The Conscious Kitchen

Boston Vegetarian Society Food Fest Recipes

2009-10-31T14:35:00.004-05:00

Thanks very much to the hundreds of people who came out today to my cooking demo at the Boston Vegetarian Society Food Festival! 400 samples of the recipes I cooked today were prepared, but we ran out faster than expected. Apologies to all who were not able to try a sample of what was made today. For those who missed a copy of the chickpea polenta recipes, and for all of those who could not be there with us today, I am posting it below along with a link to the olive oil cake recipe that was also demoed today.

Wild Mushroom and Crisp Leek Topped Baked Chickpea Polenta

Among the many reasons to love this dish are its elegance and relative simplicity to make, the rich creaminess of a custardy polenta made with chickpea flour, just like the Romans did it hundreds of years ago, and the flavorful, multi-textured bite of mushroom with a light crunch of leek. Serve with sautéed greens or a salad for a complete and beautiful dinner. The cool autumn months when locally foraged mushrooms are available and winter leeks are thriving is the perfect time to prepare this dish.

Look for chickpea flour in health food stores, ethnic food sections or Italian or Indian markets. In Indian markets, this flour is sometimes called chana flour, gram flour or besan. They are all made from chana dal, a cousin of chickpea. Though there are slight variations in texture and flavor, they are perfect substitutes for one another.

Ingredients::

4 cups cold vegetable broth
1 ½ cup chickpea flour
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 cloves garlic, smashed, peeled and roughly chopped
½ cup dry white wine (recommend Sauvignon Blanc, Chenin Blanc or Pinot Grigio)
1 ½ teaspoon sea salt
2 tablespoon fresh parsley, chopped
¼ teaspoon fresh ground nutmeg

2 large or 4 small leeks
2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon olive oil
8 ounces (about 2 cups) sliced wild mushrooms (miattake, chicken of the woods, chanterelle, oyster, morel, porcini, or other)
8 ounces (about 2 cups) sliced domestic mushrooms (cremini, white button, etc.)
2 tablespoons dry white wine
½ teaspoon sea salt
¼ teaspoon ground white pepper
⅛ teaspoon fresh ground nutmeg
¼ cup fresh parsley, chopped

Prepare::

Oil a 9” springform cake pan. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

In a food processor or blender, blend the vegetable broth and chickpea flour until well combined and frothy. Leave food processor work bowl or blender carafe attached to base unit.

In a large saucepan, warm the olive oil over a medium heat. Add chopped garlic and cook for 3-5 minutes or until garlic is golden and crisp. Pour white wine into pan and stir to scrape up any bits of garlic clinging to pan. Briefly pulse the chickpea-broth mixture before pouring into saucepan. Bring to a boil and then turn down heat to medium-low. Stir frequently and vigorously for 10 minutes. Add sea salt, nutmeg and parsley. Mix well to combine.

Pour polenta into oiled pan, brush the top with olive oil and bake in preheated oven for 20 minutes or until top is golden and lightly crisped.

Leeks::

Clean leeks and slice into very thin pieces, 2-3 inches in length.

Place olive oil in a skillet and toss the leeks in it. Sauté over medium heat for 4-5 minutes or until leeks have wilted. Transfer to an 8x11 baking pan and place in the oven. Stir every 5 minutes through baking time and continue to bake about 20 minutes or until leeks have browned and lightly crisped.

Mushrooms::

Using the skillet in which the leeks were wilted, heat olive oil over a high flame. Add mushrooms and toss with oil. Cook about 4 minutes or until mushrooms have softened slightly. Add wine, salt, nutmeg, white pepper and stir well to combine. Cook about 2 more minutes or until mushrooms are softened and well coated in spices. Add parsley and combine before turning off heat.

To serve::

Allow baked chickpea polenta to cool at room temperature about 10 minutes before running a knife around the edge of the pan and releasing the springform. Cut into wedges and place on a plate. Top with mushrooms and finish each wedge with a generous pile of crisp leeks.

Recipe for the olive oil cake with orange macedonia and cocoa nibs may be found at American Feast.

Reconsidering the Radish

2009-10-30T09:15:00.008-05:00

One of my many new undertakings this busy season was a full fledged garden. Though I'd lived in a rural area with a fair bit of small-scale farming and gardening all around, and though I'd been vegan and pretty political about my food for years before the day that a friend walked me through the packed and productive urban garden of a punk house in Oakland, I never really got the whys and wherefores of growing your own food. It dawned on me that day, but it's take a good decade to implement.

Sure, there have been years of containers with variously successful peppers, tomatoes, herbs and even an ill-advised experience with sweet potatoes, but I'd never been able to create a garden that could hope to do much more than garnish a plate. So, when a friend offered up his hard-won plot to me for the season, I took it on in a blink. And though I came into it with a righteous do-it-my-own-self streak--pouring over heirloom and organic seed catalogs, starting seeds in March and tending them with careful dreams of high-yields and liberal doses of compost tea--I had to bow to this friend's offer to help me plant seedlings and sow seeds in the early summer. As he ripped open his packet of lettuce seed, I quietly patted my own tom thumb lettuce seeds, whispering to them, "later, later." And when his pedigree-less beet seeds were sown, I thought of the room that my unfortunately named, but reportedly delicious, Crapaudine beets would have to sacrifice, but still I said nothing. When he got to the radishes though, well, even in friendships, there is a line, and for me, radishes are sown on the other side of it.

There are very few vegetables that I cannot respect and enjoy eating at least somewhat, but radishes have never moved me in a positive way. Here and there I have nothing specific against a radish or two in salad, or a little daikon in miso or dashi--sure, rock it out, but to grow a radish? To take valuable space away from other vegetables? No way. Not on my plot. "Hey, whoa, ok, let's take it easy. Don't do anything rash now. Can we talk about this?" I begged as his hand poised to shake a full packet of seeds out into a beautiful patch of perfectly turned soil. "What?" he asked, shaking the seeds out as he spoke and I cringed. "Radishes are great, and they grow really well." And it was done. The radishes were planted and what could I say?

One of many salads from my garden: featuring radish, nasturtium and tahini dressing

In the months that followed, I thought of many things I could have said, reoccurring thread concerning the fact that this friend who thought radishes so great was going to be away for the entire summer and not eat a single one, among the most prominent. Whatever I thought about the first part of his radish claim though, the second bit was dead on. Radishes grow really well. Really well.

At first their productivity was simply alarming. I was overrun with a vegetable that I didn't even like and couldn't really think of what to do with. Then, strangely, it was compelling. Unsure quite how it happened, I found myself feeling tenderly toward the radishes. They were kind of miraculous, shooting up volumes of spiky greens and crowning from the soil with bright red heads from out of nowhere. It was the magic of the garden. Magically, they also seemed to reproduce in split second intervals. I would pull up one and notice in the days after, a new little shoot scrambling to fill up the recently vacated one. Probably this was due more to the great quantity of seeds my friend dumped on the ground, but it felt magical and my respect for the radishes went from grudging to whole-hearted, even if they were driving me a little crazy.

Lemon Pepper Roasted Radishes

Why didn't I just dispose of the radishes, clear out the patch, leave them to the slugs? Why did I tend them, pick them, prepare them when still they ranked somewhere around durian and dental appointments in my book? Again, it was the magic of the garden. The radishes started to seem like a proverb, a truth I should come to see, a lesson to learn--something about making peace with what's there in front of you and making the best of it. Maybe it's the economy, maybe it's adulthood, but the radishes solidified a sense for me that nothing should be easy come, easy go. There's something relevant in the radish.

Radish greens soup, not recommended

So, I dutifully ate radishes. Everyday, I put radishes in my salads. Tiring of that, I roasted them with lemon juice, olive oil and pepper, which is pretty darn good. Getting generous, I started using the greens too. I made a terrible soup, tried to sneak a handful into sauteed greens here and there, tentatively tried them in a salad, offered them to my guinea pigs and finally decided that they made fine compost. In life, you can only do your best.

Garden Giardiniera: pickled cauliflower, cucumber,
green tomato, hatch chili, carrot and radish

What seemed like virtue in making use of all of the radishes soon faded into simple fact. This is what we do. Food grows, we eat it or store it and eat it later, then it grows again and we do the same. I wasn't sure I could be more respectful of my food or more seasonally aware, but in trying to fill my days only with food from the garden and CSA farm-share or farmer's market, I got past the highlights: tomatoes, corn, peaches, apples, squash and got into everything--were these the last borlotti beans? The first russet apples? Are the radishes done for the season?

Canned Giardiniera

A natural extension of gardening is canning and the radishes were first to prompt me in this direction as I put up jars of spicy Giardiniera, an Italian mixed vegetable pickle. It's all part of the effort to preserve that moment, even into darkest winter, when you pulled vegetables out of soft, warm earth. Even I will enjoy those radishes then, if not as much as the grapes from the arbor preserved in jams and jellies or the tomatoes in the sauce that will speak to all the best of August, but still. I grew them, saved them, will eat them, will be (if only moderately) nourished by something I had complete control over every step of the way.

Left to right: watermelon radish, black radish

I knew that things had changed between me and radishes forever when last week at the farmer's market, I exclaimed over a striking black root vegetable. It was dark as Mordor and deeply, finely textured as an elephant. I wanted it before I knew what it was, and it was, of course, a radish. Next to it was another small basket of dingy pink radishes. I bought both.

I had been weeks since I had a radish, and after months of them, where once I would have simply been glad of a reprieve, I was nostalgic and they, beautiful. So there it is, peace with radishes and a deeply felt experience as a grower. For next year, I have saved the seeds of these radishes and will plant them--a few of them-- without holding a single grudge.

I know it must seem like bad form to come back from an unintentionally long blogging hiatus with an all radish review, but they have been on my mind. Rest assured that there are desserts and treats a plenty in the future. Thanks for your patience and kind words while I've been away. I really appreciate them and am looking forward to repaying you in posts that won't even mention the word "radish."

Strawberry Season

2009-06-16T15:14:00.011-05:00

My mom called me last week to tell me she'd eaten the first of the berries from her newly planted patch. "It was amazing," she sighed, "like they used to be when you were young." While I can't say for sure how good store-bought strawberries were when I was a kid, I do know that 20-some years of agribusiness hasn't done the strawberry any favors. Typically, they are as big as they are bland, streaked with white inside and dry as a sun-baked bone. They contain only the barest hint of what they could be were they ripened to a bright red by the sun, picked in season and eaten immediately.

fresh picked strawberries in the sun

Craigie on Main, a local restaurant, makes an admirable proclamation on their menu, "sorry, no tomatoes til August." It's an acknowledgment of the fact that local tomatoes eaten in season are pretty much the only tomatoes worth serving and eating. While it might seem sad to not have a tomato at any other time of the year, it turns that moment in which local tomatoes are available into a celebration of the perfection to be found in eating locally and seasonally. It's in that spirit that I also advocate a "sorry, no strawberries 'til June" position, but you know what? It's June!

picking in the field

This is the strawberry moment for New England. The fields are full of juicy red fruit, ready to tumble from the stem into an outstretched hand. And that's just what they did on a recent trip out to Western Massachusetts where we spent the morning picking.

my first strawberry in the garden

Even the plants in my newly inherited community garden plot are bearing fruit, despite being uncared for over the winter. Next year I expect they will be even more plentiful, but this year they are good only for a quick garden snack, which is probably fine since I had so many other berries to deal with from the picking trip.

strawberry mint canapé eaten in situ, dirty hands and all

There's little that can improve upon the experience of a perfectly ripe strawberry, heavy with sun-warmed juice, but a freshly plucked mint leaf is a nice touch, the cool sharpness contrasting with subtle sweet-tart warmth.

rosemary orange shortcake with strawberries in syrup and vegan whipped cream

If you do insist on messing about with these perfect berries though, I can't think of many better ways than to go with the classic strawberry shortcake. Of course, I really can't help but mess about, which is how this one-off shortcake was born. Thinking of the natural affinity between strawberries and oranges and a less obvious connection between berries and astringent herbs, I employed my orange-rosemary sugar to make spelt biscuits with lots of flavor and a little more substance than usual, but with all the flaky tender-crumbed charm of a standard shortcake. Instead of macerating the strawberries with sugar, a process usually employed to soften the berries slightly and make them give up some of their juices, I tossed the already juicy and soft berries with a strawberry syrup, made with instruction from the new and wonderful book, The Joy of Jams, Jellies and Other Sweet Preserves.

Moscato d'Asti and strawberry syrup

The syrup is a simple matter of macerating the berries with sugar and letting them sit overnight before cooking them down, pureeing and straining the mixture. It yields a gorgeous thick syrup that is purely, deliciously full of strawberry flavor. It's wonderful over waffles and refreshing mixed into sparkling water or sparkling wine (I recommend Moscato d'Asti) for a fun brunch drink that mixes things up from the traditional mimosa.

Grand Marnier: blended cognacs with orange essence

Speaking of tradition, it's as good as written law around here that when there are fresh, local strawberries on hand there must also be strawberry shortcake. So, we had back to back shortcake. The second time 'round though I needed it to be an easily transported dessert to bring to a party. Cake form seemed like the perfect way to go, all assembled and easy to head out with. Playing on the orange tones of my first orange-rosemary shortcake, I incorporated some Grand Marnier to lend a sweet citrus flavor to the whipped cream. Also, instead of a plain vanilla bean cake, I made a rustic cornmeal cake to add pleasant texture and sweetness from the fresh milled corn.

cornmeal cake with Grand Marnier vegan whipped cream and fresh berries

One note though, as pretty as it is to have the green tops on the strawberries topping this cake, it's a total suckers move and I implore you to resist it! I can't tell you how many ways in which I should have known better, but the beauty of the berries with the tops still on conspired to drag me down as I opted, thoughtlessly, for aesthetics over eating. A choice that meant I later had to sit, shamefaced, as my friends picked berries out of the mess of whipped cream to remove the tops, which of course they couldn't enjoyably eat. Sigh.

strawberry rhubarb pie with cornmeal pâte sucrée

I tried to make it up to them though with my favorite pie, strawberry rhubarb. Following the thought about cornmeal and strawberries, which worked so well in the cornmeal shortcake, I made a tender pâte sucrée with cornmeal and coconut oil instead of margarine or oil. The coconut was a very mild flavor influence on the end result and worked surprisingly well in the crust which was wonderfully flaky, light and tenderly sweet against the tart fruit filling.

fresh strawberry jam filled rambutan mochi with Thai basil sauce and strawberry powder

Last year I served my strawberry rhubarb pie with basil ice cream, but this year my basil is not incredibly bountiful. My lemon verbena could swallow up the yard, but the basil is sort of a no-go. It's sad. There is enough to work smaller projects with though, so I made a dessert that caught my eye in Johnny Iuzzini's Dessert FourPlay a couple months ago. In the original version, Iuzzini fills strawberry mochi with strawberry rhubarb compote and serves it with basil fluid gel. I took some liberties to make the dessert a little faster to assemble and different in flavor, pairing my fresh strawberry jam filling with a freeze-dried rambutan mochi (reasoning that if I find an affinity between strawberries and lychees, rambutans would work as well) and serving it with Thai basil sauce. My mochi technique could use some work (I blame the leakage on my imperfect motor control with a hand still swollen from carpal tunnel release surgery) but overall, I adored this light little dessert and its intriguing Southeast Asian flavors.

chocolate spiced baby banana pudding with strawberries

A more straightforward, classic pairing between strawberries and chocolate was something I noticed had fallen by the wayside this season. I guess I've been taking my chocolate pretty straight these days and have been in a particular rut with the super dry, dark and lovely 84% Theo single origin bar from Ghana. So good. But I digress. Feeling that these amazing strawberries could make chocolate even more magical, I whipped up a very random pudding of organic baby bananas, dark chocolate, anise, chilies, cinnamon, nutmeg and espresso salt, sweetened with date syrup and topped with fresh berries. It was meant as a quick treat of no consequence but was so good, I'm pledged to make it again and actually write down every element of the recipe since several friends have proclaimed it's one of the best things ever, period.

breakfast with berries and nibs

After finally getting my strawberry and chocolate fix, I realized that I'd sort of been enjoying the two together all along in my breakfast bowl. Homemade cocoa nib granola with fresh berries isn't quite chocolate dipped strawberries, but it's more than satisfying at seven am.

almond crust mini tarts with fresh fruit, nibs and lemon verbena

Thinking about how nicely nibs complemented strawberries, I sprinkled a few Taza chocolate covered nibs into my mini tarts. They provided a nice bittersweet crunch against the fruit and buttery almond crust.

almond strawberry cheesecake

Almonds are a natural complement to strawberries. Their rich sweetness and lightly bitter edge are perfect against tart berry notes. And there's a reason why strawberry cheesecake is so popular; sweet tangy cheese has its richness both cut slightly and complemented by each bite of berry. So, an almond crusted and amaretto spiked cheesecake topped with fresh strawberries glazed with hot strawberry syrup and sprinkled with almond slices seemed like just the thing.

whole wheat English muffin with farmer's cheese and strawberry rhubarb jam

I've had a lot of semi-successful vegan cheese-ish substances around lately as I've been experimenting to find one that really suits me. None of them are perfect, but with a good amount of fiddling, they've all turned into tasty additions to desserts and ice cream bases. The mixture that I turned into cheesecake was also spun off into a nice mellow farmer's cheese that went wonderfully with fresh strawberry rhubarb jam (again from the Joy of Jams, but with much less sugar than called for).

bagels fresh out of the oven

In fact, I made several jams from the new book: plain strawberry, strawberry rhubarb and strawberry kiwi. With such deliciously fresh tasting jams are hanging around the house, it seemed pretty much obvious that I needed to make a delicious delivery mechanism for them. So when King Aurthur flour had a free-shipping deal, I refilled my stock of organic high gluten flour and made a batch of bagels from the Bread Baker's Apprentice, some coated into sesame seeds and some streaked with pasilla chili powder and topped with chili lime Hawaiian sea salt.

brunch at Dara's with everyone's delicious contributions: homemade bagels and jam, fennel seitan, chicory in tahini garlic sauce, roasted potatoes, beet orzo and melon with mint

Toasted and spread equally with fresh made jam and strawberry cream cheese, these were a delicious promise that the joy of strawberries in season can last as long as the jars of jam do, even if we've only got another week or two to enjoy them fresh.

Homemade Flavored Sugars (Are Sweet!)

2009-05-22T08:17:00.004-05:00

With a shelf full of flavored salts, I had to balance the scales with some sweetness and make flavored sugars. They too are simple, delicious and handy to have on hand for flavoring coffee, tea or rimming cocktail glasses. And, of course, they're great for baking, decorating and any other occasion something sweet and special is called for.

Truly though, these beautiful little jars of flavorful sugars are only really sweet if you put some thought into where your sugar comes from and under what conditions it is grown, harvested and produced. There are few food products that have been, and sadly continue to be, so tied to brutality and environmental destruction the world over. Throughout the Caribbean, the South Pacific, South Asia and the Americas, there is a legacy of abuse in the sugar industry. A recent documentary, The Price of Sugar, illustrates a contemporary example of this in the Dominican Republic. Though it has a little more missionary zeal than I'm personally comfortable with, it's a useful starting place for understanding some of what goes on to create this taken for granted product. I used to work with a really talented Haitian cake decorator, who confirmed a lot of the details in this documentary and it's the kind of confirmation that makes your blood run cold.

Unfortunately, the conditions sugar production haven't yet seen the same rise in consumer consciousness as chocolate and coffee, but there are a variety of cooperatives and companies putting forth more ethical efforts and it's worth reading labels in the store or online to find out more ethical options available to you.

Environmentally, there's also little discussion of the dire impact cane sugar plantations have on water levels. Considering that even by conservative estimates (from the World Bank) we are soon to face severe global water shortages, the fact that sugar cane slurps up water like so many dry sponges, is something we should all be thinking about. For me, this means that I consume less sugar personally, resign myself to paying more what I do consumer and hold onto the abstract value added (increased human dignity and environmental consciousness) in that higher price tag. So when I do consume sugar, I want it to be really worth it, truly experienced. These flavored sugars have helped renew my consciousness of the pleasure to be had in a little of the sweet stuff.

In a close race, this sugar is the narrow winner for me. It's sweet, floral, roasty and toasty with dried vanilla and toasted barley. The barley is a summer staple for making ice tea and I buy it by the pound at a Korean market near my house. It's warm, earthy, woody and rich, delightfully refreshing when steeped in cold water and surprisingly at home with the floral bakery sweetness of vanilla bean. I always save my beans to get double, triple or more use out of them, even after they've been scraped. They can be used to make extracts or flavor liqueurs. Used beans can employed in the easiest of flavored sugars, created by the simple action of popping them into a sugar canister and letting them impart flavor to the crystals; and when they are dried out from the sugar, a quick grind produces vanilla bean powder, handy for flavoring baked goods or candies.

Though the barley vanilla bean sugar is great in coffee and I can't wait to use it in pursuit of a brittle or chewy caramel, I've been in rapturous adoration of it sprinkled on bread that's been lightly brushed with olive oil and then toasted. It reminds me of the cinnamon sugar toast of my youth, but better and much of the eye-rolling goodness of a fresh, warm doughnut. Just remember to sprinkle the sugar before toasting to get that slight caramelization of the sugar.

Barley Vanilla Bean Sugar

1 dried, scraped vanilla bean
2 tablespoons toasted barley
1 cup sugar

Cut the dried vanilla bean into half inch pieces, for easier grinding. Grind the barley and vanilla bean in spice mill or coffee grinder until fine. Stir into sugar and store in a sealed container.

I haven't gotten fully back to recreational baking yet, barring a couple necessary seasonal treats (lilac cupcakes, strawberry rhubarb shortcake, and an emergency pan of brownies), but when my hand no longer bothers me, one of the first things on my agenda is to make blueberry lemon cornmeal muffins and top them with these beautiful purple-blue crystals of lavender blueberry sugar. This would also be a gorgeous sprinkling over scones. Though I don't take sugar in my tea, a friend loved this sugar stirred into a white tea, and I imagine other sweet tea takers would also enjoy it in mellow, floral teas.

Blueberry Lavender Sugar

1/2 cup freeze dried blueberries
1 tablespoon dried culinary lavender
1 cup sugar

In a spice mill or coffee grinder, process blueberries and lavender until fine and powdery. Mix well with sugar and store in an air tight container. Use the packet of desiccant from the freeze dried blueberries or pilfer one from an empty vitamin bottle to prevent clumping.

Rambutans are a remarkable fruit from Southeast Asia that are similar in texture to the lychee, which seems to have found more of a market in the U.S. than the poor old rambutan has. Perhaps this is because fresh it looks rather daunting with its whorls and spikes.

