Light and Momentary

Plum cake: easy, tasty, seasonal, beautiful

Stella and I picked up plums at the grocery store, and tonight she asked me if we were actually going to make the plum cake I had mused about when I put them in the cart. "Yes, we are!" I said, and we baked up those plums after dinner. You should bake up some plums too -- this cake is delicious and straightforward.

Take about a pound and a half of plums; cut them in half along their meridians and pit them. Preheat your oven to 350 and hit an 8- or 9-inch springform pan with nonstick spray. Cream a stick of butter with three-quarters of a cup of sugar (or a little more if your plums are very tart). Beat in two eggs, followed by a cup of flour, a teaspoon of baking powder, a wee bit of salt, and any suitable flavorings your heart desires. We added a sprinkle of almond extract, because almond goes so nicely with stone fruits, and a sprinkle of orange flower water.

Scrape this speedily assembled batter into your springform pan and nestle the plums into it. Sprinkle with a spoonful of sugar. Add a dusting of cinnamon or cardamom if you like that idea. Bake. Give it an hour in an 8-inch pan. Our 9-inch cake was the tiniest smidgin underbaked at 50 minutes. Adjust accordingly.

The batter will bloom up and over the plum halves, and you will have a glorious assemblage of golden cake and deep deep purple plums. You could serve it with vanilla ice cream but it is fabulous all by itself.

A recipe for when you are drowning in leafy greens

I've told you before that we often make Crescent Dragonwagon's gumbo when we have an abundance of CSA leafy greens, and I've also told you before that it's A Project. So delicious, such a pain. This weekend I used one of its elements in a much more streamlined way.

We were behind on eating CSA greens. It's a total first-world problem to struggle with eating all of our beautiful organic leafy greens -- and yet it's a struggle to eat all of our beautiful organic leafy greens. When I stuffed them into my giant Instant Pot, it was three-quarters full. I poured in a 46-ounce bottle of V-8 and maybe another pint of water. I cooked them under pressure for 12 minutes, because it's easier to get kids (and grownups!) to eat leafy greens if they are thoroughly cooked, and also because you can take the girl out of the South but you can't take the South out of the girl, and I still prefer my greens cooked to tenderness. I let the pressure come down naturally.

I want to stress here that I did pretty much zero prep. I soaked them briefly in cold water because greens do tend to have some dirt hiding in their crevices, but I didn't fuss about removing ribs or stems or chopping or whatever else. I just chucked them in the pot, doused them in liquid, and pressure-cooked them into submission. I got out my immersion blender and briskly turned them into puree.

I also cooked a pound of white beans, adding about 2t. salt once they were soft. At dinnertime I cooked up a package of sweet Italian sausage. I added a head of garlic, slivered, to the cooking fat, and deglazed the pan with about a cup of white wine once I took the cooked sausage out and chopped it up. I found that I wanted to make one flavor adjustment late in the cooking process: the V-8 made the greens puree fairly acidic, so I added a wee little sprinkle (maybe an eighth of a teaspoon) of baking soda to raise the pH. Once the fizzing was over, the flavor balance was better. I combined it all and served it up with some good bread and a plate of raw veggies for crunch.

Honestly, I was not expecting this to be a super-popular dinner, but everybody enthused about it. The greens are pleasingly vegetal but unobtrusive, the beans are mild and tender, and the sausage and garlic offer little bursts of flavor. It's like gumbo's more easygoing cousin.

Let them eat cake

We had friends over for dinner last night, and yesterday afternoon I was mostly thinking about what I wanted to make for dinner. (I settled on this NYT chickpea stew, with added cumin/coriander, served over rice -- tasty and easy). But at the last minute I threw a cake in the oven, and it reminded me that homemade cake is a particularly delicious form of alchemy.

First you preheat your oven to 350, and hit your 8-inch round cake pan(s) with non-stick spray. I always cut out a quick untidy circle of parchment paper to line the bottom of the pan, but this is not essential.

