Tag Archives: Almond meal

Foodie Tuesday: Fat & Sassy

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In my unapologetically piggy way, I almost always manage to get a goodly amount of delicious fat into whatever food I’m fixing for any occasion. Yes, I do have the proverbial sweet tooth and oh boy do I crave my salt, and surely you’ve noticed that I rarely turn down practically any sort of food on offer at all. But there are some sneaky little biases that tend to recur so regularly that they might be considered trademarks of my taste no matter what dish or meal or bite is the treat of the moment, and tasty fat is one of those delights.

Doesn’t matter what’s the course of the meal or of the day, either one–fat is where it’s at.

Say, for a starter bite. Just putting some nice fatty dry salami together with pieces of dried apricots and chunks of dense, also fabulously fat, fried cheese makes an amazingly great treat that you might not even have to be as big an admirer of fat as I am to enjoy it all.photo

If that’s not fat enough for you (or if, like me, it’s simply not too much and therefore arguably not nearly enough), you can go about pumping up the main dish with some additional lipid-licious treasures. How about a sandwich with a nice thick slab of mozzarella or other mild, thick cheese and a whack of crispy bacon, glued together with a slathering of ginger jam and cradled between two slices of nut-butter based batter bread? All good, I assure you. Probably needed some good greasy chips to go with it, but the sandwich was perfectly serviceable on its own. Enough so that I’ll bet I could have enjoyed it with fruit or vegetables or some other ridiculously healthful and low-fat sides just the same.photo

That’d probably be an even better excuse to have a nice fat slice of sleekly fat dessert, no? Perhaps something like almond cream tart with chocolate sauce. Honestly, not a terrible way to alleviate the shortcomings of a meal that didn’t already have only strictly, gloriously fat ingredients beforehand. I like to keep my arteries well lubricated so my blood will flow nice and smoothly, you know.

Almond Cream Tart (an approximation of a recipe)

1/2 pound melted butter

1-1/3 cups sugar

4 large eggs

1-1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1-1/2 teaspoons water

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground cardamom

1-1/2 cups almond flour

Blend together thoroughly and divide the batter between two small, greased loaf pans and bake at 300 degrees until ‘sticky-finished’–very slightly underdone, or able to release a test toothpick fairly clean when it’s used to pierce the center of the loaf. Get the cakes out of the pans and let them cool enough to handle. While they’re cooling, line a Springform pan with plastic wrap.

Tear the cakes into large chunks. Distribute the cake pieces evenly in the Springform pan and press them down slightly. Moisten the cake with enough (1/4-1/2 cup of) heavy cream to help hold all of the pieces together. Smooth it out a little and sprinkle 1/2 cup sliced toasted almonds over the top of it. Press the almonds down, pull the plastic wrap over the top, and seal the tart into the pan. Then, into the fridge with it for a few hours or overnight, and when it’s well chilled it’s ready to glaze and serve.

To serve, plate up pretty pie wedges of tart for each diner. Microwave some more heavy cream (1/2 cup or so) together with some pieces of nice dark chocolate (I used Dove Promises) until you can stir them together into a nice smooth chocolate sauce and drizzle it over the top of the slices and take them all out to the table. Everybody stick your forks in and start making silly slurpy sounds. And don’t forget to wipe the luscious fatty residue off of chins, y’all. I may be greasing the skids to perdition, but isn’t it a lovely slide to take?photo

Foodie Tuesday: I’m Roasting! No, I’m Frying!

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photoOh, I know, you all thought I was having hot flashes again. [Not that I wasn’t.]

But it’s Food Fun day again, and I’m referring to cooking edibles this time. Old broads still gotta eat.

And since much of the time I am thermostatically challenged myself, I generally try to find ways to make the hot foods I’m preparing require the least possible amount of time putting me in near contact with the oven or cooktop. Why risk further overheating, of either myself or my preparations, should I need to stray far afield from the heated zones of the kitchen.

One fairly easy solution, though it seems somewhat counterintuitive to me, is to roast or fry food. Yes, they’re relatively high heat methods of cookery. But by using them, I can usually evade the stand-and-stir duty: do all of the prep before even turning on the oven, then tuck the food into the would-be fiery furnace, set the temperature and timer, and head off to cooler climes until the alarm sounds for my triumphant return to check and/or finish the dish, and serve and/or eat it. Simple as that.

Roasted beetroot, for example, a nice way to enhance the flavors and textures of a cool late-summer salad, gets cleaned and quartered and then needs nothing more than a small amount of fat and perhaps a tiny bit of seasoning before it pops into the tanning booth. Goat cheese is delicious when lightly coated and shallow-fried, even if like me you’re not quite the culinary artist to present it with perfect Cordon Bleu pizzazz, and it takes no more than a couple of minutes, tops, at the cooker to brown that fine crumb crust.photo

Roasted Beetroot and Goat Cheese Salad

Scrub and quarter a handful of medium-sized beets. (Clean and save the greens and stems.) Toss the beetroot pieces with a little fat (oil or melted butter; I used coconut oil to keep its noticeable flavor to a minimum), salt and pepper and scatter them in or on a baking or roasting pan. Since I was making such a small (2-person) meal, I just made a pseudo-pan out of heavy aluminum foil to keep any juices from dripping around the oven. Roast the roots at 350°F just until tender–10-20 minutes, depending on your oven and the size of the beet pieces.

