Archive for November, 2011

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November 20, 2011

Dessert, and then More Dessert

I seem to have created a long silence here lately, so it’s probably time for an update. There’s been a lot going on in my kitchen and most of it has been dessert. Thankfully, since we’re headed into holiday eating mode, what I’ve been making has mostly been raw, vegan and sugar free. Sounds like a scam weight loss plan doesn’t it? It’s not.

A word of advice, let these brownies chill before you cut them and eat them for lunch.

A few months ago, I started hearing about raw desserts. They’re nothing new to the raw and vegan crowds, but they were new to me and I was skeptical. Tofu pie? Really? Now, I think one of the reasons I’ve been able to get wholeheartedly on board with this breed of sweets is that the regular stuff isn’t terribly appealing to me. Don’t get me wrong, I still love cupcakes and find myself facing some formidable abominations when we go to self-serve frozen yogurt places (how did this 16-ounce container get full so fast?). But I’ve never had an easier time bypassing the Halloween candy aisle than I did this year (not that I totally ignored it). Frankly, a lot of your big name candy bars don’t taste that good to me anymore.

So I think I was primed to make the transition into date- and nut-based desserts. Wait, stop, don’t go! There’s still chocolate. There’s lots of chocolate. For my birthday, my cousin made me this chocolate tofu pie. It was so amazing, and it’s super simple. There is a whole package of chocolate chips involved, but there’s no butter, no refined sugar (aside from what’s in the chips already) and no white flour. Not too shabby for a luxurious dessert. I made this recipe myself a couple of weeks ago and with a food processor, it’s a 20-minute process. The only thing that seems not-quite-right is having a pie without having to turn on the oven.

And there’s more-oh, so much more! This same cousin brought over this cashew “cheesecake”, and holy cow, that didn’t last twelve hours. I won’t apologize for eating it so fast either; I had it for breakfast. Go ahead, try and find a reason why one shouldn’t eat that for breakfast. After that, I was completely sold on the concept of raw desserts. My life-long avoidance of dates (the fruit…) was wiped out by the cheesecake’s crust.

Since then, I’ve bought dates, walnuts and almonds at Costco. I couldn’t find baker’s cocoa at Costco, but if I’d found it, that would have come home with me too. I like the Ghirardelli version; it’s way more chocolately looking than Hershey’s, and I say that because I put both in a recipe last week and saw them side by side. On to what I’ve been making: these truffles (you have to “continue reading”) and these brownies. I’ve made both recipes twice and modified them a bit. For the truffles, I substituted 2 tablespoons of coconut oil for the goat cheese to get rid of the goat-y tanginess. They turned out well; they’re a little dense and now they’re vegan. For the brownies, I just omitted the almonds. They’d be good with some, but I’d use less than the full cup in the recipe. This change made them more fudge-like, and just as sinful tasting.

Peanut butter cups for grownups

Now it hasn’t all been “aren’t we so good, we only eat raw desserts” around here. Right around Halloween, I came across this recipe for peanut butter cups. Oh, man are they good. Buying the ingredients to make them the first time was spendy, and since I used little paper cups instead of full muffin sized ones, I ended up making 75 peanut butter cups, using $9 worth of chocolate. That made it possible to share the wealth, and I took little boxes of candy wherever I went for a couple of days and gave them to friends and family. These aren’t terribly difficult, but they are labor-intensive and take a little practice. But I can pretty much tell you they’re the most delicious peanut butter cups you’ve ever had.

And just when I thought I had our sweets-eating down to a science, the woman who brought me the raw brownie comes up with this black bean chocolate chili cherry cookie recipe. Wow, wow and WOW I know what I’m making just as soon as next week’s tryptophan wears off.

A very happy, safe and delicious Thanksgiving to you!

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November 10, 2011

Your Grandma Did this in Heels

I’ve created something of a monster in finally plucking up the courage to try canning. I didn’t get into the trend a few years ago when it took off. My first attempt was pickles (which I’ve never liked with few exceptions). I forced myself into pickling and canning by buying six pickling cucumbers at the farmers market. I knew if I didn’t make myself try, I might never get to it. This summer, I bought an inexpensive canning set, mostly for the special jar tongs and good funnel, thinking maybe eventually, I’d can something.

