retreat-worthy food: moroccan-inspired couscous

Next up: Moroccan-inspired couscous, or to be more exact, Ottolenghi-inspired couscous.  Besides having written several truly gorgeous and inspiring cookbooks, Yotam Ottolenghi runs several restaurants in London, UK, that venerate vegetables and tastes that reflect his Middle Eastern upbringing.  This recipe is based off of the “Ultimate Winter Couscous” in his book, Plenty.  It was part of our first dinner at the retreat, and is transport-friendly, in that it can be made ahead of time and is delicious served warm or at room temperature.

Ottolenghi couscous

makes 6-8 servings

1/2 of a whole acorn squash
2 zucchini or 3 beets (my original plan was zucchini, but there wasn’t any in the store at the crucial moment, so beets it was)
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1/2 tsp dried ginger
1/4 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 cup (174 g) couscous
1 cup water, boiling
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 bunch cilantro
1/2 bunch mint
1/4 cup olive oil
1 lemon
3/4 tsp salt

Cut the squash in half, and roast cut-side-down at 400 F in a baking dish that has a little pool of water poured into it.  It’ll take about 30 minutes until it becomes tender and a knife can pierce the skin easily.  Since you will only need half of a squash for this recipe, save the other half for later, perhaps as a mash beside veggies or stirred into a muffin batter.  If you are using the beets, roast them with the skin on, wrapped in foil.  This will take longer, probably 1 hour.

When the squash and beets have been cooked and cool enough to handle, peel the skin off and cut into cubes.  If you are using the zucchini, cut into cubes and pan-fry in vegetable oil until golden brown.  Once the zucchini is cooked, throw in the cubed squash and spices.

Meanwhile, in a large bowl, pour the boiling water over the couscous and cover.  Let it sit for about 5 minutes, and then fluff the couscous with a fork.  Toss it with the cooked vegetables, and add the remaining ingredients: raisins, roughly chopped herbs, olive oil, the zest and juice of one lemon, and salt.  I really like how this dish leaves you feeling satisfied, but not heavy – and it’s a great way to enjoy the produce of the fall season!  And, if you are so inclined, this would be so delicious with some feta crumbled on top.  Yeah.

moroccan couscous

retreat-worthy food: granola

I just finished cooking for 21 students at a weekend meditation silent retreat that was led by my yoga teacher, Jonathan Austman!  It was a great honour to nourish people as they dedicated themselves to their practice.  All the food was vegetarian (actually it was mostly vegan), and made according to Ayurvedic principles.  Some students may or may not have broken silence to tell me how good the food was…all I can say is that I have very good recipes to work from!  Over the next few weeks I will post recipes that I used, as requested by those who attended.  Enjoy!

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This granola recipe is based off of the one in The Complete Tassajara Cookbook by Edward Espe Brown.  Tassajara Zen Mountain Centre is a retreat centre in California, where the author was the head cook from 1967 to 1970.  It is probably the most delicious granola recipe I’ve come across: it is light, cooks evenly and consistently, and is really simple to make. Make a huge batch and save it in an air tight jar for a few weeks.  We served it with plain yoghurt and honey.

Granola

makes 12 servings

4-½ cups (400 g) rolled oats
1-½ cups (165 g) chopped almonds
3 cups (378 g) sunflower seeds
½ cup (98 g) vegetable oil
½ cup (132 g) brown rice syrup
½ cup (140 g) maple syrup
1 tbsp vanilla extract
1-½ tbsp (12 g) cinnamon, ground
a few dashes of freshly grated nutmeg
1-½ tsp (4 g) salt
1 cup-ish of dried fruit (raisins, chopped apricots…)

Combine the oats, almonds, and sunflower seeds and spread onto a baking sheet.
Gently heat up the oil and syrups until it is watery.  Take off the heat and stir in the vanilla, spices and salt.
Pour the oil/syrup mixture over the oats and mix together (use your hands, it’s easier!) and then spread it out again evenly.  Bake at 325 F, for about 20 minutes, stirring every 5 minutes, until it is an appetizing roasty light-medium brown.  Let the granola cool and dry (I tend to leave the granola in the turned-off oven overnight to make sure it thoroughly dries) and then scatter over the dried fruit.
Yum!

homemade granola

we’ve been away.

This summer, Longer Hollow Legs and I took a 6-week road trip through our homeland.  We camped every night (except for two – we desperately needed showers) and it was so lovely to see our beautiful country up close.  Canada is so diverse: from prairies to mountains to glaciers to the tundra, there is so much to see and appreciate.

