MADE: Buckeyes!

A boyfriend says, "Hey, Valentine's Day is coming up. Is it all right if I don't do anything special, or buy you anything?"
The girlfriend responds, "Absolutely! Valentine's Day isn't about stuff. It's about love!"

This would have worked out fine if A) Boyfriend's line hadn't meant "I'm actually going to TOTALLY FORGET Valentine's Day, like only a character in a sitcom could." and if B) Girlfriend's line hadn't meant "You're so cute, pretending that you're not doing anything for me for Valentine's Day. Such a clever cover for the ACTUALLY TOTALLY ROMANTIC THING that you're going to surprise me with!"

So the moral of the story is twofold: Listen rationally to your significant other when he or she talks about his or her expectations, and make yourself candy on Valentine's Day. Because your boyfriend's sure not going to. Nope, he's going to spend all day in the math library cozying up to the Kummer theorem and topological cohomologies.

Ahem.

Buckeyes!

When I think "making candy," I am immediately intimidated and visions of complicated alchemies involving thermometers and double boilers dance through my head. No such drama with buckeyes. They're spectacularly easy to make and also tons of fun. If dipping things in chocolate constitutes "fun" for you. If it doesn't, you should probably stop reading now and reevaluate your life. Just saying.

Buckeyes
Adapted slightly from Smitten Kitchen's delightful recipe

1/4 cup (2 tbsp) cream cheese
1 1/2 cups peanut butter--I used about 1 cup smooth and 1/2 cup crunchy, to give them a bit of texture
1 cup graham cracker crumbs
1/4 tsp salt
2 1/2 cups confectioner's sugar
10 tbsp unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly
12 oz dark or bittersweet chocolate (I used Ghirardelli 60% cacao chunks. It was a good life choice.)

Cream together cream cheese and peanut butter. Choosy bloggers choose Jif.

Add graham cracker crumbs and salt mix until combined. Then alternate additions of sugar and butter, stirring until thoroughly mixed after each addition. Mix some more, for good measure. When everything is combined, the mixture should basically be sturdy peanut butter dough. Try not to eat it all on its own.

Now for the chocolate coating.

Melt the chocolate in a double boiler, or in the microwave. I used the microwave, and heated it in 15 second bursts, stirring after each one. When chocolate is smooth and thoroughly melted, you're ready for dipping!

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and roll the peanut butter dough into balls. I made mine about a teaspoon each, and wound up with a delightfully large number (see picture below for about 2/3 of the batch.)

With a skewer or fork or chopstick--something pointy--dip the peanut butter balls into the melted chocolate. As Smitten Kitchen says, it may take a few tries before you've mastered your own personal technique. She recommends tilting the container of melted chocolate and spinning the dough balls in it, but I found that method prone to breaking the little buggers in half. Instead, I just skewered them and submerged them at an angle, until most of the peanut butter was covered in chocolate, leaving only a little of the doughy goodness showing through. Somehow, SK got hers to come out without the skewer-holes being visible. She's a wizard of some sort. I, being mortal, just embraced the holes as necessary imperfections that in no way inhibited deliciousness.

After you've chocolate-dipped all of your peanut butter dough balls, put the baking sheet in the refrigerator to cool for at least a half hour. It may be difficult to wait that long, knowing that those little balls of peanut-butter-chocolatey goodness are just sitting in there, but be patient.

Then, DEVOUR. Because it's Valentine's Day, and you deserve it.*

*In place of this reasoning, feel free to use any other rationale that occurs to you.

UPDATE: Cheese and Dating

This diagram basically explains A) how I approach "vegetarian" cooking, B) why I will never be a vegan, and C) why KPBH is great, and why I'm still dating him. He's the "vegetarian boyfriend" from the last post, and he sent me this today because he knows me too well.

The couple that covers everything in cheese together stays together? Probably because they get too fat to go anywhere else...

MADE: Chicken Pot Pie

Not Chicken. Raw chicken is just not photogenic.

Something I'm proud of: I made it through college without once buying Ramen.

That is not to say that I didn't sink to some pretty low food-MacGyvering in times of dire financial straits. Did I attend meetings of clubs I didn't care about because there was free Thai food at said meetings? Possibly. Did I steal spinach and cereal from the dining hall in plastic bags and tupperware? Of course. Did I ever convince myself that saltines and peanut butter constituted a sandwich, and thus a meal? It's better not to remember that time.

