Monthly Archives: November 2011

November 29, 2011

Home

We have a home – four walls around us and a roof over our heads – a brick fireplace and rooms filled with musty old house smell. Moving, like so many big, exciting things in life, is hard work. Backs hurt at the end of the day a empty living room floor looks like a great place to collapse. We’re mostly moved in now, at least as much as we can be without things like dressers and bookshelves in which to put things away.

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Persimmons from a friend were the star of Thanksgiving weekend.

Thanksgiving was the perfect break from schlepping stuff and swabbing floors. Lee and I spent the holiday with my aunt, mom, brother, and brother’s girlfriend at my aunt’s house in Carmel Valley. It was beeeeeautiful, needless to say, and the food was the kind of food you look forward to eating leftover meal after meal. We ate. We talked – caught up on old times and made plans for the future. We ran, hiked, swam, played with dogs, played cribbage, and watched wildlife.

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There was a lot of this.

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And this.

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The table was lovely and the food didn’t even make it in front of the camera. There was turkey, lentil loaf for the vegetarians, roasted root vegetables, endive + persimmon + pomegranate seed salad, mashed potatoes, tabasco + asparagus quinoa, pumpkin cheesecake bars, and apple-pumpkin delight.

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In short, I’ve been busy and blogging time has been just out of reach. This week, though, I’ll be back. I can’t miss out on writing about my favorite food season!

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November 15, 2011

The best thing in my oven

Can you guess what it is? Is it a pizza? A flatbread?

I cannot resist watching things bake through the oven door.

The best thing to grace my oven for a long time is Ancient Greco-Roman Pizza with Feta, Honey, and Sesame Seeds from Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day. Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François have done it again. They’ve won my heart with bread and filled my home with the smell of baking dough and hot cheese.

The authors handed out their latest book in person at the Foodbuzz blogger festival. I think receiving this treasure trove of baking inspiration was the highlight of the conference for me.

The Ancient Greco-Roman Pizza was the clear choice for my first go at a recipe from Artisan Pizza. I’m a history geek, what can I say. According to Hertzberg and François, this pizza is modeled after the oldest known recorded pizza recipe and uses ingredients the ancient Mediterranean civilizations would have had. The whole spelt dough is wonderful to work with and bakes into a dreamily crispy-chewy crust. I never would have thought to combine feta cheese, honey, and sesame seeds on a pizza but it tastes even better than it sounds, believe me.

This post will join in the World Wide Pizza Party on Twitter tomorrow. Join in by baking a pizza from Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day and tweeting about it using the hashtag #PizzaPartyIn5.

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November 14, 2011

Fresh or Frozen?

Freezers are wonderful things. They hold ice cream, home cooking put by for later, and frozen convenience foods. Some might say there’s no place for the latter in a the healthy, local, sustainable kitchen. Just look at the ingredients and nutrition label on a frozen lasagna…yeah, they have a point.

Still, I buy things from the frozen foods aisle and I consider myself a relatively healthy shopper/eater. Sometimes, you just need something easy and the freezer is one of the best places to find real food with a longer shelf life than a head of lettuce. Here are a few frozen foods I love:

    1. Veggie burgers: While I’ve dabbled in homemade veggie patties and enjoyed my creations, I still like to have store-bought veggie burgers on hand. They’re one of my favorite go-to easy, fast dinners and make great hot lunches too. Recently, I’ve been buying a big package from Costco, which cuts down on excess packaging and makes the price a little more attractive.
    2. Ice cream, of course: I’m actually trying to cut down on my ice cream consumption. It got a little out of hand when we moved ashore from the boat and I was just so thrilled to have ice cream at my fingertips again! Don’t take this frozen treat for granted!
    3. Frozen spinach: This is my new favorite thing to put in smoothies. With a bag of frozen spinach in the freezer I know I can always make a green smoothie, even if I don’t have fresh greens on hand. Frozen chopped greens also make the smoothie colder and thicker than fresh greens. My favorite combo these days is frozen spinach, frozen mango, whey protein powder, and almond milk. It makes for a wonderfully thick smoothie that I like to eat with a spoon.
    4. Frozen edamame: snacking heaven. I don’t know how else you’d keep edamame around.
    5. The occasional frozen dinner…I feel kinda guilty about this one but I can’t help myself. My indulgent, lightning-fast comfort food for nights when I just don’t feel like cooking or don’t have time is frozen mac and cheese. I try to buy the natural/organic brands. It makes me feel better to know I have one of these in the freezer in case of a dinner emergency.
    6. Misc. frozen veggies: I’m a sucker for brussels sprouts and, lately, lima beans. I have a favorite tofu/lima bean spread/dip recipe that I’ll share here eventually.

