Food In The Fort

These muffins are an exercise in simplicity which will help you attain that ineffable state where all desire and suffering shall be extinguished and you break free from the chains of karmic bondage, finally achieving enlightenment and wisdom.

Oh, alright. So it’s probably unrealistic to expect that from any food but these muffins are pretty tasty. And I’ve been making variations on this recipe, on and off, for a few months now trying to get the perfect vanilla muffin. I don’t think I’m there yet, but these will do. They have a delicate flavor that will go well with your morning coffee and they are pretty easy to make to boot. In fact, if you’re organized, you can probably whip up the batter in the time it takes your oven to preheat.

I also like to think these are versatile little quick breads in that the basic recipe serves well as a base for other muffin varieties. Throw in a handful of blueberries, or chocolate chips or perhaps dial back the sugar and throw in some Asiago cheese and suddenly you’ve got a whole other biscuit. So maybe these muffins haven’t reached nirvana, but when they’re this simple and good who cares? Read the rest of this entry »

This is really old, so forgive me, but I thought that it was kinda cool: our lumpy garlic mashed potatoes recipe got linked to by the WBlog. They did a post on Ross’ from Friends fondness for having his potatoes lumpy and linked to a couple of recipes, ours among them!

At this point I must confess that it is part of my vast ignorance of popular culture that I have never seen an episode of Friends. I have only watched bits of Seinfeld (although I like his wife’s cookbook), haven’t seen the X-files (although agent Scully and I both have an ouroboros tattoo) or the West Wing (sorry, no clever parenthetical for that one). But I have certainly heard of Friends and I even recognized that Ross was a character’s name. See? I’m not hopeless.

So this is sort of like knowing a relative of someone famous. Like the time that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s sister babysat my daughter…

Just because you can’t imbibe in the middle of the day doesn’t mean your crustacean friends can’t. It’s a little known fact that shrimp love their rum. It makes them happy little decapods, and if you make this recipe you’ll be happy too. It’s simple enough that you can make it for lunch with no trouble at all, especially if you do the marinade the night before. It might seem a little steppy for a midday meal, but it all goes together very quickly and took me just about a half hour total. The taste, texture and wonderful aroma will beat the pants off a sandwich and chips any day.

I adapted this recipe from several I found around the net, adjusting the ingredients to our tastes. As I made it, the shrimp have a very strong flavor to them and not everybody likes that so feel free to make your own adjustments. And for heaven’s sake, enjoy it with a small shot of rum. We won’t tell your boss. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know who Patty is, or how she could cram such insane levels of yumminess into one recipe, but her Ricotta and Chocolate Cake recipe is so good that we made it twice in as many days. Of course, when a recipe starts with ricotta cheese, sugar, chocolate chips and not one, but two sticks of butter you pretty much know right away that you have a winner.

Catherine made the first instance of this cake for the students she advises in the International Student Organization meeting at Canterbury School. After sampling it for breakfast, and then seeing the way it was devoured by the students we decided we absolutely had to make it again for ourselves. Despite our springform pan deciding to suddenly fall apart just before putting the cake in the oven (don’t worry — all was saved) it was not a decision we regretted. Read the rest of this entry »

We both grew up in the Cooperstown, NY area. Now, if you’ve ever been to Cooperstown, you know it’s a very small town surrounded by even smaller towns and lots of fields. Sure, there were a few smallish cities not too far away but in general Cooperstown is the epitome of small town America. Small towns have a lot of advantages, and we both have fond memories of growing up in one. However, if you’re looking for ethnic cuisine, then you’re probably not going to find it in a small town. After all, Cooperstown didn’t even have a Chinese restaurant until the early 1990s (and then oddly, all of a sudden, it had two).

