The Cooking Critic

When Adam told me about the local Atwater Village Cookie Contest, I thought, Cookies? I know cookies. And yes, I do know cookies, but clearly I don’t know people since the cookies I made were deemed by one judge, and I quote: “Definitely not the best cookie overall.” Sigh. My cookies are so misunderstood.

For this contest, I picked a family cookie recipe that I have tentatively named Citrus Clouds–I’ve never seen these cookies elsewhere before, not the grocery store or the cookie stand or in someone else’s repertoire. This is why I decided to enter them in a contest. When I told a friend I was making Citrus Clouds, he said, You don’t expect to win with those, do you? My response, Why, because there’s no chocolate in them? Him: Exactly. But I thought originality was key (I have since realized, it is not), so I stuck with my plan.

The day of the contest, I hastily made the cookies, which are intended to be iced, but instead I thinned out the icing to a glaze and dunked the cookies in it head first. I didn’t bother with finishing touches, no zest curls, no sprigs of thyme. So basically, I completely ignored the “best-looking” component of the competition, even though I know better—people prefer their cookies to be good-looking. Basically, I’m a bad mother to Citrus Cloud (she sounds like she’s related to the Phoenix family: Joaquin Phoenix, Summer Phoenix, River Phoenix, Rain Phoenix, Citrus Cloud Phoenix). The judges might have taken note of her if I had dressed her up in a decent coat of icing—it’s the equivalent of hip clothing. Instead, I send her out in the world in a sheer coat of barely discernable glaze. I just hope she doesn’t grow up and write a book about me….

At least I had the foresight to rename the cookie, referred to as Orange Cookies in my family (though even the renamed name keeps changing, from Citrus Clouds, to Citrus Pillows, to Airy Citrus Cookies—preferences, anyone?) The name change occurred because I’ve discovered that many people think they don’t like orange desserts—I use the word citrus to trick them because then they assume the cookies are lemon-flavored and generally don’t seem to notice the lack of lemon when they taste them. The orange juice in the batter gives just the faintest sweet citrus hint to the cookies, and everybody likes that, whether they know it or not.

So I didn’t win the cookie contest. Instead a peanut butter thumbprint cookie won with a Hershey Kiss pressed into it (why are people such chocolate freaks?), and sadly, the girl who won wasn’t even prancing around in a bikini, so I can’t complain about that.

Still, I beseech you to try these cookies despite their loser status. Think of the cookie contest as a popularity contest where the cutest girl won. My cookie is delicate and unassuming with a light, cakey texture similar to a madeleine. Citrus Cloud is a wallflower who could be hot if she were just a little more socially inclined, and really, we’re lucky she’s not all-out awkward due to her goofy, inept mother.

Vote for Citrus Cloud!

My mother likes to send me forwards. Some of them are adorable (like the old tortoise that adopted the baby hippo left motherless after the tsunami), some addictive (pictures of celebrities as children), some occasionally pointless (sorry, Mom, I still love you!) and some completely invaluable and amazing. Ziploc Omelets fall into the final category.

She timed the omelet forward well since I was looking for something to fulfill my monthly breakfast recipe promise to the world. I’m sure the world would have noticed and been very angry with me if the promise went unfilled….

Ziploc Omelets may sound a little baffling, so a quick explanation: they consist of an egg mixture zipped up in a Ziploc bag then cooked in boiling water for thirteen minutes. And this may lead you to wonder, as I did, why would anyone make omelets that take thirteen minutes when you can make omelets in less amount of time the normal way? My short answer: the novelty of it! Also, maybe you can make omelets the normal human way, but I cannot. I can’t flip them without them falling apart. Inevitably, I give up and make a scramble.

I decided to make a Spinach, Tomato, and Feta Omelet, as described in The Foster’s Market Cookbook, substituting Trader Joe’s Artichoke Jalapeno Dip for the artichoke aioli mentioned in the recipe. Then I fretted about how much spinach to include because I am astounded every. Single. Time. When I see spinach cook and shrink to ridiculously tiny quantities. I threw a large handful (or thereabouts) of chopped spinach into the Ziploc bag along with the ingredients and wrote my name on the bag as instructed. This is recommended if you have a Ziploc Omelet party, as people are apt do sometimes (people are so crazy), so everyone can keep track of their personalized omelets. No one else was at my Ziploc Omelet party, but I wrote my name on my bag anyways:

(Bear with me as my omelet goes through its awkward, ugly stage.) Next, I put it in boiling water and worried about whether or not it would cook through since it was floating. I think I didn’t push all the air out of the bag as instructed.

