Category: Cooking

Simple Appetizers (Hummus and Baba Ganoush)

These are delicious and relatively quick to make.  Baba ganoush takes a little longer than hummus because you have to roast the eggplant, but you can do that ahead of time.

Hummus

People who tell you they aren’t “hummus people” are people who have only had it out of a package.  Fresh hummus is way more delicious.  This recipe is based very loosely on this one from the Fat Free Vegan blog.

Continue reading “Simple Appetizers (Hummus and Baba Ganoush)”

Cranberry (Orange) Walnut Muffins

These muffins were extremely tasty…but not very pretty.

So a few weeks (two weeks?  Three?) I had an attack of hypochondria based on some vague symptoms.  The upshot of this is that I found out that unsweetened cranberry juice is really disgusting.  And I had a lot left over.

Based on this recipe, I substituted cranberry juice for soy milk, which worked well, except that something, possibly the reaction with the baking soda/baking powder turned it kind of gray.  But they’re very tasty gray muffins, with sweet cranberries and just enough walnuts to give them some crunch.

Continue reading “Cranberry (Orange) Walnut Muffins”

Bread diaries part two: Spinach Feta Bread

So I could not have fucked this recipe up more than I did, but the bread still came out very good.  The feta could have been better distributed throughout the bread, and the loaves are a little flat (probably due to my shaping more than to them rising too long).  But overall I’d say an AB attempt.  B liked it too.

Recipe – you can read the original here.  Below is what I actually used/did.

Continue reading “Bread diaries part two: Spinach Feta Bread”

Bread Diaries

I’ve been trying to learn to bake bread.  Real bread, with yeast in it (quick breads, like banana breads, are much easier – I do those all the time).  It has been hit and miss so far.

Here’s my base recipe:

2 cups all-purpose enriched unbleached flour
1 cup bread flour (or all-purpose flour, if you do not have bread flour)
1 teaspoon yeast
1 teaspoon salt
1/8 cup sugar
1 cup warm milk
2 tablespoons butter
1/4 – 1/2 cup lukewarm water

(Taken from here.)

Directions:

1. Mix ingredients and knead for about 7-10 min.

2. Put in an oiled bowl and let it rise for 90 minutes.

3. Punch down and form loaf.  Let it rise another hour or so.

4. Put a pan of water in the bottom of the oven to create a crispy crust.  Bake at 350 for 40-45 min. until the bottom sounds hollow when you tap it.

Attempt 1: Whole Wheat Bread

I used only whole wheat flour.  I also used molasses instead of sugar.  The first rise was 90 minutes, the second was 60.

The bread came out very dense.  I should have used more yeast to compensate for the whole wheat flour.  Also, I didn’t punch it down enough and I let it rise too long on the second time, so it was pretty much done rising before it went into the oven – bad news.

Verdict: I liked the flavor, B thought it was too dense.  Eventually made good French toast.

Attempt 2: The Cheese Bread

Having learned my lessons, I used 2.5 c. white flour and 1/2 c. whole wheat.  I increased the yeast to 2 tsp. and used brown sugar instead of molasses or white sugar.  I also used buttermilk because I was out of plain.  The first rise was 90 min.  When I punched it down, I rolled it out and put cheese (shredded sharp cheddar) on the middle third, then folded the two sides over.  Then I put a little more cheese on and rolled it up.  The second rise was 45 minutes.

Verdict: Airy and awesome, with just enough bite to the crust.  If I had one complaint, it would be that the cheese wasn’t randomly distributed throughout the bread enough (should add some in during the flour mixing stage).

Attempt 3: Cinnamon Bread

Oh boy, just when I thought I had this nailed…

I again split the flour 2.5/.5, but I sprinkled the bread with whole wheat instead of white when I kneaded it (last week I used white).  Two tsp yeast, brown sugar, and plain milk instead of buttermilk.  I also put some cinnamon, cloves, and pumpkin pie spice in the flour.  Then after it was rising, I checked out another post that said that cinnamon retards the yeast, so you should use more when making a cinnamon bread!  Oops.  That said, I’m not sure I would have known the difference if I hadn’t read that.

After the first rise, I rolled it out and moistened the top with water.  Then I sprinkled on a mixture of cinnamon and white sugar (maybe 2 T. and 3/8 c.?).  I rolled it up, then decided it was too long and thin and flattened it and rolled it up again.  I think that was a mistake.  When I baked it, the sugar melted and a lot came out on the baking sheet because I didn’t adequately tuck the ends.  Also, the bread was too tall and there was an undercooked spot in the middle.  I’m not worried because it has no eggs, but it seemed unprofessional.

Verdict: B thought it was great.  I am slightly less pleased than I was last week…but I have to admit it is tasty bread, with a nice crumb and enough cinnamon to be noticeable.  I will have to come up with a better technique for rolling it.

Well, back to the drawing board.

