Hurricanes, Hotdogs, and Pie (oh my!)

You might think that me leaving New York for a week has apparently reaped some unexpected benifits - namely, missing the worst of Hurricane Sandy. New York was, after all, hit much harder than Baltimore. However, my apartment in NYC did not have any outages or flooding, whereas my parents' home in Baltimore did not quite escape unscathed. We have two separate power lines connected to the house, apparently, and ONE of them was hit. Which means that most of the upstairs is without power. The downstairs is almost entirely unaffected - save for the odd outlet. It's pretty easy to work around, honestly - my father was able to simply use an extension cord so that the fridge and stove were powered by a different, working outlet. No flooding at all, and the hot water is running just fine. However, we have no heat. It is not overly chilly for this time of year, but it does feel a bit.. brisk, especially at night and first thing in the morning. But it's easy enough to bundle up in an extra sweater and sleep in a sleeping bag, so I'd rather have hot water than heat in this situation. Plus, lack of heat means that we've had the excuse to use our fireplace, all day! Which resulted in last night's dinner: hotdogs and s'mores, roasted over the fire, of course! So all's well that ends well.

For that good charcoal flavor

The perfect crispy brown roast.

In other cozy, stuck-in-the-house-all-day news, it also seemed appropriate to carve the pumpkin. In the past, I've done my fair share of elaborate pumpkins, but sometimes a more "classic" design is appreciated. So I went with a tried and true design - the one people think of when people think of jack'o'lanterns: triangles everywhere!

Boo!

Not only is it simpler to do this style of pumpkin, but it tends to last better. If you do elaborate carvings with fine details, those details start to curl within a day or so. This design is not going to fade until the pumpkin itself starts to rot. I just did a few marks for guidance (trying to maintain symmetry), then once I cut the basic shapes out, trimmed away a bit of the pumpkin flesh from the inside so that, when lit, the design showed clearly. I think it turned out rather well! Not going to win pumpkin of the year award, but nice.



Besides pumpkins, my family's other Halloween tradition is a wonderful "Halloween Pie" - aka, a delicious French apple tart, which I baked this afternoon.

French Apple Tart
1 sheet frozen puff pastry (defrosted)
3 or 4 large apples, peeled
2 tbs melted butter
2 tbs confectioners' sugar
2 tbs apple jelly

Preheat the oven to 400F. Roll the pastry out with a rolling pin, 11x7 goes to 12x18 inches, flouring the pastry so it doesn't stick to the pan or the rolling pin. Prick a 1-inch border around the crust, and prick all over in the center of the pastry. Now, I always make a picture with my fork prickings, since after all, there's no need to be BORING. This will soon be covered with apples, ne'er to be seen again. If you've ever eaten this pie, I guarentee you I made a picture under it that you never knew about. I've done everything from pictures of my house, to neutron stars with high energy jets, to an attempt at Van Gogh's "Starry Night." This time, you can see my attempt at reproducing the pumpkin I carved earlier.

Now, you'll want to remove the core and seeds of the apple with a melon scoop (or spoon), and thinly slice the apples into pretty crescent shapes. If you happen to have an apple peeler/core-er, you're in luck, and this step becomes much easier: just insert and twist. But there IS something to be said for the old fashioned method, trying to get the apple peel in one long curl. If nothing else, it's a challenge!

Now simply lay out your apples in a lovely and decorative pattern - unlike your fork pattern, this one will be seen - and brush the whole thing generously with butter. Sprinkle confectioners sugar over that, and bake for 20-25 minutes, until the apples are tender and the pastry is puffed and golden. Let the tart cool, then melt the jelly in a saucepan over low heat. This makes a lovely glaze which you can brush over the entire tart, which adds some nice extra apple flavor and makes it look even prettier.

For best results, be sure to chant: "Halloween Pie, Halloween Pie, if I don't get some, I think I'm gonna die!"

The only day each year I can go out as a fairy princess  and no one will think it overly odd... 

Pork Wellington

I'm currently visiting my parents (as is my uncle) just in time for the hurricane. And what is the best thing to do on a day when you don't feel like going out? Cook a delicious meal, of course! And best of all, since I'm making food for four, that means I can go all out and make something LARGE.

