Monthly Archive for December, 2010

Vegetarian Grinder

Published by Josh on December 31, 2010 in Recipes. 1 Comment Tags: , .

This is from Grand Central Bakery‘s lunch menu:

  • Grand Central Seeded Baguette or Essential Baking Parisian Baguette
  • Sliced avocado
  • Red or sweet onion, sliced extremely thinly
  • Mama Lil’s hot pickled goathorn peppers (mildly spicy will do if you can’t find hot)
  • Balsamic vinegar
  • Provolone
  • Romaine lettuce

This sandwich really requires a good flavorful bread. Grand Central’s seeded baguette and Essential Baking Company’s Parisian baguette are both good.

Cut the bread like Subway used to do, with a V-shaped chunk taken out of the top. This helps keep the avocado in while you’re eating it. If you’re careful, you can cut from the base of the V out towards the sides, turning the top of the bread into a kind of hinged filling-keeping system. (Be vigilant anyway; those avocados are slippery.) Sprinkle one half of the bread with balsamic vinegar. You let it pour out, didn’t you? Well, try to get some of the runoff onto the other sandwich you’re making. You want a fair amount, but not sopping.

On the other half of the bread, sprinkle some of the oil from the pickled peppers. Layer the other components onto the bread. I think the avocado stays in place best if it’s directly next to the bread and not in contact with the cheese, but it may just be a lost cause. You’ll need to adjust the amounts of each ingredient to taste—I like more onion than Cam does, for example, and I think Cam could do without the cheese entirely while I think it’s a necessary component.

Whole Foods’ house brand balsamic vinegar is surprisingly good, incidentally.

The original recipe calls for mayonnaise, but it doesn’t need it at all. You can get about three sandwiches out of one baguette, but I recommend just cutting it in half and making two.

Kale gratin

Published by Cam on December 30, 2010 in Recipes. 1 Comment

With a busy January bearing down on us, my domestic impulses have been running high as I try to get as much cooking done beforehand as I can. I’ve been fieldstripping beets and shredding cabbage for borscht, putting up jars of frozen peanut-tomato soup base, making roux for gumbo, portioning out pulled pork for Josh’s lunch, freezing a batch of vegan black bean burger patties, and generally being a kitchen terror.

Tonight’s dinner was the sort of cook-and-freeze-half thing I’ve always meant to be organized enough to actually pull off. It’s a kale gratin based on Kurt Beecher Dammeier’s recipe in Pure Flavor. You could mess around with this quite a bit. I think a little quinoa or barley wouldn’t go amiss, and/or a touch of parmesan cheese.

The “Better Than Bouillon” is a tip from Jerry the Got Soup guy. He’s right; it’s pretty good, and a lot better than the packaged vegetable broths I’ve tried. Not that I’m surprised — Jerry the Got Soup guy wouldn’t steer me wrong.

Kale gratin

a scant two cups of leftover cooked long-grain brown rice
30 leaves of lacinato kale
a sploosh of olive oil
1 smallish onion, finely chopped
1/2 cup water with 1/2 tsp “Better Than Bouillon” veggie base
1 cup milk
1 tsp kosher salt
1/4 tsp black pepper
a little nutmeg
2 large eggs
5 1/2 ounces of semihard cheese such as Cheddar, shredded
1/4 cup of homemade bread crumbs

Preheat the oven to 350 and get out a couple of 6-cup pyrex baking dishes.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. While it’s heating up, wash the kale, strip the stems out, and cut the leaves into strips no more than an inch wide. Blanch the kale for a couple of minutes, drain it, and rinse it to cool. Gently squeeze out the excess water.

In a large bowl, mix the kale, rice, salt, pepper, and nutmeg. It’s convenient to mix this with your hands.

In a large, wide saucepan, heat the olive oil on medium-high. Add the onion and cook until it starts to brown. Add your broth and boil for a couple of minutes until it’s reduced by half. Take the heat down to medium-low and stir in the milk along with the kale mixture. Then remove it from the heat entirely and stir in the eggs and all but 1/4 cup of the cheese.

