Even in Kyoto

Both sytharin and slydevil had a snack this morning of this week's batch of muesli, so it seems they might also now find it useful to have a copy of the day's recipe since I won't be around here for much longer to make more. This is one of the things I make from scratch on a very regular basis, because it's far less expensive than buying it or granola, plus then I can really tone down the sugar content to my liking (why I call it muesli, anyway).

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees F.

Mix together in a 9x12 glass baking pan (or equivalent, that's what what works for me):
4 C rolled oats
1 C coconut - flakes, shreds, whatever you prefer. I used up a bag of sweetened shreds but usually use unsweetened stuff. This might be why the current batch is particularly delicious, though.
1 C pumpkin seeds
1/2 C sunflower seeds

Chop up 1 C of almonds to however fine you like your almond bits, and add in the chopped-up bits to your oat mixture.

Measure out some amount of sweetener - honey or maple syrup - and some amount of oil, maybe 1/8-1/4 C of each, into a container where you can heat them up until warm and runny. Today I used the microwave, at home I use a smol cast iron skillet. Pour the warm, runny mixture over your oat mixture, and mix things around to combine.

Put that in the oven for around 20 minutes. Then pull it out and give everything another mix so it toasts more evenly. Put it back in again for another 15 minutes. These are just based on eyeballing things for your favorite amount of toasty-ness. There are other ways of doing all this, like using a larger baking sheet, but for whatever reason, this is how I roll.

Once you have achieved optimal toast, let the mixture cool to room temperature on the stovetop, where other people can taste test it for you, just to be sure. It's okay if you want to have a snack at this point. But once it's cool, add 1 C of dried fruit of your choosing. I love to add apricot chunks or tart cherries, but more often than not these days I just add 1 C of zante currants (aka tiny raisins).

Store it in an airtight container. Most of the time, I habitually have 1/2 C of muesli with some yogurt at lunch, because that adds enough protein to my lunch to keep me reasonably satisfied until dinnertime, and then I'm not constantly trying to figure out what to eat for lunch every day.

Postscript, if someone gives you a large quantity of cocoa nibs and you really don't have any idea of what to do with cocoa nibs - just put a cup in the next batch of muesli, and then you'll be sad when all the cocoa nibs eventually run out.

This is my winter holiday gift to my sister, sytharin, per her request.

If you grow a lot of hot peppers, a good use for them is to make your own pepper sauce condiment. My sister is fond of growing rocoto peppers, which are individually spicy to the point where one or two go a long ways in any particular cooking application. The flesh is also thick to a point where I don't think they dry easily, either. I've seen mallorys_camera mention making a carrot-habanero pepper sauce, and at one point scrottie also made a fermented pepper sauce, so finally it was my turn to take inspiration and give pepper sauce-making a try.

First things first, here's a good, comprehensive source on making fermented pepper sauces that will tell you more things if you want to know them: https://www.seriouseats.com/fermented-hot-sauce-how-to

It's what I read to get started.

But here's my (slightly) shorter version:

Basically you can either use a saltwater brine and leave your peppers largely intact, or make a mash, where the peppers are chopped and salt draws the liquid out of the peppers. You need to use fresh peppers to supply the starting lactobacilli, but you can add some dried/reconstituted peppers after that if you'd like (or other things - see source above). Either way, you want to add salt to a concentration between 2-4% by mass, relative to the mass of peppers.

For my sister's rocoto peppers, I seeded them, weighed the total amount, and then added 5% of the mass in salt (so, e.g., if you have 100 g peppers, add 5 g salt). That all went into the mini food processor to coarsely chop everything. The initial amount didn't adequately fill the jar I had, so I added more peppers later on, including some dried/reconstituted puya peppers.

When fermenting, you need to ensure that everything is fully submerged in liquid, and/or use an airlock, to cut down on mold production. In this instance, because the initial mash didn't adequately fill the jar, a layer of mold grew across the top. If this happens to you, do like I did and scrape off the mold layer. The stuff underneath will be fine. You can do the same thing with jam that gets moldy on top, by the way.

