Some not-chocolate brownie recipes

Butterscotch brownies

1 stick butter (1/2 cup)
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg
~7/8 cup flour (original recipe calls for 3/4, which makes them a little too greasy; I've seen other recipes call for 1 cup; I've been making it with somewhere between those two marks.)
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp. salt

Melt the butter; stir in the sugar. Add the eggs and stir. Add everything else and stir. Pour batter into an 8x8 baking pan (greased, if you like, but it's usually buttery enough to not need it), and bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes.


Variation: slightly orangey brownies

• Substitute white sugar for the brown sugar.
• Add the juice and zest of one clementine orange.

Variation: coconut-spice brownies

I don't feel the need to experiment with coconut-ginger cookies anymore - these hit the flavor profile I was going for, bang-on. You might actually be able to roll them into cookies, though - the mixture is more dough than batter, and I had to press it into the pan instead of pour it.

• Substitute 1/2 cup of coconut oil instead of butter. (It will be easiest to work with if you put the coconut oil in the microwave a bit - I discovered from two different tries that freshly-melted oil stirred in better than started-as-room-temperature-liquid oil.)
• Substitute white sugar for brown sugar.
• These are more cookie-like than brownie-like. 1 cup of flour makes them sandy (which Jerry preferred); 3/4 cup makes them sturdier (which I preferred), but they were difficult to cut after I let them cool too long; I had to pop them onto a cutting board and bust out the big chef's knife. Neither version is tender-chewy.
• Add 1/2 tsp. each of ground cinnamon, ground cloves, and ground ginger.
• Omit vanilla, or substitute coconut extract.
• Optional: I accidentally doubled the salt in one experiment, to 1/2 tsp. It was noticeably salty but surprisingly good. Worth repeating, if you're feeling a bit salty.

Cocoa brownies

So my husband walks into the kitchen the other day; he stops, sniffs, turns around, and says: "Are you making brownies?"

"No," I say. I had just cooked something else, so the kitchen smelled like something, but it wasn't brownies.

A pause, and then, wistfully: "Could you?"

Dude never asks for anything, food-wise. Never. I can't even get him to express an opinion on his preferences for the week's dinners, when asked directly. He must want them pretty bad, and I can't possibly say no to that. So I ask him what kind he wants; I've been playing with my butterscotch brownies recipe, attempting variations on it: we had a successful orange brownie, and an incredibly good coconut-spice brownie.

Another pause, and then, hesitantly, "Chocolate?"

Ruh-roh. I don't know how to make chocolate brownies, except out of a box. I don't know how to make good chocolate brownies at all.

I experimented with them once or twice, once upon a time, because they're the freaking standard brownie: something I should know how to make. But they weren't awesome, and I hadn't tried again yet. I'm not a chocolate addict, so we wouldn't normally have the right ingredients on hand, either, except that cocoa was among the versatile-and-fairly-nonperishable ingredients I decided I should learn to use, to expand my options for those desperate pantry-dinner nights. (Like rice, canned beans, sage from the monster plant in the herb garden...)

A long time ago, I'd bookmarked Smitten Kitchen's Best Cocoa Brownies as a recipe I wanted to try but never got around to, so now was the time. And they were AWESOME.

For the step with heating the butter/sugar/etc., I melted the butter in the microwave and then stirred the other ingredients in. It worked fine for me. I boggled at the large amount of cocoa and small amount of flour - I have never done such a thing before, and worried that the lack of flour would make them turn out very gooshy - but it turned out just fine. The cocoa must stand in structurally for the flour somehow, I don't know how that works. I baked them for 35 minutes, and let them sit and cool for an hour or two before I tried to take them out of the pan.

Our house is now covered in chocolate brownie crumbs, and I'm going to have to get more cocoa soon, because I may only have enough for one more batch, and that is eventually going to be a problem.

