Hot Cocoa To Serve Fifteen: or, Winter has finally arrived

Winter is coming in! The grocery stores are stripped, people are panicking, and everyone in Texas is worried that the power will go out again. All the bars and restaurants are extraordinarily crowded, which suggests to me that everyone wants to get some human contact in before the roads are iced over.

Hot Cocoa for Thirty 1¾ cups boiling water ¾ cup cocoa powder 1¾ cups boiling water (again) 2½ cups sugar 1 tbsp vanilla extract To make the syrup: You're really going to need a double boiler (or a mixing bowl set over a saucepan) for this one-- you can't just cook it directly on a stove burner no matter how low you set the dial. Place the first portion of boiling water in the top of a double boiler (or a heatproof mixing bowl). Sprinkle the cocoa powder on it, and whisk thoroughly. Add the second portion of boiling water and beat well. Cook over simmering water for one hour. Whisk it occasionally, scraping any hard cocoa deposits that form on the sides of the bowl. Don't worry if it looks burnt on the edges; the cocoa is merely dried and will be just fine after mixing it back in. Mix in the sugar and cook for another thirty minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat, allow to cool, and add the vanilla. If desired, pour it through cheesecloth to strain out the last little lumps of cocoa. To serve: Add two tablespoons of syrup to ¾ cup hot milk. (You can just microwave the milk in the mug.) Add more syrup if desired. To serve thirty: Scald six quarts of milk, beat in the syrup, and serve at once. Unknown book or pamphlet clipping, probably 1930s-1950s Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

The last big freeze was awful, but this one stands to be worse. Texas' power grid (or what passes for a power grid, anyway) now has a lot of AI datacenters weighing it down. Closer to home, I was a little amused to see that absolutely no flour remained in the baking aisle. It's very optimistic to think we'll all be able to bake our way through the frost on Texas power.

With all that said, we're making hot chocolate in case we get to have a blackout-free freeze.

This comes from my great-grandmother's recipe binder. Clippings like this make me wonder about her. Did she often take charge of the kitchen in the church basement? Or did she have company over a lot more often than I would have expected? (For those who don't recall, I've been informed that she was "a cranky old woman who didn't like children" which doesn't indicate someone who would voluntarily become famous for her hospitality.)

I was going to make the full amount until I measured out the sugar and thought of the grocery budget. This recipe calls for two cereal bowls of it. (Well, it is meant to serve thirty.) Since I didn't want to use half a bag of sugar in one night, I decided to make cocoa for fifteen.

To repeat, the full recipe uses two of these.

The recipe tells us to put our cocoa powder into the water and "let stand undisturbed until moistened." I guess that's to prevent kicking up a cloud of cocoa dust when stirring. I was going to obediently let this sit undisturbed, but that mound of powder would have taken all night to finally get wet. I nudged it with a spoon and let it remain undisturbed for a minute after that.

After a bit of short mixing, the recipe basically tells us to leave this on the stove for an hour. (I assume this is meant to really draw out the flavor from the cocoa powder.) So this is perfect for setting on the back burner while you're cooking other things.

I absolutely refused to babysit this for an hour. Instead, I left the kitchen and only came back and stir it occasionally. The bowl developed dark rings of half-dried cocoa powder in my absence. I know it looks burned on the edges, but keep in mind this is a double boiler. The cocoa didn't get hot enough to burn, it merely dried out.

At the end of the time, our cocoa was almost but not quite syrupy. Assuming the recipe was going right, it next needed a small mountain of sugar.

When I tried a bit on a test spoon, I was amazed at how chocolatey this was. And we weren't done steeping the cocoa over simmering water.

This got surprisingly thick during its last thirty minutes on the stove. You can really tell when looking at the drippings from the whisk I periodically stirred it with.

I didn't see the point of pouring this through cheesecloth (nor do I have any). But after just a few seconds, a dark sediment settled to the bottom of our cocoa. I suppose if you really can't stand that, you can strain this through cloth. I decided to skip the extra fretting.

And of course, what better way to serve our hot cocoa than with gingersnaps!

I tasted this and thought "This is very weak." It's like when you've reached the end of a bottle of chocolate syrup and try to force one more glass of chocolate milk out of it. So I added enough syrup to make our drink properly chocolatey. Then I was absolutely delighted. This was so rich that I didn't even mind the mean serving size. One small cup is perfect.

