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Recipes 
Fri Jan 22, 2010 at 19:12:25 PM PST
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At my farmers' market, there used to be a woman who sold delicious kumquat preserves. They were pricey - something like $9 for a little jar of them - but wonderful. She advertised them as a good mix-in for yogurt or a topping for vanilla ice cream. I haven't seen her at the market in years, nor could I afford her product even if I did. But I LOVE kumquat preserves so that was the first thing on my mind when I spotted some kumquat trees the other day:
I loaded up with tons of kumquats and started looking for a recipe. Needless to say - if you've seen the SNL commercial I'm referencing - the sticky mixture I made is a great dessert topping, but definitely NOT a floor wax!
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Mon Jan 18, 2010 at 09:16:38 AM PST
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Weston A. Price Foundation
Have you folks seen Sally Fallon's awesome cookbook, Nourishing Traditions. She's with the Weston A. Price Foundation, which is listed on the promotional page for the film, "Fresh," here: http://www.freshthemovie.com/m...
The book has recipes and the margins are filled with fascinating food facts and quizzes. The front has a powerful summary of research based nutritional information.
This group has done a great job of demonstrating shared interests between the food movement and farmers. (See Joel Salatin's endorsement of Sally Fallon's work here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... Their research data emphasizes nutritionally dense foods. They're great at overcoming corporate myths for vegetable transfats and hydrogenated oils and against saturated fats from eggs, dairy/milk, pork, and poultry, which they show to be crucial to our health. They're leading in the fight for raw milk and against soy. Got Silk? Oooops. You better check out what the Weston A. Price foundation has found out about it. (Have yo seen the bumper sticker: Babies need milk, not beans!)
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Mon Jan 18, 2010 at 08:05:34 AM PST
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I don't cook hamburgers at home, but every so often I like to make veggie burgers. My recipe doesn't contain eggs, because while I love them, I eat plenty of them in other dishes. I've adapted this dish from Moosewood's Low-Fat Favorites. I prefer them with cannellini (white kidney) beans, but you can also use pinto beans. All quantities are approximate; I don't measure carefully, and this recipe is flexible.
Veggie burgers (suitable for vegans)
1 can cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
1 tablespoon mustard (I like coarse-ground, but dijon or other smooth kinds work well too)
1 tablespoon tomato paste (or ketchup)
1 tablespoon soy sauce or tamari
1 medium or two small onions
1 large or two regular cloves garlic
1 carrot, shredded
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon chili powder
about 3/4 cup rolled oats
In medium bowl, mash beans with potato masher. Add mustard, tomato paste or ketchup, and soy sauce and mash together.
Chop onion and saute in vegetable or olive oil. After a few minutes, add the shredded carrot. When onion and carrot are soft, add cumin, chili powder and pressed garlic cloves. Stir for another two minutes or so, adding a tablespoon or two of water if you need to prevent sticking. Stir sauteed vegetables into bowl with bean mixture. Add rolled oats and mix well. I like to leave this to sit in the refrigerator for a while to let the oats soften.
At dinner time, heat a little oil in a frying pan and cook on both sides for 5-8 minutes.
Share your own favorite burger recipes--vegan, vegetarian or carnivore--in this thread.
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Tue Jan 05, 2010 at 16:13:50 PM PST
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cross-posted from Bleeding Heartland
I'm no college football fan, but in honor of the Iowa Hawkeyes playing Georgia Tech in the Orange Bowl tonight, I wanted to put up this thread on favorite citrus fruit recipes.
I like oranges and grapefruit so much that I almost always eat them plain. However, I'm interested to hear other ideas for using them in salads, side dishes or desserts. I use a little lemon or lime juice frequently in Indian or Thai cooking, but the citrus isn't the centerpiece of the dish.
After the jump I've posted a recipe for lemon-sesame salad dressing and a cake with lemon syrup that I haven't made since before I had kids. It's not even that time-consuming, but making the syrup seems to be one step too many for me these days.
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Thu Dec 31, 2009 at 02:41:21 AM PST
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The Italian recipes of Spaghetti with Garlic , Oil, and Chilli.
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Mon Dec 28, 2009 at 21:51:59 PM PST
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One word: yum. When I was offered a copy of this book, Vegan Cookes Invade Your Cookie Jar by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero, I said yes mainly because I love one of the authors (Isa Chandra). She's done a few other cookbooks but she's also got several free recipes online at The Post Punk Kitchen and I've tried a few. It's not for no reason that she's a bit of a cult favorite among vegans.
