Green Bean and Coconut Soup ... from Avoca

I really do want to work through the Avoca Cafe Cookbook one recipe at a time ... but my friend says her daughter will kill her if I don't return the book soon.

Last night I took a look at the Green Bean and Coconut Soup. We were late coming home from work, and Tuesdays are always complicated because of piano lessons, so we usually just grab pizza. But I had all the ingredients for this soup, and oddly it had snowed yesterday (on April 15) and was cold out, so this seemed like the right choice. With this cookbook, I never quite know how much the recipes will make, and I decided to vary the quantities as I went and try to bulk up the meal. By adding tofu and rice I turned the "soup" into an easy green curry sauce that was delicious. Next time I'll make double so that we can have some leftovers.

Easy Green Curry Sauce for a Quick Meal in a Bowl

2 T. butter
a bunch of scallions, chopped (whites and greens)
2 carrots, cut into fine strips
2-3 t. finely chopped lemon grass (on the advice of our Vietnamese friend we have frozen chopped lemon grass in the freezer on hand all the time)
4 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed
2 t. grated fresh ginger
1-2 t. ground turmeric
2-3 t. ground coriander
2-4 green chiles, chopped (or just some pepper flakes if you don't have these)
a large handful of fresh green beans, roughly chopped
2 cans of coconut milk (13.5 oz.)
vegetable stock cube, crumbled

To add in the bowl:
1 cake of tofu, cubed and stir-fried
cooked rice, white or brown

For garnish: fresh bean sprouts and chopped fresh cilantro

Melt the butter in a small soup pot. Add scallions, carrot, lemongrass, garlic and ginger and stir over medium heat for about a minute. Add the turmeric, coriander, chiles (or pepper flakes), green beans, coconut milk and stock cube and mix well. Bring to a boil, and then reduce heat and simmer uncovered for 5 minutes. Season with salt and/or black pepper to taste.

Cook the rice and the tofu separately and then mound them into the bottom of a soup bowl. Pour the sauce on top and garnish with bean sprouts and cilantro.

Yum. This smelled so good cooking that my son was ladling it out of the pot before running off to his lesson. Holding the bowl between bites, and the creamy filling sauce/soup itself, was just the thing on a cold evening.

Will spring ever come? Today I'm baking zhavoronki, the Russian bread-larks, to hasten it. Stay tuned.

Image from gotovim-doma.ru. Will mine be as attractive?

Avoca Cafe Cheesecake ... in Ohio

My friend is Irish, and she swears by the Avoca Cafe Cookbook. One evening last fall she went on and on about the recipes, about how this was such a great place to go in Ireland, about how this is the only cookbook she uses. So I bought a copy and gave it to my sister for Christmas.

(My sister's husband's family comes from Ireland originally, though their roots in Ohio run pretty deep. Plus they eat meat -- and this is not a vegetarian cookbook. She has tried the Beef and Guiness stew and found it delicious, if extremely rich.)

Then last week, my friend stopped by to invite us to a dinner party and dropped by some cookbooks for me to peruse. (She must have heard of my "guilty habit" of reading cookbooks.) Two Avoca Cafe Cookbooks, and a cake cookbook called Miette. (That one is fantastic. But so far I've only drooled over it -- haven't tried anything yet.) The Avoca cookbook really is wonderful, As most cookbooks do, it starts with the soup section, and I want to try every single recipe. Just my luck that the weather is finally turning to spring...

But then my daughter requested a cheesecake for her birthday. And this presented a certain challenge. Even though my husband swears he married me for my cheesecake, I've been having dubious success over the last few years. Generally when I bake one, I just call it a "cheesecake tart," or I cut it up into "cheesecake squares." In other words, my cheesecakes in recent years have been seriously lacking in height.

And I've tried. I've tried the very slow baking -- 1 1/2 hours at 200 degrees. I've tried leaving the cake in the oven for several hours after it is done, door lightly propped open with a wooden spoon to keep it from falling. But these techniques have failed me ... so far.

The real answer, it seems to me, is to get a 9" or even a 7" cheesecake pan. Or I suppose I could double the recipe. In preparation for the birthday cake, I went to several kitchen shops on Monday and found them all closed; I checked the Macy's on the way home from work, but no luck. No 7" pan was in my (near) future. (I admit it -- I have one on order.)

