I made this cauliflower-paneer dish recently and it was amazing! I even used tofu, which is less rich than paneer, and it came out great — sweet, salty, tangy, rich (I added a bunch of olive oil). A second batch was not-so-great, and my resulting tip is that it is essential to not add too much water when cooking the cauliflower in the sauce. The sauce needs to be concentrated to have a good flavor.
Milk paint experiment
I recently refinished my trash-find mid-century modern triangle table (post coming later on that). As part of the project, I re-painted the feet black. I generally aim to use “healthy” eco products and while doing finish research I came across milk paint, which fulfills those requirements. This was the perfect small project to test it out!
Milk paint is a little finicky, and behaves differently than standard paint (you normally have to mix it from powder, for example). I found some guides from Peter Galbert, a Windsor chairmaker, on how to use it that have lots of tips and tricks.
- Intro: why to use it and how to deal with the foaminess
- Part 2: applying it
- Part 3: burnishing and finishing
- Example of before and after burnishing and oiling
- 10 Tips
(Taiwanese) pineapple cake
I’ve made a couple bachelors of pineapple cake recently using The Omnivore’s Cookbook recipe. It’s pretty straightforward and really good!
This is a “simplified” recipe. The only aspect I think is modified compared to normal recipes is that pineapple cakes are normally baked individually in special molds (could maybe try using muffin tins). This recipe shapes them more like bar cookies.
Pineapple “jam” filling
Bottom crust in a brownie pan
It’s done.
Finished piece! They’re sweet and strongly flavored so they’re good to eat in small amounts.
Recipe
Filling
- 700 g minced fresh pineapple
- 100 g (1/2 cup) sugar
- 80 g (1/3 cup) butter
- Lemon juice to taste. Maybe 1/2 tsp
- pinch salt
Crust
- 230 g (2 1/2 cups + 2 tablespoons) flour
- 40 g (1/4 cup) sugar
- 25 g (3 tablespoons) powdered milk
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 100 g (1 stick minus 2 teaspoons) butter, cubed and chilled
- 1 egg, plus 1 egg yolk
- Cook pineapple and other filling ingredients until all juice is evaporated, and mixture is thick, somewhat translucent, and a golden color. Chill.
- Mix dry ingredients. Cut in butter. Add eggs as only liquid and form into dough.
- Divid dough about in half. Roll one into the bottom crust — needs to be large enough to extend about 1″ up the sides of the pan. Fill with filling. Roll out other half of dough. Put on top of filling and seal crust edges.
- Bake ~25 min at 325°.
Notes
- You can bake individually in muffin tins or pineapple cake tins.
- This turns out not too sweet, but if you are really avoiding sugar/dislike things being to sweet, sugar in the crust can be omitted. Some tasters (sibling C) thought that reducing the sugar more would make it not dessert-y enough
- Sibling C also thought the crust wasn’t sandy enough. Other pineapple cake recipes included more powdered milk, so increasing the powdered milk and decreasing the flour (keeping the total amount of dry ingredients approximately the same) might make the crust texture more standard.
Pretty pottery
During a lunch outing in Brooklyn, we stopped in at Cibone, a Japanese “home goods” store. They sell pretty, expensive, but mostly impractical things like vases and uncomfortable-to-hold mugs.
I really liked this green, carved ceramic plate ($220), though. You can always use another plate…?
Matching flat dish on the bottom right.
Garden update!
After a spring/summer where I failed to get anything started — started seeds inside too late, started seeds outside before the garden turned on the water after the winter (although the weather was definitely warm enough for maybe a month)… I have progress!
A native flower I grew from seed on my fire escape is blooming. It’s an aster — heartleaf aster (Symphyotrichum cordifolium), I think. There’s a taller woodier volunteer aster elsewhere. Nearby native violets have buds.
I planted strawberries last week. All but one are coming up now. The variety is “Honeoye”, apparently named after a small town in upstate New York. They’re cold-tolerant, developed at Cornell, so they should easily survive the winters here. I originally wanted to plant native strawberries (Fragaria virginiana), but the cultivated strawberries have much bigger berries.
Landrace fava beans are coming up. These are supposed to be more heat- and drought-tolerant than normal favas, but still be good for cooler weather. I’m hoping they’ll survive over the winter for an early spring harvest!
Horseradish is coming up. They (apparently) sprout readily from roots or even root chunks, so I just bought one from the grocery store. I intend to eat the leaves, not the roots. Horseradish is a perennial and vigorous, so hopefully it doesn’t mind the shade.
(Foreground and fuzzy) Oland brown beans. I read that these are both shade-tolerant and prefer cooler weather (perfect for fall/spring planting here) and I actually already had them! I had previously bought them from Baer’s Best Beans for eating. These are just starting to vine.
In the foreground are various green onions, many planted from grocery store green onion bottoms. In the back are clumps of arugula and kale (not mine, I think spread from the neighbor’s plot).
My plot is dry (soil doesn’t seem to retain moisture well, despite adding a fair amount of compost) and shady. The summers are fairly hot (90-95° regularly, although humid), and the winters fairly cold (usually gets down to ~10° F at least once).
I’ve had trouble starting seeds, so I’ve been trying to pick perennials to plant.
An impressive squash or cucumber from 2 or 3 plots down is climbing on the fence, on the tree, and now turning back from where it came.
Chocolate cheesecake snack
- 8 oz (1 pack) cream cheese (room temperature, or microwave briefly to warm)
- 1/4 cup cocoa powder
- 1/4 cup sugar
- pinch instant espresso
- 2 eggs
- Combine the cream cheese and dry ingredients.
- Add eggs one by one.
- Bake ~20 min at 350°F.
Appliance advertising dinner
J and I went to a free advertising dinner for an appliance company. It was a neat experience. J described it as like being at an in-person infomercial. They did go a little too heavy on the advertising. I mean, I know that was the point, but they made both reasonable and laughable claims about their products (“this $10k fridge will pay for itself in reduced food waste”).
The whole showroom is like a bunch of luxury kitchens smooshed together. I enjoyed looking at all the details chosen for the different areas (e.g. yellow ceramic countertop with crackle glaze).
Interestingly, they use the actual products in the showroom to make the food for these events. I’m used to the appliances not actually being hooked up.
Vegetarian version was roast oyster mushrooms instead of scallop.
Vegetarian version was sad… Veggie sides were also sad.
This cupcake thing was really good! And the whipped cream was super rich.
They also gave us a lot of alcohol.
Old technology
Came across a phone booth near a friend’s house. It didn’t seem to work (no dial tone), but neat to see around.
The new mixing bowl already broke :(
I was making popcorn in the microwave in the mixing bowl I found and it cracked in half 🙁 Sometimes if the popcorn doesn’t mix itself well (the popping causes the kernels to mix themselves) because of the bowl shape, etc, it can cause a hot spot. I guess the hot spot was too much for this bowl and it broke. Maybe it had been dropped before…
Freebie plants!
Last year I got a couple BIG batches of free bulbs from someone on Trash Nothing, a give-away site similar to Facebook Marketplace or Freecycle.
Tulips, daffodils, grape hyacinth
Paperwhites (last winter)
I planted them in my local tree square. Some are starting to come up!