But it did indeed cook. And as promised, the omelet rolled out of the bag just like the instructions said it would. As a bonus, I was please to see I accidentally used the perfect amount of spinach.

You may notice it resembles a small log. No matter. I slathered on some artichoke dip, topped it with sautéed tomatoes, and had myself a substantial little omelet log.

And here’s the inside:

Color me impressed.

Assessment: Despite my doubts, thirteen minutes in boiling water makes for a perfectly cooked omelet, and Ziploc Omelets get my seal of amazement—they’d be a great activity/conversation piece for a brunch. And I also liked the suggested omelet combination from Foster’s Market as well as Trader Joe’s artichoke dip on this, even if it was a bit of an intense flavor fight between the dip and the feta in the places where the feta had grouped together in the Ziploc bag.

Overall, I highly recommend this. Please let me know what you think of the Ziploc technique if you try it (or even if you don’t.)

In my freezer, items go to die a long, slow death of freezer burn. While I’m constantly chiding myself for not freezing food more often (especially homemade food that makes too much and I’ll eventually get sick of if I eat it three days in a row), the truth is, I don’t use my freezer much except for ice. Since college, I have kept one frozen dinner in my freezer for absolute emergencies—an emergency to me is when I am very very hungry but don’t feel like cooking something. You would agree this is an emergency if you have been around when I’m hungry, and there’s nothing to eat; it’s not a pleasant experience. But when these dire situations hit, and I opened my freezer to eye the frozen meal in question, typically, the meal went back in the freezer, and I ended up making noodles tossed in butter and Parmesan.

But I have bouts where I try to reconnect with my freezer. I will wrap items up and place them in it, fully intending to eat them at a later date. Unfortunately, I rarely mark the item, and this causes some confusion later when I can’t figure out what it is. Despite this, I’ve determined recently I’m going to eat through the items in my freezer. I’ve already had a lovely filet steak thanks to this initiative, and then it was time to try Trader Joe’s frozen manítaropita, which is filo wrapped around a mushroom mixture and is related, by name at least, to spanakopita. Manítaropita had spent way more time in its cold, boxy prison than is fair.

Assessment: One reason this has been in my freezer so long is because they didn’t make much of any impression on me when I opened the box and first tried them. When I ate them this time, they were better than I remembered, and I liked them as a light dinner accompanied by a salad. The mushrooms are nicely seasoned and the dough is flaky, but I think I prefer another Trader Joe’s mushroom product. It’s similar concept—dough wrapped around mushrooms—but the dough is more substantial and buttery (my preference, you may prefer flaky), though I can’t remember the name of the product at all right now; I guess I’ll just have to purchase them, eat some and report back.

I had already started a story in my head about how I called multiple grocery stores in the Los Angeles area asking about red velvet cake mixes, no one knew what I was talking about, and isn’t that strange? But as it turns out, red velvet cake, a mild chocolate cake dyed red and typically served with cream cheese frosting, is a Southern phenomenon, which baffles me since it’s not as if red food coloring and chocolate cake are indigenous to the South. And while I couldn’t find any reason why Southerners are partial to the cake, I did figure out how it came to be: the term “red velvet cake” comes from the fact that the cocoa used in the 30s-40s (or thereabouts as far as I can tell) made the cake reddish-brown. Modern cocoa has more alkaline in it and no longer produces this color, so red dye is added to achieve the hue instead. (Thank you Wikepedia.)

But I doubt my brother cared about the historical and cultural relevance of the red velvet cake when he requested it every year for his birthday growing up. Today he turns 28. I was going to use red velvet cake mix to make some cakey cookies (I’ve done this before with lemon cake mix), and ship them to him. But since California doesn’t carry red velvet cake mix, he got Heath Bar Chocolate Chip Cookies instead, mainly because I’ve been wanting to try them.

