Easiest Lunch EVER.

Dudes. I am so proud of this recipe that I have to share it. Unfortunately (for you), it was so delicious that I ate it before taking pictures.

I shall dub it: VEGETARIAN, ITALIAN TACOS.

Cut half a medium eggplant into slices and saute over high heat–enough to char it a little as it cooks. Charred eggplant is my new favorite food.

Meanwhile, spread a mixture of ricotta and pesto on a tortilla. I wasn’t really measuring at all, as is my wont, but if I had to guess, it was probably 2-3 tablespoons ricotta and 1 tablespoon pesto. Top with chopped walnuts (about 2-3 teaspoons).

When the eggplant is done, plop it onto the tortilla. If you feel for some reason like you need more protein, top with a fried egg.

That’s it. Fold it up and eat it. It’s delicious, it has all your food groups in it, and it’s delicious. I ate mine in about five seconds, but that might also have been cuz I was really hungry. But mostly because it was delicious.

If I were doing this again, I’d replace the egg with sauteed mushrooms, but we had none in the house and for some reason I was craving an egg.

 

The Handpresso

Have 99 Euros to spare? You could be making espresso ANYWHERE with the Handpresso, a gadget that’s half K-pod machine and half bike pump.

I can’t embed their videos so just click the picture below to check it out. It’s kind of an ingenious idea, but I think anyone actually trying to make espresso with this contraption would be laughed at. That’s why the cowboy does it when only his horse is looking.

 

Does Subway Care About Health Food?

C and I have a debate going about Subway. Actually, it’s not so much a debate as him saying that he kinda likes eating there sometimes and me curling into the fetal position with my thumbs jammed into my ears screaming “NO NO NO DON’T MAKE ME” and generally making myself look like an idiot or a five-year-old child.

I used to really enjoy Subway as a kid, and it was kind of a special treat when we went there instead of Taco Bell. Hoo boy. At some point (high school? College?) my attitude, or tastes, changed, and I can hardly stand to eat there anymore. To me the bread tastes like mush and if the toppings aren’t stale you’ve won the lottery. (There’s also not much there for an aspiring vegetarian like me; last week in Subway I tried to get a “veggie patty” and was told that the Subway I was currently standing in didn’t carry ‘em. Does anyone know how ubiquitous, or not, these things are?)

Anyway, after our “debate” when my thumbs came out of my ears, C said something to the effect of, “You’ve got to at least respect them for encouraging healthy eating.”

And I wonder: do they? Or are they just responding to market forces, like when McDonald’s started offering salads (or “salads” as they look nothing like a salad I’d ever (want to) eat)?

Pro	Con
Jared.	Jared is a great marketing stunt / publicity tool.
They really do have seven subs with less than six grams of fat, and I can’t remember a time, even pre-Jared, that these weren’t on the menu and weren’t promoted as such. I mean, even in the 90s I think they were advertising their health options, and McDonalds definitely didn’t have salad and apple slices on the menu back then.	Nobody actually goes in and orders a six-inch veggie delite with no cheese or mayo (unless you’re me, which is what I ordered last week). You could hit 1000+ calories easily with a footlong sandwich, even if you got tuna, the most innocuous of toppings. A footlong meatball marinara (which I used to gleefully consume in my earlier years) gives me the willies. So while you can eat fairly healthy at Subway, you can also totally stuff your face. Which is great, because that’s democracy at work. But is Subway to be lauded?
They give out toys in their kids meals that are usually about being active (stopwatches, water bottles, sweatbands) or saving the earth. Looks like their current promotion is a reusable lunch sack, co-branded with the Smithsonian, which is AWESOME.	There is no con to this pro. Any fast food company that gives out reusable lunch bags instead of plastic crap that becomes bird toys (I had a friend who gave all her Happy Meal loot to her pet macaw) is awesome.

Okay, so I really don’t know what we’ve decided here, except that I would probably brave that mushy bread for a couple of those bags. What do we think – does Subway “care” or are they riding the wave?

 

Sweet Potato Bread

Made a loaf of bread in the machine yesterday. Potato bread sounded good, and I’ve never done it with a potato rather than with instant flakes (though to all bread machine owners: about 1/3 cup of instant flakes subbed out for 1/2 cup of your flour makes an incredibly soft and delicious loaf). Anyway, we didn’t have any potatoes but we had SWEET potatoes, so I thought I’d try and see what would happen.

