Weblog
I'm in foodie heaven, and everyone here seems to be Japanese!
My girl bought me early birthday/Christmas gifts last Friday. I received an amazing new rice cooker, the Zojirushi Micom NS-TGC10 fuzzy-logic cooker. It’s incredible! It has settings for brown, white, sticky rice, and porridge (risottos, puddings, cereals). It will even bake a cake! A cute feature: it plays the “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” melody when it starts and “Amaryllis” when it stops. So far I’ve made brown rice, sushi rice, basmati rice, and steel-cut oats, and that’s only since Friday!
The other gift I got was a Mr. Bento Japanese lunch jar. The Mr. Bento is a stainless steel thermos with little Tupperware-like containers inside. One is made just for rice, another just for soup (has a no-leak gasket), and the other two are for side dishes. It even came with its own metal spork and spork cover! I packed my first bento today. It had a couple of rice balls, baby carrots, a sliced up orange, and a bowl of miso soup. Now I’m fascinated by the art of bento and am collecting little cutters, molds, and other goodies to help me build a better bento. Geeky, maybe, but fun!
Sprouting
Now, what to do with them? Does anyone have a favorite use for sprouts?
I like to make a sandwich from mashed avocado, sprouts, red onion, and swiss cheese on a good wheat bread with brown mustard.
As I’m currently fresh out of red onion, avocado, and swiss, I suppose I’ll have to come up with something different.
Fresh mozzarella
Thanks to Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which I’m currently reading, I was inspired to make fresh mozzarella cheese. She claimed it took only half an hour and offered a recipe on her book’s companion website.
I went to a nearby natural foods store and picked up a tiny bottle of rennet for about $6, and I already had a bag of citric acid (from making homemade Lucas for fruit cups). Even if I hadn’t had the citric acid on hand, it would have only cost about $4 or $5. I have enough of both key items to make many gallons’ worth of cheese.
I picked up a gallon of whole milk (homogenized and pateurized, but NOT ultra pasteurized…a no-no). I heated the milk to 55 degrees, added 1.5 tsp of citric acid that had been dissolved in a quarter cup of cool water, then I stirred gently and heated the milk up to 88 degrees, at which point it’s good and curdled. Then I added 1/4 tsp of rennet which had been mixed into a quarter cup of cool water and continued stirring and heating up to 100 degrees.
At this point, the heat is turned off, and the whey is poured off the curds. I used cheesecloth (which we had already) draped over a colander to drain the cheese initially. Then I put the wad of curds into a glass bowl and tossed it in the microwave for a minute. This helps bring out more of the whey, which I drained after pressing as much of it from the cheese as possible. Then I reheated the cheese for another 35 seconds, pressed, drained, and repeated the process once more.
Now the cheese is ready for kneading. When it starts to get glossy, as above, it can be stretched into taffy-like ropes. If it breaks, it’s just reheated for a few seconds in the microwave. Within minutes, it’s done! If you click into my Flickr, you can see more pictures of the cheese.
Disclaimer: Even if it burns your hands, it’s probably best not to make the cheese with rubber gloves. They tend to effect the flavor of the cheese a tiny bit.
Persephone's Lemonade
I just entered the following recipe into the Bigelow Teas iced tea contest. Winners receive either a gorgeous lead-crystal pitcher and goblet set or chests of Bigelow teas:
Persephone’s Lemonade*
5 Pomegranate Pizazz herbal teabags
5 I Love Lemon herbal teabags
1/4 cup lemon juice (reconstituted or fresh)
2 cups sugar
2 quarts boiling water
1 quart ice water
crushed ice
1 gallon container (plastic or glass)
sprigs of mint and slices of lemon for garnish
chilled glasses
Place Pomegranate Pizazz and I Love Lemon teabags into 1 gallon container. Bring 2 quarts of water to a boil and pour over teabags. Allow teabags to steep for 15-20 minutes. Remove teabags and add 2 cups of sugar and lemon juice, stirring vigorously until sugar dissolves. Tea will be highly concentrated. To dilute, top off gallon container with 1 quart of ice water and plenty of crushed ice. Stir until most of the ice is dissolved. You may adjust the amount of cold water, ice, sugar, and/or lemon juice to suit your tastes.
To serve, add crushed iced to chilled glasses, pour tea into glasses, and garnish with lemon slices and sprigs of fresh mint. You may wish to add the lemon slices and mint sprigs to your pitcher, too. This tea is as beautiful as it is refreshing, possessing a lip-smacking, sweet-tart flavor and a hue that varies from deep red to dark pink, depending on the length of time the tea is steeped and how much cold water is added.
