Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bread

I realized the other day, I've made a lot of zucchini cake, but I've never made zucchini bread. Specifically, with chocolate chips. I perused the internets for a while, and while I found a bunch of interesting looking recipes, I really wanted something pretty standard. And something that would only use 2 eggs and 1 zucchini's-worth of zucchini, since those were the limits on my proportions. I eventually settled on this one, but made some changes anyway. I'm astounded that I managed to actually make this into a loaf of quickbread and not turn it into muffins... wow.

I don't have an Ed-rating for this, because it has zucchini in it, and its a moist, dense, bready-cake-thing, which is something he's scared of. Maybe he'll taste this and like it, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

In case it isn't obvious from the picture of the whole loaf, my oven has decided that the upper burner is going to go on super-duper-high, and the lower burner didn't turn on. Or something. The bottom and sides of the bread didn't get crunchy and crispy like most things do when I cook them in bread pans, and the top has a burned image of the burner above it. I hope this doesn't mean we need a new oven...


Next time, I'm tweaking this recipe so that its muffins. I mean, this stuff is good as slices, but it would be better as a muffin.

Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bread
Makes 1 9x5x3" loaf

1.5C flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/4tsp baking powder
3/4C sugar
1/4tsp salt
1 tsp espresso powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp cinnamon
2 eggs
1 zucchini
1/2C applesauce
1/4C + 2 tbs oil
1/2C toasted walnuts
1/2C chocolate chips

Preheat your oven to 350F and grease a 9x5x3" pan.

In a big bowl, mix together the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, espresso powder, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

In another bowl, mix the eggs, vanilla, oil, and applesauce. Add the wet stuff to the dry stuff, and mix just until everything is combined. Fold in the nuts and chocolate chips. Plop the batter into the pan and bake for an hour.

Future Changes (coming soon to a blog near you)
It tasted a little too baking-soda-ish. I'm going to add some yogurt, so that it reacts with the baking soda, and take out the applesauce. That wasn't adding anything anyway. I'll probably take out the +2tbs of oil, too, because why get a quarter cup measure dirty and then a tablespoon measure dirty too? And I'm definitely making these as muffins next time. I think they need more nuts and maybe fewer chocolate chips, as you can see below, there are a lot of chocolate chips studding this loaf. Luckily, its "dry" enough that they don't all sink to the bottom. Hence my belief that it really wants to be a muffin.

It was delicious, though. Moist, with a crunchy top. and chocolate chips inside. What more could you ask for?

Kale with Bacon, Egg, and Tofu

I indoctrinated Ed with the goodness of kale, particularly kale with a gooey egg all over the top. I've made this before, putting the kale over toast and white beans, and Ed conceded that it was alright. This time, instead of the toast, he fried up some tofu in butter and the kale went over that. We also added bacon to the mix (you can tell Ed has had his hands on a dish when there is more butter and bacon than normal. I never wrote about the bacon cookies on here, did I?), sprinkled on top of the egg. The kale was slightly less flavorful since it was just boiled in water rather than broth like last time (obviously, this is something that can be changed). Quite good in the end, though. The tofu tasted better than bread, but served the same function of mopping up juices and egg yolk. Yum.

Kale with bacon and egg

1/2 lb kale (about half a big bunch, or as much as will fit into a pot)
5 pieces of bacon
2 eggs
18oz of firm tofu (two of the three blocks that comes in the big tupperware of tofu)
4 tbs butter
salt and pepper

Press the tofu for at least 30min, to get out some of the water. Just put down a clean dish towel on the table, slice your tofu into 1" thick slices, fold the towel over the top of the tofu, and put heavy things on top. You'll have to wring out the towel after 20 minutes or so.

Put a pot of water on to boil. Take the kale leaves off the stems and rinse them, then put them in the boiling water. Chop the bacon into bacon-bit-sized chunks. Put the bacon bits in a pan and cook until they're crunchy.

Melt the butter (doesn't "4 tbs" sound better than "half a stick"?) in a wok or other large pan. Add the tofu (which you've now sliced into long slices), and cook until its crunchy around the edges.

When the tofu is done, the bacon should be about done too; take the bacon out and cook two eggs, sunny side up, in the bacon grease.

