Strawberry (Daifuku) Mochi

 

We went to a mochi shop called Two Ladies Kitchen on the Big Island of Hawaii that sold all sorts of different flavors of mochi (different fruit, cookies and cream, marshmallow, red bean, other flavors).  Ranier Cherry Mochi!!  They were famous for their strawberry mochi, but each one was $3.25 or $3.50!  Very expensive.  But they were pretty good!  My only complaint is that the mochi skins were a bit too thick for my liking.  So of course, after we returned from our trip, I was very motivated to try making my own!

Strawberry mochi typically has one strawberry, red bean paste, wrapped in a rice flour skin (mochi).  Some people (non-Asian) have a harder time liking the bean paste, so I figured I'd also try to make some with Nutella instead of red bean paste.

I did a bunch of research reading other blogs on how to best make mochi.  People recommended shiratamako rice flour instead of mochiko, and it was supposed to produce smoother and more chewy mochi than normal mochiko rice flour.  So I went to the local Japanese market and picked some up.

It was surprisingly easy to make, but quite messy because the rice flour is very sticky and hot when you take it out of the microwave.  The final product is totally worth it and delicious though!

Recipe adapted from Chocolate and Zucchini
http://chocolateandzucchini.com/recipes/cookies-small-cakes/strawberry-daifuku-mochi-recipe/

10 strawberries (not too big ones)
100 g shiratamako (glutinous rice flour)
50 g sugar
150 mL cold water
potato starch for dusting
Red bean paste and/or nutella

Wash and dry the strawberries, cut the green tops off. Cover each strawberry with red bean paste or nutella.  I found this easier to do with fingers instead of a knife.

Mix the rice flour, sugar, water in a microwave-safe bowl and stir well to make sure everything is dissolved properly.  Microwave on high for 2 mins, stir, and repeat once or twice until the mix is thick and sort of translucent.

Pour potato starch into a large rimmed baking dish.  Scrape the dough out of the bowl and onto the potato starch, and pour some more on top.  Flatten the dough a bit, and then use a pastry scraper to cut it into 10 pieces (square-ish is better than triangular).

Take a piece of dough and stretch it out a bit, and wrap it around a strawberry, sealing it on the bottom, and coat with more potato starch to prevent it from sticking.  Put it on a plate to cool.

Note: the dough gets less flexible and stretchy as it cools, so work fast!

Fruit mochi are supposedly best the day they're made, but we did an experiment and left a few in the fridge overnight, and they were still good the next day :)

More tomatoes! (+ peppers)

In addition to tomatoes, there are bell peppers and basil all over the farmer's markets as well.  And G loves bell peppers!  Raw with hummus, or zaatar + olive oil, stir fried, or stuffed with meat and rice.

Continuing to pick out of 'a girl and her greens', here is a recipe that uses all three of the ingredients!!

Piedmontese Peppers with Tomatoes, Basil, [and Anchovy]

3 small red/yellow/orange (NOT GREEN) bell peppers
3 garlic cloves, sliced
6 basil leaves, torn into small pieces or sliced
6 small/medium tomatoes (blanched + peeled)
1 tsp flaky sea salt
freshly ground black pepper
olive oil

Preheat oven to 450 F.

Cut each of the bell peppers in half, and de-seed them, but leave the stems intact.  Blanch the tomatoes, slice the garlic, and tear the basil leaves.  Find a baking dish that will fit the bell peppers, cut side up.  Put some garlic into each of the bell pepper halves, and some basil.  Shove a tomato into each of the bell peppers halves, and top with some olive oil and sea salt and pepper.

Put the dish into the oven for 45 mins - 1 hr, use the back of a spoon to press down on the tomatoes every 15 mins or so.  Remove the dish from the oven and sprinkle the remainder of the basil leaves on.  Serve when it has cooled down to warm.

Tomatoes = Summer!

The farmer's markets are bursting with tasty tomatoes this time of year, and they really never taste this good any other time of year.  Heirloom tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, early girls, everything!!!  So naturally I started looking for recipes that have tomatoes and basil :)

I haven't made a soup in a while because it just takes a long time to chop all the ingredients and simmer it on the stove.  But I was feeling industrious this weekend, so it was a lazy afternoon filled with cooking.

This is the second time I've borrowed 'a girl and her greens' from the library, but it is seriously a great book featuring veggies (though not all the recipes are vegetarian).  This is totally my style -- eat lots of veggies and not a lot of meat, but the meat that we do eat is sustainable and locally raised.

So this weekend's Sunday cooking project is from 'a girl and her greens', a soup called Ribollita (meaning re-boiled in Italian).  It is apparently a classic Tuscan soup similar to a minestrone, but with stale bread in it.  Now, we didn't have any stale bread or beans, so it's just a very nice soup :)

It smelled so good and tasted so full of flavor that G thought I had used chicken broth!!  It's actually vegan!

