Coconut, minus the hype

Palm and coconut oils have made a huge comeback in the last few years. But should you really be buying coco butter to cook with? It’s loaded with saturated fat. On the other hand, actual coconut, used sparingly for flavor, can be a sophisticated and not necessarily diet-busting addition to many dishes, particularly the aviyal “dry curries”. Here I try out coconut as part of an aviyal tailored to the unexpectedly smoky and bitter edge of cowpeas.

Lightening up homemade scones

Scones don’t have to be a commercial, or even a homemade, salt-fat-and-carb bomb to be delicious. Try these for a lazy brunch.

Hunan Tofu, spare the salt (spoil the child)

The issue today is tofu; see under: how to feed a vegetarian preteen some protein without overdosing her on sodium. Our favorite Chinese restaurant dish is tofu in black bean sauce, but no doubt about it, it’s loaded, both on salt and on fat. A reasonable home version needs a sauce that’s bigger on flavors other than salt and can help the tofu brown without deep-frying.

The Broccoli Bogeyman

Average US per-person consumption of fresh broccoli has skyrocketed since 1980. So why is broccoli always the Republican go-to monster under the bed? And yet they like…pork rinds? Forget pigs, I’m breaking down a broccoli, live and on camera.

ANDI Scores, Whole Foods, and diet scheme cha-ching

“ANDI Top 10 for Produce”, “ANDI Top 10 Super Foods” and so on abound at your local Whole Foods. Is it a sound nutrition ranking system or just another commercial diet fad?

Stuffed onions in a hurry

Why, you have to ask, should I make such a big deal about stuffed onions–they’re a party trick, after all, not standard cooking. But we discovered we really liked them, and they’re a pretty good kind of party trick. But they take over an hour the traditional braise-and-roast way. My way’s so quick I can make them for supper after work, and they’re so good they may actually be better than the long-roasted ones.

Medieval in LA: Sweet Spinach Tart

The fact that sugar is added to this one is reminiscent of Elizabeth I’s infamous sweet tooth, but it also makes the normally savory spinach a dish more in keeping with the earlier recipe collections so favored by Renaissance Faire participants. So we adapted this sweet spinach tart with the spices from an earlier era.

DIY Pasta–no chic gadgets needed

Although I’ve watched my share of “Make Your Own Pasta” cooking demos over the years, I know perfectly well from hard experience that kneading by hand is going to precede rolling out by hand, and that the food processor will make at least one of these ordeals faster and less of a pain. It will also give me a better product. Even, or especially, without a pasta crank, since I don’t have one.

Green Lentil Sausages

After finding a recipe for garlicky, peppery Romanian grilled beef sausages (what’s not to like?), I wondered whether I could make a vegetarian version using green lentils and vital wheat gluten, and cooking them in the microwave like seitan. The recipe took some tweaking but the final version makes a mean grinder.

Microwave tricks: Seitan without Simmering

It takes an hour or more to simmer wheat gluten fully, and the one answer I found on the web for “Can you microwave seitan?” was “Not unless you want wheat gluten shoe leather”. I wonder, though–does the person who answered that know how to microwave something doughy like gluten correctly? Does this bear revisiting? Would a cut in time down to 5 minutes from an hour or more make me happy? Answers–possibly not, probably so, and absolutely. Yes. It would.