Weeee'rrreeee BACK!

Hello folks! After a deplorably long hiatus, Yummies! is back. During said hiatus, I (Iain) was busy finding us a house to live in, then we all moved into said house, Emily and I both started our Americorps positions, and then we generally just started getting used to life as normal again. Then, when we were ready to start posting, Emily's camera died (temporarily), with all the sumptious pictures of food trapped inside it.

So, new things you should know about before I show you pictures of food!

1. Our friend and housemate Ian Boswell returned from Europe to resume cooking with us and begin posting on the blog (see his post for the quite excellent Midtown Marinara. Note - this is not your great uncle's marinara!).

2. We moved across the Mississippi to Minneapolis - specifically a neighborhood called Seward, which is full of excellent opportunities to buy awesome local food, which we now cook with as much as possible! The Seward Co-Op and the Midtown Farmers' Market are both great for this.

3. We are poor. As said before, Emily and I are both doing Americorps and Ian is a musician. That means everything we make, you can afford too!

So, to bring in the new Yummies! season, here's a quick tour of some of the dishes we've made since our last pre-Ian Boswell post that we weren't going to do a full post on:

Tortilla Soup

This tasty recipe came out of Emily's Rebar Cookbook, from the acclaimed and reputedly awesome Rebar restaurant in Victoria (hence why we can't put the recipe on here. Sorry, we don't steal other people's recipes - we were good students who don't plagiarize!).
The soup was full of cilantro, avocado, and I think a fair amount of corn, and then we made little teepees out of the toasted tortilla strips and garnished with lime juice. We highly reccomend this cookbook to veggie lovers!



Peanut Butter Chocolate Cake

Emily made this glorious treat on one of her famous "baking adventures." She doesn't remember what she did to make them (hence, no recipe on this one either, sorry!) but don't they just make you want to reach through the screen and nom on it right now? Yeah, I thought so. Basic formula was:
1. Make chocolate cake with some peanut butter in it.
2. Make a gooey peanut butter sauce to put on top.
3. Make a gooey fudgy sauce to go on top of the previous sauce.
Tada!


Fragrant Green Curry with Vegetables

This Thai curry recipe came from my Jamie Oliver cookbook: the Naked Chef, which is rapidly becoming a favorite cooking aide. This photo, which really doesn't do it justice, shows the final product in a bowl on top of rice and garnished with cilantro and pistachios. We basically loaded all the ingredients for the curry paste (including plenty of fresh basil and cilantro from our garden) into Emily's new cuisinart and blended them, and then made curry like normal. It made for an absolutely fabulous curry, which made me appreciate green curry more than ever before.


Emily's Carrot Cake of Awesomeness

This one's going into the general no recipes post just because we're so backlogged with posts yet-to-be-written-even-though-we-have-the-pictures. Maybe she will give the recipe some day, but that might not happen. She never stops with the baking adventures. She will have more. But suffice to say she made some really nice carrot cake from scratch, complete with her cream cheese icing. The final product made her happy and squeaky, as can be seen in the picture.




Tostadas from Scratch

This one was super easy, but super yummy and really fun to make. Also, it is photogenic, no? This recipe came from one of Emily's Mollie Katzen cookbooks (either the Moosewood Cookbook, or the Enchanted Broccoli Forest - both awesome) and was made on some summer night when we just wanted something quick and easy. Apparently for us, "quick and easy" involves frying your own corn tortillas and making your own hot sauce from scratch. :-p
Actually, on that topic, MAKE YOUR OWN HOT SAUCE! It's pretty easy, and it's waayy delicious! All you need is some minced up tomatoes, some minced up garlic, some minced up onion, some spiciness agent and a little water to get it to the right consistency. It took like 5 minutes and blew anything away anything you can get out of a bottle.

Bozzie's Southern Noms:
Sauteed Button Mushrooms with Brandy
and Baked Stuffed Squash

This was one of the first dishes Ian Boswell (often referred to as "Bozzie") made after our first visit to the Seward Co-op. It came from the Fearrington House Cookbook and featured a lovely peasant meal of button mushrooms sauteed in brandy and bread crumbs and a sort of casserole of squash and some sort of cheese. The whole affair was sprinkled heavily with shredded pamesan cheese and accompanied by some good rustic bread and some good rustic water. Okay, the water was distinctly urban, but it was a good rustic meal nonetheless.

aaaaand...

Iain's Improvised Swedish Pancakes

After a trip to Ikea, I marched back home the proud owner of a jar of lingonberries. Now, I love Swedish pancakes, and I am a crepe-making fiend (video post of that to come eventually!), so I decided to adapt my crepe-making to be sweeter and on a bigger pan. Its main flaw was just that I absentmindedly put in as many eggs as I would put in for crepes, and hence the pancakes had a crepe's level of egginess, instead of a proper Swedish pancake's level, but oh well. It still made for a yummy breakfast and a pretty photo shoot, presented folded in half and decorated with lingonberries and powdered sugar.


