Guys. How good is guacamole? Like so good. Guacamole is more delicious than ten tiny tin dragon statuettes used for table top gaming. I’m serious here.

My constant dilemma, throughout the course of my entire life, has been that store bought gucamole is teh sux. This was compounded by the fact that no human being could possible fabricate this ambrosia with the mere sweat of their brow (and presumably avocados).

Well imagine my surprise when, just like roasting a red pepper, guacamole is embarrassing simple. I’m going to give you two recipes here, below is the first:

• Avocados

Cut the avocado in half, remove the seed, and scoop the flesh into a bowl. Mash up the avocados with a fork. THAT IS IT. The ancient Mexican secret of guacamole has been unearthed from the equatorial bowels of Mexico.

Or you can be insane and follow this guacamole authentico recipe. It is trés authentico.

• 4 ripe avocados, peeled, seeded
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 ripe, medium Roma tomato, seeded, diced — i used a handful of cherry tomatoes
• 1/2 cup minced sweet white onion
• as much jalapeño as you feel comfortable with — i used 1/4 of a pepper
• 4 Tbsp fresh lime juice
• salt and pepper

I also added:

• so much garlic I thought I would die (5-10 tsp)

Mash all this up in a bowl and you’ve got delicious guacamole. Again, as is the theme with stuff I make, this recipe is extremely forgiving. Just throw in what you have laying around or what moves you.

WIU data

• Was the recipe easy to follow: This is easier than Suze’s pancakes. Don’t listen to her. SHE IS A LIAR.
• Did the dish taste good: Of course! Avocados are the gods’ ovaries. How could they not taste good. Furthermore how could any of their byproducts not taste good?
• Would you make it again: Yes, yes, and yes. I wish I had an avocado tree so bad.

Pancakes are kind of like dessert, only it’s a main course and you eat it in the morning. So therefore, since these guys paled in comparison to the dessert I did make this week, and since whole wheat pancakes are much more applicable to this blog than Peach-Cornmeal Upside Down Cake, Whip It Up is getting pancakes this time.

My friend Tasneem came to visit (more like “blew into town”) and said “Tomorrow for brunch we need to make these whole wheat pancakes I found on CooksIllustrated.com.” Cook’s Illustrated Dot Com is the best $19.95 I spend all year. It’s like a giant database of amazing stuff from America’s Test Kitchen. Everything is tested within an inch of its life and a lot of it is pretty easy to make.

So while Tasneem slept peacefully on my couch on Saturday morning, I made these pancakes, and she ate them.

Whole Wheat Pancakes
(copied faithfully from Cook’s Illustrated. I didn’t need to change a thing)

Note: I used my powdered buttermilk blend instead of going to the store to buy regular buttermilk, and it was fantastic.

(Cook’s Illustrated’s pithy comments begin now:)

1. Mix dry ingredients in medium bowl. Pour buttermilk and milk into 2-cup Pyrex measuring cup. Whisk in egg white; mix yolk with melted butter, then stir into milk mixture. Dump wet ingredients into dry ingredients all at once; whisk until just mixed.

2. Meanwhile, heat griddle or large skillet over strong medium-high heat. Brush griddle generously with oil. When water splashed on surface confidently sizzles, pour batter, about 1/4 cup at a time, onto griddle, making sure not to overcrowd. When pancake bottoms are brown and top surface starts to bubble, 2 to 3 minutes, flip cakes and cook until remaining side has browned, 1 to 2 minutes longer. Re-oil the skillet and repeat for the next batch of pancakes.

WIU data:

• Was the recipe easy to follow: You mix one thing and then add another. It could not be easier.
• Did the dish taste good: Delicious, topped with some FOR REAL maple syrup. (The People should never ever buy FOR FAKE maple syrup).
• Would you make it again: I want to make it every day.

Alas veggie burgers. Why do veggie burgers always have the consistency of toothpaste? In my ongoing quest to force my wife to consume mushroom and like it I started with this recipe as a base for my veggie burgers. I added a bunch of crap in there so hopefully preggo would consume some nutrients and not know it. Let the story begin.

