Potato Crackers

I've invented something new and I want the world to know about it. Of course, posting it on this blog isn't going to accomplish the goal of telling the world, since I think only my sister reads it. But at least the recipe will be recorded somewhere other than in my food-stained notebook.

I'm not sure "the world" is going to greet this recipe with enthusiasm, to be honest. Its star ingredient is potato flour, and who buys that?! People like me, who think it's fun to try different kinds of flours, who twice visited Portland, OR and took a bus 1 hr outside the city to visit the Bob's Red Mill store.

See, it's a red mill.

So many flours!

Actually, the reason I bought potato flour was that I had this idea I could use it during Passover. We tend to eat a lot of potato things during Passover, since it's one of the few carbs (besides matzo) that is traditionally permitted. Growing up and in college I remember seeing potato starch during Passover, and even now I often rely on french fries as one of the foods I can still order if I end up in a restaurant. Nowadays there are so many gluten-free recipes calling for different kinds of flours, I figured I could either find one that called for potato flour or substitute the potatoes for a flour of a similar texture, like rice flour.

(My sister asked me once, "Who is the target audience for your blog? Semi-vegan Jewish hippies?" Well, that or I'm just writing it for myself.)

So I bought the potato flour and found ... it tastes a lot  like potatoes. It cannot be used in any baked goods that you don't want to taste like potato. When I discovered this (no, I did not deduce this fact on my own, I had to discover it through trial and error), I considered the purchase a failure, and the flour sat in my cabinet for months. (Obviously the thing to do with an ingredient you never intend to use again is to keep it sitting in your cabinet.)

Then a couple months ago I was making a cracker recipe that called for rice flour, which I don't have, and I thought, "Hm, it wouldn't be bad if these crackers ended up tasting like potatoes. I'll substitute that potato flour." That particular substitution did not quite work, but it succeeded in showing me that it's totally fine if crackers taste like potatoes. Why shouldn't they? So I started experimenting ...

For my first experiment, I made vegan sour cream and substituted it for [something, I forget] in the previous cracker recipe. I was on the right track! It took me three tries, but now I have something awesome and am going to have to start regularly buying potato flour. These taste like a cross between a potato chip and a baked potato, with a sour cream and vinegar flavor. So good!

sorry for the shadow here

Potato Crackers

Ingredients
1/2 c. oats or other non-sticky flour (e.g., cornmeal, something that does not stick together when you wet it)
1/2 c. silken tofu
3 Tbsp canola oil
2 tsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp sugar
3/4 cup potato flour
1/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup nutritional yeast
1 tsp salt
1 Tbsp herbs (optional)
3 Tbsp white vinegar
1/4 cup milk (almond, soy, etc)
water, as needed

Put the oatmeal into a blender and grind until it resembles a coarse flour. Pour out into a mixing bowl. (If you're using something already ground, like cornmeal, skip this step.) Add the potato flour, wheat flour, nutritional yeast, salt, and herbs, and stir to mix.
Put tofu, oil, lemon juice, and sugar in the blender. Blend for a few seconds. Pour out into the bowl with the flours and stir well with a spoon. You should be able to mix it enough that all the flour is incorporated, but it will be very crumbly. Add the vinegar and mix again. Add the milk. If the dough is still not sticking together, add a little water at a time. You don't want the dough to end up sticky, you want it just wet enough to hold together.
Preheat oven to 350 and grease a cookie sheet.
Dump the dough onto the cookie sheet and roll it out thin. You want it to take up the whole pan, which might look impossible at first, but you'll need to roll it as thin as you can. Also, try to make it even so it will cook evenly. It can be helpful to put a piece of parchment paper on top of the dough when you're rolling. (then take it off, don't bake the paper)
Score it into squares, i.e. draw lines with a knife lightly across the top of the dough.
Bake for 20 minutes, then check on it. If you want to be really fastidious, take it out and break off any pieces around the edges that have browned or that are hard enough to break off easily. The middle may still be soft, and you can put it back in the oven for another five minutes. The goal is for it to be hard and dry enough for the crackers to easily snap apart along the lines, but not to get any browner than golden brown. You can also take the whole thing out of the oven when the edges start to brown, and the middle may still be chewy.
Break apart the crackers and let them cool

Archival Muffins

The library where I work has started celebrating Archives Month by putting out a selection of cookbooks from the archives and then asking us to pick recipes for a potluck. Obviously I think this is a great idea, but it is a little hard for me to find recipes. For one thing, old-fashioned recipes tend to be meat-heavy. There's often a lot of cream and butter, too. Dairy wouldn't normally be a problem, as it's easy to find vegan substitutes, but I feel like I ought to be following the directions accurately since I'm supposed to be providing a historical re-creation. So I wanted to find a recipe that was already pretty close to vegan.

