THE CRISPY COOK

The Crispy Cook is Let Loose in Virginia and West Virginia

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Thu, 14 Nov 2013 21:12:00 +0000

We are back at the Crispy Casa having been sprung for a week to tour parts of Virginia and West Virginia. Dan and I had a blast seeking out sites of historic interest, natural beauty and quirkiness. And of course, we were hunting for books and good food along the way, kicking it old-school without a GPS or smart phone to guide us (though I did plenty of guidebook and internet research ahead of time, and we did have a laptop that plugged into our hotels at night).

Here's the highlight of Days 1 (and 7!), the long driving days of our trip: the most awesome Latin food at La Isla in West Hazelton, PA. We were in need of a mid-afternoon lunch and just pulled randomly off Interstate 81 into this town. We're not much for the zoo food of chain restaurants and fast food eateries, so we prowled for more miles off the exit than we wanted in search of deliciousness. Just as we were about to turn around we stumbled into the triangular intersection of two streets lured by what appeared to be many contractors' trucks (those guys can nose out good eats) parked at a renovated gas station turned eatery.

It was La Isla, which was a bustling Latin restaurant filled with delicious smells and lots of folks both dining in and taking out. We waited until the crowd died down and then peppered the counter guy with tons of questions about the food, which he was most gracious about.

Dan's gluten-free, so he was told that he could eat anything on the menu that day that wasn't fried. We each got a plate of two main dishes with plantains, rice and bean soup. I had the most delicious baked chicken, while Dan feasted on roast pork. We were stuffed and happy as we hit the road again, and it was truthfully the best meal we've had in a long time. It was so good, that we made sure to stop back on our return drive and order up twice as much to go (stewed goat and chicken!), which we've been depleting in the last several days since we've been back.

We spent Night #1 in Winchester, VA, which has a great stock of 18th century architecture, a lively pedestrian mall and an amazing Beaux Arts public library gem: The Handley Library. From the curved and gilded radiators to the window seat bench nooks to the interior rotunda, every little nook in this jewel is so inviting and luxuriously detailed. They also have a little used book room, but it was closed when we arrived as the (only?) volunteer had gone home for the day.

We stayed at the historic George Washington Hotel with a great old-fashioned lobby and the biggest walk-in granite-lined shower stall I've ever seen. Bodacious amounts of hot water and water pressure and no plastic shower curtain clinging to my legs! We scooped up jerk chicken from a local Jamaican restaurant and feasted like kings in our comfy hotel room while watching the Cards unfortunately lose Game 5 of the World Series.

One thing that was really strange about our day in Winchester was the birds. We were strolling around at night and heard some enchanting birdsong up in a tree. Then we noticed the unbelievable encrustation of bird guano on the sidewalk and quite a layering all over a car parked next to the tree and we quickly scooted away. We saw this same guano phenomenon on several other sidewalks and wonder what kind of Hitchcock birds are making this mess and whether it's just migrating flocks or a constant avian population.

We devoted the whole next day to tooling down the Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park and it wasn't nearly enough time to soak it all in. The Skyline Drive takes you along the Blue Ridge Mountain tops for 75 miles or so, with some 90 overlooks among its twists and turns. I had an old edition of Henry Heatwole's Skyline Drive Guide with us and this was a great reference as we approached the mile markers and learned about the historical or geographical significance of each spot.

We were past autumn leaf peak, but there were still lots of gorgeous muted foliage west through the Shenandoah Valley and east toward the Piedmont Valley. We got out for one short hike at Fox Hollow and saw some remnants of mountain settler homes and grave sites and had a mountaintop picnic of the rest of our Jamaican delights. Hazel Ridge and the Big Meadow were particularly memorable Skyline sites.

Day 3: Fulfilling a long-time dream to see Thomas Jefferson's self-designed home and farm, Monticello, we joined a large number of other history buffs who received timed tickets to view the house and grounds. A bus takes you atop the Little Mountain (Monticello in Italian) and then a tour guide takes small groups through various rooms of the downstairs. The home is exquisite: perfectly proportioned, filled with historic treasures, fossils, books and scientific instruments.

Though it was late October, there were still plenty of flowers and vegetables in the expansive gardens that cascade down the terraced hills. A couple of gardeners were tending the heirloom vegetables and herbs, which contained many exotic items like cardoons and elecampane, and we were surprised to see an abundance of hot peppers. We lingered for a long while, examining the wine cellars (Jefferson preferred wine shipped in individual glass bottles rather than wooden casks as they were less likely to be watered down by "rascally boatmen") and then made our way downhill past Jefferson's gravesite and through a sun-dappled forest.

The museum back at the Monticello base camp focuses on the architectural designs and building construction details of Monticello, but I was left wondering how the initial site preparation was undertaken. Jefferson had 150 slaves, but the logistics of getting them, provisions and supplies up a steep mountain in the late 1700s-early 1800s and how on earth they leveled the top of the mountain, improved the rocky soil and removed tree stumps without power equipment seems a monumental task. Dan was squinting up close to see the fabulous books from Jefferson's library (these are replacements since Jefferson sold his volumes to the Library of Congress after they were burned in a fire during the War of 1812).

I might have pressed on to tour two more nearby presidential abodes Chez James Monroe/Madison, but Dan was a hungry man and wanted to check out downtown Charlottesville, so we headed in that direction and had a restorative meal at Eppie's. They were gracious enough to allow Dan to have the day before's Carolina Salad special which was gluten-free and I had a tasty pulled pork sandwich with great collard greens with a peppery vinegar accompaniment.

Note shelf title for the Civil War books

Thus revitalized, we sought out Daedalus Books, where three floors of used and rare books awaited our perusal. The prices are very reasonable and I saw many unusual and interesting titles. Dan and I bought some Adirondack history for the store and a first edition of Russell Banks' early novel "The Sweet Hereafter" for ourselves. We had a nice chat with Sandy, the affable owner, and teased him about labeling his Civil War books as The War of Yankee Aggression, as well as commiserating about how the poetry shelves suffer the most from customer's "creative reshelving" (Sandy says that comes from poets having their heads in the clouds). He advised us to be sure not to leave his city without walking around some of the surrounding historic streets so we took his suggestion and had a nice stroll around the courthouse, some churches and old hotels. One the way back to our hotel we passed by the SPCA Thrift Store, and had a nice half hour before they closed admiring their homeless kitties and interesting wares before leaving with an armload of art and music titles.

Days 4-7: Exploring West Virginia

We left Charlottesville the next morning and began our days in West Virginia. The central attraction of this trip was our daughter’s college soccer games in the USCAA national tournament in Charleston, WV on Friday and Saturday with her Albany College of Pharmacy team, but we tacked on some other days to make this a week long vacation.

Albany College of Pharmacy 2013 Women's Soccer Team

I must say West Virginia was a state I had never thought about visiting before. Here’s what I knew about the Mountain State before our trip: 1) Hatfield and McCoy feuds; 2) Homer Hickam and the Rocket Boys from the 1999 movie “October Sky”; 3) WV is the state most likely to be used as a horror film setting; 4) self-styled “hellbillies” in the 2009 documentary “The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia”; 5) John Denver’s “Country Roads” hit song; 6) Appalachian poverty.

So I did some research about the history and potential sites before we made the decision to go and found out that it is a state of great natural beauty and historical interest. After visiting and talking with the interesting folks of this great state, I am excited to visit again some day. This state has a lot of personality and its ruggedly beautiful landscape was a treat after seeing so many other American small towns gobbled up by homogenous commercial strip malls.

After crossing the border in WV got off the highway and onto the scenic Midland Trail byway. What beautiful mountain vistas we saw as we followed the Kanawha River towards Charleston! We headed up gorgeous mountaintops, including a delightful overlook and rest stop in the middle of Hawk’s Nest State Park,

and threaded our way through interesting coal, lumber and industrial towns snuggled up next to the riverside in the valleys. We had a few stops at thrift shops and convenience stores and marveled at how quickly the languid Virginia accents had given way to more twangy speech (West Virginians actually use the word “reckon”). My head was turned 180 degrees after spying a homemade sign for a cornhole tournament tacked outside of a bar in Rupert, WV and wouldn’t let Dan stop the car and turn around. A little Internet research later that night revealed this activity to be nothing more than a souped up game of beanbag toss rather than a backdoor sex orgy.

Cornhole board and bags spied at a WV antique shop.

That night we rooted for our soccer team on top of a mountain outside of Charleston. It was windy and rainy, and the game was a hard-fought battle that ultimately got a Final Four berth for our lower-seeded Albany Panthers the next day.

We had time before that semi-final soccer game on Day 5 to explore Charleston and started off with a visit to the State Museum, located right in the Capitol complex of buildings. It was a great introduction to West Virginia history and culture and I would recommend it as a launching pad for visitors. Admission to the museum was free (just had to feed the parking meters outside) and I gained a lot of insights about different aspects of West Virginia, from coal mining and other industries, mountain music and arts, and how the state’s history was shaped. West Virginia was a slave-holding state that was carved off from Virginia and admitted to the Union during the height of the Civil War. West Virginia and Virginia seem to have many distinct differences -much like Upstate versus downstate New York- with the steep, isolating geography forging a more independent-minded, frontier mentality among West Virginians.

I saw this interesting flavor a few times among our trip with the state seeming like a 50/50 blend of Northern (weather and terrain) and Southern state (I was never called ma'am so much in my life); progressive in some ways (Mass transit guy I met at the soccer field told me that the neighborhoods without a supermarket are added to the tourist trolley route so folks can go to the Capitol Market daily farmer's market) and conservative (nothing open Sundays til after the Baptist church lets out).

And man, do West Virginians take their football seriously! Friday and Saturday is devoted to high school and college football. I saw boatloads of people sporting their Mountaineer (WVU) and Thundering Herd (Marshall College) regalia over the weekend, and this was at a women's soccer tournament! We caught lunch at a Mexican place in the town of Eleanor, WV (a New Deal homestead community named after Eleanor Roosevelt - inexplicable City motto: "Cleanest town in West Virginia") on Saturday and were thankful that we got there fifteen minutes before what seemed like the entire swarm of the George Washington High School Blue Devils football team, their parents, fans, dance team, cheerleaders and anyone who ever even looked at a Blue Devil strode in, completely outfitted in their Blue Devil team apparel.

We scored some good WV barbecue from a roadside truck at the corner of Virginia Street W and Central Avenue in Charleston (Charleston's nickname is "Charlie West", which is kinda cool, and the city motto is "Hip, Historic, Almost Heaven", which is sorta too much of a mouthful and kind of just inscrutable) and ate in the afternoon sunshine at the riverfront amphitheatre.

Back on the mountaintop, our team lost their semi-final game to Daeman college, so it was back on the road for the two Jags the next morning of Day 5. We headed to nearby Madison, in Boone County, WV, as it was only a short drive and we wanted to see if that Wild and Wonderful White clan was up and about. They weren't in evidence, but we did score some great souvenirs at three great local thrift shops, from a lovely framed bird lithograph to some awesome WV-themed T-shirts.


Boone County Courthouse, a frequent White Clan siting spot

The afternoon was spent trekking northwest to Point Pleasant, WV to visit the Mothman Museum. I had never heard of the Mothman, but when I told my kids we would be going they were familiar with this urban legend. Back in 1966, some locals touring around an old factory nearby claimed to have seen a 6 foot tall feathery dude with glowing red eyes fly around. Then there was the disastrous Silver Bridge collapse in December 15, 1967 which claimed many lives, and folks starting talking about links between the sitings of this supposedly supernatural creature and this tragedy.

It's a kind of kitschy but amusing museum, full of yellowed newspaper clippings about the sightings of this cryptid creature (I buy the theory that the possibly inebriated couples that first spied him actually saw a sandhill crane)

The Mothman statue is a fun photo op. I was intrigued to see his plethora of metallic chest hair.

The museum is a fun way to spend a half hour, but we spent a lot more time in the Mason Jar Antiques Center just across the street which had great prices compared to the antique stores back home. Got a few items to strew around the house, and am kicking myself for not buying a $5 Shriner's fez when I had the chance.

A blanket which "came in contact with" Richard Gere and Debra Messing during the filming of the Mothman Prophecies". Gimme a break!

We were at the Ohio-WV border, and this was the furthest point west in our journey. We circled back east to head into Parkersburg, WV, for pampering overnight at the historic Blennerhasset Hotel.

It was by far the most luxurious and enjoyable lodging of our trip. The place is beautifully renovated and our room had every amenity: deliciously soft his and hers bathrobes, acres of pillows and comfy cotton sheets and a live jazz trio in the restaurant/lounge downstairs. It was Saturday night and the place was packed, so while it wasn't an intimate romantic dinner for us, it was an enjoyable and lively event. We lingered over a bottle of Gewurztraminer, a Caesar salad for me and a Tuna Napoleon for Dan, made specially gluten-free for him by the chef by substituting wonton skins for homemade potato chips.

We wanted to check out the beautiful used bookstore we saw on the drive into Parkersburg the next morning, but the Trans Allegheny Bookstore, housed in a former Carnegie Library, is, alas, closed. Apparently the previous owner died and there are some estate problems, so the 500,000 books inside are just rotting away.

Open basement window. Wonder what creatures get inside here.

