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.

Pesto Chicken, Veggie Roast, and Bananas Foster

I don't know if you've ever had Bananas Foster. If you haven't, you should. Do you like sugar and butter? Lighting things on fire? Ice cream? You get all of those things, in about ten minutes of work, for a recipe that will kick the ass of any cookies or cakes your pansy-ass could bake. Need I say more?

Bananas Foster served over hemp-milk vanilla ice cream

Actually I guess I do because this post is short and contains no recipes. Dinner had aspirations of a salmon baked in pesto, served with oven-roasted vegetables. The corner store (while not technically on a corner, it satisfies all other requirements) failed to deliver. While an impressive selection of dried foods is admirable, the only meat they had suitable for cooking was chicken.

Also, being me, I like trying to make my sauces from scratch. Pesto from scratch isn't bad under the assumption you have either a mortar and pestle, or a food processor. Otherwise just buy it pre-made. Trust me.

To pair with chicken, potatoes, carrots, and onion was deemed sufficient. Potatoes because they are delicious, onion because seriously have you never roasted an onion? Stop reading and go do it. It is amazing. I think the carrots were for color.

Pesto chicken, roasted veggies

Basil Pesto (makes enough for 2 peoples chicken)

• 1 bunch of basil leaves
• 1 clove garlic
• dash of olive oil
• dash of salt
• pine nuts

Finely chop the basil and the garlic. The fineness is a function of your obsessive-compulsive tendencies and patience, but think of nori flakes or dried herbs for a size guideline. In a mortar and pestle, add a splash of olive oil, 1/4 of the garlic, and 1/4 of the basil. Mash this for a few minutes and taste. Here you decide if the 1-1 ratio of basil and garlic is good or not. The mixture should look too liquidy to be pesto right now - if it isn't, add a bit more olive oil. After deciding your ratio, continue adding in basil and garlic until you've used up all of one or the other. Remember this ratio for next time. When you have a decent consistency, add a dash of salt and 10-ish pine nuts , mashing them in. Taste and serve (or add more pine nuts/salt but don't forget to serve).

Oven Roasted Veggies (serves 2)

• 4 small potatoes
• 2 carrots
• 1 yellow onion
• 2 stalks rosemary
• dash of salt
• dash of pepper
• dash of olive oil

Preheat oven to 425. Slice the potatoes, carrots, and onions into approximately thumb-sized pieces. Place in a oven-safe dish so they aren't stacked up, toss in some olive oil and stir everything around. After adding a coat of olive oil, add the seasonings. Put in oven, covered, for 20 minutes, stir, and cook for 20-30 more minutes (until the potatoes are soft, the carrots are slightly crispy, and some of the onion has carmelized).

Pesto Chicken (serves 2)

• 1 recipe pesto, above
• 1 chicken breast
• pine nuts
• lemon juice

Preheat oven to 425. Cover chicken breast in pesto, squirt lemon juice on it, and add some pine nuts. Put it in the oven, covered, for 20-25 minutes. Remove the lid and cook for 10 more minutes. Really, did I need to write that recipe out for you?

Bananas Foster (serves 4)

• 2 bananas, cut in half down the middle then lengthwise
• 1/4 cup butter (half a stick)
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons rum
• vanilla ice cream

In a pan on the lowest heat your stove can manage, melt the stick of butter. Slowly add in the brown sugar and raise the heat to medium-high. Once the sugar has been incorporated, add in the bananas. Cook this for a few minutes - the bananas should brown but not fall apart (yet). Remove from heat, throw in the rum, return to heat. Wait for it to light on fire. Try and get it to lite on fire by tilting the pan and exposing the rum to the side of it. Be disappointed that nothing burst into flames.

Immediately serve over two scoops of ice cream by removing the bananas, then drizzling the remaining sauce on top. Eat immediately. If you let it cool, you have ruined the dish and missed out on delicious.

Radish Bruschetta and Butter Lettuce Butter Bean Boats (contains no actual butter)

Decided to knock out a staple ingredient of my recent dinners, go to the grocery store, and just think up something random. Maybe I shouldn't do this in the future. I said "no rice or tofu" and ended up cooking some delicious bruschetta, butter lettuce leaves filled with butter beans and snow peas. Everything also had radish in it because, hey, it looked delicious. And everything was delicious, but nothing seemed to pair well, my plating failed, and I didn't use any herbs or spices beyond salt. Also I totally failed at staying away from my staples by cooking bruschetta, which got me through large parts of college (like nachos, but questionably healthier).

