parsnips aplenty

Spaghetti Squash with Sarsaparilla and Sage

December 27, 2008 · 4 Comments

When I first started cooking with any intention, I wasted a tremendous amount of money. One day, years ago, I was home from college for the summer and a few friends came to visit for the weekend, and we decided to make a curry for dinner. The recipe we picked was, of course, one with thirty ingredients, most of which were spices. My parents tossed me their debit card and we went to the store.

We spent eighty-four dollars. To make one pot of curry. And you know why? Because we bought a jar of every spice on that list. All of which were, of course, organic. And at least five bucks a pop. I have learned since that the most wonderful thing about health food stores is the bulk section, specifically the bulk herbs and spices. Heed this!: Never buy a jar of spices, because you can buy them by the teaspoon (or tablespoon, or whatever) at your local co-op for fifty cents, which saves you tons of money - and, since you’re not buying a whole jarful at a time, you don’t have to worry about it going stale. I think this is one of the biggest mistakes we make when stocking our pantry: spices, especially pre-ground spices, lose their potency quickly, and when you leave a jar of curry powder in the cabinet for a year before you finally get around to making that great vindaloo recipe you’ve been hanging on to, I can promise you it will hardly taste like anything except the twenty chilies you had to put in.

So there’s tip number one for the day. Tip number two, which I try to emphasize often in this blog: substitute whenever and wherever you can. When I was first getting the hang of cooking for myself, I made sure to follow new recipes to the letter the first time I made them, and then allowed myself to adapt them as needed. I think this is important for a beginning cook, but now that I’ve got a better sense of things, I do it less often, and have become more of a recipe-as-guide person, as opposed to a recipe-as-law. I love reading a recipe that has notes for variation, because it means that whoever developed it played around with it a lot before releasing it to the wind, and it also gives more of a springboard for ideas of different directions that I can take with it.

This second tip is the main reason I’ve never made spaghetti squash - well, at least not until this afternoon. It feels like such a… unitasker. If I’m going to make something with winter squash, I grab one arbitrarily from the pile at the grocery store. (Or farmers’ market. Of course.) Spaghetti squash seemed almost gimmicky to me - it’s squash, and it can be made into ribbons? Who cares?

I picked one up last week. I caved.

Okay, okay, the pastasquash is fun. I admit it. You can wrap it around your fork, suck a piece down like a noodle, and pile it up into a lovely orange tower of angel hair. But it’s squash, which everyone in their right mind loves, and so it goes terrifically with simple, earthy flavors. I’m using only two - sarsaparilla and sage. One trendy, one classic, both delicious.

You know how you make broth with a bundle of aromatic herbs? I followed the same idea here. When I split the squash down the middle to bake, I put sarsaparilla in the pan, underneath the cavity of the squash. This helped the flavor really permeate, without that annoying texture of, well, wood. No one likes eating bits of wood.

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Spaghetti Squash with Sarsaparilla and Sage
serves 2-3

1 spaghetti squash
olive oil
2 teaspoons sarsaparilla
2 dried sage leaves, crushed
salt to taste

Preheat to 350. Halve spaghetti squash lengthwise, and scrape out seeds and goop. Put 1/4″ of water in the bottom of a pan large enough to hold both squash halves, and put a teaspoon of sarsaparilla in the place of where you’ll put each half. Drizzle a bit of olive oil in there, too, then put each squash half over the little piles of sarsaparilla. Cover tightly with aluminum foil or a good lid, then put in the oven and bake until soft, 30-45 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool for a few minutes.

Take a look at which way the strands are going. You meat-eaters will know that it’s best to cut meat to make the fibers as short as possible - the opposite is true here. With a fork, gently loosen the strands of squash - with the grain, not against it. Pile onto a plate and top with sage and some good salt.

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→ 4 CommentsCategories: autumn · baked · sides · under 5 ingredients · vegan · wintery

Snow Day Stir-Fried Greens

December 19, 2008 · 4 Comments

When I arrived here in Portland at the end of the summer, the long-time transplants warned me about winter. Not so much the weather, but the reaction to it.