The nice thing about a Victoria sponge cake recipe is that it's easy to remember and to scale. For two 8-inch rounds, take two sticks of softened butter and beat them with 225 grams of sugar (this equals one cup if you prefer volume measurements, but I promise it's worthwhile to get comfortable with measuring by weight). When this mixture is fluffy, add in four eggs, and beat the mixture thoroughly. If you want vanilla, or almond extract, or lemon zest, or whatever else, splash some in. If you keep self-raising flour in your house, add in 225 grams; if you don't, you'll want about 5 grams of salt, about 7 grams of baking powder, and about 210 grams of ordinary flour. (This is approximately a cup and three-quarters, but you probably don't need me to tell you that flour is hard to measure accurately by volume. May I suggest an inexpensive kitchen scale?) You'll want a couple of tablespoons of milk as well, just enough to give you a nice ploppable consistency.

Divide this mixture across two pans, and bake for about 25 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. Let the layers cool in the pans for about 10 minutes, and then turn them out onto a cooling rack and leave them alone until they're cool enough not to melt your filling.

If you're in a hurry, slap some lemon curd or good jam in between the layers and dust the top with confectioner's sugar. If you're not in a hurry, I'm partial to this chocolate sour cream frosting.

You can easily scale the recipe up if you want a majestic three-layer cake, or down if you only need a single layer. It's a super-simple formula: for each layer, you need 4 ounces (113g) each of butter, sugar, and self-raising flour, 2 eggs, and a splash of milk. Speedy, fluffy, golden, and more delicious than it has any right to be. Happy baking!

Can't have Thanksgiving without pecan pie

"You need to write all these recipes down," Pete told me after Thanksgiving dinner, and then the next day a guest requested the pecan pie recipe. So here's a pecan pie post.

I make a pecan pie that is fussier than the ones I grew up with. I think it looks so pretty and festive that I don't mind the once-a-year hassle. You do have to hunch over a hot partially set pie to arrange pecan halves in concentric circles, so keep on scrolling if that's not your cup of tea. (Pecan pie is at approximately 1:00 in this picture of our consolatory 2020 dessert extravaganza. We had no company; we had so much pie.)

Roll out shortcrust pastry to line a 9-inch tart pan with a removable base. Let it rest in the fridge for about an hour so it doesn't shrink in the oven. Preheat your oven to 400, and blind-bake the crust, anchored by pie weights or dried beans, for 20 minutes.

While it's in the oven, cream together 6 T. softened butter and 125g brown sugar. (I will never again pack brown sugar into a measuring cup with a spoon, but we can still be friends if you hate baking by weight: that's about 1/2 c., packed.) When the mixture is light and fluffy, beat in 3 eggs, followed by 100 ml maple syrup and 150 ml corn syrup. Add a pinch of salt and a spoonful of liquor -- bourbon or dark rum, as you prefer.

Put a tablespoon of flour into a baggie, and add 150 g chopped pecans. (My cookbook estimates this as 1.25 cups; pinpoint accuracy is not essential here.) Shake them around to coat them with flour, so they are less likely to sink to the bottom of the pie. Fold them into the filling mixture.

Do not neglect this next step, even if you are feeling lucky: set the tart pan with its parbaked crust in a rimmed baking sheet, on which you have set a foil square that will cup the sides of the pan and contain any oozing pie filling. You are now going to pour most of a pound of sugar into that crust, and if you have even a small crack in the crust you will make a disastrous mess in your oven floor as the filling seeps through the removable bottom of your tart pan. If you are baking the pie while you eat your Thanksgiving dinner, the dining room will be filled with acrid smoke and the shrill voices of angry smoke detectors. (Why, yes, this is the voice of bitter experience! Learn from my mistakes, friends!) Don't overfill the crust, or you'll get overflowing baked-on goo gluing the pie to the pan. If you have extra filling, bake it until it's set in a separate little dish, like the white ramekin in these pie pictures. Turn the oven temperature down to 350 and give it 15 minutes.

Here is the fiddly part: scoot your oven rack out and place pecan halves in concentric circles atop the lightly set filling. Slide it back in and bake until it's completely set. Check it after 30 more minutes; if it's still jiggly in the middle you might need as much as ten more minutes. Cool it on a wire rack until you can slide it out of its pan and onto a pretty plate. Cut it in small slices so you will have leftovers.

This is a recipe from Barbara Maher's Ultimate Cake, the book behind many of our celebratory desserts over the years.

Alas

I was going to make a nice cozy pot of turkey-barley soup tonight. Just the thing for a cold night, I thought to myself, with the added benefit of getting rid of some of the stock taking up space in the fridge. A few days before Thanksgiving I like to serve roast chicken for dinner and make stock with the carcass, so there's plenty on hand for moistening stuffing and making gravy. But I often make more than I need, which means the extra stock is competing with the Thanksgiving leftovers for fridge space.

