A Humane Turtle

Yesterday, I invited people over to cook and eat together. It’s so easy to get into the habit of making the same food over and over again, and only for events like these do I look into my cookbooks. This time around I decided to give raw food a(nother) try; raw food as in: raw food that looks like cooked food.

I don’t exactly know what’s in the stuff we came up with, partly because we just made things up, and partly because I focused on making the sushi. But, here’s details about what I remember.

Smoothie

I actually have no idea what went into the smoothie. Bananas, and I don’t even know what berries. One of the frozen berry mixes maybe? All I can say is that it tasted awesome, and that I’m having the leftovers for breakfast right now.

Green Squash Pasta

The pasta was made by spiralizing green squash (the spiralizer looked much like the Lurch Spiral Slicer). You get REALLY LONG pasta that way, which I love.

The sauce was, as far as I know, not much more than orange juice, avocado, and pomegranate seeds. But I really don’t know…

Sushi

I love how the sushi turned out, even though none of us had ever tried to make raw sushi before. Turns out it’s not very hard to make. We concluded that it’s faster, tastier, and healthier than the cooked version

We made the “rice” out of one cauliflower head, around  1 1/2 cups of cashews that I had soaked for 2+ hours, and a little bit of lemon juice. I ground up the cashews into paste-like consistency, separately ground the cauliflower using a food processor, and then mixed them together in a bowl, with the added lemon juice. We didn’t use any salt. The filling consisted of: red peppers, cucumber, carrots, avocado (all cut into thin sticks), and sunflower sprouts.

Apple Pie with Banana (Ice) Cream

The apple pie was really something I was looking forward to trying. Fruit pies are my favorite kinds of cakes, so I was eager to have a somewhat healthy version of it.

The pie crust was made out of a mix of hazelnuts and almonds, a whole box of dates, and some added vanilla (I think).  The filling was made of ground apples, lemon juice and, of course, lots of cinnamon. The pie was topped with crushed hazelnuts. The pie was really good, though I wouldn’t consider it light food. We had the pie as our first course, and I was already pretty full before even getting to pasta and sushi.

The ice cream was a one ingredient ice cream as described here. The bananas weren’t completely frozen when we processed them, so the ice cream was on the very creamy side. But still very yummy!

Coconut!

We also had coconut. I’m not used to having coconuts, so the process of opening it, getting the coconut water and meat, was very exciting to watch. Especially when the only tool around is an old kitchen knife. The result was super-tasty nevertheless

All in All…

Our kitchen experiments were a big success, I’d say, and I’m looking forward to trying out more (raw) food soon!

Another thing I made for Global Village (see previous post) is a rendition of Linzertorte, a crumbly dough torte with a lattice design on top, named after the Austrian city Linz.

Here’s what I used:

• 250g flour
• 150g ground roasted hazelnuts
• 100g ground almonds
• 10g baking powder
• 150g sugar (typically powdered sugar, I used Muscovado sugar)
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• a pinch of clove powder
• 200g milk-free margarine
• egg replacer powder for one egg (in Norway, you can buy it at e.g. Rema1000 or Meny)
• jam (typically redcurrant; I used rosehip)

Mix the dry ingredients; then quickly knead in the margarine. (If you knead it for too long, the dough is going to break when you try to roll it out.) Put it in the fridge for half an hour or so.

Grease a cake pan. Roll out about 3/4 of the dough, and put it in the pan. Make the dough a little higher around the edge. Spread it a little with your fingers, if necessary. Then spread the jam over the dough, maybe half a centimeter high. Roll out the rest of the dough, cut it in stripes, and put the stripes in a lattice design on top of the jam.

Bake it at 180°C for 20-30min. The Linzertorte tastes best if you let it rest over night first. Enjoy!

Last Friday, we celebrated the multi-national culture at Opera Software with a Global Village, an event where employees served samples of traditional foods from their native countries. I’m the only Austrian at Opera, so I got to choose what to serve on my table.

I grew up in the Pongau  district of Salzburg (Salzburg is both the city and one of Austria’s 9 states), in the middle of the Alps. A very typical dish for the region is ‘Pongauer Fleischkrapfen’, a sort of meat dumpling, typically made with smoked meat. So for Global Village, I created a modern rendition of the dish. It is 100% vegetarian, though I must warn you: that doesn’t make the dish much lighter.

The recipe is for 6-8 people. Fleischkrapfen take quite a bit of time to prepare, so it does make sense to make a bunch. The good thing is that you can make them in stages. I did it like this:

• Day 1: prepare the filling
• Day 2: make the dough and make the Krapfen
• Day 3: deep-fry the Krapfen

The measurements are not very exact, since I usually cook by approximation rather than by book.

