Apple Pie Cookies

It's that time of year when both the stress levels rise enough to procrastinate through baking and the apples start to arrive in such large numbers that my house can't keep up with them. So, in a moment of foresight (at least, that's what I'm telling myself) I asked some friends if the next day they wanted cookies or apple pie. The response, jokingly, was apple pie cookies. That was a challenge I could pass up. You can't make some food up that sounds super yummy and expect me not to try to follow through! So, here are the very happy results. A little more like fruit pockets than apple pies, but next time I'll see if I can do a small lattice top for each (though that will be a night when I'm in need of even more serious procrastination).

Ingredients

For the Crust:
1 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 Tbsp sugar
1 pinch salt
1/2 cup butter (1 stick, and this works well with dairy free substitutes)
2-4 Tbsp chilled water

For the Apple Filling:
3 apples, diced
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 Tbsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
2 tsp cornstarch mixed into 1 Tbsp cold water

Optional: a little extra white sugar and whole milk to drizzle on top

Instructions

Preheat oven to 425F.

To make the crust, stir together all the dry ingredients. Cut in the butter and mix using your hands until a course meal is formed. Add the water 1 Tbsp at a time and mix well until the dough starts to come together. Don't overdo the water by adding it to fast - once it has been worked a little the dough comes together when at first seems like it might be dry. Make sure the final dough is not sticky but supple enough to be kneaded a bit to blend.

Most recipes say to always set aside and chill your dough. I didn't when I did these little cookies and it didn't seem to make a difference. But feel free to cover and chill in your fridge while you prepare the apples.

In a small saucepan, heat the apples over medium-low heat. Once they start to get a little juicy add in the sugar and spices. Cook until the apples start to get soft and go clear, stirring frequently, about 10 minutes. Add in the cornstarch mixture and cook, stirring for another 2 minutes (until it starts to thicken). Remove from the heat and let cool slightly.

While the apples are cooling, line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Roll out the dough. I rolled mine to about 1/8 of an inch thick. Cut out shapes using any cookie cutter you want. Place the cuttings that will form the bottoms onto the baking sheet. Spoon a tablespoon of filling into the center of each cut out. Place a second cut out on top of the filling, and crimp together the edges of each cookie-pie with a fork.

Brush the tops with milk and sprinkle with sugar. Cut small slits into the top of each to let the steam out.

Bake for 10 minutes, until the edges start to get golden.

Chocolate Butterscotch Cookies

I made these cookies one day when I had a hankering of serious sorts for some serious chocolate. No ordinary chocolate cookie was going to do. I needed something slightly fudgy. But I didn't want the sweetness of fudge. It needed to have more depth. It needed a butterscotch base...or, the closest approximation I could make with the ingredients I had in my house. And these were the result. They were, um, gone way too fast.

Ingredients

1/3 cup flour
2 tsp flax seed meal
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup honey
2 tablespoon cognac or scotch
8 oz chocolate chips, bittersweet
Almonds, walnuts, unsweetened coconut, etc for texture (about one cup total)

Directions

Mix first 4 ingredients in a large bowl. Set aside.
In another bowl beat together egg and sugar until a thick smooth paste forms, about 2 minutes.
In a heavy bottom pan over low heat, melt together the butter and honey. Add cognac and bring to a simmer. Simmer for 1 minute. Then turn the heat to low and add in chocolate chips, stirring until they melt and the mixture is smooth. Remove from heat.
Add both wet to dry. Mix until just barely blended.
Stir in almonds, coconut, etc.
Chill in freezer for 30 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 350. Line a baking tray with parchment paper. Remove dough from freezer and roll balls (of a spoonful of dough) and place evenly spread on tray.
Bake 15 minutes.

Sweet Potato Soup with Beet Green Hazelnut Pesto

Oh my dear neglected blog. I'm so sorry to have been gone so long. Happy new year. Happy new food. I've been accumulating photos for the last few months of silence. The cooking hadn't stopped even if the writing down of recipes had. Or, at least the translation of scribbles on scraps of paper written hastily once something successful emerges from my kitchen into something digital and legible to people who are not me.

Here's to starting back up, with something unusual, super yummy, and yet still healthy. What a better way to enter back in to things?

(ah, cheers to procrastination.)

This dish was the result of remnants from my veggie box. I swear, local CSA vegetable boxes are the best way to force creativity and healthy eating. I've found myself cooking with ingredient that I didn't even know were ingredients until a year ago or so. Like radish greens. Or beet greens. All I know is that I've been missing out on good things. Seriously good things. Maybe you already knew this. I'm just happy to finally learn.

