stevenpiziks | Entries tagged with food

I came across a dessert called Parsla on Facebook group for Latvian food. It looked tasty, and several people in the group asked for the recipe. The person who made it posted a recipe of sorts--it was just a list of ingredients.

Darwin happened to be looking over my shoulder and said, "That looks fantastic!" So I decided to make it. I studied the ingredient list and realized it was really a basic cake with an enriched cream topping. It also seemed to be a refrigerator cake. All right then!

I combined eggs, flour, sugar, and vanilla, spread it in a square pan, and slid it into the oven. While it was baking, I whipped together cream, ricotta cheese, sugar, and vanilla until it was cloud fluffy.

I had to estimate the baking temperature and time. Most baked goods require 350 d., and a cake of this size and density would probably be 35 minutes. I watched it carefully, and at 35 minutes, checked for doneness with a toothpick. Yep--done! I let it cool a bit, then slipped it out of the pan and put it in the refrigerator for an hour.

After the cake was completely cool, I put it back into the pan and spread the topping over it, then sifted cocoa powder on top and summoned Darwin to the kitchen for taste-testing.

It was wonderful! Like most Latvian desserts, it goes for heartiness over sweetness, and does it very well. The cake was both tender and chewy (in a good way), and the curd topping was a sweet wonder, while the cocoa powder gave it just a bit of a bite.

One nice thing about this recipe is that it makes a small cake--a fine thing for those of us who live in small households where sweets need to be limited and a full-size cake would ultimately go to waste.

Here's my recipe, if you want to try it yourself:

PARSLA

INGREDIENTS

For cake:
1 cup wheat flour
3 large eggs
2/3 cups granulated sugar
1 t vanilla
1 t baking powder
a pinch of salt

For curd cream:
1 cup cottage cheese, farmer cheese, or ricotta cheese (I prefer ricotta)
1/2 - 2/3 cup granulated sugar, to taste
1 cup cream
1 t vanilla
a pinch of salt

cocoa powder

Grease 9x9 cake pan and preheat oven to 350 d. Mix cake ingredients together until just combined. Spread batter in cake pan. Bake at 350 until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clear, about 30-40 minutes. Do not allow the top to brown. Let cool in refrigerator for at least an hour.

Cream together curd cream ingredients with a whisk attachment on high speed until fluffy. Spread on top of cold cake. Dust with cocoa powder. Keep refrigerated.

9 servings.

Air fryer diet trick:

I dehydrate apple and banana slices in the air fryer, then put the results in a bowl on the counter for nibbling. It takes me a couple days to get through an entire apple, so the calories aren't worth bothering about, and I have something to satisfy the nibble urge.

One of the veggie substitutes for pasta I found is made of sweet potato cut into spiral shapes.

I chopped up a sweet red pepper and sauteed it with onions and minced garlic, then added jarred spaghetti sauce. While that was simmering, I heated up the "pasta." Combined the two and topped with a bit of grated Asiago.

I wasn't sure this would work--I don't like spaghetti squash, for example--but it completely did. The sweet potato pasta had a good texture, and it tasted great. The beefed-up sauce was really good with it. And according to my food app, that portion of the meal had fewer than 200 calories. So it's a keeper.

Like a lot of people, I gained weight during the pandemic, though this problem really began before-hand. In all, I've gained about 15 pounds since Darwin and I got married, ten since the pandemic began. So I've joined a commercial weight modification program.

Like most such programs these days, this one de-emphasizes denial and emphasizes behavior change. It has an app for keeping track of your weight, watching your daily eating, and sending you chirpy "You can do this!" messages. One thing this program DOESN'T emphasize is exercise. In fact, they barely even mention it. It's not until you're in for more than a week that the program off-handedly mentions that for every calorie you burn in exercise, you get half a calorie added to your daily allotment. You would think this would show up prominently as a way to encourage movement, but no. And while food and weight entries are easy to get to on the app's menu, the exercise section is buried a couple levels down. I'm not sure why this is.

The program also tries to move you toward a plant-based diet without actually saying so. They don't say, "Eat vegetarian," but they definitely de-emphasize meat of all kinds. The recipe section is filled with vegetarian offerings:

Crisp Stir Fry Vegetables
Winter Squash Risotto
Lemony Fennel Salad
Tofu Pad Tai
Eggplant and Mushroom Pasta

They seem to have a love affair with soups:

Mushroom and Rice Soup
Minestrone Soup
Carrot Ginger Soup
Vegetarian Barley Soup
Corn and Tomato Chowder
Autumn Harvest Pumpkin Soup

I don't object to this. It's just odd how they quietly emphasize this without actually saying so. Maybe they figure if they draw your attention to it, you'll resist.

