Edamame Pate Sandwiches with Molasses Oat Bread

I’m trying to remember my first encounter with hippie food. I know that I’d eaten whole wheat bread and home-grown vegetables my whole life, but my first memory of eating food that was created as a countercultural statement was when I was a student at the University of Illinois. There was a little, vegetarian cafe in Urbana called Nature’s Table, and I fell for their garbanzo spread sandwich on whole grain bread. I hadn’t thought about that place in years, but it came back to me as I read a review copy of Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat. This book looks back at the origins of what we’ve come to call “hippie food” and how many products that used to be hidden away in health food stores became mainstream. It all might have started in the 1950s in California where optimum health and trust in nature became linked to food choices. Soon thereafter, interest in macrobiotic diets were on the rise and a demand for organically-grown brown rice developed. At first, there weren’t always scientific reasons to back up various nutritional claims, but the idea that food grown without harsh chemicals is better for people and the planet began to resonate in health food circles. Just when industrialized farming was taking off, this nascent call for doing things the old-fashioned way arrived. It was interesting to read how the Lundberg family in California became a leader in growing rice organically. Following the interest in brown rice came the return to whole wheat. White bread became a symbol of the industrial, over-commercialized food system. Recipes for baking whole wheat bread at home began circulating. All the while, more health food stores and cafes cropped up around the country. Health food buying coops appeared as well, and I was interested to read about the start of Austin’s own Wheatsville Coop that is still in business today. Speaking of Austin, all of this also led to Whole Foods Market that started here as well. Hippie food often has a negative connotation as bland or boring in its meatlessness, but it’s come a long way. I’m so glad ingredients like all sorts of whole grain flours, brown rice, and organic produce have gained popularity and can be found everywhere. And, I’m thrilled that we now have so many cookbooks and magazines to inspire delicious ways to use those ingredients. This book and memories of Nature’s Table had me craving a vegetarian sandwich on whole grain bread. I’d just seen the Edamame Pate Sandwich in Clean Eating, and I decided to bake my own bread for it. 

When I read A New Way to Bake, I had marked the page for Molasses Oat Bread, and this was a perfect use for it. It’s an easy bread to make too. Boiling water was poured over some oats, and molasses was added. While it sat, more oats were coarsely ground in a food processor and then added to a bowl with whole wheat flour, bread flour, dry milk, and salt. Yeast was added to the oat-molasses mixture before it was combined with the flour mixture. The dough was kneaded and left to rise before being shaped and left to rise again. Before baking, the loaf was scored, brushed with egg white, and topped with oats. For the edamame pate, thawed shelled edamame were pureed with walnuts, mint, green onion, salt, lemon juice, and a little water. I made a few different sandwiches. Some were made with pea sprouts, some had home-grown arugula, and some were open-faced with just tomato. 

The molasses oat bread was a fitting and delicious vehicle for the edamame pate. It’s been too long since I last had that vegetarian sandwich at Nature’s Table, so I would be able to compare the two. But, I do know that Nature’s Table wasn’t using fresh, local tomatoes on their sandwiches back then, and that gave my edamame sandwich a big boost. Is this modern hippie food? Evolved hippie food? Whatever the label for this kind of eating, I hope the concept continues. 

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Gingerbread Cheesecake

After one more holiday recipe, I promise to move on to cooking in the New Year. I’d been thinking about this cheesecake for years. I cut the pages from the December 2007 issue of Living magazine and filed them away. I remember the whole story about gingerbread from that issue. There were all sorts of pretty cookies, different ways of making gingerbread like with honey rather than molasses, and even gingerbread caramels. From that story, the White Chocolate-Gingerbread Blondies that also appear in the Martha Stewart’s Cookies book became a favorite of mine. But those little gingerbread men on top of the gingerbread-flavored cheesecake were so cute. I think of this cheesecake dessert every year for Christmas, and finally had to give it a try. You need some cookie crumbs to make the crust for the cheesecake, so making the Molasses-Gingerbread Cookie dough comes first. I made enough dough to be able to cut out some gingerbread men for decorating as well. I didn’t go so far as to make both types of gingerbread cookie dough to be able to have two colors of gingerbread men on top as shown in the photo from the magazine, but I was happy with the result with all the gingerbread men from the same dough. 