Beet Green and Hazelnut Pesto
1/3 cup hazelnuts
1 bunch beet greens (greens from 4 or 5 beets)
1/4 cup olive oil
juice of one juicy lime
1 Tbsp salt
2 Tbsp grated parmesean, packed
2 colves garlic

For the pesto:

Toast the hazelnuts in a pan on the stove over medium heat, stirring often. The nuts are done when they start to become aromatic. It's a quick turn between aromatic and burnt, so watch closely.
Toss nuts and all remaining pesto ingredients into a food processor and blend. This is a really thick pesto (in order to keep the oil down) so you will have to scrape the sides down multiple times. You can add more oil for a more spreadable result. This pesto will spoon as a ball but not spread.

Sweet Potato Soup
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
3 cloves garlic, smooshed
1 serrano pepper, finely chopped
3 yams or sweet potatoes, cubed (with skin on)
1 tsp ground cumin
4 cups water (more if you want a thinner soup)
zest and juice of one lime
2 Tbsp grated ginger

For the Soup:
Heat the oil in the thick bottomed pan over medium-low heat. Add the onion and saute gently until golden (about 10 minutes).
Add the garlic and pepper and keep sauteing until the garlic become golden (only a minute or so).
Toss in yams and cumin and cook, covered, until the yams begin to get soft, stirring occasionally.
Once the yams are soft, add water and bring to as boil, then reduce to a simmer. Simmer until the yams begin to fall apart (just a few minutes).
Add lime and ginger and simmer for one more minute.
Remove from heat. Blend until smooth. Serve with a dollop of the pesto.

Peach and Walnut Buttermilk Pancakes

Sometimes you just want good old fashioned traditional food. When that happens to me, if it is not a craving for garlic bread, it will be for pancakes. Buttermilk pancakes, of course. With some fruit in them. Blueberries are divine, of course. But so are peaches and nectarines, both of which are in abundance this time of year here in Southern California. These pancakes just makes me think of camping with my parents in Maine. I don't know why, because that was blueberry pancakes. Wild blueberries, to be precise. But maybe it's the comfort of a great space, seriously good maple syrup, and family. Pancakes are just not something to be made for one. That's the beauty of them. Making pancakes always means there are people around to share your morning cup of coffee with.


Ingredients
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 eggs
1 1/4 cup buttermilk
1 large peach, diced small
1/2 cup walnuts, chopped

Butter as needed
Maple Syrup


Directions
In a large bowl, mix together the dry ingredients. Add the peaches and walnuts to this bowl and toss to coat. In a separate bowl, mix together the wet ingredients. Pour wet into dry, stirring just enough to blend.

Heat a heavy pan over medium heat. Once the pan is warm enough that water simmers when splattered on the pan, melt 1/2 teaspoon of butter into the pan and spread to coat the surface. By the 1/4 cup full, pour the pancake batter onto the pan. I could do 2 at a time in my skillet. Once bubbles start to form in the center of the pancakes and the edges have solid rims, flip. (You might have to adjust the heat as you go, if the bottoms get to dark before bubbles form - every stove and pan combination is different.) Repeat until all the batter is used up (you can use less butter each time).

If I'm not going to eat them immediately (I'm cooking them all first and then serving the pancakes all at once) I heat the oven to 200 and put a plate inside that I place the pancakes on as the next round cooks.

Serve with maple syrup or a sprinkling of brown sugar.

Vegetarian Pho

Around here, Pho is something you get for lunch or dinner. Apparently it's meant to be a breakfast food. The things you learn. I had no idea! I started snooping around for the origins of Pho, and I didn't find much, except that although it is Vietnamese, it carries with it distinct French and Chinese influences. One of the main cross-cultural features is the french onion soup tradition of charring the onions to both add a sweet flavor and brown color to the broth, something that is different than other Asian noodle soups. Also, the name Pho, though no one seems to know where it came from exactly, could quite possibly be french. Pho as in 'feu' (fire, from pot-au-feu), pronounced almost identically.

So, with this new knowledge I decided to take on the challenge of making Pho. The soup as a whole is easy, rice noodles that just need to be soaked, gently steamed or sauteed vegetables, lots of lime and chile garlic sauces that can regularly be found in my fridge. The base - and hard part - is the broth. The important detail seems to be the charring of onions, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and star anise. As garnish, the mint, basil, and lime were frequent ingredients. The rest all varied by recipe. I'm sure this is not properly traditional, but what I put together sure made me very very happy.

Being a breakfast food, I decided to add egg. I did that japanese style with a sliced omelet. I need to look up if that's normally an option in Pho for breakfast or if that is simply me blending my food cultures.


