Posts filed under 'Recipes'
One of Ben’s favorite books lately is Eric Carle’s Pancakes, Pancakes. I like it, too, and I love the busy mother’s response to her son’s demand for pancakes: go harvest some wheat, take it to the miller to grind it into flour, milk the cow for some milk, etc, etc. Eventually he’s assembled most of the ingredients they need for pancakes, but the final recipe is a bit plain: 1 cup flour, 1 egg, 1 cup milk. Hmm. That’d be one leaden pancake, I think.
The other day, Ben wanted to cook breakfast and I wanted to use up some apples, so we made these very tasty pancakes, from Moosewood Cooks at Home:
1 large apple (about 3/4 c grated)
1/2 c small curd cottage cheese
2 eggs
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1 tbsp maple syrup
dash of salt
1/4 c flour
1 tsp baking powder
Peel, core, and grate the apple in to a mixing bowl. Add the cottage cheese, eggs, cinnamon, syrup and salt and mix thoroughly. Sift in the flour and baking powder and stir well.
That’s your batter; I trust you can take it from there.
This morning, another pancake project. I had offered a “breakfast feast”– homemade granola, homemade pancake mix, and homemade maple syrup (thanks, Dad!)–for auction at Ben’s preschool last weekend, and it was time to deliver. I’d found a recipe for pancake mix on the web somewhere and mixed it up, then realized maybe I shouldn’t deliver it until I knew it worked. Someone had paid for this, after all. So we scooped out some mix and made a small test batch, and it’s great! The best plain pancakes I’ve ever made! So now I’ll make a batch of mix for ourselves because honestly, despite how lame it may seem to use pancake mix, havingonly one dry ingredient to measure out is going to make pancakes happen more often. And a day that starts with pancakes is a good day.
Pancake Mix
4 c flour
1 c buttermilk powder
1/4 c sugar
4 tsp baking powder
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
Mix well and store in the fridge until pancake time.
To make pancakes, combine:
1 1/2 c pancake mix
1 c water
1 egg
2 tbsp oil
Let the batter sit for 5 minutes or so before cooking.
March 25th, 2006
I know, I know, we all need another muffin recipe as much as we need another chocolate chip cookie recipe. Which is to say, a lot!
Saturday morning when Ben crawled into bed with me, he actually cuddled up very quietly for a while and I thought maybe we’d get to go back to sleep. But then he sat up and said “Let’s make muffins, Mama! No, let’s make cookies! No, let’s make muffins and cookies!” He was so delighted with his idea, he barely waited to see if I was following him out of bed. But even though it was 6:30 a.m., I was climbing out of bed and pulling on my robe. Because that voice clamoring for muffins and cookies? It’s in my head, too.
I knew we had some bananas going brown, so I headed into the kitchen thinking banana muffins, and went straight to the cookbook produced by Berkeley’s amazing Cheese Board bakery. We are lucky to live just blocks away from The Cheese Board’s little sister bakery, Arizmendi, so I don’t actually use the cookbook much; besides, I was initially so appalled by the quarts of buttermilk, the pounds of butter and gallons of sour cream in each recipe for scones or muffins, it almost spoiled the bakery for me. But I got over that. This recipe is particularly tasty — tangy and not too sweet–and you can make it with nonfat yogurt and lowfat buttermilk and pretend it’s good for you.
1 egg
1 egg yolk
2 ripe bananas, mashed
1 c yogurt or sour cream
1 c buttermilk (or 1 c regular milk + 1 tbsp lemon juice or vinegar)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 1/2 c flour
1/4 tsp baking soda
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 c white sugar
1/4 c packed brown sugar
1/2 c (1 stick) cold unsalted butter, cut into small cubes
1 c coarsely chopped walnuts
sprinkles (optional, unless you are in preschool)
Preheat oven to 375. Generously butter or spray the top and cups of a 12-cup muffin pan (if you have another muffin pan or small loaf pan handy, get it out; I wound up with 12 big muffins and 8 mini-muffins)
If you are making your own buttermilk, combine the milk and lemon juice or vinegar and let sit for 10 minutes while you assemble the other ingrediants. You could also toast the walnuts in the oven while it preheats; not necessary, but a nice touch.
In a medium bowl, combine the egg, egg yolk, bananas, yogurt, buttermilk and vanilla. Whisk until blended.
