Butternut squash puree

This was good, and I stole it straight from here. Ed was washing dishes and got to the Kitchenaid I'd used to puree the squash, and asked, "what is the radioactive waste in the food processor?" I guess this one isn't quite a winner yet...

1 butternut squash
1 tbs butter
2 tbs maple syrup
salt and pepper to taste

cook the butternut squash, mass it up, melt the butter, and mix everything together until it tastes the way you like it.

Black bean burgers! (with mango avocado salsa)

Sometimes, Russo's (the place I go to get veggies) has sales on cases of mangos. $6 for 10 mangos, it is always too good a deal to pass up, since I love mangos, but what does one do with 10 mangos?? Well, mango-avocado salsa is a good place to start. This stuff is so good I could just eat it with a fork, but sometimes you need something else to go with your mango salsa, so I made some bean burgers. I'd made some of these before, and they weren't nearly firm enough, so this time I added an egg to hold them together and some rice to dry them out (I would have used breadcrumbs if I'd had any of those lying around, but the rice worked well). They were good! The test will be if Ed likes them...

Ingredients
3.5C cooked black beans (~1.5C dry)
1C cooked rice (1/2C dry)
1/2 onion
1/4 red pepper
1/2C parsley
1/4C cilantro
1 egg
1/3C flour
1 tbs bacon grease or butter
4 cloves garlic
2 jalapenos
Dash of hot sauce
1.5 tbs salt
Other seasonings: coriander, cumin, pepper, cayenne, whatever you think would taste good.
There are a lot of ingredients here. The only thing that is super important is the egg, bacon grease, flour, beans, and rice. Everything else is for taste.

To cook the beans:
Count on about 2-2.5 hours for this. You can either soak the beans for 8 hours, or you can do the “quick soak” method: Stick your beans in a pot of water, bring it to a boil, then turn it off and let it sit for an hour. This is not an ideal method of soaking if you wanted whole beans, because it loosens the skins, but that doesn’t matter when you’re mashing up the beans for burgers. After an hour, drain the beans, put more water in the pot and two bay leaves, and simmer the beans for another hour or so, until they’re super tender.

To make the patties:
As your beans are cooking, add about a tablespoon of bacon grease (better flavor) or butter to a frying pan. Add your four cloves of minced garlic and your half a diced onion. Sweat the onion, then add 1/3C of flour, and cook it briefly, until it has soaked up all the remaining grease. If you don’t cook the flour, your bean burgers will taste like raw flour. Alternatively, skip this step and use breadcrumbs, but I didn’t have any breadcrumbs.

In a large bowl, mash your cooked beans with a potato masher, or you can use a food processor. I found I had to add about 2 tablespoons of water when I used the food processor. Add everything else and stir it around until it is a homogenous glop. The rice will help hold it together. Form the patties. Ideally, you’ll let these sit in the fridge for an hour or two to let the flavors meld, but really, who has that sort of time or patience??


The raw patties...

Heat a cast iron frying pan or a skillet, and grease it lightly. Again, bacon grease would be best, but sometimes its just easier to use butter. Get it pretty warm, medium-high, and once the butter is sizzling and threatening to burn, throw on a couple bean burgers. Turn the heat down to medium at this point, finish browning the first side, and flip them to do the other one. They want to be fully cooked, because its not such a great idea to eat raw eggs, and they’ll hold together better when they’re cooked.

Cool them on a rack, adding some salt if you think they aren’t salty enough, and then enjoy them as you would a hamburger, or plain, or with mango salsa.

Mango Salsa
2 Mangoes
1 avocado
1 red onion
1 clove garlic
1C chopped cilantro
1 jalapeno (this makes it a mild salsa. Add another pepper or two for more kick)
1/2 lime, juiced
~1 tbs salt

Dice everything, put it in a bowl, mix it together.

Burger Buns
This is pretty much the same recipe as the sticky bun dough. So, you could make half a batch of buns, and half a batch of sticky buns, if you wished.

