Spiced Chocolate with Treats

You may think we’re crazy to create a hot chocolate recipe during the dog days of summer when at least one of us is consistently experiencing days in the triple digit temperatures, but we swear the heat hasn’t addled our brains—let us explain. In our meanderings through our Twitter feed (@ReadThisEatThat, y’all!), we came across this contest that author Ellen Kushner is hosting to celebrate the impending release of the audiobook of The Fall of the Kings. The contest involves creating a recipe inspired by any of the Riverside books.

With our long(ish) and storied history of creating recipes inspired by books (see exhibits A, B, C, and D), not to mention the many feasts of GRRM proportions Alyssa has created with the help of Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Sariann Lehrer’s wonderful A Feast of Ice and Fire, we thought this bookgeeky fun sounded right up our alley. We did some cross-country collaboration via the magic of Skype, and produced this lovely cup of chocolate to throw into the ring (which we wouldn’t actually do, of course…much too tasty to spill!). It is thick and rich and decadent, and the spices add an intoxicating and kicky element you won’t find in your run-of-the-mill Swiss Miss packets. The light treats to accompany it allow the chocolate to remain the star of the show, but the brightness of the tart-sweet strawberry jam and orange slices serves as a nice contrast to the creaminess of the chocolate, and the blueberries add a mellow freshness to the spread.

Spiced Chocolate with Strawberry Jam on Oat Toast and Fresh Fruit

Ingredients:
Spiced Chocolate
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. ground cloves
1/4 tsp. ground ginger
1-2 dashes red cayenne pepper
1 C. milk
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 small handful semi-sweet chocolate chips
2 tsp. unsweetened cocoa powder
1 Tbsp. brown sugar, packed

Treats
1 slice oat bread
Strawberry jam
1 orange
1 small handful fresh blueberries

1. Combine the cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and cayenne pepper in a mortar and pestle. Grind it all together until it is well-mixed and a uniform, powdery consistency. This might seem like a pain in the patoot extra step, but it will help the spices suspend in the chocolate later, so you don’t get a bunch of gritty stuff swirling around in the bottom of your cup.
   
2. Heat the milk in a saucepan over medium-low heat. Stir in the vanilla.
   
3. When the milk has heated up a bit, stir in the chocolate chips. Stir regularly to prevent the milk from burning and to combine the melting chips with the milk.
   
4. Are you still stirring? We don’t want burnt milk! When it comes to a low simmer, add the cocoa powder and the brown sugar. Get out Susan’s favorite kitchen utensil, the small whisk, and whisk the mixture until the liquid is a uniform, blended consistency. (At this point, photography mysteriously ceased.)
5. Now, take a 1/2 tsp of the Proprietary Spice Blend® you so lovingly created with your mortar and pestle, and whisk it into the chocolate. (There will be some left over, which you can store and use for future chocolate-making.) Whisk vigorously for a minute or so to aerate the beverage and suspend the spices throughout.
6. As for the treats, it’s really quite simple. If you’re good at multitasking and can prepare the snacks while making the chocolate and not accidentally end up with scalded milk, then by all means do so! First, toast your oat bread.
7. When it’s a nice golden brown, cut the crusts off and give them to a cute dog you know. Cut the bread on the diagonal, and spread the strawberry jam (homemade freezer jam in our case) on both pieces.
8. Peel the orange and separate into wedges, taking off as much of the icky white stuff as you deem necessary. Rinse the blueberries, too.
9. Arrange the toast and fruit artfully on a plate, transfer the chocolate to your best china teacup or other favorite drinking vessel, and enjoy! (We approve of dunking your orange slices in the chocolate for extra tastiness.)

This recipe serves one chocoholic individual, or can be divided out into 2 servings for those inclined to share or desirous of a lighter snack.

Feeling inspired? You can still enter the contest, too! It closes at midnight tonight, and you can find out more details here. Don’t forget to check out the new audiobook when it comes out on August 27th, and in the mean time you can catch up on the previous audiobooks in the series! Have you checked out this series before? What are some other books whose food-inspiration you’d like to see brought to life?

Recipe Challenge: Chocolate Strawberry Tarts

It’s pretty obvious what my experience with tart-making has been that when I was reading The Selection, I pictured the strawberry tart as a Strawberry Toaster Strudel. Not a Pop Tart though, because Pop Tarts are absolutely not fancy enough for young women wearing dresses (possibly gowns) all the time.

But when I looked in the Martha Stewart cookbook Alyssa gave me I saw pictures of tarts with crinkled circumferences or stretching sides. And I wanted to eat one of my own.

Such was my desire to eat one of these pastries that I bought mini tart pans (cuter and easier to store than the 11” pan I saw), pulled out my food processor, and read a slew of recipes for our Selection Recipe Challenge.

I went to my garden to pick some strawberries too, but this was about a month ago, and my berries weren't quite ripe yet. (Though they were still pretty!)

