eG Foodblog: Lindacakes - EIK PREWAR

[hummingbirdkiss]

What music do the birds prefer?

I sing to Ernie, and the only songs he responds to, are Kumbaya and Down by the River.

Go figure.

The verses of Kumbaya are all about him:

"Someone's screaming, Lord, Kumbaya!"

and

"Someone's biting, Lord, Kumbaya!"

It calms him down anyway.

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My birds love Santana and Los Lobos Aerosmith ....

they love a good rif from Carlos! I will take a picture after we bath tomorrow if you think Ernie wants to see them? ...I want to show them in there best color ...Kiwi is 29 and Flower is 30 years old and they are both really really fiesty!!!

they are Panama (Amazon) Yellow heads

Edited March 20, 2008 by hummingbirdkiss (log)

[lucylou95816]

I'll second the nomination of best sour cream ever, Daisy is the best! You can get a huge tub of it at Costco for less than $4, when a 16 oz at Safeway is over $3. I also sing the commercial tune when I eat it: Have a dollop of Daisy!

[Lindacakes]

I want to see the birds. The longest I've had a bird for was 11 years. I favor small birds, and they don't live as long.

I have never heard the Daisy song, and I didn't know you could get it at Costco. That could be dangerous. I read about it somewhere, same sort of thing, someone mentioned sour cream and went on about Daisy.

[Lindacakes]

The Sweet Kitchen is Revealed.

The sweet kitchen is yellow.

My favorite detail in this kitchen is the cupboards: an ironing board cabinet was turned into a spice cabinet, and the broom closet was turned into a food cabinet.

There’s also room for cookbooks in here. Did you see the Mark Bittman top cookbooks list in the New York Times today? Click to read it. Why is that so fun? Why do we never grow tired of researching them, buying them, comparing them, shelving them, talking about them, using them, and over and over again, listing our top picks. Why?

[Rebecca263]

oh.wow. 2 kitchens.

We have plenty of folks with 2 kitchens in our neck of the woods, but none in 2 different apartments as yours are!

Um, does this mean that we get TWO refrigerator shots?

[Lindacakes]

Yes, you will! And the theory behind how you divide up the food between the fridges!

Whyizzit folks in your community often have two kitchens?

[hummingbirdkiss]

Ok that is my new favorite kitchen!!!

[Lindacakes]

The Black Cake is Started.

Or, How Lindacakes Earned her Avatar.

Ah, (rubbing hands together), now at least, some baking! The food is what keeps you alive so that you can bake, yes?

Yes!

After consultation with the Black Cake Guru formerly known as Hummingbirdkiss, I decided that I would start my fruit earlier this year. I had intended to start it at Christmas, and then it seemed too luxuriant to buy two expensive bottles of extra booze just then and one thing lead to another and then it was March already. Let that be a lesson to you. Ask Santa to bring you booze.

I had my own cherries, which I candied myself from sour cherries purchased at the Union Square farmer’s market this summer. Half of the cherries I put into a traditional fruitcake and half (about 3/4 pound) I saved out for the black cake.

So, finally, one day I manage to make it over to Astor Wines on wine tasting night, just by accident and everything. This is a wonderful thing they do – every Friday night they have a wine tasting with about four bottles, and you line up and pass by the little tasting bar and get a little buzz on to help you with your shopping. And you may discover a lovely bottle in the process. This makes it easier to fill the cart and sign the credit card slip. By the time the buzz wears off, you’re home putting the bottles up.

So, what I put in here is a bottle of Myer’s Dark Rum and a bottle of Graham’s Tawny Port 20-year-old. Be careful, because the Myer’s bottle is bigger than 750 ml. This is good, because you can use the leftovers for a splash here and a splash there to flavor your baking. I pour the Graham’s first, then pour the Myer’s into the Graham’s bottle to measure it.

You need something to put this in to soak the fruit. I considered a variety of options before I settled on the 6 quart Rubbermaid container you’ll see in the picture below. This is my black cake bucket and I don’t really use it for anything else due to its fragrance. But if I had a life of luxury, I would do my black cake in a crock.

So, to the bucket you add your booze. I hand cut the cherries and added them.

I ordered the orange peel, lemon peel and citron from Market Hall. This is the first time I’ve ordered from them and I loved the quality. Highly recommended.

Market Hall Foods

I bought all of the dark fruits at Buon Italia this year. They seemed dry; they were probably old. Make sure to feel up the prunes. Every year I find an errant pit. You want to take those out, or at least, award something to the person who bites down on it. Traditional gifts are a cake, or dental work.

