Crackers from scratch

These are the world’s best crackers!

This is something really special – everybody loves these crackers, and they’re so easy to make! They’re much cheaper than store-bought crackers, and they have less fat and less salt. Plus did I mention everybody loves them? I start pretty much every evening of cooking by making crackers, and then everyone has something to dip salsa into while the rest of the dinner is cooking.

But you have to knead them!

The first time I made these crackers, I didn’t really knead them, and they came out like sand, all crumbly. Inedible. Make sure you knead them for at least a minute. And, if they don’t come out right the first time, try again.

How to make crackers:

Preheat the oven to 425F. In a medium size mixing bowl, mix three cups of flour (dump another 1/4 cup on the counter so your dough won’t stick to it later). Add a large pinch of salt, 1 cup of water, and 1/3 cup of olive oil (I do the olive oil first so the water will wash out last bits of oil from the cup).

I usually use plain white flour, but whole wheat and rye, or combinations, also work fine. You’ll need to add a little extra water. You can make them with chickpea flour too, but they’ll be a little more fragile without the gluten to hold them together.

Mix with a wooden spoon until the dough forms a ball and pulls away from the sides of the bowl, about twenty seconds. Dump the dough on to the counter and knead it for at least a minute.

Separate the dough into two balls. Use a rolling pin to roll out each ball until they are about 1/8 inch thick, and about big enough to cover a cookie sheet. Whenever the dough begins to stick to the rolling pin, or gets hard to roll, flip it over. You’ll need to flip it over three or four times. Then gently lift the dough and put each piece on a cookie sheet (you’ll need two cookie sheets).

Sprinkle with seasonings – more salt, or pepper, or sesame seeds, or chopped rosemary, or chopped thyme, or some combination. Press the seasonings in a little with the palms of your hands so they won’t fall off.

Use a pizza wheel or a sharp knife to slice the crackers into cracker-size pieces, about 1 1/2 inches on a side. Don’t cut all the way through, or you’ll scratch your pan. Just score them, and you can break them apart later.

Put both cookie sheets in the oven and bake about ten to fifteen minutes, until even the center crackers are beginning to brown. If your oven heats unevenly, you may need to turn the cookie sheets halfway through.

When you take the crackers out, let them cool five minutes before eating them, or they’ll burn you. Now stop that! Leave those alone! See, I told you they would burn you. As a starter, serve with salsa, or with chopped liver, parsley boniet, guacamole, baba ganoush, hummus, or gefilte fish. Or for a main course, serve with lettuce soup, or any other soup.

Vegetarian or vegan

Mmm, naturally vegan crackers! Enjoy 🙂

Can I keep these for later?

Yes – these miraculous crackers keep well for a few days in a bowl on your counter, if you can keep people from eating them. To keep them longer, put them in a plastic bag like a breadbag and freeze them. They’ll keep for two or three weeks. You don’t even need to defrost them – they’re so dry that a few minutes in a bowl on the counter is enough to defrost them.

Baba ganoush

Tired of salami and cheese cubes?

If you want something yummy but not so meat-and-cheese oriented to put out for guests before dinner or bring to a party, hummus and baba ganoush are perfect for that. This version of baba ganoush has extra lemon, which gives it a nice bright flavor.

How to make Baba Ganoush:

Peel a medium-sized eggplant and cut it into one-inch cubes. Heat 1/4 cup of olive oil in a medium-size frying pan. Saute the eggplant cubes until they are tender and turning brown. You will probably need to add more olive oil as the cubes soak it up. Near the end, add 3 cloves of crushed garlic too.

Once the eggplant and garlic are cooked, mash them with an immersion blender or a fork. Add 1/2 cup of tahini, 1 teaspoon of salt, and the juice of one lemon. Taste and adjust as necessary. Serve warm or cold, with crackers or bread. You might want to also make hummus.

(If you don’t know where to get tahini, look with the hippie peanut butter at your big grocery store.)

Vegetarian or vegan?

Baba ganoush is entirely vegan, and so are the crackers and the bread.

