Adelaide Lemonade

Failed Resolution #1

I haven't made any New Year's Resolutions for 2012 yet (I'm kind of waiting for them to hit me), but I did review my 2011 resolutions.  Here's one that I failed at miserably:

"Make a homemade meal once a week.  It always amazes me that I can be a mother of four and hardly ever cook (confession #1).  My husband does almost all of the cooking.  He's an amazing cook.  He especially excels at meals like Thanksgiving and Christmas, but on regular days, it's still usually chicken nuggets, mac & cheese, etc.  He does make sure we all get our veggies, so there's those, too.  I've already started in on this one.  Last weekend, I made a meatball recipe from The Pioneer Woman blog.  It'll be such an event for me that I'll probably blog about it, but I'll also be keeping a list of recipes I've made here.  I'm hoping to try something new every week, but I'm not going so far as to make that a resolution."

Looking back at my blog, I made one meal, and that was it.  I'm sure I must have made a few more throughout the year but nothing blogworthy.  I must get the urge to make a nice homemade meal every January because I made quiche this weekend.

I used this recipe for Carmelized Onion quiche.  I ended up overcooking the onions, so it wasn't a big success.  The crust was pretty good though.  I made an extra crust to keep in the freezer.  I'm hoping to start doing a bit of investment cooking - just on a very small scale.

A full two days later, I am still smelling like onions.  Lovely.

Even though we seem to slowly be getting back up to speed with kids activities (dance and baseball this weekend) and had a big birthday to celebrate, it was a nice, relaxed weekend.  I got in a bit of sewing and even some knitting and a walk.  Oh, and I'm working on some sourdough bread.  I'm one day away from actually making the bread after having started last weekend.  Talk about slow food!  

Peanut Butter Balls

Warning:  It's going to take me awhile to get around to the subject, since I first need to vent a bit and reminisce a bit.

I just got out of the tub.  I love a nice hot bath.  I usually intend to read, but then I decide that I really want to put my hands in the nice hot water, so my book sits on the side of the tub untouched.  This time I fell asleep no less than four times.  Did I mention that I wake up early?  For some unknown reason, I usually wake up like clockwork at around 5:30, but I often wake up earlier than that.  I try to go back to sleep, but then I start thinking about the sewing I could do if I just got up.  That usually wins.  Today, I got up around 4:00.

Did I also mention that I live in an old house?  In Maine?  Any kind of warmth is pretty elusive from now until the end of May.  My house is cold, my commute to work is nice and short, so the car doesn't even have time to warm up, and work is cold.  (That's the venting part.)  So my favorite way to warm up is in the tub, but our hot water situation is tricky.  I have no idea why, but the water starts out hot then gradually goes to lukewarm then eventually warms up again.  Obviously, this "feature" doesn't just apply to baths but showers as well.  You get hot water long enough to get wet then it gets colder as you wash up, and it finally warms up again when you're almost rinsed off.  So the trick to a nice hot bath is to wait for the water to warm up then run it full blast until it starts to cool off again then run it at a trickle (so you don't end up filling up the tub with cold water) until you have enough water to get in (that's usually enough time to get a decent amount of sewing done).  At that point, you can run it at full blast until it goes cold again then go back to the trickle, etc.

I have absolutely no reason to tell you this other than wanting to share my pain.  Thank you for listening.

Okay, so moving on . . . if you live in Maine or have ever visited Maine, have you ever stopped by the Market Basket in Rockport?  Back in the day, when my husband and I were just dating, and I suppose even before that with my family, we used to stop by there for yummy stuff like apple cider, French bread, and peanut butter balls.  It was the best French bread ever!  You could get sandwiches made there, too on the same bread.  I remember those being really good, but I can't remember what kind of sandwich I got.  I just remember that it had "fancy" lettuce.  We used to get them along with a bag of Cape Cod chips and take them over to Beauchamp Point for a picnic.  Those were the days!  That was almost 20 years ago (sheesh, I'm getting old).  I think the place is still open, but I have no idea if their bread is still as good.  I only live about an hour and a half away now.  That will make a good research project someday.

