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Brazilian cheese puffs: pão de queijo

I adapted this from Simply Recipes. I didn’t use a mini-muffin pan since I don’t have one, and I increased the amount of cheese. As Elise Bauer points out, the resulting cheese bread puffs are like crispy mochi popovers. Or, alternatively, like a South American version of gougères.

Brazilian cheese puffs

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Raspberry-vanilla ice cream

We don’t get raspberries here as often as we do blackberries and ollalieberries. But one day this past summer, Simon came home from the market with the most fragrant of raspberries… He got four punnets for $12—not cheap!—although high quality and organic, from Borba Farms. It was barely over a pound of fruit, so not enough for preserving. Why not ice cream, then?

Raspberry vanilla ice cream, churningChurning, churning.

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Zucchini, (sweet) potato & cheese gratin

Here’s another dish that makes use of our garden’s summer surplus of zucchini. Inspired by the potato, squash & goat cheese gratin recipe from the The Kitchn, except that I reversed the proportions of summer squash and potato. And added sweet potato, changed the cheese composition, among one or two other things. 🙂

Zucchini-sweet potato gratin sm

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Roasted tomatoes, good for freezing

I thought I had posted a recipe on how I roasted tomatoes for future usage, but I have not! This recipe was inspired by The Homemade Pantry, by Alana Chernila—about the guilt of letting surplus tomatoes sit too long on the counter. I know that sad feeling when I notice the impending squishiness and mold. Here, just cut away the icky bits, and toss in the oven. More or less.

Roasted tomatoes

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Waffles from sourdough yeast starter

Finally! After a botched attempt at making waffles from my yeast starters, I believe this a decent recipe that works. Many thanks are due to Smitten Kitchen’s essential raised waffles. My variation has different ingredient proportions to accommodate using the wet starter. I also use different flours because, in spite of having far too many flours in the pantry, I don’t have all-purpose wheat. So, some improvising occurred. 🙂

The resulting waffles were light in density, and crispy on the outside. I froze the leftovers, which are a great replacement for store-bought ones.

UPDATED 13 April 2020: Minor ingredient adjustments.

Leftover sourdough waffles *urp*

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Turning on text-to-speech in iBooks

I finally learned how to turn my books in iBooks into audiobooks, by using either VoiceOver or through the Selection menu. This feature has been around for a while, but it took articles from TUAW and Mac OS X Hints to clarify the steps for me.

I prefer the VoiceOver method, but both work fine on iPhone and iPad in iOS 6.

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Orange cake with browned butter, and draped in chocolate ganache

[Actually made this cake nearly a year and a half ago!] Browned butter adds a hint of nuttiness to this cake without adding nuts. Because this cake is made with the sponge technique, rather than a creamed-butter-and-sugar one, it’d be drier without a syrup, so I’ve added that as well. Also, because three is such a nice number for combining different flavor procedures, I’ve topped the cake with a chocolate ganache, courtesy of Alice Medrich’s recipe from Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies. The result is quite tasty. Unless you don’t like cake, oranges or chocolate, or the three together, which would be a bit sad.

Orange cake, draped with choco ganache, mmmmmm.

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What I read in 2012

Looking back at 2012, I read quite a lot, even with school going on. As in previous years, the lightbulb ( 💡 ) icon denotes recommendations—except that all items in the Shorter fiction section are podcasts where I had given the top ratings. Many goodies discovered this year, including tearing down my notion that Smashwords doesn’t publish good stuff—glad to be wrong there!

For easier list jumping:

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Apricot brandy with orange and vanilla

It’s strange given my love of apricots that I had not made apricot liqueur. Last summer I finally did, using an inexpensive brandy from Trader Joe’s, an orange, and some vanilla sugar. I filtered out the fruit solids after steeping for 4 months—using a double layer of fine butter muslin over a fine sieve. The result was still cloudy; I’ve tried using a coffee filter (with the Meyer lemon-ginger liqueur), but that was too slow and too easily clogged up, even after initially going through the butter muslin. I continue to dream of a vacuum-driven filtration system in my kitchen. O:)

What do I use this in? As with the lemon-ginger one, mostly cooking. Great with cooked fruit and sauces needing a fruity sweetness.

apricot brandy, assembledApricot brandy, assembled for steeping.

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Lime curd with a hint of ginger

We’ve got a Bearss lime tree in a large ex-wine barrel. The peak of the crop, in the past, has been during the dead of winter, December through February. But starting this year, somehow the tree started to offer ripe fruit over a wider period. Like, dropping them frequently over the past couple months. While staring at the limes on the counter, slowly getting drier by the day, my brain told me, “Make curd! You won’t regret it.” I added a bit of ginger, since it goes so nicely with lime — and I didn’t want that rhizome sitting in the fridge to develop more mold *ahem*.

Update (8 March 2014): Today I omitted ginger and used about 1/4 cup vanilla sugar, as part of the total sugar. Very nice, especially on gingerbread cake! I think having both ginger and vanilla would work as well. In addition, I froze a couple jars. I’ve been hesitant to do this, but several resources describe how it can work. It’s nice to have more than a week or two, so I’ll check to see how good the frozen-then-thawed stuff is in a few months!

Vanilla lime curd in jars, and a bit extra

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