Divide the mixture between the two baking dishes and top with the rest of the cheese and the bread crumbs. Bake uncovered for forty minutes. Let rest on the counter for about five minutes.

You can freeze one of the gratins for up to three months. Reheat, covered, in a 350-degree oven for 30 – 40 minutes.

Holiday peppermint marshmallows

Published by Cam on December 23, 2010 in Recipes. 4 Comments

Every year we make marshmallows, and every year we scramble to find that one issue of the Martha Stewart magazine that has the marshmallow recipe in it.

By the way, one of these years I’d like to try making gelatin-free marshmallows, but I’ve read that vegetarian gelatin substitutes can be tricky. I’d welcome any advice about vegetarian marshmallow-makery.

Peppermint Marshmallows
adapted from: Martha Stewart Living Dec 2004

Vegetable-oil cooking spray or butter
4 (1/4-ounce) packages unflavored gelatin
2 cups sugar
1 tablespoon light corn syrup
2 large egg whites
3/4 teaspoon peppermint extract
Confectioners’ sugar, sifted, for coating

1. Coat a 9×13″ pan and the blade of a large spatula with cooking spray. (Or butter them or oil them or whatever.) Put sugar, corn syrup, and 3/4 cup of water into a medium saucepan and cook over medium, stirring, until the sugar is dissolved. (The saucepan will seem ridiculously large. This is on purpose.) Stop stirring and let the mixture come to a boil. Raise heat to medium high and cook until it’s come to 260F on a candy thermometer. Marvel, as usual, about the heating curve of the sugar.

2. Meanwhile, sprinkle gelatin into 3/4 cup of water in a heatproof measuring cup; let stand 5 minutes to soften. Set the measuring cup in a small saucepan full of gently simmering water and whisk constantly until the gelatin is dissolved. Take it off the heat and stir in the extract, then set it aside.

3. Beat the egg whites in a stand mixer until stiff but not dry peaks form. That means that the surface of the whites should still be glossy, but the peaks stay completely upright without their tips flopping over. In reality, we look at each other and say, “Does this look right to you?” “I dunno. Does it look right to you?” One year they got a little overbeaten; the marshmallows were a little less lofty but I don’t think anybody cared. Ideally the egg whites are not sitting around deflating while you heat up the sugar syrup; starting them when the syrup is coming up on about 250F works well.

4. Whisk gelatin mixture into the sugar mixture. The mixture will foam up significantly, making you glad you used such a big saucepan. With the mixer running on low, gradually add the hot sugar-gelatin mixture, in a thin stream, to the egg whites. Then crank the mixer’s speed to maximum. (Whoosh! Steam! Very dramatic!) Keep it running on high speed until it’s a very thick mixture, which takes about 12-15 minutes. Put the saucepan in the sink to soak.

5. Pour the mixture into a lined pan. Let it set up until firm, at least 3 hours. Cut the marshmallow mass into generous cubes and roll them in confectioner’s sugar. Cutting the marshmallows can be awkward – scissors have worked best for us.

Lip balm experiment

Published by Cam on December 13, 2010 in Uncategorized. 3 Comments

I thought I might try making lip balm from our soapmaking leftovers. It turns out to be easy as long as your standards aren’t all that high. Really, it’s no harder than melt-and-pour soap.

My first trial batch was this:

16g olive oil
10g coconut oil
8g beeswax
6g palm oil

Melt it. Put it in a container. Let it firm up. Tah-dah. If you really want a lip balm stick, I’m pretty sure you can get the appropriate containers from Zenith Supplies, but it’s not like there aren’t plenty of perfectly great lip balms that come in little pots.

I wanted to fuss with it a bit, so I remelted it and infused it with cocoa nibs for about twenty-five minutes, adding a touch more beeswax. Then I added a few drops of clementine oil. I can’t say that the nibs added the kind of chocolateyness I was hoping for, but they did add a subtle scent and an interesting color.

I’m reasonably pleased with this as a lip balm, but it’s a tad on the oily side for my tastes. I’d like to try cocoa and shea butters in this, and knock down the liquid oil component a bit. What this batch seems great for, though, is heavy-duty skin moisturization. It’d be a good cuticle cream or a base for a homemade Badger Balm.