Skillet.

I threw some little sausages on a hot skillet and they started popping and rolling around.

There is a small voice in the back of my head that occasionally starts shouting.

There is also a much louder, calmer, logical voice that tends to drown out the first one.

Cooking with Ned: Toffee

After failing to make candied citron the first time, I was left with a pot of salty syrup. I usually make toffee with salted butter and sugar, so the obvious solution was to throw some unsalted butter in the pot and make toffee. To make toffee, you combine an equal amount of butter and sugar, and heat it over the stove until it reaches 285 degrees Fahrenheit.

With a candy thermometer, it's almost impossible to fail at making toffee. You put the pot on the stove, start stirring, and watch the temperature. It's worth noting that at 212 degrees (the boiling point of water) the temperature will stay constant until the moisture from the butter has evaporated.

This can take a while. Keep stirring.

You don't want to walk away from the pot. When the temperature starts to rise again, it will go up very quickly. The whole mixture will foam up and the toffee will burn if you don't stir it constantly and pull it off the heat the second it hits 285. So keep stirring.

When the sun has burned out and all life on earth has perished and the universe has come to an end, the toffee will finally be ready. Pour it onto a foil-lined baking sheet and let it cool, and you will have toffee! You can even drop some chocolate chips on top and spread them around as they melt. When the toffee is hard you can break it into pieces. Of course, all this assumes you didn't get bored and wander away before the toffee hit 285...

Cooking with Ned: Belgian Street Waffles

Pirate? and went to Europe a few years ago, while in Belgium we bought waffles from the street vendors. They were the most amazing waffles ever, sweet and sort of crispy and perfect without anything on them. Pirate? tried one covered in chocolate and it wasn't nearly as good as the plain street waffles.

Step 1: Visit Belgium, Eat Street Waffles, Return Home, Die Trying to Make Street Waffles

I kept trying different recipes for Belgian waffles, and always ended up with fluffy cake-like waffles. I tried adding more flour, honey, more sugar, anything I could think of to make them dense and chewy and amazing. My kitchen became increasingly covered in failed waffle batter. Finally it occurred to me to search the Internet, Fountain of All Knowledge. I automatically assume that any problem I have (aside from a small dog covered in hair dye) has already been experienced by someone else, who has both solved the problem and then posted about it on the internet.

Step 2: Liege Waffles, Street Waffles, Pearl Sugar
Fact: There are actually two kinds of "Belgian waffles". The familiar ones you get from the guy who makes the omelettes at a champagne brunch are known as Brussels waffles. These are the big, round, cakey waffles that I don't like. They are not street waffles. For some bizarre reason, the Liege waffle, iconic street waffle of Belgium, is completely unknown here in California. Once I found the secret identity of my beloved street waffles I was able to find some recipes to try out.

The next big barrier between myself and waffley goodness was the unavailability to pearl sugar in stores. See, in Europe they have a bunch of different kinds of sugar. There's caster sugar, pearl sugar, loaf sugar...here we mostly just have sugar. Pearl sugar has much larger granules than regular table sugar, and it caramelizes during the waffling process to give the street waffles their crispy, waffley goodness. You can buy imported pearl sugar online, but if you lack the foresight or ability to plan your cooking exploits you can also just crunch some sugar cubes up with a meat tenderizer or other blunt object. Just don't mash them too fine.

Step 3: Find Recipe, Make Street Waffles, Die of Waffle-Poisoning
I found a number of recipes for Liege waffles once I knew what I was looking for. All of them called for yeast, and some also required the waffle batter to rise for an hour or more. I am impatient, so I selected a recipe that was probably authentic and only called for a total of 25 minutes of waiting. I originally planned to half the recipe in case these weren't the waffles of my dreams, then immediately forgot and added double the amount of sugar I needed. I now have a whole batch of waffley goodness, not exactly perfect, but definitely the closest thing to Belgian street waffles that I can make in my $20 Hello Kitty waffle iron.

Cooking with Ned: Candied Citron

Z likes fruitcake. I hate fruitcake but love to cook. I vastly prefer to cook things from scratch, so I decided I would make him a fruitcake. I found this recipe and used it as sort of a guideline. Z loves candied citron from the store, so I didn't want to leave it out of the recipe. I was already drying fruit in my food dehydrator, so I figured I might as well candy a citron.

Step 1: What the Heck is a Citron?
No really. Having shopped primarily in large chain grocery stores my entire life, I had no idea what a citron was. At first I thought "candied citron" was just candied citrus peel, but further investigation  shows that a citron is actually a fruit. A very difficult to find fruit. There are basically two different types of citron found in grocery stores. The etrog citron looks like a large and very lumpy lemon. The Buddha's Hand citron looks like the illegitimate offspring of a lemon and a kraken. I found mine at Whole Foods.

Step 2: Unbrining That Which You Have Brined

Candied fruit is made by boiling the fruit in sugar syrup for all eternity. I used this recipe because it gave candy thermometer temperatures to follow so you know when it's done. Two cups of water, three cups of sugar, a spoonful of corn syrup, boil to 230 degrees F. The Buddha's hand citron doesn't have any fruity bits on the inside, it's basically nothing but rind. No scraping, no peeling, just dice the damned thing up and throw it in the pot.

When I first looked up candied citron, I found a lot of recipes for candied fruit peel that involved soaking or boiling the peels in saltwater first. I neglected to note that none of the handful of candied citron recipes online called for salt, and ended up with weirdly salty candied citron. I'm a terrible but optimistic cook, so I decided to throw it back in plain water and boil it until it wasn't salty anymore, then start over with new syrup.

Join us next time for fruitcake! Or possibly toffee, depending on what I decide to do with that syrup.