Summer Good-on-Everything Aioli

The summer is just flying past, and since I'm working out-of-state for weeks at a time, I haven't been able to keep up with crafting and cooking. But on the few days I get to spend at home, I've been trying to get in some sewing and some quick but delicious meals. Sunday was one of those, and it really was delicious - Roasted Shiitake Mushroom Sandwiches with Garlic-Basil Aioli. You can get the full sandwich recipe over at the Red Owl Blog, but here on Grow, Knead, Pickle & Sew I wanted to share this easy and versatile recipe for the aioli I used.

First, let me say that making a traditional aioli would include emulsifying olive oil and farm-fresh egg yolks a la homemade mayo, but since we're going for quick here, you'll notice that the recipe calls for store-bought mayo. If you're going the healthy, homemade way (which of course I recommend - do as I say, not as I do) then you should by all means make up a batch of mayo first, especially if you use the incredible Julia Childs whey-fermented recipe.

This aioli can be used as a sandwich spread, as a dip for roasted potatoes, fresh veggies or as a topping for a summer quiche. Also, I want to plug Alm Hill/Growing Washington, as they are selling some incredible basil right now at the Wallingford Farmers Market (Seattle on Wednesdays). 

Click through for the recipe!

An abundance of shiitakes has graced our little urban farm over the past few weeks, and we've been having fun experimenting with recipes both old and new. I just can never get tired of the rich and tangy taste of shiitakes. I'm so glad we're growing them this year!

We have to thank our friend Anna for introducing us to the joy of cold soba noodles in the summer. Chilly weather doesn't stop us from making these delicious buckwheat noodles, but it's oh so much more satisfying when the sun is shining. We had them for dinner on Sunday, holding our bowls in our laps on the porch swing, and marveling at the 8pm sun still going strong. This was the first time we've used sliced shiitakes in this "soup", and it definitely won't be the last!  This recipe is infinitely versatile, and it's one of those more-or-less to taste recipes that you can tweak to your liking. Plus, it's a really simple way to introduce yourself to Japanese cooking! It may look daunting, but it's actually quite simple and takes less than 30 minutes of prep. Here's how we make ours:

(Click through for the recipe!)

Homemade Veggie Broth - You'll Wonder Why You Ever Bought Broth!

I started making my own broth several years ago. I'd decided to go vegetarian and let me tell you, there is a shortage of good-tasting veggie broths out there. I tried almost every brand available at the store, including the condensed powder/paste types, and none of them pack the flavor punch I'm looking for. Lets face it - chicken broth tastes good! It's salty, oily, yellow... ok, actually I'm really not a fan of chicken broth. But it can add a ton of flavor to rice and veggies, and I'm a (most of the time) vegetarian who loves food with a lot of flavor. I'm also a conservationist who values the "waste-not-want-not" philosophy and I try to minimize waste whenever possible. It occurred to me that all the veggie scraps I was composting could be used for a higher cause... a tasty veggie broth made with real vegetables instead of powder or paste!

Well, I can tell you that I've never gone back. My broth is an always changing flavor medley of whatever vegetables are in season and it serves as the base for soups, gravies, stews, rice pilafs, steamed veggies, pasta sauces, and anything else where you could use water but want some extra flavor.  Here's how it's done:


What You Need:  

•  1-Gallon glass jar with tight-fitting lid (I got mine as a jar of pickles from the Cash-and-Carry. The pickles, sadly, were not good but the jar has served me well!)
•  1 or 2 large zip-lock bags
• Large soup pot
• Mesh strainer
• Vegetable scraps

Whenever you prepare vegetables, keep the scraps - all the ends, peels, greens, etc. I especially like to save scraps from onions, celery, carrots, tomatoes (oh yes, these are some of the best!), potatoes, garlic, zucchini, spinach, cabbage, etc. These are the veggies that will give you the best straightforward flavor. Then I love to add bits from seasonal veggies that will add a unique angle - turnips, chard stems, beet ends, green beans, kale, lemon or lime peels, apple cores. These veggies (and fruits) will impart flavors that are a little more distinctive, so you'll want to be careful which ones you mix together and maybe plan what your corresponding recipes will be. You may want lime peels if you're planning on making some thai soups or curries, but wouldn't want them in if you're planning a minestrone or thyme/rosemary/sage white bean soup. You get the idea.


Put these scraps into your ziplock bags and keep them in the freezer. They'll keep for a few months, but I bet you'll accumulate enough for a broth in just a couple of weeks. 


