A Raisin and A Porpoise

swede heart

2012-02-29T08:43:00.019-08:00

Consider, if you will, the rutabaga.

I never really have, aside from the fact that it is one of my favorite things to say. When I was a tot, my mother gave me Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories, a deeply weird collection of fables with names like “How They Bring Back the Village of Cream Puffs When the Wind Blows It Away,” and since then “rutabaga” has been in my top 10. It’s an excellent word. You can say it like a thug from Brooklyn, or with a little tonsil trill like a Swedish soprano might, or use it as a growling expletive, or a very effective courtside cheer for almost any sport. I have done all of these and more, but the rutabaga is not something I have ever really gotten involved with as a food. In fact, I have created a PR problem for it in my house, because whenever anyone asks suspiciously what I will be foisting on them for dinner (I made guacamole out of peas once--just once!--and my reputation has never really rebounded from it), I am likely to say something along the lines of “rutabaga fricassee” or “tangy rutabaga-clam pancakes.”

But now I have cooked a rutabaga, and it was good. Aside from its splendid visuals--purple and yellow! Come on, people!--the rutabaga, or swede, brings a lot to the table, like whopping amounts of vitamin C, iron, calcium and magnesium, and all the health-giving benefits of the Brassica family. The recipe I used came from a totally wonderful cookbook called Veganomicon, by a totally wonderful pair of cooks, Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero of the Post-Punk Kitchen, who have never steered me wrong in all the four books I have known them. They told me to put cilantro in my rutabaga, and I was skeptical. As usual, they were right. But they also said you could make it without cilantro and it would be delicious, and they were right about that, too. They included a dab of agave to sweeten this (2 tsp), which I can see the merits of, but I left it out. Your call.

As a parting gift, here is an action shot from the 14th annual Ithaca Rutabaga Curling Competition.

photo by Jerry Feist

Mashed rutabaga with coconut & lime

adapted from Veganomicon

2 ½ lbs rutabaga, peeled and chunked

¼ c coconut milk (use regular, not light, for maximum deliciousness)

2T lime juice

handful of chopped cilantro (or not)

salt to taste (didn't need much)

Put the rutabaga in a saucepan and cover with water; boil until fork-tender. Drain, and either transfer to a food processor with the remaining ingredients, or attack them right in the pot with a stick blender and see it all turn a lovely bright green. If you are not including the cilantro, you could use a potato masher instead.

you have items in your cart

2012-02-28T07:18:00.012-08:00

                                                                                                                                                          photo: thompson-finch farm

Considering our revolutionary beginnings as a nation, it’s kind of appalling how quickly we turn grassroots movements into Astroturf. Any idea that catches on like wildfire is pretty likely to become merchandised, franchised and sanitized until it’s ready for its close-up. But I have my fingers crossed for the Occupiers that they don’t get an ice cream flavor or cable channel. This is not only because the Slow Food, sustainable farming, local foodshed, food justice and environmental movements (my All-Star Team) have linked up with them, but then again maybe it is. It's pretty exciting to me, this Big Idea that it is all one issue--that fixing the food problems is not peripheral or secondary or frivolous but fundamentally connected to everything that caused the eruption of frustration into action.

If you’d like to read something beautiful and motivating about the very simple things you can do right now to start your own ripple of action, go see Alana. She nails it.

My own ripple started this morning in the freezer. Lately, I find that I am unable to go to the grocery store without sliding into a funk. WhatIsThePointWhyBotherTryingLookAtAllThisCrap is the constant refrain in my head, as I reach glumly for tired vegetables and dodge the leering eyes of the Lunchables and try not to stare menacingly into the cart of the person in front of me at the checkout counter.

But this morning I made a smoothie for my family, and as I pulled the berries out of the freezer I was transported, just for a moment, back in time to the hot, sweaty day I picked them with my children.

Last winter I thought I was being clever and I ordered a bulk bag of frozen organic strawberries, a financial savings over the tiny bags in the regular freezer case, and one that had the additional merit of inhabiting a single plastic bag instead of thirty little ones. But when the bag came it was stamped with its country of origin, and that country was China.

I am not going to mouth off about trade relations with China, or their scandalous lapses in food safety. I am just going to moan about the epic ridiculousness of shipping frozen food from there to here, and the nice little lie we can tell ourselves that buying organic is helping the world, and all the ways we ignore the costs incurred by our choices. OK, I’m done.

So last summer we picked our own strawberries, here, so we could feed our insatiable need for strawberry smoothies without the temptation to go back to that well. One afternoon’s work, and we enjoyed a long winter of restorative happiness. I forgot all about that in my grocery funk, but Alana’s voice and my hand in the freezer reminded me that the little actions we manage to take are not shouts in the wind, but the fuel and the fire both.

So it's Occupy Food Day. Here is a little encouragement to do something, some little thing, today that connects your brain to your mouth, your heart to your stomach, your mind to the hands that brought the food to your family. Alana has a great list of actions in her post. Take special note of the encouragement to taste your food. Your food came from somewhere; chew on that.

Here are a few other trees to bark up:

First of all, if you are not outraged, you are not paying attention. Get some facts:

Four corporations, led by Walmart, control more than half of grocery sales.
Three companies -- Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta -- own 47 percent of the world's seeds.
Nearly every major commodity -- wheat, corn, soy -- is controlled by just four corporations.
Just four corporations control more than 80 percent of all our meat supply.
According to USDA statistics, America loses more than 17,000 farmers a year -- one every half an hour.

Get your chin up off the desk! Little actions, big ripples.

I've said it before, but buy local honey. Why? Read more.

Read good news and spread it.

Stop buying meat in a chain grocery store. This is the big kahuna on your grocery list. Don't clutter your head with which megaproducers are better or anything like that; just don't do it anymore. If dealing directly with a farmer is not practical for your life, then buy your meat somewhere that knows, understands and identifies its sources. Not sure what the terms all mean? Learn what questions to ask. A lot of meat eating depends on not making the mental connection to its source ("pork" sounds better than "piggy") but if you are going to change one thing only, this is the place to start. Fish? Go here.

Renew your vows with your reusable bags, cups, containers and water bottles. You don't need to buy fancy new ones, unless their sex appeal is what will make you actually use them. Shying away from packaging breeds billowing feelings of liberation and mightiness, especially bottled water and disposable coffee cups. Science. It's a fact. Don't bother looking it up, just trust me.

When you have taken some revolutionary action, whatever its magnitude, reward yourself with a cool drink. Oh, and mark that berry-picking day on your calendar now so you don't forget.

dessert for breakfast
makes one

1 c milk
1 tender-ripe pear, peeled and chunked
1 c frozen strawberries
1 tsp honey
dash of vanilla

Blend, baby, blend.

idling

2012-02-27T20:26:00.005-08:00

No food! I made four things in the last two days, not counting some highly medicinal spinach with garlic and lemon that was universally craved after an unpleasant flight home, and all four were flops. I cooked and cooked as dinnertime approached tonight, and still began to feel we were heading for a pizza. I was right. I seem to have forgotten how to cook, so I am going to distract you (and me) with other things.

Last night I had the occasion to yap to someone about the John Irving book A Prayer For Owen Meany. It is not unusual to hear me spouting off about some book or another, either in a rah-rah fashion or more of a poo-poo, but I am especially passionate about this one (rah-rah), because it sustained me through a period of agitated and interminable waiting many years ago. I was stuck in a location I very badly wanted to leave, and could not get a flight out of for 18 hours, and had no desire or ability to explore while I waited. So I read. It occurred to me, as I burrowed into the story, to wonder how people wait when they are not readers.

Thanks to the charmed life I had led to that point, it did not occur to me to wonder how you wait when the level of stress of the waiting makes it unthinkable that you could follow a storyline, or even a sentence, from start to finish, but I have since encountered it. Sometimes knitting serves in this type of situation, because if it is the right kind of knitting you only have to pay attention one stitch at a time, and it keeps your lap warm in the meantime.

One of my good friends is an Olympic-level reader (the quantity that she reads excelled only, in my acquaintance, by the friend who has chronic and severe insomnia) and she was doing that kind of waiting today. She was waiting for her child to come out of surgery. Even she could not read under these circumstances. She also could not knit, under these or any other circumstances. She is one of my most ardent supporters in this venture here, and yet she disagrees with almost everything I have to say, particularly the parts about the satisfaction and relaxation that proceed from making things yourself. The very prospect of making something herself, in the kitchen or in any other room, makes her anxious and unhappy. She told me so again today, perhaps suspecting that I might suggest she lose herself in a tatting project while waiting for the doctor to come out and give her a report. I had no such notions, of course.

But when she said that she was relieving tension by thinking of all the things she was not making, I did compose a little guided meditation for her. She wanted me to make it widely available because maybe someone else in the world would feel the knots leave their neck muscles when they read it, and considering that she almost never asks for anything, and considering the whole forgetting-how-to-cook thing, I am doing as she asks.

Not Crafting: A Meditation

You are not halfway through needlepointing the second of a set of 12 new seats for the dining room chairs.

You won't waste precious time worrying over the choice between felting new Christmas stockings for the whole family and knitting them.

It will not fall to you to prepare tiny canapés or éclairs for a crowd.

No sock darning is on the horizon.

Is your immediate area free of rubber stamps and gel pens? Thought so.

You will never need to purchase or borrow a set of aspic cutters.

It’s highly unlikely that the need to find a glue stick will come up before you get to bed.

IT TOTALLY DOES NOT MATTER IF YOU KNOW WHERE TO GET PINKING SHEARS.

Maybe tomorrow I will remember how to cook.

piece of cake

2012-02-24T21:01:00.006-08:00

I do not have a funny story to tell you. I do not even have a picture. But I do have cake.

My mother made friends with the man in the bakery, where she cannot buy anything because all the nice treats in it are made with wheat flour. It’s a general truth (with certain exceptions, as most general truths will have) that wheat flour is what makes things in a bakery tasty.

The man in the bakery said he knew how to make a cake with no flour that he thought my mother would like. Ha, I said, when I heard this. Treats without wheat flour sometimes taste good, say if you buy these cookies, or sell your car and use the proceeds to buy some of this flour, but generally speaking fluffy yummy cake is well outside the reach of the home cook, especially if that cook is unwilling to get involved with xanthan gum, which the very costly flour does contain.

The bakery man scrawled out a recipe on a piece of yellow paper for my mother, and we made it. I was a little too relaxed about folding in the egg whites, and also the man in the bakery conceded he may have been a little off in the amount of baking powder he had written down. More flavor was called for, too. So the first cake, while nice, was texturally a little off.

That’s all behind us now. All necessary adjustments have been made, and now all of us know how to make a gluten-free cake that has no weird gums in it and does not keep your incisors sanded down thanks to its gritty undertones. It is fluffy cake, bless its soul. You could serve it to anyone, whatever their position on gluten.

We scarfed it down plain, but vision of berries and cream, or heaps of delightful frosting--birthday cake!!--danced in my head. Apologies to egg-not-eaters and potato-avoiders--your day will come.

fluffy cake

4 eggs, at room temperature, separated

1 c unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 c sugar

1 ¼ c potato starch

1 ¼ t baking powder

pinch of salt

1 ½ t vanilla

finely grated zest of two lemons

Preheat oven to 350. Butter a 9” cake pan, line the bottom with a circle of parchment paper, and re-butter the parchment. Now dust the pan with a couple of teaspoons of potato starch. Have a baking sheet ready. Make sure the oven rack is in the center of the oven, not too high, not too low.

Cream the butter well with the sugar, until light. Beat the yolks in one at a time, beating well after each, and beat in the zest and vanilla.

Combine the potato starch and baking powder, and add these to the butter mixture.

In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites with the pinch of salt to firm peaks. Gently combine about a fourth of the whites with the butter mixture, to lighten it, and then, using a large spatula or balloon whisk, very gently and patiently fold in the remaining whites.

Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and gently smooth the top. Place the pan on the baking sheet and bake 20 minutes. Reduce the oven heat to 325 degrees, and bake for another 20 minutes. It will look very done before this, but gird up your loins and keep baking.

Let the cake cool on a rack for as long as you can restrain yourself, then invert onto a rack and remove the parchment. Turn right side up onto a plate and have at it.

finding my mojo

2012-02-23T12:05:00.006-08:00

We went out for Cuban food in Miami last night at a diner where all the young table staff seemed to be calling the man who seated us “Tío” as they raced back and forth through the packed dining room. The main culinary activity took place in the blender (“the waitress cannot come because she is making your chakes now,” we were told) and in the deep fryer. So it was all pretty delicious. I think we ate the best tostones I have ever had. If you have never experienced them, tostones are crisp little Frisbees made of green plaintains and they owe their most appealing qualities to the fact that they are fried not once but twice. These were fried exceptionally well both times, and enhanced by a sauce that I yelped for when the waitress attempted to clear it. Later on, after I had poured it all over my black beans and rice, I asked her what was in it. “Garlic, lemon juice, bay leaf,” I said, and she nodded. “Also vinegar,” she added. “But the rest of the ingredients are all a secret. It’s the secrets that make the food so delicious, so we can’t tell the rest.” She made an expression of sympathy for my long face, then added, “Es muy rica, no?” as if to remind me that there was ample consolation for my disappointment to be found in just eating it. She had a point.

