Cool Completely / Completely Cool

When life gives you lemons, you find a new god make lemonade. When life gives you PMS, you make a huge mess.

See?


I decided on a whim that I would make some pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, so I modified a couple simple recipes (below) and came up with this beauty:


Then there was the issue of the leftover pumpkin. I still had half a can left, and I was still (and remain to this very moment) a complete glutton, so I decided to make a quick pumpkin mousse. The mousse called for 1 cup of pumpkin puree, 1/2 cup of heavy cream, a generous 1/2 cup of sugar, and a 1/2 tsp of pumpkin pie spice to be simmered for about five minutes and then cooled completely. I didn't have the patience to wait for it to cool on its own or even in the fridge, so I did the old bowl-o-ice water trick:


Fill a bowl with ice and add enough water so all the ice floats, then put whatever needs chilling in another, smaller bowl, and put the whole thing in the ice water bath. Don't submerge it, obviously, and it helps speed the process along even more if you gently stir every so often. It's better than the blast chiller in Kitchen Stadium. Not really.

Then I whipped a cup of heavy cream and 1/2 tsp of vanilla until I saw some pretty stiff peaks:


Dudes, nothing beats freshly whipped cream. It takes less than five minutes armed only with your hand mixer to make fresh to death whipped cream. It's not sweet like the canned stuff, but most things you douse with whipped cream are already sweet so you won't even care. Anyway.

Fold the whipped cream gently into completely cooled pumpkin mixture:


Then -- and this is the really important part -- take one cupcake, frost it generously with cream cheese frosting, and then -- are you listening? -- top the whole thing with pumpkin mousse:


Please make sure the mousse is almost as tall as the cupcake. Amen.

Seriously, guys: good things happen when I have PMS. I know pumpkin is technically passe by this time of the year, but I'll bet you've got a can of it somewhere in the back of your pantry. I'll bet the poor little guy has been crying since the day after Christmas that he didn't make the Holiday Pie Draft. Go cheer him up.

Pumpkin Cupcakes
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp. ground cloves
2 eggs
1 cup pumpkin puree
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar
1/2 cup vegetable oil

Preheat oven to 350. Combine dry ingredients, stir to combine, and set aside. Lightly beat the eggs in a large bowl. Add the rest of the wet ingredients and whisk until combined. Gently fold in the dry ingredients and mix with a wooden spoon (my preference) until just combined. A few lumps are fine and to be expected; don't overmix lest you end up with tough cupcakes. Pour about 1/3 cup of batter into greased or lined muffin pans and bake for 20-25 minutes until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out completely clean. Cool completely and top with . . .

Cream Cheese Frosting
2 cups powdered sugar
6 oz. softened cream cheese
splash of milk as needed
TBL maple syrup (optional)

Throw everything into a bowl and beat with a hand mixer until it reaches frosting consistency. Add milk as needed to thin it out, but don't be too heavy-handed with it or you'll end up with runny frosting. If you're about to add a splash of milk, work the beaters for another moment before making the final decision. Remember: you can always add more milk if it's too dry, but you can't take it away if it's too runny.

A Liberated Woman

I have an important announcement to make. For this announcement, please go back into your memories for the time you watched Gone With the Wind in your high school film study class. Fast forward to Scarlett standing up, dirty but determined, and declaring that - as God as her witness - she'll never be hungry again. Click here if you need a reminder. Now keep all that in mind as I will now make an equally important, dramatic announcement:

As God as my witness, I'll never go to Starbucks again!

Gives you chills, doesn't it? Ladies and gentlemen, you are reading the blog of a liberated woman. I'm free from the shackles of that siren's enslavement. Let me give you a little backstory before I offer you sweet, sweet liberation: I don't drink coffee. I'll have to wait for the census to be sure, but I'm fairly certain I'm the only adult in America that doesn't ever drink the stuff. Even in spite of that, Starbucks still managed to get me on their chain gang because I need chai. I need chai like like Daniel Day-Lewis needs your milkshake. So, as often as I can afford, I was at the Starbucks drive through ordering my grande non-fat, no-foam chai latte. BUT NO MORE! The Pioneer Woman posted a link to homemade spiced chai concentrate. I made it over the weekend, and I. Am. In. Love. I'm drinking it hot in the morning, iced in the afternoon, hot again after dinner, and iced again before bedtime. So far I've found that husbands love it, moms love it, best friends are seriously considering traveling from Louisiana to try it, and little brothers don't quite like it -- but who's going to listen to someone's little brother? I mean, really.

My friends, if you even sort of like chai, iced or hot, I beg you to make this yourself. I made two batches at once and kept it in a pitcher in the fridge; I have had to refill this pitcher three times since Saturday. It is easy, it's got much less sugar than you're going to find in a coffee house's chai concentrate, and you can play around with the ingredient levels until you find the exact combination that's right for you. Try going to Caribou Coffee and asking for a little more cardamom in your latte and see how far you get. The link to the original recipe is above, but below is an account of how I made my version.