One of the things I dislike about living by yourself (or with a roommate who doesn't eat with you much), is that when I cook I have to eat everything myself - which means I get all the leftovers. So my options are 1) cooking things that freeze well; 2) cooking only very small batches of things; or 3) get ready to eat that curry all week long. But when I'm at home, I can do things like roast entire chickens or ducks and other large-scale projects, and then I get to cook again the next day, if so I chose, and make something entirely different. So by request of my mother, I repeated a dish today that I last made for my family with the aid of my boyfriend, Benson, that I haven't made since last spring.

Now, in general, I'm not a huge fan of pork as a meal. Bacon, yes. Ribs, delicious. Sausage, the BEST pizza topping. But a pork chop, or roast ham.... meh. However, when we were looking for a fun recipe last spring, Benson thought this recipe looked like it would be awesome. I was not, at first, that enthused by the idea of a pork dish, but I was willing to give it a go. And boy am I glad I did: this dish is fun and straightforward to make, looks beautiful, and tastes absolutely scrumptious.

So I was happy to try making it again: from Alton Brown's Good Eats, a delicious Pork Wellington. That link has a handy video of Alton Brown making and explaining the dish, which is probably a far better explanation than what follows.

1 egg, whisked with about a tbs of water.
a few oz of chopped dried or fresh apple (1 small apple's worth)
1 whole pork tenderloin, ~1lb, but larger is fine as long as you can stretch pastry!
4.5 oz proscuitto
salt, pepper, thyme (preferably freshly chopped)
flour
1 sheet thawed puff pastry
1 tbs mustard
Optional but tasty: sliced mushrooms!

Preheat your oven to 400F. You want the tenderloin in 2 long pieces, and you want to remove the fat, silver skin, and gristly parts before proceeding.

First, roll out your puff pastry to be the length of the tenderloin, and wide enough to wrap around it - about 12x14 inches should be fine. You want this well floured so it doesn't stick to the tin or anything, and if you have parchment paper, you're going to end up baking everything on that in the end, so you can put the pastry on that. You'll want to spread a bit of mustard on a strip down the length of the pastry, so that you will have a nice, but not overwhelming, tangy tast. I used dijon mustard, that worked fine.

Next, in a separate space, layer your proscuitto on some parchment paper (I used wax paper, since we didn't have any parchment - that works fine for this part, too) out to the length of your tenderloin and press down, so it sticks to itself well, then sprinkle that with salt, pepper, and thyme. Place the tenderloins down on this, one on top of the other, with the apples in between. This is also where you want to put any delicious mushrooms you want to add: I used mushrooms the first time, but this time we didn't have any around. Adding them just adds another layer of tastiness to your resulting meal, but they aren't required.

Now, this is the tricky part: ROLL. You'll kind of roll it  up WITH the parchment paper, but you don't want the paper to get caught up in the tenderloin - you just want the proscuitto in a nice tight bundle around the pork. So if you've ever rolled something on a sushi mat, it's kind of like that - roll a bit, shift the paper, roll a bit more, shift the paper a bit more out of the way. Then transfer the whole thing onto the puff pastry, still holding it in the parchment paper to make sure it stays together during the transfer, then removing the paper once it's on the pastry. Now the wrapping is a bit more straightforward - you can just lift up the pastry over the tenderloin, and tuck in the edges. You should use some of the egg mixture to moisten the edges so that the pastry sticks to itself. You want to tuck in the ends, as well, so it's in once nice secure bundle.

Brush the whole thing well with the egg mix, so you get a nice toasty colour at the end and the pastry remains moist, and bake it! For a pound, this will be 30 minutes or so. Mine was actually 2 pounds, but I managed to stretch everything around it just fine, so I didn't really need to double anything, I just added extra apples, and maybe a bit extra proscuitto. You'll want to use a meat thermometer to make sure it's done, however, at least 140F inside temperature. When it's done, rest 10 minutes so the juices don't run. We didn't actually have any parchment paper, so I just baked the thing on the pan straight. So it stuck to the pan a bit. Not a huge deal, it looked gorgeous and would have gotten a bit messed up when we cut it anyway.

