[Mafia] Cookfia 8: Spice and Dice

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Zoya: Jun 12, 2023; echoes of a distant past,
bodies die but voices last.
once were held within a cell,
your mind is where these voices dwell.

okay! here is the fantastic Sweet Potato (+carrot, +raisin?) Sweetbread recipe you've all been missing out on by not choosing to murder me!

this is the recipe as written! well as i wrote it, a while ago, i keep tweaking it, anyway whatever we will not be following it exactly because we are Missing Some Things

first you need some sweet potatoes! one large sweet potato is about a cup. i'm making two loaves (one with carrot, one without, mostly as a science experiment), so i'll be using two big sweet potatoes. disregard the other poo poo in the frame, my partner made dinner out of that while i was making dessert

dice up the sweet potatoes into Manageable Chunks (this is a science term)

...because we are going to be steaming them! you can't bake with raw sweet potatoes they're too hard, harder than regular potatoes even. get em in the pan over a steamer basket, throw some water in there, get the lid on, and blast it at max heat on the burner

once you hear it boiling/steaming, you can reduce heat to medium high, then just let em go like that for about 10 minutes. you can tell they're done when you can stick a fork through them and it passes through easily

now you're gonna want to let those suckers cool for like an hour, otherwise you will 100% burn your hands trying to peel them, they are made of lava. in this case, we went off and ate dinner while they cooled

here is a picture of a carrot i left like this because it was funny, we'll get to this carrot later

once the sweet potatoes have cooled or once you get too impatient, huck em in a mixing bowl and peel all the skin off of them. you can't really do anything with the skin? it's not useful for anything that i know of. but it IS edible, so feel free to snack on it rather than hucking it in the garbage. anyway get that poo poo out of there, it's no good for baking!

now, prepare two large mixing bowls, or just one if you're only making one loaf. reminder that the numbers in the initial recipe are for 1 loaf, and any numbers i put in here will be for one loaf, i'm just making two of them is all

get all of your dry ingredients into the bowls now, because you're a stupid idiot who can't remember your own recipe and how it says to do the wets first. oh well, it's a quickbread, it doesn't really matter.

FOR EACH BOWL, THESE INGREDIENTS ARE:

1.5 cups of flour
1.5 teaspoons of baking powder (!! don't mix these up the numbers matter a lot !!)
0.5 teaspoons of baking soda (!! don't mix these up the numbers matter a lot !!)
1 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg (i recommend a burr grinder, or just use spice mix if you gotta)
1 teaspoon freshly ground cinnamon (same as above)
1/3 cup of brown sugar (the baking kind, not cane sugar)
2/3 cup of normal white sugar

in my case i actually put 1.5 teaspoons of baking soda, instead of baking powder, because i am a chaos goblin and misread my own handwriting

if you gently caress this up, it matters a lot!! as long as you didn't mix it in yet though, you can salvage it -- just scoop out all of the baking soda you hosed up with, and keep track of roughly how much flour you're removing in the process, then just add back the flour you removed. fixed!! but don't do it in the first place, please
once all the dry ingredients are in the bowl, and CORRECT, mix them thoroughly until it looks like this!

now we need some butter, and, ah, gently caress, i don't have any butter that isn't in the freezer. oh well.
you are going to want 1/2 cup of butter per bowl! mine is frozen, and a full brick of it is about a cup, so i cracked it in half and hucked it in the microwave

you aren't supposed to let it get hot, just melted, but honestly don't worry about it too much just get that poo poo melted

once melted, if you used a measuring cup you can double check the amount, and dump in your 1/2 cup melted butter into each bowl, like so

now we need eggs! i've got 2 old eggs i need to use (the brown spotted ones) so i'm gonna put 1 of those into each loaf, along with a fresh white egg from the store

2 eggs per bowl! mix em up and huck em in the bowl with the rest

now is a great time to take a big fork and MASH UP the sweet potatoes! don't worry about measurements or anything, just smush it up and put it aside again. why are we doing this right now? i dunno, my brain can't keep track of when to do any particular step so i just base it on vibes mostly

remember that carrot from earlier? it's time!! if you have a food processor this will be Very Easy and also Very Entertaining. if you don't have a food processor this will be very annoying to grate by hand, but, get to it, it makes the bread noticeably better!

don't forget to mix up all the poo poo in the bowls from before! i did! i attempted to use an immersion blender with a whisk attachment and it made an ungodly mess. i recommend you do Not That, but anyway get everything THOROUGHLY mixed up , seriously if you gently caress up and there's a patch of unmixed baking soda or baking powder it'll turn into a landmine of Bad Flavor in the end

now you can portion out 1 cup of the smushed up sweet potatoes per bowl, just using the same mixing cup from earlier, fill er up and dump it in the bowl. again, 1 cup of mashed sweet potatoes per bowl! mix that in with everything else. now is the time to switch from a metal fork to a wooden spoon because your partner just became Very Incredibly Angry at you for using a metal fork in her antique pyrex mixing bowls!

