Jammin' Through the Sieve.

See what I did there?

I put jam through a sieve today.

(terrible pun.)

Because our berry plants don't have any berries this year (perhaps due to the fact that we neglect them), I couldn't complete my yearly berry-jam-making ritual. Okay, not ritual, but tradition. It's only been a two-year tradition, though. Since there are no berries, I decided to make grape jam. Actually, to be more specific and gourmet-sounding, I made organic garden-fresh-but-from-the-wild-part-of-the-garden spherical green grape jam with a hint of mint and lime.

The problem with grape jam is that it looks a bit like pickle juice and I lack the machinery to separate the seeds from the jam/pulp. Therefore, I now have four jars of chunky, perfect textured jam-with-seeds and one jar of thin sifted-jam-without-seeds.

I also realised that I ought to measure everything using metric units because it just makes so much more sense. I did grow up with metric, but I only started cooking a lot when I moved to the U.S., so cooking measurements for me have been the whole cups-tbps-tsp thing instead of grams. Grams are better though, especially since I do have a food scale.

Ingredients for about 1.5 L of jam (5 jars)

12 cups/1560 g green grapes that are spherical and extremely sour (from the grape plant outside)

3 cups/540 g granulated sugar (or more. This one was on the sour side because I like sour jam)

7 mint candies

A few shakes of mint flakes

A spoonful of maltose (just because my mum happened to have some from cooking something; completely optional)

Some lime zest (pectin, optional)

Ingredients for a 300 ml jar of jam

310 g green grapes

110 g granulated sugar, or more, to taste

2 mint candies

Some mint flakes

Some lime zest

Method

1. The night before, stick everything in a pot. I didn't do this, but the osmosis should help reduce cooking time the next day.

2. Turn heat on high and stir. Don't be afraid of scorching any grapes.

3. 20 minutes later, there should be liquid at the bottom of the pot and the grapes should still be sort of hard, but some will be mushy. Keep stirring and wait for the water to boil. The grapes will turn from bright green to... olive-coloured.

4. Turn heat onto medium-low and let it simmer for about 2 hours, stirring every 10 minutes or so. All the grapes should be mushy now! The jam will look ugly. You can check the gooeyness of the jam by dropping some jam onto a plate, letting it cool, and seeing if it is the consistency you want. You can also adjust the sweetness at any point in the 2 hours.

5. If you really want to, sift jam into jar. I tried to do this for the first jar, but it didn't work because I don't have a sieve that everything except the seeds flow through. I also wanted the grape skins (basically, everything except for the seeds). I suppose this is the negative side of making grape jam with non-GMO grapes.

6. Wait for jar of jam to cool, then stick it in the fridge. I know you're supposed to do stuff with the jars with the water bath in order to sterilise the jars, but since we're sticking the jam in a fridge and consuming the jams (yeah... all 5 jars...) within a few months, I don't think that this is necessary. In addition, there is a lot of acid in this specific batch of jam. The grapes were really sour.

So now I know why you don't see green grape jam at the grocery store. It doesn't look that appetising. Seriously, though, this jam is way better than the store-bought flavourless and textureless jam!!

Hamantashen!

It's nearly that time of year again! Okay, so it's Purim next week, but AK and her family decided to have the yearly make-a-lot-of-hamantashen party today, since two of us are going back to college [why are college spring breaks so badly timed?!] This year, there were a ton of little kids, and I taught two of them how to make hamantashen dough, which was really fun actually. One of the kids said she likes cooking, which makes me feel all happy inside.

We made hamantashen with apricot, raspberry, and strawberry jam, and we also had some with chocolate chips. I think that next year I want to make some peanut butter hamantashen, just to try it out (and perhaps make a hamantashen within a hamantashen within a hamantashen... just because today someone made a chocolate chip haman).

I'm not sure how many we made, but we started around 1pm and all the baking was done around 3:30pm.

This is (at least) half of what we ended up with.

