A few years ago there was a thread on Ask Metafilter about tofu in which Greg Nog posted a recipe for baked tofu. Every time I want to make baked tofu I dig up that thread.

Greg Nog’s Tofu, More Or Less
(half recipe)

1 lb package of extra-firm tofu, frozen and thawed
1-2 cloves garlic, put through a garlic press
1 1/2 tablespoons of peanut butter
2 1/2 tablespoons of vegetable oil
2 1/2 tablespoons of soy sauce
cayenne or whatever you like for heat
pinch of dry ginger
black pepper

First, get your oven going to 350. Now squeeze as much liquid out of the thawed block of tofu as you can, then cut it into strips and squeeze each strip carefully. You want to get it as dry as you can so it’ll soak up lots of the marinade that you’re about to make. If you cut the block into seven or eight slabs and cut each slab in half lengthwise, it’ll fit well in a 9×13″ pan.

Mix up your marinade. Add the oils first, then emulsify with the soy sauce. This amount will just cover your tofu, so you might want to be pretty liberal in your measurements. I’m fond of Mama Lil’s hot peppers in oil and am always wondering what to do with the extra flavored oil; about half a tablespoon of it in the vegetable oil mix is good. A little sesame oil is good too. For the bulk of the oil, I prefer peanut oil. When you’ve mixed it all up, taste it for balance.

Cover your tofu with the marinade and bake at 350 for an hour, turning the tofu over half-way through.

Yesterday I made pumpkin soup.

1 red onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, chopped
some sort of oil (I used a lightly-flavored olive oil)
1 medium-sized cooking pumpkin, peeled and seeded and chunked
1-2 tsp “better than bouillon” (vegetable) dissolved in a little water
1 tsp tamarind concentrate
~2 tsp hot pepper flakes or to taste

Saute the onion in oil until almost translucent, then add the garlic and saute a little longer. Add the pumpkin, bouillon, and enough water to cover (or use that much good vegetable broth), and simmer until the pumpkin is soft. Puree everything and return it to the pot. Take 1/4 cup or so and mix it in a measuring up with the tamarind paste, then add that back to the pot in batches, stirring it in and tasting as you go. Add hot pepper and simmer until the flavors blend.

This’d be nice with some coconut milk. I might try a little star anise in it, maybe some basil if I had any.

I have a gig this week that has me waking up in the cold, dark winter morning hours, and that means that breakfast is an issue. I’m too groggy and rushed and grouchy to make a good hot breakfast from scratch, but I really want something warm on these mornings. And hot instant cereal? I guess that’s not terrible, but… bleh.

This winter I’ve learned that a good strategy for me is to bake a big batch of steel-cut oats early in the week and then keep on scooping ‘em out and reheating them. It’s amazingly simple. The basic idea comes from Giver’s Log, courtesy of somebody on Metafilter.

It’s almost not a recipe: take a rounded cup of steel-cut oats and put it in a big oven-safe pot with three cups of water, one cup of milk, and a pinch of salt. Bake at 300, uncovered, for 1.5 hours, then cover it for the last half hour or so. You’ll wing it a little bit with covering and uncovering, baking it for more or less time, depending on how saucy you like your oatmeal.

This makes 3 or 4 days’ worth of oatmeal at once, and it can chill in the fridge for about a week. To reheat, I like to plop a chunk of it into a small saucepan with a little boiling water (leftover from coffee-making) and break it up with a fork. It’ll take a few minutes to warm up and become creamy.

I like to have it with ground flax seed, chopped dried peaches, and brown sugar. If I’m feeling fancy — by which I mean “awake”, really — I might grate a little nutmeg in there. It’s delicious — creamy, hot, sweet, filling. Good oatmeal makes waking up seem not so bad after all.

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.

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.

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.

I can hardly believe got all the way to my late thirties before I found out how to make roasted potatoes the Right Way. I used to just chop ‘em up and roast them. Oh, was I wrong.

What you do is this: bring a pot of salted water to a boil. While it’s heating up, peel your potatoes (or don’t) and cut them into chunks. Parboil the potatoes for about five minutes, then drain them. Put the potatoes back into the pot, put the lid on, and shake them. Then roast them with olive oil at 425 or 450 for about an hour.

When you shake your parboiled potatoes, you rough up the surface significantly. So when you then roast them, the potatoes develop a lovely crunchy crust. It’s a tiny bit more trouble, but the payoff is remarkable. This is an old British trick, apparently; say what you like about British food, but they do seem to know their potatoes.

Last night I roasted up some potatoes and had them with a sauce based on the Colombian dish papas chorreadas. Normally, papas chorreadas is made with boiled potatoes, but it’s delicious with these roasted taters. (I am sure there’s a British Columbia joke to be had here somewhere.) No doubt it’d be even better with shallots and scallions and perhaps some hot pepper; I had my heat on the side in the form of a hot andouille sausage from Olsen Farms, which was just about perfect. You might also want to try frying the cumin, adding it near the end of the onion saute. But Josh and I were pretty well satisfied as it was.

