Caramelized Onions and Pear on Lentil Cakes with a Raspberry Vinagrette Salad

I've been doing a lot of baking lately.  This past Friday was graduation, and afterwards some of my housemates and I had our families back to our house for dessert.  Which means that they day before we made lots of desserts, and have been eating the leftovers ever since.  Because of all this, I thought it would be good to explore something a little healthier and give baking a rest for a little while.  I also want to take advantage of cooking while I can, since in just over 2 months I'm leaving for Honduras... Don't think I'll have quite the same food resources that I do in New Jersey.

I kind of threw this recipe together as I was making it and kept adding stuff to it until I had a complete dish.  I started out just wanting caramelized onions.  Then I had a pear to use up, and thought it would go well with the onions.  But then I needed something to eat with the onions and pear, so I made a lentil pancake.  Then I wanted a little more of a kick, so I added a light salad with pecans and a raspberry vinaigrette to spice things up a little.  I would have liked to continue the madness by adding some crumbled Gorgonzola cheese, but I didn't have any.  So no cheese for me.  But I have higher hopes for you.

Ingredients:

 The Caramelized Stuff:
1 large sweet onion
1 pear (Bartlett)
2 Tbs Olive Oil
1 Tbs Smart Balance
1 tsp brown sugar
Salt

The Lentil Pancake:
1 small potato (I used a red potato), cooked and mashed
About 1 1/4 cups (cooked) yellow lentils
1 Tbs ground flax seeds
About 2 Tbs plain soymilk
Salt
Garlic Powder
4 Tbs flour
Olive Oil

The Salad/Dressing:
Green leafy stuff of your choice (all I had was Romaine, but fancier lettuce and/or spinach would be wonderful)
A handful of pecans

3 Tbs Raspberry vinegar
1 1/2 Tbs Olive Oil
Reserved liquid from the caramelized onions/pears
Salt
Garlic Powder

Directions:

1. Start cooking the lentils.  You want them to be a little mushy, so add a little more than 1 1/2 times the amount of cooking water as you have lentils.
2. Cut the onion into rings or strips, whatever your prefer.  Melt the oil and butter in a large saucepan over medium heat, then throw in the onion and a pinch of salt, and stir it around.
3. Let the onion cook for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, then add in the brown sugar and let cook for another 5 minutes.  Once this is done the onions should be starting to brown and getting soft.
4. Slice the pear into thick strips and throw it in with the onion.  Cover and let it cook for another 10 or so minutes, stirring occasionally.
5. While the onions are caramelizing, cook and mash the potato (I like to just stab mine with a fork and throw it in the microwave for a few minutes).  Add the soymilk and flax to the mashed potato.  Add in the (hopefully now done and cooked) lentils and the salt and garlic powder (and any other spices you might want to make it more interesting).
6. Add in the flour a little bit at a time until the mixture creates a mushy dough.  It doesn't have to be extremely dough-like, but just enough to loosely hold together.
7. Once the onions and pears are sufficiently soft/cooked/caramelized/delicious, dump them out of the pan and into a bowl.  If you're like me and want to wash as few things as possible, take a paper towel and quickly wipe the pan.  It doesn't have to be perfectly clean.
8. Add a little olive oil to the pan (just enough to coat the bottom) and let it heat up on a medium heat.
9. Form mini-pancakes with the batter and put them in the pan like you're making pancakes.  Cook for 1-2 minutes on each side, or until lightly browned.  The inside will still seem "uncooked", but that's okay. All the ingredients were pre-cooked, remember?
10. Make up the vinaigrette- combine the raspberry vinegar, olive oil, liquid from the caramelized stuff (from the bottom of the bowl where the onions and pears are hanging out), a little garlic powder, and salt.  Thoroughly mix together.
11. To serve, place a lentil cake on the plate.  Top with some of the caramelized onions and pear.  On the side/ on top, put your lettuce of choice and some roughly chopped pecans.  Drizzle with the dressing.  Also, if you have Gorgonzola cheese or something, put some of that on top too.  Ideally all of these things should be eaten together (to get the "perfect bite", if you will).

