That avocado-quinoa thing

Last week in Austin I had the pleasure of dining at Lambert's BBQ with a couple of fellow Drupalists. We ordered a fleet of tasty dishes, but made particular note of an avocado/quinoa confabulation that lay beneath a trout: Cold Smoked Rainbow Trout, Avocado Quinoa, Bella Verde Cilantro, Tomato & Serrano Vinaigrette. The quinoa adhered to the little blocks of avocado and added subtle crunch to each bite, while also imparting significant flavor for two typically understated ingredients. Must've been _some_ vinaigrette. So, I decided to try to create something similar. And got a little distracted, so it's completely different, but not bad.

Avocado and Quinoa salad-thing

1 cup quinoa, any variety (the restaurant used plain, I used tricolor)
1 tbl olive oil, salt
~2 cups water

Toast the quinoa in the olive oil and salt until it begins to smell nutty. Add the water, bring to a boil, then simmer until the water is absorbed and the quinoa is the desired texture. Let cool.

1 small cucumber
1 small onion (red)

Meanwhile, dice cucumber and onion (I had a spring onion, but red would probably be better). Toss together in a bowl.

2 limes
2 avocados

Squeeze a couple of limes and reserve the juice (debatably, lemon might've been better). Dice two avocados (peel then slice) and toss with lime juice.

handful of cilantro
couple sprigs dill
salt and pepper

Chop herbs, add to cucumber and onion along with avocado and lime juice. Salt and pepper to taste and careful fold everything together with the quinoa. Let sit in the fridge for a bit for the flavors to relax, then serve at room temperature or chilled.

Suggestions welcome!

The Art of French Baking: Strawberry Frangipane

he Art of French Baking, published by Phaidon, is a beautiful book. The covers are padded and sparkling white, the pages thick and smooth, the photographs well shot and printed, and any cookbook with bookmark ribbons gets a lot of points from me. However, the recipes seem to leave a little something to be desired.

I am an experienced baker. Not an expert, not experimental, and not a chemist, but my pie crusts are tender and flaky, my bread rises and my batters are light and fluffy. Therefore I was somewhat surprised when several recipes from this book did not come together or bake in the way I expected. The instructions are quite brief, which is fine if one already has some technique, but I repeatedly found myself with a dough that didn't hold together despite extra liquid, or choux puffs that simply wouldn't rise (I tried twice in one day), or worse, cookies that burned but didn't bake through.

So now I've determined that I'll just need to reinterpret and double check the recipe for logic before I start anything. Make sure the oven temperature doesn't seem oddly high, that the wet and dry proportions make sense and that I can adjust here and there. Or at least I can make the recipes with frosting and cover up all the little problems!

Today I needed to use up the last of a flat of strawberries from market, and the Strawberry Frangipane looked pretty easy. It's just egg yolks, sugar, ground almonds and strawberries. Nothing can go wrong! Well, nothing except my being short an egg. Sigh. So I just eased back on the other ingredients. The batter was thicker than I was expected and didn't exactly pour between the strawberries, but it did melt around them once in the oven. Then it was just a matter of keeping an eye on it until the top was the perfect shade of done... except when I cut into it, the inside was not at all done. Not even a little. Back into the oven it goes.

I'm fairly fed up at this point, having never had so much trouble with recipes before. Perhaps it's partially my fault, but with every recipe coming from the same book it seems unlikely that this is entirely on me. I really want to love The Art of French Baking, but it's not living up to my expectations. You all know what the lesson is here, right?

Here's a quick list of the things I've made from this book:

• Sweet orange croquettes- excellent
• Babas au rhum- pretty good, not as fluffy as I'd like.
• Pate a choux puffs with pastry creme- total fail, no puff to be had, more like cookies. I have done these successfully in the past with a Martha Stewart recipe!
• Petit fours with chocolate ganache and sprinkles- worked well in mini muffin tins
• Duchesse petits fours- Dough didn't even slightly hold together and overcooked too quickly
• Orange gateau, I think- I have a vague memory of using a pineapple, too. dunno.
• Sweet slices- basically sugar cookies, oven temp was also too high
• Strawberry Frangipane- Ha. Maybe once it's baked for three times the suggested time!