Here is the base recipe:

• 1 onion, diced
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1/2 tsp cumin
• 3/4 cup diced fresh mushrooms
• 1 15 ounce can black beans
• salt and pepper to taste

To this I added:

• A couple of carrots
• Green pepper

Take everything but the beans and throw it in a food processor. Sautee the mixture in a pan with some olive oil until it gets soft — something like 5-8 minutes.

Meanwhile, thow the beans into the food process and mush them up good. Hey, here is somethign I always do: drain and wash the beans in a collander. I hate the way black bean juice turns everything purple. Once you’ve got the bean paste ready and the veggies soft mix them together into a SUPER BEAN PASTE.

Take the mush, form into patties and pan fry in some olive oil for a couple minutes — until you feel like they’re solid enough to take out of the pan. And therein lies the problem: veggies burgers are always so toothpasty. Sigh. I put some avocados on mine because I am addicted to avocados. Strictly optional.

WIU data:

• Was the recipe easy to follow: Yes, yes it was. Basically you need beans and vegetables mixed together. You could use practically anything. It would be incredibly hard to screw this up.
• Did the dish taste good: eh. I mean it was ok, it is really the consistency that is an issue. Next time I think I would add eggs and some bread crumbs. I’ve got to find a way to STABILIZE THE MIXTURE.
• Would you make it again: Definitely. I am on a quest to make a veggie burger that you couldn’t squeeze out of a tube.

Making sorbet probably doesn’t seem like it’s very people-esque, but it is a whole lot easier than ice cream, and it doesn’t have all that heart-clogging cream. Plus it’s just more refreshing. For this week’s Whip It Up(!), I tried a couple of things, but my variation of this sorbet from Bon Appetit’s July 2008 issue (”Plum Sorbet with Black-Current Liqueur, p. 56) was the bangin’-est. Plus, I think I might stick with desserts, seeing as how they are, in fact, my steez.

I don’t typically read Bon Appetit, I gues because it’s part of the hated Gourmet family (my biases are wildly without reason sometimes), but someone gave me this issue, and PLUM SORBET caught my eye. Plums are my absolute favorite fruit, and I wish I could eat them with everything.

So then I changed the fruit. Well, the recipe said you could substitue pluots (or plumcots, if you’re nasty). What the f is a pluot? It’s a plum/apricot hybrid, and I had happened across it last week at the ol’ local grocer, so I figured I’d try something new and go for it. The result is SO EFFING GOOD. Like SO GOOD. And SO WORTH IT. It makes me THINK IN ALL CAPS. If you don’t have an ice cream maker, borrow one, and get to work.

Pluot Sorbet
(reproduced and adapted from Bon Appetit!, July 2008)

• 1 c. sugar
• 1 c. water
• 1.5 lbs pluots (or, yawn, plums), halved and pitted
• 0.25 c. creme de cassis (this is a black-currant liqueur that you can get at any liquor store and is useful in all sorts of stuff, so is handy to have around. The upside of putting liqueur in sorbet or ice cream is that it makes its shelf life longer, since homemade sorbet/ice cream tends to freeze into a block of inedible ice after a few days. Alcohol, as you know, resists freezing. But it’s certainly “optional,” although you should probably replace it with some sort of juice.

1. (Can be done ahead of time) Stir sugar and one cup of water in small saucepan over medium heat until sugar is completely dissolved. Boil until syrup is reduced to a generous 1 cup, about 6 minutes. You have now made simple syrup! Then stick it into the freezer asap so that it can chill as much as possible. It should be COLD before you use it again.

2. Puree pluots in a food processor until smooth. Push mixture through a mesh strainer set over a large bowl, extracting as much pulp as possible. Discard solids left in the strainer.

3. Stir cold simple syrup and creme de cassis into the pluot puree.

4. Freeze according to the ice cream maker’s instructions (usually just turning on the ice cream maker, pouring in the stuff, then going about your business for like 35 minutes). The sorbet will be very soft. Resist the temptation to try it now, and transfer it to a freezer-safe container with a cover and let it freeze for a few hours. Honestly, overnight is better, but I cant blame you if you want to try it before then.