The Filling

• ~100g TVP (Textured vegetable protein)
• 2 blocks of smoked tofu (the smokier the better)
• 2 onions
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 large potato, cooked
• vegetable stock
• soy sauce
• vegetable frying oil
• herb salt, pepper
• parsley

Cover the dry TVP with boiling water, add a dash of soy sauce, a whole bunch of vegetable stock, and herb salt. The liquid should be a lot saltier than the usual vegetable broth. Let the TVP rehydrate for a couple of minutes (the package will tell you how long exactly). Mince the smoked tofu and mash the potato. When ready, drain the TVP and press it with your hands to remove all excess liquid.

Finely cut the onions and fry them in oil until lucent. Then add some more oil, the TVP and the tofu, and roast for a little while. Then add the rest of the ingredients (potato, crushed garlic, spicery). To make it taste authentic, make sure to use a whole bunch of oil and salt. The filling shouldn’t taste dry. Let the filling cool down before you use it. Ideally, leave it over night, so the TVP can take on some of the smokiness of the tofu.

The Dough: “Abbrennteig”

• 250g wheat flour
• 250g rye flour
• ~ 250ml unsweetened plant milk (e.g. soy milk or oat milk)
• 100g milk-free margarine
• 1 tsp ground caraway
• salt (1 tbs?)

We call this dough “Abbrennteig” (burn-up-dough?). The idea is to ‘burn’ the flour with the hot liquid, so it thickens immediately. It can be a little tricky to get the amount of liquid right, since you shouldn’t have to add too much flour or cold liquid later on. The dough should be hard enough so it doesn’t stick and is strong enough to hold in the filling. If it is too hard, it will be tough to roll it out.

To make the dough, mix the dry ingredients. Boil up the milk and margarine, then mix the hot liquid into the dry ingredients. Knead a little and let the dough rest for a little while, so it can cool down. (I had it rest over night even, covered with plastic foil).

The Krapfen

• Cooking oil for deep frying (I used coconut oil)

Take a bit of the dough and roll it out thinly, around 15cm in diameter. Put filling on the lower half of the circle, and fold over the other half. Make sure there’s no extra air in the pocket. Press the edges shut with your fingers, leave around 1cm of edge; you don’t want the Fleischkrapfen to open up while you deep-fry them. Cut off excess dough with a pastry wheel.

If you end up with leftover dough (or if you want a simpler/faster dish), roll out the dough and cut it into large squares. The deep-fried squares are called “Blattlkrapfen” (leaf krapfen). We’d usually wrap them with Sauerkraut and eat them with our hands.

Deep-fry the Fleischkrapfen (brown them a little on both sides), and put them on kitchen roll paper to remove extra fat. Serve them immediately, together with sauerkraut. Good luck!

This is my favorite creamy dressing at the moment, I thought I could share it:

50g almonds
juice of half a lemon
ca. 100ml water
2 heaped tablespoons nutritional yeast
1-2 teaspoons amchur powder
salt (maybe half a teaspoon?)
a bit of pepper

First blend the almonds, then add the rest of the ingredients and blend until smooth.

I ate it with massaged raw kale salad today.

For that, I cut kale leaves off the stems and tore them up in pieces. Then I added salt and a bit of olive oil, and massaged that in for 1-2 minutes. Then I added the almond dressing. Done!

T. Colin Campbell in The China Study:

I talked to so many people who say, “I may not live as long as you health nuts, but I sure am going to enjoy the time I have by eating steaks whenever I want, smoking if I so choose and doing anything else that I want.” I grew up with these people, went to school with these people and made great friends with these people. Not long ago, one of my best friends suffered a difficult surgery for cancer and spent his last years paralyzed in a nursing home. During the many visits I made to the nursing home, I never failed to come away with a deep appreciation for the health I still possess in my old age. It was not uncommon for me to go to the nursing home to visit my friend and hear that one of the new patients in the home was someone whom my friend and I knew from our earlier days. Too often, they had Alzheimer’s and were housed in a special section of the facility.

The enjoyment of life, especially the second half of life, is greatly compromised if we can’t see, if we can’t think, if our kidneys don’t work or if our bones are broken or fragile. I, for one, hope that I am able to fully enjoy not only the time in the present, but also the time in the future, with good health and independence.

…

So, what is my prescription for good health? In short, it is about the multiple health benefits of consuming plant-based foods, and the largely unappreciated health dangers of consuming animal-based foods, including all types of meat, dairy and eggs. I did not begin with preconceived ideas, philosophical or otherwise, to prove the worthiness of plant-based diets. I started at the opposite end of the spectrum: as a meat-loving dairy farmer in my personal life and an “establishment” scientist in my professional life. I even used to lament the views of vegetarians as I taught nutritional biochemistry to pre-med students.

My only interest now is to explain the scientific basis for my views in the clearest way possible. Changing dietary practices will only occur and be maintained when people believe the evidence and experience the benefits. People decide what to eat for a number of reasons, health considerations being only one. My task is only to present the scientific evidence in a form that can be understood. The rest is up to you.

I was super excited when I first saw this post about a Rubik’s cube version of a Battenberg cake. I had never even heard of a Battenberg cake before, but immediately loved the concept of a check-patterned cake. Also, as a long-term Rubik’s cube lover (mostly, admittedly, in inactive admiration), it just felt like the perfect project that combined my love for food with the right amount of geekiness. But most importantly, I knew just the right people to share my enthusiasm with and to make the cake for!

So, with a few months delay, I made my own rendition of a Rubik’s cake.

As with most of my little projects, I don’t plan all too much, but take it as I go. I didn’t even use a real cake recipe to start with. I made it “überhaps“, as we say in Austrian dialect: following experience and intuition, with a vague recipe in mind. While the original Rubik’s cake used food coloring for the different sections and only added some hints of varying flavor, I decided to go wild and do the coloring and flavoring with whatever I had at home. The blog post had mentioned that people would eat the cake cube-wise, so I thought opposing flavors wouldn’t be too much of a problem.

And so I started.

I knew I needed six different batters, but I didn’t want to bake six times, so I made made little dividers out of cardboard and wrapped them in aluminum foil. Then I coated both the baking tray and the divider sections in margarine and flour.

Then I went on to find ingredients for the different flavors. I chose:

• White: coconut flakes
• Yellow: mashed peaches & rum aroma
• Orange: Haselnuts, carrots, and saffron
• Red: raspberries
• Blue: blueberries
• Green: broccoli (!!) and a little bit of green food color

Next step: the batter. I chose to use six bowls for the dry and special ingredients of the different sections. I used about 100g of flour, a tablespoon of maize flour, a tea spoon of baking powder, and a little salt per bowl.

Then I had one extra bowl for the fat & sugar & egg replacer. I used around 200g of sugar, 100g of vegetable margarine, one mashed banana, and maybe a tablespoon of vinegar. Now it was time to mix it all! I distributed the fat/sugar mix over the six bowls, added the special ingredients to the bowls, and started mixing. For each bowl, I also added enough soy milk until the consistency of the batter felt right. Then I put the mixes onto the baking tray, and off it went into the oven! It baked for about half an hour at 190-ish degrees.

Looking at the finished sections, I tried to figure out the best way to use the amount of building material to create a cube. Now, the sections didn’t turn out to be super high, so I decided to make a 5×5 cube instead of the original 3×3 one. I used the height of the least risen section, and cut a piece of cardboard that was that high. Using that piece of cardboard, I cut the sections into strips that wide, and cut off any excess height using the same cardboard strip.

Now I had my cube sections ready!

To make sure that I get different cube patterns every time I cut a slice off the cake, I cut the blocks at different length. So I just did that: I cut a piece randomly, and added another piece to add up to the length of 5 cubes.

I did that over and over again, and put five layers of that on top of each other.

Now it was time to prepare the marzipan icing. I had never worked with marzipan before, so rolling out the store-bought marzipan was a challenge! But I managed eventually. I ended up with two layers, one of which would cover three sides of the cube.

Then I put the cake layers next to each other on the table – they would have to be jam-coated individually, both to help the cake keep its shape, and to make it look more like a Rubik’s cube with its black dividing lines. I warmed up a big glass of blueberry jam and pureed it with a hand blender. Then I put one layer of marzipan on the plate, put some of the jam on, and started adding the cake sections. I coated all sections with jam before adding them to the final structure.

When I was done, I made sure all sides were coated with jam, and wrapped the marzipan around the cake. Then I wrapped the second layer of marzipan around the three uncovered sides of the cube. I rolled some more marzipan to make the edges look nicer, and as extra decoration. And there it was: my own Rubik’s cake!

All in all, I was satisfied with the outcome of the cake. Not all sections turned out equally fluffy, and the colors didn’t turn out to be anywhere near the original. When it comes to flavors, I think most of them worked reasonably well. The broccoli didn’t really work though

This was definitely the funnest, messiest, and geekiest baking project I have ever attempted, and it was well worth the effort!

This year I had my first real Thanksgiving!! I was invited to a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner, and it was all-vegan! (And the food was just stunning. my was belly as full as can be…) So, I wanted show that I was thankful for the invitation, and I figured I could make something nice for the kids. And so I spent my pre-Thanksgiving evening making sweet bread bowls

Now, I didn’t make the dough according to any recipe really. I took half a kilo of white flour, the according amount of yeast, warmed up a soy milk and margarine mix, and added Xylitol (the wonder-sugar) until the dough seemed to be sweet enough. Then I took quite small glass bowls and draped strips of dough over it, from the center outwards. Here’s a picture with the almost-done draping:

Once that was done, I cut off the  strips around the edge of the bowl and added one thin twisted strip of dough around the rim. Then it looked like this:

And, after baking, it looked like this:

The bread bowl gets brown on top quite fast, so I had to cover it with baking paper for most of the time. Not sure how long it was baking, maybe around 15-20 minutes? Until it was lightly brown, in any case…

Once the bowl was ready, I rubbed it with a little margarine. Then I took it out of the glass bowl it was baked on (to make sure it wasn’t stuck), cooled down and washed the glass bowl and put it back into the bread bowl. I let it cool down in the form over night, since the bread bowl loses its shape and gets somewhat flat otherwise.

The finished product, filled with organic vegan candy can be found on the Pine Family’s blog.

Bread tends to get old fairly quickly. After one (or a couple of) days, it’s just not fun to eat it any more. And if you’ve bought new bread already, you don’t really want to eat the old left-overs, do you? But throwing away the old bread just because it’s a little hard isn’t an option, is it?

Fortunately, I grew up in a part of Austria that  has a long-standing tradition of using old bread in its cuisine. These recipes that use old bread aren’t just left-over meals though, they are some of my favorite foods!

The probably easiest recipe that includes old bread is milk soup. There’s quite some variations as to how people make it, but the basic idea is that you put semi-hard pieces of bread into warm, sweetened milk. Something like old-style cereals. I loved that as a kid.

Then there is ‘Pofesen’, a variation of French Toast, filled with jam. The layered variant of french toast is  ‘Scheiterhaufen’ (apple-bread casserole): you soak the bread in sweetened milk while you slice up some apples. Then you put alternating layers of bread and apples into a baking tin, and bake it until crispy. I experimented a little with the original Scheiterhaufen and added additional layers of semolina pudding (see picture above). Turned out to be great!

Of course there’s also a whole range of dishes involving bread cubes. They are used for fillings of all sorts. But they also make the basis of one my favorite dishes: ‘Semmelknödel’ (bread dumplings). They are amazingly good, yet incredibly easy to make and very versatile. For example, you can eat them in a soup, or as a side dish, often served with mushroom sauce and (fake) meat. And the coolest thing is: if you have Semmelknödel leftovers, you can slice those and fry them in a pan (with some onions), and you have a great third-hand dish. Unfortunately I never have bread dumpling leftovers..

And what’s more, there is a whole range of dishes that involve breadcrumbs. The crust of a Schnitzel has them. A traditional Austrian apple strudel has sweetened and roasted breadcrumbs (with lots of cinnamon!) in them, and Austrian fruit dumplings are rolled in the same kind of sweetened breadcrumbs. For what it’s worth: ‘Marillenknödel’ (apricot dumplings) are the unbeatable number one of sweet main dishes!

A little while ago, I tried out another old bread recipe: ‘Brotschmarren’ (‘Schmarren’ is something like a chopped pancake). I soaked sliced old bread in sweetened (soy) milk, and then fried it in a pan until it was sort of crispy. With all the whole grain bread I used, I wasn’t sure if that would be any good. It turned out OK. Not my favorite second hand bread dish, but not bad either

A well-tried recipe from a friend’s grandma. Easy and yum!

• 4 cups flower
• 2 cups sugar
  (I’d substitute that with Xylitol or any other sugar alcohol)
• 1 cup sunflower oil
• 3/4 cup cocoa
• 1.5 sachets (25 gr?) baking powder
• 2 sachets vanilla sugar, or a little pure vanilla
• water, as much as needed to make a viscous dough
  (around 1-2 cups)

Mix the ingredients well, put the dough in a greased cake pan, bake for around 50 min with 180 degrees Celsius. Done!

Decorate/frost this cake as you wish. I find this version especially delicious and easy to make: filled with banana slices and soy pudding, and frosted with dark chocolate.