Photos of phood (now with vastly improved imaging capabilities)

Apparently Mondays are good for making something different. The last time I did tortellini was at least a year ago, but this week I had nabbed a butternut squash at market and have enough eggs to burn on pasta. The squash wasn't terribly flavorful, so wrapping it in pasta seemed like a good plan. The photo shows some unrolled pasta circles, a bit of filling (squash + whatever herbs were lying around) and a few of the finished tortellinis. Cheese is really fantastic in these, but squash is a heckuva lot cheaper. They come out pretty big because I can only roll the pasta so thin with a rolling pin, and any less filling isn't sufficient.

I wont write out the entire process, but the pasta recipe is basically: for each egg, use a bit less than 100g of flour. I used 5 eggs and maybe 450g flour to start, a bit more for rolling, which makes for a very soft pasta dough, but is so much easier to work with.

The method: make a pile of flour with a well, put eggs in the middle, slowly stir flour in from edges until everything is integrated enough to knead (and not run off the counter). Knead. Let rest, covered. Divide, roll out to 1/4" thick slabs. Rest covered. Roll out as thin as you like, dry on a rack to slightly leathery feel. Cut. Dry some more if just doing noodles or stuff with stuff and let dry a bit. Freeze if not using right away, drop (fresh or frozen) in boiling water for ~5 min (mine, as I said, are very thick). Tada.

And because I had these photos of pretty chocolates from the Sugar Cube in Oldtown lying around, here are some pretty chocolates. They also tasted good, of course, very smooth, nice Autumn flavors.

Wineberry pie

aving the recipe is only half the battle. It took several pies for me to get the pie crust to behave in such a way that I could roll it out, instead of trying to piece something together out of the fragments that never became a whole. Your only hope in this matter is to start with a good recipe and figure it out for yourself. The very best book ever is "The Pie and Pastry Bible" by Rose Levy Beranbaum. I've gotten so many recipes out of this book, if you know me, you've probably had one. In my mind, the best kind of cookbook isn't just recipes but philosophy and information, so that you actually have some clue why things need to be just so. Absolutely essential for the baker. Go get it. shoo.

This past weekend I had the good fortune to spend a night atop a mountain in the Shenandoah region, and came back (thanks to Wortklauberlein) with a pound of fresh berries from the bazillions of vines lining the roads. The local population informed us that they are wineberries, a particularly sweet variety of raspberry. There's nothing so satisfying as baking or cooking with food you've picked yourself. er, or that someone has thoughtfully picked for you.


Ingredients
"Deluxe flaky pie crust" 21 oz
    14 tbl unsalted butter, cold.
    2.25 cups flour (pref. pastry)
    1/4 tsp salt
    1/4 tsp baking powder
    7.5 tbl ice water
    1 tbl cider vinegar
0.5 cup sugar (I only had brown)
2.5 tbl cornstarch
pinch salt
1 lb berries, washed and picked over for passengers.

