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So I had a little cooking debacle yesterday, of which I wish, now, that I had stopped to snap a photo, because it was kind of Biblical in its chthonic oozy bubbling horribleness.   There is just something about the texture and movement of gently-belching batter magma — batter that was supposed to turn into chocolate cupcakes and for some eldritch reason did not — that is really hard to describe in text.  Those of you who have ever experienced Epic Cake Fail will understand.

Anyhow, the short story is that although one of my batches of cupcakes did not succeed, the other one did, and so my small cupcake-decorating party went off without a hitch.  My Belovedary, plus two of our friends, R and M, came over to hang out and shoot the breeze and decorate cupcakes.

For those of you looking for a relaxing way to spend some time on a weekend afternoon with friends that doesn’t cost too much money, you could do much worse than decorating cupcakes.  A small tube of marzipan (a little goes a long way!), some food coloring, a few kinds of shiny decorating sugar or sprinkles or whatever moves you (or indeed whatever you have kicking around the back of your cupboards), and a few kinds of small candies if you like, and you’re off to the races.  You can make your own cupcakes, or buy them if you prefer.  The point is that you spend a couple hours sitting around the kitchen table with your friends. It’s very relaxing to do something creative and visual that is ultimately totally low-stakes and inconsequential because of the fact that you’ll be eating it later.  And one of the great things about doing something like this is that you can customize your recipes to your dietary needs: everything you see below is vegan, to accommodate my dairy protein allergy.

Without further ado, a little gallery of some of the results!

R made this bright, sunny sparkler that I loved.

M did some masterful food-coloring paint-mixing, and adorned mini marshmallows.

R's sweet little marzipan nest of eggs, so cute.

My Belovedary made marzipan dinosaur eggs in the marzipan grass.

I made a marzipan octopus.

And a marzipan piggy, complete with itty-bitty cloven hooves and a curly tail.

The marzipan proved quite popular, and unexpectedly inspiring.  In fact, my two favorites that came out of the whole proceedings were both made of undyed marzipan.  One was made by M:

Behold: Marzipanhenge!

And the very best one of all was the one that my Belovedary made for me:

It's a SQUID! Made of marzipan. With hand-painted chromatophores.

It’s a squid!  An adorable ickle marzipan squid!  I was so excited I squealed like a little girl, which I suppose tells you a lot about the kind of little girl I was and the kind of person I turned out to be, but perhaps most of all it tells you that I have married very, very well.

Recently, I talked about improvisation and its role in menu planning, and I gave a few examples. One or two folks seemed to find it useful to have the examples, so I thought perhaps some more would be useful, too.

I hadn’t done any large-batch cooking-ahead in a while. Sometimes events conspire, and there you are. Also, I had recently surveyed the larder and realized that carrots had been part of my winter produce co-op share for several weeks now, yet I had been failing to cook them up. Similarly, I had elderly shallots that wanted using up before they did something regrettable, and some very freckly bananas, a small mountain of co-op-share apples, and a surplus of eggs.

There were lots of things I could’ve done with all this, but as I thought about it, I realized that what I really wanted were dishes that would keep well and that I would be able to eat off of for several days running. I wanted them to be different enough, one to the next, that I could mix them up and not get bored. And of course I wanted them to play nice with the other things I had on hand, so that I could supplement the make-ahead foods with other things if I felt like it.

Also, we were out of bread.

Obviously, this was going to require a bit of time in the kitchen. Had some of the events that conspired not conspired this weekend, I might’ve cooked all this stuff then, but they did, so I didn’t. Instead I decided I would just take the time — one of the benefits of being self-employed is a flexible schedule — to do the cooking today.

At 7 this morning, I lined the suspects up on the kitchen counter.

Ingredients for today's cookathon

In the back row, against the wall, starting  from where the seltzer siphon is, L to R: bread flour, all-purpose flour, sugar in plastic bins, on top of them are brown sugar, margarine, whole nutmeg, baking powder, and dry baking yeast.  On the cutting board, clockwise from upper left: orange and yellow carrots, Granny Smith and Pink Lady apples, Apple Pie Spice from Penzey’s, lemons, Morally Superior Eggs from Groovy Free-Will Chickens, celery seed, tofu, bowl containing star anise and dried chilis, bananas, garlic, tin of dried winter savory, shallots, onion, ginger root, boiling potatoes that were a little past their prime.  Not appearing in this picture are a few things like soy sauce, salt, water, and cooking oil.

On the agenda: red-simmered eggs and tofu, banana muffins, carrot-potato soup, apple pie, and a loaf of bread.