Finally arriving at the subject . . . So even though their bread was to die for, the very best thing you could get there was the peanut butter balls.  You could get 3 for a dollar or 1 for 35 cents in a little waxed paper bag.  It was the perfect sweet peanut butter with some crunch inside coated with semisweet chocolate which somehow never melted in your hands.  I don't think we ever got more than 3.  I'm not sure why.  These were the things I missed most when we moved away to Colorado.  They're not necessarily a Christmas thing, but I was determined to figure out how to make them for our first Christmas away from Maine.  Here's the recipe I came up with:

Peanut Butter Balls

1 C butter

2 C peanut butter (I use crunchy, but I'm sure creamy would work fine, too)

3 - 3 1/4 C powdered sugar

4 C Rice Krispies (or any generic version will work fine, too)

2 C Chocolate Chips (I usually use semisweet, but milk chocolate can be nice, too.  My husband likes how the semisweet seems to cut the sweetness of the sugary peanut butter mixture, but if you're not concerned about that, I think milk chocolate is yummy.  And you know what? 2 C is what my recipe says, but I just keep on melting chips until I've coated all the peanut butter balls.  I'm pretty sure I use more than 2C.  I would go ahead and pick up two bags.)

6 T vegetable oil

Melt butter and peanut butter and remove from heat.  Mix in powdered sugar then Rice Krispies.  Roll into balls.  Melt chocolate chips with vegetable oil and use to coat balls.

I've been making them ever since.  My kids are all crazy about them.  I even tried them with Nutella instead of peanut butter one year.  Not bad.  This makes a nice big batch of 70 or so, so you can box 'em up and give them away as gifts.  (Check out this cute little make-it-yourself box.  I haven't make it yet, so I don't know how many it would hold.)  They freeze nicely, so you can make them ahead if you want to get some Christmas tasks out of the way early.

I did finish my Study Hall Skirt today, but it was dark by the time I finished, so I'm going to try to get my daughter to do a photo shoot in the morning.  She's not exactly a morning person, so we'll see how that goes.

Hope you enjoy the rest of your evening.  I'm sorry if you have to go back to work tomorrow after a nice long weekend.  I do, and I'm feeling pretty sorry for myself, too.

Finally Falafel

I just finished eating some yummy homemade falafel. Finally!  I spent a lot of time reading about falafel last weekend and finally decided to try Mark Bittman's Minimalist recipe after reading here that "real" falafel does not use cooked or canned beans.  I learned a bit about falafel while I was looking through recipes.  For instance, it's also called "ta’amia" and can be made with fava beans.  I'm getting a lot better, but planning isn't really one of my strengths, and as you'll see from the recipe, the beans have to soak for 24 hours.  I finally got my act together and started soaking the beans yesterday as soon as I got back from work.

It was definitely worth it.  The falafel was delicious.  I'd made it once before with a recipe that called for Garbanzo bean flour, but the falafel came out doughy and kind of gross.  This came out much more like the Papou's falafel that I was trying to emulate.

I don't think I'll be making it again though until I get a food processor.  I had to make do with the blender, but it really didn't chop up the beans well.  It never really does when I make hummus either, so I don't know why I thought this would be different.  I guess I didn't really.  I just wanted to make falafel and had no other choice.  I didn't mind eating the whole beans that ended up in the cooked falafel, but there just wasn't enough moisture to hold the falafel together.  It made it quite frustrating to cook.  It didn't help that I was making pita bread and trying to satisfy the demands of my 2-year-old at the same time.  To compound the frustration, I didn't start with a clean kitchen, so things fell and swears were uttered.  I'm over it now.

The recipe's definitely a keeper.  Let me know if you try it with a food processor and have better luck with getting the patties to stay in one piece.  If you're looking for a less traditional falafel, I've made this sweet potato falafel before.  It's very different from the original but very good.

I'm not sure what I'm going to make yet for recipe #3.  Heidi from 101 Cookbooks just posted a Ribolita recipe that I bet is good, and a friend just recommended the potato lima bean soup from the Moosewood lo-fat cookbook.  I've also been wanting to make something with artichokes purely just because I think they'd be fun to photograph.  I'll post what I end up deciding on soon.

Here are some photos of my falafel experiment:

The batter (which you can see is more of a salad than a batter):

The patties (they look like they're in one piece, but only until you try to put them in the pan):

Frying (I don't think falafel is actually good for you):

Basket o' Pita:

Vegan Challenge - 52 New Recipes in 2010

What do you think?  Are you up for it?  Will you join me?