This is what goes in the pot:

1 pound raisins

1 pound currants

1 pound pitted prunes

3/4 pound glace cherries

1/2 pound lemon peel

1/2 pound orange peel

1/2 pound citron

Finely chop all the fruit in a food processor. I do mine in batches, and I don’t mix anything except the citrus peel. You can add a dab of two or the booze to help the food processor handle the fruit. The ideal texture is a paste with very small chunks of peel or fruit.

Note that there are schools of thought on the texture. Some folks go for chunkier fruit, some folks go for pastier fruit. I kind of like pastier.

This is the beautiful fruit ready to go:

This is what it looks like once you’ve ground all the fruit and mixed it into the booze:

Now you cover that up and hide it somewhere in your closet and forget about it. If you want to, stir it a bit now and again just to remind yourself how good it’s going to be.

[Rebecca263]

...Whyizzit folks in your community often have two kitchens?

←

Wealthy people who keep Kosher homes. Well, there have always been basement kitchens, but this 2 kitchens in the main living area bit is a recent trend of conspicuous consumption. They're really one, big, humongous, overwhelmingly LARGE kitchen, divided with subtle colorways, into 2. You get to have at least 2 of everything!

As we live with one extremely tiny rental kitchen, the mind reels.

[Lindacakes]

Oh, No.

There is a seriously disturbing crisis going on the house.

The vegetable box has not arrived. Once in a while this happens. Once in a while, the doofus who delivers it will leave the box on the doorstep and it will get stolen. He's not really a doofus, he's a nice man and he has a relationship with my landlord and gives him loose fruit sometimes. My landlord is very big with the UPS guy, too, because the UPS guy parks at our house and reads the New York Post while my landlord cooks eggs for him.

I digress.

There is someone watching who wants to compare notes on vegetable boxes in Japan. Apparently this is common there. I would like to hear more about it.

I am the only person I know who gets a regular food delivery, particularly vegetables. I know people who get the occasional Fresh Direct delivery. I boycott Fresh Direct because I think they are one of many factors that are irreparably changing New York. The neighborhoods that are not serviced by subways have their own character, because certain people will choose to live in these areas. They are isolated, and do not offer a great deal of amenities. Some of them offer unique, wonderful amenities. When Fresh Direct trucks food in, the neighborhood attracts a different sort of person and the fabric of the neighborhood changes.

I digress.

I get my weekly delivery from Urban Organics. There's a variety of fruits and vegetables in the box, some seasonal, some not. You can order additional food items to be added to your box. You can ask for certain changes -- for instance, I don't get the carrots. They're too coarse. Because I don't get carrots, they'll give me an extra portion of something else. Sometimes this means I have potatoes out the gazoo. Sometimes it means I have onions out the gazoo. This affects what I eat, of course, because I have to deal with the over supply. The grapefruits built up and we'll be having grapefruit juice this weekend. Potatoes usually become soup that gets frozen. And so on.

What's normally in the box? Potatoes, onions, sometimes garlic or ginger. Almost always grapefruit, oranges, apples, and bananas. Often pears and kiwi. Sometimes tomatoes or green beans or celery. Lots of squash in the winter, butternut and acorn. Sometimes eggplants. Often cauliflower or broccoli, chard and spinach and beets. Lettuce.

These are staples and I supplement that with whatever I'm in the mood for. Carrots. Berries. I like to go to the farmer's market and get something fresh there. A lot of the organic food is flown in from places like Chile. I don't like that, and I don't like the carbon footprint of the delivery truck, but it does add to the demand for organic food.

I'm going to go make a list of what's left over from last week.

[rooftop1000]

...Whyizzit folks in your community often have two kitchens?

←

Wealthy people who keep Kosher homes. Well, there have always been basement kitchens, but this 2 kitchens in the main living area bit is a recent trend of conspicuous consumption. They're really one, big, humongous, overwhelmingly LARGE kitchen, divided with subtle colorways, into 2. You get to have at least 2 of everything!

As we live with one extremely tiny rental kitchen, the mind reels.

←

Ahh I had forgotten about the Kosher 2 kitchen thing, my mom has the Italian kitchen in the basement ( came with the house) but in Saddle River there is the Uber Kitchen, the butlers pantry, perhaps a snack kitchen near the rec room for the kids, the pool house must be fully equipped and if you have the room something for the caterer is nice to have.... I miss working in Saddle River

tracey

[christine007]

I just adore your birdie, I love his eager noodle-eatin face!

He reminds me of the joke about the guy who broke in the house and the parrot kept telling him, 'Jesus will get you", and Jesus was a huge German shepherd.

when we first moved into this house, we discovered a circa 1930s stove in the basement. Our elderly neighbor informed us that this area was a fruit orchard fifty years ago, and that stove was for canning, leaving the main stove free for meal prep.

Also, my favorite snack is crackers, cheese, olives, and anything pickled. I would have brought the exact same snacks that you did, yum!

thanks for blogging!