After I added the second batch of mash ingredients, once fermentation really got going, the carbon dioxide production was so enthusiastic that some of the liquid burped out of the airlock onto the counter. It was fun to watch the tiny bubbles form and float up. With the airlock, the carbon dioxide replaces the oxygen in the container that unwanted microbes need to grow. Meanwhile, the lactobacilli change the pH of the ferment to make it more acidic, which most fungi can't stand. So by that stage there wasn't any further mold growth.

If you ferment at slightly warm room temperature, the fermentation will be largely complete after 2 weeks. Just check it occasionally and if the bubbles aren't as enthusiastic, you've passed peak fermentation. That's the point where I put everything back in the blender to make it more of a sauce and less of a mash. The good news about pepper ferments is they aren't as time-sensitive as something like cabbage, in terms of getting too mushy if you leave the ferment for longer.

If you want your final product to be less salty, try using a brine instead of the mash: leave your peppers intact, mix up a salt water solution using filtered or distilled water, pack your peppers in your jar, and cover with your brine. After fermentation is finished you can rinse off the peppers and then grind them into a sauce.

On my second Coffeeneuring expedition this year, a buckwheat chocolate chip cookie caught my eye and then made its way into my mouth and stomach, causing a desire to continue eating more baked goods prepared with buckwheat.

Not only is buckwheat delicious, it also has a lower glycemic index than conventional whole wheat flour. My mom is working pretty hard to manage her blood sugar because she's prediabetic, so that seemed like as good an excuse as anything to try out more recipes that use buckwheat flour.

This past Saturday, I made a batch of buckwheat crepes and then fed them to her and her friends.



They came out a little bit thick and uneven, which I'd mostly chalk up to the fact that this griddle is so old and well-used that you can tell exactly where the 6 locations are for when this griddle gets used to make pancakes, based on the oil/seasoning buildup over the years.

But also, one of these days I should find some dowels and make myself an actual crepe spreader, and also also I probably didn't get the temperature dialed in just right.

Regardless - they were easy to make. You just whisk together 1 C buckwheat flour, 2 eggs, 1.5 C milk, 1 Tbsp olive oil, and a pinch of salt. I served them with roasted delicata squash, shredded gruyere, and a mushroom-shallot-thyme saute, but if I make them again I think they'd benefit from a cream sauce, too.

Today's experiment was buckwheat shortbread, which conveniently called for ingredients already on hand here, and also used up more of the bag of buckwheat flour so it doesn't linger around awkwardly after I leave.

Overall, the shortbread recipe worked, but in the future I'd be inclined to tinker with the ingredients, because the dough's a bit crumbly to work with. It does seem like a recipe amenable to tinkering.

For these, I mixed together 1 C buckwheat flour, 1 C almond flour, 1 C shredded coconut meal (powdered in a food processor), 1/4 C coconut sugar (original notes suggest brown sugar as an alternate), 1 tsp cardamom, and 1/2 tsp salt (coarse kosher, because that's what my mom had, rather than the fine sea salt in the original recipe). I then melted 1/2 C coconut oil and added 1 Tbsp warm water and 1 tsp vanilla extract, before mixing everything together, using my hands eventually, to try and combine things into a cohesive dough (mostly successful). After letting things rest about 10 minutes, I formed balls of about 1.5 Tbsp that I flattened onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper, and then baked the cookies at 350 degrees F for 15 minutes until the edges got golden brown.

Anyway, in the future I think I'd experiment with butter instead of the coconut oil, and maybe maple syrup instead of the coconut sugar. Those substitutions are partly motivated by the fact that I don't usually keep coconut oil or coconut sugar on hand. My mom said they tasted more like crackers than cookies to her; to me they definitely tasted like shortbread.

It would also be interesting to try this with hazelnut flour instead of almond.

