50th Post and Guinness Quick Bread

Wow! This is my 50th post to The Messy Apron! I’m not sure I really knew when I started this that I would have 50 different ideas about food, let alone that I would still be enthusiastically posting by this time. Perhaps these pages no longer have that new blog smell, but this is still fun, and I think 50 blog posts is worthy of a celebration.

You know what else is fun? Guinness! You know what else is worthy of a celebration? The 250th anniversary of Guinness, which just so happens to be this year, the same year that I wrote my 50th blog post! What are the odds? (Never tell me the odds.)



In the interest of full disclosure, I don’t really celebrate with alcohol, not even in the traditional (read sacred and holy) form of stouts or other blessed dark brews. I just don’t care for alcohol (I’ll have half a glass of wine with a meal), though I do recognize good quality when I taste it. (I think I drank most of a whole bottle of Guinness once, probably on St. Patrick’s Day. That was enough.) Now, I know one or two of you out there, including Harry, will be happy to be drinking a Guinness or three (responsibly, of course) in celebration of 250 years of the good stuff, but what’s a dry girl like me to do?

Well, if I don’t celebrate with traditional beverages, I do celebrate with traditional baked goods. It just so happens that Guinness bakes very well, especially in this cake at the Epicurious web site. I needed to put together something a bit faster, though (and, frankly, smaller), so I modified a beer quick bread recipe from The Clueless Baker by Evelyn Raab. I borrowed a little from the cake recipe I mentioned above to spice things up a bit and added toasted hazelnuts for a bit of crunch, and a little more British Isles flair. Perhaps it’s not purely Irish, but neither are most of the folks who enjoy Guinness.

This bread is a little more dense and a lot less sweet than more common quick breads like banana bread or zucchini bread. I like the rich, slight bitterness of the Guinness with the molasses and hint of warm spices. The toasted hazelnuts seem to flavor the whole loaf, and I like the added crunch they bring to the party. If you don’t care for them, just substitute a different nut, or leave them out. In fact this bread is so quick and easy that it begs for endless variations with different beers and mix-ins. Think lager with cheese or Leinenkugel’s Sunset Wheat with dried blueberries. I could go on, but I’ve got celebrating to do. Happy 50th post to me!



Toasting and Skinning Hazelnuts
This seems as good a place as any to give a quick review on how I toast and skin hazelnuts, a process that I believe is essential for great dishes that include hazelnuts. It is a bit of a tedious process, but the crunchy, toasty hazelnuts sans bitter, fibrous skins are their own reward.


1. Preheat oven to 375 F.

2. Place hazelnuts on a baking sheet in a single layer. Bake at 375 F until the nuts are just beginning to brown and some of the dark brown skins are beginning to pull away, about 8 minutes. (Watch the nuts carefully, as you want to avoid burning them.) Remove from oven and cool slightly.

3. While still warm, dump the nuts into a clean dish towel. Rub them vigorously with the towel to remove the skins. Some will relinquish their coats more easily than others. Remove the skinned nuts from the pile and continue rubbing the remaining nuts. Some nuts can be rubbed with your fingers to remove more stubborn skins. I find that it is pretty much impossible to get all the skin off of all the nuts. Some of them just insist on remaining attached to their skins.

Guinness Hazelnut Quick Bread Recipe
Modified from The Clueless Baker by Evelyn Raab. If you don’t have whole wheat pastry flour on hand, you could replace it with additional all-purpose flour.

1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground ginger
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
¼ teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
2 tablespoons molasses
1 (11.2- 12 ounce) bottle dark beer, such as Guinness (I used the Limited Edition 250th Anniversary brew)
1 cup toasted, skinned hazelnuts, coarsely chopped

1. Preheat the oven to 375 F. Grease a 9 x 5-inch (or an 8-inch) bread pan with oil, butter, or cooking spray (I use the spray). Mix together the flours, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and nutmeg until well combined.

2. Add the molasses and beer and stir until well mixed. The batter will be fairly thick and somewhat spongy. Stir in the hazelnuts.

3. Pour the batter the prepared bread pan and bake at 375 F for 45 minutes, or until a wooden pick inserted into the center comes out clean (ie, with no globs of unbaked batter). If you are using an 8-inch pan, the baking time may be slightly longer.

4. Cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then remove the loaf from the pan and cool on a rack. Slice and enjoy while still warm, or cool completely.

Makes one loaf.

September Tomatoes

I always have an orderly rank of recipes lined up, eagerly waiting to volunteer their services to the tomatoes that come in July and August. I can hardly wait to make Gazpacho. I always hope the basil in the containers on my porch will be ready when the first cherry tomatoes are in the CSA box so I can make Pasta with Cherry Tomatoes, Olives and Basil. Sandwiches and salads benefit from that sweet-tart and juicy boost that can only come from ripe seasonal tomatoes. When it gets to September, however, I want something different. Even if it hasn’t started to get cold yet (for the record, it just did), the days are noticeably shorter, the breezes a little cooler, and warmer food somehow beckons more forcefully than cold soups.



When I got a gift of beautiful heirloom tomatoes from my friends Jen and Jake (I do believe Jen is the gardener) a little while back, I wanted to do something particularly nice with them. I knew I was probably going to make a sauce or salsa or something out of many of them, just because it would be hard for even me, a great lover of tomatoes, to just eat them all fresh, much as I wanted to.

After I’d been shopping for the week, I remembered this great recipe for a tomato and beef stir fry I had copied from a cookbook by Martin Yan way back when. In fact, the when was so way back that I had never made this dish for Harry, at least not that either of us could remember, and I’ve known him for 12 years. Luckily, I had just bought some steak for Harry, so I happened to have what I needed for the recipe. It was a New York strip steak, which is pretty fancy for stir fry. Normally, I would use flank steak, sirloin, or even round steak for stir frying, cutting it across the grain to ensure more tenderness in the final product (the shorter fibers result in easier, more pleasant chewing). I have to say, the strip steak was super tender in this dish, and since the recipe doesn’t use much beef, a more expensive cut is still reasonably economical. Use what you like or what you have.

I made a few other changes to the original recipe that also reflected what I happened to have in my pantry at the time, plus I increased the amount of tomatoes. For me, it was all about the tomatoes. The final dish had the consistency of a stew, and, if you didn’t feel like messing with rice or noodles, or if your cupboard was bare of such starches, you could serve this like a stew. I served it over brown rice, which soaked up the savory sauce. The complex flavors of the perfect heirloom tomatoes worked and played extremely well with the soy sauce and vinegar. Harry said the flavors oscillated on the tongue. I needn’t say more than that.

Tomato and Beef Stir Fry
Based on a recipe by Martin Yan

2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons Shaoxing wine or dry sherry
2 tsp cornstarch
¾ lb beef steak, such as flank steak, sirloin, round steak (or whatever you like), thinly sliced across the grain
¼ cup ketchup
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
1 tablespoon chile garlic sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil
2 teaspoons sugar
2 tablespoons vegetable or peanut oil, divided
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 small onion, chopped (about 1-inch pieces)
1 cup green bell pepper, chopped (about 1-inch pieces)
4 cups tomato cut into wedges (about 3 large tomatoes
2 teaspoons cornstarch
2 tablespoons water

1. Combine 2 tablespoons soy sauce, dry sherry and 2 tsp cornstarch in a medium bowl. Add the sliced steak and stir to coat evenly. Set aside about 30 minutes (you can prepare the rest of the ingredients and any accompaniments during this time).

2. Combine the ketchup, 2 tablespoons soy sauce, rice vinegar, chile garlic sauce, sesame oil and sugar in a medium bowl to make a sauce. Set aside.

3. Heat a wok or large skillet with 1 tablespoon vegetable or peanut oil over high heat. Remove the beef from the marinade with a slotted spoon and add it to the hot oil. Stir fry about 2 minutes or until beef is evenly browned. Remove beef from the pan and set aside in a clean bowl or plate.

4. Add remaining 1 tablespoon vegetable or peanut oil to the pan. Add the onion and bell pepper. Stir fry about 2 minutes or until the vegetables soften somewhat and the onion begins to brown. Add the garlic and cook 30 seconds.

5. Add the tomatoes and the sauce and mix well. Cook about 1 minute.

6. Combine 2 teaspoons cornstarch and 2 tablespoons water and mix well. Add to the wok along with the cooked beef. Cook and stir until the sauce boils and thickens.