1. Pick a pound of wineberries and a few blackberries from Flattop Mountain. Or your backyard. Or somebody else's backyard. I don't think you can buy wineberries in the store, but this recipe will likely work with whatever berries you have handy.
2. Make pie crust:
• cut butter into small cubes, freeze for 30 min +
• put flour, salt, baking powder in gallon size ziplock bag, shake to mix thoroughly.
• add frozen butter, expel air and use rolling pin to (patiently) roll butter into flat flakes. Shake bag to redistribute when mix gets bunched up at one end. Freeze for 10 min.
• sprinkle water and vinegar into bag, toss to mix.
• keeping the bag open, knead from the outside of the bag until dough forms a single lump. To do this, you'll need to use the bag to fold the dough onto itself (don't touch it directly). About halfway through you'll get frustrated because it's not holding together yet. Put it in the fridge for a few minutes and come back to it. Once it's a lump, divide into two pieces, one for the top and one for the bottom crust. 
• Refrigerate for at least an hour, preferably overnight. 
3. Roll out bottom crust on lightly floured surface to 1/8 inch thickness. Lay in pie pan, cover and refrigerate at least 30 min, no more than 3 hours.
4. Combine sugar, cornstarch and salt, whisk together. Toss berries gently in this mixture and let sit for 15 minutes. 
5. Toss gently again and pour into bottom crust.

6. Roll out top crust to 1/8 inch. I used a lattice pattern, but you could do a full top crust and cut a hole in the middle for steam to escape. Lay top crust over berries, use water to glue and fold edges under (or over) and crimp using a fork or your fingers.
7. Refrigerate pie, covered loosely in plastic wrap, for about an hour.
8. Preheat oven to 425 at least 20 minutes before baking. Use a baking stone if you have one and put it on the lower rack. Bake pie for 30 minutes or until juices are bubbling and crust is browned. Put a baking sheet or foil underneath the pie plate to catch drips.
9. Let cool for at least 2 hours before serving, probably more like 4 if you have the patience.

Tuesday Night Dinner, part IV

Somewhat delayed! Possibly by a month! whoops.

So after the pesto and whatnot I made scones as an afterthought. The recipe came from the Washington Post food section, but of course I didn't quite have everything required. I substituted whole wheat flour for the barley flour and used some chopped up and slightly macerated strawberries as the center layer. They make a fantastic not-too-sweet dessert or a snack with tea and are in fact ridiculously easy to make. Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures, but rest assured that they're very tasty and attractive scones.

Ingredients:

For the scones

• 8 tablespoons (1 stick) cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces, plus more for greasing the baking sheet
• 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons barley flour, plus more for the work surface
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 1/4 teaspoons kosher salt
• 1/2 cup regular or low-fat buttermilk
• 1 large egg

For assembly

• 1/2 cup strawberry jam or marmalade
• 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, melted
• 1 tablespoon granulated sugar

Find the rest of the recipe here.

Sing It Low and Smooth

A random title, a need to post something to get the blog rolling, and a complete lack of oomph in working on any of my 9 drafted posts brings to you the following:

I have successfully created the world's best smoothie... and I don't know exactly what I put in it. I suspect the ingredients went something like this:

Blender.
Dark, dark cherries, pitted by hand, leaving cherry-blood stains on the counter. (3/4 cup)
Apricots, recently pitted, sliced, frozen because no one ate them in time. (3/4 cup)
Two fragments of melon ice, hunks of cantelope that turned glacée after a thawing and refreezing. (~2 slices)
Orange juice concentrate, spoonful of, another frozen fragment.
The last of the yogurt, perhaps (1/2 cup) the thickest trimmings of cream.
Milk, to fill the blender to the blade; to ensure a smooth result.
Finally, a dash of orange liqueur, a half shot of dark rum, to round the taste and emphasize the tang of the apricots.
Blend.


I didn't sing for a long time, the last few years. Now I'm bringing back fragments (word of the day) of songs half forgotten and wishing I hadn't taken singing for granted when I had a chance to perform. If I wasn't so self-conscious I would like to sing classic jazz tunes again, like Bye Bye Black Bird and That Old Black Magic. I wonder if people don't take music for granted these days, since everyone has an personal music player of some sort.

The reason these things are connected is because I'm vaguely synesthetic. Which is not, apparently, a word. It's to do with seeing colours for tastes, feeling music for colours, and a sort of triangle created between the three. So, this tangy and sweet smoothie, quite pink from the cherries, feels like orange and aquamarine on my tongue, and sounds like xylophone (perhaps Street Song, Key people?) in my head. Bright and sharp with a bubbly underside.

