Spicy Chickpea Hash

I don't really know what to call this, so Spicy Chickpea Hash it is.

You will need:

Chickpeas
Eggplant
Potato
Carrot
Harissa Sauce
Cumin
Fennel Seed
Ground Coriander
Salt
Pepper
Olive Oil
Garlic
Tamari
Milk


Start two nights before desired serving time. Soak your dried chickpeas for 24 hours. After soaking bring to a boil then place it immediately into the strange insulating thermos-type thing you have for large pots. Allow to cook over night.




Peel, cube and boil some potatoes.


Slice some eggplant.


Admire the pretty chickpeas that don't taste like they've been canned (because they haven't!)


The Harissa Sauce. Spiciness factor: 7


So, in a large pan, heat some olive oil. Add garlic, eggplant and onions. Season a bit with salt and pepper. Allow to cook for a little bit. Add potatoes and chickpeas now as they are already cooked. Stew and reduce with a little bit of milk.

Season with spices, tamari and harissa sauce. Add a bit of water and reduce.


Now eat!

(I forgot the onions)

Curry Vegetable Soup

No pictures unfortunately. A spicy, hearty soup.

Ingredients:

Carrot
Onion
Potato
Kidney Beans
Frozen Peas
Coconut Milk
Milk
Chestnuts
Chili Flakes
Ground Cumin
Cayenne Pepper
Red Curry Paste
Vegetable soup bouillon
Flour
Olive Oil
Sesame Seed Oil

Heat saucepan with olive and sesame seed oils. Add diced onion and carrot. Season with sea salt and pepper. Cook for a little bit on medium-high heat then deglaze with a bit of and then some of milk. Add vegetable bouillon and spices to taste. Add frozen peas, coconut milk, red curry paste, potatoes, kidney beans chestnuts and a bit of water. Reduce, cook, simmer, whatever.

When everything is cooked you have powerful flavour! Add water and stir in a bit of flour to thicken.

Desserty Polenta

I set out to make polenta today. It actually went quite well with this being my first attempt.

Ingredients:

Milk
Water
Butter
Cornmeal
Salt
Vanilla
Brown Sugar

Topping:

Raisins
Craisins
Dried Apricots
Ginger
Butter
Corn Syrup


Bring the milk just to a boil. Slowly add cornmeal while whisking constantly. Realize that you don't know how much cornmeal to liquid you need so recover by adding water. Add a little bit of butter and season with a little bit of salt. Stir occasionally over low heat for an hour.

After an hour taste the polenta and ask yourself "what do I do now? I just wanted to make polenta... I have no idea what to do with it or how one should eat it." Decide that the polenta is a little on the sweet side and therefore would make an admirable dessert. Mix in some brown sugar and vanilla.

In a sauce pan, melt some butter and add the dried fuit and ginger to it. Deglaze and reduce a few times with water. Towards the end, I added some corn syrup to thicken it. Top the polenta with the 'sauce' and garnish with sliced almonds.

Voila, but the topping needs work.

Peanut Butter Hummus

Awhile ago I bought some chick peas at the grocery store. They've been sitting in my cupboard for a few months, and today I decided it was time to do something with them. What can you do with chick peas? For one thing, you can make hummus.


As far as I can tell, hummus has four main ingredients: chick peas, lemon, garlic and tahini. I didn't have any tahini so I used peanut butter instead.


To make the hummus all I really did was throw everything into the blender and blend it. I used a can of chick peas, 2 cloves of garlic, 2 gobs of peanut butter and half a lemon. If you're wondering what the red stuff is, I decided to add a spoonful of paprika at the last minute to spice it up a bit. I also had to add a little bit of water because the stuff wouldn't blend properly without it.


After blending it was a little more watery than I was hoping, which was probably a result of the water I added. Meh.


I scooped some into a bowl and ate it as a snack with some crackers and carrots. It was pretty tasty. I think next time I might want to use a bit more spice. I'm not sure how close the taste is to actual hummus because I've only had it a few times, and I don't remember what it tastes like. It made a lot more than I thought it would... I wonder how long this stuff will keep in the fridge?

