Brontoforumus

I'm sure you could make your own dough but ... of course that involves a mold. How would it ever not involve a mold?

Bread and vegetable sculpture were my interests going into the culinary industry, but I never had the time to practice or money for materials. But still:










Plus some varnish and dye:


You can do a lot with bread without dough casting.

OKAY THAT'S CREEPY.

THE HEAD, I MEAN.

Was it filled with pizza sauce and intricately layered pleats of ham?

I made two batches of macarons last week, for a bachelorette tea party I was hosting. I had a lot of the fillings leftover- a bowl of dark chocolate ganache and a bowl of pumpkin cream cheese. I was thinking of what I could do with them, and decided to try to make them into pumpkin cheesecake brownies.

And it worked! The brownie layer came out a bit more cakey or cookie-bar-like than what I think of as a brownie, but chocolatey and good. I had to bake it pretty long because the pumpkin watered down the cream cheese so much that it poured on, rather than spread, but it firmed up beautifully after chilling and returning to room temperature.

This is the first time I've ever tried really experimenting with a baked good recipe, so I'm happy it worked out.

I started cooking some baked beans in my slow cooker today and they smell amazing. I just wish I had started maybe about an hour earlier so I could eat them now.

The whole thing is pretty impressive.

It's basically if, instead of buying a 69 cent can of baked beans from the store, you actually made your own, off a good recipe, from scratch, with fresh ingredients.

It's "Ohhhhhh so THAT'S why people not in desperate poverty would want to eat baked beans!"

Can you give a quick recipe? Gonna cook tomorrow, sounds like a good idea.

TA wrote:Can you give a quick recipe? Gonna cook tomorrow, sounds like a good idea.

I'll ask Buge to put it up, but the recipe used dried beans that had to be soaked to soften overnight. I guess you could also use fresh beans? Not sure?

TA wrote:Can you give a quick recipe? Gonna cook tomorrow, sounds like a good idea.

Let me see if I can recall how I did it. I mostly improvised, using elements from several different recipes.

First, take three cups of dried white navy beans*, pick out the cracked and gross-looking ones, and soak overnight (eight hours or so) in enough water to cover with a few inches to spare. You can do this in your slow cooker to save space. In the morning, drain it out and give the beans a rinse.

Dice one big yellow onion (I used Vidalia), mince four of your biggest, crunchiest cloves of garlic, and toss it all in with the beans.

Add a heaping teaspoon of ground cumin, a heaping teaspoon of chipotle powder, a normal teaspoon of either dry mustard or curry powder (I couldn't tell which - it was spicy and yellow). Crank in some pepper and add 2-3 teaspoons of kosher salt.

Add a glug of olive oil, half a cup of brown sugar and a half a cup of blackstrap molasses.

Pour in two cups of broth, a whole 28oz can of crushed tomatoes, and a quarter-cup of tomato paste. Stir it all together and add additional salt and pepper to taste. And make sure to taste!

Cook in your slow cooker/crockpot for 8 hours on high. I tried cooking it on low, but I could tell it would take too long after a few hours.

That's as much as I remember. Good luck.


*Or just skip this step and use canned beans. It's your body.

Okay I sous vide a lot at home and NO. Condoms taste terrible.

Also the picture is not sous vide, that's just a boiling pot.

Silversong wrote:Okay I sous vide a lot at home and NO. Condoms taste terrible.

Maybe the chef was using these:

"That water is too hot for sous vide" is maybe the fourth or fifth thing wrong with that picture

Seems legit.

Bleh, it's been such a lousy day. Kiddo's been driving me crazy with his toddler capriciousness and irrational opinions regarding hats. Let's try to end on a higher note and make cookies. Madeleines are easy, but I make those all the damn time (even though they come out so cute with my owl mold pan). What else... wait, here's a checkerboard cookie recipe... and it doesn't require eggs? Just butter, sugar, flour, and flavoring? I'll only need one bowl? Let's go for it.

*two hours of chilling, wrapping, and wax-papering*


...welp, there's sub-par cookies to end a sub-par day. The dough was supposed to roll out neatly to cut into rectangular bars for layering, but it crumbled on me instead. What should've been cute checkerboards came out as marbled failure bars. And I still need to clean the bowl and pans, and it's already time for bed, and Direwoof still needs a walk...

At the very least, they're still soft yet pleasantly dense and taste like chocolate with a little bit of lemon. I can still count on everyone in the house to dispose of the evidence.

There's nothing quite like a recipe that fails deliciously.

....All this time I could've been eating owl madeleines?

Hey R^2, you like veg sculpture, right?

Also, Buge you should CLEARLY being doing this with your avocados instead. >:3