Fusion Reaction

So many of the people I know online seem to be succumbing to a 24 hour bug that I thought it would be appropriate to repost my expereince with making chicken stock and chicken soup.

Originally posted, July 12, 2002:

I am so proud of myself.

Yesterday I made some scrumptious blueberry muffins and a chicken and potato dish. Yum. Today I made a soup from scratch; I’d just bought some yummy veggies and wondered what to do with ‘em. Yes, I made it up – no recipe or anything! Actually I had been reading several dozen soup recipes the day before, so I guess I just figured out the “soup basics”.

It turned out perfect.

I started with one bunch (with the leaves all still on) of smallish organic carrots. Small and expensive, but wow – what flavor! Well worth the expense. I chopped them up into smallish bits, then diced a clove of garlic and two medium stalks of celery (after I’d peeled all the tough strings out of the celery) into same size smallish bits. Note, peeling out those tough strings made a huge difference. It was a bit of extra work, but worth it in the end.

I then sauteed the veggies in olive oil very briefly – just 3 to 5 minutes – and added about six roughly chopped mushroom caps (no stems). I also chopped the white ends of green onions (about six smallish ones) and added those and a tiny bit of water. I let that saute for another 5 minutes or so.

Next I added about 4 cups of water and three chicken bouillon cubes. (I was out of chicken stock.) I also chopped up the two chicken breasts I had left over from the previous night’s dinner (they’d already been baked with tarragon, thyme and rosemary before) into medium chunks and added those and a half can of (drained) “toovar liva”, otherwise known as Indian bean seeds. (They’re like a firm and smallish black-eyed pea. Lentils or some other smallish bean would substitute nicely.)

Then I tossed in some seasonings: sea salt, onion powder, black pepper, basil, tarragon, lemon pepper, sesame seeds, and about ten dashes of white wine vinegar.

Finally I added a couple of handfuls of egg noodles, lowered the heat a bit and simmered the whole schemer (covered) for about ten or so minutes.

Yum!

Originally posted April 14, 2003:

Sometimes I want to make something really good and home cooked, but not  put a lot of effort into it. This slow cooked chicken is really easy and you get a lot of mileage (chicken dinner, stock and soup) out of one chicken.

Whole Slow Cooked Chicken:

First thing you need is a slow cooker. Most of the models available now have an integrated timer, but if you have an older model you can buy adapters that will give them the same ability.

Take a whole chicken and get rid of the skin and any stuff left inside. I’ll often trim off a lot of the fat too, then rinse the bird. Cut a large yellow onion into big quarters and stuff that inside of the bird with a few springs of rosemary. Place inside the slow cooker, on top of a small rack (if you’ve got one for the cooker). Sprinkle a lemon pepper spice mix all over the chicken and set to the lowest setting for about 6 hours.

You can set the whole chicken ontop of several potatoes in leiu of a rack. This has the added bonus of infusing the potatoes with chickeny goodness. With a little butter and milk or cream they make excellent mashed poattoes.

After dinner I’ll strip the chicken of the meat and and save both that and the carcass (onions and everything) in separate containers in the fridge. I can use some of the chicken for dinner the next night or keep it for soup.

Chicken Stock:

The next day, or immediately after trimming the chicken and putting the meat in the fridge, place the carcass (bones and all the trimmings.) Fill with water enough to just cover and then set your slower cooker on the highest setting.

You’ll notice a huge difference in the bones after three hours and if you let it go long enough they’ll start to disintegrate. When you’re ready, just strain the whole thing through a cheesecloth into a container and refrigerate. The next day you’ll be able to lift off any remaining fat off the top of the stock. (It’ll be a solid layer on top.)

Voila. You’re ready for chicken soup.

Hearty Chicken Soup:

This one does take a little more prep, but it’s still pretty quick.

Take three stocks of celery from a bunch and chop them up into small cubes. I de-string the stuff first, then cut them into strips and chop to get the nice cubed look. Take three or four carrots, peel ‘em with a potato peeler and chop them up into similarly sized bits. Dice one clove of garlic.

In a large pot over high heat, add your home-made chicken stock and a bay leaf (or two) plus 4 to 6 chicken bouillon cubes.

In a saute pan, add a small amount of olive oil and the garlic. Cook for a minute or two. Add the celery and carrots and sprinkle with salt. Cook two or three minutes max.

Scrape all the veggies into the chicken stock and bring to a boil. Add small (not wide) egg noodles and cook until almost done.

Roughly chop up the leftover chicken (don’t get it to small) and add to the soup when the noodles are almost done. Add some lemon pepper spice to taste (and for a nifty touch toss in a handful of sesame seeds) or, alternatively, season with cumin and allspice. Cook  until noodles are done and the chicken is heated through.