“This city shuts down under an inch of snow,” warned native midwesterners, suppressing groans.

I understood - both the fact of the matter, and the annoyance with it. Asheville does the same thing, since it’s full of tiny mountain roads that turn to ice faster than a moonshine hangover, but as soon as a flake of snow hits the air, everyone runs over to the supermarket to stock up on milk, water, and toilet paper, since they’re expecting a return of the Blizzard of ‘93. (You still see t-shirts at the Goodwill announcing “I survived the Blizzard of ‘93!”) I had a handful of days off from school when my northeastern-born parents looked out the window, said, “You’ve got to be kidding,” and took me out for breakfast.

Portland got a couple of inches of snow on Sunday, which all melted on Tuesday, and I’ve barely been able to get anything done. Except go to work, that is - no snow days for me, since I live 20 blocks away. Heaven forbid I try to make any doctor or massage appointments, though - I’ve been getting answering machines all week.

Today, though, is the start of a 3-day weekend for me, and I was excited to wake up to giant snowflakes falling outside my window. This, I thought, is a day for tea and some good greens.

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Deborah Madison taught me about bok choy. Her recipe for stir-fried bok choy with peanuts, from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, is the one that I apply to just about everything I feel like coating in soy sauce. Having grown up in the south, I can’t help but feel that every green thicker than spinach should be cooked to within an inch of its life, and I think that this new business of stir-frying collard greens is just about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Bok choy, however, does really well in this application, and is very well-rounded by peanuts, cooked in a rich-tasting roasted peanut oil, with a bit of heat at the end from ginger and red pepper flakes. This time, I used some baked tofu instead of peanuts, but I’ll post the original recipe and let you find your own variations. It’s an excellent introduction to throwing some veggies in a pan.

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Stir-Fried Bok Choy with Roasted Peanuts
serves 2-4
recipe by Deborah Madison

3 tablespooons raw peanuts
2 teaspoons roasted peanut oil
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
salt
1 1/2 pounds bok choy
2 tablespoons peanut oil
4 garlic cloves, minced
4 teaspoons minced ginger
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon cornstarch stirred with 3 tablespoons water or vegetable stock

Fry peanuts in 2 teaspoons roasted peanut oil until they’re golden. Chop with red pepper flakes and a few pinches salt and set aside.

Slice off bok choy stems and cut them into 1″ pieces. Leave the leaves whole. Set a wok over high heat. Add 2 tablespoons peanut oil and roll it around the wok. When hot, add garlic and ginger and stir-fry for 1 minute. Add bok choy and a few pinches salt and stir-fry until wilted and glossy. Add soy sauce and cornstarch mixture and stir-fry 1-2 minutes more until leaves are shiny and glazed. Add crushed peanuts, toss, and serve.

→ 4 CommentsCategories: mains · stir fry · vegan · wintery

Smoked Paprika and Rutabaga Bisque

December 7, 2008 · 5 Comments

This weekend, my goals have been:

1. Above all, do as little as possible.
2. Spend many happy minutes looking at Mt St Helens and Mt Adams from my window, as it’s often too cloudy to see them.
3. Listen to NPR in live form, not podcast.
4. Make the rutabaga bisque whose recipe has been sitting in my inbox for weeks.
5. Change out of my bathrobe only when absolutely necessary.

I’d like to report that I have done all of these with great aplomb.

This bisque is perfect. Just perfect. I don’t like anything that tastes like a radish, and rutabaga falls in that category, but smoked paprika takes that bitter sourness and turns it into something pristine and hearty all at once. The original recipe called for celery, as so many soup recipes do, but I can’t stand celery, plus I didn’t have any, so I left it out. If you want to keep it in, it’s 2 stalks, diced. But if you ask me, Enemy Extraordinaire of Celery, it doesn’t need it.

I could go on about this soup, but that would take too much time away from your marching to the kitchen to make it. And I’ve really got to get back to working on goal #1.

