Author: Suzannah Kolbeck

Pickled Beets And Thieves Oil

Beets

It may be the holiday season, but right now it’s 70 degrees outside in Baltimore.

I am no Californian. I like four seasons. It should be cold for football, and there should be at least two decent snowfalls per winter. I don’t need Massachusetts-level weather, but snow is imperative.

I have welcomed this weather this week, though. December 14th to the 21st is the darkest week of the year in the northern hemisphere. The last little bits of daylight get swallowed by the darkness well before the dinner hour, and by the time seven o’clock rolls around all I want to do is go to bed. At least the warmth helps.

Still.

“I love the stars too much to be afraid of the dark.” ~Anonymous~

This weekend at yoga teacher training we talked about shadow sides, the darkness that we all have, and how to embrace it just as much as the light. The darkness is what makes people so complex. It is the thing that makes people who they are.

What does this have to do with beets and thieves oil, you ask? Isn’t this supposed to be a food blog, you say?

“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” ~Leonard Cohen~

For me, when it gets dark outside, and I have trouble finding the crack, it is the smallest of gestures that brings me back to humanity. This weekend I was sick. Weird sick, like feverish with no fever, weak, dizzy. The teacher training went for three and a half hours on Friday night, with two hours of yoga, nine and a half hours on Saturday, with four and a half hours of yoga, and five and a half hours on Sunday, with two hours of yoga.

When I dragged myself to the training Friday night, one of my fellow students handed me a gift, a Mason jar with thieves oil Epsom salt bath soak. I had commented on this delicious combination of rosemary, clove, lemon, eucalyptus, and cinnamon on her Instagram, and she saw that I was sick.

This simple gesture stuck with me. It doesn’t take much.

If thieves oil brings me out of the darkness, beets remind me to hunker down. Putting up or preserving seasonal food is primal for me. In times of financial strain, I tend to buy two things: food and books. Entertainment, knowledge, sustenance. Mason jars on the pantry shelves remind me that I have everything I need and give me permission to hunker down until spring.  In the case of pickled beets, they are really in the back of the ‘fridge, but you get the idea.

Here’s how the magic happens.

Thieves Oil Epsom Salts (Scrub or Soak)

Thieves oil has a grisly history. Legend has it that it allowed thieves to rob sick people during the Black Plague without getting sick.  Every recipe I have found has had different proportions, but the one I like best is this:

10 drops of clove essential oil

9 drops of lemon essential oil

5 drops of cinnamon essential oil

4 drops of eucalyptus essential oil

3 drops of rosemary essential oil

Add as much or as little of the above as you like to one or two cups of Epsom salts. Dissolve salts in a hot bath, or use as a scrub. While there are some claims that thieves oil protects against illness, kills Ebola, and prevents you from contracting the Black Plague, I will settle for the fact that it smells delicious, and the transdermal magnesium provided by the Epsom salts soothes sore muscles, helps all organs of the body function, and relieves insomnia.

Spoiler Alert: Some of you local people will be receiving these. Act surprised.

As for the beets, the recipe is very, very simple. I love pickled beets, and I do them a little differently.

(Quick) Pickled Beets

The three jars above used the following ingredients:

Two bunches of beets (living in the drawer of my ‘fridge with their greens cut off for approximately three weeks. I generously call this an “aging process,” but it is highly unnecessary and was more like four weeks. Maybe five. They were none the worse for the wear.)

Pickling brine in the following 1-2-3 ratio: One part vinegar, two parts sugar, three parts water ( I used slightly more vinegar because I love it. White or cider vinegar is fine.)

One cinnamon stick per jar

Method

Peel beets. Wash hands constantly, use gloves, or live with a pinkish hue for awhile. Cut into “hearty matchsticks,” which just means don’t worry too much about uniformity. Call it “rustic” if anyone questions your knife skills.

Pack beets into Mason jars. Add one cinnamon stick for each jar.

Boil pickling brine ingredients for several minutes, then carefully pour over beets. Leave some room at the top.

Cool with the lids off until just warm, then put them in the back of the ‘fridge. Wait until they are completely cool, then start snacking. When the beets start to run out, slice an onion up and throw it in the pickling liquid.

I bet the pickling liquid would make a delicious cocktail. Give it a try and let me know.

These stay delicious forever. They are crispy, crunchy, bloody purple deliciousness that are great on their own, in salads, as part of a relish tray or…? I usually eat them standing in front of the ‘fridge while I decide what else I want to eat.

What brings you out of the darkness? What helps you see the light?

Piecaken And The Art Of Vulnerability

Hiding a yummy little secret.
Hiding a yummy little secret.

