I realized yesterday that by posting ingredient lists for recipes in Moosewood, I am probably going to be sued for copyright infringement. Correct me if I’m wrong, but until then I’m going to post everything about each recipe in my own words like I have been, but no exact copy of the text. If you want any other details, you can always contact me via this blog, or buy your own copy of The New Moosewood Cookbook! Mollie Katzen has her own store here. I’m sure the library has a hold of it too.
I was too busy baking today to blog earlier, but I’ll get to that later. Yesterday I made two tasty dishes: marinated sweet potatoes & broccoli and pasta primavera! Kind of a random combination, but they both sounded good and like we could eat off of them for a few days, so it was a go. My dear friend Mary Cassidy came over and got to try some too!
The sweet potatoes were awesome, though Ryan typically doesn’t go for them. Just by steaming some sweet potatoes, broccoli (separately because they cook faster, and I plopped in a few mushrooms), and quickly throwing them hot into a mix of olive oil, mustard powder, honey, red wine vin, lemon juice, garlic, salt and pepper… they were awesome. The recipe says to wait at least 2 hours for them to marinate, so I threw them together early in the day and left them covered on the counter to do their work for dinnertime. An optional garnish is toasted pecans, but I just mixed in some chopped walnuts at the end because I had them leftover from some cookies.
Next was the primavera, which was mostly a whole pound of snap peas that were a pain to de-string after I had sat through a long class until 8:00. I added in the (optional) greens, garlic, fresh basil, scallions, salt and pepper and the thing was a go. Questions: What’s the difference between snow and snap peas? I used snap. If a recipe reads 6 scallions does this mean 6 scallion stalks or 6 whole scallion plants? I used the whole things. Well, it turned out good anyway.
Today was a new day. I headed out to my grandmas and we hit up the grocery store and got to baking. It was nice to have some help because there are a few things I hate about baking:
1. Exact measurements/ingredients and easiness to mess up. Ask Ryan about the time I made cookies with something like 5 cups of oil, or ask Jeremy who ate them anyway.
2. It’s usually so time consuming just for something that tends to sit on my counter and go bad, rather than a fulfilling meal. Why would I make a cake that looks like a bowl of pasta when I can just eat the pasta? And yes, I think that cake idea was in the Food Network magazine last month.
3. MESS. One time a cracked an egg for a cake and it landed on my foot. Seriously, ask my mom. Another time I bought some expensive thing of almond extract, measured it and knocked it over. Today the first thing I did was open a container of walnuts and dump about 20 on the floor. No different.
But with my grandmas help we made some date-nut cake…
and pound cake!
The recipe for the date-nut cake was discouraging. No butter? Only 1/4 cup sugar? We tried it anyway, and the random mixture of odd amounts of chopped walnuts, dates, vanilla, sugar, etc. turned into something sooo good. We made the homemade whipped topping too, which was just some heavy cream, vanilla and powdered sugar. But. So. Good. It would be amazing with some earl grey tea or coffee, or just alone.
These are obviously staged photos, but we had some time to kill while the mixer was beating away at the topping.
We didn’t have as much luck with the pound cake. Did I mention yet that it has 1 lb/4 sticks of butter in it? We compared it to an old family recipe that my grandma has been making ever since I can remember, and it only has 2! (and it’s way better, but shh…) Not to mention, it had a lot less of the other ingredients. We mixed this thing up and it kept getting bigger and bigger. We changed bowls, then it filled the big bundt pan nearly to the top. During baking about a cup of the cake ended up on the bottom of the oven. We had to keep it in an extra ten minutes and it still is a little pudding-y in places. Hmph. The perils of baking… It kind of stuck, too…
After a long day of baking and snacking on hummus, leftovers and field roast sausages I didn’t eat dinner tonight, but I did make a mean version of a Happy Dog with some leftover greens. I’m not sure how it was though. I’m still too stuffed to even think about it and it’s just about midnight.
Tomorrow I’m going to try and tackle a cauliflower pie with a grated potato crust, then bam! It’s Easter. Cut up the ham and slice the t(of)urkey… Well, I guess we’ll see what happens, but so far a meatless life sounds pretty good.
Archive | Desserts RSS feed for this section
