Inductive citrus peels

We also served these candied citrus peels at our anniversary party, and they were a hit, at least with one partygoer. I am nothing if not devoted to my fans, so by her request, here's the recipe. I must confess that I got this recipe from the internet somewhere, but it was so long ago that I don't remember the source. Sorry for plagiarising!

Our anniversary happens to be Texas independence day, which I didn't know until our wedding day, but our anniversary party was vaguely Texas-themed. OK, it wasn't very Texas-themed at all, but we did receive a bottle of Tito's vodka as a gift (thanks!), and the citrus fruits whose peels I candied were all Texan. The grapefruits were from the produce market here, but they were definitely Rio Star grapefruits (I don't bother with that junk from Florida), and the lemons, Meyer lemons, blood oranges, and tangerines were grown by my aunt, who lives between Houston and Galveston. Go Texas!

Anyway, I'm a big fan of making food out of stuff that would be thrown away, and these peels are delicious, if a little labor-intensive. When done right, they are slightly juicy, sweet, and a little bitter. I find that the grapefruit peels makes your mouth feel slightly numb if you eat a lot of them. Grapefruit is kind of a scary food, what with its interactions with medications and all, so I'm not surprised that it has some sort of weird nerve chemical in it. Despite all that, I sure can't quit grapefruit.

How to make candied citrus peels

1a) To prep grapefruit peels, just peel a grapefruit and cut the peel into strips, pith and all. I will allow myself to go on a tangent about how I think there's a vast media conspiracy, funded by the powerful grapefruit spoon/knife lobby, to suppress the idea that you can just peel a grapefruit like an orange and eat it. It's true! That's how we always do it, and it's much easier to harvest the peel if you eat it that way. Tangent over.

1b) To prep non-grapefruits, you'll need to remove the pith. I don't know why grapefruit pith is different from the other stuff, but it is, and the other stuff has yucky pith. I take a small, sharp paring knife, put the peel on the counter, zest side down, and, with the knife parallel to the counter, try to get it between the skin and pith. It's imperfect, but you don't have to get it all.

2) I prep the peels immediately after eating the fruit and then store them in jars in the fridge until I have enough to candy. At that point, I dump the peels in a saucepan, cover them with water, and bring to a boil. Then drain and repeat this process until you've boiled and drained 5 times. This removes a lot of the bitterness. Then cover with water and a bunch of sugar. I just kind of guess at the amount of sugar, but I'd say a 3:1 or 5:2 ratio of water:sugar is probably about right. Bring this all to a boil and boil uncovered for about two hours. This gets the peels nice and soft and sweet. The liquid gets syrupy, and it makes a nice citrus-flavored simple syrup to use in cocktails.

3) Now put the peels into glass jars and cover with syrup. Store in the fridge until you're ready to use them. When that time comes, you'll want to drain the peels on cooling racks for a while to get them dry enough to roll in sugar. The time varies based on the humidity of your apartment. In Houston, I would usually leave them for 18-24 hours, but here, I've found that as little as 8 hours will work. You want them to be tacky but not wet for optimal sugar-coating. Dry them zest side up to prevent them from getting overly dry on the pith side. You can also roll them in a combination of sugar and "sour salt" (citric acid powder) for sour-sweet peels. I'm not as fond of those, but Jon and some of our friends really like them. I'd say about a 4:1 ratio of sugar:citric acid is a good starting point.

A note on limes: I have a dickens of a time getting the pith off of the lime zest, so I just skip the limes most of the time. Candied lime peel is really good, though, and I used to go to the trouble for my lime-loving friend Carolyn, but now we don't live in the same city, so I don't.

Cucumber-melon rocket pops

This is a work in progress. A few weeks ago, it was pretty hot, and I had half of a delicious melon. I'm not actually sure what kind. It was yellowish on the outside and light green on the inside. It was reminiscent of honeydew, but not quite the same. In any case, it was great: sweet, not too hard or soft, fragrant. We ate a lot of it just as melon, but I also wanted to try a fruit pop with melon. I also had a cucumber that had seen far better days and would have headed to the trash if I hadn't found a use for it. Cucumber and melon are friends, so I cut out the bad bits and added it to the melon. Earlier in the day I had impulse-bought some Tyku liqueur, which has melon and citrus flavors, so I decided to do something similar to the grapefruit-Campari pops I posted back in June. I blended up the melon and cucumber together, added a little sugar and Tyku, and froze them.

They're pretty good. They have a lot more texture than most pops because they're whole fruit rather than juice, and I like the texture a lot, but the mixture separated in the freezer, so the tip of the pop tastes sweet and alcoholic, but the rest of it is milder and has more chunks. I don't know how to keep it from separating, since I think it happens in the freezer before it freezes. Something I would tweak the next time is to add pineapple juice. I think the intense sweet-acid taste would be great with the cucumber and melon. I would probably leave out the alcohol as well. It definitely made a difference, but I don't know if the effect was better than it would have been without the alcohol. I could, however, see this going in the frozen cocktail direction with tequila or gin in place of the liqueur. Anyway, here's the recipe as I made it.

Cucumber-melon pops

2 cups cubed green melon

1 cup cubed cucumber

2 tbsp sugar

1/4 cup Tyku liqueur

Blend melon and cucumber together. Add sugar and liqueur. Pour into popsicle molds and freeze.

Cabbage-apple slaw

Well, I didn't win that Corner Bakery contest, so I guess I can post the cabbage-apple slaw recipe I referred to in the TLT post.

This bright, refreshing salad is a great side for sandwiches. You can use a milder crisp apple, like a Fuji, instead of the Granny Smith if you want to tone down the tartness. The amount of dressing may not sound like enough, but the goal is just to kiss the cabbage and apples with dressing so their flavor and crunch get to shine.

