CSA Week 5: Jap Chae, Galettes

So, how is your weekend? My Sunday is winding down (waaaaaaah) and it is H-O-T out there! So I'm hiding in my air conditioned apartment, eating watermelon, drinking iced green tea, and generally trying to stretch out my last few hours before the week starts again. This week was apparently the week of abundant fruit at the CSA; a whole load of peaches, plums, and apples (Macintosh, I think). I'm not even kidding, the fruit weighed a whole lot more than the veggies this week, and the peaches and plums have almost displaced watermelon on my "most eaten" list. ALMOST.


And here are the veggies: beets, zucchini, yellow squash, collard greens, carrots, cucumber, radishes, turnips, basil, a huge bunch of parsley, and lettuce mix. I roasted the beets and have been eating them tossed with olive oil, a bit of lemon juice, and some goat cheese--delicious! And I used up the beet greens, too, in a big batch of jap chae.


Jap chae is a Korean dish of sweet potato noodles mixed with veggies and beef and flavored with sesame oil. I dispensed with the beef and used a mix of beet greens, carrots, zucchini, and yellow squash (and a few slices of fish cake). Quick, easy, tasty, and it used up a whole lot of veggies (yay!).


I turned one of the peaches and a couple of the plums into some galettes (or tarts, or whatever you want to call them). And actually it turned out to be two peaches that got used in the end, because I must admit, I couldn't resist, er, snacking as I was slicing.


I wanted to see how a cornmeal crust would go with the fruits, and while they are not the prettiest looking things ever, I think they match quite well. The plums are especially juicy! Next time, I've got to tweak the filling a bit, and add some flavoring (maybe nutmeg? A little bit of almond? Hm.).

So I've still got collard greens and a huge bunch of parsley. I think I may make chimichurri with the parsley (and freeze it), but I'm really not sure what to do with the collard greens....and egads, it's almost pick-up day again! Better get a move on!

P.S. Bonus picture from a dinner I had with my brother and a friend earlier this week at The Spotted Pig, super yummy ricotta gnudi.

Well, hello there (and a green tea cake)

It's been a while since I've posted with any regularity, I know. But I'm still here! And look--I'm embarking on a new project this summer, windowsill gardening. For some weird reason I woke up at the ungodly hour of 7 this morning (on a Sunday! on a long weekend! Sheesh) and rather than try to go back to bed, I got up, did yoga (!), took a shower, and went to the farmer's market a few blocks away just as it was opening. Believe me, that is far more productive than most of my weekends. And it was kind of nice, there was hardly anyone out yet so I could chat with some of the folks running the stands, which is how I got talked into getting this awesome strawberry plant. Look it ALREADY HAS STRAWBERRIES. I'm going to repot it into a bigger container and hopefully I'll have yummy strawberries to snack on this summer. I also picked up a geranium and had previously bought a lavender plant...we'll see who's still alive by the end of summer.


But wait, that wasn't the end of my productive spate--I came home to drop off my goods, and went back out for a long walk through the park, then read for a while in the sun (Game of Thrones, if you're interested--I'm loving both the book and the series. That Jon Snow is a cutie.) and when I came back, I made cake! Green tea cake, to be exact, using the last of my stash of good matcha (must get more). I l-o-v-e how this cake turned out and would be happy to eat it by itself, maybe with some iced green tea.


But I wanted something a little fancier, and filled the cake with some whipped cream and some diced alphonso mangoes (this combination being inspired by my new favorite bubble tea flavor, mango green tea). By the way, I have not eaten nearly as many mangoes this year as I did last year, but I'm getting an early start on the watermelon!


And here's my cute little frosted cake. It's just whipped cream, because it is way too hot to be eating buttercream. Also, I'm not really that big a buttercream fan.


And here it is sliced, and about to be eaten! It's not the prettiest cake I've ever made, but I'm very happy with how it tastes. And now I can officially say that I'm done celebrating my birthday (even though it was 2 weeks ago) because it's not a birthday without cake!