Serve over hot rice or noodles, or perhaps even in a bowl like a stew.
Makes 4 servings.

The Omnivore's Solution: The Michael Pollan Lecture

About a year and a half ago I stood in line for about three hours to get Alton Brown’s autograph. In the end, I felt exhausted and a little frustrated (I am what you might call short on patience), and insisted that I would not be doing something like that again. Don’t get me wrong. Alton Brown was very cool. He was gracious to his fans and seemingly tireless, which I greatly admire. I’m glad to have met him, as brief as the encounter was. I’m just not the type of person who gets fired up to go to great lengths to meet a celebrity.

Then, earlier this year, I found out that “real food advocate,” and brilliant author of three of my favorite books (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, The Botany of Desire, and In Defense of Food), Michael Pollan would be speaking at Winona State University as part of their Lyceum series, I was really, really excited, but pretty nervous, too. What was I going to have to go through to see this lecture, and would it be like my Alton Brown experience?

As it turned out, there was a bit of an ordeal involved in getting the tickets, which were free of charge and in quite high demand. I got to the point where I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to get tickets, but I was very proud of my community for supporting such a great author and advocate. Local, sustainable food is “in” in this part of the country, and I got a warm fuzzy just from knowing that.

Enough about the tickets. I got them, and that’s what matters. It was a close call, but hardly painful. (I did get wet on the way back to the car, despite the use of an umbrella, but what’s a pair of drippy jeans when you’re going to get to see Michael Pollan speak!)

Mr. Pollan spoke to a packed house about the concept of “nutritionism,” or the reduction of the concepts of food and eating to mere nutritional components, devoid of culture, connection to food sources, and, worst of all as far as I’m concerned, pleasure. This seems to have led us to a national dysfunction and a collective eating disorder. “No other species requires experts to tell them how to eat,” Pollan says, but he doesn’t just make fun of our near-religious experience with nutritionism or laugh at us as we become suckers to clever marketing of “edible food-like substances” (I’m especially susceptible to the fun-size candy bars, and holiday-colored M&Ms that are everywhere now, and will be through Easter). He also doesn’t just lay the blame, rant, and go home. He, with his seemingly eternal and infectious optimism helps us to find solutions. We can eat less meat and more plants, support local agriculture and local artisan products, cook and eat at home more, and, if we can stand it, avoid buying “food” products that we’ve seen advertised on TV. (Prunes, almonds, raisins, and so on are clear exceptions to this, but I think you get the point.) We can consume less sugar and high fructose corn syrup. (Neither seems nutritionally worse than the other, but the presence HFCS is a sure sign of a highly-processed food.) We can just have a better idea of where our food comes from and decide what to eat for ourselves.

I have to admit that I need Pollan’s optimism in my life. He’s a great speaker, informative and entertaining, and his speech lacked anything like a dull moment. He also graciously signed autographs (there was not a three-hour wait, by the way), and I spoke to him briefly about the visit he had made to the CSA farm to which we subscribe. (He was impressed with, and, as a gardener, envious of the fantastic soil there.) I found Mr. Pollan very friendly and he even cheerfully answered when I asked him what it was like to meet Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report! (He said Colbert is very fast on his feet as an interviewer, and I assured him that he handled Colbert well. You can see the May 13, 2009 interview here.)

In the end, I was anything but exhausted after this celebrity encounter. I felt renewed in my quest for a sustainable and pleasurable eating style, and I certainly knew I was far from alone on that journey. There was an entire auditorium full of people with the same concerns and hopes for a more environmentally- and socially-conscious and healthful future. I think we’ll make a good team!

At one point Pollan quoted a grandmotherly adage he had once heard, “If you’re not hungry enough to eat an apple, you’re not really hungry.” After that, I couldn’t stop thinking of apples, and since many, many fantastic apples are grown in this part of the country, and they’ve just been harvested, I had a lot of them at home. I could munch optimistically and sustainably. Of course, I had to make a caramel dip to eat them with. Nobody’s perfect.

For a taste of Pollan’s brilliant writing, you can read his open letter to the future president-elect in New York Times Magazine, entitled Farmer in Chief. I also highly recommend the books I mentioned above.

Caramel Dip for Apples
I typically use 1/3 less fat cream cheese because that’s what I have around, and have good results with this dip. I do not recommend using fat-free cream cheese.

