Baking With Unicorns - a baking adventure

Not baking… but yummy!

February 1, 2014 by Baking Unicorn Leave a Comment

Sorry for my delay in posting anything. It’s been a busy month, despite being on break from school for most of it. I just got back from an interview with the Movement Science Program at Washington University in St Louis. It was great! Two more interviews to go!

On my way to St Louis and back (and ever since to be honest) I was listening to “Cannonball” by Lea Michelle. Overall, it’s a terrible song, but I like her voice. The video (below) is rather boring and unimaginative. I was hoping that she would turn into a cannonball or something interesting like that, but alas, no. She’s in an attic… At least she could have exploded or something, shattering the roof of the attic. Regardless of her video, I enjoy the song’s rhythm and her vocals.

Additionally, I would like to comment on Pink’s Grammy performance last Sunday. I know it’s a week later, and everyone is probably over it, but I’M NOT! I tried to find a good video of it on YouTube, but failed. Look it up yourself if you didn’t see it, or just sit back and take a moment to recall how amazing it was. Sigh…..

Onto the food that I’ve made. I was inspired to make this food after going to an Indian restaurant with my friend. The chana masala was amazing, and their gluten free chickpea roti was DERRRRICIOUS! Just thinking about it makes me hungry! Anyway, I made this a few days ago (but am only getting to posting now), and at that time I was on an “anti-yeast” diet. So nothing fermented (wine was out which made me cry) and no bread. Also no yogurt or cultured foods. No Cheese!!! Randomly, no onions, beets, oranges, garlic, or sugar that wasn’t in other fruits. I was pretty much a vegan who couldn’t even eat bread. TORTURE!! Additionally, I did a lil research and found nothing that really supported this diet as being a useful means of helping joint problems (my doc and I had an exchange of words). I’m off it now, but this recipe comes from that time, which is why it’s not an actual baked good. Baking was too depressing when you can’t eat sugar or butter. Even this recipe had to be modified because of the onion and garlic restriction. If you choose to make this dish, I would suggest adding in the onion and garlic, but it’s quite yummy without as well.

Aloo Gobi
inspired by this!

Ingredients:
1/4 cut olive oil
1 onion (optional)
1 bunch of cilantro, divided into stalks and leaves
2 small jalapenos (This is what I used, but would have preferred serrano)
1 head cauliflower
3 medium red potatoes
5 Roma Tomatoes
Fresh grated ginger
Fresh garlic (optional)
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
2 teaspoons turmeric
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons garam masala

How to make:
1. Chop onion (optional), cauliflower, potatoes, and tomatoes into small cubes. Dice garlic (optional), cilantro (leaves and stems divided), and jalapenos. Keep everything divided into bowls.

2. Heat oil in a large pot. If you’re doing the onions, toss them in now with the cumin seeds and cook until onions become translucent. Or just add the cumin and let is sizzle for ~2 minutes. Next, add in the cilantro stalks, turmeric, tomatoes and jalapenos. Allow to cook in oil for ~1 minute. Then add in ground ginger and garlic. Mix completely. I let it heat up so that it was starting to bubble a little before moving onto the next step.

The Tomato Sauce

3. Add in the cauliflower and potatoes into sauce with ~1/4 cup water. Stir completely, making sure all cauliflower and potato gets covered in the sauce. Then cover the pot with a lid and allow to simmer for ~20 minutes or until the potatoes are easily pierced with fork.

Before Cooking

4. Once cooked through, add in the cilantro leaves and garam masala and mix completely. Remove from heat and allow to sit for at least 10 minutes to let flavors sink in (I found left overs were even more flavorful).

After Cooking

5. Serve with rice and/or lentils. I made a mixture of jasmine rice and french lentils. If you are trying to time things to come out at the same time, when you start heating the oil for the Aloo Gobi, start a large pot of water heating so that it comes to a boil. Use about 8 times as much water as dry rice you intend to cook. Once you put the lid on the Aloo Gobi pot to simmer and cook, throw in your rice into the pot of boiling water. Allow this to boil for the whole time the Aloo Gobi is cooking plus 10 minutes. Then drain rice and BAM! you have rice! (I learned this trick from me mum. No more trying to measure out water and rice perfectly).

WOOT!

Sweaters and Unicorns…

January 18, 2014 by Baking Unicorn Leave a Comment

A match NOT made in Heaven…

A Crispy Holiday!

