0 Blueberry-Vanilla Goat Cheese Quesadillas

We have been rather remiss in 2015 with following through with the weekly recipes. I don't feel bad about it. The New Year started with a death in the family, and one snow storm after another, so getting out  cookbooks and finding something to blog about has fallen to a low priority after mourning, traveling, and cleaning up snow.

The dish I made for breakfast this morning didn't come from a recipe book. I was simply inspired to make it when I happened to notice the two main ingredients next to each other in the refrigerator. We bought the blueberry vanilla cheese from Trader Joe's last week. It is something we usually pick up there and I enjoy it on English muffins or crackers, but yesterday I realized it would make a jim-dandy breakfast quesadilla. The cheese is crumbly and hard to spread, so getting it onto a tortilla shell was more a matter or pressing down on the crumbles with the flat part of a knife rather than spreading. I covered one half of a round tortilla shell with the cheese, folded and then grilled it on the stove-top for a few minutes in each side. As a side dish I sauteed some banana slices.

We topped the quesadillas with some flavored vinegars from Lebherz Oil and Vinegar Emporium. I took a selection of likely pairings from the cabinet and tried them all. I found the Dark Chocolate to be especially tasty. The Wild Blueberry, and Ripe Peach were also good. James tried Wild Blueberry and called it "delicious". 

These were super easy, and super yummy.

Detail: Blueberry-Vanilla Goat Cheese Quesadillas

0 Ice Cream and Vinegar? Yes!

When we first found out about Lebherz Vinegar and Oil Emporium we learned that the proprietress used blueberry vinegar straight from the bottle on ice cream. Taking her lead we have discovered that not only does blueberry-flavored vinegar taste good on vanilla ice cream, so does ripe peach, espresso, dark chocolate, and blackberry ginger. Any of these will provide a wonderful tangy-ness to the creamy frozen confection.

Detail: Ice Cream and Vinegar? Yes!

0 Lively Green Beans

Image from The Captain's Vintage, via eBay.
See note below.

This recipe is hardly new to us, but it has been new to every person with whom we have shared it -- as we often do at potlucks. In fact, we have finally posted it here for the benefit of old and new friends who enjoyed it at the Colchester Neighborhood Farm annual potluck.

Not Your Mother's Green Beans is one of our standards from the "Mini Moosewood" which is the second-most important item on our cookbook shelf. (See our Moosewood explanatiblon or a complete list of Moosewood mentions on this blog.)

The title of the recipe refers, of course, to green-bean comfort food with which many people -- especially Southern people -- are familiar. If any vitamins, crispness, or vegetable flavor remains in traditional green beans, it is because there were not enough hours to finish cooking them -- preferably in salt and fatty bacon. The result was often welcome in a guilty-pleasure sense, but it is just not right to have green vegetables more fattening than burgers, which is where Mollie Katzen's crew comes in.

On page 82 of the Mini Moosewood is the following simple recipe.

1. Toast 1/2 cup pine nuts (we usually use chopped walnuts) and steam 1 pound of green beans.
2. In a medium bowl, combine 1 large shallot or 1/4 cup chopped scallions (Pam used a leek yesterday) with 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar and 1/4 cup olive oil. Mix in 2 tablespoons parsley or basil.
3. Drain the beans, toss with dressing and nuts, and top with salt (minimal) and pepper.

This can either be served warm or chilled for at least 20 minutes. We look forward to sharing this with our friends at Lebherz Oil and Vinegar Emporium, to see if they can recommend special suggestions for the dressing. We will post ideas here.

Now for that image: when I was about 10 or 12, my grandmother bought me (and I think my brother) a t-shirt with this design. For some reason, I loved it and wore it as often as I could for far more years than I should have. The best part: it was scratch-and-sniff. That's right; years before being a genuine foodie, I willingly walked around smelling like green beans.

Detail: Lively Green Beans

0 Stirring Up Mocha Cake

This week's recetas nuevas are variations on two favorite recipes of long standing, made all the better with secret ingredients from our friends at L.O.V.E. -- the Lebherz Oil & Vinegar Emporium in Frederick, Maryland. As regular readers may know, this culinary treasure was recently established by a fellow alumna of UMBC, where Pam and I met a few years back. And don't worry: the "secret" ingredients are about to be revealed!

The first modification was a simple one. We were pleased to get some late-season eggplant, so of course made a bonus round of ratatouille (we thought we had put the season finale in the freezer a couple weeks ago). By adding a small hot pepper from our farm box and chipotle-infused olive oil from L.O.V.E. and cooking for four hours, this weapons-grade tomato stew was even more scrumptious than usual.

