monkeys and ponies

A whole bunch of new recipes for Thanksgiving this year:

#46, potato bread. Another one from Baking With Julia, and another delicious success. The dough is very weird -- it starts off dry and sticky, but as you mix it, it loosens up and practically becomes liquid, to the point that it feels like surely you must have done something wrong. But after it rises, you can shape it easily despite how soft it still is, and it bakes up into a solid loaf with a tight crumb and a lovely potato aroma. Makes great toast.

#47, cranberry, apple, and crystallized ginger chutney. This one's from the most recent Cook's Illustrated. I usually make a spiced cranberry sauce with cinnamon and star anise, but I wanted to try something different this year. It's very good, but I find the shallot taste a bit weird in it and would leave those out next time.

#48, tandoori turkey. From the latest Bon Appetit, but found via a blog post linked from Tasteologie. Like the bloggers, I used premade garam masala; unlike the bloggers, I made my own tandoori seasoning, subbing thyme for the ajwain seeds I didn't have time to get. This was my first time cooking a turkey in an oven bag, a slighly freaky experience that nearly resulted in an explosion when even the steam vents I'd cut in the bag failed to prevent the bag from almost overinflating. But I may go the bag route again, because the turkey was incredibly moist (probably also due to an overnight soak in whole milk yogurt), and cleanup was a breeze compared to the usual soak/scrub/keep scrubbing routine involved in cleaning a post-Thanksgiving roasting pan.

#49, blackeyed pea/quinoa croquettes with mushroom sauce. From Vegan With a Vengeance, and the main course for the two vegetarians and one vegan joining us for Thanksgiving. I am not kidding when I tell you that one of the cats was begging for the uncooked batter. (Mind you, she also begged for the vegan cornbread -- and enjoyed it when I gave it to her -- so maybe she's just weird.) I'm not even a huge blackeyed pea or quinoa fan, but I liked these very much. Using panko for the coating made them even crispier, they reheated beautifully in the oven, and the mushroom gravy was good enough to use on everything.

#50, vegan "creamed" spinach. Creamed spinach is one of my favorite dishes, but it's not exactly a low-fat food. Nor is the vegan version, though at least it's zero-cholesterol. Next time I make this, I'm going to try to thicken the soy milk, and will probably add some nutritional yeast to give it that slight cheesy flavor I really like in my non-vegan version. Still, this one isn't bad, and there's good nutmeg flavor. (I left out the dill, though, because dill and nutmeg? Seriously?)

#51, vegan pumpkin pie brownies. It isn't Thanksgiving without pumpkin of some kind, and better yet, pumpkin and chocolate. I should have had some of this for breakfast this morning ... in fact, I might go get some of it now. I'd have preferred a cakier and less fudgy brownie layer, but that's my only complaint.

#41, smothered mushrooms and kale. Yes, it's a Rachael Ray recipe. Deal with it. I even own one of her cookbooks (bought before she had her massive entertainment empire), and it's really not bad at all, despite being a little too meat-heavy for my taste.

Anyway, I had mushrooms and kale that had to be used, and wanted to try something a little different than my usual garlicky kale and lemony mushroom recipes. This one is quite simple, although I think it calls for too much fat; I used a tablespoon total of olive oil and butter for half the amount of kale and mushrooms called for and felt like I got enough flavor. Would make again.

#42, jackfruit curry. I'd never even thought about cooking with jackfruit until I was watching The Great Food Truck Road Race (... yeah, I know), saw the vegan truck making "pulled pork" with jackfruit, and realized I had to give this fruit a try.

I didn't have the lime leaves called for in the recipe, so I subbed lime zest and some extra basil leaves in the curry, and oh my god, I could have just poured the coconut curry sauce in my mouth and been happy. But the point of this exercise was not to drink curry sauce; it was to cook jackfruit, which turned out to taste much like artichoke hearts and was really good in the curry. I'm definitely going to pick some more up next time I'm at an Asian market so I can make kathal kabobs.

I've had The Enchanted Broccoli Forest for years but for some reason, have never gotten around to making much out of it. (Most likely it's all the other Moosewood-related cookbooks I have.) Anyway, I had some potatoes, I wanted something other than roasted potatoes or a mayo-based salad, and I found this one, which cooks very thinly sliced potatoes in a vinaigrette.

This is some seriously delicious stuff. The potatoes have just the right mix of vinegary tang and olive-oily unctuousness; I think we could have just had this for dinner and been happy. Best of all: totally vegan, so it might end up on my Thanksgiving table.

I was making one of those last-day-before-next-CSA-pickup soups -- all the random squash I had lying around, some dinosaur kale, and a little leftover linguiça -- but I had nothing starchy to dip in it. I very nearly made crackers from the King Arthur Flour bread book, but instead decided to reach for a cookbook I hadn't touched in a while: Baking With Julia.

That's where I found this simple recipe I was able to throw together during a short break, leaving it to rise for a couple of hours while I finished up the day's work. All you need is flour, salt, yeast, and water, and when I decided the sesame seeds I had lying around were probably too old to use as a topping, fresh-ground pepper and a little fleur du sel seemed like perfectly adequate substitutes.

