MADE: Chocolate Raspberry Cake

Wednesday 16 September 2015Wednesday 16 September 2015 kristycakecakecake, Devin, food, home, recipesLeave a comment

On Wednesday, Devin asked, “How would you feel about hosting a birthday party on Saturday?”

And I said, “A birthday party?! For whom?”

He blushed and said, “Well…me.”

Oops.

In my defense, this was the day after I locked myself in the house because I couldn’t find my keys. Where did the keys finally turn up? My purse.

Right.

Clearly, I haven’t been at my brightest lately, but once I realized his birthday was Monday (that is, two days ago), I got excited, especially after he asked if I would make a cake. Contrary to what this post might suggest, I love celebrating Devin’s birthday. Last year we had a big brunch and then went roller-skating. One year I commissioned a piñata that was six feet tall. And the very first party we threw together was a ‘60s-themed birthday party for him.

At 20, I’d never baked a cake from scratch, but I had a vision of chocolate cakes in the shape of records, complete with grooves and those round LP labels on top. Luckily, I had a very generous friend named Alison who had baked me the best cake I’d ever had. That’s the cake I wanted to make for Devin, and Alison was so generous she even gave me the recipe.

The first time I baked it, it was really hard. I thought I would mess it all up, and every single one of my roommates had to help me (to bake and to stay calm), but in the end, we had record-shaped cakes, and everybody loved them.

This past Saturday I baked that cake again. I know I would have liked it for nostalgic reasons no matter what it tasted like, but I promise you, it tasted even better than I remembered. Plus, when I made it for the first time six years ago, Devin went to the store to get drinks and came back with the September issue for me. When I made it this year, Devin went out and came back with a piano. I’m sure my imaginary lawyers would totally advise against this, but I’ll just go ahead and say it: this cake is magic.

Chocolate Raspberry Cake with Chocolate Ganache Icing
(adapted from Vegan with a Vengeance by Isa Chandra Moskowitz)

Ingredients

* 1 1/2 cups all-purpose white flour
* 1/2 cup cocoa powder
* 1 teaspoon baking powder
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 2 1/4 cups soymilk (or another type of milk)
* 1/2 cup coconut oil (or another oil)
* 3/4 cup raspberry jam or preserves
* 2 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
* 1 1/4 cups sugar
* 6 tablespoons margarine (or buttery spread of your choice)
* 10 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chips (1 cup and 2 tablespoons)
* Optional: fresh raspberries or sprinkles to decorate the cake

Tools

* 1 or 2 cake pans (I used two 8-inch pie pans because we hadn’t finished unpacking our kitchen, and they worked perfectly. You could also use one slightly larger cake pan and make a single-tier cake)
* 1 small bowl
* 1 large bowl
* 1 medium pot

Directions

1. First, make the ganache icing. It sounds fancy, but it’s ridiculously easy! Bring ¾ cup of soymilk to a low boil in a medium pot. Add the margarine and let it melt. Then, turn off the heat and stir in chocolate chips until smooth. Let sit for at least one hour to thicken. At that point, it should be easy to pour over your cake.

2. Next, get your cake materials ready! Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, and grease your cake pan(s) with a little margarine or oil.

3. Mix your dry ingredients in a small bowl: flour, cocoa powder, baking power, baking soda, and salt.

4. Mix your wet ingredients in a large bowl: 1 ½ cups of soymilk, the coconut oil (make sure it’s liquid! If it’s solid, melt it in the microwave), ½ cup of the jam or preserves, the vanilla, and the sugar in a large bowl and mix. You can use an electric mixer or your muscles (I used just a fork and it worked perfectly). The jam should be mostly dissolved with the rest of the ingredients, but a few small clumps are okay.

5. Add the dry ingredients to the wet in batches and mix until everything is mixed together. If you’re going to use two pans, divide the batter between the prepared pans. Otherwise, pour it into one pan. Bake at 350F for 40-45 minutes, or until a toothpick or knife comes out clean. (I baked mine for exactly 41 minutes, so make sure you check it at 40!) Remove from oven and let cool in pans.