My goal is to lose at least 15 pounds, and make a run for 20. (I always find it useful to tell myself, "Get this far with and you can stop, but you can keep going if you want to.") Right now, I'm in the honeymoon phase, when weight loss is quick and easy. I've lost five pounds, in fact. Eventually, my metabolism will say, "Wait--what?" and slow itself down, making it harder to lose more, but for now I'll enjoy being a third of the way toward my first goal.

I'm also discovering the plethora of what I call fake foods. There's a vogue on for creating food substitutes out of vegetables. We have spiral-cut veggies that masquerade as pasta. Frozen risotto and rice dishes filled out with vegetables. And, of course, plant-based meat substitutes. The Impossible Burger is the most famous substitute for ground beef, but I've found plant-based sausage and plant-based sweet-and-sour pork.

In a self-inflicted orgy of "what the hell," I snagged a big pile of all this stuff. I've long been a fan of the ground beef substitutes, but rarely bought them at the store because they're expensive, but I decided I'd spend it now. So far, I'm liking the results.

I've also become a fan of pre-made salads, another new-ish item in the store. They're various styles of salad that come in a sealed bowl and separate packets of the dressing and crispy ingredients inside. I like these because the only other way to make a mixed salad involves buying an entire head of lettuce, a bag of carrots, a head of cabbage, and so on. You chop up ingredients for a bowl of salad, and you're left with huge amounts of leftover ingredients that, in my case, usually go bad before you can use them all up. These bowls let me have a variety of different kinds of salad without leaving piles of vegetables in my crisper drawer that turn into black sludge. The only objection I have to them is the amount of packaging. By volume, the packaging is nearly as much as the salad itself!

My goal is to lose fifteen pounds by early June. We'll see what happens!

I've been playing more with the air fryer. The home-made french fries are a major hit around here. I already have a fry cutter (I think it belonged to my grandmother), which forces a potato through a grill and cuts it into fries in a snap, so it's easy to make them and eat them hot from the air fryer.

This morning, I decided to try hash browns. I grated a potato, wrung it out in a damp cloth to get rid of the excess moisture, tossed it with a little olive oil, and spread the results over the bottom of the air fryer. Let the machine do its magic for about five minutes. The results were wonderful! Hot, crispy hash browns that weren't at all oily.

Yesterday, I was at the store trying to figure out what to have for supper, and I decided to splurge on steaks. Back home, I pan-fried them with a wine and butter sauce. I also made buttered corn and a pile of air fryer fries. Everything was wonderful.

And I can totally tell myself it's all healthy because of the air fryer. :)

For Christmas, I got an air fryer. Go me!

I've been wanting to play with one for a while, but Darwin said, "No more kitchen gadgets!" I felt slighted. I'm not one of those home chefs who collects kitchen gadgets I never use. I use my Instant Pot, bread maker, Kitchen Aid, and deep fryer regularly. The only gadget I stopped using was my rice cooker, because the Instant Pot does a better job--and I gave the rice cooker away.

But I forbore getting an air fryer. Until now.

I've been playing with it all week, and I have to say that it works as advertised. The air fryer is really a small convection oven with a non-stick baking surface that promotes quick crispness. The big thing about it? It's =fast=. Way faster than an oven. The first thing I tried was frozen tater tots. They were done in less than ten minutes and were super-crispy in a way tater tots are supposed to be but never actually are.

Next I tried some home-made fries. I sliced up a potato, tossed it in some olive oil, and slid it into the fryer. In less than fifteen minutes, I got hot-hot-hot, crispy french fries. In an oven, it would have taken an hour, and there'd be no crispness. This was great!

Then I cut chicken into bite-sized pieces, breaded them (egg, spiced flour, breadcrumbs), and air-fried them. In 15 minutes, they turned into the best chicken nuggets in the world--a crispy outer crust and a tender, juicy inside.

Baked chicken was next. Marinated chicken breasts tossed in olive oil and salt. Instead of taking an hour, they took less than 20 minutes. Let them rest for five minutes, and they were fantastic!

On New Year's Eve, I made cheater donuts. I opened a can of biscuit dough, cut holes in the center, and air-fried them. Took eight minutes. Brushed them piping hot in melted butter and rolled them in sugar and cinnamon. They were wonderful! Next time, I'll try spraying them with butter-flavored cooking spray and rolling them in sugar substitute to make a more Darwin-friendly version.

Another plus: I can bake stuff in summer without roasting the entire kitchen.

More cooking adventures ahead!

