After the longest hibernation ever (count ’em, three pointless weeks of no Hot Knives posts) we are back in full swing. And somehow, while we were gone, it became full-blown springtime.
So this week we celebrated the season with a panoply of parties. First there was a friend’s “Super Seder,” complete with horseradish relish, her Jewish mom, and a traditional drinking game involving Charlton Heston (sub ‘Hest’ for “Moses” during the seder reading, or else chug your Manoshevitz). Then there was the springtime festival of lights hosted by a buddy of ours that morphed into a drunken Easter rave.
And finally on Sunday, our favorite: an old-fashioned open-house dinner and mystical egg hunt. We invited over a gaggle of friends trained in the art of vegetarian cookery and put ’em to work. We pranced around, grilled stuff, praised the risen lord, and poured white wine sangria, aged beers and sparkling glasses of the French liqueur Pastis. The resulting feast was perfect, part dandy, part simple pauper, totally godlike.
Easter Menu
Wheat Pita Crostini with Green Garlic Hummus
Cowboy Gaspacho
Kale-Tahini Salad
Grilled Garden Veg with Handmade Aioli
Savory Turmeric Biscuits
Curry Quinoa Salad
Coriander Falafel
Brown Rice Chile Mole
Strawberry-Cardamom Shortcake
Saffron pudding
To pick one recipe for y’all we thought long and hard about ‘what would Jesus do’… nothing flashy, something hearty…curry quinoa salad. Props to our gal friend Jesse for calling this one: dried cranberries and snap peas do go together…. mmmm, Kabalah Toubeleh.
Curried ‘Kabouleh’ with Spring Veg
(Makes 8-10 servings)

2 cups quinoa
1/2 cup raw cashews
1 Tbs. honey or agave nectar
1 tsp curry powder
1 red bell pepper
1 cup snap peas
1 shallot
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1/2 cup flat leaf parsley
2 Tbs. whole grain mustard
2 Tbs. apple cider vinegar
1 Tbs. curry powder
1 tsp. turmeric
1/8 cup extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste
1. Pour quinoa into a medium saucepan, cover with slightly more than equal parts water (2.5 cups) and place on medium heat. Once water hits a rolling boil, reduce to simmer and keep lid on. Cook for about 8 minutes, al dente, just before quinoa grain is fully burst open.
2. While quinoa cooks, toast your cashews in a sauté pan on medium heat. As nuts start to brown add honey to the pan and toss well. Add first 1 tsp. curry powder and make sure spice is evenly distributed. Remove and let cool.
3. Remove quinoa and let cool.
4. Cut your spring vegetables and combine in a large mixing bowl: Chop the red bells pepper and snap peas into cubes. Finely chop the parsley and mince the shallot. Add the cranberry and warm cashews as well.
5. Prepare a curry dressing: mix a base out of mustard, apple cider vinegar. Whisk and add rest of curry powder, turmeric and lastly olive oil. Season with a pinch of salt and pepper to taste (your mustard is salty.)
6. Finely, toss in the quinoa, stirring well, and drench in dressing. This works best if quinoa is slightly warm but not hot. Then leave it to cool and turn yellow from the turmeric before serving.
Beverage: De Proef’s Saison Imperiale
Soundtrack: Sweater’s “Sky Mall”

Ever since Alex got a bread book, we’ve used the following foccacia recipe for many occasions: Tom and Andy’s Wedding, Thanksgiving Day ’08, and even lots of events that we’ve never blogged about. We’ve been waiting to unleash this one for a while, and though it’s an interpretation of a recipe that doesn’t necessarily belong to us, we still get siked as hell every time we begin the 8-hour tour required to make such an awesome treat.
Making bread is like being friends. The more time you spend the better it tastes…err, is. The task can sound daunting, but the effort is more than worth it (plus most of the time you can spend reading, cleaning up, or hanging out anyway). After you make your first loaf you literally won’t believe how tasty something with so few ingredients is; it will make you want to stop buying sliced bread all together and do nothing but stay up all night fermenting loaves, finding ways to get more heat out of your oven, talking to flours…
Anyway, bread making is totally casual! Take some “me” time, follow along with our instructional video and recipe notes, and make yourself something awesome!

