advance apologies to my ancestors...

i had a dream last night in which i came across a guy named Bren on. that is not a typo. his name was originally Brendon... but somebody stole the "d".

thus, he was left to go through life as Bren on.

naturally, he was displeased with said situation, and he was on a constant search for a letter to replace the "d". in one moment of extreme desperation, he even resorted to stealing a "t" from an uncle of his. he had seen the name Brenton on a pack of crackers, and he thought it would be a good fit.

unfortunately, a second uncle showed up and stole it back. rather than returning the "t" to the original owner, the second uncle sharpened it into a short dagger, which he would brandish at anyone who tried to recover the pilfered letter.

poor Bren on was in a state of absolute despair when our paths crossed, and i afforded him every crumb of pity i had to offer. he even attempted at one point to steal a letter from me, but he gave up after i questioned if he would really want to go through life as Brenfon.

i decided that i would do everything i could to help this troubled soul find peace, and i began by getting to know him better, until i was acquainted with all his greatest hopes and dreams.

turns out he had always wanted to be an actor. not in movies or on television, but right out in front of a live audience on a theater stage. problem was, every time he tried to even go in for an audition, a door would be slammed in his face.

i walked around for a while, contemplating his predicament, and wondering what i could possibly do to help so pitiable a character. this is when i realized that there were several theater companies in the area, and a few of them listed the works of Shakespeare as a specialty.

i was struck by a brilliant idea.

me: if you use a marker, you can turn one of the "n"s in your name into a second "o".
Bren on: uhm... okay...?
me: then you can rearrange the letters to spell Oberon.
Bren on: uhm... why...?
me: stage actors are a notoriously suspicious lot. they won't dare turn away anyone with that name.

he smiled and nodded in enthusiastic agreement... that is, once i was done explaining who Oberon was.

then he ran off in search of a Sharpie... and i woke up.
___________

as i mentioned a couple posts ago, i wanted to talk a bit about the magazine that was the source of the German apple cake recipe. i recently added a magazine subscription and a cookbook to my culinary library.

i was an avid fan for many years of America's Test Kitchen, but i stopped watching after Christoper Kimball's departure from the show. it just never felt the same with him gone. however, i was perusing the magazine aisle on a recent trip to the supermarket, when a familiar face caught my attention on the cover of a new (to me) food magazine.

i was vaguely aware of him having moved on to some new endeavor, but i do not spend much time keeping up with the programming on public television these days. we get both the public radio and public television broadcast from Vermont up here in Montreal, but i do not own a tv, so i was not aware that he was back on the air... with a new magazine to boot. enter Milk Street (named for the street in Boston where this new company is headquartered).

i want to make every single recipe in this issue... except the savory bread pudding, because soggy bread is never my idea of a good time. i have been known to gag at the sight of french toast. pretty much.

random fact: my paternal grandfather was Indian. naturally, i have zero connection to the culture, other than a ridiculous fondness for the food. there is an undeniable Indian influence on Caribbean cuisine, so i was raised with a lot of those flavors being a common part of the food we ate. however, i recognize that those dishes are not—for lack of a better term—"real" Indian cuisine.

as a result, i greatly appreciated the article about crisscrossing Mumbai "In Search of the Real Butter Chicken", and i am really looking forward to giving the accompanying recipe a go. advance apologies to my ancestors who i will (undoubtedly) offend along the way.

then there is that cookbook.

for the uninitiated, Maangchi is a Korean-American cookbook author and one of my absolute favorite YouTubers. she also gets extra points for being a New Yorker. it should be noted that she is one-thousand percent responsible for the presence of gochujang (Korean chili paste) in almost every dish we make these days. i have learned so much and been inspired to try so many new things from watching her videos, and her new book is more of the same.

as soon as it arrived, we sat down together and flipped through the whole thing. you know that you have a good cookbook when you instantly start planning all the dishes you want to make. many of the recipes are updated versions of dishes she has made on her YT channel over the years, like this Galbi-jjim (braised beef short ribs). is it wrong to want to lick a page?

my absolute favorite part of this cookbook is the guide to shopping for Korean ingredients and kitchenware.

there are many more pages like this, filled with all the basic information you will need when shopping for all the parts you will require for your next Korean meal. i only wish this section of the book was a handy field-guide size that i could take on trips to the big Asian market across town... or even the small Asian grocery store directly behind our building.

i sense a future filed with culinary mis-adventures that will make even the king of the Fairies proud.

i pity the fool...

i woke up this morning, only to be greeted by this view. that is my balcony out there, completely covered in a pile of snow.