2 cups shredded red cabbage

1/2 Granny Smith apple, sliced into matchsticks

2 tbsp sliced almonds, toasted

1/2-inch slice fresh ginger, peeled and minced

Juice of 1 lime

1/2 tsp sesame oil

1/2 tsp soy sauce

Combine cabbage, apple, and almonds in a large bowl and stir or toss to mix. Combine ginger, lime juice, sesame oil, and soy sauce in a small bowl and whisk to combine. Pour dressing over cabbage, apple, and almonds. Toss to combine.

Festive salad

This is a salad Jon and I co-invented a few nights ago. Jon doesn't tend to go for salads with fruit in them, but the grapefruit seemed like a nice change of pace for the evening. We peeled all the membrane off the grapefruit for extra fanciness. And I think having the cucumber slices peeled made it seem fancier as well. The fig vinegar was a gift from a friend. It's very thick and syrupy, and we were happy to use it for the first time on this salad. Delicious!

Salad ingredients:

Lettuce (both red leaf and romaine)

Cucumber, peeled

Avocado

Red grapefruit

Sprouts

Feta cheese

Sunflower seeds

Topped with:

Fig vinegar

Extra-virgin olive oil

Black pepper

Salt

Boozy fruit, an experiment (part 1)

Last week I saw an article in the New York Times food section about preserving fruit with alcohol. Alcohol is antibacterial, so according to the article you can preserve fruit without having to sterilize cans like you do with making jams. In addition, it just sounded intriguing to me. The article suggests that you can serve the fruit and liqueur with ice cream, custard, in trifle, or other dessert options, you can make a drink out of them or garnish drinks with them, or even make muffins out of them if you don’t mind a little buzz in the morning. It seems this is a great idea for gifts at Christmas or throughout the year.

The basic idea seems to be 1 pound of fruit, 1/2 cup of sugar, booze (at least 40% alcohol by volume) to cover, and 4-12 weeks of macerating time. I stared at my liquor shelf and came up with three combinations I wanted to try: gin and cucumber, strawberry and tequila, and plum or apricot and kirschwasser, which is a cherry brandy.

I went to the store and bought a pound of cucumbers, a pound of strawberries, three plumcots and three plums. I also picked up more gin (I didn’t want to use the good stuff for this experiment) and some regular brandy because I didn’t have enough kirschwasser, and the corner liquor store didn’t have it. I didn’t have any quart-size jars, and each pound of fruit makes about a quart, so I just used two smaller jars for each batch. This also gave me the opportunity to experiment with flavorings.

Tequila and strawberries

I paired these two because strawberry margaritas exist and are tasty. I washed the strawberries, cut the stems off, cut large ones in half, and cut all the soft or bad spots off. I figured bad spots would not fare well sitting in a cabinet for months. I divided the strawberries into two jars and added some lime zest to one of them. I added 1/4 cup sugar to each jar and filled with tequila.

Brandy with plums and plumcots

I picked this pairing because one of the recipes was in this vein and I had some kirschwasser I never used. I wasn’t really sure which stone fruit to use, cherry, apricot, or plum, but plums and plumcots were on sale at the store, so I went with those. I washed the fruit and poked it all over with a needle as advised in one of the recipes I had seen. I put the three plums into one jar and the three plumcots into another. To the jar with the plums I added 1/2 a cinnamon stick, some fragments of a nutmeg I had cracked previously, and 1/4 tsp vanilla bean paste. To the jar with the plumcots I added 1/2 cinnamon stick and 1/4 tsp whole cardamom seeds. I added 1/4 cup sugar to each jar, divided the kirschwasser between them, and filled the jars the rest of the way with brandy. The plums didn’t fit in the jars very well, so I ended up cutting one of them in half in each jar for geometry’s sake. I am interested in seeing if this changes the taste or texture.

Gin and cucumbers

I paired these two because of my favorite drink, the Gordon’s cup. I was also a excited to have a reason to use juniper berries. I received some as a gift about a year ago and hadn’t figured out a use for them yet. Using my mandoline, I sliced two cucumbers into 1/4-inch thick slices. I divided them between two jars. Into one jar I also placed 2 tsp juniper berries. Into the other I added a little lime zest and 1 tsp coriander seeds. I sprinkled 1/4 cup sugar into each jar and covered with gin.

There was a good amount of undissolved sugar at the bottom of all the jars, so I shook them around. After an hour or so of shaking every once in a while, the sugar had all dissolved.

All the fruits I used are less dense than alcohol. The plums were wedged into the jars pretty well, so they were completely submerged, but the strawberries and cucumber slices were poking up. I didn’t think that was a good idea, and I didn’t want to spend the next month rotating the jars so all the fruit would be submerged regularly, so I searched my house for ways to hold them down. I ended up putting the two halves of my tea ball into two of the jars, the top of one of our cocktail shakers into another, and an empty sample-sized glass jam jar with no label into the last one. These were just tall enough to push down the fruit so it wouldn’t be exposed to air. I hope none of them are alcohol-soluble. My life isn't very exciting; my quest to submerge fruit made me feel like MacGyver.

Tea ball to the rescue!

Having dissolved the sugar and submerged the fruit, I rinsed the jars so they wouldn’t leave sticky rings and placed them in a corner of a cabinet, the closest thing I have to a cool, dry place in my Houston apartment. Unless I get too antsy, I plan on trying them in around six weeks, which will be November 9th-ish. I’m excited. I’ll let you know how they are and what I decide to do with them. At that point, if they’re good, I can make more batches that will be ready just in time for Christmas.

Food in Singapore

Mango ice kacang

As I mentioned in my last post, I had the good fortune to spend three weeks in Singapore this summer for a math program. During that time, I also took a short jaunt to Melaka, Malaysia, about 5 hours away by bus. Here are some thoughts about eating while I was there. This is a long post, so bear with me. (Or not, if you don't want to.)

