Adaptations, On my Mind.

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Recipes knock on my door everyday. ย They come in, take off their shoes, and make a complete mess of my kitchen. They stick around for a few days, really get comfortable… and then the recipes leave. ย Actually, the recipes make their permanent home here at Joy the Baker… but they’re out of my life once they’re adapted perfected and cleaned up after.

But! ย What if I’m not done with the recipes? ย What if I want them to stick around a while? There’s not a lot of time for an extended recipe stay when I’m always trying to create something new new new… but here are five things I have in mind. Please consider this a much needed mindshare.

Take this Quick and Easy Spanakopita from Martha Stewart. This recipe is solid… although not completely quick. The Spanakopita is made with traditional filo dough, and a spinach and feta mixture. Because I can’t leave well enough alone, I believe this dish is best served with kale instead of spinach. ย Really… either way it’s a lovely meal. Add spicy chili flakes for added interest.

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The real life application of Kale Spanakopita (Kale-akopita?) involves a slow fried egg and two pieces of black forest bacon.

Kale instead of spinach. Bacon instead of the absence of bacon. ย Chili flakes for heat.

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I’m teaching myself how to make crepes. ย I have to teach myself before I can come to you with any sort of recipe and instructions.

This is my first round of crepes made in my humble, nonstick saute pan. ย These crepes were inspired by Gluten Free Girl and the Chef. ย Thanks for the lesson!!

Ham and Cheese Crepes reign supreme.

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I can’t stop thinking about this White Bean Bundt Cake I made a few weeks back. ย This cake is just such a lovely base.

I am convinced that this cake should immediately be turned into a cinnamon swirled, pecan studded coffee cake!

This cake would also thrive with a generous raspberry jam swirl. ย So major!

The task is yours. ย Show me pictures when you’re done!

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Remember the Coconut Crab Rice I made a few weeks back?

I can’t help but think that this rice, day old, would make an amazing fried rice, served with a soft boiled egg.

And! ย If you know me at all… you know that it is my instinct to add roasted kale to this dish.

Let’s marry Crunchy Kale and Coconut Crab Rice… few things would be more perfect.

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And it all comes down to a simple pot of beans. ย Possible the most willingly adaptable item in the kitchen.

I’ve recently been 100% inspired by Tamar Alder’s An Everlasting Meal. ย I know that I’ve already chewed your ear off about this book, it just continues to excite me.

I read and re-read the chapter about beans while I was away in London. I returned home and immediately put together a pot of beans to soak. ย I now have the tender cooked beans, in their amazingly flavorful bean liquor in my fridge, and I’ve enjoyed them for a handful of meals.

Dry beans are covered in cold water and soaked overnight. ย Once a day has passed, the water is drained and replaced, covering the beans with about 2 inches of water. ย The water is then enhanced with any kitchen odds and ends you might have on hand: ย parsley stems, the buts of an onion and fennel bulb, fennel frawns, a bay leaf, a dried chili, a hearty dose of good olive oil, salt and pepper. ย Beans are simmered to a dance and cooked until thoroughly tender. ย When stored in their liquid, beans are flavorful and delicious for days and days. ย I’ve eaten them on everything from buttery rice to scrambled eggs. ย I’ve even mashed beans and served them on avocado-topped crackers.

I’m so smitten by the simplicity of the bean making process. ย It’s romantic. ย It really is.

I come to you every few days with recipes. ย Sure… you know how to follow instructions and find success. ย I hope this also inspires you to think beyond the recipe. ย I hope this inspires you to make food that you don’t hover over with a camera. ย When in doubt, add kale, add a heaping dose of good jam, add a hearty turn of olive oil. ย Dip and submerge and soak. ย Try something beyond!

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  1. Fennel Frawns & Fennel Fronds = the same thing. Who knew? You did, obvi. Me? Had to look it up.
    You so smart. :)

  2. i love the inspiration. the internet is so full of beautiful pictures and precise recipes that sometimes i find it hard to find my own vision/voice for a creation. thanks for the push.

    and i am VERY fond of that book. sophie dahl is such a beautiful writer.

  3. I LOVE this! I love that you are encouraging us to experiment and to reach farther than we thought we could. People are always surprised that I adapt recipes as much as I do in my baking because the idea of a baking recipe as a “formula” has been drilled into their brains. The experiments don’t always work out, but it never hurts to try and just wait to see what happens, it makes everything so much more interesting! Thanks for the encouragement :)

  4. I love the beans… The idea of having a ready-made, ready-to-edit side dish on hand for days is so enticing. Especially because beans are cheap and I’ve always got odds and ends languishing in my fridge!