WIU DATA:

*Every time I go into a liquor store for something like this, I feel like I have to announce loudly at the register that it’s for a BAKING project. “I DONT JUST DRINK AMARETTO AT HOME HA! HA! HA!” is usually what I end up saying, and it is so forced and so awkward, especially when they card me for it and I inevitably drop my wallet.

It’s like midnightish on Saturday, so this will show up on Sunday, but it I’m hoping RA and co. won’t get all heavy on me. I made this on Friday! I just had to guest star on a Bryan Adams cover track all day in a recording studio! NO JOKE! My life is actually that awesome!

Anyhow, Ross and I had a pasta party, as he mentioned, where our spouses humored our enthusiasm (well, Ross’s enthusiasm and my natural bossiness) and waited until 10pm to eat delicious fresh pasta, AS PICTURED:

As you can see, the spouses were well-pleased.

OK but my real recipe entry for Whip It Up is Tiramisu Cookies!

Recipe below copied directly from MarthaStewart.com (cookie of the month, May 2008) with my customizations in italics!

These cookies involve all the best parts of tiramisu — ladyfingers, espresso, chocolate, mascarpone cheese (the most widely-mispronounced cheese in all of cheesedom), and amaretto. And my slipshod success with them reassures me that no matter how much I enjoy making fun of Martha’s dubious grasp on reality, her instructions are pretty sound. I’m a seasoned baker, but I rushed through this recipe so that I could pay more attention to Hellboy, which my husband and I were watching on DVD. A less experienced pastry bag wielder should take their time. And by time, I mean like a hundred hours, because that’s how long these cookies took to make. In fact, just go get some Newman-Os and call it a day.

So Suze and I have joined this cooking contest, Whip it Up, right? Just to make sure we excessively dominate each week we decided to start off BIG. GO BIG OR GO HOME. Last night we got together with the spouses and made pasta, like with our hands. And an old timey machine. Filled with mysterious gears.

Making pasta really isn’t hard and only requires a little bit time more time. Although, it’s definitely something to do when you have a bunch of people lying around — you’ll need the extra hands. The end result was light and delicate and really quite good. But onto my WIU submission from the evening:

Arugula (and basil (with walnuts)) pesto

Now, hey. I tripled (and modified) this recipe I found over at Simply Recipes. Since I am awesome I took the extra pesto and put it in an ice cube tray in the freezer. I’LL NEVER HAVE TO COOK DINNER AGAIN. So just be aware, if you are making pesto for a group of people less than an army, you might want to halve or even third the quantities.

• 3 cups basil
• 3 cups arugula
• 1.5 cups grated Parmesan
• 1.5 cups walnuts
• 15 - 20 cloves of garlic (depending on how manly you are)
• 1.5 cups olive oil (of the evoo variety)

Arugula isn’t for everyone. You could easily substitute and go 100% basil. My arugula this week was from my awesome CSA and, for some reason, was pretty pungent and a little bit bitter. So I decided to go halvsies with sweet basil.

First toast the garlic in its peel (aka put the garlic in a pan with a tiny bit of oil on med/med-low) until you feel like the garlic is pretty soft throughout, you don’t want to burn it though. This will help sweeten the pesto and get rid of some of bite from the garlic. I think if you were feeling up to it you could actually roast the garlic in the oven. After that dump the garlic in a bowl and peel it.

Next toast the walnuts. Seriously I don’t think this is necessary. I mean it might be — toasted sesame seeds are like 100x better than non-toasted.  Up to you.

Next get out your big food processor. Suze had one that blew my mind. Put the leaves, walnuts, and garlic into the processor and “pulse” it while you add in the olive oil. Pulse away until you are comfortable with the consistency — it should be nice and thick. Add the cheese and pulse a couple more times and you are done.

I threw some cherry tomatoes on the top which were excellent. I recommend you do the same.

WIU

• Was the recipe easy to follow: yeah definitely. The recipe, as you can see, is really flexible and ripe for adjusting. Also the whole thing took probably 15-20min. Depending on how far you want to go with toasting the various things you could cut 10mins.
• Did the dish taste good: yes. It was a good idea to cut the arugula. The pesto was fantastically peppery so I can only imagine what it would have been like at 100%.
• Would you make it again: sure — but I won’t be making it for a while now that I’ve got loads in my freezer.