Which isn't to say we didn't celebrate it at all, of course--Pyota took me out for a very fancy dinner to Del Posto, where I did not take any photos (and it would have been too dark even if I didn't feel self-conscious) but the food was really good. I especially loved the pansotti and the spaghetti with crab--and the gazpacho! It was quite a trip having such formal service (I lost track of how many people served our table) and although I wouldn't want to make a habit of it, once in a while is nice.

And actually, it is Pyota's birthday tomorrow--we will have to have a delayed celebration in June, but in the meantime, happy birthday :) I promise a bigger sandwich.

Weekend Breakfast: Cherry Shortcake

Aren't 3 day weekends the best? It's Sunday but I'm not dreading going back to work because I get a whole extra day off tomorrow--woohoo!!! I slept in a bit this morning and then eventually headed out to the farmer's market; strawberry season is in full swing and I could not resist and came back with a LOT of strawberries and some asparagus. On Friday, we got out early so I headed down to Chinatown and came back with (yes, more) mangoes and cherries, so I am awash in yummy things to eat right now (well, except for the watermelon that I put in the freezer to chill quickly and then forgot about--whoops!). Have I mentioned before that this is my favorite time of the year?


Anyway, one of the things I like to do on leisurely weekends is to have a nice breakfast. During the work week, my main goal is speed (I'm chronically late to work) so I usually just eat some yogurt or leftovers, or if I'm really running late, I'll grab a bagel to eat at my desk. But since I have plenty of time (and fruit!) this weekend...shortcake it is! I made a half recipe of cream biscuits, which are so easy and fast to put together, you can be eating in 30 minutes, and that includes the time to prepare your fruit.


Look how high these biscuits rise! I would have used strawberries for my shortcake but, um, I ate them all. Cherries are nothing to sneeze at, though! Just pit, mash slightly with a bit of sugar, and let sit while you make your biscuits. When they're done, split them open, top with a few spoonfuls of cherries, plop on fresh whipped cream (as much as you want!) and enjoy. Ah, love the weekends! Hope you are all having a fabulous one too!

Cream Biscuits
3/4 cup unbleached all purpose flour
1/4 cup cake flour
pinch salt
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 cup cream
melted butter to brush on top of the biscuits
coarse sugar, optional

Preheat oven to 425 F.

Sift together the flours (you can use all AP flour, but the cake flour makes for a more tender biscuit), salt, and baking powder into a medium bowl. Pour in the cream and stir until the dough just comes together. You may need a tablespoon more if you live somewhere very dry, but the goal is to be able to squeeze the dough and have it come together without falling apart. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and pat out into a rectangle. Fold into thirds (like a letter), and flatten back out into a rough rectangle about 1/2" to 3/4" thick. Cut biscuits with a 2" round cutter and place on a parchment lined baking sheet. Pile the scraps together and cut out more biscuits. I get 5 2" biscuits out of this recipe. Brush the tops of the biscuits with melted butter; if you're making shortbread, sprinkle a bit of coarse sugar on top.

Bake 13-15 minutes, or until golden brown and crusty. If you're making shortcake, cool for 5 minutes before splitting and filling with fruit and whipped cream. Serve with tea (and extra whipped cream--hey, it's the weekend, enjoy it!)

Coconut Tapioca

Have you seen the movie Spirited Away? Don't these remind you of the food that the little sootballs eat? (If you haven't, why are you still here reading?! Go watch it now! It's so good!) Anyway, these are actually tiny tapioca pearls, and when I was standing in the grocery, are you surprised that I bypassed the plain white ones and went for the colorful ones? No, me neither.


Besides, they're so much fun to take pictures of! Color!!! They are *really* small tapioca, only slightly larger than the nonpareils I sprinkle on top of cupcakes. As such, they cook very, very quickly. Perfect! Anyway, I decided to make a coconut tapioca drink/dessert soup based on the one we get at Safran (now called Jasmine), one of our standby restaurants when the girls get together.


