Gingerbread

This is a fairly spicy gingerbread cake. It can be fasting or not--if not, it's great with whipped cream on the top! I brought this a few weeks ago for trapeza.

Gingerbread

2 ½ cups flour

1 ½ tsp baking soda

2 tsp ginger

2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp cloves

(optional—½ tsp black pepper)

½ tsp salt

½ cup melted butter (or coconut oil)

½ cup sugar

1 egg (or ¼ cup water)

1 cup molasses

1 cup hot dark coffee*

Preheat the oven to 350. Grease and flour a 13x9 inch pan.

Sift dry ingredients in a small bowl. In a larger bowl, beat together the butter/oil and sugar; add the egg/water and molasses. Gradually beat in the dry ingredients. When completely combined, slowly mix in the coffee. Batter will be runny. Pour into pan and bake 30-35 minutes.

*Instead of a cup of coffee, I often add some instant coffee granules to the dry ingredients and use plain hot water at the end.

Salt-cured Salmon

Salt-cured Salmon

This is the salmon I brought for trapeza on the Entry of the Theotokos. There's a link to a website below that explains all about it, but basically, this is what I did: Find a glass container large enough to hold the entire fillet, laid out flat. Cover the bottom of the dish with a layer of coarse salt (like Kosher). Rinse off the (thawed) fillet of salmon and lay it, skin-side down, on top of the salt. Cover the top and sides of the fillet with more coarse salt. (I sprinkled some lemon juice--maybe a TBS?--over it as well.) Cover with plastic wrap (or use a lidded dish) and put in the fridge. Let it sit for about 24 hours, checking now and then to make sure all the fish is covered by salt. At around 18 hours it might develop a brine--this is fine--just spoon it back over the fillet. After 24 hours or so (taste a bit to see if it's "done"), brush off the salt and rinse the fish under cold running water (if you're afraid it'll be too salty, you can soak it in cold water for a bit). Thinly slice, and eat! It was so, so good.

I think my fillet was about 1.5 pounds, and I used about 1.5 cups of salt. 

Please read the blog post below for more information!

http://ourmothersdaughters.blogspot.com/2012/09/salmon-cured-at-home-with-ease.html