Tortilla soup with roasted tomatoes and peppers

Summer fades, and we stand at the confluence of cooler evenings and the long-awaited bounty of edible nightshades (if your garden has been lucky in tomatoes and peppers). Now is the perfect time for tortilla soup.

I've taken my dad's recipe, which is already his own mish mash of two or three recipes, and changed it up by adding bell peppers to the tomato base. 

And roasting them.

Dad's Tortilla Soup, modified

Corn oil
4 corn tortillas, cut into strips (can skip this to save time)*
4 large tomatoes, cut into quarters
4 bell peppers, cut into quarters, seeds and ribs removed
salt and pepper
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 small jalapeno, diced (also remove seeds if you prefer less heat)
2 tsp. cumin
2 Tbsp. tomato paste
1 tsp. ground coriander
1/4 tsp. cayenne pepper
8 cups chicken or vegetable stock
Other optional garnishes: diced avocado, roasted corn kernels, more diced tomato, grated cheese, chopped fresh herbs (cilantro and parsley are great), lime slices for squeezing juice, and sour cream or Mexican crema

*Optional: You can skip the frying in Step 2 below to save time, and instead use broken tortilla chips as garnish; however, the home-fried tortilla strips are a superior soup garnish, being thinner, crisper, and more fun. If you have time, I recommend doing it. 

1. Roast the tomatoes and bell peppers: Toss the tomatoes and bell peppers with oil, salt and pepper and spread into a single layer on a baking sheet. Roast at 450 degrees for about 20 minutes, or until wrinkled and slightly charred/browned.
2. Fry the tortilla strips and save for garnish: In a deep soup pot, heat 1 Tbsp. corn oil over medium-high heat. Working in batches sauté tortilla strips briefly until crisp and remove to a paper towel or newspaper. Add more oil as needed until all strips are fried.
3. Sauté the other veggies: Add another Tbsp oil to the pot if needed, and add the onion, garlic, and jalapeno. Cook 1 to 2 minutes.
4. Reduce heat and add everything else: Reduce the heat to low; add the roasted tomatoes and peppers, tomato paste, cumin, coriander, cayenne, and a 1 tsp. each salt and pepper. Cook for another 10 minutes, stirring frequently. Add the stock and cook uncovered another 20 minutes.
5. Puree: Using an immersion blender or transferring  the soup in batches to a blender or food processor, puree until smooth. (Caution: blending hot foods builds pressure. Open your blender's lid's center hole and hold a rag over it instead. You can gently plug the hole but also lift it occasionally, keeping the whirling food inside but allowing steam to escape.)
6. Serve and garnish with the tortilla crisps (or broken chips) and anything else you like.

No, I do not have a photo of the finished product. Do you want to eat it or look at it?

.

Ad hoc agua fresca - Watermelon, Cucumber, Mint

Watermelon and cucumber are possibly the most refreshing fresh produce you can eat in the summer, what with their crisp textures and high water contents. They're the perfect duo for a refreshing beverage like agua fresca. 

Agua fresca just sounds refreshing, doesn't it? Commonly associated with Mexican street vendors, this fruity water lives up to its name and, this summer, made a refreshing debut in my kitchen.

Some may argue with me, because I'm no experta en agua fresca, but I'm going out on a limb to say it's the kind of thing you can make without a recipe. For my first foray into making agua fresca, I Googled around for some recipes to inform myself on the ingredients I wanted to use, and then I walked away from the screen, went to the kitchen, and winged it.

I saw a recipe that used a whole watermelon, one cucumber, and lemon juice. A saw another for cucumber-mint agua fresca. And so on. Ultimately, I used half a seedless watermelon, one long English cucumber, a handful of mint leaves, equal parts fresh orange and lime juices (maybe 1/2 cup?), and about 2 cups water. These are the things I had and wanted to use up. Most recipes also add some sugar. I added none.

That's the basis of my argument that you can just wing this recipe however you want. You can make it to taste -- your taste.

So, you chop the watermelon and cucumber into pieces that will fit in your blender. You remove any thick stems from the mint. 

In batches, blend the solids with the juice and some water. 

Strain it to remove the pulp. 

Refrigerate and/or serve over ice.

The end result? Lovely pink water to quench your thirst on a hot day.

My non-recipe made 3 quarts of aqua fresca.

And then. Then, I discovered a quart of sun tea I'd forgotten about in the fridge. Half and half, anyone? Just point me to the nearest hammock.

Another post about gas: good news and bad

Have you been driving less because of the high gas prices lately?