December 29, 2013 by Baking Unicorn 2 Comments

I just spent the past 9 days in upstate New York with my family for the holidays. It was a lovely time. My aunt and uncle came for 2 nights to celebrate xmas with us and my brothers and sisters, except the oldest brother, were all there with me and my parents. The Muppets were also there. We watched the Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Family Christmas, both classics to my family. One of my favorite songs from Muppet Christmas Carol is “Thankful Heart”, sung by Scrooge (Michael Caine) at the end of the movie. If you don’t know it, enjoy:

So much cooking and baking occurred as well. OOOFTAH!! I’m pretty sure I’m now a blimp. Perhaps I will eat only salads until classes start again…. granted, I put so much cheese on my salads and garnish them with a healthy side of croutons, I doubt this would reduce my blimp-ness any. Sigh. I’m terrible at diets and restricting food unless ordered by a doctor, and even then…. Guess I’ll just have to hit the gym a few extra times.

Despite my inability to restrict my eating, my mother has managed to do quite a good job a cutting out gluten from her diet. Course, this is because she’s allergic to it, but I still find it impressive (clearly this trait was not passed along). I spent most of the time upstate happily figuring out ways to make various desserts gluten free. It’s kinda a great challenge to make a dessert that is gluten free AND tastes at least similar to the gluten-ness version. To my mothers joy (or dismay), I managed to make a pretty darn good Toll House chocolate chip cookie to be free of the gluten and almost indistinguishable from the normal version. But that’s not what is recorded below. Why? Probably because I once again failed to document any of the things that I made upstate, except for this one that I made last night on a whim.

The whim mostly stemmed from my friend, Mik, sending me this AMAZING apron:

I felt it only natural for me to bake something at that moment, so I did! Having had a lot of chocolate floating around in other recipes, I decided to switch it up a bit and make a fruit based dessert that would also go well with the multiple 1/2 gallon tubs of ice cream that were in the freezer. So here it is, my version of apple crisp, modified to make it gluten free.

Apple Crisp Sans Gluten:
Loosely based on This

Ingredients:

6-7 Granny Smith Apples
Zest of 1 lemon
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon cloves
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
5 tablespoons butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 1/2 cups Gluten Free Oats (I used Bob’s Redbarn)

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

2. Peel, core and cut apples into thin slices. Add 1 teaspoon cinnamon, the nutmeg, the cloves, the lemon zest, and 1/4 cup of sugar to the apples. Toss together until completely mixed up (all slices of apple are covered with spices and sugar).

3. Cream butter and rest of sugar in a small mixing bowl. Add in the oats and cinnamon and combine. The mixture should be fairly crumbly. Place the apples in an 8×8 pan (I used a glass Pyrex dish). Shake the pan/dish a bit to get the apples to “settle in” a bit. Cover the top of the apples with the oat and butter crumble.

4. Pop the pan/dish into the oven for ~30 minutes. I decided it was done when the oats were beginning to brown and an apple, when pierced with a toothpick, was soft but not mushy. Let cool for a ~10 minutes and the serve with your favorite ice cream (or whatever you have left over from the holidays!)

Lighting in mom’s kitchen was weird… But it tasted grrrreat!

How a Pie Became a Scone…

December 14, 2013 by Baking Unicorn Leave a Comment

I’m a bit slow at posting this one. Sorry! I swear the pumpkin was not sitting in my fridge for nearly a week before getting tossed into a recipe. It was only 24 hours. I’m just slow and lazy when it comes to snagging the pictures from my phone and uploading them…. BLARGH!

Anyway, here we are, closer and closer to the holiday season. Snow is FINALLY falling here in NYC. Columbia’s campus is covered in lights (I love it when they wind the lights around the branches) and I have NO pictures for you of these things. It’s cold out, and my hands say “NO” when I think about taking them out of their pockets to snap a nice pic. But I’m still hopeful, and you should be too. One of these days, my mind will overcome the will of my hands and SNAP! picture! Perhaps I can get my friend Tina to participate in this photo game. She and I have a margarita date on Tuesday, after my FINAL FINAL!!!! WOOOT!!!

Ugh, just 2 finals this semester. Unfortunately they are on the same day. But hopefully neither one will be too brutal. Hopefully. And hopefully I’ll actually study for them. Then again, maybe I’ll just bake and hope for the best with the finals… My TA’s like cookies, right? (Also, how many times can I hope to use a form of “hope” in a paragraph?)