So now that the the Christmas gorging is over,  (Did I say Christmas?  I meant December.  Wait, did I say December?  I think I meant the entire Fall), I really need to get back on the healthy eating bandwagon.

For the first 8 months of 2009, I followed a Vegan diet.  I really didn't lose much weight (which let's be honest really was my goal), but I did feel great.  It prevented me from eating my favorite bad-for-me foods like cookies, cookies, and more cookies.  By the way, if you're going to binge, the cookies from Old World Deli in Freeport, ME are the BEST.  My favorites were the chocolate espresso, but they've recently replaced the white chocolate chips with regular chocolate, so they're just not the same.  If you're in the area, their regular chocolate chip cookies are still awesome.  I love their ginger cookies, too.  Sheesh, how I digress.  Anyway, eating Vegan also eventually helped me stop craving those bad-for-me things, and I swear gave me more energy.

After an awesome sailing vacation which I took as a vacation from Vegan eating as well, I just kind of fell of the Vegan bandwagon.  I didn't fall as far as my husband who even ate meat.  (I only ate it on Thanksgiving and Christmas and on a breakfast egg sandwich three or four times.  My husband makes killer egg sandwiches.  Bacon doesn't really count anyway, does it?)  I'm really not very extreme.

So now my husband and I are fully committed to starting over again.  My husband would be content to live on red bell pepper sandwiches, but my problem is that I get bored really easily.  I do love to try new recipes though, so I'm going to try to challenge myself to try 52 new Vegan recipes, one per week, this year.  Once a week, I'll post a link to the recipe I tried along with a review and any modifications I made.  Maybe I'll even create some of my own recipes.

I'd love to have you join me.  I will try to post the recipe I'm going to try ahead of time if you'd like to cook along with me.  Sometimes I will just post a challenge like finding and trying a recipe with a certain main ingredient like kidney beans or quinoa or tempeh.  I would also welcome your recipe submissions and give some of them a try.  I'll create a list of links to participant's blogs on my blog and create a Flickr photo group.  Maybe I'll even have a few giveaways to people who make it all the way to weeks 13, 26, and 39 with me.  Leave a comment here or email me if you're interested.

Apples

This year I'm going apple-picking no matter what.  Last year we missed it.  We waited way too long then on the day we finally went, it started to rain, so we detoured to the bowling alley instead.  It was still a great family day, but I swear that half the reason I moved to back to Maine was to go apple-picking.  We always went at least once when I was growing up - usually to an orchard in Hope, Maine.  I loved to climb the trees, and I'm still a sucker for the cider.  I remember storing the apples on our three-season porch, and they seemed to last forever.  My kitchen is almost as cold as a three-season porch, so I wonder why my apples don't last as long? 

I did a little prep work for apple picking tonight by trying to use up some of the almost-rotten apples we had in our kitchen.  I wanted to try to duplicate this Apple Onion soup I had recently on a Wine Flight Training "Run" (I walked) culminating at The Salt Exchange in Portland.  I started with an onion soup recipe from one of my favorite cooking sites, 101 Cookbooks.  It calls for roasting the onions in the oven before chopping them.  I added two peeled and quartered apples to this.  The smell alone was worth making it.  The apples and onions roasting together was just heavenly - almost the exact smell of my husband's Thanksgiving Turkey that he always stuffs with an onion and an apple among other things.

It brought me back immediately to our wonderful Thanksgiving last year.  It was the first time in who-knows-how-long, probably never where we didn't have anywhere to go and didn't have anyone to entertain but ourselves.  It was the perfect commitment-free day of cooking and eating and relaxing.  Not that we haven't loved every minute of being with friends and family on Thanksgiving, but it was a perfect be-yourself, do-what-you-want kind of day.

After the onions and apples were done roasting,  (I didn't time it, but I think it was about 30-45 minutes, and I probably should have done a bit longer.) I continued on with the 101 cookbooks recipe, but also sliced the roasted apples thin and added them in the last few minutes of the wine step.  Then after simmering with the broth for the 20 minutes, I put about half of the soup in the blender with about 1/4 cup of cream.  Oh, and I replaced 1 cup of the broth with 1 cup of apple cider.  It was delicious, but not quite what I had at The Salt Exchange.  I'll have to experiment a bit more.

