Almond lemon cupcakes

I wanted to make some cupcakes, and felt like repeating the lime polenta cake I'd made before, but, I had lemons, instead of limes. And then I thought about using almond flour, because I like almonds. So basically, other than it having cornmeal and being citrus-y, its not a repeat at all. It was delicious though, and very lemony. The syrup helped keep things moist, so that the cupcakes are still good, three days later.

Almond lemon cupcakes
Made 36 mini cupcakes

3/4C flour
1/4C cornmeal - the coarser the better
1/2C almond flour - I took toasted almonds and ground them up
3 eggs
1/2C oil
1/2C yogurt
3/4C sugar
zest of 1 lemon
1/2tsp salt
2tsp baking powder

Syrup:
~1/2C powdered sugar
2 splashes triple sec
Juice of a lemon

Frosting:
~2C powdered sugar
Lemon juice, as needed

Preheat the oven to 350F. Mix together the yogurt, oil, eggs, lemon zest, sugar, and salt. In a separate bowl, mix the flour, cornmeal, almonds, and baking powder. Add the dry stuff to the wet, and stir just until its combined. Grease three mini muffin tins (or work in batches), fill each one almost to the top, and bake for 15min, until the top bounces back. Don't overbake these little guys, or they'll be dry, although the syrup helps

When they're done baking, pull them out, put them on a cooling rack, and poke the top of each one with a fork a couple times (poke all the way down), then dunk the top of the cupcake into a bowl holding the lemon-y glaze-y syrup. It should be a fairly thin syrup, but you want to dunk the top of each one well - get that syrup into the cake.

Let them cool completely now, and when they're cool, use the same dunk-the-top method with the glaze. To make the glaze, put a whole bunch of powdered sugar in a bowl, and add some lemon juice, then whisk. You want the glaze to drizzle off the end of the whisk, but drizzle slowly, so that is actually far less liquid than you'd think necessary. Luckily, its hard to mess it up, add more sugar or more liquid as needed.

Once you've dunked the top of each one, press on whatever garnish you'd like - the glaze will dry hard, and hold anything on the top.

Then don't eat them all at once, or you'll get a tummyache.

Cucumber salad

Apparently there has been a lot of hype in the foodie world recently about a cookbook written by the chefs at Ottolenghi, a catering place and restaurant in London. One of their store locations happens to be around the corner from my grandfather's house, and every time I visit, if we're walking home from somewhere, we'll stop for a dessert from "the caterer's".

I'm not exactly "in" with the foodie world, but, when I discovered that this place had a cookbook, the next time I visited London, I picked up a copy. Whenever I've expanded beyond their desserts, the food has been excellent, so I wanted to see how its done. Apparently, good quality ingredients and lots of fresh herbs, olive oil, and lemon - no real surprises. But I tried the first recipe from the book for a party on Saturday, a safe salad, and it was just as good as I'd hoped.



Cucumber salad
6 small salad cukes
2 mild red chilis - I believe I went with anaheim chilis
~3tbs cilantro
Some mint and basil, because I had it
1/4C veggie oil
~3tbs mixture of sesame oil and olive oil (this is all because I didn't have sunflower oil, so decided to just go wild)
1/4C rice wine vinegar
2 tbs poppy seeds
2 tbs granulated sugar
Salt and pepper to taste

Wash the cucumbers, cut off the ends, and slice them in half, and then diagonally, to make long strips. Chop the pepper, and roughly chop the herbs.

In a big bowl, mix together the oils, vinegar, sugar, and poppy seeds. Put everything together and "use your fingers to massage the flavours into the cucumbers". They recommend that if you have to let this salad sit, drain off the liquid before serving and re-season with salt and pepper before serving.

Pesto pizza

As you can probably tell from this photo, I like pizza that has lots of stuff on it. We had pesto left over from when we made it, and that stuff doesn't stay good forever, so it was time to use it up. I felt that a pizza would be an excellent use for it. We loaded it up with mushrooms, radish greens, caramelized onions, and ricotta, all on top of that delicious pesto.

My pizza dough recipe used to be the King Arthur one, but I've gotten lazy. Now, I put about a cup of warm water into a bowl, add about a tablespoon of both yeast and sugar, pour in a bunch (2-4 tbs?) of olive oil, pour in about a tablespoon of kosher salt, and knead in flour until its not sticky anymore. Then I just let it rest until the toppings are ready and the oven is pre-heated, roll it out, and go. Its probably not ideal, but it does taste good. I recommend going and finding a pizza dough recipe that you love and believe in, and using it. There are a lot of good ones out there. They all taste good, and they're all relatively easy.

The first (and longest-to-prepare) topping I made was the caramelized onions. They weren't totally caramelized, but they were close enough, and since they were cooking on pizza, close enough was as close as they had to be. Its pretty easy to do, and you can get away with not using a ton of oil if you don't care that they're perfect. (I don't). Chop an onion in half and then cut it into slices so that it makes half-rings. Heat about two tablespoons of oil in a pan, and once that shimmers, throw in the onions with a good dose of kosher salt. The salt will help the onions lose their water faster.
After about 5 minutes, they'll look like this, sweated. Keep stirring them.
After 10 minutes or so, they'll be looking more like this. Starting to be a bit brown around the edges.
I generally go another 5-10 minutes, depending on if the other toppings are ready yet and how hungry I am, before I call them done enough. If you taste one, it should taste sweet.