The flexibility to work from home has been a boon for us while higher gas prices have coincided with some office renovations that made it even easier for Len to avoid his daily commute some days. While I have been working remotely since March 2020, there are other commutes I've made less frequent in the last few weeks. We've biked to church, for example. It's a 17.2-mile round trip we've previously taken just for the exercise and environment's benefit, but I admit the gas prices were what recently motivated us to make the time for it two weeks in a row.

We're not the only ones choosing to stay home or use alternate transportation. I just read a news article that these high gas prices are coinciding with lower levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Apparently gasoline sales in June were about 5% below June 2019 levels and 2.6% below a year ago (since the pandemic affected travel and decreased air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions as well). In April 2020, as pandemic restrictions set in, Americans drove 40% fewer miles than the same month the previous year. Two years later, people are driving more again but still a little bit less than pre-pandemic levels -- reports are that Americans drove 6% fewer miles this past April than they did in April 2019. 

That's a good thing, driving less. Continued high gas prices ought to encourage continued reductions in driving. However...

First of all, people just hate the high prices. So, we'll all be grumpy. But second of all, and perhaps more important, if we're only focusing on the high gas prices, we're not looking at the big picture of our environmental impact. That 6% drop in driving resulted in only a 1% drop in overall U.S. carbon emissions. That's the bad news. If we (the U.S.) are going to meet our goal of cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030, simply driving less is not nearly enough -- but it's also not nothing. We should continue to drive less.

To sum up: On one hand, the high gas prices can be a good thing for making us think about how much we really need to drive vs. walking, biking, telecommuting, or taking public transportation. On the other hand, the gas prices are painful to the people who do not have the luxury of working from home or living close enough to the grocery store to walk there, so it would be great to see prices go back down. It would be even greater, though, if those of us who have been able to change our travel habits because of the gas prices keep up those changed habits -- even when cheap gas makes it easier to drive -- for the global good.

.

Gas or clothes? A math problem for a hot day

Here's a hypothetical situation (or maybe it was real...) that weighs the cost of having the wrong clothes. You work at an office 12 miles north of your home, a 25-minute drive in normal workday traffic. Today, it's 100 degrees out and your office space is under remodeling (i.e. the office is rather dusty right now); therefore, it is appropriate to show up to work in a t-shirt and shorts. There's an evening meeting taking place at another office location, another 12 miles and 25 minutes north of your office (i.e., twice as far from home). Midday, you find out that the dress code for the evening meeting is "business casual." There is unmistakably no "business" about your currently casual clothes.

There are several possible solutions to this problem, really. But, let's say showing up under-dressed is not a good one, and you aren't lucky enough to be able to borrow clothes from an officemate. We'll instead narrow it down to two main choices: retrieve clothes from home or go shopping? You must decide how to best spend your time and money this afternoon.

Do you drive home, change clothes, and then drive back, passing your office and continuing on to the evening meeting's location?

Do you purchase an outfit from somewhere near the office?

Do you spend on gas or clothes? Let's do some calculations.

At today's gas prices of close to $6/gallon, and your car averaging a decent 30 miles or more per gallon in suburban driving, the extra 24-mile home and back will cost around $5 in gas.

Buying a brand new outfit costs much more than that of course, but one shirt and a pair of pants from a thrift store can be less than $10. With the luck of a few thrift stores within a 3-mile radius of your office, you can spend less than $1 on gas getting to one or even two of them.

In dollars alone, driving home beats buying an outfit. But, we should also calculate time. The round trip from office to home and back to office is going to cost you about an hour. A trip to a nearby store, with a few minutes shopping and another few trying on... Let's say you might successfully purchase an outfit in under 20 minutes.

We're at 50-60 minutes and $5 on gas vs. 20 minutes and $10 on clothes. Are those 30-40 minutes worth more or less than $5 to you?

Let's think about other hidden costs here. Calculating wear and tear on the car is not precise, but we'll guesstimate about $7 for the trip home and back, using a rough average of $0.30 per mile based on various charts. And how about the fact that you simply burn the gas, adding pollution to the air and getting nothing in return except the privilege of wearing clothes you already own.

You can argue that you don't need more clothes, so it is impractical to buy a new outfit, but at least you're getting something for your money! You get to keep the clothes and wear them again -- if you happen to find something you like. It's possible the thrift store will offer only choices you find tolerable to wear for one night, in which case you can donate the clothes back later. You'll be out ten bucks, but you'll have saved at least 30 minutes and won't have degraded the air quality or added anything to a landfill. (Someone may suggest buying a new outfit from a regular store, wearing it with the sales tags intact, and simply returning it the next day to spend $0 on the clothes, but I will remind you -- beyond the fact that you'd be committing a form a fraud -- it is 100 degrees out! That outfit will certainly appear used.)

