sweet potato bread

So, it's Thanksgiving, and my friend invites me to her pot luck dinner slash bike ride. I'm going to be taking a bus there, so I need to make a thing that can get survive a ride in a backpack and doesn't have to be piping hot. I'm going to be representing myself to a bunch of people I don't know, so what's my best option? Clearly, it is to make that bread I conceived based on loose thoughts a week ago. An experiment. If it goes wrong, I've nothing to show for myself. I'm a bad planner. Also exemplary of this is that I opt to not even shop until Thanksgiving morning.

I get up and run down the street to the grocery store and grab most of what I need. Everything, in fact, except the pumpkin, which they seem to be out of, and the muffin papers, which I know I can get at the dollar store. I swing by the dollar store, and they don't have any pumpkin either. I'm so distraught that I fail to get papers there, too.

When I get home I sit in my kitchen for a while. What else can I use that will be delicious like pumpkin and play the egg's roles in my bread rolls? I ponder for a while, and then notice the sweet potatoes in a bag on the table, "Surely," I think, "anything I can do with a pumpkin I can also do with a sweet potato."

Thus, the experiment begins.





I can't provide you with a ton of information on this sucker, as I hardly use measuring devices. Here's a stab, though:

A couple cups of flour, a tiny dash of chipotle, maybe two teaspoons of baking powder, a palmful of salt, a teaspoon or two of cinnamon, and half that of ginger. I also threw in a small can of corn. I'd put in the rest of the pumpkin pie spice collection, but I don't have it. Toss it together, then throw in a stick of margarine, three mashed sweet potatoes, two chopped jalapenos, a quarter of a cup of brown sugar, some vanilla, and enough maple syrup to get stuff wet. Mix, put into a container, and bake at 350 until it comes out clean.





My bread came out a bit more spicy and a bit more sweet than I wanted it to. It was still good, though. And vegan. My desire for less spice and sweetness is reflected in the recipe above.

A Quick Mini-Post

A friend just asked me for my lasagna recipe. I make a pretty dope lasagna. I don't have a recipe, though, I mostly cook off the top of my head, and so I emailed her a stream of consciousness recipe. I'm mostly putting it here so I don't send it off into the ether and lose it forever. not that I really need it. But, you know, maybe someone will benefit someday.



Lasagna. Big noodles, you boil them. You put down a layer of noodles,
and then a layer of ricotta cheese (or cottage, since LA has no
ricotta, or you could make some kind of tofu-y vegan crap). Sauce on
top of that, some kind of red sauce, buy it or make it, and then
vegetables. I don't like carrots in lasagna. Spinach is great. Boil it
for a second first. Just a second, though. Or use frozen, and thaw it
first. Broccoli is great. Olives, if you're into that. Leafy things do
well, and things that can be cut big and thin. Oh, and onions. I
usually put a ton of garlic in my sauce, also. I love it. You could
put a leek in the veggie stage, too, if you want to blow up the
alliums. Trifecta, right? After vegetables comes a pile of cheese.
Mozzarella. A ton. You can mix in something sharper, too, if you want,
but the mozzarella's pretty crucial. Look for veg rennet, or don't, if
you don't care. Then repeat, starting again with noodles. I like to do
at least three iterations, but also I stack thick, so I generally end
up with a wicked tall lasagna. Most people go for shorter and wider,
with thinner (or more "reasonable") layers. Make sure you end with
pasta on top, and then cheese. That means my last three layers are
cheese, pasta, cheese, but you can skip the first of those cheeses if
you choose. I'm not a healthy cook. I'm a comfort food cook. Oh, also,
it's nice to make your own noodles, if you have an extra twenty
minutes. Lasagna noodles are the easiest to make, because they're all
big and lumpy anyway. You just need some flour and an egg and a little
bit of water and salt. You can pretty much guess how to get from here
to there. I'd use white whole-wheat flour, but I use that for
everything. Once you've conglomerated, you bake. Your guess is as good
as mine, here. Maybe 350? Check it at forty-five, and then every seven
or eight minutes after that.

BB+B - "Jim: Foreign Correspondant" Edition

Hi. I'm in Los Angeles right now, which means no home cooked goodness with the boys. It means that mostly I get by eating microwaved taquitos from Trader Joe's.





However, tooling around on the internet, I found this, and was intrigued. She lays out a simple two-ingredient cake. I know, generally I'm dead-set against boxed mixes, but right now I don't have money to make food, so a baked good on the cheap cheap is better than none at all. It hurt me a little to do it, believe me. However, the woman who wrote that post lives in a world where Martinelli's Gold Medal 100% Pure Cider isn't an unachievable luxury. Not to even mention a stand mixer. I fantasize about stand mixers in the way men are supposed to fantasize about threesomes with hot blonde twins. So I decided to take this sucker one step further and make a two dollar cake.





I ran on down to my local 99Cents Only Store and grabbed the least gross looking can of pumpkin and a box of seemingly unbranded spice cake mix ("Country Value" indeed). The directions are simple, plop and mix.





I separated my cake out into two pans (everything here in LA is Corning) in the name of being classy. You can do that how you like. I threw them into a 350 degree oven for around twenty-three minutes.





I didn't have a toothpick to check for doneness with, so I used a chopstick. Such is the life of those who care not about appearances. I took the cakes right out of the oven and stacked them onto a much nicer plate than my cake deserved, neglected to frost or ice or glaze in any way, cut out a slice and ate it.





