Home-Fermented Sauerkraut

Why the multiple sauerkraut-employing recipes lately? Oh, because we have a bumper crop of homemade sauerkraut! Fermenting sauerkraut is totally easy and will make you feel like an old-timey kitchen rock star.

1 large green cabbage
Kosher salt

First, a note on salt: Sandor Katz's guideline for salt is three tablespoons per five pounds of cabbage. You don't need to worry about hitting that exact amount, though. Just add salt one teaspoon at a time; keep going until it tastes pleasantly salty, like french fries. (If you end up with too-salty kraut, rinse it off before eating.)

Trim away any brown or wilted parts of the cabbage. Slice the leaves and core into fine ribbons. In a large, non-reactive container, sprinkle the cabbage with kosher salt and massage it vigorously. Keep massaging and adding salt until the cabbage has given off a lot of water.

Pack the cabbage and cabbage juice into quart jars (two or more, as needed). Smash down the cabbage well, so that you have at least 1/2 inch of liquid on top. Fill a smaller jar with water and use it to weigh down the cabbage so that no cabbage rises to the surface. Some sauerkraut-makers put all of their cabbage in a large crock and use a plate to weigh down the top. We like the dual jar method because it makes it easy to minimize the surface area and you can see through the glass to tell whether you've got your cabbage fully submerged. Fermentation happens underwater, while mold formation happens on the surface. Therefore, less surface area equals less mold.

Cover the jars with a cloth and place in a dark corner. Once a day, take out the small jar, remove any mold that may have formed on the surface (but don't worry about it too much) and smash down the cabbage as much as you can. (Keep those potentially reactive metal utensils away! Wood or plastic are fine.) Rinse off the small jar and return to its original position.

Depending on the season--summer heat means quicker fermentation--your cabbage will show signs of fermentation in one to three days. You may see tiny bubbles forming or hear a fizzing noise. The kraut will begin to smell sour. Keep giving it daily attention and tasting.

Once it's been bubbling and tasting sour for a whole week, put a lid on the kraut and transfer to the refrigerator. In Ye Olden Times, people left their kraut in the root cellar for months or years, but we like to get ours into the refrigerator while it's young--the kraut stays crunchier that way, and is also a bit less sour.

You can begin to eat the kraut now, or wait for it to get a little more sour. The kraut will keep for a very long time in the fridge.

Slow-Cooked Broccoli Rabe

Broccoli rabe isn't actually broccoli at all, but a leafy relative of the turnip. If you don't have access to broccoli rabe, substitute mustard or turnip greens. In the past, we've always sauteed our broccoli rabe. But after spending some quality time in North Carolina last month and learning the aforementioned turnip trivia, we decided to treat broccoli rabe like turnip greens are treated in the South: cooked slowly with a smoky flavor. You won't taste tomato paste in the final product, but it does contribute to the satisfying, meaty umami flavor.

6 cups greens
2 tablespoons butter
3 cloves garlic, skinned but left whole
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1 teaspoon smoked Spanish paprika
salt

Wash the broccoli rabe and cut off the tough bottom parts of the stem. Chop the tender parts of the stems and the leaves roughly.

Heat the butter over medium-high heat. Saute the garlic and greens for a few minutes. Add the tomato paste, paprika and 1/2 cup water. Simmer on low heat, covered, for three hours. Salt to taste.

Applesauce with Ginger and Plums

We were already planning to spend all day in the kitchen roasting heirloom tomatoes to keep for winter, so while we were at it we made a batch of my sister's applesauce. This is one of the last weeks we'll see both apples and plums at the farmer's market, and here's a great way to take advantage of that overlap: spicy, rosy-hued, delicious with a swirl of yogurt. It would be great on latkes, too.

This made enough for 5 12-ounce jars, so scale down if you're not embarking on a mass-preserving project. We used a mixture of apple types from the "seconds" bin at the farmer's market and tiny Italian prune plums, but what we ended up with was basically half apples, half plums--any plums will do.