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Smoked Paprika and Rutabaga Bisque
adapted from a recipe by Kate Ramos for chow.com
serves 6-8

3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 medium onion, diced
1 1/2 pounds rutabaga, peeled and cubed (about 4 1/4 cups)
4 cups (1 quart) low-sodium vegetable broth
2 cups half-and-half
2 1/2 teaspoons good quality smoked paprika
1 teaspoon ground black or white pepper

Melt butter in a large pot over medium heat. Once butter foams, add onion, and season generously with salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, until onion is tender but not browned, about 5 minutes.

Add rutabaga and broth, bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low and simmer until rutabaga is tender when pierced with a fork, about 30 minutes. Add half-and-half, paprika, and pepper and stir to combine. Allow soup to cool slightly, then purée in a blender until smooth. (You will have to do this in batches.) Taste and season with more salt and pepper as needed.

→ 5 CommentsCategories: autumn · soup · wintery

Cranberry-Orange Cornbread with Five-Spice Glaze

November 10, 2008 · 7 Comments

A few months ago, I mentioned my love for Crescent Dragonwagon, a self-professed “closet vegetarian” for years who finally outed herself in her wonderful cookbooks. She’s done a lot to influence the way I think about food, and has much to do with my refusal to see vegetarianism as a limitation.

So imagine my surprise when I saw that she had commented on the entry! She had her publishers send me a promo copy of her newest book, The Cornbread Gospels, and while I think it is indeed possible to beat a single food item into the ground, I trust Crescent to make anything well. I finally cracked it open last week, to make her Cornmeal-Oatmeal Cranberry-Orange Loaf. The bread itself was definitely above average, cakey and moist and everything it should be in Crescent’s magical kitchen, but I was astonished to see that the recipe called for orange zest without making use of the orange juice that would be left over!

Well, I said to myself, we’ll just fix that.

So I made this glaze and holy cannoli, it’s amazing. I understand that part of the point of having a food blog is to toot one’s own horn, and I try not to do that too much, but, really, I am a GENIUS. I had my doubts when this stuff first started heating up on the stove - the five-spice powder + Cointreau was a bit overpowering - but once it started to thicken, any sharpness mellowed and I considered buying a funnel so that I could just pour it directly down my throat. That method, however, would neglect the cornbread itself, with which this goes brilliantly. I’ll mention that all of the measurements for the glaze should end with “or so”, since I added a bit of this and a sprinkle of that. All raves aside, I can say no more other than that you really need to drop whatever you’re doing and make this. You know, now.

Cranberry-Orange Cornbread with Five-Spice Glaze
adapted, and in some cases, directly copied, from a recipe by Crescent Dragonwagon

vegetable oil cooking spray
1 1/2 cups unbleached white flour
1/3 cup stone-ground yellow cornmeal
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
3 tablespoons mild vegetable oil
1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons buttermilk (I used half milk and half yogurt)
finely grated zest of 1 orange - save the juice!
1 cup cranberries, washed, picked over, and coarsely chopped
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1/4 cup rolled oats

Preheat the oven to 350F. Coat an 8″x8″ pan with oil. Sift together flour, cornmeal, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, and salt into a large bowl. In a separate bowl whisk together eggs, oil, buttermilk, and orange zest. In a third bowl combine cranberries, pecans, and oatmeal. Sprinkle a tablespoon of flour mixture over them, and toss well.

Quickly combine flour mixture and egg mixture, using as few strokes as possible. Gently stir in the cranberry mixture. The batter should be stiff. Spoon batter into prepared pan and bake 45-55 minutes. Check two-thirds of the way through the baking period; if the loaves are browning excessively, tent them loosely with foil.

Let the baked bread cool for 10 minutes in the pan, then run a thin knife around the edge of the pan and turn the loaf out. Drizzle with glaze: in a saucepan, combine…

1/2 cup powdered raw sugar (I used Mexican sugar)
juice from the orange you zested
a splash of Cointreau
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon Chinese five-spice powder

Bring to a boil and cook, stirring constantly, until reduced to a thick glaze. (This will go fast - watch it!) Pour it on, baby.

