Baba Ganoush

I learned a lot on the trip I took earlier this summer to the Middle East. I learned that bagels are as foreign to Israelis as dim sum. That camel's milk is purported to be a powerful aphrodisiac. That in Egypt, "No" means "I speak English, and can easily be gulled into buying that knick-knack I just tried to refuse." That nothing scares me more than the fear of others.

And I learned about tahini. A creamy, nutty-tasting paste made from sesame seeds, tahini is a key part of hummus (which both Israelis and Palestinians can agree is great) and delicious on falafel (a key part of my diet as a vegetarian). My personal favorite use for tahini is in baba ganoush, a pureed eggplant spread. The recipe is quick and easy, and the resulting spread great as an appetizer with pita bread or raw veggies, or to spread on sandwiches.

Baba Ganoush

3 small eggplants (or 2 large)
4 cloves garlic
1/3 cup tahini
juice of 1/2 a lemon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cumin

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Slice the eggplant into pieces about 1 inch thick and place on an oiled cookie sheet. Bake for 10 minutes, or until soft to the touch but not dry. Alternately, you can just place the whole eggplant on a cookie sheet in the oven, prick it with a fork and bake until soft. This takes about 20-30 minutes, depending on the oven.

Let the baked eggplant cool and peel off the skin, or cut it open and scoop out the meat. Put into a food processor with the rest of the ingredients. Pulse until creamy.

Confiture de Mûres

Lately everywhere I look I see blackberries.  No, I am not talking about a handy mobile device, but the plump, juicy berries.  There are lots of blackberries in the Golden Gate Park and in the Presidio, ripe for my new favorite activity, fruit rescue or ‘foraging’.  Last week I went on a rather painful, but very fruitful, blackberry collection mission.  I came back with five yogurt containers full of berries, ready to be made in delicious jam.  Picking the blackberries ended up being a rather social event.  There were Halloween haunted house solicitations, as well as Mounties who offered their horses as ladders to aid my roommate and me in picking.

With all this bounty, I decided to make jam.  My jam making experience is limited to visits to my Grandmother in Normandy, where I would help make jam with summer fruits such as peaches and raspberries’.  My absolute favorite jam that I would covet and save for special occasions was her Confiture de mures (blackberries).  I quickly set out to use her simple, but highly delicious recipe that is pectin-free.  Take advantage of the excesses of fall and can or preserve your favorite fruit into jam! 

Confiture de Mûres

6 cups of ripe blackberries

4-5 cups of sugar

1 lemon

4-5 jars for jam (Bell jars etc.)

Rinse blackberries and put them in a large pot with sugar. 

Heat to a boil and then lower the heat to a simmer.  Put a small saucer or plate into the freezer

Meanwhile put the lids of the jam jars in a saucepan of boiling water.  Also clean the jars very well with warm soapy water and sterilize by either putting them in a steam bath or by pouring boiling water into them and letting them sit for 5-10 minutes.

After letting the jam boil for 15-20 minutes, place a couple of drops of jam on the frozen plate.  Hold the plate at an angle and watch the jam as it drips down.  The jam has reached a jelling consistency when the liquid has dripped about halfway down the plates and has slowed down dramatically or stopped.   A fun guessing game that I have yet to get wrong (it really doesn’t matter much as blackberry in any form is great, also my jam normally takes a day or two to firm up).

Pour into jars and leave about a ¼ inch of airspace (a funnel is really useful) and screw the lids on (carefully as not to touch or contaminate the lids in anyway).  Immediately cap the jar after transferring the jar and invert. Depending on your dedication to the jam and your desire to preserve it, you can boil the jam/submerge in boiling water for 10 minutes to form the seal (on bell jars).  However, my grandma just lets her jars cool upside down and has never once had a problem.  The merits of each are discussed here.

Vanilla-Almond Peace Cookies

Last Saturday my roommates (the lovely ladies who contribute to this blog, although they’ll probably shoot me for calling them “ladies”) and I went to the Power to the Peaceful music festival here in San Francisco. Since it was about peace and also free, it was a great opportunity to watch the interaction between hippies, hipsters, and the many other creatively dressed tribes that populate our fair city. I thought it was a good excuse to bake cookies and promote our blog. I mean, wait, what? We don’t promote our blog. That’s like totally icky, and like, needy and stuff. We’re just some totally authentic people trying to get by, or whatever. Anyway…

Have you ever handed out free cookies at a music festival in Golden Gate Park? On one hand, everybody’s hungry, but on the other, I could see alarmed parents tugging their children out of my path as I wove my way through the crowd, Tupperware in hand. Although both the hopeful and the suspicious expected at least one ingredient not included in the recipe below, these moist and chewy cookies managed to win everyone over. The secret is pudding, people. Pudding! (ganja optional: add during step 1)
Also, I have to say: Seventy thousand people, doing tree pose and Namaste in unison. I don’t know what it means, just gotta say.



