150,000 Fruit Salsas

Years ago, when I was at Food & Wine magazine, I worked with a brilliant recipe developer named Anne Disrude. She had the same intellectual curiosity about food and recipes as I did, and we were constantly toying with ideas (like the time she decided to make her own onion powder. . . an idea that turned out to be better in theory than in practice).

One day Anne came up with an idea for a magazine article on soups. She created a basic recipe template and then made a mix & match chart of all the possible ingredients, inviting the readers to choose their own combinations.

I have carried this idea around with me ever since, wishing I could figure out a way to get the concept across to other people. I've tried once or twice to sell this as a book idea, but I mostly get polite, slightly puzzled, nods.

So here I am on my blog, and no one can stop me from trying my experiment. What I have created is a template for Fruit Salsa. If you go to the fruit salsa template page, you'll be able to choose your own ingredients and create your own recipe. It's really hard to explain. Just give it a try: Fruit Salsa Template.

And by the way, here's the math that goes with this recipe: The number of unique combinations you could put together with this template is 150,000. (Well, that's not completely accurate. The real number is 158,760. Seriously.)

Presto Reverso

Cauliflower Hummus with Chickpea Crackers
(No cracker toppings here--a remark that
will make more sense once you read the recipe.)

Here's the usual scenario: hummus made from chickpeas with cauliflower florets for dipping.

And then . . . presto reverso . . . hummus made from cauliflower with chickpea crackers for dipping.

My son, Julien, and I are probably the only ones amused by this role-swapping idea, and we expended quite a few brain cells and person hours trying to come up with other such ideas. However, this is the idea that sparked it all, and it came about by happenstance.

It started with me cruising through Food52's book called Genius Recipes. I found the title intriguing, largely because I was skeptical of this word "genius." (In my professional life I probably edit about 3,000 recipes a year and I've been doing this for 3+ decades, so do the math.) Skepticism aside, two ideas stuck out, so I adopted them: Yotam Ottolenghi's hummus and Dan Barber's whole-grain crackers.

Much experimentation (no, really, MUCH experimentation) later and I ended up with the following crackers. And Yotam's hummus also took a left turn in my test kitchen and ended up being made with cauliflower (though the chickpea version is decidedly yummy).

Chickpea Crackers

100 g chickpea flour (aka besan, garbanzo flour, farina di ceci)
11/4 teaspoons Tajín seasoning, Trader Joe's chile-lime salt, or kosher salt
Generous 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
160 g* garlic broth** or water
2 tablespoons oil (any type; sometimes I do a mix of olive oil and sesame oil)
Topping (e.g., black sesame seeds, cracked sunflower seeds)
Smoked sea salt (optional)

1. Preheat the oven to 300°F. Spray a 9 x 13-inch baking pan with oil. 
2. In a bowl, stir together the flour, Tajín, and pepper. Make a well in the center. Add the garlic broth and oil. Stir to get a pancake batter, whisking to get rid of most of the lumps.
3. Pour the batter into the prepared pan. It does not need to go into the corners. Sort of let it find its own level. Sprinkle with the topping and sea salt (if using).
4. Bake for 11/2 hours. Carefully flip and bake another 15 to 30 minutes. Sometimes it will look done, but it will be just shy of crisp. So let it go as long as possible without burning.
5. Break it into pieces and store airtight.

*160 grams of broth/water is the same as 160 milliliters. But easier to measure with a scale than eyeballing in a measuring cup.
**Just cut up some garlic, put in a glass measuring cup with some water and a little salt, and heat in the microwave like you're making tea. Strain out the garlic. Boom.


Cauliflower Hummus

About 300 g (10 oz) cauliflower florets (to get 250 g/9 oz cooked)
2 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
1 strip lemon zest
80 g tahini, peanut butter, or sunbutter (~ 5 tablespoons)
1/2 teaspoon salt, or more to taste
2 tablespoons lemon juice, or more to taste 

1. In a medium saucepan of boiling salted water, cook the cauliflower, garlic, and lemon zest. Drain well. (At this point I weigh out about 250 grams...you could probably just use all the cauliflower.) Set aside to cool.
2. When the cauliflower/garlic/lemon zest mixture is cool, place it in a food processor and add the tahini and salt. Process to a puree (it's OK if it's still a little coarse; it just shouldn't have any visible chunks).
3. With the machine running, drizzle in the lemon juice and keep processing for a minute or so. Scrape down the sides a couple of times. Taste and see if you want more salt and/or lemon juice. Process until it's ultra smooth.

Stalks, stems, ribs, and cores . . .

. . . all those "tough" things you usually trim away and discard: fennel stalks (and core), the ends of asparagus, broccoli stems, collard or kale ribs, cauliflower cores (and leaves). I just have two words for you: food processor. All of those things can be rendered edible by whacking them around in a food processor to make veggie "rice." Boom.


