OMFG! Awesome Carrot Ginger Soup from Cook's Illustrated

I got the latest issue of Cook's Illustrated in the mail yesterday and saw a recipe for carrot ginger soup.  I love carrot soup but haven't found a recipe that I like yet.  This one looked appealing since it contained both fresh and crystallized ginger, but was really light - no cream or meat, and only 2 tbsp butter.    The secret CI ingredients were the crystallized ginger and a bit of baking soda and vinegar (not at the same time), as well as some carrot juice. 
You can watch a short video over at Cook's Illustrated.  I was so obsessed that I made it tonight.  I mostly followed the recipe, except I used olive oil instead of butter, and, since I am lazy and just have a regular blender and not a juicer, I used some carrot puree in place of juice.
There is also a recipe for croutons, and they suggest serving the soup with the croutons, sour cream and chives, but you don't really need to bother because you will be too busy inhaling the soup to care about the other stuff.  You can forget about side dishes too.  I'm not kidding.  I really like carrots, and I really like ginger, and this soup is just about perfect for me.  In fact, it is the best carrot soup I've ever had.  The lack of milk, cream, or broth really helped the soup, because the flavor is pure carrots and ginger.  For this reason, I'm going to suggest that you use olive or vegetable oil instead of the butter.  I used sweet onions and that worked well.  If you use a carrot puree and don't strain it, you soup will be slightly less smooth. 
The baking soda helps soften the carrots so you don't have to cook them as long.  They didn't discuss the vinegar but I assume it is to neutralize the baking soda once the carrots are done.  The carrot juice serves to give it a fresher flavor than you;d get from broth or just plain water. 

OMFG!!- Awesome Healthy Carrot Ginger Soup

2 tbsp olive oil
2 onions (preferably sweet onions), diced
1/4 cup crystallized ginger, chopped
1 tbsp minced fresh ginger
2 cloves garlic, chopped
salt and pepper
1 tsp sugar
2 lbs carrots, peeled and sliced into 1/4" slices
1 1/2 cups carrot juice (I just used a puree and didn't strain it)
4 cups water
2 sprigs fresh thyme
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tbsp cider vinegar

Combine olive oil, onions, garlic, gingers, 2 tsp salt, and sugar in large soup pot and cook over medium heat, stirring often, until onions are softened but not brown (5-7 minutes).  Add water, carrots, 3/4 cup carrot juice, thyme, and baking soda.  Increase heat to high and bring soup to a simmer.  Cover and reduce heat.  Cook until carrots are tender but not overdone (20-25 minutes).
Remove thyme sprigs.  Working in small batches, puree soup in blender until very smooth.  Return pureed soup to pot and add remaining carrot juice and vinegar.  Bring to a simmer.  Add salt and pepper to taste.

The gift that keeps on giving

Joe and I have been dating for a year.  We're not extreme anniversary celebrators, but Joe won a gift certificate to a local bakery so we decided to get a cake, and since the one year mark was coming up, we decided to get the cake this past weekend.
This is the first time I've ever ordered a cake, or purchased one from anywhere other than a grocery store or Costco.  I ordered a chocolate raspberry cake and picked it up yesterday.  It is in my fridge and is very pretty.  Alas, Joe picked up a stomach virus and had to spend the rest of the weekend on the toilet or on the couch.
Joe was glued to the toilet and at his request I ended up going out and buying him a tube of diaper rash cream.*   Nothing but the finest anniversary presents here...
Two days later, Joe was feeling well enough to eat cake.  We had some, then a few hours later it was my turn for the stomach bug...and the butt paste.  Sigh.

Cook's Illustrated Gluten-Free Multigrain Sandwich Bread

 I've been baking my way through the Cook's Illustrated gluten-free cookbook, but I hadn't baked any of the breads yet, mainly because of time but also because I didn't have the secret ingredient, which is psyllium husk, aka the active ingredient in metamucil.  However, my grad school friend Adam recently messaged me asking for a gluten-free bread recipe to use for his chemistry of cooking class, and that spurred me to order some powdered psyllium.
I was feeling a little guilty about blogging recipes from the book, but when I went to go find a recipe for Adam, I saw that CI had sent copies of the book to several gluten-free baking bloggers and they had already blogged some of the recipes, so I stopped feeling guilty.
The first recipe I tried was the chewy multigrain bread.  It contains sunflower seeds and gets its multi-grain from a hot cereal mix (Bob's Red Mill Mighty Grains) - this is a CI trick that they used in their regular bread recipes.  I had a pack of the hot cereal mix and really didn't like it so I wanted to use it up.
I made one loaf last night, and it was tasty but very dense.  It is cold in my kitchen and it didn't rise enough.  (Also, my yeast is kind of old.)  Today I made another loaf, because I am a geek and also because it is 15F here today.  Joe and I were going to pull out the smoker and smoke some beef and pork, but the forecast changed and instead of being in the 40's it is butt cold...too cold to smoke.  Not too cold to be a baking geek and make another loaf of the bread.  I kept everything the same, but let it rise a lot more. This time it was a lot less dense, although no one would ever describe it as fluffy.  It has a nice, bready flavor and makes good toast. 

