Bad Idea Friday: Pumpkin Tarte Tatin

I've been making Choire's excellent tarte tatin at least once a week: it's absurdly easy, and a half recipe is basically the perfect size dessert for four.  I've been trying to think of other things that would adapt well to being cooked in caramel and then baked.  Pomegranates and raspberries are too fragile, plums and peaches are not friends with caramel, quince and pears are not distinguishable from the traditional apple tarte tatin.  Then yesterday I paused, pipette in hand: pumpkin.  Pumpkin tarte tatin. Pumpkin tarte tatin, in time for the Thanksgiving blog resurrection. The idea glowed before me: it was even a Thursday.  Bad Idea Fridays are BACK, baby.

I told the spouse.  He said "let's not do that?" and ":(   I disapprove of this plan"  Miffed, I turned to another friend in gchat, a friend likely to encourage me in my experimentation.  He said "as someone who is not terribly fond of the taste of pumpkin, but who IS terribly fond of the taste of your tarte tatins, I view this as a commander might view rumors of a planned enemy invasion."

Philistines.  Why are my enablers never online when I need them.

SO.  Peel and slice a winter squash/ buy a bag of peeled and sliced winter squash.  You'll need about three cups.  (This recipe is already better than the apple version: THEY SELL SLICED SQUASH IN A BAG: no incessant peeling and coring and chopping for me!)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Mix 1 1/2 cups flour, 1 pinch salt, and 1 tablespoon sugar.  Slice half a stick of butter into 9- 16 cubes: smash the cubes into the flour mixture.  (Here the goal is to turn the butter into a butter-flour paste, but leave some of the flour in a non-butter paste state, so that later it will form a water paste and make amazing cracker-like layers in your pastry, because flaky pastry is cracker layers.  What I mean is "Don't do a great job mixing in the butter: half-ass it.  Or three-quarters-ass it.)  Add water a teaspoon at a time until you have a fairly reliable dough - not too dry.  Drop it onto a piece of saran wrap, cover it with another piece, roll it into a disc about the size of your pan.  (See step below.)

Because I make a lot of tarte tatin, I do the following step at the same time I make the dough.  Put the other half of the stick of butter in a 7-9 inch oven-safe frying pan. (This is the pan your dough should be about the size of.) Add half a cup of sugar: cook over moderate heat, stirring, as the sugar browns and melts.  When it looks like you've put a handful of Werther's Originals in the pan, add the squash.  You could also add half a teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice: it's better for being simmered in butter.  Cook, stirring frequently, until the squash produces some liquid: about five minutes.  Take the top piece of saran wrap off the dough disc, flip the dough disc into the pan, take the saran wrap off the other side of the dough, tuck the dough neatly into the pan.  Cover up holes with bits you steal from the parts that flop out of the pan, flip bits that hang out into the pan along the dough; do not fret if the crust is not remotely even.

Bake in the oven for about 30-40 minutes: until the crust is golden-brown.  Take it out: while it is warm, put a plate over the top of the pan: invert the entire thing.  Flick the bits of squash that are sticking to the pan onto the tart.  Be shocked at how easy the pan is to wash.

How is it?

That is a sad face, right?  A definite "no" vote is apparent in that expression.  But guys, this is his second piece.  I am REALLY good at that pastry.  (Crackers.  Remember the crackers rule of thumb.  Or pull out half of the flour mixture, and stir it back in after you've squooshed in the butter.  Now you are a pastry maven.)

The pumpkin is... look, this is when you make peace with your feelings about pumpkin.  It's nicely roasted (I was worried it wouldn't cook through, but it did), and tossed in caramel: this is pumpkin at its peak.  If you keep eating it because it is a beautiful tart with amazing pastry, but are saddened with each non-apple bite, you must acknowledge that you do not really like pumpkin very much.  Sometimes you just finished sharing thirty pumpkin facts with the world, and it's a difficult thing to face.  Sometimes, you've been opposed to pumpkin as a foodstuff from the beginning, and it is easy.

Make it with apples.  Impress your friends.

Bad Idea Friday: Homemade Udon

Every time my father-in-law gets to dictate a menu, he requests homemade ravioli stuffed with osso bucco. He dictates a menu fairly frequently, and I am still at the stage in the daughter-in-law relationship where I sometimes do trial runs of dishes before feeding them to my in-laws. (I'm not totally cowed, I am proud.)

