You can't beet this (!)

ADM*, can you believe I made a pun in the title? I couldn't get it out of my head and it was like when I'm dancing: the beet grabbed hold of me and wouldn't let go, but then I a girl came by and pulled my hair—totally ruining my groove, right?—and I looked at my crew and said, "Let's go beet her up." And now maybe you're reading this, thinking: Mariana, if you were surprised that you made one pun, why go and make three? But things come in threes, Katie! It's out of my hands!

Now that that's out of my system, let's go back and remember how much I like beets: a lot. Remember I once made you a chocolate cake that had beets in it? And that was even before I knew how much I like them by themselves. Since then, I've posted a few times about beets and my love for them. We are now in prime beet season and I am all over it.

Want to know what else inspired me? This new city of mine, Pittsburgh, you know what it's full of? Chock full of? White people!—all different kinds, many of which have cuisines that also love beets. I'm not quite to the point where I want to eat borscht (mostly because I've never had it and kind of want to try some extremely good borscht before going down that path myself—so if anyone out there has borscht recommendations in the Iron City, let me know) but I'm tired of eating roasted beets. I had some goat cheese in my fridge, but didn't feel like making a salad. Then I thought that what I really wanted to do was eat some beets in a mushy form, but not really a pure beet puree (seems a lot like baby food) so I decided: why not make some mashed potatoes that are mostly beets and then put in some goat cheese?

And then it turned out the idea was good. So good, in fact, that I think I'm going to make this for Thanksgiving. Really, if the end product weren't so ridiculously and beautifully red, you might be hard-pressed to realize it's made with beets at all: it's rich and chunky like mashed potatoes, a little creamy, but with that nice earthy sweetness that beets provide, but not in an assertive way.

Mashed beets

10-12 small beets, or the equivalent of that with larger beets

2 medium baking potatoes

1/4-1/2 c. goat cheese

1/2 c. sour cream

salt & pepper

Steam or pressure cook the beets until they are very soft, maybe 30 minutes (longer if you're not pressure cooking). While that happens, boil the potatoes until they, too, are soft.

Once cool enough to handle, peel the beets. Cut the potatoes into chunks. Mash these things up together.

Stir in the goat cheese and sour cream until it's the sort of texture and taste you want. Also add the salt and pepper.

*¡Ay dios mio!

Bolillos

Hey, my friend, it has been a long time! I have missed you and things have changed! #1: I no longer live in Tucson! #2: You should address all things to me as Mariana, Esquire! #3: I live in Pittsburgh, PA! This is all a lot to get used to.

First, here are my new cooking digs:

I haven't been cooking very much...but your zombie post reminded me that this is something I like to do. So let me set this post up for you: before I left Tucson I spent a lot of time worrying about how much I was going to miss it—or, really, how much I would miss my life there. It turns out that I spent so much time worrying about how much I was going to miss it that I wore myself out and haven't missed it too bad at all. But, I still had enough worry in me to worry about missing arguably the best and most Tucson day of the year: the All Souls' Procession. People painted like skeletons, walking down the street, remembering people who have passed away, enjoying being alive, and in nice weather. This is generally what Pittsburgh looks like:

Luckily, through mutual friends, I've found some Tucson people here and, to stave off our sadness, nostalgia, and impending winter, we had ourselves a nice dinner of green chile stew and bolillo rolls. It kind of worked at making me feel better. You know what's more helpful than stew and rolls, though? The fact that Pittsburgh's rad!

Bolillo rolls

2 c. water

1 1/2 tbsp. sugar

1 tbsp. salt

2 tbsp. butter, melted

1 package yeast

5 1/2-6 c. white flour

Make those 2 cups of water warm, then dissolve in the sugar, salt, and butter. Let the water cool to under 110º, then dissolve in the yeast. Let it sit a minute or two, sniff it and make sure it smells yeasty so that you know your yeast is alive.

Stir the yeasty water into 5 cups of flour until the dough is stiff. On a floured surface, knead the dough 5-8 minutes, until it stops being sticky and, when you poke it with your finger, the hole doesn't immediately disappear. Put the kneaded dough into a bowl, coat it with a little bit of oil on top, cover with a cloth or plastic wrap in a warmish place, and let it rise 1 1/2-2 hours.

At the end of the first rise, punch it! Now form as many rolls as you want/can, in a sort of oblong shape.

Let the rolls rise until doubled in size, about 35 minutes.

Heat your oven to 375º. Cut a slit in those rolls and maybe brush them with some melted butter.

Bake 25-40 minutes, depending on the size of the roll. Eat some spicy soup and think of home!

Zombie Blog + Happy Halloween

Mariana, unfortunately we totally have a zombie blog on our hands.  A lifeless shell of what it once was, our blog haunts me with regret, feelings of guilt and obligations unfulfilled.  I loved our blog, I loved keeping in touch with you, and I loved the food we made.  But somehow I just haven't posted.  But I don't want to kill it completely.

Fall is officially in full swing and I feel renewed excitement about cooking, making me hopeful (but skeptical) that returning to the blog will happen naturally.  I'm home in Tucson for the weekend and this morning I made my mom and Oliver some pear cardamom coffee cake (pictured at left).  Sadly, while edible, it was nothing to write home (let alone a blog entry) about.  So instead of including a recipe I decided to post a list of recipes that I want to try adapting to the awesome combo of pear and cardamom:

• Plum Coffee Cake
• Apple Bacon Coffee Cake
• Ina's Sour Cream Coffee Cake

Mariana -- have you been making anything lately?

