Homemade Potstickers

There are certain foods I would never try to make at home even if I know how. Soy milk, yogurt, chocolate, and cheese are the main entries, some of which I have tried to make before with embarrassing results. There are also certain foods I don't believe anyone should buy in a package. Bread is #1, followed distantly by almost everything else Sweetie and I eat.

Potstickers used to be on one list, but as of today have been transferred to the other. Witness:


I've tried to make potstickers by hand once before (without the help of experts, that is). I used store-bought wonton wrappers and made some watery tofu filling, which turned into a bland mushy mess. So I returned to the bag with the panda and relied on the sour soy sauce dip to inject some flavor into the meal. But with the holiday season comes a craving for my family's 'traditional' Thanksgiving and Christmas appetizer: potsticker soup. And not only will the bag with the panda fall short, but I can't stand to pay $6 for 10 tasteless dumplings. So I literally rolled up my sleeves to plunge head-first into flour tonight.

First, I scooped out two cups of all-purpose flour, sprinkled in some salt, and poured in enough boiling water to make a soft dough. After a brief five minutes of kneading, I broke the dough into 32 little balls.


Each ball was attacked mercilessly with a well-floured wooden roller until they would flatten no more.


I cobbled together a filling of:

-1/2 pound ground pork
-2 cups shredded Napa cabbage
-1/4 cup shredded carrot
-1 tablespoon dark sesame oil
-sprinkling of ground ginger

A heaping tablespoon of filling went into each wrapper...it probably should have been less because I ended up with an excess of wrappers. I boiled the first eight immediately and froze the rest for later.


When the potstickers floated, I drained and plated them.


I did some gloating before eating, because they all looked plump and professional with nary a break in sight.


A warning: fatty pork + pungent sesame = filling potstickers. Only five of the eight made it into my stomach. But they were a very satisfying five.

I didn't feel like making more filling for the rest of the wrappers, so I smooshed them together and cut them into noodles. They're drying on my cooling rack now, and will hopefully make another gloat-worthy lunch tomorrow.

Sweet Apple Yeast Bread

When I was a senior in high school, my mother and I spent a week driving around the East coast. Ostensibly, it was for me to look at colleges, but who are we kidding--it was a glamor tour. We toured 19th century mansions of the ridiculously indulgent nouveau riche, got a taste of subway-hopping metropolitan life in cities we could never afford, and gawked at libraries built for the most intelligent (and/or well-connected) 0.5% of the population.

One of the cities we visited was a little mountain town on the southern border of Vermont. For some reason, the residents of this town were compelled to put painted statues of cows all over the place. They also clung to the idea of "rustic" country living, even though most of them were probably wallowing in old-family wealth. But no matter...I accept the pretense with a smile, because it was responsible for one very memorable loaf of fresh apple bread.

I was in the habit of buying fresh fruit every week for snacks during summer, but I don't really feel like munching on apples and grapes while buried under three layers of blankets. The bag of apples I bought last week turned mealy and unappetizing from neglect. They were Galas...too sweet to use in most baked goods, but just sweet enough to try in my own loaf of fruit-studded yeast bread.

Sweet Apple Yeast Bread
(Modified from Fabulous Recipes)
-1 tablespoon yeast
-3 tablespoons sugar
-1 cup warm water
-2 eggs
-1/2 teaspoon salt
-2 cups bread flour
-2 cups white whole wheat flour
-3 diced fresh apples

Dissolve the yeast and sugar in the water and proof for 5 minutes. Beat in the eggs and salt. Stir in the flour, one cup at a time, until a sticky ball starts to come together. Add the apples, then the rest of the flour until the dough is dry enough to handle (but still quite wet, as far as yeast doughs go). Knead until smooth, then place in an oiled bowl and cover with plastic wrap.


After an hour and a half, you will have one monstrous mass.


Punch down and divide into two pieces. Place in two oiled loaf pans, or, if you're like me and only have one loaf pan, shape a free-form loaf on a parchment-lined cookie sheet.


After another half hour, the dough will have filled out the loaf pan(s).


preheat the oven to 375° and bake for about 35 minutes until the loaves are well browned and sound hollow when tapped.



I was actually a little worried about the dark color of the crust, since I usually like my breads doughy. But despite appearances, the crumb inside was beautiful.