Enjoy!

I tweeted about a successful culinary adventure yesterday and was promptly asked for the recipes. Here they are! (The fish is my dad’s own recipe, and the zucchini is mine, so this is the first time they’ve been written down.)

Dilled Tilapia

4 frozen tilapia fillets
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon onion powder
1 tablespoon garlic powder
2 tablespoons dried dill weed
4 tablespoons olive oil

Lay the fillets on a microwave-safe plate. Zap the four fillets in the microwave for just 40 seconds or less – enough to make them slightly moist, but still frozen. Sprinkle one side with half the spices. Heat the olive oil in a non stick frying pan over high heat. Add the fillets, spiced side down. Sprinkle the remaining spices on the other side of the fillets. Reduce heat to medium-high. Cook for three minutes. Turn fillets over. (Add some olive oil if necessary.) Cook for six minutes. Turn over once more and cook for an additional two to three minutes. Remove from heat and serve.

Couscous with zucchini

A pinch of saffron
2 tablespoons hot water
3 medium zucchini, cubed (about 1/2 square chunks)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 tablespoons onion powder
salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste
3/4 cup couscous (for a really nice look, use the multicolored couscous)
1 cup boiling water

Soak the saffron threads in the hot water. Heat olive oil in a shallow saucepan (that has a tight fitting lid) on high until zucchini sizzles when dropped into it. Reduce heat to medium and toss in all the zucchini. Cook until just slightly translucent, but still a bit firm. Add spices and toss well. Add the saffron-infused water and the boiling water. Cover with lid and let sit for 15 minutes. Fluff with a fork.

I just thought I should mention here that I’ve started another blog (in addition to my research/professional-related one, Bits and Bytes) called All About Tea. I still have a couple of design elements to fix, but please feel free to check it out and let me know what you think.

I’m sure that everyone who was excited about today’s inauguration of the 44th President of the United States of America, has some favorite part – a line, a phrase – of the inaugural speech. Didn’t get to watch/hear it? You can read it here.

My favorite part was, probably predictably if you know me well enough, this:

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

It’s a sentiment that speaks to my own multi-cultural background, my optimistic point of view, my love for travel and diverse cultures, and part of what I liked about Obama in the first place. May we, this time, act on such sentiments and move the human race forward, not backwards.

Updated 01/22/2009: Here’s a couple of links to related topics:

In First Family, a Nation’s Many Faces

The president’s elderly stepgrandmother brought him an oxtail fly whisk, a mark of power at home in Kenya. Cousins journeyed from the South Carolina town where the first lady’s great-great-grandfather was born into slavery, while the rabbi in the family came from the synagogue where he had been commemorating Martin Luther King’s Birthday. The president and first lady’s siblings were there, too, of course: his Indonesian-American half-sister, who brought her Chinese-Canadian husband, and her brother, a black man with a white wife.

When President Barack Obama was sworn in on Tuesday, he was surrounded by an extended clan that would have shocked past generations of Americans and instantly redrew the image of a first family for future ones.

[...]

For well over two centuries, the United States has been vastly more diverse than its ruling families. Now the Obama family has flipped that around, with a Technicolor cast that looks almost nothing like their overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Protestant predecessors in the role. The family that produced Barack and Michelle Obama is black and white and Asian, Christian, Muslim and Jewish. They speak English; Indonesian; French; Cantonese; German; Hebrew; African languages including Swahili, Luo and Igbo; and even a few phrases of Gullah, the Creole dialect of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Very few are wealthy, and some — like Sarah Obama, the stepgrandmother who only recently got electricity and running water in her metal-roofed shack — are quite poor.

“Our family is new in terms of the White House, but I don’t think it’s new in terms of the country,” Maya Soetoro-Ng, the president’s younger half-sister, said last week. “I don’t think the White House has always reflected the textures and flavors of this country.”

[...]

The Foreign (Student) Perspective on America’s Historic Day

Charlotte Junius, a German student interning in Washington, saw something she did not quite expect Tuesday during the inauguration of President Obama. Near her vantage point, in the shadow of the Washington Monument, she was surrounded not only by hundreds of thousands of American citizens but also a healthy dose of foreign visitors, all packed onto the National Mall to witness history.

My dad has been doing the gardening thing since he retired, and lately we’ve all been seeing the, um, fruits of his labor. Literally.

