non-casein

So I had a little cooking debacle yesterday, of which I wish, now, that I had stopped to snap a photo, because it was kind of Biblical in its chthonic oozy bubbling horribleness.   There is just something about the texture and movement of gently-belching batter magma — batter that was supposed to turn into chocolate cupcakes and for some eldritch reason did not — that is really hard to describe in text.  Those of you who have ever experienced Epic Cake Fail will understand.

Anyhow, the short story is that although one of my batches of cupcakes did not succeed, the other one did, and so my small cupcake-decorating party went off without a hitch.  My Belovedary, plus two of our friends, R and M, came over to hang out and shoot the breeze and decorate cupcakes.

For those of you looking for a relaxing way to spend some time on a weekend afternoon with friends that doesn’t cost too much money, you could do much worse than decorating cupcakes.  A small tube of marzipan (a little goes a long way!), some food coloring, a few kinds of shiny decorating sugar or sprinkles or whatever moves you (or indeed whatever you have kicking around the back of your cupboards), and a few kinds of small candies if you like, and you’re off to the races.  You can make your own cupcakes, or buy them if you prefer.  The point is that you spend a couple hours sitting around the kitchen table with your friends. It’s very relaxing to do something creative and visual that is ultimately totally low-stakes and inconsequential because of the fact that you’ll be eating it later.  And one of the great things about doing something like this is that you can customize your recipes to your dietary needs: everything you see below is vegan, to accommodate my dairy protein allergy.

Without further ado, a little gallery of some of the results!

R made this bright, sunny sparkler that I loved.

M did some masterful food-coloring paint-mixing, and adorned mini marshmallows.

R's sweet little marzipan nest of eggs, so cute.

My Belovedary made marzipan dinosaur eggs in the marzipan grass.

I made a marzipan octopus.

And a marzipan piggy, complete with itty-bitty cloven hooves and a curly tail.

The marzipan proved quite popular, and unexpectedly inspiring.  In fact, my two favorites that came out of the whole proceedings were both made of undyed marzipan.  One was made by M:

Behold: Marzipanhenge!

And the very best one of all was the one that my Belovedary made for me:

It's a SQUID! Made of marzipan. With hand-painted chromatophores.

It’s a squid!  An adorable ickle marzipan squid!  I was so excited I squealed like a little girl, which I suppose tells you a lot about the kind of little girl I was and the kind of person I turned out to be, but perhaps most of all it tells you that I have married very, very well.

Today is my birthday, one of those that ends in a zero.

As is hobbit custom (and I may be on the tall side but my feet have a family resemblance) I am giving presents today.  The first present is an ongoing present.  Or at least it is to be ongoing, and I hope it is a present.

To wit, I’ve recently begun experimenting with podcasting, and by recently, I mean, well, so recently that I basically don’t know what the hell I’m doing yet, but I figure I’ll work it out as I go along.  If you’d like, you can come along for the ride as I read aloud, in the form of podcasts, an as yet unpublished short novel I wrote called The Unauthorized True Story of the Frog Prince.  It is, as you may surmise from the title, a novel suitable for (at least some) children, although it is my hope that grownups will also enjoy it.

I’ll put up the first two chapters today, and follow up with two more chapters later in the week, and continue in that general vein until such time as I run out of book.  Depending on how this goes, I may, after that, do the same with another of my as yet unpublished, suitable for all ages, books.  We Shall See.

The Unauthorized True Story of the Frog Prince, Introduction

The Unauthorized True Story of the Frog Prince, Chapter One

Your other present is an illustrated recipe that shows and tells you how to make your own whole wheat pita bread from scratch.  Pita bread, whether white or whole wheat, is about 200% yummier when freshly made than when you buy it in plastic bags from the market.  It is also easy, one of the easiest breads I know.  And it is fun, because it is magic, even more magic than bread is under ordinary circumstances, which is not an inconsiderable amount of magic.  I mean, it’s bread!  And it blows up like a balloon when you cook it!

Whole Wheat Pita

3 cups whole wheat or white whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons dry baking yeast (or 1 packet, which is about 2 1/2 teaspoons, but it works)
2 teaspoons sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 Tablespoons olive oil
1 cup hot (not boiling) water

Combine all ingredients in the mixing bowl and mix until it forms a shaggy dough.  If the dough seems stiff, and it well may, add an extra tablespoon or two of water.  Add one tablespoon, mix for a bit, and only add the second tablespoon if you really need it.

