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“Take almonds of the finest grind/ as many as you like/Add well beaten eggs therein/the yellow is the best/make it not too thick/in a quarter measure of almonds four or five yolks is enough/rosewater so it tastes well/so a weight of sourdough/so a weight of sugar/work into the dough with fine flour//leave it alone to bubble/mound it/as before/ in the form/of the waffle iron/so it is hot/salve with a feather/ take sweet almond oil/lay it on with force/to press the iron closed/let it bake/ over a prepared small fire/ or place it near toward the fire/ when you then think/ that is has had enough had on the side/ turn the other side of the iron towards the fire/and then take it up/lay another on it/let it not get too brown/ you can keep them up to half a year.” (trans by by the fabulous jillwheezul, whose class on wafers and wafer irons I got to take at the WCCS 2013, see http://jillwheezul.livejournal.com/tag/waffle)

7 oz almond marzipan (1 tube of Odessa brand marzipan)
½ cup water
Apx 2 cups sourdough starter
1/2 c wheat flour
1/2 c almond flour
4 egg yolks
3 Tbl rosewater
1-2 Tbl sugar
Pinch salt
1/2  tesp almond extract (optional)
4 Tbl water (more or less as necessary)
Chop marzipan small and dissolve in water. Add eggs, sugar, salt, and almond flour. Beat. Add wheat flour/sourdough starter. Add rosewater and almond extract as needed/wanted.  Bake in waffle iron (oil with sweet oil). 2.5 min in (my) hot waffle iron.

I had hoped these would be like the almond waffles one buys on street corners in Belgium, but alas, the sourdough (while wonderful) is not the same. For the next version of this I'm going to try a more modern, baking powder-based waffle recipe with marzipan.

I like the Friday five, it’s nicely alliterative, and lets you know what is going to be here, even if my numbers are a little off.

Last weekend we got a lot of bookcases out of greatsword’s old house and moved them to my house. GM had wanted new bookcases, and somehow the idea that we were getting a lot of new bookcases never caused me to think that we’d need to, ya’know, clean off the old bookcases and move all books to the new ones. Needless to say, I spend all weekend moving books. But the good news is, you can  actually see all of GM’s science fiction books. Bad news is, we need to move all the history books to the back room. Tonight we’re taking two empty cases to klwilliams so she’ll have more space for Chaz’s books.

My handout for the Culinary Symposium is slowly coming into shape. I need to put together a power point slide deck for the trencher class and another for the PPF: How We Did It class, but that should be easy enough. gormflaith and I have a date for Monday to go over each other’s class handouts, hopefully she’ll catch whatever I missed in editing.

The dance ball is tomorrow. My foot is still bothering me enough that I won’t be teaching this year, so I’m considering being a total slacker and not arriving until the pre-ball dinner hour. There’s no reason for me to go early; zoccolaro has plenty of volunteers for gate, and I have little interest in decorating the hall. Maybe I’ll stay home and make a more interesting contribution to the potluck.

I’ve (mostly) been able to keep the weight I lost October off, so I’m going to try a second round of the crazystupid diet after President’s day weekend.

The household dinner went pretty well this year. GM and I made Mexican food, mostly with recipes from Rick Bayless’s TV show Mexico: One plate at a time. My favorite was the Enchiladas Especiales Tacuba Style. We had Mexican Wedding Cakes made with dried cherries and pistachios for dessert, I ate more of them than I should have. Yummy!

GM and I should really replace the old, inefficient wall heaters in the house with an actual heating system that works. We had a guy out to give us an estimate, and it was a little cheaper than I thought it would be. He also gave us an estimate for putting in air conditioning at the same time. For those of you who have bought/sold houses recently, how much does an air conditioner add to the value of the house?

• Better Homes and Gardens (pp. 76) suggests 1 Tbl salad oil instead of butter. Bake 15 min @ 475F and 25-30min @ 350F.
• Alton Brown uses a whopping 1 1/2 tesp salt. Bake 40 min at 400F.
• Fannie Farmer (pp 314) bakes 20 min @ 450F and 20 min @ 350F. Bacon variant: Add 1/4 cup crumbled cooked, crisp bacon.
• Joy of Cooking (pp 632) bakes 15 min @ 450F and 20 min @ 350F. Cheese variant: In a separate bowl grate 1/2 cup of sharp cheddar or parmesan cheese. Toss with 1/4 tesp paprika and a few grains cayenne. Put 1 Tbl batter into each cup, and 1 Tbl cheese. Fill cups as normal and bake.

kiria_dk was recently telling me about her Brownies of Win, I promptly and pompously told her that anything made with raisins just had to be better with dried cherries. I finally had an excuse to try her recipe last night and OMG they were good.

