Cayenne Pepper

in a cheesecake!

Hurrah!

Chocolate cheesecake spiced with cayenne pepper and cinnamon is an amazing thing.
I will have to make it again sometime.

Curried Yogurt

It was surprisingly pleasant, actually.
And the ginger added a nice zing to it that helped.

Savory yogurt instead of sweet...
Maybe next time we can try spiced yogurt?

Or perhaps hot yogurt.

Anyways, the accidental adding of curry to the yogurt instead of cinnamon turned out to be quite good.

Pumpkin Ginger Scones

My roommate made these several weeks ago and they were quite delicious. So I asked her for the recipe which she sent me:

from the Taste of Home Magazine

Pumpkin Ginger Scones

2 c flour
7 tbsp + 1 tbsp sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ginger
1/4 tsp baking soda
5 tbsp cold butter, divided
1 egg, lightly beaten
1/4 c. canned pumpkin
1/4 c. sour cream

In a large bowl, combine the flour, 7 tbsp sugar, baking powder & soda, and spices. Cut in 4 tbsp butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Combine egg, pumpkin, and sour cream. Stir into dry ingred until just moistened.

Turn on a floured surface; kneed 10 times. Pat into an 8 in circle. Cut into 8 wedges. Separate wedges and place onto greased baking sheet. Melt remaining butter, brush over dough, sprinkle with sugar.

Bake at 425 F for 15-20 min or until golden brown.

Orange Rolls

These are tasty rolls I found in The Hidden Art of Homemaking by Edith Schaeffer. I made them last night.

They are like cinnamon rolls except with orange peel and sugar instead.

I used a white bread dough. When it had risen to double, I rolled it out into what was supposed to be a rectangle (they never are, you know). Then I spread some oil on top. Next, I sprinkled much sugar and orange peel all over on top of the oil. Some coriander finished the spices. Then I dressed it up with a great many golden raisins. Finally, I rolled up my rectangle, sliced it, and placed all my adorable slices into muffin pans to bake for thirty minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Are there any left?

Of Popcorn Kernels and Statistics

I'm taking Modeling and Analysis of Uncertainty this semester. It's a statistics course with lots of data and finding averages and standard deviations of things.

We have six small projects throughout the semester. The fourth one, which I have just completed, was highly amusing.

We were told to find a measurable characteristic of popped kernels of popcorn and get two brands of popcorn. Then we had to pop the popcorn and measure whatever it was we decided to measure. Extra points go to those who chose interesting measurable characteristics and measured them in unique ways.

My teammate and I sat in our student union Saturday night with our two bags of popcorn and realized we had very little on hand to measure anything. So we hunted through our backpacks and racked our brains for strange and unusual measurements. At last, we hit upon it: we would measure the saturatability of popcorn. Our reasoning was thus: if a popcorn kernel is highly saturable, then it should potentially be able to absorb more butter. And clearly more absorbed butter makes for tastier popcorn, and tastier popcorn makes a better brand. Therefore, the popcorn brand with the best saturability would be the better brand of the two.

Then we had to measure it. Fortunately, my teammate had a bright pink highlighter. We sat in the union marking popcorn for two and a half hours. We are pretty sure people gave us strange looks.

But all our popcorn was marked pink, and we finished our project.

Data Crunchies

We are dorks. But at least we freely admit that we are such.
Therefore you should not be surprised when I tell you of a great cookie idea we thought up.
They are called "data crunchies".
Ideally, they should be made with some sort of alphabet cereal of something.

The reason for this cookie?
I've been crunching data (i.e. sitting crunched up in front of my computer moving pieces of data around on spreadsheets) at the lab.
And data crunching reminds one of...well, crunching and chewing on something.
Most likely...data.

So my roommate (who also works in the lab) declared we had to make "data crunchies" because they seemed to her to sound like a tasty cookie.

We have not made these cookies yet, but we propose to do so soon.

Provision

My roommate and I had a number of girl friends over last night to watch all six hours of Pride and Prejudice. And we are having other persons over for dinner tomorrow night.

