Swap-O-Rama!

Sunday, 4/29, noon to 4pm

I think some people commented after the Swap story in September that they wished they had known about it.

A little bit short notice on this, but I do want to let you know that The Scrap Exchange is hosting a Swap-O-Rama-Rama on Sunday, April 29 as part of Durham Art Walk weekend.

The Swap is from noon to four at The Scrap Exchange, 923 Franklin Street, Durham NC 27701. You can bring a bag of clothing that you’d like to get rid of, or if you don’t have anything you want to part with and just want to get more, that’s fine too. We have yet to have a shortage of clothing at one of these things.

Here’s the Swap story I wrote during the fundraiser in the fall, and here’s a post I wrote on the Scrap blog describing the Swap we had in Raleigh, if you’d like more info on the Scrap Swap-O-Rama phenomenon. (Or for more info on the national model Swap-O-Rama-Rama, you can visit the Swap-O-Rama-Rama site: www.swaporamarama.org.)

Suggested donation of $10 for the general public and $5 for Friends Club members. (And really, that’s the best bargain on the planet. Pretty much my entire wardrobe has come from the last few years of Swaps.)

If you do come, please note to be careful where you park. Scientific Properties started towing cars on Friday. If you park in the gravel lot at the end of Belt Street, with the metal PARK sculpture, you’ll be fine, that parking lot belongs to the owner of the building we’re in.

If you park in the central, paved lot, which is shared between the two building owners, be sure to park in a spot marked “Reserved for CC&W.” Do NOT park in a blank space or a space with a red R. Those belong to Scientific Properties and they will tow you away and you will have to pay $240 to get your car back. Boo.

More on The Middle Ground

[I wrote this shortly after writing my post on The Middle Ground in August, and it promptly got lost in half-written blog-post purgatory. But when I looked at it tonight, it seemed almost done, so I decided to finish and post.]

There was an op-ed reprinted in the N&O by Frank Bruni, food critic for the New York Times commenting on the culinary divide between the Elites and (to borrow a Pioneer Woman parody phrase) the Budget People. Multimillionaire food personality and cookbook author Paula Deen is defending her copious use of bacon and butter by talking about how she’s giving recipes for real people, not people who can spend “$58 for prime rib or $650 for a bottle of wine.” In her spat with her fellow celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, who took her to task for promoting unhealthy foods, she said she cooks for “regular families who worry about feeding their kids and paying the bills.”

I haven’t actually ever looked at a Paula Deen recipe, so I am unable to comment on whether or not they are budget-minded (I suspect not), and obviously, you can have too much home-cooked bacon and butter, but I think we’d be moving in the right direction if bacon and butter that people put in recipes they cook themselves were the biggest problems we were dealing with. Because that would mean that we had conquered the problems of sugared soft drinks with every meal, fast food meals three times a week, ginormous portion sizes, and continuous snacking. To name but a few.

I woke up this morning thinking about the process of learning to cook and decided that I should be more vocal in my support of the judicious use of convenience foods in putting meals on the table day in and day out. I actually think they can serve an important function.

If you want to learn to juggle, you don’t start out with a bowling ball, a chainsaw, and a flaming torch. You don’t even start out with three balls. You start out with one ball. And as you get the hang of that, you add another, then another. Then after you’ve gotten really good at juggling three balls, you can add even more — or you add chainsaws and bowling balls and standing on your head in the dark. Or whatever you want to do to keep things interesting.

I feel like the Dollar a Day Project — starting with no food and being able to spend only one dollar at a time — was the chainsaw-and-bowling-ball version of home cooking. It took thought and preparation. It was challenging. And the only reason I was able to do it was because I’d been doing what I do for so long that I’m good at it, and most of it I don’t have to think about at all.

But most people aren’t looking for a challenge when they’re thinking about dinner, they want something quick and easy that will taste good. And that’s why they don’t cook from scratch and end up getting take-out instead — take-out feels easier than cooking.

I remember a few years ago talking to my mom on the phone. She said they were supposed to go out for dinner but then she remembered she had something to do that she had completely forgotten about. She said, “We didn’t have time to go out, I made chili instead.” And I just laughed, because I couldn’t imagine very many people — especially people from younger generations — saying they were too busy to go out so they made chili.

So how do you get to the point where you don’t have time to go out so you cook at home, instead of the other way around?

I think convenience foods can serve as an important bridge when people are either just learning how to cook or transitioning from lots of eating out to more eating at home. Like training wheels, they can help you keep moving forward while you learn out how to stay balanced. Things like Rice-a-Roni, commercial pasta sauces, canned soups, packaged Ramen noodles. All of these are generally cost-effective and can help you throw together a quick, reasonably healthy meal.

And for some people, that might be as far as they want to go. Open some packages, mix a few things up, dinner.

Done.

The only real objections I have to convenience foods are that they tend to have high levels of sodium (sometimes crazy high levels) and they’re more expensive than making things yourself. And things you make from scratch generally taste better. And don’t actually take that much more time, once you have everything set up.

But if you don’t have blood pressure concerns, if you’re comfortable with the amount of money you’re spending on food, and if you think what you’re eating tastes fine, then who am I to say you should be doing anything different.