Fudge Cherry Brownies, based on recipe in the Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home (p. 317).
1/2 cup (one stick) salted butter, extra butter for pan
3 oz unsweetened chocolate (I used Ghirardelli's 60%)
1 cup (7.5 oz) lightly packed brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large eggs (I used the last two duck eggs from Rosie and Jed)
1/2 cup King Arthur's unbleached white flour
1/2 cup Dried Pitted Tart Montmorency Cherries 

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees (F).
Butter an 8x8 square baking pan
In a microwaveable bowl, melt the butter and chocolate together, stirring occasionally. When the butter and chocolate have melted, add all remaining ingredients (except cherries)  and beat with an electric mixer until the batter is thoroughly blended and smooth. Add cherries and stir briefly.
Pour the batter into the pan and bake for about 20 minutes, until the brownies are just beginning to pull away from the sides of the pan and are fudgy in the center. For more cakelike brownies, bake an additional 5 minutes.
GM thought the brownies didn't look done at 20 mins, so we went for the extra five.
Served 4.

Anthony Bourdain's version of a bacon explosion is more of a bacon implosion. Last weekend, I made the Mignons de porc a l'ail from Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook, or at least I would have if I hadn't managed to mess it up on almost every step. Fortunately there's only so wrong you can go with porkloin, bacon, and garlic confit, so GM and I ate it all anyway.

Amusingingly, this foodblogger made some of the same mistakes I did. You can find Mr. B's real recipe on this site, and while I've plagiarized it mercilessly that which follows is what I made.

1 small bottle of Christopher Ranch peeled garlic
lots of leftover bacon fat from the back of the fridge

In a small pan, warm the bacon grease until melted. While it's melting, check over the garlic cloves, removing any questionable bits and the woody brown tops. When the bacon fat is warm carefully dump the cloves in. The fat should cover the cloves by a little bit. Let them cook, stirring occasionally, until the cloves are very soft, about 20 minutes. When soft, remove the cloves from fat and place in two bowls. Save half the cloves whole for the sauce. Mash the other half of the cloves with fork into a paste. Pour the leftover garlic scented bacon fat into a jar, label and place in fridge for some future project. It's worth keeping, trust me.

1 little (about a pound?) pork loin from Trader Joe's.
8-10 slices of Dittmer's bacon

Slice the pork loin long ways, then slice each half in half, also long ways. You now have four long skinny slabs of pork loin. If you really like salt, or made your garlic confit with olive oil, salt the pork loin gently. using clean fingers or the tool of your choice, slather the pieces of pork loin with the garlic paste. Lay out the four pieces of pork loin on a large piece of saran-wrap, flipping the pieces around until it's as even a thickness as you can get. Place one piece of bacon in between each piece of pork loin. Put the remaining slices of bacon longways around the outside of the porkroll.  Roll the pork loin up into a tube shape, using the saran-wrap to get it as tight was possible. Place in fridge for as long as you can. (Mr. Bourdain said overnight, but I was on a deadline and got in an hour or two, I think.)

Remove the FrankenPork from the fridge, and unwrap on a cutting board. Find your kitchen twine. Cut off a piece long enough to tie (like a bracelet) around the FrankenPork. Tie off about 1.5 inches of FrankenPork and slice to separate. Repeat until you run out of FrankenPork. You now have 4-8 little circles of FrankenPork lying like unpressed flowers on your cutting board. They sort of look like celtic crosses.

Pre-heat the oven to 350F. Get out a sheet pan fitted with a rack, like you were going to bake bacon with Alton Brown.

1 tablespoon/14 ml olive oil
2 shallots, thinly sliced
1/4 cup/56 ml white wine, and then another 1/4 cup/56 ml white wine 
1/2 cup Swanson's chicken broth with some demi glacee
1 sprig of flat parsley, finely chopped

Put a skillet on the stove and melt some butter and olive oil in it. When the butter stops foaming, add the little pork bundles to the pan, working in batches so as not to overcrowd the pan. Cook the pork over high heat for about 6-8 minutes per side, after which the meat should be nicely browned. Place the meat in the roasting pan and finish cooking in the oven for about 20 minutes. When cooked through, but still moist in the center, remove from the oven and allow to rest on a plate.

In that pan of bacon grease and garlicy bits, add the wine, and cook down to almost nothing, after you realized you were supposed to put teh shallots in first. Add the shallots and cook for 2 minutes, or until the shallots are soft. Stir in the wine, scraping the bottom to dislodge the fond. Cook over high heat until the wine is reduced to a glaze consistency, then stir in the stock. Cook over high heat until it's reduced by half. Add any drippings from the plate that's holding your cooked pork, as well as whatever's in the bottom of the roasting pan. Add remaining cloves of garlic confit  (I mashed it all together to make it more sauce-like) and the parsley.

