Happy Girl Kitchen - Fermentation Workshop

We had a great time today going to a 'Fermentation Workshop' given by Happy Girl Kitchens. This was a wonderful way to spend a Saturday, and we learned how to make sauerkraut, kimchee and kombucha from our favorite source.

The workshop was given in Oakland in a beautiful old Victorian house.

It was a fun group and they fed us a yummy meal - featuring sauerkraut and kimchee. I'm still on the fence about kombucha, but Wikipedia says there is scientific evidence that drinking it might make your liver more efficient. I'm wondering if maybe the kombucha is just introducing more toxins into your system which could skew the results. Do you know any 100 year+ folks that regularly drink kombucha? I'll try it, but I'm still taking my vitamins.

Here are some pics from the workshop.






We brought home our jars of kimchee & sauerkraut to ferment. The house smells like kimchee, but it will be tasty!

North African Roasted Cauliflower

This recipe is derived from the recipe in one of my favorite cookbooks, the Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special. This is even better the next day. Here is the cauliflower we found today at the farmer's market.

Ingredients:

• 1 large cauliflower head, cut into florets
• olive oil to coat
• 6 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 tsp ground caraway sees
• 1 tsp ground coriander
• 1/2 tsp salt

Preheat oven to 450F.

Toss the cauliflower with oil & spices, place on a roasting pan. Bake until the cauliflower is tender and begins to turn golden brown, about 25-30 minutes, stirring occasionally.




The original recipe suggested topping with diced tomatoes and parsley. This is not necessary. just incorporate the cauliflower into your meal standalone or as part of a composed salad. Cilantro would be nice. We had this with leftover chickpea and leek soup.

Mid-Century Potato Salad

We made a salad plate with potato salad, poached salmon, for a mid-century potluck dinner. The recipe came from a 1957 USDA pamphlet Potatoes in Popular Ways. My parents didn't have cookbooks. Maybe people just knew how to cook back then, perhaps we were poor. The ingredients were arranged in typical 1950's style in lettuce cups with lots of parsley for garnish, but the potato salad was not chilled so it didn't mold into nice rounded shapes. It was still good enough that I might try it again. We replaced the canned salmon with the very trendy salmon from a local butcher shop.

Salmon & Potato Salad (1950's style)
1 lb salmon - poached w fennel seeds
Potato Salad (recipe below)
Lettuce cups (this would be iceberg lettuce)
3 tomatoes - sliced
1/2 cucumber, peels & sliced
1 lemon
curly leaf parsley

Arrange 4 molded hemispheres of potato salad on lettuce cups.
Decorate with the other stuff. The fussier, the better.

Potato Salad

4 medium potatoes
2 Tbs finely chopped scallions
1 cup hot dressing (see below)
2 eggs
2 Tbsp finely diced green pepper
1/4 cup finely diced celery
1/4 cup diced cucumbers

Hard boil 2 eggs. Peel & chop.
Peel, dice and cook potatoes. Drain and add onions.
While the potatoes are still hot, add hot dressing to potatoes and onions and stir gently. Allow to cool for 10-15 minutes.

Add remaining ingredients.
Chill for several hours - or consume warm. - up to you.

Dressing

2 Tbs flour
1 Tbs sugar
1 Tsp dry mustard
1 tsp salt
dash cayenne
1 cup milk
1 egg, slightly beaten

Prepare dressing:
Mix flour, sugar, mustard & salt in top of double boiler over heat.
Gradually add milk, stirring continuously untill thickened.
Continue to cook, stirring occasionally for 10 minutes.
Add a small amount of hot liquid to egg, then add egg into hot liquid.
Cook for another 3 minutes.

I recently made the potato salad for a 4th of July potluck, doubling the recipe, using red, un-peeled potatoes and substituting red bell peppers for green.  It fit nicely in grandma's old brown bowl with a sprinkling of paprika instead of the fussy presentation.

Christmas Limas & Fennel Salad

These are some leftovers from New Year's eve. It could have been a Christmas dish - so pretty and seasonally colored. Featured were the Christmas Limas from Rancho Gordo's Heirloom Beans. Next time we will double the quinoa and omit the honey, but other than that, the beans were lovely - cooked simply in a mirepoix of onion, celery and carrot. The Fennel salad was a simple mixture of thinly sliced fennel, celery and red onion; dressed with a lemon and walnut oil vinegrette. A nice complement in texture and flavors as well as color. I should have tried to do the presentation as a tai-ji diagram (yin yang).

