Food – Page 17 – Hobbits In Rivendell

Feeling Blas

December 2, 2008

4:25 pm

Ever feel that your food just … well, doesn’t really do it for you? Feel like you need to change a little something? Have we got the food for you! Eat here for awhile, and perhaps your food will seem heavily spiced by way of comparison! Welcome to the UK, folks, where “the taste & flavour of Scotland” can be happily advertised as being “Blas!”

We looked this up in the Dictionary of Scottish Language and couldn’t find anything, so it’s not as if it’s a Scots word. So … any ideas? We’re at a loss as to 1) why someone would name a restaurant something which may fall victim to such easy mockery, and 2) what in the world Scottish Tapas are, and 3) why they come in a bowl!

Quinoa, squash and cute overload

by David T. Macknet

November 27, 2008

2:20 pm

3 Comments on Quinoa, squash and cute overload

Food

Aww, this is so cute. Back in the day when we actually wanted to make cute-looking things out of our food before we fell on it and gorged ourselves on Thanksgiving, this is just the kind of thing we would have made. Shaped quinoa!

I think making the crown with polenta and putting a chunky ragout over it in lieu of the roasted pepper hatband would also be tasty.

This day of all cooking days, we’re going to be at Bach rehearsal for almost three hours, so no big dinner tonight — however, at our house, Thanksgiving dinner usually lasted until Sunday anyway, so there’s plenty of time. Hope you and your are having a great day, whether you’re celebrating or not.

Thanksvegging

by David T. Macknet

November 25, 2008

4:52 pm

1 Comment on Thanksvegging

Food, Recipe

We have declared… a goof off day. D. skipped a class, and stayed in bed with the heater on until the house warmed up, T. happily watched kids’ TV and concurrently read a book. It’s cold, and elsewhere it’s almost Thanksgiving, and some days, you’ve just got to veg.

Remember that big zucchini I mentioned? And my friend Alkelda’s gift of chocolate ginger candy bars that I used in my cookies? Together they made an amazingly tasty chocolate chip zucchini bread. Zucchini bread — when you’re using fresh zucchini and not dried — is a bread that can easily be too moist, so my recipe uses little excess liquid. If you use eggs instead of flax as a binder, you do have some moisture, but don’t worry if it seems a little dry — when zucchini cooks, it gives up all moisture, and leaves behind little dark green ribbons of color in your bread. (This is adapted from Bread for Breakfast, By Beth Hensperger & Leigh Beisch © 2001, Ten Speed Press)

3 c. AP flour

1/4 tsp. baking soda

1 Tbsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

1 Tbsp. freshly ground cinnamon

1 tsp. allspice

3 large eggs OR 1/4 c. ground flax (+ 1/2 c. water, for flax)

1/4 c. applesauce

1/3 c. oil

1 c. brown sugar, firmly packed

2 tsp. vanilla extract

2 1/2 c. shredded zucchini

2 chocolate bars, chopped, OR 1 c. chocolate chips

Prepare two loaf pans, and preheat oven to 325°F/163°C

In a medium sized bowl, sift together the first six ingredients, seven if you’re going to use flax.

Once you have your dry ingredients combined, in a separate bowl, cream together your oil, sugar and vanilla and applesauce (and the eggs, if you’re using them). Fold in the zucchini, and the chocolate chips. Add your dry ingredients to your wet, making sure to scrape the bottom of the bowl to make sure that everything is thoroughly combined — it’s just so much more work to do this step the wrong way around, and if you overstir your bread, more gluten will form than you might want, making it less muffin-crumbly, and more firm, so be aware of that!

Divide your batter evenly into your two oiled pans, and bake for an hour on your lowest rack. Do the toothpick test fifty-five minutes in, to make sure you’re on the right track.

There is every chance that your bread won’t be this crumbly; having to turn the loaves and otherwise fuss with this !#@$!*&%*&@# oven means that mine didn’t cook as evenly as it should have; the interior was more moist than it should have been while the edges were more dry. However, the results were whisked out of the house to the Arts Department; the secretary, who squirreled away the leftovers, remarked that I was indeed “a good woman.” Which is high praise indeed.

Brief Update

by David T. Macknet

November 24, 2008

1:23 pm

5 Comments on Brief Update

Food, Knitting, Miscellany

Well, the good news is, knitting still exists as an art form.