Aiming for dinner at 6, I was pleased that I was going to get the food into the oven at 5:30. It was at this point - putting it in the oven - that I discovered that Hurricane Sandy had knocked out some, but not all, of the outlets in our house, including the oven. This resulted in my uncle and my father physically tilting the oven forward so I could grab the cord, and stretching said cord to another, functional outlet. This resulted in a significantly delayed dinner - made longer by the fact that I didn't actually REALIZE that my father had given me a 2 lb tenderloin, when I was looking at a recipe with a cooking time designed for one pound.


However, all's well that ends well! Here is the delicious result:

Absolutely beautiful

Ginger Noodles

The idea for making this blog came from a number of different sources, but one of the major ones was a project I worked on last year in my Cantonese class.

I've been slowly trying to pick up some Cantonese -  my boyfriend's entire family speaks it at home - so last year I decided to take a formal class in the subject. The class was a lot of fun, I feel I got a foundation for the language, and I can actually pronounce and differentiate between tones (usually), which was one of my major goals. Whether or not I can keep up with conversations, well... that's another story!

One of the projects we were assigned was to describe a recipe in full - look up all the ingredients in Cantonese and instruct the class how to make the dish.  I LOVE to cook, so I figured, since my Cantonese isn't the finest, that if I really wanted to tell people how to make a dish, I should just go ahead and make it, while documenting the whole thing. Then, if my Cantonese wobbled a bit (which undoubtedly it did), the process would still be clear. I had a Cantonese cookbook and a dish in it that I had made before and loved, and was fairly straightforward. And thus, my photo-documentary on how to make ginger noodles with scallions was born.

I had a lot of fun with this project, breaking the process down and explaining it. When cooking for various department events or for friends, I often get recipe requests - and I often try to get recipes off of others when I have something I enjoy. So I figured, if I'm going to cook (or knit, or sew), why not have a place where I can post the results? Therefore, for your enjoyment, please enjoy the recipe for Ginger Noodles, now conveniently in both Cantonese (Jyutping system of writing) and English!



Liu6:                                                                 Ingredients:

1/2 lb jau4 min6                                                  1/2 lb egg noodles    

Faa1 sang1 jau4                                                  peanut oil  

4 tbs goeng1                                                       4 tsp fresh grated ginger

1 c. cung1                                                           1 cup chopped scallions or onions

1 lb dau6 fu6                                                       1 lb tofu, cubed (firm)

Zoeng3:                                                            Sauce:

3 tbs hou4 jau4                                                 3 tbs oyster sauce

3 tsp si6 jau4                                                     3 tsp soy sauce

1.5 tsp baak6 tong4                                           1.5 tsp sugar

6 tbs gai1 tong1                                                 6 tbs chicken broth

2 tsp maa4 jau4                                                  2 tsp sesame oil

jim4 tung4 haak3 ziu1                                        salt and black pepper


 

 Boil water with some salt, and cook egg noodles until al dente, stirring occasionally. Drain and put to the side, and let cool. While the noodles are cooking, mix all the sauce ingredients thoroughly in a bowl. You can chop the onions/scallions (roughly for onions, more fine for scallions) and grate the ginger at this time, as well. Cube the tofu, and let soak in that sauce for a bit, then fry briefly in the pan (SAVING the sauce - do NOT pour the sauce in the pan at this point, just strain out the tofu and fry THAT in the pan) until it's browned a little bit. Set aside for later.

Heat up the pan again with the peanut oil until it's nice and hot, then fry the ginger for 30 seconds. Next, add the noodles, cook that for another minute or so, then add the onions. You want to cook until the noodles are all very hot and the onions soften (scallions are less picky). Then, add the sauce. At this point your pan/wok will be hissing at you, so keep stirring that noodle mixture so everything gets coated by the tasty, tasty sauce, about a minute more.  Then add the tofu, make sure that's heated up as well. Add salt and pepper to taste.

At this point, you have a tasty, filling meal of noodley goodness which took maybe 35 minutes -  and some of that was waiting for water to boil. You'll note that I used onions, which I ALWAYS have around, as opposed to scallions, which I buy every once in a while and half of them go to waste. Onions just have more lasting power, and all you have to do is cook a little longer. As a bonus, you can make it completely vegetarian, simply by substituting veggie broth or water for chicken broth and getting vegetarian oyster sauce (made from mushrooms). My roommate is pescatarian (no meat except for fish and seafood), so that second substitution wasn't necessary for me. I also had some parve (no meat, no dairy) chicken flavored bouillon which was perfect for this alteration, so I still got that flavor. (I used to live with a kosher housemate). I love my meat, but delicious food is delicious food and I'm generally happy to switch to cooking the veggie option if it makes someone else's life easier.

