On an impulse, I purchased a bottle of pomegranate molasses. It’s pomegranate juice concentrate, with no added sugar, and pours like ketchup. It’s not a bright magenta, or red like fresh pomegranates, or grenadine; more of a maroon-brown.
It’s very tart and somewhat sweet —prolly nowhere near as sharp as unsweetened passionfruit purée. It reminds me of sour cherry syrup, but less sweet and lacking the almond-y flavor stone fruits can have.
But what are some good recipes for pomegranate molasses? I did a little brainstorming (list below), but not much experimenting beyond the chicken sauce and soda flavoring. I’d love to hear about your recipes with it!
- Chicken sauce made with pan drippings, a bit of water, and leftover white wine; emulsified with heavy whipping cream or crème fraîche.
- Pour over yogurt, ice cream, toast, waffles or pancakes.
- Flavor ice cream, frosting, or puddings.
- Topping for fruits and vegetables.
- Add to marinades or salad dressing. Or, schmear over chicken or seafood. Hmm, perhaps I could substitute some of the lemon juice in the yogurt marinade next time.
- Garnish hummus or other dips. Update: Hm, not so great with the former; better to use raisins as the sweet-tart additive there.
- Drinks: hot chocolate, seltzer water, alcoholic concoctions. Not very pretty with clear or translucent drinks, as it gives the liquid a brownish beer tone.
Eegad, once again I sent off an email with a word missing, making my message sound ambiguous. As well as just plain sloppy. The compulsive ferret in my brain pushes me to send yet another email with the corrections. And so it goes, even with published webpages such as blog posts.
Lorelle’s encouraging Blogging Challenge article impelled me to write about my most common, and to me one of my worst typos, absent words. (This had been sitting as a draft for several months, mainly for gathering examples.) In spite of the frustrating “Gah, how did I miss that?” feeling, the easy thing about online publishing (like WordPress) is that it’s oh-so-easy to edit. Little time is needed for fussing —plink— there, it’s fixed!
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Tuesday, 19 February 2008
In autumn and winter the birds arrive from the north to keep us company. This typically means a lot of White-crowned and Golden-crowned Sparrows around the yard, but my flagship migrator is the Yellow-rumped Warbler. Or, as Simon and I call them, Yellow-butts. For their 2007 arrival, I first noticed them on the (easily remembered) first of October. The older boys (males have a yellow spot on their heads) sport sharper plumage nowadays, so perhaps they’ll head back north soon for more dating and feasting. To my recollection, they’ve headed north around March or thereabouts, so I wonder if they’ll be hanging about less this year.
Yellow-rumped Warbler and the Avocado of Gluttony (February 2008).
At the end of January, Simon cleaned out the house previously occupied by the Chestnut-backed Chickadees. They came to feast on seeds from volunteer sunflowers in October, but I haven’t seen them again until recently.
Nest of former chickadee tenants. (February 2008).
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While I attempted to upload the previous entry on MAMP, MarsEdit kept giving me the following error:
Can’t post for Iwaruna.com because the server reported an error: parse error, not well formed.
Again, searching through a forum helped. 🙂 The poorly formed content, in this case an unwanted invisible character, prevented MarsEdit from uploading the article. Likely somewhere within the Console messages I had pasted!
Tracking down the sneaky character was a bit tricky, but quick. My usual text editor Smultron wouldn’t show it using View ⇒ Show Invisible Characters. However, Textwrangler’s similar tool did: as a red, upside-down question mark (¿), within one of the Console messages as I had expected.
Last night there were several brownouts, which may or may not affected how my laptop slept. A rare sleep disorder causes problems when waking up: Right after opening my machine, it spontaneously reboots rather than, er, staying awake. This occurred only once or twice in the past year, but when it did, MAMP passed away into a zombie state. I couldn’t stop the servers; nor could I start them! Its Dashboard widget just spun and spun and spun, and I couldn’t access my local WordPress or Zenphoto installations; nor could I access the MAMP start page or phpMyAdmin. Shutting down my MacBook Pro and restarting it didn’t help either. Time to research and document the problem. >:-)
It turns out that this is a known bug, and that it’s on the MAMP developer list to fix. Even better, there’s a workaround:
- Start the MAMP application (something I rarely do), located in
/Applications/MAMP/MAMP.app. The start page will open a new web browser page, but will fail to connect, which is expected since it’s in an unhappy state.
- Click the Preferences button.
- In the resulting Preferences sheet, don’t change anything. Just click the OK button.
- Results: The Apache and MySQL servers will stop and restart. Correctly, this time, rather than spinning infinitely. To make sure things are working, click the Open Start Page button; the MAMP start page should then load in a new browser page.
- If the Dashboard widget still continues to spin, just click its Stop Servers button, wait for the servers to stop completely, then click Start Servers.