Elsewhere in the universe, people still participate in the craft. They sit down and stroke their stash lovingly, looping their fingers lingeringly through woolens and chenilles and specialty yarns. They revel in the colors and fret gently over trying to turn a heel.

Somewhere, people still knit.

Apparently, just not at this blog.

Sigh. It’s not like it’s not COLD ENOUGH. It’s been below freezing every night for at least two weeks, and it’s been very close to snow during the day, with the daytime high of 2°/35° where it’s been hovering. We’re very clearly aware of the desperate need to cover our ears, and we’re already well bored with most of the hats and scarves we’ve been wearing, so we know we need to get back to it. It’s not like we’re short a winter holiday — people love knitted things as Christmas gifts.

And, it’s not like there’s a shortage of babies for whom to knit. My sister is gestating again, and numerous family friends have all brought forth their own little wrinkled, shrieking darlings, so it’s not like there aren’t blankets and hats that need to be made. It’s just that we can’t seem to …find free time for our hands.

I think the trick is going to be scheduling time to sit with our hands free — not typing, not scrolling through articles online or surfing the internet. Just… sitting. It’s amazing how hard that’s been. Neither of us are huge TV watchers, but I think we may have to take up a few shows just so we are sitting in one place long enough for the urge to hit. (You might suggest books on CD — both of us read too fast to have patience with that, unfortunately. It might have to do with a childhood full of books on records, or hyperactivity, or something — only live people reading works. Which is a serious pity, since BBC 7 radio is broadcasting C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet this month, which is a fabulous SF tale. Oh, well.) I hope the urge and ability come back soon; I was looking forward to learning how to turn a heel, and my friend Darla has started collecting baby sweater patterns she swears are for beginners who can’t really read a pattern. (Yeah, right.)

Anyway~! These pictures were taken at the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art a week ago. We discovered that one merely need knit something that isn’t a hat or scarf to be declared to be creating “art.”

These are cacti, knitted with worsted wool yarn, so they’re nice and scratchy. I’m sure they’d make a lovely Christmas gift.

We’re still receiving our vege box from local farms, and ’tis the season for root veg. Many growers are having the last of their tomatoes — from greenhouses, obviously; it’s frozen hard the last couple of nights, so I’m thinking these aren’t outside — and we got a zucchini the other day the size of my forearm, which is a bit largeish for a zucchini. (Time for chocolate chip zucchini bread!)

In honor of the American Thanksgiving this week, we’re concentrating on what the first settlers in the United States had to eat — a lot of duck and goose, basically meat, and very little sweet, since sugar isn’t grown on the Northeast Coast and neither sweet potatoes nor white potatoes grew there at the time. Instead of pumpkin pie, they had pumpkin just as a vegetable, and Indian Corn pudding along with their venison, mutton, quail, mussels and lobster. Of those dishes, we thought we’d try to make Indian Corn Pudding, which sounds alarmingly like grits with sugar. Is this part of anyone’s traditional dinner? We’ve never made it/had it, as it’s not a West Coast thing, but we’ll follow the recipe from 1621, and let you know how it goes…

Bagels 2.0

by David T. Macknet

November 16, 2008

3:17 pm

5 Comments on Bagels 2.0

Baking

Over a year ago, I made bagels for the first time. This morning, in celebration of our purchase of Canadian Brown Flour from The Flour Bin (and, no doubt, to avoid having to do research), I decided to give it another go. This time there was nothing fancy about them. The recipe included flour, oat-bran, flax seeds, yeast, water, and salt. I shaped them, boiled them, and baked them. Were they worth it? Well … let’s just say that we’re eating them, and that I’ll probably have to bake bread again next weekend.

C is for Cookie (That’s Good Enough for Me)

by David T. Macknet

November 11, 2008

3:59 pm

7 Comments on C is for Cookie (That’s Good Enough for Me)

Baking, Recipe

Cookies are not generally my friend.

For one thing, they’re too small. They don’t require a commitment, like bread or cake does. You don’t have to slow down and think, or get out a knife and a plate. No. You pick those bad boys up, one in each hand, and usually one in your mouth, and, well, then, do you have the two cookies you said you could have? Or have you had one more? What are you mumbling with your mouth full? Stop chewing, darn it. This is your Conscience speaking.

Tsk. Cookies. Too small for their own good.

