3-Bean Power Pasta

This is like night-mode, am-cam* of appetite porn. Not the sexiest thing I have made. Certainly. This is, however, in for the long-haul and won't let you down. I'm trying to work on a basic food stuff for freezing that is flexible enough to thaw and turn into pasta sauce (a bean-y bechamel), a pizza sauce (bean/cheezing puree topping), and a soup (yeah, an opaque one). (*I guess all I do is hyper am-cam, but I've made my peace with that.)

This rendering involved some medium-large mac shells. It came out well, and for the work it is super easy.

Main Ingredients;

• 1 can black beans
• 1 can butter beans
• 1 block silken tofu
• 1/2 cup soaked cashews
• 1 cup roasted-squash/steamed-cauliflower puree

You will also need about 2/3 cup of soy milk (+/-), mirin, tamari, nutritional yeast. Also, spices and herbs are good. Here's the thing though; you're going to make a nice thick sludge-y puree with the first 5 ingredients, sans black beans. Mix the black beans in there after the pureeing is complete so you can distract from what can be a grain-y sauce (depending on how much you thin it out and how good your processor is).

The point of this recipe is for cooking ahead. It's not going to knock you socks off, but it will set you right. This recipe will scale very well; there are no ratios to adhere to so make a quadruple batch if you're feeling frisky. You may want to cook some up for body paint. It would prove a very delicious and nutritious dressing.

I served mine last night with whole wheat shells, flavored with a sauteed onion (in paprika, garlic, and ancho; pan deglazed with marsala); spiced it up with more paprika, garlic, ancho, and some red pepper, probably a 1/2 cup of nutritional yeast (maybe more). Basically I just went for a roasty delight. I wish I had had a poblano or two, or some roasted jalapenos. Still it came out as a slightly smoky sauce, and was mild but pleasant.

Vegan Gnocchi in Buttery Balsamic Beet Glaze

Last night in the kitchen, Ms. Fraulein and I made the following -

They were like sundaes made of flour and sweet potatoes and beets and cauliflower and squash and butter and vinegar. Hungry yet?

So the ratio for gnocchi is 1 cup potato to 1 cup flour to 1 egg. This recipe calls for 2 cup Japanese sweet potato (baked, peeled, mashed), 1 cup roasted butternut squash (pureed), 1 cup steamed cauliflower (pureed) to 4 cups (plus more) flour to 2 flax eggs. You can easily just keep changing the exponent to this recipe as it scales well for OAMC. Note the change in binder though, Japanese sweet potatoes are quite starchy and as such I cut back on the binder; you should play around to figure out where you like your binder level then scale out from there. More binder should make the dough faster to form and a bit more dense; I like mine doughier as when they freeze, or are served as leftovers, they will toughen up.

We went with the following;

• Begin by baking (microwaving is fine, probably preferred since it will  likely dehydrate the potato more), then peeling, then mashing the potatoes (we used four small)
• In a large mixing bowl, mix potatoes with roasted butternut squash and steamed cauliflower purees (I already had a tupperware of this ready to go, not that everyone does), stir in flax eggs and make sure all large clumbs are broken down and mixture is well-blended
• Start a large pot of water to boiling
• Start making dough by gradually folding in the flour (by a 1/2ish cup at a time), we used all-purpose, but using whole wheat may minimize the amount of flour needed
• (Side-step: take potato peels, toss in cast-iron skillet with a bit of sesame oil and vindaloo curry powder, sprinkle on some sesame seeds, fry until crispy, and nom nom nom...)
• Peel two-three cups of beets (used a mix of white and red beets, all 12 about the size of a ping-pong ball), throw into the boiling water once its ready
• Once the dough is semi-wet, but sticks more to itself than your hand, it is basically done. Flatten ball into rectangular shape with one side the width of your hand. Cut into 1" wide strips with a pizza or other dough cutter.
• Roll strips into snakes that have a diameter about the size of the gnocchi you like (bigger = doughier, smaller = less texture variance through dumpling), sprinkle tops with flour. Cut to preferred mass.
• Pick up each baby dumpling, roll in hand to coat with dough (this prevents them from sticking together while in the bowl I am about to mention), press fork into them to flatten and imprint, toss in wooden bowl
• Remove beets from boiling water once you can pierce with a fork; the water should be all magenta
• Begin dropping batches of gnocchi dumplings into the water, skim off when they float consistently (they tend to easily drift upward and then fall back)

Now once you have removed the beets and they are cooling and the dumplings are cooking up, you will want to begin your butter sauce. The quantity of gnocchi in the ratio above obviously yields a lot; 8+ cups makes many gnocchi, and that's before they soak up some water. The amount of butter sauce is dependent on how much your plating, so bear that in mind.

