soy snack break

After recouping from last week’s presentation with multiple mugs of hot chocolate, food for fun is ready to hit the blogging circuit again. This week, I offer the six recipes featured last week when presenting a Snack Break at a client’s annual meeting.

Minnesota Soybean has been a long-time partner and my work with them has taught me that soyfoods can be a fun tool in the kitchen. Why not include them in your ingredient palette when you’re thinking through meals, snacks, and even the sweet stuff?

True, some people have allergies to soy and there have also been whispers of soy’s “dark side” in certain media circles. To those with allergies, skip right over these recipes, or try subbing in another type of nut, nut milk, green veg, or flour. And to those who believe soy has that dark side, I’d offer that moderate consumption of soy has yet to show negative effects in any study to date. On the plus side, it’s a strong source of plant protein and fiber and has been proven to reduce high cholesterol levels, possibly prevent against certain hormonal cancers, yadda yadda yadda.

Shopping for and cooking up the snacks for the presentation was loads of fun–as a writer, it’s a treat to move around and create something tangible (and edible!) for a work project. An overestimate of attendees meant there were plenty of leftovers, which I wish I could serve up here. Instead, I’ll post photos and recipes and invite you to try a little soy.

Green Tea Edamame

•  1 quart water
• 4 tea-bags green tea
• 1 (12-ounce) bag frozen edamame
• Sea salt to taste

In medium pot, bring water to a boil. Remove pot from heat; add tea bags. Steep 2 to 3 minutes.

Remove and discard tea bags. Return pot to medium heat. Bring tea to a gentle boil. Add edamame. Cook about 7 minutes or until beans are cooked through; drain and discard tea. Sprinkle edamame with salt. Serve immediately. Makes 4 (generous 1-cup) servings.

Savory Spring Scones

• 1 tablespoon vinegar plus enough soymilk to measure 1 cup
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 1 cup soy flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup butter, at room temperature
• 1 cup sliced green onions
• Dash cracked black pepper

Heat oven to 500°F. In measuring cup, combine vinegar and soymilk; let stand 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, in large bowl, whisk together flours, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. With pastry blender or two knives, cut in butter until mixture resembles bread crumbs. Stir in soured soymilk until dough forms. Stir in onions and pepper.

Turn dough out onto well-floured surface; knead dough gently 8 to 10 times, sprinkling with flour as needed. Pat dough into 8-inch circle, about 3/4 inch thick. Cut circle into 8 pie-shape wedges, pressing down with knife without sawing. Sprinkle baking sheet with flour. Gently transfer wedges to baking sheet.

Reduce oven to 450°F. Bake scones 20 minutes or just until golden. Makes 8 scones.

Egg & Tofu Salad

• 3 tablespoons plain yogurt
• 2 tablespoons mayonnaise
• 1 tablespoon mustard
• 2 teaspoons snipped fresh chives
• 4 hard-cooked large eggs, peeled and chopped
• 1 (14-ounce) package water-packed soft tofu, drained and chopped
• 1/2 cup finely chopped celery
• 1/4 cup finely chopped red bell pepper
• Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

In medium bowl, whisk together yogurt, mayonnaise, mustard, and chives until smooth. Add remaining ingredients; stir gently to coat. Adjust seasoning to taste. Makes 4 cups.

Edamame-Chile Hummus

• 2 cups fresh or frozen edamame, cooked and drained
• 1 cup canned chickpeas, rinsed and drained
• 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 1/2 teaspoons each seeded diced red and green jalapeño chiles
• 1 1/2 teaspoons fresh lime juice
• 1 garlic clove, crushed
• Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

In food processor, combine all ingredients; cover. Process until blended, but still slightly chunky. Adjust seasoning as desired. Makes about 1 1/3 cups.

Pumpkin Soynut Granola

Love pumpkin? Go ahead and double the pumpkin puree.

• 3 cups old-fashioned (rolled) oats
• 2 tablespoons packed brown sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup maple syrup
• 1/2 cup pumpkin puree
• 1/4 cup applesauce
• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup dried cranberries
• 1/2 cup roasted soynuts (can use Cinnamon-Roasted Soynuts, recipe below)
• 1/4 cup pumpkin seeds

Heat oven to 325ºF. Line baking sheet with parchment paper.

In large bowl, toss together oats, brown sugar, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, and salt.

In small bowl, stir together maple syrup, pumpkin puree, applesauce, and vanilla. Stir into oat mixture until coated. Stir in cranberries, soynuts, and pumpkin seeds.

Spread mixture evenly on baking sheet. Bake, stirring every 10 to 15 minutes, 45 minutes or until golden brown. Cool before storing in covered container. Makes 5 cups.

Cinnamon-Roasted Soynuts

• 1 egg white
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups soynuts
• 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons packed brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons granulated sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

Heat oven to 300°F. Coat baking sheet with cooking spray.

In medium bowl, beat egg white just until frothy; beat in vanilla. Fold in soynuts. Stir in brown and granulated sugars and cinnamon.