The Domestic MFer's "Fuck Starbucks!" Spiced Chai Concentrate
4-1/2 cups of water
2 cinnamon sticks
3-4 "coins" of fresh ginger, smashed
4-1/2 pinches of cardamom seeds (about 80 seeds, but I wasn't about to count)
2 whole star anise pods
10-12 whole cloves
1/4 tsp ground black pepper
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp grapefruit zest (the original recipe calls for orange zest, but I only had grapefruits in the house)
10 ordinary black tea bags (or a higher quality black tea if you're a fancy pants)
2/3 cup dark brown sugar, packed
1 TBL honey
1 TBL vanilla extract

A quick note on spices before I begin: You're crazier than I am if you think I had all those spices lying around the house. If you always have whole star anise in your kitchen, please invite me over for every meal you ever cook. The per-cup cost of this recipe can be extremely cheap, but the spices can really drive up the price. Do yourself a favor and DO NOT buy the spices at the grocery store. A tiny bottle of name brand spices, like stick cinnamon, is seriously like five bucks, and you'll be lucky if the bottle has more than five sticks in it. Go to the produce store in your neighborhood, even if you've never gone there before, to buy the spices you need. Trust me. I got all the spices I needed in bulk, each priced at less than $2, and I ended up with enough of everything to make ten kits.

Let's do it.

First, set the water on the stove on high heat while you get the spices ready.

Start with the ginger. I fully confess that I've never used fresh ginger before for anything, ever. The original recipe is kind of vague about how much exactly to use, so I just cut a few "coins" from the root, and cut each coin into quarters:



Then, lay the flat side of the knife down on the cut up pieces and let out some aggression:



The smashed ginger will release its flavor better, much like smashed garlic.



Put the smashed ginger with the grapefruit zest for a cute photo opportunity:



Then put it with the rest of the spices (everything except the brown sugar, honey, and vanilla) while you wait for the water to be ready.



Once the water boils, take it off the heat and dump in the spices and tea. Let it steep for 15-20 minutes, depending on how strong you want the flavor to be. Strain out the tea & spices. Mix in the brown sugar, honey, and vanilla. Refrigerate in a pitcher for as long as you can control yourself from drinking the whole thing. I filled a glass with ice and added a half a cup of the concentrate and a half a cup of skim milk.



Delicious. I'm not fancy enough to have a device that steams milk, so instead of combining equal parts of the concentrate and steamed milk for a hot beverage, I nuked a mug with half chai/half milk for two minutes, and you know what? It was also delicious. And then I started to feel really naughty, so I nuked two parts chai with one part half & half, and my husband told me it was the best beverage he's ever had.

As I hinted before, the spices for this amazing, cheap, wonderful, sweet, spicy beverage aren't in my usual arsenal of cooking ingredients, so I decided to make the process even easier by making little chai kits.



The only ingredients missing from the kits are the ginger and zest because those need to be freshly prepared. But as both are cheaply acquired, that's no big deal to me. Now I have a seemingly endless supply of super cheap and oh-so-delicious homemade spiced chai at my fingertips, and so can you.

Make it up as You Go-Go

Let me tell you something: I live three miles outside the Chicago city limits, and it is cold here. No, it's not the coldest place in the country or the world right now, and no, it's not even as cold as it'll be this winter (or even this week, actually). But it's a mere 17 degrees right now with a "feels like" of 5 degrees, and there's a wind chill advisory in effect until lunchtime tomorrow. So, as I said, it's cold.

I got really cranky earlier about how cold I was and decided that the only cure for it was a thick, savory, steaming vat of beef stew with at least one piece of buttered sandwich bread on the side. The only trouble is that I don't know how to make thick, savory, steaming beef stew. I've always been a stubborn determined person, so you know what I did? I made it up. And it was damn good, I'm happy to report. So now I'll be sharing that process with you. Follow me if you're cold and need to be warmed up or know someone that is and does. Just keep in mind that I made up pretty much everything as I went along with only a very vague roadmap in my mind, so feel free to add or subtract as you see fit.

Now I know that food sanitation experts the world over recommend having separate flora and fauna cutting boards. I'm admitting to you now, in front of God and everybody, that I use the same cutting boards for meats and veggies. I make up for it by having a very strict "veggies then meats" rule, and I always wash with very hot water after every meat use. Phew, glad I got that off my chest. Onward!

First I peeled and cut up a bag of carrots:



Sidenote: I always cut my carrots at an angle because I feel like it impresses people more than a blunt cut. It "looks fancier". I'm insane; don't listen to a word I say.

Then I cut up three pounds of red potatoes even though I wasn't putting them in for another couple hours because of the aforementioned veggies-then-meat rule.



