Split pea thoughts for next time

1. Try not to include little hambones easily mistaken for potato chunks.

2. Use a waxy variety potato next time; Russet turned a skosh mealy.

3. Add a chopped carrot along with said waxy potato, post blender.

4. Take Cook's Illustrated's advice and use ham steak instead of ham hock - I don't really enjoy the scent of bone in my soup. Plus some of the meat that comes off a hock is pretty nasty.

Here is the recipe for my concoction. I just had some for lunch with a 1/2 a grilled cheese, and you should, too.

Split Pea Soup a la Porkchop
adapted from several sources

1 C chopped onion
1/2 C chopped carrot
1/2 C chopped celery
2 T butter
1.5 LB smoked ham hock
1.5 C split peas, rinsed and checked for rocks
2 t dried marjoram (or 1 t thyme and 1 t oregano)
1 bay leaf
8 C water
1 chunked up potato
1 chunked up carrot
1/2 C leftover mashed potatoes (optional)
salt and pepper

In a large enough soup pot, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the chopped veg and sweat until soft,maybe 10 minutes. Add the ham hock, peas and herbs and stir. After a minute or so, cover with the water. Bring to a boil and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the ham is falling off the bone and the peas are mushy. A little over an hour, in my case.

Remove the ham to a cutting board and find the stupid bay leaf - remove it, too. Take half of the soup and either blend in batches in the blender or use a hand blender to puree until bright green and smooth. Return to pot with the unblended half. Add your chunked up veg and the mashed potatoes (if using) and continue to simmer until the potatoes are cooked through. In the meantime salvage what ham you can off the hock and return it to the pot as well. Taste and season with S&P.

I would recommend making this the day before you actually want to eat it - it tastes best if you refrigerate it overnight and reheat it the next day. Makes about 10 cups of soup.

26 Weeks

Today marks 26 weeks, aka 14 weeks to the due date, aka two weeks from bi-weekly doctor appointments, aka the last week of my 2nd trimester. Eeek!

Needless to say, we're transitioning from "casual baby prep" mode to "oh crap we gotta get ready for this baby" mode. Considering I just had a friend give birth at 36 weeks, I've realized I should probably try to get all the basics taken care of by more like mid-April than mid-May.

Physically speaking, I'm starting to get big. I know I keep saying that, but no - FOR REALS now. My belly measures 40 and 1/2 inches around, and I'm up twenty pounds from where I started - I've crossed the 150 pound threshold for the first time in my life.
I don't feel bad about the weight. I know I'm a girl and I'm supposed to worry about it, but I just don't. To me, I'm pregnant, and it's a golden opportunity to eat what I want and gain whatever I gain and just not give an eff. Harumpf.

This week in food:


I got my soup made. I realize that this photo is not appetizing even if you love split pea soup, and that if you hate split pea soup this might be the most revolting image you have ever seen. But I did not really have the time, patience or marbles required to style soup attractively, so it is what it is.

(I'm not making that up, by the way. Food stylists use marbles to style soup. To hold up the carrots and potatoes and what not so they don't sink to the bottom. Fun fact!)

Anyway, soup made and delivered to Grandpa. It's a good batch, if I do say so myself. My secret weapon for velvety smoothness was a 1/2 cup or so of leftover mashed potatoes.

Fajitas for dinner. Just in case you were wondering what I've been stuffing my face with lately. My preferred fajita ratio is one small onion to two bell peppers, one chicken breast and one can of black beans. That allows the two of us to stuff ourselves with a couple of lunches worth of leftovers. You wouldn't think it with only one chicken breast, wouldja?

This is my latest craving. Green salad with garbanzos, hard boiled egg and cheddar on top. All dressed with some Italian style dressing. I've had one for three days straight now.

25 Weeks, if you're counting

So I had it planned out that my post for the day would be all about stats. I was going to tell you my weight and circumference and even post a picture...but best laid plans - blah, blah, etc.