Long story short, fresh egg pasta from scratch is excellent, but it's also a terrible pain to make.

So let's take out all of that irritating protein and fat, and make pasta with flour and water! How could this go wrong?

We invited Gyozilla over for dinner, because he's pretty understanding about catastrophic cooking failures and terribly late meals. We made plans for a takeout based fallback.

Recipe from lafujimama. They probably also have better pictures and instructions.

Mix 4 cups white flour with one tablespoon salt. Add 1 cup water and mix into a shaggy ball. Knead for 3-5 minutes. (If you were making egg noodles, you'd just keep kneading and kneading- for about 10 minutes. If you want to skip the next step- you shouldn't, it's brilliant- just keep kneading for 10-15 minutes. After everything is a smooth shiny ball, just keep kneading and kneading for eternity.)

Put ball of dough into a heavy duty ziploc and seal. Wrap in dishtowel or grocery bags, and stand on it. Squoosh that dough out into the far reaches of the bag. Open the bag, roll the dough into a ball, and repeat- do a total of 4 times.

Oh goodness, you guys, this is delightful! All of us enjoyed squashing dough with our feet, and believe you me, it's like six times more fun than kneading for eternity.

Let the dough rest for at least 30 minutes. (You see how they say 3-4 hours in the other place? They weren't hungry. Half an hour is fine.) This is a great time to prepare the things that will be served with the udon. We made wonderful tamago, chopped cucumbers and tomatoes, steamed some sweet potatoes and chicken, pulled some kimchi out of the fridge, and made a peanut sauce.

Now, take out your pasta maker. (Of course you have a pasta maker. It justifies its shelf space each and every Christmas, saint's day, Fathers' day, and C's dad's birthday. If you don't, I'm sure you have a recently married friend who has like five.*) Dust the dough with flour and roll it through the thickest setting. Slice into thick noodles. Boil in ample water until translucent and firm- bite through a noodle to make sure it's cooked in the center. Serve- either in broth, or with all sorts of exciting vegetables and sauces.

*Fine, you don't have a pasta maker. Get a inch thick dowel, about 2-3 feet long. Roll out the dough until it's about 1/8 inch thick, you poor unlucky sod, and then follow the rest of the instructions.

So, how does this stack up as a bad idea? For a recipe where you throw something on the ground and stomp on it, it's pretty good. The udon is not ground shaking. It's pretty good- better than store-bought udon, but not by the order of magnitude that homemade ravioli is better than store-bought ravioli. The dough is much easier to work with. It's worth a try, especially if you don't live two blocks from an excellent noodle house.

Bad Idea Fridays - Rice cooker banana bread.

This is a guest posting from Mike- we've been chatting about rice cooker cuisine. He decided to take it to the next level.

Why rice cooker banana bread? Well, I like banana bread, and my current living arrangements have a communal kitchen, so we buy bananas in bulk - often resulting in extra bananas. I imagine you're probably more curious about the rice-cooker bit, though.

The reason is simple enough - I'm living in Japan, and western normal ovens are a rarity in kitchens here. I'd read of rice cookers being repurposed for non-rice dishes, however, and went looking to see if this extended to banana bread. Happily enough, it did.

The recipe I used is from here.

I've made banana bread a few times before, and this recipe is pretty standard; no complications there. Well, that would be the case except for the whole `in Japan' bit. Baking soda and baking powder are not common here (or I don't know the kanji for them). Fortunately, I know of a western-style supermarket that has them. Unfortunately, it's only halfway across Tokyo.

A friend wanted to visit the supermarket though, which was enough additional reason to go. Of course, at this point, the 'bad idea' has already began creeping in, as I've spent a couple hours and several times the worth of the bananas in other ingredients.

Still, part of it is for the challenge, so I proceed to the next step. After assembling all the ingredients (and having to purchase a measuring cup & spoons, and then look up conversions from imperial to metric), actually making the dough is simple enough. The ingredients combine fine, and the end result is within normal parameters. By this time, it's the middle of the evening, perhaps around 8:00. Now for the actual rice cooker part.

I added a thin layer of grease, dropped the dough in the cooker, turned it on and wandered off - no problem. I check back after an appropriate time later - not cooked. No worries, the recipe warned it might take another cycle. Reset the rice cooker, wander off again. When I came back, it's still warm dough. Rinse and repeat several times, until I finally had to go to bed, dough still uncooked.