I'm not sure that I should write out the recipe because it's AK's family recipe, and not mine, but I have to say that there is a LOT of sugar, oil, and butter in a batch of hamantashen. There is also a secret ingredient, which, after baking, is barely detectable. However, it adds a really fresh, zingy dimension to the cookie, so it doesn't taste purely buttery.

One thing is for certain: SHOPRITE HAMANTASHEN PALE IN COMPARISON!!! The meagre jam in those are too sticky, the dough is crumbly and tasteless, and they're also not as cooly shaped as these ones. Today, I personally prefer hamantashen a bit toasted/brownish, but the normal-baked ones are great too. I'm not Jewish but I'm really glad I get to have the chance to make different cultural desserts!!

[THR]ICE CREEEEAAAAAM!

In an attempt to make its environment more swanky, 1920 Commons has decided to refurnish and update its locations of foods. The fruit bar has moved to where the nacho bar used to be. The nacho bar and soup have moved to where the fruit bar used to be. They're both displayed rather prettily, and they look less cluttered.

The bread section has switched with the dessert section; now, the dessert has a black-table backdrop rather than a white-table blackdrop, which I suppose more elegant too.

They've also stocked Original flavoured ["Original" has been a flavour for a long time] soymilk rather than Vanilla [read: sugar] flavoured soymilk.

The ice-cream bar now has to share space with the waffle maker [which used to be next to the soup, because it, of course, was completely logical to put a waffle maker next to the chowder...], but I think this makes college kids squeal with happiness. In addition, there is now caramel syrup, marmalade [labelled "pineapple"], strawberry jam, chocolate syrup, SHREDDED COCONUT, and walnuts in syrup stacked in sticky containers near the ice cream.

This change took me quite by surprise.

I ate at Hill today and there was no noticeable change there...so why did Commons decide to ka-boom and polish everything?

It did seem to make people happy, especially the ice cream area.

That was Tuesday night. Yesterday night and tonight at dinner, Commons had moved stuff around again; the dessert, nacho, fruit and soup had all switched places. Commons also has delicious pre-packaged breadsticks from NJ, even though they claim to be "Real Italian" or something...

I think they're trying to test out where the best placement is for... themselves [i.e. best places to put food without having a huge mess to clean up from us students dropping stuff]? For us [so that we walk more and use more Calories]? It's true that changes make people more interested and more likely to lurk longer/more frequently. That's why companies always make new flavours of stuff, and restaurants always have different "FEATURED!" or "SPECIAL!!" items.

At the beginning of my first semester here [what?! Second semester already!?!?], I figured, hey, if I eat ice cream using a cone, I will "save" a bowl and a spoon. That means that energy will be saved, because dishwashers won't have to use energy to clean the bowl and spoon, and chemically cleaned water won't have to be pumped and used and re-cleaned.

However, my logic was pretty bad because the cone itself took a TON OF WATER AND ENERGY to make, not to mention package and transport! Think about it.

The cone: grow flour and other ingredients on a field from a seed to plant. Pick plants, process them, cook/shape them.

The packaging [in a giant cardboard box, with plastic wrapping, perhaps]: grow trees, cut trees, process trees, shape card, fold/glue/staple card.

Transportation from factory to dining hall: more energy.

Now, if we used a ceramic bowl and metal spoon [not disposable!], the energy to create the spoon and ceramic bowl would be invested evidently [synthesising, packaging, transporting], but once it is in the dining hall, every use only uses, say, 1L of water and a bit of dish soap. It is much less than the energy used to synthesise a wafer cone.

However, a paper/plastic [and, please NO, styrofoam] disposable container would be the same as using a wafer cone, although I think that the wafer cone would be more energy efficient because the wafer cone is digested, leaving no trace of garbage.

The digested cone is excreted as heat, water, and in poop, perhaps, and consumed by bacteria and someone cycled back into the soil or water.

