This weekend, I actually challenged my culinary skills by trying out two new recipes and getting a private cooking lesson. For my friend’s upcoming birthday party, I chose to make a cheesecake. Since her capoeira nickname means “pomegranate” in Portugese, I looked up the recipe for a white chocolate and pomegranate cheesecake. For my private cooking lesson, I chose an all-time vegetarian favorite, couscous and vegetable stirfry, since the lesson would focus on the proper way to chop veggies. Lastly, one of the characters in the novel that I’m currently working on, makes up her own recipe for blueberry pancakes; so I chose this morning to see if the recipe actually resulted in a pancake!
I prepared the cheesecake a few hours prior to my cooking lesson. Although I’ve been making cheesecakes for years, I was pretty excited about trying out this new recipe since, for the first time in life, I had to buy a springform pan and I would make use of my blender. All of my cheesecakes either have graham cracker or oreo cookie crusts. For this version, the recipe directed me to put the whole oreo cookies into the blender. After 1o seconds, all those cookies were pulverized. Pleased with the results, I called Mom to let her know this wonderful time-saving step. I then read to her the tip of putting hot water into a casserole pan at the bottom of the oven while the cheesecake was in the middle. Once the cheesecake finished baking, the instructions said to turn off the oven, crack the oven door and let it cool. The water bath was supposed to prevent the cheesecake from cracking. Not only did the cheesecake crack, but the crack formed an interesting shape. Even later on, when my friend helped me to decoratively hide the crack, it took on an interesting design, which reminded me of a jumping woman.
For the coucous and vegetable stirfry, I bought a sweet potato, a red onion, yellow squash, zucchini, roma tomatoes and collard greens. I’ve been on a collard greens kick for two weeks now and I swear that that leafy green is causing me to crave fried chicken! My friend brought over his special set of knives and his own wok. He taught me the proper way to hold the knife and chop round veggies, especially onions. Whenever he quizzed me how I normally chopped up certain things, my answer was the same: I put them in the blender.
As he chopped away, I made the dry spice mix (in the blender, of course) and prepared the pearl couscous, which I prefer over the regular, smaller-grained couscous. Had I known before hand that there would be a battle over adding fresh mint to the stirfry, I would have simply blended it with the other spices instead of setting it beside him to hand chop as he’d done with the garlic and onions that were sauted before the other ingredients were added. I gently handed him a “branch” of mint that consisted of 5 or 6 leaves. He accepted the compromise since the original recipe called for 1/2 cup of mint.
The next day the double chocolate cheesecake was a big hit at the birthday party . Not a soul knew that the milk chocolate on top had been added merely to disguise the split. As a matter of fact, I think the next time I make that cheesecake, I’m going to assume that it’ll split and have a white chocolate sauce for to cover it and then cover that with the pomegranate sauce with white chocolate shavings. In addition to eating the food I prepare, I find it’s entertaining to test out new recipes and modify them to suit my creativity.
So, Sunday’s blueberry pancake experiment truly took the cake, so to speak. In the current novel that I’m working on, The Adventures of Infinity and Negativa, Infinity describes to her twin sister how she prepares the batter:
“Well, my favorite way for making blueberry pancakes is to use twice as much flour as milk. And then I mix in a fourth of the amount of milk in oil.”
“Milk and oil. Fascinating,” Negativa said, shoving in a mouthful of pancakes.
Gaining momentum, Infinity continued. “I follow a one to one ratio for cups of flour and eggs. Then, for every egg, I’ll use an equal number of tablespoons of sugar. And for every tablespoon of sugar, half the number of teaspoons of salt, but double the number of teaspoons of baking powder. And get this,” she paused, waiting for Negativa to raise her head from her feeding frenzy to make eye contact, “with a total disregard of mathematical measurement, I’ll toss in as many fresh blueberries as I care to and gently fold them into my mathematically precise blueberry batter!”
Since I was preparing this only for myself, here are the measurements I used, following the above formula:
1 cup of flour
1/2 cup almond milk
1/8 cup (= 2 tablespoons) oil
1 egg
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
handful of blueberries
I definitely had “experimental error” in the form of overshooting the prescribed amounts of flour, milk, and salt. I’m usually not too precise with my cooking measurements to begin with, but my end result was a tad saltier than I generally like. That little problem was remedied if the pancake was dripping with syrup. Needless to say, I’ll have to try it again, showing more attention to my measurements. In the end, the result was an edible pancake that rose beautifully, despite the slanted burner it cooked on. Next time I have a private cooking lesson, I want to learn how to flip a pancake although I think making several smaller pancakes will probably be my best bet.