Premium Gold Flax Treats

The Premium Gold people sent us an extremely generous sample of two of the products, Gluten Free Flour and Golden Omega Ground Flaxseed and we proceeded to enjoy the delicious treats you can create using their gluten free line of products. Tea Time will add more to this post, so check back if you're interested in gluten free pizza dough!

J.K. baked this amazing chocolate fudge cake from Premium Gold's recipe. The recipe includes directions for buttercream frosting, but Tea Time doesn't like the taste of uncooked confectioner's sugar, so J.K. used the blender frosting recipe from Judy Rosenberg's All-Butter Fresh Cream Sugar-Packed Baking Book, which has only three ingredients: chocolate, evaporated milk and sugar. We've made gluten-free recipes before with other brands of flour, but, while all were acceptable, this Premium Gold's product is outstanding. We could not tell this was a gluten-free cake.

 J.K. also tried substituting flax meal and water for the egg in her favorite muffin recipe. This worked,  but she didn't have the same luck with a pizzelle recipe. If you know anyone who is gluten-free or someone who is allergic to eggs, you'll find the Premium Gold Flax products live up to their name! 

SF Swappers Event 10/15

Fall's a swappin'! It's been a while since Tea Time has adventured to a Swap together. SF Swappers slipped this event in just before the craziness of the Holidays begins. Everyone was happy to stand, chat and sample the evening away at the Sports Basement. Let's mosey among the offerings, whaddaya say?

J.K.'s gingerbread cookies–Halloween themed of course! Two big cookies for swapping and mini shapes for tasting.

Also on the offer from J.K. Chocolate cake in super cute shapes.

Homemade chocolates hit the spot, Bon Bons and Bars in several different flavors.

A little spice is nice... there always turns out to be a semi-theme among the goodies on offer and this October we're all ready for our food to feel the burn.

Two flavors of hot sauce–fruit gives the bottles on the left their lovely color.

Do you know about Togorashi? This spice can have a little kick. This version is perfect for onigiri (the food, not the game) and the samples of it sprinkled on rice showed that off to a T.

Perfect homemade tortillas are always a most popular item. Especially if you feature them in a homemade taco as your sample/potluck contribution. Delish.

Hostess Aimée offered up a savory treat of crumbly sesame bars. Tea Time suggests that if you were lucky enough to swap for some that you let them crumble onto your ice cream and then drizzle a little caramel on top. Or you could simply stir them into Aimée's other swappable treat–homemade yogurt!

Angela came back to the swap with big ammunition. Four options!
Left to Right, cashew butter, medium spice salsa, drunken cherries, fresh raw almonds
Sample Sample Sample, plenty of crackers to try them all.

Pickled grape tomatoes? Don't mind if we do... Or if you're feeling cheesy, check out the parmesan dip.

Here comes our theme again, featuring Hot Pepper Jelly. (Feeling smelly? try some homemade soap) Samples of hot pepper jelly were on the potluck table, poured over cream cheese with bread on the side.

So many spreads at this swap, good that there's a bit of bread to take home too.

Who could resist homemade crackers and pimento cheese spread? This was a popular and tasty item which turned into the perfect snack instead of dinner for Angela one night.

A last minute swapper showed up with a big bag of these North Bay Heirloom Apples. Scavenged from his Mom's tree just for SF Swappers.

That's quite a hunk of cheesecake! Or if you're in the mood for savory there's Jalapeno Cheddar Bread, tomatillo salsa or even a fruity nectarine salsa.

Somehow we misplaced our photo of Co-hostess Stephanie's Walnut inspired goodness, but rest assured our resident Chef had an inspired recipe to share. Have you ever attended a Food Swap? The Holidays are coming and this is the perfect time of year for a cookie or dessert swap. Everyone brings a few dozen cookies in bags and everyone gets to take home some of each kind. A perfect mix and match.

Dahlia Bakery- Cook the book for November

November is here! Wait, it's gone.

