Inspired by my beloved vintage Cuisinart, she acquired a cute little Cuisinart mini-prep. We popped it out of its packaging, flipped though the book, and put it through its paces. I recalled that I used a bunch of celery to become acquainted with mine some twenty-odd years ago, so we grabbed a couple of stalks, chopped them to length and plopped them in. (An aside: The first thing I noticed was you can't slice with this thing, since there's no feed tube! It's strictly a chop and grind appliance.) A quick pulse, then another, then another. Voilà! finely chopped celery, with the exception of one or two nearly untouched bits. We tried it again, with more stalks to see if it preferred being full (mine does). Same result. Ditto for carrots. We cut the rest of the carrots into sticks--with a knife--and moved on to making hummus.
I have avoided making hummus for years, simply because all the recipes I find start with soaking garbanzo beans overnight, etc., inferring that it's somehow inferior to use canned beans, and certainly not giving me any indication of how to substitute. But a friend of mine had enough of that, and developed a recipe that is based not only on canned beans, but on a standard-sized can! Here's his recipe:
In a blender, purée the contents of one 15 oz. can of garbanzo beans (drained, but save some liquid in case the mixture is too dry), three tablespoons of lemon juice (about one lemon's worth), a teaspoon of ground cumin, 3-10 cloves of garlic, and 1/3 cup tahini. That's it!
The mini-prep handled the whole thing remarkably well, though we had to hold on to it so it wouldn't jump around and throw it's lid off ("chop" keeps things moving in a direction that tightens the lid; "grind" goes the other way, which tends to loosen the lid during operation). The hand-cut carrots helped us with quality control here.
We tried guacamole, and even managed to coax it to do cashew butter, with a little oil and some cooling down time between one-minute spurts. DH had to do a Trader Joe's run to get chips for guacamole QC.
Then we pulled out the real food processor and got creative. Stand Partner had a wrapper from a Bobo's Coconut bar that she had in Colorado and it was so incredibly yummy and she really liked it and could I make something like it, please, oh please? Well, without the actual bar, I had only her gushing description and the ingredients list to go on. That went something like this: Organic rolled oats, organic Earth Balance soy and vegetable oils, (100% expeller-pressed) organic brown rice syrup, organic Sucanat (cane juice). It also had shredded coconut and coconut milk in it. Well, I didn't have sucanat or rice syrup handy, so grabbed a cup of clover honey out of the ten-pound bucket. Vegetable oil, no problem, I used about 3/4 cup of safflower oil, and I had oats, though they were of the quick-cook variety, so we used two cups. But I was plum out of coconut, so we grabbed some dried cranberries and macadamia nuts, probably about 1/2 cup altogether. And we added a splash of coconut milk for good measure. Ground it all together, pressed it into an 8x8 pan and baked it in a 350°F oven for about 35 minutes, until it was golden on top. We let it cool a bit, then cut it into squares. They're yummy, but still not perfect: we should have whizzed up the honey and oil before adding the oats and crunchy stuff and the pan should be bigger, like 9x11 to allow for a thinner bar and shorter cooking time.
Poor little mini-prep wouldn't quite have managed the bars, but is perfect for her homemade hummus and nut butters. I'll stick with my old thing for now and rest up for our next cooking date.
Caitlin,
ReplyDeleteHow lucky your friend with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity is to have you in her life. Many relationships of all kinds are strained or lost when this difficult and misunderstood disease comes into the picture. I can imagine your friend counts you as dear too.
--M.A.