After leaving it sitting in the fridge all day, the next evening I gave up on the rice cooker. Half a dozen cooking attempts had turned the dough it into bread pudding, from its original state, but it wasn't safe to eat. With nothing to lose, I took a last attempt and put it on tin foil in the toaster oven. After turning it on every fifteen minutes for an hour, it was finally done. Blacked, yes, but edible. After all it went through, I took what I could get.

I'm still not sure if the rice cooker wasn't strong enough, or if the electronics were too sophisticated, and calibrated for rice. What I do know is that I'll be getting a proper oven before I'll be using up any more extra bananas in bread.

Bad Idea Saturday: Easy Lasagna.

See the photo? That's a neat little slice of our lasagna, carefully scraped out of the pan. I'd say the recipe was a total failure, but we did eat the entire pan. We like ricotta.

If you have a demanding family member in love with homemade ravioli and a desire to make pasta as infrequently as possible, you might be open to short cuts. When epicurious.com pushes wonton wrappers as good substitutes for pasta dough in a couple of recipes, you might try it out. You might then be terribly disappointed in the result- not only do you still have to do the fiddly sealing bits, but the resulting ravioli does not taste like suffering and gluten. Unacceptable.

But... a box of lasagna noodles is like three dollars. One hundred wonton wrappers are like $1.07. If they're a halfway decent substitute for ravioli, I'm sure they're a mediocre substitute for lasagna. Right? Right?

No.

No. That very same lack of chewy gluten that made them poor ravioli shells allows them to become a barely detectable gummy vein between layers of sauce, other sauce, and cheese. They provide no structure whatsoever, so anything fished out of the pan has the appealing texture of... ricotta cheese.

Other than the lack of reliable pasta, it was actually pretty good.

Simple Sunchoke Soup- Bad Idea Fridays

I'll get to how this is a bad idea later. Serves 2.

Peel and slice 1/4 pound sunchokes (also known as Jerusalem artichokes) into 1/4 inch thick pieces. Simmer in two cups salted water until soft. Puree. Reheat and serve warm.

You can see that I served mine with half of a tiny steamed artichoke, a drizzle of safflower oil, and a sprinkle of sunflower seeds. That's right- every single part of this dish is from the Asteraceae.

I am unhealthily obsessed with dishes where all organic ingredients (the definition where the opposite is inorganic, not the one where it's conventional) derive from a single botanical family. I like how chemical compounds found throughout the family reinforce each other and interact in new and different ways. Also, I spend a lot of time driving in cars full of botanists; after you've played the alphabet genus game, there needs to be one more icebreaker game before you start talking about how awesome your cat is.

What sort of inspired interplay of flavors can one expect from this soup? Well, there's a crapton of inulin- a polysaccharide that human bodies are confused by, but beneficial intestinal bacteria love. Somehow this makes members of the Asteraceae oddly filling. To quote the typically insatiable C post-sunchoke soup, "Huh. Somehow, I don't really want to eat anything more." *

*This is not like my homemade bread. I swear it's edible. Tasty even.

There's also that distinctive sunflowery terpenoid that I can't find the name for- but when you have to identify a plant from one juvenile leaf, knowing this scent is a distinct advantage. Aspiring botanists should sniff all the ingredients for the soup.

There are also wonderful bitter alkaloids, although this soup lacks them. C prevented me from adding endive, escarole, and assorted other lettuces. Some people like a subtle flavor of gardens gone to bolt in their soup. Some people do not. The latter sort of people should not body check the former away from the stove. One has to get one's terrible ideas from somewhere.

Vegan Cranberry-Orange Muffins- Bad Idea Saturday

C and I roshamboed for who got to be the DD last night, and I lost. You know what everyone loves? Hungover baking. I was gonna replace the egg in these simple and tasty muffins with ground flax seed and water, (1 tbs ground flax seed, 3 tbs water) but our food processor doesn't handle tiny amounts and I couldn't find the coffee grinder. Attempts to grind seeds by whacking them with a spoon proved ineffective. After using up my January quotient of expletives, I used egg as an egg substitute. Please try it properly and get back to me.

Makes 12.

Mix 1 cup white flour, 1/2 cup whole wheat flour, one teaspoon baking soda, and two teaspoons baking powder. (Seems like a lot of leavening, but then *you* won't be getting lifting power from the egg.) Add 1 and 1/2 cups fresh cranberries and pretty much the entire zest of one orange. Stir.