The lack of honor in the room was made plain by my asking the Tío fellow the same question as we departed, and by his telling me the answer. “Not much lemon juice. Instead they use naranja amarga, which gives a better flavor. And a little pepper. And some parsley.” To make sure I understood, he moved the main ingredients into English for me. “BEE-tair OH-ronj. Leaf of LOW-rell. And what do you call it? Seelery? No, PAIRslee.” I saw no evidence of parsley in the dish on the table, so I think it must be removed after imparting its flavor.

The beetair ohronj he referred to seems, upon googling, to be a Seville orange, and the concoction itself Mojo ("mo-ho") Sauce, for which there appear to be roughly fifty million formulas on the surface of the internet. Some have raw garlic, some include onion, some have butter or chile or basil or cilantro or oregano. Not right. A lot of the ones I saw online featured cumin, which I love, but that was definitely not a feature of what I ate.

For those of us lacking a Seville orange tree in the yard--and that would be a highly controversial plant, as it happens, because the extract of same is now marketed as an appetite suppressant that can kill you--it appears you can substitute a mixture of fresh lime juice and fresh orange juice, plus some orange extract. I used a scrape of orange zest instead. I can tell you, if you are able to get your mitts on some Seville oranges, that neither appetite suppression nor death appeared to result in any immediate way from the sauce, at least not in the quantity I ingested, which was substantial.

The woman in the market where I bought the PAIR-slee and the oh-ranj said with total disdain that mojo sauce could not be prepared with a mere navel orange, even if a lime was called into play, and this strong opinion was in spite of the fact that she freely admitted that she was Chilean.

Maybe she is right. I think this one below, a triangulation from a very straightlaced author and the information I got in my eyes, ears, and gaping beak last night, is pretty tasty, but it wasn't what we ate. Everyone agreed on that. "This isn't quite it," they said, ladling more onto their plates. Clearly there is room for variation.

For those of us unwilling to make twice-fried anything to serve this on, it seems to work equally well on top of grilled or steamed or roasted anything, as well as rice and beans.

mojo sauce

1/3 cup olive oil
6 to 8 cloves garlic, minced

Combine in a measuring cup with a spout:

2/3 cup sour orange juice or lime juice
(or equal portions orange juice and lime juice, plus a drop of orange extract or a scrape of orange zest)

2T white vinegar

3T water

2 bay leaves, torn

a few stalks of parsley, whole
About a teaspoon of coarse salt

Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Heat the olive oil in a deep saucepan over medium heat until a test piece of garlic sizzles lightly. Add the rest of the garlic and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Don't let it brown or it will be bitter.

Add the remaining ingredients. STAND BACK or the resulting sputter may disfigure you. Bring to a low boil. Remove from heat and remove the parsley. Taste and correct salt and pepper, if needed.

Makes about a cup of sauce, which is a lot. The extra will keep, and maybe you have a nice jar to put it in. We did not.

faking stock

2012-02-19T11:51:00.000-08:00

soup is a much nicer color than this

I have a poem pinned up by my desk that is printed on a bright green card and titled “A Poem To Pray For Spring.” I picked it up in a bookstore somewhere a few years ago and have had it up on one wall or another ever since. Peering at the back of it now, I see that it was a promotional piece for a poetry anthology, and that the poem turns out not to be titled that at all, but rather to be a segment of a very long poem by Swinburne called “Atalanta in Calydon.” Swinburne is worth a google or two just for the hairstyles you will see represented, and for the fact that he attended Oxford except for a brief period when he was “rusticated.” I think that is almost as good a word as “defenestrated,” except that it only means “suspended,” whereas the latter is a fancy word for throwing someone or something out a window.

You may also discover (or I can save you the time) that Oscar Wilde said of Swinburne that “he perhaps professed to more vice than he actually indulged in,” which is a pretty pithy epitaph.

Even though we haven’t had much of a winter since that one day in October, we are feeling the thrilling shift towards springtime and in honor of that, here is the snippet of poem:

For winter's rains and ruins are over,

And all the season of snows and sins;

The days dividing lover and lover,

The light that loses, the night that wins;

And time remembered is grief forgotten,

And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,

And in green underwood and cover

Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

Of course--I am sure you were thinking the same--this leads us right to soup. Of course! When I came across this parsnip soup recipe, all the comments raved about its springiness and its lovely bright green color, which made me think of the poem on the card, natch. If you make this soup, you may find that it tastes like it has cream in it, which relates in some meaningful way to professing to more vice than you indulge in, and proves something--about parsnips, or poetry, or something that might be wrong with my mind.

About the soup stock: I was a vegetarian for so long that I kind of don’t miss chicken stock as a base for most soup. I just use water, generally. Making vegetable stock is tricky; making one that does not taste like dishwater takes some time and patience. Buying it is tricky, too, the shelves laden with over-salted, fakey-flavored and BPA-laden liquids that will spoil your soup. Water won’t ever do that to a girl.

Now I am not a vegetarian anymore, but still I usually make soup with water as the liquid. Thanks to this hot tip, I also now have a nice little stash of vegetable stock concentrate in the fridge, and that is so worth the hour it took to make it. Fear not the making of this concentrate; it is child’s play (except don’t let your child play with the food processor, not on my recommendation anyway) and it is money in the bank. I used it to make this soup, but I think you could be happy using chicken stock if youhave access to a nice one or just fiddling around with salt and lemon as seasonings. I added no salt other than what was in my components here, because the parsnipitude shines nicely without it.

snip snoup

Adapted from Simply Recipes

2 Tbsp butter

3 leeks, white and pale green parts only, sliced lengthwise, cleaned, sliced crosswise into 1/4-inch slices

2 Tbsp olive oil

1 1/2 to 2 pounds parsnips, peeled and chopped

2 wide strips of lemon zest, or 1-2 tsp preserved lemon

6 cups water, or 2 c stock and 4 c water, or 6 c water and 1T stock concentrate

2 cups chopped fresh parsley (reserve a little for garnish)

Wedges of lemon and drizzles of good olive oil, to serve

Heat butter in a 4 to 6 quart pot over medium heat. Add the chopped leeks and toss to coat. When the leeks are heated enough so they begin to sizzle in the pan, lower the heat and cover the pan. Cook until soft, but don't let the leeks brown.

Add the parsnips and olive oil, and toss to coat. Add whatever version of stock and water you are using, and the strips of lemon zest or little chunk of preserved lemon. Bring to a boil and reduce to a low simmer. Cover and cook until the parsnips are completely tender, about 15 minutes.

If you used lemon zest, remove and discard it. Add the parsley. Purée the soup until smooth, either by using an immersion blender or by working in batches with a stand-up blender and following sensible precautions so you do not explode the hot soup all over yourself. Adjust salt to taste, if needed.

Festoon the top of each bowl of soup with a squeeze of lemon, a dribble of olive oil and some parsley. Admire the color. Toast to spring.

Serves 6.

may I please be excused?

2012-02-18T07:26:00.000-08:00

I seem to have wandered away from the table here. This is mainly a result of practicality. In two days, we are leaving for five so I am cooking to clean out the fridge and not pausing to take pictures of what results.

While I do that, and also contact a psychic to see if she can conjure a mental image of where we stored every single pair of swim goggles we own as they have vanished and we suspect they are all together, and also check the EWG’s Skin Deep website to see if we can purchase a sunscreen that does not feel like peanut butter, stink of wild carrots, cost $50 per tube or cause genetic mutations in endangered caterpillars, I can also be found guest-posting on my friend Suzi’s website.

There is a lot to be said for and about my friend Suzi. It is good to have friends who, when you call and say, “I need you,” answer “where?” before they ask “why?” I am wealthy in this kind of friend, and Suzi is absolutely and recently and frequently one of them. Here, also, is a woman who understands the implications of hundreds of pounds of gooseberries ripening near your home, and a person who will place a gentle boot at your back when you stand at the door of the plane, because she has helped you sew the parachute and is ready to dive right there with you. She’s a courageous chick, and we all know courage is not the absence of fear, but the willingness to recognize that something else is more important.

This is her post on where we intersect on these matters, and there is a link about halfway down to a post I wrote for her series, "Out Of The Mouths Of Babes."

no calories

2012-02-17T06:14:00.000-08:00

No fork food today.

Something else to feed you with, thanks to Glutton For Life's Friday hit list.

In other news, if you find yourself with an itchy clicking finger, aim it at bee-killing pesticides, Monsanto's GMO corn, Frankenfish, or the dark side of pop culture and fire away. It's the work of a moment, I swear.

Going to go work on my outfit now. Keep an eye out for me on the street later; I'll be easy to spot.

reweeding

2012-02-16T09:40:00.000-08:00

The other day at the grocery store, I heard a woman (a well-heeled woman, who had parked next to me so I saw her snazzy wheels and knew this shocking thing I am about to tell you was not likely an issue of cash flow) ask the young man in the produce department where she could find fresh mint. He pointed it out. She said, “can I buy half a bunch?” and to my amazement, he said yes. “Good,” she said. “And I want half a bunch of basil, too.”

The very idea! Nice Produce Guy says that happens frequently enough that they have a policy about it, which apparently is to say yes even though it is possibly the silliest thing I can imagine asking a produce guy, other than maybe “can you peel this orange for me, and then can I pay less per pound?”

My reactionary response is a recipe for a metric butt-load of dip, because I was loathe to leave you with either the desire to ask the produce person for half a bunch of dandelions, or if that proves untenable to you, with half a bunch of dandelions themselves.

Dandelions continue to be the snappiest-looking things in the greens aisle, so I continue to seek out ways to make them into something. I started out thinking I was making pesto here, and I bet you could use it that way. So far, I am just eating it, but I watched someone in the kitchen spread it on bread, and someone else glopped it onto some noodles.

For the olives here I used the regular old kind you might put in your martini, not anything fancy, and I like the sweetness of the almonds to balance out the strong taste of the greens but you could make do with another nut that amuses you. These proportions made something quite thick that sits nicely on a piece of bread; increase the olive oil a bit and use just 1/4 cup of nuts to get something more sauce-like. If the quantity exceeds your capacity, I think it would freeze well.

dandelion pesto

makes about 1.5 cups

1 bunch of dandelion greens

about 4 ozs baby spinach leaves

¾ c EV olive oil

1/2 to 2 cloves garlic, as you prefer

½ c pitted green olives

2t preserved lemon, or 2 t lemon juice and a pinch of salt

3.5 ozs feta cheese, crumbled

¼ c raw sunflower seeds

½ c raw almonds

Thoroughly wash the greens so you don't end up with grit in your dip. Nobody likes that. Chop off the thicker stem-ends of the dandelion and discard (or give them to a sheep, if one lives nearby), and then coarsely chop the leaves. Place about a third of the greens in the container of a blender or food processor with the olive oil and garlic and whizz to break them down a bit, then add another third of the greens, or as the capacity of your machine indicates until they are all in there. When all the greens are roughly chopped, add the remaining items and process to your desired degree of smoothness. Taste and adjust seasonings.

get snippy with me

2012-02-15T03:52:00.001-08:00

I confess to liking the kind of hippie food that alarmed carnivores fear from vegetarians. My sister and I used to frequent a macro-neurotic restaurant (OK, that’s not really what it’s called--I know that) that lay conveniently between our two apartments, and I still crave those plain grains and steamed greens and beverages made of twigs and bark, though I am less likely to go to a restaurant to get my hands on some than I was back when I was a callow youth. One night when we met for dinner I remember that we had to go somewhere else because my sister said she had had a long day at work and she was not up for “all that chewing,” which is certainly a factor in that particular style of healthful dining.

But there are some foods that only sound like they are going to fall into this category. They turn out to be so much less weird and commune-conjuring than the ingredients suggest they will be that it would be better for the cook to construct them in secret, where none of the suspect ingredients can be observed and hearts hardened against them, and then just whisk them into the mouths of the waiting diners before they can ask any questions.

