Quieting that Cheesecake Jonz

October 26, 2008 at 10:53 pm (Baking, Eat Healthy!, Recipes, Snacks, Uncategorized)

Sunday is always grocery shopping day for us or should I say grocery trauma day.  Neither of us likes this chore.  I refuse to do it by myself and tempers flair.  Today was a relatively calm shopping day as we only got a little miffed at each other and the only catastrophic event had to do with the last minute purchase of shrimp at the Farmer’s market that leaked all over my still fresh and new smelling car.  While we were out today, I tried to calm myself by picking up the latest copy of Cooking Light magazine.  Being the passenger, I was thumbing through it on the way home when I saw something amazing that stopped me in my tracks.  Something called Cranberry-Oatmeal Bars.  A local health food restaurant we frequent makes something similar out of fresh berries and it tastes like cheesecake wedged into the middle of a fruit cobbler.  The restaurant version is definitely something I have been merely allowing myself only a bite of because it is fattening just to look at!  So much for health food dessert! (Which is an oxymoron unto itself, isn’t it?).  I mentally took a tally of the ingredients thinking back to what we had at home in our pantry and refrigerator.  I was pretty sure I could make these bars without ending up at another grocery store.

 

Well I got home and had to start making adjustments.  My boyfriend did not want this to be too sweet.  He never likes to eat too much sugar so I set about deciding how best to reduce the sweetener and still have this taste yummy.  I found out that I did not have enough dried cranberries but I did have plenty of dried fruit if I used both cranberries and dried cherries.  I was already planning on making these even lighter than the original recipe because I had light sour cream instead of the full fat stuff but uh oh!  I didn’t have enough.  I decided to make up the deficit with non-fat plain yogurt. 

All of the decisions on how to change up the recipe were made and then I realized that my pan was too big.  I tried to use a 9” x 13” pan for an 11”  x  7” pan but the bigger size coupled with the fact that I cut the sugar in half for the crust screwed things up volume wise.  I had to settle on a 9” x 9” square pan.  The original recipe made 24 squares mine made 9.  I am wondering if they cheated in the picture in the magazine because their bars didn’t look much thinner or smaller than mine but they got a much lower point count per serving than mine did when I used the recipe builder on the Weight Watchers site.  You would think that my bars were gargantuan compared to the originals but they probably aren’t.  So what does that mean?  I am disappointed in the fact that I could eat a light lunch for the points I used up on one of these but…  they were so, so very delicious for being so low in fat and sugar that it was worth the splurge and I would gladly do it again and again and again!!!! 

 

Please make these.  You will be very happy you did.

 

Cranberry-Cherry Oatmeal Bars

Adapted from the November 2008 issue of Cooking Light Magazine

 

Crust:

1 cup whole-wheat pastry flour

1 cup rolled oats

¼ cup packed dark brown sugar

¼ tsp salt

½ tsp ground cinnamon

6 tbsp unsalted butter, melted

3 tbsp orange juice

Cooking spray

 

Filling:

2/3 cup dried cranberries

2/3 cup dried cherries

½ cup light sour cream

¼ cup nonfat plain yogurt

2 tbsp evaporated cane juice or granulated sugar

2 tbsp whole-wheat pastry flour

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp grated orange rind

1 large egg white, lightly beaten

 

Preheat your oven to 325 degrees F.  Coat your pan with cooking spray.

In a medium bowl, combine flour, oats, brown sugar, salt and cinnamon.  Break up any chunks of brown sugar with your fingers and mix well.  Combine the flour mixture with the melted butter and orange juice.  Mix until it is combined and crumbly.  Reserve a half-cup for the topping and then press the remaining crust into the bottom of your 9” x 9” pan.

 

In another bowl, mix together the dried cranberries, dried cherries, sour cream, yogurt, cane juice, flour, vanilla, orange rind and egg white until well combined.  Spoon the filling over the crust in your pan.  Crumble the remaining crust over the top of the filling.  Bake for 40 minutes or until the edges are golden and the filling seems set.  If you can stand waiting, cool these completely in the pan on a wire rack (we could not wait more than a few minutes and ate them just warm.  The cookies did not seem worse for wear due to this poor treatment).

 

 

 

 

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A most excellent soup

October 19, 2008 at 11:14 pm (Eat Healthy!, Eat your fruit & Veggies, Entree, Italian food, Pasta, Recipes, soup)

I love fall.  Where I live, it is still clear and warm during the day but the air gets a definite bite at night.  When the evenings get cool, my thoughts turn from salads to warm food.  I want things that cook on the stove top for extended periods of time, food that roasts in the oven, perfuming the air with the scent of good flavors.