I do like a good, versatile base recipe.

When I rented a car for the 300k brevet, my first stop was the Asian grocery store, which is exactly 2 parking lots over from the strip mall where the rental place is located. One of the delectables I purchased there was Kalguksu, fresh Korean knife-cut noodles. They are so yummy. I didn't have a plan for them when I bought them, but the plan I eventually came up with was to make a chili-garlic sauce and then serve them with some stir-fried tofu and cabbage.

When I went hunting for sauce recipes, I learned about the existence of Chinkiang vinegar, also known as black vinegar, a pantry item we did not have. After some culinary consultation with annikusrex, it was deemed worthwhile to make an extra trip back to the Asian grocery to go get some, so I did.

Probably the most satisfying part of the dish, however, was finally putting some gochugaru to use: when AKW was out for a visit a while back she'd pointed it out among the bulk spices available at our grocery co-op and I had gotten some without having any clear plan for it.

Well, now I know I won't have any trouble at all finding a good use for the rest of it! The sauce recipe I found was great and the end result was fantastic. It's a bit of work to cook everything up, but fast enough to make this a weeknight dinner as appropriate for you.

Chili Garlic Noodles with Tofu and Cabbage
Modified from https://joyfuldumplings.com/garlic-chilli-noodles/

Ingredients:
1.5 Tbsp toasted sesame oil
1/2 C scallions, white part only, thinly sliced
4-6 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 C vegetable broth
3 Tbsp soy sauce
2 Tbsp Black Vinegar (Chinkiang Vinegar)
1 Tbsp gochugaru (Korean chili flakes)

2 bundles Kalguksu
1/4 to 1/2 head of cabbage, thinly sliced
1 container firm tofu, cubed
Frying oil of choice for tofu and cabbage

Get water started for boiling the noodles, and get a large frying pan started over medium-high heat for frying up the tofu and cabbage. In a small pan (~6" diameter), saute the scallions and garlic in the toasted sesame oil over very low heat for 5 minutes, stirring constantly so they don't burn. Then add the vegetable broth, soy sauce, vinegar, and gochugaru. Continue to simmer for another 5 minutes to fully develop the flavor. The sauce can sit and wait while your noodles, tofu, and cabbage finish cooking.

Somewhere in the middle of the flurry of sauce-makin and noodle cooking, also start working on frying up your tofu. Once it has cooked for a couple minutes, add in the cabbage and continue to cook until you've achieved the cabbage consistency you most prefer - somewhere between crunchy and soft and caramelized. Once your noodles are done, drain them and combine them with the tofu and cabbage. Pour the sauce over the works, toss everything together, and garnish the works with the green parts of your scallions and maybe some sesame seeds, too, if you're feeling fancy.

Apparently it's a family thing to bring food items with you that need to be cooked when visiting your family. For Christmas, my sister brought up some sweet potatoes that she had grown but that she didn't think would keep properly. What to do with them? I eventually came up with the idea to make some African Sweet Potato Stew. A food that you can prepare in vast quantities when aiming to feed 10 people. I put "African" in quotes because when I went looking for the recipe, I discovered that I hadn't yet digitized the recipe I'd been using, and that there are a range of different African Sweet Potato Stews that depend on which African country one is referring to, across that vast, diverse continent. This one comes from Vertamae Grosvenor's Vertamae Cooks Again, but I've modified the preparation to suit my lazy efficient self. About it, she writes:

A good vegetarian stew with crusty bread and a hearty salad can be a satisfying meal even for nonvegetarians. This stew is very filling. The combination of sweet potatoes, peanuts, and vegetables is very prevalent in African cooking.