And will baba ganoush keep?

You can eat baba ganoush for a couple of days afterwards, if you keep it in the refrigerator. After that, it starts to get nasty.

Arugula bruschetta

Arugula

Arugula: grows wild!

Arugula, once it gets going in your yard, will come back every year. It will even spread and tend to get out of hand. It’s free and it’s abundant and you can use it in all kinds of recipes. Try making arugula pesto, or eating young arugula leaves mixed with lettuce or raw spinach as a salad, or adding chopped arugula to your ceviche.

How to make arugula bruschetta:

First you make bread – either this quick bread, or this no-knead bread will work fine. Preheat the oven to 425 F, or just turn on the broiler. Slice the bread into 1/4 inch thick rounds, arrange them to fill a cookie sheet, and brush each round with a generous amount of olive oil. Sprinkle with coarse salt if desired.

Bake or broil the bruschetta until they are toasted and begin to turn brown around the edges. Remove from the oven and quickly place a leaf or two of arugula on each round of toast. Serve hot, alone as an appetizer or with soup.

Vegetarian or vegan?

Arugula bruschetta’s vegan, as long as the bread you use is vegan like this bread.

And will these bruschetta keep?

No, they’ll go soggy in an hour, once they get cold. Pick the arugula fresh, and eat the bruschetta fresh!

Salsa from scratch

Why make salsa?

You can get good-enough salsa from the grocery store, and it’s not expensive either, but even fancy store salsa does have a bunch of extra salt and sugar in it that you don’t need. You can have a much healthier salsa by making it yourself at home, and it’s not that much work. Here are two recipes, an easy one and a harder one:

How to make Quick Salsa:

Empty a can of diced tomatoes into a bowl. Add two tablespoons of white vinegar or lime juice, a large pinch of salt, black pepper, red pepper flakes, chopped cilantro, chopped onion, and chopped garlic. Mix and serve.

A medium quick salsa

Thanks to my sister – slice tomatoes and peppers and lay them out on a cookie sheet with some cloves of garlic. Broil until browned. (You’ll need to take off the peppers and garlic first and let the tomatoes go longer.) Blend them all together and add a squeeze of lime juice.

How to make Salsa – cooked:

Put six whole jalapeno peppers and two whole red bell peppers into a hot frying pan. Let them roast over medium-high heat, turning them once in a while, until they begin to blacken on all sides, about ten minutes.

Let the peppers cool a bit, cut off their stems, and compost the seeds. In a food processor (or by hand), chop up the peppers along with one onion, eight cloves of garlic, and 1/4 cup of olive oil. In a large saucepan, heat another bit of olive oil, and pour in the chopped peppers and onions and garlic. Saute over medium heat until the peppers are soft but not brown. Meanwhile, cut ten good tomatoes into quarters, and squeeze the seeds out and compost them. (If it’s not tomato season, don’t bother with this recipe.)

When the peppers are soft, add the tomatoes, mix, and continue cooking until the tomatoes are soft and beginning to take up less room in the pot, about five minutes. Meanwhile, chop one bunch of cilantro.

When the tomatoes are done, add the cilantro along with the juice of one lime and 1 teaspoon of salt. Keep simmering, cooking off the water, until the salsa is as thick as you want it to be. Taste and add more salt if needed. Let the salsa stand and cool for a while to come to room temperature before serving.

Vegetarian or vegan?

Naturally vegan, and delicious with crackers or corn chips and guacamole, or with nachos. For a good summer breakfast, have scrambled eggs or tofu scramble with salsa.

How to keep salsa

The whole point of salsa is that it keeps; this homemade salsa will keep for a couple of weeks in the refrigerator. The salsa you’ve made to store for winter you should freeze in small tupperwares, and thaw in the refrigerator as needed.

Oatmeal in seconds

Better than my mother’s oatmeal

My mother was a good mother and she made us good hot bowls of oatmeal every winter morning and we hated it. Her oatmeal was terrible: gloppy stuff like jello. Then I got married, and my husband made oatmeal, and it was nothing like hers at all – this oatmeal was delicious! All our kids like it too. After some investigation, the secret turns out to be to use water rather than milk, and not too much water, and not stirring it while it is cooking. Who knew?