Calorie-packed, somewhat healthy smoothies

I've been experimenting a lot with smoothies lately. Well, with pretty much any food that's quick to make, filling, and only requires one hand to eat. I found a base recipe for peanut butter and banana smoothies and have come up with a few components that I can mix and match depending on what I'm in the mood for:

• frozen banana - I cut these in half and stick them in the freezer so they're ready to grab
• soy milk - or any kind of milk or juice, really, but I prefer soy (we have the vanilla kind, too, so it adds some flavor)
• peanut butter - this adds a nice texture and lots of calories
• oats - still not sure what I think about oats... they seem to add a slightly bitter taste, although they do make it more filling
• honey - for sweetening
• cocoa powder - mainly to make the smoothies more tempting for the men in the household
• vanilla ice cream - just makes it taste better (and it's not like I'm trying to make this low-fat or anything)
• greek yogurt - adds more protein
• wheat germ - I forget why this is healthy, but I remember it's supposed to be good while you're pregnant, so I figure it must be a good thing
• other fruits, frozen or not

My general method is to put the solid ingredients in the cup first, then pour in enough soy milk to almost cover them. We have a handheld bender which is pretty easy to clean, although it has a hard time blending the frozen bananas sometimes.

Some good combos I've found so far:
banana, peanut butter, oats, wheat germ (just a teaspoon or so), honey, soy milk
banana, peanut butter, cocoa powder, ice cream, soy milk
banana, strawberries, greek yogurt, honey, soy milk

I've been meaning to try out some other components, like molasses, so I'll update this as I go...

Pulled pork followup:

This morning, I took the pork out of the freezer and tried this recipe, with some substitutions. It was spectacular - all of us loved it. And I really like that the only things I had to buy for it were the pork and the buns - everything else, I already had in the cupboards.

• I cut the recipe in half, because my pork roast was 2-3 lb. big instead of 4-6 lb.
• But I still used one whole onion, because (a) I had regular yellow onions, which are smaller than Vidalia, (b) I like onions, (c) half an onion in the fridge is sort of a pain.
  
• I substituted cumin for the paprika, because either paprika or cayenne pepper give me hives. I haven't pinned down which it is, and since I don't like either of them, I see no reason to bother. We keep neither on hand.
  
• I omitted the red pepper flakes and the cayenne pepper, for the same reason.
• I substituted a heaping 1/2 tsp. of minced garlic for the garlic salt, because that's the kind of garlic I keep on hand and use in everything. I did not try to add more salt to make up for the difference between just-garlic and garlic-plus-salt, and in the end it didn't need it.
  
• It was sort of a hassle to get the pork roast out of its grocery store wrappings; I had to do it while running it under cold water to thaw the ice. Since running the roast under cold water was the first step of the recipe anyway, I didn't feel too bad about this. I don't think I would change having frozen it in the same vacuum-sealed package it came in, though; it's supposed to avoid freezer-burn like that.
• My pork roast was just a little longer than the diameter of my crockpot; frozen and incompressible, it didn't lie flat. So it laid in at an angle at first. After it had an hour or so in there to thaw, I pushed it down a bit with a fork, though it still didn't go flat. But by the end, it had shrunk down and settled nicely to the bottom of the pot.
  
• I may have drizzled more like half of the vinegar sauce on to begin with.
• Drizzling the vinegar over a tilted frozen roast partially rinsed the spice rub off, down into the onions. I couldn't see how to prevent this, so I decided not to worry about it.
  
• I put it in the crockpot at 7:30am, and finished it off at 4:30pm. I didn't do anything in the last 1/2 hour. I thought about letting it go another half hour after I messed with it, but the pork was cooked through and The Little Dude had started yelling for crackers and apples and cookies, so clearly it was time to eat. Now.
  
• I didn't ever drain it. I used two forks to pull it apart right there in the crockpot, and I poured all the rest of the vinegar sauce on and stirred it up with one of the forks. I also used the forks to serve it. Limited number of new dirty dishes! I approve.
  
• It was nice and juicy, not saucy at all, and it was great. The only thing I'd change from this in the next go round would be to use a second onion. Sitting on the bottom, where the vinegar sauce and the pork juices pooled, those onions got really tasty.
  
• I picked up whole wheat buns from the store because they were out of my favorite potato rolls. But actually, I think the whole wheat went much better with the pulled pork than the potato would have. Serendipity!
• There was enough for us all - 2 adults, 1 toddler - to eat our fill, with plenty of leftovers; at least another meal.
  

