Hummus (The Restaurant)

At Pennfest, I got to sample pretty much half (or 25%. I don't know Hummus' serving sizes) a meal from Hummus. In fact, I could've sampled a bucketful of falafel and pita if I really wanted to... the next morning, as I walked around campus for MI Green, I saw that the whole platter of pita (kilos and kilos!) was on the floor. Delicious, but social suicide to pick up. The servers were friendly (well, of course they would be; here was the one chance to win the allegiance of some 2000 college students!), and the food was all vegetarian!! It was surprising, because before that, I had passed a whole herd of dead cooked animals in the form of deli food, subs, pepperoni, chicken curry...

I really liked the spring-roll-type-thing, and I'm not sure what the filling was but it was really umami. The hummus was beany and the pita tasted gluteny/yeasty (which was unexpected) and pillowy, which contrasts with the normally more dry pita bread that I'm used to. In all, I did enjoy the food by Hummus.

In other news, SR (who gave me the peanut butter cookie), abides by the vegetarian-most-of-the-time-unless-the-animal-flesh-is-getting-thrown-away. This sort of encourages me to be that type of vegetarian (in that case, I wouldn't be a vegetarian anymore), because it means that less food is wasted. Interesting concept, since I've been trying to figure out the logistics of being a sorta-freegan. More on that when I feel like typing an essay.

Hummus Restaurant
3931 Walnut St.

Irish Food!

I'm sort of Irish. I was born in Dublin and lived there for two years before moving to Australia. However, I do lack pretty much everything that pertains to Irish culture, so I don't think it makes sense to call myself Irish. Recently, I figured that I should at least learn a little about Irish cuisine. No, not American-Irish food, and not barrels-of-alcoholic-drinks Irish cuisine. I mean legitimate, daily, traditional, Irish cooking.

The internet is not really helping, funnily enough. Something I realised is that U.S. cuisine is composed of manipulations of and additions to other culture's cuisines. For instance, plain ol' sponge cake. From a simple butter-sugar-egg-flour sponge cake, the U.S. has evolved it into some seven layer sponge cake infused with peppermint oil, studded with three kinds of nuts, and sandwiched between tons of buttercream icing with sun-dried strawberries and chocolate-orange ganache and THEN topped with sprinkles and whole chunks of candy bars, AND FINALLY drizzled with a blueberry brown sugar glaze and enveloped in fondant or marzipan. I don't know. It's just that a basic recipe for the commoner gets thrown into a bucket, and comes something that is obviously not simple or traditional.

The irksome part is that it gets labelled as traditional.

So, when I was looking for a traditional Irish soda bread recipe, I found recipes that included eggs, raisins, sugar (a whole cup of sugar? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?)...and they were all labelled as "traditional" or "authentic" or whatever-the-heck. I used a recipe from here, thinking, hmm the reviews look pretty good...

...but the batter was too liquidy. It was like cookie batter, and was un-kneadable. I baked it anyway, and it tasted alright. A little moist, like an unsweetened cake, studded with pieces of dry fruit.

I did find a neat website that advocates the old fashioned soda bread and scorns the ones made with caraway seeds/sugar etc. This website, The Society for the Preservation of Soda Bread, says that the common people back then just didn't have raisins or honey or seeds or whatever exotic stuff to use in their soda bread. Well duh. So, I trusted their recipe and made a nice, doughy, kneadable round of brown soda bread, with a neat X-shaped cut at the top. Like the recipe says, there's a hollow sound when I hit the loaf with a fork. The interior is pretty dry, tastes a bit like baking soda, and is chewy. It's just like crumbly whole wheat bread, really, except that it lacks yeast. The crust, my favourite part of bread, is amazing!! So crispy!

The only problem I had with making soda bread was that I didn't have buttermilk, and I don't really see any point in buying any. For my first batch of soda bread, I needed 500 ml of buttermilk, so I just got 500 ml of low-fat milk and juiced in a lime. The bread rose, so I suppose that worked. This time, I only made half a batch of soda bread, so I used about 200 ml milk and 1 tbsp of lemon juice (we happen to have one of those plastic packets). I was freaking out that there wasn't enough acidity because the milk didn't curdle, so I threw in another tablespoon of vinegar. This batch of soda bread rose, so I guess this works too. The bubbles are pretty small and uniform, which is different from those artisan yeast-made breads, in which the holes really vary in size.

One problem, of course, is that I don't remember ever eating soda bread from Ireland. Oh well.

Knowing the way I cook, even though I intended to follow the recipe exactly, I ended up doing this (and therefore I didn't do the whole metric thing):

INGREDIENTS for one 15 cm diameter x 6 cm tall round loaf of soda bread

1.8 cups of whole wheat flour

0.2 cups of white flour

200 ml milk

25 g butter (because I used fat-free milk. If I had used whole milk, I wouldn't have included the butter)

1 tbsp lemon juice

1 tbsp vinegar

1 tsp coarsely ground salt

METHOD

1. Add vinegar and lemon juice into the milk and let sit.

2. Mix all the dry stuff.

3. Rub in butter.

4. Add the milk/vinegar/lemon juice mixture in, around 50 ml at a time.

5. Make a dough that will sort of stick together; it's okay if it's crumbly. Just knead it a little and plop it into a bowl that has been lightly greased with the wrapper from the butter or sprinkled with some flour.

