If a crepe and a quiche had a baby...

My wonderful aunt got me an absolutely fabulous Christmas present this year-- a couple magazine subscriptions, including Simple & Delicious.  NAILED IT!  The recipes are all simple, quick, and no doubt delicious.  When I was flipping through and found a recipe for a puff pancake, I decided that I needed a fancy breakfast for myself.  I had some old candy bars and a ton of super-ripe melon that I wanted to use up, so I opted to use them instead of berries as the recipe instructed.
I was also interested to see how it would turn out.  It was different from any other pancake recipe I've seen.  You make it in a pie pan and bake it, for one.  Also, it has 3 times the sugar and 1/3 the flour of the pancake recipe I normally use.  From reading BakeWise, by Shirley O. Corriher (more on this book in a later blog), I recognized a couple things: the first was steam leavening.  There isn't anything in this recipe that will cause the "puff" other than steam (no baking powder, etc.).  Also, the amount of sugar probably affects the texture.  I can't be sure on that without tweaking the recipe, but I'm reluctant to try that.

Puff Pancakes
1 Tbsp butter
3 eggs
1/2 C milk
1/3 C flour
1/4 tsp salt
3 Tbsp sugar
3 chopped Yogurette bars (or some other chocolate/yogurt candy)
1 C chopped honeyrock/ cantaloupe


Preheat your oven to 400˚F.  Place the butter in a pie plate and put in the oven to heat up.  Whisk together the eggs, milk, flour, salt, and sugar.  Briefly (so it doesn't cool too much) pull out the pie plate, and tilt/swirl so the butter coats the entire surface.  Pour in the batter, and replace in the oven for 10-12 minutes to bake.  While it's baking, sprinkle the melon with a bit of powdered sugar.  The sides should puff up and become slightly brown.  Immediately put the chocolate on the pancake so that it will melt.  Top with the melon, and serve hot and fresh.

Yummy!  The texture, as I suggested in the title, is a lot like a cross between and crepe and a quiche.  This made me think that it would also be delightful with savory components.  I tried this, actually, using cheese, bacon, and bell peppers, and it was so yummy.  My fiancé thought so, too.  Sadly, I have no photo for this.  But the point I'm trying to make is that it is deliciously versatile; you can put any number of toppings on this.
It really does need to be served right away, not just kept warm.  I wanted my chocolate to melt, so I took out the pancake, and put it back almost right away.  It still deflated.  That said, the puff-look is the only thing affected.  It actually keeps well in the fridge, so if you have any left over (you know, if you don't eat the whole thing yourself, or share it with people), you can enjoy it the next day.

Need a Vegan Dip?

While I had the Greek cookbook, I decided I ought to look at how Mr. Psilakis made tsatsiki.  I cannot get enough of that.  I didn't actually make it, though, because I didn't have a need for it, and I didn't have time to go to Whole Foods to get the kind of yogurt that I like.  But on the opposite page was a recipe for eggplant spread.  It used the garlic confit, and one of the serving/use suggestions included the chickpea confit.  Well, why not?  Bonus: eggplant.  I like to try new things with eggplant, because I've had some great eggplant, but personally find it tricky.  I want to get it right!  I want to get somewhere where I can say, "oh, look at that beautiful eggplant!  I know just what to do with it!"  This recipe is a great step in that direction.

Eggplant Spread
1 large Eggplant
1 Tbsp Olive Oil
6 Shallots
2 cloves Garlic
1 mini red bell pepper
1 mini yellow bell pepper
1 Tbsp lemon juice
12 cloves Garlic Confit 
1/4 C red wine vinegar
1/4 C olive oil

Preheat the oven to 350˚F, wrap the eggplant in foil and roast it in the oven until very soft.  For me, it took about an hour and a half.  Let it cool enough that you can touch it without blistering your fingertips off, then peel the eggplant.  I cut it into large pieces.  Line a colander with, if you have it, a double thickness of cheesecloth. I didn't, so I used a whole bunch of paper napkins instead.  Place the eggplant into the lined colander to drain overnight.

When ready to resume cooking, dice the shallots, smash and mince the garlic cloves, use a toaster oven to roast the bell peppers, and cut the red one into strips and the yellow one into smaller pieces (it makes things a little more visually interesting).  Warm the olive oil over medium-high heat, and cook the shallots until tender.  Add the garlic and bell peppers and cook about a minute more.  Remove from heat and deglaze the pan with the lemon juice.

In a food processor or blender, combine half the eggplant and the garlic confit.  Purée until smooth, then add the red wine vinegar.  Slowly drizzle in the olive oil while blending constantly (you're making an emulsion here).

Chop the remaining eggplant, and combine with the shallot mixture and eggplant purée in a good-sized bowl.  Season liberally with salt and pepper.

This dip has an amazingly creamy mouthfeel and taste.  I was surprised; I double-checked the recipe to make sure that I hadn't forgotten adding a dairy component at some point.  It was delicious.  I ate it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, usually spread on top of some beer bread, although I also used it as a dip for veggies and chips.  It probably would have been a nice addition to sandwiches, although I never got that far.  The biggest criticism I had of it was that it is not very pretty.  It is (as you can see) this odd brownish color.  I know that's just the color of eggplant, but it makes it harder to get people to try something new.

The serving suggestion I took advantage of involved combining 1 C eggplant spread and 1 C chickpea confit (drained).  Chop them together on an easily-wiped-down cutting board, then transfer them into a bowl.  Add an egg and about 1/3 C breadcrumbs (enough to make it a texture that can be formed into a ball).  Form into small fritters, dredge in flour, and deep-fry until crisp. 