Instead of posing for my glamour shots yesterday, I sat in the ER with my grandfather. He's okay - at least for a guy who is 89 years and 10 months old. Who suffered a severe head trauma. Oh yeah, and then a broken back. Oh yeah, and sepsis. All within the last five months. He's in the hospital under observation and should be going home in the morning.

Combine that with the dreary, rainy weather we're having and I'm ready for a comfort food project. One that my grandfather likes, and that will occupy my mind for a while without making me stand over the stove constantly.

I'm thinking Split-Pea Soup.

I went on a split-pea soup rampage a couple of years back, and could never find a recipe that I liked as well as the Campbell's Chunky version. I feel like I can never get it as velvety as I would like it.

Since none of the food bloggers I follow seem to have any ideas, I'm hunkered down with my cookbooks, which is really a way I like to be anyways. I'll let you know what I figure out.

The Quick and Dirty

Clockwise from top left: Cook's Illustrated, Mama's Minutia, Betty Crocker

All right. I apologize for the delay. Before I lose the attention completely of the three people on Earth who actually care about the results of this taste test, I will give you my quick and dirty low down. My well written, publication worthy piece will have to wait for the end of round two.

The Betty Crocker Box Mix: The easiest to make by far (duh) and the texture most favored by tasters. These babies were eight minutes from box to oven. They had the pretty shiny top that everyone seems to appreciate, but I noticed if you touched the shiny top the sensation was not of hardened sugar like on creme brulee, but grease. These brownies are super greasy, which seems like chewiness overkill - they want to be so sure that the texture is ooey-gooey-chewy that they load up on the fats to excess.

My takeaway impression: ooey-gooey-chewy for sure, but also greasy and more sweet than chocolate.

The Mama's Minutia recipe: This one was the next easiest to make - I liked the stove top part of the process. I felt like I was making candy, and it was sort of like candy making - when the dough got shiny and balled up on itself, it was ready to go. These took about 20 minutes from start to oven, not too shabby for a from-scratch treat. I made them with unsweetened cocoa powder, and they were VERY chocolatey. Almost too chocolately. But in a good way. They were also very dense, and so their chewiness rivaled the box brownies, but they lacked the top sheen - surprising because the dough itself was very shiny going into the oven.

My takeaway impression: I really want to make these with dutch process cocoa and see how they turn out. Also, if you put half the pan in the freezer so you don't end up eating too many, but then you go and take one out of the freezer and eat it because you're out of fresh brownies? Heaven. I can't believe I've been eating brownies for thirty years and never knew they were better frozen. Thanks a lot to Deb of Smitten Kitchen for pointing this out (and also for posting the brownie recipe in the first place and starting this whole snowball rolling).

Cook's Illustrated recipe: As expected, this was the fussiest to prepare, but still really didn't take too long. About 25 minutes from start to oven. I must admit that because I am sort of immature and tend to rebel against overly authoritative instructions, I didn't follow this recipe to the letter. That makes me a bad scientist, and calls the validity of this whole exercise into question.

Here's what happened. I failed to find dutch process cocoa in any of three stores (since when is it so impossible to find?), but I did have some cocoa mix that was dutch processed cocoa plus sugar, which said you could use in the place of cocoa powder if you reduced the amount of sugar in the recipe proportionately. Fine, right? Well, I'm not so sure. These Cook's Illustrated brownies were SO CLOSE to perfect, I HAVE to make them over again with the correct ingredients and see what happens.

Except I am going to change one other little thing also...the recipe calls for two teaspoons of instant espresso. Two OPTIONAL teaspoons. That much espresso gave the brownies an almost bacon-y, smoky flavor that I can't say is really what I'm looking for in a brownie. I think when I make the next batch, I will reduce it to one teaspoon.

