Socca That Shouldn't, But Does, Work

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I actually posted. Then, I went to Beijing for a few weeks, got back to a stomach bug for a week, and have generally been busy. I ate really a rather large variety of food in Beijing; E along as my translator made things much easier. We still did guess our way through a few menu items as the characters used for describing food aren't exactly the most descriptive. For instance, my "noodles tomatoes and egg with <unrecognized characters> extra" that we were excited for? <unrecognized characters> just meant "a size bigger". Hrm. But, yes, chuan is delicious (as is all Uyghur food we had), I really like zhōu (congee/rice porrige/jook/etc), and there were some surprisingly good tofu skin/peanut dishes.

And really a lot more to talk about, but this post is not about that. It is about a dinner that, by all accounts, should have been an interesting experiment and nothing more but was, in reality, simply delicious. I have been cooking a lot from Plenty (another reason for the lack of recipes) and have enjoyed everything from it so far. It had a recipe for socca - chickpea flour pancakes - topped with onion and tomato. I took the recipe as an inspiration, ran it through parts of Japan and China, and came up with this.

Socca, with green onion inside, topped with mâche (lamb's lettuce), and a mushroom/tomato saute. The China part is, somewhat obviously, the green onions in the socca - like scallion cakes but much lighter. The Japan part isn't so obvious from a photo, but from a bite it would be obvious. The saute was seasoned with a combination of sake, (fake) wasabi, and brown sugar. Sesame oil could, probably, have helped a great deal. Delicious, though, most definitely delicious. If I see Italian/Japanese fusion places in the future, I won't be quite so stunned.

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Socca (By Way of Asia)

Serves 2

This recipe is an approximation, and not a final product. Consider it a place to get started; much could be improved in the dish. For instance, a sauce, aioli, or dip could be of great benefit. As could some spices.

1 cup chickpea flour

1 cup lukewarm water

1 tbsp olive oil

1/2 tsp salt

2 tbsp minced green onion

1 "box" mushrooms (8oz, I think)

2/3 "box" cherry tomatoes (???oz)

1/4 cup-ish sake

1 tbsp brown sugar

1 tbsp (give or take) wasabi

salt+pepper

a bit of mâche

Mix the socca batter - combine all the ingredients in a bowl and whisk. Clean the mushrooms and dry them, then slice them. Sweat the mushrooms with a dash of salt in a frying pan over medium heat for about five minutes. While the mushrooms are sweating, begin cutting cherry tomatoes in half. When the mushrooms have reduced by a bit and are tasty, prepare to multi-task.

Preheat the oven to 250 degrees and prepare a parchment-lined baking sheet. Heat a non-stick pan over medium-high heat with a bottom the size you would like your socca (think slightly larger than tacos). While doing the rest of the saute prep, you should be cooking socca: put a dash of oil in the pan and add ~1/4 cup of batter, spreading it evenly over the bottom. After 1-2 minutes, it should have bubbles and the top should have begun to set a little. Flip and cook for another minute.

In the downtime of cooking socca, add the sake, brown sugar, and wasabi to the mushrooms and reduce for several minutes. Then add the tomatoes, cook for five minutes, and add salt and pepper to taste. All the while, you should be making socca - I got 6 pancakes from the recipe, which is a good amount to aim for.

The saute should finish before the socca, which is good as you want it to cool slightly. When all the socca are done, put a bed of mâche on each one, then top with saute. Place in the oven for 5-10 minutes to warm. Serve and eat immediately, as they will cool quickly. Warmed plates may help. Eating with your hands may be a good idea, as E thought the dish was close enough to a taco to be eaten like one.

Hell, maybe add some guacamole.

Cinnamon Rolls, Mushroom and Fennel for Dinner

Things have calmed down a bit in Mikey-land; I even got a quick weekend trip to Seattle in. This means back to baking and cooking; I took this as an opportunity to handle a long-standing request from coworkers for cinnamon rolls. The recipe is straight from Artisan Breads Everyday, one that I have even used in the past (the dough, not the filling). And if I remember one thing from that, it was the amount of glaze called for by the recipe was preposterously excessive. I used a quarter of the called-for glaze and still had a bit left; I don't know why anyone would want to dump a full two cups of sugar on top of something already filled with it.

