Adventures in Cooking: Brownies Mexicanos

Normally brownies wouldn't be something that I'd consider to qualify as an 'adventure in cooking,' but when perusing some cooking forums someone suggested something that never crossed my mind; using Mexican chocolate for brownies. I had been introduced to Mexican chocolate at university but all we ever used it for was for hot chocolate (which, by the way, is awesome and you should totally make it; heat some milk in a saucepan and mix the chopped chocolate in and stir until it's done. Amazingly delicious on colder evenings)

Anyhow, this got me searching for recipes and I decided to follow this one. I had most of the ingredients lying around, except for the unsweetened chocolate, so after picking that and a new beer up I was ready to go!


Here are the culprits. As with last time, the beer is just something to tide me over while food cooks. The only unusual thing is the Mexican chocolate; I used Ibarra, which I've never had any trouble finding in west coast grocery stores.


The first step is melting the chocolates and butter; the website I linked doesn't suggest doing it, but roommates in university ingrained the notion that doing otherwise is a mortal sin; I melted the ingredients in a makeshift double boiler. It's probably fine to do it in the saucepan alone, but superstition can be fun sometimes.



Anyhow dropped the chocolate and butter in the double boiler and stirred until melted. It doesn't take too long and is pretty straight-forward. When it's done, I pulled out the bowl from the double boiler and poured the remaining ingredients in and stirred until mixed well.



Mixing things isn't interesting at all; just stir.


This doesn't take long; so it's time to pour the mixture in a glass pan and shove in the oven.

This takes around half an hour to bake, leaving me with some time on my hands. There are two good things that I think come out of baking; it often has good opportunities to clean my kitchen and when I'm done with that I might as well crack open a beer.

Well, that and lick the stirring spoon once the rest of the batter is in the oven. This is the best tasting thing ever.


And in what will likely be a trend, I drink while cooking; this session's beer is Captain Sig's Northwestern Ale by Rogue. I love Rogue's stuff and the premise of a Deadliest-catch beer was amusing enough to buy it.


And eventually after the kitchen is cleaner than when I started and the beer is partially consumed, the brownies are done cooking. It's time to pull them out and let them cool down. After letting them cool for a bit I tried one and it was good; I brought the rest into work the following day.

All in all, I was fairly satisfied with these; I don't think I can bear to make regular brownies again. I simply love the cinnamon-y taste of Mexican chocolate too much.

Adventures in Cooking: Manjuu (あんまん)

In an attempt to post something more often I'm going to try something new. I'm really awful about cooking for myself, but I frequently get into moods where I want to bake or otherwise cook something that's impractical often but is a nice way to spend an evening. So in the style of a Goons with Spoons post, I figure I'll document various cooking projects I do.

This weekend's project was manjuu. I stumbled on a recipe for the bun here and decided to just go with a simple anko filling rather than going too crazy.

The truth of the matter is I've had a bit of an anko craving recently.


The ingredients are nothing special for bread; the anko was the only thing a little challenging to find. I had actually looked for this at the local Uwajimaya a few months back and completely missed it. After asking around at work I was told it really should be there, and some more thoughtful looking turned it up. I used koshian, the paste-like version that is free of bean husks. The recipe called for 'oil' which I decided meant 'butter.'

The beer was a very important "something to drink while cooking" ingredient. Though since I forgot to pull out the yeast for the photo you could say it represents that.


Omitted from the ingredient picture earlier was the yeast; the site linked earlier has a baking soda recipe, but I prefer using yeast when I can. Step 1 was mixing the sugar and slightly warmed in the microwave milk with the yeast and letting it chill out for about 10 minutes while I worked on the beer.


Waiting for yeast to proof is a great excuse to drink.


After the yeast had been sitting long enough to develop a small layer of foam, I mixed in the melted tablespoon of butter (which I had let cool a bit while the yeast was proofing), stirred well and poured it into the flour. The recipe said to mix and kneed by hand, but I bought a KitchenAid mixer recently and opted to use that instead.


As with just about any bread-like thing, I let it mix until the dough stopped sticking to the pan and then switched to the dough hook for a bit. When I was convinced it was done, I pulled the bowl out, threw a clean dish towel over it and let it sit for a while to rise (probably 30-40 minutes).