Through the majority of those rapscallion years, I dated a vegetarian,* cooked with a vegetarian, and thus effectively became a vegetarian when not at restaurants. I developed plenty of opinions about vegetarian cooking and eating during that time (For instance--making a "vegetarian" version of something does not mean "replacing the meat with EVERY VEGETABLE KNOWN TO MAN." To the misguided folks who do this--you are the reason that veg-haters hate. Not cool.) One thing that's fact, rather than opinion, though, is that buying meat is expensive, making vegetarianism a lifestyle of convenience for perpetually-poor college students.

When I went home for the summer, then, I was used to cooking vegetarian dishes. This would have been fine, except for a certain punk kid brother of mine. We'll call him Luke. I'm pretty sure he's a hipster Tyrannosaurus with a GPS implanted in his brain. If an entrée doesn't have meat in it, he sends it back. Or just complains a lot. As the summer wore on, I quickly grew tired of his pre-teen snark, and endeavored to make more food WITH MEAT IN IT. This chicken pot pie--perfect for feeding a ton of people, particularly if one of them is a secret T-Rex--was one of the recipes that sprang from Luke's demands, and one of the best. I cobbled it together from a variety of recipes and was pretty pleased with the result. It's a pretty flexible recipe, and the mix of spices and veggies is quite open to interpretation. A more traditional pie might have peas, corn, and green beans in it, while an even meatier version (that I might cook up in the near future?) would obviously contain bacon.

Pastry Crust
8 tbsp butter, chilled
3/4 cup flour, plus some for dusting and flouring surfaces
1/4 cup ice water

Cut butter into flour with a pastry blender until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Turn the mixture onto a working surface and mix in the water a little bit at a time, until the dough just clings together--this might not use all of the water.
"Turn" the dough by kneading/rolling it flat (about 3/4 inch thick), folding it in thirds, and kneading/rolling it flat again. The first couple of "turns" will be more like "flops," as the dough gets itself cohering. Do about nine turns in all, then let dough rest for a half hour, in the fridge if you'd like. (This is a good time to do some work on the filling.)

Filling in a Skillet
1 tbsp butter
1 medium onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 red pepper, diced
Salt and pepper to taste
1 tbsp Raspberry Pepper Jelly (optional, but delicious! You could also use a hot pepper or chili powder for a little extra zing.)
Splash of white wine (just how big of a splash is up to you...)

Melt butter in a medium skillet. Add diced onion and garlic and cook for about two minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the peppers and reduce heat, simmering for ten minutes, still stirring occasionally. Sprinkle in salt and pepper to taste, and add any spicy goodness during the simmering. Add boiled chicken (see below) and splash in white wine, stirring briskly until the wine is mostly cooked in. Set aside until pot pie assembly.

Filling in a Pot
3 medium potatoes, diced
1/2 head cauliflower, cored and chopped
1/2 cup baby carrots, diced
1 small tart apple, cored and diced
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, diced

Bring a pot of water to a boil. Toss chicken chunks into the boiling water for about five minutes, until whitish rather than pinkish. Leaving water boiling, scoop out chicken and deposit in skillet. Drop in vegetable and apple chunks and boil for 10 minutes, or until slightly softened. Scoop out veggie and apple chunks into the pot pie container--a deep stoneware bowl works best, but a general casserole dish works too. Add the skillet mixture once it's tender and delicious, and mix well, adding additional salt and pepper to taste. A sprinkle of cumin or sage wouldn't go amiss here, either.

Filling in a Saucepan
3 tbsp butter
1/4 cup flour
1 1/2 cup milk
2 1/2 cup chicken stock, water, or the reserved water from the boiling pot
Pepper and a sprinkle of nutmeg

Melt butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Once butter is thoroughly melted, add flour and whisk briskly for about two minutes. The mixture should be thick and goopy--a little like cookie dough. Add the milk a little at a time, whisking until smooth after each addition. After all the milk has been added, cook for three minutes, stirring occasionally with particular attention to the sides and corners of the saucepan. Add the chicken stock one cup at a time, stirring until smooth after each addition. Cook for an additional 3 minutes, then remove from heat.