Anyone still with me on this?

These Are My Confessions

Well, really just the one: I kind of, maybe, just a little, but only in some respects, like Martha Stewart. Not like-like, and not like, want-to-be-"BFFs" -like, but one really has to admire the woman. If spending time in jail doesn't cause your massive domestic empire to fold up and hide in a corner, and you pretty much built all that yourself, well.. would that I may someday be so successful (sans the imprisonment thing).

I've been hunting for the book that started it all (according to Amazon, anyway): Entertaining, the 1982 guide to all things party, from hiring help to setting the table and making a bazillion dishes for the guests. For some reason none of the used bookstores I've scoured (a significant number, both in Brattleboro, Vermont and Washington, DC. The links are to my favourites) have it in stock. I think everyone else wants to hang on to it as well. For one thing, it's an emblem of a bygone era, the 1980s. In hindsight (and I'll grant you, I wasn't alive for most of that decade) everything was bright and hopeful, exuberant and jubilant and full of optimism. Nostalgia aside, the book brings that back to us, and gives denizens of this decade and century an opportunity to modify and modernize some very classy parties to fit our own characterless era.

I did find my own copy of Hors d'Oeuvres, which is equally sumptuous and dreamy. I think juxtaposing that style of opulence in decor and food presentation with a contemporary minimalism could be very gratifying. The best part of this book is not that Martha presents themed party menus or very tasty and precise recipes, but that everything is a bit mix and match. Because my guests are so often vegetarian or vegan, I need to be on my toes with modifications. Miniature tarts and sandwiches, small bites of fruit and cheese, roasted tortellini (the pictures in Hors d'Oeuvres inspired me to make my first tortellini from scratch) are all conveniently alterable. There's usually two parts to a recipe: the filling and the base. If, for example, I really like the salmon mousse tartlets, but can't serve salmon, I can replace it with herb mayonnaise and cucumbers, a sprig of dill on top. The first menu even begins with highly interchangeable tea sandwiches (p. 19).

This is also the book that led me to discover how few people in the States know what a pain de mie pan is. I even made a bet with a friend that Sur La Table wouldn't have one, or know what it was. Someone still owes me a cookie.

All of this is actually leading up to the fact that I made a recipe from Martha Stewart Living (May 2009) for dinner last night and it was very tasty. It did, however, fulfill my butter limit for the week, so I guess I'll be having dry toast for a while. The recipe was Brioche French Toast with Roasted Asparagus and Orange Beurre Blanc (image and recipe from MarthaStewart.com). As usual, I had about half the required ingredients, but I think it came out just as well anyway. I substituted smaller amounts of vermouth, soymilk, blood orange juice and onions for dry white wine, heavy cream (which I also left out of the beurre blanc altogether), more orange juice and shallots. And I made the brioche from scratch that morning, from a recipe in my new Beard's Bread Book for brioche loaf (not to be confused with little brioche buns). Very tasty bread, and it adds to the egginess of the dish without oversoaking the slices. Plus it smelled great in the pan as it was cooking. And I like asparagus.

Tuesday Night Dinner, part III

I'm not actually sure where this recipe came from. I think it was clipped from a Better Homes and Gardens magazine by Wortklauberlein. It was originally for bread crumb, spinach and feta burgers, but I had only one of those ingredients, so some modifications were made. Because I was making it up a bit as I went along, I changed all the original measurements and uhm... it's a whole different recipe now.

