Soup Duo Jour

A quart of buttermilk costs 1.25 at the grocery store. After using one cup for coffeecake, and one and a quarter cups for cinnamon rolls, that left me with one and three-quarters cups, approximately sixty cents' worth of buttermilk, and a burning desire to use up the remainder. I was determined that whatever I did, it would (a) not be a sweet or baked good, having just made plenty of that and (b) not require buying more buttermilk, as it defeats the purpose.
Buying other ingredients to go with that remaining buttermilk seemed to suit me just fine, which is slightly absurd as it completely eradicates any sort of frugality to the gesture, but I've never been very good at math or at being practical. Especially when it comes to grocery stores.
Eliminating baked goods and other buttermilk-based sweets left me with some basic options of ranch dressing, buttermilk mashed potatoes, buttermilk fried chicken, or soups. The weather being warm as it is, I turned my attention to the chilled soup section and found two recipes that would just about finish the quart off. The pea soup recipe is actually meant to be served hot, but left to cool to a bit above warm it's delicious and not stifling. On an even better note, that recipe could be modeled entirely out of on-hand kitchen ingredients, leaving me feeling justified to spend money on fresh herbs and more tomatoes for the second recipe. Overall, frugal it isn't, but tasty indeed.

FRESH PEA SOUP
adapted from Gourmet via Epicurious
3/4 c chopped onion
2 tsp unsalted butter
3 c frozen peas
2 1/2 c chicken broth
~1/2 tsp chopped fresh tarragon
herbs of your liking (recommended: basil, thyme, dill)
1/3 c buttermilk
~ 1 tsp lemon juice

In a saucepan cook onion in butter over medium heat, stirring occasionally, 5 minutes or until tender. Add peas and broth and simmer, uncovered, 5 minutes or so. Stir in tarragon and other herbs.
Using a blender (a stick blender works wonders) puree soup until fairly evenly smooth. Heat soup until hot, if you've let it cool, and remove from heat. Add salt and pepper to taste and stir in the buttermilk. Stir in lemon juice to taste. Correct seasoning, adding salt, pepper, and more herbs to taste.
Yield: about 1 quart

CHILLED CREAM OF TOMATO SOUP
adapted from Just Like Grandma Used to Make

2 lbs very ripe beefsteak or plum tomatoes, rubbed with olive oil or sprayed with cooking spray and halved
3 Tbsp unsalted butter
1 medium onion, chopped
2 c chicken stock
2 sprigs fresh tarragon
several sprigs fresh parsley or maybe ~1 tsp dried
1/2 tsp dried basil
1 c buttermilk

Preheat oven to 425 F. Place tomatoes on a greased or well-sprayed baking pan and bake 30 minutes, turning tomatoes every 10 minutes until the skins loosen. Allow to cool, peel and discard skins, reserving pulp and juice.
Meanwhile, melt butter in a medium saucepan and saute onion on low heat until soft, about 6 minutes. Add stock and herbs; simmer for 30 minutes.
Remove sprigs of herbs and add tomato pulp and juices. Allow soup to cool and puree (the stick blender also helps here). Stir in buttermilk and season with plenty of salt and pepper. Serve well chilled (I'd recommend making the soup the night before and letting sit overnight in the fridge, both to chill and meld flavors).

Sugar High Friday: Gingered Coffeecake

Hello, food world. Let this serve as our introduction, and perhaps the beginning of more fruitful interaction. I'm a long-time reader, new to the blogging scene, but I always thought, if I ever get myself a blog, I'm going to join Sugar High Fridays. And when I was reading Jennifer/Domestic Goddess's post the other day, I noticed the icon and clicked the link to find that the topic was ginger, and the deadline just days away. The timing seemed perfect what with the holiday weekend, and when I found myself in a baking mood tonight, the only question remained: what to make?
Actually, the question became: is this possible? Already in pajamas and in for the night, venturing to the grocery store was not an option - I wanted to bake, but I wanted to do it now. I haven't worked much with ginger in desserts, only in Nigella Lawson's fresh gingerbread, and I also didn't want something that tried or true, or something that felt out of sync with the season. And like the proverbial lightbulb, coffeecake lit up in my head, perfect for the weekend guests and late breakfasts. Gingered coffeecake it was to be.
Luckily, I'd made a trip just a night or two ago when planning on making cinnamon rolls for the weekend, so I had buttermilk in stock. Unfortunately for me, I don't keep 'staples' like eggs or milk around, and it would have to utilize the bag of crystallized ginger or the ground ginger in the cabinet. Luckily, some hunting around found a recipe for eggless buttermilk cake, and a half-cup of oats remained in the container to make a streusel topping. With some minor alterations for palatibility, resourcefulness pulled through. A cake started on a whim - just like this blog - came into being.