In another bowl, mix 1 cup sugar, 1 cup orange juice, 1 egg or 1/4 cup egg substitute, a dash of vanilla, and 1/2 cup vegetable oil. (I think the mention of 1/2 cup oil is a sign that the recipe used to contain butter.) Stir.

Mix the contents of the two bowls until all the dry ingredients are moist- and no further. Gluten should stay inside the flour particles when muffins are concerned. Measure into a muffin tin filled with those cute little papers. If you don't have cute little papers, the cranberries will stick to the pan something fierce. Of course, by the time they need washing, you'll have some muffins and orange juice in your stomach, and the world will not seem quite so unpleasant.

Bake at 375 degrees for twenty minutes, or until they pass the toothpick test. C said that they're better when they're a little bit burned, but C wanted to survive the morning.

Bad Idea Fridays: Mochi

Today is my birthday. This proffered Bad Idea Friday post from the incomparable A (or ---, as her friends call her) is a perfect birthday gift- I don't have to destroy the kitchen or post today, suckers. Hurrah for guest posts.

1) Purchase a small box of glutinous rice flour on a whim.
2) Decide that you have too many clean dishes in your house
3) Read rice flour box for a recipe because you are Irish and only recently mastered cooking brown rice in a rice maker.
4) Note that the only recipes on box are for chocolate mochi (all out of cocoa) and white sauce (I can make roux with cheap flour).
5) Google.
6) Opt for a stove top recipe due to a distressing lack of microwave safe containers
7) Combine 1 part rice flour, 1 part sugar, and 2 parts water, heat without boiling until quite thick. (I may have erred here.)
8) Place mochi in a very well oiled pan to cool. (13x9 would be better than 8x8.)
9) Wait several hours for mochi to set. When it does not, place in 250F oven for two hours. (When in doubt, bake, there is no recipe anywhere which advises this because...)
10) Remove mochi from oven. Notice a distressing texture on surface, somewhat like the patchwork of dessicated moss and pond scum from the bottom of a dry reservoir.
11) Leave mochi out all night, partly in disgust, partly to cool
12) Cut gummy blocks the next morning. Dust one with flour. Find it inedible and decide to dust the rest with confectioner's sugar. (bad idea because...)
13) Hydroscopic properties of the sugar cause mochi to become [more] digusting, sticky, sweaty globs of novel-textured bland starch.
14) Relegate to the back of the fridge for a week, then compost. Perhaps soil bacteria and saprophytic fungi will relish this pure energy source.

I'm fairly certain rabbits are better confectioners than I am.

-A

Bad Idea Fridays: Red Velvet Cake

What a wreck.

I made Red Velvet Cake for my brother's birthday. It tasted like propylene glycol. (Wikipedia says Propylene glycol has no flavor. I accidentally got a face full when we were draining a cooling system, and I beg to differ.) I used the Cook's recipe, I followed it to the letter, I had my mother taste the result and confirm that it was the same cake her grandmother used to make and still I was horribly horribly disappointed. Still, I'm sure there are people out there- people who haven't had a traumatic encounter with food dye solvents- and they might enjoy the traditional cake.

Every single recipe I have ever read for Red Velvet Cakes briefly discusses the history of the cake. There's a lot of diddle-daddle about chemistry, a brief mention of Steel Magnolias, and a sneering reference to the wartime use of beets. Happily, I like beets. I am seriously considering making this week 'beet week'. Even more happily, my indestructible chocolate cake uses one cup of water as the fluid component. Beet cooking liquid is like water, except it stains everything it touches. Since the recipe has proven resilient when I muck around with the ingredients, halving the cocoa and doubling the vinegar shouldn't be fatal...

But what of the frosting? There must be a cream cheese based frosting- otherwise, there's no startling color contrast. I tripped off to the natural foods market to buy some vegan cream cheese. There a lovely woman told me that as a vegan, cream cheese was forever barred to me and that eating the vegan version would only make me crave the real stuff more. Plus, she said, it was gross. Better that I should make an icing of Crisco and powdered sugar.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Stir together 1 and 1/2 cups white flour, 3 tbs. cocoa powder, 1 tsp. baking soda, 1/2 tsp salt, and 1 cup sugar in a 9 inch round baking pan. (I added 1/4 cup cocoa, because my hand usually shakes when measuring out 1/3 cup) If you are using a fluted Bundt pan, do the mixing in another bowl and grease the pan. Otherwise, the cake will be removed in chunks and will look like crap.

