Dooring

I knew this was going to happen eventually.  Super biker guy (in work clothing) on his Orbea with a fi'zi'k (or whatever) saddle and clip-in shoes passed me going down Massachusetts this morning.  Just outside of Dupont, he was speeding along next to the stopped cars, when a cab door opened in his path.  He saw it in enough time to start to break, but he still hit the door and went down pretty hard on the sidewalk.

Ouch.  Because I was just a few feet behind him, I stopped to make sure he was OK.  Although he seemed totally fine, I offered to call an ambulance because I guess that's what you're supposed to do in these situations...he said, "Nah, it wasn't that serious," while he put his chain back on. Meanwhile, the gorgeous blond who got out of the cab clearly felt horrible and was apologizing her face off.  There wasn't much I could do besides awkwardly stand there, and I figured it was between them, so I left.

And that is my very anti-climactic commuting tale for the day.  This guy must have had balls of iron, because he didn't seem shaken up at all.  Then again, I guess dooring hurts a lot less when the person who does it to you is tall, beautiful, nice, and extremely apologetic.

I have been doored twice.  Once, it was in roughly the same spot as this guy.  The French girl who had opened the door felt awful, someone in a Georgetown hat stopped and called an ambulance, and someone else rushed out of a nearby embassy and offered me Tang, then invited me inside (to this day, I am annoyed at the person who suggested that I not move).  I thought I was OK, but they stuck me in the ambulance anyway because I was being an idiot and not wearing a helmet. The paramedics spent a lot of time arguing with each other over what to do with me, so I'll assume my condition wasn't that dire.  

All I got out of that incident was a tacoed wheel and a citation from the police officer for passing on the right.  After consulting WABA and some local bike laws, I contested the ticket and won.  Small victories.

The second time, I was delivering documents to Copy General and got doored by a van on 12th and Pennsylvania.  I got knocked into the street and an SUV tire narrowly missed my head (fortunately, I was wearing a helmet).  That time, the door-er was a male utility worker.  Of all things I could have been freaked out about, I chose to be upset fact that my favorite pants got ripped, and he offered to buy me new ones at the Macy's across the street (I declined the offer).  To make matters even more humiliating, it was on one of my former company's brand new rental bicycles, and I eventually had to roll it back to the shop in shame.  Then my boss made fun of me and made me cry, but that's a whole different story.

Anyway.  I now have my brakes tightened to within an inch of their lives, and I ride VERY cautiously next to cars, whether they are parked or stopped at a light.  When there's a lane divider next to parked cars, I ride on the left side of it.  It pisses some drivers off, but they go around you eventually.  Because as observant as you'd like people to be sometimes, they often aren't, and accidents just happen.  

Comfort food: Chicken Alfredo

Alfredo sauce is incredibly easy to make--making it really well so that Italians approve might be a different issue, but anyone with a pan and a spoon can create some concoction that tastes alfredo sauce-y.  And it's quick, and when your friend is coming over for dinner and you have most of the ingredients already, it's a good option.

First, I fried up some chicken breast in olive oil with minced garlic, Italian seasoning, salt and pepper. I set the chicken aside and deglazed the pan with some white wine, and while ideally, I would have made the sauce in the same pan, it was too small, so I just had to transfer all the pan juices.  This deglazing concept is new to me, and I'm not sure if this is what I was supposed to do, but it all tasted OK, so I guess it worked?

In a bigger pan, I melted about 2 tbsp butter in with the pan juice and added salt, pepper, 3 or 4 minced garlic cloves, half a diced onion and a bunch of sliced mushrooms, then sauteed until the onion was translucent.  Slowly, I added in some flour to create a roux.  I let that cook for a short bit then slowly stirred in about 1 3/4 cups light cream.  As I tasted it, it was 1) too thick, so I thinned it out with some white wine and a little bit of soy milk (shhh...I don't drink real milk, so I didn't have any, and I was desperate).... and 2) not at all garlicky enough, so I  pressed 2 more cloves of garlic right into the sauce towards the end of cooking.  Correct technique?  Almost decidedly not, but it tasted better that way.  I then dumped in a bunch of Parmesan cheese.  The recipe that I was sort-of-kind-of-not-really following called for colby jack cheese, but that seemed like too much, so I skipped it.

Anyway, in the meantime, I boiled some linguine (fettuccine would have been better, but it wasn't on sale....), then tossed it and the chicken chunks with the sauce. 

Lessons learned....substitute some of the cream for (not soy) milk to thin things out, and potentially use less flour.  Add more garlic from the beginning. Fresh herbs would have been AWESOME in this (my guest suggested parsley....I would have added thyme or maybe a sprig of rosemary during cooking), so next time, I'll try that.

Scary drivers and jerk cyclists

So yesterday, I had an event to attend at North Chevy Chase elementary school and the weather was beautiful, so I decided to take the Capital Crescent/Georgetown Branch trails up.  It was a seriously pleasant commute, probably because I left the house around 7 and there weren't a ton of cars on the road.  Even going down the Mass Ave hill wasn't totally terrifying due to lack of traffic.  (I did get on the sidewalk at one point, however, and nearly smacked into a tree that was growing diagonally over the ground).  Lots of super bikers going onto the CCT at that point.  The guy in front of me, in his white and blue spandex, powered up the entrance ramp.  I got off and walked my bike up because I had zero momentum...

