So here on Eating Your Feelings, each week honors a new feeling with recipes for the food you eat when you feel the need to eat said feelings. And today is really unique because we have the good fortune to have two really intriguing consecutive holidays in our midst – Valentine’s Day is tomorrow and Friday the 13th happens to be today. So if you’re feeling unlucky, or you’re feeling in love, or both, this show has something in store for you! This afternoon, this EPIC afternoon, in honor of both holidays, we will explore the ways to eat through feelings of love and bad luck as it relates to love. Yes, it will certainly be epic…or more like Epic…curion. Yes, yes, that is a pun. Perhaps it is bad. But did you know that BAD PUN happens to be abbreviated in my mind as “bun”, and I find buns delicious, so it looks like the jokes on you.
No, sorry about that, today we talked about feeling in love and feeling unlucky in love and featuring some thematically-appropriate recipes, including ones for molten chocolate lava cakes, jam-filled scones, and lemon chickpea stir-fry. Now, if you’re thinking “WOAH THERE. SLOW IT DOWN, that list is mighty overwhelming! And I will agree with you but only for the moment. But! No worries, I will explain each one with care and tenderness, just as I would want these recipes to treat me.Recipe for Molten Chocolate Lava Cakes
Ingredients
6 (1 ounce) bittersweet chocolate squares
2 (1 ounce) semi-sweet chocolate baking squares
10 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups confectioners' sugar
3 large eggs
3 egg yolks
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons Grand Marnier
Directions
Preheat oven to 425°F Grease 6 (6-ounce) custard cups. Melt chocolates and butter in the microwave or in a double boiler. Add flour and sugar to chocolate mixture. Stir in eggs until smooth. Stir in vanilla and Grand Marnier. Divide batter evenly among custard cups. Bake for 14 minutes. Edges should be firm but the center will be runny. Run a knife around the edge to loosen and invert onto dessert plate. Top with vanilla ice cream or raspberry sauce.
So one particular reason why Valentine’s is such an appropriate holiday for the show to talk about is that Valentine's Day began as a feast day, believe it or not, of two different Christian martyrs named Valentine. Now I don’t know how that became the disjointed crazy it is now, but I think one of the continuities can be found in the fact that Valentine’s Day, for some, like myself, is still very much a Feast Day. It’s actually the 4th biggest holiday of the year for confectionary purchases, following Halloween, Easter, and Flag Day. Just kidding. That last one is actually Christmas, and not Flag Day. So one of the most popular candies floating around this time of year is the Conversation Heart, that chalky little nuggetofhumor. And this candy goes way back in time to the Early American Colonists who started the tradition of making homemade candies with love notes scratched into them. The New England Confectionary Company (now Necco) expanded on this idea and created the conversation heart in the mid-1800s. and in 1860, Daniel Chase, brother of Necco founder Oliver Chase, invented the process to print motto candies. The candies were originally not in the shape of hearts, but in the shapes of cockles- small, scallop shaped candies wrapped in paper with sayings printed on the paper. In 1900, candies with sayings inscribed directly on them were invented and called Sweet Hearts. Originally the sayings were rather long, but over time they became shorter and more to the point, such as "Be Mine." “My Man” and “Call me”. In the years immediately following these new phrases, requests were made to the company for additional, more responsive phrases, including “No Thanks”, “Washing Hair”, “Not You”, “It’s Me”, and “Stop Winking”.
Recipe for JAMMERS!
Ingredients
| 2 | cups all-purpose, unbleached white flour | |
| ½ | tsp. salt | |
| 2 | tsp. baking powder | |
| ½ | tsp. baking soda | |
| ½ | cup unsalted butter, cold | |
| ⅔ | cup low-fat buttermilk | |
| ½ | cup jam or fruit preserves: raspberry, strawberry, cherry, or apricot |
Directions
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
- In a large bowl, mix together the dry ingredients. Cut butter into dry ingredients with a knife (or your fingers) until the mixture is crumbly like cornmeal, leaving some large pieces of butter as well. Pour buttermilk into bowl with dry ingredients and stir with a fork, just until the dough comes together. If necessary, add more buttermilk.
- On a floured surface, gather dough into a ball, then roll it out into a ½-inch-thick circle. With floured biscuit or cookie cutters, cut out biscuits. Press together any scraps, then roll out and cut remaining biscuits.
- With the back of a floured spoon or your thumb, make an indentation in the center of each biscuit. Spoon a teaspoon of jam into each indentation.
- Place jammers on a large baking sheet — with an extra baking sheet placed directly underneath to avoid burning the bottoms of the biscuits — and bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until lofty and golden brown. Serve warm.
