ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

So last month I didn’t have much going on and I managed to somehow scrape together a blog entry every single day of the month.  This month I have so much going on that I haven’t felt like I really had the time to sit down and write about it.

We’ve settled on August 8 to be married at the courthouse, since the numerical significance of this date was so appealing that my boss allowed me to have the day off even though we’re not really supposed to take days off before the middle of the month or so.  The day after that, we’re having a reception at his aunt’s fancy’s condo here in town.  It started out as a rather small affair and by now has grown to be bigger than I originally imagined.  But today I finally got the invitations all mailed and am keeping my fingers crossed that I didn’t forget anyone.  At least that part is over with.  I still have some more things to do.  His dad’s wife wants me to make a decision about flowers, which I’ve been deferring since I more or less have no idea what I am doing in that area.  I also want to get the house cleaned up so that when we go on our honeymoon another week after the wedding, we’ll get to come home and have it be tidy and welcoming.

I’m looking forward to it all coming together, but I’m not sure why women get so excited about planning their perfect wedding.  This crap is a lot of work, and most brides aren’t even planning to cook much of the food themselves.  Frankly, I’m a little surprised more people don’t opt to throw a crock pot of beanie weenies on a card table and call it good.  If we did this thing for real, it would be ridiculously expensive.  Luckily, we get the space for free and we’ll be doing most of the food ourselves.  A couple months ago we weren’t even planning to have a party, and at this point we’re having a reception for family and friends.  So it’s mushroomed a little.  But I have no expectation of things fitting some nebulous standard of perfection.  Yes, I am going to be that bride who probably buys some of the wedding food at Costco.

But I did successfully test the cheesecake recipe pictured on the cover of The Best Light Recipe, which was the first light-cooking book I purchased when I started Weight Watchers.  I have never cooked a dud from this book, although the recipes tend to be rather time-consuming.  That’s probably why they are good.  The cheesecake was a lot of work and frankly, shockingly good.  The remainder is in the freezer right now being tested for its freezability, but perhaps when I pull it out later I’ll remember to snap a picture for my food porn collection. I also tried a new coconut cake recipe, which I made up in my head on Friday and then baked for the first time on Sunday.  We found it to be a success as well.

The coconut failure cake went over rather well at work last week.  When I got home Thursday night I realized to my alarm that I’d forgotten to go back and collect my plate that afternoon, and hoped the housekeeping staff wouldn’t have thrown it out.  I mean, it was like a $3 plate originally.  So you can imagine how attached I am.  When I got back the next morning some mystery person had taken the “EAT ME” note I’d written and scrawled, “Thank you / My friends and I licked the platter clean.”  This was faintly surprising to me, since I found the icing barely tolerable and the cake forgettable at best.  But I was cheered by these tidings and resolved to discard the recipe in my book entirely and make up my own coconut cake recipe.  I also decided to make things much easier on myself and use a cake mix as the base.  From scratch?  Who gives a shit when the wedding is less than a month away now?

So my second effort at coconut cake was much more satisfactory.  I elected, as I usually do, for an icebox cake, since for some reason I love cold cakes.  This one turned out light and fluffy where the other cake was short and dense, the new topping I made was cool and refreshing and not at all cloying, and the cake looked much nicer when all was said and done.  It was good enough that I’d like to experiment in the future with replacing some or all of the oil with pureed fruit, but I didn’t want to mess with it when I needed to get this recipe workable on a deadline.

Basically, I looked up a lot of coconut cake recipes online.  They ranged in complexity, but one thing that confused me was that a lot of them did not actually contain any coconut ingredients in the cake itself.  Which I thought was weird, personally.  So I decided that the easiest approach would basically be to make a white cake mix according to the package instructions, but replace the water with coconut milk and add some shredded coconut to the batter.  Then I’d make the topping with coconut flavorings as well and call it good.

Reinventing the Coconut Cake

• 1 18.25-oz box of white cake mix
• 3 egg whites
• 1-1/4 cups light coconut milk
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 1/2 cup shredded coconut

• 1 4-serving size box of instant vanilla pudding, sugar free and fat free
• Around 1 cup light coconut milk (supplement with skim milk if topping is too thick)
• 1 8-oz tub fat free Cool Whip
• 1/2 cup shredded coconut

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Prepare the cake mix more or less according to the package instructions, replacing the water with the coconut milk and stirring in the half cup of coconut at the end.  Bake in two layer pans greased with nonstick spray.  Mine broke up a little when I turned the second layer out of the pan, so you may want to consider cutting circles of parchment to put in the bottom of the pans.  Bake according to the package instructions until done and a toothpick comes out clean.

