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    raw blueberry pie with microwaveable filling and graham cracker crust

    This mostly-raw blueberry pie is a snap to make and very versatile--the filling microwaves in a few minutes, and you don't even have to bake the zippy gingered graham cracker crust--perfect for a hot Fourth of July and all summer long.

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Ice cream, enhanced

Sometimes your kid sees a new flavor of Dreyer’s ice cream at the store and decides she has to try it because “It’s Black Raspberry, Mom!” and it’s on sale. But mostly because it’s a trendy light purple (“Orchid or thistle?” I asked, calling on my distant memories of the Binney & Smith guide to the universe.  “Lavender” she retorted. I caved to her superior fashion sense.) It was made with real raspberries–that’s a plus, I suppose. And it came in a “half-the-fat” version, and it was enough on sale that I could get a safety flavor as well.

It’s been over 100 degrees here in Pasadena this week, so ice cream is practically a medical supply.

When we got it home though, it tasted sweet and kind of dull. The fruit flavor was there but not particularly strong, and the overall effect–particularly the smell, for some reason–reminded me suddenly of those horrible “berry-flavored” motion sickness lozenges my mother used to foist on us just before long car trips. Bonamine? I’m still shuddering forty years later.

My daughter, blissfully free of Bonamine-induced associations, still thought it had merit, though, so we kept the lavender-tinted ice cream and I wondered whether anyone else would eat it without having to be threatened. What was wrong with it and could it possibly be fixed?

I’ve been potschkying around with store bought ice cream pretty much ever since I was old enough to buy it for myself–adding extra cocoa powder and some mint or almond extract to chocolate, leftover coffee and cinnamon to vanilla, and on and on. Not many people do this, or do this enough, I’ve discovered. You have to wonder why not, because most non-super premium ice cream in America is a little, or a lot, bland.

In fact, the only flavor I never messed with was Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch, which was perfect and sublime and needed no help ever, other than a spoon. My husband and I were such devotees that when we had a chance to spend a late-summer week in Vermont and New Hampshire one year (way back when, in our 20s), we made sure to stop in at the factory in Stowe for a tour. CHBC was such a supreme flavor that I only gave it up when Ben and Jerry both retired and a new CEO took over. Somehow, the next pint I bought tasted a little off–weak on coffee flavor or something, hmmm…I looked at the ingredients and sure enough, they’d changed the formula and flavorings. It had also been monoglycerided down, even though the fat count was still in the stratosphere. I’m sure my ice cream snobbery saved me from a decade of extra arterial damage, but I’ve been sullen and resentful ever since (or at least that’s the explanation this week).

So anyway–back to the prosaic purple ice cream. It needed something–tartness–to liven it up, and probably would have been better as a frozen yogurt. Come to think of it, would yogurt work? Naah. Messy. Plus refreezing time. Lemon? Maybe, maybe not–it might end up seeming too sweet. Then I found a lime in the fridge–from who knows how many weeks ago; it had already lost its green, but it was still fine inside. Sometimes where lemon’s pure acidity underscores the sweetness and makes it more apparent, lime’s aromatic edge undercuts it and makes the flavor seem fresher. Works for ginger ale, works for blueberry jam…

A squeeze, a stir–from lavender to…raspberry pink (what else?) and I have to say, a BIG improvement in flavor. Much more like actual black raspberry. That’s all it took? Why couldn’t they have done that at the ice cream factory? But they didn’t.

I have another reason for punching up my storebought ice creams, and it’s not just boredom or fidgetiness (though those are obviously tops).

A long-ago-and-far-away gelato-eating expedition in Florence (it didn’t start out that way, but it’s the fulltime occupation in the summer–even more of a medical necessity when you’re wandering outside all day as a tourist) taught me the difference between Italian and American standards for ice creams: Americans expect big portions and don’t really pay attention to the flavor. Bland and sweet is acceptable. Italians are happy enough with small 1/3 cup portions as long as the flavors are wild and adventurous and vivid. If you can taste it well with one of those tiny gelato spoons, a gram at a time, it’ll last you.

Makes you wonder whether the lack of flavor punch in American ice cream (and maybe our other food as well) is the reason we typically eat biggish portions at a sitting, or seek out seconds. If it doesn’t taste like much, you eat it without paying attention, and end up not feeling like you’ve really eaten it. Interesting and vivid flavor seems like a good idea for health and portion control as well as pleasure–if you’re going to have ice cream, after all, you may as well taste it. Otherwise you could just suck on ice cubes.

So–a few suggestions for upping the flavor of store bought ice creams.