The Molasses-Gingerbread Cookies recipe is very similar to the recipe I’ve always used for gingerbread cut-out cookies. It included molasses, ground ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. For the cheesecake, one quarter of the dough is rolled into a big rectangle and baked until firm. When cool, it’s broken into pieces and pulsed in a food processor to make crumbs. Next, melted butter, some sugar, and two cups of those crumbs were combined and pressed into a springform pan with the bottom wrapped with foil. The crust was baked for about 15 minutes or until set. The cheesecake itself was a mix of cream cheese, sugar, vanilla, eggs, molasses, lemon zest, and more ground ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. I also added some finely grated, fresh ginger for an extra boost of ginger. The filling was poured into the crust, the springform pan was placed in a large roasting pan, the roasting pan was set into the oven, and hot water was added to the roasting pan before closing the oven to bake. The cheesecake needs to bake for at least an hour, but mine was still very jiggly at that point. I left it in the oven for an extra 15 or 20 minutes until the center was only slightly wobbly. When the cheesecake was completely cool, it was transferred to the refrigerator to chill for several hours. I dusted the top with confectioners' sugar before placing the cookies in a circle.

It’s a shame that gingerbread only gets the spotlight during the holidays. Every time I bake with molasses, I think about how much I love the flavor and how I should use it more often. The molasses and all the gingerbread spices were delicious here from the crust to the filling to the cookies on top. Maybe I’ll finally try the gingerbread caramels the next time the holiday season arrives. 

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Pumpkin Spice Cookies

Apparently, as the bandwagon was driving by, I jumped right onto it. It’s a pumpkin spice world. There’s probably even a pumpkin spice shampoo at this point. Pumpkin spice toothpaste? But, who can resist those flavors? In full disclosure: there is actually no pumpkin in these cookies, but they are shaped like pumpkins so I think the name is valid. I baked them to send as long-distance trick-or-treats for my nieces and took a few to a party as well. I heard lots of good things from the party guests about them which tells me the recipe is a definite keeper. It’s from the October 2000 issue of Living magazine, and it’s available online. I made a few changes from the original. They’re intended to be circular cookies cut from logs of chilled dough. I added a step by rolling out the dough and cutting pumpkin shapes. It’s a somewhat soft dough, and it does spread a bit in the oven. After the first sheet of spread-out, blobby-looking, baked pumpkin cookies, I decided to chill the cut cookies on baking sheets before putting them in the oven. That helped some. But, any shape more intricate than a pumpkin might not work well. You’ll also see in the photo with the original recipe that they’re decorated like jack-o-lanterns in various colors. Piping bags and I don’t always get along so well which is why I took a different direction with the decorating. 

The dry ingredients including flour, baking soda, salt, baking powder, cinnamon, and ginger were sifted together and set aside. Butter and sugar were creamed together, and then eggs were added followed by vanilla. Next came the molasses, and every year at this time, I’m reminded of how much I really like the flavor of molasses. After incorporating the lovely molasses, the dry ingredients were added and mixed into the dough. Rather than dividing the dough into two pieces and rolling each into a log to be chilled, I just chilled the dough in one big disc. The next day, I worked with a quarter of the dough at a time and rolled it out with a rolling pin to about a one-quarter inch thickness. I cut pumpkin shapes, placed them on baking sheets and popped the baking sheets into the refrigerator for a few minutes before baking. After the cookies were baked and cooled, I used Royal Icing to outline each cookie and then filled that outline with more icing which was topped with orange sugar. This was far easier for me than attempting to draw jack-o-lantern faces with a piping bag. 