Fill a large measuring cup with 1 cup beet water, 1/3 cup oil, and one teaspoons almond extract. (To make beet water, get some beets. Wash them, cut them in half, put them into a pan, cover them with water, and simmer them for about half an hour. Reserve the beets. Use the water. On another note; I added the almond extract on a whim. It turned out to be the best part of this cake.)

Pour the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients and whisk vigorously until combined. Add four tablespoons cider vinegar and stir until combined.

Pop the cake into the oven and bake for 25 minutes. Remove, let cool, gently coax out of the pan, fail, end up removing cake in three large pieces. Try to talk yourself into making buttercream frosting with Crisco. Fail. I made a glaze with the juice of one lemon, 1/2 cup powered sugar, and one cup dessert wine, simmered together until I could claim the alcohol evaporated. I also added 1 tsp. grated ginger, so everyone who tasted the cake could say "Ginger. Interesting." (This is exactly what they said.)

The cake was red going into the oven, but it was only a little red coming out. It smelled exactly like beets going in, but when it was removed it smelled and tasted like cake. Since it was reddish, sourish, and tasted of almonds, everyone thought it was a cherry cake. I dub this quasi-failure "Cherry Blossom Cake" and promise to oil he pan next time. Also, fie to the people who disparage baking with beets.

I realized this morning that I could have used haupia as frosting. The color contrast would have been perfect.

Bad Idea Fridays: Vegan Stuffing

Oh, how helpful: a recipe for stuffing after Thanksgiving. You are all probably most grateful.

Oh my goodness, you guys, vegan suggestions for Thanksgiving food are dreary. Garbanzo nut loaf! Lentils and wheat berries! One of the best suggestions is a big old plate of enchiladas. I was going to make one as my bad idea, but they were so sad! Also, the house is full of food, and I am not allowed to cook until some of it goes away.

But here's the thing. Thanksgiving has a lot of great plant based side dishes, and only one ridiculous giant roast. It hearkens back to an earlier era of American cuisine- one which considers squash paste in a crust to be an acceptable vegetable dish. It's back from when meat was a seasoning- that's why one of the dishes is kitchen scraps moistened with bird fat.

Doubtless you wonder how it tastes without bird fat. Allow me to share.

Take one pound of chestnuts. Cut a cross on the flat side of each one, place them into a shallow pan with a little water, and bake them in a 350 degree oven for 20 minutes. Remove, let cool, and then peel off the shell and inner skin. If you've fooled around with acorns- another member of the Fagaceae- then this will be startlingly, delightfully easy. And the fruit is delightful. I propose planting chestnut trees as preparations for the inevitable fall of society. Cut the chestnuts into small pieces, discarding any moldy bits.

Make a mirepoix with one chopped onion, one peeled and diced carrot, and two stalks diced celery. (Saute in oil until fragrant.) (Oh, and look, you've generated vegetable ends for the broth you'll need later. Start simmering them in a little water.) Add three cloves smashed garlic and 1/2 pound sliced mushrooms. Add this point, you'll probably need to add what seems like an unreasonable amount of oil.

Here's where most people start to disagree violently. Some use cornbread, or crumbs, or diced bread, or cooked wheat, or polenta, or solid sausage. (The last one is either a marker of my Midwestern family, or a marker of bad culinary decisions in college.) Some season with sage, or thyme, or angry bees... Some add walnuts or currents or dried cranberries or fresh cranberries. Happily, with a flavorfull mirepoix, the creamy nuttiness of chestnuts, and the meatiness of sauteed mushrooms, there's a flavor base that can support whatever you prefer to add. I use about four cups of diced good bread, a dash of thyme, half a cup of currents, two more stalks of chopped celery, and the chestnuts. Moisten slightly with about half a cup of vegetable stock and bake at the temperature the oven is until a little crunchy. Moisten with more vegetable stock if needed.

At this point, I cheated and added a lot of turkey drippings. Bad idea Fridays are important, but the first Thanksgiving with my family and my brand new inlaws is even more important. It was good.

If your family has irreconcilable opinions over what should be in stuffing, I recommend marrying a foreigner who is not nostalgic for an imaginary past Thanksgiving.

