Thanksgiving 2012: Celebrating Movember with Mustache Sugar Cookies

When I went home for my mom's birthday

a couple weeks ago, 

I noticed my brother grew a mustache.

Since he's half Italian, he was able to grow a mustache at least,

but since he is half Chinese, it was a little thinner in some places.

It was also dark brown with some blond highlights.

I thought he wanted to look like my dad

for some reason.

My dad is famous for his glasses and mustache.

He has a dark blond mustache with gray highlights,

but that's the only similarity between their mustaches (being bicolored).

My brother mumbled something about Movember.

He didn't really explain it though.

So that weekend, I saw the Office episode that explained it!

That episode was funny.

If you're not going to watch the episode, here it is from the official site:

During November each year, Movember is responsible for the sprouting of moustaches on thousands of men’s faces, in the US and around the world. With their Mo's, these men raise vital awareness and funds for men's health issues, specifically prostate and testicular cancer initiatives.

I got mustache cookie cutters and stamps

for my birthday,

so I thought since our cheese appetizer failed,

it would be very timely to have Movember cookies

for Thanksgiving.

We'd used almost all our butter for our

supersilky smooth mashed potatoes,

so I had to make due with the stick we had left.

I only made these two trays,

but after the meal we just ate, 

it was definitely enough.

I used a quick recipe I found online since it automatically did the

proportions for me.

No one thought the recipe was that awesome

(the people's comments are a bit exaggerated on the website),

including me.

But it worked in a butter pinch. 

Mustache party!

My popo, ayee, and mom,

showing off their mustaches.

Such deliciously hairy women.

Oh, and it's hereditary.

Wee even sported a goatee with the freehand 'stache we made.

A Vegetarian Birthday Party Dinner

We celebrated Carmina's birthday with a dinner

on St. Patrick's Day.

She's vegetarian,

so no corn beef and cabbage today.

What we had was so much better!

Jon made a beet vinaigrette for a small salad to start. 

I had no idea that the magenta sauce in the cup was the vinaigrette 

at the time that I took this photo.

Anyway, right before serving it, he dressed the salads for us.

It was really delicious.

For a small appetizer, 

he used up some leftover fancy spaghetti we had 

to serve with a vegetarian interpreted carbonara sauce: 

very buttery and Parmesan-y.

He topped it off with some truffle caviar.

We all had seconds.

For the main course,

we had cannelloni filled with spinach and ricotta 

(that first photo above) 

topped with saffron-and-paprika-infused oil.

Jon took sheets of fresh lasagna, halved, and cooked them.

While he did that, he baked the spinach and ricotta mixture to warm it up.

Then he assembled it.

This cooking-things-separate method made for a really nice presentation.

And you wouldn't believe how delicious it was!

For dessert we had olive oil cake,

fresh whipped cream,

and freshly pureed blueberries on the side.

The extra mini cakes we gave away as party favors.

I think it was a very good dinner party,

and we each had beer to celebrate St. Patrick's Day.

The birthday girl got a bit tipsy

and our stomachs were full

and we had fun.

Success!

I Love/Olive Oil Cake

I really wanted to make an olive oil cake,

so for a dinner we hosted to celebrate Carmina's birthday,

I made one.

The cake base gets really thick, 

but it's a really gorgeous color.

It smells amazing.

And instead of gobs of butter,

it's a 1/2 cup of extra-virgin olive oil for the fat.

Is it healthier?

I have no idea, 

but I'd like to think so.

The recipe doesn't say at first,

but you'll have to transfer and wash out your bowl/paddle of the base cake batter

to whip up the egg whites.

(Unless you have an extra bowl on hand.)

I had a mini cake pan that I'd never used.

I forgot what a mess it was to make cupcakes--

let alone mini cakes--

because of the scooping issue.

Then I remembered from my Cupcake Diaries books 

that the girls use an ice-cream scoop to divvy up the batter.

It kind of worked better than two spoons.

You'll want to use a really good extra-virgin olive oil.

Don't be cheap.

(They'd charge at least $5 to $12 for a dessert like this at a restaurant,

and do you know why the restaurant cake might taste better?

Because they didn't cheap out on the extra-virgin olive oil.)

Your main flavor is coming from the olive oil.

They looked a bit like bouchons.

And they tasted wonderful.

I used the Olive Oil Cake recipe from Mark Bittman's

How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.

(The "fluffy, moist" description won over the Mario Batali recipe in Molto Italiano.)

