Category Archives: bread

Dumplings – baked or steamed

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dumplings

I’m not a fan of big movies. I was an independent filmmaker in a pre-child life. That’s part of it. I’m naturally contrary. That’s a contributing factor. I don’t like the big films that I feel like I’m supposed to like. Most of the time those big films also tell you how you’re supposed to feel – now you laugh, now you cry. They don’t bother with subtlety at all. It’s like they think we’re really thick. (They DO think we’re really thick!) I could go on and on, but I won’t (yet).

Sometimes a biggish film breaks through all of that, though, and defies expectations and makes me love it, despite my ornery ideas. I love Kung Fuuuuuuuuuuuuu Panda. I love both films, 1 & 2. Yes, it’s another tale of an unexpected underdog using unexpected physical force to defeat a bully who seems stonger and is really mean! Yes, that story has been told a bazillion times. But there’s something about Kung Fu Panda that rises above all of that. I asked Malcolm why he admired Po (the panda). He said, “because he’s happy all the time.” That’s exactly what I was thinking, although I’d used the word “cheerful” in my head. I love the fact that he doesn’t get discouraged, he doesn’t have a dark and brooding side, he doesn’t have an angry side. When he fights his stronger bullyish foe, he laughs. Even when he’s getting beaten, even when he surprises himself by doing well. He laughs! It’s so unexpected, so anti-drama, and yet it makes you care about him more, which makes it more dramatic. The other quality that I admire in Po, that you don’t see very often in your cooler-stock-hero characters, is that he’s a fan. He admires his cohorts so much that he’s bursting, he’s desperate, he’s glowing with the pleasure of being in the same space as them. Even when he should revel in being the best of the best, instead he’s a warm furry bundle of disbelieving gratitude at being in their presence.

We had a lot of leftovers from our black rice, black lentil, golden beet meal, and Malcolm asked if we could use them to make dumplings like in Kung Fu Panda. Of course we can! It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. So I made the dough while Malcolm was at school, and we put them together when he got home.

The dough is quite simple. Traditionally, they’re steamed. I don’t have a bamboo steamer, so I used my vegetable steamer, which is not huge. I could fit 3 dumplings in there. I decided to bake the rest, because I’ve always wondered if that was an option. It is! They turn out lovely! Crispy, just the right amount bread-y. The steamed ones were nice, too. David said the steamed ones felt inexplicably lighter. You could put anything in these! Leftover beans or vegetables. Cheese. Just beans, just veg. Anything! Pretty much any filling for any savory pastry I’ve ever posted on this blog would work in here. I’ll give you a few suggested fillings, but…go crazy!!

Here’s Cee Lo Green with Living Again. Another unexpected hero!
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Artichoke, walnut and feta croquettes

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Artichoke croquettes

We don’t have cable in our house (conscious choice, cable companies! Don’t come calling.) But sometimes at work I can persuade my fellow restaurant patrons to watch the cooking channel. My favorite is Chopped. I can imagine a version at my house. Instead of gleaming counters and well-coiffed judges, you’d have tables full of school work and drawings and old bills, walls coated with little hand prints and globs of paint, and an elderly dog clattering through, bumping into everyone. And the challenge would be to look in my fridge, pick 2 leftovers packed away in plastic boxes, and make something special out of it. I’d win this round!! I had some leftover mashed potatoes, a half-used can of artichoke hearts, and a bit of extra sandwich bread on hand. What did I make? Lovely croquettes – crispy, flavorful and delicious. Croquettes can be a little stodgy, what with the bread and potatoes, so I wanted them to have bright flavor – something that would go well with feta and artichoke hearts. Hence the fennel and lemon. They turned out really nice! We ate them with a smooth roasted red pepper sauce (open jar of roasted peppers!), which the kids later happily ate on pasta for lunch.

Here’s Vaios Malliaras with Aginara (artichoke) Greek folk clarinet music from 1933. Odd and really lovely!
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Ratatouille sofrito w/ crispy eggplant

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Ratatouille sofrito

I love the movie Ratatouille. I think it’s well-made, of course, but beyond that, it makes me happy to watch it. I’ve talked before about my fascination with the connection between food and memory, so the scene in which Anton Ego takes a bite of ratatouille and rockets back to his childhood appeals to me in every way! And there is something about ratatouille – its simplicity, its distinctive flavors. Ratatouille seems like the embodiment of summer at its height, when everything is plump and ripe at the same time, and glowing with possibilities. The fact that everything that grows together and ripens together and tastes so wonderful proves that there is a pattern, there is meaning and sense!