But sometimes, a girl’s just gotta have a cookie. Or, a biscuit, if you’re British. Although apparently cookies exist here, I just can’t figure out how come those cookies are cookies and they’re not biscuits. But then, if you’re Scottish, there are like six words for HILL, so don’t worry too much trying to figure out this one. Let’s get back to the point: COOKIES.

(I have to apologize for the craptastic nature of the first couple of pictures. We have ONE nice fancy camera, and then… my phone. I did my best, but because of the low lighting in the kitchen, these are fuzzy and make our house look like it’s back in the 70’s. Sorry.)

A friend sent me a box of chocolate bars from Portland, apparently secure in her sympathetic belief that there is no chocolate in Scotland. Actually, she was just worried that I hadn’t found any chocolate covered crystallized ginger here, and while it probably exists, I’m just as happy I don’t have to look anymore. Not only is this bar divided into tidy little squares, inside each wrapper is a love poem — in this one, the Bard’s famous 18th sonnet. Gotta love that. I decided to use these hot/sweet chocolate bars as my chocolate chips.

Fortunately, the Post Punk Kitchen Blog and I were on the same page. I used their same basic recipe, but as always, I couldn’t resist the tweaking. So, here’s mine:

Chocolate and Chipper

1/2 brown sugar

1/4 white sugar

1/3 cup oil

4 Tablespoons applesauce

1/4 cup milk (I used unsweetened soy)

1 tablespoon tapioca flour

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour

1/4 c. oatbran

1 Tablespoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

Two 3.2 ounce crystallized ginger chocolate bars, chopped, or 3/4 c. chips

Preheat your oven to 350° and make sure your cookie sheets are ready to go,

With a fork or a stick blender, blend together sugar and oil until it is thoroughly combined. Since my applesauce was chunky, I had to throw that in, too.

I added the wet ingredients in order and then the dry, and by the time I got to the chocolate chunks, I had to sort of just fold them in. It’s a stiff dough.

Using a tablespoon measuring spoon, make ping pong sized balls and flatten them on your cookie sheet. Mine were about an inch across.

Bake each pan for 8-9 minutes, tops — chocolate chip cookies are always molten and then do their last baking on the sheet. Let them rest for five minutes before even attempting to move them!

This yielded two dozen cookies, plus the three tiny “taster” cookies I made.

Because of the dual sugars, these cookies are soft and will stay soft and yummy. You’ll note that I cut the amount of oil used in the original recipe; I prefer to rely on the sugars and applesauce to keep the moisture instead of the oil.

You’ll also note that these cookies do not even remotely resemble Tollhouse, or even the Post Punk cookies — and that’s because of the flour. The original recipe calls for AP, I had whole wheat, so that’s what I used. A simple substitution involves using oat, AP, or even white flour to make the cookies look a little less scary to the fiber-averse. (On the other hand fiber AND chocolate should be a win-win.)

If you don’t have tapioca, experiment with using a tablespoon of ground flaxseed. The tapioca flour is an egg substitute; I didn’t grow up using eggs in cookies very often, so I doubt a whole lot is needed to keep the cookies held together. Just — try making it without, and see what happens. If the first batch crumbles, you can always spoon the rest of the dough over sliced fruit and call it a crumble.

There was a tiny hitch in this project; I intended to simply bake a batch of cookies, eat one or three, and then set them free into the wider world. Unfortunately, D’s department put on a full sit-down luncheon the day I packed him off with the goods, so he triumphantly returned the cookies home, made a few statements which began with the word “Mine,” and retired happily to a dim corner.

Cookie Monster is in the house.

Cranberry Orange Marmalade

by David T. Macknet

October 28, 2008

12:40 pm

5 Comments on Cranberry Orange Marmalade

Food, Recipe

This recipe is about having 10 oranges just sitting around, and having a bag of cranberries (frozen), and thinking that it should be Autumn, rather than it really feeling like Winter. So, we made a marmalade of sorts.

Cranberry Orange Marmalade:

10 Navel Oranges

1 bag Cranberries

1.5 Cups Sugar

3 Tbsp Agar Flakes

Using a vegetable peeler, peel the orange zest from your oranges.

Snip, chop, or julienne the zest into little pieces.

Slice away the pith of the oranges.

Supreme your oranges, squeezing the juice from the membranes when you’re done (and adding that juice to the pot).

