Beans, Greens, and Mint Frittata

And now for the token savory recipe of the month! I know I give the impression that I bake all the time (well, okay, maybe I do), but I do provide other food for myself to eat, and I really, really enjoyed eating this frittata. One of the things I love about egg dishes is how easy they are to adapt to the contents of your kitchen, as well as to make healthfully. This dish is all protein and vegetable fiber, with minimal fat from the egg yolks but great flavor.

The mint is a lovely touch; I actually think I like it better as a fresh seasoning for a frittata than I do basil. I had to make several trips to different stores to find the fresh mint and nutmeg required, but it was worth it!

This is the first time I prepared fresh fava beans (I've used the dried beans for falafel before), which was a satisfying process. The beans are wrapped in thick pods that are waxy green on the outside, furry white on the inside. The individual beans each ALSO have a waxy casing that needs to be removed, and inside there is the tender brilliant meaty bean that gets eaten. One spends a bit of time getting down and dirty with the natural bean packaging, unless one misses out and starts with frozen beans.

Of course, if you have favism in your family and are horribly deathly allergic to them, absolutely do not use them in this dish - but do still make some sort of frittata with mint! The dish would be completely fine with just greens or other vegetables mixed in, so don't feel limited. The beans do boost the fiber and protein content of the meal; edamame may be a good substitute to try.

This is one of the many new vegetables and legumes I've tried this year over the past seven months of receiving CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) boxes of local produce. Any time I have mentioned kale, swiss chard, other greens, or beets on my blog this year, it has been because that is what arrived in my box, and therefore what I had to prepare for myself to eat. I have had a great experience with this particular CSA: it's delivered to my apartment complex, costs me $7 per week, introduces new vegetables to my diet, motivates me to learn new recipes, and moves my nutrition towards a more organic and plant-rich base, which makes me feel great physically. Not a bad counterpoint to all that baking, eh?

Enjoy!


Beans, Greens, and Mint Frittata
Adapted from the Frittata Fève et Menthe in the Chocolate and Zucchini cookbook

3 C vegetable or chicken stock, or water
1 C shelled fava beans, fresh or frozen
2 C (several handfuls) cooked kale or other greens
6 large eggs
1/3 C plain non-fat yogurt
1 C grated cheese (Gruyère, Pecorino Romano, crumbled feta, or others would work)
12 fresh mint leaves, washed and chopped
1/4 tsp salt
pinch of ground nutmeg
a shake or two of black pepper

1. Fava bean preparation: After removing the beans from the pods, heat the stock or water to boil in a medium saucepan. Drop in the shelled beans and cook for 5 minutes (6 if the beans are frozen). Drain and drop into a bowl of ice water to stop the cooking. Cut a tiny slit in the outer skin of each bean with a fingernail or a knife, and peel the waxy skin away with your fingers to squeeze out the inner meat. The beans can be prepared up to two days ahead of time and kept in an airtight container in the refrigerator.

2. Kale/greens preparation: Wash and tear up/chop the greens and cook them for a few minutes in a frying pan until they become bright green and slightly limp. Set aside off the heat.

3. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Line a 9 inch cake pan with parchment paper and grease the interior with cooking spray or olive oil.

4. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the eggs, yogurt, cheese, and mint. Season with salt, nutmeg, and pepper. Gently stir in the beans and greens and pour into the cake pan.

5. Bake for 25 minutes, and let cool for 5 minutes before serving.

Marshmallow Christmas Trees

After my foray into marshmallow baby rattles, I knew I could get more creative with my guimauve/marshmallow creations, so here's the newest: Marshmallow Christmas Trees.

To summarize, I made mint marshmallow and cut out three sizes of circles, which conveniently left small pointy sections that could act as the top of the tree, and glued it all together with chocolate (one of my recipes made 7 trees like this).

To give more detail, I shook green sprinkles over the marshmallow after I poured it into a pan, and after it sat overnight I cut out the shapes and rolled them in powdered sugar. After those shapes sat overnight, I dipped each piece in dark chocolate and stacked them together. They held beautifully once hardened (while melty they threatened to avalanche), a process I sped up with 30 minutes or so in the fridge.

And there you have a Suess-ical, snow-tipped Christmas tree marshmallow. As close to snow as I'm going to get in Southern California this Christmas!

Fall Cupcakes

Since I'm taking forever to write this post, I decided to just post the pictures without the full recipes, but you've got the idea from my previous cupcake posts: make a white cake mix and add flavors, decorate with buttercream or cream cheese frosting tinted with complementary flavors and colors!

Here we go:


These are the vanilla bean brandy and mint chip cupcakes. As you might guess, the former are flavored with the seeds of a vanilla bean and a small touch of brandy, and the latter were given a light touch of mint extract and sprinkled with dark chocolate chunks (and green food coloring reminiscent of the ice cream!).


