Gluten Free Brownies

Last night was movie night at some friends' house.  There were gluten intolerant people there; they made Trader Joe's gluten-free brownies.  The batter needed to be patted into the pan instead of being poured.  It smelled like rice instead of chocolate.  The result was not completely inedible - we ate occasional spoonfuls in a meditative way and said "This isn't terrible?" and "You can really taste the rice.  Yes." while waiting for the movie to be less horrifying.  Then we went out for ice cream.

I looked up the mix on the internet: the reviews are "not great and I wish I could eat gluten" and "pretty good if you replace the oil with applesauce - no pictures included." Well.

So today I made gluten free brownies because I was certain I could do better.  You guys know about me feeling certain - you usually hear about it under the heading "Bad Idea Fridays".  (Spoilers: look up at the title.  This turned out to not be a bad idea.)

You should make these!  Gluten intolerant people are nice, and if you're going to trick them into becoming your friends you'll need something other than creme anglaise and fruit for dessert.  Also they are damn good brownies, thank you, I am a genius, make the brownies.  Look at the recipe and say "no, actually, that looks pretty good" and then make them and serve them with whipped cream.  If people are allergic to something besides gluten, well, there are eggs and milk and tree nuts in here, so be careful.  I'm sure you could replace the milk products - and maybe the tree nuts, somehow - but the eggs are essential.

So!
Melt 5 ounces of good dark chocolate - I use the microwave in ten second bursts punctuated by brisk stirring.  If you don't stir, it may burn.  There is no recovering from burned chocolate.

Once it's 75% melted and very very stirred, add a stick of butter and continue brief microwaving punctuated by lots of stirring.  You'll end up with a bowl full of glossy chocolate.  It's beautiful.  It's worth eating on its own.

If you don't have almond flour or other nut flours on hand, dump about a cup and a half of almonds or hazelnuts into a food processor and reduce them to cous-cous sized bits or smaller.  You'll need one cup of nut flour, loosely packed.

Break four cold eggs into a big bowl and add a generous pinch of salt.  Whip these eggs without mercy for A MILLION YEARS.  Whip them until they are foamy and pale - at least a full five minutes of staring into space, holding a whisking machine or whisking madly.

Add one and a half cups of sugar - whisk until combined.  Add the now cool-enough-to-not-cook-the-eggs butter and chocolate mixture - and a teaspoon of vanilla - whisk, damn you, whisk like the wind! Add one cup of nut flour.  Whisk until combined.  Pour into a 9x9 buttered pan.  Sprinkle the surface with kosher salt.

Throw that into a 350 degree oven for 45 minutes.  Is the center still liquid?  Does it rock when you tilt the pan?  Give it another ten minutes.  Foam from the eggs and chocolate form a high pale crust - don't listen to that when it says the brownies are done, pay attention to how the weight shifts in the pan - you're waiting for the moment when the weight doesn't shift. When that moment comes, take it out of the oven.  If it turns out to still be liquid, put it back in for a while.  It's fine.

If you let it cool, you'll be able to slice it neatly.  I did not let it cool because I wanted to know if it was terrible.  It was not.  It was quite good.  The high pale crust? It's brittle and crunchy and amazing, and the brownies are dense and fudgey and amazing, and I am brilliant.  Yes.

Parsley

I've been eating a lot of parsley.

"Oh" you say, "Parsley is technically a food, I guess.  Parsley, huh?"

I have!  It's good!  You get a great crisp bunch and pick off about a cup of the best leaves.  You mix those leaves with your best oils and some very finely chopped onion or shallot and maybe a bit of orange or pear or sugar pea or artichoke heart and a dash of lemon juice and some salt and pepper and probably some cilantro or mint or shiso leaves: parsley salad.  Absurdly good.

Two days later it's too limp for salads, so you chop it finely with onion and lemon and oil and salt and pepper and actual peppers, perhaps, and probably whatever other herbs you used two days ago and you have a gremolata which is a nice thing to put on your avocado salad, your avocados on toast, your poached eggs on toast, or your poached eggs on lentils.  All of them are things I eat when I'm too tired to really cook - but this is a fancy dinner, don't you see the gremolata?

At the end of the parsley lifespan, you have several choices.  You can make more pesto, if your husband didn't ask you to stop making pesto, please, let's just eat all the pesto in the freezer first.  You can chop it and flick it over things to give them visual appeal.  You can substitute parsley for celery in mire poix because you aren't buying celery for a while since the time you found five rotting heads of celery in your fridge.  You can chop it up and make tabouli and then forget to photograph it until you're almost done eating because tabouli is delicious.  Parsley is delicious.  It tastes great.

