For anyone not following my IG, I’m experimenting with making dosa for the first time.
I saw the Bon Appetit video where Sohla and Brad make some, and realized that I technically had all the ingredients. In fact, I have a lot of rice and lentils, courtesy of my grandmother. So, this might be a regular thing I do during quarantine.
I’m working on cleaning out my pantry, so this batch is purple because some black rice was used. I’m not mad at it. 🙂
Reference Link:
I did a silly thing.
I kept coming across Meghan Markle’s “zucchini bolognese” recipe on the internet recently. To the point where I saw the Buzzfeed follow up on it, and was just like “EFF IT. I’M TRYING IT MYSELF.”
I kept pretty close to the original recipe as posted by Delish, with the only change being a swap for Parmesan cheese with Grana Padano cheese, because it’s cheaper per pound and good enough for me. (I’m a plebeian who sometimes prefers to be thrifty over being cultured. Sorry not sorry.) Oh, and one tiny eggplant found its way into the recipe because it was in my fridge and about a sneeze away from going bad (that’s a unit of measuring time, right?). These aren’t huge changes in my opinion, but I’m sure someone out there is more than happy to disagree with me. Anyway…
My personal experience:
As for my feelings after cooking and upon consumption, the sauce was kind of “meh” to be honest. It’s just good enough. I certainly wasn’t impressed. If I were to make it again in the future, I’d want to make changes. Adding herbs is the first thing I can think of. With some of my leftover sauce, I added fresh basil and marjoram. Slightly better than without but not quite what I wanted. Using dried herbs during the long cooking process might make the better choice. And I’m half wondering what it would have been like had I added some ricotta just for extra depth and texture.
So, am I making this again? Probably not. Or at least not the printed version of the recipe. I’m not against nor above altering it, sticking it in the slow cooker, and declaring it a great summer recipe. (So that might happen in the future. Maybe. A very strong maybe.)
Reference Links:
https://www.delish.com/cooking/recipes/a58228/zucchini-bolognese-recipe/
Previous Kitchen Conclusion Post:
https://awesomesauceeats.wordpress.com/2018/01/13/cardamom-and-loaf-pans-a-kitchen-conclusion/
Two posts in one week? After weeks of nothing? Yeah, I know. My posting is inconsistent. What can I say? I need to feel inspired.
And inspired is definitely the right word here. I hadn’t planned on doing another meal prep kit post so soon. However, a new market opened in Davis Square/Somerville called bfresh last Friday. There are bfresh stores in Allston and Brighton, which I’ve never been to, but I’ve heard that Somerville is their largest location to date. I was unsure what to expect other than something that would fit the lifestyle of busy urban dwellers.
Quick review of the market – it’s smart looking. The price tags on many of the shelves were digital. It’s bright and small, but probably carries a little bit of everything. Prices were average. Some items were expensive. For example, I saw a package of tempeh for about $5. I usually pay just $3. There was onigiri! At $5 a pop. But I bought a bottle of coconut aminos because it was a $1 less than what I saw while shopping recently.
They have an app to get coupons and I’m not impressed so far. There were about 6 coupons available, and I only tried to use one. My one coupon didn’t apply for some reason when I checked out. Also, their website said something about getting free shopping bag when you download the app and I didn’t see any coupons in the app for said shopping bag.
I’m not sure if I missed something somewhere, or they just aren’t on top of their communications game.
I was also unimpressed that for a market that has literally only been open for a handful of days, there might be some mislabeled prices already. My coconut aminos checked out fine, but the meal kit I bought was a $1 more than I thought it was. I could have sworn that all meal kits were $13. (Ok, technically $12.99 but I always round up that one silly penny.)
Having said all that, bfresh’s strongest points are their ready made items, their cheese selection, and their bulk selection. And price annoyance aside, I was there primarily for their meal kits.
(Yeah, that price tag under gnocchi kit looks like it says $12.99. My receipt, though, shows $13.99. And I really wasn’t about to turn around and head back into a fairly bustling market to argue over my receipt.)
I didn’t even realize that they were selling ready to go meal kits until a friend of my commented on it recently. There were about 6 different recipes to choose from – pizza, lemon cod, salmon, sweet potato gnocchi, steak tips, and I think one with turkey. All of the kits are 2 servings. These kits don’t claim to be 30 minutes of activity like many other meal kits out there, although most of them probably don’t take too long.
I’m masochistic and picked the sweet potato gnocchi to experiment. This kit took me almost 2 hours to make, because roasting the gigantic sweet potato in my kit took about an hour in the oven. I made the sauce easily enough, but the gnocchi making took me more time than I had expected. I’ve never made ricotta gnocchi before, and it was quite the sticky mess.