Vegan Pasta

The purpose of today's cooking adventure was to see what fake soy cheese was all about. Continue reading for the results...


Meet the ingredients: Pasta, Coconut Milk, White Beans, White Onions, Garlic, Shallots, Fake Soy Havarti, Shallots, Yellow Pepper, Red Pepper, Endives...

Margarine, Flour, Sun Dried Tomatoes in Oil, Capers and Olive Oil.

My first thought was to make a basic Mornay Sauce without the butter, milk or cheese. So, let's just call this a "Yanrom Sauce". I made a "roux" with margarine and flour. Then I poured in a can of scalded coconut milk.

This is the soy havarti, aka fake cheese. Since I couldn't find fake edam or parmigiano-reggiano, I settled for something with a hopefully creamy taste. I was wrong. Fake cheese is awful. Icky, ick, ick! So with nothing else to do with the entire $6 block of fake cheese, I put all of its 900 calories into the sauce hoping the other ingredients would obfuscate its flavour.

At least it melted, but it's just not gooey or stringy. Add salt, pepper and I also put in a few capers for good measure.

While the cheese is melting in the sauce, use some olive oil in another pan to fry the onion, then shallots and finally the garlic. After a Little While (tm) add the rinsed out can of white beans, sun dried tomatoes and chopped up peppers. I deglazed with water a couple times. If white wine were on hand, that would have been the preferred deglazing agent.

Now came the endives. I've never cooked with them before and they were expensive!

Chop, chop chop! Endives are grown underground so they remain white. Raw, they are somewhat bitter.

To complete the sauce, I combined both pots together.

And there it is, on top of some pasta. Tasty. You can barely taste the cheese at all! I'm not sure how to describe the flavour. It's an Asian-Italian-Hippie infusion.

Chocolate Cranberry & Almond Brownies

Not having made brownies in over ten years, I decided to give it a whirl.

Meet the Ingredients

Cream butter, eggs, sugar, vanilla and elmond extract
In a double boiler, melt some chocolate. In this case, some blocks of unsweetened baker's chocolate and some semi-sweet chocolate chips.

Add chocolate to butter mixture.

I understand baking power is a leavening agent of some sort. I threw some in for good measure.

Then I added flour, almonds, dried cranberries and skor toffee chips.

Bake at 350 till a toothpick says otherwise. 45 minutes for me.

Then for some reason, I decided I wanted cold brownies, so I inverted them on a sheet and...

Put them in the freezer for an hour.

Voila. Decadent. Perhaps a bit too much sugar and the sugar's caramelized a bit too much on the bottom.The cranberry is a really nice contrast with all of the sweet. A little bit of orange would probably go well too.I used sliced almonds, so they're hard to taste in there. Almond chunks or walnuts next time.

Pear, Apricot & Almond Bread

Inspired by Eileen's delicious Apricot loaf and Jamie Oliver, I bring you my latest no-recipe bread creation!

Flour, water, yeast, salt and sugar

Create your own retention pond (man-made lakes for you marketing folk)

Knead (poorly) and let rise.

Step 4: Caramelize Pears in butter


Add Amaretto and Corn Syrup. I was looking for honey, but I couldn't find any. Hence the Corn Syrup.



Add some dried apricots while you're at it. Oh, and some Apricot Jam. I wanted to add marmalade too, but I went with...

Zest du L'orange

I ended up reducing it for over an hour by continuously adding water. The pears were really resilient and refused to soften! When done, reserve and allow to cool.

After dough has doubled in size, knead some of the gooey fruit mixture into it along with sliced almonds.

It goes into a greased pan.

Alternatively, roll out some dough and create some sort of bread turn-over with the filling.

The Loaf took about 70 minutes at 350 degrees.

The "turn-over" took 50 minutes at 350.


Yum, yumm!

In retrospect, the bread is a bit dry, perhaps over-cooked. Sixty minutes next time along with some butter or olive oil in the dough to keep it moist. Maybe some almond extract in the dough as well.