Veggie Burgers

~1-2 cups cooked black eyed peas
1 cup spinach (frozen or fresh)
2 eggs
2 tbl olive oil
2 tsp dill (fresh always better)
1 tsp oregano
a pinch or two of sage
Salt and pepper to taste, and any other herbs/spices

1. Mush up the black eyed peas to rough texture.
2. Mix everything else in, makes sure there's enough egg to coat the ingredients and hold them together. Hold back on the spinach or peas if it seems like a stretch.
3. Heat up a cast iron pan with some oil, use the same pan the sweet potatoes were done in, if using in the same meal.
4. Drop large spoonfuls of the mixture into the pan and let cook. Flatten a bit with the back of a spatula to make sure all the egg is cooked and turn over once they hold together. They're never going to be very solid, but they do hold together.
5. Serve with Asparagus Pesto.

I added the black eyed peas not just because I didn't have any bread crumbs handy, but because they're protein, and the meal needed some. I just moved the starch aspect over to the sweet potatoes instead. I suspect that other beans could be substituted. When in doubt, try something different.

Tuesday Night Dinner, part II

For the main course, I made asparagus pesto over some veggie burgers. The pesto, first:

This recipe came from the New York Times, very timely, just as I was considering what to do with some overly aged asparagus in the refrigerator drawer. As usual, I modified it to fit what I had around, and it was drastically different from the original. It turned out a little damp at first, but reabsorbed the liquid as it cooled and behaved very well on the burgers.

Asparagus Pesto
Some asparagus, perhaps a bunch
2-3 tbl olive oil
juice of 1/2 lemon (or to taste)
Fresh ground pepper
"21 seasoning salute"
Few pinches salt, to taste.

1. Wash and cut the asparagus into small inch long pieces. Boil a pot of water and drop the pieces in, cooking until they are bright green, no longer. Drain and rinse in cool water, then add to the container of a food processor.

2. Add the lemon juice, pepper, 21 seasoning salute, if you have it, or other spices. The 21 seasoning salute is a Trader Joe's mix that's especially tasty on popcorn, but can easily be replaced with fresh garlic and whatever else strikes your fancy. I used it purely for the garlic, as I was otherwise fresh out. Salt, too, then blend.

3. That's it! Set aside for later use, reheat it in a saucepan or microwave if you need to. Serve on pretty much anything.


One of the most important parts of using any recipe is being able to make it do what you want, with what you have. If I ran out to the store every time I was missing an ingredient, I would never have time left to spend in the kitchen. So, it's best to substitute where possible, adjust to the amounts you have in stock, and not let yourself be too rigid in following directions.

Tuesday Night Dinner, part I

You may or may not have seen my tweet last night describing my dinner:

@ekl1773 Made strawberry whole wheat scones, cinnamon sweet potatoes, spinach and blackeyed pea burgers with asparagus pesto. Pleased with self.

The scone, burger and pesto recipes all came to me at once, opportunely. The sweet potatoes I made up on the spot to go with everything else, partially because I didn't have the "herb seasoned stuffing mix" called for in the burger recipe (and the horror of buying such a thing instead of working with a loaf... perhaps I'll post my stuffing recipe someday).

Cinnamon Sweet Potatoes

A couple small (1' diameter) sweet potatoes
Cinnamon
Cardamom
Olive Oil

1. Clean the potatoes and slice into thin slices, less than a quarter inch thick.

2. Drizzle a couple tablespoons of olive oil around the bottom of a cast iron pan and heat up.

3. Add potatoes to the pan and stir to coat, being careful not to break the slices. Spread them out and let cook. Sprinkle with a teaspoon or so of cinnamon and an 1/8 teaspoon of cardamom, just enough to put a dash on each slice. Stir and try to flip most of them over, sprinkle the other side as well. Add a little more olive as necessary.

4. Cook until soft, slightly browned on the edges, but not mushy. Serve immediately.

Caramel corn

I'm going to post a few recipes over the next couple of days, because I have a small backlog piling up here. And why post them all at once when I can spread them over several posts and not overload you all at once? Cooking and baking are things I do to procrastinate, even to avoid writing blog entries, say, so I figure, heck, I'll turn that sucker right back on itself and show it who's boss. Uhm, by which I mean, me?