So here's the review: The book's great. I love it. The cookies include all of the classics plus innovative varieties like Tahini Lime Cookies and Sweet Wine Biscuits with Sesame. Plus it starts with sections on ingredients and equipment that make clear what you need, why you need it, and when and how you can substitute. They even include a gluten free flour recipe that you can use to replace regular flour. That's wonderful because, let me tell you - if one dietary restriction is harder, once you start mixing and matching dietary restrictions you're really screwed. Vegan cookies? Sure. Gluten free? No problem. Vegan and gluten free? Umm, eat some fresh berries for dessert. So I like it that this book actually provides an option there.
Tonight we used the book to make brownies. I thought about doing it together with my boyfriend's kids but I didn't want them to catch me putting tofu in the brownies. I made a few substitutions. I used applesauce instead of canola oil to reduce the fat and 1 tsp arrowroot powder instead of 1 tbsp corn starch because we didn't have any corn starch. The result is fantastic. They are a bit fluffier and more cake-like than I'd like in a brownie, but they are better than ANY boxed mix you will ever find. The only way to beat them would be to use a from-scratch recipe with tons of eggs and butter. Or maybe they would be better if you follow the recipe as written instead of substituting like I did. And I have a hunch that with some experimentation, you could find a way to make them denser and fudgier using avocado.
UPDATE: One more thought: You don't need to be a vegan to use the recipes in this book. You can't taste the tofu in the brownies. And most people don't eat bacon-flavored cookies, so it's not like any meat eater would be giving something up by eating a vegan cookie. All in all, it's a painless way to cut down your carbon footprint without noticeably giving anything up. The only aspect that might be annoying to non-vegans is that the recipes call for ingredients you might not keep in the house (like soy milk).
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Sun Dec 27, 2009 at 00:34:10 AM PST
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In all likelihood, I will be working both New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. I think I'll cook the rump end of a ham (lots of leftovers!) on Wednesday, with maybe some mashed potatoes, or else potatoes mashed with turnips, and brussels sprouts on the side.
That's the extent of my plans at the moment, although if anyone has a great recipe for a maple-bourbon glaze for the ham, I'm interested: haven't found one online that could match the one a friend of mine (a former chef) did off-the-cuff some years ago when we collaborated on dinner. (She was in charge of the ham; I watched her make the glaze but have never been able to reproduce it.)
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Fri Dec 25, 2009 at 07:15:32 AM PST
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Merry Christmas, Locavores! Although we don't celebrate the holiday, I do enjoy listening to Oy to the World, the klezmer Christmas album by the Klezmonauts (samples here). Their arrangements make the songs sound joyous, which is surprisingly rare in Christmas music. It's Jesus' birthday, after all.
I got a kick out of this cartoon by Steve Sack of the Minneapolis/St. Paul Star Tribune: a Christmas card from the Republicans (NOel).
What's cooking at your house today? If you missed it last week, read AAF's amazing diary about Christmas dinner in Provence.
I'm not that ambitious, but the kids helped me make gingerbread yesterday. I use the recipe from the Laurel's Kitchen cookbook: 2 1/2 cups flour, 1 tsp baking soda, 1 tsp cinnamon, 2 tsp ginger, 1/2 tsp salt in one bowl. 1 egg, 2/3 cup blackstrap molasses, 1/3 cup honey, 1 cup buttermilk (or kefir), 1/3 cup melted butter mixed in another bowl. Combine wet and dry ingredients, pour into greased 9 x 9 pan and bake at 350 F for about 40 minutes (a few minutes less in my oven).
My husband used to request noodle kugel every Christmas, but I just made that last week for Chanukah, so tonight we're having roast chicken instead. After the jump I posted my noodle kugel recipe, adapted from my mother's to include more protein and less fat and sugar.
UPDATE: Kids came in from playing out in the snow and requested popcorn. So that's popping up in grapeseed oil on the stove, to be served with melted butter. Mmmm!
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Fri Dec 18, 2009 at 13:17:30 PM PST
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In Provence, our Christmas season begins on 4th December, the day of St. Barbe, with the ritual sowing of wheat and lentils on dishes to provide some fresh green shoots to decorate the Christmas table. Our Christmas festivities last for three whole days (and nights), from 24th to 26th December so we get to eat lots of stuff. And drink! The word blotto comes to mind.
For the people of Provence, Christmas is a series of traditional customs beginning with the "gros souper," the large supper served on Christmas Eve before Midnight Mass. The table around which the family gathers is decorated according to custom with sprigs of myrtle and St. Barbe's wheat and lentil sprouts (which are symbols of prosperity).
Next week I will write a special piece on vegetarian Christmas dinner.