Fragrant cinnamon and ginger draw you in, but I think it’s the molasses that seals the deal. I liked these cookies just as well with no icing or decoration at all. But, for Halloween, they do demand some dressing up, some color, and more pumpkin-ness. 

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Dark and Stormy Fresh Ginger Gingerbread

On a day when I wanted to make dessert but didn’t want it to be an all-day project, this was the perfect cake. It’s from Sinfully Easy Delicious Desserts which is full of great desserts that don’t take all day to make. I was drawn to the idea of a quick gingerbread made with fresh ginger, and the variation suggested in the side-bar sealed the deal. That variation was to replace some of the water in the recipe with dark rum to match the flavors in a Dark and Stormy cocktail. So, not only was this cake whipped up in record time by mixing everything in a food processor, adding a little Gosling’s Black Seal rum took me back to that pretty, pink sand and that sparkling, blue water of Bermuda on a January day. Alice Medrich also offers all sorts of great ideas for garnishing desserts, and there’s even a page of “Things to do with gingerbread” that lists accompaniments like lemon whipped cream, dessert chutney, and fruits in syrup. Sticking with the Dark and Stormy theme, I topped mine with grated lime zest and poured a little more rum over the mascarpone whipped cream. 

The only slightly time-consuming task here was peeling some fresh ginger. You need to peel and slice enough to fill one-half cup. Then, the fresh ginger was finely minced in the food processor. Next, brown sugar, cinnamon, ground dried ginger, allspice, cardamom, salt, molasses, butter, an egg, rum, water, flour, and baking soda were added. In all of about 15 seconds, the batter was done. The cake baked in an eight-inch square pan for about 30 minutes. I whipped mascarpone and cream with a scant bit of sugar and washed a lime for zesting. Once the cake was cool, it was ready to be topped with the lime zest, some whipped cream, and a drizzle of more black rum. 

Ginger and molasses have become a couple of my favorite ingredients in recent years, and they’re especially good in the wintertime. They’re also quite good with the flavor of rum. Admittedly, our winter hasn’t been too harrowing, but still, a dessert that brought back memories of Bermuda was a welcome idea.

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Bake Sale Cookies

I’ve been open about my problem with cookbooks and food magazines regarding how I can’t stop collecting and reading them. Well, I also have an issue with collecting links to recipes I see on all those fabulous food blogs out there. The list of recipes keeps growing. Fortunately, a perfect opportunity for trying some of them presented itself. Bread Baby mentioned an upcoming bake sale and asked if anyone in Austin would like to donate items. She, in fact, had organized a very cool benefit for Space12 and planned a bake sale as part of it. What could be better than getting to try a few different recipes from my list and then having a place to take the baked goods to prevent me from eating them all? I wasted no time in combing through that long list of links and decided on these: cinnamon cappuccino cookies from A Kiss and a Cupcake, molasses cookies from Cooking During Stolen Moments, and banana snickerdoodles from Noble Pig.

I didn’t realize it when I picked those cookies, but they all have something in common. For all three cookies, balls of dough are formed and then are rolled in sugar or a sugar mixture before being placed on a baking sheet. I had the technique down after these recipes. The cinnamon cappuccino cookies have powdered espresso in the dough, and then the dough balls were rolled in cinnamon and sugar to which I added a little more espresso powder. The molasses cookies were rolled in sugar, and the banana snickerdoodles were rolled in cinnamon and sugar. I made one change to the banana snickerdoodle recipe which was to use butter instead of shortening, but I always do that.

These were three very different cookies in the flavor department, and I liked them all for different reasons. I’ll be keeping all three recipes in the permanent file. Kurt’s favorite, hands down, was the cinnamon cappuccino. I thought for sure my favorite was going to be the molasses cookie because I’ve become so taken with molasses in recent years, and it was extremely good. In the end though, I was torn between it and the banana snickerdoodle. The banana snickerdoodle dough was ridiculously good, and I almost had to restrain myself from eating the entire bowl before the cookies could be baked. Since I clearly can’t pick a winner among the three, I suggest you bake them all and let me know which one you like best.




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