Macaroon Tart

The Macaroon Tart from Super Natural Every Day is a simple sweet treat that will please anyone who loves coconut.  A buttery tart base packed with coconut flakes is topped with a layer of blackberries and snowy macaroon tufts that turn a delicious golden brown when baked.  Chopped pistachios provide a beautiful color contrast to the purple blackberries.

I made this for my grandma's birthday and then again for Mother's Day, and it was a huge hit both times.  The first time, I lazily opted not to halve the blackberries, instead scattering them over the tart.  This was a mistake because they should have been in a layer covering the entire tart base, to ensure that every bite contained some blackberry goodness.  I fixed this the second time around and I feel that it was worth the extra step.  Even with the tedious task of halving tons of tiny berries, this is still quite a quick dessert.  A few extra notes: the pistachios don't shine here in terms of flavor, but are visually crucial to the dish, and in place of a tart pan I used a medium bar pan (stoneware).  I may try coconut oil in place of the butter next time - it seems like an appropriate substitution.

Honey Whole Wheat Cornbread

As the weather gets warmer, it's time to start emptying the freezer.  There's an awful lot of chili in there, so in keeping with this month's Melissa Clark theme, I made Honey Whole Wheat Cornbread to encourage chili-eating in the household.

Some of Melissa Clark's recipes could be considered healthy, but this isn't one of them.  You are instructed to mix a whole stick of melted unsalted butter into your cornbread batter (I scaled it back to 6 tablespoons and I believe I could have done away with it a bit more).  She also calls for sour cream, which I substituted yogurt for, cutting down on the calorie count.  I love that this recipe is baked in a cast iron skillet, after melting and swirling the butter around in it - the cornbread pulls away from the sides of the skillet as it cooks and doesn't stick at all.

The book also contains a handful of salad recipes, which I intend to try over the next few weeks.  After a nice dinner at Frog & Peach, where I had a perfectly cooked piece of salmon atop a bed of mixed citrus and thinly sliced fennel with herbs, I am looking forward to trying an orange/fennel salad from Cook This Now - hopefully I will be writing about that in the coming days.

Oatcakes

I finally got around to making the Oatcakes from Super Natural Every Day.  Ken wanted a muffin to bring to a work holiday celebration breakfast potluck thing.  I was looking for something that I had all the ingredients to make (and that I would want to eat) and settled on these.  With all the butter in them, of course they were delicious, they were chewy and hearty, like eating a really sweet bowl of oatmeal.  I want to try making these again, but I intend to health them up a little to make them a more appropriate breakfast option.

Starting tomorrow, January 2nd, I'm going to try the Whole Living Magazine's 21-day (or 28-day if you're feeling ambitious) detox plan.  So I will be posting mostly about that, and I won't get to try too many of the recipes I've been flagging lately - but I know it's only a temporary thing, and I think it will make me feel a lot better after all the sugar and junk I've been eating lately.

Cornmeal Pancakes with Warm Cherry Sauce

The featured cookbook right now is Ancient Grains for Modern Meals, which I bought a few months ago.  I haven't made too much from this book, but I flagged a few to try over the next few weeks while it's being featured.

Today I decided on the Cornmeal Pancakes with Warm Cherry Sauce.  Why?  I wanted breakfast, and I had a bag of cherries in the fridge that were hanging on by a thread and I didn't want them to go to waste.  Plus I love things with cornmeal.  I had a great cornbread french toast once at the place we sometimes go to brunch on the weekends - I'll have to remember to recreate that sometime.  So I decided to make the cornmeal pancakes.

They really came out great.  I enjoyed them as well as the warm cherry sauce.  I halved each cherry to remove the pit (with all my kitchen gadgets, I surprisingly do not own a cherry pitter) and cooked them with honey, orange zest, and cloves to make a delicious sauce, thickened with a bit of cornstarch.  I multiplied the recipe by 1.5 because I had 3 cups of cherries instead of 2 to use.  I have about 2 cups left that we'll have to find another use for (cherry yogurt maybe?) but I'm not too worried about that.

I didn't have any buttermilk, so I used yogurt thinned out a bit in its place.  I think it worked out just fine - I didn't notice any significant difference, but I would also like to try it as written.  I would also love to try the cornmeal pancakes with blueberries.  In fact, I could see making a similar kind of sauce with blueberries... maybe with some cinnamon instead of cloves and lemon instead of orange zest... yum!