But, in anticipation of being tired today, we decided to not invite anyone over tonight (shocking, I know, to those to know us).

As it turns out, today is looking to be a long day full of data collecting and figuring out. So it was a good thing we decided to do nothing.

Yesterday, a friend stopped by and dropped off some lasagna for us for a dinner. Now we do not even have to worry about dinner this evening. It has already been provided for us. After a longish day of data, we can come home and just eat dinner.

And so God provides for us, though we had not even expected it. Nor were we thinking about dinner for tonight at all until our friend brought it over. So the fact that God thought we needed dinner and gave it to us is most wonderful to us.

Cookie within a cookie

I found pictures of a cookie I made several months ago.
They were very tasty cookies. They were a regular chocolate chip cookie recipe but with crushed up sandwich cookies instead of chocolate chips.



Here are the sandwich cookies I crushed. As you can see, they are chocolate.










This is the cookie dough. The dark splotches are the crushed up chocolate cookies.










See them all sitting in a nice row on the baking sheet?










Here they are! All done and tasty.

Concerning Curry

I have only just learned something.

"Curry" is not a particular spice. It is in fact a mixture of several spices used to make a curry (or sauce). According to the RecipeZaar, it can have 20 different spices! It is the tumeric which makes it so yellow. The powder we get in stores is like a standard mix of the spices from Britain. It was made so you could add the flavor of Indian spices without preparing it all yourself. In India, the spices vary depending on region and household.

Some recipes for "curry powder" are here:
Curry Powder Blend
Garam Masala
Curry Powder

So now I have learned something new today...and I have to see about making my own.

Well, I'm still alive

The EVP did not kill us.

Nor the six other persons who it with us.
We had four guys over for dinner before soccer and two guys over after.
They all enjoyed it, surprisingly, and gave us many compliments.

'Twas roommate M's idea, actually, to use the rhubarb. I just began the whole thing by mentioning we needed to use up the mozzarella cheese.

Oh yeah. Carrot salad is a salad made solely of shredded carrots and a bunch of herbs and spices. Like cumin. The cumin made the EVP taste really good.

We're eating the leftover for lunch today.

EVP

Experimental Vegetable Pasta


Contains these things:
Carrot Salad
Mozzarella Cheese
Elbow Macaroni

and

Sauteed Rhubarb with onion and peppers.




we'll let you know how it turns out (if we're still alive)...

Mountain Pies

Here is my post with pictures!


Last weekend I went camping with four other friends.
'Twas my first time camping, so I found it quite exciting.
Some people said it was not real camping, though, because there was a little building nearby with flush toilets.
But despite possible contentions to the contrary, we called it camping.
Friend A has been camping many times before with her family.
So she organized us and our camp.
And built the fire.

She also had these amazingly nifty little irons. We made what we called "mountain pies" with them.

I don't have pictures of the irons heating in the coals, but that is what they did first.
Then we sprayed their insides with cooking oil.

This picture is of Friend A placing tomato sauce in the center of a flour tortilla which is sort of in/on top of one half of an iron.



Here it is again with cheese on top of the sauce. Some people added mushrooms or pepperoni to theirs.



Friend A is folding the tortilla so that the whole thing will fit inside the iron. You can see some pepperoni in this pie.



And here is the pie cooking. The second half of the iron is hooked onto the first and the entire thing is shoved into the coals.



I burned my tongue on my first one. But it was tasty nonetheless. The next night we used pieces of bread and cheese and roast beef or chicken. It was sort of like grilled cheese, only not really grilled.

Broccoli Salad

Hurrah! We shall eat grilled cheese and leftover broccoli salad tonight!

Roommate M has done a good job at indoctrinating me since we have moved into the Giraffe (yes, that is the name of my new apartment - the Upside-down Giraffe, I might add). I go to bed by eleven every night and shower in the evening and carry water bottles with me all over the place.

And now I am raving about broccoli salad.

I tried it last night.