From Parkersburg we traveled some highway miles to Clarksburg, where we had learned of the fabled West Virginia magical food: The Pepperoni Roll! We stopped off the highway to take in the ornate stonework of the downtown architecture when we noticed a whole lot of cars signalling to park at the curb. I looked up and saw a small sign for Tomaro's, an Italian bakery that was noted in one of our tourist pamphlets as having the most amazing Pepperoni rolls in the state. I stood in line where the counter ladies were doing a brisk business and just had time to glance along the bakery menu. There was no hope of scoring a gluten-free version for Dan, but I sampled two of these awesome little snacks, still warm from the oven, (and only $1.40 each!) and tried to suppress my whimpers in front of Dan.

They are not the little strombolis I had pictured in my mind, but a very soft, pillowy roll studded in the center with several rods of pepperoni. I have purchased a stick of pepperoni upon our return and will try to duplicate this WV road food awesomeness in a gluten-free semblance for my wonderful husband sometime soon. He did get a great Indian lunch further on down the road in the hilliest college town in America, Morgantown, so you don't have to feel too sorry for him.

That pretty much wraps it up for our On the Road adventures in VA and WV. I know I want to go back to West Virginia again. There were so many beautiful things to see and unusual places to explore. Yes, I saw some poverty and some faded industrial towns, but we have that too in upstate New York. Certainly I saw a lot of personality and not much of the homogenized strip mall morass that engulfs so much of the American landscape. I was amazed when I asked some of the other soccer parents that traveled to the Charleston tournament what they had done in town. Universally, they said they checked out the downtown mall or went out to dinner at Chili's or somesuch. Reminds me of the protagonist in Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist, who writes soothing travel reviews for people who don't want any unexpectedness in their travel plans. Can't wait to get sprung again for our next road trip!

Zeralda's Ogre: Vintage Fairy Tale and Prepubescent Foodie Inspiration

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 11:03:00 +0000

Like many others, I seek out some of the books I most vividly remember from my childhood for a bit of nostalgia and to see if reading them again as an adult provides the same experience. Zeralda's Ogre, written and illustrated by Tomi Ungerer, (NY: Harper and Row, 1967) was once such blast from my past that I recently found at a library book sale and yelped over at first sight. My copy is worn, torn and full of librarian desecrations, but it is now enshrined in a place of honor in my bookshelves at home.

I remember borrowing this book numerous times from my local library long after I outgrew a respectable age to check out children's picture books, but I loved reading it over and over and gazing at Ungerer's hilarious illustrations. It's a great fairy tale about a plucky young farm girl named Zeralda who conquers a kid-eating ogre with her culinary skills. She eventually ends up marrying him, which I remember thinking was icky even way back when, but I loved poring over the zany illustrations of what she cooked up. Think Brothers Grimm mashed together with the colorful, exuberant Sixties graphic design sense of Ungerer's better known artist colleagues like Milton Glaser or Seymour Chwast.

Zeralda's food is over-the-top "Gourmet", festooned with encrustations and garnishes. I remember my child self thinking a roast chicken with red high heels was rather fetching and it still makes me grin today.

How about that "Pompano a la Sarah Bernhardt" below? Ha! I really wanted to recreate this dish for my homage to Zeralda post here, but all those lurid colors had me stumped. I could make a crispy whole fried fish Asian-style with the head and tail still attached, lounging in a puddle of black bean sauce, but the sauce in the illustration really looks more like a chocolate sundae topping or mole. Molded rice timbales might work for those little cylinders surrounding the fish, with roasted asparagus curled up at the base, but then what would I do about those lavender, pink, mint, yellow and blue stripes adorning the fish body? It all sounded too complicated and frankly, somewhat inedible, the more I pondered the Pompano Project.

Instead, I decided to make something riotously colorful and festive but still tasty, and so I put together a version of Antipasto Kebabs to bring to a party recently. There are many versions that one can make, depending on the type of pickled, salty snacks you prefer, but the key is keeping a nice color balance and finding appropriate-length toothpicks to spear them with. I finally found a nice package of four-inch toothpicks (standard sized toothpicks are really too small and bigger wooden skewers go beyond finger food handling).

If Zeralda had made these skewers they probably would be sticking out of a purple cabbage or some kind of crazy edible ziggurat, but I chose an antique china plate instead for my base. And the ogres I served them to ate them all up.

Antipasto Kebabs a la Zeralda

Wooden toothpicks or skeweres (4 inches long)
1 jar giardiniera (those mixed Italian pickles-cauliflower, celery, peppers, tiny onions)
1 can medium size pitted black olives
1 can whole artichoke hearts packed in water, cut into fourths
8 oz. mozzarella, cut into 3/4 inch cubes
Grape tomatoes
6 slices Genoa salami, folded into fourths
6 slices cappicola, folded into fourths
1/2 stick pepperoni, cut into 1/4 inch slices
Whole basil leaves

Makes 30 skewers

These kebabs can also be drizzled with a little vinaigrette right before serving, and/or garnished with a little snipped parsley.

The artichoke hearts were a little floppy and the kebabs with giardiniera seemed to be gobbled up last, so I would go with more of the popular mozzarella and salami combinations in the future.

This post is my contribution to Novel Food, a semi-annual blog event hosted by my blogger buddy, Simona of Briciole. For Novel Food, one can submit a food post that derives inspiration by any literary work. If you would like to join in the fun, you can do so by the deadline of July 1, 2013, or wait until the next edition of Novel Food.

Eggs The Color of Tea

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Wed, 29 May 2013 15:02:00 +0000

Way back when, the Crispy Cook was a young sprig who served as an Au Pair for a family one summer. On my time off I would ride a bike into the little touristy beach town nearby and prowl around, but for a teen in a strange town with no money, there wasn't much to do besides poke around the local antique and souvenir shops. After a couple of these sojourns, I just ended up spending my down time relaxing and reading in my room.

The house was well-stocked with books, and being a foodie in training, I often picked a cookbook out of the shelves to peruse. I remember writing down many recipes out of the 1000 Recipe Chinese Cookbook by Gloria Bey Miller and being fascinated by the variety of intriguing ingredients and types of cuisine that were presented in its pages. One of the recipes I remember vividly was for Tea Eggs, hard-cooked eggs steeped in black tea and fragrant spices.

I never did get around to making these eggy delicacies until just last week, after having read the latest selection for Cook the Books, the online book club that I and three of my blogger buddies take turns co-hosting every other month. Our featured book this time 'round is The Color of Tea, by Hannah Tunnicliffe, and the author herself has graciously agreed to serve as the judge of our contributed posts about the book and the dishes we were inspired to make.

The Color of Tea is an interesting novel about an English woman married to an Australian man, who emigrate to the south China island of Macau after husband Pete lands a job supervising construction of a new gambling casino. Macau is a former Portuguese colony and the culture is an amalgam of Eastern and Western influences, as our heroine Grace discovers in her new life.

Grace and Pete are recovering from multiple rounds of unsuccessful infertility treatments, and as one way of clawing her way out of her malaise, Grace decides to open up a tea shop that specializes in delicately colored and flavored pastries, including many varieties of macarons, those delicate French almond and meringue confections. That's when I really got into the novel, with its descriptions of the customers and coworkers that Grace befriends. The reader finds out the intriguing back stories of these people and of Grace herself, which makes her a lot of more sympathetic than she was to me at the beginning of the tale. I also enjoyed learning more about the issues that foreign workers face which is an integral thread in the novel as well.

One thing that really irked me, though, was the front cover art. It's a delicious looking cover, alright, but given that our protagonist was a redhead, I kept waiting for some explanation of who the long-lashed brunette was featured on the cover. Shouldn't the art department have some conversations with the editorial department at the old publishing house before the book is cranked out?

Back to the Tea Eggs....Reading this book provided the perfect opportunity to finally eggs-periment with making Tea Eggs, as I imagined that might be something found on the menu at Lillian's, Grace's Macau cafe. I found a recipe over at Tiny Urban Kitchen, and it was simple enough: hard boil some eggs, then tap the shells to crack them all over and then simmer (for two hours!) in a mixture of black tea and star anise. I didn't have star anise, but did have some five-spice powder, so I made a small batch. They were beautiful colored with a crazed pattern of brown and white, but to me they weren't much different in taste from a plain old hardcooked egg. They were rubberier in fact, from all those extra minutes in the pot and had that greenish ring around the yolks that one gets from overcooking eggs. Ah well, at least I finally satisfied my curiosity about this dish and I remembered how delicious five-spice powder is, so I will utilizing that more in the kitchen.

Please join me in visiting the other Cook the Books posts about The Color of Tea back at the blog. Deb of Kahakai Kitchen is our wonderful hostess this round and she will be shortly posting the roundup of writings and recipes about our featured novel.

And feel free to join the regulars in our foodie book club in reading our June/July book pick, M.F.K. Fisher's collection of essays, "How to Cook a Wolf".

No Heartburn with a Nostalgic Eighties Gourmet Veggie Pasta

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:37:00 +0000

Earlier this year America lost a wonderful writer and filmmaker, Nora Ephron. I first encountered Ms. Ephron's writings through her collections of essays, like "Scribble, Scribble" and "Crazy Salad", books passed on to me by girlfriends whose passion for Ephron's humor and worldview became my own.

When I subsequently read through "Heartburn", (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), her semi-autobiographical novel about chef Rachel Samstat, who loses her way during her second husband's adultery, I knew she would always be a part of my pantheon of favorite authors.

I was delighted when "Heartburn" became the featured selection of Cook the Books, a bimonthly foodie book club that I and three of my good blogger buddies co-host. Simona, of the blog, Briciole, is the host of this round of Cook the Books, and she has enlisted Laura Lippstone, a big Ephron fan and blogger at Planet Lippstone, to serve as guest judge of the posts that we all write featuring our book selection and the foods we cook up inspired by our reading.

Dipping back into "Heartburn" was a nostalgic read: there was the nostalgia of seeing that great dust jacket art, the familiarity of sinking back into Ephron's words like having a cozy conversation with a great friend that one hasn't seen in a bunch of years, and nostalgia for the 1980s world that pervades its pages. Ephron describes Samstat's longing for the great produce sections of New York City supermarkets and gourmet shops that she left behind when she moved to Washington D.C. and that made me remember how arugula and twelve different kinds of peppers didn't used to be a common site at the average food store.

And then there was that passage that made me laugh out loud when I first read and reread it to my friends back in the early Eighties, and which I read and snorted through and reread to my husband now that we're in the 2000-teens.

"When I was in college, I had a list of what I wanted in a husband. A long list. I wanted a registered Democrat, a bridge player, a linguist with particular fluency in French, a subscriber to THE NEW REPUBLIC, a tennis player. I wanted a man who wasn’t bald, who wasn’t fat, who wasn’t covered with too much body hair. I wanted a man with long legs and a small ass and laugh wrinkles around the eyes. Then I grew up and settled for a low-grade lunatic who kept hamsters. At first I thought he was charming and eccentric. And then I didn’t. Then I wanted to kill him. Every time he got on a plane, I would imagine the plane crash, and the funeral, and what I would wear to the funeral and flirting at the funeral, and how soon I could start dating after the funeral.” (p.83)

My homage dish to Heartburn is one that celebrates the dazzling bounty of what the grocery store produce aisle features most any time of the year (alright, the locavore in me is conflicted about how great that bounty is in terms of carbon footprints). I made this great pasta dish after sniping the recipe from my cousin-in-law Diane, a fabulous cook. I added some cubed winter squash, because I have an abundance and threw in some diced tomatoes, too, cause I had some hanging around, but otherwise it's Diane's fantastic recipe. It's delicious and I can assure you that it won't give you Heartburn:

Diane's Eighties Gourmet Pasta

1 small eggplant, peeled and diced small
1 small Delicata squash (or other winter squash), peeled, seeded and cubed (about 1 cup)
1 each red and yellow bell pepper, diced small
1 red onion, peeled and diced
2 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced
3 plum tomatoes, medium chop
1/3 cup olive oil
1-1/2 tsp. kosher salt
1/2 tsp freshly ground pepper
1 lb. of your favorite small pasta shape (Diane uses orzo, I used GF rigatoni)

Pasta Dressing:

Juice of one lemon

1/3 cup olive oil
Kosher salt and pepper

4 scallions, minced (I used chives)
1/4 cup pine nuts, toasted (I used walnuts)
3/4 cup feta, diced (not crumbled)
1/2 cup fresh basil leaves, cut into julienne

Toss all of the vegetables in the first part above with garlic, 1/3 cup olive oil, salt and pepper on a cookie sheet. Coat thoroughly with oil and then roast in a 425 degree oven until browned, turning at least once with a spatula.

Cook pasta and drain. Toss with roasted vegetables. Mix dressing and pour over pasta and vegetables.

Gently toss in scallions, nuts, feta and basil.

Serve at room temperature. Serves 6-8.

Diane says to try throwing in some cremini mushrooms, yellow and green squash or zucchini, if you want.

Simona will be rounding up all the delicious Hearburn blog posts back at the Cook the Books site after today's deadline, so be sure to stop by and see what everyone cooked up. And don't forget to join us in reading, cooking and blogging up our thoughts about "The Hunger Games", by Suzanne Collins, both book and film, for our next round of Cook the Books!