Recently, the Foodbuzz Tastemakers program sent me a coupon for a Green Giant Valley Fresh Steamers frozen vegetable + sauce dish. Normally I’d steer clear of any sauced vegetable in the frozen food aisle. I was happy to see that the ingredient lists aren’t too weird – there’s mostly just veggies in there! I was also thrilled to find macaroni and cheese with broccoli among the selection. While that doesn’t exactly qualify as enough vegetables for a meal to me, it is a great example of how to incorporate more green stuff in normally not-so-green meals (even my guilty pleasures!).

The Steamer I tried tonight was good! It served Lee and I as a side dish. The sauce was light and with the addition of eggs tortillas, and a few more vegetables (since I cannot get enough of them) made a tasty dinner. I do wish there were more veggies in the bag. The whole thing was about as many veggies as I normally eat in one sitting.

Simple dinner: scrambled eggs and Garden Vegetable Medley + some

additional vegetables + whole wheat tortillas to stuff = sort of egg and veggie fajitas

(This would make an awesome breakfast too!)

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November 12, 2011

Coconut Molasses Swirl Cornbread

Dear food blogging world,

I love you and I wish I could live in your warm, sweet-smelling world of cookies and spices, talented cooks and writers, brilliant photographers and intriguing recipes.

Sincerely,
Rachel

I’m feeling really, really connected all of a sudden. Maybe it’s the Burwell Recipe Swap. Maybe I’m still riding the Foodbuzz Festival high. In any case, I love life in this food blog world. Life in the real world is pretty good too. Lee and I will be the proud owners of our first house-home (as opposed to boat-home) in a few days and should be moving in by this time next week. Both of my museum internships are going swimmingly. They keep me intellectually fired-up and assure that my fingernails are always blue with clay. I have a whole slough of new friends and I’m starting to really, really appreciate this fabulous city.

This haze of happy feelings propelled me away from the computer to bake yesterday. I dug out Helen’s Texas cornbread recipe along with some special ingredients. I wanted to infuse this delicious but plain cornbread with a couple of flavors I’ve been loving lately: coconut and molasses.

The all-cornmeal bread became cornmeal+millet flour, which has a similar texture to cornmeal (and hey, that means it’s gluten free). Buttermilk became coconut milk+vinegar. Shredded coconut went perfectly with the gritty cornmeal texture and it only took a tablespoon of molasses to turn half the batter into a deep, dark molasses swirl. I am firmly in the “cornbread shouldn’t necessarily be sweet” camp but that doesn’t rule out ingredients more commonly found in sweets.

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My only mistake was to follow Helen’s recipe in terms of salt. I know she loved her salt and tended to be a bit too liberal with it for mine and my mom’s taste. I thought I’d give her some credit when it came to cornbread, though, and added a full teaspoon of salt. Hah! The bread it still good but it would be a completely different kind of good with less than half that amount of salt. I think I’d like it better that way.

I think this cornbread would be beautiful on a holiday table or for breakfast with a smear of jam, like the homemade apricot I’m currently enjoying. I might even let some of it dry out in a paper bag and make something resembling Helen’s cornbread dressing, a holiday food institution in my family.

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Coconut Molasses Swirl Cornbread (gluten and sugar free)

1/2 cup stoneground cornmeal
1/2 cup millet flour
1/2 cup light coconut milk
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt (revised down from 1 teaspoon)
1/2 cup low-fat milk (or more coconut milk)
2 teaspoons vinegar
1 tablespoon blackstrap molasses
2 tablespoons unsweetened, shredded coconut

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
Oil a small baking dish/pie plate/cake pan, or, ideally, a cast iron skillet.
Combine the dry ingredients in a medium bowl.
In a separate bowl, beat together egg, milk and vinegar.
Add wet ingredients to dry, stirring until most lumps are gone.
Pour half of this batter into the baking dish or pan.
Add molasses to the rest of the batter, stirring until it is fully incorporated.
Pour this batter into the pan as well and stir gently to swirl both together.
Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until the center of the cornbread is firm.

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