Vietnamese Crepes

These are awesome....

Ingredients for crepe batter:

1 3/4 cups short grain brown rice ground into flour
1/4 cup spelt ground into flour
2 cans of coconut milk
1 tsp turmeric powder
1/2 tsp curry powder
1 T honey
2 scallions thinly sliced into rings
1/2 cup of finely chopper cilantro
2 T olive oil (or any oil of your choice)
1 tsp sea salt
black pepper to taste, freshly ground
enough water to make a crepe like batter



Mix the batter up and let it sit on the counter for an hour.
















Heat a skillet on medium heat.
Add a few drops of oil and spread it evenly.



Now pour about 1/3 to 1/2 cup of the batter on the skillet and spread it around by either tilting the skillet around or spread it with the bottom of the measuring cup.












Let it cook until it's getting golden brown on the bottom. Then flip it and cook it on the other side for about 10 seconds.

















And now it's time to be creative with the fillings...
You can make a simple stir fry...
Add ginger and garlic to a wok and stir fry any or all of these:
green beans (already steamed)
turnips
summer squashes
tofu
dried shiitake mushrooms
kale/collard
carrots

or anything else that you prefer...




















Now have a huge selection of salad greens and herbs...
Here I have



Spinach













Lettuce













Cilantro













Basil













Mint
















To arrange the Crepes, Get a "fresh-off-the-skillet" Crepe.












Add some stir fry on one side.
Add the herbs on top.














Fold it in half and serve with lots of Lettuce etc.














To eat, break a piece of the crepe with the herbs and veggies. Wrap this piece in a piece of lettuce and dip it in a dipping sauce. Savor the flavor with every incredible bite of it...!











For a dipping sauce, in a food processor, I combined a clove of  fresh garlic, just a little bit of apple cider vinegar, honey, and just a pinch (or more) of cayenne. Process it until and add some more vinegar to get the consistency and taste you like.
(Next time I make this, I'll try to be more scientific about this recipe and measure things out! ;)

Asparagus & Leek Soup - with an Indian Flair

I just had to tweak this recipe and the result was surprisingly delicious!



3 tablespoons of butter
1 1/2 tsp cumin seeds
2 leeks halved lengthwise, washed thoroughly and chopped (use both white and green parts)
3 big garlic cloves chopped
2 lbs of asparagus cut into 1 inch pieces
About 32 oz of vegetable broth
a pinch of cayenne pepper (mine is the super duper hot kind, so a pinch is all I needed, but you might want to add more.)
salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste

In a large soup pot, heat the butter over medium-high heat.
As the butter starts melting, add the cumin seeds.
Continue stirring and don't let the seeds burn.
When the seeds are getting nice golden brown, add the leeks and the garlic and sauté for 2 minutes.






Add the asparagus and cook for another 1 minute.



Add the cayenne, black pepper and salt and stir again for 5-10 seconds.

Now add the broth to the pot, then bring to a boil.



Lower heat, then cover and simmer for 10 minutes or until the asparagus is tender.

Blend soup in batches in a blender/food processor until smooth. (Be careful if your blender is plastic, let the soup cool down first before adding to the plastic jar.) I used my Stainless steel Vitamix.



I had the plan to add some yogurt and garnish with cilantro after this stage, but it was so delicious that I stopped here!

Maybe next time :)

Enjoy!!!

Vegetable Broth

We do a lot of fruit and vegetable juicing.

And we HATE throwing food away.

When we heavily got into juicing, we always were hating to throw away all the left-over pulp.

I tried all kinds of things to do with the pulp.... from baking to making burgers!

But nothing turned out good... :(

Then we started making broth out of it! Instead of spending $3-4 for 32oz of broth... what we do is put all the pulp in a big pot with lots of water, bring it to a boil, and simmer it for an hour. It make delicious fresh broth!

Filter it through a strainer.

Either use it right away or fill up in jars and stich it in the fridge. Use it within a week. If you wanted to, you could even can it!

Do not add any fruit pulp. Only vaeggie pulp, otherwise it's too sweet.

Carrots, celery, turnips, even some beet.... whatever you can think of!