Or you could throw it out.  Parsley is like a dollar.

2:4:1 Soup

We accidentally joined a CSA because the salesperson was very polite - and it isn't like I'm going to go to fewer farmers' markets - so there is a surfeit of produce around.  Produce is like colostrum - you end up using the freshest stuff first - so the old stuff was starting to get disreputable.

But then I found this blog post!  One takes two cups of broth, four cups of chopped raw vegetable, and one cup of dairy.  One simmers the vegetable in the broth, purees it, and then stirs in the dairy product.  It sounds good, right?  And it's technically a lunch if it's soup.

So I made my first soup - something I like to call "Ahahaha, hahahaha, mwahahaha, Vitamin A!" soup.  I like vitamin A.  Vitamin A makes you pretty: science agrees. (PLOS ONE, I know, I know, how the mighty have sunk.)

I used;
Two cups of chicken broth
One cup of roasted bell peppers that were hanging around the fridge
One cup of carrots, also mouldering in the fridge
One and a half cups of sweet potato - both orange and purple, because that is what was in the fridge.
One half cup of roasted garlic, because it was adjacent to the roasted peppers.

I cooked the carrots and sweet potatoes until soft first, and then added the garlic and peppers.  I threw the resulting mess into a food processor with some vandouvan - about a teaspoon - and pureed it.  (I think an immersion blender or a potato ricer would have been a better idea.)  I threw it back into the pan and added 2/3 cup milk and 1/3 cup yogurt, because I realized I had some yogurt that had not yet gone bad.

See how slapdash that is?  It's ridiculous.  AND IT'S AMAZING.  I have been eating it for every reasonable meal since.

Being that the first soup worked out so well, I sauteed two cups of chopped onion until a bit caramelized, and then added broth and two cups of broccoli.  I cooked that until the broccoli was tender - which honestly would be a lot easier had the broccoli not been sad, dessicated and wilted broccoli, contemplating its salad days in the bottom of the badly-named crisper.  I also added a half cup of cooked brown rice in a generous "this needs eating" spirit.  Puree with a generous spoonful of mustard - because I like mustard - and add basically all yogurt, where was all this yogurt hiding?

And that is also very good.  It could be sourer.

My next plans are tomato and onion, leek and parsley, maybe kale and potato - I will be eating soups until it is completely unseasonable.

Paleo car-camping

It's easier to eat paleo while camping because the store and the place that sells ice cream are far away, and the food is right here.  However, if you underpack, or think that maybe a lower number of calories is fine, you'll end up weeping unconsolably on the side of a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, too hungry to make good decisions.  Don't short yourself, especially if you're going to hike or climb or paddle.  For reference, this is food that I eat while doing field work - hiking 6-10 hours a day with a light pack, and then car camping at night.  It would also work for river rafting - although it might not meet the high culinary standards of rafters - or pack animal camping or car camping like a normal person with normal desires vis a vis digging cat holes (no) and sleeping on some sort of mattress (yes).

I do not understand how long distance backpackers feed themselves - I think y'all are basically John Muir, and that you just take two loaves of bread and a pound each of bacon and tea, and then three months later you're back, covered with welts and abscesses and less thirty pounds of muscle.  Thus, some of this stuff is heavy, and some of it requires a cooler.

If you say glamping, I will give you the look.

And for my actual regular readers, the lovely people who know me in real life and observe me eating wheat and legumes and pretty much all of the dairy, and of whom there are several who hate the idea of paleo from the depths of their souls, well...  this is how I eat when I'm working, because blood sugar crashes are a lot harder to fix out there and weeping is a bad career choice, paleo cooking blogs have the best vegetable recipes, really truly, the best, and one of you told me that acorns were edible.  I think that you can take deep breaths and control your impulses to expound on what people in the Paleolithic actually ate (spoiler, in California it was acorns) for the length of this blog post as penance for that indignity.

So, paleo camping: I give instructions for one person because C hates camping for fun, and when we do it I have to promise him bread.  Also, I camp for work, so often it is just food that exists to please me and no-one else.

