Things to be thankful for

Yesterday I turned in my last final of the term and I'm officially on spring break for one short, glorious week and a half. Well, I still have to go to work today, but as far as school is concerned, I'm on spring break! It's a little bittersweet, because this is my last spring break ever, but I have big plans to make it memorable. Surprisingly, these plans aren't "sit on my bum and watch Star Trek all day."

(Don't worry, this will get to food... eventually.)

One of the things I've been trying very hard to do during finals is be thankful for what I have. Finals and work stress really, really get to me in the worst way, so I've been trying to remind myself of the good things to help calm me down. I first thought of this when I was drawing a thank you card for some relatives that helped me out with spring break plans (and also to procrastinate on studying for finals, but mostly because I was grateful).

The secret to drawing awesome cards? Draw in pencil first, then ink it in with a gel/ballpoint pen.
When the ink is dry, erase pencil marks and fill in empty spaces.

 I am grateful that I have finals in the first place — I know so many people who can't afford college or are indebting themselves because they value a diploma so much. In this economy, in this world, I'm incredibly lucky just to be in school, be reading, and be taking classes I enjoy — even if they stress me out.

I'm incredibly lucky to be employed as I work my way through college, and even luckier to be employed somewhere that values creativity. (No, seriously: Check out this pitch my boss wrote!) Sometimes the commute can get me down, but then I'm treated to the most amazing skies and the drive doesn't seem bad at all. I mean, just take a look:

And of course, I'm thankful for my readers! You guys are awesome... even especially if you're my friend and I'm forcing you to read it!

I'm also thankful my mom taught me to make French toast, and I'm deeply thankful for this French toast, because it's freaking delicious. I use Semifreddi's cinnamon challah swirl as the base, but it's tasty with any kind of bread. Plain challah, Italian bread like pugliese or ciabatta, French bread, sourdough sandwich bread, cinnamon raisin bread — all kinds of bread are delicious. (I'm hungry, okay? Lists of food are forthcoming.)

First thing is to slice your bread. Thick slices are delicious but will need to be cooked for longer; thinner slices will cook more quickly.

I usually cook the whole loaf and eat the rest for breakfast later in the week. For each two slices of bread, you'll need one egg and a quarter cup of milk, so with 10 slices of bread, I mixed five eggs and a cup and a quarter of milk.

Beat the eggs and milk together as much as you can. If you don't have flavored bread, at this point you can add cinnamon and a little vanilla to the eggs (and nutmeg, if you like it!) to get sweeter French toast, or add dried basil and oregano for a savory version.

Pour a little egg and milk over the bread and let it soak in.

The thicker your bread and slices are, the longer it will take to soak in. My mom actually leaves bread to soak in eggs and milk overnight in the fridge in a 9 by 13 inch pan if she's using pugliese or baguettes. Challah absorbs liquid easily, so it doesn't need to soak too long.

Plop the bread on a medium-high skillet and let it cook. The key here is patience, patience, PATIENCE! When you're cooking French toast, you're essentially cooking an egg inside a slice of bread. Do not sear the outside and let the inside of the bread remain soggy.

Flip when one side is golden brown and looks like a cooked egg. Depending on your skillet heat, this will take about four minutes, but don't worry if it takes longer! If the outside is cooking but the inside is staying soggy, cover your skillet with tin foil (shiny side facing the French toast) to help it cook. When both sides are cooked, serve with real maple syrup and fresh fruit, your favorite jam or honey, or  you've made savory French toast, serve with sausage and lemon green beans.

Refrigerate any leftovers to enjoy later! Reheat and spread with peanut butter and jam. Make this French toast for the people in your life you're grateful for, and be thankful for all the delicious varieties of French toast you can make. I certainly am!

French toast
Ingredients:
Bread
Eggs (1 egg per two slices of bread)
Milk (0.25 cups per two slices of bread)

To make:
1. Whisk together milk and eggs.
2. Soak bread in egg/milk mixture.
3. Cook soaked bread on a medium-hot skillet. If the center isn't cooked through, cover the skillet with tin foil.
4. When both sides are cooked, serve with syrup, jam, or fresh fruit.

Citrus salt scrub

Waaaaay back in December, my roommate and I made this wonderful face and body scrub for our housemates' Christmas presents. It's quite simple to make, smells delicious, and feels wonderful on your face.

(And apparently, I'm on a citrus kick for the blog!)

Since we were making this scrub as a present, we mixed it up in our bathroom to keep it a surprise. (We felt a little like we were cooking drugs, so I made this logo as a play on AMC's "Breaking Bad.")

We started out by zesting a lemon and an orange — except we didn't have a zester at the time, so we peeled the fruit and diced the peel into the smallest pieces we could manage.

Fear not: Cold medicine and hair gel are not part of this recipe.

