Blog for Annie's Delectation

an excellent use for your stripy pan

2012-02-14T14:39:00.000-08:00

I've made this recipe twice lately, because it's so easy and good! Rachael especially likes it, and always wants seconds. It's by the ever-inventive Yotam Ottolenghi and can be found here. I made it exactly as written except that I used 1lb of broccolini (AKA baby broccoli) instead of the called-for 550g of purple sprouting broccoli. I've never seen purple sprouting at a store or farmer's market around here, and think it's probably only available to those who grow it themselves. Anyway, if you have stripy pan you really should try this recipe!

yummy, yummy tofu

2012-02-02T12:04:00.000-08:00

If you're in need of a quick pick-me-up and have some tofu handy, you should try this super-quick scrambled tofu. It takes less than five minutes to make, from decision to in-your-bowl!

serves one
a little bit of olive oil
1/2 a carton of firm (not extra-firm) tofu, 3.5-4oz
1/8t each black salt* and turmeric
a couple of grinds of black pepper and a couple of shakes of garlic powder (I like Spike Garlic Magic)

Heat your frying pan over medium heat with a little olive oil in it. Squish the tofu through your fingers directly into the pan (you needn't wait for the pan to heat up), then add the seasonings. Stir around to get everything mixed together, then stir occasionally till it's all warm and steamy. Transfer to your dish and eat.

*You can get this at your local Indian or Pakistani store, or from Amazon.

yet another hippie dressing

2012-01-22T10:03:00.000-08:00

If you're fond of tahini-based salad dressings, as I am, you'll probably like this one as well as my Goddess and Woodstock clones. It has an east Asian flavor profile, and would likely overwhelm a plain lettuce salad, but it nicely complemented the seaweed Waldorf salad I made recently and is also good with heartier greens like cabbage and kale.

Creamy Gingery Dressing
makes about a pint
1/2C tamari
1/2C tahini
1/4C sesame oil
1T agave nectar (or honey or maple syrup)
1/4C apple cider vinegar
fresh ginger, about 1 1/2T, peeled and roughly chopped
1/4 oil (olive or canola)
juice of half a lime

Whiz everything in your blender till smooth. It will be pourable at first, but thicken up as it rests.

My seaweed Waldorf salad is made with about 20g mixed dried seaweed, rehydrated in cool water, along with a banana, an apple, a couple of green onions, a couple of stalks of celery, and some finely shredded cabbage, all mixed together with about 2T of Gingery Dressing.

The below-pictured coleslaw was made with half of a small green cabbage, finely shredded, along with a chopped apple, a big handful of briefly-soaked-in-tea sultanas, and maybe 3T of Gingery Dressing. Both salads keep well for a couple of days, so are good for work lunches.

a light wintery soup

2012-01-06T19:43:00.000-08:00

Mushroom Soup
serves 3
10g dried porcinis
2t olive oil
a medium red onion, julienned
2 medium carrots, diced
250g creminis, or a mixture of fancier mushrooms if you like, thinly sliced
marjoram, thyme, urfa biber (or similar mild chile), a big pinch or two of each
2t of a light miso, like chickpea
2t black vinegar or sherry vinegar
1/2C chopped parsley

Cover the porcinis with water and let them soak while you prepare the remaining ingredients. Heat the oil in a big soup pot over medium-low heat and add the onion. Stir occasionally. Dice the carrots and add them. When the onions are well-done and the carrots are beginning to brown a little, add the sliced mushrooms and turn the heat up to medium. When the mushrooms have gotten nicely limp and are beginning to brown, strain the porcini soaking water into the pot and add enough additional water to cover everything generously.Slice the softened porcinis and add them to the soup along with the marjoram, thyme, and urfa biber. Bring to gentle boil, turn down the heat, cover the pot, and let simmer for about ten minutes. Take of the heat and add the miso (using a miso-koshi if you have one) and vinegar. Stir thoroughly, then taste for seasoning. Does it need more salt than was provided by the miso? More vinegar? Finally, mix in the parsley and serve.
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tuna-safe tempeh salad

2012-01-05T14:34:00.000-08:00

I made this tempeh salad for my work lunch a couple of days ago, and thought I'd better chronicle it here so I don't forget about it. It's really quick and easy, though not very fishy-tasting. Next time I'll try it with some stronger-tasting seaweed like hijiki, even though it will be less attractively pink than it is with dulse.... I had intended to eat it with crackers but was too lazy to make the crackers so ended up making little lettuce wraps. That was good too, though maybe not quite as satisfying as the cracker would have been.

Tempeh Salad
serves 3
8oz tempeh, cut into little 1/4-1/8" cubes
a handful of seaweed
a medium avocado
1 1/2T Vegenaise
juice of 1/2 a lemon
a small dill pickle, minced
a smallish shallot, minced
2 stalks of celery, thinly sliced
1T soy sauce
2t seedy mustard
1t vinegar (whatever kind you like)
1 clove of garlic, crushed
pepper

Steam the tempeh for 10 minutes and put the seaweed in a cup and cover it with water. Meanwhile, scrape the avocado insides into a big bowl and mash it thoroughly with the Vegenaise and lemon juice. Mix the remaining ingredients in, then add the tempeh. When the seaweed's soft, drain it and squeeze it, then chop it finely. Stir it in, and then let everything rest in the fridge for at least an hour before serving.

an easy, make-ahead squash dish

2011-12-26T12:45:00.000-08:00

I went to potlucks two days in a row recently, with no time to cook for the second one ( it was a work party so my food had to be all ready when I left the house at 6:20 in the morning), so I needed a recipe which could be made well ahead of time and served at room temp but still be festive and delicious. Luckily for me, the always reliable Yotam Ottolenghi had a suitable looking recipe in the Guardian. I tripled it and took two-thirds to an event peopled by a bunch of squash-haters--so I'll have nice leftovers for my upcoming work lunches--and the rest of it to my work the next day where it was a triumphant success!

It really was quick and easy; the only part that took any real time was peeling and cutting up the squash. I used a kuri, because I like them better than butternuts, but if you used a butternut even that would be quick and easy.

I took the above picture before I remembered to add the za'atar, so in real life it was a little more brown. Za'atar is the only ingredient in this which might be hard to find. In Seattle you can get it at PFI or The Souk; otherwise, Penzey's has it.

dried pineapple

2011-12-21T06:19:00.000-08:00

If you find yourself in possession of a pineapple or two and don't feel like making pineapple salad or pineapple crud (really quick and yummy!), you could always make dried pineapple. I like the kind I make better than the kind you get from the store, mainly because of its texture; I don't dry it as long, because I expect to eat it up within a few weeks, so it turns out much more tender. I also like to sprinkle a little herb salt over the pineapple pieces before they go in the dehydrator. You should end up with about a quart of dried pineapple per whole fruit (the jar pictured above has two pineapple's worth in it).

Dried Pineapple
a pineapple, peeled and cut up into fairly thin pieces--a little less than a centimeter, maybe
a small amount of Yamuna's herb salt
3T dried cilantro
2T dried basil
1T dried dill
2t dried marjoram
1t dried oregano
1/2t dried cayenne
4T coarse sea salt
Grind everything together in a blender, then store in a little jar.

Spread the pineapple pieces out on your dehydrator trays, then sprinkle lightly with herb salt. Dry at 118° till dry but still tender and pliable. The time required will vary according to the thickness of your pineapple slices, but should be somewhere between 8 and 24 hours. Just keep checking every once in a while!

Rachael's birthday pineapple salad

2011-12-19T06:24:00.000-08:00

I guess pineapple's really in season in the spring, but they've been on sale in all the stores here lately so I've been eating lots of them. I took a pineapple salad to a potluck last week--not my usual Indian one, but a Vietnamesish version I used to make for Rachael's birthday dinners. This salad's not as universally popular as the Indian one--only one person asked me for the recipe--but I like it equally well. A key ingredient is tuong cu-da, a soybean sauce which has a stinkiness similar to that of fish sauce.

SE Asian Pineapple Salad
salad:
A nice, ripe pineapple, peeled and cut up
a red bell pepper, cut into short strips
a couple of firm but ripe tomatoes, if there are good ones available to you, halved and cut into thin semicircles
a generous handful of peanuts, toasted in a pan on the stove and then roughly chopped
a shallot, minced
a chile, minced
herbs (coriander, Thai basil, mint--whatever you think will be good)
dressing:
juice of a lime
tuong cu-da, the same amount as the lime juice
a clove of garlic, crushed
sugar (palm sugar if you have some), optional, depending on how sweet the pineapple is

Mix the salad ingredients together in a big bowl, and the dressing in a smaller bowl. Taste the dressing for balance of flavors before tossing it into the salad.

This sauce can be hard to find--when Annie and I were looking for it at the Viet Wah, where I'd bought it previously, a helpful employee directed us to the thick, cloudy fish sauces as they have a similar taste. When we said we wanted a fish-free sauce, she found a man who told us that they didn't carry it any more but that we could get it at nearby Minh Tam. If you can't find it and you don't care if your salad is vegetarian, fish sauce would be a good substitute; otherwise, try some regular soy sauce.

yet another post about kale chips....

2011-12-05T05:52:00.001-08:00

It seems like every blog in the world has posted about kale chips and how delicious and easy to make they are, but I thought I'd better add one of my own in case any of my followers haven't gotten the message. You should make them! They're so easy and good! And if you can't help but eat a whole batch at one sitting, well, it's better than if you'd eaten a bag of potato chips.

I think it's easiest of all to make them in a food dehydrator, as you just leave them in till they're dry and don't have to worry about overdoing them, but if you don't have one you can bake them in your oven. I've read various recommendations for temperatures and baking times--from 30 minutes at 250° to 5 minutes at 450°--but the key to success when using an oven is frequent stirring and checking so they don't get too dried out and brittle.

You can use any flavors you like--make them fancy and cheesy like these, or add lime and chile if you'd like them zippy. I usually make them like this:

Kale Chips
1 bunch of kale, minus the stems, torn into chip-sized pieces
a couple of cloves of garlic, crushed
a couple of sprigs of thyme, roughly chopped
a big pinch of salt
a smaller pinch of Aleppo pepper
1 T nutritional yeast
1T olive oil

Mix everything together in a big bowl, and kind of massage the seasonings into the leaves till they're really well coated. Spread out on a Silpat-lined cookie sheet if you're using your oven (be sure not to crowd the leaves; you may have to do a couple of batches) or on your dehydrator racks. If you're dehydrating, it should take about six hours at 115°.

a quick idea

2011-11-20T05:43:00.001-08:00

I made myself some squash soup recently and didn't feel like making pumpkin seeds with the squash's guts. I hated to just throw them away, though, so I made some pumpkin milk. I just covered the seeds and stringy stuff with water and let it soak while I worked on my soup, and after a couple of hours whizzed it all in my blender till it was very smooth. I squeezed it through a nut milk bag (If you don't have one, a big piece of cheesecloth would work nearly as well) and put it in the fridge. The next morning I used some as the liquid for a spinach smoothie. I think it would also be good used in place of water when cooking rice or oats.

cauliflower tomato

2011-11-07T06:19:00.000-08:00

I've made this dish a couple of times lately, and I really like it so I thought I'd better record it so that I don't forget all about it. It's good either fresh out of the oven or later on at room temp ( the second time I made it I took it to a potluck, where it was a success), and you can get all the vegetables cooked the night before so that it only needs a quick run through the oven right before you plan to eat it.

Cauliflower Tomato Bake
serves 2, and can easily be multiplied to serve more.

1 small cauliflower, thinly sliced so that the pieces look like little tree silhouettes
8 oz cherry or grape tomatoes, halved
olive oil
ground cumin and coriander
a couple of sprigs of marjoram, leaves stripped from stems and roughly chopped
salt and pepper

1/4C tahini
juice of a lemon
1 fat garlic clove, crushed
walnut parmesan*

If you're cooking your vegetables in advance, do them on a tin foil lined cookie sheet so they take less time. Otherwise cook them in a greased 8"x8" pan. Toss the sliced cauliflower with some olive oil, cumin, coriander, salt, and pepper. Spread it in your prepared pan and bake at 450°F till tender. Meanwhile, toss the tomatoes with a little more olive oil and salt and pepper, plus the marjoram. When the cauliflower's ready, scatter the tomatoes on top and cook for ten more minutes. At this point you can let the vegetables wait till the next day, or proceed to the final bake.
Heat (or turn down) the oven to 350°F . Whisk the tahini, lemon juice and garlic together, then add enough water to make it into a pourable sauce. Pour it over the vegetables in their 8"x8" pan, spread it around, and sprinkle some walnut parmesan over the top. Bake for 10-20 minutes more (it will vary according to how hot things are when you start), till browned and tasty looking.
*Walnut parmesan: walnuts,nutritional yeast, salt, and a little lemon zest, all chopped together to a fine meal in a food processor.

this year's quinces

2011-10-21T18:13:00.000-07:00

My quince tree did well this year--I picked 2700g of quinces altogether, leaving one stunted, under-ripe one behind. The squirrels seem to have learned that quinces are sour and hard and unlike apples, so they've stopped picking one and throwing it away in disgust after ruining it by taking a single bite.

The first thing I did with them was to include one in a batch of baked fruit, along with apples, pears, prunes and dried apricots. A single quince really enhanced the flavor!

Then I made some jam according to Christine Ferber's version of Nostradamus's recipe. This recipe takes five days--each day you simmer it for a couple of minutes, then let it rest till the next day--and I finally finished it today. It got a little singed on the bottom of the pan, but still tastes really good.

According to the Telegraph, greenish quinces will ripen off the tree, so I'm letting my remaining quinces sit in a bowl and perfume my house till they're ripe enough to make some quince vodka and roast quinces.

health-food chocolate pudding

2011-10-03T11:24:00.000-07:00

I've made this pudding a couple of times lately, and it really does seem pretty healthy for how good it is. I used to make puddings out of tofu sometimes, and they were never satisfactory as there was always a jarring note of soy. In this recipe the avocado fits right in, and the chia seeds add a pleasantly tapioca-y texture. It would even be suitable for a raw-foodist if you used raw cacao instead of the regular cocoa I had on hand.

Chocolate Pudding
serves 1-3, depending on your appetites
3/4C + 1/3C milk (I used almond milk)
3T chia seeds
1 small, ripe avocado, peeled and seeded
4 dates, seeded and torn apart
1/4C cocoa or cacao
1/4t cinnamon and a pinch of salt

Mix the chia seeds with 3/4C milk in a big bowl and let soak about half an hour. Try to remember to give them a whisk every few minutes as you proceed, so they don't clump together too much.

Whiz the remaining ingredients--including the 1/3C milk--together in your blender till they're really smooth. Stir into the soaked chia seeds. Cover and let rest in the fridge for a while. It will taste unpleasantly of raw cocoa at first, so don't bother to taste for seasoning till it's been there at least half an hour.

apologies, and a recipe

2011-09-18T13:07:00.000-07:00

I just realized that I haven't posted in over a month! If any of my followers have been fretting and wondering what I'm up to, I'm truly sorry. I've been taking lots of pictures with blog posts in mind, but until today hadn't even transferred them from my camera to the computer, let alone to flickr and thence to the blog.

I made a pretty good cucumber-eggplant dish--a good use of all the cucumbers and eggplants I got in my vegetable box recently--and took a picture so I could tell you about it.

I made a couple of kinds of jam--Victoria plum with star anise and vanilla, and peach melba with cardamom--and planned to tell all about it.

I've just been too lazy, though, till today. Today I mean to sew together the sweater I've been knitting for the last several months (above is pictured the half-knitted collar). That task seems much more onerous than a mere blog post, so I decided to get my pictures in order and give you a nice recipe for hemp seed tabbouleh. I've made this a couple of times and really like it. It's not quite the same, texturally, as regular tabbouleh with bulgar, but has the advantages of being gluten-free and higher in omega-3 fatty acids.

Hemp Tabbouleh
makes enough for about 4 people

1/2C hemp seed, soaked in water for a couple of hours, then thoroughly drained
a small bunch of parsley, finely chopped
a handful of mint leaves, chopped
a medium cucumber, peeled, seeded and chopped
about 12oz tomatoes, chopped
2 or 3 green onions, thinly sliced
a couple of Anaheim peppers, or the equivalent, seeded and chopped
a pinch of allspice
1/2t cinnamon
salt
juice of a lemon
a couple of glugs of olive oil

Mix everything together, then let sit for a while before you taste for seasoning. Does it need more salt? More lemon? Adjust, then serve.

another hippie salad dressing

2011-08-10T04:12:00.000-07:00

Here's a recipe for one of my favorite salad dressings, Annie's Goddess. It's really easy, and is better than Annie's in a couple of ways: my version is cheap, and it can be gluten-free if you use wheat-free tamari.

