My visiting friend and I are making a couple more recipes out of the chocolate chip cookbook. Surprisingly for a Chronicle cookbook, there appear to be some… problems… in this one. There were multiple things in the cheesecake bar-cookie recipe that left us scratching our heads in confusion; I’ll give you more detail in the inevitable review. I’m looking forward to getting a digital camera at the end of next month; this is the sort of thing where I’d love to be able to post pictures of the ways in which a recipe clearly isn’t coming out as it should. Next we’re making a berry-chip cake, and some ‘make-ahead mashed potatoes’ to bring to a friend’s house this weekend.

Then maybe I’ll indulge in some World of Warcraft; I’m rather enjoying all the new content from the latest patch!

Today’s review is a sneak peek at Christie Ridgway’s How to Knit a Wild Bikini.

I forgot one thing on that list yesterday: we had to trim the cats’ claws. That’s always a real adventure. It’s made easier by the use of Kitty Kaviar as a reward (freeze-dried bonito flakes), but things got interesting when the cats heard another pair of cats fighting in the next yard over. Or mating—with cats it’s hard to tell.

Today’s review is of actor/writer Emmett James’s wonderfully entertaining memoir, Admit One. I highly recommend that you give it a read!

Meanwhile, we improvised a dessert this weekend that I have to share.

Tropical Turnovers

• Frozen sheets of raw puff pastry
• Fresh coconut, shredded. If you can’t find any, use unsweetened dried coconut. If you can’t find any of that, use sweetened (found in the baking aisle), and reduce or remove the agave nectar, honey, or sugar from the recipe.
• Crystallized ginger, minced
• One ripe banana, diced
• One tablespoon agave nectar, honey, or sugar
• One quarter cup water; more as needed
• One egg, lightly beaten

Filling: Combine a small handful each of coconut and ginger in a small saucepan. Add the banana, sweetener (if using unsweetened coconut), and water. Bring to a boil and simmer until all ingredients are tender (add more water a tablespoon at a time as necessary) and the liquid has all but boiled away.

Pastry: Prepare pastry as instructed on the package for turnovers. (The Trader Joe’s package we had said to thaw briefly at room temp, quarter each sheet of pastry, and brush with egg.) Put a spoonful of filling in the middle of each square, fold over, and seal shut. Brush with egg and bake as instructed on the pastry package.

Serve as is, or with a drizzle of honey, agave nectar, or even maple syrup.

The rough amounts of ingredients above made enough filling for two sheets of puff pastry, or eight turnovers. Adjust amounts as necessary for different results.

Agave nectar is officially one of my favorite discoveries ever. I first read about it in Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Cooking. It’s a sweetener in syrup form made from a cactus (the same one that gives us tequila), and it has an extremely low glycemic index—meaning it takes a comparatively long time to get converted into blood sugar. Those with blood sugar problems such as diabetes know this is an extremely useful thing in a sweetener.

I hate artificial sweeteners. They leave a bitter, chemical aftertaste in my mouth that I can’t stand. So, I decided to try agave. There’s some history of type II diabetes in my family and I’m prone to mild blood sugar problems, so it seemed like a good idea. Now I’m completely stuck on it. One of my favorite ‘I’m trying to be healthy’ snacks is a tall drink of plain kefir (a cultured milk drink, basically liquid yogurt) with a tablespoon or two of agave stirred into it. I also used it last night when a coffee ice cream soda drink called for a bit of sweetening; it dissolves in cold liquid much more readily than sugar.

The only problem is, the little 8 oz bottles I can get at the Whole Foods Market cost more than $5 each. Ugh. Not something I want to start using wholesale as a substitute for corn syrup in recipes. Then it occurred to me to go look at Amazon. They sell everything now, right? Right. Any moment now UPS is going to show up with a couple cases of bottles that run much cheaper than the stuff I can get at the store. YAY!

Also today, it seems I got tagged for a meme, so why not. Here we go:

• Write your own six word memoir
• Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like
• Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere
• Tag five more blogs with links
• And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

It doesn’t make sense as a sentence, but that suits me.

I’ve seen this meme just about everywhere, so instead of tagging specific people, I’m going to do an open tag. If you haven’t played yet and want to, just leave a link to your post in the comments!

Today’s review is of The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to More Not So Useless Facts.

Today’s review is of Margaret M. Wittenberg’s marvelous New Good Food. It’s a fantastic reference work for folks who want to know more about and make use of whole foods of all kinds.

Speaking of healthy cooking, it looks like I’ll be getting my next scan next Monday to see if my gallbladder has deteriorated enough to remove yet. Hopefully so. That won’t necessarily cure all ills, but it should at least get rid of that nagging soreness and the tendency to sometimes hurt when I laugh.

We’re finally going to get to grow some tomatoes in the garden this year, so I also finally picked up a tumbling composter. I LOVE getting to compost. There are just so many good things about it. Your waste produce and excess fallen leaves don’t go to waste as trash—instead they feed your bushes, your trees, your flowers, and most delightfully, your edible produce. You also don’t have to spend as much money on soil amendments and fertilizer if you’re making your own. It’s a long-term money-saver AND a waste reducer. Hard to beat that. I can’t wait until we’re picking home-grown tomatoes.

