Even in Kyoto

I don't remember what got me started on this alternative scone recipe, but perhaps it was a desire to use up some leftover buttermilk at some point. Regardless, it's a bit different from the scone recipe I've been using over the last several years.

Ingredients:
1.5 C whole-wheat pastry flour
0.5 C oat flour, or coarsely ground oats (I used a coffee grinder)
1/4 C sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 C butter
2/3 - 3/4 C buttermilk
1 tsp. vanilla extract

Combine the dry ingredients, then cut in the butter with your preferred method. Mix in the buttermilk and vanilla extract, then knead briefly and chop into scones. Bake at 400 degrees for 15-18 minutes.

I should really sit down and do some calculations of the nutritional differences between this recipe and the prior one, based on using different ingredients. I tend to do a 50-50 mix of white and whole-wheat flour with the previous recipe, whereas the present one is good with 100% whole-wheat pastry flour. The previous recipe is also most delicious when cream is used instead of milk, and contains two eggs; the present recipe uses the buttermilk instead, but twice as much butter. Eventually I hope to track down some soy flour here, for extra protein.

It always seems like the moment I figure out how to use up copious amounts of some vegetable, suddenly I'm living somewhere different and the hyperabundant vegetable is different and presents its own challenges.

Out here, it's been a summer of okra and spaghetti squash. We might be through the worst of the spaghetti squash, but I'm not sure about the okra. So far, we've made:

-Vegetarian gumbo (time-intensive and not everyone's favorite)
-Pickled okra (tasty, but not something we eat all the time)
-Fried Okra croquettes (.rtf)
-Maque choux, which got turned into a burrito filling in homemade burritos
-Cajun mac'n'cheese: roast the okra plus some onions and peppers for 30-40 minutes at 350 degrees, then blend in the roasted veggies along with the cheese sauce

I am thinking the roasted okra could also get added to some other vegetable mixture put into burritos. Roasting okra cuts down on the slime, but doesn't completely eliminate it, though. The main reason the mac-n-cheese works is because the delicious cheesy-ness partially masks the okra slime. All of it takes time.

J has gotten good at roasting up the spaghetti squash and doing different things with it. One of the best items has been spaghetti squash pancakes, but if you make them without the onion they're tasty served either savory or sweet - I've mostly been eating them with a mixed vegetable sautee and vegetarian gravy. This recipe might convert some ambivalent spaghetti-squashers into true believers.

Now we've got a big pile of acorn squashes and butternut squashes. At least those will keep for a bit longer. I'm certain there's soup in our future.

gfrancie will be pleased to hear that last weekend's peaches did indeed get turned into sorbet, and the sorbet was, indeed, AMAZING. I actually made a combination mango-peach sorbet because I'd frozen a bunch of lusciously good, ripe mango cubes, and thought sorbet would be the perfect use for them. On top of that, when I told J about the sorbet plans, he declared that they would require something with coconut, so he cooked up some delicious coconut rice pudding, and he was absolutely correct. The peach-mango sorbet was creamy and fruity, and paired beautifully with the warm coconut rice pudding.

So, if you have access to these things, I would suggest that you follow suit as well, should you come across some deserving peaches. I couldn't tell you everything that J put into the rice pudding, but I know it involved coconut milk, cinnamon sticks and cardamom.

The sorbet and rice pudding all happened at a housewarming party on Saturday night, where we all stuffed ourselves silly on a number of other incredible nibbling things. Good times.

Sunday was devoted to other cooking projects. First, waffles for breakfast, with more peaches and some of the frozen strawberries and a dab of whipping cream. Then I used up all of the corn flour in making mediocre corn tortillas (ah well). scrottie went out and picked the week's tomatoes - two enormous grocery bags full - and then cooked up a loaf of bread (in parallel with a loaf I made), a half-gallon of marinara, an enormous pot of black beans, a huge bowl of fruit salad, and a big batch of enchiladas plus enchilada sauce (with the tortillas). The marinara and enchilada sauce barely put a dent in the tomatoes. After he wrapped up his 7-hour cooking bender, I dove back in and made a luscious half-gallon batch of ratatouille.