First the bruschetta (and side salad, because a head of lettuce is a lot of lettuce for one person and I couldn't use it all making boats).

Sovrano Grana/Radish Bruschetta with Frisee, plus side salad

I'm not sure a recipe would do much good here, but my cooking directions for bruschetta might. I used a very hearty whole wheat bread with wheat bran and rolled in sunflower seeds. To properly prep it, you slice the bread about pinky-thick and brush olive oil and salt on both sides. You then put on thinly sliced topping of choise (usually tomato, here I used radish,) covered that in grated cheese (Sovrano Grano in this case), and add a few sprigs of your garnish (usually rosemary or basil, but here frisee). Cook it for 15-20-ish minutes in a 450 degree oven. About a minute or two before you think it is done, pull it out, drop a little more cheese on and one final sprig of garnish, place back in the oven and turn off the heat. Let this sit for a few minutes to melt the cheese and fix the garnish.

Butter Bean Butter Lettuce Boats

The second part of the meal was the "protein" portion, which I arrived at in the grocery store via the following observations:

• Butter lettuce is delicious.
• As are butter beans - which, if you haven't had, are like pinto beans that have been gamma-radiated and angered. Except they don't turn green.
• Snow peas are wonderful lightly cooked.
• Radish looks awesome (and I had leftovers from above becase things at the grocery store really aren't meant for one person).
• Oh hey butter lettuce makes nice little boats to put shit in.

I baked the radish for a while, and cooked the beans and some snow peas over medium-low heat for 10 minutes with the bean juice and grated cheese. Served this in butter lettuce boats, the finest ship in the leafy-green navy.

I'd say it was a good dish with flavors that paired well, but the presentation could use some work. Snow pea oars for little butter bean men with radish hats? Its a shame I only thought of it now, writing this post, or there would have been 2.718x the amount of awesomeness in this post.

This Bread Contains no Water

Except that which is found in beer. Yeah, you read the right. Also it contains cheese. So, two delicious and wonderful things, all rolled up into delicious, delicious morsels. This bread is somewhat of a departure, as it can't (easily) be used for sandwiches or have things spread on it. It exists in a condiment-free vacuum; a galaxy of tastes yet to be explored. It is also, distinctly, bread - not like dessert breads or pastries.

So, yes, this bread is magnificent and wonderful. It has Lagunitas Brown Shugga and some sharp cheddar cheese. The other ingredients are nothing new - flour, yeast, salt, brown sugar, melted butter (presumably for a bit of flake), buttermilk (for softness), and chives. It, like all the bread I've cooked before, came from Artisan Breads Every Day (specifically, "Soft Cheese Bread").

The dough was very firm compared to the liquid-heavy ones I have been making lately, requiring a lot more hand-stirring time (6 or 7 minutes, compared to a usual 2-4) and a kneading instead of a stretch and fold. For liquids, it had (roughly) equal parts buttermilk and beer, and a 3:1 flour to liquid ratio (by volume).

To get the swirl, after overnight cold fermentation, the dough was rolled flat and cubed cheese placed on top. I then rolled it up from one end, closed the seam with a wet fingertip, and sliced it. I let these slices rise. Sadly, some of them rejected cheese cubes during this process, preferring to use the space for expanding dough. They were reprimanded and the cheese was pushed back in before I placed them in the oven.

The only flaw with the cooking (although I wouldn't call it anything other than cosmetic) were darkened bottoms, as the cheese melted out of the spirals, coated the bottom, and then cooked into a crispy delicious layer. Actually, that sounds less like a flaw and more like a delicious accident.

LazyDinner (Teriyaki Tofu)

I had plans, big plans, for dinner last night. I was going to pick a recipe out of my comfort zone, I was going to cook that shit up, and it was going to be good. Except it was raining so I took MUNI home. Not the wisest idea, that. After getting stuck for 30-ish minutes, I arrived home much later and much hungrier than anticipated.

Scrap my adventurous plans, its time for some stir-fry. Lazy stir fry. With beer.

