Zombie Mint: IT’S ALIVE!

Before I left for the west coast, I conducted a wee experiment with a decaying mint sprig in a pot of dead cilantro.  To recap, I took a sprig of mint that had spent a week in a jug of water in my fridge and jammed it in the soil.  I took a fresh sprig of mint and did the same.

My suppositions were that the decaying sprig was displaying new growth, while the freshly cut sprig probably wouldn’t survive.

When I came back, this is what I found.  You can see that the fresh sprig is in its death throes, but the zombie sprig?

Check out that new growth!

Who knew that freezing something a few times makes it grow?

Connecting and Reconnecting on the West Coast

As you know, my eldest brother Krystopf got married to the lovely Atlas on the 7th of July in Vancouver, and the Pie and I took the opportunity to head out west and explore both Vancouver itself and Vancouver Island, where I spent five years of my childhood.  It was a good opportunity to see old friends and old places again, and we met so many new people who are now part of our (extremely large) extended family.  It was also fun to show the Pie some of the places I remembered growing up.

We saw and did so much in the 12 days that we were gone that I can’t even begin to cram it all into one blog post.  I will therefore be doling it out every couple days (interspersed with your regular DIYs, so you don’t get bored!) for the next little while.  I learned some new recipes while I was gone and we ate soooooooooo very much food, so you’ll get to hear all about it.

We’ll start off slow, though.  The weather while we were out west was remarkable, in that it was sunny every day (which you know is rare for that side of the Rockies).  We stayed at Atlas’ parents’ house in Coquitlam, a suburb of Vancouver, and their house is perched halfway up a hill with a great view of the river and surrounding cities.  This is the night-time view.

Atlas’ parents have a fascinating little garden at this place (they also have a hobby farm outside of town where they keep all sorts of things).  I’m a sucker for sunshine shining on plants (because I see it so rarely here in St. John’s), so I took tons of pictures of the wee garden, which was right outside our bedroom window.

These look like giant thistles, but I’m sure they are something else entirely.

Those things that look like beans are actually curly leaves.

But I wish they were beans.  I like beans.

And so many flowers tucked in every corner.

And some illicit flowers as well.

You might be familiar with this plant.  It’s called giant hogweed, and its sap, if you get it onto your skin, acts as a magnifier for UV rays, so you can easily get yourself a third-degree sunburn if you aren’t careful.  They are a banned plant in Ottawa, and probably many other cities as well.  Atlas’ parents, however, cook with the seeds, so they keep the plants around.

They made me feel quite tiny wandering between their stalks (careful not to touch them, of course).

And it seems I wasn’t the only visitor to the garden on this day.

The ladybug kindly stayed still long enough for me to take a million photos.

More to come in the next little while: new recipes, daring tree-top adventures, massive festivities, and me with tons of makeup!  Stay tuned!

Chocolate Fudge Ice Cream

Happy Birthday Caity!  Welcome to thirty!

I swear that this is not poo.

I don’t know if you know this, but the original plan, eight years ago now, was that Stef and I were going to set up Cait with the Pie.  They’re both complete computer nerds, skinny jerks, and their birthdays are only four days apart.  What could possibly go wrong?  Needless to say, it didn’t happen, to everyone’s relief.  Anyway, today Cait turns thirty, and I’m pleased to say that now we have been friends for over half our lives. Pretty heady stuff when you’re a girl who rarely stayed in one place longer than five years growing up.

In continuing the birthday theme, I am going to give you the recipe for the chocolate fudge ice cream you saw in the Pie’s ice cream birthday cake on Monday.

I took this recipe (and modified it only a tiny bit) from My Lemony Kitchen, and I think it’s tops, even though I am not particularly fond of chocolate ice cream.  It is, however, a very British recipe, and everything is in metric, including the measurements for a substance known as GOLDEN SYRUP.  Fortunately in Newfoundland, where we love everything British, this was easy to find.  This partially inverted refiners syruptastes kind of like molasses, and kind of like corn syrup.