Since I was on the apple bandwagon, I decided to whip up a batch of apple crisp.  I'm sure there's a gazillion apple crisp recipes floating around on the Internet, but I posted mine - actually my grandmother's - here.  It's simple and delicious - I've never had any better.  (I like apples and all, but have you ever thought about just making the crisp?  I swear that in the photo above, I wasn't using that fork to shovel in the uncooked crisp - really.)  I call my grandmother "Gommy".  Apparently that was the best I could do for Grammy when I was learning how to talk, and it stuck.  I have a lot of recipes that start with the word "Gommy".

So - come hell or high water (or should I say come CCD or soccer or dance or out of town visitors - no sacrilege intended) - we're going apple-picking this weekend.  I don't want to miss another year.  Hopefully, my next post will have some photos of our apple adventures.

Gommy's Apple Crisp

4 cups peeled and sliced baking apples (6 medium)

1 cup brown sugar

¾ cup flour

¾ cup rolled oats

¾ teaspoon cinnamon

¾ teaspoon nutmeg

½ cup softened butter

Place sliced apples in a greased 8“ x 8” x 2" pan. Blend remaining ingredients until mixture is crumbly. Spread over apples. Bake 30 - 35 minutes at 375° until apples are tender and topping is golden brown.

Serve warm.

Dinnertime, Distractions, and Challah

Where to start?! I have so much to blog about. It's been awhile since I've blogged. I got distracted by a sewing project. We've always used cloth napkins (one less thing to throw away), but lately we've been washing them after just one use which seems almost as wasteful. I love my kids and have dealt with every possibly bodily excretion, but I just didn't like the idea of sharing their napkins. Since all the napkins look the same, it would be impossible for everyone just to keep track of their own from meal to meal, so I decided to make each person their own napkin with a different fabric. Since it would be too much to ask some of the less observant members of the family (Dad) to keep track of whose fabric is who's, I also appliqued each person's initial on their napkin. I was determined to use up fabric I already had and not succumb to my usual temptation to buy all new stuff for a new project. Mission accomplished! A few of the napkins have a bit of patchwork on the back, since I didn't necessarily have the right sized scraps, but that just adds to the charm. I just finished them yesterday, and we have yet to actually try them out, since our dining room table is covered with piles (okay mountains) of clean laundry waiting to be put away. Here they are: I hope to make one more set at some point to allow us to have the other set in the wash, but for now, I'm going to try to focus (back) on gardening, baking, and cooking. Oh, and we're going to be doing some rearranging of the house that will let me have a craft room. Woo hoo! I'm so excited about that, but I'm sure it will take me quite a bit of time to get everything set up. My craft "area" up in the attic is quite a mess right now. On to other things. I'm still doing (and keeping up with) the Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge. I messed up last week though and made the Challah when we were supposed to make the Casatiello. I'll make that this weekend. Although I love the name and have had it stuck in my head all week - with various dramatic (and really embarrasing if anyone could hear me saying it in my head) pronunciations, I'm not all that excited about making it. I loved the brioche (this casatiello is similar with salami and cheese also thrown in), but I don't want to compromise my Vegan diet twice (I had to the first time to try the brioche in all it's buttery, eggy glory). I'm going to have to try to make the Casatiello with rice milk, Egg Replacer and Earth Balance. And of course something other than salami and cheese. I'm thinking sun dried tomatoes. I guess it will be a good experiment. Anyway, I didn't love the Challah either. I had to use quite a bit of Egg Replacer in it as well. It ended up being quite bland, but I think that may actually be how it's supposed to taste. In my pre-BBA life, I probably would have loved it, but now I'm too spoiled by the other breads I've made from the book which are so much better. The challah, at least, was very pretty, and I enjoyed doing the braid. Here it is: Finally (for now - there's still so much more to catch up on), for the past two weeks, I've actually sat down on Friday or Saturday and planned out the meals for the entire week. I know that's probably the norm for most people, but it's a real novelty for me, and it feels like quite an accomplishment. I wanted to share what we've been having: Saturday Breakfast, 5/30 - Assortment of Poppy Seed, Blueberry, and Plain Pancakes, Bacon for kids. Saturday Dinner, 5/30 - Gone to a party Sunday, 5/31 - Pizza - With homemade dough from BBA - cooked in the oven on the pizza stone. Kids had bacon leftover from Sat. breakfast on their pizza. Adults had regular onions, carmelized onions, sauce. Need to come up with some more Vegan toppings. Monday, 6/1 - Sandwiches - Turkey for the kids and avocado and tomato for me Tuesday, 6/2 - Adults: Orange Pan-glazed Tempeh with Bulgur Pilaf. Kids: Leftover Pancakes Wednesday, 6/3 - Adults: Sweet Potato Pot Pies. Kids: Baked Potato Bar (with more leftover bacon, cheese, etc.) Thursday, 6/4 - Pasta Friday, 6/5 - Pizza - same dough - this time cooked over charcoal in the fire pit. I think the dough was too thin for this to work well. The next week was mostly the same, since I had a lot of leftover ingredients to use up. This coming week, I'll definitely have to throw in a few new things. Saturday Dinner, 6/6 - Maple Glazed Tempeh, Roasted Potato, Garlic, and Bell Pepper Salad, Burgers for the kids Sunday, 6/7 - French Toast or Eggs for the kids, Homemade Hummus and Pretzels for me Monday, 6/8 - Tacos for the kids, more hummus and pretzels for me Tuesday, 6/9 - Adults: Sweet Potato Pot Pies. Kids: Leftover French Toast and Tacos Wednesday, 6/10 - I went out with some friends. Dad and kids were on their own. Thursday, 6/11 - Adults not hungry. Kids: Mac & Cheese Friday, 6/12 - Adults: Orange Pan-glazed Tempeh with Bulgur Pilaf. Kids: PB & J I kind of fell apart on the kids meals. I go back and forth between wanting them to eat whatever I make and just wanting them to eat - period. I haven't completed the meal planning yet for this week, but today, I'm going to be making these awesome sounding Berry Beer Baked Beans from my favorite cooking blog, 101 cookbooks. I've had these beautiful, local, Jacob's Cattle Beans that I've been wanting to use for almost a year. They just completed their overnight soak and will go in the oven as soon as I get back from the Farmer's Market (and supermarket) with the rest of the ingredients. Gotta run - I like to get to the Farmer's Market right when it opens, and I'm already late.