Between the two of us, we've managed to cook up ALL of the squashes, and we have enough food for dinners for the week. The tomato pile, however, is still wonderfully big, and we'll be getting more CSA veggies today.

I'm glad to have had this much success with the tomatoes this year, although I feel like the success has much to do with the vagaries of the weather - a good winter freeze to kill a lot of insects, plus frequent spring rain, plus relatively cool summer temperatures. On the other hand, it's also very much a product of having invested a couple of years in learning how growing conditions work here, and how to manage the challenges particular to this place. As my friend T put it, you just have to plant and grow things while remembering that you'll be sharing a substantial fraction of your crop with other animals, no matter what you do. If you plant with that in mind, you CAN finagle things to ensure you get a meaningful harvest for yourself while the birds and squirrels and snails also have their fun. On top of that, it really does take YEARS to build up good soil fertility, but in some ways that just makes it even more rewarding to finally reach that point.

Last year, I struggled with Thanksgiving, in part because I just didn't feel like I had a good sense of how to approach the holiday from a vegetarian perspective. It's one of those holidays that can become rather awkward because all of the side dishes to accompany the turkey tend to be pure carbohydrates. While some people don't seem to mind (scrottie), I do. I want a centerpiece that I can enjoy that involves the same sort of drama and suspense as a roasted turkey. Tofurky just won't cut it.

So, to the Cafe Flora Cookbook I've gone. The crew team had a Thanksgiving party yesterday evening, so it seemed the perfect opportunity to try out an option, Portobello Wellingtons with Madeira Sauce. I've never had Beef Wellington before, but it also sounds like a lovely little centerpiece for the meat-eating sect: a side of beef wrapped in pastry and roasted, served up with some gravy.

Whatever. Anyway, I've written about the Cafe Flora cookbook a few times. It tends to specialize in amazing vegetarian dishes that are mostly amazing because they're carefully constructed and take a considerable amount of time and effort to prepare. Among the dishes, this one is by far the most complex one I've attempted to date. Good for special occasions, not good for a last-minute supper idea. I started on Friday night by preparing the Mushroom Pecan Pate, roasted portobellos, and pan-braised leeks, which took around 1.5 hours, altogether. I already had some mushroom essence in the freezer, but if I hadn't had any, I would have made it then, as it takes a good hour or longer to simmer down. I continued on Saturday afternoon with the Madeira sauce and Wellington assembly and baking, which took another 2 hours altogether.

The result was tasty and satisfying - the mushrooms, mozzarella, and pecans make the pate proteinaceous, while the sauce and leeks add rich flavor. And it is indeed great with mashed potatoes, as promised by the Cafe Flora cookbook. I'm glad I brought it, too. There weren't many vegetarian items at the Crew Thanksgiving, aside from the pies (though those were tasty, too).

( Recipes are below the jump. )

So. That tortellini-making over the weekend. I need to write down a few notes about it all. First, the dough. I used my mom's recipe for pasta dough, which goes as follows:

Take one package of Bob's Red Mill semolina flour, and add three eggs. Then add a tablespoon or so of olive oil, and a scant teaspoon or so of salt, and mix. Then start adding water, bit by bit, until everything starts to come together into dough. Don't be shy about getting your hands in there to give things a good squeeze and mix. Once you can, start to knead the dough. Maybe add a bit more water, if necessary. Plan on kneading the dough for around 10 minutes, until it's smooth and supple. Then, refrigerate for a while - at least 20 minutes.

Next, the filling: This time around, I took a small packet of goat cheese (it was on sale at the HEB before I left on vacation, so I popped it in the freezer and then thawed it for this recipe) and mixed it with roasted butternut squash business. I also added about a cup of some ricotta-like "farmer's cheese" that was on sale at Brazos Natural Foods, and grated in some romano cheese (maybe 1/4 to 1/2-cup?). Plus fresh black pepper, crumbled sage, and a hint of nutmeg. And some finely toasted walnuts - from sytharin. I gave everything a good mix or ten, and then I was ready for the next stage.