I minced an onion and a stalk of celery and set them to browning in a mix of olive oil and butter. I cubed up a few small carrots and added them too, and once everything was turning golden I added some slivered garlic and sprinkled the veggies with salt. I poured in stock and added a couple of handfuls of chopped leftover turkey, and then I grabbed the quick barley. We had an open box in the pantry, left over from last soup season, and I tipped it all in. It seemed a little clumpy, but I told myself it looked fine. If you are reading this post in hopes of finding an actual recipe for turkey-barley soup, you're almost done: simmer until the barley is tender and check the seasoning. Easy, cozy, golden, frugal -- who could ask for anything more? But this is not primarily a recipe post, because the story takes a sad turn:

Fifteen minutes later I peeked in and discovered an armada of little cream-colored crescent-shaped items afloat in my soup. 

For a moment I thought optimistically that all the broken bits of barley must have been crescent-shaped. And then my heart sank, and I pulled up the magnifier app on my phone to survey a few ships from the fleet, kind of like Gulliver in Lilliput if Gulliver had been an iPhone user preparing to eat the Lilliputians.

It turns out that boiling one's specimens in chicken stock does not assist in the process of accurate entomological identification, but the miniature navy in my soup pot looked an awful lot like these little guys. (Don't click that link if you're an easy-queasy person.)

"Hm," said Elwood, when I asked him for a second opinion, "that doesn't look right." 

He was less grossed out by the weevil picture than I was, pronouncing our visitors "free protein." "We didn't even have to pay for it," he added cheerfully. "Joe's always trying to eat more protein. And you! You want gains too, don't you?"

I don't want gains enough to eat larva soup, I assured him.

I need to find out who the patron saint of pantry infestations is, so I can pray earnestly: deliver us from weevils.

Easy, happy, fresh, local

I always forget how much I like potato-leek soup until I am actually eating potato-leek soup. We get CSA leeks regularly in the late fall, and tonight I made a pot of soup that we all enjoyed. You can make this soup with any quantity of leeks or potatoes, really, but I had four medium leeks and two medium potatoes.

Chop up the white and pale green parts of your leeks into bite-sized pieces, and soak them briefly in cold water to get rid of any lingering dirt. Toss them into a heavy pot in which you have melted a half-stick of butter. Season them with salt and pepper and let them stew on medium-low heat for about 15 minutes.

Sprinkle a quarter-cup of flour over your softened leeks and stir it around for a few minutes. Once it's nice and hot, whisk in about 3 cups of stock, starting slowly to avoid sad lumpy soup. Chuck in your peeled and cubed potatoes at this point, and about a cup of milk or cream or a combination thereof. You are the only person who knows where you like your soups to fall on the soup-stew spectrum, and the only person who knows how much butterfat is the right amount of butterfat for your palate, so do what works for you. You'll probably need more salt. Tonight I chopped up some leftover sausage that was lurking in the fridge and added it to the pot, but it also makes a nice meatless meal.

When your potatoes are tender, taste again for salt and serve it forth. 

I love the squeak of a leek between my teeth-- don't you?

In which we summon the Gains Fairy

If you want to get stronger, you might benefit from eating more protein. People argue about the exact amount you need, but the recommendation has been pretty well studied and the findings seem to be fairly consistent: protein intake makes a difference in a person's response to resistance training. I aim for about 120 grams per day. 

To make this feasible, I supplement with whey protein powder. Yes, the person who used to grow her own lentil sprouts has turned into a person with a subscribe-and-save order set up for 5-pound tubs of artificially sweetened protein powder (affiliate link). I keep thinking I'll investigate a less processed option, but no dice so far.

Usually I include a scoop of whey in my breakfast, which might be a smoothie with Greek yogurt and frozen bananas, or maybe some steel-cut oats with walnuts or chia seeds or a spoonful of flax meal. I am the queen of unfinished cups of coffee, and in recent weeks I have been pouring my leftover tepid coffee into my shaker cup and mixing it up with whey and creatine and ice. These combinations get me 30-40 grams of protein at breakfast, depending on the details. 

I aim for 40g at lunch, which is usually a sandwich or a salad. If I'm making the lunch, I will pile on more protein-rich toppings or fillings than I used to: cubed leftover meat, garbanzos, hard-boiled egg, walnuts, feta, etc. I used to think a can of tuna yielded enough tuna salad for two sandwiches, but these days I stuff it into one (not very often, though, because mercury, PCBs, etc.). 

