rum raisin bars and cranberry-orange-walnut scones

My general pattern with baking with alcohol is as follows: buy liquor for a specific recipe, use a couple tablespoons, shove the remaining liquor to the back of one of my baking shelves (yes, I have so many baking ingredients that they take up 3 shelves), and promptly forget about said liquor.

Lately though, my baking motto around here is "add booze." About a month ago, I took inventory of my kitchen, making mental notes of everything that needs to be used up by the end of July. I found near-full bottles of bourbon, rum, amaretto, and frangelico. Since then, I've been frantically trying to use up the liquor, which is tough to do without simply drinking it. 

So, I made a chocolate amaretto cake from the Magnolia Bakery Cookbook . I also added rum to pumpkin bread and pineapple upside-down cake. I've added bourbon to blondies and banana bread. And sometimes, I just pour frangelico into a shot glass and just sip it (it's the only one of the four that I'll drink). I'm doing my best to bake with the booze, and I'm waiting for Drew to come home so I can make him this Flourless Chocolate Hazelnut Cake (he doesn't read my blog, so I'm not worried that he'll find out).

Last weekend, I made rum raisin bars from the Fat Witch Brownies cookbook. Not at all too heavy and not overpowering, these were quite good. 

Okay, I'm not adding booze to everything around here. I also made cranberry-orange-walnut scones, from Vegan with a Vengeance. I think Drew would be proud of me for taking some liberties in baking these. I added dried cranberries and toasted walnuts, and I substituted oats for half of the flour in an effort to make the scones healthy and appropriate for breakfast.

I broke the "add booze" rule because they were for my breakfasts this week and I thought it would be wrong to eat something with alcohol in it at 7 in the morning. 

vegan chipotle mac and cheese

Having grown up in Minnesota, I used to have what my friend, DG, affectionately called "Scandinavian tastebuds" (or was it Midwestern tastebuds? This was over 10 years ago, so I forget). Anyway, I used to hate spicy food. I would break out in a sweat at the sight of a jalapeno pepper. Everything had to be mild, which often overlapped with bland. 

DG didn't give up on me. In the two years that we lived together, in addition to introducing me to fresh herbs and garlic, she worked on improving my tolerance for spicy food. For instance, despite my half-hearted protests, she made her enchiladas with the hot or medium sauce instead of the mild. She might have even tossed in a jalapeno pepper for good measure.   

But it worked. Between DG and Drew (whose tolerance is higher than mine), my tolerance for spicy food has increased exponentially. Sometimes I don't even recognize myself. A few years ago, we were at an Asian restaurant in Milwaukee and when I ordered the stir fried noodles, with a spiciness level of 3 chili peppers, Drew turned to me and asked "You sure you want to do that?" It's a valid question; the old me would have balked, but I responded "It's okay because 3 chili peppers in the midwest are probably like no chili peppers in California" (and I was right).  

After years of living in California, I've also become somewhat of a hot sauce fiend. Between my refrigerator at home and in my office, there are 6 bottles of hot sauce. Last weekend, I read that putting hot sauce on your food is a very California thing to do, and I laughed out loud as I recalled dousing my breakfast burrito in Cholula earlier that day. For the most part, I've resisted turning Californian, but I guess I'm not immune to some of its influences. It's a good thing I'm leaving; otherwise, the next thing you know, I'll be getting botox, plastic surgery, and a diamond so big that a village in Africa surely died for it. 

So last week, I made this vegan chipotle macaroni and cheese from the Post Punk Kitchen.

It was really simple. You soak some cashews, drain them, and then process them in the food processor with veggie broth, garlic, nutritional yeast, and chipotle peppers. The recipe calls for 4 peppers, but I was feeling adventurous (or stupid, depending on how you look at it), so I added 6. I surprised myself by doing this, as the old me probably would have added only one or maybe two. This dish turned out really well and just manageably spicy. As you can see, I added corn and black beans because I love veggies. 

A while ago, in an effort to inject lots of veggies into one meal, I made the Chubby Vegetarian's taco salad. The filling is a mushroom and eggplant "meat."

And scrolling through my phone, I found this picture of the granola bars I made a couple months ago. The recipe is from the Smitten Kitchen. 

And so is the recipe for the mushroom lasagna I made a few weeks ago. Sadly, I was so ravenous that I forgot to take a picture.

kimchi and a korean seafood pancake

When Drew and I moved in together a few years ago, we made a peculiar discovery. This discovery, however, was not about one another, but rather, about our former roommates. Both moved out of our respective apartments before us, and both left behind a box of rubber gloves (to be fair, both left behind things that were not so odd and of immediate use to us, like a table and chairs). We had no idea what they did with rubber gloves, and we concluded that for whatever reason, hard science students must have to have them, as this was the only commonality between the two (my roommate was in chemistry, and Drew's was in biology). But that explanation didn't really make much sense because it's not as though my roommate was conducting science experiments in our apartment, at least to my knowledge. Anyway, we didn't really know what we'd do with the rubber gloves, but after one too many incidents involving jalapeno peppers and contact lenses, I figured they'd come in handy. 

Fast forward.

I began making sauerkraut a year or two ago, inspired by The Homemade Pantry. This naturally led to making kimchi and finally having a use for the rubber gloves. Making sauerkraut and kimchi are more or less the same process, except that when you make kimchi, you add things like shredded carrots, scallions, ginger, garlic, and gochujang to the cabbage. Gochujang (don't ask me how to pronounce it) is a Korean red pepper. It's hot and spicy, and when you're mixing everything together, you certainly don't want to handle the mixture with your bare hands (fortunately, I didn't learn this lesson the hard way--the internet warned me). So every time I make kimchi, I put on the rubber gloves and silently thank our former roommates and apologize for ever questioning why they ever had them.   

(I have no picture of the kimchi. As I was mixing it, it occurred to me to take one, but my hands were messy and I wasn't going to deglove, get my phone, and reglove. And now that the kimchi has fermented, it's a big mess and not very photogenic. My apologies.)

I do have this picture of a Korean seafood pancake for you:

I have had Korean seafood pancakes twice in my life. The first time was at this restaurant in this Korean spa in Irvine and the second time was in Seoul. I had a craving last weekend, and instead of hunting down a restaurant and paying Orange County prices, I decided that it would be much cheaper and probably just as tasty if I made them at home. I don't regret my decision.