1 8-ounce package Philadelphia-style cream cheese, softened
¾ cup brown sugar
¼ cup granulated sugar
½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Combine all of the ingredients in a medium-size bowl and stir vigorously to combine until very creamy. Dip apples in it or spread it on apples to serve.

All photos of the Pollan lecture were taken by Harry.

A Gift of Tomatoes and Cabbage

I can’t remember where or when I heard this, so I can’t give credit where it is due, but I seem to remember someone once saying that people give you zucchini from their garden because they know you, but they only give you tomatoes from their garden if they love you. If that is true, then our friends Jen and Jake must love Harry and I very much. Not only did Jen give us a heap of beautiful, delicious heirloom tomatoes from her garden, but also a lovely, huge purple cabbage. How did I ever get so lucky?

I suppose there is something in my recipe vault that would use both the cabbage and the tomatoes in one dish, but I’d been wanting to re-test a recipe for an Asian-style red cabbage salad with a spicy peanut dressing that I threw together last year. Well, all right, here was the cabbage. No more waiting.

I like to shred cabbage for slaws with the slicing blade on my food processor rather than the shredding blade (an idea think I got from Ina Garten on Food Network’s Barefoot Contessa). I find that the cabbage just gets mutilated and mushy when I try to shred it with the machine, where the slicing blade makes long, even and substantial pieces. I switch to the shredding blade to prepare the carrots in this salad, or any slaw for that matter. I don’t have good luck using the machine on bell peppers, however, which I also put in this salad, and thinly slice them by hand, trying to mimic (but never mock) the size and shape of the cabbage. You could use a knife to cut the cabbage as well, if you’re good at such things (I’m not) and a box grater to deal with the carrots if you have stronger fingers and tougher knuckles than I do.

The dressing for this salad has a sweetish, rich kick from the peanut butter, and some flashy umami from the soy sauce and fish sauce. (I recommend trying not to think too much about fish sauce being made of fish. Try to think of it as liquid umami unless, of course, you’re strictly vegetarian, in which case, you should know it’s made of fish). The dressing leans more, however, toward the sharp and spicy side with the chili garlic sauce and raw garlic and ginger. The lovely cabbage I received has a nice bite to it, reminiscent of a hint of horseradish. If your cabbage is wimpier and you want some more zest, you could add some shredded daikon radish or even turnip to the slaw.

My written recipe for this salad called for “½ a small red cabbage”…um, whatever that means. Clearly, I did not have a small cabbage, and I gained a little too much in my attempt at translation to mass and/or volume. In other words I shredded too much cabbage, and would have like the ratio of dressing to cabbage to be a little higher. I’ve reflected what I think is a reasonable change in the recipe below.

This recipe was a great use for some of that beautiful cabbage, (I’ve got about two-thirds of it left. Back to the recipe vault!) and I have big plans for whatever tomatoes I can’t just eat in the next few days. I hope to post something I’ve done with them, but tomorrow night, I’m headed out the “Omnivore’s Solution” lecture by Michael Pollan, author of three of my favorite food and eating-related books (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, The Botany of Desire, and In Defense of Food). I’m so excited, and I hope that I learn something new that I can post here soon!

Cabbage Slaw with Spicy Peanut Dressing
You can use any kind of cabbage you have, such as red, green, napa or a mixture. Mirin is a sweet wine that you can find in the Asian sections of some supermarkets. You could replace it with 2 teaspoons of sugar or honey.

The Dressing
2 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
1 tablespoon mirin
1 tablespoon lime juice
1 teaspoon Asian chile sauce or chile garlic sauce
1 teaspoon fish sauce
3 tablespoon peanut butter
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tablespoon grated ginger

The Slaw
1 pound red cabbage, shredded
1 cup grated carrot
½ cup diagonally sliced green onion
1 cup julienned bell pepper (any color)
¼ cup chopped cilantro
¼ cup chopped fresh mint
¼ cup chopped peanuts

1. In a medium bowl, vigorously mix the dressing ingredients until very smooth. This may take a minute or so.

2. In a very large bowl, mix together the cabbage, carrot, green onion, bell pepper, cilantro and mint.

3. Pour the dressing over the slaw and mix well to coat. Sprinkle the top with the peanuts.

This makes a really big salad, perhaps 10 servings.