See-Through Food, Part 1: Glass Noodle Soup

Glass noodles (a.k.a. "cellophane noodles" or "bean thread noodles") are made from water and mung beans. (Sprouted mung beans are what we call bean sprouts, commonly used in Chinese stir-fries.)

Dried cellophane noodles and dried mung beans.

This take on Vietnamese glass noodle soup is another easy meal for one or two. It requires a bit of prep (cutting up veggies and soaking noodles) but, all-in-all, it's not very time consuming or difficult to make.

Start by choosing two or three vegetable for your soup. Keep it light and uncomplicated, in keeping with the Asian theme. Today I chose two veggies for my soup: fresh shitake mushrooms and broccolini. You'll also need a few other ingredients for this soup. Here's the entire list:

• 1.5 oz. glass noodles (also called bean thread noodles, cellophane noodles, or mung bean noodles), reconstituted in boiling water, then drained
• 2 cups water
• 1 teaspoon bouillon paste or cube (chicken or veggie work best)
• 1 large clove garlic, thinly sliced
• 1 piece of ginger root (about the same size as the garlic clove)
• 1 dried chilli (optional)
• handful of fresh mushrooms, sliced
• handful or two fresh vegetables (snow peas are good, as is savoy cabbage, broccoli, bean sprouts, or whatever you like), cut into bite-size pieces
• 2 to 4 oz. shrimp or fish or shredded cooked chicken or tofu can also be added, though I tend to prefer a meatless (except of the broth) glass noodle soup 
• juice of 1 lime
• 1 tablespoon Vietnamese or Thai fish sauce

Prep

Put the dry noodle in a bowl and cover with boiling water. Let them set for 10 minutes or until the water cools down significantly and the noodles are clear. Drain the water off the noodles and set the noodles aside.

Cover noodles with hot water.

After 5 minutes, noodles are pliable but not clear.

Clear glass noodles.

Noodles are ready to drain and use.

Reconstituted and drained glass noodles at the bottom of my soup bowl awaiting the rest of the soup.

While the noodles are reconstituting, prep your veggies.

Thinly slice the garlic and cut the ginger root into tiny little shreds. Clean your vegetables and cut them into bite-size pieces.

Get Cooking:
Heat 2 cups of water in a medium soup pan. When it comes to a boil, add the bouillon base, garlic and ginger pieces, and whole chilli (if using). Simmer for 2 minutes or so, then start adding the vegetables (and seafood or meat, if using). Continue to simmer for another 3 to 5 minutes, until the vegetables are crisp-tender or cooked to your liking.

Turn off the heat and add the fish sauce and lime juice.  Remove and discard the chilli pepper (unless you need to use it in a food porn photograph like the one below). Pour the soup over the glass noodles, stir, and enjoy.

A Post-Rapture Feast, Part 2: Indian-spiced Sweet Potato Soup and Onion & Sweet Pepper Focaccia

Not exactly a glamor shot, this is Indian-Spiced Sweet Potato Soup in a plastic bowl with a big dollop of cucumber raita and a chunk of Onion & Sweet Pepper Focaccia.

Indian-Spiced Sweet Potato Soup

This soup is a pureed vegetable curry, basically. It has a silky texture and is filling without being heavy. I looked at many, many recipes for Sweet Potato Soup, but I ended up creating something a little different, with more sweet potato and more spice.

• 3 tablespoons vegetable oil or ghee
• 1 large onion, peeled and diced
• 5-6 cloves garlic, crushed
• 2- to 3-inch piece fresh ginger root, peeled and minced
• 2 tablespoons ground cumin
• 2 tablespoons ground coriander
• 2 tablespoons ground cardamom
• ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
• ½ teaspoon black pepper
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 can (15 oz) coconut milk
• 4 yams, peeled and cut into large pieces
• 4 cups good quality vegetable stock
• salt to taste

Heat a dutch oven over medium-low flame; add the oil. When oil is hot, add the onion, garlic and ginger root. Saute until the onion is translucent and begins to brown, about 15 minutes.