6. Stick a lid on the container and put on the bottom rack of an un-preheated oven. Bake for 15 minutes at 425 degrees F.

7. Take off the lid and continue baking the bread for 15 minutes at 425 degrees F.

8. The bread's actually basically cooked now, so turn the oven off and keep the bread in the oven for about half an hour.

9. Yay!!

From now on, though, I think I'd prefer to make hand-sized rolls of bread because

1. They cook faster = lower gas bill

2. MORE CRUST!!!!!!

In addition to making Irish soda bread, I also made Irish Colcannon last week. I used the recipe on the back of a sack of potatoes although I used a lot more cabbage than the usual recipe calls for. I think I used about 400 g of dark green cabbage (NOT the sweet, white/light green rounds of cabbage that you find in salad mixes), since it was fresh from the garden. Actually, the potatoes were from the garden too, as were the spring onions.

Battle of the Brownies!

^Vegetable Brownie

In an effort to get my sister to eat more types of vegetables, I told her that she'd have to eat one slice of eggplant from the casserole I made today before she could eat her brownie. She initially agreed, and we made brownies. My mum thwarted my plan, though, by giving in to my sister's crying/whining and telling her that she could just eat cabbage instead. I didn't take any pictures of the casserole because it wasn't particularly pretty. However, I did get pretty riled by the fact that my sister just plain refuses to try new foods.

In order to show her that vegetables CAN actually be delicious, I made two types of brownies today (with her help. I think that introducing people to cooking from scratch is great education). The first one was the generic, perfect, cliche chocolate brownie. The second one was a whole wheat flour, zucchini and cabbage brownie. You're probably retching at the thought, right? On the contrary, though, the zucchini and cabbage brownie didn't taste like vegetables at all! You couldn't even SEE the shredded zucchini (you could see some of the shredded cabbage because I got lazy with the grater).

The generic brownie was perfectly moist, dense, and chewy. It's the ubiquitous brownie you can get from a box, from the freezer, from scratch, or from a bake sale. It's not cakey, and it was kind of sweet because my sister added more sugar (since she wanted really sweet brownies). It was pretty fudgy. This is the kind of thing I would make for other people who aren't accustomed to my weird cooking style.

The recipe for the GENERIC BROWNIES is adapted from here, and I made only half the batch since my sister is the one who's going to be eating this one.

INGREDIENTS for a 200 cm^2 pan of thin brownies.

50 g oil

100 g caster sugar

1 egg

vanilla

25 g cocoa powder

50 g all-purpose white flour

0.25 tsp baking powder

METHOD

1. Mix oil, sugar, egg and vanilla.

2. Add in cocoa powder, flour, and baking powder, folding in a figure 8. The batter looks like this.

3. Bake at 177 degrees C/ 350 degrees F for 18-20 minutes on the bottom rack of an un-preheated oven. If you use the top rack, bake for 23 minutes.

*******

The vegetable brownie was not too sweet since I cut the sugar in half, not as oily, and definitely more cakey. I was actually pretty disappointed that I ended up with a cake rather than a brownie... it was more crumbly, but still pretty succulent. The cake is really dense and there is a slight grainy whole wheat flour texture to it, which I enjoy. Although I think it may be confirmation bias, there was a clean, vegetabl-y aftertaste which kind of reminds me of cucumber. The interesting thing about this vegetable cake/brownie is that the batter was the consistency of cookie dough, or super thick porridge. It also didn't rise much in the dish (Guess what?! I found a glass 20 cm square baking dish! Whoooo!!! My mum kept all the glassware in the top cabinet, above the stove...and now I'm putting it to good use!).

The recipe for the VEGETABLE CAKE is adapted from here. Incidentally, these are vegan. I aspire to make these brownie-like in the near future. Modifications for brownies include using less flour and using more oil...

INGREDIENTS for a 400 cm^2 pan of thick cake

50 g oil

110 g caster sugar (more if you'd like)

200 g grated vegetables (particularly zucchini, but I used a combination of zucchini and about 75 g of cabbage. Oh, right. Zucchini = Courgette)

pinch of salt

50 g cocoa powder

140 g whole wheat flour

30 g all-purpose white flour (I should've cut this out)

2 tsp baking soda

METHOD

1. Mix oil, sugar, and vegetables.

2. Add cocoa powder, salt, baking soda, and flour(s). Mix thoroughly. The batter will be extremely thick and sticky, sort of like moist cookie batter or thick corn grits. Or thick rice pudding.

3. Scoop batter into baking dish and spread it evenly.

4. Bake at 177 degree C/350 degrees F for 23 minutes on the bottom rack of an un-preheated oven. The shredded zucchini will miraculously disappear.

5. Somehow, half of the cake will disappear within a few well-chosen minutes.