Then it's time for the meat assembly line. Meat, seasoned flour, board to transport them to pot. We used three pounds of pre-cut "stew beef", which is basically just cubed chuck roast. If the uncut chuck roast is cheaper than the pre-cubed stuff (which it usually is, though not today), grab one of those and cut it into cubes yourself. As for the seasoned flour, I just grabbed a few handfuls of flour (I'd say it was less than two cups) and seasoned it with whatever struck my fancy. I few dashes of cayenne, a measure of Lawry's seasoned salt, plenty of black pepper, etc.



Give the meat a light flour coating.



Brown it in a dutch oven on high heat with a little olive oil. Just toss it around so you get all sides.



Don't overcrowd the pan. Work in batches if you have to, just be ready to heat a little more oil between batches.

Oh, and remember that veggies-then-meat rule? Here's my proof that I follow it. This photo from my new series entitled "True Life: I'm Forgetful".



Now I didn't technically skip any portion of the recipe since there is no recipe, but I had decided before I did anything that I was going to use this ginormous onion that'd been on my counter for a while. The cutting board and my favorite knife had already been meated, so I had to use backups.

Not to be discouraged, I deglazed the pan with two cups of beef broth.



Deglazing is when you pour liquid into a pan, turn the heat on high, and vigorously scrape the heck out of the bottom. The goal is to get all the bits up that stuck to the bottom while you browned the meat. Those bits are a flavor goldmine. Scraping up those bits now also makes it much easier to clean the pot later.

Then I threw in a tablespoon each of worcestershire and apple cider vinegar plus a couple heaping tablespoons of tomato paste.



I threw that concoction in the dutch oven along with the veggies and the meat.



Oh look! It's another photo from "True Life: I'm Forgetful"!



Yeah, yeah, so I meant to smash the garlic earlier in the "veggies" stage of cutting board use. I had already put the backup cutting board in the dirty sink, so I smashed these babies out of their skins right on the counter.

Everyone was finally ready to hang out and get to know each other.



I actually brought it to a boil uncovered and let it boil for about ten minutes before reducing it, covering it, and letting it simmer for two hours. It wasn't quite as thick as I wanted it to be when I checked it, though, so I took action. I mixed a couple tablespoons of that seasoned flour with as little hot water as possible and poured it in.



Then I let it simmer uncovered for another half hour, and that did the trick. By this time you might be wondering what happened to those potatoes you saw me cutting up. Well, true to the "fly by the seat of my pants" nature of today, I decided halfway through that I didn't want to put the potatoes in the stew lest they get mealy. I hate mealy potatoes. Hate hate hate. I decided instead to turn them into mashed potatoes. I had a vision of a mashed potato volcano with a beef stew lava river.

And you know what? It was so good.



Make it tonight for your family. Invite the neighbors over. The stew will keep them warm through the walk back to their house and beyond.

Improvised Beef Stew:
3 lbs cubed chuck roast
Flour, seasoned for dredging
1 lb bag of carrots, peeled and cut at angles to make yourself feel fancy
1 gigantic onion, roughly quartered
6 cloves or garlic, smashed
1 TBL Worcestershire sauce
1 TBL apple cider vinegar
2 heaping TBLs tomato paste
2 cups beef broth
Salt & pepper to taste

Second Verse, Different than the First

I wasn't raised on leftovers. Sure, sometimes yesterday's pot roast beefed up (no pun intended) tomorrow's stroganoff, and mashed potatoes were made in bulk to last an entire week, but that was pretty much it. Wasteful though it is, yesterday's lasagna went into the fridge to become next week's trash. The newest addition to my Domestic MFer Skill Set is the desire and ability to utilize leftovers. My husband used chili as a condiment on pretty much everything for a week straight after I made a big vat. I had lasagna for lunch for a whole week (when I wasn't also busy finding things on which to pour chili).

We're having the most fun with the leftover spicy pulled pork. I had a serious lapse in judgment when I didn't take any pictures of the cooking process on Friday. It was a fun and interesting one, but my brother and sister-in-law were visiting with their new wittle bitty baby that day. So I guess I did take a lot of pictures that day, but they were all of sleeping, yawning, pooping, farting cuteness. And that's just my brother I'm talking about. Kidding.

So this pulled pork was amazing. I used a very simple recipe and roasted it in my dutch oven for longer than recommended and at a lower temperature than recommended. This resulted in the greatest pulled porch sandwiches ever seen this side of the Mason-Dixon. The success of the endeavor and how much it was enjoyed by my family makes me confident I'll make it again, hopefully when an adorable newborn won't distract me from documenting it for you. I'm getting off track. The point (if there is one) of all this is that I was left with a tupperware container full of pulled pork and another full of homemade coleslaw.

So I put a tortilla in a nonstick skillet and topped it with a generous handful of mozzarella cheese.

