Adventures in domesticity

Last night housemate Leo got in a cooking mood. After dragging me with him to our neighborhood Watergate Safeway (with some interesting purchases including rhubarb, mushrooms, and Spam), he kicked me out of the kitchen so he could prepare some magic dish. I "helped" by printing out his recipe for him, but I still didn't know what was going on, since he found the recipe on a Hong Kong Web page and it was written in Chinese. Close to midnight, I began to smell something baking. He'd make a cake called a "strawberry-rhubarb crumble." It was an interesting concoction with a base of sliced angel food, a homemade cake batter over that, sliced fresh strawberries and fresh rhubarb, yogurt, and some kind of butter, egg, sugar, and flour "crumble" topping.

But there was a little problem. The recipe didn't translate well. The first problem was it said to bake the cake at 200 degrees....well, Leo assumed that meant 200 degrees Fahrenheit, when it actually meant Celsius (200˚C=392˚F). Then there was the matter of reading conversion tables....and the mistaken assumption that two adjacent tables were providing equivalencies across the entire row.....so that when the recipe said to use "100 grams of flour," Leo saw next to that that 100 grams=1 teaspoon. Well...100 grams of flour is actually about 3/4th cup and there are about 36 teaspoons in 3/4th cup!

Other than the translation problem, Leo only made one little error in cooking technique. He was supposed to cream butter and sugar, but our butter was in the freezer, he was impatient, so he melted the butter before creaming it with the sugar and adding the eggs. Of course, the excess butter and significantly insufficient flour created an interesting problem as the cake slowly began to bake: the butter melted and rose to the top, giving the impression that the cake was deep-frying in butter!

About this time, I was called in for a consultation.

The overflowing butter was hitting the bottom of the oven and creating clouds of smoke in the kitchen!

It was a simple fix, actually. It just needed a cookie sheet underneath and the windows opened. Of course, the "crumble" was not going to happen, but by increasing the oven temperature to 400 and extending the cooking time, we were able to create a sort of "strawberry-rhubarb-yogurt clafouti." Leo thought it was a failure, but I found it an interesting experiment; it was unique, but it actually tasted pretty good.

* * * * *
Meanwhile, I took the extended cooking time as an opportunity to pop some frozen chicken fingers into the oven. While they baked, I made a big pan of milk gravy (flavored with a touch of chicken base, but I should have added more pepper). I'm not a great fan of chicken fingers, so I ate a couple and then reverted to having bread and gravy. I'd planned on having leftover gravy that I could use this morning for sausage, biscuits, and gravy, but we ate the whole bowl—a surprise, since I didn't expect Leo would like thick, Southern-style, milk gravy. Must have been that third martini.