soy ahoy, part two: hot and sour edamame with tofu

As mentioned last week, I went a little soy crazy in Flushing. This is the rest of the story.

 

Hot and Sour Edamame with Tofu
(adapted from Mark Bittman’s How to Cool Everything Vegetarian)

1/4 cup neutral oil, divided
8 oz tofu, drained and cut into cubes
1 onion, chopped
2 teaspoons minced garlic
1 tablespoon minced ginger
2 hot dried red chiles, minced or the equivalent in red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon fermented black beans or other salty bean product (miso, etc.)
1/3 cup shaoxing wine or dry sherry
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1/4 cup rice vinegar
2 tablespoons honey
1/2 cup stock or water, mixed with 2 teaspoons cornstarch
2 cups edamame

Heat your wok/skillet. Put in half the oil. When it’s hot, add the tofu and brown.

Add the rest of the oil and, after it’s hot, add onions and saute until soft. Add garlic and ginger and chili (flakes) and saute until they’re soft and fragrant, too.

Add liquids: wine, soy sauce, vinegar, honey, and stock. Add salty bean product.

Bring to a boil and then turn down to low. Add browned tofu and edamame. Simmer until edamame is tender, 5-7 minutes, and adjust seasonings.

Edamame is certainly not new to me, although I’ve never bought it in this format and I’ve never cooked with it, so I’m counting it in the tags. I’m more used to it in the bento boxes at the Korean lunch place and as bar snacks. But these were quite affordable and much less of a hassle than peeling a gazillion pods myself.

Tofu, mid browning. I’d drained it earlier. I’ve got a system going involving one of my cooling racks, a cutting board, and the Gourmet cookbook (all thousand pages and two tons of it). It’s less complicated than it sounds and is more effective than just resting cubes between weighed-down dishes.

Browned tofu, onion, and then garlic and ginger. I may have been a little generous with the ginger.

The brown pastes that have lived in the back of my fridge since the Clinton administration, at least. The one on the left is miso and, yes, I got rid of the spoon contamination from the chili paste on the right.

The serving suggestion from Bittman is over rice. The first time, pictured at the top, I ended up doing it with kasha because that’s what I pulled out when I stuck my hand into the back of the freezer looking for the rice. (I have portioned containers of both for easy dinner.) It was tasty and nutritious. For leftovers, I used my spinach noodles:

It was also tasty, if not necessarily as nutritious as the kasha.

And there was dessert.

soy ahoy, part one: banana milkshake

The most recent excursion to Flushing saw me going a little soy crazy. I came home with soy milk, frozen edamame, and tofu. The latter two went into a recipe that’ll be up here in a few, but I was a bit perplexed about what to do with the soy milk. I bought because, hey, I’ve never tried it and for $1.19, I can afford the experiment. But once the initial tasting was complete, that still left most of the quart left over.

As for that experiment, I cannot imagine how anyone with functioning taste buds could confuse unsweetened/unflavored soy milk with anything that came out of a cow. Or a goat or a sheep, for that matter. It’s not awful. It’s not even bad. It’s just… not milk. It tastes like plants. And I would never consider pouring it over my generic-brand Lucky Charms, let alone pouring it into my coffee.

That does not mean I couldn’t find other uses for it.

 

It was close to a hundred degrees in NYC for much of the week, so it’s no surprise that my whim took the form of something cold – frozen, in fact. I have a selection of fruit hanging out in the freezer – blueberries, cranberries, and a bag full of overripe bananas because I always buy more than I can finish before they start to go.

There is no recipe because I didn’t measure anything and, really, it will all depend on what you’ve got going on and how sweet your fruit is and how sweet you like your smoothies. But this is all I used, except for a splash of vanilla.

 

Possibly by blind luck, this came out spectacularly. It was creamy beyond any reasonable expectation and there were no grassy undertones. Also, it held together as a thick, smooth liquid until the end, not separating out the way my usual milk-and-yogurt shakes do – it held together like a fast food shake with its added stabilizers and emulsifiers and whatnot. Except it was smoother and tastier and definitely kosher to accompany a hamburger.