Cooking and Cauliflower

I made this cauliflower recipe from 101 cookbooks last night, and it was delicious - kind of like home fries but with cauliflower. The photo on the left is of the lemon zest and chives waiting for their turn to be thrown in the pan. I just thought they looked so pretty together in my handmade (by me!) pottery bowl. The chives are from my new herb garden - which is why there are actually a lot fewer than the recipe called for. I only have a very small chive plant so far that I'm hoping will grow a lot over the summer and come back next year and the next, etc. I may buy a couple more little seedlings at the farmer's market tomorrow. The photo on the right is the yummy finished product in a beautiful pottery bowl that my mother bought for me at a craft fair. I have to say it's kind of what inspired me to take pottery in the first place. It's really simple but the curves are just right and the color is so calmingly organic. The photo in the middle is actually the beginnings of 101 cookbooks' 5 minute tomato sauce that I actually made the other day as well. This time I toned down the red pepper flakes and used the crushed tomatoes as Heidi recommends. Last time I had to used diced because that was all we had. I think I actually liked the diced tomatoes better. Either way, it's definitely going to be a staple (especially on Thursday nights when grocery money is getting low before payday on Friday. I was able to buy the ingredients for this whole meal along with a loaf of French bread for $15 - not bad). I'm very excited about the fact that I've been doing so much cooking at home. I'm guessing that a lot of you especially those with families do that every night and always have, so it probably sounds ridiculous that it's a big deal for me. For a while, we weren't so good about always eating around the table or even eating together at all. When the kids were really little, we'd feed them something healthy-ish and get them to bed then get takeout for ourselves - not every night obviously - but more frequently than I like to remember. As the kids got a bit older, we'd get takeout for all of us maybe once a week or so with, I'm ashamed to say, a cereal night thrown in there every once in a while. Now I have a full head of steam for cooking at home. I really hope I can keep it going. (I'm rather infamous for obsessing over one thing like it's all I can live for then moving on to the next thing with hardly a glance back at the thing I could previously not live without; knitting, sewing, pottery, gardening, etc. And those are the ones that I actually do revisit. There are some things that I dallied in that I will probably never go back to; scrapbooking, needle-felting, linoleum block printing.) I think there were several motivators. The first was starting our Vegan diet which pretty much limits our takeout options (not too mention the lack of funds being limiting). Who wants to buy a pizza only to scrape off the cheese and eat the crust? (Actually, my husband, sometimes. Yuck.) I think it (the diet) helps me have more energy, too. Plus, by some miracle of Veganism, I'm not so ravenous when I get home from work that I just have to eat the first thing I come across. I can actually comfortably wait to eat until I've prepared a yummy dinner. It also helps that my youngest is now almost two and most of the time would rather hang out with her older siblings than cling to me in the kitchen, so I actually have time to cook. Finally, Barbara Kingsolver's chapter in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle about cooking together and eating at the table together really helped motivate me as well. Note to self: Read that again if I start losing cooking-at-home steam.