Oh, another fussy Cook's Illustrated thing I didn't do, but probably should have. They called for lining the pan with foil and removing the brownies after 10 minutes of cooling, so that the heat retained by the Pyrex pan wouldn't overcook them. I didn't go through the whole foil sling making process, because I didn't do it for any of the others and I was trying to make all things equal. The brownies did get a little overcooked, however, and the texture suffered. I can tell from the vast improvement in texture of the frozen version that the foil sling is an important measure.

My takeaway impression: Near perfect. I can't wait to remake the recipe with the right cocoa-to-sugar proportion and the reduced espresso powder. Frozen version almost impossible to resist.

Brownie Hangover

The Great Brownie Experiment of 2010 is underway, and Phase 1 is complete. I woke up today with what can only be described as a brownie hangover - a theory proven by the fact that the only cure for it was hair of the dog. A few little half brownies after my breakfast cereal and I was fine.

Going in I was not expecting a Phase 2 to be necessary - but upon tasting the completed brownies I knew immediately that more tests were in order. I think that it is possible-through hard work and dedication- to create from these two brownie recipes The Greatest Brownie Recipe of All Time.

I have lots of details to share from Phase 1 - notes, pictures, you name it. But I think it's too soon to take my research public.

Madness, I tell you

Take a look at all this food, would you? Can you believe it was ours for just $16.90?

Husband and I decided to hit up our favorite neighborhood teriyaki joint for lunch today. I love it so because you get eight pounds of food for eight dollars, and that includes my upgrade to brown rice and all-white meat. And don't forget the refreshing cucumber salad, the health benefits of which are extolled all over the walls of the restaurant (just don't ask me exactly what they are, I'm not quite sure).

This is my plate. You can observe that it is respectably full, lunch appropriate portion.


This is the take-out container after my serving was removed. You can see that the dent made was pitiful. These leftovers filled a 4 cup tupperware to the brim.


Here is Husband's "It's not THAT spicy" Spicy Teriyaki that I found to be plenty spicy, thank you. You see that you get even MORE meat if you are not a chicken hooter snob like myself. He decided to eat an inverse proportion to my own, and saved about a plate's worth.

Now I know, 17 bucks for lunch isn't *technically* anything to write home about. But considering I am going to get three meals out of my $8.45 investment, I'm pretty happy. Plus, it is a much healthier option than your typical fast food treat - we could have spent that $16.90 at Taco Bell instead, after all.

It all makes sense now

I just spent the past hour or so rifling through my cookbook collection, trying to find an alternate shoofly recipe, maybe see how the pie works, maybe figure out where I saw it in the first place.

The only place I could find it was in Richard Sax's Classic Home Desserts. Under "Coffee Cakes."

I love it when an obsession comes full circle.

At least my glucose tolerance test isn't for another week

Behold, the sweet syrups section of my pantry.


I have been thinking about doing something with these syrups for a while now, and yesterday the perfect opportunity presented itself. One Ms. Jennifer Jo (the artist formerly known as Mama JJ) posted an entry to her blog about shoofly pie, and queried her readers as to whether or not they were fans.

I was without a formal position. I had never tried shoofly pie, or even heard of it, until I saw a recipe for it in one cookbook or another a couple of years back. I was intrigued, because it sounded to me a lot like pecan pie minus the pecans - and I've always thought pecan pie would be better without the nuts in the way. But Mama JJ - Jennifer - posted a recipe for what she calls shoofly cake, and said try it, see if you like it. So I did.


Holy sweet mother of all things that are holy and sweet. Did I like it? I became instantly obsessed with it. As a matter of fact, my first conscious thought upon waking this morning was SHOOFLY. I had two helpings last night and it's all I can do not to eat more right now. Any time I'm in the kitchen I end up standing over the stove, staring at it.

You make it by making a kinda sorta crumble topping, only that part is the crust. Then you pour a mixture of your sweet syrups, egg, boiling water and baking soda (science!) over that, and top it off with a little more of the crumble mixture. Then it begins to look and smell exactly like a 9x13 pan full of Guinness, which I considered a very positive omen at that stage of my little experiment.