Go for plain flavors as your base

Try to find ones that are relatively low in carb and fat for a half-cup serving. Low here means about 15 grams of carb per half-cup, and maybe 2-3 grams of saturated fat.

Not only don’t the dressed-up flavors with loads of mix-ins need (or take well to) further tinkering at home, they’re not always as high in quality. Dreyer’s (Edy’s on the east coast), seems to try to keep the nutrition stats consistent across the line–ice creams with lots of mix-ins and/or caramel-type ribbon swirl are a bit higher in carb, up to maybe 22 grams per serving.

To keep things consistently low, though, the components or the ice cream itself have to compensate–so Reese’s Cup-style peanut butter and chocolate chip swirl has iffy peanut butter and iffier quality chocolate chips (well, so do the real Reese’s ™–don’t know whether authenticity is such a good thing in this case), plus the ice cream’s a bit icy, maybe even a little stale-tasting on occasion. You’d get more intense flavor from vanilla bean ice cream with a few squares of good dark chocolate chopped in and some peanuts or a bit of peanuts-only peanut butter.

Make flavors you can’t buy

Sometimes these are ones you grew up with, like Rum Raisin–I think only Haagen Daz still makes this. People got kind of prissy about feeding ice cream with rum flavoring in it to kids, I guess. Or raisins got too expensive.  So did pistachios, except in super premium ice creams.

No one makes ginger, or lemon-ginger, even though I’m pretty sure those were two of Bon Appétit‘s and Gourmet‘s big summer standbys for at least a decade (and I know because I once bought a decade’s worth of each magazine from my friends-of-the-library auxiliary at about a dime an issue. The seasons change, the same 10 recipes repeat…)

And no one makes Sabra (chocolate orange), or fig, or liquorice, or marzipan, or rose. Or pear. Or chocolate hazelnut with sour cherries.  Or even just plain bittersweet chocolate. There are home recipes for all of Continue reading

Really? No, not really.

Reason for dismay at the top level restaurants:

(LA Times Food Section) “Three top chefs create more healthful versions of favorite dishes”

They cut down a little on the calories–as in, substituted olive oil for butter, or ricotta for mascarpone, or even ground chicken for ground pork. But only one of them cut down significantly on the sodium–and even then it was 1000 mg for the dish, down from about 1400 mg. Give Daniel Mattern credit where it’s due, but it’s still a lot. Josiah Citrin’s dish, which started out about 650 mg, not horrible for restaurant food, actually went up in the modified version.

In Susan Feniger’s case (and she was far from succeeding or even trying hard on the sodium reduction), the sodium count was more than a day’s worth in one dish–from 2100 mg or more to 1800-plus. Choke. She did skip marinating the ground chicken, but the “mabo” sauce, which she didn’t change at all, contains three different kinds of soy sauce AND fermented black beans. Because you really need a sauce that salty in fine food?

Couldn’t she have done a different sauce, more savory or spicy but less salted? That’s the first thing I would have targeted. I probably would have used my low-sodium prune-based Asian barbecue sauce instead of the black bean sauce–it’s different, but good, and it’s similar enough in texture and flavor density to substitute well.

In fact, none of the chefs tried to go radically different–they were all too fixated on whether diners could tell the difference between the originals and the modified dishes. Well, if they’d changed anything worth changing, I’m sure the diners would have been able to taste the difference. The real question is, would it have been a good dish and would they have liked it? I think the chefs could certainly have gone after bigger, more ambitious changes and made the dishes satisfying–perhaps even better–without choking the diners on salt.

The bad part of the article came at the end. All three chefs just gave an arrogant little shrug when the results were revealed at the end of the test (showing that they hadn’t done all that well). They all said grandly that it doesn’t really matter, because as Josiah Citrin put it, their customers come “to be blown away” by the food.

And so, just like the fast food kings, they put the blame on the diners for not demanding better, saner nutritional standards. Beats workin’.

Microwave tricks: Seitan without Simmering

My sisters-in-law from Oakland were planning a visit to us this summer now that we actually have a house and can host them. It fell through, but the prospect got me thinking about vegan food and what we might serve them. They’re both good cooks, but they eat a lot of commercially-prepared vegan meat substitutes along with their own fresh vegetables and grains and baked goods.

I’m not great on packaged foods in general, and unfortunately, vegan proteins other than plain fresh tofu and dried beans look an awful lot like vegetarian versions of Oscar Meyer sliced bologna and turkey loaf to me. Not just the appearance, but the cost per serving (really high–something like 4-6 bucks for a chic little package that serves two, ostensibly) and the salt (also really high–600 mg and up per serving). And the ingredients lists are always long and kind of mysterious-sounding, either in a surprisingly chemical way or in a Japanese-ingredient-names-as-authenticity way. Not that I’m not working to figure out exactly what kombu and dulse and Job’s tears are. Two seaweeds and a resin? I think, anyway.