In homage to the well-dressed vampire we’ve managed to become enemies with in our D&D campaign:

I’M DEAD
I just wear it well

I’m out of coffee! Somehow I missed the fact that I didn’t have any more in the cupboard. *sob* No coffee today.

Well, at least I got another review written: Greg Patent’s A Baker’s Odyssey. Excellent bread!

I think I’m going to save my review of Bettie Sharpe’s super-awesome Ember until the 15th, so I can link to her new book when it gets released. She’s an incredibly good new author, and I think incredibly good new authors deserve all the exposure they can get.

We’re still going strong with the recipes from the artisan baking book. We have a batch of pumpernickel dough in the fridge now that’ll yield fresh home-baked bread for the next handful of days. I noticed at Amazon that there was a baker who was very snippy about the whole notion of this different way of making bread. What made me shake my head, though, was that some of his complaints weren’t even particularly valid. He said the title’s ‘5 minutes a day’ was misleading because of things like rise time, but the book is extremely explicit about the fact that it’s referring to time during which you’re actually working with the recipe, not time during which you can be doing other things. He also said that because it’s a wet dough people would find it difficult to shape into anything other than a round boule loaf, yet I’ve found it just as easy to make dinner rolls and baguettes with it. I can’t help thinking this is either a bit of traditionalist bitterness (it’s different/easier so it can’t possibly be good), or a smidge of feeling threatened that folks might not need to pay $5-10 for a fancy loaf of bread at the bakery if they can make it themselves so easily. In particular I have to think this is the case because all of the other people who’ve used the book—myself included—have had delicious results with it. To which a feast of almost 20 people from last weekend can attest.

Short post today. I just wanted to link to the three recent book reviews I put up: Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, The Writer Behind the Words by Dara Girard, and Soups & Salads for Spring and Summer Days. Upcoming: the Baker’s Odyssey cookbook, Bettie Sharpe’s Ember and John Karr’s Dark Resurrection.

Okay, okay, I admit that part of my lack of posting is a result of the Pirates of the Burning Sea pre-launch, which started Monday. Despite the mess that SOE made of the pre-order, the game itself is every bit as much fun as I’d hoped. I’ll post about it in more detail soon!

We have a printer box full of bread and then some. The whole wheat oatmeal rolls are delicious, and the Kachauri is so good it’s taking a supreme act of will to avoid hoarding it for ourselves.

We’re resting our feet for a few moments. Before long it will be time to get changed into fancy clothes and head to dinner. Full reviews to come next week, but I can already tell you how ‘Baker’s Odyssey’ and ‘Artisan Bread’ will fare. To put it simply: YUM!

We didn’t end up making saffron rolls, but I think we made more than enough, so I have no regrets!

The Cheese Sambouseks came out deLIGHTfully delicious. Now we’re making a quadruple batch of corn muffins (with whole kernels and chipotle cheddar), which actually only works out to 24 muffins since this recipe makes small batches.

We’re also baking batches of plain, crusty dinner rolls from the master recipe in the artisan bread cookbook, and they’re coming out beautifully. The whole wheat oatmeal bread has almost finished rising. We still have to decide whether we’re making saffron rolls, and of course we have to make the Kachauri. We ended up appropriating a printer box to put all the baked goods in because nothing else was large enough.

I wonder if our friends realized what they were in for when they asked us to bake bread. I picture Jervis finding out that his wife asked us to do so, looking at her with wide eyes, and saying, “Are you insane?”

Next we made Cheese Sambouseks, made from a batch of Kahk dough surrounding a cheese-and-egg filling (we decided to use a rather untraditional mix of chevre and maple-smoked cheddar). Those are currently in the oven. We’ve also made a batch of Kachauri filling, which is soaked and pureed split peas cooked with spices and such; that will fill a flat bread later. In another half-hour we’ll be able to continue the whole wheat and oatmeal bread recipe, and once we’ve baked all the Sambouseks we can bake the plain rolls from the batch of dough we made last night.

Good to get off of my feet for a moment, but soon it’ll be back to the wonderful smells of baking bread!

As previously mentioned, my husband and I are baking bread for 25 people for a friend’s Twelfth Night feast. Last night we made doughs from the ‘Artisan bread in 5 minutes a day’ book for a plain artisan loaf and a Limpa bread (minus the anise seeds since we couldn’t find any at the store and didn’t have time to order them). Last night we also baked Kahk—a traditional Iraqi recipe for round, crispy breads—from the ‘Baker’s Odyssey’ book.

We’re currently baking rounds of Limpa in roll form; we of course had to ‘quality-test’ the batch, and they’re awesome! Next we’ll bake rounds of plain rolls. We also started a sponge going for whole wheat-oatmeal bread, also from the Baker’s Odyssey book. We still have some cornbread mix from the Make-a-Mix cookbook that we plan to turn into muffins with the addition of some cheddar, whole corn kernels, and cayenne.

Now, back to baking with me!