happy valentine's day

Quinoa, cooked love apples, and tofu marinated* and sauteed in soy sauce, sesame oil, and clover honey**.

Truth: I am my own best valentine. Saucy.

*Usually I'm pretty terrible at coming up with the right ratios for ingredients in marinades, but this one turned out quite nicely! Unfortunately I don't have specific measurements for you so my general advice is to make incremental changes and be sure to taste along the way. Add more soy sauce than sesame oil and enough honey so that you don't feel like you're going to bloat up and die from a sodium overdose. Good luck!

**Speaking of honey, check out the most perfect card for this blog: C'mon, honey. Bee my valentine.

Cards available for purchase from Magnolia Press for Tiny Prints and Etsy.

the evolution of slimon, the slime mold

This semester, I'm taking a class called Magical Mushrooms, Mischievous Molds, taught by Professor George Hudler. This class is something of a beginner's foray into mycology. We had a demo session in place of class one day last week, and one of the activities at this demo session included "making" your own pet slime mold. At this DIY slime mold station, I used a scalpel to cut off a nail-sized piece of slime mold-covered agar and placed it in my petri dish, along with 10-20 oat flakes. I sealed my petri dish with parafilm (it looks like tape, but it's stretchier and more epic) and that slime mold has been growing ever since I brought it home on Thursday.

Above: Slime mold as of Thursday evening, around 6pm. I named him Slimon. He's yellow. He's the little triangular bit you see just left of center. It's not easy taking pictures of a pet slime mold in a petri dish filled with condensation.

Below: Two photos of Slimon on Friday morning, 11am. Not much has changed overnight, but he's started to produce spores, creeping out toward some of the oats nearby.

 

Below: Two photos from Friday afternoon, 4pm. Slimon's really starting to take off. You can see all the little networks that are forming outward in a circular pattern. Fungi tend to grow this way so as to disperse their spores most efficiently. (Interesting fact: slime molds are not really fungi - they are actually protists - but mycologists like to include them in the fungi kingdom anyway.)

What causes a slime mold to produce spores, you might ask? There are a number of factors, really, but changes in moisture and food availability are the two main factors at play here.

 

Below: Slimon on Saturday, 12pm. He's grown quite an amazing amount in just 16 hours. Just look at all those networks and protoplasmic strands!

Below: Slimon on Saturday, 2:30pm.

I know a lot of you might find this kind of stuff to be a bit squicky, but I think slime molds and fungi in general are really amazing and beautiful organisms on another level. They operate in mysterious ways, and there are always new species and things to discover. They've done a lot in human history (e.g., "nature's ultimate recyclers," the Irish potato famine, penicillin, the deliciousness that is the enoki mushroom...), and you have to totally respect that.

Above: Slimon, late Saturday night, around 11pm.

Below: Slimon, 12 hours later on Sunday morning, 11am.

I'll leave you with some links to more slime mold-related reading, because I find these articles to be really interesting:

• Can Answers to Evolution Be Found in Slime?, New York Times, October 2011
• Railways and slime moulds: A life of slime, The Economist, January 2010
• Hunting Slime Molds, Smithsonian Magazine, March 2001

house of horrors: bon appétit edition

 

My dad has been a big fan of Bon Appétit since I was a kid. However, it wasn't until over winter break that I discovered the extent of the obsession. Check out the massive collection of issues that have been hidden away in our home since 1998. (Yup, that's right: We liked Bon Appétit before it was cool.) A few weeks ago, my mom finally decided not to renew our subscription - and with good reason! We're not pack rats, I swear...

dobbs ferry cowl

Back in October, I discovered this local yarn store down in the Commons, where I picked up a lovely Rowan wool yarn. You can't tell very well from the photos, but it's a very pretty deep evergreen color with blue-gray flecks embedded. I decided to use this yarn for the Dobbs Ferry Cowl from Lion Brand Yarn (if you have a Ravelry account, you can check out my project here), which I gave to my sister for Christmas.

The pattern is originally from Lion Brand Yarn but has also been made available on Martha Stewart's website.

My mom likes being mentioned on my blog, so this is a shout out to her for modeling for my pictures:

sour cream coffee cake with pears and walnuts

The annoying thing about following recipes is that you always end up with a large container of some obscure, random ingredient that you purchased for the sake of two tablespoons, only to stick in the pantry or in the back of the fridge, never to be seen or used again.

(See: apple cider vinegar for Madam Rosmerta's Butterbeer, buttermilk for Irish Soda Bread, or sour cream for Jamie Oliver's Green Goddess Salad Dressing.)

 

I'm clearly not the only person who finds this irritating and highly wasteful because my mother also requested that I find a recipe to use up the 7.9oz of sour cream remaining in the 8oz container. After poking around on Epicurious, I found a seemingly promising recipe for a sour cream coffee cake with pears and pecans, which I adapted due to our lack of pecans.

The recipe is included below. This coffee cake has a great flavor, but I'm warning you, it is a pain in the PATOOTIE to make, unless you have a sous chef around to pour everything into a separate bowl and stir everything in a separate bowl and clean up your five bajillion dishes when you're done. Yeesh. I'm exhausted just thinking about it.

Sour Cream Coffee Cake with Pears and Walnuts
Adapted from Bon Appetit | October 2003

Topping ingredients
1-1/2 cups walnuts
1/3 cup light brown sugar
2 tablespoons all purpose flour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons chilled unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes

Cake ingredients
2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
1/3 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup light brown sugar
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon lemon zest
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2-3/4 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 cup milk
3-4 pears, peeled and chopped

For topping:

Blend walnuts, brown sugar, flour, and cinnamon in food processor until walnuts are coarsely chopped. Add butter and pulse on and off until coarse crumbs form.

For cake:

Preheat oven to 350°F and prepare a 13 x 9 inch baking dish with nonstick spray.

Using a mixer, beat butter in a large bowl until light and fluffy. Add granulated and brown sugar and beat well. Beat in one egg at a time. Add lemon zest and vanilla extract.

Sift flour, baking powder, salt, and baking soda into a medium bowl.

Mix sour cream and milk in a separate bowl.

Beat in sour cream mixture with butter, alternating with dry ingredients, in three additions each.

Spread half of cake batter in baking dish. Sprinkle over half of crumb topping; cover with pears. Spread remaining batter over. Sprinkle remaining crumb topping.

Bake for about 50 minutes, until top is brown and cake tester comes out clean. Allow cake to cool in pan on rack. (Can be made 1 day ahead. Cover and store at room temperature.)