GINGERED COFFEECAKE
adapted and tweaked from several recipes

for cake
2 packed c. brown sugar
2 c. flour
1/2 tsp. ground ginger
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
3/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 c (one stick) butter
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 c. buttermilk
1 tsp. vanilla

for streusel
~ 1/3 c. quick-cooking oats
1/4 c. flour
1/4 c. brown sugar
optional pinch salt
3 heaping Tbsp. chopped crystallized ginger
3 Tbsp. butter
heaping 1/4 c. dry cake mixture

Preheat oven to 375 F and generously grease a 9x9 or similar capacity cake pan. (you may use an 8x8, as I did, but be forewarned that you will need to cover the top with foil to prevent streusel from browning too much while the interior cooks, and that it will take perhaps up to 45 minutes to bake.)
In large bowl, crumble the brown sugar and whisk in flour, ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Cut in the butter and then mix with your hands until the mixture is crumbly and has a sandy feel. Reserve heaping 1/4 c. for streusel.
Whisk in baking soda, pinching to make sure no lumps remain, and the salt. Mix together buttermilk and vanilla and stir to combine.
In separate medium bowl, stir together the oats, flour,brown sugar and salt for the streusel. Separate pieces of ginger as best as possible and toss to coat, separating the pieces as you go along. Rub or cut in the 3 Tbsp. butter until the mixture forms large (bigger than a pea) clumps of crumbs. Add dry cake mix to your liking, rubbing into the crumb mixture to combine.
Pour buttermilk cake mixture into greased pan and even across the top with a spatula. Gather streusel crumbs into clumps or leave sandy as you prefer and drop streusel over the top of the cake. Bake for 30 minutes, checking at 20 or 25 minutes into baking if you need to cover the top with foil to prevent overbrowning. Remove from oven when a tester inserted in the center comes out clean (may have some streusel crumbs attached, but no wet cake) and place on a rack to cool before cutting.

Rediscovering Risotto

Last night was comfort food. Simple cooking, nothing spectacular, and with the ease of jarred green curry sauce for chicken and frozen Thai-style carrots (both Trader Joe's, and both addictive), it might have felt like too much cheating if it weren't for washing all the final pots. The risotto, however, I can maintan dignity with.
I've had this risotto cookbook for literally years; so long that I can't even remember when or how I got it. I do know that there was a time when I was a risotto devotee and then for some years fell out of touch with it in advertently. Some months ago, however, I rediscovered this book on the shelf and fell upon it with the vigor I normally read cookbooks, devouring the pages and the recipes. And with the rediscovery of the book, a rediscovering of risotto.
Risotto's a favorite dish of mine because it looks fancy and impresses those not-in-the-know by sounding exotically Italian and tasting at once rich and delicate, soothing and exciting. It rewards with its relative ease in really just needing some patience and a good strong stirring arm to coax creamy starch out of the rice grains. This one in particular - coconut risotto - smells like heaven while it's cooking, and I've found it quite forgiving in terms of the constant vigilance usually recommended - if I need to neglect stirring the rice for a minute or so while I'm beginning to stir-fry the chicken, for instance, I don't worry. This does work best if the heat under the pot is maintained properly, you only need a very brief time away, and the time is towards the end of cooking when you have maybe a quarter to third of the liquid remaining left to go. The end result is still lush and smooth, with the undercurrent of coconut running through, and tender with just a little give left in the grains. It makes an excellent accompaniment to pork with peanut sauce, but I've also eaten it with curries, beef, sausage, and cold straight from the refrigerator.