Disclaimers:
1. Dried out things (onion skins) can't be rescued
2. I haven't tried butternut squash skin, but I'm thinking that even if it got turned into rice it would be nasty.
3. Bean pods: I've made broth from them, but I've never tried to rice-ize them. Next on my list.

Two problems + one solution = ginger snow

Problem #1 You bought more ginger than you needed (or the market made it difficult for you to tailor your purchase) and now it's lurking in your vege-lator all dried and shriveled . . . and/or moldy. 

Problem #2 You love ginger tea and a) you just ran out of your favorite teabags or b) you thought you had fresh ginger, but refer to Problem #1.

The solution:

Put the surplus ginger in the freezer while it's still plump and tight-skinned (ah, reminds me of sixth grade). You can peel or not. It's just a matter of aesthetics, not flavor.

When the ginger tea mood strikes, just grate the ginger on a Microplane into a mug. Add just-boiled water (and honey and lemon, perchance). Ginger tea. You can just drink the snowy ginger; no need to strain it out. 

And of course the finely grated ginger works in any recipe where you want ginger (though not if you're looking for the ginger to provide some kind of texture). Give the ginger snow about 2 seconds at room temperature and it melts into an absolutely superb, fiber-free ginger paste.

Cake, Kuchen, Koek, Kake, Kolač, Cacen, Keke, Kage, Kuko*, Keyk

When my niece Emily was little, she couldn't manage my name (Kate) and instead called me Cake. In spite of the fact that I don't like actual cake (I wish I had been Aunt Pie or Aunt Lemon Square), I liked the moniker.

So, what's in the name? Where does the word cake come from. It has a connection to the Old Norse word kaka (phew, dodged a bullet with that linguistic evolution...unless you live in modernday Sweden). But I can't help but feel that somewhere, far up in the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) branches there is a connection to the verb cook.**



I'm picturing early man, pre-fire, making a "batter" of ground up roots and water and eating it two-finger style (like poi).

Then, fire. Same mixture + hot stone = a cooked thing. Let's call it a cook....or koek or kaka.

Then, iron. Same mixture + hot pan = cook/koek/cake in a pan. Let's call it a pan cake.

Then, leaveners. Same mixture + leavener + hot pan = pan cake but taller

Now we've got the hang of it. Let's make a small version. Let's call it a cookie.

And now, let's bake that cookie not once but twice (because now we have an oven, yo). Let's call it a biscuit, biscotto, or zwieback.

Actually, near as I can tell (or near as the brains behind the OED can tell), the process went the other way around. The original cake was a hard little twice-cooked hockey puck suitable for nomads and other journeyers. (Oh, P.S., johnnycakes, journeycakes.) But I like my story better.

____________________________________________________

*Esperanto. As in "Shut your kuko-hole."
**For you linguistic pedants out there, I am aware that the original connection to the Latin verb coquere has been discredited. But that brings me to one of the Latin words for cake, which is placenta.

The Mystery of the Exploding Eggs

Young Master Julien Slate-Aussoleil
holds the explode-o egg so Mom
can take an out-of-focus photo.

A couple of whiles ago, I was working on a book called Scratch (written by Maria Rodale, of the Rodales), in which I learned that to get really consistently peelable eggs, you steam them. Genius! And I've been doing that ever since.

But every so often I would get what I call a "crater egg." It appeared that for some reason the air inside the egg couldn't get out (eggshells are porous, n'est-ce pas?) and pushed the egg white up against the shell at the opposite end, leaving an egg-white crater behind. Net result = the most unpeelable egg you'll ever meet, times a million.

Then, even weirder, some eggs would simply explode in the steamer, with loud (relatively speaking) egg bangs. Of course these were beyond peeling: They needed to be scooped out of the shell.

Why, why? My perfect system! What was wrong with it?

Research on the Google Interwebs Machine.

Fake Egg Bloom. Read on

As an egg emerges from the hen, it gets coated with a thin layer of something called the cuticle or "egg bloom," which seals the pores of the egg, protecting it from anything getting to it while it waits to be hatched. However, unless you raise your own chickens, any egg you've ever purchased has had this bloom washed off.

Some egg producers replace the natural cuticle with a coating of mineral oil or wax* to increase the shelf life. In addition to keeping the bad things out, the coating prevents the egg from "respiring"—a process that over time introduces more air into the egg and eventually makes it go bad. (This is why you can test the age of an egg by seeing if it floats in water.) When you cook an egg in boiling water, the minute you immerse the egg, the hot water melts the wax off (though this is just my guess). But with steam, apparently, not so much.

However, the American Egg Board claims that only 10% of producers actually coat their eggs, so I guess it's just the luck of the draw.

*Anyone who has ever stocked a sailboat's pantry in preparation for a long cruise also knows this trick. With limited fridge space on a small boat, eggs are one thing you can keep at room temp, as long as you dip the eggs in paraffin.