How quickly does cod go bad if you put it in the refrigerator?

I bought some cod over the weekend in Chinatown - I was going to buy it in the East Village, but the idea of spending $9.99 / lb. didn't really appeal to me. So Chinatown it was. I bought it a fish market on Mott St, live frogs in trash barrel included. Gross. I know, I have eaten frog, in fact, I love this dish at Nha Trang-- frog legs in chili lemongrass sauce, but seeing the real live suckers at the market just grossed me out.

So I haven't had time to marinate the cod; I'm following a recipe out of Nobu's cookbook for black miso cod. I bought the cod on a day when most liquor stores are closed (hmm, is this a bad sign for the quality of the cod?) so I just stuffed it in the freezer. On Monday I bought the sake I needed, but since the cod was frozen and I needed to defrost, I left it. Now its Friday, I defrosted the cod finally yesterday when I remember to take it out of the freezer before leaving for work.

Again, last night after I got home from work at 11:00 PM, I decided to hold off on preparing the marinade. So now the cod is almost a week old and when I finally do marinate it, its supposed to marinate for 3 days! Maybe I should start over with a new cod?

Shit.

Chocolate and Zucchini Cake

I made chocolate and zucchini cake a couple of nights ago.

Work has been sort of bad lately, well not that bad, but I got staffed recently, and I haven't had the luck of being able to leap out the door at 6:00 pm, which all those sit around me seem to be able to do. I guess they've found a way to ward off the staffing fairy? I don't know. So I've been sitting in my empty bullpen along, after 8:00 pm trying to get stuff done, but not trying that hard since I know that if I finish something, they will just give me more to do... which means that even at 8:00 pm at night, I stay in the office and surf the web instead of being too productive.

Anyway, so I bought some zucchini last weekend in Chinatown (a sort of monstrous one actually), since I was planning to make zucchini pancakes-- I'd found a recipe in this book my college roommate gave me before I moved to New York, The New Cook, by Donna Hay.

The book has been sitting on my fridge for ages, and its actually very pretty, with lots of stylish photos of the dishes. Til now I haven't been able to bring myself to make anything in the book. Anyway, it turns out that the cookbook is pretty good, so I really wanted to experiment with dishes. I was going to make the zucchini pancake and the leek souffle. But I don't have an electric mixer and I couldn't figure out which vegetables were leeks when I went to Chinatown, since they don't label the produce. I mean, I know a leek is sort of like a big green onion, and they had those, but... were those really leeks?

Anyway, so I got home after work a few nights ago, and I decided I had to do something about this zucchini that was exploding in the fridgerator. So I decided to make a chocolate and zucchini cake, which I got from the blog Chocolate and Zucchini. Its a pretty wonderful food blog.

I spent about half an hour manually grating the zucchini--

that gave me about 3 cups of zucchini. I guess the sucker wasn't as big as I thought! (Should I buy a food processor?)


Then I mixed it all up, added flour, baking soda, baking powder, brown sugar and ground coffee.

Here is the flour combined with cocoa.


Everything mixed up.


Ingredients: baking soda, salt, baking powder


I added the butter to the brown sugar.


Tried to mix it together.


Some ground coffee-- I store it in a mason jar in the freezer.


Tossed in some eggs.


Then I put in the flour mixture cup by cup into the wet mixture.


The last step was to put in the zucchini.


More mixing.


I poured it into the pan and then I


sprinkled hazelnuts on top.

The cake turned out pretty yummy, sort of dense and rich. It really wasn't all that sweet though, I guess that amount of sugar isn't very high. I was sort of expecting something different I guess. In any case, its made an interesting snack for me the past few days at work-- for 4:00 pm lull, I guess.



Beats spending $4 on a snack from Starbucks..

Is that a cupcake? Or is it lasagna?

Over the weekend, I sort of went on a shopping rampage at East Village Cheese. I picked up brie, monterey jack, cheddar cheese, mozzarella and ricotta cheese. Hopefully, green furry things won't start sprouting on the cheese before I figure out what to do with it.

I decided to make my own version of Dweezil and Lisa's Lasagna Cupcakes. I say modified, since I sort of changed things around-- I combined the recipe with one that I found on epicurious for one-step lasagna. It actually turned out okay, and I learned that you can use dumpling wrappers instead of lasagna pasta. Pretty neat.

So I started by preparing the tomato/meat sauce.

Heat up a pan, then add olive oil.


Toss in some chopped garlic.

After the garlic browned for a while, I threw in

some chopped onions. (I am thinking about buying a food processor, since I feel like I spend so much time chopping. But, maybe I should improve my chopping skills first?)


After the onions had softened and turned slightly clear, I threw in half a pound of ground pork. I would normally use beef, but mad cow has me a little freaked out. Plus, I like pork anyway.


After the pork changed color, I opened up a can of tomato sauce and tossed it in. I wanted to add some chopped tomatoes too, but at that point, I was too tired to do more chopping.


Here are the spices I used. Let's see there's red pepper flakes, oregano, basil (fresh is always better, but hey I have the dry stuff too), and bay leaves.


Then I let it simmer for about five minutes.


Here are all the cheeses. There's the fresh ricotta, low-fat mozzarella (I wanted to buy regular, but it actually cost more!) and parmesan. It took me a while to grate all that cheese. Blah!


Then here is the first cupcake. I used cupcake wrappers, which in retrospect, I sort of regret. After the cupcakes cooked up, the lasagna got all stuck to the wrappers! In any case, first I added one layer of won tons.


Then I added a cheese layer, putting in half ricotta, a lot of mozzarella and a dash of parmesan.


Then I put a layer of tomato sauce. Yum, I love tomato sauce.


Then, after realizing that the won ton wrappers were too big for the cupcake tins, I cut the won ton wrappers up into quarters. I put a layer of these on top of the tomato sauce.


So more cheese, more tomato sauce, more won tons, you get the idea. I topped it off with a layer of mozzarella and parmesan. Here's the final product before I put them in the oven.


All done! Don't they look yummy? The tasted pretty good, just like normal lasagna. I guess the won ton wrapper was a little thinner than normal lasagna pasta though. Maybe in the future I'll add two layers instead of one.

So that's the lasagna. Homer took some to work the next day, and when he was taking them out to heat up for lunch, someone mistakened them for real cupcakes! Heheh. I guess the trickery worked!!

But should you try this recipe, remember, do not use cupcake wrappers. They get all stuck!

So now I still have another half pound of ricotta cheese to use. What to do?! Maybe I'll make up a pan of regular lasagna, since I have a million dumpling wrappers left also.

Another day, another delectable duck.