Oatmeal Muffins

I was eating muesli every day for a while, so for a few months, I was buying the 32 oz containers of yogurt.  I bought one a few weeks ago and never got around to opening it - I guess that's around when I started eating omelets for breakfast.  So I need to use up this yogurt over the next few days, and I went searching for some easy recipes.  I decided to adapt Heidi's Oatmeal Muffins.  Instead of the all-purpose flour, I used 100 g Multigrain Flour Mix (from Good to the Grain).  Besides that, I used 100 g unsalted butter instead of 200 g, plus 1/2 cup (one individual package) of unsweetened applesauce.  I sprinkled a bit of cinnamon sugar on top because I didn't feel like making the crumble.  It came out pretty good - definitely moist - but very dense.  If you like eating oatmeal, though, you'll probably like it.  I'm interested to find out how the original version tastes, but it was fun to kind of wing it and use up some of the miscellaneous ingredients I have lying around.  It could easily be adapted many different ways so I will probably use this recipe as a base again in the future.

Chocolate Chip Skillet Cookie

Last week I was craving sweets.  I thought about making the Mesquite Chocolate Chip Cookies, but I didn't feel like doing all that work.  Immediately I remembered Heidi posting a whole wheat cookie recipe that she baked in a skillet.  I looked up the recipe, saw that I had all the ingredients, and got to work.

I used (obviously) my Le Creuset cast iron skillet, which was not as deep as Heidi recommended.  I used less of the dough to compensate, but I'm not exactly sure how much, since I ate bits of it while I worked.  For future reference, though, my cookie did not puff up beyond the edges of the pan or even close, and I think I could have included most, if not all, of the dough when I baked it.  I used a few tablespoons less butter than the recipe called for and I did not notice any difference - it's always nice to shave off a few calories from any recipe.

This was a big hit with my coworkers, and Ken's coworkers loved them too.  My mom hid the leftovers to keep for herself.  Some of the comments that I got were that the whole wheat changed the texture in a good way, making it more dense and satisfying, and that the cookies were not too sweet like many cookies can be.

Heidi's Multigrain Pancakes

It's been a while since we've really cooked.  I find it easier to feel motivated in the beginning of the day, so I went with breakfast.  Heidi's Multigrain Pancakes from Super Natural Every Day - served with fresh local strawberries, sliced.  The leftover whole wheat, oat, and rye buttermilk batter made us a few Monday morning waffles.

Ricotta Pancakes

I've been neglecting the current featured cookbook on the 101 Cookbooks Library -  Breakfast, Lunch, Tea: The Many Little Meals of Rose Bakery.  In addition to my regular everyday busy schedule, I've been making things from the NY Times Recipes for Health and from Super Natural Cooking, and now Super Natural Every Day.  But I bought some fresh ricotta last weekend specifically for this recipe, and I fully intended to try it!

I made two adaptations to the recipe.  First, I added one tablespoon of sugar because I wanted just a bit of sweetness to it.  Also, I ran out of all-purpose flour, which I didn't mind because I didn't want to use all AP flour anyway, but I substituted 25 grams (out of 150) with whole wheat pastry flour.  I think it would work fine to increase the amount, but I ran out of AP at 125 grams, so that's why I chose that amount.  I love that the measurements are in grams - it was way faster and less messy to measure with my scale.

I'd love to try sprinkling in some blueberries - they go well with ricotta and I think they would be great to sweeten up this pancake.  I'd also like to try a savory application, with some chopped fresh herbs and sauteed mushrooms/vegetables.  That could make a nice brunch or dinner, or maybe even a savory breakfast (though that's usually not my thing).

Bran Muffins with Molasses and Apricots

You'll notice if you look at the linked recipe for these muffins that they are called Molasses Bran Muffins.  Well, the name sounded very familiar to me, so I looked back and saw that I had already made Molasses Bran Muffins from Good to the Grain.  These are different, so I decided they needed a different name as well.

These bran muffins are soft and nice and flavorful.  I like biting into the sweet dried apricots.  Next time I might try to break up the flax seeds to get more of the nutrition out of them.  I think it may also be interesting if I make these, or an adaptation of these, with the pomegranate molasses I got at the market around the corner.

