Wednesday Catch-up

Wednesdays are one of my catch-up days. Monday and Tuesday are full of classes and lesson prep, and then I get a breather (until Wednesday evening when I teach my second section of grammar). Yesterday, I went for a run, swept the floor (you can't imagine how much dust accumulates--think godzilla-sized dust bunnies), and intended to go grocery shopping. When Turner got back from class, he decided taking a nap was a better option. I didn't make it to the grocery store, but I was able to pick up what I really needed from our school store: sugar, peanut butter, tofu, vegetables. My first culinary chore was to use up an old lemon, some eggs, and yogurt. So a yogurt cake it was!

Too bad it flopped...again! It's still tasty but really dense.


I think this may be a case of needing fairly exact measurements of flour, eggs, and oil. Since I don't have any measuring cups, I usually make an educated guess at what is a cup or a cup and a half. Thirds of a cup start getting tricky.

Dinner was to be quick and easy, since I had to leave for my class a little after 6pm. I marinated some tofu (or doufu in Chinese) in soy sauce, fresh ginger, and sliced chilis for a couple of hours. When you want to buy tofu in China, you don't look for individually wrapped packages. At larger stores it is sold near the deli or prepared food counter. At our school store, the vegetable lady also deals in tofu. She has one large block--think 3 feet by 3 feet--and will cut off however much you want. I asked for about 50 cents worth and got a piece the size that comes packaged in the US.

For a vegetable, I bought some youcai (oil plant), which looks and tastes like baby bok choy but is actually a rapeseed plant.I sliced the tofu into cubes and then fried it in some oil for about twenty minutes until each side was golden brown. The greens went in the wok for a couple minutes. And I made Peanut Sesame Noodles to go with everything.

I wonder if the Chinese would enjoy a meal like this...


I found it very satisfying, though Turner complained about how many dishes and pots I used to make such a simple dinner.

Let Them Eat Cake

Happy Birthday Turner!

The cake turned out well, but the vanilla layers were a little dense. The whole was definitely better than the sum of its parts. I think it was a noble attempt at a layer cake.

Neapolitan Birthday Cake

Turner turns 28 years old today, so only a special birthday cake would do for such a special man. My inspiration for this cake came from the container of Betty Crocker Strawberry Mist frosting that we were given by former expats who left last spring. Like all foods chock full of preservatives, this frosting is shelf stable for about two years, but I figured now would be a good time to use it. Also, in the fruit stands around the city, the strawberries have been temptingly red and plump these days.

I wanted to do a layer cake that involved strawberries but did not want the cake to be all strawberries, so I decided on a Neapolitan cake based on the ice cream that has vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry all in one. Looking for recipes proved fairly daunting as most cake recipes make two 9-inch cakes but in only one flavor. It always takes some Google ingenuity to find the right search words that result in appropriate hits. I finally found this recipe from King Arthur Flour for a Choco-Vanilla Cake that I used to make two heart-shaped cakes, one vanilla and one chocolate. I cut each cake in half so I had four layers total and alternated them using strawberry jam as the filling.
After I made the layers, it was time to get creative with the strawberries. I had about half a pound to play with. In the middle of the cake, I added sliced strawberries to the jam, which created an interesting pattern of polka dots on the chocolate background. (This would be a cute way to top a cake in the future.) Once the cake was assembled, I opened the container of frosting to find Barbie-pink, sugary frosting, not all that appropriate for a 28-year-old male, but it was part of the plan so I had to run with it. I chopped some of the strawberries that were not pretty enough for the garnish and mixed them in, hoping to temper to tooth-aching sweetness. This made the frosting fairly difficult to spread, so I think I will shy away from adding chunks to frosting in the future, but everything worked out in the end.