(I didn’t have a hamburger; this was dinner. But you could have it with a hamburger and it would be okay with a rabbi.)

On a day when it was still 92F at midnight, this was a win.

 

As a related aside, since I’ve burbled happily about a vegan treat, let me briefly mumble less than happily about vegan cookbooks, since I’ve taken out a few from the library over the past several months. I skipped the (in)famous Veganomicon because it weighs a ton, but I did borrow books separately written by the two authors of that, Terry Hope Romero’s Viva Vegan and Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s Appetite for Reduction. I don’t know what the two of them are like together – I had no patience to sit through their old public access show – but separately, they take wildly different paths to reach their audiences. Viva Vegan, focusing on Latin American cuisine, is very inclusive: here are tasty recipes you might like to try and oh, by the way, they’re vegan and I don’t think you’re going to miss the meat and dairy. There are also a bunch of interesting recipes to try. Appetite for Reduction, which is a healthy-eating book, is… not inclusive. It takes for granted that you think “meat is murder” and all of the other tropes that make PETA look like goofballs when they take it too far. I found the author’s tone extremely off-putting to the point that I didn’t even finish browsing it for ideas. There are many reasons to choose a vegan meal either in isolation or as part of a lifestyle choice and most of them aren’t based on personal ethics. I don’t need my dinner with a side order of shame.

leaving it to the experts

I own rye flour. I own caraway seeds. But sometimes, it’s better to leave it to the experts.

I went into Zabar’s for coffee and while I usually skim past the cashiers straight to the coffee and tea section, this time I took the scenic route to check out their supply of block chocolate. (Result: Fairway is much better.) And between the desserts and the coffee is the bakery section, which is usually blockaded by a queue. Except it wasn’t. And there was the lady depositing hot loaves of rye bread into the basket. And so I bought bread for the first time in a few years.

I have no excuse for the smoked whitefish spread; I had to double back for that.

Saveur recently did an article on the best rye in the US and Zabar’s earned special mention. For good reason.

food to google

 

I consider myself to be a fairly adventurous eater within my normal boundaries. I’ve got no interest in offal or other ‘fun’ parts of snout-to-tail eating, but that’s entirely because I’m not a big eater of the more standard parts of our meat animals. But give me a new cheese or fruit or vegetable or starch, and I’m totally game.

Downtown Flushing is a great place to spread one’s wings in any direction, animal, vegetable, or mineral. Mostly it’s because they’ve got a very wide variety of stuffs that aren’t familiar to Western palates, almost none of it labeled in English.

For vegetables, my usual method of post-purchase identification is to pull out Bruce Cost’s book and flip the pages until I find a picture that matches what’s on the counter. For fruits, however, the search can be a little harder and, occasionally, impossible.

In other words, I have no idea what these are:

They look like pears, but there is nothing pear-like about them. They feel like a succulent almost, like they’d be the fruit of some kind of cactus. But they come from something leafy – the pile at the market had a few attached to stems with long green leaves.

Tastewise, they’re pretty mild with a little bit of muskiness and sourness. Of course, I don’t know if you’re supposed to eat them raw or if they’re incredibly underripe. I tried half of one raw and the other half I steamed along with some greens.

The register receipt called these kamtai, but Google gives me nothing related to food on that front, so I’m still not sure.  

So the story goes like this: Pal S took one look at that picture and went “oh! Jamrul! We got that in Calcutta!” and from there, the mystery rapidly came to a successful conclusion.

The rest of my mystery pile was a little more straightforward:

These are both gaya melons. Or, at least, they were both labeled as gaya melons on the grower’s sticker.

They might both be gaya melons, since this is clearly not some mutant cantaloupe nor is it the right color to be an Israeli melon. (Although what an Israeli melon would be doing in a Chinese market anyway is beyond me.) Very sweet and tasty, like a honeydew.