Whole Wheat Oatmeal-Cranberry Muffins

I bought buttermilk recently to make the Granola Muffins and the Buckwheat Amaranth Muffins.  Those two combined used a total of two cups, so I had two cups left to finish in order to avoid wasting any of the buttermilk.  I searched the blogs I read for recipes and found these Whole Wheat Oatmeal-Cranberry Muffins.  I like oats in anything so I decided to make them.

These are fantastic muffins.  They are extremely moist and tasty.  I substituted oil for the 2 tablespoons of applesauce because I didn't have any, but I'd like to try it that way next time to make them healthier.  I was hesitant about the dried cranberries, since they are kinda boring, but I went with them anyway and I think they work really well here.  I'd like to try some frozen cranberries, or orange zest instead of the cinnamon.  I think this could be a great base for a lot of other flavor combinations and different fresh, frozen or dried fruits.

Buckwheat and Amaranth Muffins

Not too long ago I posted about Steel Cut Oatmeal and Blueberry Muffins that I made after I saw the extremely exciting MUFFIN feature in the Recipes for Health section of the NY Times.  These Buckwheat and Amaranth Muffins are another recipe from that series that I had been just dying to try.  You can't see them in the picture, but these muffins have big blackberry-bombs in them.  In fact, 3 or 4 of the muffins had a big chunk fall out the bottom because the blackberry was a bit too close to the edge.  Next time I'll put a small scoop of batter in each cup before I even mix in the blackberries.  And yes, there will be a next time, because these were delicious.

Rose Bakery's Classic Pancakes (with a little twist)

The featured cookbook for March and April over at the 101 Cookbooks Library is Breakfast, Lunch, Tea: The Many Little Meals of Rose Bakery.  I was going to sit this one out... until I found a list of the recipes in the book.  Hazelnut Brownies, Ricotta Pancakes, Maple Syrup Scones, Brownie Cheesecake, Raw Muesli, Cheddar Cornmeal Scones, Quinoa and Pepper Salad, Coconut Custard Slices, Honey Granola, Courgette and Millet Risotto, Oat and Coconut Cookies... Within minutes I had ordered it from Amazon.

I was determined to make Sunday morning's breakfast from this book, but being the poor planner that I am, didn't choose a recipe until I woke up and was already hungry for breakfast.  I sprung for the Classic Pancakes, because who doesn't have the ingredients for pancakes, and I decided I would use some thinly-sliced honey-spiced peaches from last summer's peach canning frenzy to sweeten them up.

Right from the start, I decided to make some changes.  First, I used half whole wheat pastry flour.  I can't justify to myself using only all-purpose flour in any recipe when it is so easy to substitute better-for-you whole grains.  Then, as I made the batter, I discovered that I had been moving too slowly, and my melted butter had turned back into tiny little solids after I added the cold milk - I should have mixed it right away, but I was too busy making my coffee.  Oops!  I tried to get them to re-melt but eventually just decided to finish the batter as-is and hope it worked out.  I'm not sure if it worked out the way the recipe intended, but our pancakes came out fine!  The batter was super airy, like the Hazelnut Muffins and Millet Muffins - I think it may have had something to do with the butter, but maybe not.  As a result, though, the pancakes were super thick and did not spread very well.  (This worked out for us later when we went to put the last two pancakes in a rectangular container, and they actually fit pretty well because they hadn't spread to the sides of the round pan!)

While the first side of the pancakes were cooking, I thinly sliced the honey-spiced peaches and laid the slices neatly on the uncooked top side of the pancake.  When I flipped them over, they caramelized a little bit.  It added the perfect amount of sweetness for me.  Although this pancake recipe was good, it was not amazing - and the amount of butter makes it more of a special-occasion recipe.  I probably will not make it again, but only because there are so many other pancake recipes out there to try.

Steel Cut Oatmeal and Blueberry Muffins

I have been really into the NY Times Recipes for Health lately.  Recently, the week's recipes were whole-grain muffins.  The main article was posted, along with the first recipe, the day before the rest - and I was so excited to see those recipes, I kept checking back until they appeared!  I happened to have some extra cooked steel-cut oats in the fridge, so I started with the Steel Cut Oatmeal and Blueberry Muffins.

