Delicate, delicious, gluten-free, low-sugar muffins
This is the second recipe I’ve tried from “Whole Food Cooking Every Day: Transform the way you eat with 250 vegetarian recipes free of gluten, dairy, and refined sugar” by Amy Chaplin. I’m always looking for muffin recipes that don’t just feel like (a) more wheat in our lives, and (b) dessert in disguise. Chaplin has three base muffin recipes in her book—a vegan gluten-free recipe, a gluten-free recipe with eggs, and a grain-free recipe. Then she has a bunch of flavor variations that you can combine with any of the base recipes. I made the gluten-free recipe with eggs as my base, and tried two different flavor combinations: spiced seeded winter squash muffins and zucchini, lemon, and walnut muffins. Read the rest of this entry »
Best ever chocolate pudding
Way back in 2013 my friend Nev sent me this chocolate pudding recipe from A Cup of Jo and indeed it was great. I think I made it twice then promptly forgot about it. But then this week a Smitten Kitchen ad for Best Chocolate Pudding popped up on Facebook and made me want to try it.
So Alma and I made it together last week. She said it was not quite as good as the chocolate pudding they serve at preschool. I thought it was much, much too sweet. And oddly, even though I used 85% chocolate my pudding was quite light in color, nothing like the dark brown color on the photos on the website. Strange. In any case, I wasn’t very impressed and next time I want to make pudding I’m going to return to the Cup of Jo recipe. Here’s the difference in ingredients, in case you’re curious. Basically the SK recipe doubles the cornstarch and omits the egg, uses more sugar and less salt, and twice the amount of chocolate (but no cocoa powder).
| A Cup of Jo Recipe | Smitten Kitchen Recipe |
| 3 cups (710 ml) whole milk | 3 cups (710 ml) whole milk |
| 1/3 cup (75 grams) granulated sugar | 1/2 cup (100 grams) sugar |
| 2 tbsp. cornstarch | 1/4 cup (30 grams) cornstarch |
| 2 large egg yolks | – |
| 1/4 tsp. salt | 1/8 teaspoon salt |
| 2 tbsp. unsweetened cocoa powder | – |
| 3 oz. (85 grams) dark or semi-sweet chocolate, finely chopped | 6 ounces (170 grams) semi- or bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped |
| 1 tsp. vanilla extract | 1 teaspoon (5 ml) vanilla extract |
Chocolate teff banana bread
I was looking for a recipe to use up some teff flour, and I came across this recipe for chocolate, teff, banana bread on the Cannelle Et Vanille blog. I vaguely recall making a different chocolate, teff, banana bread earlier this year (this recipe from the gluten-free-girl blog) and not being so excited about it. I’m not usually a fan of chocolate in banana bread—I normally prefer adding nuts and spices, as I find that adding chocolate or chocolate chips overpowers the pure banana-bread-y-ness. With this recipe, however, I absolutely loved the final product. I’m not sure what made the key difference (maybe it’s just the pregnancy talking?), but I adored this cake. It’s very sweet and very moist and very banana-y, with a tender crumb that is neither overly delicate nor overly gooey. Read the rest of this entry »
Healthier zucchini bread
A friend gave me a ton of zucchini from her garden, and I had to figure out what to do with it. I’d never made zucchini bread before, but I was in the mood for something sweet, so I found two recipes online for reasonably healthy-looking zucchini bread. One is for a “regular” zucchini bread, just modified a bit to be lower calorie. The second is for a chocolate zucchini bread. Read the rest of this entry »
What I’ve been cooking lately
What have I been cooking lately? Not much. I just haven’t been in the mood. Derek has been cooking some old standbys like whore’s pasta and chilaquiles and sesame noodles, and I’ve been making a lot of really simple dishes like stir-fries or roasted veggies or big pots of beans. But I have tried two new recipes, which I’ll blog about here, briefly.
Naomi Pomeroy’s Celery Velouté With Spring Herb Salsa Verde. It’s rare that a vegetarian recipe wins a challenge on Top Chef, so I was excited to try this recipe for a creamy celery soup. Without the salsa verde, the soup was not that exciting. I generally like celery, but the soup smelled a little too strongly of cooked celery for me to really love it. It was better with the salsa verde, which added some acid and non-celery flavors. Still, overall I wasn’t so impressed. It was basically a celery vichyssoise (i.e., using celery instead of potatoes). But Derek liked it a lot more than me. I had a few bowls over a couple of meals, but he single-handedly finished off most of the pot.
