Matcha Madeleines

It's a wonder why there isn't a higher rate of heart disease in France than there is in the US. Perhaps it's our lacking embrace of saturated fat from animal products such as dairy, cheese, butter fat, etc. There is really no reason why these little cakes are so pricey at coffee shops like Starbucks. You're literally eating just a tablespoon of cake batter. So anyways.. onto the recipe. Oh, and one other thing, when using AP flour, if you use unbleached/unbromated flour the cakes will be darker than when using "white" flour.

Ingredients

1/2 c unsalted butter (1 stick or 4 oz or 113 g)
2 large eggs, at room temperature
1 tbsp whole milk
1 c all purpose flour (120 g)
2/3 c organic granulated sugar (133 g)
1 tbsp powdered sugar, plus more for dusting
1 tbsp matcha green tea powder
1 tsp baking powder
pinch of sea salt

Directions

0. Prepare the Madeleine pan(s) with butter and a dusting of flour. Set aside.

1. Melt the butter. Set aside and let cool to room temperature.

2. In a bowl, sift together flour, sugar, matcha powder, powdered sugar, baking powder and sea salt.

3. In a separate bowl, whisk together milk and eggs.

4. Gradually add the flour mixture to the milk/egg mixture and fold in with a spatula. Let the batter rest for at least an hour.

Preheat oven to 375 F (190 C).

5. Bake for 10-12 minutes.Remove from oven and let cool. Gently remove madeleines to a rack.

At this point after the cakes have cooled to room temperature, you could dust them with powdered sugar and eat.


Strawberry Lemonade Iced Tea, Cold-Brewed

This ratio came out tasting rather well. Though, I wonder if it's better to add all the sweetener (in this recipe, just organic granulated sugar) when mixing the base or after the fact and just sweeten per serving. This write-up reflects the latter. I had half a quart (2 cups) of Strawberry mash in the fridge. I was going to make more strawberry ice cream with it but after a week of it just sitting in the fridge, this is what it went into.

There are actually four recipes on this page. Stop and go wherever you'd like.

Ingredients - Strawberry Syrup Mash

1 lb fresh strawberries, core/stem removed
1/2 c sugar

Mash the strawberries, use an immersion blender, or blend it all together in a food processor.

(optional) Add 1-2 tbsp of fresh lemon juice if you want to preserve the red color of the strawberries.

At this point, you could skip the lemonade part of this recipe and add a 14-oz can of coconut milk to make coconut strawberry ice cream. But, that's an experiment for another day.

Ingredients - Strawberry Lemonade

1/2 fresh lemon juice from 2 large lemons

Directions

Add the lemon juice to the strawberry syrup mash. Mix well. Refrigerate until ready to use.

For one 12 oz serving:

add 1/2 c Strawberry Lemonade base
fill mug with filtered water (or cold-brewed iced black tea for a Strawberry Arnold Palmer)
add sweetener, to taste (for this I added 1 tbsp organic granulated sugar)

Cold-brewed Black Tea

4 tsp English Breakfast tea (or 4 black tea bags)
4 cups of water
1 quart mason jar w/ lid

Combine in the mason jar and let sit overnight in the fridge.

Side note: 

You can use a vegetable peeler to peel just the yellow part of the peel from the lemon and put the peels in a clean jar filled with vodka.. to make lemon extract. You can then add a simple syrup to that extract (1:1 ratio) to make limoncello. Then compost the peels when all that is done.

Two ingredient Five-Spice Peach Ice Cream

I had an almost serious thought about how ice cream is made. Much like that fruit-at-the-bottom yogurt concept where it is just plain yogurt + jam, I thought I might try to add a finished jam (five spice peach) to the two-ingredient no-churn ice cream base. These no churn recipes are for the extra lazy. Taste-wise, you're much better off making an actual custard base for ice cream for a more balanced taste that doesn't taste overly dairy-like. The prep time is so short that from start to finish, you could be eating this ice cream in about six hours (what it takes for the mixture to set in the freezer).

