approximately 8,000 words » Food

Recipe: Thrice-baked potatoes

Kit — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 05:30:14 +0000

With another buddy of mine, I recently took an advanced lesson from a very engineering-minded friend on better cooking with magic. I’d made special butter before, but she gave me valuable lessons in optimal temperatures and techniques. Later that night the three of us threw together the following recipe, which should therefore be considered a joint effort. You could easily leave out the special ingredient and do this with conventional butter that isn’t a federally scheduled substance; you could probably cut back on the butter then since you weren’t using it as a carrier for mind-altering goodness. I’m not going to include instructions on making cannabutter here, but you can find them in many places on the Intertubes. No, these were not full of plant material as we sifted our butter with cheesecloth.

Ingredients:

1 5lb-bag of potatoes
Chives
Sour Cream
Ricotta Cheese
2.5 cups of cannabutter
Kosher salt
garlic powder (optional)

Bake potatoes in an oven at 350 until done. Cut potatoes in half and carefully remove the insides, leaving thin shells behind. Mash up the potato-guts and mix in the butter and salt. Then add ricotta (we used about a cup, or half one of those larger containers), probably a 1/2 cup of sour cream, and chives. When I do this again I plan to add a little garlic powder, but we didn’t and they tasted delicious. Bake them a second time, just long enough for the cheese to get melty and everything to bind together, probably 10 minutes or less. The goal here is not to brown the potatoes; although cannabis is relatively heat-tolerant there is no sense weakening it by exposing it to more than necessary.

We made these late one night and then served them at a party the next, gently reheated, to rave reviews. With a little alteration, these would also make probably fantastic pierogis.

Chickpea recipes, part 1

Kit — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:31:41 +0000

Well the landlord replaced the stove in my apartment with a shiny newish one and I have been doing more cooking recently. As I cook I often tweet about it, and as a result I’ve been asked to share recipes. I cooked a whole bunch of chickpeas recently and whether you call them garbanzos or chick peas, they are probably my favorite bean.

Any recipes I post here will be short on measurements and feature a lot of ’to taste.’ Sorry, that’s just how I cook.

Garbanzo Bean Wraps

This originally began its life as this recipe. These wraps will keep you safe from Rover if you find yourself trapped in the poorly received 2009 remake of The Prisoner. Though I am always tinkering with it this is my current version and it is often requested by some of my friends.

Ingredients:

2 cups cooked or canned garbanzo beans. Rinse canned beans first.
An onion, chopped
Frozen or canned corn (about 1/2 cup?)
Garlic
a splash of bragg’s Amino Acids (like soy sauce but not)
Yellow curry powder
Lemon Juice
Kosher salt, to appease Alton Brown
1-2 tablespoons of tomato paste
Spicy stuff like Sri Racha or Vulcan’s Fire Salt
Tortillas & shredded cheddar cheese for garnish

Using a potato masher, mash up the chickpeas a bit so they are chunky but not completely smooshed. In olive oil, cook the onion and garlic until the onions softens. Add chickpeas, corn. Add bragg’s, curry powder, lemon juice, salt and other spices to taste. Pour some water over the whole mess until you cover it. Add tomato paste. Cook over medium-low heat until the water is almost all boiled off, leaving you with just a little sauce in the pan around the chickpeas. Serve on warmed tortillas with shredded cheddar on top.

You might also enjoy two older recipes using garbanzos which I’d posted to my LiveJournal: Creamy Garbanzo Beans with Spinach, and Garbanzo Bean Soup. Soon I will follow up with my recent Spicy Chickpea Marinara Sauce.

A Map of the City

Kit — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 10:50:24 +0000

Today, Reesa, Steve and I spent nearly all of our productive hours creating a map of a city on another world. It was a fairly grueling 12+ hour process, even with breaks to take in an episode of Dexter and eat. The first draft results are impressive, and preliminary photos have been shared with our collaborators. This is a huge step toward the creation of a major goodie for our fans as well as countless other future creations in the Continuous Coast Project. Along the way we mostly decimated three medium pizzas and a lot of snacks.

In honor of the completion of 12 hours of labor, I baked some brownies. I actually used the tollhouse cookie recipe in the pan cookie variation, except I used slightly less chocolate chips (1 and a half cups) and added a generous 3 tablespoons of Dutch Cocoa powder (from the Spice House in Old Town Chicago), as well as a tablespoon of oil to compensate for the cocoa powder. As you can see from the photo, we were happy with the results — of the brownies, but especially of the map!

Since the cocoa bean was first cultivated on Mother, I guess I’ll call them Elms Gate Brownies.