Back in August, I fortuitously met Phi of Princess Tofu at a Bay Area food blogger’s picnic on the very same day I’d decided to make a pot of silken oboro tofu at home without a recipe (more on that to come). I selfishly prodded with questions of tofu-making, while scarfing down the gluten-free corn cakes Phi brought to the potluck. She told me about the eternity she spent grinding the recipe’s split pea flour by hand, and the unfortunate fate of her broken hand grinder to boot. This somehow meant the cakes were made with extra love and were decidedly more delicious.
With the promise of recipes, I followed her to her loft where she pulled out one cookbook after another, raving about the merits of each, but resting on Naturally Ella‘s The Homemade Flour Cookbook, where the aforementioned corn cakes recipe came from. With a flood of inspiration, we made plans to spend an entire Sunday grinding flour with my KitchenAid grain mill attachment – a more efficient (yet disturbingly louder) method than the hand-grinder.
With a week’s worth of e-mail chains looping Alanna of The Bojon Gourmet in on the flour fest, we settled on making homemade chickpea flour ravioli with mushrooms and thyme. But first, a trip to the Berkeley Bowl to load up on anything we could possibly imagine sending through the grain mill – chickpeas, red lentils, black wild rice, mung beans, brown sweet rice, buckwheat, and pumpkin seeds. That last one actually went through the blender for fear it’d turn to butter in the mill.
My weekly grocery haul always includes at least 2 stores, but usually 3 to 5. So we stopped off at the Monterey Market, Country Cheese Coffee Market for ‘shrooms, cheese, and more than a week’s worth of other produce we somehow planned to eat over the course of the day. One cooking task is not enough. Then a last-minute visit to 99 Ranch for red bean paste, where despite intentionally leaving her wallet in the car to show restraint, Phi still managed to grab a few more ingredients to spice up the lunchtime pad see ew feast she threw together.
The three of us spent the next 11 hours in the kitchen with the hum of the grain mill in the background, bonding over a common interest in food, rare ingredients, photography, light, and our ginger cat band debut, while we covered every surface in my kitchen with a thin film of homemade flour. Watching the two of them fully absorbed in culinary experimentation motivates me to be bolder in my cooking, to constantly push to try new things, and to not be afraid if it doesn’t work the first time.