  5. Hey there fancy pants design! Love it! Thanks for the daily dose of inspiration…you’re helping me experiment not just with food, but also with layering all sort of dishes and patterns and textures for pictures too. So fun to layer flavors (or colors) to get something deliciously different (and beautiful!)

  6. Woah! Fancy new website. This will take some getting used to, but it is beautiful. That crepe is beautiful too.

    I am totally in love with An Everlasting Meal. Thank you for recommending it. Tamar Adler has me wanting to cook things that I have never had any interest in: boiled chicken, mayonnaise, sauces with anchovies. I even want to have a French-style aioli party now.

    As a person with food allergies (and just plain old particular tastes), I love the chance to adapt recipes or add new ingredients or tweaks to things. I couldn’t agree more on the bacon and kale front. Your recipes inspire me to create new things, so thank you again! I made a gluten-free lemon matcha poundcake that was a huge hit, and now I’ll have to try the white bean cake too.

  7. Oh! You’ve changed, and just in a couple of hours since I checked to see if a new post was up!!
    I like it. Change is good. And I don’t have to enter my info. every time I leave a comment now. Woo hook! Ah, that would be hoo – stupid auto correct.
    Besides, it’s sleek, it’s hip, it’s you!
    I’m also a huge fan of anything purple, except that stinkin’ dinosaur.

  8. I just bought her book. I can’t WAIT. she really seems to be getting to the core of this whole cooking biz. And what a great writer! By the way…I’ve been suffering trying to find a decent pair of shorts as well. JCrew seems to be decent. I just can’t swing the shorties any more.

  9. I loved this post, thank you! Like you, I’ve been converted to believing in kale instead of spinach. (And in kale instead of the absence of kale.)

    I toss kale in everything. When the recipe calls for anything green (spinach curry, greens with pasta), and when it doesn’t (rice soup, miso soup, lentil soup).

    Your Kale-akopita idea has been added to my to-cook list! Scratch that; it is actually replacing spanakopita on the list. Thank you, thank you.

  10. Your vanilla bean cocoa nib meringues are even better with toasted coconut folded in as well. It’s like a Mounds bar, but better :)

  11. You’ve inspired me! I’m making a nice pot of white beans right now and I’ve added all sorts of tasty little bits to the water. I can’t wait to taste them!

  12. you definitely inspire me as to kale. and this is a great post! i know i need to break out of the box of just baking other people’s recipes and get creative. it’s hard when there are so many fabulous recipes out there, but man, you are right. time to experiment!

  13. crepes made with buckwheat flour will ruin you for all others! so delicious with both sweet and savory fillings, and because buckwheat flour is gluten-free it makes for a very tender crepe.

  14. “When in doubt, add kale.” Yes, ma’am. In fact, only from reading your blog for the past two years did I even consider buying kale in place of another dark leafy green. When I was down to my last big leaf, I looked in my fridge and found some day old rice. A quick sautee in the fry pan, some edamame, avocado, and mango and voila–dinner. Adaptations :)

  15. Oh crepes! Because our family is so big, we only get them once a year at Christmas, it’s our own little tradition, but wow. My mother is the queen of making crepes. We do them simple here: butter and sugar for the most of us, maybe a little bit of chocolate spread or jam for those of us who want something a little different.

    I can’t wait to see what you come up with !

  16. I just got An Everlasting Meal from the library based on your high praise. I hope I am as inspired as you!

  17. So, about two weeks ago I got together with a couple of good friends and we had a baking party. We made miniture bundt cakes using your White Bean Bundt Cake recipe, and–omigosh!–it was so freakin’ delicious. We did three variations; lemon, cinnamon, and vanilla. All three were to-die-for good! So totally worth making again!! Thank you so much for posting that fabulous recipe!

  18. Just a tip with the crรชpes- if you use buckwheat flour for the savory ones (like French galettes), reserving ap flour for the dessert crรชpes, the result is amazing. Buckwheat flour makes for the most perfect savory crรชpes in the world, even if you’re just adding salty butter.