On an aside, that's my favorite fork in LA, right there, which, if you know me at all, is weird. I'm normally a pretty die hard three-tine man, but that guy right there just has such a beautiful heft to it.

The cake is pretty solid. Great for two dollars. There's lots of room for improvement, though. Ken (my roommate here) was eating it with butter on it and suggested putting a can of corn and some cayenne pepper in it.


So here, after a brief moment of thought (that's a lie, I'm totally making this up as I type it) is a totally untested recipe based on the fact that pumpkin is the new banana and still one of my favorite things in the world:


Jim's As-Yet Untried Ultimate Thanksgiving-Style Pumpkin Dinner Muffins (YES!)
(also, if you do this, you should tweak it)
(also also, this is vegan)

You will need:
one can of pumpkin
2 1/2 cups of white(ish) flour
1/2 cup of cornmeal
maybe a palmful of arrowroot or cornstarch or something
one stick of margarine (or whatever you prefer)
one and a half tablespoons of baking soda (I use Rumsford because there's no Aluminum in it)
1 tablespoon of vanilla (good stuff)
1/2 cup maple syrup
also 1/4 to 1/2 cup of dark brown sugar (if not, serve with honey, which might actually be the better option)
1/2 cup of corn kernels if you want (I don't usually dig on that)
1 or 2 chopped up jalapenos (only if there're corn kernels, I think)
sure, some cayenne
maybe 1/2 a teaspoon each of nutmeg, clove, and allspice
1 teaspoon of cinnamon

That seems good, right? Mix that stuff the way you know it wants to be mixed: the dries, add butter, mix in the wets, mess it all up with a fork. Then I'd put it into some buttered (or paper cupped) muffin tins, but I'd keep it pretty low. You don't want big old muffin sized dinner rolls. You want little graceful delicious pumpkin doobers. Bake them at 350, check at like fifteen, and then every few after that.

Probably all of you with stocked kitchens should get on that and tell me how it goes. Tell me your variations and how they came out.

Much love.


I didn't listen to anything while I was baking this because I'm not set up to do so here. Sad.

Sweet Potato Burrito - mini post

It's a natural thing, Texas being Texas, that there's a version of Mexican food here that only exists here. Tex-Mex. Texas is pretty special. We put a little twist on Tex-Mex by swapping out any of a million things that might be in this burrito for sweet potato.







While we were cooking this we were listening to: various works by Ennio Morricone.

Banyan Empire Spicy Noodle Soup

The Banyan Empire (which climaxed in the late 14th century) was famous for its adventurers, and one of the treasures they brought back to the Greater Mekong Subregion was spicy peppers. The emperors were very excited, and they used them carefully and just for their most bombastic celebrations. Fortunately, we can get hot peppers anywhere, and make a celebratory noodle soup when anything even mildly exciting happens.

"Huzzah! We have half a zucchini left!"





We used:
1/2 of a zucchini
1 onion
a bunch of garlic
several stalks of collard greens
soy sauce
hoisin sauce
the hot salsa from the Tamale House
three pads of wheat noodles


Chop and sautee your vegetables. Dump water into your pan. Add noodles. Add spices or sauces. Rejoice. Consume.





While we were cooking this we were singing: part of Kool and the Gang's "Jungle Boogie" over and over again.

Cratchett's Slivered Beef

We decided tonight to go for an old southern favorite: Cratchett's slivered beef. Story goes that this was invented by R. Brandeis Cratchett, proprietor of Cratchett's Travis County Beef Farm around the turn of the century. It's a meal of slivered beef and carrots mixed with some shaved pork and potatoes. It's traditionally served with bread and mashed potatoes. We spent some time thinking, though, and figured that was too much potato for us, so we swapped the potato in the beef out for green beans, and then because Jim is a vegetarian, we traded our beef and pork for apples and pears. Also, due to Adam's theories on the balancing of appropriate flavors, we decided to go with mashed sweet potatoes rather than the standard. We finished our plate out with a good chunk of french bread.





Our recipe:

3 average sized sweet potatoes
3 carrots
2 good handfuls of green beans
1 apple (we used gala)
1 pear (we used bartlett)
sliced cheese
1 loaf of french bread





Cut your sweet potatoes into small cubes and toss them into boiling water, then ignore them for a while. Matchstick your carrots, apple, and pear, then begin to sautee the carrots and green beans. When the potatoes are getting soft, toss the apple and pear into the sautee pan, mix, and top with cheese. Drain the water from your sweet potatoes and mash (we used a beer bottle for authenicity). Dish each generously onto a plate, rip off a hunk of bread for the side, and serve.








While we were cooking this we were listening to: Van McCoy's "Disco Baby".

El Perrito Suerte

Today we made a traditional Nicaraguan dish, el perrito suerte.



It was a basic meat and potatoes style breakfast dish for working class Nicaraguans up until the 1920s when it fell out of favor due to a shortage of eggs. We've made a vegetarian version (still with eggs, though), and a version with chorizo sausage, which is a bourgeois touch. An upper class merchant might have added a sausage such as this, which is probably due to Spanish influence.


Our recipe:
2 1/4 cup of rice (cooked)
4 eggs (juevos)
1/3 cup milk (we used soymilk)
sliced cheese (traditionally unmelted queso de cabra selva)
chorizo (if desired)

Begin to fry your eggs in a hot pan, and before they congeal, throw in the rice and milk. Stir frequently. When eggs are cooked, part out onto plates and place the cheese and sausage artfully atop the pile. Salt and pepper to taste.






While we were cooking this we were listening to: Funkadelic's "Connections & Disconnections".