The grocery store sells these pre-packaged, freshly-prepared "stir fry" mixes. Mostly bell pepper, but also some zucchini and squash. That, a block of tofu, and some Soy Vay, and we've got ourselves a meal. Adding a recipe wouldn't be too useful - I think it was equal parts teriyaki sauce and beer, plus the tofu and veggies, served on rice.

BBBread

Three breads today! I promised a few people more struan, so I made that. The lean bread keeps coming out delicious, so I made that. And the rustic mini baguettes are probably my favorite, so I made them again. Also bacon was involved because of a comment made in jest that I could not ignore.

The struan this time used to correct yeast (instant, no "wake up" required). Much fluffier than the last time, still all the delicious taste. You can see in the photo below it is a bit airier, and the crust was quite a bit lighter. The other change was to not leave it in the oven for 5 minutes after it was done with the heat off - less crispy crust, moister on the inside.

Struan on left, rosemary on top

The bacon baguettes used the Pain a L'Ancienne recipe from Artisan Breads Every Day, halved, and with 4 pieces of very crispy, very thick bacon crumbled into the dough before cold fermenting. This was a perfect amount of bacon, and adding it before the refrigeration process really let the flavor grow without overtaking the bread. I'm going to say, with some certainty, that this recipe is a beautiful thing, and the mini baguettes are the perfect way to prep it. 50 minutes at night (1-2 minutes of work every 10 minutes), 1 hour proofing period the day of cooking, and maybe 15 minutes in the oven. I think if people knew bread this good could be had with so little time, they might make it more often.

Rustic Bacon Mini Baguettes

The other change in my cooking was, for the lean bread, I cooked it in a cast iron pan instead of on a baking sheet. This gave it a much crispier bottom but I couldn't notice any other differences. As an experiment, I also added 17g of corn meal to the bread (with 340g of flour). I think (but could be mistaken) that this improved the texture of without ruining the airy goodness you get from the loaf.

Rosemary Lean Bread 

Breaks Over, Soup's On!

Thanksgiving break is over and I'm back to my own kitchen. I did bake the bread for my Thanksgiving dinner, but it was nothing new - I made a full batch of rosemary sea-salt rolls and everyone enjoyed them. No photos of that, sorry.

Looking for cooking inspiration, I noticed it has been cold for a while now and the rain is ever-looming (and sometimes even falling, although thankfully not on my bicycle commute). My usual reaction to this is to drink hot chocolate and Irish Cream. That, however, fails as a nutritional dinner. I was going to make the next best thing, but Kahlua doesn't really add any nutritional value over Irish Cream, so I went further down the list until I hit the "soup" section. A while back, I had homemade bread and soup from a can; what would be better to try than homemade soup and bread from a bakery?

(The pictured carrots did not cook for long enough to brown because I forgot to preheat the oven)

Weirdly Seasoned Tomato Soup and Roasted Carrot (serves 4?)

For the soup:

• 1 shallot, chopped
• 1 carrot, sliced
• 2 boiling onions, quartered
• 1 stalk lemon grass, chopped into a few pieces
• 1 bunch savory
• 3 cups water
• 1.5 to 2 cups diced tomatoes (a decent sized can, roughly)
• 1.5 to 2 cups navy beans (a decent sized can, roughly)
• olive oil
• salt

For the carrots:

• enough carrots for as many people as will be dining (1.5 or 2 carrots each), quartered
• olive oil
• salt

In a soup-sized pot, put in a bit of olive oil and sautee the shallot for a minute or two. Take the dice carrot and the onions and add, sauteeing for another two minutes. Add in the water, lemon grass, and savory, and simmer, salting to taste. Let the stock simmer for 15 minutes.

On a cookie sheet, spread some olive oil and rub the carrots in it. Sprinkle salt on top of the carrots, and put into a 425 degree oven. Keep track of when you put it in - they should get about 45 minutes, which will be timed to when the soup is done.

Let the stock simmer for another 15 minutes, then add in the tomatoes. Raise the heat a little, but still don't let it boil, and cook for another 20 minutes. Add in the beans, and cook for 10 more minutes.

Both the carrots and the soup should be done now (although do keep an eye on the carrots and make sure they aren't in the oven too long).

When serving the soup, you can add some cheese on top. Also remember to not eat the lemongrass or the savory stalk - although you can, they are both very strong and can be removed from the soup.