Goddess Dressing

makes about 1 1/3C

120g tahini
1T tamari
2T apple cider vinegar
1/2C water
1 or 2 cloves of garlic
2 or 3 sprigs of parsley--leaves only
pepper

If you have an immersion blender you can make this right in a wide-mouthed jar. Just add the ingredients in the order written, then blend till the parsley's pretty finely chopped. Otherwise blend it in your big blender, being careful not to thoroughly emulsify the parsley into the rest of it, and transfer to a jar. When it's first made it's the right thickness for salad dressing, but as it rests in the fridge it thickens up so that it's more like a dip. I like it like that, and roll my lettuce leaves to dip in a little cup of it, but you could always add more water if you want it to be runnier.

I couldn't decide which photo to use to illustrate this post: the top on was taken with a toy camera, and the watermelon's the only thing in focus, but I sort of like it; the bottom one is a better representation, I guess, but it's kind of dull.

zucchini spelt salad

2011-08-09T07:34:00.000-07:00

I got zucchini in my vegetable box last week because I forgot to ask them for a substitute in time. Since I hate zucchini I had to think of a way to prepare it which would disguise its flavor. This recipe from the Los Angeles Times looked good, except that the zucchini would still taste of zucchini if prepared as written, so I changed it around a little and was really pleased with the result:

Spelt Salad with Zucchini and Augula

180g cracked spelt*
450ml water
250g zucchini, halved lengthwise
1 spring onion, halved lengthwise
juice of half a lemon
1T olive oil
salt and pepper
2t fresh marjoram, minced
half a bunch of arugula, torn
40g pine nuts**, toasted

Cook the spelt with the water in your rice cooker on the brown rice cycle, or on the stove for about 25 minutes. Meanwhile prepare the vegetables. Rub the cut surfaces of the zucchini with salt and let rest for at least half an hour. Brush the spring onion with olive oil and cook on a stripy pan till softened. When the zucchini's time is up, squeeze the juice from it as best you can, brush the pieces with oil and cook on your stripy pan till no longer springy but still al dente. After they've cooled sufficiently, slice the onion and zucchini into thickish slices--maybe 1/4".

When the spelt's done cooking, transfer it to a big bowl and toss with the olive oil, lemon juice, marjoram, and salt and pepper. Add the cooked veg, but let it cool a while before mixing in the arugula. Scatter the pine nuts over the top right before serving.

* I cracked it myself with my little mill; if you don't have a mill you could substitute cracked wheat or coarse bulgar. If you use bulgar, cook it on the white rice cycle, or for 10 minutes on the stove.

** Trader Joe's now has pine nuts from Korea, which should not cause 'pine mouth' as that's associated with pine nuts from China.

a whiny day

2011-07-28T05:35:00.000-07:00

My Hotpoint stove (you can see it above, hiding behind the fan) has been wearing out for a while; two of the burners have gotten pretty wimpy, and one cracked right in half, making me afraid to use it. I asked my landlady if she could get me a couple of new elements, and after she looked into it she decided that it would be cheaper to get me a whole new stove than to fix my current one up. She found a bargain Frigidaire similar to my Hotpoint at the Sears in Chehalis, and arranged for it to be delivered on Monday between 11:30 and 1:30.

I worked on Monday, so Annie said she would wait at my apartment to let the stove men in and keep Maria from escaping. I got up at the crack of dawn on Monday to empty out my stove (it has a big cupboard on the side, and a big drawer underneath, so most of my pots and pans fit in it) and clear a path from the front door to the stove.

At work, I checked my phone for messages at noon and there was a voicemail from my landlady saying that the stove would not be coming at all that day, and had been rescheduled to Friday. I'm glad I checked my messages! I called Annie right up. She hadn't been there very long but was already bored, so she was happy to go home.

The stove was supposed to come between 11:00 and 1:00 on Friday, so I planned a day of reading and knitting and being alert for the stove men. I was afraid to play music too loud, lest I miss their knock. They had not arrived by 2:00, so I called them up to see when I should expect them. I had to try a couple of times, the second time impersonating my landlady since the woman I got at the call center in India would only speak to the person who had actually ordered the stove. She said she would send the men a message to call me and tell me how they were coming. I hadn't heard from them by 3:00, so I tried the call center again and this time was informed that the stove was not coming at all! When I expostulated she said she would give my landlady a $30 gift certificate to make up for my inconvenience, and then said the stove men would try again on Tuesday.

My kitchen was still taken-apart, with all the counters and tables covered with the contents of my stove. I decided to try to get by without putting things temporarily away, so over the weekend I did most of my cooking on the floor, like an Indian lady. I actually quite liked doing it except that I had to keep getting up and down, as my stove and sink are high and require standing. Maybe I should have asked my landlady for a traditional Indian stove!

Sears called the night before to say that the stove should arrive between 11:30 and 1:30. I was prepared for another long wait and lots of phone calls to India, but The Sears truck pulled up right at noon. I was so pleased!

The stove men were very efficient, so getting the old stove out and the new one in only took about half an hour. Their invoice said they were supposed to drop off the new stove in its carton, leaving me to plug it in myself, but I whined and pled and they agreed to hook it up.

Below is my new stove on the morning after delivery, when all I had made with it was a pot of tea (it boiled the water very quickly). So far it seems pretty nice. The oven only goes up to 500° instead of 550° like my old one, but I think I can fiddle with the thermostat to make it a little hotter. Its main deficiency I've discovered so far is that it doesn't have an electrical outlet where I can plug in my mixer or immersion blender.

At the very bottom of this post you can see the first bread I made with it, just this morning. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like it turned out well.

maque choux

2011-07-12T10:20:00.000-07:00

(or is it 'maquechoux'?)

Annie and I had our Fourth of July party nearly a week late this year, since I worked on the actual day. We skipped the baked beans and sauerkraut salad, but otherwise made our usual menu: potato salad, coleslaw, weenie bread (challah dough with vegetarian weenies embedded, baked in a Pullman pan), watermelon (which we forgot to serve), and maque choux. The first time I made maque choux I carefully followed the recipe in Talk about Good, and it wasn't very good. Ever since then I've made it pretty much the same way, except that I leave out the sugar and don't cook it nearly as long, and it has always been very good indeed.

Maque Choux

makes a lot, but it makes good leftovers

6 ears of corn, husked and desilked as much as possible
1T olive oil
a small onion, chopped
3 ribs of celery, thinly sliced
a big green bell pepper, chopped
4 small ripe tomatoes, or a couple of bigger ones, peeled and chopped
salt and pepper and optional cayenne

Cut the kernels from the corn cobs into a big bowl, and then use the dull side of your knife to scrape the milk from them. While you're working on the corn, start cooking the onion on medium high heat in the olive oil in a big frying pan (one with a lid). When the onion's about ready add the celery, then the bell pepper and tomato. Let everything cook till it's done how you like it, then add the corn along with salt, pepper, and cayenne to taste. Stir around a little bit, then cover the pan and let cook on medium heat for about seven minutes. Taste for seasoning, then serve!

quincemopolitan party

2011-07-10T12:10:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to making Quincemopolitans nearly two years after I made my quince vodka, and I thought the quince really added something to the drink. I had never actually tasted a regular Cosmopolitan at the time of my party, but when I tried one the next day I thought it was lacking in comparison; the quince added a delicious sour fruitiness.

Quincemopolitan

ice cubes
2oz quince vodka
1 oz clementine cordial (or Cointreau or triple sec)
1oz Vincent Family Cranberry Agave Juice
1/2 oz fresh lime juice
lime slice for garnish

Half-fill a cocktail shaker with ice cubes, then add the remaining ingredients (except for the lime slice). Shake well, strain into a cocktail glass, and garnish with the lime slice.

an announcement

2011-07-07T10:31:00.000-07:00

Maria has changed the pronunciation of her name to 'Mar-eye-ah,' after Maria Wyeth of Play it as it Lays.

I took the above picture of her using my new lens; I think it turned out pretty well considering that I took it in my dim, naturally-lit bedroom at 9:17 at night. Below are a couple of other pictures showing it off:

easiest polenta

2011-06-28T13:23:00.000-07:00

If you have a rice cooker with a porridge cycle, you can easily make nice, fluffy polenta which is much tastier than the kind you can buy premade in log form. If you want it to be sliceable and stiff you can make it the day before and let it set up in the fridge.

1C polenta
4C water
salt and pepper to taste
a big pinch of nutritional yeast
a glug or two of olive oil

Mix everything except the olive oil together in your rice cooker, then run the porridge cycle. If you've started well in advance, you can have it go through the cycle twice, stirring it in-between; this will make it extra soft and fluffy, but isn't really necessary. Stir in the olive oil right before serving.

Pictured above is my dinner from last night: polenta with garbanzo bean and potato stew, herby baked tomatoes, and braised dandelion leaves.

best sauerkraut ever!

2011-06-25T08:16:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry that I forgot to update you on my seaweed sauerkraut. It was ready a week or two ago and was really good. It was not too seaweedy at all--I could easily have added twice as much seaweed as its flavor was barely perceptible--but was deliciously gingery. When I've eaten it all I'll make it again with more seaweed, or maybe with a more strongly flavored kind like hijiki.

guest post

2011-06-24T15:12:00.000-07:00

Lookit!

work treats

2011-06-24T05:35:00.000-07:00

I made the above-pictured strawberry tartlets for a work meeting yesterday, and they were a great success. Lori said they were the best thing she'd ever eaten, and everyone else seemed to like them too. I saved one for Rachael, and she said it was the best use she'd ever seen me put quinoa to.

I got the recipe from an article in the Chronicle about gluten-free desserts. I followed the recipe as written except that I used regular sugar instead of coconut sugar (I think that's the same thing as palm sugar) and a little bit of pomegranate molasses instead of the pomegranate juice I forgot to buy. With my tartlet pans I ended up with seventeen, but if I had used mini cupcake pans as the recipe suggested I bet I would have squeezed out twenty.

sweet or savory mush

2011-06-10T09:21:00.000-07:00

I have been working on making a dent in my huge container of oats, and have found that my fuzzy logic rice cooker does a really good job of making delicious mush for me, ready whenever I want it. I can put all the ingredients in before I go to bed and tell it to cook them on the porridge cycle, and that I'd like it to be done right at 5:30 when I plan to get out of my bath, and it's done! I tried making savory mush in my proto-crock-pot (an experiment on behalf of my readers who don't have fancy rice cookers)and it worked nearly as well, but stuck to the bottom a little: I think I would add a little extra water in the future.

With the rice cooker, I just put in one part oats to three parts water (1/3C cup oats and 1C water should be about right for a hearty eater), and then various fruity or vegetably additions to suit my anticipated morning mood. For the above-pictured savory mush, I added a couple of slices of kabocha (you don't even have to peel it, as the peel softens sufficiently with cooking), a couple of thin wedges of cabbage, and a big pinch of Tianjin preserved vegetable or nutritional yeast. You can add a tablespoon or so of adzuki beans to the oats if you're using a crockpot; I don't think they would get thoroughly cooked in the rice cooker unless you pre-soaked them. Add a little salt if you're not using the preserved vegetable. I like it served with lots of pepper, but no milk.

For a sweeter version, add whatever fresh or dried fruits you have on hand that appeal to you and seem like they will hold up to being well cooked (not strawberries!). I usually use an apple, quartered and cored; a banana, peeled and quartered; and a handful of raisins. I like to eat this version with milk, mainly because it seems to stay too hot longer than the savory version.

seaweed sauerkraut

2011-06-01T05:39:00.000-07:00

I started the above sauerkraut a week ago, so it should be ready to try in another week. It's made of 2375g white cabbage; 90g peeled, julienned ginger; 270g chiffonaded green onions; 208g rehydrated dulse and wakame and 28g salt. I worried that it wasn't making enough noise (with my fancy sauerkraut crock, it usually makes pretty frequent 'blub' sounds as gasses rise through the water seal), so I peeked yesterday and found that it's already smelling nice and sour. I just hope the seaweed doesn't make it too peculiar.

ramps

2011-05-31T07:58:00.000-07:00

Every spring I read about ramps--stories about ramp fests, and what people have made with the ramps they've found--and I have always felt left out because it seems to be an East Coast thing. This year I found them in the Pike Place Market at Frank's and Sosio's. I wonder where they grow around here... or maybe they're cultivated.

In any case, I got some and made myself a nice springtime dinner of ramps and asparagus with scrambled tofu and rice. I rubbed a little olive oil on the ramps and asparagus, salted and peppered them, and cooked them on my stripy pan. I gave the asparagus a four minute head start, and it only took eleven minutes altogether. I carefully didn't eat everything in one sitting so that I would be able to mix it all up into ramps fried rice for breakfast the next day. The ramps tasted just as I imagined: like extra flavorful, garlicky leeks. I look forward to getting them again next year, maybe finding a hidden ramp patch in some local park.

madeleines!

2011-05-23T09:39:00.000-07:00

Nurse Jennie got the new BabyCakes book and promised to bring it to work to show me, but when I looked it up and saw that it has doughnuts! and madeleines! I couldn't wait and bought it then and there.

I tried a year or so ago to make vegan madeleines, and they were sad failures: horrible, greasy blobs. As you can see above, these were much prettier, and they tasted pretty good too. I followed the recipe just as written except that I reduced the vanilla by two thirds--3 tablespoons sounded like an awful lot. I thought they were a little too sweet--next time I'll try reducing the sugar by a third or so, and see if they keep their nice structure--but Rachael disagreed and ate them right up. I only have two left, which I've hidden away for Annie.

I made twelve of them in a real, metal madeleine pan that I borrowed from Annie, and nine in a silicone pan and, strangely, the silicone ones got a better crust with nicer browning. I put the ones from the metal pan back in the oven, upside down, for a few minutes till they turned golden.

a springtime salad

2011-05-20T07:32:00.000-07:00

We had a potluck at work this week with the evening housekeepers, who brought yummy Ethiopian food--one of them even made her own injera. I couldn't think of any Irish specialties to bring, so I settled for seasonality instead and brought asparagus strawberry salad. I knew I had heard of this, but when I searched for recipes they all called for the asparagus to be cooked. I was sure that my salad would be more fresh-tasting and springy if I left it raw, so I had to invent it. It ended up being very tasty and pretty.

Strawberry Asparagus Salad
6 servings

1lb fat asparagus
1lb strawberries
30z walnuts, toasted for 10-15 minutes at 350°F
a small handful tarragon
2T balsamic vinegar
2T walnut oil
salt and pepper to taste

Peel the bottom halves of the asparaus, then slice them as thin as you can manage. Core and slice the strawberries, and add them to the asparagus. Roughly chop the walnuts and tarragon, and set aside. Whisk the oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper together.

Add the dressing to the strawberries and asparagus about an hour before you plan to serve the salad to allow things to mingle and let the raw asparagus get softened by the vinegar. Mix in the walnuts and tarragon at the last minute, to maintain the crunch of the walnuts and the sprightliness of the tarragon.

a use for smoked salt

2011-05-18T05:40:00.000-07:00

Annie and I both worked on Mother's Day, so we celebrated it the following week, with breakfast before we went to the Magic Flute. I made us some festive Tofu Benedict (or maybe it was Tofu Florentine since I added some spinach I had on hand) from Vegan Brunch, and was happy to find that it called for smoked salt. You may recall that I made smoked salt a couple of years ago: at the time I'd been seeing lots of recipes calling for it, but once I had a jar of it I didn't seem to need it any more. In this case the salt is sprinkled over sliced tomato to make it simulate ham, kind of.... Anyway, it was good, and if you have some smoked salt that somebody gave you it's an idea for you! I bet it would be good sprinkled on the tomato in a TLTA, too.

creamy, lemony pasta sauce

2011-05-02T09:32:00.000-07:00

I had some leftover pasta dough yesterday, along with fingerling potatoes and sugar snap peas from my vegetable box, and I thought that together they would make a nice dinner for me and Rachael. But what would be a good sauce to tie it together? Back when I was a cream-eater, I made a lemon sauce from The Classic Pasta Cookbook--just boil lemon juice and zest with some butter and cream till it's reduced by half. I decided to veganize it by using almond cream. I could make the cream as thick as I liked, so I wouldn't even have to reduce it!