1/2 cup Concord grape juice, apple cider, Good Earth tea or other yummy sweet liquid
12 medium apples, roughly chopped (leave the skins on if they're organic)
30 Italian prune plums, halved and pitted
4 tablespoons very finely grated ginger (use a microplane if you have one)

Place all ingredients in a large stock pot and simmer for about 2 and a half hours, stirring occasionally, until fruit is broken down and saucy. Run through a food mill.

One Year of Hearting Kale

Happy anniversary to the blog! Digital camera in hand, we set out exactly one year ago to archive our recipes and amuse ourselves, and have ended up with comments from across the country and readers from all over the world, according to Google Analytics! Most importantly, having the blog has pushed us to be more creative--knowing that someone will actually read our recipes, we've taken risks and gone through multiple iterations of dishes to get the seasoning and proportions just right, resulting in some pretty awesome stuff we might not have come up with sans blog. To celebrate, here are our top five blog success stories, recipes we perfected for the blog and have continued to enjoy after posting.


#1: Tortilla Soup. The first recipe we ever posted is also the one with the most hits, so it seems like everyone else loves this one as much as we do!

#2: Dark Chocolate Mousse Pie with a Coconut Crust. Ordinarily, we're a little shy sharing dessert recipes--if you eat normal cookies, whole wheat agave-sweetened hermits taste like cardboard. But having the blog made us realize that there are other folks out there who want to make delicious sweet treats without refined flour or sugar, and we happily monkeyed around in the kitchen to get the perfect consistency for this filling. Now, we have a go-to dessert whenever there's a potluck, and this is it.

#3: Brussel Sprout and Green Bean Bhaji. When we plan out menus, now we try to think not just about making food that is delicious and healthy, but also about making food that is bloggable. This has resulted in a lot of season-specific variations of old standbys--for example, adding brussels sprouts to a much-loved bhaji right after Thanksgiving!

#4: Raw Kale Salad with Tamari-Roasted Almonds. One of the main innovation drivers in our kitchen has been trying to create new kale recipes for the kale-hearting masses (and those striving to join their ranks). With that goal in mind, we went on a kale binge week, and this is the standout recipe from that experiment, with the most reported reader attempts of any recipe on the blog!

#5: Whole Grain Strata with Oregano and Myzithra. Situation: a loaf of rapidly-aging sprouted bread. Usual remedy: breadcrumbs. Blog-era remedy: whole-grain strata!

Thanks so much to all of you for reading, commenting and being a part of our kitchen. Here's to another year of cooking for you guys!

Yellow Tomato Soup with Cucumber and Yogurt

It's a tomato explosion all this week on iheartkale! The Berkeley Farmer's Market is bursting at the seams with heirloom tomatoes in every size and color, and we've created a rainbow of raw* tomato soups. Soup number one -- yellow tomatoes!

We started with your regular old cucumber-yogurt soup and took advantage of this tomato challenge to mix it up a little. The result: a creamy, pale green puree, perfect for a light summer meal or first course. We used a mix of yellow heirloom tomatoes, but feel free to use whatever tomatoes are accessible, ripe and delicious (although the color will obviously be quite different).

1 and 1/4 lbs tomatoes (it'll be 3 cups pureed)
1/4 cup chopped fresh dill
1 cup plain yogurt
1 clove garlic, minced
1/4 teaspoon salt (more to taste)
1 cup grated cucumber (we used two lemon cucumbers, but half of a regular-sized one will work too).

Combine tomatoes, dill, yogurt, garlic and salt in a blender and puree until smooth. Stir in cucumber, taste for salt and serve.

*Okay, picky raw food folks. We call them "raw tomato soups" because the tomatoes are always raw, but other ingredients may have been heated above 112 degrees Fahrenheit. Pay $30 at Cafe Gratitude if you want the real thing.