Stir the flour, baking soda and baking powder together in the bowl of a stand mixer. Add the salt and sugars and mix with the paddle attachment until combined. Add the butter and cut in on low speed until it is the size of small peas, about 4 minutes (you can do this all by hand, of course, using a whisk and then a pastry cutter or a couple of knives). Mix in the walnuts. Make a well in the center and pour in the wet ingrediants. Gently combine with just a couple rotations of the paddle, taking care not to overmix the batter.
Fill the prepared muffin tins and, if you are 4, sprinkle generously with multi-colored sprinkles. Bake 25-30 minutes, until the muffins are deep golden brown. Let cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then unmold the muffins onto a wire rack to cool.
March 2nd, 2006
After my recent roasted broccoli triumph, I thought I’d try roasting cauliflower, a vegetable none of us much likes. Delicious! Ben acted like his cousin with tuna casserole; he ate three big helpings before we cut him off. We’ll be making this again.
1 head of cauliflower
1/3 c pitted olives, very coarsely chopped
2-3 tbsp capers
olive oil
freshly ground black pepper, grated parmesan cheese, and chopped parsley to taste
1 pound of pasta (I actually made ours with half a pound of pasta — there are only three of us eating — but if you like a higher pasta-to-vegetable ratio, or are feeding more people, then of course you’ll want to cook a full pound)
Preheat the oven to 400 and put up a big pot of water to boil.
Break the cauliflower up into bite-sized florets (this is the most time-consuming part of the recipe). Toss the cauliflower in a large bowl with the olives and capers, and drizzle a couple tablespoons of olive oil over the lot. Spread out in a large baking pan and roast, stirring once or twice, for about 20 minutes, until the cauliflower is tender and starting to brown a bit around the edges.
Toward the end of the cauliflower-cooking time, boil the pasta. When it’s done, drain, reserving a half cup or so of the pasta water. Toss the pasta back into the cooking pot with the roasted cauliflower, olives and capers. Add some of the pasta water if it seems too dry. Serve with lots of freshly ground black pepper, grated cheese, and a sprinkling of parsley.
February 27th, 2006
Nigella Lawson’s Feast is my current favorite cookbook, although I’ve only made recipes from two sections: Chocolate Cake Hall of Fame and Breakfast Feast. Because really, despite the broccoli and tofu recipes I’ve been posting, every day I just want to eat breakfast and chocolate cake. Is that so wrong?
I’m going to quote here from Nigella on granola, because she captures my feelings exactly:
You may think making your own breakfast cereal is a strange way to go about life, and certainly I’d never have thought I’d be the kind of person who does this, but the only big deal here is the shopping–the actual making is incredibly easy–and even there, don’t be daunted by the length of the ingrediants list. It means one big sortie to a health food shop [or Trader Joe's!] and then you’ve got the goods to make this again and again. I love having a big jar of it in the kitchen, to eat with milk for breakfast, over yogurt and drizzled with honey late at night, [with peanut butter and ice cream while watching hard-working Olympic atheletes...], or as it is, by the grasped handful, any time I pass by the jar.
I am eating this granola all the time these days. Today I made Nigella’s granola muffins, which are fine; last week I made these chocolate chip granola cookies, which are also very nice. But I like the granola on its own, whether as breakfast cereal or dessert topping, best, rather than as an ingrediant in something else.
Here is her recipe, which is Andy Rolleri’s recipe, to which I’ve added a few ingrediants myself.
4 1/2 c rolled oats (I use oats half-and-half with TJ’s multigrain hot cereal)
1 c sunflower seeds
3/4 c sesame seeds
1 c raw pumpkin seeds
2 c raw almonds
1/2 c flax seeds
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp salt
3/4 c applesauce
1/3 c brown rice syrup (I’ve used maple syrup instead, but brown rice syrup gets the granola to clump up better)
1/4 c honey
3/4 brown sugar
2 tbsp vegetable oil
2 c raisins (or half raisins, half dried cranberries)
Preheat oven to 300.
Mix together the nuts, seeds, spices and salt. Add the applesauce and mix well, then add the syrups, sugar and vegetable oil and mix again. Spread the mixture out in two large baking pans (I use two pyrex lasagne pans) and bake 45 minutes to an hour, stirring midway through, until it’s all golden and toasty. Remove from the oven, stir in the dried fruit, and let cool.
February 20th, 2006
A totally soy supper! Well, not quite. This is essentially Libby’s chicken edamame stir- fry adapted, as she suggested, for vegetarians. And because I can rarely cook a recipe as written, I made a couple of other changes, too. Still, the whole dish comes together in less than the time it takes to cook a pot of rice.
