Doctor Who Cookies: No Jammie Dodgers Required

Ah yes. Fall. The peak of summer humidity has finally come to an end. The sleepy, lazy days of August are shaking off to the start of the new school year. But oh wait. For the first time in forever (since like I was 3 years old), I don't have school this fall or rather, year. And yes, you were supposed to read "for the first time in forever" with the melody of said song from Frozen. So, rather than celebrate the non-existent return of school, lets celebrate something more exciting-the return of Doctor Who to TVs all across ponds in the world!

Yes its been a rather long hiatus since December, with hardly any episodes last year-aside from the 50th anniversary special and Matt Smith's farewell. Doctor Who is a strange show. Or rather, my continued dedication to it is a bit strange. David Tennant will always be my favorite doctor (all the angst!). Matt Smith, and the show over the past few years under Moffat? Eh, lets just say it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of meaningful storytelling, and positive representations of women. Honestly, the combined terribleness that was Matt Smith's Christmas goodbye, the 50th anniversary, and plain shoddy writing last year made me embarrassed to say that I watched Doctor Who.

Since the premier last weekend, I've gained a small glimmer of hope that this season, Doctor Who will return to some of its roots in meaningful, angst-filled, morally challenging stories that aren't solved with buttons or quick resets. Peter Capaldi has taken on the role now as the Doctor, and word has it that he's been resisting some of Moffat's less than savory story directions, such as any flirty boyfriend-girlfriend interactions with his companion, the young, oh-so-horribly characterized Clara. Seriously, I think I learned more about her personality in this first episode than in all of last season. Maybe its a commentary on just how bad Doctor Who had gotten, but this new episode has breathed new life into my enthusiasm for Doctor Who (haha ged it? no you probably don't).

I realize that this "food" blog post, that probably should be detailing more about the process of making sugar cookies and decorating them using awesome food color dyes and food markers has been completely hijacked by a rambling story about how I lost my faith in Doctor Who and am slowly hoping it will return. But like the long storied history of Doctor Who, sometimes episodes just don't make sense and you have to roll with it. So for non-Doctor Who fans, bear with me, as I promise there will likely be a ~holiday~ sugar cookie post at some point in the distant future.

Some quick comments about sugar cookies. The recipe I used tasted great, but I found that it helped to freeze the cookie dough for a quick 3-4 minutes after cutting out shapes to facilitate their movement to a baking sheet.

Sugar cookie recipe from The Kitchn. Royal icing and pro-decorating tips from Bake at 350. Doctor Who cookie cutters from We the Sciencey.

Lasagna for Deux: If the Pan Fits

When I think about loaf pans, I think exclusively of banana bread. Whole-wheat banana bread with walnuts and occasionally chocolate chips to be exact. To blog as a stereotype, my mother is well known amongst our little community of family and friends for her banana bread. She always makes two loafs at a time-- one to share, one to keep at home. The one that is kept at home is usually on a wooden cutting board, quickly consumed till the last piece sits sadly around for two or three days. Then, someone honorable soul always makes it his or her duty to pop it into the toaster and get on with eating the last piece. I know, its an unbearable burden, but must be done.

See, that story was literally a text-book food/family blog narrative. Sure, food is obviously strongly tied to family and identity in a way that makes it pretty clear why everyone tells stories about their mamma's and father's home cooking and the childhood memories that go along. However, it really does seem like after the 100th Chopped episode or 500th ~best homemade shortbread (now vegan!)~ that everyone has the same story. It's like dreams and conversations. You find your dream fascinating and deep, but others find it just to be their down sleep and consequently dream inducer.
Perhaps unlike a normal, rational, well-thought out blog, this post is not actually about banana bread. No, I am not going to share my mother's recipe. One, because it is printed in a cookbook we bought at Costco. Two, it's pretty obvious that this is a post about lasagna by now. Unless you're using the speech-to-text feature to listen to my blog as your eyes focus elsewhere.

So technically this is out of order- should be noodle, ricotta cheese mix, then turkey-tomato sauce.

This little loafpan turkey lasagna was from my The Complete Cooking for Two Cookbook by America's Test Kitchen. Lasagna noodles really do fit quite perfectly into a loaf pan. While this lasagna is mini in size, it isn't so mini in prep time. However, it's hard to resist the beautiful, delicious layers of noodles, cheese, turkey and tomato sauce. Oh the cheese. This was my first time buying parmesan by the block and grating it myself, but it was so easy. I'm happy to spend half my groceries on cheese if I can eat like this all the time. Seriously, you just throw a chunk of parmesan into your food processor and you have powdery parmesan in seconds. It's a beautiful thing. 