Spread soynuts evenly on baking sheet. Bake, stirring occasionally, 20 to 25 minutes or until just lightly browned. Cool slightly, breaking up any clumps before serving. Makes about 2 cups.

All together now:

tofu, edamame, soynuts, oh my!

get crackalackin’ or DIY crackers

Though last week’s bacon jam has yet to meet a food it doesn’t improve, it was meant for a party and simply screamed to be partnered with goat cheese and homemade crackers.

ready to party

Which meant I needed to bring my cracker-making A-game to the kitchen. Past experience with DIY crackers has yielded tasty results, though the baked crackers always seem softer than what you’ll find in stores. I wanted crisp, so this seemed perfect opportunity to give cracker making another shot.

The Homemade Pantry, Alana Chernila’s collection of all things DIY kitchen, was the book I turned to for my recipe. Her humbly named Wheat Crackers–basic and über-healthy–seemed just the thing to balance bacon jam. Ingredients were gathered and dough was made, rolled, and baked. I focused on rolling the dough to exactly the 1/8-inch thickness given in the recipe, as I’m guessing the softer crackers I’ve made hadn’t been rolled thin enough.

1/8 inch thick

Using olive oil instead of butter also gave them a slight crunch and the uncooked millet added to the texture further. Because I can’t seem to do “pretty” or even “uniform” when baking, the crackers came out looking a bit disheveled. They were still delish and some would say their slightly ragged appearance adds to their charm. (You would say that, wouldn’t you? 😉 )

Following Alana’s suggestion of adding garlic or rosemary to the dough would have given them more flavor; I’ll make this change next time. Still, these crackers were paired with that bacon jam, which has enough flavor for them both.

wheat cracker, goat cheese, bacon jam

These were good crackers and making them reminded me of how easy a process it is. I’ve featured Homemade Pantry before along with Make the Bread, Buy the Butter by Jennifer Reese. These books deserve another shout-out as they’re fun reads (Reese is lol funny) and offer recipes for so many basics: pudding, bread, yogurt, pop-tarts (that’s a basic, right?), pasta, lemonade, Kahlua, fruit roll-ups, marshmallows, etc. You don’t need chef’s training to make any of it and food always tastes better–and usually costs less–when you make it yourself. (Excepting A-1 Steak Sauce and ketchup–I tried making both and am sticking with store versions.)

If you’re reading this, my guess is you’re already on the DIY bandwagon, but if no, I encourage you to pick something–anything–and give it a shot. (Butter, for instance, is nothing more than overwhipped cream. You can make butter; no churn required.) If you’re well versed in from-scratch kitchen arts, would love to hear your stories. Please share in comments!

Wheat Crackers

from Alana Chernila’s The Homemade Pantry

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 cup whole wheat or spelt flour
• 1/3 cup uncooked millet
• 1/3 cup ground flax seeds
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more for sprinkling
• 5 medium cloves garlic, minced and 1 tablespoon minced fresh rosemary, if desired
• 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1/2 cup water
• Freshly ground pepper

Heat oven to 350°F. In medium bowl, combine flours, millet, flax, baking powder, salt, and garlic and rosemary, if using. Add oil; mix with fork. Slowly add water, mixing with hands as you go. Add more water (up to 1/4 cup) as needed until dough holds together.  Knead in bowl 2 minutes or until smooth and workable.

Turn dough out onto floured surface; press into flat disk. Roll with rolling pin until 1/8 inch to 1/4 inch thick. For square crackers, use pizza wheel or sharp knife to cut dough into 2-inch squares. For round crackers, use 2-inch biscuit cutter. (Or to make it food for fun-style, attempt to cut diamond shapes with sharp knife, realize it’s not going so well, but transfer dough to baking sheet anyway.)

Transfer dough to ungreased baking sheets with spatula; sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake 20 to 22 minutes, rotating baking sheets midway through, until crackers are hard to the touch. Transfer to wire rack to cool. Makes about 50 crackers.

pink eggs

Food for fun’s last few posts have gotten a bit lengthy, so we’ll simplify this week with a simple story about a simple recipe.

A recent Dash magazine photo knocked me out.

Beet Pickled Deviled Eggs. So. Pretty.

Deviled eggs are high on my list of favorite foods; pickling intrigues me. A dislike of canned beets (remember this?) wasn’t enough to dissuade me from giving these deviled eggs a go. It’s not like I was going to consume the canned beets, right? They were there only to add pretty pink and a tinge of sweet.

So, I set out to hard-cook a few eggs. My method? Foolproof and taken from the pros: Bring a covered saucepan of eggs and lots of water to a gentle boil. Turn off heat and let eggs sit 10 minutes. Drain and cool immediately under cold, running water. Works all the time.

Except today when I forgot about the saucepan and let it sit longer than 10 minutes (doh!). This particular batch of hard-cooked eggs sported the dreaded greenish halo around an otherwise yellow yolk. Yet their color didn’t bother me as much as the rubbery whites. These babies were tougher than I’d have liked.