In two bowls, put down the tofu, a pile o' kale, an egg, and sprinkle the bacon bits on top. Yum!

Mango-avocado salad

This might actually be a salsa, but I'm going to call it a salad, since that is how we ate it. I think that without the red pepper, I'd probably call it a salsa. Go figure. Mangoes and avocados just go well together, especially with a hint of spice and some lime juice and salt.

1 mango
1 avocado
1/2 red pepper
1 jalapeno
1/2C cilantro
1/2 red onion
1 clove garlic
juice of 1 lime
salt to taste

Dice the garlic and onion and jalapeno, chop everything else to the same size. Mix it together in a bowl. This is best if you let it sit for an hour or so before serving, but its still delicious if you serve it immediately. We ate some of it with chips, and some of it just with a fork.


The stuff next to it are baked sweet potato "fries" and swiss chard and fava beans. A really colorful meal...

Pull-apart garlic bread

Once upon a time, I made these soft garlic knots. I wasn't sure I'd like the butter poured over the top, but it turns out I did like it. It reminded me of the disgustingly-greasy garlic bread from Jack Aster's, a restaurant we used to frequent back in Rochester. I think, although I could be wrong, that bread had been pull-apart, because I just remember my fingers always getting really greasy. Anyway, I decided to replicate that garlic bread, in a slightly less greasy fashion, with a pull-apart loaf that had been drizzled with garlic butter. Ed got his hands on this idea and didn't approve of the drizzling part, so we had bread soaked in garlic butter instead. It worked well, so I guess I'm glad he got his hands on my bread!

I started with a regular bread recipe, although I think I used twice the yeast I was supposed to, because this bread rose AGRESSIVELY. It didn't taste too yeasty, though, and I liked the texture, so I think I'll stick with that much yeast. When it came time to shape the bread, I formed it into little balls and let them rise together in a loaf pan. If you wanted more buttery-garlic flavor, you could divide the dough into twice the number of balls and put it into two loaf pans, then double the amount of garlic butter at the end. As it was, my one loaf-pan rose to full loaf height, which required a little bit more dexterity in the pulling apart. I liked it that way, though. Once it has risen the second time, you bake it, and when it is golden brown, you pull it out and dump garlic butter and salt all over the top, and grate some optional parmesan cheese on top. mmmmm.

Pull-apart garlic bread

2-3C flour
1 tbs yeast
1C warm water
1 tbs sugar
1/2 tsp salt

Garlic butter:
4 tbs melted butter
4 cloves garlic, minced.
~1/2 tsp kosher salt
grated parmesan cheese, optional

Put the warm water in a big bowl, stir in the sugar, and add the yeast. Let it sit 5-10min, until its getting bubbly, then add the first cup of flour. Stir that around, then add the 1/2 tsp of salt. Add the next cup of flour. It should be getting more dough-like, now. Put part of the third cup of flour on the table for kneading, coat your hands in flour, and start to knead the dough in the bowl. Once its together, dump it onto the table and knead, adding flour as necessary, for about 10 minutes. It should be feeling pretty smooth and elastic before you give up.

Grease the bowl and put the dough in the bowl. Let it rise, covered, for about an hour, until doubled in bulk. Dump it back out on the table and divide into 16 equally-sized balls. I use a knife to cut the dough into equally-sized pieces, generally.

Grease a bread pan (you could use a 9" cake pan if you had one, alternatively. It might look prettier) and put your dough balls into the pan. Its ok if you have to squish them, they'll just rise upwards. Cover the pan and let it rise for another 1-2 hours.
(dough balls before rising)

Preheat the oven to 400F. In goes the bread. Cook for 20 minutes, until the top is golden-brown. Take the pan out of the oven.

Melt the butter and mix it with the garlic. You can either sprinkle the salt on top or mix the salt in with the butter. Pour the garlic butter onto the bread, making sure it covers all the nooks and crannies. Slide the bread out of the pan using a spatula. Grate some cheese on top if you want (you want). Tear it apart one ball at a time and enjoy!
I see a hand sneaking in to steal some bread...