Do not forget to bring
Salt (I use a 50%-50% mixture of potassium salt and regular salt, but I also drink like a million liters of water a day.)
Fat (You might think that olive oil or nut oil is the right choice here, but it's lard or clarified butter.  Oils will inevitably spill in transit, somehow.  Everything will be covered with oil.  You will have to sponge oil off of everything in your kitchen - and possibly some parts of the car, or whatever the kitchen was on top of {put the kitchen on the bottom of the things} with cold water and an improvised rag.  Bring solid fats, because even if they melt, they won't go far.)
Sponge, soap.  (So that when you don't listen to me and bring oil, you can at least clean it up effectively.  Also so you don't die of food poisoning from not washing your plate.)
Cutting board. (It can be tiny, but you want one.)
Knife that is only for food. (I carry a knife that is for cutting rope and branches and taking plant samples and whatever else.  You need a knife that is only used for food, because you eat food, and some of the things you cut with your pocket knife are not edible.  Also, some of the things you cut with a pocket knife make a pocket knife dull.  Also pocket knives are not good for chopping things with.)
Cast iron pan (Frying things in aluminum is an exercise in self-loathing)
Onion, Garlic, Ginger, Lemon (You might hit a point where you desire culinary experimentation.  Having these ingredients around will make this possible.)
Salt tabs (It is hot and you are working.  Please not to dehydrate, it will ruin your tomorrow.)

Breakfast: I fry nuts and seeds in butter or lard.  You could add dried fruit - it's quite good - and a generous sprinkling of salt.  I melt the fat, and then add a handful of almonds, stir, wait a minute, add a handful of hazelnuts, stir, wait a minute, add a handful of pumpkin seeds, stir, wait a minute, and then add a handful of sesame and flax seeds - with the dried fruit.  I sprinkle it with salt, and there, breakfast.  I suggest eating it with a spoon, because using your hands is greasy, and using a mug gives the impression that you're gargling almonds and looks pretty gross.

I also drink three cups of hot liquid that might include caffeine.  If you are addicted to caffeine, don't go cold turkey while planning to run around all day.  Also don't bring inadequate substitutes for your cherished daily ritual.  You can bring different or superior substitutes - but if you drink something handcrafted and beautiful every morning, don't lie to yourself and slam some Via packages.  Tea is fine.  Also fine; hot water with lemon and glaring.  Mint tea.  Basil tea.  Glaring.  Whatever facial expression you have is fine, as long as you are getting a jump on hydration.

Lunch: Possibly because I eat oil fried in fat for breakfast, I don't eat a lot of lunch.  I keep snacks on me - more seeds!  Dried fruit!  Jerky!  Food bars! - both because I've gotten lost and because eating a little food breaks bad decision trees and helps encourage me to do difficult things.  (Difficult: accepting that the car is not down the road I've been walking on for 45 minutes, and I have to go limp back to where I started and find it from there.  Going and checking out that meadow even though the day is almost over and I'm tired.  Explaining how the GPS works again.)  I also carry a lot of water and some iodine tablets in case I get very lost.

Here are some suggestions, though: Sardines in olive oil with onions and mustard - make lettuce wraps or spoon into your face.  Wrap the can in plastic when you're done because it is candy for raccoons and bears.  (Are "sardines in olive oil" packed in real olive oil?  I don't know.  Hazelnut oil is a common substitute, so tell yourself it's that.)  Sometimes I make a trail mix that is basically two squares of very dark chocolate, almonds, hazelnuts, dates, and dried cherries and dried coconut.  Dates are amazing - they are the food God gave us so we could walk up hills at 5pm.  Lastly, hard boiled eggs are nice - bring salt - and so are apples and peach slices and carrots and baby tomatoes and I'm sure you can figure out how to make a lovely picnic lunch.

Supper: I eat eggs.  I eat the eggs from my egg dude that aren't pressure-washed, so they're fine at non-ideal temperatures for a few days.  Find someone who has backyard chickens, and then buy enough eggs so that you'll have 3-4 a day.  I fry them, and then I put them on pre-cooked lentils because I love lentils.  You could eat a little rice that you cook before you go - egg fried rice with garlic and ginger and a little shiitake mushroom is amazing - or roast some sweet potatoes in advance and then fry them up and put eggs on them.  I also have kale or collards - fried, yes, of course - with lemon, and sometimes tomatoes, either salted and popped directly into my mouth or sliced in half and fried.  I've also done hash browns, for those of you who eat white potatoes.  This is super good with a quick salsa - tomato, onion, cilantro - and a half an avocado and some sort of hot sauce.

Things you could do, but I don't do for various reasons (because I'm tired.  I've been walking all day.)
Make stew at home, freeze it, and then eat it on the second day because it helps keep everything else cold: an excellent idea if you happened to make stew before going out.  You could cook sausage or bacon in advance and then make stir fries (SO MUCH CHOPPING) - but be careful to use enough ice, because things chopped into stir-fry sizes go bad quickly, and chopping things for stir-fries while starving is awful.  You could also do this with other meats - you could bring steaks for all I care, and then fry some asparagus in fat and maybe make OH MY GOD, IT'S BEEN LIKE TWENTY MINUTES, I WILL EAT THE STEAK RAW.