First, I should say that I did not eat strictly vegetarian while I was there. There are several reasons for that. After eight years of being a vegetarian, I wanted to see the other side again, and I've partially fallen away from my rather naive reasons for becoming a vegetarian, so it wasn't important to me to avoid meat. I also found myself in many social eating situations where I did not want to make my food choices a big issue. I'm sure many other people with different diets can sympathize with this. It gets tiring always to feel like your dietary choices cause a hassle or even just raised eyebrows to others, so I took the easy way out. My third reason is that when I travel, I like to try new and authentic local specialties, and those are often meaty. If I am with Jon, I can just try a few bites from his plate, but on my own, I just order it. After three weeks of not being vegetarian (in which I probably still ate vegetarian more than half the time), I was ready to go back. Meat just isn't my thing.

That said, Singapore is a pretty easy place to be a vegetarian. Most Hindus and many Buddhists practice full- or part-time vegetarianism, and most food courts have clearly labelled vegetarian stalls. One difference from the US, however, is that in Singapore a non-vegetarian stall or restaurant may have no vegetarian options at all, whereas here, most restaurants have at least something, BBQ and steak places possibly excepted.

The main food traditions in Singapore are Chinese, Malaysian, Indian, and Peranakan, which is a blend of Chinese and Malaysian very distinctive to Singapore and some parts of Malaysia. While there were lots of restaurants specializing in just one food tradition, there is also a lot of merging of them, and it can be particularly hard to separate Peranakan from Chinese and Malaysian. I must say that eating a few traditional Chinese meals has dispelled any pretension I had of being an adventurous eater. Especially as a vegetarian, a lot of the dishes were well outside my comfort zone. Indian and Peranakan food were more my speed, but they were almost always too spicy for me. Singapore was a British colony for quite a while, so English is one of the official languages. This made dining much easier because I always at least had some idea of what I was eating. Western food is also available, and there are a few very highly-rated French and Italian restaurants, but the only non-Asian meals I had were salads.

Food in Singapore is relatively cheap compared to the US, and in Malaysia it is even cheaper. Hawker centers/food courts/canteens are ubiquitous and cheap. They are areas where lots of different food merchants set up shop, so you can pick and choose whatever you want. Each one has rather limited offerings, but the variety is so great that it can be really tough to choose. They're like food courts in malls but with really good food at great prices. The university where the conference was held had several canteens, all of which had several different stalls and were ridiculously cheap. For my first lunch there, I was worried that the plate I had ordered for S$3 (about $2.25) wouldn't be enough, so I added a S$1 side dish and barely got through half of my meal. I think it's very hard to get a huge, filling meal at a college cafeteria in the US for $3. Food in the rest of Singapore was about 30% more expensive than on campus, but I was still eating well for about $5 a meal. In Malaysia, I had some great meals for RM6-12, which is about $2-4. On the other hand, alcohol was very expensive, so I only drank when someone else was paying for it.

This picture doesn't show you the vast scope of this hawker center, but it does show you that it had a stage on top of one of the dessert stalls.

The Indian food I had was fairly comparable to Indian food in the US. There were both North and South Indian restaurants, but a lot of restaurants served food from both areas. Many of the Indian restaurants were vegetarian, I think to a larger extent than in the US. The people eating Indian food were much more authentic in Singapore. Many people used their hands instead of utensils, although I was always given a fork and a knife. I tried a new beverage in one of the Indian places I visited: jal jeera, a bracing lime, cumin, and salt concoction. The idea was OK, but the end product was pretty intense. I ended up ordering a sweet lassi (yogurt drink) as well to counter the spice of the food. I might explore the idea of a similar beverage, but it will be much less strong. One very popular Singapore Indian dish that I never tried was fish-head curry. I did a lot of stepping outside my comfort zone, but I never got around to stepping out in that direction.

Peranakan food was really great. One of my favorite dishes in both Singapore and Malaysia was laksa. There are two types, curry laksa, which has a spicy coconut milk broth, and asam laksa, which has a sour (I think tamarind-based) broth. I loved curry laksa and had it a lot. I only tried asam laksa once, and I wasn't a fan. The curry laksas I had varied a lot, but they all had noodles and spicy coconut milk and seafood broth. The other toppings included fried tofu, bok choy, eggplant, fish balls, shrimp, mussels, octopus, bitter gourd, mushrooms, and seaweed. I liked everything but the mussels. I've had mussels a few times now, and they taste like sea mud to me. I am definitely going to try to make my own vegetarian laksa here.

A great Malaysian dish I only managed to try once was nasi lemak, which is rice cooked in coconut milk and served with fish, breaded chicken, peanuts, sprouts, and fiery sambal sauce. Once again, it can be adapted to whatever you have on hand, and I was just intoxicated by the coconut milk rice. It wasn't sweet at all but just had a rich, coconutty flavor and texture. I have only used coconut milk a few times in savory dishes, and clearly between laksa and nasi lemak, it's time to explore that more.

Soy and adzuki bean products are all over the place in Singapore, and what I loved about them is that they usually weren't trying to be something else. In the US, we buy vanilla soy milk and chocolate soy yogurt and fake bacon strips. I went to a Mr. Bean soy shop one time toward the end of my stay. Mr. Bean is all over the place and sells soy milk beverages, frozen soy desserts and the like. I got a drink with soy ice cream on top, and the ice cream tasted like sweet frozen beans in the most wonderful possible way. I had some tofu in a soup in Malaysia that tasted fresh and beany. I've never had tofu here that really tasted so much like itself. Usually before cooking it, it tastes like nothing, and afterwards, it tastes like whatever I cooked it in. I am really going to have to get myself down to Chinatown and see if they have any tofu as good as the stuff I had in that bus station in Malaysia. It was a revelation. The exception to the "not trying to be something else" clause is that the Chinese vegetarian restaurants and stalls are masters of disguise and use a lot of very realistic fake meat. But this soy posing is pretty much confined to Chinese vegetarian restaurants and can be kind of fun, although I tended to prefer the dishes with less fake meat.