I cooked a pound of halved fingerling potatoes cut-side down in olive oil in a wide, covered pan over medium-low heat till they were tender, then turned the heat up to medium so they'd get a little brown. Then when the noodles (the equivalent of one pound of dried pasta) were done, I added them to the potatoes along with 8oz of trimmed sugar snaps. I stirred in the sauce, let everything heat up, then added a handful of chopped parsley. This sauce would be good with any spring vegetable: I plan to try it soon with asparagus or artichoke hearts.

Creamy Lemon Sauce

makes about 2 cups, enough for 1lb pasta

1/2C blanched almonds
juice and zest of a lemon (organic, please, as you're eating the zest!)
salt and pepper

A few hours before dinner, pour enough boiling water over the almonds to make a total of 1 3/4C. Let soak. Shortly before dinner, whiz it your blender till it's really, really smooth. Stir in remaining ingredients.

sultanas

2011-05-01T10:49:00.000-07:00

Until about a year ago I could buy sultanas at my favorite grocery store, the Madison Market. Then they rearranged their dried fruit section, and seem to have replaced them with a larger and more expensive variety, Hunza raisins. Sultanas are made from the same grape--Thompson seedless--as regular grocery store raisins and golden raisins (which are treated with sulfur dioxide), but are dried more quickly so that their color ends up halfway between the two. I have been keeping my eye out for them ever since, but had no luck till I went to Little Knits in West Seattle to get some needles for my Eala Bhan. I stopped by PCC and found my favorite raisins, on sale for only $4.99 a pound! I bought a couple of bags, and as soon as I got home made a batch of Sultana Biccies.

These cookies are truly quick and easy, a good choice when you realize you'll have company in an hour and you want to serve them a little treat.

Sultana Biccies

makes about 3 dozen cookies

100g oleo
110g sugar
2T milk (whatever kind you like)
1T golden syrup (or corn syrup if that's all you have)
1t baking soda
210g flour
1/4t salt
80g sultanas
1t vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 325°F. Melt the oleo, sugar, milk, and syrup together in a large saucepan, add the baking soda, mix till it fizzes, then take the pan off the heat and let it cool while you gather the remaining ingredients. Mix in the flour, salt, and sultanas, then the vanilla.

Roll the dough into little balls the size of big hazelnuts and arrange them on a parchment or Silpat-lined cookie sheet. Flatten each cookie with a dampened fork. Bake for 10-12 minutes. Leave on the cookie sheet for a minute, then transfer to a cooling rack.

a kind-of-quick bread recipe

2011-04-28T14:00:00.000-07:00

Last Tuesday was Grandma Ryan's 100th birthday, so Annie and I had a little party to celebrate. It was right after I had worked six days in a row, so I was not able to do much cooking in advance, but I knew just the bread recipe to make when you hope to impress but are pressed for time. It's an adaptation of 'Pain Rustique' from Bread by Jeffrey Hamelman. It turns out with a really pretty crust and nice big festive holes in the crumb, and is hardly any work. You have to start it about a day before you bake it, but it only requires very brief spurts of activity. Here's how it's done:

Easy Country Bread

Makes two loaves

for the poolish:
11oz bread flour
11oz water
a pinch of instant yeast

for the final dough:
all of the poolish
11oz bread flour
4oz water
0.4oz salt (2t)
1t instant yeast

In the morning before the day you plan to bake, mix the poolish ingredients together in your mixer bowl, cover, and let rise till about an hour before you go to bed.

Add the flour and water for the final dough to the poolish and stir till the ingredients just come together into a shaggy mass. Let rest for about twenty minutes, then add the salt and yeast and mix on medium speed for 2-5 minutes, depending on your mixer. I do it two minutes in my Electrolux, but a Kitchenaid would need a little longer. Let it rest twenty more minutes, then stretch-and-fold it once before you go to bed.

Stretch and fold it once more in the morning while you're making your tea, then let it rest for another hour. Transfer the dough to a floured cloth or board, cut it in half, and shape into two rough rectangles. Preheat your oven (with a baking stone in it) to 475°F. Cloak the dough rectangles with flour and let them rise, covered with a linen tea towel, for another hour, then transfer them to a parchment paper lined peel and then onto the baking stone. Squirt with water a couple of times in the first five minutes of baking, and start checking after half an hour. They're done when their internal temperature is at least 205°F.

my new bread pans, and what I made with one of them

2011-03-21T11:24:00.000-07:00

I recently came into a 25lb package of oats, so Annie and I went to the restaurant supply place to get a big, bug-proof container. There was a used section in the back of the shop with cute dishes and things, and some nice industrial bread pans. Annie saw me admiring the pans and encouraged me to get one even though I don't really have anywhere to put it and already have plenty of bread pans. I was persuaded, and got a set of three 4"x12" pans all strapped together to make them easy to move around as a unit.

We had a St Patrick's day party soon afterwards, so I decided to make a double recipe of Irish oatmeal bread instead of my usual soda bread, because I thought it would be the perfect size to fit into one of my three new pans. It did turn out just right, and I ended up with a long, skinny loaf. I normally only make one recipe of this at a time, as soda breads are best on the day they're baked (though they make excellent toast for a couple more days), so I'll give you the smaller recipe.

Oatmeal Bread

makes one 4"x8" loaf

200g steelcut oats
250ml homemade soy yogurt*, or milk of your choice soured with 1t vinegar
50g coarse whole wheat flour
210g all-purpose flour
1/2t each baking soda, salt
25g oleo

The night before you bake, mix the oats with the yogurt or soured milk, and let sit out on the counter soaking all night.

The next day, heat the oven to 425°F. Whisk the flours together with the soda and salt, and rub the oleo in with your fingers. Add the oat mixture, and stir together thoroughly. You may need to add a little liquid to get a nice, soft dough. Spread into your greased bread pan, cut a lengthwise slash down the center of the loaf, and bake for about an hour. Turn out of the pan and let cool.

*The boughten kind, with its tapioca starch and guar gum, isn't wet enough to work as well as the kind you make yourself, which has the consistency of buttermilk.

creamy soup

2011-03-15T09:09:00.000-07:00

I recently made some cream of broccoli soup to go with my chard tart, and I liked it well enough to use the same method for kabocha soup to go with some black sesame soba. This method can be easily modified to suit the vegetables you have around and want to use up, and flavored to suit the theme of your meal. For instance, I wanted my broccoli soup to taste sort of Mediterranean to go with the pine nuts and roasted peppers from the tart, so I added Aleppo pepper and a little ground cumin and coriander to the onion as it cooked. I wanted the squash soup to seem Japanese, so I added some shiro miso when I puréed the soup, and a handful of soaked wakame to the pan as it heated up post-puréeing. Here's a template you can modify according to your needs:

Creamy Veg Soup

makes 1 1/2 to 2 quarts

1/4 brown rice, overcooked in 1 1/2 C water*
2T hemp seed and 1/4C blanched almonds, soaked for several hours in 1C water
1T oil
1 smallish onion, chopped
optional spices
1 lb your chosen vegetable, prepared and cut up
salt, pepper
optional, a source of umami**

Sauteé the onion along with any spices you're using in a big soup pan with your oil. When it's turning golden add your vegetables and cook a little longer. Add the mushy brown rice, enough additional water to not-quite cover the vegetables, salt and pepper and nutritional yeast if you're using it, and cover and let simmer till the vegetables are soft.

If you want some bits of vegetable in your soup, pick out and hold in reserve a few of the most attractive pieces. Add the rest of the soup to your blender along with the hemp seeds and almonds and their soaking water. Blend thoroughly! If you don't have a really big blender you'll have to either do this in batches or use an immersion blender.

Once it's blended, pour it back into the pan and add anything (attractive vegetable bits, soaked seaweed pieces, etc.) that you wanted to remain whole. Bring back to a good temperature, then serve, adding any garnishes you think would be nice.

*You can cook it in your pressure cooker for 35 minutes, or in your fuzzy logic rice cooker on the porridge cycle

**I used 1T nutritional yeast with the broccoli soup, while the squash soup had the wakame, 2t of miso, and was garnished with fried mushroom slices.

really good savory tart

2011-03-10T08:08:00.000-08:00

I had a bell pepper and some Swiss chard from my vegetable box that needed using up, so a few days ago I made this tart. It was so good that I wrote down the ingredients right after dinner so that I wouldn't forget how to make it in the future. It's holding up well in the refrigerator, too, making it a good choice for work lunches. You could easily vary the vegetables according to what you have around: caramelized onions, asparagus, squash--they'd all be good in place of the chard.

Chard Tart

crust:
225g flour
75ml each water, olive oil
1/2t each baking powder, salt
veg:
olive oil
1 smallish onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 bunch Swiss chard
salt, pepper
custard:
220g firm tofu
2T water
juice of half a lemon
1T each nutritional yeast, tapioca flour
1/2t each turmeric, black salt
1t dried marjoram
topping:
a red bell pepper, roasted, peeled, and sliced into strips
a couple of handfuls (handsful?) of pine nuts

Heat oven to 350°. Mix crust ingredients together thoroughly, then let rest in the refrigerator while you get the rest of your tart's components ready.

For the veg, sauté the onion and garlic with some olive oil in a big, lidded frying pan while you get the chard ready. Cut the stems out of the leaves and slice thinly as if they were celery, and cut the leafy part into wider ribbons. When the onion's cooked to your liking, add the chard stem pieces and cook, stirring frequently, till they change color. Add a tablespoon or so of water to the pan, put the lid on, and let everything steam for a few minutes till the stems are nicely softened. Add the leaves, stir a little bit, then put the lid back on and cook for about five more minutes. When the chard seems done, take the lid off and let any remaining water cook off. Season with salt and pepper.

For the custard, whiz everything except the marjoram in your blender, then scrape into a little bowl and stir in the marjoram.

To assemble the tart, first roll the crust out and fit it into a 28cm tart pan (a slightly smaller pan would work, too, but I think you'd have to adjust things to make this fit into a bigger pan). Spread about 1/3 of the custard over the crust, then scatter the vegetable mixture evenly on top. Spread the remaining custard over the vegetables, being careful to get it all the way to the edge. Artfully arrange the pine nuts and pepper strips on top, then bake for about half an hour. Let rest about ten minutes before cutting into it. This is just as good at room temperature as hot from the oven.

what I did with my oat milk

2011-01-25T14:45:00.000-08:00

Annie and I went on an outing to the vegan grocery story to look at fake cheese last week, and to our astonishment found frozen rolls of Cedar Lake brand fake tuna! Our family has been pining for Tuno ever since it stopped being made a few years ago, and this looked like it might be a viable substitute. I bought a packet and immediately began planning a festive tuna casserole dinner. I would make tuna casserole with cream of celery soup made with oat milk, and iceberg lettuce salad, and soda bread, and tapioca pudding....

The tuna was pleasant tasting and had pretty good texture, but was not nearly as fishy as genuine Tuno. Rachael thought my casserole could easily have passed for a turkey pot pie minus the crust. It was good, though, and I'll make it again.

The surprise hit of the dinner was the salad dressing I made to go on the iceberg. It tastes just like the orange 'French' dressing you buy at the store, but it's cheap and fun to make it yourself.

fake Tuno casserole
makes enough for four or five people

condensed celery soup:
4 stalks celery, thinly sliced
1/4C finely chopped onion
2T oleo
1/4C flour
salt, pepper, a pinch of mace
1C oat milk
12oz fake tuna
8oz wide noodles, cooked
1 1/2C frozen peas, thawed
2oz crushed potato chips

Cook the celery and onion with the oleo on medium heat in a heavy pot till the celery's soft. Mix in the flour and stir around for a while till it's mixed in well with the oleo and juices. Add the seasoning, then whisk in the milk and cook, stirring very frequently, till everything thickens into a paste.

Mix the tuna, noodles, pea and soup together in a big bowl, taste for seasoning, then press into a greased 8"x8" pan. Scatter the potato chips over the top, and bake for30-40 minutes in a 350ºF oven.

another easy milk from my vegetable dairy

2011-01-24T21:25:00.000-08:00

Oat milk is a nice milk to use as in ingredient--it's more substantial and flavorful than plain water, but it's cheaper to make than almond milk doesn't have a (to some) obtrusive beany flavor like soy. You just have to remember to start your oats soaking the night before, and after that it's only about five minutes work. Whatever you do, don't make the mistake I once made of buying ready-made oatmilk--when you make it, it tastes pleasantly of oats, but the boughten kind tastes like stale cardboard.

To make about five cups of milk, soak a cup of oat groats overnight. Drain them, then grind in your blender with two cups of water till really smooth. Add two or three more cups of water, blend some more, then strain through a cheesecloth. The oats get really viscous, so you'll have to squeeze it through--it won't drip much at all on its own. Squeeze hard! You should only have about 1/4C of oat solids left in your cloth.

This should keep a few days in the fridge. Be sure to shake it every time you use it--as you can see in the above picture, the oat stuff really likes to sink to the bottom.

an easy work lunch

2011-01-21T09:34:00.000-08:00

I had a recent request for easy work lunch ideas, so decided to post this recipe I made for myself last week. It's made from leftovers (cold rice and extra cauliflower), so the amount you end up with will vary according to how much you started out with. It's made like fried rice, but has a Mediterranean rather than east Asian flavor profile.

Cauliflower Rice
olive oil
onion, cut into big pieces
cauliflower, cut into thin slices like tree cross-sections
raisins or sultanas
tofu
leftover rice (I like brown)
salt, pepper, aleppo pepper to taste
a splash of rice vinegar
optional: olives*, capers, pine nuts, thyme, marjoram

Heat the oil in a big, wide pan on medium heat. Add the onions and cook till they're nearly done, then add the cauliflower and cook, stirring frequently, till it's nicely browned. If it's not yet tender you can cover the pan to help it get done faster. Add to tofu, raisins, and pine nuts if you're including them and cook till the tofu's browned. Finally, add the rice, seasonings, and any remaining ingredients and cook till everything's nice and hot.

*I used kalamata olives this time and I think it was a mistake, but I think mild, nutty olives like picholines would be a good addition.

Here are some other work lunch ideas:
kale salad
yummy avocado
sunflower cheese
pumpkin casserole (I'll have to make this for myself soon!)
tofu salad

sauerkraut revisited

2011-01-11T13:08:00.000-08:00

My cranberry sauerkraut didn't turn out quite as I expected--I layered the cranberries in the midst of the cabbage and expected them to pop as I squashed the cabbage enough to make the juices rise above the top of it all (I forgot to mention in my previous post that you have to really press hard to get red cabbage to give up its juice), but they pretty much all remained intact. When I make this sauerkraut again (I will!) I'll pre-squash them a little before adding them to the crock.

I ended up with right about a gallon of sauerkraut ( I have three jars in the picture because I gave a little jar away as an Epiphany present), enough to last me a few months. I mostly like to eat it with my work lunch, as a sort of salad.

P.S. According to I Write Like, this post was written in the style of James Joyce.

Happy Epiphany!

2011-01-06T11:22:00.000-08:00

I bet baby Jesus would have appreciated a kitty this cute much more than some boring old myrrh!

baking fun

2010-12-28T17:27:00.000-08:00

My aunt Pauline invited me over for some post-Christmas cookie-making. We looked through her recipe box on Christmas evening for a recipe that wouldn't take too long (no overnight chilling or anything like that) and would be easy to veganise. We settled on molasses sugar cookies, which have no butter and only one egg, and only have to be chilled about an hour before baking. Pauline hadn't made them in a while, but remembered that they were easy to form and then flattened and crinkled up in the oven, becoming 'very professional looking.' She got the recipe in Chicago in 1956. Rachael thought they were the best molasses cookies she'd ever had, and ate her share right up!

Molasses Sugar Cookies

makes about 4 dozen

3/4C shortening
1C sugar
1/4C molasses
1 egg or its equivalent
2C flour, scant (recipe called for sifted flour, but I can't be bothered)
2t baking soda (that seems like a lot, but I think it's so the cookies will over-rise and then collapse with attractive crinkles)
1/2t cloves
1t cinnamon
1/2t ginger
1/2t salt
more sugar for rolling

Melt the shortening in a 3-4qt pan. Let cool briefly, then beat in the sugar and molasses, and then the egg. Sift the remaining ingredients into the pan and mix in thoroughly. Put in the refrigerator to chill for an hour or so.