Which is why one of the things we really value about living in Fort Wayne is the large array of ethnic dining to be found. We both love trying new things, plus we’ve found that if you really want to learn about a culture the two most direct routes for doing so are through its music and its food. So, as you might imagine, we were delighted to read about the opening of the Ethiopian Restaurant a few months ago and wanted to visit it right away. As things usually work out though, one thing led to another, and “right away” ended up being four months later. Honestly though, after tasting Ethiopian Restaurant’s food, we’re sad we waited so long. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a wonderful recipe taken from Madhur Jaffrey’s brilliant cookbook. If you like Indian food and you don’t own this cookbook, stop everything and go buy it now! Ms. Jaffrey calls this “simple buttery rice with onion” (p. 149 of my ancient edition), but I have nicknamed it “1-2-3-4 rice” since it helps me remember how much of everything to use (although I have to cheat on the “1″ since there’s one onion and one tsp of salt).

You’re gonna love it!

1-2-3-4 Rice

Ingredients

• 4 Tbsp unsalted butter
• 3 cups of water
• 2 cups of rice
• 1 medium onion
• 1 tsp salt

Preparation

1. Melt the butter in a heavy pot over a medium flame.
2. When hot, put in the onion. Stir and saute it until it is almost translucent; do not let it brown in the slightest.
3. Put in the rice and the salt. Stir and saute gently for a minute.
4. Pour in the water and bring to a boil.
5. Cover tightly, turn heat to very, very low and let the rice cook for 25 minutes.

Serves 6

Oh, Bisquick, is there anything you can’t do? Whether it be your namesake quick biscuits, hangover-easy chocolate chip pancakes, or any one of your myriad of Impossibly Easy™ creations, Bisquick seems to be the baking mix of a thousand recipes. Except everything comes out with the taste and texture of Bisquick. This browine recipe I found on the web is no exception.

Now don’t get me wrong; I love Bisquick. It’s an essential ingredient in any bachelor’s apartment or hurried household’s pantry. In fact, if you don’t have any Bisquick in the house, I recommend you run out right now and buy a 5lb. box. Believe me, it’ll last you forever and assuming you have eggs, water and milk on hand you’ll never be at a loss for a crumbly bread-like side or dessert. Just resign yourself now to the fact that you will never make anything with Bisquick that quite resembles whatever-the-hell it’s supposed to be. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, Leo and I have had two very good dinners which were easy to assemble (one was especially easy for me since Leo made it by himself!) yet not the usual heat-and-eat fare that we often resort to on week nights. These meals left us asking, “Why don’t we do this more often?” To which I respond, “Cuz we’re stupid.”

Anyway, dear reader, I’m sure that you’re not stupid and you’ll want to make this recipe and Leo’s hearty crockpot fish stew over and over again. We love this shrimp dish (from the Thai: Simple and Delicious Easy-to-Make Recipes book by Lesley Mackley) for its sweet and spicy sauce and because one out of two children at my house will eat it. You can put it over 1-2-3-4 Rice or just serve it with instant rice or bread. Read the rest of this entry »

The upgrade of Food In The Fort from Wordpress 2.3.3 to Wordpress 2.6.2, including the Freshy 2 theme and all plugins (at least those I planned on upgrading) is now complete. Overall, this was a pretty smooth upgrade. Not at all as nightmarish as some of the Drupal upgrades I’ve done. There were a couple of problems which I’ll note below, and there’s some further backend stuff I want to do, but for now I’m calling it quits.

The first problem of note is that the WP-Print plugin is not displaying the little “print me” printer icon anymore although it upgraded successfully. If I recall correctly, when I first installed this plugin I had to make a small modification to the Freshy 2 theme in order to get it to work correctly so tomorrow or sometime soon I’ll go ahead and take a look at that. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m going to do a long overdue upgrade of Food In The Fort from Wordpress 2.3.3 to Wordpress 2.6.2 starting now. While FitF should generally remain available, you might expect a good deal of wonky behavior if you visit the site as I’ll be disabling plugins and moving back and forth between the default Wordpress theme and the Freshy 2 theme that FitF uses. Hopefully this won’t take too long, and I’ve done a full backup in case of disaster. I’ll post when the upgrade is complete. See you on the flip side.