*Named for the Greek goddess who is said to have eaten pomegranate seeds on her visit to the underworld.
calling all phoodwhores™!
just like MJ has said in her post it is time for summer recipes.
so all of the planting for the summer garden has been done, and some of the plants are starting to produce vegetables. the list includes:
- tomatoes (all different types and varieties)
- tomatillos
- peppers (all different times as well)
- eggplants
- summer squash (zucchini and patty pan, aka ufo squash)
- winter squash (butternut squash)
- cucumbers (both pickling and loofah)
- carrots
- sweet corn
- radishes
- bak choi
- broccoli
- various salad green mixes (including spinach, mustards, lettuces, etc)
- herbs (parsley, cilantro, basil, etc)
so here’s where the phoodwhores™ come in: i need recipes that i could try this summer using stuff from the garden. post them, put them in comments, however you want. heck, try them out yourself, comment, make suggestions, you name it!
besides it would be make great phoodadventures “reading” material for these hot days and warm nights of summer.
Orange Rose Sparkler
Or, as Alexis likes to call it, “Homemade Fanta!”
Last week, she made kataifi, that wonderful Greek dessert made with shredded phyllo, butter, and nuts, and then drenched in simple syrup that is flavored with rosewater. Well, she had leftover syrup that she stored in the fridge.
Prior to that, I had bought a three liter bottle of club soda. Why? Well, for a while now, I’ve been concocting what I like to call “drinky drinks.” Since I don’t imbibe alcoholic beverages anymore but still have the lingering desire to play at tending bar and mixing up new designer drinks, I have taken to satisfying these urges by creating “mocktails.”
Some have been smashing successes. Others have been phenomenal failures.
My Braun hand blender is my best buddy when it comes to blending these drinks, especially the frozen ones.
Well, last night, I was dying for something sweet to drink, but we were out of Sprite, and I didn’t want to make KoolAid (the last refuge of the desperate), nor did I want to make jamaica con limon (though the last time that went over pretty well). It was late, and all that seemed like actual work.
Instead, I broke open the club soda, got out my “freezy mug” from the freezer. You know the glasses…the ones that have liquid in them that freezes and keeps your drink cold. And then I poked my head in the fridge and started to figure out how I would assemble the drink.
My eye settled first on the carton of orange juice. Grabbed it. Then the bottle of RealLemon. I was feeling too lazy to actually juice a lemon. Then I saw the tupperware container with the rosewater syrup. EUREKA! The final ingredient.
I didn’t really measure the proportions. I just poured some syrup in the glass first, then orange juice, then a smidgen of lemon juice. Topped it all off with club soda, and I gave it a good stir to incorporate the ingredients.
Finally I took an experimental slug. Would it work? It was EXCELLENT! I even went in, woke up Lex, and made her take a sip. She pronounced it no different than Fanta (I don’t entirely agree; there is no hint of rose in Fanta) and then promptly went back to sleep.
At any rate, the drink went down extraordinarily well with the tuna salad I had just made. Very light and refreshing. One change I would made next time I mixed the drink: less syrup and more lemon. I think I made it too sweet this time. I would have preferred a bit more tartness. Maybe even the juice of a lime would have helped.
First Podcast!
PhoodAdventures.com now has a podcast, made possible through Odeo.com.
I made the first one just as an introduction to the site and what we do here. Click the icon above to hear it.
The icon in the nav bar on the right will let you add the podcast to your Odeo queue which you can setup to download to iTunes or Windows Media Player.
Very cool, very geeky. Just my style.
what's cooking?
this isn’t exactly a phoodpost in the sense that i didn’t cook/read/eat, but it does pertain to food.
i just got a movie called what’s cooking? from netflix. this movie is directed by gurinder chadha, the director of bend it like beckham. but unlike her more popular movie, this one takes place in los angeles.
the movie is about four different families celebrating thanksgiving in los angeles. you have a latino family, an african american family, a vietnamese family, and a jewish family with a lesbian daughter and her partner.
the part of the movie that made me want to post it here was the fact that they do show the sorts of preparations each family does on their own take. you see one turkey being done in two different ways (traditional vietnamese and traditional american), tamales being prepared, shiitake mushroom stuffing, macaroni and cheese, among other dishes.
having just watched the oscars earlier this week, this movie isn’t the greatest in the world. the plot could be improved, but the movie is worth it just for the phood!
|