[hummingbirdkiss]

I think it will be a while until I prepare black cake again..oh well the longer the fruits sit the better they will be I guess

..it is so nice to see you do it

thanks for sharing

ps my girlfriend upped the grated fresh ginger she uses and added mace and cardamom

fantastic cake ..she is from the Virgin Islands ...her fruits are soaked in (ironic I think) very nice brandy and a bottle of Manischewitz....a friend of mine from Jamaica soaks hers in a decent but not great port and rum and thinks that the former is herecy (hers tastes just like plum pudding to me and is wonderful too

...I love talking about this cake you know

Edited March 21, 2008 by hummingbirdkiss (log)

[BarbaraY]

Thanks for bringing Market Hall Foods to my attention. I go to Oakland as often as I can as my dearest friend lives there. I'm surprised that she has never taken me there.

I'm stopping there next week to visit with her for a bit before I leave from SFO for a trip to Italy. Maybe we can find time to check this out, either coming or going.

[Lindacakes]

The Leftovers.

This is what is leftover from last week’s Urban Organics Delivery, some of it likely left over from the week before that:

broccoli

zucchini

collard greens

spinach

celery

lettuce

6 potatoes

3 red onions

4 yellow onions

2 Granny Smith apples

6 grapefruits

2 tomatoes

1 pear

Last night’s dinner was zucchini with tofu.

Today’s lunch would have been appropriate for St. Paddy’s Day: a stir fry with tofu, potatoes, broccoli, zucchini, a bag of celery sticks and a Granny Smith apple.

I warned you about the Lucy-and-Viv-in-the-Candy-Factory factor. The stuff sometimes piles up, time is short, and your lunch is completely green.

[Lindacakes]

A Cookie Tasting.

Dinner was decidedly healthful and light to allow for the indulgence of a Girl Scout cookie tasting.

My mother was a Girl Scout leader, and Girl Scout cookie time was a trying and exciting time for me as a child. Trying because it necessitated going door-to-door in our neighborhood, ringing the bell, and then actually asking a strange person to buy something from you. Money was collected, an order was taken. If you were lucky. If you were unlucky, you gathered your child’s sense of try, try again about you and went to the next house. Where you rang the bell and faced another stranger.

Exciting because the Burry truck drove right up to the house and unloaded cartons of cookies into our living room, where they took over for a week or so. Then my friends and their mothers would drive up and take some of the cookies away. My mother had to keep track of all this on a clipboard. Who got which cookies.

This is all done differently now.

We got an email from our niece asking us if we’d like to buy some cookies, with a link to a Web site where the cookies were depicted. We asked all about All Abouts, and after she told us, we felt obligated to buy them. Lynn sold cookies around her office and turned an order for nearly a hundred dollars worth of cookies over to the kid. A box, mailed by her mother, arrives at Lynn’s office with a note inside asking her to write a check to the sister-in-law.

Well.

Six boxes came home, some cookies were skimmed off the top and those boxes will be returned to the office. They can end up on the butts of Lynn’s co-workers. Surely there’s a thread here about dumping your unloved calories on your bored and under-stimulated co-workers.

But I digress.

The cookies were served with milk to cleanse the palate.

Now, we are going to start at 12 o’clock and work in a clockwise direction around the plate. Is everyone with me?

Cookie number 1, at 12 o’clock is a Thin Mint. This is a shortbread cookie with a mint-flavored chocolate coat. You are likely aware of this cookie as it is the best seller of Girl Scout cookies.

Once you’re tasted the Thin Mint, take a drink of milk to freshen your taste buds.

Cookie number 2 is a Do Si Do. I don’t know who named it this, because it’s a peanut butter sandwich cookie, and calling it that would save a lot of wear and tear on the Girl Scouts of America, who could be visiting old people in hospitals and picking up trash from the side of highways instead of explaining what a Do Si Do is.

The peanut butter cookie part was saw-dusty.

Let’s have a swallow of milk to make the memory go away.

On to cookie number 3, which is the aforementioned All About. I offer a close up here. The All About is apparently all about the character traits that Girl Scouts are supposed to acquire in their scouting efforts, like selling cookies. These cookies say, “Girl Scouting is all about . . . “ around the outside edge, and in the middle, the character trait is displayed. Confidence! Character! Values! Service! Friends! Fun! And our favorite, Girls! I’m thinking something like Live Nude Girls, but of course, they didn’t mean that.

If we had these when I was a kid it would say Being Embarassed by Your Mom! Saluting the Flag! Acquiring Badges! Camping! Farting Around with Linda Reynolds!

Drink your milk.