Introduction: Bear Hat & Mittens

Hi everyone, my name is Jennifer and I'm an astronomer - I study as a Ph.D graduate student in New York City. However, if you came to this blog looking for astronomical related things, you may be a bit disappointed.

Now don't get me wrong - I love my work and am very happy with my career choices. But I also live in one of the most fantastic cities in the world, I am a hiking and backpacking enthusiast, I knit and sew, and one of my joys when I come home from the office is to cook awesome new things. So I wanted to create a place to record my various projects and interests, and to remind myself NOT to get bogged down pouring through data. I will undoubtedly post some astro stuff here - it's a major part of my life - but that is not my intended focus for this blog.

Bear hat, as modeled by my father

To get started off, let's take a look at my most recent knitting project. Recently, a cousin of mine and his wife had their very first child, Jack. So, in anticipation of this happy event, over the summer I worked on a hat and mittens pair, using some very nice angora wool yarn which I purchased at the Union Square Farmers' Market. I bought two tones of brown: one for the general "fur" and a lighter one for the pawprints and the ears.  They weren't as high contrast as I originally thought, but I think the project turned out fairly well.

Paw print mittens

You can find the (free!) pattern I used here, from Stitch Nation. I only really used one ream of yarn to do both hat and mittens (for the newborn size) but of course I used two, since I wanted the color contrast for the paw prints. So now I have almost an entire ball of very nice wool yarn to use for a future project!

So, materials are 1 or 2 reams of yarn, plus some double pointed needles for knitting in the round.  It was a little tricky knitting the mittens in the round since they are so small, so a crochet hook also helped. For the paw prints, you'll want an embroidery needle - though I'd misplaced mine and just used a bobby pin to pull the yarn through, that worked just fine.

Jennifer's first hat, circa 1995

Now, this is not the first hat I've made - I went to a Waldorf School in elementary, where everyone in the class learns to knit, sew, crochet, and so on and so fifth. So the first hat I knit was in the third grade - a hat I still wear in the winter and which has lasted quite well, stretched out though it may be. My second hat ever I gave to my boyfriend as a Christmas present last year, and do not currently have a picture of. However, this was my first baby sized hat. And I realized, as I was knitting it, that I have a TERRIBLE sense of scale when thinking about babies. I was first completely paranoid that the hat was going to be too small (because... it was so small and cute!), especially since I'm not seeing the baby until Thanksgiving, and he was born in early September.  But I was assured by people who know babies (namely, my parents) that they were sure it would fit fine then, though of course he'll grow out of it eventually.

Note the LENGTH of the hat...

But now I worry the hat is a little too long - when I have held it up for people, they tend to orient it the wrong way, so that that the long end is down, when that part should be horizontal. I guess I'll just have to show the parents how it's supposed to go when I give it to them. We shall see.

I was very happy about how the buttons turned out - I was at my grandfather's house when I was finishing up the sewing part of this project, and I didn't actually have a pair of buttons to use for the strap, just one that I'd used as a temporary hold (which is the one in the first picture).  I'd asked my mother to bring up her "button jar" from Baltimore to see if I could find a pair that suited the hat, though she didn't want to give me ALL of her buttons. However, my grandfather informed me that he still had all of my grandmother's old sewing materials, and among these was a band-aid tin full of buttons! So now I have a button jar of my own, and in it found a set of THREE buttons which went extremely well. So, I'm sending along an extra to go with the hat, in case an accident occurs, as they tend to do.

I have yet to start a new knitting project, but as I said, I have a nice ball of wool yarn, plus a couple other balls of some courser yarn sitting around. I've been thinking of trying my hand at making a stuffed animal of some sort for Christmas, but I haven't done THAT since the FIRST grade, and that was just a very simple starting project. And I'd need to find some stuffing. But then again, I DID find some interesting look patterns... we shall see!