No more! A few weeks ago, I decided to liberate myself from the iced-beverage monopoly.* I’ve been making my own iced coffee and iced tea and hauling it all to work. I’m saving money and gaining arm strength carting all these beverages around. For both, I cold-brew, meaning I use cold water, and in the case of the iced tea, the fridge. Something about the process of cooling down hot coffee or tea for iced coffee makes both go a bit bitter. That’s not a problem with cold-brewed. The taste is fresh and clean. Just what you want when it’s a zillion degrees out.

I’ve been making my own cold-brewed iced coffee using this recipe from the New York Times intermittently for a few years, but with student loans to pay off and a relative paucity of convenient Dunkins on my commute (what do I gotta do to get a convenient Dunkin on my commute, New England?!), I’ve been drinking it nearly every day.

The coffee takes less than five minutes to prepare the night before and about as much time to pour and mix the next morning. I don’t water down the coffee concentrate as much as they recommend—I just throw in a splash of water and about three ice cubes—so I get about one and a half drinks per batch. I store the leftover coffee in a glass covered in foil in the fridge, and it seems to do just fine in there for a day or two. I like my iced coffee with two-percent milk and a dash of simple syrup (more on that below), but I’m sure it would hold up to the preparation of your choice.

Cold-brewed iced tea is a different animal. It’s not as strong as its coffee counterpart or the kind you brew hot and then cool down. I view this as a good thing, but if you don’t, you might want to read Vrylena’s instructions for iced tea. Or just use more tea bags than I’ve been using, I guess. I like four tea bags per two quarts of cold water—it’s strong enough to taste but still light—but you could start with two for an agua fresca feel and adjust upwards from there for your liking. Flexibility! It’s a beautiful thing. So far I’ve had good luck with every variety of tea I’ve tried, and that includes two kinds of vanilla-flavored black tea, Moroccan mint green tea, a hibiscus tea, and a raspberry matcha tea. Leave the tea in the fridge to steep at least eight hours or overnight. Black tea seems to benefit from closer to 24 hours of steeping, but it will be fine after 12.** I like my tea straight up with ice or with a teensy bit of simple syrup to brighten the flavor. Jay likes his with quite a bit more simple syrup. Again, your preference.

What’s simple syrup, you ask? It’s the liquid sugar stuff they use to sweeten iced beverages at Starbucks. You can buy it at Whole Foods and many other stores (a common brand is Monin), but it’s so easy to make at home that there’s absolutely no reason to spend money on it.

Simple Syrup

1 cup sugar
1 cup water

Pour the water into a small saucepan over medium-high heat.

Stir in the sugar and continue to stir until it dissolves. Allow the mixture to come to a boil and boil for about a minute. Reduce the heat and simmer for about another three minutes.

Turn off the heat and let the syrup cool. It will thicken as it cools.

When cool, store the syrup in a jar in the fridge. It keeps well, and this recipe is easily multiplied to fit your needs.

*This is a reference that I’m sure no one will get but me. There used to be these weird little text ads at the bottom of the front page of the New York Times in the 90s that said “so-and-so building has been liberated from the cable monopoly!” They sounded oddly like an incitement to revolution.

**EDIT: Added instructions about steeping time for tea.

I guess this is a lesson in multitasking. I was busy doing other steps in the recipe and lost track of the bechamel after I whisked in the milk. Some time later, I remembered the sauce, concluded that it must be done, and dumped an entire package of baby spinach** into the pan. Immediately, I could tell that something was wrong. Instead of a thick, velvety sauce wilting the spinach leaves, I had… a pot filled with cooked milk with spinach swimming in it.

With the rest of the ingredients prepped, no other dinner options, and a hungry, grumbling populace pacing around the kitchen, I said to myself, “Screw it, I know this is wrong, but I’m making it anyway!”

“Maybe it’ll thicken up in the oven,” said Jay, attempting to be helpful.

“No,” I said huffily. “It won’t, because I screwed up.”

“Stop beating yourself up and put the lasagna in the oven,” said Jay. “Besides, I’m hungry.”

The lasagna turned out as expected: A pile of noodles, spinach, lemons, and sausage, surrounded on the plate by flavored milk. It was a tasty pile of noodles, spinach, lemons, and sausage, surrounded on the plate by flavored milk, but still–it was a pile of stuff, and not lasagna.