Bad Idea Fridays: Membrillo

Dear readers, you might think that making quince jam does not count as a truly bad idea. Pish, you say, and also tosh- jam is always tasty, unless the fruit is rotten or the jam is burned. Sometimes even under these circumstances, edibility ensues. I say that you have never spoken with my inlaws about making membrillo.

A quick aside on the culture of my beloved: for some reason, jam is fraught with associations. I can't begin to comprehend what they are- but making preserves is not done. Well, of course it's done, because one has all this fruit and no one else can be trusted to can it, but one doesn't spread this fact around. Jam apparates, like horses in Jane Austen novels. There was a bit of teeth sucking when I announced my intentions. Then, there was a certain amount of trepidation in admitting to actually knowing a person who might know a recipe. Long story short, I'm not sure if this is a family secret or not. Even though I link over from Facebook, keep it on the downlow.

Get some quince. I had six, but one of them was the size of a child's head. You will probably want less than six, because there is room for only so much sliceable jam in most people's lives. (Quince are in the same subfamily of Rosaceae as apples and pears, and have a similar pome. The flavor is intensely floral; in fact, the best thing I have ever done with quince is letting them ripen in a bowl on the counter- it always smelled like I was baking pie. The fruit is full of pectin. A raw slice of quince tastes like every surface of your mouth is covered with a thin layer of peanut butter, also cider. Poach quince if you want to eat them for non-novelty reasons.) Peel, core, and slice the quince into 1/4 thick pieces. Poach in water until soft. Strain out the quince bits and puree. (Food processor, or mash them like potatoes, or put them through a ricer.) Measure your quince puree.

Now, for every four units of quince puree, you'll need one unit of water and three units of sugar. Make a simple syrup by simmering the water and sugar together in a large heavy pot until the sugar dissolves completely. Add the quince paste. Simmer gently- either on a burner or in a 300 degree oven- for three hours. Stir frequently to prevent burning. Use a long spoon, because somehow the combination of fruit paste and simple syrup results in a lava-like substance that can leap truly impressive distances when disturbed. Eventually, the magma will cook down enough so that the tracks of the spoon are reluctant to fill, and cooling a teaspoon or so of the mixture results in a bouncy, chewy sort of jam. Remove from heat, place into a lightly oiled loaf pan, and let cool. Slice lengthwise once and wrap tightly.

Slices of membrillo are traditionally served with Manchego cheese as a dessert. It would also be good with this, if you hate hard cheese or are actually a vegan. You could also put it on toast. Please be aware that if made according to instructions, the final product will not be spreadable- it's a slicing jam. It's pretty good, aside from the half-dozen burns on my hands. Also, I have seven cups of jam that no one here knows how to eat.

In the past, I've found liquid from poaching fruit makes an excellent syrup- for enlivening assorted dessert items. I thought to make some with the quince poaching liquid- I added a little tuna juice from a failed experiment with prickly pear jam because I didn't want it to go to waste. I cooked the whole thing down with a minimal amount of sugar and poured it into a gravy boat. It set up into the best jam ever, oh my goodness you guys, I want to marry this jam and Thanksgiving gravy can find another container because this one is mine.

Bad Idea Saturday: Acorn Bread.

Sarlah dared me to do this, and I am apparently seven years old.

So some time ago, Sarlah sent me an article about eating acorns. The article had no recipes, a few tips, and a general message that I should cook with acorns, because I deserved it!

"Goodness," I thought, "Have I been unusually unpleasant lately?"

I have long suspected that acorns simply aren't very tasty. If they were, we would have domesticated them like almonds and walnuts. If they were, some of the hundreds of cultures that used to eat them wouldn't have happily turned to wheat in all of its beautiful forms at the very first opportunity. If acorns were tasty, hogs would eat the ones that fall into their pens before they ate hog food.

But because I can't resist a dare, I shelled a whole bunch of acorns, poured them into a cloth bag, and suspended them in the toilet tank. This is the sole practical tip in that article: replace the endless rinsing that used to be found in streams with the sterile toilet tank. Every time you flush, the acorns leech out a little bit of their bitterness. (The acorns will stain the water in the bowl a weak-tea brown. If you leave part of the bag outside of the tank, water will drip all over the floor. You will then have to explain that there are acorns in the toilet. It will go about as well as you might expect.)

I started looking for acorn bread recipes. An ethnobotany guide explained that 3/4 of the calories consumed in Pre-Columbian California were from acorns. It noted that the indigenous peoples of California were blessed with the ability to gather most of their food for the coming year in four or five days. It notes that preparing enough acorn gruel for the daily meals took at most one or two hours a day, leaving the people of California with copious free time. It also notes that they spent most of this free time searching for foods that were not acorns. Because acorns suck.