When I initially started this recipe, I thought it was a revelation about taking time for yourself. How we often feel guilty for doing it, or how what we consider “self-care” is actually not really good for us (drinking, splurging on treats both edible and non-, etc.). I was coming off a week out of town, and the only thing I could bring myself to do was to bake. This, for me, was self-care.

I continued to think about this post this way as I carefully made the piecaken over two days. Two days of happy, humming baking, apron on (for real) and Florence + the Machine in the background. Two days of crossing my fingers because really, as with life, any stage of this piecaken could have taken the whole week completely off the rails.

But then I stumbled across this TED Talk. If you have never seen or heard of Marina Abramovic, go ahead and take a second and watch this.

I’ll wait.

Done? Because after I watched this video my whole week changed. Funny, that, how I started out making this weirdly named, #trending cake and then suddenly the whole thing became a metaphor. The fluffy outside, vanilla flavored and sweet-smelling, followed by the almost crusty exterior of the vanilla cake and finished with a sweet, tart, creamy pomegranate cheesecake (with a final bite of its sugar cookie crust).

This cake is like me. Like many of us, really. On the outside it is just a beautiful bit of cake, snow white with smooth, glossy frosting.

On the inside, things change. Get more complex. Marina Abramovic talks about vulnerability as the thing that connects us all. Our willingness to truly show ourselves is what brings us together, not our common hobbies or politics, the fluffy white frosting of life. Vulnerability is where real change lies, where the art is made. Our insides don’t always match our outsides. We hide behind The Facebook and a carefully cultivated online brand that has us posting only the happiest bits of ourselves.

’tis the season for the happy horseshit group Christmas letter where the ENTIRE FAMILY was EXCEPTIONAL this year.

But that’s not real.

Which is sometimes okay because I know I don’t always want an intimate relationship online. And not everyone needs to know my business.

I have a friend (who shall remain nameless but who will know clearly who I am talking about if he reads this) who was a raging asshole in his younger years, angry and obnoxious and crappy to pretty much everyone. We didn’t like each other much at first but somehow became close. I got to know him. He showed me his cheesecake-like insides.

Gross, I know. But it’s the cake metaphor, people. Keep up.

Once when we were both deeply in our cups and he had just finished being a total douche to someone, I told him that if he would stop being a dick maybe more people would realize he wasn’t, well, a dick. If he would just let them know the person I know.

He said (or yelled, really, because this was the kind of drunken argument that happens in full voice), “But I don’t WANT them to know me that way.”

And that’s where it is. And that is where the art lies. My friend is an artist (in a genre I will not name, again, for his protection), and in his art he is completely and totally himself. Absorbed. Dare I say…vulnerable. He shows his squishy places to the world if the world will just look and see.

This cake, and the writing about it, and the sharing of it, is my squishy place. As noted in a previous post, food, to me, equals love.  So I research it, I make it, I write about it, and I give it away.

And just as complex as we are as humans, this cake is also complex and time-consuming to create. But totally, utterly worth it.

Pomegranate Cheesecake With Sugar Cookie Crust Wrapped In A

Marshmallow-Frosted Vanilla Cake. You know, #PIECAKEN

Make these elements in this order. Read each recipe through before you begin.

Pomegranate Cheesecake

Ingredients

Crust 

1 1/2 c. finely ground sugar cookies (I used gluten-free cookies, but graham crackers, Oreos, or any other crunchy cookie works)

4 T. melted butter

Filling

2 – 8 ounce bars of cream cheese, room temperature

3/4 c. sugar

1 t. cinnamon

2 eggs

1/4 c. heavy cream or half-and half

1/2 c. cooled pomegranate syrup (2 cups of pomegranate juice reduced to 1/2 cup. Apple cider works here, too)

1 t. vanilla extract

Method

For the crust: Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Butter the bottom of two 6″ springform pans and then line with parchment paper circle. You could also use a regular 6″ cake pan and line the whole pan with parchment.

In a food processor, crush cookies. Or put in a freezer bag and bash with a rolling pin until you get finely crumbled cookie. Add melted butter, and mix to combine. Divide between pans and press firmly. Bake at 300 for about 15 minutes or until golden brown. Cool completely.

For the filling: In a food processor, thoroughly combine cream cheese, sugars, and spice. Add the eggs, one at a time, then add the heavy cream, pomegranate, and vanilla. Mix completely.

Pour into cooled pie crust and bake at 350 degrees until custard is completely set (about 35 to 40 minutes). Let cool completely. You can prepare these the night before you make the cake.

You could also make this in one regular spring form pan and stop here. But why would you?

Plain White Cake

a.k.a., possibly the best white cake you will ever put in your mouth

NOTE: You are making TWO of these. Make them one at a time. Do not double the recipe. Or give it a whirl and let me know how that goes.

