Un-soy milk

It's amazing how some words are so onomatopoeic that one can instantly figure out what a word means upon first encounter. Take "meh" for example. The word just exudes its definition, the apathy, the "ugh"ness, the negativity.

It is the perfect word to describe how I feel about all soy milk, organic, fru fru, fresh, sugared, flavored or otherwise, that I have tried in this country. In fact, how dare it call itself soy milk. Thanks to it, many of my friends think soy milk is "nasty". That's because they've only had white people soy milk. (Pardon my un-PC ness.)

For real soy milk, they need to go to Asia, where it is unadulturated and has no remote resemlance to the stuff that masquerades as soy milk.

First, real soy milk does not have that nasty annoying chalky taste that is so pervasive in soy milks sold in stores here.

Real soy milk doesn't have that disgusting aftertaste.

Real soy milk doesn't come in cartons whose shelf life is over a year.

The best soy milk I've ever had was in a department store right across the street from where Verdant Broccoli lived, in Beijing. In fact, I got so hooked on it, that I had it at least once a day the whole time I was there.

Now, as I sit here drinking its vastly inferior cousin sold in the U.S., I yearn for more of that real soy milk I had while I was in Beijing.

This soy milk was ever so slightly greenish in hue. Not surprising, since soy milk comes from soybeans.
It had no chalky aftertaste. It had no added sugar, yet had a tinge of natural sweetness. It tasted like lightly perfumed pureed soybeans.

How I wish I could return to Beijing for more of that good stuff.

Super yummy sauce ala BJ

With all of the postings about tomatoes (here and here) of late, I wonder if I shouldn't change the name of this blog to "tomato musings". . ..

I went over lala and bj's for a dinner and movie night the other day. BJ concocted this really good tomato-y ricotta sauce. I admire people who can just stare at things in their cupboards and fridge and invent fabulous dishes out of thin air. I cannot do such a thing. I am a follower-- perhaps a modifier and a tweaker, but never an original.

Let's see. Let me see if I can describe what she said she did. She put sun-dried tomatoes (the oil-packed kind) and tomatoes in a food processor, mixed it with ricotta cheese, some Parmesan cheese, half and half, seasoned it with basil, and let it simmer on a stove top. To this she added tiny diced up bits of firm tofu (pre-sauteed, before adding it to sauce).

In a combo that I would've never thought of partnering, Italian meets Asian. And splendidly so.

This was served over pearl barley. YUM. It reminded me a bit of korma sauce or butter chicken sauce, with the Indian cheese.

Tomato Paella

Yes yes, I know. I've been remiss about posting anything for a while. . .. However, sometimes the best time to blog is when you've had a blog-worthy meal that truly wowed you, as I did tonight. Tonight, I tried a tomato paella recipe that I saw in the 5 September edition of the NYT. A Mark Bittman recipe, which is usually very simple, but sometimes hit or miss, in terms of flavors. Well, this one was right on. I think because it called for saffron and smoked paprika and roasted tomatoes, which I believe will make anything taste very good, but I was truly wowed by the robust flavors, and even better still, the recipe was very easy to boot.

One thing I like about recipes in the NYT is that the author/cook explains the recipe a little and then presents the recipe, which puts the recipe in some sort of tangible context for me.

In his article, Bittman started with the premise that normal paellas are time-consuming to make. Indeed, this is why I hardly make them. I did make a seafood paella earlier this year. But paellas usually end up being once- or twice-a-year things for me, for precisely this reason. (It also usually makes about 8-10 servings, which means I need help eating it.)

Bittman promised a very simple recipe in his tomato paella recipe. It almost being the end of tomato season, today (the first day of autumn) was the perfect day to bid summer farewell and bring in the fall season with a tomato paella recipe.

I used brown rice instead of white rice, but the recipe worked beautifully. I cooked it slightly longer on the stovetop before putting it in the oven to account for the brown rice.

The recipe calls for smoked paprika and saffron, both of which Bittman says are "optional", but in my unhumble biased opinion, I feel that this is hogwash. The whole reason this paella tastes so good is because of the smoked paprika and saffron. I cannot imagine how this would taste without these two key ingredients, especially the smoked paprika. Bittman says that regular paprika is a fine substitute, and that may very well be the case, but the smoky flavor was what I think made such a strong impression in my mind (and taste buds).