How to make oatmeal:

Put a half cup of old-fashioned rolled oats in a cereal bowl. Mix in a pinch of salt and a handful of raisins (if wanted). Pour a half cup of water over the top. Do not mix. Microwave for one minute. Remove, stir, and eat.

Some things to put in your oatmeal:

I like to just add raisins or huckleberries. The kids like a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of brown sugar. You can also add maple syrup, or honey, or walnuts, or almonds, or cinnamon (or any combination of these). Or apple slices, banana slices, or peaches, or any other kind of fruit.

Vegetarian or vegan

Just naturally vegan! Enjoy! You could make it not-vegan by pouring milk on it, but really, why would you want to?

What can I do with leftover oatmeal?

I’m glad you asked, because you can make delicious oatmeal cakes with salmon and spinach for dinner!

French toast

Pain Perdu

Did you ever wonder what they call French toast in France? They call it pain perdu – lost bread – because you lose the pieces of bread in the eggs. In England, they call French toast “eggy bread.” Either way, French toast is popular all over, whereever people eat eggs and bread, because it’s a great way to use up leftover or stale bread and make a quick hot filling cheap meal at the same time.

How to make French toast:

In a medium size mixing bowl, mix 6 eggs with a fork. Add a cup of milk, and mix again. Slice a baguette into thin rounds, or just use slices of store-bought bread. Toss about half the bread into the bowl of eggs, and push the bread under the eggs. Leave it be for about five minutes so it can soak up the egg.

Get out a large frying pan and put in a couple of tablespoons of butter. Melt the butter over medium-high heat, and then put in as many of the soaked bread slices as will fit in the pan without crowding. Let them cook until the egg begins to set in the middle, about five minutes. If they start to burn before that, turn down the heat. You may need to rotate the pan so that the pieces cook evenly.

Meanwhile, put the rest of the bread into the eggs to soak. Slice up some strawberries or peaches and microwave them to make strawberry sauce or peach sauce for the French toast. Or just slice up the peaches and serve them on top of the French toast without heating them.

When the French toast is mostly done, use a spatula to flip them all over so they get browned on the other side. Give them another minute or so, and then use the spatula to turn them out on to a plate. Arrange the other half of the bread in the pan, and cook as before. Keep the first ones covered with a plate or dishcloth so they don’t get cold waiting. Serve hot.

I try to convince the kids to just eat French toast with the fruit sauce or sliced fruit, as I do, but they like to add a little maple syrup or a sprinkling of white sugar too.

Vegan or vegetarian?

French toast is vegetarian but not vegan. If you need it lactose-free, it’s fine to leave out the milk and just use another egg instead. If you use gluten-free bread, this can be gluten-free.

But will French toast keep?

Not really; you can reheat them in the microwave the next day, but they’ll be soggy. They’re best fresh.

Gravlax (salmon)

A healthier replacement for ham and bacon

Salmon’s way better for you than pork, and salty, fatty gravlax made from salmon is still way better for you than salty, fatty ham or bacon. But in many ways they serve the same function – in Eggs Benedict, for example, I usually replace the traditional ham with lox. Plus, of course, you can’t beat lox and cream cheese on bagels. Lox is expensive, though, and you can’t always get it everywhere – here’s how to make your own.

How to make Gravlax:

Get about a pound of salmon fillet. Put it, skin side down, on a large piece of plastic wrap (I hardly ever use plastic wrap, but this is an exception). Pull out any bones you can feel or see. In a small mixing bowl, mix 1/2 cup of kosher salt, one cup of sugar, and a chopped bunch of dill. Pour this mixture over the salmon and wrap the plastic wrap tightly around the whole thing.

Now leave it in the refrigerator for 24 hours. When the time is up, unwrap the salmon and rinse off all the salt and sugar and dill in the sink. Slice the gravlax on the bias, across the grain of the salmon.

But will gravlax keep?