Revelatory tofu soup from a Malaysian bus station

One of the best things about Singapore was the abundantly available fruit and fresh-squeezed juice. At home I don't drink much juice, and it's usually a little bit of grapefruit or orange juice with breakfast. In Singapore, I drank juice with almost every meal, in part because it was so tasty and in part to tame the spiciness of a lot of the food. Honeydew-pineapple was one of my favorites, and watermelon was not far behind. Sugarcane juice was widespread. It was a small amount of pressed sugarcane diluted with water and ice, so it wasn't as sickly sweet as I had expected. Indonesian alpokat juice, a smoothie of avocado, sugar, condensed milk, and chocolate syrup, changed my life. Oh my gosh, it was amazing. I will definitely try to recreate it here.

I also drank and ate my very first whole young coconut while I was there. And then had probably 10 more over the course of my stay. Coconut water is not very sweet and has a complex but very fresh flavor. The most satisfying coconut I had probably came at the end of the day I spent mountain biking around Pulau Ubin, a smaller, less developed island owned by Singapore. I think coconut water had just the electrolytes I was looking for.

A great Indian meal, including my first coconut

On the other hand, it is very hard to find raw vegetables in this part of the world. I talked to a Malaysian friend recently about this. He has lived in the US for about five years now and has finally gotten over his initial reaction to salad, which was disgust, and gotten used to the idea of eating a pile of raw veggies, although he doesn't do it left to his own devices. It is just a cultural difference, I guess. I did eat two meals at a salad restaurant in the downtown business district because I was really craving them.

A really great (and welcome) salad

Finally, something must be said about cendol and ice kacang. These two desserts have the same idea: shaved ice, syrup, red beans, corn, jellies (like the texture of jello or the tapioca balls in bubble tea), and either coconut (cendol) or sweetened condensed (ice kacang) milk. They look truly wacky and taste great but are way too big for just one person. The ice is very finely shaved, so it isn't long before it's melting and you're eating sweet, cold, brightly colored soup. There are lots of variants, and you can also get the shaved ice with almond milk or other fruits, but I never got around to that.

Cendol. The bright green things are not alien eggs. They're sweet jellies of some sort.

Ice kacang at a soupy stage

All in all, I think my time in Singapore has given me a lot of great ideas for my own cooking and eating. I haven't tried any yet because I've spent the last week eating non-Asian-type food because I was kind of tired of Asian food, but maybe next week I'll crack open some cans of coconut milk and make some magic.

The King of Fruits

I can't convince myself it looks like food and not a dissection project.

I have been in Singapore since July 24 for a math program at the university here. I've really been enjoying the food, and I think I've gotten a lot of great ideas I can take home. I hope to write a post about my overall food experiences here, but right now, I am just going to tell you about my experience tonight with the "king of fruits," durian.

Durian is a famous tropical fruit. It seems to be very popular in Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. Here is its wikipedia page in case you want more information and some better pictures. It is large and formidably spiky, but the most distinctive thing about durian is its smell. Before I came here, I had heard of durian and knew that it was famously stinky, but I had never smelled it. Walking along the sidewalk in Chinatown, I caught a whiff of something and immediately knew it was durian. Durian is a good reminder that our ancestors spent a lot of time starving. It's notobvious that it is edible. Durian is not permitted in most buildings or transport in Singapore, so procuring a durian immediately decreases your range. Consequently, I had not tried it until today.

Durian does not smell that bad to me, at least in an open area. It doesn't smell like something good to eat, but I was under the impression that it smelled like a rotting corpse, which is not the case. It reminds me of pineapple that went seriously funky. Tropical but feety. I have had the experience of being on a subway train with a durian, so I know that in a confined space, it's pretty overwhelming. Given my fairly mild reaction to the smell, I expected that I would not mind durian, and possibly even like it. I was also going into the experience thinking of durian as a cheese. I have heard people describe it as cheeselike. I thought that if I didn't think of it as a fruit, the fact that it was unlike most other fruits would be less offensive. All in all, I was confident that I could take it.

Durian is available at many price points. The stand I went to tonight sold the same amount of durian for prices ranging from S$1-S$25. In retrospect, perhaps this was bad advice, but I had heard that it was important to try good durian and that there was a strong positive correlation between price and quality. I was told that if I tried a bad one I would never want to try it again. So I went with a midrange durian, marked at S$12 but sold for S$8. (To put this in perspective, I usually spend about S$4 for a nice lunch and a drink in the student canteen at the university, so S$8 is not insignificant.) I was given a bag and went off in search of a place where I could eat it without bothering anyone.

I ended up sitting on a ledge near the Chinatown MRT station. I carefully opened the package and attempted to pick up the first piece. The texture was not anything like I expected. More than anything, it reminded me of ripe, room-temperature Camembert. Undaunted, I licked what I could get off my fingers. The taste was a lot like sharp roasted onion or garlic. I like Camembert and roasted onion, but I did not like durian. It was almost like as the fruit approached my mouth, there was this revulsion I had to overcome to get it in. I think the smell influences the taste in a negative way, and the texture doesn't help at all. I tried to get a few bites down, but I gave up pretty early. An older man sitting near me was clearly amused by the "white girl trying durian for the first time" show and asked if I liked it. I replied that it wasn't my thing, and he told me that only Asians and Australians like it. Europeans don't like it at all. I tried to offer him the rest since the thought of trying any more was quite unpleasant. He refused it several times and told me I should give it to someone in my hotel (where it is not allowed), so I gave up and threw it away when I was out of eyeshot.