It is incredible delicious though and can sometimes be found fresh here, though they are quite expensive. More commonly, you'll find them canned in heavily sweetened syrups or, more recently, freeze dried at Trader Joes. Eaten as is I find freeze dried rambutan fairly to moderately repulsive, mostly because of the texture. Blech. However, ground up and stirred into sugars or other mixes, they impart some of the magic of their elusive flavor handily. A hint of rose brings out some of the floral tones nicely too and together they make a great complement to strawberries. I used a sprinkle of it on a sweet biscuit topped with rosewater rhubarb and strawberry compote and think it would also be great sprinkled across the lattice work of a strawberry rhubarb pie.

Rambutan Rose Sugar

5 freeze dried rambutans
1 tablespoon dried organic rose petals
1 cup sugar

In a spice mill or coffee grinder, process rambutan and rose petals until fine and powdery. Mix well with sugar and store in an air tight container. Use the packet of desiccant from the freeze dried blueberries or pilfer one from an empty vitamin bottle to prevent clumping.

If you ever enjoy a cup of coffee or espresso, this is a must make sugar: spicy, warm, rich and decadent; it's incredibly delicious.

Mixed with a higher ratio of cocoa powder, it would also make a great chocolate drink. It's best with fresh ground spices, but pre-ground are good too.

Masala Chocolate Sugar

1 cup sugar
1 tablespoon cocoa powder
1 teaspoon Vietnamese cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon ground anise or fennel seed

Mix all ingredients together well and store in an air tight container.

I've had a complete re-orientation to anise in the past year or so. Prior to my turn around on the matter, I wouldn't touch it with a stick, now I simply cannot get enough. In the inestimable words of Martin Gore: just like a rainbow, you know it sets me free. I love it in baked goods and all over fresh fruit, especially oranges and melon. So, of course, I'm all over this sugar, particularly when espresso is in the works. This is one of those sugars that is so very simple, you might just wonder why not add the sugar and spice separately? Of course, you could, but having it already assembled makes things much easier to dip into for a little teaspoon here or there.

Toasted Anise Sugar

2 tablespoons whole anise seed
1 cup sugar

Lightly toast anise seeds until fragrant in a dry skillet over low heat. Cool and grind to a fine powder. Mix with sugar and store in an air tight container.

For breakfast, I often enjoy unsweetened soy yogurt with a little fruit. Sometimes, when the fruit isn't very sweet, I want to add a little sweeter of some sort. Anise sugar on top of sour oranges in unsweetened soy yogurt makes my day.

Speaking of oranges, that very orange that was supremed for my morning meal had its zest donated to the cause of this rosemary orange sugar. Slightly sour and astringent, but floral, fruity, earthy and sweet, I love this sugar and look forward to using it for muffin tops and on shortcakes. It also serves nicely to flavorfully macerate fruit and would make a spectacular cocktail glass rimmer.

Oh, and it's good with chocolate. Who knew? I had an emergency craving for brownies and had to whip up this pan which I made with half rosemary orange sugar and turned into extravagant brownie sundaes topped with chocolate ice cream, orange segments, strawberry rose compote and chocolate shavings. Again, for baking purposes, one might wonder why it would be worth it to use a pre-flavored sugar instead of just adding in the additional elements fresh. I wondered too and wanted to try it out. My opinion is that it definitely had a more developed and deep flavor than it would have if we'd put fresh rosemary and orange zest into the brownie batter, probably the results of light toasting to dehydrate the orange and herb and the infusion of the sugar by these ingredients over time.

Rosemary Orange Sugar

1 large organic orange's worth of zest
2 tablespoons fresh rosemary
1 cup sugar

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. Place the zest, rosemary and sugar in a small food processor bowl and process until fine and ingredients are all well distributed. Spread the sugar out in a baking pan and toast for about 20 minutes or until zest and herb fragments all seem completely dry. Cool and store in an air tight container.

Enjoy and tune in next time for some recent extracts and infusions I've been making!

Do It Yourself Flavored Salts

2009-05-13T16:42:00.007-05:00

When I was a kid I was a fiend for salt. My parents were always after me to go easy on the salt shaker. Concerned about my youthful over-indulgence and convinced that it was more the action of shaking the salt than the salt itself that I enjoyed, they slyly equipped me with my very own salt shaker...filled primarily with dried rice. It sure sounded like salt, but nothing came out. Took me a while to put the pieces together, but ultimately I think I did, not just because they suddenly started letting me shake to my heart's content, but because I really did love salt and missed its presence. Years later I paid them back for this trick by insisting we all enjoy 13 discs worth of Mark Kurlansky's history of salt on a very long car trip from New York to Atlanta.

Salt is fundamentally something our bodies need and our tongues desire. It's something we don't often consider liking or not because it's simply an assumed feature of daily eating. In recent years though much more attention has been paid to the many and varied varieties of salt avaliable and their different flavors, textures and applications. From flaky and tender finishing salts to thick jagged gray crystals, there are salts of all sorts from lakes, oceans, mines and brines all over the world. And for those who can't be satisfied even with that wide world of natural variety, flavored salts have also been surging in popularity.

With no parental oversight of my salt intake, I've been a steady collector of salts over the years and have sometimes even purchased flavored salts--most notably my favorite espresso salt, with smoked salt coming in a close second. In the back of my mind though there has always been a little voice that wondered why I didn't just make my own flavored salts. After all, it couldn't really be that hard. And guess what? It isn't. Good news for salt lovers and, really, for anyone who likes to add a flavorful flourish to finish their food. Simple grains and greens, pasta, tofu, plain old toasted nuts, homemade chips or toasted pita, anything you might salt can be completely transformed with a dash of flavored salt.

While my right hand is still coming back up to full capacity following surgery, I've been trying to be good and scratch my kitchen experimentation itch by doing things easily done without taxing my right hand. Since my left hand can operate a food processor with ease, these flavored salts came together quickly for me and are a fun, easy project for anyone with a few spare minutes.

The basic idea is as simple as salt+flavor+stir+store. It can get a little more complex with the addition of slightly wet or oily ingredients like citrus zest, fresh herbs or nuts, but only in that they need to be dehydrated in an oven for the sake of storage. You can also complicate things a little by matching different salts to different flavor add-ins, but any course sea salt that you enjoy will work perfectly. The following six salts were my favorites and would all make great gifts for any salt aficionados in your life.

Lime zest, aji amarillo and cayenne Hawaiian pink salt. This salt was a Christmas gift and it has been one of my favorites. It's crunchy but light, not hard or rough edged and it's subtle with just the right level of saltiness for me. The salt is pink because it is harvested from alaea, red clay rich in iron oxide found in the Hawaiian sea. Imagining uses for this salt ranging from finishing chocolates to topping homemade torilla chips to rimming spicy margarita glasses, I thought the pink color would alert people to its heat and look nice when combined with the yellow and red chilies.

1/2 cup Hawaiian pink sea salt
zest of one lime
2 teaspoons aji amarillo powder (or mellow chili powder of your choice)
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Combine ingredients and toast in an oven set to 300 degrees for 20 minutes or until zest is dry.

Every Meyer lemon I get lately I'm sure will be my last for the year, so it was with joy at the thought of extending my ability to enjoy them that I made this citrusy-sweet salt with sel gris, a gray sea salt from France that is harvested from magnesium rich marshes, which impart a distinct flavor to this rough and boldly flavorful salt. This salt is particularly good on asparagus and really set off a slow-dried tomato and roasted garlic whole wheat pizza.

1/2 cup fleur de sel
zest of one and a half Meyer lemons

Combine ingredients and toast in an oven set to 300 degrees for 20 minutes or until zest is dry.

It always seems like a little shame to grind up star anise, argueably one of the most beautiful spices in the world, but in the name of deliciousness, every once in a while it's ok to sacrifice beauty. This salt, made with ground star anise, vanilla bean, Himalayan salt, as well as cocoa nibs, was really designed with dessert applications in mind and I can't wait to see what will come out of it. So far I've only tried it by dipping some squares of chocolate in, but it has a lot of promise.

There's a lot of (sometimes bizarre) marketing bluster about the health benifits of Himalayan salt. I don't know about all that, but is pretty cool that this salt is harvested from a primordial sea which evaporated over the ages and left salt behind in the Himalayan Mountains.

1/2 cup Himalayan pink sea salt
2 teaspoons cocoa nibs
2 star anise
1 dried, used vanilla bean
(reserved and naturally dehydrated after having been scraped for seeds)

Cut vanilla bean into 1/2 inch peices for better processing. Combine all ingredients in a food processor or spice mill and grind until fine.

Murray River salt is probably one of the first experimental salts I ever purchased, in great part because it shared a name with the Archives where I worked. Luckily, being a wonderful finishing salt, perfect for light seasoning, I had better reasons to purchase it again and again. The salt is harvested from brines in the Murray River basin, which are fed by melt off from the Austrailian Alps and occupied by an algae that gives the salt its distinctive color. It has such a dramatically different texture than most other salts, reminicent of delicate ice chips, like flat little flakes in peachy apricot pink that melt quickly and evenly on the tongue. Owing to its mellowness and sweet childhood tea-party inspired coloring, I thought to combine it with thyme fresh from the garden and lavender, dried from last year to create a kind of Provence-style salt that would work well with spring time vegetable dishes and pastas. This morning though I actually used it in my annual bake-off of lilac cupcakes, flavored with an allergy-attack load of lilacs from the garden, and it worked beautifully. (You can see a pre-blog picture of the cupcakes here.)

The last bit of my smoked Spanish sea salt from Barcelona had me thinking about the Arabic legacy in Spain, inspired by a tangent in Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth, which I just finished. So this salt became a smoked za'atar flavor, mixing the basic components of dried thyme, oregano marjoram and toasted sesame seeds with a little cardamom, cumin and fennel seed. This would be the perfect salt to serve with olive oil, bread and mezze like hummus, baba ganoush or other little dips and salads, or to finish a flat bread with.

1/2 cup smoked sea salt
1 tablespoon sesame seeds
2 teaspoons dried herbs of your choice
2 teaspoons whole spices of your choice

Toast sesame seeds and whole spices. Cool and process with dried herbs until a smooth powder has formed. Combine with salt, mixing well.

The most experimental of my salts was probably this marcona almond salt. Inspired by the salted almond Mexicano round from Taza, which I can't stop eating, I've been thinking about a salted marcona chocolate dessert. Marconas are terribly addictive almonds native to Spain that have the most buttery texture and sweet, delicate almond flavor imaginable. They're at their best served warm after being sauteed lightly in olive oil and sprinkled with salt, so I thought this salt would work well in my pursuit of a warm chocolate dessert that captures that salty, rich almond flavor. Because it seemed like something that could also be a pretty finishing touch on a truffle, I wanted the salt to be truly beautiful. For that I turned to my Balinese salt which has big, bold, crystal clear grains. These grains are actually hollow, an effect gained by the winds that blow over the brines on rainy days in Bali, which gives them a lovely, delicate crunch that goes well with the density of the marconas.

1/2 cup Balinese course "pyramid" salt
3 tablespoons marcona almonds

Grind the marcona almond to a fine powder. Mix with salt and toast 15-20 minutes in a 300 degree oven until dry.

And that's it for salts! Stay tuned for flavored sugars, extracts and drinks.

Taza Chocolate: Sustainable, Stone Ground, Bean to Bar in Somerville

2009-05-05T13:41:00.012-05:00

If you even know of Somerville, Massachusetts, a densely populated little city often overlooked by out-of-towners who, when they venture across the river from Boston, flock to our more collegiate neighbor, it's unlikely that you conceive of it as a center of chocolate revolution.

But in this town noted for its historical rebellions, in the shadow of Prospect Hill where one of the earliest American flags flew, Taza Chocolate is staging a subtle resistance against business as usual in the American chocolate industry: developing deep relationships with their growers, paying direct trade prices for beans, creatively circumventing obstacles to growth while remaining true to their ethically-minded origins, and making a chocolate that takes its cues from Mexican traditions rather than dominant European paradigms. If it seems to be overstating the case to call this a revolution, well, ok, but it is part of a significant shift in the world of American chocolate production, a shift you can see happening in the transformation Dominican cacao beans into a singularly unique chocolate at the Taza factory, just down the road from my house.

There is always something amazing about coming to understand the processes involved in making something as mysterious as chocolate. Chock it up to my status as a child of 1980s America, but it actually makes me kind of emotional to see real food really being made from real ingredients by real people. Sometimes I feel as though my whole conscious life has been spent resolving an abstract sense that bags and boxes of food spring fully formed from grocery store shelves with knowledge of the realities of ingredient growth, transportation, manufacturing and marketing. So when I think about land, plants, human knowledge and hard work becoming solidified in something that could be so easily be taken for granted as a delicious, but trifling, morsel, it makes me feel passionate, and reverent. I feel that way about my garden and the vegetables from my CSA and the artisan breads I buy and I've felt that way about chocolate. I'll admit though, I never expected to feel so moved in a chocolate factory. No, it was my experience in BriBri, Costa Rica that I had planned to hold as a pinnacle of this feeling, but something about experiencing the Taza factory on a recent behind-the-scenes tour got me in that same emotional place, and somewhere different too because in it I saw the possibility for maintaining this kind of reverence even within a factory and a growing company, too often the final resting places for respect and dedicated involvement in the creation of products that have meaning beyond themselves.

Perhaps reverence is an enduring possibility in the Taza factory because the machines are not simply hulking industrial beasts, but lovingly salvaged tools. The bing cherry colored antique roaster, reconditioned in Europe and installed, bit by gorgeous bit, in Somerville stands near the dramatic, if weathered, winnowing machine which was found in an abandoned chocolate factory in the Dominican Republic. Each enable greater production without the sacrifice of story, history or art.

At the core of Taza's unique texture is the molino, a Mexican millstone that is used at Taza to grind the cacao and sugar. For each different ingredient, a different "dressing" is required for the stone. At Taza, co-founder Alex Whimore hand-dresses the molino, a skill he developed studying in Oaxaca, Mexico. The stone grinding produces a more textured final product, a result that is further emphasized by Taza's decision not to conch their chocolate, a step the majority of Western chocolate producers would not even classify as optional because it is the mixing and refining process that creates the silky smooth chocolate that is supposed to be a marker of greatness.

The stones are powered by more contemporary motors, but the process is age-old. The cacao nibs (roasted, crushed and winnowed cacao bean fragments) are ground into chocolate liquor, a thick and bitter liquid that is mixed with sugar and further ground with the molino to create chocolate. Additional flavoring agents like vanilla, cinnamon, chilies or almonds might be added at this point, or for the smoother Taza bars, a bit of cocoa butter will be incorporated to smooth out the more rustic texture of the Mexicano Taza chocolate rounds.

The chocolate is then tempered in a large automated vat that moves the chocolate through a precise set of temperature points and then holds it at the perfect point to produce glossy, evenly textured chocolate. Though there is a certain French-flavored poetry to tempering chocolate on a marble slab, which is how I was taught to do it, I have to admit to a powerful envy at meeting the large tempering machine at Taza. It really wouldn't fit in my kitchen though.

Here's another point at which to appreciate the creativity and uniqueness of the machinery at Taza. This machine, which drops pre-measured glops of tempered chocolate into the molds, is essentially a modded-out doughnut depositor which would shoot out dough into boiling oil. Using my good hand (this was soon after my carpal tunnel surgery--I'm doing really well now!), I maneuvered the mold under the chocolate dropping from this machine and carefully filled its cavities with freshly made chocolate.

It takes a lot of molds to meet the demand for Taza chocolate, there were racks and racks of them for both the bars and the unique Mexicano rounds, as well as large molds to produce the bulk blocks sold to restaurants, cafes and bakeries.

Once the chocolate sets in the molds, it is turned out on racks to await wrapping.

Again, this kind of a child of the 1980s thing, but when I think of factories and packaging, I never fail to think of some behind the scenes Sesame Street video, like the peanut butter factory one, where machines and conveyor belts get the job done. So, it came as a shock to me that all the bars at Taza are hand wrapped, a task which, if you want it to look really good, is easier said than done.

Not only are the bars hand wrapped though, they are wrapped in beautiful paper printed by Taza's neighbor, Albertine Press. On the day of our tour, press owner Shelley Barandes demonstrated how the letterpress is used, inking up a machine and then letting us take a whirl on it to create our own labels for the chocolate we'd just molded. Not all the bars were wrapped though, because who could resist trying some of the fresh made chocolate? It was strikingly different: aggressively fruity and bold with a notably soft and rich texture that melted instantly, leaving the chocolate crystals of sugar behind just a little longer to linger on the tongue.

Aaron Foster, the voice of Taza on Twitter, noted that three day old chocolate was his particular favorite, and he has reason to know, what with access to all sorts of chocolate at every possible day old. So, I took him at his word and didn't crack my bar until day three. Luckily, I had diversions from other Taza chocolate in the intervening days, including my favorites, the Mexicano rounds of guadillo chili and salted almond. Oh, and day three is awesome, but I probably need to taste more to find my favorite day.

I also got a little chocolate fix from a series of pitchers of cacao tea. While Alex Whitmore explained how Taza's reconditioned winnowing machine separated out the cocoa nibs from the skins of the beans, he mentioned several uses for the skins. In addition to donating them to local gardening efforts and farmers, Taza sells some to tea and beer producers, who use them to impart a subtle flavor to some of their blends. Since summer to me means a ready pitcher of cold barley tea and we've had some mysteriously summer-like weather lately, I immediately wondered if the skins could be used in the same way as the roasted barley. Begging a few handfuls off Aaron, I set home to find out. A full pitcher of cool, filtered water, a quarter cup of cacao bean skins and about three hours in the fridge and I had my answer. It works like a charm. If you like the earthy, musky chocolate flavor of cocoa nibs and cold barley tea, you'll definitely like this. It works with cocoa nibs too, though they seem to want a longer steeping time and the flavor is a little less delicate. Perfect for a light and refreshing drink that just hints at chocolate flavors.

For those who want more than a hint, you can try these Mexican chocolate cupcakes made with Taza's chocolate. Or, just eat it out of hand, it tastes even better when you think about all the work and care that goes into each bar. Local folks can catch Alex and Larry, founders of Taza, giving a talk about their delicious chocolate and building an ethical company at the Cambridge Center on May 13th. Details here.

Taza Mexicano Guajillo Cupcakes with Whipped Ganache
makes one dozen vegan cupcakes or 1 8” layer cake

Ingredients::

77 grams (one package) Taza Chocolate Mexicano Guajillo, coarsely chopped
1 cup (125 grams) all purpose unbleached flour
1/4 cup (22 grams) Dutch processed cocoa powder
1 teaspoon (4.5 grams) baking powder
1/2 teaspoon (2.3 grams) baking soda
2 tablespoons (14 grams) masa harina or cornflour
1 teaspoon (2 grams) cinnamon
¼-1 teaspoon ground guajillo chili or pinch of cayanne, optional, depending on desired heat level
1 cup (240 grams) unsweetened soymilk (Vitasoy brand is recommended)
1 tablespoon (15 grams) fresh lemon juice
3/4 cup (165 grams) piloncillo or packed dark brown sugar
1/4 cup (55 grams) canola oil
2 teaspoons (8.7 grams) vanilla extract or ½ Mexican vanilla bean, scraped
1/2 (3 grams) teaspoon sea salt

to top:
one recipe whipped ganache frosting
¼ cup Taza cocoa nibs or crushed raw cacao bean or shaved chocolate

Prepare ::

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Fill a medium-sized saucepan less than half way with water and bring to a simmer. Reduce heat so water is steaming but not boiling. Place a bowl with a lip wider than the saucepan over the steaming water. Add coarsely chopped Mexicano Guajillo to the bowl and stir gently until fully melted. Note that the Mexicano discs will not melt as smoothly as some other chocolates and may seem slightly grainy. Remove from heat and set aside, taking care not to allow any water to enter the bowl.

In a medium-sized bowl, sift the all purpose unbleached flour, Dutch processed cocoa powder, baking powder and baking soda. Whisk in the masa harina or cornflour, cinnamon and chili powder, if using.

In another medium-sized bowl, whisk the unsweetened soymilk and lemon juice together until mixture has thickened and is foamy. Add the piloncillo or brown sugar, oil, vanilla extract and sea salt. Whisk vigorously for about one minute.

Pour the wet mixture into the dry and whisk until smooth. Add melted Mexicano Guajillo to the batter and whisk until well combined. Scoop into a prepared cupcake pan or pour into prepared cake pan. For cupcakes, bake 20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. For cake, bake 35-40 minutes. Cool on a wire rack for 5-10 minutes before turning cake out of the pan or removing cupcakes. Allow cake to finish cooling completely before frosting with whipped ganache and sprinkling with cocoa nibs or chopped cacao bean.

Whipped Ganache Frosting

Ingredients::

170 grams (2 bars) Taza 60% or 70% dark chocolate, finely chopped
3/4 cup unsweetened soy milk (Vitasoy brand is recommended)
¼ cup agave syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ teaspoon cinnamon
pinch of sea salt

Prepare ::

Place finely chopped Taza chocolate in the bowl of a stand mixer.

In a small saucepan, heat the unsweetened soymilk until bubbles begin to form at the edges of the pan. Stir in the agave syrup and vanilla and immediately pour over the chopped chocolate. Let stand for 30 seconds. Add cinnamon and sea salt, stirring until mixture is smooth and consistent in color and texture. Scrape down sides as needed to fully incorporate all ingredients. Let stand at room temperature until mixture has thickened.

Fit mixer with a whisk attachment and whisk mixture until light and fluffy. Use frosting promptly or it will become stiff and hard to work with. If making ahead of time, the frosting can be stored and beaten until soft just prior to use.

A note on ingredients:

Masa harina is the flour made from corn that has been soaked in water and lime to soften it and improve digestibility. It is used widely to make tortillas and tamales. Cornflour is produced without this soaking step and without the lime. They are typically not interchangeable products, but in this recipe, because called for in such a small amount and is used primarily for texture, they may be used in place of one another without much difference. Masa harina is sold in most well-stocked grocery stores as well as specialty and ethnic markets.

Piloncillo is a flavorful, unrefined cane sugar commonly used in Mexico. It is typically sold in a hard, molded block. To use, simply grate. Brown sugar may be used to substitute, but do look for a designation of “dark” which means it contains more molasses than other brown sugar. Alternatively, you might add a teaspoon-tablespoon of molasses to the brown sugar. Piloncillo can be found in specialty and ethnic markets and spice shops.

Guajillo powder can be hard to find; it is more common as a whole dried pepper. Simply grind the whole pepper in a spice mill for fresh homemade powder instantly.