Anyway, take about 5 tablespoons of earthbalance and melt down. Press (or add) four (minced) cloves garlic into the butter; once garlic is soft, slice the beets and toss them in there. Add some balsamic vinegar and mirin. Spice and season at will.

Hopefully you have a good reserve of gnocchi at this point; well, enough to plate anyway (toss soon-to-be leftovers in olive oil). Once the beets are all glazed and terrific looking skim off the beets and put them on top of plated gnocchi. Add more butter if necessary. Now add a splash more of balsamic and a splash of something like Tamari or Bragg's, then thicken the remaining sauce a little bit with corn starch (slurry) or flour (not as effective since there's not much fat at this point); we added enough to glaze it over into a near jelly (pectin might be fun to play with here). Bring sauce to a bubble; pour over dish.

Freeze your leftovers (no sauce, just enough olive oil to keep them from sticking together while you nom nom) in single serving ziplock bags in a larger gallon size freezer bag

For bonus points, if you have some extra of the potato/squash/cauliflower puree lying around, you can scoot it around the bottom of the sauce pan to pick up the extra bits of beet and then plate like a little minaret. Do this step just before adding thickening agent to sauce.

Also, when you add any spices to the dough (i.e. garlic/onion powder, pepper, etc), you would add a 1/2 teaspoon of beet powder to make your gnocchi all pink, or up to 2 teaspoons to really push them. After that the taste may take a (not-necessarily-bad) swerve.

Perhaps I should have added some of those dried cranberries or cherries to the sauce? Oh well. There's always tomorrow!

So enjoy. It's an incredibly filling meal. As was promised; making it is therapeutic, eating it is narcotic.

BTW: It was a bit cold and rainy this morning. As such, my lunch quickly became my feel-good 9am breakfast. Seen above in the blue bowls are the gnocchi tossed with more of the potato beet mixture. YAY for vitamins and starch and butter.

Update on 1:10PM by mfg

gallery slideshow to follow of entire process thanks to Ms. Fraulein, documentarian

Super Weekend Mega Fun Shiny Time

food, massivelySo I have a few things to accomplish this weekend. My PBS for the weekend is busy-body mode. I did hazy-lazy a few weeks back, it was great. I have practical household items to do, as well as a bunch of recipes I want to make (bottom segment of list).

Here's the objectives, qualified with priorities;

• I need to clean the house top to bottom, per usual starting with dishes. Hopefully the lawn will be dry enough for a mowing at some point, though it rained a ton last night. [PRIORITY UN]
• Get thermostat working in house, or call landlord [PRIORITY DEUX]
• I got 30 gig of music from one laptop to the other, and all of my images. I need to figure out how to get the other 80 gig off my desktop (which is all torn down) and onto the laptop.
  • What follows from that is needing to then perform some kind of reconciliation of the files, and a merge, and what is sure-to-be some nasty tagging unpleasantness.
• Afterward, I should be able to format the NAS I recently got, and throw both the image and music libs on there. Right now I think I'm going to be doing 2T in JBOD; but if I set my NAS up for something a bit more special I may need to flip to a RAID. Unfortunately the device runs some flavor of *nix and I will need to do some EXT3fs magic to get it to play nicely with windows 7. bah. [PRIORITY TROIS]
• Set up NAS to stream media, perform weekly backups of new laptop HDD
• Conjure scrobbling music library magic
• ---------------------------RECIPES-THAT-SOUND-AMAZING-TO-ME-RIGHT-NOW---------------------------
• Make nom noms in bulk and freeze;
  • butternut squash soup (I already have a few quarts of the stuff, I think I might extend with another squash and block or two of tofu) [PRIORITY TRES]
  • caulifower-potato soup, (maybe a hybrid)
  • cumin roasted cauliflower (with yogurt?)
  • There Will Be Baking.
  • Make spinach-broccoli quiche. [PRIORITY UNO] maybe a normal quiche too. maybe.
  • make Rye Bread (!?)
  • pies. ZOMG, YES pies, more pies... asdf. [PRIORITY DOS]
  • cookies? dunno, probably fuck em up using a tart recipe that ends up miraculously coming out like creme brulee. is that a plan i hear knocking?
  • EAT THE RAINBOW Black Bean Soup (I think halving beans and adding lentils would be a nice shift of gears. Besides, with a name like that I will be victorious on monday if anyone asks what I did over the weekend)
• go for a freezing cold bike ride; gotta get ingredients somehow
• Consider a haircut, then decide against it for this pay-period
• Clean out bookshelves
• Maximize open spaces
• Put rugs in basement or on floors, some-the-fuck-where-anywhere
• Consider buying a comforter, also then decide against it for this pay-period; then maybe double-cross self and get it anyway? 