once the sweet potato is mixed in, you can go ahead and dump all the shredded carrots into one of the bowls and mix those up too (if you're using a stand mixer or an immersion blender or something be sure to only mix up the carrots, you want the shreds to stay in identifiable pieces)

here's where things kind of go off the rails. in the recipe as written, i wrote "pumpkin seeds", but you really just want any kind of nut or seed here. walnuts or almonds or pecans work best, usually! but i don't have any of that. what i do have, is a giant container of roasted salted cashews from costco, so i'm gonna try and make this work. i do not recommend you do this, it's not ideal

i hucked em into the mixing cup, rinsed them all off to remove the salt (don't introduce new salt into baking! it'll ruin your ratios!), then dried them in some paper towels. time to chop! this is an enormous cleaver we got from the asian grocery store for like $10. anyway chop em up to reasonable standards

go ahead and mix all that poo poo into the bowls, roughly 4 oz per bowl but this can be vibes based as long as you don't go overboard

next, prepare 2 baking dishes, i dunno what size these are other than that they are Correct, and you're gonna want to grease them up if you don't want to be sad later. butter, oil, cooking spray, whatever you prefer -- i used a bit of grapeseed oil and spread it around with a paper towel. i also left too much excess oil in one of the pans but it doesn't really matter! time to pour!

ok so not so much pour, this stuff is pretty thick, just get big fat spoonfuls and dump them in there. again, in my case, i've got 1 loaf with carrots and 1 without, they are otherwise identical -- i wanted to test how big of a difference the carrots make

you may have noticed something missing! that's right, i did not add raisins!
ordinarily i would add golden raisins into at least one of these loaves... but mine have apparently been expired for a year and a half. i dunno if raisins really go bad? but they looked off. so i skipped em. big sad, raisins add a lot of flavor to this, but it's okay, you don't need them!
hope you remembered to preheat your oven to 350 degrees farenheit! i didn't! once your oven is heated, go ahead and chuck the pans in there. set a timer for 70 minutes, these babies take a while

good thing you have so much time on your hands because in the process of baking this you have managed to dirty nearly every dish in your kitchen! hooray! gently caress.

70 minutes later and your house should smell loving amazing! pull em out, and test with a butter knife right in the center (this is a steak knife i don't know why i used a steak knife). you want to be able to push the knife all the way through the bread and remove it with nothing getting left on the knife, if that happens, they're done!

get a butter knife (for real this time or you'll gently caress up your pans) and gently press all along the edges of the loaves to separate them from the sides, if stuck, then flip them upside down onto a wire rack. bang on the pans a bit if they won't come out, until they do! then flip em over and let them cool

strictly speaking, you should let them cool completely, but you'd be a fool to actually do that, because they're really good hot!

i never wait longer than 10-15 minutes

once you've waited as long as you can stand, it's time to slice, and enjoy!

important notes!!
the carrots made a big difference! i've made it with and without carrots before, but never at the same time, so it's always been hard to compare. because i made both, i could try both side by side... and the carrots add an extra depth of flavor that i think is definitely worth the slight extra effort

the cashews, on the other hand... well, they taste fine! but their texture leaves a lot to be desired. they somehow ended up... kind of mushy? it didn't ruin the bread or anything, and it's probably still better than having no nuts in it at all, but you definitely shouldn't intentionally do them this way. it's just all i had! so it's fine. i don't know if the cashews ended up that way from rinsing them, or from baking them for an hour when they're already roasted, or just from being in the batter and being too weak to handle it, but it is what it is!

even if you gently caress it up somewhat, it's still gonna be good!

couple of extra baking notes: !!!
this recipe is actually very flexible! if you're allergic to sweet potatoes (is that a thing?), this still works with substitutes! you can basically tweak this recipe to work with any other fruit or vegetable instead of sweet potatoes, but you'll need to adjust the moisture levels or it won't bake right. we've used it to make banana bread, for example! but bananas are much wetter than sweet potatoes, so you have to tweak the wets in the recipe to make up for the difference. if you go with banana bread, consider using a dark spiced rum in place of the water in the recipe, and be sure to use raisins.

also, a general baking note for anyone who doesn't know -- the purpose of baking soda + baking powder in the recipe is that baking powder is a more complicated compound than baking soda. basically, baking powder contains an acid that activates the baking soda -- baking soda is lacking that acid, and so requires an acidic component in whatever thing you're baking to actually work. so if you were to put lemons in this bread, maybe? or some other acidic ingredient as a substitution, you could leave out the baking powder and just use baking soda. but be sure to look up online to get the ratios right, because if you don't, it just won't work at all! sour cream is an obvious source of both moisture and acid if you don't have any baking powder, but i find this bread tastes better without leaning on sour cream as a texture crutch like that.