Probably because of the butter, it was still good the next day. I don't think I'll be able to give a third-day report, though... there won't be anything to report on!



One alteration that could be quite good would be if you poured on the garlic butter and then returned the bread to the oven for 5 minutes. I'll try that next time. Because there will definitely be a next time.

Lemon curd tart

The tart just after pouring in the curd.


I saw this the other day, and instantly knew - I needed to eat that. Now. I went and bought two lemons, and a bunch of butter, and set to. The only issue with making this tart, is that I knew ahead of time that Ed wasn't going to like it - he doesn't like curd-textured substances. Which meant that I was left to eat it all myself. Which is fantastic until I realized that there were close to two sticks of butter in this thing. This would be fine if I had any ability to use self-restraint in the face of good desserts... I don't. So I guess I knew ahead of time the self-loathing that would come after eating an entire lemon curd tart. Thats ok, it was worth it.

I used David Lebovitz's recipe on his blog for both the tart crust and the lemon curd. I've made lime curd before for my mojito cupcakes, and I remember trying both a regular version and a low-fat version, and I overcooked the regular version and didn't add enough sugar to the low-fat version, so basically I wasn't happy with either one in that case. In this case, I still had no idea how long to cook the curd, but since I was tasting it along the way, I figured it was thick enough after about 20 minutes or so, and even if it wasn't done, it tasted delicious as it was, so I'd happily lick the curd out of the pie crust if it didn't work out.


The crust was interesting - the recipe I used was rather unorthodox, to say the least - I melted the butter with oil and water in the oven, then dumped in the flour, mixed it around, and pressed it into the pie pan. It ended up being a very crumbly crust, and excessively buttery. The little shiny bits in that picture - those are butter bubbles that were still there after the crust had cooled. I also had issues keeping the crust flat, since my docking holes seemed to close back up thanks to all the butter, so I had to twice pull out the crust and re-dock it. In the end, while it was deliciously crumbly, it was much more work than a regular pie crust, and I didn't like how overly buttery it was. On day 2, though (I'm suprised there was any left on day 2), the crust was much less buttery, and the curd had hardened up a bunch, and it was absolutely amazing. Reminded me of a slightly tart lemon bar.
See the butter ooozing out of that crust...

I'm going to write out David Lebovitz's recipe, just because then its easier for me to find again when I plan on modifying this to make it perfect - which I have every intention of doing. Although maybe I should just stick with lemon bars since thats what I seem to like about this dessert...

Tart crust:

3 oz (6 tbs) butter, cut into cubes
1 tbs sugar
1 tbs oil
3 tbs water
1/8 tsp salt
1 rounded cup of flour

Preheat the oven to 410F.

Put the butter, oil, water, sugar, and salt into a heat-proof bowl and put it in the oven until the butter bubbles and its a little brown around the edges. Take out the bowl, and dump in the flour. Be careful not to grab the bowl with bare hands, its 410 degrees. Thats hot. Stir around the flour until the dough comes together, and then dump it into a pie pan. Spread it with the back of the spoon, reserving about an almond-sized lump for repairing cracks later. Once the dough cools enough, use your palms and fingers to spread it evenly. Dock it liberally with a fork, and bake for 15 minutes until it is golden brown.

When you take the crust out, use the extra dough to repair any cracks (I had many cracks).

Lemon Curd
1/2C lemon juice, fresh squeezed
zest of one lemon
6 tbs butter, cut into cubes
1/2C sugar
2 eggs
2 egg yolks

Turn the oven down to 350F.

In a sauce pan, melt the butter with the sugar, lemon zest, and lemon juice. Beat the eggs and egg yolks together in a separate bowl. Once the butter is melted, whisk about a third of the butter/lemon mixture into the eggs, whisking continually. This tempers the eggs. Add the tempered eggs into the sauce pan, and stir continually for the next 15-20 minutes, until the curd is thickened and pulls away from the pan as you stir it. I can't really get more exact than that...

I skipped the straining step because I like my chewy lemon peel bits, so I just poured the curd directly into the crust. David Lebovitz says to put it in the oven for 5 minutes to set, but I put it in there for 10 minutes to cook. It looked like a lemon bar (i.e. not smooth) when I took it out, and it was hard to let it cool before eating it. But you have to let it cool. Do not skip this step.