Through it all, this is some of what we ate and drank:

grocery shopping
This is the load of groceries we bought before embarking on the trip. Ooh yah.
camping breakfast
Our first breakfast on the road! It would be more of the same later. Amazingly enough that jar of Nutella lasted the whole trip – I thought I would pound through it in one week.
Phil and Sebastian
We stopped in Calgary to visit a friend (yay!) and check out Phil and Sebastian coffee (yum!)
camping breakfast, another version
Breakfast is serious business when camping, especially if you are going to go for an 8-hour hike up a mountain that day, you got to start it off right!
cream cheese and crackers
A favourite snack: herb and garlic cream cheese on vegetable crackers. Even when the cream cheese gets waterlogged from all the melted ice in the cooler, it still doesn’t go bad (yay for preservatives..?!?!)
Before our trip I decided to treat myself to an Opinel folding knife; it has become one of my favourite possessions. The beautiful wood handle feels comfortable, and the weight of the knife is well balanced and substantial. I hope to take it on many more adventures.
How to make coffee when camping
This is how Longer Hollow Legs makes our coffee while camping! It’s simple, requires little extra equipment than what we would bring anyway, and it makes a delicious cup of coffee that properly shows off the beans. When you are on the road for a long time, having little rituals like making coffee in the morning are so comforting.
a big mushroom
Look at that mushroom!!! We found this majestic creature in a campground in Hyder, Alaska. No, we didn’t eat it…but we did wonder about it.
blueberry pancakes
We hardly make pancakes at home…so making pancakes while camping was doubly special!
breakfast in Dawson City
Every so often we treated ourselves to breakfast in a restaurant – this was a lovely start to the day in Dawson, Yukon, to bolster our confidence before embarking on the gravelly (and legend would have it, treacherous) Top of the World highway. Suffice to say, eggs Benedict are good luck.
Sorachi Ace, Brooklyn Brewery in the Yukon
After a few hours of stumbling around in the Arctic tundra, we treated ourselves to the Sorachi Ace by Brooklyn Brewery moments before it began weeping rain. We had been to Brooklyn a few months ago and weren’t able to try much of the local brew (too much other stuff to imbibe!) so in a strange twist of fate we found a bottle of this in a dodgy liquor store in Prince George, BC.
crow berries in the tundra
After what proved to be the most informative and engaging interpretive hike in the tundra, we spent the rest of our time there pointing out and naming all the new flora we had learned about and picking crowberries, which are a great source of water on a hike if you happen to run out of some!
The Rookery, Juneau, Alaska
It rained for all the five days that we were in Juneau, Alaska. Amazingly enough, all the locals were happy and didn’t complain once about the broody weather! We basked in their optimism mostly at the Rookery, a cafe/bistro in the middle of the historic downtown area. French toast with bits of maple-glazed bacon…how can you be unhappy with that served to you?
camping breakfast, another version
Last year during our road trip we went wine tasting in California – so we figured it was time to make it a tradition and go wine tasting again, this time in the Okanagan Valley, BC. We did a vertical tasting of some wines at Black Hills – the same wine from consecutive years. It was enlightening to taste how the weather affected the wine so drastically from year to year.

And now we’re home – back to running water, a 4-burner electric stove, a full-size fridge, a grocery store down the street.  I am so grateful for these modern conveniences, as well as for the experience of not having them.  I’m still “digesting” the trip, but as I look through the pictures, I am certain I will remember it fondly.

seaweed wrap, peanut butter edition.

It would appear that I like to variate on a theme.

After all the jollies I got from making raw veggie seaweed wraps, I decided to try another version, but this time make it a little heartier.

I give you peanut butter chicken spinach seaweed wraps.

peanut butter chicken seaweed wrap

Yeah.  Yeah!

The rice is instant brown rice (sacrilege!) mixed with a little mayonnaise to help it to stick together.  Thin slices of cucumbers are layered over, and a good crop of baby spinach is weighed down with chicken breast tossed in peanut sauce before it is all rolled into one delicious tube of awesome.  The first time I made this, it really came in handy as car food when my friend graciously did me a favour and drove to the edge of the city to deliver a back-up pair of glasses to Longer Hollow Legs when he broke his at a music festival (he was taking photos, which you can see here)!

Peanut butter sauce

The peanut butter sauce is made like this: put two huge dollops of natural peanut butter in a cereal bowl.  Add a light splash of tamari/soy sauce, and a light splash and a half of rice vinegar.  Add a few good shakes of fish sauce.  Add a heaping spoonful of white or brown sugar.  Add a splash of water, and mix it all together.  If it feels a little thick, add more water.  A few drops of sesame oil won’t hurt it either.  This will make about a cup of sauce, but I recommend making lots, because it is so so good.

homemade ice cream 2.0.

Maybe the dairy is clouding my brain, but I don’t think I’ll ever buy ice cream from the grocery store again.

It is so easy and so gratifying to make ice cream from scratch – I think it’s one of the great secret pleasures of life.  And you don’t need an ice cream maker.

Last year was my first attempt at making ice cream, and it turned out wonderfully!  It spawned the great realization that homemade ice cream means that the sky is the limits in terms of flavour combinations; for instance, you can add booze to your ice cream, which you would never find at the supermarket (at least not real booze, maybe booze flavour).  That first recipe was pretty classic: cream, sugar, egg yolks, a vanilla bean, lots of stirring and time.

