Born For This

I’ve been subjected to some sort of Divine joke.

No, really.

I’ve met the love of my life, my other half, my soul mate, the man who is all the gushy things that I didn’t really believe in.  And for this, I am grateful. Astonished might be a better word, or maybe freaked-the-f-out.

Grateful.

Part of this joke is that, despite my firm vow never to deal with long-distance relations lasting longer than 3 weeks, he is not here right now.  The total time we will be apart will be between 7 and 9 weeks; in the three weeks that have passed so far, I have made a total jealous, immature ass of myself twice.

However, as another part of this joke I get to learn how to love on him from more than 900 miles away while difficult things are going on in his life.  I am a pro at lavishing love on people from within a few dozen miles, but 900 is tough.  Every day I’m facing down the reminders of my failures during my last long-distance endeavors (my heart barely lasted 3 weeks, despite our history…but I made myself stick it out for almost 20 before I told him. Can I get partial credit for being 12 years younger than I am now?) and hoping that I am a wiser, stronger person who can really be dedicated to this amazing love that has found me.

So I am loving on him with nearly every possible form of electronic communications.  I love on him all day with text messages, I try to stifle my desperate (immature, jealous) longings for him in the e-mails that I send a few times a week, and at night I gladly suffer the staticky tin-can hell of his skype-iphone torture or, more joyfully, spend as many starry-eyed minutes as I can gazing at him through the glory of video chat.

But I’m always one to try to outdo myself, and it is the holiday season, after all (though, isn’t it always some holiday season in the states now?  I mean, really), so last week I blew my budget at the grocery store and got to cooking for him. This is the point at which I should have checked customs requirements for the place where he finds himself these days, but the heart cares not for such bureaucracies.

I had already composed the contents of the box while visiting my best friend a week or two prior:

• margarita truffles (procedure below)
• caramel corn with sea salt, almonds, and cacao nibs (a mod of Guas’s recipe as published here – sub in chopped almonds for the peanuts, add about 1/2 cup cacao nibs, salt the caramel with about 1 T of sea salt or more, to taste)
• Abuelita-dusted marshmallows (this recipe, using the vanilla bean option, and adding to the coating 1/2 tablet of Abuelita that I powdered using a grater)
• World Peace cookies (they did not make it into the cooking schedule, but that is good given the customs issues!)

First, I made some lime sea salt: spread a layer of good sea salt (just like Ina would say!) – I used Maldon – on parchment and sprinkle with the zest of 1 lime and the juice of 1/2 lime (about 3 teaspoons, tops).  I don’t know how much salt I started with, about enough to cover 2/3 of a 1/4 sheet pan, so maybe 1/3 cup?  I made too much, for reference, but this ish is good. Mix it all together with your fingertips and leave it to dry for at least an hour.  I put mine under the light breeze of a ceiling fan because I am impatient as f*ck.

Next, I made the ganache for the above truffles so that it would have time to set. About 2 cups of chopped 60% chocolate (I used El Rey but I found it a little grainy in the coating) met up with 1/3 cup+ of excellent tequila, a splash of grand marnier, and about 3/4 cup of hot cream; they were all combined and went into the refrigerator to get their act together. This made a pretty loose ganache, but I like a creamy truffle.

Then, like a wizard, I put the gelatin in the Kitchen Aid to set up, popped  10 18 – whoops – cups of corn on the stove, and cooked the marshmallow and caramel syrups simultaneously while forgetting that I had only one candy thermometer.

We made it through that minor setback with only a small caramel burn on my chin from taste-testing. You’ll see that look on the runways for fall ready-to-wear soon, I guarantee.

I whipped up the marshmallows with the syrup and the egg white addition, put the caramel corn in the oven to set, marveled at the fact that everything came out well on my first attempt at making both the caramel corn (though, God knows, I have eaten enough of the original version at Ceiba!) and the marshmallows, and rolled up my sleeves to roll the truffles in the dining room since, due to my poor planning, there was now a hot oven in the kitchen.  I may have had to set the ganache balls on a sheet pan on some ice packs to keep them from becoming creamy margarita puddles while I was rolling them.