I used frozen blueberries and didn't bother tossing them with flour as suggested.  I think next time I will try it, though, as the berries smeared the batter with purple streaks.  The muffins weren't very sweet.  I like them this way, and I think with fresh Jersey blueberries in the summer, they will be perfect.  Ken wanted more sugar in them, though.  I think they would be a nice side to an omelet or similar savory breakfast.  Next time I will also try to eliminate the 1 cup of all purpose flour that is included in the batter, although they did rise beautifully and form nice domed tops, but it's worth a shot.  This is a great recipe for when you cook steel-cut oats for the whole week but get sick of them by Friday - the leftovers can just be stirred into the muffin batter!

Coconut Macaroon Pancakes

I don't get much natural light in here - all our windows are on one side of the building and it's a side that never faces the sun - but I think I've managed to get good shots overall.  I think this lead photo may be my best shot so far.

I was looking for a recipe that would use the remainder of the coconut milk that I had opened for the roasted banana bread, but I wasn't able to find anything that would use ALL of it.  So, I adjusted a recipe for Coconut Macaroon Pancakes to use the amount I had left.  I used 1/2 cup or 4 ounces of coconut milk for the banana bread, so I had 10 ounces of coconut milk left.  I used a ratio to change the amounts in the recipe to be appropriate for the amount of liquid I had.  I had to round in some places but tried to stay as close as possible to the original ratios without adding any insanely precise measurements.

Coconut Macaroon Pancakes
10 ounces of coconut milk
1.5 Tbsp agave nectar (or honey)
2 Tbsp plus 2 tsp whole wheat pastry flour (I expect you could use any type of flour)
2 cups unsweetened dried shredded coconut
1/4 tsp fine grain sea salt
1.5 tsp baking powder
2 large eggs whisked in a medium bowl
2 Tbsp plus 2 tsp natural cane sugar or brown sugar (I omitted this the first time around)

Follow the instructions here.

I attempted to do a banana-muscovado variation here which I encourage you to try if you make these.  I put a small pat of butter in my pan along with a small spoonful of muscovado sugar.  As the butter melted I mixed them together.  Then I put banana coins down in the bottom of the pan and spooned the pancake batter over top.  This would have been successful if I stuck with a pancake small enough to flip, but I tried to make a bigger one, and now I'm eating caramelized-banana-coconut-macaroon-pancake-crumble.

Roast Banana-Pumpkin Breakfast Bread

I've been making a list of possible edible gifts for Christmas, and I came across a recipe for Roast Banana-Pumpkin Breakfast Bread.  The picture looked amazing.  At first I thought it had pumpkin in it, but it turns out to be only pumpkin SEEDS.  (I'm considering a variation for the future already!)  I figured I'd try making it in mini-loaves to see if it might be a nice Christmas gift for some of my family members.

The recipe calls for 2 cups of cake flour, so I made some adjustments.  I wanted at least half whole grains here, so I used half all-purpose flour and half white whole wheat flour.  A substitute for cake flour, which I found online, is to add two tablespoons of cornstarch to the bottom of the measuring cup, and fill the remainder of the one-cup measure with flour, so I did this for both cups.  Since I was baking mini-loaves, I baked them for 40 minutes.

I started making this around 8AM, so just the smell of the rum-soaked raisins nearly knocked me over.  I was nervous about how they'd turn out in the bread.  One of the four mini-loaves fell apart, so of course I had to eat the piece that broke off.  At first, I thought my concerns were warranted and I thought to myself that I would use less raisins next time or cook a bit of the alcohol out of the rum.  But as I took a few more bites, I decided that wouldn't be necessary.  This is DELICIOUS.  I love banana bread as it is, but I think roasting the bananas gave an extra dimension to the flavor, plus the plentiful add-ins made it more interesting.  My cake flour substitution seems to have worked, and I may try all white whole wheat flour next time.

King Arthur Flour 100% Whole Wheat Bread

I got this recipe from the bag of whole wheat King Arthur Flour.  I haven't made bread in a while, as the recipe for Oatmeal Sandwich Bread from Good to the Grain was too crumbly for us.  I wanted to try this one because there is a quote from a customer right on the bag saying how great this bread recipe is.