Gluten-free pumpkin chocolate-chip muffins. I don’t eat gluten-free, but I bought some coconut flour and was looking for recipes to try it out with. I chose this one because the photos looked very good and the comments were generally pretty positive. I doubled the recipe to make 12 muffins. Some of the comments said the muffins were greasy so I cut down on the oil by about a tablespoon and used an extra tablespoon of pumpkin puree. I reduced the maple syrup to 1/4 cup and halved the amount of chocolate chips, because some reviewers complained that the muffins were too sweet. When the muffins first came out of the oven the texture was very odd, but by the next day they had improved. They were definitely sweet with plenty of chocolate chips (despite the halving), but not very pumpkin-y or spice-y. The outside of the muffin was a bit greasy. Derek didn’t like them at all, so I ended up giving some to a friend and eating the rest by myself. They weren’t bad, but I don’t think I’ll make this exact recipe again. Maybe next time I’ll try a recipe that calls for both coconut flour and almond flour.
Buckwheat pumpkin muffins
This was the second recipe from The Splendid Grain that I chose to use up my buckwheat flour. In her recipe head notes Rebecca Woods says that the recipe is reminiscent of carrot cake, only better. That sounded so good that I willingly sacrificed my very last butternut squash of the season. Read the rest of this entry »
Homemade lara bars
So far I’ve been doing pretty well on my elimination diet, except for my one “cheat” with a bit of oatmeal. Also, I forgot that lemon is citrus and I ate it several times. It’s so hard to cut out lemon that I’ve decided to leave it in. Could anyone really be allergic to lemons? I haven’t actually noticed any improvements in my allergies yet, but it’s only been a week and a half, so maybe it just takes more time.
The hardest part for me so far has been the nightly desire for a sweet snack of some sort. I said I was going to try to cut out added sugars as much as possible, and instead I’ve been eating Lara-type dried fruit and nut bars as a post-dinner dessert. They’re very tasty but a little bit too big for a dessert before bed. Also, they’re quite expensive (about 2 euros each). So I decided to try making my own. There are a million recipes online and I picked two to try: gingerbread bars and coconut cranberry bars. Read the rest of this entry »
Apple cranberry crisp
I saw the first cranberries of the year in the store this week, and decided to make an apple cranberry crisp to celebrate. I based my recipe on the apple crisp recipe from Cook’s Illustrated, but modified it a bit. Read the rest of this entry »
Homemade ice cream
I bought Derek an ice cream machine for his birthday, and we’ve experimented with it a little bit this spring and summer.
The first flavor we made was a Philadelphia-style vanilla. The recipe is from The Perfect Scoop, by David Leibowitz. The flavor was good (very clean–milk and vanilla), but the texture was initially a bit soft and wet. It firmed up after 24 hours in the fridge.
After that we tried a strawberry rhubarb sorbet, also from Leibowitz. Unfortunately, once frozen it tasted mostly of strawberry and very little of rhubarb. I’d like to try just plain rhubarb next time. Perhaps I can replicated the really really excellent rhubarb ice cream Katrina and I had in Paris.
My third attempt was to use up some very ripe bananas and cream. I tried to make a no-sugar ice cream using bananas, frozen cherries, cream, and coconut nibs, inspired by this raw vegan chocolate cherry ice cream recipe. Unfortunately, I didn’t follow a recipe and the texture ended up extremely icy. (Maybe the cherries added too much water? Maybe adding cream was a bad idea).
