Category: Food

My mother was raised in the American South, so it’s not really like I’ve ever heard of leftover sweet potatoes, because, well, you eat them, right? They don’t linger. But leftover marmalade, … well, if you live with One Of Those People who opens another jar or box of something when what’s there is half gone, or someone who opens a new jar when they want another flavor of jam… well. You see how these things happen.

And you find that you have five tablespoons full of something here, and something there, and clementine marmalade you made ages ago, that got shoved to the back of the fridge and froze (Yes. Froze. Don’t ask. Scottish fridges are all against me.), well, with the agar, it’s a weird texture now and probably would be fine on toast, but…nah.

It’s time for another quick something-out-of-nothing dish. First, take a couple of medium sized sweet potatoes. Now, this is assuming that you grew up like I did, and always had a few around the house, since an attack of sweet potato pie could happen at any time, and one needed to be ready. If you don’t have sweet potatoes, well, get some. Pretend they’re leftovers. Now, concentrate, this is really super complicated:

Sweet Potato Custard

• Bake two medium sized sweet potatoes, until they’re soft, about 45 minutes.
• In a medium sized bowl, blend together your potatoes, one box of silken tofu,
• 1/2 c. brown sugar
• 2 tbsp. freshly ground allspice
• 1 tsp. freshly ground nutmeg
• 1/4 tsp. cayenne pepper Yes, really.
• Those 5 leftover tablespoons of marmalade





• 3 heaping tablespoons of cornstarch

Preheat your oven to 350° (or, if you’re smart, it’s still warm from baking the potatoes, yes?) Blend potatoes, tofu, spices and marmalade until you have a creamy mixture.

OPEN THE OVEN.

Place six baking ramekins on a flat baking sheet and fill the sheet with a half-inch of water. Ladle your potato mixture into the ramekins, and carefully carry them to the open oven.

Close the oven. Bake for forty-five minutes.

Just turn off the oven and open it when the time is up; wait a little before you remove the pan. If the custard cools slowly, there’s less chance of cracking. Or, if you don’t care, just grab your goodies and go.

Congratulations. You now only have two more tiny jars of marmalade, and a really gorgeously creamy, spicy, flavorful custard with a hint of citrus flavor, free of both eggs and the insipid sweetness that usually accompanies sweet potato pie. This one won’t even make it to the freezer.

Leftover sweet potatoes. *tsk* Please.

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Rosemary Sweet Potato Gluten Links.

• 1 1/2 cup vital wheat gluten
• 1/4 cup nutritional yeast
• 1 t curry powder
• 2 T freshly pureéd rosemary
• 1 t rubbed sage
• freshly ground pepper
• 2 t garlic powder
• 1/8 t cayenne pepper
• 1/4 t ground nutmeg
• wet:
• 3/4 cup vegetable broth
• 6-8 T sweet potato purée, based on moisture content
• 2 T oil

Unless you plan to let your sausage sit overnight, preheat you oven to 325F. This is one of those dishes that will need to bake on “low and slow,” as Alton Brown would say. Mix together dry ingredients, and in a separate and larger bowl, your wet ingredients. Work the dry into the wet, and when it stiffens, get in and squeeze it in your hands until everything is all kneaded into a ball.

Previously we’ve baked the sausages unwrapped, but that just doesn’t work to give you a finished product that looks like something you’d want to share with your loved ones (!). In order to get the gluten to look like actual links, wrap them tightly in foil, and bake them wrapped for 90 minutes.

If you’re going to use your links in another dish, they can be baked for 30 minutes, then chopped and added to whatever, and baked again.

Ever since finding HCWT’s version of the postpunk people’s seitan o’ greatness, we’ve been eager to see what else we could do with it. There’s lots of room for interpretation!