 

The groceries by work also have interesting fruits on occasion, but I’m as likely to pick up a new cheese there as anything else.

This is called buenalba, which is a raw sheep’s milk cheese. It’s purple because the rind’s been washed with merlot. It’s tasty, although I don’t think it’s a life-changing cheese. It’s certainly a striking element for a cheese plate.

 

And thus concludes this week’s investigation into the weird stuff in my fridge.

a collection of lesser ideas

The problem with trying to write regularly on a food blog is that it presupposes you always have something to say. And that you’re always trying something new, or at least new to the blog, and that something has some merit in being shared. And for me, that’s not always the case.

An egg mcmuffin with cheese and a salad is a tasty treat for dinner, but hardly worth a post on its own.

There was yet another attempt at a respectable rice pudding that doesn’t involve a pint of heavy cream and lots of egg yolks, but I have not yet arrived at the One True Pudding, so detailing the ‘certainly edible but not yet there’ attempts is also not an effective use of blog space.

I’ve made mapo tofu a few times with the same recipe, but a lot of my changes to it involve swapping out what’s asked for and substituting the various brown pastes that have been hiding in the back of the fridge for a decade. And while obviously I’m okay with how it comes out, it’s not exactly a method I can or should advocate to others.

There’s actually kind of a funny story about the first time I made my own crème fraîche. It’s a very straightforward concept and seemingly impossible to goof up… except I sort of did. It’s supposed to take 12-24 hours, but it took me almost a week and involved adding all kinds of cultured dairy products to finally get it to set. Why? Best I can figure out is that my house was too cold – it was February and my oil burner is more than half a century old and, well, it took forever.

The second time, of which this is a photo, it only took a little longer than it was supposed to. Both times, however, it was very tasty.

Passing over passover

Pesach has come and gone, although there’s still matzoh on the table. In general, I’m responsible for two elements of my cousin’s seder, the charoses and dessert. The former is why I’m really invited – I make a quart for a small seder and it’s never enough. The latter is an annual experiment with my family as the willing guinea pigs. This year, I made almendrados (lemon-almond macaroons) and some frosted brownies from Marcy Goldman’s book, neither of which I remembered to take pictures of because I was running around like a headless chicken at the time of their creation. I thought the brownies came out all right – with that much chocolate, how can it be bad? – but I think they could have been better.

But after the seders are done, it’s time for more pedestrian fare. Normal people can look forward to a week of meat and potatoes, but I will admit that I sometimes struggle with what to prepare. It’s not the bread or pasta that I miss, it’s the rice and beans and tofu and the spices that are verboten because of one reason or another.

Also, there was corn on sale at the grocer and every day that I passed it, I started really craving the corn-and-mung-bean salad I sometimes live on in warmer weather. But, of course everything but the basil is chametz, so there was none of that.

Of course, some parts of Pesach aren’t so bad – the first matzo brei of the year is always a treat.

 

I’m in the wetting-the-matzo-beforehand camp – yes, this is a point of contention – and I generally use a 1:1 egg to matzo ratio. I’ve made both sweet and savory matzo brei; this is a sweet one – a pinch of salt, a pinch of sugar, and a lot of cinnamon.

 

Something I tried for the first time this year was to make a kind of pancake – I was really going for crepe-like pancakes I could slice up as noodles for soup, but they ended up with a little bit of lift as they cooked – they flattened out once they got off the heat.

They tasted nothing like pancakes, but they could fake it from a distance.

 

Something that had to wait for Passover to end:

My cousin who hosts the seder just got back from a trip to Australia. In an attempt to head off the possibility of a kangaroo plushie or koala baby-doll t-shirt as a souvenir, I told her that I wanted Tim-Tams. I’d had them years ago when some Aussie acquaintances brought them along to a gathering; I presume they’re sold somewhere in NYC, but I’m sure these are fresher. And so much better than a stuffed kangaroo – imagine a chocolate-covered oreo except the cookie and cream are both tastier.