Papas Chorreadas

~3 pounds of potatoes in some form
1 small onion, minced fine
2 c of canned tomatoes, minced fine
1 tbsp dry cilantro (much better to have a big handful of fresh, of course, but this is what I had on hand)
1/4 tsp cumin
1/4 tsp oregano
1/4 tsp black pepper
1 tsp flour
~1/4 cup milk or cream
2 oz queso fresco, grated, (or any other salty white cheese that’ll melt at least a little)

Cook the minced onion in olive oil or butter at medium heat until it’s begun to brown, then add the tomato and spices and cook until the tomato bits have softened and it smells delicious. Stir in a little flour. Add a dollop of milk — not a lot, just enough so that it no longer looks like salsa — and the grated cheese. Heat, stirring, until the cheese has melted. Pour the sauce over the potatoes at the last moment.

This sauce held surprisingly well — always a consideration here, when I’m rarely sure exactly when Josh will be getting home.

Getting a jump on my resolution to use the pressure cooker more often, I tried split pea soup in it today. It was a roaring success. Josh had three and a half bowls and wound up hunched over the nearly-empty pot in the kitchen, scraping out the last little bit with a spatula. I bet he’s sorry he can’t get his whole head into the pot.

I went through our cookbooks and found that we had recipes for all kinds of fancy-pants pea soups, but no plain old vegetarian split pea soup. This is plain old vegetarian split pea soup. You don’t really need the bacon salt, but it adds a subtle smokiness. Just don’t get crazy with it or you’ll easily oversalt the soup. Then you’d have to add a potato. Which is pretty tasty, actually.

Split pea soup

1.5 smallish-medium onions, diced
2 carrots, diced
2 celery ribs, diced
2-3 cloves of garlic, diced
1 1/3 cups split peas, picked over and rinsed
1 1-qt package of “No Chicken” broth
a hefty grind of black pepper
a very small dash of Bacon Salt (no kidding, it’s vegetarian)
2 bay leaves
~1 heaping tsp red pepper flakes (or to taste, but don’t be stingy here)
balsamic vinegar

In the pressure cooker base, sweat the onions in a little neutral oil while you chop the carrots and celery. Add those, and keep it on medium while you chop the garlic. Add that and cook until all the vegetables are soft, translucent and perhaps slightly touched with brown here and there.

Remove the vegetables to a bowl and add the split peas and veggie broth. Bring the peas up to high pressure for about six minutes, then let the pressure decline naturally. Add the vegetables back and simmer on super-low heat with hot pepper flakes, bay leaves, bacon salt, and pepper.

Each eater might want to try a splosh of balsamic vinegar on their soup. (Who taught me to finish pea soup with balsamic vinegar? Whoever you are, thanks – you were right.)

I swear, I looked away for just a moment, and pow! Mushrooms! The kit I started on the 19th has started producing, right on time. Unfortunately, the mushrooms are showing the long skinny “octopus” formation that indicates that they’re not getting enough light. I’m not yet sure what to do about that. I don’t think I have a spot that provides better indirect natural light. Time to get out the light-meter.

Besides learning that I needed more light for good fruiting, I’ve learned a few other things from that kit, not the least of which were to use a humidity tent and to get the coffee grounds pretty damp. (They’re really not all that hydrated when they come out of the espresso machine.)  That was probably the major problem with the batch I started from grocery-store oyster mushrooms. I should have hydrated the grounds. And I think it would have been better to start with a more modest batch of substrate and then expand the mycelium out into a whole bucket; the mycelium wasn’t quite keeping up with the bacteria on the bottom, I think.

I should look into this stuff: Growing Mushrooms with Hydrogen Peroxide. Not that building my own laminar flow hood doesn’t sound like fun!

Still no eggs. The chickens are still growing, I’m pretty sure, though much more slowly now.

I’m sorry to say that Trouble is losing her beautiful pristine white color and gaining some yellowish patches. She’s also getting really good at leaping from the ground to my shoulder, and I’m having to invent new, advanced chicken dislodgement techniques to get her off me. It looks like Trouble’s going to stay a wee thing; I hope she lays well, and isn’t just a runt. (She was a small chick and had a rough start.) For all I know, she’s just right; poultry experts seem to have have varying opinions about just how substantial a Delaware ought to be. Temperamentally, she remains herself: ruthlessly inquisitive, voracious, fond of buttons.

Miss Thing is getting friendlier and more curious. She’s looking very cute these days. La Thing does express her curiosity through biting sometimes, though she’s usually fairly gentle with it. The pecking, not so gentle.

Durf, on the other hand, seems to be getting a little wilder. You can really see the meat-breed lineage in her these days — her legs are enormous, and if you grab her across the wings, she feels solid, like a big dog feels solid. She used to get a little bullied, but she seems to have noticed at last that she’s twice the size of Trouble and is now making a play to be something other than the omega chicken.

After an unfortunate incident with the first run on the 8th, they’ve been stuck in their coop until we can get the next one built. It’s a pretty plush coop, with a covered run, but they’re not too happy about it. They’ve been getting a little squabbly. And who can blame them? Being cooped up does that to me, too. I hope to get the run up for them very soon, and with luck, maybe we’ll score some fresh straw for them from one of the grocery-store pumpkin displays.