A Picnic Farewell to the Saratoga Racing Season

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 17:14:00 +0000

It was an impromptu gathering of friends to celebrate the end of summer and a chance to hang outside watching beautiful thoroughbred race horses thunder past us. Our venue was the historic Saratoga Springs Race Track. on Labor Day, the last day of the summer racing season. The racetrack offered free admission for that day, which was a nice bonus. Dan and I went early in the morning to claim a picnic table at The Top of the Stretch (where the horses make their last straightaway sprint to the finish line) by draping our tablecloth on a table near the fence. Next time I will leave the vase of zinnias home, which, though it was kind of a classy addition, invited pesky yellow jackets and wasps to our table.

Husband Dan used to go more often in his youth and we were astonished at how many years had passed since we had attended the races. Neither one of us is much of a gambler, but it is always a fun time because the people watching is superb. You'll see fashions aplenty from nattily dressed and hatted ladies strolling through the clubhouse to cigar-chomping OTB regulars perusing the racing papers with great intensity.

We arrived early and brought our picnic fare and feasted like kings. The weather cooperated with sunshine and not too much humidity, though when the track guys came around in their track misters, we did enjoy the spray of water on our faces turning like sunflowers in the light.

Our friends brought a splendid array of delicious foods. We ate some luscious lemony deviled eggs (I'll have my friend Ellen's recipe posted up soon), rice and pasta salads, gazpacho, cheeses, fruit, and other edibles, all packed up in various non-glass containers as per track rules). Then there was this luscious cold zucchini salad, inspired by one of Laurie Colwin's essays from her book "Home Cooking".

You start with a platter of fried zucchini.

I used three largish zucchini, which kept me stationed over a large cast-iron frying pan for a good while the day before. I breaded my zucchini with a mixture of brown rice flour and chickpea flour. They were moist enough after slicing to not require any eggy painting to make the flour adhere. After I drained and cooled these fried zucchini slices, I layered them with dabs of an 8 oz. log of goat cheese, chopped parsley and basil, and sliced bits of a 12 oz. jar of roasted red peppers. Salt and pepper went between the layers, they got a splash of olive oil and vinegar and that was a wonderful salad that was delicious at room temperature the next day and kept well under the hot temperatures during our al fresco track picnic.

Now, to focus more attention on Colwin's delightful book, Home Cooking, which is the featured selection for Cook the Books, the online foodie book club started by me, my buddy Deb of Kahakai Kitchen and my buddy Jo of Food Junkie, Not Junk Food. This book was published in 1988, and has been in my home library since shortly thereafter. Colwin was just a bewitching writer; she was witty, self-deprecating, passionate about the things she loved, and her descriptions of dinner parties (even the ones that went awry) are mouthwatering.

My favorite essay is entitled Kitchen Horrors, and I can read and reread this comic chapter and still chuckle out loud. There are so many disasters described in its pages, but none more hilarious than the strange English dessert Colwin attempted to make for an Easter dinner, called Suffolk Pond Pudding. It involved a sugar-encrusted lemon atop some butter and sugar, wrapped in a suet crust and then steamed in a kettle for FOUR HOURS. Well, that's enough description for me, and I certainly wouldn't want to have to ingest it, but Colwin sallied forth and when she produced her dessert, the comments on its appearances included suggestions that it looked like a baked hat and the Alien. The taste produced further editorial commentary: "This tastes like lemon-flavored bacon fat", "I'm sure it's wonderful, I mean, in England", and the straight-forward "This is awful". Ha!

Sadly, Colwin died at the tragically young age of 48 from a heart attack (her descriptions of her go-to comfort food, rosti, may have been a complicating factor), so there are not many other Colwin titles to read through, though there is a sequel to this book, More Home Cooking, to look forward to.

My zucchini salad was inspired by an essay in Home Cooking, entitled Red Peppers. In it, Colwin describes a favorite dish from an East Side restaurant that she didn't get to often enough. It involved layers of sauteed zucchini slices and pimento strips garnished with olive oil, fresh garlic and lemon juice, which sounds great too.

Deb is hosting this current round of Cook the Books, so be sure to check back at our book club website after the September 24th deadline to see Deb's roundup of all the Home Cooking posts.

Curried Zucchini Coins

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 08:07:00 +0000

It's that time of the garden year when bowls of cukes, zukes and tomatoes overtake the kitchen real estate. A really hot and dry July burned out my broccoli and greens, except for a hardy patch of escarole in some semi-shade, but our sun-loving vegetables are really enjoying this warm patch of weather.

I've been keeping up fairly well with the veggie bounty, making batches of pesto, zucchini bread and muffins, sauteed grated zucchini with basil and garlic, zucchini stewed with tomato and garlic, and other summer zuke standards in our repertoire, but then the other day I tried a few different spices with my zukes and husband Dan said that the recipe was a keeper. I tried it out again the next day and have to concur. Maybe you will too.

Curried Zucchini Coins

1 Tbsp. butter
1 Tbsp. olive oil
1 tsp. mild curry powder
1/2 tsp. celery salt
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 small onion, peeled, halved and cut into thin rings (we grew purple onions this year)
6-7 small zucchini (about 1.5 - 2 inch diameter) topped, tailed and cut into thin coins

Melt butter in large skillet. Add olive oil and let it bubble up. Add in curry powder, celery salt, onions and garlic and cook, stirring constantly, for 1-2 minutes. Add in zucchini coins and cook over medium heat, stirring often, for 15 minutes, or until onions are soft and golden and the zucchini is floppy, but still has some bite. You don't want to overcook tender, young zucchini.

Please use small zucchini for this dish, as the bigger, older zucchini that one tends to overlook in the patch under the leaves will be too seedy and watery.

Makes 6-8 servings.

The curry, celery salt and sauteed onions lend such a nice earthy, mellow taste to this dish.

I am sending over a virtual plate of this delicious way to deal with zucchini abundance to Susan the Well-Seasoned Cook, who is hosting Weekend Herb Blogging this week. Weekend Herb Blogging is a long-standing weekly food blog event hosted by Haalo of Cook Almost Anything that celebrates edible plant ingredients.

How to Make Gluten Free Crumpets

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 20:58:00 +0000

It's October in the genteel city of Charleston, South Carolina, and tea shop owner Theodosia Browning is not only busy with her regular business, but there's an important catering job to plan and carry out with aplomb: the city's annual candlelight historic homes tour. Unfortunately, while the blackberry scones were a hit with the partygoers, Theodosia's tea gets a bad reputation when one of the guests is found to have dropped dead over his cup and saucer.

That's the set up for the first book in author Laura Childs' Tea Shop Mystery series, Death by Darjeeling, and the current selection of the online foodie book club Cook the Books. I am hosting this round of Cook the Books and am collecting submissions until July 30, 2012, after which time our guest judge, author Laura Childs herself, will be picking a winner to receive the coveted Cook the Books winner's badge and a copy of her latest Tea Shop mystery (#13), Agony in the Leaves. Cook the Books participants read the featured book, blog about it, and then cook up something inspired by their reading. New participants are always welcome, so feel free to stop by Cook the Books to find out more about the fun.

This is the quintessential cozy mystery, full of atmosphere, a fairly bloodless crime, quirky characters and then there's the interesting tidbits about tea making, tea varieties and the mouthwatering Indigo Tea Shop tea time treats!

For my Death by Darjeeling entry, I was inspired to make up a basket of crumpets. Now, before last week I couldn't tell you the difference between a crumpet and a trumpet, but after a little tea-soaked research (several cuppas in hand while I pored through my cookbook collection and looked online) it appears that the crumpet originated as very holey griddle cake that morphed into something a bit grander and yeastier on Victorian tea tables. They have been described as the love child of a pancake and an English muffin, with the main point being that there must be many, many airy pockets in the crumpet either on the top side or within, when split, that must be slathered with butter, jam, honey or golden syrup.

I found a recipe for Gluten-Free crumpets in the 2006 edition of the Glens Falls Regional Celiac Support Group cookbook "Tried and True Recipes", and with a little adjustment here and there, I made a very satisfactory batch of these fluffy little tea accompaniments. Just look at those gorgeous little air pockets above! These crumpets were so good straight out of the oven, split and served up with softened butter and some homemade strawberry jam, but they were just as good the next day when we toasted them and used them for sandwich buns.

Gluten Free Crumpets

1 cup warm water
1 Tbsp. dry yeast
1 tsp. sugar

Vegetable shortening

1/2 cup chickpea flour (also known as besan)
1/2 cup cornstarch
1/2 cup tapioca starch
1 tsp. xanthan gum
1/2 tsp. salt
1-1/2 tsp. Egg Replacer (found at most health food stores)

1 Tbsp. sugar
2 tsp. poppyseed
1 egg, at room temperature, lightly beaten
3 Tbsp. melted butter
1/2 tsp. white vinegar

Mix warm water, yeast and 1 tsp. sugar together and let stand in warm place until foamy, about 5-10 minutes.

Grease 6 egg rings or English muffin rings (I bought egg rings with the handles above pretty cheaply at a restaurant supply store, but you could also make your own from carefully cutting and filing down the rough edges of some small, 3 inch diameter, tin cans, like the ones you buy tuna fish, pineapple rings or clams in). Place greased rings on a baking parchment-lined baking sheet.

Whisk together chickpea flour, cornstarch, tapioca starch, xanthan gum, salt and egg replacer until well blended. If your chickpea flour comes out of the bag in small clumps, make sure to run it through a sieve first to make sure the flours will blend smoothly).

In a large mixing bowl, blend together 1Tbsp. sugar, egg, melted butter, vinegar, poppyseed and yeast-water. Beat in 1/3 of the dry ingredients and beat until smooth. Add in another third and then blend and repeat until dough is silky. It will be a bit moist, but then when you divide it and pour it into the greased rings, they will contain the dough and give it its shape when it rises and bakes.

Cover dough in the rings with, what else, a tea towel, and let it rise in a warm place, until the batter doubles (30-45 minutes).

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Bake your crumpets for 18-20 minutes or until browned on top and crumpets have pulled away slightly from their metal girdles.

Makes 6 large crumpets. May be eaten hot or cold. Store in airtight container once cooled.

Having a spot of tea (lemon balm from the garden) with these crumpets on the side made for such a civilized afternoon break; almost as good as a Hobbit's Second Breakfast. And this project made for good excuse to break out some underutilized linens and doilies to make our tea break even more enjoyable.

One thing about crumpets. There appears to be some very naughty British slang usage for the term tea and crumpets, something Theodosia and Company would not likely approve of, so be forewarned, my fellow Americans, before you start spouting off about how much you are looking forward to eating these in bed or something else potentially embarrassing.

I hope you will join my booking and cooking friends in reading Death by Darjeeling (I've devoured books no. 2 and 3 in the series already and am savoring the thought of diving into no. 4 later this week) and joining us at Cook the Books. I will post the roundup of all the posts for this book selection shortly after the July 30 deadline over at the CTB website, so be sure to pop on by for a spot of tea and some good reading.

Adventures in Lickable Wallpaper with Roald Dahl and Charlie Bucket

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 19:58:00 +0000

It is time to Cook the Books once again with the best darn tootin' online foodie book club, and this time round we are reading that childhood classic, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. I have seen a couple of different illustrated versions of this book but I think Quentin Blake's artwork invokes the playful spirit of Dahl's words just right.

I zipped through all of Dahl's juvenile novels as a youngster and freshly enjoying reading them aloud to my daughters when they were small. We all especially loved The Twits, his book about a thoroughly obnoxious, smelly man and wife who get their comeuppance from the children, monkeys and birds they torment.

It was a pleasure to dip in again with little Charlie Bucket and his sprightly Grandpa Joe as they explore the wonders of Willy Wonka's amazing Chocolate Factory with a bunch of rotten kids and their equally revolting parents. The kids represent several vices: Augustus Gloop is a glutton, Mike Teavee embodies rudeness and lack of imagination (he watches TV all day long), Veruca Salt is the eptitome of the spoiled brat (and veruca means wart, I just found out, ha!) and Violet Beauregarde is pushy. I would recommend this witty book to anyone looking for a wacky, slightly sardonic romp, old and young alike.

With Cook the Books, we read our selected book and then come up with some kind of dish inspired by our reading. The book is full of all kinds of fantastical sweets, but I was most taken with Wonka's description of his Lickable Wallpaper for Nurseries:

"Lovely stuff, lickable wallpaper!" cried Mr. Wonka, rushing past. "It has pictures of fruits on it - bananas, apples, oranges, grapes, pineapples, strawberries, and snozzberries..."

"Snozzberries?" said Mike Teavee.

"Don't interrupt!" said Mr. Wonka. "The wallpaper has pictures of all these fruits printed on it, and when you lick the picture of a banana, it tastes of banana. When you lick a strawberry, it tastes of strawberry. And when you lick a snozzberry, it tastes just exactly like a snozzberry..."

"But what does a snozzberry taste like?"

"You're mumbling again," said Mr. Wonka. "Speak louder next time. On we go! Hurry up!" (pp.104-105 of my copy)

I'm not sure what I think a snozzberry would taste like. I keep seeing an extra "h" in there and thinking "schnozz-berry" and that conjures up awful suggestions of nose boogers. So I wasn't going to go the snozzberry route.

However, I also possess another wonderful book, Roald Dahl's Revolting Recipes (by Felicity Dahl and Josie Fison), which is a cookbook that brings to life many of the wild foods discussed in Dahl's oeuvre (with the bonus of featuring Quentin Blake as illustrator again). There is a beautiful rendition of lickable wallpaper there made with an apple-gelatin puree, which, after being rolled out and dried, is like a sticky sort of fruit leather that can be decorated with various fruits and edible garnishes.