My cousin and her friend were most generous and I have a selection to snack from:

Considering that I have baked my own treats for years and have never been a consumer of supermarket cookies… I have rarely been this excited by processed food.

lazy person’s pasta primavera

So lazy, I didn’t even take a picture of it plated.

 

I went into Zabar’s for coffee the other Friday evening and, halfway between the cheese and the dried fruit, I realized that I didn’t feel like cooking dinner. Luckily, halfway between the cheese and the dried fruit is the fresh pasta, so I picked up some tortellini.

It’s not quite spring, no matter what the calendar says, and so this is not quite pasta primavera, although I suppose it is because there’s no such thing as a definitive recipe, is there?

One zucchini, having come up against the box grater and lost.

The last of the spinach I had lying around; this is not the knife to chop spinach with, but it was the one that was already dirty.

One very messy stovetop as I sauté the veggies with some olive oil, garlic, and capers. I added some freshly grated pecorino later, but forgot to photograph.

I think this was tomato and gorgonzola tortellini, the former explaining the orangey tint. It was tasty, as most of Zabar’s fresh pasta is.

Dessert was kiwis. The ones on the left are golden kiwis, the ones on the right are the standard variety. Golden kiwis, at least the ones I got, are a little sweeter and don’t have a fuzzy exterior.

666 is the number of the entree

I have a very mixed history with food pretending to be other food – or, at least, non-meat pretending to be meat. Historically, I’ve disdained it. It’s like the bread and cereal and other items that appear around Passover so that you can still have your Cheerios for breakfast without eating chametz. If you’re going to give something up – especially for a non-medical, non-required reason – then give it up and stop weaseling with technicalities.

But that was a position staked out largely before I gave up pig products, which explains why I have a vegan chorizo recipe photocopied and waiting to be tried. Also, it explains this post.

This is technically my second experiment with seitan, the first being the little curds I picked up the other month and tried to figure out how to use without any sort of directions or suggestions on the package. In my vegetarian Thai cookbook, there is a recipe for making seitan from scratch, the end steps being to either deep fry (preferred) or bake the results. I got something edible out of toasting the store-bought version, so I figured I’d try again.

These may put anyone on the path to carnivorous behavior. They felt exactly the way they look – like rubber.

Thankfully, they look a little more like food and less like mistakes from the tire factory after toasting, even though I believe this type is supposed to be steamed:

As for what to do with them, I opted to go for a Chinese-Thai mishmash (it’s not elegant enough to be called a fusion): a Thai green curry stir-fry.

This is my new-ish wok, by the way. It’s one of those flat-bottomed types for western stovetops. I actually have a proper Chinese wok, complete with a crown that rests on the burner grate, but this is easier to work with. It was originally a bright, shiny stainless steel, but while my seasoning has been irregular, the important part – the bottom – is well done. It’s gigantic, though, and one of the reasons my next home cannot have a tiny stove.

Food that looks exactly like what it’s supposed to be. More or less; the coconut milk is reconstituted from powder.

This is a lot of food and yes, I was eating it all week.

I didn’t make it as soupy as a Thai curry that you get in a restaurant would be – I love that style, but that’s an awful lot of coconut milk to be consuming. It was saucy enough, though, and very tasty.

Dessert was from the other end of the globe: a poppy cake made with the remainder of the mun filling from the Purim hamantaschen. 

cinnamon snaps & benne wafers

Purim was the other weekend, which means I spent a few evenings making hamantaschen in between my enthusiastic efforts to cough up a lung. A few days later, I was informed that the dinner I thought was scheduled for next weekend was in fact the day after tomorrow. More cookies were clearly required.

(But first I had to buy a $2 pineapple.)

I’ve made both of these before and they came out a little differently each time for reasons I can understand and learn from.

 

For the cinnamon snaps, the one thing I must most strongly exhort: use good cinnamon – or at least use fresh cinnamon. Don’t use the stuff that’s been sitting around since the Clinton administration. If it smells only faintly of spice, like an old scratch-and-sniff sticker, treat yourself to some fresh cinnamon and hold this recipe until then or else you risk your other spices overwhelming the tired cinnamon. You want something that’s got a little zip.