So, I suppose the way to conserve the most energy in this circumstance would be

1. Consume less of everything and stop wasting stuff!

2. Use a reusable bowl and spoon.

3. If there are no reusable utensils, use the wafer cone.

4. As the last resort, use disposable utensils [oh how I dislike them!]

Victoria Sandwich Cake

I decided to tackle the Victoria sandwich cake again. This time was NOT going to be a half-baked attempt to recreate something that I knew worked 7 years ago. This time, however, I creamed the sugar and butter first, and I used bleached flour. The result? The second-best Victoria sandwich cake, ever! [The best one was the first one I made, because it was less burnt and more jammy].

Ingredients

150 g caster/granulated sugar

150 g unsalted butter

150 g self-raising white flour

1 tsp baking powder

3 eggs

JAM OF CHOICE!

Powdered sugar!

Method

1. Cream sugar and butter. This takes a long time, but it is extremely worth it. I suppose softened butter would be easier to cream, but I'm guessing the butter I used was around 18 degrees C.

2. Add 3 eggs and mix. You will get a lumpy mixture. The original recipe called for the use of an electric whisk, but I don't have one. I don't have many sleek kitchen utensils... so I just mix. Please, Victoria sandwich cakes were invented wayyyyy before electric whisks were [Victoria = Queen Victoria, right?]

Yes. Lumpy.

3. Add in flour one tablespoon at a time. By the last three tablespoons, you will have a really thick batter. The batter should ALMOST be cookie-dough-dense batter. The batter will have little lumps.

4. Separate batter into two pans. The whole point of the Victoria sandwich cake is its sandwich-ness. It is perfect for females to make for males, as it is a sandwich, but offers all the cakey goodness that men crave [ JUST KIDDING!].

5. Anyway, bake at 355 degrees F [or, 180 degrees C, as the original recipe says] for:

8 inch/20cm pans: 25 minutes [says the original recipe] on...the middle rack

9.5 inch pans [the pans I used]: no more than 20 minutes!! on the lowest rack

For me, I used the lowest rack and after I baked the cakes for 20 minutes, I let them sit in the oven for another 20 minutes. When I took them out, one was perfect and the other was a tad burnt. Ah well. Next time I'm putting them in for 15 minutes and letting them sit for 30 minutes.

6. Spread with jam. Warm jam is more easily spread, but cold jam is good too. Then, SANDWICH!

Victoria sandwich cakes are usually thicker, and the recipe I had was meant for 20 cm pans. So, my Victoria sandwich cake was rather thin. However, the taste, texture, and smell were not lost! It was rich, crumbly [big big big big big crumbs!], buttery, crusty on the circumference but spongy in the center, pure, fresh, and mouth-watering. It was not vanilla-y, small-spongy-holes, artificial, super-sweet, or like any of those yellow cake mixes at the store.

You will NOT find a cake like this in a box or frozen in a tin in a store in the U.S. You won't even find this in the bakery section! It doesn't taste moist like Boston cream pies-cakes, and it doesn't taste at all monotone like those *ahem* various "just add half a cup of oil and 3 eggs and mix and bake!" cake mixes. Victoria sandwich cakes are delicate, flavourful, and clean-tasting. One interesting aspect of it is that when you first bite into it, the cake doesn't feel that great; it's dry and crumbly [but not crunchy]. However, as you chew, you feel a bit of "juice" flow out of each thick crumb. Yes, this "juice" is sugary butter. How succulent.

The powdered sugar isn't necessary, but it adds a nice touch to the sandwich cake. Notice that the sandwich cake is not "yellow" or "white" or one uniform colour; it is composed of beautiful shades of caramel; it demonstrates elegance and hard work. Yes, I'm being dramatic, but this cake was definitely the most meaningful cake I've ever made [I'm... bad at making cakes...]

My sister started taking chunks out of it from 11am to 1pm. I told her to just take a slice already! She loved it.

SHE LOVED IT.

This is going to be her birthday cake! It's going to be better than last year's! It's going to be eight layers tall! [Maybe?]

Victoria sandwich cakes are also really photogenic in sunlight. Look at these pictures! No flash! Perfect!

New Year Party!