Well, hopefully we've tantalized your taste-buds a little for the coming posts! We hope to see you soon!

-Iain

Vegetarian Tamales

Howdy all!
So here is my first food post. I hope you enjoy it!

Vegetarian Tamales
Ingredients:
5 ears of corn
1 canister of cornmeal
Lime Juice
Garlic Powder
Salt
1 can of frijoles negros (black beans)
6 Tomatillos

1 Onion
Cumin
Chili Powder
2 Jalapenos
Cheddar Cheese

Kitchen Equipment
Knives
Cutting Boards
Skillet
Medium Bowl
1 can of frijoles negros (black beans)
Large Pot
Metal Caulinder
Pan for soaking

Music Listened To:
The Rough Guide to Irish Music

So Tamales are a pretty intimidating dish. That's why I'd never attempted them before now - everything I'd heard made them sound pretty difficult, and they're supposed to take forever to make.

BUT

It actually turned out to be pretty straight forwa rd. It all broke down into 3 basic steps of 1) prepare masa 2) prepare filling and 3) put masa and fillings in husks and steam for 2 hours. If I can make them, you bet your butt you can too.

Part I: Making Masa
So if you have a nearby place that will sell you true masa, go ahead and buy it and prepare it according to package directions. That is, if you want to be boring. The way I chose was far more amusing to me.

1. First of all, I shucked my five ears of corn, being careful not to tear the husks. Set these aside to soak in a pan, bowl or sink.


2. Cut the kernels away from the cob into a bowl. Be generous - every bit of corny goodness helps. The cobs can just be thrown away.

3. This is the part where I felt simply deranged. If you have a blender and want to be boring/sane, go ahead and use it. I, on the other hand, used the nearest available equipment, and bashed the hell out of the corn with a can of black beans. Aside from taking half an hour, it was actually quite fun. Don't waste your time pounding up and down, though, as fun as it is - pressing straight down and twisting the can back and forth to grind the kernels is much more effective. Do this until the kernels are barely recognizable as kernels.

4. There should be a fair amount of liquid in the bowl at this point. To make the consistency more masa-ish and to get rid of the liquid, start adding cornmeal and mixing it in. Keep adding it until you get something resembling the consistency of chunky peanut butter (probably about 2 cups of cornmeal, give or take).

5. Mix in some lime juice, a generous amount of salt (at least a teaspoon) and a generous amount of garlic powder. Congratulations, you now have masa fresher and yummier than anything you'd get in the store. Set it aside.


Part II: Making the Filling
The nice thing about making vegetarian tamales is that, since tamales are normally made with meat, there is no standard of what to put in them. Pick whatever veggies or cheeses you want. The important thing is to get plenty of cumin and chili powder in there. Being a fan of beans, tomatillos, onions and Jalapenos, I used those. If you prefer tomatos, avocados, bell peppers and Japanese eggplant, go ahead and use those.

1. Chop your veggies, grate your cheese, all that good stuff. Make sure to throw away the tomatillo husks - they aren't edible. If using hot peppers do NOT stick your finger in your nose after chopping. Seriously.

2. Start cooking the onion first, then add the tomatillos and beans. This stage of the process looks really pretty. Put in plenty of cumin (at least a tablespoon) and plenty of chili powder (at least two tablespoons). Stir in your cheese and Jalapenos towards the end. That's all for that section, folks!


Part III: Assembling and Steaming Tamales
Here's where things get fun (well, funner, at least. It's hard to beat bashing the corn though...) Use the pictures as a guide.

1. Put your pot with a little water on the stove to boil.

2. Take a corn husk and hold it open in your palm. It should be nice and pliable after soaking. Take a few forkfuls of masa and spread it around the husk, leaving 1/3 of it on the right side clear, and probably only covering the bottom half of the husk. If it is a small husk, feel free to cover the whole thing and down the line use another small husk to finish the wrapping bit.


3. Take a light spoonfull of the filling and make a little trail of it down the center of the masa. If you put in too much, the tamale will be difficult to wrap shut. If you are Emily or generally sympathetic to her love of cheese, feel free to add some cheese on top of the filling.


4. Wrap the tamale into a cylinder, using the uncovered third of it to cover up any exposed masa or filling. There should be a little "tail" of husk that doesn't have any masa or filling in it. Bend the tail so that the tamale can sit upright. Set it in the caulinder vertically (most recipes call for a real steamer, but hell if I'm going to spend $40 on a pot and steamer so I can make tamales). Repeat steps 2-4 until you have as many tamales as you can fill.



5. Set the caulinder on the rim of the pot and leave the tamales to steam for 2 hours. Use this time to watch a bad movie, snuggle and/or make a side dish (we did spanish rice, you could also do rice and beans, or whatever you want, really).


And there you have it, folks! Veggie-friendly tamales! Definitely something to do when you have a few spare hours to do cooking - not just a weekday dish, but it's definitely worth the time. Enjoy!