I definitely used a lot more commercial products when I first started cooking. I would often use them as a base and then add my own vegetables. Like for instance I would buy a package of Lipton Noodles and Sauce, which you add milk and butter to — basically it’s like a slightly upscale version of packaged mac and cheese — and then I would sauté onion, mushrooms, and broccoli with garlic and olive oil and add that to the prepared noodles. I would do the same thing with pasta and tomato sauce, buy prepared tomato sauce and add green pepper and mushroom or zucchini or whatever. A lot of my meals were like that the first few years I was cooking for myself.

I’m sure there are people who would argue this isn’t a “home cooked meal” but I don’t really care about those people. And you shouldn’t either. You get to cook and eat what you want.

I started doing less of that when I started trying to get my monthly food bill down. It’s cheaper to buy noodles and make a basic white sauce, and you get to control the seasoning and add flavorings, and once you know what you’re doing it takes about the same amount of time. But I’m not a food snob. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using Bisquick to make pancakes or biscuits, or Jiffy mix to make cornbread.

So if you’re working on eating home more and spending less on food, don’t feel like you have to do everything at once. Just do what you can and try to make a little progress every day, every week, every month. Eventually you’ll end up where you want to be.

Frugal Habits

There was an article in Wednesday’s N&O called “Cheaponomics: Lessons for the Home Cook from High School Culinary Teachers,” with tips from teachers in high school culinary arts programs, who have severely limited budgets to work with, about how to save money shopping. I always find those kinds of articles interesting because it feels like half the time they are rules that I don’t follow — and that I may not even agree with — and it would be hard for anyone to argue that I’m not frugal. So for this one, I decided to do a yes/no breakdown with my thoughts.

Here goes.

10 Frugal Habits

1. Plan your weekly meals and shop from a list. If you visit the supermarket only once a week, you’ll save both time and money, and you’ll avoid expensive impulse buys.

NO!

I hate this piece of advice and I give this one a resounding — RESOUNDING — no. A thousand times no. I do not do this, and once I stopped trying to do it, my grocery bill plummeted.

Here’s why.

I cannot plan meals a week in advance because it is extremely unlikely that what I decided on Saturday that I was going to eat on Thursday will match what I actually feel like eating on Thursday. If I don’t feel like eating something I won’t. Or I’ll eat it but not be happy about it.

I really like food, I like cooking, I like eating. Planning meals a week in advance and working from a list takes something I enjoy — something that is a nice break from the endless frustration and tedium that is my pathetic day-to-day existence and that gives me great pleasure — and turns it into drudgery. I don’t want to do it, and I won’t.

When I used to buy a week’s worth of groceries at a time, I would end up wasting a lot of food, because I would project what I needed for the week, but then one day I would have a late lunch and one day I would get stuck at work so I would come home late and eat cereal and one day I would go out for drinks after work and eat while I was out, and I would never fix everything I thought I might fix when I was buying groceries, and things would go bad I would have to throw them away.

This problem was solved for me when I stopped trying to think too far ahead and instead started shopping for just a few days at a time.

I discovered that if I bought food for the next two or three days, I would actually end up with food to last four or five days. I would make sure I had on hand staples that I could always make a meal out of — pasta, canned tomatoes, rice, beans, potatoes, eggs, baking supplies (flour, cornmeal, oats, sugar, baking powder, salt), tortillas, cheese, carrots, frozen vegetables — so even if things got disrupted and I wasn’t able to make it to the store for an extended period, I’d still be able to fix passable meals.

I am always astounded — astounded — at the volume of food people in this country have in their houses. I swear that most people could eat for months without buying anything (which is one of the reasons I like the Eating Down the Fridge projects so much).

A lot of people I’ve talked to say they really hate shopping, they don’t want to have to do it more often, but shopping every few days is qualitatively different from shopping for the whole week. When you’re shopping for the week (or, god forbid, the month, like the registered trademark America’s Cheapest Family who seem to have turned their lifestyle into their entire life, which just feels really weird to me), you need to try to think of everything you might need, or might run out of, or might want, so you go up and down every aisle looking at every item and putting things in your cart. It takes a long time, and it can be exhausting. And you end up putting a lot of things in your cart that you probably aren’t actually going to use this week.

When you shop for the next few days, you don’t have to go up and down every aisle, and you don’t really have to think about much. You look at the list of things you need right now — ingredients you need for tonight’s dinner that you don’t already have at home, pantry/freezer staples that you’re out of, fresh fruit and vegetables — and get just those things, then leave. The trip is much, much faster, and much less mentally taxing, than a standard weekly shopping trip.

Impulse buys were never much of a problem for me but now they’re definitely not a problem because I pay for my groceries with cash and I have to make a certain amount of cash last for a certain amount of time. Also I feel like frequent shopping reduces the lure of many things. When you know you’ll be back soon, it’s easier to say, “Hmm, I kind of want that but I’m not going to get it now; if I still want it the next time I’m here, I can get it.” And then you’ll be back in two or three days and if you still want it, you should get it. But usually you don’t.

So that one gets a big fat No all the way around.

2. Adjust the items on your list to what’s on sale.

Qualified yes.

I heard a great quote the other day that went something like, “An elephant for fifty cents is only a good deal if you need an elephant and if you have fifty cents.”

Don’t buy things you or your family won’t eat just because they’re on sale.