Overall impression of the kit? Everything seemed pretty fresh. The spinach in my kit hardly had any bad/slimy bits. There was less packaging than the ready to go Purple Carrot kit I previously bought. (Or at least that’s how it felt as I carried it home.) The only potential downside is that you have to be somewhat comfortable with cooking and ingredients in general. The recipe card isn’t full of photos. The packaged ingredients had no labels. But for me, I was still impressed.
Now, remember how I called the Purple Carrot recipe card mildly cheap in my previous post? It’s because the bfresh recipe card is seems expensive by comparison. It’s laminated and shows the full ingredient list up front.
OH HEYYYYY! I JUST REALIZED THAT THE ESTIMATED COOKING TIME IS UNDER THE INGREDIENT LIST!
Anyway.
The recipe came out fine. I wish there were a bit more flavoring in it though. But that might be because, after all these years, I’m still not fond of goat cheese.
Yes, you read that right. The woman who’s not fond of goat cheese intentionally bought a meal kit with goat cheese in it. I should have subbed it out, but I thought that if I just didn’t use the full amount that I’d be ok. So, that’s just me being ridiculous and no fault of the meal kit.
I am sorely tempted to try every flavor of the meal kits. And since it’s affordable compared to shipped meal kits, I may just do so.
(Here, have another badly lit photo.)
Reference Links:
http://somerville.wickedlocal.com/news/20170227/ribbon-cut-for-bfresh-market-in-davis-square
I heard about Purple Carrot, the vegan meal prep kit, when Mark Bittman left the New York Times to work for them.
I kept my eye on their recipes, but I generally found that I was only interested in *maybe* one recipe a week. But my interest in Purple Carrot rose when it was announced that they were partnering with Whole Foods in Massachusetts for meal prep kits available in stores. It was rolled out in Dedham first (I think… or was it Danvers?) which was nowhere near me. Then last week, a few more stores were announced including the Whole Foods at Alewife/Cambridge. Finally! A location that I could get to a little more easily.
So I went on Sunday. My choices were:
I decided on the cauliflower/beets/green beans recipe because it wasn’t something that I’d normally picked from a cookbook.
In hindsight, I wish I had picked the pesto pasta.
Now, some quick disclaimers:
Got it? Good.
The cost was $20 for the kit (which like many kits is only 2 servings). This seemed a little high to me since there are no at-home delivery costs. My only consolation was that there was a $2 Whole Foods coupon on the box to encourage the sale of a new product.
The kit I picked up had a moldy beet in it. ONE MISERABLE MOLDY BEET. The actual recipe on the website says 6oz of beets, and I’m pretty confident that one moldy beet (which was smaller than my fist) was not 6oz. I tossed it.
Luckily, I had my own beets…
… which I proceeded to not even use out of laziness more than anything.
Then to add insult to injury, the mildly cheap looking instruction card mentioned parsley in the recipe. There was no parsley in my kit, just a ton of thyme. Said instruction card also did not have an ingredient list. I was just smart enough to google it (which I will link to at the bottom on this post).
Overall impression of the recipe? Tasty but required too much equipment for a meal prep kit. Technically, it needed a pan to roast the cauliflower, a pot to boil the beets, and a pan to cook the beans. Oh, and a small pot for the sauce.
I liked the sauce better than I want to admit. The sauce was just orange juice, water, cornstarch, brown sugar, and ketchup. I think that it’s the addition of ketchup rubs me the wrong way. At any rate, I have more sauce than I need for the cauliflower and the green beans so I’m going to serve with with some baked pieces of chicken.
I am aware that adding chicken will void the vegan-ness of the meal.
Maybe I’ll even throw in the beets by then.
Will I try this again? Well, I’ll be open minded about it but it’s not the only game in town.**
Oh! And, fair warning, you might want to measure the ingredients against the original published recipes. The meal kit gave me almost twice the amount of apple cider vinegar than I needed.
Reference Links:
https://www.purplecarrot.com/plant-based-recipes/cauliflower-l-orange-with-beets-and-fresh-herbs
** = hint, hint… I have another meal prep kit post coming. Maybe as soon as tomorrow.
It’s hard to see, but the radishes in my dongchimi had some color change. Everything smelled fine, but I wasn’t convinced so I didn’t eat it.
Both photos were after I drained out the liquid. Before I drained it, it looked like this:
That’s a lot of life going on in there.
