The eater always tells me I make the best sandwiches. My formula for a good sandwich starts with good bread. Leave the Wonder bread for toast and find something good - something with a good crust, something with an unusal flavor, or something with a nice airy texture. I then try to match the ingredients in the sandwich with the bread. You can never say too much about good, fresh vegetables or top-quality deli-meats, don’t skimp here! Finally, to hold everything together, you need a good spread. Dry sandwiches just aren’t any good so find something to bind it all together and marry the flavors. To top everything off, garnish the sandwich with something fun, like olives, and pile on the potato chips…mmmmm, potato chips.

Here’s one I almost deleted and didn’t show everyone.

• Whole Foods focaccia bread
• Fresh mozzarella
• Homegrown sprouts
• Red leaf lettuce
• Ripe, hydroponic tomato (hey, it’s still winter in New England)
• Olive tapenade /mayo mix

It was a damn good sandwich, I can’t lie.

I promise a new post this week. P-R-O-M-I-S-E!

In an attempt to get some more cooking inspiration, I signed up for Taste and Create VII. The idea of Taste and Create is you are randomly paired up with another food blog, find a recipe listed on their site, make the recipe, and blog about it. I thought it would be a great way to try something new and get a little more involved in the community. For my first T&C I was paired up with Food and Laughter.

Food and Laughter is a blog mostly about Indian food. I find this fascinating because Indian food is something that I don’t usually cook but often eat out at restaurants. My lack of experience with this cooking style made this event even more exciting. The Eater and I checked out the site and decided to make a dish called Toovar Dal.

My first reading of this recipe I was a little bit overwhelmed with all the ingredients that weren’t familiar to me. I was worried that I was going to have to special order these ingredients and wouldn’t be able to finish the dish in time. After a little bit of research I found out that many of these ingredients just have different names in different parts of the world. Here’s some examples and what I did with the ones I couldn’t find:

toovar dal - Pigeon Peas
chana dal - Chick Peas
jaggery - a type of Palm sugar. I substituted regular light brown sugar here.
jeera - cumin

I didn’t have any real sources for these two:

kokum - this is similar to tamarind so I substituted chopped raisins
asafoetida ( heeng) - I had no ideas for this one, so I omitted it.

Cooking this dish was pretty exciting. The sights and sounds of the popping mustard seeds was something I was not expecting; they really pop and go everywhere. The dish came together quickly and quite nicely, there were no surprises after the mustard seeds. I opted for both dals but skipped the yams because I felt like it. I also decreased the spice level a bit because I was afraid it may be too spicy for the eater.

While I’ve never had this dish before, I don’t feel like my substitutions adversely affected the dish. In my mind, a large part of cooking is being able to adapt recipes to ingredients that you have on hand without sacrificing results. I’m sure I broke some sort of rules, but both the eater and I thought the dish was a keeper, as-is.

The pigeon peas really are the star in this dish lending a nice, subtle sweetness. The peanuts added a bit of a surprise crunch that I was not expecting even after cooking this dish myself. This really is a good dish, sweet, tangy, spicy, and a little sour, pretty much everything I wanted in a dish. I served up the dal with some long grain rice. I opted for a little extra spice on mine in the form of red pepper which worked out nicely.

Random fact: I’ve never made cupcakes. I’m not quite sure why, but I usually shy away from them. Maybe they seemed too basic, maybe I just didn’t see all the fanciful flavors of cupcakes out there these days, or maybe I just never had a decent reason. This week was different.

Usually I like to try and find some recipe of a food or pastry I either can’t find locally or something that I can make better than the pathetic supermarket offerings out there. Sometimes it’s macarons, other times it’s puff pastry, and sometimes I just want a decent home made bread. This time around I wanted to see what all the fuss was about cupcakes.

Cupcakes have apparently become quite the high-class food. There are shops in cities around the US that will make you stand in line and gladly charge you five bucks for the privilege of eating their cupcake masterpieces. I’m all for fancy new foods, but I never thought cupcakes were going to get this sort of treatment. I’m finding out how wrong I was.

I wanted to create my own cupcake masterpiece but I thought that I should at least look at some of the masters out there. There are plenty of cupcake chicks on the Daring Bakers Blogroll, at least one of them must have come up with something exciting, right? I spent a few hours reading all about these daring cupcakes. I was still amazed at all the flavor combinations, frosting types, and presentations for the lowly cupcake. After much research, I found one I liked.

A fellow baker, Chockylit has a site with nothing but cupcakes. Photos, frostings, tips, recipes, she has everything you’d ever want if you were going to make cupcakes (like me). I was intrigued by her recipe for Chocolate Chai cupcakes.

Her basic cupcake recipe was, well, basic. There was nothing really fancy here — no separating eggs, no sifting flour, no whipping meringue, no folding batters — how could this be? I read and re-read the recipe just to make sure and then decide to just give it a go.