One cup of tempered dark chocolate, some very messy hands and the obligatory chocolate handprints on every appliance, and two ruined white t-shirts later (whatwasIthinkingseriously, I have made truffles more than a dozen times and I always do that), the truffles were all coated and sprinkled with the gorgeous, slightly greenish, lime salt.

Proudly, I sampled and packaged everything the next morning before work. (The truffles, if made as described, are a touch too strong to be sampled before going to work, mmmmk?)  A crisp white candy box with cling wrap to protect the marshmallows, striped candy boxes and bright red cups in which the truffles nestled snugly, and bags for the caramel corn, all tied with white ribbon and labeled with silver cards. I wrote a lovey-dovey note card and bundled up a few fall leaves that I had brought him from the east coast, and all went off to FedEx.

We’ll put aside the fact that the package was delivered to his city Monday but still hasn’t been released from customs.

That is my first attempt at loving on him more from 900 miles away. I know he knows how I feel but, like…does he know, you know? (See, this is why I can’t do long-distance relationships: my brain never. stops. asking. questions.) The next attempt will be far less edible and much more inclined to be delivered on the first try, without making the poor man fill out a sheaf of paperwork.

(Sorry about that part, babe, I love you.)

The kale smoothie seems to have had its moment (don’t get me wrong, I’m still guzzling that shiz), and now that it’s summer it seems that there are lots of questions about smoothies.

That, my friends, is just the kind of low-hanging (frozen) fruit that could bring me back to this blog! Especially when the other options include cleaning up after my cat’s father’s day “gift” and washing two loads of dishes!

Ze Smoothie Tips (pronounced TEEPS)

1. It ain’t no thang if you don’t have a blender powerful enough to blend an iphone. I bought my $25 Black & Decker at the grocery store.  It won my heart because it has a glass jar – it won’t stain the next time I make tomato sauce or carrot soup, and it won’t warp in the dishwasher.

2. You could freeze your fruit (or use frozen fruit), and if you do, you should wash, pare, and chop it before you freeze it (but plan to use it soon – this is the trade-off of chopping things to usable sizes before freezing them).  I don’t, because I…

3. Add ice cubes!  I was convinced I couldn’t, because I didn’t have the blender featured in tip #1.  Good ol’ B&D chomps ‘em like a pro, creating a thick, frosty concoction of deliciousness.

4. Add powdery ingredients (protein, supplements, cocoa powder, whatever) while the blender is running, AFTER all of the other ingredients are pretty smooth.  I take the little insert out of my blender lid and pour protein powder in through the inconvenient rectangular hole – works like a champ.  This will keep you from having clumpy, weird smoothies!

(Don’t take your blender lid itself off while blending.  (Duh.))

5. Don’t put the kitchen sink in there with your ice cubes and protein powder – the more ingredients you add, the more likely you are to end up with a muddy-looking and -tasting drink.

My basic smoothie formula (serves 1):

• 3/4 cup liquid (water, iced green or herbal tea, iced coffee, milk from cows, almonds, or coconuts, juice)
• 1/3 cup chopped mix-ins (fresh herbs, berries, pineapple, kiwi, mango, peaches and other stone fruit, banana, raw or steamed veggies – fruits and vegetables, get the idea?)
• 3 ice cubes

Optional: add 1/4 cup cottage cheese (yes, really) to the mix, or a scoop of protein powder (see step 4)

For example(s):

• Iced green tea, pineapple and strawberries, cottage cheese, ice
• Iced coffee, banana, vanilla protein powder, ice
• Coconut milk, pineapple, mango, and kiwi, ice
• Red zinger iced tea with a splash of limeade, mango, blueberries and strawberries, ice
• Iced green tea, steamed sweet potato, pineapple, cottage cheese, ice
• Water, pineapple, 1/2 jalapeno, cucumber, ice
• Iced green tea, pineapple, peaches, basil, ice

I’ve become partial to the water-based smoothies this summer – they taste cleaner and seem more refreshing than the heavy yogurt- and nut butter-based smoothies.  (I can’t get into adding almond butter to my smoothies, try as I might…it leaves an oily film on the top that grosses me out.)  I’ve also blended up several of these combinations and frozen them as homemade popsicles.  You could even get fancy and layer them with yogurt to make a light parfait.