Incidentally, I also tried serving this cold, thinking "Well, we basically made chocolate syrup." But it just didn't taste very good. This is meant to be hot cocoa. We know that foods often taste bad when you serve them at the wrong temperature. (Just look at how bad our eggnog was after freezing it.) So I'm not debunking the recipe, just noting that (as is often the case) you should serve it at the temperature that it says.

In closing, here are some handy preparation tips from someone who mostly survived the Great Texas Winter Blackout. I'm not bothering with any advice that involves shopping. Panic buyers have probably already stripped the grocery stores.

• First, wash things while you've still got electricity to run the machines:
• Do your laundry. All of it. Wash your bedsheets because if everything else is going wrong, a fresh clean bed feels so, so good. Wash all your rags so you have a clean stash ready to wipe any messes that arise before electricity returns. And of course, don't forget to clean your clothes!
• Clean your dishes, especially if you use a dishwasher instead of doing them by hand. You don't want your last pre-blackout dishes to slowly ferment while you wait. Even if you don't mind doing dishes in the dark, sometimes the sink won't drain right until things melt.
• Wash yourself! Take a good, long shower. If the water goes out, you want to start the next few days feeling fresh and clean.
• Find the biggest bucket or pot in the house and fill it with tap water. We lost our tap water because our local water plant does not have emergency generators. Don't let it happen to you unawares.
• If your kitchen sink is on an outside wall, open the cabinets under it so that warm air can drift past the pipes. Also, leave the faucet on a slow drip, even if the sound gets annoying.
• Charge all your internet-y things.
• If you have candles or oil lamps or suchlike, get them out and put them where you'll want them. And don't forget to dig out the matches or lighters! Put them right next to the candles so that you don't need to rummage for them in a cold dark house.

Well, good luck everyone! I'd love to chirp that following these easy steps will make blackouts a breeze, but I didn't believe that long enough to type out that sentence. But at least things won't be so bad. And who knows, maybe we'll all be fine and simply put all our candles away until next time.

The Flavor: or, Here comes 2025!

We at A Book of Cookrye are giving 2024 the sendoff it deserves: with questionable cocktails from Tumblr!

The Flavor 1 can Cranberry Mike's Harder 1 bottle cucumber-lime Gatorade Pour the two into the same glass. Serve and contemplate how peculiar it tastes.

 

Did you know they make cucumber-lime Gatorade? I sure as heck didn't! I thought cucumber-lime would make a better lotion scent than Gatorade, but then again I never liked Gatorade. 

I could get into the measurements and all that, but that seems quite inappropriate for the recipe at hand. Instead, I just held one bottle in each hand and poured. I was surprised at how dominant the cranberry's color was. Like, the green Gatorade barely changed the color at all. 

I have to admit, I was super hyped for this bizarre flavor experience. I wanted to experience the strange. I wanted to taste the ineffable. But instead I was like "This tastes like church punch." 

If you've ever been to a Sunday children's social where they poured Hawaiian Punch and Sprite into a large bowl, you already have a good idea of what this tasted like. Except this also had undertones of cucumber. And I don't mean it tasted like artificial cucumber flavoring. I would have believed anyone who told me that the water had cucumber slices floating in it. 

I should note that when drunk on its own, the Gatorade merely tasted like Gatorade. You couldn't detect any cucumber until you mixed it with the cranberry. I also want to point out that it was a lot better with the alcohol in it. Maybe you have to be slightly schnockered to think Gatorade is any good.

I didn't finish my drink. But since I chose the wineglass, I filled it with Diet Coke and felt slightly classier for it. Well, we can't run away from the New Year, so may it be full of, um, flavor!

Snowcoa!

 If you're in lovely Ottawa, you'd look outside and think that it's the perfect weather for a barbecue.

 

We at A Book of Cookrye have been indulging in two of our favorite winter hobbies: driving with car heater turned up high enough to wear short sleeves and sandals in spite of the freeze, and making tasty treats with snow.

A few years ago, a new liquid sugary delight hit gas stations everywhere: frozen hot chocolate. A lot of us joked about how silly the name was, but it seems I'm nowhere near the only one who decided the stuff is actually really good. I used to agree with the snarks who were like "Don't you just mean chocolate milk?", but you have to admit that if you make hot chocolate from a packet and get it cold, it tastes different than if you made chocolate milk.