Gluten-Free Chewy Multigrain Bread

11 1/2 oz GF flour blend (appx 2 1/2 cups)
4 oz Bob's Red Mill Mighty Tasty hot cereal mix (3/4 cup)
1 1/2 oz (1/2 cup) dried milk powder
3 tbsp powdered psyllium husk
1 tbsp instant or rapid rise yeast
1 tbsp baking powder
1 1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs
2 tbsp honey
2 tbsp oil
1 1/2 cups warm water.
 2 tbsp sunflower, sesame, or flax seeds 

In a stand mixer using the paddle attachment, mix dry ingredients until blended.  Beat eggs and add water, oil, and honey.  Mix to blend thoroughly and then add in several portions to dry ingedients.  Mix at low speed until blended, and then increase the speed to medium and mix for 6 minutes.  Mixture will resemble very sticky cookie dough.  Add seeds (if desired) and mix to blend.
Spray a 8"x4" loaf pan with vegetable oil spray.  Place dough in pan.  Wet your hands and press dough gently into corners and smooth out the top.  Wrap foil around the outside of the pan so it makes a tent about 1" or 2" above the top of the pan.  This will keep the load from spreading too much or overflowing the pan or sticking to the plastic wrap.  Place a piece of plastic wrap over the top and let rise in a warm place until it is appx 50% larger (CI said it takes an hour, but it took about 2 hours for me.) Don't bake it too soon unless you want a dense loaf.  Preheat oven to 325F.  Spray or brush loaf with a bit of water and bake 1 1/2 hours. Rotate the pan about halfway through the baking process.  The bread is done when it is golden, crust is firm and loaf sounds hollow when tapped.  Let bread cool in its pan for 10 minutes, then remove it from the pan and let it cool on a rack for 2 hours, or until completely cool.

Bossy Bitchy Biddy

If you've spent any time on Facebook or the internet recently, you may have heard about Sheryl Sandberg's "Ban Bossy" campaign.  If you haven't, the basic premise is that 'bossy' is a gendered criticism that is mainly directed towards girls, making them hesitant to express their opinions or take on leadership goals. I don't always agree with Sheryl Sandberg, but as a current and former bossy person I think this is a wonderful idea. 
What I like about it most is that, unlike virtually all empowerment suggestions for girls and women (including a lot of Sandberg's book, "Lean In") the onus to change is not put on girls, but on their parents, relatives, teachers, and society as a whole.  This is definitely preferable to the "U R doin it wrong" advice that is typically geared to women.  It's not that hard.  Stop calling little girls bossy, and don't use "bossy" to discourage the same behavior in girls that is encouraged in boys. It's a small thing, but an important one.
As you might expect, there has been a lot of objections.  Some people suggest that rather than "banning bossy", we should embrace it.  I'm fine with this in theory, and I'm fine with people choosing to describe themselves that way.  But it is difficult to fully reclaim words that have been previously used as an insult, and it would still have a gendered connotation.  I can proudly describe myself as a bossy bitchy biddy (incidentally, all those words have a negative gendered connotation) but I've had a lifetime of socialization telling me that I don't want to have other people describe me as bossy or bitchy. 
I have more to say about bossy, about microagressions and tone arguments, and the double standard I encountered when working in one group at my former job, but I will leave that for another time.

Cook's Illustrated Gluten-Free Flour Blend

I bought the Cook's Illustrated gluten-free cookbook recently.  In the ads, they hyped their flour blend recipe as being the best thing since sliced bread.  I was a little dubious but their track record is pretty good.  Anyway, I made their flour blend, which isn't too obscure or pricy, at least by gluten-free standards.  It has brown and white rice flour, tapioca starch,  potato starch and a little bit of non-fat milk powder.  From there, I tested the chocolate chip cookie recipe and the waffle recipe.  These are things that I haven't been able to replicate very well.  Much to my surprise, they both came out really well.  As in, 'I can't believe it's gluten-free!' well, even though I took some liberties with their flour recipe (see below)  Even more surprising, the recipes were actually less full of special tricks than the average Cook's Illustrated recipe.  So I am going to share the flour blend recipe, but I do recommend buying the book if you're going to be doing a lot of gluten-free baking.  It is awesome and I am looking forward to trying more recipes.

For the flour blend, they recommend using Bob's Red Mill rice flours.