6. It’s time to put icing on the cake! When the cakes have cooled, spread one layer of cake with the rest of your raspberry jam or preserves. If you’re making a single-layer cake, just mix the raspberry jam with the chocolate ganache. The ganache should be the perfect consistency for pouring over the cake––my favorite way to spread icing on a cake because it’s easy and looks nice.

7. Decorate it to your liking! Raspberries on top look really pretty, but so would sprinkles or nothing at all––a chocolate cake is a thing of beauty on its own.

MADE: SUMMER WRAPS

Sunday 31 May 2015Saturday 26 September 2015 kristyfood, home, recipes2 Comments

I’ve been feeling pretty weird about sharing this recipe because I used collard greens, which have traditionally been used in African-American cuisine and have recently been aggressively marketed by Whole Foods in hopes of making them trendy and driving up the price. (Writer/feminist/activist Mikki Kendall aptly calls this “food gentrification.”)

So, before I tell you the recipe, I want to clarify that I am very much opposed to driving up prices and making fruits and vegetables even more inaccessible for low-income people and people of color around the world. The good news: you can use any kind of sturdy green for this recipe. I used collard greens because that’s what was sent in our local-food package that week, but I think lettuce or chard would be even more delicious!

The key thing for me is to eat as much fresh food as I can (it tastes better than canned or frozen stuff) and learn how to cook with what I have. Instead of buying into food trends, I think we should consider what’s best for our planet and our communities––if that seems hard to figure out, just buy what’s cheapest!

Summer Wraps

To make these wraps, you’ll need

• greens with big leaves (like chard, collard greens, or lettuce)
• meaty filling (like tempeh, tofu, or meat)
• assorted vegetables for topping (like caramelized onions, baby greens, and carrots)
• readymade barbecue sauce (OR ketchup, vinegar, maple syrup, and chipotle powder)

1.If you’re using lettuce, skip this step! If you’re using a green like chard or collard greens, start by blanching them. That way they won’t be so tough to eat, and they’ll have time to cool before you’re ready to eat them. Blanching basically means dunking vegetables into boiling water for a few seconds, but this recipe has good instructions if you need a reference.

2. Devin makes fantastic caramelized onions, but they take a while to cook, so you’ll want to start these early in the process, too. Here’s a recipe for reference.

3. We usually make our own barbecue sauce because it’s so much cheaper, especially since we have an endless supply of maple syrup from Devin’s family farm, but store-bought is just as good. If you’ve never made it before, take note: barbecue sauce is ridiculously easy to make, but you do need a little time for it to cook down. (The more you make, the longer it takes.)

Combine

1 cup ketchup
¼ cup vinegar (I usually use apple cider vinegar)
3 tablespoons maple syrup (you could also use honey or another sweetener)
½ teaspoon chipotle powder, a.k.a. my secret ingredient (I use it in everything!)

…and cook over low heat, stirring occasionally until it’s nice and thick (around 15-20 minutes).

4. Cook your “meat” of choice. Devin and I cut tempeh into thin slices and cooked it in a skillet with a little bit of oil, flipping the pieces once to make sure they got crispy on both sides. It took less than 10 minutes.

5. Chop your other veggies pretty small so that you can fit them into the wrap easily. We had baby greens (they were microgreens, I think) and carrots, so all I did was wash the baby greens and shred the carrots using a vegetable peeler.

6. Put out all your ingredients on the table, and let everyone make their own wrap. Make sure not to fill it too much, and roll it like a burrito.

It’s all easy, and you could make everything ahead of time to take for a picnic.

Happy summer!

MADE

Sunday 22 March 2015Monday 27 November 2017 kristyfood, home, recipes2 Comments

Confession: aside from writing and thinking up ways to disrupt the social order, cooking is my biggest hobby. I was pretty annoyed with myself when I realized that because it’s not exactly exciting. At all. I wish I were a painter or a drummer or even an electric racecar driver, but I’m not. I’m not even a chef, just a home cook who gets excited when her Crockpot soup tastes good. Is that worth sharing? I kept thinking about it and came up with two things:

Q: First of all, how lame is it that my hobby is something women were forced to do for generations?
A: SO LAME. My grandmother would not be impressed.

