parsnips aplenty

Entries categorized as ‘breakfast’

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.

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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.

Categories: autumn · baked · breakfast · desserts · fruity · pantry-dependent · quickbreads · snacks · wintery

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.

Categories: baked · breakfast · fruity · quickbreads · snacks · summer · vegan

Pomegranate Molasses and Sheep’s Cheese Biscuits

June 16, 2008 · 6 Comments

                                     

Woke up this morning.  Talked to my parents.  Asked Dad, “What should I have for breakfast?”  Dad said, “Um… pomegranates, scones, garlic.”  I said, “Well, I could do the first two.”

Based on Crescent Dragonwagon’s biscuit recipe from Dairy Hollow Soup and Bread.  These are great.  Strong flavors pack a delightful punch.  Drown them in honey.  ‘Scuse my brevity - I’ve got to go eat more.  Mmmph.

                               

Pomegranate Molasses and Sheep’s Cheese Biscuits
makes 16

2 cups flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup cold butter, cubed
1/4 cup grated fresh sheep’s milk cheese
1/4 cup pomegranate molasses
3/4 cup milk
sesame seeds
honey, for serving

Preheat to 425F.  Sift flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together into a large bowl.  Add butter and cheese and incorporate into the dry mixture with your fingertips, a pastry cutter, or two forks, until the whole thing is a little coarser than coarse cornmeal and a little finer than peas.  Combine milk and pomegranate molasses and stir thoroughly; add about 2/3 cup of this mixture to the bowl and give it a few strokes with a fork.  If it’s still too dry, add remaining liquid.  This dough should barely hold together as you dump it out onto a floured work surface.  (And I do mean barely.  Proper biscuits require trust.)  Pat it together into a square and use a pizza cutter to slice it into 16 pieces.

                                   

Why aren’t we making nice round biscuits?, you may ask.  Because this method insures the least possible amount of dough handling.  If you want to use up all your biscuit dough and you make circular biscuits, you’re going to have to do another couple of rounds of kneading the dough - which makes for a very Not Perfect Biscuit.

Sprinkle the top with sesame seeds, load these onto a baking sheet, and pop ‘em in the oven for about 15 minutes.  Remove to a linen-lined basket and don’t be shy with that honey.

                                          

Categories: baked · breakfast · snacks

The Perfect Muffin: Matcha, White Chocolate, Rose Petals

May 4, 2008 · 7 Comments

                                          

This weekend, I went to the Artmospheric music and art festival, where I would have had a great time save the fact that there was inescapably loud pounding electronic music playing for 20 out of every 24 hours.  I was so happy to be out in the middle of nowhere, on a stunning mountain in my favorite region of Bulgaria, but I am flabbergasted at the amount of sleep I did not get.  I returned home last night, had a cup of tea, and slept for 10 hours.  I’m still a bit hazy, so I’m just going to give you this muffin recipe and say that I don’t know how I ever lived a satisfactory life before I made these last week.  Seriously.

Matcha Muffins with White Chocolate and Rose Petals
makes 12

2 cups flour
2/3 cup sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2-3 tablespoons matcha green tea powder
1 cup yogurt
1/4 cup oil
1 egg
petals of 10 dried rosebuds
3/4 cup white chocolate chunks

Preheat to 350F and butter a 12-cup muffin tin. In a large bowl sift together flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and matcha powder. In a small bowl combine yogurt, oil, egg, and rosebuds. Let this sit for about 10 minutes to let the rose petals soften a bit, then pour wet into dry and mix until just barely combined. Fold in white chocolate and divide mixture evenly between muffin tin cups. Bake 15-20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean, being very careful not to overbake. Eat.

Categories: baked · breakfast · pantry-dependent · quickbreads

Carob Quinoa Waffles

April 26, 2008 · 11 Comments

Well, all that talk last time about my lack of breakfast made me want some breakfast.  And here it is, Saturday - no classes, first day of Easter vacation (Orthodox churches do Easter a few weeks later) - and I’ve got a hankering for waffles.  You heard me.  A hankering.

I have only a couple of cookbooks here with me - the rest are lolling about on my parents’ bookshelf, awaiting my imminent return - and none of them has a waffle recipe, so I did a Food Blog Search and found a recipe on Nook & Pantry that looked worthwhile.  I still had some leftover quinoa, though, and some carob syrup that I found in Greece, so I figured, what the hell, I’m feeling adventurous.  Carob syrup was something I was very surprised to find - I’d always seen it powdered - but I’ve used up almost the whole bottle by just pouring a few teaspoons in a glass of milk, and I didn’t want to finish it off without having done something interesting.  So carob waffles it is! 

Carob, an ingredient often maligned because it was so frequently substituted for chocolate 20 years ago when those loopy health food nuts loved substituting everything.  (Some of them are still substituting tofu for cheese.  It’s never going to work, people.)  Now that we know that chocolate is good for you, though, carob has dropped back by the wayside, but I think it’s about time it found its own niche.  I’m not saying this is the perfect vehicle for it, but I sure liked it well enough, and I think it works. 

At the bottom I linked to a source to buy carob syrup for yourself, and also to a recipe to make it from carob powder, but you’d probably do okay just adding carob powder to a scant cup of liquid (instead of the 3/4 cup in total that the milk + yogurt yields), whisking in enough that it turns a rich brown.  I’m going to tell you now, this is some serious, substantial hippie food - but don’t worry, they’re not hockey pucks.  (Try to veganize them by leaving out the eggs, though, and they will be.)

And thank god I finally finished up that quinoa - I made way too much a few days ago.  I’m finding, though, that I love adding it to things I wouldn’t normally expect it in.  (But really, who expects quinoa yet?  It’s still got a bit of a foodies-only gloss on it that is slowly being rubbed off.)  These little seeds give a fun, not daunting, chewiness, crisping things up just a bit, in all the right places.

I topped them off with grape molasses, another little jarful I picked up in Istanbul and am still trying to use up.  (I did some serious shopping in Istanbul.  Anyone want some saffron?  I’ve got tons.)  These would be fine with cane molasses, maple syrup, fruit syrup, or even date syrup - carob and dates go well together.

Carob Quinoa Waffles
makes 4-6, depending on your waffle iron

1 cup all purpose flour
3/4 cup cooked quinoa (preferably a day or two old, so it’s dried out a little)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup plain yogurt or milk
1/4 cup carob syrup
2 tablespoons oil
1 egg, separated, plus 1 extra egg white
nonstick cooking spray

Heat waffle iron.  In a large bowl mix together flour, quinoa, salt, and baking soda.  In a separate bowl combine milk, yogurt, carob syrup, oil, and egg yolk, and stir well.  Pour wet into dry and mix just until it’s barely combined.  Whisk egg whites into soft peaks and fold into batter.  Cook in waffle iron according to its maker’s directions.  Top with butter, fruit, syrup, powdered sugar?

Learn more about carob

Make your own carob syrup (note - I haven’t tested this recipe)

Buy your own carob syrup

 Also: I’m serious about the saffron.  Free.  I have too much.  Leave a comment.  We’ll be in touch.

Categories: breakfast · pantry-dependent