There’s also a lot of yeast extract in some of these processed vegan proteins–sounds like between that and the salt, what they really did was dump in Vegemite or Marmite. Bleagh (my husband’s sister is kind of an Anglophile, but that doesn’t excuse either version to me).

On the other hand, some of the vegan cookbooks out now have do-it-yourself recipes for seitan, and so do Ellen’s Kitchen and FatFree Vegan Kitchen.

Seitan is basically wheat gluten dough cooked in stock. If you do it yourself at home, it may take an hour to simmer but really isn’t very expensive compared with the commercially prepared versions. A 5-lb bag of flour at about $2-3 or a few ounces out of a 22-oz bag of vital wheat gluten (about $6-8, depending where you buy it, and worth it for getting 100% gluten out of the bag and not having to wash the starches out of the dough since it’s already done for you) produces something like a pound or two of seitan at a go. That’s enough for a larger meal, maybe even for that elusive home-made vegetarian centerpiece dish

Why is this worth doing if you don’t eat vegan and aren’t actually having vegan guests in the house after all? (and now that I’ve schlepped the last of the moving boxes out of the living room, I’m really wondering).

I think back to my favorite Chinese restaurant back east, the Hunan Manor in Columbia, MD. Every time we fly back east we try to make a stop there.

One of the things that makes the Hunan Manor great is their willingness to experiment and invent. They serve a wide variety of vegetarian versions of standard banquet dishes using “vegetarian chicken”–basically seitan cut and fried as for meat. These dishes complement their masterful use of tofu with textures from nearly silken to deep-fried to pressed and diced for the vegetarian jao tse, which I’ve always thought looked better and probably tasted better than the pork-based meatball filling our nonkosher friends would get (though they raved about them, and I’ll take their word for it).

The last time we came east, the restaurant had added several new dishes using a different form of seitan with very finely layered rolls that were cut in bite sized pieces, coated and fried–a pretty close simulation for the layered flesh of chicken. It was really delicious in their orange “chicken” with perfectly cooked bright green broccoli. It was unexpectedly unsalty as well, so I don’t know whether they made it in-house or had bought the prepared seitan in an unflavored form.

Either way, the dish was a great argument for using seitan creatively, and I don’t think my sisters-in-law, competent cooks though they are, have eaten any seitan dishes that good using anything from a little Gardein package.

So I decided I’d like to try my hand at seitan at home and see if I can’t come up with something flavorful, chewy, satisfying and nutritious, without having it scream salt. After all, once you’ve got the finished loaf or pieces, you’re Continue reading

Pyrex and Anchor Hocking now both unsafe for cooking

I’m not sure how I happened upon Consumer Reports’ disturbing feature from January on exploding glassware cooking accidents in both Pyrex and Anchor Hocking tempered glassware. Since a lot of my microwave directions call for Pyrex bowls, I thought I’d better post about it asap.

Here’s the link explicitly:

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine-archive/2011/january/home-garden/glass-cookware/glass-cookware/index.htm

Because I’ve used my current Pyrex bowls and bakeware for more than 10 years, I’ve been looking recently to replace and/or add to my collection. But every time I’ve looked for it in the past year or so, I’ve hesitated–the stuff on sale is a blueish color. Or it’s a little thinner than I remember. Or it doesn’t feel or even sound right when I pick it up. And the cardboard overwrap has a lot of new warnings about when and how you can or can’t use it that are different than the old classic Pyrex. It’s confusing–can I use it the way I’m used to or not?

So even though the casseroles and pie plates are bright and shiny and new and usually on sale at my local supermarket and the Target, I’ve passed them up, thinking, “I’ll do it next time.”

According to the Consumer Reports piece, it’s a damn good thing I did. Read the article. Now. Please. Before you put any of this generation of Pyrex in an oven or microwave. Before you give a set to some newlywed as a kitchen gift.

And don’t buy this stuff. If you did, don’t use it for any kind of heating up, conventional oven or microwave (I know, so what good is it if you can’t heat stuff up in it? Wasn’t that the whole point?)

Apparently both companies are claiming that the explosions–which have caused burns and lacerations when the victims took a hot casserole out of the oven or microwave and set it down–are the result of misuse, or perhaps the glassware had gotten dinged or scratched and therefore the flaws had weakened it, and that it was a rare phenomenon. The article authors estimated a fairly high number of incidents in the past few years based on hospitalization records and other outside evidence.