Hot chocolate mix and just enough hot water to dissolve.

 

And so, we reach the magic moment! I'd figured I'd just make really concentrated hot chocolate syrup and pour it out like snow-cone syrup. However, I failed to realize that snow-cone syrup generally isn't boiling hot. Therefore it doesn't cut through the snow on contact.

 

Our snow may have deflated to nearly nothing on contact with hot chocolate, but it's still really good. I think even the most refined people who have spent years making their tastes "grown up" have a few cheap things they like. You know, the sort of foods that are only guilty pleasures because you feel guilty that your tastes aren't "grown up" enough. Anyway, hot chocolate made from a mix (especially with those weird desiccated marshmallow globules) is one of mine.

Stay warm, everyone! 

Girly Wine Things: Rhubarb Sangria

Did you know wine goes rancid? We at A Book of Cookrye didn't, but then a bottle someone gave us started to smell foul. Therefore, we at A Book of Cookrye decided to drink the wine left over from the boozy pork chops before it had time to turn into depressing vinegar.
However, we do not like wine. So the next time we had company over, we decided to simultaneously use up the wine and the rhubarb (apparently it's always "rhubarb" and never "rhubarbs") lurking in the freezer from the Pieathlon. Taryn at Retro Food for Modern Times suggested in the comments we use the rest of it making Rhubarbaritas from Splendid Table. If we use wine instead of tequila, does that make it more of a sangria? Well, we have wine already, so whether it's a sangria or just wine with training wheels, we're drinking it!

Rhubarb Sangria 1 c water ½ c sugar 5-7 oz rhubarb* Wine (red wine if you want it to be a really nice sangria color, though white will probably make a really pretty pink) Make the rhubarb syrup ahead: Boil the water and sugar until dissolved. Reduce heat and add the rhubarb and any juices that came off of it. Gently boil until the rhubarb is reduced to threads, then cool. Wet a thin rag or shirt, then drape it over a bowl. Pour the syrup into it, then take it up and twist the shirt so the rhubarb is well contained. Squeeze it until you've wrung out as much as you can into the bowl. When you want a drink, pour half syrup and half wine over ice. *This doesn't make much syrup, so up the amounts if you want to either keep it on hand or make a large bowl of sangria.

Boiling rhubarbs!

We tried some of the syrup as it boiled, and it tasted exactly like jamaica tea. Also, all the color went right out of the rhubarb, leaving a heap of sad brown stuff.

However, we now had a tiny little puddle of lovely magenta syrup! It really tasted like hibiscus tea. If you live near a grocery store aimed at the Spanish-speaking market, get a bag of dried hibiscus petals from the tea section and you can make this a lot faster and without this business of straining things through a rag.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't like the color.

The consensus: It's a girly wine drink. However, it's a really good girly wine drink. If rhubarb grew here, we'd make this more often. As it is, we have plans to make jamaica sangria because it'll probably taste exactly the same.

Invigorating Hump-Day Quickie: Bananacafé!

We at A Book of Cookrye are not morning people. It takes drastic measures to make us get up when the sun is still out. While we have at long last accepted that as long as we live, we will forever be night owls, the rest of the world does not reschedule itself for our convenience.

We need a bigger cup.

However, now that we are in college, we, like the rest of the adult world we are pretending to pass for members of, turn to coffee. Unfortunately, no matter how hard we try, black coffee tastes like bitterness and sadness had a baby and liquefied it.

Bananacafé  4-6 tbsp instant coffee (or twice/thrice what the label says will make one cup)* 1 c water 4-6 tbsp powdered milk† Sugar to taste 1 ripe banana Ice Mix coffee, sugar, water, and milk powder, put over medium heat, and stir until dissolved (it'll probably be ready around when the water gets lukewarm). If persistent lumps of undissolved milk powder remain, the blender will deal with them. Put in blender with the banana and ice. *You could properly brew coffee instead, but were you really going to get up earlier just to wait for the coffeemaker to finish? †We went with powdered because, after it kept expiring on us, we no longer buy milk. Besides, you won't know the difference once it's blenderized with everything else.

Don't stint the ingredients. No one ever woke up on watered-down coffee.

This is what the sweet feeling of about-to-be-awake looks like.

