Not Every Adventure is a Success

I have an obsessive attraction to Japanese food. Lately my favourite dish is broiled or grilled miso eggplant, so when I came home today with a purple eggplant under my arm, I knew just what I wanted to do with it.

What is miso? Miso is basically a paste made from fermented soybeans. A few weeks ago I bought a package of miso soup mix which included 8 packages of miso paste and 8 packages of tofu cubes, seaweed, and green onion. I didn't like the miso soup but thought maybe I could salvage it and use the paste with this eggplant. I took a real risk with this because I couldn't find any recipes that didn't involve making the paste on your own. I looked at a few recipes to see the process that was used.

I started by slicing the eggplant in rounds about half an inch thick. I read in one recipe that Japanese eggplant has a thinner skin, and if you choose to use American eggplant it is best to score the outside. I then soaked the eggplant rounds in water. 

Eggplant floats so I had to improvise a bit!

In the meantime I squeezed out 5 little packages of miso paste. It is quite bitter and the dish should be sweet so I added a teaspoon of sugar and about half a teaspoon of ginger powder (I like to use ingredients that I have on hand).

After soaking the eggplant for 10 minutes, I then patted the rounds dry and arranged them on an oiled baking sheet and brushed them with a bit of oil. With the oven tray at the top rack, I broiled the eggplant for about 8 minutes until the rounds became slightly browned. I took them out and spread my doctored miso paste on the top of the rounds. I placed them back in the oven for another 8 minutes until they became soft. The smell was delicious and they looked amazing!

Unfortunately the taste was not so amazing... I had only used half the eggplant rounds so instead of giving up I decided to sprinkle the rest of the rounds with soy sauce and honey and baked them at 350F for about 10 minutes.

From here I have 2 options. I can try to make miso eggplant from scratch another time, or leave it to my favourite Japanese restaurants to prepare perfectly. At this point I haven't decided which I will opt for.

Adventures involve taking risks, trying new things, and hoping for a positive outcome. As the title of this week's Adventure in Domestication states, "not every adventure is a success." To be an adventurer you accept the possibility that not everything will work out perfectly, because if everything worked out all the time, it wouldn't be an adventure at all!

Apples Apples Everywhere

I want to start out this week's entry with a correction to a previous blog post. In this post I mentioned the Gap's Recycle Your Blues program and wrote that if you "Like" their facebook page, The Gap will give you an additional 10% discount on top of the 30% that they give for recycling your old jeans. Unfortunately the additional 10% off is only available in the US. I apologize for this misinformation!

On to new and exciting things...

This week's Adventure in Domestication is a crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, perfectly sweetened, fall treat. I had the opportunity to go apple picking at an orchard outside of the city and I came home with about 25 apples of different varieties. As you may already know, I live on my own, and can't eat 25 apples before they go bad! I did some research online about different recipes that call for apples. I have never been a fan of baked apples and apple pies and cobblers so I wanted to try something a little different.

One recipe that really caught my eye was this one for Apple Latkes. This recipe called for ingredients that I already have in my home, it seemed pretty easy, and promised to be delicious.

I would be lying if I told you this adventure wasn't challenging, and I realized the benefit of certain kitchen tools like food processors and egg beaters...and whisks.

I started out by peeling the apples with a potato peeler. I prepared a bowl with cold water and some lemon juice for the apples so that they wouldn't begin to brown.

 

When the apples were peeled I cut out the core and grated them with the only grater I own. It has smaller holes than a standard grater, which meant more work for me but the end result was more what I was looking for than if I had used a standard grater. When my mom makes potato latkes for Channukah she purees the potato rather than grating it, so the consistency of my apples actually came out a lot like the way my mom does it, which I love. I added the lemon juice and sugar to the apple mixture and set it aside.

I washed, cracked, and separated 2 eggs with ease. But here is where it got challenging. The recipe says, "in separate bowl, beat egg whites until soft peaks form; beat in remaining sugar until stiff peaks form." To me, this implies that you own an egg beater...or a whisk...I seem to own neither of these so I settled with a good old trusty fork and started beating the egg whites. 10 minutes later they started to get a bit foamy but they weren't forming any type of 'peaks'. 

20 minutes later I was still working away at the foam, but still no peaks. I decided to add the sugar even though the egg white hadn't formed soft peaks and continued to beat.With a tired arm I looked online for tips for beating egg whites. Following the advice, I added a splash of lemon juice to the foam and kept trying to make it work. I even tried using 2 fork to beat the egg whites but another 10 minutes passed and although the egg had fluffed up quite a bit, it wasn't forming the peaks that the recipe called for. I considered giving up and eating the apple mixture as apple sauce but I questioned how important the consistency of the eggs really was and decided to use it as is!

I beat the egg yolks (soooo much easier than the whites), added the flour and cinnamon, and folded in my sad excuse for egg whites.

I heated a large pan with canola oil and fried up the latkes. But

instead of just frying them like the recipe calls for, I decided to once again incorporate in my mom's way of making potato latkes. I fried them on both sides until the outside was golden brown, and then I baked them slowly at 350 degrees until the insides were no longer overly soft.

The end result was delicious and I am happy that I was able to use some of the apples in an original way.

Now what to do with the rest of them?

No Flyers Please

Happy Thanksgiving to you! I will be celebrating this lovely Thanksgiving long weekend by cleaning up my apartment a bit. The last few weeks have been busy and although I am sad to admit it, the cleanliness and tidiness of my home has suffered...how undomestic of me!

The best thing about cleaning up your neglected living space is how much more organized and welcoming it feels. I always find that when my apartment is cluttered it makes everything harder to find and I feel stressed by the overwhelming amount of things that need to be done. A cluttered home = a cluttered mind. And that is a scientifically proven mathematical equation. Sure I could try to shove all that clean laundry that is sitting in a pile on my desk into my closet and dresser drawers. Sure I could pick up all those flyers I never looked at and throw them in a bag to be recycled. Sure I could probably even take the recycling downstairs. But I prefer to do one step at a time here people.

Here is a cool initiative from The Gap that may help you clean out your closet a bit.

It's called Recycle Your Blues. Until October 20th you can take in your overly worn, never worn, or worn-once-but-spilled-paint-on-them jeans and get 30% off a new pair (that you will hopefully be a bit more careful with next time, please). And if you "Like" it on facebook they will give you another 10% off! Not bad, not bad at all. That's all fine and dandy but what's going to happen with those jeans? They will recycled and turned into cotton insulation and donated to disadvantaged communities.

"The Gap and Cotton Incorporated collected more than 270,000 pairs of jeans last March for their first denim drive. The donated jeans were converted into insulation for 500 homes in need, and for projects including Hurricane rebuilding efforts".

As for those flyers that obnoxiously pollute my front hallway everyday, I am putting up a No Flyers sign.

Do you have ways you reduce the clutter in your home?