I felt like this was an easy cake to make,
and the results were much greater than my expectations!

Christina Tosi's/Milk Bar's/Jon's Corn Cookies

Nat was hosting a cookie exchange pre-New Year's Eve party,

so we needed to make some interesting cookies.

The most interesting cookies we've had in awhile were the corn cookies 

from Momofuku Milk Bar.

To make these cookies, first, you probably would want to 

buy the book because the recipes are awesome.

Then mise en place yourself.

Here's the recipe from the book:

To cream (butter and sugar).

So creamed.

(Follow the excerpted page below to cream your cookies.
You get a good sense of the tone of the book too.
It's a good tone.
And it's easy to follow her directions too.)

 

I love that line: "You can certainly make delicious cookies 

without a mixer . . . But not these cookies."

Other ingredients tossed in.

Plopped to be chilled.

Scooped and flattened.

Baked.

Corn cookies.

They were a bit on the salty end, so we'll have to reduce or use a different salt next time.
Jon also made a brown butter sauce for it, but in the end we skipped setting that out for dipping.

A Tale of Two Dinners

A fancy store's window on Fifth Avenue

On Thursday, Lakshmi and Pam came over for dinner. It was the rainiest day of the week, and that they still wanted to come despite the rain, cheered me up. I made the last of our rice (our usual sushi rice supplemented with some sweet rice to make at least two cups of rice for four people), ground lamb with apples (the Macoun apples provided a nice contrast to the slightly gamey lamb and the cracked black pepper ties it all together; the head chef was a bit miffed by the white pieces of sliced garlic that were added as basically an afterthought, since they didn't brown, but whatever), and spinach (with oyster sauce; the spinach turned out kind of watery, but at least it wasn't burnt like every other spinach I've made in the last few months), and apple crumbles for dessert. (I'm not sure why Lakshmi calls it a streusel in her blog, but it's all good. Lakshmi peeled and cut the apples for this dish and the lamb because I was doing a crappy job of it.) Lakshmi brought her mom's homemade coconut chutney and spiny melon chutney. Both chutneys were delicious and went well with the meal. We caught up and watched the Halloween episode of Community together.

The back/unfinished part of our apartment

After the utter failure of not placing in the Halloween contest at work, I thought of another masochistic thing I could do: try to get Laduree macarons for dessert that evening. I walked up there from work, and forty-five minutes later, I realized how dumb it was because the line was really long (though inside the store, which I suppose is great), but after waiting a few minutes, I realized how dumb it was to wait with the tourists. Cause after a few minutes, I realized that they had to be all tourists since they all looked so confused.

(Laduree, you need to get your shit together. You need to have flavors posted like an ice-cream shop and prepackaged assortments of macarons and all. You need someone taking orders from people who know what they want and not just want to gawk at the variety of flavors. I have money. I want macarons. I want efficient service.)

I took the M66 across town and walked to D'Agostino to get my mozzarella ball. (If I'm serving salad, I feel like there should be mozzarella as an option too.) Hetal came soon after I got in and watch in horror as I cut up the apples for another apple crumble. (We have a chef's knife to cut up things. I like seeing my fingertips when I cut things so I know where they are. Apparently, this is a bad way to cut things. But I've yet to cut myself, so I don't see any reason for alarm.) Then Dani came with Crumbs cupcakes--one with a vampire guy on top of it. And Nat came shortly after too. I forget what happened, but I think Hetal was cold, so I went to grab a sweater that I didn't want anymore and told her that she could keep it, and I suggested they all look at my "give-away" clothes bins. I had three bins, and they each took a nice bundle of clothing. One bin is entirely empty now. I'm excited that I had desirable stuff! I feel like when I try giving stuff to my sister or mom they look at me like I'm nuts or try to convince me to keep it. I just haven't got any room though I have relatively lots of room. Jon came home at some point and started cooking the meal while I finished prepping. Aditya came and showed us photos of his engagement party and beautiful fiancee.

Our menu included: olive bread, pumpkin ravioli with brown butter and sage, rye bread with carmelized onions (we made that on Wednesday for an onion soup that we ultimately never made) topped with some Swiss cheese (so like onion soup without the broth), and lettuce with mozzarella and the "good" balsamic vinegar. One should never fill up on lettuce or eat lettuce while the other food is warm anyway, is my motto. For dessert we had apple crumble (this time with MiniWheats in the crumble as well) with amaretto-almond crunch ice cream and split the vampire-baby Halloween cupcake. I had the lemon cupcake for breakfast the next day. So nice and lemony!