Absolute success.

Standardizing my chili

Sometimes you look in the fridge, and you're like, goddamn, there is nothing in here. It's nice to have something stashed away in the pantry and freezer for those days, y'know? Or just for when the craving hits.

Chili is like that, for me. It's very easy to keep canned beans and tomatoes on hand at all times. I used to make it with ground beef, but then my husband requested that we not eat ground beef at every meal, so I decided to try substituting. (He exaggerated. We did not have ground beef for every meal.) Over the years, I tried ground turkey (gross), ground chicken (OK), steak chunks (very good, but not something I keep on hand), leftover roast chicken (ditto), and finally, when I started feeding The Little Dude real food, just beans.

Bean chili was OK. What I liked best about it was that I didn't have to spend any time browning meat; I could just throw everything in the pot as-is. I also liked that The Little Dude was a big, big fan; that every ingredient was the right size for him to eat easily; and that I could freeze leftovers in little portions for him.

I still had some nostalgia for the ground beef, so I tried it again recently. Ugh. The texture is just nowhere near as nice as black beans, or garbanzos, or black-eyed peas. (I do not like kidney beans, though. The skins creep me out.) The ground beef didn't add any significant flavor, and I had to spend all that time browning it and washing the pan. W T F. So not worth it; never again.

The major problem with my recipe these days is that I've never measured anything. So if I go too long without making it, I find myself wondering how many cans of beans go in. It's difficult to give the recipe out upon request, because I "measure" the spices in fractions of the chili's surface area, as I sprinkle them. And I'm always forgetting the onions or something.

So today, I pulled out some measuring spoons for the spices, and I'm writing it down. This is a version that we're very happy with, that I would be using as the bones of any further chili experimentation (like substituting various chile peppers, or adding new and intriguing vegetables or spices - I hear good things about cocoa in chili, for example):

2 (14 oz.) cans beans, drained and rinsed (Black beans, garbanzos, or black-eyed peas are good.)
1 (14 oz.) can diced tomatoes
1 (14 oz.) can tomato sauce
1.5 bell peppers, red/orange/yellow, diced (this just happens to be the portion size I stuck in the freezer after chopping up the six peppers sitting idle in the veggie drawer - it could as easily be 1 or 2)
1 cup frozen corn
1.5 tsp. ground cinnamon
1.5 tsp. ground cloves
3 tsp. ground cumin
1/4 tsp. ground chipotle chili pepper (I am no expert, but it seems to me this is spicier than the other chili powders I've tried, so this measurement may not be the same for other varieties)
1 fat onion, or 2 small onions
1 tbsp. minced garlic

It tastes about like I expect it to taste, spice-wise. (I did have to taste-test and add more to get it that way - the number recorded is the final total.) It may actually be more like 2 tsp./4 tsp. instead of 1.5 tsp./3 tsp., but I'm running low on cumin, and this is pretty close. I do know it's two parts cumin to one each of cinnamon and cloves.

It's a little saucy; I think it could support some more chunky ingredients, like meat, more corn or peppers, some additional veggie, or possibly another can of beans. (Though I tried three cans of beans once, and it wasn't saucy enough anymore. But I wasn't measuring on that attempt either, so for all I know, I changed something else, too.)

It's about the right amount of chili pepper for us, as far as the heat goes. I think it could be spicier and I'd still like it, but The Little Dude would not agree. He makes this spectacular jaw-dropped expression when food is too spicy, like he's trying to air his whole mouth out; he sticks his fingers in his mouth like he wants to wipe the capsaicin off his tongue.

I'm a little sad about this, because although I am not a particular fan of spicy, I do like the chipotle flavor, and there's not enough of that. I haven't figured out how to get the one without the other, though. For all I know, it may not be possible. I had been thinking I'd try to get an actual chipotle pepper and seed it or something, but I see now that I look at Wikipedia that it's actually a smoked-dried jalapeno. That would explain why I never see it in the produce aisle.

We top the chili with shredded cheese just before serving, if we have it. (Which we usually do.) Sometimes, if I remember about it when I'm already chopping the first onion(s), I also chop up another onion very finely, and set it aside to sprinkle on top with the cheese later.

