Thai (Inspired) Slaw

I find that in the spring I get inspired by Thai flavours. Light and fresh and clean and well, just yummy really. 

At our house, we are also slaw heads. Well, Poppy and I are and we strive to turn Tilly into one and Stephen just eats what is put in front of him for the most part. So, vegetables and salads and slaws reign.

I had some leftover Red Lentil Veggie Burgers and some mango ‘ketchup’ to use up and we had a bunch of stuff that needed eating before we left and it was a beautifully warm spring day out and I really didn’t feel like doing anything inside and this just seemed to jump out of the fridge and cupboards. To boot, I had a very cranky almost four year old and she needed a project. So, I had a helper too.

I spent quite a while in Thailand pre-Poppy and I can be pretty particular about Thai food. But, I have no problem with Thai-inspired as long as it doesn’t try to pass it off as the real thing. So, this is unabashedly Thai-inspired. 

It should have loads of chilli but my main audience for this wasn’t yet four. I wouldn’t mind some sliced right in with the slaw but to make it a little milder, you could blend a little into the dressing. 

It should also have peanuts, not almonds but I was trying to use things up and I did think about going to get some but it was twenty minutes to supper and I wasn’t striving for authentic. 

And the tofu, well, did I mention I was trying to use things up? I wouldn’t normally put smoked tofu in a slaw but it worked here. You could leave it out completely but with it, this slaw becomes pretty much a meal in itself. And, you could use any firm tofu, it doesn’t have to be smoked and would likely be better if it wasn’t.

The dressing emulsifies beautifully with an immersion blender. It would in the jug of a regular blender as well. If you don’t have one, just mince the garlic and ginger. You can mix the ingredients together and strain after a couple of hours if you don’t want the bits in the dressing. You will have more dressing than you need which I don’t think is any hardship because you should find it pretty versatile. It would be pretty good on cold noodles or mixed greens for a quick salad.

This would also be a pretty good accompaniment to just about anything that comes off your barbecue this summer. 

Thai Slaw (serves 6 as a generous side dish)

2 cloves garlic chopped

1inch piece of ginger peeled and chopped

2 tablespoons brown sugar (unless you have palm sugar to hand)

1 1/2 tablespoons fish sauce

4 tablespoons rice wine vinegar (use the unseasoned kind if you can)

4 tablespoons grapeseed oil (or another vegetable oil)

1/2 green cabbage finely sliced

1/3 red pepper (that was all I had)julienned

1/3 yellow pepper julienned

1/2 GIANT carrot (see photo, or 1 medium carrot)julienned

150 grams firm tofu (optional)cut into cubes

Handful sliced almonds (or if you have unsalted peanuts, even better)

Handful chopped cilantro/fresh coriander

Put garlic, ginger, brown sugar, fish sauce, vinegar and oil in a bowl, if you have an immersion blender, or in the blender jug and blend until smooth. 

Put all the veggies on a serving plate or bowl.

Gently saute the tofu, if you are using it, until it starts to crisp up on the outside.

Toast the almonds, or peanuts, if they aren’t already. You can do this in the oven, or in a dry pan on the stovetop.

Sprinkle the tofu, almonds and cilantro on top of the veggies.

Dress with half the vinaigrette. Toss and serve.

2010 Rhubarb Trilogy Complete

Just for the record, I would like to say that not cooking is not so bad. We have the lovely and talented Janine making scrummy meals and that is just fine. She even leaves little unsalted bits for Tilly. Nice. 

Another bonus is that my hands are looking and feeling lovely. Poppy has stopped telling me that they feel like Daddy’s stubbly chin. I haven’t been washing and then working and then washing and then taking a photo and washing and...

I think the Caribbean humidity is helping too. As the fault lines in my bamboo countertop will tell you, winter is a dry season in Canada.

And, while it isn’t the best thing for your skin, a little sun helps appearances too.