I got the recipe from here and didn’t change it appreciably, so I will just point you to the original.

They are icebox cookies, more or less, and while they are not complicated to make or require much in the way of hands-on time, they do take time overall, so not a great choice for a last-minute cookie-baking itch. On the other hand, they freeze fabulously and require next to no defrosting time, so they are a great choice for keeping in the freezer for last-minute cookie-eating itches.

I still haven’t quite figured out how to make them round. Actually, no, I have – wait until they firm up a little and then roll them until the logs are cylindrical – but that would require remembering to do so.

 

On the other hand, these have character.

Benne Wafers are sesame cookies from the Carolinas. They, too, freeze fabulously – and taste pretty darned good straight out of the freezer, too. They’re pretty quick to make and require no resting, so they have that in their favor, too.

 

Benne Wafers
(adapted from the King Arthur Cookie Companion)

1/2 cup (1 stick, 4 oz) unsalted butter [you can use as little as 2 oz]
3/4 cup (6 oz) brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 egg
1 cup (4.25 oz) all-purpose flour
1 cup (4.5 oz) toasted sesame seeds

Preheat the oven to 350F.

Cream together first five ingredients. Add flour and mix until well combined. Add sesame seeds and mix until well incorporated.

Drop the dough by the teaspoonful onto greased/papered/silpatted sheets, leaving a lot of space in between — at least two inches. These spread. A lot.

Bake 13-15 minutes, until deep golden brown. Start checking around 11 minutes for the first batch because they go from ‘pleasantly golden’ to ‘char’ pretty quickly when they’re that thin.

Let them sit for a moment on the sheet, then transfer to a rack to cool.

 

Now here is where I have to confess that my pictures don’t quite reflect the recipe that is printed above. And it wasn’t until I typed out the recipe that I realized why.

The first time I made these (sadly undocumented by pictures), they came out flat like florentines. This time, as you will see, they are fully 3-D, although they were still tasty and perfect in every way.

The difference? I accidentally halved the butter. I read ‘4 tablespoons’ instead of ‘4 ounces’ and used only half a stick of butter instead of the full stick. So I accidentally made a light version of these cookies. But since they did come out so well with half of the butter, I might consider doing it on a regular basis.

Even with half of the butter, they still spread:

lentil soup with caraway

Last month’s Saveur was full of all sorts of good things, but what did I immediately decide I was going to make first? Any of the glorious maple syrup recipes? The Sicilian fare? The lentil soup.

It’s perhaps also just as telling that I had caraway seeds and coriander seeds to hand, but had to wait until I went and bought a carrot.

 

Lentil Soup with Caraway
(adapted from Saveur)

1-2 tbsp. canola oil
2 medium yellow onions, roughly chopped
1 carrot, roughly chopped
2 tsp. coriander seeds, toasted and finely ground
1 tsp. caraway seeds, toasted and finely ground
2 cloves garlic, crushed
6 cups stock
1.5 cups red lentils, rinsed and drained
salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

 

1. Heat oil in a good-sized pot. Add onions and carrots and cook, stirring occasionally, until soft, about 10 minutes. Add coriander, caraway, and garlic and cook, stirring often, until fragrant, 1–2 minutes. Add stock and lentils and bring to a boil; reduce heat to medium-low, cover with a lid, and cook, stirring occasionally, until lentils are soft, 15–20 minutes.

2. Using a blender or food processor, purée until smooth. Season with salt and pepper.

There’s a shallot here, you might notice. I had a few extra and my onions were tiny.

I toasted the caraway and coriander on the stovetop until they were fragrant, then tossed them into my non-coffee grinder.

These are the lentils that look pretty dry and then lose their color once cooked. I used these because I had them, but I think next time, I will just go with the regular brown/green ones and just cook everything longer.