There were no pictures, but we had roasted dungeness crabs for Christmas dinner. Jen and Mike were here to help demolish the 4 crabs we purchased from the San Francisco Fish Company. They were very easy to fix, tasty and messy. A nearly perfect meal.

Marinated Tofu

This is so simple - why I never tried this before is beyond me but here it is...

I found this recipe in the 'Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special' cookbook. This is a great cookbook IMHO. I will undoubtedly modify it each time, but you can get the basic idea. It is really good and really easy. My 2 favorite things.

1 cake firm tofu, pressed
3 T soy sauce
1T water
1T toasted sesame oil
1 T tomato paste/pesto
1 t rice vinegar
1 t honey
1/2 t anise (I used Chinese five spice)


Preheat oven to 375 F
Cut the tofu horizontally into 3 slices, then slice vertically into shapes you like.
Combine sauce ingredients and blend.
Arrange the tofu into a baking dish and coat both sides with the sauce. Bake uncovered for 35 minutes, turning the tofu every 10 minutes. When the tofu has a taut, seared appearance and the sauce is mostly evaporated, it is ready to serve.

This works well when you are also roasting vegetables. Just start the tofu 1st, then turn up the heat when the tofu is finished. Unfortunately, this does not result in the same chewy texture due to the steam from the vegetables.

Chickpea and Leek Soup

One of our favorite soups shamelessly copied from Jamie Oliver who copied it from a friend who found it in some undocumented recipe book. Very tasty indeed. This is nice with roasted cauliflower.

Yield: 6

This is a recipe that my Aussie friend Bender found in some old recipe book. It is quick and easy to make and it tastes fantastic. The chickpeas go really creamy and moreish and the leeks go silky and sweet. These are just two simple flavours, and even though I?m a bit of a fresh herbs boy, this lovely light soup is very tasty.

Ingredients:

Chickpea and Leek Soup

• 12 oz chickpeas, soaked overnight in water
• 1 medium potato, peeled
• 6 leek, finely, sliced
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• knob of butter
• 2 cloves of garlic, finely, sliced
• salt
• freshly ground pepper
• 850 ml chicken or vegetable stock
• 2 handful parmesan cheese, grated
• extra virgin olive oil

Directions:

Chickpea and Leek Soup

1. Rinse the soaked chickpeas, cover with water, and cook with the potato until tender.
2. Remove the outer skin of the leeks, slice lengthways from the root up, wash carefully and slice finely.
3. Warm a thick-bottomed pan, and add the tablespoon of oil and the knob of butter. Add the leeks and garhc to the pan, and sweat gently with a good pinch of salt until tender and sweet.
4. Add the drained chickpeas and potato and cook for 1 minute. Add about two-thirds of the stock and simmer for 15 minutes.
5. Purée half the soup in a food processor and leave the other half chunky this gives a lovely smooth comforting feel but also keeps a bit of texture.
6. Now add enough of the remaining stock to achieve the consistency you like. Check for seasoning, and add Parmesan to taste to round off the flavours.
7. This is classy enough for a starter, but I like it best for lunch in a big bowl with a good drizzle of my best peppery extra virgin olive oil, a grinding of black pepper and an extra sprinkling of Parmesan.© Jamie Oliver 2002
   http://www.jamieoliver.com

Gorditas

We made a nice soup of fire roasted tomatoes, beans, posole, and kabocha squash. After giving up on finding gorditas in the local Mission St. groceries, we decided to make them ourselves. We already had a bag of masa harina from the Christmas tamales and white flour from the New Year's ravoli. This is the 2nd attempt at making gorditas today. The 1st batch was made with considerably less flour, mostly masa - and was fried in peanut oil. They were heavy and did not poof up like the ones we had purchased. They were also considerably thicker. after frying, I tried toasting 2 of these in the toaster (our preferred way of cooking the ones from the store) and the thinner one actually puffed up some. In hopes that we are on to something, I'm documenting this next recipe as we go.


1 cup masa harina
1 cup while flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt


Add dry ingredients in food processor. Process while adding hot water in a stream until a ball of dough forms - not too wet or too dry, just right.





Let the ball of dough rest covered for about 20 minutes.

Roll out half the dough on a floured board to about 1/8th inch thickness and cut using a glass or other round object of the desired size.





Fry in a little oil on medium heat for about 2 minutes on each side. Remove from pan and drain on paper towels till cool. Save in fridge till you're ready to pop thm into the toaster.


The downside is they did not taste like we liked - more flour than corn tortilla taste. Next time we will try this with more masa and less flour. I think everything else is right.

