It’s Alive!

Internet, it’s only been about two years since I’ve written to you.  It’s not like anything interesting can happen in two years, such as getting another dog, or becoming a vegetarian, or buying a house or anything.  Oh, wait, I did those things.

I did something really smart; I started a blog a few months before I began grad school.  Now I’m only a few months away from graduating, and I want to start focusing on preparing more food (I took a fairly significant break from regularly cooking for myself).  I’m going to overhaul the blog and record my cooking process once again.

Vegan Raspberry Mocha Cake.

• 3 cups flour
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 cup cocoa
• 1/4 cup oil
• 1 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 2 tsp vinegar  dissolved in 1/4 cup water
• 3/4 cup strongly brewed coffee
• 3/4 cup raspberry preserves

This cake, you want to eat it.  This cake, it will make you forget about those horrible enchiladas you made.  It also cures cancer and impeaches President Bush.

Saturday was my dear friend Jackie’s birthday, and since she is a vegan, and vegan cakes are not readily available around Kalamazoo, I decided I would make her one.  Most of the recipes I found called for soy milk or soy margarine, which I was reluctant to bake with, solely because I would probably waste whatever was leftover after the cake was made.  The ingredients for this vegan raspberry mocha cake were simple enough (i.e., what I didn’t have, I could steal from my parent’s kitchen) and the words “raspberry” and “mocha” sounded yummy enough, that I figured I could give it a go.

I had never baked a cake that hadn’t come out of a box before, let alone a vegan one, and everything I’d been reading lately lead me to believe that baking is an exact science–a science that will hunt you down and kill you and your family if you even think about changing the recipe measurements or substituting ingredients–so I was a bit intimidated.  I invited my friend Katie over to help with this, the third installment of the Great Cooking Experiment.

First we mixed the flour, sugar, baking powder, and cocoa in a bowl.  In a separate bowl I  added 1/4 cup water to the two tsp. of vinegar, and while that dissolved, I added the vanilla to the dry ingredients.   I then added the oil, hot coffee, and raspberry preserves to the vinegar concoction and stirred until the raspberry preserves had lost their lumpiness.

Katie poured the liquid mixture SLOWLY into the dry ingredients while I stirred them.  If you make this, you’ll probably want to use a whisk instead of the spatula I used, but a sturdy spatula will work in an emergency–you know, one of those cake emergencies.  I have since purchased a whisk.  The preserves and the coffee smelled really good when I mixed them together, and the batter tasted fantastic once it was thoroughly mixed and smooth.  Since it has no eggs, you could really eat it without even bothering to bake it.  Katie and I seriously considered doing just that, but with the birthday party less than an hour away, we figured it was a bad idea.

I preheated the oven to 350 degrees, and after baking the cake for twenty-five minutes, Katie stuck a chopstick in it (I’ve since purchased toothpicks) to see if it was ready.  We let it bake for another five-to-ten minutes before taking it out.  After it cooled down, I spread the remaining raspberry preserves over it instead of using frosting.  I took it over to Jackie’s where she failed to notice I had brought it until I asked her if she was blind, to which she responded “is that cake?”

I think everyone liked it, and I was really pleased with how it turned out.  This is a very simple, very yummy cake to make, and as an added bonus, no animals were harmed in the making of it.  I definitely recommend it. 

The Great Enchilada Disaster of 2007.

My second trial in the Great Cooking Experiment did not go well.  I’ve learned two things due to this failure:

1. I should trust my instincts even though I’m new at this.  If it seems like it’s going badly, it probably is.
2. The smell of fresh cilantro will make me sick.  Unpleasantly so.

I haven’t included the enchilada recipe I got from the book Good Housing Keeping Light and Healthy because you do not want to make it, unless you’re particularly fond of bland food and are not allegeric to cilantro like some people I know.  The recipe basically consisted of white beans, cilantro, vegetable stock, and various veggies (corn and a few other things I can’t remember) wrapped in a torilla and topped with salsa and cheese.  Sounds good, no?  That’s what I thought until I started making it.

The vegetables smelled and looked wonderful while I cooked them–no problem there.  I started to doubt the recipe when I was preparing the beans.  I used two cans of low-sodium cannellini beans as the recipe suggested and tasted a few before I blended them with vegetable stock.  They were very, very bland.  Although the vegetables I cooked looked very good, I was a bit worried since the beans were the main ingredient in this dish and I hoped that the vegetable stock would take care of the low-sodium flavorlessness.  This is the point where my instincts said uh-oh.

Next came the cilantro.  This is the point where my instincts said holy crap.  I had never cooked with fresh cilantro before, and though I’m certain I’ve eaten cilantro before, I’m also fairly certain I’m somewhat allergic to it.  When I began chopping it  up, the smell made me sick to my stomach.  Now, this was fresh cilantro; I had bought it that very day at my local food co-op, and it looked very good, so it’s not as though I had old cilantro.  The smell was bothering me so much I decided to cut way back on the amount the recipe called for; I could tell already that the enchiladas were going to be bland so I didn’t want to completely forgo the cilantro and I figured that a small amount wouldn’t bother me so much.  I was wrong.

