Strawberry Almond Roulade and Little Bee

I made a strawberry roulade from a squishy pink baking book that Bridget brought home from work! It is all gone already, that is how delicious it is (was). Make it and see for yourself!

The Prep: Heat your oven to 425 degrees. Take a jelly roll pan (or something 14x10 inches (ish) and line it with parchment paper. This is going in the oven, so don't cheat and use wax. Go out and buy some parchment. It's August and I had to bicycle to the store to get some, so I don't wanna hear you complaining.

The first step is making the spongy cake part. Start with a pot with some water in it. Put that on the stove and heat it up while you find a nice heat-proof bowl to put on top of the pot, so the bottom of the bowl is in the pot but not touching the water. Now put 3 eggs and 2/3 of a cup of sugar into the heat-proof bowl and whisk them until everything is warm and thick and mixed. Don't cook the eggs though.



Action shot!

Take that off the heat and get another bowl with a little bit less than 1 cup of flour. Be sure and sift this pretty well, because you will be folding the eggy sugar mixture into this and you want as few lumps as possible. Okay, now you can fold the eggy sugar mixture into the flour. Add 1 tbsp of hot water to the mix as well.



Pour the mixture into the pan and pop it in the oven for 8-10 minutes, until golden and springy.



Meanwhile, you can make the filling by mixing 3/4 of a cup of mascarpone cheese with 1 tsp almond extract. I added some sliced strawberries as well, and then sliced some more strawberries in another bowl to put on top of the filling. I really love strawberries.



When the cake is done, turn it out on a fresh piece of parchment paper and peel the old, oven-y parchment paper off.



Roll the cake up in a spiral, with the fresh paper to keep it from sticking. Wrap it in a dishtowel and wait for it to cool. Meanwhile, let the filling get cool in the fridge.



Wait a couple hours and pull everything out to assemble. Unroll the cake bit and spread the filling on it. Drop some sliced strawberries on the filling and roll it all back up. For extra decoration, add slivered almonds on top.







Yum!

Last night I finished Little Bee, a novel by Chris Cleave. It is about a young woman from Nigeria and a less-young woman from England. It's about a lot of other things too, but it is a story that I was told not to spoil by explaining. Suffice to say that it was beautiful and heartbreaking and please enjoy this, one of my favorite passages from it: "We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived"

Casada - a Costa Rican Union of Fried Plantains, Volcano Rice, and Kidney Beans + Scott Pilgram

Casada was basically all I ate (read: could eat) for a week in Costa Rica with my roommate and her family and it is still in the top three of my list of Foods I Would Choose If Some Omnipotent Figure Forced Me To Only Eat One Thing For The Rest of My Life. So, um... yeah. It's good.

In some ways, you are forced to start this dinner an indeterminately long time in advance. Since we do not live in Costa Rica (well, I don't, maybe you do, in which case this recipe is pretty unnecessary to you), we do not have nice fresh plantains to pick off our trees. You can use bananas but I promise it won't be as good. Instead we get them picked when they are green and shipped here to ripen in their own good time, which can be anywhere from 1 week to 6 weeks. Seriously. I buy like 6 and keep them in a brown bag in the pantry and check on them periodically and then cook them when they look something like this, as the more yellow and brown they are, the sweeter and softer and less like a potato they taste.



So, basically, they rule my cooking schedule. These took 4 weeks to get this way, but the other 2 I bought them with were ready in one week. Ridiculous.

Anyway, now that you understand the mysterious nature of the plantain, I need to tell you that they are ridiculously delicious, even if you don't like bananas much, because they take everything bad about bananas and make it good (less intense smell, less slimy and gooey, you don't feel the banana fumes in your mouth when you eat plantains).

Okay, now how to cook them.

Actually you should start the rice first, especially if you have a rice cooker to keep it warm (have I convinced you you need one yet?) I used Volcano Rice that I bought at the Green Festival in SF. It is organic and delicious and can be bought here (http://www.lotusfoods.com). Really, all their rice is delicious, but I'm sure the rice you have in your pantry is very nice too. I didn't take a picture of it for some reason, but there's one at the end, so you'll just have to wait.

