While I was in Sweden, my cousin Sarah made this homemade donut recipe that she’s been generous enough to share.  -D

Sarah’s Swedish Donuts

• 1 dl milk
• 25g dry yeast
• 4 ½ dl white flour
• 50g margarine
• 2 tbsp sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 ½ tsp cardamom

Filling:

• Vanilla cream or applesauce

Warm the milk until it’s about 104°, don’t heat the milk to hot or the yeast will die. Pour the milk into a big bowl and add the yeast. Add 3 dl of the flour. Melt the margarine and mix well with the sugar, the egg, the cardamom and the vanilla sugar in a separate bowl. Then pour into the big bowl and add the rest of the flour. Pour out the dough on the counter and knead very well, add more flour when needed.

Cut the dough in half and put the other half back in the bowl. Roll out the dough until thin. Use a tortellini maker or something similar to make light marks on half of the dough. Then put small cliques of vanilla cream in the center of the markings and gently pull the other half of the rolled out dough over. Then use the tortellini maker to press out round donuts where the bumps of filling stick up. It’s crucial that you use a tortellini maker or something similar because it closes the dough around it so it won’t split in two. Continue this procedure until the dough is finished.

Heat the oil in the deep-fryer to about 360° and put in a couple donuts at a time. They will float to the surface and when turned brown you flip them over and fry them on the other side. When done roll them immediately in sugar.

Smaklig måltid!

Note: The milk temperature is in Celsius, the deep-fryer (I assume made in the US) is in Farenheit

Categories: Food, Travel
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The news that Kim’s dream of making genuine Italian food available in the capital has been realised comes as North Korea threatens to test-launch a rocket which the US believes is capable of striking America.

Via Marginal Revolution.

Categories: Ephemera, Food, Politics
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Friday night I had friends over for dinner (this is not the same as a dinner party for reasons that are too complicated to get into).  The Dinner Impossible challenge: two guests were vegetarian, one would only eat fish, and another gets stomach aches from spicy food. I also wanted to accomplish the entire meal in only two hours of cooking time, and spending less than $50.

Because of the two vegetarians, I decided to use asian vegetables and flavors in pulling together most of the meal.  I can’t stand vegetarian menus that sacrifice flavor in the hope of simulating meat.  There’s a restaurant near my house that boasts of their ability to do this, but I think most of it turns out poorly and I’d take an ethnic restaurant that uses veggies or tofu instead of animal proteins any day.

The menu in brief, with more details below:

• Course 1: Kale and Lime Soup
• Course 2: Asian Stuffed Cremini Mushroom and Sauteed Portabello
• Course 3: Vegetable or Salmon Stir Fry
• Course 4: HomeMade Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream with Fresh Chocolate Chip Cookie

Course One: I wanted a simple, vegetarian soup that I could make without much effort.  I thought about a mushroom soup, which I have some experience with, but decided that later courses would already have too many mushrooms, and this wasn’t Iron Chef.  Instead, I opted for a Kale and Lime Soup from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, garnished with a slice of lime.  It generally got positive reviews, though my guests thought it could have used some more kick.  Unfortunately, I left out the jalepeno from the recipe which may have solved this some.

Course Two: Mushrooms make great appetizers and cook quick, but most stuffed mushroom recipes use cheese and italian flavors, which didn’t fit in will with the rest of the menu.  I modified this recipe for Asian Stuffed Mushrooms from Eupicurian instead, using medium-sized White Mushrooms replacing the peppers (which I didn’t have) with carrots and changing around the ratios for the other ingredients which seem more like guidelines than rules.  I popped them in the oven when I served the soup and served each guest one mushroom garnished with two slices of sauteed portabello.

Course Three: For the entree, I made a stir fry, starting by heating the aromatics (garlic and ginger) in oil, then stirring in the slower cooking ingredients (onions, broccoli, zuchini), some leafy vegetables (bok choi, scallions), adding some liquid (a stir fry sauce I found at the grocery store), and cooking for a few more minutes.  It would have gone great with a side of rice, but a friend brought Pasta Salad so I didn’t think we needed more starch.  For the carnivores in the room, I quickly sauteed a piece of salmon in a separate pan to toss on the stir fry.

Course Four: By far my strongest course was the dessert, shown below.  Before anyone came over, I made homemade Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream and chocolate chip cookies, which combined took about 10 minutes of work.  I put the ice cream in the freezer to harden and served each in a cup with a cookie, a sprig of mint from my herb garden, and slice of cake courtesy of my guests.

Home Made Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream

My ice cream maker has quickly become my favorite kitchen appliance.  Making ice cream is fast, easy, and tastes orders of magnitude better than anything in a store.  Plus, the ingredients tend to keep for a few weeks, so I can leave them in the fridge/pantry without worrying about them going bad.

Categories: Food
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The NYTimes Magazine teaches you about the farm bill, agricultural subsidies, and obesity:

The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

Via Tyler Cowen

Categories: America, Business and Economics, Food, Incentive Centered Design
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From the second best Jewlicious post I’ve read this year:

The Jews, the perennial fly in history’s ointment, have never been able to resist the impulse to sabotage a good thing. We ruined a rich Egyptian tradition of public works projects by letting a hallucinating second-rate magician with a speech impediment lead us, as one might expect from a hallucinating second-rate magician with a speech impediment, straight into freedom at the heart of one of the world’s most inhospitable deserts. We managed to improve on that enormous step sideways by sticking around for forty years because the whirling column of flames we were worshiping at the time didn’t appreciate artistic self-expression. We managed to let two perfectly good commonwealths get destroyed, the second time by a gang of sheet-wearing bathhouse enthusiasts. We nailed someone who was by all accounts a pretty nice guy to a stick. We called in a few favors from the countries we owned through our control of global banking and brought the proud German Empire to its knees – which, I remind you, did not turn out well for us.

The next paragraph is even better. After that, it degrades into an announcement for a blog that’s all about Humus. If he had quit at paragraph 2, it might be my favorite post of the year.

And for those who don’t know, Fuul is one of the most disgusting things on earth. It’s an Egyptian dish that resembles shit and tastes only slightly better, eaten for breakfast and every other meal. Why any rational human being with a choice would subject themselves to it is beyond me.

Categories: Food, Funny, Jewishness
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Searching around, my little brother found out that my favorite restaurant in DC may be shutting down:

Though the restaurant has been allowed to go a bit to seed — there’s dirt everywhere, the ceiling is a mess, and the facade’s original plate glass is patched and seamed — its great bones survive unchanged. With not much more than a splash of paint, some elbow grease and a modestly tweaked menu, one of the city’s more artistic restaurateurs could restore the Waffle Shop to its former glory.

DC has a strong waffle culture, but not much in the way of pancakes (I’m yet to find any outside of a chain). Luckily, the Waffle Shop makes waffles good enough that I don’t mind. I introduced my siblings to it during Dworins4Darfur, and now they’re hooked on the place too. If you’re in DC, get over yourself and visit one of the city’s best hole-in-the wall eateries before the last vestige of good breakfast disappears from the city forever.

Categories: America, Ephemera, Food
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