TasteBook vs. Blurb

Last night, my husband cooked dinner, so while he was doing that I started making my own cookbook. I had starting using the BookSmart software from Blurb to do that a couple of weeks ago. I really love Blurb and have used it to make our family's year-in-photos album as well as an alphabet book for my niece. Blurb has tons of different options for how you set up your book and your pages, and they have some really nice, professional and clean looking cookbook options. When the book is open, I wanted to have the recipe on one page and a full-bleed photo of friends and family doing food-related activities (mostly cooking, but eating, drinking, harvesting, etc. all qualify, too) on the opposite page. I got as far as doing 3 recipes with photos, and they look wonderful. Two things were nagging at me though. One is that I really like a spiral bound cookbook that stays open to the recipe that I'm using. (In the professional cookbook writing world, that's probably not the cool thing to do because none of the really beautiful cookbooks are spiral bound.) The second thing that was bothering me was that I would have to get in all the recipes and photos that I could possibly think of this time around because if I didn't, I'd have to edit the book and buy it all over again. I'm always discovering new recipes that I'd like to include. That might not necessarily be a bad thing. It would be kind of fun to publish a "New Edition" each year, but I know I wouldn't be able to throw the old one away, and it would just get confusing and kind of wasteful. So . . . I had seen a reference to Tastebook on the 101 cookbooks site that I mentioned (okay obsessed about) in yesterday's post. I had noticed it a few times on Epicurious, too, so I finally decided to check it out yesterday. It definitely solves the two problems I mentioned above. It's spiral bound and you can order recipe pages individually - perfect! You can include a personal photo on each page. It doesn't cover the whole facing page like I wanted to do with Blurb, but it still looks very nice. The recipe formatting is pretty similar to what you get if you use one of the cookbook templates with Blurb, but it has a few additional fields that it formats nicely onto the finished page like yield, prep time, total time, and notes. I also like that it's all on-line. It usually takes me a really long time to make a Blurb book, and I always worry that after all that work I'm not going to be able to upload it for some reason. I've never had a problem, but still it's a bit stressful. With Tastebook, you upload as you go which offers the other nice feature of being able to work on it or look at it from any computer. The rest of my family wanted to help me with this cookbook, and I wasn't sure how I was going to do that with Blurb. I'm not sure if multiple users can share a Tastebook without making the recipes public (which probably wouldn't be a big deal), but I can at least log into my family members' computers when we work on it together. The other cool thing about Tastebook is that you can suck in recipes from your favorite cooking sites like Epicurious. Most of my recipes are family recipes, so I had to do a lot of typing, but I have 5 or 6 that I originally got from Epicurious, so I was able to get them from there. The only down side to that is that I would have liked to add a photo and some notes on my modifications to the recipe. Maybe there's a way to do that that I haven't figured out. With Blurb, you get to choose your own photo or photos for the cover. With Tastebook, you choose from about 50 different stock photos. Those photos are more beautiful than any I could take, but they're not of my family. Tastebook also has tabbed sections which I think is handy. I don't think you can get that with Blurb. Utimately, I think Blurb gives you way more flexibility in your formatting than Tastebook, but Tastebook gives you more flexibility as far as adding/changing recipes later on - after you get the book. I love the limitless formatting flexibility of Blurb, but sometimes that's why I think it takes me so long - making all those decisions about how I want to format it, then changing my mind and redoing it a few times. Like I said, I had gotten as far as 3 recipes for Blurb, but I was able to do almost 40 last night with Tastebook. I'm nowhere near down yet, but I'll let you know how it comes out.