Tomorrow I will no longer have an almost four year old. I had pictured a beautiful birthday cake post. It will have to wait until the at-home celebration. The request has been made for an ice cream cake, which sounds like disaster to me in 30º sunshine, but hey-ho, it is the request. And, because I certainly don’t feel up to cleaning up gallons of melted ice cream, we have ordered one from a place that says they can do it.

In the meantime, you will have to make due with rhubarb sorbet. I wish I had some right now. 

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In the process of making this, Little Daughter in sling ‘helping’, one of my favourite bowls was broken (the green one) and consequently, half of the rhubarb I had, the first fresh of the year, was riddled with tiny little shards of green pyrex. So, I couldn’t make as much as I had hoped. 

Big Daughter loved the stuff, rhubarb head she is. I thought it was nicely rhubarby but a little too sweet. I added two cups of syrup before tasting, amateur mistake really. I did think the texture was divine, silky smooth, easy to scoop after being in the freezer for a couple of days and completely ice crystal free. This is all made possible by the sugar syrup. My sorbets are usually harder and a little crystally because I am so mean with the sugar.

I have an ice cream maker. I don’t think my husband knows I bought it and he, somehow, still either hasn’t noticed, or maybe just doesn’t care what the big silver thing in the cupboard is. And, after two years, it is way too late to get cross about it.

You can make it in any ice cream maker, according to manufacturer’s instructions. Or, you can even still make it with just a freezer and a mixer. It takes longer and it may not be as silky smooth but it should still taste fresh and sweet and tart and just like more.

You will have extra sugar syrup, which you can keep in the fridge for ages to use next time you make sorbet or for sweetening iced tea and coffee.

This does need a bit of advance prep just because of the cooling and chilling required. So, if you wanted to have it for supper, I would start in the morning. If you have leftover syrup, it will still need a bit of time to chill the rhubarb before freezing it.

I passed the rhubarb puree through a sieve to remove any stringy bits which, it turns out, was totally unnecessary. If you don’t mind the risk of a few stringier bits, I would save the time and the washing up, and not bother.

When I get home, and strawberries come into season, we will be eating this with them. I am thinking it might be nice with some lime juice and zest instead of lemon and that ginger would add a great little zing. As I experiment, I’ll update here with the variations.

Rhubarb Sorbet (makes about 4 cups)

4 cups sugar

4 cups water

325 grams (11.3 ounces) chopped rhubarb  - I started with just shy of twice as much

4 tablespoons fresh lemon juice 

Make the syrup by bringing the sugar and water to a rolling boil. Remove from heat, cool and chill.

Cook the rhubarb with a few drops of water, covered and over low heat. Check often, you don’t want it to burn. As soon as the rhubarb breaks up, remove it from the heat and  puree. You can use a blender or a hand blender or a sieve and spoon if you don’t have either of those. This should yield a little over one cup of puree. Cool.

Mix the puree with 2 cups of the sugar syrup and the lemon juice. Chill until cold.

Chill and freeze in ice cream maker according to manufacturer’s instructions. Transfer to an irtight container and keep in freezer.

Or, put it in a bowl, your mixer bowl if you have a stand mixer, a glass or stainless bowl, if you don’t. Freeze it is partially frozen, maybe an inch or so in all the way around, around an hour.  Quickly remove it from the freezer and mix it with the mixer or whisk for a few seconds until it is all mixed together. Return to the freezer. Repeat freezing and whisking until it is getting firm. This will take a while. Sometimes, depending on your freezer and the temperature of your kitchen and any other number of temperature based variables, it could be as quick as three or four hours. It will be worth it.

This should keep in an airtight container for a couple of weeks, if it lasts that long.

Veggie Burgers That Work

I love a veggie burger. Granted, I have been known to order it with cheese and bacon before, but it still counts in my book. I have had good ones and bad ones, ones that taste like bad hamburgers, which is wrong, and ones that taste like nothing. I have made them, rarely with a recipe, sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much.

I borrowed The Golden Door Cooks at Home by Dean Rucker with Marah Stets from the book bus. It reminded me of all the things I used to cook in really nice, hot tropical locales. The recipe for Red Lentil Veggie Burgers with Spicy Yam fries and Mango ‘Ketchup’ sang out for two reasons. The first, I really wanted a burger and the second, I decided I would follow the recipe to the letter. Could I do it?

