raw pakorafy me, baby!

Okay, these are sooo not pakoras. They are loosely inspired by pakoras, and even then, "loosely" might be too restrictive a term for what I've done. Basically, I wanted something to serve as a vehicle for some awesome chipotle tamarind-date chutney I have on hand. Also, I had to use up some sprouted buckwheat, and I've been having this methi craving... you can see where this is going. Like many of my "recipes", the end dish was the product not of a plan, but of a series of unconnected thoughts that I just happened to have while making dinner. Serendipitous dinner creation is a wonderful thing. Option 1 (which I have been known to do): mix chutney into sprouted buckwheat or cold rice or any other vaguely starchy thing that the chutney will adhere to and then eat it on salad. Option 2 is slighly more elegant, and much prettier than it looks here. Sometimes you only bother with one photo before devouring the food. It is, after all, a food blog, not a photo blog.

3-4 c. sprouted buckwheat, half of it blended to a paste
1 tbs toasted cumin seeds
a few toasted fenugreek seeds, squished roughly
1 tbs toasted coriander seeds, squished roughly
1 tsp garam masala
1/3 cup methi leaves, crumbled (I used dried ones)
1 large carrot, finely grated
1 handful of dulse, torn into tiny pieces
as much jalapeno as you want, chopped fine
1/2 tsp garlic paste (1 small clove)
1 tsp ginger paste
squeeze lemon juice
large-ish pinch smoked salt

Mix everything together. At this stage, you can just use it as a highly addictive pate and scoop it up with red pepper chunks (and then drizzle them with tamarind chutney). To make something a little more stand-alone, you'll need to add something to make it a bit less wet and then form it into patties. You can use ground dried coconut or chickpea flour or oat flour. I used chickpea flour, since I don't particularly care if something is 100% raw, but I do care that it's not full of fat. I added about 1/3 of a cup. Make your own choices on this one. I imagine if one owned a dehydrator, one could then dehydrate them for a billion hours. I don't, so I didn't. Also, that would have meant waiting, which frankly, I was simply not willing to do. I just decorated them with the chutney that caused all this in the first place and ate them. With a giant salad, because I'm that kind of vegan. Yuuuuuuuuum.

As a note, one of the things that keeps me from eating more raw food is that I like to eat without adding fat (or relying on large amounts of high-fat food like nuts, avocados or coconuts), and I do love my starches. Everyone has their own take on nutrition etc. nowadays, but the thing that works for me is to do a no-added-fat vegan, starch-based diet with lots of fresh fruit and veg. Doing this, I run, bike, do mad science, goof off, read, have a personal life, get up far too early because I hate missing out on life, and am generally happy and healthy and full enough of energy to annoy those around me in the early mornings. That being said, I like the lightness of eating a high proportion of raw foods, especially in the summer when I have to eat so much heavy food when I travel for work and so when I'm home... sprouted buckwheat! Yay! These are nice because they're starchy and filling and heavy without being full of fat. Also, can I just mention again that they're the perfect vehicle for tamarind-date chutney?

A little note: I wrote down the conservative amounts for the spices because my chutney was super-flavourful. If I was having these alone, or with coriander chutney, I'd probably up the coriander seeds, ginger and garlic.

serendipitous music based on... : in C, by whoever you want, dammit.

less is more

Fresh peas! With the first fresh peas of spring, it is best to do as little as possible. Why fuck with something that's already perfect?

Fresh raw pea soup

1 cup peas, shelled
1/3 cup Malborough sauvignon blanc. (yes, I insist. you need those capsicum notes)
1 handfull fresh mint leaves
1/2 tsp marmite
ground pink peppercorns
1 cup water

Put everything in a blender. Blend until frothy. Add more water if you need it. Eat.

I served this with a blood orange, fennel and sprouted buckwheat salad.

1 heaping cup (okay, proably more like 1.5 cups... we were hungry) sprouted buckwheat
1 head fennel, in ridiculously thin slices (use a mandoline)
1 blood orange, sectioned
large handful dandelion greens, picked on your bike ride, washed well and chopped
large handful chopped flat leaf parsley
a few mint leaves, in ribbons (optional)
a few kalamata olives, seeded and chopped
pomegranite seeds from half a pomegranite (because you need to snack on the rest of them, duh)
a few walnuts

dressed with
fennel seeds crushed and mixed with the juice from the blood orange, some lemon juice, some of the brine from the olives, salt and pepper

music: Good morning sunshine.

crunch!

I've been eating more raw food lately, and I loooove it. Granted, I've been a super salad fan for some time now, so I fail miserably at convincing people that vegans don't just eat salad. I mean, I don't eat *only* salad, but I do eat a lot of it. Because salad is yummy, and it makes me feel so good when I eat it, and it's crunchy and colourful! Now, I've said it before: if the only option is a sad iceberg lettuce, then the prospect of a giant salad is indeed rather underwhelming. But there's no reason it has to come to that, is there? Repeat after me: There is no excuse for boring salad. EVER. Also, I love saffron (just for the record). This vaguely middle-eastern and not-vaguely yummy. So satisfying. So tastey and simple. And yeah. Just.. yeah.

Bottom layer:
sprouted quinoa
chopped dates
chopped green olives
chopped rocket (arugula for those of you on the other side of the pond)

Salad layer:
chopped tomatoes
shredded purple cabbage
veeeeery thinly sliced carrots

the salad is marinated in
crushed fennel, saffron, a drop of lime oil, salt and pepper, all dissolved in apple cider vinegar.

music: mirah. yay!

big bowl of hug

Yup. It's a giant bowl of umami. The culinary equivalent of a hug, if you will.

1/2 cup dry aduki beans
1 large piece konbu
4 dried shitake mushrooms
1 onion, chopped
4 tbs soy sauce
1/2 cup white wine
splash of mirin
1 heaping (and I *do* mean heaping. don't skimp) tbs chopped fresh ginger
1 cup butternut squash bits in cubes
1 leftover baked spud, chopped
1 tbs red miso
sesame seeds to sprinkle on top

Put the dry aduki beans in a pot. Add konbu and shitake mushrooms. Add about 6 cups of water. Bring to a boil. Now, go away and do about half an hour of yoga, or read a book, or whatever. Then, come back, top up the water, fish out the konbu and discard it. Fish out the shitake, chop them up, and throw them back in (discard the stems if they are too tough to eat). Go away for another 15 mins, or until the beans are soft. Add everything up to, but not including the spud. If you don't have leftover baked spuds lying around, add raw chopped one now. It will be almost as good. Almost. But not quite. Simmer until the squash is done. There should be just enough water to cover all the ingredients, but not much more than that. This is a pretty thick stew by the time it's all done. Add spud and miso and warm through. Adjust seasonings. Sprinkle with sesame seeds and eat. Feel better about the world.

Now, you could of course be all fancy and make dashi etc. etc. But I was not feeling fancy. And you know what? It worked out fine. Better than fine. Yummy enough to make again, just like this, all non-fancy like.

Umamusic: naive and simple music, by john adams.

garlicky goodness is the first sign of spring

Spring has sprung! Which means... the wild garlic is out! The boi and I spent Saturday ambling along in the sunshine. We walked up the Water of Leith and then down the Union Canal. For 5 hours. And we picked more wild garlic than is reasonable. So we are now extra-good smelling and completely vampire proof.

Wild garlic polenta for two very hungry walkers

First, get this in the oven, on as high as you can go:
2c itsy-bitsy cherry tomatoes in
1/2 c water and (an optional) 1/2 cup red wine

while the tomatoes are baking to wonderfulness do this:

1.5 cups polenta
sea salt
1/4 cup nutritional yeast
1 cup chopped wild garlic.

When the polenta is about 5 mins away from being done, add some (about a cup) crumbled smoked tofu on top of the (now kinda blackened) cherry tomatoes. I used smoked tofu that I had fermented according to the directions in The New Now and Zen Epicure, which I highly recommend. I find most vegan cheeses gross, but I looooooove the tofu one in this book. Pop that back in the oven to let the cheese warm through. The fermented tofu is really salty; if you are using regular smoked tofu, add salt.

Stir the nutritional yeast and wild garlic into the polenta at the end. Spoon some tomato/tofu onto each bowl. Consume. Radiate wild garlic out of your every pore for the next 24 hours. I will be radiating wild garlic for at least a week, since the rest of it is going into wild garlic pesto.

Music for ambling: Norah Jones. Come away with me.

I wanna be a chocolate god post 11: just the chocolate, ma'am.

Well, it had to come to this eventually. I'm making my own chocolate bars. Or rather chocolate stars.

It's not hard, but it does take a little practice. You need to get a good feel for how the chocolate changes consistency as it tempers, and you need to be able to work pretty fast. Also, each chocolate will have it's own idiosyncracies, so you may need to adjust the tempering temperatures by a degree or two. Also, all chocolates taste different, so you have to play around with various chocolate: cocoa butter: sugar ratios until you find the one you like and that works with the particular chocolate that you use. But the basic idea is that you temper chocolate, and then pour it quick quick into a mould (I use silicon muffin cases). Tempering chocolate gives it that snap and sheen (untempered chocolate is fudgy, tempered chocolate snaps). For the dark chocolate I use, I heat all the cocoa butter+ half the cocoa liquor + all the sugar in a double boiler up to 115F, then remove it from the heat and stir in the remaining cocoa liquor in an double cooler (what I've decided to call it when you fill the bottom pot with cold water instead of simmering water) while stirring like mad. Then when the molten chocolate reaches 83F, pop it back on the double boiler for a few seconds (until it reaches 85F) and then add whatever flavours you want and pour it into moulds. A much better explanation of tempering chocolate is here. I mostly just practiced until I got it right.

Key 1: the chocolate should never, ever come into contact with water. Like with gremlins, water = disaster.

Key 2: this takes practice. Luckily, few people complain about having to eat slightly mistempered chocolate. And you can always turn botched batches into cakes or brownies. Many of my friends have said that they are willing to "eat as much chocolate as it takes" for me to get to the point where I can make the perfect chocolate bar. I have such selfless friends.

Key 3: you cannot make good chocolate out of cheap or bad chocolate. You need good ingredients or you might as well just melt a bunch of chocolate chips and pour them into moulds. Meh. If you do that, please don't tell me about it. It will hurt my soul.

I use raw cocoa liquor and cocoa butter that I order from here. I like the way raw chocolate tastes, and also like that I can order the cocoa liquor and butter separately, which lets me actually mix the chocolate to the taste and consistency I want, instead of just tempering pre-mixed, pre-sweetened chocolate.

My proportions:

80g cocoa liquor, chopped very finely
20g cocoa butter, chopped very finely
20g sugar, ground up a bit in a mortar and pestle

Though I usually make about 600g total at a time. Sometimes it's nice to use vanilla sugar, sometimes not. This makes a fairly dark and bitter chocolate that can go with salty things just as easily as it can with sweet, which I prefer. For something smoother, use 60g cocoa liquor 40g cocoa butter, and 30g sugar. For kid-friendly batches, I use equal amounts chocolate liquor, and cocoa butter, and I blend a few sundried bananas into the cocoa butter (about half as much banana as cocoa butter), then use about 50 g of sugar for every 100g of the cocoa liquor/cocoa butter/banana mix, depending on the sweetness of the bananas and the sweet tooth of the child. I like to use granulated sugar, just slightly crushed so that the resulting chocolate has a bit of a grainy texture from the sugar. I also like that the sweetness is slightly uneven. If you want perfectly smooth chocolate, use icing sugar (reduce the amount slightly).

In the chocolates above, the ones with roses are marbled with sesame fun. Sesame fun is 1 cup of toasted and then ground sesame seeds, 1 tsp vanilla, 1 tbs sugar and a good pinch of salt all mixed together and then 1/2 cup of melted cocoa butter added to it. If you a) use ready made tahini or b) skip the cocoa butter, it will be too runny to set. This is more like semi-ground sesame crumble held together with cocoa butter. It should not be spreadable, runny or oily like store bought tahini. Also, these are not filled chocolates (making filled chocolates does not amuse me, so I refuse to do it). It's a marbled chocolate, but with tahini marble instead of white chocolate marble. To be honest, I really don't like white chocolate much. I make it for other people from time to time, but that's about it. Ahem. So... to make the tahini chocolates, get a batch of dark chocolate ready to go, and have your tahini filling ready. Pour a layer of dark chocolate into the mould, then add a dollop of the tahini marble and marble it through the dark chocolate with a chopstick. Pour a layer of dark chocolate on top, and drop a dried rose onto it. You have to work pretty fast, so make sure that everything is laid out beforehand. Well tempered chocolate should set almost instantaneously. In fact, a good way to check if your chocolate is tempered is to drop a wee bit of it onto a dry plate. It should harden to a nice glossy chocolate "button" in a few seconds. If it doesn't, chances are that you haven't tempered the chocolate properly.