All done but the shouting (or the immersion blender). The original recipe calls for vegetable stock and I used chicken – half bouillon and half rich homemade. The end result was definitely a little meatier than what you would have ended up with just the bouillon or straight veggie stock. I think for warmer weather, I’d go with bouillon or veggie stock.

This is not a soup one makes for looks or texture. 

The original recipe calls for mint and greek yogurt, which is certainly an option. But I thought an apple (a pinata apple!) was a nice complement – sweet and tart.

candied grapefruit peel

There’s a story about a tornado, wonky internet, wonky graphics cards (again!), and inertia, but nobody cares. On to the fruit!

 

Candied fruit is pretty straightforward – boil in water, boil in simple syrup, dry, sugar.

When I did these with orange peels, I shaved off some of the pith after the boil-in-water phase. The grapefruit peel was much thinner, so I didn’t bother.

After boiling in simple syrup – equal measures of water and sugar – for 45 minutes, the peels are translucent. And sticky.

Part of the way through the sugaring process, plus the leftover syrup.

After they’re sugared, they have to dry in open air for at least a day, two or three even better. Tap off the sugar and store in an airtight container.

cakes of woe: a tragedy

After posting about a cake that divides easily and tastes fabulous, it’s time to delve into a cake recipe that… did not turn out quite as planned. Abject failure would be closer to the truth.

The local library had a copy of Small Batch Baking, which features cakes, pies, and cookies reduced down to one- to two-person portions. I wasn’t so interested in the cookies – if you’re going to turn the oven on for two cookies, might as well make the whole batch and freeze the rest. But for cakes and pies, things that are both not meant to last as single or double-consumption items (or are dangerous when left lying about as temptation), it’s a pretty nifty idea. Even my half-sized blueberry cake gets a little soggy by the end when there’s only me to eat it.

The clever factor of the little cakes is supposed to extend to the preparation. Some of it does seem quite clever – using an individual loaf pan as a mock jelly roll pan for a roulade, using giant muffin tins as small cake pans, etc. And some of the individual cakes are made in cans. Regular small-sized (15 oz) cans, each of which gets through two or three turns before being replaced, which is simple and easy, since everyone uses cans… except I don’t really. I use canned tomatoes and, when I lack foresight, canned chick peas. But other than that, there are no cans in my repertoire. Which means I had to wait a bit before being able to make one of these recipes; fortunately, I remembered not to recycle the chick pea cans after a spur-of-the-moment curry.

The test cake was a white chocolate cake; you can see the white chocolate (actual white chocolate, not white “chocolate” – never cook with the fake stuff). The experiment came out to an auspicious beginning in that the batter came together easily and looked and tasted perfectly normal.

Even if it didn’t come out to much.

Around here is where I started wondering if I was going to have trouble getting the finished cakes out because of the lip on the cans. The BFF has a can opener that takes the entire top off so that there’s no lip, but the cake was getting frosted, so anything imperfections would have been covered up.

… and now you see why I put the picture at the bottom instead of at the top.

Getting them out wasn’t too much trouble – it was sort of like getting tennis balls out of the old-style cans – but that turned out to be the least of the problems.

These little darlings, which despite appearances were fully cooked, were inedible. “Leaden” is probably the best adjective. I ended up throwing them away with extreme prejudice, lamenting even the small amount of ingredients wasted. I’d toyed with the idea of picking up 2” cake pans if these had looked like cakes I’d want to make regularly, since the pans are cheap enough and I’d never use that many cans, but that turned out to be a moot point.

I ended up returning the book to the library without either buying cake pans or, for that matter, buying the book (which I could have gotten for $3 on Amazon). I don’t want to make two cookies at a time and, well, after some less than successful cake attempts, I’m back to learning how to make do with 6” pans and the wonderful world of freezing what you can’t eat.

blueberry buckle

One of my weaknesses in the summer is to empty my wallet on berries. The two places by work where I buy my fresh produce often have good sales on berries – 3-for-$5, the odd 4-for $5 for blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, and strawberries depending on the season. It’s not unusual for me to splurge twice in one week, not when berries go so well with the morning cereal or on yogurt or on salads or… Let’s just say I eat a lot of berries in the warm-weather months.