I am certain that any time I set about making pasta, I am going to spend that time thinking about my mother. For years and years, she made ravioli for our family for special occasions, to the point where she really doesn't want to look at the ravioli-making implements anymore and now we have to do it for ourselves. It happens, when one's children suddenly decide to be virtuous vegetarians and one is forced to come up with Thanksgiving and Christmas alternate dishes. I got lucky this time and happened to mention my pasta-making plans to a friend who has a hand-crank pasta roller, so she loaned it to me. Easier than hand-rolling it, for sure.

But boy did it make me miss the KitchenAid version. There's a certain monotonous rhythm to the hand-crank roller, when one is working by oneself. Chop off a piece of dough with a dough cutter, hand-flatten and shape it a bit, then adjust the pasta roller to the wide setting and crank it through. Pause, adjust the pasta roller to the next setting, and crank it through. Pause, adjust the pasta roller to the next setting, and crank it through. At this point, the dough will be long enough that it's no longer possible to roll it all through in one go. Instead, start it through the roller, then pause to adjust the dough coming out of the bottom so it doesn't stick to itself. Then roll some more, pause again to adjust the bottom, roll some more, let go of the rest of the dough up top and catch the dough underneath. Pause, adjust the pasta roller to the next setting, and crank it through.

Once the dough is thin enough, it's time for the next step. I happened across a tortelli recipe in a copy of Food and Wine while I was in the midst of tortellini-making, which divided up the workflow slightly differently, but probably takes around the same total amount of time overall, and seemed to involve a lot of waxed paper. There was a quotation across from the article about how making tortellini just takes time, and would-be chefs just have to deal with it, which made me chuckle internally.

Instead of rolling out all of the dough and then cutting out circles all at once (then taking all the scraps and re-rolling, etc.), I took each sheet of pasta, one sheet at a time, put it on a floured board, and cut out 5-8 circles. Then I took a pastry bag full of the squash filling and piped a teaspoonful in the middle of each circle. I took two fingers, dipped them in water, and ran a circle of water around the edges of each piece of dough, then folded the dough in half, over the filling, and sealed the edges. Lastly, I picked up each half-circle and curled the ends together to make a little tortellini. Once everything is set up, it takes about 10 minutes to make enough tortellini for one person's dinner. I made enough to fill two toaster-oven trays, and then tucked them in the freezer.

Ravioli-making might be marginally faster. It looks like there are a couple of methods out there, but they require more specialized implements that I don't own, and ravioli require more space for freezing (they have to be kept separated from each other so they don't stick together or to the pan they're on). My mom has a tray which is sized to correspond to the width of dough produced by pasta rollers, and which makes 10 or 12 ravioli at once. You roll out a bottom sheet, press a mold against it to make pockets for the filling, fill the ravioli, then roll out a top sheet, run water along the edges of the dough, lay the top sheet across everything, and then roll and cut the ravioli with a rolling pin. For the years she spent making ravioli, my mom always spooned the filling in by hand. When I finally had the idea to pipe in the filling, things got a bit faster, but it's still methodical work.

The whole process is really the best with at least two people involved, particularly with hand-crank pasta rollers, where one person feeds the pasta and catches it, while the other turns the crank.

Regardless, the end result is phenomenal.

This is a quick recipe description for a friend, how to make rhubarb sauce and rhubarb syrup. It's pretty simple, actually:

Take some rhubarb and chop it up. Add some sugar - maybe around a cup of sugar to four cups of rhubarb. I generally guesstimate. Simmer the rhubarb/sugar mixture in a pot on the stove at a medium-low temperature until it gets nice and soft. I like to add in a vanilla bean pod as I'm simmering, for some nice, aromatic flavor. Then remove from heat and strain through a jelly bag or cheesecloth. Congratulations, the stuff you've strained out is rhubarb syrup, and what's left in the bag is rhubarb sauce! If you feel like canning any of it, add it into jars and process for at least 10 minutes in a boiling water canner.

I like to treat the rhubarb sauce like a soft jam, and spread it on toast. It's also great on crepes.

The syrup is best for making rhubarb soda - add a shot or two to a glass of club soda, and enjoy. Most recently, I've discovered that strawberry-rhubarb soda is even more delicious - take the juices left over from sugaring strawberries, and add them to the soda.