  19. I heart the way you live. Kale for spinach. Not always, but here? Yes. And I love the odds and ends in the bean water idea. Usually I just do a bay leaf and save my greenery for stocks. But let’s face it. I have enough scraps for stocks and bean water. Yes!

  20. How do you keep recipes around and easily found when needed? I print out new finds from online and then have a mess of papers to sort through. Any tricks?

  21. Beautifully written!
    My finace keeps asking me to make beans but I was a little lost on how to make them, I think maybe it’s because there are so many recipes out there, I get lost. Simplicity is key at times. Thank you for the reminder :)

  22. Why don’t those recipes clean up after themselves? It irritates me so much. Especially the ones that don’t turn out great the first time and you have to keep making them, using every bowl in the house to get them right! Those, at the very least, should be the self-cleaning ones!

    :)

  23. Well, that would actually be kale-pita or kale-o-pita :)
    The Greek follower
    Luv from Athens Greece
    Anna

  24. Hi Joy! I substitute kale for most greens in recipes because I love it so. I find that when you blog you tend to make a recipe once or twice then post it and forget about it. I have actually scrolled back to some of my older recipes that I had forgotten about and made them again because they were so good. Then there are those recipes that we tend to make over and over and I wish at times that blogs could have a ticker symbol that you could click on each time you made a recipe. I have some recipes like my kale salad that I make at least 2 to 3 times a week.

    BTW, looking at your bacon shot I see that you love crispy bacon as well. I can’t stand undercooked bacon. Blah!

  25. I love adapting and readapting recipes, but it’s hard to remember to make something I loved again with all the inspiration out there.

    I’ll have to pick up a copy of this book. I need a good food-book.

  26. I enjoy the free-spirited approach you take to cooking and baking – it makes your recipes so unique and delicious each and every time! I eat kale literally every day (most of the time in breakfast eggs) and have never thought to put it in a pastry…this idea is glorious and I’m excited to give it a go. Your plate with bacon, eggs and kale-akopita is the exact way I’d like to savor my morning meal.

  27. The all look delicious! I have to add though that salt really isn’t supposed to be added to beans until the very end of the cooking time otherwise they don’t cook properly and stay hard.

  28. I agree inspiration is important. This weekend I made strawberry, basil, and farmer’s cheese pizza inspired by something I saw on Tastespotting. Nothing inspires new ideas like spending a good amount of your weekend on Tastespotting while you are watching DVDs of Beverly Hills, 90210 from 1998.

  29. Your minds is always racing. I bet you have tons of little notebooks filled to the brim with your ideas. I love it, cause I’m the same way.

    Vintagehoneybee.blogspot.com

  30. Thank you for the inspiration! There are times when I make something beautiful and delicious and I choose not to photograph it for the blog. It just feels good to make it for myself sometimes instead of hovering over it with a camera.

  31. pots of beans are my secret favorite. I make them more than a few times a month. dried beans are magic, glad we share that truth.

  32. Ha ha! You have to name it “green pie” or something if you put other greens instead of spinach ’cause spanakopita literally means spinach pie in Greek. It’s one of the things I make very well and you can make it richer in spring adding nettles (as somebody already said), and other herbs such as chevril and salad burnet (thank you by the way ’cause I just found out, so I could write it to you, how these two herbs are called in english. I only knew their greek name up ’till now!)
    Put 1/2 a kilo spinach and 2-3 handfulls of the other herbs (or more, as you like), ten spring onions and dill or fennel and you have the perfect “twisted” (in a good way) spanakopita! small tip: because it usually has a lot of juices you could add 3-4 spoonfulls of semolina

  33. Joy, as always your posts and just the simple, lovely, elegant way that you write is so captivating! You are such a great inspiration for amateur chefs/bakers to step above and beyond. Thank you! :)

  34. I do the same thing, although I also tend to do it the other way around: instead of finding a recipe and goofing around with it, I think of a vague idea and look up enough similar recipes to feel validated in my inspiration enough to do what I thought of in the first place. It’s a good part of the creative process to tweak everything, I think.

  35. No one is more surprised than I am that I turned into someone who is willing to experiment with ingredients. My mother is the kind of person who will literally stop cooking if she realizes a recipe calls for something she doesn’t have and run to the store, rather than substitute. Lately I’ve been collecting “base” recipes where I can play with the seasonings and vegetables that I add. Other than baking, it’s been quite awhile since I’ve followed a recipe straight-up.