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Fri Dec 11, 2009 at 11:38:08 AM PST
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My earliest memory of cassoulet was when one the chefs in the family hotel declared that there was a restaurant somewhere in the Languedoc region which had been simmering this particular dish since the 1789 revolution, perhaps even before that. At the time I thought it a tall tale but as an impressionable boy of ten I gave the chef the benefit of the doubt. Several years later, I visited the celebrated Tour D'Argent in Paris and on the menu there was a description of a cassoulet which had been on the stove for the best part of a hundred years. When I questioned the maitre D', he explained the process of preparing it: it is traditional to deglaze the pot from the previous cassoulet in order to give a base for the next one. It made sense.
Next week I'll resume this series with a piece on my favorite seven spices. And a Xmas recipe for mulled wine.
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Wed Dec 09, 2009 at 17:46:34 PM PST
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What do you like for dinner when winter just dumped more than a foot of snow on your house? My first choice would normally be home-made soup, but we're out of bread, and I just made curried pumpkin soup over the weekend.
We had tomato and olive wild rice casserole, and I'll be enjoying the leftovers for lunch tomorrow.
Yesterday I baked brownies while the kids were playing in the snow, and I finally tried my friend's trick of stirring a can of black beans, pureed, into the brownie mix (instead of oil, butter, eggs or water). They turned out great, and my kids never suspected a thing. Good way to sneak protein and fiber into a treat.
This thread is for any comfort food recipes or inspiration.
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Fri Dec 04, 2009 at 10:09:52 AM PST
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In part one I covered the history of the olive oil and how it's made and now comes the promised recipes. But first, here's a secret: it is incredibly easy to make your own herb or spice flavored olive oil. There is no point buying an expensively decorated bottle of olive oil that has a sprig or two of herb swimming into it. It's more fun to make one's own, and cheaper. Much cheaper.
There are basically two ways of making infused oils: hot and cold. I much prefer to go the cold way for the simple reason that I have burnt oils in the past. Even if you know how to use a thermometer, you might still get it wrong as it is a delicate process. The cold way is dead easy: select your desired herb or spice, add it to the (extra) virgin oil and store in your pantry for two weeks before use.
To be cross-posted on the Big Orange.
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Sun Nov 29, 2009 at 14:05:56 PM PST
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We've just about polished off all the leftovers from Thanksgiving this year. I tried to keep them to a minimum by not cooking the things most people in my family don't eat (stuffing, gravy) and cooking moderate portions of everything else. We had just the right amount of mashed potatoes and only one serving left of the salad, curried butternut squash soup and apricot-glazed beets.
Tonight we'll finish the last of the turkey soup. I made the broth with the carcass and cut up the last bits of meat, along with some carrots.
I had more than a cup of cranberry sauce leftover, so I mixed it with a couple of diced apples and poured it into a frozen pie crust. I made a crumbly topping with oatmeal, flour, brown sugar, butter and cinnamon, spread it over the pie and baked it for about 35 minutes at 350 F.
Share your own leftover ideas in this thread. In the past I've used mashed potatoes to make potato pancakes, which was tasty.
UPDATE: I forgot that I have most of a jar of applesauce left, and no one in my family likes to eat it plain. Anyone have any good cake or quickbread recipes that use a lot of applesauce?
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Fri Nov 20, 2009 at 13:36:59 PM PST
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Homer called it "liquid gold." Olive oil has been more than mere food to us Mediterraneans: it's our way of life. The olive tree, symbol of abundance, glory and peace, gave its leafy branches to crown the victorious in both friendly games and bloody war. Olive crowns and olive branches, ancient emblems of benediction and purifiation, were ritually offered to deities and powerful figures but it is only in recent times that modern scientific research has proven over and over what the peasant wisdom knew a long time ago: its wonderful taste and health properties.
One tablespoon of olive oil contains 120 calories and 14 grams of fat, but the fat is mostly monounsaturated and has a beneficial effect on blood cholesterol levels. It is no wonder that Mediterranean countries where olive oil is consumed extensively such as Greece, France, Italy and Spain, there is a low incidence of cardiovascular diseases. It also protects the body's digestive tract.
Cross-posted on the Evil Orange.
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Tue Nov 17, 2009 at 17:03:57 PM PST
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I haven't posted enough food diaries lately, so here's a thread for protein-rich main dishes. I love my carbs, but I've been trying to eat less pasta, rice and other grains.
After the jump you'll find the recipe for tonight's dinner, which I adapted from "Ground Meat in Cashew Nut Sauce with Chick-peas" in Julie Sahni's fantastic book Classic Indian Cooking. I highly recommend the cookbook if you want to make Indian food at home. Although it includes chapters on meat, there are plenty of good recipes for vegetarians here. I used Sahni's book for about 10 years before I ever tried any of her meat dishes.
Please post your own favorite high-protein meals (with or without meat) in the comments.
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