Eat Simply, Eat Well

Lemon-Vanilla Polenta Cake

March 9, 2015 by aplough

Lemon-Vanilla Polenta Cake

Corn in my cake? What?!?
I know you probably don’t typically think of corn & cake together. But trust me when I tell you this recipe is well worth your time. Corn gets such a bad rap nowadays that we could almost forget that it can be a healthy option, too. Forget the refined corn in syrup and the GMO-plagued crops. Think organic corn, lovingly grown, and eaten in season and fresh, or dried, stone-ground, and delivered to your local store as polenta or cornmeal. Adding this whole grain to your cake will provide vitamins B1 and B5, folic acid, protein and fiber, the last two of which help balance your blood sugar – so eat up!
Polenta makes a delicious, savory base to pasta sauces and meat sauces and caramelized onion-feta combinations. In a pinch, it can be used to replace cornmeal in cornbread – you’ll get a slightly more pudding-like cornbread which is absolutely delicious.What is the difference between cornmeal and polenta?
Essentially, it’s the grind that makes the difference. Cornmeal comes in three different grinds: fine, medium and course. Polenta is a course grind and is used to make an Italian dish by the same name. Confused yet? Don’t worry. Fine grind cornmeal is essentially cornflour and good for making things like corn tortillas – although looking for masa harina, a corn flour that is of especially fine grind is a good idea if you want your tortillas to hold together well. Medium grind cornmeal is what you want for nearly every recipe calling for cornmeal, unless it specifies the grind in the recipe. However, medium grind cornmeal will impact this recipe differently as the grind impacts the volume and the liquid absorption, so I don’t recommend you use them for this cake or for recipes calling for polenta. If you don’t have or can’t find polenta, use course cornmeal for this recipe or as a replacement for polenta in general.

Simple, delicious cake for any day.

Gluten-free
In this cake, polenta paired with almond flour and lemon provides a perfect, undemanding, bright and flavor-filled confection to enjoy with your afternoon cup of coffee or tea. It has a wonderful crunchy-on-the-outside-soft-in-the-middle texture and enough lemon to get your taste buds tingling. The lemon flavor is buffered gently by the large quantity of vanilla, and the combination is addicting.

You can easily make this gluten-free by using all-purpose gluten-free flour. If gluten isn’t a problem for you or the people you’ll be serving it to, feel free to use regular wheat flour for this.

Leaving town? Take it with you.
This is a sturdy cake that stores, freezes, and travels well. You can leave it on the counter, covered, for a few days and slice off a sliver every time you pass by, until, eventually, you run out of slivers and find yourself looking around, wondering who it was that ate all of your cake, anyway. You can freeze it whole and serve it for last minute company. You can freeze it in slices and pull out a slice every now and again, allow it to thaw on the countertop for 30 minutes and happily enjoy the good fortune of having cake in the freezer on a day when you don’t feel like baking but “just need a little something”. Or, you can pack the whole think along for a picnic or a potluck, and make your friends love you just a little bit more.

You can use a mixer or beat this all by hand. Bake it off, let it cool slightly, and you are all set to make friends and influence people.

Lemon-Vanilla Polenta Cake

Lemon-Vanilla Polenta Cake

8 oz / 225g butter at room temperature
3/4 cup / 1.5 dl Indian sugar, coconut sugar (or other sugar of your choice)
zest of 2 organic lemons
3 eggs
juice of 2 organic lemons
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
3/4 cup / 125 g polenta (preferably organic, stone-ground)
2 cups / 215g almond flour
6 tablespoons / 60 grams all-purpose or gluten-free flour
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

Preheat oven to 180°C / 375°F. Oil a bundt pan and pour 1/4 cup polenta into. Rotate the pan around so that the polenta sticks to the sides. This well make it easy to remove the cake from the pan once it is baked.

Cream the butter, sugar and lemon zest together until well combined. Add the eggs, lemon juice and vanilla and beat together until smooth.

In a separate bowl, combine the polenta, almond flour, flour, baking powder and salt. Using a whisk or fork, combined the mixture really well, making sure to break up any lumps of almond flour.

