French Onion Delicious

Yes, it's true that Emmy and Cloud have buckets of homework and midterms and junk to do, but we are still hungry ladies. And sometimes hungry ladies, especially during cold Ottawa winters, crave French Onion Soup so badly, they don't even care that they don't own ovens. They persevere.

So Emmy ventured down into the foreboding mess known as the dorm kitchens, and caramelized a handful of onions. :

Looking at this photo, you might think "That foolish Emmy! There are things in that pan that I am certain are not onions! Can't she tell the difference between vegetables?"

As it turns out, she often can. This photo was taken after the vegetarian BROTH she also made was strained.

It was originally composed of homemade shiitake mushroom broth, rosemary, hot peppers, bok choy, and a dab of soya sauce.  

 Once it was nice and fragrant, she strained out all the delicious solids and put the hot pepper and bok choy in with her onions.
Then, the broth looked a bit like this:

Yeah, delicious and golden. 

Like a superwoman, she lugged all these treasures back upstairs, to where Cloud was waiting with cute little ramekins and her ILLEGAL toaster oven.

Yes, these hungry ladies are the reckless desperado types that use all sorts of hot machinery in their rooms.

We're rebels.

And we filled the little ramekins  with our caramelized onions, and ladled in some of our fantastic broth. Then, with a healthy layer of bread cubes and Parmesan cheese, we put them into the toaster oven and proceeded to make our hungry-lady hungry bellies very happy indeed.

 Though, if I could just point out, those little ramekins
were seriously like a half-cup or smaller. And Emmy and Cloud are women, not hamsters.
We wanted more!
Except that neither of us wanted to go back down to the icky kitchen to make more caramelized onions.
And we still had rather a lot of broth. (Scroll up and look at the picture of the broth again. That's a like a solid litre of broth for two girls!)
So Emmy grabbed her vermicelli, and we stuffed them in, covered them with broth and cheese, and toaster-ovened them, too.

Yeah.

Pretty fantastic.

The noodles inside the broth cooked, and the ones along the surface stayed a little crunch, and without the onions overwhelming everything, the delicately spicy flavour of the broth, with hint of mushroom and rosemary....

Augh, it's got me hungry all over again!

The Waffle-ganza

As previously mentioned, Cloud bought a waffle maker.
It was a big deal. I actually got a little woozy. We both got pretty hyped.
But of course, we're not the sort of people satisfied with the mundane, especially not the mundane of waffles.
So the only "normal" waffles we made were for the test run.
And then things got interesting.
Cloud had a great big bowl of base batter, and we got experimental.

 We began with cute little chocolate waffle strips, made by stirring in a couple tablespoons of yummy Camino cocoa powder and sliced almonds.
They went pretty quick, because some other friends smelled the deliciousness and surreptitiously showed up at the door.




But then dinner rolled around. And do you think we are the sort of ladies who would've had enough of waffles by then?

                                                        We are not.

So we took more of the basic recipe, and Cloud stirred in ground flax and a touch of grated nutmeg. Emmy, meanwhile got all busy in the kitchen- she fried up some itty-bitty cutesy shrimp with shiitake mushrooms, and whipped up a bechemel sauce, but replaced half the milk with mushroom broth.
Then, as the French say, «Miam miam miam!» -we ate 'em all up!

Brunch the next day, however, was when the real madness started.

Yes. That is an egg.
Being cooked in a waffle maker.
We expected that it would be hell to get out, but were pleasantly thrilled to discover that it flipped out quite easily.
And it was flipped out ONTO...

Yeah, another waffle. This one had squash purée mixed in with the batter, adding a fantastically buttery flavour to the dough. It also had a couple tablespoons of grated Sardinian Pecorino cheese. 

Oh, and a waffled egg on top. 

Did I mention the waffled egg?

It was seriously perfect- crispy on the edges of the white, tender through the rest of the white, and a perfectly hot and runny yolk.

Salt, pepper, and  tomatoes made this thing divine!

To top off our waffle-ganza that night for dinner, Emmy made a bok choy and extra-garlic omlette. But instead of frying it, yes, that's right. Into the waffle maker it went.
We accompanied them with toast (ALSO done in the waffle maker) and drizzled on Sriracha  hot sauce, and more of that awesome pecorino cheese.

After all this waffle-fun, though, we made ourselves take a break.
After all, it's far too early in the year to be getting sick of waffles. Actually, far too early in our lifetimes to be getting sick of waffles.
So anyway, the following day was sanctioned waffle-free. Boring boring boring, I know. However, we managed to survive, and by 9:30am the day after that, Emmy was loudly knocking on Cloud's door. There was one more extremely important thing to be made: present waffles.
You see, it was Emmy's friend's birthday. Plus, a boy on the residence's first floor had done some HEROICS the week before, and we figured he needed some applauding. So we grated ginger and nutmeg into the recipe. And then crushed in cardamom and coriander. And sweetened it with coarse brown sugar. Yes, chai waffles. And that's not even the exciting part.

The exciting part was those toppings. Immediately after cooking them, when they were all steamy and hot, Emmy sprinkled on chocolate chips, and covered the waffles so the chips could melt.
And then...
When the chocolate was melty enough to be a little sticky, they sprinkled on EDIBLE GLITTER.
What have YOU eaten that glitters today?
That's what I thought.

First Post^^

Hello Internets,
We, Emmy and Cloud, are proudly beginning this first entry of our first BLOG POST. It began, as many things do, as an act of desperation. Food. We love it. We dream about it, we read about it, we cook it, we eat it. Cloud loves it so much, she's studying nutrition. Emmy loves it so much...um...so much that...well, she likes it lots.
But, tragically, we are both first-year university students. Who live in a residence. With no oven. Yes, that's right. We are suffering.
But we are nothing if not persistent, and therefore, we work long and hard to create confections and delicacies worthy of our gourmand tastes.
And then, Cloud bought a waffle maker. And everything changed.
We got too into it.
We needed...a blog.