Thursday, June 23, 2011

I spend a lot of time reading cookbooks, cooking magazines, cooking blogs and websites.  I frequently come across a recipe that appeals to me, and I say, “I’ll have to try that”.  And off I go to the kitchen…where I find that I’m short at least one key ingredient.  This is exactly what happened today. 
Now, according to the Costa Rican government weather website, there is a massive low pressure system over us, and we can expect torrential rains to start at any moment.  In fact, when I wandered into the kitchen, it had already been thundering for an hour or so, and as I looked out my window, the pavement was steaming from the first few drops of rain. So when I discovered that I had no white sugar, and only a small amount of peanut butter, the idea of jumping on my scooter to see if I could beat the rain seemed silly.  I decided I would just have to be creative when it came to making these Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip cookies, taken from one of my favourite blogs:  SmittenKitchen.com
Before I begin cooking a recipe that I’ve found on the Internet, I go to the comments posted by other people who’ve tried the recipe, to see what they’ve got to say.  It always makes me laugh to see the degree to which a recipe can be modified and still yield a satisfactory result.  So what if the sausage and mushrooms are replaced with tofu and zucchini?  Or the ricotta is replaced with mascarpone, or béchamel?  The recipe still works!  Baking can be trickier though, because there’s a little more chemistry involved, and the ratio of liquid to flour to fat can be unforgiving.  But in this case, I was really craving peanut butter and chocolate together, so damn the torpedoes! I’m a professional! I'll wing it!
I only made half the recipe, because that’s all the peanut butter that I had.  And half a recipe calls for half an egg, which is just silly, so I threw in the whole thing. So then I skipped the tablespoon of milk. Since I had no white sugar, I used all brown sugar, instead of half and half. (Costa Rican brown sugar is quite dry and coarse, so there’s no such thing as measuring out a ‘packed’ cup, and it never really dissolves at all).  And finally, I used only chocolate chips, because I’ve never seen peanut butter chips in Costa Rica.  As I got to the last step on the recipe and added the chocolate chips, I had one of those Homer Simpson “Doh!” moments.  Because as the dough split into a nasty, greasy mess, I realized that I had tried this exact recipe about a year ago, when I last had a craving for something with chocolate and peanut butter, with exactly the same result.  And that time, I hadn't made any substitutions (except for the peanut butter chips).  There’s something about Costa Rican butter that’s different from North American butter, and my pastry recipes frequently give me funny results here. Last year, when the dough was such  a mess, I continued experimenting with other cookies, and that's how I ended up with the Double Chocolate Peanut Butter Ice Cream Sandwich that's on the menu at Ginger Restaurant.  However, this time, the finished product was none the worse for the dough splitting, and the cookies were beautiful.  And delicious!

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Craving Lemons

Cravings are funny things. Lemons are one of my favourite things in the whole world, and until recently, you couldn't get lemons for love nor money in Costa Rica.  Don’t get me wrong, limes are a lovely thing (remember Amy and the pickled limes, in Little Women?).   The big, fat juicy Mecino limes that we get in Costa Rica are delicious.  And cheap. And available, year round.  But they’re not the same.
Whenever I went north, lemons would always be the first thing I would pick up at the grocery store.  I would have a celebratory vodka & tonic with lemon and savour every drop of it.   I have saved the seeds from these lemons, over the years, and planted them here in Costa Rica; so far, I’ve had a couple of completely sterile trees, with nary a sign of a lemon.  I have (gasp!) smuggled in a lemon or two in the toes of my shoes when returning from foreign parts, and I’ve even asked friends to commit the same crime.  But now, thanks to the wonders of Free Trade, lemons have appeared in the grocery store in Coco. And I’m free to indulge in all those lovely, lemony things that I’ve been craving for years.
So today, I give you Lemon Poppy Seed Pound Cake*.  With no poppy seeds.  Thankfully, I tasted them before I dumped the called-for three tablespoons of seeds into the batter, because they looked a little dodgy, and sure enough, they were rancid.  I have a friend coming to visit me from Canada in a few weeks.  Looks like she’s going to be smuggling in poppy seeds.



*The recipe is from The Cake Bible, by Rose Levy Beranbaum.  You're supposed to wait 24 hours before cutting into it, to let the lemon syrup soak in, but the craving was too strong.