Tada! It's a good source of potassium and calcium! Also, in a short time, you'll be able to put up with morning people even if you're not. If you're like me, you'll imagine the Popeye the Sailor Man theme playing as you drink it.

As I said to someone stupid enough to do so in person, do you really think it's wise to call me out for drinking coffee on training wheels when I just woke up?

Have a good rest of the week!

The Limoncello's Done, or True Love Waits Patiently for a Miracle

Ever wondered what 3 months of waiting looks like?

Limoncello 1 (750 mL) bottle of vodka Lots of lemons (12 or so) 3 c sugar 3 c water Peel the lemons. Put them in the vodka and leave it in a cool, dark place for 4-6 weeks. Strain the vodka. Make a syrup of the sugar and water, add it, and leave it for a another month or so.

We at A Book of Cookrye featured a lot of cutting peels off of lemons because Mike made limoncello. After 3 months, it finally finished sitting in the back corner of the closet.

Why on Earth does it look greenish?

And... it turns out he was right to do so! This is amazing! It tastes like spiked lemonade only even more so. If you have the space in the back corner of some cabinet or closet to leave a bottle to sit for a while, you should try this. Happy Friday, everyone!

It's snowing!

We at A Book of Cookrye are having meteorological troubles.



Yes indeed, the world is covered in beautiful fluffy glitter that makes driving impossible. There were a lot of snowball fights. I saw some people playing in the snow right outside my building and jumped into the picture thinking they were neighbors. Turns out they don't live in my building or anywhere near me, but now they have pictures with someone who looked like this.

Being cold is for other people.

At any rate, we were super excited to make snow muffins with actual snow!

They're just giving the stuff away!

They were slightly lumpy but still delicious. As excited as we were to make them with proper snow, they might be better made with sleet.

Magical winter muffins!

And what might one have with snow muffins? Snow tea, of course! Production was slightly hampered when the snow shrank a lot while melting.

Fortunately, since there was so much of it outside (for free!), we easily brought in more.

That's not cloudiness in the water, that's winter magic. It's the fairydust that lets an entire heaping skillet of snow fit into one really tiny pot.

All of that snow is in this one cup of tea. It's concentrated winter wonderland.

Stay warm, and be careful if you have to drive on ice!

Limoncello, or Patience is a Virgin (who waits for alcohol)

Happy Friday from all of us at A Book of Cookrye! Today we're going to Mike's kitchen to start something that will take a month. You see, Mike (who has been here twice previously) went to Italy over the summer to visit his relatives. Naturally, having had the privilege of having Italian food made by Italians and liking to cook himself, he brought home a lot of really good recipes. Or so he's claimed- I haven't seen any of them. However, what stood out to him the most out of his entire visit was alcohol. Therefore, the first thing we're making (well, starting) is limoncello. He has really fond memories of the stuff, so much so that he bought all these lemons to peel. I've never had any, but he's just so excited about it.

He actually did most of the peeling himself before I got to his domicile.

Here I must unpin my hat so I may remove it to Mike. I have made little secret of my store-brand and clearance-bin buying ways. However, Mike has outdone me in that field by finding store-brand vodka.

Since you're doubtlessly wondering, it doesn't sting like the cheap stuff but you wouldn't feel guilty mixing it with things.

The lemon peels are to be soaked in vodka for a whole month in a cool, dark, place. If they didn't apparently have the same problem with sunlight that I do, I'd have left them out on the table as a decoration.

However, like me, the sun is evil and does them no favors. Therefore, they went into the closet. Meanwhile, Mike and I feasted on the last of my brother's wedding cake from last April. By which I mean the last of it that we didn't see in the freezer when we sent the massive leftover hunks of it to his apartment.

It looked better the day of.

The limoncello-to-be is in the closet, and we'll see what happens in a month or so!

Hump-Day Quickie: Far-Out Green Smoothies, or Now we pay for Christmas leftovers

We at A Book of Cookrye are now facing the consequences of Christmas. We suffer not from the shameless face-stuffing on Christmas Day, but from the weeks of delicious, delicious leftovers. Anyway, we're going to attempt to reverse what we did to ourselves and--- oh, who am I kidding. Every time I think of sticking to a diet I get existential depression at the thought of a long life without cake.
However, this slice of vintage diet recipes seemed really tasty in its own strange way. Besides, this is the recipe with the shortest instructions I think I'll ever put up.