I now think that perhaps I should have tried cheaper durian, not just because then I would have spent less on something I didn't enjoy, but because perhaps more expensive durian is also softer and more pungent. Maybe cheap durian is harder and less distinctive, and I think I would have done better with a less flavorful specimen. But I'm not going to test that theory.

After ditching the durian, I quickly upgraded to a coconut, my king of fruit.

My hero!

Peach pie

We're back! We were in France and Germany again for a month this year. Then we got back to Texas, almost immediately flew to San Francisco for Jon's brother's wedding, and just got back here on the fourth. We are still settling in and getting re-adjusted to Houston. I started a short summer teaching stint on Tuesday, so we will get a lot of Jon recipes in the next couple weeks. I hope to do a post soon about the good stuff we ate in France, but for now, here's a great American dessert.

When I was a kid, my family had two or three peach trees, two apple trees, and a pear tree that produced copious amounts of fruit in the summer. My mom would put up tons of applesauce and peach jam, but the pies were the best. She made dozens of them every summer and froze them. When a family moved into the neighborhood or a friend had a baby, got sick, or had a death in the family, she would take a pie over. We also ate a lot ourselves throughout the year.

This week, perfect, ripe peaches from Fairfield, Texas were only 0.88/pound, so I decided to make a pie. They had been pretty picked over and a lot of them were bruised or squished, but I knew they would make a great pie. So often, the peaches we get at the store are hard and flavorless, so I'll take a squishy, oozy, delicious one over those any day. I didn't get back from the store with my peaches until 9 pm, but they were so ripe I knew they wouldn't wait, so I whipped up a late-night pie.

The remains of the peaches we used plus some we didn't end up needing.

Peach pie
You can also make this with partially thawed frozen peaches. Let them sit in the sugar-flour mixture a little longer and add about 20 minutes to the baking time.

8 generous cups sliced ripe peaches (about 11 medium peaches), no need to peel unless you're picky or the skin is clearly damaged or undesirable
1/4 cup flour
Scant 1/2 cup sugar
2 pie crusts
1 tbsp almond milk
Sugar and cinnamon for dusting the top

Put sliced peaches into a large bowl. Sprinkle flour and sugar on top and stir together. Let sit while you run to the store because you realize you forgot the flour (or at least 20 minutes). Transfer one crust to the deepest pie dish you have. Spoon peaches into crust. Top with 2nd pie crust. Trim around edges and crimp if you're fancy like that. If you've got extra crust, you can roll it out and cut it into shapes. (I put "E+J" on the top, but I didn't realize how large the E had been when I cut out the J, so I look very egotistical.) Brush the top with almond milk and sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon. Slash some vents in the top to let the hot air out. Here is the pie before baking.

Place pie on a baking sheet to catch any bubbling juices that might otherwise fall to the bottom of your oven and burn. This is very important because it will happen. Put foil around the edges of the pie, leaving a hole in the middle, so the edges won't burn. Bake at 375 for about 40 minutes. Remove foil and bake about 20 more minutes, until crust looks done. We were too tired to eat any pie when it came out, and it looked like there was no danger of it burning, so I turned the oven off and left the pie in it until the morning. It made a great breakfast!

Watermelon-feta salad

I threw this together to balance out the heaviness of the fried potatoes I made for breakfast this morning, and I think this would be a great dish to serve if you were hosting a summer brunch. The sweet watermelon and salty feta are a winning combination, and the fresh herbs really make it pop.

Watermelon-feta salad
Serves 1.

1 1/2 cups watermelon chunks
1/2 cup large chunks of cucumber
2 tbsp feta, crumbled
2 tsp fresh mint, minced
1 tsp fresh oregano, minced

Combine all ingredients in a bowl. Mix.

Cranberry-Pecan delight

We had a little dessert party with family and a few friends the day before our wedding. We provided three desserts, and other people brought things, too. Of course, one of the things we made was this plum cake, and I can't resist showing off a couple pictures of it because I really worked hard to make it pretty this time.

One of the other desserts we made was this cranberry-pecan-cream dessert my mom used to make a lot when we were little. It's pretty simple, but you do need a food processor and something to whip cream with, so it's a bit messy and loud. Unfortunately, I didn't take as good a picture of it (and it was frozen at the time, so the texture in the picture is misleading), but rest assured that it's quite pink and pretty and smooth and fluffy. I have only ever eaten it as a mousse-like dessert, but Mom also uses it to frost cakes sometimes, in which case she uses a little more whipped cream. There's a rather large range in amount of cream you can use for this. Of course, the cream tempers the tartness of the cranberries, so pick an amount you think you'll like and see how it goes. I've made it a lot of different ways, and it's always good.

Cranberry-pecan delight

1 bag cranberries, thawed if frozen
1/2 cup plus 3-8 tbsp sugar, divided
1 cup chopped pecans
1-2 cups whipping cream

In a food processor or blender, combine cranberries and 1/2 cup sugar and chop coarsely. Add chopped pecans. In a large bowl, whip cream along with 3-4 tbsp sugar per cup of cream until it holds stiff peaks. Combine cranberry mixture with whipped cream. It's OK if you combine them incompletely. The red and white ribbons look pretty.

Salad days

We love salad. Almost every day, we have a big one with dinner, and we often bring one in to school to eat with lunch. The usual ingredients are lettuce, tomatoes, red pepper, and cucumber, but we keep it interesting by adding things like carrot, daikon, beets, or celery and varying the extras: nuts, seeds, croutons, beans, and cheese. Sometimes I supplement the regular red leaf or romaine lettuce with baby greens, sorrel, kale, or herbs from my garden. Despite being a vegetarian since 2002, I was never much of a salad person until Jon and I started dating. He showed me that salads don't have to come from a bag* and are interesting and different every time. Now I miss them when I leave town for a few days. When I get back from a math conference or other out-of-town trip, I often call Jon from the airport and tell him to have a big green salad ready for me when I get home.