I pulled that off tonight, but only because on Tuesdays dinner happens in shifts and I made these in between the first wave of eaters and the second, when no one was lingering around in the kitchen. They sound heavily weird, I am just going to warn you, but they don’t taste that way. I swear. Independent tastebuds that would not get close enough to a millet croquette to hit it with a mallet confirm this, as does the photographic evidence of small digits snatching them off the plate as fast as I could try to aim the camera at them.

What of the parsnip, anyway? I just learned it is the closest cousin to parsley, which in some varieties grows with a thick and very parsnip-esque root. Earlier today, in a random event having nothing intentional to do with parsnips, I came across an article in a 2010 New Yorker (this is about the standard delay at which we come across issues of the New Yorker) about root vegetables. In it the writer, Jane Kramer, laments the lack of parsley roots in NYC green-groceries. Apparently it is a hot item in Croatian cooking, especially if you want to stew a rabbit, which I never do. Parsnips are high in potassium and fiber and--perhaps more compelling for the younger customers--are an important food for several butterfly species. Mainly they are tasty, with all of a carrot’s sweetness and a lot more flavor.

OK, I have danced around long enough. I am going to have to tell you what is on these parsnips. I just ask that you keep an open mind.

parsnip oven fries

adapted from here

4 medium parsnips, peeled and cut into sticks (or substitute any root vegetable)

3 T almond butter

1T EV olive oil

pinch of sea salt

pinch of cayenne

Preheat the oven to 400 and line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper. In a medium bowl, mix the nut butter, oil, salt and cayenne. Toss the sticks of parsnip (or rutabaga, if you swing that way) in the mix until thoroughly coated and spread in a single layer on the prepared baking sheet. Roast for about 35 minutes, moving them around occasionally, until they are crisp on the edges. Over-roasted is better than under-roasted. Eat the first one quizzically, with a little hesitation, and then find you have finished the tray.

I was going to suggest, before I made these, that the coating be duded up with some fresh ginger or lime zest, or a finishing salt, but I am glad I made them plain. Parsnips have a mysterious spiciness to them, and it was nicely supported by the little tix of heat from the cayenne and the tiny bit of salt was all it needed.

two for tuesday

2012-02-14T07:14:00.000-08:00

Lucky girl that I am, I can be found today guest-posting over here at Glutton For Life. Thank you, Laura!

good morning

2012-02-14T05:20:00.001-08:00

portion control

2012-02-13T08:15:00.000-08:00

When I was pregnant with my first daughter, the midwives sent me in to see their new staff nutritionist to evaluate my vegetarian diet. If you have a mental stereotype for a dietician or nutritionist, it is quite likely it looks a lot like she did: pert, earnest and tidy, with her brand-new diploma hanging right over her desk. She asked me to fill out a diet summary and I did it diligently, recording all my protein sources and so forth. She began to look it over. “Now here with the tofu,” she said, tapping the paper with her pen, “what size portion would you say you consume? And here with the peanut butter,” (tap, tap)” is that about a two tablespoon portion?” And so on down the list, until I knew without much doubt that 16 years of being the vegetarian daughter of a worried Jewish mother was better preparation for reviewing my pregnant diet than whatever it was she had done to earn her diploma. But if doubt remained, it lasted only until she got to the bottom of my list.

“What about casseroles?” she asked. “Do you eat casseroles?” I said I didn’t. “Well you should,” she said with certainty, patting my list. “Two to three portions per week.” What they might be made of was not addressed.

My husband and I spent the rest of the pregnancy thinking up Horrifying Casseroles we might pretend we made weekly. Baked Snickers with Crack, and so on. But we behaved ourselves and didn't tease her, because I never went back.

As luck would have it, a few years later when my sisters and I were wrangling a collection of little cousins whom we often fed together, I stumbled across a recipe for Chilaquile Casserole in a Mollie Katzen cookbook. Making it as I did back then, I felt like I had either just stepped into our out of the test kitchens of a women’s magazine. A package of this, a jar of that, open a can, and presto! Six portions of casserole! I wanted to call up the nutritionist and let her know. But it was delicious and nourishing and totally simple to make and we abused the privilege of its discovery so severely that my oldest nephew re-christened it “Chili-Kill-Me Casserole.”

It is not really a recipe, I guess, but more of a platform on which to build something you will find tasty. I hope you enjoy your portion.

chilaquile casserole

Adapted from Mollie Katzen’s Still Life With Menu

The basics:

12 uncooked corn tortillas

2-3 cups of coarsely-grated jack or mild cheddar cheese

dashes of salt, pepper, cumin and/or chile powder

3 large eggs

2 ¼ c buttermilk

The options:

1-2 cups cooked, drained pinto or black beans (or use some leftover black bean soup or chili--just try to steer clear of canned beans)

1-2 c shredded cooked chicken or turkey, or browned ground meat

1 c corn kernels

1 4-oz can of chopped roasted green chiles

1 to 1 1/2 cups of salsa

1-2 c cubed roasted potatoes

Oil a 2-quart baking dish. Cut a stack of 4 tortillas in half and then quarters, so you have four little stacks of wedges, and repeat for the other two stacks of 4. Cover the bottom of the dish with one set of these wedges, and layer on half of your chosen additions, followed by one third of the cheese. Lay on the next set of wedges and repeat. Top off with the remaining wedges.

Beat the buttermilk, eggs and seasonings together and pour gently over the top. Distribute the remaining cheese on top (you can also reserve a few tablespoons of salsa to glob decoratively on the surface), and let stand at least 20 minutes before baking. You can pause here for a few hours if you want to bake it later; just put it in the fridge and let it come to room temp before you bake it, uncovered, at 375 for about 35 minutes, or until golden on top and apparently set.

For a true Good Housekeeping glow, be hereby informed that this serves well hot or at whatever temperature it is when you arrive at a potluck with it, doubles easily and re-heats without complaining.

counter measures

2012-02-11T10:28:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, a week that has been full of bran muffins

can lead you,

on Saturday,

to a completely

different

place:

oh, grate

2012-02-10T09:59:00.000-08:00

Who da man? Who. Da. MAN?

Am I going to let a muffin beat me? No, I am not. The muffin does not drive this bus.

I started thinking about this star-crossed muffin because I was thinking about wooden spoons. I have a motley and beloved collection of them, and I could tell you where I got each one and how each received its distinguishing blemish: the crack in the one that was a party favor at my friend's Maine wedding, from when I used it in my giant Squeezo food mill and got it caught in the works; the chip in the one from the craft fair where I couldn't find my daughter for five harrowing minutes, from when I whapped that one too hard on the side of the polenta pot. And so on. For years my mother had one with one third of the spoon-end missing and it looked like that because in the winter we would make hot bran mash for the horses, and my sister let the pony lick the spoon and he forgot himself for a moment and bit the end off. I understood his enthusiasm. Hot bran mash on a cold morning is pretty enticing, and I dipped into it myself pretty freely on the way out to the barn.

In New York in the 80’s, as I recall, a bran muffin was a hot item. It was big news all of a sudden that bran was good for you, and people in the early morning in New York in the 1980’s seemed often to be looking for something that was good enough for them that it would reverse the effects of whatever they had done the night before. The bran muffin I remember from those days was dark brown and kind of like a shot put that seemed to be made of wood shavings and sugar. Digesting it occupied most of the morning, if you happened to in fact eat it--often enough, I think people felt enough virtuous cleansing from the purchase, from eyeing the doughnut and then ordering the muffin, that they just left it on their desks. ( I have a friend who believes this principle explains why Stephen Hawking's book was a best-seller. People felt smart enough buying it, and having it around, that reading it kind of didn't come up for a lot of them.)

This bran muffin goes down a little easier than those old ones did, though I suppose it won't entice you if I say it tastes more like horse food than something in a city bakery cart. Probably that would only entice me. This one combines oat bran and flax meal, which is high in lots of things we know we ought to get more of, like omega 3s and lignans and fiber (ooh--that last one is something I actually understand!). Flax meal seemed like such a good idea even in the 8th century, before nutritionists, that King Charlemagne passed a law requiring his subjects to eat it. Now there’s some big government action a person can get behind.

I used golden flax meal for this because it is prettier, which may be why I think it tastes better, but you could use the regular stuff. I shred everything on my box grater because it is easy to wash, or at least this is how I console myself for not having a food processor, and also because the choice of grating options means that I can make the carrots less carrot-y, which may nudge these muffins up a few points in the polls in your district. When I grated them coarsely, I heard some grumbling about too many carrots.

Most of the people around here take a dim view of raisins in the muffins, but I think a case could be made for adding them, along with some toasted pecans, if that's how you roll.

pony muffins

makes 12

2 carrots, peeled and finely grated (about a cup)

1 apple, peeled and coarsely grated (a scant cup)

1 egg

1 c buttermilk

1/2 c sugar

1/2 t vanilla

3/4 c golden flax meal

3/4 c oat bran

1 1/4 c whole spelt flour or ww pastry flour

2 t baking powder

1/2 t baking soda

pinch of salt

1/4 tsp ground cardamom or 1/2 t crushed cardamom seed

6T butter, melted

optionally:

1/2 c raisins, soaked in hot water for a few minutes and drained

1/2 c chopped toasted pecans

Preheat the oven to 350, and prepare a 12-cup muffin pan by lining the cups with paper liners or lightly greasing them.

Set the butter to melting over low heat.

Mix the grated items, the egg, the buttermilk, the vanilla and the sugar in a medium bowl.

Combine the dry ingredients in a smaller bowl. Dump this into the liquid mixture and lightly combine, then add the melted butter and the raisins and/or nuts if you are using them, and mix lightly until dry ingredients are no longer obvious. Divide among the 12 cups and bake about 20 minutes, or until tops spring back when you press them lightly.

skinny dipping

2012-02-09T07:45:00.001-08:00

When my oldest--who is about to get her driver's license may the good great spirit above bless and protect her--was about three years old, the parents at her school decided to produce a cookbook. The idea was to raise a little money for the school, and maybe we did. In the manner of such projects, we did it at such a cost to personal time and energies that it probably would not hold up to careful cost/benefit analyses, were it not for the lasting effect that we all have a copy of this now-tattered cookbook. The thing is gorgeous, thanks to my friend Julie. She had the idea to go all Moosewood and made us hand-write the recipes, and if it is possible to use a scanner lovingly, that is just what she did on dozens of our children's drawings, which illustrate the pages. There is something wild and fantastic about the drawings of a 3 to 6 year old. For one thing, they have almost no self-consciousness about getting anything to look "right," so they draw freely. For another, I think they are still receiving messages from the home planet; I swear I can see antennae crackling over their heads as they earnestly transcribe some wild mental image to the page.

One of the best sections of the book is a compendium of little ways to get reluctant eaters to eat. Two of the most magical methods, which I continue to employ happily with eaters of all ages, are to impale things on a stick, and to serve them with dip. Dip rocks. With dip, persons overcome their objections in many surprising ways. The vegetable is just a utensil, after all, to get more dip.

I have moaned enough about eating travel-weary vegetables in the winter that I could use a few tricks myself to make them go down more appealingly. The main problem I encountered making this dip was fitting my head into the blender container to get all the dip out, and I hope you face the same.

This recipe calls for preserved lemons. If you don't have any of these, use a fat pinch of salt in their place and vow to get your hands on some, or make some yourself.

vegetable lubricant
makes about 3/4 cup

2T tahini
1T raw sunflower seeds
1/2 cup or one good handful of flat-leaf parsley
1/4 c good olive oil
2 slices of preserved lemon (about 2T)
2T lemon juice
2T water
1 t cumin
pinch to 1/4 t cayenne pepper or paprika, to taste

Put all of this in a blender and blend, baby, blend. It will be a gorgeous green color. Although I didn't manage it for the photo above, serve it with skinny twigs of carrot, fennel, cucumber, jicama, endive, celery, bell pepper, sweet japanese turnip, radish--whatever looks good. Make the twiglets skinny, so people reach for them without thinking too hard about whether or not they object to that vegetable on principle.

worth beans

2012-02-08T10:20:00.000-08:00

OK, forget muffins. Muffins are over-rated. If you can’t forget muffins, please go try these muffins, which cannot be over-rated enough, and for which certain members of my family were pining yesterday as the counter piled up with bad muffins of other sorts. Please note for best results I recommend adding 2T of cornstarch to this batter because it radically improves the texture; also you have to track down almond flour, which is different from almond meal, and can be found here and will make a great addition to your pantry.

Black bean soup is a much better topic, I think. Black bean soup behaves, and a big pot of it will ease your mealtime pain for days and days. Three vectors converge on my black bean soup, and I will sketch them out for you.

Vector # 1: Greens Restaurant in San Francisco

Going to this restaurant in my 20’s was a revelation. After ten years of trying to quietly assemble a vegetarian entrée on the occasions that I found myself in fancy restaurants, it was heaven to be in a fancy restaurant that was all about vegetarians. Subtle, delicious, meticulous, intricate food for vegetarians! Wild stuff.

