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Chocolate Zucchini Cake recipe
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Do you think you'll die if you see another zucchini? Well then here's a recipe to die for. The photographer made hers in a Bundt pan, but the recipe below suggest a 13 x 9 baking pan. Either way, you're going to love this cake. Before you know it, you'll be out in the garden pulling back leaves looking for one or two zucchini for another batch.
Ingredients
2 1/4 cups sifted all purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 3/4 cups sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup buttermilk
2 cups grated unpeeled zucchini (about 2 1/2 medium)
1 6-ounce package (about 1 cup) semisweet chocolate chips
3/4 cup chopped walnuts
Procedure:
Preheat oven to 325°F. Butter and flour 13 x 9 x 2-inch baking pan. Sift flour, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt into medium bowl. Beat sugar, butter and oil in large bowl until well blended. Add eggs 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in vanilla extract. Mix in dry ingredients alternately with buttermilk in 3 additions each. Mix in grated zucchini. Pour batter into prepared pan. Sprinkle chocolate chips and nuts over.
Bake cake until tester inserted into center comes out clean, about 50 minutes. Cool cake completely in pan.
Serves 12.
Recipe source: Bon Appétit, November 1995
Photo credit: Tania Ho
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PMS and Pain
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It’s no
secret that many women suffer through their monthly periods, experiencing
cramps, bloating and lower back pain, to name...
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Optimal timing for your garlic harvest
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Plants tell us a lot with their leaves. In the case of garlic, they tell us when the bulb is ready for harvest. Or do they?
Scanning some of the literature written by expert growers, we saw differing opinions on what harvest signs we should be looking for:
Garlic is mature when the tops fall over (mid July to early August).
-Eliot Coleman, Author of the Four Season Harvest
When half to three-quarters of the leaves turn yellow-brown, it's harvest time.
-Organic Gardening Magazine
Each green leaf above ground represents a papery sheath around the cloves. Once the leaf tips begin to yellow and die back, its time to dig the garlic. The lower six to eight leaves still being fully green indicate optimal harvest timing: This allots 5 to 7 protective wrappers around the bulb after curing. Our harvest here in northern New Hampshire begins the latter part of July and gets completed by the first week of August.
-Michael Phillips, Heartsong Farm
It's time to harvest garlic in the late summer when the bottom two or three leaves have turned yellow or the tops fall over.
-Ed Smith, author of the Vegetable Gardener's Bible
Harvest in summer when the bottom leaves are beginning to yellow and before more than one or two leaves turn brown (July through August).
-University of Wisconsin Cooperative Extension
Fully green, yellow, or brown: so who's right? Well, in a way, you could say that all of them are. It depends on what your garlic goal is. The longer you wait, the larger the bulb. The danger in waiting too long is that the bulb will start to split apart into individual cloves. If Michael Phillips urges an earlier harvest when the plant is still upright and showing a lot of green, it's because he has a different goal: long term storage. An earlier harvest helps insure that the garlic cloves are "well-wrapped" for fall and winter feasts.
One surefire way of knowing whether your garlic is ready is to dig up a test bulb. If it's a decent size and seems well formed, then you can harvest the rest of your crop with confidence.
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Water: Tap is the new Bottled
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Just as in the world of high fashion, trends come and go in the world of food and drink. It was once seen as the height of food fashion to buy "designer water". It was what the rich and famous did and, therefore the logic goes, what the rest of us should aspire to do. Now, however, tap water is enjoying a renaissance in popularity.
Some of the most chic restaurants in the US - such as Chez Panisse in the Bay Area and Del Posto in New York - now serve only their own filtered still and sparkling tap water. This gushing new popularity comes amidst admissions on the part of many bottled water makers like Pepsi (maker of Aquafina) that their waters do not originate from some pristine mountain spring, but from a public tap as well. Below you'll find The New York Times' take on the issue which, to us, reads like a drink of cool water on a hot, summer day. Tap water, that is.
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Making home-made mayo
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Home-grown veggies cry out for home-made mayo as a dipping sauce or as a spread for those delicious tomato sandwiches many of us are enjoying this month. KGI's friend, Chef John of Foodwishes.com, is with us in the good fight against sugary, corporate mayo. Check out his video above and recipe below.
Ingredients:
2 egg yolks
1 tbl fresh lemon juice
1 tbl white wine vinegar
3/4 tsp salt
1/8 tsp sugar
1 tsp Dijon mustard
1 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup olive oil
Warning: watching John's video is likely to give you a bad case of stick blender envy if you don't have one already.
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