Otsu: best soba noodle dish ever

In the past few months, I've been making this soba noodle dish often. It's possibly my favorite recipe from Heidi Swanson's Super Natural Food. Fortunately the recipe is posted on Heidi's site for easy reference. I leave the olive oil out of the sauce and use more cucumber, but otherwise this recipe is perfect.

Annie Chun brand soba noodles are good. I had ordered six boxes from amazon, and was pleased with them. Having used them up, I now have some Roland brand soba noodles, which are thinner and don't seem to soak up the sauce as well. I've also gotten soba noodles from the big Korean grocery store at Belmont and Kimball. They are cheap there. I would go there more often but it's such an unpleasant walk. I hate walking under the freeway overpass through the pigeon shit, and Kimball is a depressing street.

The noodles from the Korean grocery are not as good as Annie Chun, and not pure buckwheat, unfortunately. I've yet to try pure buckwheat soba noodles--you can get them at Whole Foods--because they are at least twice as expensive as the wheat/buckwheat mixture.

Breakfast Cookies

It's been a while since I posted. I've had other preoccupations, and doing a nice post with a photo and well-considered text is a fair amount of work. But I would like a record of what I've been cooking and an online place to store recipes for future reference, so I'm going to lower my standards.

Even Healthier Breakfast Cookies
June 14, June 17, 2009

First I made a batch of Ellie Krieger's breakfast cookies, following her recipe fairly closely. I made a double recipe, used 2 c. all-purpose flour and 1/2 c. whole wheat flour instead of her mixture of whole-wheat pastry flour and all-purpose flour, used applesauce instead of carrot baby food, and added chocolate chips. They turned out great. Commenters on Krieger's recipe page fault the cookies for being too healthy tasting, but I disagree. In fact Mike, who has been on a big health kick lately, thought they were not light and healthy enough, so I tried making them healthier yet. The result was tasty but not especially cookielike. Probably Ellie Krieger has already pushed the envelope on how healthy you can make a cookie without changing its essential nature. Mine reminded me more of flat muffins, or extremely healthy scones. Still, they are big and yummy and a reasonable 227 calories each. I got only 13 cookies from this batch, but they were pretty big.


1 c. whole-wheat flour
1 c. all-purpose flour
1/2 c. bran flakes
1 t. baking soda
2 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. salt
1/2 t. ground nutmeg, or a few good grates of fresh nutmeg
2 T. canola oil
2 T. butter
3/4 c. loosely packed brown sugar
1 t. vanilla extract
2 eggs
1 c. applesauce
1/2 c. walnuts
1 c. Raisin Bran cereal
1/2 c. raisins
1 c. rolled oats

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Whisk together flours, bran flakes, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt in a medium-sized bowl. Combine butter, oil and sugar and mix with electric mixer until sugars have dissolved and mixture is light in color. Add eggs, applesauce, and vanilla and beat an additional 30 seconds. Add flour mixture and beat an additional 30 seconds. Add oats, cereal, raisins, and walnuts and stir to combine. Dough will be slightly sticky and less cohesive than traditional cookie dough. Line a large cookie sheet with parchment paper. Using about 4 tablespoons of batter, form a ball and place on cookie sheet. Repeat with remaining batter. Flatten cookies with a piece of waxed paper until about 1/4-inch thick. Bake for 12-14 minutes, until cookies are fragrant and golden brown on the bottom. Let cookies cool slightly, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

Cost-effective pantry staples

There's an interesting article on Slate this week. Jennifer Reese makes bagels, cream cheese, yogurt, jam, and granola from scratch to see if they are cheaper than their store-bought counterparts. The results: bagels and yogurt, cheaper and tastier; cream cheese, more expensive and less tasty; jam, tastier, cost varies; granola, more expensive, tastier. For the most part, she's using the cheapest possible raw ingredients (generic sugar, not organic dried cane juice) and comparing her results to the cheapest grocery store products.