Still, I did have Michael in mind. I called Mom and Dad and quizzed them on Michael’s favorite flavors. Their response, “Hmm, I don’t know. Maybe peanut butter?” When I think about it, I realize Michael doesn’t voice his opinion on foods so often. I believe he likes a balsamic vinegar linguine with bacon and goat cheese that I make, but besides that and red velvet cake, nothing else comes to mind. His main concern when we made food in our family was the ease in making it and the ease in cleaning it up. In fact, when we were pre-teens and assigned to make a meal once a week, I’d go about making homemade breadsticks and strawberry chicken. When Michael cooked, he made something along the lines of hot dogs and macaroni and cheese. His specialty was baked chicken fingers well-seasoned and doused in butter. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy them.

But back to the glories of toffee. The reason cookies with toffee candy appeal to me (and hopefully my brother) is because my family went on a toffee bar craze when we first discovered Skors. I’ve always preferred the Skor to the Heath bar, which is why I used it in this recipe despite the fact the recipe is called “Heath Bar Chocolate Chip Cookies.” Perhaps I like Skor simply because I met it first, and it introduced me to the world of toffee. But I’ve always thought it tasted better too, and I felt vindicated when an examination of the ingredients of the two candy bars revealed Heath had more unpronounceable ingredients than Skor. It also revealed both candy bars are made by Hershey, which I thought was very strange.

I suspected Michael must have the same fondness for the Skor bar that I do since we grew up in the same Skor-obsessed household, so I decided these cookies would be up his alley. And here’s a picture of my brother pretending he can operate machinery. He’s got a bit of a Burt Reynolds thing going on these days.

Happy birthday, Bear!

Assessment (of the cookies, not my brother): When I first tasted a warm Skor Bar Chocolate Chip Cookie, I determined they’re better in theory than in actuality. The toffee distracted rather than added to what is primarily a chocolate chip cookie with oatmeal and walnuts mixed in. But I adjusted my opinion when I tried the cookies cold. The toffee added something more when the Skor bits solidified into a buttery crunch rather than when they were sticky and oozy. So my final verdict is: if you’re bringing cookies somewhere with you, than try out these chewy Skor cookies (an adjustment involving 3/4 cup butter and ¼ cup shortening might have helped the texture of this cookie). But if you’re mixing up a batch to eat out of the oven, stick to the tried and true regular old chocolate chip cookie—they’re hard to beat.

Maggie wants the world to know she isn’t a mooch. If you look over my posts in the last couple of months, it may look like she’s constantly stopping by on the off chance that something just came out of the oven, and why doesn’t she join me for dinner? But I must set the record straight. Not only did Maggie have Shahan and I over for a meal recently, she, in fact, had me over for dinner long before I ever returned the favor.

Maggie planned the meal, set the date and I said I’d bring an appetizer—the Vegetable-Avocado Salsa I made was an easy choice. I’d been eyeing the recipe for a while; the small picture of it in the upper left-hand corner of my Complete Outdoor Living Cookbook has been beckoning to me for a long time what with its festive colors and all. I even tried once to convince my non-avocado
-enamored mother to make it and bring it to a gathering because I wanted her to report back to me on how it tasted. On top of all this, I also had some Trader Joe’s avocados—despite my love for the avocado, I always have a hard time using up the four that come in a bag, and this salsa was a way to check one of my list. The dish required no oven either, a major bonus due to a recent heat wave and lack of air-conditioning in my apartment.

So I chopped and chopped and chopped the vegetables into fine little bits but left out the avocado initially because it makes the dip soupy if it joins the party but then sits around too long. I called Maggie and told her I’d be a little late because I needed to pick up a jicama on the way to her place. Maggie responded, “A jigga-what?” And I said, “It’s a bulbous, root vegetable that has the crunch of an apple but is mostly flavorless.” “Oh,” she replied.

I picked up my jicama and added both it and the avocado to the dip at Maggie’s place. And we happily munched on the dip then happily ate up Maggie’s red wine-themed meal. I’m not sure how I only just recently discovered intimate dinner parties are a great way to spend an evening, but I did. First we had cocktails with the appetizer, next we had wine with our meal served al fresco on the patio—it included a salad topped with blue-cheese stuffed mushrooms, eggplant parmesan and strawberries soaked in red wine sauce served over ice cream. As far as I can tell, the latter is the perfect summer dessert: wonderful, unusual and no stove or oven required (the heat has made me obsessed with the last criteria of late). After the meal, Maggie read our Tarot cards, which determined Shahan will never ever find love or happiness. I fared slightly better, though the multiple reference to “moving houses” made me nervous since there’s a For Sale sign in front of my apartment complex right now that I’m not pleased about at all. But the tarot cards predicted that in the end I’d be happy with the move. Perhaps my new place will have air-conditioning?