The whole purpose of salting fish is to make it keep longer. Even so, I wouldn’t trust gravlax longer than a week or so.

Bagels from scratch

Not by Bread Alone

I grew up on bagels; in Ithaca, New York, bagels were like the default food. People had them for breakfast, lunch, and snack, and then had pizza bagels for dinner. No respectable bagelry would sell a bagel more than two hours old – after that, they gave them away free out the back door. Crisp on the outside, chewy on the inside, and only a quarter apiece – bagels were the perfect food.

But here in Portland – augh! Bagels are often just bread shaped round, soggy and bland. Or, they’re expensive specialty items you have to drive across town for, and then they’re always out of the poppy ones and you have to get something West Coast like pineapple or ginger. So here’s how to make your own.

How to make Bagels:

(takes about two hours; makes two dozen or so)

In your largest mixing bowl, mix 6 cups of regular white flour with 6 cups of whole wheat flour, 2 heaping tablespoons of instant yeast, 1 heaping teaspoon of salt, 3 tablespoons of olive oil, 1/8 cup of sugar (to help the yeast), and 5 cups of warm water.

Mix with a wooden spoon until the dough forms a ball and pulls away from the sides of the bowl, then turn out on to a floured surface and knead. If not all of the flour will incorporate, turn it out anyway and try to incorporate more flour as you knead.

Knead the dough for about ten minutes, until it feels stretchy. Divide the dough into balls the size of tangerines: you should get about 24 balls. Cover with a dishtowel and let them rise for 20 minutes. Go get the laundry started or something.

Bagels

Come back after 20 minutes and shape each ball into a bagel: roll it between your hands to make a snake about seven inches long, and twist it around into a bagel; pinch to seal the ends together. Cover the bagels with the dish towel and let them rise another 20 minutes. Put a large pot of water on to boil, and preheat the oven to 425 F.

When the water is boiling, gently drop in eight of the bagels. You may need to use a spatula to get them off the counter cleanly. Use a slotted spoon to move the bagels around a little in the water. Fold the dish-towel in two thicknesses to one side to drain the bagels on. When they float, after a minute or less, lift the bagels out with the spoon and drain them on the dish-towel. Boil the rest of the bagels in two more batches.

Meanwhile, get out two baking sheets and pour a couple of tablespoons of olive oil on each one. Use the first bagel to spread the olive oil all over the baking sheet, and then arrange the bagels on the sheets as they get dry enough. Sprinkle the bagels with toppings as desired; I pretty much always use poppy seeds, which everyone likes around here, but sesame or salt are just as easy.

Bake the bagels for about twenty minutes, until they are crusty and brown. Let the bagels cool for ten minutes before slicing and eating.

Vegetarian or vegan?

Naturally vegan, and delicious with peanut butter or hummus.

But will these bagels keep?

Bagels are best fresh, of course, but these are good in the cupboard for a couple of days, in the refrigerator for a week, and in the freezer for a month. Be sure to slice them first before freezing, and then you can defrost them quickly in the toaster.

Zucchini eggs

Mediterranean Thyme

The summer I spent on an archaeological dig on the island of Cyprus, digging up an Early Bronze Age village and cemetery, the hillside we worked on was covered with wild thyme bushes, as you can see in this picture. After smelling thyme all day long, all summer, I couldn’t face using thyme in cooking for a year! But when we came back down to camp in the evening, zucchini scramble was one of my favorite dinners.

is it good for you to eat eggs?

As far as I can tell, eggs are basically good for you. They have a lot of cholesterol, but there’s not much evidence that eating cholesterol gives you high cholesterol. Eggs are a good cheap source of protein, and better for you than meat, though it’s probably healthier to be avoid animal products altogether. This recipe’s mainly zucchini anyway.

Fancy eggs or cheap eggs?

As far as I can tell, or anyone doing a blind tasting can tell, all eggs pretty much taste the same. If money is the main concern, get the cheap ones. I do try to always get the vegetarian-feed ones: I don’t like the idea of eating eggs from chickens that ate meat byproducts. When I can spare the money, I get the farmer’s market eggs, because I like to support local small-scale farming, and because I like to eat eggs that came from happy chickens.

