Spinach Walnut Pesto-ey Pasta

One of my favorite all time foods is pesto, so imagine my delight when I found this recipe on eat me, delicious who adapted from Quick-Fix Vegetarian. Walnuts, spinach, and flax seed? I couldn't have been happier. I love fixing my family healthy delicious food and this recipe looked (and absolutely was!) amazing. We recently unearthed our food processor too, after years in hibernation, when I made baklava. The food processor is great, especially for finely uniformly chopped foodstuffs. Ours is super tiny, but it makes cooking so much easier! I digress, back to the pesto: my dad said it could have used parmesan cheese (it's vegan as is) and my brother said that reducing the amount of olive oil made it a lot drier than normal pesto but that he thought normal pesto was too oily, so next time I might add somewhere between 1/4 cup of olive oil and 1/3 cup of olive oil.

Serves 4-5

makes about 2 cups, serves 4 with pasta

Ingredients
3 cups fresh spinach
4 cloves garlic
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup firmly packed fresh parsley leaves
1/3 cup walnut pieces
1 cup fresh basil
2 tbsp ground flax seed
(whoops! looking over this I realized I didn't grind the flax seeds.)
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil or walnut oil
(I might add more oil next time, the pasta was a little drier than normal pesto)
1 block of baked tofu (mine was 7 oz)
(I couldn't find smoked tofu, which the recipe originally called for, at either TJ's or our local health food store. Where do you get smoked tofu?)


Meanwhile, steam the spinach over boiling water for 1 minute, or wilt it in a covered bowl in the microwave for about 3 minutes.
(I really struggled with this step for some reason. I've made gyoza before by frying then steaming them but for some reason, without a special steaming device, I felt like I needed a solution that wasn't provided above. Does this ever happen to any of you- where you have a cooking block that you just can't seem to get past? I didn't want to blanch all the flavor and nutrients out of the spinach, but I also wanted to have a good consistency for the sauce. What I ended up doing was really ridiculous: I rinsed baby spinach in a colander, and then dipped the bottom of the colander into the boiling water I was preparing for the pasta for about two seconds. Then I tossed the wilted spinach with the fresher spinach while still in the colander).
Mince the garlic with the salt in a food processor. Squeeze any moisture from the spinach and add to the food processor along with the parsley, basil, flax seeds and walnuts. Puree until smooth. Add the olive oil gradually and process to a smooth paste.

Cut up baked tofu into squares or small strips. In the pot that you cooked the pasta in, add the pesto and the tofu. Heat over low until tofu is hot.


so healthy and tasty!

Baklava

Having blown through cookies, cheesecake, and brownies influenced by Profe, I needed something fresh and new to bake. Looking for inspiration, I pensively stroked Profe's fur, and admired the warm golden glow of his coat between his dark spots and stripes, laughing silently and lovingly at his ludicrous and almost maniacal expression. Suddenly, the idea came to me from his layers, color, and the mischievous shape of his eyes in that moment: baklava.

Hailing from the former Ottoman empire, and keeping with our South Asian theme, baklava is a dessert with an interesting texture that I think is partly an acquired taste. To illustrate this point, allow me to provide you with a conversation that took place ten minutes ago:

"Would you like some Baklava?!" I ask my brother as he walks in the front door.

"Is it good?" he asks.

"Try it for yourself. My taste buds are not your taste buds."

"I'll take this small piece-- I'm normally not such a huge fan of Baklava," he says as he reluctantly cuts one of the smaller pieces away from the baking dish. "It's actually pretty good," he says after several moments pass. "I like it more than I normally like Baklava."

To some extent I agree with him: baklava is incredibly rich, but on top of that it's made of flaky crust has a syrupy sauce that sinks to the bottom. I've had some horrendous baklava during my twenty-three years of life. It can be papery or soggy and overly sweet. Also, if chopped nuts as a texture bother you, then steer clear of this recipe.

That being said, baklava can be a wonderful dessert when prepared carefully and eaten by an enthusiastic audience. I'd never made anything with phyllo dough until last night and the prospect made me nervous, but I needed something that would keep without refrigeration, so that I could travel to school and share the dessert. I searched the internet for a recipe infused with spice and came up with this gem.



Ingredients

For the filling:
1 (5-inch piece) cinnamon stick, broken into 2 to 3 pieces or 2 teaspoons ground
15 to 20 whole allspice berries
6 ounces blanched almonds
6 ounces raw or roasted walnuts
6 ounces raw or roasted pistachio
2/3 cup sugar
(I left this out)
1/4 cup water
1 teaspoon rose water
(I left this out)
1 pound phyllo dough, thawed
(You will not need the whole pound)
8 ounces clarified unsalted butter, melted

For the syrup:
1 1/4 cups honey
1 1/4 cups water
1 1/4 cups sugar
1 cinnamon stick
1 (2-inch) piece fresh orange peel
(I used almost an entire orange peel and ended up using only half the syrup over the dessert)


Directions

Heat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Place the cinnamon stick and whole allspice into a spice grinder and grind.

Place the almonds, walnuts, pistachios, sugar and freshly ground spices into the bowl of a food processor and pulse until finely chopped, but not pasty or powdery, approximately 15 quick pulses. Set aside.

Combine the water and rose water in a small spritz bottle and set aside.

Trim the sheets of phyllo to fit the bottom of a 13 by 9 by 2-inch metal pan. Brush the bottom and sides of the pan with butter; lay down a sheet of phyllo and brush with butter. Repeat this step 9 more times for a total of 10 sheets of phyllo. Top with 1/3 of the nut mixture and spread thinly. Spritz thoroughly with the rose water. Layer 6 more sheets of phyllo with butter in between each of them, followed by another third of the nuts and spritz with rose water. Repeat with another 6 sheets of phyllo, butter, remaining nuts, and rose water. Top with 8 sheets of phyllo brushing with butter in between each sheet. Brush the top generously with butter. Place in the oven and bake for 30 minutes. Remove pan from the oven and cut into 28 squares. Return pan to the oven and continue to bake for another 30 minutes. Remove pan from the oven, place on a cooling rack, and cool for 2 hours before adding the syrup.

Make the syrup during the last 30 minutes of cooling. Combine the honey, water, sugar, cinnamon stick and orange peel in a 4-quart saucepan and set over high heat. Stir occasionally until the sugar has dissolved. Once boiling, boil for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from the heat and discard the orange peel and cinnamon stick.

After the baklava has cooled for 2 hours, re-cut the entire pan following the same lines as before. Pour the hot syrup evenly over the top of the baklava, allowing it to run into the cuts and around the edges of the pan. Allow the pan to sit, uncovered until completely cool. Cover and store at room temperature for at least 8 hours and up to overnight before serving. Store, covered, at room temperature for up to 5 days.

Cookie Monster

Generally, I am not a huge fan of cookies. On top of that, I absolutely abhor nuts in desserts, but these cookies completely changed my mind.

The backstory: I am at my boyfriend's Aunt's house talking about baking during the holidays when Aunt K. mentions that during the holidays she wasn't up to making a fancy dessert, she runs to the other room and retrieves a giant aqua colored tome enscribed with "Zov" in thin green lettering. The word "simply" sits nonchalantly in the "O". Aunt K. opens the book to page 341 to the much raved about recipe entitled "jumble cookies". The titles are all lowercase reminiscent of an e.e. cummings poem. I'm skeptical. There's several kinds of nuts, chocolate, and dried fruit. The combination sounds overwhelming, but Aunt K.'s sister, daughter, and husband all assure me that these are the most delicious cookies they've ever had. She photocopies the recipe and sends me graciously on my way.

About Zov: She's a proprietress of a bistro not so far from my home in California. Her middle-eastern inspired recipes have been called "brilliant"by the Zagat Guide according to the review of another cook book on amazon.com.

So, this evening, I set myself to the task of recreating Zov's recipe as best I could.

Here it is:

Makes 20 cookies

Ingredients:

1 3/4 cups whole almonds
[I used Trader Joe's Dry Roasted and Unsalted Almonds]
1 1/2 cups pecan halves
[I used Trader Joe's Raw Pecan Halves]
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
10 ounces (2 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature)
1 cup grandulated sugar
2/3 cup (packed) brown sugar
2 large eggs, room temperature
1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
[I used at least twice as much as this recipe recommended]
1 12-ounce package Hershey's dark chocolate chips
[I used Trader Joe's Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips]
2 cups raisins
[I used organic raisins from a local health food store]
Parchment paper or nonstick vegetable-oil cooking spray
[I used salted butter- yum!]

Directions:

Position the rack in the center of the oven and preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Place the almonds and pecans on a heavy, large baking sheet and bake until golden brown and fragrant, about 11 minutes, stirring halfway through the baking time to ensure the almonds brown evenly. [note: unless you have a gargantuan baking sheet, you'll probably have to toast your nuts in waves.] Transfer the nuts to a cutting board to cool completely. Coarsely chop the almodns and pecans, then set the nuts aside. Maintain the oven temperature

Stire the flour, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl to blend. Set the flour mixture aside. Using a stand mixer with the paddle attachment (or a hand-held mixer), beat the butter sugar and brown sugar in the mixing bowl until well blended, about 3 minutes [it really helps if you can get someone to pour slowly as you beat your ingredients together]. Add the eggs one at at ime, beating well after each addition. Beat in the vanilla. With the machien on low speed, gradually add the flour mixture, beating just until incorporated (do not overmix or the cookies willb e tough). Mix in the chocolate chips, raisins, and then lastly, the chopped nuts [note: I was short on nuts so I supplemented the last cup or so with raw walnuts, first baked in the cookies, from Trader Joe's.

Line 4 heavy, large baking sheets with parchment [again, I used butter between batches] or spray the baking sheets with nonstick cooking spray. Using 1/2 cup of dough for each cookie, mound the dough atop the prepared baking sheets, spacing evenly and forming 5 mounds on each baking sheet. With the palm of your hand lightly press down the cookie dough to flatten. Working in batches bake the cookies until they are golden brown all over and the very center is still pale golden, about 15 minutes. Cool the cookies on the baking sheet for 5 minutes. Transfer the cookies to a rack and cool completely.

I hope these cookies are as much of a hit in your household as they were in mine!