Fruit of Adventure

My Sweet Valentine

Right now Alex is peacefully sleeping and I will be off to work before he wakes so I won’t get to see his reaction to the Valentine’s gift I left him this morning. And actually I’m okay with that as it might be more enjoyable for him to open it without me hovering over him. It might afford him the time to just relax and enjoy it.

So what did I make for him? Well, after my successful chocolate candy making experiment over the holidays, Alex has been begging me to make more. So always wanting to please my hon, I decided that Valentine’s Day was the perfect reason to get back into it. I knew that I wanted to use the occasion appropriate hearts and kisses molds for the shape.

And for the filling? Well, having been born and spending his early childhood in New Hampshire and Vermont, Alex has a certain affinity for maple. Maple sugar, maple candy, maple cream, maple syrup, and, of course, maple butter. So what better way to treat him for Valentine’s Day than to mix his recent chocolate candy request with his love of maple?

For the kisses, I cut thin strips of pink tissue paper and wrote little notes with things that I love about him on it and placed it in the kiss before wrapping it in foil.

I then packaged them all up in a tin with pink tissue paper and, because Alex is a software engineer and totally geeks out on things like this (and I won’t deny that I don’t either), I wrapped his gift in paper that says “I love you” in binary. Can any other geeks out there read this? 🙂

Maple Filled Chocolate Candy

These are so ridiculously easy to make!

Ingredients

• 2 cups (or more depending how many you want to make) chocolate chips
• 1 tablespoon vegetable shortening
• maple butter (or maple cream)

Melt Chocolate and Assemble: In a microwave or heavy saucepan, melt the chocolate chips and shortening until completely smooth. If you want to be extra careful not to burn the chocolate, you can use a double boiler. With a paintbrush (or small spoon) paint the inside of the mold with the melted chocolate. Once you’ve completed every heart and kiss in the mold, place it in the freezer for 3-5 minutes until hardened. Remove from the freezer and fill each heart and kiss with the maple butter. The maple butter I was working with was VERY sticky so I had to grease my finger when working with it. If you use maple cream, you probably won’t need to do that. Then cover the maple butter with the melted chocolate and put the molds back in the freezer until the chocolate hardens completely. Pull them out of the freezer, pop them out of the mold and store in a cool place until ready to serve.
Enjoy!

Green Machine Smoothie

I have been eating this smoothie every day (for weeks) as a post-lunch snack. By using seasonal fruit and taking advantage of the luscious kale that is in abundance at the markets right now, you too should enjoy this nutrient powerhouse. The great thing about the Green Machine is that even if you abhor kale you’ll still love this smoothie! It’s the perfect way to add this high-nutrient dense veggie into your diet. I promise you won’t even taste it! The fruit completely overpowers the flavor of the kale and the only way you know it’s in there is because of the beautiful green color it lends to the smoothie.

Powerhouse Green Machine Smoothie

• 2  oranges peeled (make sure to remove all of the pith otherwise your smoothie will be bitter—it’s happened to me, don’t let it happen to you)
• 3 apples cored
• 1 pear cored
• 2-inch peeled chunk of ginger (optional—but for me, this makes the smoothie!)
• 1 banana
• 2 cups frozen pineapple chunks
• 2 cups kale, rinsed and de-stemmed

Roasted Tomato Gigante Bean Salad

Let me just say that I might have a new favorite bean. Don’t get me wrong, I still love my pinto, black bean, cannelini, and most of all, garbanzos, but there is a new kid on my block and I’m falling hard for him. He goes by the name of Gigante, sometimes Gigande, and I’ve even seen some people use Giganti. He’s totally beefy and much larger than your average bean. Here’s a photo for comparison (note: all of these beans are steamy and at their fully erect size).

And here you can see him from the side—see, super beefy, right?

His texture is soft yet firm, but totally creamy melt-in-your-mouth. Oh, em, gee…I’m salivating just thinking about it.

