Cubic Foot Kitchen: Cornbread

This recipe was supplied by my dear mother and adapted to be cooked in my rice cooker. There are no eggs in the dish, but there is milk so it isn’t vegan. When I made it, I also included dried peppers because of my love for spicy food, but I omitted that from the recipe itself. This recipe was so easy, so simple, and exactly the Southern cornbread flavor I was looking for. The recipe calls for buttermilk, but if you add lemon juice to milk, 1 tbsp per cup, you get about the same flavor.

Rice Cooker Cornbread

Ingredients

• 2 cups cornmeal
• 4 teaspoons baking powder
• ¼ cup oil
• 1½ cup buttermilk

Mix all ingredients very well. Put in your rice cooker, and cook on normal settings. After the cooking cycle is complete, let it stand in ‘keep warm’ mode for 15 – 25 minutes, or until the top is both dry and golden brown.

PS. Sorry about the cell phone pictures.

Cubic Foot Kitchen: Black Bean & Sweet Potato Stew

Yet again I have been pleasantly surprised by leftovers. Last week I made black bean burritos for some friends, and they gave me a yaki-imo (grilled sweet potato) as a thank you. Now I hadn’t finished off the burritos because I made a bit  too much, and I ate half of the potato but it was too huge to finish. Today I am making it a point to eat up leftovers and some veggies that will go bad soon, so I devised the following solution. (Items in parentheses are ingredients that I wish I could have added, but didn’t have on hand)

Black Bean & Sweet Potato Stew

Ingredients

• ½ a vegetable bouillon
• 2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• ½ an onion, coarsely chopped
• 1 ~ 2 carrots, coarsely chopped
• (celery, coarsely chopped)
• (cilantro (corriander) stems)
• a handful of mushrooms, coarsely chopped
• cumin seeds
• sweet potato (in this case, already cooked), cut in to bite sized pieces
• black beans (in this case mine were cooked and included onions & spices)

Directions

1. Boil the bouillon, garlic, onion, carrots and mushrooms with salt and pepper. In the rice cooker, fill the water barely over the ingredients.
2. Let everything boil together for a few minutes, and then add the black beans, as well as a sprinkling of cumin seeds.
3. In the rice cooker, let it run until finished, or cook on the stove until it reaches an appetizing consistency.

At the end, I added some chopped cabbage and bean sprouts, then garnished it with a lone flour tortilla chopped in to long strips (it had not been well sealed, and had therefore become a bit stale). I wish I could show you the photos cause it even looks pretty good.

Cubic Foot Kitchen: Kabocha Soup

Welcome to adventures with Sylvia in the cubic foot kitchen!! The cubic foot kitchen basically means my rice cooker, although it is actually smaller than that (but slightly smaller than one cubic foot kitchen doesn’t have the same ring to it). I’ll just share something I’ve made in it recently. Just be warned that A) I’m vegetarian, and B) These are mostly experimental. Although I will probably only be sharing the ones that turn out well. Today I want to tell you about Kabocha Soup! Kabocha, also known as Japanese Pumpkin or Winter Squash is a really delicious and filling food. I think this is a really great recipe for the winter, and although I made it in a rice cooker it would be very simple to make on the stove.

Ingredients are as follows (although I thought spinach would be nice in it too, and I’m sure you could think of other very nice things to add).

• Kabocha (half)
• Onion (one)
• Olive Oil (just a wee bit)
• Black Pepper
• Salt
• Coconut milk (mine was from powder)

This is so easy, it is unbelievable – if you make it in the rice cooker that is even more true. The trick is just to microwave the kabocha for a couple of minutes before attempting to cut, because it is really tough at first. After microwaving it will cut easily, and just hack it down to small bite sized pieces. Then skin and cut the onion also down to small pieces, and add the onion and the olive oil to the rice cooker (or pan) until the onions are a little bit cooked. Next, add the kabocha and the coconut milk. You want to add the salt and pepper to taste at the very end (I used about one part pepper two parts salt, but not a whole lot of either).  And presto! Delicious, simple kabocha soup!

Also, I have these seeds left over. Does anyone have a nice kabocha seeds recipe, or even a plain old pumpkin seed one? I was thinking about seasoning them, but I have no experience even with pumpkin seeds (other than eating them of course). It would be a shame to waste such a wealth of seeds!

最近は…

So much has happened lately, a lot of which is just I did this for one class, and read this for another. I gave a presentation for one professor, and so on and so forth. I sometimes feel that being a graduate student drowns other things out of your life in certain ways.

But that’s not all! I’ve been cooking a lot lately, and falling in love with the strange fruits and vegetable available in this part of the world. In a sense, I’m setting myself up for over-priced asian grocery store dependency whenever I move away from East Asia, but I cannot say that I mind terribly much. The solitary other female vegetarian here and I have become friends and lunch-slash-dinner buddies as of late. I tell her that we would be doomed to companionship even if we detested each other’s company, so we are fortunate to have actually hit it off. Between the two of us, a lot of culinary magic is occurring around the time of day when you stomach starts to grumble. It is very good to have a partner in crime, because the overcrowded kitchens are not worth braving to cook a one person meal. The kitchens are a few kinds of horrifying, especially for we few of the vegetarian persuasion.

A few weeks ago there was an around the world at IUJ event where students set up booths exhibiting their region of the world, or nation in the case of a high enough concentration of students (such as Indonesia, Thailand and India). I helped with the Americas, because we didn’t have enough students from either North or South America for even a continental booth. We made friendship bracelets and helped kids (and the occasional adult) make cute crafty stand up Christmas trees, and to decorate them. The even was fun, but also very draining. There are a few photos by one of my classmates at the end of this post.

Some other recent events include a low-key birthday party for a friend’s boyfriend, the cooking of a magical miracle leftover collage improv dish (tasted great, but shouldn’t have), Trivia Night (my team actually won second, shockingly enough), an adventure to rival Lord of the Rings where we walked for 10 km in a few hours in search of a restaurant that was open, a brief but enjoyable trip to a nearby Zen Buddhist temple, a brief skype encounter with family in the low country, and the grand rearranging of my bedroom furniture. Well, and as always a ton of school. I wrote my Japanese final presentation on the Appalachian Mountains. ♥  I went to Tokyo this past weekend for a belated Thanksgiving dinner, and had an amazing and fulfilling time.  It was quite an event, and deserves a post all its own. I’ll get on that soon when I have time.

photo by Bobby Liang

photo by Bobby Liang

photo by Bobby Liang

And that’s all for now, folks. またね。