More often than not, I've been cooking and baking with high-quality ingredients lately (organic whole-grain flour and vegetables, local honey, etc., etc.). Not exclusively, but I try to avoid the "dirty dozen" and refined flour. I'm pretty sure that my homemade foods are more expensive than cheap grocery store versions, but less expensive than upscale grocery store versions. It's a dilemma. Ingredients like maple syrup and organic flour are extraordinarily expensive, and I'm finding it hard to cut my grocery budget down really low. But we're eating better than ever. The sad truth is that upscale grocery store items are sometimes kind of mediocre, or stale, or oily. (Whole Foods deli counter, I'm looking at you.) That's the worst bummer, spending big bucks on so-so upscale chow. And I'm exceedingly happy to avoid vegetarian freezer items—Morningstar Farms veggie burgers and the like. They are expensive, high in sodium, and have ingredient lists as long as your arm.

I've never made homemade bagels, but I'm going to try this soon.

chocolate cake number two

The second chocolate cake I made is from Nigella Lawson's Feast. I'm on the lookout not only for the perfect plain cake, but also for the ultimate fancy cake. My ultimate cake must include chocolate and coffee, and perhaps caramel or hazelnut. I haven't found it yet, although tiramisu isn't too far off. Nigella's Chocolate Espresso Cake with Caffe Latte Cream (p. 292) sounded like a candidate, so I wanted to try it before returning Feast to the library. I didn't make the Caffe Latte Cream, since this was just a test run.

Another motive for all these chocolate cakes is my friend John's upcoming birthday. I kind of want to make a cake, although I'm not sure yet if a cake will be called for by the festivities at hand, or if this is the cake. He's visiting from out of town. Sigh, it's been a long time since John and I have lived in the same place, and I no longer remember what his favorite type of cake is. I wish that I knew everyone's favorite cake, and had happy dinner parties with loved ones, the sort of dinner parties that Nigella has. Or Orangette. I love the fantasy of bonding over food. It doesn't happen often enough in my particular social circumstances. Still, I'd like to make a nice cake for John.

I do have one memory of an idyllic food get-together: Thankgiving 1997. My friend Joanna and her husband Ed lived in our neighborhood in Chicago, and they came over, along with some other friends. There was a lot of wine, beer, and hard cider involved. We thawed a frozen turkey in the bathtub, and Joanna and I made pies. One guy brought over some red bell peppers cooked in olive oil over low heat until melted down to nothing. So delicious with crusty bread. The turkey, despite great ignorance and drunken preparation, came out perfectly. I drank so much that I had to go lie in bed for a while, but then I rallied, returned to the group, and thus avoided shame.

But back to Nigella's fancy cake. It turned out good. It's an eggy cake with only a little flour, and it puffed up gorgeously while baking, then deflated as it cooled. It's a rather delicate cake, not at all dense or heavy, and would probably be a good choice to impress guests. I don't know. It was pretty and lavish, and but perhaps not my heart's desire. Clearly I'm looking for more than just cake here. But don't let that stop you.

Chocolate Espresso Cake
adapted from Feast by Nigella Lawson, p. 292.

For the cake:
5 oz semisweet chocolate chips
1 stick plus 3 T. unsalted butter
6 eggs
1 1/4 c. granulated sugar
1 t. vanilla extract
1/2 c. all-purpose flour
5 t. Medaglio d'Oro instant espresso, or other espresso powder
1/4 c. Frangelico or other coffee liqueur

Take all ingredients out of the refrigerator and allow to come to room temperature. The most important thing is that the eggs be room temperature. If, like me, you can't be bothered to take everything out ahead of time, set the eggs in warm water for 10 minutes.

Preheat oven to 350°. Butter and line a 9-inch springform pan.

Melt the chocolate and butter in the microwave in 30-second increments, stirring in between heatings to prevent scorching. Set aside. Beat eggs, sugar, and vanilla with hand mixer until thick, pale, and doubled or tripled in volume. Nigella does this in a standing mixer (I want one of those). It took me close to ten minutes of beating for the mixture to reach this state.

Gently fold in flour and espresso powder, and then chocolate-butter mixture, taking care not to lose volume. Pour into prepared pan and cook for 35-40 minutes. The top of the cake should be firm. Immediately pour the coffee liqueur over the top and let the cake cool completely before releasing it from the pan.

This was perfectly delicious without the Caffe Latte cream, but maybe it would be even better with. Here is another blogger's account of making this cake that includes the cream recipe. The liqueur flavor was rather pronounced. If you don't like that, you might want to leave it off. I wonder if the cake would not deflate if you nixed the liqueur. Any readers out there, let me know if you try these variations.

chocolate cake #1

There's a certain yin and yang to my cooking habits. When last I wrote, I was making salads, brown rice, and chard, but since then I've been all about chocolate cake. I've baked not one but two chocolate cakes in the last week.