How sad that I've only discovered this recipe just as tomatoes are on the wane. . ..

Tomatoes for dessert

I saw an intriguing recipe for a tomato-based dessert in the SF Chronicle the other day. I have to admit, I was a tad skeptical, but given that I conveniently had a surfeit of sungolds, some mascarpone cream and some cream cheese left over from my mango cheesecake experiment, I decided to give this recipe a try. However, I don't like making dessert just for myself, so I invited one of my college friends over to be a guinea pig. From salad to main dish to dessert, it ended up being an all-tomato affair. But back to this dessert.

I had to halve the recipe, since the original recipe made 10 servings.

The first thing I liked about this recipe is that I didn't have to modify the sugar content much. The custard part has a mere 1/6 cup of sugar, which I may have reduced slightly, but turned out to be not cloyingly sweet and nicely offset by the slight acidity of the lemon. As for the tomato compote part, this called for less than 1/2 cup of sugar, which after you add the lemon peels, raisins, and tomatoes, ended up being the right amount. If you have a sweet tooth, you might even add more.

The result was a pleasant surprise, to which none of the pictures I took can do justice:
The budino is an Italian steamed custard. It almost tastes like a very light, subtle cheesecake. This one had a light citrus flavor from the grated orange and lemon peels that the recipe called for. It tasted pretty good unaccompanied. However, the tart/sweet tomato compote enhanced and really brought out the latent citrus flavors. The tomato in dessert thing actually worked really well. The compote is essentially candied lemon peel w/ carmelized cherry tomatoes. The one modification I made was to use really good demerra brown sugar, which imparted a rich toffee-like taste. The slicing and roasting of tomatoes was a bit of a hassle, but without the roasting/carmelizing, the compote would not have tasted the same.

All in all, I was pleased with the results. My friend, who is not much of a dessert-eater, even seemed to like it enough to finish his portion.

I am now a tomato-dessert convert.

Mango Cheesecake

For the longest time, I've had a recipe for mango cheesecake sandwiched between one of my recipe scrapbook pages. I'm not overly crazy about cheesecake (unless my mom makes it; she has a really good non-heavy cheesecake recipe), but the bright yellow color caught my eye. I thus clipped the recipe and added it to my ever-growing pile of to-try-someday-when-the-inspiration-hits recipes.

Pretty though the yellow hue may be, it sat in my recipe pile for a few years for a variety of reasons.
First, the recipe is a Nigella Lawson recipe from the NYT, which typically means that the recipe is very involved. (It was. More on this later.)

Second, her recipes typically call for a lot of butter and sugar (It did.), and not that there's anything wrong with that, but to assuage my guilty conscience, it often means modifying her recipes, which takes a few attempts. I'm not sure I like cheesecake that much to want to try multiple renditions before I declare it edible.

Third, as I mentioned, I'm not overly crazy about cheesecake. Thus, I can't just make this when I'm having people over. I need a party or something to bring it to, so I don't have too many leftovers. (Cheesecake also doesn't freeze well.)

But on this weekend was hot, and I was going to a barbecue birthday celebration in Berkeley, and when I flipped through my recipe pile in search of inspiration, the brilliantly yellow-hued cheesecake jumped out at me. Well, not literally, but still, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to try this dessert.

My first mistake was grossly underestimating the amount of cream cheese I needed. I don't really like cream cheese much, so I hardly ever buy it, unless a recipe calls for it. The recipe calls for 1.5 pounds of cream cheese. I thought one package of cream cheese was one pound, so I bought two, thinking I'd have half a container left over. Wrong. I ended up needing another package. That is three packages of cream cheese. More cream cheese than I've bought in the past ten years, mind you. Perhaps this was reason number 4 for not having tried this recipe before.

The graham cracker crust called for a stick of butter. I looked at the 3 packages of cream cheese appallingly and made my first recipe modification. I used a WF whole grain graham cracker recipe, which called for 2 tbsp of butter total and worked perfectly fine as a graham cracker crust.

The recipe calls for a cup of sugar. Second recipe modification: I cut that as well-- but since I was taking it to a barbecue where others were eating it, I didn't cut it as much as I would have were I making this for myself.

The recipe is straightforward enough. (But still very time consuming.) First you make the graham cracker crust, then puree mangoes, mix with the cream cheese (all 3 packages of it), sugar, and 6 eggs. Then it calls for baking it in a water bath for about 2 hours. I was a little skeptical about this, b/c I don't remember my mom ever baking cheesecake in a water bath. Plus, 2 hours of oven time in the heat of summer was just a very long time. Ah well, at this point, I was committed.

2 hours later, the cake came out beautifully. I really wanted to try a sliver to make sure it was fully cooked and also make sure it was edible, but it probably would've looked odd to bring a cheesecake with a gaping hole in it.

The verdict? Well, let me start with a picture of it. It came out looking very impressive and very pretty. Here it is garnished with raspberries. (The raspberries was C's idea.)

Despite the many compliments I received on it, I think I was more impressed with its looks than its taste. I did like it better than a typical cheesecake. It turns out that the water bath steams the cheesecake, which makes it seem deceivingly fluffier/lighter, and also I think helped prevent cracks, which made the above photo op possible.

The mango taste was very subtle-- in fact a little too subtle, for all the time I spent pureeing mangoes.
For the amount of time it took, I wasn't overly wowed by the taste. For this reason, I don't think it is a practical all-purpose or weekday (or even weekend) dessert. However, it does make a good crowd dessert. It has the mango-unusualness factor. It is also very photogenic. It might make a very good alternative to your quotidian pumpkin pie at a thanksgiving gathering.

In the end, I ended up keeping the recipe precisely for that reason.

Foolproof pudding with a few modifications

A few weeks ago, I clipped out a recipe that I saw in the NYT, b/c the title caught my eye: "Foolproof pudding".

Now I am all for foolproof, since I seem to have a knack for mangling the simplest of recipes. But it gets even better. The author promises the dessert will take no more than 20 minutes, and it calls for a vanilla bean. A foolproof dessert that takes 20 minutes to make and calls for only 4 ingredients? Who wouldn't want to try making such a dessert? Plus other than the lack of fresh fruit, it sounded like a very quintessentially summery-sounding dessert.

I bought all of the requisite ingredients (whole milk and a vanilla bean, since I already had the sugar and corn starch and salt) last weekend and set out to make it sometime this week.

Unfortunately, I had a little mishap w/ the milk expiring before I ever got around to making the dessert, but undeterred, I got another container of milk.

The recipe calls for 2.5 cups of whole milk or half-and-half and 2/3 cups of sugar. It wasn't quite the appalling 1 cup of sugar that I often see in recipes, but the sugar content still seemed a tad high, so I cut it to 1/2 cup, which granted, isn't a whole lot less than 2/3 cup.

Well, after mixing the sugar, milk and vanilla bean in a saucepan for a bit and tasting it, I decided that even with this slight reduction, it was still too cloyingly sweet for my tastes. What is it w/ recipes and their annoying penchant to overestimate the amount of sugar one needs to put in a recipe? Anyway, I ended up dumping the entire carton of milk--which btw, is twice the amount of milk that the recipe originally calls for--into the saucepan. The result?

Not counting the cooling time, the dessert did really only take about 20 minutes to make. I was a little skeptical about the corn-starch overpowering the delicate flavors of the vanilla, which it did a little when it was hot, but when cooled, the corn-starchiness disappeared.

The end product lived up to my expectations. It was simple to make, called for minimal ingredients, and tasted yummy. I would still cut the sugar even more, perhaps, if I were making it for myself (especially if I plan to have it as part of breakfast as I did today. . .), but it came out quite well, otherwise, and looked cool, bespeckled with vanilla bean specks.

The recipe calls for either vanilla bean or vanilla extract, but if you are like me and get excited at the sight of real vanilla bean specks, it is well worth the $3 or $4 per vanilla bean pod to splurge for the real thing. I mean, look at how beautiful the specks look amid the pristine white surface:
On the other hand, if you decide to go for option b. and turn it into a chocolate pudding (by adding a few finely chopped up shards of chocolate to your liking), then don't bother with the vanilla bean. Vanilla extract will suffice.

I discovered that it makes a good weekend "almost breakfast" item (hey, the milk has protein!). I think this one is going in my dessert scrap book.

Figs and Tarragon

Where did I get the title of my blog? From this divine combination.

It's such a simple combo, but truly divine. Just figs. And tarragon. That's it. You can grill the figs if you want, for an added bonus, but just plain will do the trick.