Next we tried the sprouted kitchen fresh mint frozen yogurt from 101cookbooks, except without any chocolate chips. The recipe calls for 1 cup of fresh mint, which is a pretty vague measurement. I used a pretty packed cup of fresh mint. The original recipe calls for brown rice syrup, which I didn’t have. Instead I followed Heidi’s suggestion of substituting maple syrup. The only Greek-style yogurt I could find here was a cream-based yogurt. I thought that Greek yogurt was supposed to be higher in protein than normal yogurt, but this one was not. It was just very high in fat (as you’d expect since it’s made from cream not milk). The frozen yogurt gets mixed reviews in the comments section of Heidi’s blog. Some people report off flavors and an icy texture, while other people say it’s perfect. I thought it came out great. The mixture was definitely thicker than the typical ice mixture, but it froze up well with a nice creamy texture. I loved the combination of the herbal mintiness from the fresh mint leaves and the strong peppermint flavor from the mint extract. And the tang from the yogurt was perfect. I didn’t even miss the chocolate, but Derek did. He’s not such a fan of sour frozen yogurts, but I loved it. I’ll definitely make it again. Next time I might try a sweetener that’s cheaper than maple syrup.
Today we’re trying the Leibowitz recipe for ginger ice cream. It’s our first attempt to make a custard-based ice cream Stay tuned!
Vegan banana bread with peanut butter frosting
I used to make banana bread all the time in Pittsburgh, but for some reason I stopped making it once I moved to Germany. But yesterday I had five over-ripe bananas gracing my windowsill, and so I decided to resurrect my old recipe. We were having guests for dinner, however, and Derek thought that plain banana bread was a little homely to serve for dessert, so he decided to dress the bread up a little with a peanut butter icing. Banana and peanut butter is a ubiquitous combination, but somehow I’ve never had banana bread with a peanut butter icing. But a quick internet search reveals quite a few recipes for banana cupcakes with peanut butter frosting, so clearly others have trod this path before us. I even found one recipe for banana bread that calls for mini Reese’s peanut butter cups in the batter. Wow. Our banana bread wasn’t quite that decadent, but the peanut butter / banana bread combination was definitely a winner.
My recipe makes a basic banana bread with deep banana flavor, a moist, crumbly interior, and a golden, crisp top. Use older, more darkly speckled bananas because they are sweeter, more moist, and give more banana flavor than less ripe bananas.
Indian rice pudding
I was making an Indian dinner for company, and Derek decided that he needed to make rice pudding for dessert. He used this recipe from Alton Brown. The recipe has received excellent reviews. I’ve never had a rice pudding I’ve loved, so I had pretty low expectations. But I enjoyed it. The raisins and pistachios were tasty, and I liked the freshly ground cardamom. (I’d probably add even more if we ever make rice pudding again.) That said, given all the wonderful desserts in the world, I don’t think this one is worth the calories. Derek had higher expectations than me, and ended up a bit disappointed. He thought there was too much rice and in general just too much “stuff.” Read the rest of this entry »
Cherry clafoutis
It’s cherry season here in Germany, and wow are they good. I don’t know if this year is unusual, but almost all the cherries I’ve bought have been big, juicy, and extremely flavorful. Martha Rose Shulman recently did a whole set of recipes featuring the cherry, including a recipe for a cherry soup (which I’d like to try), one for a cherry smoothie (which I blogged about on my smoothies post), and one for a cherry clafouti made with yogurt and no butter or cream. Many years ago in Pittsburgh Derek and I used to make a cherry clafoutis recipe, which was also from the New York Times (posted below). For reasons best left unexplained, he had dubbed it “floor cake”. But we decided to try neither of these recipes. Instead we ended up making Julia Child’s recipe for cherry clafoutis. Read the rest of this entry »
Silken chocolate tofu pie
One of the desserts I remember best form childhood is silken chocolate tofu pie. I know, it doesn’t sound that great, but it was creamy and rich and chocolately and sweet… I loved it. My mom used to bake it in a graham cracker crust which made it even better. But I also loved it uncooked right out of the food processor. When I lived in the co-op I used to make the pudding with lemon juice or grapefruit juice for a little extra bite. I liked the stark contrast between the sweet pudding and the sour juice. Other co-op denizens didn’t like the combination of citrus and chocolate and soy as much as I did. I didn’t mind though, because that way there was more for me. I tried making the pudding for Derek long ago, but he was disturbed by the strong underlying soy flavor, so I stopped making it. But last month I had a few boxes of silken tofu lying around that needed to get used up, and so I decided to try making tofu chocolate pudding again. Read the rest of this entry »
