Further Adventures in Cooking with Cat Ears

[sorcyress]

So I sez to Ria, I sez "should I make candied lemon slices tonight"

"The better question is why aren't you?" she replies, which is a valid enough thing to ask.

I'm honest to Ria. So she probably wasn't surprised by my response: "Because I'm laaaaaazy"

However, Ria is a wonderful roommate, and has no truck with that. An immediate response: "PUT ON YOUR HIGH HEELS AND GET IN THE KITCHEN"⁰

...
...
...

So I put on my high heels and get in the kitchen. I mean, what else can you do at that point? I have a recipe, an apron, and high heels. And for completeness, I put on a string of pearls. And a pair of cat ears.

This is apparently becoming a trend in my world. I don't know how to feel about that.


Ears, pearls, and heels. Do you know how hard it is to get a picture with both your feet and ears in the same shot? outtake here

So, first step of any good cooking adventure is to gather ingredients. No wait, we went through this already. First step is to wash hands, zeroth step is to PUT ON SOME AWESOME MUSIC (Next to Normal? it has that fifties housewife zen while being crazy enough to keep up with me).

Now that all that's done, we can find ingredients.


W-wait, seriously? That's it? That and water is all the food stuff required? This recipe is awesome!

Don't expect that to make this post any shorter than the last one.

Next step: Find all the pieces that aren't edible. This means excuse to use my FUCK YES knife. I approve of basically any recipe that includes that excuse.


Seriously. This recipe involves _this little_.

...this does not make me any less fretfilled.

Anyways, real first step is slicing me some lemons

OKAY THIS ISN'T WORKING.

So, the instructions tell you you want thin slices, and you get those by using something with a bit of thickness as cutting guides. Theoretically chopsticks work. Except, apparently I am supposed to have three hands. Which leads me to believe I'm not doing a very good job of making slices. This means it is time for CAREFUL SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS, because the opposite of fear is data¹.

...oh. Apparently I am not holding the lemon flat to the cutting board. That'll do it. Let's try again!


You know what? FUCK THIS PLAN. I will have slightly thicker slices of lemon and you can DEAL WITH IT.


Yeah, okay, this worked basically infinitely better at the "getting actual round slices of lemons things. I feel much better.

Next step! Boil a couple cups of water! Toss the lemons in! Blanche!

....Blanche?

OHWAIT! I almost forgot the important step: WASH AND DRY THE GOOD KNIFE. Because otherwise we are not allowed to have nice things.

Anyways, where was I? Oh right. Blancheing.

Ice water? This recipe just got twice as complicated. The sad part is that I'm not even exaggerating that badly. Anyways, while I'm waiting for the blanching water to boil (seriously blanche, is that even a real word?) might as well clean the cutting board.


DON'T YOU FUCKING DARE JUDGE ME. What the hell did you think would happen when I had to make a recipe involving fresh lemons? Lemons are basically the MOST DELICIOUS FOOD EVER.

Also if you lick enough lemon juice off a cutting board it makes your tongue feel all tingly. Just saying. Wow. That's...that's intense actually. I might have to stop this. But there's still lemon juice on there...

...you _really_ don't want to know what I was doing for the five minutes while I was blanching the lemons. Actually, I take that back. You probably really do want to know. I just _really_ don't want to tell you.

Anyways, now to mix a fuck-ton of sugar in with some boiling water. A lot of my lemons died (unfortunately) because they were crappy lemon slices, sliced by someone who is a crappy lemon slicer. So as an experiment, I am re-using the boiling water with lemon in it (instead of clean boiling water SCANDAL) to see if that helps. And now I go put a couple cups of sugar into that pot.

Blah blah blah, so much stirring, okay. Bring water to a low boil and then simmer for an...fuck.

To the googles! Tell me googles! What is "simmer"

Oh. Well. That was actually quite helpful. Anyways, as soon as it boils, I do that for an hour. Then I drain the lemons (saving the magical lemon-sugar-water mixture for...nefarious purposes I haven't determined yet) and put the lemons out to dry.

So, here's the skinny: I don't think I'm gonna get a lot out of this one. My slicing was too erratic --you really need whole rounds, any of the half or 3/4 slices I made (lots) didn't really survive the blanching. I think I went too thin, which is not usually my problem when cooking.

That being said, aforementioned lemon-sugar-water? OHMYGOD, does it smell good, and it hasn't even simmered for an hour yet. I'm pretty much entirely okay with this plan. And I think I will have enough candied lemon slices to give one to me, Nurit (the finder of the recipe) and Pi (in exhange for pie).

Alright, simmer time! It's 1:09 in the morning. I'm gonna type up my words and send some e-mail, and then get back to this. Ohwait! Hangon, first this:


As you can see, there's a couple workable slices in there, and mostly glop. We'll see how well it does.

Also as you can see, my pot has a giant dent in it. It came like that, and we don't actually own that many pots, so I suffer so.

Okay, it's 1:44. There are actually some small effects happening to the lemon slices, which is reassuring. I am still more confident that this recipe will fail, and yet somehow very non-fretty about this.

Maybe because I'm trying to candy lemon slices, and I don't know how to cook. I'm pretty sure candying things is like, at least cooking 302 or something. I myself have flunked out of the 101 class, and they have sent me back to remedial cooking school. It's very unfortunate.

Okay! I have taken them out of the boiling water and put them onto the cookie rack, where they will dry for a while.


...yep. That's it. A few measly slices and mostly rinds of lemons. But you wanna know what? I put one of those rindy bits into my mouth and ate it.

