No-Sun Dried Tomatoes

My lab scheduled a picnic potluck for Jazz in the Park. Leading up to our the day of our scheduled picnic, the weather was beautiful with sunny skies. Following the day of our scheduled picnic, the weather was beautiful with sunny skies. The day of our picnic was unceasing torrential downpour creating Escalade-eating sinkholes and flooding every basement in the Midwest.

We rescheduled our picnic for River Rhythms the following week. The weather report was identical, with gorgeous skies before and after and epic flooding scheduled for our picnic, but we stuck to our guns and were rewarded for our tenacity with a beautiful evening and six surprisingly good bands.



Given my need to over-plan all things except vacations, I had already bought tomatoes for a bulgur-tomato-oregano salad-thing before the floods. I figured I could still use them with a slight change of plan: Dried tomato slices with goat cheese and a sliced baguette. My labmates approved mightily of Plan B.



The secret ingredient is a dead simple not-even recipe, everything else was store-bought.

Ingredient:
Delicious tomatoes you can't use before they spoil

Directions:
Slice tomatoes ~1/4 inch thick (you will really want a sharp knife for this)
Line baking sheet(s) with parchment paper
Arrange tomato slices in a single layer on the parchment paper(s)
Put in oven on LOWEST setting until dry (if you have a pilot light and your oven is generally above 100 degrees F, don't even bother turning it on)

You will know they are done when they don't squish anymore when you poke them. I left mine overnight. If your oven is on, it will take less time to dry the tomatoes, but you may end up cooking some of the flavor out of them.

Peel dried tomatoes off of parchment paper. Store in tupperware or a bag. I got six romas into a 1 cup container.

Bitchin' Banana Bread

I ended up with a ridiculous surplus of bananas. Not shockingly, they went a little bit sketch. There is one word for this situation: Awesome.



My solution to this non-problem is adapted from the ABC Children's cookbook



To participate in the awesome, you will need:

3 sketchy bananas
3/4 c. of sugar
1/2 c. of vegetable oil
2 eggs
2 c. all-purpose flour
1 t. baking powder
1/2 t. baking soda
1/2 t. salt
2 t. vanilla extract
3/4 c. chocolate chunks (I really, really like the 365 organic mini-chunks from Whole Foods. Feel free to substitute whatever you want.)
1/2 c. chopped walnuts (optional)

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F and grease up a bread pan. (I use PAM)
2. Put the sketchy bananas and the sugar in a bowl and mash them up with a wooden spoon. I like to leave mine a little bit lumpy.
3. Add the vegetable oil, eggs, and vanilla and stir until the liquids are incorporated.
4. Add the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt and stir until incorporated.
5. Now mix in the chocolate chunks and walnuts.
6. Pour the batter into the baking pan and put it in the oven for 60-70 minutes.
7. Lick the bowl.
8. Test the bread with a toothpick or cake tester. When it comes out clean, your bread is done. Take it out of the oven and set the bread, in the pan, on a cooling rack and let it set for 10 minutes. (Fair warning, if it comes out dirty after 65+ minutes try sticking a clean tester somewhere else. You probably hit a banana vein.)
9. Turn the bread out onto the cooling rack and let it cool to room temperature.
10. Slice and enjoy.

When you've had your initial fill, wrap the banana bread in saran wrap and it will keep for longer than it will last. I also have it on good authority that it freezes well, but I haven't had any last long enough to test this myself.

Spicy Pineapple Teriyaki Flank Steak

Let's get something straight: There are few things that I enjoy more in life than picnics and barbecues. Any chance to combine them is even better. This lovely meal was pre-meditated grilling combined with impromptu picnic. Does it get any better?



This also serves as an excellent reminder that my memory of recipes is somewhat (read: extremely) unreliable. I ended up with a couple of un-identified greenish-yellow peppers. This made me think of a recipe for flank steak that I just knew was a spicy-fruity-teriyaki in Cooking at the Academy. Fun fact: there is a recipe for flank steak in that book, and it bears precisely no resemblance, aside from the cut of beef, from what I was imagining.

