Category Archives: recipe

Cinnamon buns with chocolate covered ginger

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Cinnamon buns with chocolate covered ginger

For valentine’s day dinner, we had cauliflower steaks roasted with thyme, layered with portobello steaks roasted with rosemary and balsamic, layered, as well, with chard, smoked gouda and mozzarella, and topped with porcini-sage gravy. It was a delicious and special meal, and there was none left to take a picture of. We ate it all! One of the things that made it so special, besides its ridiculous tastiness, was that it was my husband’s innovation. He thought of it!! I feel a little crazy, because I spend a lot of time thinking about new ways to cook food, and it just kills me that he sometimes does, too! We’re in it together!

Back in the days of my chocolate covered ginger craze, he suggested this combination – cinnamon buns with chocolate covered ginger baked right in. It seemed almost too good to make! Almost but not quite! It’s a really really good combination. A comforting cheerer upper, for sure.

Here’s Cinnamon Girl by Neil Young.
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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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Apple & carrot mulligatawny soup

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mulligatawny

If you’re like me, and you’re a highly esteemed scholar of food history as it relates to Europeans aggressively roaming the earth and changing their cooking styles and the food-preparing habits of the people they met as they traveled… Okay, obviously I’m not an esteemed scholar of anything. But I am a bit of a buff, when it comes to the role of food in the history of colonialism. As I’ve mentioned before, in relation to savory pastries. Anyway! If this kind of thing interests you at all, than you’ll have some thoughts about Mulligatawny. I think the name means “pepper water,” and as I understand it, the soup came about because somebody was trying to make Indian flavors palatable to Englishmen. But it became hugely popular! And the whole notion of the soup is completely open to interpretation. You could put anything in there and call it mulligatawny! I made this soup thinking about a mulligatawny I ate at an Indian restaurant somewhere just outside of London, when I was about 7 years old. I remember apples. I remember pleasant spices. I remember a tawny color. And that’s about it! But something must have worked on some strange level, because my Isaac, who is 6, and who generally won’t eat much of anything unless it’s pale and has lots of butter on it…asked for 3 helpings of this soup!!

Here’s Dead Milkman Punk Rock Girl, which really has nothing to do with mulligatawny, but it’s so stuck in my head! And it’s a good song for valentine’s day tommorrow!
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Chili with cauliflower & 2 beans

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Chili!!

I realized that I’ve been saying some mean things about winter lately. And we’ve had such a pleasant winter, so far! The truth is, I kinda like winter (in the way that a person who was probably a hibernating animal in another life likes winter!) I’d like to stay home all day, cuddled up, reading books, the boys in their pjs, me making complicated baked goods and slow-cooked I-don’t-know-whats! But I work on the weekends, so we never have a day of everyone in their pjs. Here’s something you can make that’s warm and rich and has complex flavors, so it feels like that kind of day, but in a fraction of the time. Oh, yes, and I almost forgot! We ate it with home-made tortilla chips and some grated cheese. Nice.

Here’s Bryon Lee and the Dragonaire’s with Hot Hot Hot.
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Roasted butternut & tomato bisque

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roasted butternut bisque

Remember Bob Ross and his happy accidents? This soup was the result of a happy accident, in some ways. NO I DIDN’T PUT TOO MUCH BURNT SIENNA ON MY FAN BRUSH!! I just made the roasted red pepper-almond sauce too hot and spicy. That’s right, the one we made with our empanadas. So last night, with fiendish cleverness and calculation, I decided to use the sauce as a base for a soup! Thus spreading the spicy joy around, and rendering it more palatable. I decided to add roasted butternut squash because it’s so mild and sweet that it could easily accommodate a bit of heat. And then I thought about all the roastiness going on, with the pepper, and the chipotle, and the squash, and I thought fire-roasted tomatoes would go well (from a can, unfortunately – it being February). So I made this lovely, velvety, sweet, smoky, spicy bisque.

Here’s Lee Perry with Roast Fish and Cornbread, because, let’s face it, I’m never going to have recipe for roast fish, and this song is wonderful!
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Empanadas with greens, green olives and pistachios

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empanadas with greens

I bought these beautiful little green olives. I can’t remember what they’re called, but I think they might have been castelvetrano olives. They were small and round and serpent green. Lovely! They were so pretty that it might have been a shame to stuff them inside of empandas – if the empanadas hadn’t been so mother-flippin delicious!

They have three kinds of greens – chard, kale and spinach, they have very green olives, and they have pistachios, which are green nuts! They also have ricotta, mozzarella and lots of herbs. I’m especially pleased with the texture of these. You never know how it’s going to go with greens and ricotta. Will they be watery and runny? Or mushy? This was perfect, though. Juicy, almost, but not soggy. It occurred to me that these were like large, baked, crispy ravioli, and in that spirit, I added a little semolina flour to the dough. (If you don’t have semolina flour, just leave it out. Or add 1/4 cup regular flour to replace it. Either way. )I made a sauce to go with these with roasted red peppers, almonds, tomatoes, paprika and chipotle. It turned out very spicy!