First up, we have Caramel Corn. I made this for work a few weeks back and it was quite a success. The recipe could easily be halved if you don't have a ginormous bowl around. I found it in the Joy of Cooking, 75th anniversary edition. I've only got three copies of the Joy so far, and I'd like at least four, maybe six... My other two are both from circa 1950, one from a used book store and one that was my Grandmother's (I'm very happy to have the latter, as well as her recipe box!). You see where my interest in cooking and booking overlap here: collecting cookbooks is a fantastic hobby. A bunch of mine are in my LibraryThing collection.

Caramel Corn

3/4 cups unpopped popcorn
corn/canola oil
1.5 tbl unsalted butter
1.5 cups light brown sugar
6 tbl H2O

1. To pop the popcorn, put a few (three) kernels in the bottom of a large pot (needs to hold 6 cups of popped popcorn) and just cover them with a layer of the oil, making sure it's distributed evenly across the bottom of the pot. Turn heat to high and wait for the oil to heat up. When all three kernels have popped (watch out for spraying hot oil), pour in the rest of the popcorn and put a lid on it. While waiting for it to pop, hold both pot handles and shake the kernels to make sure all of them are exposed to the heat and none of them stay in one place long enough to burn. It is possible to do this just above the burner so the oil keeps getting hotter. This process took me a few tries to learn, so you might want to try a smaller batch, first. The balance of heat and oil is delicate; too much direct heat and it burns, too much oil and it's greasy. You can also caramelize "airpop" popcorn, but I haven't tried it. Remove from heat when popping slows.

2. Lightly salt the top of the popcorn in the pot, then pour into large bowl and salt again, toss to coat.

3. To make the caramel, melt the butter in a saucepan, then add the sugar and water. Heat should be mediumish, whatever it takes to create just some loose bubbles around the edges of the sugar. Put a lid on for a few minutes to let the steam wash any sugar crystals off the sides of the pan. Cook to 234F, the "soft ball stage."

4. Carefully and slowly, pour the caramel over the popcorn, stirring as you go. Try not to get it on the sides of bowl, but cover as much popcorn surface area as you can initially, as it cools fast. Keep stirring until the caramel stops moving to new kernels.

5. Spread the popcorn out on cookie sheets to cool. Once it's at a comfortable temperature to handle, break the bunches of popcorn apart with your fingers, down to bits an inch big or smaller.

6. When completely cool, pack it up in bags, containers, or put it back in the bowl and share with party guests. I consider this recipe seriously easy and seriously tasty. Would make good party munchies along with my spicy caramel almonds recipe (which I'll have to find again...).

Chocolate Caramel Cups, +3 for alliteration

Yours truly recently acquired some very exciting and rare footage of the elusive Chocolate Caramel Cups in the wild. As you will see from the somewhat grotesque imagery shown here (reported exclusively on this blog!), the Chocolate Caramel Cups have a fearful habit of wreaking havoc on their fellows. Evidence suggests that an Alpha Chocolate Caramel Cup will strip an entire rival tribe of their outer coatings before eviscerating them (as seen below!). Your faithful reporter has little stomach for this, and shall not go into further detail. The photographs must speak for themselves in this case.

The first photograph, daringly captured by our field scout, is a close up of one of these Chocolate Caramel Cups. You may observe the formation of the cranial ridge and overall dimensions of the beast. The second image shows the vestige remnants of rival Caramel Cups, and the third was captured after the war party had left; a lone victim of the atrocities.

~ ~ ~

All silliness aside, the camera on my phone is of seriously low quality, but it's all I got. The recipe for these monsters is as follows.

Chocolate Caramel Cups

You will need one or two mini-muffin tins and tin-liners. The quantity of chocolate is easily variable and amendable, but the caramel can only be fractionally divided. I made a full batch (measurements below) and have leftover (woe is me).