I love cake but I'm not crazy about frosting, so I'm always on the lookout for cakes that are complete unto themselves and don't require buttercream. French yogurt cake is a good example. I'd been reading More Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin, which I checked out of the library after reading a scathing review of Amanda Hesser's Cooking for Mr. Latte on amazon.com that, among other things, complained that Hesser is no Laurie Colwin. I'm not so sure. I enjoyed Cooking for Mr. Latte at least as much as I did More Home Cooking. To Colwin's credit, upon reading this chocolate cake recipe, I went immediately to the kitchen and started making it.

Buttermilk Cocoa Cake
Adapted from More Home Cooking, p. 161.

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. and butter and flour a 9- by 2-inch round cake pan.

2. Mix together the following:

1 3/4 cups flour (I used whole wheat pastry flour)
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt

3. To these ingredients add:

1 c. buttermilk (I used 2/3 c. plain yogurt mixed with 1/3 c. rice milk)
1/2 cup vegetable oil or melted butter
2 teaspoons vanilla

Mix.

4. Turn the batter into the pan, bake the cake in the middle of the oven for 30 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean, and let it cool for 5 minutes before turning it out of the pan.

Here's what Colwin says about the cake:

It is hard to encapsulate the virtuosities of this cake. It is fast, easy, and scrumptious. It has a velvety, powdery feel—the result of all that cocoa. It is not so horribly bad for you, because you use buttermilk, which is relatively low in fat, and cocoa powder is defatted anyway. Furthermore, it keeps like a dream and tastes even better after a few days. If you want to be lavish you can dress this cake up by serving it with ice cream or crème fraîche. This mitigates its purist, minimalist virtues, but that is the way of chocolate cakes. They are good in themselves but sometimes call out for window dressing. You can eat them gussied up with all sorts of rich and fattening things or you can leave them quite alone and serve them in pristine, solitary splendor on a nice white plate.

Right after making it, I found the cake disappointing. It isn't very moist, and the texture is crumbly. This is common for eggless baked goods, and I may have caused yet more crumbliness by using whole wheat pastry flour instead of all-purpose flour. The batter, too, is very thick; it seems more like muffin batter than cake batter. The next day, though, the cake was unbelievably delicious. I found myself standing over the pan, cutting myself little slivers and picking up the crumbs with my index finger. It also has the virtue of being easy to veganize. You could use nondairy yogurt instead of buttermilk, or add a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar to soy milk.










Next I'll write about chocolate cake #2.

detox and the beauty of salads

I've been cooking plenty lately, but haven't been taking pictures. Dinner is usually my main cooking project, and it's hard to snap good food pics when there's no natural light. Excuses, excuses. In the evenings, I've made soup regularly, and also tofu/greens/brown rice/sauce–type dinners. When my mood is not good, as it hasn't been lately, I try to eat ultra-healthy. It seems to help. I find things like cake, cookies, and bread more irresistible than usual if I'm feeling low. I think it's a grasping for pleasure. Apparently carb-loading boosts your serotonin levels, but I think it's a faster feedback loop than that: Eating something tasty is the most instantaneous pleasure I can think of. Of course, eating carbohydrates to self-medicate backfires. You feel worse soon enough. But fortunately the world is full of good things to eat that won't give you a carb hangover.

Sometimes I loosely follow a three-day "detox diet" that I clipped from Body + Soul magazine a couple years ago. It's nothing like the hard-core detoxes where you consume only lemonade for ten days. I deviate from it a lot, too. I drink coffee in the morning and whenever I feel like it, and usually skip the tea and lemon water. I eat more rice and oatmeal than allowed, and I sauté my greens with garlic in olive oil and salt them. Steamed beets are horrible, so I often substitute some other vegetable. And since the dinner's so small, I add tofu and tahini sauce, and I have a bedtime snack, too. Even though I play fast and loose with the rules, I feel some sort of refreshment after a day or two.

Do-It-Yourself Detox
from Body + Soul magazine

For a week leading up to this simplified, moderate three-day cleanse, created by Cathy Wong, ND, gradually reduce your intake of sugar and artificial sweeteners, white flour, dairy, alcohol, salt, and caffeine while increasing your intake of fresh fruits and vegetables.

