A Rose By Any Other Name

...would taste mostly like honey, as it turns out. TRUE FACT!

It's less than a week to my first finals due date, which means that I have to be on my A-game. In regards to procrastination, that is. And since I've realized that I'm not going to get anymore actual work done tonight on badass mysterious female Restoration playwright Mary Pix, I might as well do some catching up on the cooking. And just in case you were wondering, I'm not overstating the awesomeness here. Or the mystery. We only know when she was born because we know how old she was when she got married. And we only know when she died because there was a benefit performance for her estate. And we only know that she killed all the rabid wombats in London because London is no longer plagued by wombats, rabid or otherwise.

But, uh, I was probably talking about a recipe I did. Many moons ago (well, two weeks) I decided I should return to the dessert section of Shakespeare's Kitchen and try my hand at some baking. My various cookie attempts had all turned out strangely poorly, so I thought it would be a good time to try again with 1610 Rose Cakes. Despite the name, the Rose Cakes are actually cookies and the recipe only makes about 30 of them, not over sixteen hundred. Ok, the actual reason it's called that is because the recipe is from around 1610, from the personal cookbook of one Sarah Longe.

To make sugar Cakes 

Take a pound of butter, and wash it in rose-water, and halfe a pound of sugar, and halfe a douzen spoonefulls of thicke Cream, and the yelkes of 4 Eggs, and a little mace finely beaten, and as much fine flower as it will wett, and worke it well together then roll them out very thin, and cut them with a glasse, and pricke them very thicke with a great pin, and lay them on plates, and so bake them gently.
MISTRESS SARAH LONGE HER RECEIPT BOOKE

This is one of those recipes that I might be tempted to try from the original one day. Especially since, well, I wasn't terribly amazed by my results this time around. Not entirely sure who to blame for this one. I can sort of imagine Shakespeare trying them back in 1610. "Forsooth, Mistress Longe," he would sayeth, "these cakes seemed like a good idea at first, but alas, they were not. Verily, I am inspired to write Cymbeline."

OH! Almost forgot to mention: I picked up a new camera. My old one was a six year old point and shoot, and not exactly great at taking pictures indoors. The new one is already a million times more useful, and that's before I've actually gotten any good at using it. If nothing else, the pictures should have a lot less noise. Although you'll have to deal with me messing around with depth of field and trying to be all arty and out of focus and etc. Or at least, this is what I will tell you I was doing whenever I am forced to post a crap photo because it was all I had for an important step.

Segan's version of the Rose Cake recipe uses rose syrup instead of straight-up rose water. I didn't actually have rose syrup available, but the recipe contains a sub-recipe for a substitute: Rose water, non-rose water, and honey. It mostly tastes like honey.

Here we have Ariel just waiting to chow down on the main ingredients. Butter, mace, sugar, and some of the rose syrup. The rest is reserved for glazing later. Is glazing the right term? Brushing something syrupy onto a hot thing and letting it cool? Anyway.

Two eggs, separated and so yellow that they drained all the rest of the color from the world so they could be that much more yellow. Either that, or I discovered my favorite camera setting ever. My point-and-shoot used to do this as well, although it had the benefit that you could choose your colors as you went instead of choosing among the few pre-programmed into the camera. Ah well. Separating eggs is actually something that I'm pretty good at, and I was almost a little disappointed that the whites don't get used for anything. Because they were really, really separate.

Two cups of pastry flour lying in wait. For reasons unbeknownst to me, I purchased whole wheat pastry flour, which I guess makes my cookies healthy or something? I'm going with magically healthy.

WARNING: The images you are about to see are violent, and may disturb some viewers. That poor, poor butter. Taken from us before its time.

Here we have the results of the creaming. I know the safety section of my instruction manual says not to stick anything in the bowl while blending, but I find it so much easier to deal with this step if I use a spatula to  divert butter away from the walls of the bowl and back towards the beaters.

The eggs get tossed in one at a time, which isn't actually interesting enough to warrant a picture. I took one anyway because I wanted to take more pictures, so sue me.

The butter mixture mid-eggening. My butter diversion technique is unstoppable!

Once the eggs are taken care of, flour is next, one cup at a time. I get nervous about parts of recipes that say "until just mixed" or "just incorporated." I'm always terrified that I'll get to a point where I either have to give up and have clumps of unmixed ingredients or an overmixed mush that wasn't going to cook right.

Luckily, my mush just incorporated.

Here's where things get dicey. The modern version of the recipe calls for a flower-shaped cookie press. And I read that and thought "Oh, yeah, let me grab my flower-shaped cookie press, I keep it in the cookie-press drawer between the egg-shaped and gnu-shaped cookie presses." I know that cookie presses are a thing, but not something I had lying around. Lucky for me, the recipe also says you can just drop the cookie dough by the tablespoon. If the bakers among you are already slightly skeptical about a cookie dough that is equally at home being pressed out, cut, and dropped, this is because you are wiser in the ways of cookies than I.