Cook everything on the stove until your massive cauldron of canning liquid comes up to a boil (approximately 30 minutes).

Can according to your canning instructions (sterilization, cleanliness, all that good stuff), leaving 1/2″ of “head space” using boiling water process canning method* for 30 minutes.

Let them cool by themselves, and refrigerate any jar which hasn’t sealed.

*Note: if you would like a very loose syrupy sauce, go ahead and pressure can these. If you want things to turn out right, don’t let your paranoia get the better of you. Pressure canning destroys pectins, so it’s not your friend!

When we came to Scotland we left a lot of things behind – either sold, given away, or just plain thrown away. Of those things which stayed with us was The Canning Cauldron. To call this a pot, or a kettle … well, that’s just the understatement of the century! Notice that it’s on the handy double-burner and it dwarfs the range?

And why did we go to the trouble to fire this up, when all we needed to can was two small jars of marmalade? Well, firstly, because the larger jar was just this much too tall to be canned in anything else. And, secondly, because we’ve been without hot water or heat for several weeks, now (except that our shower is an electric shower). Hot showers just don’t do the trick, when what you really want is a hot bath!

The cauldron served to fill the bathtub with enough hot water for a decent bath – although next time we’ll have opened the bathroom door in advance, so that the room itself can come up to temperature!

Thoughts from the Back of the Fridge

by David T. Macknet

October 26, 2008

12:05 pm

3 Comments on Thoughts from the Back of the Fridge

Food, Miscellany

One of the end-of-summer treats I’ve enjoyed have been pomegranates. From their beautiful beginnings as a frill of flaming red blossom on the skinny tree in my parent’s backyard to the hard, dark red fruits that my mother sent us out onto the back porch to eat. I’m used to fighting with my Dad over the ones I take from his tree — he’s such a pomegranate hog — and enjoying the bursts of piquant tart-sweetness against my tongue. My little sister occasionally still calls them Bugs, because I told her they were insect larvae when she was about four. (Of course, for that reason, she immediately decided to eat them. Go figure.)

D. brought me two pomegranates a week ago, and they’re not the deep jeweled red that I’m used to, but a faded pink. Instead of the bursts of tart sweetness I’ve enjoyed, these pomegranates are quite sweet — startlingly so — with no tartness whatsoever. I’m sure there are various kinds of pomegranates, but I’ve only ever had the one, so I must admit that I was briefly painfully disappointed at the differences. However, instead of these being a taste of home, they are the flavor of a farther shore, perhaps a sultry Persian backyard, where a girl swathed in silks is happily and stickily consuming fruit. At least that’s what I tell myself…

Autumn has so far favored us with a bit of hard squash! Acorn squash is almost — almost a substitute for our favorite kabocha squash. They at least look enough like pumpkins to make us happy!

We’ve enjoyed them in soups during these windy cold days, and have great hopes that we can find one big enough to make it worthwhile to make pumpkin ravioli! Can’t waste that good semolina flour, right? Wondering what we’ll put ON or IN ravioli? We’re working on a fabulous seitan sausage with lots of sage, mushrooms and black pepper that will match really well with a creamy white sauce and pasta… we’ll get back to you on that…

By now, Cake Wrecks has become a Blogger institution, probably because most people love looking at decorated cakes, and like it better if the professionally made cakes look like something they could have pulled off themselves. (Ah, schadenfreude.) We get a kick out of looking at the decorated cakes in the shops around here, but let me say this: at HR Bradfords (Baker), there’s not a wreck amongst them.

Most of the time, people who wander down Sauchiehall St. downtown are headed for the much ballyhooed Willow Tea Rooms, snazzily designed by Art Deco dude Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1904. While lovely, yes, the Willow rooms are fairly pricey and not the only tea rooms in town by a long shot. Glasgow apparently invented tea rooms in the 1830’s, so we are told. Europe was famous for coffee houses… and Glasgow for tea rooms, in response to what must have been a rather short-lived temperance movement when they were more popular than pubs.*cough*

Anyway, at the back of the shop at HR Bradfords, away from the window full of cakes and the glass-fronted cases full of pastries and cookies and all the brownies that you don’t really need? Is a stairway leading to a full-scale tea room, where wait staff wear the traditional black and white livery and escort you to a table.