I also made a batch of olive oil chocolates sprinkled with vanilla salt. Other combos I've made: thyme and toasted pine nuts, ancho chili and vanilla and pumpkin seed, vanilla and salt, garam masala, rose, gold, frankensence, myrrh (can you tell what I did for christmas?), roasted cumin, black pepper and mace and nutmeg, ginger.... and of course just plain (which truth be told, is my favorite). And some others that I don't remember just right now. I've also made a few different vegan white chocolates, since people seem to like white chocolate.

For white chocolate:

80g cocoa butter
30-50g vanilla icing sugar (depending on how sweet you like your white chocolate)
40g powdered coconut milk

Melt the cocoa butter over very low heat. Stir in the other ingredients. Pour into moulds. I like to add 1/2 tsp cardamom to white chocolate. You can also add 1 tbs matcha powder and have green tea chocolate, which is lovely. In that case, omit the cardamom, and add a few drops of almond essence. Depending on the brand of coconut milk powder you use, your white chocolate may or may not taste like coconut. I use coconut milk because the consistency of white chocolate made with powdered soy milk (at least anything I've found in the UK) can only be described as "gross". So there. I've said it. White chocolate made with powdered soy milk is yuck, and I refuse to participate in it. For white chocolate with cool texture (I think of this as "adult" white chocolate), you can blend a mix of almonds and cashews, about 50g, to a powder (NOT a butter), and then blend them into the melted cocoa butter. This is especially nice with the green tea flavour. I've also done this with saffron, which was bloody amazing. You have to extract the saffron in warm cocoa butter beforehand, like pot, only legaler. It makes orange chocolate. Yay!

Finally, don't use slave chocolate. People shouldn't suffer for your sweet tooth, and chocolate is a luxury good, so please don't whine about having to *gasp* actually pay someone for the hard work they do to grow, pick, and process it. There is nothing romantic about using slave labour to make goodies for your sweetheart.

multicoloured carrot pilaf

After a few days of holiday food, it's nice to get back to normal food. This is simple and easy and homey, but not at all boring. You can easily double or triple the recipe for potlucks or to have leftovers for lunches. The fancy-pants carrots and easygoing spices make it great for bringing to shared food-ish events. It's also the perfect break from rich foods after the crazyness of Christmas and before the impending culinary lunacy of Hogmanay. And I love multicoloured carrots! The ones here are orange ringed with purple. So fun!

Multicoloured carrot pilaf

3/4 cup brown basmati rice
1/2 cup puy lentils (dry measure), cooked and drained (about 3/4 cup cooked)
1 tbs cumin seeds
2 bay leaves
3 cardamom pods, crushed,
1 red onion, in half-moons
1/2 tsp smoked salt
1/3 cup chopped dates
1/3 cup currants
1/3 tsp cinnamon
2 multicoloured carrots, in thin rounds
black pepper to taste
lemon juice from 1/2 lemon
1/2 cup chopped parsley (optional)

Cook rice separately, as usual. Let cool a little bit. Heat up a pan and throw the cumin in. When it smells amazing, add the onions ,bay leaf and cardamom, and saute over low heat until the onions are (I did them in a bit of white wine). Add everything else up to the cinnamon and cook until combined. It should be dry, but not sticky. Add a splash of water or wine if it starts sticking to the pan. Add carrots and cover for a minute or two. You want them to steam, but not get mushy. When the carrots are ready, add lemon juice, pepper, and parsely and stir. Serve immediately. This is also really good as a cold salad, in which case I would garnish it with fresh pomegranate seeds. I served this with roasted okra (in pomegranite molasses and lemon vinegar).

homey, chill, and interesting music: the dubliners, played nice and quiet so that you can sing along without shouting and dance along while you cook in a peaceful candlelit kitchen.