However I do recommend not being too tied down to your grocery list and working with what’s on special. Instead of saying “apples” just say “fruit” — maybe pears are cheaper, or look better. Or maybe cauliflower, which is usually $3.50 or $4.00 a head is on special for $2. You weren’t planning on getting cauliflower, but you have that cauliflower and pasta dish you like so you decide to get what you need for that instead of what you were planning on making for tonight.

3. Be flexible about brands. Be willing to substitute a brand that’s on sale or try store brands, which may be close to brand-name products in quality.

Yes.

I would qualify that to say that you should be willing to try different brands, and if you can tell the difference, decide what it’s worth to you to have the one you like more.

For instance, I prefer Tropicana orange juice (well actually, I prefer fresh-squeezed orange juice, but I don’t usually have enough oranges on hand to make it; one of the problems with walking to the grocery store and spending $12 at a time is that some things are really difficult) but Whole Foods 365 brand is much cheaper. If it’s a dollar more, I’ll probably still get the Tropicana, but if it’s more than that, I probably won’t.

4. Track prices. Keep a price book, a small notepad of items you buy frequently. It’s the best way to spot a deal.

Yes.

This is one of the Tightwad Gazette strategies. I was never organized enough to do an actual price book, but I’m sort of addicted to looking at prices and I have a crazy good memory so I generally know what is standard and what is a good price. If I ever went on the Price is Right, I would kick ass.

5. Stockpile. When something you use a lot is on sale, buy multiples.

Yes & No.

In theory this is fine, but for the most part, I think stockpiling is a bad idea. Studies have shown that people use more of something when they have more of it, so I think you don’t save as much as you think you would. (Of course I can’t find links to any of those studies right now, and I’m too lazy to look very hard at this moment. I’ll try to see what I can dig up when I have more energy. Sorry, long week.)

Also things don’t keep forever. Make sure the thing you stockpile will still be good by the time you get around to using it.

And some things just take me forever to go through. If it takes me two years to go through a bottle of Worcestershire sauce, do I really need more than one bottle in my pantry?

On the other hand, I’ve been making cookies for Scrap Exchange Third Friday, so over the holidays when chocolate chips were on sale at every store I went into, I bought like six packages because I’d walk in and see the price and go “Ooh, those are cheap” and then I’d go to another store and they’d be even cheaper. And I’m only using those for Third Friday so I’m not actually using more than I would otherwise. And I know I’ll be able to use them before they deteriorate. And I can make cookies for the forseeable future without having to remember to go to a regular grocery store for chocolate chips. All good.

6. Price match. If your store matches competitors’ prices, bring along sales fliers to get the lowest prices. Wal-Mart and Target, for example, have national price-matching policies.

No opinion.

I’m sure this is a perfectly good strategy but there’s no way I’m going to be bothered to do that. It goes back to the coupon thing which I just can’t make myself do. You gotta pick your battles. This is not one of mine.

7. Check the freezer section. Frozen fruits and vegetables are usually frozen in the field, so they may have more nutrition than fresh produce that’s been sitting in bins. Frozen fish may taste fresher than fresh fish that’s labeled “previously frozen.”

Yes yes yes.

Frozen foods are especially useful for small households and for people like me who adhere to a just-in-time shopping strategy. I have several meals that can be made entirely from things in the freezer and pantry, so even if I haven’t been able to make it to the store in much longer than usual, I can still usually manage to put together a passable meal.

8. Don’t be afraid of canned tomatoes. When tomatoes aren’t in season, canned tomatoes are usually much cheaper than fresh, and the flavor may be better in a cooked dish than fresh tomatoes that have to be cooked down.

People are afraid of canned tomatoes?

Yes, certainly.

If you’re really on the ball, you can can your own tomatoes, either ones you grow or ones you buy from farmers’ markets when they’re in abundance. Sometimes you can get seconds that are cheap (but probably not in Durham, they don’t have cheap things at the farmers’ market here). My parents, who have a fabulous market near them, get a bushel of seconds and process them for canning and spaghetti sauce that they use throughout the year.

9. Use those scraps. Keep recipes in your repertoire that let you use smaller amounts of leftover meat and vegetables. Examples: frittatas, salads, and fried rice. Or sauté leftovers and use them to top a baked potato.

Yes, yes.

You can put almost anything in an omelet, and lo mein, casseroles, and fried rice are great ways to make a good meal out of little bits of this and that.

10. Stretch milk by using dried or evaporated milk for part of the fresh milk when you’re baking.

Yes.

For the most part, you will not be able to tell the difference between baked goods made with dried milk and baked goods made with fresh milk. The only thing I’ve made where I noticed a difference were bucky cakes, which I thought were noticeably more delectable when made with Mapleview Dairy buttermilk than they were the normal way I make them, with dried buttermilk. Since I only make those for special occasions, I will most likely go with the fresh buttermilk from now on.

Okay so only one big fat “no” on that list, the rest mostly “yes” and a few “mmmm, maybe.”

There you have it, your frugal tips for the week. Hope you enjoyed.

Age Quod Agis

[Note: This is another post that I wrote last year sometime and then never quite finished. It feels a little weird when I do that because some of the details don't actually match my current life — for instance I'm pretty much done with work stuff at this point, and actually doing a much better job of staying focused and getting through things — but I decided it was worth putting up anyway. For future reference, if nothing else.]