The second problem is me overthinking. By which I mean, it's got to be weird enough that it stands out as representative of its time, but not so weird as to be gross. I loved looking through the recipe book for the elementary school cafeteria. (I forget what decade, maybe the 70s?) It had recipes that would call for four quarts of milk or sixteen bananas. One recipe I considered making was banana pudding, which called for bananas, gelatin, milk, and sugar. There were several macaroni and cheese casseroles as well.

Then there was the cookbook from a local synagogue from the 80s. It was fun in a way, but the recipes were all too familiar. Some of them are in my own family cookbook, and I've already made them. So that would be pointless.

The recipe I settled on was honey prune bread. It came from a USDA pamphlet from 1953 called "honey: some ways to use it." It's different, but not unappealing, and it requires few enough substitutions that I think I can get away with not telling my co-workers that it's inauthentic. I used Earth Balance where it calls for shortening, and soy milk where it calls for milk, but I think one can argue that Earth Balance is shortening and soy milk is milk. Oh, did you mean dairy milk? I thought you meant any kind of milk ...

I do eat honey, though that would also be easy to replace (with agave), so that left the two eggs. The substitution worked out well here, as I was able to make a multi-purpose addition. The recipe actually called for sour milk, which I assume means milk that has gone bad. Whoops, I poured mine down the drain last week! Just kidding, I would've been afraid to cook with the expired soy milk that I threw away, especially since it smelled horrible! What I did was, I added some vinegar to my non-soured soy milk. This not only made it taste sour, but the vinegar interacts with the baking powder and soda
in the dish to add more leavening. You know that science project kids do that involves making a volcano with baking soda and vinegar? That's why vegan baked goods occasionally have vinegar in them, to add puff. In this case, I got the desired sourness along with the leavening.

Another role that eggs serve is adding moisture, so I actually substituted silken tofu as well. When I veganize things on my own, I sometimes use two different egg substitutes, since I'm not sure which quality is needed: binding, moisture, or leavening.

Anyway, it worked out fine, and in addition to a loaf of bread for work I made a batch of muffins for myself.

They came out moist and fluffy. Success! I bet these would also be good with figs and/or dates instead of prunes.

Honey Prune Muffins

3 Tbsp Earth Balance
1/3 cup honey
3 Tbsp sugar
1/2 cup silken tofu
1 cup white flour
2/3 cup whole wheat flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 Tbsp + 1 tsp vinegar
1/2 cup soy milk
1/2 cup prunes
1/2 cup walnuts
1/2 tsp lemon peel

Pour milk and vinegar into a cup and set aside.
Preheat oven to 350.
In blender, mix Earth Balance, honey, sugar, and tofu until well blended. In a medium-sized bowl, mix the dry ingredients (flour through salt) and stir until thoroughly mixed. Chop the prunes and walnuts well (can do both together). Add the honey-tofu blend and the sour milk to the dry ingredients and stir lightly with wooden spoon until fairly well mixed. Add in the prunes, walnuts, and lemon peel and stir until mixed. The prunes will stick together, so it helps to add them in little clumps spread out over the dough, so you don't have to break them up.

Pour into 12 muffin cups. Bake for 24 minutes, or until well browned.

Killing Several Birds with One Dumpling Mold

As I get older, it's become less clear whom I should get birthday presents for. For the most part, the number of people who get me presents has decreased, and if I have a tradition of exchanging gifts with someone I keep it up until one year they don't get me a present. When that happens I just say to myself okay, so now we've stopped. With my twin sister it's harder to know what to do. Since our birthdays are of course on the same day, I can't just wait and see if she gets me something. Last year was the first time neither of bought each other gifts, and luckily we made that decision at the same time, despite not discussing it with each other ahead of time. But this year I saw something I really thought she'd like and wanted to get it. So I deliberated and decided to go ahead and buy it, knowing she probably wouldn't have a gift for me.

When I mentioned that I had a gift for her, she was worried for a minute that she hadn't gotten me anything, but then she quickly had an idea. She would take me to her favorite Asian grocery/department store and I could pick out a gift there! I was a little puzzled, since I expected the store to be mainly a grocery store, but when I got there I realized it had all sorts of random items - a stuffed Dory doll, a french fry cutter, pajamas, zipper pulls shaped like cupcakes. She kept texting me from different parts of the store, asking things like, "Would you like plastic grapes?" The store was so cheap that it felt like I was on a shopping spree, and it was so fun to be able to pick out items and have someone else buy them for me.