Heat the oven to 375°F. Roll dough into 1" balls, roll them around in the sugar, and arrange them 2" apart on greased cookie sheets. Bake for 8-10 minutes, until they seem almost done but are still a little too soft and puffy. Let sit on the pan for a couple of minutes before transferring to a cooling rack.

another hippie casserole

2010-12-24T07:12:00.000-08:00

I recently bought some Scottish fake cheese (Sheese, available at the Pigs Peace Sanctuary's grocery store in Seattle, or by mail from Food Fight in Portland), which I hear is the best available around here now that Heather Mills has stopped US distribution of Cheezly (one more reason to hate her!). When I showed Rachael, she got all excited and said I should ask Annie for the recipe for a wonderful casserole they'd had in which cheese was an essential ingredient. It would be a good way to try out my new cheese! Annie emailed me the recipe and it turned out to be a favorite of my childhood, Spinach Casserole from Diet for a Small Planet. It had eggs in it as well as cheese, but that was easily remedied! Here's my cruelty-free version of

Spinach Casserole

makes enough for 2 or 3, depending on their appetites

2T chickpea flour
1T flax meal
1T tapioca flour
1/3C water
3/4C raw brown rice, cooked (that's one rice cooker cup)
1/2C grated Sheese, strong cheddar style
1 bunch fresh spinach, stemmed and roughly chopped
1/2t salt
1/4t pepper
2T wheat germ mixed with 1T olive oil

Heat oven to 350°. Whisk the flours and meal together with the water in a big bowl. Add all of the remaining ingredients save the wheat germ and oil, and mix well. There will seem to be far too much spinach in proportion to the other ingredients, but it will all work out. Press into a greased 8"x8" pan, and scatter the wheat germ mixture over the top. Bake for about 35 minutes.

Xmas cookies 2010

2010-12-18T06:02:00.000-08:00

This year I made eight kinds of cookies, though again I didn't start in time to make Aachener Printen or my previous favorite lebkuchen (I have a new favorite, which I'll tell you about below).

Starting at the top and working around clockwise I made:

Cinnamon Roll Cookies from The Vegan Cookie Connoisseur, Rachael's favorites. She thought maybe we should eat them all ourselves, but they were easy and fun to make so I'll be happy to make them again just for her.

My new favorite lebkuchen, Mabel's Lebkuchen from the Christmas Cookie Book. My old favorites, Mrs. Schmidt's Lebkuchen are also from this excellent book.

Clove hearts from Fine Cooking's 2008 Cookie magazine.

Bourbon Balls from The Gourmet Cookie Book--they were the editors' pick for the best cookie recipe from Gourmet magazine in 1980.

Better 'n Biscoff, from Baked Explorations. They weren't actually quite as good as real Biscoff--they tasted really good, but their texture wasn't quite right. I think I rolled them out too thin in an attempt to make more cookies out of not very much dough.

Dutch Caramel Cashew Cookies, Gourmet's best cookie of 1972. These were very tasty, even though they melted and spread out unattractively. I had the same problem with a similar cookie a couple of years ago, and my theory is that it's because I baked them on a Silpat. I'll have to try them again with parchment paper and see if they turn out prettier.

Candy Cane Cookies from The King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion These are fun to make and pretty festive looking.

And finally, in the center, Pfeffernüsse. Last year I made them with this icing, which looked pretty good but never got as hard as real royal icing with real egg whites. I heard that this icing from the BBC would get harder, so I tried it this year. It was a failure! It's less opaque when dry than last year's icing, and it got even less hard! Plus it had a funny, grainy texture and somehow tasted too sweet.

And here, at Lori's request, is the recipe for the best Lebkuchen ever. These don't need to cure or soften up with a slice of apple or anything, so you still have time to make them before Christmas!

Mabel's Lebkuchen

makes about 20 big cookies, more if you make them smaller

dough:
1C honey
3/4C grown sugar
1 egg or its equivalent
1T lemon juice
1t lemon zest
2 1/2C flour (310g)
1/2t baking soda
1/2t allspice
1/2t grated nutmeg
1t cinnamon
1/2t cloves
1/3C finely chopped candied peel (I used grapefruit)
1/3C finely chopped almonds

decorations:
2/3C sugar and 1/3C water for the glaze
halved blanched almonds and halved glacée cherries and/or
finely chopped pistachios

Bring the honey to a simmer in a big pan, then let col and add the sugar, egg, juice, and zest. Whisk the flour, soda and spices together (sifting the soda first), and stir into the honey mixture. Mix in the almonds and peel, then stick the whole thing in the refrigerator to rest overnight.

The next day, heat your oven to 375ºF. Roll the dough out to about 1/2" thickness and cut into flowers. circles, or rectangles. For the flowers or circles, decorate with almonds arranged as daisy petals with a cherry half for the middle. Leave the rectangles alone for now. Bake for about 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, make the glaze by bringing the sugar and water to the boil in a little pan and cooking till it spins a thread. As soon as the cookies are out of the oven, brush with this glaze. If you've made rectangles, sprinkle them with pistachios as soon as you've glazed them.

pretty pink sauerkraut (I hope!)

2010-12-14T16:40:00.000-08:00

I started a batch of sauerkraut today that should be pretty and festive if it turns out. It had three heads of white cabbage and one of red, totaling 3265g after coring, 680g of cranberries, and a couple of big sprigs of rosemary and bay leaves. Salt should be about 1% of the weight of the vegetables, so I added 40g of kosher salt.

When you're picking out cabbages to make sauerkraut with be sure to get the heaviest, most compact feeling ones you can find--they'll be easier to cut up thinly (you want to aim for slices the thickness of a dime), and ought to be pretty juicy. The thinner you can cut the cabbage, the easier it will be to squeeze out the juice--and you want to get out enough that the cabbage is covered with its own juice. Every time I make sauerkraut I wish I had a slaw board, but I don't make it often enough for it really to be worth it.

I'll be able to peek in a couple of weeks to see how it's doing, and I'll let you know!

flaxy eggs for cookies

2010-12-11T08:38:00.000-08:00

I'm finally feeling a little less grinchy, so decided to make some Christmas cookies. When I'm going to do a lot of baking requiring veganising omnivorous recipes I like to make a big batch of flax gloop to take the place of the eggs. I like how it works in cookie and cake recipes where the main function of the eggs is binding. It has kind of a funny flax smell, but I've never noticed it in a finished cookie, even a really mildly flavored one like a sugar cookie. I doubled the recipe since I'm planning to make more than five eggs worth of cookies.

Flax Gloop

makes about five egg-equivalents

4t flax seed
1C water

Put the water and seeds in a little pan and let soak at least an hour, or overnight. Simmer them together for 20 minutes, then pour into a cheesecloth-lined funnel set over a jar.

When it's cool enough to handle, squeeze the gloop through the cheesecloth. It'll come mostly in one big glob, and you'll be pleased to see how slimy and viscous it is--remarkably reminiscent of egg whites!

Use two to three tablespoons to equal one egg.

a tasty salad for a meeting

2010-12-10T11:46:00.000-08:00

I had a work meeting requiring treats yesterday, and had some nice apples and apparently nice celery roots from my vegetable box, so I decided to make this salad. It turned out a little different than I'd imagined it--I thought it would be a sort of grainy Waldorf salad, and it was a little sweeter and a lot fluffier than that--but I really liked it and wanted to record it here so that I remember to make it again. I made it just as the recipe said except that I used my rice cooker to cook the quinoa, supplemented the celery root with regular celery when I turned out not to have enough of the root (see picture below), used aleppo pepper instead of a fresh chile, and added the arils of a pomegranate to make it look extra festive.

I used a magic vegetable peeler to julienne the apple; I would have tried it on the celery root too if I hadn't hacked it up into such tiny pieces to get the yuck out of the middle.

hippie salad dressing

2010-11-10T13:38:00.000-08:00

Annie has been asking me to keep an eye out for one of her favorite boughten salad dressings, Annie's Woodstock Dressing. I found it at our grocery store--its label has changed, so Annie must not have recognized it--and was shocked to see that it cost $4.69 for a tiny eight ounce bottle. It's only $3.39 if you buy it directly from Annie's, but I'm sure she charges enough for shipping that you wouldn't save any money. I make my own Goddess Dressing all the time, so I was sure I could make I decent version of Annie's favorite.

I pretty much copied the ingredients off of the label, leaving out the xanthan gum, and I think it turned out very well. Annie's version has little lumps of sundried tomato--if those are crucial to your enjoyment of this dressing, you could reduce the amount of tomato paste and, after whizzing the dressing with your blender, mix in a dried tomato rehydrated in warm water and chopped up into tiny bits.

I used some of this dressing to make a nice cruciferous salad for my work lunch--I just mixed it with some thinly sliced kale, savoy cabbage, green onion, and celery, and let it get nice and limp.

EZ Woodstock Dressing

makes a little more than 8 ounces

1/2C oil of your choice
2T tahini
2T soy sauce
4 1/2T apple cider vinegar*
2T nutritional yeast
2T tomato paste
2 cloves garlic

Blend everything till smooth.

*Really! 1/4C wasn't quite sour enough, and 5T was a little too sour.

work treats

2010-09-30T11:17:00.000-07:00

We had a birthday party potluck at work yesterday, and due to a communication breakdown I was the only person working that day who knew about it. We pulled ourselves together and got some cake and ice cream to complement my salad, so my efforts were not in vain. Everyone but me had brought their lunch--not knowing there was a potluck--so there was enough to go around. My salad turned out really well, and several people asked me for the recipe, so I decided to record it here.

It was adapted and Americanized from this recipe by Yotam Ottolengi. I didn't have enough fennel, but had some lovely leeks I'd gotten for my birthday so added those, and I substituted edamame for the broad beans since that's a lot easier to find in Seattle. You could, of course, do your own substitutions and additions--but try to keep everything green, as the greenness was one of its appealing attributes.

Green Quinoa Salad

1/4C olive oil, divided
225g quinoa cooked in 325ml water (I did it in my rice cooker)
400g frozen edamame, thawed and mixed in with the hot quinoa
1 big fennel bulb, thinly sliced
2 or 3 leeks, depending on their size, cleaned and thinly sliced
1 tbsp sugar
3 tbsp cider vinegar
1 green chile, deseeded and chopped (I used a roasted poblano)
1 sweet green pepper, seeded and chopped
2 celery stalks, thinly sliced
1 tsp ground cumin
Salt and black pepper
a handful of mint, roughly chopped
a big handful of cilantro, roughly chopped
some of the feathery leaves from your fennel, roughly chopped
3 limes, supremed, along with the juice squeezed from the leftovers

Heat 2T of olive oil in a big frying pan and sauté the fennel and leeks for about 15 minutes, till the leeks are soft. Add the sugar, vinegar, and some salt and cook for a couple more minutes, till the sauce thickens. Let cool.

Mix the quinoa and beans, your cooked vegetables, and all the remaining ingredients except for the lime supremes, in a big salad bowl. Artfully scatter the limes on top, and serve.

If you're not going to eat this straight away, keep the herbs separate and mix them in at the last minute, as the mint will turn ugly and black after a while and you want your salad to be pretty and green.

noodle fun

2010-09-28T09:31:00.000-07:00

I made these noodles the other day, and it really was fun. You bake baking soda for an hour to turn it into sodium carbonate--more alkaline than sodium bicarbonate--and then mix a little of it into the water for your noodle dough. It turns the dough yellow and makes the resulting noodles more springy and slippery than they would have been with plain water. My dough was a little dry and I had to add a little more water (for maybe a total of 7 tablespoons), but that may have been because I didn't have enough semolina and had to use about half durum flour.

Harold McGee says you can also use sodium carbonate to dip your pretzels in before you bake them if you're afraid of lye--it does a much better job than baking soda, which I know from experience has no effect.

fluffy spelt bread!

2010-09-17T08:11:00.000-07:00

I've made this bread several times lately--it's really good when you want some sandwich bread in a relative hurry (i.e. you've no time to wait for your levain to resuscitate itself from its dormant state in the fridge). With this amount of yeast it will still take ten hours or so, but if you were in a super hurry you could speed it up by tripling the yeast. The disadvantage of making your bread this way versus with a levain is that it will stale much more quickly: you'll want to eat it up within three days, or make two smaller loaves and freeze the second one.

Quick and Fluffy Spelt Bread

750g whole spelt flour
525ml water
2T chickpea flour
2T oil (walnut oil's nice, if you have it)
1t yeast
2t salt
1t-1T honey (less if you're making savory sandwiches, more if you're eating it plain or making sweet sandwiches like the almond butter and bread and butter pickle one pictured below)

Start this before you go to bed if you want to have bread in the morning, or when you get up if you want to have it for dinner.

Mix all the ingredients together in a big bowl. Stretch and fold two or three times over the next hour, and then let the dough rest, covered, for about eight hours.

Shape into one big or two small loaves (for one 9"x5" pan or two 8 1/2"x4" pans), put into greased loaf pans, cover with a tea towel, and let rise till a little more than doubled.

Bake for 40-45 minutes in a 425° oven.

savory breakfast

2010-09-04T10:04:00.000-07:00

I had a bunch of spinach that needed using up, and some leftover rice and pressed tofu from last night's dinner (we had this very good celery-tofu salad), and I decided to make them into my breakfast. It ended up being both tasty and photogenic, and something I'll want to fix again--suitable for a blog post!

Spinachy fried rice

serves one greedy person, or two with smaller appetites

1T peanut oil
1/2 an onion, cut into biggish pieces
2oz pressed tofu (or just firm, if that's what you have on hand), cut into little rectangles
about one cup cooked brown rice
salt and pepper (be generous!)
1T tahini
juice of half a lemon
a bunch of spinach, just the bottom inch cut off, washed and patted dry on a tea towel

Heat the oil on medium high heat in a big frying pan with a lid (like this one), and add the onion. Stir it nnow and then, and when it's starting to look cooked add the tofu bits. When the tofu starts to get nice brownish crusts, add the rice, salt and pepper as soon as the rice looks shiny and fried turn the heat down to medium, stir in the tahini, then add the spinach and lemon juice and cover the pan. Breakfast will be ready when the spinach is barely limp.

blueberries, blueberries

2010-08-21T11:52:00.000-07:00

Blueberry season seems to be going on and on this year. I got a huge thing of bargain blueberries about a month ago, and I'm still seeing blueberry bargains at the store, so I thought I'd better post a couple of blueberry recipes before it's too late.

First, a blueberry-banana jam. Though you might not think it, bananas are high in pectin which helps this jam gel nicely (blueberries seem to have less pectin than black and raspberries). Starting the jam the night before and letting it rest overnight means you'll heat up the kitchen a lot less than you would if you cooked it all at once.

Following that, a recipe for blueberry muffins. Rachael thought these weren't sweet enough and I thought they were just right: if you like your muffins to taste like cupcakes, feel free to add half-again as much sugar.

Bluebana Jam

makes 6-7 1/2 pints

1 small lemon, halved and thinly sliced, pips tied in a cheesecloth bag along with
4 cloves
1C water
3 bananas, sliced (200g)
2lb blueberries
2lb sugar

Simmer the lemon slices and the little bag of pips and cloves in the water till the lemon's tender. Add it to all the remaining ingredients in a big pot, bring to the boil (stirring frequently so the stuff at the bottom doesn't stick) and cook till the sugar's dissolved. Take off the heat and cover, and let rest overnight.

The next day bring it back to the boil and cook for about five minutes, till it's turned to jam (it should be 221 or 222ºF). Pack into jars and boiling-water-bathe for five minutes.

Blueberry Spelt Muffins

makes 12 muffins

325g whole spelt flour
110g sugar
2t baking powder
1/2t baking soda
1/2t salt
2t powdered ginger

1/2C soy yogurt
1C soy or other milk
1/3C oil, your choice
1t vanilla

220g blueberries

Heat the oven to 425ºF and prepare your muffin tins (grease or line with cupcake papers). Whisk the dry ingredients together in a biggish bowl and the wet ingredients in a smaller bowl, then combine them along with the blueberries. Mix just till it looks like nice batter, then fill your muffin tins and bake for about 20 minutes.

canning fun

2010-08-20T20:48:00.000-07:00

My friend Jennie came over for a day of canning--we made lavender peach jam (we cooked it till it was 224ºF this time, and it set nicely) and Yummy Banana Chutney. The chutney has to rest for six weeks before it will be truly ready, but it's already pretty yummy. The chutney had to cook for quite a while, so while we waited we had okara oaty bread and tomato eggplant salad for a treat.

The okara oaty bread was a regular soda bread incorporating the sludge I had left after making almond-hemp milk yesterday. I'm sure any similar stuff would work--genuine soy okara, or ground-up oats from oat milk....

Oaty Bread

makes 1 small loaf

160g coarse, wholemeal flour
100g all-purpose flour
1/2t each salt, baking soda
25g oleo
1 batch of okara
100g rolled oats
200ml soy yogurt, about--the amount needed will depend on how thoroughly you squeezed your okara

Heat your oven to 425ºF and grease a smallish bread pan (my 8-1/2" x 4-1/2" one is a little too big). Whisk together the flours, salt, and soda, and rub in the oleo. Rub in the okara, stir in the oats, then mix in the yogurt till everything's wet. Add more yogurt if necessary to get a nice wet dough. Spread it into the greased pan, cut a deep slash down the middle, the pop it into the oven and bake for about 45 minutes. It won't darken much, but should smell nice and sound hollow when you thump its bottom.

milkmaid

2010-08-06T15:21:00.000-07:00

I got a soy milk maker a couple of months ago, and I really like it--it can make grain milks, mung bean milk, and nut and seed milks as well as soy milk, and all for much less than buying them at the store. A quart of soy milk costs at least $2.00, and enough soybeans to make a quart only costs about 15¢. My favorite milk so far has been using half soybeans, half brown rice: the brown rice gets rid of the beany flavor and adds creaminess to the milk--it's as thick as whole cow's milk, but without the unpleasant (to me) mouth-coating unctuousness.

Today I made a quick-and-easy milk that didn't require my new machine or any cooking at all--just a good blender and some cheesecloth. It has a nice, nutty taste and should have some omega-3 from the hemp seed.

Almond-Hemp Milk

1 1/4 oz hemp seeds
2 oz almonds
5C water
optional: salt, sugar, vanilla to taste (I like my milk plain)

Soak the seeds and almonds in a couple of cups of water for a few hours, then blend thoroughly in your blender. Add the rest of the water and blend some more. Pour through a cheesecloth-lined sieve into a big bowl. When most of it's gone through, gather up the cheesecloth and squeeze the rest of the milk out. You can add the remains to some muffins or something if you feel bad about throwing them in the compost.

Mango!

2010-07-26T11:13:00.000-07:00

There have been bargain mangoes around lately (2/$1 at Safeway this week!), so I have been buying them to eat for breakfast and to make things like apricot-mango jam (not really a success: it tasted nice but didn't set). I made this salad for Rachael, and it was the only part of dinner she liked--the stripey-pan tofu and oniony bulgar were too healthy for her refined palate. It's based on a salad our friend Mely brought to a church picnic long ago. When I asked her later for the recipe she said she couldn't remember, she'd just made it up: this is my reconstruction.

There are all kinds of methods for cutting up a mango, but whatever method you use, you should be sure to get all of the peel off as it can cause a terrible rash. I have a special mango peeler that gets off a nice, thick layer:

Fil-Am Mango Salad

makes enough for four people, or two with leftovers

a sweetish onion, thinly sliced
2T rice vinegar or lime juice
salt, black pepper
2 under-ripe mangoes, peeled and cut up into biggish pieces
a cucumber, peeled, halved lengthwise, seeded, cut into thickish slices
1 or 2 tomatoes, cored and cut into suitably-sized pieces
a little sugar,if necessary
some lettuce, preferably a crunchy kind like iceberg or romaine, ripped into bite-size pieces

In a big bowl,sprinkle the onion with the vinegar or lime juice, season with salt and pepper, and let soak while you prepare the remaining ingredients. When everything's cut up,lay the lettuce on your serving dish and mix everything else together. Taste for seasoning--it may need a little sugar if the mangoes were really under-ripe. Pile it all on top of the lettuce and serve.

crunchy granola

2010-05-18T13:00:00.000-07:00

I have always thought that granola and I had the same birthplace--Chico--but this article makes it clear that granola's actually a Texan, and only moved to Chico in early childhood. We made it once when I was little, and it turned out well, but Annie was so horrified by the huge amount of oil in the recipe that we never tried it again and stopped buying it at the health food store.

Last January I read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about modern, un-hippified varieties of granola, including one in which applesauce takes the place of much of the oil. I tried it and it was good. Here's my version--it makes a little more (it keeps well, so why not?) and has even less fat. I don't add any fruit, because it's easy enough to add fresh or dried fruit as you serve it, depending on your mood and what you have on hand. You can, of course, vary the nuts and seeds according to your tastes.

Crunchy Granola
makes about 5 pints

dry ingredients:
450g rolled oats (or other rolled grains)
150g each flaked almonds, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds
100g each sesame seeds, flax seeds
2t cinnamon
1t each ginger, kosher salt

wet ingredients:
1 medium apple, cored and roughly chopped (or 200g applesauce)
100g (1/3C) agave nectar
1/4C (80g) maple syrup
2T oil (I used canola)

Heat oven to 300°. Line two cookie sheets (the kind with edges) with tin foil.

Mix all of the dry ingredients together in a big bowl. Blend the wet ingredients in a blender till you can see no discrete pieces of apple, then mix into the dry stuff with your hands. Spread out over the cookie sheets and bake for 40-50 minutes, every 10 minutes or so stirring the granola and shuffling the pans around in the oven so that they will bake evenly.

Let cool thoroughly before putting into jars.

This is less sweet than granola from the store, so you'll want to be sure to add some fruit upon serving.

springtime parfaits

2010-05-16T10:37:00.000-07:00

I've been getting strawberries and rhubarb in my vegetable box lately. If I was cooking for just myself I'd have made strawberry tapioca with some of the strawberries, but Rachael inexplicably doesn't like it. I used to make these strawberry parfaits from Eating Well at least a couple of times a year during strawberry season, so thought Id try a veganised version. It was a success, so I followed it the next week with a rhubarb version which I thought turned out even better. If you're a fan of strawberry-rhubarb, you could try using raw, sliced strawberries in place of the banana in the rhubarb version.

This should make four or five parfaits, depending on the size of your glasses--mine are 250ml, or a little over 8oz, and I get five with them.

Strawberry or Rhubarb Parfaits

for the cream:
1 1/2T tapioca flour
2t custard powder
3T sugar
1 1/2C almond milk
2t orange zest

for rhubarb:
1lb rhubarb, trimmed and sliced
1C sugar (7oz)
3T orange juice
2t Minute Tapioca
1/4t cardamom
2t clementine cordial or similar
2 bananas, thinly sliced

for strawberries:
1 pint strawberries, cored and sliced
1T sugar
2t clementine cordial

To make the cream, mix the tapioca flour, custard powder, sugar, and 2T of the almond milk in a small heavy pan. Once all of the lumps are mixed out, whisk in the rest of the milk along with the orange zest. Bring to the boil and turn the heat down and simmer for a couple of minutes, stirring frequently. Take off the heat and let cool for about twenty minutes.

To make the rhubarb, mix together all of the ingredients except the bananas in a medium pan. Bring to a simmer and cook, covered--stirring frequently--till the rhubarb is very soft. Take off of the heat and stir in the bananas and cordial. Cool for about twenty minutes.

To make the strawberries, mix everything in a bowl and let rest for about twenty minutes.

Once everything has rested and cooled, assemble your parfaits: starting with a layer of fruit, divvy up the cream and fruit among the glasses. With my glasses, three layers of fruit and two of cream worked out well. Cover the glasses and chill the in the fridge for an hour or so. These keep well for at least three days.

olive bread

2010-05-07T11:43:00.000-07:00

My usual olive bread is a sourdough with a little bit of rye flour as its base, but I recently had a request for an olive ciabatta recipe so I decided to branch out. I made a couple of loaves of this--one for me and Rachael to sneak in to the movies, and another to take in for a work treat. Rachael didn't really like it (she's not a big olive bread fan in general), but it was a great success at work.

I usually measure my bread ingredients with a scale--as well as being more accurate, it's easier and less messy and makes for fewer dishes to wash--but have converted to volume measures for any scaleless readers.

Olive Ciabatta
makes 2 loaves

poolish:
180g bread flour (1 1/2C)
180g water (3/4C)
1/8t instant yeast

dough:
400g bread flour (3 1/4C)
25g toasted wheat germ (1/4C)
260ml water (1C +2T)
12g salt (2t)
1t yeast
2t fresh thyme, or 1t dry
225g unpitted olives (1 1/2C)--I used kalamatas because that's what I had, but use any olives you like.
all of the poolish

The night before you bake, mix the poolish ingredients together in a little bowl and let rise, covered, overnight till it's very bubbly.

In the morning, thoroughly mix together all of the dough ingredients except the olives. This dough will be very sticky, so if you don't want to use your mixer to knead it do as I did and stretch and fold* it three times in the first hour of its rising. Let the dough rise for about three hours altogether, till about tripled.

Meanwhile, smash the olives with the side of a big knife, then tear them in half and get the pits out. Let them drain on a towel while the dough rises.

Dump the dough out onto a well-floured counter and stretch out into a big rectangle (about 10"x14"), and scatter 2/3 of the olives over it. Fold the rectangle into thirds (like a letter), stretch a little more, scatter with the remaining olives, and fold into thirds again. Cut it in half and shape each half into a round, tucking in any exposed olives.

Let the dough rest for ten minutes, then stretch out into ciabatta shapes on a piece of parchment paper on a peel or back of a cookie sheet.

Veil the shaped loaves with flour, cover with a cloth, then let rise till very light, one to one-and-a-half hours.

At least 45 minutes before you bake, preheat your oven with its baking stone in it to 475°. When the loaves are risen, squirt them with water and then slide them onto the stone. After ten minutes, turn the oven down to 425°. Bake for about 25 minutes total, till well-browned and until the loaves' internal temperature is at least 205° (mine got up to 211° and weren't overdone).

*I just do this in the bowl, not laying it out on parchment paper, and stretch mostly lengthwise instead of making nice rectangles. It works just as well.

hamantaschen

2010-03-10T06:08:00.000-08:00

I was having company for breakfast and again for lunch on Purim, so I decided to make a bunch of hamantaschen with my spelt cinnamon roll dough. According to Jewish Cookery I erred in serving them with tea--the cookie variety goes with tea, while the yeasty buns should be served with coffee. They were a success nonetheless, so I thought I'd record how I made them so I can do it again next year.

There are bigger sections of bread uninterrupted by sweet filling in these than in cinnamon rolls, so I think next time I'll add a little more sugar to the dough, and maybe a little lemon zest. One recipe's worth of dough is sufficient to make eight hamantaschen. I doubled the recipe as I was serving them twice and hoped to have some left to take to work the next day, so I made two different fillings: apricot and poppy. The apricot filling was very easy to make--mix together equal parts apricot jam and grated apple. I invented the poppy filling and didn't write down the amounts, but here's the general method: soak poppyseeds in water overnight, then cook in soy milk with sugar, honey, cinnamon, and some raisins. add a little vanilla, and grind in a blender. If it's too watery, add some more raisins and grind some more.

Divide dough into eight equal portions, and roll each out into a thin disk. Put a blob of filling in the middle, and fold the edges in to form a triangle. Leave the center open so a little filling is peeping out. Bake at 350° for 17-20 minutes.

spelty cinnamon rolls

2010-02-24T05:52:00.000-08:00

I must apologize to all my fans for my lengthy blogging hiatus. I had all kinds of ideas for things to write about, and took lots of pictures, but just haven't been in the mood to actually write anything down. I'm back now, though, and have a nice veganised, speltified cinnamon roll recipe for you. It's adapted from the 'Twinkling Rolls' recipe in an old Good Housekeeping cookbook.

They're small and raisin-and-frosting-free, because that's how I like them. Rachael agrees, and adds that they are the perfect sweetness. I used a little bit of whole spelt flour along with the white, because it seems to make for a livelier dough than one made with only white flour. These aren't quite as soft and fluffy as regular wheat cinnamon rolls, but they're close.

Cinnamon Rolls

makes 12-14 little rolls, enough for 3 people

dough:
175g white spelt flour
75g whole spelt flour
1T each potato flour, chickpea flour
150ml soy milk, warmed
25g oleo
2T sugar
1t yeast
1/2t salt

filling:
40g oleo, melted
1/4C sugar mixed with 1t cinnamon

Mix together all of the dough ingredients and knead till smooth. You can either let it rise now or stick it in the refrigerator to rise slowly overnight if you plan to have cinnamon rolls for breakfast. In either case let it double.

Heat the oven to 350°. Roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface into a big rectangle, about 14"x10". Smear with melted oleo, leaving about 1/2 an inch along the long side ungreased so you'll be able to seal it up. Sprinkle evenly with cinnamon sugar. Roll the dough up, pinch shut along the ungreased edge, and cut into 12-14 little rolls. Arrange them into a greased 8"x8" pan. Sprinkle any remaining cinnamon sugar over the rolls, and smear them with any sludge that oozed out when you cut them. Bake for about 20 minutes.

superhealthy scones

2010-01-21T08:42:00.000-08:00

I made these vegan, wheat-free, whole grain, no-cane-or-beet-sugar, trans-fat-free, no nuts or legumes scones the other day and they turned out really well. They weren't dry and dense like whole wheat biscuits usually are, and are edible by everyone I know except the gluten intolerant and coconut allergic. The recipe's adapted from a raspberry scone recipe in Babycakes.

Cranberry Spelt Scones

makes 8 smallish scones

4oz cranberries
3 3/4 oz light agave nectar, divided
8oz whole spelt flour (if you grind it yourself, run it through the mill twice to get it really fine)
1T baking powder
1/4t cloves
1/3t salt
2 1/2 oz coconut oil
1T grated orange zest
1T vanilla extract
2T oil (whatever kind you like: I used canola)
1/4c hot water

Preheat oven to 400°.

Cut the cranberries in half and toss them with 1oz of the agave nectar. Set the bowl on the stove so that the heat of the preheating oven warms the berries up; periodically squeeze them a little with your hands to work the agave nectar in.

Whisk the flour, baking powder, cloves and salt together, then rub in the coconut oil till the mixture looks like cornmeal. Make a volcano and put in the orange zest, vanilla, and remaining agave nectar. Mix it up, then add the hot water and mix some more.

Divide the dough into two blobs on a floured board. Flatten each with a floury hand, cut each into quarters, then transfer the wedges to a parchment or Silpat-lined baking sheet. Bake for about 15 minutes.

apricot bread

2010-01-12T17:20:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday, Annie, Rachael, and I went to our friend Julie's house for dinner and to exchange Epiphany presents. My holiday preparations this year were halfhearted (I get more misanthropic at Christmastime with every passing year), and on Saturday morning I decided that Julie's little bag of presents was inadequate. What else could I make that would be unusual and festive, and not require going to the store to get ingredients? I decided to make pan de albaricoque, similar to this apricot bread but with more flavors. I was astonished when we opened our presents to find that Julie had made us Turkish fig balls--a very similar concept, dried fruit whizzed in the Cuisinart with nuts.

My apricot bread was easy and pretty successful, so I'll present you with its recipe:

Pan de Albaricoque

375g dried apricots (I used Trader Joe's Blenheim apricots, as they're a lot more flavorful than Turkish ones)
90g each pistachios and almonds
2t orange zest
1T each sugar and honey
1T brandy
1t powdered ginger
optional: more dried apricots, bay leaves, dried cherries

Toast the nuts in the oven at 350 F° for about 10 minutes, then grind them up in your food processor till they're fine meal. Don't let them turn to greasy butter! Put them in a bowl, then grind the remaining (non-optional) ingredients till they're a nice, smooth paste. Scrape the paste (watch out for the blade! I nearly made pan de albaricoque y sangre!) into the bowl of nut meal and mix everything together thoroughly with your hands. Divide it in half and shape into two big, flat circles.

You can make a cereza sandwich with one of the circles if you like, by cutting it in half, pressing dried cherries onto one of the halfs, covering it with the other half, and squashing it some more to make it as thin as it was before. You could decorate the other circle by covering it with some of your prettier dried apricots, or just cut it into wedges and stick a bay leaf on each.

If these are anything like the pan de higo I made a couple of years ago that's still good, they should keep a long time.

squash bread

2009-12-30T04:52:00.000-08:00

I worked on Christmas, so had to bring something for our potluck. As I planned to spend most of Xmas eve day at Annie's, I needed to bring a dish that didn't take much time or advance preparation. I actually ended up taking two things--a pie made of leftover applesauce and cranberries from the previous week's latkes, and this very successful bread.

Squash Bread à la New York Times

makes one big loaf

800g all-purpose flour
300g pumpkin purée (I had it frozen, but canned would also be good)
400ml water
1t instant yeast (2g)
2t salt (15g)
200g raisins
150g chopped pecans
2t cumin seed
wheat bran

On the morning of the day before you plan to bake, mix everything but the bran together till there are no visible streaks of flour or squash remaining. Do a couple of stretch and folds over the next hour, then let it rise in a not-too-warm place till just before bedtime.

That night, scrape the dough onto a lightly floured counter and roughly shape it into either a round or oblong loaf, depending on what pan you plan to use to bake it. Generously cloak with bran, and set into an appropriately shaped dish (round bowl or oblong pan) sufficient to contain it when it's risen one and a half times and lined with a well-floured linen cloth. Rye flour, if you have some, has better non-stick properties than wheat. Put everything into a big plastic bag to prevent a skin forming prematurely on the loaf. If your house is warm at night, put in the refrigerator; otherwise, leave out on the counter.

When you get up preheat the oven to 425° with a 7 liter heavy, lidded casserole in it (I use this). If the dough's in the fridge, get it out and let it warm up. After an hour, carefully turn the loaf out into the hot pan, put the lid on, and bake for 25 minutes. Take the lid off and bake for another 25 minutes, or until its internal temperature is over 200° or it sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom.

Xmas cookies

2009-12-26T11:22:00.000-08:00

This year I again made only seven kinds of cookies. I didn't get started on them till about a week before Christmas, so I couldn't make Aachener Printen or my favorite kind of Lebkuchen as they both require at least two weeks of aging to get non-leathery. From the top and working around clockwise, there are windmills, sugar cookies, Annie's favorite Lebkuchen (from Betty Crocker), Afghans, Linzer cookies (my fancy Linzer cookie cutter didn't work very well, and kept falling apart as I tried to cut the too-soft dough), lemon-pistachio wedding cookies (made from this recipe but with twice the sugar and a little lemon juice added), and in the center, Pfeffernüsse (with icing adapted from this icing recipe).

five-can dinner

2009-12-19T04:22:00.000-08:00

I used to make tamale pie for Rachael and Annie all the time--it was an easy dinner, and very quick to make if you discount its time in the oven. It was always kind of a thrill, too, to make something involving so many cans. Rachael tired of it, though, and I forgot about it. I hadn't made it for years till last week when I was working on my Christmas baking and needed to fix something for dinner which would make nice leftovers for work lunches. I had my Betty Crocker cookbook out for its lebkuchen recipe and it reminded me of my old standby, which is heavily adapted from Betty's version. I rushed to the store to buy some cans, and soon I was eating this nostalgic dinner.

If you wanted to make it without mussing up your cutting board, you could even use pre-cut onions (I've seen them at Trader Joe's!) and squash your garlic through a press. For variety, I bet this would be good if you added some Soyrizo, fried along with the onions.

Fiesta Tamale Pie

serves 4, or 1 with lots of leftovers

1 medium onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1T oil
1 can diced tomatoes
1 can beans (pinto or black), drained
1 can corn, drained
i can diced green chiles
2t chili powder
1 cup corn meal
2T garbanzo bean flour
2T nutritional yeast
1 can black olives, drained
10oz unsweetened soy milk

serve with vegan sour cream and a lettucey salad

Fry the onions and garlic in an 3-4 quart ovenproof pan till the onions are yellowing. Add the tomatoes, beans, corn, chiles and chili powder, and bring to the boil. Meanwhile, whisk together the corn meal, garbanzo bean flour, nutritional yeast, and milk. Carefully pour over your hot mixture, then strew the olives over the top. You probably won't be able to fit all of the olives on, so the extras can tide you ever while you bake your pie for 40 minutes at 350°F.

It's really cold!

2009-12-08T18:26:00.001-08:00

It was 18°F when I got up this morning, and 28° when I got home from my day's outing (I hear it got up to 31° somewhere in there, but I never noticed). I'm not in charge of the heat in my apartment--my downstairs neighbors have custody of the thermostat and make sure it's nice and warm when they're home, but we seem to have very different schedules--and it wasn't hot enough when I got home to drive the chill completely out of me. I decided to make my first hot whiskey of the winter to fortify myself for cooking dinner.

I've hated whiskey ever since I drank a big swig of it as a tiny child. My daddy always let me have drinks of his beer, so one time when he was drinking whiskey with his friends I couldn't understand why he wouldn't let me try some of it. I nagged and nagged until he gave in. It was the worst thing I'd ever tasted! Worse than marmalade! Worse than beets! I've been opposed to whiskey ever since, until Rachael nagged and nagged me to make her a hot toddy when she had a terrible cold. She didn't like it, so I finished it so as not to be wasteful. The water and sugar and everything made it much more palatable than Jack Daniels straight from the bottle.

I've since switched to hot whiskeys: they're made with Irish whiskey instead of Scotch whisky or brandy, and have cloves instead of nutmeg (I think Joy of Cooking, which taught me how to make a hot toddy, calls for nutmeg), but are otherwise the same.

Hot Whiskey

a shot of Irish whiskey
a lemon slice with 3 cloves stuck in it
1t sugar or honey
boiling water

Before you put anything else in it, rinse your heatproof glass with hot water so your whiskey will stay hot longer. Put in the lemon and sugar slice, and then the whiskey, and finally add hot water to taste. Stir around to dissolve to sugar and squash the lemon a little.

my sad new haircut

2009-11-28T09:31:00.000-08:00

People have been remarking on how long my hair's getting, accusing me of becoming a hippie, so I've been nagging Rachael to cut my hair. She wanted to give me a Louise Brooks hairdo,

while I hoped to look more like Ian Curtis:

I finally convinced her that I was too lazy to maintain such a smooth, nice bob--it would probably require products, or a blow-dryer--so she relented. My hair cut was going well till she got to the fringe. It felt like she was cutting it awfully short, and when she finished she began shrieking with laughter. It was less than an inch long! She quickly decided to give me an aging, punk-rock lesbian look, and cut it shorter all over. Sadly, I ended up looking more like GI Jane.

bread troubles, and a little lesson learned, and a cake recipe

2009-11-25T05:44:00.000-08:00

Last Friday we had Dakki's 85th birthday party, serving nice , soft, bland food because that's what Dakki likes best. We had baked spaghetti (with potato chips crunched up on top), cauliflower (the blandest vegetable), challah (the softest, squishiest bread), and pumpkin cake. Annie made a more exciting salad, with persimmons and candied pumpkin seeds, but Dakki never eats any salad anyway.

I worked the two days before the party, so my bread making time was limited. I planned to make my usual challah dough when I got home from work, adding a little less yeast so it wouldn't rise too much in the night. I got up in the morning to find that the dough hadn't risen at all! I remembered that I had never put in the yeast (it's funny how you can remember things like that after the fact, too late to be much help). I made a little dent in the dough, added some yeast, water, and flour, and re-kneaded the dough. An hour later, it was still an inert lump.

I was sure my yeast was still fresh and viable, because I had used it to make the above bread only the day before, and it had risen very well. When I got the yeast out of the freezer to examine it, however, I discovered that the zipper in its freezer bag had broken and the poor little yeasts had been exposed to the desiccating freezer air for a whole day and were undoubtedly all dead.

Fortunately, I had some alternate yeast, my special osmotolerant yeast for sweet doughs, so I made another little yeast volcano and kneaded the dough yet again. At this point I was in a hurry, so I set my mixer on the floor to knead. This way it would be able to knead unattended with no risk of walking off the counter. This trick would not work as well in a house with a helpful dog in the kitchen, but I think it's what I will do from now on in my pet-free household.

The third time was the charm, and I ended up with some lovely, well-risen loaves:

Dakki's cake was a great success--even Pauline liked it--so I'll post its recipe even though I forgot to take any pictures of it.

Pumpkin Cake

250g all-purpose flour
2t baking powder
1/2t baking soda
1/2t salt
2t cinnamon
1/4t nutmeg
1t ginger
120g margarine
200g sugar
100g brown sugar
1/4C water, mixed with 2t each potato starch, tapioca flour, and flax meal
1t vanilla extract
300g canned pumpkin
a big apple, peeled, cored, and chopped
120g dried cherries
100g coarsely chopped walnuts

1/2c powdered sugar
2T maple syrup, or as needed

Heat oven to 350°F. Grease a 9" Bundt pan.

Whisk the flour, powders, and spices together. Beat the sugars and margarine till light and fluffy, then add your fake egg (the water with flours and flax) and beat some more. Beat in the vanilla and pumpkin. Stir in the flour mixture till just combined, then the fruit and nuts. Pour into your prepared pan and bake for 60-70 minutes. Cool on a rack for ten minutes before turning out i=of the pan to cool completely.

When it's cool, make the maple frosting by mixing the maple syrup into the powdered sugar. You may need a little more syrup to make it a good consistency: spreadable, and only a little bit runny. Spread it over the top of the cake, letting it run artfully down the crevices.

another easy fruity recipe

2009-11-16T07:16:00.000-08:00

This is a nice autumnal dish to make when you've already got your oven on. It takes only a few minutes to prepare, and hardly any room in your oven.

Start off with some fresh and dried fruit, any combination you think sounds good. In this case I used apples and pears for the fresh, and apricots and prunes for the dry, but try whatever you have on hand. Peaches would be nice in the summertime, and I usually always add a banana. For the dried fruit, figs (cut in half) or cherries would be good additions.

Peel, core, and cut up your fruit into biggish bite-size pieces. Mix it all up in a casserole with a good lid, and add 3T apple juice concentrate, 2T water, the juice of half a lemon, and a big pinch of cinnamon. Bake for about 30-45 minutes. The baking time will vary depending on the dimensions of your casserole, the temperature of the oven, and how thoroughly you want your fruit cooked. Just check it after alf an hour to see how it's coming.

tsimmes in the rice cooker

2009-11-15T15:02:00.000-08:00

No matter that it looks like fish, or pork belly, above is pictured a tasty, entirely vegetarian treat I made recently in my rice cooker. I used the slow-cooker setting, and it only took about five minutes of preparation. You could use your crockpot on 'high' if you don't have a fuzzy logic rice cooker. I've written below the ingredients I used, but you could easily change things around: for instance, use potatoes or yams if you don't like parsnips.

Easy Squeezey Tsimmes
2 apples, peeled, cored, and cut into eighths
1 pears, peeled, cored, and cut into eighths
2 big carrots, ends cut off and cut into pieces similar to the apple pieces
2 parsnips, peeled and ends cut off and cut into pieces similar to the apple pieces
1 onion, peeled and cut into wedges of an appealing size
a big handful of pitted prunes
1/2t cinnamon
1/2C water
juice of half a lime
1-2T maple syrup

Throw everything in your rice cooker and cook on the 'slow cooker' setting for 6 hours.

vegan cookies take over your cookie jar

2009-11-09T06:04:00.000-08:00

I made these vegan pignoli (the ones on the right; on the left are Mexican chocolate cookies made with spelt flour) for a recent work meeting, taking the extras to a baby shower at which I presented my Baby Surprise Jacket. I adapted the recipe to Rachael's tastes from this recipe, which can be found in a wonderful new cookie book, Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. I made them a little less sweet and bitter-almondy, plus used brown rice flour instead of wheat and increased most of the ingredients to accommodate my larger can of almond paste (I used Solo).

Pignoli

8 oz almond paste
pinch salt
120g sugar
1t vanilla extract
110g margarine
200g brown rice flour
1/2t baking powder
70g pine nuts
almond milk (or soy milk) for dipping

Heat oven to 350°.

Grind the almond paste, salt, sugar, vanilla, and margarine in your food processor till light and fluffy (it helps to cut the almond paste into several chunks first), stopping and scraping as necessary. whisk the flour and baking powder together, than add to the almond fluff.

Roll the dough into small balls, dipping each first into the almond milk and then into a little dish of pine nuts. Flatten each ball slightly, pressing the pine nuts in. Bake on a parchment or Silpat-lined cookie sheet for about 16 minutes, till turning color. Let cool for five minutes before transferring from the pan to a cooling rack.

wheatena

2009-10-31T10:29:00.000-07:00

Rachael and I ate the last of my Wheatena a few weeks ago, and I have been unable to find any since. I went to all my usual grocery stores, which had carried it a couple of years ago, and had no luck. I did find online sources, but they all required me to buy at least four boxes and pay exorbitant shipping rates. I finally discovered that it's not available anywhere on the west coast(maybe because of the 2006 acrylamide lawsuit?). I found these directions for making it myself and tried it out, with equivocal results.

I think part of my problem was that I used soft, white wheat (on the left, above) instead of hard, red wheat, because I was nearly out of the hard kind. I was also afraid of burning it, so didn't let it bake long enough. It had barely changed color when I took it out of the oven, and hadn't begun to have a nice toasty smell. It did end up with the sandy texture that's Wheatena's hallmark, so I'm pretty sure my next batch will be entirely successful.

quince vodka

2009-10-30T22:30:00.000-07:00

I picked more quinces from my neighbor bush to make Jane Grigson's quince vodka. It's super-easy: core your quinces and cut out their fuzzy blossom ends, grate them, put the shreds in a big jar and cover with vodka, then let soak for a few weeks. I got 105 proof vodka on the advice of the liquor store lady, who pointed out that if I used 80 proof it would get too watered down with quince juice.

Right now it just smells of alcohol, but when I stirred it with a chopstick and licked the chopstick it already tasted pleasantly quincey. When it's ready, Rachael and I can have a cocktail party, and serve quintinis and quincemopolitans!

our anarchical day

2009-10-18T08:46:00.000-07:00

Rachael and I went to the anarchist bookfair yesterday morning, and had a very nice time. Rachael (pictured above in the anarchist bathroom) got a bunch of Mumia fashion accessories, and anti-nonviolence and anti-hipster literature (and an anarchist planner, which is cuter than her UW one), and I got this Wobblie yo-yo:

I though I would have plenty of time after the bookfair to fix hom baos and tripe, but my lack of organization got the better of me. I went home to gather my equipment so that Annie could take me and all my things to her house to cook. I had cleverly made a list of everything I needed, so I could get it all bagged up in a hurry.

I'd done a big shopping the day before, but hadn't bought tree ears* or chile-garlic paste as I thought I already had them (I didn't). They were too expensive at the Asian store in the Market, so I decided to have Annie take me by the Viet Wah on the way back to her house. We had to stop to visit Dakki at the hospital and get her keys so we could move her car.

Once we got to Annie's I realised that I'd forgotten to bring dried black mushrooms (actually, I thought she'd have some but she didn't). We went back to my house for those. Then Annie remembered that there were some movies in for her at the library that she had to pick up before they went away. I was frantically cooking, so didn't go with her. While she was gone I discovered that she didn't have any dried chiles de arbol, a crucial ingredient in my bok choy recipe, so I called her up to tell her to get some at the Red Apple on her way home. Her phone never rang, so we had to go back out to get some from my house. I finally had all my ingredients and could cook in earnest.

The dinner was a success. Julie hurt her mouth eating a chile de arbol on my behalf after Rachael dared me to, and the hot and sour soup was too salt and not very sour, but the hom baos were my best ever! The new dough recipe was a real improvement. It was easy to roll out really thin so as to make nice pleats, none of them came unstuck as they steamed, and they were really light and fluffy.

I remembered my camera but left it in my knitting bag, so all these pictures were taken with my phone: that's my excuse for their poor quality....

