Yes, it’s true: the vegetarian food blogger is offering you a recipe for bison jerky, courtesy of her even-more-stringently vegetarian nine year-old son.
I am trapped in a head cold that makes me uninterested in much besides tea and toast.
My son, however, is embarked on a multi-week westward migration game in his third grade classroom. The kids have divided into families, been assigned jobs, built covered wagons, bought supplies, and, just this week, started heading to California from Missouri. This week’s homework has involved some research projects: cholera; snake bite remedies; and, tonight, jerky. My husband tried to suggest that Ben, who has frustrated his classroom family a little bit by refusing to imaginary-hunt or eat meat on the journey, come up with a recipe for tofu jerky, but he demurred. He was interested to hear that his late grandfather had once built a backyard smoker, and of course a herd of bison grazes in Golden Gate Park, just a few blocks from our house, but thankfully those bison and that smoker have never met. He wasn’t interested in the recipe I found in my copy of Sarah Hale’s The Good Housekeeper (first published in 1841). She doesn’t offer jerky, exactly, but has a variety of recipes for smoked, pickled, and salted meats, and even one for a meat preserved in snow: “the meat remains as fresh and juicy when it is taken out to be cooked, as when it was first killed.” Mmm. Instead, he adapted a recipe from our current bedtime book, Little House in the Big Woods. Let me know if you try it!
The real name of this dish is a Salvadoran quesadilla, but rather than confuse readers looking for a Salvadoran version of the familiar Mexican dish, I’m giving credit to the mother of José Carlos Ramirez, one of the folks Lynne Anderson interviews in Breaking Bread (click here for my review of the book). José left El Salvador in 2002, and now lives in East Boston with his wife, daughter, mother, sister, and several nephews. A dish like this is a very good way to satisfy a crowd like that. It’s slightly sweet, like a cornbread, so it’s nice for an afternoon snack with tea, and the boys have been eating slices at breakfast, too; but it’s not so sweet that you couldn’t eat it with some stew for dinner. You can also adjust the sugar and parmesan depending on what you plan to serve with the bread.
1 c heavy cream
1/2 c ricotta cheese
1 egg
1/4 c cream cheese, softened
1 T freshly grated parmesan
3/4 c sugar
1 1/2 c harina de arroz (rice flour)
1/4 t salt
1/2 t baking soda
1 T sesame seeds (we didn’t have on hand, so skipped)
Preheat the oven to 350.
Mix the heavy cream, ricotta, egg, cream cheese and parmesan in a large bowl until smooth. Add the sugar and mix well. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, salt and baking soda. Add this to the cream mixture and mix just until the ingredients are incorporated. Spread into a lightly-greased 9-inch cake pan and sprinkle with the sesame seeds. Bake until the cake springs back when touched in the center, about 30 minutes. Let stand for 10 minutes before turning out of the pan.
Ben was sick. He lay on the couch, with neither an appetite nor a fever nor any other symptoms. It was starting to get worrisome, the lack of symptoms. At least when a child is sneezing or vomiting you have a general idea of how to make them feel better and when they might turn the corner. He’d missed two and a half days of school, and I was just starting to think I should consider calling the doctor when he got up off the couch, pulled a couple books off the kitchen bookshelf, and took them back to his cozy spot under the blanket, now paging through his Spatulatta cookbook, showing more energy than he had in days.
“Can we make this, Mama?” he asked. And without even knowing what recipe he was looking at, maybe Stained Glass Cookies or Extra-E-Z Fudge, I said yes, we can make that. And we did, and we will again because it is a) delicious; b) healthy; c) quick; d) easy enough for even a sick kid to make. We added a carrot and some black sesame seeds (Ben is wild about sesame seeds) to the recipe, but otherwise followed it as written. Here’s how you can make it, too:
3″ piece fresh ginger
1 carrot (optional)
10 oz tofu
2 scallions, sliced in rounds
2 T soy sauce
sesame seeds of any color, to taste (optional)
Peel the skin from the ginger and grate with a microplane or the small side of a box grater. Peel the carrot and grate with the large side of the box grater. Slice the tofu into 1″ cubes and place in a serving dish. Sprinkle the sesame seeds, carrot, ginger, and scallions over the tofu, drizzle with soy sauce and serve.
I have to admit that a food article about cooking post-kids is speaking to me when I read, “Well, I used to actually cook…Now I just make food.”
I might like to think I resist this cliché, but really, the days of poring over cookbooks to find new recipes, making spontaneous market trips (or multiple market trips) to assemble ingredients, and knowing that whatever I put on the table will be greeted warmly by my dining companions — those days are pretty much on hold right now. Oh, they aren’t over entirely; we do find new things to cook, especially when we take the kids with us to the market, but the priority these days is not on the new, but on what’s quick, reliable, and healthy.