Throughout each day of the cleanse, aim to drink at least 8 cups of water and do moderate exercise. Alleviate digestive stress by chewing your food thoroughly and stopping before you're full.

THREE-DAY CLEANSE

Upon waking: A cup of hot water with lemon; meditate for 10 minutes
Breakfast: Smoothie (1 cup berries, 1 cup rice or almond milk, 1 scoop protein powder) or 3/4 c oatmeal and 1 cup berries; green or black tea with lemon
Snack: One small organic apple or pear and 10 unsalted raw almonds
Lunch: 3 oz. organic chicken or turkey, or 1 cup legumes; 1/2 cup brown rice or quinoa; 1 cup boiled swiss chard
Snack: Celery and carrot sticks with 2 tablespoons hummus
Dinner: 1 cup steamed beets over 3/4 cup brown rice; 1 cup boiled kale; 1 cup green, black, or herbal tea with lemon
Before bed: 1 cup hot water with lemon

So, last week I halfway followed the detox for a couple days, and felt a bit less like yuck. Mike then went out of town, and I made a few good salads. Salads are nice for low times because they are quick to put together and energizing. We had a lot of oranges and grapefruits on hand, and I love citrus in salads. (The detox diet has something against citrus fruit, but I'm not sure what, especially since it's in love with lemon water.) I also just discovered raw fennel. I knew about braised or roasted fennel, but it's amazing raw, too.

Here's a simple orange and shaved fennel salad, dressed with olive oil, lemon juice, and some Hawaiian black sea salt that I got at Trader Joe's a while ago. This beautiful salad reminds me that life is good, and that summer will come eventually even though it's Indian Winter in Chicago.



Here's a salad with butter lettuce, orange, raw almonds, sunflower seeds, and raisins. I ate it with some tahini dressing.

decadent muffins

I frequently make healthy vegan muffins. There's a pumpkin muffin recipe in Vegan with a Vengeance that tolerates my fiddling, so I cut the sugar by half or more, use whole wheat pastry flour and wheat bran instead of all-purpose flour, and substitute applesauce for some of the oil. The muffins when made as directed are very tasty. My healthified versions are pretty good too, so long as I don't go overboard with the substitutions. I also make healthy banana or carrot or raisin bran muffins. When working, I would take one or two with me to the office each day, and eat them at my desk.

Lately I've been feeling irritated by healthy muffins. I made some bran muffins (the source of the recipe I will cloak in anonymity) that were really, really dense and really, really healthy. They were utterly dreary. I eventually chopped them up and resurrected them as bread pudding, so it wasn't all for naught. Is it better to make a fattening, delicious paradigmatic version of whatever you're making than a less-tasty healthy or thrifty version? In the case of granola, the answer is yes. I've messed around making granola out of okara (soy bean pulp) or almond pulp, the residue left over after making soy milk or almond milk. It's doesn't get nicely browned and carmelized like regular granola. I've also tried a granola recipe that contains applesauce, ostenstibly to lower the fat content, and it was similarly mediocre. Never again. I'm going to throw out the okara and almond pulp, waste be damned, and make granola that tastes as good as possible. (I will post my granola recipe soon, but here's a good basic recipe from a blog I like.) For that matter, I'll also stop making homemade soy or almond milk. Mine isn't as as good as store bought.

But back to muffins. I'm in the middle of a love affair with my new cookbook, Super Natural Cooking by Heidi Swanson. The recipes all contain whole foods or natural ingredients, but are often quite rich. I've had my eye on the Espresso Banana Muffin recipe (p. 38) for weeks now. It's the real deal, with butter, eggs, sugar, lots of walnuts. The addition of espresso powder to the batter is the touch of brilliance. It adds a mysterious caramel-like and bitter something.

I've greedily eaten a few Espresso Banana Muffins, and I would definitely serve them to guests. But as an everyday muffin, I'm unsure. I think they are too fulsome, and would put me in a decadent and devil-may-care mood. I might lie on the couch reading all day, because that's more pleasurable than working or leaving the house. Maybe something a bit more bracing. I wonder what would happen if I subbed applesauce for the butter, and cut the sugar down a bit . . . ?

Muffin with Primrose