I haven’t had the energy to buy the ingredients again. But I still wanted to work on some fermentation so I decided to try my hand at amazake.
Amazake is a drink made from sticky rice and koji grains. Koji are rice grains that have been inoculated with the bacteria you would use to make miso soup and other Japanese fermented products. Amazake, like yogurt, needs a certain temperature range to ferment. It was the primary reason why I never bothered to make it.
Last week, it occurred to me that I had access to a couple of sous vide products which could make DIY amazake possible in my house. So, it’s currently doing its thing in a slow cooker hooked up to a Codlo device.
This is what determination looks like:
It’s not the most thought-out set-up, but that’s what I get for not planning ahead. What you see is a 3qt sauce pan (with the rice and koji) set into a 4.5 qt oval slow cooker. The sauce pan was too tall, and the handle was in the way. So, I resorted to covering it with aluminum foil.
I am ridiculous, I know.
This also won’t be done until about 10pm because cooking the rice and then cooling it took me longer than I had anticipated.
This is a silly post. I won’t even try to deny it.
At the same time, I am incredibly pleased.
I took a GIR lid and stuck it on a cut avocado half. Very little browning the next day and very little space used up in my fridge.
Yes, I am a superb dork. (^_^)
Note – not a sponsored post in anyway. I was a kickstarter backer and paid with my own money.
I have a confession – I’m not a huge fan of Greek yogurt. So, when I was given a free tub of Fage yogurt, I struggled for ideas. This became a struggle for healthy ideas, because this happened not too long ago:
Has anyone tried to make ice cream with a food processor? I finally did.
I have an ice cream maker, on permanent loan, that I never use. I used to keep the insert in my freezer, but that was just taking up room so I finally took it out. Of course!… when I finally want to make ice cream, I can’t use the ice cream maker.
I first heard about using a food processor to make ice cream on thekitchn.com, but seriouseats.com actually beat them to the punch. Basically, you make your ice cream per the recipe, freeze it as fast as possible, and then place it into a food processor to whip in air.
Kenji from Serious Eats froze his custard base into ice cube trays, but I don’t have spare trays or enough of them. (Most ice cream recipes make 1 quart.) Jeni Britton, in the video she did for CHOW, recommended putting the custard base in a large resealable food bag and laying it flat in the freezer.
My ice cream base was this:
two cans of full fat coconut milk
1 3/4c cane sugar
1/2c fresh mint
I brought the sugar and coconut milk to a simmer, cut the heat, and then let the mint steep about 15 minutes. This was transferred to a ziploc bag, moved onto a small tray to lie down flat, and cooled first in the fridge. After about an hour, I moved the tray into the freezer for 4-5 hours.
(Note – when you’re pouring your ice cream in liquid form into the food bag, make sure that you stand the bag up in a container large enough to hold one quart of liquid. I stood my bag up in a container that was a little small, and made a mess.)
When it’s ready, put the ice cream into a food processor. Run the food processor and scrap down the ice cream as needed until it’s an even and smooth consistency. Move the ice cream into a container for the freezer (I just reused the food bag), and let freeze again before eating.
Overall, it’s a bit icier than traditional ice cream but maybe that’s because I was making a dairy free ice cream. (I was making a dairy free ice cream out of laziness, and for no other reason to be honest.) I would say that it’s a bit more like gelato in texture.
As for the flavor of what I made, I needed more mint. I *love* ice cream made with real mint. Before my mint plant dies as the weather gets cooler, I should harvest all the leaves and try again with a traditional custard base. However, it’s still quite delicious. I’d be happy to make it again. (Although, I might cut back the sugar next time.)
Reference Links:
http://www.chow.com/videos/show/chow-tips/90744/an-easy-way-to-make-ice-cream-in-your-food-processor
1. Cookies still haven’t happened since Boston was humid and then we had our second heatwave. I’m feeling hopeful that tonight will be the night.
2. I’m experimenting with what is essentially a vegan chocolate pudding. It’s not good enough to post on the blog, but it’s good enough for me to stuff my face. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Flavor-wise, it’s perfect. The texture is gritty though. I didn’t intend for it to be a vegan pudding but it’s not quite working for the application I had in mind. More fiddling is required.
3. In a few weeks, there will be regular updates from me because I go on vacation! Yay! Ok, it’s a “staycation” but that’s not the point. For the first full week of August, you can expect a new post everyday. I’m really excited.
My mind is blown.
http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_268744/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=mxsc69bs
I need to try this method of heat shocking to extend the life of produce. I never go through produce fast enough – it is one of my biggest regrets.
Awesomesauce Eats 