However, version 2.0 offers an even easier way to make ice cream – moreover, it doesn’t include egg yolks, so it takes less time, and you don’t end up with a bunch of egg whites you have to creatively deal with.

I was inspired to make a cardamom-flavoured batch, as there is a local restaurant that pairs cardamom ice cream with a chocolate torte on their menu, and it is divine.

Homemade cardamom ice cream 2.0

300 ml whipping (35%) cream
half of a 400 g can of sweetened condensed milk
10 green cardamom pods

Gently heat the cream in a small saucepan.  Just before it starts to boil, take it off the heat and add the cardamom pods.  Cover, and let it steep for 30 minutes.  Strain the cardamom out and stir in the condensed milk.  Put the ice cream mix into a container you would like to freeze the ice cream in, cover, and place it in the fridge for 8-24 hours to get it as cold as possible before putting in the freezer.  Then, and this is crucial, put it in the freezer.  I didn’t bother stirring the ice cream during the freezing process, and it turned out smooth and silky.

homemade cardamom ice cream

This base recipe of cream and condensed milk is an excellent starting point for all sorts of flavours: I think next I’ll try adding a big spoonful of Nutella to make a chocolate-hazelnut version – hubba bubba!

The cardamom ice cream paired wonderfully with an espresso, a new library book, and a lazy afternoon.

cardamom ice cream + espresso

raw! seaweed! sprouts! YEAH!

Hot summer days (and even the not so hot ones) beg for light, easy to digest meals: a sense of freshness and clarity is what I seek when I push myself away from the table.  So when I remembered the idea of using seaweed as a wrap, I set to work: to start, I began sprouting some alfalfa seeds in a jar.  While that was growing, I roasted some sesame seeds and made my own tahini paste with my splendid and all-powerful Vitamix.  When the sprouts were ready after a few days, I smeared the tahini across a sheet of seaweed, laid over a thin layer of cucumber slices, piled on some sprouts and baby spinach, and weighed the leaves down with some peaches.  Rolled up firmly and then cut in half, it made a most refreshing and simple weekday lunch.  I think the next bike ride to the park will include a supply of these.

raw veggie seaweed wraps

sexy vacuum chicken.

 

I’m not sure what’s sexier: a laser thermometer, or cooking food without reaching a boiling temperature.  Hm….

The other week I tried cooking chicken breast using the sous vide method – that is, under vacuum.  If food is under vacuum, then the cooking temperature doesn’t have to be as high for the food to cook.  The result is usually more tender and juicy, but what I was really interested in was not overheating my humid and non-air-conditioned apartment in the summer by making dinner.

As this was my first foray into vacuum cooking, I decided to keep things basic by cooking boneless, skinless chicken breast that had been lightly seasoned with salt, pepper and vegetable oil.  I placed individual boobs into Ziploc bags, made sure to squeeze as much air out as possible (partially submerging the bags in water helps with this, as the water pushes the air out) and dropped the bags in a water bath around 60 degrees C.

Checking the water temperature every half hour or so and maintaining a temperature between 60 and 70 degrees C, the chicken steeped for 80 minutes.  They emerged tender and ready!

checking temperature on sous-vide chicken
I threw together a quick sauce of soy sauce, sesame oil, brown sugar, grated ginger and garlic, rice vinegar, corn starch and green onions.  Grilled broccolini and asparagus rounded it out.

Ta DA!

sous-vide chicken breast dinner
Delicious as it was, I’m not sure if poaching the chicken would have yielded a similar, equally pleasing result.  I suppose the next step will be to do an experiment and see.  In the meantime, I’m going to test the temperature of the water in my bathtub with my laser thermometer.

stock pizza.

While some people peep into their friends’ medicine cabinets to develop an overgeneralized conclusion of the owners’ character, I peep into their freezers.  When we first started dating, Longer Hollow Legs had a steady supply of frozen pizzas occupying the frosty depths of his ice box.  How this is a reflection of his psyche I do not know, but I do know about me – that I like to make things hard for myself and thrive off self-righteous DIY-ness.  Hence I said, “No more store-bought pizzas” and now I make giant batches of our own pizza to freeze.

“It’s not that hard,” chirped the sweaty, beet-red aproned woman-child with Hollow Legs, “It’s just a matter of organization.”

Outside of the questionable anatomy (and reference to myself in the third person), I really do think that she/I am right.  Handling dough is one of life’s secret joys, and nothing helps you fall asleep faster than the smug satisfaction of knowing exactly what went into your pizza combined with heavy carbo-loading and cheese consumption.

I use a simple focaccia recipe (found here) as the pizza dough base, and keep the toppings pretty simple: tomato sauce, mushrooms, old cheddar.  Sometimes I’ll also scatter pickled artichokes, a few blobs of ricotta and a handful of baby spinach over top as well, if I feel like getting Really Fancy.  Then we gobble one back for dinner, and save the rest for another day.

pizzas to freeze for later homemade pizza for tonight!