and onion only cooked together for a minute, and then I removed it from the heat and mixed up the eggs, cream, and spices for the rest of the filling:



After that I had to mix everything together, pour it into the crust, and sprinkle it with the crumbled bacon.



It’s really hard to crumble bacon without eating any. When I make this again, I’ll have to make extra bacon to nibble while I put the quiche together. As it was, I licked my fingers about fifty times while crumbling the bacon. (Don’t worry, whoever’s reading. If I make this for you I will refrain from licking any of the food.) Anyway, I baked it, where the absurd height of the crust became even more apparent:



After it cooled, I sliced it up:



Oh my God, it was good. The bacon was salty, and there was just a hint of onion, and the maple was almost like an undertone. The whole thing together was delicious, and I continue to not be nearly as scared of Martha as I used to be. I only say that, of course, without her present. In person I’m sure she’s intimidating as hell.

Please Martha, don't hurt me

Last time I tried to make a recipe I saw in Martha Stewart, for a pasta pie, it took hours and many pots and I wanted to hurt myself by the time it was done. It turned out delicious, but was so labor intensive and confusing that it has been almost three years since I attempted to do it again. This month, though, I was reading it and saw a soup recipe that sounded kind of interesting:



The spiced chickpea and tomato soup looked like it would be a nice change from split pea or green apple and blue cheese, the other two soups that I make most often when I make soup from scratch. It also looked a lot easier than that apple cheese soup, which takes about an hour and a half, and than the typical Martha Stewart recipe, in that most of this one comes from cans and jars. I can handle cans and jars.

Or thought I could, until I got to the grocery store.

Tomatoes, it seems, are much more complicated than I gave them credit for. Either that, or Food City is a lot less logical. The recipe asks for crushed canned tomatoes, so I went to the canned vegetable aisle. There I found peeled tomatoes, diced tomatoes, sliced tomatoes, finely diced tomatoes, tomato paste, tomato puree, Southwestern style finely diced tomatoes, and Italian style finely diced tomatoes. No crushed tomatoes. Unable to locate an employee (not surprising; they find me when I don’t need help, but when I actually do need something they’re probably all in the security room laughing as I drift up and down the camera screens holding a scrap of paper and staring helplessly at the aisles as if what I want might materialize if I look hard enough), I picked up two cans of finely diced tomatoes and hoped Martha Stewart wouldn’t snap awake somewhere in Connecticut and know someone was defiling one of her recipes.

Fortunately, I found crushed canned tomatoes in the “Italian” section later, after I had searched half the store for jarred roasted red peppers. For inexplicable reasons, Food City has no peppers of any kind in the canned vegetable section, but you can find them in “Spanish”, “Italian”, and “Natural Foods”, because, of course, everyone knows that plain old white people who aren’t tree-hugging hippies would never eat such a thing. I was so happy to find the tomatoes, and the peppers, that I stuck my two cans of finely diced tomatoes on the shelf right there, rather than putting them back where I got them. I know it was wrong, but one of the employees watching on the camera can put them away if they’re not going to help me.

Back at home this afternoon, I got everything ready to go:



I bought too many cans of chicken stock because I can’t ever remember how many ounces are in a cup and lack the spatial awareness to look at a can and think, “That’s about a cup and a half”. That I ever passed a math class at all is a minor miracle.

The first part of the recipe, and really the only part that involved more than dumping something into something else, called for me to grind about half the ingredients into a paste with a mortar and pestle. This also involved buying a mortar and pestle, which involved me harassing a “Bed, Bath, and Beyond” employee with questions about whether or not marble was dishwasher safe or if it would erode on the top rack like a sixteenth century tombstone in acid rain.

“I… don’t really know what that means.”

“It means I don’t want this melting in my dishwasher. Is it going to damage it, or can I throw it in there and not have to hand wash it?”

“It won’t melt. It’s marble.”

Don’t look at me like that. I might be crap at math, but I got an A in Earth Science.

Anyway, I finished my paste to my satisfaction.



The magazine didn’t have any pictures of preparation, but that looked like paste. The mortar and pestle also felt vaguely medieval, as if I might finish dinner and start practicing alchemy. After I made the paste (after I pasted?) I was supposed to simmer it in oil and then add all the other ingredients.





Everything seemed to be going well. Things were simmering, I was stirring, and I’d only used one pot, unlike the last Martha Stewart recipe that involved three different ones on the tiny, doll sized oven in my old apartment that also didn’t have any counters. After everything simmered, I was supposed to remove the pot from the heat and transfer the contents to a blender for pureeing.



That photo is my kitchen, about ten seconds from disaster. Martha Stewart didn’t include a warning in the recipe about hot soup in a closed blender, but she probably never imagined that the average cook would need one. I, on the other hand, despite my high score in Earth Science, didn’t really stop to think the mechanics of steam in an enclosed space all the way through, and promptly slapped on the lid and hit “puree”.



It’s hard to tell from that picture, because my counters are black, but there is soup on the blender, the counter, the wall, the floor, in the sink, and a little bit on the underside of the cabinet. Fortunately there is also soup left in the blender, and after figuring out how to vent the lid and cleaning the kitchen, I pureed it up and served myself a bowl with a dollop of sour cream, as suggested in the recipe.



It was good. It tastes a little like tomatoes, but also has a little bit of spicy heat, so that your mouth is still warm after you eat it but not burning like you swallowed a hot pepper. It tastes vaguely Indian, and I would definitely make it again.

I’ll let it cool a little more before blending, though.