Q: On the other hand, how cool is it that my hobby involves preparing something that is necessary for human survival, saves me money, and helps me keep my friends alive, too?
A: That sounds better. I have to cook, so I might as well enjoy it, and actually, Devin almost always cooks with (and without) me, so in our house cooking isn’t “womyn’s work,” it’s a shared chore and one of our favorite things to do together. (I know my grandmother would be happy about this because she once told me that she thought American men were a little more feminist than Mexican men because they weren’t afraid of the kitchen.)

All that to say, I’m going to start sharing my favorite recipes here! Devin and I almost never make the same things two weeks in a row because every week we get a package of whatever fruits and vegetables are in season from Nextdoorganics, so we often find or make up new recipes. And all the food we make is seasonal and vegetarian, which sounds fancy, but is really code for cheap! My hope is that the recipes will be helpful or inspiring to someone.

And now, without further ado, I present unto you…last week’s lunch.

Salad with Roasted Beets, Israeli Couscous, and Orange

First you’ll want to peel, chop, and roast the beets because that takes the longest. We peeled and chopped about 10 beets (you could use any amount) into half-inch pieces while we preheated the oven to 400° Fahrenheit. Then, we spread them out in a glass pan and tossed them with some olive oil and a little salt before putting them in the oven. We cooked them for about an hour, stirring occasionally. If you’re cooking fewer beets, they won’t take as long. The number-one tip for roasting vegetables is to cut everything roughly the same size and cook it in one layer so it all cooks evenly. You’ll know they’re done when you can easily poke them with a fork.

Next you’ll want to make the grain. Devin and I happened to have Israeli couscous in our kitchen, but you could use any grain. Israeli couscous is really easy to cook because it’s not actually couscous. It’s just little balls of pasta, so if you can cook spaghetti, you can make this.

2 3/4 cups broth or salted water
2 1/4 cups Israeli couscous

Bring water to a boil and then pour in the Israeli couscous. Turn down the heat and simmer uncovered (check it every 5 minutes until it’s the consistency that you like your pasta; it took me less than 15 minutes).

Chop or tear whatever lettuce or greens you want with your salad. We used a small head of leafy lettuce. Then, chop the orange into bite sized pieces. You could also use any fruit. I calculate one half of a fruit per person because I love having a lot of fruit in my salad.

Finally, toss it all with your dressing of choice. I adapted this pomegranate vinaigrette (leaving out the oil and mustard) because we happened to have pomegranate molasses, but balsamic vinaigrette would also be really good. I tossed the dressing with the beets when they came out of the oven and poured more on my salad right before eating it.

I packed up all the ingredients separately to prevent sogginess then took them to work the next day. Ta-dah! It’s an easy, cheap salad if you make it at home, but a New York restaurant would probably charge more than $10 for something similar.

A Thanksgiving Recipe: Cranberry Sauce

Wednesday 26 November 2014Wednesday 26 November 2014 kristyfood, ThanksgivingLeave a comment

This morning I got permission to share my favorite Thanksgiving recipe from Nextdoorganics. Nextdoorganics is a local food subscription service that Devin and I get on a weekly basis. Aside from bringing us fresh organic fruits and vegetables from nearby farms (and New York City rooftops!), Nextdoorganics also sends weekly email newsletters with recipes, and maintains social media accounts, like this Pinterest, that make it easy to learn how to make new things. We love it because we can pay by the week and skip weeks when we’re out of town. We could also cancel at any time (but why would we want to?). It’s a great way to support local farmers for people who don’t have the funds or stability to join a CSA program.