I found several recipes online, but they all seem to suffer from the "lotta butter, lotta eggs, lotta flour" problem. Those things taste good on their own! There's no reason to add acorns except as some bizarre ecological cachet! What's the point?

Huh. While I was complaining about that last bit, my mother wandered by and shared anecdotes. Apparently, my opinions about cooking with acorns have not changed much over the last twenty years, and are the long lost reason that I was... mutually agreed to not be the best fit with the local Girl Scout troop. I must have been really obnoxious about native peoples and their access to sugar, wheat, and baking soda. And they say we mature as we age.

The Internet recipes also rely heavily on common names for oaks. Several sites (and Cuervito) suggest eating only the seeds of the white oaks. The ethnobotany guide suggests that the preferred species were black oaks. There is a local species known as the Oregon White Oak (Quercus garryana) which is closely related to the California Black Oak (Q. kelloggii). Both species are technically classified as red oaks. There's a sister clade known as the white oaks, and it contains the Blue Oak, (Q. douglasii) the Golden Oak (Q. chrysolepis) and a whole bunch of other oaks that do not have color related names. All the records I can find are iffy, because anthropologists are terrible botanists. This is a pet peeve of mine; I had to take a quick break from researching this article to spam my anthropologist cousin with information on oak identification.

I ultimately went with the Q. kelloggii growing in my back yard. Lazy...

But what of those acorns, sitting patiently in my toilet tank for... about a month now? I tasted them every week or so, and they never got less bitter. Today, I took them out, rinsed them off, and nibbled on one for a while. Then I spat it out and drank three glasses of water. Then I tried another: still bitter. Then I shelled a fresh acorn and tasted it: less bitter than the prepared ones.

But what is this? One of my friends just returned from a reskilling fair, where there was a workshop on acorn cuisine. She suggests boiling acorns for 90 minutes to remove bitterness. The part of me that objects to using quickbread ingredients objects to boiling things in a pot for a very long time. At the very least, the energy going into making the nuts edible is probably greater than what is strictly reasonable. But still- I now have a viable plan to make an acorn food product, it's already Saturday afternoon, and my cold leads to poor decisions.

------------------------------------------------------

(Makes like four tiny biscuits, because why would you want more?)

Take two handfuls of acorns. Crack them with a meat tenderizer or a nutcracker, and remove the shells. At this point my father will wander into the room, shake his head, and say "Somehow I thought that you would have outgrown doing inexplicable things in the kitchen by now." He will then go outside so that he doesn't have to observe the devastation being wreaked.

Take said acorns and boil for one and a half hours. Change the water three times. Peel off as much of the skin over the acorns as possible- Internet sites say that it's richer in tannins, though my tongue cannot detect a difference.*

*I do have a cold, and it was cook things with tannins in them day, (quince, unripe persimmons) so I may be absolutely wrong.

Remove acorns from heat and drain water. Pulse in food processor (sorry Cuervito!) until it resembles some sort of meal. Frequent scraping of sides will be necessary. (I suppose food processors technically violate the reskilling/native foods part of this exercise, but I purposely cooked without appliances for three years, and am confident I could do so again in a pinch. I could also live on oranges and potatoes and dumpster olive oil again. Part of some experiences is proving that it was a bad idea. Like eating acorns.)

Mix with a bit of water and notice that the dough is not at all cohesive. Grudgingly add a couple tablespoons of wheat flour to harness the glory of gluten. Perhaps a dash of salt? Does that offend delicate sensibilities? And a clove of minced garlic- interesting choice. Form into small oblong biscuits, attempt to wrap in oak leaves, fail, wrap in chestnut leaves, succeed, but only until the biscuits have gone into the oven. Bake for twenty minutes. Remove. Clean the kitchen to make future Bad Idea Fridays possible.

Okay guys. Guys. Everything tasty about this is based on wheat and garlic and salt, but I would totally eat these to survive. It's got a little bitter aftertaste, and I ate only one, and that one was eaten with about an equal volume of bad idea jam- but they aren't awful. They just aren't very good.

Bad Idea Fridays: Bonobo Diet

I was raised by former hippies, so when I have a bad idea, I don't stifle it like a normal person. I do science to it, and C comes home to find a terrible mess and a wife with a slightly perplexed expression. How do you know that it's a bad idea until you try it? Common sense is just an excuse for laziness.