The bread is a little boring to eat plain, but I didn't add any spices or strong flavors on purpose because I intend to use it in combination with other things. A grilled apple & cheddar sandwich would taste weird with cinnamon and nutmeg. The original recipe also said it made great french toast, which I might try tomorrow because I was too lazy to make my usual batch of pancakes this weekend.

Single for Two Days

Hello from the spirit world. For the past few days, I have been dead to the world, and I haven't quite gotten used to my corporeal body yet. What happened? Sweetie went out of town, and I had exactly two days to do everything I can't when he's here.

This means the most nutritious item on the menu was something most health bloggers would put evil-warding charms on the door to prevent from entering their homes.


And I was too busy blaring playlists of The Veronicas and Ke$ha to keep up my blogging duties.


(Note: I hate Ke$ha's promiscuous drink-whiskey-for-breakfast image, but if you ignore the lyrics the songs are addictive)

But now, after four hours of driving to fetch him back yesterday, Sweetie and I are salvaging the responsible student lifestyle I had abandoned in a box on the highway shoulder. Today will be filled with schoolwork, real food, and a respectable outing to the theater thanks to half-off tickets from one of my professors. There's only so long you can live off rice with tuna plopped on top and go without washing your hair, I guess.

Joanne's Jelly Donut Muffins with Orange-Cranberry Filling

Most of the time I let other bloggers's ideas mix and mingle in my brain for a while before I put them into action. However, there are some days I see a new recipe and have to make it right there and then. This usually happens when Joanne posts on Eats Well With Others, as it did today with her recipe for Jelly Donut Muffins with Ginger Pomegranate Cranberry Sauce Filling.

Wow, that's a mouthful of a title. Just like my mouth is full of muffin right now.

The one thing standing between me and bites of warm sugary goodness was my dislike of all things pomegranate. I can't explain why I have such an aversion to the innocuous fruit...because the flavor is too mild? Because pomegranate derivatives are usually expensive? Because I have an irrational fear that eating the celebrated seeds will trap me in the underworld for half the year? (Oh, wait, moving to Indiana already did that).

In any case, not only do I not like pomegranate juice, I don't have any. And if you've been reading this blog long enough, you'll know I'm lazy. So I improvised.

Jelly Donut Muffins with Orange-Cranberry Filling
Sauce:
-1/2 cup sweetened dried cranberries
-1/2 cup orange juice
Muffins:
-1/2 cup sugar
-1 egg
-1 1.2 cup white whole wheat flour
-2 tsp baking powder
-pinch salt
-sprinkling nutmeg
-1/4 cup canola oil
-3/4 cup light vanilla soy milk

At least an hour before you intend to make the muffins, combine the dried cranberries and orange juice in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil, then put over low heat until the liquid is mostly absorbed and the cranberries are plump and soft (I think this took about an hour, but I was doing schoolwork and didn't count). Put the cranberries and juice into a blender and whir until mushy and jelly-like.


Combine the muffin ingredients in the usual manner (wets, dries, stir...you get the idea). Line a 12-cup muffin tin (or don't, per personal preference) and lightly spray with oil. Spoon a little batter into each cup, then top with a dollop of the orange-cranberry sauce. Cover the jelly with more batter. Bake at 350° for 15 minutes.


At this point, Joanne dipped her muffins in butter and rolled in cinnamon sugar, but as aforementioned I am lazy and did not feel like melting butter and cleaning the bowl afterwards. So I used my handy dandy spray oil instead.



Loverly.


The only problem with these muffins is that the cranberry-orange filling is very tart and strong, and the muffin sort of disappears into the background. Next time I'll consider substituting a little orange juice in for the soy milk, adding some ginger to the batter, or using some butter instead of canola oil to give the muffin a more distinctive flavor.

I had some sauce left over that I was afraid to put in the tins, because there's nothing more aggravating than a sticky over-filled muffin. I think it will go excellently with ice cream, when Kroger gets its act together and puts Breyers on a real sale instead of slipping a yellow sale sticker on the shelf shouting "$4.99!" when it's regularly $5.20. I take my previous sentiment back...that's infinitely more annoying than an over-filled muffin.

What is "Disordered"?

Yesterday at the grocery store I found this little guy on the Manager's Clearance table buried under piles of Halloween decorations.