Adjustments: I used a jalapeño instead of a serrano chile but will try the spicier latter next time. And I used frozen corn instead of fresh since I’m on a freezer initiative right now. I ignored the instructions to make your own baked tortilla chips and instead bought some blue corn Tostitos.

Assessment: Shahan called this dip “a winner” and declared it a great fancy alternative to traditional salsa or guacamole. The different textures are wonderful: soft avocados, crunchy carrots and crisp jicama (of course, now I’m looking for recipes to help me use up the rest of the jicama). Be sure to salt and pepper the salsa appropriately since the seasonings help the flavors meld. Also, Vegetable-Avocado Dip is very beautiful. And while this dish wasn’t difficult to make, there is a lot of chopping, so I’m going to say it’s relatively easy with an emphasis on the “relatively.”

My father had a request for Father’s Day: a story about his father. Surprised, I asked, “A non-fiction story?” “Of course a non-fiction story,” he replied. In retrospect, I’m not sure why I was so confused—people order up stories from me all the time. If I can create an article on bathroom fixtures, a boring subject I know nothing about, surely I could write a memoir about my grandfather, a man infinitely more interesting than bathroom fixtures. Still, it was a daunting task to pull off a decent gift of a story about someone so close to me in just over a week. But here’s Dad’s promised story. And here he is with me on the first day of being a father (or maybe the second)—he’d like you to think that he did all the work and my mother was just there to take pictures:

To give this piece some focus, I determined I’d cook a food in honor of my grandfather (who my brother and I called Daddy Drew when were young and just Drew as we got older). The foods that came to mind were: gumbo, mincemeat pie and dog food, in that order. Gumbo because of his Cajun heritage, but then, the month of June doesn’t exactly shout out for a hearty stew served over rice, even with the dank overcastness we’ve had lately and especially with the pounding heat that followed. Then I contemplated a mincemeat pie, a dish often made with dried fruit preserves and no actual meat. I was surprised when I discovered Drew’s affinity for this dish a few years ago, especially since I recently had encountered this dessert in Wales and was so put off by the word “mincemeat,” I didn’t even try it. I can’t say the thought of making one is anymore appealing to me now, although I’ve since tasted it and discovered that there were, in fact, no traces of meat in it. But if I’m going to spend time in the kitchen creating a pie, it certainly isn’t going to be filled with mincemeat. After rejecting making a mincemeat pie, dog food came to mind because Drew once claimed to have eaten it and that “it didn’t taste too bad.” But then again, Drew was known for tall tales. That and big sneezes. And an extremely competitive nature that kept my brother and I from ever beating him at ping pong. But since I wasn’t about to do any experiment cooking with dog food, I decided to write about carrots. Because he hated them, and I did too for a long time, and it was strangely bonding.

Carrots typically showed up at Sunday suppers at my grandparents, and Drew would simply ignore us when we’d jokingly suggest he eat some. I too turned my nose up at carrots for a long time. I think I refused the puréed version as a baby, which carried into an aversion towards cooked carrots and their mushy texture as an adult. I’ll eat cooked carrots now if they’re served, but I can’t say I ever go back for seconds. Raw or barely cooked carrots are a completely different story for me, but I don’t know if Drew’s dislike of carrots had nuances.

So I began my quest for a carrot recipe both Drew and I might have liked. I flipped through my recipe books and found a carrot terrine— “a ter-what?” he would have said. A response that it was a cold, molded pâté probably would have gotten an “I don’t know about that.” Then I came across a carrots Vichy recipe, which is traditionally made with water from Vichy, France. This would have been met with strong opposition—my grandfather was a man who fundamentally opposed bottled water since perfectly good water came out of the tap. Requesting a specific bottled water would have prompted stories about growing up during The Great Depression. Next I considered a carrot soup, a light delicate thing that I was surprised to find I enjoyed when served it at a wedding, but Drew simply would have skipped that course of the meal. In the end I determined the best dish to make with carrots was a carrot cake, a cop-out if ever there was one.