“Poolish”
2+ 1/2 cups bread flour
1+ 1/4 Tsp. Instant Yeast
1+1/2 cup water
1. Combine the yeast and flour, and mix with your hands.
2. Add the water and stir to combine. You’re looking for a thick batter, like sludge, so add up to 1/2 cup extra water until the desired consistency is reached.
3. Cover with plastic wrap, and let ferment at room temperature for 4 hours.
Dough
3 cups poolish (all of what you just made)
2 and 2/3 cup bread flour
2 tsp. salt (kosher or grey is preferable)
1.5 tsp. Instant Yeast
6 Tbs. XVO
3/4 cups water
Extra water
Extra flour for dusting
1. Mix dry goods together in one bowl.
2. Add the wet ingredients to bowl and mix with your hands until the all the flour is hydrated and the whole mess becomes one big sticky ball. Work the dough by making your hand like a claw grabber and twisting down into the dough, like screwing in a giant lightbulb. While you do this, turn the bowl in the opposite direction of your dough throttling. If the dough is completely sticking to your hands, sprinkle a little flour on them and around the bowl and it’ll loosen right up. Do the twist/grab for 7 minutes, reversing directino from time to time to help develop the gluten.
3. Now, sprinkle some flour on a clean and dry surface (table top, giant cutting board, etc.) and gently transfer the dough to the flour. Pat and shape it into a rectangle and let it sit and relax for ten minutes.
4. Coat your hands with flour. Pick up the dough and gently stretch it out to twice its original length. Fold it like your laundry: one extended end goes to the center, then the other extended end goes on top. This should bring you back to the same size as you started with. The stretching helps develop the gluten and allows the yeast to grow evenly during fermentation, which will result in better texture and flavor in your end-loaf.
5. Spritz the top of the dough with canola oil, and sprinkle with a nice coat of flour. This will keep the dough from drying at all while you let it sit. Cover it loosly with plastic wrap and let ferment for 30 minutes.
6. Repeat the glutinous yoga outlined in step 4, then spray with oil and coat with flour. Cover with the same piece of plastic and let ferment for another hour.
…to be continued. While you wait, here’s a recipe for some herb oil for baking the bread in.
Herb Oil
1/2 cup XVO
1/8 cup fresh parsley,
1/8 cup fresh dill
1/8 cup fresh cilantro
1/8 cup fresh basil
1 shallot
6 garlic cloves
1 tsp. fennel seeds
1 tsp. Salt
1 tsp. ground pepper
1 tsp. alleppo pepper, or red pepper flakes
1. Chop all the herbs, the garlic and the shallot.
2. Heat a small saucepan on medium heat. Toast the fennel seeds for three minutes.
3. Add all the oil and then all the other ingredients. When the oil begins to bubble and sizzle, remove from heat and cool.
Dimpling and Baking
1. Heat your over to 500 degrees.
2. Oil a 1/2 sheet pan: put a nice few spoonfuls of your herb oil down and rub the whole pan until its slick.
3. Gently transfer the ball of dough onto the pan.
4. Dump half the herb oil onto the top of the bread. Stretch the dough by sticking your fingers in and slowly pulling outwards, dimpling or fingering the bread until it reaches the edges of the pan. Be careful not to poke too aggressivley, you don’t want to bread the dough. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest for thirty minutes so your oven can get nice and hot.
5. Dump any remaining oil onto the bread and gently dimple. Plop the monster in the oven, preferably on the highest rack, and bake for 10 minutes.
6. Rotate the sheet pan and reduce the heat to 450 degrees. Continue baking for 5-10 more minutes. When the bread has firmed up enough, you can check the bottom using a spatula to lift up a corner of the bread. When done, the top of the bread will be golden brown and all of the oil will be absorbed.
7. Enjoy! Finally!
Beverage: Telegraph’s Wheat Reserve
Soundtrack: The Best Of Bread

Lisa says her favorite stand at our local farmers market is the guy who hawks hummus, pita and sauces. And our buddy Lisa is onto something: The jalapeno hummus is sweet, the black bean & cilantro stuff’s a little bastardized. But the chipotle-garlic hummus is fucked-up good.
Still, we couldn’t help but chime in that buying hummus is a bit of a rip-off when you can make the stuff much cheaper. That got us thinking two things a) man, we wish we had some chipotle-garlic hummus that we didn’t have to share, and b) would making hummus really save us that much dough? The hummus by numbers was on… Hummus man charges $3 for a smallish 12-ounce dish. We squeezed out 2 cups of the potent stuff for, well, about $7 thanks to the high-caliber cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil, but if we re-sold it at a farmers market, well…
Chipotle Hummus

2 cans chickpeas
1/2 cup olive oil
6 cloves garlic, peeled
1/8 cup tahini sauce
5 chipotle peppers (in adobo sauce)
1 lemon
1 Tbs. apple cider vinegar
1/8 cup water
1 tsp. red chile powder
1. Open cans of chickpeas, drain, rinse and let sit.
2. Place a small saucepan on medium heat, add half of the olive oil and four of the six whole cloves of peeled garlic to the pan (save the rest of the oil and garlic for the end). Roast for 10 minutes until cloves are slightly brown, but not burnt. Remove from heat.
3. Combine chickpeas, tahini, garlic oil, chipotle peppers, juice of 1 lemon and vinegar. Using a processor or handheld mixer, pulse mixture thoroughly for several minutes until smooth and creamy. Add the remaining two cloves of fresh garlic cloves, another 1/8 cup olive oil (you should have 1/8 cup left for garnish) and finally 1/8 cup of water to help the mixing along.
4. Pour hummus into a serving dish and use a spatula to create a smooth surface. Top with remaining oil and a dusting of red chil powder. Serve with hot pita chips.
Beverage: Rogue’s Chipotle Ale
Soundtrack: Mercury Rev’s “I Collect Coins”