I found the curd delicious, maybe a tad too sweet, but still delicious. I had my face in the pan licking it clean, it was that good.

The cooked tart. Less pretty. Maybe if I'd just chilled it after its 5 minutes to set, it would have kept that smooth look. Oh well, it tasted good!

So the modifications I plan on making will involve a much less buttery crust, possibly more akin to lemon bars, actually I think I will probably modify this to basically be a lemon bar with a crumbly-not-very-sweet crust. We'll see how that goes...

Vietnamese Salad (Bun)

One of my favorite places (other than the Ding Ho, of course) to get lunch in Chinatown is the Xing Xing restaurant, which offers mostly Vietnamese fare. I invariably gravitate towards the barbecued shrimp with vermicelli dish, which is essentially a salad with rice noodles and tasty shrimp on top. They also offer this dish with beef and pork, but I've never branched out that way. Eventually I realized that I could save myself $5.95 if I just made the dish myself, since its not like its complicated. So, here is a version of the Vietnamese salad with which I am so enamoured. Its not really the quickest thing in the world to prepare, since there is a lot of chopping and julianning and stuff, but it was worth it. Plus, you can make lots of extra and have enough for lunch all week (or a couple days). Just dress it before you eat it. In this case, I experimented with some pork, rather than shrimp, since I had pork in the freezer. I also had squid in the freezer, but I guess I thought pork might go better.

Vietnamese noodle salad
Serves 3-4
1/3 pack of rice vermicelli (~4.5oz)
4 leaves of lettuce, any kind
1/2C basil
1/2C cilantro
1/4C mint, optional
1C bean sprouts (NOT alfalfa sprouts...)
1 cucumber
2 carrots
~1/4C ground peanuts
4 scallions

Pork
~9oz of pork of any kind, I used tenderloin
Marinade: ~1tbs sesame oil
~1/4C fish sauce
~1/4C rice vinegar
~1/4C brown sugar
~2 tbs thai garlic chili paste
(all these are approximate because its a marinade, so it doesn't really matter the proportions as long as it tastes right)

Dressing (apparently this is actually called "Nuoc Cham")

1/2C warm water
1/4C fish sauce
1/4C brown sugar
2 tsp Thai garlic chili paste
1 clove garlic
1 jalapeno
Juice of one lime

Assembly

First, prepare the marinade. Mix together all the ingredients, and taste it to be sure that it tastes "right". Slice the pork into thin slices. A sharp knife helps. Put the pork in the marinade and let it sit about 30 minutes, just enough time to chop everything else.



Next, prepare the dressing - mince the jalapeno and garlic, and mix everything else all together in a bowl. Let it sit while you prep the salad.

Boil a pot of water, and put the rice vermicelli in the water for two minutes. Taste to make sure they're cooked, then remove them from the water, and run them under cold water to stop the cooking. Divide the noodles into three (or four) eating dishes. Or, into three or four tupperwares if you're making these for lunches. Make sure the dishes are big, you're adding a lot of veggies. Plates worked, but barely, and a bowl would have been easier, I just didn't have any bowls big enough.

Julianne the cucumber and the carrots. If you're a little shaky on your julianning skills (like me), you can just use a carrot peeler to peel thin slices from the carrot. Chop the scallions, basil, cilantro, and mint. Chop the lettuce finely. Put all of these things in the dishes sort of next to the noodles. Add the bean sprouts on top (evenly divided). Sprinkle some ground peanuts on top.


To cook the pork, heat a frying pan to medium-high, and put the pork pieces in the pan. Cook them on one side until that side is cooked, then flip them over and cook the other side. The sugar in the marinade is going to caramelize a bit on the edges, don't fear this process, because its delicious. Divide the pork pieces evenly on top of the veggies. If you want to clean the pan without a ton of scrubbing/soaking, once you've taken out the pork, add some water to the pan (still on the heat) and scrape at the bottom until all the black bits come off.

Now you have your salad all ready to go. Let people dress their own salad, I found that this amount of dressing was perfect for that amount of stuff. A delicious meal, although its easier, maybe, to let the ladies at the Xing Xing do this for you...