We didn’t have time to do more than dine-and-dash last time we were there (they do have a decent vegetarian sausage pastry), but we’re going to go back and have a proper sit-down soon, and we’re looking forward to it.

Stopping by for Lunch

by David T. Macknet

October 17, 2008

3:34 pm

3 Comments on Stopping by for Lunch

Food, Recipe

Boy, this has been a busy week.

It’s been aggravating, because there have been a lot of elements outside of our control — people bashing holes in the wall with a sledge hammer, people tromping through and discussing things in loud voices. It’s not exactly an atmosphere conducive to work or story — so it’s Friday, and we’re way behind on everything. It’s a day for just a quick, one-handed-and-keep-going-at-one’s-desk kind of lunch. With a little quick bit of prep, this is good for any day.

As a reprise of Veggie Meat, we did up two kinds of gluten this morning. Rather than forming them into individual links, we figured we could slice off chunks of sausage and be just as happy, and wouldn’t have to take the time to do all of that fiddly shaping. (We apologize that there aren’t pictures this time of the steps, but we just didn’t have time!)

Here again is the basic recipe:

1.5 cups vital wheat gluten

1/4 cup nutritional yeast

2 tsp paprika

1/4 tsp cinnamon or nutmeg

1/4 tsp cumin

1-2 tsp pepper

1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

2 Tbsp garlic or onion powder AND sage

3/4 cups water or vegetable broth or tomato juice

1 tbsp soy sauce

2 tbsp oil

As you can see, there are two colors of sausage; when using the basic recipe, we simply added 8 tablespoons of butternut squash purée and used veggie broth for liquid for the lighter colored sausage; the other has 3/4 c. tomato juice as its liquid component, and 1/2 c. chopped cranberries. In future, we’ll try adding the cranberries to the one without the tomato; though it is delicious, it tastes more like Italian sausage and completely loses the piquant sweet-sour zing of the cranberries. They would pair well with the butternut, which is quite mild, and would be a good candidate for inclusion in beans or with other things which have not so strong of flavors. The Italian Greatness is rather spicier, too, as we, um, *slipped* when tossing in the garlic, and so things are a little intensely flavored… but ignoring the garlic breath, yum. We don’t quite know what that will be paired with, but we’ll let you know, if we can quit eating it just out of hand.

As we have no central heat, and are reliant upon a small space-heater, we’re baking as much as possible, much to the joy of everyone at work and in the Arts department at school. Banana bread is on the agenda again sometime this weekend, as is Kansas’ famous carrot cake jam — a recipe we’ve feared yet been dying to try for ages (Look: she posted it with the comment “look out hips.” This is NOT GOOD. Yet obviously awesomely good, and needing to be made immediately!) We’re obviously going to have to make time to see friends again, and soon, or else we’ll be staggering under the weight of baking. However, we’ll be warm, so that’s what counts!

Yes, that’s a cup of unsweetened, black coffee. That’s about 1/3 of the daily dosage, now that school has begun. Detox / withdrawal will begin around about Christmas Break.

Indian Braid

by David T. Macknet

October 11, 2008

11:33 pm

3 Comments on Indian Braid

Food

OK, so this is really Danish Braid, yet again … except that it’s not, really.

This evening we’ve been to a dinner party at my PhD Supervisor’s house, and I wanted to bake something to go along with Indian food. So, this is the same recipe, basically, except that we’ve added about 1 Tbsp of Garam Masala instead of the measly little teaspoon I added last time. I figured that the spices would help this to match with Indian food. We’ll see.

Some of these are ginger-apple filled, and some are chocolate filled. Sadly, because of our gimpy oven, most of the chocolate ones were a bit overdone (they were on the top rack, and the oven door doesn’t close all the way, so the top gets too hot while the bottom stays cool). Most of them turned out just fine, though, and were an good accompaniment to dinner.

Our train back was cancelled (mechanical problems) so we had to wait around at the station for an extra half hour, and the queue for taxis was immense, so we ended up taking a bus. Waiting for the bus with the Tartan Army was quite … an experience. The football match between Scotland and Norway resulted in a tie, so people are … confused. They weren’t drinking to celebrate, they weren’t drink to lament, so … they were just drinking as if it were another Glasgow Evening.

Now, it’s 12:30 a.m., and high time we were in bed!

Glasgow:
NY:
Grinnell:
Roswell:
Berkeley: