ravenously

from a messageboard:

5 MINUTE CHOCOLATE MUG CAKE
Most dangerous cake recipe in the world

4 tablespoons SR flour (or sub all-purpose flour with a pinch of salt and baking powder)
4 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons cocoa
1 egg
3 tablespoons milk
3 tablespoons oil
3 tablespoons chocolate chips (optional)
A small splash of vanilla extract
1 large coffee mug
Add dry ingredients to mug, and mix well.
Add the egg and mix thoroughly.
Pour in the milk and oil and mix well.
Add the chocolate chips (if using)
and vanilla extract, and mix again.

Put your mug in the microwave and cook for 3 minutes at 1000 watts.
The cake will rise over the top of the mug, but don’t be alarmed!
Allow to cool a little, and tip out onto a plate if desired.
EAT!
(this can serve 2 if you want to feel slightly more virtuous)

This recipe is the most dangerous in the world because it means we’re only ever 5 minutes away from chocolate cake.

Written down for us by Chris (of Chris and Laurel), a vegetarian gumbo recipe:

Gumbo des Herbes

1 bunch mustard greens

1 bunch collard greens

1 bunch turnip greens

1 bunch beet tops

1 bunch carrot tops

1/2 head lettuce

1/2 head cabbage

1 bunch spinach

3 diced onions

1 cup celery

1 cup diced bell pepper

1/4 cup garlic, minced

2 gallons water

5 Tbsp flour

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1/2 tsp thyme

salt, pepper, cayenne, gumbo file’ powder

rice

Clean greens, chop coarsely. In 12-quart pot, bring greens, onions, celery, bell peppers, garlic, and water to a boil. Reduce to a simmer, cook 30 mins. Strain greens, reserve liquid. Puree greens. In pot, make roux with flour and oil until color of a penny. Add all veggies (except greens) and cook till soft. Add water from greens and bring to a boil Reduce to a simmer, cook. Add greens and cook at least 45 minutes. Add file’ powder, stir well, add seasoning. Serve over rice.
cmmattin at indiana

From Rahul’s mom

Dosas made with dal

1 part urad dal

1 part chana dal or moong dal or a combination of the two

Soak for 1 hour. Blend. Add salt. Cook.

Chutney

6 Tbsp coconut, grated or dessicated

1 Serrano pepper

A few sprigs cilantro

2 cloves garlic

1/4 tsp lemon juice and salt to taste

Blend everything.

Potatoes

5 red potatoes

10 curry leaves

4 tsp chilli powder

1/2 tsp cumin powder

1/2 tsp black pepper

2 tsp salt

4 Tbsp wine vinegar

2 Tbsp oil

Cut red potatoes into quarters. Put in a flat dish on medium flame and add all the ingredients and cook until potatoes are done. Add more salt if needed.

I made a big batch of pesto on Sunday, but accidentally ground up part of my pink silicone spatula in the Cuisinart. Fortunately it was not a green spatula, and the pieces were easy to locate. The basil was from the farmer’s market, as was the cheese–absolutely delicious raw milk Trader’s Point Fleur de la Terre–and I used walnuts instead of pine nuts because the downtown Bloomingfoods doesn’t carry pine nuts. Booo! I put two Tbsp of pesto into each Saran wrap-lined cup of my muffin tin, and froze the pesto into little cakes, and put the frozen pesto cakes into some Ziploc freezer bags so I can enjoy the taste of summer basil all winter long.

Dinner tonight will come from one of my favorite cookbooks, Lindsay Bareham’s Supper Won’t Take Long. Sort of, anyway. It’s a dish called Brown Tom; the only reference I could find to this on the internet came, coincidentally, from Martinsville, IN: the Morgan County Longrifles site informs us that “Brown Tom was the nickname given to the standard ration bread issued to the British military.” Bareham’s recipe is for a gratin of tomatoes, brown bread, flat leaf parsley, garlic, and onion. My onions seem to have dissolved into a goo at the bottom of my crisper drawer, so I ended up using lots of garlic instead, and I had no flat leaf parsley. Also, I ignored her advice to peel the tomatoes first.

