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From Birr to Bareilly, from Leeds to Lahore
Some things make a post. The rest is me remembering to take out the trash tonight.
1. I wrote out the coconut chipotle sweet potato recipe for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
strange_selkie right before I fell over on Thanksgiving night; I am copying it here for posterity, but fair warning: I really mean right before I fell over. If this recipe makes no sense to the conscious, someone should let me know.
Take five large-ish sweet potatoes. In an ideal world, wrap them in foil and bake them for an hour until they are fork-tender. In the world we live in, bake them for an hour, then realize there is no more time for baking before turkey occurs and unwrap them from their foil, cut them into inadvertent quarters in the process of peeling them or at least tearing off as much skin as possible without losing too much of the flesh, and microwave them for fifteen minutes, at the end of which at least one potato will still be chunky and dry-splitting inside, so you will lose a third to a half of a sweet potato overall and this will not make any difference whatsoever to the recipe.
If you have a Cuisinart in which you can purée the remains of five large-ish sweet potatoes along with the ingredients described below, throw them all in there and godspeed. In the kitchen in which this recipe was devised, purée the sweet potatoes in three batches, adding to each:
· half a cup of coconut milk (the brand should not matter, just not the low-fat kind because that is an incomprehensible abomination)
· a quarter-cup of maple syrup
· one dried chipotle which has been soaking in water for the last eight hours and consequently plumped up like a raisin; sadly you were not allowed to keep the chipotle-steeped water, which tasted like either the world's best or worst idea for tea, but you and the partner of your choice had enough self-protective instinct to snap on thin rubber gloves so as not to hurt yourselves with capsaicin and carefully de-seed all three peppers with small knives and grapefruit spoons, giving both of you flashbacks to tenth grade biology; these were separately puréed with a little hand mixer prior to their addition to the sweet potatoes after the initial attempt with mortal and pestle, due to the unexpected tenacity of chipotle skin, did not so much work out
· one half-teaspoon cinnamon (true cinnamon, not cassia)
Scrape each batch as completed into a serving bowl, stir all together briskly just to make sure everyone is on the same page. Fight your cooking partner for the spatula and/or the right to finger-swipe the last bits out of the Cuisinart once one of you has dropped the blade safely into the sink.
Realize you now have a ton of this stuff, but it doesn't matter, because everyone except your mother who doesn't do spicy even when that means ground black pepper is eating it. Feel victorious.
This makes the fourth or fifth Thanksgiving recipe now that's come out vegan even when that wasn't one of my starting criteria. I find this sort of thing useful to know. But mostly delicious.
2. Last nightderspatchel and I went to see a double feature of Paul Newman at the Brattle Theatre: The Sting (1973) and Slap Shot (1977). We had planned on a similar brace of W.C. Fields this afternoon, but for reasons including the stupid weekend replacement bus schedule, The Bank Dick (1940) and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941) did not work out and we determined to settle for Hitchcock (2012) at the Kendall Square Cinema with dinner at the Friendly Toast first. There were no problems with the latter part of this plan. By now, I almost invariably order a damned good grilled cheese with roast beef (I do not order grilled cheese anywhere I can make a better one at home, but since I do not regularly have on hand either cayenne-and-cheddar bread, olive-and-garlic tapenade, or strawberry habanero sauce, the Toast is an exception) with sweet potato fries on the side and a Vertigo for dessert, since it is essentially a chocolate milkshake with pomegranate molasses and rum. It was when we got to the Kendall with our teeth chattering from the freezing raw cold and saw the small apologetic sign on their door warning us that there was a problem with the heat in both theaters showing Lincoln and Hitchcock that we decided perhaps today was not a day for the movies after all. These things happen. I have hours of work to catch up on. We did get more than the usual number of films last night.
3. Abbie the Cat has updated his blog.
Tristen is back in Pennsylvania with his family, but I took him to the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology on Saturday and we have agreed that if he hasn't seen Singin' in the Rain (1952) by the next time he's in Boston, it is my duty as a human being to show it to him. I admit I'm kind of impatient.
1. I wrote out the coconut chipotle sweet potato recipe for
strange_selkie right before I fell over on Thanksgiving night; I am copying it here for posterity, but fair warning: I really mean right before I fell over. If this recipe makes no sense to the conscious, someone should let me know.Take five large-ish sweet potatoes. In an ideal world, wrap them in foil and bake them for an hour until they are fork-tender. In the world we live in, bake them for an hour, then realize there is no more time for baking before turkey occurs and unwrap them from their foil, cut them into inadvertent quarters in the process of peeling them or at least tearing off as much skin as possible without losing too much of the flesh, and microwave them for fifteen minutes, at the end of which at least one potato will still be chunky and dry-splitting inside, so you will lose a third to a half of a sweet potato overall and this will not make any difference whatsoever to the recipe.