But since I'm getting older and wiser, I will recognize that some of these ideas are likely to be... unwise. Then, I will do them anyways. I will write a post about them. Who doesn't read blogs for the schadenfreude?

Onward.

In recent years, there's been a rash of dietary nostalgia. Michael Pollan- who I am somewhat ambivalent about, despite naming my blog after one of his ideas- says you shouldn't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't eat. My family already had that policy, but that's because she possibly poisoned her first husband. Before that, there was the What Would Jesus Eat diet- basically a Mediterranean thing, looting the moldering WWJD corpse for one more dollar. And now, now there's the Caveman diet. It's based on a very 1960s version of Paleolithic life, interestingly enough. I would have expected more quail and rabbit and partially mature eggs- possibly the odd lizard- and an absurd emphasis on radical shifts in food based on the season. They seem to eat a lot of ground beef. But the principle- that your body evolved eating certain things, so possibly you should eat like that now- that seems interesting.

But come on, the stuff they're referring to is 100,000 years old, tops. You might grab a couple of extra enzymes to break down gluten and lactose, but you still have the intestines- and general biochemistry- of a chimp. Thus, the bonobo diet.

My goal- to spend one day eating a reasonable approximation of a chimp- or bonobo's- natural diet. This is probably a bad idea.

First things first- I am bad at finding termites. Even when I'm getting paid to look under rocks, I don't find many. And I'm pretty sure that I'm not willing to eat them without someone telling me that they are cuisine. Dried shrimp though- they're in the same... Phylum. I don't think I can do any better on short notice. I will also not hunt bush babies. Dialium is closely related to Phaseolus- so, I'll eat some dry turtle beans. (Don't worry about my teeth- the preferred method is to let them sit in the cheek until they disintegrate.) Ficus is easy- I bought some figs. I'll bet that will be the tastiest part of this experiment. Chimps apparently extract moisture from a whole range of herbs in families I don't know- but there's a fleshy Brassicaceae in there, and an honest to goodness wild parsley. No drinking water. As for the other fruits that are the backbone of the chimpanzee diet- Lost Crops of Africa calls Pancovia laurentii "so delicious in its native state that there was no reason to domesticate it." All the other fruits are apparently not eaten by humans. I've found some polite treatises on not buying these rain forest woods- but that's all. Double figs, then.

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I didn't make it past lunch.

I started off well enough. I ate a couple of figs, (it's kinda past the best part of fig season) a couple of dried shrimp (Not bad, and made me popular with the cats. Odoriferous though.) I finished with a couple of kale stems (very chewy) and a large handful of parsley (good for shrimp breath). Apparently chimps hold a wad of vegetation in one cheek, masticate it slowly, and suck out the resulting moisture. This is as disgusting as it sounds. I tried it at work- after one minute, I realized that I couldn't continue to do this once my coworkers arrived- green drool is not professional. After three, I spat out my cud and made myself some tea. My jaw muscles ached.

Fine, yes, chimps have significantly larger and stronger jaw muscles. I knew that. And the huge cheeks are apparent from pictures. I didn't know there was a reason. All my reading about primates covers how they are just like us. Freaking deceptive evolutionary biologists.

So I figured I'd try sucking on two or three beans with my tiny cheeks. Let me tell you- raw beans taste gross. And there's a point where you can crunch them with your teeth or swallow them whole- my saliva enzymes never get them soft enough to chew safely. Or not after 45 minutes.

I ate some more figs. They're kinda tasteless in November. Also they make my tongue swell. I don't know if that's a me thing. Eventually- in a point familiar to anyone who's ever been on a "Eat all the X you like and lose weight"- I was desperately hungry and completely unwilling to eat a fig.

I went home for lunch. I ate a couple of dried shrimp. Then the cat explained- through interpretive dance- that he could eat those shrimp, and I could eat something else. So I did. I had a grilled cheese sandwich on wheat bread with a glass of Coke. Haha, evolutionary biology.

This diet was definitely a bad idea. I may have the intestines of a chimp, but I have a puny human jaw and weak human teeth and itty-bitty human cheeks. Also, I grew up in a world with ample calories. Eating no calorie dense foods makes me very very cross. I can't think of one good aspect of this idea.

Oh, apparently I now have the perfect cat treat.