Oh, and look who spotted one of his favorite foods (and don’t worry your cute little pants off as I disinfected the cutting board after letting him enjoy this mid-afternoon snack.) Anyone else have a cat with a penchant for beans? He plays no favorites and loves them all—so weird!

But here’s the catch—Mr. Gigande is incredibly elusive. I thought Rainbow Grocery, with their extensive bulk bean selection, would for surely carry him. After all they carry peruano beans, ayacote morado beans, black calypso beans, and Santa Maria pinquinto beans! But woe is me after not finding my beloved Gigante there.

I then went to Whole Foods to see if he might be there. Since I have been meeting him there for our regular trysts at the salad bar for months now, surely they would stock him in bulk! But no such luck for me at Whole Foods and I walked out the door empty handed.

Hmmm…I didn’t want to have to go back to his native land, Greece, to track him down. On the other hand, maybe that would be the perfect excuse for a trip? Either way, I wanted to be able to see him more frequently—like every day. I wanted to be able to find him here and enjoy him when it strikes my fancy!

So I was then reduced to stalking him on the internet: “Where the hell can I find Gigante beans in the Bay Area?” was my Google search. It became clear to me through this search that I am not the only one who has fallen for him—apparently he’s quite the charmer and has made the rounds—but it seems that he’s not just elusive with me, as others were having the same trouble locating him as well. I did; however, discover that someone had spotted him at the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market from Iacopi Farms in Half Moon Bay. Bingo! Just as I was beginning to lose hope, suddenly my spirits started to lift.

On Saturday I dressed in my finest Farmer’s Market garb (thank god he prefers the athletic look because I was not about to hike up SF hills in heels) and trucked my booty to the Ferry Building.

Wahoo! FINALLY! I found him!

After I returned home, I got busy in the kitchen with Mr. Gigante and created this amazeball dish!

Roasted Heirloom Tomato Gigante Bean Salad

• 1 pound dry gigante beans
• 2 large heirloom tomatoes
• 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, plus more for drizzling over tomatoes
• salt and pepper
• 3-4 green onions

Rinse your beans and soak them in water for 8 hours or overnight. Make sure there is 8 inches or more of water above your beans as they will soak up way more than you’d think.

After that, strain and rinse them. Also, remove any deformed or discolored beans like the one on the right. That happened to be the only sad bean I found in the bunch.

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Wash, slice, and deseed your tomatoes and then place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Drizzle olive oil over the tomatoes, sprinkle with salt and pepper and place them in the oven.

Let the tomatoes roast for 30 minutes and then pull them out and turn them over to roast on the other side. This is what mine looked like after 30 minutes. After turning them over, pop them back in the oven for another 30 minutes.

While they’re roasting, thinly slice the green onions and mix them with the beans.

After the tomatoes have roasted for at least an hour, you can pull them out of the oven. If you wish, you can roast them for several hours; the longer you roast the more intense their flavor will become. Here’s what mine looked like after an hour.

Chop the tomatoes and fold them into the beans and onions. Drizzle with the 3 tablespoons of olive oil and add salt and pepper to taste.

I am totally over the moon for Mr. Gigande and this dish. I’m also massively happy that I made a hefty amount and will be able to enjoy it throughout the week!

Super Easy, Super Amazing Vegan Sunbutter and Coconut Cups

Once you’ve gone “all the way” with your sunbutter like my hot night of passion, or even just had a quickie by picking up a jar at the market, you’re ready to take your relationship to the next level and dress your little sunbutter up in some chocolate! This goes for coconut too, though, it holds a completely different, more platonic, place in my heart.

I made both of these bad boys over the holiday break and gifted (I know that Alex is going to cringe when he reads me using “gift” as a verb, but I stand by this use as it’s now perfectly acceptable—the dictionary confirms this, thank you very much) my co-workers with a variety of chocolate goodness that you can read more about here. These little buggers were a serious hit with my co-workers so it’s safe to say that they’re as good (if not better) than your standard peanut butter ones. And, really, the options of what kind of nut or seed butter you want to use are limitless so play around with a particular filling that knocks your socks off.

