work treats

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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.