Gluten-Free Flour Blend
24 oz white rice flour (4 3/4 cups, or a standard size pack from Bob's Red Mill)
7 1/2 oz brown rice flour (1 2/3 cups)
7 oz (1 1/3 cups) potato starch
3 oz tapioca starch (3/4 cups)
3/4 oz (3 tbsp) non-fat dried milk powder

Whisk all ingredients together well.  Store in a ziplock bag.

I have a confession to make - I didn't totally follow their recipe since I was running low on a few things.  So I used more like a half and half mix of brown and white rice flour, and a little bit less potato starch and a little bit more tapioca starch.  Even so, the recipes came out better than any other gluten-free recipes I've tried, even ones using pricy flour blends.  So I'm going to guess that the relative proportion of rice flours to starch is important, but the relative amounts of brown vs white rice flour, or tapioca vs potato starch, are less important.  The milk powder is important since it helps with browning and contributes protein. 

Musings on Lego Chemist

Missy and Kadin gave me a little Lego scientist figure.*  Her name is Dr. Bodin, which reminds me of the Bohdan automated weighing station I used to use.  She has brown hair, glasses, and is wearing a purple shirt underneath her labcoat, and is holding two flasks.  In short, she looks a lot like me except she actually is wearing a labcoat and is holding flasks rather than Schlenk tubes or sticking her arms in a glovebox...or at a desk writing proposals and advising students.  (Note to self: make a Lego glovebox sometime)  Note: I did not mention that Dr. Bodin is a woman.  This fact is not that unusual in the world of real life scientists, and it wasn't even all that noteworthy 25 years ago when I first stuck my arms in a glovebox.  However, it is extremely unusual in the sausage-fest world of Legos.  Dr. Bodin had her debut a few months ago, and it was noteworthy enough that I, a cranky old childless biddy, knew about it from both feminist websites, Facebook, and Chemical and Engineering News.  It is 2013.  There should've been lots of female Lego figurines doing lots of different occupations, about 30 years ago, or whenever they started selling all the custom Lego pieces.
Today when we were shopping Missy said she would've had trouble dealing with the princessy crap if she had a daughter rather than a son.  I agree 1000% on that sentiment, but the toys geared to boys are not free of gender stereotypes, and I told her so.  Perhaps I notice it a lot because I do not have kids and only get exposed to it a few times a year, or because I work in what is still a male-dominated field, even though women have been going to grad school in large numbers for at least 30 years.  I get cranky about the Lego sets with one or no female characters, and the fact that Dr Bodin is still newsworthy.  I get cranky that the token Lego woman in Kadin's new Lego set is a princess locked in the tower, and that when Kadin asked me to play Legos with him he assumed that I would want to be the princess and put up quite a fuss when I said I wanted to be the wizard instead, and gave the princess some agency other than just being rescued (more on that later).  I go "WTF?!?!?" when the practically all the cartoon characters in the They Might Be Giants kids science video are boys.  I raise my eyebrows at the few female Skylanders characters, who, although they are all badass honey badgers, are all small and cute, whereas all the male and theoretically gender neutral characters can be big or small, ugly or cute, and are always assumed to be male even when they are something like a robot. 

I know that toys are more gendered now so that retailers can sell more stuff, and kids love to self-identify with a group, whether it is by gender, interest, or whatever, and so naturally they want the stuff with the targeted marketing that they have been inundated with since birth.  I know that many people view it as mainly harmless.  I am not so sure.  To me, it's kind of akin to junk food versus somewhat healthy food.  Sure, kids are going to prefer the junk food but that doesn't mean they should get a steady diet of it all the time.  I don't think it should be forbidden, either, just get a balance.  Even if the majority of Lego players are boys, that doesn't mean that every single interesting character should be male.  Perhaps if they included some interesting ones more girls would be interested in Legos, or, barring that, Dr. Bodin would not make the news and I would not have to give Kadin lessons on feminism, which he shouldn't need in the first place because of the good example of his awesome mom.  I can give similar examples of girls' stuff that is equally cringeworthy.   Even if the majority of kids who play with a toy are one gender or another, I don't think the toys, especially the middle of the road ones like soccer balls, Legos, or animals, should be targeted they way they are. 
Why do I care about this, you ask.  I don't have kids. It's the 21st century.  Women have made huge inroads in the workplace, even in the years since I started grad school.  Well, it all comes back to Dr. Bodin, the Lego princess, and 25 years of "2nd generation sexism" I've dealt with in the workplace.  This is the subtle kind that people deny still exists, but most women experience in the form of some blatant stuff and thousands of microagressions, which are like death by a thousand paper cuts, be they in the form of reduced pay and professional opportunities, a constant stress about one's weight and looks, the second shift of working full time and doing the majority of the housework/childcare, or in countless conservative politicians launching attacks on women's access to birth control and health care.  These things make me cranky, and I am worried that all the subtle influences kids are exposed to from birth will continue to set us back.*
Anyway, back to Dr. Bodin and the Lego princess.  When Kadin and I were playing with his Lego set, I was the princess and the evil wizard.  I forgot to include Dr. Bodin, unfortunately.  Kadin was the knight and various other characters.  The princess told the knight that she did not want to be rescued, that she was in grad school learning alchemy from the evil wizard.  It took a long time to convince the knight to go away.  I turned the narrative around a bit and was pleased with myself about that.  But, upon reflection later, it would've been even better if I had made Dr. Bodin the professor and the evil wizard a member of the princess's thesis committee.  Like everyone else in this country, even the cranky old feminist biddy is sexist at times, and it is humbling to realize that. So that is why we need more Dr. Bodins, so that 40 years from now, the women of Kadin's generation are not fighting the same microbattles that my generation naively assumed were history 25 years ago.