Far-Out Green Smoothies 4 large lettuce leaves 1 peeled orange 2 parsley sprigs 2 packets artificial sweetener Crushed ice Put in blender. Add water if it's too thick to blend. Source: 1972: The Retro WW Experiment

This doesn't look so bad, actually.

I do want to credit my parents, who upon my leaving home at the end of break said I could help myself to whatever foodstuffs I wanted. Short of "I deposited it in the bank today" or "the package should be there in a day or so," is there anything more gratitude-inducing to one's ears than "help yourself to the food"? At any rate, that is where everything in today's recipe aside from the parsley comes from.
Speaking of, I've never eaten parsley before ever. It's always been the thing on the side of the plate that everyone knows you're not suppose to eat lest you expose yourself as uncultured and severely déclassé. Upon biting off a leaf, it's surprisingly pungent and seems to do as much good for one's breath as mint. The next time someone tells you not to eat the parsley sprig on a plate, especially after the garlicky spaghetti with extra garlic, ignore them. You may be a philistine, but unlike the highly high-minded naysayers, you're more likely to snog someone later.

This seems to be the makings of a perfectly good salad. Therefore, like anyone dizzy from dieting, we're going to put our salad in the blender someone left in the kitchen and drink it. I've often wondered what the appeal of putting salads in a blender might be. A lot of people I know do it and call it "juicing." The best answer I've come up with is it disguises when your vegetables are wilted and sad yet not expired enough to throw them out. I myself saved the inner leaves that hadn't gone droopy for salads and used the ones that were kinda brown at the edges for this.
I can see how it'd be convenient to have your salad in a glass which you can have on the go. However, any time-saving anything hinges on being able to leave your dishes later. Communal kitchens being what they are, I do not have the luxury of saying I'd wash up later tonight as I ran out the door. At any rate, this was too thick to blend without stopping every five or six seconds to stir it. It likely would work better in a food processor, but we are restricted to what appliances have been abandoned in the kitchen.

Slight aside: now that I think about it, I have no idea why the dorm is provided an ice machine. A lot of us are grateful, but I don't know of any other school that puts one in each dorm, for free.

Thick enough to hold up a spoon.

Honestly, the Far-Out Green Smoothie wasn't just mildly tolerable, it was really good. I'd deliberately make it again. The parsley definitely added a slight pungency that made it a lot better. Since fresh parsley is surprisingly cheap, it's totally worth adding.
However, in full disclosure, the original recipe says it's supposed to be 2 servings. But let's be realistic here- that essentially means making a meal of two lettuce leaves and half an orange. I think the recipe writers thought the same. Given that this would become a sad runny mess if you try to save the other serving for later, if you were really only supposed to have one serving at a time they would have listed the ingredients at half quantity.

Hump-Day Quickie: Lavender Lemonade

You know, all those hump-day quickies can make one thirsty. This may be a bit strange, but it's really tasty.

Lavender Lemonade ½ c sugar 1 tbsp dried lavender flowers 2 c water ¼ c lemon juice Mix lavender, sugar, and water. Bring to a boil, stir if sugar's not dissolved, and take off heat. Let steep at least 10 minutes, or just let it sit until the water's cool. Strain it, then stir in lemon juice. Dilute if you think it too strong, but if you're pouring it hot over ice you may want to make it stronger instead.

You may be wondering where the heck you'd get lavender flowers. I got them at the middle-Eastern store that has figured so prominently in the making of older English recipes. They have them with all the other spice shakers.

Since I like adding lavender flowers to tea already, I was curious one night how lavender lemonade would taste. (Bottled lemon juice made this a lot faster.)

Lavender can join dates in the list of things I think look like will sprout 6 legs and crawl away.

Lavender tea is surprisingly brown.

The lemon juice just makes it cloudy.

Like I said, I wondered how lavender lemonade would taste and decided to find out. And... it's pretty tasty. The taste is definitely unexpected, though. Lavender and lemon go surprisingly well together. The combination tastes a little like one, a little like the other, and mostly like something completely different.
If you make it for others, you'd definitely want to tell them what's in it beforehand. You'll skip everyone staring at the glass like it howled at them and asking "What's in this?". I made this for some friends and the consensus was that it's good, but it does take a little getting used to.