Blog Archives

Garden Gifts: Roasted Califlower Medley with Tahini Sauce

9/9/2016

Local Food Friday

Roasted Veggie Medley

Serves 4 as a side dish
Ingredients
1 medium cauliflower broken into florets
1 eggplant peeled and sliced into cubes
1 medium zucchini sliced into cubes
A handful of green beans cut into pieces
10 garden pole beans cut into sections
1 head of garlic peeled into separate cloves
3-4 tablespoons olive oil
Sea salt about 1 teaspoon

Instructions
Preheat oven to 450F to 230C
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper
Lay diced vegetables on the tray
Massage olive oil and sea salt into the vegetables
Bake for 20 minutes,
Stir and bake for another 25 minutes
Vegetables should be melty and tender roasted

Creamy Kefir Tahini Sauce
Makes 1 1/2 cups

Ingredients
1 cup roasted tahini
½ cup milk kefir, or water kefir
more may be needed to thin the sauce
2-3 cloves raw garlic crushed
or 5 cloves roasted garlic
Juice of 1 lemon plus zest
or ¼ cup preserved lemon chopped
1/2 teaspoon sea salt

Instructions
In a food processor while vegetables are roasting
Crush garlic in food processor
Add other ingredients and process until smooth
Taste and adjust for salt, sour or liquid
Serve roasted veggies with tahini sauce on warm flatbreads with lightly salted chopped tomato, cucumber and shredded lettuce
With Love Enjoy!

coveting a cauliflower

We had company, our friends Michal, Michael and their almost two-year-old daughter Maya over the weekend. As a parting gift Michal presented me with a beautiful locally grown dark yellow cauliflower, and mottled white and purple eggplant. She must of known I’ve been coveting a cauliflower, craving a favorite recipe of mine-- roasted cauliflower and tahini sauce with flatbreads.

Cooler full of Cucumbers

Then today, Lee who tends the big garden next to our house, brought us a cooler full of cucumbers, zucchini, and two kinds of pole beans. Garden gifts. Abundance of the season, it’s all rolling in from the farms and gardens. My dehydrator is a constant background whir, pickling pots bubbling, and the crockpots full of cooking down apples and plums.
I’d toasted and fermented garbanzo bean flour last night, because I’d glanced at the recipes on the backside of the Bob’s Red Mill package. One for falafel patties, and the other for Whole Grain Flatbreads. I had to, of course, reconstruct the recipes and started by toasting the bean flour in a dry skillet for 4-5 minutes on medium heat. I think I’ll do it in the oven next time; then added firm sourdough starter to both recipes and fermented overnight. Wonderful results, but I want to test them again before I publish the recipes.

From all the bounty I roasted the cauliflower in medley with the other veggies, rubbing them with olive oil and salt; made the tahini sauce; cut up cucumber and shredded lettuce; pressed and cooked up the flat breads and pan fried the falafel patties.
I wouldn’t really call them falafel, but they were good and have possibilities.
I love this local life, the soft rain, my garden transitioning to the slower season and warm meals inside with good company.

Havreflarn with 1/2 the Sugar & All the Flavor

9/8/2016

Culinary Curiosity Thursday

Havreflarn
Swedish Oatmeal Crisp Cookies
Makes 2 dozen

Ingredients
1 stick unsalted butter melted 1/2 cup (113 g)
1 cup old fashioned rolled oats (gluten free) (100g)
¼ cup sunflower seeds (30g)
2 tablespoons flaxseed ground (13g)
3 tablespoons+1 ½ teaspoons tapioca flour (23g)
½ cup unrefined cane sugar (82g)
I use Rapunzel sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon sea salt
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon raw apple cider vinegar

Method
Preheat oven to 350F 176C
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper
Melt butter and set aside
Grind flax seed and set aside
In a food processor
Grind oatmeal until fine
Add all dry ingredients and process until fine (don’t over do it 5 seconds or so)
Add melted butter and wet ingredients
Pulse 5-6 times until combined.
Measure 1 tablespoon per cookie leaving 2 inches of space between
Bake for 8 minutes
Cool off the cookie sheet
To make them perfectly crisp bake in the dehydrator or oven at 145F 63C
For 1 hour and 15 minutes.

What makes this recipe work?

Spinning the oats, flax and sunflower seeds into a fine meal makes a delicate cookie.
Melting the butter helps the cookie to spread out.
Using unprocessed sugar gives complex caramel notes
Sea salt adds a sweeter flavor
The tablespoon of ACV tricks the tongue to pick up the whole spectrum of flavors and keeps checking back to sweet. You think it’s sweeter because of the slight sour note.
The flaxseed adds cohesiveness and replaces the egg. Eggs adds moisture which I didn't want.
Sunflower seeds add flavor and a wholesome feel.
Tapioca starch helps hold the cookie together and create crunch
Small amount of cinnamon and vanilla help to focus the flavor of the oats and butter.
Returning the cookies to a low heat draws enough moisture out to make a crisp cookie without the excess sugar.

