Work and Workings of a Nerd

My friends and I have a lot of potlucks. We haven’t had as many recently, but last summer, we had them weekly on Friday nights, and I thought it was a great way to hang out. It’s cheaper than going to a restaurant, exposes you to interesting creations, and hopefully gives you something to be proud of. Having done a few, I have a few suggestions for potlucks, both in planning and cooking.

In terms of planning, I think the most important thing is to have a theme. This might range from something conventional, such as “Chinese food” to something quirky, such as “food that looks like other food.” Great potlucks often involve a lot of discovery, and constraints often generate very creative results. Otherwise, potluckers may fall back onto their tried-and-true recipes and not take advantage of the opportunity to explore their next big dish.

Second, it helps to either assign or publicize choices for courses. Horror stories of potlucks usually involve little diversity in food, and unless you were planning a lasagna cook-off, you might get tired of lasagna by your 4th serving. My friends and I used a Google Spreadsheet, where we could record location, time, theme, attendance, and dishes in advance to help out with organization. Other than the token amount of trolling that must come with the internet, it worked well to keep the meals diverse.

Once the logistics are out of the way, you can focus on your personal contribution to the meal. Although you might be shooting for creating the perfect meal, potlucks have unusual constraints that make some meal choices better or worse than other. Specifically, you want to serve food to many people after carrying it to the desired location. Depending on your choice of dishes, these constraints may be detrimental.

First, you need to be able to feed everyone who attends. You might have a great recipe for creme brulee, but when you only have 6 ramekins, you might end up a little short. On the other hand, remember that everyone will be bringing food, so you actually don’t need to contribute that much. The rule of thumb to make as much as you could eat personally doesn’t really work, since at least I don’t have a good sense for how many a meal’s worth of cocktail shrimp is. It all depends on what the distribution of courses is, but factor that into how much you make.

Second and furthermore, your meal should be easily distributable to those who like your meal more and less. Even if you have enough to feed everyone, personal-sized portions may leave many bread bowls half-eaten and burger-loving stomachs partially sated.  In general, food that requires a serving utensil are good, and food that is taken whole is suspect.

Third, your meal should be okay if left to sit for an hour or more. Between transportation, late arrivals, and general merriment, it can often be a long wait before your dish gets eaten, and that shouldn’t be a problem. I myself have failed this test many times, and although I feel industrious cooking while others are chatting, it’s a bummer to not be involved in the party that a potluck is. So, things that can get cold and can’t be revived by the microwave, such as most things crispy or a lot of meat, may not turn out very well by serving. You’ll get sympathy for your meal, but wouldn’t you rather have a delicious dish. The rules here obviously vary, depending on what the kitchen situation is at the potluck location. Most salads are fine if plopped in the fridge, it’s usually not a problem to bake something on the spot (as long as it doesn’t require too much checking), and soups can be kept at a simmer.

So those were a lot of rules, and I haven’t given you many good choices. Here are a few that I think work well:

• just about any cold salad. Leave the nuts, other toppings, and salad dressing to mix in just before serving
• soups and stews. You’re supposed to let them sit anyways, and most can be warmed on the stove or nuked at the last minute
• cookies. I’ve found that by dessert, most people are usually stuffed, and cookies are a small enough offering that everyone will take at least 1
• do it yourself foods of any variety. Offloading cooking to the consumer makes your life easier, allows everyone to customize as they desire, and usually means that the components can be left to sit for awhile beforehand

Happy potlucking!

Merry Belated Christmas, Happy New Year in advance, and Happy Holidays as a catch-all! Here at the Leung family estate, being all together means a few things: whining, bickering, accusing, and, most importantly, cooking. Often all at the same time. Over each other. It’s quite an enlivening experience once you get used to it.

But Christmas is extra-special, because we put extra planning into everything: my mom coordinates all of the gifts, my mom determines what we’re going to cook for her birthday (often celebrated along with Christmas since they’re close and we’re all home), my mom makes sure that the house is organized for all of our arrival, and we all dredge up old stories to jab each other with. This particular Christmas, we all have our own kitchens to stock, so my mom appears to have amassed a huge pile of on-sale kitchen gadgets from which we can all snatch what we need. My haul was particularly good:

But moving past my obsession with containers and random gadgets, let’s focus on what we actually cooked up on Christmas. And all pictures are credited to the Zanbato iPad, which at least takes better pictures than my phone.