Ingredients:
3.5 pounds sweet potatoes, peeled and cubed
2 Tbsp vegetable oil
1 onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp grated fresh ginger
1 stalk celery, chopped
1.5 C chopped cabbage
1 C chopped tomatoes
2 C tomato juice
0.5 tsp dried thyme, crumbled (we recently used turmeric and cumin instead)
0.5 tsp red pepper flakes
8 oz vegetarian sausage
1 C green beans
0.25 C peanut butter
1 C vegetable broth
salt and pepper to taste

Heat the oil and saute the onion, garlic, and ginger for about 5 minutes. Add the celery and cabbage and cook for 3 more minutes. Then add the sweet potatoes, tomatoes, tomato juice, green beans, thyme, red pepper flakes, and vegetable broth. Simmer everything until tender (20 mins?), then add the veggie sausage and peanut butter. Simmer a couple more minutes, then add salt and pepper and adjust the spices to taste. Delicious served over rice.

I've been on a buckwheat kick recently. Bored of my usual pancake go-to recipe, I decided to make Buckwheat-Molasses Pancakes. But I accidentally bought too much buckwheat flour. Oh noes!

So then I made some buckwheat waffles. It had been a long time since scrottie and I'd had a waffle morning. We're a bit out of practice, so a lot of the waffles stuck to the waffle iron a bit. But never mind - they were DELICIOUS with bananas and lemon curd on top.

Yesterday morning I made Blueberry Buckwheat Scones and used up the remainder of the buckwheat flour. I cheated and used half-n-half instead of cream because that's what we had on hand, and I didn't do the 45-minute chilling step. They still came out quite tasty.

Then last night for dinner I had soba noodles with peanut sauce, scallions, and carrots. As I was cooking, I went, mentally, "Oh yeah - soba noodles are made from buckwheat." This peanut sauce recipe isn't my favorite, but at least it was pretty quick to put together.

Out of it all, I'd say the waffles were the most delicious.

I think that's it for buckwheat, for now. I am trying to clear out the pantry some, in advance of moving. I suppose a benefit of not having a tremendous amount of food storage space here is that there have been limits to how much stuff I could accumulate, heh.

I might be overly excited about this project.

Porridge 1: 2 parts steel-cut oats, 1 part toasted buckwheat groats, a generous dollop of amaranth seeds. Yesterday evening I put roughly 1.75 C into the Zojirushi rice cooker, added water up to the "1.5 scoops porridge" water line, and set the cooker for 6:50 am completion.

I think I added slightly too much water, and I should make sure to stir everything when I put it together into the rice cooker. I should also only make a single batch instead of a double batch.

The buckwheat groats added some delicious flavor, and I liked the ratio of oats to buckwheat. But now I want to add even more grains.

annikusrex came to town for a mini-conference on Friday, which meant that I got to kidnap her for Friday night and the better part of Saturday, hurrah! An amusing amount of cooking and eating ensued:

-Butternut squash pizza with goat cheese, romano, walnuts, apples, mushrooms, onions, and crispy sage (fried in butter). For the sauce, I roasted up a butternut squash and pureed it in the Cuisinart along with a bit more sage. In case that wasn't enough, it's also artichoke season, and they're actually available for an affordable price around here ($1/each for organic ones). Yum.

-For breakfast, another feast. sytharin has been wanting to have some of our dad's Swedish pancakes, but at some point in her travels her Herman culture perished, and they just don't taste the same without that special little bit of twang from the Herman. I've managed to keep my own Herman going, so on Saturday morning, it was time. Here's our dad's Swedish pancake recipe. Swedish pancakes are like crepes, except slightly thicker:

1 C whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 C soy flour (you can substitute more pastry flour but the soy protein makes these more filling)
4 egs
2 Tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 C melted butter
2 C milk
1 C Herman (omit if you don't have any, or you can probably use a regular sourdough culture to achieve a similar effect)

Put everything in the blender or whip it together with a whisk or egg beater. Heat your griddle to ~425 degrees F. Use around 1/2 C of batter to make plate-sized Swedish pancakes. Fill with your favorite fruit filling and top with a dollop of freshly whipped cream. In our case, rhubarb compote made from rhubarb freshly harvested from the backyard.