My office when I worked in DC was in the front of our office suite, near the main door and the conference room and the receptionist’s desk. Once a year (or possibly twice? the details of this are fuzzy), we would have a board meeting that involved many people ringing the bell for the front door to be opened and coming in and out of the suite and into and out of the conference room. This event would also require the little worker bees like myself to pretend we were professional, so we’d have to upgrade our wardrobes for the day. This was definitely a hardship for me; it’s difficult for me to work and look professional at the same time.

The meeting coincided with copywriting season, which was hard enough under the best of circumstances, having to try to do it while I was dressed up with people coming and going all day was a real problem.

I remember one time complaining to my housemate Ted about it, I was talking about what a miserable day it was going to be and how I wasn’t going to be able to get anything done, too many people standing in front of my office and talking and ringing the doorbell and walking around and being in my way.

Ted didn’t think it sounded like a big deal, just normal office stuff. He said, “What, are you autistic?”

I said, “Yes, maybe I am.”

I’m pretty sure I’m not autistic, though for a while I was trying to decide if I have Asperger’s syndrome. There are about three things I’m interested in talking about, none of which are of interest to anyone I know, which is one of the signs of Asperger’s. (From Wikipedia: “People with Asperger syndrome often display behavior, interests, and activities that are restricted and repetitive and are sometimes abnormally intense or focused.” Hmmm….) Though the hallmark of the condition is an inability to read social cues and to connect with other people, which is generally not something I have a problem with. So I eventually decided that I probably don’t have Asperger’s.

But I do have a lot of trouble dealing with sensory inputs, and one of the reasons I’ve structured my life the way I have is to make it easier for me to manage that. And despite the significant level of control I have over my life, I’m having trouble right now trying to get done what I need to get done without feeling like I’m always behind.

One of the things I’ve really struggled with for the last year and a half is how to balance the things I have to do with the things I want to do while still keeping my life moving forward. I feel like I haven’t done a very good job with that.

Some things have gotten done, especially work (which was actually important, I’d been in a holding pattern on some things for a while, so it was good to have some of that turn into actual projects that I actually got paid for) but many things are exactly where they were two years ago … or worse, since a bunch of things have broken but very few things have gotten fixed.

In thinking about this, I realized that when the wheels really started to come off the bus was when I started being online all the time, logging into Skype to stay in touch with the people I was working with, and being available all day, every day to take care of problems and make updates.

It’s hard to set limits when you have a constant barrage of requests. It creates a false sense of urgency, and in dealing with those, you never get to the things that aren’t sending you emails or texts or phone calls. (For instance the bathroom tub surround will remain untiled forever unless I make a plan for fixing it; it’s not going to send me a message asking when I’m going to get to it.)

So I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately, and thinking about organization and managing information and setting goals and figuring out how to make things happen.

There’s a Latin phrase that means “do what you’re doing”: age quod agis. After I learned it a few years ago I really tried to stay focused on doing one thing at a time, just concentrating on what I was doing. If I was cooking dinner I was cooking dinner and if I was biking I was biking and if I was cleaning the bathroom I was cleaning the bathroom. And if I was working, I was working. But when I wasn’t working, I wasn’t working.

I seem to have lost that at some point along the way.

So I’ve decided I need to quit trying to multitask and just do what I’m doing. And maybe I’ll manage to get something done.

Happy Valentine’s Day

I put this up last year for a belated Valentine’s Day post, and I’m putting up again this year because … well, because I love it. What more can I say.

F Minus by Tony Carrillo. Check it out at comics.com.

Blondies

Pile o' Oatmeal Blondies

One of the main benefits for me of this blog is that when I’m talking to someone about some recipe I like and they ask if I can give it to them, I can just come here and look for it and send them the link. And I feel like I’ve written about pretty much everything I like by now, so when I went to pull up a blondie recipe that I’ve been making for many years and make all the time, I was surprised to discover that I’d never posted it. (Though it’s not exceptionally cheap, so maybe that’s why.)

I also had a new recipe for blondies that are good and easy and cheap that I’ve been meaning to write about, so I decided I needed to do a quick post about blondies.

Both of these recipes are great because they come together very quickly and taste really good.

I like to make the cranberry granola blondies before road trips, or when I’m looking for something slightly better-for-you than cookies or brownies. They do have a lot of sugar, but they’re mostly granola and dried fruit, so they don’t put you into quite as much of a food coma as some other treats. Unfortunately granola and dried fruit can both be expensive, but they’re still worth making, I think.

The original recipe is from Eating Well magazine (the first iteration, from the mid-1990s) and I’ve modified it to use whole eggs instead of egg whites, because I think using egg whites is nothing more than a way to waste a perfectly good egg yolk. I’ve tried it with less sugar (they are very sweet), and you can drop it down to a cup or so, but if you go much less than that, they’re not very good. The texture isn’t right and they taste like something that’s supposed to be good for you.

Cranberry-Granola Blondies
adapted from Eating Well magazine

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1-1/4 cups packed light brown sugar
1/4 cup canola oil
2 eggs
2 cups granola cereal with raisins
1 cup dried cranberries or chopped dried tart cherries

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9 x 13 inch baking dish.

Whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt. Beat together sugar, oil, and egg in a large bowl with an electric mixer on high until smooth. Add the dry ingredients and beat until just blended. Stir in granola and dried fruit. (The batter will be quite thick.)

