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The mind of man had thought of everything—except that which was beyond his comprehension
So about eighty-five percent of today sucked like a shop vac, but I salvaged an hour or two with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel in the early afternoon and in the evening rushthatspeaks and I made sesame seed balls with azuki bean paste for dinner. All from scratch. This was both much easier and stupidly more aggravating than it sounds. The deep-frying was fine, the paste mostly involved Rush setting the beans up to soak the previous night (and then blending and cooking them down this afternoon with oil and two kinds of sugar. An immersion blender is the most entertaining kitchen appliance I've encountered in years). Glutinous rice flour with palm sugar syrup, however, is the devil. It comes out a lovely blond color, but it dries faster than Play-Doh. It breaks. It crumbles. It sticks to everything but itself. If you wet your hands to work it more easily, you wind up dripping a kind of cornstarchy slurry everywhere. We gave up on finger-shaping the prescribed inch-deep cups for the bean filling and just hammered each section out flat with a wet rolling pin, then scraped the resultant (like a miracle of chemistry, suddenly dry and crumbly) splatter off the cutting board with a small sharp knife and extreme prejudice. Next time, we're thinking we should use more water on the rice flour than the recipe calls for and make the syrup with either brown sugar or the slab brown candy recommended by Andrea Nguyen if we can find it anywhere. That said: the dumplings came out looking like we'd ordered them at a dim sum restaurant. Also, tasting like it. Crackling and sesame-crisp on the outside, frying-puffed and chewy underneath with hot sweet bean paste melting in the center. Neatly round. Unsurprisingly filling, to the point where after four or five each we didn't so much make dinner after all. Homemade bean paste is better than anything I've ever had in a storebought moon cake: not so sticky (or so deeply red: ours darkened in the cooking to a kind of smooth taro purple) or so tongue-burningly sweet. I want to learn to make lotus paste now and beta-test the next batch on ratatosk.
Ray Harryhausen is gone. The last movie of his I saw was It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in December, with its magnificent six-armed octopus wrenching San Francisco apart, never moving like a natural thing, all the more uncanny for it: magic, the fingerprints you could see it left. I will watch something stop-motion this week. I hope he had Medusa waiting for him at the end.
derspatchel in the early afternoon and in the evening rushthatspeaks and I made sesame seed balls with azuki bean paste for dinner. All from scratch. This was both much easier and stupidly more aggravating than it sounds. The deep-frying was fine, the paste mostly involved Rush setting the beans up to soak the previous night (and then blending and cooking them down this afternoon with oil and two kinds of sugar. An immersion blender is the most entertaining kitchen appliance I've encountered in years). Glutinous rice flour with palm sugar syrup, however, is the devil. It comes out a lovely blond color, but it dries faster than Play-Doh. It breaks. It crumbles. It sticks to everything but itself. If you wet your hands to work it more easily, you wind up dripping a kind of cornstarchy slurry everywhere. We gave up on finger-shaping the prescribed inch-deep cups for the bean filling and just hammered each section out flat with a wet rolling pin, then scraped the resultant (like a miracle of chemistry, suddenly dry and crumbly) splatter off the cutting board with a small sharp knife and extreme prejudice. Next time, we're thinking we should use more water on the rice flour than the recipe calls for and make the syrup with either brown sugar or the slab brown candy recommended by Andrea Nguyen if we can find it anywhere. That said: the dumplings came out looking like we'd ordered them at a dim sum restaurant. Also, tasting like it. Crackling and sesame-crisp on the outside, frying-puffed and chewy underneath with hot sweet bean paste melting in the center. Neatly round. Unsurprisingly filling, to the point where after four or five each we didn't so much make dinner after all. Homemade bean paste is better than anything I've ever had in a storebought moon cake: not so sticky (or so deeply red: ours darkened in the cooking to a kind of smooth taro purple) or so tongue-burningly sweet. I want to learn to make lotus paste now and beta-test the next batch on ratatosk.Ray Harryhausen is gone. The last movie of his I saw was It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in December, with its magnificent six-armed octopus wrenching San Francisco apart, never moving like a natural thing, all the more uncanny for it: magic, the fingerprints you could see it left. I will watch something stop-motion this week. I hope he had Medusa waiting for him at the end.
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If there can be dream-eating tapirs, maybe there can be shop vacs that suck up ... suckiness. They sound like demigods worth offering to.
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Nine
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It is possible we made them slightly harder than they needed to be with the palm sugar, but it's also possible glutinous rice dough with any sugar in it is just like that. If you decide to try making them for yourself, let me know if yours turn out more manageable? The results were amazing regardless. I don't usually eat four or five fried anything unless it's some kind of crustacean or mollusc.
If there can be dream-eating tapirs, maybe there can be shop vacs that suck up ... suckiness. They sound like demigods worth offering to.
Actually, I think I've met one of those. I find the baku more endearing, but the shop vac was damn good at eating ghosts.
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I don't know why Medusa shouldn't cook. So long as she doesn't catch her reflection in a polished pan or running water as she does the dishes, she should be fine. And it is a kind of discipline, and she must have something to occupy her in her years on that island, and maybe it doesn't matter if no one else ever tastes what she makes.
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The sesame seed balls sound delicious.
An immersion blender is the most entertaining kitchen appliance I've encountered in years
Aren't they? I find it a very convenient thing--not as versatile as a mixer, perhaps, but handy for jobs like blending coconut cream with Cholula sauce, allspice, and cinnamon for baking sweet potatoes in. And the clean-up is refreshingly straightforward.
Ray Harryhausen is gone. The last movie of his I saw was It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)...
RIP.
It sounds as if I should see that film, sometime. I had it confused with the movie about the carnivorous (?!) sauropod-thing that came out of the sea, which I regret because it sounds greatly superior.
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Everything we've made from Nguyen's recipes has been delicious, but these were kind of ridiculous in how thoroughly professional they looked when we were done, notwithstanding that we both knew very well we'd just spent the last hour swearing like sailors in a proverb.
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Wow, sounds yummy! If a lot of work.Indeed. It does not, however, do a very good job of making whipped cream, and if you try, it tends to leave a sizable fraction of the kinda-sorta-whipped cream all over your kitchen walls. Ask
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(Thank you. I think there's been a lot of that going around!)
Wow, sounds yummy! If a lot of work.
In the immortal words of Grunkle Stan: "Worth it!"
and if you try, it tends to leave a sizable fraction of the kinda-sorta-whipped cream all over your kitchen walls. Ask plumtreeblossom and me how we know this.
Heee. Before
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but the shop vac was damn good at eating ghosts --well done, shop vac!
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Fantastic! We haven't made that one.
(It looks pretty awesome, though. Maybe we should.)
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