Walnut Dessert Mess

We went to see Master Pancake Theater last night. It's basically Mystery Science Theater 3000, but live. The current movie is the first Lord of the Rings and it was amusing. There were a lot of gay jokes, followed by sex jokes, followed by pop culture-y things so much of it was lost on me, but overall, it was a good time. Surprisingly, the best part was the beer. Alamo Drafthouse, being much more than just a theater, has an extensive beer list and among those offered was Magic Hat #9, my most favorite apricot fruit beer. The last time that I looked for it in Texas, I was told that Magic Hat didn't sell any of its beers in Texas, so it was an exciting and tasty find.

The movie didn't start until 11, so we didn't get back until around 1:30, which meant that I had ample time to play on the internets and look for things to cook. After looking through tastespotting, I found a recipe for pistachio brigadeiro, which looked delicious. I'm still not completely sure what a brigadeiro is, but I think it's a Brazilian chocolate truffle and the use of it in those pistachios is loose; however, the recipe calls for nuts, sweetened condensed milk and butter. If you combine those and it's not delicious then you're doing something way wrong.



We had a can of sweetened condensed milk lying around that I had purchased with the intent of making caramel. I had read somewhere that if you just boil the entire can for a few hours, the insides would just turn to caramel. It sounded wonderful, but Colby didn't want to deal with explaining to the landlord why we set off a bomb made of metal and caramel in our apartment, so that idea was quickly nixed. Nevertheless, the sweetened condensed milk was sitting around begging to be used and the pistachio brigadeiro was the perfect choice.

Given the recent pistachio scare, we didn't have any on hand, but we did have some walnuts that we impulsively bought from costco (then again, which purchases from costco *aren't* impulsive?). It turns out that it takes awhile to use up three pounds of walnuts, so they've been slowly used and living in my freezer for awhile.

Walnut dessert mess
3.5 oz by weight walnuts, unroasted, unsalted
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1 tbs butter + more for coating
1/2 tsp fleur de sel sea salt

Grease a shallow dish (i used a pie pan) with butter. Process walnuts until they're ~.5 mm (or sort of look like lumpy wet sand). Over low heat, combine walnuts sweetened condensed milk, butter, and fleur de sel. It's important to use a salt that works well with sweets because it's not going to taste good with iodized table salt. Also, the next time I do this, I'm going to use 1/4 tsp of fleur de sel instead. heat until the mixture thickens a bunch. pour into the greased dish and let cool.




At this point, you could form them into cute little balls and serve them on tiny wooden spoons with ribbons, but I don't have those so my dessert thingy is still sitting in the pie plate. Colby just took some and ate it from a bowl. We have no pretensions in this housepartment. ;)

Thanksgiving Recapped

I celebrated my first Thanksgiving away from home and it made me realize two things: a) my friends are wonderful and b) I really want a *real* dining room table instead of the card table that we inherited from Kyle. I sent an open invitation to the department and had about 12 people show up. It was the perfect size for the party and now I'm looking forward to planning a miniature white-elephant exchange Christmas party.

I took a lot of recipes from all over and modified them to fit my tastes/pantry. I made the homemade rolls from the pioneer woman cooks, which were tasty if not a bit heavy. Turkey, of course, with stuffing a la Chris complete with breakfast sausage and sour dough bread from the farmers market. We also had the Alton Brown version turkey and green bean casserole (although, I didn't have the patience or time to make my own french fried onions). Both came out wonderfully, and the turkey was made even better with cranberry apple chutney. There were also mashed potatoes with roasted garlic (along with plenty of cream and butter) and we mashed sweet potatoes from the farmer's market with cream, butter, smoked sweet paprika, and just a hint of cayenne. We also had apple and pumpkin pies which were made courtesy of my new pink KitchenAid stand mixer. Way tasty and easy too! :) In all, it was very successful and I'm looking forward to winding down the rest of the semester and going home.

Ice Cream Toppings

Adapting baking recipes isn't the easiest thing in the world. Also, I hate Kroger with a burning fiery passion. It basically has a monopoly on inner ring suburb grocery stores. The parent company for Farmer Jack decided to close all their stores in the midwest and Kroger came in and bought out all the old stores.



The green arrow is where my house is located. All those damn pink bubbles are Kroger stores. Lame. Anywho, they didn't have any fresh peaches or plums or name a fruit that's not citrus or an apple. Oh, but they had grapples. That's "cool". :( I just keep reminding myself that Austin at least has two Whole Foods... and even though I'm going to be way too poor to shop there, at least the H.E.B. has 1L boxes of strawberry jumex. *Anywho*

So I was trying to make a fruit crisp that I saw on 101cookbooks.com. I didn't think I had enough brown sugar so I modified the recipe as follows:

"crisp"
1/3 c melted butter
1/3 c yogurt
3/4 c oatmeal
3/4 c AP flour
1/2 tsp cinnamon
a bunch of salt
1/2 c brown sugar

filling
12 oz frozen mango
16 oz frozen peaches
1/4 c peach flavored simple syrup
1 tbs + 1 tsp corn starch

I first made the "simple syrup" by mixing 1/2 c granulated sugar, 1/4 c water, and 1/2 a peach cut up into little chunks. heat it until the sugar all dissolves, let it reach a simmer and cover for two minutes. I added this to the mangoes+peaches along with the corn starch and mixed thoroughly. I was sort of hoping for the corn starch to thicken.

For the "crisp" I whisked the dry ingredients together and then mixed in the yogurt and butter. I'm pretty sure that I'm going to use way less yogurt next time because it wasn't as much "doughy" as it was pasty. And I'm pretty sure that it's not supposed to be a paste. Cover an 8x8 in pan (that you've already put the filling bit in) with this and then put it in a 400 F oven for 20-25 minutes.

It turned out to be rather soupy. I guess next time I'll not use frozen fruit (but then again, next time I'm not going to try to do this from friggen Kroger. Damnit.) and I'll just mix the sugar and cornstarch with the fruit and hope for the best. Also, way. less. yogurt.

It turns out, though, that this ends up to be a really good, albeit complicated, ice cream topping.