Black Grape Rosemary Focaccia & More
Yesterday was a good day. My dad and I basically cooked, and watched Chef's Table all day. For those of you that don’t know what Chef's Table is, it’s an amazing eye-opening show about incredible chefs and their journey. You should really go check it out. We had some surprisingly great outcomes. My favorite of the bunch was a black grape, rosemary sweet focaccia. Yes, I did say focaccia. If you read my last post, you can see that focaccia and I haven’t been getting along. The recipe I was trying came from Jim Lahey’s cookbook “my bread”. It wasn’t working out too well, so I switched gears to one of my favorite blogs Smitten Kitchen and tried the only focaccia she had listed. It was fantastic! I was a bit skeptical about the combination of grapes and rosemary, but it was surprising delightful. It was the perfect mix of sweet and savory. Instead of using potatoes like the previous recipe, I solely used flour, salt, sugar, and yeast. In addition to various rising periods. This resulted in a beautifully sugar coated crust, along with a soft fluffy interior. I plan to work a lot more with this recipe, because the toppings were in no way involved in the recipe until the very end. This means there are endless combinations of toppings to experiment with. Our second accomplishment of the day was also from smitten kitchen. Smitten kitchen has an amazing recipe for apple pie cookies. I have many these many many times, because they are THAT good. The process is long and tedious, but the result is addicting. These cookies are both playful and delicious, perfect for the holiday season. Our last success for the day was vegan mashed potatoes. I know you must be thinking: “potatoes are already vegan”. I thought that too when my dad first mentioned them. But what you forget is the immense amounts of milk and butter that people add to make them so silky and delicious. We found a way, however, to make them equally delicious without these insane amounts of dairy. We mashed up about 8 potatoes with some rosemary and salt. If you are wondering why I use rosemary so often, it’s because I have a fresh bush of it outside. Next, we added some vegan butter. To my surprise, it actually tasted like butter, just a bit more earthy. They tasted great, but the texture was a bit off. It was somewhat dry and a bit griddy. The solution to this issue turned out to be just adding some water, oil, and almond milk. After these changes, they were amazing. Couldn’t tell a single difference from the creamy, butter filled ones we would make in the past. This is really simple, but it’s a great way to improve your diet while still enjoying great food. This is a great change that I promise you will never even notice. I have been trying to be vegan for some time now, and believe me it is not easy. But even the effort to limit your animal product intake, can make a huge difference. There are endless vegan recipes out there to try, and they aren't just garden salads, I promise. To sum up, Sunday was a good day. There is nothing better than cooking all day and being with family.