Still, my decision to make a Super-Moist Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting wasn’t completely void of logic. Drew was a man, after all, with a fierce sweet tooth; cookies tended to disappear when they were in his house, and he didn’t seem to mind the nickname Cookie Monster at all. I reasoned, too, he might have liked carrot cake since it has some vaguely similar qualities to mincemeat pie, both being spice-heavy and not overly sweet (if you just forget about that cream cheese frosting for a while.) Also, carrot cake isn’t strange and foreign. It would have been far easier to get him to eat a cake than a terrine.

True to its name, this carrot cake was moist, and my friends raved—thankfully since some mishaps were involved in making it (the frosting oozed out of the center and the top layer of cake started sliding to the right all because of the heat in my un-air-conditioned apartment). But would Drew have liked it? It’s hard to say. He was stubborn in both his likes and dislikes. He was opposed to anything unnecessarily fancy—the carrot cake is borderline on this front, made from the humble carrot but whipped into a two-layer cake appropriate for special occasions. Had he seen my kitchen after making the cake, he would have grumbled about how he didn’t understand why it was necessary to use every bowl in the house, but then he would have started doing the dishes without another word.

But I think, like the cookies, the cake might have disappeared when we weren’t looking.

Drew (1920-2006) with my brother

The writers of Easy Summer Food said that Pappa al Pomodoro, a Tuscan soup, “once tasted, [is] never forgotten.” I have to disagree. I’ve forgotten about it over and over again. It was sitting in my fridge for well over a week, and when lunch or dinner rolled around, and I started contemplating my next meal, I forgot I had a completed option waiting for me.

A little info on Pappa al Pomodoro: it’s a thick soup, served hot or cold, composed primarily of tomatoes and mashed-up bread. This may sound strange, but think of the bread as a pasta substitute. Oregano and basil add flavor . . . but not nearly enough. Still, it looks pretty, doesn’t it?

Assessment: Despite my lukewarm reception of this dish, I halfway considered posting the recipe because it’s easy and pleasant-tasting if not outstanding, and perhaps my use of canned tomatoes instead of the “ripe red tomatoes, preferably on the vine” didn’t do it justice. But eating it cold, I was reminded of Panzanella (me and the crazy words today), which is a Tuscan salad of tomatoes and bread. The list of ingredients for Pappa al Pomodoro and Panzanella are very similar, but Panzanella made a much stronger impression on me, so I’ll just save my typing for that recipe. Be on the lookout. And if you want to make a tomato soup, make this tomato-dill one.

People like to tell you the weather is perfect in Los Angeles. This is an out-and-out lie, created, I think, to increase the glamour of a city hell-bent on being glamorous. One of my biggest beefs about Los Angeles (besides traffic and no discernable autumn) is that nights are cool and pretty much always require a jacket, which is sure to ruin adorable summer ensembles. But I had to send my complaints a-packing the other night when we were blessed with a truly perfect warm evening. I, an always-cold person, was comfortable in short sleeves, pants and sandals, and my friends and I got to watch the sun sink below a row of particularly tall palm trees. It was a wonderful night to be an Angeleno, and luckily, we chose the perfect activity for such a night: another picnic/movie outside at Hollywood Forever.

This night also seemed a great chance to hold another round of the Great American Dip-Off since Trader Joe’s dips are a favorite toteable at these events. This week’s contenders: Artichoke Antipasto and Spicy Feta Dip. And the judges: Adam, Maggie, Rob, Shayna and myself.

This match-up was a little bit like watching a game only to see who’s going to compete against your favorite team in the second round. The judges had quite a bit of wine and had difficulty focusing, but then the dips weren’t really interesting enough to warrant our attention, no slam dunks, no fancy footwork. They just plodded along and seemed more or less happy to be in the game at all. Spicy Feta Dip ended up winning 4-2 since Adam voted twice, even though the group generally felt Artichoke Antipasto had more potential. Still, we determined it’s better off as a sandwich spread than as a true dip—it has a strong artichoke taste (as it should) but needs the balance of other flavors to truly appreciate its artichokiness. I recommend spreading some of the antipasto on bread, top with sautéed mushrooms, cover with provolone, then broil.