Transfer the batter to the prepared baking dish and press to fill the pan.

Bake until golden brown on top and set when lightly pressed in the center, 20 to 25 minutes. Let cool in baking dish on a rack. Cut into 20 bars.

The second recipe is one I found last year when I was looking for something new and different for Third Friday food for Scrap Exchange. I checked out the Martha Stewart Blondies and Brownies entry on the website and the one for Chewy Oat Blondies seemed like the simplest recipe. When I made it, I was reminded of the salty oat cookies from Teaism in Washington, D.C., so I sprinkled a little kosher salt on top and that definitely worked. You just need to use a little bit, though — you don’t want them to actually taste salty, you just want a tiny hint of salt.

Salty Oat Blondies
adapted from MarthaStewart.com

1 cup flour
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature, plus more for pan
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
1 egg
3/4 cup + 1/4 cup old-fashioned rolled oats (not quick-cooking)
pinch kosher salt

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8-inch baking pan.

Stir together flour, granulated sugar, baking powder, and salt.

Using an electric mixer, beat butter and brown sugar until light and fluffy. Add egg, and beat until combined. With mixer on low, gradually add dry ingredients; mix until just combined. Mix in 3/4 cup of oats. Pour batter into prepared pan.

Smooth batter evenly in pan. Sprinkle with remaining oats and a pinch or two of kosher salt, pressing gently to adhere. Bake until a toothpick inserted in center comes out with only a few moist crumbs attached, 30 to 35 minutes. Let cool in pan 30 minutes.

Cut and remove to wire rack and let cool completely.

To Die For, Part II

Bucky cakes in their natural habitat

I was out of town visiting some friends last week, and one of our mutual friends recently had a birthday but didn’t get to celebrate it due to circumstances that are much too complicated to try to explain here. I said I could make something when I was up, we could have a little belated birthday thing.

I’d been with them a week or two earlier and had been talking up the brownie ice cream bars; they said they wanted me to make those. I was thinking about it and trying to figure out logistics, but then I started thinking about what I make for myself on my own birthday, which are these beautiful little chocolate cakes with chocolate frosting that were born out of an article I read in ReadyMade magazine a few years ago.

My oven has some problematic aspects to it, but I have a fabulous toaster oven that’s large enough to roast a chicken, and if I can roast a chicken in my toaster oven, what do I need an oven for? So I gave up thinking about fixing the problematic aspects of my oven. The only problem that remained — the only thing I occasionally wanted but couldn’t make — was cake. The cake pans I had did not fit into the toaster oven.

So I’d given up on the idea of oven repair, and for the time being, on the idea of cake. But I wasn’t happy about it. And one day I’m reading ReadyMadeand they have this picture of someone who make these little cakes, I think for their wedding, and they used tuna cans as the cake pans. And I was like, “Hey! This totally solves my cake problem!”

It was decidedly a Eureka moment.

With the help of my friend Bucky (for whom the cakes were subsequently named) I procured six of the proper-sized tins and made a cake recipe and baked the cake batter in the tins and there was a little bit of trial and error to get the right recipe and bake everything properly but now I have it down and the cakes are pretty amazing.

So I’m thinking about what to do for my friend’s birthday and I decided to put the question to my friend Ann, who has had both the bucky cakes and the brownie ice cream bars. Even though I already knew what her answer was going to be.

I said, “Should I make the brownie ice cream bars or the bucky cakes?” Without hesitation, she said “Bucky cakes.” I said, “I knew you’d say that.”

I told her she was biased toward the bucky cakes because she had a prior relationship with them. She said, “No, that’s not it. It’s because they’re so perfect. What could be better on your birthday than this beautiful little cake, that’s just for you, that you don’t have to share with anyone?”

I decided Ann was right.

I caught some flak from my friends who’d been looking forward to the brownie ice cream bars, but I made the bucky cakes, and promised we could do the ice cream bars next time I’m up. I’m not sure if my friend whose birthday it was appreciated the cake quite as much as Ann does, but I did my best.

The reason I like these so much is because (a) the frosting is really to die for (possibly in a literal sense, it includes raw egg yolks as one of the main ingredients) and (b) the small-sized cake means you have a much better ratio of frosting to cake than you do in a standard layer cake.

You can make the cake using any pans — or, alternatively, I could use any cake or frosting recipe in the mini pans that I use — but as far as I’m concerned, this is just right. The cake is light and the frosting is rich, and they complement each other perfectly.

Don’t waste these on someone you don’t love. And in fact, I highly recommend you make these for yourself on your birthday — that way you know you’ll have at least one thing that makes you happy. And who doesn’t want that?

Chocolate Buttermilk Cake
from The San Francisco Chronicle Cookbook

2 cups sifted cake flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 ounces unsweetened chocolate, melted and cooled
1 cup buttermilk
Chocolate Frosting (see below)

Have all ingredients at room temperature. Adjust the rack to the lower third of the oven; preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour two 9-inch cake pans.

Sift together the flour, baking soda, and salt; set aside.

Using an electric mixer, preferably with a paddle attachment, cream the butter until smooth. Add the sugar and continue to cream until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in the vanilla, then the cooled melted chocolate.

Add the dry ingredients alternately with the buttermilk, beginning and ending with dry ingredients.