1-2 ~10 oz bags of semi-sweet or dark chocolate chips (I used ghirardelli)
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 cup cream
2 cups sugar

1. Start the chocolate melting in a double broiler over simmering water. Stir occasionally.

2. Melt butter and sugar in saucepan over medium heat. Stir once or twice to incorporate.

3. When sugar has dissolved and no crystals remain, add the cream and again stir until just mixed. Over-stirring causes the sugar to crystalize. Continue to cook over medium to low heat, just hot enough that the caramel bubbles a little at the edges but does not get too carried away. Cook until caramel reaches 240 degrees F. (you will need a cooking/chocolate/candy thermometer for this. Make sure it doesn't touch the bottom of the pan when you're measuring.)

4. Meanwhile, the chocolate has melted. Put a small spoon-full in the bottom of each mini-muffin cup (lined) and use a pastry brush to brush it up the sides so that it reaches the top and covers all the paper. Place tin in freezer to solidify.

5. Remove chocolate from freezer and carefully pour, do not spoon, the caramel into each cup. Do this by transferring the caramel from the pot to a pyrex measuring cup with a spout. Add enough caramel to almost reach the rim, perhaps leaving 2-3 mm free for the top layer of chocolate. This top layer must be able to connect with the first layer of chocolate to seal in the caramel. Place the cups back in the freezer again while you melt a little more chocolate.

(if the caramel gets too hard/crystalizes, turn the heat back on and don't stir it.)

6. Remove trays from freezer again. Spoon more chocolate on top of the caramels and smooth it to the sides with the back of the spoon. Fill to the brim. Replace in the freezer.

7. Once everything has solidified a final time, peel the muffin cups off of the chocolate and pack away for later or eat. They should be just fine at room temperature, or in the fridge if it's hot out.

Feel free to try other fillings with the same method. I did peanut butter caramel "cups" previously, but was lacking the muffin tins, so they were really... sandwiches.

Seitan Recipe

I posted this elsewhere a while ago, but when it was difficult to find again today, I thought heck, I'll repost it here. Plus I'm making it right now, first time in the new kitchen. Eventually (soon, I hope, cause I'm hungry) it will become salad rolls.

This entire recipe is easy to change around, but here’s a starting point:
-4 cups UNBLEACHED (or whole wheat) flour (use more on your second or third try if you want, but probably not more than 6 cups)
-enough water to make your pile of flour (which didn’t need to be accurately measured at all) into a solid ball of flour dough. The ball is very important, so make sure it’s all stuck together and not too wet or dry at this stage.
-Once you’ve got a ball, fill a mixing bowl with water and begin to gently knead the ball under it, keeping it together as best you can. It does get a little too soggy sometimes and tries to come apart, but if you just keep going patiently and keep the bits together you’ll be fine. The water should be changed fairly frequently, once it becomes opaquely white. The white is the starch coming off of the gluten, which is what we want. Gluten=protein=yay.
-So you knead for about 45 min until your ball becomes a bit more solid and rubbery. The water should be a bit less opaque when you refill it now. Ideally you might want it to be clear, or quite close to that. Definitely don’t stop until it’s close or you’ll get sponge instead of seitan. I like to put a cutting board in the bottom of the sink and knead under a light flow of water for a while, sometimes picking up the ball and rubbing it or spreading it under the water to get those pesky lumps and starch out.
-Now that you have a squeaky lump of what looks like beige brains...
-Get a large frying pan with a lid, about 2” deep. Make up your simmering sauce to cook the seitan in. I think it can also be baked and other things, but I like doing this for some all-purpose seitan. Using a 2 cup measure, mix about 1/4 cup soy sauce, 1/8 cup olive oil, 3 tbl (ish, really, I just dump some on) sage, some thyme, maybe a couple drops garlic oil, salt, pepper... sautee some onions first and use those, too. Again, this is pretty arbitrary and variable, so maybe start with something simple (soysauce/oliveoil/sage) and then experiment later. Pour this into the pan and fill up with some water, about an inch deep. Bring to boil.
-Cut your lump of “brains” into half inch strips. Squeeze each of these carefully over the sink to get out the last bits of water, and lay them into the hot simmering sauce (turn down to simmer now). Put on the lid and let them sit for about 10 minutes.
-At this point the seitan lumps should have puffed up and look like poofy beige blobs. They can be coloured with this sauce, too, so more soy sauce makes darker seitan, etc. After 20 mins turn the blobs over, simmer another 20. Remove from heat and lay your blobs on a cutting board to cool. The sauce can be saved for another (slightly weaker) batch later.
-The seitan can be cut up again from here and used in stir fry, spring rolls, on salads, in tomato sauce.. whatever you like. I think it lasts about a week, but it’s usually gone so fast I haven’t tested that.