I ended up getting a set of 5 pairs of chopsticks, each made of a different kind of wood, a plastic squirt bottle, and a set of three dumpling molds. All for $8. Most exciting was the dumpling mold. I hadn't necessarily felt the lack of one before, but once I had it I started thinking of all sorts of things I could make with it - ravioli, pop tarts, calzones, empanadas, or of course dumplings. I have a tiny kitchen and love to cook and bake, so the idea that I could do so much and make something relatively fancy with one small, easy-to-store piece of plastic was enticing.

The problem was ... my oven was broken. This was also upsetting me because I couldn't bake birthday cake, which is one of my favorite parts of having a birthday. It felt odd to have a birthday and not be able to bake cake.

A week after my birthday, a repairman came and fixed my oven, and then I was out of control. In one weekend, and for no occasion, I baked coffee cake, banana bread, stuffed peppers, lasagna, and about 50 dumplings. I used a vegan quiche recipe with a filling of tofu, tahini, spinach, mushrooms, kale, and curry powder, and a basic pie crust recipe (earth balance, flour, and water) for the crust. You need to roll out the pie crust and cut out circles, then put each circle onto the mold, spoon on some filling, then close the mold. Then carefully open it, making sure the edges of the semi-circle stay pinched shut.

I actually made a double batch because I'd been meaning to bring some food to a friend of mine who has two new babies. I figured handheld food would be convenient if she only has one hand free to eat with. So I spent a lot of time molding these thingies, which I decided to call "quiche pockets." I was really proud of them. They look fancy, and they taste so good!

I texted my friend to see if she could use food, and if/when she had time for a visit, and she turned out to have time a couple of days later. So I brought her about two dozen and got to hold one of her babies for awhile and catch up with her. It was a good use of both my new kitchen tool and my newly working oven, as well as a chance to help out and visit with a friend. These quiche pockets met a lot of goals at once. The only problem is, they keep being mistaken for empanadas, and some people deny they count as quiche since they don't have egg. But they taste and look great, so I say they are a success.

Who Gets the Marshmallow?

This past weekend, I returned for the 20th time to the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. I've gone with various configurations of people over the years, but at this point the diehards of my circle who are still attending regularly are me, my sister, and one close friend. My niece and nephew are along for the ride.

The festival is held on a farm, and most attendees camp there all weekend. The first few years, it bothered me that we weren't allowed to have ground fires, though the rule makes sense because a) we're on somebody's farm and b) there are too many tents too close together. Now I've gotten used to eating cold food all weekend, but I always feel like on principle there should be smores when one is camping. So lately I've tried making smores bars or smores cupcakes to bring with me. Last year my friend and I both brought smores bars, so we had a contest. Mine were a little bit healthy, and hers were not, so she won. We were almost tied, though, until somebody who had voted for both decided to eat seconds of only hers!

This year we coordinated a little better, and we only had one kind of smores dish. It was also a little healthy, but still plenty chocolatey. And aesthetically pleasing:

 

And yummy ... if you're a grown-up. The chocolate layer is date-sweetened and doesn't have any sugar, so it's the sort of subtle flavor that tastes great if you're taking the time to savor it, but could be disappointing if you are expecting sugar, or if you are seven and a half.

My nephew only wanted to eat the marshmallows off the top of the pie, which we told him he couldn't do. At first this seemed like an obvious lesson in manners. Of course you don't get to just eat the marshmallows off the top and leave the rest of the pie! But when I thought a little more, I could see why he was frustrated. It's not as if I'd brought extra, standalone marshmallows, so basically I was putting marshmallows in front of him and saying he couldn't eat them unless he also ate a dessert he didn't like. No one has yet commented on my blog, but I'll put a question out there anyway. Should we have let him eat just one marshmallow off the top of the pie? Is that a rude thing to do?

On the last day of the festival there was one piece of pie left, and he'd been asking for more than a day if he could eat the marshmallow. So I told him if nobody ate the last piece by 4 pm, he could eat the marshmallow and we'd throw away the rest. A few minutes later, the wind blew by, and this happened:

 

Sadness!