So I decided to wing it -- from the Avoca Cafe cookbook.

The recipe is unusual, AND it's Irish. So our standard quantities and ingredients don't map onto it perfectly. Since I was determined to have a cheesecake that was higher than an inch, I figured I'd just guess -- substituting ingredients and fudging quantities -- and hope for the best.

Baked cheesecake with lemon topping (modified)

Filling:
1 container small curd cottage cheese (do they come in 15 1/2 oz. containers?)
4 eggs
~2/3 c. white sugar (who has "caster sugar"?!)
16 oz. cream cheese
3 T. corn starch (almost forgot this and added it last -- in Ireland it's called "cornflour")
juice and grated peel of 1 lemon
juice and grated peel of 1 lime
4 oz. melted unsalted butter
2 small containers of heavy whipping cream (no creme fraiche at our country grocery store, and only after I poured the cream in did I look it up on the web, which suggests half as much whipping cream as creme fraiche if you're substituting... oops...)

Crust:
~1 1/2 c. flour
~2/3 c. sugar (this may have been too much -- remember, I was experimenting, and not actually doing the math...)
1 egg
5 oz. soft unsalted butter (okay, maybe it wasn't all that soft...)

Mix all crust ingredients in a food processor. Press half into a greased and lined 10" springform pan (that's all I have at present!) and bake for 10 minutes at 375 degrees. Let cool slightly and press the remaining crust dough on the sides of the pan. In the meantime, lower the oven temperature to 300 degrees.

For the filling, whiz the cottage cheese in the food processor for 20 seconds. I also used my kitchen aid mixer with the whisk attachment, whisking eggs and sugar together for 5 minutes. At this point I think I should have changed to the beater, but I didn't, and just added the cottage cheese and cream cheese. After a bit (and I'm sure the cream cheese was not mixed in properly, but oh well) I added the lemon and lime juices and rind (the recipe calls for zest, but my zester is in my PA kitchen, so I simply grated the rinds). Stir in the melted butter and whipping cream (better 1/2 pint than a whole pint, but I thought of that later, so it was pretty liquid-y!). Which is why when I remembered about the corn starch, I added 3 T. With only 1/2 pint of cream, I would have used 1 T.

Pour the mixture into the pan and bake in a 300 degree oven ... for two hours? When I read that, I reduced my oven a little part of the way through, to about 275. My oven runs a bit hot anyway. The top was definitely browned when I took it out! Leave to cool and chill overnight.

Then the fun part -- today I made the lemon curd after work. Delicious!!

Homemade Lemon Curd

Juice and grated rind of 3 lemons
4 oz. unsalted butter, diced
2/3 c. sugar (who has caster sugar?!)
5 eggs

Put the lemon juice and rind, butter and sugar in a large bowl set over a saucepan of simmering water, making sure the water does not touch the base of the bowl. Leave until the butter has melted and the sugar dissolved, stirring occasionally.

Lightly whisk the eggs, then pour them onto the mixture through a sieve (that was fun!). My glass bowl and Ikea small pasta pot combo worked perfectly, and eventually most of that egg did get through the sieve and into the lemon mixture.

Leave for 40 minutes to 1 hour, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon. The curd is ready when it's thick enough to coat the back of the spoon. Remove from the heat. (I was making a half recipe; if you did the whole recipe it would probably make 2 pint jars and you could can it.)

This recipe was super easy -- I could essentially do all kinds of other things (like make the birthday dinner of Pad Thai) while it cooked. And it is so tasty! I can't believe I never tried to make it before. I let the lemon curd cool a bit and then spooned it on top of the cheesecake. Which was plenty high -- probably because I doubled all the cheese quantities!

I am happy I have somehow convinced my daughter that cheesecake is the best birthday cake. Tonight reminded me of how fun her birthday was two years ago when we had a bonfire in the backyard and girls running all over -- jumping on the trampoline, zipping across the yard on the zipline, and everyone eating cheesecake. But tonight's cheesecake deserved the name and made the birthday really special. Light and yet dense -- how can that be? And not too sweet -- especially the lemon curd. Yum.