EveJohnson, Author at Ant & Anise • Page 2 of 4

Hard to Beet Hummus

What a brilliant idea it was to split a community shared agriculture box from Cropthorne Farm. And I think the strategy of alternating weeks, rather than splitting each box is going to work out just fine too.

In fact, when I read the CSA’s email about this week’s box, and saw garlic scapes in the mix again, I was delighted on two counts: it’s your week for the box, and it’s the last week of garlic scapes.

There’s the rub with eating local: if you want the joy of saying “that came from our farm,” then you have to like what grows there.

As satisfying as they are to look at – curvy green snakes! how cool is that? – I can easily wait a year before eating garlic scapes again. They’re okay, just underwhelming.

Ah, but the beets, that was another story.

I roasted them – four medium sized beets – the day I picked up the box – and served one still warm from the oven as the delicacy it was, cut into segments, and sprinkled with a little salt.

We could have just eaten them like that. But I wanted to expand my repertoire of beet recipes. Remembering your parsnip hummus, I searched for beet hummus recipes and found the Minimalist Baker’s – just one beet, and a 14-ounce can of chickpeas, but still proof-positive that someone had made beet hummus and liked it enough to post it.

We agreed that more beets would be better and ditched the chickpeas. There was a lot of tasting – at first I put in too much tahini, which had to be balanced with more lemon – but in the end it was very good indeed.

Three medium beets turned into what seemed like a very large quantity of hummus. We ate all but half a cup before dinner, with fancy carrots and cucumber, both from the CSA box, and tonight I finished off the last of what was left, making pretty canapés with a Cropthorne cucumber and mint from the back deck.

And yes, I’m happy to say that the beets came from our farm.

Hard to Beet Hummus

Serving Size: 6-8 people

Bob, your best beloved, made so many puns, so steadily all night that I can’t remember if “Hard to Beet Hummus” was his best line or not. As a recipe title it is, indeed, hard to beet. Allow at least an hour for roasting the beets – even better, roast them the day before.

Ingredients

3 medium beets
1 teaspoon olive oil
2 tablespoons tahini
2 to 3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon lemon zest
Juice of 1 lemon
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
Black pepper to taste
2 fresh mint leaves for garnish (optional)

Instructions

To roast the beets: Preheat the oven to 375 F. Scrub the beets and trim off greens and long roots. Toss the beets in a teaspoon of olive oil, enough to coat, and season with salt.
Cut a large piece of aluminum foil, enough to make a sealed package that will hold your beets. Place the beets on a baking sheet, and roast for an hour, then check for doneness. A knife should easily penetrate through the beet.
Set aside to cool. when the beets are cool enough to handle, remove the skin. It will rub off easily.
In a food processor or blender combine beets, garlic, tahini, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Blend until you have a smooth paste. Taste and adjust for seasoning.
Transfer the humus into a bowl, and garnish with mint leaves cut into chiffonade

Baby artichokes, grief and the pleasures of memory

Ah yes, nothing disrupts writing quite so completely as death.

I’ve been making my way along since Ann’s death, good most days, a weepy mess on others, with no warning and no apparent trigger for the tears. But that’s how grief goes, unpredictably and in waves.

And somehow any grief is every grief, so sadness over one loss brings back sadness over another.

Lately I’ve been acutely missing my old friend James. He was as different from Ann as any two people could be, in life and death.
James was an irrepressible enthusiast who couldn’t wait to tell you a new joke, or give you a taste of the latest in a never-ending series of new foods. He died at 84, with a soup on the stove and a cookbook on the table, from a heart attack so massive that he may not have had time to register what was happening.

I’d been missing him even before I found the baby artichokes in the grocery store. But standing at the chopping block, trimming away the outer leaves, I felt again that particular ache of wanting to see someone you love, and knowing that you never will again.

Forty years ago, in San Francisco, we were shopping for supper and James found some baby artichokes in the market. I’d never seen them before. He erupted into effusions. We bought a very generous amount.

Back at the house we were staying in, he showed me how to break off the outer leaves, trim away the green on the stem end, and immediately rub the ends on a cut lemon.

Next step: slice off any prickly ends of leaves and rub the ends on a cut lemon. Then cut them in half, and rub the halves on a cut lemon.