Add the dry mixture to the wet mixture and stir with a spatula until there are no visible dry bits left. Spoon the cake batter into your prepared bundt pan, smooth the top, and bake for 40-50 minutes, until golden brown, the top is slightly cracked, and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

Invert the cake onto a cake rack and allow to cool for at least 30 minutes.

A different kind of fish soup: Sweet Potato, Kale, Fish and Coconut Curry Soup

March 6, 2015 by aplough

Sweet Potato, Kale, Fish and Coconut Curry Soup

With the rain dripping down the side of the window at a steady and soothing rate, a little relaxing classical piano music streaming through the computer speakers, and an evening of relaxation ahead, soup seemed to be the perfect dinner. I’ve been in the mood for something spicy all day, so “making something with curry” was the starting point for tonight’s dinner.

With a sweet potato that had been languishing on the countertop for a couple of weeks, a huge pile of fresh cilantro I’d just picked up from the local Turkish grocery store, and coconut milk I’d made this morning on a “just in case” whim waiting in the fridge alongside a hunk of Greenland halibut that we’d put there to thaw last night, the creative wheels started turning.

The crunchy pieces of fish from the frying pan add a nice texture to the soup, too.

First of all, although that had been the plan, I really didn’t want a dinner centered around that hunk of fish. Don’t get me wrong: I love fish, especially halibut. But a hunk of fish requires side dishes and sauces and things that I wasn’t in the mood to make. Plus, this hunk of fish was fairly small, so as a resource it needed to be stretched a bit. I decided to treat the fish as a garnish to the main course, and with that we were off and running.

This soup isn’t overly spicy, but you can easily adjust the spice level by adjusting the amount of red curry paste you use. I also felt that the curry paste together with the fish sauce provided enough salt; feel free to adjust the level of salt to your liking.

Not only does this soup taste delicious with a all favor flavors including umami at play, it’s good for you. The sweet potato packs a strong punch of vitamin A, the kale is one of the super greens with more phytonutrients than nearly any other plant out there, and the cilantro packed into this soup has been shown to have anti-diabetic effects, is used as an anti-inflammatory in India, has been studied in the US for its ability to lower cholesterol. And if you’ve been having trouble getting your omega 3, the fish will add a healthy dose of that, too.

Full of satisfying flavor, it tastes as good as it looks.

Sweet Potato, Kale, Fish and Coconut Curry Soup

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 onion, diced
1 large garlic clove, minced
1 liter chicken broth
1 cup water
1 cup coconut milk
2-4 teaspoons Thai red curry paste, depending on how spicy you like it
1 1/2 teaspoons Fish sauce
1 small bunch cilantro, roots trimmed; stems and leaves chopped
1 sweet potato, peeled and cut into small cubes
3 cups Kale, washed, stems removed and chopped small
300 g halibut (or other white fish)
lemon juice, salt and pepper, for seasoning halibut
oil, for pan

Season the halibut with a sprinkle of salt, and a few grinds of pepper. Set aside while you prepare the soup.

Pour the tablespoon of olive oil into a medium-sized pot over medium heat. Add the onion and cook until the onion is soft and translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for one minute more. Add the chicken broth, water, coconut milk, curry paste, fish sauce and cilantro stems. Allow the broth to simmer gently for 5 minutes. Add the sweet potato and cook for 5 minutes. Add the kale and cook for one minute. Add the cilantro leaves, reserving a few leaves for garnish. Cover the pot and turn off the heat.

Heat a heavy bottom frying pan or cast iron grill pan over medium-high heat. Squeeze lemon juice over the halibut, brush the top side with oil, and place the fish, oil side down, in the pan. Brush the side of the fish that is now facing up with oil. Cover the pan and allow the fish to cook and steam until it is cooked about halfway through: 2-3 minutes. Now, using a flat spatula, gently lift the fish up from the pan and flip it over.

Cover the pan again and allow the fish to cook for 2-3 minutes until cooked through and slightly crisp. Transfer the fish from the pan to a cutting board and cut it into all cubes. If you can, use the spatula to scrape some of the crispy bits from the bottom of the pan as well. Be careful to remove any bones during this process.

Ladle the soup into four bowls. Divide the fish and the crispy pieces and arrange it over the top of the four bowls. Garnish each bowl with cilantro leaves and serve.