Just-mixed, shaggy pita dough

Once the dough has come together, begin kneading instead of mixing.  This recipe is the perfect size to make in a standard KitchenAid mixer, by the way, so if you have one (or a similar mixer), now’s the time to get out your dough hook.  You can, of course, also make it by hand… millions of people do, every day.  Knead 12 minutes in the KitchenAid, or about 15 by hand.

When you knead this or any dough, bear in mind that it is difficult to overknead bread, particularly if you are kneading by hand, but it is easy to leave the bread under-kneaded.  Under-kneaded doughs will produce bread with a cardboardy or cakey texture, and they will not rise well: the gluten essentially forms elastic gas- and steam-filled bubbles (the gases come from the yeast), and this is what makes bread rise.  And all yeasted breads, even flatbreads like pita, need to rise.

How do you tell if you have underkneaded your bread?  Texture, partly, will tell you.  Properly kneaded bread has a lively spring to it, and will pop back into shape quickly if you dimple it with a finger.  But another way to tell is to see whether the gluten breaks easily, or whether it stretches smoothly.  If you take your dough and form it into a ball, then pull the sides of the ball down toward the underside, then examine the surface of the dough, what you see will tell you what you need (or knead) to know.

In this first picture (taken about 4 minutes into kneading) you can see how rough and shaggy the surface of the ball looks.  This is because as I pulled the dough, the gluten broke instead of stretching.

Under-kneaded pita dough

In this second picture (taken after the full 12 minutes of machine kneading), the surface of the ball is smooth and sleek.  The gluten is now stretchy, and will form nice long continuous sheets that do not break easily.

Well-kneaded pita dough

Once your bread is well-kneaded, form it into a ball, put it in a large bowl, cover it with a wet kitchen towel.  You could also use a piece of plastic wrap, or a plate, or a shower cap — some folks swear by them — whatever you’ve got handy that’ll cover the bowl to keep the dough from getting dried out or having things fall in.  (Like exploratory cats, ahem.)

Let the dough rise for an hour or so.  More if you get distracted.  The purpose of this rise is to develop gluten (it will develop further as the dough sits) and flavor due to yeast activity, not to raise the loaves into bakeable shape, so if it sits for a couple of hours it’s not a big thing, especially if your kitchen is cool and your bread dough thus slower to rise.

Punch down your dough.  This just means to press the dough down, forcing the gases out of it.  The flat of your fist works well for this, but you don’t have to actually punch.  Just deflating the dough is all you really have to do.

Next, divide the dough into 8 roughly equal pieces.  Shape each piece into a ball.

Pita dough, divided into eight pieces and rolled into balls

Preheat your oven to 500 degrees F.  Space the racks evenly so that one is near the bottom and the other is in the middle.

With a rolling pin (use an empty or well-sealed round glass bottle if you don’t have a rolling pin), roll the balls out into thin rounds, about 1/4 inch thick.

Rolling out pita. They won't be perfectly round, that's part of the charm.

Place the rolled-out rounds on lightly-oiled cookie sheets or other large flat pans and cover with kitchen towels.  Let them stand for about 20 minutes.

Put the first pan of pita in the bottom rack of the oven and bake 5 minutes.  They will puff up like balloons from the steam that gets generated inside them.  (If they don’t, your oven’s too cool, so bump the heat up another 15 degrees or so and try again with the next panful.  Un-puffed pita are still tasty, so don’t despair.)

Pita just out of the oven. Some inflate wonderfully, others are party poopers. But even the party poopers taste good.

After the initial 5-minute baking period, move the pan to the upper rack and bake another 2-3 minutes until just golden.  Do not overbake or they’ll become crispy like crackers.

When you move the first pan off the bottom rack, you can put the second pan in, and cycle the pans through until all 8 of your pitas are baked.

Remove finished pitas from the pan and place on a plate or in a shallow basket and cover loosely with a kitchen towel or cloth napkin.  You want to trap some of the heat, but not to the extent of also trapping lots of steam and making the pita soggy.

Serve hot, perhaps as part of a birthday-eve dinner, which is what I did with these.  We ate them with hummus, cucumber and red bell pepper slices, and gorgeous gravlax and  smoked sardines (aka Crack Fish) produced by the inimitable Barbara of Neopol Savory Smokery.

p.s.  I will simply note here, as a way of making my wishes known: should the spirit move you to give me a birthday present of some kind, the gift I would enjoy the most is a donation made in my name to pioneering indie comprehensive sex ed website Scarleteen, which is currently making your sex-ed support dollar go even farther with a matching grant program.  I thank you for your generosity and your compassion for all the people (not all of them kids!) for whom Scarleteen is their sole source of reliable information about sex, reproduction, and their own sexual/reproductive health.

