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April 2020
pandemic coffee trend
One famous recipe from the pandemic that got everyone talking was whipped coffee (aka dalgona coffee), a simple beverage made using equal parts instant coffee, sugar, and water, until you get a super fluffy concoction. If you haven’t tried it yet, I suggest you do! -
2020-04-07
Rediscovering the tastes of my childhood
Some of my earliest memories are of the sights, sounds, and tastes of my grandmother’s kitchen. She passed away almost exactly one year before the stay-at-home order was put in place in Washington State. At that time, I was already an online student working from home and my partner was driving across the state every weekend to work and come back home. When lockdown started, I didn’t realize how cooped up I would feel. I decided I needed to revisit the feelings of my grandmother’s kitchen. Around the same time, my family got a trailer full of boxes of my grandmother’s things. In this box was a handwritten cookbook filled with the recipes and stories from my childhood. There were handwritten letters from my great-grandfather to my grandmother, recipes she had clipped out of newspapers in the 1970s and 1980s, and family recipes I thought were lost when she passed. One of which was a Spiced tea, also known as friendship tea, recipe. For me, this tea is the epitome of Christmas time spent with my grandma. This recipe exists on the internet, but it was never as good as the one my grandmother made. When I found these recipes, I set out on cooking my way through them to pass my time during lockdown. My partner was working remotely so he was home to try them with me. It was an emotional experience for me after the loss of my grandmother and it reminded me how much food can bring people together. This recipe no longer represents Christmas and my grandmother, it now is something that makes me think of lockdown with my own family and how it brought us together. If it wasn’t for the stay-at-home order, I probably wouldn’t have connected to these recipes again and I definitely would never have had to buy tang. The pandemic has brought a greater connection to history and sensory history. The pandemic has also changed the way we experience our senses and even changed those senses for some people. Sensory history shows how people experienced the world around them during the pandemic. If you try this recipe, don’t be afraid of adding more or less of what you like. I don’t know what measurement a scoop is, but as my grandmother always told me, we don’t measure to be perfect we measure with our hearts. My best guess is that there are about 2 tablespoons in a “scoop”. Ginther’s Spice Tea 1 ½ cup Tang 6 scoops lemonade ½ cup instant tea ½ cup sugar ½ teaspoon cloves (or fresh whole cloves) 1 tablespoon cinnamon (or fresh sticks) Combine the above ingredients. Add 2 Tablespoons of mix per cup of hot water. -
2021-03-21
A tale of the babka
If you had asked me if I was a baker prior to the year 2020, I would have unequivocally said no. A cook? Yes. But a baker? Absolutely not. But that was before the global Covid-19 pandemic. I worked in the cruise industry prior to the pandemic and I travelled a lot for my job. I was not home enough to really jump into and try to master baking. Following mandatory quarantine in March 2020, I suddenly had extra time on my hands. Further, I was laid-off from my job in early June and ended-up with even more time on my hands. Like so many around the world during quarantine, I took up baking. But unlike the many who tried sourdough, I started with making standard wheat breads and then went straight to enriched breads like babkas or challahs. The photos I am attaching here show my progression as a baker. My first babka was fine and tasted great, but as you can see, I have improved in technique and in flavor over time. My favorite babka recipe comes from King Arthur Flour. As a new baker, I relied on the King Arthur Flour website for flour and yeast tips, baking tools, and recipes. I was too hesitant to add walnuts the first time and I accidently used a quick-rise east instead of standard yeast. As time went on, I felt more comfortable adding walnuts and raisins. I also felt more comfortable working with the dough to perfect the twisting technique of the babka. I relied on trial-and-error for most of my recipes, but I also watched all episodes of the Great British Baking Show and found some videos that gave me the basics of flour, yeast, and water. My family were very surprised by this newfound baking skill. But they enjoyed tasting the results. I have enjoyed bringing people together over food – and I have enjoyed giving loaves as gifts. I am still trying new bread recipes and plan on continuing to bake even as life slowly returns to our new normal. -
2020-11-26
Thanksgiving Dressing Connection
My family Thanksgiving's have featured a wide variety of fare throughout the years. The one constant, the one dish that has always made an appearance is dressing. The recipe is a family one that originated with my great-grandmother, a wonderful woman who lived to the ripe old age of 102. Known across the extended family as the Queen of the Kitchen, her legacy lives on through the recipes she left behind. This Thanksgiving was more difficult than any I can remember. Out of the twenty-four Thanksgiving's I have been alive to see, I have never spent one without my sister. Now, she lives a state away and health concerns surrounding my 93-year old grandmother kept my sister away. COVID-19 drastically changed the mood of the holiday, but one dish still had to be cooked. You guessed it, dressing. Ingredients: 10 baked biscuits 2-3 cups of baked yellow cornbread 1 loaf of toasted bread 1 1/2 cup chopped onion 2 cup chopped celery 1 cup celery tops 1 tablespoon sage 1 tablespoon poultry seasoning 2 cups water 1 cup chicken boullion 2 eggs Salt and pepper to taste Original Directions: Break bread into small pieces. Set aside. Put all remaining ingredients except eggs in a saucepan. Boil till celery and onions are tender. Pour over bread mixture and toss. (Add more liquid if it needs to have more water. Cool. Add eggs. Mix lightly. Put in greased pan - Bake 300 degrees for 30 minutes. -
2020-03-18
Comfort in the Kitchen