Recipe Challenge: Strawberry Basil Tart-Pouches

In our recent fascination with Kiera Cass’ The Selection, we came across a mention of strawberry tarts:

I picked up a strawberry tart from the basket in the center of the table. [other random thoughts] I mulled this over as I bit into the strawberry tart. It was so sweet and the dough was so flaky, every millimeter of my mouth was engaged, taking over the rest of my senses entirely. I didn’t mean to make the little moan, but it was by far the best thing I had ever tasted. I took another bite before I even swallowed the first. (135)

I don’t think we were necessarily inspired by the description, but Susan and I were talking and decided we needed more recipes on the blog, and wanted to do another challenge, and were both in possession of strawberries at the time, and remembered there were strawberry tarts in a book we had read recently. Ergo, we both invent strawberry tart recipes!

I decided I wanted to make little ones (since in the book the prince sends a bunch of them to the heroine’s family—doesn’t make much sense to send lots of full-size tarts, so I interpreted that to mean that they were mini), and quickly decided on a dough-purse construction rather than the traditional tart crust. I also remembered I have basil plants proliferating in the garden, and thought basil would add a little something different to the strawberries.

I realized this was probably going to end up being a little apple dumpling-like (only with strawberries) and I wanted to have a nice, flaky crust reminiscent of the family shortcake, only in dough form. I adapted the dough from this Cook’s Country apple dumpling recipe to surround the strawberry-basil filling. The result is 8 cute little strawberry tart-dumpling-turnover-shortcake-pouches! They taste nice with, a) extra strawberries added on top, (b) a little milk poured over them, (c) some whipped cream, or (d) all of the above.

Recipe Challenge: The Thief (Part 2)

Last week, in the hope of getting Alyssa to finally get over her PTSD from the POV switch in the second book of Megan Whalen Turner’s Thief sequence (only traumatic if you’re in middle school, I think), I challenged her to cook something inspired by the books. I think it’s working!

As I was describing my idea for the challenge to Alyssa, she and I basically jinxed ourselves by saying “Mediterranean Food!/?” at the same time. The wording probably wasn’t exact, or we don’t count alternate punctuation marks in jinxes, because we both continued talking happily that night. A few nights later Alyssa asked me if I had any ideas for what I was making. Possible spoiler “Sumac?” I added, otherwise clueless.

A few nights later, I was in bed with my Kindle, skimming the series for mentions of food. The series is set in a land somewhat like the Byzantine Empire could have been if the ancient Greek gods were still worshiped. Setting-wise, this excludes tomatoes, potatoes, corn and any pepper you’d chop. Since those are some of the most adaptable foods for cooking, I knew I would need some inspiration from the books. Unfortunately I forgot that about half the series involves journeying, and foods on the road tend to be bread and hard cheese, with a stolen chicken for a treat. Even when characters are sitting for a meal, there isn’t too much time spent on describing the food. Soup comes up a few times, everyone drinks wine, olives are stored in jars, and court meals involve soft cheese spreads and lamb. Somehow all this was less than inspiring without the prospect of a tomato to balance the saltiness.

I went back to the books. Agriculturally, olives are a big deal—Gen, the thief, doesn’t just pass through the Sea of Olives on his travels; another character tells him an etiological myth for the trees. In terms of relevance to the cooking challenge, though, olives interest me only in the form of olive oil. I dislike the texture of canned and jarred olives, and am particularly disgusted by the smell of brine.

I had almost resigned myself to the possibility of making a bowl of barley for breakfast and calling it my inspired meal, when I reread a passage about wheat. I love wheat.

The meeting on wheat production seemed to be a recitation of the yield of every wheat field in the country in the last year. Costis tried unsuccessfully to pay attention. They were a half hour into the list when the king asked, “What’s the difference in the wheat?”

“If Your Majesty would like to see, I have samples here.” [Pilades] reached into a variety of small bags that he was carrying and dumped handful after handful of grain onto the table. Dust rose in a cloud, and the king winced, waving his hand in front of his face. Pilades didn’t notice. He called the king’s attention to the formation of the seeds, to the number of the seeds, to their shape. He dumped more piles onto the table and explained the advantages of each, which one yielded the largest crop, which survived the most inclement weather, which could be planted summer or fall. Many facts Costis knew, having been raised on a farm. Some were new, and the lecture, once begun, was clearly unstoppable.

The king, who normally wandered away to a window during meetings like this, sat immobilized. He had little choice. If he so much as shifted in his seat, Pilades moved in closer, hovering over him with zeal. No doubt he rarely got a chance to expound to this extent and was reluctant to lose the king’s attention. The king made a few abortive attempts to escape but was ultimately forced to sit and listen.

… When Pilades finally wound down, the king, his face blank, thanked him. He thanked the two men he’d begun the meeting with and suggested that perhaps they could finish their business at another meeting, or better—they could just give him a written summary and he would look over it sometime himself. They nodded; the king rose and escaped into the hall. Once there with the door closed, he put his face in his hand.

“Thank gods I didn’t ask about fertilizer,” he said.