My folks live on one and a half acres of land, most of which my dad has turned in garden and orchard. And while dad’s planted apples, pears, peaches, figs and pomegranates, since they live on the Gulf coast it’s the citrus that’s done the best. (My husband and I live in Central Texas, where the peaches, pears and pomegranates do better.) Sweet oranges as well as sour oranges and tangerines. Ruby red and golden grapefruits. Your standard lemons and limes as well as Key limes and Meyer lemons. When they fruit they do so with gusto and the tree branches are bent halfway to the ground.

It’s during the wintertime that all the citrus bears fruit so, during our holiday visit with my family, my husband and I picked nearly 150 pounds of sour oranges (great for making marmalade) and 30 pounds of Meyer lemons. I have a recipe for orange marmalade (that’s another post) that everyone seems to love and that is the reason for a marmalade-making party with friends (in order to acquire slave volunteer labor) this Saturday.

Fortuitously, the most recent issue of Fine Cooking magazine had a recipe for “lemon-ginger marmalade” that I thought would be perfect to try with some of the Meyer lemons:

The results? Um, epic FAIL. [sigh]

Unfortunately, I let the fruit cook a little too long and nearly all the liquid cooked away. I added some water, but quite possibly not enough and the sugar didn’t dissolve fast enough. In the end, though it all thickened nicely, the consistency is more like a jar of honey that’s starting to crystallize than a nice jelly or jam.

Actually, that may not turn out to be such a bad thing. I plan on trying my new Meyer lemon infused sugar concoction as a sweetener for tea (hot and iced). When I get my tea blog up and running you can read about the results of that experiement.

A few months ago I heard about a nifty photography technique that uses post-processing to fake a very narrow and shallow depth of field, like the kind you get using a tilt shift.

Now a web application called TiltShift Maker lets you can make your own “minatures photo”. Here’s mine, of a street scene in Las Vegas:

You can see the original photo on Flickr.

My attempt is only so-so, but the effect can be quite dramatic with the right composition. Smashing Magazine offers 50 Beautiful Examples Of Tilt-Shift Photography as well as tilt-shifted videos. Wow.

I must be the only nerd on the planet who hadn’t heard about the expansion of the traditional rock/paper/scissors game (to reduce the probability that you’ll end up in a tie 80% of the time). Oh, I’d known about USARPS and the World RPS Championship. (I knew about them because of a seriously cool series of posters for one of them at a local bookstore a couple of years back. I’d looked everywhere online, trying to find that particular poster to hang in my office. Found some posters, but never that particular series.)

So when I saw the clip from the newest episode of The Big Bang Theory, I was ROTFL:

Casey Lynn has a good post about it over at Geeks Are Sexy.

The breakdown is thus:

Scissors cut paper.
Paper covers rock.
Rock crushes scissors.

That’s where the traditional game ends. The expansion adds:

Lizard eats paper.
Rock crushes lizard.
Paper disproves Spock.
Spock vaporizes rock.

etc.

Awesome. I’m so totally whipping this out on some unsuspecting non-geek sometime. Maybe my sister. She’s already contemplating an intervention for me for my Star Trek action figures purchases off of eBay.

Several years ago, I had a frozen ice cream dessert that I simply can’t forget. It was a lovely layering of super-thin chocolate and soft vanilla ice cream, luscious and decadent. Surprisingly, I didn’t encounter this memorable dessert at a fancy restaurant; it was readily available at my local grocery store.

Then all of a sudden and without warning, it vanished. My local grocery store no longer carried it and neither I nor my husband could find it at any other store. We tried. Man, we tried. The problem was (or so I thought) that I simply couldn’t remember the name of the dessert. Without that bit of information, it was exceedingly difficult to explain what I was looking for to anyone else. After a year or so I gave up. But every so often, and for the next several years, I would check the frozen section hoping to spot something that looked like what I remembered.

Then I happened to mention it in conversation with my folks around the dinner table on New Year’s Eve. My mom instantly knew what I was talking about. She’d loved the dessert too and had also noticed it’s sudden disappearance. She thought about it carefully and then said, “It was a Vienna-something”. That was enough for my husband to do a Google search and discover the name that had eluded us for years:

Breyers Vienetta.

Heaven on earth.

Once I’d had my memory jogged, it was a cinch to find more information online. I still remember this commercial for Vienetta:

Apparently Vienetta is still available in Europe, distributed by Unilever, and quite popular. But for some strange reason still unknown to me, it was discontinued in the United States, despite the fact that it seems I was not the only person who still dreams of this dessert. At least I am not alone in wishing this was still available in the U.S. I would not be surprised if it was all due to some kind of legal problem regarding a U.S. patent or some such.

At least the production video is still available on YouTube. It makes me wonder how difficult it would be to create something like this at home.