You can’t possibly overestimate how quickly a cut artichoke left open to the air turns brown.

Then he warmed a bit of olive oil in a heavy frying pan, put the artichokes in, cut side down, cooked them until they browned, then turned them over, ground on salt and pepper, and squeezed the juices of the cut lemon over top. He put a lid on the pan and cooked them until they were tender and easily pierced by a paring knife, about 10 minutes.

We ate them whole, with good bread and wine, all by themselves. Oh my.

I’ve cooked baby artichokes many times since. In fact, I buy them whenever I run across good-looking ones, firm and fresh.

The purple ones, by the way, while exceedingly nice to look at, don’t offer any other benefit over their plain green cousins, and seem to take longer to cook.

Last week, I bought artichokes, thinking I’d make them as a side dish for Friday’s supper. But by suppertime I was in a hurry, so I didn’t cook them.

On Saturday, we bought spot prawns, the first of the season – just eight, at a somewhat astronomical price from our neighborhood health food mega chain. Pasta would turn the prawns into dinner, so pasta it was, with baby artichokes, spot prawns and goat cheese.

Alan kindly twisted the heads off the prawns for me.
It’s important to do it right away, while the prawns are still lively, because as they die, they secrete a chemical that turns the flesh of their tails to mush. (A good reason to never buy whole spot prawns that are lying still on ice.)
But the livelier they are, the harder it is for me to separate the heads from the tails. I’m a hypocrite: I love to eat them as long as someone else will spare me the horror of killing them.

I put the pasta water on once the artichokes had started cooking, then sliced some onions very thin and put them in a second pan to cook slowly in olive oil. The prawns joined the onions when the pasta was almost cooked, and took only two minutes before they turned a bright pink.
I used the whole grain spaghetti that Barilla makes, but any long thin pasta would do. A bit of goat cheese and parsley on top, and there it was: an impromptu taste of spring.

We talked about James over dinner – Alan knew him too – our delightful, prickly, always entertaining friend.
It’s been five years since he died. In my experience, grief never goes away, but it gets softer over time, and in the end, you almost welcome the ache, because of the memories that come with it.

In the spirit of James, here’s a recipe for two that you’re encouraged to modify.

Baby Artichoke and Spot Prawn Pasta

Ingredients

1 to 2 pounds baby artichokes, green or purple
1 to 2 lemons
8 spot prawns, about 3/4 of a pound
olive oil
1/2 medium onion, sliced very thin
enough spaghetti, linguine, angel hair pasta for two
2 tablespoons chicken stock (optional)
goat cheese
parsley
salt and pepper

Instructions

Trim the artichokes and seal the cut ends as you go by rubbing them into a cut lemon.
Heat a tablespoon or more olive oil in a heavy frypan. Place the artichokes fact down in the pan. Cook them on medium heat until they brown.
Once the artichokes are cooking, put the pasta water on.
In a second frypan, heat a tablespoon of olive oil and add the onions. Cook them slowly, stirring often, until they are soft and beginning to brown.
Once the artichokes have browned, turn them over, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and squeeze on the remainder of your lemon. If your lemon is not very juicy, add the juice of the second lemon.
Cover the pan and cook over low heat until the artichokes are tender and easily pierced by the point of a paring knife, about 10 minutes. Check the pan often. If it's too dry, add a few tablespoons of chicken stock or water.
Put the pasta in when the water is boiling.
When the onions are cooked, bring the heat to high and add the spot prawns. Cook for a minute on each side, just until they turn pink.
Turn off the heat and add the cooked prawns and onions to the cooked artichokes. Drain the pasta, add to the prawns. Then put the pasta into a serving dish, top with crumbled goat cheese and sprinkle on parsley.

Peppermint Patties: so easy, so good

Cookie night seems like a long time ago now – almost as long ago as the day I promised to post this recipe “tomorrow.”

A lot has happened in the meantime, some of it happy, some of it worrisome. Here’s the conundrum of a family food blog: when illness rides through the centre of Christmas preparations and blogging time both, then what do you do?

Write brightly about Peppermint Patties?

Or “tell the truth and shame the Devil,” as Mother used to say – no matter how sad the truth might be?

Well, the happy part is that my sister Ann recovered from her bout with pneumonia, although she will never recover from Alzheimer’s.