We put the zest in a bowl, then added the coarsest salt we could find without going as coarse as rock salt.

Then we added light olive oil...

We used light olive oil for two reasons: 1. We couldn't find a lot of almond oil for a reasonable price and 2. normal olive oil is more likely to cling to your skin and cause acne. On this note, remember that light olive oil is different from extra virgin olive oil!

We mixed everything together (though it did separate quickly), and poured it into a jar for each of our housemates.

I made up a little label for them, we wrapped them, and gave them away. Afterwards we realized that it wasn't exactly tactful to give the people we live with soap... but this smells so darn good that none of our housemates minded!

Citrus salt scrub
Ingredients:
0.5 cup light olive oil, or almond oil
0.5 cup coarse sea salt
1 teaspoon lemon zest
1 teaspoon orange zest

To make:
Mix ingredients. Store in an air-tight container.

Mini lemon souffles: Summer in the middle of winter

My friend and I made deliciously tart lemon souffles, I took a bunch of pictures, and I'll share the recipe with you, but first I have to tell you this story: I've been tracking my social media with Klout, a tool that looks at your influence the world of Twitter, Facebook, Google+, blogs, etc. (Speaking of which, don't forget to follow me on Twitter!) It also measures how much influence you have over a particular topic. According to Klout, I'm influential over the topic of Minnesota.

Guys. I've never even mentioned Minnesota. I love when tools like this turn up such wacky results! For what it's worth, the blog tool tracks what search keys people used to find your blog. The top results are for "scherenschnitte," which makes sense, and "you pull it out," which I don't understand at all. I love search engine analytics!

Anyway. Enough about nerd stuff, let's get on to the baking!

I found this recipe for mini lemon souffles baked in lemon rinds on Martha Stewart's website and wanted them immediately. The recipe was first published in 1998, when I was in elementary school and couldn't separate an egg. Twelve years later, the recipe has held up brilliantly. My friend has a lemon tree (and therefore more lemons than she knows what to do with), so she brought some over and we pretended we were fancy with our souffles.

The original recipe asks for you to remove the inside of the lemons with a grapefruit spoon or a melon baller. Sadly, we didn't have either of these things, so we used spoons to scrape the lemon pulp.

We couldn't punch through the bottom layer of the lemon. The bottom of the lemon is sliced off to let it sit stably on the cookie sheet, but we were afraid that without the skin to hold the souffle batter in, it would spread all over the cookie sheet, so we placed the hollowed-out lemons in a muffin tin.

The first start of the actual souffle part is to whisk lemon juice, egg yolks, sugar, and flour.

We whisked this together, then held it over a pot of simmering water to thicken it. We stirred constantly, then pulled it off the heat and continued to stir until it was cooler. (In the background of the picture below, we've got homemade pizza. Yum!)

 

We set this mixture aside, then used the same technique and heated egg whites and sugar until the sugar melted, then we used an electric mixer to beat the mix until we could pull the egg whites up and soft peaks would remain after.

I tried using a hand whisk at first. Please, do not make the same mistake I did. Go straight to the electric mixer!

We mixed about a third of the egg whites in with the egg yolks, using a whisk to stir them until they were combined.

When these were combined, we slowly folded the rest of the egg whites in with the egg yolk mix. The secret here is to go slowly: You don't want to crush the egg whites (they're what make the souffle so poofy), so you need to make a circle with a spatula around the bowl, cutting the two together without crushing the egg whites.

We alternately spooned the mix into the hollowed-out lemons and cleaned the bowl out with our fingers, then licked our fingers clean. We had smaller lemons than the recipe called for, so the souffle spiled over the edge of the lemon rind, which was fine.

This picture is so very washed out. Awesome.

Side note: We filled the empty cups with water so the lemons wouldn't cook unevenly. This is important to do whenever there are empty cups in whatever you're baking in a muffin tin.

When the souffle tops were ever-so-slightly browned, we pulled the souffles out. The souffle puffed up quite a bit and spilled over the rind.

We pulled them out with tongs, placed them on plates, sprinkled them with powdered sugar, and tried to savor them — but we devoured them instead.

The souffle itself is light and fluffy, and gets scrumptiously tart when you spoon it out from the rind. I love these little babies — they're definitely going on the menu for summer, and they were a great reminder of sunshine in the middle of a winter rainstorm. You're going to love them.

Mini lemon souffles

Ingredients:

8 large lemons

3 eggs, separated

0.5 cups sugar

2 tablespoons flour

Powdered sugar, for topping

To make:

1. Preheat oven to 350F.

2. Trim "bottom" end from lemons so they sit flat on their own. Cut the "top" or stem end about a third of the way down.

3. Scoop out the pulp and squeeze the juice out. Put the shells in a muffin tin or on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

4. Mix the egg yolks, 0.25 cups of granulated sugar, 0.25 cups of the lemon juice you squeezed earlier, and the flour in a heat-proof bowl. Whisk until the mixture is pale yellow.