So now we can start the plantains. First, get a nice layer of oil in the bottom of a skillet and heat it up. While it's heating, slice your plantains up.



The oil took awhile so I made some iced tea too. Teavana's Jasmine Dragon Peals and Roobios Tropica are really good together. These companies should really be paying me for all this fabulous publicity.



So your oil is heated now and you can tell because you put your fingers under the faucet and flicked a few drops of water into the pan and it danced. So now you can place as many plantains as fit in the pan and let them cook (on medium heat, or low if necessary, you don't want it to get too hot or the pan will spit hot oil in your face). Let them cook for like 5 - 10 minutes, and check on them periodically. The bottom side should look like these guys in the back left:



When they look sorta like that you can flip them all over and cook the other side. Meanwhile, you can open a can or two of kidney beans and heat them up. (Or, if you are judging my use of canned beans, feel free to go back in time and make your own dried beans. I'm not that intense, sorry.)



Yum.

This dish is called casada because everything is mixed together. Like being married. So I hope you didn't divide each thing into a separate part of the plate, cause its supposed to look all good and mixed up, like this



I've recently begun reading the 6- volume Scott Pilgrim graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley and enjoying them thoroughly. The humor is perfectly tailored to my weird tastes and the drawing is pretty fabulous too. Plus there is an impending movie with the inappropriately-cast Michael Cera, which otherwise looks pretty exciting. So check them out!

Lentils, Roasted Brussels Sprouts, and Red Quinoa

This is the epitome of Healthy Vegetarian Dinner, but it is also really tasty and makes your body feel nice after you eat it, so we have it kinda frequently. My friend Anastasia, however, does not have it ever, so when she heard what I was making for her visit, she was a little hesitant. But after helping me make it and a little wine, she was very excited and even put the meal on her tumbler (http://whatsonyourplate.tumblr.com/), so hooray!

I started with the red quinoa, which I buy at Trader Joes. We have a rice cooker, so it can just chill (or warm, I guess) in there until the rest of the meal is done and it won't get cold or dry or anything. 2 cups water to 1 cup quinoa :)



I looks like I also added some herb, but I'm not sure what it is... sage maybe? Try it out, lemme know if it tastes nice.

Next, I started the Brussels sprouts. I preheated the oven to 400 and preped the sprouts by cutting off the icky end bit, slicing them in half, and then rolling them around in a bowl with some olive oil.



Then I sautéed them with plenty of brown sugar and more oil so they could get soft and sweet.



While they sautéed (for about 5 minutes), I cooked the lentils. First I cooked 1/2 an onion and 2 carrots (both chopped) in a pot with some oil for about 5 minutes. Then I added a couple cloves of minced garlic and cooked another minute. Then I added 1/2 of white wine, 2 cups of vegetable broth and 1 cup of the lentils, plus a bay leaf. The mixture simmered away and I left it partially covered for about 25-30 minutes, stirring whenever I needed something to do in order to look like a Busy and Important Chef.



By now, I had put the Brussels sprouts on a baking tray and had moved them into the oven (I did that while the onion and carrot were cooking, keep up).



They were meant to stay in there for 30 minutes and I was distracted by Anastasia's charming company and so didn't check on them enough - they were darker than I like when I took them out, but still sweet and good. So check on them. Speaking of which, you should probably check those lentils right about now, they might be soupy. You don't want that. Anyway, make sure you flip the Brussels sprouts and know that 30 minutes is a random estimate. Just take them out of the oven when they look a little toasty and brown and like something you would want to eat.



This is why my Brussels sprouts burned.



Finished product!



And, look, the quinoa is done too!

So I know I talked about reading Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond last time, but that was a whole two months ago and due to work and busy-ness and all the reasons I have for blogging about something I ate 6 weeks ago, I haven't finished the book yet. Another reason is that reading it is like taking a full college course in the history of all civilization. So I am going to recommend it again, this time based only on the sheer volume of interesting and relevant things I learned - things that, in fact, I frequently had to stop reading for a few minutes and take in and review in my mind, so I would remember and understand it all fully and use it to understand and explain societal phenomenon in my daily life. Seriously, read the thing.