→ 7 CommentsCategories: autumn · baked · breakfast · desserts · fruity · pantry-dependent · quickbreads · snacks · wintery

Sweet Potato and Corn Chowder

November 1, 2008 · 4 Comments

Today is a monumental day in the Lauren Mitchell History of October: it’s the second day in a row that I have off from work. My days have been going thus: wake up. Go to work. Come home. Don’t go out for fear that I’ll get back too late to get enough sleep. Shower. Sleep. Repeat.

Don’t get me wrong - I love the work. I doubt I could ever get tired of chopping up vegetables. I love being around other people who spend their waking hours thinking about food; I love to know that I’m in a place where I can learn about the ideals of taste. I knew I’d be saying goodbye to a social life when I started doing this work, though, and boy have I ever. I’ve been starting to make myself go out, though - there’s so much great stuff going on in this town, and I’m realizing, if only by the fantastic percentage of cookbooks taking up my shelves, that I risk losing balance. Today when I went to Powell’s I bought four books that have nothing to do with food. I didn’t even go near the cookbook room. (But then, of course, I went to Whole Foods, and I came home and put a crazy brown sugar glaze on some cranberry-orange cornbread. More on that next week.)

So this is the kind of food that comes from me when I don’t necessarily want to think about cooking in the sense that I’ll be chopping vegetables all day - but that doesn’t mean it’s not delicious, because it is. This the result of some leftovers from a farmers’ market trip a couple of weeks ago, and a smile at the bunch of sage I just took down from drying.

It’s also a real effort made to use fake meat. I have many hesitations when it comes to soysage, but the patties that Morningstar makes are actually quite good, and they go terrifically with that dry, earthy punch of sage. If you’re an omnivore and want to use real sausage, ease up on the butter. I also added a couple of tablespoons of goat cheese when I made it, but it was really just to use up the end of the log. I won’t note it in the recipe, but throwing it in certainly doesn’t hurt. Apologies for the mediocre photo.

Sweet Potato and Corn Chowder
serves 4-6

2 tablespoons butter
2 soysage patties (Morningstar highly recommended), diced
1 fist-sized white onion, thinly sliced
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 tablespoon dried sage
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
kernels from 2 ears corn
1 medium-sized sweet potato, peeled and cut into 1″ pieces
2 cups vegetable broth
2 cups milk

In a soup pot over medium heat, melt butter. Add soysage, onion, garlic, sage, salt, and pepper. Cook until onions soften, 5-7 minutes. Add remaining ingredients, bring to a boil, then drop to a simmer and cook until sweet potatoes and corn are cooked through and flavors are combined, about 20-25 minutes.

→ 4 CommentsCategories: autumn · mains · one-dish meals · soup

The Best Avocado Sandwich Ever

November 1, 2008 · 5 Comments

I’m writing up a post on sweet potato-corn chowder, but I couldn’t let this sandwich go unheralded. So here’s a short intermission: If I ate this every day until I died, I’d be happy. Red or white onions are fine. I used a toasted English muffin, but I’ve yet to put this on any kind of bread that didn’t work.

It’s half a sliced avocado, an ounce of cream cheese, a few thin slices of onion, and mango chutney.

→ 5 CommentsCategories: sandwiches · snacks · under 5 ingredients

Roasted Eggplant-Pepper Salad (Кьопоолу)

October 6, 2008 · 6 Comments

One of the first Bulgarian language sessions we ever had was on food. We learned how to say, “I like honey” and “I don’t like honey.” We learned the words for butter (краве масло), milk (прясно мляко), tomatoes (домати), apples (ябълки). Before long, we were reading menus with aplomb and bumbling through restaurant orders like true expats. We learned that you don’t much use conditional tenses to be polite - none of this, “Could I get…?” It’s just “For me, the fish.” If you’re really sweet, you say please. My Bulgarian friends would laugh at us Americans who would always emphasize the wrong syllable in “banitsa” and who had to be trained in toning down on the thank yous. (Lots of places think that “thank you” should be reserved for cases of extreme gratitude.)

