It's all Panda-licious!

Mayo: Results Varied

Amanda — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 05:38:01 +0000

Indeed they were. I happened to be out of my favorite store bought mayo the other day and had been too busy to run to the store and needed to make a sandwich to take to school for the eating of the mid-day meal. Bright idea! Consult the reliable Fanny Farmer to see if I had the ingredients to make my own.

half an hour later, ze sauce, she is done!

I got the texture spot on, however, the taste isn’t all there. I used an extra virgin olive oil as the fat in the recipe and I think that the mayo tastes too much of the oil. I will have to experiment with a lower grade of oil. And I’m not sure of the mustard…

Once I get the mix right I want to experiment with chipotle and cayenne pepper to make flavored mayo….

Don’t you think the brand would sell well? “Pan-delicious Flavored Mayos. Good for the Pan, Good for the Panda” *snerk*

Picture and recipe up laterz.

Tamale Pie

Amanda — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 10:54:12 +0000

This is a long standing favorite dish of mine, dating back to childhood. I don’t really remember where the recipe came from and my mother doesn’t quite recall either. Basically you pan fry the majority of the ingredients and then dump it in a casserole dish and put a polenta topper on it and bake it all bubbly delicious-ness

! I made it by myself for the first time tonight and am quite proud of my accomplishment, even though the polenta topper was /way/ too thick – I’ve got some experimenting to do as I still don’t think that the recipe it quite right.

Hmm. Perhaps it depends on the size of the dish – I dumped it in a 9×13 glass, but it made need a smaller and taller dish.

Tasty but Top Heavy Tamale Pie

Third Bread

Amanda — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 01:00:39 +0000

I made bread today. I was going to make a simple wheat bread, but I ran across a recipe in the famous Fannie Farmer Cookbook that looked intriguing and I decided to try it.

Note to self: Set the timer when you let dough rise or else you’ll lose track of time.

It’s called Third Bread because, according to the recipe, it incorporates three different flours – well, 2 flours and a meal. It uses molasses as a sweetener which is a flavor I have to get used to; it as a musky grainy smell and tasty. However, given that it’s a byproduct of the sugar process, the grainy smell is just bizarre. How I like rum falls in that bizarre category, since molasses isn’t my favorite sweetener.

The result? A dark brown bread that has a hard shell and a chewy delicious with a mild molasses taste. Excellent with a bit of butter. The shell is a bit of a problem, but that might be due to my college priced bakeware. *shrugs* Goes with the territory and is a minor issue.

My Attempt at Third Bread

Dutch Babies

Amanda — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 22:23:53 +0000

So, I was working at Collier’s Hardware the other day, obsessing about waffles as per usual when a family came in and bought a professional Kitchen Aid waffle maker and so I got to talking to them about waffles and eiblekeebers (which I can’t pronounce, much less spell) and they asked if I had ever had a dish called Dutch Wah wahs, or Dutch Babies.

Never Heard of It. So the lady explained it to me, that it was essentially an oven pancake. I didn’t research it immediately until the day after when I was having a pancake craving guaranteed to make me sick the next day. I decided to find a recipe for it and found a good one on Cooks.com.

It was TEH awesome!

My 1st Dutch Baby

The Food Blog

Amanda — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:43:30 +0000

Hi. My name’s Amanda. I’m an anthropology graduate student at the California State University @ Chico.

So this blog is dedicated to my growing obsession with food, food writing, and the anthropology of food. I will attempt to use this site to convey recipes I’ve found in various sources and if I’ve tried them, the results and my rating. Although it’s not like I’m some sort of connoisseur or something. It’s more like I just need to gush or rant about my obsession. I’ll also include a book list of the sources I’m reading.