The filling was what I thought traditional, and the book as well, but my coworkers seem to have differing ideas w.r.t. the makeup. Cinnamon and sugar, plus equal parts chopped pecans and raisins. For a brief moment, I contemplated walnuts and went so far as a taste test. Walnuts taste like... walnuts. Dry things. Salads with apples in them. Pilafs. A single bite of the pecan brought back memories of cinnamon rolls as a child; the association is so strong that I think pecans taste like cinnamon rolls. The only tweak I did was a bit of lime juice in both the dough and the glaze; a hint and no more. They also puffed immensely in the oven - below is the just-sliced photo; a two hour rise later, they didn't look much different. 20 minutes in a hot oven, and they almost filled the pan.

I also quicked a cook dinner with E the other night, though she honestly did most of the work. I was in charge of a veggie side, knowing the main was garlic and lemon flavored. Asparagus is an obvious choice, but an overdose in the past week left me blasé on the matter. Mushrooms with fennel seemed a good idea. There wasn't anything remarkable in the dish - the mushrooms were cooked in a pan with salt, no oil, until they began to sweat then a bit more. At that point, you add the oil and a few minutes later the fennel, cooking it for just long enough to not. Something learned: however many cloves of garlic we used were too many, especially to deglaze with a splash of white wine and dump on the potatoes.

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).

Something Like Bento

I've been trying to cook more, well, defined meals recently. The easiest way to do this is via a recipe, which usually don't make their way to this soapbox. The desire stems from my limited cooking vernacular; E ribs me about cooking "Mikey food" so often yet, without a recipe, that is the extent of my ability. Cook veggies so they are tasty? Sure, saute and season, maybe bake. Cook tofu? Sure, saute and season, maybe bake. So, to fix that. More recipes, more adventurous cooking. And, so, I bring you... Mikey food. Whoops.

While, yes, it is just cooked veggies, each bit was prepared individually, allowing me to play around with a whole four different preps in a single dish. The squash has rice vinegar and cayenne, the apple a mustard seed/sesame oil/rice vinegar dressing, the mushrooms soy sauce, and the rice furikake. I admit, none of that is very inventive, but it was a nice platform for experimenting.

The squash prep was probably the most involved; thinly sliced squash tossed in a bit of olive oil, cooked over medium without flipping or stirring until they became a little translucent. Sprinkle some cayenne over the pan, flip everything, add a dash of rice vinegar, and stir a bit. The mushrooms were equally simple - after the squash was out of the pan, the mushrooms went in until they started to sweat, at which point they were splashed with soy sauce, stirred a few times, and taken off heat.

The apple dressing is approximately 1 tsp coarse mustard, 1 tsp rice vinegar, and 1/2 tsp sesame oil. The proportions were easy but far from perfect; the main flavor was mustard seed. The egg was an attempt at soft boiling; the egg was too fresh, so I mostly destroyed it in removing the shell.

Veggie "Lasagna" Bake

I was going to prepare a raw, vegan dinner tonight but decided against at the last minute when I realized that I didn't have the tools to prepare cashew cheese. Thanks to a discussion with Emily earlier in the day, I had carrot and zucchini on my mind. So, improvisation time - zucchini carrot pasta bake? Why not!

The "lasagna" with rice

Veggie "Lasagna" Bake (serves 1)

• 1 carrot
• 1 zucchini
• 1 bunch trumpet royale mushrooms (10?)
• handful of grape tomatoes (10?)
• chili flakes
• salt
• shredded cheese that you like and that melts (asiago is a good call)

Preheat oven to 425. Grate the carrot and zucchini onto a plate. Save the ends you don't want to grate for fear of destroying your fingertips for garnish. Slice the tomatoes as thin as you can without juicing them - for me, this was into halves or thirds. Cut the mushrooms into sticks. In a small oven dish (like, say, a loaf pan), put down a layer of mushrooms and lightly salt them. On top of this, put down about half the tomatoes, squeezed a bit, and a very thin layer of grated cheese. Then layer on the zucchini and carrot bits, topping it off with the remainder of the tomatoes and a final layer of cheese, plus the garnish slices of carrot/zucchini. Top with chili flakes.

Bake for 30 minutes - it is done when the top layer is browning. Attempt to serve in original shape (namely, that of lasagna) but watch it fall apart completely when you scoop it up so just serve it as a pile. Maybe attempt to bake it for longer and hope that it sticks together more, but know, deep down, that it won't.