Cabbage, Potato, and Carrot Soup

I have a lot of holiday recipes to add, but I’m going to start with this soup.  It is not a visually attractive soup, lacking the striking green of a blended broccoli soup or the popping colors of a black bean and squash chili.  Instead it’s somewhat brown and orange, since it consists of cabbage, potatoes, and carrots.  But it is tasty, easy, and relatively simple, which is nice this time of year when people feel overwhelmed by highly caloric, highly complex holiday food.

I made this a year ago and lost the recipe, so this time I used this one.

Ingredients

  • 1-2 T. olive oil
  • 1/2 onion (sweet white), minced
  • 1 clove garlic, peeled and smashed
  • 1 large potato, washed and chopped (don’t bother to peel it)
  • about 1/2 bag matchstick carrots
  • slightly less than 1/2 of a small green cabbage, chopped into small pieces
  • 3 c. water + 3 cubes veggie bouillon
  • seasoning: oregano, basil, rosemary, dill, red pepper flakes, coriander, salt, pepper

Methodology

  1. Put a large pot on the stove to heat.  Add olive oil, then veggies as you are done cutting them up.  Mix.
  2. Add water, bouillon, and seasoning (not salt and pepper yet but everything else).
  3. Cover and simmer until potatoes and carrots are tender, about 20 minutes.
  4. Turn off the stove.  Ladle the veg (as best you can – don’t have to get it all) into the Cuisinart and puree it.  Add the puree back into the broth and let it heat on low for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.  Add salt and pepper to taste.
  5. Serve with parmesan, bread, etc.

Notes

  • I didn’t make this very spicy.  It also could have used more salt.  Still, it was very tasty, and not as heavy as almost everything else I’ve eaten recently.  That’s a plus.

Tofu Satay

From here.

Ingredients

Marinade

  • 1 T. soy sauce
  • 1 T. sesame oil
  • 1 T. orange juice (frozen)
  • 1 T. Marsala (was out of sherry)
  • 2 tsp brown sugar
  • A few T. water (2-3)

Peanut Sauce

  • 1/2 c. coconut milk (I  used “lite”)
  • 1/4 c. chunky peanut butter (natural)
  • 1 heaping tsp red curry paste
  • 2 tsp brown sugar
  • zest of a lime
  • juice of 1/2 lime
  • 1 tsp soy sauce
  • 1 large clove garlic, minced
  • dash of cayenne pepper

Also

  • 1 16-oz brick extra firm tofu
  • 1 small bell pepper, cut into strips

Methodology

  1. Make marinade.  Cut tofu and pepper into bite-sized pieces and marinate for at least 30 minutes.  Tofu will absorb the liquid better if it has been frozen and thawed.
  2. Preheat oven to 450.
  3. Mix peanut sauce ingredients together.  Pour about 1/4 c. over the tofu and pepper and mix.  Spread on a pan large enough to create a single layer.  Bake 20-25 minutes, until tofu is dark golden brown.
  4. Serving suggestions: with rice, over spinach or lettuce if you want something green.  Spoon some of the remaining sauce over them.

This was good.  Easy too, since I didn’t have to stand over a pot and stir stuff.  I could get into this roasting thing.

Oatmeal Cranberry Chocolate Chip Cookies

From here.  I made a modified half recipe and it made plenty, probably about 24.

Ingredients

  • 1/2 cup margarine
  • 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
  • 1/4 cup white sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1/2 cup and 2 tablespoons flour (I used whole wheat)
  • 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1-1/2 cups oats (I used regular, not quick oats, and I think this is crucial to the texture)
  • 1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips
  • 1/4 cup craisins or other dried cranberries.

Methodology

  1. Preheat oven to 325.
  2. Mix sugars and margarine together “until light and fluffy,” whatever that means.  Add in vanilla, egg, flour, baking soda, and salt.  Oats go in last, then the chips and cranberries.
  3. Drop by the teaspoonful on a greased cookie sheet.  Bake about 10-12 minutes.  Let cool before you remove from cookie sheet.

Notes

  • I think I baked these about 13 minutes, mostly because I put them in for 8, then opened the oven and stared at them for a minute.  Don’t do that – start with 10.
  • These were incredible.  The oats really give them a great texture, and they’re sweet without being too sweet.
  • Good for breakfast, according to Bryan.

Buttermilk Pancakes

Blogging is so depressing.  My top post is the one that got ONE view over the past week.  ONE.  So I guess I’ll stick to what I’m good at and post some recipes.

This is pretty much the pancake recipe my mother made when my brothers and I were growing up.  Dan and Claire have a copy up over at their blog, and I modified that slightly.  I guess this is my take on their take on the original.