In addition to the humongous turkey, I bought a spiral ham for Darwin. A while ago, I bought some ham steaks for cooking, and Darwin ended up munching them down--it's a no-carb food, you see, and he likes it. He ate the ham steaks right quick, in fact. An entire ham is way cheaper than a few slices, so I bought one, carved it into chunks, and put the extra in the freezer so he can have as much as he likes.

Anyway, this evening I mentioned to Max and Darwin, "Don't forget that there's a lot of ham in the freezer. When you finish off a section of it from the fridge, get a new bag to thaw."

"Fried ham," said Max, who hadn't had supper. "And Miracle Whip. And cucumbers. That would be a great sandwich right now."

It did sound good. So what the hell, right? I sliced up a some ham and set it in puddles of melted butter on a griddle. While it was frying up, I sliced my home-made brioche and a cucumber. Thick, sizzling slices of ham in tangy sandwich spread with crisp cucumbers. It was dee-licious!

My family agreed--we're only doing in-house Thanksgivings this year because of the pandemic. So I'm making turkey and fixin's for five instead of twenty.

Also this week, the Michigan governor announced we're going into semi-lockdown, starting on Thursday.

I realized I needed to do the Thanksgiving shopping. I also realized the store would be mobbed with pandemic panic shoppers. Darwin said I should just continue my usual practice--make out an online list and have the store get the order ready for me to pick up. I don't usually like doing this for holiday dinner shopping because when I'm at the store, I usually remember something I didn't put on the list. But I did the online thing anyway in this case.

On the list was a turkey. I asked for one weighing 10-14 pounds. A couple hours before the order was ready, the store texted me to say they had no 10-14 pound turkeys. I read an article a while ago that said turkey farmers started this year's batch of turkeys back in the early days of the pandemic, when no one was predicting we'd do reduced Thanksgivings. They hatched lots of big turkeys and few small turkeys, the exact opposite of the eventual demand. Oops. I suspect this is why the store didn't have any littler ones.

"Will you accept a 15-20 pound turkey for the price of a 10-14 pound turkey?" they asked.

I replied that I would. I wasn't as thrilled as you might expect with the idea of getting twice the turkey for the same price, but I wasn't quite. What are five people going to do with all that turkey?? First-world problems, I suppose.

Darwin went to pick up the groceries this evening while I was in my writers group Zoom meeting. He got back just as we were finishing up. Once everything was hauled upstairs, I glanced at the bags.

"Where's the turkey?" I asked.

"It's not in there?" he said.

"How you could you not notice carrying up a 20-pound turkey?" I countered.

The turkey definitely wasn't there. We checked the receipt. The turkey was mentioned in the space for substitutions, but instead of listing the price difference, it only said REVIEW. What the heck did that mean? That the clerk was supposed to review the order with Darwin? That the order was supposed to be confirmed?

Additionally, I'd ordered butter. It was missing, too.

So I called the store. "We seem to be missing part of our order," I said. "A box of butter. And a turkey."

The clerk rummaged around and came back to the phone. "I think we have it here. Do you want to come back and get it tonight?"

Why not? So Darwin and I drove back to the store, where a bemused clerk brought out the turkey.

"How did I miss an entire turkey?" she asked.

"We wondered the same thing," I agreed. We were actually more eye-roll-y than snarky. There's a pandemic on, you know.

We got the thing back home and hauled it upstairs, where I checked the weight.

Twenty freaking pounds. Forty dollars.

Then I had a thought. The store no longer gives you an itemized receipt with your order, something that annoys both Darwin and me, since this practice makes it harder to verify what you ordered vs. what you got. But I could check the TOTAL they charged us with the bank. The total was more than $20 under the store's original estimate.

So we apparently got a big-ass free turkey.

I love reading recipes. I love reading the way they lie.

"15-Minute Recipes for a Lazy Supper" boasts one cooking headline I just saw. Lies, lies, lies!

I've never in my life managed to cook a 15-minute recipe in 15 minutes. This is because these recipes always leave out:

--prep time (gathering, washing, chopping, etc.)

--heating time (the time it takes for the stove to heat the pan or for the oven to pre-heat or the pasta water to boil)

--shopping time (because these recipes invariably list ingredients the average person doesn't keep on hand, like pancetta, gyoza, scallops, or sun-dried tomatoes

All these add considerable time to any recipe. The first two will easily triple the time. Add in the fact that cooking a recipe for the first time always goes slower, and a 15-minute recipe easily takes an hour or more.