The cookbook was a revelation, too. Subtle, delicious, meticulous, intricate food is not made in a snap. Each recipe in that book takes a chunk out of your day; frequently one of the items lurking on the ingredient list is “a batch of X, on page Y” which has its own nine-yard-long list of steps and ingredients. But the black bean soup, which I had been told repeatedly could and should only be made with plenty of pork, was delicious. Almost worth the steps.

Vector #2: Laurie Colwin, natch

Laurie Colwin has a recipe for black bean soup in her essay collection More Home Cooking which is the perfect inverse of the one above. It is made in the proverbial snap in a largely hands-off process which is revolutionary, but less flavorful. Aiming for the middle ground between the two has produced a black bean soup that outperforms muffins any day of the week.

Vector #3: The Goddess Miranda

I have known my friend Miranda since I was a tot and she taught me (I know what she thinks I am going to say here but that is not the story I was planning to tell so HA) that is was possible to drink chocolate milk through a straw in your nose. I have yet to try it out personally, but she demonstrated so I know it is true. Whatever this gastronomic accomplishment might suggest to the contrary, Miranda is an epic chef. Her husband’s sweet toast on their wedding day revolved around the role of her cooking in winning his heart. It was a PG story in every respect but the tone of his voice as he said these two words: “lobster ravioli,” which to this day make me blush a little when I see them on a menu. Anyway Miranda once bet this husband of hers that he could not go five days without discussing flatulence, and to stack the odds in her favor, on Sunday of the week in question she made a big pot of black bean soup WITHOUT PRE-SOAKING THE BEANS.

What you can take from this is two-fold: one, whatever Laurie Colwin tells you to do will make your life easier and better, except the part about not having to soak your beans first. Two, it is a wise person who makes a large pot of black bean soup on Sunday. All odds will be stacked in this person’s favor for the week ahead. Black bean soup is tasty enough on the day you make it, but it improves so much on the subsequent days that making a large pot is unquestionably the right move.

If you have not soaked your beans overnight and MUST HAVE THIS SOUP, rest assured you can quick soak them by putting them in a pot with water to cover, bringing it to a boil and turning off the heat. Let them stand 30 minutes to an hour and off you go. Also be sure to look for a pure chile powder; commercial chili powder is usually a blend of spices and includes salt, which will toughen the beans if you add it too soon. Finally, I bet you could make this in a slow cooker, instead of the oven, once you have sautéed everything.

triple vector black bean soup

3 c dry black beans, soaked and drained

3T olive oil

2 medium onions, finely chopped

4 cloves garlic, minced

2 T mild pure chile powder, such as ancho

4 t ground cumin

1 t mild paprika

2t dried oregano

1 25-oz jar of pure Italian tomatoes

a large handful of fresh cilantro, chopped

1 4-oz can of chopped roasted green chiles

optionally: ½ to 1 chipotle in adobo sauce, to taste, for extra heat

salt to taste

To serve, some or all of these:

Grated cheddar or jack
Green salsa
This fresh green sauce: large handful of minced cilantro, 1T minced scallion or shallot, juice of a lime, pinch of cayenne or minced fresh jalapeño, pinch of sugar, all mixed well together
Dollop of plain yogurt
Corn tortillas, warmed

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

In an oven-proof pot (I use my Dutch oven), heat the olive oil and sauté the onions over medium heat until they soften. Add the ground spices and the garlic, and sauté a minute or two longer, until the fragrance is all around you. Add the beans, the tomatoes and three jars full of water, stir well and bring this to a simmer. Cover the pot, put it in the oven and turn the oven down to 250. Go on about your day. Stir if you feel like it, from time to time. After 2- 3 hours, see if the beans are totally soft (this will depend on the age of your beans). Keep going if not. If they are, take the pot out and turn off the oven. You can pause the soup-making at this point if you need to.

When you are ready to resume or continue, toss the chopped cilantro and the chipotle pepper if you are using it into the pot and use a hand blender to attack the cilantro heap, and then bounce it around the pot to partially blend the soup. It should be smoothish, but with texture. Add the green chiles and about 2t of salt and taste for heat and salt and adjust to your liking.

The more times you let this mixture cool and then reheat it, the more the texture will improve and the flavors will deepen and it even looks better, all shiny and nice. You can ladle it into bowls or over cornbread or rice or baked potatoes or, especially as it thickens, into burritos or over nachos. It freezes well, too.

half baked

2012-02-07T09:47:00.000-08:00

Well, I wanted to write about muffins today, but the muffins are not behaving. A little scuffle like that, with the clock ticking down on the time I have to cook and write today, is enough to make me question this whole enterprise. (I am easily led astray.)

The last time I felt this way, which was the day before yesterday, or maybe it was the time three days before that, I randomly opened a big book of M.F.K. Fisher's writing and found something wonderful.

So, maybe you will get muffins tomorrow. Today, you get M.F.K. Fisher instead.

People ask me: why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do?...

The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it...and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied...and it is all one.

I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness.

There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more insistent hungers. We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we'll be no less full of human dignity.

There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?

bitter, sweet

2012-02-05T11:39:00.000-08:00

The lambing season got off to a bitter start yesterday, with two stillborn lambs. Bitterly sad, such a waste of all the energy devoted to creating two such beautiful creatures. Eunice, their mother, was one of our first ewes and so has been with us for a while. Maybe because she is the most robust eater of our flock, and a big girl herself, she can generally be counted on for strapping, healthy lambs. During the Valentine’s Day blizzard a few years ago, several weeks before the lambs were due and while my husband was on the highway chasing a passport renewal for the vacation we were set to leave on in 24 hours, and while the snow was flying too thick to see one’s hands fly up to the sky in defeat, Eunice produced a lamb the size of a small pony. She has a sense of humor, as well as a good appetite.

Birthing is always a tightrope, a “perfectly ordinary miracle,” in the words of one midwife I know. I have done it and I have witnessed it enough times to know that the frightening moment of recognition of the perilous balance between worlds in which mother and baby can hover is not a rare component of the proceedings. Both times I watched my sisters do it, I saw that moment plain as day. “I could give up now," said their eyes, and then they didn’t, and all was well.

Generally if a ewe is walking that knife-edge, the movements and scent of her wobbly baby will bring her around. We couldn’t offer that to Eunice, who clearly knew all was not right. She arched her neck along the ground, and her eyes rolled. I took her head in my hands. I talked to her, and we offered her coin in the currency we know she values: a slick of molasses, a nibble of grain. This tickle of her senses seemed to tip her back over to our side. My husband arranged her so she could stand, and she stood. A bitter day, and a restorative mouthful of sweetness.

We trundled off to a dinner party later that day, not in the best of spirits. It was a lovely group, in a lovely house, and at the end of the meal our hostess left the table for about three minutes and produced a dessert that was perfect. Bitter and sweet, light but with enough richness to satisfy. Restorative.

Here it is:

oranges with caramel and cream

6 or 8 oranges, a mix of blood oranges, navels and maybe a cara cara if they look good

a pint of heavy cream

a dash of vanilla

1 c sugar

¼ c water

Using a very sharp knife, cut the ends from the oranges and set them upright. Cut the peel and pith away from all sides, and lay the oranges on their sides to cut slices a little less than ½ “ thick. Remove any stray seeds from the slices, and arrange them in a dish where they will be no more than two slices deep. If you like, you can sluice them with a splash of wine or other spirits, or leave them plain. Whip the cream and the dash of vanilla to soft peaks.

Now you have done all your prep work, and you can leave all this in the fridge for a few hours if you need to.

An hour or so before you are ready to serve, let the oranges and the cream come out of the fridge and lose some of their chill. In a small, heavy pan, melt the sugar with the water and swirl gently (don’t stir) until you have an amber-colored syrup. Working fast and attentively (sugar burns are doozies), pour the sugar in a thin, circular stream over the oranges. It will sizzle and snap and smell delightful; the sugar will harden on contact with the cool fruit, and you want to try to avoid creating large, tooth-threatening clumps of it. I suppose you could pour the sugar onto a buttered piece of parchment, and crumble this thin sheet over the oranges, but the beauty of this seemed to rest as much in the perfect flavors as the total simplicity of the preparations.

Serve the oranges with a dollop of the cream. Our hostess had a tray of dark chocolate meringues alongside these which was warmly received, but the fruit and cream could easily stand alone. If you are new to the caramelizing trade, don't fret over the sugar pot: hot water will clean it in a snap.

stuck in the weeds

2012-02-03T10:42:00.000-08:00

As long as we are digging around in the yard for our dinner, we may as well talk about another mighty weed, the dandelion. If you thought burdock was a powerhouse you could no longer live without, wait until you get a load of dandelion. Although our name from it proceeds from the French ("dents de lion," or lion's teeth, because of its serrated edges), its common French name is "pissenlit," which means, none too politely, "wet the bed." In case you think I am making this up, here is the tag that was on the bunch I just bought at the grocery store:

This is particularly amusing because it turns out that what I bought was in fact chicory, but as the mighty herb witch Susun Weed is careful to explain, they are sister plants and often confused, which is OK because they share many of the same benefits and all of the same guidelines for preparation.

I am not sure we have time to list all the fantastic things that dandelion can do for you. Though you can rest assured you are unlikely to wet your bed in any language, dandelion is a flusher. Like all bitter vegetables, it is a digestive, and a boon to your liver and other organs of sanitation. It is astoundingly high in calcium and the antioxidants A and C. Believe me, this is the proverbial tip of the iceberg, and if you just want to dip a toe in the waters here, try mincing up a few leaves of dandelion greens and adding them to your iceberg or other lettuces, particularly at the start of a meal, in order to make the most of all the digestive benefits.

You can also cook them, preferably in a cast-iron pot, and here again a mixture of dandelion and a milder green like spinach will ease you into the project if you're unsure how much bitter you want on your plate. Dandelion greens, which are long and slender and pointy and sometimes red-stemmed, are widely available in the market here now, as are fatter bunches that look more like spinach, labeled as above, and which might just be chicory. Bitterness varies greatly from bunch to bunch, but be aware the red-stemmed varieties tend to pack more of it.

sweet & sour greens

2 bunches dandelion greens, or a mixture of dandelion and spinach
2-3 carrots, peeled and coarsely diced
1 medium onion, diced
2-3 T olive oil
generous pinch of salt
1 t finely grated fresh ginger root
2t balsamic vinegar
1 t tamari or shoyu

Wash the greens very well (they tend to be sandy); trim and discard the tough ends and coarsely chop the leaves. If you are using spinach as well as dandelion, keep them separate for now as the spinach won't need to be blanched first.

Bring a medium pot of water to boil and salt it well. As the water heats, heat a skillet with the olive oil. Sauté the onion in the oil over low to medium heat. When the water boils and the onions are just beginning to brown, drop in the carrots and cook for about 2 minutes. Use a slotted spoon to pull the carrots from the water and drop them into the pan. Turn the heat up to medium, and continue to sauté; the carrots should lighten and the onions start to brown nicely. Drop the dandelion into the water now, and stir to submerge it all and make sure it wilts. Use the spoon to scoop the greens into the pan with the onions and carrots. Add the spinach, if you are using it; the moisture in the cooked greens should be enough to steam the spinach as you stir. Add the tamari and vinegar, and the grated ginger, and stir and cook a minute or two more until the mixture is well-coated in the slightly thickened sauce. If you did use a cast-iron pan, be sure to remove the cooked greens as soon as they are done.

The blanching water from the greens and carrots will add some dandelion power to the cooking of rice or other foods. I'm just saying. It fits comfortably down the drain, too.

from Russia with love

2012-02-02T10:08:00.000-08:00

I have a friend who wants me to read War and Peace. She is one of approximately two people on earth who could persuade me to take this on, and at her urging I have spent some recent hours trying to locate an audio version of this admirable monstrosity so I can devote some of the time I spend driving around like a hamster in a Habitrail to absorbing a portion of the material. Here are some of the highlights of this quest:

I ordered the book through the library, and when it came it had TWENTY-SIX CDs, and turned out to only be volume two.
I looked it up on iTunes (there is nothing you can say to me about looking for Tolstoy on iTunes that I have not already said to myself), where one review read simply: “You will die before you finish this book.”
I found an mp3 version on the web, and feeling victorious, downloaded it to my iPod. This morning in the Habitrail I turned that puppy on, and it appears to have been recorded by an Austrian with a severe speech impediment and the thespian skills of a shoe horn. I think he recorded it in his bathroom.

