Food, cooking, eating, and me

Boiled nuts help protect against illness

A research study has shown that boiled peanuts are much better for you than roasted or raw ones. Their “phytochemicals have antioxidant qualities that protect cells against the risk of degenerative diseases, including cancers, diabetes and heart disease.” For some reason boiling them makes more of these chemicals available to the body.

Back when I used to drive down to Florida every year, I would stop at roadside stands and buy containers of freshly boiled peanuts. Most Northerners have never tried them. You can’t even buy raw peanuts in the shell up here, as you can down South.

But don’t put them into the “Ew!” category. Shelled raw peanuts are readily available, and they make a great addition to soups and veggie stews. Also, if you blend them with some water until smooth, they make a creamy thickener that can take the place of dairy and flour, for a filling vegan “cream” soup.

The only drawback is, yes, the allergy thing. But if you’re not allergic, go ahead and try them out. I’ll come up with a recipe or two soon.

First of all, as far as I’m concerned, hot chocolate and chocolate milk are made with chocolate and drinking quality milk or “milk”, not with cocoa, and definitely not with some kind of mix that looks like you got dirt in your skim milk.

I’m just a firm believer in the real thing.

So what you have to do is melt the chocolate in the almond milk and blend it to mix it in. Almond milk should not be heated to boiling by itself, but you can safely heat it after mixing in the chocolate.

I have found that some commercial milks can taste thin. If I want the finished product to be “milkier”, I add some coconut milk powder, which I buy at an Asian food store.

For chocolate milk, it’s the same thing, but you may need to add some extra sugar, as chilled things taste less sweet.
Gosh, better make plenty, too. I bought some chocolate rice milk once that was so horrible I took one taste and threw the carton away. Not this. This is the real deal.

Ah, and the piece de resistance: European-style hot chocolate. When blending the chocolate and milk, add some cornstarch to thicken it up so you will use a spoon while drinking it. Thicker is definitely better.

This is so easy it hardly merits an entire post, but it is the best!

I was thinking about making a coconut ice cream (thickened with egg yolks), but I never motivated myself to start. Finally it occurred to me that I could make a sorbet using a can of coconut milk and sugar. Actually, I had this feeling that that would be too fatty to have the proper texture, so here’s what I did:

I put a measuring cup with 1/2 cup of water and 1/2 cup sugar in the microwave, and heated it for a minute, taking it out to stir it and continuing to heat until the sugar dissolved. It didn’t taste sweet enough to me at this point, so I added another ounce of sugar. I then added this to the contents of a can of coconut milk and stirred until completely mixed. I put it in the refrigerator until it was cold, stirring several times. Finally I put the bowl in the freezer and stirred it every 1/2 hour at first, less time as it started to freeze, smashing up lumps and scraping the edge off the bowl. Finally, when it was mostly frozen with hardly any liquid in it, I put it through the food processor to break up any lumps and crystals. Then I packed it in a container to store in the freezer.

You can, of course, make this in your ice cream maker, if you have one, which I don’t. It’s a little rich, but it has that mouth feel that tells me if I had diluted the coconut any less it might have been a bit greasy. I’m making this again!

I’ve always had a fondness for canned cream of mushroom soup that bordered on a perversion. Even though I only occasionally purchased it, just having it in the house was such a temptation that I often ended up eating it undiluted, thick and yummy.

Of course I haven’t been eating much cream of mushroom soup since I went gluten-free, which is more than two years ago, and certainly no canned Campbell’s as in my diet’s previous incarnation. People have been posting about wanting cream of mushroom soups to eat and concentrate to put in casseroles, such as that famed green bean casserole with the Funyons instead of the crunchy fried onion bits (I can’t comment on that, as I haven’t tried it). I also read that Progresso makes a gluten-free cream of mushroom soup, but I haven’t looked for it. It must have something to do with that icon of Americana, the red and white soup can.

Then last week I had an idea. I had been making sausage gravy with water instead of the milk I can no longer consume. Though you can get the right texture and a brown gravy-like appearance, the flavor is nonexistent. This time I blended some blanched almonds with water - about 2 ounces of almonds to 1 cup of water - until smooth, added it to the pan drippings, and slowly cooked until it had simmered for a while. It was much better than not bad. The almond particles made the texture, if anything, a bit floury, which when you’ve gone without flour for this long, is not unattractive. Almonds don’t have those starch particles that explode and cook smooth like wheat flour does. Also, it was very rich, much more than I would have predicted from the calories in the almonds that went into it.

I found that leftovers were as good as fresh, and I added a spoonful of this to several things I ate last week - pasta, frozen spinach, polenta, eggs mollet… The recipe made a sauce that was too thick, so I need to tinker with the exact proportions of almonds to liquid before I decide to make any sauce recommendations.

Now for the big deal: cream of mushroom soup. I figured it might be a little thin to use 1 ounce of almonds per cup of liquid, but I had to start somewhere, so I made the commitment to that proportion. I put the almonds in the blender jar with a tablespoon of sherry and added water to just below the level of the almonds. I whirled, scraping down chunks off the cannister walls and adding liquid a little bit at a time until it was perfectly smooth and about as thick as a pancake batter. I diced 8 ounces of portobello mushrooms and sauteed them in a tablespoon of butter (substitute olive oil if you can’t tolerate butter). Then I just added the thick almond milk to the pot with the mushrooms in it and heated it, stirring, until it had simmered for a few minutes.

Salt and pepper to taste. Yum. To make this into a condensed-style cream of mushroom soup, just use about half the water.

As the weather warms up, my thoughts turn to cold composed salads, things lined up on top of salad greens. Think of Cobb salad, not as itself, but as a starting point for inspiration.

The past couple of days I have put dry greens in the bottom of a rectangualr glass baking dish, and put rows of things like cooked asparagus, rinsed canned black beans, halved hard boiled eggs, chopped cooked bacon, green olives, and walnuts. Yesterday I cut the tomato and put it into the salad first. Today I held it back and put it in at the last minute, preventing the salad from picking up too much water.

I include a little covered takeout cup of homemade mayonnaise to dip into.

To eat, I pick off the pieces, and when they are mostly gone, I put salt, pepper, vinegar, and olive oil on the salad greens and stir before eating them.

It’s an incredibly attractive lunch. Everyone is always very jealous…

It was time to make some almond milk.

I never really had any use for fresh milk aside from cooking, even before I realized I was lactose-intolerant. But I did like almond milk, at least the homemade non-sweet kind.

Have I ranted yet about how Americans insist on having everything sweet? So all available nut and soy milks are quite sweet, to cover up for the fact that they’re not cow’s milk. Horrors! Imagine being able to taste what you’re eating or drinking because it’s not sweetened! The trend is for everything to be sweeter and sweeter, and most Americans follow the trend blindly, not even realizing how they are ratcheting up the sugar themselves. Yogurt? Sweeter than ice cream, but that’s ok, it’s fat-free. Thai or Chinese restaurant food? Americans insist on sugary sweet sauces. I’d better stop now before I get carried away. You know how I get.

Back to the almond milk. It is white and delicately flavored, though you might not guess it has almonds in it if you didn’t know. You can use it in a baking recipe, but don’t boil it by itself, as it will curdle. You can mix it with equal parts of carrot juice for a nice morning juice drink. You can use it to make panna cotta, though it will be light and delicate, not the heavy, rich creamery type.

Best of all, for us cheapskates, you can make a gallon for the cost of a pound of almonds, currently going for $4.89 here at the natural food store.

Almond milk