Best baby quiche!

This one looks funny but I ate the other 2 I brought for breakfast while installing the blogger app that allowed me to post a photo in the first place.

Crimini mushrooms, onion, garlic, spices. Cilantro. Spelt flour. Grated the delicious cheddar cheese on the tops, & then realized with the Mexican spice theme adding a teaspoon of salsa on the top would be delicious & also mean I wouldn't need to bring additional sauces. I was right.

Grandma's chicken noodle soup

There's definitely no chicken in here.  I remember my grandmother's delicious golden broth with homemade egg noodles and parsley very fondly.  I also remember that when I was done eating it, leftover in the bottom of my bowl would be pieces of chicken.  I'm not saying I never liked meat, I guess I just really didn't like it that much. (I also remember loving Thanksgiving dinner at my grandma's house, and putting turkey on my plate just because everyone called it "Turkey day", and then leaving it on my plate when I was finished with everything else.  Turkey was always my least favorite thing about Thanksgiving.)

I had a craving for it yesterday.  She usually made it with home made egg noodles - spaetzle.  (Sometimes she would buy frozen egg noodles and we'd all be slightly disappointed but not say anything.)

I was making a bunch of other things while I was doing this, so it kind of got away from me.  But it's delicious, and this is what I did.

cook one tiny onion and one lg shallot in a bit of olive oil until they're beginning to be translucent.
add about 10 baby carrots.  cook for another minute or two.  add a hefty teaspoon of garlic salt (I'm almost out of garlic) and stir for a minute.  then,
add 4 c vegetable broth (I had some from Costco that was heavy on the carrot, which was good for this recipe) slowly to deglaze pan at first.  Bring to boil.
Add some herbs - a bit of tarragon and sage, and a hefty handful fresh parsley.  Add lots of pepper.
Add about 3/4 c diced seitan (i made homemade seitan last week, otherwise I would've used something else.  I kind of like it, though.)
Cook for awhile why you

Mix 1/2 c whole wheat flour with 1 egg.  Add water/milk if needed or more flour to create a very sticky dough.  Force dough through a grater using the largest holes you can find to create spaetzle (about a 1/2 inch at a time, atmost), drop in boiling soup.  The noodles will probably stick to the underside of the grater - use a knife to cut them free.  Cook until noodles are done (float to top.)

Adjust for seasonings, add water if necessary throughout process (as in, if you have let it boil down too much and ran out of liquid!)

I was afraid my spaetzle was all going to stick together because I did it so precariously, and there are some noodles that are rather large and a couple stuck together, but it turned out alright.  As in, delicious.

chocolate-raspberry hand-pies

i haven't made this yet, but i bought frozen raspberries today and if i wasn't so sick, and ready for bed (at almost 6:30.... hmmmm) i would make it today.

my sister bought be "vegan pie in the sky" for christmas, which features a raspberry pie with balsamic vinegar, crust recipes with cocoa powder, and many recipes for individual hand pies.  but i want all three - chocolate-crusted hand pie with that balsamic-hinted raspberry filling.

the handpies in "vegan pie" are square, but i'm making round ones.  maybe i should use the regular dough instead of puffy pie dough, but hell, i'm changing the dough recipe all around anyway so who the fuck cares.

so this is how i'm going to do it:

filling:
1 bag (2.5 cups) frozen raspberries
1.5 T cornstarch
1 T balsamic vinegar
1/3 c shugar
shake of salt
mix, crumbling together, then RETURN TO FREEZER.

handpie dough (i thought it would be too much dough but then i realized i want to make them in a muffin tin instead of round which might take more dough.):
1.5 c flour (probably combo buckwheat/multi-grain? i'll let you know)
.5 c black cocoa powder (because I have it)
3 T sugar
1/2 t salt
1/2 t baking powder
1/2 c butter
1/2 c sour cream
1/4 c soymilk
add more flour if necessary.

roll out choco dough.  use a largish bowl to cut out pieces and fit each into pie tin.  roll out dough and cut out circles that will cover the dough (maybe with a fun star cut out in the middle to go on top?)
make sure your oven is preheated to 350 before proceeding.
then take out frozen pie filling, mash, and fill the pies quickly, cover and seal, and bake.

yum.

i'm excited for tomorrow/whenever i stop feeling like shit.

Cabbage with Potato Dumplings

Another from my grandmother's cookbook.

I was talking to my mom on the phone awhile back while my dad was making this for dinner but it didn't sound very tempting to me.  When I was out of town last week I gave my farm share to a friend, who, upon my return, gave me back the red cabbage.  He doesn't like cabbage.  His family doesn't like cabbage.  I gave him my best recipe suggestion - the caraway/tomato/sour cream concoction - and he shot it down.  The next recipe that came to mind was this, probably because my mom had read the recipe to me over the phone.  My friend said that he would not make it, but would serve it to his family if I made it.

I forgot that this recipe calls for bacon.  Not a huge deal, though, I used butter instead, and sprinkled in some liquid smoke.  (Liquid smoke is very important if you have rabid meat-lovers over for dinner.  It somehow fools them... I don't know how.  I like a little smoky flavor, sure, but it certainly doesn't taste like meat.)

