Zucchini Carrot Potato Pancakes

Growing up potato pancakes were one of my favorite things to eat for dinner, perhaps it was because we always ate them with steak. Can you imagine a time when that was my favorite food? Long long before I became vegetarian. So while my eating tendancies have changed, my love of potato pancakes has not.

Traditionally, and by that I mean in my parents house, we always cut just a little carrot into the pancakes. I don’t know if this was for taste or just to sneak some non potato vegetables into our very picky diets, but it’s a trick that I have never strayed from. These days I think it adds a nice little pop of flavor as well as giving the pancakes a playful color.

This weeks CSA box came with some zucchini and absolutely beautiful Canela potatoes. Canela potatoes are very similar to russets, but about a third of the of the size of those giants you find in the super market. It was going to be a hectic week so I decided to make a huge batch of these to reheat throughout the week when I was too exhausted to cook.

Zuccinni Carrot Potato Pancakes
2 medium Zucchini
5 small Carrots
6 Canela Potatoes (~2 Russets)
1 medium Onion
2 eggs
1/3 cup flour
1 tsp salt
pinch pepper
1/4 cup flavorless oil (I prefer grapeseed, canola always smells fishy to me)

I like to leave the skins on my potatoes, but make sure to give them a good scrubbing if you’re going to do this. Same goes for the carrots and zucchini, I do not peel, only trimming the ends off before grating. Using a box grater, grate the zucchini, carrots, and the onion into a large bowl. Grate the Potatoes onto a kitchen towel and wring or pat dry before adding to the bowl. Whisk the eggs together in a separate bowl, and stir in the salt and pepper. Pour the eggs into the bowl with the grated veggies and mix together. I find it’s easiest to do this with my hands, but it does make quite the mess. Once the eggs are mixed in, add the flour and mix again. This is the part that’s always a little up in the air, depending how moist your veggies are, you may need to add a little more flour, but rarely more 2/3 a cup total. You’re looking to have a very thin egg and flour “paste” on the veggies.

To cook, heat oil in a large skillet, I prefer cast iron above and beyond anything else for this kind of cooking, but whatever you have will do. Once the oil is hot, create you pancakes. Again, I like to make a mess and do this with my hands so I can squeeze out the extra “juice”, but each pancake should be about 1/2 cup. Once you pancakes are in the skillet, flatten them with a spatula and turn the heat down to low. Rotate the pancakes occasionally to ensure they cook evenly. Once the bottoms have browned to you liking, give them a flip and continue cooking for another 10 minutes.

If your making them in batches they stay crisp if you keep them in a low heat oven on a plate, and make a wonderful snack for days to come. I enjoy eating mine with apricot apple sauce, or plain yogurt with a little freshly chopped dill.

BBA Challenge: Anadama Bread

Bread number one is finally here. I avoided writing about it for awhile because even through the bread came out fine, baking it was a comedy of my poor timing, and perhaps inability to follow recipes.

First things first. What is the BBA Challenge? Well, funny you should ask, there is this rather well known books, with perhaps a cultish following called the Bread Bakers Apprentice, written by none other than Peter Rheinhart. It contains about 50 recipes, many with variations, and the challenge is to bake them all.

Which brings us to bread number one, Anadama. While all good things in food come with lore, Anadama bread originates from New England. Supposedly, the wife of a woodsmen (or fisherman depending who tells the story) was a notoriously awful cook, and made him eat cornmeal mush night and day. So one day when he returned from his daily activity, in a fury he mixed flour and molasses into the mushy cornmeal muttering “Anna damn her” to himself, and before he knew it out popped a quite delicious loaf of Anadama bread! While fact or fiction, I think it’s a great story, and a great bread.

Now I have to admit, I have made a number of breads from the BBA, but never Anadama as I generally dont find sandwich loaf bread all that intriguing. That being said, Anadama bread was delicious, and I would probably make it again.

To make the bread you must begin the night before, and set out a soaker. The soaker is just cormeal and water. I used course ground cornmeal, but polenta would do as well. The next day (note: not evening!) you should make your sponge, let that rise, make the dough, let that rise, shape the loafs, let that rise and then, just when you thought you could wait no more… you bake your bread!

In total there is about 5 hours of rising, which probably would have been less if it had been warmed day and I had been insulation. I made the mistake of not starting the bread until 3PM, which would have been fine if I hadn’t remembered halfway through baking that I had tickets to a soccer game that night and gasp.. wouldn’t be around to finish baking the bread! The bread normally need to bake for about 40 minutes, with a turn halfway through, so I pumped the oven a little hotter to begin with and at the halfway point i turned the breads, turned off the oven, and walked out tof the house. It was a huge risk, but thankfully, my bread stars were aligned and it came out just fine, although I suspect had it baked properly, the crust would have been much crustier as I prefer.