COCONUT RISOTTO
from Williams-Sonoma Kitchen Library: Risotto

4 1/4 cups chicken stock or broth
3 1/2 cups coconut milk (about 2 14-oz cans. I use light)
2 Tbsp vegetable oil
2 shallots, finely chopped, or a mixture of chopped onion and minced garlic as you like
2 1/2 cups Arborio rice

Pour the stock and coconut milk into a saucepan and bring to a simmer. Adjust the heat to keep the liquid hot.
In a large, heavy saucepan (at least 3 qt.) over medium heat, warm the vegetable oil. Add the shallots and saute until golden brown, about 3-4 minutes. Add the rice and stir until white spots appear in the center of the grain, about 1 minute. Add a ladleful of hot liquid, adjust the heat to maintain a simmer, and cook, stirring constantly, until the liquid is absorbed. Continue adding the liquid, a ladleful at a time and stirring constantly, until the rice is tender but slightly firm in the center and the mixture is creamy, 20-25 minutes longer.
Season with salt and pepper and garnish with cilantro, if desired.

Appetitive on-location: Amada

One of the perks of the job, I was told and reminded of today, is the opportunity to expand my education. And that comes not only inside the lab, but outside of it for special lunches.
Super-swank restaurants I've been to include
Le Bec Fin, with its imposing doors, tuxedoed waiters, gilded wallpaper, and delectable dishes
Pod, with a futuristic feel and intriguing bathrooms, the first place I ate edamame, and whose Thai-style beef and chicken lettuce wraps I dreamed about for days
and just today, Amada
I remember Spanish food the way it was in Spain, some years back in high school, and going for tapas in a little underground, shady cave of a restaurant. Tortilla espanola was something of a pleasant surprise, being that I've never had much of a liking for eggs, but when light and savory and chock-fill of onions and potatoes, they're really not that bad at all. And jamon serrano, manchego y membrillo, all paired with fantastic bread . . . someday I'll go back.
Amada was not quite Spanish tapas the way I remember, but it was tasty. The patatas bravas, for instance, seemed more like spiced french fries in taste and appearance. Ensalada rusa, the tuna and potato salad, had a molded round of the salad made with mayonnaise and peas, and the tuna (cured, perhaps, with long slivers of chive) was the more noteworthy part. Tortilla espanola came in a small, maybe four-inch round rather than the thick wedges I'd expected, and though warm and cooked to a slight crunch at the edges, actually had less egg and far more potato than I would like. Its dryness was helped by the flavorful saffron aioli, served in a small mortar and pestle, already bright yellow and with red strands strewn on the top.
The lunchtime mixtos for both queso y charcuteria included three each. The cheese plate was beautiful: thin slices of aged manchego with thin lavender honey, a potent cabrales with a slightly sweet tomato marmalade, and garroxto with a garlic dulche de leche, a more mustardy color than the caramel itself and resembling it only in texture. First time I've had either the blue-veined cabrales or the nutty garroxto, and I hope it won't be the last. Meats included shaved slices of the jamon serrano; which they say is similar to prosciutto but really nothing quite mimics it, chorizo and salchichon with a peppery bite. And I have nothing negative to say of the baby lamb chops, grilled medium rare and served with a garlic-parsley sauce, except that a full serving of four, even when split with five other dishes and two other people, seems to disappear all too quickly.
Banana y azafran was split for dessert. A warm chocolate brownie, which the waiter told us was made with hazelnut flour, covered by part of a caramelized banana and a sugar crust, paired perfectly with the saffron sauce. The foam atop the brownie looked just slightly unappealing and got lost in the other flavors and textures, but I suppose that's artistry.
If eating like this qualifies as a learning experience, I'm going to be a lifelong student.

Bitter Greens

the green thumb, I have it not. this is my second attempt at growing the 'a taste of mexico' windowsill garden - a tantalizing trio of cilantro, tomatillos, and jalapenos - because i inadvertently killed the first one. I'd like to say I lack the knack for growing anything, but truth be told I just haven't ever really tried. the last time I worked with plants, I was in my early years, and was allotted partial responsibility for watering the plants in our new vegetable garden in the backyard. I always watered the weeds on days it was my turn, because I couldn't stand lima beans and didn't want them to grow, for fear that if they did I might actually be expected to eat them. rather unsurprisingly, the vegetable garden in the backyard was a spectacular failure, and I've simply never had occasion to be concerned again. until now. the windowsill planter was a lovely christmas gift from R, who took all my not-so-subtle hints and salsa-loving ways into account when finding the right addition to my kitchen. the first seedlings sprouted and raised my hopes with their little shoots poking through the soil, only to sputter out and wither away within a week. I've procrastinated for a little while now, but finally purchased new potting soil and crossed my fingers. so far, they're not disappointing - although there's a long way to go between me and homegrown salsa.