Gluten powder or flour or vital wheat gluten — whatever it’s called in your neck of the woods — is a fairly forgiving substance, but in making our links, we erred on the side of adding too much “stuff,” and not enough gluten to balance it. The texture isn’t as tender as our previous batch, but the spiciness of the cayenne came through nicely. The rosemary and sweet potato combination turned out to be complimentary, and next time we’ll wrap the links. Next we’ve set our sights on a spicy basil chili link, maybe with a bit of coconut and ginger, with a nod to our Thai proclivities, and we’ve got gluten enough to try again!

One thing that did work well for us was prepping our gluten overnight. If you get a late start, don’t worry! The gluten flour will absorb all of the liquid overnight, and these are great to just pop into the oven for breakfast the following day. We enjoyed ours with oatmeal and stewed ginger apples. Yum.

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Since both of us come from families of three or four siblings, it was a hard switch when we got together to stop cooking for the horde. However, since the horde doesn’t live with us, and we don’t have fridge space here in the UK to accommodate them, it was really important to learn quickly to stop cooking (and eating, ahem!) for a big group.

Now that we’ve learned to be a little more controlled with our food prep, we don’t often find ourselves with odds and ends and extras lying around, but when we do, we’ve come up with a few good recipes to deal with them that freeze well and pack away nicely.

Leftover naan: This flat bread is amazing with Indian foods, and in a pinch restaurant leftovers make the quickest mini-pizza crust ever. We’d been tempted a time or two to buy it, since the stuff we make ourselves is never quite the same as what’s in the restaurant. Well, once was enough. The store-bought naan wasn’t nearly as nice as what we were used to, so it sat in the freezer. And sat. And sat. And then, we had a bright idea: roasted vegetable bread pudding.

The usual recipe for bread pudding would call for about four to six eggs along with roasted veg and cubed or chopped bread. I’ve never been able to eat eggs and enjoy them, so though I’m not vegan, eggs: not an option. What, then? Enter soft tofu, my usual answer to creamy and binding.

Roasted Vegetable Bread Pudding

• Preheat your oven to 350°, and prepare a large baking pan with a little olive oil
• Using whatever means necessary (for me a rubber mallet and my Joyce Chen chopping knife), split a butternut or other hard squash in half, and clean it of seeds. If you’re not squeamish about the sap getting on your hands, you can peel it now. If you’re a wuss like me, you’ll peel it when it’s roasted.
• Tuck half an onion into each hollow in your butternut squash.
• Add four peeled and diced carrots, 2 large potatoes, two cloves of peeled garlic and a handful of mushrooms to your roasting pan, and place in the oven for 40 minutes.
• While your veggies are roasting, in a large bowl blend a container of soft (not silken) tofu with 1 T. of cornstarch, and a 1/2 c. of soy milk or vegetable broth. To this add 2 t. of rubbed sage, freshly ground pepper to taste, 1 tbsp. garlic powder, a 1/2 tsp. freshly ground nutmeg, and if you’re using milk, 1 tsp. of salt.
• Add to the mix 1 packed cup of shredded cheese, cottage cheese or cheese substitute is optional. A sharp cheddar pairs nicely with hard squashes.
• When your veggies are roasted, add them to the milk and tofu mixture. In an oiled 9×12 baking pan, crumple a piece of naan, and add a layer of vegetable and cheese mixture.
• You can finish this out with another layer of crumbled stale naan and a little extra cheese to form a crust on top of your vegetables. If you, like me, are lucky enough to have some homemade gluten sausages around (*recipe to follow shortly!*), these are a tasty, tasty addition to the dish.(Be advised that if you add the naan to the cheese-veg-tofu mixture that it will suck up much of the liquid – but some people prefer a crunchier more casserole-like bread pudding, so that’s fine, too.)
• Bake for fifty minutes, until the top is golden brown and crisp.

Congratulations. You finally got rid of the stale naan.

This cuts into nice squares to pack for lunch, and freezes …well, theoretically. Ours is going to be eaten before it gets to the freezer. Oh, well. I’m sure there are some bread and vegetables we can shove in the freezer instead…

Stay tuned for more leftover goodness.