First post of 2011! I will now post about my "birthday party" on the 31st of December 2010. It's actually not my birthday on the last day of the year [but I do know someone who is born on that day!], but the idea was that I meet up with my friends from high school and celebrate my birthday which is around this time of year. The funny thing is that my mum actually let my friends stay overnight. The sad part is that 80% of the people I invited couldn't come due to another party or travelling. So, my brother invited his friends [and they took the TV to play games], and my mum invited her friends, so we ended up with a group of around 20 people. I also made a birthday cake, since I didn't want to buy a cake that had icky stuff in it. The cake I made included whole wheat flour and balsamic vinegar.

This layer of cake actually turned out alright [I was using a brownie recipe, so it's a bit flat and dense], but the first two layers were way too thin; when they were piled together they looked shorter than a pie. Or a fruit tart.

Orange glaze - 3 tablespoons of orange juice, 1 tablespoon of milk, and 1 cup of sugar! The glaze only had a hint of orange when it was dry, though.

See how flat the first batch came out?

A very coarsely-ground recipe for this cake [if you want 1-2cm-thick brownies that fit two 9.5 inch pans]

Ingredients:

2 cups of whole wheat flour

1 cup of sugar

1 cup of milk

1 cup of oil

1 cup of cocoa powder

3 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar

1.5 tsp baking soda [want it poofier? add 1-2tsp baking soda]

some salt

Method: Mix and bake for 20 minutes at 350 degrees F. Add more time if you want to.

First layer=blackberry jam

Second layer=marshmallows [Should've gotten marshmallow fluff, which doesn't have gelatin, but I didn't realise that I was going to be making a four-layer cake].

Third layer=peanut butter icing!

And... the cake! I have more pictures but I'm not uploading those because I do not want people to know my real name.

[The best] Sprinkles [in the world]! They're just like the ones from Australia - the Hundreds and Thousands that my mum used to put on honey bananas [except that these are only pink, green, and white, instead of rainbow-coloured].

So there were other foods, and I took pictures of them too, but this is one that I want to commemorate. This was brought by HM's family, and HM is my sister's friend. It's primarily composed of glutinous rice spotted with quartered jujubes [red dates]. Enclosed in the chewy, sticky layers is a mound of warm red bean paste. Curly swirls of orange and lime rind gently garnish the outside of the hemispherical [or parabolic... Actually, perhaps more parabolic, since bowls are generally more parabolically shaped] dessert.

Everyone said that the cake was nice, but they could've just been saying that because they knew that I had baked it. Apparently, one of the kids had been eyeing it for a long time before my mum realised that the kid wanted cake. The kid's mum told me that it tasted "fresh" and "rich", which are nice compliments! Another comment includes the "It's good". My sister, who had helped me with it, of course was scarfing down cake and burping out compliments.

We later watched some Harry Potter upstairs because my brother and his friends were still playing games on the TV downstairs, and then we watched the ball drop, which was seriously anti-climatic [as it is, every year].

We finished Harry Potter, and BV and I watched some Snoopy [yes, Snoopy and Harry Potter are awesome!]. It was a great birthday-partyesque-dinner-type-thing.

Cram N Jam

...And Jam-filled doughnuts! Hopefully sticking information into my brain... There were a whole bunch of study breaks over finals week, and this one was set up by the 2014 class board. They had a lot of pizza, doughnuts, chips, baked goods, and ...some pastry thing with animal flesh inside.

So, the irony is that there were NO BURRITOS TO JACK!! I went to Cram N Jam to obtain a burrito.

I only ate a few tortilla chips... :(

I really do like Chipotle, or burritos in general. The one I had at MIT was amazing. So, I wasn't really happy trekking through ten minutes of rain to get some chips.

Close but no burrito. ["Close but no cigar", but I really dislike cigars and cigarettes and nicotene-type chemicals].

There were a lot of doughnuts. Boxes and boxes of them...glazed, chocolate, sprinkles, powdered, cream-filled, jam-filled, sugar coated...