For those not in the know, there are (generally speaking) two main types of cookie dough. One, most commonly encountered in sugar cookies, requires rolling out (often after refrigeration) and cutting. The cookies swell a bit in the oven, but don't change their shape terribly much. The other kind, usually referred to as drop cookies, is what you get when you make chocolate chip cookies. You drop a glob of cookie dough onto a baking sheet and it puddles out into the cookies we all know and love. So when the recipe says "You can either shape this beforehand or drop it," I should have been on guard. And I should have taken a look at the original 1610 recipe before cooking. If I had, I probably would have rolled out the dough and cut it with a glass. Instead, I used a tablespoon to make lumps, expecting them to flatten out in the oven.

Here are my cookies, eagerly awaiting the closing of the oven door. Witness the majesty that is my fancy new oven thermometer! If that thing is correct, then my oven has a propensity to be about 100-150° hotter than I actually set it. Whoops. But this is good to know.

Ok, so this picture isn't all that great but I was really proud that I managed to trick the camera into focusing on the oven contents instead of on the dots on the oven door. On the other hand, you can tell fuck all about the state of the cookies, which I guess is an accurate representation of sitting through the cooking process.

One tray of cookies came out a bit more done than the other, but everything was within acceptable tolerances. Of course, since I used two different baking sheets in two different places in the oven, I have no idea how to control for the correct results. Or even which results were correct. But you can see that the cookies' only real concession to drop-cookie-style melting was that they all adjusted enough to touch the cookie sheet.

I brushed the cookies with the remaining rose syrup while they were still hot, and then waited for them to cool. Quick shoutout to Dancing Bull Wine for giving me a free bbq brush at the 2010 BBQ Battle. It's been really useful, except never for bbq. Anyway, this is the final product, and it is kind of good looking.

But not exactly what I call evenly cooked. You can see that the inside wasn't quite as done as the outer part of the cookie. Probably wouldn't have been an issue if I had rolled them out, although then I would be complaining about how quickly they burnt.

Verdict: They taste like honey? The rose doesn't come through terribly well - if I did this again, I'd use less regular water and more rose water when creating the rose syrup. And maybe spring for a cookie press so I can see how they were supposed to turn out shape- and consistency-wise. All in all, they were nothing special. Although people did keep sneaking back for more of them even after deciding they were nothing special and certainly no one needed to eat more of them. So there is that. But I chalk it up to any cookie vs. no cookie. The recipe was pretty simple, and I'd take a shot at it again except for the minor detail that there are billions of recipes I haven't tried yet and no pressing need to revisit this one.


Happy Classical Theatre Fundraising Day!

While Men Delay

This mini-entry comes as an apology for the lack of recent updates. I've gone into end-of-semester panic mode, where food exists entirely as a form of unacceptable procrastination and blogging is right out of the question. I do have one recipe's worth of pictures that need posting, but you probably won't get to see it until early May. May will also mean catching up on my schedule, so look forward to a day where I make three different roasts and then throw most of them out because nobody was going to eat them before they went bad anyway.

In the meantime, I don't want to leave you completely empty-handed. So let me talk about blogs!

Playing the Cook is a weird thing, because I am a cooking blog without recipes. There's no particular reason to go back to one entry or another unless you just can't get enough of the old "repeated picture of a covered skillet" gag. That means new posts are the only way to bring in traffic, which is sort of a truism anyway. Still slightly strange for a food blog, I think.

But there are plenty of other good (and related) blogs you can be checking out when I don't update!

• The Blogess: If there is a person whose blogging style I would like to emulate, that person is Jenny. She is also insane and absolutely hilarious. Come for the taxidermied weasels in dresses, stay for the giant metal chickens.
• Smitten Kitchen and The Pioneer Woman: I actually get all of my non-Shakespeare recipes from Punchfork, which is a sort of image-based cooking blog aggregator. It rates recipes by how much exposure the original post is getting and how many Punchfork users are saving the recipe for later. It is also the devil, because it provides pages and pages of delicious food photos. Almost everything I make turns out to be from one of these two sources, and Smitten Kitchen has the additional benefit of wonderful photography.
• A Sasha Party: My good friend Sasha has a blog about throwing and attending parties. It has lots of quick and useful tips for turning chips-and-wine-type-hangouts into memorable soirees. I am also the inspiration for her latest post, 5 Appetizers Even An Idiot Couldn't Mess Up.
• Inn at the Crossroads: Recipes based on George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. They just published a book with the blessings of GRRM and HBO, so some things have had to vanish from the site. But it's great to follow another themed cooking project, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if A Feast of Ice and Fire turns out to be the next project after Shakespeare's Kitchen.