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Have Cake Will Travel has led us into the land of temptation. Yes, we’re back into making gluten … but this time we’re not doing it the hard way, and we haven’t even gotten around to posting about the sort-of-hard way. No, this time, we’re doing it the insanely easy way, and eating the whole darned thing in a single evening!

OK, you didn’t just hear that. No. Not at all. Of course we were good enough to space out our gluten consumption over a few days, and a few meals. Umm. OK, no, we weren’t. This went down our gullets all in the same night, sadly (but only “sadly” because we wish that we had more!).

This is the very basic “seitan ‘o greatness” recipe to which we were pointed by Have Cake, Will Travel back in the day.

• 1.5 cups vital wheat gluten
• 1/4 cup nutritional yeast
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tsp paprika
• 1/4 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp cumin
• 1-2 tsp pepper
• 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
• 1/8 tsp allspice
• 2 tsp garlic powder
• 3/4 cups water
• 4 tbsp tomato paste
• 1 tbsp tamari
• 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• 2 tbsp vegetarian Worcestershire sauce

We didn’t do much else but follow directions, but we were so wildly successful that it won’t be long before we thoroughly subvert it to our own fiendish uses. (chilies flakes, anyone?) Please note I said we didn’t do “much else.” We did add great heaps of sage and diced apples and garlic (next time we’ll ease up on the garlic or add it in powder) to imitate St. Helena’s Gillwoods Café chicken apple sausages — which, granted, we haven’t tasted, but it always sounded good. Next time we may use mushrooms… sweet potatoes… chives… The possibilities are endless.

Despite the pretty presentation (just for you out there in blogland), we gnawed on this for like 15 minutes before it ever hit the plates. It was terribly tempting, and … after the first bite, it was basically the end, for this dish. We don’t know how it is that Have Cake Will Travel ever leaves the house except to buy gluten powder, this stuff is so good!

DO follow the links to the recipe, and DO try out your creative muscles on this stuff!

Sorry for the short post — after snorting up peppers (not my eyes, my nose, of all things) my endless sniffles have morphed into some kind of evil sinus infection. Anyway, I have to stop blogging … and order more gluten powder.

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Gardening, 2006, gave us bunches of Thai Bird Chiles (the two outside bunches, here). We tied them up, dried them, and then packed them away against a time when we needed peppers and didn’t have any fresh ones. Well, folks, that time has finally arrived! Two whole years after they were harvested, these thai bird chiles have been pressed into service!

When we arrived in Scotland, these were still on a ship. So, we bought a packet of generic chile flakes. A year later, we finally finished off that packet. We do use fresh chiles as well, including fresh thai chiles, but dry chiles are just so handy. So, this weekend, I sat down & pinched off all of the dried ones (note: use gloves next time!). They then went into the little blender thing that attaches to the stick blender, a handful at a time.

Since then, the house hasn’t been quite the same. They’re packed up and double-bagged now, and the house has been aired, with fans and exhaust fans going, and windows open. But my sinuses are still miserable with the heat. These babies are truly spicy!

The powder did make its way into some gluten, though. More on that later.

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Every once in awhile we exchange gifts with foodie friends that look like they might better be left outdoors. Like knitters have their yarn stashes, many cooks and bakers are avid collectors of seeds and sticks — herbs and spices from various places.

Using whole spices has been beneficial for us. Whole spices can keep up to two years if kept airtight/reasonably dry, but once a spice is ground and it is presented in its little container at the store, the clock is ticking. Essential oils break down easily, and within six months, much of the flavor and scent in ground spices are lost. We’ve also found that ground spices are much more expensive than whole spices, in that we have to use so much more of them to get any flavor, and we have to buy them more frequently.

