Category: recipes

An easy one, and just the thing to use up lots of ripe fruit.

You need some bread, half a loaf or so, commercial cotton bread if that’s all you have, and 4 – 6 cups of fruit. Your choice of raspberries, strawberries, blackberries (any variety), peaches, nectarines, plums, whatever. Skin the peaches, nectarines, plums. Frozen fruit is fine as well.

Take a large bowl/pudding basin, and line it with de-crusted slices of the bread, cut to fit like a jigsaw puzzle, in a single layer. Put all the fruit in a large saucepan with 1 cup sugar and 3 tbsp of lemon juice and bring to a gentle boil, then simmer a few minutes.

Pour a third of the fruit mixture into the bowl, and top with more bread slices, again cutting to fit in a single layer. Repeat twice more.

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and cover with a pan that will fit inside the inner diameter of the bowl. A cake pan should work if you have the right size. Press it down firmly, add 2 pounds of weight to it (2 lbs rice or sugar in a bag is fine).

Refrigerate overnight, or up to 24 hours.

Remove the weight and pan, and unmold onto a plate. It may take some persuading: the recipe I used suggested lining the bowl with plastic first, but I didn’t need it.

Variations: for bread, substitute angel food cake or ladyfingers.

Adapted from The Joy of Cooking.

I have always liked simple foods, big on texture and flavor and low on technique. So things like burritos, quesadillas, pizza, pasta, etc, have always been staples on the menu.

Being vegetarian doesn’t really make it more difficult, since most of these items were meatless as a matter of course. With the advent of “better eating through chemistry” it’s quite easy to slip some faux meat/protein into these things. These work well for stuff like tacos and the like.
Continue reading “mexican melange”

Potato Gatto

I have made a few modifications to this recipe.

First as vegetarians, salami isn’t going to work for us, but LightLife Gimme Lean sausage works just fine. I also use buttermilk in the potatoes. I never have the high-end mozzarella around, but the regular kinds work well: gruyere works well too, and I intend to try a smoked mozzarella sometime.

The full 40 minutes of baking is worth doing: you want the cheese to be molten . . . .