Oh, and the Ed-rating was "I really like this". We call that a success 'round these parts.

Pork fried rice

This is another of Ed's recipes, all I did was take pictures. Well, "recipes". This was his second attempt to make fried rice, and I'd say it was better than the first attempt, although I didn't have any of the first attempt, I just cleaned the pan... This version was good, it tasted really similar to the gut-bomb I can get at the Ding-Ho Fast Food place on the corner of Kneeland and Harrison, except in a less gut-bomby way. I love the Ding Ho. $2 buys you a styrofoam box PACKED with unidentifiable meat/veggies and either fried rice or fried noodles. Probably not very good for you, come to think of it...

Ed might have used a recipe, but that would have been unlike him, so here is what went into this pile of fried deliciousness.

Pork Fried Rice
1C white rice, cooked - we used sushi rice, because we have a 20-lb bag of sushi rice, so there is no point to buying more rice of a different type.
~1tbs vegetable oil
2 eggs
1/2 onion
2 cloves garlic
~4oz pork
2 tsp sugar
Soy sauce to taste (~1/4C?)
2 scallions

Dice the garlic, and chop the onion so that it ends up in thin strips, rather than diced. Chop the pork into little 1/4" squares. Put the oil in the wok, and cook the pork until its almost cooked. Add the onion and garlic, and keep cooking things until the onion is sweated and the pork is cooked through.


Push the pork and onions to the side of the wok, you don't want them to mix with the eggs. Add the eggs and stir vigorously, to get them to scramble.


More vigorous scrambling.

Once the eggs are cooked, mix them with the pork and onions. Sprinkle in the 2 teaspoons of sugar and mix it around. Then add the rice. The idea is that you don't want to crush the rice grains, so sort of fold it in.


Once the rice is mixed into the mixture, add the soy sauce. Everything is all cooked, so you can just keep tasting it until you think you have enough soy sauce. More is better.


Once its all mixed together, you could keep frying the rice longer if you wanted, but we just served it then because we were hungry. Mix in the scallions once you're done cooking it. The fried rice was good. We'll definitely be making this again...

Lemon Cornmeal Muffins

I bought some blue cornmeal the other day. I couldn't help myself, it was BLUE! Unfortunately, this cornmeal hasn't lived up to its awesome blueness, its actually more purple than blue, and if you cook with it, it sort of fades, and ends up just looking ... dirty. Thats exactly what I'm looking for in a baked good, dirty! Hmm.

Anyway, its also a very fine grind, which I don't like so much. I made muffins out of it, and I wanted more of a crunchy, big grain texture. I actually think I wanted polenta, I had a cake in mind when I made these muffins that I had had in London when I was last there. There is this little pastry shop around the corner from where my grandfather lives that makes the most amazing desserts, and the last time I was there I had this lemon polenta cake with pistachios that was out of this world amazing. I haven't really tried to replicate the recipe, yet, but I'd say that these muffins were polenta-cake-inspired. They were quite good, and because of the squash they stayed pretty moist, and they were healthier than eating cake for breakfast. Although I have been known to do that. I would make these again!

(sorry for the uninspired picture, the other muffins all got eaten and this muffin didn't last too long before it suffered a similar fate).

Lemon Cornmeal Squash Muffins

1 yellow summer squash
1C white whole wheat flour
1C blue corn meal
1 tbs baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2C sugar
2 eggs
1C milk
juice of 1/2 lemon
zest of 1/2 lemon
1 tsp lemon extract
1 tbs oil

Mix all the dry stuff in a big bowl. In a different bowl, mix all the wet stuff. Grate the squash using a cheese grater into the wet bowl. Add the wet stuff to the dry stuff, stir just to combine. Bake 25-35minutes at 350F, until a tester comes out clean. I found that because of the squash, the muffins took a little longer to cook all the way through, but they stayed moist for two days.

The Ed rating was a "good", even after I ascertained that he knew that they contained squash. Apparently squash is ok, but zucchini is still out. He wanted them to be more like a regular corn muffin, though, skipping the lemon flavor altogether. I disagree. Keep the lemon.