also, just from experience -- we've tried many, many other main ingredients as the pillar of the bread, and really, nothing comes out as good as sweet potatoes. they're just perfect -- the perfect texture, constitutes into the bread evenly, very noticeable influence on the taste, it's just good in every way. we tried baking it with zucchinis we accidentally grew too many of, and even that worked! but, it felt like the zucchini was just filling a void. it never fully owned the dish in the way that sweet potatoes do, if that makes sense. unless someone told you you were eating zucchini bread, you'd never be able to identify what it was made of, because the zucchini was just there for the sake of being there. sweet potatoes, on the other hand, uplift and support the whole experience! they're good!!! okay thats it for baking notes

_{^{_{edited nearly a year later because i realized discord broke all the drat image links and i won't stand for it}}}

Zoya fucked around with this message at 21:51 on May 12, 2024

# ? Aug 11, 2023 00:11

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# ? Jun 10, 2024 06:48

Tired Moritz: Mar 25, 2012; wish Lowtax would get tired of YOUR POSTS

_{_{(n o i c e)}}

Aww man, sleep hammered again

# ? Aug 11, 2023 01:14

Maerlyn: Jun 29, 2003; Everything at once
the evil step-son

_{_{This av has been socialized, viva la Revolución}}

Good job town, and thanks Grandi - I'm glad I was able to make one dice meal at least. Hopefully next cookfia I'll be back to my normal (kinda lazy) cooking ways.

Also was good sharing a brain with Voodoo, thanks for doing the heavy lifting good brain. Sincerely - evil brain

# ? Aug 11, 2023 01:54

CapitalistPig: Nov 3, 2005; A Winner is you!

Yay! Thanks for the game grandi!

That's what you get for killing me night 1 scum.

# ? Aug 11, 2023 02:26

Tired Moritz: Mar 25, 2012; wish Lowtax would get tired of YOUR POSTS

_{_{(n o i c e)}}

Oh aww crap I never got to make my Mac and cheese

# ? Aug 11, 2023 02:29

Zoya: Jun 12, 2023; echoes of a distant past,
bodies die but voices last.
once were held within a cell,
your mind is where these voices dwell.

Tired Moritz posted:

Oh aww crap I never got to make my Mac and cheese

your microwave spam cheese ramen monstrosity was sort of a kind of mac and cheese when you think about it

# ? Aug 11, 2023 02:40

CubicalSucrose: Jan 1, 2013; Phantom my Opera and call me South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut

Zoya posted:

okay! here is the fantastic Sweet Potato (+carrot, +raisin?) Sweetbread recipe you've all been missing out on by not choosing to murder me!

this is the recipe as written! well as i wrote it, a while ago, i keep tweaking it, anyway whatever we will not be following it exactly because we are Missing Some Things

first you need some sweet potatoes! one large sweet potato is about a cup. i'm making two loaves (one with carrot, one without, mostly as a science experiment), so i'll be using two big sweet potatoes. disregard the other poo poo in the frame, my partner made dinner out of that while i was making dessert

dice up the sweet potatoes into Manageable Chunks (this is a science term)

...because we are going to be steaming them! you can't bake with raw sweet potatoes they're too hard, harder than regular potatoes even. get em in the pan over a steamer basket, throw some water in there, get the lid on, and blast it at max heat on the burner

once you hear it boiling/steaming, you can reduce heat to medium high, then just let em go like that for about 10 minutes. you can tell they're done when you can stick a fork through them and it passes through easily

now you're gonna want to let those suckers cool for like an hour, otherwise you will 100% burn your hands trying to peel them, they are made of lava. in this case, we went off and ate dinner while they cooled

here is a picture of a carrot i left like this because it was funny, we'll get to this carrot later

once the sweet potatoes have cooled or once you get too impatient, huck em in a mixing bowl and peel all the skin off of them. you can't really do anything with the skin? it's not useful for anything that i know of. but it IS edible, so feel free to snack on it rather than hucking it in the garbage. anyway get that poo poo out of there, it's no good for baking!

now, prepare two large mixing bowls, or just one if you're only making one loaf. reminder that the numbers in the initial recipe are for 1 loaf, and any numbers i put in here will be for one loaf, i'm just making two of them is all

get all of your dry ingredients into the bowls now, because you're a stupid idiot who can't remember your own recipe and how it says to do the wets first. oh well, it's a quickbread, it doesn't really matter.

FOR EACH BOWL, THESE INGREDIENTS ARE:

1.5 cups of flour

1.5 teaspoons of baking powder (!! don't mix these up the numbers matter a lot !!)

0.5 teaspoons of baking soda (!! don't mix these up the numbers matter a lot !!)

