Baked oatmeal

As you can see, my frequency of posting is a variable with no control. As usual, that doesn't mean I'm not baking as much as I possibly can. I recently moved in with my boyfriend, with whom I share the passion for food and cooking. Over the past few months, he's turned me into a spicy food lover and I've convinced him that there's many pastries worth making at home. He's the cooking master, I'm the baking master. Really, we're not masters at all, but we like to pretend. One of our favorite things is homemade weekend breakfast/brunch. We try not to repeat recipes, but ever since we tried this baked oatmeal, we've been making it over and over. With tons of summer fruit available, it's a quick, healthy way of eating a hearty breakfast.

One of the times we made this, I took pictures of the process. So you're about to see the boy at work. Or at least his hands.

Baked oatmeal

2 bananas sliced + 1 1/2 cup of blueberries (or any combination of fruit you can think of that will roast well)
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 cup rolled oats (not quick cooking)
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
1 egg
1 cup unsweetened rice milk (or some other milk you like best)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Step 1: Spread about 3/4 of your fruits (for us, all the bananas and 1 cup of blueberries) on the bottom of an 8x8 inch roasting pan coated with some butter or non-stick spray. Roast your fruits at 375 F for 15-20 minutes. This batch is blueberries + bananas, we've also done just bananas and we tried peaches as well. I bet you could try with apricots, nectarines or strawberries.

Step 2: Combine oats, sugar, baking powder, salt and nuts and spread on top of the still hot roasted fruit.

Step 3: In a bowl, mix the egg, vanilla extract and milk and pour it over the fruit and oats.

Step 4: Add the remainder of the fruit on top and bake at 375 for 30 minutes or until the oatmeal is set.

This keeps well for about a week in the fridge, although I doubt it'll last that long.

Blueberry peach crisp and the crazyness of grad school

You might be wondering where I've been... why I haven't posted in almost two weeks or I don't comment on other blogs as often. The answer is grad school. I've spent the past 10 days reading so much daily that I can't keep the headaches away. I still have time to cook, although not so much to take pictures of any baked goods, but don't worry, it'll happen. Maybe less frequently, but this blog is not closing any time soon.

Those of you who read often know that I just started a PhD in Chemistry. I don't really have that many classes, but boy, are they intense or what... Take for instance my class at OHSU, where we have about 100 pages posted the evening before our next class, which are supposed to be read for the class. I feel like hiding my head underground every time it happens. But I can't complain, I enjoy it too much. 

I'm one of those dorky girls who gets a huge kick out of sitting at a seminar and understanding what the professor is talking about. I'm thrilled about understanding relationships between metabolic processes and diseases. But more than anything I love being in a lab more than anything else in the world. 

Now that I'm a grad student, not only do I get to work in a lab, but I also get to teach a lab. I can't put into words how exciting this is. I've been waiting for this moment to come for two years. To be able to show the newbies how to do experiments, how to work in the lab, how to understand the chemistry behind what they're doing. Hopefully this excitement is contagious and my students enjoy the lab as much as I do. 

Even with the large amount of work, I still try to eat decently well, specially for breakfast. Sometimes you're not sure when the next meal is gonna be, so starting the day with abundant fuel seems like the right thing to do. On Saturday, the farmers market takes place at the PSU campus, so I just walk a couple of blocks and find myself surrounded by fresh fruit and veggies. Cold weather seems to have arrived to Portland, but I was lucky enough to find some peaches and blueberries before it did. They went into this easy and wonderful crisp, which would work with pretty much any other fruit and will warm up the cold fall mornings. 

Blueberry and peach crisp

Serves 2

1 peach

1 cup fresh blueberries

2 tablespoons brown sugar

4 tablespoons of butter

1 cup of old fashioned oats

Preheat your oven to 350 F.

Peel and cut the peaches in big chunks. Mix with the blueberries and the two tablespoons of sugar. Stir it well to coat the fruit and let it sit for about 5 minutes so it releases part of the juices. With your fingers, mix together the butter and oats so they get sticky. Distribute the fruit in two oven-safe bowls, ramekins or container of sorts and cover with the butter and oat mixture. Sprinkle with a bit more brown sugar and bake for about 30 minutes, until the oats are crisp and the fruit is cooked and juicy.

Blueberry galette and publications

Somehow, my life revolves around publications. As a teenager, I used to publish articles in the school magazine. Nothing too fancy, but it was fun and it gave me the opportunity to write about whatever I wanted (more or less). A few years later, while in college, I published poems and short stories in a Catalan website. I wrote always with a nickname, just because I'm not ready for the world to associate my verbal ramblings to myself. Then all the sudden, for some reason, I stopped writing. 

Wait wait, don't be too sad. The artsy part of myself didn't get lost, it just changed instruments. I certainly forgot about pens, papers and keyboards, but I discovered cameras. My dad and one of my sisters are both great photographers, so I guess the transition was meant to happen. 

