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.

Jacob Bronowski on Science & Humanity

- mathematician and biologist, Jacob Bronowski – The Ascent of Man (via alien8ted)

“This is where turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some 4 million people, and that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance; it was done by dogma; it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of Gods. Science is a very human form of knowledge.”

This man raises my level of consciousness every time I listen to him lecture. He speaks of a myriad of subjects relating to both the human condition and science.

Okay, and I want to share one more video, this one on a totally different topic – slow architecture. This is Roald Gundersen’s pioneering movement of whole tree architecture – using unmilled and young or unhealthy trees to construct homes. Not only aesthetically beautiful, but natural building can be locally sourced, utilizes less toxic building materials and he says it can cost less and can be sustainably produced. Heres a video of Roald Gundersen talking about the parallels between whole tree architecture and the slow food movement.

Well, anyways, the homes are beautiful. Check it out at their website: http://www.wholetreesarchitecture.com/

Cubic Foot Kitchen: Leftovers

Okay, I must put this up here for posterity’s sake because I’m still a bit shocked at how well it came out. Today I made lunch in my rice cooker, completely out of leftovers. I guess I’ll just call it Sweet Potato Rice.

Here’s a breakdown of what I used: I had some rice from last week that I had undercooked to match with some Indian food we ate for lunch, and it had gotten very dry and hard in the fridge for a few days. Also, I had made sweet potato au gratin a la denki suihanki (sweet potato, with milk, cooked in the electric rice cooker) for an IPSP/IR party. When I made that dish, I was doing quadruple the portion I am used to and accidentally added too much milk. Because I only had an hour to cook it, I ended up ladling out the excess liquid, now a mix of potato starch and milk boiled together. Finally on Saturday I had bought four 焼き芋 (yaki imo) at the Tokamachi Snow Festival to split amongst my group, and I still had one whole potato left. So today I added rice, plus starchy milk, plus chopped sweet potato, plus mushrooms and some water to my rice cooker and crossed my fingers.

This effort to not be wasteful left me with a surprisingly delicious lunch! The rice actually sort of baked on the edges, and was very delicious. I even had a bit of Mango pickle over it, which tasted nice too! I guess we just need to remember that even food scraps can be recycled, with scrumptious results.