kitchenmage

Pesto Rolls

Over at A Year in Bread, one of my other playgrounds, I just posted my recipe for the current round of "summer breads": Pesto Rolls. Made like a savory cinnamon roll, but with baguette-ish dough, pesto and Parmesan, these are great for summer picnics where slicing and buttering is a hassle but plain bread is boring. I absolutely adore these things and start making them every summer as soon as I can get my hands on basil. Read the rest and get the recipe here. I also put up a flickr set of action photos taken while making them...and clutching a camera remote in my teeth. (yes, really)

totally OT (but funny)

One of the other places I write is a place called Gather.com where my column, the kitchenMage's Apprentice is published twice a month. Gather is carving itself a niche somewhere between social networking and blogging with a smidge of "rewards" style revenue sharing* thrown in. (you get points for stuff and points eventually equate to gift cards or cash)

It's an interesting mix of folks and the topics cover a lot of territory. I have been doing a bit of non-food writing there lately (I was silly enough to write an "Ask the feminist" open question piece. Oh my!) and it has been a lot of fun.

A couple of days ago, I wrote this rant about plastic surgery that has gone too far called "How Do you tell a friend..." and it's currently featured on the home page! (Okay, so I excite easily, but it's the first thing like this I've written for publication in a while and I'm happy.)

Should you decide that Gather looks like an interesting place and want to join, I'd be mighty grateful if you would click on this little link so I get a referral...hmmm, whatever it is we get for one of those. Join me at Gather.

I now return you to your regular food blogging, already in progress.

question for my non-US readers

How do you measure ingredients for recipes?

I have been trying to include all of the useful variations on measurements in my recipes lately but there are so many options! Did you know that there are US, Canada, and metric "cups"? How is that even supposed to work? I can't recall ever seeing "cup (Canada)" in a recipe and I used to live right next to the place. Maybe it's because there is only a smidge of difference (about a third of an ounce vs Europe which adds over an ounce and a half!) but still. (and is it a "Canada cup" or a "Canadian cup"? like the geese are Canada geese, not Canadian geese - although some of them may live there...at least in the summer.)

...but i digress...

Back to measurements.

Having the Internet literally at my fingertips, I thought I would go look at a mass market site like the BBC to see how the Brits do it and discovered that they have only weights. US as well as metric, but still, only weights.

Hmmm.

Does everyone in Europe have a kitchen scale? Are they issued at birth or something because a lot of folks over here, including myself, have been proselytizing kitchen scales for a while now and the adoption rate is kind of slow.

Figuring that I might want to look a bit deeper for clarification, I went to Chocolate and Zucchini. Um, not so much. While Clotide is any number of great things, consistent does not seem to be one of them. I loaded half a dozen yummy sounding recipes and gave up when I found one with grams being translated to ounces on one line and cups on the next. (one might ask whose cups but that's just asking for trouble) In fairness, several sites later I am asking for your advice from the trenches, so all of Europe may have something to answer for here. (I do have a few new recipes from C&Z to try so I'm happy enough with that.)

Further along my clickstream I found all sorts of amusements, most of which turned out to be ephemeral since my computer hung in the middle of it and they went poof. Ah well, such is the nature of the 'net.

I am coming closer to the conclusion that I should go with converting dry volumes to grams and wet volumes to milliliters, but since I insist on including US weights, can I do less for people who want to weigh their liquids? Is it a problem if I have four columns of measurements? Does anybody know what time it is? Does anybody really care? (does anybody get that reference or am I just old?)

Tools: Hooked on my spatula

Maybe I excite too easily, but I just noticed the coolest thing: my spatula has a hook to keep it from sliding into the bowl! I am sure they have made these for years and I've been too busy cooking to notice, but wow, what a difference this makes. The bowl the handle is leaning of the edge of in the picture is HUGE and I am always fishing spoons out of the half-made bread dough they slide down into. Ugh!

But no more! I discovered this wonderful little hooker (that'll get me google hits) and now my gooey troubles are over. Want one? Run over to Amazon and snag your very own spatula of wonder.

Next thing: can someone tell me how many years ago they started making the little tipout things on the front of the sink cabinets? You know, the ones you are supposed to store sponges and stuff in. I figured out they existed a couple of years ago and the first tow people I mentioned it to looked at me like I had been offplanet for decades. Have they always been there?

I feel so oblivious some days.