Huckleberries, Heath, Cucumber

I've come back from a relaxing 5-day stay in Northern Idaho to visit E's family. The daily plan went something like this: lazily wake up. Eat some grub and decide where to go outside that day. After getting hot hiking/walking, jump in a lake/river. Eat some food, drink adult beverages, and go to bed. Also I didn't have cell phone service or easy internet access, so there was that. E delivered on one of her longstanding promises - to take me huckleberry picking in Idaho. We hiked up Schweitzer resort in 90 degree weather, eating huckleberries the whole way and emptying a Nalgene or two. We walked down, filling that empty Nalgene up with berries to use later. It was divine.

E put most those berries to use in a cobbler, though we couldn't find suitable sugar to use so it was more hot berries topped with something like a honey-oat streusel, served on ice cream. I put another chunk of the berries to use with pancakes topped with E's quick berry syrup, introducing yet more people to the wonder of Mikey's pancakes. And that was all the cooking we did. No bread, no experiments, nothing.

As an addendum to the previous post, it was brought to my attention that I mentioned, but did not picture, the bowls. So, below, you'll see one of the bowls filled with lightly-crusted indian-spiced tofu, blackened brussels, and grilled cucumbers. Peaking out of the corner is the fig/bacon dish. Oh, yes, right, grilled cucumbers. In the same way that pickling transforms a lukewarm, bland vegetable into a chilly, crunchy delight, cooking cucumbers in a cast iron elevates them to cuisine. An early dinner at Bar Tartine led to this discovery, quickly recreated at home. Cut cucumbers into quarters or so. Heat them, face down, over medium-ish in a cast iron with a brush of salt and cumin. Do this until they are soft and hot all the way through. Consume. Be enlightened.

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Huckleberry Pancakes with Syrup

Recipe for 1, scales as necessary

for pancakes

1/4 cup spelt flour

1 thumb-length of banana (~1/4 banana)

2 tbsp huckleberries

~1/4 cup soy/almond/coconut/hemp/etc milk

1/4 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp ginger

pinch salt

for syrup

handful huckleberries

handful strawberries, chopped

sugar to taste

possibly water

To make the pancakes, mush the banana until it almost passes as a liquid. Add everything but the milk-like liquid, then slowly pour in milk until you end up with a batter-like consistency. This is usually a quarter cup and a dash more, but it varies on the kind of milk and the amount of banana. Experiment a bit. On a griddle or non-stick pan over medium, add some butter. Cook pancake amounts of batter until bubbles form on the surface. Wait 15-30 seconds after that point, then flip and cook for a minute or two longer.

To make the syrup, in a sauce pan over medium-high, add the berries. You'll want to lightly mush them with a spoon, but also make sure you stir them so they don't stick or burn. After a few minutes, they will start to liquify. Add a dash of water and sugar, and continue stirring while it kinda-boils. Continue until you have something that looks like jam. Let cool for a few minutes and check the sweetness, adding sugar if necessary. Once removed from pan, you can boil some water in the pan to both clean it and make some pretty tasty tea (all credits to E on that one).

Iterating

Instead of the usual cooking routine, I took time recently on refining and iterating on recipes. I've done this before, most notably when experimenting with shortbread, but never with dinner. It is odd, as well; there is no dinner I can cook that is distinctly "my" dinner. Maybe black bean cakes as I've cooked them a few times, though never really learned much from them. Or tofu and rice; but I season that what appears to be a unique way each time. The trout of last weekend, however, seems a good candidate.

E and I cooked it again, somewhat randomly, with a few attempted tweaks. I think I overcooked it, however, as it was not noteworthy as the last effort, though still a fine meal. The modifications this time were a bit more oil in the pan, a bit more flour on the skin, and (potentially?) a hotter pan. Also, I may have cooked it too much in the pan, making the three minutes it spent in the oven one or two too many. We had it with E's prep of oven-roasted veggies and also her take on a simple dish of farro, onion, and goat cheese that I cooked earlier in the week.