 

I have been intending to make Lentil Minestrone for weeks.  I got a dutch oven for my birthday last month and I have wanted to try it out but soup just wasn’t meant to be until today.  I stumbled onto the recipe while looking up something entirely different.  The soup makes good use of pantry items and staple veggies.  The only problem I had is that the dutch oven I got turned out to be a bit small for this particular soup recipe.  I have a three and a half quart dutch oven.  This recipe makes more like four or five quarts of soup.  The soup should have been brothier than it turned out, but I was determined to use my new pot so I used much less vegetable stock than called for.  I enjoy a thick lentil soup anyway.  I also traded out some of the herbs and flavorings called for in the original recipe with items I already had.  The herbs seemed a little more French inspired so I went with Italian herbs instead.  It was a good choice.  Redolent with parsley, rosemary and fresh bay leaves, this soup was delicious!

 

Lentil Minestrone

Adapted from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison

 

2 tbsp olive oil

1 large onion, chopped

2 tbsp tomato paste

¼ cup chopped parsley

4 large garlic cloves

3 carrots, diced

1 cup celery, diced

Salt and pepper to taste

1 cup French lentils, rinsed

3 fresh bay leaves (or 2 dried)

8 branches parsley

2 branches fresh rosemary

6 cups vegetable broth

Soy sauce to taste

1 bunch chard, washed thoroughly and chopped

1 cup dry pennete (or any small pasta of your choice)

Optional toppings:  drizzle of olive oil, shredded parmesan

 

Heat the oil over medium heat in a dutch oven.  Add onions and saute for ten minutes until lightly caramelized.  Add tomato paste, chopped parsley, garlic, carrots, celery, salt and pepper.  Cook for another three minutes.  Add lentils, bay leaves, parsley branches, rosemary branches and vegetable broth.  Bring to a simmer and cook thirty minutes.  Meanwhile, boil water for pasta in a small pot.  Boil water for chard in a large pot.  Boil pasta according to package directions until al dente, drain and set aside.  Cook chard for three to five minutes, drain and set aside.  When the soup has cooked for thirty minutes, season the soup with soy sauce to taste.  Remove the parsley branches, rosemary branches and bay leaves.  Stir in the cooked pasta and chard right before serving.  If you would like, serve with a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkling of Parmesan.  The soup is wonderful without these condiments.

 

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Mimi’s Reserve Red Wine Vinegar

October 5, 2008 at 9:47 pm (Uncategorized)

In the recent past, I have had food fantasies.  These fantasies revolve around a certain self-reliance that I don’t feel I know in reality.  There have been times in my life where I have grown food but it has never been on a scale that could sustain me.  I currently grow herbs in pots.  I grow a Meyer Lemon Tree.  These things I grow add spice to my food but they cannot sustain me.  I dream of raising animals who in turn feed me milk and eggs; I dream of sowing the seeds of many kinds of grains and fruits and vegetables; I dream of harvesting these things that I have nurtured to make into the food that will sustain me.  But I am soft.  I am weak.  I grew up in a suburban neighborhood eating from plastic bags and glass jars.  But, I still yearn for alchemy and so for now there is vinegar.

 

As you can mix water and flour and capture tiny creatures to leaven bread, you can leave fruit based alcoholic beverages out in a crock wide enough to provide contact with air to capture tiny creatures to make vinegar.  A bacterium called acetobactor digests alcohol turning it into vinegar.  Some people prefer to purchase an established colony of acetobactor called a “mother”.  It you have time and patience, wine will eventually sour.  I don’t often take the easy path so I decided to add wine to a jar and let it sit.  After a couple of weeks, I could see a film form on the surface of the wine.  This was the formation of a mother.  I added fresh wine each week to “feed” the vinegar.  Some wine was good stuff that we didn’t finish very quickly and so the flavors diminished.  Some wine was not very tasty to begin with and ended up reserved for cooking or feeding this beast.  Just don’t use wine that is “corked”.  The path to good vinegar is drinkable wine not spoiled wine. 

 

Although the mother never formed a thick clot, there was enough bacterial action that the wine soured into something delicious.  Each time I fed the vinegar, I could see the liquid bubble and froth.  It took roughly six months to become a wonderful elixir.  I filtered and decanted a small bottle to use now and I left half a jar to continue to evolve.  I’ll keep feeding this sour, smelly beast because the rewards for my care and nurturing are great.  I feel a little more self-reliant knowing that I can care for something wild and create something that will sustain me, even if it is just in an emotional rather than physical way.

 

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