Martha Stewart was doing something right, even if I wasn’t, because the lasagna was tasty enough in its semi-failed incarnation that I made it again. Here are the steps I took to not screw up the bechamel:

• Melt butter.
• Add flour and stir to incorporate.
• Cook for a minute or two.
• Gradually add milk in fairly small quantities, stirring to incorporate after each addition. I feel very strongly about gradually adding the milk. Your arms will get a workout, but it’s worth it. I think you get a smoother sauce.
• Cook, stirring, until the sauce comes to a boil.
• Lower the heat and simmer, stirring from time to time, until the sauce thickens.
• Yay!

*Stop making that face and make this dish. It’s really good.

**The only substitution I made was to switch out the chard in favor of spinach. We are not chard fans. I think it tastes like dirt, and I don’t want to eat lasagna that tastes like dirt. I rejected kale in favor of the more chard-ish texture of spinach, and if the dish suffered, I didn’t notice. I used a full package of baby spinach (I believe that’s five ounces).

The recipe had rave reviews, so you can imagine my surprise at hearing it had been a disaster. Jay claimed that after an hour and 20 minutes in the oven, it still wasn’t cooked through in spite of a thick crust on the outside. We conducted a joint inspection of the banana bread, now lying partially dismantled on the kitchen counter.

“See?” said Jay, pointing at a spot in the loaf. “It’s not cooked!”

“I think that’s a piece of banana,” I said, squinting. “Let me cut a piece and check.” I cut a piece, and Jay grabbed half. I held it up to the light. Banana.

So I guess we’ll be having banana bread for the next few days, and there’s no need to find a new recipe.

I asked my mom–who’s been making whoopie pies for years but has never, to my knowledge, dressed up as one–to weigh in and to tell me about the origins of our family whoopie pie recipe. Although one set of great-grandparents made a pit stop in Maine for a few years along the well-traveled path from the west of Ireland to Dorchester, I didn’t think there was a Maine connection with our recipe. I also speculated that perhaps the lard accusation, which seemed strange to me, originated in a pre-shortening recipe. Here’s the word from Mom (emphasis mine):

“Mercy! First off, I never particularly associated whoopie pies with Maine–they were simply a dessert of my childhood (though I think the King Arthur flour catalog, which had a recipe a couple of years ago, mentioned Pennsylvania…)* We never made them with lard. I suspect you’re right about bakers switching from lard to shortening. But I can’t quite imagine people using lard in the filling, so I wonder if the recipe originated in the shortening era. Wikipedia says Crisco was introduced in 1911. (Could this be a Schlesinger Library research question?)

P.S. Does Confidential Chat still exist? It was a regular feature in the Globe, a few days a week, eventually reduced to just Sundays. People contributed under pen names, not just recipes but all sorts of tips, instructions, how-tos. You could ask any kind of question; like asking Joan Hamburg. There were even occasional controversies (woman who claimed to feed her family on ridiculously small amount each week). I remember considering what name I’d use if I ever wrote in, but I can’t remember any of the candidates. I wonder if there’s a book about the Chat.

As the above link tells us, Confidential Chat no longer exists. Mom again: “Good article about Confidential Chat. That’s the way I remember it. It was touching how people helped one another, and pretty amazing how people came up with obscure items or information well before the Internets. And, as the article says, it wasn’t limited to recipes and household advice; over the years social issues played out in the letters. Btw, I remember Fireman’s Wife.”

*Follow-up email from Mom: “Found the King Arthur clipping. The headnote reads: ‘OK, we understand if you’re not from northern New England, you probably don’t know what a Whoopie Pie is. Well, read on…’ So I don’t know where I heard of Pennsylvania origins.” I’ve heard of Pennsylvania claims to the whoopie pie as well. When the New York Times discovered them a few years ago, they mentioned the (I think!) spurious Pennsylvania claim.

**Fannie Farmer would be a good cookbook to consult, given its origins as the Boston Cooking School cookbook.

***Marshmallow fluff is, of course, also a Massachusetts original. Maybe you already knew that if you live in Somerville.

Now that you’re hungry, here’s the recipe. Mom said in another follow-up email that she is checking with her cousin Eileen, who lived downstairs when they were kids, to see if she remembers the origin of the recipe. Let’s say for now that it’s from Confidential Chat, but I’ll update this if something different comes to light.