Stone Fruit Chutney

We made this to use the last fruits of our loquat tree, but we based it on a Madhur Jaffrey recipe for peach chutney (which was based on a recipe for green mango chutney!), so this basic concept will work with apricots, nectarines or other stone fruits. Chutney is a great showcase for fruit that may have been bruised on the way back from the farmer's market, and will be delicious on whatever protein you choose to throw on your grill.

This is based on the recipe for Delhi-Style Peach Chutney in Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian; we skipped the overnight soaking of fenugreek seeds and subbed honey for the sugar.

2 lbs peaches, nectarines, apricots or loquats
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
3 tablespoons peanut oil
1 teaspoon whole cumin seeds
1/2 teaspoon mustard seeds
1/4 teaspoon fennel seeds
2-inch piece of fresh ginger, finely minced (use a microplane if you have one)
2 cups water
1/4 teaspoon turmeric
5 tablespoons honey
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cayenne

Pit and roughly chop fruit and toss with lemon juice. Heat oil in a medium-sized saucepan and add cumin and mustard seeds. When the mustard seeds pop, add fennel seeds, stir once, and add ginger and fry for a minute. Add water, fruit, honey, salt, turmeric and cayenne. Simmer, uncovered, over medium heat for 10-20 minutes, until fruit breaks down and sauce thickens, stirring frequently. (If your fruit is extra-juicy, you might need longer than 20 minutes). Cool and store in a clean glass jar.

Spinach and Roasted Garlic Talluyos de San Juan with Black Bean Sauce

Talluyos de San Juan are a type of tamale served in Guatemala. The tamale dough is rolled out into a square, spread with filling, and then wrapped up like a jelly roll in a process that's similar to to making sushi. We've filled ours with a spinach and roasted garlic paste, but feel free to experiment with black beans, sweet potatoes, goat cheese or whatever else you like.

You can find masa harina for the dough and corn husks for wrapping in the international aisle of some supermarkets or in a Latin American grocery store. We've been looking for an acceptable corn husk substitute for those of you who don't have access, but we haven't had good results. Any suggestions?



Tamales

About 20 corn husks
1 head garlic
olive oil
2 cups masa harina
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons canola oil
1 cup water
1 tablespoon butter or Earth Balance
1 shallot, thinly sliced
2 cups frozen defrosted spinach, drained well OR 2 bunches fresh spinach, washed and chopped

First, two hands-off prep steps, to do about an hour before you make the tamales:

1. Soak the corn husks in plenty of boiling water while you do everything else.
   
2. Roast the garlic: cut off the top fifth to expose the cloves, drizzle with olive oil, wrap in aluminum foil and roast at 375 for about 40 minutes. When soft, squeeze the cloves out of their skins.
   

Once you have those two things going, you can also start the dough. Place masa harina in a large bowl and add oil and salt. Mix with your hands until you have a coarse meal, then add water and knead for a minute or two, until dough is smooth. Divide dough into three equal pieces and cover until ready to use.

Next, the filling: melt the butter in a skillet and add the shallots, stirring for 2-3 minutes until they start to brown. Add the spinach and saute another 2 minutes. Transfer mixture to a food processor, add the roasted garlic cloves, and grind until you have a coarse paste.

Place one of the dough sections on a large square of parchment paper. Layer another sheet of parchment paper over the dough and roll it out until it's about 1/4 inch thick. If you have the rolling skills, aim to make a perfect square. If you don't, trim off the edges into a square shape. Spread a layer of the spinach mixture over your dough, then roll it up like sushi, using the parchment paper to help control the shape. Smooth out any cracks that have opened and cut the roll into four equal pieces.


Wrap each section in one or two corn husks. (Robe the tamale in husk, then fold under the ends of the husks. If you want, you can make a ribbon from strips of husk and tie a cutesy little bow, but you could also just lay the tamales fold-side down.)

Repeat until you have used up all of the dough. Put a steamer basket into a large soup pot with an inch of water. Carefully load your tamales into the basket and bring the water to a boil. Steam over low heat for 45 minutes to an hour. When the masa is firm, your tamales are ready to eat.