Our dinners usually include some meat, which makes it easier to get to 30-40 grams of protein. Tonight, for instance, was leftover night, and I chose leftover ham and beans (a Gladly family standby for more than 20 years now) in part because of its protein content. 

Somewhere in there I will probably eat a snack, which could be yogurt or cheese cubes if my meals have included less protein, or apple slices with nut butter if I'm already pretty close to the target number. Or if I want something sweet after dinner, I might have a little yogurt with some frozen fruit and protein powder and maybe a little drizzle of peanut butter.

I feel intermittent uneasiness about relying so heavily on animal products, but this is where I am right now. Casey Johnston has some helpful posts on protein, including this one on protein targets and this one on protein choices.

This post was prompted by a comment from NGS, who is also doing NaBloPoMo. If you miss blogs and blogging, check out the NaBloPoMo links!

Breakfast in October

Do you like steel-cut oats, except that they take too long to cook? I like to make a big batch over the weekend and then reheat them during the week, using milk or water to thin them out again.

Apple-Cinnamon Instant Pot Steel-Cut Oats

Melt 2 T. of butter in your Instant Pot on sauté mode, and let it get brown and nutty-smelling. (Don't go too far while it is browning; burned butter is considerably less appealing than browned butter.) Chuck in 1.5 c. steel-cut oats and toast them, stirring occasionally, until they smell like popcorn. Add a cup of cider, 3.5 cups of water, a chopped apple, a heaping half-teaspoon of cinnamon, and a scant half-teaspoon of salt. Switch to Porridge mode and cook under pressure for 12 minutes. Let the pressure come down naturally for 10 minutes and then release the valve. Stir it well and serve it forth.

This is mostly Coco Morante's recipe from her Essential Instant Pot Cookbook, which is cheap and useful.

Lentil bowls for dinner

I decided to make lentil bowls for dinner tonight, and the kids liked them more than I expected they would.

I put a cup and a half of little French lentils in the Instant Pot with two cloves of garlic and 3 cups of water. I gave them 18 minutes and let the pressure come down naturally.

While they were cooking I cut up the sad remains of a bag of Brussels sprouts (halved vertically, browned slowly in olive oil, tossed with salt and lemon juice and a spoonful of preserved lemon paste). I wanted something crunchy and tangy to go on top, so I steeped a grated carrot and a cucumber that I had peeled and seeded and cut into spears in a speedy mix of rice vinegar, lime juice, sambal oelek, and honey. 

When the lentils were ready I added some Middle Eastern flavors to the pot along with salt and the juice of half a lemon: ground coriander, za'atar, a spoonful of NY Shuk's olive matbucha and another of preserved lemon paste. I also added a shake of Kafe Hawaij but I'd probably leave it out next time -- I didn't love the cinnamon.

We also had a sad little bag of wilting parsley in the crisper drawer, which I turned into a speedy dressing by chucking it in the blender with a clove of garlic, the juice of half a lemon, a handful of walnuts, salt, and enough olive oil to make it pourable. 

I put everything on the table along with a dish of reheated leftover rice, some sliced avocado, and plain yogurt. I love meals where everybody can choose whatever combinations look tasty to them. Of the four kids at dinner, three were very enthusiastic. "It would be easy for lentils and rice to be really boring," said my most carnivorous kid, "but there are so many pleasant flavors here."

They ate up every bite, which probably means they thought it was delicious. But it might also mean that I'm out of practice cooking the right amount of dinner for 6 people.

Delicious

Elwood made something new for dinner tonight and I think it will stay in the rotation: pasta alla Brontese. I am sharing an approximate version for anyone who gets paywalled.

Cook up a box of fettuccini, and sauce it like so: first, take toasted pistachios and blitz them to rubble with Parmesan. Crisp up some nice fatty pork (we rarely have pancetta on hand, which is what the recipe calls for, but always have bacon, which works just fine) and cook some onion in the fat. Cook down some wine in the oniony fat and add heavy cream. Combine, and eat while making happy noises.

Would a cardiologist approve? Perhaps not. Am I going to keep it in the rotation anyway, because "moderation in all things" also applies to bacon and heavy cream? Yes indeed I am.