Continuing on with my exploration of lickable wallpaper, I found a web link to a BBC show featuring chef Heston Blumenthal and his creation of a Chocolate Factory Feast in which celebrity guests got to lick up some tomato soup and prawn cocktail flavored wallpaper. That was getting more interesting to me, though I do have some hygienic concerns.

First, unless you tear off the sheets of this lickable wallpaper or have some sort of crazy conveyor belt to keep fresh spots of wallpaper available for new lickers, there will be sodden, bacteria-laden patches that someone else may inadvertently plant their lips on. I just keep thinking of petri dishes or flypaper.

Then I thought about licking wallpaper and then tearing off a strip to eat. I thought about those homemade flyers that have strips at the bottom with people's phone numbers to rip off, and then that got me thinking about making edible wallpaper using nori, those sheets of roasted seaweed that one uses to roll sushi. With some inspiration from these Internet recipes: here and here, I set off to experiment with some toasted nori as my lickable wallpaper base.

Nori is certainly handsome enough to hang as edible wallpaper on its own, but I thought about painting it with all sorts of condiments from the inexhaustible supply that festoons my larder and fridge and then toasting it to a crackling, CRISPY-edged goodness. I get these bags of Japanese seaweed snacks at Albany's Asian markets and they are so addictive. They come in Tom Yum, Tomato, Wasabi, Spicy Squid and Plain Salt flavors and I am hooked.

Surrounded by a counter full of sauces, seeds and spices, I set to work on my

Lickable Nori Wallpaper Snacks:

First, I preheated my oven to 250 degrees F. Then I painted, drizzled or sprinkled on my nori wallpaper adornments and baked each batch for ten minutes.

Experiment One: I mixed a little Thai green curry paste with soy sauce and painted that on two pieces of nori. One also got a sprinkle of sesame seeds. Result: Too salty, though I was pleased to see that the sesame seeds adhered to the nori after baking.

Experiment Two: I beat up an egg white and brushed it on two pieces of nori. One was sprinkled with Five-Spice Powder and the other was dusted with Smoked Paprika. Verdict: Good adhesion of spices, both flavors good.

Experiment Three: Some leftover pesto spread on one sheet of nori. Some chili-garlic-black bean paste spread on the other. Verdict: Both tasted good, but they result in soggy nori centers.

Experiment Four: Drops of liquid smoke on one sheet of nori and splash of hot pepper sauce on another. Both spritzed with Dr. Bragg's Liquid Aminos (it's like soy sauce in a spray bottle, very handy). Verdict: Liquid Smoke nori is inedible. Hot pepper sauce version okay.

Experiment Five: Two sheets of nori brushed with egg white and sprinkled with sesame seeds. Quick shot of Dr. Bragg's to serve as fixative. Verdict: Best tasting and looking version. Not too salty, but pleasantly so.

Ultimately, this experiment with lickable, edible wallpaper proved that the simplest adornments proved the best. Just a simple spritz of Dr. Bragg's or a painting of beaten egg white and a sprinkling of sesame seeds made the CRISPIEST, tastiest toasted nori snacks, though for visual beauty, I must say I fancy the nori with chili, garlic, and black bean paste. And while I thought about making my family line up to the kitchen wall to chomp off a portion of these nori snacks, I ended up snipping them into strips with kitchen shears and offering them up a bit more elegantly.

Though I sped through a full ten-sheet pack of nori, this would be a splendid way to use up leftover nori sheets after a bout of sushi-making.

Our Cook the Books hostess for this round, Deb of Kahakai Kitchen, will be back after the March 26 deadline to post a roundup of all the great dishes. You still have time to join in the fun, or you could wait until the next round of Cook the Books when we will be reading "The United States of Arugula" by David Kamp.

Cooking Vanessa's Beans at Frankie's Place

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 12:18:00 +0000

Reading Frankie's Place: A Love Story, by Jim Sterba (NY: Grove Press, 2003) makes you feel like you are visiting friends at their summer camp on Maine's Mount Desert island. Sterba's book is an atmospheric account of his courtship of, marriage to and many felicitous summers spent with fellow author Frances "Frankie" FitzGerald. Sterba is a former NY Times and Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent and FitzGerald is a Pulitzer Prize winning nonfiction writer, both of whom found love later in their busy, globe-hopping lives.

The book revolves around the slower pace of summers spent at Frankie's place, a family-and mosquito-shared cabin in the woods near the shore. It might be summer, but there is still a schedule to adhere to: Frankie is an advocate of morning dips in Maine's icy waters, calisthenics and excessively long hikes, which Sterba loving refers to as FitzGerald Survival School. There is also much writing to be done (Frankie likes a manual typewriter for that task), reading, sailing, mushroom hunting, mussel gathering and other foraging/shopping for provisions.

There's also an amusing chapter about the author's search for WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) on this island historically populated with many of these folks. He researches the subject at the library, at a private swimming club, and in other prowlings around the village of Northeast Harbor. They elude him, particularly the wily subspecies, the High WASP, until a chat with a friend clues him in to the fact that he married one. Oh.

Punctuating all the prose is Sterba's recipes - offered in somewhat slapdash prose style, with plenty of room for variations according to what the pair might have rustled up from the ocean, container garden or woods. I have festooned my copy of the book with lots of bookmarks to hold my place for various recipes, but one dish called out to me immediately. Sterba describes a warm bean salad that he first tried at a friend's wedding. He pestered the caterer like a good newspaperman until she gave up her secrets and so I offer to you my own adapted version that made us all very full and happy at Chez Crispy Cook.

Vanessa's Beans (or Frankie's n' Beans)
-adapted from a recipe in Jim Sterba's Frankie's Place: A Love Story

1 (l lb.) bag dried small white navy beans (I used red kidney beans)

2 Tbsp. olive oil
1 quartered onion
3 cloves peeled garlic
2 bay leaves

Other aromatics of your choice (I threw in celery trimmings, carrot peels, onion skins, and parsley stems from my soup stock stash in the freezer). Sterba recommends sliced ginger, bacon, rosemary and thyme branches)
2 cups vegetable broth

2 Tbsp. red wine vinegar
Juice of 1/2 lemon
1/4 cup olive oil
1 cup chopped fresh herbs (I used parsley and chives)

1 cup chopped red and yellow bell peppers (I used the trimmings from chopping up pepper squares to grill on skewers during our first spring barbeque)

Salt and pepper to taste

The night before, cover beans with cold water and let sit out at room temperature to soak overnight. Change water 2-3 times.

The next day, drain beans and place in a large, heavy soup pot with 2 Tbsp. olive oil, onion, garlic, bay leaves and vegetable broth. I added in the soup trimmings as noted above to further enrich my bean broth. Bring to a boil and then simmer along merrily until beans are to desired softness (about 1-1/2 hours).

Drain off and reserve bean broth. Let beans cool a bit, and then fish out all the large bits of veggie detritus (onion skins, celery stubs, parsley stems, bay leaves, carrot peels, herb branches). The garlic should have become quite soft so you can just "moosh" that in, to use a favorite Sterba cooking term.

Mix up a vinaigrette with 1/4 cup olive oil, lemon juice, fresh herbs, and peppers. Add in some of the reserved bean broth (about 1/2 cup). Let stand for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Gently dress the beans and season with salt and pepper to taste.

Serve warm or at room temperature.

Vanessa's Beans are some good frugal eating and I even have leftover bean broth to use in other recipes (I'm thinking about some pasta fazool later on). I have sampled and made many other bean salads, but I think the key here is that the beans are warm and infused with so many aromatic flavorings in their cooking liquid that they really melt in your mouth.

One serving of this lovely dish is being sent over to my friend Simona at Briciole for her semi-annual Novel Food event, where you will find lots of other interesting posts about various books and the recipes inspired by them after her March 18 deadline.

A second serving of Vanessa's Beans is being sent to another blogger compadre, Heather of Girlichef, who is guest hosting My Legume Love Affair #45. This monthly blog event celebrates legumes in all their glory and is the brainchild of Susan the Well Seasoned Cook.

Cooking Along with our Local Gluten-Free Celebrity Chef, Elizabeth Barbone and a Giveaway

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 12:29:00 +0000

I first met Upstate New York's own Gluten Free cooking diva Elizabeth Barbone at a celiac support group meeting back in 2007 when I first feeling my (gluten-free) oats as a GF cook. She was a guest speaker at our meeting, and she bedazzled me with her cool purple Kitchen Aid mixer, the cookies and cupcakes she made for us to sample and her lively presentation.

I bought a copy of her "Easy Gluten-Free Baking" cookbook on the spot and took it home to pore over and cook from. She kindly allowed me to reprint her recipe for Lemon Bars in a subsequent post, which are a pitch perfect combination of sweet and tart flavors over a buttery crust base. I use that baking cookbook often, as it contains a lot of baking standards, from Pumpkin Bread to Brownies, and a few unusual recipes (Garlic Muffins, Hummingbird Cake) that are fun to try. Barbone's recipes don't make you crawl from market to health food store to food co-op tracking down oddball ingredients to make her recipes and her instructions are precise and have worked for me every time.

In addition to maintaining her GlutenFreeBaking website, giving GF cooking classes and demonstrations, and writing a weekly Gluten Free Tuesday column at Serious Eats, Elizabeth has been working on her second cookbook, "How to Cook Gluten-Free: Over 150 Recipes That Really Work", (Lake Isle Press, $27.95) which will be published later this month. Elizabeth sent me an email to ask if I'd join some other bloggers in a Cook Along event featuring several of the recipes from this new book and my immediate response was a high-pitched yipping that startled my sweet Martha dog awake from her guard position snoozing at my feet.

I was able to make three out of the four recipes she sent along and each one was great. I first tried out an Avocado and Grapefruit Salad with Citrus Vinaigrette and that was very tasty. I used a Pomelo, a grapefruit cousin, as I had one-half languishing from a recent Asian market field trip and that worked out really well. The Pomelo is both a bit less juicy and less sweet than a Red Grapefruit, as called for in Barbone's recipe. This was a really refreshing salad and we made it twice more when avocados were on sale at our supermarket.

I was intrigued by the next recipe I tried, Elizabeth's No-Rise Pizza Crust recipe. Dan is usually the Pizza Maker in our house, as he has the patience for yeasty, slow food items, but since this recipe didn't call for yeast and the need for allowing the dough to rise, I forged ahead. The dough was easy to assemble and work with. I rolled it out and patted into the rectangle shape called for in the recipe and then slathered on mozzarella, Parmesan, sauteed garlic and broccoli and some spices to make a White Broccoli Pizza.

As noted in Elizabeth's recipe text, this crust can stand up to a lot of toppings, and that was certainly true as our slices buckled but didn't break under all that cheesy goodness. The crust didn't get as CRISPY as I would have liked, even baking the pizza on a heated pizza stone, so I think next time I will divide the dough in half and make two thinner, smaller pizzas. I love the ease of this recipe for busy weeknight dining, though. You can't beat slapping some pizza dough together and baking it up what my grandpa used to call a "Hot Pie", within 45 minutes.

The final recipe I took out for a test drive was our favorite, Powdered Sugar Doughnut Muffins. These little mini muffins are nicely spiced with nutmeg and then rolled in powdered sugar while they are still warm. They are fantastic little sweet bites, paired with a tall glass of cold milk. Plus they are extremely cute.

Elizabeth will be rounding up the other posts in this Cook Along to celebrate the publication of her new cookbook, so check over at her website, GlutenFreeBaking.com later to see what other people cooked up.

I am also pleased as punch to be able to offer a giveaway of a copy of Elizabeth's new cookbook to one of my Crispy Cook readers. To enter this giveaway, leave a comment below telling me about something great and gluten-free that you have recently made. You can get a second entry in this giveaway by stopping by the new Crispy Cook facebook page and liking it and then telling me that you did so in another comment. I will pick a random winner after the deadline of March 21, 2012, midnight Eastern Standard Time. This giveaway is limited to U.S. residents.

Good luck with the giveaway!

Disclaimer: I received some advance recipes from Elizabeth Barbone's new cookbook and an opportunity to offer one copy of the cookbook to one of my readers from the publisher. However, I was not obligated to post about these recipes or the cookbook and my comments about them are completely my own.

The Anna Roundup: Cabbage Soup, Pampushky, Pierogi and and a Giveaway, From Belarus with Love

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 02:10:00 +0000

As noted here in my post last month, my creative mother, Carol Marie Davis, recently published a book about her maternal grandmother, Anna: Heart of a Peasant.

It tells the story of our intrepid ancestor as she made a new life for herself in America after being banished by her family in her small village in Belarus. Anna's story is not a tragedy, however. She emigrated to a new home that she cherished, married, raised a family of her own, and nourished and healed them with vegetables and herbs grown in her garden. There are some beautiful illustrations and even a few heirloom recipes at the back of the book

As a surprise Christmas present for my mom, I sent copies of her book to five of my blogger friends from Cook the Books, our online foodie book club, to read and review, and they very kindly obliged with great posts about the book as well as their forays into some pretty tasty Russian cooking.