Black Bean Sauce

2 cups cooked black beans (canned okay)
2 teaspoons cumin
4 peeled garlic cloves
1-2 chiles, whole
2 tablespoons canola oil
1 cup of leftover bean cooking broth or stock
salt
optional: 1 small tomato

Heat the oil in a saucepan on medium. Add the whole garlic cloves, cumin and chiles and cook for just a minute. Add the beans and cook for another minute, stirring occasionally. (In the summer, it's nice to add a diced tomato with the beans.) Add the stock, reduce heat, and simmer for about 20 minutes, or until 2/3 of the water has cooked off. Remove the chiles and blend the rest of the mixture until smooth. Taste for spiciness. If you want more heat, throw part or all of the chiles into the blender. Salt to taste.

Carom and Spinach Parathas

If you like curries and are looking for a new accompaniment, try these parathas instead of rice. They're buttery, iron-rich and delicious toasted the next morning for breakfast.

We've tagged this post "projects" because it takes a while, but (1) it's still less time-consuming than most bread recipes and (2) you can multi-task here--if you're making these to go with curry, you can start the dough, let it rise while you prep the curry ingredients, and then roll out & fry the parathas while the curry is simmering.

Carom seeds are also called ajwan or ajwain, and you can find them in Indian groceries. They're supposed to be good for your digestion and have a very similar flavor to thyme, which would be a good substitute if you can't get your hands on some carom seeds. You can find semolina in the bulk section, or buy it packaged in the "baking needs" aisle.

We modified this recipe from The Everything Indian Cookbook by Monica Bhide.

2 cups finely chopped fresh spinach
2 cups whole wheat flour
2 tablespoons semolina
1 and 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon carom seeds
Water, as needed
6 tablespoons melted butter

Boil spinach until wilted (i.e., put it in the microwave with water to cover and nuke for about a minute) and drain off the water. In a large bowl, combine the spinach, flour, semolina, salt and carom seeds and mix well. Add 2 tablespoons of the melted butter and then slowly add small amounts of water as needed to achieve a doughy consistency. Knead for 10 minutes--the dough should be pliable and not sticky, since you'll need to roll it out later. Cover and let sit for 30 minutes.

Lightly dust a clean work surface and rolling pin with flour, and grease your hands with a little oil. Divide the dough into 10 pieces. Roll one of them into a ball with your hands, then flatten and roll out with a rolling pin into a 5-6 inch circle. Brush with melted butter, fold in half, brush with butter again, and fold in half once more to form a triangle. Roll the triangle out until the base is 5-6 inches.

Heat a cast-iron skillet or griddle on medium and brush with butter, then add the paratha. Cook for 2-3 minutes, until the bottom is golden brown, then flip and cook 2 more minutes. (Some parathas will puff up, which looks really cool. But don't cry if yours don't--they'll still taste good, because they have 6 tablespoons of butter in them). Remove paratha and cover with a clean towel. Repeat the rolling and frying until all the dough is used up.

Miso-Preserved Garlic

About a month ago, I had the flu and was good for nothing except lying on the couch, coughing and groaning. Because I was down for the count, activity-wise, Phoebe embarked on a weekend of miscellaneous preserving and fermentation projects to keep herself amused, including this salty treat. We dug out a few cloves tonight and threw them in a stir-fry and the results were well worth the wait! Best of all, this is a project that requires very little effort from you: just pack the garlic cloves and miso in a jar, stash them in your fridge and fuhgetaboutit for a month, then retrieve a few and feel all righteous and Martha Stewart.

If you're new to Japanese cooking, both mirin and miso can be found in natural-foods stores, well-stocked supermarkets and Asian groceries. The garlic cloves will get mellow and take on a magical saltiness, perfect for perking up salad dressings, sauces, kebabs, stir-fries and rice dishes. You can basically use them anywhere you'd want regular garlic, but they are saltier and less stinky. They're fantastic sauteed with a little broccoli, and if you're the type to eat whole garlic cloves when you're getting sick, nibble on one of these straight without having horrendous garlic breath! Perhaps if we'd had these handy a month ago, I could have warded off the flu...

1 head garlic
1 cup miso (we used barley miso, but if you've got something else on hand, go for it)
3-4 tablespoons mirin

Separate garlic cloves and peel. Toss in some boiling water for just a minute, then drain and pat dry with a clean towel.

In a separate bowl, combine miso and mirin. Spoon a small amount of miso-mirin mixture into a clean 12-ounce jar, add a few garlic cloves, and cover with miso-mirin mixture. Repeat until all garlic cloves have been used and finish with a final layer of miso-mirin mixture. Screw on the lid and store in the refrigerator. You can eat these after 5-6 days if you're OK with a strong garlic flavor, but they're best if you wait a month or so for the garlic to absorb the flavor of the miso.

Wheeler Greens (and other New Year's resolutions)

Will you be making a New Year's resolution to cook more, eat out less and/or eat more kale? Here are a few ways to bulk up your kitchen arsenal and help you avoid the mid-week take-out trap, plus our favorite way to cram more kale into our diet.

Freeze cooked grains! We've discussed this before, but it's enough of a lifesaver that we'll risk being repetitive: brown rice and quinoa (and, apparently, millet) freeze beautifully. Once you've cooked your grains, just cool to room temperature and seal in plastic bags or tupperware in 1-cup portions. Retrieve when you're starving, transfer to a bowl and nuke 'em for 2-3 minutes while you stir-fry some kale.

Freeze other stuff you use a lot! Pesto in ice cube trays! Mass-caramelized onions! Your favorite soup! Anything else you want to be able to pull out of your back pocket at the end of an arduous day! If you're in the middle of a butternut squash avalanche (and hey, this time of year, who isn't?), try making and freezing this pie.

Make vegetable stock with your trimmings! If you eat and chop a lot of veggies, you'll probably have accumulated enough carrot tops, onion skins and parsley stems by the end of the week to make vegetable stock. Homemade stock is cheaper--you were just going to throw that stuff out, anyway!--and more delicious than powdered boullion cubes and freezes very conveniently (a yogurt container's worth tends to be just the right amount for a soup that serves 4).

To make your own stock, save whatever trimmings you accumulate in a container in your fridge. (Try garlic and onion skins, carrot/parsnip/sweet potato peels, celery bottoms and leaves, stems from fresh herbs, leek and scallion tops, mushroom stems--anything except potato skins, broccoli, kale, spinach or cabbage trimmings, since they won't taste good in stock. If you eat meat, save chicken or turkey bones and throw them in too). When you have a little time at home, cover the trimmings and a handful of whole peppercorns with water in a large stock pot, bring to a boil, and simmer for about 45 minutes. Strain, salt to taste, and cool to room temperature. Freeze in whatever portions are convenient for you and your amount of freezer space. In addition to being a soup base, this stock can be used instead of water to cook rice, quinoa or other grains.

Bow down to sprouts! We try to always have a container of sprouts handy so we can throw them into salads and stir-fries for quick protein without all the fuss and time-sucking of soaking dried beans. We love making lentil sprouts, but you can sprout whatever suits your fancy OR you can also find mung bean sprouts in almost any grocery store in the produce aisle.

Realistically menu plan! Taqueria dependence is usually the result of (a) not having anything else planned or (b) having something elaborate and unrealistic planned. As veterans of cooperative living, we've been menu-planning for years (indeed, this blog is the result of wanting to just archive our menu ideas somewhere safe and fireproof!), but sometimes even having something planned and having all your ingredients handy isn't enough to ward off the desire to throw up our hands and succumb to the prepared section at Whole Foods. We've noticed that this generally happens to us on Wednesdays, when whatever labor-intensive dish we gleefully planned on Saturday suddenly seems like an insurmountable struggle of chopping, roasting and otherwise not getting dinner for an hour. So get in touch with your burn-out schedule and plan accordingly: we've started either making a double batch of whatever we have on Sunday and eating the leftovers on Wednesday, or having Wednesday dinner be chilaquiles, miso soup, Wheeler greens (below) and defrosted quinoa, or something else that can come together quickly.