By the time we had our brunch and present exchange on December 27, we were all pretty much returned to normal.

I gave the last of my stock of Peppermint Patties to my niece Janet, along with the heirloom 1960s Christmas tree plate. Happily, like Janet, the chocolates are gluten free.

I’m even toying with the idea of making them again, just one more time before the holidays are truly over.

For one thing, despite the oddness of producing something that seems so decidedly commercial, Peppermint Patties are easy to make.

And since the chocolate is so much better than any chocolate-mint combination you can buy – barring a trip to a chocolate specialty store – they are immensely pleasing.

I’ve made a few changes to the recipe below, which I found in the Gourmet Holiday special edition, from 2011.

The most important ingredient change is substituting coconut oil for their “vegetable shortening.”
I’m not even sure what vegetable shortening is, but I know I don’t have any. Since there’s no discernible coconut taste, I think it’s a good change.

Gourmet gives instructions for tempering the chocolate: a series of steps for heating, cooling, and reheating it.

Because I don’t have an instant-read thermometer, I used my old candy thermometer.

But it only measures temperatures above 100 degrees, so the critical dipping temperature – 88 F to 91 F – is too low for it to register.

Still, it was useful. My habitual way to melt chocolate is in the microwave, at power level four on my machine.

Turns out that’s way too hot, almost 110 degrees. So it’s no wonder that on cookie night, Marla and Shirley had trouble with the chocolate spreading. I’d like to apologize now for remarking that they seemed to have “puddling issues,” and even more for thinking that I could have done better.

Once the chocolate is cool enough, dipping them is much easier, and the Peppermint Patties, while they don’t look machine-perfect, do look like something you shouldn’t be able to pull off in your own kitchen.

Gourmet’s editors suggest that they will keep, refrigerated, for a month. Good luck with that. I’ve noticed that they’re the first sweets to be plucked off a cookie tray. Factor in raids by resident Christmas mice, and you won’t have them for long.

Luckily they work just fine if you double the batch, and you can store the un-dipped rounds in the freezer indefinitely.

Peppermint Patties

Yield: 4 dozen

Ingredients

2 1/4 cups icing sugar, for filling
1 1/2 tablespoons light corn syrup
1 tablespoon water
1/2 teaspoon peppermint extract
1 tablespoon coconut oil
10-ounces good quality 70 per cent bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped.
icing sugar for rolling

Instructions

For the filling:

With a hand held electric mixer, beat the icing sugar with the corn syrup, water, peppermint extract, coconut oil and a pinch of salt on medium speed until just combined.
Knead on a work surface dusted with icing sugar until smooth.
Roll out between sheets of parchment paper on a large baking sheet into 7 to 8-inch rounds, less than 1/4-inch thick.
Freeze until firm, about 15 minutes.
Remove top sheet of paper and sprinkle round with confectioner's sugar. Replace top sheet, then flip round over and repeat sprinkling on the other side.
Cut out as many rounds as possible with a cutter. Transfer to a parchment-lined baking sheet. Gather the scraps and repeat. Freeze until firm, at least 10 minutes.

For the tempered chocolate:

Melt 3/4 of the chocolate in a metal bowl set over a saucepan of barely simmering water.
Remove the bowl from the pan and add remaining chocolate, stirring until smooth. Cool until thermometer inserted at least 1/2 inch into the chocolate registers 80 F.
Return water in pan to a boil and remove from heat. Reheat, stirring, until the thermometer registers 88 to 91 F. Remove bowl from pan.
Balance 1 peppermint on a fork and submerge in the chocolate, letting excess drip off and scraping the back of the fork against the rim of the bowl if necessary. Return patty to sheet.
To make decorative ridges on the patties, immediately set the bottom of the fork briefly on top of the patty, then lift the fork straight up.
Coat the remaining rounds, rewarming chocolate to 88 to 91 F as necessary.
They will keep, chilled, in an airtight container, layered between sheets of parchment paper for one month.

Claus’s Chocolate Crinkles

Fudgy, soft, with the intense chocolate flavor that comes from using unsweetened Baker’s chocolate, the Crinkles have a sweet layer on the outside yielding to a slightly more bitter taste inside.

They look fancy, but the oven does the decorating, so as long as you remember to make the dough at least six hours before you plan to bake, nothing could be easier.