The issue of "what kind of blog is this?" also brings up a few other questions. There are times that I cook things that Shakespeare didn't eat, like carnitas or mac-and-cheese. What should I do about that? Are you interested in hearing about my other cooking adventures? And if so, should they be placed in separate entries? Or just mentioned/shown off quickly in other posts? Maybe photo digests of completed dishes with no write-ups? Or full write-ups, but only as part of an official Renaissance entry? I'd really like your opinions on this. I want to know what you would enjoy seeing, because I care about my readers.

By which I mean, page views.

Looking over the statistics for Playing the Cook is always a fun thing, partly because I can puzzle out some of the meaning hidden behind the data. For instance, I have 47 page views from from Georgia, placing it behind the US and above the UK for the source of most views.

This would be pretty weird, except I know that they are in one way or another thanks to my friend Neal at Georgia On My Mind. And then there are the two Russians interested in "sallet of lemons" or my one Indian reader using Opera in Linux who is attempting to discover why his riceballs always fall apart. That's how statistics work, right?

Also, three of my top ten search terms involve the word "penis", and I can only assume that typing it out here will just make things worse.


Penis.

Let The Sky Rain Potatoes

I went into work today only to discover that, when your employing institution considers Easter to be SRS BZNS, everything is closed on Thursday and you can't actually hold your office hours. And so, in honor of... Jesus deciding to take the day off and do some tidying up around the house or something, I bring you this short and felicitous entry.

I recently decided to revisit a recipe I had tried before: Homesick Texan Carnitas, from Smitten Kitchen. The last time I did it the meat was delicious but not exactly falling apart. More like tasty bricks. I needed something else to eat with it, but coleslaw and guacamole don't get me any closer to my actual cooking goals. So I flipped through the cookbook until I found something that almost sort of went and wouldn't completely be at odds with the carnitas. Lemony Sweet Potatoes with Dates seemed to fit the bill.

There was, however, a minor miscalculation. The plan was to get the sweet potatoes roasting, then the carnitas into the pot while they were cooking, then the rest of the sweet potato recipe in the two hours it took to boil down all the water in the pot. But the problem was that two hours is a long time. So my side was done and partly eaten and stored by the time that the main course finished. I do have one useful picture for you. There's still a lot of fat hanging out on some of the pieces (there wasn't enough room at the bottom of the pot to make sure it all rendered down) but it's been really useful for reheating servings in the cast iron. The fatty pieces go in first to melt, and then the rest to crisp a bit and reheat.

Onwards and potatowards! Lemony Sweet Potatoes with Dates is one of those annoying recipes where a main ingredient is, under other circumstances, a full recipe. Because before I even start "cooking," I need to turn these...

...into these:

Ok, so that doesn't really tell you anything. I have harnessed the power of fire to transform these previously ordinary sweet potatoes into ROASTED SWEET POTATOES! LOOK ON MY WORKS, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR!

The lemon flavor in this dish comes from a half cup of limoncello, which is great because limoncello is delicious and also I now have a bottle of limoncello to deal with. Turns out it tastes great in orange juice.

I went back to the pitted dates instead of the pre-chopped. Not for any culinary reason, it's just that the recipe calls for 8 dates and I didn't know how to estimate that otherwise.

Here you can see the potatoes peeled in the... not background, really. Underground? And gravity defying dates.

I got sort of lazy, since the dates were going into a food processor. I mean, why cut them up if they're getting cut up? Dates, limoncello, mace, and a little salt into Caliban.

And then I left them there because I thought I should probably get the sweet potatoes ready for the sauce. Here they are, sliced up. Oh, I forgot to mention: the recipe only calls for two sweet potatoes, but I used three because I have been burned by a lack of sweet potatoes in the past. I think I made the right decision - the final dish may have been too sweet if there had only been two sweet potatoes. No more than three, though, without increasing the sauce.

I learned that Caliban is not a blender. If there's a liquid inside and you aren't pressing the lid down really hard when the blades start spinning, you get limoncello everywhere. Which is especially weird if the liquid isn't actually limoncello.

The puree gets boiled for a couple of minutes to reduce.

It gets poured over the sweet potatoes, and if I could do this again I'd probably toss them gently to coat instead of trying to spread it out. The next step was to dot butter over the top. I had no idea what that meant, so I guessed.

Brown sugar over the butter.

And into the broiler! The weirdest part is that I managed not to burn everything. Not really sure how that works yet, aside from it involving laying on my kitchen floor staring into the dark heart of the broiler.

Verdict: Every day is a battle to not run to the store to buy more sweet potatoes. I want to be eating this again right now. The only other thing I can do to convey the deliciousness to you is to refer to the limoncello. There is a delicious alcoholic beverage in my kitchen that I could be drinking at this very moment,  either chilled, in orange juice, or as part of a lemon drop. But instead I find myself thinking, "Best not; I may need it for potatoes."

And that's all I have to say about that.


Writing about the limoncello has made me thirsty. Dammit.