One of the nicest second-hand gifts we’ve gotten here in the UK has been our coffee grinder. Someone had an extra one they passed along, and though it has a weird plug issue and will shock us if we don’t discharge it onto a steel surface (!!!), it’s a real workhorse, and grinds everything from cashews to cumin. One of the best uses has been to create spice blends. D.’s coworker, Alex, is Romanian, and finds most Scottish foods bland. He’s the recipient of one of D’s infamous spice blends — with plenty of chilies. (We have a similar blend which we use on popcorn. YUM.)

Without a doubt, one of the coolest culinary places we’ve ever been wasn’t a clean and well-lit kitchen store, but a dark and narrow spice merchant’s shop somewhere at Pike’s Place Market in Seattle. The hundred year old market is much more famous for the touristy shiny shops and the fish-flinging up top than for the tiny shops underneath the main arcade. Wedged in dark stalls down walkways and stairways are a whole other world of shops, and there we found our best deals. Piles of spices measured out on scales and twisted into paper sacks. Shelves full of whole spices that towered up to the dim ceiling. An unsmiling proprietor who could have been sitting cross-legged and silent inside a souk somewhere dusty and far away. The place smelled — pungent, sweet, harsh, sharp, and amazing. We could probably never find it again.

Proving yet again that great minds do occasionally think alike, What Smells So Good? posted a Banana Oat Scone with Chocolate Chips on Monday, the same day we bodged up some sconish things to stave off the urge for serious junk food. (As opposed to acceptable junk food. We’re not going to argue that banana bread isn’t mostly just cake.)

We split the dough and created scone-shaped things and a loaf, and since I can’t bring myself to use the amount of butter it takes to make real scones (it’s a personal failing, I feel), I feel it’s only fair to post the picture of the banana bread — Since I’m positive it can legally be called bread. Invoking the word “scone” on these shores might mean I’m up for some judiciously worded discussions with people who actually know how to make them (*cough*).

Of course, we used the grinder to add some allspice and cinnamon, but instead of just chopping up a chocolate bar to add the chips, we had the sort-of bright idea to spoon in a little Nutella in the middle. (This is veering ever closer to cake, yes?) Nutella isn’t completely unfamiliar, as it’s been imported for years to the States, but few people eat it just as a bread spread, which seems to be its primary function here. We’re still a little bewildered as to what to do with it, short of sucking it off of a spoon, and since chocolate and bananas go together of old, it seemed like a great idea. Baking Nutella didn’t have too much of an effect on it; once the bread cooled, the lava middle settled down to just being a ribbon of chocolate. We’re a bit disappointed that the hazelnut flavor didn’t come through more clearly, but we’ll fiddle with it and see what we can do. It’s all in the name of food science.

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What Color is Your Diet?

A few years ago there was this huge push for people to eat by color. Of course, a few years ago there was also this push to get people to eat five servings of fruit and veg a day, to get people to drink wine for their health, to eat chocolate for their health, drink tea for their health, eat blueberries for their health… Seeing a trend, here? Right. Here’s my take: Food. It’s generally healthy, and if it’s fresh and/or raw, it’s even better. Sure, you should eat a lot of purple, and orange food contains all those yummy hard squashes (and what is life without sweet potato bread?), and red food is generally chock full of Vitamin C and nutrients, but it’s ridiculous to be trying to count and rationalize and figure out how many colors you’ve had (is my beet purple? Or red? Are we counting color before or after cooking?) I think it’s time to default to what Mom said: Eat Your Greens.

Fruit Green: It’s the season for kiwifruit here in the UK, “season” being kind of a generic way of saying that these fruit are now really inexpensive in grocery stores and being stocked by organic grocers as well. Italy, New Zealand, Chile, France, Japan and California are among the leading commercial producers of kiwifruit, so it’s likely actually in season somewhere nearby. The exotic golden kiwifruit, the more familiar green — all of these fruits are full of antioxidants, and some studies have shown that they help stop asthmatic kids from wheezing (unless they’re wheezing because they’re allergic to kiwifruit). Loaded with Vitamin C, potassium and fiber, these Chinese gooseberries, as they were originally called, are green gold.

Kiwifruit, though, is tough to work with — it destroys collagen, and so it’s not one of the fruits easily made into gelled desserts (regular Jell-o with kiwi won’t set! Agar jelly should be fine, though, I’m thinking). Kiwifruit also curdles milk, so ice creams are out of the question unless the kiwifruit is cooked first — and I’ve never had kiwifruit any way but raw. People use kiwifruit to tenderize meat, I’ve read, and with judicious application of pectin and a lot of sugar, kiwifruit boils up into a bright green jelly — often paired with lime and strawberries, two of the flavors that many people claim to taste in the kiwifruit themselves. I’m sure there must be other creative uses for this fruit. A refrigerator cheesecake? A cold fruit soup with mint? What do you do with them?

Spicy Green

Biostar Gartenkresse, the box said.

We peered at the close packed little bits of greenery. It looked rather like a doll-sized patch of lawn. “Well, it’s cress,” we decided, and tasted some. After all, all of the British novels we read had people having watercress sandwiches for tea, right? And, okay, this didn’t look like it grew on water, but…

The tiny green stems packed a seriously startling punch of horseradishy flavor. We were excited to receive ours in our veggie box, but were briefly at a loss at how to use it. The box had suggestions — in Dutch and in Deutche. Gartendress Tips: als Beilage im salat als Brotaufstrich Kombination mit Käse, Tomaten und Ei, oder Fleischwaren. We easily picked out most of those words, but a couple hung us up. Brotaufstrich Ei? Flesichwhat? Google Languages rescued us – cress, the growers explained, is a salad supplement and can be eaten in combination with tomatoes and egg and other flesh products — like, on a meat sandwich. Right. We timidly tossed a bit of cress in a salad, and… that was the depth of our creativity. They kind of seem like bean sprouts, which we pile on sandwiches and salads in California — but what else does one do with cress? Why would people eat them by themselves in sandwiches? What are we missing? Anyone?

Dark Green Leafy: These are the greens my Mom always said we should eat. Dark green leafies — full of iron, lutein, zeaxanthin and fiber. Many greens slow or prevent macular degeneration, supply energy-boosting supplies of iron, and contain enzymes to stimulate the production of cells that fight liver cancer.

In California now, the farmer’s markets are just beginning to show those first signs of the autumn greens season. Chard, pungent mustard greens, collard greens — the greens grow best in the waning days of summer, enjoying the warmth, but not the high heat which causes them to bolt. In cool and moist Glasgow we’re enjoying loads of bok choi and curly-leafed kale. Kale — also called Tuscan kale, black cabbage, cavolo nero, dinosaur kale, and flat black cabbage — is the king of greens to us. Greens and so very easy to enjoy. Just a quick stir-fry with onions, bell peppers and tofu or chicken and you’ve got something to go on top of noodles or rice. (Add a splash of coconut milk and some curry paste, and you’ve got a whole ‘nother dish. And then there’s the mae ploy sauce…) Since we’re partial to tofu, tempeh and other veggie options, we sometimes eat greens just as a side dish with just a bit of garlic and lemon juice.

The basic way to cook kale, if you’re not doing a stir-fry, is to clean it, and chop it into one-inch pieces, then drop it into boiling water for six minutes. Once it’s drained, it’s ready to be anything — a side by itself, or added to sautéed mushrooms and garlic atop polenta (once your mushrooms and garlic are sautéed, add the kale back to the pot, and simmer it for six minutes with a bit of lemon zest and a half cup of white wine vegetable broth). When it’s rainy, we like to add our kale to the last ten minutes of a white bean soup, after the beans have been simmered with onions, garlic, bay, rosemary, and a rind of Parmesan. Because kale has very firm leaves and a hearty flavor, it’s very versatile, and pairs well with smoky flavors (many people use pancetta and bacon) and strong flavors like garlic. Yum.

How do you like your green?

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