Add the spices and the bay leaves. Continue sauteing until the spices are toasted slightly, releasing their aromas. Then, add the coconut milk, yams pieces, and stock.

Lower the heat (as low and slow as you can get it) and put a lid on the pot. Allow the spices to infuse the liquids and the yams to slow-boil until very soft, 30 to 40 minutes.

Remove the bay leaves. Add salt to taste, taking into account the salt content of the broth you're using. Some recipes add a little brown sugar, but I have always found that yams and sweet potatoes don't need need the sugar boost; they're plenty sweet all on their own. Cool for 15 minutes with the lid off, then puree the vegetables with all the liquid using a blender, food processor, or in the cooking pot using a hand blender.

Serve hot or at room temperature with, if you like, a dollop of cucumber raita our sour cream (both of which go great with the aromatic spices) and some bread for dipping.

I found this soup absolutely wonderful, but most of my friends at the Post-Rapture Feast last Sunday didn't try it. Apparently, the food habits of the natives of northeast Ohio do not include the eating of soup on a 80-degree spring day, even if the soup is cold. I was surprised to learn this, being myself from places on Planet Earth where soup makes an appearance on the dinner table 365 days a year.

But that's all right. More for me!

Onion & Sweet Pepper Focaccia

First off, I apologize for this recipe. I've been making bread since 1974, when I was 16. I don't  remember how I ended up with a copy of The Tassajara Bread Book, by Edward Brown, but the book shifted my life in a serious way. I stopped thinking about cooking as a chore to be done correctly, following a recipe, and started thinking about cooking as something much more organic. Overnight, cooking became organic, physical (like dance or swimming) and a celebration of life, contemplation, love. 

Sometime in the mid-80s, when my daughter was a toddler, I quit referring to the book completely yet kept making breads using the same basic method. More and more, I began to rely on my own inter-personal animal instincts (because yeast, after all, are living beings) and took my inspiration for ingredients from whatever bounty or interest came into my daily life--like dried apricot bread (1980s) when we lived in Walla Walla, WA, renting a house with three apricot trees, kaas bread in the Netherlands, where I would always order too much cheese from the wonderful cheese vendor, and crushed hemp seed bread in Youngstown, OH, not because culinary hemp seed is plentiful but because... well...it's available, a great source of protein, and (though perfectly legal) a little bit naughty.

When I make bread, I do not always know or even track the amounts of the ingredients (especially flour) that I use, because I've come to realize over the years that, with bread making, much depends on the weather, the humidity, the room temperature, and the age and quality of the ingredients. Nonetheless, I'll try to explain how I made this:

• 1 cup warm water
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons dried yeast
• enough bread flour
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1/8 cup plus 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• more bread flour
• 1/4 sweet Vadalia or other sweet onion, sliced into moons (and enough boiling water to cover)
• strips of roasted pepper (I used jarred peppers preserved in oil)
• percorino romano cheese

Put the warm water (warm, but not hot, when you splash it on the inside of your wrist, as if testing the temperature of a baby's bottle of milk) in a large, non-reactive bowl. (Glass, crockery, Corningware and stainless steel are non-reactive; aluminum and copper are reactive.) Add the sugar and dry yeast. Stir until both dissolve, then walk away for 15 to 20 minutes.

the sponge

When you come back, the concoction should be bubbly. Use a large wooden (or other non-reactive) spoon to stir in enough bread flour to form a batter about the consistency of thick mud, quick sand, or lava: It should not be thin, but it should still be pourable. Cover the bowl with a damp towel and walk away again.

Thirty to forty minutes later, check the "sponge."  It should be a bubbly, thick mud almost twice the size as when you left the room to do other things. If not, let it raise and ferment a little longer, then stir down the sponge until most of the bubbles collapse.