Consumer Reports debunked the companies’ blame-the-victims ploy by testing both brands of glass cookware at various temperatures and setting the pans down on a variety of typical kitchen surfaces.

The results were not pretty–Pyrex had a slight temperature range advantage over Anchor Hocking, but a fairly high percentage of both broke or exploded if they weren’t used exactly within the laundry list of restrictions on the cardboard overwrap that came with the new bakeware.

Altogether, conducting the tests and videorecording them took more guts than I would have without lexan armor and a full face shield.

But, as I’ve said, I’ve been using my mixing bowls and pie plates for years without problems. What’s going on?

The article authors did track down a probable explanation for all this breakage in what’s supposed to be very durable glassware. Both brands have recently switched to a cheaper formulation for their glass. Pyrex–note, no longer made by Corning–at least used to be borosilicate glass but now uses soda lime glass, as does Anchor Hocking’s tempered glass. Borosilicate is the standard for laboratory grade glassware; it’s stronger and somewhat more expensive to produce–probably the mineral shortages of the past few years have made it more so.

Technically, you can temper soda lime glass, but even when tempered it’s not as strong as the old classic tempered borosilicate. It also seems to be less uniform–and the little unevennesses in the material create local instabilities that can cause cracks and even explosions when subjected to rapid or uneven heating and cooling. It only takes a split second in some cases.

Borosilicate is almost certainly what my old Pyrex standbys are made of, and I’m standing by them. I just wish I could have bought more at the time, or that someone else made them now. I wish Pyrex’s current manufacturers in particular had not ruined their product by changing glass to reduce costs, and that their managers weren’t scrambling to deny it.

For now, I’d say please DON’T use the newer Pyrex or tempered glass bakeware items for microwaving. They’re just not the same anymore. Use microwave-safe ceramic instead.

Microwave Tricks: Stripped-Down Chiles Rellenos

Anaheim chiles with corn and feta for stuffingI know, Diana Kennedy (The Cuisines of Mexico, 1971, and onward) probably wouldn’t do it this way–or maybe she would, at home, for herself? Naaah. She’s still pretty particular. Eighty-seven years old, and doesn’t seem to have slowed down noticeably in her quest to rescue the disappearing dishes of Mexico. Her latest, Oaxaca al Gusto (2010)  is a huge coffee table cookbook, beautiful and unfortunately for me, so full of rare Mexico-only ingredients, not to mention pork and lard, that I don’t know if there’s much I can really cook from it. I’m scouring it now for possibilities, but in the meantime…

Friday afternoon was vegetable-shopping day again, because we go through good tomatoes like a pack of sharks after a swimmer’s leg, and unfortunately our own backyard gardening adventure is turning out to be more like the $50 tomato kind of thing. To make up for packing our daughter out with my husband on his errands all afternoon instead of on mine (because I desperately needed some time off for bad behavior), I decided to do a little better than the usual dinner. Of course, they had a decent time, and so did I. Gotta do that more often.

So while they were gone I stopped at my greengrocer and bought a ton of ripe tomatoes that actually have flavor at 99 cents a pound (we have one left), a couple of eggplants for 65 cents apiece, some tart green plums, and these Anaheim chiles, which were beautiful and at $1.19 a pound, cheaper than the bell peppers this time. If you’re not completely clued into eating with the seasons, sometimes the pricetag gives a gentle hint of how the growers are thinking about any given vegetable that week.

Normally I wouldn’t buy Anaheim chiles–they’re pretty mild, but still hotter than bell peppers, which we usually eat raw, and the chiles are really better cooked. But when I saw them, all I could think about was stuffing them with feta for a quick pick-me-up side dish to go with mahi mahi and rice.

Some stuffed chiles are authentically made with Anaheims, I was encouraged to find (thumbing through one of my two, count ’em, two copies of Kennedy’s first book). But the ones that make good-looking cookbook photos are made with pasilla or poblano chiles–darker green, plumper to hold more stuffing, and with thinner walls. Also a little hotter, and often soaked up from their dried form. Baked in tomato broth or else stuffed with meat picadillo, coated in egg, baked, and dressed with a walnut/sour cream sauce (chiles en nogado) with pomegranate seeds sprinkled on top–a Moroccan-origin dish, maybe, with that egg cloak and the pomegranate seeds?

The other thing Kennedy specifies is to char, bag-steam and peel the peppers before using them, which makes the egg cling a lot better and probably makes them a bit more digestible. Very classic, but let’s face it, with all this stuff, including the sauces: I’m not that good, and I’m kind of impatient. What I really wanted for supper was quick stuffed peppers, gooey on the inside but not so messy outside– so as to avoid wearing it. (A girl’s gotta know her limitations. Maybe next time, if I can find an oilcloth bib my size?)