My Australian expat buddy Alicia blogs in England at Foodycat. Alicia is always an adventurer in the kitchen and like our heroine Anna, is expert at putting up the garden harvest. Her Anna post led to a glorious pot of borscht studded with chunks of vegetables and short ribs, accompanied by some pampushky, a sort of savory doughnut rolled in garlic and salt. Where's my spork!

Traveling halfway around the globe, we find ourselves next in Hawaii at Claudia's blog, Honey from Rock. Claudia felt a bit of kinship with Anna and her gardening, preserving, wine-making ways, and notes "Peasants rule!" She took up the challenge of making Potato and Cheese Pierogis and they came out quite splendidly, bathed in a little emerald green parsley butter.

Heather the Girlichef is a blogging dynamo with a big heart and a great writing style. She immediately said yes when I approached her about reviewing this book and her phrase about resonating with Anna's "hands in the earth growing food" is just beautiful prose. Heather set about making a pot of Garlicky Chicken Soup and reports that this foodie medicine may have warded off a few colds that were brewing around her home.

The rest of our book reviewing band fell in love with Anna's Cabbage Soup, though all three pots of soup came out quite differently:

Simona of Briciole, is an Italian-born California resident, and used Savoy Cabbage and home grown Red Russian Kale (how appropriate) topped with a dollop of homemade kefir in her rendition of this hearty vegetable soup. Simona writes that she may be inspired to start recording some of her father's many stories and I can enthusiastically second this idea! Perhaps we will have another interesting memoir to read soon?.....

My Cook the Books co-founder and co-host, the effervescent Deb of Kahakai Kitchen in Honolulu, also tried out a cabbage soup recipe a la Anna, though her version was a little less sugary, a little more lemony and enhanced with a scoop of brown rice. Deb may also be providing us with some future recipes and/or memories of her Scandinavian immigrant forbears at her blog. I sure hope so!

Finally, there's my version of Anna's Cabbbage Soup from the recent archives of The Crispy Cook. Like Deb, I cut down on the sugar, lessened the cooking time (I like my "kapusti", or cabbage, more al dente) and made up a pot of love at my own little dacha.

Thanks to all my wonderful friends who helped celebrate the publication of my mother's new book. I offer you my heartfelt thanks and am glad that you enjoyed Anna's stories and recipes. My mom has been excitedly reading all your posts and even stirred herself to learn how to leave comments on your awesome blogs, no mean feat!

Giveaway Announcement:

To keep the book party going, I will be offering a copy of Anna: Heart of a Peasant to one of you now. Just leave a comment below (for an extra entry LIKE The Crispy Cook on Facebook ) and leave a comment below telling me about your action, and I'll randomly pick a winner and send out a copy of my mom's book to you, anywhere in the world. I will pick a random winner from the comments below after a deadline of Feb. 29, 2012.

And for all you readers who can't get enough cabbage soup, please feel free to join us at Cook the Books as we read and cook from Roald Dahl's classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Deb of Kahakai Kitchen is the host for this round, in which we find our central character, Charlie Bucket, staving off hunger with his family in a cold house with meals of cabbage soup, boiled potatoes and bread with margarine (on a good payday!) before Charlie wins the lucky Golden Ticket in a bar of chocolate that allows him to tour this fabulous Willy Wonka candy factory. Cook the Books submissions are due March 25, 2012 and you can find out all about how to join in the fun with our book club regulars over at the Cook the Books website.

Creamy Black Bean Soup with Roasted Fennel

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Certain members of the Crispy household have been having some tender tummies and medically-authorized restricted diets as of late. This has presented a bit of a challenge to the Crispy Cook, who, in addition to having the gluten-free diet to consider, has had to produce low-acid, low-fat , tomato, onion and garlic-free meals. I have even had to bone up on the liquid diet in preparation for one of us to have some medical tests.

Now, we love us our spice, alliums, acids and fats in our family, so this is new territory for me. I've been consulting my cookbook library in an effort to keep everybody happy and healthy during this new food adventure. While some of us would be perfectly content sucking down Italian ices and popsicles 24/7, this is hardly a nutritious diet, so I've been constantly referring to the list of approved vegetables, fruits and seasonings, to try to come up with restorative and satisfying edibles.

There is good news that more and more, you can find grocery coupons for healthier foods. Enter this tasty cup of black bean soup. Not the most photogenic of potages, but this batch was so yummy, I will be making it again when we are back to eating our regular menu. It is soothing, full of vitamins and is pleasantly sweet. Though most other black bean soup recipes feature lots of spice, this variety is flavorful in a botanical, herbaceous kind of way.

The home run ingredient was roasted fennel. I chopped up a large bulb of fennel, feathery fronds, chunky stems and all, doused it with 1 Tbsp. of olive oil and a pinch of salt in a covered ceramic baking dish, and then baked it at 375 degrees F for 20 minutes. Then I uncovered the baking dish and roasted it another 10 minutes to let it brown up. We ate some of that as a side dish for our supper and then the next day was dedicated to a liquid diet, so I decided to add the leftovers in with some sauteed carrots and celery to a simple vegetarian black bean soup and the fennel joined with the fresh taste of its celery cousin and the whole thing was really sublime.

Black Bean Soup with Roasted Fennel

2 cups dried black beans, soaked in water to cover for several hours
(you could also use 2 (14 oz.) cans of cooked black beans, undrained)

1 large bulb fennel, roasted (see above)

1 Tbsp. olive oil
2 carrots, peeled and finely chopped
3 stalks celery, finely chopped

5 cups vegetable stock

Salt to taste

Drain beans and cover with fresh water. Bring to a boil and lower heat to simmer. Cook until softened, about 45 minutes.

Meanwhile, in another large pot heat olive oil. Add carrots and celery and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened, about 7 minutes. Add roasted fennel and vegetable stock and bring to boil. Cover and simmer while beans finish cooking.

Add cooked black beans to the soup pot. Stir together to blend and add salt to taste. I then stuck in my immersion blender to puree the soup. You could eat it like that or go further and strain out any vegetable bits if you are on a liquid diet, like we were this past week.

Serve hot. Makes 8 servings.

I am going to send a cup of this luscious black bean soup over to my blogger buddy Deb of Kahakai Kitchen, for her weekly Souper Sunday roundup and another cup over to Sweet Artichoke who is this month's host for My Legume Love Affair, a blog event created by Susan the Well-Seasoned Cook. Disclaimer: I received compensation for adding the link to the third paragraph of this post.

In Which I Become an Outlaw Cook with John Thorne

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:19:00 +0000

Running a used bookstore for the last fifteen years has educated me about which books are treasured, or perhaps guarded is a better word, by their owners and hardly ever relinquished back into the market. I rarely get any books in the shop about blacksmithing, stained glass or rare coins; such classics as To Kill a Mockingbird, Catch-22, The Cat in the Hat and Gone with the Wind don't show up to be traded; and works by a select group of authors and illustrators like Shirley Jackson, W.H. Auden, Edward Gorey, Kurt Vonnegut, Tasha Tudor and Philip K. Dick are seldom brought to our doors.

Add food writer John Thorne's books to this elite list. I was first made aware of his work many years ago by my bibliophilic friend Myra, who asked me to keep an eye out for Thorne's books. After at least a decade, I had yet to find any such titles in my shop or out book hunting, until one day when I was on a holiday in Great Barrington, Massachusetts at Yellow House Books, and spied a copy of Outlaw Cook (NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux: 1992), a collection of food essays written with his wife Matt Lewis Thorne. I snapped it up and devoured it with great pleasure over the next several weeks and am waiting to savor another of his books, Mouth Wide Open, which is at the top of my bedside room reading pile.

Now I know why Thorne's books never show up in the shop. They are to be savored and reread, bookmarked and propped open on the kitchen counter, and reread again. I chose Outlaw Cook for the current round of Cook the Books, the online foodie book club started by me, and two lovely blogger friends: Deb of Kahakai Kitchen in Hawaii and Johanna of Food Junkie, Not Junk Food in Greece. For this bimonthly blog event, participants are asked to read our chosen book, blog about it and cook something up that is inspired by our reading. Anyone can join the "regulars" in this book club by posting and then leaving a comment at the Cook the Books site. The deadline for this round is January 23, 2012, and I am delighted that our featured author, John Thorne, will be reviewing the submitted posts and picking a winner to receive the coveted CTB winner's badge.

Thorne's prose is an interesting mixture of the erudite and the commonplace. One will learn much about a lot of different subjects, and need to look up many things along the way, but the writing is simple and direct and full of great quotes and turns of phrase. There are many intriguing essays in the book which explore different dishes and cultural traditions, some autobiographical asides, reviews of cookbooks and examinations of food personalities. Outlaw Cook devotes many pages to bread baking and outdoor hearths and there's a gloriously evocative chapter on Russians' love affair with mushrooms.

I really like Thorne's approach to trying out a new recipe or ingredient. Once something strikes his fancy, he's on an adventure to study it and make it his own. He reads about it extensively, cooks up many variations and then presents the reader with his findings. Whether it's hunting for the perfect meatball, simple pasta dishes, black beans and rice, pea soup or the best thing to do with a bounty of summer raspberries, there's lots of research and development in the Thorne kitchen and library and plenty of references offered up for further exploration.

As an avid member of the Order of the Stinking Rose, I was particularly entranced by the essay on garlic soup. I've made creamy, decadently rich garlic soups and delicate garlic and rice soups, and thought that covered much of the culinary territory on that subject. Not so fast, says Thorne, with his musings on various Mediterranean permutations of garlicky broths. There's the paprika and saffron-laced Sopa de Ajo of Spain, France's Soupe a l'Ail Bonne Femme studded with potato and tomato, herb-redolent Aigo Bouido from Provence and even a cold Garlic and Walnut Soup with Fresh Goat Cheese. Most of these soups require a crusty piece of toasted bread sunk at the bottom of the soup bowl, and since my gluten-free breadbaking production neither produces quantity nor quality (witness the hockey puck "fluffy bun"example in the photo below), I turned to my trusty recipe card file for a breadless garlic soup recipe instead.

My garlic soup recipe is of origin unknown, most likely copied out of a cookbook borrowed from the public library during my foodie youth, but I tinkered with it enough to confidently call it my own adaptation. It's a very herb-redolent broth, perfect for bolstering the winter-ravaged immune system and imparting a warm glow after a day battling the wind and cold. Just be sure to share it with those around you, since "...garlic is the ravisher, dominating those who would eat it, and then crowing that subjugation to the world through the body's every pore." (p. 120)

Herb and Garlic Soup

1 head garlic, separated into cloves
2 quarts water
2 tsp. salt

2 whole cloves
1/4 tsp. dried sage, crumbled
1/2 tsp. dried thyme, crumbled
1 bay leaf
2 Tbsp. parsley, chopped coarsely

2 egg yolks
3 Tbsp. olive oil

Grated Parmesan

Bring water and salt to a boil and drop in garlic cloves. Boil 1 minute, then fish out garlic and peel. Cut off root tip and cut into chunks. Throw it back into the simmering pot with the herbs and spices.

Bring to a boil again and then lower heat and simmer 30 minutes. Strain soup to remove herbs and then pour broth back into pot. Finely mash the cooked garlic and put back into the soup pot. Bring to a low simmer.

Beat egg yolks with olive oil and add to the soup pot. Gently simmer for 2-3 minutes to let simmer and thicken. Add salt and pepper to taste and serve hot with a sprinkling of cheese on top.

Makes 4-6 servings.

I'll have a roundup of all the Cook the Books posts about Outlaw Cook after the January 23 deadline, so be sure to stop back to see all the submissions. Next up for our book club is Roald Dahl's childhood classic, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which will be hosted by Deb during February/March. Happy reading and eating!

Gluten Free Food Find of the Week: Korean Rice Cakes or Dduk Noodles

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 12:48:00 +0000

One of our recent food finds at the Asian markets in Albany has been bags of dried rice cakes. No, not those tasteless puffed rice cracker-y things that come dusted with cheese or cinnamon, but a variety of Korean rice noodle, called dduk and spelled about thirty different ways in English.

These gluten-free noodles look like mini tongue-depressors to me, being somewhat elongated ovoids, and are a nice, chewy addition to stir-fries. One can buy fresh or frozen dduk, but so far I have just experimented with the bags of dried dduk. These noodles are made of pounded, steamed and dried sweet rice flour and must be pre-soaked in cold or boiling water to make them ready for cooking. They have a great texture that really stands up to extended cooking, so they are a good choice for any noodle soup or juicy stir-fry dishes in which a more tender noodle would give up and implode into mush.

Korean cooks make many varieties of dduk dishes, both sweet and savory, and a bowl of steaming Dduk Gook soup is a traditional way to ring in the New Year. I enjoyed reading this blog post from a Korean doctor who relates the many sayings that involve their much beloved rice cakes, like "give your enemy another piece of dduk" (i.e., "turn the other cheek").

I haven't followed any traditional Korean recipes for using this noodle, (but I intend to!) so much as incorporating them in my weekly stir-fries when I have needed something starchy. They do tend to suck up a lot of sauce and flavor, so plan on adding more liquid to your wok when you are adding in your dduk noodles. Above you can see a stir-fry of julienned carrot, cabbage, zucchini and garlic bathed in a sesame-soy-garlic sauce and zapped with a little chili-garlic paste. The dduk noodles add such a nice heft in there!