Ingredients:

2 sticks salted butter
1 cup sugar
1 pkg instant vanilla pudding powder
1 vanilla bean
2 eggs
2 cups white flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 cup raw almonds, chopped





Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Place one stick of butter, the pudding powder, and the sugar into a large mixing bowl. Melt the other stick of butter in a saucepan over low heat.

Slice the vanilla bean lengthwise, cutting off both ends, and scrape seeds into the melting butter. If you don’t have any vanilla beans you could throw in some vanilla extract, I guess. Once fully melted, pour the butter and vanilla over the sugar, pudding mix, and unmelted butter. Stir vigorously until the other stick of butter is dissolved. The mixture should be very thick and creamy.

Add the eggs to the mixture and beat well until combined. Add the flour, baking powder, and chopped almonds, mix well. Form the dough into golf-ball-sized spheres and flatten to ½ inch thick before placing on the baking tray. Bake for 20 minutes or until the edges are just starting to brown.

Makes approximately 30 cookies. Super easy, super quick, super delicious. Could help you make friends, possibly even with people who aren’t currently feeling the Universal Love Connection.

Black Knight White Bread

This was the bread that didn’t die. I tried, really hard, to kill it — mixing the yeast with salt before it was activated, not covering the bowl during the first rise, putting it on an ungreased cookie sheet before I put it in the oven, forgetting about it while it was baking.

But like the Black Knight from Monty Python, this bread kept fighting, even with the metaphorical blood pouring from its very real wounds. Mostly because Molly and Chloe, who have actually baked bread before, kept rescuing it. And it’s delicious, and somehow doesn’t look too much the worse for the wear.

The recipe below is more what I should have done than what I actually did.

At Chloe’s recommendation, (and based on a recipe from The Fresh Loaf) I started with poolish, a pre-fermented mixture of flour, water and yeast. To give the yeast time to activate, we mixed the poolish 24 hours before starting the actual dough.

Poolish

1 cup water
1 cup flour
1/4 teaspoon rapid-rise yeast

Mix the ingredients and leave in a covered bowl overnight. By the next day it should look terrible — kind of like rotten pudding with hemp seeds in it. (Not that there are actual seeds, but that’s what the bubbles look like.) That means you’re doing it right.

The following day, mix the dough:

Black Knight White Bread

poolish
1 1/2 teaspoons rapid-rise yeast
3 cups flour (we used half all-purpose white and half white whole-wheat)
about 1 cup warm water
1 1/2 teaspoons salt

Mix the yeast and the water together and let the yeast activate. You can tell it’s activated when it bubbles. (Rapid-rise yeast isn’t supposed to need water for activation, but the first time around I mixed all of the ingredients directly, and there was clearly something wrong. Chloe magically rescued me, adding more yeast that she activated with water. In any case, it can’t hurt to mix the water and yeast beforehand.)

Combine the yeast-water mixture with the rest of the ingredients, and stir until doughy. I mixed the dough that formed by hand for about five minutes to activate the gluten in the flour.

Cover dough and let rise for approximately two hours. Knead for five minutes a lightly floured surface. Shape into a ball.

At this point, I decided there was no way in hell I could stay awake for another two hours to wait for the second rise, so I stuck the dough in the refrigerator overnight. When I woke up the next morning, it had risen again. I punched the dough down and set it aside to return to room temperature.

When it was no longer cold, I divided the dough into two balls, and Molly helped me shape shaped the dough into long loaves. We scored the top with a sharp knife to get the pretty diagonals.

Let rise once more, for about 30 minutes, while you preheat the oven to 550 degrees. Paint the tops of the loaves with egg yolk. Before you put the bread in, turn the heat down to 450. Let bake for 20 minutes, or until the bread looks golden. (Like I said, I forgot about it for a while while it was in the oven, so that time is an approxmation).

The result was, miraculously, amazing. Crusty on the outside, light and silky on the inside. If the bread was any the worse for the wear, I’m excited to see how it comes out next time.

Mom's Granola

This recipe grew out of something disgusting. About five years ago, my brother became obsessed with bodybuilding (long story, not for here). Along with many hours in the gym, this came with a truly horrifying diet of egg whites, chicken breasts, the occasional antioxidant-packed blueberry — and no refined sugars, or fats (other than omega-3s, of course), or basically anything delicious.

My brother’s diet made it hard to find foods that the whole family could bear to eat. In an effort to appeal to his tastes, my mom took a recipe for granola from my aunt Gina and altered it to make what she called “healthy granola,” with minimal oil and sweetened with sugar-free maple syrup. (Whether that can actually be called healthy is open to debate.)