Ah! Broccoli salad!
You look so tasty in your greenness
Your golden raisins poke their heads
'Neath clustered trees of goodness
The seeds
they are roasted
and sunflower are the best
Put them all away lest
I eat it up
Especially that coleslaw dressing!

And thus ends my tale, which, if you are careful in observation,
you may find
the recipe to this tasty meal.

Yummy Yummy Chicken and Lost Umbrellas

Bother, I left my umbrella in the food court.

And of course it only occurred to me after I walked out of the mall with my friends and loudly declared my most favorite line in the movie was "I left my new torch in Narnia!"
And it started sprinkling on me.

Ah well. At least the teriyaki chicken we had for lunch just before the 12:20 showing was good. We were convinced into buying it by the funniest nice lady handing out samples.

She came over to us as we walk in. Handing friend H a sample, she says "Yummy yummy chicken! Have some yummy yummy chicken!"
Handing more around to all of us, she continued, "See? Look, combo 1? yummy yummy chicken? teriyaki chicken?"
We look up at the menu board. The young man behind the counters sees us and nods his head and says, "You want yummy yummy chicken?"
Friend H stalls for time and asks "Can we think about it?"
"Oh yes! Have some yummy yummy chicken!"
We huddle. We were going to get lunch anyway and we were hungry. The samples tasted good and besides, who could refuse yummy yummy chicken?
So we all ordered combo 1: teriyaki chicken with lo mein noodles and some vegetables and a drink. Then we watched as they fried up the chicken and prepared the lo mein noodles. And it was good, though there was a lot of it. But in the last rush, I left my umbrella hanging on the back of the chair I was sitting on.

Pumpkin Difle Pictures

Here are the pictures of the dessert my roommate and I made last Saturday.

This one is a close-up of the layers.


This one shows the total remains, but this was before I had some with my sister. There is much less left now.


This is a picture of the side of the bowl to try to show the layers of cake.



One of my roommates complained that there was not enough pumpkin in it. So it will be modified next time: more pumpkin and vanilla pudding instead of chocolate so the flavor doesn't override the cake taste.

Pumpkin Difle

Because it is not made of three different layers but only two.

Pumpkin cake and chocolate pudding:
It was a normal yellow cake recipe which we modified by adding pumpkin and cutting a small amount of the milk and butter out.
We baked it on a cookie sheet.
Then we cut it up and wrapped the rectangles in pieces of plastic wrap.
These were frozen until the Saturday.

The pudding was made in the afternoon of Saturday.
It was an instant pudding mix called "sweet dark chocolate".
One of my roommates had stored it when the company that made it was bought out.
They don't make this pudding anymore, at least it is not sold at our local stores.
A roommate added dark chocolate chips before refrigerating.

Just before serving, we assembled it all in a glass bowl.
Layers of pumpkin cake with layers of chocolate pudding formed the difle.
It was a grad student, friend of our host, who pointed out that it was not a trifle.
So we renamed it.
And it was tasty.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures.
Hopefully there will still be some left tomorrow evening when I come back from my long weekend.
Then I can get a picture of the remains.

Pumpkin and Cheese

I forgot something else I wanted to post before going back to studying.

I had a most delicious dinner tonight: cheese and pumpkin filling sandwich.

Doesn't that sound just wonderful?

It was this way: Two of my roommates went out for dinner with family, one was busy else where, and the other was on a weird eating schedule caused by sleeping in too late. So I was left to my own devices.

I hunted around in the pantry and the refrigerator and spied a bowl of pumpkin custard (I'm calling it that because that is what it most resembles. It was really that the roommate who made it ran out of crust when making pie, and just poured the leftover filling in a bowl and cooked it). So I seized it and took my cheddar cheese along too. I had already pulled out my bread. I sliced the cheese and laid it on one half of my sandwich. Then I put the two slices of bread into our toaster oven. When the cheese was melting, I pulled the bread out, slapped some pumpkin stuff onto the side with the cheese and closed the sandwich with the other piece of bread. It was really good even though our toaster oven toast bread in a most unusual uneven pattern.