The trail was mostly uneventful, until I got to Connecticut Avenue with its 17 lanes of traffic, signs for the Beltway, and no obvious crosswalk in sight. Little did I know, the trail jogs over and continues on the other side (I found it on the way back), but because Google maps led me astray, I turned left up the Connecticut Avenue sidewalk, crossed onto Manor Road, proceeded to get a little lost until a friendly driver noticed me looking confused, then finally found the school on Jones Bridge Road.  Success!

A side note: I did this all without coffee in my system.  Trying to work on the caffeine addiction.

One thing that I appreciate about the office where I intern is that none of my co-workers expressed shock that I was biking.  It annoys me, for some odd reason, when people say things like, "You're planning on BIKING EIGHT MILES?"  Probably because 1) it gets old and 2) it proves that cyclists are still in the minority because apparently, we're hard to come by (it continues to baffle me that I see a bunch of cyclists out on any given commute downtown, yet I never know where they go because I rarely encounter them in everyday life).

Anyway.  On the way back (noontime commutes home are FUN!), I passed a couple of guys who were riding next to each other.  One moved behind the other, so I assume they saw me, but I said, "On your left!"  anyway because that's what you're supposed to do.  The rear guy responded with a snarky, "I was aware."  Thanks, jerk. 

Once in Georgetown, I decided to head to GW to check out the anthropology department (they accepted me!), and in doing so, had to go around the terror that is Washington Circle.  No one really respects anyone's right-of-way there, and a cab driver just looked at me blithely as he started to cut me off.  I stared back with all the loathing I could muster, and clearly he did not care because he cut me off anyway.  As I was turning onto K Street, I stopped at a red light where a pedestrian was about to cross.  He paused and stared at me when he saw me coming, then when I stopped, he said, "Thank you for stopping!"  I responded, "The light's red...?"  And he said, "Oh, but you're the first person on a bicycle I've ever seen who actually stopped there."  So apparently cyclists are jerks at that particular intersection.   Law-abiding pedestrians really shouldn't have to fear getting mowed down by a bike, and it makes me sad when stuff like this happens.   

Because I am extraordinarily directionally challenged, I get confused about who has the right-of-way at un-lit intersections.  When I can't tell if I'm supposed to go or not, I just look purposefully confused and/or lost and/or distracted until it's clearly my turn.  I need to work on that.

Everything fried tastes good: 3 case studies

(In case you can't tell, I don't always take my "cooking" very seriously.  There was more thought that went into the last 2 recipes, but let's be honest, it's fried stuff.)


Case Study 1: World's Quickest Dinner

Ingredients:

A sliced potato
Lots of olive oil
Sliced onions
Garlic
Cheese

Using the oil, fry the shit out of the onions and garlic.  Add potatoes.  Fry the shit out of those.  Scrape onto a plate.  Add cheese.  Microwave if you are too impatient for the cheese to melt.  Maybe add sriracha.  Inhale.

At one point there was more food on this plate.

Case Study #2: Risotto Balls

Ingredients:

Homemade risotto with crushed red pepper and garlic (too complicated to write out in this post, look it up elsewhere)

Bread crumbs

Parmesan cheese

Egg

A bunch of fresh mozzarella cubes

A shit ton of oil

Beat egg.  Mash together risotto with egg, bread crumbs and cheese.  Form into balls.  Stuff cheese in the middle of each.  Roll in bread crumbs.  Fry the hell out of said balls (at 375 degrees, drain them off on a paper towel), then serve with warmed pasta sauce.  Boom.

Risotto mush

Cubes and Balls

Case Study #3: Onion Rings

Ingredients: 

An onion, sliced into big rings

Some combo of flour, baking powder, dark beer, and maybe an egg
More shit tons of oil

Make batter.  Dip onion rings in said batter.  Fry at 375 degrees.  Absorb extra oil on a paper towel.  Dip in many delicious condiments.  Eat.

I don't remember what I used; it doesn't REALLY matter which recipe you pick.  My batter looked like this.

Yum.

Salted Caramel and Chocolate Pie

Sometimes, you just want to take as many creamy and delicious things as possible and combine them into something edible.  When my coworker told me about a super easy salted caramel pie that she had made, my brain was intrigued and I bought all of the ingredients for my own, ridiculous version of it.  They sat in my cupboard/fridge for a couple of months, as working at a bakeshop apparently makes one disinclined to bake for oneself.

But today, I woke up and thought, "I'm going to make that pie, goddammit."  So I did.  It took a long time, and simultaneously, I managed to do three loads of laundry and watch 12 episodes in a row of "Who the (bleep) Did I Marry," which is possibly one of the best reality shows I've seen lately.

So yes, based on the ingredients list, this SHOULD have been the easiest pie in the world.  And it was, in some ways, because it's hard to mix chocolate, caramel, and cream in such a way that it tastes terrible.  But because I started this without caffeine in my system (baking is to caffeine is as driving is to not drinking alcohol...or something like that) and I have no sense of mise en place and am terribly out of practice, this got overly complicated.

