Cooking Food In The Dishwasher: Challenge Accepted!

Italian author Lisa Casali demonstrates her dishwasher cooking method.

Are we all aware that dishwasher-cooked food is a thing?

I just learned about this via the NPR food blog, The Salt. When describing it to my husband, he called it (this is why I love him) "a poor man's sous-vide." Which obviously means I want to try it.

The NPR article linked to an Italian cookbook called "Cucinare in lavastoviglie: Gusto, sostenibilità e risparmio con un metodo rivoluzionario" (Cooking in the Dishwasher: A revolutionary method that's tasty, sustainable and thrifty). The author, Lisa Casali, is an Italian environmentalist and blogger -- click here to check out her blog (also available in English).

I studied some Italian in college, so I just might be able to read, translate, and recreate those recipes! (That opera performance degree just keeps on being useful in the most interesting ways!) Provided I can snag a copy of the book, I'll be posting those recipes along with my attempts, Julie & Julia-style.

My first adventures in juicing

My name is Helen, and I'm a juicer.

Last week, motivated by the CSA-box-worth of greens we're getting on a weekly basis (and not finishing), and a few friends' experiences with juicing, I decided to get a juicer on a whim.

I got a Hamilton Beach Big Mouth Juice Extractor, which from my research seemed like the best-performing juicer under $100. But if you really want to fall deep into the world of juicing, juicers and educational materials about said topics, my sister recommends (too late for my purchase, unfortunately) the juice man. Specifically she said that he's "omg the happiest man on the planet," which is high praise coming from her.

Not knowing where to start, I asked friends for recipes, and I made my first drink out of everything left from the prior week's CSA box: beet greens, carrots, chard, kale, red cabbage, romaine.

It looked like sludge and tasted like a 20 oz wheatgrass shot, but I powered through it like a champ.

And you know what? Placebo or no, I swear I felt a euphoric lightness after drinking that stuff. Maybe it was just the relief of being done with the glass, but I wanted to feel that way again. I realize that's the way most people would describe their first taste of a drug -- but if the drug is vegetables, is that so wrong?

Out of curiosity, I started to research various juice cleanses, reasoning that I could make that stuff at home for half the price, if that. I ended up zeroing in on the Blueprint Cleanse, gathering copycat recipes around the web and organizing them here. I find the version of the green juice here too tame, so I'll be fine-tuning it over time.

Some things I've learned so far:

• Strain that juice. The juicer I bought leaves a lot of pulp and froths up the juice as well, so I strain that all off. Personal preference.
• Choose sweet apples over tart ones. I've tried Red Delicious and Granny Smith apples so far, and much prefer the sweet to the tart. Tartness masks all other flavors in the drink, and if I'm doing the work to juice all those vegetables, I want to taste it!
• The colors of fresh juice are wild. Just look at the picture at the top of the post!
• Fresh carrot juice tastes creamy. So crazy, and so delicious!

District 4's Seaweed Bread

When I decided to start this project, I knew District 4's seaweed bread would be one of the first breads I'd try. The book describes it as a "salty," "fish-shaped loaf tinted green with seaweed." My first thought: Er. Seaweed??

I'd never cooked with seaweed before, and I'd never even heard about a bread with seaweed in it. I thought at first that I might be able to slip in the seaweed unnoticed, as a powder or something. But as I continued to research, I found a great recipe for Irish soda bread with dulse -- aka seaweed. 

I felt like I had stumbled upon greatness. My educated guess put District 4 in either the Pacific Northwest or the Mexican Gulf, but with a tribute named Finnick Odair, I've always wondered about the district's potential Irish roots. This recipe honors that, and it lets the seaweed shine through too, instead of being surreptitiously added as a powder.

Although the book describes the loaf as tinted green from the seaweed, I didn't get much tinting, and I chose not to add it artificially. If you want to, add a little bit of moss green food coloring to get a green tint.

District 4's Seaweed Bread

Ingredients

1/4 to 1/3 oz dried dulse (you can find this at a specialty store like Whole Foods)

2 cups plain white flour 

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt 

3/4 cup buttermilk (No buttermilk at home? Add 1 Tblsp lemon juice to 3/4 cup milk & let sit 5 minutes.)
Egg white

Instructions

1. Preset the oven to 400 degrees, and put a baking sheet inside to let it warm up.

2. Soak the dulse in water for 5 minutes, then strain water out and break leaves into small pieces. I tried the dried dulse before soaking it, and it tastes like an accidental mouthful of ocean -- almost caustically salty. After a soak, the taste is remarkably different.

3. Mix the flour, baking soda and salt into a large bowl, using a sieve if you have one. If you don't have one, use your hands to aerate the flour.

4. Add the buttermilk and gently fold it into the flour mixture using your hands or a wooden spoon.

5. If you have a fish-shaped cookie cutter (recommended), roll out the dough so that it is approximately 1 inch thick, then use the cutter. If you have no cookie cutter, break the dough into 4 pieces and shape each one into a fish. (Be forewarned, your biscuits will lose some of its shape as it bakes up, so your fish may end up looking wonky -- like mine did!)

6. Take the warmed cookie tray out of the oven. Place the biscuits on the tray, then brush the tops with egg white and sprinkle with some salt.

7. Put in the oven for 20-25 minutes. Once they're ready, enjoy with some seafood!

I'm gonna make some watermelon pickles!

Inspired by one of the characters in Parade, I decided to try making "watermelon pickles" -- apparently a Southern favorite. They are supposed to have a sweet-and-sour bread and butter pickle taste. I will know soon!

Making the pickles is a multi-day process. This evening I peeled and cut up two small melons. I ended up with 4 quarts of peeled rind (currently soaking in salt water, as shown on the left in the picture above) and a large Tupperware container of ready-to-eat watermelon triangles (my inner 5-year-old is bouncing up and down).

As I usually do, I looked around at various recipes before finally settling on the one I'm following. Traditional recipes suggest removing all signs of pink from the rind, but that doesn't work well with the seedless watermelons most stores carry these days. (Somehow the seedless-ness also causes thin rinds.)

I'm hoping to hand these out to the cast and crew of Parade, so I will probably can these in decorative 4 oz jars to yield ~30 jars.