Sugared Violets

Y’all, I love the *concept* of sugared violets, but I just don’t have the patience. I find the process of brushing them with egg white and dipping them in powdered sugar so fussy, and the end result is never as neat as I want it to be, since the petals tend to stick together.

Maybe if I did it all the time, I’d get good at it, but I think I’m just going to accept that sugaring violets is really not my thing. 🙂

I did like making a violet simple syrup, though…

Jaggery S’more Bars

Another one for the Patreon boxes!

(30 minutes, makes 30 bars)

What’s summer without s’mores? You can make these with brown sugar, of course, but jaggery adds an extra dimension of yumminess. They are very gooey, in the best way.

1 c. butter, melted
2 eggs
2 c. jaggery (or dark brown sugar), packed
2 T. vanilla extract
1 1/2 c. flour
4 c. graham crackers, broken into small pieces
2 heaping c. mini marshmallows
2 c. bittersweet or semi-sweet chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 350F; butter and flour a 9×12 baking dish.

2. In a large bowl, whisk together melted butter (cooled slightly) with egg, brown sugar, and vanilla.

3. Add flour and stir until just combined.

4. Add graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate chips; fold until blended.

5. Pour batter into prepared baking dish, smoothing out as needed.

6. Bake 22-25 minutes, until edges are set and lightly browned, with the center of the pan relatively firm.

7. Cool bars in pan for 30 minutes, before attempting to slice. Slice and serve. Can be frozen for long-term storage.

Variation: Try mixing in some salty pretzels!

A Spin on Classic Fairy Bread

Finishing up the Patreon baking. For the fairy theme, I thought it’d be fun to do a spin on classic fairy bread, which is bread and butter with sprinkles, popular in Australia and New Zealand.

I did sugar cookies instead of bread, spread with a rose & vanilla buttercream and covered in sprinkles. The end result is quite sweet, but I gather fairies are very fond of nectar, so it does seem appropriate. 🙂

*****

The Spruce Eats had some fun notes on fairy bread:

“The exact origin of fairy bread is not known, but some say it may come from the poem “Fairy Bread” by Robert Louis Stevenson in his anthology A Child’s Garden of Verses published in 1885. The poem is as follows:

Come up here, O dusty feet!
Here is fairy bread to eat.
Here in my retiring room,
Children, you may dine
On the golden smell of broom
And the shade of pine;
And when you have eaten well,
Fairy stories hear and tell.

For a variation on fairy bread, try topping buttered bread with chocolate sprinkles instead. This treat is popular in the Netherlands, where it is called “hagelslag,” which quaintly translates to “hailstorm.””

https://www.thespruceeats.com/fairy-bread-4771689

Fairy Dust Experiments

Kitchen experiments for the Patreon boxes — homemade marshmallow fondant (tasty, easy to make, stretchy and therefore easy to work with, very sweet, the kids like it). Also used an embossing set for these fairy dust cookies (and then gilded the embossed portions).

The result doesn’t look super-professional, but I figure fairies probably aren’t super-professional either. 🙂

A Meal Fit for a Reporter

You get a pic of me along with the meal I served the reporter yesterday, because I knew she’d be taking photographs so I actually changed out of grubby summer garden clothes for a change. I really go a little wild / feral in the summer. 🙂 But look, clean hair! Earrings that match my dress! So fancy.

One of the things we talked about was how there aren’t any recipes using meat substitutes in Vegan Serendib — no Beyond meat, etc. I thought about using those, but a) they’re often expensive, b) they’re not commonly used in Sri Lankan cuisine, and c) there’s SO MUCH that’s inherently vegan in Sri Lankan cuisine, that you just don’t need meat substitutes to make large, satisfying, varied and interesting meals.

Neither she nor I are actually vegan, so another thing we talked about was how we definitely want to feel full and satisfied after a vegan meal. For this meal, the jackfruit & mushroom curry takes that role — it’s the main ‘entree,’ as it were, and you could just eat that with rice and feel satisfied. (Adding chickpeas or cashews to the curry would make it even more substantial.)

Of course, I wanted to let her taste lots of different dishes, and usually you’d have at least a few accompaniments to the meal in Sri Lanka. Sambols, pickles, etc. I was just cooking out of what I had in my fridge, so this is what I ended up with:

• red & white rice combo (Sri Lankan red rice has a lower glycemic index than white rice, and I’ve taken to doing half & half with white basmati when I make rice these days)

• jackfruit & mushroom curry

• mixed vegetable poriyal (potato, carrot, and pea pod)

• potato sothi (a coconut creamy, fenugreek-heavy mild dish)

• eggplant sambol

• ripe jackfruit curry

• coconut (pol) sambol)

Not bad for a few hours of cooking. 🙂 If I hadn’t run out of onions AND coconut milk, though, I would’ve been tempted to make just one more curry….probably lentils / paruppu / dal, which would have made the meal even more filling.

I Recommend Jackfruit

It was interesting talking to the reporter yesterday about jackfruit — she’s a very accomplished chef (much more than me), but hasn’t really worked with jackfruit. I told her that yes, you could often find jackfruit nearby at Pete’s or Tony’s grocery stores, if you wanted to buy fresh and break it down, but to be honest, that’s a lot of work, and mostly, I like to just keep jackfruit on hand in forms that are easy to work with.

So for green jackfruit, that’s cans, usually packed in brine (it shouldn’t be very salty, but taste before adding more salt in your recipe, just in case). It’ll be cut up already — sometimes I cut it up a bit more, but you can just toss it in too. For this recipe, which is the most substantial element in my vegan meal, I combined the jackfruit with mushrooms, but you could also add chickpeas and/or cashews, if you wanted even more substance and protein. Eggplant also works well with this. Trader Joe’s reliably has green jackfruit cans, and honestly, I find it in most of our local grocery stores these days.

Using exactly the same curry sauce, you get a very different result if you use ripe jackfruit, which is fruity, like ripe mango. It works really well as an accompaniment; I wouldn’t usually use ripe jackfruit curry as the main entree, but it’s a bright, sweet note on the plate. You could also do ripe jackfruit pickle, of course, if you wanted more tang. This is much easier to make if you just buy frozen ripe jackfruit and cook with that; that’s getting easier to find — I’m pretty sure I just got this at my local Whole Foods, but if not, then Indian grocery stores are a good bet. You can also get ripe jackfruit in cans, but they’s usually packed in syrup, so I’d drain the syrup (save it for a dessert or cocktail component) before using the jackfruit itself in a curry.

If you’re vegan or vegetarian, I strongly recommend trying both green and ripe jackfruit, if you haven’t yet! And even if you aren’t vegan or vegetarian, they’re both delicious, so you should try them too. 🙂

All of these options are available on Amazon too.

The Only Problem with Eggplant Sambol

The only problem with making eggplant sambol, is that after I rub the eggplant slices in turmeric and salt, let sit for an hour, blot away the excess bitter water that’s been drawn out, and then fry them, there is a good chance Kavi will come by and excitedly eat a bunch of the eggplant ‘chips’.

This is not actually a problem. 🙂 Salty fried is something she reliably loves, and I’m just glad that she gets a little nutrition from the eggplant.

Whatever eggplant chips she leaves me get tossed with sliced onion, lime juice, a few chopped green chilies, and a few tablespoons of coconut milk, just to bind it together. A really nice contrast on a rice & curry plate!

(Recipe in both Feast and Vegan Serendib.)