If you have a Cuisinart in which you can purée the remains of five large-ish sweet potatoes along with the ingredients described below, throw them all in there and godspeed. In the kitchen in which this recipe was devised, purée the sweet potatoes in three batches, adding to each:
· half a cup of coconut milk (the brand should not matter, just not the low-fat kind because that is an incomprehensible abomination)
· a quarter-cup of maple syrup
· one dried chipotle which has been soaking in water for the last eight hours and consequently plumped up like a raisin; sadly you were not allowed to keep the chipotle-steeped water, which tasted like either the world's best or worst idea for tea, but you and the partner of your choice had enough self-protective instinct to snap on thin rubber gloves so as not to hurt yourselves with capsaicin and carefully de-seed all three peppers with small knives and grapefruit spoons, giving both of you flashbacks to tenth grade biology; these were separately puréed with a little hand mixer prior to their addition to the sweet potatoes after the initial attempt with mortal and pestle, due to the unexpected tenacity of chipotle skin, did not so much work out
· one half-teaspoon cinnamon (true cinnamon, not cassia)
Scrape each batch as completed into a serving bowl, stir all together briskly just to make sure everyone is on the same page. Fight your cooking partner for the spatula and/or the right to finger-swipe the last bits out of the Cuisinart once one of you has dropped the blade safely into the sink.
Realize you now have a ton of this stuff, but it doesn't matter, because everyone except your mother who doesn't do spicy even when that means ground black pepper is eating it. Feel victorious.
This makes the fourth or fifth Thanksgiving recipe now that's come out vegan even when that wasn't one of my starting criteria. I find this sort of thing useful to know. But mostly delicious.
2. Last night
derspatchel and I went to see a double feature of Paul Newman at the Brattle Theatre: The Sting (1973) and Slap Shot (1977). We had planned on a similar brace of W.C. Fields this afternoon, but for reasons including the stupid weekend replacement bus schedule, The Bank Dick (1940) and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941) did not work out and we determined to settle for Hitchcock (2012) at the Kendall Square Cinema with dinner at the Friendly Toast first. There were no problems with the latter part of this plan. By now, I almost invariably order a damned good grilled cheese with roast beef (I do not order grilled cheese anywhere I can make a better one at home, but since I do not regularly have on hand either cayenne-and-cheddar bread, olive-and-garlic tapenade, or strawberry habanero sauce, the Toast is an exception) with sweet potato fries on the side and a Vertigo for dessert, since it is essentially a chocolate milkshake with pomegranate molasses and rum. It was when we got to the Kendall with our teeth chattering from the freezing raw cold and saw the small apologetic sign on their door warning us that there was a problem with the heat in both theaters showing Lincoln and Hitchcock that we decided perhaps today was not a day for the movies after all. These things happen. I have hours of work to catch up on. We did get more than the usual number of films last night.3. Abbie the Cat has updated his blog.
Tristen is back in Pennsylvania with his family, but I took him to the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology on Saturday and we have agreed that if he hasn't seen Singin' in the Rain (1952) by the next time he's in Boston, it is my duty as a human being to show it to him. I admit I'm kind of impatient.
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Need I say what will happen next?
(How do I know whether I have true cinnamon or cassia?)
I would like to have a Vertigo for dessert. I have not had dessert tonight-_-
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Huzzah! Let me know how it works for you.
(How do I know whether I have true cinnamon or cassia?)
Cassia is closely related to true cinnamon: the one is Cinnamomum cassia and the other Cinnamomum verum and I have trouble describing the difference except to say that I think of the flavor of cassia as sharper, rawer, and slightly bitter; I am not one of the people who finds it completely unpalatable as a spice, but it stands out oddly in fruit or sweet dishes of any sort. (What feels most accurate is to say that cassia is more angular and I just prefer cinnamon, but I'm not sure how much that helps.) True cinnamon is often marketed as "Ceylon cinnamon," with cassia sold as "Chinese" or "Vietnamese cinnamon." They can be easily distinguished in stick form: cassia sticks are hard single rolls of bark, while cinnamon sticks are packed tight with multiple, more easily ground layers. If it's already a powder and you have only the one kind, I don't think cassia will kill the dish; I just know cinnamon will taste better.
I have not had dessert tonight
That is an unhappy statement. If it's any consolation, the sweet potatoes come out very sweet.
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Penzey's sells true cinnamon in sticks. I get it from there.
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I should still like to hear how your version turns out!
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And now we've taken to using the word cassia in place of cinnamon, seeing as that's what it really is. "Let's make cassia toast."
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Fantastic! I'm so glad to hear it. Also that my post-Thanksgiving writeup was coherent enough to be replicable.