5. Hold the bowl over simmering water, whisking constantly for about 8 minutes. When it's thickened, remove the bowl and continue to mix until it cools. Set aside.

6. Mix egg whites and remaining 0.25 cups of sugar in another bowl, and hold it over the simmering water until the sugar has melted.

7. Beat egg whites with an electric mixer, first on a low speed until they're frothy, then on increasingly higher speed until the meringue is shiny and pulling the beater out leaves soft peaks. Don't overbeat!

8. Whisk about a third of the meringue/egg whites into the egg yolks and lemon.

9. Fold the rest of the egg whites into the yolk mixture very gently.

10. Spoon the souffle into the hollowed out lemon rinds, and bake the souffles for about 14 minutes.

11. Transfer souffles onto plates, sprinkle with confectioners' sugar, and serve immediately.

Homemade, homestyle pizza

I had a craving for pizza for a while, but since I'd been in quarantine for a while, the idea of ordering pizza simply wasn't doing it for me. I needed to get into the kitchen, get flour all over my clothes and counters, and make pizza the way my mom has made it for years: from scratch. My friend came over, we opened a bottle of wine, and got to work proving stereotypes about college diets aren't always true.

This method has two steps, so if you're going to go all the way, you need to block out plenty of time to prep everything, or else you'll end up eating at 9 o'clock at night and you won't have time to enjoy your creation. If you're going to put the effort in, make sure you have time to savor it!

First step is to make the pizza dough and let it rise. Start this at least two hours before you want to roll the dough out and bake the pizza in the oven. I'm using Patricia Wells' Trattoria pizza/bread dough recipe. It's always worked well for my family, so it's what I rely on. (Also, it makes enough dough for two pizzas, so I'm guaranteed to have my craving fulfilled!)

Start out by whisking sugar, lukewarm water, and yeast together, then let it sit for about five minutes and get foamy and bubbly.

I know I always write about this, but make sure the water is warm, but not too hot. Find the Goldilocks temperature by holding the measuring cup against your wrist: It should feel warmer than your skin, but comfortable. If it hurts, the water is too hot and will kill the yeast. (Also, you can use a candy thermometer to get the water to around 115F. I've definitely done this before.)

When the yeast is bubbling and smells bad, add the salt and olive oil to make lava lamp patterns.

At this point I put the dough hook on my mixer and started adding flour a half cup at a time. (I used whole wheat flour for a third of the flour to give the dough a bit of texture.) Make sure you scrape down the sides and the bottom with a spatula so all the flour is mixed in.

When the dough is no longer sticking to the sides of the bowl and forms a ball (about 3 to 3.5 cups of flour later), pull it out of the bowl and knead it for about 5 minutes on a floured surface until it's smooth and doesn't stick to your hands too much.

Roll the dough into a ball, plop it in a bowl, cover it with plastic wrap or a towel, and let it rise. If you're in a rush, place it somewhere warm — I like putting it in the laundry closet if someone's running the dryer. At home, my mom would put the dough in the oven, but this only works if you have a gas oven that holds heat. It doesn't work in electric ovens, and you might kill the yeast.

When the dough has doubled in size, it's ready. This usually takes about two hours, but if it's very cold in your kitchen, it can take longer. (As a side note, if you want to make pizza the next day, let the dough rise in the refrigerator and it will take about a day to rise.)

While my dough was rising, I started making the tomato sauce. Cans of diced tomatoes in olive oil and garlic had been lurking in my pantry for far too long, so I took those and dumped them in a pot and simmered to reduce it to the consistency of sauce.

If I had plain diced tomatoes, I probably would have browned some garlic in olive oil first, then added the tomatoes, along with whatever seasonings I was digging at the moment. And next time I make sauce from scratch, I'm going to put the tomatoes through a food processor first: The sauce was very chunky and would have been better chopped up a bit.

The sauce simmered for about a half an hour on very low heat (we could've cranked it up if we were in a  hurry), and when it was looking much thicker we rolled out our first pizza. Here's the awesome part about making your own pizza: You can choose how thick you want the crust. Some people like a thin, cracker-like crust, some people like a thick crust. All you have to do is roll the dough out more or less. A warning: thicker crust means a smaller pizza overall. And if you want a very thin crust, be careful not to overload the pizza with toppings or make the pizza bigger than your cookie sheet!

Much better.

Our first pizza was a bit of a test run, so we just put sauce and mozzarella on top. We cooked it on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and it turned out great.

Encouraged by our results, we got a bit bolder with our second pizza, adding roughly chopped basil under the cheese and asiago to the mozzarella.