Soul cakes: tasty, easy, seasonally appropriate

All Souls' Day is today and Stella requested soul cakes. If you're in the mood for some seasonal baking, soul cakes might be just the thing.

Preheat your oven to 400.

To two cups of flour, add 1/2 t. salt, 1/2 t. baking soda, 1.5 t. baking powder, 1 T. sugar, and approximately a heaping teaspoon of fall-flavored spices. I used Kafe Hawaij with extra cinnamon. Stir your dry ingredients together and sprinkle in a handful of raisins or currants. Cut a stick of butter into small cubes and rub them briskly into your flour mixture. Add about 2/3 c. buttermilk, or ordinary milk to which you've added a splash of vinegar. Stir gently and tip onto a floured surface. Knead gently until it coheres (don't overdo it or you'll have tough soul cakes). Pat it out to about a half-inch thickness and cut out circles with an upside-down glass. It's traditional to cut a cross into the tops of your cakes. Brush with egg wash, if you like, and bake for 20 minutes.

For reasons that are opaque to me, all the soul cake recipes that come up for me in Google are unleavened, yielding a "cake" that I find unpleasantly brick-like. Sure, they would have been unleavened six hundred years ago. Also six hundred years ago people were serving up roast peacock for festive occasions. I do not wish to eat a peacock; I do not wish to eat a pile of unleavened flour. Modern cooking, I embrace it. 

These are speedy enough to serve for breakfast; they also make a welcome afternoon snack.

Apples Galore

We went apple-picking over the weekend and came home with a peck of tasty local apples. Elwood has been making a delicious salad of grated apple and raw beet with a honey-lemon vinaigrette and toasted walnuts, and he also made an apple-fennel salad that caused me so much happiness I thought I might levitate above my chair. 

Tonight Pete asked if I'd help him make an apple upside-down cake, so I went back to this recipe that I shared last year.

Our apples are very juicy. This makes sense to me, the idea that store-bought apples might have lost moisture during their time in transit and on shelves, but I didn't put it together until after the apples went into the hot spiced butter and started throwing off a bunch of liquid. Even though we cooked it down for a while, we still had more syrup than planned and a damp cake as a result. I think if I were to make that recipe again with local apples, I might toss them in a baggie of flour first, as if I were making an apple crisp.

The cake was really delicious but not beautiful, because the syrupy apples stuck to the skillet and needed to be coaxed onto the former-bottom-now-top of our cake. But you know, if you have to choose between delicious and beautiful, delicious is the one you want.

Happiness Awaits

The Slaw of Happiness varies in its veggies but its dressing is pretty consistent. The recipe I got from my internet pal Jodie more than 20 years ago is this: to a cup of mayo, add 1 T. apple cider vinegar and 1 T. sugar. You can vary it to suit your own tastes: make it a yogurt-mayo blend, use lemon or lime juice in quantities that suit you instead of the vinegar, and change the amount and/or type of sweetener. You want a dressing that's mostly creamy, with some tang and some sweetness.

To this dressing, add a big pile of small pieces of cruciferous veggies and their friends. Shredded cabbage is fine. Finely (finely finely) minced broccoli is also good. Grated salad turnips are scrumptious. (I never use the ordinary purple-shouldered ones; salad turnips are solid ivory, sometimes called Japanese turnips. They are milder and sweeter.) You could probably use just about anything in the brassica family. Radishes that you have manhandled through the food processor and coated in slaw dressing become more pleasant, less pungent versions of themselves. If you get kohlrabi in your CSA share and you have no idea what to do with it, peel it and shred it and cover it with slaw dressing. No one at the dinner table will have any idea that you're feeding them something unfamiliar and kinda weird-looking in its natural state. It's just another bowl of slaw. 

When I said "and their friends" in that previous paragraph I especially meant shredded carrots, which are sweet, colorful, familiar, and cheap. From there you can go in a variety of directions. Do you want some minced red onion? Maybe some chopped scallions? Maybe something with a little crunch, like sesame seeds or walnuts? If I am using broccoli, I will probably go with wee small bits of red onion (a habit left over from when my kids were small: strongly-flavored foods are often less objectionable if they're cut into teeny pieces), a handful of raisins, another of sunflower seeds, and some crumbled bacon. If I'm using cabbage, I might also toss in some grated apple.

Basic formula: dressing, shredded something-or-other from the brassica family, shredded carrots, plus a couple of additional ingredients that please your palate. Here's to happy microbiomes!