Au Bon Pain also provided various baked goods. I tried a muffin with carrot and raisins in it, which was pretty moist.

I'd figure that with each doughnut being around 300 Calories, each slice of pizza being 300 Calories, random baked goods being 500 Cal [I mean, croissants were the size of dinner plates...], drinks being 140 Cal, and a serving of chips being 140 Cal, the average person consumed at least 1200 Calories withing those 2 hours. I wonder how much energy the brain expends when thinking? Does one expend more if one is more intelligent? Or less? I left early because there were no burritos.

Two more study breaks are coming up in blog posts...

Berry Jam!

Basically, gooseberry jam...

...with strawberries, and raspberries, and kiwi, and tomatoes. Oh, and balsamic vinegar. This is the third summer in which I've made jam. The first summer, I made this blackcurrant jam that was wayyyy too dry. In other words, it congealed while the fire was still on, so by the time it had cooled, it had turned into a really-gummy-almost-dried-blackcurrant consistency. It was also really sour. Last year, I think I made three batches of jam [two currants, one gooseberry], which all turned out really lovely. This year, all our blackcurrants and red currants appear to have died, due to the climate characteristic of a summer on drugs. So, all we have now are raspberries and gooseberries. Actually, we're losing those too. Anyway, I salvaged about 4 cups of gooseberries, a few raspberries, and decided to make some jam, since my family isn't really in love with fresh gooseberries.

To make the jam:
4 cups of gooseberries [yay pectin!]
1 cup of sugar [which was way too much. Hence, I added all the other fruit too. Then again, I don't really like sickly-sweet jams, so maybe it's okay for other people]
0.5 cups of water
10 or so cherry tomatoes, cut in half
1 kiwi without seeds or white centre [my brother wanted to add this]
5 or so cut up strawberries.
4 tbsp balsamic vinegar [complements the strawberries very well, both taste-wise and SMELL-wise]1. Add gooseberries and sugar and balamic vinegar. The vinegar, I suppose, helps preserve the jam, meaning that we don't need to use lemon juice or another acid. In all honesty though, the sugar and gooseberry's acidity should preserve the jam well too. Stir mixture. Realise that there is wayyyyy too much sugar - see image above. All that goop is sugar. [A fine coating of sugar on each berry should be enough. A freakin' snowstorm is... too much for me].
2. Add water and other fruit.
3. Stick it on high on the stove until it starts to boil.
4. Add more fruit if it still looks/taste too sweet.

5. Start mashing the berries. Technically, the tomato is a berry. And, to astound you more, the kiwifruit is ALSO a berry! So, yes, I made berry jam today.
6. Turn down to the stove to low heat, and the mixture should be simmering. Stir every once in a while [this works best in a nonstick pot] for 45 minutes or so.

7. Check every once in a while by dropping a tad of it onto a dry plate and letting it sit there, and see whether it congeals. This is also a great time to taste the jammy syrup, because you want to know whether it's too sour/sweet.
Note the tomatoes - orangey.
8. Turn off heat. Let it sit for a while. Then, pour into jars. I got about...900g? Well, three chili-sauce jars full. Evidently, chili sauce has a different density than berry jam, so the yield is probably 1 kilo of jam.



We didn't have any bread so I spread some on man[2] tou[2] that my mum made a few days ago. You should put all remaining jam in the fridge. It keeps for at least a month. I don't know beyond that because we, as a family of 5 [well, temporarily 6] usually consume it all within that time.
Taste? Starts off soury-sweet, almost like candy. The gooseberry and strawberry flavour is initially very prevalent [NOT the store-bought strawberry jam taste, though!!], and ends in a slight tomato taste [think a tiny touch of tomato sauce]. There is no kiwi taste, even though my brother, who had insisted we stick in a kiwi, insists that there is a tang of kiwi. Texture-wuse, the skin from the berries and tomatoes and such are surprisingly a great addition. I find it amazing that the kiwi and strawberry chunks appear to have melted [even though they're just mushed]. ENJOY Jammmmmmin' EVERYONE!