For the EAT THE RAINBOW BLACK BEAN SOUP!

Update on 10:44AM by mfg

I may not have won the weekend, but it was amazing nonetheless;

• I need to clean the house top to bottom, per usual starting with dishes. Hopefully the lawn will be dry enough for a mowing at some point, though it rained a ton last night. [2/3 Accompli]
• Get thermostat working in house, or call landlord [Accompli, needed new batteries; thanks Glen]
• There Will Be Baking.
  • Make spinach-broccoli quiche. [done, twice over; excellent results! thanks PPK].
  • Blueberry Cobbler with Corn meal stylin' buttermilk biscuits. [rad, thanks Vegan Pie in the Sky]
  • cookies? dunno, probably fuck em up using a tart recipe that ends up miraculously coming out like creme brulee. is that a plan i hear knocking?
• go for a freezing cold bike ride; gotta get ingredients somehow [wasn't freezing, but got it done]
• Consider a haircut, then decide against it for this pay-period [done, refrained from haircutting]
• Consider buying a comforter, also then decide against it for this pay-period; then maybe double-cross self and get it anyway?  [came to a decision to buy one once i get the money]

freezer cooking: mac & cheese & freeze

and Yes we had some for dinner and it knocked our socks off. (photographed courtesy a.b miller)

so i actually set a goal and followed through.

its not a huge goal, but im glad i did it. we now have a baker's dozen servings of a poblano macaroni & cheese. i made it from scratch via bechamel (white/millk sauce thickened with roux, fat&flour), jack/colby.

actually, based on the recipe, you'll see that if you  really want to get crappy with me it's not technically a bechamel since i didn't use clarified butter, and i added the cream to the roux (instead of vice versa and without scalding it first which i swear ill do next time); but enough with  semantics.

3 lb pasta in a 4 quart pot can be done

normally i like to have a focus on the finished product. but I am particularly proud of the finished-finished product. that is to say, those thirteen ziplock sandwich bags full of mac and cheese, then air squeezed and wrapped in saran wrap and squeezed and then wrappped in foil and then pressed and stacked in gallon ziplock freezer bags.

i kind of felt like the guys in breaking bad once i got into the swing of packing the stuff up in bricks.

that being said, we did enjoy eating it, and adding the poblanos, they rocked tonight and i cant wait to see how crazy they get over time. i marked all the pouches (each with about 3 servings) with the date, although i actually have no idea how to tell when this stuff goes bad.

as far as making the mac and cheese, i used a recipe based on the Betty Crocker recipe. Basically, you make a roux (in this case i made 150% of the recipe, so about 2 1/2 cups of roux) with onion in it. then add cream, bring to a simmer while whisking, add milk and bring to a almost simmer while whisking. added a large chopped poblano. add a full block of colby jack and maybe a 1/4-1/2 cup of cheddar gradually by the handful whisking the entire tiime. i also added a few tablespoons of salt, pepper, oregano, garlic powder, and some Penzey's chili 3000. i also added a few teaspoons of ground mustard for the sake of its ability to keep sauces from separating (which i presume may be a problem later on after freezing when i go to reheat it).

its a slower process than it sounds but its completely worth it. but once it gets to a nice thickened level and the cheese has all melted into the ooey gooey wonderment of Mornay (Bechamel sauce thickened with cheese), you put the pasta in the casserole dishes (see pics), and pour the sauce over top. pop them in the oven @ 325F for 25 minutes. [you'll notice the surface of the glass one and the back one are different; i mixed up the glass one half way through, and i would recommend against that. no real reason, just 'cuz.] and done.

if youve never had mac and cheese made  from scratch this way i have to say it is time for your enlightenment. it aint comfort food until its from scratch. fortunately for me and baby we now have 13 meals' worth of mac and cheese. now i need to find out how quickly it goes bad, and stock up on supplies for my next bulk & cook & freeze (mini-quiches tomorrow for the Dexter season finale?).

my bakers dozen of satisfaction  

 courtesy a.b miller

nom nom let's eat

so i want to kick up my bulk cooking and feeding to my freezer.

here are some of the recipes I want to try my hand at this weekend:

mac and cheese: comforting and the perfect ready to go food

stuffed (red) peppers: with wild rice, chicken, black beans

mini-quiches: woo hoo

filo rolls: hecks yeah, onion cheese and spinach

black bean chick pea cakes: its worth a shot!