I decided to make a sort of distillation of ratatouille. An intense concentration of the flavors and textures, which uses wintery ingredients to produce a memory of summer. Obviously, I don’t have fresh tomatoes and peppers from the garden. I have a can of tomatoes and a jar of roasted reds- So I sofritoed it. In this way, you can still get a fix of warmth and sunshine to get you through the chilly months. I combined all the signature ratatouille ingredients – zucchini, tomato, red pepper and herbs – and I cooked them and cooked them until they were meltingly delicious and very very flavorful – almost like a chutney. I have to admit that I don’t really like mushy eggplant. I only like eggplant if it’s sliced thin and crisped up. Even in the summertime, when I make ratatouille – even if I get the eggplant right out of my garden – I don’t cook it with everything else. I slice it thin, bread it, and bake it in olive oil till it’s nice and crispy. And then it goes perfectly with the ratatouille!

So that’s the story about that. We ate it with slices of bread I’d baked with my OOTO spice mix (more about that later!) and some grated mozzarella. Malcolm made little sandwiches with eggplant on the outside and ratatouille and cheese on the inside. And we had a salad, of course! Baby spinach, baby arugula and some grape tomatoes.

Here’s a song from the ratatouille soundtrack. It’s a good soundtrack. No cheesy teen idols singing inane songs. Like on some other animated hits.
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Red bean hominy stew & little cornmeal “quiches”

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red bean posole stew

I’ve been feeling super blechy the last few days. Headache, stomachache, sore throat, the ague. I’ve got the ague, I tell you!! So I wanted to make something spicy and flavorful to clear the sinuses and get past my dulled palate. So I made this stew…red beans, zucchini, hominy and some spices – lots of spices. Hominy is, as I understand it, corn kernels, skins removed, treated with lime. Round here, you can buy it in cans (Goya! Oh boya!). It has a mysterious taste and a lovely texture. Soft but firm. It makes a very very nice addition to a saucy spicy stew. This stew was so pretty when it first started cooking – red, green and white. Lovely.

cornmeal quiches


To go with it, I made these tasty little…good golly, I’m not sure how to describe them! They’re not popovers, not muffins. For all the world, they’re like tiny little quiches. They make their own crust…of cornmeal toasted in brown butter. And the inside stays very dense and eggy and ridiculously comforting and tasty. They’re quite magical! They’re not hard to make, and I think they’re gluten free. I might try them next time with some grated cheese stirred into the mix, to make them more quiche-y than ever.

Here’s Old Corn Liquor, by Joe Thompson. He’s remarkable! And this meal really did include corn in just about every form but liquor.
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Toasted barley flatbread with sesame seeds

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barley flatbread

You know who likes these? My son Isaac. He doesn’t like a lot of different flavors, but he gobbled these up and asked for more. As you might recall, I bought some Machica a few weeks ago, in my super bodega travels. Machica is a toasted barley flour, and mine is from Ecuador. I did a bit of research into recipes that call for toasted barley flour. I read about some rolls served in an ecuadorian restaurant, which sounded intriguing. But most of the recipes I came across were actually Tibetan, for a sesame-crusted flatbread that sounded delicious! This is my vague interpretation of that idea. Baked toasted barley has a lovely flavor – slightly sweet, distinctive but subtle. I have to be honest, and tell you that my flatbread became crisp bread, because I left it in the oven to keep warm after it was fully cooked, and it cooked further till it was more cracker-y than bread-y. Tasty, though! I could almost pretend that I’d done it on purpose. The other thing I might say, is that my sesame seeds (I used black, because I had them and they looked nice, but you could use white as well) fell off and, somehow, I got them all over my kitchen. If I were to make this again (which I will!) I’d knead them right into the dough. Yes I would.

Here’s Freddie Hubbard with Open Sesame.
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Butternut squash flatbread stuffed with greens & walnuts

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butternut squash flatbread

I seem to cook a lot with butternut squash in the winter time. I’ve made empanadas, enchiladas, big pies, little pies, soups, stews, dumplings, soufflés… on and on it goes. So when presented with half a roasted butternut squash (I’d used the other half in soup), I decided I wanted to do something different with it. I decided to bake with it. I’ve never done it before, but it makes perfect sense! I’ve baked with sweet potato puree, and pumpkin puree – people do that all the time. So why not butternut squash puree? Why not, indeed. I decided to make a yeasted dough, and to make it into a flat bread, because I feared it might be a bit dense, and in these situations it’s a good idea to keep it thin. I thought a lot about how to flavor it. Butternut squash goes well with so many herbs and spices. I decided on a mix of sage, nutmeg and allspice. A little bit savory, a little bit sweet, very nice together when all baked in a bread!

And then I decided to stuff it, because I love how butternut squash tastes with greens and nuts and cheese. I think arugula, goat cheese, and hazelnuts is my favorite combination with it, but this time I decided to go with chard, walnuts and mozzarella, because it’s February, I guess! I made two fat rolls out of extra dough, because I was curious about how they would come out. They were nice! The flavor really shines through, and the texture was dense, but not unpleasantly so. Extra good toasted the next day. And my Isaac gobbled one down, which means he’s getting some vitamins, right?

