The Kitchen Mouse

Cabbage is one of those much-maligned veggies that are incredibly cheap and very filling. If you’re living frugally, like we are, having a few great cabbage recipes in your repertoire is a very good thing. We made the entire recipe for about a dollar, possibly less. It’s also incredibly easy to make vegan or vegetarian – simply omit the cream for vegans and make sure you use vegetable broth.

This particular soup is truly greater than the sum of its parts. It’s comfort in a bowl, homey and perfect to have while it’s still wintery enough to warrant a bit of a pick-me-up while you watch the snow fall. I love the interplay of flavors between the cabbage, carrot and tomato, myself.

I’m participating in the Ratio Challenges this year, hosted by Seattlejo of Fat and Crafty, and experimenting with ratios from Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking.

We’re reaching the end of the first Ratio period and I’ve learned a lot from working with it. I’d always thought of pancakes as being an involved process, requiring recipes and plenty of time. Now I can whip up a batch of pancakes sized for the meal and number of people in nothing flat for breakfast, lunch, dinner or dessert — plus every single batch is completely and utterly different. The creative freedom that it allows me is tremendous!

For instance, the recipe below came about while I was thinking up potential flours and ways to play around with the pancake ratio and my old experiments with chickpea flour and savory flatbreads came to mind. I’ve made chickpea flour flatcakes since I discovered the flour at Seattle’s Central Market. Back then, I would usually mix a one-to-one ratio of chickpea flour to water, add a pinch of salt and rosemary, then fry them up in olive oil.

I’ve learned (thanks to Wikipedia) that creating a batter out of this particular blend of chickpea flour, water, olive oil and rosemary is known by several names in the Mediterranean, including farinata, socca and cecina. I’m not really clear on the distinctions, if any, between them. Wikipedia seems to say that most of the difference is cultural between different areas, such as Tuscany, where it is known as cecina, from ceci for chickpea. Of course, all three of these are traditionally oven-baked, so I’m not sure if or how skillet-cooking them fits in.

The problem I found was when I tried to work the recipe into our menu. I couldn’t figure out what to make it with! So, I turned to an Italian friend of mine who hails from Tuscany and asked him how he enjoys it. He informed me that it’s eaten plain as a snack, much like pizza. (I do believe that he and I think of pizza a tad bit differently, but that’s a topic for another post!) I decided at that point to stop trying to force it into our dinner menu and instead make it as a super-fast side for lunch.

I’d made my Three-Bean Vegetarian Chili for dinner the other night and my husband and I decided to have the leftovers for lunch. As it turns out, these little pancakes made a fantastic accompaniment! The strong flavors of the chickpea flour and herbs complemented the pumpkin, chile and tomato flavor in the chili. I don’t think I would eat these all by themselves unless I was really in the mood for a savory flatbread, but they were truly excellent with the chili.

Third in the Ratio: Pancakes series. I’m participating in the Ratio Challenges this year, hosted by Seattlejo of Fat and Crafty, and experimenting with ratios from Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking.

No picture of this one and why is that? Because I managed to have so many problems putting this together, it’s not even funny. It came out tasty in the end but quite frankly, I need to test my recipe revision to find out if it’s really fixed.

Yesterday was my vārdadiena or name-day. (A vārdadiena is somewhat similar to a birthday, except that smaller in scale and you celebrate based on your name’s position on the Latvian calendar. Let’s just say, it’s an excuse for a party or at least getting your favorite meal out of it.) I decided for dessert, I’d go ahead and make these up, not realizing that I hadn’t finished writing the recipe out by its ratio.

Let’s review the pancake batter ratio: It calls for 2 parts flour : 2 parts liquid : 1/2 part fat : 1 part egg + leavening + sweetener. Simple, right?

I left out the fat and forgot to increase my liquid because I played around with the sugar. So, my initial recipe looked something like this: 2 parts flour / cocoa / nuts : 2 parts sweetened, condensed milk : 0 parts fat : 1 part egg + leavening.

I had decided I would chop the nuts finely into a pseudo-flour and use that as part of the flour. Last night, I discovered that my Cuisinart mini-chopper would not effectively chop nuts. Instead, I got some walnut/pecan butter, some walnut dust and a bunch of chunks and whole nuts. Great. So, I dumped it in the bowl with the cocoa powder and pastry flour. Didn’t really think about the ratio and the fact that I had just lost 1 1/2 parts of flour to a bad chopper without replacing it.

But wait, it gets worse. Not only had I forgotten to add in the fat, but the correct ratio calls for baking powder. I used baking soda. They’re both leavening agents, but baking powder is double-acting. Baking soda is single-acting, which means you only get one “rise” out of it and it begins as soon as it activated. Baking powder can sit around a while. Luckily, I had mixed it and immediately began cooking it, but I’m not quite sure how much of a problem this is.

With everything else going wrong, I would up adding a lot of milk just to get the batter to thin out properly. When my husband started cooking them, they spread very far and very fast — and weren’t easy to flip. This is because of the missing part of flour and fat. We wound up quickly stirring in flour to get them to a cookable state.

In the end, they came out pretty well. Even the first one that spread like crazy and was a bitch to flip tasted great. I hit the cocoa measurement dead-on. They were extremely delicious and I only wished I’d had some fresh strawberries and whipped cream to top them.

Here’s the revised recipe, the way I should have cooked them. I’ll be making these again soon and will edit this post if there are any changes that need to be made, but if you try them, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. Just mind the ratio, okay?

When we were at Winco earlier this month, I found a great deal on some marbled pork shoulder that would be great to grind up for sausages or meatballs. Since I was grinding meat that evening anyway, I decided to make open-faced burgers.

These came out juicy and packed with flavor. I loved the mushrooms and onions cooked in red wine!

Now the original recipe actually called for ground chicken and Marsala wine. That would also be good but I didn’t have any Marsala left in my pantry. I believe that just about any combination of ground meats would be delicious, whether it’s ground chicken or veal/pork or buffalo.

They say, “Necessity is the mother of Invention.”

We had planned to have a spinach salad with all sorts of goodies, including some asian pears we picked up on sale. We then suddenly discovered that we were out of any type of dressing, even our favorite Ranch mixes we keep for emergencies! In fact, we were out of garlic, so we couldn’t even make our usual red wine vinaigrette. (It goes without saying that we were also out of shallots. This happened the day before our major grocery shopping trip of the month, if you can’t tell.)

A mad scramble for a workable dressing promptly ensued. It had to be fast and incorporate very few ingredients, preferably all staples that we still had in the pantry. My husband found this one on MyRecipes.com and it worked out beautifully. It’s well-balanced between sweet and tart, pairing up well with the sweet asian pears and the bite of red onions.