Let's see:

Friday night: I baked Alton Brown's cocoa brownies, swapping in white sugar for some of the brown, as I had run out, reducing the total amount of sugar, and substituting whole wheat pastry flour for the white flour. These substitutions do not suddenly make these brownies virtuous. For the record.

I got up early on Saturday, rode over to the farmer's market, and bought: 2 dozen eggs, a bunch of asparagus, a gorgeous and huge head of read leaf lettuce, a bunch of freshly harvested onions, a bird feeder, tomatoes (greenhouse-grown), peppers, a cucumber, and a bag of pecans. That filled the Jolly Roger to capacity, so I stopped by the house and dropped things off before heading over to campus for the Horticulture Department's plant sale. By that point, a plant-buying frenzy had already occurred and there wasn't much interesting stuff to ogle or covet, so I just bought two eggplant plants, brought them home, and stuck them in the ground. I detoured past the Farm Patch to check if they still had any Meyer lemons or plants of interest, but they didn't. I just don't even know where to begin, with ornamental plants and flowers, and their stuff tends to not be native anyway. Then I stopped by the Habitat Re-Store (closed for Easter weekend) and Goodwill (nothing of interest) before heading to Brazos Natural Foods for groceries, et cetera.

I used to buy Burt's Bees conditioner, but after they got bought out, they switched their formula and added a bunch of crap, so I'm on the hunt for a good conditioner. Sigh. I'd been buying the Burt's Bees at Village Foods, but none of their other conditioners appeals to me. The stuff I just picked up from BNF advertised itself as made of fair-trade shea butter, for whatever that's worth. I just hope it does a decent job on my hair. I've been using some grapefruit conditioner from Whole Paycheck in the interim, but it leaves my hair dull and dry.

For lunch, I whipped up a soba salad (substituting galangal for the ginger; note to self, this recipe also looks tasty, as does this one). I also had an apple with peanut butter and chia seeds. A seedy lunch.

Then my friend S came over in the evening, and the cooking continued. She'd prepared some Amish turnips, and we'd planned on collaborating on a quiche, except we failed to discuss who would take charge of the crust. As a result, I had a crust prepared by the time she arrived, and she'd brought along another premade one. The best solution, I determined, was to make two quiches instead of one. We filled one quiche with asparagus, swiss cheese, and onion, and the other with crimini mushrooms, cheddar cheese, and onion. Both of these were topped off with an egg-cream mixture, which had a ratio of 2 eggs to 1 cup of cream - I'm noting this because each crust wound up holding around 3 eggs:1.5 cups of cream, slightly less than the full allotment for the quiche lorraine recipe S had brought over. This was seasoned with a splash of Indian red pepper and salt and pepper. I turned the lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber and a carrot into a salad in an attempt to at least partly balance out this fat-fest. The asparagus quiche was really good, but the mushroom-cheddar quiche was excellent.

This morning, I baked more of those pecan cinnamon rolls - breakfast for the week. Then I prepared some paneer for dinner (recipe follows) and used some of the whey for the week's loaf of bread.

The only cooking project left at this point is figuring out what to do with some failed biscotti from last weekend, where I forgot to add the sugar to the dough. This has made the dough so crumbly that I can't cut and twice-bake it. I tried turning one of the two biscotti loaves into a bread pudding-like substance, but that only rendered the outcome edible, not delicious. I'm pondering making some sort of ice cream with the remainder - maybe swirling in some chocolate or butterscotch for sweetness. We'll see. I'm not in a tremendous hurry to tackle that project, but need to do it sometime before this pint of cream goes bad - I got it on sale, so it needs to be finished sooner rather than later.

Anyway. Indian Spaghetti's on the agenda for dinner (aka "Shahi paneer korma", though this isn't the page where I originally found the recipe and there are a lot of disparaging comments below it; this recipe looks similar, though with cashews added; I'll be adding in additional vegetables like peas, and will just use canned tomatoes). And once the current batch of muesli runs out I'm going to experiment with making a maple syrup - pecan version. I'd like to start using more pecans than almonds because the pecans are grown around here, and almonds come from giant, honey bee-dependent orchards in California.