Miso soup, of a sort

As usual, the fridge was empty, the cabinets were bare, and it was dinnertime. We tend to have some basics lurking in corners, a few carrots, some ginger, noodles... And what better to do with odds and ends than soup? With Tampopo in mind, I set about to make something tasty, simple and filling.

It began, as most soups do, with a pot of water. I used my dutch oven for the heck of it, about half full of water (6 cups). Into this I chopped one onion, about an inch of ginger (would have used more if I had it, ~2") and four cloves of garlic. After letting it boil for at least half an hour, I strained out the bits, and put the broth back on the stove with the heat off.

Meanwhile, in a blender I had been working on the miso. First I squeezed a lemon, retaining the skins, and put the juice along with a large (1/2 cup+) spoonful of red miso paste into the blender. I used the lemon skins to grate some zest and set it aside. I also chopped some dried kelp and set this aside, as well. Then I added the strained out onions, garlic and ginger bits to the blender as well as a splash of vermouth (because it made more sense than soy sauce (overwhelming) or water (thinning), and because I didn't have sake, which would have been more appropriate). [Blend] You could also use some of the broth, but make sure you have enough left in the pot for cooking the veggies in the next step. The broth is not strong on its own, but there should be about 6 cups left by the end step. I added water twice during the cooking process.

While everything was blending and cooking I also prepped some rice noodles (vermicelli style) and chopped a cube of tofu. Note that as a component in this soup the tofu pretty much tastes like plain tofu. I like it this way, and it's traditional in miso soup. The noodles soaked in a bowl of warm water for ~10 minutes. They don't need to be completely soft, as they will finish cooking when added to the soup.

At some point I managed to get two chopped carrots and about a 1/4 head of cabbage into the broth on the stove and turned it back on for a few minutes, maybe 5. The cabbage got a little overdone in my case, and could be replaced with a different green soup veggie, possibly bok choy or some such.

Check list:
-Soup base: broth + carrots + cabbage
-tofu squares
-rice noodles
-blended miso mixture
-chopped kelp
-lemon zest

To assemble: I used a couple of conical bowls, which meant that things stayed in the order I added them in instead of spreading out across the bottom of a wider bowl. First about a cup of tofu cubes went in (mine were largish), then a handful of noodles, then several ladles of soup to fill to the top with hot broth (ideally there should be a good pile of veg, but not so much that they emerge more than 0.5 cm from the broth . On top of this I spooned a generous helping of the miso mixture (er, 1/4 - 1/2 cup?), then a sprinkling of kelp and lemon zest and voila! a rather pretty bowl of soup.

Of course, the whole shebang should be at least partially stirred up before eating, or you'll get all your miso in one bite. It should be mixed into the soup on the table to create a new broth. Miso cannot be cooked or it will die a horrible horrible death.

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In retrospect, and if I had my choice of ingredients, I wouldn't change much. I might ditch the onion in the beginning for some shredded spring onion on top, and find something more pleasant than cabbage. There was also a vote for soba noodles instead of the rice noodles I used. The lemon really makes this dish, so don't you dare go using bottle lemon juice. Tsk.