I have the privilege of hosting Presto Pasta Nights #244 this week. PPN is a popular weekly blog event chronicling the many incarnations of the world's noodles and was started by Ruth of Once Upon a Feast in 2007. I thought relaying my adventures with this new-dle would fit the bill quite nicely.

I have already received some great pasta recipes from other bloggers and look forward to other pasta creations in my emailbox until the deadline of Thursday, December 15. You can send them to me (with a photo attachment of your creation) at oldsaratogabooks (at) gmail (dot) com and please also cc ruth (at) 4everykitchen (dot) com. I will post the roundup for this last Presto Pasta Nights of 2011 the day after. Hope you can squeeze in some pasta fun with us during this busy holiday week!

Time to Cook the Books a la Grecque

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:07:00 +0000

The latest book pick for Cook the Books, the Internet foodie book club that my friends Johanna of Food Junkie, Not Junk Food and Deb of Kahakai Kitchen started three years ago, is Patricia Volonakis Davis' Harlot's Sauce: A Memoir of Food, Family, Love, Loss, and Greece (NY: Harper Davis Publishers 2008). With Cook the Books, we have read many kinds of foodie non-fiction, novels, children's literature and biographies, and traveled the world reading about different culinary traditions, but we have never examined the wonderful food culture of Greece, so I was excited when Johanna picked this book for our current CTB selection.

Davis tells the story of her courtship and marriage to a Greek immigrant and the cultural clashes between her first generation Italian-American family and his. Eventually, she and Gregori and their son Nick move to Greece and her descriptions of her new life there were the most interesting part of the book for me. I enjoyed the translations of various Greek words and expressions ("She can make a donkey die!" means someone is stubborn beyond words) and loved her prose about about Greek Orthodox rituals, the complex dance of the biscotti and coffee at Greek funerals, and comparisons of American and Greek attitudes towards children, stray dogs, and education.

Though the word "Food" is given preeminence in the title of this book, there is not so much discussion of Greek cuisine as there are descriptions of how Davis' marriage weakens and ultimately unravels. And this is not what I thought the book would be about, so unfortunately, I would find my thoughts drifting away through yet another recitation of a marital argument or fight with a passive-aggressive in-law. I flipped ahead through many pages seeking out the nuggets about Greek culture seen through an American's eyes or about the love-hate relationship that first generation immigrant families have with US pop culture and societal freedoms.

My favorite character in the book is Patricia's mother, a chain-smoking philosopher, whom she unfortunately becomes estranged from after too many Gregori incidents. I absolutely loved Mama Nancy's theory of comparative religion. When young Patricia came home from Catholic school one day and asked how one knows that their religion is "the right one", Mom replies:

"All religions are the "right" religion, if they're right for the person following them. They all teach basically the same things: to love one another, be the best people we can be, to never deliberately harm someone else."

When her daughter asks why there are different religions, Mom's educational metaphor comes back: "The best way I can describe it is that it's like decorating a house. Some have furniture that might seem strange to you, but the people who live there are happy with it." (p. 81)

After my reading, I was inspired to filch a Greek cookbook from our bookstore shelves, Perfect Greek (London: Parragon, 2006) and perused many a delicious recipe for various mezze, sweets and salads, but ultimately I settled on a recipe for a tomatoey Greek Fisherman's Soup which I adapted to be much more stew-like and which made for a wonderfully fragrant meal served over rice. I'm glad I made a big pot of rice, because this concoction had terrific juices and we sopped up every bit at dinner.

Here's a Fish Stew fit for a Harlot or Fisherman or whomever shows up at your table:

Greek Fisherman's Stew (adapted from Perfect Greek)

2 frozen fillets of tilapia, thawed and cut into chunks (they will flake off in the cooking)
1 lb. frozen shrimp, thawed and shelled

1 onion, peeled and thinly sliced
4 stalks celery, thinly sliced
3 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced

3 Tbsp. olive oil
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 (14 oz.) can diced tomatoes and their juice
Peel of one orange
1 tsp. chopped fresh thyme
3 Tbsp. chopped Italian parsley
2 bay leaves
Salt and pepper to taste
Hot cooked rice

Heat olive oil in large soup pot. Add onion, celery and garlic and cook, stirring often, until softened, about five minutes. Add fish and shrimp and cook, stirring often, another 5-7 minutes, until shrimp are pink

Add white wine and tomatoes and bring to a boil. Add orange peel (I used a tangerine and squeezed in the juice too), thyme, parsley and bay leaves. Cook another 15 minutes at a simmer until seafood is thoroughly cooked and the fish has flaked up and into your wonderful stew juices. Season with salt and pepper and serve over hot cooked rice. The citrus in the sauce really picks up the sweetness of the fish and shrimp.

Makes 4 dinner servings.

Johanna, our resident Athenian Cook the Book hostess, will be posting a roundup of all the blog entries about Harlot's Sauce after tomorrow's deadline, so hop on over to Cook the Books later this week to see all the posts. Our featured author, Patricia Volonakis Davis, will also be serving as our guest judge to select a winner from the blog entries so that should be entertaining reading as well.

**Next up on the Cook the Books reading list is John and Matt Lewis Thorne's collection of food essays "Outlaw Cook". It's a fantastic book and I invite you all to join us in reading the book and then blogging up your thoughts and any Outlaw-inspired recipes.

Cinnamon Basil Cupcakes with Fresh Tomato Soup for Novel Food

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 13:55:00 +0000

If you are a gardener, cook or voracious reader of mystery novels, (or all three like me) you will love diving into Susan Wittig Albert's China Bayles series. Set in the Texas hill country, China is a former high-powered defense attorney who shifts gears mid-career to open up an herb shop surrounded by gardens in a small town. Her main side kick is a red-haired Amazon, Ruby, who wears flamboyant clothes and shares commercial space with our heroine to run her New Age shop full of crystals, tarot cards and incense.

I had a thoroughly enjoyable time this summer reading through the cozy series, which now numbers 19 books in all. Albert has a different herbal theme for each book and its title and one can learn a lot about gardening, folklore, the medicinal use of herbs and even try out some delicious recipes from the back of many of the books. I was particularly taken by a scene in Book 2, Witches' Bane, in which China and her mom dine at former nun Maggie's Restaurant and have a lunch of Cinnamon Basil Cupcakes, thick Tomato Soup and Greek Style Broccoli Salad. That sounded like a fantastic combination, so much so, that I ordered cinnamon basil seeds from a catalogue just to try out those cupcakes (which are more like savory muffins).

That's where I was stymied. I had a nice little bunch of Cinnamon Basil plants sprouting up in a clump in the garden when the overzealous weeder, husband Dan, yanked them out by mistake. It was a long interval between reading about this mouthwatering literary feast and actually seeing this project to completion, but it was a worthwhile wait.


A bunch of Cinnamon Basil with gorgeous purple stems

Back to the garden patch I went to plant some more, this time carefully marked with a special stake, and they duly grew into the handsome plants you see above. This basil variety really does have a spicy cinnamon fragrance and taste and are a striking plant with dark purple stems and light purple blossoms. In addition to using them in the following Cinnamon Basil Cupcake recipe, I used the chiffonaded leaves liberally in my tomato and noodle salads all through August.

The Cinnamon Basil Cupcakes come out a pale shade of green, which is not the usual color for a muffin or cupcake, but they are so delectable and they certainly make for a colorful meal paired alongside deep red tomato soup. I will reduce the amount of sugar in this recipe when I make them again, as I felt they were a little too sweet, but they really were a wonderful accompaniment when served warm from the oven and dunked into my soup.

Gluten Free Cinnamon Basil Muffins (or you can call them Cupcakes like China)

1/4 cup cinnamon basil leaves, stripped from stems
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg, lightly beaten

1/2 cup white rice flour
1/2 cup cornstarch
1/2 tsp. xanthan gum
1 tsp baking powder

1/4 cup sour cream
1/4 cup milk
1/2 cup walnuts, finely chopped

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Puree cinnamon basil leaves in a blender with the oil until it is a fine puree. Add sugar and egg and mix well.

Sift together dry ingredients. Add to basil-oil mixture and combine. Add in sour cream, milk and walnuts and mix well.

Bake at 350 degrees F for 15-20 minutes, or until muffins feel springy.

While muffins are baking, you can whip up a quick tomato soup by sauteeing some onions and garlic in olive oil until golden, adding in a bunch of fresh or canned peeled, pureed tomatoes and then cooking over low heat, stirring often, until desired thickness. Season with a little more fresh cinnamon basil and salt and pepper and you have an awesome, literary-inspired light meal.

I hope this whets your appetite for this excellent herbal mystery series and to plant a patch of cinnamon basil yourself. You'll want to read the China Bayles series in order, as China, Ruby and various family members go through a lot of changes in life. I saved up this tasty post just for the 14th edition of Novel Food, which is hosted quarterly by Briciole. Novel Food invites participants to cook up recipes inspired by a literary work which has been particularly captivating.

If you haven't already discovered this fun blog event, you can check back through the archives to discover novels, plays, short stories and poems which have inspired bloggers to whip up wonderful creations in their kitchens. This round of Novel Food ends this Sunday, so you still have time to join in the fun or wait until after the deadline to see what others have been reading and then eating.

**And now for a bit of Crispy Cook housekeeping. I am pleased to announce the winners of my Lundberg Family Farms and Stonehouse 27 giveaways. The five winners are: Lindsey, John, the Swedenese Family, Simona and Kathleen. Congratulations to all and I will be contacting you to get your mailing address so that you can receive your Lundberg Brown Rice Bowl and Stonehouse 27 Cooking Sauce sent to you.

Stay tuned for another Giveaway post this week to learn how to get a copy of a great new GF cookbook: Laura B. Russell's "The Gluten-Free Asian Kitchen". I've made several recipes from this cookbook and all have been terrific.

Cook up a Homemade Life and Some Cabbage with Molly Wizenberg

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:10:00 +0000

There are times when you are in the mood for a light read to let you escape into another world; there are times for a chunky doorstop of a novel to distract you from the miseries of a stubborn cold; and then there are those occasions when a great book of essays or short stories is just the thing to see you through bouts of stop-and-start appointments and other life interrupters. Molly Wizenberg's "A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from my Kitchen Table" (NY: Simon and Schuster, 2009) was the perfect book to tuck into during a busy last few weeks and I thoroughly enjoyed reading and dog-earing the pages of this lovely book of food essays.

The author has chronicled her journey from anthropology grad student to popular food blogger and author on her blog Orangette and expands upon these writings in "A Homemade Life". The pivotal moment that changed her life focus came after the death of her gusto-laden dad, known affectionately as Burg. Burg smacked his lips when cooking and eating; he sometimes laughed so hard that he gagged; he showed his family how to live "wholly, hungrily, loudly" and to appreciate the whole process of cooking and gathering together around the table. The pages of "A Homemade Life" are packed with the author's memories of various members of her family and friends, but Burg is the one that cartwheels out of the pages with his effusiveness and charisma.

I was also tickled by Molly's memories of a first date with a health food aficionado who served her a salad made of seven kinds of sprouts--plus three cherry tomatoes!-- and then serenaded her with some sort of Chinese lute. She lurched home to her peanut butter jar to muffle the roar in her stomach. It reminded me all too vividly of some one and only dates in my past, including one strange encounter on Halloween night (I should have known better) with a cute but twitchy reporter who played opera music at Def Leppard volume while we poked at our bowls of not-quite-defrosted lentil soup with blocks of frozen legumes in the middle.

The book is stuffed with recipes for desserts and sweets, but I was lured in by her recipes for savory delights. Someday I will try her intriguing recipe for Pickled Grapes with Cinnamon and Black Pepper and those Tuna Buchons, but for a recent dinner, I made up a batch of her homey Cream-Braised Green Cabbage. The cabbage sections come out caramelized, yet sweet and this simple, luscious recipe has won a place in my brassica recipe rotation.

Molly's great book is the present selection of the online foodie book club, Cook the Books, that a couple of food blogger colleagues and I started back in 2008. We take turns hosting the bimonthly rounds of Cook the Books and this time round it was my Hawai'ian blogger buddy Deb of Kahakai Kitchens who picked this gem for us to delve into. Today is the deadline to submit a blog post for the roundup that Deb will put up with all the blogger contributions, so be sure to check back in later to see what others thought about the book and what they cooked up. Molly herself will be taking some time out of honing her next book to serve as the guest judge for the CTB submissions.

Gluten Free Chocolate Donuts with Chocolate Glaze: Baked, Beany and Beautiful!

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

I sit here stunned. Amazed that I baked up something that was not only edible, made with normally infuriating talc-like, slippery, gluten-free flours, but which looked kinda fancy; like something you might buy in a bakery.

I'm talkin' doughnuts, those circular little sweeties that form two-thirds of Homer Simpsons food pyramid; those coffee break staples and snack time scarfables that bring sugar and grease together in one carb-bursting handful of deliciousness. Oh, I tried lightening up my doughnut making foray with some garbanzo bean flour, by baking rather than frying, and by substituting in coconut oil instead of other oil or shortening. But I know doughnuts are lovely indulgences that wreck hell on one's middle-aged metabolism unless you are an annoyingly lean soul such as my Old Man.