Meanwhile, pat 1/2-cup batches of cold chèvre (goat cheese) into patties and coat them with coarse almond flour, pressing it in on all sides. Quick-fry these in a little butter in a nonstick pan over medium heat. You can see from my photos that I am far from adept at this part, so mine look less like haute cuisine than like something unearthed at Herculaneum, but I assure you, they taste quite fine.

Using in tandem these two homely yet highly edible items plus a small assortment of others, you can quickly assemble a presentable version of some hotshot chef’s beetroot-and-goat-cheese concoction and your stomach will not be critiquing the view anyhow. My version, this time around, consisted of a few of the tenderer, prettier beet greens pared down to the leaf and laid on the plate, a bit of peeled cucumber slices arranged in a green frame around the rest of the plate, and all topped with the chèvre rounds and roasted roots and a sprig or two of fresh dill. I’m sure that roasting any sweet enough veg or tuber–sweet potato, carrot, pumpkin, parsnip for example–would make a similarly fine complement to the bright, fresh taste of the cheese, which in turn could be substituted for with any nice salty/sour cheese, undoubtedly.

Which of course leads me to another hot-weather or hot-mama advantage of this preparation: the leftovers (if any) lend themselves to innumerable variant cold, cool or room temperature dishes that can be popped out of fridge or freezer next time the climate or one’s overheated innards require such things. Behold tomorrow’s dish: minced beet greens and stems, steamed quickly in the microwave while the beetroot was roasting, and now blended with that remaining diced vegetal goodness, some leftover quinoa, some diced dried apricots, a few pine nuts, a little orange dressing . . . and the beet goes on . . .photo

 

Foodie Tuesday: You KNOW I’m Just a Big Marshmallow

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s'mores brownies photo

With a heart full of darkness (chocolate, that is) . . .

. . . and if you think I am capable of eating strictly on the basis of survival and good health, you’re seriously deluded. Oh, wait–your impressionability is why I like you so much anyway, isn’t it!

However, I’m not utterly irredeemable. At least, not in the way of All Things Ingested (ooh, a good companion program to All Things Considered?). F’r’instance, while I found the above-pictured S’mores Brownies (simply a then-favored brownie recipe topped with marshmallow fluff and lightly oven-toasted, as I had no twig substantial enough to hold the entire 9×13 pan inverted over my campfire for full authenticity) perfectly edible and acceptable, I have since realized that I’m not as willing at my age to trade those moments of indulgent bliss for the mean-spirited monkey-wrenching that wheat seems, increasingly, to give my internal clockworks. So I have sauntered through a slew of my favorite cookery books and foodie websites and learned how to make a damn tasty brownie with almond flour rather than wheat (take that, grass meanies!). So far it’s such a fragile and airy brownie–unless smashed into fudginess with a fork, a style of eating to which I am not averse myself but others might find a bit less than perfect as tea-with-the-Queen manners go–that I will still have to tweak the recipe to discover a perfect lightly crisp outside, dense chocolaty inside brownie to meet my exacting standards. Or I’ll just pre-squash the entire pan of almond-flour brownies, if that’s what it takes.

Revise? Sure! Eschew the chew? Erm, unlikely. Never been much in the way of abstemious.

Meanwhile, back at the table, I can also lay claim to being broad-minded (and -beamed) enough to happily eat the great majority of things put in front of me. While I have tailored my cooking, and therefore my everyday eating, to better suit the tastes and needs of my partner in life and dining, I still enjoy eating stuff he’ll never touch, so there are divergences on our plates from time to time.

I gladly eat my vegetables. I like all kinds of “good-for-you” stuff. Though there may be few things that in middling-to-large quantities aren’t a bad dietary idea, there are even fewer that I won’t willingly overindulge in when my self-restraint gauge is on Low. So I’m trying over the years to get smarter and fill up that particular tank with the more permissible and sustaining pleasures of less processed and fresher and more carefully produced foods to at least divert attention from, if not lessen the lust for, those things I’d otherwise dive into in my full fressing gear. I am no ascetic and am not planning to become that one almost universally feared at table, the person whose foodly preferences go far beyond anaphylactic necessity into the territory of requiring that I be hand-fed a peeled butter lettuce leaf wrapped around a single organic and humanely free-range raised haunch of butterfly with a drop of steam-distilled chive water in a room spiritually cleansed of tomato effluvia by two shamans and a fruit bat.

Hey, I’ve even been known to eat and drink those relatively few things I really don’t like if I think it’s diplomatically appropriate or just good guest behavior. I’m not a complete jerk.

But no matter how eagerly I’ll scarf down the eggplant and brussels sprouts and gladly chomp my choppers on tasty roasted what-have-you, there will always be room for the perfect lard-crisped carnitas (available, by the way, at Tacos Guaymas on 38th and 72nd Streets in Tacoma, Washington: http://www.tacosguaymas.com/tacostacoma/menu-broadway.html) and rich fat salmon oven roasted in Jack Daniel’s, and homemade ice cream and cardamom butter cookies and yes, probably even brownies made with wheat flour. Definitely brownies made with almond flour, and I do plan to get those down to a science someday–though I’m doing just fine for now, eating the current version with a spoon.