The genius part of the evening was the addition of dark chocolate balsamic vinegar -- along with a few other modifications -- to our favorite pound cake recipe. Our new creation is based on the Mocha-Swirl Pound Cake on page 191 of Mollie Katzen's classic Moosewood Cookbook (just try to find another two-word title with eight Os!). The result is a perfect use of Marley Coffee from Jamaica!

Our modified version requires

• Butter (or Crisco or Pam) and flour for a Bundt pan
• 1 pound (hence the name) of butter, softened. Yes, that is four sticks. I'm going rowing in the morning.
• 2 cups unbleached, granulated sugar, preferably fair-trade organic, which is available from Costco, believe it or not!
• 6 eggs, preferably from a local chicken. Ours were from Hanson Farm.
• 4 cups white flour (use the healthy stuff on another recipe)
• 1 Tbs. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 cup Buffalo Soldier Marley Coffee, strongly brewed. I used medium-roasted La Orchidea from my friend's farm in Nicaragua, because I did not have time to order the Marley Coffee, but I think the medium-dark Buffalo Soldier would be even better for this recipe! (Reserve the rest of the pot of coffee -- I used a Chemex -- to serve with the cake.)
• 2 tsp. pure vanilla (also available from Costco, by the way)
• 1/2 of a 3.5-ounce Ibarra Mexican chocolate disk, which lends just a hint of cinnamon  The next time I plan to use exotic pepper from Madécasse, which I happened to try the day after making this, and I think it would be even better. Melt the chocolate in microwave or on stove top.
• 1 cup confectioner's sugar
• 2-3 Tbs. dark chocolate balsamic vinegar (see above)

To prepare, first make the batter:

• Beat together butter and sugar until fluffy. Beat eggs into mixture, two at a time.
• Sift together flour, baking powder, and salt.
• Alternate mixing dry ingredients and coffee into the butter mixture, until blended. Do not beat or over-mix.

Then prepare to swirl:

• Separate one-third of the batter to a small bowl, blend in melted chocolate.
• Prepare Bundt pan with butter and flour and pour in plain batter.
• Dollop chocolate batter in clumps onto pan, and then use a knife to swirl gently into the plain batter. 

Bake and glaze:

• Bake at 350 for 50-60 minutes, or less if using convection. Remove to wire rack to cool, and overturn gently onto a plate, using a spatula if necessary.
• Meanwhile, sift confectioners sugar and whisk in 2 Tbs. chocolate vinegar. It will be difficult at first, but avoid the temptation to add too much liquid. Eventually, a thick glaze will form, which will drip off the whisk. Use this to drizzle glaze onto upright cake.

Present:

• Use bread or cake knife to slice modest servings -- this is rich cake!
• Garnish with espresso beans and/or mocha chips (ours were from Hilliard's)

Serve with Marley Coffee and try to contain yelps of true bliss, as the tart glaze melts perfectly into the rich mocha cake!

UPDATE: Having a professional photographer involved in the baking means a lot of cool shots of Stirring Up Mocha Cake in progress. Enjoy!

FURTHER UPDATE: We actually won this contest!

We were modifying a fairly complicated recipe, so all members
of the team had to study the original version!

Yes, a pound cake does have a full pound of butter.
But not in each slice!

It's all about Jamaica.

Jamaica, coffee, and chocolate, that is!

The chef hat does not help the coffee,
but hand grinding does!

While going to the trouble of baking
from scratch and using good Marley Coffee,
one might as well use a Chemex or
other pour-over brewing method.

Two hats are better than one for adding the coffee!

Coffee-infused batter!

And the cocoa batter

Swirl the two batters -- with and without cocoa.

Dark Chocolate Basalmic Vinegar glaze is the secrete ingredient.

The final presentation -- with espresso and mocha chips!

Detail: Stirring Up Mocha Cake

0 A tale of two salads

The type food we get in our farm box haul varies quite a bit as the season moves along, and changes from year to year as well. We are still occasionally getting beets, and last week also received some peaches and pears, things we had not gotten in previous years. I did some searching on allrecipes.com to find out what I could build with these ingredients and found two delicious salads.

I made some changes to the, Roasted Beet, Peach, and Goat Cheese Salad, to incorporate ingredients we already had on hand, but was pleased to be able to use the beets and the peaches in one dish. I followed the instructions to roast the beets until I could easily remove the skin. I used more than the recipe called for as ours were rather small, ditto for the peaches, which I cut into small chunks. I added these to a mix of farm greens, lettuce, and herbs from my garden. I substituted a diced onion for the shallots, and included the feta and pistachios as suggested. Rather than make the vinaigrette recommended, I simply sprinkled some of our peach balsamic vinegar from the LOVE Emporium. It was a perfect use for it. A wonderful salad with ingredients I would not have thought to put together. And it tasted great paired with a Cabernet Sauvignon from the Milbrant vineyards of  the Columbia Valley of Eastern Washington.