Though I complain of having no signature dinner dish, the same can not be said of breakfast. My pancake recipe is a frequent request from my tummy and others. A prep right before camping this weekend, and a discussion over camp breakfast the next day, had me decide to make the dry mix in bulk. I added a dash of both ginger and cayenne pepper to the recipe, and settled on 100% spelt flour for the "perfect" taste. I need to take a few times to weigh out bulk quantities of the recipe and get it to a happy place; the current prep is all volumes, pinches, and dashes. But, once done with that, I'll post the current state of easy-to-measure recipe and bulk-by-weight for all to enjoy.

Vermont Ruminations; Adapted Cottage Pancakes

I recently returned from a quasi-vacation in Vermont - I sampled the local coffee shop-and-laptop culture for a few days, but the rest of my week was spent relaxing, sightseeing, and spending time with E's family. Not counting a few-hour layover in Newark for an international flight some years ago, this marks the first time I've visited a state in the East (Columbus, Ohio being my previous record, narrowly beating out Detroit). My liberal, snobby, San Francisco-yupster opinion of the place? In one word: cool. In more words:

Have you ever seen Portlandia, more specifically the song "Dream of the 90s" which opened the pilot? Well, Vermont was a bit like that, except instead of the dream being that of the 90s, it is that of San Francisco farm-to-table obsessives. The atmosphere is libertarian - taken to mean personal freedoms and self sufficiency, not whatever cable news has decided it means this week. There are co-op grocery stores with an embarrassingly large local produce section, restaurants striving for local ingredients, and plenty of land with which to fish, farm, hunt, harvest, and otherwise get the good stuff. Cast iron pans were everywhere, which one should take as a sign of an advanced culture. The meal's host would casually mention the wonderful farm/friend that provided ingredients, a spiritual opposite of the name dropping one finds on Kanye albums. That isn't to say everything is good - the restaurants that aren't trying to source local fare are not trying just as hard as other greasy spoons in other states. The diners are just as diner-y as elsewhere; the population density isn't quite high enough to support artisan coffee ($4.50 for a 8oz cup of drip and the sultry attitude when you ask for sugar and they say they only have simple syrup which you'll find next to the compostable napkins though, oddly, not near the compost bin for said napkins which doesn't exist).

I came back from the trip, then, with two cravings. The first was for good, not drinkable, coffee. The second was for pancakes. A home-cooked brunch featured a yeasted waffle recipe, complete with blue corn freshly ground that morning. And 101 Cookbooks posted the Cottage Pancakes recipe I've been dying to try. I don't have the recipe yet for the yeasted waffle/pancake batter, but I did bastardize the cottage pancakes.

I very much toned them down, taking only the idea of putting cottage cheese in pancakes and scaling it to a single serving (as I prefer). My batter was 1 egg, 1/4 cup oat floar, 1 tbsp cottage cheese, 1 tsp baking powder, and about a thumbs-length of crushed/pureed banana. I would up the cottage cheese but otherwise leave that alone and call it a success. Maybe change out the oat flour for something more standard (all purpose) or less standard (spelt/rye/etc mix).

I also wanted to cook some more simple, flavorful creations, so I made what you can see below. A recipe is left as an exercise to the reader. As a hint, the central part of the dish features roasted parsnip in a mushroom/onion "gravy" (a bit of butter and a helping of water). The only spices were cayenne (on the asparagus), rice vinegar (dressing for the arugula salad), and herbes de provence (in the gravy).

The Schwartz, apparently, is not with me

Rather, Yogurt and I don't get along when cooking. Today, I bring you a failure. Do not try and cook this at home. I won't even give you a recipe, only a basic description, so the casual browser is not confused. This isn't the first time I've failed with yogurt. E and I attempted to cook some Indian food going off of half-remembered recipes; it used Greek yogurt and it tasted awful. Nearly the whole of the meal was a complete failure - a runny-and-chunky sauce with raisins and almonds served over charred spanish rice with a glass of horrible red wine. The spinach was pretty good, though. It was a traumatic experience, but not enough.