2 eggs
Hot water to make 2C
2 tbs sugar
1 tbs (1 packet) yeast
2 tbs butter, softened
2C whole wheat flour
1 tbs salt
3-3.5C white flour
Sesame seeds (optional)

Crack two eggs into a two cup measure, and fill the remainder with warm water. Mix this thoroughly, then put it in a big mixing bowl. Add the sugar, beat well. Add the yeast, stir, and let it sit for about 10 minutes until it is frothy.

Add 2 tablespoons of melted butter, then the whole wheat flour and the salt, and start adding and mixing the white flour until the dough starts to pull away from the sides of the bowl. Dump it out on a floured board/table, and knead until it is slightly tacky but smooth and shiny and does not stick to your hands (about 10 minutes). Clean your bowl, grease it, and return the dough to the bowl. Let it sit at room temperature covered with a damp cloth about 1 hour, or until it doubles in size.

Separate the dough into about sixteen pieces, and roll them into balls. Then flatten them as flat as you possibly can. They’ll look way too flat, but they’ll rise a lot in the oven, so you want them looking like mini pizzas. Sprinkle the tops with sesame seeds, and lightly press the sesame seeds into the dough so they don’t fall off.

Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper and put your flat balls of dough on it. Place this in a 400 degree oven for 5 minutes, then turn down the heat to 350 and finish baking until they look done. Cool and slice in half to make buns.

Lavender Cupcakes

Spring is a time of year when I feel like preparing food. Often this feeling manifests itself as baked goods, but sometimes as cooked stuff too. In this case, I felt like making something fancy. I toyed with the idea of a matcha green tea cake, as seems to be the rage all over the internets, but I don't have match tea powder and I'm too cheap to buy any. Then I remembered that I had a bunch of dried lavender and I'd never really figured out what to do with it. I would turn it into lavender cupcakes! Perfect!

But what kind of cupcake? I knew I needed a recipe that called for some form of liquid, that I could steep lavender in to give the cupcakes a lavender flavor. I started looking up recipes, and most of them were pretty heavy, which is fine, but I worried that the lavender needed a light cake to go with its delicate flavor. Almost like an angel food cake, but angel food cake cupcakes just didn't sound right. And then I stumbled across the solution-- Sponge cake! Similar to an angel food cake, but slightly heavier, I decided this would be the cake I was looking for.

As for frosting, I thought of just doing a lavender buttercream frosting, but stumbled across a recipe for a while chocolate frosting, and that sounded better. It tasted pretty darn good, too...

Ingredients
For the cupcakes:
1C flour (all-purpose flour works here)
1.5 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
5 tbs hot milk
1C granulated sugar
2 eggs, whites and yolks separated
1/2tsp salt
3 tbs dried lavender flowers
1 blackberry herbal tea bag

For the frosting:
6 tbs white chocolate, good quality
4 tbs butter (this is a 1:1.25 ratio, if you want to go with it that way)
2 tsp milk
2-3C icing sugar
4 tbs cream cheese


The method:
The first thing you will do is make the lavender milk. Put ~1/4C of milk into a small saucepan, and add the teabag and the lavender. You can leave out the teabag, but I found it gave the cupcakes a slightly purple tint, which I liked. Heat the milk and stir around the stuff in it for a while, and once it smells very strong and is colored purple, strain all the stuff out of it.

Meanwhile, beat your egg whites to stiff peaks. Put your yolks, 1/2C of sugar, milk, and vanilla into a big bowl, and beat them to combine. Add the rest of the sugar, the flour, salt, and baking powder, and then fold in the egg whites.

They say to bake these in an ungreased pan; maybe this is where turning a cake recipe into a cupcake recipe fell through. I was not able to easily get the cupcakes out of the cupcake tins; I do remember taking the bottom off the angel food cake pan and cutting around the edge last time I made one of those, maybe that is the problem. Anyway, bake these little suckers at 350 degrees for 10-20 minutes, or until they look done. Don't fill up the cupcake molds too far, because the batter needs to be able to climb up the sides of the pan. I filled mine about 1/2-2/3 full. Let them cool completely before frosting.