Bringing this back around to what we are all going to have for dinner, after I listed to the entire first chapter of the Austrian's version, laughing a little harder than I imagine Tolstoy intended me to, I started wondering what to write about today. (This is code for “feeling like I had nothing to say.”) Thinking back over the last few days of eating, my mind settled, with not much certainty, on burdock root. Last weekend my brother-in-law brought me a packet of fresh burdock root from the Asian grocery store he raided for me on his way here, and I made quick pickles with it. I used to make this dish, which in Japan is called either Gobo Kinpira or Kinpira Gobo, all the time when I learned from my herb witch friend that burdock was a superfood. But like some things do, despite their popularity, it had fallen off the menu for quite a while. My children, whose growing bodies are 73% composed of pickles, were happy to see it come back. (This is code for “they ate the whole bowl.”) I supposed that was worth a post, so I did a little reading (“Wikipedia”), and--you may have seen this coming, but I didn't--immediately encountered a quote from Tolstoy regarding burdock. He said, of the tenacious root, “it makes me want to write.”

So there you have it: fusion cuisine! Salad from Japan, with Slavic and Napoleonic overtones.

In case you are curious about burdock's stupendous powers, its roots and leaves and seeds are all a potent part of the herbal pharmacy, acting as a blood purifier, skin soother and cooler of inflammations, among other applications. A particularly prolific member of the Dock family, the widely available leaves were often used by farm wives to wrap the butter they were taking to market, hence the name (“beurre-dock”), and we all have the pesky seed heads to thank for having Velcro in our lives: a Swiss scientist felt a mental light-bulb switch on when he was pulling them out of his dog’s tail, and the rest is history.

I think there is no shortage of ways to make this, and as I recall I make it this way because this is what I deduced from how it tasted in the Japanese restaurant we went to when our girls were tiny tots. It's best to set this up for an hour or so of marinating before you plan to eat it, but you may have to hide it.

gobo kinpira

carrot & burdock pickle

about 5 ozs burdock root (look for firm roots not much thicker than your thumb, or they may have woody centers; if this turns out to be the case just trim that part out)

3 or 4 carrots

2T brown rice vinegar

1T tamari or shoyu

1t maple syrup or honey

1t finely grated fresh ginger root

Have a medium size saucepan of cold water near your cutting board, and into it splash about a teaspoon of rice vinegar. Work with one burdock root at a time, as they oxidize very rapidly. Peel the root, noticing but not becoming alarmed by the earthy smell that's released, and cut it into matchsticks about 2-3" long. Plunge these into the saucepan, and continue with the rest of the burdock. Cut up the carrots in a similar way, but set them aside; they cook much faster than the burdock.

Bring the pot full of burdock to a boil and then reduce the heat to medium and simmer for about ten minutes, until the pieces are barely tender. Throw in the carrots, and cook about two minutes longer. Cooking time will vary somewhat according to how thin your slices are and how old your roots are, so just aim for barely tender.

Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, combine the other ingredients. When the vegetables are cooked, drain them (you may want to reserve this water for making soup, as it is full of goodness) and plop them in the marinade. Stir well and let them sit, stirring occasionally and trying not to finish the bowl as you test to see if they are pickled enough before you serve them. Adjust the sour, sweet and salty to your taste, if need be.

They will keep for days in the fridge for nibbling purposes.

molasses in january

2012-01-31T11:26:00.000-08:00

Looking at my children now, it is hard to believe I was ever able to carry them around in my belly. This was sort of hard to believe the moment I laid eyes on them, now that I think about it. But dim memory and ample wide-screen photographic evidence suggests that I once did keep them in my midsection. They were good-size babies, and maybe as a result I tended to be slightly anemic while they were under construction. This led to talk of iron supplements. Supplementing with iron is a tricky business; it messes with your digestion something awful, and many believe this is due in part to the fact that non-dietary sources of iron are basically indigestible and consequently unavailable to your body--so you mess things up for no good reason, in the end. My midwife tried me out on a liquid herbal iron supplement that was food-based, but to my pregnant sensibilities it tasted like a juicy blend of marmalade and loose change and I could not choke it down. So to shore up the boost I got from eating like Popeye and cooking in a cast iron pot, I drank molasses. Not straight, mind you, but rather in hot water with a little soy milk. It must have been good for me, because it tasted heavenly and I sucked it down.

Molasses, proceeding as it does from the same source as sugar, can get a little collateral bad rap--but molasses is essentially all the nutrients that have been sucked out of the sugar, in concentrated form. Regular and dark molasses are what’s left after the first two stages of “purification,” and blackstrap molasses comes from the third boiling. Whopping amounts of calcium, potassium, magnesium and iron course through all of them. According to various unvetted sources, it’s reputed to cure cancerous tumors, fibroid tumors, anxiety, constipation, edema, heart palpitations, anemia, arthritic pain, joint pain, acne and will reverse the graying of your hair, should you be experiencing any of that. Let’s just say it’s good for you.

If you don’t feel like drinking it, I understand completely. How about gingerbread instead? In muffin form, so you can tuck it into your lunchbox or your mouth with equal economy of motion. Small children can put away a large number of these muffins, which tells you something about their appeal. Please note they do not give you the crested, bakery-window top of other muffins, thanks to a high proportion of liquid ingredients. But thanks to their flat tops they will sit still nicely for a dab of cream-cheese frosting, if you want to throw caution to the wind and call them cupcakes.

Please also note that you can get pretty creative with the dry ingredients here. I substitute flax meal, wheat germ, oat flour and/or almond meal for some of the flour, and usually use a mixture of white and whole wheat flours as well. If they are going down easy, they may as well bring some nutrition along.

gingerbread muffins

1/4 cup canola or other mild oil

1/2 cup molasses

1 cup unsweetened applesauce

1 egg

1 1/2 c flour
1 t baking powder
1/2 t baking soda
1 t cinnamon
2 t ground ginger (you can substitute or supplement with grated fresh ginger as well)
pinch of salt

Preheat the oven to 350 and line a twelve-cup muffin pan with paper liners. Mix the oil, egg, molasses and applesauce together well in a medium size bowl. In another bowl, combine the dry ingredients thoroughly. Combine the two mixtures, divide among the muffin cups and bake about twenty minutes. These keep quite well, tasting not at all like day-old muffins when or if they reach that age.

the loving spoonful

2012-01-30T11:29:00.000-08:00

If you are lucky enough to be loved by Millie Chan, you may have received a container of this when your spirit or body was overwhelmed. Millie is a Chinese chef who grew up in Texas, and she is as likely to blow your socks off with spring rolls as pecan pie. It’s a powerful combination of skill-sets, let me tell you.

I am lucky enough to have known Millie almost my whole life. Millie and her husband introduced me to mine. I have seen a lot of pots of congee pass from her kitchen into my family’s kitchens, and when I was asked to make a meal of exceptional gentleness and appeal for a friend in need I went straight to Millie’s book.

There are not many ingredients involved here, and the process could hardly be simpler. If it is Monday, chilly, gloomy or taxing in your world--or the world of a loved one--actually or metaphorically, this may be just the ticket. Enormous reward-to-effort ratio makes it even more satisfying.

rice congee

Adapted from Millie Chan’s Kosher Chinese Cookbook

serves 4; doubles easily

10 cups of water

1 cup long-grain white rice (I used jasmine rice, but any long-grain white will do)

2 t kosher salt

1/2 of a boneless chicken breast

1 t cornstarch

½ t kosher salt

to serve:

sesame oil

tamari or soy sauce

very finely minced fresh ginger

coarsely chopped cilantro

maybe some minced scallions

Combine the water and the rice in a large heavy pot. Bring to a boil, stir quite thoroughly, then turn the heat as low as it will go and simmer gently, covered, for an hour and a half. Really. Stir occasionally to make sure the rice does not stick to the pot. When the congee is done, it will look like a thick, smooth gruel with barely visible rice kernels (think oatmeal) and you will wonder what the hell I am having you do. Stir in the salt. Now you have plain congee, and you can stop there and go straight for the garnish.

If you want chicken congee, then while the rice is simmering, finely sliver the chicken breast (a very sharp knife and a partially frozen piece of chicken will simplify this task immeasurably.) Don't try to make it perfect, just chop it as best you can. Toss the chicken in a small bowl with the cornstarch and salt. The attempt to toss will lead to a worrisome clump, but mix as well as possible and it will work out fine in the end. When the congee is done, stir the chicken in and keep stirring, to separate the chicken pieces, until the chicken meat turns white.

Ladle into bowls and garnish with a sprinkle of ginger and cilantro, a light drizzle each of sesame oil and soy sauce, and if you are feeling the need for some heat, a little black bean and garlic sauce from the Asian section of your local Gourmet Shoppe.

Note: Millie says you can also substitute fish for the chicken, by slicing 1/2 a pound of a mild white fish quite thinly and seasoning it with a teaspoon of salt, a dash of pepper and a dash of sesame oil. Portion the seasoned, raw fish among the bowls, and ladle the hot rice over it. This will cook the fish.

hot-bed of activity

2012-01-29T18:17:00.000-08:00

My niece, who visited over the weekend, noted that it was Super Vegetable Week and asked me how this distinguished the present week from the other 51 in my year. “Are you going to post something about dessert today, to reward everyone for all the vegetable stuff?” she asked me. She likes dessert, possibly slightly more than she likes vegetables, a viewpoint which may be reflected in the little snippet of dialogue I have just quoted for you. I have a strong feeling that what I am about to offer you is not the kind of dessert she means, but it is the right dessert for Vegetable Week, in my opinion.

I have been reading Elizabeth David lately, specifically her book about Christmas food, for no particular reason other than it was the one they had at the library and I thought it might have something in it about vegetables in winter. It did.

If you already know all about Elizabeth David, skip this next part and go straight to the excerpt I have excerpted for you below.

If you wonder who she is, I will tell you in the briefest possible terms that she was by her own description a “British cookery journalist,” a food writer of astonishing historical knowledge whose proper tone and decisive manner make me feel as though I have a slightly alarming but fascinating governess in the kitchen with me. David, who died in 1992, lived a wildly unconventional and adventurous life and is credited with nothing less than entirely renovating British food. “She taught us we could do better with what we had,” said Jane Grigson, who is no slouch herself and also worth a google in your spare time.

In her tone, David is kind of Margaret Thatcher meets Mary Poppins--no nonsense tolerated, lots of adventures to tell you about, breezy instructions that must be followed to the letter or certain ruin will follow, and no time for your peevish questions about the details. “If here and there in my account of a cookery journalist’s Christmases a note of desperation is clearly audible, I don’t make apologies. Christmas, at any rate the way we are supposed to celebrate it nowadays, does tend to unbalance people,” she says in her introduction. This either makes it clear why it’s kind of tempting to just re-type the whole book here for you, or makes you glad that I don’t plan to.

With the stern self-control any governess would expect, I am going to limit myself to one story. Thinking about how unnatural it seems to truck vegetables in from other climates for several months of the year had me wondering what people in cold climates ate in this season before such dubious and seemingly irresistible wonders were possible. David quotes from a book in her vast collection (which is now housed at Harvard and seems worth a pilgrimage) called The Complete English Gardener, written by a fellow named Samuel Cooke and published in 1760. It seems the unwillingness to live through winter without salad has some historical roots.

“We have in the conservatory some artichoaks preserved in the sand. There are several sorts of cabbages, and their sprouts, for boiling; asparagus upon hot-beds; and if diligence has been used, you may find some cucumbers, of the plants that were sown in July and August.

“We have this month on the hot-bed sallads of small herbs, with mint, tarragon, burnet, cabbage-lettuce preserved under glasses, and some cresses and chervil upon the natural ground, with which high taste helps the sallads of this season. To these may be added blanched celery and endive.

"There are variety of herbs for soups and the kitchen use, such as sage, thyme, beet-leaves, parsley, sorrel, spinach, cellery, and leeks...Likewise sweet marjoram, dried marigold flowers, and dried mint..."

He writes about forcing peas in a cold frame and coaxing cherries from the December trees and what types of apples are left (Ambret! Colmar!) and generally makes you wonder how a culture known--until David galloped in to rescue them--for boiling everything until it was grey could have sprung from such concern for year-round access to flavorful tender greens. It's good to know the craving for high taste and sallads of the season connects us over time, even if our present methods could bear some adjusting.

No more peevish focus on vegetables alone--back to regularly scheduled programming now.

bale out

2012-01-28T07:13:00.001-08:00

My husband is away, which among other implications means the morning chores are all mine. I loaded the wood furnace without singeing off my eyelashes--a major victory, considering my record--and fed the sheep. Here are a couple of facts about sheep, for those of you who do not live with them. In the summer, sheep are as finicky as cats. Patches of grass that look lush and delicious even to those of us with two legs and one stomach are passed over with a sniff if that’s not the mood they are in that day. Treats are carefully examined and considered from all angles, and after some deliberation may or may not be cautiously accepted.

All the plants in “my” “garden,” of course, are pre-approved in any season in which they manage to poke their heads up, and are summarily dispatched when access is granted. But I’m not talking old grudges right now. What I meant to tell you is that in winter, sheepy tunes change. My husband hays all summer, which is among both the calmest and most meditative of farm tasks and also the most stressful and arduous. Thanks to this labor of his, every day, all winter long, bale-of-hay is the special of the day, the appetizer, the entrée and dessert in the Sheeptown Café, because it is basically the only thing on the menu.

But do you see a “Hay? Again? Not hay again!” expression on their faces? No, you do not. If they could clap, they would, as you approach with the bale. “Look! Guys, look! She’s bringing hay! AGAIN!”

Treats, too, are suddenly big news and a broad category. Finicky summer tastes fade to memory, as their need for the this-and-that provided by a diet of fresh greens cannot be met in the bale. Their enthusiasm for carrot tops and lettuce butts and apple cores may not surprise you, but the excitement of being handed a pile of lime rinds (we generate a lot of lime rinds) might. My husband reports that after he’s given them a mineral block from the feed store (kind of like a salt lick, but also kind of like a Kit-Kat bar, as they load it with molasses to make it palatable), their interest in these things wanes.

Bringing this neatly back around to Vegetable Week, rest assured I am not suggesting you eat lime rinds or hay. I am suggesting zucchini pancakes. They are entirely unlike a bale of hay in real terms. I make them a lot and everyone is happy to see them regardless, so in that sense they are metaphorically similar. Because I was trying to cast a wide net, wider than my usual bag of old stand-by tricks, I was not going to include them.

But something in her expression suggested that I should.

In the summer, when zucchini are everywhere, this is a nice way to dispatch some. In the winter, when they have to jet in from elsewhere, this means you will not mind if the zucchini are not bursting with summer sunlight. It’s the mint that elevates the goings-on here, makes your mouth happy and wakes up senses that may have been hibernating a bit, so don’t skip that if you can help it. These are more savory and satisfying than the otherwise simple ingredients might have you think. One of my housemates is a confirmed Zucchini Hater, but gobbles these right up. It's the pancake factor, I think.

zucchini feta pancakes

adapted from Mollie Katzen's Moosewood Cookbook

3 eggs

4 c coarsely grated zucchini

1 c crumbled feta cheese (about 4 ozs)

2T minced scallions or chives

1T finely chopped fresh mint

Fresh pepper to taste

1/3 c cornmeal (corn, millet or rice flour can be substituted, as can regular wheat flour if you are not avoiding it)

Olive oil for the pan

Lightly beat the eggs in a large bowl, then add the remaining ingredients and stir to combine. The mixture will be mostly zucchini, bound by a little batter. The longer this mixture sits, the more water will be extracted from the zucchini by the salt in the feta, so it's best for the texture to cook them right up; if you need to do some advance work to make these possible, just prep all the bits ahead of time and then combine them right before you cook. Heat a medium heavy skillet and add oil enough to coat the bottom of it; let the oil get hot enough to race around the pan. Drop the batter in by 1/3 cupfuls and turn the heat down to low-medium; fry the pancakes until they are a nice golden brown and flip to repeat. Take some time to let them brown slowly and well and they will not be hard to flip. These can be kept warm in a 250 degree oven as you go, or eaten at room temperature, and leftovers ride happily in someone's lunch the next day.

salad daze

2012-01-27T08:41:00.000-08:00

wishful thinking. all we have now is rain and mud.

My mother has a belief that people in cold climates should not eat salad in the winter. Tender greens are not a natural part of our winter ecosystem, goes her reasoning, and so we are not meant to eat them.

She may have a point, but I find it hard to stick to this as a rule of thumb. For one thing, I get a little wonky when I go too long without a salad. For another, the minors in my care are big salad eaters, to such a degree that our middle child has a Salad Ranking System--“ooh, fennel salad! That’s my fourth-favorite!” I find it hard to say “no” to a child who is begging for salad, even if it means buying lettuce that has a frequent-flier number.

A friend brought a version of this one to a potluck, and the standings were immediately re-shuffled to accommodate it. I am not a fan of cold grain salads, but this one avoids the chalk and sog that turn me off by flipping the proportions around; grains are an accent rather than the base. A power salad is a pretty free-form experience, so this is an approach more than a recipe. Our favorites are noted but it’s a good place to go wild and make it your own.

Start with washed greens sufficient to feed your crowd. In the winter, where garden-fresh leafy greens are not in plentiful supply, Romaine lettuce turns up in the bowl pretty frequently. Its sturdiness makes a great base that stands up well to additions, but add baby spinach or arugula, torn red-leaf or boston lettuce or anything else looking brightly back at you from the produce shelf. Chopped steamed broccoli can be another great addition in months when leafy greens choices are slim.

For a salad to feed 6, toss about ½ c of cooked, cooled quinoa (my favorite), cracked wheat (if gluten is not an issue) or any other cooked, nutty whole grain on top of the greens.

Sprinkle on about half a cup of finely crumbled feta or goat cheese, or choose chopped green olives or capers if you are going dairy-free, or try both, along with the same amount of coarsely chopped roasted nuts, like almonds or pine nuts or pecans.

Now add about ¾ c of chopped fresh fruit. The top pick in our house is a sectioned and de-membraned orange (try a cara cara if you haven’t before) or grapefruit, but a mango would work well, too. Add a chopped avocado if they are looking good when you shop. There's a lot of whining around here when I don't use an avocado.

Dressing this salad is a pretty simple matter, as there is so much going on that little is required. A glug of good olive oil (maybe a dash of flax oil, while you are at it), the fresh juice of half a lemon or lime and a twist of pepper usually do it; a sprinkle of coarse salt or a dash of tamari may be desirable for balance if there is not enough salt in your chosen add-ons.

bandwagon

2012-01-26T05:44:00.000-08:00

I had to lay off the Brussels sprouts for a while, but I have just fallen off the wagon. I entered rehab after a love affair with oven-roasted Brussels sprouts led to run of these Brussels sprouts, which are delicious, and from there it was a short slide to a spate of these Brussels sprouts, which you can make with bacon instead and which are insanely addictive, or at least they are to me, and I was all set to embark on these Brussels sprouts when the family staged an intervention, and I cooled it for a while.

But during my Vegetable Week quest, I ran across a recipe for Brussels sprouts in coconut milk, and that sounded pretty good, and I was home alone. As soon as the coconut milk hit the sprouts, though, I knew I had been steered wrong. The reason the other sprouts were so damn tasty was that they are flash-cooked in a little fat, and you get a caramelizing effect on the edges with a bright flavor elsewhere. If you groaned at the mere mention of one of these dollhouse-size cabbages, it is likely because you have been subjected to the odor, flavor and texture of a Brussels sprout cooked in liquid. Let’s just pretend this is a whole new vegetable, because that is what it tastes like.

Furthermore, fast cooking preserves the stupendous nutrient value of the sprout, which is high in sulforaphane, believed to have potent anticancer properties, and indole-3-carbinol, which is reported to block the growth of cancer cells. Who doesn't need a little of that action in their day?

But mainly they are tasty, and in my experience tastiness leads to eating, and this week we are all about eating our vegetables so this is all to the good.

If you have a food processor, it is the work of a moment to shred the little buggers using the slicing disk (be sure to trim the woody end off and peel off the outer leaves first). If you don’t, and I fall into the latter camp, it’s the work of several moments to just slice them up not particularly carefully. My friend Julie gave me a swanky new knife, which made short and pleasant work of the slicing. Incidentally, my friend from Grenada says if you set your knife down and it happens to balance blade-up, it means someone is going on a trip. My knife did, and then my dad called to ask if we wanted to go on vacation with them, so you can see that vegetables are VERY POWERFUL INDEED.

stir-fried Brussels sprouts with coconut, chile & lime

About a pound of Brussels sprouts

2-3 T unsweetened shredded coconut

2-3 T vegetable oil

1-2 cloves garlic, minced or chopped

a fat pinch of coarse salt

a fat pinch of dried red pepper flakes

to serve:

a wedge of lime

Trim and whack up the sprouts, by hand or machine. Have a serving dish ready near the stove. Heat a medium heavy skillet over medium heat and put the coconut into it. Stir and toss for a moment or two, until the coconut is lightly toasted. (This is not a good time to space out and wander off, as I am telling you that a few moments is all that stands between you and burned coconut). Immediately remove the coconut to the dish. Now heat the oil in the pan for a moment, and toss in the remaining ingredients, Stir well to combine and fry until the sprouts are lightly browned in places and bright green and tender-cooked throughout. This takes about 3 minutes.

Turn off the heat, toss the coconut in and stir it around, and then remove it all to the serving dish and squeeze the lime on top. Serve immediately as a hot side, or room temperature as a salad.

winter greens

2012-01-24T07:23:00.000-08:00

There is an email that makes its way around as such things do, on a certain cycle, that may or may not have originated with an actual contest in the Washington Post years ago. Do you know the one I mean? The challenge in that mythical contest was to create a new word by changing one letter of an existing one, and the list is one of the few seasonal emails I am generally happy to see, because it has some great words on it. As will happen in the Great Age of Computers, some enterprising soul who was tired of the same email coming around announcing a contest that wasn’t happening anymore, if it ever did, revived the thing. I have just wasted ten minutes I will never get back choosing (in my entirely objective opinion) the best of the words in this year’s contest. I present them to you so you can immediately begin using them. No need to thank me for saving you the trouble of culling the list yourself, and if you prefer to waste your own time directly, the full list can be found here.

automagically - a thing that just happens mysteriously

carcolepsy - the chronic inability to stay awake while riding in a car

eblaborate - oversharing at length and with no clear thesis

jobstacle - when work gets in the way

pregret - Regretting something that you haven’t done yet

All good ones, right? But the ultimate winner, I feel, is this one:

crapacity - Upper limit to the amount of BS you can tolerate

Perhaps you have reached yours, so let’s talk about bitter vegetables. Family legend has it that when I was served an endive at a tender age I did not find it pleasant. I began to refer to anything too bitter to enjoy as “derve,” and that word has persisted in my family’s lexicon ever since. It’s a good word, I think, perhaps not on the order of “jobstacle,” but one I continue to use for things that are too bitter to be palatable.

Very few vegetables these days get the diagnosis, though. I love endive and radicchio and dandelion, and even the most casual research will tell you these are definitely vegetables that will love you back: they are high in minerals and immune-boosting antioxidants, and stimulate your liver to be a better sanitation device.

But that’s worthless data if you can’t make them tasty enough to eat. My favorite way to eat broccoli rabe has always been to blanch it in salted water, then sauté it with garlic and olive oil and and lots of salt. If the very bitterness of this common Italian restaurant treatment has put you off it before, though, fly in the face of your pregret and try eating it raw.

My friends Naomi and Ron served this salad at one of their periodic, epic potluck dinners, and I have been making it ever since. This amused Naomi when I told her, because she forgot she ever made it at all. She is the Queen of Greens, and it is probably hard to keep all her incredible salads straight. Contrary to what you might expect if you have gone to lengths to cook its bitterness away, raw rabe is much sweeter. And the salty-sour dressing makes it go down nice and easy.

broccoli rabe salad with pesto and lemon

1 head broccoli rabe

about half a cup of prepared pesto

the juice of at least one lemon

coarse salt to taste

Trim the woody ends from the broccoli rabe stalks and tear/chop the tender upper parts into bite-size pieces. The leaves and little florets are of much more use here than the thicker parts of the stems. Wash and thoroughly dry. Mix or shake the pesto, lemon juice, and a perhaps a little extra olive oil, depending on how thick the pesto you have is, in a little jar or dish and pour this over the greens, along witha good pinch of coarse salt, tossing or mixing with your hands until everything is well-coated. Pesto can vary quite a bit, so taste for the right balance of sour, salty and pesto-y, and correct accordingly with more of whatever you require.

that cosí feeling

2012-01-23T11:33:00.000-08:00

I know about 28 words of Italian, not including words like “rigatoni” and “prosciutto.” They are very handy words, most of them, comprising survival-oriented sentences like “do you have these shoes larger, and in brown?” and “I'd like apricot, but with whipped cream, please.”

I am going to teach you seven of them today, and then move on to dinner. Apologies if you know them already.

Years ago, I was in Sicily with my parents and a school friend. We were staying in a breathtakingly beautiful old monastery, which had been converted into a decidedly not-monastic hotel. In Sicily, super delicious olive oil basically runs out of the faucets, and everything you eat is drenched in it, and your skin feels and looks fantastic, and there is no chance you could possibly need to eat when you get back to your room or before you leave it, because the food everywhere you go is so good.