Cookies for Christmas

Dorie Greenspan's chocolate chip cookies are one of my family's favorites so I made them in addition to the mini-cake and cupcakes for Christmas.



I remember the first time I made the cookies I thought they came out perfect--they looked like the Bon Appetit magazine article that included her recipe anyway. The subsequent times though came out kind of superthin and crispy. Jon liked them and my family preferred them, so I stopped trying to figure out what I was doing wrong.



Jon liked how small the first batch came out small. Like silver dollar-size. He said that cookies aren't really meant to be more than a couple bites. Some of these are one bite. Some are two.



I then accidentally overcooked a batch. I initially was taking them out at 9 minutes, but I set the timer to 9 hours instead, and it was 8 hours 45 minutes before I took out a browner (though not burnt batch). Jon said they looked better and tasted more complex. Jon likes burnt things though. But they did taste better.



So in addition to making the tiniest cookies possible, I had to bake them a tiny bit longer. And since I was doing the whole process by myself in our tiny kitchen, it took awhile. I had three trays with Silpats rotating--one in the oven, one cooling, one being prepped. I was a tired machine. (I must say though, the paddle that scraps the sides of the bowl is an amazing invention. Thanks to Charleen for that awesome shower gift!)

Start time was 11:43 p.m. and about 100 cookies later I was done at 1:55 a.m. Christmas day.

Cookies were crispy and delicious!

Sant Claus is coming to home.

On Christmas Eve, we went to Mitsuwa to buy eggs for the baking I was doing for Christmas and pick up a cake from Italian Tomato/Saint Honore for Christmas Eve dinner. (It was Jon's idea to pick up a cake--I wanted to make chocolate pudding, but in the end, buying dessert really freed up some of my time to concentrate on the Christmas baking.)

Mitsuwa was really pushing the chestnut, chocolate, and vanilla-strawberry shortcake flavor cakes, but I wanted something fun and not too sweet so we went with the green tea cake. The sugar Santa and bodiless snowman was really cute too--especially compared to the weird things they had on the other cakes.



It came in a festive box too. Sant Claus is coming to home.



I thought Pam once wrote about Christmas cakes being a derogatory term in Japan in her blog, but I guess I was mistaken. Anyway, this was fun to read again too.

Ah...Christmas cakes:

Christmas Cake

In Japan, age counts. Especially if you are a woman. The ideal of feminine beauty in Japan is youth and innocence. Plus, there's a lot of pressure on women to get married. So, if you're an unmarried woman, and heading towards thirty, we'd say that you're being "left on the shelf" or maybe "past your sell-by date".

In Japan though, they compare such women to a "Christmas Cake." It may well be sweet and delicious, but no one really wants any after the 25th. So, if you're an unmarried Japanese woman, after the age of twenty five, you're in extreme danger of becoming a Christmas Cake.

Easter Saturday 2010

After the best Good Friday dinner that I could recall, I set off to make rainbow cookies. Not that I had any desire to, but my mom suggested that I make them for when we celebrated Easter on Saturday. So around 9pm I went to Trader Joe's and Whole Foods and got some groceries.

Whole Foods sells canned almond paste for about $9. I think I could've gotten two nice-size boxes of rainbow cookies from Wegman's (if I knew where there was one in the area besides in Virginia) instead:



Other ingredients:



All mixed together:



I was too lazy to move the batter into a different bowl and clean the mixer's bowl to then use to beat the egg whites, so I carefully held up a metal mixing bowl to the whisk while the mixer worked its magic. Probably dangerous, but it was nearly midnight at this point.



White layer:



Pink and green layers:



Ultimate product: (I guess I could've made an effort to take a nicer photo, but look it's rainbow-y.)



I don't think I'll be making these again or using this recipe. I'd rather make pignoli nut cookies, and I know my family enjoys those even more...pignoli nut cookies or brownies for next year!

My aunt's Jell-O layers were a bigger hit--and much easier to make:



I egged and cornstarched these guys:



I didn't have a chance to eat them that night though, but I brought some home to eat tonight along with some homemade cream corn. The mayo sauce was served on the side (for mayo shrimp).

What I ate instead on Saturday Easter dinner was: lamb, roast beef, ham, baby bok choy, and garlic mashed potatoes...not to mention the appetizers: stuffed mushrooms, hard salami slices, carrots/celery and dip, and cheese/bacon bites.

Easter Sunday was another day of eating, but of a different nature.