A DOUBLE PLUS WOULD EAT AGAIN!

So, Obviously the next time I do this (which honestly might wind up being within the next week, since we still have fresh lemons) I need to slice it thicker and make more consistent round slices. Although the bits of rind are pretty damn good, and surprisingly gummy.

And as an aside?


That is not maple syrup. (It is also not delicious boozamahol, stop thinking it.) That is what happens when you throw sugar, lemons, and water into a pot and let it boil for an hour.

I am pretty sure I am going to make crepes and put it on them, having reached the lemon-sugar singularity. Until I get to that, this is going in everything I eat or drink for the next week. Because I have tried little bits of it and it? Is delicious.


So I'm calling this experiment a reserved success. I need practise slicing, and next time I should use a lot more lemon, but look! I candied something. Those ridiculously good gummy candies that I would eat SEVEN HUNDRED of if I could? Yeah, I can _make those now_.

The world is mine.

~Sor
MOOP!

0: I feel I shouldn't have to say this, because you lot are clever people, but just in case: Ria is not actually a raging misogynist. Her and I say terrible things to each other, because laughing at the terrible shit makes it feel just the slightest bit better sometimes.

1: For more details, see the study "jere7my is not down with the sickness", 2011.

And in case you were wondering, the recipe I used is here

Comments

[persis]

I always thought candied citrus was mostly rind... what I remember from being a kid was some relative giving it as Christmas gifts. These sound really yummmy! When I get my kitchen back, I'll have to try them. Thanks for the reminder that I do like candied things. :-)

[mogwit.livejournal.com]

I am really enjoying reading about your adventures in cooking.
Regarding 101/302: I think for cooking and knitting and other make-y-type things, the best way to learn how is to make things you want to make. Which you're doing. So keep doing it. (The first thing I learned how to bake was pie. It took me years to master rice. And I can cook lots of gud fud now.)

[kdsorceress.livejournal.com]

Aww, thank you.

Making the things I want to make is serving as a delightful incentive. It does however mean that I will never get around to learning how to cook meat, because I'm just not that interested in it most of the time.

~Sor

[macaroniandtuna.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure the trick to using a chopstick as a cutting guide is that you need more than one, that way the knife lays flat and parallel to the cutting surface. Tape them to the cutting board so they don't move and you don't need 15 hands.

[blaisepascal]

But chopsticks aren't flat, so you'd get a tapered slice that way.

I think a mandolin would be the best tool for this job. I wonder though, if you affixed the chopsticks to the table, then fixed the knife to the chopsticks so the edge was towards the point (so the blade tapers up) could you get a mandolin-like cutting action to work?

[macaroniandtuna.livejournal.com]

This is true. I guess I was more commenting on the principle, that having only one [height guide] makes it harder to maintain a consistent angle of knife vs. two, where you can just lay the knife flat instead of having to fiddle with it.

[kdsorceress.livejournal.com]

I don't own a mandolin.

Cheap chopsticks are flat enough. And just slicing them works perfectly fine in the first place.

~Sor

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

Not all chopsticks taper -- I have some that are the same thickness for most of their length. Chinese ones are more likely to be like this than Japanese ones.

[kdsorceress.livejournal.com]

...I used two!

I thought about taping them down, but decided it wasn't worth it. It was a lot easier to use my knife as a measurement -the blade does not touch the counter when the handle of the knife lies flat.

~Sor

[macaroniandtuna.livejournal.com]

Ah. Now that I look, I see that your knife has a fairly thick handle. Maybe it's just a practice-makes-perfect thing then.

[jannyblue.livejournal.com]

Hmm... I've always had better luck chopping off the "pointy" ends, then halving the lemon (for stability) and cutting them into wedges, like you would for the kinds of lemon wedges you put in tea... (though I would slice them thinner than that, like 16ths instead of 8ths.)

Much easier to do it that way, because the lemon doesn't slide around, and it can be done with a paring knife.

Flavor won't be affected, though I generally use oranges because I like those a little better.

[kdsorceress.livejournal.com]

Ooo. Doing wedges might be a good way too. I thought about it, but wanted to make sure I followed the recipe exactly the first time, before experimenting.

I'm debating doing a big batch sometime of lemons + oranges + limes. I don't know if it'll affect the flavour negatively to toss them all into the same pot, though.

~Sor

[mogwit.livejournal.com]

I bet they would taste sort of mixed up and Generically Citrusy. Also, keep in mind that oranges have a higher sugar content than lemons or limes.

[tacnukesoul.livejournal.com]

Though I know you don't drink - well, much anyway, but the uncut picture makes it look like you're getting your "My Drunk Kitchen" on: http://hartoandco.com/my-drunk-kitchen/

[hermitgeecko.livejournal.com]

Did those five undescribed minutes cause pain, or just tingliness?

[minibusy]

Anyways, while I'm waiting for the blanching water to boil (seriously blanche, is that even a real word?) might as well clean the cutting board.

Funnily, that's the third meaning I learned (over time) for "blanche." The first I ever heard of the word was because it's the name of the command-line tool to manage MIT mailing lists. That tool (and some other related tools) is named after a character in "A Streetcar Named Desire".

Later, someone in one of my student groups created a blanche wrapper called "parboile," a word which I was also unfamiliar with, and at that point, I learned what "blanche" in the cooking sense was. ("parboile" also turns out to be a cooking term.)

[dualangel.livejournal.com]

Katt in Cat ears? =O