Yeah, yeah. Boring post, especially without good photos of most of it. Shrug. I took photos. They just were blurry.

1. One of my favourite recipes: Chocolate-almond biscotti. In Spanish, they call them cantuccini, which is also the word in italian. They burned very slightly (I don’t know why — bad pan?) but they were delicious anyway. I brought them into school and had almost every teacher at my school tell me they were delicious. Although they all thought of them as brownies. Weird.

2. Sandwich: freshly-sliced chorizo iberico, brie, and tomatoes. This is what I’m eating right now. It’s delicious. I kind of got sick of chorizo, but then I realized that the solution was to on occasion buy good chorizo and to avoid the cheaper supermarket-bought stuff. So I went today on my way home from work to the butcher, and got them to slice me some. It’s not cheap, but it’s quite a bit better. Less gross-and-fatty, for one thing. Not as spicy, though — probably I should ask for a spicier version next time. But yes, chorizo goes well with brie.

3. Dulce de leche. I used, as ever, a slight modification of thekitchn.com‘s recipe for dulce de leche. It’s quite good, by my standards. For whatever reasons, it doesn’t come out as well here — not using a good pot, since we only have a bad one, is my main excuse — it just never thickens all the way. Oh, also the fact that I don’t know how much baking soda I’m using, since I don’t have measuring spoons. (Should bring some back from the States with me…) But delicious nonetheless. Tasted right this time.

To redux the recipe (and misuse that word):

• 1 quart of milk
• 1 cup of sugar
• 1/2 tsp. baking soda (dissolved in 1 Tbsp water)

You bring the milk & sugar to a simmer, add the sodium bicarbonate when the pan’s off the heat, and then simmer for an hour-and-a-half or so until it’s the right color and the right thickness. The baking soda thickens the mixture; the milk slowly browns (Maillard reaction!), and eventually it looks like caramel, and tastes even better. Yep.

4. Ginger snaps. I used a recipe from the Homesick Texan, another foodblog I really like, but honestly wasn’t so impressed. I mean, I like her recipes; I’ve used her quite often actually. But I dunno. I found these kind of boring. Also, mine were ginger snaps even though they weren’t supposed to be. I guess I can blame that on the oven, again. I think I’m going to give Clotilde Dusoulier’s recipe a try this weekend, I think. I even bought candied ginger for that purpose, although I’ve found that it’s fucking delicious on its own, and I want to try making it myself.

5. Finally an perhaps most excitingly, I made the recipe from Mark Bittman’s Minimalist column: Pasta with mushrooms, risotto-style. It’s a really good recipe. I altered it quite a bit, as he suggests; I used oyster mushrooms (because that was what I could find — I’m not actually a big fan of them; they’re too spongy) and no chicken, and added in frozen spinach at the last minute. I was going to use some raisins, too, but decided I didn’t want to. I definitely do recommend using the white wine, though: it makes it smell amazing. Then again, cheap white wine is really cheap here. Anyway, I was a big fan. I had it for dinner for two nights, and for one day’s lunch.

I’ve been reading Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, where by reading I mean listening to on my iPod (thanks, Alex), over the past week. It’s super-interesting, although I’m trying to take it with a grain of salt. I’m not going to review it, beyond saying that I totally recommend it (it’s short) and think it’s fascinating; I’m mostly going to summarize its main tenets. Which I figure will be interesting to more than just me. It’s pretty short, I think? Although honestly I have no clue. It’s in MP3s.

Pollan’s anthem is this: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” By which he essentially says that people should worry less about the [nutritional] contents of the food, and more about what they’re eating. He begins the book with a “how things got to be this way,” talking about what he calls “The Age of Nutritionism.” By nutritionism, he’s talking about reducing food — plants (fruits and vegetables and grains), meat — to the chemicals within them: proteins, fats (well, lipids; he says fats as though they’re synonymous, but he includes fatty acids here), carbohydrates, vitamins, as though this were a meaningful indicator of what we could gain from them. As he points out (with pretty strong evidence, I’d say), this reductionist approach means that we tend to eat based on “low-fat” or “low-cholesterol,” and miss that these chemicals act in concert, generally. In other words, high fat or low fat? So what — how much, with what other foods, and how often are questions that matter a lot more.

He presents evidence (and suggests that much exists suggesting this) that the Good Things in food are ineffective when distilled and added to another food, or when taken in pill form. Instead, he suggests that what’s important is not having high levels of omega-3 fatty acids, but rather eating a diet that includes the foods that contain omega-3s. (Thus, so what if you bread artificially inseminated with omega-3s — eat the foods they’re originally found in.)

A lot of his book talks about what you shouldn’t eat, which ends up being both a lot and not-so-much, depending on how you look at it. Evidence, according to him, points towards not caring about vitamins in tablet form, with the exception of multi-vitamins being perhaps useful for people from middle age on. (Although, he also notes that the type of person who takes supplements is generally healthier — there just isn’t much evidence that these people are healthier because of the supplements, but rather because of the fact that they eat well in general.) Most importantly, he says again and again that processed foods — which he calls “food-based products” sometimes — should be avoided as much as possible. All of the things we do to prolong shelf life, to make things sweeter, to change foods; all of these things, according to Pollan, result in diminishing the benefit of the foods. Polishing rice (turning brown to white)? Bad. Grinding grain further (from whole-wheat to white flour)? Bad. Eating lots of sugar or, worse, lots of corn syrup? Bad. Corn products and soy products (that are not tofu)? Not very good. And so forth.