P.S. I loved your Halloween pictures on facebook.

Fish Cake

It turns out: writing a thesis and preparing to leave a city and friends you love for a job that could be most accurately be described as "dream job" is a really great way to neglect a blog.

But, this past weekend, blogging and partying collided in a very good way. Guess what this is:


A fish cake. I made it. No lie. With a nod to BonAppetempt, here's the Martha Stewart version (left) and mine (right):


Eat it, Martha—my cake totally looks better than yours.

To make it, I used Smitten Kitchen's Best Birthday Cake recipe. I made a recipe and a half, and this made three thin layers of cake, baked in a cookie sheet with a rim. Then I cut them into a fish shape (the fins are made out of parts that were left over), put vanilla pudding on the bottom layer and cut-up strawberries in between the middle and top layers.

Then I made a recipe and a half of the 9"-layer cake version of the Swiss Buttercream, tinted it sea foam green, frosted on the crumb coat, waited a bit, re-frosted and put on the scales. Six rolls of Necco wafers worth of scales.

Here's the cake on fire, because it was a birthday cake:


And it was delicious!

Just so you don't think that cake was the highlight of the party, let me show you what else we did:


That's my thumb wrestling cage. For the 4th Annual Mexican Cage Thumb Wrestling Tournament.

And here's our Communist Party FunAppetempt:


And, after all that: the best guitarty* ever. Behold:



*Friends with guitars + friends with voices + party = guitarty.

New Kitchen

Though I don't have time for a full-fledged post, I thought I would quickly share some (unadorned) photos of the kitchen in my new apartment as well as my latest cooking adventure.

This photo is before I moved all my stuff in -- now there are just boxes of unpacked kitchen utensils.  I don't know if it's obvious from this picture, but this is almost the size of a full, adult kitchen!  I am thrilled and eagerly anticipating breaking the kitchen in.

Today I decided to prepare a quick lunch consisting of a delicious quesadilla.  However, instead of the gooey cheese I was anticipating when I opened the oven door I was greeted by flames.

Yes, I almost burned my new kitchen down.  At least in the moment it felt like my new, spacious kitchen was in grave danger.  Luckily, I had a box baking soda nearby and though I'm not sure my technique was the correct way to handle the 16-inch flames bursting out of my oven like a scene from Backdraft, it did the trick.  Now I just have to deal with the clean up.

Baking Soda Quesadilla?  Any Takers?

A sad goodbye...

...to my portland kitchen.  You're small, poorly laid out, and prone to moth infestations, but you and your cute checkerboard floor have served me well.  I'll miss you and hope your next tenent treats you well.

Salted butter caramel tart

True fact: with only FOUR ingredients, you can make this tart which, when I put a bite in my mouth, knowing full well that it was going to be delicious, made me say out loud that it was delicious. Expectations = met.


It's also easy to make ahead, in stages. But, look, it's also easy to completely mess up a blind-baked crust:


That was my exciting disaster, using the Smitten Kitchen Unshrinkable Sweet Tart Shell—it did exactly the opposite of shrinking. See how there's no room in there for fantastic caramel? I don't really know what happened because I've made that shell before and it worked. This time, I just got a big sugar cookie in a pie pan. I ended up using a Martha Stewart tart shell recipe and it worked out fine.

Making this recipe made me a bit nervous because I'm way chicken when it comes to making caramel. But did you know that in college I had a volleyball coach who gave us audio tapes that guided us through a visualization exercise? It sounds hokey and the background music was corny, but it kind of worked. We had to lay down and relax and then visualize ourselves doing whatever we wanted—generally something that we were struggling with. And then, sometimes, we were better at what we visualized.

So, because I know that I am sometimes afraid to take caramel far enough to get a nice brown into it, I prepped myself by visualizing myself not being a chicken and letting the caramel turn browner than I was comfortable with. I think it worked—maybe a little too well. My caramel had a slight hint of burnt at the end, but I decided that I kind of liked it. Mind, you are so freaking powerful!

Salted Butter Tart
Adapted from Leite's Culinaria

Crust: you need to have an already-baked crust at the ready. Go ahead and try the SK one linked to above, because I think my disaster was caused by me, not the recipe.

Filling:
1 1/4 c. sugar
1 stick salted butter, diced
1 c. whipping cream

Put the sugar and butter in large pot and start heating over medium.


The above mixture will eventually turn into caramel. During that process, you should stir it occasionally and not get afraid when it looks like the butter is separating from the sugar—press onward!

In the meantime, bring the cream to a boil over medium heat. Once it hits the boil, turn off the heat.

Imagine the shade of brown of your favorite caramel. When your butter-sugar-caramel reaches a shade lighter than that caramel, turn off the heat—the mixture will continue to cook a bit once you turn off the flame.

Now, slowly stir in the warmed-up cream. Spatter, spatter, bubbling caramel, oh no things aren't quite mixing together, but do! not! worry! because once the cream has been added you can turn the burner on again, but to low. Stir a bit, everything will come together, it might take about 5 minutes. Remove the mixture from heat and let cool 10 minutes.

Once 10-minutes-cooled, pour the caramel into your prepared tart crust. Chill for 2 hours to set but serve at room temperature, probably with a dollop of whipped cream and, if you don't get too distracted (which I totally did), maybe with some fancy salt sprinkled on top.