How to make pickles...

Since my first canning experience, the ping of a successful seal has become a prized sound in my kitchen. Among the canned things now in our pantry: lemon curd, pickles, pickled pears and green beans (different recipes), stewed tomatoes (I bought 25 pounds of Roma tomatoes…), applesauce and jam. It’s a freezer jam recipe, for the reduced sugar, but I canned it. My understanding is that as long as you have enough acidity, sterile jars and a good seal, all should be well. I feel sort of unstoppable. We will, naturally, smell test everything before eating it.

I’ve stuffed all these jars onto a cramped cupboard shelf and am surprised at how compactly all this food can be stored. The jars contain very little air and have small footprints. If you wanted to put up enough food for the winter, you wouldn’t need a ton of space (more than we have to spare, but not a ton). Of course, historically, that’s what people did before you could get strawberries from Chile in January. Produce is nothing short of overly available in the high season and sadly, much of it goes to waste. Why not hang on to some of it? Or a lot of it? The fruit preserved from the high season tastes so much better than off-season options.

Next stop: the pantry.

I don’t foresee myself buying beans by the bushel to can, but I did take advantage of low prices to squirrel away enough summer flavors to brighten up some dreary winter days. Also, I’d rate our preparedness for the zombie apocalypse better than before. Or we won’t go hungry if the city gets snowed in for two weeks this year…that seems well within the realm of possibility. Nor will we have to buy mealy, crunchy, pink tomatoes from the grocery store. This week, they’re from Mexico and Canada, of all places (I don’t get it either). There are still a few local tomatoes to be had at the farmers market, but they’ll soon be gone and we’ll switch to the juicy, perfect canned ones.

 

 

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November 2, 2011

Serious Cold Weather Bread from My Own Kitchen

I grew up baking. My family photo albums include many pictures of a little-kid me up on a step stool at the counter, helping my mom bake cookies. In some of the photos, I’m wearing one of her aprons. I love potlucks because that means I have an excuse to bake a pie, a cake from scratch or fancy cookies. And my younger twin brothers are even better bakers than I am.

The baking focus was always dessert. Something we did not grow up making was bread. I attempted it a couple of times as a kid. Usually, I was too impatient to let anything rise, resulting in things like crunchy cinnamon rolls the size of a quarter. I’m a little intimidated by recipes involving yeast. But I resolved a of couple weeks ago to make pumpernickel bread. I really enjoy the bread, but possibly like the name even more. It’s just so homey and seasonal. So I picked up some bran flakes and rye flour(not things I keep at home) at the grocery store and was on my way.

Phew! A successful loaf!

Using whole grain flours in baking is infinitely more interesting than plain old all-purpose. They add all kinds of new flavors, density and fiber to whatever you’re making; you get character without having to resort to tons of sugar. Plus, whole grain flours haven’t been stripped of the grain’s bran and germ, meaning they have nutritional value and digest much more slowly than white flour. Kim Boyce’s Good to the Grain is hands down one of my favorite cookbooks; it made approaching new flours much less intimidating, and includes a lot of seriously delicious recipes.

The recipe, from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything (another favorite), calls for making the dough in the food processor (so easy!), then letting it rise until it doubles in size (supposed to be two hours). After four hours, the dough hadn’t risen at all and didn’t smell anything like yeast. I’d used a couple of yeast packets that were nowhere near being expired, but I pronounced it dead anyway. Time to improvise. Bittman’s notes on active dry yeast said it could be added to bread pretty much anytime, so I dashed out to the grocery store for more.

When I got home, I whipped up a paste, adding liquid to the yeast and then enough flour to knead it in with the rest of the dough. Another few hours later, mercifully, the dough had risen. If it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have known what to do, wanting to neither bake a brick nor throw out the dough. A couple hours after that, two gorgeous, raisin-speckled (and puffy!) loaves of pumpernickel came out of the oven. It literally took all day (most of it leaving the dough to rise). But I had success. I made bread—not fluffy, fiberless bread, but substantial, eat-it-with-some-butter-for-breakfast hearty bread. It’s delicious. The first loaf didn’t even last long enough to get in the picture. “Oofs” – that’s “oops” with a mouth full of bread.

 

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