Frosting
Set a pot of water over a burner and get it boiling. In a large heat-proof bowl, add your chocolate and butter and whisk these together until they are just melted. Remove the bowl from heat and start adding the icing sugar until you reach a texture you're happy with. Add the cream cheese and beat that into the frosting. You may have to add more sugar after the cream cheese. This frosting will harden up a bit as it cools, so work with it while its still a little warm.

Sticky Buns

mmmmm sticky buns... so, these would benefit from some milk in the dough, to make them slightly more cakey. Most recipes I was looking at used milk, or dry milk, including this one, but since I didn't have any milk, I left it out. This made for a slightly breadier bun, but there were no complaints. The other thing I might do, since I was using walnuts instead of pecans, would be to substitute some of the sugar for maple syrup, because maple and walnuts go together even better than coffee and chocolate. Anyway, this is the recipe as I used it. The original one replaced 2C of the white flour with whole wheat (again, I didn't have any on hand), and added 1/2C of dry milk after the first cup of flour.

Expect 10 minutes of letting the yeast do it's thing, 10 minutes of kneading + 1 hour of rising + 10 minutes of shaping + 45 minutes (or overnight) of rising + 45 minutes of cooking. = 3 hours total.

Ingredients
2 eggs
warm water to make 2C
1 tbs yeast (one packet)
1 tbs salt
2 tbs sugar
1 stick of butter
1/2C of dry milk (It worked out fine without this)
2C whole wheat flour
3C white flour
1 C brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1C walnuts or pecans

The Dough

Get your tap water running as hot as it'll go, then crack two eggs into a two cup measure and fill the remainder of the 2C with warm water. Mix this thoroughly in a big bowl, then add the sugar and one tablespoon (or one packet) of yeast. Let this sit for about 10 minutes, until it looks frothy.

Add one cup of flour and one tablespoon of melted butter. Add the dry milk and salt, stir well, then add the rest of the flour, one cup at a time. When the dough starts to pull away from the sides of the bowl, dump it out on a floured surface and start kneading. Continue to knead until the dough is tacky yet shiny, about 10 minutes. Put the dough in a greased bowl, cover with a damp cloth, and let it rise until its about doubled in size, about an hour.

The Filling/Topping
Melt 6 tbs of butter, and add 3/4-1C of brown sugar. This is where I would substitute part of it for maple syrup, but that could change the texture of things. Add the nuts and cinnamon, and make sure everything is thoroughly mixed up and the sugar looks syrupy.

Assembly
Once your dough has risen, dump it out on a lightly floured surface, and using a rolling pin, roll it into a ~1x2 foot rectangle. The sharper you can get the corners the better it will roll. Melt your last tablespoon of butter, and spread it evenly over the whole surface. Sprinkle on about 3/4 of your filling, adding more brown sugar if it looks too splotchy. Begin to roll from the wide side, trying to make it as tight as possible without mutilating the roll. You should end up with a 2-foot-long roll of dough that is maybe 4 inches in diameter.

Take a roasting pan (with high sides) and line it with tinfoil or parchment paper. Grease your tinfoil, then put down the rest of the topping, making sure its evenly spread. Cut your roll into 1 inch rounds, and place them cut-side down on the greased tinfoil. Ideally, you'll leave about an inch between each roll, but I packed mine on there very tightly because otherwise they wouldn't have fit on one pan, and they rose fine.

Place your pan of sticky buns either in the fridge overnight, or let them rise for another 45 minutes. Once they've sat for an hour, stick them in a cold oven, and turn the heat to 400F. This will supposedly allow them to rise to their fullest fullness. After 15 minutes at 400 degrees, turn down the heat to 350, and bake for 20-30 minutes. If the sugar smells like it is caramelizing, turn down the heat to 325 for the last 10 minutes.

While they're still warm, loosen the sides with a knife, and invert the pan on a tray or platter that can accommodate all the rolls. I used a piece of wax paper on the table, and that worked fine. Enjoy!



**The dough without milk makes an excellent dinner roll, fyi!