When I do want to innovate, I follow a friend’s advice to make sure there’s at least something on the table I’m confident the kids will like. Like Lisa using cornbread to ease the way to chili earlier in the week, I usually make sure there’s either bread or rice on the table (our standard rice/quinoa mix) when I offer something new. In this recipe, I was fairly confident they’d eat the tofu (though the lemon juice made it a question), and pretty sure I’d get at least one thumbs up on the kale (from my 3rd grader; the kindergartner’s on a bit of a vegetable strike at the moment). The chopped peanuts were a plus, too; my kids, like most, adore any extras they can sprinkle on the top of a dish and in our house we’ve retained Ben’s early malapropism and delight the boys by calling these extras not condiments, but contaminants.
So, Eli, the kindergartner took one bite of the tofu, pronounced it delicious, and only ate one more bite. He tried one dainty scrap of kale and pushed the rest aside in favor of carrot sticks, a big helping of rice, and a handful of peanuts. His older brother ate the entire meal, as served. That’s a success in my book, and I’ll be making this one again.
I’m copying in the recipe just as it appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, in an article by Amanda Gold.
10 ounces extra-firm tofu
1/4 cup low-sodium soy sauce
1/4 cup lemon juice (from about 2 lemons)
2 tablespoons honey
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
3 tablespoons olive oil
Kosher salt and ground black pepper, to taste (I left these out)
1 or 2 bunches Lacinato or Tuscan kale (about 8 cups, chopped)
1/3 cup roasted, salted peanuts, coarsely chopped
2 tablespoons thinly sliced green onions
Cut the tofu into 1-inch cubes, and place on paper towels to
drain while you make the marinade.
Whisk together the soy sauce, lemon juice, honey, sesame oil, 2
tablespoons olive oil, and salt and pepper to taste in a medium-sized bowl. Add the tofu, and gently toss to coat; let marinate for about 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, remove the tough stems and ribs from the kale, and cut the leaves into 1/4- to 1/2-inch slices. Rinse and dry very well. Take care to remove grit and water, either in a salad spinner or by hand. Place into a serving bowl and set aside.
Set a large, nonstick frying pan over medium-high heat. Add the remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil and heat until shimmering. Use a slotted spoon to lift the tofu out of the marinade and add to the pan in one layer; cook, undisturbed, until bottoms are golden brown, about 2 minutes. Stir the tofu and continue to cook for another 3 minutes, gently stirring every
minute or so, until golden brown on most sides.
Add the marinade and let boil down for about 1 minute. Pour the contents of the pan over the kale, toss gently to fully coat the leaves with the dressing, and garnish with peanuts and green onions. Let stand for a few minutes to slightly wilt the kale, toss once more, and serve warm.
Five years ago today, in honor of her milestone birthday, I organized a virtual birthday celebration for my sister by having her many friends post birthday cake pictures on their blogs.
This year, with fewer of us blogging and more of us on Facebook, her friend Becca and I organized a somewhat different celebration of the day. But here I am, still blogging, and still with cake-baking energy, so in her honor I want to post the recipe for the first cake we ever baked together. It’s known by many names — Crazy Cake, Cockeyed Cake, 6-Minute Cake — but no matter what you call it, it’s always delicious. I usually make it now with revisions Libby first suggested to me — adding espresso powder and chocolate chips; using raspberry vinegar for the white vinegar — but whether you use those variations or not, the result is always surprisingly chocolate-y and rich. It happens also to be vegan, which is often convenient these days.
So for Libby on her birthday:
1 1/2 c white flour
1/3 c unsweetened cocoa
1 c sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp espresso powder (optional but good)
1/2 tsp salt
1 c water or coffee
1/2 c vegetable oil
2 tsp vanilla
2 tbsp vinegar (any old vinegar will do, but red wine or raspberry is particularly nice)
1/2 c semisweet chocolate chips (optional, but what’s not better with some chocolate chips?)
Preheat the oven to 375.
Combine the dry ingredients in an ungreased 8″ square or 9″ round baking pan. In a 2-cup measure, combine the water, oil and vanilla. Pour the liquid ingredients into the baking pan and mix the batter with a fork until smooth (make sure to get into the corners so that you don’t get dry floury bites in the finished cake!). Now add the vinegar and stir quickly. There will be pale swirls in the batter from the baking soda and vinegar reacting. Stir just until the vinegar is evenly distributed. Sprinkle the chocolate chips on top.
Alternatively, line a cupcake pan with liners, mix the dry ingredients in a bowl, then carry on with the directions as above.
Bake a single cake for 25 minutes, bake cupcakes for 15, cool briefly on a rack, and enjoy.