The thought of veggie burgers made me think of a time, not so long ago, when I was somewhere between three and four months pregnant with Tilly. I really needed to have a veggie burger, I have no idea why. We were living in Alaro in Mallorca and there wasn’t a chance we would be getting one there. I decided that Poppy and I would pick Stephen up from work in Palma and, prepare for shameful confession here, we would go to The Hard Rock Cafe where surely, in a land of amazing and fresh and beautiful food, we would be able to get a veggie burger, maybe even with cheese and bacon. Off we went, and what arrived on my plate, I was pleased to see, was not an imitation beef burger. It appeared to be made of lentils and rice and good things. Then I took a bite and realized that no, it was made of sawdust and Elmer’s glue. I didn’t go back to The Hard Rock Cafe after that, I had learned my lesson and I would stick to the local amazing and fresh and beautiful food offered everywhere else.

Or, I would make the veggie burgers myself. It didn’t happen in Alaro. In fact, it only happened a couple of weeks ago, inspired and spurred on by The Golden Door.

These are really tasty. The have a great texture and a little kick from the curry powder. The veggies give a really nice crunch. You could put them in a bun but that would be pretty heavy. The burgers are really nice with the Thai Slaw, not the dandelion salad in the photo which was good but not as good as Thai Slaw which will be up on here soon, and the mango ‘ketchup’ which is really just a quick fruity salsa.

And, I followed the recipe exactly, almost. I didn’t make the fries. I didn’t have any edamame so I substituted frozen limas. I also substituted cremini mushrooms for shitake which, unsurprisingly, I couldn’t find round these here parts. I doubled the recipe because it is a bit heavy on prep. I froze the extra burgers on a parchment lined baking sheet and then, when they were fully frozen, transferred them to a freezer bag figuring that they would cook well from frozen, which they do. You just need to lengthen the cooking times a bit. The recipe calls for cooking spray which I don’t use so I just used grapeseed oil where it called for that. Other than that, I was so serious about being exact here that I even used measuring cups.

Red Lentil Burgers with Mango ‘Ketchup’ adapted, ever so slightly, from The Golden Door Cooks at Home by Dean Rucker with Marah Stets (makes 8 pretty big burgers)

1/2 cup brown rice and 1 cup water

1 cup red lentils and 2 cups water

1/2 cup finely diced onion (about 1/2 medium)

1 teaspoon minced garlic

1 1/2 cups finely chopped broccoli florets and peeled stems (about 5 ounces, if you care to weigh it out)

1 cup finely chopped carrots (about 2 medium)

2 cups peeled, grated and squeezed to remove excess liquid potatoes

1 cup finely chopped cremini mushrooms 

1/2 cup frozen limas, thawed and finely chopped (about 2 ounces)

1 1/2 teaspoons yellow curry powder

Salt and pepper to taste

1/2 cup cornmeal

Grapeseed oil (or any vegetable oil you use)

Cook and cool the rice and lentils, separately. Cool and transfer to a large mixing bowl.

Saute the onion and garlic with a teaspoon of oil until translucent. Add the vegetables and cook, stirring occasionally, until they are cooked but still crunchy, about 5 minutes. Stir in curry powder and season.

Preheat the oven to 400º.

Mix the vegetables into the rice and lentils.

Using about 1/2 cup of the mixture for each, form into eight patties.

Put the cornmeal on a plate and dredge each of the patties in the cornmeal.

Put 1/2 tablespoon of oil on a skillet and sear the burgers for about 2-3 minutes on each side over medium heat until golden. Transfer to a parchment lined baking sheet and finish in the oven for about 12 minutes.

Serve with Mango ‘ Ketchup.’

Here is where I really have screwed this up. I can not find the notes I made on the ‘ketchup’. I thought I had brought them with me but, unless they have become a piece of  almost four year old’s artwork in the last week, I have lost my mind. I can remember what I put in, because I strayed from the recipe here, but not exactly. So, I am going to tell you roughly, and you can play with it if you want to. Really, it is easy.