Serves 4.

Pomegranate, Mint and Beluga Lentil Salad

March 5, 2015 by aplough

Pomegranate, Mint and Beluga Lentil Salad

I feel like celebrating. Why? Because I was walking along my normal route last night and heard the waves lapping against the shoreline for the first time in months. Yes, there are still ice floes bobbing up and down out there, but still – waves. I love the sound of waves. Today, I also noticed that the ground is more green than white. So while my friends in Seattle are posting pictures of blooming forsythia and daffodils and magnolia (you know who you are my dear people), I will settle for the few tiny buds I see forming on the ends of branches, the signs of weeds working their way up through the thawing soil and the grass emerging under the mostly melted snow.

If I had grown up in a place with serious winters, this might seem commonplace. But every year I feel a sense of dread as the cold days arrive (the darkness doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the cold). And every year, I am first in line to celebrate even the smallest indication that yes indeed, we’ve made it through another one, and Spring is on its way. And I am probably one of the first to break out my summer dresses and flip flops as the days start to get longer and brighter and warmer.

Pomegranate: one of the most beautiful fruits I’ve ever seen.

Which means pretty soon it’ll be summer, and maybe then it will be hot around here. And if it’s hot, we’ll be needing a long list of salad options that include items fresh from the garden, including vast quantities of mint – about the only thing that grows with great abundance all over the place, especially in the spots in which it has not been planted, but nevertheless wishes to take over. And there I am, applying human emotion to things in nature, an error my college English professor would have called “pathetic fallacy”, and would have reminded me that an inanimate object, in truth, never actually wishes anything or thinks at all. But never mind, Spring and it’s abundance of mint and other green things does strange things to our behavior, so I’ll forgive myself that little slip.

Mint is one of the few things this salad has in common with the warmer months. Otherwise, this salad highlights the jewel-like pomegranate, still abundant now; the earthy lentils that are harvested each fall, and is flavored with lemon and orange, arguably fruits of Winter but available anytime.

I made this salad for dinner and served it with whole grain sunflower seed sourdough on the side. It’d work well as a side salad too, but with the abundance of legumes, vegetables and seeds, it’s perfectly filling on its own. So make the best of the last of the Winter produce – we’ll be dining on rhubarb, strawberries and asparagus soon.

The colors are ready for a celebration too…

Pomegranate, Mint and Beluga Lentil Salad

1/2 cup / 1 dl dried Beluga Lentils
2 cups / 500 ml water
2 spring onions, thinly sliced
1/2 English cucumber, diced (about 1 cup)
10 Brussels sprouts, halved, core removed, thinly sliced
1/4 cup / 1/2 dl mint leaves, roughly chopped
seeds from 1/2 pomegranate*
2 tablespoon raw sunflower seeds
juice of one lemon
zest of one orange
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon maple syrup
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Rinse the lentils in a fine sieve. Combine the lentils and water in a small pot, bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, cover, and cook for 20 minutes.

While the lentils cook, prepare the rest of your ingredients. Combine all of the ingredients in a medium-sized bowl, reserving a few mint leaves and pomegranate seeds for garnish. When the lentils are ready, drain through a fine sieve, then pour the hot lentils directly onto the vegetables. Stir well to combine.

Salad may be served immediately as a warm salad, or refrigerated and served later. It travels well, and can be made up to one day ahead if you want to make it for lunch the next day or for a picnic or potluck.

Serves 2 as a main course.

*To deseed a pomegranate, roll it around on the countertop, pressing down lightly as you hear a slight popping sound. Cut the pomegranate in half around the middle i.e. “equator” just deep enough to puncture the skin. Using your fingertips, and holding the pomegranate over a bowl to catch any drips or wayward seeds, pull the two halves apart. Set one half on the countertop. Use your fingers again to break the pomegranate open slightly. Then hold the pomegranate half, seed side down, in your open palm with your fingers spread open. Using the handle of a wooden spoon, rap the top of the pomegranate firmly to knock the juicy seeds out and into the waiting bowl. Continue until most of the seeds are removed. There are always the stubborn few you’ll need to remove with your fingers, but most will fall easily into the bowl. Remove any wait pith that has fallen into the bowl. Continue happily with the recipe.