I’m not so interested in long baking in tomato broth or soaking fresh walnuts in milk for the moment–maybe sometime when I want to get the whole dish together, because I’m sure it’s delicious, especially if someone else is making it and heating up their own kitchen in July. But right now, time is ticking, it’s nearly supper, and Beauty and the Beast are about to show up in the driveway (my husband is beautiful for taking on the Beast, even if he grumbles while doing it.)

So I’m definitely not about to char and peel the peppers–what a pain, plus to me it makes them kind of slimy and slithery and not what I want to eat. Unlike Tom Colicchio, who consistently makes a fuss about it on Top Chef, I don’t mind the fact that pepper skins have a little bitter alkaloid edge to them. It’s part of what makes them peppers, and it helps them keep their crunch.

And, of course, I’ve had the experience of walking into someone’s house when they’d just been charring peppers on the gas burner, and it smelled an awful lot like dope. Not lovely, and not at all like them.

So anyway, these are not proper chiles rellenos by any normal standard. They just taste good, they’re not slimy, and they don’t take more than 15 minutes tops. My kind of dish.

In addition to the usual feta and mozzarella, I still had a few half ears of leftover corn on the cob from my daughter’s birthday party last weekend. They were still good, but there weren’t enough to share out for supper, unless–well, corn and peppers also go together (usually as a soup, but why not here too?)

Aside: That was surprisingly one of the easiest celebration dinners I have ever put together in my life — pan-grilled salmon fillets, tomato/basil salad, raw vegetables with bleu cheese dip, and microwaved corn on the cob. I was going to make a cheesecake but decided at the last to buy a Trader Joe’s frozen one for expedience and served it with strawberries and blueberries. It was surprisingly good, inexpensive, and quite moderate on carbs and calories for commercial cheesecake. Of course, because my daughter’s friends are all about 11-13 years old, at least one couldn’t eat the corn due to braces but didn’t know how to shuck the kernels off with a knife, one immediately declared she wasn’t into vegetables (I was mellow enough to shrug and say it was fine), and one couldn’t hack cheesecake so I scrounged her up an impromptu dessert of chocolate bar and cinnamon grahams because we had literally nothing else in the house dessertwise. Oy. And they all stayed up till 4 am, but at least they were quiet and sneaky about it. My goals for a good sleepover.

So anyway, I had made 6 or 7 ears of corn, broken in halves, and steamed them in the microwave in a big pyrex bowl for about 8 minutes. The leftovers were fine reheated during the week with a drizzle of water on a plate in the microwave for 30 seconds or so. But I still had a couple and decided to use the kernels for the chile stuffing, and they were delicious.

Stuffed Anaheim Chiles with Cheese (specific amounts given for 3 chiles, because that’s what I made for us Friday and again on Sunday with new corn, so this actually works out, but you can and should scale up, obviously, and I wish I had made enough to serve them a second time without starting all over.)

  • Anaheim chiles, 1 or 2 per person
  • corn kernels (1 ear or about 1 c. kernels made enough for 3 chiles, generously stuffed)
  • feta cheese, crumbled (1-2 oz)
  • low-fat mozzarella, chopped fine (1 oz/stick)
  • finely chopped onion (1/4 med yellow onion)
  • garlic clove(s), grated/minced/mashed (1 med clove)
  • za’atar (wild thyme), thyme, oregano or sage, chopped or crumbled in if dry (to taste; I used 1 t. or so chopped fresh za’atar–do what looks and tastes right for your quantities)

Wash the chiles, cut off the cap and remove the seed core as best possible without splitting the flesh (rinse with water to get out the seeds way down inside). It’s not really a disaster if the pepper splits–just wrap it around the stuffing and press it together, more or less, but it looks prettier and handles better if you keep the pepper whole.

Microwave the peppers on an open plate 3-4 minutes to start them cooking. Mix all the other ingredients together well with your hands–it’ll be pretty moist and crumbly, but you want the garlic and onion well distributed. Cool the chiles just enough to handle. Stuff the chiles with the mixture by hand, pressing it in with your thumbs as you go to make sure  some filling reaches the tip end. Microwave again on HIGH on an open plate 3-4 minutes for 3 chiles, arranged with the tips  toward the middle of the plate and the wide stem end toward the outside, or maybe 5-6 minutes for 6, or until the peppers are getting tender and the cheese has melted.

Don’t forget to wash your hands well with soap after handling the chiles–I find that even though the Anaheims are mild-tasting, my fingers still get a little of the classic burning sensation as an aftereffect when I handle them.