It's Not Easy, Making Greens

Another recipe that didn't really work. Much like the battle with fennel, we are having problems with the bitter greens we keep getting. We didn't like the escarole, and we didn't like the chicory we made tonight. Tonight we were tired and hadn't done enough prep work for the beet recipe (beets need pre-roasting), didn't pull out a pizza crust, didn't have time to let things rest for 60 minutes. So we made Caramlized chicory with rustic tomato sauce and put it over whole grain pasta. And then we all ate around the chicory.

Caramelized Chicory with Rustic Tomato Sauce
ingredients
1 tbsp olive oil
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
1 red chilli, deseeded and chopped
230 g can chopped tomatoes
1/2 tsp sugar
salt and freshly ground black pepper
25 g butter
2 tbsp olive oil
160 g pack chicory, cut into wedges
15 g soft brown sugar

method
For the rustic tomato sauce
1. Heat the olive oil in a saucepan, then add the garlic and chilli and saute for 1 minute, add the remaining ingredients and heat for a further 2-3 mintues. Put to one side.

2. In the meantime prepare the caramelised chicory:

3. Heat the butter and oil in a frying pan then add the chicory and sugar, cooking for 4 - 5 minutes or until caramelised.
To serve
Pile the caramelised chicory into a serving dish, spoon over the rustic tomato sauce and serve immediately.

Yuck. To be fair the tomato sauce was quite tasty, just not the chicory. Oh, and we used a jalepeno instead of a red chile.

On the plus side, I made the soba soup again today and emended it a little. I cut up half a container of hard tofu and through it in the sesame oil after the garlic, ginger, and onion. With the addition of the tofu it was very filling. I also used veggie stock instead of no-chicken stock. It was fine to me, but Eric preferred the no-chicken stock, which I think was a litle lighter in taste.

Finally, in what will hopefully be the plus side, I made small batch chocolate cake with peanut butter icing. We didn't have some of the ingredients, so I substituted.

Chocolate Cocoa Cake

Mix:

1/4 cup boiling water

1 oz chocolate (I had chocolate chips on hand)

1 tbsp espresso powder (didn't have, used cocoa trio mix)

stir til all melted together

Mix:

1/4 cup eggbeaters

1 tbsp vegetable oil

1 tsp vanilla

2 tbsp sour cream (didn't have so I used cream and just beat longer)

Add chocolate mix in with this mix.

Mix:

1/2 cup flour

1/3 cup sugar (I used less what with the sweet chocolate and the cocoa instead of coffee)

 1/8 tsp baking soda

1/8 tsp salt

Add liquids to dry. Mix.

Put in cake pans (I got a 4.5 and a 4 inch spring form at Sur La Table today for super cheap. It would have been better, however, if I'd gotten two 4 inch, as you will see from the pictures).

Bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

Peanut Butter Frosting

1 tbsp softened butter

2 tbsp peanut butter

1/4 cup confectioner sugar

cream as needed

Mix first three ingredients together, start blending with mixer. Add cream as needed until it his spreadable fluffy texture.

Frost cake. As you can see, frosting a cake where the bottom is wider than the top layer is difficult and stupid. Get two pans of the same size. :)

Finally,

Whole Wheat Bread

No recipe for this, cause it wouldn't work without the breadmaker and it's in the cookbook that comes with the breadmaker. Thus, if you could use it, you would already have it. But... the new breadmaker made the most delicious loaf of whole wheat bread for us. It came out perfectly. We ate hot fresh bread with butter and honey for snack today. Yum.