1 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg (i recommend a burr grinder, or just use spice mix if you gotta)

1 teaspoon freshly ground cinnamon (same as above)

1/3 cup of brown sugar (the baking kind, not cane sugar)

2/3 cup of normal white sugar

in my case i actually put 1.5 teaspoons of baking soda, instead of baking powder, because i am a chaos goblin and misread my own handwriting

if you gently caress this up, it matters a lot!! as long as you didn't mix it in yet though, you can salvage it -- just scoop out all of the baking soda you hosed up with, and keep track of roughly how much flour you're removing in the process, then just add back the flour you removed. fixed!! but don't do it in the first place, please
once all the dry ingredients are in the bowl, and CORRECT, mix them thoroughly until it looks like this!

now we need some butter, and, ah, gently caress, i don't have any butter that isn't in the freezer. oh well.
you are going to want 1/2 cup of butter per bowl! mine is frozen, and a full brick of it is about a cup, so i cracked it in half and hucked it in the microwave

you aren't supposed to let it get hot, just melted, but honestly don't worry about it too much just get that poo poo melted

once melted, if you used a measuring cup you can double check the amount, and dump in your 1/2 cup melted butter into each bowl, like so

now we need eggs! i've got 2 old eggs i need to use (the brown spotted ones) so i'm gonna put 1 of those into each loaf, along with a fresh white egg from the store

2 eggs per bowl! mix em up and huck em in the bowl with the rest

now is a great time to take a big fork and MASH UP the sweet potatoes! don't worry about measurements or anything, just smush it up and put it aside again. why are we doing this right now? i dunno, my brain can't keep track of when to do any particular step so i just base it on vibes mostly

remember that carrot from earlier? it's time!! if you have a food processor this will be Very Easy and also Very Entertaining. if you don't have a food processor this will be very annoying to grate by hand, but, get to it, it makes the bread noticeably better!

don't forget to mix up all the poo poo in the bowls from before! i did! i attempted to use an immersion blender with a whisk attachment and it made an ungodly mess. i recommend you do Not That, but anyway get everything THOROUGHLY mixed up , seriously if you gently caress up and there's a patch of unmixed baking soda or baking powder it'll turn into a landmine of Bad Flavor in the end

now you can portion out 1 cup of the smushed up sweet potatoes per bowl, just using the same mixing cup from earlier, fill er up and dump it in the bowl. again, 1 cup of mashed sweet potatoes per bowl! mix that in with everything else. now is the time to switch from a metal fork to a wooden spoon because your partner just became Very Incredibly Angry at you for using a metal fork in her antique pyrex mixing bowls!

once the sweet potato is mixed in, you can go ahead and dump all the shredded carrots into one of the bowls and mix those up too (if you're using a stand mixer or an immersion blender or something be sure to only mix up the carrots, you want the shreds to stay in identifiable pieces)

here's where things kind of go off the rails. in the recipe as written, i wrote "pumpkin seeds", but you really just want any kind of nut or seed here. walnuts or almonds or pecans work best, usually! but i don't have any of that. what i do have, is a giant container of roasted salted cashews from costco, so i'm gonna try and make this work. i do not recommend you do this, it's not ideal

i hucked em into the mixing cup, rinsed them all off to remove the salt (don't introduce new salt into baking! it'll ruin your ratios!), then dried them in some paper towels. time to chop! this is an enormous cleaver we got from the asian grocery store for like $10. anyway chop em up to reasonable standards

go ahead and mix all that poo poo into the bowls, roughly 4 oz per bowl but this can be vibes based as long as you don't go overboard

next, prepare 2 baking dishes, i dunno what size these are other than that they are Correct, and you're gonna want to grease them up if you don't want to be sad later. butter, oil, cooking spray, whatever you prefer -- i used a bit of grapeseed oil and spread it around with a paper towel. i also left too much excess oil in one of the pans but it doesn't really matter! time to pour!

ok so not so much pour, this stuff is pretty thick, just get big fat spoonfuls and dump them in there. again, in my case, i've got 1 loaf with carrots and 1 without, they are otherwise identical -- i wanted to test how big of a difference the carrots make

you may have noticed something missing! that's right, i did not add raisins!
ordinarily i would add golden raisins into at least one of these loaves... but mine have apparently been expired for a year and a half. i dunno if raisins really go bad? but they looked off. so i skipped em. big sad, raisins add a lot of flavor to this, but it's okay, you don't need them!
hope you remembered to preheat your oven to 350 degrees farenheit! i didn't! once your oven is heated, go ahead and chuck the pans in there. set a timer for 70 minutes, these babies take a while

good thing you have so much time on your hands because in the process of baking this you have managed to dirty nearly every dish in your kitchen! hooray! gently caress.

