Tag Archives: honey

Soupe de la Semaine: Coconut Tomato [Vegan]

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The turmeric makes it yellow.

The bride and I just got back from Paris, where we dined somewhat indiscriminately. Maybe that’s not the precise word, because we were pretty careful (bordering on obsessive) about choosing our restaurants. We certainly dined well, if perhaps excessively. But since the scale ticked a little higher upon our return, we decided to dial it back a bit.

February is normally one of our two vegetarian months per year (and not because it’s the shortest, since our other is October), but we’re kickstarting it off a few days early as part of our “Going Clean in ’18” campaign. I saw a version of this soup in Urvashi Pitre’s Indian Instant Pot® Cookbook, and it’s very close to this one, but I adjusted some of the portions because I love cilantro and ginger, and I’m not afraid of a little pepper. While she prepares it in an Instant Pot®, it works just fine as a stovetop recipe. It’s easy and delicious both ways.

Three quick notes: Should you be using fresh tomatoes, the immersion blender (or food processor) might not decimate all the seeds to your satisfaction. If you’re fussy about that, you could strain the soup (I didn’t). Second, this could easily be adapted for omnivores; some shrimp or cooked chicken (especially thighs) would make an excellent complement. Finally, this is pretty great served cold as well, just in case you want to make it in summer.

Coconut Tomato Soup
Makes about 8 cups (about 2 liters)

INGREDIENTS
3 lbs. / 1.5 kilos tomatoes, roughly chopped
(you can use canned if they are unseasoned)
1 red onion, diced
3 cloves minced garlic
1 chunk minced ginger (approx. 1 inch / 2.5cm) (approx 2.5g)
¾ cup / 15g chopped fresh cilantro
1 can coconut milk (13.5 oz. / 400ml) (I prefer the “fat”/”whole” variety)
1-2 teaspoons / 6-12g salt
¾ teaspoon / 1.5g ground white pepper (or cayenne pepper or Piment d’Espelette)
1 teaspoon / 3g ground turmeric
1 tablespoon / 22g agave syrup or honey (the latter is not vegan)

DIRECTIONS [Stovetop]

Chop tomatoes (unless using canned), dice onion. mince garlic, peel and grate ginger, wash and chop cilantro and add them all to soup pot. Add coconut milk, remaining spices, and agave syrup or honey.

Heat over medium heat until just about boiling, then back the heat off and allow to simmer for 30 minutes.

Process soup with immersion blender or in batches in a blender/food processor. [If you’re using either of the latter, drape a towel over the input tube or lid to allow the steam to vent, or you will Jackson Pollock your kitchen walls — and yourself — with hot soup.]

Ladle soup into bowls and garnish with a little extra chopped cilantro.

Before the magic of the immersion blender.

DIRECTIONS [Instant Pot®]

Chop tomatoes (unless using canned), dice onion. mince garlic, peel and grate ginger, wash and chop cilantro and add them all to inner cooking pot. Add coconut milk, remaining spices, and agave syrup or honey.

Lock lid (making sure the vent is set to “Sealing”), select “Manual,” set pressure to “High,” and time to 5 minutes. When finished, allow pressure to release naturally before unlocking lid.

Process soup with immersion blender or in batches in a blender/food processor. [If you’re using either of the latter, drape a towel over the input tube or lid to allow the steam to vent, or you will Jackson Pollock your kitchen walls — and yourself — with hot soup.]

Ladle soup into bowls and garnish with a little extra chopped cilantro.

Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free Blood Orange Olive Oil Honey Cake

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At $20 USD, how could I resist?

At $20 USD, how could I resist?

All right. I admit it. I’m a sucker for odd Bundt pans and other cake pans with funny shapes. And when I saw this one on Amazon for twenty bucks, I just had to have it. Had to. It’s like certain women (like the one to whom I’m married) and shoes. The sooner you learn to stop resisting — I’m speaking from personal experience here — the happier your life will be. That said, I’m not interested in becoming the Imelda Marcos of goofy baking tins, so my rule is that if I buy it, I have to use it. After I make 20 cakes in this pan, the price of the bakeware will have added a mere eight bits to the cake’s cost.

As luck would have it, the Internets this evening (24 September in lovely California) yielded a plethora of honey cake recipes, given that sundown marked the beginning of the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashanah, and some version of honey cake is a staple of the holiday in many households. While I myself cannot number myself a member of the tribe, many of my dearest friends are, and their cuisine has been a mitzvah in my life.