Bring something to sip in the evenings - for me it's more mint or tulsi tea, because hydration is essential! - and maybe something to nibble on - dried figs are good, and I can't upsell dried Bing cherries enough, and of course very dark chocolate and maybe some nuts - macadamia nuts? Or even a small slice of Parmesan cheese.  The idea being that you eat very small servings of delicious things, and if you start not savoring them but instead shoveling them into your mouth, you should have another sweet potato or an egg; you are still hungry.  You may have not been hungry earlier because you were still dehydrated. For very bad days, I always have a can of broth that I drink - sometimes with an egg, sometimes not - as I baby myself back to being a functional human.

Wash your dishes before you go to bed: there are bears and raccoons, and I doubt having them lick your bowl clean is sanitary.  Also once they are at your campsite, they'll find something to eat.

S'mores: S'mores are disgusting, but it takes a while to figure that out.  I forget about once every three years.  What you want - and lord, it's not strictly paleo compliant, but you can see I don't really care - is plain mochi, cut into marshmallow-sized pieces and boiled for five minutes, and then neatly wrapped with raw bacon.  You can fry it in your pan - look, I'm not crazy about campfires either - or hold it on a stick over a campfire.  It's gooey and melty and generally amazing.

If you are with very small campers who are not sold on this whole paleo thing, you can avoid the campfire on tough nights by putting the ingredients inside a tortilla and toasting it quickly.

There.  That is how I camp, unless I am with my spouse.  On these occasions, there is a lot more bread.

Thanksgiving Sides.

Two years ago, we were making Thanksgiving dinner when we discovered that one of my cousins didn't eat pork. We had to do a last minute menu overhaul because other than the salad and the cranberry sauce, there was precious little that was pork-free.

And that was while I was writing things here! This year, my mother invited two chicken-broth vegans, and we looked at the menu, shrugged, and left it as it was. There are going to be like five vegan dishes, seven if I get to count each kind of cranberry sauce and the turkey-basted stuffing. I don't know what happened to us.

 I hear this pie is not terrible, by the way. And seriously, cranberry sauce is two cups of cranberries (that is how big the packages are), like a quarter cup of sugar, and then like half a cup of port or orange juice or white wine or water or cranberry juice and maybe some cloves or lemon peel, your choice. Either you cook it together on the stove top for fifteen minutes - until all the berries burst - or you whirl it around in the food processor until it's a relish. Test the sugar, because I'm not good at remembering how much sugar goes in - it's totally fine to add more sugar at the end. Don't use the cloves if it's going in the food processor.

I am going to give you three quick vegetable sides, because I'm Californian and vegetable sides are the things that give you strength to eat more of the starches. None of them require oven time at the last minute, which is good, because otherwise I'd tell you to make this. They're all fine cold, or reheated in a microwave, or whatever.  

Green Beans with Pesto. Buy one and a half pounds of green beans. Good ones, mind you. Beautiful beans. Start a pot of water boiling - like a liter. I always hate boiling too much or too little water. A liter of water. Snap the stems and ends off of the beans, slice or snap them into 1 inch pieces, and throw them into the boiling water. Stare at them for about one minute, and then start fishing them out with a fork and tasting them to see if they're done enough. C likes things basically boiled yellow (a full minute in hot water), while I like them a reasonable amount of done (raw), so figure out what other people you are feeding also want to eat. The savages. When they are still bright green - look, like two minutes - dump the whole thing into a strainer and then run cold water over them. Take one half cup pesto - cilantro would be best, and kale would be worst. I've been making a lot of broccoli pesto lately; do not put broccoli pesto on green beans. Basil or parsley is good though. Take the pesto and juice from one half lemon and stir with the green beans in a mixing bowl. Taste. Did I lie about the amount of pesto? Does it need salt? Adjust. Put in the fridge.  

Broccoli Rabe with Red Bell Peppers and Garlic
I finally got Laurie Colwin's cookbook, and reading it after reading many other cookbooks is like reading Shakespeare after reading the rest of western literature. So many weird hang-ups and quirks make sense now! The fried chicken that makes people sing, the black cake, the low-key tea party for forty - all these weird tropes have a root! Anyway, the cookbook is lovely to read, if not particularly well tested. She does make the point that if someone does not like broccoli rabe, this recipe will not change that. She also suggests it be served hot. She is wrong. C does not like broccoli rabe much, and the entire dish is vastly superior when eaten cold off his plate. You can skip the spouse step and just let it sit out while you carve things and fuss.

