Blogzac 4: Rexodus

Note:  Eglentyne has not yet returned from New Mexico, but right now, she’s driving back home  across the desert in a van with her Partner and three children under nine years old.  Likely she’s wishing for caffeine and ready to choke them all, but we hope there will be good pictures when she gets back and gets them developed.  And we also hope that the digital camera will be fixed soon.  

Breakfast-for-dinner has been common for us recently.  For one thing, breakfasty food seems to use up less fresh food and more pantry food (handy in the lead-up to vacation).  For another, cooking breakfast food seems to heat up the kitchen less than cooking more conventional dinner food.  That’s probably just a psychological difference.  Maybe.

We made french toast to use up a loaf of bread, and the recipe I usually use calls for Cinnamon and Nutmeg.  Browsing through the cupboard, I knew I had Nutmeg stashed in a can.  I love Nutmeg, especially off the—hm, is it actually a nut?—nut, grated fresh.  Fills the kitchen with great smells.  But as I was fiddling my fingers across the spice jars, contemplating, I stopped at the Cardamon (which I am forever, for some inexplicable reason, confusing with Coriander).  While this jar of ground Cardamon doesn’t offer the same pungent aroma of freshly rasped Nutmeg, it did offer the potential for something different.

I sniffed.  Could Cardamon and Cinnamon work together?  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d used the Cardamon.  In the breading for fried chicken maybe?  No telling.  But I decided to give it a shot, using it in place of the Nutmeg.  

It was great.  Subtle, almost peppery notes were added to the french toast sticks.  So much did I like it that I used it in oatmeal cookies in place of the cloves, and lo, it was good there too.  

Next time (hopefully): the return of the feckless blogger.  

Go Cook this

It’s fast (you really can have it finished in thirty minutes).  It’s easy.  It’s cheap.  And oh my, does it taste yummy.  

You might have to give up an email address to get to the recipes, but they’re both free recipes that were on America’s Test Kitchen on PBS recently.  In the show, they suggested that the garlic-shy could use as few as three cloves of garlic, but seriously, you want to use all six.  The house will smell fantastic for hours. 

Ziti

This one uses a bit of cream.  Which I did not have on hand.  So I used milk with a dollop of butter.  I also used 16 ounces of pasta and increased the water to four cups—in a bigger pan of course.

  

Ziti with Putanesca Sauce

This is a variation on the theme, using some anchovy and olive, and substituting red wine for the cream.  I’ll do this one next time.  Side note, I can’t read ‘Putanesca’ without thinking of the scene in the first Lemony Snicket book, where Violet, Klaus, and Sunny are forced to cook dinner for Count Olaf and his troupe of ‘actors.’  

You know you wanna.

Stupid Mango Tricks, or Things to Entertain and Amaze Your Kids

Half a ripe mango, scored inside and then turned inside out

Sonar X4: “It looks like hair!”
Sonar X7: “Can I put it on my head?”
Sonar X3: “It’s Mango Hair!”

Later, to facilitate the fair-sharing of a pint of Ben and Jerry’s “Fossil Fuel”, I cut the ice cream, carton and all, into four pieces with a big knife. That was also met with delight by all three Sonars.

Teaching them to scoop small bites, suck the ice cream off the fudge dinosaurs, and spit them into their hands for species identification: Probably not such a good idea.

The Next Great American Snack Food

Smokey Bacon Popsicles.