It’s extremely sweet.  And good for serving with “sweet puds.”  Can any of my UK readers tell me what exactly a PUD is?  I am on tenterhooks to know.

This is where your handy dandy kitchen scale is very useful.  If you don’t have one, you should get one.  They are always worth it.

So.  Ice cream.  In a pot with a heavy base, pour 300mL whole milk.

Chop up 100g dark chocolate and scoop up 25g butter and add those to the mix.

Heat on medium, stirring often, until everything is melted and smooth.

Measure out 125g sugar and 75g golden syrup.  I weighed the syrup on top of the sugar, so that the whole thing just slid into the pot and I wasn’t left with a sticky mess.  Clever, eh?

Add the sugars to the pot and raise the heat to bring the mixture to a boil.  Reduce the heat and allow to simmer for about four minutes.  Then remove the whole thing from the heat and allow it to cool until it’s just warm.

In a mixing bowl, beat up 4 eggs.  Slowly, stirring the whole time, pour the slightly warm chocolate mixture into the eggs.

Strain this whole thing into a heatproof bowl or the top of a double-boiler.  You may need to scrape the bottom of the strainer occasionally, as the egg whites are quite membranous.

Plop the bowl full of chocolate onto a pot of barely simmering water and cook until it thickens and coats the back of your spoon.  Now you have custard.

Something caught fire under my burner at this point, but I like to believe that the delicious smoky taste to my chocolate ice cream was not accidental.

Remove the chocolate custard from the heat and stir in 300mL heavy or whipping cream.

I also added in a few tablespoons of crème de cacao as a softener.  You’ll note that the packing tape was still on the lid from when we moved in four years ago.  It’s not a popular liqueur in this house.

Allow your mixture to cool completely and store it in the fridge overnight.

Then churn it in your ice cream maker according to the machine’s instructions and then do with it what you will.

I smoothed mine into an ice cream cake but I bet it would be great by itself, or maybe with some fudge sauce …

The Pie’s I’m-Turning-Old Ice Cream Birthday Cake, with Fudge Sauce

I will let you in on the worst-kept secret in our family: Saturday was the Pie’s thirtieth birthday.  He’s finally as old as me and will (hopefully) shut up about my aging process.

The Pie’s birth flower is the delphinium. That peony just happened to be there.

Now, for me, being born the week before March Break, as a child I often celebrated more than one birthday.  There was my actual birthday, then there was one when my grandparents came to visit the following week, and then maybe one with my friends from school.  Through no fault of my own, this happened consistently through to my adulthood, just little low-key celebrations dotting a week of aging, with maybe a cake at the end of it.  For the Pie it’s a bit different. Because he was born in the summer, all of his friends were out of school and so he generally had one big bash to celebrate his big day.  Needless to say, since we became broke and moved to Newfoundland, his expectations have taken a hit.  Fortunately, Papa John and Mrs. Nice are in town, so we can make it a bit of a party.

One of his “big boy” gifts: a sweatshirt designed to look like Optimus Prime. If you zip the hood all the way up it forms Prime’s large blue head, with mesh eyeholes. It wouldn’t zip over the Pie’s rather prominent nose.

As a rule (because we’re broke), we don’t exchange gifts, but on our birthdays, the other makes the celebrant a cake.  Last year, I made the Pie that disastrous leaning tower of chocolate.  This year I thought I would try for something a little more refreshing, given that it is summer, after all: ice cream cake!  Having watched several of the bloggers I read try and fail at this feat last summer (Caroline, I’m thinking of you!), I think I know what NOT to do, so here goes …

Start with a springform pan.  The fact that you can dismantle it means that getting the cake out when you’re done won’t be that hard.

Now you need some ice cream flavours.  One of our favourite restaurants in St. John’s, Get Stuffed, used to have this boozy ice cream cake, where the three layers of ice cream were flavoured with various liqueurs.  It.  Was.  Fabulous.  So I’m going to try to recreate that, but with a little less booze.  Just a little less.

