Tomanade

Jenn — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:12:50 +0000

Think tapenade, but with sun-dried tomatoes added in. I’m a huge fan of tapenade, the salty/sour/slightly bitter spread is just begging for some fresh baguette. When I saw a new-to-me spread called tomanade in the grocery store, I had to check it out. Much to my disappointment, it was literally puréed sun-dried tomatoes with absolutely no other ingredients. Talk about overly tart, and not part of my vision of tomato and olive blended goodness. Uggh. Well no matter, why don’t I just throw something together that is more of what I had in mind when I first found out about the existence of tomanade?

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Gluten Free Substitutions Part VIII: The Flours

Jenn — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 18:27:02 +0000

Welcome to the next installment of of the gluten free substitutions series here on Jenn Cuisine! We’re currently in the process of investigating various GF baking ingredients, and why they may or may not be useful. Last week I did a post about starches and why they can be important in baking, and previously I had discussed various binding agents to use. So this week we are pressing on to the flours!

Truth be told, at the moment I’m not feeling so awesome about my abilities to discuss gluten free flours with you . I had a bit of a baking flop this weekend. I mean a real flop. I attempted puff pastry. Maybe I was being too ambitious? I don’t think so, after all there is more than one very successful looking gluten free puff pastry recipe out on the web, namely by Jeanne of Four Chickens and Helene of Tartelette. My last gluten free puff pastry attempt unfortunately didn’t puff. Yesterday, neither did this attempt. After talking to the Twitterverse I don’t think it was all from my flour combo, instead I am thinking it is also my lack of decent puff pastry skills. But I did use some less starchy flours, and maybe that also contributed to its downfall.

Oh well, everyone is allowed a flop here or there. Maybe one day someone can teach me exactly how to do this and show me when I go astray… until then just don’t expect to see any cute little vols-au-vents here on the site!

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A Pasta to Remember Summer By

Jenn — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 15:56:12 +0000

Summer is a three-month symphony that nature offers up to celebrate the beauty of the world – she gives of herself to us color and flavor, changing the tones through each movement. In the beginning, the berries punctuate the markets and then also my breakfast. Strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, currants, oh how I love them all. I almost think the produce alone could make summer my most treasured season. But now we are nearing the end (as the fresh chanterelles cue us to the soon-approaching Autumn, less than a month away!) and it’s worth appreciating the current chorus of tomatoes, peaches, and plums. This meal is to enjoy those tomatoes and chanterelles, marrying Summer and Autumn together in an easy one-dish dinner.

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GF Substitutions Part VII: All About Starches

Jenn — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 07:36:24 +0000

Welcome to the next installment of Gluten Free Substitutions here on Jenn Cuisine! We are now really getting into the nitty gritty of gluten free ingredients, last week covering binding agents, and this week moving on to the starches. I think you’ll find this week is a bit easier, less complicated chemistry, hopefully The binding agents really did need chemistry though, because their main purpose in GF baking is to replace the missing properties of gluten. Starches also can have some binding properties, albeit to a lesser extent. I promise to keep the chemistry a bit less this week…we’ll see how I do

Typically isolated starches, mostly or completely devoid of protein content and almost flavorless, can dissolve in water when heated, which is great for sauces that you want to be thickened, but you don’t want any flavors from the flour – or maybe you want a clear gravy. Flours often have some starch content but also have other things as well (like protein!). Often in GF baking recipes there is a starch listed in the ingredients, so I thought it’d be good to take a look at exactly what that starch part is – is there a reason for using a pure starch in your GF flour mix? What exactly is the purpose of starch anyways? Here, let’s take a look at two extremes – tapioca starch and white corn flour – (And yes, I have a beaker for a measuring cup, I am a full chemistry nerd!). Tapioca starch is clearly a starch, where as the white corn flour is indeed a flour. Corn does contain starch, but it has to be extracted out of the corn to get pure cornstarch. Here, I’m just talking about the flour – just finely ground up corn.

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Gazpacho Blanco

Jenn — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 18:38:04 +0000

Gazpacho has always been one of my summer loves. Just take ripe summer produce, throw in the processor, purée and enjoy. I committed the ultimate gazpacho sin when I first made it on my own, using *gasp!* canned tomatoes, but I was a poor grad student and it wasn’t summertime – I will say now never do that, ever. Wait for beautiful fresh tomatoes, it’s worth it. Gazpacho is often my choice when I go out to eat as well – there is just something so refreshing about the blend of cucumbers and tomatoes together, that even when it’s so hot out that you feel like you’re going to start melting like that ice cream cone the kid walking down the street is enjoying, you can take a few loud slurps with the spoon and instantly cool off a few degrees (and when it’s that icky out no one minds a few loud slurps anyways).