For one thing, there’s no creaming. You melt the butter and chocolate together and then add them to the beaten eggs and sugar before adding the flour. An electric hand mixer does the work – at least until it’s time to form the dough into 80 one-inch balls and roll them in icing sugar.

If you have some kitchen elves on hand, that can be very pleasant and social, the kind of simple, repetitive kitchen chore, like shelling peas, or cutting fruit for canning, that we don’t often do any more.

I found them in A Baker’s Field Guide to Christmas Cookies, by Dede Wilson, a truly wonderful cookbook that has fueled the creativity of cookie night for several years: the Christmas Mice! the Meringue Mushrooms!

If you’re a fan of Christmas Cookies, you need this book.

I’ve taken two liberties with the recipe.

First, I’ve changed its name. Wilson called them Kris Kringle’s Krinkles. Somehow the initials KKK just don’t say Christmas to me. Right now I’m going with Claus’s Chocolate Crinkles, but I’m open to better names.

And as of this batch, I’ve officially stopped making the version that’s rolled in cocoa powder instead of icing sugar. Here’s why.

Although we make these cookies every year, they aren’t my favorites. The telling proof? I can keep a container of them in the house and not feel any need to go get another cookie every half hour or so.

But other people, including Alan and Marla, always ask for them.
What they say, with glad expectation in their voices, is: “Are you going to make those chocolate cookies with the icing sugar on them?”

Since no one ever mentions the cocoa-rolled version, and they’re always the last to be eaten, I’m not going to make them any more.

Expect your hands to become sticky with dough. You’ll have to stop and wash a couple of times in the course of rolling a batch.

Tomorrow: the best chocolate-covered mints ever.

Claus’s Chocolate Crinkles

Yield: 80 cookies

Ingredients

5 ounces unsweetened chocolate, broken into pieces
1/2 cup butter
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
4 large eggs
2 cups granulated sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Confectioner’s sugar
unsweetened cocoa powder (optional)

Instructions

Melt chocolate and butter together in a double boiler – over hot but not boiling water – or in a microwave until about ¾ melted. Remove from heat and stir until completely melted and smooth.
Stir flour, baking powder and salt together in a medium bowl.
In a large bowl, with an electric mixer on high speed (hand-held is fine) beat eggs, granulated sugar and vanilla together until creamy, about 2 minutes.
Whisk chocolate and butter mixture until smooth, and beat into the egg mixture.
Add about one-third of the flour mixture and mix on low speed. Gradually add remaining flour, mixing just until blended.
Dough may be very thin; it will firm up on cooling.
Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least six hours or overnight.
Preheat oven to 350 F. Line 2 cookie sheets with parchment paper. Sift some confectioner’s sugar into a small bowl. If you’re using the cocoa, sift some into a small bowl.
Roll dough between your palms into 1-inch balls, then roll in confectioner’s sugar (or cocoa) to coat completely. Place the balls 2 inches apart on cookie sheets, and gently flatten so they don’t roll.
Bake until puffed and cracked in appearance, about 12 minutes. The centres will still feel somewhat soft.
Slide parchment onto racks to cool cookies completely.
Store in an airtight container, up to two weeks.

Chocolate-Dipped Cappuccino Shortbread: do Christmas cookies get better than this?

Imagine a rich, coffee-flavored shortbread dipped in dark chocolate, served cold, so the chocolate snaps when you bite into it.

If there’s a better Christmas cookie, I haven’t met it.

A caterer called Jane Bailey invented these Cappuccino Shortbread cookies, and gave the recipe to the Vancouver Sun for a story on gifts from the kitchen. She suggested packing them into coffee mugs as gifts.

It was one of the best recipes of the year, and shortly after was reprinted in Five-Star Food, the cookbook I wrote at the newspaper in 1993, where it’s gone on to earn an ever widening circle of admirers.

I’ve made Cappuccino Shortbread cookies many times, and found them infallible, so I’ve been surprised when other people report having problems with them.

As long as you follow the recipe, I think there are only two things that can go wrong.

If the dough is too warm, the cookies may spread too much. You can avoid that problem by making sure that the butter is room temperature, and not on the verge of melting. That may mean letting it sit out, rather than speeding up the process in the microwave.
If you cut too deep a line into the cookie with the back of your knife, they will also spread too much (like the cookie on the right in the photos below).

