Howdy Readers:

I love the blog 28 Cooks so I’m participating in Fiber’s roundup of “Behind the Apron.”

I could tell you a little about why I’m obsessed with food, why I’m vegetarian, or why I’ve chosen to live in a small apartment in Brooklyn with my two sisters, but, I figure: yawn. You want some dirt on me and I’m here to tell you you’re not going to get it. You are instead going to be treated to a bullet point - yeah, I just said bullet point - list of some of my favorite pieces of art from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As some of you know, I spend much of my time Monday - Friday planning special events at the Met. I know. I’m a lucky daughter-of-a-biscuit.

Here I am at a “sketching” event in front of a Hans Hoffman. Photo by Don Pollard.

The Met has more amazing works of art that you can see in a day, or even in three years, as I happen to know by personal experience. Walking though the galleries daily, some the pieces have started to grow on me and I’ve started to think of them as “mine.” I go visit them whenever in I’m the area to stop, say hello, look at them from different angle, ya know, like a pet rock or something.

• A few of my favorites coincide with the highlights of the Museum’s collection - masterpieces of Spanish Art that you might be familiar with: El Greco’s View of Toleto (the Met has several other must-see El Greco’s too, but to me this one alone is worth the price of admission.)
• Juan de Pareja by Diego Velazquez. More intimate and interest-capturing than the Mona Lisa
• This little jewel (only 8.5 x 6.5 inches) always melts my heart
• A work by one of my favorite modern artists, De Kooning.
• This “fountain” by Noguchi is simple but fully commands the space it’s in. Walking by it makes you a more peaceful person.
• The exhibition After the Flood by the photographer Robert Polidori was my favorite exhibition of the past year - a small show of gorgeous large-format photographs showing beautifully what statistics fail to capture about the New Orleans flood.
• I walk by this cat often, and have come to think of it as my pet. More than 2000 years this mummified sculpture still looks like the platonic ideal of a cat.

Thanks for indulging me. Don’t forget to check out 28 Cooks’ “Behind the Apron” Roundup in early February.

It was an apartment like many other stately Upper East Side apartments except instead of a parquet floor the floor of this living room looked like it been prepared for surgery with linen, plastic wrap, and silver utensils stretching wall-to-wall. It overflowed with guests focusing with utmost concentration on… dumplings.

You see, the lively Nex0s hosted a dumpling party last Sunday. Guests were invited bring their own fillings to stuff into dumpling skins until they got silly. It reminded me of the nursery rhyme about Old Mother Hubbard except it wasn’t a shoe - it was an apartment. And there weren’t so many children - there were so many dumplings I didn’t know what to do. So many, in fact, that at the end of the evening I became concerned about the “orphan” dumplings - dumplings whose masters had left without giving them a home. Luckily, my sisters were happy to help house a few dumpling-children. For a few minutes, at least, before they gobbled them up.

Here was my contribution:

Peanut Butter and Jelly Dumplings

peanut butter
jelly
dumpling skins
toppings and/or sauces (suggestions below)

The directions are pretty simple if you’ve ever made dumplings before: stuff your dumpling skins with your favorite kinds of peanut butter and jelly. I used the most amazing peanut butter made by my fellow foodblogger Jessica of Su Good Sweets. Buy some. You won’t regret it.

Steam your dumplings. Or, pan fry your dumplings in butter or vegan margarine. If, like me, you’ve never made your own dumplings before, this PDF from Cooks Illustrated does a great job explaining the different methods of stuffing and cooking the dumplings.

If you want to be extra fancy you can make one of the two toppings I made for the dumpling party:

1) Spiced Sugar

In a small sauce pan, lightly brown a few cardamoms and cloves either “dry” or with a little butter.
Mix with some turbinado or demerara sugar (or just plain white sugar if that’s what you got) and add a hardy sprinkle of cinnamon.

2) Salt & Vinegar Crumbs for the Adventurous

Crush up some salt and vinegar chips. Dip away with your Pb&J dumplings.

I’m guessing that these dumplings would be good with pretty much any sweet “dip” too - warm nutella, melted chocolate, lavender honey, cinnamon-butter sauce with lemon zest. So many possibilities you won’t know what to do.

After consulting a few choice source materials — Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian and Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking — I began to feel quite confident that I could make my own yogurt. Both say it is easy as pie and making your own yogurt, with live cultures and whatnot, seems like a) one of those hippy-dippy things that went out in the 60s but b) so magical that I had to try it.

So put on your bellbottoms and love beads, roll up your hemp sleeves and follow these amazingly simple instructions. All you will need is about 1 lazy hour, 1 night to sleep, yogurt, a quart of milk, a large pot, a whisk, a ceramic bowl or thick glass jar, a towel, a pilot light or other hot place and a can-do attitude.

