A Handful of Farina Breads

It’s almost Passover–time to use up the hametz! So I started pulling the flour off the shelf and realized I’d used up all the bread flour for hamantaschen but I still had a good 3-4 pounds of whole wheat and two pounds of farina. The trick for this heavy, grainy bread dough is finding the right shape to complement its crustiness. Simit rings, laden with sesame seeds and herbs, seem to do that best.

Tabbouleh vs. me

But let me explain something I learned the hard way about making things from scratch. There’s a reason the boxes of commercial just-pour-boiling-water-on-it-and-wait tabbouleh are so tiny.

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.

Political Pancakes, or, Why is Borders flogging so much lard?

Borders has just sent me an offer I can smell from here–four ultraconservative books-to-be at deep, deep discount for preorder. What does it say (reading the tea leaves here) when Newt Gingrich looks like the most coherent and readable (and properly-dressed) selection? My response–a lard-free and much more appetizing breakfast of pancakes. With patriotic red and blue berries.

Chickpea Crepes: Protein Inside-Out

Vegetarian cooking doesn’t tend to favor centerpiece dishes. Either the ingredients are smallish and lend themselves better to casseroles or they lean towards starches and low protein. One possible solution is to incorporate some of the protein in the wrapper itself by using a high-protein ingredient like chickpea flour. Here I give a basic recipe for chickpea flour crepes for savory or sweet fillings.

Superfoods and Magic Beans

The premise of calling something a superfood is that if you eat this one special food, or at least shop your way down the list of 5, or 10, or whatever’s in the article, you’ll be so much healthier than someone who eats a regular food. What are superfoods supposed to be, exactly? Look at the captions for what’s so great about each featured food and you find a couple of consistent characteristics that should give you pause.

Microwave Tricks: Brown Rice Resolution

Tougher grains like brown rice and pearl barley still have the skin on, which forms a barrier to quick absorption, so they take 45-50 minutes to cook on the stovetop, which is simply too much for me to babysit, and they also don’t microwave well if you treat them the way you do pasta and white rice. Last week I resolved to figure out how to microwave them right–and now I have. It’s easier than I thought, and even though it’s not fast-fast, it’s a lot less actual cooking time and much, much less babysitting.

Couscous, its own fine self

The first couscous I ever ate was at a really dingy hole-in-the-wall in Israel. But the couscous itself was so light and fine it was like eating hot curried snowflakes. What was it? How do you do that? And in half a year of eating at other people’s homes, I never ate a couscous that delicate again. You haven’t either, I’ll bet. Couscous out of a box will never do it. Neither will rolling the grains by hand and steaming them in a couscoussiere. But when I came back to the US, I made up my own quick method for the ultra-fine version and it comes out close to right. Now if only I had someone’s mother to make me the tagine to go with it.

Matzah Brei–blintzes?

I’m not a big fan of matzah brei, and whole wheat matzah doesn’t soak up all that well, even after several minutes in hot water. It’s the tougher bread of affliction. But one accidental microwave discovery and one daughterly complaint later, we were able to turn it into surprisingly good blintzes with much less trouble than you’d expect.