You need a conversation piece on your bedside table

Hi Everyone,

It's been a long time since we wrote a fully collaborative post from Amanda's bed. We are enjoying our Valentine's Day with a relaxing tea!

And, here's a video:

Where Community's Organically Grown

Whoa. It’s been three months since we last posted - that's practically an eternity. In that amount of time, Kathryn and I started senior year, turned 22 and 21 respectively, have been asked about our post-grad plans about 182938109284039248 different times, and most importantly, witnessed the election of Barak Obama – I’m definitely still feeling the post-election glow.

Because patience should always be rewarded, I offer all of our devoted readers out there a truly fabulous recipe for Chocolate Beet Cake. I made this over fall break, when I went on an Alt-Break service trip with other Grinnellians to Community Homestead, which is an intentional community and organic farming operation for families and people with special needs. It was a locavore's dream vacation. In exchange for our work on the farm, we got to eat many a vegetable soup, made with freshly harvested produce, drank raw milk from their dairy barn, and ravenously consumed the homemade cookies and bread from their certified organic bakery. Being a part of this community and seeing the physical labor of food production really made me appreciate the sacredness of food, something that is often missing from my mind when I go shopping at the super market.

We also got to take part in their weekly potluck supper, and we brought over the aforementioned beet cake, and we got to use some of the beets that we had harvested earlier in the week. Here it is:

Bringing a cake made out of beets gets you some serious farm-cred at a country potluck - we even upped the anty by coloring our frosting and a powdered sugar glaze with the leftover beet roasting liquid and carved an extra beet into a shape of a heart and stuck it in the center of the bundt. As for the cake itself, the beets lend a really subtle earthy flavor to the chocolate and give it a supremely moist texture. Not only a conversation piece and way to use up the last of your autumnal root vegetables, I swear you will enjoy the cake for its pure and simple flavors. Enjoy.

Chocolate Beet Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting
Adapted from Washington Post June 7, 2006

Ingredients:

* 3 medium beets
* 1 cup vegetable oil
* 1 1/2 cups flour
* 1/2 cup whole-wheat flour or pastry flour
* 2 teaspoons baking soda
* 1/4 teaspoon salt
* 4 tablespoons butter
* 3/4 cup cocoa powder
* 3 large eggs
* 1 3/4 cups sugar
* 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
* confectioners' sugar (optional)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Wash the beets and put them in a roasting pan and add 1/2 cup water. Cover and put in the oven for 45 minutes to an hour, until approximately fork tender. Reserve the juice from the beet pan and set aside. Peel and coarsely chop the beets, and then puree them in a blender with the oil. Set aside.

Reduce the oven temperature to 375 degrees. Lightly coat a bundt pan with butter and dust with either flour or cocoa powder. In a medium bowl, stir the flours, baking sode, and salt. Set Aside.

In a microwave safe bowl, melt the butter and cocoa powder together in the microwave, making sure to stir the mixture at least every minute to make sure that the butter doesn't burn. Once the mixture is smooth, set aside.

With a hand-held, stand mixture, or good old fashioned egg beaters, combine the eggs and sugar in large bowl, and beat until the eggs are fluffy and change to a pale yellow color. Slowly incorporate the beet puree, the chocolate mixture, and the vanilla. Gently fold in the flour mixture until it is just mixed in. Pour the batter in the pan, and bake for 45 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Set aside, and let it cool. Meanwhile, make the frosting.

Cream Cheese Frosting
Adapted from March 2008 Bon Appetit

Ingredients:

* 8 ounces cream cheese, room temperature
* 2 cups powdered sugar
* 1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, room temperatur
* 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
* reserve beet roasting liquid (optional)

Combine all ingredients except for the beet roasting liquid. Add the reserve beet roasting liquid in tsp increments until the frosting becomes an appealing shade of salmon pink. Frost the cake, and serve.

Happy Cooking,
Allison

Pocketful of Peach Drop Cookies

Hey Kathryn,

Many strange things happened.  I have had not one, but two whole days off from work this week, and the high yesterday in Iowa City was 65 and complete with cloudy skies and a chance of thunderstorms.  Though it was not quite idyllic weather for RAGBRAI (the week long bike across Iowa), the odds could not have been better for summer baking, which is usually so nonsensical.