Cupcake a Day

2009-04-23T15:52:00.012-05:00

There's a pathological impulse that leads to excessive complaining about the personal details of one's life on the internet. Somehow, it's a natural forum. I'm bravely attempting to spare you all that. So I'll only mention briefly my recent carpal tunnel surgery, the resulting discomfort, complications and three week limit on activity, moving immediately to a full-on food porn post featuring 21 recent cupcake experiments: one for each day of my projected recovery period.

They say in jail that you only do two days: the day you go in and the day you come out. I kind of feel jailed, or at least sidelined for this period, but they don't get cupcakes in jail. Or maybe they do. Either way, I wanted to go into my confinement on a bang with this Mexican chocolate cupcake made with stone ground Taza chocolate. This is a new offering from Taza and it's the chocolate I was waiting for from them, perfectly spicy with brash vanilla, a hint of citrus and the wonderful rustic texture Taza's getting famous for. Amped up with a little stone ground cornmeal to echo the Taza texture, a little extra cinnamon and a dusting of crushed cocoa bean and shaved chocolate, this is one of my dream cupcakes.

For day two, something more delicate and restorative. I fell in love with the combination of rose and lychee last summer and have been playing with it ever since. Chopped lychees and rose petal jam cupcakes topped with rosewater frosting will do the trick.

Day three is all about comfort and warmth. Turkish Smyrna fig cake with hazelnut coffee buttercream hightop fits the bill.

For four, I need to perk up. A shot of Grand Marnier with the balanced Theo Ivory Coast chocolate makes for a familiar, if fancy, chocolate orange combination that is set off spectacularly with strawberry frosting. During these winter months I've been playing with fruits in their preserved forms more than fresh, trying to honor seasonality while still getting flavor. One thing I discovered was the potential in freeze-dried fruit that I had previously written off for its strange texture. Ground into a powder and incorporated in frostings, creams, chocolates and batters, the fruit flavor comes through with fantastic clarity, fresh and bright tasting.

Day five is time to get some spice back into life. The hints of exotic fruit, tea and spice in this cake really shine with dark brown sugar, sticky with molasses. And the addictive ganache, inspired by Pichet Ong, well that just flat out shines.

Day six belongs to amaretto cream cheese cupcakes with fresh grated cinnamon and toasted almonds. I've been playing with using creamy substances like faux cream cheeses, sour cream, crème fraîche, ricotta and strained yogurt in cake--there is lots of fun potential in it, yielding really tender, rich crumb.

For day seven, I'll continue a four day streak of boozey cupcakes and catch a nip with these black walnut truffle cupcakes with bourbon frosting and chocolate chunks. Black walnuts in and of themselves have a pleasantly rich alcoholic note so it's tricky to find balance with the bourbon, but a little seems to highlight the natural flavors in the nuts.

First day of the second week: blueberry chocolate mousse cupcakes. Again, astronaut-style freeze dried blueberries are powerfully flavorful in this cake batter, accented lightly by a little bit of lavender, dried from my garden last summer. It's nice to be using up the last bits of dried herbs stored from the end of the season as the plants return to life under our mild spring skies.

Day nine goes to the kind of cupcake that got me through the winter. Jaggary (coconut palm sugar) cake with lemongrass frosting and toasted coconut offers flowers and fruit even on the grayest day.

Day ten marks the double digits. Time to celebrate. There's little better than spicy chocolate in my book, but this chili-spiked chocolate cupcake filled with peanut butter mousse, spread with spicy peanut butter frosting and covered in cardamom ganache has the plain old chili and chocolate beat like a dirty rug. It's over the top, sure, but sometimes you need to go there.

Rein it in slightly for eleven, but only just. Super-spiced chocolate pumpkin cupcakes made with heaps of fresh ground cinnamon chips, nutmeg and mace. The pumpkin and liberal quantity of melted chocolate make this a super soft cake that manages to stay airy while still having density in its crumb. The cinnamon chocolate mousse doesn't hurt either.

Day twelve: can't get enough nutmeg. Did you know I grew up nutmeg-less? My dad is allergic to the spice and we never had it in the house. It's only been recently that I've really been gotten into nutmeg and ever since getting a nutmeg grinder I can't be stopped. No more skinning my fingers trying to microplane nutmeg. If you like nutmeg, you need one of these gadgets, they are brilliant. And if you like nutmeg and are using pre-ground, you're in for a major case of love at first sniff when you switch to fresh. Nutmeg looses the majority of its flavor very quickly once ground, so fresh is the way to go. Fresh nutmeg with caramel and chocolate is even better.

Thirteen is a far from unlucky experiment. Making fresh nut milk for baking is easy enough and delicious to boot. Packaged nut milks are so pale in their flavor after you've had fresh. I like cashew milk for baking and it goes really well with South Asian spices like in this garam masala cashew milk chocolate cupcakes with cashew cream coconut frosting.

Two week mark! In addition to playing with "milks," the sugar component to cupcakes is wide open for further exploration. Barley malt has promise, especially in combination with dark, dark chocolate like this Venezulean from Theo. The malt has a more earthy sweetness that can take on the sweet blast of a buttercream and not be overwhelming. A drizzle of cinnamon ganache is just the warm note to top it.

Day fifteen strikes me as a discouraging day. I expect to be feeling really pretty good, but still not quite up to whisking. It's a good day to explore a cupcake I want to work but doesn't quite. I love the scent of cocoa butter and wish there were a really good vegan white chocolate that lots of high quality cocoa butter, real vanilla bean and fair-trade organic sugar. In the absence of this product, I've been making my own, which is not up to snuff and probably never can really be without the proper equipment. Still, I'm exploring the flavors of white chocolate more successfully in forms where it's just a flavor and not an end unto itself. Hence, the white chocolate cupcake.

Sixteen: simple and sweet, with a twist. Chocolate strawberry cupcake with vincotto ganache. I'm enamored of the idea of strawberry and balsamic and it certainly can work, but with vincotto nothing is forced at all. It's a natural affinity that is complex without being demanding.

Day seventeen might be time to take a major shot in the arm. Turkish coffee'll do that trick, so this pistachio cardamom cake with Turkish coffee ganache will be a perfect pick me up.

Keep the healthy fats and protein coming on day eighteen with this lemongrass peanut flour cake with ginger coconut frosting. Peanut flour can be found in many Asian markets, or make your own fresh at home in the food processor, just watch that you don't end up with peanut butter. Gentle pulses and cold nuts help.

Nineteen is so close to the end I can taste it and it tastes like cocoa nibs. After using nut flours in cakes, my thoughts turned to cocoa nibs and I pulverized some to make a course flour, which I used instead of cocoa powder or chocolate. The result is intriguing. It's definitely cacao flavor, not chocolate, but I like that. The sweetness was added back in with hazelnut praline frosting and balance kept by adding a darkly bitter chocolate ganache, hazelnut shards and crushed raw cacao bean.

Day twenty is freedom is on the horizon. Let us welcome it with haiku:

lemon cream cupcakes
raspberry puree frosting
chocolate butterfly

Day twenty-one, three week review and the doctor will release me from my binds! So we end much as we began: guajillo chili chocolate cupcakes with chocolate peanut butter mousse, a final idle decilacy before really getting back to work again.

Sugaring in Spring

2009-04-07T16:49:00.019-05:00

If nothing else, spring in New England is dramatic. Every day shoots are springing up, early color in the form of crocuses, daffodils, forsythia and hyacinth unfurls, greens and herbs wake up, trees bud; the air almost hums with a constant sense of growing. And if it's days of gray rain that make it all happen, well, what else were you going to complain about with neighbors at the bus stop?

first up, crocuses from my garden

Past the observations of pure joy at the flowers coming up and the promise of fresh produce returning to cold New England, it's the trees I keep my eyes on. Though I'd be happy enough living in a hammock beachside with only palms for company, something in me would be at a loss without the four season cycle of trees. They're majestic, mysterious, beautiful and so variable: pale green and flowering in the spring, rustling deep and cool in summer, a canopy of flame and gold in fall, seemingly barren and skeletal in winter.

early spring on Lake Champlain at Darramont

But it is not just an outward cycle that trees undergo. There is a seasonal cycle inside trees as well. In fact, it is the internal workings that cause the external drama, and it is in these early days of spring, while temperatures flirt around freezing, that many people take a particular interest in the interior life of maple trees. It's what is known as "sugar weather."

checking the buckets, two or three per tree

On a recent weekend in the midst of the sugaring season, some friends and I headed up to Vermont to learn a little more about this ritual time of sugaring when the maple sap is collected to make that most delicious of syrups. At the edge of Lake Champlain we were hosted by the wonderful Felicia and MaryEllen at their home, Darramont. Right after hugs of greeting, they loaded us with 5 gallon buckets (re-purposed from their original task of holding bulk Soy Boy Tofu) and sent us out to collect sap from the trees.

a drop of sap at the tap

At the sugaring time, each maple is tapped and outfitted with a little bucket. Roaming up the hills of Vermont out to Darramont, the forests sparkled everywhere with bright spring sun bouncing off shining metal buckets. At Darramont there were about 20 trees to visit in the cold morning, each dripping slowly into their buckets.

ice block from the sap bucket

My first surprise was that the sap was clear. When I think of maple syrup, I imagine an array of amber colors and when I think of sap I think of sticky, thick, dark resinous stuff, so it was a shock to watch the little drops of sap ping into the buckets, clear as water. The second surprise was the ice. Huge round blocks in each bucket represented the water content that had frozen while the other material in the sap remained behind. We chucked the weighty rounds into the woods and then licked our fingers, which led to the greatest of the surprises, the taste. If I hadn't had it straight from the tree, I would have never believed it had come from a maple. It tasted for all the world like coconut water: pure, clean, light and refreshing with only a sense of the possibility of sweetness, not sweetness itself. I wondered then why maple water is not on the market. It is delicious.

Mary Ellen strains sap and boils it down on the syrup stove,
Josh, Sari and Felicia collect from trees and pour sap off

And if in those first moments of the work toward making maple syrup I wondered why we don't just go in for the sap, I surely wondered about it later after all the lugging of buckets and the heavy lifting to pour collected sap through a lined strainer, separating out bits of extraneous material, pouring it back into storage containers, pouring that into huge syrup pans on the stove and cooking it down for hours and hours, and then, finally, carrying it into the house to conclude the process. In short, the answer is obvious: the sap is nothing on the syrup. How anyone ever figured that out though is beyond me.

evaporation, it just takes time

It takes a lot of sap and time to make maple syrup. About 10 gallons of sap can be turned into about a quart of syrup, slowly turning from its clear, watery form into thick amber syrup. Fortunately though, the trees produce a lot of sap that may be collected without imparting harm to the it. As the morning warmed into a sunny afternoon, we sat out on the deck and listened as the sap dripped steadily into metal buckets all over the hillside.

Mary Ellen and Felicia carefully watching the syrup's temperature

Depending on when it is collected, the sap will boil down into differently colored syrups that each also have distinct flavors. Commercially these differences are designated as "grades" which always seemed like a poor choice of words to me since that designation seems to imply a distinction in quality when really, they're just different: the lighter colors usually coming from the earliest sap collected and having a delicate, mild taste while the later-season syrup is darker and more pronounced in its maple flavors. Though you can project what the syrup will look like depending on when its source sap was collected, you'll never really know until the end. The color and the flavor vary slightly year to year and batch to batch. We peered excitedly into the pot, watching as the sap really recognizably became syrup and the smell of maple, like a hundred pancake breakfasts on a hundred glorious Sunday mornings, filled the house, wondering what the final product would look like, what it would taste like, once it was finally finished.

Mary Ellen modeling an important step in the
syrup process that I cannot remember!

There's been some talk about terroir, the taste of place, as it relates to maple syrup lately and I wondered if this syrup would taste differently to me than the syrup I primarily use which comes from a family friend in Western New York. Would it have a flavor imparted by the particular trees, rocks and soil of Darramont? In the end, it was a beautiful, deep gold syrup that had the butteriest, richest flavor any of us had ever experienced in a maple syrup. Maybe it was the taste of Darramont. It was light and silky, sweet, of course, but with that deep, rich element to it, playing alongside a gentle earthiness and an unusual sharp twinge of something bitter on the back of the tongue that made me love it like chocolate or coffee. It was precious. From the instant the lid went on our jar of Darramont syrup, I feared getting over the hump of "too good to use."

left to right: grade A dark, grade A light

Luckily, we were able to load up on Vermont syrup at the Burlington, VT winter farmer's market, getting some organic grade A, dark and light syrup (note the color difference) from Green Wind Farm. In Vermont, where maple syrup is a like a birthright, we paid less for this haul of syrup than we do from our usual New York family friend source, not that it was cheap. Knowing all the effort and quantity of sap required though, it made every penny seem doubly worth it.

thief!

Back at home, the first thing I did was make waffles, hearty and textured with buckwheat flour, which honestly are my favorite--nuts to all those fluffy white flour waffles. I covered them in warm syrup. They smelled amazing. And they never made it to table. Instead, as you can see above, I was hit up by a waffle thief who intercepted them en route, striking out from a post near the toaster oven. With homemade syrup and waffles, you've just got to watch for these attacks.

spiced maple granola

Later I made something with more staying power: coating oats and puffed kamut with cashews, almonds, cocoa nibs, dried figs and dates, cinnamon and nutmeg with as much Darramont syrup as I could stand parting with. I baked the granola until golden brown and have been enjoying it over unsweetened soy yogurt ever since.

maple hot cross buns

And here's a great way for you to enjoy the early spring with a twist on a traditional and seasonal treat: maple hot crossed buns. I put the Green Wind Farms syrup to use for these so I could save the remaining Darramont. Using a lighter syrup made for a subtle maple flavor that complements these buns well, pairing nicely with the spices that somehow seem just right for this moment, a friendly wave goodbye to winter and happy welcome to spring with all its delicious promise coming back to life.

Maple Hot Cross Buns
makes 16

2 tablespoons/1 ounce dried yeast
1 cup unsweetened soy milk (Vitasoy), warmed to approx. 110 degrees
1/3 cup canola oil
1/4 cup grade A maple syrup
1 tablespoon sea salt
2 3/4 cup unbleached all purpose flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2-3/4 teaspoon fresh ground nutmeg
pinch of ground cloves
3/4 cup dried currants
zest of one organic lemon
maple syrup for brushing

Dissolve the yeast in warm soy milk. Stir in oil, syrup and salt. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. Pour the liquid mixture over the flour and work it in, kneading about 10 minutes or until smooth and cohesive. Place dough in clean, lightly oiled bowl. Cover and allow to rise until doubled, about an hour.

Remove dough from the bowl and turn out onto a clean, lightly floured surface. Knead in the currants and lemon zest. Let dough rest on surface, covered lightly with a towel for about 10 minutes to allow gluten to relax.

Roll the dough out into a thick snake about 20 inches long. With a bench scraper or knife, cut the dough into 16 equal portions. Roll each piece gently into a ball. In a light oiled 9x9 pan, arrange the dough balls in rows. Cover pan with a cloth and allow dough to rise again, until doubled again in volume.

Brush the tops of the buns with maple syrup. Place buns in a 400 degree oven for 20 minutes. If desired, pipe a frosting or cream cross on top of the slightly cooled buns (I like them with almond-flavored cream cheese frosting).

Remember: hot cross buns should be served hot!

Foodbuzz 24, 24, 24: Soy, Not Oi, 20 years later

2009-03-29T17:26:00.013-05:00

Time was when a young vegan couldn’t just hop on the internet to tap into blogs and other digital compendiums of veg recipes and ideas. It used to be more likely that an introduction to veg cooking came in the form of some post-hippy parent’s copy of The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, recovered from a dusty shelf, rather than the shiny gleam of the post-punk kitchen’s bestseller, Vegan with a Vengeance. And in that time, before all of these contemporary resources, there was Soy, Not Oi.

ravaged by the ages, my 1996 copy of Soy, Not Oi

How do I tell you about Soy, Not Oi? I can distill it factually, tell you that almost 20 years ago Soy, Not Oi, a cookzine collectively assembled by the Hippycore Collective in Arizona, was put out as a punk rock treatise on veganism, a cut and paste 100+ page masterpiece of recipes, playlists and illustrations: punks carrying grocery bags full of produce, anthropomorphic avocados in anarchist capes and gauntlets, angry vegetables hell-bent on destroying the government. It was a champion of do-it-yourself veganism and politics, a cookbook that abandoned of the idea of recipes as rules which require allegiance. If most cookbooks are linear driving directions, Soy, Not Oi was a full-color map that offered inspired company along the way to whatever destination you were able to dream up. Unintentionally, it was a quirky catalyst for a generation of punk vegans who found meaning in what they cooked, how and for whom. Soy, Not Oi was a reference point, a cultural standard bearer. In my youthfully arrogant, self-referential punk space, it seemed that there were few people worth knowing who didn’t know the Soy, Not Oi chocolate peanut butter cookies.

veggies storming congress, the back cover of Soy, Not Oi

After the factual summary though, I'm left with a more complex task of drawing out the personal. Maybe there's profundity, of a punk rock measure, in Soy, Not Oi, but on the whole it's a collection of jokes and inside ribbings, silliness and scrounge-around cooking. It makes me pause and weigh what's actually there in its pages against the meaning it has for me, wondering how these sides of the scale can balance out. Balance though--it's in the ripped up pages, the packing tape binding repairs, the splatters of meals from long ago with people I loved and those I didn't, the smears of cookie baking with bands and travelers and assorted others who I met in passing or lived with here and there, and in the little notes from a teenaged me, thinking in the margins, becoming someone who found something in cooking: creativity, community, compassion. On the side of Soy, Not Oi there are years of experience and memory and a whole path carved out toward finding care in the kitchen, becoming autonomous and experimental, creative and questing. And lest I sell it short as a cookzine, I should say up front, there are many useful, creative and delicious recipes too, that you may follow, as you will.

Jack Kahn, a Soy, Not Oi editor in his band Desecration, photo by Wayne!

So, yeah, it was a bunch of culinarily questionable punks who taught me how to cook. I don't think I would have ever found myself in the kitchen if I'd spent those formative years really following recipes. It was passages like this in Soy, Not Oi that got my mind working:

...what kind of a vegan are you, having to read a book to cook or prepare food! ...You have been socialized. You think that 1/2 cup less of this or 1/2 cup more of that will render your dish inedible. You think that a written recipe is the optimum balance of ingredients...you are bummed.

Different combinations will bring different tastes and different textures; a wonderful array of tastebud experiences that will bring you joyful, romantic, painful, funny, gratifying and humiliating memories...the merging of the soul and the pallet [sic]. So my friend, break free from the rigid limit of your food habits and turn your kitchen into a playground of creativity.
-Helium

A founding principal of Soy, Not Oi seemed to be that veganism was actually about forging new paths and being creative, being adventurous and not only asking why things had to be the way they were, but trying out new methods, just to see what might happen. It was an essential element of my own identity as a vegan. That I later started studying more classic techniques, becoming fairly certain that a 1/2 cup more or less of anything could do some serious damage in a recipe, and learning about the chemistry involved in certain culinary ventures doesn't negate any of the freedom that I found in Soy, Not Oi. It's all part of the journey.

Jack Kahn and me: older, wiser, 2009

In its way, Soy, Not Oi has been my constant companion these many years, so it was a fun twist of fate when a couple years ago, while I was neck-deep in a sociology PhD program and cooking like crazy to find blessedly footnote-free solace, a friend suggested I would like to meet someone she’d been working for, a psychology professor interested in gender. In Boston, that’s a little like saying you know an aspiring actor in Hollywood (we're chock-a-block with academics who study in all sorts of interesting areas), so sure, I’m interested but, you know, mildly. Did she also mention that he had been involved in the punk scene and once did a vegan cookzine…called Soy, Not Oi? Fast as you can say “recipes designed to destroy the government,” Jack Kahn (that's J@ck for those of you in the Soy, Not Oi know) and I are sharing dinner and then tea at a nearby coffeeshop and then before you know it, we’re really friends and it’s hard to believe, as I cook his 40th birthday party dinner, that all those years ago, before we could ever have imagined meeting, he was teaching me to cook. Sort of.

In honor of my friendship with Jack and the strange centrality of Soy, Not Oi in my life I took this opportunity offered by Foodbuzz to throw a meaningful dinner party for Jack and some of our friends. Obviously, I had to go back to the source, my ragged copy of Soy, Not Oi, but to stay faithful to its influence in my life, I had to go off road; finding inspiration in its pages and marrying it to all that I've learned, practiced, succeeded and failed at through the years. No recipes, no masters! We started with soup, minestrone alla genovese, a recipe for which is actually in Soy, Not Oi. Its instructions and ingredients are a little suspect and I remember, if not it in particular, bland, undercooked vegan soups like it. The wisdom it shared with me though was the addition of pesto to the minestrone. Being vegan meant that commercially prepared pesto was generally out of the question, so I had to learn to make my own pesto, something I'd never even had before. It transformed that soup (and many others), even as poorly as I may have made them at the time. Now, understanding a little more about how to coax depth of flavor from soups, the addition of fresh made pesto just takes it that much further, for a perfectly comforting bowl of rich, deep flavors.

For the minestrone, though the original recipe doesn't call for them, I added in broad beans and bortolli, soaked and cooked from their dry forms, another trick I picked up from Soy, Not Oi. No health-food vegans were the Hippycore Krew, but they did share the notion that big business foods and overpackaged items did damage. Plus, it was cheaper, vital when you needed that extra three bucks for a 7" record. And of course, there was the do-it-yourself (diy) ethic--why pay for something you could do yourself?

In that vein, I made us a homemade loaf of rosemary olive oil bread. Working from a full winter's earned knowledge of bread baking that has finally made it a complete intuitive process, I started a poolish a day before and used the heat of a cozy kitchen, alive with cooking, to coax a nice rise out of my loaf in its basket, which accounts for the nice little lines on this pre-baked dough.

How many permutations of poorly made bread lay between my first experiments doing diy loaves in college and now? Who can say, but the will to try and try again and learn was definitely established in a punk rock spirit, even if the keys to success actually lay in learning techniques from Bread Alone and Peter Reinhart.

Whether you're a serious gourmand or a serious punk, sometimes, you have to take diy to the next level, as with these homemade baked potato chips, one of the few recipes that Soy, Not Oi shares with Gourmet magazine. With the oven cranked to turn out a crispy crust on the rosemary bread, we sliced up russet potatoes and tossed them with a little olive oil and salt. Into the oven to crisp up and sprinkled with a few twists of sea salt: it's a chill snack, it's a fancy little appetizer, it's both!

