Thursday night was red cooked cabbage. Made with green cabbage, the red comes in from the colors of everything else it gets cooked in. Although, truth be told, they should call it brown cooked cabbage, but I can see where that might not sounds as appetizing, and it was very good. This one was a cinch! Here's the biz:
1 cabbage sliced thinly
3 tablespoons canola oil
1 cup vegetable broth(I've been opting for Rapunzel brand bouillon rather than keeping cans or cartons around what is quickly becoming a well-stocked kitchen.)
1/2 cup of soy sauce ( I used Bragg's Aminos, just as flavorful and much lower in sodium.)
2-3 tablespoons of rice vinegar
1 table spoon rice wine or dry sherry (I used sherry because I happened to have it in the pantry already.)
1 teaspoon of black peppercorns
Cook the cabbage in the oil until it is vice and tender, add everything else, and simmer 25 minutes covered. Check out "Serving Up the Harvest" for the full recipe.
The result was pungent and peppery, I had mine for dinner ladled over a healthy serving of quinoa for some protein.
The night before my experiment du jour was maple roasted carrots. And frankly it's as easy as it sounds. This one also comes from "Serving Up the Harvest."
1 pound of carrots, cut into bite sized spears
1 tablespoon butter (or vegan buttery alternative)
2-3 tablespoons of pure maple syrup (hint: Aunt Jemima and Mrs. Butterworth wouldn't know the real thing if it bit them.)
Parsley for garnish
Roast the carrots 10-15 minutes in a single layer in a greased baking sheet with sides. Melt butter and syrup together, drizzle over carrots, bake another 10 minutes.
Sweet but not too sweet, this would make a lovely, colorful addition to a holiday table in lieu of a more expected, nightmarish sweet potato marshmallow casserole.
Today ended up involving a bit more free time than I had originally anticipated, so I tried a couple of new things, to surprisingly pleasant results. First, raw "double-stuffed tomatoes," filled with a sunflower seed and sundried tomato filling. Second, tomato strawberry ice cream (made with, you guessed it, the vitamix) which I then used as a filling for mochi.
If you're not familiar with mochi, it's a Japanese dish, made from sweet rice flower and sugar essentially, which combines a sweet taste with a doughy,chewy texture. Almost but not quite gummy, mochi is often served as bite sized balls fille switch ice cream. There's a Mochi store on Crown St in New Haven, and all I have to say is whatever they charge, it's worth every penny. This stuff is a royal mess to make, from beginning to end. I should have taken a shot of the disaster area that was my kitchen during the mochi making process. Alas, as I was up to my elbows in gooey, sticky, hot mochi, I was unwilling to touch anything I couldn't easily wash. This of course includes the iPhone. I once heard someone compare an iPhone to Joan Rivers' face, something along the lines of they cost too much money, and if you get them wet you're fucked. I believe it on both counts.
Here's a shot of what mochi should look like:
Here's one of mine:
In all fairness, they taste the same. Mine are much darker because I used an unrefined sucunat sugar instead of white. And make sure you give these things a good dusting of cornstarch. Otherwise they will stick together, and, as you can see, this can lead to some mochi breakage when prying them apart.
The tomatoes by the way were just ok. Three out of five stars. The filling needs a little bit of zing factor, maybe some lemon juice, I'm not sure, maybe a higher ratio of sun-dried tomatoes and olives to seeds. They were tasty, but I had to spice mine up with a few spritzer of Bragg's Amino Acids. I will say, they look fantastic!
So at the end of the day taste and presentation were a wash, one dish succeeding where the other lacked. The tomato ice cream, by the way, spectacular!
I am working at becoming more diligent about sharing actual recipes with you rather than mere descriptions, and in the very near future will set out a list of all the wonderful cookbooks(and uncookbooks) I have been using.
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Location:Madison, CT
Everything looks and sounds delicious! You should let Geoff and Annie know that you made mochi, they love it! Yours don't look all that different from the professional ones, by the by.
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