Right. Take two red bell peppers and five cloves of garlic - get rid of the seeds and stems and garlic skins. Mince the garlic and dice the pepper. Saute both in half a cup of olive oil until the garlic is a little soft. Add a bit of salt. Take two pounds broccoli rabe, chop into bite-sized pieces, and blanch in boiling water - for like four minutes, until bright green. Drain the rabe and throw into the garlic/pepper pan. Continue to heat gently for two-odd minutes - until you've stirred the garlicky oild into basically everything. Let sit for at least half an hour, and maybe add a little lemon juice. It's better cold. It's no-leftovers-because-I-eat-it-out-of-the-pan-while-doing-dishes better. It's usually-I-leave-dishes-to-the-next-day,-but-this-is-worth-being-prompt better.  

Brussels Sprouts with bread crumbs
This was the winner of the birthday dinner for mother-in-law eight vegetable dish round robin; I still get carried away about in-law meal prep.  But it's good!  It's "pretend it's an old family recipe" good!

Take two pounds of Brussels sprouts and remove the tough outer leaves and bases. Cut into thin slices lengthwise- the recipe that this is very loosely based on suggested a mandoline, but those things are death traps. Like four slices per sprout. If you cut them in half crossways too, it works better. Blanch them! In boiling water! For two minutes! It's a trend! Dress with 1/4 cup olive oil, juice from one lemon, and a tablespoon, tablespoon and a half of soy sauce. Garnish generously with bread crumbs fried in duck fat or olive oil - it's good how or cold. 

Did you know the best way I've found to get bread crumbs from stale French bread is to put the bread in a plastic bag and hit is with a hammer? People say "food processor" or "chop it roughly", but when bread is not so stale that puny mortal engines and knives repel it, C eats it. C likes bread. Hammer, guys. It's relaxing, and if you're seen doing it, people treat you with more respect, somehow.

So there: three solid side dishes which involve blanching, and lemon juice, and olive oil, if you count the stuff in the pesto. I am a little set in my ways. My delicious, oily ways.

Maddeningly Simple Panna Cotta

This recipe goes out to my loyal readers who have just regained the ability to refrigerate things and spent today paddling boats further than I drove. Put one cup heavy cream and 1/4 cup white sugar in a saucepan. Heat gently while stirring to dissolve the sugar. Once sugar is dissolved, boil for five minutes. Do not let boil over. Remove from heat. Add 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract or 1 tsp grated ginger with 1/2 tsp vanilla extract or 3 tbs. lemon juice or nothing at all. Stir to combine. Pour into 3 ramekins. Chill for two hours. Serve with fruit. It's a perfect creamy dessert! C has allowed me several spoonfuls while eating them all.

Regaining Balance after the Momofuku Pork Belly

So you take a couple of pounds of pork belly, you rub it all over with a mixture of even parts salt and sugar, and you throw it into a 500 degree oven for an hour, followed by an hour at 200 degrees. Then you slice it, slap it into a steamed bun, and serve it with quick pickles and hoisin sauce. You have guests, because this is a lot of pork, but by then end of the night you feel... you feel like you just ate all of the saturated fat in the world. All of it. Even your thoughts feel greasy.

So you eat nothing but lentils and greens for a week, and do not even feel deprived.

Now you have the last few slices of belly, and about four cups of beautiful rendered fat. You may have even saved a half cup of soy sauce colored drippings. What are you going to do with this bounty?

Use it to make vegetables wonderful. Obviously.

Why yes, you could skip the beautiful greasy belly part and just use bacon and bacon fat.

So! Take the tough outer leaves and dry base off of about twelve brussels sprouts, and then quarter them lengthwise. Microwave them for a minute. Chop up a bacon slice sized piece of pork belly. Heat a cast iron pan so that it's quite hot. Add a teaspoon of pork fat. Let melt. Add the belly. Stir. Add the sprouts. Stir. Cook for about three minutes, tasting occasionally. Season with salt, Sriracha, or lemon juice. (Oh, or kimchi! That would be awesome!)

Cut two heads of broccoli into florets. Repeat the chopped slice of belly, hot pan, dab of pork fat plan from the above recipe. Stir fry the broccoli until just tender. Drizzle about a tablespoon of the pork pan drippings and eat. (Hunched over the dish, on the sofa, ignoring the rest of the meal.)

Microwave about half a pound of potatoes for three minutes. Place three tablespoons of pork fat into a cast iron pan. Quarter the potatoes and put them in the pan cut side down. Cook in a 450 degree oven for fifteen-twenty minutes. Prepare a decoy starch to distract your spouse. Laugh maniacally.

The pan will always be very hot. At no point should you remove the pan from a heat source with a potholder and then transfer the still hot pan to your unprotected hand. I just thought I should mention this. In case.