Cookie number 4 is a Tagalong. Do you want to guess what that is? Come on, try. No, it’s nothing Filipino. You’re stumped, right? It’s a shortbread cookie with a dab of peanut butter enrobed in chocolate. I actually sort of like these and pause on this section for a while, sampling and identifying different flavor notes. I am a fiend for peanut butter with sugar in it in all forms, so the top note for me is that raunchy sugar-substitute tropical fat flavor that lingers and begs for more.

Let’s have a sip.

OK, cookie number 5 is the Trefoil. Very famous. Shortbread, sort of like a Lorna Doone. Lynn’s boss likes Lorna Doone’s and he thinks these are better. One bite is enough for me. I mean, I bake my own shortbread.

Drink about half of that glass after that one.

Our final cookie of the tasting is a Samoa. What do you suppose that is? If you said dictator, you are dating yourself. If you said Indian pu pu, you’re still wrong. It’s a shortbread cookie with caramel on top, shredded coconut and stripes of chocolate. It is the only cookie which deviates from the round shape, and is pierced in the middle. It also tastes like a--.

Finish off your milk.

Thank you for attending our tasting today. If you found a new friend in any of these cookies, you can order them from a Girl Scout.

[lucylou95816]

I guess this year some of the cookies got different names, due to different bakers is what I was able to find out. Here's what I ended up with:

Samoa's were called Caramel Delights

All Abouts were called Thank Yous

Do Si dos were called Peanut Butter Sandwiches or something like that.

Tagalongs also had a new name, it's escaping my mind right now.

Luckily, thin mints stayed thin mints.

[hummingbirdkiss]

I got kicked out of Girlscout camp for swimming across the lake to play with the boys but I digress into nostalga here

Flower and Kiwi are going to get a bath for the photo session if I am not back on the board please call 911

loved the glasses of milk and the tasting platter!

Edited March 21, 2008 by hummingbirdkiss (log)

[gini]

Up in Boston, I was once a subscriber of Boston Organics, which sounds almost identical to your Urban Organics. I had to cancel my subscription due to a hectic travel schedule for work, but I really liked the idea of someone else picking out my fruits and vegetables for me. Always made cooking much more of a challenge.

[Lindacakes]

How did you deal with the challenge?

I use certain books a lot because of the vegetable box --

Dolores Casella, The Complete Vegetable Book

Deborah Madison, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

Alice Waters Chez Panisse Vegetables and Chez Panisse Fruits

I also collect my own tips and tricks that I find, mostly on eGullet. The roasted cauliflower was a really good one.

I use a lot of quinoa and beans to complement the veggies.

Hummingbirdkiss, I know your birds wear leather jackets.

[heidih]

Love the blue Ball jars in actual use.

Thanks for the details on the black cake fruit prep. I lean toward more chunky. Only made it once to my husband at the time who was Panamanian. I did it based on his recollection of grandma's cake. Went with port and rum. Soaked in a covered glass container, stored in a dark cool cupboard for about 2 months. Is your recipe posted here? Do you have an interior/slice shot of it?

[hummingbirdkiss]

I have to say with all your vegetables my favorite ..great down to earth vegetable cook book (if you do not already have it) is The Victory Garden Cookbook by Marian Morash

she loves vegetables and knows how to treat them

[helenjp]

Your vegetable box sounds rather like the Japanese ones (range of vegetables from root vegetable staples to cheap all-round greens and a few seasonal delicacies). I don't order them now, but you can usually order "two person box with eggs and bread" or "family box without eggs", etc etc.

Love the vegetable cookbook recommendations!

The Girl Scout cookies were a real eye-opener! I thought that Girl Scout cookies only came in one flavor, and that they had some kind of Girl Scout badge embossed on them, certainly not girl-power slogans.

[hummingbirdkiss]

I am completely astounded you can have vegetables delivered to your door I have honestly never heard of that ..I know grocers that still deliver but that is not exactly the same from what I am hearing you say? ..when I was a kid in Providence RI we used to have Tommy the vegetable guy come through the neighborhood in a step van ... we all ran out while whomever was caring for us tasted, then bought whatever was fresh off his truck (I am assuming he bought from farmers and brought it into the city to sell in the neighborhoods)

it is like that I think but you get it all picked out nicely for you! (and they will leave it with out you there huh? I can imagine someone would walk buy and pick it up ....)

could you have a container for them to put in in kind of like a milk box in the olden days?

wow!!! Vegetable boxes delivered ..never heard of such a thing

Edited March 23, 2008 by hummingbirdkiss (log)

[baroness]

How did you deal with the challenge?

I use certain books a lot because of the vegetable box --

Dolores Casella, The Complete Vegetable Book

Deborah Madison, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

Alice Waters Chez Panisse Vegetables and Chez Panisse Fruits

I also collect my own tips and tricks that I find, mostly on eGullet.  The roasted cauliflower was a really good one.

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Mollie Katzen's newest, The Vegetable Dishes I Can't Live Without, has many tempting options.