Since the inception of my mom’s granola-making career, my brother has started eating again like a medium-normal person, and my mom has altered her recipe to the one below. (At first she substituted in the honey for the fake-sugar syrup without telling my brother.) I’ve gotten to the point where the only kind of granola I actually like is hers.

This is the best recipe in the world, because it’s hard to mess up and it’s infinitely adaptable. Consider the ingredients in the recipe below as guidelines, not actual rules.

Mom’s Granola Recipe

2/3 cup oil (I used olive oil, but any kind of mild cooking oil will do)
2/3 cup honey
1/4 cup sunflower butter (or sunflower seeds, added to the dry ingredients)
dash milk
seeds from 1/4 vanilla bean (or 1/2 teaspoon vanilla)
3 cups oats (not instant)
1/4 cup sesame seeds
1 cup wheat germ
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 cup chopped almonds (or whatever kind of nut you like)
Preheat the oven to 275 degrees.

Combine oil, honey, sunflower butter, milk and vanilla in a saucepan over low heat until bubbling but not boiling. The ingredients won’t really mix, but that’s okay.

Add everything else. Stir together so the dry ingredients and wet ingredients are fully mixed.

Spread thinly onto a cookie sheet. Put in the oven for about a half hour. Take it out and turn the granola over with a spatula, being careful not to break the chunks that will have formed. Bake for about 15 minutes more, or until the oats turn dark golden brown.

Chipotle-Tomato Soup with Black Beans and Toasted Sweet Corn

The only bright spots on the six-hour Labor Day traffic-crawl from Tahoe to San Francisco (other than running out of music and being forced to listen to the Garden State soundtrack and sing along at the top of our lungs) were the plethora of roadside fruit and veggie stands that dot the Central Valley.  Where else can you get fresh watermelon for 9 cents per pound, or watch open-top tomato trucks spill their goods onto the median strip as they negotiate turns at top speed?
By the time we finally straggled back into the city the car was weighted down with several boxes of fresh produce, necessitating the invention of this recipe. This soup is easy to make if you have a food processor, probably not as easy if you don’t (liquefying the tomatoes would require a much longer cooking time).  I used prepared black beans that had been sitting in the fridge for a week, but you can use canned instead. Just remember to rinse them thoroughly with cold water before adding them to the soup.

Chipotle-Tomato Soup with Black Beans and Toasted Sweet Corn
Ingredients:

10 Roma Tomatoes
2 large yellow onions
1 ear sweet corn
¼ cup fresh basil, rinsed
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
I cup water
32 oz. prepared black beans
1 T chipotle powder
1 T ground coriander
1 t cumin powder
3 T salt
1 T black pepper
¼ cup Tapatio hot sauce

Using the stainless steel chopping blade, puree the tomatoes, basil, and one of the onions in the food processor until liquefied. The mixture should be pink, thick and foamy and resemble something nasty from a sixties cookbook. Chop the other onion and cut the kernels off of the ear of corn. This will make more of a mess than you might expect, so scrape the kernels into a large bowl.  (pic)
Heat the oil in a large pot over high heat and add the chopped onion. Saute the onion for five minutes, until translucent.  Add the corn kernels and sauté until the mixture begins to brown, about another five minutes. 
Add the tomato-onion puree and the water and simmer over medium heat until the soup turns from pink to bright red, about 20 minutes. Add the beans, salt, chipotle, cumin, coriander, pepper, and Tapatio.  Simmer for another 10 minutes or so until most of the added water has cooked off. Turn off the heat and allow the flavors to blend for at least a half hour.
Add more salt, pepper, or Tapatio as needed. Serve hot and garnish with a dollop of plain yogurt and a few slices of avocado. Insert soup in mouth, chew if necessary.

food is the new fixie

 

food is the new fixie

Hipsters who eat?  A quick Google search gives you answers such as… “do hipsters eat? Ever?”  Or  “cheap cocktails, what hipsters really eat”. Traditionally, the word “hipster” has been eschewed by all who could conceivably be labeled as such. In the era of skinny jeans and manorexia, food (with the exception of PBR and the occasional drunken burrito) has also been a no-no for the city’s cooler-than-thou cohort. However, in the gastro-cultural foodie tornado that is San Francisco, there was bound to be some overlap, like how the old newspapers inevitably get mixed in with the collected tin cans in a homeless man’s shopping cart. Plus, acknowledging hipsterdom is totally meta. Self-awareness is the new plaid.
As the many blogs documenting “the scene” can attest to (example a and b and c), hipster culture is as diverse as say, Sweden.  Sub-classes of hipsters include assless fixie aficionados, SLR-toting compulsive life documenters, and pseudo-intellectuals fond of misquoting Derrida. To this vibrant mixture we would like to add ourselves: hipsters who eat. Cigarettes give you pimples and icky teeth, and the NYT says that pot bellies are in, anyways (or work it off in the hipster Olympics).