So my sister bought her son some ice cream instead. He's probably over it, but I feel kind of bad. I guess if I were a mom I'd be practiced at saying no, but I'm just an auntie who doesn't see him very often, and he's a helpful and kind boy. (Who did get to eat cookies and ice cream, even if not pie, so maybe I shouldn't feel so bad.) I'm going to see him again this coming week, so I was thinking I'd buy him this pre-packaged smore that I like. There's a corner store near me that sells them, so I stopped there yesterday ... no smores. So I went to the website and looked up other stores that sell them. It listed my local health food store, a bit further from my house, but I went there today after work and ... no smores. There's one more place I might try tomorrow, but I may be stuck buying a marshmallow on a stick from the 7-Eleven. I'm sure it would be sugary, unhealthy, and familiar, just like he wanted.

Smores Pie

9" Graham cracker crust

filling

1 1/4 cups dates
1/2 cup cashews
1/4 cup coconut oil
2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 cup cocoa powder

marshmallows for the top (lots of small ones are easier to deal with than big ones when slicing the pie)

Soak the dates and cashews for half an hour or more. Drain, but hold onto the water in case you need to add liquid to the filling. Put in a blender and blend until very smooth. Add just enough liquid to make it wet enough for the blender to handle it. Add the coconut oil, vanilla, and salt and blend again. Then add the cocoa powder and blend until mixed. It should be just thin enough to pour, but not liquid. Pour into the pie crust and smooth with a spatula. Sprinkle marshmallows evenly over the top so it is covered. Broil for just a few minutes, until starting to blacken. (In my kitchen, this is when the smoke detector goes off.)
I didn't try eating it warm, but I think it would be good either warm or slightly chilled.

Baking in the Heat

I woke up this morning and felt like lying lazily in bed all day. Lately I've been wanting more unscheduled days when I can just read, go to a park, talk on the phone. It used to be very rare that I even wanted a day with no plans. I thought five social plans per weekend was pretty much the ideal amount. I seem to be having a mood shift lately where I get really excited when I have no evening plans after work, and even a whole weekend with no plans seems nice. "No plans" often means I'll go to swim practice, and probably do laundry, and still end up running around a lot. But it still means the whole day is full of my own choices I can make on the spot, not commitments to other people.

Since my air conditioner is at the foot of my bed, staying in bed all day seemed like it made perfect sense as a goal. But I'm not usually still for all that long, so it figures that eventually I came up with something worth getting out of bed for. I wanted to bake! Then I remembered it was going to be 94 degrees today.

When I was in high school, my sister and I loved baking and cooking. We just wanted to be in the kitchen all the time! My mom always had reasons she didn't want us to bake: either we had too many leftovers and she wanted us to eat those before making something new, or it was too hot she didn't want us to put the oven on. She doesn't remember it this way; I'm sure she allowed us to bake or cook more than she stopped us, but I remember the restrictions. Oddly enough, even though I understand her objections better now that I am adult, they still bother me. I live alone, so everything I cook lasts more than a week, and I'm always thinking, "I wish I didn't have so many leftovers in the house! I really want to cook." Sometimes, like today, I find myself wishing I could bake, but I know I'll be uncomfortable with the oven on.

When I bought my condo almost ten years ago, and it had a roof deck, I had a great idea. I'd buy a solar oven! That way I can still cook on hot days without turning on the oven or standing over the stove. My dad commented once, "It's funny, it seemed like a novelty when you bought it, and I thought you'd try it out and then it would sit in your closet, but you really use it." It's true, I really do use it several times a summer.

cat, in the shade of the solar oven

I'ved used it for foods that are meant to saute, like sliced cabbage, for soaking/cooking dried beans, for slow-cooker-type dishes, and several times for veggie burgers.

baked beans

black bean burgers

Today with my out-of-season baking mood, I went with an out-of-season recipe for pumpkin muffins. 

They are brown because of the molasses; not burnt. Also, note that it's 250 degrees in there!

Baking in the solar oven does not always work. Stuff tends to come out flatter and wetter than it would in a regular oven. I think because the oven traps moisture inside the baked goods don't really puff up. But they do get fully cooked. One nice thing is that it's a lot harder for foods to over-cook in the solar oven, so you don't have to worry too much about cooking times. And you can leave the house while it's "on," because it's just collecting sunlight! Once you get used to putting food in, leaving it, and then just checking when you get home, it can feel so convenient. Also, of course you can't use it if it's too cloudy, and sometimes I forget to check the weather and then realize the stuff I put in the oven isn't really cooking. On a cloudy day it only heats up to 150, and that's not hot enough. But today was crazy hot to begin with, and the oven got up to almost 250. And I got to make muffins. Success!