Adapted from 'a girl and her greens':

Summery Ribollita

6 medium garlic cloves: 4 minced, and 2 thinly sliced
[small handful marjoram leaves] <--- omitted because we don't have any
1/2 c olive oil + 3 tbsp
1 med/large onion, 1/2 finely diced and the other 1/2 diced
1 large carrot, 1/2 finely diced and the other 1/2 diced
4 celery stalks, 1/2 finely diced and the other 1/2 diced
1 bunch swiss chard, stems finely diced, and leaves cut into strips/pieces
2 teaspoons salt
-3 dried pequin chiles] <-- omitted
2 lb cherry tomatoes
[2.5 cups beans] <-- omitted
[1/2 lb stale rustic bread] <-- omitted

 Heat 1/2 cup of oil in a large pot over medium high high, put in onion, carrot, celery, chard stems, 1 tsp salt.  Cook and stir often for 15 mins.  [Melody addition: 2 bay leaves -- I think this is what makes soups taste distinctly Italian].  Put in the minced garlic (and marjoram and chilis if you have it).  Reduce heat to medium low, cook for another 30 mins or so until the veggies are tender and sweet.  Stir to prevent burning!

[Melody's lazy shortcut] Dump in the swiss chard leaves and stir in with the other veggies, put the lid on.  The actual recipe says to boil the leaves until wilted and then drain and chop.

Put the 3 tbsp oil + sliced garlic into another pan/pot and heat until light golden brown, then dump in the cherry tomatoes and 1 tsp salt.  Cover and lower the heat and stir a couple of times until the tomatoes burst (about 10 mins).  Now it says to pass the tomatoes through a food mill, but I don't have one so I just used my trusty immersion blender (one of the most awesome kitchen gadgets ever!!)

Pour the tomato mixture into the veggie pot, and wash out the tomato pot with some water and pour that into the veggie pot as well.  Add water to the veggie pot until you're satisfied with the consistency of the soup.  Heat until warmed, and add salt and pepper to taste.

Summer Fruit Tart

I've met very few wedding cakes I've actually liked (most of them are either too dry or have too much fondant), so we eschewed cake for our wedding.  We asked a bunch of friends to bake dessert for our wedding, and some of them brought beautiful looking fruit tarts!

Too bad we didn't get to try all the desserts on the day of our wedding, but it did inspire me to want to bake a fruit tart of my own.

And now I'm armed with a brand new tart pan, so I took it for a spin on a Thursday night after work.  (And managed to almost set off the smoke alarm.... sigh).  At least the final product was very tasty!

It is the height of summer, so of course I wanted to bake with some stone fruit :)

Nectarine and raspberry tart from David Lebovitz's website:
http://www.davidlebovitz.com/summer-fruit-tart-berries-almond-cream/

 

Sorrel

It's been a while since I've posted anything.  We've been busy with wedding planning, the actual wedding, and honeymoon.  And being tired from all of that and just trying to get back into a more normal rhythm of things.  And on top of that, I've been getting pretty ambitious with weeknight dinners and trying to use as many bowls as possible to up my presentation game.  Luckily G can just put all of them in the dishwasher, so he's not complaining too much.

Ok, so last weekend's new find at the farmer's market.  Sorrel!  Herb or green, or both?  It was straddling the border of the greens and the herbs at the stand.  G asked what it was, and I had no idea, so of course I bought a bunch! 

According to the internet, sorrel is an herb.  When eaten raw, the leaves taste sour, with a flavor kind of like kiwis.  I verified this.  To me it tastes kind of like lemon but more grassy and pleasant! 

So now onto recipes: most of the things that turned up in a quick search involves making sorrel into sauce to go with salmon or protein, sorrel pesto, pureeing sorrel into soup, or just putting some sorrel leaves into a salad to give it a more citrusy brightness.

Here's a long list of ideas: http://chocolateandzucchini.com/ingredients-fine-foods/50-things-to-do-with-fresh-sorrel/

So I decided to make a sorrel pesto, and mix it into a wild rice blend and serve it with poached eggs on top.  I looked at enough of the pesto recipes and they all looked pretty similar, but I had to improvise based on the ingredients we had. 

Sorrel Pesto: (makes about 8 oz)
2 cups sorrel leaves, packed
3 cloves garlic
1/4 cup pine nuts
1/4 cup walnuts
[freshly grated parmesan cheese <-- this is what we were missing!]

Combine all the ingredients in a food processor and pulse until it's a paste,  Then slowly drip olive oil in until the pesto is a consistency that you like.  Add salt and pepper to taste.

I mixed about half of the pesto into steaming hot rice, and let it sit until it was warm.  The rice with pesto ended up almost like a risotto because of the creaminess of the pesto.  But a risotto without having to stir it constantly over the stove.  Win!

And it got even better topped with 2 poached eggs!  (we sous vide the eggs for 45 mins at 145  deg F, and then poached them in simmering water for 1 min to solidify the outside skin of the tight white)