A few notes: I like to make smaller cookies than you are likely to see in many bakeries. They’ll spread and smooth out as they bake, and I’d aim for discs that are about three inches in diameter. They’re actually more cake-like than cookie-like, and you want to keep them soft rather than letting the edges or the tops crisp up.

You’ll want about a third of an inch or so of filling in each whoopie pie. If you end up with extra filling in the bowl once you’re done, go back and slap on some more where it seems needed. You’ll notice that this recipe features frosting made with powdered sugar. I know there are recipes out there that call for a fluff filling–there’s the New England connection again–but I can’t advise you on how to make those.

Whoopie Pies
From Mom, we think via Confidential Chat

Cakes:
½ cup shortening
1 cup sugar
2 egg yolks
1 cup milk
2 cups all-purpose flour
5 tablespoons cocoa
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon vanilla

Sift dry ingredients together (if you don’t have a sifter, use a strainer, or stir the dry ingredients together to combine).

Beat the shortening, sugar and egg yolks briefly. Add the dry ingredients, milk and vanilla; beat until smooth. Drop the batter by tablespoons on ungreased cookie sheets. Bake 10 – 12 minutes at 375°, until cookies are set but not crisp. Cool cookies on wire racks. When cool, put together pairs of cookies with filling.

Filling:
2 egg whites
2 cups confectioner’s sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
¼ teaspoon salt
½ cup shortening

Beat filling ingredients until smooth and fluffy.

Also, what am I complaining for? I own two heavily used Mark Bittman cookbooks, and thanks to the internet, I can look up any of his recipes that I don’t already have on hand. I can check my cooking sanity at any time!

Thanks, Mark.

In no particular order:

1. Don’t cook tomato sauce repeatedly in a cast-iron pan. You will de-season the pan, and the sauce will start to taste metallic.

2. If you’re going grocery shopping on foot, don’t buy orange juice, laundry detergent, and canned tomatoes all at once. HEAVY.
2a. Learn how to bag your groceries properly: distribute the items so that each bag is about the same weight. If someone else bags your groceries, check the bags before you leave the store and redistribute as necessary.

3. If you feel the need to kosher the kitchen in your dorm, don’t have your friend or cousin or brother or whoever who’s a rabbi come over with a blowtorch at midnight to do the job. It will set off the fire alarm, and all your neighbors will hate you.
3a. If you have a kosher kitchen in your dorm, don’t assume the suitemate randomly assigned by the housing office isn’t eating trayf in there late at night when you’re asleep. That suitemate was my friend, and yes, she is Jewish.

4. Don’t cook the noodles for chicken soup in the broth along with the rest of the soup ingredients. The starch from the noodles will make the broth cloudy, and it will look really weird and unappetizing when the leftovers have been sitting in the fridge for a day or two. Cook the noodles separately and add them to the soup right before you eat it.

5. That awful smell in your kitchen? It could be the potatoes you bought a few weeks ago and left in a cabinet. Potatoes smell like rotting flesh when they’re, well, rotting.

6. The best time to go grocery shopping in New York is late at night. It’s less crowded, but be forewarned–the crazy-people quotient is higher than it is during the day. Fairway at 74th and Broadway is a good late-night shopping destination, and it’s right on the 1 train!

7. Beware the college obsession with free food. Just because there’s food around doesn’t mean you have to eat it. It’s tempting to eat anything and everything that’s free because you think you’re saving money. If you make this a habit, you’ll pay for it later in life, trust me.

8. Don’t buy food in the large packages your parents bought to feed a family of five. You’ll never finish all those Cheez-Its. And don’t do this thinking you’ll share with your roommates under some system you guys devised for communal purchases. It’s not going to work. Buy a smaller package, and buy your own food.

9. Why did the wooden spoon turn yellow?! Your roommate used it to make some concoction involving lentils and curry powder (the leftovers are now in the fridge in an assortment of repurposed cottage cheese containers you guys are using as “Tupperware”). The turmeric in the curry powder turns everything yellow, and it will take a long time to come off, if it ever does.

10. Clean it up. Whatever the mess is, clean it up. If it was something smelly–fish is automatically “something smelly”–take out the trash NOW.

