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osprey_archerI recently learned how to roast garlic and it has become a delightful new part of my repertoire. Cut the top quarter inch off a head of garlic and peel off as much of the paper as you can. Drizzle with olive oil (I suspect any vegetable oil would work), wrap in tinfoil, bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for 40+ minutes.
I like to time my roasted garlic by "the length of an episode of The Great British Bake Off," because that way it's nice and roasty and also I'm super ready to eat it when it comes out of the oven because it is impossible to watch The Great British Bake Off without getting hungry.
And voila! Roasted garlic! Supposedly it keeps for a week, but in fact I suspect that it would keep just fine for a while longer than that - provided of course that you don't gobble it all up; it tastes delicious on toast. It's also good for garlic bread: rather than dicing up all that garlic, you can just mash the roasted garlic cloves into the butter, spread it on bread, sprinkle with cheese, zip it in the oven and - cheesy garlic bread! Hooray!
Both garlic toast & cheesy garlic bread make a wonderful side dish for soups of all kinds. After the success of my white bean soup with bacon (I made it for my parents tonight and they were suitably impressed. "Julia Child always said a bean soup should have a velvety texture," Mom commented.), I decided to branch out and try black bean soup, which I finally did last week and...
"It's nice," Julie said diplomatically.
"It tastes exactly like the white bean soup, doesn't it?" I sighed.
I cut everything I didn't like out of the recipe (carrots, celery, cumin, and also I substituted bacon for the ham because I only like ham on alternate Tuesdays) and therefore basically recreated the white bean soup recipe, except with black beans and a spot of lime juice.
So back to the soup pan I went, and added lime zest as well as lime juice, twice the amount of red pepper flakes, and even - daringly - about a quarter as much cumin as the recipe asked for, which was small enough that it didn't do anything obnoxious to the soup, either because it was so slight that it did not affect the flavor in any way, or because the lime and the pepper flakes were so very zesty as to mask any untoward cumin happenings.
This is perhaps a little too zesty. I will need to fine-tune further.
Other cooking plans for the winter: new biscotti flavors. My giant cookbook has recipes for orange-almond and lemon-anise biscotti - I'm not sure I trust anise; I may substitute poppy seeds. Possibly a cassoulet? (Elaborating upon the bean theme.) Certainly pot roast. It's certainly cold enough. Perhaps this will be the year that I master pot roast!
I like to time my roasted garlic by "the length of an episode of The Great British Bake Off," because that way it's nice and roasty and also I'm super ready to eat it when it comes out of the oven because it is impossible to watch The Great British Bake Off without getting hungry.
And voila! Roasted garlic! Supposedly it keeps for a week, but in fact I suspect that it would keep just fine for a while longer than that - provided of course that you don't gobble it all up; it tastes delicious on toast. It's also good for garlic bread: rather than dicing up all that garlic, you can just mash the roasted garlic cloves into the butter, spread it on bread, sprinkle with cheese, zip it in the oven and - cheesy garlic bread! Hooray!
Both garlic toast & cheesy garlic bread make a wonderful side dish for soups of all kinds. After the success of my white bean soup with bacon (I made it for my parents tonight and they were suitably impressed. "Julia Child always said a bean soup should have a velvety texture," Mom commented.), I decided to branch out and try black bean soup, which I finally did last week and...
"It's nice," Julie said diplomatically.
"It tastes exactly like the white bean soup, doesn't it?" I sighed.
I cut everything I didn't like out of the recipe (carrots, celery, cumin, and also I substituted bacon for the ham because I only like ham on alternate Tuesdays) and therefore basically recreated the white bean soup recipe, except with black beans and a spot of lime juice.
So back to the soup pan I went, and added lime zest as well as lime juice, twice the amount of red pepper flakes, and even - daringly - about a quarter as much cumin as the recipe asked for, which was small enough that it didn't do anything obnoxious to the soup, either because it was so slight that it did not affect the flavor in any way, or because the lime and the pepper flakes were so very zesty as to mask any untoward cumin happenings.
This is perhaps a little too zesty. I will need to fine-tune further.
Other cooking plans for the winter: new biscotti flavors. My giant cookbook has recipes for orange-almond and lemon-anise biscotti - I'm not sure I trust anise; I may substitute poppy seeds. Possibly a cassoulet? (Elaborating upon the bean theme.) Certainly pot roast. It's certainly cold enough. Perhaps this will be the year that I master pot roast!
no subject
Date: 2018-01-20 03:25 am (UTC)Yeah, I have never made roasted garlic that survived that long.
Personally I would eat lemon-anise biscotti, but if you don't like anise, you can't go wrong with lemon-poppy. I look forward to hearing how they come out!
no subject
Date: 2018-01-20 02:51 pm (UTC)I'm a little doubtful about the tiny-seeds-in-biscotti idea either way; I rather imagine that it's going to end with quite a lot of poppyseeds at the bottom of the tea cup, because they'll fall out when the biscotti get dunked. We'll see!
no subject
Date: 2018-01-20 02:55 pm (UTC)It is not identical to the flavor of licorice—I can't stand licorice, but I like anise—but it's close enough that if the worst-case scenario is an entire batch of biscotti you can't eat, it's not worth it.
no subject
Date: 2018-01-20 08:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-20 02:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-22 09:10 pm (UTC)Another thing you might try is (and I know it sounds weird, but hear me out) is unsweetened cocoa powder. It obviously depends on the recipe (I'm sure it wouldn't work for ALL BLACK BEAN THINGS, ALL THE TIME), but I make a dish where I use 2 teaspoons of cocoa powder with a 29 oz. can of black beans, and you'd never know it was there if I didn't tell you. But it adds some extra background flavors, and also makes the texture richer. So something to keep in mind, at least?
Lemon-anise biscotti sounds amazing to me, but anise is definitely one of those "you either love it or you hate it" kind of flavors, so a substitution might be prudent.
Gah! Now I just want to bake things! XP
no subject
Date: 2018-01-23 01:19 am (UTC)Obviously you should bake something! This is always a good impulse to follow, surely.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-09 03:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-10 02:25 am (UTC)"It has that thing they put in chili," I complained to my brother.
"What thing?"
"I don't know. That thing they put in chili."
So he tasted my chili and gave me a look. "You mean chili powder?"
Well, that would explain a lot about why I don't like most of the chilis I've tried, yes.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-12 02:24 am (UTC)I was going to say that if you made it yourself you don't have to put 'that thing' in, but even though I have an extremely wide view of what counts as chili, it probably does require chili powder.