The main recipe I improvised from can be found at epicurious.com, though I made a couple of modifications that I believe enhanced it significantly. First, instead of using any old vegetable oil, I used Stonehouse extra-virgin blood orange olive oil. Oranges and honey take to one another like Marilyn Monroe’s arm and an elbow-length satin glove. I wasn’t keen on adding a coffee flavour to the mix, but I needed the additional moisture, so I substituted some French vanilla coconut milk “creamer” instead (think orange + vanilla = creamsicle). And I used some stupidly expensive (and largely unavailable) ingredients, such as Manuka honey that a friend hand-carried over from New Zealand (and which sells in America for about $20 USD for a 12 oz. / 350 ml jar), and Green Spot single pot still Irish whiskey, of which only about 500 cases are made per year, making it the Pappy van Winkle of Irish whiskey. I’m sure some of my friends would happly clout me upside the head with a 4×4 for using such an extraordinary spirit in baking, and they might be right. But the batter was excellent, and it was only two tablespoons / 30 ml of the whiskey.

19 little mini-cakes of goodness.

19 little mini-cakes of goodness.

Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free Blood Orange Olive Oil Honey Cake

Ingredients
• 1 3/4 cups / 225 g. Cup4Cup gluten-free flour (or all-purpose flour, if you’re OK with gluten)
• 1 teaspoon / 2.6 g. ground cinnamon
• 3/4 teaspoon / 4 mg. baking soda
• 3/4 teaspoon / 6 g. salt
• 1/2 teaspoon / 2 g. baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon / 1 g. ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon / .75 g. ground cloves
• 1 cup / 237 ml honey (I used Manuka honey that a friend had brought from New Zealand)
• 2/3 cup / 158 ml blood orange olive oil (available from Stonehouse Olive Oil Company)
• 1/2 cup / 125 ml So Delicious French Vanilla coconut milk “creamer” (or freshly brewed strong coffee, cooled)
• 2 large eggs (I used duck eggs, because I had some)
• 1/4 cup / 60 g. packed brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons / 30 ml whiskey or bourbon (I used Green Spot Irish Whiskey)

Preparation
Put oven rack in middle position and preheat to 350˚F / 175˚C. Spray pan with Baker’s Joy, PAM cooking spray with flour, or oil pan well and dust with flour, knocking out excess.
Whisk together flour, cinnamon, baking soda, salt, baking powder, ginger, and cloves in a small bowl. Whisk together honey, oil, and coconut milk in another bowl until well combined.
Beat together eggs and brown sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer at high speed 3 minutes. Reduce speed to low, then add honey mixture and whiskey and mix until blended, about 1 minute. Add flour mixture and mix until just combined. Finish mixing batter with a rubber spatula, scraping bottom of bowl.
Pour batter into Nordic Ware honeycomb pan or loaf pan (batter will be thin) and bake 30 minutes. Cover top loosely with foil or parchment and continue to bake until cake begins to pull away from sides of pan and a wooden pick or skewer inserted in center comes out clean, about 30 minutes more. Cool on a rack 1 hour.
Invert rack over pan and invert cake onto rack. Turn cake right side up and cool completely.
Baker’s note: • Cake keeps, wrapped tightly in plastic wrap or in an airtight container, at room temperature 1 week. As if you’ll be able to keep from devouring it for that long. Seriously.

NOTE: When I first posted this, I had some truly wacky cup-to-gram (or -ml) conversions, which I have since revised. [Some of them were computational errors, some mere typos.] I presume my astute audience would have correctly divined that 225 mg. of flour wouldn’t have made a very large cake in the best of scenarios, and given the amounts of the other ingredients, it would have been overwhelmed by, um, just about everything else. Because I am in America, I foolishly tend to continue to use cup/tablespoon/etc. measurements, and while the metric equivalent is printed on my measuring spoons, it’s not printed on my measuring cups. I should probably just measure the stuff on my fabulous kitchen scale, which is bilingual both in metric and the ridiculous and outdated Olde English measurements. Sorry about that.

Beware the chicken heart! Not.

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The Deadly Chicken Heart!

The Deadly Chicken Heart!

Seventy-six years ago, the brilliant radio dramatist Arch Oboler wrote a radio play for the NBC series Lights Out called, simply, “Chicken Heart.” The main thrust of the story was that a science experiment had gone terribly, terribly wrong, and what once was a harmless, knuckle-sized, garden variety chicken heart had grown to gargantuan proportions, and was — LUB-DUB, LUB-DUB, LUB-DUB — threatening to take over the world. Good times.

As intended, the story terrified a very young and impressionable Bill Cosby, as well as many others, enough so that the story was repeated the following year and again in 1942. It is still regarded as one of the finest examples of radio drama’s darker side.

I wasn’t around seventy-six years ago, but I was around in 1966, when Cosby described the depth of his dread on the album Wonderfulness. Like most kids in North America, I wasn’t predisposed to eating organ meats anyway, and the now-disgraced comedian’s riff on Oboler’s play gave me one more reason to avoid the deadly chicken heart.