Photo-wise, it doesn't look that interesting. And since the jam is essentially pureed peaches with sugar, pectin, and spices, there aren't visual orange peach bits in the ice cream. I think the "five spice peach jam" comes from the Food in Jars cookbooks.

This has the texture of an ice cream; but it lack the body and flavor depth that an egg-based custard brings to the dessert. Maybe it could be plated up with some grilled peaches. That'd be a dashing display.

Makes: 1.5 quarts

Ingredients

1 pint organic heavy cream
One 14-oz can of sweetened condensed milk
1 pint peach jam

Directions

In a large bowl, whip the heavy cream to soft peaks (about 10 minutes) with an electric whisk. If you do this step by hand it takes much longer and requires serious upper body strength.

Once soft peaks have formed, whisk in the sweetened condensed milk. Then stir in the peach jam. Make sure you break up the jam so that it is evenly distributed.

Put the ice cream mixture into quart containers and freeze for at least six hours.

Two Ingredient Strawberry Ice Cream

You know when you've spent too much time on Instagram or Pinterest when your tired brain thinks that Buzzfeed's Tasty videos are onto something with their "2 ingredient' ice cream recipes. Then you actually try them out and find that the ratio of dairy to everything else is too high. This strawberry ice cream tasted a lot like strawberry-infused cream than an actual strawberry ice cream, despite having mixed in 2 lbs of strawberries into the batch.
The Foodening Blog - Two Ingredient Strawberry Ice Cream
While this is a no-churn recipe, you do need a food processor or blender.

Tasty's recipe ratio:

1 pint heavy cream, beaten to soft peaks
One 14-oz can of sweetened condensed milk

And, strangely, that is it for their "two ingredients". I put in more than their suggested amount of mix-ins into this batch. Tasty only uses 1 cup of chopped strawberries. I can't imagine how bad their ice cream tastes.

To this, I added 1 lb frozen strawberries (coarsely chopped in the food processor) plus 1 lb fresh strawberries, an additional half cup of organic granulated sugar to balance out the tartness of some of the strawberries.

And even with that, it didn't really have that strong strawberry flavor.

The flipside to this is to make an actual churn-based recipe and make a vanilla custard base, like what Alton Brown would suggest.

This batch made 2 quarts. While just tasting like frozen strawberry-infused ice cream, it lasted less than a week. What can I say. I really like ice cream.

Kitchen Notes: Garden Seed Starts, 2019

This spring I have been 'composting' a lot of the vegetable scraps directly into the raised garden beds to amend the soil. Generally this just involves digging a hole, dropping in some non-meat food waste, enslaving red wrigglers (worms) that I find lurking under my patio pots, and covering it with topsoil. A week or month later, the food is gone and I have nice dark rich earthy-smelly soil. Perfect for...

Despite the very warm start of May, I have not planted anything new in that raised bed. I should probably move all the flowering bulbs out of the vegetable garden bed into its own area at some point. Half of my rosemary bush on the side yard died when some boards from the fence fell on it during winter. Oh, and I picked up a rhubarb plant. That'll get put into the side yard as soon as I dig out the Prima apple tree that didn't seem to have survived our freak spring snow days in April. It's just as well.

The gold potato "seed" starts from sprouted potatoes in my pantry seems to be leafing very well. For months they were in a pot on the backyard side-of-the-house that gets less than four hours of sunlight, also covered by leaf mulch. Just last week I moved the pot to the backyard patio and it seems to be doing well.

The russet potato "seed" starts don't seem to be doing much at all. How long do I have to wait until the sprouts turn into leaves?

As for other plant "cuttings", I have some romaine lettuce that is regrowing its leaves nicely after having eaten the rest in a salad, I wonder if I should plant them down into soil now that they're starting to grow roots in the yogurt cups I have the plants in.