70 minutes later and your house should smell loving amazing! pull em out, and test with a butter knife right in the center (this is a steak knife i don't know why i used a steak knife). you want to be able to push the knife all the way through the bread and remove it with nothing getting left on the knife, if that happens, they're done!

get a butter knife (for real this time or you'll gently caress up your pans) and gently press all along the edges of the loaves to separate them from the sides, if stuck, then flip them upside down onto a wire rack. bang on the pans a bit if they won't come out, until they do! then flip em over and let them cool

strictly speaking, you should let them cool completely, but you'd be a fool to actually do that, because they're really good hot!

i never wait longer than 10-15 minutes

once you've waited as long as you can stand, it's time to slice, and enjoy!

important notes!!
the carrots made a big difference! i've made it with and without carrots before, but never at the same time, so it's always been hard to compare. because i made both, i could try both side by side... and the carrots add an extra depth of flavor that i think is definitely worth the slight extra effort

the cashews, on the other hand... well, they taste fine! but their texture leaves a lot to be desired. they somehow ended up... kind of mushy? it didn't ruin the bread or anything, and it's probably still better than having no nuts in it at all, but you definitely shouldn't intentionally do them this way. it's just all i had! so it's fine. i don't know if the cashews ended up that way from rinsing them, or from baking them for an hour when they're already roasted, or just from being in the batter and being too weak to handle it, but it is what it is!

even if you gently caress it up somewhat, it's still gonna be good!

couple of extra baking notes: !!!
this recipe is actually very flexible! if you're allergic to sweet potatoes (is that a thing?), this still works with substitutes! you can basically tweak this recipe to work with any other fruit or vegetable instead of sweet potatoes, but you'll need to adjust the moisture levels or it won't bake right. we've used it to make banana bread, for example! but bananas are much wetter than sweet potatoes, so you have to tweak the wets in the recipe to make up for the difference. if you go with banana bread, consider using a dark spiced rum in place of the water in the recipe, and be sure to use raisins.

also, a general baking note for anyone who doesn't know -- the purpose of baking soda + baking powder in the recipe is that baking powder is a more complicated compound than baking soda. basically, baking powder contains an acid that activates the baking soda -- baking soda is lacking that acid, and so requires an acidic component in whatever thing you're baking to actually work. so if you were to put lemons in this bread, maybe? or some other acidic ingredient as a substitution, you could leave out the baking powder and just use baking soda. but be sure to look up online to get the ratios right, because if you don't, it just won't work at all! sour cream is an obvious source of both moisture and acid if you don't have any baking powder, but i find this bread tastes better without leaning on sour cream as a texture crutch like that.

also, just from experience -- we've tried many, many other main ingredients as the pillar of the bread, and really, nothing comes out as good as sweet potatoes. they're just perfect -- the perfect texture, constitutes into the bread evenly, very noticeable influence on the taste, it's just good in every way. we tried baking it with zucchinis we accidentally grew too many of, and even that worked! but, it felt like the zucchini was just filling a void. it never fully owned the dish in the way that sweet potatoes do, if that makes sense. unless someone told you you were eating zucchini bread, you'd never be able to identify what it was made of, because the zucchini was just there for the sake of being there. sweet potatoes, on the other hand, uplift and support the whole experience! they're good!!! okay thats it for baking notes

"Sweetbreads, oh interesting, never tried those before. Wait. This is just...sweet...bread."

Also, nicely done town!

# ? Aug 11, 2023 04:23

Zoya: Jun 12, 2023; echoes of a distant past,
bodies die but voices last.
once were held within a cell,
your mind is where these voices dwell.

CubicalSucrose posted:

"Sweetbreads, oh interesting, never tried those before. Wait. This is just...sweet...bread."

Also, nicely done town!

yeah! if you've ever had storebought banana bread, its basically that consistency (but better) -- so somewhere between cake and bread

this recipe actually started out as an attempt by me to make rum raisin banana bread and has evolved until the point where we just kept making sweet potato bread cuz its so good

(rum raisin banana bread IS GOOD but you gotta be careful if you soak the raisins in rum for too long they turn into sour little balls of pure rum in the final product which is just, kinda unpleasant, which was a shame... replacing the water in a banana bread recipe with a dark spiced rum is always a good time, though)

# ? Aug 11, 2023 04:53

Cloacamazing!: Apr 18, 2018; Too cute to be evil

Tired Moritz posted:

Aww man, sleep hammered again

Aw man, if RWC hadn't jugged me, I'd have gotten two scum for the price of one townie!

# ? Aug 11, 2023 06:01

Cloacamazing!: Apr 18, 2018; Too cute to be evil

AND Zoya didn't get to use my cool spice blend!

Oh well. Now to cook the rest of your recipes.

# ? Aug 11, 2023 06:01

WindwardAway: Aug 22, 2022; Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.

Oh wow, gg everyone! Lol I was sitting on quite a few points and spice blends in the end, oh well.

Time to cook all the remaining delicious recipes!

# ? Aug 11, 2023 09:18

WindwardAway: Aug 22, 2022; Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.