Note:  Reading this in a feed? Comment at
http://www.hanneblank.com/blog/2009/02/24/happy-birthday-to-you/

One of my quiet devotions in the food world is Shaker cooking.  I grew up near, and sometimes in, the city of Shaker Heights, Ohio, an early twentieth-century “streetar suburb” of Cleveland where at one point there had been a substantial Shaker presence.  The Shakers were, of course, long gone by the time there were streetcars: their community, which was called the North Union Settlement or, by some, The Valley of God’s Pleasures (and isn’t that a fantastic monicker?) reached its peak in the mid-19th century and had faded into near obscurity by the time the Shakers sold their land to the Van Sweringen brothers who went on to establish it as a town.

But I do digress.  The point is, I grew up in an area that had a Shaker history, and a number of Shaker recipes had made their way into the local culinary vernacular.  Since then I have, as they’ve come my way, collected Shaker recipes, which I have found to be as trustworthy as Shaker carpentry and created in much the same spirit: Shaker food is not fancy, in fact it is quite plain, but it is very sturdy and beautiful.

In keeping with the Shaker spirit of economy and resource management, Shaker cooking is also thrifty and geared toward making much of little.  Certainly we can all, particularly in straitened times, do with more of that.

Best of all, these pies are very simple to produce, and, as the Shakers well knew, simplicity is a gift.  Pies like these are easy enough, and good enough, to make you wonder why you would ever buy a pie.

In that spirit, I offer you my two favorite Shaker pie recipes.  Both are winter pies, not summer pies, although I suppose you could make them in summer if you wanted.   They have the additional attraction of being non-dairy, and the cranberry-raisin is vegan so long as you eat some form of granulated sugar. I will presume for the sake of argument when presenting these that you already have a pie crust recipe in hand and know what to do with it.

Shaker Cranberry-Raisin Pie

crust for double-crust 9 inch pie

1 to 1.5 cups fresh raw whole cranberries, washed and stemmed
one-half to 1 cup seedless raisins (you may substitute dried sweet cherries, dried blueberries, or other small sweet dried fruit if you prefer)
3/4 cup sugar
pinch salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 Tablespoon all-purpose flour

Preheat oven to 350F.  Line pie dish with bottom crust.

In a bowl mix fruit, dried fruit, sugar, salt, vanilla, and flour with a fork.  The variable amounts of cranberries to dried fruit allow you to adjust the sweetness of the finished pie.  If you use equal amounts of cranberries and dried fruit, you can expect a quite sweet pie, for the dried fruit is there partly to act as a sweetener.  If you increase the cranberries and decrease the dried fruit it will be more tart.

Pour fruit mixture into prepared pie crust, dispersing sugar evenly, and top with second crust.  Cut several slits (make them decorative if you like) into the top crust so that steam can escape.  Bake at 350F until evenly browned on top and allow to cool completely before cutting.

Note: Cranberries should be plump, smooth, and very hard.  Discard any cranberries that are wrinkled, wet, soft, or seem badly bruised.

The Cranberry-Raisin pie is a homey pie, comforting and surprisingly rich-tasting.  Serve it in narrow slices.  It is very nice with ice cream, and also with tart homemade applesauce.

By contrast, the lemon pie for which I am about to give the recipe is a showstopper.  No one expects a pie made of whole lemons.  Certainly no one expects it to taste as amazing as it does.   Because of the presence of the lemon rind and pith, it has a wonderful marmalade-like taste, a symphonic combination of sweet, sour, and bitter. If you make it with a double crust, it is all the more unexpected since typically both lemon pies and custard pies (of which this is a variant) are single-crust pies.  I prefer it as a double-crust pie, as I feel the extra crust helps balance out the intensity of the filling, but your tastes may well be different.  Do what you feel tastes best.

Shaker Lemon Pie

pie crust for either a single or double-crust 9″ pie

2 lemons, well scrubbed (organic by preference if you can get them)
2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon salt
4 large eggs
4 Tablespoons flour
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (optional)

The Day Before:
Blanch lemons in boiling water for 2 minutes.  Cool in a pan of cold water.  Slice paper-thin, rind and all,  with a sharp knife or, if you have one, a mandoline of some sort, I suppose, although you’d never have caught a Shaker cook with one.  Truly, though, you want to slice the lemon as thinly as you possibly can manage; the thicker the slices the more likely you are to end up with objectionably bitter bits in your pie because the sugar won’t be able to penetrate the rinds properly. Remove the pips as you go.