Wheeler Greens!
About a year and a half ago, we went to visit our friend Little Phoebe (both smaller and younger than the original) and when lunch time rolled around, her roommate, Wheeler, went out into their garden, picked some dark leafy greens, and made us a simple, delicious lunch: swiss chard, sugar-snap peas and sunflower seeds over brown rice with fried tofu. We make a variation with winter ingredients as well. The beauty of Wheeler greens is that, so long as you have some cooked rice or quinoa on hand, you can make a satisfying meal with complete protein and lots of calcium without breaking a sweat.

Essentials
2 teaspoons canola oil (or other high-heat oil)
7 large leaves of dark leafy greens (swiss chard in summer, kale in winter, or anything in season)
1-3 large cloves garlic
1/4 cup sunflower seeds (summer) or chopped walnuts (winter)
1/4 cup fresh sugar snap peas (summer)
or 1/4 cup sprouted lentils or bean sprouts (winter)
Salt
1 1/2 cups cooked brown rice or quinoa

The Preparation
Before you start chopping your veggies, put a few cups of water in the teapot to boil. Smash unpeeled cloves of garlic with the bottom of a jar or crush them under your knife with enough force to bruise, but not destroy them. Remove the skin and chop each clove into a few large pieces. (It sounds picky, but big bruised hunks are the key to making your stir-fried garlic taste fresh, not stinky.) Chop the peas in half (or thirds, if they're mutantly huge sugar snap peas) and slice the greens finely. Put your sliced greens into a colander in the sink and pour the boiling water over, steaming the greens ever-so-gently. (This will get rid of the bitterness in kale or collard greens).

Heat the canola oil in a wok over medium high heat. First add the garlic and stir a few times. Next, add your sugar-snap peas. When they are just getting warm (Wheeler greens are served al dente) add the seeds, nuts, sprouts, salt and greens. Stir until the kale is wilted, then serve over rice. Voila, complete meal for two in 15 minutes or less.

Sweet-Hot Lemon Preserve

This is the third and final recipe from our spontaneous dinner party, but we had to wait a bit to post it because we wanted to make a new batch and take process pictures. Lemon chutney is a versatile addition to your fridge--it really perks up a simple meal of grains and kale, is outstanding dolloped on mjeddra, and a straight spoonful is helpful when you feel a yucky cold coming on. (No, that statement has not been evaluated by the FDA, and there hasn't been a randomized double-blind trial, but come on, it's tasty) Best of all, it lasts a really long time in the fridge, so you can whip this out three months from now when you need a little something extra for your dinner party.

The recipe below, adapted from Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian, is for a 12-ounce jar. If you want to make mass quantities for gifts and/or disaster preparedness, we did this times five last night--no need to adjust proportions, just scale up (and practice multiplying fractions while you're at it).

2 large lemons
2 and 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric
1 and 1/2 teaspoons cayenne (you can cut back for a milder chutney)
7 tablespoons honey

Wipe the lemons with a damp cloth and then dry them off. Cut into 1/8 inch-thick slices, then cut those slices into 1/8 inch-thick dice and remove the seeds.


Place the lemons in a large saucepan (stainless steel or enamel--cast iron isn't good for this kind of thing) with the salt, turmeric, cayenne and honey. Bring to a simmer and cook gently about 5-6 minutes. (Don't worry if it isn't chutney consistency yet--it'll get thicker as it cools, particularly once it's refrigerated).


Transfer mixture to a clean 12-ounce glass jar. Once it cools to room temperature, screw on the lid. Leave the chutney in a dark corner for 5 days before refrigerating. This will keep in the fridge for at least 3 months. You may notice the difference in color between the serving suggestion photo and the simmering in the pot photo. The chutney in the first picture was about 5 months old, and has had plenty of time to soften and mellow.