The final texture was probably not as soft as it should have been, if only because my aged oven can't quite hit 500 degrees, not even with the pizza stone inside; that meant baking the naan for a good fifteen minutes instead of five to hit the right level of doneness.

But you know what? I don't care, because first of all, it tasted terrific, and second, LOOK AT HOW PRETTY IT IS.



Next up: cupcakes, baby!

I've been down with a cold all weekend, but I've still been cooking:

#33, langoustine "stew-fay" from Marcelle Bienvenue's Who's Your Mama, Are You Catholic, and Can You Make a Roux?. Bienvenue's recipe calls for crawfish, which we sadly cannot get up here, but Trader Joe's frozen langoustine tails make a decent substitute. I didn't use quite as much butter as was called for, because half a stick of butter between two people seemed excessive. (Mind you, my compromise was a mere three tablespoons of butter instead of four.) Not bad; needed more umami, so I punched it up with a bit of soy sauce.

#34, ultra-butterscotch brownies, from the King Arthur Flour baking book. Like congo bars, but richer, despite calling for a tablespoon less butter than my usual recipe. Probably the two cups of brown sugar are to blame. This one comes together a little differently than most brownies; you mix some of the dry ingredients in with the wet to start with, and add the eggs at the end. I made two minor changes: subbing in actual dark rum instead of rum flavor, and using some chocolate chips, because I didn't have quite enough butterscotch ones. These were both good ideas.

#35, polenta gnocchi with gorgonzola. I cooked out of Sundays at Moosewood all through college, but somehow never got to this recipe. Wicked easy if you have instant polenta on hand, even if what you end up with aren't exactly traditional gnocchi. Served with a simple, chunky sauce out of slightly caramelized onions, a roasted pepper, and a couple of my homegrown tomatoes.

Only 20 more to go!

We got a handful of okra with last week's CSA share, and not having time to pickle it, I searched online for a recipe for sambal okra, a simple but incredibly full-flavored okra dish we'd had at a local Malaysian restaurant. This version suffered slightly due to several substitutions I had to make -- no shrimp paste, so I used an anchovy and a little fish sauce; and the grocery store didn't have the right hot peppers, so I used two milder ones and an underripe tabasco from my garden. I also tossed in some green beans, an onion, and a carrot I had from the share, because there's nothing wrong with more vegetables in a dish.

Considering the substitutions, this was a damned good recipe. The okra was soft but still had a little bite to it, and was barely slimy at all; and despite the lack of shrimp paste, the dish had a mild underlying funk to it that was at least reminiscent of the real thing. It was a start, anyway. Next time: try to get some shrimp paste, and use something other than a nonstick skillet so I can get the same level of crispness the restaurant got on its okra.

I've made all kinds of pickles over the year, but somehow have never made relish. Since the cucumbers are coming in like gangbusters right now, I grabbed a few and made this recipe. It yielded fewer jars than expected -- I knew I had exactly 1.5lbs. of cucumbers, cut the recipe in half, and yet still only ended up with a jar and a half of relish when I should have had three -- so that's something for me to keep in mind for next time. Because there's definitely going to be a next time: this stuff is delicious.

25. A Smitten Kitchen version of a Bon Appetit recipe for chipotle baked beans. Like SK, I left out the bacon, and I also made a couple other modifications: I used Boston Roman beans, because I still had some dried ones from the winter CSA; and I whipped together a quick fake barbecue sauce out of salsa, ketchup, honey, and ancho chile powder, because I was making 1/3 of a recipe, and damned if I was buying a whole bottle of BBQ sauce just for a few tablespoons of it. Delicious and vegan. Will make again.

26. Quick cucumber kimchi. It's going into vegetable bibimbap tonight, assuming I don't eat it all first.

How this began: I made vegan peanut butter cups for my friend's birthday a couple weeks ago, and the cups were especially recalcitrant about coming out of the molds this time around, leaving me with a bunch of broken ones I couldn't serve. I stuck them in the fridge and figured I could chop them up into ice cream.

Later, I began thinking about how I'd never tried making nonfat frozen yogurt, and how this was marginally better for me than actual ice cream, even if I was still planning on mixing in the peanut butter cups. And that led me to the next problem, which was I knew that given the aforementioned zero fat content in the yogurt, even if I drained it first, I'd end up with a hard, icy rock in my freezer.

Which reminded me of xanthan gum. I have another friend who's allergic to cow milk, but has had excellent luck making coconut milk-based ice creams using xanthan gum to ensure a soft texture. So I figured, why not? Sure, I'd never used xanthan gum before, but it was worth a shot – and a mere $15 later (oof) I now own enough xanthan gum to last me a lifetime.

( Recipe? Who needs recipes? )

A vegan recipe from Saveur I had to try, since I love collard greens. I made two small alterations to the recipe, sautéeing two thinly sliced portobellas I added back in at the very end of the cooking, and using light coconut milk. The mushrooms were a good idea, but I shouldn't have futzed with the coconut milk, despite the fat content. The final recipe needed that little bit of extra depth the full-fat stuff would have given it, though compensating with some tamari helped, as did -- interestingly enough -- vinegar. (I always add a touch to Southern-style greens, but I was surprised at how much it perked up these, too.)