Too Many Cooks

My husband filled the pot while I peeled potatoes. I was planning to make green potato soup to use up another bunch of CSA greens, so I sliced potatoes and stemmed greens and chucked them into boiling water with half of an onion. I've done this enough times to feel comfortable eyeballing proportions: a healthy shake of salt, a spoonful of Marmite for umami. Once the potatoes were soft I added sour cream and pureed it all with the immersion blender.

Except-- something was wrong. I tasted it: horribly salty. Painfully salty. I took a deep breath and added thin slices of raw potato, hoping they would soak up some of the salt. But it was STILL too salty, so I tossed in some leftover white rice from the fridge. BLAND, I was thinking to myself, I NEED MORE BLAND.

"I wondered when I saw you add the salt," said Elwood, and I did not take it well. IT WAS A REASONABLE AMOUNT OF SALT, was my all-caps inner response. MY SAD SALTY SOUP DOES NOT NEED YOUR MONDAY MORNING QUARTERBACKING.

"I added a fair amount of salt when I filled the pot," he added, and the light dawned.

Pro tip: If two people each add the right amount of salt to the pot, the soup will be too salty.

We did eat it for dinner and it was only a little penitential. I think over the weekend I will cook up a couple of potatoes in unsalted water and blend them into the leftovers, and the result should be about right. But the soup is in timeout for now.

The annual post about using up CSA vegetables

This is the eleventh year, I think, that we've been part of our CSA, and the kids all smile wanly when they hear me talk about it. They agree that it's a good thing, in the abstract -- good to know the person who grows your food, good to buy local, good to support sustainable agriculture and small family businesses. And yet they sometimes yearn for a life with a little less chard.

Last night was the first CSA pickup of the year and I had an idea: what if instead of a whiteboard list of veggies glowering at me, I made a loosey-goosey whiteboard menu plan with the kids' input? 

And so:

"You do not have to eat any lettuce," I told them. "I'll be in charge of eating the lettuce when I have lunch." They approved of this plan.

"But there's rhubarb," they sighed. "You like rhubarb some of the time," I answered briskly. "Tell me what you want me to do with it, and when you want to eat it."

"Not rhubarb ice cream," said one with a shudder. "Or rhubarb GELATIN," said the other, with a subtle revulsion convulsion. "How about crumble?" I asked, and they agreed that rhubarb crumble would work. I used this recipe, and it was a hit. If I make it again I'll add a spoonful of flour or cornstarch to the apple-rhubarb mixture, which threw off a fair amount of liquid.

Pete volunteered to turn both bags of spinach into palak paneer tonight, and I made a beet-walnut-feta salad to serve alongside. 

We have agreed that the cooked-down beet greens will go into a nice cheesy soufflé, and the lambs' quarters will get blended into potato soup and served with fresh bread. 

"Onions aren't hard to use up," Pete said, and I agreed. 

These are all ideas I would have considered if I hadn't consulted the kids, but I'm hopeful that they will say, "Oh, potato soup with greens; we talked about that," and not "WHY OH WHY are there so many green things on the menu this week?" 

I'll let you know how it works out.

A birthday cake

Joe is 20 today, which means I will never again be the mother of three teenagers. I was so worried about having three teens at once but I did not need to be worried. (<- The Jamie Story -- same song, different verse)

I made an almond cake that is a particular favorite of his: moist and fluffy, flavorful and easy. I used a slightly different recipe and I will stick with it going forward, because it requires a smidge less butter and sugar than the one I had made in the past. You can knock it together in the food processor with lightning speed. This is all you do:

Preheat the oven to 325 and hit a 9-inch springform pan with nonstick spray. Take a 7- or 8-ounce package of almond paste (we can find this brand at Gladlyville grocery stores) and process it with 1.25 c. sugar. (This will prevent chunks of almond paste in your finished cake.) Blend in 2 sticks of softened butter with 1/8 t. almond extract and 1 t. vanilla. Next, add in 6 eggs. Finally, add 1/4 t. salt, 1.5 t. baking powder, and 1 c. flour. Pulse just until combined. It will be a fairly liquid batter. Bake for an hour and peek at it; it might need as much as 75 minutes. You want it to be risen all the way to the center, and a skewer should come out clean.