In her recipe (click that link up there), Jennifer calls for 1 cup of light Karo and 1 cup of molasses, but says that you can play with that ratio according to your love/hate of molasses. I like molasses-y things, but I was also in possession of two rather old, rather empty bottles of Karo syrup, one light and one dark. To use up the bottles, I ended up with about 1 1/4 cups of Karo (more light than dark) and 3/4 cup of molasses.

The end result was perfect. It was less sweet than I expected, which is actually a good thing. It's the sort of thing where the flavor in every bite is so exquisitely nuanced - thanks to the molasses - that you cannot wait to eat the next bite (or the rest of the pan, for that matter) to get to more of those little sneaky flavors. And the textures. The slightly crunchy little crust layer, the ooey gooey, almost batter-y middle and the more cooked top...heavenly. It reminds me of brownies without the chocolate, if chocolate were something awful you were looking to get rid of in the first place.

So do I like shoofly cake? Um, yeah. I am smitten.

What I've Been Eating: The Early Weeks

It seems that everyone who finds out I'm pregnant wants to know what sort of things I've been eating. The most common question I get by far is "so, any crazy cravings yet?" and because I'm socially awkward I usually just say no, not really and the disappointed questioner goes off to find someone more interesting to talk to. And there I am, left wishing I could really sparkle with some story about the tuna fish-raspberry jam-banana-onion ring panini I just had to get up and make at 3 am.

But once I stop and think about it, removed from the pressures of simple conversation, I realize that I have been eating some strange things the entire time. The trouble is, when people ask me about crazy cravings, I immediately think of the weird pickles and ice cream combinations that we've all heard about on every sitcom that has ever gotten desperate enough to get one of the characters pregnant (i.e. all of them). I haven't craved anything like that, but I have craved specific food. I would say they are more like obsessions than cravings. To wit:

In the beginning, it was breaded chicken products. Chicken fingers. Wendy's chicken sandwiches. Anything that combined batter and some semblance of chicken breast, I had to have it. I think that I must have had some form of breaded chicken at least 10 times during the last two weeks of September. It was chicken fingers and Dr. Pepper at a baseball game that gave me away to my first friends to find out. I remember calling Husband as I drove home from Pilates to tell him that I was going by Wendy's for a chicken sandwich and I was powerless to stop myself. And of course there were the hospital chicken fingers, from the week my grandfather was in the hospital. I took this picture with my phone to show my husband that yes, I was having chicken fingers AGAIN.

After the chicken obsession came the ramen phase. I had to have some form of noodles and broth at least once daily. When the noodles that came in the cup o' noodle or the ramen pack ran out and I had leftover broth, I put leftover spaghetti noodles in my bowl and ate them, too. The ramen obsession culminated with our supposed-to-be-romantic anniversary trip to San Francisco, which I spent curled in the fetal position in the dark hotel room due to a sinus infection. I sent Husband out on a noodle hunt with the aid of Urban Spoon, and luckily he was able to secure me some form of noodles and broth from a nearby Thai place.

By the time the noodle phase ended, I was feeling a little bit more like a normal person than a newly pregnant woman, and my food obsessions petered out. The one thing that has remained: a serious downgrade in the quality of my diet. I'm supposed to be eating vegetables and whole grains and growing the baby's brain, right? That ain't happening. All that I want is fast food, ice cream, cookies, more fast food, and pizza.


Under normal circumstances I am very much a whole grain, lean protein, local fresh produce kind of girl. These are not normal circumstances, however, and I CANNOT go to bed without a giant bowl of ice cream and at least two oreos. We have had pizza Friday night for the last three Fridays and I can tell you I have no intention of stopping that trend anytime soon. Husband has noticed the surge in junk food purchases when I grocery shop and actually felt the need to tell me I didn't have to try and finish off said junk food without him seeing it.

So there you have it. No outlandish concoctions, just a bunch of junk, and a husband who is worried I have become some sort of Secret Eater. I'll update here though if I do start going for anything crazy.