I made Asian-style dumplings (pot stickers) from scratch last night (okay, I bought the wrappers, but I wrapped them by hand). I couldn't find ground chicken at the grocery store, so I used ground turkey instead (it was on sale and I don't eat red meat, so pork was out). I also didn't have all the ingredients on the list, but I noticed that no two dumpling recipes on the Web were the same, so I did some substitution. Folding them was a pain. I ruined the first 8 entirely and the next 20 or so were pretty ugly. By the time I got to number 30 (close to the end), they were looking more like restaurant dumplings. I put them in the refrigerator when I was done and took them to Scott and Lisa's tonight, where I steamed them in my electric steamer. The steamer worked perfectly and the texture and composition of the dumplings were pretty close.

Unfortunately, Lane and Lisa each had half of one and Scott (who loves spicy food) only managed to eat two. It turns out that the "1/4 cup minced red bell pepper" called for in the recipe is *not* equivalent to the 1/4 cup crushed red pepper I actually used . . .

I'm going to make up a batch of plain brown rice and see if I can "dilute" the dumplings that way. If I die of heartburn, remember me fondly.

Labels: amusement, cooking, food

Inspired by this site, my own take on chocolate arachnids: chocolate mini-cakes with pureed cherry filling (the "guts"), coated in hard chocolate and adorned with Pocky legs (32 pieces of Pocky individually cut and reglued at an angle), then decorated with eyes (and, for Lane's, fangs and a black widow decoration).

They only took two hours (partly because they have a lot of parts, and partly because I ruined an entire pan of melted chocolate and had to start the coating process over again).

The twins were thrilled (although Alec quizzed me very closely to make sure there weren't any *actual* spider parts in it). Lane about died in delight.

Shortly after that, Kyle thanked me by accidentally clocking me with a toy, leaving a hideous bruise the size of a 50-cent-piece in the middle of my forehead that everyone seems to find funny.

Labels: baking, cooking, fun, funny, ouch, recipes, twins

[Spoilers, Cris.]

I understand that Top Chef is a reality show. Despite this nefarious moniker, I've felt that the show stood apart from the banal, neuron-killing sludge that percolates through MTV, Fox and the rest of Bravo by making it a food show that happens to be reality rather than a reality show that happens to have food. While there is craziness on the show (some of the contestants are just plain nuts; go Andrew), traditionally the producers have allowed the personalities and the pressure of the show itself to be the sources of the drama.

This season's talent is not on par with the previous seasons, and to make up for that the producers have used more of the "traditional" reality show fare. The camera crews now peek in the windows to secretly spy on the contestants in their apartment, put contestants on the spot about cheating on their significant others and open shows by staring down a contestant's shirt for 10 seconds while listening to her voice-over about how much she loves cooking. I'm sure there are a lot of viewers who like this direction. I find it distracting from the thrust of the show (promising young chefs looking for recognition for their creativity and skills).

They've now eliminated all of the contestants I liked, so I'm kind of ambivalent about who wins. I know Cris still has a favorite, so I hope he gets his wish. :)

Labels: annoyance, cooking, television

I'm finally caught up with this season of Top Chef (guess what I did instead of watching the Super Bowl . . .). As is usually the case, watching Top Chef makes me want to cook, so last night I made pan-seared bananas, which were edible but not fantastic enough that I'll make them again any time soon. I suppose they might be better with ice cream, but my limited fondness for ice cream discourages me from keeping it on hand.

I'm disappointed in this season of Top Chef. The talent levels just aren't there (especially compared to the previous two seasons). The food they're making isn't innovative or creative and rarely takes risks. There is only one clear front-runner (the guy who has won about 70% of the challenges), and he's a jerk; the remaining members could be eliminated at any time and I wouldn't be surprised. I think the producers recognize that the talent isn't there, and to compensate they've made the show more like other reality fare (something distinctly unpalatable to me, as the emphasis on food rather than drama has always been a selling point for me); rather than interviewing contestants on their food philosophies and the finer aspects of their dishes, the cameras are (voyeuristically!) peeking in the windows of the contestants' shared apartment to spy on two of the (already in relationships) chefs making out on the couch and focusing on *that* for the rest of the episode. That's a bad sign for the quality of the show.

On a note of personal preference, there is no equivalent to Richard on the show this year, which not only means I have no one to root for, but also that molecular gastronomy is completely unrepresented (no foams, no liquid nitrogen, no hi-tech gadgets, no discussion of how different flavors interact in terms of chemistry). That's not a staple of cooking, so there's no requirement to include it, but I miss it.

Labels: cooking, television

Not at the same time, of course. Some things should not be cooled to -320 degrees F, and nipples are probably one of them.

The Top Chef finale was last night. Unfortunately, I can't talk about it yet because Cris's cable was out due to the second round of tornadoes and flash flooding we've had in a week and I don't know if he's seen it yet. I *will*, however, say that my favorite contestant, Richard, once again tickled my molecular gastronomy bone by incorporating liquid nitrogen into his cooking (yay for cool gadgets and high-tech ingredients), in this case to make a flash-frozen ice cream. The idea is pretty simple; assemble your non-frozen ice cream ingredients (in his case bacon-flavored ice cream, which did not particularly impress me; his original idea for tabasco pepper ice cream sounded better), put them in a high-grade mixer (like my KitchenAid), turn the mixer on low and slowly add liquid nitrogen until the concoction is ice cream (observing all due safety precautions, of course). Nitrogen is inert and boils out, leaving only the original, now-frozen ingredients. Lane has encouraged me to try it (with her present, of course), and liquid nitrogen can be had without permits or the like (it's not a regulated gas). The limiting factor is finding a place that will sell it to you in small quantities (most gas supply stores sell in bulk and I don't really need 30 liters of the stuff, since it doesn't store). I haven't found one in Omaha yet. Maybe someday.

On the nudity end of the spectrum (Do spectrums really have nudity ends? Is there a chocolate end?), the Transportation Security Administration rolled out its first full-use backscatter airport security machines this week. I first heard about these years ago in a Discover Magazine article (because they use a unique form of X-ray that measures object density by how much the object "scatters" the radiation rather than how it absorbs and re-releases it), where the focus was on the science rather than the politics. Now that they're in use, expect to hear about them in the news, because they produce near-photo-quality black-and-white images of the subject's nude body, regardless of clothing (clothing scatters almost none of the radiation so it doesn't show up). In an attempt to address privacy concerns, early versions of the machines had software that blurred out private areas, but apparently the TSA has decided that blurring those areas will encourage terrorists to hide items there, because the machines delivered to 10 airports this week "allow the security screeners . . . to clearly see the passenger's sexual organs." The TSA's press release assures people that there is no way for the screener to make a copy of the image, and the software still blurs the subject's face, but they're still getting a "show."

The defense offered to make the machines easier to swallow is phrased in the form of options. You can still request a physical pat-down in place of the machine, and the idea is that the machine is less physically invasive. I can see from my own personal standpoint that I would prefer the machine to having a stranger's hands on me, but then I'm not particularly uptight about images of the nude body (even my own), given my photography portfolio. It remains to be seen how most people, especially women and parents of pre-teen children, react, and how the actual security setup is handled (the procedure would likely be more palatable if the person viewing the images is in a different room and cannot see the subject, making it more impersonal, and the screener and subject are matched up by gender the way physical pat-downs are). I imagine it's only a matter of time before there's a scandal of some sort involving an overzealous screener; stay tuned.

Labels: cooking, politics, science, social commentary, television