I justified that with winter coming I'd be blow-drying my hair a lot and should protect it from damage with this serum. So I plopped down the $6 for the itty bitty bottle, with the secondary reasoning that it was originally $14 and I've been conditioned to bargain-hunt since infancy.

But another justification could be that some time ago, I set up a rewards system for myself to stop drowning my sorrows in Oreos and tortilla chips. Then, when I forgot to binge, I forgot the incentives too.

It used to take very little effort to count calories, and a lot of effort to stop. I used to drink tea to fill my stomach when I was hungry. I worried about half a cup of all-purpose flour in a recipe and left nuts out of homemade granola because they were "fattening."

I've only recently realized that, though my anorexic teenage days were long behind me, my eating was disordered right up until about May of this year. It takes surprisingly little to cross that line. Go to any reputable-looking health/nutrition site or forum and read some comments...you'll find tons of people talking about how they'd be so much happier 5 pounds thinner, how much "discipline" it takes to stay away from "bad" foods, and what swaps they can make to feel like they're eating real food for fewer calories. This is not "health;" it is disordered.

There's no point in citing a medical definition of an eating disorder, because you can't really diagnose it from physical symptoms. Part of the definition of anorexia is being severely underweight. At 15 years old and 105 pounds I was technically within the "normal" BMI range, but I can assure you, I was anorexic.

You can't define it by behavior, either, because what would be a perfectly normal choice for one person could be disordered for someone else. Take, for example, last night's dinner:


I added steamed broccoli to my portion of teriyaki chicken. I did this because chicken and rice alone is boring, because I like the snap and texture of broccoli and the way the buds trap salty-sweet sauce, and because the green makes the bowl look pretty. The disordered me from a few months ago would have done the same, but because I wanted to minimize the fried chicken and bulk my meal up with low-calorie vegetables to lose weight while "feeling" like I was being properly fed. It's the same behavior, but last night I finished my meal very happy and content, whereas a few months ago I would have finished nervously waiting for when the clock struck 7 and it was acceptable to dive into the refrigerator for dessert.

Extreme cases notwithstanding, no doctor or psychologist can tell for certain whether a set of behaviors is disordered, because we have no alien technologies that allow us to read a person's mind. Whether eating salads for lunch is a healthy or disordered choice depends on motivation. Are you eating it because it tastes good, you need vitamins and roughage, it's a good bargain for the price, you don't like the other options, or you have an office party later you want to be hungry for? Or are you eating it because you want to be a size 4, you want to feel "virtuous," or you think frenemies would look down on such a fat, frumpy person for eating a hamburger? Are you signing up for a road race because you genuinely want to be strong and enjoy running, or because you want to match up to a celebrity blogger or get a runner's svelte silhouette?

When it comes down to it, any decision regarding your body that leaves you hungry, hurt, or unhappy is disordered.

Friday Fails II

Fail #1:

As you all read on Wednesday, my head exploded when the city gave the local school system a carte blanche to take millions of tax dollars and spend it however they want. Well, yesterday officials said they'd remedy that. Now that the referendum already passed, they're "ready to scrutinize and prioritize spending." Man, wouldn't it be great if the banks worked that way?

Me: "Hi. I'd like to apply for a loan to start up a business."
Bank: "Great! Do you have a business plan?"
Me: "No."
Bank: "Do you have any justification at all for the amount of money you're asking for?"
Me: "Uh...I'll let you know after I get it?"
Bank: "You're not giving me much to go on, here. What should I write on the form?"
Me: "Giving more money to me is good! My children will suffer without it! You're a bad person if you don't give it to me!"
Bank: "Oh, OK. Sounds good. Here you go."
Me: "I knew you had a good heart."

Fail #2:
As part of my job at the Lilly library, I made my life difficult by instigating a project to enter all of the manuscript descriptions into a searchable database. The fun part of this was the coding...the not so fun part of it is the 20+ hours I've spent on data entry. While doing this monkey-work, I occasionally find minor mistakes in the older descriptions, usually because it lists an author or collector as alive when they've passed away between the time it was written and now. This is understandable. I wouldn't expect library staff to scour the obituaries every day for names of people that potentially gave stuff to us in 1995.

However, there's an enormous portrait of a certain person in our Student Union, who's sorta kinda important. For example, the library is named after him, his quotes are plastered all over the place, and every parent who brings their child for a campus tour shakes his bronze hand in the plaza.