4 tbsp soy sauce (divided)
1 tsp honey
1/2 cup walnuts, chopped coarsely
1 8 oz. package tempeh, cut into strips
1-2 cups frozen, shelled edamame
1/2 pound frozen broccoli florets (yes, of course, you could use a head of fresh broccoli, but the point here is easy and quick)
4 tsp dark sesame oil
3-4 tsp minced fresh ginger
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 c veggie stock
2 tbsp rice wine
Rice for 4 people
Get the rice started.
Stir the honey and 2 tbsp soy sauce together and pour over the cut-up tempeh. Let it sit while you toast the walnuts.
Toast the walnuts in a large frying pan or wok over medium heat for about three minutes, shaking the pan or stirring frequently. Drizzle the rest of the soy sauce (2 tbsp) over them, stir until the walnuts are coated, and dump them out into a bowl. No need to clean out the frying pan or wok for the next step.
Now heat the sesame oil in your pan over medium heat. Cook the tempeh for several minutes, stirring constantly. When it is getting brown and crispy around the edges, lower the heat a bit, add the garlic and ginger and stir a minute or two, making sure that they don’t burn. Now add the frozen edamame, broccoli, stock and rice wine, stir to mix well and cover. Let it simmer for about five minutes. When the broccoli is tender, toss the walnuts in, stir, and serve!
February 17th, 2006
It’s not uncommon to find some version of this on brunch menus here in San Francisco. This is my attempt to recreate the effect. I think of this as a sister dish to Huevos Rancheros, but rather than having tortillas on the side, they’re integrated into the dish.
I’ve seen versions of chilaquiles without eggs, but I’ve only ever eaten it myself as an egg dish, so here goes.
One of the main things that my version has going for it is that it scales. That’s a term us software monkeys love to use — it simply means that you can make this for many people, or (as I most often make it) for just one. When making it for many, I do scrambled eggs because it’s just more efficient. When making it just for myself, I almost always have fried eggs — there’s something great about the oozy eggs contributing to the overall gooey, messy effect.
Again, the recipe changes based on how many people I’m cooking for. If it’s just for me, I usually don’t include beans, simply because I would only need about a half can, and a don’t trust myself to remember to use the other half can of beans in the fridge before they get fuzzy.
Eggs (roughly 2 per person)
Tortillas (corn or flour or even tortilla chips)
Salsa (this is a dish where salsa from a jar is better than a really fresh chunky salsa)
Onion
Soyrizo (!) (optional) I’ve seen this on many menus with the more traditional chorizo. I’m a vegetarian, so
Black beans (optional)
Avocado (optional)
Heat the oven on low (250 or so) and put plates in. If you’re just using tortilla chips, put a couple handfuls of chips on each plate.
If you’re using tortillas, cut them into strips — I usually cut the tortillas in half first, and then cut the two halves into strips. Add a little oil to a skillet and fry the tortilla strips until crispy. Transfer them to the plate/s in the oven.
Chop the onion into thin wedges. If you’re cartographically inclined, that would be slicing them longitudinally. Add a little more oil to the pan and saute the onions over pretty high heat. If you’re using Soyrizo (or chorizo for that matter), add it to the pan after a couple minutes. Cook until everything is nicely browned.
Things move pretty fast at this point, so be on your toes.
Add the salsa to the onions, thinning with a little water or some tomato sauce if you’ve got some handy. Since the pan is hot, it will bubble up pretty fast and you don’t want to cook away all the liquid. If you’re using black beans, add them now. Simmer until everything is nice and hot.
Pour the sauce over your tortillas or chips. Now it’s time to cook the eggs.
Fry or scramble your eggs in the same pan… they’ll pick up the flavor from the salsa and onions. Put the finished eggs on top of everything else. If you’ve got an avocado, you’re in heaven.
February 13th, 2006
Roast it! Who knew? This recipe came with my weekly produce box (in which, inexplicably, there was another leek). I just assumed it was a pasta dish; it was only when I started to type up the recipe (after I made it for dinner last night) that I discovered there is, in fact, no pasta in the recipe. There is now! Because why stop at a side dish when it could be an entire simple and delicious supper?
Here’s the game plan: preheat the oven and bring the pasta water to a boil while you chop the broccoli, then cook the pasta and make the lemon-garlic butter while the broccoli roasts. Dinner in less than thirty minutes!