Cook one small head cabbage in butter with a sprinkling of liquid smoke until it's tender.  Meanwhile, finely shred 3 small potatoes, and soak/rinse in cold water.  (I finally bought myself a decent food processor.  It makes shredding so easy.)  Pull the potatoes out of the cold water and mix with a little flour (I think I used whole wheat) to make dough.  Also add the potato starch from the bottom of the cold water you were soaking the potatoes in.  Make them into little balls and boil them in water, add to the cabbage.

I used half my cabbage for this and half for the caraway/tomato/sour cream concoction, and the color difference is stunning.  This is beet-colored, almost, and dark and shocking pink, and the other dish is a warm pink.

Again, if I had a decent camera, I would show you!  Oh well.

Bread!

This is a recipe from my grandmother's cookbook.  The family put it together after she passed in '96, and a revamp will probably be happening soon.  The cookbook has dozens of bread recipes, some of them make sense, and some of them maybe not.  (There's a recipe for oatmeal bread, for instance, that does not call for Oatmeal.)  I chose this one first because it calls only for whole wheat flour.

the exact recipe says this:

1 c oatmeal

Pour 2 cups boiling water over this, let stand until lukewarm.  Dissolve 2 packages yeast in 1/3 c warm water for five minutes.

1/2 c honey
1/3 c oil
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/2 c dry milk
6 c whole wheat flour or more

Bake 1 hour at 325 degrees.


This recipe has the opposite problem of most of my blog entries - it is under-descriptive.  I mean, if you didn't know how to bake bread, you would end up with crap.  I, however, did not end up with with crap.  The loaf was dense for sure, and crumbled a lot, but made excellent PB&J's for my bus trip to DC.  (Which also featured homemade raspberry jam.  Yum.)

I made the following substitutions:
I halved the recipe.
I used Agave instead of Honey (what I had on hand)
I used powdered soy milk instead of dry milk (thought about leaving it out altogether but since I had powdered dry milk, I figured, why not?)


I have been thinking a lot about baking bread in the last month, and this is my first attempt.  My thoughts have focused on what I *don't* remember from when I "helped" (watched?) my grandmother bake bread.  What I realized at some point today - I think after my kneading - is that I do have one very helpful memory. My memory is not the ingredients, or even really the process.

As a child, I loved dough.  I would always ask Grandma for a piece of dough, especially while she made bread.  And, although she might feign grouchiness about it, she'd cut me off a little piece, and I would eat it slowly.  I remember how that bread dough felt, how it tasted, how tacky it was, how moist, how squishy.

And really, that's the most important thing about bread - it's consistency.  You can never have an exact recipe for bread.  You can never say "if you use this much water and this much flour it will be perfect" because conditions outside of your ingredients are always changing.  You've got to be adaptable.  And knowing what the perfect bread dough feels like (and BELIEVE ME - MY GRANDMOTHER'S BREAD WAS PERFECT) is a huge piece of the puzzle.

So I'm going to keep baking bread.  This loaf was good considering I hadn't baked bread in years, but there's always room to improve.

Potato Mushroom Quiche

I made more mini quiche, again with mushrooms and potatoes.

This time I boiled the potato and rinsed it, and mixed it in with the mushroom-garlic that I cooked up.  I also used gluten-free flour, and it didn't mix in very well so it'll probably be lumpy.  I think it'll be better.

I also mixed in some hot sauce.  I love hot sauce.

Tofu "bacon" (deliciousness)

I really wish blogger had subtitles.  I need them.  Everything I make needs a subtitle.  Usually, I would make the subtitle the real title.  Using this entry as an example -- the real title is:
HOW TO EAT AN ENTIRE BLOCK OF TOFU IN ONE DAY.  But that doesn't tell you what it is.  That is a subtitle.  So I leave the title with the name of the thing, and my snarky comments don't draw attention.

But seriously.  I did not know I could eat a block of tofu in ONE DAY until I made this, and could not stop eating it.

When I made this delicious baked item - kind of like a jerky (I really have no frame of reference so that's kind of bullshit), I knew it needed thin slicing. Usually when I bake tofu, I cut it into 8 slices.  It is routine.  Half, than imagine the halves halving, and voila-- 8 slices.  But, I've realized, I don't like 8 slices. I want thinner slices.  I think it was more than 20 slices, and I ate all of them in one day.

I actually started by pressing the tofu - something I don't do these days as often as I used to.  I think this is in part because I don't rely upon tofu as much as I used to.  It's not a once-a-week thing so much as a once-every-few-months thing, and I've been freezing it lately, which makes pressing pretty unnecessary.  But for this, I used fresh tofu, and I pressed it, using a glass baking dish and some heavy tomato-something cans.

The marinade is from Vegan with a Vengeance, made for tempeh and not tofu, but I far prefer this.

3 T soy sauce
1/3 c apple cider
1 t tomato paste
1/4 t liquid smoke (I am generous)
2 cloves pressed garlic