Curried Cabbage with Vegan Feta

I've had some good luck with recipes lately but haven't felt like blogging. Maybe it's because I know I'm not good at the photography aspect of it and am not interested in getting better. I think it's useful for me to know I don't have to be good at everything, and photography really doesn't interest me. Besides, everyone takes pictures of everything these days, so I can usually get someone else's. But writing and cooking are amongst my favorite things, so I keep cooking and jotting down notes, and then nothing gets blogged.

I made curried cabbage with vegan feta a couple weeks ago and enjoyed dissecting with my sister what cultures were represented in the dish. (Another thing I like doing, besides cooking, is having What's App conversations with my sisters.) She told me that Indians do not use curry (they use spices, as we all know, but not curry, which I'd never noticed), so that aspect of it is more Thai. But Thai cooks would never stick breadcrumbs on a dish and bake it. That made me kind of happy, because it meant I'd invented a fusion food.

I feel creatively successful also because this dish was not just a modification of an existing recipe. I had half a cabbage left from my CSA and felt for some reason it ought to be curried. I guess because all the cabbage recipes I normally make have such subtle understated flavors, using colorless things like garlic and white wine, and I wanted this to be different. It was hard to find a curried cabbage recipe, though, so I ended up combining ideas from different recipes I found online.

I added the vegan feta because I'm always looking for ways to add protein to my meals, and I know cabbage is good with feta. The recipe is from John Schlimm's The Cheesy Vegan, but I left out some of his spices because they didn't go with the curry.

Feta Ingredients

1 block of extra firm tofu, pressed
3 tsp miso paste
1/4 cup red wine
1 Tbsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp salt (I'd use more salt if this wasn't going in a curry, but the curry also has salt)
2 Tbsp nutritional yeast

(you won't use all the feta in the recipe)

Curry Ingredients

1/2 a shallot
1 clove garlic
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 Tbsp mustard seed
1/2 tsp turmeric
dash of cayenne
1 tsp curry powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 head of cabbage, chopped

1/4 cup breadcrumbs

To make the tofu, crumble the drained tofu into chunks with your hands. In a separate bowl, mix the miso, wine, lemon juice, and salt together. Pour over the tofu. Mix with your hands if the tofu is still in large pieces. If it's already crumbled well, just stir gently. You want the tofu to stay lumpy. Let sit for 10 minutes. Then sprinkle the nutritional yeast on top and stir. Leave in fridge.


Mince the shallot and garlic and sautee in the olive oil on low heat until translucent. Turn the heat up to medium and add remaining spices. Add the cabbage. Stir occasionally and cook until soft and translucent as well.

Spray a baking dish and heat the oven to 350. Pour the spiced cabbage into the dish, add 1/2 cup feta and mix together gently. Smooth out the top and sprinkle breadcrumbs on top. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until breadcrumbs start to toast.

This made me only 2 servings because my cabbage was small. It should make 3 or 4 with a regular-sized cabbage.

Why Can't I Put Vegetables in Babka?

Every so often I toy with the idea of having a small business cooking for people. I worry that the bookkeeping would be a pain, and the pressure of everything having to turn out extra good would take some of the fun out of cooking. And what if I got cat hair in the food? It doesn't usually happen, but I know a kitchen with a cat in it is not up to certification standards. Anyway, I always feel lucky when there's something I want but haven't actively pursued and then an opportunity just comes to me.

Back in January I had friends over for dinner; it was my turn to host our rotating monthly dinner group. I don't remember what the meal was, because the star of the evening was the chocolate babka I made for dessert. It was enormous, swirly, and chocolatey. One of the guests is a good friend who doesn't cook at all but is a big fan of my cooking. I like cooking for her, since the praise is a nice reward, and she's always willing to help with dishes. A few weeks after the dinner, she asked if she could pay me to bake a babka for her mother's birthday.

Raw babkas rising on the ledge above my sink

 She said she would like it a little less sweet, which I don't understand. Why would anything be better with less chocolate?! But I've heard some people think "too sweet" is a thing, so ok. I really thought she also suggested maybe it would be good with vegetables, but there are some signs I may have remembered that wrong. Sign one: I told another friend I was going to make a babka with vegetables and she said, "Wait, these are two different things you're making, right? Babka and something with vegetables?" I said no, babka with vegetables. She said no. We were at a small restaurant at the time, and she told the chef, "Her friend wants her to make babka with vegetables," and the chef started laughing. Sign two: when I told my friend I'd bought the ingredients to make babka with vegetables, she said "No, I think I just said I wanted it less sweet. You can still put chocolate in it." I guess my faulty memory was being creative.

I'd already bought the vegetables and was excited to invent something new, so I asked if she wanted a chocolate babka and a savory babka, and she said sure. So I got to spend half the day kneading and rolling dough. Which was actually a little stressful since I wanted to also revise a work-related article I'm writing, but I got it done. And the babka came out great. The chocolate one is extra beautiful, though I made it a little bit too much less sweet.

Doesn't it look amazing? One friend said it looks like a giant cinnamon raisin bagel. The vegetable one is slightly less beautiful, but despite the laughter, it actually tastes better than the chocolate!

Vegetable Babka

Dough: 

3/4 cup Soy Milk (or any kind of milk)
5 tbsp Earth Balance (or butter or margarine)
1 package active dry yeast
1 1/2 Tbsp sugar
2 leggs
3/4 tsp Salt
4 cup Flour, white
  

Filling:

1 1/2 onions, chopped
4 cloves garlic, whole
olive oil
2 cups broccoli, chopped very small
3 cups spinach, chopped
1 Tbsp soy sauce
2 tsp sesame oil
1 Tbsp nutritional yeast

Heat the milk and earth balance in a small saucepan. Turn off just as milk almost comes to a boil. If the butter is not fully melted, don't worry, it will continue melting. Let sit for 10 minutes to cool.
Mix the yeast and sugar with 1/4 cup lukewarm water and let sit. It should get puffy after 5 minutes - if not, your yeast is dead. Add the warm milk to the yeast, along with the eggs and salt, and mix with a wooden spoon. Add in the flour one cup at a time, stirring well. When it starts to come together into a ball, turn it into a floured surface (e.g. a very clean countertop) and knead it while mixing in more flour until it is no longer sticky. Pour just a bit of oil into the bowl and put the ball of dough back in. Cover with a cloth and let sit for 2 hours.
Pour about a tsp olive oil into a frying pan and heat on very low heat. Put in the onions and whole cloves and stir occasionally until they are golden all over. Yum! This takes about half an hour. Transfer the onions to a bowl. Put a little more oil in the pan and add the broccoli. Add a half cup water and cover with a lid so it will steam. When the water is evaporated, add soy sauce, sesame oil, and the spinach. Stir and cover again. When spinach is wilted, sprinkle nutritional yeast over it and stir again.
Re-clean your countertop, sprinkle more flour, and put the dough back on it. Put half the dough aside. using a rolling pin, roll out into a large rectangle. I think mine was about 6" x 18". Spread half the onions and half the green vegetables evenly across it. The garlic will be soft enough to break apart with your fingers so you can distribute it more. Roll the dough up from the long edge into a long tube. Put the two ends of the tube together to make a circle. (If you can hold the two ends and twist before bringing them together, this will look a bit prettier. See the chocolate babka above, where I did that.) Put into a greased pie pan. Repeat with the other half of the dough and filling. Let rise again for an hour.
If you'd like, you can glaze with sesame or olive oil before baking.
Preheat oven to 375 and bake for 50 minutes.

Eggplant, Asafetida, and Passover

It may not be a great idea to blog about a dish I haven't eaten yet, but I liked how this dish pulls together some leftovers and new ingredients, and I like its unusualness, so I wanted to share.

I made this to eat during Passover next week. Last year, after some consultation with Facebook friends, I decided I would start eating beans on Passover. I had always avoided beans, as I grew up Conservative, and most Conservative Jews of an Eastern European background consider them to be not Kosher for Passover. As my eating habits got closer to vegan, though, I realized I wouldn't be getting any protein if I didn't eat beans, and I believe my health takes priority over following the letter of the law. (I almost said "my health trumps following..." but let's not say that word.) It turns out there are some well reasoned arguments about why beans should be ok anyway.Nowadays I eat a lot of beans on Passover.

This recipe didn't start out with beans, though. I was looking through one of my favorite falling-apart cookbooks, World of the East Vegetarian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey, and found an eggplant recipe. I have no memory of making it, but in my handwriting above the recipe it says "very good." I love eggplant, so I figured it would make a good starting point and I could add a bean spread to it. Then I had some leftover tomato innards from another dish, and tomatoes go great with eggplant and white beans, so it all started to come together. Here's what I did:

Boil white beans (or open a can) and add 2 Tbsp lemon juice and salt. Mush.

Slice 1 eggplant the long way and sprinkle each piece with salt. Let sit until beads of water form on top, then rinse the salt off. Then spray cooking spray in a pan and fry the eggplant slices, two at a time. If you put a lid on, it will steam a bit as well and you won't have to use as much cooking spray or oil. Set aside the eggplant until cooler.

Spread 2 Tbsp white beans on each eggplant slice and roll it up.

In a spice grinder, grind 4 tsp fennel seeds to powder. In a small bowl, mix with 1 1/2 tsp powdered ginger, 2 tsp ground cumin, 1/2 tsp cumin seeds, 1/2 tsp turmeric, and 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper.

Add 2 Tbsp oil to a medium-sized pot and heat. When it's hot, add in two shakes of asafetida. Let it heat for just a few seconds, then add the other spices, plus 1/4 cup water. Stir until spices are all mixed with the water. Then add 2 cups stewed tomatoes, 2 Tbsp tamarind, and 1/2 tsp salt. Let it come to a boil, then gently add the eggplant rolls. Simmer for about 10 minutes.

I think this should be eaten on top of rice, quinoa, or potatoes. I'm not sure yet what I will do with it.

I was glad for an opportunity to use asafetida, as I have a lot of it and few uses for it. My understanding is that Hare Krishnas use it instead of garlic and onions, which for some reason they don't eat. I was avoiding those foods a few years ago due to stomach acid so I bought asafetida as a substitute, and it is stinky!! Mine is inside a plastic container, inside a plastic bag, inside a glass jar. It takes a lot of layers to contain the smell! You use it in small quantities (just a pinch) to add some oomph to dishes. It is always the first ingredient in the pan, since it needs to be fried in oil for a few seconds. If the rest of the dish is not fried, you can fry the asafetida all by itself and then add it to the dish. Or you can just use garlic instead.

Is This Brownie Healthy?

I've been trying for a few weeks to nail down a single-serving brownie recipe. I found one online, and it tasted great, but it has 3 tablespoons of sugar in it. I know the brownies I buy at bakeries probably have a lot of sugar, too, but I can not think about it if I'm not measuring out the sugar myself. Measuring out three tablespoons of sugar for one brownie makes me really aware that this should be a once-in-awhile indulgence.

I'm generally a fan of making healthier versions of the sweets I like, rather than denying myself. Or I guess I could just eat sweets all the time, which I sort of do. But it's great when I can make a healthier version that still satisfies the craving. Like these butterfingers, which are so good! And I'm trying to be more deliberate about inventing/modifying recipes, as in really thinking about what seems off and paying attention to how different ingredients change the end results. So I set out to make a brownie recipe.

I posted about this on Facebook and got the sense some people were upset with me counting calories. I can understand that being trigger-y. So many women have either restricted their eating or had other people try to for so much of our lives, and it creates a starvation mentality, as if food is actually scarce and not plentiful (I know for some people scarcity is the reality, but probably not for most of the people who saw my Facebook post.), or as if we're not allowed to give in to what we want and what feels good to us. I feel like there's some value in having information about what I am consuming, but I'm trying to figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't trigger that scarcity panic, which not only leads to overeating but is just unnecessary stress.

So, while I don't feel bad about calculating how many calories were in my brownie, other people's responses did make me think about what my goals were. Was my goal actually to keep the calories low? Well, sort of, but I did put in coconut oil, which has twice as many calories as canola, so obviously that wasn't my highest priority. I think my goals were

1. That it not taste like banana. (the oil-free versions had banana in them, and it wasn't worth the trade off to keep the calories low but have it taste like banana)
2. Not too much sugar
3. A nice texture - dense but moist and not gummy (gummy is what happens when you use no oil)

Coconut oil is somewhat sweet, so using it allowed me to use less sugar. That seemed like a good trade-off, since coconut oil has some health value while sugar has none. Here's what I ended up with.

Single-Serving Brownie

1 tsp Flax Seed
2 1/2 Tbsp Soy Milk
1 tbsp Coconut Oil
1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract
1 tsp Apple Cider Vinegar
2 Tbsp Cocoa powder
2 Tbsp white flour
1/4 tsp Baking Powder
1 pinch Salt
1 Tbsp Sugar
1/4 tsp stevia

Preheat the oven to 350. Grind the flax seed in a spice grinder, put in a bowl with the milk, and set it aside while you mix the dry ingredients. Mix the ingredients from cocoa powder to the end of the list in a separate bowl and stir well. Then go back to your flax mixture and add coconut oil, vanilla, and vinegar. If your oil is solid, stick the mixture on top of the preheating oven for a minute or so until it is melted enough to mix with the other liquids. Then pour the liquids into the dry ingredients. Stir until all the powders are incorporated. Add a bit of milk if you need to.
Spray a ramekin or mug with cooking spray and pour in the batter.
It took 20 minutes for this to bake, but I'm bad about sticking things into the oven before it's fully pre-heated. Try 15 minutes, and if it still looks wet, bake for a few more minutes. Since there's no egg, there's no risk to under-cooking it.