The Taste of Tea

We watched The Taste of Tea by Katsuhito Ishii last night. Lauren found it on Netflix and brought it to watch. I absolutely loved this movie. It was a refreshingly different story of a family set in rural Japan. I didn't know there was such a thing as rural Japan. This movie had the feel of a fairy tale, lush and serene with an undercurrent of nature that was ancient, but still vibrant - complete with a haunted forest. The pervasive sounds of birds, wind, rain and crickets felt very right. I forgot how much I loved real rain, the type that suddenly comes and goes; not the heavy fog that passes for rain here.

The story was a slice of time in the life of a family of eccentric, creative, good people. Though never spoken, you could tell there was love and support, but not smothering. Each of the members of the family was living in their own interesting world, with different dreams, ambitions and obstacles. It is hard not to identify with these people and get caught up in the flow of their life.

It is important to brew a nice pot of tea before sitting down with this movie. Definitely a feel-good movie.

Soba Noodles with Pea Sprouts

I seem to be on a streak of inspired cooking. It happens like that, I don't really understand it. Oh well, I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

This weekend we went to the grocery store on 8th and Clement Street again. I was craving bitter melon after last weekend. We had a wonderful bitter melon, tofu and egg dish last night, but I can only write about one thing tonight so I'll do the pea sprouts.

We found these bigger-than-basketball-size plastic bags stuffed with really fresh pea sprouts. They also had fresh turmeric, which was a new one for me.

3 servings soba noodles
1/2 basketball size bag of pea spouts, washed
1 sq inch fresh turmeric, diced
2 sq inch fresh ginger, diced
2/3 head of garlic sliced very thin
1/4 cp tamarind sauce
2 tsp hoisin sauce
1 tsp honey
1 package grape tomatoes, halved
2 serrano peppers, diced

I stir-fried half the bag with minced fresh turmeric, ginger and very thin slices of garlic in some olive and toasted sesame oil. I added soy sauce for liquid. I removed the sprouts after a few minutes and reduced the liquid remaining after adding some hoisin sauce (wanted oyster sauce, but didn't have any), red wine vinegar and a dab of honey.

While all this was going on, we boiled udon noodles about 5 min, drained and rinsed to cool. When the reduced sauce was about right, I tossed the noodles in the skillet to absorb the sauce; poured them into a large serving bowl; arranged the pea sprouts on top; then added sliced grape tomatoes and diced serrano chilies.

It doesn't get much better than this.

Discovering Bitter Melon

We happened to be on Clement St. earlier this week and stopped at one of the big Chinese markets. I picked up 2 vegetables to try, a bitter melon and a silk gourd which was not a silk gourd, but that is another meal.


I spent a few minutes on internet looking for recipe ideas but started getting hungry so I went with a variation of one of the simple dishes. Next time I'm going to try some of the tasty looking dishes on the Hare Krsna website. Come for the chanting - stay for the food.

After trying a few more methods of cooking bitter melon, I believe this is my favorite. The spices work really well with the bitter flavor and the potatoes provide a comforting backdrop to the pungent bite of the squash. The last coking I doubled this recipe (3 medium bitter melons & 4 yukon gold potatoes) and 3 people consumed the entire pan.

Potato and Bitter Melon Hash Browns
This is somewhat reminiscent of the potato and onion hash browns typically served with eggs. In fact this would be really good with eggs.

1 bitter melon (made about 2 cups diced)
fingerling potatoes (also about 2 cups diced)
2 Tbs ghee
turmeric
salt
asafoetida
1 Tbs mustard seeds
1 sprig of fresh curry leaves
red chili powder
1.5 square inch of ginger finely diced
sliced jalapeño peppers

Slice and dice the bitter melon into 1/2" cubes Remove the seeds from the bitter melon when you slice it. I toasted the seeds and thought they were good. I've also left the seeds in when they were young and moderately tender. If the squash is more mature and there is a bit of red around he seeds, remove the seeds and the center pulp. Put the bitter melon into a glass bowl and toss with turmeric and salt. Let it sit while you clean and dice the potatoes.

Heat the ghee in a skillet, add the mustard seeds, ginger and curry leaves. They will sputter and pop if the oil is hot enough. Add the bitter melon and potatoes, sprinkle with a pinch of asafoetida, cover and cook on fairly hight heat. While cooking, turn the veggies to brown on their sides, scraping the skillet as you go. The combination of frying on the bottom and steaming should cook the potatoes and bitter melon till they are tender and nicely browned. Sprinkle with red chili powder about 5 minutes before the dish is finished.

We served this with assorted papadum and chutneys and wished we had eggs.