I’m using ice creams I made from scratch, but you can use store-bought ice cream that has been softened.  The first layer, at the top of the cake, is raspberry (you can see the recipe here, though this time I used cognac instead of vinegar!).  Simply spoon 2 or 3 cups of softened ice cream into the bottom of the pan and smooth it out.  In retrospect, I should have frozen the empty pan before plopping the ice cream in it, because just-churned ice cream on a hot day has a habit of melting, and this seeped through the edges of the pan a bit before it re-froze.  No big deal, just something to remember for next time.

You might also want to scrape down the sides a bit, just so residual ice cream doesn’t interfere with the look of the following layer.

This cake took a couple of days to make, because each ice cream mixture needs to sit in the fridge overnight before you churn and freeze it, but that gave each layer ample time to get nice and solid before I added the next one.

The middle layer is vanilla, and the Pie loves his vanilla ice cream, so I used the best recipe possible.

Because the pan was frozen and the ice cream underneath was frozen, it was an easy job to smooth on this layer.

Then a chocolate layer.  Neither the Pie nor I are particularly fond of chocolate ice cream, but I have never seen an ice cream cake, especially one with a fudge layer, without it, so it had to go in.

You will be able to see the recipe here on Wednesday.

So, with that all frozen, I could work on my chocolate fudge layer, which, in my opinion, was always the best part of the store-bought ice cream cake.  Fudge sauce recipes abound on the internet, but I was looking for something with a bit of substance, something that would take well to freezing, and this one from The Foodess seemed perfect.  She even said it went well in ice cream cakes.

Making it was super easy, too, which I like.  I did it on the stove, but The Foodess recommends working with the microwave, so that should tell you how easy it is.

In a small saucepan with a thick bottom, pour 3/4 cup granulated sugar, 1/2 cup powdered cocoa, and 1/2 cup heavy cream or milk (I used homogenized milk here).

Heat, stirring often, until the sugar dissolves, and bring the mixture to a boil, all of which should take about 3 minutes.

Add in 4 tablespoons butter and cook for another few minutes, stirring occasionally, until the mixture thickens.  You might want to turn the heat down a little bit, so that the sauce doesn’t burn.

Remove the sauce from the heat, add in 1 teaspoon vanilla and a pinch of salt and you’re all done.  Wasn’t that easy?

Let that cool before smoothing it onto your final ice cream layer. Mine was in the fridge overnight and so I just stuck it in the microwave for a minute to soften it up a bit.

It slathered onto the frozen chocolate layer quite nicely.

Then you want a crumb crust.  You can use Oreo crumbs, but I also had some leftover pieces from some particularly crumbly gluten-free brownies that were in the freezer, so I pulsed them in the food processor and used them instead, which meant that everything in the cake was made from scratch (you gotta put in the extra effort sometimes).

 

 

As an aside, I also broke my mini food processor doing this — not because of the density of the brownies, but through my own mishandling of the situation.  Alas.

Smooth the crumbs over the fudge layer.

Right to the edge. Yes, I licked the fudge off my finger later.

Press that stuff down and re-freeze for a couple of hours.

To serve, run a bit of hot water around the edges of the springform pan and release the cake, flipping it upside down onto a plate (make sure it’s a plate with a lip, otherwise the cake will dribble everywhere as it melts).

I used an icing scraper to texturize the sides and scrape away dribbles from other flavours that ruined the effect.

Then I used a fondant smoother to get rid of the weird melty marks on the top.

You can decorate it any way you want, but the Pie is a huge Street Fighter fan and he plays the character of Hakan, a Turkish oil wrestler.  So I bought some teal and white icing from Sobeys and put a stylized version of his face on the cake, as his skin is almost the same colour as the raspberry ice cream (okay so now not everything is made from scratch. Sue me).

Cover the cake with plastic wrap or seal in a container and store in the freezer when you’re not eating it.