Yesterday I discovered that, according to our very own website, good old Herman, the first Chancellor of Indiana University, is still alive! Yay! But then I had to kill him. In 2000.

Fail #3:

And finally, a food-related fail. Yesterday I thought dinner-time needed a little kick in the pants. We've been eating the same dishes over and over in a staggered rotation...Sweetie doesn't mind, but I do. The only meat we had ready to cook was lean ground beef, so I looked in Eating Well for something different, and found a recipe for empanadas.

I had never eaten empanadas. I had no idea what they were supposed to taste like. Plus, I didn't have any of the ingredients on the list, and we were too hungry to go the store first. But no matter...I'm good at improvising. So I mixed up a flour-and-cornmeal dough, tossed some beef in with chopped onions and poured salsa-from-a-jar all over it, assembled, baked, and called it good.





Well, they look like empanadas as far as I can tell, but they tasted like manju in a cornmeal crust. Because they basically were manju in a cornmeal crust. And because the salsa was kind of watery, a few leaked all over when they were bit into. Failget.

My Bills Just Shot Up

As much as I rallied for everyone voting yesterday, the unreasonable part of me can't help but wish some people didn't.

Because thanks to a propaganda surge by the local schools, in which the board deliberately cut funding to media centers and extracurriculars to incite outrage (administrative salaries? expensive land purchases? what?), then had their teachers tell all the kindergardeners to go home and sweetly ask their parents to vote to increase taxes so they can get them back, my rent just went up.

"But it's such a small tax, only 14 cents per $100" the unions and warm-hearted newspapers say, "It's for the children." (a) It's not so small when you're talking about owning half the city, like my university does, and (b) is it really now?

The reason I did not vote for these taxes is because the school district was mum about how it will be actually spent. There is no published record of what they intend to use it on. In a short article a few months back, their proposal did NOT decrease class sizes, introduce more programs, etc. etc. like their shiny "We <3 America and if you don't vote for this you hate babies" website claimed (though I must point out, this district has more teachers per student than any of our neighboring counties, and they're not raising a fuss). It proposed to use that money for teacher and administrative raises. And the city just handed them a blank check to do that with.

"But we need those raises. We don't even make enough to cover the cost of living here!" This is a quote from a teacher talking to student journalists about the need for the tax. Now, with a statement like that, what kind of squalor do you imagine teachers here are suffering in? The median income per household in this city is about $30,000, which for reference is what most professors in the humanities departments are making. So public school teachers are making what, $25k? $35k?

$50k. An average home here costs $150,000 and Sweetie and I have excesses with $20,000 per year combined. I know couples making $60k total who have enviable properties and children in club sports and enough left over to get caramel lattes from Starbucks mid-morning (and presumably are not racking up the credit cards to do it, since they're responsible people). With the low cost of living here, do you know what kind of paradise we would be in if only one of us made fifty-thousand dollars a year?

I am displeased.

But I have to go to class.

I promise I'll write about food next time. But for now, grrrrrrrrr.


(Source)

Election Day

Today is mid-term election day! Sweetie and I have full-to-bursting schedules today, so we already visited the polls this weekend. However, for those of you normal people who prefer costumes and jack o' lanterns to finding parking at City Hall, go get 'em.

One thing to keep in mind about politics as you go: sifting through political ads is like going to the grocery store.

Many senatorial candidates are squishy, artificially-flavored marshmallows parading as enticing 50%-off post-Halloween treats, who will rot the country's collective teeth. Others are wholesome-sounding loafs of bread that shout "Good for you!" on the package but have high-fructose corn syrup lurking in the ingredients list (or in this case, the voting record).


On the other hand, a good chunk of candidates, either at the state or local level, are unappealing spuds with suspicious-looking dark brown spots. It's okay. If you cut off the spots, the core of the vegetable is still good. There are also some broccoli crowns who dip themselves in melted cheese to appeal to the masses...stupid, but they're still chock-full of vitamin A.


I can't tell you which is which, because beyond the candidates for my own state, I am uninformed. And I wouldn't sign my soul over to a party any more than I would sign up for a diet that omitted any food groups. So it's up to you to decide who is broccoli, and who is a sparkly, but bland-tasting and cavity-forming Peep. In any case, vote!


Note: unlike Peeps, stale politicians are not better than fresh ones.