So my Brown Tom is really pretty different, and I don’t know if you can really call it the same thing. I pureed some of the white and whole wheat rolls my mom made while she was here (I’ve been eating them, but there sure are a lot of them) into bread crumbs, minced about four cloves of garlic, and mixed the crumbs and garlic up in a casserole dish with slices of red farmer’s market tomatoes, salt, and pepper. I sprinkled some parmesan on top, drizzled the crumbs with soy sauce and olive oil, and stuck one of my pesto-cubes smack in the middle. I hope it tastes good. It seems like it should, in theory. I will find out soon.

Some interesting stuff I’ve eaten lately:
- Yummy quinoa salad at Angela and Pete’s house: quinoa with parsley and mint, dressed with a garlic-lemon juice-olive oil dressing, mixed with chopped tomatoes.
- Water buffalo yogurt. It’s pretty creamy, but sort of a weird, smooth, firm texture rather than the creamier type I prefer.
- Malabar spinach, bought from Jennie and Rebecca at the farmer’s market. I thought about growing this for a while–it’s recommended by permaculture books as a perennial green (permaculture is big into growing perennials rather than annuals; it’s supposedly much easier on the ecosystem). It’s… um… interesting. And by “interesting,” I mean “slimy.” Like okra, it gives off tons of mucilage, especially the stems. I cooked it with ramen and threw in a couple of beaten eggs for protein. I was kind of appalled as I was eating it and the sliminess gradually dawned on me, and had to look it up to make sure it wasn’t rotting or anything. The flavor seemed pretty nice and inoffensive. The slime was just something else. I bet it would be good in gumbo, though.
- Mom and I also did a lot of baking when she was visiting–she made rolls, both white and whole wheat, and I helped her make a whole wheat crust custard apple pie with Jonathan apples from the farmer’s market. Yummy!

Yesterday, September 15, was Joseah’s birthday, so we had him, Beth, Jeanne, and Steve over for dinner and a screening of David Lynch’s Inland Empire (horrible). Jeanne and Steve brought some of their homebrewed beer and delicious homemade mac and cheese–the secret is apparently Worcestershire sauce and dry mustard. I made salsa with some red and yellow farmer’s market tomatoes, cilantro, red onion, bottled lime juice, salt, garlic, and some rare chiles we bought from the Chile Woman at the market–I believe they were called Arrivivi Gusano. They were very hot, but with a wonderful fruity taste; half were unripe green and half were pale yellow, and they were perhaps an inch long and fairly thin and tapered. I also made some almond thumbprint cookies from the Joy of Cooking, minus the almonds. I made a few with Maine blueberry jam, for Rahul, and for most of them I used spoonfuls of peach jam Joseah’s mom had sent him for his birthday, and that he’d brought over to share. It was all very nice. We had hash browns and eggs at Wee Willie’s, went to the farmer’s market, and went to the Bloomingfoods grand opening, where I got a free chair massage and some free soap samples.

Today I was woken up with breakfast in bed! I didn’t actually eat it in bed, but I was incredibly thrilled to wake up to hash browns, cottage cheese, and a vegetable omelet with sweet red pepper, onion, olives, and spinach.

I made an easy casserole for dinner: emptied a can of organic rice and beans into a glass pie pan, mixed it with a chopped fresh tomato, red onion, fresh spinach, and topped it with some shredded cheese, then baked at 350 for about 20 minutes, turned it up to 450 for the last 10 minutes to brown the cheese.

Now I’m trying to catch up on work and readings for class–spent all day in the library watching the videos I’d missed–and I’m feeling very tired.