I actually ran out of canned coconut milk, but fortunately it's easy to make it yourself if you have shredded (unsweetened) coconut on hand. I've had a pack in the freezer for months, so this ended up being kind of a pantry-clearing dessert. To make coconut milk from dried, shredded coconut, you simply put two cups of coconut in a blender with two and a half cups of hot water, whizz for a minute or so, and then squeeze through some cheesecloth. Presto, thick coconut milk! (You can add another two cups of water to the squeezed out coconut and repeat for thin coconut milk.) The coconut milk is then mixed with ginger syrup and chilled.


Here's the tapioca after it's cooked. It's not as colorful, but I love the pink glassiness of it.


And here's the soup put together--coconut milk, tapioca, and diced fruit--strawberries and mangoes, because that's what I had on hand. By the way in case you are curious, I now have 8 mangoes left, so I'm making pretty good progress.


Refreshing and light, perfect for hot weather. Which is exactly why I made it on this weekend, when the weather has unexpectedly taken a turn for the cold (it's supposed to get down to the mid 40s F tonight!). Oh well, no one ever said I had a knack for timing! It's been a nice weekend all around, quiet and relaxing, and I even managed to get over to our local bakery, Silver Moon yesterday to pick up a few things.


I love their fig bread and I'm slowly trying out all the other varieties--this time, I picked up a pain au lait, a palmier, and a lavender cookie. The lavender cookie confirmed that I do not, in fact, like lavender flavored food. The palmier and the pain au lait were great though! In fact, the pain au lait reminded me of my schoggibroetli, except with raisins.

Hope everyone had a great weekend too!

Coconut Tapioca
For the sugar syrup:
1 cup water
1/3 cup sugar
3 slices fresh ginger, smashed

1 can of coconut milk, shaken (or make your own, above--you'll need about a cup and a half)
1 1/2 cups small tapioca pearls
1 cup diced fruit of your choice

For the sugar syrup, combined the water, sugar, and ginger in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Cook until the sugar is dissolved. Set aside and let cool to slightly warm.

If you are using canned coconut milk, give it a good shake and make sure it hasn't separated. If it has, warm it slightly and give it a good whisking to make sure it's homogeneous. Stir sugar syrup in, including the ginger slices. Cover and refrigerate until very cold.

Meanwhile, soak the tapioca pearls in cold water for about 20 minutes. Bring a saucepan full of water to the boil, drain the tapioca, and cook for 5 minutes or until the tapioca are translucent. Drain and let cool. Add to the coconut milk and stir in your diced fruit. Serve in small bowls or glasses and enjoy, preferably on a hot day!

Best Time of the Year

*Before I start rambling--I am thinking about buying a food processor, can anyone share recommendations? I want one that has a big enough bowl so that I can make pie dough in it. Thank you :)*

Yes, it IS the best time of the year--Chinatown is flooded with mangoes, especially my favorite ones, the champagne! (also known as ataulfo) I maaaaay have gone overboard the other day when we ran down to Chinatown during lunch. But they are so cheap now! And I also spied some really really tiny mangoes, like the length of my thumb, but I resisted buying those because, well, frankly I couldn't carry anymore.


See? I bought a dozen, and they weighed a ton! I've eaten two so far, and breakfast this morning is a cut up mango and a couple of Jules Destrooper ginger thins (my latest obsession). I've got some good ideas for what to do with these after I'm tired of eating them plain (hah!) so stay tuned.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Yay, Spring!

It's finally feeling spring-like here (although for a few days this week, we skipped right to summer--it was almost 90 on Wednesday!) and the stores have been awash in strawberries. Hooray! I never thought I'd say it, but I was getting really tired of winter fruit. I mean, a girl can only eat so many bags of clementines before she starts turning orange, you know? This was my breakfast yesterday after almost a week of nothing but thinned out congee and soup for lunch (I'm almost back to normal now, thank goodness). Man, was it good--the strawberries are super juicy (I'm eating some right now!) and the yogurt! So good!


I came across these adorable little jars of yogurt made by the White Cow Dairy at the Murray's Cheese outpost in Grand Central Market. They are a bit spendy at $2.99 for a small jar, but I bought a jar of maple and a jar of gingerberry to try out, and I can see that I'm going to be having a very pricey yogurt habit to deal with now.