The bread is a beautiful orange color, but the texture is a bit strange and the loaf collapsed, a symptom, I’m told, of too much moisture in the dough and not enough gluten.

This makes me curious how a sweet potato differs chemically from a potato that would cause it to absorb less liquid or react with the yeast differently.

I then went searching for answers: I found nothing conclusive, but this person was making potato yeast rolls and was recommended to use a higher-starch variety of potato; Texas A&M University’s agriculture page suggests that sweet potatoes are higher in starch than an Irish potato (same as a white potato?). So that’s not the culprit.

In conclusion, I’m not sure what caused the lack of rise and odd texture, but next time I make sweet potato bread, I’ll try doing the mixing at least, and maybe the baking, without the machine, so I can get a good gauge of how wet the dough is.

And I’m using this recipe, because WOW.

 

What’s Fun About Food?

Today nobody at Chez Scrapple felt like doing much of anything, so I sat around playing Cooking Academy*. It’s a gesture-based cooking game that’s better than Cooking Mama by a long shot, —though so similar to CM that I’m quite surprised nobody’s been sued.

For those who aren’t familiar with gesture-based cooking games, the basic premise is this: You are given a recipe that has a number of steps. To perform each step you move the mouse (or Wii controller, or Nintendo DS stylus) to mimic knifework or stirring or folding a wonton or what have you. It’s so realistic it’s like you’re actually cooking!

If my disdain didn’t come through there, let’s try again: It’s not at all realistic and it’s nothing at all like you’re actually cooking!

The problem with these games, C and I have decided, is that the idea of “cooking” is reduced to a number of menial tasks that the real cook performs without a second thought. A game of dicing onions and peeling carrots is not my idea of a fun night.

I realize the hypocrite I’m being, of course, since I am a huge fan of Rock Band, which to a real guitar player is anathema. Real musicians would probably prefer to see a game that doesn’t reduce the art of playing music to the motion of pressing frets along with a backing track.

So what would a fun cooking game for cooks look like? I don’t know. It would be more freeform, but would still be a game—that is, with metrics and points and in-game rewards. It would not be a collection of recipes with some pretty pictures, is what I’m saying.

It would not be a manage-a-restaurant sim. In this cooking game, you would be cooking. End of story.

Maybe you would develop recipes using the ingredients and equipment you have on hand, with the successful recipes earning you money (through cookbook sales, restaurant licensing, or through your rising stardom and sponsorship on Food Network), which you could use to invest in more exotic ingredients or fancy equipment. I’d try a game like this. The trouble is that recipes are so subjective: who would decide what’s “good”? And is cooking really fun at all if you can’t eat it afterward, or at least smell it while it’s cooking?

Maybe the idea of creating a cooking-game-for-cooks is impossible. But I’d love to know what would go into your dream cooking sim.

*I also made this.

 

Inspiration

I simply have to share the recipes I’ve discovered today. Which will I make first? They all look so incredibly yummy, and healthy.

African Sweet Potato and Peanut Soup – I believe the traditional preparation of this dish involves dunking a still-moist lump of fermented cornbread into the soup, if this City Paper piece is referring to the same soup. Anyway, I don’t think you can go wrong with peanut butter and sweet potatoes.
This Veggie Bowl is going to be lunch today, I think: it looks like it takes all of three seconds to prepare.

And these black bean burgers have just four ingredients and can be frozen? Joy of joys!

 

Worst. Idea. Ever

Safeway’s “festive projects” webpage contains this terrifying, er, “gem:”

Yeah, that. You know what that is? That is “sushi” candy, made of POWDERED DOUGHNUT PIECES, FRUIT ROLLUPS, AND SWEDISH FISH.

Great food styling. Really. Props. It even looks tasty. But then I thought about it and realized that if I ate one of those, I would be eating powdered doughnut, a fruit rollup, and a Swedish fish. In the same mouthful.

Ugh.

 

Nobody told me how easy it was to make paneer

I’ve been hankering for homemade paneer for years. I knew, in theory, that making it is easy: Milk, heat, acid, stir. But I never really realized how foolproof it is.

Tonight I heated half a gallon of whole milk and 1/4 tsp salt to 180 degrees on the dot. I removed the pan from the heat, added 1/6 cup white vinegar, and stirred for one minute.