-Then, Scrabble. RAC played a strong game, including a bingo, but then AKW played a bingo which wasn't a real word (MILKINGS) and we failed to challenge it, so she won. RAC hadn't known about the googly eyes on the J until she drew the J.

-After that, AKW and I tried to go to the newly renovated Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, except there was a "Medical Emergency" on BART (I believe that's code for somebody died?), so we hopped on the 72 bus and took the long route there. Fortunately, the weather was pleasantly warm, and the extended walk up University was scenic. We went past this place, which looked intriguing:



The museum itself was fine. A number of the individual pieces on display were striking, such as the artist who created sculptures out of spider silk by alternately giving solitary and social spiders access to a frame for web-building. When I first saw the pieces, I figured they were synthetically made. I liked how the artist was playing around with the solitary/social concept. The social spiders build interestingly engineered webs. Also striking was Portrait of my Father by Stephen Kaltenbach. There was some incredible colorwork in that piece that can really only be appreciated in person, appreciated even further when you realize it was painted in 1978. It has a holographic feel and shifts and moves as you look at it, plus it deals with some complex subjects.

As an exhibition, however, I felt like the curators were trying a little too hard to put in as many different kinds of things as they could to showcase the museum's collections and ties to other strengths of the university. The University of Nebraska's art museum, in contrast, did a better job of reverential presentation of works from its holdings.

Still, I love going to museums with AKW and it was wonderful to have her out for a visit!

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While she and I were larking about, RAC was otherwise engaged. After Scrabble, she ran off to rent a pickup truck, and proceeded to drive all over hither and yon picking up all of the kinds of things one needs a pickup truck to acquire: two bales of straw, a bunch of bags of mulch, sand, pavers, three 50-pound bags of clay, a bag of pottery plaster, and probably a couple of other things I'm forgetting. I'm highly amused by a similarity in our temperaments - like me, RAC is inclined to charge around working on projects until she drops from exhaustion. There's something comforting and nice about being around this kind of work mode, though. There's something similarly comforting about cooking and sharing food with the household network out here, too. Saturday night, for example, after AKW had left for the airport, I joined RAC and M&M for some tasty stuffed onions and roasted cauliflower. Yum.

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Sunday morning, I'd promised RAC that I would help with some aspects of the ongoing household projects. In particular, it was time to give the workshop a thorough cleaning and round of organizing.

I feel so much better now that things are better organized in there. I mostly had to shuffle around various accumulated piles of abandoned projects to move the table saw back into a corner that would give us all better access to some storage shelves we moved in there when we were renovating the bike garage to accommodate more bicycles. RAC installed plastic sheeting over half of the shelf to ready it for storing ceramics-in-progress:



We also cleared off the worktable and cleared floor space. You can't really tell either of these things from this photo, but before the photo it was getting pretty hard to walk around in the workshop.



RAC was generally on a roll. She managed to apply some copper paint to the kick wheel to protect it from further rust, and she built the last planter box for the front driveway. She also filled it with soil and got tomato plants transplanted, and set the paving stones for the path here:



We are now tomato-ready.

I did manage a couple of other small projects, like painting more trim for my door-window (to tack down the fiberglass screen along the sides):



And transplanting a lavender plant and strawberry plant into pots (both plants are being hugged by a kale plant that's going to seed):



The local plant shop (Berkeley Horticulture) carries five or six different kinds of strawberry plants. I got a Mara des bois because highly flavorful French strawberries sound fantastic. But I might have to get even more varieties in the overall search for strawberry perfection. We shall see. I'm still skeptical about whether it's possible to achieve strawberry perfection outside of Washington, but it seems worth a try.

Other than all that, RAC built up a frame for making a plaster wedging table, did a bunch of weeding, and figured out what was wrong with the irrigation system. We've been enjoying the colors of all the different California irises she's planted in the front yard:



And with that, it's time for the beginning of another full work week.