Here’s REM’s Green Grow the Rushes, because I’ve had it going round in my head lately.
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Tapioca-choux dumplings with turnips and cheddar

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Turnip & cheddar choux dumplings

As I was making these, I thought to myself, “I really can’t imagine anyone else in the world cooking these.” Not that they were hard to make, or that they didn’t taste good (they did!). It was just such a strange and winding path that led me to them. First of all, I bought some tapioca flour at the Super Tropical Food Mart. This reminded me of an intriguing recipe I’d seen in the New York Times for Brazilian cheese puffs. And my tapioca flour is called “Yuca flour.” For some reason this made me think of Japanese Takoyaki. I thought maybe they add yucca root to that. Which is an entirely different thing, of course, but the connection had been made! I like watching how-to videos about takoyaki on youTube. (In fact I like watching any short cooking videos with non-English narration. I really do.) Anyway – takoyaki always seemed like a messy-fun thing to make and eat (and say!), and I had dreamed of trying a version of my own, with a muffin tin instead of a real takoyaki pan. And I’ve always wanted to try making something with a choux batter … but with something tasty stuffed inside!! Why roasted turnips, sharp cheddar and thyme? Why? Why not, I say! I wasn’t sure what to expect when I pulled these out of the oven, but I liked them a lot. They were soft and dense and cheesy on the inside, and nicely crispy on the outside. We ate them with leftover vegetarian haggis, cause everyone knows you’re supposed to eat turnips with haggis!

I should mention that if you don’t have tapioca flour on hand, these will work fine with regular flour – just use 1 1/2 cups. And if you’re not a turnip fan, you could substitute roasted parsnips or butternut squash, or just use cheese – any cheese you like!

Here’s Duke Ellington with Tapioca
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Spicy machica cocoa baked pudding

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baked pudding

The other week I bought some machica at the Super Tropical Food Market. I’ve been thinking about what to do with it ever since. What is machica, you ask? Well, it’s toasted barley flour. The machica that I bought is from Ecuador, and according to my extensive research, when it’s at home it’s used to thicken hot drinks. I saw several recipes for machica hot chocolate, that sounded very nice. And then I was browsing through Mrs. Beeton’s Everyday Cooking. (There’s such strange stuff in there! So matter-of-factly presented! It’s irresistible.) She has a recipe for baked puddings made with very finely ground grains! Including barley! The idea of combining Ecuadorian machica and a recipe of Mrs Beetons seemed like the best kind of fusion cooking, so I gave it a go. I decided to flavor it with dark cocoa powder, cinnamon, and nutmeg. I didn’t want to overwhelm the subtle flavor of toasted barley, but I thought it might be pleasant to fashion it after spiced cocoa thickened with Machica. The resulting pudding was very tasty. The texture is comforting, and it has a nice balance of tastes, with the toasted barley-flavor subtle but distinct.

Here’s Miles Davis with Tasty Pudding.
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Almond cake with cherries, white chocolate and chambord

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Almond cake with cherries and white chocolate

I have a cupboard in which I keep all the cakes or cookies that I bake. I had a dream last night that the cupboard was overflowing. I opened the door, and mounds of cookies and pieces of cake came spilling out. In my dream I had a genius idea of what to bake with all of the excess baked goods! And then my elderly dog did this thing she does, where she click clacks frantically around on our wooden floors, and it sounds like she’s desperate to go outside, so you heave yourself out of bed and down the stairs, only to find her back on her bed, staring at you with a “What are you doing up at this hour” expression on her face. So we’ll never know what I would have done with the dream cakes in the dream cupboard. Perhaps the dream was a sign that I should slow down on the baking. Honestly, though, it’s February. If you don’t have the promise of some small sweet thing to have with your coffee, why the hell would you get out of bed at all?

I made this cake for my father’s birthday. He doesn’t really like chocolate, but I snuck a small amount of white chocolate in. He does like almonds and cherries, though. (At least I hope he does!) So this is the cake I made. It’s a dense cake with ground almonds, made slightly lighter by the inclusion of 3 extra whipped egg whites. (I used the yolks in the ice cream!) In the middle of the layers, we find some cherry preserves thinned with chambord. (I love chambord, but any fruity liqueur would do. Or amaretto. Or anything you like!) And then I topped it with a thin white chocolate/chambord ganache.

Here’s Bob Marley doing Sugar Sugar. Today is his birthday!! I wonder what kind of cake he would have liked.

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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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