General recipe ingredients and guidelines for making your way to any sunbutter or coconut lover’s heart:

Ingredients

Chocolate

• 4 cups chocolate chips
• 1 tablespoon vegetable shortening

Sunbutter Filling

• 1 cup creamy sunbutter
• 1/2 cup powdered sugar

Directions

Mix Filling: For both, stir together all filling ingredients in separate small bowls and set aside.

Melt Chocolate and Assemble: Melt the chocolate chips and vegetable shortening in a small heavy bottom pan over the stove until completely smooth. With a mini spoon, other small utensil, or paintbrush paint the inside of the paper muffin cups with the melted chocolate. Make sure to coat every nook and cranny so that there are no holes. Place the cup in the muffin tin so that it retains it’s shape. Once you’ve coated as many cups that the mold holds with chocolate, place the pan in the freezer for 3-5 minutes until the chocolate has completely hardened. Remove from the freezer and spoon the sunbutter or coconut filling into each of the cups. Then cover each cup with your melted chocolate.  Refrigerate until hardened. They can be stored this way for several weeks (and probably months, but they’re not likely to last long enough to test that theory). Also, I had to do many batches since my tin only held 12 cups at at time and I didn’t need to remelt my chocolate through all of it, but if your chocolate does harden before you’re finished simply go ahead and remelt it.

Yield: Varies depending on the size of your muffin cups.
Coconut filling recipe inspiration credit: Elana’s Pantry

Christina Does Sunbutter

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of nut butters. I love ’em all. In fact, I publicly proclaimed my love of the nut in it’s buttery form years ago here. And this is still true today—my unwavering love of nut butters has not changed; however, this love has evolved. It has evolved to include a cousin of the nut, seeds, and just like nuts, there a a lot of them out there, from the more standard sunflower, pumpkin, and sesame to some newcomers (in the sense that you can find them on your standard grocery store shelves) like hemp and chia.

The seed that I became enamored with a couple years ago is the beloved sunflower, particularly in it’s butter form called sunbutter. Even after a few years into our relationship we’re still going strong. Though, we have had our ups and downs like when I consumed an entire jar in a single day and had a massive bellyache, or that time when I consumed heaping amounts every single day and started to develop a weird sensation on my tongue whenever eating it so we had to go on a break for a while. Thankfully those dark lonely days only lasted a few months. And through all of that, we’re now in a really great place. So great that I decided it was high time to try making some from scratch myself.

On my walk home from yoga on Friday night I stopped by Whole Foods and picked up some plain organic sunflower seeds and got busy in the kitchen. It was a date—a totally giddy-like-friends-who-are-just-starting-to-get-to-know-each-other-on-a-new-level kind of date. And let me tell you, the results of that date are awesomesauce. The chemistry was purely magical. I suggest you too give it a go! Here’s how you can move on to a deeper level in your relationship with the sunflower seed and how my Friday night romp ended up:

Ingredients:

• plain, unsalted, shelled sunflower seeds
• sweetener of your choice (agave syrup, maple syrup, cane sugar, etc.)
• salt
• cinnamon or any other interesting flavors you might want to add to the mix

Don’t Give Up: Keep grinding and its nerves will subside, it’ll become more relaxed and start to form into a creamy paste.

Keep Grinding: Don’t let the screams of the food processor fool you, it’s not done until both parties are satisfied. You really have to be patient with it and it will eventually loosen up to become a smooth operator like this. This foreplay lasts roughly 7 to 10 minutes before you’ve gotten the sunbutter to the right drippy consistency. And if your food processor starts to whine about the massive workout you’re giving it like mine did, you might want to give it a short break. You don’t want it to die pre-climax and be left with a mealy, unfinished sunbutter.

Any Accoutrements?: Right at the sunbutter’s peak consistency, I then added some salt, maple syrup, and cinnamon. Oh. My. God. Just when I didn’t think it could get any better I totally lost it. This is the thing about being on a date with your own sunbutter—you can completely customize the additions to your liking. Maybe you like the paler agave syrup? Or maybe you too prefer the complex flavors of maple syrup? Or maybe you like both at different times? Or a little of both at once? You totally get to choose when you make your own!

At this point, Alex arrived home and walked in on me in such a post-coital haze that I forgot to snap more photos, but you probably don’t want to see me shoving it in my mouth. So that’s pretty much how it went down on Friday night in my house.

Serving: For me, I truly love my sunbutter straight up with a spoon (like the picture below), but I also enjoy when it dresses up in some sexy outfit like bread or crackers from time to time.

Anyone else this crazy about nut and seed butters? Or am I the only nut-case like this? Pretty please tell me that’s not true!

Homemade Curry Powder

• 1/4 cup coriander seed
• 1 1/2 tablespoons black peppercorns
• 1 tablespoon cumin seed
• 1 tablespoon cardamom pods
• 1 teaspoon fenugreek seeds (Does fenugreek smell like butterscotch to anyone else? Or is it just me?)
• 1 or 2 cinnamon sticks (2-3 inches worth)
• 1 tablespoon ground ginger
• 2 tablespoons ground turmeric

Roasty Toasty: (This is one of the reasons homemade curry powder is so amazing—and I have a feeling that most commercial producers skip this step.) Place the coriander seeds, peppercorns, cumins seeds, cardamom pods, fenugreek seeds, and cinnamon stick in a dry skillet. Toast them over medium heat, stirring and shaking the pan for about 4 minutes until they become fragrant. Transfer the spices to a plate and let them cool for a few minutes (make sure to do this right away so that they don’t continue to cook in the hot pan.)

Grinding: Place the roasted spices in a coffee grinder and grind to a fine powder. I suppose you could do this by hand as well using a mortar and pestle; though, a coffee grinder will be way more efficient.

Pour and Mix:  Pour the powder in a bowl and stir in the ginger and turmeric until they are well incorporated.

*Makes approximately a 1/2 cup of curry powder

Storage: Store the curry powder in an airtight container in a dark place. It will last for a good 6 months without compromising the amazing flavor.

Gifting: Also, homemade curry powder makes a wonderful gift (and this is when Alex tells me I’ve gone a bit overboard and am getting too Martha Stewart-y, but I see nothing wrong with that 🙂 )

Vegan Chocolate Covered Cherries

This holiday season marked my first foray into making chocolate candies. I must admit that once I get an idea into my head, it’s very easy for me to get so carried away that I have to spend serious energy reeling in my mind that has left the gates at a pace far too fast for a marathon. Sometimes my mind can go in so many directions thinking of all the possibilities and things I want to do that I become physically exhausted just thinking of it all. Then I become paralyzed and don’t do anything because if I can’t do everything, why even do one thing? And then once I’ve thought so much about actually doing it, it almost feels like I have already done it. Does this happen to anyone else or is it just me?

I’ve noticed that this can happen to me when planning major events like moving, a wedding, and lately I’ve even noticed this happen in November when the Christinamas Monster shows up. It’s like I feel the need to recreate every experience I’ve had of every Christmas past into each Christmas, which is insane and completely impossible.

So in this chocolate making experiment, I averted a head’splosion by narrowing down my creations – I decided to stick with four different types of fillings and three different molds for this first time. I had to assure myself that I can always do more in the future – all of the possibilities and ideas don’t have to be done right this instant, Christina!

Also, the reason for this experiment was to treat my co-workers with something sweet for the holidays so I ended up creating a little tin to package them up as well. Here’s how it all turned out:

If it wasn’t super obvious, for each tin I cut out pretty pieces of paper to fit the top and then glued them with rubber cement like so:

Ok – onward to the recipes!

Chocolate Covered Cherries

• 30 maraschino cherries (About  1 10-ounce jar)
• 1 cup powdered sugar
• 1 1/2 tablespoons (= 4 1/5 teaspoons) Earth Balance, softened (my 1.5 Tablespoons was approximate and it worked fine)
• 1 1/2 tablespoons light corn syrup (also an approximate 1.5 Tablespoons)
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
• 1 tablespoon vegetable shortening

• 1 (or more) chocolate cherry mold

Cherry Prep: Drain the cherries, remove the stems, and then pat them dry with paper towels. Set aside.

Buttercream/Sugar Dough: In a small mixing bowl combine the sugar, butter, corn syrup, and salt. Mix and then knead until smooth. It may take a few kneads to get to this state and don’t be concerned if it seems crumbly at first – it will eventually come together.

I covered the ball with plastic wrap and placed it in the refrigerator as I was preparing other candies, but I don’t think it’s necessary to do this. You can move right on to covering the cherries.

Buttercreamed Cherries: Take a small piece of the sugar dough—enough to cover a cherry—and wrap it around a cherry. You want to make sure the cherry is completely covered, but also make sure it’s a thin layer so that the cherry will fit inside the mold. Proceed with the remaining cherries and then place them on a loosely covered plate in the refrigerator.

Chocolate and Putting it All Together: In a microwave or heavy saucepan, melt the chocolate chip and shortening until completely smooth. With a paintbrush (or small spoon) paint the inside of the mold with the melted chocolate. Once you’ve completed every cherry in the mold, place it in the freezer for 3-5 minutes until hardened. Remove from the freezer and place 1 cream-covered cherry in each piece of the mold. Cover each cherry with the remaining chocolate. If your mold has less then 30 cherries you’ll need to repeat these steps. Refrigerate until hardened. They can be stored this way for several weeks. Bring to room temperature for a day or two before serving so that the buttercream inside can soften.

Final Words: My last comment about these is that I only had issue with a couple of the chocolates not coming out of the mold perfectly and losing their tops in the process, but that was due to a few of them having a too thin shell. After experimenting with thickness, I realized that as long as I created a reasonably thick chocolate coat on the mold (but not too thick because you have to leave room for the cherries!), I was golden.

Adapted from Taste of Home Best Holiday Recipes from 2008.

Ok – writing all of this out has exhausted me for now so I’m going to have to come back later to lay down the deets of how I did the sunbutter and coconut cups. Stay tuned!

Vegan Peanut Butter Blossoms

Oh, lovely cookies. As a kid these cookies were one of my all-time favorites. I first recall having them at my after-school babysitters and I didn’t even know what they were called (and frankly, didn’t even think to ask…probably because my mouth was stuffed full of ’em) so I always referred to them as “the cookies with the Hershey Kiss in the middle” and even as an adult I still didn’t know what their official name was and it wasn’t until I Googled the phrase “cookies with Hershey Kiss in the middle” that their sweet little name was divulged to me. Lo and behold they’re called Peanut Butter Blossoms! What’s funny is that I don’t recall my immature tastebuds ever detecting there was peanut butter in them so when I started baking these years ago I was skeptical that they were the real-deal from my childhood. However, after my first adult bite I knew they were the delectable treats I’d had from yore.

Onward with how to make these little babies—here is the recipe so that you too can enjoy a scrumptious vegan version of (perhaps) your childhood favorite:

Ingredients:

***Lastly, I have to mention that over the holiday weekend I stopped at Spun Sugar in Berkeley and found an awesome chocolate mold that will change my relationship with these cookies for every Christmas here on out.

So next year these babies will actually have a completely vegan chocolate kiss in the center of them. Holy flip! I am stoked for the holidays next year!!!