Sicilian Eggplant

Well, I went to Farmer's Market as usual today and I stopped to see my friend working a vegetable booth. Her boss gave me a free Sicilian eggplant.... I'm afraid of destroying it, but I will try again on this wonderful specimen.


More to come.....

4th of July: Candy Making

A few of my older posts showed some pictures of my candy making adventures in China. Since then, I have slaved and tried to perfect some recipes I have collected over the years. Each Christmas, I have been trying new recipes, some failures, but many successes. My two favorites: buckeyes and mint melt-aways. For three years now, I have had success with buckeyes changing and experimenting new ways of making them; the tried and true always win.

When I was a child, my grandmother used to make mint melt-aways and since she has passed, I decided to try to make them myself after finding confidence in making buckeyes. At Christmas 2009, I made my first batch. I used the wrong mint extract and the wrong candy coating. It is best to stick with plain chocolate for dipping and pure peppermint for flavoring. This Summer, I decided I wanted to try making 4th of July Candy. I wanted to dip in white chocolate and use food coloring the make red and blue. Well, seeming that I am inexperienced with while chocolate, I got it too hot, surprise, surprise, and the red food coloring came out speckled. Any old hands out there have some advice? I learned that white chocolate needs to have not vegetable fat in it and needs to be heated only until melted... but how does one make it thin enough to dip and drizzle? That is my next feat in candy making. After my chocolate got clumpy, I just spread it over the chocolate fillings of mint chocolate and peanut butter chocolate... tasty but a little rough around the edges. Better luck next time!

Asian Cooking: Can I even call it cooking? More like destroying.

For those of you who have followed my blog in the past, I have been back from my overseas adventure for 2 years, and those of you who have not, I was in China, Thailand, and Laos. Since I've been back, I have had a taste for authentic Asian food. I have tried many times to replicate the food experiences I had overseas. Some have succeeded and many have failed. Let's begin with the first failure: Di San Chen. (spelling I think is right). Roughly translated, three vegetable dish. It had egg plant, bell peppers and potatoes. I tried to make this on the more spicy side by using some local hot peppers I found at our Farmer's Market. I also found some Asian eggplant. I had the eggplant dried to what I believed was right and I had begun cooking some chicken, garlic and other spices together in a pan. I then added the hot peppers. Big mistake. Walking down the stairway toward a restaurant near my University in China, I was greeted with the pungent aroma of stinky tofu and something extremely spicy that took my breath away. My coworkers and I called it "Cancer Valley" because as we walked through this non ventilated death trap we felt suffocated with the pungency of the spice and rotten tofu. I never understood what made that spicy aroma that takes your breath away until I added the hot pepper to my scorching pan of chicken and spices. In a moments time, I was gasping for clean air and opening every window in the house. Now I got it. After this unfortunate step, I added the eggplant. Next time I will have to let them dry longer or something; I'm not very skilled or experienced in dealing with eggplant. After adding the eggplant and letting it cook for a little while, everything just got so soggy. I forget what else I added, but let's just say that this dish was finished... not to eat but to be thrown out.

After this mistake, I tried a few more times with eggplant, and I have surrendered to this mysteriously resistant vegetable.

Im home!

So, for those that have not talked to me yet, I made it home on friday early morning. I hadnt updated my blog for a while because blogspot was temporarily blocked.

After three flights and two long layovers I made it home. Its great to be back and its hard to believe the year is over but I feel its the right thing for me to do at this point. As far as my plans, I have none. This is the part of life where I have to trust God for what comes my way.

Thank you for reading all these months...I will continue to use this site for other entries!

Amy

The latest...

So, Ive been putting off blogging... :( sorry. I just dont feel inspired to write and try to sound interesting. So here is my latest attempt at sounding interesting and witty, whether or not I ever am is beside the point.

So the last trip we took was to Luoyang to see the Peony Festival. The peony is China's National Flower. Pretty cool flower if I might say. I remember having a bush in our yard when we lived on Victoria street. Seeing all the different colors was so cool. I thought they were only pink, but they come in tons of colors.

The next day we went to the Longmen Grottos, which were pretty cool except that it was raining all day! Got a few pics of the sea of umbrellas. it was a constant battle of speed and strategy not to get poked in the eye and bumped into/splashed on. Fun day! It actually was refreshing to have some rain finally.

That night we went to have Hot Pot and there was a guy flinging noodles. Its allways fun to watch noodle flinging.

Okay not the best video, but he flings them from a mound of dough, its pretty cool!

Thats all for now. Maybe more in a few weeks. :)

The Cake Bucket

We finally did the cake bucket! Let me explain... one of the guys here, his name is Shea... he makes these ridiculously awesome cakes. He interned at a bakery and picked up the skills quickly. He is our resident cake maker... So, when he gets the cake ready to stack into to tiers and decorate he always has the extra scraps. So this is how the story goes. Last year, he made a wedding cake and he had lots of cake scraps. One of the girls was jealous that he didn't share his scraps with her. My details may be wrong but she likes cake scraps from a bucket. So Shea gets a bucket, ties a rope to the handle and lowers it to her window from the roof. and she opens her window to receive the yummy scraps of scrumptious cake. So, yesterday he said to me that their were cake scraps left over from the last cake he made and offered me some. So I suggested he do the cake bucket. I am glad to say that I have gotten the sacred cake bucket... It was really fun. There's a video from last year they took... I'll have to load it later. But here are some pictures from the night of the cake bucket.


The cake bucket being received at the window


Becca retrieving the cake


Me eating the awesome cake.

Another little add on...He added this mixture of peanut butter and chocolate to the middle layers of the cake instead of frosting... It made it super moist. The idea for the mixture came up one day at dinner... We are always trying to be more creative with desserts here, seemingly there are not good ones. So we had bananas and I went to get some peanut butter and chocolate, then I mixed the two together and it made a frosting like goo. It was really good. Shea tried it and is now using it in his cakes and cupcakes! :) Two creative minds working together... makes really good cakes.

This is what I categorize as some of the crazy-documentable things that go on here in Peter Hall. Hope you enjoyed a peak into my fun little world this year!

Disappointing Snacks...:(

One day I was at the bakery and was hoping to find something comparable to chocolate cake... Well I saw a box that said "Chocolate Cake" on it. I was happy so I bought it. I failed to look closer in the box (my first mistake). When I got home I opened the box anticipating this glorious (or as glorious as it can get for Chinese cake) chocolate cake.... and this is what I found:



You can understand my utter disappointment. The cookies were thin, hard and filled with some kind of seed that made my mouth react like it does to walnuts... YUCK.

After I had recovered from my saddening experience, a few weeks later I go with a friend to another bakery on campus. There they have much more comparable sweets to what I am used to. I decided to pick up a small package of donuts... I didn't see the label on the box until after I took the first bite.

They look harmless enough but the package says : "Dry Snacks"



They tasted like month old donuts that had weird flavoring...Note to self: Never buy sweets in China and expect anything what I am used to!