Friday Food Finds
Edition 12
Summer weather made its grand appearance here in Vermont this week, and it has completely changed my cooking/baking tune. I may have started out the week in soup mode, but my recipe searches have quickly trended towards lighter and simpler fare. So here’s how that shaped up for me.
Ramen1 is one of my favorite noodle dishes and has long been on my list to cook at home. I’d love to prepare it from absolute scratch at some point and make its requisite broth and noodles by hand. But for this Vegan Miso Ramen, from Marissa at It’s All Good Vegan, I employed the recipe’s shortcut options — a carton of vegetable broth and a package of fresh egg noodles.
Although Marissa’s recipe results in pretty tremendous flavor, the dish comes together really easily and feels like it’s endlessly adaptable. Since I made the ramen with egg noodles, I decided to add a boiled egg to it in place of the grilled tofu. I also had some first-of-the-season baby bok choy that I wanted to use, so I flash-cooked those in a pan and added them to the top of the ramen as well. This is one dish that is more than the sum of its parts, and yet its parts are pretty darn good too.
With my son’s pancake craze still going strong, and my enthusiasm for flipping them in the heat waning, I’m ready to explore other breakfast staples that we can all shout about emphatically. These Crispy Sourdough Discard Waffles from Amy of Amy Bakes Bread have been a hit so far, and I now have a freezer stash of them for easy weekday breakfasts.
The waffles are aptly named as they did come out nice and crispy2 and were a great use of the sourdough discard I had building up in the refrigerator. They were also pretty light in texture considering that I used 50% whole wheat flour and 50% stone-ground all-purpose flour in them. Amy in fact advocates for making the batter with whole wheat flour in her blog post. She also provides an overnight option so that all you have to do in the morning is pour the batter into the iron and wait for your hot, crispy waffle. I didn’t have the foresight for that option (planning, as I’ve mentioned is not my forte these days), but I can certainly see the flavor benefits of doing so.
Entering the warmer days of the week, it occurred to me that another great breakfast option for the kiddos would be smoothies. They’re both very into straws — the fights over who gets which straw can be fierce — and, as a result, very into drinking thick, shake-like beverages. So by midweek, I was pulling out our 1970s-era blender and searching for recipes that would make use of the remaining frozen berries I have from last year’s picking.
I landed on this Blueberry Banana Smoothie, from Julie Chiou at Table for Two, which was another quick and adaptable recipe win of the week. Not being much of a smoothie person myself, I don’t have a lot to compare this recipe to, but I found it very well balanced in flavor and as unfussy as I feel smoothies can get (i.e. no powders or other “wellness” additions). I also liked that Julie provided options for different add-ins. I chose to incorporate a couple of handfuls of frozen spinach and maca powder3 just because I had it. I imagine I’ll be committing this recipe to memory and employing it regularly throughout the summer.
This final recipe for Chickpea Avocado Lemon Mash, from Nikisha Riley of Nikisha Riley Holistic Health and Wellness, I found in my search for Ramen. I couldn’t pass it up, and it turned out to be just the thing to use up the stale heel of a loaf of bread I had waiting for me.
There are plenty of variations on this salad/mash around, and I liked the burst of lemon flavor in this one. The cilantro adds a lot too, though I could see chives or parsley also working well.
This recipe’s other nice quality is that it keeps well. I would have expected the avocado to brown within in a day of storage, but it and the salad maintained their color well into the third day when I used the remaining mash in a veggie sandwich wrap (shown above).
And that’s it! Thanks for reading through another Friday Food Finds. I hope you’ve found a recipe to try and then adapt to your liking. That is the beauty of cooking and recipes. One recipe can lead to so many different possibilities and permutations. And that begs the question: when does a variation on one recipe become its own new recipe? I’ll let you think about that (please feel free to share your thoughts!), and I’ll be back next week with more recipes to share.
On a separate note, I apologize for not coming to your inbox more frequently with my own new recipes and other food system news. I am working on various projects in the background and will let you know about those as they come to life. Stay tuned and please share my work if you think others will enjoy it. Thanks!
Despite now being identified with Japanese culture, Ramen is actually originally from China. From pre World War II to today, Ramen went from being a cheap, filling meal for Japan’s blue collar workers to becoming an international culinary trend with many variations and adaptations. Throughout that transformation though, ramen’s two distinct characteristics have remained constant: the addition of kansui (a baking soda and water combination) in the noodles — to make them chewy in texture and yellow in color — and the deeply-flavored meat broth.
For more than you maybe ever wanted to know about making waffles crispy, check out this article from Joe Sevier at Epicurious. I would agree with my friend/former colleague that in this case the higher proportion of oil contributed to the crispiness of these waffles. As did the cornstarch.
I mentioned maca powder a few weeks ago when I wrote about a coffee smoothie. Here’s that brief explanation: Maca is a cruciferous plant that has grown in the Andes Mountains of Peru for over 3000 years. It has been cultivated for the consumption of its root, which is typically dried and cooked before being used to make dishes such as porridge (mazamorra), soup, jam, and empanada. The dried root can also be ground to a flour or powder (the most commonly exported maca product), or fermented into a weak beer (chicha).