To give you an idea of how much time this kind of cooking doesn’t take, let’s see what I had managed to produce by 10:30 a.m.

Carrot, potato, and shallot soup

Lovely easy banana muffins

Red-simmered Eggs and Other Things

Bread dough rising

More than half of the cooking was done, or at least done enough that it could simply sit and coast and do its thing without any real involvement from me.  The soup had been assembled, the red-simmering liquid prepared, the eggs cooked and shelled, the tofu pressed and drained.  I had time to rummage in the freezer to see whether I could make some progress on the Great Freezer Space Reclamation Project of Ought-Nine by finding some things to toss into the red-simmering pot (I did — some strips of uncured pork belly, and some frozen tofu).  I had made my bread dough, baked a dozen delightful banana muffins, cleaned up after it all, and… because even when you are doing a lot of cooking like this, there are always down moments where you have to wait until the eggs are done or the onions and shallots have gotten transparent… I even managed to read two chapters of a book I’m reading for research purposes.

Later today I’ll make the pie crust, then refrigerate it until after my Belovedary gets home, and he’ll help me peel and slice apples for the pie.  This afternoon, after I get some lunch (I think I’ll have soup!) and go for a walk with my dog, I’ll bake the bread, which is having a nice second rise.  And while the bread bakes?  I’ll probably get a little more research done.

And then I really won’t have to cook much for a bit.  Unless I want to.

Which, knowing me, I probably will.

To Whom It May Concern,

Filling A Much-Needed Void is taking a much-needed nap.  Blogging will perhaps resume once sufficient non-blogging has been attained.

Yours Most Sincerely,

The Management

Due to the unfortunate conjunction of a rather expensive part having had to be ordered for repairing my oven, and that part’s not yet having arrived from wherever it was in Outer Kreplachistan that it had to be shipped from, I still haven’t got a working oven.  One hopes this situation will be remedied soon, but one is not actually feeling any too sanguine about the chances.

This is, despite the fact that one can handily survive without using one’s oven — I have known people who use their ovens as bookshelves, believe it or not — still throwing me a little off my cookery stride.

I was even more off my game last week, when my kitchen sink decided it would no longer drain, and nothing I was able to do could convince it to drain again.  For several days I ate small things that could be prepared in small dishes that could be washed in the bathroom sink, or else we went out for meals.  Finally the plumber came and thrust yards upon yards upon yards of pipe snake down it and, after considerable mucking-about, got it more or less working again, though apparently there is still some vent gizmo that wants improving in that drain line.  I can wash dishes again, at any rate, which is the important thing.

Further complicating matters, my schedule is insane with work.  I’m  terribly overbooked with freelance projects, plus the two books I’m theoretically working on at the same time, and so my cookery has contracted to fit the time I have.

In my house, this can mean several things, all of which have raised their heads in the past week or so.

• Sandwiches have been in evidence.  I do not often eat sandwiches, but it must be admitted that they are a time-saver.  I am particularly fond of egg salad (egg mayonnaise to you English speakers) when I make it at home, with plenty of mustard and chopped celery and some pickle, and pair it with a nice sturdy bread that has been well-toasted.
• Homemade pasta sauces and variegated ragouts, served over a starch of some kind.  Taking advantage of a bumper crop of eggplants last week, and some nice sauce tomatoes donated by one of my Belovedary’s coworkers, I made a really fine eggplant ragout.  This weekend, a fortuitous deal on some nice organic ground beef enabled me in the production of a ragu alla bolognese.  These are nice when you’re busy because they take a long time to cook but don’t actually take a lot of time for the cook, since mostly they just sit and bubble and can be safely ignored.
• I have laid in a stock of tofu, soy hot dogs, soy yogurt, and apples.  Quick proteinaceous lunches are easily grabbed.  WIth a few more minutes I can yank some sort of vegetation out of the relevant fridge bin, wash it, and chop it into pieces convenient for eating.
• I have done ditto with regard to spicy Korean ramen noodles.  These, with some additional vegetables and some chunks of tofu (or an egg poached in the broth while you cook the noodles) can be reasonably palatable, and are certainly zippy enough to answer at least partially to the feeling I get, when the cookery gets like this for a time, that I am not getting enough chiles, garlic, and ginger.

Just about the only Argh No Cooking Time standby I haven’t trotted out yet is the luncheon that consists of celery stalks filled with peanut butter.

And that is only because I haven’t any peanut butter in the house.