Even so, for some reason I can no longer recall, my friend and I noticed that our in-room refrigerator was not working properly, and felt the need to have that corrected. I cannot imagine what it was that we needed to keep cold, but the refrigerator refused to do anything other than shield whatever was inside it from the ambient room temperature, no matter which knobs we twiddled. We called the desk, and in the fullness of time--probably the next day--they sent a man up to have a look. He looked.

“Non é freddo,” he pronounced. [“It is not cold.”]

This was not news to us, it being the reason our little summit had been assembled, but he did not tell it to us in a tone that suggested it was new information. Nor was it an apology, it should be noted, or really a diagnosis. It was clearly the first part of a statement that was about to continue.

“É fresco,” he continued. [“It’s cool.”]

He looked at us. “E basta, cosí.” [“And like that, it’s enough.”]

He left. Whatever we needed to keep cold learned to thrive at room temperature, or we learned to love it that way.

I was thinking about that little episode this morning, and then I went to yoga. This is a new activity for me, and it is succeeding as a venture because I finally found both the motivation to look after myself (pain, because I haven’t been), and the right teacher. Ilana always starts us off with a little direction, mentally speaking, and so far her hit-rate in terms of what I came through the door already thinking about is hovering around 100%.

Today she said: as you twist yourself up in pretzels for the next hour (OK, I am paraphrasing), think about giving yourself permission to see what you are doing as just enough, just the right thing to be doing to take care of your body and your needs. Don’t keep your eyes on some ever-elusive Bigger Goal, just dwell, in this moment, on the idea that you are already doing what you need to do.

Basta, cosí.

So, turning our attention from Italian refrigerators and Eastern philosophy to the stove, welcome to Super Vegetable Week. Here in the finally-snowy Northeast, it’s hard to get very excited about vegetables in the winter. They have traveled a long hard road to reach us, maybe been iced down for a good while in the process, and taken a chunk out of the wallet on their way to our plates, too. But it’s good to love your vegetables. They love you back. I was reading yet another “EAT THIS WAY OR DIE” manifesto the other day, and amid all the statements contradicting all the other credos I have encountered prior, the author said “your body owes 70% of its health to diet.” Whether there’s meat on the plate or not, the vegetables ought to play a major role. We all know that. And if you live west of the Produce Line, which bisects the nation more or less where the Long Underwear Line also hits, maybe your access is unrestricted and consequently your enthusiasm never wanes.

Super Vegetable Week is for the rest of us. Kind of like Date Night for your relationship with the Food Pyramid.

My default position on squash is to split it, gut it, and roast it face down, then butter it. It gets eaten, and it is tasty, if not especially exciting. I read a recipe this week that went in a whole new direction, but had too many steps to make use of in a hurry and used spices that did not appeal. So I punted, combining the idea and the amount of time I had to spend on it to come up with this. My friend Laura recently reported, re: a recipe that asked her to toast cumin seeds, that it caused her to roll her eyes at the extra work--but when she gave in and spent the extra three minutes doing it, the aroma made her "understand why the entire age of exploration was fueled by an interest in spice-trading." Good payoff in terms of time invested, I reckon. But toasting the spices, or not, is your call. Tasty regardless and, of course, either way is the path of enlightened self-care.

roasted squash slices

1 medium to large butternut squash

1 t whole cumin seed

a pinch of whole fennel seed

½ t nigella seed, also known as kalonji or black onion, or substitute whole coriander seed (you can also use both)

a pinch of red pepper flakes, if you want a little heat

a pinch of coarse salt

1T vegetable oil

optionally, a lime (and a kaffir lime would do well, too)

Preheat the oven to 400, and line a large baking sheet with parchment paper. Chop the neck of the squash from the bulb, then put each of these sections down on their cut side and split lengthwise. Scrape the seeds, and cut the squash in horizontal slices not quite ½ “ thick. Plop them in a medium bowl that leaves room for tossing.

Optionally, put a small skillet over medium heat and when it is heated up, drop the spices in and toast for less than a minute, until one or two seeds pop and the fragrance rises. Dump them into a small mortar or into whatever you will use to very coarsely grind them if you don’t have a mortar. They should be cracked, but not powdered. In a mortar, that took me about 40 seconds. Dream of sailing to Madagascar, if you like.

Pour the crushed spices (toasted or not) and the oil and the salt over the squash slices and toss to coat. Spread in a single layer on the prepared pan and roast for about 15-20 minutes, until the slices soften and brown a little. Squeeze a little lime over them, or not, before you serve them at whatever temperature suits you.

A note about the Nigella seed: it is generally not hard to find in the Indian section of your Gourmet Shoppe, or buy it online here or here, among other places. If you are ordering from Kalustyan's, you may as well add a few ounces of the spice known temptingly as 'grains of paradise' to your order, because you can put it in your peppermill instead of black pepper and be very happy you did so.

three of three

2012-01-22T12:35:00.000-08:00

Speaking, as I have done twice already, of things you may be surprised to learn you can do, I washed a chicken. Not one I was planning to roast; I washed the chicken you may recall has been enjoying some spa time indoors thanks to her present health condition. She has been indoors with us for quite a while now, long enough to have greeted my friend Adair, who stopped by last week to deliver some of her homegrown roasting chickens for my freezer. You may imagine that Adair wondered why a farmer, or even a “farmer,” would keep a chicken in precarious health lingering on, outside the soup pot and well inside the boundaries that normally exclude her ilk (namely, the front door.) You would be right. She wondered. I couldn’t tell her much. We raise some animals that get eaten, but none of them are chickens. The chickens have names and after their egg-laying days are over, they retire on our nickel here where they hatched. We eat chicken, but we eat other people’s chickens. It takes all kinds to make the great world spin, I suppose.

Anyway, Tippy Tina had taken on a certain odor, as one will when one lives in a box and sometimes cannot stand up straight, and if she was going to stay indoors it was time for a shampoo. She is the second chicken I have washed, and though you may be surprised, as I said, to learn that chickens can be washed, you will perhaps be more surprised to learn that they like it. How surprised will you be to learn that the complimentary blow-dry offered in the cooler months (so she shouldn’t get a chill, you know, and maybe die or something) is the chicken’s favorite part? I imagined the chickens would cower in terror of the blowdryer. In fact, they work it like runway stars, turning this way and that to make sure you get all the areas that need attention. I learned this on the first chicken I washed, and now that I have a sample of two in my study, I feel confident saying you can generalize.

Maybe you stopped reading up there when you learned I had bathed a chicken. That’s fine, because it really has nothing to do with today’s post, other than the thin thread of Things You Can Do Yourself.

What I meant to tell you about was the soup you can make with the whey that results when (notice I do not say “if,” in this context, because you need to make the cheese to make this soup) you make ricotta. I think you can use the whey in place of broth in any number of soups and be happy--potato soup comes to mind, especially. But what I made was lentil soup, because I love lentil soup. The whey doesn’t make it creamy, and therefore too rich and heavy to be enjoyed in quantity (I always like the idea and the flavor of a cream soup, but can’t eat very much before wishing I had stopped sooner.) The whey just makes it more savory and full-bodied, as well as a nutritional powerhouse, and more than what you can do with the whey left after you make the cheese, it is reason enough to make the cheese in the first place.

lentil soup with whey

2T olive oil

1 large onion, finely chopped

3 cloves garlic, finely chopped

I large carrot, finely chopped

1 stalk celery, finely chopped

¼ c tomato paste (preferred) or ½ c ground peeled canned tomatoes

1T cumin

3t pure ancho chile powder

3 c small green French lentils, or small brown Spanish lentils

whey from 1 gallon of milk that became ricotta

salt to taste

optionally:

1 medium potato, diced

1 large carrot, chopped

¾ c pearled barley

3 handfuls of fresh spinach or kale leaves, chopped or torn coarsely

grated cheese for serving

Preheat the oven to 325. In a large dutch oven, sauté the finely chopped vegetables in the olive oil until they soften. Add the spices and tomato paste and stir for a moment over medium heat. Now add the lentils and the whey and bring to a gentle boil. Turn off the heat, cover the pot and put it in the oven for about an hour, stirring occasionally if you are around to do so. I think you could also do this in a slow cooker, but I don’t have one, so I use the oven. Cooking them slowly and covered produces a far superior soup to simmering on the stove. I don’t know why.

If you have time, let the soup cool at this point. Another mystery of lentil and bean soups is that cooling and then reheating improves the outcome enormously, which is why making a large pot at the start of the week will serve you well. If you don’t have time to let it rest, it will still be tasty. Season with salt to taste, and if you like, add the diced vegetables and barley and simmer on the stovetop until they are tender, and the texture of the soup pleases you, and then add the kale or other greens. It’s tasty without any of these things added, too. Serve with cheese grated on top, and maybe bread for dunking, and a nice big salad.

whey to go

2012-01-21T14:49:00.000-08:00

My friend Alana is making a name for herself leading us toward making things instead of buying them. In the spring her book on this topic will be out, and I can hardly wait. As a result of this focus of hers, she has brought joy to many, and I think also sees some people skulk away from her in the grocery store, shielding their cart from her gaze. When she makes lasagna, she makes the ricotta and the mozzarella and the noodles. She does this in the middle of a busy life, and she wants you to know that you can, too. On a smaller scale, I sometimes find myself reassuring people that they don’t have to justify their store-bought bread or cookies or whatever it is they buy, yet when I saw Alana on a day I was responsible for creating a lasagna myself, I avoided eye contact. All sub-ingredients had been purchased.

I confessed. She laughed. She said, I just want you to make things that make you happy! However you get there is OK with me! I am of like mind, you might say, and so together we have puzzled over mozzarella and ricotta and pressure-canned tomatoes and cheese crackers, up to our elbows in them and in long, theoretical emails and phone conversations that I hope no one taped to embarrass us with later. The idea is not, as I am often teased about personally, to make the maximum amount of trouble for oneself and avoid convenience at all costs. I do not thresh my own wheat, thank you very much, no matter what you have heard. The idea is to make it simple, to demystify our access to the pleasure and satisfaction that toddlers know lie in doing something ALL BY SELF, and also to make things that are good to eat.

There are skills you can master, like Italian meringue buttercream and an omelette, which will elicit big rowdy whoops of self-congratulation when you get the hang of them (I think--I am still working on both). But you will have to break a lot of eggs, and perhaps cry a little, and learn Life Lessons as you go (“do not start buttercream you are unsure of two hours before child’s birthday party,” e.g.). Godspeed to you if you aim for a skill like that. I applaud the effort and think you will enjoy the results, if not the Lessons.

Then there are things you can master that are not hard, just unfamiliar. The bang for the buck ratio works soundly in your favor and in approximately no time at all tail-wagging levels of pleased-with-yourself happiness are yours.

I would say without a doubt that making your own ricotta falls into this camp. You need milk and lemons, and a thermometer and some cheesecloth. You are rewarded with ricotta better than any you have ever purchased, and a gallon of whey that you can use to make soup that is transcendentally delicious, all for the investment of about 30 minutes. Also, it is fascinating. Furthermore, you can then go around saying you know how to make cheese, because you do.

If you would like to try it, head over to see Alana, and know that if you want to end up with about a pound of ricotta, enough to make lasagna ALL BY SELF, then use a gallon of milk and half a cup of lemon juice when you follow her instructions. Heating slowly as she recommends produces a superior texture, so don’t argue with her about the time factor. It still doesn’t take very long.

If you would not like to try it, at this moment, but do want to make a simple winter dessert, then with my blessing go buy some really good ricotta (hint: not in a plastic tub, which is where you and me both can find the kind we use to make a big lasagna for the sixth grade basketball dinner) and go to town this way:

baked pears with ricotta & lemon

serves 4, depending on greed levels and who is watching

4 pears, firm-ripe (Bartlett or Anjou are nice)

1 c excellent ricotta

2-4 T honey

2t lemon juice (a Meyer will reward you tremendously here)

finely grated zest of that lemon (as above)

butter to grease the baking dish

Generously butter an 8x8 or comparable oven-proof dish. Preheat the oven to 350. Peel the pears, core and quarter them, and put them in the dish. Sprinkle the lemon juice over them, and drizzle about a tablespoon of honey over them, too, and grate the lemon zest over all that. Gob the ricotta here and there on this mess, and drizzle the rest of the honey on top of it all. Bake about 15 minutes, until the pears soften, the cheese browns a little and the juices are bubbling. Try not to burn your mouth. Wag your tail.

that's amore

2012-01-20T07:56:00.000-08:00

Long ago, I was sent by a former employer to a few workshops on fundraising, in the hope that I might do some. Speaking in grossly oversimplified and unfairly general terms, workshops of that type can be appallingly goofy sometimes, and are generally boring enough to make your teeth itch. I don’t remember a lot of what was laid out for me in the ones I took, but I do remember the concept one fellow touted: the Personally Significant Gift. Fundraising pyramids, he said, are built on a base of gifts that are small in absolute terms, but don’t necessarily feel small to the givers. What you want from each donor you cultivate, he said, is not the same amount, but the same idea: the number of dollars that if their friends were to hear about it, would make them say “gosh, you must really believe in this place.” For some people this will be $10, while others will have the new wing named in their honor.