Doughnuts and fritters are this month's baking challenge at the Gluten-Free Ratio Rally, hosted this time round by Meg of Gluten Free Boulangerie. Meg has all the other links to the toothsome doughnut varieties that other GF bloggers and awesome bakers have cooked up in their kitchens, so be sure to drop by on your coffee break.... The GF Ratio Rally is built on the premise that using ratios of flour:eggs:fat:liquid and measuring by volume will produce more predictable results in baking and I am sold on the concept after successfully churning out cream puffs and cherry bublanina cake with this group.

I was thinking about maybe sitting out this GF Ratio Rally challenge this month, as my Fear of Frying and visions of ending up with a greasy pan of burnt donut crumbs was scaring me off. But then I had a sign from Saint Honoratus, the patron saint of bakers, while I was making my weekly visit to my favorite charity thrift shop. Ever alert in the housewares section, I spied my Holy Grail: a bag of what I believed to be aluminum doughnut molds (they actually produce a rather skinny, though beautifully round, donut) but which I believe now to be individual jello molds. No matter, St. Honoratus gave me the self-confidence to put these new kitchen treasures to use, and after a thorough cleaning, drying and anointing with holy oil, or rather cooking spray, they were perfect for shaping my sticky and unwieldy donut batter into perfect little cake donuts.

I started with this great recipe for a vegan chocolate donut from this blogger, and then adapted it to be gluten-free and to incorporate the coconut oil for my exploration into the donut zone. I thought that the garbanzo bean flour would work beautifully in a chocolate doughnut, both in terms of taste and texture, and that proved to be the case. The dough was rather sticky, as most GF batters tend to be and really dripped rather slowly and thickly from my wooden spoon into the greased donut molds. It was a messy project, but satisfying, and the gooey batter leveled itself out after a minute or so, so I didn't have to smooth it into position.

These doughnuts are cakey, rather than CRISPY, like fried doughnuts. They had a not too sweet taste and the chocolate, gooey glaze was the perfect counterpoint. With a glass of cold milk or a mug of hot coffee on the side, (and I tried out both options), this made the perfect snack/breakfast/go-to-the-gym-motivator.

Gluten Free Chocolate Doughnuts with Chocolate Glaze

Cooking oil spray

3 oz. coconut oil, (liquified if your coconut oil has gone solid in the jar)

10 oz. sugar

10 oz. gluten free flour (about 1-1/3 cups - I used a mixture of 1 cup brown rice flour and 1/3 cup garbanzo bean flour, also known as besan)

4 oz. baking cocoa (about 1/2 cup)

1-1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp. xanthan gum

1/2 tsp. salt

1/2 cup milk mixed with 1/2 tsp. apple cider vinegar (let sit for 10 minutes to get thick)

3 eggs, lightly beaten

2 tsp. vanilla

Chocolate Glaze:

1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

2 Tbsp. melted coconut oil

Doughnut Toppings of your choice (I used flaked coconut and sprinkles for my resident coconut-phobe)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. If you own doughnut molds or donut rings/small jello molds, lightly spray them with cooking spray. If you don't own such things, try a different recipe, because this batter is too oozy for shaping freehand.

Blend together sugar, flours, baking cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, xanthan gum and salt.

Add the milk and vinegar mixture, coconut oil, eggs and vanilla. Mix just until the ingredients are combined.

Dribble 2 1/2 tablespoons of batter into each prepared doughnut mold. My batter was very thick and I had a lot of drips and drizzles all over the molds until I got the hang of it, so I kept a wet napkin at the ready to wipe things down.

Bake for 20 minutes. Let cool on the racks for 10 minutes. Run a knife around the doughnuts in the molds and invert them onto a baking sheet. Let cool another 10 minutes.

Make chocolate glaze by melted coconut oil over a low flame in a frying pan. Add chocolate chips, and, stirring continuously, let melt into a smooth chocolate glaze.While glaze is still warm, dip half of the doughnut into the chocolate sauce. Allow some to drip off and then dip glaze side down into your coconut or sprinkles. Let dry on a rack for at least another 10 minutes.

Makes 12 doughnuts. GF Ratios: 4:1.5:1.5:2.

These doughnuts are not super-sweet like a coffee-store donut or greasy like the cider donuts you get at an apple orchard. Instead, they are more cake-like and semi-sweet like a great cake donut, but they were a stone cold delight for my family. I am envisioning making spice cake and carrot cake versions in the future, and will certainly be checking out the other GF Ratio Rally recipes that other bloggers have posted over at GF Boulangerie. St. Honoratus would want me to.

Cook the Books: Garden Spells and Bachelors Buttons

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 20:53:00 +0000

With the fruits of our garden labors taking up an increasing amount of real estate on my kitchen counters, it is the perfect time to let you know about an evocative novel, Garden Spells, the debut offering by bestselling author Sarah Addison Allen (NY: Bantam Books, 2007). This is the current book selection for the bimonthly foodie book club, Cook the Books.

Cook the Books features books from all kinds of genres, from chef memoirs to fiction featuring cooking or foodcentric themes, and participants offer up posts that discuss our current selection and their culinary creations inspired by their reading. I will be coordinating the roundup of submissions at the Cook the Books blog after tomorrow's deadline and then our guest judge, Jenna of the wonderfully entertaining blog, Literature and a Lens, will pick a winner.

Garden Spells is a lyrical blend of Southern Gothic and magical realism set in a small North Carolina town, where the Waverley clan has always had a certain reputation for odd powers. Elderly cousin Evanelle is driven to give people gifts which they later find out that they need and want, from Strawberry Pop-Tarts to bed linens, condoms and mango cutters. Caterer and night gardener Claire cooks up magical foods that have various properties, like the snapdragon casserole used to ward off the unwanted admiration of her hunky new neighbor. It would be a plot spoiler to let y'all know about the power that her wayward sister Sydney discovers that she possesses late in the book, but suffice it to say that all of the Waverley women have unusual talents. Even the family apple tree in the backyard has an ominous power: the ability to fling apples around, which, if eaten, will give the bearer a vision of the biggest event in his or her life. And bigger is not always better.

There were so many delicate and intriguing things that Claire cooks up in this book: lavender bread, crystallized pansies, violet white cake, lemon-verbena sorbet, and honeysuckle wine. Herbs and garden vegetables feature prominently in her sensual descriptions and it was a treat to read the excerpts from the Waverley kitchen journal at the rear of this book. Chive Blossoms will ensure you will win an argument and are an antidote for hurt feelings, and Nasturtiums are noted as promoting appetite in men (for sex or food, or both?) and for making women secretive. Very entertaining.

With a swath of long-blooming Bachelors Buttons in my vegetable patch, grown just for attracting pollinating insects (and because they're so easy to grow and are self-sowing), I was delighted to learn from this book that the petals are edible and, according to this book,

"Bachelor's buttons make people see sharper, helpful for finding thing like misplaced keys and hidden agendas"

Well, sez I, I could certainly use help in both these departments, so I plucked a handful of petals, and used them to garnish a salad gleaned right out of the Crispy summer garden: mixed lettuces, radishes soaked in rice vinegar and some sliced asparagus stalks. They really looked lovely as a garnish and I am making a note to remind myself to use them on top of my next Fourth of July dessert. They are so deeply blue.

I'll be posting the roundup of all the Garden Spells submissions over at the Cook the Books blog after tomorrow's deadline and encourage you to drop by and see all the different, creative interpretations of this dreamy novel that we've all cooked up.

Our August/September Cook the Books selection is A Homemade Life, by Molly Wizenberg, a collection of essays and recipes, compiled from her popular blog Orangette. Anyone is welcome to join in the fun for this and all future rounds of CTB by reading the selected book, and then blogging up your book commentary and a dish inspired from its pages.

Off to deliver some garden produce to my friends. Now, where'd I put those keys?

Smoked Paprika Noodles with Butter, Cheese and Garlic Scape and Herb Drizzle

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 14:33:00 +0000

A wonderful bunch of gluten-free bloggers posted a collection of recipes and posts for making fresh pasta a couple of days ago. I was unable to get my own post up in time for the Gluten Free Ratio Rally, a monthly food blog challenge that encourages experimentation in the kitchen with gluten-free flours. Last month, we all played with pate a choux (I made cream puffs filled with coffee cream) and next month we will be trying out cake recipes.

I did make an awesomely good set of gluten-free noodles, gently flavored and colored with smoked paprika, and wanted to share my experiment with you. I started with the Fresh Gluten-Free Pasta recipe from the showcase cookbook, Gluten Free Girl and the Chef by Shauna and Daniel Ahern. I had made their recipe for fresh pasta once before and wanted to switch up some of the flours. Shauna and Daniel's recipe in their cookbook called for corn flour and quinoa flour, which added a nice nubby texture to the fresh pasta, but I was out of quinoa flour, so I subbed in brown rice flour and added in 3 generous tablespoons of smoked paprika. The Aherns have since done some other experimenting with fresh pasta, so you can check out their recipe at the link above and try it for yourself to find out how adding in a boost of extra egg yolks makes the dough more easy to work with.

My dough came out beautifully; just needed a touch more water to make it more pliable. I covered it and let it rest for a while, giving me time to head out to the herb patch to pick some Italian parsley, basil, oregano and garlic scapes. I whizzed them up with some olive oil and kosher salt in my blender to make a garlicky herb drizzle that I scattered over the noodles later on.

I then rolled out my pasta dough between sheets of parchment paper and was able to get it to about 1/4 inch thickness. I would have liked it to be thinner, but I just couldn't seem to get it to stretch as much as I wanted, so my noodles came out on the hearty and thick side. I therefore cut them into short fettuccine lengths.

After a short bath in some salted boiling water, I tossed my noodles with some butter and grated Parmesan, seasoned with salt and pepper and then drizzled on my garlic scape and herb puree. What a toothsome dish! It was a satisfying, yet light supper and we all licked our plates.

I'm sending a batch of these gluten free noodles over to Presto Pasta Nights, a weekly celebration of the world of pasta started by Ruth of Once Upon a Feast. This week's guest host is Lavender and Lime, who will be posting her roundup of carbs next Friday.

Pasta with Broccoli Rabe, Garlic Scapes and Anchovies

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 22:19:00 +0000

It's taken years, but I finally made an anchovy aficionado out of the old husband. Oh, I've tried before, with stealthy insertions of the salty fish into Caesar Salads, minced onto pizza pies and tucked into pastas, but I was always discovered. Not until I melted a tin of anchovies into a luscious and decidedly unsalty base for a supper pasta with Broccoli Rabe and some of our bountiful supply of homegrown garlic scapes did I succeed in winning over my Dan to the anchovy side.

When anchovies are cooked down over a low flame, they lose their super salinity and gain a mellow, earthy flavor that was the perfect foil to the bitter Broccoli Rabe greens. This dish was so successful, I've made it twice since, and Dan has even cleaned out the cupboard of my tinned anchovy stash, so I believe I have an anchovy convert on my hands now.

It's a quick and simple pasta dish and one that I will pass on to you should you covet a hearty pasta dish with once-sharp flavors that are delightfully mellowed after cooking.

Pasta with Broccoli Rabe, Garlic Scapes and Anchovies

1/2 bunch broccoli rabe, trimmed and cut into 1/2 inch slices

1 lb. fettuccine

1 tin anchovies

10 garlic scapes, chopped

Olive oil

Pinch of hot pepper flakes

Grated Romano cheese

Salt and Pepper to taste (taste first; you made not need to add any salt with the saltiness of the anchovies)

Cook fettuccine until al dente. Drain and rinse with warm water. Set aside.

Heat a teaspoon or so of olive oil in a medium saucepan. Add chopped garlic scapes and stir over medium heat for 2-3 minutes, stirring. Add anchovies and their oil and break up with a wooden spoon, stirring until they melt and coat the scapes. Add chopped broccoli rabe and stir all around. Cook until leaves are wilted and broccoli rabe is crisp-tender, about 7-8 minutes. Add a little water and cover pan to steam for another minute or two.

Add hot pepper flakes and salt and pepper to taste. Mix with your cooked pasta and toss to coat. Garnish with grated cheese.

Serve hot to 6-8 persons.

I am sending a plate of this toothsome pasta over to Helen of Fuss Free Flavours, who is this week's host for Presto Pasta Nights. This weekly event was started by Ruth of Once Upon a Feast and is a great showcase for noodly dishes. Helen will have the roundup for Presto Pasta Nights #221 posted after the July 7 deadline.

Foraging a Fungus Among Us Which is Now In my Corpus

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 19:22:00 +0000

And what a delicious fungus it was. I don't normally cook dangerously; but having transplanted a patch of lily-of-the-valley at the base of a grand old sugar maple in my backyard the day before, I came out to inspect my flowers the next morning. Right above them was this beautiful shelf of white mushroom that had definitely not been in residence before.

It was a truly lovely 'shroom.

It was a pearly white with a cascading shape and sweet aroma.

And most importantly, it looked delicious.

Now, I'm no foraging expert. I am more in tune with the idea of foraging than successful in its application. I've failed at harvesting stinging nettles (gathered them too late in their development) and at figuring out fiddlehead ferns (gathered them too early in their development). The potential for disaster with harvesting wild mushrooms always steered me clear but this specimen was so tantalizing. And my husband Dan was so cute when I pointed out this gorgeous fungus and its potential for our dinner. He exclaimed that he had just fallen in love with me all over again.

