Does size matter?

I had a cooking date with my stand partner today. One of my dear friends suffers from a myriad of afflictions, including multiple chemical sensitivity, which can make it difficult for her to function in society. Her daughter, the same age and in the same class as my eldest, is an energetic 12-year old with several dietary restrictions. She loves to cook, but accommodating her diet and creating new things in the kitchen overwhelms her mother (did I mention that Stand Partner is energetic?), so she comes here.

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.

Playing favorites

One of the problems with being a good cook is that it's difficult to find a restaurant that does better than I do (or can do). Sure, there are five star experiences, but I'm talking about someplace we can head to as a family when Mom (that would be me) doesn't feel like cooking.
Like this evening. I've been tiling the downstairs shower, and between little mosaic pieces that aren't the same thickness as the field tiles, combined with the fact that the nothing about that room is plumb or square, my head hurts along with my back by the end of the day. Enter one of our favorite places, Teapot, tucked away in a nondescript strip mall in Bellevue. This place inspires me. The first time we went there, on a recommendation from a friend, we tried their Jewel Box, an exquisite presentation of nuts and vegetables in a nori "box." But what made us regulars was their vegetable curry. It's a Singaporean curry, sweet from thick coconut milk, yellow from curry, and chock full of broccoli, tofu, potatoes and cabbage. We actually brought out the spoon to devour the sauce straight from the serving dish.

I liked it so much that I've learned to make it: brown yellow onions in oil, add curry and a bit of garam masala, add a can of coconut milk, some chunks of extra firm tofu (fried chunks are best), a few roughly cut cabbage leaves, some thinly sliced carrots and one coarsely chopped cooked potato. Simmer until tofu is warmed through, them put plenty of broccoli on top, and pop the lid on the pot to steam the broccoli for another ten minutes or so. Serve with rice steamed with a generous pinch of saffron.

Tonight the curry wasn't great--someone in the kitchen gave it a squirt of hot sauce, which none of us care for, but, since we try to taste a new dish each visit, all was not lost. The basil nuggets were out of this world, a deep savory sauce with sautéed onions, tomatoes and tofu chunks. The vermicelli vegetables were also light and delicious. Both are on their way to favorite status.
The problem now is that we have so many favorites, it's hard to decide which one we won't order to be able to try something new. We should all have such problems!

A happy love habit

Growing up in California, the chocolate store for special occasions was See's. It was just too expensive for "everyday" chocolate. Ah, but one of the things I learned when I was losing weight was to focus on portion size: I was eating the right things, just too much of them. Since I was limiting the amount of chocolate I ate, I convinced my dear husband that we (he) could afford to shop at See's to keep me in chocolates.

With the dietary restrictions put in place more recently, though, he was a bit at loose ends: his love currency was off-limits because of the milk content. The See's web site, while delightful and enticing, is completely devoid of nutritional information, and the attractive black-and-white boxes only contain composite ingredient lists. But, if I didn't already know how much my husband loves me, I do now. The light of my life went down to the store and had the lady in the nice white uniform produce an ingredients list for every dark chocolate soft center they had (I don't waste my time with nuts). The result of his research was a quarter-pound box under the tree with See's Dark Molasses Chips and Dark Patties (chocolate vanilla caramel).

Unfortunately, the box now weighs considerably less than a quarter pound. But that weight seems to have gone to my heart.

Figgy pudding

"Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat..."

Ah, the traditional Christmas dinner: the Victorian picture-perfect roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, a token spoonful of overcooked peas, followed by the flaming steamed Christmas pudding served up with hard sauce, all dished up midday (or later, depending on the organizational skills of the perpetrator/host.)

Not for us. We snacked our way through the morning, mostly on chocolate, since that what Santa put in our stockings (isn't he smart?). Then this evening, I threw together a pot of coq au vin (lovely, melted onions and leeks, thyme and marjoram, bacon and chicken thighs, and the remainders of two bottles of red wine), some potatoes and Brussels sprouts. This wintery menu, with its roots and kale family seems imminently appropriate to the season, and has special meaning for us. When we decided to wed, we were living in Germany as graduate students. The discussion between equals went something like this: "Let's get married." (Already adept at reading his mind, I could tell he really meant, 'Let's go down to the town hall and be done with it in fifteen minutes') "I would only feel married if we wed in a church." "The only church I would consider would be the cathedral in Bourges." "Okay." That short exchange defined the wedding: it was ours, not our families'--they all lived at least 12 hours away (by car for his; by plane for mine), so we made the decisions. When my husband-to-be said, "I'd like to have a wedding dinner at a cozy inn in the French countryside," I said, "Let's go find one!" When we finally found the right one (after truly exhaustive and inebriating research), the rustic supper that she suggested sounded right for a sure-to-be chilly March evening. A salad of pâté de campagne and avocado, potato pastries, trou berrichon, coq en barbouille (coq au vin thickened with the blood of the chicken in question), all washed down with local wine, Menetou-Salon. The wedding cake also departed from tradition, as I eschewed the showy pièce montée for a homely but rich chocolate decadence cake. A wedding menu of our own, for a wedding on our own terms.
So, this Christmas, we celebrated the season, the bounty of the local harvest (did I mention the food was all local?) and life on our own terms, as we stayed home rather than cave to the requests of family to be present for them.