 
 Since I just made this up (well, maybe very vaguely based on the idea of the delicious pizza from California Pizza Kitchen) it's definitely open to being tweaked, but I think it's a good start.  It makes a fancy appetizer or a light meal.  Try it!

Almond Scones

I always forget how much I like scones.  At the same time, they always feel like a bit of a guilty pleasure because they pretend to be a nice breakfast-y snack but are actually just as unhealthy as normal baked goods, made with lots of butter and traditionally eaten with clotted cream.  My previous attempt at a healthier scone alternative went pretty well, with the Vanilla bean scones, but I wanted to try another scone recipe to see if I could use less butter and still maintain the quintessential scone-y-ness.

My main issue with scones is that they always require a bunch of butter to be cut into flour to get the right consistency, so I can't just replace butter with some oil or applesauce or something.  I eventually decided that almond paste might be the right consistency to substitute for some butter, and started searching for a recipe.  Nothing that I found fit what I wanted, so instead I used about 4 different recipes as a jumping-off point and made up my own recipe.  I was a little worried how the scones would turn out, but I was quite pleasantly surprised- they had a lightly crunchy outside and a dense, moist inside, with a delicate almond flavor.
 These were good on their own, but like most scones, would also be wonderfully complimented by some kind of fruity jam, or nut butter, or (dare I say it?) clotted cream if you want to be all fancy.

Ingredients:

·         1 ½ cup flour

                ·         ½ cup whole wheat flour 

                ·         scant ¼ cup sugar

·         1 ¼  tsp baking powder

·         ¼ tsp baking soda

·         ¼ tsp salt

·         ½ cup almond paste

·         2 Tbs Smart Balance, or other butter substitute

·         ½ c unflavored soymilk mixed with about 1 ½ tsp vinegar (I used apple cider vinegar, but white vinegar works too)

·         1 tsp vanilla

·         ½ tsp almond extract

·         1 tbs ground flax seeds mixed with about 2 ½ tbs water

·         1/3 - 1/2 cup chocolate chips, depending on your ideal chocolate-to-scone ratio

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
2. Mix the flax seeds with the water in a small bowl and set aside.  Mix the soymilk and vinegar in a measuring cup and set aside.
3. Combine flours, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. 
4. Crumble/ slice the almond paste and Smart Balance, and cut it into the flour mixture using 2 butter knives or a pastry cutter.  This will take a few minutes to make sure everything is thoroughly combined, and when you're done it should have an almost cornmeal-ish consistency.
5. In a separate container, mix together the soymilk mixture with the vanilla, almond, and flax mixture.
6. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients. The batter should be fairly thick and clump together.
7. Add in the chocolate chips
8. Spray a baking pan with oil.  Dump the mixture onto the pan and spread into a rectangle. Cut the rectangle in half lengthwise, then divide each smaller rectangle into 3 squares (or 4, or 2, depending on how big you want your scones).  Cut each square in half, diagonally, so that you have triangles.  Separate the triangles and spread them out on the pan (You don't need to leave a ton of space between them because they'll rise but they won't expand too much.  Mine were pretty cramped together and they never invaded each others personal space.  What respectful scones I made.)  Alternatively, I’m sure you could just blob it on a pan like cookies and be fine.  You could even shape your blobs like triangles and pretend you cut them. I won't tell anyone.
9. Cook at 375 for 15 minutes or until lightly browned.
   
   

   

   See? Crowded but not cramped.

   
   

   
   

   
   

   
   

   
   

   You should really try making these. The delicate almond flavor is quite delightful without being too overpowering to mingle well with other flavors, like jam or whatever. And as scones go, these are pretty darn healthy AND delicious. My favorite combination.  
   Side note: make these *vegan* by using Earth Balance or some other vegan butter substitute, and obviously use vegan chocolate chips.  Woo hoo!