Can you tell I've reached what I consider the most logical conclusion? Thrift-store clothes win over gas. Do you disagree? Tell me why.

.

Adventures in Cake Decorating #14 - Spider-Man Cake 2

It's really more of a building cake or a city cake, and you certainly could top it with any superhero (or no superhero at all), but let me tell you the story of how this so-called Spider-Man cake came to be.

Once upon a time, I made a Spider-Man-Batman cake...

and afterward vowed never again to use red icing as the main color...

only to do it again on a Mickey Mouse cake.

The next time I included Spider-Man on a cake, I used red as the main color but only for his small section of the cake. That's right, it was the Multi-Hero cake!

A new Spider-Man cake request came up this year. Because the birthday boy and his mom had no specific design in mind, I had the perfect plan for using no red icing: a Spider-Man scene, instead of a cake that looked like the hero himself. 

I remembered that small toys make handy cake decorations (a competing interest with my preference for everything on the cake to be edible, but a much easier option than sculpting a Spider-Man figurine out of modeling chocolate!). And so I had a vision -- two skyscraper cakes, with a Spider-Man swinging from his web between them!

OK, in reality, two moderately sized city building cakes, with some spiderwebs piped here and there and Spider-Man standing atop one building, shooting a white chocolate web to the other. A white cardboard cake board underneath it all would provide a canvas for drawing city streets below to complete the scene. What follows is how I executed this plan, with a photo of the finished product, of course. One note: As with many of my cakes, I rushed to finish.

It started with one vanilla cake and one chocolate cake, each baked as large, thin rectangle. I used baking sheets rather than cake pans so I could simply cut squares out for stacking multiple thin layers of the two flavors:

I froze these stacks overnight. In the morning, I trimmed, shaved, and sculpted the uneven sides of the frozen cakes with a serrated bread knife. I spread a thin layer of light chocolate buttercream on all sides (the "crumb coat"), and froze it again just to harden the icing faster.

The light chocolate buttercream became the main frosting for the brownstone-like buildings. Fudge chocolate icing right out of the can is what's top. A little white buttercream with yellow coloring made the windows, with the remaining white used to pipe a couple of spiderwebs on the building corners.

The web coming from Spider-Man's hand is white chocolate. I melted white chocolate morsels and piped a web pattern onto wax paper (it turned out more like a net or a lattice, but within the scene it works). I propped the wax paper into a slight curve -- how I wanted the white chocolate to cool and harden, rather than just flat. It worked but was very delicate and broke when I moved it. Not to worry -- I melted the extra white chocolate and used it as glue to hold the web pieces back together... But I didn't have time to let the repair solidify before we needed to transport the cake to the birthday party. So, toothpicks are holding the broken web in place.

Ta-da!

.

Homemade tomato paste and a sun-drying experience

Don't underestimate the power of tomato paste umami. The times I leave tomato paste out of recipes that call for it ("oh, it's only 2 tablespoons"), the recipes turn out just fine, but... they lack a depth I know should be there, having tasted them with tomato paste before. I've come to know which of my recipes benefit the most from tomato paste and, for these, try to keep some handy in the pantry or freezer.

There isn't a huge need to make your own tomato paste, because the little cans are inexpensive, and you can repackage and freeze the leftovers. 

However. 

If you have an abundance of tomatoes, and you're looking for a way to use them besides tomato sauce or salsa, homemade tomato paste is another way to preserve and intensify the tomatoey taste of summer.

I usually make my tomato paste in the oven -- a great method, except that recently we had a string of 90-degree, sunny days at the same time I was dealing with a ton of tomatoes. No way was I going to sabotage my efforts to keep the house cool on a hot day by oven-roasting for three-plus hours. I considered the crock pot, a somewhat energy-conscious alternative, but it cannot duplicate the roasty flavor from oven heat. While looking for my usual recipe (just instructions, really), I discovered the eco-friendliest alternative that was shining right in front of me: sun-drying.

Hot diggity! I had the sun, the heat, and the time (it can take a few days).

Ultimately, I used a combination of sun-drying and slow cooker methods to make tomato paste this time.

Different recipes online use different amounts -- 8 lbs tomatoes, 10 lbs, 11 lbs. Whatever. I quartered an armload of Roma tomatoes until they filled my large pot. It happened to total about 8 pounds.

I cooked the tomatoes for a short time until the skins started to peel and juice started to ooze. 

Then, I processed the tomatoes through a conical food mill (a.k.a. chinois, a.k.a. "china cap"), stirred in a sprinkling of salt, and spread the puree across a baking sheet. You may need more than one baking sheet to keep the layer of puree fairly thin.

