Cookin it, old skool

It's still freaking hot, and I wanted cheesecake. Fortunately I have friends with recipes. Old Skool Recipes.

And zombie movies.

And what better to eat during a zombie movie than cherry cheesecake! Screw popcorn, chips, and nachos. If you're really going to get into things, you need to match the food to the flick. And we needed braaaaaiiinss.

Cherry brains!

On top of gooey, golden, lemony cheesecake.

No Bake Cheese Cake

What you need:

Crust:

• ~3 c graham cracker crumbs
• ~1/2 c butter

Filling:

• 1 8 oz block of cream cheese
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• 1 tin of evaporated milk
• 1 pkg of lemon jello (no, really!)

Topping:

• 1 c water
• 1 c sugar
• 1 c dried cherries

What you gotta do:

We started with the topping. Combine the water and sugar in a medium pot over medium heat.

 

Once the sugar has dissolved and the syrup has started to bubble, add the cherries.

 

The plan here is to rehydrate these fabulous little things (omg they are the tastiest most luxurious dried fruit ever) and let their deliciousness infuse the basic sryup. The plan. That's it.

While the cherries are simmering, dump the crumbs into a 9 x 11 pan and spread them out. Drizzle the melted butter over them and start mixing.

 

A spoon is fine, but you'll probably end up getting your hands in there eventually to press it down into the pan. You want no more than 1/2 inch thick.

So, these next steps get a little dishes intensive, but hey, we're not at my house so I'm okay with that. :P

Start with the medium bowl and pour in the evaporated milk.

With a hand mixer, beat the milk for a few minutes. I'm thinking that you could also use whipping cream here, but you wouldn't want to whip it too much. Just enough to fluff it up, but not enough that you get peaks.

Take that off to the fridge to chill while you dirty more bowls. 

Next is the cream cheese. Dump it in the big bowl with vanilla and lemon juice.

Works best at room temp, but an electric mixer will bring it into line pretty quickly. Beat it up with the vanilla and the lemon juice. We didn't have lemons on hand, but the bottle will suffice in a pinch.

And in the third bowl, combine the lemon jello with one cup of boiling water. I'm thinking that you could get a sharper, brighter lemon flavour in this step if you went with plain gelatin and some lemon zest, but as I mentioned, no lemon, so we jello'd it. 

And if you mix it with the spoon that you used to scrap the sides of the cream cheese bowl, you get all kinds of fun cheesey floaties in the jello.

Don't worry, it's all going to end up in the same place. Let it cool for a bit so that you're not adding boiling hot stuff to your cold things. Hm. This step maybe should have come a little sooner. Oh well, it all worked out in the end. The cheesecake did.

And in it goes.

Cooled lemon gelatine mixture, chilled beaten evaporated milk (or whipped cream, if that's what you opted for) into the big bowl of lemony, vanillay cream cheese.

And beat it some more! Power tools are fun.

Once you've got it all combined and whipped up into a frothy gooey mess, pour it onto the crust.

Oh crap, the cherries.

Remove them from the heat and let them cool while the cheesecake chills in the fridge for a couple hours. It will be just barely jiggly when it's ready.

The cheesecake layer ended up a little shallower than we were hoping,

so you could do this in a smaller pan to get a ratio weighted more to the cheesecake, just make sure that you decrease the crumb amout so you're still below the half inch mark.

Now, the plan for the cherries (you remember the plan, right?) was to have a nice gooey syrupy pile of brains to pour on top of our cheesecake. Um.

Yes, that is the spoon stuck to the pot.

I highly recommend not boiling the cherries for as long as we did. And I have no idea how long we boiled them. Don't do that.

We ended up with something more like toffee than syrup. Very stringy toffee.

But, a little more heat was enough to get it moving again and we were able to blob some onto the cheesecake. The rest, we poured into a gratuitously buttered pan.

Cherry. Toffee. Okay, some things are good ideas after all. Chewy, stick your teeth together good.

Of course, the warm toffee melted the cold cheesecake, but it sure tasted good and it really did look like... BRAAAAAAAIIIIIINS!!!!

 

Now that you've got your braaaaiins, thick and chewy braaaaaiiiiins, all you need is a copy of Dead Snow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-KQh87_V2Q

Watch for the cherry topping. It's there.

I once knew a guy who would eat baked beans out of a pot with a wooden spoon while waching westerns so he could get right into the characters. Me, I'm happy with cherry brains for my zombie cheesecake.

What's your favourite food and movie combo?

Cramming my face off

It's exam time. I barely have time to brush my teeth, never mind cook.

There are flashcards on the back of the toilet, sticky notes on the walls, and my couch is covered in physics problems. If you think I'm making dinner this week, you are sorely mistaken.

I'm doing my best to eat more than coffee, tortilla chips, and beef jerky, but I've got 2 more exams to go, and I've had to wash forks to eat my last two meals. 

Exams mean I don't have time to wash dishes either. Coffee cups don't need to be washed, only rinsed.

One of the few clean things left in the cupboards is the food processor. Yeah, I know, pain in the ass to wash, but there's really no other way to make pesto.

Pesto

What you need:

• Basil leaves
• Olive oil
• Garlic
• Pine nuts
• Romano or parmsan cheese (real cheese! not Kraft!!)

No, I didn't measure. I didn't have time to measure. There are finals looming! (um, yes, I know I promised to write shit down. I didn't mean I'd do it during exam week).

What you gotta do:

Tear the basil leaves up a bit, ripping the stems off. You'll have about a cup (measurement; happy? better be).

Put the leaves and the garlic and a bit of olive oil in the food processor.

Mine has a regular sized bowl and a mini-bowl. Mini is all you need. If you're doing this in a regular sized one, you might want to double the recipe. Double a recipe with no measurements. Ha. I kill me.

Put the lid on and run it.

If it's sticking to the sides, stop the machine. Or if it's like mine take the lid off. Poor safety engineers; they go through their days having to assume that everyone on the planet is a total fucking moron. Well, it's kinda true. Any time you think to yourself "no one's dumb enough to try that" you just guaranteed that some jackass will try it.

So, pesto. Scrape down the sides and pour in another blob (technical term, very foodie, an actual measurement) of oil. Replace the lid and let it whir a bit more.

Add some pine nuts. Some, more than none, but not too much.

Whir until the pine nuts are no longer discernable.

Now, the grated cheese. Can I say "to taste" here instead of telling you how much? Is did "to taste" a valid measurement?

And another whir.

Look! You made pesto.

Don't you feel fancy.

And what do we do with fancy pesto?

Well, I'm sure you could do something like some kind of grilled steak over linguini with a pesto and cream sauce, or mix it with chevre and fill butterflied chicken breasts with it, or mix it into cream cheese and bake it to make a creamy, cheesey pesto dip.

Me, I made pizza. (Dude, I'm in freaking university and I have a final exam tomorrow, what did you expect me to do?)

Slices of half stale baguette, smeared with pesto, topped with onion, tomato slices and chevre.

      

Baked at 350 until I decided I needed to take them out of the oven and get back to studying.

Would you tell me if I had pesto in my teeth??