Pasta with Roasted Broccoli, Lemon-Garlic Butter and Toasted Pine Nuts
1 pound broccoli florets
2 tbsp olive oil
salt & pepper
2 tbsp unsalted butter
1 tsp minced garlic
1 lemon, zested and juiced
1 pound of pasta (penne or some other chunky shape is preferable, I think, to spaghetti for this)
toasted pine nuts
grated parmesan cheese
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Put up a big pot of water to boil.
In a large bowl, toss the broccoli with the oil, salt and pepper. Spread out on a baking sheet and roast, stirring once or twice, for 10-12 minutes, until just tender.
When the water is boiling, start cooking your pasta.
Meanwhile, melt the butter in a small saucepan over medium heat. Add the garlic and lemon zest and heat, stirring, for about a minute. Add the lemon juice. Remove from the heat.
Drain the cooked pasta, then toss it back into its cooking pot with the lemon-garlic butter and broccoli. Mix well.
Serve topped with toasted pine nuts and grated parmesan cheese.
February 10th, 2006
I order our produce box on Sunday evening when I’m relaxed and sort of rested and have ambitious plans for a week of home cooking. By the time the box arrives on Wednesday afternoon, I am usually wishing there was a lasagna inside.
So imagine my disappointment when I opened this week’s box and discovered that I thought leeks would be a good idea. Leeks are nice, but they have to be cleaned and chopped and cooked, and to me (and at the risk of bringing the wrath of leek-lovers down on me) they are not much more than onions that go bad faster. Really, carrots are so much simpler. I know of really only two good things to do with leeks (leek & potato soup and sweet potatoes Anna) and I pretty much ate my fill of leek and potato soup in college.
So imagine my delight when Wednesday night I opened the latest Real Simple, the magazine I love to hate (more on this another time; suffice to say right now, I just don’t recognize myself in its pages. And yet, I subscribe.) to find a recipe for butternut squash soup. With leeks! And it tastes really pretty good.
Here it is, with my emendations:
4 leeks
1 3-pound butternut squash
1 bay leaf
3/4 tsp kosher salt
5 c stock
1/4 c shelled raw pumpkin seeds
1 tbsp fresh rosemary
olive oil
By the way, these are the quantities listed in RS’s recipe, but use your best judgment, or what you have on hand. I made the soup with 2 leeks, two squash, and without measuring the stock – I just poured it in until it looked like soup — and it tasted great.
Real Simple suggests peeling the squash (you can do it with a regular vegetable peeler), seeding it, and chopping it into 1-inch chunks. I’m going to recommend another way to deal with the squash, even though I know some people will balk at turning on the oven to make a soup. But this is really easy, and makes a more flavorful soup:
Preheat the oven to 375. Line a jelly roll pan or cookie sheet with a piece of parchment paper, silpat, or simply spray with a little oil.
Halve the squash lengthwise and scoop out the seeds. Fill the squash’s cavities with unpeeled cloves of garlic. Depending on the size of your squash, you could probably get a full head of garlic in there. This is a particularly good use for those “fiddly cloves of garlic” as Deborah Madison calls them, that are as much peel as useable garlic. Now drizzle the cut sides and the cavities of the squash with a bit of olive oil, flip the squash onto the pan (cut side down) and roast about 45 minutes or so, until it’s nice and soft. Once it’s out of the oven and cool enough to handle, scoop the squash into your soup pot. You can squeeze the roasted garlic out of its skins into your soup pot too, or squeeze it onto pieces of toast to eat as your reward for cooking your family soup. Your call.
Another digression, regarding stock. Before I had kids, I would have made my own stock for this soup, using the squash seeds and their accompanying scraped-out strings of flesh. You can put them into the soup pot with a slosh of olive oil and a chopped-up celery stalk, a chopped carrot, the leek tops, a bay leaf. Sauté it all for a few minutes, then deglaze the pan with some white wine and then several cups of water. Let it simmer for half an hour or 45 minutes (unlike meat stock, veggie stock doesn’t get better the longer it simmers) then strain and use. But now I have kids and we’re doing well to have homemade soup. I use store-bought stock these days.
Back to the soup.
Slice the leeks (all the whites and the tender greens) into half lengthwise and then into half-circles. Put them into a big pan of water (the bowl of a salad spinner works nicely for this) and let them sit a minute to get all the sand out. Then scoop the leeks into your soup pot.