Out into the sun it went, protected from bugs and everything the maple tree drops by a rigged picnic net and cheese cloth.

Just because of the configuration of our fence, our house, and the surrounding trees, no one spot in our back yard gets full sun all day long, so I did have to move the setup a couple of times throughout the day so it maintained maximum sun exposure.

Besides protecting sun-dried foods from critters and debris, you also must protect it from overnight humidity, which can reintroduce moisture you had spent all day evaporating and promote spoilage. Temperatures were falling below 80 each night, and it was somewhat humid, so I brought the tomato-paste-in-progress inside each night, where I transferred it to the crock pot on low for continued slow reduction. In the morning, I spread it back out on a baking sheet and put it back outside.

On Day 3, my paste had reduced into a thick, brick-red paste.

Lesson learned: When I make this in the oven, I check it every half hour and stir or scrape the puree as needed to keep a nice even layer. Out in the sun, I didn't need to check it as frequently as that, but I should have checked on it a few times to scrape the thinnest edges in toward the center. Not having done this, I ended up with some areas that were more like fruit leather than paste (see the darkest smears where the metal really shows through).

Nevertheless, the portion I could scrape into a jar tasted great and is now in my freezer, awaiting its proper place in my next Zucornchile Rajas Bake.

.

Adventures in Cake Decorating #13 - Dinosaur Cake and Cookies

Three years after I made it, let me tell you about this dinosaur cake and cookies. It's a good example of combining two simple decorating components into one impressive overall look -- a frosting petal technique and cutout sugar cookies.

Sure, the dinosaur-shaped cookies on their own could suffice as a dino-themed party treat. There was indeed a plate of the dinosaur cookies served alongside the cake. But, by using the cookies as part of the cake's decoration, an otherwise nondescript (albeit colorful) cake got a thematic upgrade with a fun edible topper.

The color theme came from the party invitation or its paper decorations. I'm pretty certain the idea for the frosting "scales" look came from the images of cakes my sister-in-law sent me for inspiration. You know, the standard "I like this. Can you do it?" text messages that occur before each birthday. It was a new technique for me, and one I haven't used again but would like to.

To create these buttercream petals/scales, you pipe a vertical line of fat dots and then smear them to the side with a small offset spatula or the back of a spoon. Pipe your next line of dots over the tail of the previous line. When you've come full circle around the cake and make the final row of dots, you won't be able to smear it underneath the first set for an infinite overlap. Just smear enough to close the gap and make that the backside of your cake! You could of course pipe these petals/scales all in a single color simply for the interesting texture or arrange multiple colors in any other pattern.

For the cookies, just pick your favorite sugar cookie recipe, preferably one intended for cutouts, meaning it won't rise or spread very much while baking. My go-to sugar cookie icing is just powdered sugar, vanilla extract, and milk, combined in that order and starting with as little milk as possible, adding no more than a tablespoon of milk at a time until the icing is the consistency you need.

There are a couple of things I would do differently if I was making this cake again, and they both have to do with neatness.

1. I would have baked a few of the sugar cookies on sticks (like cookie lollipops), which I could then just poke down into the cake to hold the cookies more neatly upright on top of the cake, rather than nesting the cookies in little piles of frosting. (I guess these dinos look like they're trudging forward through a swamp.)
2. I would have been more patient when decorating the cookies so each base icing color was fully dry before I tried adding the icing accents (eyes, spots, etc.), which would prevent color seepage and help with neater, more defined details on the cookies.

We can take a brief look at the baking of this cake, in which pure happenstance resulted in rave reviews from those eating it. Something was wrong with the oven. The two 8-inch chocolate rounds were taking forever to bake. It turned out to be fudgiest cake I'd ever made, thanks to cooking low and slow and probably being a bit underdone. I also was running out of frosting ingredients and didn't want to make a late-night run to the store. I stretched what little chocolate frosting I had (for between the cake's layers) by whipping some heavy cream into the buttercream base. It whipped up fluffy and cool, and people thought it was delicious.

In addition to finding a reason to pipe petal-scales onto another cake because they look cool, I am also on the lookout for more opportunities to incorporate decorated sugar cookies into celebrations because I have so many cookie cutters I haven't used yet -- playing card suits, sports items, air/land/sea transportation, several holiday shapes... 

These are some of my previous cake-cookie combos:

Bowling cake – sugar cookie bowling pins bursting behind a bowling ball cake (baked in a bowl)

WordWorld cake – a few animals made of letters (it makes sense if you've seen the show) served beside the cake

Cookie Monster cupcakes – mini chocolate chip cookies in the "mouth" of each Cookie Monster as well as ABC and 123 sugar cookie sets served beside the cake

.