Every once in a while, I go crazy and make a wacky salad that doesn't even have lettuce! When we discovered the great new Chinese grocery store that's convenient to my tutoring gig, I bought these little yellow melons and tons of pea shoots. Here's a little salad I love that I've made a few times now.
Just chop up half a little yellow melon (I don't know a name for them), toast 1 tbsp sesame seeds, grate one carrot, and toss it together with a handful of pea shoots and blueberries. Green, sweet, crunchy, and springy. I didn't dress it. Maybe a squeeze of lemon juice and a drizzle of honey or agave nectar, maybe some almond oil? But it was good naked too.

I don't have any other good salad pics on this computer right now, but I might update this post with some salads of which we are especially proud.

* We don't buy bagged salad greens, but I am certainly not opposed to them. We eat salads regularly enough that the lettuce rarely goes bad, and we have time to wash and tear the lettuce leaves each time we make a salad, but I completely understand that bagged greens are more convenient, and that convenience might be the difference between eating a salad and having lettuce rot in your fridge. So if bagged salad greens work for you, go for it! Anything that leads to a larger number of salads eaten is good.

Caramelized onion, pear, and blue cheese pizza

I think I got the inspiration for this flavor combination from California Pizza Kitchen years ago. The onions and the pears are both sweet, but the tangy blue cheese balances it out. I served this pizza with a truly extraordinary salad. In addition to the normal lettuce, tomato, pepper, and cucumber, I added dill, sorrel, kale, and carrot tops from the garden and pear slices that didn't make it onto the pizza. Jon is the onion caramelizer in the household, so I can't give you guidelines on that. Low and slow is my best guess. I'm sure the internet knows how to do it, though, if you need a recipe. In addition to this pizza, we use caramelized onions in wraps with black bean dip and as a topping for veggie burgers. (We made veggie burgers from scratch for the first time a few days ago.) I plan on using the onion-pear-blue cheese trifecta in galettes later this week as well.

Caramelized onion, pear, and blue cheese pizza

1/2 recipe pizza dough made with whole wheat flour in place of half of the white flour
Extra- virgin olive oil for brushing
Caramelized onions
1 pear, thinly sliced
Crumbled blue cheese (we used a mix of Maytag and a local generic blue cheese)
2 tbsp pine nuts
Coarse salt, optional

Preheat oven to 425 with a pizza stone in it. On a floured surface, roll the pizza dough out to a large circle. Brush with olive oil. Arrange caramelized onions, pear slices, blue cheese, and pine nuts on dough. Carefully transfer to hot pizza stone. Bake for 12 minutes or until crust is done. Sprinkle with salt at the table if desired.

Unresolved raspberry-rhubarb pie

This past Saturday was the annual Houston Sacred Harp singing. (You can read about Sacred Harp at this website.) It was snowy all day Friday, so I spent most of the day inside cooking in preparation. (Part of the Sacred Harp tradition is serving dinner on the ground to guests who have come from out of town.) This is one of the dishes I contributed. Since I had a little crust left over after putting it in the bottom of the pan, I made a treble clef and some shape notes (explained on the Sacred Harp website) out of the extra and put it on the top. I think of rhubarb as a spring or summer pie, but I had a bag of frozen rhubarb and remnants of a couple bags of frozen raspberries in my freezer, so I didn't have to go out and buy anything to make this pie. And I got a bonus of extra room in my freezer. This pie recipe won third place and "most creative" in a Pi Day pie contest last March. I made it up because one bag of rhubarb isn't quite enough fruit for the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook rhubarb pie recipe, and I happened to have just enough raspberries in the freezer to round out the volume the first time I made it.

I call this pie unresolved because the notes I have on it, "fa, sol, la, mi" are the equivalent of "F, G, A, B" in C major, hence an unresolved leading tone. For the record, I did made two fa's, but only one would fit on the pie, and if I went down to the next line, I'd have to make another clef for it to make any sense. I didn't think about the fact that I could put the fa at the end and get "G, A, B, C" and a lovely resolution. And yes, I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about this. It's what I do.

Raspberry-rhubarb pie
1 pound frozen rhubarb (about 4 cups)
2 cups frozen raspberries
1/2 cup sugar
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1 pie crust, made with either all-purpose or whole wheat pastry flour
splash of milk
tiny amount of sugar

Place fruit in a large bowl. Let stand for about 45 minutes, or until icy but not frozen. (During this time, you can make your pie crust if you haven't already.) Stir in sugar and flour.
Place pie crust in pie dish. Trim any overhanging edges and cut them into fun shapes if you want. Pour fruit mixture into pie crust. Arrange fun shapes on top. Brush with milk and sprinkle with sugar for extra beauty and crunch.
To prevent the edges from burning, place aluminum foil around the edges. Bake at 375 for about 50 minutes. (If using fresh fruit, only bake for 25 minutes.) Remove foil and bake for another 20-30 minutes, or until filling is bubbling at the edges and crust is golden. Cool on a wire rack.

Veganized Banana Bran Bread

My first experiment with veganization was a resounding success! I have never veganized an already-vegetarian recipe before, but one of my goals this month was to try some simple substitutions, and this one worked very well. About two weeks ago I made the standard recipe for Jeanne Lemlin's banana bran bread from Vegetarian Classics. It was a great bread. It is less sweet than standard banana bread, and the bran gives it a nice chewiness. Both aspects make it more breakfasty and less desserty than normal banana bread. As written, the recipe contains eggs and melted butter. I made it as written first to make sure it was a good recipe before I started messing with things. In the vegan version, which I made last week, I used flax seeds mixed with water in place of the eggs and vegetable oil in place of the butter. I was worried that my naive substitutions would mess up the chemistry completely, but when it came out of the oven, it was great. I didn't have a piece of the first batch to compare it to, but it didn't seem to suffer at all from being veganized. Hooray! I look forward to using the flax-egg substitution in the future. Flax has a lot of fiber and omega-3's and is much lower in calories than eggs, so it is a good healthy alternative.