One other caution: don’t give in to the temptation to use good quality coffee beans instead of instant, not even if you have to go out and buy a jar of instant coffee to make the cookies. No matter how fine the grind, coffee beans will always stay gritty, and they won’t release their coffee flavor.

It’s worth risking the shocked question from guests – “You keep instant coffee?” – to make Cappuccino Shortbreads work as they should. Just buy a wide-mouthed jar, so the measuring spoon will fit in easily. Store it in the back of the cupboard from year to year. You may be surprised how often you find yourself replacing it.

Over the years, I’ve changed the original in two ways:

Jane Bailey called for dipping both ends, but this presents a problem. It’s hard enough to hold onto the cookie and dip one end without getting chocolate smudges on the shortbread. To dip two ends you’d have to dip them very shallowly, and that would mean a reduced chocolate to shortbread ratio. Who would want that?

The original recipe also called for squares of semi-sweet chocolate – supermarket chocolate in other words. Upgrading the quality and intensity of the chocolate is well worth it.

Chocolate-Dipped Cappuccino Shortbread

Ingredients

4 teaspoons instant coffee
1 cup butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup cornstarch
6 ounces 70 per cent Belgian chocolate

Instructions

Finely crush the instant coffee in your coffee grinder. In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar together. Beat in instant coffee and vanilla.
Sift flour and cornstarch together. Stir into butter mixture. The dough is dry. You will have to use your hands to mix it.
Mould the dough into the shape of coffee beans, using one tablespoon of dough for each cookie.
Using the back of a knife, press and indent about 1/8-inch deep, lengthwise, across the top of each cookie.
Place on a parchment-paper covered baking sheet.
Bake at 325 F for 15 minutes. Slide the parchment paper onto wire racks to cool the cookies.
Melt the chocolate. Dip one end of the cookies in chocolate. Place on baking sheets lined with waxed paper or parchment paper and refrigerate.

Tomorrow, cookie night recipes continue with Kris Kringle’s Chocolate Krinkles.

Of moose and men: truly great gingerbread cookies

I no longer know who Betty was, or why we ran her recipe, but I’ve been making Betty’s Traditional Gingerbread since the first Christmas I worked in the food section at the Vancouver Sun, in 1987.

I was planning to make a gingerbread house, but I was busy. The dough stayed in the fridge, Christmas came and went, and the moment for gingerbread houses passed. Sometime early in January, I rolled out the dough, cut some cookies, and realized, with enormous pleasure, that this recipe makes truly great gingerbread cookies.

They have a subtle spicy flavor, not too heavy, and if you roll them thin and keep them crisp, a satisfying snap. I’m happy to have leftover dough early in January, because they’re good spread with soft cheese, with an apple on the side. And if it’s still Christmas, they’re lovely dipped in chocolate – but what isn’t?

And though sugar cookies sometimes make it onto the menu for cookie night and sometimes don’t, gingerbreads to decorate always do.

I double the recipe and sometimes end up making it twice.

Because the dough keeps so well in the fridge, it’s perfect for pulling out for last-minute guests. You can roll out the cookies, pop them in the oven, and in less than 10 minutes have a house that smells of Christmas.

The only thing you need to know is to make them at least a day before you want to bake them, to let the flavor develop.

Betty's Traditional Gingerbread

Yield: 36 3-inch cookies

The original recipe called for shortening. I always use butter. And I roll the cookies thinner than the 1/4 inch that Betty suggested. One quick tip: grease your measuring cup before you pour the molasses in, and it will come out easily.

Ingredients

1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
2-1/2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3/4 cup molasses
3 tablespoons white vinegar
1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Instructions

Cream butter and sugar together.
Combine flour, salt, ginger, nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon, mixing well.
Combine molasses, vinegar and baking soda and add to the butter and sugar mixture. Add flour, part at a time, mixing well.
Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.
For gingerbread cookies, roll dough out to 1/8th inch thickness on a lightly flour surface. Cut out shapes with cookie cutters. Place cookies on a baking sheet, lined with parchment paper.
Bake at 350 F for 8 to 10 minutes.

Tomorrow: Possibly the best Christmas cookie of all time: Cappuccino Shortbreads