New Years Resolution Update

As I mentioned about 2 weeks ago, my New Year's resolution was to keep a neater, tidier kitchen. The first step in that was organizing my pantry so everything had a designated location, it was easier to find things and to know when I was running out of an item. That has so far gone swimmingly. I have to dig around a lot less, and my husband can find the things he wants--small trash bags, large trash bags, snacks, what have you, without asking me, who may or may not be anywhere near the pantry.

The second part of my plan was to take care of dishes more quickly (not instantly, because some of them are better off soaking overnight and some of them are 300 degrees), and generally reduce clutter in my kitchen. While it is not perfect, partly because there is no good place to put mail, my purse, etc, that isn't the kitchen island corner, it is certainly better than it has ever been. I have a lot more working space, and Dear Husband seems to be less twitchy every time he walks in.

The third goal was to be more prepared for weeknight dinners. During the semester, actively cooking on Tuesdays and Thursdays is difficult. I get home around 6 (which is late for me) which means dinner cannot be produced from scratch before 7:30 or so, which is just too late when you go to bed a little after 9. So my goal is to either have something prepared Monday night so Tuesday I can take it straight from the fridge to the oven and not have to cook, or make a huge batch of something on the weekend that I can use as leftovers. This is also so far going pretty well. Monday I put together a baked ziti, but did not bake it. When I can home yesterday, it went into the oven and we had a hot homemade dinner without my having to actively do anything other than check it.

Of course, it's easy to keep a resolution for 2 weeks. But I am hopeful that I will be able to keep it up because it actually does seem to make my life easier. We shall see.

~AMPH

Comtesse au Chocolat

Yesterday, I set out to make Julia Child's "Marquis au Chocolat" cake. It looked insanely delicious, even in black and white, and everything she demonstrated seemed well within my capabilities, even if not quite as adroitly as she.

Everything was going swimmingly. I made the chocolate spongecake, safely de-panned it and cooled it without disaster. Then I listened more carefully to her instructions for the first layer of icing, and realized that I did not have NEARLY enough butter to finish the recipe. The first layer of butter cream called for half a pound alone.

So I decided to improvise, and I whipped up a batch of think ganache, at about 3.5 parts heavy cream to 5 parts semi-sweet chocolate. After it cooled and thickened a bit, I smoothed it over the cake.

It is decadent. It is delicious. It is chocolatey and satisfying in a small slice. It is shiney.

It's a single layer, which I actually think I like better than the taller cakes I'm used to. And the icing is not thick, but what it lacks in bulk it makes up for in lusciousness.

Yes, it gleams that much in real life. Over all it's kind of like a cake, a brownie, and a truffle in one package. It hits all the right notes, without being over the top like some 'death by chocolate' cakes.

This is kinda what it would look like if you can wait to cut into it.

This recipe is definitely a keeper. Since it is not quite the Marquis au Chocolat, but would certainly satisfy any woman's chocolate cravings, I'm dubbing it the Comtesse au Chocolat. It seems fitting.

Cake~Julia Child's "Marquis au Chocolat" sponge cake recipe
Icing~ 180 g heavy cream, heated to simmer and poured over 260 g semi-sweet chocolate chips. Stir until melted, cool until the consistency of thin whipped cream, and ice cake.

Enjoy!

~AMPH

Foods Falsely Feared: Souffle

There are certain foods that people will avoid making without ever having tried, or even read a recipe. Whether because it has a reputation for taking a long time to make, being particularly difficult in required technique, or just having a general air of requiring years of training to get right, people avoid making them like they will explode if done improperly.

Souffle is probably the best example of this. It is a dish that is beautiful in its simplicity, and demonstrates perfectly culinary aesthete which sits opposite to the over-the-top-must-be-huge-with-every-ingredient-possible-plus-bacon aesthete that seems popular right now. Whether savory or sweet, souffle is easy and pretty quick to make.

Cheese souffle, aka Friday's dinner

Physics 2: Electric Charge

Once again, I am  teaching Introduction to Electromagnetism this semester, which really means "Basic electrostatics, circuits, and magnetostatics"

While Classical Mechanics, or Physics 1, deals with quantities that we all have direct, visceral experience with--masses, gravity, acceleration, velocity-- electromagnetism, or Physics 2, deals with things that, while technically we have experience with, we don't have a good intuition for. Even if you are a little shaky on the difference between mass and weight, or the difference between velocity and speed, you have an intuition that if something with more mass drops on your head, your head is going to experience more force. You know from driving in a car and stopping short for something that anything not tied down to the car will keep going forward  until it hits something--Newton's 3rd law of motion. If you've ever played pool you've used conservation of momentum.

But if something has a lot of charge, what does that mean? What even qualifies as 'a lot' of charge? Something has mass if it's made of 'stuff'.  What gives somethings charge and other's not? We use refrigerator magnets and electricity every day of our lives, but its actions are for the most part mysterious.

This post is going to try to cover, in a basic, plain-English kind of way, to describe the quantity that is at the heart of all electromagnetism--charge.

Select Field-lines between positive and negative charges. 

Benefits of Uber-labeling

I am loving my very organized pantry. It is easy to find things. It is easy to know when we are running out of things. 

My husband can find things when my hands are goopy. 

I was making chocolate souffles for dessert last night, because it was cold and my mother gave me a lovely set of ramekins for Christmas, and these two things seemed to call for chocolate souffle. As I started separating the eggs, I asked Dear Husband to grab me out the vanilla.  And he did. He could find it easily because it was right there in the 'extract and flavoring' section. 

Moreover, he seemed happy with this. Add this to the fact that he no longer has to look around for the cereal every morning (it was always in the same spot, but somehow a label makes it easier to find), and he seems willing to help on my organization, even helping to put up a cleaning-implement rack. 

This trend is slowly seeping outward. It is yet to be seen how well it works outside the pantry. 

My New Year's Resolution

For the most part, I don't do New Year's Resolutions. If you want to change something, I don't see the point in waiting for January 1st to roll around.

This year though, my desire for change and the New Year coincided. So my resolution is to keep a tidier kitchen. I would eventually like to have an overall tidier house, but one room at a time.

So, I started with my pantry.

Homemade Croissants

Croissants are one of life's great simple pleasures. The child of a basic bread recipe and puff pastry, they satisfy pretty much any craving you can have in one delicious package.

Growing up, we had croissants a good deal, but never homemade. They were, as far as I could tell, the one food my mother said was too much trouble to make at home. For the longest time, I took my mother's word for it. She made puff pastry several times a year for heaven sake.

But I recently have been watching episodes of Julia Child's cooking show (the old black and white one). And when I saw an episode on croissants, I figured I should at least try making them. If Julia Child could make them with the kind of pots and pans and electric stove/oven she has on the show, I could surely make them with my 21st century electric stove and high tech kitchen gear.