Food in Milwaukee. And other places.
These are some hyper-elaborate cookies the recipe for which is found in the Milk Cookbook. These are sorta like rice-crispie-bar cookies because you use marshmallows but they are made with corn flakes instead and mini-chocolate chips are tossed in for fun. You have to make the elaborate dough and then refrigerate balls of it for 24 hours.
The cookies turn out to be enormous. They are delicious. Worth the effort and if I ever truly get the hang of the process I will make them more often.
Nearly everything I cook for myself tastes the same. Or at least looks the same. I made a . . . I hate the expression stir fry, I don’t know why, I want to call it something like gai kwak jinn . . . but I made a stir fry using basically the same ingredients I used last night for ratatouille but the mushrooms were larger and I added cabbage.
Cabbage is amazing. I bought this cabbage last year. Seriously. And not on December 31st. Like in September. I used chicken (this was a getting-rid-of-crap-in-my-refrigerator meal), celery, red pepper and green onions.
The gai kwak jinn was passable. It looked better than it was, in fact it looked just like ratatouille. But there was too much soy sauce and I neglected to add fermented black beans. I also neglected to make rice or noodles. I was too busy watching Chopped. So I ate it just plain. I’m not sure if that’s allowed in Chinese circles. It seems not right. But then there were no cellophane wrapped fortune cookies at the end either.
Or something like it. The French eat it cold. Generally speaking, although there are billions of recipes, each ingredient is sauteed separately and then added together in the sauce, briefly simmered and then let sit overnight. This way it does not turn into the mush you usually get called ratatouille. This isn’t really ratatouille since there is no zucchini and little eggplant. And it has mushrooms not usually found in ratatouille. Come to think of it, it’s not really ratatouille at all. I ate it with ramen noodles. The more I think of it, the less like ratatouille it gets. None the less it was delicious. Eaten hot.
I’m not sure why but I am fascinated by a cookbook from a restaurant called Milk. I love how the author thinks and I am awed by her inventiveness. For the second time I attempted to make her chocolate malt cake. I’m not so interested in eating it. I want to understand her procedures. Under the best of circumstances I am not tidy. With this, which requires endless bowls, I was less so. I’m told it was good.
I bought blackberries yesterday. When I got them home i discovered that they were moldy. What do you do about that? I wasn’t gonna run back for a couple of dollars. Now I won’t buy them again.
You couldn’t see the mold. Metro Market is dark. The mold was between layers. Dammit.
It literally tastes like gasoline.
I don’t know why but my mother buys products from Omaha Steaks. Not just steaks, in fact, it’s mostly chicken, pork and dessert things. All of this is housed in a nearly full freezer in her basement. I took a box of steaks without her knowledge last Sunday. As far as I know she has never made a steak in her life, unless you count the round steak she pan fried when we were kids and pretended we were having real steak which tasted like liver to me. Unless it actually was liver and she told us it was steak which is not out of the question. So last night I decided to use some Omaha Steaks.
The steaks are square. I cannot say why they do this, it is not delicious looking. But I was going to make my mother’s pepper steak and shape didn’t mean much since it is sliced. Peppers onions and soy sauce. I have some brown jasmine rice I love. I don’t know if the steak is somehow super hydrated but the second it got in the hot skillet, it was mess of water and steak. I seared, well, boiled, the steak first, then sauteed the vegetables and then brought it all together. It tasted like liver.
I decided to make turkey chili one of my go-to, easy, good, diet meals. I use eggplant to create the right mouth feel when I’m making something with ground turkey, a trick I learned on Top Chef. It works well. The eggplant more or less melts into the meat and creates a not-unpleasant, slimy-that-translates-as-greasy feeling. But I also bought some chorizo to put in it which totally ruins the point of the low fat turkey. It also added nothing to the chili. Couldn’t taste it at all. It also negates the need for the eggplant since it was plenty greasy.
I decided on chili because I wanted to try out the hot sauce my sister brought me from Puerto Rico (a place I don’t think of as a destination for spicy food) but I forgot to use it. I did use the tomato sauce I made last summer. Excellentemente. But I didn’t have my go-to chili powder from the Spice House which is the world’s best because I sent it to Ashish in Belgium. Instead I used some really crappy Caputo chili powder, a bag of which I bought at Metro Market rather than try to park near the Spice House. The chili powder was flavorless. I added a lot of cumin. It was edible. Or, in any event, I ate it.
I don’t know what I will make for dinner. I have to go to Metro Market and scrounge. I have a half an eggplant in the refrigerator. The thought of it makes me yawn.