How to make paneer
Take some milk, say around a half-gallon. Find a pot large enough for the milk, and lightly oil it so the milk doesn't stick so badly when you heat it. Heat up the milk, over medium-high heat, stirring so it doesn't stick and scorch on the bottom. Once the milk comes to a boil, lower the heat and keep cooking and stirring for one minute. Then remove from heat and add a couple of tablespoons of either citrus juice or vinegar, until the milk begins to curdle. Keep stirring, adding a little more acid as needed if the milk hasn't curdled completely. Don't overdo it, though, or your cheese will taste sour.

Line a colander with some cheesecloth and put it into a bowl (bonus points if it's reusable). Pour the curd mixture through it to strain the curds from the whey. Pick up the corners of the cheesecloth and hold it over the bowl for another minute to drain out some additional whey. Then, put the cheesecloth bundle onto a surface where you can put a bit of weight on it and allow it to drain for another hour or so. Once that's finished, voila! You have a loaf of paneer. Not only that, you also have a bunch of whey. And it's all soooo much cheaper and more delicious than buying paneer at the store.

What do do with the whey (besides some variant on a frothy whey drink [a non-alcoholic original comes from The Healthy Cuisine of India, by Bharti Kirchner]): use it instead of water when making bread, oatmeal, or rice. You'll be sad when it's all gone.

A couple of years ago, a friend and I got into some discussion about whole-wheat croissants. She was incredulous. But I grew up eating them, about once a week: my parents would buy them while out grocery-shopping, as PCC carried some made by Touchstone Bakery. We would toast them for breakfast, and spread on butter or peanut butter and jam. Delicious! Unfortunately, when I went back to Seattle to find some for DM, I learned that Touchstone Bakery had gone out of business. Truly sad to see them go. For a little while, PCC carried whole-wheat croissants from Vancouver Croissants, but as of my last visit to Seattle those appear to have disappeared as well.

I should note that whole-wheat croissants aren't the same as white flour croissants, which tend to be much easier to come by. Also, I'm partially after the whole-wheat ones just for the culinary challenge. I've read plenty of opinions about not bothering, and that's fine for you, but I'll carry on.

Anyway, in the face of all of this, a couple of years ago I thought, well, I managed to create a cupcake that made me stop craving the cupcakes from Cupcake Royale. Perhaps I can make a whole-wheat croissant as well. I spent some time reading about the subject in publications from the San Francisco Baking Institute (directed there via this discussion thread), and then decided to just give it a go one weekend. Well. My results were somewhat like what happened to this person, except worse, actually. I tried to get the dough to laminate with the butter, except the butter was too hard and the dough was too soft, so I just wound up redistributing butter chunks throughout the dough. Fast-forward to baking, where the butter melted and dripped into the bottom of the oven, creating a smoky mess. I really couldn't call the resulting objects "croissants." They were more like smoky butter rolls. Barely edible. Discouraging.

For Christmas this year, scrottie gave me a rolling pin I'd been lusting after. It's made of mesquite, and was handmade by someone in the Phoenix area - a beautiful, functional item, my favorite. A nice Arizona connection, too, and it's a French-style one with tapered ends. Just from looking at it and picking it up to feel its heft, I had the sense that it would do an excellent job. And pretty much anything would work better than the wine bottles I'd been using previously.

Well, it has done a sufficiently good job that I've started to consider trying my hand at croissant-making again. This time around, I decided it would be better to start more humbly, using a white-flour recipe, and I happened to find a well-illustrated one on Instructables. The first step, wrapping the butter, is a brilliant one.

So, yesterday I attempted croissants again, round one. A thing you should know about croissant-making - the whole process involves rolling out the dough, then refrigerating it, a number of times. Somewhere around four or five times. This has to be done to ensure that the consistency of the butter and dough are similar enough that you don't wind up with butter chunks. So it's an activity that's best done on the weekend, interspersed between other projects. I started at 7 am and baked the first one at 9 pm.

This recipe also included a second rather critical component that had been missing from my prior attempt, the use of "stretching butter." This is butter with some flour incorporated, which makes it more malleable and thus easier to work with. The one thing I'd do differently next time is that this time around I thought I'd try using the KitchenAid's dough hook to prepare the stretching butter. It worked reasonably well, but there were still a couple of butter chunks left. It's worth it to take the time to ensure the stretching butter has a nice, smooth consistency, so it would benefit from use of the paddle or good arm strength and a wooden spoon.

