The hard way

As with most things in life, there is a hard way and an easy way to learn new things when cooking. Tonight, I learned the hard way that parchment paper and waxed paper are not the same thing.

But wait, you say, they look the same.

Wrong!

Wax paper is covered in…wax! Which when you put it in the oven…melts! All over the Martha Stewart brownies you spent an hour slaving over a double boiler for!

I attempted a rescue by scooping out the batter from the insides of the pan and transferring to an 8×8 dish. We’ll see how this turns out.

UPDATE: The brownies burned a little on the bottom, but based on initial tests, appear not to taste like crayons. I’m counting it as a victory.

Weddings, Peaches, & Wegman’s

I’m 28, which means that some significant portion of my weekends in the summer is devoted to celebrating the unions of friends and family. Happily, this summer, many of these weddings have featured delicious food (melt-in-your-mouth beef, tomato salads, potato salad, milkshakes(!), etc.), which partially explains a desire to cook these last few weeks.

That, and the access to good shopping on the way home from said weddings. Last weekend, Dan and I stopped at a farm stand on the way home from a wedding in West Virginia and each bought a bushel of stone peaches. Hundreds of peaches that were ripe and sweet and awesome. I gave half to my mom, but still found myself with an unbelievable quantity of peaches to do something with on a pretty tight timeline. I perused some blogs and cookbooks and determined that peaches could be frozen and pseudo-canned, both of which I attempted with an uncertain degree of success. I now have two gallon sized bags of frozen, lightly sweetened peach slices in my freezer and two large mason jars of peeled peach halves in light syrup in the fridge.

Tonight I cooked down some of the canned peaches in syrup to eat with yogurt for breakfast. I also tossed some rolled oats in a tupperware with buttermilk, goat’s milk, a pinch of cardamom, and some syrup from the canned peaches in the hopes that it will make a Swedish-style muesli for the morning.

This weekend, I was in Chicago for Liz and Dave’s wedding. On my way home from Dulles, my dad introduced me to the wonder of Wegman’s, land of…everything. We stopped, I shopped, and came home laden with meats, veg, bulk nuts, and a Revlon brow wax pencil that Dell introduced me to over the weekend (apparently I hadn’t gotten the memo that we now have to start obsessing about the tint of our brows. But hey–the brows looked good in photographs! Did I mention it’s the land of everything?).

So in a cooking frenzy, I made:

-Sauteed baby spinach with olive oil and garlic

-Broiled chicken with herb rub (garlic, parsley, lemon peel, salt, slid under the skin before cooking) and roasted veg (a la Judith Jones, though it took more than an hour instead of the promised 35 minutes, and I’m still not sure the breasts are cooked all the way through. I may resort to the microwave to avoid death by salmonella.)

So this week I’ll be looking for creative things to do with cooked chicken for lunch and dinner. I’m dreaming of the happy union of chunks of roasted chicken, Hellman’s, celery, s&p, and maybe some bits of peach.

Artichoke

In which I read recipes for cooking artichokes and become frustrated. Who has time to prepare a cold water bath with the juice of two lemons?

Sauteed artichoke for one or two

• Prepare artichoke by slicing off stem and taking about an inch off the top. Trim rough outer leaves. Rub with lemon juice to prevent discoloration.
• Halve the ‘choke. Cut out sharp fuzzies. Rub cut surface with lemon.
• In a medium pan, heat a hearty splash of olive oil until very hot.
• Place artichokes face down in oil. Cook until brown.
• Add about 1/4 in. of water. Cover. Steam until tender, 20 minutes or so.
• Eat with lemon butter, on a weeknight, because you can.