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On Sunday morning, I tried a new recipe, Rosemary Roasted Chickpeas, from a Better Homes and Gardens Special Interest publication, Cut the Sugar (p.78). I used 30 oz. of the chickpeas I cooked last week. These are roasted for 40 minutes with 1 Tbs. of olive oil at 425F. I put them on parchment paper to make cleaning up easier. They do have to be stirred every 10 minutes. Once removed from the oven, they are drizzled with 2 Tbs. olive oil, 1 tsp. dried rosemary (or 1 Tbs. fresh), 1 Tbs. honey; a scant ½ tsp. kosher salt, and ¼ tsp. cayenne pepper. I had a few with the leftover slice of pizza that I had for lunch. These did not knock my socks off, but they are a satisfying snack. I might also try them sprinkled on a salad. There are two other variations in the magazine. I might try a variation with Penzey’s salt-free Forward, which is a seasoning to replace salt that I have not used more than once or twice, as I keep forgetting that I have it.
I have my car back. It had a dead cell in the battery.
On Thursday morning, I used a recipe for Chocolate Olive Oil Cake with Blood Orange Glaze, from a Baking from Scratch email to bake a Bundt cake, but I made some changes in the recipe. (See discussion under baking-desserts--blood oranges.) Blood oranges are not available right now, so I used a regular orange. I used canola oil and reduced it by 1/3 cup. I used buttermilk rather than regular milk and increased it by 1/3 cup. I used 1 cup of white whole wheat flour (Bob’s Red Mill ivory flour) in place of that much AP flour, and I added 2 Tbs. Bob’s Red Mill powdered milk. I baked it in the Nordic Ware Celebration Bundt pan—the one that allows you to cut 20 equal slices—as I don’t have the pan the recipe specifies and do not intend to buy it. I found that my cake needed 45 minutes to bake at 325F. After 20 minutes on the rack, it came out perfectly. I’m not planning to glaze it. We will eat it for dessert tonight, and I’ll add a not about what we think. The entire cake still has 43g saturated fat, but that is fine when sliced into 20 pieces. Had I followed the recipe, and used 1 1/3 cup olive oil, the total would have been 58g.
In the afternoon, I baked my Buttermilk Grape Nuts Bread, with some whole wheat and barley flour substituted for some of the AP flour, and I used bread flour for the rest. I also reduced the honey to 1 Tbs. and the salt to 1 tsp.
Note: The cake has a delicate orange taste behind the chocolate. The texture is excellent.
For Wednesday’s dinner, I roasted a chicken. I had forgotten just how much it smokes up the house when the oven door is opened and the chicken removed. (I suspect this is one reason--the other being cleaning the oven--that so many of us just buy rotisserie chickens.) I’m glad that there is a vent fan in our apartment kitchen. We had noodles made with some powdered mushrooms. I made a new vegetable dish, working off a recipe in a recent special magazine issue, Heart Smart Recipes. I put a 15x10 sheet pan into a 450F oven to heat up for about 5 minutes. I had cut asparagus into 1-inch pieces, sliced some white mushrooms, minced 4 cloves of garlic, then mixed in a package of cherry tomatoes. I tossed these with some olive oil. I pulled out the pan, put a sheet of parchment (oven safe to 450F) on the pan, put on the vegetable mixture, and roasted for 18 minutes. When I took them out, I drizzled a bit of olive oil on them, then sprinkled with Penzey’s Sunny Paris and stirred. My husband, who is not a big asparagus fan, really liked it prepared this way. Note: the original recipe did not use parchment paper, but I do my own clean-up, so I used it and lowered the temperature from 475F.
I also cooked a bag of garbanzo beans that I soaked for nearly a day. Some will be frozen, and some will be used in recipes to be noted here.
