Basilicious

Mmm… summer. One of the best things about summer is the availability of all the fantastic fresh herbs everyone seems to grow! Amanda’s parents have mint in their yard, Annie’s parents have jalapenos (ok not really an herb but delicious all the same) and someone happened to bring in some freshly picked basil to Annie the other day. Thankfully she was willing to share!

Inspired by this awesome surprise and the tofu gnocchi I had already tried from Peas and Thank You, I decided to whip up a batch of what I like to call Black Bean and Basil Dumplings. I was much too lazy to wait for the dough to get cold enough to roll into snakesand cut into tiny pieces. I was just patient enough to let the dough cool its heels in the freezer for about 20 minutes. They were just hard enough to stand up to boiling by then, so I just kinda rolled them into rustic balls and squashed them a bit.

I boiled them in a pot of slightly salted water and covered them with a Cucumber Basil Pesto-type sauce. They came out pretty damn tasty! And they were mega satisfying! I will definitely be making these again and trying out different types of beans.

Kyle just brought me Cranberry Beans. He also restocked my adzuki beans supply. Maybe I can do an adzuki bean gnocci with a Japanese flavored pesto… we’ll see where the summer winds blow me!

Black Bean and Basil Dumplings
1/2 cup black beans
1/3 cup cannellini beans
1 large clove garlic
1/2 large jalapeno, seeded
1/3 cup fresh basil
1 egg
1/3 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup brown rice flour (you could use a different flour here)
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
1 tablespoon water
Salt and Pepper, to taste

In a food processor, combine beans, garlic, jalapeno, basil and egg until well combined. Add in flours and give it a whirl again. Add vinegar, water, salt and pepper and process until a dough begins to form. Transfer into a container and place in the freezer for at least 20 minutes or until firm enough to handle.

Break apart pieces of dough, rolling them lightly in flour until you form a bunch of tiny dumplings, or large dumplings if you prefer. Bring a pot of water to a boil. Add salt, then place about 1/3 of the dumplings in at a time, boiling until they float for 2 minutes. Serve plain, with a sauce or even just melted butter!

I opted to serve these with a delicious “pesto” I made. In it was:
- a whole cucumber
- half a jalapeno, seeded
- 2 ounces asiago cheese
- 1/4 cup toasted walnuts
- a dash of lemon pepper
- a palm full of basil leaves
- 2 tablespoons olive oil

Mmm… YUM!

The Unbearable Lightness of Bean

On Prudence Pennywise, a blog I follow, I was struck by her post about a recipe for “unrefried beans”. I am a huge fan of refried beans but the whole lard factor is pretty off-putting if you’re watching your girlish figure. Seeming to read my mind, my mom produced a bag of dried pinto beans from her magical pantry and my dream of reproducing this recipe became a reality! I followed the recipe mostly, adding a bit more water since I did not use a can of taco sauce. I diced up a few jalapenos and some garlic amongst a few other choice ingredients and my concoction has been simmering in the crockpot for a few hours. I look forward to tomorrow morning when I can mash the beans up and see how the recipe turned out. Beans, beans, beans!!

Update: This morning I padded out of the bedroom at 2:30 toward the heavenly aroma the crockpot was emitting. I removed the lid and peered inside.. Now for all the good smells in the world, pinto beans are just not pretty. You won’t find a photo of them here but I will tell you that they tasted just delicious. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. I turned that crockpot off (it had been simmering for 7 hours at that point) and went back to sleep. After waking up for real this morning, the beans mostly cooled, I followed a suggestion posted on Prudence Pennywise’s site. A clever blogger stated that he or she used a slotted spoon to ladel the beans into their kitchen aid and mash them up using the paddle on the second setting. This worked like a dream and saved me from having to use those arm muscles to mash em up. I saved the “stock” the beans created and used it to cook my fish for lunch. Protein OVERLOAD! =)

The Great Red Bean Experiment

I have finally done it! I’ve mashed the beans, made the dough, steamed the buns, and made.. RED BEAN CAKES! These are not your ordinary cakes. I put my own personal spin on them, of course. Quite some time ago I made sweet potato biscuits with sage gravy.. now let me tell you, making biscuits is HARD WORK! I haven’t made them since, but decided this was the right time to pull them out and use them for my experiment! I borrowed my dad’s bamboo steamer and went to work on creating!

Red Bean Stuffed Sweet Potato Biscuits
For the Red Bean Paste:
1 cup red adzuki beans
1/2 cup sugar

For the Biscuits:
3/4 cup cooked, mashed sweet potatoes
1 1/4 cups white rice flour
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
4 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons milk

Cook up the beans on the stove until they’re nice and soft, this will take roughly 2 hours and you will have to keep adding more water as they cook. Once all nice and soft, mash the beans up and add the sugar. Mash it some more until the sugar is all incorporated, then set aside.

Mix together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. I cheated a bit on this next step. Since I cooked up the potatoes the same day, I just added the butter into the steaming mashed potatoes along with the oil and mixed them up that way. Add the potatoes (& Co) to the flour mixture and combine well. Add milk and mix until the mixture looks nice and doughy, like this!

Here comes the messy part.. this dough is rather sticky and requires quite a bit of flour to roll out. I regret that I did not take more photos of this, but I was alone and had messy fingers! I took about a third of the dough at a time and worked in some all purpose gluten free flour to make it suitable for rolling (in other words, so it wouldn’t stick to my makeshift rolling pin: the outside of my pushup measuring cup!) I rolled the dough out into about quarter inch or so thickness and cut them out using the same tool I rolled with, which turned out circles about two inches across. I then took roughly a spoonful of red bean paste, placed it in the center of one of my dough circles, covered it with another circle, and smoothed the edges closed so they were seamless. I repeated this process over and over again until I had very little paste and very little dough left. I mixed the two together and made two buns out of them.

I then left my little buns in the fridge for 3 hours while I ran out to visit my Grandma and play with my niece. When I came home, it was time to STEAM!! Since I don’t have a wok, I set up the bamboo steamer on my big red pot and added some lavender to the water for flavor. I set about four buns at a time in each basket (on top of some wax paper) and let them steam for about fifteen or so minutes.

Now, this is going to be hard, but try to let them cool before you remove them from the wax paper or they’ll fall apart! Once they’re off the paper.. it’s munching time!

Hummus! I got the hummus!

There’s a birthday celebration at the bank tomorrow and I wanted to make a healthy treat to balance out the chocolate I know will be present! I found a delicious recipe for hummus to eat with the homemade bread I made. I am a huge fan of garlic (there’s no way any vampire would come within ten feet of me) but thought that the raw garlic might knock our customers over. I decided the solution would be to quick-roast the garlic in a pan over the stove. This was simpler than I expected: just leave the skins on the garlic and let them take a spin around a hot, dry pan until they smell all yummy and buttery, then slip the skins off. The best part of this recipe is how incredibly simple it is to prepare.. once again I bow to my food processor!

Lemon Garlic Hummus
1 16 oz can garbanzo beans, well rinsed
1/3 cup tahini paste
4-5 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
3 cloves of garlic, roasted
Juice of one lemon
Kosher salt and pepper to taste

Add beans, tahini paste, and garlic to food processor and blend well. Add remaining ingredients and continue to process until a nice paste is formed. Serve with chopped veggies, bread, crackers; whatever you crave! You could serve this right away but I’m allowing mine to sit overnight so the flavors can mingle.