I’ve never seen the point of buying and consuming products dolled up to simulate meat. This includes Tofurky, source of our running joke during last year’s Hood River trip. Yet these products are still popular. (I thought you vegetarians and vegans didn’t want to be reminded of evil animal products.)
The latest entrants in the fake meat competition are legume-based burgers specifically designed to have the look, taste, and texture of real meat. The marketing is primarily toward omnivores who may want to reduce their meat consumption. Julian was intrigued after reading an article in Cooks Illustrated about these products. We sampled both of the highest rated burgers, Impossible and Beyond. He cooked both in a skillet to do an accurate comparison.
The Impossible Burger was first. The aroma while cooking gave no hint that this was food. The taste and texture were okay. About a week later we tried Beyond Burger. My virtual happy hour friends preferred this product. They were right. The cooking aroma was more food-like, and I thought that taste and texture was better than Impossible Burger.
A few caveats: Neither of these products is cheap. Unless you get them on sale, they cost more than a comparable pound of hamburger. The Impossible Burger contains modified starch, which often means from wheat; therefore, it may not be gluten-free. The soy hemoglobin in the Impossible Burger is actually made by genetically-modified yeast. If you’re averse to foods featuring genetically-modified organisms, you may want to opt for Beyond Burger.
Overall, if I want a burger I’ll eat one made of beef or lamb. However, if I’m at a vegetarian friend’s house, either of these would be okay.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2020/07/14/beyond-impossible/
The problem with maintaining a sourdough starter is that you have to throw out a hell of a lot of it on a regular basis. With flour being as coveted as toilet paper, this strikes me as a waste. So I’ve been scouting around for other recipes that use sourdough starter.
I came across a recipe for sourdough cherry cobbler in a Garden Way publishing bulletin I bought years ago. The biscuit topping uses sourdough starter as the sole liquid and leavening. I took liberties with the recipe, of course. The original recipe called for pie filling. I substituted frozen tart cherries, a peach, and some blueberries, mixed with a little maple syrup and some arrowroot powder for thickening. I doubled the amount of sourdough starter that I used to get more of a drop biscuit texture. Julian declared it good. For someone who usually kvetches when I deviate from the path of the One True Cobbler®, this is high praise.
For those of you who need a recipe, here’s what I did: Mix together about 3 cups of fruit in the bottom of a greased 10″ pie plate. In a medium bowl, stir together 3/4 cup flour and 1/2 cup EACH white and brown sugar. Cut in 1/4 cup butter until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Stir in 1/2 cup sourdough starter (thin consistency) until dry mixture is incorporated. Drop clumps of dough on top of the fruit, leaving a gap in the middle of the pan to let steam escape. Bake in a preheated 425° oven for 25 minutes. Cool on wire rack.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2020/07/08/a-worthy-substitute/
Most public Independence Day fireworks shows have been canceled this year due to COVID-19. Many of the towns in the Seattle area ban fireworks sales and use. The glaring exception is our hometown of Bothell. I counted three fireworks stands on our way to the grocery store this morning, within five miles of each other. The city encourages residents to shoot off fireworks exclusively between the hours of 9 and 11 pm on July 4. (Yeah, right. It’s nearly noon on July 3 as I write this, and I can hear explosions.)
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2020/07/03/fireworks-on-the-fourth/
It was a cold, wet spring here. Many wags took to calling last month Junuary. This morning I heard the furnace kick on. I thought, “What the…?!? It’s July 1!” So if last month was Junuary, this month is Februly. I daresay when the heat and drought descend in August, we’ll miss the cool weather.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2020/07/01/welcome-to-februly/
For the average armchair sports fan, COVID-19 has been disastrous. No baseball. No NBA playoffs or WNBA games. Limited soccer. An auto race or two. The Belmont Stakes. This afternoon Julian was channel-surfing and discovered a new televised “sport”: The National Cornhole Championship. Cornhole, for the non-cognoscenti, consists of throwing a beanbag at a slanted board with a hole near the top. It’s a popular bar and backyard game. The introduction to the competition mentioned getting Cornhole into the Olympics. I guess that means that beer will be considered a performance-enhancing drug…
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2020/06/27/desperate-times-indeed/
We’d bought some sockeye salmon on sale yesterday and I was puzzling over how to cook it. Julian suggested an Iron Chef challenge. For those of you who are reading this from a television-less bunker, Iron Chef is a cooking competition that originated in Japan where the host unveils a “secret ingredient” that has to be used in three courses. Numerous variations on this theme have been broadcast, including the Food Network’s Chopped. The ingredients he suggested for the salmon? Horseradish and honey.
Horseradish always suggests Jewish deli to me. So I grabbed the spicy brown mustard (not Gulden’s, which is hard to find on the Left Coast) and stirred in horseradish and honey to make a paste. This got smeared (schmeared?) onto the salmon, then broiled until the fish was done. I served it with orzo and Tabatchnick creamed spinach. Julian judged my effort as worthy of cooking another time.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2020/06/21/iron-chef-casa-sammamish/
Yeast Mode is the gift that keeps on giving. I’ve never had such a frisky sourdough starter. Tonight I made sourdough naan to go along with red lentil dal for dinner. The recipe came out of Sourdough on the Rise, by Cynthia Lair. Lair is a local cookbook author and teacher who has the YouTube channel Cookus Interruptus. There is a blog of the same name, but it’s not the same author. (I can’t see Lair reheating a Whopper, given her long tenure on the faculty at Bastyr University.)
