Cauliflower

Not much to say here, just that roasted cauliflower is gloriously delicious.

Slice it thin.

Apply oil, spice, and blackbody radiation (broil it in the oven)

Barley soup with aromatics

I've never considered making any kind of barley soup other than mushroom-barley.  That's a shame, because this one we made up is ten times more interesting.  As usual, I opened the fridge and pantry and basically threw in whatever I saw there.  I encourage you to do the same.

What we had:

1. Onions
2. Carrots
3. Celery (with some of the leaves chopped up)
4. Green cabbage
5. Scallions

The first four went in first to sautee in olive oil.  Then came the seasoning:

• Black pepper
• Garlic powder
• Hot paprika
• Thyme
• Oregano
• Basil
• Soup mix
• Mustard
• Miso
• Soy sauce
• Fish sauce

Then came water.  Once the barley was cooked and the carrots were soft I shut of the heat and tossed in the scallions.  Done.

As you might have guessed from the seasoning list, the soup was rather salty.  There should have been less soup mix, or none at all.  Still, a great soup.

Beef jerky

This project started when Dave brought a biltong-making box from South Africa.  To make either biltong or regular beef jerky, you cut raw beef into strips or pieces, and soak them in vinegar and soy sauce for about 8 hours or overnight.  Then the meat is hung to dry - biltong gets special biltong spices, while beef jerky is usually plain.

Due to my mistake, we made our first biltong batch out of #2 meat (not shown).  All dried meat should be made with the leanest stuff you can find, but #2 is the opposite of lean, which means our biltong came out with great flavor, but super hard texture.  I've had biltong before, and I know it's hard, but not that hard.

These pictures are from the next attempt - beef jerky.  This time we used #6, or false fillet - the cut that resembles tenderloin because it's lean and tender, but it's taken from the shoulder, and is cheaper.  Using the setup pictured above, I dried the beef in an oven.  Diehard biltong guys (I say guys because I've never met a female particularly passionate about biltong) would never do this, but jerky is a more laid back affair.  I saw a recipe for 150-160 F for 10-14 hours, so I set my oven to 70 C, and put it on convection.  Maybe the convection was a mistake, because when I checked on them it was like almost sizzling, which is much hotter than it should be.  I turned it down to the 50-60 range and turned off convection.  Still, I think it was ready in like 4-6 hours.

Weighing the stash.  This is good stuff.

Red fruit-veggie smoothie?

So, we had this leftover salad with beets, pine nuts, and arugula...

...and I thought, "why not put it in this cup,"

"and add some of this sweet apple pear cactus juice"

"and blend it all into a red fruit veggie smoothie?"

The idea was to recreate something like Naked juice, which I really like.

Here goes...

What is that taste? 

Can't quite place it...

Uch, raw shallots.  Forgot those were in the salad, too.

Sorry, red buddy, there's no hope for you.  You're getting dumped in the trash.

Meringues

Every now and then we tinker with ice cream recipes, which generally call for egg yolks.  But what do you do with the whites?  Obviously you whip them up and make meringues, because the other options - chocolate mousse and sponge cake - require the yolks and you only have the whites.

All you really need to add is sugar (a cup, give or take whatever you feel like), though cream of tarter helps stabilize the foam and vanilla adds flavor.  Plastic is the perfect pastry bag material for meringue, because the former is hydrophobic while the latter hydrophilic... anyway, just snip off a corner of a ziplock bag and let your creativity do the rest.

Meringue can be baked in two ways: low and slow or hot and fast.  Low and slow gives you a nice crunchy meringue, maybe just a little chewy in the center, if you like that.  Hot and fast gives you a toasty outside, and fluffly, still-kind-of-raw insides.  We kind of did something halfway between the two, ending up with sticky, chewy meringues.  Still delicious.

Cheesy quinoa pashtida

Would you believe me if I said quinoa is our new favorite food?

I remember tasting quinoa a long time ago and not liking it.  That's what happens when you treat it like rice and serve it barely seasoned, as a side dish.  Boring, bland, and weird texture.

But then we started tasting quinoa with other savory ingredients mixed in, and seasoned.  We tried some vegetables with quinoa stuffing.  The trick to quinoa is to mix it together with lots of other delicious things, and that led us to adapt this dish from a recipe we saw somewhere.

We've made this about four times in the last six weeks, and each time it's a little different.  The quinoa always gets soaked in water, then strained, and then boiled in 2 times whatever volume of dry quinoa you started with.  We always add chicken soup mix to the boiling water, which does a great job covering up quinoa's natural bland taste.

Then, sautee vegetables of your choice - we used onions, garlic, zucchini and מנגולד - a type of chard - with salt, pepper, garlic, etc.  After the quinoa is cooked, mix it with the veggies, 1 egg per cup of dry quinoa, and cheese.  Pour into a baking dish, top with grated Parmesan cheese and bake till bubbly.

With all that soup mix, egg, and cheese, one might wonder if the quinoa is really contributing here.  Believe me, it is.  Maybe not so much taste wise, but it definitely gives the whole thing a unique and addictive texture.    It's easy to eat through an insane amount of this stuff without even realizing.  Pretty much every time we make it for dinner, we have to force ourselves to save enough for lunch the next day.

Try it.

Go-to pizza toppings

These are some pizzas I made over Sukot, using the same dough I always use.  The pizzas tasted great, as all pizza does, but I'm far from satisfied with my crust.  I have long since ceased baking pizzas directly on my small round stone; the only way to avoid the invariable burning mess (when part of the pizza dangles over the stone) is to make unacceptably tiny pizzas.  Instead, I form the crust on a thin aluminum sheet, and bake that on the stone.  It's a method that seems to be getting worse with time, and I've reached the point where the crusts barely browns at all underneath.  The culprit may be oven temperature, or aluminum's heat capacity, or even soft Israeli flour.  I'm sure a good baking steel would solve my problems, but I don't know where to get one here and probably couldn't afford it anyway...

But I digress.  Here are some tasty pizzas:

Mozzarella, tomato sauce and basil.  Classic.  I went with the little balls of מוצרלה בייבי, a slight upgrade from theגבינת עמק on all the rest of the pizzas.  You can taste the difference, but only just.  The basil was fresh from the gahhden.

Carmelized onions, גבינת עמק, thyme, a dash of balsamic vinegar.  No tomato sauce.

טבעול veggie burgers sliced thin, fried in olive oil until crispy and seasoned with hot paprika.  גבינת עמק, tomato sauce.  Use Morningstar burgers in the US.

Mushroom pie.  Can't beat it.