Inside Mitsuwa

Inside Mitsuwa

Jump forward forty-seven years or so, to August of 2013. I happened to be shopping in Mitsuwa Marketplace, an Asian grocery store complex that’s one of my favourite local haunts. Other folks, when they go overseas, visit temples or museums or strip clubs. I visit grocery stores. [Yeah, and temples and museums as well. Strip clubs, not so much.] In between travel jaunts, I try to find the most “foreign” grocery stores I can, preferably ones that don’t have English-speaking help. Mitsuwa is as close as I can get to Japan without going into the Little Tokyo section of downtown LA.

While there, I came across a bottle of yuzu honey. Yuzu, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is an Asian citrus fruit not seen much in the United States except in extracted form, and that generally only in Asian markets. It tastes something like a cross between a lemon, a grapefruit, and a tangerine. It’s really quite a fetching fruit, so I picked up the bottle of “honey” (at $12.99 for 33.86 oz./980g) and tried to figure out what I might do with it. [I put quotes around the word “honey” because its main ingredient is high fructose corn syrup.]

Yuzu Honey

Yuzu Honey

Perhaps because I’d been hankering to visit a (now shuttered) local restaurant called Corazón y Miel (Spanish for “Heart and Honey”), I flashed on the idea of glazing chicken hearts with the yuzu honey. Heck, if the name was good enough to carry a restaurant, it certainly should be able to carry a meal.

This may come as a shock to you, but the Interwebs are not exactly chock-full of chicken heart recipes; nor were any of the cookbooks that were immediately at hand. The best piece of advice I got was that chicken hearts should be cooked either very quickly or very slowly; anywhere in between is likely to result in a tough heart, and who wants that? I did stumble across a blog called Cooking in Sens, which had an interesting recipe for a Chicken Heart and Pepper Stir Fry, and I took some inspiration, if not a recipe, from them.

Yuzu-Glazed Grilled Chicken Hearts

Ingredients
2 dozen or so chicken hearts
1 cup soy sauce (or tamari sauce)
4 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup yuzu honey (or honey with a blast of 2-3 tbsp. of some citrus juice, with zest from one lemon or orange)
Kosher salt

Wash chicken hearts, removing as much blood as possible (it is a heart after all). Then trim off the gristle-y bit of connective tissue at the top of the heart (you should NOT remove all the fat). [See picture below.]

Heart with connective tissue separated. More connective tissue from a previous heart at left.

Heart with connective tissue separated. More connective tissue from a previous heart at left.

Place cleaned chicken hearts, minced garlic, and soy (or tamari) sauce in plastic bag. Seal, and marinate in refrigerator for 30 minutes to 2 hours, depending on the degree to which time is a factor in getting the meal to table.

Marinating hearts.

Marinating hearts.

After marinating the hearts, you have a couple of options; you can either pan fry them, or grill them. I chose the grill because my stove top was taken up with rice and stir-fry veggies, so it was an easy choice. Just season them with a little kosher salt and skewer them on either a metal skewer or a pre-soaked bamboo skewer (don’t want it catching fire or turning to ash on the grill). In either event, you’ll want to pre-heat the grill or the oil in the pan.

A quick grill means a tender heart.

A quick grill means a tender heart.

Cook them about two minutes per side, or just as soon as they can be lifted from the grill without sticking. When you first lay them down, brush half the honey on the top side of the hearts; when you turn them over, brush the remaining honey on the now-browned side. After 4-5 minutes (TOTAL!), you can take them off, and they’ll be perfect.

Hearts a-plenty.

Hearts a-plenty.

Because my sous chef was me, I placed the hearts into a 200°F/95°C oven just to keep them warm while I finished off the stir-fry veg and rice. They were in the oven for about 15 minutes or so, to no ill effect. When combined with the rice and veg (which themselves had been augmented by a yuzu seasoning base), they made a — ahem — hearty meal.

A different way of approaching chicken and rice.

A different way of approaching chicken and rice.

[NOTE: The price on the yuzu seasoning base in the link is confiscatory, and I only put the link in to show you the bottle. It (or something very close) should be available at your local Asian market for something in the neighborhood of three to four dollars or so, if memory serves. For goodness sake, don’t spend $20 on a tiny bottle of yuzu seasoning base. Its ingredients are water, yuzu juice, vinegar, citric acid, orange juice concentrate, evaporated cane juice, yuzu oil, and the ubiquitous “natural flavour.” A little lime juice, vinegar, sugar, and water (with some lime zest, if it’s handy) will work perfectly fine as a substitute.]