Labels: diy cookbook

101 Cookbooks and Book Club

I found a new cooking web-site that I just love. It's http://www.101cookbooks.com/. The photos are gorgeous and the recipes are really unusual (but not to the point where it's impossible to find the ingredients). Apparently the woman who does the site, Heidi Swanson, decided that once she had close to a hundred cookbooks, it was time to stop reading and collecting them and start using them and decided to start blogging about it. Now she has a couple of her own cookbooks. (Maybe she had her first cookbook before that. I'm not sure.) How cool is that? I've already tried several of her recipes, but there are a few others I'm dying to try. There are these really intriguing sounding black bean brownies and these beautiful poppy seed pancakes. All her recipes are Vegetarian, and she has a lot of Vegan recipes as well, but unfortunately these two have both eggs and butter. I've had a lot of success substituting Earth Balance for butter and Ener-G Egg Replacer for eggs, but I've only tried the latter in recipes that only had one or two eggs. I think both of these recipes have 4 (oh wait, I just checked, the pancakes only have two - maybe I'll give those a try). The other thing is that I had made (and eaten) the recipes that I converted before I became a Vegan, so I knew how they were supposed to taste. I'd kind of like to try the brownies and pancakes with the right ingredients first. I'm probably just rationalizing. Anyway, both of those recipes have come the closest to swaying me off of my Vegan path so far. I have a similar issue with the Brioche recipe that's next up in the Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge. I think making Brioche without real butter is probably just wrong. I think I'll make it, try a bite, then give the rest away. My co-workers might like the treat. Don't know if the kids will like it or not.

Anyway, more on Heidi's awesome recipes . . . I already made the hummus that I mentioned in my last two posts, but I stumbled across her website in the first place looking for Vegan appetizers to serve at my Book Club meeting last week. I found these Sweet Potato Falafel Bites which I just had to make. Here was my menu in case you, too, are looking for some Vegan appetizers:

Sweet Potato Falafel Bites served with store-bought Tsatziki (Yes, I know Tsatziki is not Vegan - I didn't eat that part)

Eggplant Caponata served with my homemade Pain a L'Ancienne from Bread Baker's Apprentice

Morrocan Phyllo Rolls served with Thai sweet and spicy sauce from my sister-in-law. (I made little appetizer-sized triangles. The phyllo dough was not my friend that day! I gave up after I thought I had enough for the party, so I had a lot of filling left over which was yummy by itself. I didn't make the maple sauce but I'm sure it would have been good.)

I was a little worried that there wouldn't be enough and a lot worried that I was using ingredients that people frequently really hate like sweet potatoes, eggplant, and beans. I guess my friends have pretty sophisticated taste because it was all gone by the time the evening was over. Other people brought delicious snacks, too, so there was plenty of food; asparagus soup, asparagus salad, local pork pate, and veggies and dip. The reason for the abundance of asparagus was that our book was Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (which I've mentioned in some of my other posts - if you haven't read it, you must). Asparagus is about the best local veggie you can get around here right now.

Wow, I'm amazed by how much I can ramble about one thing! And I'm not even close to being done yet. On somewhat of a tangent, speaking of local food, we also have rhubarb in our farmer's market right now, so the weekend before last, I made the beautiful rhubarb gallette you see in the picture above. It was quite tart but still my favorite way to use rhubarb. This recipe is on page 702 of The New Basics by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins. Definitely a classic cookbook that gets a lot of use in our kitchen.

So the book club was a big success. We have a really nice group of dynamic (a.k.a not boring) people who had a lot to say about the book. For next time we picked An Absolute Scandal by Penny Vincenzi. We wanted a beach read for the summer. I'm on such a reading kick that I already bought it and read it this weekend. It was very entertaining. I've already moved on to one of the other books we almost picked, Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I love it so far, and I already want to go to Italy. Am I the only one who gets this influenced by books I like?

Okay just one more thing about 101 Cookbooks and I'll stop. I made the 5 minute tomato sauce from there last night and it was everything it was advertised to be - fresh, delicious, simple but not boring. Oh yeah, and it really only did take 5 minutes. It was also very spicy, but I can't stop eating it. I had my homemade bagel dipped in the sauce for breakfast this morning. How weird is that? (Can't have cream cheese or butter, I'm all out of almond butter, and couldn't bear to ruin one of my good bagels with Skippy, so it sounded good to me.) Still I think I'll cut back on the red pepper flakes next time.

Few. All for now.

Labels: 101 Cookbooks, Heidi Swanson, Vegan Appetizers