no exaggeration... it snowed non-stop from Thursday to Saturday. when the skies finally cleared, there was something in the region of two feet of snow on the ground. but it did not stop there.

we woke up this (Monday) morning to whiteout conditions across the greater Montreal area on account of even more snow. it was so bad that there were very few cars out on the main roads leading to the heart of downtown... on a Monday morning. it was generally understood to be a day when you venture out of doors only if absolutely necessary... and it absolutely was not necessary in my universe.

then i made the mistake of opening the balcony door—which was a bit of a surprise in itself, as it was frozen shut all weekend.

see that little glimpse of black under there? that is one of the ten-gallon planters for the balcony garden project. we keep them double-stacked on the balcony during the Winter. somewhere out there is a row of large ten-gallon planters, stacked on top of other large ten-gallon planters... and all you can see is the corner of one pot, because the rest of them are buried under a mountain of snow.

these planter boxes (like the one i grew strawberries in last Summer) are about two-and-a-half feet wide, and they appear to be covered by about two-and-a-half feet of snow.

there is another one somewhere in that odd formation of snow. kinda looks like a neck-pillow for a polar bear.

and the third one is so weighed down, it looks like it is going to fall any second now. good times.

it was still snowing pretty heavily at this point.

the lady across the street has one of those big dogs that looks like it should be pulling a sled in the Arctic, which seems appropriate in this setting.

i pity the fool who has to dig this car out of all that snow.

want to know the best part? we are supposed to get even more of the stuff during the course of the week. good grief!

executive bad-girl decision...

someone had a birthday. i made a German apple cake to mark the occasion.

it was not my birthday, i should add, as my parents had sense enough to see that the celebration of my arrival in the world would not fall in the dead of Winter. and, before i forget... let us just chat a bit here about the dead of Winter.

you know all those groundhogs everyone tends to make a fuss about at this time of year? well, according to the majority of said creatures, Spring is supposed to come early this year. meanwhile, we are expecting something in the range of fifty centimeters of snow... FIFTY CENTIMETERS... (TWENTY INCHES, to us Yanks)... before the day is through.

so, basically... groundhogs lie!

where was i again? oh, yes... a birthday has been celebrated.

he has been super-busy of late, so the festivities consisted of the aforementioned cake... and leftovers from the day before. and, before you go thinking that it sucks to be eating leftovers, i should point out that we made a huge batch of sarma (the subject of my first ever post).

while most people's Wednesday meal probably consisted of bits left over from the meals they ate on Tuesday, Monday... and probably Sunday too... we were whipping up a fresh batch of mid-week Croatian cabbage rolls. so that is what we had for his birthday meal the following day.

i had one with a bit of smoked meat...

and he had two with half a kielbasa... because he excels at being absurd.

we made quite a few adjustments to his father's basic recipe, which will probably result in my favorite animator being kicked out of the family when his dad finds out. the four biggest changes were 1) using a combo of ground  pork and lamb (his dad uses pork and veal), 2) the addition of some barley to the rice and ground meat filling, 3) ditto for a grated zucchini, and 4) copious amounts of gochujang (Korean chili paste) mixed into the simmering broth. the first bite was indescribable.

him: i may get disowned... but it will be totally worth it. 

i cannot begin to explain how delicious this was. i love the taste of lamb, and gochujang makes everything better—we put it in most things we cook around here—but the inclusion of the barley turned out to be the best decision of all. not only does it bring a slightly nutty taste, but the chewy cooked-barley texture is fantastic in the filling. there was no discernible taste from the zucchini, as it has very little to offer on that front, but i like knowing that it was there.

we were practically pausing after every bite to comment about how good it was. my empty bowl speaks for itself.

then there was that cake.

this was my second time using this recipe from a food magazine (which i will talk about next time around, as this is already too long), and it is far less complex than it looks. the secret is the use of frangipane (almond paste) in an otherwise basic butter cake batter. that goes into a springform pan, and is topped with fanned out slices of Granny Smith apple.

i made a some minor changes to the recipe (added some ginger, cinnamon, and nutmeg to the mix) and a few less-minor ones. we tend to like our baked goods on the less-sweet side, so i used about two-thirds the recommended amount of sugar (especially as there would be powdered sugar sprinkled over the top, plus a bit more sugar sprinkled on the apples).

if you squint a bit, you can see the sugar crystals on the fruit before the cake went into the oven for about an hour.

the biggest change of all was to reduce the oven to 350°F, instead of the suggested 375°F. i was skeptical about so small a cake being in so hot an oven for so long a time, but i decided to be a good-girl and do as i was told the first time i used this recipe. i will not be making that mistake twice, as the batter expanded so rapidly that first time, the apple slices were mostly covered up.

had i not made the executive bad-girl decision to reduce the heat halfway through, the cake would probably have been burnt long before the cooking time was up.

so, i used the lower oven temperature this time around, and it was perfect... if i do say so myself. i left it cooling while we ate sarma and watched the newest episode of Death in Paradise.