Cherry Challah French Toast

I haven't blogged in months and was considering that maybe my enthusiasm had run its course after just a few posts. But maybe my enthusiasm is cyclical. At any rate, I've been in a reflective mood lately that has intersected with a cooking mood, so I've decided to blog again.

I've been reading a book about Jewish practices and thinking mostly about Shabbat (which is what the first two hundred pages of the book are about). The book takes an approach (typical of Reconstructionist Judaism) of not prescribing what one ought to be doing but providing guidance on how we can make our own choices that feel meaningful to us. My main reason for reading the book was to start thinking about why I do any Jewish practices. I know I like to observe my religious customs but have never tried to articulate why.

One thing I am getting from this book is that practices, which become habits, can enforce values. I really like the idea that, instead of telling myself I have to think or feel a certain way, I can choose or design a practice that embodies that belief and then focus on doing the practice. Whenever I try to change my mindset, to become more focused or confident or positive, I get frustrated because it's not that easy to change how one thinks. I like that Judaism encourages me to pick a really ordinary behavior like cooking, lighting candles, or turning off my cell phone - something I can totally do, though maybe not that last one! - and commit to it. If it changes how I feel or think, so much the better, but if that doesn't happen right away at least I'd be consistently acting with intention.

So what do I want to change about the way I think? Well, one of the things that speaks to me about Shabbat is the idea that it's ok for us not be trying to accomplish things all the time. We all have value simply as beings, value that is not dependent on what we do. This lesson feels more meaningful to me than just resting, which I'd previously thought was the point of Shabbat. Of course I haven't gotten that lesson down, and I definitely tend to value myself based on my accomplishments. But that seems like all the more reason to think of a practice that would repeat this lesson over and over until maybe it will sink in.

On the other hand, the idea of a Sabbath is based on the creation story, so originally the instruction was not the vague directive not to accomplish anything but more specifically not to create anything. This resonates less with me. While my work week sometimes (not as often as I'd like) contains accomplishments, it rarely involves creating something. Creating is usually a relaxing thing I do on the weekend - in the kitchen. You could say that creating makes me feel more G-d-like, though if I made that a goal I'd want to pick and choose which aspects of G-d to emulate!

So I'm toying with the idea of making a practice of always cooking on Shabbat, even though this is opposite to the traditional rules and also to my own intention from two paragraphs ago. Cooking makes me relaxed and connected to something, though I can't say what.

While I'm figuring this out, I decided to make a challah. My conclusion was that it takes forever and would be hard to fit in on a regular basis. So I'm not posting a challah recipe! But I do have a recipe for the leftovers. This is one I'd made a few times and just today got it down. yay. Most of my recipes stay in draft form for awhile. This took fewer tries to get right since it was just a few modifications away from this one, from Chocolate Covered Katie. I use Bolthouse Farms Cherry Juice, which is 100% juice but not 100% cherry. I imagine if you used pure cherry juice you'd need to dilute it, but maybe not. Maybe it would just be richer. Anyway, here's my recipe.

 

Cherry Challah French Toast

makes 6 servings of 2"x3"

half a block firm tofu
2 Tbsp lemon juice
2 tsp maple syrup
pinch salt
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp pumpkin pie spice
3 Tbsp sugar
2 tsp vanilla
3/4 cup cherry juice
1/3 cup raisins
4 cups challah, torn into chunks

Mix the first four ingredients in a blender, but only for a few seconds. It should remain chunky. You can call this vegan ricotta. Add spices, sugar, and vanilla and pulse, still leaving it lumpy. Add the juice and pulse just until blended. Add the raisins. I didn't stir them in, just poured them on top. It got mixed enough when I poured the liquid out of the blender later.

Spread the challah over a brownie pan (8"x8" is standard, mine is some other dimension). Pour the blender mixture over it, evenly distributed. At this point it's nice if you can let it sit for an hour. This lets the bread and raisins absorb more liquid. I assembled it before a run and then baked it while I was showering after the run.

When it's time to bake, preheat oven to 400 degrees and bake for 35 minutes.

I hope nobody reads this blog for the photos! They're pretty bad.