I cooked tonight's chili on the stove, for about an hour. I've done it as short as just twenty minutes or whatever it was to heat everything up - the veggies were still a little crunchy, which was interesting, and not bad - and I've done it all day on low in the crock-pot. It seems pretty forgiving.

The Little Dude, upon discovering that chili was in the works, was super mad that he had to wait for it. "Mine! My din! MINE!" He went so far as to shake the bars of the baby gate in rage as he yelled. That was what determined how long the chili cooked. Whatever benefits there may be to letting it stew longer, they do not outweigh the demands of a hungry toddler.

Pulled pork "research":

I've been thinking about pulled pork lately. There's a recipe I kind of like out of the Betty Crocker cookbook, but Jerry's not a big fan and I'm not addicted, so I never make it anymore. It's very barbecue saucey, which is how I always assumed pulled pork was just supposed to be.

But in the past year or two, I've seen it done a different way. At the annual summer picnic at work, they've served barbecue from Dinosaur, which is just the seasoned pork, and you add the sauce at the last minute, right there on your bun. At the Ithaca Bakery, there's one where the sauce is based on strawberry jam, and it also seemed like it was added as a last-minute condiment. At Trillium on campus, there was a North Carolina pulled pork that was just the pork, with a vinegar sauce that we could put on top if we liked. All of those were very intriguing; I was surprised at how much flavor just the pork itself had.

I really like that this style doesn't involve jarred barbecue sauce. I haven't discovered a jarred sauce that I really like - I don't have any reason to keep it on hand, and don't like any of the ones I've tried enough to be motivated to experiment with it. Plus, industrial food is industrial. So I'm glad to ditch it.

So I'm currently looking up recipes, and I found this porknography website rich in the How of pulled pork. I really like how the dude explains exactly why all the important elements are important. Alas, I'm not going to do mine by the method he describes; it requires infrastructure I don't have (a smoker, etc.), and more planning-ahead skills than I can dredge up. What I have is a crock-pot. Nonetheless: there the link is, for reference.

It seems like the thing to do in a crock-pot is going to be to rub the pork in the appropriate spices, give it some liquid, and let it go. I seem to recall the Betty Crocker recipe using a lot of root beer to cook in, and then pouring much of it off before adding the barbecue sauce. That seems to be a typical crockpot approach - pork, cola, onions, and at the end, possibly omittable, jarred barbecue sauce. I don't generally like soda, but I make an exception for root beer - so it seems like that method, minus the BBQ sauce, might be acceptable, but not necessarily intriguing.

The most Googly recipe (i.e. a top hit, and one that several of the next hits on the front page either refer to, or are remarkably similar to) seems to be this one; it looks similar to the one I had in Trillium. It doesn't use any cola or jarred sauces, and some of the hits explicitly call it a Carolina pulled pork. I think that's the variation I'll try.

You know, eventually.

Corn crab cakes

I've been promising Laurel for weeks now that I'd post my crab cakes recipe. I found the original in a Southern Living compilation that I checked out of the library. That's a really beautiful book, by the way. There were too many recipes that looked really good for me to try them all. But I had to do the crab cakes, because every time I go to a new restaurant I want their crab cakes, and I'm sad if their crab cakes suck, and I've been trying for years to make a good one at home, but failing.

I was failing, apparently, primarily because I was using imitation crab meat. It turns out that it is nothing at all like the real thing. I am very sad that crab costs as much as it does; the grocery bill spikes every week I give in to this recipe again.

That said, a pound of crab - although it is an appalling $20 - makes 8 or 10 good-sized cakes with this recipe. And since you refrigerate the cakes for a few hours, or up to a day, before frying them, this can actually be prepared one night and then made for dinner twice - half the first night, and half the second. I haven't done the ingredient-price-math, but I think, all told, it actually isn't that bad a hit to the wallet as a fancy dinner could be. Especially since it's two fancy dinners if it's only 2 or 3 of you - or enough for guests, without having to double it. Unless you've got a lot of guests. With a salad, a loaf of nice bakery bread, a glass of Riesling, slightly chilled... oh, God. I may never order a restaurant crab cake again; it might not measure up.