[random aside: i am rather fond of Ralf Little, so i may have done a bit of fan-girl swooning over him being added to the cast.]

it should be noted that my favorite animator is like a small child where cooling baked goods are concerned, so we had the same conversation several times.

him: how long do we have to wait to eat cake?
me: until it's done cooling. 

and, eventually it was. he insisted that it had to go on one of the plates he... uhm... "borrowed" from his parents place when he first moved out... like twenty years ago. those plates are older than him. this one has a chip on the edge, which i cleverly positioned just out of the frame.

the last step was to add a bit of powdered sugar. he did that part.

i skipped this step the first time i tried this recipe, because i did not want the extra sweetness, but we were celebrating this time around, so the powdered sugar is a nice final touch. i was afraid the apple slices would be covered up, but they were still visible.

it was still his day, so he did the slicing.

now, if it was my birthday, i would be eating cake with some sort of adult beverage. however, he absolutely despises the taste of most forms of alcohol (he makes an exception for boozy eggnog during the holiday season), so we opted instead for geriatric-adult hot beverages.

that last bit reminded me that i also added a healthy splash of vodka infused with juniper berries to the cake batter. he may hate drinking alcohol, but he has no problem with it as an ingredient in cooked items.

the most important thing i should note about this cake is that it was entirely wheat-free, so i did not have to resort to taking antihistamines at any point.

i used a combination of roughly three parts oat flour to one part Bob's Mill Gluten-Free baking flour. i used straight oat flour the first time i made this cake, but the GF flour was a surprisingly excellent addition this time around, especially as i only included it because i wanted to get rid of the stuff. i usually hate the grainy texture of those GF flours, but this one was absolutely undetectable when combined with the oat flour, so i will most likely use this combination in other wheat-free baked goods from now on.

a great time was had by all.

dreams...

i have been having an odd relationship of late with sleep, and i do not mean the normal (for me, that is) sense in which it seems to elude me most days. to the contrary, i have spent more time asleep than awake over the past few days, and that in itself is already strange.

the most bizarre part of the experience, however, is the intensely-vivid dreams i have been experiencing in said state. like last night, for example.

i found myself, near the end of that dream, laying on the roof of a building. it was a broad, mostly-flat surface, and i kept going back and forth between imagining the terrace garden that could be created in that space... and wondering what the heck i was doing up there in the first place.

that is when vertigo got a hold of me, and i could not convince a single muscle to move enough to try to find a door or a set of stairs that would lead me down from there. i finally managed to crawl a few feet. not so much that i was at the edge of the roof, but just far enough that i could get a glimpse of the landscape beyond the building.

what i saw was equal parts breathtaking and frightening.

i was high up enough to be well above the top of the surrounding trees. but they were not any trees i had expected to find. the whole world, as far as the eye could see, was surrounded by a sprawling expanse of lush green coconut trees, like something out of a tropical fantasy.

i could also make out a field of vegetables growing a short distance from the building, and i instantly recognized the large leaves of dasheen and other plants that one or the other of my grandmothers wold have grown in their gardens back in the day.

it was familiar... but frightening all the same.

i was definitely no longer in Montreal, or even back in Brooklyn. where was i... and how did i manage to find myself in such an awkward position?

this is when i heard the faint sound of a woman's voice coming from somewhere near the building. she was welcoming someone, and explaining that the resort they were standing in was once a working estate that belonged to her family. she went on to note that all the food they would be eating during their stay had been sourced from the property, and i got a sudden mental image of a figure walking through the picturesque field, filling a basket with items that would later become a colorful meal.

i realized at this point that all i had to do was to make enough noise for them to know that i was up there. but doing so would have meant crawling closer to the edge of the building, or even just opening my mouth to scream. however, the panic was so great at this point, that i was struggling to even breathe.

so i just laid there... paralyzed by fear.
___________

i awoke a short while later to find myself alone in the bed at almost one in the morning, still surrounded by that feeling of dread. i wanted to get out of the bed just long enough to walk to the studio next door where my favorite animator was working late into the night, or to even tap on the wall just loud enough to let him know that i was awake. but i could not shake that horrible feeling.

so i just laid there for the longest time... still paralyzed by fear.