Anyway, enough with the testimonial, let’s get to the food! Until last year, I’d never made cranberry sauce, but when we got cranberries in our Nextdoorganics package and I saw the recipe in the newsletter, I decided to give it a try. This year I couldn’t wait to make it again. It’s really easy, but the flavors are beautiful and complex. It’s a fancy food with minimal effort, a.k.a. my favorite kind. I like eating it with my Thanksgiving dinner and using it in sandwiches or as a jam for weeks afterward. It’s good with everything!

Classic Cranberry Sauce

12 ounces of fresh cranberries
1/4 cup light brown sugar
1/4 cup white sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup water
1 teaspoon orange zest
Juice from 1 orange (about 3 to 4 tablespoons)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated ginger
1 cinnamon stick
1 star anise

Instructions: Add all of the ingredients to a medium saucepan and place over medium-low heat. Simmer the mixture for 15-20 minutes, until the cranberries have burst and the sauce has reduced slightly. Give it a taste (be careful, it’ll be hot!) and adjust the seasonings. You may want it to be a bit sweeter. Remove the star anise and cinnamon stick and discard. Transfer to the refrigerator to chill. The cranberry sauce will thicken as it cools.

FRNDSGVNG MMXIV

Wednesday 26 November 2014Wednesday 26 November 2014 kristyfood, friends, New York, raccoons, ThanksgivingLeave a comment

On Sunday Devin and I hosted a last-minute Thanksgiving dinner. The food was great, but the best part was how many of our friends came with such short notice.

This is what our kitchen looked like before we started cooking. I think it might be the prettiest part of our apartment.

Here's all the food that came out of the kitchen. — Dining room table plus food!

About the food: I know Tofurky is controversial among vegetarians (not to mention everyone else!), but I am really partial to the way Devin makes it. He bastes, seasons, and roasts it with pride and precision. It is a whole production, much like baking a real bird might be, so it feels absolutely festive, and it tastes delicious, too! As for my contributions, I am most proud of helping make these rolls, little butternut squash tarts from a word-of-mouth recipe (not pictured), and my very favorite recipe for beets. I could go on and on about those beets with pomegranate and pistachios. At this point, I think I’ve made them for everyone I love.

Fun fact: we met all but one of the friends pictured above in college, in Portland (Oregon, not Maine). How cool is it that we all live in Brooklyn now? It’s kind of mind-boggling, actually. (Lauren, who we met in New York through Tasha who knows her from high school, might as well be an honorary Portlander because she’s been hanging out with us for three years and counting.) My advice for making friends when you move to New York is…don’t bother. Just bring all the friends you already have. ; )

In between dinner and dessert, we walked to Prospect Park, played American football by lamplight, and ran into a raccoon.

Then, we came home and had the most heavenly babka and pecan pie and many other treats I wish I were eating riiiight now.

The whole day was a good reminder for me that having to change your plans can turn out all right sometimes, especially if you have good friends who don’t mind changing theirs.

PANDEMONIUM!

Sunday 5 October 2014Sunday 5 October 2014 kristyDevin, food, hijinks5 Comments

Yesterday after we made and put away a big batch of soup (pictured above), Devin yelled, ” Oh no! We’re going to have to make another soup! We have a giant leak!” Pandemonium ensued.

Only he actually said, “Oh no! We’re going to have to make another soup! We have a giant leek!,” which is a vegetable in the same genus as onion and garlic, commonly eaten in soups.

Let this be a reminder to all of you, lest a dramatic person in your life cry at the thought of mopping: it is important, when using homophones, to provide ample context for your audience.

Pie-iversary

Saturday 31 August 2013 kristyDevin, food, loooove, pie7 Comments

Shepherd's pie and blueberry pie — Shepherd’s pie and blueberry pie

Last weekend Devin and I celebrated our fifth pie-iversary. A pie-iversary is a holiday that desperately needs a new name (suggestions?). I made it up because in 2008 Devin single-handedly baked me two pies—the single-handed thing is not hyperbole; he’d just had surgery on his right wrist, so he could only use his left hand. Incidentally, he’s right-handed. He biked the pies over in the rain with a plastic bag over his cast and a kettle of tea in his backpack.