For the chips, a couple of dips. This, a roasted red pepper and fried sage dip was made creamy with a raw cashew base, tangy with a little balsamic, earthy with the sage and sweet with the peppers. A fairly random suggestion in a Soy, Not Oi recipe taught me to roast my own sweet peppers, a usefully thift-conscious exercise that I've always been thankful for. I've emphasized the freedom and flexibilty that is to be found in Soy, Not Oi, but for every time I was invited to play around with a recipe or actually not really even provided with a recipe, there was also a bit of concretely useful advise and instruction: from learning to make dolmas to brewing your own beer, it opened up worlds and demystified things I thought I would never cook with. I think it goes to show that everyone knows something specific and interesting and passed down from family and friends about how to cook and what to do with a wide variety of ingredients. Looking through this zine, there are recipes from around the world, with no self-consciousness about presenting any particular sampling of dishes and no gesture toward relegating certain ingredients to a either a particular ethnic group or gourmet-minded yuppie territory.

As Jack points out in Soy, Not Oi, pretty much every vegan gathering needs a bean dip, so I couldn't let this be an exception. My house-dip is a straightforward cannellini puree, this time though, I punched it up with smoked Spanish paprika as a promise to myself to pick up a new diy skill this summer and build a little smoker in the backyard: smoked tofu, smoked mushrooms, smoked peaches, smoked peppers...coming soon to Somerville.

Oh, and yeah, we had an entree. I took the tofu burger recipe, a very '70s style veggie main and embellished it with roasted garlic, caramelized cipollini onions, fresh English peas, herbs and broth-cooked bulgur and wild rice. Dipped in fresh bread crumbs and lightly fried, these reimagined burgers became croquettes and were topped with a pinenut-based basil and black pepper cream. Served alongside some purple kale and what is actually probably my favorite thing in Soy, Not Oi, fried cauliflower. There was a time in college when I worked on a three-four head a week cauliflower habit. As Kamala notes in the recipe's intro, it's simple but it takes "finesse" to char it just so and keep the florets intact. I liked that about it--the barest of ingredients combined with time and attention transformed into sometime perfectly satisfying and delicious.

For dessert, I took off from the following recipe for baked apples, found in the lunches section of Soy, Not Oi: "hollow out some apples. Fill them with almond paste, raisins, almonds, hazel nuts and marmelade" [sic]. I'd never thought of using marzipan to stuff fruit and baking it. Inspired, I sketched out this dessert of pear halves with a filling of marzipan, marcona almonds, quince paste and rosemary, drizzled with olive oil and baked until soft. The sharpness of the rosemary, tang of quince, richness of marconas and the sweet almond candy flavor that seeped through the soft pears was miles down the road from any baked apple I'd ever made "back in the day" and it was a real illustration of the all the road traveled.

To accompany the pears, I took a note from the pastry chef at Oleana, Maura Kilpatrick, who makes an amazing dairy-free cremolata with just almonds and sugar. I wanted to turn to the Oleana cookbook, but had to keep it real and made a version that starts just as I knew their's does, with fresh made almond milk. I soaked the blanched almonds in water and then pureed them along with a scraped vanilla bean pod and a pinch of sea salt to a smooth, milky consistency that was then poured into a cheese-cloth lined mesh strainer where the almond pulp was collected.

Then it was simply a matter of squeezing the remaining milk out of the almond pulp, whisking in some sugar and freezing in my ice cream maker. The result is so ethereal, so much more than any commercial almond milk you could buy, so much lighter and more delicate and purely flavorful than any frozen dessert from the store. While I'm definitely thankful that there are more frozen vegan desserts than I ever could have imagined when I first became vegan, it's good to be reminded that cultivating the skill to do things ourselves is a treat that nothing else can match.

A freshly toasted bit of almond brittle finished the dessert, which we all finished while listening to old records and sharing stories of days gone by.

If you were inspired in your own life by Soy, Not Oi, are moved to check it out now, or have other diy sources of vegan inspiration, I'd like to welcome you to contribute to what Jack and I are hoping will be a 20th anniversary edition of Soy, Not Oi. After much conferring, it was decided that Soy, Not Oi is in fact in its 18th year now. In the next year, we're hoping to collect new recipes and non-recipes, jumping off points for diy explorations to fuel a new generation of vegan masterminds. If you'd like to join in, email me at emilie@consciouskitchen.net.

A Vegan Malay Feast

2009-03-06T12:31:00.012-05:00

"I didn't want any of what I was observing to slip away. I wrote down how Iman extracted tamarind pulp, how she carefully coaxed coconut milk from grated coconut flesh and warm water, how she balanced the spices that would go into her curries so they wouldn't overwhelm one another. It began to dawn on me that cooking a meal didn't have to be what I'd experienced in my mom's kitchen: a chore performed on a schedule. What I saw in the Alwis' kitchen was a soulful, relaxed act more akin to painting."

- James Osland in Cradle of Flavor

With that revelation, Oseland opens his expansive exploration of homecooking in what he calls the cradle of flavor: Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. It makes sense to me that the miracle of coconut milk, the art contained in tamarind, a nobbled husk unlikely to inspire poetry that none the less offers up incomparable flavors, all experienced in the dense heat of equatorial lands brings Oseland to this moment of powerful understanding. It was in Malaysia that I too first fell in love with food. The markets, piles of gorgeous, alien fruits and vegetables, the stalls, steaming with spice-laden delights, they all dimly opened up an early insight for me into our potential for connection to ingredients and the transformative power that the act of cooking can provide.

mixed faux meat bak kut teh

I don't really remember foods before Malaysia in the same way that I remember sitting at Restoran Mungo Jerry's eating bak kut teh, resplendent with spices I'd never tasted before, heaped with slices of yu char kway and garlicky wilted lettuce. When I think hard, I can come up with some ghosts: bowls of Cheerios, my dad's lasagna, my mom's cornbread, baked potatoes with cauliflower and broccoli. But it is without hesitation that I can call up memories of slurping bowls of mee and polishing off little paper bags of fried sweet potato balls, watching greedily as the crispy pancakes, apam balik, filled with coconut and peanuts, bubbled in their griddles. I remember clearly the transfixing arc of teh tarik, the freshly pressed foamy green apple juice, the lychees, rambutans, mangosteen, the rice, the satay. Would that I could have learned to cook in Malaysia, but it really wasn't until years later in college that I started trying to figure it all out, unlock the secrets of flavor and rediscover those dishes that made me love food for the first time.

building block of Malay cooking: ingredients for spice paste

It is my thank you card to Malaysia that every year I like to grab some galangal and ginger, buy a pound of garlic, a dozen stalks of lemongrass, a sack of shallots, tons of turmeric and tiny Thai chilies to do up a Malay-inspired feast.

veggie beef rendang curry

The first dish I cooked this year was my veggie version of bak kut teh, a soup cooked long and slow that is usually full of unidentifiable animal parts. For authenticity's sake, I filled mine with mysterious faux meats from Super 88 (the buying of which is somewhat of a tradition for this celebration). I also cooked it for hours, letting it sit overnight to deepen the flavors. Bak kut teh means something like "bone tea," a little unappealing from a veg perspective maybe, but the idea of a deeply steeped, flavorful tea-like broth translates well as a vegan dish.

The other slow, long-cooking dish featuring faux meat that I did was a rich festival dish, beef rendang curry. In its traditional preparation, the beef is cooked over the barest flame for hours until the coconut milk is all gently absorbed, along with the nutmeg, turmeric, lemongrass, galangal and chilies. In my version, veggie beef strips were cooked in the just the same way, slowly taking on the coconut cream and spices, breaking down into a tender, spicy mash just the same way the meat-version does. This preparation is really interesting one that changes from boiling to frying as the coconut milk is absorbed and it's a good one to start cooking a feast with because it demands time, consideration and care in just the right measure to create the kind of meditatively focused space that I like to cook in.

spicy tamarind dressed jicama, pineapple, cucumber salad

Malay meals are typically served all at once in a great array of dishes, selected to balance and complement each other. So I knew that I needed to create harmony for the royally rich bak kut teh and rendang with something cooling, light and crunchy. Enter, rojak, a wonderful salad, simple on all fronts but flavor, filled with the tang of tamarind, the fire of chilies, the earthy salt of fermented soy and the mellow sweet of jaggary (palm sugar). Jicama is a favorite...vegetable? fruit? of mine, which occupies a kind of lonely territory somewhere between water chestnut and green apple. Its watery crunch pairs nicely with cucumber and pineapple for a refreshing Malay salad.

kari terung, eggplant curry

With the rojak in place, it was back to a richer dish, this time a creamy eggplant curry full of tender, slender bruise-purple Japanese eggplant. I like eggplant more than most, as I'm sure I've mentioned, but this dish can make a confirmed detractor reconsider their position.

fresh water chestnut and mixed veggie stirfry with tofu puff

Recognize the pattern yet? We're back to crunchy and sweet with fresh water chestnuts, lightly sauteed snow peas and sugar peas, red pepper and bean sprouts. Jazzed up with some fresh tofu puff from a local producer, this is a straightforward, uncomplicated stirfry that relies on the natural flavors of fresh ingredients tossed together in the right proportions; a sweetly simple complement to the dramatic dishes that surround it.

Even when tossing together a simple dish, it pays to take the time and add something special. When I saw these beautiful purple-streaked onions with their long, tangled roots, I knew I had to do something to highlight them in a dish.

baby bok choy with fried Chinese onions and Thai chilies

So, a quick slice and deep fry later, the crispy rounds dressed up a platter of lightly cooked baby bok choy dressed in vegetarian oyster sauce. Along with a sprinkle of fresh ground Thai chilies, the onions transformed a potentially forgettable little dish into a beautifully simple surprise.

massaman curry with cauliflower, potatoes and sweet peppers

Though Massaman curry is now considered a Thai dish, this sweet curry fit perfectly into my spread. The name "Massaman" is thought to derive from an old word for "Muslim," the idea being that this curry originated in a Muslim nation, like Malaysia, where traders brought spices from India and the Middle East. The traditional spices in Massaman curry vary from many typically Malay dishes, but the core flavors of cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom and bay provide a welcome warm, sweet tone that blends in beautifully.

Nonya-style lemongrass braised beans

A favorite dish of the evening was this citrusy braised bean dish with lemongrass and macadamia nuts, straight from Oseland's Cradle of Flavor. Nonya cuisine is a seemingly under-represented element of Malay culture, one that illustrates with creative and delicious results, the melding of traditional Chinese cooking with the available ingredients and flavors of the Malay Straits. The distinct sour notes in this dish are a core feature of Nonya cooking, especially in dishes that originated in Penang, closer to Thailand where sour citrus and tamarind are essential elements of flavor. Making food like this is an opportunity to reflect on how our environment and traditions, when we aren't so divorced from them, can shape what we eat and why.

mee gorang

Mee gorang, the national noodle dish of Malaysia, is always a central feature of this celebration meal for me. Bitter greens, scrambled silken tofu, fried tofu, shredded seitan, curls of non-egg wheat noodles, lime and bean sprouts, handfuls of basil, it's a meal in and of itself.

In times of celebration, even rice must get special treatment. Cooked with a bit of coconut cream, star anise, fresh ginger, cinnamon, lemongrass and knots of pandan leaf, a favorite ingredient of mine that can be found frozen in many Asian markets, this rice comes alive with sweet spice and herb.

This rice, a paired down version of another traditional Nonya dish, nasi kemuli, which calls for a great many more spices such as fennel seed, cumin, nutmeg and cardamom as well as shallots, chicken and poppy seeds, makes a good accompaniment to the great variety of dishes without overwhelming them. To improve upon my usual celebration rice, I took note of a bit of advice shared in Cradle of Flavor and switched from my standard jasmine rice, a reasonable pick, to an Indian basmati. Rightly, Oseland's friend advised this switch, commenting that the floral quality of jasmine takes away from the potential exploration of other delicate flavors here while the slight nuttiness of basmati rice serves as a better backdrop.

While I may have been able to avoid overwhelming my rice dish with flavors, I couldn't avoid overwhelming my dessert table with a huge fruit salad of persimmons, lychees, starfruit and fresh pineapple, decorated almond cookies, a pandan-scented cake filled with sweet red bean paste, topped with a rambutan cream cheese frosting and decorated with toasted sesame seeds, as well as traditional Chinese orange wedges, done up a little fancy with temple oranges, blood oranges and cara caras. As the Malay proverb goes though: Alang-alang menyeluk pekasam, biar sampai ke pangkal lengan. The saying is actually about pickles, but the gist is: if you're going to do something, do it all the way.

I can't wait until next year to do this all again and luckily, I don't have to. I'll be teaching several of these dishes in my Vegetarian Malay cooking class at the CCAE on Saturday, April 4th. I've had great fun teaching lately and am looking forward to this one a lot!

Valentine's Chocolates and The Winners!

2009-02-15T10:54:00.010-05:00

With 99 different entries to consider in our search for the ideal Valentine's chocolate, we had our work cut out for us. Armed with Excel spreadsheets, highlighters and pens, my friends and I settled down with tea and cake to make our picks. We were looking for flavors that struck us as emotionally evocative, delicious and creative; flavors that would truly inspire love. And indeed, we each found many reasons love on the wide-ranging list of entries and despaired of ever making a final choice. After developing our individual top ten lists and comparing notes though, we found that while individually our task was difficult, the final selection emerged with surprising clarity and consensus as our diverse top tens overlapped on two flavors. Rather than haggle, we happily agreed to award the two entrants who brought us all together in agreement.

saffron infused coconut crème in bitter chocolate

One of our picks was Nico of Coconutz who suggested a chocolate made with a saffron-infused coconut creme center. We all agreed that such a richly, sweetly decadent delight of coconut cream laced with the unique and suggestive bitter-honey flavor of saffron would be a perfect way to say "I've got love for you." Suspended in a shell of 90% Vintage Plantation chocolate, the bitter edge of the chocolate breaks into the alluring, sweet cream in the center and meets every one of our expectations for Nico's entry. Thanks, Nico!

lapsang souchong, fig paste and Sichuan peppercorn

Our other pick was a sort of surprising one, as none of us are or have ever been smokers, but we were romanced by the suggestion from Kris of a smokey chocolate with fig and black pepper. Maybe it's one too many Bogart movies, but we thought the notion of a lingering smokey element in deep dark chocolate with the earthy, sexy complexity of fig and the final bite of black pepper on the back of the tongue could make us go a little weak in the knees. Since the first comment from one taster was that the chocolate gave his thighs goosebumps, I think we were on the mark with this one. Thanks, Kris!

the Valentine's Day assortment, completed

I have to say though that I was totally inspired and fascinated by all of your suggestions. Thanks so much for playing along! I think this chocolate making venture was a very collaborative experience and you'll see ideas and inspirations from all of your suggestions echoed throughout the assortment. So while I wish we could have shared these chocolates with all of you, I hope it will at least be interesting for everyone to share in the results of these lovingly communally-created chocolates digitally.

bay leaf, juniper berry and fennel seed infused-Muscat Canelli

Taking a page from Marleigh of Sloshed, (who, incidentally, was also the only person with multiple flavor suggestions to have every single one of her chocolates selected by at least one person, a feat for which we dubbed her an "overall honoree") I infused a Muscat reduction with fennel seed, juniper berry and bay leaf for a tart, fruity chocolate with a lightly lingering herbal finish.

ricemilk chocolate covered tart cherry, zinfandel port and espresso salt

We had a couple of port chocolate suggestions in the contest and I was happy to oblige those ideas with this ricemilk covered chocolate filled with tart cherries soaked in zinfandel port and finished with my favorite espresso salt for a mysterious, bittersweet finish.

Turkish coffee with urfa biber in ricemilk chocolate

Remembering a cupcake I made for Iron Cupcake, I drew the smoked ufra biber chili back into a sweet. I've been loving this new-to-me ingredient in many savory dishes, so it was fun to taste it again melded with the sweet tones of cardamom and ricemilk chocolate against the deep, bitter edge of fresh brewed Turkish coffee. This was also my first time working with a "milk" chocolate, a task made all the easier because of the early birthday present of a chocolate tempering machine from my dad. It's impossible to tell you how exciting this machine is and how much time it will save me and how much easier it will be to whip up small batches of chocolate any time I want. The overnight mode means I can instantly make chocolates right after I get out of bed if I wanted, which to be frank, I often do. You all know this means even more chocolate to come, right?

sassafras root infused truffle

On a recent visit to Christina's Spice Shop, I noticed a little bag of sassafras in with the herbs. I immediately snatched it up since this controversial ingredient is not something you can typically find for sale. Use of sassafras in food was banned by the FDA 1960, because in high doses it apparently caused cancer in mice (as if that is a directly applicable result). Canada and the US continue to prohibit its use in any consumable product, but it was in fact a prized treatment against some sexually transmitted diseases throughout history and has a significant place in particularly Southern US culinary traditions. It is also one of the primary roots used in the traditional brewing of rootbeer and it is amazingly delicious. So, I had to experiment with this as a "forbidden love" truffle, infusing soy creamer with the banned sassafras to create a spicy and wonderfully woody chocolate that feels really grounded and deep in it flavor. One or two can't hurt, can it?

hazelnut praline caramel with smoked sea salt

With specific thanks to Amey of Vegan Eats and Treats, as well as to all those who suggested that the ooey gooey cooked sugar flavors and textures of caramel make for a sexy addition to Valentine's, I made this praline caramel with a liberal pinch of smoked sea salt, an ingredient that set off the sweetness perfectly with a wonderfully mellow saltiness and subtle smoke.

pink peppercorn and Meyer lemon caramel

And since I can't help myself with caramel, another one, this time with the addition of some pink peppercorn and Meyer lemon. This was a thin and lightly cooked caramel that really looked beautiful flecked with pink and yellow and offered a really intriguing citrus spice to the pale sugar.

oro blanco and cara cara infused sake fondant with candied ginger

Citrus was a popular suggestion in the contest, and why not? It's in season, it's juicy, it's compelling sweet and tart, it's all coy with the thick rind hiding jewel-like flesh. The combination of a grapefruit-tinged orange like the cara-cara with the sweet orange-tinged flavor of the oro blanco seemed like a fun pairing along with a dash of sake and a fine dice of candied ginger.

maple brittle, chicory and black tea

Sometimes romance isn't the exotic allure of distant shores and heady spices, sometimes it's the cozy homestead and a roaring fire and the slow sap of a New York maple tree creeping out from a deep winter sleep. From a family friend, this maple syrup really does taste like my New York childhood, so combined with black tea, a little maple brittle and roasted chicory, I hit on the nostalgic romance of a winter day bundled up inside with all the comforts of home kind of chocolate.

mangosteen, toasted sesame seed and cocoa nib

Then again, sometimes romance is a distant shore and exotic fruit and so this little chocolate was born of mangosteen (the Southeast Asian queen of fruits) toasted black and white sesame seeds, a little coconut cream and cocoa nibs.

macadamia, olive oil and lemon

I really can't get enough of olive oil and chocolate, so it's worth exploring new ways of combining the two. Though I'm not always a lover of macadamia, the soft, rich nut seemed like a sexy and more sophisticated choice than peanut butter, and from earlier experiments, I knew that I liked it with olive oil, orange and white chocolate. So, mixing things up a little, I used olive oil to coax the macadamia into a smooth nut butter, sweetened it with agave, salted it with pink Himalayan sea salt and cut the richness with a tiny bit of lemon zest. This is the savoriest of the chocolates in my Valentine's assortment and I love it for that.

forelle pear and vanilla bean crème with Riesling reduction

Intrigued by a suggestion to cook down beer to a syrup, I applied the idea to a favorite dry Riesling of mine that I had reserved earlier as part of the poaching liquid I used to cook these amazing forelle pears for a tart. Reduced to a pale amber syrup, the Riesling was like an intensely fruity honey caramel spiked with pear nectar.

caramel ganache with cocoa nib brittle, orange zest and allspice

After observing the caramely reduction of the Riesling, I wondered what would happen if I whisked that into melted chocolate to make a caramel ganache. So, next opportunity I got, I made a small batch of dark caramel and poured it into melted chocolate along with caramelized cocoa nibs, a little orange zest and allspice. The resulting texture was intriguingly trapped between a caramel and a ganache, soft and slighly chewy with a tendancy to linger.

sweet marsala, rosemary and cranberry

A suggestion from Madeleine to encorporate rosemary in a chocolate made me remember a sweet marsala plumped cranberry and rosemary biscotti that I made a lot of last winter and hadn't revisited since. Something about rosemary is really great against cranberry for me and the marsala is a nice foil for the tartness in the cranberry and bitterness of the chocolate and the herbal punch of the rosemary.

lemon verbena and cucumber-scented green tea white chocolate

Having to buy rosemary made me inexpressably sad, wishing I could just cut it off from my months dormaint plant in my snow-covered garden, but I was able to cheer up a little by using the lemon verbena from my garden that I had dried and saved for an occation just like this. Paired with a sweet white chocolate and grounded with the clean-cool scent of cucumber and green tea, this is definitely a summer chocolate, but it's nice to have a reminder of the warmer days in the dreggs of winter.

blood orange and mango chili fondant in ricemilk chocolate

Another popular ingredient in many suggestions was blood orange, which seems right on the mark for Valentine's day, so how could I resist a red heart chocolate (annatto in oil brushed into molds and dabbed with pearlized luster dust) filled with chili-spiked mango and blood orange fondant?

I should also mention that we had a surprising moment in the tabulation of our top ten lists when two new members popped into the group to demand a voice in the proceedings. River and Oslo were adamant that we recognize the sensible suggestion of Patti's cat, Kissa, who thought that nothing said love like a cat nip truffle. Swamped as I was with the holiday, I handed the task of creating this chocolate off to River, who you can see above working her magic with some Cosmic Catnip!

Hope everyone enjoyed some chocolate and love over this Valentine's weekend. Thanks again for all your entries.

The Taste of Love Chocolate Contest

2009-02-06T09:47:00.016-05:00

Seems like only yesterday it was Chinese New Year and I think the day before that was Christmas, right? How time flies. Now Valentine's is on our doorstep, wondering what culinary concoction will mark its arrival. Lucky for me, the answer is simple since little says "I love you" like chocolate. Devil's in the details though, so while chocolate is part of the answer, there's more to consider. And that's where you come in.

port and star anise infused heart-shaped truffles

Ever since my previous chocolate making spree, I've been thinking about what to make for this Valentine's. I've been considering flavors that run the gamut from romantic to comforting, straight up sexy to subtle and seductive, wild day dreams to familiar favorites, trying to come up with a good mix for friends and family, but I think you can help me make this assortment even better.