Veganized Banana Bran Bread
You can probably substitute whole wheat pastry flour for the all-purpose flour with no problems. I was out, so I didn't.

1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup wheat bran
2/3 cup sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp nutmeg, optional
1/2 cup chopped pecans or walnuts
2 tbsp ground flax seed mixed with 6 tbsp water
2-3 mashed ripe bananas
6 tbsp vegetable or nut oil

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Use shortening or oil to greast a 9x5-inch loaf pan. In a large bowl, combine the dry ingredients and mix. In a medium bowl mix together the flax mixture, bananas, and oil. Scrape into the flour mixture and stir just to combine. Pour into the prepared pan.
Bake for 50 minutes, or until a knife inserted in the center of the loaf comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack for 10 minutes before removing from the pan. If you have superhuman self-control, cool completely before slicing.

Vegan mofo and plumcot spring rolls with basil dipping sauce

I decided to "officially" join veganmofo 2009, which I mentioned yesterday. I've never participated in a blog community thing like this before, so I make no promises. Considering I haven't yet made 20 posts in a month, I probably won't hit the 20-post goal. But I do have a nice list of vegan recipes I've made recently and not posted or want to try this month. I'm not limiting myself to vegan food posts this month either. I've got some other recipes to share as well. A few goals for myself this month: try some common vegan substitutes I haven't tried before, like nutritional yeast, flax meal for eggs, and tofu scramble. It should be fun.

First up, some spring rolls I made this past weekend, along with a simple but delicious dipping sauce. Of course, my award-winning* watermelon rind spring rolls are still the reigning champs of my spring roll world, but variety is the spice of life. This past weekend I had some plumcots and a bunch of alfalfa sprouts to use, so I decided to try a fruit and sprout spring roll. I rounded it out with yellow bell peppers and cucumber. I thought basil would pair well with it, so I made a basil dipping sauce. It was all really nice. I really like a bit of fruit in a spring roll. Mango, peach, or apple would be good in place of the plumcot. Or, of course, plum or apricot.

Plumcot spring rolls
No amounts here. Just cut up a little of everything, roll it up, and make some more if you're still hungry.

Plumcot
Yellow bell pepper
Cucumber
Alfalfa sprouts
Spring roll wrappers

Thinly slice desired amount of plumcot, yellow bell pepper, and cucumber. Soften one spring roll wrapper in water that is hot to the touch but doesn't actually burn you. Place small amounts of plumcot, pepper, cucumber, and sprouts on the wrapper and roll it up. Repeat as desired.

Basil dipping sauce (based on a recipe from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman)

2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp rice wine vinegar
2 tbsp water
1 tbsp sugar
1/4 cup basil (I used a mixture of Thai and regular), thinly sliced
dash of Srirachi sauce, or more to taste

Combine all ingredients. Bonus points if you make it an hour ahead of time so the basil can infuse the rest of the sauce.

*They got a "most creative" prize at a recent potluck.

Frozen raspberry mousse

I have been having a lot of fun with desserts lately. This was in the July 2008 Bon Appetit. I made a couple modifications, decreasing the sugar quite a bit and using frozen instead of fresh raspberries. I can get frozen ones for $2.79 a pound, while fresh are $3.99 per 4.4 oz. This mousse is good. We ate the first cup right after mixing it up, and it's just as good thawed as it is frozen. I stand by the decrease in sugar, and I might even decrease the cream next time too (or, equivalently, increase the raspberries). It is very rich. Kirschwasser, a clear cherry brandy, really makes a difference. I was dubious because 1 tbsp is so little, but I could tell it really made the flavors pop. That said, if you don't have any, just add a little orange or lemon juice or water to make it blend more easily. I'm sure it will still be delicious.

Frozen raspberry mousse (adapted from Bon Appetit)
2 1/2 cups frozen raspberries, mostly thawed
1 cup powdered sugar
1 tbsp kirschwasser
1 1/2 cups heavy whipping cream
1/3 cup sour cream

Place raspberries, sugar, and kirschwasser in a blender and blend until very smooth. In a large bowl, whip heavy cream with an electric mixer until it holds stiff peaks. Add sour cream and beat just to combine. Gently fold in raspberry puree. Don't worry if you don't get it all the way blended. The little white ribbons are pretty. Eat some now if you want. Pour the rest into parfait glasses (I used a combination of wineglasses and teacups) and freeze. I used 6 glasses and put a hearty 6-oz helping in each glass. Let it thaw in the fridge for a couple hours or on the counter for 20-30 minutes before eating.

Jon demonstrates the proper way to clean the mixing bowl:

Plum Cake "Tatin"

I don't have a TV, so I don't normally get to watch the Food Network. But when I was at a math conference in Connecticut, I got to see a couple entire episodes of Barefoot Contessa. She made this cake in one of them. It is my understanding that a tarte tatin is a caramelized apple tart baked with the crust on the bottom. This has cake instead of pie crust and plums instead of apples, but it's the same idea. My pictures aren't good, but this recipe is. The fruit, which cooks on the bottom of the pan, is sweet and moist and infused with caramel flavor. If I were to do one thing differently, I would squeeze more plums in the bottom because they are the highlight of the dish. There is a good chance that visitors to my house will get this for dessert. I also plan to try it with different fruit. I think apricots would be fantastic. If anyone ever has an Iron Chef: Plum party, I will win every prize.

