[photo of the day] my nephew eating ice cream
he's terribly cute, no?Thursday, September 25, 2008
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
banana bread, but not that kind of banana bread
So here's the situation: I had an unexpected two days off of work due to Tropical Storm Fay and a few overripe bananas sitting atop my refrigerator. Normally, overripe bananas get turned into banana "bread." I chose quotations there because it's really more like a cake even though it is technically a quick-bread. Sweet, sometimes spiced, sometimes with nuts -- old-fashioned banana bread is equally at home on the breakfast table as it is for dessert.
But I didn't want something sweet. Couple this with the fact that I had some time on my hands and I thought to incorporate bananas into a yeast-raised recipe. I consulted my cookbooks and wouldn't you know it, Rose Levy Berenbaum already had a recipe for just such a thing.
Friday, August 01, 2008
[tip for bloggers] easy-to-print posts in blogger
I was stumbling through cyberspace and found a page with a recipe I wanted to try. It was obviously hosted by Blogger, like mine, but had some sort of tweak that allowed you to print the pages without the side columns. This made me so excited that I forgot about the recipe and the website! I had to figure out how to do this...
I searched online and found some sites that gave me some ideas, but individually they were coming up short. Some would print just the first page, all of them were leaving on the navigation bar at the top of the page, and others included the comments section in the printed version. I ended up -- through lots of trials and many errors -- with this bit of CSS code that works for me (and should work for anyone else using Blogger/Blogspot):
<style media='print' type='text/css'>
#header-wrapper, #header, .header, #sidebar-wrapper, .sidebar,
#leftsidebar-wrapper, #rightsidebar-wrapper, .date-header,
.post-meta-data, .comment-link, .comment-footer, #blog-pager,
#backlinks-container, #navbar-section, .subscribe_notice,
#navbar, #Navbar1, #comments, #comments-block, .post-footer,
.noprint {display: none !important;}
#main-wrapper, #footer-wrapper {width: 99% !important; text-align: justify;
text-justify: auto; word-wrap: break-word !important;
overflow: visible !important; font-size:70% !important;
line-height: 1.4em !important;},
</style>You simply insert it after the <head>tag in your Blogger template HTML and BAM! -- whenever someone wants to print a post, it will automatically include just the text of your post and any footer text (copyright info, etc.) that you have on your page. If they do it from your home page, it will print all entries on that page, but from individual post pages it will print just that singular page.
If you want to toy with it, here's some extra info...everything that comes before the .noprint line gets excluded from printing, so you can customize what gets printed. For example, to add comments into the printed page, simply remove the correct section labels (#comments, #comment-block). You can also adjust the output text size, line height, and any other attributes you're comfortable editing by changing the settings after #main-wrapper, #footer-wrapper. Want bigger text? Change the 70% to 85% or even 100%. The more you know, the more you can do, but this will get you started.
Oh, one more thing...
PLEASE BE SURE TO SAVE A BACKUP COPY OF YOUR TEMPLATE BEFORE EDITING!
PS - A lot of people asked for the code to put a "Print This Post" button in their posts. Here it is:
First, you have to "Expand Widget Templates" in the Blogger HTML editor and
add the following code:
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'> <form> <span class='noprint'> <p align='right'> <input onClick='window.print()' type='button' value='Print This Post'/> </p> </span> </form> </b:if>
after this line:
<p> <data:post.body/> </p>
It should still keep the "noprint" settings from the edits I suggested
in the blog post.
Thanks to David Zetland for pointing out that the printed page might cut words off of the right margin. This was added to make that happen -- text-align: justify; text-justify: auto; word-wrap: break-word !important; and is reflected in the code above.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
easy mango sorbet
I was one of the lucky people who won a copy of Lynne Rossetto Kasper's The Splendid Table's How to Eat Supper over at Serious Eats. It's a great book -- tons of quality weekday recipes and great mini-anecdotes from lots of people in the food world; I couldn't stop flipping through it.
In it, she offers up a recipe for a pineapple sorbet that seemed quick and easy -- perfect for a summertime dessert. It calls for frozen pineapple to be quickly pureed in a food processor with lemon juice, sugar, and a bit of fresh ginger.
For some reason, though, my supermarket was out of frozen pineapple, so I decided to whip up a batch with frozen mango instead. I tweaked a bit further and came up with this -- a Mexican-inspired mango sorbet that you can make in a snap!
easy mango sorbet
21 oz. frozen mango
juice and zest of one lime
1/4 tsp almond extract
5 TB granulated sugar
pinch of salt
1 bottle of your favorite tequila
Get your food processor running and drop the mango through the feed chute a few chunks at a time until it's all in. Stop the processor. At this point, you'll wonder how this is going to become sorbet, as it looks like a bunch of finely chopped mangoes. Fear not.
Add the juice, zest, sugar, salt, extract, and 3 TB of tequila to the mangoes and puree until it is smooth and creamy. While this would make an excellent slushy, it's not yet a sorbet.
Pack this bright-orange slush into a tupperware-esque container, place plastic wrap directly onto the surface, and cap it with the appropriately sized tupperware-esque lid. Plunk that into your freezer and polish off the rest of the tequila with friends (lime and salt optional). By the time you're done getting hammered (4 hours?), the sorbet will have sufficiently solidified in the freezer. Alternatively, you can do this a day ahead and save yourself a hangover, but what fun is that?
Even after a day in the freezer, the sorbet is still scoopable -- the sugar and alcohol help ensure that. Serve it with grated lime and another shot. Cheers!
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
36 hours for cookies?
About two weeks ago, the New York Times Food Section published a story about one author's quest for chocolate chip cookie nirvana. In it, David Leite interviews several cookie pros in and around the Big Apple to identify some tips that could help home bakers find The Way with cookies:
- Rest your dough. Leite recommends at least 24 hours but mentions that 36 are even better.
- Under-bake your cookies. The key to a chewy cookie is to make sure it isn't cooked all the way through.
- Don't be afraid of salt. Coarse salt in and on the cookies makes flavors "pop."
- Make 'em big. Larger cookies can provide for cascading textures from crispy on the edge to chewy/gooey in the center, provided you pay attention to Tip #2.
Finally, I popped the dough balls into the oven, six at a time (they're big, don't forget). When they emerged from the oven, they were as advertised -- golden all over, rich, buttery, and with that variegated texture that Leite promised. My only substitution was for Ghirardelli semi-sweet (60% cacao) chocolate chips rather than Valrhona chocolate "feves" (which are flatter), mainly because that's what I had on hand. I don't think the cookies suffered, but I'm willing to give the feves a try one of these days.
Was the 36-hour wait worth it? Yes and no. The cookies were wonderful, but certainly not spontaneous. I think they were more uniformly golden than my usual batch of chocolate chip cookies, but the texture bit really stems from under-baking (I should really call this "properly baking" your cookies, as they aren't raw, just less done than the typical home baker makes them). The biggest selling point of this recipe, to me at least, is that you can make the dough and bake off a cookie or two at a whim, up to 3 days later according to the article (but probably as long as a week later if you wanted).