I was pleased with the texture of this bread.  It was softer and less dry than the other one, had a nice whole wheat flavor, and had soft crust.  The only thing I didn't like about this was the rise - I think it came out too flat and it makes very small sandwiches.  It used instant yeast, which I have not used before (it actually took me months to figure out the difference between instant and active dry yeast, and to locate instant at Shop Rite).  I am thinking about trying to use active dry yeast instead, and use the technique from Good to the Grain, but with the same ingredients as this recipe.  I am also interested in trying the bread with white whole wheat flour, or with different types of flours.  Bread is something you should make your own!  I want to keep experimenting until I find the method and ingredients that work for me.

As I searched online for a link to the recipe I used, I found another bread recipe I would like to try.  Classic 100% Whole Wheat Bread - if this looks anything like the picture in real life, I want it!

Five-Grain Cream Waffles

This is the recipe that inspired the Multigrain Waffles on 101 Cookbooks.  It originally wasn't high on my list, to be honest, but I wanted to do a sort of comparison between the two.

A few days ago I put together the dry mix for this recipe so that it would be easier when I actually wanted to make them.  This worked out well for me.  I dumped the contents of the bag directly into the sifter and there was no measuring to be done whatsoever.  All I had to do was blend together the heavy cream and eggs, then mix them into the dry ingredients.  Yes, heavy cream.  50 calories per tablespoon.  Not the best nutritionally, but again, I want to try all these recipes as-is so that when I modify them I know whether I am completely ruining them.

The waffles were delicious but honestly, a little boring.  I definitely prefer the Multigrain Waffle recipe with the poppy seeds.  I think these would taste delicious with fresh strawberries - like strawberries and cream.  Yum!

The one thing I do want to stress about this recipe is that I can understand how it inspired the multigrain waffles.  It inspired me, too.  Mostly to severely cut the calories down, but also to add my own twist to it - kind of like a blank canvas waiting for some art to be made on it.  I've got a small notebook where I write down my recipe ideas, since I'm not too capable yet of putting things together entirely on my own, but I have a few thoughts that will go down in there.  I'm looking forward to continuing to work with these different whole-grain flours to learn more about them and how they work.  I found a great substitution list on the Bob's Red Mill website that should help a lot.  (If you are seeing black diamonds with question marks in place of numbers, go to View > Character Encoding and try selecting Western.)

I need to stop baking and get back to cooking actual meals.  Expect to see a few interesting things coming up, maybe over the weekend.  I've been flipping through some other books (as hard as it is to put down Good to the Grain, there are no dinners in there) and I've found a few things that I plan to try out in the next few days.

Walnut-Dried Cherry Bars

I can't believe I haven't posted about the Walnut-Dried Cherry Bars in Ellie Kreiger's book So Easy.  I make these all the time.  It's painful for me when I take the last one out of the freezer.  They are perfect for before or after a workout, or for breakfast, or for an afternoon snack when you are craving something sweet and baked.

I have been meaning to mess around with these.  I want to try reversing the flavors - instead of dried cherries with apricot preserves, I want to try dried apricots with cherry preserves.  But I like it too much to mess with it like that.  If there are none left in the freezer, I can't bring myself to do it.

Today I finally tried something at least a little different.  I did not feel like removing everything in the refrigerator to get to my whole wheat flour, which is also almost gone, so I reached for something else instead.  Near the front of the shelf was the multigrain flour mix I made from Kim Boyce's book Good to the Grain.  I have been substituting this in many places in an attempt to make things more interesting.  It worked out great in the oatmeal sandwich bread, and it lightened that up a bit, so I thought it would be good here.  Lucky for me, it was great.  I always have to eat one of these, because I make them when I am already craving them, so I got to try it with the multigrain flour and it came out really well.  It was lighter than the whole wheat but didn't stand out too much in taste.

If you like to take snacks with you to work, school, etc. this is a perfect recipe for transportation.  I wrap mine in wax paper, then store them in ziplock bags in the freezer.  I grab one before I leave the house and when I reach for it 2 hours later it's completely defrosted.

As I mentioned above, I'd like to try reversing the flavor combination, but I would also like to try some completely different flavors as well.  Any suggestions?