Combine the lemon slices in a bowl with the salt and sugar.  Mix well to combine, cover, and set aside in the refrigerator for 24 hours.

Assembling The Pie:
Preheat oven to 425F.

Line the pie dish with bottom crust.

In a bowl, whisk together the eggs and flour (and vanilla if using) until smooth.  Add sugar/lemon mixture and mix in carefully with a spatula or wooden spoon until thoroughly combined.  Pour into the bottom crust and gently pat down any protruding lemon slices.  Try to make sure the lemons are more or less evenly distributed throughout the pie.

Add top crust, if using.

Bake for the first 20 minutes at 425F, then reduce heat to 350F and continue baking until pie is well set in the center (test by jiggling the dish — if the center doesn’t shimmy, you’re good to go).

Cool completely before cutting, as the filling finishes setting during the cooling process.  Cutting prematurely will result in filling oozing all over the place like lemon magma, which may or may not appeal to you.  It does not really appeal to me, but some of you people are weird.

Serve the lemon pie with tea, it is a natural pairing.  A little plain unsweetened whipped cream on the pie would not go amiss if you are the type to bother with such a thing, but if not, don’t worry about it.

Both pies keep well.  Because the lemon pie is not a true custard, it does not tend to weep and cannot separate, so if you normally avoid making eggy pies because you suffer from Custard Fear, try this one.

For tedious reasons that do not bear a dissertation at this point, my Belovedary’s doctor has directed him to pursue a course of primarily vegan eating for the next six months.  Dairy and eggs are strictly verboten, and while fish is permitted, meats of all other sorts are meant to be a “major holidays only, if you can’t avoid it” sort of thing.

The Belovedary’s co-workers, it seems, have had a skeptical field day with this, teasing that he’ll never be able to maintain such a regime, and proclaiming with a metaphorical wrist-to-forehead swoon that they would starve to death if they had to go vegan.

This is, of course, all very silly.  But it’s likewise true that many people seem to be terrified of the idea, let alone the reality, of vegan eating and cooking.  My reaction, on the other hand, was “oh, okay, but how do you feel about continuing to use oyster sauce in cooking?”  ( We have decided that, as oysters are considered permissible in Chinese Buddhist vegetarian cooking, and as fish is permitted by the sawbones in question, the oyster sauce can stay.  But if it couldn’t, there are vegan alternatives for it to be had.)

You see, my take on it is that human beings are omnivores, and “omnivore,” by definition, means that you’ll eat anything that is edible.  Therefore the prospect of an entirely-vegetable meal, or even several months or years of entirely-vegetable meals, really shouldn’t bother anyone too much.  Besides, as I have mentioned previously in this blog, you still get to eat French fries (made in vegetable oil) and pie (made with vegetable shortening), to say nothing of things like Fish-Fragrant Eggplant, ratatouille, hummus, mushroom-pecan pate, channa masala, and red beans and rice, so really, I am not so convinced that veganism is a prison sentence.  (Unlike, say, being the captive audience of a militant animal-welfare-wingnut vegan who won’t shut the hell up about it, which is.)

Probably it helps that I was a vegetarian for 11 years of my life, and vegan for two of those, so this is not unfamiliar territory to me.  Probably it also helps that with an allergy to dairy protein, I eat vegan by default any time I don’t eat a meal containing meat or eggs.  But mostly, I think the way to stop being scared and feeling deprived when faced with veganism — or with any dietary regime that is limited in some way — is to get into the kitchen and start experimenting.  Its hard to feel like you’re missing out if you’re eating really well within the boundaries of what is available to you.

I bring all this up because, given what we’ve been handed as a household, the content here for at least the next six months or so is likely to be 99.6% vegan.  If you find that offensive, there are about seventy billion other food blogs out there, not a few of them fully and vigorously omnivorous, so don’t let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya.

As for me, I’m looking at it as an opportunity to blog about more dairy-free recipes — that will also, for the time being, be meat- and egg-free, or at least exist in versions that don’t use animal products.  The astute among you will have already realized that just as you can often take a dish that contains animal products and vegetarianize or veganize it by removing and/or replacing the things you don’t want to eat, you can also take vegan recipes and add things to them.  (I myself am partial to a hard-cooked egg or two in my channa masala.)