Know-Hows of Baking Bread at Home

This is the sourdpough bread I make regularly. Follow the "stretch and fold" and shaping videos closely.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/4737/finally-100-whole-grain-hearth-bread-i039m-proud

Very good video to watch and learn the procedure from.
http://www.pbs.org/juliachild/free/baguette.html


A good video tutorial for shaping a sandwich bread which I will be adding later:
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/2461/video-tutorial-shaping-sandwich-loaf

There seems to be a lot of info on scoring here, though I haven't had a chance to go through the article yet. There are some videos on the bottom as well
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/10121/bread-scoring-tutorial-updated-122009

Here are the search results for "video" grom the fresh loaf:
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/keyword/video

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/searchresults?cx=partner-pub-5060446827351852%3A9bvu1n-clx1&cof=FORID%3A9&ie=ISO-8859-1&cow=video#914

Lots of good videos!

Gari (Japanese pickled ginger)

This pickled ginger is specially unbeatable with nori rolls. We used to buy this at asian stores year and years ago, but soon came to realize that these are mostly packed with sugar and food coloring and consequently we stopped buying it. Then recently I thought whynot make it at home?!!!

You need Ginger. The freshest and the tenderest you can find, the better. Usually new/baby ginger is better, but I usually make it with normally found ginger and it works great!

Slice the ginger as thin as possible! If you hve a 1 or 2 mm thin slicer in your food processor, use that. If not use a knife to cut it into super thin slices.

Now put his in a small container with a tight lid.

Fill it up with Apple cider vinegar to the top of ginger.

I also used to use some brown rice vinegar and some Mirin (rice cooking wine). You may also, if you want to experiment! These days I just use Apple-cidr vinegar.
The good thing is, it's ready to eat right away with noris. And it will keep almost 20-30 days in the fridge. The longer it sits the milder it will get.

Vegetarian Nori Rolls

I have heard people complain how hard it is to make nori rolls/sushi at home... And always wondered what their problem was.
Perhaps they use special sushi rice and mix in all kinds of sugary/vinegary sauces in the rice.. (I really don't know!)

We make these at least once or twice a week.
They really are easy to make. A fast, nutritious and satiating food.

• We always just use organic short grain brown rice. 1 part rice to 2 parts water. Bring it to a boil, keep covered, and then turn it down to low heat until all the water is soaked up. It's ready in less than 45 minutes!
• We always have nori sheets at home. These are easily and cheaply available at any asian grocery store. If you are as unlucky as me to not have any in your town, ebay is the place to find them!

• You need to assemble the nori as soon as rice is done. The rice needs to be hot.
• Lay down a nori sheet on a cutting board, smooth - shiny side down.

• Put lots of rice towards one end of the sheet (as much as you think you can roll up.) I would say almost half cup or even more... I didn't measure it, but you can kind-of guess from the picture.
• Avocadoes are really awesome in nori rolls. Other eqally good options are: thin slices of cucumber, Spinach, sunflower sprouts... The possibilities are endless!

• Now starting from the side which has more rice (upper side in the picture,) start rolling up the nori as tight as you can.

• Let it sit seam-side down while you assemble the rest. The steam from the hot rice will glue the seam of the nori sheet up.

• When they are all done, with a long serrated knife ( a bread knife works good for me, you have to see which one of your knife works for you,) cut them into thin slices that are about an inch (or less) thick.

Some of my favourite things to serve with sushi are:

• soy sauce
• Ume boshi vinegar
• Fresh horse-radish root finely grated and soaked in apple-cider vinegar.

• Wasabi (the japanese horeradish which can be dried powder form and can be rehydrated anytime to make a fiery green paste.)

• And the very favorite is Homemade Gari(japanese pickled ginger)

So good!

Bread Lessons - Sourdough Starter- Step-by-Step Finish

This is how the starter looked at the end of the 6th day... just after a few hours of some warmth!

Today I already used it for baking bread and it turned out excellent! The starter is really bubbling and active! Very healthy indeed :D

According to sourdolady:

Once your wild yeast is growing, the character and flavor will improve if you continue to give it daily feedings and keep it at room temperature for a couple of weeks longer.
After that time, it should be kept in the refrigerator between uses/feedings.

I will be making two more batches of bread this week using this new starter so it will get a lot of feedings.