Havreflarn, Swedish oatmeal crisp cookies, a Scandinavian treat you can make any time of the week. Thin, crispy, but with ½ the sugar, gluten-free, and twice the nutrition of the usual recipes.

No matter how long it took I was committed to getting this cookie right! Back in July a woman in FaceBook's Sourdough group mentioned that she makes these cookies gluten free, but she couldn’t track down the recipe. We traded a few comments back and forth, she'd made them with oats and corn flour.
I finally found the cookie’s name, Haverflarn, all I had to go on was that Ikea sells them.
I found several recipes online each of them completely different. This was the one I ended up referring to most often Haverflarn, but mine needed to follow the guidelines for Revisionist Baking

My recipe needed to be thin, crisp...delicious but low in sugar, wheat free, and with more nutrition.

I went through six cookie trials

Before I nailed the recipe. I’ve been at it for two months now, on and off. I wasn’t having trouble with thin, or delicious but crisp was an issue. Usually you rely on sugar and fat content to give a cookie crisp.
Finally, I was drinking tea with a friend and hashing out my cookie troubles with her while we sampled my trials, and a light bulb went on---
Crackers are crisp, and they don’t have any sugar, so maybe if I bake the cookies, and then crisp them at a low temperature? And it worked wonderfully.
I baked the cookies at 350F for 8 minutes and then put them in the dehydrator at 145F for an hour and 15 minutes. Perfectly crisp. I’ve kept our baked cookies in the freezer to retain freshness, since we don’t go through sweets quickly, this is a new trick for me.
With Love Enjoy!

Apple Plum Poppyseed Rye Crisp

9/2/2016

Local Food Friday

My Inspiration was Gifted Fruit

I made two of these crisps this morning, delicious, one for us to sample at breakfast, and the other for my husband to take to a staff retreat. We’re having a long overdue rainy morning, so the late summer plums and apples baked into crisp feels right.
My inspiration, the two bags of plums and apples I was gifted. I’d put most of the fruit into the food dehydrator yesterday, and they’ve filled the house with the smells of sweet baking fruit, but saved back enough plums and apples for a crisp.Thoughts of a poppy seed strudel I’d made with rye earlier in the summer came to mind, as I dreamed into this crisp--hmm rye, plums, apples and poppy seed with a bit of brandy, yes, and the inner food whisperer added, and how about sunflower seeds?

Apple Plum Poppy Seed Rye Crisp

Makes 1 large or 2 smaller crisps /serves 10
Ingredients
The Fruit
6 cups (5 medium apples) chopped medium dice local baking apples on the tart side, several kinds works well
3 cups (6 plums) local Italian plums chopped in a medium dice
4 tablespoons tapioca flour
¼ cup sugar (see note)
2 tablespoons brandy (I had some homemade vanilla brandy)
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
The Topping
1 cup rye flakes toasted
2 cups rolled oats toasted
½ cup sunflower seeds
1 cup local rye flour
3 tablespoons local poppy seeds
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ to ¾ cup sugar (½ cup will be more breakfast, tea and ¾ cup dessert)
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1 cup cold unsalted butter (two sticks) cut into ½ inch cubes

Instructions
Preheat oven to 375F 190C
Butter casserole(s) for crisp
The Fruit
Chop into a medium dice apples and plums,
Sprinkle tapioca flour, sugar, spices and brandy with fruit,
Mix together and let sit while you make the topping.
The Topping
Toast oats and rye flakes together in a heavy bottomed pan stirring occasionally, I use cast iron, about 4-5 minutes on low, they will smell toasty.
In a food processor
Add 2 cups of the toasted oat/rye flakes, rye flour, sunflower seeds, poppy seeds, sea salt, cinnamon, and sugar.
Spin to combine, everything should be spun to a meal.
Add cold butter and pulse 6-8 times until the size of small peas, Add last cup of rye/oat flakes and briefly pulse to just combine.

Finishing and Baking
Lay fruit on the bottom of the casserole and topping over it. Gently mix and move the topping so that some of it goes down into the fruit.
Bake for 45-50 minutes. It should smell wonderful the top toasty but not burnt. Decorate with dried local apples and plums. Serve warm to local people.
With Love Enjoy!

Note on sugar I don’t think any processed sugars, organic or not, are good for us, and I use very little sugar as a cook and baker; but sugar has its place, and I do love the flavors in the Rapunzel brand. It makes superior baked goods, and that’s why I use it--flavor. I find that the proper amount of sugar in a recipe helps to bring out the full flavors of food, whereas too much sugar hides the beautiful food and paralyzes the tongue. Sugar like makeup it’s meant to enhance natural beauty not mask.