Btw i gifted a powerful spice mix to Voodoo/Maer last night so that mightve been what they said they wanted to use before they die, lol

# ? Aug 11, 2023 09:19

Opopanax: Aug 8, 2007; I HEX YE!!!

Nooo, my spice mix never got used!

# ? Aug 11, 2023 15:15

Rhymes With Clue: Nov 18, 2010

Cloacamazing! posted:

Aw man, if RWC hadn't jugged me, I'd have gotten two scum for the price of one townie!

That would have been some kind of end game for sure. Uh, sorry I deprived?

Anyhow fun game and I hope everyone enjoys my recipe. Thanks Grandi!

# ? Aug 11, 2023 18:57

Cloacamazing!: Apr 18, 2018; Too cute to be evil

Rhymes With Clue posted:

That would have been some kind of end game for sure. Uh, sorry I deprived?

Anyhow fun game and I hope everyone enjoys my recipe. Thanks Grandi!

It was delicious and will be cooked again.

# ? Aug 11, 2023 19:19

Zoya: Jun 12, 2023; echoes of a distant past,
bodies die but voices last.
once were held within a cell,
your mind is where these voices dwell.

Zoya posted:

okay! here is the fantastic Sweet Potato (+carrot, +raisin?) Sweetbread recipe you've all been missing out on by not choosing to murder me!

this is the recipe as written! well as i wrote it, a while ago, i keep tweaking it, anyway whatever we will not be following it exactly because we are Missing Some Things

first you need some sweet potatoes! one large sweet potato is about a cup. i'm making two loaves (one with carrot, one without, mostly as a science experiment), so i'll be using two big sweet potatoes. disregard the other poo poo in the frame, my partner made dinner out of that while i was making dessert

dice up the sweet potatoes into Manageable Chunks (this is a science term)

...because we are going to be steaming them! you can't bake with raw sweet potatoes they're too hard, harder than regular potatoes even. get em in the pan over a steamer basket, throw some water in there, get the lid on, and blast it at max heat on the burner

once you hear it boiling/steaming, you can reduce heat to medium high, then just let em go like that for about 10 minutes. you can tell they're done when you can stick a fork through them and it passes through easily

now you're gonna want to let those suckers cool for like an hour, otherwise you will 100% burn your hands trying to peel them, they are made of lava. in this case, we went off and ate dinner while they cooled

here is a picture of a carrot i left like this because it was funny, we'll get to this carrot later

once the sweet potatoes have cooled or once you get too impatient, huck em in a mixing bowl and peel all the skin off of them. you can't really do anything with the skin? it's not useful for anything that i know of. but it IS edible, so feel free to snack on it rather than hucking it in the garbage. anyway get that poo poo out of there, it's no good for baking!

now, prepare two large mixing bowls, or just one if you're only making one loaf. reminder that the numbers in the initial recipe are for 1 loaf, and any numbers i put in here will be for one loaf, i'm just making two of them is all

get all of your dry ingredients into the bowls now, because you're a stupid idiot who can't remember your own recipe and how it says to do the wets first. oh well, it's a quickbread, it doesn't really matter.

FOR EACH BOWL, THESE INGREDIENTS ARE:

1.5 cups of flour

1.5 teaspoons of baking powder (!! don't mix these up the numbers matter a lot !!)

0.5 teaspoons of baking soda (!! don't mix these up the numbers matter a lot !!)

1 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg (i recommend a burr grinder, or just use spice mix if you gotta)

1 teaspoon freshly ground cinnamon (same as above)

1/3 cup of brown sugar (the baking kind, not cane sugar)

2/3 cup of normal white sugar

in my case i actually put 1.5 teaspoons of baking soda, instead of baking powder, because i am a chaos goblin and misread my own handwriting

if you gently caress this up, it matters a lot!! as long as you didn't mix it in yet though, you can salvage it -- just scoop out all of the baking soda you hosed up with, and keep track of roughly how much flour you're removing in the process, then just add back the flour you removed. fixed!! but don't do it in the first place, please
once all the dry ingredients are in the bowl, and CORRECT, mix them thoroughly until it looks like this!

now we need some butter, and, ah, gently caress, i don't have any butter that isn't in the freezer. oh well.
you are going to want 1/2 cup of butter per bowl! mine is frozen, and a full brick of it is about a cup, so i cracked it in half and hucked it in the microwave

you aren't supposed to let it get hot, just melted, but honestly don't worry about it too much just get that poo poo melted

once melted, if you used a measuring cup you can double check the amount, and dump in your 1/2 cup melted butter into each bowl, like so

now we need eggs! i've got 2 old eggs i need to use (the brown spotted ones) so i'm gonna put 1 of those into each loaf, along with a fresh white egg from the store

