Category: World

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!

Tunisian Spiced Chickpea and Zucchini Casserole

9/1/2016

Created in honor of Dena’s Jubilee Year

Culinary Curiosity THursday

Spiced Chickpea and Zucchini Casserole

Recipe in Three Parts
serves 6-8

Part One
Slow Cooking The Chickpeas
Ingredients
2 cups dried chickpeas
4 dried New Mexican chilies
5 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon sea salt
Fresh water for soaking and then cooking

Instructions

Soak the chickpeas overnight covered by 2 inches of water
Next day drain chickpeas, cover with fresh water in a medium pot, bring to the boil straining off any foam, let cook at a high simmer for 10 minutes.
In a slow cooker, put dried chilies, garlic, and 1 teaspoon sea salt. Add chickpeas after the 10 minute high simmer.
Set slow cooker to high and cook for 4 hours.

Part Two
Roasting The Vegetables
Ingredients
1 ½ lbs (610g) summer squash-yellow is lovely, green is great. Cut in a large square dice
2 medium onions (484g) halved and sliced thin
3 large red sweet peppers (281g) cut into matchsticks
3 tablespoons fresh minced garlic (46g)
2 tablespoons fresh minced ginger (22g)
¼ cup olive oil
Sea salt

Instructions

Preheat oven to 450F (232C) Line a baking sheet with parchment paper
Slice, dice and mince all vegetables--I mince garlic and ginger together in a food processor.
Massage olive oil into veggies, sprinkle with salt
Roast for 20 minutes, stir and roast another 15 minutes until sweet and melty.

Part Three
Spicy Sauce and Finishing
Ingredients
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
1 ½ teaspoons whole caraway ground
1 teaspoon whole coriander seed ground
1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns ground
1 ½ teaspoons sea salt
2 tablespoons high mineral sugar
¼ cup sherry vinegar
1 teaspoon hot chili sauce
Pureed and strained N.M. chilies from chickpea cooking

Instructions

Measure out all ground spices
Measure and grind all whole spices in a spice grinder and sift through a mesh strainer
Puree the chilies from the cooked chickpeas with about a cup of the chickpea water. Put the puree through a food mill into a large bowl
Add ground spices, vinegar, sugar, salt, chili sauce to the chili puree
In a heavy bottomed pan, I use cast iron, set on medium heat combine the chickpeas, and sauce and reduce until thick, about 6-8 minutes stirring occasionally. The flavors should meld and vinegar’s harshness cook off.
Correct chickpeas and sauce for salt. The taste should be a beautiful balance of sweet, spice, heat and sour. Sometimes a bit more salt will bring out the right balance.
Layer the saucy chickpeas with the roasted veggies ending with the colorful veggies on the top. Keep warm until served.

Serve with flatbreads, or roasted barley
With Love Enjoy

Tunisian Food Links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunisian_cuisine

I was perusing through Clifford Wright’s Mediterranean Vegetables cookbook and found a recipe for a Tunisian zucchini and lamb casserole with chickpeas. It looked delicious, and I do adore lamb stews, but lamb is not a frequent guest at my table so I wondered about making something with just the chickpeas. I love North African spice combinations and the harissa. You might be surprised to see a North African recipe with caraway, but it’s actually used a lot throughout the Mediterranean.
   I’ve been making my own ‘quick’ chili sauces by stewing dried chilies with my beans as they cook and then pureeing and straining them. They then do double duty by lending depth to the chickpeas, and making a rich chili sauce.
   Grinding fresh whole spices and reducing the sauce over the chickpeas really makes this dish. The secret of its luxuriant taste is the sherry vinegar reduced with the sauce, I also added a bit of high mineral sugar to make sure the reduction springs forward. I can’t emphasize enough how salt opens up your tastebuds, adding just the right amount will allow you to hear all the players.
Clifford Wright’s recipe deep fries the zucchini, and doesn’t have onions or sweet peppers. I like my roasted version because of the meld that happens between all the sweet summer flavors.
   This recipe may look complicated, but it’s not. It’s one of those get in the flow recipes, do this part, and come back, to do that part, and finally bring it all together. Really, there’s nothing stressful or needing much tending about it. Once it’s done it becomes a slow-cooked fast food. A meze meal that can be brought out to eat at room temperature with salads, breads, or meats.

I took this dish to my friend Dena’s 50th birthday party potluck this afternoon. Arleta across from me in a lawn chair, who I don’t know well, shouted over and asked if I’d made the chickpea casserole.
--Yes, I said.
--I just knew it, because it was right.
I bet you started everything from scratch,
It just feels of goodness like food should.
--Thanks! I said.