I have always loved cooking, and from a very young age, I spent time working through tough moments in my life with the comfort of flour, sugar and butter in the kitchen. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, I was a student teacher at a middle school in California, and finishing up my final quarter of my masters in education. I loved my job, my students, and my colleagues and I was heartbroken when I had to say my final in-person goodbyes to my first set of students. Just as I had in the past, I took my confusion, worry and stress to the kitchen, and began to procross the difficult road that I knew was ahead of me. One of the first recipes that I baked in quarantine was coffee cake because I had been talking to a friend, who had never tried it before. As I listened to my mixer beat the sugar and butter together, I could feel a sense of calm wash over me. Baking, even though it’s science, has an interesting paradox of being confusing and straightforward at the same time. I typically understand how the ingredients work together, and the process of following each step of a recipe brings a sense of peace. As I incorporated the eggs, vanilla, cinnamon, dash of allspice, salt into my mixture, the daunting nature of a global pandemic hit me. How was I going to adapt to online learning? How was I going to get a job in the fall as a teacher? How was I going to handle the next unknown amount of time? The smells wafting from my mixer comforted me, and even though the smell was confusing to my nose, I knew that the end product would be delicious and bring warmth to those who tried it. As I poured the mix into a pan and set it in the oven, a new sense of ambition began to bubble in me. If I could bake this wonderful cake, how hard could it be to face a pandemic? As I said this to myself, I knew how ridiculous it sounded, but I knew at this point I had to fake it until I made it. So as my coffee cake was baking I sat down and began to plan the next few weeks of virtual learning and by the time the timer went off, I had a rough plan of what I wanted to do. Taking the cake out of the oven and sampling it for the first time was glorious. I had worked hard to produce this thing, and I knew I could do the same with any task put in front of me during this pandemic. As I delivered baked goods to my friends doorsteps, while maintaining 6 feet of distance, and wearing a face mask, I hoped that a taste of coffee cake would bring the same comfort to my friends as it did to me in the tough early days of the pandemic. -
2020-04-01
"The Coronavirus Is Bringing Back a 1,000-Year-Old ‘Cheese’ in Japan" - Atlas Obscura
Like other countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, Japan is experiencing a rising interest in learning new cooking recipes, particularly local culinary traditions. In a short article for Atlas Obscura, Makiko Itoh looks at how the recent cooking craze has hit Japan through the lens of a particular dairy product, known as so. Recently, the Japanese dairy industry had a problem with being unable to sell its surplus milk supply overseas due to the transit disruptions created by the pandemic. In response, Japanese consumers were encouraged to purchase more milk to save the industry and to use them for local recipes. One recipe in particular, known as so, has gained increased interest from Japanese foodies. According to Itoh, so is a cheese-like dairy product that was first created during the Nara and Heian periods of Japanese history, when dairy farming was at its height. So was popular among aristocrats, and even the Japanese emperors of the time were avid consumers. However, according to Itoh, the rise of the Kamakura Shogunate and the samurai warrior class caused the popularity of so and other dairy products to decline markedly. So making was recently revived by foodies and history buffs, who have helped popularize the recipe again for new consumers and amateur cooks. -
2020-10-14
Time to Cook
Before the onset of the corona virus and the lockdowns and quarantines that followed, I had a pretty routine schedule. I would wake up around 7:15am and I would not get home again until about 7pm. Normally I would make something easy for dinner that I could have at least another night in a row. Usually it would just be a meat and a vegetable with fruit for dessert. I would cook the vegetables and the meat in the same pan to save myself the clean up time later as I would normally go to bed around 11pm and not want to waste any more time cleaning than I had to. I also would not stray too far from recipes that I was comfortable with. I would be very upset if I made something terrible after a ling day at work. However now with quarantine, I work from home and my schedule has become quite different. I am able to sleep in a little longer as I do not have to commute anymore. As soon as I am finished work I am already home and can start making dinner as soon as I want. This extra time gives me more flexibility to try new recipes and take chances on foods I may not have tried otherwise. On my lunch break I am able to go food shopping so I am not limited by what ingredients I have on hand. For this meal that I made and posted pictures of, it would be a rare treat to get this on a worknight before COVID-19. This meal took longer, used more ingredients, involved more pots and pans, and took longer to clean up than any pre-quarantine meal that I would make. Yet the payoff was absolutely delicious. To have pan seared scallops in a creamy garlic sauce over wheat spaghetti on a random Wednesday night is one of the few bright sides of quarantine. I am looking forward to the day when all restrictions are lifted and life returns to normal but I will surely miss all the extra time I have to try new recipes, to have my kitchen filled with new and unique scents and for my taste buds to experience diverse ranges of cuisines that my normal schedule precluded. -
2020-04
Sweet Basil Vinaigrette Recipe
I found this recipe on a Facebook group for people sharing quarantine recipes. This recipe really showcases how many people were having to learn how to make things due to food shortages and an inability to go to the grocery store. This recipe is for a salad dressing which, under normal circumstances, folks might not be anticipating having to make themselves. -
2020-04
Survival Bread Recipes
I found this recipe on a Facebook group for people sharing their quarantine recipes. I thought this recipe was important to share because not only did so many people become really interested in baking bread during quarantine, but these recipes call for the sort of bare-bones ingredients that many might have attended to during some of the flour shortages.