2 eggs per bowl! mix em up and huck em in the bowl with the rest

now is a great time to take a big fork and MASH UP the sweet potatoes! don't worry about measurements or anything, just smush it up and put it aside again. why are we doing this right now? i dunno, my brain can't keep track of when to do any particular step so i just base it on vibes mostly

remember that carrot from earlier? it's time!! if you have a food processor this will be Very Easy and also Very Entertaining. if you don't have a food processor this will be very annoying to grate by hand, but, get to it, it makes the bread noticeably better!

don't forget to mix up all the poo poo in the bowls from before! i did! i attempted to use an immersion blender with a whisk attachment and it made an ungodly mess. i recommend you do Not That, but anyway get everything THOROUGHLY mixed up , seriously if you gently caress up and there's a patch of unmixed baking soda or baking powder it'll turn into a landmine of Bad Flavor in the end

now you can portion out 1 cup of the smushed up sweet potatoes per bowl, just using the same mixing cup from earlier, fill er up and dump it in the bowl. again, 1 cup of mashed sweet potatoes per bowl! mix that in with everything else. now is the time to switch from a metal fork to a wooden spoon because your partner just became Very Incredibly Angry at you for using a metal fork in her antique pyrex mixing bowls!

once the sweet potato is mixed in, you can go ahead and dump all the shredded carrots into one of the bowls and mix those up too (if you're using a stand mixer or an immersion blender or something be sure to only mix up the carrots, you want the shreds to stay in identifiable pieces)

here's where things kind of go off the rails. in the recipe as written, i wrote "pumpkin seeds", but you really just want any kind of nut or seed here. walnuts or almonds or pecans work best, usually! but i don't have any of that. what i do have, is a giant container of roasted salted cashews from costco, so i'm gonna try and make this work. i do not recommend you do this, it's not ideal

i hucked em into the mixing cup, rinsed them all off to remove the salt (don't introduce new salt into baking! it'll ruin your ratios!), then dried them in some paper towels. time to chop! this is an enormous cleaver we got from the asian grocery store for like $10. anyway chop em up to reasonable standards

go ahead and mix all that poo poo into the bowls, roughly 4 oz per bowl but this can be vibes based as long as you don't go overboard

next, prepare 2 baking dishes, i dunno what size these are other than that they are Correct, and you're gonna want to grease them up if you don't want to be sad later. butter, oil, cooking spray, whatever you prefer -- i used a bit of grapeseed oil and spread it around with a paper towel. i also left too much excess oil in one of the pans but it doesn't really matter! time to pour!

ok so not so much pour, this stuff is pretty thick, just get big fat spoonfuls and dump them in there. again, in my case, i've got 1 loaf with carrots and 1 without, they are otherwise identical -- i wanted to test how big of a difference the carrots make

you may have noticed something missing! that's right, i did not add raisins!
ordinarily i would add golden raisins into at least one of these loaves... but mine have apparently been expired for a year and a half. i dunno if raisins really go bad? but they looked off. so i skipped em. big sad, raisins add a lot of flavor to this, but it's okay, you don't need them!
hope you remembered to preheat your oven to 350 degrees farenheit! i didn't! once your oven is heated, go ahead and chuck the pans in there. set a timer for 70 minutes, these babies take a while

good thing you have so much time on your hands because in the process of baking this you have managed to dirty nearly every dish in your kitchen! hooray! gently caress.

70 minutes later and your house should smell loving amazing! pull em out, and test with a butter knife right in the center (this is a steak knife i don't know why i used a steak knife). you want to be able to push the knife all the way through the bread and remove it with nothing getting left on the knife, if that happens, they're done!

get a butter knife (for real this time or you'll gently caress up your pans) and gently press all along the edges of the loaves to separate them from the sides, if stuck, then flip them upside down onto a wire rack. bang on the pans a bit if they won't come out, until they do! then flip em over and let them cool

strictly speaking, you should let them cool completely, but you'd be a fool to actually do that, because they're really good hot!

i never wait longer than 10-15 minutes

once you've waited as long as you can stand, it's time to slice, and enjoy!

important notes!!
the carrots made a big difference! i've made it with and without carrots before, but never at the same time, so it's always been hard to compare. because i made both, i could try both side by side... and the carrots add an extra depth of flavor that i think is definitely worth the slight extra effort

the cashews, on the other hand... well, they taste fine! but their texture leaves a lot to be desired. they somehow ended up... kind of mushy? it didn't ruin the bread or anything, and it's probably still better than having no nuts in it at all, but you definitely shouldn't intentionally do them this way. it's just all i had! so it's fine. i don't know if the cashews ended up that way from rinsing them, or from baking them for an hour when they're already roasted, or just from being in the batter and being too weak to handle it, but it is what it is!

even if you gently caress it up somewhat, it's still gonna be good!

couple of extra baking notes: !!!
this recipe is actually very flexible! if you're allergic to sweet potatoes (is that a thing?), this still works with substitutes! you can basically tweak this recipe to work with any other fruit or vegetable instead of sweet potatoes, but you'll need to adjust the moisture levels or it won't bake right. we've used it to make banana bread, for example! but bananas are much wetter than sweet potatoes, so you have to tweak the wets in the recipe to make up for the difference. if you go with banana bread, consider using a dark spiced rum in place of the water in the recipe, and be sure to use raisins.