So here's the deal: To participate, leave a comment with your suggestion for an ideal Valentine's Day chocolate flavor combination by 8pm est, Thursday, February 12, 2009. At that time, my Top Chef watching crew and I will review all the entries and pick a winner. Obviously, our judging will be subjective, but we will all try to agree on the chocolate flavor we think sounds the most emotionally evocative, delicious and creative. In short, we're looking for a chocolate that instantly inspire love. Cynics are also welcome to make their suggestions! We know Valentine's is hooey, but we can't seem to pass up the communal joy the comes of celebrating holidays, so give us what you've got, maybe you can take the wind out of our sails...and we'll like it.

The winning suggestion will be turned into an actual factual chocolate and I will send the winner a box of assorted vegan chocolates that includes their flavor. Unfortunately, to receive the chocolate you must have a United States address. Those in other parts of the world should still feel free to play along though; your idea could be immortalized in chocolate form! The winner must also be committed to eating the chocolates promptly since I do not use artificial ingredients or stabilizers and they must be consumed fresh. My apologies to those in the rest of this big world (shipping costs are killer) and those who practice that thing... what's it called? Oh, yeah, self-restraint.

To get the creative juices flowing or to receive some immediate chocolate in your life, I'm happy to share some new demonstration videos that I did with the very fine folks at How2Heroes. The chocolate above are the hand-dipped chocolate-coated truffles I filmed with them, using a standard square baking pan, a piece of parchment, and a chef's knife. Don't balk at chocolate making just because the books tell you that you'll need frames and guitar cutters and a huge marble slab and all that other fancy stuff, this easy method uses what you already have and still makes beautiful chocolates.

For a really forgiving chocolate without all the fuss over tempered chocolate, we also shot a video that walks you through a super simple recipe for rolled truffles. In the past I have made truffles by pouring hot liquid over chopped chocolate, but this video illustrates a different way of making them that I think yeilds a particularly silky and gloriously smooth, completely knee-melting chocolate. It's a soft ganache, which makes it a little messy to work with, but wonderful to eat. Made with olive oil and sastuma zest, they are a rich and sophisticated twist on the winter classic of dark chocolate and orange.

The ganache for these truffles can also be piped into molds for a different presentation. I made this batch with tangelo to get a little hint of grapefruit flavor that also complements the olive oil.

These are a modification of the truffle recipe in the video. By omitting the olive oil and bringing in port wine as well as 2-3 tablespoons of ground star anise, a whole different and super sexy chocolate is born.

Another modification, this time omitting the oil and increasing the unsweetened soymilk. Then, thanks to an amazing blend of cocoa rose tea from Sofra Bakery, the milk is turned into an
ambrosial liquid with bitter cocoa nib notes, deep black tea flavors and floral flourishes as it steeps with about 1/4 cup of the tea. Rolling the ganache in chopped cocoa nibs really seals the deal...

...though casing of dark chocolate can bring it home too.

Here's another deal-maker: espresso-salted nutmeg caramel truffles. The espresso salt is an indulgence, no doubt, but oh-is-it-worth-it and since a little goes a long way it lasts for a long time. Of course, you could also make the caramels just as they are or cover them in tempered chocolate like I did for Christmas. There's no end to the ways to play with this caramel and no better time to start playing because they would be a great Valentine's gift, if you were so moved to share.

Speaking of sharing, get those flavor ideas in! I can't wait to see what you all come up with. Until then, I leave you with the long promised Chocolate-Covered Espresso Salted Nutmeg Caramel recipe. Give a little, get a little?

Chocolate-Covered Espresso Salted Nutmeg Caramels

adapted from Alice Medrich's Golden Caramels, Pure Dessert

1 cup golden syrup
(or 3/4 cup golden syrup and 1/4 cup agave syrup, more agave and they will not form properly)
2 cups sugar in the raw
1 teaspoon espresso sea salt
(or 3/4 teaspoon sea salt + 1 teaspoon espresso extract added with the vanilla)
2 cups soy creamer
3/4 teaspoon fresh grated nutmeg
3 tablespoons room temperature Earth Balance buttery stick or other margarine
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 pound bittersweet dark chocolate, tempered

Line a 8x8 baking pan with parchment paper. Combine the syrup or syrups, raw sugar, and espresso salt in a medium-sized saucepan over medium heat, stirring until mixture simmers at the edges. Cover and cook for about 5 minutes. (As mixture cooks, wash spoon so it will be clear of sugar crystals when used later.)

Uncover saucepan and wash down the sides with a pastry brush dipped in water to remove the sugar cyrstals on the sides of the pan. Insert a candy thermometer and allow the mixture to cook, uncovered and without stirring to 305°F.

As the sugar cooks, gently heat the soy creamer with the fresh grated nutmeg until just before boiling. Maintain the heat at a simmer and keep covered to allow the nutmeg to infuse.

When the sugar mixture reaches 305°F, remove heat and stir in the Earth Balance. When well incorporated, slowly and carefully pour the nutmeg infused cream into the sugar mixture while stirring. When the mixture ceases to bubble dramatically, stir well to mix the thickened sugar resting at the bottom of the pan back into the mixture.

Return the pan to heat and allow it to cook, stirring occasionally, until it reaches 245°F. Then cook, stirring constantly, (this step may take as long at 10-20 minutes) to 260°f. At 260°f, remove the heat and stir in vanilla and espresso (if using) extracts. Pour the mixture into the lined pan and allow it to set at room temperature for 4 to 5 hours, or overnight.

When set, remove the caramel from the pan and use an oiled knife to cut into squares. Dip the squares in tempered chocolate and decorate with transfer paper or a sprinkling of nutmeg. Or, for rolled truffles, add caramel to chopped chocolate in a 1:3 ratio and place over a double boiler, gently heating until liquid and smooth before whisking with hot liquid and proceeding to make ganache as per usual. Or, wrap the cut caramel squares in parchment paper and eat as is.

Vegan Soups and Stews Blog Tour: The Borscht Edition

2009-01-28T12:13:00.000-05:00

We interrupt your regularly scheduled chocolate for...borscht. That's right, another storm is swirling across the country and an expected 6-10 inches of snow, followed by sleet, followed, naturally, by ice will soon blanket the frozen solid heaps of snow left behind by our last storm and there's only one thing for it: make soup and stay in.

Whether through meteorological divination or just plain good timing, cookbook maven Nava Atlas has today released the 4th edition of her book, Vegetarian Soups for All Seasons. The 3rd edition of this go-to soup cookbook was handily veganized, and this latest edition features a slew of seasonal vegan soups, a new photo spread, historical quips on soup, soup making and star ingredients, as well as the general good sense and good humor of Nava Atlas. Having been asked to be a stop on the Vegan Soups blog tour, I was lucky enough to have this new edition to turn to for a delicious, if temporary, remedy to the winter chill.

What with the winter outside being frightful, I immediately cruised the fall and winter sections of the book, open to the possibility of pretty much anything that might warm the old bones. And being, as I am, 28 going on 82, I latched onto an old world recipe for Hot Beet and Potato Borscht. Five years of participation in the Parker Farms CSA, wherein we are inundated with beets, has been time enough for me to cultivate a pretty happy relationship with the beetroot, but I did have my doubts about borscht, so it was on faith that I proceeded. Faith, and desire to meet a household request for more beets. I live with an avidly game eater. There is nothing in the world of vegan possibilities that he will not eat. Generally, this is a great arrangement for an experimental cook such as myself, but it does have a slight downside that can be captured in the following exchange: "What would you like for dinner?" "Oh, anything!" So, when on those rare occasions that an actual request for a particular food or ingredient is made, I try to accommodate, and happily, Nava'a borscht fit the bill perfectly.

In a sprawling exploration of this classic Slavic soup, journalist James Meeks sorts out several enduring myths concerning borscht. It is not, as many claim, a Russian creation (its origins are in the Ukraine) and it need not include beetroot, though it is perhaps most known in that incarnation. In his borscht-related travels, Meeks heard of recipes that included "a ragbag of unorthodox ingredients: dill, sugar, vinegar, flour, spring onions, basil, pickled apples, dried apples, plums, cherries, aubergines, olives, prunes, marrow, sausages, ham, mint, tarragon, paprika and oregano. The arbitrary and anarchic community of domestic borshch-makers," he says, "is a rebuke to political borders, order and standardisation, whether the Soviet standardisation of central planning or the capitalist standardisation of identical retail outlets." Borscht then is a reflective rebel soup: experimental, seasonal, individual and maybe even a little whismical, even as it is tied to history, tradition, place and people.

So it's fitting to add a vegan version of this boundless soup to the winter repertoire. At once comforting and hearty, this borscht is tangy and playfully flavorful. To accompany the sprawl of flavors in the borscht, Nava also provides a recipe for Onion-Rye Scones, which I made in a slightly altered form (barley instead of rye) for a wonderfully warm and substantial winter meal. Another classic borscht add-on is sour cream. I happened to have leftover homemade sour cream on hand, though Nava also provides a recipe in her book for that essential element of the soup; essential not just for the extra sour notes and creaminess but for the gorgeous swirls of pink that lighten the deep hue of the soup.

And speaking of color, this was a particularly auspicious soup colorwise for this week which marks the beginning of the Chinese Lunar New Year. This is the year of the earth Ox and it welcomes in a period of solemn dedication to hard work that promises a steady and calm time ahead. Let's hope anyway. Gong xi fa cai! These are almond cookies from our Chinese New Year dinner, which I share with you in anticipation of the coming post that will detail our feast. In the meantime though, you can do a cultural mismash and ladle up some of Nava's bright borscht in welcome to the Ox.

Hot Beet and Potato Borscht
with citrus notes and fresh dill

serves 6-8 1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil 2 large onions, chopped 3 medium potatoes, peeled and grated 4 medium beets, peeled and grated 1 large carrot, peeled and grated 1 cup orange juice, freshly squeezed or store-bought organic juice of 1 lemon 2 tablespoons minced fresh dill 2-3 tablespoons natural granulated sugar, more or less to taste salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste Vegan Sour Cream, to serve, optional

Heat the oil in a soup pot. Add the onion and saute over medium heat until golden. Add all the remaining ingredients except the sugar, salt and pepper, and optional sour cream.

Add enough water to cover the vegetables. Bring to a rapid simmer, then lower the heat. Cover and simmer gentle until the vegetables are tender, about 40 minutes.

Adjust the consistency with more water if the soup is too dense. Season with sugar, salt, and pepper, then simmer for 5 minutes longer.

If time allows, let the soup stand for an hour or two. Heat through before serving. Garnish each serving with a dollop of sour cream, if desired.

Check out other cozy recipes like Thai-Spiced Sweet Potato Stew and Jerusalem Artichoke Puree in Vegan Soups and Hearty Stews.

Chocolate from the Source

2009-01-14T20:28:00.015-05:00

Warned off of the advertised chocolate making tours posted around town, we asked Eric, our host at the veg-owned Cashew Hill Jungle Lodge in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica, for an alternative. On a small piece of paper he sketched out a rough map and sent us to to see how an indigenous Bribri family a few kilometers down the road make chocolate.

Securing the hoods of our coats against steady rain, my friends and I headed for town in search of someone willing to drive us out to the chocolate house. It had been raining for a week. The roads, which rank as moderately treacherous at their best, had turned into sinking muddy minefields of holes full of calf-deep water, a fact we knew well having walked ourselves into Puerto Viejo several nights ago from the lonely Bar Pen where our bus had stopped, unable to take us any further. Walking down to the swollen sea, crashing gray against the beach that had been reduced to a slick wet strip of dark sand between road and water, we roused some reluctant attention from a group of men sitting under a porch awning near the deserted bus stop. "¿Taxi?"

"Si. Hola señor. ¿Sabe donde está la casa del cacao cerca de Bribri?"

He did, más o menos as it turned out, but we were off, piling into his old brown car and bouncing down the road as Afro-Caribbean ballads trickled through the fuzzy radio. Receiving some unwelcome spinal adjustments, we ricocheted around the car as it traversed the temporary bridge that stood in for the one which had been washed out in the rains, muddy water splashed up around us as our pirate taxi continued to carefully pick out a path on the pitted road. But as we pressed on down the road, it seemed that the rain was breaking. Watercolor pale brushes of blue were bleeding out of the gray sky. We smiled at each other and experimentally shook off our raincoats. Things were looking up, we were on our way to learn about chocolate.

Expertly negotiating a left hand turn as the sun boldly broke out of a clump of gray clouds, we jangled down a few more kilometers of road to find ourselves exiting the car at a small dirt driveway leading down to Cacao House on the edge of the Talamanca Jungle. Taking the driver's cell number and promising to call him if we needed a hair-rising ride back into town, but silently praying that the weather would hold and a walk back into Puerto Viejo would seem like an adventure, we clamored down hill to be greeted by the family and taken around to explore their cacao operation.

Their home was set in front of a hillside dense with cacao trees. All around us, the family pointed to the cacao fruit ripening. Here a bright yellow fruit, there a knobbled green one, softly purple striped fruit rubbed against ripened orange ones. On the hillside, monkeys and birds rustled. The owner shooed them from afar and gently cursed the monas who were always stealing her cacao.

When people express surprise that I, as a vegan, eat chocolate (I guess because chocolate seems inextricably connected to milk or cream for many), I always explain that chocolate is made primarily from a fruit. It comes as a surprise to many, but even knowing as I do about the cacao pods and their translucent fleshy seeds which can be transformed into sublime confections, it is amazing to hold a cacao fruit in your hand and realize that it is the building block of all those dark bars of chocolate.

Inside the banana leaf-lined workshop, we were treated to a view of the whole process of transforming the cacao fruit into chocolate. Though the Bribri people traditionally used cacao more for more medicinal applications than enjoyment, they did, and do, consume some mind-altering delicious hot chocolate made simply with cacao paste, raw cane sugar and water. Some, like the family we visited, do now produce chocolate "bars" for sale outside their community. These tiny bars, made with ingredients harvested around their land, like nutmeg, coconut, ginger and mint, are what we got to see being made.

First, the cacao fruit is cracked open with a machete. The little white fleshy bits inside look like big white nibs of corn or hominy, but are softer and squishy. They have an indescribable flavor that reminds me of Southeast Asian fruits like lychees or rambutans and possess, actually, a similar texture.

Thees fleshy fruit bits are removed, leaving the big broad cacao beans behind.

A low fire is then prepared to gently toast the beans. The heat is monitored and kept under even control with the aid of a big banana leaf fan.

With careful and constant stirring, the beans are toasted over the flame. As the beans are toasted, a pure, earthy scent of unsweetened chocolate begins to trickle out as the oils warm and the beans begin to crackle.

After allowing the toasted beans to cool, they are crushed with a heavy wooden rolling pin. As the beans were being crushed and cracked, I began too frantically compose my Spanish, knowing that the first thing which came to mind, quiero, meaning I want, was not the most polite declaration. But I did want. These were the freshest cacao nibs I was likely to ever have in my life and the scent of warm, toasty pure chocolate was killing me. Fortunately, we were soon offered a taste and like a small and greedy child, I elbowed my friends out of the way to get first grab.

Sated with my handful of nibs, I chewed the deliciously crunchy bits of cacao, marveling at the supremely satisfying nutty-chocolate flavor, and watched as the husks of the beans were picked away. The final step in the process was then to grind the nibs into a cacao liqueur and mix it with cane sugar and additional ingredients for flavor to produce the most intriguing, rustic and compellingly fresh chocolate I have ever had.

The texture of the chocolate was worlds apart from the smooth bars that shine and snap with a satisfyingly clean sound, but we were a world apart, so that seemed as it should be. Pleasantly gritty with raw cane sugar and roughly conched nibs, this chocolate crumbled onto the tongue and then melted unevenly in waves of flavor, the chocolate, the jungle earth, the sweetness of the sugar crystals, the toothsome spice of freshly rough-grated nutmeg, it all rolled in a pleasant jangle across our tongues and made our eyes sparkle. Wow, we said. Holy crap, that's amazing. And it was. Not just for the flavors, intense and fresh and so close to the place from which all the ingredients had grown, but for the knowledge of each step that had gone into making the delicate little bits of chocolate that melted in our mouths.

The sun had truly and wildly broken out by the time we emerged from tasting and talking and exploring the chocolate workshop. Giddy on sugar and an indescribable feeling of something like blessing at being able to understand how much bounty and possibility there is in transforming elements of the natural world through completely gentle and respectful means, we tromped through muddy roads for kilometers talking chocolate, talking chickens, talking everything that we passed, worrying about the flood lines on houses, wondering at how vulnerable we are in a world that for all we know about it still holds us at its mercies, until we reached the black sands and sea again. Instinctively, we ran for it, crashing into warm water to wash away the grit and grime.

Just as there is nothing like the experience of eating chocolate made right in front of you, there is nothing like running fully clothed into the ocean, just for the joy of it.

Our next sunny morning in Puerto Viejo, we sought out the highly recommended Caribeans, an open-air cafe and coffee roaster. Luck was with us as well as the sun because Paul, the founder, was there to talk to us about Caribeans business practices, give us samples of their homemade macadamia nut butter and make up a cocoa nib granola with soymilk and slices of local bananas.

Caribeans uniquely does not own the farms from which their coffee and cacao beans come from. Rather, they continually negotiate with the growers for their products. Paul explained how, just as it was important to him that he have a relationship with the growers, it was important to have a relationship with his customers, which is why their products are pretty much only available at that little spot on the beach in Puerto Viejo.

I left Caribeans with several bags of espresso and a big bar of their baker's chocolate.

...Some of which went into these completely Costa Rican chocolate cupcakes with whipped espresso ganache frosting, which we later enjoyed back home, reminiscing about our time in Puerto Viejo.

Now, of course, it is not always possible to enjoy chocolate straight from the source like this, but there are some nicely ethical options easily available in the States. From my own backyard, Taza, produces some similarly rustic stoneground chocolate on reconditioned Mexican chocolate equipment in Somerville, MA. Their beans are grown with a social and environmental consciousness and they are purchased under direct trade criteria and their website contains transparent information about their principals and practices. You can even learn about how your particular bar was made, who made it, who grew the beans and when it was produced by entering the batch number from the back of your bar.

Another non-organic, but social and environmentally engaged chocolate that I like is Vintage Plantations. Plantations works to develop and implement sustainable cultivation methods for cacao that protect the rain forest and appropriately compensate growers. They are also involved in the Rainforest Alliance, a conservation agency that is not as cool as Rainforest Action Network, but is at least in the good fight.

Olive Oil Orange Cake with Dagoba Organic Cocoa Nibs

I used to be a big fan of Dagoba, but I hesitate in recommending their products since they were purchased by Hershey, which is notorious for poor labor and environmental practices, not to mention poor product. Dagoba offers a lot of information about their own practices, which you can read here. It's just a matter of determining whether its possible to support a company who you feel pretty good about when it is owned by another company that is pretty repellent. Given the tangled web of ownership and the constant gobbling up of small, successful companies by larger ones, this is a area of ethical purchasing that can quickly make you feel crazy, potentially hypocritical and limited, but it's worth thinking through when possible.

A new and really interesting chocolate maker from San Francisco, TCHO , makes a socially responsible vegan chocolate that is incredibly good. TCHO uses TCHOSource to "enable farmers to become premium producers and create...relationship[s] of mutual self-interest that [go] beyond Fair Trade." If you can, try their "chocolatey" flavor and revel in it.

Divine Chocolate gets double stars for offering organic and fair trade chocolate from the Kuapa Kokoo cooperative in Ghana who co-own the company. Divine offers many non-vegan chocolates, but do provide very clear labeling and make a truly great mint chocolate bar. Also organic and fairtrade with many vegan options for their chocolate is another neighbor of mine, Equal Exchange. For bulk purchasing chocolate, cocoa powder and cocoa butter (which I use to make white chocolate), I use Sweet Earth Organics. They certify their chocolates as vegan, fair trade and organic, which is, you know, sweet.

Before I sign off, let me assure you there is more chocolate to come, including the chocolate dipped caramels I've promised, as well as a video on making dark chocolate olive oil truffles, just in time for Valentine's Day! Thank you so much for the overwhelming response to my previous chocolate post. I've received a great deal of email on chocolates and chocolate making and I'll definitely get to it all, apologies if you are waiting. In in the meantime, I hope this will help answer many of the frequently asked questions on my chocolate sources.

Vegan Chocolates

2009-01-08T16:41:00.005-05:00

I don't know about you, but if I have been, say, ignored or otherwise ill-treated, chocolates will go a long way toward making up for it. So, in an effort to treat my poor blog, passed over in the frenzy of a very busy holiday season, as I would like to be treated, the following post will attempt to win back favor by indulging in an all out chocolate-fest.

my holiday assortment of chocolates

I became interested in chocolate making last year after meeting with a friend of a friend, Brendan Gannon, who at the time was running a local artisan chocolate business, La Tene, and making chocolates of great beauty. It was one of those moments when something that should have been obvious but wasn't becomes clear and you are stunned by the revelation. My revelation was this: people make chocolates. I mean, of course they do, but if you were, like me, a casual consumer of chocolates and had become familiar with them in childhood by way of some waxy box of Russell Stover at Valentine's, you may have been more of the opinion that machines make chocolates. The difference is marked, like the difference between a sliced loaf of shelf-stable bread that will hang around for a week or more and a crusty, flour-sprinkled loaf that demands to be eaten straightaway.

Professional quality polycarbonate chocolate molds, cleaned carefully with cotton and ready for use. Flimsy plastic chocolate molds found readily in craft stores will not hold up to repeated use and will often create imperfections in the finished chocolates.