Squashes are on sale at Open Harvest, what with it being fall and all, so I bought a couple of butternut squashes the other week and then pondered what to do with them. After flipping through the recipe files, I found this recipe for butternut squash bread pudding, which sounded worth a shot. I used milk instead of half-and-half, brown sugar instead of maple syrup (I don't keep maple syrup around), and didn't attempt to remove the baguette crusts (??!!), but the outcome was tasty. If I make it again I will amp up the spices more (especially the cinnamon).

I was also looking for an interesting way to use up cornmeal, and came across this recipe for "Toasted corn bread hash with brussels sprouts". Reading it over, I thought meh to the notion of mixing the cornbread and brussels sprouts, BUT the flavor combination sounded good. The fresh brussels sprouts at Open Harvest were a wee bit outside my budget, so I bought a couple of bags of frozen ones, which I sliced in half, tossed in olive oil and balsamic vinegar, salted and peppered, and roasted (at 425 I believe) for a spell. The texture of the frozen ones isn't as great, but overall it worked and I ate those things like candy on Sunday night. I just baked up a batch of cornbread to eat on the side.

But why stop there? This assortment needed some sort of legume accompaniment, so I went back to the good old Cafe Flora Cookbook and made up a batch of these Braised Black Lentils, although with French Green lentils because that's what I could find. Leftovers will be dinner for the week (that's where the last portion of the post title comes from).

1 Tbsp olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 shallot or small red onion, minced
1 C lentils - black Beluga lentils, or French green (Le Puy) - a variety that retains its texture
1 bay leaf
1 Tbsp fresh thyme leaves or 1 tsp dried thyme
4 C water
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp fresh black pepper

Saute the garlic and shallot in the olive oil over medium heat until translucent (5-7 minutes). Then add the lentils, bay leaf, and thyme, and give them a stir to coat the lentils with the oily deliciousness. Then add the water, turn up the heat and bring to a boil, and then cover and simmer until the lentils are cooked (20-25 minutes). The original recipe says to drain off the excess liquid, but I say don't bother unless you feel like it.

This whole ensemble was fairly simple to prepare, and any of the dishes would work well for a vegetarian Thanksgiving feast. I love fall cooking that involves turning on the oven and baking and roasting a whole bunch of things. A big tip o' the hat to my mom for teaching me about amazing roasted brussels sprouts. I will also point out that the prepackaged frozen kind were simple to prep, even though I balk at the notion of recommending packaged frozen foods.

Well, the subject line says it all, really.

I signed up for the 90-hour start, with a 6:15 pm start time. I will probably wonder for forever about the 84-hour start, but I'm okay with that.

On my third try, I finally figured out how to make pretty good homemade whole-wheat tortillas:

The basic recipe is below the photo (click the photo for the link). I read good things about coconut oil as another fat source, but for some reason I'm more comfortable with butter as my saturated fat. Midwesterners appear to be satisfied with bready, low-flavor flour circles, but good flour tortillas in Arizona and Texas have spoiled me.

I used some of the tortillas to make black bean, rice, and kale burritos for the 400k next Saturday. I'm grateful to have the time to plan out food in advance like this, and I'm also glad to have figured out that burritos work so well as an on-bike food for me. I can eat them while I ride, they don't taste like the garbage from convenience stores, and I can make and carry multiple different kinds of burritos so I don't get tired of eating them. I'd like to be enjoying more meals like the ones described here, but I suspect that will be easier to accomplish in France compared to the U.S. I'm still pondering exactly what I will do for food while on the PBP itself. I know there will be heaps of mashed potatoes and omelettes in there. Maybe I should pack some Cholula for myself, ha! Last time I brought along a squeeze bottle of peanut butter, which was good for adding protein to the multitudinous croissants that we ate (also a squeeze bottle of jelly). Hmm, maybe I should bring along an entire roasted Tofurky, heh heh heh...