My sole culinary revelation of the past two weeks, pathetic as this is, is that light finally dawned on Marblehead over here and I realized that it was possible for me to make Thai iced tea with soy creamer.  I’ll tell you what, my quality of life skyrocketed.

Sometimes it’s the little things.

Upon discovering my dairy allergy, one of the categories of things that immediately vanished from my food options was the category of the creamy dip or dressing. Mayonnaise, of course, was still an option, as were creamy-textured dips and dressings that had a mayonnaise base, since mayonnaise is an egg emulsion and not made with dairy products. But since it is frequently impossible to tell visually whether a dressing or dip that one is served at a restaurant or party is exclusively mayonnaise-based or whether it is dairy-based or as is often the case, made of some combination of dairy and mayonnaise, I quickly learned to just avoid anything that looked creamy.

This wasn’t a huge problem. I’d never been devoted to creamy dressings and dips. Then again I certainly had been known to enjoy roquefort or ranch salad dressings now and then, and once or twice a year would get a horrifyingly intense jones for the Lipton onion soup sour-cream-and-onion chip dip and would eat a whole pint of it over the course of a couple of days. It didn’t seem like so much to give up. Still, not having the creamy-dip/dressing option got annoying after a while, particularly after I started to realize just how many vinaigrette-style prepared salad dressings also contained ingredients I couldn’t eat, most commonly in the form of small amounts of cheese.

Oh, I know from vinaigrettes and egg-based dressings, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been making my own salad dressings on a fairly regular basis for years. I can coddle an egg or two for a Caesar salad with the best of them (I just leave out the parmesan, and add extra anchovies). But… well… sometimes you want something with a nice creamy mouthfeel. And you don’t necessarily feel like being bothered to coddle eggs to get it.

Enter Hollyhock Dressing. The recipe was given to me by my wonderful friend and darned good cook, Liza, who warned me, not a bit hyperbolically as it turns out, that the stuff is addictive. It really is. Hollyhock dressing is fantastic stuff. It’s garlicky. It’s savory. It’s vegan. It keeps well. It’s easy to make, providing you’ve got a blender. And it’s creamy.

Seriously, this stuff is so good that I rarely make less than a double batch at a time. Often, I make a triple batch.

The ingredients are simple and few.

For a single batch, you will require:

• 1/3 cup water
• 1/3 cup tamari (you can use soy sauce but the flavor isn’t as good)
• 1/3 cup balsamic vinegar (you can use red wine vinegar or cider vinegar or whatever vinegar you like, but the flavor will be accordingly different, and balsamic is so yummy I rarely mess with anything else)
• 1 cup olive oil
• approximately 1 bulb worth of peeled raw garlic cloves (I usually just use 15 cloves because I peel large quantities of garlic ahead of time)
• 1 cup nutritional yeast

The method, likewise, is a complete and utter cakewalk:

Whiz the liquid ingredients together in your blender with the garlic until the mixture is as smooth as you can get it. Add the nutritional yeast in thirds, whizzing it together in the blender each time, and scraping down the walls of the blender jar after each blending. At the end, blend the mixture for an additional minute or so, just to make sure everything is completely combined and completely smooth.

Note: if you make a double or triple batch, make each batch separately in the blender, to avoid overloading your blender jar. Pour them out into a large bowl and stir them together as you finish blending the batches, to ensure a uniform consistency and taste.

Store, refrigerated and covered, for 3-4 hours before serving, or preferably overnight. Let come back up to room temperature before you serve it, as the olive oil will thicken quite a bit when it’s cold.

One of the best things about Hollyhock Dressing is how versatile it is. It’s great on salad, of course, and brilliant as a dip for crudites. But it’s also a wonderful dip for hard-boiled eggs, and anything you might be prone to dip into aioli or anchoiade you can certainly dip into this, a list which very much includes good crusty bread. Additionally, Hollyhock Dressing has an amazing affinity for potatoes. Pour it over your baked potatoes, or, if you want your mouth to think it died and went to heaven, use it instead of butter/margarine/milk/faux-milk in your mashed potatoes.

Try it. You can thank me later. Or better yet, thank Liza, who gave me the recipe and thus brought great joy into my culinary life… and made it commonplace for my Belovedary, not normally much given to salad-eating, to request a big plate of salad with his supper.

I told you it was good.

(Full disclosure: This photo is of the salad I had for lunch… mixed greens (several lettuces, rocket, parsley, a couple kinds of basil) plus Corno di Toro pepper and two sliced Brandywine tomatoes. My Belovedary, poor thing, is allergic to raw tomatoes, so this is categorically Not His Salad.)