On the left are the caramelized apple cupcakes, which are based on a Tarte Tatin idea; I caramelized an apple, puréed it, and mixed some in with the batter. Then I made some brown sugar caramel and coated the bottom of each cupcake liner with the caramel and poured the batter in on it. They stuck fantastically to the pan, so greasing it would have been good, but in the end I was able to peel the paper off each cupcake and turned them over into new liners, as pictured here. Since a Tarte Tatin is an upside-down cake, I thought it would be appropriate...and I added more caramel on top for good measure. On the right are pumpkin spice cupcakes, to which I added spices based on my family pumpkin pie recipe, plus some pumpkin purée. Both of these cupcakes were moister than the others because of the fruit purées, and the others were lighter.


Mint chocolate chip, topped with chocolate buttercream that had just a hint of mint extract (the stuff is strong, so be careful!) and dark chocolate chunks.


Pumpkin spice, swirled on top with cream cheese frosting that had a bit of the pumkin pie spice in it (see the flecks?), and an abstract pumpkin piped on with a few green sprinkles to insinuate a stem. The pumpkin decoration is a bit too abstract, since people still had to ask what the flavor was, but I still think it's cute.


I kept the vanilla bean decoration simple, adding more vanilla bean seeds to the buttercream, but again included brandy to keep a thematic kick to the cupcake.

And, finally, the caramelized apple took a squiggly dollop of cream cheese frosting on top, with more brown sugar caramel mixed in.

I've just learned that there is a book out there called The Cake Mix Doctor which basically does what I've been doing with these cupcakes - it tells you how to start with a cake mix and flavor it up in all sorts of ways. This reinforces for me the fact that cake mixes are fairly fool proof; you can do a lot to them and they'll still turn out great!

I've added fruit purées of varying densities, extracts, cocoa powder, coffee, caramel, fruit juice, spices, sprinkles, dried fruit, Oreos, coconut, nuts, honey, almond paste, and candy (i.e., all manner of liquids, fats, and sugars!) and every one has been a success. As my mom says, cake mixes are full of stabilizers that home cooks don't have access to for cakes from scratch, which means that cakes from scratch can be pretty difficult to get right (something I personally have proven with a number of dense, heavy cakes). It takes mastering a number of correct techniques in order to get a good scratch cake.

So, don't feel bad if you rely on cake mixes! Why not use a fool-proof method of achieving a moist and well-textured cake? Just get creative by doctoring the batter up a bit to satisfy your inner food artist. And make sure to use homemade frosting, since that part is super easy and makes an immeasurable difference in the final product.

Guimauve Part Deux: Some Kosher Fluff

My foray into the world of guimauve became a lesson in gelling agents when Passover hit this spring, and I had the opportunity to contribute to a Syrian seder meal. The Mediterranean nature of the meal brought to mind the rose water-flavored marshmallows I had read about, and I thought that rose and mint guimauves would be a fun touch to the dessert tray.

I was previously aware that most gelatin (think Jello and Knox gelatin) was made from animal products, but the idea of cooking kosher for this one meal brought me to the point of looking at other gelling options. I learned that agar agar, a gelling agent derived from sea vegetables (seaweed, etc.), was a vegetarian possibility, and therefore a kosher choice. It was difficult to determine through online searches exactly how agar agar might be substituted for Knox gelatin, so I decided to just give it a try and plan back up desserts in case it didn't work out.

My first attempt was not a success (thank goodness for the back up desserts!); I used the amount of water suggested on the agar agar packet to soak the flakes, which ended up being such a large amount of water that it took a long time for the syrup solution to incorporate with the egg whites, and when it finally did, it was a foamy mass in the Kitchen Aid. Needless to say, this concoction did not solidify and ended up in the trash.

I was determined to make the agar agar work, so I went for it again the next week. This time I reduced the water to just enough to cover the flakes in a small bowl, and then heated the flakes and water for 30 seconds at a time in the microwave. After stirring and reheating the flakes and water until the flakes dissolved completely, I subbed them into the recipe I used before, and the result was much better than the fluff I got the first time.

When it came time to divide the mallow into individual servings, it was still quite delicate - it crushed to the touch and was rather wet. I decided to divide it up, but then roll it in a stiffer coating than the non-kosher marshmallows. Half of the recipe was rose, colored lightly with red food coloring, so I rolled these in a combination of powdered sugar, ground almonds, and sliced roasted almonds. The mint half of of the recipe, tinted with blue and green food coloring, I rolled in unsweetened cocoa powder and powdered sugar. The results at this point are pictured above.

I let this form of the marshmallows dry for a day or so, but they weren't firm enough to pick them up and eat them without them falling apart or sticking madly to the fingers, even though they tasted good. After some brainstorming, I decided to give them feet of chocolate: white chocolate for the rose, dark chocolate for the mint. I melted chocolate chips in the microwave (I know this is not considered the best method for melting chocolate, but I find it satisfactory for my purposes) and plopped 1 1/2 inch circles of it on parchment paper, which I topped immediately with the delicate fluff. And voilà, now I had airy bites of sweet delight!

So, agar agar can work, but it does not result in a chewy marshmallow. Instead, it makes a light, fluffy marshmallow that could almost pass as meringue. I would perhaps make it again this way, but I still am on a quest for a chewy kosher marshmallow.

Next step in the guimauve saga: putting into play the gelatin sheets I bought in Paris and the 2 kinds of kosher gelatin powder (fish & bovine) I purchased in Israel.