Sweet Potato and Caramelized Onion Tamales with Avocado-Cilantro Sauce

These tamales are a great addition to your Thanksgiving table--we made them last year with a cranberry salsa! The avocado-cilantro sauce used in this recipe is our attempt to recreate the avocado salsa that comes with tamales and taquitos at the Flacos stand at the Berkeley Farmers Market.

This post is tagged "projects" not because you'll be preserving anything for the winter--you'll be lucky if you end up with leftovers--but because the recipe takes a long time, so make these on a day when you feel like puttering around at home.

Go Ahead, Block Out a Whole Afternoon

About 25 dried corn husks (depending on how big they are)
1 large sweet potato
1 onion, sliced into rings
1/2 cup plus two tablespoons unsalted butter (OR Earth Balance shortening), softened
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
3-4 cups masa harina
1-2 cups water
1 ripe avocado
1/2 cup packed chopped cilantro
1 serrano chile, minced (leave the seeds in if you like it spicy)
juice of 1 lime
1 tablespoon water
2 teaspoons olive oil
salt

And Call Up Your Grandma While You're Waiting

First, three prep steps, to do about an hour before you make the tamales:

1. Soak the corn husks in plenty of boiling water while you do everything else.
   
2. Prick the sweet potato and bake on 400 until soft.
3. Caramelize the onion: in a heavy-bottomed or cast-iron frying pan, heat 2 tsp olive oil on high heat, add the onions, and then turn down the heat as low as it will go. Cover and cook, stirring occasionally, until everything else is done and onions are browned, soft and delicious, like this:

When you're finished with the prep steps, go ahead and start the masa. Put the butter or shortening in your food processor and pulse about a minute, until fluffy. Add baking powder, salt, 1 cup of the masa and 1/2 cup of water and process. Keep adding cups of masa and half-cups of water until the mixture has a mashed potato-type consistency.


Speaking of mashed potatoes: when the sweet potato is done baking, peel and transfer to a bowl. Mash well and mix in the caramelized onions. Taste the mixture and add salt if desired.

Clear off some counter space and set out your soaked husks, filling and masa bowl. Oil your hands lightly, then pick up a golf-ball-sized hunk of masa, roll into a smooth ball, and make a depression in the middle with your finger and fill with a spoonful of filling:


Press the masa around the filling and seal. Take the resulting rectangular-ish chunk and lay on an opened corn husk. Fold edges of husk inwards, first vertically and then horizontally. Tie shut with string or a long strip of husk. Repeat until all masa is used up--this should make about 20 tamales.

Get a large stock pot and fill with about an inch of water. Place tamales in a steamer basket in the stock pot and steam for about 40-45 minutes. When these are done, the masa should be steamed to a firm consistency. When tamales are almost done, place the avocado, cilantro, chile, lime juice, water and olive oil in the food processor and blend until you have a saucy consistency. Salt to taste. Eat tamales with a drizzle of avocado-cilantro sauce.

Work Snacks: Oven-Dried Charantais Melon

My sister's friend Tom is the (un?)official melon man at the Saturday farmer's market Happy Boy Farms stand. He's been generous with samples and melon advice all summer, so when I ran into him on Saturday en route to the Happy Boy stand and heard that someone had just stolen $100 from the Happy Boy cash box, I was even more determined to buy melons before the season ended. I picked up three small charantais melons ($7 back in the Happy Boy cash box, you soulless thief!), which are so densely flavored that sometimes I forget I'm not eating a butternut squash. We love the dried melon from Full Belly Farm, so we decided to try it out on our own, undeterred by recent oven-drying mishaps. (Apparently dried melons also have their fair share of haters, presumably because the drying intensifies that meaty, musky flavor. Whatever; people are crazy). And-YAY!-we emerged unscathed from this oven-drying experiment, with a nice heap of dried melon for mid-afternoon noshing.


