2014 - Book 29

"Under the Blood-Red Sun" - Hawaii

Usually I really love historical fiction books, especially those set during World War II, but I just couldn't connect with any of the characters in this book. It's probably because it is narrated by a young boy, but it just felt like a book that I would have been assigned to read in grade school, not something I would have picked out myself. Not that it wasn't a good book, because it really was, I just didn't really get into it.

The story follows a young Japanese-American boy living with his family in Hawaii when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. It is obviously very difficult for him, but he has a great group of friends in his baseball team, The Rats. So if you know any grade school age boys who like baseball, they would probably really like this book, it just wasn't for me.

The recipes I have to share this week are hearty breakfast muffins, slow cooker beans, and chipotle tomato soup.

Although the muffin recipe was a top-rated recipe on Allrecipes.com, I almost didn't make it, just because I was so annoyed with whomever wrote the recipe. Seriously, "one zucchini" is NOT a measurement. Sure, bananas are pretty uniformly sized, so I can understand that one, but even carrots vary greatly in size. How is anyone supposed to know if they are creating the recipe properly, and if they do happen to succeed, how on earth will they be able to recreate their success again? We grew zucchinis that were approximately "medium-sized", but I've seen them in the store about the size of a carrot, and I've gotten some from friends and neighbors that netted me at least 10 cups of chopped or shredded zucchini, EACH. Can you imagine doubling the recipe, using 2 of those giants, and ending up with 20 cups of zucchini in this recipe?!? Now, I would hope most people would use a little common sense and not do that, but still, my initial argument stands, "one zucchini" is NOT a measurement.

Being of a scientific mindset, I of course set out to remedy this problem. I got out my kitchen scale (if you don't have one yet, you should get one . . . it really makes so much more sense, especially for measuring flour, powdered sugar, and cocoa powder) and weighed my ingredients. I took the most helpful suggestion I found in the Allrecipes reviews and tried to get approximately the same amount of carrot and zucchini. Who knows if my carrots were "average" size, but I tried to find ones that weren't too big and weren't too small. I ended up using 4 carrots (I doubled the recipe) for 183 grams shredded carrot (~ 2 cups), and ~one and a half medium zucchini (318 grams after draining it through a strainer, again ~ 2 cups). Notice the large weight difference in the "same amount" (~ 2 cups) of each ingredient? That's why weighing is better. Anyways, I also used four bananas (492 grams).

After all of this headache, I did end up with some very tasty muffins, so I will be posting my findings on Allrecipes and hopefully be able to help out other picky bakers like myself ;) Also, instead of dried cherries (because they are expensive and hard to find), I used half dried cranberries and half mini chocolate chips . . . I liked the substitution. This recipe is pretty amenable to any little tweaks like that.

As for the beans, I've cooked beans in the slow cooker before, but this recipe didn't really work. They were just not done enough. I've gotten suggestions from friends to add one teaspoon of baking soda to the water, and that seemed to work, but even after an overnight soak, these were still a bit hard. I ended up freezing half of them because I'm trying to get away from buying canned foods. I want to do another round of slow cooker freezer meals soon and those always call for many cans of beans, so I thought I would be ready, but I think when I need to use these, I'll have to thaw them and then do another short cook so they aren't so crunchy. It was a good experiment, but next time I'll try a different recipe.

So, this soup was not much of a success, but I think that was mostly due to the undercooked beans. Even though I braved the molten lava-esque boiling soup to attempt a few rounds of immersion blending, it still didn't have that creamy texture I was looking for. I was trying to be healthy and substitute beans for cream, but it just didn't work. The soup was pleasingly spicy, so it grew on me after a while, and the beans were good protein, but it just wasn't that good . . . oh well. I didn't follow the recipe exactly, I just used it as a guideline, so maybe if you use the actual recipe and add canned or properly cooked beans you'll be more successful.

That's all for this week folks . . . sorry for my lack of pictures.