When you're ready to make your broth, make sure that your glass jar is clean. I run it through the dishwasher on hot to be sure that it's as sterile as possible without actually boiling the jar, although you could do that too. If you're going to can this broth and store it outside the fridge, then of course you'll want to follow canning principles, but I keep mine in the fridge. Put all of your frozen veggie scraps in your soup pot. One to two bags full is perfect. Fill the pot with at least one gallon of water. This does not have to be exact as long as the water covers the veggies. Add 1-2 tsp of kosher or fine sea salt (to taste) and whatever spices you'd like. I have a rosemary bush, sage bush and bay tree, so I add those fresh, but dried herbs work too. I also crush several garlic cloves and toss them in with their skins. 


Bring the pot just to a boil, then reduce the heat to keep it at a simmer for at least an hour. Taste, and if it's too weak for your liking, keep simmering until you're happy. Depending on what veggies I have in there I'll sometimes let it go for up to two hours. I'll also add more salt/spices if I feel like it needs it. 


When you're happy with the flavor, turn off the heat and let the pot cool for 15 minutes or so. With a wooden spoon or potato masher, press the veggies down against the bottom of the pot to squeeze out as much flavor as possible. Place the glass jar in the sink with the mesh strainer balanced on top of the opening. If you don't have a mesh strainer you can use your colander, but you may get some unwanted veggie-bits in the broth. Carefully pour the broth through the strainer into the jar until not-quite-full. If there is any liquid left, I always feel slightly guilty about pouring it down the drain, but hey! You've already given your veggie scraps a 2nd life!  You should feel great about that! Discard veggie scraps in the compost.


If you put the lid on your jar while it's hot the pressure from the cooling liquid will seal it on really tight, so I like to leave the jar on the counter for a few hours to overnight with the lid just resting on top. Another reason to let it cool is that putting a jar of hot liquid in your fridge will raise the temperature in there, forcing the cooling element to kick on and increasing your energy use (and bill!) The broth will keep in the fridge for about 3 weeks. Once you get past 2 weeks, be sure to give it a sniff before using it. And if it goes bad before you use it all, no worries. You'll most likely have another bag of frozen veggie bits ready by then to make another batch!


Next time I make a batch I'll take photos and add them to the post. What is your favorite veggie broth-based recipe?




 

Pickled Young Cabbage Leaves

My garden has been doing its thing, as you can see here and here, and about a week ago was high time for thinning out the red cabbage. I'm a big fan of thinning! Not only does it make the remaining plants grow faster and healthier by removing competition, but I get to eat baby greens!!! 

Instead of eating these greens, as I've been doing with the chard, beets and mizuna, I wanted to indulge my infatuation with vinegar-pickled veggies. A search on the internet led to my realizing that although many many people pickle cabbage (usually using lacto-fermentation, but that's a whole other post!), no-one seems to be interested in pickling the tender early leaves. Or at least not anyone I could find. So I started doing the next best thing... experimenting!  I used this recipe as a basis for my vinegar mixture and method, then added and changed ratios to compliment the mild sweetness of the young cabbage leaves.

(Click through for the recipe!)

Roasted Figs and Feta

The title says it all: Roasted Figs and Feta. There's really not too much else to say, except to drool a little, try to mop it up off your chin, and squeeze another one into your already overflowing mouth. I got the idea from my friend Nate who casually mentioned that someone at a dinner party had stuffed figs with feta cheese and brought them for an appetizer. Enough said. That is, it was enough for me. I think we probably kept chatting about something or other, but my attention was busy swimming in gooey, sweet and salty dreams and planning my evening's meal. 

This tasty treat is so simple that there is really no recipe needed. I bought about 1/4 lb dried figs from the bulk section of my local grocer and a small container of crumbled feta. I went for the stuff that was on sale because its main purpose was to add saltiness and it didn't seem like the time to splurge. I then sliced each fig lengthwise, stuffed in as much feta as would fit, and roasted them on a baking sheet in a 375F pre-heated oven for about 6 minutes. 

The photo above is from this first batch. They were VERY good. Something was missing though... the sweet was there, the salty was there, but something elusive kept flitting through my mind. A second batch was made a few days later upon my mother's arrival from Chicago. In all the excitement of getting back from the airport, the figs were forgotten in the oven and stayed in there for about 15 minutes. Now I'm not necessarily saying that you want to purposely leave them in that long, but the resulting caramelization of the fig's sugars and the slightly toasted feta was amazing! I'd say that 10-11 minutes would be just perfect.  

Spring has arrived!

