Late Spring Cooking

I made two delicious dishes this weekend:

Mark Bittman's Beet Roesti with Rosemary (from How to Cook Everything)

Bittman blogged this recipe in the New York Times back in 2008: Beet Rosti With Rosemary. 

The beets were fabulous, as they always are from Pine Knot Farms. The rosemary was from my kitchen garden.


The photo doesn't do the beets justice - they were terrific.





 

Tonight I made Singapore (Street) Noodles (from the July / August 2014 issue of Cook's Illustrated). The magazine calls them Singapore Noodles (tho' they're from Hong Kong, not from Singapore), but I know them as Singapore Street Noodles, so that's what I call them.

I made the recipe for 4-6, but the recipe for 2 is online through August: Singapore Noodles for Two Recipe.

Just about everything was from NC., except for the noodles and the spices.

The shrimp were from Core Sound Seafood, a local community supported fishery (CSF) that also sells to our local food coop. Scrumptious!

The red peppers were from Vollmer Farms (whose berries are out of this world) and the eggs were from Roberson Creek Farm.

I want to finish the whole batch!

Honey Oat Quick Bread

Honey oat quick bread. It's what's for lunch. 

The flavor was quite good, but it was a bit dense (like a good quick bread should be) and not quite right for peanut butter. Still, it's a good solution for a no-yeast bread.

Recipe from Eating Well.

Cheerful Winter Soup: Tom Yum!

I made a delicious Thai recipe from EatingWell in Season: The Farmers' Market Cookbook tonight: Tom Yum Soup. I'd never had it in a restaurant, but it looked tasty: shrimp, pineapples, red peppers, and tomatoes ... (I omitted the mushrooms). I went to a big healthy food store to get lemongrass and lime leaves, and I'm glad I made the effort.

It's in the winter section of the Farmers' Market cookbook, but none of the ingredients are in season around here ... still, it is a nice cheerful winter soup.

Next time, I'd add more ginger (in addition to the dried galangal) and also some red pepper paste.

Aromatics creating the broth: jalapeños, galangal, lemongrass, and lime leaves

Stirring the soup

Eating the soup (I added rice noodles)

Delicious!

Christmas Eats

As usual, Christmas was a day of good eats! Here's what we had:

Started the day with a cup of Willoughby's decaf
in a new Spode mug

Goat chops, frozen

Darnarian supervises

Cooked carrots (with maple syrup & mustard)

Cooked chops, before the red wine reduction

Garlic smashed potatoes

This was what we ate, in the end. Delish!

The finished product

Mama Leah's Chicken Soup

"When a man eats a chicken, one of them is sick," says Tevye in _Fiddler on the Roof_.

We recently had the need AND a stewing hen for soup, thanks to a cold and a stewing hen from Little Tree Farm.

Our favorite chicken soup recipe is from Mama Leah's Jewish Kitchen, by Leah Loeb Fischer and Maria Polushkin Robbins (c1990).

The best part of making the soup was that the stewing hen came with feet!

Chicken feet!	Chicken feet in the soup ...
The second best part was eating the soup! Tasty soup!

Ginger snaps!

As I do every year, I made a ginormous batch of ginger snaps. My work, spouse's work, our fridge ... so many reasons to have ginger snaps!

The cookies taste best after a day or two, and they freeze beautifully!

The wet stuff: eggs, butter, molasses, vanilla.	The dry stuff: flour and four tablespoons of ginger powder (and a few other things).
The dough is very sticky!
Lots of little dots on the baking pan turn into ...	Lots of ginger snaps!

Check out the recipe on Evernote.

Christmas Soup

This recipe for Pasta e Fagioli (Pasta and Bean Soup) from ChefMD looks like Christmas! The look is entirely coincidental, but I'm glad for a holiday-looking soup all the same. 

Yesterday, I listened to a People's Pharmacy® interview with ChefMD, aka Dr. John La Puma called Healthy Holiday Feasts. I'd heard them talk to him before, but this time I was inspired to check out the recipes on ChefMD.com. Many look quite tasty!

Substitutions
This recipe calls for fennel, which wasn't available at the store yesterday, so I substituted an onion instead. I used Bionaturae's whole wheat macaroni, as that was the smallest pasta I had. On the show, Dr. La Puma talked about using "reduced sodium spicy vegetable juice" which I also didn't have; I used a double can of fire-roasted tomatoes with their juice. I also didn't have peas, so I used string beans.

Tomatoes + string beans + navy beans = Christmas soup!

Musical Accompaniment
Pink Martini's Joy to The World.

Chocolate Mooncakes (Gluten-free). Or, Recipes on the Blog!

I've been cooking & posting photos / recipes to my Facebook page for a while now. That turns out to be satisfying because my friends post comments ... but ultimately is unsatisfying because I can't easily refer people to my baked kale recipe or my spicy Thai slaw recipe.

I got a suggestion (or two) to start a blog ... but hey, I already have a blog, and it's not being used. So ... I'm planning to post some recipes here, in addition to the occasional post about teaching or librarianing or cognitive sciencing.

Chocolate Mooncakes

First up: Chocolate Mooncakes (Gluten Free). or, Black bean, gluten-free brownies. I wanted a relatively healthy and wheat-free baked good to take to various holiday events -- but it had to taste good first. So I scoured the interwebs for black bean brownie recipes & settled on Eat Good 4 Life: Dark chocolate and black bean brownies.

The recipe calls for many of the usual brownie ingredients, such as eggs, sugar, and vanilla.

Variations: I am not a big brownie baker, so I was less familiar with the chocolate aspect. The recipe calls for dark cocoa powder, but since I didn't know if I was going to like these (and thus make them again), I didn't want to buy a lot of cocoa powder. So I bought a single-serving packet of sipping cocoa. I used Whole Foods semi-sweet chocolate chips for the toppings. I also substituted (and toasted) pecans instead of chopped walnuts, just because I'm in the south.

I was flummoxed at the notion of buying instant coffee -- all I could think of was Sanka, and I didn't know where I might big a jar of Sanka these days. While I didn't look hard, I still didn't find any instant coffee, and so I thought I would do without. Then I remembered that Starbucks is making instant coffee, so I bought a three-pack of their coffee-flavored instant coffee.  (I didn't buy their flavored mochas, nor their Christmas blend.)

The cool thing about this recipe, and this is not a variation, but is, imho, A Good Thing, is the use of a can of black beans instead of flour. The texture is not quite brownie-like, but as my friend Tomasa said, is more like a Chinese mooncake. Actually, according to Wikipedia, this is nothing like a typical Chinese mooncake, but it's more like a mooncake than a brownie, so I'm sticking with the name.

If you're gluten-free, or just want to try a brownie variation, I recommend these.