This year, I baked the pumpkin pie and made the cranberry sauce.
I didn't have all the spices called for in the recipe, so I only added cinnamon, nutmeg and went very easy on the cloves.
As for the cranberry sauce, I prepared it just as suggested on the package of fresh cranberries, one cup water, one cup sugar per 12 ounce package of cranberries. Only this time, I prepared two packages worth of cranberries, because cranberry sauce is the thing that always runs out first.
The first Chinese New Year that I spent in Taiwan, the head of our English department gifted each of the new professors in his department with a bowl of rice balls with black sesame filling inside. I loved them! I still had not identified the substance in the middle, nor did I realize it was related to my favorite breakfast food, but I knew it felt familiar and was a comfort food. It tasted and smelled like childhood and being safe and loved.
I have never made these, but this is a great video about how to make them. Someday, I will give it a try.
It's better than chocolate milk. Just add two spoons of black sesame powder to a glass of milk, together with a spoonful of sugar.
Bow certainly relished the drink, as did I. I only prepared about half a glass for each of us, so that we would not overindulge.
Bow started out drinking from the straw, like the civilized person that he is.
But when the strange slurpy sound let him know that the utility of the straw had come to its end, Bow took the the pink straw out of the glass and sucked up any excess liquid still left trapped inside it.
Then he set about drinking from the glass.
He lifted the glass high in the air to get every last drop. Then he looked carefully inside to see there was still sesame powder to be had within the glass.
Bow then used his very flexible tongue to mop up all the rest of the sesame powder.
I'd say that means the sesame milk was pretty good!
I have been making a lot of yogurt lately. I make it from week-old raw milk, which has almost started to go sour, but after a thorough boiling, it smells fresh and very milky all over again. If you like the smell of warm milk, this will give you a feeling of nostalgia. At my house, Thursday night is yogurt making night, and Friday morning when I get up at six am, I can smell yogurt even before I get to the kitchen.
My homemade yogurt comes out creamy and thick
I explained my method of making yogurt in this earlier post, in which my mother appears and shows the process I learned from her. I leave the yogurt in my oven in glass and porcelain containers on baking trays overnight with the oven set to "Bake" and the temperature set to "wm" --which means warm. It's a setting just to keep food warm, not to actually bake it. This makes the oven just warm enough for the yogurt bacteria to grow in.
The yogurt comes out so thick and creamy that I can hold the container upside down and nothing spills out. The very best containers I have are porcelain from Meito China, Japan that I inherited from my grandmother. They allow the water from the milk to condense and come out through the pores in the porcelain. That leaves the yogurt extra creamy,
Today, though, I do not want to focus on how to make the yogurt or even how absolutely wonderful it tastes. Instead, I want to talk about what making and eating your own yogurt can do to improve your ability to eat other foods.
I am not a health nut. I hate dietary restrictions. I want to be able to eat anything and everything that appeals to me. I don't want to live in some kind of apartheid world or a protected bubble, where everybody else is eating all sorts of foods, but I have to turn everything down because it's not on my diet. Eating yogurt on a weekly basis allows me to sample a wide range of foods that I could not eat if I were not eating this much yogurt.
In the past couple of decades, I gradually developed all sorts of food sensitivities. I suddenly could not eat bread and eggs or even avocados. These were foods I had liked, but I could not bear them any more, because they upset my stomach. But now that I spend half a week eating yogurt with every other meal, I can spend the other half of the week eating whatever I want.
As an example, this Tuesday I went out with my daughter and two of her friends for a trip to the mall. That day I ate beef Teriyaki with noodles -- not rice-- for an early lunch, cheesecake and iced coffee with cappuccino for a late lunch meal, and a hot dog with fries with a peanut butter shake for dinner. And my stomach did not get upset. Not at all!
I even find I can eat an occasional egg -- white and yolk and all -- now! But the trick is, you have to go back to yogurt for the other half of the week. And I don't mean meals consisting only of yogurt. I mean normal meals of which yogurt is a component. Since I like my homemade yogurt, that is no sacrifice.
There is -- to me -- no joy in a restricted diet. I like to be able to join in a festive meal where nothing is off limits. But the best way to do that is to make sure my gut is in the best of shape to meet any challenge. My creamy, homemade yogurt helps me do that!
I have never made black sesame ice cream or any ice cream for that matter, but I really enjoyed this video about how one can make black sesame ice cream at home.
I love the flavor of black sesame, and I do have plenty of that black sesame powder left from my last trip to Indiana. I also have fresh cream and all of the equipment described here. What I especially find charming in the video is the two methods described for making the ice cream without an ice cream maker, using simple things you already have in the kitchen.
I will be posting more on this after I try to follow the recipe. Wish me luck!
This time when I visited my mother in Indiana, I got a new container of 100% pure black sesame seed powder at the local Chinese grocery store. I was used to getting black sesame porridge in small pouches, already mixed with sugar. I remember it fondly from my days in Taiwan when I first discovered Sesame Seeds and Joy. A very important character in my novel, Our Lady of Kaifeng: Courtyard of the Happy Way, is even called Mr. Sesame or 芝麻老師.
The pure black sesame powder with sugar added on top
I asked the woman at the grocery store for the black sesame porridge in pouches, but she said: "This is better. This is pure ground sesame -- nothing else." Well, she didn't have it in any other form, so I bought it.
Now, many people add either rice or flour along with sugar to their black sesame seed powder to make porridge, but this time around I contented myself with just adding boiling water and sugar. The powdered black sesame seeds contain a lot of very healthful fat.
The idea of adding too many extra carbs besides the sugar to sweeten it did not appeal to me. So I kept it simple.
Bow loves sesame seed porridge, But this time I made it a bit watery, so it was more like a drink, and that's how Bow treated it.
Whether you drink it or eat it, black sesame porridge is always good.
Bow's friend has been bringing him Pickle Ice, and he has been enjoying this treat very much. It's delicious!
But many people may not know that there could be health benefits to enjoying this salty treat. Pickle Ice consists of frozen pickle juice. And pickle juice is made of water, salt and vinegar. There are no calories in it at all.
Sodium is good for hydration, so having some Pickle Ice on a hot day is much better than a sugary popsicle. But there's also another surprise benefit I had never heard of before I researched the topic.
There is said to be an antiglycemic effect to ingesting pickle juice before mealtime. As I understand it, that is the vinegar at work. I am not sure as to the validity of this health claim, but if you look at the second reference I have listed below, you can read the abstract by the authors from Arizona State University and perhaps research it yourself.
You can buy the Pickle Ice treats at your local grocery store, or you can make your own in an ice cube tray by using leftover pickle juice.
It tasted quite a lot like cherry pie, although it wasn't. The dough was very rich, but not sweet at all, and all the sweetness came from the cherry jam.
Ingredients
a jar of cherry jam, 10 oz.
2 cups all purpose flour
2 1/2 tsp of baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/3 cup shortening
1 tbsp melted butter
3/4 cup whipping cream
I mixed together all the ingredients except the cherry jam to make the dough, and then I used a little over half of the dough for the bottom of the baking tin and and a little less than half for the top. I spread the jam evenly over the bottom layer of dough and covered it with the top layer. Then I baked it at 375 degrees for about twenty-five minutes.
Bow really enjoyed his piece!
He liked it so much that he licked the fork.
This is something that you can make at short notice from ingredients found at home, and of course there are many different variations possible, such as a different flavor of jam, and non-dairy substitutes for butter and cream, for those who cannot tolerate dairy.