Well folks, this weekend was gorgeous. We're talking sunshine, bike rides, working in the garden, even dragging an extension cord into the garden to work on my computer while basking in the afternoon sun. And then we found a sparrow's nest with three tiny blue speckled eggs nestled in our cedar. I mean, c'mon! Spring in Seattle, what could be better?! And to top it all off, a quart of strawberries found their way into our fridge.

Now some, when faced with strawberries, will sprinkle sugar and pour cream. In fact I did just that last week and enjoyed my evening thoroughly. But this being Sunday night, the night before Monday morning you know, it seemed of paramount importance to do something a little more decadent, a little more gooey, a little more like... a crumble. If you've ever made a crumble then you know that you can take a few ingredients that you almost certainly have in your cupboard and in about 5 minutes of prep work and 40 minutes in the oven, your evening is transformed into a thing of sweet, savory, crumbly goodness. This is one of the easiest desserts you can make, and while it isn't exactly healthy (hooray for butter!) it does have fruit in it and, as I discovered, you can include whole wheat and oatmeal to trick yourself into thinking you're eating health food. Ooh, I just wish I could have recorded the sweet sound of strawberry juices bubbling and the topping crackling when it came out of the oven!

(Click through for more!)

Smitten Kitchen's French Onion Soup

One of my favorite food bloggers, Smitten Kitchen, recently posted an adaptation of Julia Child's French Onion Soup recipe. I tried it out this weekend and pretty much followed her instructions (except to use a homemade veggie broth instead of beef and to use Romano cheese because that's what I had on hand). I'm sorry I failed to take any pictures of my own, but oh my goodness!  You should head on over to her site immediately and get to work! The soup was rustic but elegant with complex caramel flavors, and the toasted cheese on top was absolutely mindblowing. 

Here she is in all her glory:  French Onion Soup  Enjoy!

Crusty Bread Heaven

 

I know the name of this blog is "Grow, Knead, Pickle and Sew", but for my first bread-related blog I just have to tell you about the greatest-ever-no-kneading-necessary recipe!

There must be a thousand recipes for "no-knead" breads floating around on the internet, and I have tried most of them. Along about the millionth try I gave up hope that any of them would truly produce a palatable loaf (except beer bread, but that's a whole other post!) Until now. I came upon the 2007 New York Times adaptation of Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François' recipe for "Simple Crusty Bread" from their book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. They also had a recipe for "No-Knead Bread" by Jim Lahey published about a year earlier. When these two recipe's are combined, oh man! The resultant loaf is perfectly golden and crunchy on the outside, dense but fluffy on the inside. There are lovely air pockets to catch your melting butter but most of the inside is reminiscent of the best Italian loaves. You know the ones. The kind you keep dipping in olive oil until you look up and can't believe the entire loaf is gone. And that's exactly what I did when this loaf came out of the oven. Who knew that simple could really be better?

The key here is that the dough must be left alone to ferment for a good amount of time. The Simple Crusty recipe only has the dough rising for 2-5 hours. There have been critics that say the quicker rising time leaves the bread with a bitter, overly-yeasty flavor. I don't know because I let mine rise much longer both times I've made the recipe. On my first try I stuck with the NYT recipe that calls for only using all-purpose flour. Incredible. For my second try I used 3 cups of bread flour and 3 1/2 cups of all purpose thinking that it couldn't possibly not be better with bread flour. I was wrong. The texture skewed toward sandwich bread instead of luscious Italian, and the crust lost some crunch after cooling. So my recommendation is to stick with all-purpose, as unlikely as that sounds. 

As for storing the dough, it works wonderfully.  I've stored the dough in the fridge for up to a few days and the freezer for about a week, and both baked up perfectly. If storing in the fridge, allow the dough to rest for about an hour before shaping into a ball and letting rise for another 40 minutes. If freezing, I would recommend letting it thaw in a warm spot for a few hours. Once it is completely thawed let it rest for another hour, then shape and rest as above. I found that as it thawed it spread out on the cutting board. Then as it warmed and rested it rose to about double its size. 

The other adaptations to the recipes that I've made are to cut down the salt a bit (so if you like your bread more salty, then increase my amount by 1/2 tsp), to divide the batch of dough in three instead of four loaves, and to bake on parchment paper on an overturned baking pan (because I don't, gasp, have a baking stone). I also used a rising time that varied between 8 - 20 hours. I feel that a rise on the longer side, 12-15 hours, is fine because we're using quite a bit of active dry yeast as opposed to the smaller amount of instant yeast from Lahey's recipe. He also calls for up to 20 hours. 

(Click through for the recipe!)