    PS, one of our cookbooks has a recipe for tofu-kale spanakopita that is UNBELIEVABLE. I do follow that recipe, actually. My husband is not down with cheese, so tofu is an acceptable substitute while still getting our little vegetarian bodies stocked up on protein.

  36. Lovely post! I made my first giant lot of beans this week after my son spent the day using them in place of sand in his sand toys. Does that count as “beyond”?! Still delish!

  37. Great advice Joy. Love the intro about the recipes having a life of their own – I have a mental picture of them rooting around in your kitchen drawers and leaving the counters covered in flour.

  38. Never underestimate the power of a good pot of beans….they usually get a nice long soak on Sunday nights at my house, and then a nice slow simmer on Monday, and are consumed with great enjoyment all week long (especially by my 13-month-old son….total bean enthusiast.) I especially love throwing some crazy farmer’s market cheese rind in with the cooking beans (everything’s better with cheese, right?)

  39. What IS the satisfaction in cooking beans? I noticed the first thing when I did it too. You just feel so. . . what? Romantic is true, but there is something else too. Resourceful, or self-sufficient maybe. It takes you back in time or something. I don’t know, but I love it. It feels sustaining and healthy and old-fashioned. And that bundt cake. . . . Can’t wait to try it. I thought the same thing when I saw it the first go round. I need to make that one soon. Bundt cakes are the love of my dessert life!!

  40. I love this post, especially that last paragraph. Sometimes it’s so easy to get caught up in the need to try out new recipes and come up with new posts that you forget that sometimes food is just for eating & enjoying.

  41. An Everlasting Meal to be purchased come summer when we are back in the states… maybe at the new Book Larder in Seattle. Can’t wait to check out the book and the new store!
    It’s exciting and at times overwhelming how many recipes we come across- I’m actually getting backed up on things I want to post… especially with spring on our heels.
    As for crepes- they are a divine medium with the ability to satisfy the sweet and savory. In a way like philo pastry. They tend to hang out with you in the kitchen for long periods of time, never overstaying their welcome. For Sunday brunch, it was buckwheat crepes with sauteed green & white asparagus, mushrooms, schinken, gouda, fresh thyme and mornay. Today with the leftover crepes, maybe a version of that and/or jam, berries and lightly sweetened cream.
    Coconut crab rice is on for summer.

  42. I really like this post and felt the same way reading “An Everlasting Meal.” It just compels you to do things you don’t normally do in the kitchen, to approach food in a different way, to make simpler meals and to lovingly savor the process, as well as the end result.

    I’ve made beans, I’ve been soft-boiling eggs like there is no tomorrow and I’ve done all kinds of magical things with bread and bread crumbs. Oh, and I also got the original source–M.F.K. Fisher–out of the library. The writing is just as beautiful.

  43. Till a couple of weeks ago I completely followed recipees. Last months I learned so much (Started my blog because I wanted to cook more, try new things and cook more out of my box!)
    Now I am trying to create (my own) new recipees. Sometimes they are inspired by a already existing recipee or a post on a website. Like one from a foodblog, like yours!

    I try to challange myself to create new things with ingredients that are in my fridge and sometimes ingredients that I never used before! Step by step I am learning about ingredients, preperation techniques, photographing… love it!

  44. Hopefully (for us) recipes will never stop knocking at your door.
    I’ve learned so much about cooking/baking since I’ve started “hanging out” on your blog: meringues, cupcakes, etc…
    I’ll definitely try the White Bean Bundt Cake, with my own tweaks, and I will send you the pictures…I’ll try to impress you! :)

  45. You have such recipe ingenuity! Love all your suggested ideas! I will do my best to accept the challenges and make some of these delish dishes :)

  46. I rarely make the same thing twice too, except when requested by my boyfriend to make something specific. If I do try to make it again, it isn’t ever the same, things are added or changed, depending on what’s in the fridge or what I’m in the mood to add. Cooking doesn’t have to be precise all the time and that’s what makes it fun, adding your own twist to recipes. That bundt cake stole my heart and I wanna try it soon! And Tamar Adler, I will have to check him out.

  47. I make a spanakopita with nettles in the spring (https://www.growntocook.com/?p=887) , have not thought of kale but would be a great winter version of spanakopita – will try! Plus I have also been cooking beans all the time after reading Tamar Adler. I got the book after reading about it here and want to thank you for the recommendation

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