Ingredients

  • 1.5 c. flour (consisting of 1 c. white and 1/2 c. whole wheat)
  • 1.5 tsp baking soda
  • 3/4 tsp salt
  • 2 tsp brown sugar (packed)
  • 1/2 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 banana, mushed up
  • 2 eggs
  • buttermilk as needed

Method

  1. Mix the dry ingredients (including sugar) in a bowl.  If the bananas are frozen (see note below), thaw in the microwave.
  2. Add the eggs and the bananas.  Mix.
  3. Add buttermilk until you get a batter of pancake-like consistency.
  4. Make pancakes in a frying pan, keeping temperature to medium-low.  OR on a griddle, keeping temperature between 300-350.

Notes

  • If your household eats a lot of bananas, I recommend putting the overripe ones in the freezer at the end of the week.  Then when you have a couple accumulated, you can make banana bread or pancakes.
  • You can sprinkle chocolate chips on the pancakes if you want to be fancy.

Apple Muffins

This worked surprisingly well…there were a few glitches, all my fault.

Recipe from here with some alterations (most notably the egg was omitted, other changes are bolded, compare to original recipe).

Makes 18.

Ingredients

  • 2 cups whole wheat flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 T cinnamon
  • a pinch of ginger and pumpkin pie spice
  • 1/2 cup margarine (I use yoghurt-based margarine so I won’t die of trans-fats)
  • 1/2 cup (3 1/2 ounces) granulated sugar omitted
  • 3/4 cup brown sugar
  • 1 large egg, lightly beaten omitted
  • 1 cup buttermilk
  • 4 large apples, peeled, cored, and chopped

Methodology

  1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees.  Grease muffin tin.
  2. Mix dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, spices).
  3. Cream together the margarine and 1/2 cup brown sugar (setting the other 1/4 c. aside).  Add buttermilk and mix, not too hard.
  4. Add dry into wet, adding more buttermilk to thin batter as needed.  Mix in apple pieces.
  5. Spoon about 1/3 c. of batter into each muffin compartment on the muffin sheet*.  Sprinkle a little of the remaining brown sugar on top of each one.  These don’t rise much, so don’t be afraid to fill the muffins pretty full.
  6. Bake 10 minutes at 450 F, then reduce temperature to 400 F and bake another 5 minutes or so.  Let the muffins cool for a while (10-15 min?) before removing them, since they will be fragile until cooled.

Notes

  • I wanted to use up some apples, so I doubled the apples in the recipe without doubling the rest of the recipe.  That was a mistake…there was so much apple that the muffin part didn’t hold together well, especially when I first took them out of the oven.  So I would say if you want to use more apples, make a 1 1/2 batch, not a single.  That would probably handle the additional 2 apples well.
  • Leaving out the egg was not a problem.  Usually in quick breads and stuff that uses buttermilk, eggs aren’t really necessary.
    And I don’t really cook with them much, so I didn’t feel like buying any, since if I bought half a dozen eggs, five of them would wind up sitting around.  This did fine with just buttermilk.
  • Also, the reduced sugar was good.  They were more breakfast-y muffins, not really the tiny apple cakes I’d been hoping for.  Next time if I’m making these for dessert, I might add a little more sugar.  But the apples are so sweet it hardly needs it.  I guess it’s dumb for me to complain that something is too healthy.

*Is there a better name for this?

Apple Pie

After reading close to 600 pages of stuff about libraries in the past three weeks, I’ve gotten a little tired of spending my every waking moment thinking about literacy, archives, and the information society.  Fortunately, my future in laws brought us approximately 10 lbs of apples the other day (my fiance B. has given away at least 30 apples and not made a dent in them), so to help clear us of this mess I made a pie.

This recipe was made partially out of this one from my brother and his fiancee’s blog, and partly out of this one from All Recipes.com.  Because there is a limit to how much time I have to spend on this, I used a pre-made pie crust.  It came in a box at the grocery store and made this basically the easiest thing ever.

Ingredients

  • 5 apples (peeled and sliced)
  • 1 nectarine (peeled and sliced)
  • the juice of 1/2 orange
  • cinnamon, nutmeg, black pepper, and salt
  • 1/2 c. butter
  • 1/4 c. water
  • 1/2 c. brown sugar
  • 3 T. flour

Methodology

  1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees.
  2. Futz with the pie crust.  Don’t pre-bake – you’ll want a bottom crust with enough dough left over to do a lattice on top.
  3. Peel, core, and slice the apples and nectarine.  Mix in a bowl and squeeze orange juice over them.  Heap in the bottom of the pie crust and put the lattice over it.
  4. Melt the butter in the pan.  Add the brown sugar, water, and flour.  Add the spices (in an amount which might be described as “some”, probably about 1 tsp of each, but I wasn’t really measuring.
  5. Pour the sugar mixture over the pie.
  6. Bake for 15 minutes.  Turn oven down to 350 and bake for another 30 minutes.

Q: How was it?

A: Delicious.  It looked a little soupy, and I think I would cut the amount of liquid (butter+water) and maybe even add some corn starch, but it tasted phenominal.  B agreed.

Edited to add: it wasn’t soupy at all the next day.

Pretty cool, huh?