For the caramel, you will need:
2 cans sweetened condensed milk
salt (the recipe calls for fleur de sel, which would have been lovely, but I couldn't be bothered to go out and buy salt for $4 an ounce)

For the ganache:
1/2 c. heavy cream
4 oz. good, bittersweet chocolate

For the crust, you will need:
1 1/2 c. chocolate cookie crumb (I used Newman's Own Alphabet Cookies)
4 tbsp. butter
a couple tbsp. sugar (maybe 2)

For the whipped cream:
1/2 tbsp. confectioner's sugar
1/2 c. heavy cream


First, combine your crust ingredients and mash them into a 9" pie pan.  Pop in a 350 degree oven for about 10 minutes.  Remove (duh) and set aside.

Crank up the oven to 425 degrees.  Pour the 2 cans of sweetened condensed milk into a pan, and place inside another, bigger pan.  (The recipe called for a 9 x 13 pan inside a roasting pan, but I don't have a roasting pan, so I used  a smaller dish inside a 9 x 13 pan.)  Sprinkle on some salt, place foil over the little pan, and fill the bigger pan with water until it's about 1/3 way up.  Place the whole mess in the oven and leave it to bake for about 2 hours.

Every once in awhile, you want to lift the foil and give it a good stir.  Unfortunately, when I did this, I somehow got water into the pan.  Convinced that I had ruined the entire pie, there was much gnashing of teeth and crying....well, not really, but I freaked out a teensy bit and consulted Kate, the official star of this blog because she likes my cooking and provides emotional support when I do stupid things like get water in caramel.  She suggested pouring off the water, and when I did that, I discovered a  nice layer of golden brown wonderfulness underneath.  I stirred everything together, took off the foil, and let it bake for a little longer, assuming that the water molecules would evaporate.  That seemed to work.

Anyway.  When done, the caramel will be a rich color with some lumps that will straighten out as it cools.

Once things have cooled slightly, scrape everything into your crust.  Spray some plastic wrap (or Ziploc bags cut open, if you don't have plastic wrap....) with cooking spray and let it sit over the caramel.  Place in the fridge for a really long time.  4 hours minimum.



As you are nearing about the 3 hour mark of refrigeration, make your ganache.  Get your chocolate and cream all nice and gooey in a double boil on the stove, then pull out the pie and pour the ganache on.  Place it all back in the fridge.  Plastic wrap isn't really necessary, but I used a pie pan cover to keep out weird fridge flavors.



Once the ganache has cooled, whip your heavy cream into a frenzy and layer it on the pie.  Add chocolate shavings and potentially more salt.  You can re-chill it, but at this point, you probably just want to slice into the freaking thing.  Feel free to do so.

I love whipping cream by hand.  It's just so damn satisfying and beautiful.

I don't mean to brag or anything, but Kate declared this the best thing she has ever eaten.  You will probably need to eat very tiny slices, because this is RICH. 

Next time, I would make the ganache layer a little thinner, as the flavor overwhelmed the caramel a bit.  I would also mash the crumbs in the crust into a finer grain, but as I am lacking a food processor, I used the rolling pin method until I got lazy.  It might also be worth buying the $4 salt, because I couldn't taste the "salted" part of this pie so much.  Most recipes I've seen for this just call for caramel and whipped cream, but Kate hates whipped cream, and I wanted more chocolate in here.  It might be worth trying it that way, however, so the caramel can really shine.  

Enjoy!

***Later note: After discussing this recipe with my parents, my dad mentioned that when he lived in Brazil, they used to set cans of sweetened condensed milk in a pot of boiling water for 2 or 3 hours, then open them once they cooled.  I might try that next time, because dealing with 28 ounces of sticky, boiling sugar in an open pan is a MESS.  

Illegal things

You know, the funny thing about those no U-turn signs on Pennsylvania Avenue is that THEY'RE THERE FOR A REASON.  I saw no less than 4 cars blatantly breaking that law today, and I missed some idiot diplomat town car by about two inches.  He crossed right into my path with nary a second glance, which resulted in me stopping and yelling (G-rated yelling) at him.  He had his windows up and looked thoroughly lost--probably late on his way to pick up some very rich and impatient person.  I'm not drowning in sympathy for him, though, because if my brakes had been ANY looser, that could have hurt.  A lot.

aslfdhsak h.kjsahg.kwawgwa.

UGH.  I'm so mad.  Says Kate on the subject, "I hate non-diplomatic driving by diplomats."  Just because you have immunity doesn't give you the right to be an asshole.

Before that happened, I was all whistle-y and happy--so distracted by the weather, in fact, that I almost fell off my bike while standing still at a red light.  That takes some doing.  I heard at least 2 other cyclists singing to themselves today, including the grumpy guy with the chopper recumbent who likes to switch between the sidewalk and the street a LOT, and I have definitely seen him with an air horn blasting pedestrians out of the way before--even HE was happy.

I am now decidedly less happy after the run in with the diplomidiot.  But still humming to myself, so welcome, springtime! ....not that you haven't been lurking about since January or anything.