Cool the cakes on a wire rack for around 10 minutes before turning out of the pan onto the rack to cool.  Let them cool to room temperature.  If either layer got a little mauled coming out of the pan, make it into the bottom layer.

To make the topping, combine the pudding and the coconut milk in a large-ish bowl and beat on medium speed until the mixture thickens.  When I made the cake, I had some extra coconut milk in the fridge so I used 1-1/4 cups in the topping.  But if you want to just buy one can of coconut milk for frugality’s sake, I recommend dividing it roughly in half and supplementing it with skim milk to make the needed 1-1/4 cups for both cake and topping.  Clear as mud?

Stir the cool whip into the pudding mixture with a spoon or spatula until well blended.  Place the bottom layer on a plate and top it with some of the pudding mixture (I think I iced it about 3/8 inch high).  Sprinkle 1/4 cup of the coconut on top of that and put the second layer on top of it, upside down so that the top of the cake is flat.  Ice the top and sides with the pudding mixture and top with the remaining coconut.

I think this cake is best left in the fridge for a few hours to get very cold before serving, but it certainly won’t taste bad if you eat it sooner than that.  We left it in the fridge loosely covered with plastic wrap since this past Sunday and it has still tasted good every day between then and now.

Last weekend we drove up to Des Moines to visit my boyfriend’s mom and sister, and also to see his aunt and uncle, who live about a block away from his mom.  There is this one particular rest stop on I-35 on our way up there, which has an Iowa visitor center and a dog trail and other nice things and it is very fancy and we always stop there.  We don’t stop at the Missouri one just past the state line.  It really isn’t nearly as good.

On our way back this weekend, we did pass the Missouri one and my boyfriend commented, “Hey, I guess that rest stop has buffaloes going for it.”  Thinking he meant real buffalo were over there near the rest stop, I turned, shocked. It was a series of flat metal buffalo shaped cutouts.  So people going by on the highway can see buffalo silhouettes, but there aren’t actually any real bison hanging out.

I told him I thought at first he meant real ones and that it kind of freaked me out because buffalo aren’t safe.  It spawned this kind of interesting conversation.  Now, I-35 is a north/south bound highway, so in general it probably doesn’t have that much traffic from people who aren’t at least vaguely familiar with the buffalo.  If we’d been on I-70 or I-80 I might think it was more likely we’d get some furrners who weren’t from our parts.  But regardless, there are probably at least some people who go to the rest stop who don’t know that buffalo aren’t just unusually big cows.  People who don’t know that buffalo have to be kept behind eight inch steel barriers because of their horrific brute strength.  People who don’t know that they cannot be killed by conventional means.

And if people like that saw buffalo at a rest stop, they might just go up to them all playful like and then wind up being killed by a rampaging animal.  That’s why they have to keep silhouettes there and people just have to imagine the buffalo instead of actually seeing them for real.

So we are having a reception at my boyfriend’s aunt’s place next month sometime and I elected to do a dessert reception, which sounded good because we can basically just make a lot of the stuff ourselves and serve coffee and iced tea or something like that. At least, that sounded good to me.

This weekend while we were up in Iowa with his mom and sister, I watched a program with his mom on the Food Channel, which is basically a show dedicated to the noxious turd chef Bobby Flay, who seeks out amateur chefs and does his best to demoralize and humiliate them as much as possible. If they make a traditional hog roast, he has to one-up them by tacking “chipotle” on to it. I think he is basically a terrible person and I hate his egotistical steamroller campaign of cooking terror.

But anyway, one of the episodes of this show was about coconut cake, and this was this nice guy from the Carolinas who made a great looking coconut cake and Bobby Flay burst this poor man’s coconut cake bubble and anyway, coconut cake just started sounding awfully good to me. I found a recipe for a coconut cake in one of my cookbooks and I did a test run of it tonight and it was an utter failure as far as I was concerned. I was really disappointed. It didn’t rise well, the texture was too dense, and the icing recipe was frankly disgusting. It was one of those boiled sugar icings where you whip the caramelized sugar into beaten egg whites and it was pretty dreadful.

I’m going to leave it in the break room at work (without my name on it) and hope that it gets cannibalized by the unsuspecting, because while the cake itself is not so awful as it could be, it certainly isn’t worth the calories. So if I want coconut cake, it’s back to the drawing board. I may make a trip to the library tomorrow or Friday night and see what I can find. On Saturday my crafty friend and I are going to test the cheesecake recipe I have to make sure it will work out okay. So maybe I’ll be able to test another coconut cake then. I hope I’m not just screwed because my countertop oven situation is not ideal.

