Soup, sourdough and healthy-ish turtles
Hi everyone,
At the beginning of all this I was resistant to the bread-baking. (Partly because I didn’t have any flour.) We don’t tend to eat tons of bread, and we have access to really good purchased bread, so I thought I’d be better off baking cookies and cakes. (And I was! Don’t get me wrong there.)
But sourdough is something I’d always wanted to try, and the pictures of everyone’s loaves were just too much to resist. So I stirred together some flour and water the other day and am cultivating my first starter. I’ve been following instructions from a blog called Zero Waste Chef, which I appreciate because she doesn’t believe in throwing out the discard, and has recipes like crackers and pancakes that use it. So far I’ve been adding mine to my standard banana-egg pancakes, which is working well. In any case, I promise to keep you up to date on my sourdough in not-too-gory detail…
Friday night pizza
I finally acquired all the ingredients for this vegan mushroom pizza recipe from Virtuous Pie, and it was a success! With the caveat that this is a pizza for people who, like, me, always gravitate to the white/mushroom pizza on any menu.
I realized when I started cooking that the recipe makes eight (8!) pizzas, so I halved all three sub-recipes because I only wanted to make one pizza. The halved potato mixture made sense (and now I’m trying to figure out what to do with the leftovers, so perhaps I should have quartered it.) The halved mushroom mixture was just enough mushrooms for my one pizza – a reminder that while there are never enough toppings on a pizzeria pizza, you’re at home now and can have all the mushrooms you desire. And the halved almond ricotta mixture was appropriate for two to four pizzas, but I had a hard time blending it – I assume a full recipe would work better. So mine was a little chunky.
As for the crust, I made this food processor recipe and it worked out really well for me. I love that it’s make-ahead and makes enough for three pizzas (I have the two other balls of dough in the freezer). I don’t have a pizza stone, I just made it on a cookie sheet in the oven, but it turned out crispy yet chewy, just how I like it. (You do need yeast, though. Sorry.)
Speaking of yeast…
I had some kicking around in the cupboard, and who knows when I’ll get more. But in the meantime I’ve been living it up.
The other night I made this Russian Black Bread, and I did not regret it. (Though I did kind of regret accidentally leaving out the vinegar.) Mine is not as black as in the picture because I don’t keep black cocoa around, but I do think it will work well for tempeh reuben sandwiches.
Don’t forget about cabbage
Another win this week (that goes very well with the bread) is this cream of cabbage soup from David Lebovitz.
He is correct that it is “surprisingly good” and I don’t think I had realized before how much I love caraway seeds. (My to-make list now includes seed cake, which was a favourite of my grandmother.) Note that I personally would skip the parsley oil next time – there’s nothing wrong with it per se, but it’s another thing to make and keep in the fridge and I think it detracts from the flavour of the soup.
And for dessert
These “healthyish” salted caramel turtles are so worth it.
I made a half recipe, which worked out well. Next time I would freeze the caramel blobs for longer before dipping them in chocolate – they were melty and hard to manage by the time I got to the last few, and I only had 15, not 30. And I concur that they are best straight out of the freezer. Which makes them less giftable, but maybe you need a gift for yourself?
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