By the end of college, I was all into metal music. The only one to blame is my friend M, who plays in a band and introduced me to several other bands. I loved going to shows and taking pictures, all with a point and shoot and no photo editing. Still, the shots were decent and I ended up being pretty much the official photographer of my friends' bands. 

But change doesn't stop. I finished college, moved to the US, to a variety of music styles and to a lab at M.I.T.. In the academic world, science is all about publications. People need to know what you're doing in order to establish collaborations, give you money and such things. So I spent my one year project working on tons of experiments that eventually found their place in three papers.  (I'm not gonna go on with what my research was about but if you're interested I'll be happy to tell you more about it). 

After that project, I found a job, started my PhD applications and this blog. At first it was only about publishing posts. Then I took the photography of the recipes more seriously and started sending my pictures to Foodgawker and Tastespotting. The first has already published some of my pictures. Getting published in Tastespotting proved very difficult, but I finally got published this week! I know lots of my fellow bloggers get published there. For them it's probably no big deal. To me it is. It proves that no matter if it's science or photography, perseverance takes you places. 

I made this galette for 4th of July while staying at my friends' place. (Excuse the pictures of the finished product, they are not exactly ideal). They all loved it. My friend S asked me to publish the recipe ASAP, so here it goes. Easy and delicious. According to S, very tasty. Maybe he liked it so much because it has some bourbon in it. Oh, and best of news, I got told yesterday that another one of our papers has been accepted for publication. I hope to be publishing many more recipes  and papers in the upcoming years. Now, galette.

Blueberry galette
Print this recipe

Pate brisee:
adapted from Martha Stewart via Smitten Kitchen
1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
1 stick butter, very cold, cut into pieces
1/4 cup water, freezing

In a bowl, combine, flour, sugar and salt. Stir in the butter pieces and work them into the dough. I used my hands, you can use a pastry blender. If you're making this in summer you'll want to work fast to prevent the butter from softening. Once the mix resembles coarse pebbles, add the cold water and keep on working the dough until it comes together as a ball. Wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least one hour.

Filling
3/4 pint blueberries (or as many as you can fit in your dough)
3 tablespoons bourbon
1 tablespoon of sugar

Wash your blueberries. Toss them together with the bourbon and sugar and let them sit in the fridge while you refrigerate your dough.

Assemble the galette

Preheat your oven to 375 F
Roll your dough into a disc (I did it with my hands because my friends don't have a rolling pin, works just fine). Leaving a 2 inch border, place your blueberries on the dough. Brush the edges with egg wash and then fold them over the fruit to form a seam. Brush the outside part of the seam with more egg wash and sprinkle with some sugar. Transfer to a baking sheet and bake for about 25 minutes, until the crust is golden brown and the fruit filling is bubbly. Serve cold or at room temperature.

Experimental lemon 'mousse' with blueberry sauce

Let's say you're at your beloved friends house... it's Saturday night and you want to make something yummy for dessert... Like this...

Now let's say you love mousse but you don't really feel like using raw eggs... Well then you experiment... and by that I mean you find a suitable substitute for the egg whites. Its name is... jello + whipped cream...

Alright, at this point you're like... what the heck, is this a mousse? really? Well I don't know what it is... it's a fluffy concoction that contains lemon and has a mousse-like texture.  To make it even better... it has a swirl of blueberry sauce... and some fresh strawberries on top... so who cares about labels!

Now the recipe...

For the 'mousse'

1 pint heavy whipping cream
2 tablespoons of lemon jello*
1/2 cup water
Juice of 3 lemons
Zest of 1 lemon
4 tablespoons of sugar

For the blueberry sauce

1 bag of blueberries (about 1 pound)
4 tablespoons of sugar

*The store didn´t have regular jello but you can totally go for that one if you want.


In a bowl, mix the 1/2 water and the 2 tablespoons of jello. Heat it in the microwave for about 1 min and stir to dissolve the jello powder. Add the lemon juice and zest. Let it cool outside or in the fridge. Just make sure it's not warm when you proceed to the following step.

With a hand mixer, whip up the heavy cream half way, then add the sugar. When the peaks are almost stiff add the lemon + jello mixture slowly while mixing. You want the liquid to be cold or at room temperature so it doesn´t deflate the cream. When stiff peaks form, transfer the mix to a pan, bowl or whatever you want and put it in the fridge.

Now if you put it just in the fridge, it'll take about 4 hrs to set (setting time for the jello). If you're in a rush, like I was, stick it in the freezer for about an hour and then transfer to the fridge. It'll be ready in about 2 hrs.

Did you forget about the blueberry sauce? Don't! It's seriously yummy and adds a sweet hint to the tart mousse.

Put the blueberries and the 4 tablespoons of sugar in a pan and cook over low heat until the blueberries burst and look tender. I mashed a few with a masher so they would release the juice, making a syrup. If you'd like a more liquid mixture, reduce the cooking time. For a thicker sauce just let more water evaporate. Put it in a serving jar and cool in the fridge until ready to serve.

And you'll get these beautiful blueberry sauce drops in your mousse...

Experiment #1 = success! Yum!