The recipe required making a sponge with starter, water, and flour. That burbles away for several hours. I mixed it up at breakfast and started step 2 after I finished work for the day. A little bit of yeast is added with olive oil, more flour, salt, turmeric, cardamom, and yogurt. I didn’t have any yogurt in the house, so I substituted sour cream. Knead the dough and let it rise until doubled. Punch it down, roll out into 6 ovals, then bake on a baking stone in a 500° oven for 3-4 minutes, flipping about halfway through. The trickiest part of the process is flopping the ovals of dough onto a very hot baking stone. The first oval was a bit misshapen, but the others came out less mutilated.
Julian was impressed by the results. The naan was softer than what we get in Indian restaurants. Most home ovens can’t get as hot as a real tandoor can, which probably explains the difference in texture. The leftover naan and dal will make a good lunch or midnight snack.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2020/06/16/starter-naan-or-naan-starter/
I know, everyone and their monkey are into sourdough these days. I had resisted because flour was hard to come by in the early days of the pandemic and our friend Bruce had beaten into my brain that starters need to be fed every day to remain viable and uncontaminated by unfriendly flora.
Two weeks ago Julian got an envelope from a company called zourdough.com. It contained a packet of freeze-dried starter and directions. He passed the envelope to me with these words: “Here you go. Have fun.” I dutifully followed the instructions on rehydrating and feeding the starter, which was named Wharf by the company. This starter lives up to Zourdough’s hype: It’s extremely frisky. Julian commented that the yeast must be breeding like bunnies. I reminded him that yeast reproduce asexually. (There are some situations where yeast cells do reproduce sexually, but we’re not talking mating rituals. Alcohol is involved, however, as yeast fermentation produces alcohol as an end-product.)
My first sourdough product was pancakes, which were well received. Last night I made an adaptation of sourdough onion caraway bread, from the King Arthur Flour 200th Anniversary Cookbook. I didn’t use the caraway seed. The recipe called for a tablespoon of dry yeast along with the starter. I reduced that to a teaspoon because of the friskiness of the starter. In addition, rather than just scattering the onions atop the loaves, I mixed most of the onion into the dough before I shaped it into two large boules. The crust and crumb were quite tender for a sourdough loaf. Julian was pleased.
I normally don’t name cultures of unicellular organisms, but this one deserves its own name: Yeast Mode, as a nod to Seattle Seahawks past (and current?) running back Marshawn Lynch, aka Beast Mode. May Yeast Mode be as relentless as its namesake.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2020/06/09/yeast-mode/
It was bound to happen. A pandemic disease leads to economic meltdown in the shadow of societal polarization. Politicians in charge choose not to rise to the occasion and aid those they represent who are unemployed. It would only take a spark to lead to violence. That occurred with the killing of George Floyd at the knee of a Minneapolis police officer.
I do not condone looting or violence. However, this is a time that eerily mirrors the years 1968-70. Instead of a pandemic, there was the war in Vietnam that polarized society. The economy was on relatively shaky ground in 1970. One could argue that there were repeated sparks during that era, including the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy and the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State. Both times we’ve had presidents prone to overstepping their Constitutional boundaries – or just plain ignoring them.
How do we pull back from chaos? Prosecute those who have perpetrated crimes against individuals and property equally, regardless of status. Expand aid to those who have lost their jobs because of the pandemic. Demand our elected officials pay attention to the facts in the country. If you haven’t registered to vote, do so now. Encourage your friends to register as well. Then vote in November.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2020/05/31/confluence-of-chaos/
It took a while, but this year’s upper deck farm is coming into shape. Two weeks ago I bought a hanging pot of mini tomatoes. Miracle of miracles, I have 3 tiny green tomatoes on the plant. As I’ve mentioned before, growing tomatoes is a faith-based venture here. My next door neighbor planted some tomatoes in a raised bed behind her unit. Julian noticed that the perimeter of the bed resembled a coffin. (Gardening in the time of COVID-19…)
I also have some padron peppers on the upper deck. These I started from seed and they look rather spindly. At the same time, I started some tomatillo and Columbian golden berry plants. I volunteered for a citizen scientist project through the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell. These also look pretty spindly. I’m hoping some warm weather will perk them up.
Today I hit Fred Meyer and got three types of basil, red shiso, and a fuchsia. All of them were seriously pot-bound, so I spent the afternoon repotting them. I bought a tomatillo plant, to cheer on the spindly seedlings. I also started some more parsley and garlic chives from seed. The parsley I planted last year is rapidly going to seed. The garlic chives from last year are still fine.
Later this week I may venture to Molbak’s or Sky Nursery to get some more plants for our shady planters in front. One heuchera from last year wintered over well; the others were toast. I may get some bleeding hearts and a few impatiens. The impatiens did very well last year.
Stay tuned for progress reports.
Permanent link to this article: http://ediblethoughts.com/2020/05/25/my-little-farm/
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