We took a two-pronged approach: slicing half of the melon as thin as possible to dry on top of the stove, and slicing the remaining melon 1/2-inch thick to dry in the oven.

We stovetop-dried the thinly sliced melon for 5 hours while roasting tomatoes in the oven, then finished them by briefly oven-drying on 200 for 10 minutes. The result: Terra-Chip-like crisps of paper-thin melon.

The thicker slices went in the oven on 175 for 4 hours, and we flipped the slices over halfway through cooking. Then we turned off the oven and let them sit overnight. The trick is to use the hot oven to get the melons close to finished, then take away the heat at first sign of burning and let them coast. The result: dried-apple-like consistency with heavenly melon scent.

What To Do With A Weekend's Worth of Early Girl Tomatoes

When Denise, our local tomato pusher, stopped by after the Thursday market with a flat of Early Girl tomatoes, we jumped at the chance to do some hard core tomato projects. The booty: sun-dried tomatoes, oven-roasted tomatoes packed in olive oil and tomato-coconut soup. Here's Denise, with that charming all-your-friends-are-doing-it grin:


Part One: Burn 'Em to a Crisp

For our first project, we wanted to sun-dry tomatoes sans sun. Triangulating from a few internet recipes designed for a gas stove, we decided to halve the tomatoes, sprinkle them generously with salt, and dry them in the oven on 200 overnight. Here's what we started with:


And here's how it ended:


So we tried again with a few more mixed methods: (1) turning the oven down to 175 and cracking the oven door open--still too hot, (2) turning off the heat and letting the tomatoes sit in a pre-heated oven--not quite hot enough, and (3) letting the tomatoes sit on top of the stove while we oven-roasted some more fortunate tomatoes--just right, but takes forever. Finally, we ended up with about 2 cups of stovetop-dried tomatoes:


The take-away: The sun may be fickle, and it may give you skin cancer, but it appears to be the only reliable method for producing sun-dried tomatoes if, like us, you have an electric stove that doesn't have a "warm" setting. But try this out on your gas stoves, and let us know how it goes.

Step Two: Dry Our Tears, Fire Up the Oven, and Bring on the Olive Oil

Since we still had seventy tomatoes left and needed to keep the oven going for stovetop-dried tomatoes, we rolled up our sleeves and tried out the Figs Olives Wine recipe for roasted tomatoes preserved in olive oil. For those of you with electric stoves, we lowered the heat to 200 degrees. The drool-inducing final product:


I'm going to keep these in the fridge until, like, February... Yeah, right.

Step Three: Quick Monday Night Tomato-Coconut Soup


Phoebe's stepmother recently sent over The Everything Indian Cookbook by Monica Bhide. And while it doesn't have any pictures for our food porn fix, it does offer this more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts soup, delicious over rice and ideal for a minimal-effort Monday evening dinner. Our slightly modified version follows; we left the skins on our tomatoes since they were so new and delicious, eliminated the added water to sharpen the flavors, increased the number of chiles and added powdered cumin at the end.

Tamatar Ka Shorba

4 large tomatoes (or 10 Early Girl tomatoes, in our case)
1 teaspoon cumin seeds, toasted in a dry skillet
salt to taste
1 14-ounce can coconut milk
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 sprigs curry leaves, stemmed
1/2 teaspoon black mustard seeds
3 dried red chiles, roughly pounded
1/2 teaspoon powdered cumin

Puree tomatoes, cumin seeds and salt in a blender until tomatoes are completely pulverized. Pour into a medium-sized saucepan, bring to a boil, and simmer 15 minutes. Add coconut milk and simmer for another 5 minutes. Meanwhile, heat oil in a small skillet and add curry leaves, mustard seeds, chiles and cumin. When the mustard seeds pop, pour the oil and seasonings into the soup.


A note about curry leaves: these can be found in Indian markets, and if you don't have access to them, don't substitute curry powder--these are the leaves of the kari plant and bear no botanical or gustatory relationship to curry powder. There's no real substitute, but Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian suggests holy basil for a different flavor.