Corn crab cakes
adapted from Southern Living: 40 years of our best recipes

Part I: frying pan
2-3 tbsp. butter
1 large bell pepper (Orange, red, or yellow; I tend to buy a pack of all three, and use half an orange and half a red. Then I use the rest of the peppers in chili, or on a pizza.)
1 cup frozen corn
1 onion, chopped

Part II: small bowl, or 1-cup Pyrex measuring cup
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1 egg
2 tsp. Old Bay seasoning
2 tsp. Worcestshire sauce
3/4 tsp. dry mustard

Part III: large mixing bowl
1 tbsp. minced garlic
1 cup finely crushed crackers (I use 1 sleeve of Ritz crackers, which we have on hand for eating anyway)
1 lb. fresh lump crabmeat, drained and picked (whatever that means - the can of crabmeat my supermarket carries appears to have no juices, and have no shells to pick out)

First, deal with Part I: melt the butter in the frying pan, and start sauteeing the Part I ingredients.

While they're cooking, mix together the Part II ingredients. I tend to measure out the mayo into a 1-cup Pyrex liquid measuring cup, add the eggs and spices right into it, and stir them up with a spoon.

Then, chuck the Part III ingredients into the large mixing bowl. It doesn't matter if you mix them up or not. They're just waiting there for the other stuff. When Part I is done cooking to your satisfaction, throw all the ingredients - I, II, and III - together in the mixing bowl, and mix.

(Aside: the original recipe suggests that you handle the crabmeat as little as possible, to keep the crab lumps lumpy; they break apart easily. I'm a little dubious about this. For one thing, do I really care? I like crab, and I like corn, and the closer together they are, the happier I am. Granted, their original recipe did not contain corn, so clearly they are not responsible for the consequences of my adulterations and my tastes. But for another: if the crab lumps aren't already broken and mixed uniformly throughout the crabcake, I suspect that they might provide fault lines along which the cake can break when I try to flip it. One of the other reasons my crabcake attempts fail is because I am a terrible crabcake flipper. Sometimes my salmon-cake attempts are reduced to salmon hash. It can be an ugly business.)

Get a plate or cookie sheet out, and line it with wax paper or something similar. Now start taking handfuls of crab mixture and forming them into balls of roughly the size you want your crabcakes to be; set them on the wax paper. Put them in the fridge for at least 1, but up to 24 hours. (I've actually done it for 48. They still seemed OK to me.) This is important: whether it's the lower temperature, or the time it gives the cracker crumbs to absorb the liquids and do some starchy-bindy thing, it helps the crab cakes hold together when you're frying and flipping them.

In your frying pan again, pour a layer of frying oil to cover the bottom. (Not olive oil; it smokes at frying temperatures, I hear. But canola or peanut or generic vegetable oil work.) You want enough oil in the bottom that it's not going to all get absorbed and then risk the cakes sticking to the pan when it runs out, but not so much that you're going to have a big pond to clean up afterwards. Original recipe suggests 1/2 tbsp. butter, 1/2 tbsp. oil; this seems inadequate, to me. Especially if your stove is slightly slanted and all that oil runs to one side of the pan. I don't like it. I coat the pan, so as to not run into these problems.

Heat the oil. I hear you get better browning if the oil is hot from the get-go. Then lay as many crab cakes in the oil as you can fit in your pan, but still leave room for your spatula to easily get in and flip them. (For me and my 8- or 9-inch skillet, that's four.) Don't crowd them. Flatten the cakes after you put them in the pan. (You can flatten them beforehand, even before you put them in the fridge, but I find if you do that, that they sometimes fall apart when you try to move them. I'd rather risk a little oil spit on my hand from being too close to the pan while putting them in. Maybe my priorities are backwards, I don't know.)

Here's the part I don't understand well enough to give good instructions on: cook them until their bottoms are browned, and then flip them and do it again. Sometimes I guess wrong on when it's time to flip them, and the first crab cake is ugly or broken. I usually err on the side of the premature flip, rather than on the burnt side.

Repeat until all the crab cakes you want to eat that night are cooked. Leave the others in the fridge to cook tomorrow, if there are any remaining.

Devour.