Since then, he’s done at least a hundred similar things. We joke that his motto is, ‘Go big or go bigger’ because his gifts and projects are always like this: thoughtful and ambitious. There was nothing else significant about that day. Neither of us remember if we even ate any pie together, but somehow the date has always stuck with me; and every year I try to celebrate it. Usually I do something sneaky to avoid having to bake (the biggest stretch was buying him a pint of Boston Cream Pie flavored ice cream), but this year I felt like making the real deal.

I modified this recipe for blueberry pie and this one for shepherd’s pie. Shepherd’s pie is a cheater’s pie because you can cook all of it on the stove (hooray!), but we stuck it in the oven for a little bit to give the top layer of mashed potatoes a little crisp, and I made a heart out of fresh sage from our CSA. Our four year-old neighbor heard we were making dessert and decided to come over for dinner. She discovered that she loves ‘chicken-peas’ (chickpeas). Devin and I discovered that I can bake. It was a two-course pie meal enjoyed by all!

Trader Harry*

Thursday 7 February 2013Wednesday 9 September 2015 kristycheese, food, grapes, New York, rambles, steak, Trader Joe's5 Comments

Tonight I went to Trader Joe’s (boy, do I wish this were a sponsored post. It’s not).

First, I made an enemy of the girl with fuchsia lipstick because I stopped in my tracks to compliment her. She gave me such a LOOK that I didn’t even get to tell her that the reason I stopped is that her lipstick looked awesome, and that outfit was on-point, and it takes a very special person to pull off fuchsia. Fuchsia Girl, if you are reading, please know I didn’t mean to block your access to the hummus! I would never do that!

I was disappointed because the sample food was deep-dish pepperoni pizza. I remembered that at my Trader Joe’s in Portland, the employees would always have vegan/vegetarian snacks on-hand whenever they served meat samples. But this is New York, and in New York, you can give out any kind of sample and people will eat it. So probably these Traders don’t even know how many people they alienated with that pepperoni. Also, they almost certainly don’t care. But it’s okay because we’re all too busy becoming what dreams are made of to get hung up on these things, right?

At this Trader Joe’s you have to get in a line that loops around the store, next to a Trader holding an “END OF LINE” flag. Then, you wait to get sorted into three lanes to be further directed to one of the thirty cash registers. The three lanes each have a flag above them: one is a bunch of grapes, one is a wedge of cheese, and one is a steak. I don’t really like waiting in line, especially because you always get jostled by people who are still shopping, and I get worried that they are going to try to cut after they grab that tub of yogurt (so far nobody has cut in front of me, so let’s all have faith in humanity). But when I get to the front I get excited about being sorted, and I pretend the classification has some deeper meaning.

If I get grapes, I try—but fail—to remember when they are in season and send happy vibes to the United Farm Workers, Dolores Huerta, and César Chavez.

If I get cheese, I smile because it reminds me of how much I love Devin and cheesehead hats.

If I get steak, I remember how medium-rare steak was my favorite food when I was ten and how cool it is that my mom didn’t make me order from the kids’ menu if I didn’t feel like it.

Tonight I got steak and was sent to register 26.

At register 26 I impressed Trader Harry* with my most prized possession:

Harry loves NPR, like me, but his favorite show is ‘The Takeaway’, which is one of the few shows I have never heard. He scoffs at ‘Morning Edition’ and ‘All Things Considered’ because ‘they just don’t compare’.

Harry has a girlfriend who tap-dances, and when he talks about her, his face lights up.

Harry makes sure you get entered in the raffle for free groceries if you bring your own bag.

Harry guesses I always buy more groceries than I can comfortably carry because of a number of things: ‘the quality of the food, the prices––you know you’re getting a good deal, so it’s worth the sacrifice’.

Harry knows that the official closing time of his store is 10 PM. But he let me in on a little secret, and if you read all of this, you deserve to know it, too:

If you get there at 9:55, you can take your time and shop in peace!

Reporting live from a city where you need a strategy to buy groceries,
kristy

*Not his real name.