Here’s a nice little ditty from the Arctic Monkeys called The Bakery Song. Do you think they sell roasted squash bread in this bakery?
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Pizza with faina

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Pizza with faina

One of my favorite food-related scenes in movie history, is the moment when father and son go into a restaurant and share a bottle of wine and a mozzarella, in The Bicycle Thief. We recently watched Gigante, an Uruguayan/Argentinian film, that I promise to stop talking about soon. In one scene, our hero goes into a restaurant and orders pizza with mozzarella, a beer, and faina. First of all – it reminded me of that scene in Bicycle Thief to such an extent that I was sure it was a tribute to it. Second of all – what is a faina?!? I was so intrigued that I researched it the second the movie was over. Faina turns out to be a Uruguayan version of socca…a chickpea flour-based bread. It’s mixed with olive oil, herbs, sometimes parmesan, and tons and tons of pepper. And then it’s baked in a hot oven, till it’s crispy outside, though still dense and soft on the inside. And then it’s sliced and each slice is eaten on top of a slice of pizza. How strange but tasty does that sound!

I had to try it. I like making pizza anyway. It’s fun and easy and everybody in my family happily eats it, which is always a pleasure. I’ve been trying for some time to make pizza with a thinner, crispier crust – it had always eluded me. It worked this time, though…I used less yeast, more water and olive oil. The dough was quite sticky, but not hard to work with. I put lots of herbs in the dough, and I topped it with a roasted red pepper tomato sauce, dollops of goat cheese, and lots of fresh rosemary.

And the faina. It seemed such a strange idea to me at first, but when I took one bite, it all made sense! The texture was nice with the pizza, but more importantly, it seemed like a vehicle for the pepper and rosemary…flavors that are nice with the pizza, but tend to get distracted in the sauce were distilled into a perfect form.

Here’s The Bouncing Souls with The Pizza Song. When I was in my early twenties I lived across the street from these fellows, and they lived a few doors down from the legendary Tata’s Pizza. Is that what they’re singing about here? We’ll never know.
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Spinach raisin spiral bread

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Spinach spiral bread

Wouldn’t it be nice to stuff everything you love in a spiral of rich pastry, so you can peel apart the layers and discover it as you go along?

Let’s see…there are several advantages to baking things in spiral rolls/bread/cookies. 1) they’re superlatively fun to eat. 2) the flavors are nicely distributed in lovely layers 3) You generally have a nice contrast of mild taste and texture with more intense fillings, which is really what it’s all about!

This bread pits a rich sort of herbed dough against a tasty filling of spinach, garlic, mozzarella and goat cheese with just a touch of sweetness from the raisins. And everybody’s a winner!

I dreamed this up whilst standing on a slope of snow. My little ones were red-cheeked, hot, and happy, flying down, climbing back up, flying down again. My toes were so cold I thought they’d never move again. Baking this warmed me right up!

Here’s Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s Two Little Fishes and Five Loaves of Bread. I didn’t actually make 5 loaves, of course, and I’ll certainly never eat 2 little fishes, being a vegetarian, but it’s a killer song!
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Pumpkin popovers

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pumpkin popovers

These little popovers are very subtly spiced with cinnamon and cayenne. I wanted them to go well with our kale and chickpea stew (which they did!) but also to be good warmed up in the morning with butter and jam. It’s really sinking in that it’s winter, here, with icy drizzle and everlastingly grey days, and these are a good antidote. They have a nice warm color, a mild sweet flavor, and a lovely light soft texture. They’re also incredibly easy to make! I was reading Mrs Beaton’s cook book, the other day (as one does) and I think these are related to her chapter on “batters.” Which makes them also related to yorkshire pudding, perhaps the most famous of batters! Yorkshire pudding is cooked with a bit of dripping in the bottom of the pan, and these are cooked with butter. I let the butter get burnt, because I like the flavor, but if you don’t, just put the pan in the oven for a minute before you’re ready to cook.

Here’s Tricky’s Pumpkin
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Basil & black pepper naan

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Basil and black pepper naan

This recipe isn’t completely authentic – it involves more butter than any I’ve seen in a cookbook – but it is fun to make and good to eat! The basic recipe, as I make it, is similar to a simple pastry dough, with yogurt added at the end instead of ice water. And the whole process is not as icy and distant. You knead the dough for a few minutes, but it’s a very enjoyable dough to knead – soft but not too sticky. I added basil and black pepper, because I like basil with curry spices (we ate it with a cashew butternut squash curry and leftover kofta). The basil smells wonderful while these are cooking! I cooked them on a hot griddle, and then put them under the broiler to puff a bit, and then kept them in a warm oven till I was ready for them. They’re nice toasted the next day, too – they get crispy.

Here’s K’naan’s ABCs. Because it’s a brilliant song, and because my son just got his first headphones, and it’s the sweetest thing in the world to hear him sing along to this song.
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