We did not celebrate traditionally. We'll save that for another time.

Santa's snack

For Santa: a cup of Celestial Seasonings Sunrise C tea (he's out in the cold a lot), a fat slice of cheesecake ("shall we give him cake or cake and cookies?" "Oh, cake and cookies, Mommy!"), three Mexican wedding cakes and one lone Dominostein.

For the reindeer: a bowl of water, and a pitcher to refill it, a bag of oats--the carrots in the fridge were not suitable for even livestock, I'm afraid. Maybe we should have made it hot water, since they're quick-cooking oats.

Norad says Santa is fast approaching, so I'll need to finish up and get to bed, to let visions of sugarplums dance in my head.

Christmas eve

We started off, quite festively, with champagne at the neighbors, enjoying conversation, playing music together, and then playing murders until at the bottom of bottle four, we reached a lull where kids were hungry enough to bring home for supper. After that much champagne, I was quite pleased that I had had the presence of mind to skin the salmon filet before we went over.
I put the water on under the potatoes, then we popped over to the other neighbors for the annual exchange of cookies: I offer up Vanillekipferl, Zimtsterne and Lebkuchen, she reciprocates with her Swedish cookies: Pepperkakkor, Krumkake and Spritz. We have two Christmas-y trays that the cookies go on, and they move back and forth between our houses yearly.
Once the cookie exchange was accomplished, along with the usual catch-up on offspring/girlfriends/niece, we headed home and put on the salmon. I was thinking a nut crust and some pretty fresh cranberries would make for a nice counterpoint to the buttery flesh, but apparently the acid of the cranberries reacted with the carbon steel of my pan, and the juices turned out a grubby grey. Luckily, there was no metallic taste, and it looked worse in the kitchen than by candlelight on the table. The potatoes did the buttery melting thing, with herb salt, and lemon juice gave the steamed broccoli the perfect tang. A lamb's lettuce salad with a lemon-herb dressing made for an elegant but festive supper on a busy evening.
We only managed one of the cheesecakes this evening, but there are enough leftovers that we can resume more scientific testing tomorrow.

The great cheesecake experiment

Christmas dinner this year will be absolutely non-traditional. Our exchange student has invitations for brunch and dinner on the 25th, so we'll celebrate today (I've promised my husband's favorite, coq au vin for our dinner on the 25th.). After a party at the neighbors ("bring your cello, violin and something to drink"), we'll grill up some salmon, potatoes and broccoli and polish it off with cheesecake. Ah, cheesecake, but how shall I make it? Conventional is out, with its milk, eggs and wheat, so it'll have to be an alternative. Since I couldn't decide between a soy-based cream cheese recipe and a tofu-based recipe ("Wait, aren't they both tofu, Mom?"), I made both, adding some Irish cream syrup (more intense flavor than the real item, which Santa is hoping to find with his snack tonight) and a handful or two of chocolate chips. The crust is the same for both, made from Newman's wheat-free chocolate sandwich cookies, sugar and melted butter whizzed together in the food processor.

Which means we'll all have to have at least two slices of cheesecake for dinner tonight. At least.

Party food

Our strategy for potlucks is to always bring what we know we can eat, since we never know if we'll be able to eat what others bring. Yesterday, a rice day, was white elephant gift exchange party with a potluck, so I rolled some sushi. I had some cucumber and avocado sliced into strips and some shrimp that I mixed with mayonnaise for the filling. A little bit of gomasio garnished the cucumber rolls.

Two generous cups of rice make seven rolls (and a couple rice balls), and about five rolls fit on my white square platter. That should mean we have two rolls to nosh on before we leave. My misguided hope is that my kids will be satisfied with that and not make pigs of themselves at the party. The extras, including the shaggy end cutoffs, disappeared as I wrapped the platter in plastic wrap. I got one piece!

Unfortunately, there were slim pickings at this potluck--2 veggie trays, a bowl of grapes, a fruit platter and some cold chicken. The sushi was gone within 15 minutes, and it wasn't just my kids!