It will be delicious plain, or you can dress it up. I made a speedy berry fool and piled it on top with some pretty shards from a failed caramel cage.

Take two vegetarian shepherds

Once when we lived in Edinburgh a friend had us over for dinner and served us vegetarian shepherd's pie. A few weeks later I decided to try my own version. Elwood came home and sniffed appreciatively. "What are you making?" he asked me.

"Vegetarian shepherd's pie," I told him.

"What's in it?" he asked me.

"Vegetarian shepherds," I said.

This has become a family joke, but the actual answer is usually red lentils. Usually I dice an onion and a carrot and sometimes a stalk of celery, and let them get brown in hot fat. I throw in a few cloves of garlic, and once they have had a minute to soften I stir in a cup or so of red lentils. I add a can of petite diced tomatoes with their juice along with some stock, and cook the lentils until they are tender. Once they're cooked I season the mixture (it will take a fair amount of salt) and plop leftover mashed potatoes on top. If you dot it with butter, sprinkle it with Parmesan, and run it under the broiler, you'll have a tasty frugal reasonably quick vegetarian meal. It's a pretty standard way for us to move leftover mashed potatoes out of the fridge and into people's bellies.

But last night I made an even quicker version: I tossed in two cans of chickpeas in lieu of the lentils, and hey presto! It was a lightning-fast tasty frugal vegetarian meal. If you try it, you'll probably want to add something for umami -- I went with a spoonful of Marmite. And if you are feeding hungry teens, you might think about adding a little extra fat for satiety and staying power -- I put in a dab of tahini to boost flavor and creaminess, just as I might add a spoonful of peanut butter to a pot of vegetarian chili.

An easy meatless dinner

On Friday night I made a streamlined version of this lentil-chickpea salad from Smitten Kitchen. (Tangent: I started typing Smitten Chicken and had to fix it. When Marie was 2 she used to say "chicken" when she meant "kitchen." Can't you just imagine a starry-eyed chicken, dreaming of her true love?) Modifications: I did not toast or grind my own spices, I did not use any sage in my lentils, I swapped in preserved lemon paste for the chopped rind, and I steeped thin-sliced shallot in salt and lemon juice.

I also took about a cup of Greek yogurt and stirred in another spoonful of preserved lemon paste. I spread the mixture across a plate, for communal dipping, and sprinkled za'atar on top. We ate it with toasted pita, sliced yellow peppers, and steamed broccoli. Yummy, easy, frugal, and the leftovers vanished in a trice.

"I want to put that in my MOUTH."

Back in the spring of 2020 I ordered goodies from New York Shuk for the first time, and I continue to shiver with delight every time I lick the spoon I've used to add preserved lemon paste to something. I feel about it like Miracle Max felt about his MLTs-- so perky.

Recently I bought a bottle of kafe hawaij, and I find that I am using it all the time this fall. It's nice for chai, it's delicious on roasted squash, and I used it for soul cakes on Tuesday. Just tonight I mashed together sweet potatoes and squash with butter and a healthy shake of kafe hawaij. Pete smelled the result and his eyes went wide. "I want to put that in my MOUTH," he said, and proceeded to gobble it down. Maybe you already have the individual spices in your cupboard, but the proportions in this blend are just right.

If you find yourself in need of some fun fall treats for your own household or some fun fall gifts for someone else's, I've been pleased with everything I've ordered from NY Shuk. This is not a sponsored post, just an appreciative one.

Soup Season

Do you like beef-barley soup? I am very fond of beef-barley soup.

We had a little bit of leftover stew beef in the fridge tonight, and I browned it in oil with the Instant Pot in sauté mode. I minced an onion and two ribs of celery, and diced two fat carrots into small cubes. When I pulled the browned beef cubes out of the pot, I tossed in the veggies, salted them, and let them get brown. We had a couple of sad little deliquescing leeks in the veggie drawer, so I chopped them up as well and added them to the pot. In other circumstances I would have thrown in a few cloves of garlic instead.

To the browned veggies I added a glass of wine, about 6 cups of stock, a small can of crushed tomatoes, a cup or so of quick barley, and the resting beef cubes along with their liquid. I cooked it under pressure for 12 minutes and let it rest for a little longer after the timer went off. It needed a bit more umami, so I added some Worcestershire sauce. If I were a mushroom eater, I might have chucked in some mushrooms along with the other vegetables to provide a little umami boost. 

We all liked it; maybe you will too.