--Megan Whalen Turner (2006)

In fact, wheat confuses me even more than it confuses the advisors initially present in the meeting described above. In an attempt to replicate a Marks and Spencer salad last fall, I went on a grain-buying trip to Whole Foods, where I discovered that spelt and farro look almost exactly the same, both being varieties of wheat. Farro is the more expensive of ye olde wheats, and also takes about three times longer to cook; spelt sounds as rustic as you can get.

With that passage in mind, I decided to adapt a Middle Eastern rice soup recipe from the Around the World Cookbook Alyssa and I used in college. The rice became spelt, the beef meatballs became cubes of Quorn because I’m meat-adverse but the soup needed the textural contrast, and all the fresh herbs changed to dried ones from last summer’s garden.

I’m still not sure the spelt is the most likely wheat that the characters would find at an inn in Sounis, but unlike the characters in the series, I never had a lecture about varieties of wheat.

Sounis Soupis

1 large onion, chopped
2 Tbsp. olive oil
½ Tbsp. ground turmeric
½ cup yellow lentils
6 cups water
1 cup chicken (I used Quorn Chik’n Tenders + 1 veg bouillon cube)
1 cup spelt
~1 Tbsp. each, dried parsley and mint
~½ Tbsp. each, oregano and dried lemon-thyme
1 clove garlic, sliced thinly
dab of butter
small pinch of saffron strands

1. Heat the oil in a saucepan over medium-low heat, and fry the onion, stirring often.


2. When the onion is golden (or when some of the pieces look like they might start to burn if you don’t do something soon), add the turmeric, lentils and water.
3. Bring lentil-onion mixture to a boil, then put the top on the pot, and lower the heat to simmer for 20 minutes.
4. Add the protein, spelt and herbs (except the saffron). Stir, and simmer for another 60-90 minutes, depending on how crunchy you are willing to leave your spelt. Spelt, like rice, will plump with water. Spelt will absorb more water per dry cup than rice will, so most of the water in the pot will disappear by the time the soup finishes. When I served my soup, the spelt was plump and its kernel was splitting open. My thinking now is that it would make more sense to put the spelt into the pot with the lentils.





5. For the saffron, pour some boiling broth over the strands in a small bowl. Let the strands dissolve in the water, and add the liquid to thesoup towards the end of cooking.
6. Garnish soup with garlic, lightly fried in butter.

Recipe Challenge: The Thief

As our first ever recipe challenge, Susan challenged me some time last week to create a recipe inspired by The Thief, by Megan Whalen Turner! Now, this book has been one of my top 5 since I read it way back when in 7th grade or something—it completely blew my mind, in a way that few books have done before or since. I don’t want to ruin anything if you haven’t read it, BUT YOU SHOULD READ IT. It’s not the kind of book where you say it’s good…for YA fiction. Nope, no qualification necessary. It’s a just plain good book, whether you are a YA or not. In the decade and a half since The Thief’s publication, the series has grown to a total of 4 books so far, with more to come. The WordNerds (the Skype book club Sus and I belong to) planned to read all 4 and discuss them for our December meeting, but I had some other things going on and wasn’t able to finish all 4 in the allotted time. I am still working my way through them, with reviews to come in the future, I imagine. I finished up my re-read of the second novel, The Queen of Attolia, a few days ago (no link to that one—I’m serious about avoiding spoilers on these gems!). So with my brain in the correct frame of mind, I set about concocting a recipe worthy of the world of Gen, the Magus, Sophos, Ambiades, et al.

A little background for anyone who hasn’t read these books: They take place in a fictional world that takes its cues from the Mediterranean climate and ancient culture of our own world. Very Greco-Romanish in its religions, mythology, agriculture, clothing, names, and so on. Lots of olive trees. The most part of the books’ action takes place in the three neighboring countries of Sounis, Eddis, and Attolia. Sounis and Attolia are the lowland countries on either side of Eddis, which is a smaller nation up in the mountain range separating the other two. For some reason I always got the impression that Sounis was more arid and desert-y than Attolia, although it is on the sea, and that Attolia has much more arable land. Eddis, being up in the mountains, doesn’t have much in the way of agriculture and relies on trade for much of its food. I only mention these random bits of information because they were what I pondered while trying to invent a dish that might be consumed by the characters in these books. Of course, I can take some inspiration from Greek and other Mediterranean cuisines, I thought to myself, but I don’t want it to just be a Greek-style recipe that I plop down in the world of the books. I wanted it to still be something unique that would fit into that world naturally, taking into account the kinds of foods that would be available there, but not have it be something, like, the gyro recipe from that little Greek shop down my street. And this is what I came up with.

Side Dish: Cucumber Yogurt Salad

So this is my take on tzaziki, the Greek staple. I imagine it’s quite likely something like it exists in the world of The Thief (I seem to remember something involving yogurt when they’re at an inn in the first book, but I could be wrong), and as it’s simple, tasty, and cooling, I can imagine it being consumed by peasants and rulers alike during hot Sounisian and Attolian summers.