As I alluded to earlier, despite all the work that goes into making a lasagna and the bubbling burnt goop that makes your oven want to cry, I was so elated by my first lasagna, that I made another a week later. Plus, I have like a gazillion no boil lasagna noodles I need to get rid of (#cookingforone). This time, I made a chicken pesto lasagna. Winging a few things, it turned out less flavorful, but the extra veggies and basil made me happy. Plus, I added a cookie tray to keep the bubbling goop from hissing onto my oven, which saved me from the stress of worrying about my fire alarm. Lasagna may not be an easy weeknight meal, but sometimes you gotta do the right thing in the name of bubbly, melty cheese.

Recipe from The Complete Cooking for Two Cookbook by America's Test Kitchen.

Marble Bundt Cake: Fancy Shapes Eh

I learned a few things about bundt pans through this little project. One, when they say grease well, they really really mean grease well. Oh, PAM will probably be ok you think? Nope, its gonna have to be like a quarter to half a stick of butter next time. Two, all those nooks and crannies make a beautiful cake, but cleaning that? Why have they not invented disposable bundt pans?



I'm not entirely sure if I'm jesting about all of the above. The little motivated part of me is inclined to bake this cake again sucessfully, but the other part of me that hates dishes is more....meh. I do like that frosting is optional for bundt cakes given its shape. Unfortunately, the beautiful shape is kinda defeated when you fail to grease and flour your pan enough so that when you try to pry it out, only half plops out, and the remaining bits kinda crumble into a misfitting puzzle.

Being the go-getter that I am, it wasn't enough to attempt to make just a single flavored bundt cake apparently. No, I had to make a marbled bundt cake with pretty swirls of vanille and chocolate instead. This of course led to a little adventure in learning about cocoa powder and spending a solid 10 minutes starting at the baking aisle. Given that I'll probably be in CT for only one more year, it seems excessive to buy both dutch processed powder and normal cocoa powder. However, after reading several pages about cocoa power from David Lebovitz and Joy the Baker, it seems clear that many baking blogs that call for "cocoa powder" without really specifying, may actually mean dutch processed in their recipe.

I ended up going with normal cocoa powder, though I get a feeling the semi-insane part of me will end up forcing me to also buy dutch processed just to try it out (unclear why I've decided to describe my personality as separate entities in this post). If anyone is too lazy to read the links I've posted, basically dutch processed powder neutralizes the acidity found in cocoa powder, which can change affect your cake's final texture and rise depending on if you are correctly using baking powder or baking soda. The mnemonic that someone mentioned in a comment was "dutch-processed = baking powder."

Doing all of this googling also came to highlight, yet again, the lack of basic science education in our society. Several Yahoo! Answers questions popped up where frantic people asked if "chocolate processed with alkali" was bad for you or had toxins. And unfortunately, people again fell to the fallacy that processed equals evil big agro/unhealthy and unprocessed equals more "natural" and better for you. And the classic, "if you can't pronounce it, its probably bad for you!" trope. Maybe even worse, or as a result, several of the super fancy cocoa powders I was examining at the grocery store used this as an advertisement point (ie our powder is ~natural~ and 100% unprocessed for full on maximal chocolate without the chemicals!)

Sorry if that bitterness is a turn off. I just had my hair cut by a nice woman who also seemed to believe that people who touch certain parts of their heads or lose hair at specific random spots are somehow activating different parts of their brain for personality traits like motivation or confidence. Just. Whyyyyy.
Well, while my mood is now a bit sour, this cake certainly was not bitter. Despite the problems getting it out the pan, the bundt shape also meant it had a nice crust that I personally enjoyed. The chocolate and vanilla swirling could have probably been more distributed, but that is likely again my fault for not alternating the different batters well. Additionally, I found my baking time was a bit less than what was called for in the recipe. I image that this and a combination of how it took to get the cake out of the pan resulted in the cake's slight dryness. I'm not entirely sure if this a pound cake, but my cake definitely seemed a bit too dry and not buttery enough to truly be ~pound cake~.

Recipe from Sailus Food.
TL;DR:

• Bundt Pans need to be very very well greased
• Dutch processed cocoa = baked goods with baking powder as the main leavener
• Processed dos not equal "bad for you"

Drunken Noodles: Or Drunkard Noodles?

A quick wiki search answers the question I know that we're all thinking (if you're thinking about like your cat instead or something, we're wondering here why the flip its called drunken noodles). And sadly the answer is rather unclear. Given that no wine is actually used in the original dish, I'd have to say I'm pro-the theory that the dish was first made by a drunk fool late one night who didn't have access to pizza. At least the name "drunken" appears to also be in the original thai name, so it's not some random Americanization of the dish. Or some random American invention (looking really judgmentally at you fortune cookies).