Ingredients

350 grams (about 2 1/2 c.) gluten-free all-purpose flour mix (or cake flour if gluten isn’t an issue)

1 T. baking powder

1/4 t. salt

1/2 c. butter (one stick), softened

1 t. vanilla extract

330 grams (about 1 1/2 c.) sugar

2 eggs

1 c. milk

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Prepare pan: butter bottom of 9″ cake pan, line with parchment circle, butter the entire pan and dust with flour. If you skimp on this step, your cake will stick and all your hard work will be for naught.

While you are making this cake, pop your cooled cheesecake out of the pan and into the freezer. This makes it easier to work with.

In a small bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, and salt.

In the bowl of a stand mixer (or a large bowl with hand mixer), cream butter with sugar and vanilla extract. Beat in eggs, one at a time, until smooth. Add dry ingredients and milk, starting and ending with dry (flour, milk, flour, milk, flour).

Pour approximately 1/2″ of batter into prepared pan. Place one cheesecake into the batter, crust side facing up. Pour remaining batter over cheesecake and level the batter in the pan. Bake until a toothpick comes out clean (test on the sides and in the middle until it hits the cheesecake crust), between 40 and 50 minutes.

Cool in the pan for ten minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack and cool completely. You can cool on the rack in the ‘fridge.

Make second layer, and while it’s cooling, start on the frosting.

Marshmallow Frosting 

Ingredients

250 grams (approximately 2 c) powdered sugar

1/4 t. cream of tartar

2 t. light corn syrup

2 egg whites

1/4 c. water

1 t. vanilla extract

Method

Combine ingredients in a metal bowl and whisk to combine. Place metal bowl over a saucepan of simmering water and beat with a hand mixer on medium until the mixture begins to thicken (like marshmallow Fluff). Continue to beat on high until mixture stiffens (stiff peaks). This whole process takes 10-15 minutes.

Remove from heat and add vanilla. Continue to beat the frosting until it is completely cool.

Assembly

Frost as you would a regular cake, with a generous hand. A rotating cake stand and offset spatula make the process easier but are not requirements.

Recipe notes:

This is a time-consuming affair, but the resulting cakes serves 16 people, easily, and is impressive as hell. Make it over two days to take the pressure off.

 

 

 

 

Persimmon Polenta Cake With Rosemary And Lemon

Seriously, the sun-swept fields of Italy on a plate.
Seriously, the sun-swept fields of Italy on a plate.

Today, unexpectedly, a new(ish) friend told me about something traumatic happening in her family.

I was giving her a ride home, and when she strapped herself into the passenger seat of the Cube she began to talk, surprising herself, even, at what she was revealing. She apologized for laying it all out in the open.

I told her it was the Cube that had that effect, that the boxy walls and ripple pattern on the ceiling often caused The Teenager to open up. Some of our best conversations have happened in the Cube.

In fact, some of my best conversations, period, have happened in cars. It’s where it took me 30 minutes to ask for my first bra. Where I fell in love with the man I thought I was supposed to marry, and then again where I realized there was no way we could be together. And then a car brought Dane and I together when he rescued me from the body shop where my new-to-me-car was deemed dangerous to drive. He swooped me up in his tow truck, just another type of vehicle, and laughed, outraged, when I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up.

And then a car took him. But I digress.

What struck me about my friend sharing her traumatic event (which is not mine to tell, so suffice it to say it is beyond what most of us will have to deal with in our lives) is twofold.

First, that she trusted me enough to share it. But then again I guess cars do that. You are trapped, even by your seat belt, and it’s like you have no choice.

And second, what a burden secrets are to the keeper.

We all of us walk around with secrets, large and small. Secrets we keep from others. Secrets we keep from ourselves.

So potent and powerful, this secret keeping.

My friend’s timing was, as usual, impeccable. In sharing her secret and seeming visibly relieved and unburdened, she reminded me of two things.

One: You never know what burdens other people are walking around with.

It’s easy to make so many of our daily experiences about ourselves – the unkind word, the slow driver, the glare from a stranger – but often they have nothing to do with us. We are, in truth, the center of our own universe, but the universe does not actually revolve around us.

(Get it? Revolve around us? Solar system humor).

We can cultivate a fine sense of outrage about the many things that happen to us, even when so many of them are actually happening to others on the periphery of our little world with some spilling over on us. Then we get fired up and let that interaction shape our world when, turns out…it was never about us.

Two: The time has come for me to unburden myself of my own secrets. 

Some are quite dark and have been a part of me for my entire life. Others are small, hidden creatures that just need a little light.

Shadow work, they call it. It sounds dark and hard and scary, and it is those things. It means confronting potentially the most painful things about myself, but it also means rolling them around in my hands and then letting them go. Letting them be.