also, a general baking note for anyone who doesn't know -- the purpose of baking soda + baking powder in the recipe is that baking powder is a more complicated compound than baking soda. basically, baking powder contains an acid that activates the baking soda -- baking soda is lacking that acid, and so requires an acidic component in whatever thing you're baking to actually work. so if you were to put lemons in this bread, maybe? or some other acidic ingredient as a substitution, you could leave out the baking powder and just use baking soda. but be sure to look up online to get the ratios right, because if you don't, it just won't work at all! sour cream is an obvious source of both moisture and acid if you don't have any baking powder, but i find this bread tastes better without leaning on sour cream as a texture crutch like that.

also, just from experience -- we've tried many, many other main ingredients as the pillar of the bread, and really, nothing comes out as good as sweet potatoes. they're just perfect -- the perfect texture, constitutes into the bread evenly, very noticeable influence on the taste, it's just good in every way. we tried baking it with zucchinis we accidentally grew too many of, and even that worked! but, it felt like the zucchini was just filling a void. it never fully owned the dish in the way that sweet potatoes do, if that makes sense. unless someone told you you were eating zucchini bread, you'd never be able to identify what it was made of, because the zucchini was just there for the sake of being there. sweet potatoes, on the other hand, uplift and support the whole experience! they're good!!! okay thats it for baking notes

mafia edit: this, uh, isn't a sweetbread at all, sweetbread is apparently some kind of meat! why would someone call meat bread? i dunno! i just meant that its a bread that is sweet, a sweet bread if you will, a tasty treat from the oven, definitely not comprised of gullets or pancreas of any sort

it's technically a type of quick bread, i think

# ? Aug 11, 2023 19:20

Opopanax: Aug 8, 2007; I HEX YE!!!

I made sweet potato Cinnamon buns last Thanksgiving and they were pretty good

# ? Aug 11, 2023 19:24

Grandicap: Feb 8, 2006

I made some short ribs!

Get some short ribs, season with just salt and pepper, we are going to get our fun flavor depth from the sauce so you can go simple here. Throw in a vac bag, vac seal. Then Sous Vide at 144 for 2-3 days.

Wow, way fewer pics than I remembered taking. But hey, it's 3 days later. Start making a red wine sauce! Take your short ribs and drain off all that yummy meat juice into a measuring cup. Add like a cup and a half of it to a sauce pan with like half a bottle of red wine (375mls I guess), add a few sprigs of resebary and cook down until it's like a shotglass worth (3ish ounces I think was my yield, {yeah I'm mixing measurements, what are you going to do about it.}). You want it thick, but not burnt, be careful, the last bit goes fast. Also throw in some chicken demi you have laying around to bump up the flavor too.

Once your sauce comes together, time to sear off your ribs because they look grey and ugly coming out of the tepid puddle machine. Cast Iron and high heat will do the trick. I used a flame thrower to finish the bone end since I couldn't get a good sear there because of the shape.

Plate with a little spoon swoosh of the sauce. Cut in and see that even though it was cooked 3 days it's still pink in the middle. Marvel at science and enjoy.

# ? Aug 12, 2023 02:08

WindwardAway: Aug 22, 2022; Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.

Opopanax posted:

Nooo, my spice mix never got used!

None of mine did, either xD one died with me and the other I didn't give out until the last night lol.

# ? Aug 15, 2023 08:42

Opopanax: Aug 8, 2007; I HEX YE!!!

Grandi posted:

You have combined **Sage, Allspice, Unlabeled Spice, Unlabeled Spice, Unlabeled Spice, Unlabeled Spice, Unlabeled Spice, and Unlabeled Spice** into a **ONE-SHOT** *Wind Tunnel Money Machine*

At night, you may activate your *Wind Tunnel Money Machine* It will perform 6 random actions from all the spices available and the spice blends that exist (actually blended, not exist in theory) in the game. This actions will be performed on random target(s) if it is a targetable action.
You will be informed what spices and spice blends were activated and what the spices that made up said blend. And which spice or spice blend effected which target(s).
Additionally, everyone who was targeted by any of these random actions will be placed in the *Wind Tunnel Money Machine*, all actions each of these players perform in the night will instead target **ALL** players in the *Wind Tunnel Money Machine* instead of their intended target(s).

This is what you all missed out on by killing me

# ? Aug 15, 2023 14:59

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# ? Jun 10, 2024 06:48

Cloacamazing!: Apr 18, 2018; Too cute to be evil

Daaaaaaaaaaamn

# ? Aug 15, 2023 16:49

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > The Game Room > [Mafia] Cookfia 8: Spice and Dice

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