When I heard about the existence of white gazpacho from Green Kitchen Stories (GKS), I was immediately intrigued – I mean, where would gazpacho be without all of those fresh summer tomatoes?? I wasn’t really that skeptical though, because it looked mouthwatering – go check out their pictures, and you’ll understand. I immediately knew that I wanted to make this, and so I did what anyone does nowadays – I googled blogs for “white gazpacho”, and picked one on the first page that looked yummy. I still am pretty lacking in the cookbook department, and so the vast interwebs are basically my very large cookbook. It’s really not such a bad way to be. I love my cookbooks, but they are all in the U.S., an ocean away, and I just cannot bring myself to either A) pay to ship a bunch of books over the ocean or B) buy them all over again. Besides, the interwebs can be a great resource if you are able to recognize a good recipe out there. And the one I came across looked amazing.

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Bruschetta

Jenn — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 20:24:59 +0000

Do you remember when you first tried to cook? I’m not talking about executing a recipe, but really delving into the steps and determine exactly what benefits a dish? Ok, so you all probably aren’t as nerdy as I am. I really do try to use cooking as a form of relaxation, but sometimes the scientist in me just gets in the way!

A while back Shauna asked her readers about the first meal they ever cooked. And frankly, I can’t think of that earliest time. I was probably 12ish, because I’m guessing it was after we moved in with my step dad. He was definitely the one that instilled in me a joy of food and the process of making it. I honestly have not a single memory of cooking before then, except for that awful dried out meatloaf my sister’s father used to make where the only way anyone could stomach it was by drowning it in ketchup. And poor me because I hated ketchup too. Given that my strongest memory in the kitchen from my younger years is a terrible meatloaf isn’t so encouraging. But I can look back at other times, because there were good memories of the kitchen. I remember just loving to help my mom make sun tea – we took a large pitcher and filled it with water and tea bags, and let it set out on the porch in the bright hot summer sun for a few hours. I was enthralled with watching the color develop over the afternoon, it seemed like magic.

In college I really began thinking about how to make food on my own, but believe it or not, one of my first major forays into cooking involved no cooking at all!

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Gluten Free Substitutions Part VI: Binding Agents

Jenn — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 19:45:14 +0000

Welcome to the next installment of the Gluten Free Substitutions series! Now we are really getting into the meat of GF ingredients, and this post is all about one of the more enigmatic of the categories of gluten free – the binding agents. I like to think of these as the “gluten replacements,” because their inclusion often serves to give gluten free dough those glutenicious properties like elasticity, and air trapping. The air trapping is especially important because without being able to hold the CO2 made by yeast or baking soda, baked goods can’t rise. Elasticity (caused from development of a strong network of gluten proteins) is good because it allows one to work with the dough, or hold it together so that it doesn’t turn into a crumbly mess after baking. Of course a binding agent’s presence doesn’t guarantee gluten free perfection as the other ingredients are important too, but often it helps.

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Summer Salad App

Jenn — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 19:41:06 +0000

I haven’t lived in the same place for more than 2 years ever since I went off to college. I’m starting to think that I’m secretly addicted to moving. After all, it’s a great way to purge extra stuff that you’ve accumulated over time, like a forced motivator to do all that Spring cleaning that was supposed to happen oh, 4 months ago. I always had a really good reason (not an excuse, a reason! reasons are forgivable and rationalizable) to put it off another week…

We, as fortune would have it, are moving to a new apt. How could we turn it down? The opportunity presented itself, we applied, and we actually got it! New place is bigger, newer, nicer, cheaper, and closer to everything we do. It has four burners on the stove, counterspace, a real oven and get this – a dishwasher! I am beyond excited. Sometimes my husband and I think about all the food we have made in our current apartment, and we are both amazed how we pulled it off with so little space. Well, I know how we did it. It’s called our food processor and toaster oven. Lifesavers, they are. Moving now means crazy things like, we can now cook and store enough food to take lunches to work. I can now go buy muffin tins and bake things. Gluten free brioche? That’s something I’ve been longing to try. Or doughnuts? mmmmm. My list of things to make just got a long longer really quickly!