Ingredients
(for 2)

For Broth:
1 sweet onion, quartered
4 garlic cloves, whole
4 star anise pods
4 cloves
4 green onions, cleaned
1 cinnamon stick
1 one inch fat piece of ginger, thickly sliced
2 Tbsp soy sauce
2 Tbsp fish sauce
4 cups water or mild vegetable broth (here I didn't use my normal boullion since it is herbed)

For Soup:
rice noodles (one handful per person)
2 tsp grapeseed oil
2 eggs
2 tbsp scalllions, chopped
1 zucchini thinly sliced
1 carrot thinly sliced
1/2 cup chopped bitter green (like dandelion green)
1/4 cup basil and mint leaves, fresh
1 lime, sliced into quarters
bean sprouts (I didn't have any but I would use them next time)
chili paste, such as sriracha

Directions
Bring a pot of water to a boil. Place the rice noodles in a metal or ceramic bowl and pour the boiling water over them. Let sit for 15 minutes (or less, following the instructions on your noodle package). Drain.


In a thick bottomed medium pan, char the first 7 broth ingredients over medium high heat, stirring occasionally as they turn dark brown, about 5 minutes. Once well charred, add the remaining broth ingredients, bring to a boil and then turn the broth down to a simmer and cook for 15 minutes. Strain solids out of broth (tossing the solids, keeping the liquid - some mornings I need this spelled out for me!).


While the broth is simmering, make the omelet. Heat 1 tsp oil in an omelet skillet over medium high heat. Add scallions and gently wilt for 30 seconds. In a bowl, whisk eggs together and then pour over the scallions. Cook for 2 minutes until the edges become solid enough to put a spatula below. Flip over and cook top half for 2 minutes. Remove from heat and slice into 1cm thick slices.


Take the carrots and zucchini and saute in 1 tsp oil until they begin to get tender. Remove from heat.


Assemble the soup. Place noodles in the bottom of 2 large bowls. Spoon broth over the noodles. Portion out the remaining ingredients between the two bowls, laying each in their own section above the noodles. Squirt lime juice and chili paste over top.

Cornbread Salad with Buttermilk Dressing

I made cornbread the other night. Fresh cornbread, right out of the oven with the butter still slightly bubbly and drizzled with honey is simply a transcendent experience for the taste buds. However, once cornbread is 3 days old, it looses it's excitement. So, the other night I went looking around for what to do with leftover cornbread that wasn't a dessert. I found my answer at smittenkitchen.com (my favorite foodblog that I'm a little scared to share, since it is so incredible and well done). She made croutons out of cornbread and paired it with a buttermilk-lime dressing over a salad. I did my own salad base, but followed her notes on how to crisp the cornbread and dressing. And it turned out as one of the best salads I've ever had.

Ingredients
(for 2)

For the salad:
2 large slices of cornbread, cut into 1 inch cubes.
1 small head green leaf lettuce, washed and ripped into bite size pieces
1 handful dandelion greens, thinly sliced
1 cup grape tomatoes, sliced in half
1/4 red onion, finely chopped
2 small zucchini or summer squash
1 roasted red bell pepper, thinly sliced

For the dressing:
1/2 cup buttermilk
Juice of two limes
1 tablespoon honey
1 clove garlic, crushed
2 tbsp finely minced fresh basil
2 tbsp finely minced fresh flat-leaf parsley
2 tbsp cup finely minced green onions
1/2 teaspoon salt


Directions

Make the croutons:

Preheat the oven to 450F. Spread out the cut pieces of cornbread on a baking sheet. Bake for 15 minutes.

Make the dressing:
Mix together all of these ingredients. Shake well. Refrigerate until use.

Make the salad:

Over medium high heat, saute the yellow squash, stirring frequently, until the sides are golden, about 10 minutes. While sauteing, assemble the rest of the salad. Add squash on top of the other vegetables. Add croutons. Dress as you like. I used a lot more dressing than normal here. But at the same time, I was so flavor satisfied at the end, that I didn't need to each anything more.

Green Tonic Soup

Modified from spring tonic soup in The Savory Way (one of my favorite cookbooks).

I've been craving nettles. Yes, those things that sting. That plant I was taught to avoid in my grandparents farm fields. In The Netherlands, it is a common edible green. Nettle Gouda (oh, so yummy). Nettle soup, the endless cause of many of my cravings. Yet, it is not easy to find around here. So I started to look for soup recipes that might have the same kind of flavor and I worked my way into this one. It was super easy and exactly satisfied the craving. I recommend working with a bitter as well as savory greens (the list I've included is based on the greens in the original recipe - I used dandelion and beet greens for this soup). I didn't have any sweet greens in my fridge tonight, but I'm sure it would be goo, too. Don't be shy with the garlic and make sure to add that splash of sour dairy - I added about 2 tbsp of buttermilk to my soup (if you use cream, be sure to add the vinegar - it's not as needed if the dairy is already sour).

