Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Savory New World

This blog is a savior! Just this weekend, whilst eating some delicious Vietnamese sandwiches on the roof of the church, and discussing the P-Bury bake-off, I was presented with the question "so, do they tend to favor sweet or savory recipes?" Well, as you can probably imagine, I was able to speak quite knowledgeably on the subject given my last blog entry. Of course the conversation took a turn when another friend chimed in, "What does savory mean?"

Hanging up Christmas lights on the roof

The genesis of our topic was when I pulled out what I'm calling "cheesy spicy surprise biscuit bombs." I'd recently had what I can only assume is a normal desire to bread something in crushed-up Cheez-Its. The victim of this urge ended up being some p-bury biscuits. And to spice things up (literally and figuratively) I used the Cheez-Its with Tabasco, and tucked a wee bit of queso de papa in the middle of each one.

The result was a little odd. Ok, a lot odd. (Why is that a running theme in my experiments?) Frankly, I thought they tasted like...bleh. Some of the Cheez-Its burned, and when the biscuits returned to room temp, the queso inside re-hardened into an unsavory block.

However, it was decided that in the future, Cheez-Its would make a suitable substitute for cornflakes as a chicken breader.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Upside-Down Uprising

What a stellar statistical circumnavigation of bake-off winners past, Rachel! You have such a way with numerals.

We inhabitants at the red castle have been preoccupied with a new neighbor, who is still adjusting to his home and scratching post/box. St. George (the mouse-slayer) is not inspiring us in a culinary fashion, as his palate favors meaty-but-odd variations on brown, in "wet" and dry variety. Now that the mice have returned, we can assume, to hiding in the walls and feasting on the fall-out shelter crackers, we can again face our pantries courageously.

Last Sunday, I shared an old favorite and considered ways to fashion him for the modern age: pineapple upside-down cake. Not that I don't love him just the way he is, but he's just so retro. So McCarthy-era conscious of trying to please and fit in. Nothing untoward here, just us canned, culturally bland chunks. Dear Mr. Upside, let's get down. You are soaked with sweet. You are weighty in that ponderous Brezhnev/Yeltsin way.

While I like the density of the cake (it contains much less egg and much less flour than the standard ratio), it is one-dimensional. It could be enriched with extra yolks, or officially soaked with fruit juice (and rum?) after baking. The one standard that must be perfected is the crispy caramel topping that goes into the pan first. I let the brown sugar and butter commingle, slowly and luxuriantly bubbling, for a few minutes, but cut down the over-all baking time as the cake appeared to be brown about 15 minutes early. A fatal error, as far as the caramel was concerned. Everything tasted great, but was of mushier-than-desired consistency.

To make Mr. Upside into a Pils winner, we will have to revolutionize. I call for perestroika: abandon your out of date identity, sir! I'm imagining cardamom, cloves, a merangue topping -- or rather, bottoming, once flipped, and of course fresh pineapple, cut into practicable bite-size triangles -- a banishment of the alien-rounded donuts from the can. Are you with me, comrades?