The holiday season can sometimes seem to fly by since everyone is trying to pack in parties, baking, vacation with family, not to mention shopping for presents (or making presents)! J.K. and Angela stepped outside the hustle bustle one day to enjoy our simple lunch inspired by our Cook the Book for November, The Dahlia Bakery Cookbook: Sweetness in Seattle.

Our goal was a warming and nutritious lunch to sustain us through an afternoon of Chocolate making. We were ready to try out our new silicone molds. The only soup in the Bakery book, Tomato Soup, uses ingredients you can find in the pantry! So it was an obvious choice to add grilled cheese sandwiches to the menu as well. Angela had to buy some canned tomatoes (she's so spoiled by California produce, she usually uses fresh or none), but everything else was at hand. In fact, Angela was a bit skeptical of the recipe, it seemed so simple. However, it was delicious! Next time Angela is visiting a relative and we don't know what to do for dinner...Dahlia Tomato Soup!

 We skipped the croutons since we were having grilled cheese. J.K. made a sourdough rye in her bread machine, using yeast and Ready Sourdough from Seitenbacher. At first the dough looked much too wet, but the finished loaf, while not very tall, was very tasty. We ended up making one sandwich and splitting it. We were good and resisted the bacon (and avocado) suggested as a variation recipe, although J.K. did ask, "Did you bring some?" when Angela asked about the recipe. This sandwich recipe calls for shredded cheese, and due to that, the cheese did fall out a bit on the way to the pan, so maybe we'd form it into a loose patty instead of just piling it on the bread and tomato on next time? Lunch was rounded out with a nice salad dressed with Balasmic vinegar (presented in a vintage bowl).

Tomato Soup and Grilled Cheese (with Tomato) Sandwiches

Seitenbacher products make tasty bread (for the grilled cheese sandwiches)

While we didn't get a lot of pictures from lunch, JK was ahead of the game and ready to show off her lovely new baking pan featuring the Chocolate Banana Bread recipe from the Dahlia Cookbook. They're a perfect match to make a lovely and delicious hostess gift. She also gives a picture tutorial on making custard, just add ice cream maker.

Creme Anglaise

Strained over the chopped chocolatae

Melted Magic, ready to go in the ice cream maker.

Created perfect frozen custard.

J.K.'s prepared new loaf pan

The pan was just the right size for the recipe

The strip around the pan kept the top of the loaf even.

And the banana bread unmolded perfectly.

Dessert was much later, featuring the chocolate chunk banana bread (Very good) from the cookbook, served with Chocolate Frozen Custard (Belgian style). That Ice Cream maker is getting a work out this fall. Thanks to Cook the Book from August for making J.K. get it out of the mothballs!

Chocolate Banana Bread with Chocolate Frozen Custard

Meg from Grow and Resist and Briggs from OhBriggsy have inspired a lot of good cooking this year and introduced us to some new cookbook authors. It makes us feel like next year we need to cook our own books, the ones we buy that inspire us but then sit on the shelf for a while waiting to be cracked open, spilled on and loved. One more cookbook is on hold for Tea Time at the Library... check in next month (or maybe look under the tree) for the fruits of our labors.

Happy Holidays from Tea Time!!

What's cooking in Jerusalem? September luncheon

Cook the Book September (yup! it's nearly the holidaze!) was Jerusalem, co-authored by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi. Angela must have been living under a rock, because this was a cookbook she's never heard about before cook the book. Turns out the hype is for real. Check out this cook book if you want salads with few ingredients but big taste. Plus the amazing full-page pictures are a treat as well. If you're intrigued about what we ate for lunch, read on!

J.K., as usual, made dessert, a semolina, coconut and marmalade cake. This is very different from her usual cakes. No chocolate, to begin with, and not too sweet. No frosting, either. This is more a quickbread than a cake.

A lot of ingredients, though

First, combine the wet ingredients.

Oil, juice, zest, eggs and marmalade.

Mix until the marmalade dissolves. If you don't have a silicone paddle, use a whisk for this step.

Whisk the dry ingredients together.

Don't forget to prepare your pans. J.K. uses cake strips to keep the edges from baking before the middle, so she doesn't get a cracked dome in the middle of her cakes.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, and pour evenly into the prepared pans. The recipe said to use two one-pound loaf pans, so she did, but one would have been enough.