Ingredients
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 leeks, chopped
2 medium carrots, chopped
5 garlic cloves, peeled, smooshed with the side of a knife.
1 bunch flat leaf parsely, chopped
2 cups chard leaves chopped (chop and reserve stems)
Greens to select from: beet greens, watercress, mustard greens, broccoli rabe, escarole, arugula, dandelion greens, radish greens
2 quarts vegetable stock
cracked pepper
white wine vinegar
buttermilk, cream, or sour cream to garnish

Directions

In a large pot, heat oil over medium heat. Add garlic, leeks, chard stems, parsley and cook covered, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes. Add 6 cups of any of the greens. Once well wilted add broth. Bring to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes. Once all cooked, transfer to a blender and puree. Serve with a splash of cracked pepper, white wine vinegar, and cream.

Fresh Tomato-Basil Pasta

This is a simple summer dish I've been doing for a long time. I'm still amazed that years later I've yet to tire from it. Which is good, since tomatoes are an overabundance right now. The best part is, it offers such an aesthetic presentation that it makes for a great dish to prepare for guests. the proportions really are based on likes. I've estimated what I do for 2 people here.

Ingredients:

1 pint grape tomatoes or one very large heirloom tomato, room temperature
(grape or heirlooms are the best so that they have extra flavor)
2 tbsps pine nuts
1/4 cup sliced fresh basil
1 tsp olive or avocado oil
1 tsp balsamic vinegar
1 garlic clove, thinly sliced
salt and pepper to taste
Parmesan cheese to garnish
2 handfuls whole wheat penne

Directions:

Bring water to boil and cook the pasta until al dente.
While the pasta is cooking, slice the tomatoes and divide between 2 bowls.
Add garlic, basil, nuts, oil, vinegar, salt and pepper to tomatoes and toss together.
Add cooked pasta and toss together.
Serve with parmesan to taste.
It's that easy.

Raspberries with sour creme custard

Berry Heaven. I love it when berries are on sale at the store for super cheap. I can't help by buy up more than I can eat. Then I face the challenge of what do to (other than just throw them in the freezer and use them to bake in the winter). There is always breakfast with yogurt. Or a tart. But what else? I remembered my aunt once made me a nectarine and blackberry pie with slightly sweetened sour cream instead of whipped cream. I loved the extra depth of flavor the sour cream added to the berries. So, here's my attempt at a variation on a theme.

Ingredients:
8-10 oz raspberries
1/3 cup sour cream
1 egg yoke
2 tablespoons honey

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 450F.
Spread the berries evenly between 4 3-inch ramekins.
Mix together the sour cream, yoke, and honey until smooth.
Poor over top of the raspberries.
Bake for 10-15 minutes until the custard begins to delicately brown.
Serve warm.

Chocolate Zucchini Bread

I woke up way to early this morning after a night of poor slept. In my haze, I tried to figure out what to do with myself so that I could either jump start my system or put me back to sleep. As I stared at my fridge looking for an early morning snack to get things going, all I really could see in there were veggies. Specifically, zucchini. lots and lots of zucchini. So, to zucchini bread it was. Or, did I want chocolate zucchini cake? I couldn't decide. In the end, I decided to take the cocoa powder and add it to the bread (as well as some cocoa nibs, since I had them but no chocolate chips in my pantry).

Some of the best loaves I've ever made emerged from my oven. The zucchini was bright green specks in caramel colored loaves. The chocolate was a balancing accent to the zucchini; tastable but in no way overpowering. This recipe needed to be written down. I sure hope I can repeat it.

Ingredients:

2 cups whole wheat flour

1 cup whole wheat white flour

1 3/4 cups sugar

1/4 cup ground flax seed

1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
3 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

1/2 teaspoon ground clove
1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt

3 cups grated zucchini

1/2-1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

1/4 cup cocoa nibs (optional)

3 eggs

2/3 cup butter, melted

1/3 cup yogurt

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Butter and flour 2 bread pans.

Sift together the dry ingredients.

Stir in the zucchini until it is well coated and mixed in.

Stir in the optional ingredients and mix well.

Mix together the wet ingredients and add to dry, mixing just enough to moisten everything.

Scoop into the bread pans.

Bake 50-60 minutes, until a tester comes out clean.