cooking

Cocoa Peanuts

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(Yeah been on a roll lately)

This is a simple recipe – and you can substitute any kind of nuts or seeds in for the peanuts. I like it as a healthy snack – the maple syrup doesn’t add many calories unless you’re really slamming it (keep it to about ¼ a cup or so).

You can scale this one up easily – just multiply the recipe.

Ingredients

  • 1 cup peanuts, unroasted, unsalted
  • 1 Tbsp maple syrup
  • 1 Tbsp cocoa powder
  1. Preheat oven to 325
  2. Mix peanuts and maple syrup in a bowl until peanuts are coated.
  3. Sprinkle cocoa powder into syrup/nut mixture gradually, stirring until it is mixed in with the syrup, and the peanuts are coated thoroughly. It will form a thick brown liquid that covers the peanuts.
  4. Pour mixture onto a cookie sheet and spread out.
  5. Cook for 10-15 minutes, stirring every 5 minutes until the nuts are dry – the pan may be a bit sticky still, but the nuts will be dry.
  6. Remove sheet, stir one more time to unstick. Allow to cool, then store in an airtight container.

Notes:

• Make sure you use a good non-stick pan – the mixture bakes on, but it comes off with a bit of soap and scrubbing.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

Leftover Vegetable Kofta

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I love good Kofta, those delicious spiced spheres from Indian cooking.  There are many different versions, of course, and I’ve tasted some wonderful personalized recipes (one local restaurant uses rasins).  I never tried making any until now

I came up with this after realizing that making vegetable broth meant that I wasted vegetables, so I began exploring recipes.  I realized that vegetarian kofta, which are basically balls of vegetables and flour, would be perfect to make use of these leftovers.  Plus I’ll look for any excuse to use chickpea flour, which is just amazing stuff.

These came out pretty good.  This is the second time I’ve tried this, and though they’re a bit chewy, there’s definitely something here.

One note is that I’d pick out most herbs if you use a bunch of them. Some are powerful, some taste bad if there’s too much, some may trigger allergies en masse, some are so loaded with specific vitamins that they may not be good for people taking supplements, and so on.  Parsley and peppercorns (which I both use in my vegetable broth) are stuff you want to watch out for.

Ingredients:

  • 2 cups of pureed, boiled vegetables (you may be able to use cooked vegetables and roasted vegetables with a little broth or water). Be sure to pick out most herbs if you used any.  This is 2 cups after being pureed, by the way.  The more different vegetables the better, and you could probably use leftovers pretty easy.
  • 3 cups of chickpea flour.
  • 2 tsp ground cumin
  • 2 tsp ground coriander.
  • 1 tbsp garlic (two if you used no garlic in the recipe)
  • 1 tbsp curry powder or garam masala
  • 2 Tbsp baking powder.
  • Olive oil (or good nostick pans)

Directions:

  1. Preheat oven to 400. Use a towel/cloth to lightly coat small muffin tins with oil. You’ll want enough to make 18-24.
  2. Puree vegetables in a blender/food processor. The mixture should be reasonably thick
  3. Pour the vegetable puree into a bowl. Slowly stir in the chickpea flour bit by bit, sprinkling it on the mixture (about ¼ a cup at a time), stirring, and repeating. This is needed as chickpea flour can lump up easily – with the last ¼ cup, stir in the baking powder.
  4. After stirring in the chickpea flour there may be lumps. I use a large spoon to mash the mixture against the side, stir it in, and repeat.
  5. Place about 1-2 tablespoons of the mixture in each muffin hollow. You should get around 18-24.
  6. Place in oven and cook for 8 minutes.
  7. Remove the tins and use chopsticks to flip each kofta over. Place back in oven for another 5 minutes.

 

I want to tweak the spices a bit, probably add one more tablespoon of baking powder, and a bit more chickpea flour to make sure the dough is less sticky – turning these over was tough.  Probably much like bread dough you can just add a bit here and there until it’s more powdery than sticky.

I want to try these with my various sauces . . .

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

Failcess – Vegan Pizza

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So this is probably one of my weirder experiments. I tried to make a totally vegan cheese pizza. It also happened to be gluten free or potentially gluten free if you want to go for the whole pop hypochondria thing.  If this sounds weird, you don’t know me.

So, this potential mad creation of mine was . . . failure and success.  Let’s take a look.

Cheese

The cheese is purely from the Forks Over Knives Cookbook. It’s simple and it was “cheeseque” – good enough to use as cheese in something that needs a taste kind of like cheese.  It wasn’t cheese but, well, close enough for this.

  • One white onion, diced
  • One red pepper, seeded, diced
  • One tablespoon peanut butter
  • 1 cup nutritional yeast.

Just puree all of these in a blender- it’s surprisingly easy. I puree the red pepper and onion in batches, and it’s surprisingly “liquidy.” I then blend in the peanut butter and then the yeast.

Sauce

I used a can of tomato sauce. Because I was being lazy.

Crust

  • 3 cups besan (chickpea) flour (by the way, this awesome high-protein flour is great for nutrtion, cooking, chips, pudding, and more)
  • 6 tsp xanthan gum
  • 1 tbsp baking powder.
  • 1 cup water

Mix the dry ingredients together, then slowly stir in the water. Finally coat your hands with chickpea flour and knead it a bit. Then place it in a nonstick pizza pan.

To cook this, I tried

  1. Cook the crust for 8 minutes.
  2. Remove, add tomato sauce as needed (about a cup)
  3. drizzle cheese sauce (about 3/4 of it)
  4. Cook for 12 minutes.

And how did it come out?

Imagine an extremely lame homemade pizza. Dough wasn’t quite done, the tomato sauce soaked in, the sauce didn’t cook in well, everything was drippy. It tasted “eh” but didn’t quite blend so was ultimately unsatisfying.

Except . . . it was recognizable as a pizza. Just a really bad one.  It was a failure as a pizza, but a success in that I made a completely vegan low-fat pizza that still had quite a protein kick due to the chickpea flour and nutritional yeast.  It was just a bad pizza.

Failure as a pizza, but at least it was a pizza.

So I think there are ways to improve this:

  1. The crust probably needs a bit of a sweetener and/or salt.  Not a bad idea as the only sodium source was the sauce – and next time i’ll use homemade.
  2. I’d also flip the crust over before adding toppings so they don’t soak in so much and the other side gets to cook.
  3. Go easy on the tomato sauce.  Also crushed tomatoes may work as well.
  4. I wonder if I could thicken the cheese sauce a bit, perhaps chilling it, cooking it and then adding some arrowroot.
  5. Overall it needs to be baked longer – probably 8-10 minutes, flip it over and add toppings, and then 15 or so.

So a failure on one level, a success on another.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.