When it came time for planning our contributions to cooking for my mom, I was politely asked, “What are you doing?” I shrugged and offered up my services anywhere they were wanted, but my mom threw me a bone and said, “I liked the bagels you made last year.” That might make her the exception, as they were universally regarded as too salty and a little small and not fluffy, but I accept any low standards that I manage to set for myself. It makes it more difficult for people to be disappointed in the future. At the recommendation of Lisa’s Jewish boyfriend Matt, I looked specifically for a kosher bagel recipe, which I found here.

The recipe called for far too little flour, and I ended up adding close to another cup of flour to get the consistency of the dough right. It also calls for very large pieces of dough for each bagel. I made them much larger than last time, but not quite as big as recommended. I think I got the size just about right.

This recipe said to put the bagels in hot but not boiling water as well. I’m not entirely sure if this is correct, but at least they floated this time. The dough also rose more at each stage (resting, boiling, and baking).

The tops of the bagel browned up quite nicely after setting the oven to broil for the last 2 or 3 minutes of baking. The consistency is a little funny, which I think has to do with how I rolled out the individual bagels. You’ll note that there aren’t any toppings on it. In my excitement, I somehow ignored the etymology of “toppings” and got the notion that the bagels would work better if I had the toppings on the bottom where it would be pressed into the bagel more.

The bottom looks a little gross, but it ended up being delicious. They got a crispy side that beats any baking I’ve ever done, and it ended up being quite a success. Like many of my creations, they don’t look perfect, but the usual criticism ended there. We fortunately had some lox in the fridge, and they made a nice lunch before we started baking.

The menu for dinner ended up not being nearly as extensive as it has been in the past, but we didn’t need more food with stacks of leftovers in the fridge and more in our tummies from bagels and snacking. Nicole headed up the shrimp ravioli made entirely from scratch. I beheaded some of the largest, ugliest shrimp I had ever seen, and she made and rolled out the pasta by hand. It sounds like it was a lot of work.

The ravioli were quite large, but Nicole managed to dole out all of the shrimp filling, so it worked out. I guess this is preferable to ravioli without enough pasta around the edges that might burst. The recipe didn’t make a lot of sauce, but it made enough to coat all of the ravioli, of which it was difficult to eat more than 1 or 2 because of the size.

We had about an extra 1/2 pound of shrimp, so Lisa used that to make some Greek shrimp. Unfortunately, mint didn’t quite make it onto the shopping list, but it still ended up being pretty tasty, even if there wasn’t quite enough shrimp. She ended up slicing them in half, which worked because with the huge shrimp we had, this meant that we still had 8 pretty meaty halves.

To fill out the rest of the meal, we also had a few crackers with some very ripe brie and leftover cranberry sauce:

some asparagus:

and a simple salad. The most exciting part of the salad, from my perspective, was the avocado we used. I carried it back with me from California in my luggage after Julie and I picked it off of a tree at Stanford. We were worried that we picked it too soon, but it ripened nicely. The inside was bright green, soft, and juicy:

The other big effort was in making the birthday cake. My mom wanted something not too sweet and relatively light so that it wouldn’t languish in the fridge for a long time like the rest of our leftovers. It took a good portion of a car ride for her to describe a fruity cake, which was essentially the fruit tart we had always done, except with a sponge cake on the bottom instead of a crust. Why we couldn’t have just done the crust we’ve always done is beyond me, but I don’t do any planning.

The recipe we found for it turned out to be a vegan recipe, which we only realized after Lisa made the cake, and we started the custard, all without using eggs. Quick tip: if there aren’t any eggs in it, it’s not custard. Anything pretending to be is suspect, and by suspect, I mean probably bad. While I was stirring the custard, we tried a bit, and it wasn’t very good. Lisa made a game-time decision and tossed that custard down the drain and started again with a real custard. Better success followed.

