Drool-worthy summer inspiration

It's really hot. Like, sweating-while-sitting-still hot. Yeah, I could turn on the air conditioner, but it's all the way upstairs and any move away from this seat would be just. too. much. effort.

So this'll be a roundup, of sorts.

Cruising Thekitchn.com this morning, I have been so inspired by posts about and gorgeous pictures of salads: cabbage, macaroni, beet... I was reminded of what a geek I am when I saw this book, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, by Harold McGee. I literally drooled while I was reading the post. Maybe the science-y stuff in this book could explain exactly what neurotransmitter synapse caused me to salivate over a reference work. Or, I might just be a sleep-deprived nerd.

Reading through my favorite food blogs, instead of getting into the kitchen and making something refreshing like a kickass spicy Chinese cabbage/carrot/pickled chili salad, reminded me of this article at the New York Times last month. I hope I'm not becoming one of those people who are "out of the kitchen, onto the couch"; reading about food instead of doing something with it. I don't even own a TV, so maybe I'm somewhere in the middle? Believe me, I'd rather be cooking. It's just that the kitchen has no air flow. No, it's worse: It has negative air flow. All the hot air in the apartment goes there to hang out, and like some dinner guests, it doesn't know when to just leave.

I have had a fair amount of food interaction this summer:

In July I made awesome strawberry-sour cream scones (recipe here). It was still raining every day at that point, so using the oven was not so painful.


My vindaloo spices. I think getting them prepped for the cooking is my favorite part of making that dish.


The Latin American festival at Beacon's Riverfront Park:


Where I come from, "Latin American festival" likely means a huge event with a ton of Mexican food, with at least one vendor for each of the country's distinct regions, plus Central American and South American booths. Roaming mariachis, and the Chilean folk music Inti-Illimani guys, and the Peruvian pan flute players, and tiny wrinkled Guatemalan ladies selling brightly colored cloths. So it felt strange to go to a smallish event, with booths mainly representing Caribbean nations such as the Dominican Republic and Cuba, and Puerto Rico of course. Welcome to New York, Cali girl... Of course the food was amazing. This was actually the second of two plates B and I shared (and maybe Leo got some too).


I had a rare weekend off after the hecticness (hecticity?) of the past few weeks, and I needed to get out of town. B found a bouldering area near a lake in the Adirondacks. I stuffed a bottle of wine in my backpack for Saturday night. It was worth the extra weight.


Wild blueberry bushes covered the area where we camped. The ones I picked Sunday morning were just what the Quaker Instant Oatmeal needed. (Well, it needed a lot of help, but the berries were a great start.)

Alien bread

There's flour all over the kitchen.
There's flour all over me.
The apartment smells like stale beer.
(I think it's the yeast, but it could be stale beer.)
The dough is rising.

This is the fourth time I've attempted to make my BFF Jenessa's vegan bread, and I swear it turns out different every time.

Maybe it's because I'm not the most attentive dough-watcher. ...Maybe.
Last time, I let it rise about two and half hours, until it was doubled. Then the boyfriend and I wanted to go do something else, so I stuffed it into a loaf pan, beat it down, wrapped it in plastic wrap, and put it in the fridge.

We have refrigerators to inhibit growth of cultures such as yeast, right??? Well, we got home from wherever pretty late, too late to bake the bread. I peeked into the fridge and was confronted by an angry, amoeba-"shaped" tan mass that threatened to hold the sprouts (don't laugh at me because I ♥ sprouts) hostage. The sprouts will never forgive me, because I shut the door, went to bed, and tried not to have nightmares about that horrific scene.

I had to work the next day, so I punched the dough back into the loaf pan, re-Saran-wrapped it, threw it back in the fridge, and walked away. Again. With the lives of at least a few different kinds of produce at stake.

I checked it again when I got home sometime after 1 a.m.
It had exploded. Again.
I went to bed. Again.

I probably should have known better, and just thrown it out, but I'm always game for a bit of a science experiment. So I baked it the next day. Needless to say, it was not as tasty as the first three loaves (the first time, I split the dough into two loaves like BFF says; second time, baked it all in one and it was great), but it looked amazing! This was the Sears Willis Tower of bread tops. Too bad that when I took it out of the oven, even after tapping it for that lovely hollow sound, much of the interior was doughy and gross.

I still ate the crusty parts.

Here's hoping the current loaf comes out better...

It's electric, pt. 2

this fascinated me
Originally uploaded by stephaniekg

The coffee grounds acted like this.

It's electric! (... boogie woogie woogie.)

Yesterday morning and today, I had chocolate cake (left over from B's birthday Monday) and black coffee for breakfast. Delicious. Of course, this is my weekend, so I'm not worried about the inevitable energy crash.

B, being the earlier-riser, had been the primary A.M. coffee-maker. He's mentioned it before, but not until my own recent forays into home coffee brewing have I noticed that the coffee grinder magnetizes the grounds.

Huh??

No, I'm not walking around the kitchen holding a magnet, but it seems as though when the receptacle for the grounds is pulled out of the grinder, and when the lid's removed, grounds splay out in patterns that look like the same ones metal filings make. Remember Wooly Willy? Where you drag the magnet-pen to make his beard and hair and mustache? Like that. It's kind of a pain to get coffee dust to behave.

Well, after much Googling and not-really-what-I-was-looking-for information about magnetic therapy, I found this in a review of a coffee grinder:

* Grounds receptacle builds up static charge. This is an amazing thing. I had no idea coffee beans could so convincingly mimic the properties of magnetized iron filaments, as they cling together in a lump on the wall of the plastic container. I am forever scraping them off into the coffee filter. Sometimes they take to flight, perhaps attracted by the magnetic force of the International Space Station, only to settle scatter-shot all over the counter.

Makes sense.

A review for another grinder claims that the slow bean-grinding speed doesn't magnetize the grounds. Yet another site is pro-grinder magnetization, but I can see why they'd want to conserve as much product as possible.

So now I know a little more about the science causing the Wooly Willy coffee grounds, but I'm still not sure what to do about it. I really like the grinder, and it was free. Funny thing: Until looking it up just now, I didn't know that it claimed to have an anti-static bean container.

More Googling yields this coffee-grinding nugget: The static charge can be created by the speed of the burrs when coupled with the wrong humidity and temperature.

Looks like plenty of other people have had this problem, as "static" is mentioned in more than a few coffee grinder reviews. I guess once this one dies, it'll be good to have a reference. Until then, it doesn't sound like there's a way to fix the current problem. Throwing some Downy in with the beans is not exactly appetizing.