This also made the kitchen smell like basil. Now, some people will put entire leaves of basil on top of their pizzas, and that's fine, but if you chop up the basil, it releases some oils and the basil scent lingers. That's what I'm talkin' about, baby.

We baked the pizzas one at a time, but they can be done together. We only staggered them so we could gnaw on one while waiting for the second (I'm a terribly impatient person).

This is the only artsy shot I took.

Like I said, I'm impatient! Especially where pizza is concerned.

And there you have it! We went the simple route, but the beauty of making your own pizza is you can also add your own toppings. My mom loves putting sliced red onion on, my dad and brother love spicy pepperoni, my friend likes artichokes or roasted red bell pepper, and I even know some people who don't like sauce, so they eat their pizza with just cheese and toppings.

I definitely recommend the basil and asiago combo: Together they add a bit of a bite and some tanginess to the sweetness of the mozzarella. But you certainly don't have to take my word for it! Here's the recipe so you can experiment with your own toppings. Enjoy!

Pizza dough
Ingredients:
1 teaspoon dry yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
1.5 cups lukewarm water
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
about 3.75 cups flour

To make:
1. In a large bowl, combine yeast, sugar, and water. Stir to blend and let it sit until foamy (about five minutes).
2. Stir in oil and salt.
3. Add the flour a little at a time, stirring until most of the flour has been absorbed and the dough forms a ball.
4. Transfer the dough to a floured surface and knead until soft and satiny but still firm. This will take about 5 minutes of kneading. Add extra flour to keep the dough from sticking to the surface or your hands.
5. Transfer the dough to a bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and let it rise until it doubles in size.
6. Preheat oven to 500F.
7. Split dough in half, and roll it out into a circle. Put the dough on a cookie sheet.
8. Add sauce and toppings, but don't get too close to the edge or the toppings will spill over while baking.
9. Bake until dough is crisp and golden; 10 to 15 minutes.
10. Take pizza out of the oven, transfer to cutting board, slice, serve, and enjoy.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Again, it's been a while since I've blogged anything and I apologize. I recovered from a week of sickness only to get sick again a few days later, and I'm not good for anything when I'm sick (except complaining. I'm really good at that). I appear to be healthier now, so baking should resume shortly. (Arteries, consider yourselves warned!)

Recently, my life has gone through a lot of changes, and since I've been sick, I've had plenty of time to reflect on them. You've probably noticed the first change: I did an overhaul of the blog, and I think we can all agree it was badly needed. And my gorgeous new header? Courtesy of the adorable Katie, a dear friend and fellow blogger. She's actually going through her own changes: She updated her blog layout and, after nearly a year-long hiatus, has returned to blogging as well. Give her a read. I think she's grand. Also, she's been known to dress up like a Christmas tree, so it's worth tuning in simply for shenanigan updates.

Secret: I want to be just like Katie when I grow up. Except without the "being a teacher" part.

There are bigger changes in my life as well. Yesterday was my last day at the office job I've held for nearly two years now — I've been promoted at my company, and it was time to move on. My (now former) coworkers gave me a darling send-off complete with cake, but what was strangest was training my replacement. There are so many little details to look after that it's just plain bizarre to think that I'll never have to notice them again. And of course, it's always strange to leave a place where you know people well. I know I'll miss everyone at the office, even if I don't necessarily miss the work!

Little changes have become really noticeable as well. Since I was sick, my biggest landscape change was moving from my bed to the sofa. I barely left the house for two weeks. Now that I'm healthy again, I'm taking extra joy in going outside and inhaling deeply, enjoying the early spring we're having in California. Being healthy after being sick makes you appreciate the simplest parts in life so much more.

I've also noticed how important moving around the house is. Like I said, my usual spot is on the couch, but I had to write a research paper this week (fascinating topic: European Union-Chinese relations. Read an EU report on the matter here if you're a nerd like I am), and I wasn't getting anywhere on the couch. I picked up my laptop and research and moved to the dining room table.

I googled "writing a paper at a table." Yep, this is exactly what I look like when I write a paper.
(I love stock images so much.)

Just that simple shift to a better place to write helped me tremendously. Sitting up straight, with a solid surface to type on and organize my research, helped me get into a more studious mode and focus on my paper. I wrote my paper in record time. The entire experience reminded me that sometimes it's not just about your headspace; sometimes you need to change your physical space to concentrate.

P.S. As a "sorry I'm terrible at updating gift," here's a link to a streaming "penguin cam," courtesy of SeaWorld and the Discovery Channel. I've spent waaaay too much time today narrating what the penguins are doing in a high-pitched voice. My roommates are sick of it, but now you, too, can enjoy penguins penguining in their special penguin way!
P.P.S. I promise there will be more recipes soon! But let me know if you like these kinds of posts, and maybe I can come up with some interesting points in my life to blog about. :)