Here is a picture of my depressing cake.

Last night I deliberately did not blog since I had completed my NaBloPoMo obligations for June and it was the first night in 30 days that I felt I did not have to do anything.  But it felt odd not to think about topics, and even odder still to wake up and not have written anything the night before.  “Oh, there isn’t anything to read this morning,” said my boyfriend when I came out of the shower today.  We’ll be out of town from tomorrow night on through the weekend for the holiday, but I’m hoping that regardless of that, the habit of writing more frequently will have stuck with me.  If it feels somehow wrong not to be writing, that’s a good thing.

Tonight we had a meal that I have been looking forward to all week.  I’m not sure why I like it so much, since it’s basically a soupy fish casserole, but we’ve made it several times and I always feel great anticipation whenever we plan to eat it.  It is also pretty easy to make, which I think is nice.  I was so excited to eat it tonight that I forgot to take a pretty picture of it before we dished it up.

Panko is a type of super crunchy Japanese bread crumb, usually available in the Asian foods section of grocery stores that carry it.  If you can’t find panko crumbs, you can still make your own bread crumbs or use store-bought.  I just think they are terrific because they have close to half the calories that regular bread crumbs do, plus they crisp up much better in my opinion.

Ingredients

• 4 stalks of celery, chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/2 pound button mushrooms, sliced
• 1/2 tsp Old Bay seasoning
• 1 tsp lemon pepper seasoning
• 1 to 2 tsp canola oil
• 1 10.75-oz can cream of shrimp soup
• 1/3 cup milk
• 2 tbsp sherry or wine
• 3/4 cup panko crumbs (reserve 1/4 cup)
• 8 oz package imitation crab, lump style (or real, if you care to pay for it)
• 1/4 cup reserved panko crumbs
• 1/4 cup shredded parmesan cheese

At some point during this process, preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Chop up the celery and slice the mushrooms while you are heating the oil in a skillet over medium-high heat.  If you like, supplement the oil with some nonstick spray.  Mince the garlic, too.  I like to mince up the leaves from the celery stalks while I’m at it, and I think it gives a nice bright flavor, but if that isn’t your thing, I certainly understand.

When the skillet is hot enough, add the celery and mushrooms and cook them until they begin to release their moisture.  Add the garlic (and celery leaves if you used them) and sprinkle the Old Bay and lemon pepper (I use the Lawry’s kind) over the vegetables. How long you saute everything depends on how crunchy you prefer the celery.  Taste some of it.  If you will be able to stand it at that texture in the casserole, it’s ready.  Continue to give the skillet a good stir every couple minutes while you prepare the other ingredients.

Whisk together the soup, milk and sherry in a large bowl.  Stir in 1/2 cup of the panko crumbs and all of the imitation crab.  In a small bowl, stir together the parmesan and remaining bread crumbs.  Coat a 9 inch deep dish pie plate with nonstick spray.

When the vegetables are cooked to satisfactory tenderness, add them to the large bowl and stir to combine.  Turn the mixture from the bowl into the pie plate and top it with the crumbs and cheese.  Bake the whole thing for 25 minutes or so until the bread crumbs are toasted and the entire mixture is hot and bubbly.  I usually serve it with a side salad and crusty bread or rolls.

I found this list on a blog I read, which in turn was tagged to fill it out by another blog.  Apparently it’s a list of books from the BBC website, which polled site visitors of name their favorite books.  I copied it directly from the other blogs, and at first I was thinking to myself how it’s pretty obvious this was a popularity contest, since a couple of volumes I consider undeserving, such as The Time Traveler’s Wife and The Davinci Code are on it.  Then I chanced to look at the list as it appears on the BBC website, and was surprised to learn that the two lists are completely different.  They have probably at least 50% of their items in common, but neither of the two books I just mentioned are even there on the official list.  How baffling.  I noticed that the second list features a lot of Terry Pratchett novels.  Also, both my boyfriend and I thought it was odd that The Twits was on the list instead of James and the Giant Peach.

If I had to pick some books that I think should be on there instead of, say, Bridget Jones’s Diary and the loads and loads of Terry Pratchett (no offense to Pratchett), I would submit: The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, and Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer.

The ones I’ve read are underlined.  If I started it but never finished, it’s there in red.

The List I Found First (38 read, although 37 really since #33 and #36 are redundant)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (one of my favorites)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (don’t know what this was doing on there)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (isn’t this part of #33??)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (ok, why is this even on the list?)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (all of them??!)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (this is one of my all-time favorites)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (does this belong on here?  seriously?)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

The “Real” List (Scored 36)

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie