Almond pudding/jelly/Jell-O

Whatever it might be called in a cookbook or at a restaurant, it's delicious.  I came across this recipe while flipping through a dim sum cookbook; I got the impression that the cookbook as a whole was designed for people like me who know and enjoy dim sum but are slightly nervous about attempting it at home.  Since the recipe in the book only required one ingredient that we didn't already have, I figured it was worth a try.

Unfortunately, the finished product had no business calling itself "something delicious that you would want to consume".  When I took the dish out of the fridge it was still a liquid and nowhere near set, even after 18 hours.  Upon closer inspection, I discovered some watery milk (milky water?) lying atop a sickly-sweet almond-flavoured morass of still-grainy gelatin.  It wasn't even one of those culinary mishaps that still taste all right, like the Great Annapolis Pizza Fiasco of 2009.  This went into the sink immediately.

Our notes:

• Total time elapsed from measuring out the sugar and water to putting it in the fridge to set: 15 minutes, from 11:01 PM to 11:16 PM.  Not too bad, though see the point below about letting the gelatin soften.
• There was a very strong almond flavor, more than even I would want in this dish.  Perhaps 1 or 1½ teaspoons would be more appropriate rather than the 2 specified, though this may not have been an issue had the gelatin set as expected.
• The recipe only said to let the gelatin soften for 5 minutes; the box of gelatin (consulted long after the fact) called for 10 minutes. Might this have been part of the issue?
• Apparently, you can't just go by appearances on this one: on the stove the water-sugar-gelatin solution looked like just that, but as we would discover later, the gelatin had not, in fact, dissolved into the sugar water.
• Like the red beans and rice experiment, this recipe seemed like it was designed for beginners, calling for gelatin rather than the more traditional agar. Next time we'll try and get actual agar; we live right down the street from a fairly large Asian grocery store so I don't think this will be a problem.

It's very sad when a recipe doesn't turn out even after following the directions to the letter.  We'll try a different recipe for almond pudding next time.


Blonder, Ellen. (2002). Dim sum: The art of Chinese tea lunch. New York: Clarkson Potter.

Red beans and rice

First up: red beans and rice, because I always like cooking food that reminds me of fabulous vacations, and because we wouldn't need to buy too many things that we wouldn't buy normally.

Our notes, in no order:

• The recipe called for kidney, pinto, or small red beans; we used small red beans (Michigan-grown, which had been the deciding factor at the store) which were all right, but the dish didn't seem as satiating as it should have been.  Should try pinto beans next time as they seem to be better about this.
• For a dinner, soak the beans in the morning rather than overnight; based on what we'd done, it seemed that the beans could only soak up so much liquid, and thus the final product was more on the liquid-y side than what I recall from Mother's Restaurant in New Orleans (my current standard, which, I suppose, is not directly transferable to a home kitchen in Michigan).  This particular recipe takes 2-3 hours on the stove, but only for about half that time are the beans in the pot; even getting up late on a weekend still gives plenty of time for the beans to soak before cooking.  OR, maybe we left the pot lid on for too long during the cooking time, preventing excess water from boiling off.  Either way, don't soak beans for 16 hours.
• We did not use the half teaspoon of ground red pepper as called for in the recipe, which was fine for both of us!
• This particular recipe did not call for mashing some of the beans at the end of the cooking process; this might have helped the texture a bit.

The finished dish had some good flavor, and we liked that there was no added salt--and it didn't need any.  A good recipe for beginners like us, though we may try a different one next time we do red beans and rice.

Red beans and rice on...Sunday.

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 256
Writeup background music: Mario Kart Wii soundtrack

New culinary adventures.

Hi, it's me again, the pseudo-librarian formerly staying in that nebulous region known to Michiganders as "Up North" for eight weeks of the summer.  Because I have this blog URL and because Dom and I are trying out new recipes thanks to a wedding gift of The Joy of Cooking (2006 edition), I'll be using this to archive recipes and reviews for things we try that are not our usual pastas or stir-fries.  Feel free to read or not, but the narrative probably won't be too exciting!

Raccoons

I have lived in urban areas my whole life, and I personally never had to worry about putting out the trash for the trucks to take away.  Either someone else took care of this (thanks, Dad!), or I lived in apartment complexes that would have a giant dumpster into which our trash could disappear, never again to be seen by us.  As a consequence I never fully realized how wily raccoons could be until I got here this summer.  Until today, actually.  My previous two raccoon encounters had been:

1. At the Bursley Hall bus stop freshman year, a bunch of us kiddies were startled to hear some rustling in a nearby trash can.  After some minutes a raccoon popped its head up, climbed out, and slinked away.  To my rather immense relief, the bus arrived shortly after.
2. Outside a branch of the Ann Arbor District Library earlier this spring, the fiancé and I saw a raccoon skulking around the dumpster which, due to the layout of the library's grounds, was relatively close to the sidewalk where we happened to be.  We watched in fascination as it managed to pry open the top and drop inside, after which we heard a bit of a commotion coming from inside the dumpster as I wondered how it would be able to get out.  We didn't stick around to find out exactly how.

This morning I arrived at the library to find two of the trash bins knocked on their sides and spilling their contents.  At first I suspected a raucous party--likely involving copious amounts of alcohol--had occurred last night (hey, you know, I have firsthand experience with going a bit crazy with end-of-semester stress--is it not unreasonable to think this happens to others as well?), but the wonderful people at the admin office immediately knew it was raccoons' work and made a call to the facilities staff to help clean it up.  Sure enough, when I got back to the library a closer inspection revealed paw prints all over the floor behind the reference desk--where I'm sitting right now, though in a chair, not on the floor.

Everything is now cleaned up thanks to one of the TAs and the quick response of the staff here; someone just came by to put signs on the doors exhorting people to please "CLOSE doors when you leave" (there have been multiple raccoon incidents recently); and we are all thankful that the raccoons didn't do anything worse to the collections or facility than going through the trash.  As far as I can determine they didn't help themselves to any books while they were here.

Cute, right?  UNTIL IT GETS INTO YOUR LIBRARY.
(U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

No one ever suspects the Asian librarian.

The fact that I, a relatively small Chinese American librarian, play hockey (in a co-ed league, no less), never fails to elicit reactions of surprise from people I mention this to.  This happened at lunchtime today during a conversation among a group of women talking about their kids playing sports.  It's a fantastic conversation starter because people usually want to know how I got into it, do I like it, what's it like, etc. which I don't mind at all because I usually have very little to say in a given conversation around here and it forces me out of my usual reserve.  Nobody, nobody suspects the unassuming Asian librarian of being the type to get under the other team's skin enough to draw penalties out on the ice.  Excited to play again in the fall!