Sure enough it was every bit as easy as it was written. Everything came together just as it should. I piped 12 mini cupcakes and 6 regular cupcakes and was amazed at how much leftover I had, even AFTER halving the recipe. I decided to take a chance and just let the batter sit while the cupcakes cooked. Twenty-five minutes later the cupcakes emerged from the oven, puffed up all nice and ready to go. I removed the mini’s from my silicone pan and refitted it with new cups and piped another batch and there was still more batter left. Batch two looked just as good as batch one so I finished one more round of six this time and baked them off as well.

While everything was cooling off I assembled the frosting. This was another first for me: American buttercream. Funny that I’ve never made an American buttercream yet I’ve made Swiss, French and Italian buttercream. Of course I would have to screw something up on my first shot and this was it. I got too anxious and just threw all the ingredients together and whipped them in the kitchenaide. My multi-temperatured ingredients did not want to properly mix and I was left with a broken mess.

I search around a little bit and realized everything needed to be at the same temperature to emulsify properly. Everything went back in the mixer and I whipped them to a frenzy and got it smooth enough to use. After piping about a dozen cupcakes it started to break again, probably from my warms hands or probably from my rushed technique.

I think they came out pretty good. The eater wasn’t a big fan of the frosting but cake and frosting aren’t really her thing. I tested a dozen of these on my coworkers and the cupcakes quickly disappeared. They got good reviews all around, even by the non-chai loving coworker of mine.

Have I been converted to a cupcake lover? Possibly. There will need to be a few more experiments carried — stay tuned!

This month the Daring Bakers chose a recipe by Boston’s own Julia Child: Baguettes. This recipe was probably 3 pages long and very detailed. I’m not listing it here, but I’m sure you can find it on another Daring Baker’s site.

While mine did not come out as perfect as I wanted, the taste and texture were pretty good for skipping a two steps in the recipe.

The first step I omitted with proofing the bread on a cloth. I searched high and low but could not find anything appropriate in my house to this sort of application. I ended up proofing them on a silpat, on the counter, with a small tea towel draped over them.

The second step omitted, which is pretty important, was I didn’t cook with steam. I tried spritzing the loaves with a sprayer but omitted any of the other (very important) steps the recipe suggested for producing steam in a home oven.

The results were decently shaped baguettes with a crust that wasn’t as crunchy as I hoped. This didn’t stop me from eating an entire baguette with jam though, they were more than tasty. Would I try this recipe again? Maybe. If I use the recipe again, there are a few things I would change:

• I’d skip the whole cloth proofing and just use a sheet pan with a towel over the top
• I wouldn’t try to flip the proofed loaves over and THEN cook them, too much risk
• Create steam in the oven, it is important for the crust formation
• Less flour, more water. I even thought the recipe had a high hydration factor, but I was wrong.
• Take more pictures and show them off!

These baguettes featured in a salad I made later in the week, as well. They were thinly sliced and toasted and served with a grilled goat cheese; I then paired that with a golden beet salad. I jokingly called it, “The Yellow Beet Road.”

While I really love these French-style baguettes, I’ve started to acquire a taste for the Vietnamese-style baguettes. The Asian-inspired breads had a bit lighter texture and had a better crust formation even without steam. The recipe was a little bit less involved, too!

Last night we upgraded Wordpress to version 2.3.2. We were a bit behind on updates and wanted to get things back (close) to the current version. We had to create a new site for testing just in case there was a disaster. Once we got everything working properly, we cut everything over to the new version and updated DNS to point to the new site.

While we were waiting for DNS to update, the page was unavailable. During that time I hope you had a chance to browse the eater’s site, www.ogdog.net.

Hopefully we can plan changes like this a little bit better in the future. Now back to your regularly scheduled foodgeek.

The long cold winter is sucking my will to cook anything new and exciting. In the meantime, I continue to eat pizza and buy expensive produce from California.

Is it spring yet?

Shortly before I moved away from San Diego I discovered this Vietnamese bakery that sold some of the best sandwiches. Crunchy baguettes filled with just the right amount of lettuce, barbecued pork, pickled vegetables, and cilantro; these little sandwiches were not only tasty they were very cheap - about THREE BUCKS! We had these sandwiches several times before we made the trek back east.

It wasn’t until recently that I found out the name of these sandwiches: Bánh mì . A trip over to wikipedia sums up what they are:

Bánh mì is a Vietnamese baguette made with wheat and rice flour or a type of sandwich traditionally made with this type of baguette. The sandwich is made up of thinly sliced pickled carrots, daikon, onions, cilantro, and meat or tofu. Popular bánh mì fillings include pork, paté, chicken, and head cheese. The contrasting flavors and textures of the sandwich — as well as its relatively low cost — make it a popular dish.

I made a cursory search of my immediate surroundings and haven’t been able to find a Vietnamese shop that offers these sandwiches in the way I remember them. So I did what any self-respecting ex-chef would do, I recreated them how I remembered.