Here's a closer look of the gingerberry--it's so creamy and rich and thick and has a nice warm spiciness from the ginger. I can't find any nutritional information on these, but I am pretty sure they are not the low fat kinda yogurt. And that's okay, because this is totally going to be a dessert kind of yogurt for me. I can't wait to try out all the other flavors. Good thing the market is 5 minutes from my office.

And hey, when I'm done, the cute little jars will double to hold homemade pudding...or serve as mini vases for flowers...or to store spices...

Happy Friday!

Baking on command: Plum Cake

A hazard of being known as an avid baker? Sometimes you go home and you're met with a bowl of sub-par plums and the gentle command suggestion that you do something with them. Aye, aye, Captain!

No, no, I kid. But I did head home for a little family time this weekend and since there were some plums which weren't quite juicy enough to be satisfying eaten alone, I decided that they would be perfectly fine for baking a plum cake. And, as usual, Dorie Greenspan to the rescue! I've made plum cakes before using mostly German recipes, which usually have you cutting the butter in to the flour, but this one just has you cream the butter and sugar together and it comes together in literally 5 minutes. Slicing the plums is probably the most time consuming part of this cake.


For something that takes so little time to put together, this is definitely a gorgeous looking cake, in that rustic kind of way. Although, as it turns out, plums that aren't juicy enough for eating...aren't really juicy enough for baking in this cake, either. That's my only complaint--these plums didn't really get "jammy" enough. Still, the cake base is delicious (flavored with cinnamon rather than cardamom) and I will definitely be making this again.


Oh hey, and this recipe only used 5 tablespoons of butter. In my world, that qualifies as health food. Now why did I leave the rest of the cake behind?!

(The recipe used is the Dimply Plum Cake from Dorie Greenspan's brilliant book Baking: From My Home To Yours. Go buy it! You can also find the recipe reproduced online in many, many different places.)

Another Classic: Almond Tofu

Here's another Tofugirl family classic--almond tofu or xingren dofu (also known in Japan as annin dofu). This is one of the easiest desserts to whip up, but it is so perfect for summer--so refreshing and light, yet indulgent all at the same time. My mom would always make up a giant pot of this and just keep it in the fridge so that we could all help ourselves whenever we wanted some (which, in my case at least, was all the time). Tofu is a bit of a misnomer, actually, since this is really more like almond gelatin--no tofu involved. We always had it with canned fruit cocktail, which I still kind of love (although I still pick out all the horribly colored cherries) but I decided to jazz this one up a bit by using a fresh fruit salad steeped in ginger syrup. I know the weather is starting to cool off in NYC at least, but we've still got a couple of weeks of warm(ish) weather left--so go on, have a bowl of this and relive your summer memories.


Since this is comprised of milk, some sugar, and fruit, I consider this darn near a health food--so enjoy, guilt free!

Almond Tofu
Makes about 8 servings

For the tofu:
2 packets unflavored gelatin
1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups boiling water
2 1/2 cups whole milk
1 1/2 teaspoons pure almond extract

For the fruit salad:
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup water
a slice of fresh ginger, crushed
assorted fruits (I used grapes, a nectarine, and a plum)

Combine the gelatin with the sugar; use the larger amount if you have a serious sweet tooth, but keep in mind that you are going to be serving this with a sweet syrup and sweet fruit. Pour the boiling water over the sugar and gelatin and stir until everything is completely dissolved. It's much harder to dissolve sugar once you add the cold milk, so try to get it all now. Add the milk and almond extract and stir. Give it a taste, and if you think it needs more sugar or almond flavor, correct it (if you think you need more sugar, I recommend using sugar syrup rather than straight up granulated sugar). Pour into a shallow pan (I used a 9" round pan which gave me a layer about 2" high, but you can use any shallowish pan), cover, and refrigerate until set, usually about 4 hours or so.

