Category Archives: food and cooking

Owls, Lepers, and More Around the Net

art, birds, books, crafts, food and cooking, humor,

In just two days’ tootling around some of my favorite places on the Internet I have found items worth sharing in several categories: humor, animal photos, Bible study, a recipe and a quilt — just a sampling of this week’s surprises in that wide world.

Gumbo Lily shows photos of the darling owls in her own back yard. She often encounters wildlife to capture with her camera, illustrating the ranch life she captures with her pen (um…keyboard).

Angie got me laughing again, this time about Internet spam, of all things. Spam with a Scottish twist.

M.K.’s recent post To Touch a Leper, got me thinking on the wonderful and mysterious fact of Christ’s life and how it is health and cleanness.

A quilter-blogger Who Loves Baby Quilts and doesn’t own a sewing machine made a sweet mini quilt she refers to as a mug rug. Now I know what to call my own treasured little rug given to me some time ago. I’m showing both sides, which I have tried to keep pretty by not using it when my mug contains cocoa.

Last, a simple and simply yummy-sounding Greek dessert that requires not much more than opening a container of good yogurt.

Chocolate & Pumpkin & Spice

food and cooking, ,

Everyone, it seems, is talking and writing about every variety of pumpkin bread possible, which they have baked and posted recipes for, and the (pumpkin?) seed sprouted in my mind and bore fruit last night, when I put all these ideas together and came up with my own batch that was pretty much perfect. My thanks to all of you who made my mouth water and my imagination start working.

Pumpkin & Chocolate Chip Muffins
This made 30 smallish muffins and two mini-loaves

3 1/2 cups unbleached flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 29-oz can pumpkin (about 3 1/2 cups)
1/3 cup white sugar
1 cup dark brown sugar
3/4 cup olive oil
4 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 tablespoon finely grated fresh ginger
3/4 cup buttermilk
2 cups Ghirardelli 60% cacao chocolate chips
3 cups toasted walnuts, chopped

Combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice in a medium bowl; whisk to blend. Using electric mixer, beat pumpkin and sugars until blended. Gradually beat in eggs, vanilla, oil and ginger. Stir dry ingredients into the pumpkin mixture alternating with buttermilk in three additions. Stir in nuts and chips last.

Fill lined muffin cups 3/4 full with batter; likewise mini loaf pans that have been greased or lined with parchment.

Bake muffins at 375 degrees, 30-45 minutes, depending on size of cup and whether your oven is convection, until a toothpick comes out clean — though it can be hard to tell with all that chocolate in there! Bake the mini loaves about an hour. Cool in pans.

Upon eating the first muffin I thought I hadn’t put in enough spice to suit, but today they were the perfect combination of tender and moist, with lots of soft dark chocolate not quite melted in, and dreamy flavor, probably just the right amount of spice. I wouldn’t mind if they had still less sugar, but I’ll be cautious about changing that ingredient too much and maybe not liking the resulting change in the crumb texture.

I took this recipe at epicurious.com for my jumping-off place, after reading all the reviews that told the many ways people changed the original. I mostly combined many of their changes to customize mine; and I was in such a hurry to get my loaves and muffins done before my bedtime, I forgot to take a picture. This tiger does have something to do with the recipe, because he was carved from a pumpkin by Pippin some years ago.

After Mr. Glad and I enjoyed my creations with breakfast, most of the remainder went into the freezer to bring out when there are more people around to enjoy them. I hope that will be soon, but I’ve had my fix, which I think will keep me for a while.

Recipes Page Has Appeared

food and cooking

I’m headed to the mountains this week for a few days, but I managed to put together a page of recipe links, found now on the sidebar. I’ll have to transcribe the Ratatouille recipe later and add it along with others by and by.

At church we just had our yearly international food festival, and I baked a couple of things for the bakery which I’ll tell about, too, illustrated with pictures taken in process and upon completion. It was quite fun to bake goodies that didn’t sit around here tempting me for days; they were consumed within a few hours of the start of the party. This year I didn’t even eat any baklava. The memory of the perfect rendition of baklava that a member of our parish bakes was still lingering and satisfying.

Turkish Green Beans

food and cooking,

Here is the recipe for the green beans I wrote about in my post on vegetable stews. I have seen versions of this recipe that don’t use a pressure cooker, but if you are comfortable with this kind of cooking it’s very convenient, especially when you have a lot and would like to save them. Most ways of preserving green beans end up with a product that I find lacking, but these are quite good after being frozen. Traditionally they are served cold, but we enjoy them at all temperatures. I put my adjustments in parentheses to the original recipe.

I tried making them with less oil, or with a different type of oil, and the result was mushy beans. But one commenter on my first post (who has a blog dedicated to pressure cooking) said to try pressure-cooking them only four minutes.  I may do that next summer, but this year’s pole beans are about done.

Turkish Green Beans in the Pressure Cooker

2 pounds green beans, trimmed and bisected lengthwise (I didn’t read this carefully and have always cut mine crosswise into 2-3″ lengths.)
1 medium white (I used yellow) onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, slivered
5-6 Roma tomatoes, peeled and chopped (or 1 16-oz can diced tomatoes)
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 heaping teaspoon Turkish hot pepper paste (or 1 tablespoon Louisiana hot sauce)
1 to 1 1/2 cups water, divided
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 cup olive oil

Place the beans, onion, garlic and tomato in pressure cooker. Dilute the tomato and pepper pastes in 1/2 cup water and pour that over the beans. Add the remaining water, salt, sugar and oil. Cover and cook; once the pot is at full pressure, cook for 18 minutes.

Quick-release the pressure under cold running water or with the quick-release mechanism. Serve chilled (or warm, or room temperature).