For these sandwiches to be successful, they needed to include the following:

• Crunchy, salty, tangy pickled vegetables
• Fresh greens, cilantro, cucumbers, and jalapeño peppers
• A savory pork, chicken, or egg filling
• A light, crispy, yet not too crusty baguette

I searched around the web for a pickled vegetable recipe and finally settled on the recipe over at Battle of the Banh Mi. I wasn’t able to find daikon at the normal mega-mart and didn’t make a trip to the Asian stores so I just used carrots. I think the flavors would have turned out a little bit better with the mix of carrots and daikon but the thought of not having any pickles on my Banh MI was out of the question. I should warn you that their recipe makes quite a large amount of pickles, which isn’t always a bad thing, is it?

The vegetables are a pretty standard sandwich mix. I decided on red leaf lettuce since it looked good. A plain old cucumber, bunch of cilantro, and jalapeño pepper rounded out the mix. I’m sure once the summer comes around the selections of vegetables in the north east will drastically improve. For now, I settled on the best looking ones I could find at whole foods.

For my first run of sandwiches I decided on using a nicely marbled pork shoulder. The pork shoulder was thinly sliced, marinated in a soy and ginger sauce, then quickly pan-fried. I then thinly sliced the pork into fat, match stick sized pieces. I had the pork both warm and cold and both were winners. If I knew it was going to come out so well I would have made much more!

The last obstacle to overcome was getting a baguette that was somewhere between crunchy like a French baguette but also soft enough that it made for a decent sandwich. Right away I decided against buying a baguette since I’m almost never happy with that is available at the supermarkets. Rarely do I find a baguette that is worth the $3 price point it commands. I scoured the internet and pieced together a recipe. It took a few tries, but this is the final recipe that I’ve been using.

Vietnamese Baguettes

1 cup warm water (between 85-110F)
2 teaspoons yeast
2 tablespoons sugar

1 1/2 cups AP Flour
1/2 cup Rice Flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons butter

Place the yeast, 1 cup lukewarm water, and sugar in the bowl of a mixer with a dough hook. Mix together the all-purpose flour, rice flour and salt in a separate bowl.

Starting the mixer at the lowest speed gradually add the dry ingredients and beat until well combined, about 3 minutes. Add the butter to the dough.

Increase the speed to medium and continue beating the dough until it is smooth and comes away from the sides of the mixing bowl easily. Put the dough on a lightly floured surface, cover with plastic wrap, and allow to rise (double in volume), 45 minutes to 1 hour.

Punch down the dough and separate into 4 portions. Shape each into an 8-inch-long baguette. (The dough may be sticky and hard to handle at this point. Do not overwork it, just gently shape it.) Cover loosely with plastic wrap and allow to rise a second time, about 45 minutes.

Place baking stone on a rack set in the middle of the oven and preheat the oven to 415 degrees Fahrenheit.

With a sharp knife blade or a clean razor blade, make three diagonal slits along the top of each baguette.

Bake either directly on the stone or on a sheet pan for about 20 minutes or until golden brown.

There’s nothing special about how the sandwich is put together. If you’ve ever made a sandwich before this should be pretty simple. A thin layer of Japanese mayo ties the sandwich together while the thinly sliced jalapeños and sriracha hot sauce added the much needed spicy that this sandwich deserved.

These came out so well (and I made so many pickles) that I was able to experiment a little bit. What isn’t pictured is a version of this sandwich with a thinly rolled omelet. I’m trying to get the courage up to try a spam version of this sandwich. I’m sure it isn’t an original idea, but the thought has invaded my mind recently.

A few weeks ago one of my co-workers asked me if I could make her a birthday cake. There was much discussion on what kind of cakes, flavors, toppings, icings, decorations, everything. Conversations went on for what seemed like hours before we decided on a cake, and then at the last moment, the cake changed again. After many google searches, it was settled and I was to make a cake that was inspired by this cake. We settled on a price (a bargain because I’m a nice guy) and a pickup date. I gathered the proper ingredients and off I went.

Cakes like this usually aren’t my thing. I usually concentrate on more of a French styled gateau or at least something with more of a European flair. I’m not trying to be a food snob, it’s just what I’ve been taught. This is the first time since culinary school that I’ve willingly used rolled fondant as an ingredient. In the past I’ve got up on my soapbox about how rolled fondant is just a bland, sugar, mess. Most people don’t eat it so why bother putting something like that on the cake. I may have changed my view, just a little bit.

The covering went on easily and stayed nice and smooth, the flowers and decorations were easily made in advance, and everything went together very nicely on the last possible day so things didn’t get all nasty. The guts of the cake were basic chocolate chiffon on the bottom and vanilla chiffon on the top. I used real chocolate buttercream on the bottom and vanilla buttercream on the top. I was told the vanilla chiffon was the better of the two but they were both good.

I really would consider this more of a WOW cake than a gourmet cake but I could have probably added some more extras to the actual cakes. Things like fruit purees or liquored soaking syrups would have elevated this cake to the next level, but the basics I used were what was requested. I made sure I used the best swiss method buttercream I could find using both real butter and real chocolate when the recipes called for it.