Take some mango, I used 2 cups of previously frozen and thawed chunks, if I recall. You can use fresh if you have it. Whizz some of it up in the food processor and chop the rest. Add some finely diced red onion or shallot, some finely diced red pepper or chilli, if your main audience isn't an almost four year old, some lime juice, some salt and pepper and some chopped fresh coriander/cilantro. And, that, I think, is about it.

Nerves and Down Under Cookies - Mucked Up

I love being in the kitchen. I love cooking. I find it so hard to let go and not be in the kitchen when there is cooking to be done. So hard that I made dinner, of sorts, for Poppy and Stephen twelve hours after Tilly was born. Sure, it was just a bowl of pasta with some tomato sauce I had made in a hormonally charged fit of nesting a couple of days before but I still couldn't just sit back and let Stephen do it.

I love it when someone else cooks. It doesn't happen very often. And, even then, I feel awkward and anxious when there is nothing to help with in the kitchen. I have certainly never sat on our window seat and watched someone else cook.

So, I worry what will happen over the next month as I try to stay clear of the galley and let the very capable chef, who cooks for my husband all the time, cook for me and the girls. Will I be beside myself with nervousness or will I relax and enjoy it for the break it is?

I have lots of things planned for here while I am away. I have a few food posts squirrelled away and a favourite stuff page and other things I read page in the works. I am also going to try to read Heston Blumenthal's In Search of Perfection more than two pages at a time.

And, maybe I'll have some amazing food experiences to share, who knows.

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In the meantime, I have done it. I have mucked about with the much revered ANZAC cookie recipe. I will no longer refer to it as an ANZAC cookie in its mucked up form, because it quite clearly isn't. There may even be a law in Australia and New Zealand about mucking about with it. So, from now on, it will just be a recipe for Darn Good Oatmeal Coconut Cookies With Anything I Choose to Throw in.

The first, and so far only go, I had involves walnuts and raisins. They are just as good but a little nuttier and I love the taste of just starting to caramelize raisins. Very, very nice on a rainy afternoon with a hot cup of tea.

I used a little less coconut than I did in the original and I found that they needed a couple minutes longer in the oven than the plain ones but that may just be due to my thermometerless gas oven.

Darn Good Oatmeal Cookies With Walnuts and Raisins

1 cup all purpose flour

1 cup rolled oats (I used old fashioned)

1 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup unsweetened coconut 

1/2 cup raisins

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

125 grams (1/2 cup) butter

3 tablespoons golden syrup

2 tablespoons water 

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Preheat oven to 350º.

Mix flour, oats, sugar, coconut, raisins and walnuts in a large bowl.

In a saucepan, bring butter, golden syrup and water to the boil. Add the baking soda and   then mix into the dry ingredients.

Roll into walnut sized balls and place on parchment lined baking sheets. Flatten the balls with the back of a spatula.

Bake for 10-12 minutes.

New York Yogurt Cheesecake

I have been sitting on this post for ages. Just as I was about to write it, I noticed a cheesecake post on here, one of the best food blogs ever. So, I waited, wondering whether I should post it now, or wait, or just not worry about it. Then, I decided that it isn’t really the same. In fact, it is just as much a New York Yogurt Cake as it is a New York cheesecake. 

I have never made a cheesecake that I have been 100% totally and completely happy with. I don’t know whether it is because I don’t love cheesecake or whether the ones I make just aren’t that good.  I have made them in restaurants and the feedback has been nothing but positive so I like to assume that it is the former.  I have the Cook’s Illustrated All-Time Best Recipes magazine and it has a New York cheesecake recipe with, apparently, the best way to bake one so that it comes out uncracked. I couldn’t remember ever making a crackless cheesecake so I thought I would give it a go again. Er, a go in the sense that I would follow the baking instructions but to hell with the actual recipe which, in case you haven’t noticed yet, I am fairly hopeless at sticking to.  Not that I, or my hips, needed an entire cheesecake in the fridge. I was hoping for an occasion when, luckily, we were invited to supper at some friends’ and I offered to bring dessert. 

