Crown Thy Good With Brotherhood.

America...

The Free.

The Beautiful.

The Bountiful.

The Winner!

-Papermoon

leftover coffee rice pudding.

my brother came in for a whirlwind visit with seven of his buddies, and when they left they also left me a full pot of coffee, undrunk.

so, i saved it all day until i thought of something to do with it.

all of my online recipe searches only yielded the idea to freeze it into coffee cubes (cool, but not intellectually stimulating) or to add it to brownies or frosting. not my style--i don't really like either of those things.

i couldn't stop wondering what would happen if i made rice in coffee.

so i just did it. after i put the coffee and basmati rice i had around into a pot and started it going, i thought about whether i wanted something sweet or savory. after poking my finger in to taste some of the coffee rice, i decided it would be very tasty in a strange stir fry, but that i wasn't in the mood. (i already knew that whatever i was eating for dinner needed to be tasty with my leftover vodka sauce.) i moved on to sweet.

i googled 'basmati rice pudding' until i found a recipe that interested me.
i modified it to come up with this: and it's DELICIOUS.

(modified from the recipe for Basmati Rice Pudding in Totally Vegetarian by Toni Flore)

SERVINGS
4 to 6

INGREDIENTS

2 cups leftover coffee
1 cup white basmati rice
4 1/2 cups milk (i drink 2%)
1/2 cup sugar
2 tbsp. flour
1 1/2 tablespoons vanilla extract

PREPARATION

1. Combine coffee and rice and bring to a boil. Cover and simmer over very low heat 8 to 9 minutes, until most of the coffee is absorbed. Check and stir to avoid stuck rice, which will burn at the bottom of the pot.

2. Add 4 cups milk and the sugar. Continue cooking, now on low heat, for an additional 20 to 25 minutes, OR until the rice is soft and most of the milk absorbed. Remove the rice from the heat.

3. Pour 1/4 cup of the remaining milk into a bowl and whisk in the flour to dissolve. Add the vanilla extract. Add remaining milk and add to the pudding. Serve warm or at room temperature, or even after refrigerating.

delicious. and not too unhealthy.

and the rest of the coffee? in my ice cube tray. :)

-papermoon

oh so chocolate brownies.

one of my favorite cookbooks of all time is a little wonder i picked up in my younger years. in fact, it was the first book i ever bought all by myself.

i was a wee little eight year old, taking my turn at the book fair in second grade. we were living in tokyo at the time, and my copy still has--among other childhood ephemera--an envelope stuck into the back cover, ripped at the top, with my papa's handwriting on the front stating my name, 2A, 'BOOK MONEY', and 2,100 yen. (which really isn't much money.)

yes, my sophisticated book of choice is Betty Crocker's NEW Boys and Girls Cookbook.

mine seems to be the 1990 reprint. the pictures are of little ugly children in 90's gear, adding their opinions to the easy recipes, which are categorized in such groups as 'super snacks and drinks', 'good morning eye openers', and 'noontime fixin's'--to name a few. i was enamored with it as a child, but i barely made ANY of the recipes--i just looked at them and thought about them. i was strange. i actually remember envying the kids on the 'test panel'. and i had their names memorized. it was a lot like my obsession (um... at 15(!) years old) with ZOOM on PBS, and all the kids on it.

in any case, i actually got the most use out it in middle school, when my taste for cooking finally went farther than melting american cheese and milk in the microwave, adding pepper, and proclaiming it salad dressing. (seriously. and i ate it.) i have made a few of the recipes many, many times...though most of the book goes unused.

the recipes i have actually used are a funny collection:
-chocolate milk shake
-chocolate popcorn bars
-egg in a frame
-big puffy pancake (this one is actually UNBELIEVABLE and a way better recipe for a german pancake than most. i will be sure to post it at some point. mmmm. i impressed many a sleepover buddy with this... in high school! and college!)
-i <3 shortbread
-big burger cake (we forced my mom to do this one)
-cranberry apple sparkler
-toasty hot dog roll-ups
-and of course, the oh so chocolate brownies

all in all, it's actually a great book for kids. it makes everything sound easy, explains what every term means, and has pictures of almost everything--and the pictures are fairly realistic. for instance, the one pot spaghetti looks disgusting, and the vegetable soup looks appropriately bland. i treasure this little wonder.

to be honest, all the childhood reading of this book is probably responsible for my innate ability to make chili and macaroni and cheese without ever bothering to 'learn'. cute.

and here are my oh so chocolate brownies, freshly made this afternoon--off to eat them in front of some little house!!! hooray for my 23 year old childhood!!!



-papermoon

delicious caramels and a really fun game idea.

first of all, my friend norah gave me three neat boxes of japanese candy for christmas, and these morinaga's milk caramels are rocking my world. i may or may not have eaten half of them in two days. (the link is another blogger's very good description of them.) the box looks like a 1920's cigarette box or something, but opens like a matchbox to reveal the delicious little guys. i am going to save it, obviously. the japanese really do milky candy awesomely, which is odd because as a child i really hated the milk there. maybe it's better for candy than straight-up consumption.
second reason for posting: guess who?
yesterday lora had been diligently studying for most of the day, so she was ready for an evening break. we had already decided to make some vodka sauce and have a little dinner together, and we really wanted to play a game. we only have dice/cards/scrabble here, and none of the above were really appealling to our desire for a relaxing game. i trekked out into the snow to walk to borders and see what they had to offer, which wasn't much. i was pretty disappointed and spent an hour searching the internet for creative game-making ideas online while sipping a beer. (delicious thing: black toad dark ale, brewed for trader joe's. a.maz.ing.)

remember these?

i was getting a bit exasperated with the options, and then guess who? came to mind. remember that game, from kindergarten? "does your person have a mustache?" etc? well we realized we could make our own version!!!! i wasn't initially as creative as lora, and i was thinking i could just do a funny image search and get a mix of random people, celebrities, and cartoons...but lora realized that we could use our friends! much more fun! we just used thirty mutual friends, and used their facebook pictures to keep it easy.

if we were planning on making it look good, i would have standardized the size and used photoshop to add nice, clear text, but as it was we were getting hungry, so i just globbed a bunch of photos on a document and got them around the same height, and then printed three sheets: one set for each player, and one set we could draw from to guess who? about. i cut them up into little cards, and we would just flip them over when ruling out possibilities. we used the coffee table as a divider and just layed everything out on the floor.

it was HYSTERICAL. we decided to nix the questions about physical appearances and gender, and the results were very funny. questions ranged from "does your person subscribe to a monotheistic religion?" to "would your person be described as metro?" to "does your person appreciate chill fashion shows?" etc, etc. it was very funny. i very nearly demolished an entire bottle of wine. i hope we play again soon!

you should try and make one... i think it would actually make a very funny gift if it were made with relatives or family friends in mind. or, for your girlfriends, if it featured past love interests. very amusing. book characters would be really adorable... i might do that for my kid someday. the possibilities are pretty endless... babies could have an animal version...

-papermoon

16. vegetables and chocolate

the sixteenth thing i am grateful for: zucchini chocolate bread!!!!!!!

it's one of those non-sensical things. it tastes more like chocolate cake than chocolate cake does.

it's amazing... and you can rationalize very easily when you've seen how much green goes into it!

time for my fifth piece in the last hour...
-papermoon