My Bulgarian food vocabulary god to be pretty good, especially after working on a cookbook that circulated among volunteers, with a glossary of food terms at the back. For example, I’ll never be able to dislodge from my poor brain the translation of fenugreek. (Сминдух.) Think of the useful fact that could take the place of сминдух! Quantum physics? Sorry, out of room. Сминдух stays.

One word that always tripped me up, though, was кьопоолу. I’d see it on a menu and frankly, it terrified me. As soon as I opened my mouth in front of any waitress I was at a disadvantage because she’d hear my accent and know I needed her careful ear; I didn’t want the added emotional expense of having these unctuous syllables piling up around my tongue. Pointing to the fatal word on the menu and asking the simple question, “What is this?” No! Too much to bear! Could I please have the fries please please? Thank you. Insert giant American smile of flustered confusion.

Finally, a year in, I was talking with a Bulgarian friend and asked him what he’d done that weekend.

“I made кьопоолу,” he said.

“Huh?” I said.

“Кьопоолу.” he said. Then he pronounced it very patiently and carefully for me. KYO-po-loo. Then - then! - he told me what it was. And I’ve ordered it from every menu I’ve seen it on since. You can tell it’s going to be good when you smell the eggplants being grilled as you walk in the restaurant.

Кьопоолу - kyopolu - is considered a salad to Bulgarians, but it’s more of a chunky sauce in the American lexicon, great on crostini. It’s really just roasted vegetable heaven, is all, but without any of that slime that one may consider at the thought of room-temperature roasted veggies. Don’t go overboard with fresh garlic - it only needs the kick of one clove. (Don’t worry; you’re putting a whole head of roasted garlic in there, so you won’t be lacking.) You can’t eat just one bite of this stuff. It’s addictive. Mediterranean crack, I like to call it.

You might want to make double.

Roasted Eggplant-Pepper Salad (Кьопоолу)
makes about 1 1/2 cups

1 red bell pepper, roasted and peeled
6 finger-sized eggplants, roasted and peeled
1 head garlic, roasted and peeled, plus one fresh clove garlic, minced
1/4 cup minced parsley
2 tablespoons olive oil

Put everything but the olive oil down on a big cutting board and chop it up together pretty finely. (See picture.) Put in a bowl, add olive oil and stir gently, then let sit for at least 30 minutes. Serve at room temperature on bread spread with soft goat cheese, or maybe a little tofutti cream cheese.

→ 6 CommentsCategories: appetizers · neo-bulgo · salads · snacks · summer · under 5 ingredients · vegan

End of Summer Bean Salad

September 28, 2008 · 2 Comments

Well, it’s been quite a rowdy couple of weeks! For some reason, I didn’t expect to be that stressed out during the week that I both started a new career and moved into my apartment in a new town. Total blood pressure rocket! Who knew?

So I cook now for a living. I’m definitely at the bottom of the totem pole, but I’m at a good place, with good people around me who are patient and encouraging, so while the job is far from easy, it’s feeling right so far. And right is all I need. I’m still having the occasional “What on earth am I doing in this country?” but I’ve been finding ways to get through those moments, and things are rolling along.

I’ve got the weekend off, and so far, I haven’t really left the house. Not even for the farmers’ market eight blocks away. This morning I slept in, read a magazine that told me how to organize every facet of my sorry existence, and put garlic, beets, and squash in the oven to roast for later eats. I also threw some white beans in to soak and thought about how I never would have had the patience to soak dry beans before I left for Peace Corps. Tonight I cooked the beans through and tossed them together with the odds and ends of jars left over from a wedding shower my roommate had thrown for her sister last weekend.