Half an hour later, I poured the curdly mixture through a cheesecloth-lined strainer; it’s being shaped now with a weight on top (to form it into more of a brick and less of a crumbly mess).

Wow. So easy even I can do it. Love that.

I wanted to make ricotta with the whey, but this smartypants says you can’t do it. So perhaps I’ll bake bread with it, or use it as a soup base. Any whey ideas?

 

Turn, Turn, Turn

It doesn’t seem like it’s been almost half a year since we moved to Chez Scrapple, but the food on our table proves it: squash and greens from the supermarket instead of farmer’s market tomatoes, CSA corn and figs from our neighbor’s tree (“Come get some,” she said, and we must have picked dozens. Would have taken more but we were asked to leave some for others–god that’s a good fruit.)

Eating seasonally is a daunting task, one I’m not up to. I admit I like tomatoes on my sandwiches, even in winter, and sometimes in the summer you still want some broccoli. And why on earth would I want to eat nothing but root veggies and canned goods during the cold months? I wouldn’t, that’s right.

But there are advantages, of course: tomatoes taste better in July, not to mention that they’re much cheaper. Squash at 70 cents a pound or sometimes even less is a nice reminder that winter’s here, and it’s not like I crave butternut any time but winter.

I don’t claim to have a handle on the rhythms yet; I haven’t been paying attention long enough. I know asparagus and peas come in the spring, tomatoes come in the summer. Easy. But when are blueberries ripe? Before or after strawberries? (Before. I think.) And when’s corn at its peak? When I first moved here, I wouldn’t let Mr. Scrapple buy any corn because “it’s not in season yet–it’s only fresh when it gets down to 12 cents an ear.” Little did I realize that sweetcorn never gets that cheap outside the grain belt. So now I try to time it for 15-25 cents an ear, and miss that roadside corn from Minnesota terribly.

Last time I went to Minnesota, I brought back two pounds of lefse in my suitcase, because you just can’t find it on the coast. Perhaps next time I’ll need to smuggle back some corn.

 

Baking

used under a creative commons license. TheLizardQueen - http://www.flickr.com/photos/lizard_queen/

I love baking. I don’t make my bread entirely by hand, and in fact many of the breads I “make” I just put in the bread machine, but my parents sent me some sourdough starter and it’s really hard to make sourdough in the machine.

By the way, I am a total sourdough nerd. Some people say it’s a pain to keep the starter going, but that hasn’t been the case with ours. Perhaps the wild-caught ones are harder to keep alive; my folks bought me some dehydrated San Francisco sourdough flakes from this genius lady who I respect terribly for being able to sell San Francisco Sourdough from Texas. (She’s also a great entrepreneur–the recipe book is filled with sentences like: “Now stir your starter with this special wooden paddle. If you don’t have one, you can buy one on my web site.”) Anyway, those fuckers cannot be killed. I feed them MAYBE once a month if I remember; more if I’m making a lot of bread. Highly recommended.

So the starter gets mixed up the night before and when I wake up in the morning I have a bubbly sponge. And then I spend some QT with the Kitchenaid. Also not very hands-on.

But then right before the first rise, I always knead the dough a little by hand.

I’m not very good at it, and I feel like if I were a “real” baker I’d have much bigger biceps, but those few minutes are *fun.* (Mr. Scrapple doesn’t agree, and you may not either.)

Then the bread rises, and rises again, and this takes about 5-6 hours. Insane, and not something I can imagine “normal” people doing, even on the weekends. But lucky freelance me is in the house anyway, and once the dough is made in the morning (about 15 minutes) there is almost nothing to do. Punching it down and shaping it takes maybe 10 minutes, and prepping it for the oven takes five minutes more, if I really take my time with the egg glaze.

And then I’m rewarded with a fresh, piping hot loaf of bread to share with Mr. Scrapple. It’s a beautiful thing.

Today I made the bread with about 1/3 wheat flour and 2/3 white, plus a third of a cup of instant mashed potato flakes for good measure. It’s the first time I’ve put mashed potato flakes into a sourdough, but they’re now a staple in my bread machine breads made with conventional yeast. Just a third of a cup makes incredibly soft, squishy bread that doesn’t go hard so soon. Highly recommended.

Someday I will start posting photos that I actually took.