Left to my own devices, I came up with the following:

2 peppers
1 can crushed pineapple
1 1/2" ginger, peeled and grated
1/3 c soy sauce
1/8 c brown sugar, packed

I started by seeding the peppers by cutting around the tops with a thin-bladed knife and pulling out the seeds by the stem:


Next, I sliced the peppers into thin pepper rings, roughly 1/8" thick. I threw those in a large, well-sealing plastic tupperware-thing along with the crushed pineapple, and then grated the ginger into the mixture. Then I added the soy sauce and brown sugar, put the lid on, and gave everything a good shake to mix the ingredients.

At this point, add the flank steak, making sure to bury it well in the marinade. Put the tupperware in the fridge and leave it there for at least a few hours, and up to overnight.

When you are ready to cook, heat up the grill, fish out the flank steak, wipe off any excess marinade, and grill to your heart's content. Keep an eye on the meat so that you get it to whatever level of doneness pleases you. I generally go for a true medium, where it is still pink inside, but is warm throughout.

When your meat is cooked how you like it, pull it off and let it rest for a couple of minutes on a cutting board to let the juices re-distribute and then slice it against the grain. Serve and enjoy.

(Food safety hint: NEVER EAT A MARINADE WITHOUT COOKING IT. If you want to make a sauce from the marinade, strain out the chunks and BOIL the marinade. Would you lick raw hamburger? Then why would you use a marinade as a sauce?)

Door County's Finest

My coworker, PK, came in today and set down a giant (seriously) tupperware on the lunch table.

Inner Voice: Cherries?

PK: My friend went to Door County this weekend and gave us a bunch of cherries.

Inner voice: Cherries!

PK: But they are not really good for eating...

Inner voice: Jam?

PK: they are really sour, not sweet like regular cherries.

Inner voice: Jam!!!

PK: I was wondering if you wanted to do anything with them, like make a pie or something.

Outer voice: I will bring you jam tomorrow!

After a quick consultation with the almighty Google, I found a man after my own heart. The link is David Lebovitz's non-recipe for cherry jam. I think I may follow his example of non-recipes, because frankly, I seldom really cook by them. Writing up the hummus I felt like I was focusing so much on trying to figure out how much of whatever I was using, I couldn't replicate my standard hummus because I was using too much of my engineer-brain and not enough of my food-brain. I'm thinking future posts will be more in the vein of knitting recipes, where the focus is getting the end product by trying on as you go and making any necessary alterations, than chemistry experiments, which tend to be explicit about the steps while strictly prohibiting putting things in your mouth.

Ingredients:
Bucket 'o Door County's Finest
Lemons
Sugar
Almond Extract

I started by pitting the roughly 10-12 cups of cherries , and then chopped them into bits, ending up with roughly 5-6 cups of this:



(I highly recommend putting your phone on hands free and catching up with your calls for this part. I also highly recommend a cherry pitter. It is a unitasker, but it does its job very, very well.)

To the cherry bits, I added the zest and juice of two lemons and then threw the whole mess into an enameled cast-iron pot, brought it slowly up to a simmer, and then cooked it, stirring, for about 25 minutes (in an un-air-conditioned apartment, in July, no less. This has been killing my desire to cook of late. A donkey cart full of cherries solves all of life's problems).

After everything was nice and soft, I measured out my cherry mush (in my case, 3 cups) and added 3/4 as much sugar as there was mush (which was 2 1/4 cups). Usually I don't put in nearly as much sugar as recommended because I don't like super-sweet jams, but these puppies were sour and two lemons sure didn't help. After stirring in the sugar, I put everything back on the heat, this time cranking it as high as it would go. I brought the now-rather-sticky goop back to boiling, stirring the whole time, and kept it going strong until it was jelling on the my frozen spoons (I put all of my tablespoons in my beer-mug in the freezer before starting this bit). After pulling everything off the heat, I added a tiny splash of almond extract, because cherries and almonds were meant to be together (now I want scones).