But we’re not quite moved yet, even though all our pots and pans are packed up. Food processor is packed, and so is the toaster oven. Cooking this week is a pretty minimal word. And in the case of this post, non-existent. Lately, we’ve done lots of salads because prep work and lack of cooking work makes them really easy. This is one that we just kinda threw together in our heads the other day coming home from work. Beyond simple, quick, satisfying, and no cooking required. Took a max of 10 minutes to make (when you count chopping all the veggies), 5 minutes to photograph (don’t you just love the tablecloth? ha), and then a few more minutes to devour!

I call this an app, because that’s how most people would eat it I think. We had it for dinner. To each their own, these rules about food aren’t so fastly set in stone. In fact, I encourage breaking some food rules every now and then. It’s good for that adventurous spirit, even if it’s something small like eating an appetizer for dinner

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Gluten Free Substitutions Part V: Sorting out the Nuts & Bolts

Jenn — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 17:31:22 +0000

Thanks for your patience! We had a bit of a web hosting hiccup this weekend with my domain registration, so Jenn Cuisine was down for a day, but now things are back up and running full swing! And while my website was down and there was nothing I could do about it at the time, I was off enjoying beautiful views like this:

No, I wasn’t off in a fantasy land in my head, this place really exists, and it’s in Switzerland. It’s even more gorgeous if you see this scene with your own eyes, standing on top of the world (we were pretty high up in the Alps!). Probably more important, the clean and sometimes brisk mountain air was perfect for realizing some of the other needs I have in life, like stopping for a moment, letting my mind shut off, and seeking out a little clarity. I really find admiring the vast beauty of nature to be the perfect method for achieving my “zen place”. And I’m sure my knees and thighs will forgive me later.

But speaking of seeking out clarity (and my quite awkwardly abrupt transition sentence), now we are back to regularly planned things, like continuing the Gluten Free Substitution Series and elucidating all there is about cooking gluten free!

So, the past few weeks of this series have been all about simple easy substitutions that one can do to convert a dish from glutenicious to gluten-less. We’ve learned about recognizing those meals that don’t need any changes at all, ones where simple one-ingredient switches are needed, and a bit about employing pre-made flour mixes. If you only ever do these three things, I promise that with just a little creativity, you can create diverse flavorful meals ranging from easy weeknight dinners to fancy desserts for that romantic evening gazing dreamily like a love-sick teenager into the eyes of someone you love. I went for a long time cooking only things that would fit into one of these last 3 posts. Trust me, you can too, and it can be both simple to adapt and delicious.

But let’s say that you are really craving some homemade from scratch apple pie, or pancakes, or ravioli. Things all of a sudden become a bit more complex, eh? Now we have all of those alternative flours to choose from, and there’s no manual at the grocery store for buying gluten free ingredients. Don’t you sometimes wish they had one? One that said, “Yes, you need this magic flour over here, this will be the secret ingredient for the perfect brownies.” I wanted this too, especially when I first started baking.

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An Adventure with Peanut Butter Cookies, Gluten Free

Jenn — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 21:40:45 +0000

Flour-based cookies seem to be my gluten free nemesis. I’ve never gotten sugar cookies right, and my chocolate chip ones just turn into a flat melty mess unless I bake them in a bowl to become a mini cookie cake - sometimes, one has to get creative and work with the failures

But these I am determined to convert, and convert with resounding success. I started working on the recepe development to adapt a family recipe for peanut butter cookies. It’s been, well, let’s just say it’s been educational.

It took six. Six batches. Yes, it took six different trials of baking cookies – mixing together dough, carefully rolling out each rounded cookie, smashing them down with a fork oh so gently, slipping into the oven and saying a little prayer to the gluten free gods. And with each new batch, the disappointment intensified. I tried different flours, different ratios, different cooking times. And I ended up with a giant bowl full of all the crumbled memories of peanut butter cookie failures, each begging me not to end their fleeting existence with a trip to the rubbish bin (don’t worry, they didn’t, the ended up on top of ice cream instead). But, by the time I got through to batch #6, I had cookies. Rich, softish peanut buttery goodness, gluten free. And the disappointments from all the previous failures turned into pure joy They are not quite as awesome as my dad’s grandmother’s famous cookies (well, famous in our family), but they are close. Oh they are so close.

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