When I worked at Lolita’s Lust, we started playing around with using pressed yogurt instead of cream cheese in the cheesecake. If memory serves, we never got it really right and it was always just okay.  I wanted to try it out again, because I can convince myself that yogurt, no matter what the fat content, is better for me than cheese.

This turned out really well, save for the cracks, which despite following the New York method, were San Andreas-like in size. To be fair, it was probably either my not following the recipe or my gas oven, which I don’t have a thermometer in. The shame, the shame...

I’ve also used rhubarb here, another recipe to get you ready for the glut and, selflessly, used some from-far-away strawberries to test the recipe because when they are in season, this will be even better. The rhubarb sauce makes a tart layer and the macerated berries a sweet freshness to compliment it.

The New York method says you should put the cheesecake into a 500º oven for ten minutes and then turn the heat down to 200º for around another 1 1/2 hours. Cook’s Illustrated says that the cake should be 150º and that if it gets to 160º, it will crack. I think that is if it hasn’t already cracked due to recipe mucking about with or dodgy oven temperatures. I am certainly not going to argue with them because they have made hundreds of cheesecakes testing this out. 

I would also put a baking sheet underneath the pan in case some of the butter leaks out of the crust. I never remember. Then you won’t have to rescue your cake from an oven full of acrid burnt butter smoke like I did.

The texture was really light, for a cheesecake anyway, and, I think, the yogurt gives the cake a lighter and fresher taste. It is a little more work to make the pressed yogurt but you have the added benefit of being able to convince yourself it is almost good for you.

The recipe here is a combination of my mom’s, some hit and misses from Lolita’s and some playing around in the kitchen.

New York Yogurt Cheesecake with Rhubarb Sauce and Strawberries

Crust (I always seem to make too much)

10 ounces graham cracker crumbs (you can make them easily just by chucking the crackers in the food processor)  

1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons melted butter

1/2 cup granulated sugar

Mix all three ingredients together. Press into the bottom and up the sides of a 10 inch springform pan. I used a smaller one and had extra crust and filling.

Cheesecake Filling

1 1/4 pounds pressed yogurt (you can find out how to make that here)

1 1/4 pounds cream cheese

5 large whole eggs

3 large egg yolks

1 1/4 cups granulated sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 teaspoons lemon zest

2 tablespoons all purpose flour

Preheat oven to 500º. 

Beat cream cheese, yogurt, flour and sugar together until smooth. Add zest and vanilla. Then add eggs and yolks gradually, scraping the bowl down often to avoid any unmixed bits of cheese.

Pour the mixture into the crust and bake for ten minutes.

Turn heat down to 200º for about an hour and a half, or use a thermometer and bake until cake reaches 150º. Or until it is just a little jiggly in the center.

Remove from the oven and loosen from the edges of the pan with a knife but leave it to cool in the pan. When cooled, refrigerate overnight.

Rhubarb Sauce

5 cups chopped rhubarb (I used some from the freezer and cooked from frozen, cooking time for fresh shouldn’t vary too much)

3/4 cup sugar

1 tablespoon cornstarch

2 tablespoons water

In a large saucepan, put rhubarb and sugar and one tablespoon of water. Cook over low heat, stirring frequently, until rhubarb is softened, about fifteen minutes. Mix cornstarch with remaining tablespoon of water and stir into rhubarb. The mixture will go a little bit cloudy. Simmer and stir until the cloudiness is gone. Remove from heat and cool.

Macerated Strawberries

2 pounds strawberries give or take a few

2 tablespoons granulated sugar

1 tablespoon lemon juice

Wash, hull and slice strawberries. Mix with sugar and lemon juice and leave for a few minutes.

Pour the cooled rhubarb sauce onto the chilled cheesecake and return it to the fridge until you are ready to serve.

To serve, remove the cake from the springform pan and out it onto a cake plate. Top it with the macerated strawberries and slice.