Zombie Mint

This sprig of mint was submerged in a pitcher of water in my refrigerator for a week and a half.  During that time, it probably froze a couple times, because that’s the sort of thing my fridge does.

I fished it out and jammed it in the soil of one of my failed cilantro plants.

Two weeks later it has not yet died, and I suspect I actually see new growth.

As an experiment, I have cut a fresh sprig and jammed it in alongside.

I will let you know how this turns out.  I may have brought mint back from the dead.

Wingin’ it Wednesday: Comfort Ramen

The week before we left for Vancouver, the Pie, poor thing, got tonsillitis.  After the fever went down and he’d rested a bit (read: slept all day and all night for two days), he still had a raging sore throat and came home from the doctor’s with an enormous jar of amoxycillin pills (sorry folks, when you’re grown up, they don’t give you the banana-flavoured liquid anymore).

To tempt his appetite (hard to be hungry when every swallow is like eating razors), I made him all sorts of his favourite soft foods, and this was one of them.  Ramen is the sort of thing we eat when one of us is out for the evening and the other doesn’t want to be bothered with really cooking.

Of course, the ramen as it comes in packages with salty broth and dried noodles cooked in coconut or palm kernel oil is an unhealthy choice, and I haven’t yet learned to make it from scratch.  So we try to add a few things to it in the hopes that it will be nutritionally redeemed — somewhat.

This means that there’s a bit of prep work involved in making what is normally an almost instant meal, but it’s totally worth it.  Just remember that any vegetable or meat or anything you put in the ramen must be fully cooked or sliced super dooper thin, because it will only be in the boiling water for a very short time.

Accordingly, tonight I thinly sliced up a small onion, an Italian sausage, and about six mushrooms.

I’m trying to get more protein in small packages into the Pie’s stomach (when you’re a large man and you’re barely eating, you tend to get very tired), so I’m also adding two eggs to this mix.  Beat those up and let them wait in a bowl until you’re ready.  Other things that work well in ramen are things like thinly sliced roast beef, green onions, pre-cooked baby shrimp, chopped hard-boiled eggs, red peppers, alfalfa sprouts, spinach … anything small, pretty much, will work.

So the first thing I do when cooking packaged ramen is I measure the water into a pot and I add the powdered broth.  I like to give it a chance to simmer a bit.  I also add a healthy dollop of minced garlic.

When the water is boiling, I slide in the blocks of noodles and cook them for about a minute.

Then I pour in the vegetables and sausage and give them a stir (cooking chopsticks are very handy here, but a regular pasta spoon will work as well), and let that cook for another minute.

Then carefully pour your egg in, in a thin stream, so it cooks and forms strings on the surface of the soup.  Give that a stir as well, and then you’re ready to serve.

Garnish with fresh herbs if you like, or chili flakes or whatever floats your boat.  Smooth and simple!

Heeere, Piggie Piggie!

Isn’t this cute?  I made it for my new baby cousin.  I have another one in the works for Doodle’s new nephew, but I didn’t get it finished before we went to Portland so I will just have to mail it.  I also didn’t finish Atlas and Krystopf’s blanket before their wedding, either.  Seems deadlines are not my thing this summer.

Also whenever I hear the word PIG I think of that scene in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure when Napoleon is at the Ziggy Piggy restaurant and he finishes off that mammoth sundae and the servers present him with a special badge and they chant “zeeegy peeegy, ZEEEGY PEEEGY, ZEEEEGY PEEEEGY!” and then they oink a lot.

I love eighties movies.  Fashion, movies, politics … all those things really sucked in the eighties.  But the movies?  They were choice, as Ferris Bueller would say.

This is a Martha Stewart pattern, and I followed her instructions here.  You may remember the stuffed chicken I made from this same project a while back.

This one was a little trickier to sew than the chicken, what with all the limbs and all.

Plus there were pipe cleaners involved.

And I stuffed it with scraps of felted wool instead of cotton batting.

And I think I messed up the ears.

