a use for smoked salt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.