While cooking the onions, I cooked down some mushrooms, in oil, with lots of kosher salt (again, to get rid of water), in a different pan. Here we have a giant oyster mushroom and one or two regular crimini mushrooms. They'll take ~10min to lose most of their water. I don't like putting anything watery onto the pizza, since I like my crusts crispy.

Once the mushrooms were done, I threw in the radish leaves (any dark leafy thing would do here), and just wilted them. We happened to have eaten the radishes the day before, and it turns out radish greens are edible, they're just bitter.

The last topping was the ricotta - this happens to be homemade ricotta. Which is actually really easy to do, and we had some 2% milk that wasn't going to last forever, so I turned it into cheese. Heat 'til almost boiling, add vinegar and water, remove from heat, let sit for an hour or two, put dish towel in colander in a bowl, drain into bowl, let sit another couple hours in the fridge, and done! This one drained for eight hours overnight, so was pretty dry, I didn't need to squeeze it at all. It had the consistency of feta cheese, almost, just less salty, and more ricotta-y tasting.


Finally, assemble your pizza. Sprinkle some coarse cornmeal on the bottom of the pan, put down the rolled-out pizza dough, spread a generous layer of pesto on the bottom, top with all your toppings (more is better), and pop into a 500F oven on the bottom rack. Cook for 10-15min, start checking after about 8min, and take it out when the crust is just starting to look golden and a little browned.

We had enough dough for two pizzas, so the second one got half "regular" and half white pizza. We didn't have any mozzarella cheese, so I put down some basil and cheddar and mushrooms on the tomato-sauce-side, (which, honestly, didn't taste that good, cheddar is just not a pizza cheese), and the white pizza side got olive oil, toasted garlic, a little basil, and cheddar. The cheddar worked very well on the white pizza - it was delicious. Not as good as the pesto pizza, though.

Pesto

Russo's sells basil in massive bunches for $1.98, when I say massive I mean massive, and this makes me happy beyond words. Unfortunately, even I can't eat that much basil, and Ed gets sick of me putting basil in everything, so, I turned most of it into pesto. Its a pretty delicious pesto, so I'll try and remember the quantities... as with most things I make, the quantities did not come from a recipe. I don't know where I got the idea to use almonds instead of pine nuts, it certainly isn't my original idea, but it works really well. I also don't remember where I got the idea to put in a tomato, but wherever I got that idea, its awesome.

Basil Pesto
Makes about 2 cups

~4C packed basil leaves, rinsed and dried
~2-4 tbs olive oil
1/2C whole almonds
1/2C grated parmesan cheese
1 tomato
salt
pepper
1 clove garlic
more olive oil

Equipment:
Food processor

Start by toasting the almonds. Bake them on a sheetpan in a 350F oven for 15 minutes. Let them cool a couple minutes before chopping them up.

Meanwhile, chop the garlic into slivers and toast it in a generous quantity of oil (~1 tbs in a small pan should just about deep fry the garlic). Toss it around in the oil over medium heat until its barely toasted brown. Don't throw out the oil, you'll use it in the pesto.

Once your almonds have cooled, grind them as finely as you can (but not to the point of making almond butter) in the food processor. Add the garlic, the tomato (chopped roughly), and some oil just to lubricate things. Process that until it looks like a paste. Add the basil, about a cup at a time, processing in between, until things are nice and green. Keep adding basil until its green enough for you. Add more oil for a thinner texture, if you like it that way. Add the cheese. Add lots and lots of salt, and a little pepper - keep tasting as you keep adding things. Definitely taste along the way.

I like my pesto on the thick and chunky side, hence the small quantity of oil. If you want it as a really thin spread, add lots more oil (and maybe fewer almonds?). Either way, its delicious.



What to do with all this pesto? Aside from just spreading it on bread and eating it, or just scooping it up with your finger and eating it, or tossing it with pasta and eating it, one of my favorite ways to use pesto is with portobello mushrooms.

Preheat your oven to 400F and rinse your mushrooms.
Place them flat-side-down on a baking sheet, with a little olive oil to lube the pan.

Spread pesto all over the bottom-side of the mushroom.

Bake at 400F for 15 minutes, until a fork stabbed into the middle doesn't encounter much resistance. They'll ooze mushroom juice mixed with pesto all over after you stab them, just warning you...

(I use LOTS of pesto on these things... I guess that's why I like it a little chunkier, it holds up to being spread thickly!)

Sweet and Sour Tofu

We spiced up a usual stir fry with some sweet and sour sauce last night, and it made a world of difference - it sort of tasted like cheap Chinese takeout (which happens to be exactly what we were going for). Go us! The recipe we found online, but naturally we didn't follow it completely. That would be too easy.

Sweet and sour sauce
Makes a lot

1/4C brown sugar
6tbs rice wine vinegar
1.5tbs tomato paste
1.5tbs soy sauce
2 tbs corn starch mixed in 4 tbs of water*
small amount of a random spicy chinese spicy sauce we had in the fridge. Otherwise, use something hot - red pepper flakes? just to give it a bite
More water as needed to thin it out

*It looks like most recipes call for 2 TEASPOONS of cornstarch in 4 tsp of water, which would explain why our sauce got so thick and we had to add more water. Whoops.

Heat everything together in a saucepan until its all dissolved. Pour over a usual stirfry and cook for a minute or two, then serve.

Our stir fry this time 'round had tofu (the firm kind), purple cauliflower, onion, orange pepper, green beans, baby bok choy, and scallions. And it tasted delicious! The purple cauliflower makes it pretty, eh?