Add the garlic, salt and 1/8 cup olive oil, stirring in each addition.

Add more bread flour, half a cup at a time, folding in each addition from the outside of the bowl into the center of the dough. The point here is to never cut through the dough with the spoon, if you can help it, because we want to encourage the dough to form long strands of elastic, gluten. Gluten makes bread chewy.

After several additions of flour, you'll need to abandon the spoon and use one of your hands as a tool. Keep adding flour until the dough starts to pull together as a ball.

This dough has enough flour but has not been kneaded yet.

Many bread books will tell you to turn this ball out onto a floured surface for kneeding at this point. I think it's  a lot easier and certainly a lot less messy to continue working the dough in the bowl, but go ahead and turn the dough out onto a floured board or counter, if you wish. I, however, continue in the bowl to kneed--pushing down into the middle of the ball, then folding the dough, turning the dough a quarter turn to the left, then pushing it down again and folding again. I'll add sprinklings of flour when things get sticky. And before too long, the dough has a smooth surface and no longer sticks to the bowl at all. And that's what we want.

It sounds like magic, but actually, it's easy. It's chemistry, it's biology, it's a small amount of elbow grease.

Drizzle 2 tablespoons of olive oil over the ball of dough in the bowl, flip the ball over several times so that the oil covers the entire surface, then cover the bowl with a damp cloth and walk away again for a full hour.

I love the walking away part of bread baking. Set a timer and read a book. Set the timer, tuck it in your pocket, go outside and play with your dogs. Set the timer and do the laundry. Set the timer and do something else. This is the only kind of multitasking that makes sense to me.

While the dough is raising, take a few minutes to slice the onion, put it in a bowl and cover it with boiling water. This will take the onion "bite" away without really cooking the onion.

Onion moon slices blanching in hot water.

When you get back from your hour-long break, the dough will be alive, very happy, and twice its original size. Now it's time to  punch it down (but not in a bad way). Punch down and push all the air bubbles out of it, fold and collapse the dough to its smallest size, then kneed it a few times for good measure. The yeast will love it, the bread will be better for it.

Oil or grease a half sheet baking pan (a.k.a. cookie sheet). Put the dough in the center and roll it out to the desired thickness. Imagine that the dough will be two to three times thicker after baking, and use that image in your mind to base your decisions about how thin or thick to make it.

Once you have the dough rolled out, you can start topping it. Drain the onion and distribute the onion slices over the surface of the dough, then do the same for the pepper strips. Grate pecorino romano cheese, like a snow drift, over the entire focaccia.

Just looking at the last two photographs (above), I can see that the camera picks up what is happening here while you're adding the last touches -- the dough is alive, picking up speed, continuing to expand and lift even in the 5 minutes it takes to add a few toppings and grate a bit of cheese.

Bake the focaccia in a "fast" oven (as my grandmother used to say), 400 to 425 degrees. Leave it alone (don't even peek!) for 30 minutes. Allow it to cook a bit longer, if it isn't yet cooked through and golden brown.

Obviously, you can put any toppings you like on the focaccia. It's basically a thick pizza without sauce or mozzarella cheese.

Mother's Day Brie en Croute

Val, who enjoyed the Brie and Peach Até de Durazno en Croute last October, asked me a few months ago about creating a baked brie that wasn't sweet, but savory. Immediately, I thought about substituting a bruschetta topping or olive tapenade for the jam or sweet chutney that is usually found in Brie en Croute. A quick check on the Internet told me that I am not the first to think of this.

I'm an olive lover and so is Valentine, so I decided on tapenade for our Mother's Day brie-in-a-blanket. Tapenade is an olive spread from southern France, great on crackers, toast (bruschetta), or as a condiment in a veggie wrap or a cheese sandwich. Though it's readily available in stores, tapenade is also very easy (if not exactly cheap) to make at home. As with any dish, the key to success is to use only the best ingredients. The method itself is almost brainless.

