Japanese Sweet Potato and Carrot Gnocchi in Sage Butter

I've officially been home for a week. I've spent the majority of it sleeping in, watching How I Met Your Mother, the I.T. Crowd and Sherlock, and eating ice cream. Not only is this a hard-earned lazyness (3.8 gpa this semester whatup), but also I was disentangling myself from my crazy addiction to caffeine. It sucked, and was basically like a period but worse, so I gave myself license to laze around and be miserable.


Now that things are better and I no longer have headaches all day, I figured I'd start pitching in around the house. Doing dishes and all that. 


I stumbled upon this recipe and decided to make it for my family, but the road was paved with disaster and mishap! But it was okay because today was the first not-rainy day since I've been home.

The only sweet potatoes at the grocery were Japanese Sweet Potatoes.
I figured they were the same as regular sweet potatoes.

WRONG. They are not orange, but potato colored inside. 

They are also very dry and starchy, like already dehydrated mashed potatoes.
I added water to in order to rehydrate them.

Pureeing them with steamed carrots did the trick!

Adding flour.

Flour is essential in the making of these babies, so that the dough isn't too sticky, and so the gnochi doesn't fall apart in the cooking process. The sad truth of the matter is that the more Flour you add, the less the dough will taste like sweet potato. I made a few gnocchi with only a  small amount of flour. They didn't cook well, and totally dissolved into soft gummy blobs, but they were much tastier than the ones with more flour.

As the dough formed, chunks of carrot emerged. Tasty.

Gnocchinis!

This was only half o the dough.

I took a mojito break. Also this book is awesome. 

Butt Pats

  Overall, fried in butter and covered in cheese, these babies were fantastic. But on their own, they were a little too gummy. I'm not sure what I could do to perfect them. Maybe I will consult with a non-vegan, non-sweet potato recipe. I did have a lot of fun making this dish, as it forced me to improvise. 

Japanese Sweet Potato and Carrot Gnocchi in Sage Butter


2 pounds Japanese sweet potatoes (about 2 large ones. Yields 2.5 cups of potato)
1 cup chopped carrot
dash cinnamon
dash nutmeg
dash salt
2.5 - 3 cups flour
1/2 stick of butter
sage leaves
pine nuts


Because Japanese sweet potatoes are so much drier than regular sweet potatoes, the best way to cook them is by microwave. 
Pierce the potatoes and microwave them for about 6 minutes each.
After letting them sit a little bit to cool down, cut them in half and scoop out the insides into a large-ish bowl. mash, add a little water to incorporate it, then cover and chill for a bit. 


Meanwhile, peel your carrots and cut them in to uniform pieces. Then steam them. I under-steamed them, which you should not do. Steam the heck out of those babies.


Put your carrots and potato mash in a food processor and add your spices.
Turn the processor on and slowly add about a half cup of water, until everything is well incorporated and smooth. 


Transfer your mixture to a large bowl and start adding flour a half cup at a time. It gets tough, but never fear.


Cut your dough in to small, fist sized sections, and roll them out on a floured surface one at a time. Make about half inch to an inch thick snakes, then cut into half inch pieces. roll them, and mark them with a fork.


Cover them until you cook them. If you're waiting a while to make them, put them in a container in the fridge.


When you're going to eat them, cook them in boiling water for about 5 minutes. Meanwhile, melt your butter in a pan and start crisping your pine nuts and sage. When your Gnocchi is done, drain them, and then put them in your frying pan. Set the heat for medium high and cook them for 10-20 minutes, or until they are sufficiently browned.


Serve with lots of cheese.

I just had a revelation

This is my last night in the Quiet Room at the library for at least eight months.

Puffs for my Prof.

I'm obsessed.

Today is the day I have the last meeting for my hastily thrown together independent study, for which my Prof. has decided not to give me a final paper (just in time! I can't even write one paper, let alone two. In other news,  research papers drive me crazy.)


Anyway, in lieu of a paper, I made cream puffs for my Professor. This time I used a different recipe, because I wanted them to look like this:

For some reason my puffs just don't puff that much. 

However, this recipe calls for about twice the butter as the other recipe I used.

AKA they are so crunchy and SO GOOD.

I used a syringe with the tip cut off to fill them, because I do not have any fancy pastry filling tools.

Here's the Nutella Syringe. It got overwhelmed near the end and the plunger broke off.

Here is my triumphant batch of puffs, full of Nutella
There is no pretty way to fill a pastry, apparently. 

In conclusion, I love making cream puffs. I just need to figure out how to make them puffier! 

Recipe from the Brown Eyed Baker.

Not to brag, but...

I totally figured out the secret to making cream puffs. Just look at these bad boys!

Maybe a little burnt, but definitely puffy

Even they are excited for me! Or maybe they just look like T-Rex heads

The secret, as I suspected, has to do with boiling the water butter mixture. It starts to fizz/froth up, which was the cue for baking magic to happen. I still need to get better and shaping these. the first few blobs happens because I tried to pipe them, but cut too big of a hole in my piping bag. Oops. 