After I shaped the croissants, I tucked most of them into the freezer. My plan for this week is to pull some out of the freezer in the evening, and then bake them in the toaster oven in the morning so I can have fresh-baked croissants for breakfast. I have to tell you that breakfast this morning was pretty amazing.

For transitioning to whole wheat, I have to look around at other recipes again. I'm also thinking of experimenting along two lines. The first is just trying a mixture of white and wheat flour, to see if that retains enough gluten action to continue stretching well without ripping. The second attack I'm considering is just adding additional gluten. We shall see. For now, I'm mostly just happy to have had this initial success.

I've been going through back issues of Food and Wine, tearing out recipes that sound interesting and with potential. Meanwhile, DM gifted me a bag of pecans as a wee hostess gift, so I decided to put two and two together and make one of the recipes I'd torn out, for butterscotch sticky buns.

There's a slight hitch, which I think scrottie already knows - I get "sugared out" by recipes that contain too much gooey sweetness. I've never liked all that much sugar. Actually, DM and I had been discussing this, too, as we both think things like pecan pie are too sticky-sweet. She's in search of an alternative pecan pie concept, so if you have ideas along those lines, please share them.

Anyway. The weekend's going to be busy, so I made the sticky buns this morning. I decided not to make the glaze, however, as I lacked three of the ingredients. Plus - the glaze mostly just adds even more sweetness. Perhaps that makes these cinnamon rolls instead of sticky buns. Hrm.

I also ran out of whole wheat flour (only added 3/4 cup before switching to white flour), and subbed in a third cup of soy flour.

Long story short - I like the dough recipe. Next time, I'll halve the brown sugar for the filling (they are still ungodly sweet! Makes my teeth hurt.), and will hopefully have more whole wheat flour on hand. Eventually, I will hopefully have a nice cinnamon roll recipe to share with you.

People who know me IRL generally find out, sooner or later, that I don't like ginger. Growing up, I never really cared for the hearty, healthy vegetarian stir-frys my parents would make, and I could never really pin my finger on why until I figured out that their standard marinade relied heavily on ginger for its flavor. For the record, it turns out that I LOVE a good stir-fry. I realize that my dislike of ginger is akin to a dislike of garlic, as far as most of you are concerned, to which I always say, well, there's no accounting for taste.

The one time I will seek out ginger is when I don't feel especially well. A blog I read has also pointed out that Asian foods can be great comfort foods when one is sick (see, e.g. here for hot and sour soup and here for a green curry soup).

I haven't been feeling especially well today, so restorative Asian cuisine was on the agenda. This afternoon I made up some broth for vegetarian pho, based on a recipe from my friend Z, but I didn't manage to get my silken tofu draining in time to cook it properly, and the bean sprouts need another day to reach full sprouty-ness, so I'll have to have the pho for dinner tomorrow.

In the meantime, I keep thinking back to a simple dish that was served on the airplane trip to Korea by way of Japan last summer - just soba noodles with seaweed and sesame-soy dressing. I haven't reached a point where I can confidently construct Asian sauces by adding things willy-nilly (splashy-dashy?), so I hunted around and found this recipe. I made a few initial adjustments to it, substituting arame for wakame (because I know of other things to do with arame as well), omitting the cucumber (because I didn't feel like buying one), and using galangal instead of ginger. The result's pretty tasty, but next time I think I'll try the following ingredient ratio instead, for two servings (or, you know, one large one):

Soba Seaweed Salad
7 g arame (dried seaweed)
150 g soba noodles
2 carrots, cut into matchsticks or shredded
2 Tbsp toasted sesame seeds
2 green onions, thinly sliced (maybe slightly less)
1 Tbsp galangal (or however much ginger you fancy)
2 tsp sesame oil
2 Tbsp lime juice
2 tsp tamari

To make this, put the seaweed in a bowl to soak for about 10 minutes, and then drain it, squeeze out the water, and chop it a bit. Meanwhile, cook the soba until tender and then rinse it under cold water and drain it. Also meanwhile, get the rest of the ingredients ready to go. Then, put everything together into a bowl and gently toss to combine everything.