Mel's Tapenade Provençal

• 2 cups pitted kalamata olives (canned ripe black olives also make a great tapenade)
• 2 tablespoons of capers, well rinsed
• 2 (or more) cloves of garlic, rough sliced
• 4 anchovy fillets (Be brave! They will not overpower the olives, I promise!)
• 1 tablespoon dijon mustard (Do not use regular yellow mustard as a substitute. Skip the mustard completely if you don't have dijon.)
• 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
• juice of 1/2 lemon
• 5-6 sprigs fresh thyme leaves, leaves only

Even though the olives may be pitted, be sure to rough chop them with a knife or squeeze each one by hand because sometimes pitted olives contain pits. Shattered pit shards will ruin your tapenade. Trust me; I learned from experience.

Put everything into a food processor and pulse 8, 10 maybe 12 times. Do not over-process. There should be a somewhat chunky texture to the spread. And that's it. You're done!

(Note: The recipe above makes about 1 1/2 cups of tapenade. The recipe below requires only 2/3rds cup of tapenade.)

Exploded Brie En Croute with Tapenade

• 1 small wheel of brie (The "mini brie" I used today was 15oz, which was probably a bit too big)
• 1 sheet frozen puff pastry
• 2/3 cup homemade or store-bought tapenade
• 1 egg, whisked

Let the puff pastry defrost, then roll it out a bit. Trim some of the rind off the brie, then cut the wheel through the middle, so that you end up with 2 disks of cheese. Center one disk on the puff pastry. Top with 1/3 cup tapenade. Cover with the second disk of brie, spread it with the last 1/3 cup of tapenade.

Wrap the puff pastry around the cheese decoratively. Seal seams and brush the entire top and sides of the pastry with the whisked egg. Bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit until the pastry is puffed, flaky, and golden.

This is what happens when you put too big of a brie wheel into too little puff pastry and don't seal it well or turn it over so the seams are on the bottom: It explodes in your friend's oven! (Sorry, Val!) Such things never happen on the Food Network, but they happen pretty regularly here in the real world.

The exploded Brie en Croute was a wonderful addition to our Sunday meal outside in the backyard with the dogs and sunshine and the birds (and, yes, the other humans). While it was still hot, we dipped apple slices and multi-grain chips into the molten goodness. Later, when it had cooled, we tore off bits of the olive-y, cheese-y bread to enjoy with the rest of our meal.

Happy Mother's Day, everyone!

Prize Ingredient: Xoconostle!

Dried and (sad-looking but) fresh fruit of the prickly pear cactus.

Only half of the package of the dried xoconostle “prize ingredient” was left by the time I decided to turn them into a side dish. As a snack, these sweet-sour pieces of candy-like dried fruit are simply addictive. I tried to limit myself to one every other day, but once I opened the package and tasted that first chewy, fructose crystal-riddled piece, the rest were doomed.

Xoconostle: chewy sour-sweet goodness!

The following recipe is a dressed-up version of a quick rice side dish that I run to often. It passes for cheap, quick eats at my house. At the base is onion, garlic and leftover rice infused with cumin and paprika, plus canned beans and frozen corn. Simple and (almost) plain, but very satisfying, I use this dish as an alternative to Spanish rice. In the recipe below, I've added a mild chili, dried fruit, toasted pine nuts and a few more spices.

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Summer's End Veggie Pie

Perhaps it's the dip in daytime temperatures or the shorter daylight hours, but the only foods I want to think about these days are the hearty comfort foods of fall and winter--stews and soups, casseroles and root vegetables. In the meantime, it’s still summer (technically), and the farm-stand bounty of northeastern Ohio continues to flow through my kitchen.

Piles of fresh veggies wait on my counters to be preserved or devoured, so last weekend I decided to split the difference between a celebration of fresh vegetables and the early introduction of winter fare by marrying ratatouille to a shepherd’s pie.

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