For many years, I considered a bean salad something to be avoided at potlucks. They were canned kidney beans mixed with overcooked green beans, saturated with Italian dressing. It kept on showing up in buffets everywhere I went, and it continued to win only an averted gaze from my roving eyes. It wasn’t until I lived in Bulgaria that I finally gave in and tried cold tart white beans (which, in Bulgarian, are called “bob”. That was one of the first Bulgarian words that I learned, and still one of my favorites) - and, lo and behold, they were tasty! Not mush, not loaded with chemically-thickened dressing or, heaven forbid, ketchup. Ever since, I’ve been a big fan, and whenever I put beans on to soak, I expect that I’ll end up making a little salad with at least a few of them.

So here’s a great fridge dump white bean salad. No, you don’t get measurements. Trust yourself. If you don’t have some of the ingredients, use something else. Root through the chill chest. Brazenly. If you’ve got a balance between mellow, fresh, and tart, you’ll be safe.

In a bowl combine a few handfuls of cooked white beans with some diced red onion, the cloves of a head of roasted garlic (squeeze ‘em out like toothpaste), a few capers, some chopped canned artichoke hearts, a handful of halved cherry tomatoes, five or six quartered mini mozzarella balls (bocconcini), six or seven trimmed halved green beans, a little chiffonaded basil, a little chopped parsley, and a couple of glugs each of rice wine vinegar and decent olive oil. Salt and pepper to taste. Eat - with bread, if you’ve got it.

→ 2 CommentsCategories: salads · snacks · summer

Mango Meringue Pie

September 15, 2008 · 8 Comments

There’s a scene in Kissing Jessica Stein when the two main characters are discussing the phenomenon known as Sexy Ugly. Famous men falling into this category include: Mick Jagger, Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, and Alan Rickman. (I’m adding Alton Brown to the list as well.) Upon doing some more research into this descriptor, I found only one woman who is commonly considered for the prize - Sarah Jessica Parker. We could talk about this at length, taking any one of the several levels offered up for discussion, but this is a food blog, not my gender studies thesis. Which was excellent, by the way. (And what about Janeane Garofalo?)

Yesterday I made a pie. I screwed it up in several ways, but oh my heavens is it still delicious. This, friends, is the Lyle Lovett of pies - the ugliest sexiest pie I’ve ever made.

My biggest mistake was overbeating the egg whites. I’d never done that before, and I always figured that you’d have to try awfully hard to actually get them to such a point. Turns out, not so much with the trying.

Another stellar move: after cooking the mango curd, I rinsed out a bowl to store it in the fridge for a bit, and I didn’t toss out every last drop of the rinse water, so when I poured in the curd, there appeared little pockets of non-curd liquid that I cursed at and mopped up with a paper towel. This was a Sunday afternoon full of pitfalls. I’m sure I avoided a few of them by cheating on the pie crust. (Store bought! I refuse to feel guilty. I have made hundreds of great pie crusts. Well, maybe tens. But I’ve put in my time. I can buy a frozen pie crust from Whole Foods now and again. So can you. It’s okay.)

In the end, after all my fussin’ and cussin’, when the pie came out of the oven, it was ugly as sin and just as good. The mango curd was strained not once but twice, making it super silky and light. The meringue has just a bit of sugar, and while I would recommend not overbeating the egg whites, this is proof that life goes on even when the albumen disagrees with you. I served this on a plate that’s seen five too many dishwasher cycles - it seems only fitting. And I’m eating it with ginger chips from Trader Joe’s. You could throw some powdered ginger in the meringue and/or the curd for the same effect. Or maybe crystallized ginger in the crust, if you eschew the frozen foods section and make your own crust. Ooh, that’d be good. You’d also do well to serve it with some toasted coconut. But don’t go makin’ it too pretty.

Lyle Lovett Sexy Ugly Pie
aka Mango Meringue Pie
makes 1 pie

1 good quality pie crust

2 large dead-ripe mangoes, peeled and roughly diced
quick squeeze of lemon or lime juice
1/2 cup plus 2 teaspoons sugar
pinch of salt
8 eggs, separated
2 tablespoons butter

Preheat to 400F. Prick holes in the pie crust with a fork and put in the oven to prebake until very lightly done, about 30 minutes. Set aside.