The well-stocked and inventive chocolate section at Harvard Square institution, Cardullo's, is a favorite shopping spot of mine and frequent visits keep the chocolate bowl in my kitchen full of bars. It's been years now that I've been indulging in dark chocolate bars from around the world, many with interesting additions ranging from pink peppercorns to roasted chicory, but it was rare for me to have molded chocolates as an adult and I hadn't developed an appreciation for the artistry that goes into making them. That is until, spurred on by a visit to Brendan's chocolate kitchen, I started reading about chocolate making, learning, gathering tools and practicing on my own.

filled peanut butter chocolates waiting for their feet

This fall I got to take my practice to the next level in a series of chocolate classes with Chef Delphin Gomes, who wasn't exactly supportive of the idea of vegan chocolates or pastry, but who was an exceptional teacher whose skill with chocolate was inspiring and whose unstoppable French punning was memorable. Following the class, I started tempering chocolate in my spare time, a process in which the chocolate is taken through several different heating and cooling periods in order to create a dense crystalline structure that will make the finished chocolates shiny, smooth and hard. I'd smear the chocolate on my lip like Chef Gomes, watch it carefully as it fell back to the bowl in a gorgeous dark ribbon, feel the changing resistance of the melted chocolate as it cooled, trying to internalize how chocolate looked and felt at every different point in the tempering process. I started doodling notes, drawing from my experimentation with rolled truffles, thinking about all the different chocolates I could make. And I started thinking about making chocolates from an ethical vegan perspective.

chocolate bark with ginger, apricot, pistachio and cocoa nibs

There are plenty of near-universally recognized "great chocolates" that are naturally vegan. Valrhona, El Rey, Guittard, Michel Cluizel, and Callebaut all make couverture chocolate that is vegan and which many pastry chefs and chocolate makers prize. (Couverture, meaning "covering" in French, is a finely ground chocolate with a high cocoa butter content that is used for making chocolates.) In this sense, vegans can consider themselves lucky to have access to such a wide world of fine chocolates, but from an ethical perspective the labor and environmental practices put to work in the production of these chocolates should also be taken into consideration. Both chocolate and sugar are responsible for many labor and environmental evils around the world, but there are many positive choices to make by choosing fair trade and organic products to make delicious chocolates with an ethical point of view that also provide opportunity for simple enjoyment.

cinnamon and cardamom peanut butter chocolate

In putting together the assortment of chocolates that I gave as holiday gifts this year, I tried to create a balance of interesting, even adventurous, flavors and flavors that would be instant comfort. For every straightforward creamy peanut butter filled chocolate, a peanut butter filling loaded with freshly grated cinnamon and hand-ground cardamom.

dark chocolate with tangerine marmalade and Grand Marnier

For every Christmas classic of dark chocolate and orange...

satsuma and Spanish olive oil white chocolate

...a satsuma and Spanish olive oil white chocolate filled chocolate.

one batch wasn't enough, more satsuma

Flavor isn't the only fun thing to play with that chocolate work offers. The opportunities for decoration are pretty much limitless too. Of course, the molds used offer variety and beauty. Some have beautiful decorative motifs, like the floral design on the first picture of the satsuma and olive oil chocolates, others are simply elegant or whimsical shapes. There's no end to the forms molds can take; I even saw cell phone, Buddha and chicken molds when I was shopping for mine. Other molds with magnetic bottoms that snap away allow for the insertion of a chocolate transfer sheet that will affix cocoa butter designs to the tops of the chocolates, as in the photograph above.

homemade strawberry jam, Modena balsamic and black pepper

Luster dust is also a decorative option that gives a striking finish to chocolates, like this pearl dusting that I painted into the shell molds. When selecting a luster dust however, you should be prepared to ask lots of questions. Some luster dust that is sold by even reputably pastry stores actually contains chemicals that are not safe for consumption. These should be well labeled as "for decorative purposes only," but it's worth keeping an eye open. Others contain cornstarch, something that is more than likely to be a genetically modified ingredient and still others use carmine, a dye made from grinding up insects.

pistachio rose white chocolate

How the luster dust is applied greatly changes the look of the final product. For the strawberry, balsamic and black pepper shells, I thickly dabbed the dry luster dust into the clean mold with a paintbrush. For the white chocolate, rose and pistachio chocolates above, I dissolved a small quantity of the same pearl luster dust in vodka and softly painted it into the molds and waited for the alcohol to evaporate, leaving behind a subtle pearl-pink sparkle.

pistachio rose white chocolate

Of course, well-tempered chocolate all on its own is a beautiful thing that needs no adornment.

amaretto vanilla bean fondant

When making an assortment of chocolates however, if the same molds will be used for more than one chocolate, it is useful to highlight the difference between the batches, even if you are careful to mark the molds and labeled the finished chocolates. For all my care in this matter, I still managed to mix up some of the pistachio rose chocolates with the amaretto vanilla bean chocolates that were made in the same mold.

amaretto vanilla bean fondant

It would be embarrassing to have someone think they are biting into something that will be filled with white chocolate, rose petal and pistachio and have them come up with the liquid spill of an amaretto fondant. Fortunately, I was able to save my friends and family from this fate by eating a number of the mixed up chocolates. So there are worse things in the world, but it's still a good lesson for the future if the same molds are being reused, be sure to clearly and completely label the chocolates by type or create some means of distinguishing them in the future.

fresh mint

Luckily, I learned this lesson early on and painted my fresh mint filled chocolates while leaving the port, fig and meyer lemon ones made in the same mold plain.

port, fig and meyer lemon ganache

This combination of fig, port and lemon was probably the most daringly different chocolate I made technique-wise. Heating the port gently, I added chopped fig and meyer lemon zest and let the port sit to create the infusion. Straining it, I reheated the port and then poured it over the chocolate, making a ganache of sorts. This is what I love about learning a new skill, it prompts me to think about all the possibilities and try things that there might even be good reasons not to do. Rethinking things from a vegan perspective opens a lot of creative doors like that--why should we be limited to cream when we want to have a ganache-like center?

cherry cordial

Making mistakes is one of the double-edged swords of learning a new skill; you learn something new, but you mess something up. One of the first chocolates I settled on making for the holidays was my mom's favorite, cherry cordial. So as luck would have it, the cherry cordial had a lesson to teach me.

broken

My mistake was in the size of the morello cherry I used as the center of the cordrial--too big by far. When I add the kirshwasser fondant to the cherries, the cherries floated up and prevented a nice, neat seal on the bottom of the chocolates. Half of them fell apart, like in photo above. The remaining sticky chocolates were popped into a freezer bag from which my mom basically had to eat with a spoon. Though I'll note that she didn't complain!

nutmeg and espresso salt agave caramels

I danced on the edge of out and out unusable mistake with these chocolate covered caramels. I've been very into playing with caramels lately and have hit on my ideal mix: fresh grated nutmeg with espresso flavored sea salt. It's perfect for me, but instead of working with what I know would have come out just so, I went for the adventure and made these caramels with agave instead of golden syrup. Turns out this works reasonably well, but the caramel does not like to set with firm edges. This makes it tricky to cut them in nice neat squares for dipping, but working in small batches with great speed, it can be done.

pinenut anise brittle

Straight cane sugar cooked down into a syrup with sea salt and ground anise, mixed with toasted pinenuts made for a super-quick and unadventurous but completely delicious brittle. Tempered chocolate spread on the bottom balanced out the sweet caramel notes of the brittle and made it hard to stop snacking on the stuff.

black and white sesame brittle

With the sucess of the pinenut brittle, I made another quick batch of brittle, this time with toasted sesame seeds and fresh ginger.

black walnut and dimple pinch

I also considered doing a different kind of chocolate confection, like fudge, with my small stock of precious black walnuts, but the siren-call of those intense whisky tones in the nuts made me want to amp things up even more. So, sitting cross-legged on my kitchen floor I rummaged through my partner's whiskey collection, sampling from bottles as I ate black walnuts. All in all, a very satisfactory culinary experience, though I am totally limited in my knowledge of whiskey and may have chosen this particular whiskey in great part because of its incredible name.

espresso and anisette ganache

A trip back to the liquor cupboard was called for later when I made these espresso and anisette chocolates. Sometime in the summer I'd discovered that a quick pour of anisette into my iced coffee was pretty much my idea of perfection, so the pairing was natural and somehow worked as a great cold-weather chocolate, the bitter and earthy elements bracing against the snow and ice storms outside.

mixed chili and cinnamon

This chocolate, another favorite of mine, was also warming against the inclement weather that marked our holiday season here in New England. The heat of chili peppers and the warmth of fresh grated cinnamon stood out in a dark chocolate center and dusting of light-colored Vietnamese cinnamon on top distinguished them from the orange chocolate made in the same mold.

fresh grapefruit and tarragon

The final confection was a risky one that paid off nicely and made use of seasonal citrus in the form of grapefruit. Pairing the zest of the citrus with fresh tarragon and mixing them all into a creamy fondant, this was a unique, fresh and bright chocolate to cap off my first major foray into chocolate making.

Stay tuned over the next week for more chocolate, including a photo-documentary from Bribri in Costa Rica on bean to bar chocolate making, fair trade and organic chocolate resources, and my recipe for chocolate covered nutmeg espresso salt caramels.

Updates: Costa Rica, Cultural Survival and Vegan Cooking Classes

2008-12-05T10:34:00.013-05:00

Returning home to New England after a week+ of warmth and coconuts on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica is taking some adjustment. I spent a lot of time over our Thanksgiving getaway reading, thinking, writing, cooking, learning, walking in the rain, swimming, meeting people and animals, getting bug bites and watching the stars come out in pitch black skies. Now I'm home. The leaves have all shaken loose from the trees, snow flakes whisked through the air last night and I'm shivering under my glad-to-see-me-again cats' warmth, but I'm tranquilo. It's good to be back and it was good to be away.

Omar opens a coconut en route from Manzanillo to Punta Mona

My reflections and photos will have to wait for me to catch up on all that has been left on hold while I've been gone, but for the moment, some pressing news and some more personal updates. The pressing first: it's been raining where we were in the Talamanca region of Costa Rica. Really, really raining. Bridges out, cities closes, mudslides, crops destroyed, people displaced, homes flooded, utter destruction kind of rain. This introduced some difficulties for me and my friends, but our troubles were a speck of dust compared to the struggles that people in that area of Costa Rica and Panama have and will continue to face. The indigenous people who live in the Talamanca Mountains of Costa Rica have been particularly impacted. Also, in Yorkin, another area occupied by the BriBri people, the entire water system, septic system, lodge and communal kitchen have been wiped out. Their crops are completely destroyed as well. USAID is providing relief in Costa Rica and in the impacted areas of Panama as well, but if you can give anything to help, it would surely be welcomed. In Puerto Viejo, where we stayed, many places were gathering donations of much needed food and water. The Association of Ecotourism and Conservation (you can contact Alaine at atecmail@gmail.com) has been bringing these donations to BriBri and is continuing to collect for the area. If you've ever enjoyed a trip to Costa Rica or Panama, here is a chance to give something back.

me with my adopted kitten, 'Quilo
at the veg-owned Cashew Hill in Puerto Viejo

In other much less significant news, I've been delinquent in posting a link to the interview I did a while ago with the lovely Cathleen of Vegan Nutritionista. She's been interviewing lots of interesting people from the veg-blog world and I am honored to be included. So, if you'd like to learn more about my vegan philosophy, soymilk preference, travel experiences, baking business, eating for immune system support, as well as my fondness for alpacas and pygmy goats, check it out here.

star anise and port ganache cupcake

And if the interview just isn't enough, you can come see me this weekend at the Cultural Survival Bazaar in Boston. It is being held December 6 and 5 from 10-6pm at the Hynes Convention Center, 900 Boylston Street. I'll be there both days with plenty of baked goods for sale.

yeasted sugar cake with muscato poached plums

Also for Boston-area folks, I'll be teaching some upcoming classes at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. The first will be a winter desserts class where we'll make things like the yeasted sugar cake pictured above as well as olive oil and anise cake with blood orange macedonia, spiced fig and apricot compote, black pepper apple galette with salted caramel sauce, and a variety of truffles. It's being held on Saturday, January 31 from 11:00 am–2:00 pm at 42 Brattle Street in Cambridge. You can register here.

fettuccini alfredo with smoked paprika,
cabbage and green beans

I'll also be teaching a cooking series where we'll make a well-balanced main dishes from around the world that really show off all the different ways to incorporate plant-based proteins in your diet, including a chickpea polenta tart, white kidney bean and seitan stew in phyllo cups, fennel sausage and pear pizza, fettuccini alfredo, tofu laksa, cashew cheese endive and roasted beet salad, macadamia kibbeh, and tempeh sambal. It will start on March 9th (the day after my birthday, take note!) and you can register for it on the CCAE website.

Hasta luego, amigos.

Thanksgiving Breakfast

2008-11-24T18:10:00.008-05:00

Culinarily, holiday emphasis falls on the dinner, but there's an awful lot to like about breakfasts the day after too. Whether you raid the refrigerator for feast leftovers, happily subbing mashed potatoes for toast, or continue riding a wave of inspiration in the kitchen to come up with something special, the breakfast following a holiday always feels a little special, particularly if you're still surrounded by friends and family.

There was an interesting bit on NPR this week about the rather notable amount of waste that Americans produce from their holiday meals. I'd guess that much of that waste probably comes from tossing out dried up turkey, but we can all be more conscious of not creating food waste. Leftover fresh cooked or canned pumpkin that was mostly used for pie can be turned into deliciously fragrant spiced muffins with currants or sultanas and chunks of dark chocolate. And those pumpkin seeds you might have scraped into the compost? Use them as a toasty garnish. Pumpkin puree can also give waffles or pancakes a seasonal makeover, or, cook it down on the stove with spices and a little agave or sugar to create a quick pumpkin butter.

If you've cooked up a little more rice than needed for a stuffing or dressing, plain rice can be quickly transformed into a morning treat for everyone just by adding some coconut milk, sultanas, lightly toasted pistachios and almonds, a hint of agave, rose water and cardamon. Heat the mixture over a gentle flame and serve up steaming bowls with very little effort. This works equally well with any leftover take-out rice.

If you relish thoughts of lazy mornings where breakfast just seems to appear magically for you to enjoy, just think a little bit ahead while cooking for the main event of dinner. Cornbread as a Thanksgiving side or as the primary ingredient for a stuffing offers the opportunity to make a double batch and set some aside for morning muffins. Make them in cast iron for particularly delectable crusts with a little crunch.

Warm the muffins and spread them with cranberry sauce or enjoy with a drizzle of olive oil, sea salt and some of the chopped leftover herbs you bought to make dinner. If you think it's impossible to enjoy muffins properly without butter or margarine, just give it a try with good fruity olive oil. It's common enough to dunk bread in oil, but extending that practice to pastries that are typically served with butter works too.

Those with sweeter teeth can transform a batch of batter for cornbread into a rustic morning cake. I like to use the precious berries in my freezer that were frozen at their peak in summer for use throughout the colder months to spiff up a corncake. Blueberries and lemon zest with a dusting of cane sugar can't really be beat, unless you've got some raspberries in the freezer as well.

Mix a few frozen berries into the batter to spread them evenly through the cake, but just drop some on top of the unbaked cake in the pan as well. The batter rises up around the berries and creates little dimples in the sugar-crusted golden top. Any leftover cranberries or sauteed apple chunks would work well in a cake like this too. More adventurous types might even like to try a bit of leftover diced sweet potato, yams or even squash and a good teaspoon of cinnamon with their corncake.

Or maybe your a.m. tooth is sweeter still and your will to extend the cooking frenzy of the holiday even greater. You then are a candidate for some homemade vegan danishes. Especially when I have guests in the house, it feels great to be able to offer something special like this that extends the celebration of the holiday dinner. With amazing seasonal fall fruit like persimmons, pears and apples, the options for fillings are endless. Apple or pumpkin butter make great choices too and a little spread of vegan cream cheese with some leftover cranberry sauce or maple roasted squash sprinkled with nutmeg and cinnamon don't go amiss either. The tail ends of herbs unused in the Thanksgiving dinner can find a happy home in a sweet cheese filling as well. This is also a good time to break out any jams or preserves you may have made or been given--quince, crab apple, grape--all perfect.

For a light touch at breakfast that is still special, soak some dried apricots in water overnight, split them in the middle and stuff them with a teaspoon of vegan cream cheese, fresh tarragon or mint and some toasted pecans reserved from your pie making ventures. These are a great treat if you're still feeling a little full from the night before.

A more dramatic light and fruity breakfast can also warm up your kitchen if it's anything like mine in these cold New England mornings with the blustery wind at the windows. Fig season has faded, but there are still a few hangers on to be found and the earthy sweetness of these beautiful fruits that is the epitome of fall can be intensified by roasting them with a light drizzle of agave, a tiny bit of olive oil and sprinkle of cardamom.

Serve the figs warm with some unsweetened soy yogurt mixed with rose petal jelly or quince jam.

And if all that fails to please, scoop everyone up some of the rewarmed apple crisp you were too full to finish the night before. I like my apple crisp made with cranberries and crystallized ginger, toasted oats and almonds. A little scoop of ice cream can't hurt either...neither can a good dose of caramel . After all, it is the holidays. Happy breakfasting!

An Early Thanksgiving Meal and Cooking Video

2008-11-13T11:46:00.011-05:00

I love planning for a big festive meal--thinking about old favorites, new ingredients, seasonal treats and flavors. While any day can be a reason to celebrate, I take special joy in Thanksgiving feasts and the last few moments of harvest: the bounty of squash, carrots, parsnips, turnips, apples and pumpkin.

My planning for this Thanksgiving took a different form and came a great deal earlier than usual, but it has yielded more to share with more people. The main dish for Thanksgiving this year, the seitan roulade stuffed with wild rice and figs that you see above, was the focus of my first cooking video for How2Heroes. Now, more than offering you my recipe (posted here), I can offer a step by step video in two parts that takes you through the whole operation: Part One (making the seitan), Part Two (making the stuffing and assembling). While the dish does take time, most of it is spent passively. The active preparation is really straightforward and quick, as I hope is clear in the video. Though my nerves were wrecked by the prospect of filming, I had a great time doing it and I hope the video will prove useful to people. Certainly, there are endless possibilities for variation, especially with the stuffing, which could be anything you like, so feel free to play around. I'd love to hear what you come up with.

The wild rice and fig stuffing is also a pretty delicious dish all on its own. I like to eat it with just some simple baked tofu and a salad. The figs are a perfect complement to the slight crunch and chew of the rice and their flavor is deeply autumnal: subtle and earthy sweet.

To accommodate the filming of this dish, I had to make two roulades, i.e. a huge amount of food, and once it was all made and filling up the fridge, it seemed so festive that we decided to host an impromptu early Thanksgiving feast.

a mix of local purple, red and fingerling potatoes for roasting

Now, I'm almost always happy to do something a little crazy like cook a Thanksgiving feast for twenty people by myself, but I was feeling pretty sensible that day and knew I'd be best off setting myself up to do less work and enjoying the amazing offerings of friends and family in a potluck-style Thanksgiving. Since the night begins to fall around 4pm these days, sadly I didn't get pictures that do any sort of justice to our absolutely mind-boggling quantities of beautiful food.

roasted potatoes with olive oil, garlic and fresh ground pepper

So imagine if you will, our plates all piled high with the roulade, roasted potatoes and fried garlic sage cream, mashed potatoes with chickpea gravy, balsamic marinaded portobello mushrooms, brussel sprouts two ways, one shredded and sauteed, the other roasted with shallots and curry, nutmeg-scented lentils and parsnips, Soy Not Oi stylee cornbread stuffing, agave-sweetened yams, maple roasted sweet potatoes, creamy butternut squash soup, butter lettuce salad with chickpeas and heirloom tomato, roasted applesauce, cranberry sauce, garlic and olive oil roasted beets, spiced hot cider, vanilla-fig martinis and a variety of desserts. Who could possibly say that vegans can't do up the the national day of gluttony?! For other ideas about what to serve on your Thanksgiving, Erik over at Vegan.com has a very useful feature courtesy of veteran cookbook author, Robin Robertson. Robin's full Thanksgiving menu has recipes for every dish, including another stuffed-seitan main dish that also looks great.

Even though I didn't take on the task of making Thanksgiving myself, I feel like I still got the best parts of the experience. It always feels great to put the harvest to use: peeling all the almost-black Rome apples and the rosy Macouns for a roasted applesauce loaded with spices, cutting the last of the fresh herbs and tossing them into my stuffing before tying the rest up to dry in the kitchen, steeping figs, roasting roots, picking another pumpkin off the pile. And to have a house full of people share in the food, that just made it perfect.

I think I performed admirably in keeping my contributions to dinner very calm, but I may have gone a little overboard with dessert, which is to be, you know, expected.

Never one to look past an opportunity to use up pumpkin lately, I passed over the traditional pumpkin pie for a spiced pumpkin and chocolate cake to meet both the demands of the season and of my friend's birthday.

Cinnamon, ginger and a hint of black pepper and cayenne warmed up the chocolate and the pumpkin cake while the layers of fresh apple butter and a rich whipped dark chocolate ganache made for a decadent dessert even before the whole thing was wrapped in chocolate decorated with a pretty fall-colored cocoa-butter transfer and topped with piles of chocolate curls.

I also made a big batch of my Great Aunt Jay's cuccidati. Well, sort of my Aunt Jay's. I've been playing with all of her old Italian cookie recipes, remembering the tins of treats she always seemed to have on hand filled with all manner of cookies. This cuccidati is one of my favorites. It's like a grown up fig or date bar. I've toned the sweetness way down in these, leaving off the traditional sugar glaze and sprinkles and adding a very dark chocolate as well as toasted anise and whiskey to the oranges, dates and figs.

From the other side of the family, a seasonal treat that I'd never had before. On a recent trip to West Virginia for genealogy work, my dad brought back some black walnuts and sent them to me with ample information about how to harvest the nut meat. Let me cut to the chase with this: it's dangerous and definitely involves a hammer, but is well worth it. Black walnuts are an American variety that are not grown commercially; it seems the trees have a bit of a mind of their own about where they'd like to grow. They are much less common than their English counterparts and they taste completely different. There's almost a bourbon-quality to the very strong flavor that is heightened, as with all nuts by toasting.

Just a half cup of black walnuts in this, my first fudge, made the confection into something completely unlike anything I've ever had. I'm looking forward to working more with the pre-shelled black walnuts that I have, so any tips for working with them, please send my way.

A much less labor intensive heirloom treat was also a gift from my Dad. The chinquapin is a kind of wild American chestnut that used to be a significant protein-rich food source which has never been commerically harnessed. Many of the trees that produce chinquapins were destroyed in the blight that killed so many of the American chestnut trees in the 1900s. There weren't enough of these beautiful little nuts to do anything with but eat straight out of hand. Fortunately though, that was no great hardship since they taste like a blend of hazelnut and and chestnut, sweet and rich and just like fall should.

Here's hoping your celebrations of the season are just as perfect as this one!

Vegan Pizza and Crackers: A Two for One Daring Bakers

2008-10-29T10:37:00.008-05:00

Sadly, I missed last month's Daring Bakers challenge, a big first for DB that featured a completely vegan challenge (no 12 egg and 8 pints of cream recipe to veganize!) in the form of lavash crackers from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart. Luckily, this month's challenge combines nicely with last's as it also features a Reinhart recipe, this one for a pizza dough. So here they are brought together in a two for one post special.

I love thin crust pizza dough and Peter Reinhart, whose book Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavors is going to be a major help in keeping my house warm and full of fresh baked bread this winter, so this was a good challenge for me to work with. The recipe for this dough, a very reliable crust that bakes up beautifully crisp with a chewy interior, can be found on this month's challenge host, Rosa's, Yummy Yums blog and it's well worth making, especially with these toppings.