Spoon equal amounts of batter into each pan, spreading it to level the top. Bake for 22 to 25 minutes, or until a wooden toothpick inserted into the center of the cakes comes out clean. Cool in the pans on a wire rack for 10 minutes. Invert and remove pans; cool completely on racks before frosting.

Chocolate Frosting
adapted from Larry Forgione, An American Place, by way of The New York Times

1-1/4 stick butter
2 Tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
2 Tablespoons + 2 teaspoons water
1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar, sifted
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 egg yolks
10 ounces semisweet chocolate, melted and cooled

1. In a saucepan over medium heat, melt butter with water and cocoa powder, stirring until smooth. Remove from heat and let cool.

2. Add confectioners’ sugar and vanilla, and stir until smooth. Stir in egg yolks until smooth, and then chocolate. Use immediately.

And here are my notes…

You can substitute 1-3/4 cups all-purpose flour for cake flour.

Note that you need to sift the flour before measuring. If you measure then sift, you’ll use too much flour. Especially if you substitute all-purpose flour for cake flour without adjusting for that. Trust me on that one.

As mentioned, I cook these in mini pans in my mini oven. I get 15 cake layers from the recipe above. Once they’re cooked and cooled, I trim the rounded top part off to make them flat, and then I put them together to make five, three-layer cakes. (This last time I made them, though, I got five, two-layer cakes plus one extra layer. Not sure what happened there.)

I make the cakes one day, let them sit overnight, and frost them the next day.

I generally get some kind of fancy chocolate from Whole Foods for the frosting, usually Callebaut because it’s the cheaper option, but sometimes Valrhona. This is definitely a situation where the better the chocolate you’re starting with, the better the frosting will be.

In the frosting recipe where it says “use immediately,” they’re not kidding. You need to work with the frosting while it’s pourable (i.e., before the butter and chocolate re-solidify) because it’s not spreadable when it’s hardened. You’ve basically just made chocolate-flavored butter (or butter-flavored chocolate) and the way I handle it is to pour it onto the bottom layer of cake, put the next layer on top of that and press down so it oozes out the sides and then repeat with the top layer. Someone with more skill than I have might be able to actually spread the frosting all over the cake, but I gave up on that idea early, and now I deal with it like a glaze, I let it run down the sides. The finished product actually looks quite lovely.

(If you do have enough talent to spread the frosting, you might want to double the recipe. What I gave there is half of what was printed in the New York Times, because the original recipe made way more frosting than I could use. And trust me, the last thing I need sitting around in my refrigerator is a mess of chocloate-flavored butter.)

To Die For, Part I

FINALLY! A RECIPE! (But still no picture … sorry. I’m doing the best I can.)

This recipe is not cheap, not easy, not healthy.

It is, however, really good.

I pulled this recipe ages and ages ago but I’d never made it because it is a multi-day process and it just didn’t seem worth the effort. I didn’t want to go through all that and have it be not that good. But then I needed something to bribe people with and I figured this might work.

I was organizing the Swap-O-Rama this year and I needed to make sure I had enough people around after things were over to help with cleanup. The Swap ended at four o’clock. I told people that I was making brownie ice cream bars but they weren’t coming out of the freezer until four-thirty, so anyone who wanted one had to stick around and help with cleanup until then. Worked like a charm.

Turns out the recipe is from Martha Stewart and it’s on her website. (I had a photocopy from the magazine, but the magazine name wasn’t anywhere on the page so wasn’t sure what magazine it was actually from.)

You can get the original from the website, but here is my version, with some comments.

Brownies
1-1/2 sticks unsalted butter
6 ounces semisweet chocolate, cut into 1-inch pieces
3 large eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup packed light-brown sugar
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
3/4 cup all-purpose flour

Filling
4 pints vanilla ice cream

Chocolate Coating
40 ounces semisweet chocolate, cut into 1-inch pieces
1/4 stick unsalted butter

Commentary
(1) I am not Martha Stewart-esque enough to pull off a full chocolate covering; mine just had a small-ish amount chocolate on the top, none on the sides, and that was fine.

(2) I wanted to use good ice cream (Haagen Dazs Five is my current favorite) and could not bring myself to spend $16 on ice cream for a recipe that I didn’t know how it was going to turn out, and also four pints of ice cream seemed excessive for the number of people I was feeding. I used two pints, and had a smaller proportion of ice cream to brownie than you would have if you used the full amount. (Alternatively, you could use only half the brownie, or adjust as desired to get the right volume of ice cream with your given thickness of brownie.)

(3) 40 ounces of chocolate for the coating is insane. You don’t need that much.

Here’s what I did.

1. The first day, I made brownies, following the instructions as given:

Melt together 6 ounces of chocolate and 1-1/2 sticks of butter in the top of a double boiler. Whisk 3 large eggs in a large bowl; add 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 1 cup granulated sugar, 1/2 cup packed light-brown sugar, and 1 teaspoon vanilla and stir to combine. Stir in the butter and chocolate mixture, then fold in 3/4 cups all-purpose flour.

Pour the batter into a 10 x 13 pan lined with parchment paper. Cook at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes. Do not overbake; a cake tester should not come out clean.

I actually cooked them in small loaf pans because of the limitations of my oven; I think that worked better, it made it easier to work with in later steps.