Best bento boxes ever:
http://e-obento.com/

A few yummy things to report:
- I ate paw paws last weekend (Labor Day weekend) thanks to Jeanne, who stopped by early in the morning from her shift at the Bloomingfoods stall to pick some up. They were much better when old and soft and brown, and tasted somewhere between banana, mango, and papaya, with a bit of papaya-ish kerosene taste that kept me from fully enjoying them.
- I made cornmeal pancakes with frozen corn kernels and they were really crunchy and good.
- I also made buckwheat pancakes with buckwheat flour from the WIBS mill at the farmer’s market, and then tried to make a sourdough-starter buckwheat bread loaf, but it didn’t rise. It was really good when fresh out of the oven, though, with that browned grain flavor bread should have.
- I made a tomato sauce with fresh tomatoes and basil from the farmer’s market. I think we ate this with rotini.
- I made a tomato stew with Quorn pieces, green olives, fresh tomatoes, basil, cinnamon, cumin, oregano, and sweet peppers from the farmer’s market. We ate this over couscous with sauteed mushrooms.
- Went to Camie’s house a few days ago, on Sept 5th, where she and Laura showed us how to make salsa, beans, and fresh corn and flour tortillas. I made huevos rancheros the next morning with some leftover refried pink beans and chipotle salsa. Delicious!

We had a pretty nice weekend, I think, full of many of the simple domestic pleasures I missed in our studio apartment in Cleveland. Yesterday morning we biked up to the farmer’s market and bought a few things. Jennie and Rebecca were there, though without any yarn or roving to buy (and the sportweight alpaca lady wasn’t there either!). We chatted about spinning briefly, and I bought some plump Pink Lady and small dark Brandywine tomatoes, and a huge, fragrant, flowery bunch of basil with sharp pointed leaves–it looks like Thai holy basil, but green, not purple. They threw in a small round watermelon along with it. The folks from Wibs were there for the last time this year with their loudly chugging red enameled mill pouring out cornmeal, so I stocked up: 2 lbs buckwheat flour in a white cloth sack, 2 lbs white cornmeal, and 4 lbs whole-wheat flour. The fresh sage at another booth looked so nice, I had to pick some up despite having no plans for it. And it was mainly the thought of having to carry anything else on my bike that kept me from going crazy over the huge variety of summer heirloom tomatoes. We went to the library, I divested myself of three trash bags full of clothes at Goodwill, and I made whole wheat rotini with fresh tomato sauce (seasoned with hot peppers from our Thai bird pepper plant, which grew insanely huge and leafy under Jeanne’s care over the summer).

Today, I made John Thorne’s buckwheat pancakes–I think the recipe is from Serious Pig–which we ate with maple syrup and melted butter. Not bad, not great either. I think fermenting longer would help. I uncharacteristically attempted to clean the bathtub. Then we went to the Bryan Park pool and I went down the two waterslides about a million times. The sun is shining, cicadas are buzzing, Bloomington looks green and fresh and summery still.

We had Charlie and Defne over for dinner (plus a late-night postprandial swim in our clothes)

The menu:
- aperitifs of Charlie’s fancy, fragrant French absinthe poured into a glass, with cold water slowly poured into it through a sugarcube on a cut silver spoon, till the liquid was a cloudy pale yellow
- green leaf lettuce salad with walnuts, dressed with chopped shallots, lemon juice, flaxseed oil, EVOO, sweet and spicy mustard, salt, pepper, dried tarragon, and dried thyme
- sauteed asparagus dressed with herb and fried shallot compound butter
- crisp-fried polenta slices (not fresh–we bought a tube from the store) topped with a tomato sauce made from canned crushed tomatoes, soffritto (garlic, onion, carrot, celery), a fresh chopped tomato, a bay leaf, fresh basil from Aarthi’s garden, oregano, fennel seeds, salt, and pepper; and sauteed white button mushrooms
- red lentils cooked with soy sauce, garlic, soffritto (garlic, onion, carrot, celery), fresh rosemary from Aarthi’s garden, dried oregano, cumin, cinnamon, paprika, chopped fresh tomatoes, soy sauce, fresh parsley, fresh chopped spinach, bay leaf, salt, and pepper
- rice pudding: a cup or so of brown basmati rice gently cooked, uncovered, with a can of coconut milk and water, seasoned with cardamom pods, vanilla extract, lemon zest, fresh lemon juice, star anise, dark brown sugar, a tiny pinch of salt, and maple syrup from Steve and Amalia’s farm.