Made two batches of candied almonds for Christmas presents — the ginger/cinnamon candied almonds are really good, but I think next time I’ll make a batch with cinnamon and a batch with ginger.
The maple ones weren’t as crispy as expected — tasty, but an odd texture.
Scott always wants a bacon cheeseburger — and, occasionally, I make him one. But that’s more of a “out at a restaurant” meal … and we’ve not been out at restaurants for a long time. A few weeks ago, I got the Impossible meatless ‘ground beef’ stuff to make meatball subs. It’s a little expensive to make a couple of burgers (8$ a package, and I’d use three or four packs to make a handful of burgers), but I immediately thought of bacon cheese burger pizza.
I mixed up my usual pizza crust — about four cups of white flour, a third of a cup of vital wheat gluten, yeast, water, and about a tablespoon of olive oil. Crisped up a few rashers of the MorningStar Farms fake bacon. Then I sautéed the Impossible ‘ground beef’ in the pan
I made a smokey maple barbecue sauce, sprinkled the crumbles, then added cheese.
Baked for about 15 minutes at 550F and then topped with the fake bacon.
I have been following the “roast apple slices before putting into pie crust” approach from Bon Appétit when making apple pies. The Thanksgiving pie this year was about five pounds of sliced apples, mixed with about a cup of maple syrup, and roasted at 350 F for 25 minutes. They should be tender but not dehydrated (a big *no* on the convection oven). The roasted apples are mixed with 2-3 tablespoons of flour and drizzled with more maple syrup. They are then added to a walnut pie crust and baked for another 20-30 minutes.
I made a maple cranberry sauce tonight — add about a cup of water and a cup of maple syrup to a saucepan and stir. Rinse a bag (12 oz) of cranberries and add them to the pot. Bring to a boil, then lower the temp and simmer for twenty minutes or so until the cranberries break up. It’s really good warm and cold.
We saw jerky-style shiitake mushrooms on Shark Tank a few days ago, and their SEO isn’t awesome because searching for “shiitake mushroom jerky” doesn’t show their company’s site in the first page. And, since I didn’t remember the company’s name … that makes ordering it difficult. The first page of results does, however, provide a lot of recipes. So I picked up a pound of shiitake mushrooms at the grocery store (a.k.a. every not-dodgy-looking shiitake they had in the bulk mushroom section). I marinated them for 24 hours in a combination of 1/4 c soy sauce, 1/4 c low-sodium soy sauce, 1/4 c apple vinegar, a clove of garlic (diced into small pieces), and a sprinkle of crushed red pepper (ground). I roasted them at 200 F for a LONG time. The recipes said 90 minutes to two hours, but it was after midnight when I turned off the oven, and I had started cooking the things at 7PM. So that’s at least five hours. A food dehydrator would be a good investment if we’re going to keep making mushroom jerky!
End result — it’s way too salty. Possibly using 1/2 c of low sodium soy would have been OK … but thinking of using veggie stock for some of the soy. And possibly making one with a few tablespoons of maple syrup instead of garlic.
Our power went out last week, and we were discussing where to pick up dinner for the night. I kind of wanted to get sandwich-makings, but it was cold. While I could easily have sold warm sandwiches … cold sandwich makings from the store had limited appeal. And, unfortunately, there’s nowhere around here to get a veggie meatball sub. We ended up getting pizzas from Pizza Hut because they now offer Beyond’s Italian sausage as a topping. It was really good (good enough we ordered another pizza the next night of our power outage), but I was still hungry for a meatball sub.
Now that we’ve got power again, I picked up a package of Impossible’s ground-beef-style stuff. It looked pretty dodgy — a grainy lump of red stuff. I added panko, salt, shredded Parmesan cheese, ground pepper, an egg, and Italian herbs. Mixed it all up and rolled them into balls. Fried them until crispy. For a comparison, I used the same basic recipe with mushed cannellini beans. I should have made the cannellini balls smaller so they’d have been crispier.
The Impossible meatballs were awesome. Not exactly a meatball — they were a little dry, but that would have been solved by simmering them in the sauce (something I intentionally didn’t do because I wanted them to be crispy). I think rolling the meatball around a little bit of mozzarella cheese might work too.
Either way, we had really good meatball subs. And between the can of cannellini beans and the pack of Impossible ground-beef-style stuff, it was enough for dinner yesterday and lunch again today.
10
minutes304 cloves garlic
1/2 cup olive oil
2-3 Tbsp hop tea
1 tsp honey
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp Aleppo Pepper
15
minutes30
minutes2 egg whites
2 tbsp vanilla extract
4 cups unblanched almonds
2/3 cup coconut sugar
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
I got a bunch of flavoring to make carbonated flavored water. In the process of researching all-in-one electric brewing systems, I happened across a recipe to make a *hop* sparkling water!
Boil water for 10 minutes to sterilize. Chill to 170 degrees. Add a bit of lemon or lime juice to drop PH to 4.6. Add ~2 grams of hops per gallon of water and let stand 20 minutes to make a hop tea. Filter out hops. Keg hop tea and carbonate. Voila, hop soda.
4
servings30
minutes40
minutes2 Tbsp butter
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
5 ears fresh corn, kernels cut from cobs
6 cups stock (veggie, chicken)
1 lb potatoes, diced
2 tbsp corn starch
Bacon (or veggie bacon)
Cheddar cheese