When the dough had risen enough, which in this case means, when I got impatient after 30-40 minutes, I split the dough into 10 roughly even shaped lumps and began rolling.



I've never been able to roll dough out to look very circular, but at least for this sort of thing it doesn't matter too much. I topped the rolled out dough with a nice helping of anko and then proceeded to messily fold up the manjuu. To make things look authentic one should twist the balls shut, but I just folded it in half and then in half again. Perhaps that's how it's always done in America, or so I'll claim.



Once the manjuu were rolled up and ready to go, I let them sit a bit covered to rise a little more. In the meantime I dug out my vegetable steamer and put some water in a pot to get ready to steam them. I put some cheesecloth between the lid of the pot and the pot itself to keep water from dripping on the manjuu too much while it cooked. This turned out to burn the cheesecloth that was hanging out of the pot, which was a tad worrisome but not problematic.



It turns out that cooking the manjuu upside down (i.e., folded side down) works best in the steamer; otherwise the bottom tends to stick to it. I should try using the wax paper I had the manjuu sitting on in the steamer to save myself some cleaning problems.

All in all they turned out pretty tasty; I only cooked two or three the first night, and a quick attempt the following day indicated that they should last a little bit refrigerated. This will give me a nice, albeit sweet, breakfast for the next day or two. I'd like to try some variants in a later version of this post, perhaps something like nikuman.

Forever in debt to your priceless advice

It's the time of New Years resolutions. I've got a few things on my own little list of resolutions, but one I figure I'd bring up here is that I'd like to actually try and use the guitar I've got this year.

I've been pretty good about picking it up and playing a bunch of the old things I used to try and play back in college. In fact, I find myself remembering other songs Lyle used to play while we were living together and have been trying to learn some of those too. I'm certainly not any good, but can play the beginnings of a few new things. I'm also trying to round out some of the older intros I knew for some songs by learning the rest.

I'd also like to travel a bit more this year. The way things are turning out I may do okay on that one.

Got to keep the loonies on the path

It's been forever since I've written something here, but reading other people's blogs has me feeling like I should try to write something here more often. A lot of things have happened since I last wrote something here in January, and I don't think I'll try to recap too much of it. One thing worth mentioning though is that in the middle of the year, I moved teams within Microsoft to work on the team responsible for Xbox Live Community Games.

In more recent events, Seattle has once again been crippled by a winter storm. This year seems far worse than anything I remember seeing before; we had about 7 inches of snow today, which probably seems like nothing to folks in areas that regularly get snow, but for a region typically sees no more than that much in Winter it's a lot for a day.

Today was a bit of an adventure too; I ended up heading into work with a co-worker despite the horrible weather. Making it there wasn't bad at all (which I suppose is easy for me to say since I didn't drive), but it was interesting to watch as emails flew in from folks working from home, or watching the department of transportation giving updates via twitter, all the time chilling out at my desk at work.

After a lot of fretting (and me thinking it might be easiest to try and walk back to my place), we ended up trying to take the freeway back anyway and made it back fine. While the thought of being stranded got a bit frightening, I'm glad I left the house instead of staying cooped up at home. That said, I think I'm fine being a shut-in tomorrow if we get more snow or if it's still really icy out.

Welcome Home

When I got back from Japan, the first question a lot of co-workers and friends asked was "so what do you miss most about Japan." My usual response was to chuckle and say "the vending machines." Now, there's some truth to that statement, but really, I miss a whole lot. Many of those things are things I miss about living in Germany as well, but one unique thing seems interesting to write about right now.

First though, I feel like clarifying the vending machine remark; vending machines are ubiquitous throughout Japan. A gaijin Lyle and I hung out with at one point mentioned a rumor that Tokyo has more vending machines than all of the US. This is a number I doubt, but from what I saw it wasn't that far-fetched. It seemed like one couldn't go more than 5 feet without running into a set of vending machines. It took smaller towns like Kurabuchi to get down to the frequency of vending machines I'd see in larger US cities.