This recipe went through several permutations before being made. At first I wanted to make a pumpkin pie with a curried corn crust (I saw a recipe for this somewhere) , but then I got lazy and couldn’t decided on how exactly to execute it to my liking. Next I was thinking that it would be nice to make this into a cheesecake kind of deal, again with the curried corn crust. And again, I’m just lazy! Then I was thinking “corn pumpkin scones” that sounds easy. And it probably would have been just as easy as this recipe turned out to be, however I decided I was forcing the corn and pumpkin together at this point and that I would simply make pumpkin scones with candid pecans outside. The idea came from a pumpkin pecan recipe that I made for Turkey day: Pumpkin Praline Pie!

Also, please note that as I type this up and as I was baking these scones, I was listening to this song, nonstop!

Sigh. What can I say. I love her.

Pumpkin Praline Scones!
Inspired by This and by This
Yields: ~12 scones

Ingredients:
For Scones:
3 cups all-purpose flour
2/3 cup packed light brown sugar
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon fresh grated nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1 1/2 sticks (3/4 cup, 6 ounces) unsalted butter, cold and cut into small cubes
1 cup half and half, cold
1 cup pumpkin puree (from scratch if you wish)
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract

For Pecan Covering:
1 cup coarsely chopped pecans
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 tablespoon dark Molasses

If you’re going to make the pumpkin puree from scratch, see instructions at end of this post.

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees and line a baking sheet with either a Silpat or parchment paper.

2. Place all dry ingredients and butter into food processor. Pulse for ~20 seconds until resembling a course meal. Transfer to a large mixing bowl and set aside. I found that after this, there were a few chunks of butter that resisted chopping. They got thrown back into food processor with a couple handfulls of the course mixture and pulsed some more until they yielded to becoming course meal themselves.

3. in a smaller bowl, combine 1 cup pumpkin puree, 1 cup half and half, and vanilla. Mix this up with a fork and set aside. Then, in food processor, chop up pecans until finely chopped. Place in a medium bowl and add remaining pecan covering ingredients. Toss with a fork until combined.

4. Combine the pumpkin ingredients with the dry ingredients and mix with a fork. You’ll notice that the mixture is very fluffy! Odd, I know and NOT at all what I expected for a scone, but who am I to judge? I suspect its the large amount of baking soda that reacts with the milk to get fluffy texture. Anyway, go with and go with it relatively quickly. Grab your prepared pan and prepare to get a bit messy. Spoon a large amount of batter (~1/4 cup) out and plot it into your bowl of pecan covering. Don’t be dainty here. Just use your hand and roll the lump of batter a round then plop is (unceremoniously) onto the prepared baking sheet and repeat!

5. Bake the scones for ~20 minutes and then remove from oven. Allow to cool on pan for ~10 minutes and then transfer to a wire rack. I recommend serving with a lit butter (Cuz there’s not enough in them already, but hey, that’s just me!)

For making your own Pumpkin Puree:

1. Find a suitable pumpkin. When I weighted my pumpkin, it was about 2 lbs. I probably got about 10 ounces of puree out of it, so make sure your pumpkin will be large enough for whatever you’re planning on doing with it.

2. Completely wash your pumpkin and then chop the sucker in half! Watch your fingers!

3. Removed the seeds and the stringy bits. Then rub with oil and, since I was making this into a sweet baked good, I threw on some cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves so that those flavors would bake in a bit.

4. Then roast the halves face down at 400 degrees for 45-50 minutes. You’ll know it’s done when it’s easily pierced with a toothpick. I generally don’t worry about overcooking here, just under-cooking as no one wants tough pumpkin baked goods. Gross.

5. Remove your pumpkin from the oven and let cool for at least a half hour. It helps if you flip them so they’re face up. Another way that you’ll know they’re done is if the skin is very very easy to peel off the “meat”. Remove all the skin and place in a food processor. Puree the heck out of it! Store in an airtight container until ready to bake with it. WOOT!

A Reenactment… kinda

December 9, 2013 by Baking Unicorn 1 Comment

PHEW! Turkey day is over! Pie have been made. Pies have been eaten. Green Beans have been made (though according to my family, they were “spicy”. LIES! I like to think of them as a pallet cleanser). Green beans have been eaten. Many a bottle of wine, prosecco, and beer have been opened (but not made). Many a bottle of wine, prosecco and beer have been drank (not eaten).
And of course, I documented NONE of it. Of the many things that were baked and cooked and boiled and fried over the Turkey day holiday, I took not a single picture. I did note some recipes, one of which is below!

But let us be perfectly honest, the real reason one celebrates Turkey day is not for the giving of thanks and for having friends and family around you. No no. Admit it. The actual reason that we celebrate Turkey day is because it marks the time of the year when Holiday music becomes acceptable to listen to, on repeat, at full volume. No one can judge you for this because it’s officially the “Holiday Season.” And so of course I did my part in ushering in this season by tapping on the “Christmas!” playlist on my phone and blasting Mariah, J. Simpson, Britney, n*Sync, and several songs from the Broadway Carols album. This music has been playing pretty much nonstop since turkey day. As I type this, I have “winter wonderland” playing in my ears.

I did venture onto iTunes to look for some new music. I recalled that I enjoyed a holiday tune by one of “The Voice” finalists last year, so I went searching for him. Chris Mann is his name, and he has a holiday album. I have yet to buy it, but have listened to most of the songs and find them quite enjoyable. BUT I also found he has a new non-holiday album. I stumbled upon “Unless You Mean it (Remix)” and when it’s not Brit Brit singing about her only wish this year, it’s Chris Mann telling me what I can and cannot say. It’s one of those songs that I will blast in the car and sing at the top of my lungs (and don’t judge me for that. All y’all know you do the exact same thing with your favorite songs.)

OH! and speaking of Brit Brit, she has a new album out. WHAT?!?!?!?!?! I kinda love it. And by kinda, I mean I DO! But by now, you should know that she can do no wrong in my world. NONE!
And Leona Lewis has a pretty fantastic Christmas album out called “Christmas, With Love” I’m hoping that whatever her next album is, it has the stylings of “one more sleep.” LOVE HER!
But enough of my music loving. Let’s move onto the foods!
Now, I admit that this is not a “baked good” exactly. But it was baked in the oven! And it was baked with an ingredient that will be needed for another baking expedition that, if all goes right, will be baked tomorrow. Or Tuesday? Eventually! Anyway, I made these on Thanksgiving Eve, and really enjoyed them. There is a recipe for them, somewhere in my mom’s house. So, sadly I cannot properly credit whoever this recipe comes from, but if you recognize this as your recipe, then lemme know! And thank you for it! T’was delicious!!!!

Quinoa Stuffed Acorn Squash!
adapted from a recipe by someone awesome!

Ingredients:
2-3 Acorn Squash
1/2 cut quinoa (I used red quinoa this time)
1 small red onion
1 granny smith apple
1 navel orange (original recipe used cranberries)
1/2 cup shredded Cheddar cheese (or more. live your life.)
Olive oil
Salt + Pepper

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line a baking sheet (I think I technically used a jelly roll pan?) with parchment paper.

2. Wash squash and cut in half. Remove seeds and the extra stringy bits (if you’re feeling thrifty, then you can clean the seeds of the stringy stuff and bake them with some olive oil and seasonings. YUM!). Drizzle a touch of olive oil on cut face of squash and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Then spread/rub in the oil/salt/pepper onto entire cut face of squash. Place cut side down onto parchment and place in oven. Let bake for 40-50 minutes. (You’ll notice in my pictures, there’s a pumpkin. That’s cuz I’ll be using the pumpkin in a later recipe!)

3. While the squash is baking, rinse quinoa and then place in saucepan with 1 cup of water, a drop or 3 of olive oil, and salt and pepper. Bring water to a boil and then reduce heat to a simmer and cover. Allow to cook for ~15 minutes. Remove from heat!

4. While the quinoa is doing its simmering thing, chop up the onion and toss into a pan with some olive oil, sauteing until slightly browned. While sauteing, chop up the apple into lil bits. Once the onions are brown-ish, toss in the apple bits and saute for another 7-9 minutes, until apples are soft. The quinoa should be done by now! Place quinoa in a bowl with the apples and onions and mix them together!

5. Peel orange! I tried my best to remove the pith from the orange, so I took a knife to it and scraped the outside, like I was shaving it. Worked pretty well. Then chop up orange into lil bits and add to the quinoa. Throw in some salt and pepper if you wish, and perhaps some red pepper flakes (I did this cuz I like things to burn and make me cry when I eat them. I understand that some people don’t like this sensation. weirdos).

6. Check your squash! They should be easily pierced with a fork. If they are at that stage, then they’re ready for stuffing. Turn squash over and keep on parchment. To the quinoa, add in the cheddar cheese and mix that all up. Then fill the squash with the quinoa mixture. Place squash back in the oven and bake for another 15 or so minutes (or, in my case, whenever you remember that you have put something in the oven and that maybe you should take it out…).

7. EAT!

p.s. HI CECILY!!!! I didn’t realize you read this 😀

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