The pears were well used in the Curried Cashew, Pear, and Grape Salad. After toasting the cashews I mixed them with the melted butter, curry powder, brown sugar, salt, and cayenne. I did not have fresh rosemary, so a used dry, which worked out fine. Again, I used a mix of greens and added the seasoned cashews, the cooked bacon, sliced pears and grapes. I tossed it all with the honey/mustard dressing included with the recipe. This was sweet, tangy, and salty, with a rich variety of textures.

Detail: A tale of two salads

0 Mole L.O.V.E.

During a recent visit to Frederick, Maryland, we found ourselves slurping vinegar straight from little sample cups -- a lot of them! What inspired such strange behavior? The delicious balsamics and infusions of L.O.V.E. -- The Lebherz Oil & Vinegar Emporium, that is.

We learned of the shop from our UMBC alumni magazine -- the shop was founded by the delightful Maggie Lebherz, a recent graduate of the Spanish program from which Pam graduated a few years back. Our visit was even more enjoyable and interesting than we expected. We learned that -- as with coffees and teas -- oils and vinegars can be special either because of special origins and preparation or because they are infused with other flavors.

Samples in the Emporium are free but fine oils and vinegars are expensive, so we had to choose carefully. Fortunately, Maggie mentioned a tantalizing recipe that employs the most decadent vinegar in the shop: 12-year-old dark chocolate basalmic. The recipe in question is Lebherz' own version of chicken with mole (MOH-lay) sauce.

As I mentioned in my Champandongo Magic post last November, I have been a sucker for mole poblano, after first having it in the summer of 1989 on the flanks of Popocatepetl, near its birthplace. "Poblano" refers to the Valley of Puebla, arguably the hearth of mole and of maize. I use "arguably" because the neighboring state of Oaxaca has competing claims on both, and according to a food-travel article in today's Boston Globe, it is home to at least seven kinds of mole!

A few restaurants in our area serve mole, but always as an enchilada sauce or over boneless chicken breast, rather than the bone-in turkey or chicken that Moctezuma intended. For me, that original mole was served over a turkey I had seen wandering around the kitchen only hours before, prepared by ladies who spoke only Nahuatl!

In gathering ingredients for the Lebherz version of mole, we were fortunate enough to have cooking chocolate from Castillo Cacao in Matagalpa, and we were even more fortunate that Pam remembered this fact.

Moles vary, and mine varied even a bit more, with thees slight modifications to the recipe:

1. Because almonds are mentioned in the directions but not listed in the ingredient list, I guestimated that 1/3 cup of slivered almonds would work. 
2. The biggest gumption trap that led me to delay making my first mole sauce by two decades was the need to roast peppers. This should have made the listing of one ordinary green pepper welcome news, but instead I was determined to employ this new skill. I was therefore pleased to see passilla chiles in a local grocery, even though I had to go to a separate store for corn tortillas. I roasted them according to the method I mentioned in my Busy Kitchen post last month, along with a half of a jalapeño we had on hand.
3. The recipe calls for olive oil, for which I substituted Chipotle Olive Oil, also from L.O.V.E.
4. Finally, the recipe calls for light rum, which we do not usually keep around. I almost substituted aged, dark rum from Nicaragua for a bit more complexity, when I had an even more brilliant (in my mind) idea: Kahlua.

I did not take any photos of the final product -- I expected it to taste much better than it looked, and I was correct -- but I did make a little still life of some of the more colorful ingredients (including the oil and vinegar and a beautiful onion from Colchester) during preparation.

I increased everything in the recipe slightly by about half, both so we could be sure to have enough for guests and so that we could have leftovers. I think I added more broth than necessary; in any case the result was more like a stew than a sauce -- a happier spot along the mole continuum for Pam, but thinner than I would have preferred.


The result was not as photogenic as the tableau above, but it was certainly delicious, served with rice, warmed corn tortillas, and of course beer. It was even better on subsequent days. We finished the chicken but have some sauce left over (yes, leftovers of leftovers), which I hope to fashion into some sort of champandongo.


If I ever find a source to a proper assortment of fresh chiles, I will try the Puebla-style recipe on Epicurious, perhaps modifying it to include the Lebherz secret ingredient. The sad assortment of peppers in our local markets make this highly unlikely, unless I treat the ingredients list as a shopping list for next winter's seed catalogs.


Which I might just do.

Detail: Mole L.O.V.E.