*Tree ears are called 'cat ears' in Vietnamese, and 'tree jellyfish' in Japanese.

shopping trip

2009-10-16T15:57:00.000-07:00

I went to Chinatown today to buy ingredients for a hom bao dinner I'm going to fix for Annie tomorrow (I'm going to try a new dough recipe, but it will be other wise my usual dinner of hom baos, hot and sour soup, and fake tripe). I went to the same stores I always do, but saw interesting sights that I hadn't noticed before:

A giant tin of custard powder, next to a gallon jar of mayonnaise,

these terrible rat traps,

and these poor tilapia in their crowded tank.

lookit!

2009-10-08T21:31:00.000-07:00

Above is a picture I took of the bag I knitted Rachael for her birthday this year. Click here and look at the photo illustrating this article!

quinces

2009-10-05T14:53:00.000-07:00

My quince tree did better this year than last year, yielding enough quinces for about one-and-a-half batches of jam. I picked an equal amount of quinces from a nearby bush whose owners always let all the fruit fall to the ground and rot, so ended up with enough for three kinds of jam.

I've used fruit from flowering quince bushes (Chaenomeles lindl) before, but not in conjunction with fruit from my tree (Cydonia oblonga), and I had never realized how different they are. The bush quinces are small, shiny, and sticky compared to my big fuzzy tree quinces. The insides were different too: the bush quinces were crispy and translucent, and didn't brown in the air, while my tree quinces were much harder, opaque, and somehow mealy, and quickly oxidized.

I made three jams: from left to right, Honey-Quince, Quince and Orange with Cardamom (both from Mes Confitures), and Vanilla Quince, a jam of my invention. The Honey-Quince is made of bush quinces, the Vanilla Quince of tree quinces, and the Quince-Orange of a mixture. The bush quinces seem to get darker with cooking, don't they?

Vanilla Quince Jam
makes 6-7 half-pints

1.5kg quinces, about 900g when peeled and cored, cut into thin slices
300ml quince juice
800g sugar
juice of 2 lemons
2 vanilla beans, split lengthwise

To make the quince juice, put all the of quince trimmings in a pan, cover with water, bring to the boil, and let simmer uncovered for about an hour. Strain through a cheesecloth. This always gives me right about the right amount of juice I need for my jam, but if you don't get enough you can supplement it with water or apple juice.

Put the quinces, quince and lemon juice, and sugar into a big jam pan, bring to the boil and let simmer till quinces are tender. Add the vanilla beans, take off the heat, cover, and let rest overnight. When you're ready to can it, bring to the boil and boil hard till it's 221&F: be careful, as this will probably take less than five minutes. Pluck out the vanilla beans and cut two of the halves into thirds. Pour the jam into your prepared canning jars, add a piece of vanilla bean to each jar, seal, and boiling water bathe for five minutes. Dry off your remaining vanilla beans and stick them in a jar of sugar to make vanilla sugar.

another banana bread

2009-10-04T10:27:00.000-07:00

Last week I made banana bread for me and Rachael to sneak into the movies (we ended up not going because she missed her bus, so I went by myself on a different day), and it turned out pretty well. It was different from my usual recipe--Rachael asked suspiciously, 'Does this have any whole-grain flour in it, Mommy?'--but I liked it just as well. It was meant to be entirely pale yellow, but I didn't have quite enough golden flax meal so had to add a little of the regular, dark kind to make up the difference.

Flaxen Banana Bread
makes 2 little loaves, or 1 bigger one

225g all-purpose flour
50g gram flour
80g golden flax meal
1 1/2t baking powder
1/2t baking soda
1/4t salt
1/2 grated nutmeg
1/2C oil
1T each potato starch, tapioca flour whisked into 1/4C orange juice concentrate
150g sugar
4 small bananas, mashed (about 470 g)
1/2C walnuts, coarsely chopped and toasted

Heat oven to 350° and grease two 8 1/2"x4 1/2" bread pans or one 9"x5" one.

Whisk first six ingredients together in a medium bowl, and whisk the oil, orange juice mixture, and sugar together in a bigger one. Mix the dry ingredients into the wet, then stir in the bananas and walnuts. Pour into your prepared pan(s) and bake for 45-55 minutes.

Let cool in pans ten minutes before turning out onto a cooling rack to cool more thoroughly.

using up allioi

2009-09-30T19:39:00.000-07:00

The allioli I made so successfully a while back was staying well-emulsified and continuing to taste nice, but I knew it couldn't last forever and I'd better use it up. I planned a couple of easy dinners with that in mind and invited allioli-loving Rachael over for both of them, and she managed to scoff it all!

The easiest dinner of all is pictured above: potatoes, onions, and corn, all baked at 425°. Stick the potatoes in the oven first, as they have to cook for about an hour; after twenty minutes add the onions, unpeeeled, then after another ten minutes add the unhusked corn. Half an hour later you'll have a nice, hot, starchy dinner! Smear allioli on your corn and mash it into your potatoes.

Pictured below is the second dinner I made, a paella using a lot of vegetables from my favorite vegetable stand. You could easily vary the vegetables, as long as you end up with about the same amount. Rachael said she'd just as soon I left the eggplant and okra out....

Easy Paella de Verduras
makes enough for 4, or 2 with good leftovers

1/3C olive oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 small eggplant
several small, sweet peppers
150g string beans
150g okra
1 1/2C cooked garbanzo beans
2 tomatoes, peeled and cored
225g frozen artichoke hearts, thawed
300g paella rice (I used bomba), but you could use arborio in a pinch)
750ml water
1/2t salt
1/4t hot pimentón
pinch of saffron

Preheat your oven to 425°. Cut all the vegetables into biggish bite-sized pieces. Heat the oil in a wide, shallow pan (I don't have a special paella pan as I don't make it very often, and use this). Fry the garlic briefly, then add the eggplant and fry till its surfaces are mostly browned. Add the rest of the veg and fry a little longer. Add the rice, trying to arrange it so that the rice is mostly towards the bottom of the pan and the veg on top, then pour in the water and add the seasonings. Boil for ten minutes. You don't want to stir, making rice slime, but feel free to poke around, trying to keep the rice somewhat submerged. After the ten minutes has passed, transfer the pan to your preheated oven and let bake for another fifteen minutes. Take it out of the oven and let rest a while longer, then serve. It's traditionally eaten right out of the pan, but Rachael and I didn't do that. Tastes good with blobs of allioli on top!

my birthday party

2009-09-23T19:44:00.000-07:00

My birthday was a couple of days ago, and we had the party on the actual day (unusually for us) since neither Annie nor I had to work. The party was at Annie's house, and we were supposed to have a fun day of cooking together but she ended up being sick so I mostly cooked by myself. I made many pretty dishes, and even remembered to bring my camera to document them, but I forgot to take any pictures of the food or festivities. I took pictures beforehand:

Here's Maria helping me procrastinate

by knitting on my baby sweater (I got it to the point where I have to get buttons before I can knit any further).

I took pictures afterwards:

Rachael came over for a sleepover and here she is, computing into the night.

And the next day I took pictures of some of my presents:

Socks knitted by Annie and mitties knitted by Ana,

and strawberries bottled by Billy Warner and Carmen.

stew

2009-09-18T15:53:00.000-07:00

As I was working on my allioli, I was making a nice Spanish-style stew to go with it and to take as my work lunch for the next three days. It was made mostly of vegetables I got from my favorite vegetable stand, plus some garbanzo beans to fill me up. It turned out really well, and was especially good with a big blob of allioli. If you don't want to bother making allioli to go with it, you could just add a few cloves of garlic along with the onion.

Stew of Garbanzo Beans and Vegetables

makes three servings

2T flour mixed with 1/4t salt and pepper to taste
3T olive oil
1 small eggplant
1 medium onion
1 sweet, red pepper
2 big tomatoes, peeled
1 Mexican zucchini (they're paler than regular ones, and globular, and taste better)
1C garbanzo beans, cooked
3T olive oil
2 bay leaves
1/2t each ground cumin, Mexican oregano
1/4t pimentón

Cut all the vegetables into biggish chunks. Toss the eggplant in the seasoned flour. then fry in a couple of tablespoons of oil till browned on all sides. Pluck th eggplant out of the pan and put it back in the bowl with the remaining flour.

Add the third tablespoon of olive oil to the pan, and cook the onion in it till it's turning golden. Add the remaining vegetables, cover, and cook till the tomatoes have made the stew wet with their juice. throw in the rest of the ingredients, including the eggplant and its flour, and let cook, covered, another twenty minutes or so.

Taste for seasoning, and serve with big blobs of allioli on top.

allioli lessons

2009-09-12T07:17:00.000-07:00

I was inspired by this lying blog post to try making allioli with my Bamix; you can see the result above. I wound up with slightly thickened olive oil with a layer of garlic purée on top. My dinner guests politely poured it on their stripy-pan vegetables, but I was disappointed--not least by the waste of so much of my nice Spanish olive oil.

On my next day off, I decided to try to turn the garlicky oil into allioli by starting from scratch with my mortar and pestle, dripping it drop by drop into two fresh garlic cloves. At first, all went well. I know from sad experience that it's really crucial to add the oil slowly--much more so than when making mayonnaise. I was about fifteen minutes into the process, and had added about three quarters of my oil, when I got over-confident and poured in a teaspoon or so all at once. I frantically beat with my pestle, but the allioli broke.

I started a third time with just one clove of garlic, and this time I had success: a nice, thick, smooth sauce that's still emulsified a day later. Here's how I will do it in the future:

Allioli

2 cloves garlic
big pinch of salt
a few drops of lemon juice
1C fruity olive oil

Crush the garlic and salt together thoroughly in your big mortar and pestle. Add the lemon juice, then add the oil a drop at a time, stirring constantly with your pestle. You don't have to stir very fast, tiring yourself out: just be sure that the oil gets mixed in.

After you've added about a quarter of a cup, you can start pouring the oil in a thin stream, but be sure not to let your hand tip! You'll end up with a very stiff sauce, which you can lighten with a teaspoon or so of water if you like.

Lessons I learned:

Allioli's not as hard to make as some say: it just requires some time and a steady hand.
You can pause in the middle of the process. I stopped several times to wash off my pestle when it got too greasy and slippery.
If it should break, you can start over with a new clove of garlic. It won't take as long the second time, because you can add entire clots of broken allioli without fear of breaking it again.

lunch for Rachael

2009-09-06T10:24:00.000-07:00

Rachael and I went to 'Extract' yesterday (we love Jason Bateman), and we planned to go directly from the movie theater downtown to the U-District so Rachael could get her ear pierced by Chuck. Rachael got up late, though, and didn't have time to eat breakfast first, so by the time our movie got out she was really hungry. I'd forgotten my coupon for 20% off jewelry, so we decided to stop by my house to get the coupon and fix some lunch.

I made nice scrambled tofu with frozen peas, in corn tortillas with tomatillo salsa, and fried corn and squash. As we were eating, Rachael asked why I hadn't taken any pictures of our food. I pointed out that it wasn't very photogenic, and she said 'But it's so yummy, Mommy! You should write about it in your blog!' So I got myself seconds and took its picture. Rachael liked the vegetables best, so here's the recipe:

Summer Squash and Corn

Olive oil
A small white onion, thinly sliced
2 summer squashes (yellow ones, not zucchini; ick!), halved lengthwise and thinly sliced into semicircles
2 ears of corn, kernels cut from the cobs
salt and pepper
A small handful of basil, cut into chiffonade

Fry the onion and squash with salt and pepper till the squash is very limp and quite brown. Add the corn and continue cooking, stirring frequently, till the corn's warmed through but still pretty crispy. Stir in the basil and take off the heat.

a kitchen disaster

2009-08-28T19:14:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago I was lying in bed after a hard day's work, happily watching Torchwood, when I decided to pause my video and get up to fix myself a peanut butter and Sriracha sandwich.

Just as I was getting the Sriracha out from behind the soy milk I heard a terrible crash, and I looked down to see that the glass shelf covering the vegetable drawer had shattered into thousands of little pieces! As soon as my sandwich was made I put the ingredients away and resolved not to think about my refrigerator till my next day off.

I sent away for a new shelf in the mail, figuring I'd get it almost as quickly as if I waited for my day off and tried to get someone to drive me to the appliance parts store. It turned out it won't get here for almost a week and a half, so today I made myself a nice interim shelf out of cardboard. I was pleased to find a good use for some of my cardboard I keep around, justifying my hoarder tendencies!

ideal bread

2009-08-23T09:47:00.001-07:00

I recently made a bread of my own invention which turned out to be the perfect bread for a stretch of seven days of work. It was a big enough loaf to last that long, and it was still not stale on the last day. It was hearty but not excessively so, and the seeds added visual and textural interest. I'd intended to add some pepitas as well, but was out.

Rachael really liked this bread thinly sliced with vegan liverwurst. Neither she nor I have ever had actual liverwurst, so we don't know how this compares to the real thing, but it's also a nice thing to have on hand for work treats. The recipe makes two little loaves, so one can be frozen for later.

Seedy Dark Bread

500g whole wheat flour
125g each whole spelt, dark rye flour
25g potato flour
220g 100% hydration whole wheat or spelt levain
60g each toasted flax, sunflower seeds
550ml water
15g salt

Mix together all of the ingredients except the salt till you get a shaggy mass, then let half an hour. Add the salt, then knead the dough more thoroughly. Every twenty minutes for an hour and twenty minutes, stretch and fold the dough into quarters. Let rise till doubled, or overnight if your kitchen's not too hot. Shape into a bâtard and let rise in a couche or banneton till just about doubled (I let mine over-rise, so it collapsed a little and didn't have mush oven-spring). Bake on a stone in an oven preheated to 450ºF, then turned down to 400, for 45 minutes. Squirt with water a few times in the first five minutes or so.

burnt jam

2009-08-18T20:34:00.000-07:00

I have lots and lots of basil at my house, since Annie made me buy some that I didn't need so she could take my picture. Fortunately basil keeps really well if you cut the tips of the stems and keep it in a glass of water out on the counter: it grows little roots and keeps growing as long as you can remember to keep the water topped up.

When Safeway had organic nectarines for 99¢/lb I bought a big bag of them to make one of my favorite jams, basil-nectarine. I like to make nectarine jam better than peach because the peels soften nicely when cooked instead of getting tougher, as peach peels seem to, so you needn't peel them. Including the peels helps make the jam a brilliant vermilion. Unless you burn it, in which case it'll be a dull brown.

My back was only turned for a couple of minutes when I smelled a burny smell. I quickly took the pan off the heat and took the jam's temperature: it was 226ºF, at least 4º too hot! I decided to proceed with my recipe and bottle it up anyway, and hope for the best. It turned out to have a really nice caramelly flavor, and to be only a little bit too sticky, so I considered it a success and labelled the jars 'Caramelized Nectarine-Basil Jam.' The following recipe, however, is for the pretty, vermilion jam I'd originally intended to make:

Nectarine Basil Jam
makes 7-8 1/2 pints

3lb nectarines, pitted and coarsely chopped
2lb 12oz sugar
4oz lemon juice
~1/2 basil, chiffonaded (about as much as in the photo at the bottom of this post)

Early in the day before you plan to finish making your jam, bring the nectarines, sugar, and lemon juice to the boil in a big kettle and let simmer till the fruit's tender. Cover and let rest till the evening, when you should bring it to the boil again, let cool uncovered, then re-cover and let stew till the next morning.

Get all set up, with your jars boiled and everything, then bring the fruit to the boil for the third time and boil hard till it's reached 221ºF. This usually takes about four minutes, but watch it the whole time lest it caramelizes after only three minutes!!!! Take the jam off the heat, stir in the basil, bottle it and boiling water bathe for five minutes.

Another use for blueberries

2009-08-16T21:43:00.000-07:00

I had blueberries left over after I made jam , since my bargain was a little flat (maybe 8 pints) for $8. I decided to see if I could make some sorbet that Rachael would like. She ended up thinking it was just okay (she choked down a bowl, but didn't ask for seconds), but thought it was very good as sorbet goes. I thought it was good, period, and thought I'd better record the recipe while it's still blueberry season.

