Culinary Consternation
on January 04, 2011
My posts have been nothing but big blocks of text recently, so I thought I’d spruce things up a bit by writing on a topic that lends itself to a couple of pictures: cooking! Granted, the past few posts could have been appropriately adorned with shirtless body shots of myself, but who wants to see those? No, what you want to see is pictures of muffin cups filled with a mysterious brown substance.
But before I jump into documenting my attempts at Paleo-style desserts, I want to issue a public service announcement about a variation to the veggie meatza that I tried today, which was to substitute ground beef with ground pork. Just as a heads up, the recipe really doesn’t work at all with ground pork, so just stick with ground beef. Plus, it’s really hard to find humane pork at most grocery stores, so you may want to stick to free-range grass-fed beef for those purposes alone. (I have a post about lamb meat as a really good Paleo option coming down the pipeline, so stay tuned for that if ethical husbandry has been on your mind recently.)
Although suppose that against your better judgment, you did just splat down 2 lbs of ground pork to turn it into a full-fledged veggie meatza—what are you going to do afterwards? It would be bad form to let your victims—er, guests—leave on the disappointment of your mangled meatza, so the only reasonable thing to do would be to provide a delicious Paleo-style dessert to help them overlook your failure of epic pork-portions. Only, whatever dessert you choose to make, it probably shouldn’t look like this:
If you look closely, you can see all sorts of shapes! Oh look, there's a heart! And there's a pony!
Um, so what happened here? In order to understand this culinary consternation (oh look—I said the title!), we’ll have to go back in time about one week, to the afternoon that produced these:
Wow, your kitchen lighting really brings out the sheen in that frosting!
These were a sorry imitation of the original Caveman Cupcakes by my friend Tracy Jones over at Caveman Eating. If you looked at her blog post, you’ll probably conclude that either (a) she’s just way better at taking food pictures than I am, or (b) my cupcake attempt was legitimately poop-like; in fact, it’s probably a lot of both. But despite the associations in your mind that swirly brown piles may conjure up, my own caveman cupcakes tasted pretty decent. Moreover, the ingredients I had purchased for my original attempt would be enough for many future batches, so at some point down the road, I would have to make them again.
Today was supposed to be that day, but the house was devoid of avocados, which would be necessary to make the chocolate frosting. Being fond of efficiency, I figured I could sidestep this little problem by just making chocolate muffins: these would be just like the original caveman cupcakes, except they would combine the cupcake and the frosting into one. I would make “Chocolate Cavemuffins,” or something like that. Great. But there was one last problem—the kitchen was downstairs, and my computer was upstairs. That’s like… really far apart, so I decided I would just wing the recipe from memory. Besides, if Tracy could invent awesome desserts, I could totally just copy the important parts and invent my own, right?
No.
You see, I simply dumped a bunch of stuff that was reminiscent of the original recipe from Tracy’s blog into a blender/food-processor, and just pureed the mess. I didn’t really care for proportions or measurements, since I figured I would just “feel it out”; besides, cavemen didn’t have standard units of measurement anyway. And so, with some seriously brown batter, I filled a dozen muffin moulds and threw it all in the oven.
With the seductive aroma of baked foods wafting into my nose 20 minutes later, I opened the oven door expecting glory; instead, what I found was twelve collapsed brown… things. I quickly declared out loud that I had produced “conCaveman Muffins,” and that it was my intention all along, but seriously, can any of you baking pros out there help me troubleshoot these collapsed muffins? I did add quite a bit of baking soda, so I’m thinking that’s probably not it.
Nonetheless, I didn’t accept defeat quite so easily—not even when the defeat was tinged as brown as this. Indeed, I noticed the nearby jar of almond butter, and the lightbulb went off: these weren’t concaveman muffins… these were caveman chocolate almond butter cups! A spoonful of almond butter to fill the chocolatey bowl, and I had a new dessert on my hands that would be promoted as the Paleo replacement for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups! Yes!
That’s how it went in my head, anyway. In reality, people just pointed and laughed.