2. I let the brownie sit overnight. (I can’t remember if I put it in a plastic container or if I wrapped it in plastic wrap and then covered with foil — anything along those lines would work.)

3. The second day, I softened the ice cream slightly and beat with an electric mixer so it was spreadable but not melted. I do not have a paddle attachment, so I just used the regular metal beaters.

I put the brownie back in the small loaf pans and spread the softened ice cream on top of it. (I had started to follow the instructions to take the brownie out and trim but then decided that was just a waste of brownie and my friends probably wouldn’t care how straight the brownie edges were. So I didn’t trim, just used as is.)

4. I put the pans with brownie covered with ice cream back in the freezer. I increased the coldness of the freezer to make sure that it got really solidly frozen. I left it overnight.

5. The third day, I melted maybe 8 or 10 ounces of chocolate. I attempted to follow the recipe and melt chocolate with butter, but it didn’t seem like the consistency was right so I ended up adding a little bit of vegetable oil and that seemed to work better. I don’t remember what kind of chocolate I used, if it was just a bag of chocolate chips or some kind of chocolate from Whole Foods. I feel like I might have used better chocolate (Valrhona or something) for the brownies and regular chocolate chips for the coating, but I’m not sure about that at all. Basically any chocolate coating, such as melting together a tablespoon of oil with a bag of chocolate chips, would work.

6. I brought the ice cream bars out of the freezer one pan at a time (this is where having them in small pans worked better), took them out of the pan, and cut them into small squares. I did not trim them to make them even. No one I know cares how even the edges of their brownie ice cream bars are.

7. I attempted to cover them with chocolate and the first attempt started to melt the ice cream and all of the chocolate slid completely off onto the counter. From this I learned that you need to let the melted chocolate cool a little bit before attempting to put it on the ice cream. (That might obvious to other people but it wasn’t to me. Now you know.)

I very quickly realized that I lacked the skill to fully cover the ice cream bar, and I didn’t want everything to melt, so I just poured some chocolate over the top, spread it around a little bit, and didn’t worry about covering anything or how much was there.

I wrapped the squares in waxed paper and packed into plastic containers for storage and put back into the freezer. I transported in a cooler.

I gave one to a friend who worked an early shift and wasn’t able to stay later, I saw her just before she left and she said, “That was possibly the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”

Really

really

good.

They were worth the trouble.

And if I make them again, I’ll try to take a picture that does them justice.

A Dangerous Notion

This is something I started writing in spring 2010 when I was blogging about my weekly food purchases, and noticing the implications of doing that normal everyday thing in an oddly public way. On the one hand, buying food is not a deeply personal experience, but on the other, it tells a story about yourself that you may or may not want the world to know.

I was reminded of that idea this week with the divorce announcements of two high-profile bloggers, personal finance blogger J.D. Roth at Get Rich Slowly, and uber-blogger Heather Armstrong, known the world over as Dooce. Thought it might be worth expanding it a little, wrapping up, and posting.

So here it is.

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There was an article in the N&O recently [oops, not recent anymore, April 2010], picked up from the New York Times, about all of these internet services that allow people to broadcast everything that’s going on in their lives — not just Facebook and Twitter but things like Blippy (which includes information about everything you’ve spent money on) and Foursquare (which announces exactly where you are at any given moment).

They talked to someone who is a big fan of the services and when asked about the privacy implications, he said he didn’t mind having everything about him on the internet, in fact he embraced it. He said, “I simply have nothing to hide.” [Somewhat random aside, I just need to say that when I first started hearing about these types of services, I thought, "Yeah, everyone thinks all of this is a great idea until they want to start having an affair." Come on people, think ahead!]

I just need to say that I think this is a terribly dangerous notion, the idea that anyone who doesn’t want everything they ever think or do or say posted on the internet for public consumption has something to hide.

One of the things I found exceptionally weird about my food projects was the level of detail I chose to put up on the internet for everyone who ever googles me to discover and read. I went from being really happy that when you searched for my name I didn’t appear until the second or third page, to having pictures of me eating soup and videos of me showing the contents of my refrigerator to reporters as the first hit. Oy! What was I thinking?

There’s nothing wrong with anything I’ve done, and there’s nothing particularly embarrassing about it, but it definitely affected my thinking — you can’t help but think, “How is this going to look on the internet?” every time you make a decision about something you’ve committed to blogging about. And that may have positive benefits — if you’ve told everyone you don’t eat junk food, you’re going to think twice about getting a Big Mac — but I don’t necessarily think it’s a healthy way to live. Because if you do get a Big Mac, you’re probably going to figure out some way to not talk about it, which is weird, or if you own up to it, you’re going to have to write about it and feel bad about it, which is also weird.

I think that people should be able to live their lives and not have to worry all the time about how it’s going to look to other people. And not feel like they’re “hiding” something if they don’t want it posted on the internet. Or actively (or passively) lying about what’s actually going on because they’ve decided they don’t want to talk about it.

Before the release of The Social Network (better known as “the Facebook movie”), there was a long  article in the New Yorker about Mark Zuckerberg. His stated reason for starting Facebook — and his ongoing contention — is that the world would be a better place if it was more “open and honest.” He feels like having all of this information about everyone easily accessible on the internet breaks down barriers and brings people closer.