Oh well, I get to try again tomorrow, and they'll be even better! I'll be making them for a professor in lieu of a paper... definitely a good trade.


Recipe from Smitten Kitchen

Why do seagulls fly over the sea?

Because if they flew over they bay, they'd be bagels (bay-gulls). GET IT.


Today, my house received it's res-life style finals survival kit, including all the fixings to make some bagels. I decided to accept the challenge because the recipe looked fairly easy. I'll reproduce it here because I couldn't find anything like it online. 


These bagels are pretty dense, but they're small too, so you can eat a couple of them.

My little bagel babies are done rising.

Bagels

That's right, BAGELS.

Finals Distraction Bagels

4 cups flour

2 tsp salt

1/4 cup sugar

1 1/2 cups water

1/2 tsp active dry yeast

1 egg

sesame seeds, poppy seeds or sea salt.

combine flour, salt and sugar in a large bowl. combine yeast with water, then pour water in to dry mixture, but not all at once.

Take off any of the rings you might be wearing, then knead the dough until it's combined. It will be stiff, but that's okay. 

cover the dough and let it sit for 10 minutes. after 10 minutes it will be a lot easeir to knead. knead some more until its a smooth ball, then cover and let rise for another 10 minuets.

roll your dough in to a log, then cut off even-sized chunks. Roll each chunk in to a thin snake, and pinch/twist the ends together to form a bagel. do this with all of the dough, then over with a clean towel for an hour and a half.

15 minutes before your hour and a half is up, preheat the oven to 425F and put a large pot of water to boil.

boil the bagels for about 30 seconds each, then fish them out and place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment.  

brush the bagels with some egg (which you will have whisked beforehand) and then sprinkle each bagel with the topping of your choice. I'm actually a big fan of just a dash of salt.

Bake the bagels for 15 minutes, then flip them around and bake for another 10 minutes. 

let them cool a little, then eat with cream cheese or whatever.

Let's just not talk about this.

So what was supposed to turn out like this...

Turned out like this...

and this.

Needless to say, it was pretty frustrating. Smitten Kitchen, how could you do this to me? They looked so simple....


So, welcome to my new obsession. 

I just had possibly the best evening of my Whitman career (at least in my recent memory), and it's not even midnight!


So... I'm pretty happy. Just sharing.


Here is a picture of a very nice cat that I met, though it looks fairly disgruntled here.

[Ba]king [Br]ead

I posted a facebook status last night that read:

I just have no sense of priorities. Baking bread is so much more important to me than doing homework right now.

My friend responded:

Read this as "Breaking Bad is so much more..." then realized I read it wrong and was sad. 

He then proceeded to post a picture of a Breaking Bad promo. This is what I responded (because I just had to). 

All photoshop done in paint, because I'm really cool.

The "Easiest" "Bread" "Recipe" Ever.

So, I decided that since I only had one class this morning, I would attempt some more bread. I didn't have time to wait for things to rise, though, so I attempted this recipe I found which excitedly claims that it is the EASIEST BREAD RECIPE EVER. It literally tells you how fucking great it is as a caption to every picture. 

I will tell you right now that this is a big fat lie.

Putting it together is super easy. Flour, baking powder, seeds, and club soda. It's easy and vegan? How could it go wrong?

My guess is that the lack of yeast led to my baking hell.

For starters, the oven temperature is in centigrade. What. Luckily, I caught it, and adjusted the temperature of my oven accordingly.  

Here is what the recipe says about baking. 

Bake at 200 degree C for 45-50 minutes till the toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

So, I bake it for 50 minutes, then take it out, excitedly waiting for it to cool. Then I try to pry it out of the pan, and after minutes of struggle, it slides out revealing a severely under-cooked bottom. Shit. A fork in the center does not come out clean. Shit. 


I'm caught. Obeying the directions means baking it for 50 minutes, but it also means that my bread should be well baked in the center after that. I decide to bake it some more.

I bake it at 400 degrees for increments of 5 minutes, for probably another hour (at least that's what it feels like). It DOES NOT get cooked in the middle. I give up. You can see what happened next.

Here it is when I finally give up. Looks good, right?

WRONG. It is mocking me.
"HAHAHA" thinks the bread monster.

The bottom is a little less undercooked by now.

But it's still doughy inside.

In addition to the horribly doughy inside, the crust is ROCK HARD.
It even bested our sharpest serrated knife.

I basically stab at it for a while, attempting to get a "slice"

The wreckage

 So, I butter some pieces, but it's pretty awful. It's only saving graces is that it tastes like sesame seeds, which I have a sentimental attachment to. However, even butter can't save it. It's awful. 

The moral of the story is that this bread is terrible. Maybe if I had made little buns or something the inside would have gotten more cooked, but from now on I'm going to stick to yeasted bread when it comes to loafs.