Also, I stumbled upon this great peach drop cookie recipe from the domestic guru herself, Martha Stewart, and unlike her public persona, they are not at all stuffy.  They are a cross between a scone and a snickerdoodle, having both a chewy consistency along with a mildly spiced topping.  

Look at how pretty they are with the flecks of purple peach skins!  I didn't think of this before, but they would be excellent with chopped crystallized ginger.

They are also best eaten the first day, so invite some friends over, make some peach iced tea, and have a porch party.

Peach Drop Cookies

Adapted From Aug 2007 Issue of Martha Stewart Living

Ingredients:

2 cups flour

3/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 stick of butter at room temperature

1 cup granulated sugar plus 2 tbsp granulated sugar

1 egg at room temperature

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

2 large ripe peaches, diced into 1/4 inch pieces

1/2 cup peach jam

1/4 tsp ground cinnamon

Directions:

Preheat oven to 375, and dot the corners of a baking sheet with butter and place on top a sheet parchment paper or wax paper.

In a small bowl, mix together the flour, baking soda, and salt, and set aside.  In a large bowl, stir the stick of butter until fluffy, and then add a cup of sugar. Cream the mixture until the sugar is well incorporated into the butter and is no longer grainy.  Add the egg and vanilla and stir until well combined.  Add the flour mixture, and stir (don't worry if the dough is clumpy at this stage).  Add the peach jam and diced peaches and blend just until well combined.  

In another small bowl, combine the remaining sugar and cinnamon and set aside.  Use a tablespoon sized spoon and scoop the cookie dough onto the baking sheets.  Sprinkle the tops with the cinnamon sugar mixture, and place in the oven.  Bake until the edges are just golden brown, about 11 to 13 minutes.  Let them cool in the pan for five minutes, and then transfer them to a cooling rack.  

Makes about 3 dozen cookies.

Enjoy!  Good luck with your article for Urban Tulsa.  See you in less than a month!

Allison

You say sei-tan, i say sei-ton

Hey Kathryn,

How're you?  I can't believe that it's Friday already, one whole week after the 4th, when I actually made this new recipe.  I didn't do the conventional 4th of July BBQ this year - there was a Jazz Festival in Iowa City, and I got me some fried oreos instead.  They didn't quite match my expectations - the chocolate wafers were a little too soggy from all of the batter and frying - but you only live once, right?

However, I still had the urge to cook something equally revolutionary, and then it crossed my mind that we've had this blog for over seven months, and we have very few posts devoted to vegetarian proteins like tofu, tempeh, and probably the most mysterious one, seitan.  I wish that I had discovered seitan when I first became a vegetarian, and was really craving meat.  Seitan is made from gluten, the protein in flour.  In color and in texture, it vaguely resembles liver, and since it is vegetarian, it is way less creepy to eat than the meat-version.  It is delicious on its own, eaten with some homemade broth, or put into curries, taco-fillings, etc.  If you haven't tried it before, I would recommend ordering it at a restaurant first so you can see if you like it (for all of those in Iowa City, go to Thai Flavors, and order it in the Green Curry). 

Once you've discovered that you can't live without seitan, you can either continue ordering it at restaurants, buying it at the store, or you can make your own!  I kid you not, it's easier than making pie.  All you really have to do is make the dough, knead it,

and plop it into some simmering stock.

It makes quite the homey meal, served with the homemade stock and some noodles.  Also, do you remember gak, that rubbery playdough?  Because the seitan dough totally resembles it, so you can only imagine how much fun it is to work with it and knead it.  

Simple Seitan

Adapted from Veganomicon by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero

Braising Broth:

2 tbsp vegetable oil

3 onions, roughly chopped

3 garlic cloves, kept whole

1 tsp dried thyme

salt and pepper

1 quart of water

1/4 - 1/3 cup soy sauce

Heat the oil in a stock pot on medium heat, and add the onions and garlic.  Cook the onions and garlic until they start to caramelize and brown along the edges.  Add thyme and salt and pepper and continue cooking until the onions are a golden brown all over.  Add the water and the soy sauce and stir to incorporate the browned bits from the bottom into the stock.  Watch the pot and once it comes to a boil, cover and simmer for at least 25 minutes.  In the meantime, make the seitan. 

Seitan Ingredients:

1 cup Vital Wheat Gluten Flour

3 tbsp nutritional yeast

1/2 cup cold vegetable broth

1/4 cup soy sauce

1 tbsp olive oil

2 garlic cloves either finely minced or pressed

Combine the gluten with the nutritional yeast in a medium sized bowl, and combine the rest of the ingredients in a small size bowl.  Create a well in the gluten mixture bowl and pour in the wet mixture.  Stir until the mixture comes together in a dough-like ball, and knead with a spoon along the sides of the bowl for about 2 minutes.  Divide the dough into three parts, and knead and stretch each of them in your hands for about 3 minutes.

Once the stock has come to slow simmer, drop the seitan balls in the liquid, cook them in the covered pot for about an hour.  

To store the seitan, put in a reusable container along with the extra broth to make sure that the seitan stays moist.

Another tip, you should wash any of the cookware that you handled with the raw gluten flour or seitan by hand, not in the dishwasher.  Hand-washing ensures that the loose bits of flour will not turn into protein clumps on your cookware.  

Good luck with everything, and stay cool in scorching Oklahoma 

Love,

Allison

I survived the flood of 08'

Hey Kathryn,

It seems like you've been mighty busy over the past week.  I've definitely tried to decompress over the past couple of days - I've had some time off, and it finally appears that this flood is on the mend.  Yesterday, the water receded 10 inches, and more roads are starting to open up.  It is now safe to cross the river and venture over to the Iowa City downtown area (yay!  Farmer's Market, here I come!)  

I don't have any pictures of the flood, but I do have this fairly biblical/ironic/mundane photo of a rainbow framing my neighbor's home that I took last Saturday when the Iowa River rose to around 30 feet, which is 8 feet above the 93' levels.  

As far as cooking goes - I've been in quite the frugal mode, ie, trying to make as many things as possible without having to go to the store.  Some projects have been really successful, such as this pesto I made with arugula, parmesan cheese, almonds, garlic, lemon juice, salt, and a combination of olive and truffle oil (I know, this hardly qualifies as a frugal ingredient, but I've been trying to find as many applications for it as possible before it becomes rancid.)  I don't have any pictures of it, but it was rustic and sufficiently garlicky.  If I were a recipe developer for Gourmet Magazine, I would use it as a base for a grilled pizza topped with smoked mozzarella and peaches.  

However, I found that improvisation can be a bit more complicated when trying to make pancakes.  Marci and I attempted to make pancakes with a recipe that called for 1/2 a cup of plain yogurt.  After discovering that the only non-gelatin containing yogurt we had in the fridge had expired a month ago, I thought we could use a combination of ricotta cheese and buttermilk.  Due to this decision and the addition of a few too many frozen blueberries, the batter was a Bridget-Jones-cooking-disaster shade of blue and a little too watery.  The batter would flood onto the griddle, which produced really haphazardly shaped pancakes such as these ones.   

Bio-major Marci called it "imperfect mitosis."  

As hard as they were to spoon on to the pan, they were even harder to flip.  We agreed to equally distribute the more perfect ones and the "screw-up" pancakes, but as you compare the two stacks, you can clearly see that Marci who was on flip-duty has a relaxed definition of sharing.  Just teasing...



However, even though these pancakes were mushy, not fluffy, blue, not golden brown, amoeba shaped, not round, Marci and I still cleaned them off.   The real moral of the story is that there isn't anything in life that can't be fixed with a dollop of ricotta cheese and good old Canadian maple syrup.  

Missing you, and I hope that you find more great recipes from the Splendid Table cookbook.  

Allison

PS - Marci and I had the greatest idea ever for a breakfast party in Grinnell.  It'll be an ode to the character Letitia Cropley on Vicar of Dibley and the game will be called Surprise Ingredient Pancakes.  What do you think?

One More Post

I know I've been a posting fiend lately, but I just have to tell you about the dinner I just made. Well, actually, it was boring except for the main dish. I don't have any pretty pictures (because the tofu got eaten up too quickly), but here's what I did:

First I marinated the tofu (extra firm, drained of liquid, cut into 1/2-inch-thick slices) for 10 minutes in a mixture of teriyaki sauce, sesame oil, apricot preserves, honey, dijon mustard and chile powder (because, if we've learned anything in the past six months, it's that dijon mustard makes everything better). Then I fried the tofu in more sesame oil (over medium-low heat, about 5 minutes to a side), poured the oil off, added the remaining marinade, and sauteed the tofu in the marinade/sauce for a couple more minutes.

We ate this over plain old rice, but it would also be good paired with something fancier, like quinoa or couscous.

Non-Salmonella Tomatoes

Hi Allison! I had to post again, if only to tell you about a recent trip to the bookstore, where I saw this lovely journal in the blank paper section. It's true, we can never escape the Pre-Raphaelites! I'm sure the irony of this journal doesn't escape you... since the Lady of Shalott's destiny is to float down the river to Camelot... and die... yeah, whoever made this journal probably didn't think about that.


ANYWAY. That wasn't the only thing I found at the bookstore. I also found something marvelous and exciting, something I actually purchased. None other than Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Sally Swift's new cookbook, The Splendid Table's How to Eat Supper. Can I just tell you how much I love this book? It's not only full of tempting-looking recipes, but also little tidbits of food knowledge and new techniques... for example, there's a section on how to teach yourself to cook without measuring spoons. Although this isn't a totally vegetarian cookbook, there is a big section of vegetarian entrees, plus lots of good-looking side dishes, salads, desserts and pasta dishes.


The first meal I tried was pesto risotto and tomato salad. The risotto was good, although it would have been better if I had been able to find fresh basil. I ended up using freeze-dried basil which was kind of like space food... and tasted a little bit like it. Luckily the onions and parmesan cheese compensated for that.


The outstanding part of the meal was this tomato salad. I made this before everyone in the country was convinced that tomatoes were carriers of disease--so I made it with plain old grocery store tomatoes, not even organic, definitely not ripe-on-the-vine. And it was still SO GOOD. I imagine that if you make this salad with actual good tomatoes it would be amazingly, unbelievably good. And I don't even like tomatoes.


Big Tomato Sweet-Sour Salad
(From The Splendid Table's How To Eat Supper by Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Sally Swift)

Ingredients:

Dressing:
1 cup cider vinegar
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 med red onion, thin sliced lengthwise into long strips
salt and fresh-ground black pepper
8 large garlic cloves, thinly sliced
2 tight-packed tablespoons brown sugar

Tomatoes:
4 or so big ripe tomatoes (non-salmonella-ridden preferable)

Finish:
1/2 cup light-packed coarse-chopped fresh dill leaves

Make That Salad!

1. To make the dressing, first pour the vinegar into a small sauce-pan and boil it down to about 1/2 cup, about 5 minutes, set aside.

2. In a 10-inch skillet set over medium heat, warm the olive oil. Stir in the onion, sprinkling it with a little salt and a generous amount of pepper. Saute for a minute, or until the onion is softened but not browned. Stir in the garlic and cook for another 30 seconds to one minute. You want to soften the garlic but not brown it. Pull the skillet off the heat and blend in the brown sugar to melt it. (You can set the dressing aside at this point for several hours, or refrigerate it it for up to a week)

3. Put the tomatoes into a large serving bowl. When you are ready to serve, warm up the onion mixture if needed--it should be warm, not hot. Pull the pan off the heat, and stir in the boiled-down vinegar and any liquid from the tomatoes. Carefully (the dressing could be quite hot) taste for seasoning and sweet-tart balance. Pour it under the tomatoes, folding in the dill.

4. Serve, warm or room temp. I ate this over romaine lettuce and it was delicious!

NOTE: According to the recipe, this can be made with bacon fat instead of olive oil but, for obvious ideology-related reasons, I wouldn't recommend that.