A lot of these things aren’t surprising, although it’s interesting to hear them put together. Many of them I knew. I still think his book is interesting.

He has some advice as to what to eat: mostly vegetables and fruits (he refers to the leaves instead of seeds of plants; I can only assume he’s grouping fruits and flowers here as leaves?). A variety. When possible, from CSAs or from your own garden or from farmers’ markets — not from monoculture farms that have less-nutritious soil which really diminishes the number of nutrients. He talks a bunch about eating traditional diets, but doesn’t really elaborate on how to start. Or, for that matter, whether people who eat foods from many different cultures — I love cooking Indian food, Chinese food, and Italian food, often all within the same week — can be equally healthy isn’t really addressed, although he suggests the answer is yes. (Hope so.) He focuses, to be fair, on eating food within its original context — eating things the way people in some culture have eaten it for a long time. I don’t quite follow his argument that this must be a good way since these people were healthy — seems faulty logic to me; I can’t imagine that every food in every diet was unilaterally good for you — but I think the underlying logic: don’t have too much sugar or salt, eat a variety of foods in a meal, and cook them according to some recipe that utilizes them best, not using fake substances as substitutes.

Anyway, the point is that this book makes me feel quite good about my diet, and makes me worry less about the fact that I’ve started drinking whole milk more often, or that I don’t eat meat too often. The only thing he criticizes that I do is snacking, and he’s right. Then again, snacks for me tend to be a fourth small meal in the afternoon — not a bag of chips here, a bag of cookies there. He also argues for people eating meals in groups, at tables, without a TV, with conversation — essentially, he’s an advocate of the Slow Food movement (which he mentions). Eat small portions, he says. Have one portion. Eat it slowly. Enjoy it. And then don’t eat more.

I don’t really have a conclusion, other than that I think to the extent that he’s right we should be more conscious of the foods we eat, and worry less about the fats or proteins within them. And I’m curious what people think.

Made this today, Brussels Sprouts With Bacon and Figs, from Mark Bittman. It’s good, but not wonderful. My flatmates were really interested in what it was. I think I still like brussel sprouts best in butter and garlic.

I also had “pancetta” today, but not the Italian way; rather, fried in large chunks, with a vaguely vinegar-like flavored pepper sauce, and balsamic-vinegar-soaked mini-onions. (I don’t know what these are called.) It was. . . well, interesting. A really great flavor, but the texture was, well, way too fatty. Not again, thanks.

Went to the Fundación Juan March today. The exhibition was, well, fine. Nothing special. I loved the building, though.

I made my first pot of chai today, and it turned out deliciously. I don’t have black cardamom or fennel seeds, so my mix for chai at the moment is: sugar, fresh ginger, ground cinnamon, whole cloves, whole green cardamom pods, ground coriander, black peppercorns, and a mix of black teas. (At the moment, I have some black tea I bought at the Indian stores in Lavapiés, called PG Tips, which is made by the same conglomerate as Lipton, and is a basic black tea, as well as some Lipton Earl Grey and some Darjeeling; I primarily used the first one.) I still think it’s fascinating that black pepper makes chai taste good instead of just okay.

I’d give a recipe for chai, only I never measure when I’m making it, and I think if I tried to I would fuck it up. So experiment! That’s what I do. Do be aware that you don’t want to over-spice it; it can end up way too strong.

I also made cupcakes yesterday, which was thrilling. I’d been wanting to make them for weeks, now, and this week I found a muffin tin for cheap at a dollar store. So of course I bought it (€2.40!), and brought it home. It only has holes for six muffins/cupcakes, so I think I’ll go and buy a second one so I can make 12 cupcakes at a time. It’s a nearly-worthless tin, but if it lasts me for a few baking rounds, that’s good enough for me.

I wanted to make cupcakes to bring with me to Emily’s, since she was having a few of us over, and I figured it would be nice to have something sweet. So I looked and found a recipe for banana cupcakes, since I had a super-ripe banana. And made it, changing a lot of things to the point where I feel comfortable posting this recipe as my own. And then I made a basic cream cheese frosting, which made it worthwhile. The cupcakes are eggless, but certainly not vegan the way I made them. If you want them to be vegan, use soy milk instead of milk, and make a different frosting.

Banana-Spice Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

Ingredients

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 350° F (170/180° Celsius). Take out the butter and cream cheese and allow to come to room temperature. Ideally, you’ll do this an hour or more before.
2. Warm the milk slightly in the microwave (just so it’s not cold), and then combine cider and milk in a bowl and set aside. The milk will curdle over the next few minutes.
3. Mash the banana well.
4. Stir together the dry ingredients, including the spices. (That means flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, baking soda; also cayenne and coriander.)
5. Add the liquids and stir until smooth.
6. Ladle or pour mixture into a muffin tin lined with cupcake papers. If not using cupcake papers, butter the molds before using.
7. Bake for around 22 minutes. Check to be sure they’re done by using a wooden toothpick. Alternatively, you can make this as a cake; cook in a square pan for around 35 minutes.
8. Let cool, and make the icing.
9. For the icing, stir the butter and cream cheese together. Once mixed, mix further with a whisk or (better) a hand blender.
10. Add the powdered sugar a medium amount at a time, mixing it in after each addition. Taste occasionally. You can get by without adding fully two cups.
11. Spread frosting onto cupcakes. Eat.

I only made six cupcakes, and then had to run to Emily’s; the rest I baked as a small cake. I think the cake was possibly better — more moist — but the cupcakes were pretty damn good.