How to make Zucchini Omelette:

Slice two pounds of zucchini (about five or six medium-size zucchini) into slices about 1/8 inch thick. Break 5 eggs into a bowl and mix well. In a large frying pan, heat 1/4 cup of olive oil over medium heat. Add the sliced zucchini and spread them out all over the pan. Let them fry on one side for about five minutes, until they begin to brown, and then gently turn them to brown on the other side. Don’t break them too much, or you’ll have zucchini mush, but don’t let them burn either.

When the zucchini are browned on both sides, pour in the eggs over the top. Mix until the eggs are cooked (breaking up the zucchini), season with salt and pepper to taste, and serve hot. Serve this with sliced tomatoes.

Vegetarian or vegan?

Naturally vegetarian. You can make this vegan by making a tofu scramble instead of eggs, though, or by using egg substitutes.

How long will zucchini omelette keep?

It’s good reheated the next day for lunch, but I wouldn’t try to keep it longer than that.

Wontons and broth

Frozen Wontons or make at home?

Yeah, you can get frozen wontons, and they’re yummy, but they’re also full of salt and sugar and grease. These are healthy and fun to make. It took about an hour, but you’d get faster at it with practice. Also, it would be fine to make the wontons and broth ahead of time and then you’d just have to boil water to cook the wontons and heat the broth.

But can’t I just buy the wonton wrappers?

Sure you can, at any big grocery store or Asian grocery. But if you make the wrappers from scratch you can make this anytime, using whatever leftovers you have in the house, instead of having to plan ahead and get the wrappers. It wasn’t hard.

First get the broth started:

Put a large saucepan half full of water on to boil. Add chicken bones or a couple of pieces of chicken (or start with chicken broth instead). Add chopped celery, carrots, garlic, and mushrooms, bring to a boil, and simmer until everything else is done. If you want this vegetarian, use miso broth instead. (and hey, if you’re in a hurry, this is chicken soup: just add rice and you can have that for dinner instead of wontons).

Now make the filling:

In a medium-size bowl, mix a cup of chopped cabbage, 1/2 pound of chopped cooked shrimp, 1 cup chopped kale, 1/2 cup chopped green onions, 1 tsp. soy sauce, 1 tsp. rice wine (or white wine), 2 tsp. ginger, 2 cloves garlic, and red pepper flakes to taste. Any variation on this is fine: try mixing shrimp with pork sausage, or leave out the meat, or use sprouts, or carrots, or broccoli, or any other kind of greens. Put another big pot of water on to boil to cook your wontons in.

Now make the wonton wrappers and wrap them up:

In a medium-size bowl, mix 2 cups of flour, a large pinch of salt, 4 eggs, 1/4 cup of oil, and enough water to make the dough stick together in a ball. Turn the ball out onto a floured surface and knead for a few minutes. Divide the dough into small balls (like Ping-Pong balls). Roll each ball out thin, and cut into two halves. On each half put about a ping-pong-ball-size bit of filling. Moisten the edges with water and fold over, pressing down so the dough fits tightly around the stuffing. Then pinch two of the corners together to make a wonton.

TIP: fill the wontons on a different work surface from where you roll them out, or your rolling-out surface will get wet and be sticky.

Final assembly:

Boil the wontons for about five minutes. Meanwhile, tear the leaves off about a cup of cilantro, chop it a little, and put some in the bottom of each bowl. Add some spinach leaves. Then fish out the wontons with a slotted spoon and put three in each bowl. Taste the broth and add salt and pepper, and the juice of half a lemon. Ladle some broth (and the vegetables in the broth) on top of the wontons and serve.

Vegetarian or vegan

Vegetarian, if you use miso broth and leave the shrimp out of the filling. The egg in the wonton wrapper keeps it from being vegan. You could probably substitute olive oil but I haven’t tried it yet.

Can I keep these wontons for later?

Yes, they’re fine reheated the next day.