It took me a very long time between bookmarking this recipe in my little Cooking For Two book to actually making this. I had a surprisingly hard time finding wide rice noodles. I ended up just settling for some medium-sized rice noodles after my third trip to the Asian market here. That's another thing, I don't know why, but going to Asian markets alone always makes me a bit anxious. Probably the whole embarrassment of not really knowing Chinese or the culture. You know, all that stuff with being offspring of immigrants.

 Anyways, aside from the fact that I managed to load quite a bit of vegetables into this dish (hurray!), the only thing I really have to say is that this is probably the first and only time so far that I've taken semi-decent pictures of food on these ~Christmas~ themed plate. Not that I really had a high bar to pass given the many problems in my oh-so-professional non-existent photo studio. Sorry, was that too many modifiers? Oh well.

Drunken Noodles recipe from The Complete Cooking For Two Cookbook by America's Test Kitchen. I got this book as a graduation gift to help with my single-dome cooking because no one likes leftovers for an entire week. The book has some very helpful tips about how to store things to prevent mold and decay, but some of the recipes do seem to require a number of special tools that I'm just not into buying.

Lavender Lemon Sugar Cookies: Soap or Space?

I'm very good at impulse buys when it comes to strange, vague-ly fancy food related items. You gotta hand it to etsy for making it so easy to buy the most adorable, hipster, cutesy, nerdy things. I could easily bookmark half the webpage and just cry about all the things I couldn't buy. But this is the first time I've bought any food-item from etsy, but for dried lavender it was necessary. Amazon sells 1/2 lbs - 1lbs bags of dried lavender, which no one could possibly finish in their lifetime unless they were running a bakery or restaurant. And I don't live in France where I can just frolick through fields of lavender all day.

 I initially bought the dried lavender to make lavender ice cream (eventually, when I get my ice cream maker back). Lavender flavored things sound seriously pretentious and may initially give the impression that people have gone made and enjoy the taste of soap. I first had lavender while in Ojai during a high school summer science program where I spent many mildly sleep deprived nights with some of the smartest people programming and trying to learn astronomy. So to me, lavender isn't so much about fancy soap than it is about the weird silly things we did alongside all the astronomy and science, like lavender festivals, getting a stress test from the Church of Scientology, and creating a 3-level headphone split. You get the idea- summer nostalgia and all that jazz.



If you're feeling a bit of trepidation about investing in a full-on lavender recipe, these lavender lemon sugar cookies are a good way to dip your toes in. The lemon comes off as the main flavor in these cookies, while the lavender come in as key supporting characters that make these cookies, well, better than lemon sugar cookies. 

I ultimately copied the recipe for Lemon Sugar Cookies from Two Peas and Their Pod, but made some modifications to incorporate the lavender. I'll reproduce the recipe below, but I still don't have a fancy recipe widget since 90% of my posts I just follow the recipes from other people. 

Dried lavender purchased from LLFarm on etsy. 1 oz. is the smallest quantity I have found online for a reasonable price, and this will still likely last you for several rounds of lavender baking/cooking. Williams Sonoma or one of those fancy food stores also sells a 1/2 oz amount, but its priced much higher than what I saw on etsy.

Lavender Lemon Sugar Cookies
Lemon Sugar Cookies from Two Peas and Their Pod. Reproduced below with * indicating modifications.
Ingredients:
2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

1 1/2 cup sugar
1 TBSP dried lavender buds*
1 cup butter

1 egg
1 lemon- zest*
2 TBSP lemon juice
1/2 tsp vanilla

1/4 cup walnuts*
1/2 cup sugar for rolling
1/2 tsp-1 tsp dried lavender buds for rolling*

Steps:
1-Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat.
2-Combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a bowl. Mix and set aside.
3-In a food processor and blend together sugar and lavender until lavender is chopped up. You can add in all the sugar or just some of it depending on how large your food processor is.*
4-In a clean bowl or mixer, beat together butter, lavender, and sugar until smooth and creamy.
5-Add lemon zest, lemon juice, vanilla and egg and mix till combined. Slowly add dry ingredients and mix till just combined.
7-Set aside dough. Chop up walnuts in food processor or by hand until you have fine pieces. Add to dough, leaving aside 1-2 TBSP if you want to use walnuts in your rolling mixture.*
8-Using a food processor, blend together sugar, lavender, and walnuts to create rolling mixture.*
9-Roll dough into ~1 tsp-1 TBSP balls (your preference for size) and roll into sugar-lavender-walnut mixture before placing on baking sheets, about 1-1/2 inches apart.
10-Bake for 8-10 minutes until slightly brown and edges are set. Remove, let rest on sheets for 2 mins before transferring to cooling rack.