Dark, spicy gingerbread
I’ve been making this gingerbread recipe for years, but somehow I never got around to blogging about it. But I made it last night to take to a holiday party, and someone explicitly asked me for the recipe. It seemed a good time to finally add it to the blog. I haven’t tried many different gingerbread recipes, so I can’t argue that this one is best. But it makes a dark, moist, deeply flavored, very gingery cake. The recipe is from Cook’s Illustrated, but note that it’s no longer on their website. They just published a new gingerbread recipe, which is totally different than this one. It calls for stout, oil instead of butter, and omits the crystallized ginger, the buttermilk, and most of the spices. The new recipe doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of the old one, and the old one no longer seems to be available on their website. Read the rest of this entry »
Light cranberry orange muffins
I have a recipe for pumpkin cranberry bread that I just adore. I wanted to try making it into muffins, but I couldn’t find any more fresh cranberries. So instead I found this recipe in Cook’s Illustrated’s The Best Light Recipe. The basic recipe is for blueberry muffins, and then they offer variations for bran muffins, corn muffins, raspberry almond muffins, and cranberry orange muffins (which call for dried not fresh cranberries). Alex and I made the cranberry orange muffins for breakfast last Sunday, along with these two ginger muffins. Read the rest of this entry »
Hungarian sour cherry soup
When I was in Israel last summer my friend made her Hungarian grandmother’s cold fruit soup. It was definitely quite different than any soup I’ve ever made. The soup was refreshing, with a nice balance of sweet and sour, but with some heft from the yogurt and eggs. I wanted to make it this summer and so I emailed her and asked her for the recipe. Read the rest of this entry »
Artisanal balsamic vinegar… not
We had friends over for dinner the other night, and Derek wanted to make a summery dessert. He decided on panna cotta. He considered making green tea or earl grey panna cotta, but in the end he decided that he shouldn’t mess around on his first attempt, and made plain vanilla panna cotta. He thought it sounded a bit boring though, and so he decided to top the panna cotta with fresh strawberries and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar. I only had cheap supermarket balsamic vinegar though, and so we decided to reduce it to make it sweeter, less harsh, and more syrupy. Read the rest of this entry »
Roasted rhubarb with vanilla and white wine
I’m always looking for new recipe for rhubarb, and I came across this recipe for roasted rhubarb on the blog Orangette. Actually, I’m not sure why she calls it roasted because the rhubarb is cooked in white wine and seems to stew more than roast. Whatever you call it, the recipe is dead simple. You just slice the rhubarb into long pieces, add the white wine, some sugar and a vanilla bean, and bake for about 30 minutes. Read the rest of this entry »
Pineapple upside down cake
When I was a kid my mom used to make pineapple upside down cake quite frequently. It was one of my brother’s favorite desserts, and he often asked for it for his birthday. My mom made the cake in her cast iron pan, which fit exactly 6 pineapple rings around the circumference. It was perfect, since we had 6 people in my family. There was also one ring of pineapple in the center of the skillet–that ring always went to the birthday boy (or girl). This recipe makes a short, fluffy cake with a hint of pineapple flavor. But the cake is really just a carrier for the real highlight–the caramelized pineapple rings and ooey-gooey butter/brown sugar mixture. My mom made a vegan version of pineapple upside down cake, but below I’ve written up the non-vegan version. Use your favorite egg and butter replacements to make it vegan. Read the rest of this entry »
Sticky toffee pudding
Derek has been raving about sticky toffee pudding for a little over a year now. I finally got to try it when we went to Scotland last September. I tried a number of different restaurant versions, and although I don’t know exactly what it’s supposed to taste like most of them seemed to miss the mark a little. Derek wanted to try to make it at home, and I said fine–next time we have company. Well, a few weeks ago, right before leaving for Spain, we ended up with 5 guests over for dinner. The menu was mostly Italian (salad with roasted winter veggies and walnuts, white bean soup with fennel and rosemary, and cacio e pepe pasta). But our dessert was Scottish.
Derek looked around online to try to find a recipe for the kind of moist sticky toffee pudding that he prefers, and ended up selecting a sticky date toffee pudding recipe that had excellent reviews on epicurious.com. I printed out the recipe, but unfortunately didn’t read the reviews myself. If I had, I would have been more prepared for what followed. Read the rest of this entry »
The captious vegetarian 