Farmers Market Saturdays

It was a beautiful day at the farmers market yesterday, cool but sunny.

While stone fruit was nothing new this week, it was finally sweet enough (and cheap enough) to warrent a few peaches and nectarines. And I’ll admit it, I ate two of them standing over the sink first thing when I got home. Yummmmy!

Interesting cucumbers.

And no trip to the farmers market would be complete without some Adante Dairy cheese, and a mindless veggie lunch.

Mindless veggie lunch generally falls into two categories, leftover magic, or some variety of kale salad. Yesterdays lunch was the former. There is something very gretifying about bringing home a weeks worth of veggies AND clearing out last weeks odd and ends.

I almost always have some kind of cooked grain and bean in my fridge, which is a huge time saver, especially on the bean front, since soaking and cooking can take the better part of a day (or overnight if you’re smart enough to think ahead). Mix those together with almost any combination of veggies and you’re sure to have a decent lunch.

Mindless Lunch 

Farro

black beans

roasted beets

sauteted cucumbers

toasted, copped almonds

scallions

Dressing

olive oil

red wine vinegar

salt and pepper

Jammin’

Believe it or not, strawberries are at their peak right now, so after weeks of harassing the girls at swanton berry farm, i finally bought my flat of strawberries! Which means… jamfest 2012 happened this weekend! well, more like mini solo jamfest. Real jamfest will happen in a few weeks when cherries hit their peak, because while cleaning and de-stemming 10lbs of strawberries is not so bad, depitting that many cherries is something you need lots of help (and mimosas) to get through.

 

…so who wants some jam?

Lazy Sunday Cinnamon Buns

With the weather heating up, and the beer safely moved out of hte kitchen, it was time to whip out the Bread Bakers Apprentice again and fill the air with yeasty goodness. Cinnamon Buns were one of the first morning pastries I ever really mastered, and although they will never compete with a croissant fresh out of the over, they are a whole lot easier to make. The recipe is actually pretty fool proof, and even though the phrase “let rise for two hours or until doubled” doesn’t make sense to me as an engineer, I know to wait until my dough has doubled, no matter what the time.

Holiday Cookies

Its no secret that I am a collector of cookbooks, and while I’d like to think I use them all all the time, the truth is, there just isn’t enough time.

One of my newer additions which had been previously ignored, was “Milk and Cookies” so with a little extra time, and an overabundance of butter and eggs in my fridge I decided it was time to give that baby a spin.

Chocolate chip cookies are generally a good measuring stick on which I pass cookook judgement, and I’d been particularily interested in the recipe in here because it included oatmeal and a whole lot of chocolate.

End result? delicious.

Everything but the Kitchen Sink

Around here, Sundays are bread baking days. Some Sundays more than others, and if anything was obvious today, it was that I was making up for lost time. It’s been months since I last made bagels, I had become contented with what was available locally, and trying to eat 10-15 bagels in one week between two people can be challenging, if not gut widening. But for some reason I heard the delicious toppings calling my name and whipped up a batch this morning amid tremendous floor shaking base from our downstairs neighbors, and general debouchery happening just down the block (bay to breakers).

But of course, after hours of making bagels, I was still not satisfied. In my recent attempt to spend more time at the local library, and less time ordering cookbooks off of amazon, I checked out a really wonderful book on whole grain baking (http://www.amazon.com/Good-Grain-Baking-Whole-Grain-Flours/dp/1584798300/) . After spending the morning thumbing through the pages, I saw a really delicious looking photo of a whole wheat and oatmeal sandwich bread. Despite not having the exact ingredients it called for, I decided to plow ahead and just ad lib it.  The result was absolutely delicious, despite being just a little deformed.

The bread of course needed a few hours to cool down before it was ready to eat, so I decided what would really go great with such bread was dill butter. But as I was making the dill butter I decided that what really would go well with both was a good soup, or stew, or anything involving beans an lentils. At this point the oven had been on high for at least 6 hours and I had no real notion of what was going on outside weather wise, so I opted for soup, because I had read earlier in the week that we were in for rain. (of course there was no rain)

Unfortunately, of perhaps fortunately, I am really bad at planning out what I’m making before I start making it, or even sticking with one recipe. So I started cooking some delicious Rancho Gordo beans, Eye of the Goat to be exact (to be honest, I was just enamored with the name) without any real notion of what was going to be for dinner. At that point I was still thinking about pesto pasta. Little did I know where the evening was headed.