Ah, Vienetta. How I miss thee.

Update (April 20, 2010):

This has been, hands-down, one of the most popular blog posts I’ve ever written (and that includes thousands of entries on previous blogs over the last decade). Obviously I’m in good company – there’s a LOT of you out there that miss this lovely dessert.

What could be more maddening than remembering this, craving it and discovering it had been discontinued? Finding out that it was brought back, for a limited time and that I missed it.

Yup, that’s right. It was back. Well …  sort of. And now it’s gone again.

Apparently Unilever brought out a “Viennetta” branded dessert for the 2008/2009 winter holidays in the United States. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) the product was back off the shelves in February of 2009, which explains why my searches for it have been fruitless (ice creamless?) since people started reporting seeing it in January of 2009.

Why fortunately? It wasn’t exactly the same product we remember. The original was made with Breyer’s ice cream and this temporary holiday fix wasn’t even made with real ice cream. Ingredients were: “nonfat milk, sugars, whey, cocoa, propylene glycol monoesters, cellulose gels, mono and diglycerides, locust bean gum, polysorbate 80, guar gum, natural flavor and carrageenan.”

Oh why do they vex us so? *sigh* At least we’ve got the memories. Right?

You know what? I’m going to try to create something like this at home. I’ll report back on the success or failure of the attempt. Wish me luck!

Update (March 15, 2012):

Thank you all for your comments! For those of you who haven’t read through them all, here’s some useful information:

Thank you to “Patrick” who apparently lives in Europe where the dessert is still available:

I just read this post and I’m sorry to see you guys have to miss out on this wonderful desert.

If it is at all helpful, i have some contact information with the company itself, you could try and see if you can get some pamphlets or information to bring to your local supermarkets?

Unilever N.V.
Corporate Centre
Visitingadres: Weena 455 – 3013 AL Rotterdam The Netherlands
Postadres: Postbus 760 – 3000 DK Rotterdam The Netherlands
Tel.: +3110 – 217 40 00
Fax: +3110 – 217 47 98
Internet: http://www.unilever.com

Also a big thank you to “Desdemona” who points out:

Please, there’s a petition to bring it back! Sign it and tell everyone you know to sign it, too.

http://www.petitiononline.com/brvien10/petition.html

“Rick” from Palo Alto, CA adds:

For those jonesing for the heroin that is Vienetta…I present to you your methadone: Voileta.

http://www.daduicecream.com/cat-05.shtml

It’s a Vienetta knock off that isn’t exactly the same, but contains the same elements. The crispy chocolate layers are fewer and thicker (most likely because Dadu decided to add peanuts) and the Violeta cake is just not as pretty as a Vienetta…But I’m sure the differences are all about circumventing copyrights.

Best of all, I found this at my local Whole Foods. If your local Whole Foods doesn’t carry Violeta, you can always ask since Dadu is already part of their supply chain.

Correction: The crispy layers on the Violeta has hazelnut pieces…Not peanuts.

And yes, Violeta is delicious and has SOME of the same textural creamy/crispy mouth-feel as Vienetta…But Vienetta was much more subtle with the thinner crispy chocolate layers.

Originally posted September 12, 2002:

Kemah Taco

1 lb ground beef
1 package frozen peas
1 tablespoon each: ginger, cumin, garlic, onion powder
1 teaspoon each: salt, black pepper
1 tablespoon tomato paste

Toppings:
green olives, sliced
shredded cheddar cheese
plain yogurt

Small (6″) tortillas

Brown the ground beef in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Add the spices and incorporate thoroughly. Add the frozen peas and cook until they are no longer frozen. Add the tomato
pesto, stir through throughly and remove from heat.

Warm the tortillas ( I usually zap in a microwave for a couple of seconds).  Add the shredded cheese and sliced olives. Spoon on the meat mixture, then top a dollop of yogurt. Roll up like a burrito and enjoy!

Over the next few months I’ll be reposting a few of the better posts for my old blog. That includes all of my recipes. Here’s the first:

Thai Red Curry

2 tablespoons canola or peanut oil
1 onion, finely chopped
2 teaspoons Thai red curry paste
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 can coconut milk
3 Tablespoons fish sauce
2 bay leaves
1 chili pepper
1 can bamboo shoots
3 skinless, boneless chicken breasts, cut into small chunks

Heat the oil in a large saucepan over a medium heat. Cook the onion for 5 minutes. Add the curry paste and garlic and cook, stirring, for one minute. Add the next four ingredients and heat until bubbling. Add the shoots and chicken, reduce the heat and simmer until the chicken is done. Serve with steamed jasmine rice.