I think it’s worth noting that Facebook was designed for college students. I think most people’s life when they were in college was probably simpler than their life is now (assuming that you are not a twenty-year old student at an elite institution) and some things that make sense when you are twenty might not make sense a few years later.

I so far have remained one of the thirty-five per cent of internet users who are not on Facebook, so I have only anecdotal evidence to draw from, I can’t speak from my own experience, but it seems to me that the way people get around this is to create an “online persona” that for some people is very close to who they actually are and some people is not. People set up a filter for how they deal with Facebook, just like they do with other areas of their life. So in that sense, it’s not more open and honest, it’s just another layer for people to negotiate. Not sure if that was what Mark Zuckerberg had in mind.

Right now I half wish I was a sociologist who studied online communities, because I think it would be fascinating to look at the intersection of public and private, how it changes as people move through various stages of life, and what are some of the unintended consequences of social media. Last I checked, J.D. Roth’s divorce announcement had garnered more than 500 comments. He’s not a blogger like Dooce, who has made a living writing about his private life, but the reason his site is popular and compelling is because of the personal connection people feel to him, which was built over years of his incorporating details from his life into his writings. There was really no way he could not mention this change in his life, but in so doing, it required him to put his private life out to the public in a way he might rather not have done (and in a way I’m sure his wife would really rather him not have done).

Which takes me back to the original point of this post, which is that just because you don’t want everyone on the internet to know everything about you does not mean you have something to hide.

And it is my firm contention that the world would be a better place if everyone stood their ground on that one.

What’s Next

I don’t actually know the answer to that question.

The main work project I had going since mid-2009 (or earlier than that, actually — it started in 2008, though it went in fits and starts for a while) ended at the beginning of December. Now I’m trying to work through the things that had been neglected while I was taking care of that, and also trying to wrap up a few other projects that have been going on.

I have a lot of partially written posts, mostly random thoughts about frugality and lifestyle-type things, and I’m going to try to work through those and take a second look, finish what I can, and get posted.

My real-life food project for now is to try to eat for $100 a month including the food I buy for Scrap Exchange Third Friday receptions.

For the past year or two I’ve been making most of the food for the gallery openings, because the food I get is cheaper, better, and we don’t waste anything because I handle the leftovers and either freeze and use them again the next month (for instance crackers and juice) or incorporate into my next week’s meal planning (for instance crudité, which I can use in a stir fry). For 2011, I counted that as a separate budget line and didn’t worry too much about how much I was spending.

I just looked at the totals, and I averaged $42.04 per month for that line, including wine but not including food for the holiday party, which I was reimbursed for. (I spent about $150 on stuff for the holiday party, about half of which was used and reimbursed and the other half counted as grocery expense for me.)

My food average for the year was $101 per month which was much higher than expected due to a really stupid mistake I made with how my tracking system was set up.

[And I know probably no one cares about the details of this, but I'll give them anyway, in the interest of full disclosure.

I used to track everything in Quicken, but it was on an old computer and when that computer finally died and I went to try to get a version of Quicken that would work on my new computer, I discovered it was $75, which seemed like a lot to pay for a program that I used only a tiny fraction of, and that left my historical data in a format that required a special program to access. I tried various alternatives and finally settled on an Excel spreadsheet for tracking day-to-day expenses that I would then transfer into a Filemaker database at the end of the year. The Filemaker database includes all of my historical data exported from Quicken in addition to the more recent data transferred from Excel. This has worked well.

I gave up on Quicken in 2009, but I wasn't actually making any money at that point so tracking expenses wasn't an issue. I know that might seem backwards, but my goal is to spend the right amount of money -- when I have no money, the right amount of money to spend is none. I don't need to track that. Also I think I was trying to be less OCD and not track so much, but in doing that, I discovered that I like tracking expenses, I find it relaxing. Also when I actually have money, it's important because it keeps me from spending too little on things I do care about and too much on things I don't care about.

So in 2011, I went back to looking at monthly expenses more carefully, but I was doing it out of Excel instead of the way I used to do it, and was figuring out a new system. The way I deal with grocery money is to put cash on a Whole Foods card and use that for my normal grocery purchases. This simplifies tracking and also lets me handle cash in a way that works better for me; if I run out of cash, I can still buy food.

In my tracking spreadsheet, I deducted the amount left on my Whole Foods card at the end of the month from the month's total but I failed to add that amount to the following month's expense. Duh. So I'm tracking and I'm like hmm this is interesting, this seems lower than I would have expected, guess things are just going well. And I spent money in a way that I wouldn't have if I had actually had the right number. In December when I looked at the final totals in a different way and had the actual numbers come up I was like what?? And then I figured out what had happened and felt like a dumbass. But it was what it was, nothing to be done.]

So for 2012, I would like to spend $100 on food for me and Scrap combined, though I think I will exclude wine. Mostly I get two-buck Chuck (which is actually three bucks), but it still adds up. And I never use any of that for myself, unlike the food, which I end up using as needed.

If it turns out this endeavor seems worth writing about, I will. (And hopefully take some pictures, even I have started to miss not having any pictures on this blog. Where are the pictures? Maybe I’ll just start taking pictures of random things and posting them, since I can’t seem to manage to ever get any pictures taken of food.)

So anyway, that’s what’s going on here. For starters, I’ll try to get the odds and ends finished and posted and see how that goes, then take it from there.

Hope all is well with you.