Out came my field guides, my mushroom books, my Euell Gibbons library, and research on the Internet. After much study, it appears that I had an Oyster Mushroom, a wild edible delight that blooms on decayed and dying maples during the spring and summer in the Northeast. It has no toxic lookalike mushroom cousins on this continent and so it was with only a small amount of trepidation that I cleaned it up, dipped cut up sections in brown rice flour and then dipped them back in some beaten egg. After a final dredging in some gluten-free bread crumbs, I sauteed them briefly in butter and garnished my 'shrooms with some chopped lemon thyme and parsley.

Heeding well-worn foraging advice of the ages to only sample a small amount of this new wild edible, we adults munched on our CRISPY fried oyster mushrooms with moderation on the first night. They were earthy and delicate and had a nice chewy texture. The next day, having noticed that we were still alive and were suffering no ill effects of my foraging adventure, we heated them up and feasted once more on these delicious wild treats.

I noticed one more shelf of oyster mushroom blooming at the base of my tree and decided to come back a few days later to cook it up, but alas, the passage of just a couple of days had made this mushroom dry up quite a bit and turn brown. There were also lots of insects in residence, so it was not the evanescent thing of beauty that its had been.

I am sending this successful mushrooming adventure post over to Healthy Green Kitchen, who is hosting this week's episode of Weekend Herb Blogging. WHB is the popular food blog event centering on edible plants, herbs, flowers and fruits, and is headquartered at Cook Almost Anything. Healthy Green Kitchen will post a roundup of delicious posts from great cooks from all corners of the globe, so tune in after tomorrow's deadline to see what was cooking.

Raspberry Financiers at my Lunch in Paris

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Tue, 10 May 2011 16:16:00 +0000

Elizabeth Bard has written a book to make me sigh with happiness. Lunch in Paris: A Love Story with Recipes (NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2010), is a very snappily-written memoir of how this native New Yorker fell in love with her future husband, his family and his country. From the grace with which he dealt with a splat of pigeon poop while on a romantic stroll with our author, to his joie de vivre in cooking for his lady on a cramped apartment hot plate, attending tap dancing camp and film studies conferences, and tenderly caring for his ailing father, I have to say I fell in love with Gwendal too.

Bard writes with plenty of panache about her faux pas and discoveries about her new country. She learns not to use the word "plaisir" interchangeably with "pleasure", as the former has some sexual connotations. She learns how to correctly bargain while shopping in the Parisian food markets. And perhaps most importantly, she learns how to navigate French culture as an ex-pat American. I particularly loved her observations about the snits and spats that she and Gwendal went through in their wedding preparations:

"One of the great gifts of an intercultural relationship is that when you fight, you never quite know if you are mad at the person, or at their culture: Is he really too bum-ass lazy to call back the band at eight p.m. on a Monday evening (are they in the middle of dinner?), or is he just being French? Is she bombarding me with lists and timetables and questions about the color of the wax used to seal the invitations because she is a manic control freak (or General MacArthur's granddaughter), or is she just being American?" (p. 137)

This wonderful book is the current selection of The Cook the Books Club, which is being run this time round by my blogger buddy, Johanna, of Food Junkie, not Junk Food. At Cook the Books, we read a different foodie novel or non-fiction book every two months and then post a roundup of participant's thoughts about the book and any recipes inspired by our reading. Anyone is welcome to join in the fun (deadline is May 27 to submit a post) and I am delighted to report that our esteemed author, Elizabeth Bard, will be serve as our guest judge to read through the submissions and announce the winner of the much-coveted Cook the Books Winner's badge for his or her blog.

I have a few dog-eared pages in Bard's book for delicious recipes that I will make when various edibles come into season: Goat Cheese Salad with Fresh Figs (p. 100), Zucchini Flowers Stuffed with Goat Cheese and Mint (p. 160) and Melon with Port (p. 290), but I had to run out and splurge on a jewel box of red raspberries to make Raspberry Financiers (p. 87), rich little tea cakes stuffed with butter and ground almonds and topped with a perfect raspberry that melt into your mouth. This recipe was terribly easy to make gluten-free. I substituted brown rice flour for the regular wheat flour called for in Bard's recipe and my family was delighted with the sweet results.

I made one batch in my muffin tins (sprayed with vegetable oil first) and then one batch in my dollar store find of the decade, a madeleine pan. Unfortunately, I thought the madeleine pan was non-stick (it isn't) and didn't use the cooking spray, so I had to dig out these delicate little financiers with a butter knife so they are the crumbled up examples in the photos. (And check out my second example of "upcycling" some of my thrift shop china and glassware into this triple-tiered cake stand.)

I am love with these little French dainties and hope to make some other financiers soon. I may try these other gluten-free examples from some other wonderful bloggers:

Apricot and Lavender Brown Butter Tea Cakes
from Tartelette

Chocolate Financiers
from Gluten Free Girl and the Chef

Blackberry and Vanilla Bean Financiers
from Une-deux Senses

Hope to see you at the Cook the Books roundup after our May 27 deadline. Next up after "Lunch in Paris" is Sarah Addison Allen's magical debut novel "Garden Spells".

Strawberry Cupcakes and a Review of the new Gluten-Free Cupcakes cookbook by Elana Amsterdam

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Wed, 04 May 2011 13:48:00 +0000

Who can resist a cupcake? They are so darn cute and make delightful little hand held treats. Cupcakes are so prevalent these days throughout the foodie world and Colorado blogger Elana Amsterdam has presented the gluten-free community with a lovely Spring gift with her new cookbook "Gluten-Free Cupcakes: 50 Irresistible Recipes Made with Almond and Coconut Flour" (Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts, 2011).

The publisher sent me a review copy of this book and it had already been perused by my youngest before I got home from the bookshop. She requested that we go out the next day and get the ingredients for the Strawberry Cupcakes (p. 24 of the book, and there's also a recipe posted on Elana's Pantry here)

We picked up the ingredients and also decided to top these delicate cupcakes with Elana's Strawberry Meringue Frosting (p. 97).

These cupcakes were delectable and even better the next day after the chopped strawberries mixed into the cupcake batter had moistened up the cakes with their juices. Coconut flour provides the base for the cake mixture and has a nice fiber and nutrition boost as well. All of the recipes in Elana's book are chock full of healthy ingredients, so one can feel good about cooking up these sweet treats and serving them to your family. The author does a great job of describing the various ingredients that she uses in a beginning chapter that is really useful. Cooks that are unfamiliar with what they are, where to buy them and how they perform in the baking process (cooks like me!) will refer back to this section many times over.

The Strawberry Meringue Frosting got less favorable reviews. It certainly performed well and made some wonderful curlicues that held their shape well on top of my cupcakes, but half the Crispy Crew complained that the frosting taste and texture was not to their liking (it's a meringue made of whipped egg whites, boiled down agave syrup and chopped strawberries), so I would top these pink beauties with a cream cheese or buttercream frosting next time. And there will be a next time soon. ; )

I am glad that my kid picked the Strawberry Cupcake recipe, because not only was it scrumptious, but it was one of the recipes that didn't call for almond flour. The only almond flour I have found in my area for sale is at a local health food store for $13 for a one-pound bag, and that's just too expensive for me. I see that one can halve this price online, but I wasn't ready to plunk down double digits for a bag of flour.

The book contains a great selection of other interesting flavor combinations to try out (Pecan Pie Cupcakes, Pina Colada Cupcakes, White Chocolate Cherry Cupcakes) as well as some gluten-free recreations of some nostalgic delights, like the Cream-Filled Chocolate Cupcakes which are dead ringers for the Hostess chocolate cupcakes. There are also a few toothsome savory muffin recipes at the back of the book. Kudos also to Annabelle Breakey for the great color cupcake photographs throughout the book that make all of these recipes seem so irresistible.

I enjoyed perusing and test driving this sweet treat of a cookbook and recommend it to other home bakers.

Here are some other favorable reviews of Elana's new cookbook by fellow bloggers:

Gluten-Free at Mother Earth News

Book of Yum

Gluten-Free Easily

Gluten-Free Diva

***As an aside, this book review also gave me the perfect chance to make my own cupcake stand made from vintage plates and candlesticks. I certainly have more than a few orphaned pieces of china in my shelves and will now be keeping an eye out at garage sales and thrift shops for more perfect cupcake stand components.

With inspiration from my Greek blogger buddy Johanna, of Food Junkie, Not Junk Food, I whipped this up craft project up in a few short minutes on one of the few breaks in the Spring precipitation we've been enjoying this past month. I used a clear all-purpose epoxy to join my pieces together and want to remind those of you who may want to try this cupcake stand project out yourselves to make sure to do so outside or in a very well-ventilated area. Solvent fumes are very hazardous to your health and I want you around to let me know how your cupcakes and cupcake stands turn out!

Roll-Cutting and Dry-Frying some Chinese Eggplants

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 18:51:00 +0000

Second Daughter and I took a shopping trip down to Albany to stock up on pantry provisions and went to the Asian Supermarket at 1245 Central Avenue. This stop proved to be yet another fabulous ethnic market to add to our list of great places to find interesting, exotic and naturally gluten-free foods.

Asian Supermarket had an extensive produce department, where we found everything from banana blossoms to huge piles of durian to dragon fruit. I didn't buy those three intriguing edibles, but I did buy a huge bag of baby bok choy, packets of chrysanthemum tea, a 20 lb. bag of basmati rice and a wonderful Chinese vegetable from the mustard family, yu choy, which was meltingly soft when braised with garlic and soy sauce.

Some other new items fell into our cart. I fell in love with Thai packages of Crispy Fried Seaweed in regular and Tomato Ketchup flavors (gotta try the Kimchi and Squid flavors next time!), while the young 'un enjoyed scoring a huge bag of Happy (rice) Crackers and some delicious to-go foods from the take-out bar.

Some sensuously-curved, light purple Chinese eggplants called to me and I brought them home to play around with. I have never cooked with any eggplant other than the glossy purple-black aubergines of the Mediterranean variety, but I had read that the slender Chinese and Japanese varieties are less bitter and more tender, which I found to be slightly true. Certainly more experimentation with these gorgeous members of the nightshade family are in order here at Crispy Cook Central.

My first step was to pore through my well-loved copy of the late Barbara Tropp's "China Moon Cookbook" (NY: Workman Press, 1992). Tropp's blend of traditional Chinese cooking techniques and ingredients, Yiddish-spiced instructions and California pizzazz always wows me, and I love her clear instructions that break down restaurant cooking results into components that a home cook can understand.

Tropp offered a few recipes for wonderful eggplant-centric dishes (I've made her Strange Flavor Eggplant several times to rave reviews), but her siren song description of "Dry-Fried Chinese Eggplant Nuggets" as her favorite Chinese eggplant dish, bar none, made my decision for me.

The dish involves a roll-cutting technique which I had never tried. It's easy to do but hard to describe. Basically, you make one 45 degree slice at one end of your vegetable and then roll it 180 degrees and make another 45 degree slice at your desired thickness. You end up with chunky, somewhat triangular segments of eggplant, which have a lot of surface area to absorb cooking heat and sauciness, not to mention a whole bunch of visual style. Ming Tsai has a short video segment on roll-cutting carrots and zucchini here which I found helpful before I attempted hacking away at my beautiful lavender-colored eggplants.

Aren't those eggplant slices beautiful?

They lose their gorgeous purple color when they are cooked up, but the resulting mixture of spicy and sweet flavors surrounding these soft hunks of eggplant tantalize the other senses quite nicely.

Sweet and Salty Braised Chinese Eggplant

adapted from Barbara Tropp's "Dry-Fried Chinese Eggplant Nuggets" in her China Moon Cookbook.

1-1/2 lbs. Chinese eggplants (4 slender eggplants)

3 scallions, thinly sliced (reserve some for garnish)
1 Tbsp. finely minced ginger
1 Tbsp. finely minced garlic

2 Tbsp. chili paste with garlic
2 Tbsp. soy sauce (check to make sure it's gluten free)
2 Tbsp. palm sugar (or brown sugar)
1 Tbsp. black rice vinegar (or balsamic vinegar)
2 Tbsp. hot water

3-4 Tbsp. peanut oil

Slice top and tail off your eggplants and then roll cut them into one inch pieces.

Mix together chili paste, soy sauce, palm sugar, black rice vinegar and hot water and stir until sugar dissolves.

Heat 3 Tbsp. peanut oil in hot wok or large, heavy frying pan over medium-high heat. Add minced ginger, garlic and most of the sliced scallions (reserving some to garnish the dish). Cook 1 minute, stirring constantly.

Add eggplant chunks and cook, stirring frequently, until browned on all sides. Add another Tbsp. of peanut oil if the pan gets dry, but no more, because eggplant is like a big sponge when it comes to absorbing cooking oil.

Stir in chili paste sauce mixture and let mixture come to a boil. Lower heat, cover and braise until liquid has mostly been absorbed and eggplant is soft, about 3-5 minutes. Garnish with reserved sliced scallions.

Makes 4 main dish servings. We enjoyed it over hot steamed basmati rice. Delectable!

I am sending this dish using my new found favorite vegetable, the Chinese Eggplant, to Weekend Herb Blogging which is hosted this week by Honest Vanilla. Weekend Herb Blogging is housed over at Cook Almost Anything by awesome food blogger and photographer, Haalo, and you'll find four years of weekly recaps, rules for WHB, and other great recipes and blog posts at this wonderful site.