I just came across a 15-minute recipe for peanut noodles that listed in its ingredients "one pound spaghetti noodles, boiled and cooled." Really? Because I just happen to have a pound of boiled, cooled noodles on hand at all times! A 15-minute recipe for pork fried rice calls for a very hot pan and bunch of cooked rice, both of which take a fair amount of time to prepare. (I know fried rice was invented as a way to use up leftover cooked rice, but this recipe doesn't make note of that, and it's the very last ingredient on the recipe list instead of the first, and needs a "use up that extra rice" note.)

My favorite of these recipes calls for 1 pound of raw shrimp, peeled a deveined (because THAT doesn't take an hour) and 1/2 cup julienned fresh basil (because I keep fresh basil right on hand, and prepping it julienne takes no time at all).

Then this particular headline called the recipes "lazy." Because deveining, julienning, pasta-ing, and rice-making are "lazy" kitchen activities on par with spreading peanut butter on a stale roll.

15 minutes. Lies, lies, lies!

Remember Co Co Wheats? I didn't think so. Any time I mention them to people outside my own family, I'm met with blank looks, which feels weird. I mean, we ate them all the time when I was growing up. I still ate them as an adult. Co Co Wheats, for the uninitiated, are a hot chocolate cereal. They're actually a bit of a trick to make. You have to boil water with a bit of salt, then gradually add the Co Co Wheats and continue boiling for a minute. Careful! If you do it wrong, it boils over, or you get lumps, or the cereal comes out too thick or too thin. The trick is to use a fork or wire whisk to stir in the cereal. When it's done, you mix in sugar and milk and eat.

When I was little, every so often the cereal was too liquidy. Either my mother had gotten the proportion of water to cereal wrong, or I'd poured in too much milk. It happened to my brother and sister sometimes too. We always--always!--tried to thicken it by pouring in more sugar. When the cereal didn't thicken, we'd pour in more. And more! It made for some jittery mornings. The dishes are also a bitch-kitty to clean. If you don't soak the pot and the bowls, the cereal sets like cement and has to be scoured away.

Co Co Wheats were invented in the 1930s as a way to get kids to eat porridge, and they were extremely popular for a long time. Back in those days, moms had lots of time to cook breakfast and scour chocolate-flavored cement off their dishes. However, instant hot cereals showed up in the 70s and 80s, right around the time more moms entered the workplace and didn't have time to stand over a stove in the morning. In the 90s, breakfast became a grab-and-go kind of thing, and cooking a cereal that took a certain amount of skill and patience became even less appealing. Additionally, chocolate became less of a treat and more of a staple, meaning Co Co Wheats for breakfast weren't special or interesting to kids. Sales declined. Co Co Wheats hung on, but became harder to find in the store. I remember when I was a kid, it was shelved at eye-level for kids, prime "Mom, can we get these?" space. More lately, Co Co Wheats have been banished to the tippy-top shelf with Grape Nuts and Bran Flakes.

Darwin had never heard of Co Co Wheats and shouldn't eat them anyway. The boys never liked them much, either--in their view, there were better versions of chocolate around. But I liked them, and always kept a box in the kitchen, even if it took me most of a year to work my way through it by myself.

And then Co Co Wheats vanished from the local store. Gone. Not a sausage. For a dreadful moment, I thought MOM, the company that bought Co Co Wheats in the 2000s, had discontinued them at last. I hunted online (because we're staying at home these days and I don't have anything else to do), and discovered a store in my area still carries them--WalMart. No thanks. So I decided a piece of my childhood had finally disappeared.

But wait! I'm a chef!

Well, sort of. I like to mess around in the kitchen. Just this week, I created my own pumpkin pancake recipe to use up an old can of pumpkin and to see what they tasted like. Delicious! And I made a monte cristo sandwich for the first time. Mwah!

I also realized that Co Co Wheats must basically be farina with added cocoa. I could do that! So I set about trying it.

I bought some Cream of Wheat (a cereal my brother and sister and I hated when we were kids, by the way, though my grandmother swore by it--note the irony) and saw the cooking directions were much the same as Co Co Wheats. I was on the right track. My experience with cocoa, however, has taught me that cocoa dissolves better into something that's warm or hot. Cold makes it clump up. It would be a bad idea to add cocoa directly to the mix at the beginning. So I made a batch of Cream of Wh

eat, took it off the heat halfway through, whisked in a spoonful of cocoa, and returned it to heat to finish.

It came out dark, rich, and very thick. I had to thin it with a fair amount of milk. And I added aspartame. (Sugar is not so great for me these days.) I tasted it, and this version was richer, with a more powerful chocolate taste than the original. Superb!

Two other breakfast staples from my mid-Michigan upbringing: Smok-Y-Links and Spatz's bread toast. It's hard to get the latter down here--Spatz's bread, which first appeared in the 20s, is made only in the same tiny bakery up in Saginaw it's always been in, and they have a limited delivery range. So whenever I go up in that direction, I buy a couple dozen loaves and freeze them. Smok-Y-Links are still readily available everywhere, at least, so that's ONE thing that's easy.

I put all these things together and had a 70s meal!

So much fuss over breakfast. Next time, I'll probably just grab a bagel.

I'd spent the last several days at the computer, working either for the school or on a book. (Where's all the binge-watching I'm supposed to be doing?) Today, I said, "Enough!" and headed to the kitchen.

In the Instant Pot, I made bean soup for lunch for Max and me. Then I made some piragi (Latvian rolls stuffed with ham and onions). And this time, I updated my technology.

For Christmas last year, Aran gave me a dumpling press, and today I tried it out. It's a round, flat metal thingie with a cookie-cutter edge on one side, a hinge in the middle, and a zipper-like rim around the back. You use one side to cut out a round section of dough, then lay the circle on the other side with the zipper rim. Then you drop a dollop of filling into the center of the dough, fold the whole thing over, and press. The zipper rim crimps a perfect half-circle, and it's way less labor-intensive than doing it by hand.

It also occurred to me that the pasta roller I bought for my stand mixer years ago would be excellent for rolling dough out evenly. I decided to try that, too.

The pasta roller was awesome! I ran a ball of dough through it, and presto! Perfectly flattened. The dumpling press made short work of the cutting, and the crimping was easy and uniform. It made for some BIG piragi, though. Usually piragi are a half-circle about three inches in diameter. These were five or so. But more to love!

They came out of the oven, hot and fresh and full of hammy goodness.

This weekend, I stayed away from school stuff except to remind my seniors that a bunch of them hadn't turned in their projects yet. I decided it would be good idea to stay away from the computer for a while, so I took refuge in the kitchen. It was time to make boeuf bourguignon!

I did have to pop out to the store for mushrooms and a couple other ingredients. It was only 8 AM on a Saturday, and I was rather hoping the store wouldn't be a madhouse.

Hopes dashed.

The parking lot was crowded, and a steady stream of people was entering and exiting the store. I accepted a spritzed towel from the employee station out front (apparently this was a Kroger-wide thing) and zipped through the store. As a bonus, I found seven jars of sunflower seeds in the nuts section. Sunflower seeds are a snack Darwin can reliably eat without spiking his blood sugar, and he can go through most of a jar in one sitting. Our household consumes enough sunflower seeds to keep an entire farm afloat for a year. They aren't all that popular as a snack, though, and often I have to hunt for them in the store--the store doesn't bother to shelve them prominently. I initially thought, "At least this thing will be easy to get, since few other people want it." Nope. Sunflower seeds have become as difficult to find as toilet paper. But today I found a seven of them lined up like chess pawns. I thought about grabbing all of them, then said, "You don't need to be selfish," and I took three instead.

I had only a few things in my cart when I was done, and I headed up to the front of the store. The despised self-checkout line was long, long, long. The cashier lines were a little shorter, but people had more stuff. I lined up for a cashier. Good choice. Like the cashier in Jackson, this woman whipped through the people ahead of me with the speed and efficiency of a drill instructor on cocaine. And the customers actually bagged their own stuff! You know it's bad when a bunch of wealthy entitleds bag their own groceries.

So I got out of there pretty quick. Yay!

Back home, I spent several hours in the kitchen, following Julia Child's recipe, but with modifications of my own. (The "flour crust" she insists on for the meat simply doesn't work, and I've abandoned it. And Darwin isn't a big onions fan, so I scale back on those.) It came out deliciously!

And I stayed away from the computer.

For Yule, I roasted a goose--and I saved the fat. I carefully rendered it, strained it, and stored it. So much of it! And now came the reckoning!

Max has to work this evening and since we had a LOT of Christmas and Yuletide celebrations, Darwin and I decided to do a quiet New Year's at home. So I made a big dinner before Max had to head out.

And for that, we had goose fat.

I chopped up and parboiled some potatoes while a roasting pan with a dollop of fat heated in a hot (400d) oven. When the potatoes were not quite done, I drained them, dropped in a little flour, and tossed it all together. By now the fat was sizzling and ready. I dumped the potatoes into the roasting pan (so much sizzling) and spooned the fat over everything. Added some salt and pepper and paprika, and put it all back in the oven.