Our winner, Spicy Feta Dip, true to its name, was mildly spicy and very feta-y, and some people said, yeah, sure, I’d serve it at a party. But Maggie and I decided later that these people were wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. While it’s a perfectly acceptable dip, and we probably wouldn’t shun it altogether at a party, it just doesn’t make sense to invite Spicy Feta Dip when there are so many other better dips out there. In short, expect Spicy Feta Dip to get stomped in the next round . . . unless there’s another equally weak bracket.

P.S. You must put Over the Edge, Matt Dillon’s first movie, on your Netflix queue, the movie we viewed at Hollywood Forever. It’s part actually-funny, part dated-funny, even though it’s primarily a drama. And I pictured it here, since I forgot to take a photograph of the dips before we tossed them.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I, um, don’t like white chocolate that much. I realize to like white chocolate is to be a full-fledged adult, but I’m just not that mature. I comfort myself with the knowledge that white chocolate isn’t real chocolate at all. While this may seem like a slanderous unfounded attack aimed to hurt white chocolate’s unblemished reputation, it is, in fact, true. According to Food Lover’s Companion, white chocolate “can’t be officially classified as ‘chocolate’ because there is no chocolate liquor in it.”

Not that my stance towards white chocolate is at all consistent. When I’m at the mall, I will sometimes find myself walking in a trance toward the cookie stand and purchasing a white chocolate and macadamia nut cookie, though white chocolate and macadamia nuts are not foods I’m normally drawn to on their own. I even made and enjoyed a White Chocolate Ganache not too long ago. But when I baked some White Chocolate Cranberry Cookies a while back, as much as I loved the cookie and as much as I loved the cranberries, I found myself distracted by the sweet white chocolate and determined next time I’d make the cookies with something more semi-sweet in nature. And so I did.

Assessment: Um, so, uh, my version wasn’t better. I envisioned a cookie packed full of something resembling Raisinets (one of my favorite candies)—a Craisinet Cookie, if you will. And though it was good and all, the crowd generally preferred either the regular chocolate chip cookies I also made or the white chocolate and cranberry ones from before. Either Adam are Marri said (or perhaps they jointly concluded) that the white chocolate highlighted the cranberries more since there was such a contrast in taste while the semi-sweet chocolate hid the cranberries a bit. So stick to the original recipe posted in From the Pantry—it’s a crowd-pleaser, and you’re likely to find some good Indian and vegetarian recipes while you’re there as well.

Until this past Memorial Day, I’ve never attempted to make corn on the cob. There’s really no excuse for it, other than I don’t own a barbecue, so I don’t host barbecues, so I don’t make corn on the cob, which has barbecue associations for me. All the same, I think about making corn on the cob a decent bit—there are a few recipes I’ve often admired from afar, one involving a lemon-chive butter and another with a chile-salt rub. Since many of my past barbecues have involved one boyfriend or another at the helm of the barbecue, I’d run my fancy corn-on-the-cob aspirations by him first. Inevitably I received a stare that seemed to say, why would you make a lemon-chive butter or a chile-salt rub when you can have excellent corn just by throwing it on the grill or tossing it in boiling water? Or maybe the look simply said, please don’t make things more difficult than they need to be. But since boiling or grilling regular old corn doesn’t exactly capture my imagination, I lost interest in the project and couldn’t be counted on to assist with the corn. I typically ended up making dessert.

So when a Memorial Day barbecue was announced with no boyfriend in sight, I went about making the dressed up corn I’ve always contemplated: not one of the recipes mentioned above, but a Cherry Tomato and Corn Salad made from corn on the cob that’s easy to make, easy to transport and easy to eat.

Assessment: Despite the many eases associated with this corn salad and though it pains me to admit it, I have to say I see the old boyfriends point with this one. Fresh corn on the cob is really good, so why make any adjustments to it by adding a dressing that might be best described as faint? The taste of the salad was pleasant enough, but I think I might prefer my corn slathered in butter. (Of course, I also adore butter more than any person should, so you might not want to listen to me on this one.) But corn salad does have some advantages you may want to consider: A) It’s a great portable dish that requires no last minute prep and will keep you out of the host/hostesses’ hair and B) You don’t have to worry about corn all over your face and teeth like you do with corn on the cob, a difficult food to eat gracefully. Also, you could easily substitute frozen corn for the fresh and speed up this already speedy recipe even more.