Oddly enough, though, I never really get around to cooking with them. I have never made a blueberry or blackberry pie, have never made a raspberry torte, have never made jam or preserves out of berries or even a simple fruit sauce or coulis. They don’t last that long. I think the sum total of my fruit desserts can be a failed cake and a couple of clafoutis, all made in the dead of winter with berries I’d frozen.

This summer, however, I finally got around to cooking fruit I’d just bought. It was by accident, more or less, because I was flipping through my little cake book and stumbled upon a recipe that appealed. And so I grudgingly spared some of my fresh bounty from being inhaled au naturel and tried it out.

I’ve made this cake three – four? – times already. I’d say it was a keeper except it would be a bad pun considering the recipe comes from Cake Keeper Cakes, which I purchased back when I’d bought myself the cake stand.

As for the book itself, it’s been hit and miss; I’ve made three cakes from the book, all chocolate-related, and haven’t been amazed by any of them. This one, however, is certainly in the ‘hit’ column.

The cake has a couple of things going as far as I’m concerned, above and beyond fruit, which always improves a cake.

First, it divides well. I can split the recipe in half, making one six-inch cake instead of one nine-inch cake, without any ill effects and it comes out splendidly.

A bonus, since not everyone is a lapsed mathematician like I am, is that there are no strange measurements involving complicated fractional division not covered by your average kitchen measuring cups. The hardest division is turning 3/4 cup into 3/8th cup and you can do that by eyeballing with your 1/2-cup measure the way you would with your cup measure.

Ingredient-wise, the only complication is to halve the one egg, which is a non-problem for me because I keep egg substitute in the fridge and just measure out one ounce for half an egg.

Secondly, and non-trivially, the recipe’s not butter-heavy. Anything with a streusel on top is going to be adding a ton of butter and sugar, but this is actually pretty mild. The ‘full’ recipe only requires a stick of butter total for both cake and streusel, so half a recipe is just half a stick of butter, which is pretty fair.

Thirdly, it’s flexible. I don’t own a six-inch springform (although I’m considering it), but I can get away without one with some deft maneuvering. A springform pan definitely would help here, but it’s not like it’s a cheesecake or something else that just won’t work out in a standard one-piece pan.

Fourth, hey, it’s really good and it’s really simple and it has fruit and that’s pretty much what’s important.

 

Blueberry Buckle
(adapted from Cake Keeper Cakes)

makes 1 9-inch cake (halve for 1 6-inch cake)

Preheat the oven to 375F.

for the streusel

1/3 cup flour
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
4 tb (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, softened

Combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix, either in a mixer or with a fork or fingers, until the consistency is of wet sand and the flour is absorbed. A few lumps are great, just make sure none of them are solid brown sugar.

Cover and refrigerate until needed.

for the cake

4tb (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, softened
3/4 cup granulated sugar

1 egg [1 oz egg substitute for half a recipe]
1 tspn vanilla

2 cups flour, divided
2 tspn baking powder
1/2 tspn salt
 
1/2 cup milk

3-4 cups blueberries, rinsed and dried carefully.

 

Put the blueberries in a bowl or large container with a lid and add 2 tb of the flour or enough to thoroughly coat the berries. This is to keep them from all sinking to the bottom when the cake bakes, so be thorough. Shake gently (if using a covered container) or fold gently if using a bowl, then set aside. Give it a shuckle or two while assembling the batter.

Combine the rest of the flour with the baking powder and salt and set aside.

In the mixer, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

Add the egg and vanilla and continue to beat until the batter is lemon-colored and smooth.

Starting with the dry ingredients, alternately add the flour mixture and the milk in segments: dry-milk-dry-milk-dry, letting each component thoroughly incorporate before adding the next.