11. Learn to make do. With inadequate kitchens, a shortage of cooking implements, not enough money to buy the high-quality ingredients your parents would buy, not enough time to prepare a full meal every night, and not as much knowledge as you’d like to have about any of the above problems. There’s almost always a workaround, so put on your thinking cap and find it.

You should be able to find all the ingredients for this recipe at a standard Asian grocery store, or depending on where you live, at a regular supermarket. Don’t expect to find a wide selection of rice wine at a Cambodian grocery store, though. Maybe that’s not a problem if you don’t live in Lowell, possibly the most Cambodian place in the country, but it goes to show that “Asian” is not a monolithic ethnicity or cuisine, as many restaurant menus would have you believe.

Alice’s sweet and spicy beef noodles
Adapted from Ming Tsai

Toppings
1 cucumber, peeled, seeded, and julienned
2 carrots, diced into 1/4” cubes**
2 cups mung bean sprouts

Brown the beef. I suggest a cast iron pan, and you don’t need any added oil.***

Meanwhile, heat a large saucepan over high heat. Heat the oil and when it shimmers, add the chiles, garlic, ginger, beans, and onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are soft, about 5 minutes. Add the hoisin sauce, stir to incorporate, and cook about 2 minutes more.

Transfer the beef to the vegetable mixture with a slotted spoon. Add the rice wine and stock.

Reduce heat to low and simmer until the mixture has a saucelike consistency, stirring occasionally, for about 45 minutes. Correct the seasonings as necessary.

Prepare the Shanghai noodles as directed. Drain well and divide among 4 bowls. Ladle on the beef sauce and top with the cucumber, carrots, and sprouts.****

*The original recipe calls for canola oil, but I have come to dislike the taste of canola oil in cooking. I know, call me weird, but it tastes and smells funny to me. I’ve started substituting peanut oil in this recipe, and I like it a lot. It tastes cleaner to me.

**Quoth Alice: “Alternative: Sometimes I cook the diced carrots with the chiles, garlic, etc. instead of using it as a topping.” Either way is good.

***You can also brown the beef in with the vegetables after the hoisin sauce step. I’ve done this and prefer to brown the beef separately, which is what Alice recommends too, because browning it in the saucepan with the vegetables produces too much fat for my liking, and I hate skimming fat.

****I usually just mix the sauce in with the noodles in a big bowl and serve that way with condiments on the side. It’s not particularly elegant, but it gets the job done.

I use my garlic peeler every day, though. It takes up very little room in a drawer and saves me a lot of time on a task I perform regularly. If there’s another use for the garlic peeler, I haven’t yet discovered it, but even if it only peels garlic, it was worth the money.

I was nearly defeated by giant olives that were impossible to pit because they didn’t really fit in the pitter contraption I got from my dad. Then I realized that I forgot to ask the butcher to split the chicken breasts, so I had to do it myself.

I almost had a cooking breakdown standing there in the kitchen over the unsplit chicken breasts. I almost threw the chicken in the freezer for a day when I had more patience and got leftovers out of the fridge.

But then!

I thought about it and said to myself, What Would Mark Bittman Do? I remembered that one of the things I like about Mark Bittman is that he gets those cooking breakdown moments, and he tries to cut them off at the pass. In fact, I once said to Vrylena that I like Mark Bittman because he seems to understand that “what the hell have I done” moment you have when you’re staring down the raw chicken in your kitchen after you get home from the store. I said that I suspect he gets that feeling himself sometimes, in spite of the multiple cookbooks and the New York Times column and the TV appearances and everything. I take comfort in that.

So I took a deep breath and rallied and attacked the chicken breasts. They were only slightly mangled and still perfectly usable, but next time I’ll remember to ask the butcher to split them for me. I put the recalcitrant olives back in the fridge and caved and used canned black olives that Jay had in the basement (don’t even start: I searched four stores for non-kalamata black olives not sold in a can and came up empty handed, except for the giant unpittable cerignolas from Whole Foods). I’m sure fancy olives would have been better, but honestly, the canned ones were perfectly decent, and the whole dish was really tasty and had this nice thick tomato sauce that went really well with rice and broccolini.

Katy 1, Cooking Breakdown 0.

*That recipe as written is what’s in the cookbook, for the most part, except for the zucchini and eggplant. And I didn’t use the anchovies because, I don’t know, anchovies. We’re not really fans, but if that’s your thing, go for it.