I made two pizzas as per the challenge demands, both favorites that are extremely different. The first pizza, pictured in the shots above, is brushed well with strongly flavored Spanish olive oil and then layered with thin slices of local pear and spiced fennel sauage from the Artful Vegan, chopped rosemary from my garden and a sprinkling of balsamic vinegar and fresh grated black pepper. It's sweet and savory, rich and light, subtle and spicy all at once. This is a captivatingly different pizza that works really well as an appetizer done mini or as small wedges that are easily picked up.

For the second pizza, I did a much more traditional take and started with a homemade tomato sauce made simply with some red and gold heirloom tomatoes, roasted garlic, olive oil, salt and a tiny bit of agave. Then, a thin layer of tangy cashew ricotta, broiled eggplant, the last red pepper from the garden, wine-braised vidalia onions, fresh basil and semi-dried roma tomatoes completed the package.

For this dough I used a very fine milled Italian tipo 00 pizza flour which has a medium-high (11.5%-12.5%) gluten content. This flour is specially produced to make thin pizza crusts that stretch out nicely. Tipo 00 flour can also be specifically made for pastries and has a significantly lower gluten content, so it is important to make sure you are working with the right flour for the job. Sure, it's fussy, but this flour for this kind of pizza is worth trying as it creates the perfect base for a thin spread of great toppings.

Last month's challenge, hosted by Natalie from Gluten A Go Go and Shel of Musings From the Fishbowl, also gave me a chance to work with a new to me flour, King Arthur's European-Style Artisan Bread Flour. The major selling point of this flour is that it naturally encourages yeast production, so it will probably shine most when actually baking loaves with it, but it was a great flour for these tasty, rustic crackers too.

I've enjoyed making crackers before, but have always rolled the dough out and cut it into neat little cracker shapes. For this challenge, I wanted a more free form experience. Whenever I have a chance to get to a Armenian bakery in nearby Watertown, MA, I often get fresh lavash and soon after can be found with a vat of hummus or muhammara, ripping off bits of the bread and digging into the dips with it. So that is what I wanted from these crackers, large non-uniform pieces of crisp bread to scoop with.

The recipe made a sizeable batch of crackers, so I divided up the dough to experiment with lots of different topping combinations: za'tar and sesame oil, poppy seeds, black cumin and black Hawaiian sea salt, olive oil, urfa biber and black cumin, niora chili and celtic sea salt, Murray river sea salt, olive oil, aleppo chili and sesame seeds.

These crackers made great snacks eaten plain with salted slices of heirloom tomato covered in olive oil as well as with the simple caramelized vidalia dip I made to go with them. Made with a caramelized vidalia, 12 oz of fresh silken tofu, 1/4 cup raw cashews, 2 tablespoons of mellow white miso, 1 tablespoon of tahini and salt and pepper to taste, the dip was extremely rich and strong, a great thing to set out at a party with crackers like these and slices of fruit.

With a fridge drawer full of eggplant from the farmer's market, a quick eggplant dip also seemed in order. I scrubbed white, lavander and the classic dark purple eggplant and put them under the broiler until their skin was blackened and the flesh very soft.

Waiting just until the eggplant were cool enough to handle, I removed the seeds and skin, mixed the remaining flesh with toasted cumin, roasted garlic, lemon juice, unsweetened soy yogurt and some diced tomato. It wasn't the classic baba ganosh I usually make, but this mellower version seemed just right for eating warm with Middle Eastern spiced crackers.

Just because these Daring Baker's challenges were savory on the face of it didn't mean that a little sweet couldn't come to the table. I used two cracker toppings that lent themselves to a more dessertish application. The first was an olive oil cracker with lemon and orange zest which I topped with a sweet pistachio cheese (something that is still better in concept than execution at this point), a fresh fig half and dark raw agave. Though the cheese could still be better, this was a sophisticated little treat that anyone who likes figs would definitely enjoy.

My second dessert offering was this napoleon made with olive oil, anise seed and espresso powder crackers. The crackers were elevated by alternating layers of thin sliced sweet pistachio cheese, figs and chocolate sauce. Once I can get the pistachio cheese working out the way I envision it, this is going to be the dessert of my dreams. Until then, we'll see what sweet delight Daring Bakers pushes me toward in the next challenge.

Tomato Politics

2008-10-22T15:17:00.015-05:00

My friend Josh, an organizer for Rainforest Action Network (get involved!), always tells me that without optimism we have no hope of changing the world. Maybe that seems obvious if you think about it, but it requires a fairly radical repositioning of my social-political framework which was born out of a punk rock anger at all the injustices of our world and a sort of despondency mixed with fear that it could never change. Now what kind of introduction to a food-related post is this? Well, it's one that gets at the inspiration and hope I had listening to Billy Bragg say much the same thing as Josh last night at the Somerville Theatre. And in hearing it at that moment, I sat back and thought about all of the ways to find hope in the everyday and, somewhat strangely perhaps, realized that one thing I have been continually inspired to hope by this year is the current tomato trend.

If it seems like every year you are seeing more and more varieties of local, heirloom tomatoes at the farmer's markets, at specialty stores, at conventional big box grocery stores, you're right. Though seed-saving on the whole has experienced significant declines, especially in the last decade, many growers are saving, sharing, planting and tending a great number of unusual tomato plants, and the market for them is growing as well. Despite the fact that these heirloom fruit are more labor intensive to grow, more delicate to bring to market, and thus more expensive than their perfect red round laboratory counterparts, they are increasingly popular.

In many ways the trend of increased popularity for heirloom tomato varieties goes against big market-shaping assumptions about what people want from their food. These tomatoes are not cheap, they're not uniform, they're not consistently available, they are sometimes even unattractive with lumps and bumps and dark ridges or strange colors that do not fit into our archetype for the perfect tomato. And that's just the thing, they're changing the way both producers and consumers think about food. Heirloom tomatoes are on the frontline of expanding possibilities for produce, creating opportunity and incentive to get invested in trying new varieties, support crop diversity, encourage farmers to grow real food from seeds without patents and to say we value and support this kind of production.

There are few people who are not feeling at least the looming shadow of fear caused by the implosion of the credit market, and yet my farmer's market is busier than it has ever been and people are willing to pay almost four dollars for a pint of cherry tomatoes. I recognize that this is mark of privilege (though there are always customers paying with food stamps at the market), but I also choose to think of it as progress. I like to think that the huge piles of heirloom tomatoes stacked on plywood planks every Saturday morning that dwindle quickly through the opening hours are a sign that people are increasingly willing to pay a real cost of food production for real food. Maybe others look at it the same way I do, as a matter of priorities. I choose to prioritize food and I think that tomatoes were gateway produce for me in this regard. My first year of grad school, cobbling together Boston rent and bill coverage out of a pretty paltry stipend, standing at a farmer's market table I compared the cost of our pantry staple, Goya black beans, to the cost of heirloom tomatoes and wondered, could it possibly be worth it? I decided that it was. It was worth it not just in that moment as instant gratification, but as a macro thing, as a broad choice for the future of food production.

Fast forward six years to my kitchen window sill this morning in late October and I'm staring at four heirloom tomatoes ripening above a truly obscene, if artful, pile of local squash mostly from my Parker Farm's CSA (plus an extra red kuri and birdhouse from the farmer's market that couldn't be resisted) and I realize that my heirloom tomato-spurred philosophy has been broadly extended. I value food, I value the people who grow food, I particularly value food that comes from my Commonwealth and in so far as it is reasonable for me to do so, I will pay for it because that's the only way to keep it coming. Watching as the tomatoes year after year become an accepted and valued part of the late summer and fall for people gives me hope that we can broadly shift our ideas about food and put more care into it. Food might seem like a fluffy kitten of a problem compared to other things going on in the world, but our attention and investment in food systems is vital on a macro level and our willingness to put time and energy into cooking and eating and sharing food with each other does not a little to dent our dependence on impersonal and unhealthy factory food and our "bowling alone" culture.

I know I've said it before, but food choices are political in both a capital P and baby p sense and in each sense a possibility for change exists. Serving my favorite tomato soup made with rich red tomatoes with craggy tops and tiny golden tomatoes, each one near to or having burst open with juices, from a farm in Lundenburg where I've actually seen them growing transforms me in a way that opening a can could not. The question is though, how does that transformation matter? The cynic in me could say that it doesn't, that it just serves to make me feel good and prop me up on my privilege as a person who can obtain quality foods. A spirit of hope in me though says that it matters in terms of my ability and willingness to extend out from that, to find value in considering all of my choices, beyond food, considering their impact on the world and in my own life. Beyond all the day to day noise, life really might just be as simple as finding joy in something and holding onto it, transforming yourself with it.

That was what Saturday afternoons this summer and fall were all about for me. Though my weekends tend to be the busiest part of the week, I carved out a little ritual that brought me more joy than seems possible: flowers from the yard and or market, a selection of heirloom tomatoes and herbs, white bean puree accented with Spanish olive oil, sea salt, fresh mint and lemon, fresh baked bread, and time to enjoy it all.

In general, I do poorly with repetitious food, but as you can see, this meal was a habit that I didn't want to break. Each lunch, piling beans and tomatoes on slices of bread felt like a gift of simplicity and perfection. And while after this week, as the tomatoes are overtaken by squash and apples, pears and pumpkins, I will miss them, but it feels good to look forward to them again next year and bend in recognition of a seasonality that I've had to learn how to respect and value.

Perhaps in addition to the growth of interest in heirloom tomatoes this year, I've been particularly focused on them because its truly been an amazing season for them here in Massachusetts. We got them early in the season and only recently has the flow started trickling. The proliferation of tomatoes meant that I had many opportunities to use them in some memorable meals, as well as casually making use of them for lunches and snacks like the hummus, pickle and tomato lavash wrap above sprinkled with urfa biber chilis and adorned with purple pepper from my garden or chopped in a simple but great salad that paired sweet cherry tomatoes with earthy chunks of pear and candied pecans, a delectably crunchy Texan gift from Amanda. Tomatoes also became a co-star with asparagus and patty pan squash in summery salads made with my favorite grain of the season, kamut.

I also had a revelation about tomatoes and Thai flavors, namely that they go together amazingly. The picture in the bottom right corner of the mosaic above is a seitan and broccoli curry with a tamari-lime tomato salsa over a Thai corncake. Tomatoes cooked down into a savory sauce with garlic and lemongrass also make for an amazing dish with the tangy quality of tomatoes hitting all the right notes for a compelling dish that is complex and comforting all at once. Served with coconut rice and a tatsoi salad it has become one of my favorite dinners.

Thai and tomatoes may have been a new pairing for me, but I am well enough versed in tomatoes and Mexican: black beans, red beans, pinto beans, roasted garlic, fresh corn, spicy roasted tomatillo salsa with lots of lime, some rice, a beer and lots of fresh chopped tomato--that's pretty much simple perfection.

And then there's my Italian birthright of tomato sauce. I like to channel my Great Aunt Jay, an inspiring home cook and baker, and cook it down right with lots of garlic and wine. It feels good to connect this heritage crop of tomatoes grown from seeds passed down from generation to generation to my family history and to my own beliefs and practices, layering the sauce on organic pasta and topping it with homemade breaded garlic seitan. Taken all together, it kind of gives me hope for a life that can eat its way to meaning, purpose, relevance, respect and change.

And I do what I can to
Bale string and tie some ballad truths
...Once more again
To help in the feeding and the seed of man
And not in the bleeding and the end of man.

-Woody Guthrie, by way of Billy Bragg

Best of Summer Roundup, Part 2: Herb Gardens

2008-09-25T09:00:00.008-05:00

This installment of Best of the Summer also doubles as my entry for Iron Cupcake Earth, a creative cupcake competition that features a new ingredient every month for participants to bake with. In honor of the end of summer here in the States, the ingredient selected was one of summer's fragrant stars, basil.

I love basil of all kinds, but my favorite is probably Thai. It's got a hint of anise and a sweet little bit of spice. During the cold months I have to really stratagize to get it though since I only know two places to buy it, both inconvenient and neither organic. That's one of the primary reasons to worship my small herb garden--organic Thai basil on demand. A step out the back door, a snip of the garden shears and I've got the freshest Thai basil possible.

We had a frost warning last week and I've had to remember the summer-lost art of wearing socks and hoodies, the days are noticeably shorter and my faithful herb garden which has been supplying me with four kinds of basil, three kinds of thyme and mint, two kinds of sage, parsley, lemon verbena and balm, tarragon, rosemary and oregano is starting to go to seed. I had been thinking I would use the final crop of Thai basil for another batch of ice cream, but this challenge gave my last little bit of summer convenience and freshness a good goodbye in cupcake form.

The cupcake is primarily flavored with unsweetened soymilk in which a cup of fragrant Thai basil, chopped lemongrass and star anise were steeped to infuse it deeply with these intoxicating flavors. Another element of flavor comes from the use of jaggery, an unrefined sugar that can come from sugarcane or date or coconut palms. It is used through South and Southeast Asian and is often used in Thai cooking where a tiny bit of jaggery can accentuate the fire of a curry like nothing else.

The jaggery produced with cane sugar is often a dark brown sugar color and is hard to the touch. There are also Central/South American sugars called panela that come in similar hard disc or dome shapes. In the States health food store often carry products called rapadura, which is the same kind of sugar but in a ground form. All forms of the sugar are considered to be, as far as sweeteners go, healthier than their refined counterparts because they are unprocessed and retain a great deal of the mineral content of the plant is is made from. The coconut palm jaggery I like to use looks a little different from some other preparations and sometimes, depending on the weather, separates as you can see in the picture above. Whisking the syrup back into the harder sugar mass takes a little work, like when oil separates from natural peanut butter, but is easily done with a fork and patience and is well worth the effort for these cupcakes (p.s. I've posted the recipe here) and all other applications.

Saying goodbye to my crop of Thai basil for the cupcakes made me a little sad, thinking about all the other things I take advantage of the summer months to make with fresh herbs from right outside my door. While it's not difficult to find rosemary in the store, the stuff that is available is really a different animal from what I grow, which has softer, longer leaves and a more intense flavor and scent. Not having access to it really does change the character of our "house bread," this wonderfully crusty rosemary olive oil bread made in a large cast iron pot. Which is not to say I don't make it year round, it's just not the same without my garden's rosemary.

Nor is this easy answer to bread in the heat of summer--a quick flat bread that doesn't require the oven to stay on for long. It too is full of fresh garden rosemary which goes wonderfully with fried heirloom garlic and course Celtic sea salt.

Of course, there are any number of dishes I could show you which are made better by the addition of fresh herbs from the garden, additions that I greatly appreciate being able to pick in just the quantity I need them, something impossible when you have to actually buy them at the market. So maybe it's a foolish impulse, given the real culinary work that my herb garden does to improve flavor, but really my favorite thing about it may be the access it gives me to fresh picked, impulsive garnishes that make simple things eaten at home with or without company truly special. A little bit of chocolate and orange mint on this fruit plate which also contained local melon, ground cherries and nectarines (as well as some distinctly not local figs) made this little fruit plate one of the most memorable things I've eaten this summer. It's a tiny thing, but its addition is transformative.

Garnishes should never be extraneous or irrelevant to the dish though. A garnish for garnish's sake is often silly. The mint with with fruit above added a new component to a simple plate, accenting the flavors of the fruit as well adding color. Garnishes can also hint at what's going on in the dish and in doing so they marry the dual power of herbs: beauty and function in flavor, like in this fresh herbes de provence panna cotta garnished with tarragon, lavender and basil. Paired with a lemon thyme cake and sauteed stone fruit in creme de cassis, the herbs work beautifully in a dessert framework.

Same story with this panna cotta where a lemon verbena infusion provides lots of flavor in the soft custard and serves as a fragrant garnish. A swirl of mango coulis, a pistachio tulie and some hulled strawberries set the whole thing off.

Of course, a more standard savory application of fresh herbs is also always welcome. Compound butters mixed with herbs from the garden make a gorgeous spread on any bread or muffin, like this corn muffin made with corn from my CSA as well as freshly ground organic cornmeal, courtesy of my dad who recently restocked me in a 10-pound bag kind of way. That's love and it shows in the final results. I think that's why I love my herb garden too, the herbs become ingredients that I am really connected to and that kind of investment and care always translates into the food. It's hard to love an herb that you just pluck out of a plastic box.

And speaking of pluck--one more highlight of summer and the garden would have to be the flowers. I am not an especially skilled gardener, but I love having flowers surrounding me so I grow things I can count on, like this coreopsis. They're lovely in the yard and nice to cut for flowers on the table, and because they're organic, I can use them at home as garnishes like on this lemon raspberry cupcake.

My fall asters are also nice and dependable, as are the flame-colored spikes that creep up next to the hostas and which for the life of me I can never remember the name of. Asters are so pretty and so fleeting once they're picked so having ready access to them is great for decoration, just pluck right before they're need to, say, decorate a bourbon brown sugar cake with whipped espresso ganache, chocolate shavings and white chocolate wrapper with pretty dark chocolate accents for a 1920s themed murder mystery dinner party.

Soon the asters and mums will be all that's left out there, but until that time I'm keeping my garden shears at the ready.

Best of Summer Roundup:Part One, Tarts

2008-09-12T07:14:00.011-05:00

Early this morning I peeled apples. Honestly, they'd been peeking out of wooden baskets at the farmer's market for a few weeks, little red harbingers of fall to come, but the heat and humidity made it clear summer was still here, as did the peaches.

And so I'd been resisting the apples, not quite ready for them so long as nectarines, blackberries, plums and melons were all still there. When the basket of tiny crab apples caught my eye though, I suspected that they were one of those blink and they're gone fruits, something I'd have to try now or wait out a year of curiosity for. So I bought them, each no bigger than a small green plum, and then, occupying a sun splash on the floor of my kitchen where the afternoon light is always best, I ate an apple and listened to my increasingly fuzzy cat purr as I stroked her incoming winter coat and knew, fall was here.

So this morning I peeled the remaining crab apples, poached them in lemon and sugar, cinnamon, star anise and fresh nutmeg and fully fell into fall. The scent of these warm apples has crept into every corner of the apartment, making me giddy for crisp nights and crunchy leaves, apple picking in cool orchards, hunting raspberries through dark, dry canes, steamy tea to ward off the morning chill and cocoa in the evening. My backlog of things to blog however is still firmly set in summer, so I am going to feature my five favorite things of summer over the next week or two, a proper summer send off and a clearing of the slate for fall and all the fabulous food to come.

It's probably a cheat to say that one of my favorite summer features is a dessert so fluid and flexible that it is at home in any season, but summer tarts always seem best to me, laden as they are with all the best fresh fruit.

Tarts take on all the intersections and by chance meetings of fruit--that little window of time when summer raspberries fade as blueberries flourish and peaches, small and hesitant but perfectly sweet all meet.

Tarts highlight the beauty of fruit, allowing a peek at the inner striping of a strawberry or the capillary-small flush of red on the orange flesh of a peach. For me, the fresh tumble of fruit on a tart is an illustration of the intention that it has just been made to enjoy in that moment, not to languish in a bakery case encased in sticky-sweet glaze that preserves the fruit and lends a lacquered finish.

This style of fruit tart is my go-to summer dessert. Invite me to a potluck or summer supper and this is what you'll get. A cookie-style crust that takes less than 30 minutes in the oven, a quick pastry cream on the stove and a beautiful array of cold fruit to chop, tarts come together quickly without generating too much heat in the kitchen.

Mini tart are also great for potlucks or informal summer gatherings, tiny little pastries with just a morsel of fresh fruit that you can just pop in your mouth.

Tarts are so endless variable too, even within a subcategory like the fresh fruit tart. One week it might be a cashew cardamom crust with vanilla bean pastry cream and berries, the next it might be a chocolate almond crust with an amaretto pastry cream, like the one above.

Or it could be a dark chocolate cookie crust with a thin layer of lavender-infused chocolate spread across the bottom and a wonderfully contrasting lemon pastry cream with tart kiwi and blueberries spread across the top.

As seasonal as I like stay with tarts, the form often prompts me to reach for striking imported fruit like kiwi or dragon fruit.

For these tarts, ground black sesame seeds stud the crisp crust and a cool key lime mousse fills the inside while fruit is subjected to fondant cutters for the top, cute little cookie-cutterish tools which I never actually use for fondant, reserving them for things that actually, you know, taste good, like dragon fruit.

The other thing that is often great for decorating tarts are little vegetable cutters sold in many Japanese food stores for decorating bentos or adding a flourish to sushi. The cutter I used for the shapes above were from a Joyce Chen set of four different shapes, but I've seen others.

The great variety of tart pans is also fun, like these little rectangular pans, which make a perfect single serving size.

Stone fruit in general probably deserves a post all on its own as one of my favorite things about summer, especially these little black apricots. They were new to me this year, but I promptly fell in love with them. A cross between apricots and plums, these delicate fruit are a perfect melding of sweet and tart like a plum but with the deeper more layered flavor of apricot as well. They're astoundingly good, especially when baked in a tart where their flavor intensifies.

The tarts I made with black apricots might have been my favorite dessert of the whole summer, which accounts for, though doesn't justify, the number of times I made it.

Sometimes paired with plums, sometimes with peaches.

Sometimes with regular apricots, but always in the same puffy sweet almond dough...

...until I figured out that replacing the almond meal with the cornmeal that my dad stone grinds for me at Christmas was equally delicious, if totally different. The mellow sweetness of the corn crust with an intensely sour local plum and floral-scented peach made for an unexpectedly great whole, the kind of dessert that is in perfect harmony with itself in that moment. Perhaps it could be recreated, but that corn, that exact plum, that specific peach, all of exactly those ingredients are what you need to experience it again in just that way.

Like the cornmeal tart with those extraordinary plums, these were tarts that could probably only have been made within the three week span that gooseberries and currants were readily avaliable. I'd only ever done anything with gooseberries once, likewise with red currant (except for decorative purposes) and those experiments were less than successful. Actually, they boarded on the inedible.

This year I felt more prepared, mixing the berries well with agave and spreading the bottom of the fragile puffy pastry crust with a sweet cashew cream to balance out the natural sourness of the berries.

Balance really is the art of the tart. As in this mini tart with its first of the season figs and last of the season berries, the fruit's harmony plays well against the dark chocolate mousse filling in taste and texture, the crumbly pistachio crust picks up the crush of seeds in the black berries and figs, and taken all together it is a perfect tiny package.

While the endless variety possible in tart crusts is lots of fun, sometimes you just need a plain old rolled out pie dough, flaky and light, just a tender shell that won't overwhelm the filling. It's always best to blind bake such a crust before filling it, even if it will return to the oven to bake with the fillings.