Pancake looks pretty good, non? Tastes like shit, though. Problem, that. Pancakes shouldn't taste like shit. It isn't entirely the yogurts fault, mind you. I also decided to add the smallest amount of fresh ground clove I could manage as it goes well with cinnamon and I figured the bitter kick it provides would also pair with the bit of bitter in yogurt. I used a single fragment, ground via mortar. Instead of getting sweet, sweet love between a yogurt and clove, I got an all-out orgy of acids and bitters in my mouth. I was forced to hose the place down with a mixture of honey, banana, and generous gulps of water. Also, the pancake was far too thick. This one below was after the first; I added some more almond milk to thin out the batter and hopefully hide some taste.

Guess what? It didn't work, not at all. On the plus side, my coffee was pretty good and the banana was just-ripe. To catalog my failure, and give you an idea of what not to do, this is a brief description of how the mess happened. I have a vegan pancake recipe I adore, which I wanted to cook. I did it with spelt flour (100% spelt instead of a buckwheat/pastry mix) and I tried a substitute of 50% yogurt for 50% of the almond milk. Doesn't really work, especially with greek yogurt. Next time, if there is a next time, maybe 25% russian yogurt for 25% of the milk? Maybe I'll just give up an stick to yogurt in bread.

Breakfast of Chumpions

That would have been Breakfast of Champions, but I was making it. And I don't really learn from past mistakes. I made my vegan pancakes again to round out a breakfast of drip and a shortbread cookie, to see if I had in fact ruined the cookies. Rewind - I made shortbread cookies last night. It was late, I was tired, and I wasn't too patient. I didn't properly cream the butter and sugar before adding flour, I didn't roll the dough out thin enough, and I didn't pre-cut the cookies deep enough. Oh, I also put on too much salt/not enough chocolate. They still taste good, but are not pretty.

Back to the pancakes: I scaled it down from 1/2 cup flour to 1/3 cup flour (so 1/3 cup milk, etc). I used spelt flour this time, so they look much more like pancakes and act much more like pancakes than the buckwheat version. The one thing I forgot to scale - the banana. I still put in half, and of a large one at that. Looking at them, you would think them a delicious and beautiful specimen of veganus pancakinar. You would be right - just a mushy one. They look cooked, but when the batter is about 1/3 or so banana, you can't really cook something through. Lesson learned: less banana in the batter.

Also, I got semolina flour so I went right into cooking with it. The recipe I want to cook needs 3 nights, and I wanted the bread for the next day, so I scrapped it. I did my standard mini baguettes (a very liquid dough) and replaced a full 50% of the flour (by weight) with semolina flour. The dough took forever to firm up - not until the 3rd stretch and fold (of 4) was I really doing much besides letting it ooze, and that was after giving it an extra 10 minutes to hydrate. If doing a similar substitution, you should probably do a soak before adding the yeast and moving on to stretching (that is, combine the flour and water, stir, and let it sit for 20 minutes or so before moving on with the recipe). Also dill in bread is pretty gross when you put in as much as I did, so don't put in as much as I did. Luckily I didn't measure at all so I'm free to repeat my mistakes in the future. Go me!

Experimenting (But Not With Shortbread)

So my last post I mentioned adding cornmeal to the vegan pancake recipe. It wasn't corny enough - I had a 1:3 cornmeal-to-flour ratio and suggested a 1:2 or even 2:3 ratio. Well, in my finest tradition of doing things wrong, I said "lets take the cornmeal to eleven". I used a 4:3 ratio. Yeah, thats right, more cornmeal than flour. How you like dem apples?

Personally, I didn't much like dem apples. You might, but I'd recommend sugar. For reference, I used the previous recipe linked with 1/3 cup cornmeal and 1/4 cup flour. It made... a crepe? I guess we can call it that. I also crushed blueberries into it, then topped it with a few more for good measure. I think adding either a teaspoon+ of sugar, or doubling the amount of crushed blueberries, would have greatly increased the edibility.

For figuring out these ratios, I looked at a recipe I had for savory cornbread (2:3 cornmeal-to-flour ratio) and the cornbread muffin recipe on the box of cornmeal (1:1 cornmeal-to-flour, plus lots of sugar). Could stand to improve my recipe-reading skill, but that only comes from trying and failing, I guess. At least it was edible if the bite contained a blueberry.