Love is a beautiful thing. It’s idealistic, all-consuming, confusing, unintelligible, and never, ever easy. Then why do we insist on seeking it out in almost all our stories and movies and songs and art and poetry and friendly neighbors? We are a culture obsessed with love. We like it pure and simple – with fireworks and European cities and surprise rare metal jewelry. We think about it when we’re little in terms of family and wedding rings and dances with teenagers, and then as we get older, it becomes more and more practical and still more and more mystifying. What’s more, it starts to come down to that issue of luck and unluck. There are lucky people who find their soulmates easily, who recognize love as the feeling they want it to be and they also usually go to vending machines where they get two bags of Doritos when they only paid for one. The unlucky people get discouraged more easily, maybe they meet the wrong people too many times or maybe what they want or expect of feeling in love is not what they’re ready for. Oh, and they also paid for that first dangling bag of Doritos. And for those people, well…today’s your day to change it all up. I firmly believe that luck is very relative, unless it’s about the McDonald’s Monopoly game, and in that case, it can’t be relative because NO ONE CAN WIN THAT GAME!! But in all other cases, like they say in Batman, “you make your own luck.” And if you are able only to trust very little in this world, please trust the writers of Batman. Why?! Well, they WROTE. BATMAN. I don’t know how I can be more clear.
Recipe for Lemony Chickpea Stir-fry
Ingredients:
2 tablespoon ghee or extra-virgin olive oil
fine grain sea salt
1 small onion or a couple shallots, sliced
1 cup cooked chickpeas (canned is fine, if you don't want to cook up a pot of dried chickpeas)
8 ounces extra-firm tofu
1 cup of chopped kale
2 small zucchini, chopped
zest and juice of 1/2 a lemon
Directions:
Heat 1 tablespoon of the ghee/olive oil In a large skillet over medium-high heat and stir in a big pinch of salt, the onion, and chickpeas. Saute until the chickpeas are deeply golden and crusty. Stir in the tofu and cook just until the tofu is heated through, just a minute or so. Stir in the kale and cook for one minute more. Remove everything from the skillet onto a large plate and set aside. In the same skillet heat the remaining tablespoon of ghee/olive oil, add the zucchini and saute until it starts to take on a bit of color, two or three minutes. Add the chickpea mixture back to the skillet, and remove from heat. Stir in the lemon juice and zest, taste, and season with a bit more salt if needed. Turn out onto a platter and serve family style.
Serves 2 - 4.
Stir-fry is THE MOST romantic food preparation technique you will ever encounter. I promise. You may disagree, say “well, I don’t know about that. What about…hey what about…?” What about what. “Well, what about something you get to use your hands with, there’s that thing that gets your hands really engaged…?” I don’t know. You must be thinking of PLAY-DOUGH. Just, just, listen, okay? TRUST ME on this one. Simple equation, okay, stir-fry equals most romantic…times 3. Because have you heard vegetables in a stir-fry together? They make friends real fast, I’ll tell you that. They’re rubbing all on each other, getting their flavors all mixed together, they start lettin’ off steam. They are making each other sweat. Pure vegetable juice sweat. And then, AND THEN, now this part you have to be PRETTY ASTUTE to pick up on it, but if you’re really quiet, you can even hear them whispering sweet nothings to each other. You think, “nooo! That’s sizzling!” Well, Bless your naivetee. Probably better off you didn’t hear them. Zucchini has quite the vivid imagination. It’s really disgusting, if you ask me. And Kale is so easily swooned by all that gush, she’s just fainting left and right, passing out on top of all the other vegetables. It’s like a bad, bootleg, kitchen-version of Moulin Rouge or any Woody Allen movie, only you can smell it. …I guess that makes Woody Allen the Zucchini, huh? Oh dear, I’m gonna try my best here.
Zucchini: I, I, I, I don’t know why…but…but you are the most beautiful, sexy, SEXY thing I’ve ever sat here with. Ever. In my whole entire life, I…I…I…can’t think of a better, more sexual, sexy piece of vegetable. Are you cut special? You…you…go to the gym. Everybody goes to the gym!
And then Kale comes on, played by some beautiful blonde 3 generations younger and 4 generations more attractive than Woochini Allen. And Kale’s all:
Kale: Hey, how’d you learn to talk like that? You could make a lady wilt with that kind of talk.
Zucchini: I, I…I.
Kale: Mind if I get cooked next to you?
Zucchini: Not at all, not at all. You…you…you want to go to the movies sometime?
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