After putsing around on the internet looking for inspiration, and half watching America’s Test Kitchen, I decided what my beans really needed was some cinnamon (thanks ATM!), which was a huge mistake. Pro tip to all, cinnamon does not belong in your beans, ever, even if it is ceylon. So here I was with some… let’s call them “interestingly flavored” beans, and not much else. At this point I was thinking dal, all that curry and masala would easily hide my cinnamon mistake. However in my quest for goo dal / lentil recipes I happened upon a “minestrone” soup with lentils and deicded to run with that.

Halfway through starting the soup I realised I was down a few ingredients and decided to just go for it anyway, using miso paste instead of veggie stock, and just throwing whatever vegetables I had lying around into the soup, plus the beans and some pasta. the end result? utter magic. combined with the WW bread, it was the perfect sunday dinner, even if it took all day.

Pizza on the mind.

With the first days of spring showing their face here, I did the only logical thing, I bought a basil plant. It’s no secret that I lack the ability to keep a basil plant alive (yet the potato experiment has been going strong, even through the winter), I have once again bought another aromatic and healthy basil plant. I’d love to blame trying to grow it indoors without any direct sunlight as the problem, but even when I had a whole backyard of sunlight, and plant food to keep little baisy happy, I still killed him. Pro tip: do not go on vacation for a week and leave your basil plant somewhere were it can get blown over, fall a few feet and then get flooded in a freak spring storm. This time I will not be tricked. I will make no attempt to keep it alive, I will view it as a fresh basil repository. I will use it over the corse of a month, get my $5 worth, and then buy a new one. no hurt feelings.

So now with this ticking time bomb of a basil plant,  I decided it was time to make pizza again. After the most illogical break of making pizza over the winter, I have thrown myself back in the game after reading an interesting article on pizza sauce. After spending years of perfecting my own favorite pizza sauce, I came across a new idea and just had to try it. Of all the permutations I went through in my sauce quest, I had always followed the same general recipe. clean tomatoes, cook, blend. I saw no fault in this… it was just how it was done. Now fast forward years, I come across the revolutionary idea of blending the tomatoes BEFORE cooking them! who would have thought? (okay, maybe it’s normal)  Anyway, the initial results were mixed, I was extremely happy with the texture and color (gone are the days of curse orange sauce!) but I may have over done it with the red pepper flakes… again. Perhaps my red peper flakes are just unrealiable… somedays they are mild others they are hot hot hot. Maybe it’s time to make a visit to Rainbow and stock up on spices.

Indulgent White Chocolate and Macadamia Nut cookies

White Chocolate is not one of my favorite things, in fact, I sort of dislike it, but when it comes to white chocolate and macadamia nut cookies, I make an exception. Perhaps it’s the guilty pleasure of having a mouthful of sugar, who knows. My friend had just returned from Hawaii with a bag of macadamia nuts for me, so I decided it was probably time to pull this recipe off the shelf again and whip up some cookies. Because despite my reservations about white chocolate, the rest of of my house absolutely loves it. So whether you are a white chocolate lover, or skeptic, give these cookies a try, and perhaps you too will come to love them.

White Chocolate Macademia Nut Cookies

• 1 cup butter, softened (2 sticks)
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup brown sugar, lightly packed
• 2 tbls vanilla
• 2 eggs
• large pinch of salt
• 1  1/2  tsp baking soda
• 2 1/2 cup flour
• 1 cup white chocolate
• 1  1/2 cup macadamia nuts, chopped

In the bowl of a stand mixer cream together the butter and two sugars. Reduce the speed of the mixer and add in the eggs and vanilla. In a separate bowl mix the flour, salt and baking soda together. Now slowly incorporate the flour mixture into the rest of the batter. once the dough is of a uniform consistency, add in the chocolate and macadamia nuts. I often opt to mix these in by hand with a wooden spoon.

Cover the dough with saran wrap, and place in the refrigerator while you pre-heat the oven to 375°. When the oven is ready, take the dough out of the fridge and create just smaller than golf ball balls and place them on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet. Bake for 10-12 minutes.

A box full of when will I have time to cook

WOW, the past two weeks have been hectic, between moving and midterms I’ve had absolutely no time to really cook. Last weekend was the big move day, and of course our CSA box arrived just days before. So while all the fruit was eaten, I still have a shiney new refrigerator of slightly wilted veggies. I wasn’t particularly inspired either, I was tired of chard, and pretty sick of broccoli too. Which brings us to… how to use veggies you’re not wild about, part 1: