Russian Chocolate, Date and Walnut Torte

These are the days of world wide culinary social networks and recipes and…. google translate. Which means with some fantasy (and baking wisdom) I can make a Russian cake which had me at “hello”. Or is it a Bulgarian recipe? As Russian grad student said it is not Russian, more likely Bulgarian, cyrillic and all. With some fingers crossed it came out just fine. The raw dough tasted marvelous, the torte even better: light, fluffy, rich, not too sweet and one would not suspect dates I think.

Russian Chocolate, Date and Walnut Torte

a 10 inch non-stick springform pan.

• 2 cups medjol dates
• 1 1/2 cup strong hot coffee
• 10 TB butter
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup flour
• 1/2 cup cocoa
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup chocolate chips
• decorate with powdered sugar
  

Preheat oven to 370F. Spray or butter a 10 inch springform, and set aside.

Prepare 1.5 cups hot, strong coffee (best in a French press with ca 3 TB of fresh ground espresso). De-pit the dates, and cut them into small dice. Place them in a large coffee cup and cover with the hot coffee. Soak for 5 minutes.
Now, mix the flour with the baking soda, salt and cocoa and set aside.
In a standmixer, beat the butter and sugar until fluffy. Add one egg at a time, and incorporate well. Add vanilla.
Turn speed to low, and slowly add the flour mixture to the cake batter. Mix well. With a large spoon, retrieve the dates from the hot coffee, and add to the cake batter (add a bit of coffee at a time). You should only have about a 1/2 cup of coffee let in the pot after the figs are removed. Incorporate well.
Pour the mixture into the prepared form and sprinkle top with chocolate chips.
Bake for 35-45 minutes or until ready by checking with a stick if you spend dry then the cake is ready. Cool before removing from the form.

The Maine Collection

Maine becomes fashionable…. --- GAP named a fall collection for kids 0-24month for boys and girls the Maine collection. Absolutely adorable, my favorite being the long sleeved body double with a seagull wearing a red white scarf.

 

 

Stuffed Globe Zucchini with Black Rice and Mint

Today’s dinner was slightly more involved: I had to grow the globe zucchini first. Unfortunately, there are none available at the local farmers markets or grocery stores, and I ordered some seeds in the winter and started seeding in February. Now, mid July the globe zucchini find the perfect climate: it is sufficiently warm, in the upper 80s and it also rains.

The zucchini plants share a raised bed with the mint plants as well as the flat leaf parsley plant. Both the mint and flat leaf parsley are mixed in the rice mixture which I used for stuffing the zucchini.

As usual with zucchini, first there are many flowers, and tiny zucchini. Then, the small zucchini just fall off until some of the zucchini decide it is the perfect climate to grow strong and big almost overnight, and then everyone else also decides to grow huge until you raise your hands over your head in horror and share the zucchini deluge with the neighbors. But, we are not quite there. Just enough for a 4 person dinner side.

The zucchini are scraped out with a melonballer, then stuffed with a rice mixtures, and baked for about 1h at 350F. Here is the recipe!

 

Stuffed Globe Zucchini with Black Rice and Mint (for 4 medium sized globe zucchini):

• 4 globe zucchini, washed
• 1/2 cup of chicken or vegetable stock
• springs of sage and thyme

Rice mixture for stuffing:

• 1 ts extra-virgin olive oil
• 1/2 medium sized red onion, finely chopped
• 2 small garlic cloves, microplaned
• 1/2 cup black rice (or risotto rice), rinsed and drained
• splash of white wine
• 1/2 can of fire-roasted tomatoes
• 1 cup of zucchini flesh (from the globe zucchini), chopped
• 1 TB tomato paste
• 1 ts bouillon
• 1 1/2 cups hot water (as needed)
• large handful of fresh mint, chopped
• large handful of fresh flat leaf parsley, chopped
• Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Wash and pad the globe zucchini dry. Cut off the tip of the zucchini to make for a little hat. Scrap the zucchini with a melon baller,  and preserve the zucchini flesh. Set aside.

To make the rice for the stuffed zucchini, heat a medium saucepan over medium heat and add the olive oil to the pan, and heat. Add the chopped onion and fry on medium heat until translucent. Add the garlic and the rice as well as the zucchini flesh, and saute for about 3 min. Add the white wine, and scrap the bottom of the pan for the dark bits. Wait until wine is cooked off, and add a 1/2 cup of the hot water, bouillon, tomato paste, and canned tomatoes ; stir the mixture, cover the pot, and cook gently. Stir frequently and add more water as needed until the rice is tender (ca. 30 min). Remove from heat and stir in the  fresh mint, and flat-leaf parsley. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Preheat oven to 350F.

Use the stuffing to fill the globe zucchini and arrange in an oven safe baking dish. Place the little hat on top, drizzle some olive oil on the zucchini and fill the chicken or vegetable stock in the baking dish. Baked at 350F for about 1h. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Garden, the summer version.

Few words necessary.

 

 

A trip down the coast

We have a stretch of good weather and after all the rain, summer suddenly sneaked up on us. Time for a road trip! First, browsing the goods at the Treasure barn along Rt 1, just before Belfast. This place makes feel more like I am in a natural history museum than antique ‘mall’.




Should have bought the bear cast iron mold…

The next stop: lunch at Chase’s Daily. The indoor farmers market was abundant with produce from the Chase’s garden, mostly fabulously looking lettuce. and herbs, even epazote.



Lunch followed the theme: lettuce with avocado, radishes, flowers and lime vinaigrette and grilled bread.



After snapping up a small olive tree at Brambles in Belfast, the next stop was: Camden.

Ready for sea-kajaking in a tandem kajak?





A beautiful, quiet footbridge in Camden’s river district, full of hanging flowering baskets, and little benched to enjoy the ice cream.


On the way home, a stop at Dot’s in Lincolnville.

Yes, summer in Maine.

Pickled Jalapenos

It started with this beautiful Weck canning jar and me wondered what to fill it with. Pickled jalapenos! Two years ago, I started cooking Rick Bayless’s Mexican dishes, and these pickeled jalapenos I had made several times, but I never wrote up the recipe. So, I watched his cooking DVD 1 again today, and a pickling reminder as well as a tasty tomato sauce were the outcomes tonight.

The pickled jalapenos are a great ingredient for anything escabeche, tacos, tortilla chicken soup. Anything really ;-)

Pickled Jalapenos a la Rick Bayless

• ca 20 fresh jalapenos
• 1/2 TB olive oil
• 1 white onion, thinly sliced
• 1 garlic clove, thinly sliced
• 1 large carrot, peeled and cut in thicker slices
• 1-2 TB whole peppercorns
• 2 fresh bay leaves
• 1 spring of fresh thyme
• 1/2 ts salt
• 1 cup water
• 1 cup cider vinegar (I had none and use rice vinegar)
• 1 pickling jar

In a large saute pan, heat the olive oil and add the onion, garlic, carrot and the jalapenos, and fry them until the onions are translucent on medium heat.  Regularly stir, and saute jalapenos from all side.

Now, add the water and the vinegar, and all the other ingredients. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for ca. 10min.

Place the jalapenos in a large, heat-proof jar, arrange the jalapenos and pour the vinegar liquid over the jalapenos. Cool and place in fridge. They are ‘pickled’ sufficiently after a day, and can be eaten.

Chip Monkey

It looks like we have a new family member. He/she has been living in the bushes around the deck for over a week, always loudly annoyed and in panic if Channelle and I walk over the deck, but taking over the deck on quieter days. I am just waiting until he/she takes a relaxing sunbath on the chaise lounge. We call him Alvin or chipmonkey.

Changing plans

Today, I was planning to drive down the coast and capture many little tidbits of July 4th. The day unexpectedly started rainy and overcast. So, I went to Portland instead and chased the closing hours of Trader Joes, Wholefoods and the mall. The farmers market at the river yesterday, on the other hand, was picturesque.

Vegan summer nights dream

While others are roaming the grocery stores to buy food to go camping next week  or are on a wonderful mid-summer vacation already, I am over my head in work and have an upcoming deadline. Fortunately, it will be over before July 4th. So, there is not much going on right now with good eats and cooking or any trips to the scenic coasts. Free time is spent on mowing the lawn for exercise and fresh air. Oh well, can’t be long anymore.

What did fit in was some nice red wine on the deck on a summer evening, grilled vegetables and sauted bok choy from the farmerr market.

Tacos! --- from our very own food truck!

The other day I read in the Bangor Daily News that the cultural wave of food trucks had finally made it way up to the most Northeastern corner of the USA. We’ve got our own local foodtruck! Like most foodtrucks, Street Bistro advertises its menu over Twitter and Facebook, and today I finally checked out the lunch fare at its 11-2pm location Tues/Wednesday behind the Key Bank in Bangor. While they offered escargot poppers (you are reading correctly, really escargot) I was not tempted by this menu option, but the pulled pork tacos with coconut rice, coleslaw and mango salsa sounded better. There were also braised beef tacos, but I went with the vegetarian option. Delicious!

Curvy summer squash

It is the time of the year when the summer squash starts to go wild: leaves that are humongous in size and all over the place and squash production is starting. This year it’s going to be round, mini-melon like squash. Can’t wait! I should call it the Botticelli squash….

I wonder when the summer squash will have taken over the raised planted bed….. At the moment they all are cohabitating nicely, the thyme, the lacinato kale, the sweet peas, the sage….. and of course a few weeds.

A 100th birthday.

ok, nerd alert. But as a computer scientist I have to acknowledge that today is the 100th birthday of Alan Turing, a ground breaking computer scientist in the early days, basically a Steve Jobs of the earliest days of computing. His untimely death was tragic, but his influence enormous. So, now you know why the Google home page looks a bit different today.

Watermelon, kale and feta salad

The cats are tucked underneath the bed, and peek out suspiciously. Yes, a thunderstorm is passing through. It should be a short one. The weekend is here, the good weather kind of continues, and lunch was another harvest from the lacinato kale bed. This time the olive oil + lemon juice massaged kale leaves were combined with watermelon cubes, a handful of briny kalamata olives and sheep’s milk feta from the farmers market. To be honest --- it was the best salad I had in a while!

 

Watermelon, kale, and feta salad (1 portion)

• ca 10 lacinato kale leaves, washed and sliced
• juice of 1/2 lemon
• 1 ts extra virgin olive oil
• salt, pepper to taste
• 1 cup of watermelon cubes
• 5-6 kalamata olives
• slice of sheep’s milk feta block, diced

Massage the olive oil and olive oil into the kale leaves. Add salt and pepper to tasted. Gently mix in the watermelon, olives and feta. It probably tastes even better when chilled for an hour, but I was too hungry, and it was divine.