I will leave you there, before I tell the story of the rough afternoon last week during which my boyfriend confused “frappé” and “parfait” was SURE HE WAS RIGHT (heh) that the layered thing at Starbucks was NOT A PARFAIT.  No need to get testy about these things, you know?  We’ve got plenty of first world problems to worry about.

Sometimes, one might find oneself drinking rum out of a measuring cup…

…even if one has used that measuring cup to measure applesauce before the rum.

And one might make some overly salty buttercream frosting with cocoa that requires a lot of tasting directly from the bowl even though it doesn’t taste particularly good, under the guise of “checking to see if it’s good.”  It’s not good.

If you add enough rum, it gets better.

And these ugly, angry, chocolate-rum muffin-cakes that one stirred together with only ratios, sans recipes, might be in the oven.  They might never be fully baked, but it will be okay because they are vegan and therefore won’t kill you as easily.  Plus, they contain so much rum that pretty much nothing bad could happen to you as a result of consuming one.  These are the ugly cakes you want when you are shipwrecked.

This is angry baking.  Angry nights when you don’t want to use your fancy expensive camera and your art school degree to photograph your ugly, angry snack food that you don’t even want to EAT now that you’ve made it.  Nights when you are trying not to be nice and tell someone what you think of them and their liar-liar-liarness and their endless mooching.  Nights when you would like to call your family, not to check in but to tell them that THEY ARE RUINING THEIR LIVES and most of all you are glad you escaped their endless maze of mistakes.

Baking is particularly well-suited to angry cooking.  Baked goods don’t fight back by sputtering up in your face like blurping polenta or sauces and soups.  They’re pretty tough to burn, even tougher to ruin – the overbaked can find a home in a bread pudding or atop ice cream, the underbaked…well, put them back in and finish baking them, and the strangely flavored can be fixed with an endless array of toppings.  You can bake by stirring a bunch of things in a bowl until they’re of a batter-ish consistency and putting them in a (buttered and probably floured, for God’s sake) pan, then putting the pan in a 350º oven until the proverbial inserted toothpick comes out clean, and you will end up with SOMETHING.

Just watch.  I might make a lemon anise cream and fill these ugly cakes with it BEFORE I top them with the unintentionally salty frosting.

Oh, I might.

And while you are angrily stirring, you might forget some of the annoyances of the day – the endless parade of grammatical errors inflicted upon your poor ears and eyes, the lying and swindling and disappointments (OH, THE DISAPPOINTMENTS), the dashed-ish dreams and the doors that seem to be closing, closing, closing.

You might even consider forgiving someone for their abhorrent acts.  But then you will remove the angry muffin-cakes from the oven…

…and even a smear of rummy frosting won’t fix the horror that is this ugly, tiny, most, chocolatey, chia-studded muffin-cake.

And so you will renew your grudges all over again, in a heap of selfish self-pity.  While pitying, you may contemplate the sorrows of those who truly have a worse lot in life than you do – the hungry, the sick, the poor, the disadvantaged, the third world children in commercials who have neither water to drink nor food to eat; you may then dismiss their concerns as entirely IRRELEVANT to the pity at hand, because PLENTY of people feel sorry for those people and want to help them but no one, NO ONE feels sorry for you.

And you may or may not go order yourself something from 1 800 flowers.com because you are just that selfish tonight, and because the flowers are better for you than the rum you may or may not have been guzzling.  With milk and Kahlua.  Don’t judge.

Or, if you must judge, take pity on me and my ugly, angry cakes.

(PS – Angry baking may not really help anything, but sometimes even a little bit of catharsis goes a long way.  As does a 4 mile run on the treadmill, even if you weren’t supposed to run two days back to back. Plus, if you make healthy goo like these mufin-cakes – they are mostly chia, flax, raw cacao powder, and …rum – you won’t worry about scarfing a few while blogging.)