While that's setting, you can make your ginger syrup, which is so simple that all you do is dump your sugar, water and ginger slice in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Stir to dissolve the sugar, and let simmer for another 2 or 3 minutes. Remove from the heat and let cool. Store in the fridge (with ginger slice) until you are ready to serve. When that time comes, cut your fruit into small bits--in my case, I thinly sliced a nectarine, cubed a plum, and thinly sliced some red grapes--and toss in the syrup.

To serve, cut your tofu into diamonds; the size isn't super important, you just want to break it up a bit. Spoon a few pieces of tofu into a small bowl and pour a couple of spoonfuls of syrup and fruit over the top.

Normandy Apple Tart (or, Adventures in Applesauce)

I love Dorie Greenspan's Baking book--I've made at least 10 recipes from it by now and every single one has been terrific. I don't know if it's just me but I find that a lot of recipe books lately have a lot of errors (sometimes glaring! like a certain cake recipe from a book-that-shall-not-be-named which neglected to give measurements for flour) or which are converted improperly from the metric measurements. I've never had a problem like that with Baking AND it's beautifully photographed and full of little anecdotes and tips. It's my current favorite book (although my wonderful brother got me a Nick Malgieri book for Christmas so...game on!)

This recipe is no exception. I could not locate my tart ring (a recurring theme with me) so I made it in an 8" removable bottom cake pan. It's a bit deeper than it was intended to be and of course, somewhat more rustic looking (especially in the crust edges as you can see above), but you know, I actually found the ratio of apple to crust to be more to my preference this way. I'm usually a crust person, but this applesauce is SO GOOD.

And now for the "learn from my stupidity" part of the post. When I read instructions that tell me to puree something with a food mill, I usually shrug and reach for a potato masher or a mesh sieve and a spoon. BUT (and you know there is a but), I fell victim again to missing implements--in this case, my large mesh sieve was MIA. "Oh well," I thought, "I have this little one that I use for sifting powdered sugar. So it'll take a little longer...big deal!" Two hours later, I was sweaty, covered in bits of apple, my hand was sore, I had invoked and then cursed a number of deities, and all I had to show for it was a smallish bowl of sauce. Fortunately it was a delicious bowl of sauce (thank you Greenmarket farmers!) or I think I might have cried. Anyway, I have learned my lesson--I'm going to go get a food mill. And when I do, there will be delicious Normandy apple tart for all.

Normandy Apple Tart (recipe adapted from Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours)
2 pounds apples (I used a mix of Gala, McIntosh, and Honeycrisp)
1/4 cup water
half a stick of cinnamon
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Topping:
2 medium apples (I used Fuji)

1 9" tart crust, partially baked and cooled

For the crust, use your favorite sweet tart dough; there is an excellent one in Dorie's book, although I used a batch of pate sucree I had left from another baking endeavor.

Peel and core the apples and chop into 1" chunks (of course if you have a food mill, you can cut them larger and leave the skin and cores intact). Place in a saucepan with the water, cinnamon, and brown sugar and bring to a simmer over medium heat. You want to cook the apples until they are extremely soft; if the water boils away before this happens, add enough a bit at a time so the apples don't stick to the bottom of the pan. When the apples are soft enough, remove from heat and process through a food mill (or push through a (LARGE) sieve.) Under no circumstances should you use what amounts to a glorified tea strainer. This is your last warning! If the applesauce seems thin, return it to the pan and cook very, very gently until it thickens slightly. Stir in vanilla, transfer the sauce to a bowl, cover and refrigerate.

When ready to assemble the pie, preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Fill the baked and cooled tart shell (which you have left in the pan) with the applesauce almost to the top; place the filled pan on a baking sheet. To make the topping, peel and halve the two apples and remove the cores. Cut each half into very thin, neat slices and arrange in concentric circles over the applesauce, overlapping slightly. You could arrange them in any old way, but concentric circles is pretty. Dorie's recipe calls for an eggwash but I skipped it and sprinkled some coarse sugar on top instead. Bake for 50 minutes or until the apples are golden and easily pierced with the tip of a knife. Cool and eat!