Texture aside, I didn’t love these eggs as much as I’d hoped to. While they were still shockingly pink and pretty, that canned beet flavor was there. Using cooked fresh beets sounds lovely, but wouldn’t provide canning brine for the pickling. Perhaps it’s a recipe that would improve using home-canned beets?

Another note: The eggs had white spots where they had rested against the bottom or side of the bowl. A larger bowl may have helped as would have the occasional stir.

While I wouldn’t consider this as disastrous as my last round of canned beet cooking, I deem them better looking than they taste. Proper cooking would have improved the texture, but there’s no getting around that tinny, canned beet flavor.

That said, the filling was most definitely a win: yolks, a judicious amount of mayo, and sprinkling of celery salt, black pepper, and ground mustard. It’s now my go-to deviled egg filling as it has just the right amount of each ingredient.

overcooked, but still pretty

I made these up on a sunny day, so have no excuse for this sad little photo. By the time I noticed my pictures were too dark, it was too late. The four pink-tinged deviled eggs had become my lunch, making them far more edible than my last beet escapade.

easy cheesy DIY

Doing It Yourself is all the rage these days. Reality TV is ripe with programming devoted to folks doing their own pretty much everything. I’m not a fan of reality TV and you’ll never catch me sewing my own clothes, making my own (or anyone else’s) jewelry, or refurbishing anything in my house. I’m just not crafty like that.

But I have always been a fan of cooking and baking from scratch. Homemade bread? DIY. A batch of cookies? DIY. A pot of soup or broth? DIY.

With the proliferation of do-it-yourselfers, the bar has been raised for what can be done in the kitchen. The food section of this week’s local paper headlined with a piece on grinding your own meat. I’ve also been seeing more about homemade butter (it’s as simple as overwhipping cream), yogurt, and cheese. And then there’s the wave of home brewers and wine makers.

A new cookbook that speaks exactly to this point was also featured in a recent newspaper story. The Homemade Pantry: 101 Things You Can Stop Buying & Start Making by Alana Chernila got my attention. This is my kind of book. Make your own foods so 1) you know exactly what’s in them and 2) you aren’t spending hard-earned dollars on foods you can easily make yourself.

I made the recipe offered alongside the newspaper article as it mimicked one of my oldest daughter’s favorite snacks–cheese crackers. I buy them occasionally, but consider them little more than junk food. If I made my own (and they passed her taste test), I could offer her my version of Cheez-Its. They’d contain “real food” ingredients–no additives, preservatives, etc. Also, I’d be paying for ingredients, but not the manufacture, packaging, and marketing that goes into processed foods.

My Cheez-It fan and I whipped up these crackers tonight. The dough took only a few minutes to make and I froze it for only 10 minutes instead of refrigerating for 2 hours. It still rolled out perfectly. I cut the crackers with a crinkle-cutter, but a knife or biscuit cutter would have done just as well. The dough baked up beautifully and the resulting crackers were pretty and tasty–salty, rich, savory, exploding with cheese flavor. I used the Cheddar called for in the recipe, but it’d be fun to change it up depending on your mood or your family’s preferences: mozzarella for pizza lovers, pepper-Jack for those who like it spicy, sharp Cheddar for an extra punch. A teaspoon of dried herbs would also add distinction.

Though these crackers aren’t as crispy as what you find in that red box (might need to fry ’em up for that), my daughter gave them a rating of “good to great” which is high praise from her. I’ll probably buy the book as I’d love a collection of such recipes all in one place. The article mentioned homemade pop-tarts which sounds like a delicious project. Definitely a DIY I would Do.

Homemade Cheese Crackers

adapted only slightly from The Homemade Pantry: 101 Things You Can Stop Buying & Start Making by Alana Chernila

• 3 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into pieces
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon dry mustard
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 6 ounces grated Cheddar cheese
• 3/4 cup water
• 2 teaspoons vinegar
• 1 ice cube

In mixing bowl, use paddle attachment to beat together butter, flour, mustard, and salt 30 seconds or just until crumbly. Add cheese; beat on low speed 30 seconds longer or just until mixed.

In small bowl, combine water, vinegar, and ice cube; let stand briefly to chill. Add 6 tablespoons vinegar mixture to cheese mixture; beat on low speed until liquid is absorbed. Beat in vinegar mixture, 1 tablespoon at a time, just until dough forms a ball. Wrap in plastic wrap. Refrigerate 2 hours. (I froze the dough for 10 minutes.)

Remove frozen dough to counter 15 minutes before baking.

Heat oven to 325°F. On lightly floured surface, roll dough 1/8-inch-thick. Cut into small squares or rounds. Place on baking sheet. Bake 30 minutes or until lightly browned. Cool on wire rack. Makes about 40 (2-inch) crackers. (I cut them smaller, so got about 60 (1 1/2-inch) crackers.)

crinkle-cut dough

ready to bake

in the oven

cup o’ DIY cheese crackers