With kitchen scissors, snips the twine holding the pork flowers together. Serve. Cover with sauce and eat.

GM thinks we should tie the FrankenPork off with strips of prosciutto next time, instead of using string. Maybe.

Today was my first free Saturday in a while so I spent most of it puttering around the kitchen. We've been watching too much Alton Brown, so I made a pork wellington, and a cheese souffle. The pork wellington was ok, but underwhelming. I like the pork wrapped in sage and proscuitto better. The cheese soufflé was very good. I'm not certain it was a good soufflé, I've never had a cheese soufflé before and the top of it looked like a badly pocked asteroid. But it's hard to go wrong with baked cheese. It was like what a really good quiche wants to be when it grows up. I also made GM's Grandmother's coffee cake. His mom gave me the recipe when we were visiting her a few weeks ago. It's very good for something so simple. She gave me several of her mother's cookbooks. I must remember to make chocolate rocks for her sometime soon.

I really should have spent the day taking care of the yard. The roses need deadheading, and all the beds need weeding. Hopefully I'll do that tomorrow.

GM's paternal grandmother used to send his family cookies every Christmas. GM says he and his brothers got most of the cookies, but his dad kept (some) of the krumkake for himself as they were his favorite. GM got the recipe for me from his Aunt Siggy, and last Tuesday was the first time it worked perfectly. The moon must have been in the right phase, or maybe the humidity was finally not wrong. Or, far more likely, this was the first time I was making krumkake undistracted by the frenzy of the big Christmas bake.

Aunt Siggy's Krumkake recipe
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup melted butter (unsalted), cooled to room temp
2 eggs
1 c whole milk
1 1/2 cup flour
pinch salt
1 tesp vanilla
(I added a tesp of powdered ginger. Cardamom is also good.)

Beat eggs lightly. Add sugar to eggs and beat until light. Add cooled butter. Mix in vanilla and salt. Mix in 1/2 cup of flour and tesp of ginger, a 1/2 cup of milk, a 1/2 cup of flour, a 1/2 cup of milk, and the last 1/2 cup of flour.
Put mixture in fridge for at least an hour.

I have an electric krumkake iron, which is much easier and less burny than the stove-top version.
Heat iron, put 1 Tbl of batter on each round. Close iron and wait 1 minute and 15 seconds. Open iron, roll krumkake on a wooden spoon handle if desired. Place on cooling racks. Repeat, preferably while watching television.

cake:

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 cups sugar

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 cup (two sticks) butter

5 Tbl unsweetened cocoa powder
1 cup water

2 eggs, lightly beaten

1/2 cup buttermilk

1 teaspoon vanilla

frosting:

1/4 cup (one stick) butter

3-5 Tbl unsweetened cocoa

6 Tbl whole milk

1 lb (one box, about 2 1/4 cups) powdered sugar

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat oven to 400F. Butter a 15X10X1-inch or jelly roll pan or a 13X9X2-inch baking pan; set aside.

In a large bowl, combine flour and sugar, set aside.

In a microwavable bowl or large measuring cup, combine 1 cup of water, 5 Tbl cocoa, and 1 cup butter. Nuke until butter is melted. Mix chocolate mixture into the dry mixture until thoroughly blended. In the microwaveable bowl, lightly whip the eggs and add the buttermilk, soda, and vanilla. Add buttermilk mixture to the flour/chocolate mixture. Beat for 1 minute (batter will be thin). Pour batter into the prepared pan. 

Bake in a 400F oven about 15 minutes for the 15X10-inch pan or 25 minutes for the 13X9-inch pan, or until a wooden pick or cake tester inserted in center comes out clean. While cake is baking, prepare frosting.

Cut the butter into pieces and place in a clean microwave-safe bowl. Add 3-5 Tbl unsweetened cocoa and 6 Tbl whole milk. Nuke until butter is melted. While warm, mix in all the powdered sugar, if the frosting seems stiff, warm by nuking 10 seconds or place bowl on stove top near oven vent. Add 1/2 teaspoon vanilla. If you are done making frosting before the cake is done baking, place the bowl in a warm spot.

When cake is done, remove from oven. Turn oven off. Place cake, in pan, on a stable cooling rack. Pour hot frosting over the still hot cake, covering all parts. Don't worry, there's lots of frosting and it will melt over the hot cake beautifully.

 Allow cake to cool in pan. Eat. Serves one. Or more than 20 if you share.