The fritters were also fantastic.  Like all fried things, they were best hot, although they were so flavorful I enjoyed them cold, too.  Both of these recipes are my new favorite way to eat eggplant.

Chickpea Confit

My last blog was about garlic confit, a recipe I found in How to Roast a Lamb.  While I was doing the whole confit thing, I went ahead and made chickpea confit, too.  There was a bit of irony to this recipe, because I used canned chickpeas, which are already shelf-stable, and made what is essentially a preserve out of them.  But it's another kind of deliciousness, so let's not get hung up on that.





Chickpea Confit (By Michael Psilakis)
1 head Garlic
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp mustard seeds
28 oz. canned chickpeas (aka garbanzo beans)
Kosher salt
Pepper
Canola Oil
Olive Oil

Separate and peel the garlic cloves, and rinse and thoroughly drain the chickpeas.  Preheat the oven to 325˚F.  Combine the garlic, cumin, mustard seeds, and chickpeas in a heavy, oven-safe pot.  Season with salt and pepper, and pour in equal amounts of olive and canola oils until everything is just barely covered.  Place the lid on the pot and cook about 45 minutes, until "aromatic but not browned."

Sterilize a jar.  After the chickpeas are finished, let them cool and transfer them and their oil into the jar. Store in the refrigerator, and enjoy the delicious chickpeas and cumin-flavored oil.

When I decided to make this, I wondered what I would do with a bunch of chickpeas.  I had a vague idea that I could make some amazingly awesome hummus.  I still haven't done so (I've gotten hung up on tahini), but I've made excellent salads.  The oil is great for a vinaigrette, and the chickpeas themselves are a nice topping to a salad.  Make your salad even fancier by adding home-made croutons toasted in the oil.  The chickpeas are also ideal for fritters or burgers, bringing rich flavor that they don't necessarily have.

Probably my favorite thing that I did with these, though, was a fresh tomato salad.  I cut up some tomatoes and some fresh, mild-flavored cheese (I used Babybel, because I had some, but mozzarella or queso fresco would be equally nice).  I tossed them together with some of the chickpea confit, a bit of balsamic vinegar, a tiny drizzle of oil from the garlic confit (just to give it a little more garlic flavor), and some thyme.  It was delicious, healthy, and a great side dish or snack.

Thank you, Michael Psilakis. I love the garlic.

I recently got lost-ish in the library, found myself toddling down the cookbook aisle, and wound up checking out How to Roast a Lamb: New Greek Classic Cooking (ISBN: 9780316041218).  I love this book.  I want to cook just about everything.  I'll probably buy it sooner or later.  But in the meantime, I chose two recipes that sounded too good to pass up: Garlic Confit and Chickpea Confit.  This blog will for the garlic confit; chickpeas will get their own.

The writer, Michael Psilakis,  said in the intro for the garlic confit recipe that the reader would thank him for that recipe, "if nothing else in this book."  He was right!  So as I said in the title, thanks, Mr. Psilakis.

Confit is a traditional preservation method in which the item you are preserving is slow-cooked in oil.  It works because the oil keeps out water and makes it difficult for bacteria to grow.  So the trick here is that you want everything to be as dry as possible, and you want to have a bit of extra oil.  Because we live in the 21st century, refrigeration adds even more shelf-life to confit, so the recipe uses a blend of olive oil and canola oil.  Olive oil for flavor; canola to keep it clear and fluid in the cold.

Garlic Confit
3 C garlic cloves, peeled
2 dried bay leaves
10 sprigs fresh thyme
1 Tbsp Kosher salt (skimpy Tbsp)
1/2 Tbsp Pepper
1 C olive oil
1 C canola oil

Preheat your oven to 350˚F.  Put the garlic cloves in a heavy, oven-safe pan.  Add the bay leaves, thyme, salt, and pepper.  Cover the whole lot with oil, cover, and pop in the oven for an hour and 15 minutes, until it is tender and golden.  Pull it out and cool it to room temperature (approximately).

While the confit is cooling, sterilize a jar.  To do this, place it in a pot of water so that the water is able to flow in and out of it, and bring it to a boil.  After a couple minutes of boiling, carefully remove the jar from the water (and pour out the water), and place it upside-down on clean, dry paper towels.  Allow to dry completely, and DO NOT touch the inside.

When the confit is cooled, transfer it into the jar.  I had to use a spoon (which I sterilized the same way I sterilized the jar).  Cover the surface with a piece of plastic wrap (don't touch the oil!), and place the lid on the jar.  You don't need the confit to be perfectly room temperature, just cool enough to not shatter the jar.  The less time you spend cooling it, the less time conditions are good for bacterial growth.  Once you've to it in the jar, you can let it continue to cool.  You can place it in a cold-water bath to cool quickly.  Then put it in the fridge.  According to Mr. Psilakis, they should last at least 3 weeks in the fridge, as long as you aren't sticking your fingers in or anything.

The hardest part of this is that is time-consuming.  I spent close to 2 hours peeling garlic.  I set up a little peeling station, with a bowl for peel, a bowl for peeled cloves, and a bowl of whole heads of garlic, put on a show I liked, and did my best to enjoy it. 

The best part of cooking this (besides eating; I'll get to that) was that my whole house smelled like garlic.  In a really pleasant, Italian-restaurant-y kind of way.  It isn't like raw garlic.  

The flavor is amazing!  I love it.  This is garlic at its finest.  I was able to eat a whole clove of it.  It was almost sweet, without being caramelized.  It didn't sting or even give me bad breath.  And the oil!  Oh, I LOVE the oil.  I've been cooking just about everything with this oil-- popcorn, meat, veggies.  I drizzled it over a tomato.  BEST DANG TOMATO I have ever eaten!  Worth all the time an effort I put into it.  Hands down.