While crust prebakes, combine mango, lemon juice, 1/2 cup sugar, and salt in the blender, and puree until smooth. Add egg yolks and buzz it again. (We’ll use the egg whites in a little while.) Strain mixture through a sieve, discarding remaining pulp, and put it in either a very thick-bottomed saucepan or the top of a double boiler, with the butter.

Cook on low heat, stirring almost constantly, until mixture starts to thicken, 10-15 minutes. Strain it again. Let cool at room temperature, then pour into a bowl and cover with plastic wrap - make sure the plastic wrap is touching the whole surface of the mango curd, so no condensation occurs. Refrigerate at least an hour.

Preheat to 350F. Pour mango curd into prebaked pie crust and bake 50-60 minutes or until curd is still just slightly wobbly in the middle. Turn off the convection heat and fire up the broiler to high. Whip egg whites with remaining 2 teaspoons sugar until peaks form, then pile it on top of the pie, making sure to spread the meringue enough that it covers the edges of the filling. Broil until it starts to brown, then remove from oven and use your superhuman strength to wait until it cools a bit before you slice into it.

ps. Yes, I saw the Keri Russell pie movie.

→ 8 CommentsCategories: baked · desserts · fruity · pies · summer

blueberry muffins with extra lovins

September 8, 2008 · 5 Comments

Hello dear Parsnippians! I bet you thought I disappeared, didn’t you? Ha! Fooled you. I am indeed still up and at ‘em - only now I’m in Portland, OR. Not Bulgaria, not Asheville, not in the stressville that was my life the week before I hauled it cross country to land in this strange utopia. But now I’ve got a job, an apartment, a (fancy) cell phone. So I’m set. I’ve got a couple of weeks before I start working, so I’ve been spending time getting to know the area. I drove out to Multnomah Falls last Tuesday - that’s where the top and bottom pictures are from.

Right now I’m crashing with a friend who’s got a giant, beautiful house within walking distance of the nearest Whole Foods - I only wish she were home more often so I could show my gratitude to her by cooking her more dinners! This morning I baked up some nice blueberry muffins and threw in some ginger and citrus peels. If I don’t scarf them down plain, I might take the time to spread some ginger pear butter on them - I made that a few days ago. You’ll get the recipe for that, too. Why not?

If you wanted to, you could veganize this by making the usual substitutions - but here’s an idea: use pear butter instead of the egg. Yes? Yes.

Blueberry Ginger Orange Muffins
makes 12

1 cup half-and-half
1/3 cup melted butter
1 egg
1/2 cup sugar
2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger
grated zest of 1 orange
grated zest of 1/2 lemon
60 or so blueberries

Preheat to 400F and grease 12 muffin tins. In a small bowl combine half-and-half, melted butter, egg, and sugar. In a large bowl sift together flour, baking powder, and salt. (If you use kosher salt, put that in with the liquids instead, to give it more chance to dissolve.) Combine the two and mix until it just barely comes together. Add ginger and zests and give it another couple of stirs.

Fill muffin tins half full with batter. Go through and put about 5 blueberries on each muffin. (This will keep you from getting purple streaky muffins, which would happen if you had mixed the blueberries in the bowl. This is especially needed with frozen blueberries.) Top with remaining batter. Bake ‘em for 20 minutes or until a tester comes out clean. Let sit for 2 minutes, then remove from pan.

Ginger Pear Butter
makes 1 cup

3 pears, peeled, cored, and roughly chopped
1/2″ fresh ginger, finely grated
juice and grated zest of 1/2 lemon
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup water

Throw all that in a heavy-bottomed pan over medium heat until water comes to a boil. Turn the heat down to low, mash the pears up, and cook, stirring frequently, until it reaches a thick, spreadable consistency.

What you’re essentially doing here is cooking most of the water out of the pears, so you don’t need any grand cooking skills to do this - just patience. This is a low-n-slow dish.

→ 5 CommentsCategories: baked · breakfast · fruity · quickbreads · snacks · summer · vegan