*  It's really quite astounding how much sexism persists in chemistry, even though things are a lot better than they were 20 years ago.  I've seen the female faculty candidates get subjected to much more critical assessments than the male ones, even though all of the obviously bad ones were male.  Over on ChemBark, which is a bit of a chemistry gossip blog, there was a post about who got hired for faculty positions last year.  That's not noteworthy in itself, but some of the comments degenerated to a discussion about various female faculty members and how they were so undeserving of the jobs they got, to the point where the commenter suggested that the faculty members got their jobs due to their parents' influence.  Seriously.  It was just ridiculous that the commenter had tracked down that information and actually believed it.  Fortunately, other commenters issued a pretty complete smackdown.

Gluten Free Pumpkin Ricotta Cheesecake

I'm on a completely non-ironic pumpkin spice craze, despite the fact that I have not consumed any pumpkin pie or pumpkin spice lattes this year.  Although I do enjoy a pumpkin-spice latte once or twice a year, this is sort of a new thing for me.  A few weeks ago, I made some pumpkin butter, which really looks more like pumpkin poo. That was my gateway drug.  I started putting it in my oatmeal and really liked it, so I made more.  Then I used some of it in pancakes, and liked that as well.  My neighbors had a fall-themed potluck, so of course I had to make a pumpkin cheesecake.  And of course it had to be gluten free...After much perusing of recipes online, I decided to make one with a mix of cream cheese and ricotta.  I have sentimental reason for doing this, and I happened to have ricotta. 
When I was a kid, my mom liked to make cheesecake.  Once in a great while, if she had to take it to a potluck or something, she pulled out her recipe and made one with all cream cheese and that nice sour cream layer on top.  That was awesome.  Most of the time, if it was just for us, she would take a bunch of cottage cheese, eggs, sugar, and lemon and put them in the blender and use that as the filling. She didn't use a recipe, but the overall proportions are something like this recipe.   Once in a while she would add a brick of cream cheese, but usually she didn't.  Sometimes she did this when she got discounted cottage cheese which was nearing its expiration date.  Anyway, as a result, these cottage cheese cheesecakes are my point of reference for cheesecake, even though I also love the richer all-cream cheese ones. I found a recipe for a pumpkin ricotta cheesecake online, but then proceeded to make major changes to it.

For the crust

1 1/4 cups ground almond flour
3/4 cup gluten free flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 tsp almond extract
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup butter, melted
1 egg yolk

Preheat oven to 350F.  Melt butter and let cool.  Beat in egg yolk and add vanilla and almond extract.  Combine dry ingredients and mix. Pour wet ingredients on top and mix.  Press into bottom and sides of a 9" or 10" springform pan.* Bake until crust is lightly browned and has started to set.

For the filling
1 lb cream cheese, room temperature
2 cups ricotta
5 eggs
1 cup brown sugar
1 15 oz can pumpkin
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
3/4 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp cloves

 I used both a mixer and a blender here, but you don't have to.  I wanted to get the ricotta and pumpkin really smooth.  Unfortunately I still had a few small lumps of cream cheese since my mixing bowl is tall and narrow, and some lumps got left on the bottom.  Anyway, whip up cream cheese until no lumps remain.  Add ricotta, eggs and sugar and dry ingredients and blend well (or puree ricotta and pumpkin in blender with eggs, and then add.to cream cheese mixture).  Pour into springform pan.  Place springform pan ina large roasting pan and add boiling water up to appx 1/2 the height of the springform pan.  Bake at 350F until it is set.  I think mine took about 1 1/2 hours.  Allow to cool to room temperature before putting in fridge.

I really increased the amount of filling relative to the original recipe.  If I make this again I will use a 10" crust.  As it was I had a little bit of extra filling which I put into a glass loaf pan and baked.

Anyway, it came out well.  It was creamy but not grainy or heavy.  It was very popular at the potluck.  If I make it again I will up the sugar a bit (maybe 25% more) and also increase the spices.