While all this was going on, I was simultaneously working on a set of ribs. Rubbed them with spices and salt, set them in the Instant Pot, and hit the pressure cooking controls.

And in the middle of =that=, I threw together a batch of caramel popcorn for munching tonight.

When the potatoes should have been done, I checked on them. They were cooked, but not crispy like I wanted, and showed no signs of heading in that directions. I thought a moment and switched the oven from bake to broil. In five minutes, voila! We had lightly-browned potatoes with a crispy crust.

Removed them, slathered the ribs with barbecue sauce, and put them under the broiler for a couple minutes to finish.

It was all deliciously fantastic. My last cooking venture of 2019!

We're having two holiday celebrations at our house this year. My side of the family is coming over the Sunday before Christmas (on Yuletide!) and Darwin's will be here Christmas Eve.

Guess who's doing the cooking? :)

So far, I've made a huge batch of piragi, a mess of cookies, and two cakes of chocolate so dark, they're actually black. I'm also roasting a goose for the first time when my family comes over. We'll see how that turns out!

My dad's side of the family is from Latvia (totally confirmed by Ancestry DNA), and our holiday gatherings always involved piragis. These are TRUE piragis, rolls stuffed with bacon, ham, and onions, not the wimpy, bastardized "pro-gees" from other, lesser countries that are more like limp pasta dumplings and are only bearable when they're smothered in some kind of gravy.

Anyway, my grandmother was the piragi queen, but she never wrote down her recipe, so the secret died with her when I was fourteen, and we went without.

When I was in my thirties, I got tired of piragi-less holidays and set out to re-create Grandma's recipe. By then, I had become a decent enough chef with the experience to reverse engineer most dishes I wanted. I uncovered a half-dozen piragi recipes, worked out what made the most sense to me, and created a batch of dough. They came out beautifully, and I became the family piragi baker ever after.

This year, Thanksgiving is at my mother's, and I'm bringing piragis, of course. But this year, something shifted.

While we were out running errands, I mentioned to Darwin McClary that tomorrow would be piragi baking day, and he said, "You know what would be great in piragis? Raspberry preserves."

I thought about this and said, "Why not?"

So we went to the store. I snagged a jar of raspberry preserves, but next to them on the shelf was Nutella. On impulse, I grabbed that, too. And I bought some soft cheese.

Took these home and whipped up a small batch of dough, then stuffed it with these new ingredients. Brushed them with beaten egg and baked.

They came out smelling fragrant and both sweet and savory. Darwin tried all three kinds straight from the oven and swooned over all three. So did I. The raspberry was sweet and a little tart. The Nutella ones were rich and sweet. The cheese ones were mild and creamy.

We're totally keeping these.

We have more of my journal from Germany last July:

COOKING WITH FRIENDS

As I’ve occasionally (only occasionally) mentioned in this journal, I enjoy cooking. When Christina and her then-boyfriend (now fiancé) Timo stayed with us during the American end of the exchange, it turned out Christina was an avid cook as well, and we shared dinner-making chores, teaching other different recipes from our respective countries. [Ed., Christina and Timo are now married. Yay! It's been wonderful seeing their relationship progress from dating to engaged to married.]

Now that I’m in Germany, Christina invited me over to cook together at her and Timo’s place, and I avidly accepted.

But first I had to get there.

Our plan was simple. I’d hop the train for their apartment and be there around 6:00. Timo gets home from work at about 7:00, so we’d have time to hit the grocery store and get supper going before he arrived.

None of us counted on a very sad stranger.

A woman whose name wasn’t released to the press was apparently suffering from deep depression, because she jumped from a bridge over a set of tracks and died immediately. An entire section of the railway shut down so the authorities could handle the situation.

At the time, I knew nothing about this. I only knew that the train stopped at one station and stayed there. Eventually, the conductor announced we all had to disembark due to a problem on the tracks.

Grumbling and muttering, all the passengers left the train. I was barely halfway to my destination and had no idea how to get there. I texted Christina to update her, and she offered to come get me.

I waited patiently. In America, I’m generally an impatient waiter. Hey, I’m a busy guy and every moment I spend waiting is wasted, right? But in Europe, I turn into a patient waiter. I’m perfectly content to examine sewer gratings or count subway bricks. Then I get back to America, and I’m impatient again.

At last Christina arrived. We’d already run into each other several times at school, but we still hugged in greeting, and it was a joy to see her again. Still, we were considerably behind on our schedule. I had planned to make Phony Lasagna, a sort-of lasagna casserole that’s a family favorite, but it’s a 90-minute project at least. Christina and I headed into a grocery store to discuss the matter.