The cakes didn't rise enough for two pans, but they were delicious and had a nice texture nonetheless.

After baking, the cakes get brushed with as much orange syrup as they can hold.

J.K.'s cake rounded out our veggie meal nicely! Angela made three salads from the cookbook (although there were a lot more recipes that inspired her, she used the tried and true cook the book method of sticking with the recipes that grabbed her attention during the first scan of the cookbook.) They were Baby Spinach Salad with Dates and Almonds, Burnt Eggplant salad and Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Fresh Figs.  We loved them all, and they were great to mix and match. They were supplemented by olives, hummus and pita and lots of pomegranate seeds. For our drinks we had a lovely light Sparkling white, provided by an absent friend which Angela gussied up with Brandied Cherries (also made by said friend, thanks G!)

Cook the Book Jerusalem Luncheon–the mystery jar contains soft cheese!

You can make this–simple, beautiful, delicious–here.

This recipe revamped the spinach salad for Angela.

Choose small eggplants to shorten the cooking time for this dish

Angela chose to serve up J.K.'s cake with the suggested orange blossom water flavored Greek yogurt (tip: make sure your "Greek" yogurt is not thickened with cornstarch–or something more ominous!!) roasted figs and more more more pomegranate seeds. It was a light and flavorful ending to the meal.

cake, yes please!

Have you found any favorite cookbooks through friends? Or do you page through them at the bookstore/library? Maybe you just search the internet (Angela found lots of recipes from Jerusalem online, but few blog posts/articles had the amazing photos and historical background provided in the cookbook–unless they were quoting it directly of course.)  J.K. has so many cookbooks (mostly dessert) that she needs to start a cook the book a week club just to make a dent!

Cook The Book July: The Bread

The July Cook the Book selection, Maricel Presilla's Gran Cocina Latina, doesn't have any recipes in my style of dessert-making. I requested her book The New Taste of Chocolate on July 4, but the library still has not been able to locate one of its four copies. So I made Cuban Coconut Bread (pp. 593-4), which turned out to be rolls. (Angela specially requested them for our cook the book lunch!)

I weighed the flour in my newest gadget–a measuring cup scale. I've been using it as a regular scale, but I could just tell it "flour" and it would tell me how many cups, according to the weight. That would be useful if your recipe doesn't give weights and you don't have enough dry measuring cups. Bread is very forgiving, though, so if you don't have a scale, you'll be fine measuring your flour. If your dough is too wet, add flour. If it's too dry, add water. Just remember, a little goes a long way, so don't add too much at a time.

 It was easy to assemble the rest of the ingredients.

Only 7 Ingredients

Mix the wet and dry ingredients separately, then combine them.

Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients.

Whisk the yeast into the wet ingredients.

When it bubbles (about 10 minutes), it's ready.

The directions told me to mix the dough with my fingertips. That was a huge mistake. It was a sticky mess, and it took me longer to get the dough off my hands than it did to mix it.

So I scraped it into my trusty bread machine, and let it do the kneading.

The bread machine has a warm up period before starting the kneading cycle, so for the second kneading I used my stand mixer.

Both risings were voluminous, and took about half the time suggested by the recipe.

The dough plopped right out of the oiled bowl, onto a piece of silicone paper.

The recipe said to make nine 4-ounce balls of dough. I got eight, and the last one was "only" 3 7/8 ounces.  I think that's because I used the bread machine for the kneading and didn't have to work more flour in to keep the dough from sticking to a board.

A final rise and the rolls are ready to bake.

Top of Rolls After 12 Minutes

Bottom of Rolls After 12 Minutes

Fully Baked Rolls
Brown and Crusty!

I had to make these the night before, so they weren't crusty when we ate them, but they were still delicious. This was a lot of work, and took a lot of time. I'm going to use the rest of my coconut milk in a bread machine recipe. The recipe says that grilling the bread is the ideal way to go when making these rolls, so please try out the recipe and let us know if the coconut flavor shines through when they're cooked that way?