Although it’s probably not the fruit cake you’re thinking of around Christmas time, it ended up being pretty good. The cake had an interesting (but not bad) consistency and definitely held its lime. The custard was as delicious as you might expect, and the array of fruit all worked pretty well.

I hope you saw something that you liked!

(Author’s Note: I’ll be moving my food writing from the group blog back to my own blog now that the summer is over and I’m trying to keep my writing regular)

Beginning the summer after my freshmen year of college, I have hosted an annual deep-fried day. Having heard of delicious deep-fried twinkies and snickers from the Texas State Fair, I insisted that I could do the same, and for the past 3 years, I have worked on my technique. As of yesterday, I think it finally paid off.

The theme for our weekly potluck this past week was “deep-fried food” to continue my tradition. Sensing that others might be tired of this, I presented this as an opportunity to think of other things we might deep fry, traditional or not. It worked out perfectly, with falafel, goat-cheese wontons, fried cheese in a salad, and sweet potato fries as good options. What worked best about it, though, was that all of these required different sauces and ingredients to accompany the deep-fried bits. Our dessert, though, was twinkie, oreo, and snicker-ful.

Given the improvement that we’ve managed over the years, I thought I might put together a few thoughts on deep frying. I tried to organize them, but the topics overlapped too much, so it’s just paragraphs.

You can use just a regular pot to do it and use a canola or vegetable oil for it. You can buy a deep fryer, but it isn’t necessary as long as you’re careful. As far as the size of the pot, I have been using something about 8 inches. Bigger takes a lot more oil, and smaller doesn’t give you enough space (though don’t worry about that too much as I will explain soon.
Have a thermometer with you and try to keep the heat between 350 and 375. You can be on the 350 for things that need to cook through but won’t soak too much grease (falafel) but hotter on the things that will soak it up (oreos). On my slow electric burner, I can get to 375 below medium, so you don’t need to crank the heat too much.

What will happen, though, is that when you put things in the oil, the temperature will drop. Thus, my strategy for deep frying has been to keep the heat just below medium until I get to the desired temperature. Immediately after adding things to fry, I turn the heat up a little, then watch the thermometer. When I start approaching the original temperature, I bring the heat back down.

As far as adding things to the pot, always do batches so you know how long things have been in the oil. If you try to stream items in and pull them in and out over time, you can’t maintain a steady temperature. Similarly, try to keep the batches small (that’s why an 8 inch pot works) so that the temperature doesn’t drop too much.

As far as adding and removing things, dumping in with a slotted spoon (even plastic) should work just fine. I tried to move things in and out with chopsticks before, but gripping battered food will coat the chopsticks in a layer of fried batter quickly. As far as other equipment goes, have lots of paper towels around and try to pat dry things immediately after coming out of the pot. Things cool very quickly, so don’t be too afraid about burning yourself on the food.

For the batter, pancake mix works just fine. It should just barely be thick enough to coat things. Make sure all surfaces of the food are covered, but don’t worry too much about getting a thick coat; as soon as it hits the oil, it’ll puff up and harden.

Go slow with it. You can only eat so much fried food, but you’ll feel better about it if you spread it over a few hours. Or maybe even days. As long as the oil doesn’t get too hot and go rancid, you can reuse it a few times.

And to be intentionally didactic, make sure you do it safely. A pot of oil can ruin your day quick. Keep the lid nearby in case you need to cover the pot at any point. Don’t put water/ice/water-based stuff into the oil, or else it might begin to sputter.

You can google around to look for things to deep fry (pretty much everything), but here are a few things I or my friends have done. Most are successes, but failures are notable too

• twinkies – they work fine even if you don’t freeze them. Batter and top with powdered sugar.
• oreos
• PB & J sandwiches – battered. It’s delicious
• Snickers – I’ve only done frozen before, but I think that’s the way to do it
• Onions & mushrooms – great with BBQ sauce
• gummy worms – these disintegrated quick, but liquified gummy worms are delicious
• ice cream – haven’t done, but I hear it’s delicious. These take preparation
• falafel – good as a meal on its own. Pair with traditional things
• sweet potato fries
• goat cheese
• fried wontons