So why would I miss this? Two reasons. First, the smallest bill in Yen is 1000, which is roughly $10. That means that 100 and 500 Yen ($1-$5) come in coin form. This makes Japanese vending machines a million times easier to use than US ones, where I rarely have the right combination of bills and change to get a $1.25 soda. The second reason is selection; the vast majority of vending machines were for drinks (the rest were cigarettes and a few had beer; I never saw any of the more... creative ones people claim exist), but unlike the US those weren't limited to bottled water and soda. There was often tea, vitamin drinks, and coffee, not to mention an assortment of soft drinks that were more varied than anything in the US (how I miss CC Lemon). Many of the machines had milk tea and cafe au lait, both of which often had both cold and warm versions. The latter was very nice in the cold weather.

What is it I miss right now? Kotatsu. While they aren't nearly as necessary in American homes as they were in Japanese homes, I really wish I had one in my apartment. Why? My apartment's heating is probably one of my biggest complaints about it. It has two small electric heating elements in the living room/kitchen space, which is two stories high thanks to a loft above the kitchen, and thus not kept warm very well by the two lame heaters. Lyle's kerosine heater did a better job than these do. |f I need a lame electric heater, I think I'd be much happier and better served by one in a table with a thick blanket than by what I have now.

I think there might be a little more to it than that though; most of the kotatsu I saw were fairly small (which makes sense given the size of most Japanese homes), so when eating dinner with a group of people, it felt a lot more social than a dinner at someone else's house here in the States (though I suppose the fact that we ate sukiyaki when we ate at one of Lyle's co-worker's house didn't hurt that either). I think I'd almost go so far as to say I prefer the smaller houses I saw; if it weren't for the poor heating, I'd love to find a house like Lyle's around here. Well, I would if housing prices here weren't lame.

Mystery Hunt

Two weeks ago I went to Boston to participate in the MIT Mystery Hunt. I've been relatively active in a lot of the Microsoft-run puzzle events (between helping run the intern events and playing in the last two Puzzle Hunts), so when someone I knew from various puzzle-related stuff at work asked if I wanted to join, I jumped at the chance.

All in all, I'm glad I went, but I think I prefer the local hunts. Truthfully, I probably could have worked with the remote team (i.e., folks who didn't fly out to Boston) and noticed very little difference. There were some aspects of the hunt that made the event feel a little amateur; answers were phoned in to a human with no leeway on answers, some of which could be very vague (e.g., one had us translate Chinese to English, which proved to be very ambiguous and frustrating). While this isn't necessarily dissimilar to how things are done in other events, I like to think that if a team called the people running the event and could explain the puzzle, they'd get the answer if there was a translation error.

I probably could complain more, but on reflection, there's always a lot to complain about after a Hunt; some puzzles simply don't sync with everyone, and even after hearing the answer it can be natural to think "that person is crazy."

As I said though, I'm glad I went. I've been thinking more and more that I'd like to travel more, so while I spent most of the time in either a hotel room or a classroom, I'm glad I got out of the state. I suppose I rode the subway as well, which only serves to remind me how much I hate the lack of decent public transit around Puget Sound.

And all of this reminds me that I need to book another weekend flight here pretty soon.

Traveling Home

I plan on coming back and posting pictures and stories about my trip to visit Lyle in Japan, but as I'm really tired from the fight back, I though I'd post a few anecdotes worth remembering:

• My original itinerary involved flying to SFO, chilling out in San Francisco for an our, and then flying to Seattle. Thankfully, when I got to Narita Airport, the first thing they asked when I checked in was "we overbooked the SFO flight; is a direct flight OK?"
  
  The answer is an obvious "absolutely." While this would potentially cause issues for my ride (since I was coming in two hours early, now at the wee hours of 8am), I appreciate any opportunity to skip connections.



• When I finally did board the plane, they upped me to business class. This was incredibly awesome, as it meant I had tons of leg room (too much, actually), awesome food, and an otherwise comfortable 8 hour flight across the pacific. The flight included an awesome view of the sunset over Mt. Fuji, which is great, because the weather in Tokyo was always so bad that I could never see the thing.



• As comfortable as the flight was, I still couldn't sleep. So now I have to relive Saturday as though I never slept Friday night. I've got some errands to run (no food left) and some other things I'd like to do, but I really don't think I should drive. Oh well.

I'll try to get photos up quickly (or at least start getting some up) and posting impressions. I have the feeling that Lyle is the only one who reads this though so maybe I can take my time since he experienced pretty much everything I did first hand.