Then grab your Sriracha and put on a few dots -- or more if you like things hot.

(If you don't know what Sriracha is or if you don't have any in your house at this very moment, you're missing out on one of the best parts of life. Trust the Domestic MFer. Buy a bottle -- look for the rooster -- and soon you'll be putting it in and on everything: eggs, pizza, mixed in with mayo for fancy-pants spicy mayo.)

On goes the leftover pulled pork. I admit I was a little more heavy-handed with the ingredients than the size of my tortilla called for, but I'm telling you this stuff just so good.

Fold it and flip it after a couple minutes just to make sure everything is good & melted.

And devour. Don't forget the coleslaw!

Husband went a different route and made pork tacos with coleslaw (and plenty of Sriracha) inside.

Tasty!

The delicious and economical power of leftovers is one quickly learned. I'm off to the kitchen right now, actually, to see what else I can turn Friday night's dinner into. All I need is a little imagination and a giant bottle of sriracha.

Mysteriouser and Mysteriouser . . .

Things are coming to this blog. Good things. Chocolately things. If you need a hint to hold you over, spend a little time here.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go spend approximately 7.24 hours on the elliptical to undo the damage I did to my waistline today in the kitchen.

409 is for Suckers

I make my own household surface cleaner, and now I'm going to show you how to do the same. It's better for you, better for the environment, it takes less time than it does to buy a new bottle of 409, and it's dirt cheap. I learned the tip while working at an earth-friendly tea shop, but you don't have to hug trees to replace your Lysol Antibacterial Kitchen Cleaner. You just have to not want to put Lysol Antibacterial Kitchen Cleaner in your mouth, which you do every time you eat food that touched a surface you previously cleaned with LAKC. Unless you spray your counters, wipe them down, rinse them with water, and then dry them. If that's your process . . . you should still follow these instructions because I'm about to save you a ton of time.

Ready? Let the saving begin!

Step one: Pull your vinegar out of the cabinet and pull one cup of water from the tap.


Step two: Pour one cup of vinegar into your cup of water. Combine the water & vinegar in any way that floats your boat, really, as long as it's a 1:1 ratio.


Step three: Grab your funnel and an empty spray bottle (I'm using an old 409 bottle) and pour!
 

Step four: Spray your kitchen surfaces and wipe dry as you would with any other household cleaner. Take the Pepsi challenge with with against any bottle under your sink; I guarantee it cuts through just as much (if not more) counter and stovetop gunk. When you're done cleaning your counters and stove, go spray your bathroom mirrors with it. Trust me.

The only complaint I've gotten from my family about switching the 409 for vinegar/water is, "It smells like vinegar!" Well, yeah. Of course it does. I promise you, though, that the Easter egg dye-smell fades very quickly. The clean kitchen and bathroom surfaces last much longer.

Flash Dance

Do you know how to flash freeze? It’s the easiest thing in the world and is a cookie-maker’s best friend. Flash freezing is my favorite way to make a whole batch of cookie dough once and enjoy fresh, hot cookies for weeks.
First, make your favorite cookie dough:


Whee!!

Then, make dough balls and drop them onto a cookie sheet just like you would if you were going to put them right in the oven. The only difference is that you can (and should!) put them as close together as you need to in order to get all the cookie babies onto one sheet:



Note: these cookie babies are actually in a 9” x 13” baking pan because my cookie sheets were occupied. The lesson here is that you can use anything to flash freeze cookie dough as long as it keeps the dough balls from rolling all over the place.

Next, put the whole cookie sheet/baking pan/whatever in the freezer and walk away for about ten minutes (or an hour if you’re like me and get distracted when Cheaters is on. Don’t be like me). The maximum amount of time they spend in the freezer doesn’t matter. They just need to chill enough to keep their structural integrity when they go through the next step:



Move them from the cookie sheet to your favorite freezable storage container. I like to use plain old freezer bags because they are easily written on. I sometimes find myself with a freezer full of cookie babies (is there a more delicious fate?), so it’s helpful to have titles and instructions written on the bag. Be sure to use an ancient Sharpie that makes the writing all fuzzy so it’s sure to be indecipherable when you go to it later, ok?

Ever since I joined the world of flash freezing, I’m never more than 20 minutes away from a dozen fresh to death cookies. And isn’t that a world we can all get behind? Just pop a dozen in the oven whenever you feel like warming the hearts of your friends and neighbors, and make a new batch of dough when you empty the bag.

Super bonus: the experts in my stomach agree that cookies taste better when the dough’s been frozen at least overnight, and sources all across the internet agree. I’m sure there’s some science-y explanation, but I like to think that the ingredients just spend a little more time getting to know each other. Also, frozen cookie dough spreads out less than room temperature dough, resulting in thicker, chewier cookies. What’s not to like about that?