Add your roasted or raw cubes of squash, the bay leaf, salt and stock. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer 15 minutes or so, until the squash (if you started with raw cubes) and leeks are tender. Remove from the heat, then pick out the bay leaf and puree. Pour the soup back into the soup pot and keep warm till serving.
Meanwhile roughly chop the pumpkin seeds and rosemary. Heat a bit of olive oil in a small skillet and add the seeds and herbs, stirring occasionally, until fragrant (2-3 minutes). Obviously you can skip this garnish, but it’s tasty, and I’ve learned recently that pumpkin seeds are particularly good for you.
Ladle the soup into bowls and sprinkle with the pumpkin seeds and herbs.
February 5th, 2006
At the risk of needing to change this blog’s name to tofuandcaroline.com (the eponymous tony might have something to say about that), I should offer up the best simple tofu recipe I’ve made, from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. This is the standard tofu we make for stir fry, one of Ben’s favorite meals (and one he is learning how to cook! More on that another day).
Carmelized Golden Tofu
1 pound of firm tofu, cut into 1-inch cubes
2 tbsp peanut oil
2 tbsp soy sauce
3 1/2 tbsp brown sugar
Drain the tofu and, if you have the time, blot it a bit with paper towels. Heat the oil in a medium nonstick skillet over fairly high heat. Add the tofu and fry until golden. It takes a few minutes to color, so let it cook undisturbed while you do something else (really! leave it alone!) then come back and turn the pieces over. Don’t let them get dry and hard, but 5-6 minutes a side should give them some nice color. Remove the tofu from the pan, turn the heat down to medium, and put in the soy sauce and brown sugar. Whisk them together a bit and then add the tofu. Toss well, simmer for a couple minutes, then add a few tablespoons of water and cook till the sauce coats the tofu nicely. Turn off the heat; let the tofu cool in the syrup for 10 minutes before serving.
February 1st, 2006
I’ve been a vegetarian a long time now, but I really don’t proselytize about it, and I take true vicarious pleasure in the meat-eating of my friends (recently I was out to dinner with some friends who ordered head cheese. Head cheese! And they loved it and I was so pleased.) Further, tofu and tempeh just can’t replace meat and never will. Bacon is bacon, and bacon is delicious (I continued to eat BLT’s for an entire summer after I started calling myself a vegetarian), and you’ll never get anything so bacon-y good made out of soy. Still, other than bacon I don’t much like meat, and never learned to cook it so well I wasn’t afraid I’d poison myself, so I don’t eat it. But you won’t catch me putting tofu in a burrito or someplace else it doesn’t belong. I try to be pretty upfront about tofu; if it’s in something I’ve made, you’ll know it’s there, and you can probably pick it out if you really want to. But we’ve learned some good things to do with it. Here’s one we tried recently:
Moosewood Sesame Tofu with Spinach
1 pound firm tofu
1/4 c sesame seeds
2 tbsp dark sesame oil
2 tbsp soy sauce
a few drops Tabasco or similar (we have chipotle tabasco, which tasted good)
2 tsp vegetable oil
3 cloves chopped garlic
10 oz baby spinach, rinsed
Slice the tofu lengthwise into 4 rectangular slabs, then halve the slabs to make 8 square pieces. Spread the sesame seeds on a plate and press each tofu square into the seeds to coat evenly.
Heat the sesame oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Place the tofu squares in a single layer in the skillet and cook about 5 minutes. Turn them over carefully and cook another 5 minutes. Now add the soy sauce and tabasco, and turn the tofu squares over again to cook about one more minute, until most of the liquid is absorbed. Transfer the tofu to a plate, leaving the stray sesame seeds in the pan.
Add the oil & garlic to the pan now and sauté about 30 seconds. Add the still-damp rinsed spinach and cook a minute or two, until wilted but still bright green. Season with salt & pepper.
Put the spinach on a platter and top with the tofu. If, like me, your partner went to costco and you have quantities of spinach to use, then serve your tofu and spinach with the following:
Green Rice
1 1/2 c white rice
2 1/4 c water
3 scallions (or a handful of chives)
4 c loosely packed spinach
black pepper
Cook the rice. While the rice is cooking, coarsely chop your scallions or chives and rinse the spinach. Saute the scallions/chives in a bit of oil for a minute or two, then add the spinach and cook till just wilted. Puree in a blender till smooth, adding water or stock if necessary.
When the rice is done, fluff it with a fork and stir in the spinach puree.
February 1st, 2006
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