Once I added the cilantro, I mixed the beans and veggies together, put the mix in torillas, and placed them in a baking dish that I had lined with fresh salsa my dad had made.   I then topped them with salsa and a sprinkling of cheese and baked them for about twenty minutes.

These enchiladas looked deceivingly delicious.  All I could taste was cilantro, and by the third bite, it was making me gag and I had to spit it out.  Let’s just say, I was upset about this (not to mention sick to my stomach) since I had planned to eat the leftovers for lunch the rest of the week, but that certainly wasn’t happening.  I threw them out and decided to trust my instincts from now on.   And I returned that horrible Good Housekeeping cookbook to the library.

Just a side note, the Good Housekeeping cookbook was written by the Good Housekeeping Institute.  Oh yeah, there’s an INSTITUTE.

Sautéed Eggplant and Pasta

• 1 large eggplant
• 1 red pepper
• 1 yellow pepper
• 1 large onion
• 4 tbsp minced garlic (yum!)
• 1/4 tsp rosemary
• 1/2 tsp savory leaves
• 1/2 tsp thyme
• 1 can of cannellini or great northern beans, drained and rinsed
• Some form of pasta

I bought most of the produce at my local farmer’s market the day before and the rest of the ingredients the day of.  I’ve been reading about how quickly fruits and vegetables loose nutrients after they’re harvested, so I recommend buying fresh and local if possible; eggplant in particular can turn bitter if it isn’t used within two days of buying it.

Because I’m so green at this, I began my great cooking experiment by inviting my friend Katie over to cook with me; this was an excellent idea on my part: she is a good cook AND she brought wine.  Unfortunately, we weren’t able to cook immediately–mainly because I don’t know my grocery store well enough yet.  I mean, really,  you would think the aisle labled “beans and rice” would have all the beans in it, wouldn’t you?  But no, not at my store.  The beans and rice aisle has dried beans and cans of black beans, while the canned vegetable aisle has the canned beans.  I ended up buying a bag of great northern beans because I thought the directions said that they only needed to be boiled for about 10 minutes before cooking with them.  What the directions really said was that they had to soak in a bowl of water for an hour before boiling; I realized this just as Katie arrived.  We let the beans soak while we opened the wine.

I had never cooked with eggplant before, and I’m sure I would have been slightly concerned about the quality of my particular eggplant if Katie hadn’t been there to reassure me that eggplants look like this inside:

We diced it, skin intact, along with the peppers, the onion, and garlic, and then sauteed all of it over medium heat in a covered pan for 5-10 minutes.  These vegetables take up a lot of space, and the pan I used wasn’t quite big enough, so I sauteed them closer to the 10 minute range.  By then, everything had soften and cooked well.  Next, I added the beans and the spices, and cooked for an additional 5-10 minutes. 

While all of this sauteing was going on, Katie started the pasta.  The recipe called for spaghetti, but I’m not terribly fond of spaghetti, so I used a whole-wheat reginelle pasta.

This stuff, it smells good.  And tastes good.  While I didn’t get the beans right–they should have been boiled a little longer–the dish was still yummy.  Katie and I ate a lot of it, but there were still a ton of leftovers.  Using the reginelle pasta worked well because, mixed with the leftovers, it made a sort of pasta salad which I ate for lunch the next few days.  Forewarning:  if you’ve got leftovers, don’t be surprised if you find the pasta’s turned black in spots–the eggplant skin stains the pasta.  It still tastes the same.

The first attempt in my grand cooking experiment was a success.  If you’d like to make this, I recommend using canned beans or soaking dried beans overnight.  Also, it wouldn’t hurt to first saute the peppers, onions, and garlic for a few minutes before adding the eggplant.  That way everything cooks thoroughly and nothing get soggy.

Hey. I Don’t Know How to Cook.

Hi, I’m Caitlin, and this is my blog about cooking.  The thing is, I have no idea about cooking or food or anything of the sort and if you ask me what bok choy is, I will say “does it have something to do with Chinese food?”  It does, right?

What I do have is a desire to learn how to cook, particulary food that is easy to prepare, full of fresh ingredients, and a pleasure to eat.  The recipes that I choose will seem simplistic to even the most simplistic of cooks, but I’m new to this and over time, I’m hoping that the level of difficulty in the recipes I make will progress.  Right now, I’m focusing on dishes that are healthy (or at least healthier than the way I’m currently eating) and, though I’m not a vegetarian by any means, I’m trying to incorporate as many vegetables as possible and limit the amount of meat I eat.  Also, lots of fiber makes me happy, which means a whole lotta dark green veggies and whole wheat products.

Any advice or suggestions I give will be obvious–knives are for cutting–because I am that clueless of a cook, and the idea of this blog is to document and share what I am learning.