So what have we been eating since the whitecoated declaration was made?  Noodle soup with tofu and chiles.  Roasted cauliflower, eggplant, and Brussels sprouts. Homemade bread with cashew butter and apricot jam.  Red beans slow-cooked with four kinds of sweet and hot peppers.  Black bean soup enhanced with liberal handfuls of smallage (bunching celery) and poblano chiles.  Aloo ghobi, the Indian potato-and-cauliflower dish.  Oatmeal cookies with dried tart cherries.  Cantonese-style pickled cauliflower.  Hummus sprinkled with diced smoked black and green olives.  Honeycrisp apples, “Shinko” Asian pears, Macoun apples, the last of the year’s peaches.

Tomorrow I will be making an apple pie in the morning.  While it bakes, I’ll prep several pounds of plum tomatoes for gradual caramelizing in a slow oven all day long.  We’ll eat them tossed with pasta, perhaps, or made into an out-of-this-world pesto and smeared on homemade pain de campagne.  Or maybe I’ll marinate some portobello mushroom caps in sherry and soy sauce and olive oil and garlic and grill them on my panini grill, and put caramelized tomatoes on top of each one.

Yeah, I don’t know what I’d eat if I had to go vegan, either.  It’s just so hard to choose.

This is a cellphone photo of my lunch yesterday, which, in this case, was, a serving of a dish I first devised in college when I was poor and had to make something hearty for a vegan potluck.  My roommate at the time christened it, amusingly if not entirely charitably, “Hungry Hungry Hippie.”  (The reference, for those too young to get it, was to the children’s board game Hungry Hungry Hippos, introduced by Hasbro in the late 1970s.)

Hungry Hungry Hippie is one of those dishes for which I will never publish anything like a precise recipe because there really can’t be one.

Nonetheless, I love Hungry Hungry Hippie to this day, and wish to spread the joy.

Hungry Hungry Hippie is, in its most elemental form and as pictured here, a sort of pilaf of cooked seasoned barley tossed with cubed tofu.

It can get plenty fancy if you have the scratch and the interest.

But usually, if you are making Hungry Hungry Hippie, you don’t.

How you make the basic version (and it makes plenty) is like this:

– you take about seven cups of water and you put it in a big heavy-bottomed pot what’s got a lid to it, and you start heating it

– then you flavor the water with a spoonful or two of Vegemite or Marmite, maybe some miso, and some onion powder and garlic powder; the water should end up pretty strongly flavored and a notch or so saltier than you’d want it for soup.  You use the Vegemite or Marmite (I prefer the latter) because it has a lovely strong meaty flavor that goes really well with the barley, and also seems to penetrate and soak into the barley better than anything else.  Don’t use boullion cubes instead of Vegemite or Marmite, it won’t work, it’ll taste of salt and nothing else.

–then you add a couple-three tablespoons of olive oil or whatever kinda oil you got.  Bacon grease is amazing in this, but totally not vegan or vegetarian.  You do what turns you on.

– then you pour in 2 cups of pearled barley and you stir it, and you bring it to a boil

– then you reduce the heat to a low simmer, cover it most of the way, and let it simmer until the barley kernels get to swelling appreciably

– whereupon you give it a stir, turn the heat off, put the lid on tight, and ignore it for a couple hours until all the liquid is absorbed

– at which point you drain and cube a pound or so of firm tofu and toss it into the barley, and reheat the whole thing a little (add another half-cup of liquid if you do it on the stovetop, or else put the whole thing (covered) in the oven at 300F for a bit)

And then you eat it!  Unless, of course, you’d like to add something yummy to it first.

Many things can be added to Hungry Hungry Hippie along with the tofu.  Some combination of sauteed onions, garlic, celery, and mushrooms is good.  Thoroughly caramelized onions are super-duper rockin’.  So are caramelized tomatoes, or little bits of sun-dried tomato.  Sauteed cabbage (sliced thinly) goes into it nicely. So does chopped fresh parsley. And so do chopped up dried tart fruits like unsweetened dried apricots, or cranberries.  When I could, I used to eat it with a dollop of sour cream on top.

But it’s also really tasty (and hella easy) on its own.  I like it with a healthy wodge of black pepper ground on top.

Its many virtues include keeping well, reheating well, being very nutritious, being very filling, having lots of complex carbs that will handily carry you through the day, being high in fiber, and being extremely economical.

Good for hippies and other living things.  Give it a whirl.