Blueberry Sorbet

1C water
3 lavender sprigs
1T lime juice
1/2C sugar
5C blueberries
2T clementine cordial or Grand Marnier

Bring the water, lavender, lime juice, and sugar to the boil in a largish pot and let simmer for five minutes or so, till you have a nice lavender-scented syrup. Pluck out the lavender, add the blueberries, and let simmer, covered, till the blueberries are tender. Whiz in the blender till thoroughly smooth, then chill overnight. Add the clementine cordial, then freeze in your ice cream maker according to its directions.

tender noodles

2009-08-13T05:58:00.000-07:00

Rachael, Annie, and our friend Julie came over for dinner last week, and I made them these summery noodles. Annie was very impressed with the noodles themselves--they're thin and tender and have no egg--and asked me to post the recipe ASAP. The secret ingredient is chickpea flour, AKA gram flour or besan. It's used by Indian vegetarians, who don't eat eggs, for its sticky, binding properties. You can get some at the health food store or Indian store, or a regular grocery store with a big flour selection. I think these noodles are best served with a light sauce, such as the one pictured: it's just raw tomatoes, corn, herbs, and spring onions, along with olive oil, olives, salt and pepper.

Tender, Eggless Pasta
makes a lot, enough for 6 or so

300g all-purpose flour
150g chickpea flour
1/2t salt
200ml water
3T olive oil

Mix everything together with your hands, then knead till it's a nice ball of dough. It'll seem too stiff and dry at first, but persevere and incorporate all of the flour. Wrap it up in Saran Wrap and let it rest for about half an hour, then roll it out and cut it as you would any other pasta dough.

In this case I rolled it in sheets of the penultimate thinness my Atlas pasta machine does, then let them dry out a little while I fixed the rest of the dinner. Right before I cooked the pasta, I cut it by hand into broad noodles. I boiled them briefly--only a couple of minutes--then tossed them with the sauce.

blueberry jam

2009-08-11T20:14:00.000-07:00

I got a bargain on blueberries last week, so decided to use some of them up in jam. Plain blueberry jam is always pretty dull, so a lot of recipes liven it up with spices, but then it ends up tasting like spice jam, not blueberries. I thought adding some citrusy notes would liven the jam up without obscuring its essential blueberriness. And a little peach never hurt anything.... I think this is the most successful blueberry jam I've made to date.

Blueberry Peach Jam
makes 9 half-pints

1 1/2 lb blueberries
2lb peaches, peeled and chopped
juice of two lemons
1 cinnamon stick
1/3C orange juice concentrate
3lb sugar
2T clementine cordial (or Cointreau or Grand Marnier)

Bring everything except the sugar and cordial to the boil in a big pan, then cover and let simmer till the peaches are tender. Add the sugar, stir till it's dissolved, then let rest for a few hours. Bring to the boil again, then let rest a few more hours. When you're ready to can it, bring to the boil one more time while your boiling water bath's getting ready, and boil hard for about five minutes, till the jam's 222ºF. Stir in the cordial, then pour into your prepared jars, seal, and boiling water bathe for five minutes.

peachy peaches

2009-07-27T16:09:00.000-07:00

There were actually good peaches--tender, juicy, and tasting of peach--at the grocery store last week, and they only were $1.99/lb, so I bought a bunch of them with hopes of luring Rachael to my house with promises of ice cream. I'd actually intended to make peach sorbet (less fattening for calorie-conscious Rachael) after work, but it didn't quite turn out. I had my peach mixture all chilled in the refrigerator, met Rachael, went home and got the ice cream machine all set up, and then Rachael decided she needed some French fries first. We left the machine automatically stirring, hoping for the best, but when we got back it had stopped prematurely and the lid was broken. We had peach slushies, and I made the rest into granita the next day: granita has the advantage of not requiring an ice cream machine.

Peach Sorbet or Granita
makes a generous quart

2 1/2lb peaches, peeled and pitted
1/2C sugar
3T pink or white wine
2/3C water, brought to the boil with a bay leaf, then chilled

Whiz everything except the bay water in your blender till really smooth, then stick in the refrigerator till really cold. Whisk in the bay leaf water, then (for sorbet) run it all through your ice cream maker according to its directions. To make granita, pour the mixture into a shallow pan (8"x8" or so) and stick it in the freezer. Let it sit for an hour, then start giving it a good stir every half hour till it's a mass of nice big crystals. I stirred mine a little too frequently, so its crystals turned out on the small side.

If you want to use nectarines, and have a good blender, you needn't bother peeling them.

ice cream

2009-07-24T08:31:00.000-07:00

This is the most successful vegan ice cream I've ever made; its texture was just like that of the dairy kind. I used Mimiccreme and unsweetened soy yogurt for the base, and it didn't have any of the peculiar aftertastes that vegan ice creams so often have. Rachael didn't like it very well because it was so chocolaty, but everyone else who tried it thought it was good.

Chocolate Banana Ice Cream

makes about a quart

200g sugar
200ml unsweetened Mimiccreme
50g Dutched cocoa
pinch of salt
170g unsweetened chocolate, roughly chopped
500g unsweetened soy yogurt (if you can only find the sweet kind, use it and reduce the sugar by 50g or so)
1t vanilla extract
2 ripe bananas (250g), roughly chopped

Bring the sugar, cream, cocoa, and salt barely to the boil, then take off the heat and add the chocolate. Stir till it's mostly melted, then put in a blender along with all of the remaining ingredients besides the bananas. Blend thoroughly, then transfer to a bowl, mix in the banana bits, and let chill in the fridge. It ends up being so thick you could eat it for pudding as-is, but if you want it to be ice cream, put it in your ice cream maker and freeze according to its directions.

bean salad

2009-07-18T20:36:00.000-07:00

Annie had me and Dakki over for dinner yesterday, the hottest day of the year (it was 90º during my walk over). We were going to have garlic soup and pretzels, and I was to bring a vegetable. I decided to bring a vegetabley bean salad, even though Annie doesn't like beans, because I thought we needed something substantial to fill out the menu. It turned out well, and Rachael and Annie both had seconds despite the beans!

I think part of the reason for its success might be the beans I used. Tepary beans stay firm and keep their shape well even when thoroughly cooked, and don't seem to have the mealiness that some find objectionable in beans.

Bean Salad

8oz tepary beans, cooked (I did them for 6 or 7 minutes in my pressure cooker)
3 medium carrots
3 stalks of celery
6oz tomatoes
1 big avocado
1 spring onion
2 cloves garlic
a handful or two of fresh herbs (I used parsley, marjoram, thyme, basil, and Puerto Rican oregano)
juice of a lime and an equal amount of olive oil
salt, pepper, and a biggish pinch of ground cumin

Blanch the carrots for a minute, then cut them into bean-sized pieces. Cut the celery, tomatoes, and avocado into similar pieces. Cut the top of the onion into hoops, and the bottom into little squares. Chop the herbs.

Whisk the lime juice, oil, salt, pepper, and cumin together in a big bowl, then add the rest of the ingredients and mix thoroughly. Let rest a couple of hours before eating.

lemon-squeezy tempeh

2009-07-14T08:02:00.000-07:00

This is an easy way to add a little substance if you've planned a menu that's too vegetabley and unfilling. You can change the flavorings around to suit the rest of your dinner--add a little chipotle en adobo if you're having Mexican food, or ginger and green onion if you're having rice and miso soup.

Tempeh Fingers

to serve 2
1T each soy sauce, water, oil, and vinegar (pick oil and vinegar that will go with the rest of your dinner)
a couple of cloves of garlic, squashed
a few pinches of suitable flavorings (to go with the pasta in the photo, I used marjoram, thyme, pepper, and chili flakes)
6oz tempeh, cut into 1/4"-thick fingers
oil for frying

Whisk the marinade ingredients together in a shallow dish, then roll the tempeh fingers around in it. Let rest 10-15 minutes, then turn them over and let them rest a while longer, till they've soaked up most of the liquid.

Fry on medium heat, about five minutes per side, till they have a nice golden crust.

kombucha

2009-07-03T20:09:00.000-07:00

Rachael got us a bottle of cranberry kombucha yesterday, and while it didn't taste too much of cranberry it was really pretty and pinkish-red. My own kombucha has been languishing in a dark corner of my kitchen for months, but I was inspired by the grocery store kind to make a copycat version.

I think kombucha 'mushrooms' are really just vinegar mothers, and the resulting beverage is just fizzy tea vinegar, but it really is a nice refreshing drink in the hot weather.

My usual recipe is:
per liter of water,
70g sugar
5g tea
100ml kombucha from the previous batch

Bring the tea and sugar to the boil together, then let the tea mask for 15
minutes. Strain and let cool to 75ºF, then pour into a big jar. Add the
'mushroom' and old kombucha, cover with a cloth, and let ferment 8-12 days,
depending on the weather and how sour you want it to be. Bottle, cap tightly,
and let rest at room temp five days before refrigerating.

All I did to make it cranberry was to whiz 12oz of cranberries with a liter of water, and add that to the tea when it was done masking. I used darjeeling instead of pu erh, since pu erh would have masked the color of the cranberries.

Aunt's Day party

2009-06-30T20:15:00.000-07:00

We finally had a day when everyone was free--with no work or choir obligations--to celebrate Aunt's Day with Dakki, the cutest, best aunt ever. Here's what we ate:

A spring salad of endive, radish, fava beans, and tangelo with creamy orange dressing; carrot soup (which I forgot to take a picture of, but which looked just like you'd expect);

Israeli couscous with asparagus and sugar snaps, and charmoula-braised tempeh (Dakki's freshly intrigued whenever I serve her either couscous or tempeh, asking lots of questions about their history and how they're made, so I picked this menu item with her amusement in mind);

and blueberry cake and ice cream. As Annie rudely pointed out, the ice cream turned out grey, but it still tasted nice. I think it would have been more blue if I'd cooked the blueberries instead of just grinding them up raw in the blender.

The cake was an adaptation of the raspberry cake I made for Lillian: I made it bigger, plus added some cornflour (the kind that's finely ground cornmeal, not cornstarch) because I like corn and blueberries together.

Blueberry Cake

1 1/2T each tapioca starch and golden flax meal
75ml + 150ml soy yogurt, divided
120g margarine
200g + 1T sugar, divided
1t vanilla extract
zest and juice of a lemon
150g all-purpose flour
50g corn flour
3/4t baking powder
1/2t baking soda
1/4t salt
200g blueberries

Heat oven to 350ºF. Grease and flour a suitable cake pan (I used a 7.5" tube pan, but an 9" round pan would work too).

Whisk the flax and tapioca together with the 75ml soy yogurt, and let rest and thicken while you beat the margarine and 200g of sugar together till fluffy. Add the flax mixture to the margarine, and beat some more. Add the rest of the yogurt along with the vanilla, zest, and lemon juice. Whisk the flours, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together, then beat in till it's nicely amalgamated. Spread half of the batter into your prepared cake pan, then scatter a third of the berries evenly around. Spread the rest of the batter over the berries, then sprinkle with the remaining berries. Poke them down into the batter till they're halfway submerged, then sprinkle with your remaining tablespoon of sugar.

Bake till the cake's coming away from the sides of the pan and a tester comes out clean, 45-50 minutes. Let cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a rack to finish cooling.

more work treats

2009-06-26T09:02:00.000-07:00

We had our quarterly work meeting yesterday at the tail end of my eleven-day stretch of work, so I had to make a treat that didn't require much shopping to prepare. Most people were planning to bring savory things (often there's a surfeit of desserts), so I decided to bring some nice flapjacks. These suited everybody's dietary requirements, being vegan and oat, wheat, and legume-free.

This recipe is easily adaptable to your tastes and the contents of your pantry--use oats instead of spelt, if you like (I made the spelt flakes with my flake mill; I don't know if they're available at many stores), or try another flavor of marmalade. Add candied ginger, dried cherries, or toasted pumpkin seeds: whatever you like.

I used greased tin foil to line my pan with, but I'll try parchment paper next time: these were very sticky, and it was hard to peel the tin foil off. I was almost late to work, and ended up leaving a few adhered to the foil to eat for breakfast the next day!

Lemon Apricot Flapjacks

100g dried apricots, chopped into raisin-size pieces
100g golden raisins
200ml fruity olive oil
125g brown sugar
150g lemon marmalade
Finely grated zest of a lemon
1T ginger
2T golden syrup
400g rolled spelt

Heat oven to 350ºF. Line a 10"x10" (or 9"x13" if you don't have one) pan with parchment paper.

Pour boiling water over the raisins and apricots, and leave to soak while you prepare the rest of the ingredients. Warm the oil, sugar, marmalade, zest, ginger, and golden syrup in a large pan until barely boiling, then take off the heat and mix in the spelt and drained fruit. Be sure to strain the soaking water into a cup, so you can drink it! Pack the mixture evenly into your prepared pan and bake for 25 minutes, till the edges are turning darker. Let cool thoroughly before cutting into 2" squares.

Lillian's party

2009-06-15T06:04:00.001-07:00

Lillian graduated from high school and was confirmed this month, so I planned to have a little party à trois for her at my house. Her Auntie Tina invited herself, then moved it to her house, so the party and its menu ended up being outside of my control, but I did make the cake I'd originally planned. It's a veganisation of this cake from this month's Gourmet magazine. Nobody but Rachael said much about it, but she really, really liked it. She cut the cake into eight pieces so there was an extra piece, which she claimed, then she ate Apolinario's piece (he was sick, and didn't want it) and half of mine (I was the mother, so had to give it to her).

Raspberry Cake

1T each tapioca starch, golden flax meal
45ml + 120ml soy yogurt, divided
75g/5T margarine
140g + 1T sugar, divided
1/2t vanilla extract
1C/140g all-purpose flour
1/2t baking powder
1/2t baking soda
1/4t salt
1/2 pint (6oz/170g) fresh raspberries (blueberries would be good, too)

Heat oven to 400ºF. Grease and flour a suitable cake pan (I used a 7.5" tube pan, but an 8" round pan would work too).

Whisk the flax and tapioca together with the 45ml soy yogurt, and let rest and thicken while you beat the margarine and 140g of sugar together till fluffy. Add the flax mixture to the margarine, and beat some more. Whisk the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together, then add to the margarine fluff alternately with the yogurt. Spread batter into your prepared cake pan, then scatter the berries over. Poke them down into the batter till they're halfway submerged, then sprinkle with your remaining tablespoon of sugar.

Bake till the cake's coming away from the sides of the pan and a tester comes out clean, about 30 minutes. Let cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a rack to finish cooling.

waffles

2009-06-12T10:36:00.000-07:00

Sleepy Rachael came to my house for breakfast before school today. We had peanut butter waffles from Vegan Brunch, a new book full of recipes for vegan pancakes and crabcakes and omelets and waffles.... Everything I've cooked from it so far has been good, and these waffle were no exception. I made the full recipe, enough for four people, because I'm going to freeze the extra to take in upcoming work lunches, to toast and eat with Tozy's Tofu Pâté. I'm about to work a million days in a row, so need to have lots of lunches ready in advance!

You probably already have a good way of fixing strawberries, but it took me a while to come up with my preferred method so I'll show it to you:

Strawberry Sauce
1 lb strawberries
1T sugar
1t rose or orange blossom water (optional)

Cut the tops off of and the cores out of your strawberries. Pick out about a third of the least nice ones (too big, too ripe, too under-ripe), cut them into quarters, and mash them with the sugar till you have a nice sauce. I use a miniature potato masher for this, but you could use a full-size one or a fork. Slice the rest of the strawberries into the mush, stir them around, and let them macerate for a while. If you're feeling exotic, and not feeding Rachael, you can add the optional flowery water. This sauce is good for strawberry shortcake or layering with tapioca pudding for parfaits as well as for putting on your waffles.

hot weather spargel

2009-06-09T07:58:00.000-07:00

It's still asparagus time--I got a nice bunch at the farmer's market on Sunday--but it's getting too hot to fix it my favorite way. The food magazines are all featuring grilled asparagus recipes, so I decided to try cooking it on my stripy pan. It was just about as easy as the oven way, and heated up my kitchen a lot less.

Stripy Pan Spargel

asparagus
olive oil
whatever seasonings you like (I used Trader Joe's Lemon Pepper, but salt, pepper, and garlic would be good too)

Heat your stripy pan on medium high. Peel the bottom halves of your asparagi, and cut off their tough ends. Pour a little olive into a shallow dish, then roll the asparagus and seasonings around till everything's mixed up nicely. Lay as many as will fit nicely in a single layer on the stripy pan, and let them cook for about four minutes. Turn them over and cook for another three or four minutes. I did a pound of asparagus in my smallish pan, so I had to do it in two batches. They came out kind of al dente, with pleasingly frizzled tops. If you want them to be more well done, try cooking them on medium heat for a little longer.