Apples might be our own local signs of fall, but the appearance of figs in stores always makes me remember a particular November night in San Francisco when I ate a grilled fig salad and looked out over lights on the water, wishing that every night could be so clear, cool and perfect.

So it makes perfect scene then to draw inspiration from California native and Greens co-founder, Deborah Madison, for this late summer fig tart that starts with a simple crust and is then filled with gorgeous wedges of fresh fig and then topped with an orange blossom custard.

Baked to set the silken-tofu based custard and caramelize the slices of fig on top, this is a great tart to say goodbye to summer with, welcoming fall with open arms and a pleasantly full belly.

The Vegan Pâte à Choux Chronicles

2008-08-31T23:40:00.000-05:00

It's that Daring Bakers time again and I'm posting in at the eleventh hour, though I've been working on this challenge for quite a while. Lest you get too excited for the great unveiling though, let me warn you right off that this post is more an exercise in chronicling out-right failures and near-misses than it is in making with the pretty pastries. In fact, this will probably be the least appetizing, most technical post I've ever put together. Getting vegan pâte à choux right has been a proverbial pain in the behind, but every experiment, successful or not, yeilds new information and skill, so all in all I'm thankful for Tony Tahhan and Meeta of What’s For Lunch Honey? who set us this month's challenge of Pierre Hermé's chocolate éclairs.

This picture is of my final and most successful experiment with making the pâte à choux, a traditionally eggy pastry that serves as the core of many desserts, of which the éclair is likely the most popular. As far as the éclair went, I knew it was this pastry that was going to be the real challenge. Pâte à choux is one of those things that people like to demystify, pulling back the curtain and showing you just how easy it is to be the wizard who can churn out these French delicacies. Pâte à choux, they say, is really a snap once you know how. But have they tried to make it without eggs?

This disgusting thing was my baseline, the utterly demoralizing first batch, which I share not to turn your stomach (sorry about that), but as part of my process and as full disclosure of all failures in this challenge. I started out trying to keep as close to the original Hermé recipe as I could, minus, of course, the non-vegan ingredients, including a number of very significant eggs. The chemical wizardry of the egg is really what makes pâte à choux; it is the only leavening and the primary agent of flavor, as there is very little in the way of other ingredients--some flour, a pinch of salt, a teaspoon of sugar. In this first shot, I used a mixture of tapioca starch, potato flour and water whisked hard to get a thick slurry that I thought might give the pastry some substance without making it too heavy, as I suspected that something like pureed silken tofu or soy yogurt might. I also used a little baking powder to get lift and, well, the picture is worth a thousand words, but here is what I learned: potatoes won't work, I was working with too much fat or the fat was not incorporated well enough into the choux paste, the oven was too high or the time in was too long, it was possible that I needed more leavening, and it was going to be a long haul to perfected vegan pâte à choux.

The next batch at least did not make me physically ill to look at, so mark that as improvement. It had a little puff, which again marks improvement. This time I used more tapioca starch and subbed rice flour for the potato flour, whisking those ingredients with water, increased the sugar for flavor, increased the baking soda to 1/2 teaspoon, decreased the Earth Balance, beat the paste harder with a wooden spoon and used only the top of the oven but left it at the same temperature.

As this picture reveals though, there was still too much fat leaking out of the pastry and the insides were not beautifully puffed and open wide. Rather, the inside was gummy and wet.

After two complete failures, I scraped my original fumblings and started getting serious. Playfully working my way to decent vegan pâte à choux just wasn't going to happen. A friend suggested an episode of Alton Brown's Good Eats on pâte à choux, from which I picked up the piping technique you can see above, the "lazy S" shape. This is a thing that I can't explain, but which experentially I can say is very helpful. In baking a tray of straight piped lines of pâte à choux dough along with "lazy S" shapes, the "S" éclairs had significantly better poof, which is definitely something you want for these pastries.

In research mode I also turned to my friend, Bo Friberg, hoping he could steer me right since Hermé and I weren't getting off on the right foot. (Please note, Bo Friberg is not actually my friend, though I'm sure he's lovely. In fact, he is the author of The Professional Pastry Chef, which is a great resource.) The first tip I took from Friberg was one about flour. He suggested using a mix of cake and bread flour for éclairs or profiteroles, coming up with what is essentially a custom-blended all-purpose flour for a tender pastry. However, he noted that some chefs use a "stronger" (which I took to mean more glutenous) flour for larger items. I wondered if using bread flour containing more gluten than my all-purpose mix might help the cause since I had little else to provide good structure and produce a firm shell for the éclair. The second tip was to use a stand mixer to really beat the paste well and the third, most useful peice of information, to freeze the éclair before baking them. Freezing turns out to be the eggless éclair's best friend.

Moving the frozen paste straight from the freezer to a hot oven produces a good deal of steam in a very short period of time causing the paste to quickly puff up. The thin bit of paste that is pushed up hardens in the heat and firms nicely, leaving an empty space between the base and the top of the pastry, the hallmark of a good éclair. On my first pass, this worked pretty well and I got pretty excited. Certainly, I got a higher rise than the other attempts and a nice hollow, but the middle was a little soggy, as you can see in the above photo. To remedy, I increased the heat of the oven to 425 degrees, as reccomended in The Professional Pastry Chef, and moved the rack from the top of the oven to the middle.

Then, as you can see, I got pretty great puff. So, finally, I felt able to make an éclair with my passable pâte à choux. For the filling I made a decadent dark-chocolate cherry vanilla pastry cream and topped it with a straighforward thick chocolate glaze instead of the multi-step Hermé recipe, which to be honest, at that point I had no patience for. I used a Theo Chocolate 65% Madagascar bar that was a little sweeter and fruiter than I usually like my chocolate, but which worked really nicely for this, complementing the cherry and providing some constrast to the slightly bitter chocolate in the pastry cream.

The filling, the glaze, they were all things I could be happy with, but the pâte à choux was kind of tough and flavorless and still it was the tiniest bit soggy inside. I don't think I've ever actually had a real French éclair, but this just didn't hold up to my idea of it as a wonderfully delicate marvel of the pastry world. Was I really going to make it again though? I resolved to give it a rest. I certainly had many other things to do...but it haunted me and I know myself well enough to know that this was the kind of thing that would drive me crazy if I didn't at least take one more quick shot.

So, one last try. This time I hunted down a dusty old package of egg-replacer thinking maybe, just maybe it would really work. I measured out enough water to equal the liquid mass of eggs called for in a half-recipe of the small-batch pâte à choux in The Professional Pastry Chef (240ml) . Then, I calculated how much egg-replacer powder I should add to it to going by the formula on the egg-replacer box of 1 1/2 teaspoon powder to 2 tablespoons water. I whisked this mixture and let it stand to thicken. Before slowly adding it to the slightly cooled roux in my stand mixer, I whisked it again to remove any last lumps and sediment so it was all evenly mixed as I add it "egg" by "egg" to the forming paste. In this batch, I also added a tiny bit of tumeric to give the pastry a hint of yellow since the other batches had seemed a little too albino and strange-looking, except for, interestingly, the hideous potato flour batch which had it not been so revolting might have had a good golden-yellow color.

I was happy with the color in this batch and mostly happy with the texture, especially since I was able to eliminate most of the remaining dampness inside by poking a hole in the end of the baked shell with a sharp knife, allowing the steam to escape as it cooled. I filled these with a caramel pastry cream (see first photo in this post), which went well with the leftover Theo chocolate glaze. So, this final batch of pâte à choux was better than its predicesor, but still nothing I'm really happy with. For now though, I'm taking a pass on unlocking its mystery and am looking forward to picking up again with it some other time, combining the results of my own experiments with the amazing work of all my fellow vegan Daring Bakers who I'm sure also pushed hard and learned a lot with this month's challenge.

So, to review: potatoes don't work, profanity won't help you but poking a hole in it will, definitely freeze your paste, use a stand mixer and pipe a "lazy S", add a little baking powder, a pinch of turmeric, a heap of patience and you just might make something edible!

Delicate Flame: Urfa Biber Chili Cupcake for Iron Cupcake Earth

2008-08-29T07:51:00.006-05:00

When I read on Cupcakes Take the Cake about an Iron Chef-style cupcake competition taking place, my gears immediately started turning. As in Iron Chef, a special ingredient is the uniting theme among competitor's entries and for this first round of Iron Cupcake: Earth hosted by Sandy, the Milwaukee Cupcake Queen, the ingredient was chili pepper, which, you know, I can get down with.

My submission is a Turkish inspired cupcake featuring a favorite new ingredient, urfa biber, a Turkish chili pepper, which is delicious in all things, not just cupcakes. I thought about naming this cupcake after my upstairs neighbor, Baigum, who just this week became a United States citizen, but my friend Anna once told me about the tendency for Turkish dishes to have poetic or even racy names (she has a great story about her young brother declaring that the "tender inside of woman's thigh" the family had just enjoyed to be delicious) and that made me reach for something else. Staying on the G-rated side of the fence, the name of "Delicate Flame" is a perfect fit for these gently warm, musky-fruit tinged cupcakes that linger long with rich, complex flavors and soft heat.

Urfa biber is one of the most unique spices I have ever experienced. The chili, a striking burgundy pepper that grows in the Urfa region of Turkey, is sundried during the day and then wrapped up tight to "sweat" through the night. The result is often described as a "spicy raisin" and while at first blush that might not sound appealing, it points at some of the magic of the urfa's flavor. There is definitely a sense of dried fruit, a highly concentrated sweetness that has a richness and depth to its flavor that fresh fruit lacks, and that's what hits the tongue first, but it is soon met by a full-bodied warmth that is highly persistent and holds flavor instead of just heat.

Urfa biber was definitely my chili for this cupcake so I started building around it. Cardamom seems to be the vanilla of Turkish desserts, so I cracked a few pods and got to work with the mortar and pestle to grind them into a fine powder. If you enjoy cardamom, you can do no better than to grind your own. The flavors are so much more present and bold than if you were to use an already ground powder. I've found that cardamom is one of the most fleeting spices I use, in powdered form it is really only good for a brief period of time.

Once the kitchen was full of the captivating scent of cardamom, I started thinking about Turkish coffee, which is often brewed with that spice. My favorite coffees tend to be from Central America and have notes of cocoa, fruit and spice, which seemed perfect for this project. So, breaking all rules of Turkish coffee making, I started with a very fine ground Guatemalan shade-grown bean and proceeded to make it in a syrup warmer, lacking as I do the traditional ibrik (also, my neighbors were out and their ibriks secured just a floor above my reach). Does anyone else in the world have a syrup warmer? It's a very New England thing to have, so I'll understand if you don't, but it happens to double fairly well for the wide-bottomed, narrow-topped ibrik, having a wide bottom and narrow top. Coffee Geek seemed like the no-brainer destination for a primer on making Turkish coffee at home (I'd only ever consumed the stuff), but when I noticed that their finished cup had no crema, the wonderful foam that forms on top of the syrupy coffee, I was out. Luckily, Ana Sortun came to the rescue in Spice with instructions.

While the cupcakes were baking, I made a cardamom pastry cream and set it to chill, which was really good, but something I'd leave off next time in favor of just enjoying the cake and chocolate. I'd initially planned to leave chocolate out of my cupcake since chocolate and chilies are, as far as I'm concerned, made for each other and I wanted to explore something different, but the flavor profile of this cupcake was already so different for me and I knew dark chocolate would be a perfect companion, so I began work on a dark chocolate ganache to top. Whipping set ganache to get it light and airy is a great way to get the decadent experience of ganache without as much of the density, which can drag things down.

On top of the ganache a rough chop of pistachios provided a beautiful contrast in color, texture and taste with the light nuttiness of the coffee and the seemingly natural pairing of dried fruit flavors. Also, since there is a...I hesitate to say "mildness" because it makes me think of some sad, watery salsa in a jar on the shelf...so let's say, because the urfa biber is delicately fiery, it seemed perfect to sprinkle a bit of the dried pepper right on top of the cupcake so it was the first element to make itself known on the tongue. Of course, I also think its near black, purple-red color is very pretty. Tasters had no idea what it was, but universally enjoyed the unexpected flavors.

Delicate Flame Urfa Biber Cupcakes

makes six 3" cupcakes in Panettone baking cups

for Turkish Coffee:
4 tablespoons very finely ground espresso, preferably Central American
4 teaspoons dark cane sugar
2 cardamom pods, black seeds finely ground
1/4 teaspoon green anise, ground
1/3 cup cold water

1/2 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons semolina
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon urfa biber dried chili flakes
1/4 teaspoon ground green anise
1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/2 cup unsweetened soymilk
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
Turkish coffee
1/4 cup cane sugar
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
2 tablespoons safflower oil
2 tablespoons brown sugar

To make the coffee:

Pour ground coffee, sugar and spices in the bottom of the pot and pour cold water over top. Do not stir. With a high flame, cook until the sugar melts, about three minutes. When the coffee grounds collapse into the liquid and the liquid rises around it, immediately remove from heat and stir. Return the mixture to the flame and allow the liquid to rise again. Remove from heat just before boil. Allow it to sit for about 1 minute because returning to heat and allowing it to rise a second time, remove and allow to sit once more for a minute and then return to heat and rise a third and final time. Note that each rise will take progressively less time, so watch carefully. Allow coffee to cool.

To make the cupcakes:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a medium-sized mixing bowl, sift together the flours, baking powder and baking soda. Whisk in the ground spices and set aside. In a small mixing bowl, combine the unsweetened soymilk and apple cider vinegar, whisk to combine. The mixture should almost immediately thicken like a thin-yogurt. Stir in the cooled coffee, sugars, salt and oil, whisking well to combine. With a whisk in one hand, pour the wet mixture into the dry, whisking to incorporate as you pour. Divide the batter evenly among six panettone papers and bake for 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cupcake comes out clean.

Top with dark chocolate ganache, chopped pistachios and urfa.

Voting for Iron Cupcake Earth will begin at noon on Sunday, August 31st at No One Puts Cupcake in the Corner and will be open through Thursday, September 4. You can vote for your favorite chili cupcake there and help someone win great prizes from Cakespy, Jessie Steele Aprons, Cupcake Courier and Taste of Home. There are a surprising (and fantastic!) number of vegan entries. Wouldn't it be fun to have one of them win the first Iron Cupcake challenge?! Until voting is up you can check out entries on the Flickr group.

Sugarbaby: A Watermelon to Remember

2008-08-19T15:45:00.007-05:00

It was a slow drift, something I didn't even really notice until there I was in front of a catered fruit platter at a work lunch looking at the watermelon from a great distance. Where once I would have reached out on instinct for a wedge, I could only gaze on it with sorrow. I knew it would be tasteless, soggy, pale, pathetic, a poor excuse for the summer fruit of my youth, slurped from a time-honored position, arms and face extended, juice dripping steadily on the grass rather than down my front. And thus, watermelon for me went the way of grocery store tomatoes, peaches, apples--down that sad road to "not even worth it" status.

Enter, sugarbaby. I'm sure there are other varieties of watermelon that are still perfect at their prime, but I have not experienced such watermelon paradise as cracking open the small dark green round sugarbaby and digging in to its sweet crush of fruit ever in my life.

See, I'd been angry with Saveur's September issue ever since it arrived in early August. Its cover features a truly beautiful watermelon, a taunting sort of watermelon, the kind of melon I'd given up on. Inside, a plethora of dishes sweet and savory featured a spectrum of watermelon varieties that I'd never seen. The editors also offered a list of their top 18 cultivars, starting with Sugarbaby and ending with Cream of Saskatchewan. I had a desperate kind of twitching; I wanted watermelon so badly.

The majority of watermelon sold in the US has at least in some part a parent in the cultivar Charleston Gray, a variety developed in the 1940s at a USDA Vegetable Breeding Laboratory in South Carolina. Scientists there had been working to develop a commercially viable melon for years and finally succeeded in the unappetizingly named Gray, which boasted a hard rind and the now-familiar oblong shape that made it easy to ship and stack in grocery stores. I knew that anything born of such parentage as the Gray was out. Here and there in Massachusetts we find other melons, small round ice-box melons which, sadly, tend also to be tasteless and dull. The obvious answer was to start looking out for heirloom, local, or other varieties of watermelon which may be less practical from a shipping and marketing standpoint, but had to be more satisfying.

Though watermelons do grow in the area (reportedly... not that I've had any success with them, but then you should see my cabbages...also pretty weak) I cannot find them for sale. There's not a melon in sight at any farmer's market I've poked around, none in the orchards or farms, no local or heirloom varieties in the stores. I'd just about given up when on a fateful Sunday shopping trip, I picked up a local Crenshaw melon, turned my head to put an ear to it and as my eyes turned down the open stalls of fruit, I caught sight of a pile of large forest green melons. Could it be? Crenshaw forgotten, I went to them. I lifted one up. It was heavier than it looked. I tapped it and the sound came back dense and wet, like slapping a waterbed. Walking with my heavy prize I could feel it, the fruit like huge bowl of barely-set jello, so full of juice there was almost a ripple inside the rind. Score.

The first sugarbaby I devoured, more or less by myself. They're small(ish). I cut wedges, installed myself in the backyard, attracted an audience of squirrels and ants and just enjoyed. It was the melon I'd been waiting for. How long would they be around? I was concerned, went back at the soonest opportunity and bought two. The second I started in on immediately, scooping half of it into jewel-like little balls, promising myself that I would do something more interesting with them than just eat, but then there I was offering friends toothpicks and the precious bowl of fruit. Using a melon baller on the sugarbaby left behind cups of juice. As the blunt tool cut into the fruit, the rind filled with bright, beautiful, sweet and deeply refreshing juice. Drinking it took me back to hot, humid nights with the bright lights and chatter of nightmarkets in Southeast Asia with pitchers of watermelon juice calling to me as a perfect ending to meal of mee and Chinese broccoli, but really, it was even better, the flavor stronger and clearer.

I'm often a wreck when reading about food, getting all worked up about all the things I want to try or get inspired by, and a good picture can send me over the edge, straight into the kitchen. That's how it was with this shot from August's Gourmet. I didn't even know what it was, but I wanted to make it. As luck would have it, Gourmet was just as wrapped up with watermelon as I was and this dessert, a watermelon sorbet base with a creamy lime semifreddo top was just what I was looking for.

The sugarbaby made a wonderful sorbet, bright and cheery and with a great texture, not too icy, not too sugary. Semifreddo, a frozen dessert I'd never had before is actually a great time saver as well as a great treat. A creamy base infused with tangy lime zest, the mixture is whipped and then simply poured over the frozen sorbet base. For those without an ice cream maker or without inclination to drag one out from wherever it's hiding, this is a great alternative. Semifreddo means half-cold, which on the face of it seems odd since it is indeed frozen, but since it is not stirred as it freezes, the air incorporated in it through whipping the cream or custard that serves as its base gives it an a lighter, more melting mouth-feel to it and makes it seem to be not completely frozen. Technically, semifreddo is a class of desserts which could include anything served partially frozen--a cake, a custard, a mousse--but it seems most commonly to refer to something like this tequila lime layer. My adaptation of the watermelon sorbet and lime semifreddo is below and makes for a really nice hot night dessert offering.

The other thing in Gourmet that caught my eye allowed me to make use of my melon baller again and I knew that because of the incredible color of the sugarbaby, it would yield a gorgeous dessert. A final page of simple but incredible looking "sundaes" included a recipe for Lemon Sorbetto with Watermelon and Anisette. The recipe calls for store-bought lemon sorbet or Italian ice, but I broke out my ice cream maker, a bag of beautiful organic lemons, and a new bottle of limoncello to make my own extremely lemony sorbet (1/2 cup water, 2 small lemons zest, 1 cup fresh lemon juice, 2 tablespoons limoncello, mix well and turn on the machine). Tossing about 2 pounds of watermelon balls with 3 tablespoons of anisette and a handful of fresh chopped pineapple mint (I opted to cut the sugar called for by Gourmet, to no harm) and when the sorbet was ready, a wonderfully complex and deliciously refreshing dessert was born. There's no doubt this is a summer go to for me from now on.

I had one more project left in my sugarbaby and that was watermelon rind pickle, something I'd never tried, but have always wanted to. Using a sharp vegetable peeler on a well-scraped hunk of melon, I removed the hardest, darkest part of the rind and the turned the piece to its narrowest side. A mandolin would work here, but it was just as easy to slice off thin strips of rind with the peeler. Hot water, vinegar, peppercorns and salt poured over the strips of rind, shaken and stowed for a day in the fridge and I had a nice little pickle.

I used most of it to top fried seitan steak sandwiches on homemade rosemary olive oil bread, but it would be a good condiment for lots of sandwiches or main dishes. The watermelon rind pickle got me started early on my lazy pickling this year, something I usually just do in the fall with a big bag or two of CSA pickling cukes. The watermelon rind opened up my mind to pickling possibilities though I did up a big batch of fridge pickles with green tomatoes, radishes, beets and garlic scapes... all of which sounds to me like another post. I've resolved to try creating shorter, more frequent posts. I don't want to veer too far from doing the kind of writing I enjoy here and wind up with just recipe-focused posts, but I think I can look for slightly narrower topics. I'm immersed in one too many big projects lately, so turning posts into more manageable affairs will be helpful for me and hopefully still be enjoyable for everyone.

Watermelon Sorbet and Tequila-Lime Semifreddo
adapted from Gourmet, 8/08

for sorbet:
2 1/2 pounds watermelon, rind cut (sugarbaby is a great choice)
1/4 cup cane sugar
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
1 tablespoon tequila

for semifreddo:
1/2 cup soymilk
1/2 cup soy creamer OR 1/2 cup thick, fresh almond milk (soak 1 cup of almonds in 2 cups of water overnight, blend and strain through cheesecloth, squeezing the almond pulp to release the liquid)
1/3 cup boiling water
2 tablespoons safflower or other mild tasting oil
1/2 cup fresh lime juice
1 tablespoon tequila
2 teaspoons lime zest
1/2 cup vegan whipped cream, optional (I used Soyatoo, whipped to peaks)

To make the sorbet: Puree the watermelon in a food processor and pass through a colander to remove seeds without straining out much of the flesh. Combine melon with other ingredients and freeze in an ice cream maker. When frozen, spread with an off-set spatula evenly along the bottom of a 9" square baking pan lined with overhanging parchment paper and store with a layer of plastic wrap secured over it in the freezer.

To make the semifreddo:
Combine the soymilk and creamer or almond milk, sugar, boiling water and oil, whisking well to combine and dissolve the sugar. Add the juice, tequila and zest whisking well. If using, whip the soy whippable cream and then gently fold into the mixture. Pour over the watermelon sorbet and leave overnight to set.

To serve, lift the sides of parchment and remove the whole frozen square. Cut into 12 pieces and serve with fresh melon and mint.