White Chocolate & Thai Tea Fudge

The first attempt: the tea is dry, not bloomed in water or vodka.

This is not my recipe. The original recipe is surpassingly simple and elegant, and the results are beautiful. Plus, I love a thai iced tea, so much so that I don't even care how much carcinogenic food dye they use to make that radioactive orange color.

The original recipe specified white chocolate. I am just not a fan. If it's chocolate, I want it to be dark and bitter and just a little sweet. Not bland and white and cloying. Ok, two things: first, I love thai iced tea. And second? Well, just look at the darn blog. If this woman says "Cook this, it's delicious," I am simply not going to argue. I am going to cook what she says to cook the way she says to cook it. So I bought white chocolate.

Pav Bhaji

No, I did not forget. There's no garlic here, no ginger.  Just this once.

If you are going to prepare a home-made Indian Ultrafeast for forty people, you are insane. If some of those people don't even like Indian food, then you are twice as insane. And you are definitely going to need some Midwest-meets-Mumbai dishes. You know, like sliders. Vegetarian sliders.

Pav bhaji is Mumbai street food: a plain dinner roll (pav) split and filled with spicy curried vegetables (bhaji). The dinner rolls can be white or wheat, your call. Or, serve the bhaji as a vegetable side dish with other Indian fare. You can adjust the vegetable combinations, you can ramp the seasoning up or down.

Hearty Minestrone

Cat: very good at sleeping on the couch.
Not so good at working kitchen machines.

I did not want to go to the Kroger this morning. What I wanted was to stay in bed, and have someone serve me a tray of hot coffee with cream and flaky croissants with jam while I listened to the rain patter on the skylight and read the Sunday paper. Maybe in my next life.
Alas, there was no one but the cat to serve me breakfast in bed, and Mamie was even less inclined than I was to get up and brew a pot of coffee. Plus, she has no thumbs and a brain the size of a walnut, so kitchen tasks are extraordinarily difficult for her.
So, after making my own coffee with milk and settling for a bowl of oatmeal with honey at the kitchen table, I decided to go Krogering anyway. Sunday morning is the best time. The shelves are restocked, and there is no one else in the store to fight you for that gorgeous bag of bell peppers that has just been marked down to $0.99. Or that huge bag of banana peppers for $1.50. And no one is going to arm-wrestle those neckbones away from you, no matter what day of the week it is.

Vanilla Porter Cupcakes

11.11.11 has come and is long gone. The Canadian Chemist hosted the Nigel Tufnel Day festivities, and a good time was had by all. The Canadian Chemist also happens to be an accomplished brewer, with a brand-new batch of vanilla porter on tap. I had seen a recipe for Blue Moon cupcakes, and filed the idea away for later use...well, vanilla porter cupcakes with chocolate stout icing sounded like a good idea...

You would not think such a small number of ingredients could
wreak such havoc. You would be wrong.

These cupcakes were baked and eaten and enjoyed weeks ago. I am very late in getting this to post. I have about a million slips of paper with recipe notes, all over my house. I lost the slip with this recipe on it. I hate it when that happens. I find slips everywhere, which are unlabeled, consisting of just a list of ingredients in a mind-boggling mixture of weights and measures. What I finally found was a recipe fragment on the same slip as an unrelated recipe for pumpkin custard. A quick check of my reference recipe...yep, this is it.