Oatmeal Sandwich Bread

I had promised I had quite a few things to post about, and now here I am having gone four days without an update.  Oh well.

I am trying not to eat preservatives and other junk found in the processed foods at the store.  I have found a few brands of sandwich bread that are acceptable, but the last time I went to buy one they were not on the shelf.  (Granted, I will not pay full price for bread, especially the type of bread that I find acceptable, so they may have been on a shelf somewhere, but they were certainly not on the sale shelf.)

I have tried to make my own bread before, but I have since researched the difference between instant and active dry yeast (rookie baker mistake), so I gave it another go.  This time I used a recipe for Oatmeal Sandwich Bread from Good to the Grain, using active dry yeast.

Things went well at first.  I used an autolyse which gives the flour time to absorb or something.  (I don't know, I just followed the directions.  Note to self: learn what the hell you are actually doing.)  Then I had to let it rise for an hour.  Then I had to knead it a bit and fold it over on itself and put it in the pan to rise some more.

Here is where I ran into some trouble.  Maybe I need a bigger loaf pan, but I suspect the whole hour in the directions was too long for the second rise.  I should have kept a closer eye on it, because when I brought it out to go in the oven it was already bulging out of control.

I tried to scoop it back in a little, but it was a little too late.  I put it in the oven with a sheet pan on the rack below in case it fell that far.  (Luckily, it did not.)

In the oven, it grew more, as you can see from the photo.  For the whole 40 minutes of baking time I was nervous that it was going to get out of control and turn into some kind of bread monster.

When it came out of the oven, it had wrapped around the loaf pan.  As you can see, it was not sitting flat on the cooling rack since it had literally wrapped around the bottom of the pan.

The roughness you see is mostly wheat bran, which promptly fell off as I tried to find a way to remove the bread from the pan.

This was no easy task.  In the end the loaf pan had to be released from its yeasted prison by knife.

In the end, it looked mostly like a loaf of bread.  I would count it as a success, although it could be improved upon.

I sliced the bread the next day (sorry, no pictures) and made a sandwich using leftover spiral sliced ham from Easter, a slice of Swiss cheese, a romaine leaf or two, and some spicy brown mustard.  It was delicious, but crumbly.  The top part of the bread pretty much just fell off.  I would attribute this to the stress placed on that area by the excessive rise.  Oops.

The bread did taste good, at least as good as storebought bread, with the potential to be better.  I followed the recipe exactly which I do not think I will do again.  My main concern is the refined bread flour.  After a little bit of research I am going to try using white whole wheat flour in its place because, if the source was correct, it has a similar amount of protein to bread flour.  I would also like to try including some of the multigrain flour mix, the recipe for which is also in this book.  I think it would be fun to add some different flavors in the mix.

When you take into account how little time you are spending actually doing work, bread making goes fairly quickly.  Now I can't wait for tomato season so I can have my favorite sandwich, BLTs, on my homemade bread!

Orange and Oat Scones

I don't typically make the currently featured recipe on 101 Cookbooks because I rarely have time to do it, but I couldn't pass up these Orange and Oat Scones. And I am so glad I took the time to make them, because they are SO good!!!

I hate the pastries at Starbucks because they are so full of sugar. These scones are so lightly sweetened, and the oats and whole wheat fill your stomach. The orange zest was the perfect addition to this - the slight flavor from the zest was amazing.

These were so simple and easy to make. I actually found afterwards that I accidentally used only half the amount of butter - but they still came out delicious! This also made them substantially healthier. I also skipped the currants - just not something I had on hand and I wasn't too sure if I really wanted them in there. Dried cranberries might be a really nice substitute for the currants. The walnuts lent a little extra texture in there too.


This recipe inspired me a little and I tried a little twist by using frozen blueberries and no orange zest or nuts. Aside from turning a little green on the outside, these came out great too, although the moisture from the blueberries (and their frozen-ness) changed the texture, so they were more cake-like rather than crumbly like a good scone should be. However, they reminded me a lot of the Blueberry Oat Cakes from Jamba Juice which I have been trying to find a recipe for forever - so if you like those, I would recommend this variation.

I would like to make these again... they might make a good Christmas gift, actually. I think it would work well to make and freeze the dough, then bake off a few as needed.