Heady stuff for a Tuesday, and not quite what I expected to come out of a simple ride home.

As we were getting ready to part, my friend said in passing and in reference to my recent (welcome) onslaught of paid work that had seen me badly neglecting my unpaid work – this site, recipe development, food writing, and photography – “Yes, but you make CAKE.”

And that is exactly true.

Cake is a comfort to me, in the making, the sharing, and the eating. I love pretty much everything about cake; it may even have surpassed my love of chocolate candy, which is saying something.

There is nothing new in a polenta cake, but this one has a few special touches. I developed this the way the very best recipes are developed: by listening to the ingredients themselves in the season in which they are intended to be eaten. I bought a few fuyu persimmons at Asia Food (my favorite Asian market off York Road) and started thinking about how I might like to eat them. Raw was of course always an option, but I wanted more. A quick search led me to a recipe for blood orange upside down cake. Some tweaks to highlight the ingredients, fine-tune measurements (and get rid of some sugar), and make it gluten-free, and this is what you have. Mad props to the process in the original recipe; the inspirational recipe was lovely, and I can’t claim this as my own.

#GiveCreditWhereItsDue

I immediately shared it with another friend and made sure The Teenager had a hunk after school, but I won’t lie: I ate most of it.

This cake is for everyone out there doing the shadow work, and for my sweet friend whose world has been flipped on its head. This cake is for you.

Persimmons in cast iron - rustic as hell.
Persimmons in cast iron – rustic as hell.

A few notes before you begin:

  • Read through completely before beginning, and utilize the principles of mise en place. It will make the process much more enjoyable (in life as well as baking, if we’re being honest)
  • Dry goods are measured in grams. Otherwise, you have imprecise measurements like “six tablespoons.” But don’t worry; I have included those as well.
  • Persimmons should be ripe but not mushy. This makes them easier to peel and slice. And mandolins make slicing easier but are not 100% necessary.
  • I used grits, not “polenta.” When we lived in the south, I went searching for polenta in the grocery store one day, and the clerk looked over his glasses, down his nose, and drawled, “Y’all mean grits, raht?” If you want to save some cash, use grits. Polenta is a little finer, and it is, after all, in the title of this, but I like the slight toothiness of grits. A little crunch.

Persimmon Polenta Cake With Rosemary And Lemon

Ingredients

75 grams of sugar, plus 150 grams of sugar (6 tablespoons plus 3/4 cup)

3 tablespoons water

8 tablespoons butter (one stick), softened

3 Fuyu persimmons, ripe but firm, peeled and sliced 1/8″ thick

110 grams gluten-free all-purpose flour (regular AP works fine here, too. 3/4 cup plus 3 tablespoons)

45 grams polenta (or grits, y’all. 1/4 cup)

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 teaspoons finely chopped rosemary (about 1 sprig)

zest of one lemon

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 large eggs, separated

6 tablespoons milk

Method

Prep all ingredients first. Peel and slice persimmons, zest the lemon, finely chop the rosemary, separate eggs. The sugar is used in two separate steps, so divide it as noted.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a 10″ cast iron or ovenproof skillet, dissolve 75 grams of sugar in water and heat until the mixture becomes slightly amber in color (about five minutes). Don’t stir during this process, but feel free to give the skillet a little shake. Don’t walk away, as the change happens quickly. Once it is amber, remove from heat and stir in two tablespoons of butter until dissolved.

Arrange the peeled, sliced persimmons in a spiral pattern and then set aside while you make the cake.

Combine the dry ingredients in a small bowl: flour, polenta, salt, baking powder, chopped rosemary, and lemon zest.

In a large bowl, cream the butter, remaining sugar, and vanilla until creamy. Mix in one egg yolk at a time. Alternate adding milk and dry ingredients, starting with dry. Mix until just combined, then add milk, then dry, then milk, then dry.

In a medium bowl with absolutely clean and dry beaters, beat the egg whites until they are stiff but not dry. They will be shiny and hold a stiff peak.

In three additions, fold the egg whites gently into the batter. The batter will be thicker than a regular cake batter.

Pour over your persimmons in the skillet, then spread evenly with a spatula.  Bake at 350 for 30-45 minutes. This is a large range because ovens vary so much. Start peeking in at around 30 minutes. The cake is done when a toothpick or cake tester comes out clean, and the top is a lovely brown (just past golden).

Remove from oven and allow to cool for 10 minutes, then loosen around edges with a sharp knife. Place a platter or plate on top of the skillet, then carefully invert. If any persimmons have moved or look wonky, replace them, then cool completely before serving.

For me, this serves four. But that’s because I ate it for breakfast, a snack around three, and then again after dinner. And I let my kid have some.

For most other people, this serves 8-10.