Another switch for me: at home, I loathe grocery shopping. I hate everything about it, from planning the menu to making the list to fighting the crowd to putting groceries away at home. But in Germany, grocery shopping becomes fun. The store is full of interesting and unfamiliar products, or ways to present products. I scamper around the store like Rikki Tikki Tavi on speed, examining everything in chef mode. The milk has a different percentage of fat than in America. The variety of cheese is much wider. Check out these odd vegetable combinations in the canned section. And CHOCOLATE!

After some discussion, Christina and I decided to make chili. We selected ingredients—yes, we put meat in ours—and I double-checked with her for a spice list. She had everything we needed in that category already. She suggested putting corn in the chili, which isn’t normally an ingredient for me, but I agreed to it, and why not?

Just as we were leaving, Timo called. He was stuck in the same shutdown and was, in fact, at the same station I had been stranded at half an hour ago. However, the transportation system was sending a series of special buses to route people around the problem area, so no need to come get him.

Since Christina had taught me some German recipes back home, it was my turn to teach her my chili recipe. My secret ingredient is a big dash of curry with a fair amount of pepper. Christina worked on a custard dessert with a chocolate center. We had a great time, cooking and chatting and catching up. (I got to see her wedding dress, which Timo, of course, hadn’t seen at all.)

At last Timo arrived. He had a deep suntan, to my surprise—last fall he’d been very fair. More hugs and happy chatter! A lot of it was about their upcoming wedding, which is taking place in a castle, and their honeymoon in Greece.

The chili finally finished. I served it with a cheese plate and some interesting spiced crackers Christina found at the store. It was all delicious. Christina and Timo were enthusiastic. The chocolate/custard dessert was a perfect sweet end after the spicy chili.

We talked quite a lot and killed a bottle Diet Coke among us. (Wine? Pff!) They actually had ice (!!!), and I got my caffeine as cold as I like it.

In the end, I had to get back “home,” and Timo offered to drive me so we could talk a little more, too, and that was very fine. It was a wonderful evening of cooking with friends, and exactly what an exchange is supposed to be about.

COOKING FOR FRIENDS

Since I’m staying with JK and AK and they feed me regularly, I felt I should cook for them at least once. I thought I’d make for them something fun and new. In this case, my weirdo combination of cordon bleu and chicken Kiev.

“I will need to be a little rude,” I joked, “and rifle your kitchen to see what equipment you have.”

This also started with a trip to the grocery store and inspired more Rikkti Tikki Tavi scampering about, this time assembling bread crumbs and chicken breasts and cucumbers and corn (which I couldn’t find frozen; only canned, for some reason). Earlier that day, I had already visited a street farmer’s market and picked up potatoes.

In the kitchen, I set to work. It was interesting and fun to use someone else’s kitchen to cook in. AK got home from work in the middle of it and asked when supper would be ready. When I told him it would be about half an hour, he looked a bit surprised, but AK does most of the cooking in the household, and he often doesn’t get home from work until seven or later, so they’re used to eating at eight or even nine—quite normal in Germany, but a little startling to Americans.

I discovered the chicken breasts (pre-packaged) weren’t in large pieces as they usually come in America, but were a lot of much smaller fillets. This only stymied me for a moment—I decided on the spot to make a whole bunch of smaller servings than fewer large ones.

I oiled the chicken fillets with sunflower oil and rolled them around cheese and ham, then rolled =that= in breadcrumbs. They went into the oven (carefully checked for Celsius temperature). After that, I boiled and mashed the potatoes (their set of beaters caused me some consternation, but I got it sorted out) and made Ukrainian salad out of cucumbers, sunflower oil, and salt, then heated the corn.

Everything came out deliciously, and AK and JK were very impressed. It was fun!

On the advice of my friend Tammy Coxen, I tracked down CarbaNada noodles--low-carb flat noodles. I discovered Meijer sells them, and while they're about three times more expensive than regular pasta, it's way easier to buy them than undergo the complicated process of making my own low-carb pasta. Best of all, they have the same taste and texture of regular flat noodles.

I made a couple of pasta dishes with CarbaNada noodles, and not only did they taste the same, they didn't spike Darwin's sugar. Total win! Darwin can eat pasta again! One of Darwin's favorite recipes is Sweetie's Macaroni and Cheese (https://www.justapinch.com/…/p…/sweetie-pies-mac-cheese.html), but it's on his strictly forbidden list. I made it with the Carba-Nada noodles. He tried it and we watched his sugar levels carefully afterward. Not a peep. Darwin was overjoyed! This is why he has declared Tammy a food goddess.