I still use MAMP v1.7, but I’m guessing that the current version 1.7.1, released sometime late last year, also has this bug.
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Saturday, 16 February 2008
Mmmm, hazelnuts. Hazelnuts ground up and used in fillings for truffles, cakes, ice cream, chocolate spreads like Nutella. Mmmuh.
Hazelnut products aren’t too popular around here (defined as California, United States), which is sad. It’s more difficult to find things like hazelnut pastes and butters. One time I purchased some hazelnut butter, I think it was Kettle brand. Very disappointing: full of nut skins (hey, they remove the skins off nuts for peanut butter and almond butter; I expect no lesser standards) and gritty, not creamy.
A couple years ago, though, I found a rather expensive (at Whole Foods, unsurprisingly) jar of hazelnut praline spread from Spain, produced by Matíz in Andalucía. (Praline means caramelized sugar added, in contrast to the usually unsweetened nut butters.) More recently I’ve found the same available online, although not quite as outrageously priced. And even more recently, I learned about a New York company, American Almond, who produces hazelnut and pistachio pastes (in addition to almond paste) under its Love’n Bake brand. Interestingly, the domestic Love’n Bake stuff is more expensive than the imported Matíz stuff. Go figure.
Anyhow, I got myself a couple jars of the Matíz spread. What to do? Make frosting for cakes, of course! (If anyone has used the Love’n Bake pastes, I’d love hear your thoughts on its quality.)
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Wednesday, 30 January 2008
Chemistry makes everything better!
Adding a bit of acid, i.e., vinegar, made a lot more curds form. Really, dramatically more. More than twice as many curds as last time. This cheese was somewhat firmer and more squeaky. I was relieved that it didn’t taste or smell vinegary at all; its flavor was only slightly tarter (less tart than store-bought cottage cheese), yet still milky-sweet.
Fresh, unripened cheese, in small curds form.
After draining for 10 minutes, I got a roundish, cheesecloth-textured lump of, well, cheese. I decided to mash it up, to effect smaller curds, and make it more spoonable. On the surface it looks like cottage cheese, but its texture is much more like ricotta.
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The search for the ultimate macaroni and cheese never ends. That’s a good thing, too, because it’s fun to try out and taste more dishes made of pasta and cheese.
Tonight’s version was based on the creamy baked mac-and-cheese by Deb of Smitten Kitchen. The main draw was the avoidance of both pre-cooked pasta and cheese sauce preparation, simplifying the recipe. Since I can’t keep my paws away from meddling, there are some… cunningly familiar ingredients. 😉
So how did it compare? Well, other than our desire for a better grating box-tool-thing, it turned out deliciously. (Not to mention the unloved oversized soufflé dish which had finally found a purpose.) While it didn’t have as Precious a top crust as last year’s model (i.e., more chewy than crunchy), it was incredibly creamy and saucy, you minx of a gratinéed pasta dish.
Leftovers exist. How shall they behave during tomorrow’s lunch? Watch this space to find out. Update (30-Jan-2008): The mac’n’cheese was tasty, but yesterday the cheese sauce separated. Then again, I had that with other versions of this, as well as with alfredo and other cheesy-creamy pasta dishes. After pondering the separation mystery, I found that the interwebs suggested adding a bit of milk or cream and slowly reheating. Indeed, the creamy sauce returned today (using whole milk), while mooshing it gently in a saucepan over medium heat.
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I always thought cheesemaking was out of reach for a plebe(*) such as myself. Then I saw recipes by Mercedes of Desert Candy and Heidi of 101 Cookbooks, and thought, “Hey, that looks easy.”
(*)Here defined as someone who has only purchased cheese, never made it. Not meant as derogatory, just as an observation.
Well, things didn’t go as I had hoped. I estimated that with half a gallon of milk plus a pint of buttermilk (mostly following Heidi’s recipe), I’d get about a pint of cheese. Nuh-unh. Barely got a cup out of it. What went wrong? Perhaps I stirred too much? Perhaps the buttermilk wasn’t acidic enough? Or, gasp, perhaps the bacterial beasts in the buttermilk were mostly dead?
Anyhow, what about the texture and flavor? It’s somewhere between a large curd cottage cheese and ricotta cheese; not too creamy, but I did drain it overnight on purpose. (It’s destined for macaroni and cheese tonight.) But, oh, it smells like butter! It has a sweet, milky flavor. And it squeaks. 😀
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Why bother rereading books at all? Isn’t it like, as Pink Floyd put it, merely “running over the same old ground,”(*) avoiding going forward or ignoring new stories?
Nope, not at all! Reading a favorite book again is like eating one’s favorite comfort dish. Something to curl up with and savor. As exciting and satisfying as the wonderful New.
(*)”Wish You Were Here,” by Pink Floyd, from Wish You Were Here (1975). ¡Muchas gracias! to Akkana for inspiring this article while discussing the top unread books.
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