I canned two using a water bath, and the half-jar is in the fridge, silently willing me to make bread tomorrow.

I seem to have a tendency to over-thicken my jam. This doesn't bother me texturally, but I am somewhat disappointed to get 1 1/4 pints of jam from a metric arse-ton of cherries, awesome though that jam may be. I consulted my sister, and she recommended actually using pectin next time, or at least using my candy thermometer to make sure I'm not boiling past jelly, i.e. 220 deg. F.

In conclusion, JAM!!!

Fat and Happy Hummus and Pita Chips

If you ever find yourself in Tucson, AZ, do yourself a favor and stop by the Fat Greek. While I’m pretty sure you can’t go wrong with anything on their menu, my favorite thing is their hummus. I play a little game with myself before I go there. I convince myself that it can’t possibly be as good as I remember, and then I am corrected every time: it is even better. A perfect balance of earthy and savory, it comes out in a paper-lined basket, drizzled with olive oil and herbs along with toasty hot triangles of Greek bread. I generally end up sitting outside and watching passers by, burning my fingers a little on the still-steaming pita topped with cool, delicious hummus. Patience is a finite resource, and I wouldn’t waste it on something like this.

I once asked them to reveal their secret, and they told me garlic and oregano. Even with that knowledge, I couldn’t replicate that flavor until I stumbled on a small, but crucial, fact: “Greek oregano” is not the same thing as “oregano.” I haven’t the faintest clue what the difference is botanically speaking, but flavor-wise, don’t bother with “oregano” when attempting to make Mediterranean food, find the “Greek oregano”. It sounds obvious, but I can be a little slow sometimes.

Using my newfound knowledge, I began developing my own variation. What I’ve come up with is a little bit heavier, but rather good, if I do say so myself.

I generally start out with dried garbanzos, and then soak and boil them. It can be a bit of a pain, but I think they turn out much better (I will happily eat them with a spoon), and you can definitely make use of economies of scale. For instance, I boiled up two pounds of dried beans when I decided to make hummus. A few cups were used for hummus, and the rest are sitting in their broth in my fridge, waiting for further inspiration.

Hummus:
1 ½ c. garbanzo beans, boiled
2 cloves garlic, quartered
½ t. salt
1 ½ t. dried Greek oregano
Juice of ½ lemon
4 t. Tahini
1 T. olive oil
a few T. of garbanzo broth

Add the garbanzos, garlic, salt, oregano, Tahini, olive oil, and lemon juice to a food processer. Pulse bit to get things started, and then blend. Add the garbanzo broth leftover from cooking a little at a time to thin the mixture until you reach your desired consistency. Tweak the measures a little until you are thrilled with it. If it is a little too sharp, a bit more tahini will add earthiness, if it is a little to earthy, a little more lemon will punch it up. This game is all about balance.

And because hummus should not always be eaten directly off of a spoon (or finger, if I’m being honest), I’ve also thrown in some pita chips.

Pita Chips:
~4 small pitas (I use more of an arab style, i.e. with pockets, than a greek style, i.e., flat)
1 t. salt
1 t. Greek oregano
¼ t. garlic powder
Spray oil (like PAM)

Heat your oven to 300 degrees F. Cut your pitas into little triangles (I generally cut mine into sixths), and then split each triangle in half. Now all of your triangles will have a smooth side and a more textured side. Lay the bread triangles textured-side-up on a baking sheet and spray them with a bit of oil. Put all of your spices into a mortar and pestle (or if you are using a food processer, do this before making the hummus to avoid doing the dishes twice), and grind them into a fine powder. Sprinkle the spice powder across the oiled pitas and put them in the oven.

Now you need to keep yourself busy around the kitchen so that you don’t wander off and burn your pita chips. This is a good time to tidy up. Keep checking on the chips every couple of minutes. You can easily test how done they are by pushing down on one of the triangles (do mind the hot metal all around them). If it feels soft or squishy, they need more time. Once it firms up and becomes crispy, they are ready. If you want to brown them, leave them in a bit longer, and watch them like a hawk. Let them cool a little, and then serve.