Plum Cake "Tatin" by Ina Garten
6 tbsp unsalted butter, room temperature, plus extra for greasing the pan
10-12 plums, preferably "prune" plums, cut in half and pitted
1 3/4 cups white sugar, divided (1 cup plus 3/4 cup)
2 large eggs
1/3 cup sour cream
1/2 tsp grated lemon zest
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup plus 2 tbsp all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
Confectioner's sugar for dusting, optional

Grease a 9-inch pie or tart pan generously with butter. Place plums, cut-side down, in the bottom. Combine 1 cup sugar and 1/3 cup water in a small saucepan. Cook over high heat until sugar is 360 F. It should be a warm amber color. As tempting as it is, don't stir the pan. Just swirl it gently. Pour evenly over plums. It will bubble and hiss and eventually harden. Don't worry. It will turn liquid again when you bake it. It should look like this:
While the caramel is setting, combine butter and 3/4 cup sugar in a medium mixing bowl and cream until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time. Add the sour cream, zest, and vanilla and mix until combined. Add the flour, baking powder, and salt. Stir until just mixed. Pour the batter into the pan and bake at 350 F, until a tester inserted in the center comes out clean. Let cool 15 minutes if you can stand it. Then invert onto a cake dish. If a plum sticks to the pan, gently cajole it out and replace in the top of the cake. Sprinkle with confectioner's sugar if you want.

"Healthy" oatmeal-chocolate chip-pecan-dried cherry cookies

I got this recipe from my mom. One of my aunts lives in Michigan and sends us big bags of dried Michigan cherries every year. They're nice and tart, great in oatmeal, granola, and these cookies. They're also good eaten right out of your hand, which is how we eat a lot of them. I call the recipe healthy because it has whole-wheat flour, not much sugar, whole oats, dried fruit, and nuts. It also has two sticks of butter, hence the quotation marks. It's sure tasty, and it must be healthier than cookies with a ton of butter and none of the good stuff. At least that's what I tell myself. The batter has so many "goodies" that it barely sticks together. Consequently, you don't have to cook it for very long. As you might be able to tell from the picture, I just barely burned the first batch.

"Healthy" oatmeal-chocolate chip-pecan-dried cherry cookies

1 cup butter, softened (two sticks)
1 cup brown sugar
2 large eggs
2 tbsp milk
4 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups whole-wheat flour
1 tsp baking soda
2 tbsp cocoa powder
2 1/2 cups oats (I use old-fashioned, but quick-cook and instant are fine too)
12 oz chocolate chips or chunks
1 cup chopped toasted pecans or walnuts
1 cup dried cherries or raisins

Cream together the butter and sugar. Add the wet ingredients and mix thoroughly. Add the flour, baking soda, and cocoa powder and mix thoroughly. Add the oats, chocolate chips, nuts, and cherries or raisins and combine. Bake at 350 F for 8-10 minutes. They will continue to cook a little when you take them out of the oven, so err on the side of undercooked.

Mango-lentil-yogurt salad

Sorry about the blurry picture. I can't always tell on my camera screen whether something is in focus. This one wasn't. A few days ago I had two friends over for a goodbye dinner before they moved to San Antonio. My initial plan was to serve spanakopita and carrot salad. They seem like good company food. But the day before they were going to come over, I found out that one of them is avoiding dairy, so I had to change my plan. The salad had been on the menu for later in the week, so I bumped it up a couple days and also made a spinach-chickpea-tofu skin curry, which will get its own post. The yogurt is not integral to the salad, so the non-dairy guy didn't have any, and the rest of us were happy.

I based this salad on something I saw in the most recent Bon Appetit. The original recipe calls for roast chicken, but I decided to recplace that with French lentils. They are smaller and darker than regular lentils, and they keep their texture better. Any bean would probably work, but I thought the lentils were perfect. Unusually for me, I used a purchased mango chutney in the dressing, and I was really glad I did. It had just the right blend of flavors and was basically no work. I felt so semi-homemade! (Maybe the completely homemade yogurt made up for it.) Also, the original recipe calls for arugula, which isn't our favorite green, so we just used red-leaf lettuce and supplemented it with fresh herbs and baby greens from my garden. You'll probably have some leftover lentils. I have been using them in green salads at lunch. They are very lightly spiced, so they shouldn't ruin any other flavor profiles. They would probably also be good in a pasta or grain salad. And just in case you aren't an Indian spice expert, kalonji are also known as nigella or black onion seeds. They are small black seeds that often top naan. They kind of look like black sesame seeds and can be found in Indian and Middle Eastern grocery stores.

Mango-lentil-yogurt salad
This recipe will make 5-6 salads.

Lentils:
1 cup French lentils, rinsed
Splash of red wine
1 tsp curry powder

Dressing:
3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
2 tbsp mango chutney, large pieces finely chopped
Juice of 1 lemon or lime
1 tbsp curry powder
1 1/2 tsp water, or more

Salad:
2-3 large lettuce leaves for each portion, rinsed and torn
Fresh herbs, such as basil, Thai basil, mint, and oregano, if desired
2 mangoes, peeled, pitted, and sliced
Plain yogurt
Kalonji and/or cumin seeds to garnish, optional

Cover the lentils in plenty of water in a medium saucepan. Add red wine and curry powder. Bring to a boil and lower to a simmer. Simmer until lentils are soft, about 20 minutes. Drain and reserve lentils.

Whisk together the dressing ingredients, adding a little extra water if needed to make a nice dressing. To assemble the salads, put the lettuce and herbs in bowls. Top each with several mango slices and about 1/3 cup of lentils. Pour 1-2 tbsp of dressing on each salad and top with a dollop of yogurt. Garnish with seeds.