Final Assembly

Heat oven to 425 degrees F.
If you haven't already, combine skillet mixture (onions, peppers, and chicken) with pot mixture (veggies and apples) in a large casserole dish or oven-proof stoneware bowl. Pour the saucepan of gravy over the vegetable mixture and mix everything together. This is a good time to do a taste-test, making sure that no last-minute spice additions are needed.
The dough's had its little rest, so bring it back out and turn it a few more times. Then, roll it out to a little larger than the circumference of the pot pie bowl. Lay the dough over the filling, pressing around the edges of the bowl to seal. Cut a few knife slits in the top of the crust for ventilation. If you'd like, brush an egg wash over the top of the crust to get a nice golden brown crispness--I mixed my egg with a splash of water, a twist of sea salt, and the tiniest smidge of chili powder.
Bake for 30-35 minutes, until crust is just golden and filling begins to bubble around the edges. (If your pie is particularly full, you might want to put a baking sheet underneath the dish to catch bubble-over.)
Then DEVOUR, particularly if you are a carnivorous Cretaceous predator disguised as a blonde miscreant sibling.

Bubbled over. Still delicious.

*Just in case you were worried, I'm still dating him. He's less of a Real Vegetarian now, though. More of a Vegetarian of Convenience.

MADE: Beet Soup

Apparently beets are mysterious? When my Saudi Arabian roommate mistook my beet soup for some kind of strawberry gelato (and subsequently refused to believe that it was soup and made of vegetables), I assumed that it was some kind of cultural divide.

But then my other--very American--roommate and his girlfriend exhibited similar confusion, just moments later. Did you guys never have to eat beets as a child? I remember being grossed out by them, and confused as well. They were one of those vegetables that straddled the line between savory and sweet--an unacceptable breach for my fragile childhood psyche.

I've rediscovered them in my cooking adventures, however, and they've fallen onto the "Ingredient Obsessions" list. (Other past list-makers include spinach, sweet potatoes, and sour cream. Ask my beleaguered boyfriend, who frequently has to gently pull me back from cooking frenzies with questions like "Do we really need to put sweet potatoes in the lasagna?" and "Are you sure that you should buy another three bags of spinach at the grocery store?")

Beet soup is both delicious and aesthetically pleasing--that bright red color makes a cozy winter soup that much cheerier. Also, chopping up beets leaves you with red hands and knives--a fun little reminiscence of Lady Macbeth, for those who are inclined to be amused by such things. (Me.)

Soupstravaganza #1
Beet Soup
1 tsp olive oil
1 clove garlic, chopped (or ZOOMED)
1/3 onion, diced
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1 medium potato, peeled and diced
3 medium beets, peeled and diced
4 cups water or chicken broth
1 bay leaf
1 tsp lemon juice
Sour Cream, for serving

In a medium pot or large saucepan over medium-high heat, sauté garlic and onion in olive oil until onion is tender and begins to clear, but not brown, about four minutes. Add salt and pepper and sauté one minute more. Add potato, beets, water or broth, and bay leaf. Bring the ingredients to a boil, partially covered. Once boiling, continue to cook for about 20 minutes, or until potato and beet pieces are tender.

Remove from heat and allow to cool for five minutes. In three batches, transfer soup to a blender and blend for about 10 seconds, until soup is somewhere in the median state between chunky and smooth. Mix blended soup back into the pot, add lemon juice, and stir until mixed. 
Distribute among bowls or package in airtight containers for freezing and storing. For serving, stir in a dollop of sour cream. DEVOUR, of course. 

UPCOMING: Soupstravaganza

A few days ago, I had had enough of academia. Somehow, this translated itself quite clearly into "Make a ton of soup!" Dutifully, I headed out to my local produce stand and stocked up. I bought...well, a ridiculous amount of varied vegetables and fruits. And then I brought them back to my house and spent several hours chopping, dicing, boiling, stirring, blending, and packaging into freezer containers. (Strangely, the last step is the most problematic in my house. For whatever reason, we have a drawer full of lids and a drawer full of containers, but amongst all that, we only have about four matching container-lid sets. It's bizarre.)

The recipes to my creations will be up later this weekend. For your anticipatory pleasure, I'll be recipe-ing:

• Beet Soup
• Fennel, Pear, and Squash Soup
• Creamy Potato and Leek Soup

Get ready! SOUP.