The currently craze for the keto diet (which is basically the Adkins diet in a new package) is giving Darwin and me some benefits. The craze makes a whole bunch of low-carb, high-protein raw ingredients and recipes available for diabetics. Now that Darwin is serious about eating right, I've been turning the kitchen into a keto factory.

Apparently, my best friends are almond flour with a dash of coconut flour, xantham gum, and eggs. Almond flour has no gluten in it, which means it doesn't rise well, though it'll puff up a bit with some help from eggs. Xantham gum helps it hold together during this process. Another plus: Internet shopping. The grocery store doesn't carry a lot of the weirder ingredients, but on-line stores do. They even carry the stuff in bulk. This makes everything a WHOLE lot easier.

My latest experiment was with bread. Darwin misses bread terribly, and I was determined to find a substitute for him. An edible substitute. After some searching, I found what looked to be a decent bread recipe. It's a quick bread--yeast doesn't play nicely with almond flour--but it looked pretty and wouldn't be difficult to make.

I mixed up a batch and baked it. The loaf was low, maybe half the height of normal bread, but it wasn't overly dense. It has a slight nutty flavor to it--the almond flour at work--but it was quite tasty and Darwin deemed it a wonderful bread substitute. So we'll keep this one.

And keep benefiting from the keto craze.

Yesterday, Darwin and I had supper at Red Robin. A new part of their menu is the Impossible Burger, a burger made of plant protein that's supposed to be indistinguishable from real beef. I decided to try it and see.

Total win. The patty was tender and juicy, with the taste and consistency of beef. If you served me this without saying anything, I would have thought it was real beef. And it had fewer calories.

The manager stopped by our table and asked how the meal was. I gave him my opinion of the Impossible Burger. He asked me to fill out the customer survey on my receipt and mention this because he's trying to make the IB part of their regular menu. (Currently, it's a special item.) So I did.

I think this and lab-grown meat will have a big role in saving the planet. Go try an Impossible Burger! See if you agree with me.

I've lost 15 pounds in the last few weeks. Go me! But I have to give a chunk of credit to Darwin.

See, after the Great Hospital Trip of Doom, Darwin suddenly became a great deal more careful about monitoring his blood sugar. He flipped over to a high-protein, low-carb diet. He won't touch bread, or pasta, or potatoes, or even brown rice.

As head chef in the house, I found myself under orders to find acceptable substitutes for all carbs. Potatoes were once a standard side dish, but now? Out with them! Rice and noddles are forbidden. I stopped making cookies. Darwin can't eat them, even if I make them without sugar (the flour still spikes him), and for some reason, it never occurs to Max to eat them. They grow stale in the cookie jar. No more cookies. Chips are contraband. Carb-heavy store yogurt is gone.

This isn't the first time we tried this. See, a couple years ago, I bought a couple diabetic cookbooks in an attempt to find healthy foods Darwin might like. The books were AWFUL. The recipes were TERRIBLE. Either they required exotic ingredients or insisted on tasteless substitutes for flavorful foods. Additionally, Darwin was simply uninterested in lowering his carb intake, and would happily sabotage my low-carb attempts by cooking up some ramen or ordering macaroni and cheese at a restaurant. I didn't see the point in working hard to change things around for nothing, so I stopped trying.

This time, Darwin's mind-set has become more stringent, but instead of using the awful cookbooks (and the dumb-ass web sites that abound everywhere on this topic), I started relying on my own instincts and knowledge. A bunch of recipes are simply discarded. Others I modified

Potatoes became butter-sauteed carrots or steamed cauliflower. Rice and noodles transformed into quinoa. Stews and curries are chockful of turnips. Chips flipped over into peanuts and sunflower seeds. Store yogurt changed into home-made yogurt with artificial sweetener.

A side-effect of all this is that my own diet changed. I'm generally not up for cooking two different dinners, so I eat what Darwin does. Thanks to him, I've lost considerable weight.

Go me!

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Steven Harper Piziks

Writer, Teacher, Harper

Entries tagged with food

Parsla

Air Fryer Diet Trick

Sweet Potato Pasta?

Dumping the Pandemic Pounds

Let the Frying Continue!

New Food Item

Mmmm . . . Sandwich

Big-Ass Free Turkey

Recipe Lies

Remaking Co Co Wheats

The Plague Diaries: More Kitchen Time

The Plague Diaries: Escaping to the Kitchen

Final Meal of 2019

So Much Cookery

New Piragis

Cooking in Germany

Pasta Restored!

Benefiting from the Keto Craze

Impossible Burger: A Short Food Review

Go Me!