But it’s cute, right?  You might recognize the pattern of the wool from the “keystone” in Doodle’s afghan.

Router Incognito

I saw this post at the end of May and it was just so ridiculous that I felt I had to try it at home. You could do this with a modem, too, I suppose, or any other piece of electronica you want to keep out of sight.

Our wireless router is hidden in the chaos of the Pie’s desk, so needing to hide its unsightliness from view is not an issue for me.  I’d much rather the Pie tidied up his desk more often.  Regardless, perhaps the subtle awesomeness of this new router cover will inspire him.

So you take a hard cover book.  Like these ones. They’re old editions from the library at work that are now out of date.

Then you cut out all the pages.  Like so.

And you’re left with the cover.

Which you then slide over your router.

I used a slightly bigger book than my router, because the air vents are on top.  And so I made some wee supports out of skewers to hold up the top of the cover for air flow purposes.

So if you feel that your router is unsightly, here’s an idea for you!

BAKED’s Chocolate Chip Cookie

It’s no secret here at Ali Does It that the Pie and I are quite enamoured with the guys over at Brooklyn’s Baked.  When the b’ys were on their way over last weekend to play some Street Fighter at our house, the onus was on us (ha. ha.) to come up with a tasty treat, so we made some chocolate chip cookies.  These ones are great because they’re crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside, just like we like them.  The trick to getting that texture is in chilling your dough for several hours, or even overnight.  This means that when you make your dough balls on the baking sheet, the outside will start to cook and provide a cookie structure, an outer wall, before the inside can warm up and ooze all over the place.  You will notice with these cookies that I didn’t have time to chill them for very long and as a result they spread quite a bit, running into each other on the pan.  So that’s why you chill your dough.

Start with your dry ingredients.  In a bowl, whisk together 2 cups all-purpose flour and 1 teaspoon baking soda.  Set that aside.

In the bowl of an electric mixer, cream together 1 cup butter, 1 cup packed brown sugar, and 1/2 cup granulated sugar until it’s smooth and fluffy.

Scrape down your bowl to get all the stuff back together and beat in 2 large eggs, one at a time.  Let the eggs emulsify the ingredients between additions.  The mixture will look light and fluffy when it’s ready.

You can add in now 2 teaspoons vanilla and beat for an additional few seconds.

Add in half the flour mixture and beat slowly until just incorporated (if you do it on a high speed the flour will fly everywhere. Been there, done that. More than once).  Add the second half and do the same thing.

Fold in at this point 2 2/3 cups chocolate chips.  I used 2 cups of chocolate chips and then added 1 cup Skor bits that were leftover from an office ice cream party.  I also got the Pie to do the stirring for me, as the dough was stiff.

Now chill your dough for about six hours, or even overnight, before you do your baking. As I said earlier, I didn’t have time, which means I had to deal with the consequences of flat cookies.

Preheat your oven to 375F. Line baking sheets with parchment paper, and using an ice cream scoop with a release mechanism, or a really round soup spoon, serve up the dough in 2 tablespoon-sized balls.

Bake the cookies for 12-14 minutes, rotating the pans halfway through.  Leave the cookies to cook for 5 minutes on the pan before transferring them to wire racks to cool completely.  If you don’t eat them all immediately, store them in an airtight container for a couple days.

These Iris

My mother sent these iris to me about four years ago, in the mail.

I planted them according to her instructions (which is to say, I sort of set them gently atop the soil and hoped they wouldn’t wash away).  And I waited.

Every year, the leaves would grow tall and green.  But no flowers.

This year, the year I have given up on my garden officially (too many rocks, too many weeds), this year they decide to bloom on me.  Just in time for my mother’s visit, thankfully!

These iris are descended from a batch of iris given to my mother by a friend about twenty years ago.  They have traveled back and forth across the country a couple times.  When I leave Newfoundland I will likely take them back home with me.  That’s just how we roll in our family.  My mother has already taken a chunk of my garden home with her on this visit to keep it going until I get there.