Sesame-Glazed Edamame, (Attempted) French Macarons

The number of Heath Ceramics I own just tripled, from one to three. I guess I should be precise - I joint-own the two I just got. E moved in with me, and her wonderful former roommate got us a pair of large bowls. This adds to my happy cup, purchased for hot drinks at work. An aside on that - SFMOMA has a Blue Bottle on the top floor in a beautiful, well lit space next to the sculpture garden. They serve coffee in cocoa-colored Heath mugs and these mugs make me quite happy. After some investigation, I found to be custom-made just for that location but an almost-identical mug is sold at their store. It may seem stupid to spend that much for a single mug, but it does make me quite happy. End aside.

The most remarkable feature of the bowls is their size. My standby dinner bowls, pictured in many previous posts, aren't really big enough for single-dish dinners. Maybe chili is filling enough given the volume, but definitely not my more standard rice-and-tofu dishes. To inaugurate them, I cooked a rather  unremarkable udon and silken tofu soup. About halfway through making the soup, I knew it would not astound and hatched a plan to make at least something good. A few handfuls of edamame, pre-steamed and laboriously popped from pods, were intended for the soup. Instead, they met their fate in my cast iron with mirin, cayenne, and sesame seeds. I was a little influenced by that little chickpea dish I've made before. The end result was a slightly crispy sweet and spicy bite, perfect for adding some flavor to a meal. Not so good for finger food - much too sticky.

The same weekend, I also endeavored on a standard trial of bakers: French Macarons. In short, if you don't care about them looking perfect and you own something for beating eggs, you have no reason to not make these. The ingredient list is impressively small, ignoring the filling, and the result is that combination of soft and chewy and sweet and sticky that begs to be savored. Again, assuming you don't care how perfect they look. Case in point, the macarons I baked up:

I think my flaw was using the wrong recipe. I should have just used the one a friend of mine does; instead, I Googled for "Miete French Macron Recipe" and took the first hit. It gave me weights for all the ingredients but the egg whites. It said 6 for the double recipe, so I halved it down to 3. But, alas, my batter was runny. Before you ask, yes, I'm sure my whites were stiff enough. They clumped in the beater and looked like meringue; they held a point. I may have deflated them too much in the mixing, but I'm going to bet if I used a recipe with weights on the egg whites and scaled around that, they would have come out at least the generally correct shape. Not bad for the mess it created.

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Sesame-Glazed Edamame

More an idea than a recipe

1/2 cup edamame beans, pre-steamed and removed from pods.

1 tbsp mirin

1 tbsp sesame seeds

1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (reduce if desired)

dash salt

dash chinese five spice

Make sure the beans are fairly dry. Toss them with spices and salt, and put them in a pre-heated cast iron over medium. Allow to cook for five minutes, stirring once. Pour in the mirin and the sesame seeds, and stir actively to make sure the edamame gets a nice coating. Once the mirin starts to gum-up, leave them alone in the pan for a few minutes so they can brown; repeat on the other side.

Ethnically Challenged "Latkes", and a Twist on Rosemary Loaf

Continuing a theme of amazing weekend weather, we had another one. A somewhat hectic schedule led to me eating exactly 2 meals at my apartment the entire weekend, Friday included. One of which was a simple breakfast. Now, some of that was warranted. A truffle-making class Saturday morning gave me the opportunity to take E to Sightglass coffee. Her comments were mostly "I can't believe your drip cost more than my latte", "this is pretty good", and "yeah, you were right, this place is pretty awesome inside". Lets consider that a glowing endorsement. The truffle class was wonderful; I feel like I can make truffles at home. Some cooking classes I've been to and heard of are more like a dinner party; the instruction takes a back seat to drinking wine, socializing, and doing (but not being instructed in) prep work. Not this one.

The lack of cooking finally caught up to me on Sunday; not wanting to go to the grocery store I settled on quinoa and apple. Not the most exciting meal, but spruced up with a little bit of earthy pu-erh tea in the water, pan-toasted almonds, and a light mirin-cayenne finish it was a nice grounded meal after a weekend of heavier fare. It also put me in the mood to do something Japanese; I wanted tempura but didn't want to deep fry something. So I made latkes, except Japanese. Both those words should be in air quotes, by the way.

A recipe would do no good, but the thought process was such: latkes are a starch + egg/flour (binding) + flavor. Replace the shredded potato (starch) with sushi rice (also a starch) and move the flavoring away from the normal (onion, sour cream) to something Japanese (shitaki, seaweed, edamame) to get a new dish. It worked, impressively. 2/3 cup cooked sushi rice, 2 eggs, enough corn flour that I felt it was binding, and far too many hand-extracted edamames later, I had something that would form into patties and cook in a bit of oil. For a bit of final flavor, I also added a tad of furikake to the batter, a pre-cooked shitake pressed onto the top of each, and served on a piece of dried seaweed. Pre-cooked mushroom is important to get all that moisture out. I served it with a bit of raw kale and cucumber salad, with cooked kale just because I love kale so much. The only lack was wasabi, which I left at E's when we made latkes in the past.

I also found the time to toy around with bread - I think my loaves are doing well flavor-wise, but the visuals are sometimes lacking. With this last loaf, I was going for a tiled pattern, with raised, flour-coated tiles separated by rivulets of cheese tween them. You can see how that turned out:

In short, there was a bit of flooding. I think my problem was a too-short rise; given the temperature of my apartment and my impatience, this is unsurprising. What I attempted to do was make a cold-fermented loaf (that is, mix the dough at night and let it rise in the fridge) with a bit of rise time before it went to sleep for the night, and putting it to bed pre-shaped. I gave it 1.5 hours on top of the 45 minutes of mixing + stretch and fold, then another hour in the morning before going in the oven (instead of 2 hours). I'm unsure if it needed a longer night rise or a longer morning rise; the Tartine bread gets exclusively a night-time rise and has an amazingly crispy crust so that leads me in the direction of more pre-ferment proofing.

The pattern was made by coating the top in flour then scoring a grid on the loaf. Finely-grated hard cheese (like asiago, for instance) was carefully sprinkled into the cuts, making sure it didn't spread out of the lines. I did the scoring immediately after bringing the dough from the fridge; pushing this off until cook-time might be preferred, which is less of an issue if it doesn't have a morning rise at all.