Fold the blueberries (including any remaining flour) into the batter gently with a spatula. Try not to mash too many of the berries in the process.

Grease a 9-inch springform pan and dump the batter in gently.

Deposit the streusel on top, making sure that it’s relatively even and no streusel mountains exist.

Bake for 55-60 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. You may need to poke more than once not to hit a blueberry.

When it’s done, leave the cake to cool in the pan for 10-15 minutes on a baking rack, then remove from the pan and let cool on the rack directly.

Serves 8-10.

take me out to the ballgame

Citi Field is supposed to have a wealth of fine stadium dining opportunities. It has a Shake Shack, Blue Smoke, high-end sushi, Korean barbecue, taquerias, and dozens upon dozens of other options including the old standbys of dogs and fries and pretzels.

I finally got to Citi for a baseball game last weekend. It was my first at the new stadium, but I seem to have brought my old habits with me. I packed dinner.

This is my big bento. It says on the bottom that it holds 1.1 liters (37+ ounces), but I’m a little dubious because the big compartment fits maybe a tablespoon more than my 10-ounce capacity thermos. Anyway, it’s still too big for lunch unless I’m going to put salad in the big compartment, so I don’t use it that often.

Contents:

Tea-and-chili chana curry, made properly this time, and basmati rice.

Some of the cucumber and poppy seed salad and then a pluot and some blueberries.

I heated up the curry and kept the salad and fruit in the fridge until it was time to go. I checked with Citi Field’s rules about bringing food in – they’re more worried about liquid and bottles, but clear food containers are apparently fine. I say apparently because while I had to get on the line to get felt up/patted down by the female guard, the look into my backpack was cursory at best and I was not asked to unwrap the bento, which was covered in a tea towel and clear plastic bag.

All in all, it might not be as trendy as Shake Shack, but I think it worked fine for ballpark food.

cucumber and poppy seed salad

As happens every year in early August, people prove their love and affection to me by buying me stuff. *cough*

One of my presents was Ottolenghi: the cookbook, the first collection by the fellows behind one of London’s hippest restaurants. I know, I know, English food! My time in England and Wales was coated in mayonnaise and memorable for the utter dearth of fresh ingredients anywhere – did everyone just eat takeaway from M&S? – but apparently they have gotten better about it in the last dozen years.

Ottolenghi’s team has put together a lovely cookbook, full of gorgeous photographs and Middle Eastern-influenced recipes. It’s also a cookbook without an American edition, so it requires some fluency with both the metric system (or a good cheat sheet) and English cooking argot and ingredients.

The first recipe I tried out of the book was a case in point. In translation:

Cucumber and Poppy Seed Salad
(adapted from Ottolenghi)

1 pound Persian/Israeli or kirby cucumbers (4-6 depending on size), sliced into manageable spears
2 mild red chilis… or 1 small Serrano chili, thinly sliced
3 tbsp cilantro, roughly chopped
2 tbsp poppy seeds
2 tbsp superfine sugar (powdered is acceptable, but ideally just dump your table sugar into the blender/grinder)
spare 1/2 cup nice neutral oil
spare 1/4 cup white vinegar
salt and pepper to taste

Mix everything together, preferably with your fingers so you can make sure the spears are evenly coated. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve.

notes: (1) The recipe asks for caster sugar, which we call “superfine” and tend not to stock in the house unless you barkeep. Powdered will work in a pinch, but you can just make superfine sugar by putting granulated sugar in the blender or food processor or spice/coffee grinder. Don’t use table sugar; it won’t dissolve easily. (2) I used the amount of oil and vinegar required, which is what’s listed above, but it’s too much. There’s a lake at the bottom of the bowl. My suggestion is to halve the amounts – at least – or, better yet, just do the oil and vinegar to taste as you do the salt and pepper.

My homemade caster sugar and the photo from the book, so you can see what it’s supposed to look like.

A little color’s not a bad idea, so I used part of a plum that I had lying around.

All in all, not a bad debut for the cookbook. I look forward to more adventures with it.