1. Buy a quart of milk that you like. Whole milk, naturally, tastes better than skim and I can imagine that a little whole cream in there would make it even better. Ms. Colwin advocates goats milk, I advocate whatever fresh organic milk you can find.

2. Buy some plain yogurt that you like. Since this is going to be your “starter,” along with the milk it is what is going to influence the taste of your yogurt. I’m a fan of the Stonyfield Farm brand though have recently indulged in a passionate love affair with Fage, which has a thick tangy taste that I cannot seem to get enough of.

3. Pour your milk into a big pot and bring to a boil. Easy enough.

4. Once it’s started to simmer, take it off the heat. Pie. I told you.

5. Let it sit for 15 – 25 minutes to cool it down the Correct Warm Temperature. You can find the Correct Warm Temperature the following ways

• With a candy thermometer, when it reads 100 - 115 degrees.
• Sticking your finger in the milk for 10 seconds without pain.
• Timing 20 minutes from the time you’ve taken the milk off the stove. Should be close enough.

6. Add 2 Tablespoons of your starter yogurt to a small bowl. Whisk until fluffy. As fluffy as yogurt can be, anyway, which isn’t very.

7. Whisk a little of the Correct Warm Temperature milk into your bowl of fluffy yogurt.

8. Then, add your starter + milk into the whole pot of milk that’s at the Correct Warm Temperature. Whisk to combine.

9. Pour your almost-yogurt into a thick ceramic bowl. Cover with a lid or saran wrap. Ms. Colwin suggests a large thick glass canning jar instead of a ceramic bowl, but a bowl worked fine for me.

10. Wrap the bowl or jar with a towel. Or blanket. Or tie-dyed wallhanging.

11. Place the wrapped bowl over your hottest pilot light overnight. If you don’t have a pilot light, try a radiator. If you don’t have a hot radiator, maybe try your oven or on top of the freezer (which, counter-intuitively) tends to be hot. If you don’t have a pilot light, radiator, oven, or freezer, you probably shouldn’t be making yogurt.

12. In the morning, be surprised to find that you have a bowl of your very own yogurt.

13. Put your yogurt in the fridge, assuming you have one, to enjoy for the next few days.

I’ve been feeling quite smug about this venture and saved a few bucks on my grocery bill in the process. The sisters didn’t find the yogurt as impressive as I did. Then again they they weren’t the ones magically reproducing live active cultures overnight. My yogurt had a nice, but not incredibly thick, texture and a good tang with a buttery aftertaste. I don’t think it necessarily tasted any better than store-bought yogurt, but it didn’t taste any worse either and you get the added satisfaction that you made it yourself and you know exactly what is in it.

Try this and let me know your how you fare. Of, if you tried it before, I’d love to hear about your successes and failures.

Hey there, glorious readers. It often irks me when blogs get self-referential, but I’m having a hard time getting around it cause I want you all to know that I’m here: a real person, happily waiting for ya’ll to get to know me via these crazy modern ways we have. The best way I know how is to make a list of these ways. And then explain them. In third person:

You can now contact Vanessa at Myspace.
She’s at http://www.myspace.com/vanesscipes

She still isn’t clear what the Myspace hype is all about yet, but loves any way to get to know you and to exchange comments about about food, life, and how vegetarians are just generally better-looking. Make her your newest Myspace friend!

Vanessa has been ready and waiting at Flickr for a while now for you to share photos with her.
She’s at http://flickr.com/photos/vanesscipes

Here is where the third-person gets confusing, but bear with me, glorious readers:

You can now contact Vanessa as Vanessa Picnic in Second Life:

Vanessa Picnic, Vanessa’s Second Life avatar, has a hard time walking, flying, and sitting, has old-school (or so Vanessa hears) hair, and hasn’t put on her shoes yet. The avatar was (the world’s geekiest?) gift from Jerry, known in Second Life as SNOOPYbrown Zamboni. Vanessa Picnic is supposed to resemble real-life Vanessa, and sort of does, frighteningly enough. Please come help Vanessa Picnic brave this brave new world. She really needs to figure out how to get her shoes ons.

Vanessa is a member of the Veggin’Out forum (ladies only, please.)

Vanessa admits she hasn’t had the time to frequent it lately, though she thinks it’s pretty cool and has a veggie girl crush on sunny Harmonia, MC of the forum.

Vanessa spent an embarassingly long time designing a very small favicon (or, in Vanessa’s case, a forkicon) which now garnishes the area left of her URL. It’s the little things, people, the little things. If you look closely, you just might see it.

Thanks for listening, and, as always, I’m available at vanesscipes@gmail.com if you want to berate me for speaking about myself in the third person. And, like every blogger, I love, cherish, and think constantly about any and all comments! Thanks for listening.

Love,
Vanessa