I’m sorry, have I made your teeth itch?

Let me come at this another way. In the British novel I Don’t Know How She Does It, the main character is a working mom with a high-powered executive job. Returning home late one night from a business trip, she is reminded that there is a bake sale at her child’s school the next day, to which she must bring something home-made. She unwraps a package of mince pies from the grocery store, whacks them with a rolling pin, and dusts powdered sugar on top. Voilá.

Here’s where I am going with this. Home-made can take many forms. It is never my intention to suggest life has to be home-made or the highway. Making food is supposed to be satisfying and not stressful, goes my thinking. Bless the pie-whackers and the wheat-threshers both.

Hang on while I swap a lunchbox for my soapbox. In grossly oversimplified but largely accurate terms, almost all children like pizza. Almost all mothers (but perhaps not fathers) who find their children eating cold pizza will suggest they heat it up, but almost all children like cold pizza too, and way more than they like any number of other things we might earnestly prepare for their lunch.

Making your own pizza has its own sliding scale, thanks to the fact that every grocery store in the land these days seems to sell pizza dough in the refrigerated section. Buying a lump of this (try to stick to the ones that say “flour, water, yeast, salt” on the ingredients, and don’t offer a long, dense paragraph that includes “dicronomitosalglyceridalates added for shelf life,” or words to that effect) can help you to see your approval ratings soar in a key demographic.

You can make the little pizzas the night before, or in the morning. I have clocked it, and no matter what you think when I suggest it (try to keep it clean), it just doesn’t take very long to make them. Cut the dough, poink it out flat, smear and adorn it, and I bet you a nickel the pizzas will have time to rest and rise because you will be done constructing them before the oven is heated. No matter if they don't--this is not supposed to be Old Napoli, after all--if the oven is hot already, stick them in. Bake them for ten minutes. Keep the amount of toppings spare, so it is more of a pizzafied bread, and then it travels neatly, and lunch gets gobbled up.

If you like, you can hyperextend and make the dough yourself, thanks to a mickey mouse version of the miracle known as Jim Lahey's no-knead bread. If so, you add FIVE MINUTES to the process. That’s all. I TIMED IT. But maybe you never get there. Maybe you keep buying the lumps of dough, and pre-grated cheese, and that is enough for you. It ought to be. It’s home-made.

lunchbox pizza

1 lump of pizza dough

tomato sauce or tomato paste

a firm, fresh mozzarella or any cheese you like (cheddar, feta, goat), thinly sliced or grated

some shredded parmesan

olive oil

Preheat the oven to 450. Maybe it is your toaster oven you will be using; in that case, a slightly lower temperature or it will burn.

Put a sheet of parchment paper on your baking sheet. Cut the dough lump into equal sections (I cut six from a pound of dough). Try not to over-handle the dough or it gets the gluten all excited and makes it hard to spread out. Put the small lump of dough on the parchment and poink it out flat and thin (less than ½ “) in a shape that suits the container it will ride in. Repeat for as many little pizzas as you plan to make; reserve remaining dough balls in bag or container for tomorrow, or bake them all at once). Drop a few drops of olive oil on the dough and spread that out, especially on the edges. Thinly spread about a teaspoon of sauce on the dough, then fling on the melting cheese (you could add chopped sausage or chiken or olives at this point, if you like), leaving some areas of sauce visible, and scratch some parmesan on top. When the oven is heated completely, put the tray in and bake for about 10 minutes, while you dash around making breakfast. The cheese should be lightly browned and the crust, too. Bingo bango bongo, into the lunchbox it goes. The leftover dough keeps in the fridge for days, should it come to that.

For poops and giggles, you can also fold the dough over the filling, like a little calzone, and scratch some more parmesan on top. These need to bake a little longer. This one had some pesto in it, because there was some pesto in the fridge:

If you want to go further:

quick and dirty pizza dough

3 c flour (white, or a mixture of white and whole wheat)

1 tsp salt

½ t yeast

2T olive oil

1 ¼ c water

optional: 2T ground flax meal or wheat germ

Mix the flour, salt and yeast in a medium bowl. Stir in 1c of water and the olive oil, and mix until a wet dough ball has formed. You may need the remaining water to complete this, or not. You want a ball of dough, but a sticky one, not too dry. Cover the bowl and let rest overnight. In the morning, use a spatula to scrape the dough onto a very lightly floured surface, gather it into a ball and proceed as above.

purple reigns

2012-01-16T20:11:00.001-08:00

I used to think that it was the pinnacle of good hosting to provide all aspects of nourishment to one’s guests, but now that I have a bit more mileage on the odometer I see what a callow youth I was. Finding enough forks is hard enough; subbing out portions of the menu only eases your pain, and expands the menu.

In my scientific study of one of humankind’s most significant advances, The Potluck, I have noticed a number of things. First of all, if you are the parent of young children and are mulling over your educational options for the future, a Waldorf school will serve you well, and I mean that. The Waldorf potluck is a superior potluck. Second, parameters are good. If you say, "bring any old thing," your menu will tip slightly or gravely to one side. But people generally like to be asked what they like to make, because they like to bring things they are happy with, and then you can shape things a bit.

Here is another scrap of data from the field: even if you put it in a container they don’t recognize, and even if you try out something grandly new (which I do not for one second recommend in a party setting), your family will be able to pick out the dish you brought with almost 100% accuracy. I can usually tell which of my friends brought what, too, even if it is not on the platter I know their cousin Penelope got for them in Majorca on the trip where she lost her passport. I think we have a food accent, each of us, even the adventurous cooks who eschew the tried-and-true.

This is part of why I read cookbooks sort of obsessively. I like to listen to how other people speak food, and I like to look for a few expressions to throw into daily conversation myself, so I do not always make the same four things, which is what I often feel is going on in the pans around here. I can get royally irritated, however, if I have had to amass a bunch of ingredients I do not usually have on hand and consign spare hours I do not possess to make something that I don’t, in the end, like to eat. So it’s a bingo bull’s-eye bonanza when something is simple, kind of familiar, and yet a total departure from Pasta Again.

Andrea Reusing’s Cooking In The Moment is the kind of cookbook that makes me think I should maybe move to wherever it is the author lives, or at least to wherever it is that I, too, could have a fig tree in my backyard, and run a small, critically acclaimed restaurant that is exclusively provisioned by local purveyors and write a book and look good in photographs.

This hot coleslaw comes from her. I never in a month of Sundays would have arrived at this preparation, but it is quite simple and no special provisions need to be acquired. The major risk factor involved here is that you may eat all the cabbage while it is in its spicy spa bath before cooking, but otherwise there are no sacrifices to be made.

hot slaw

From Andrea Reusing’s Cooking In The Moment

1 medium head of red cabbage, quartered, cored and thinly sliced

Juice of I lemon

Juice of 1 lime

1 ½ t sugar

2t kosher salt, plus more to taste

1 small jalapeño pepper, seeded (unless you like things hot) and finely chopped

1 large red onion, cut in half and sliced lengthwise into ¼ “ slices

1 garlic clove, smashed and peeled

1 T vegetable oil

4T unsalted butter

2/3 c coarsely chopped fresh cilantro (a large bunch, or two small ones)

[cilantro-haters can probably achieve happiness with fresh basil]

In a large bowl, combine the cabbage with the lemon and lime juices, sugar, salt and chile. Let marinate for at least 15 minutes and up to half an hour.

In a large sauté pan over medium-high heat, sauté the onion and the garlic clove in the oil for 2-3 minutes, until fragrant and just starting to color. Raise the heat to high, add the cabbage mixture and toss until very hot but still crisp, about 3 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat and add the butter and cilantro, tossing well to combine. Taste and adjust salt if necessary. Serve hot.

constitutional amendments

2012-01-14T09:56:00.000-08:00

Do you know what’s good for you? I certainly don’t. I barely know what’s good for me. Thankfully, the world is full of people who will declare what is good for all of us. Setting aside, for a moment, my basic skepticism about any orthodox belief system, I am still hampered in accepting any of their declarations by my orthodox belief that nothing is good, or bad, for everybody. Okay, the eight glasses of water thing is probably universally good. But aside from that, it’s all pretty subjective. Here are a few things I have been told recently:

Thanks to our American diets, our bodies are woefully understocked with acid
Thanks to our American diets, our systems are much too acidic, and must be made more alkaline
Eat a balanced diet that includes limited animal protein and emphasizes whole grains and plant proteins
Eat generous amounts of animal protein and fat and steer clear of fruit, grains and nuts
Adopt an 80% raw, vegan diet of nuts, fruit and vegetables and avoid animal proteins and fats entirely

Every one of these prophets makes such a powerful case for his plan! It’s all terribly compelling. Terribly! Terrible things will happen to you if you don’t do one of these things--whichever one is really the right one--immediately. Make it your gospel and your guiding star.

But which one?

In my case, I recently emerged from 30 years as a mostly vegetarian. I am really unlikely to put bone marrow on my vegetables or eat a kangaroo burger, no matter how good for me it might be. I’m not a great candidate for an all-raw program because I am allergic to many raw foods. I know people like to say they are allergic to things when the truth is that they don’t like them much, but I nearly went into anaphylactic shock from a pea (a pea!) and you could probably take me out with a well-aimed hazelnut. I mean allergic, not fussy. The dizzying array of other considerations I am weighing is probably best kept classified. Let’s just say they don’t make choosing a strategy any easier.

Feeding yourself is a pretty basic act of self-care, and a natural talent we are losing. It’s definitely a first-world problem, but it’s harder than it ought to be to identify both when we are hungry (and not just, for example, bored), and what we are hungry for. This is strangely not always the same as what we think we want. Don’t we all crave the quick rush of sugar (or caffeine) when we are feeling draggy, and oddly sometimes pickles when we are in fact thirsty? It’s good to listen to your body, not your mouth, but it isn't easy. ‘Appetite’ is first defined as desire for food, but next as an urge to satisfy a bodily need or craving, and thirdly as a fondness. It derives linguistically from both “natural desire” and “action.”

So, maybe you will read this recipe and hear your body say “perhaps,” whatever your head and any spectators may be saying at the same time. Maybe you will try it out, and hear your body say, “that’s what I’m talking about.” It certainly peps me up. This is a pretty basic incarnation of the stuff, almost guaranteed to please, but there is a world of variation possible. The essential ingredients are a good blender and the lime.

green drink

4 -6 leaves of romaine lettuce

handful of fresh mint leaves (unless you hate mint, in which case skip it)

1 lime

1 c of frozen or fresh strawberries

3 dried dates, pitted, or a handful of raisins

1 ½ cups water

Put the pitted dates in the blender with half a cup of very hot water and let them soften while you fuss around with the rest of the ingredients.

Cut both ends off the lime, and stand it on a cutting board. Using a sharp knife, cut the peel and pith away. Throw this into the blender with the remaining ingredients. Blend, baby, blend. That's it. Bottoms up!

When I started out drinking these, I went heavy on the berries and lighter on the greens. It was a “red green drink,” and that is how my daughter orders one up when she wants one. Now I err on the side of greens, and mix things up by changing parsley for the mint, spinach for the lettuce, and so forth.

Did you try it? Did you like it?

get a hold on

2012-01-12T05:23:00.001-08:00

Are you surfing while you wait, 7th in line to talk to a customer service representative who will not be able to answer your question or solve your problem or shed any light on who may have those powers, but will nonetheless ask, when your chat is over, if there is anything else they can help you with? We do appreciate your patience. As your estimated hold time (mwah ha ha) ticks by, you might want to click around the They Draw and Cook site. I haven't cooked anything over there yet, and the recipes are posted more for beauty than utility, I think, but I do like to look at it all and think of what I might be hungry for later.

weak day meal

2012-01-11T09:46:00.000-08:00

in which we finally get to Italy

Do you ever catch yourself doing something stupid, and in plenty of time to stop yourself, and yet for some reason you just let the tape run until the end? Okay, maybe that is just me. As I have said, if I can’t set a good example, at least I can serve as a horrible warning.

To wit: It’s possible, when reading a fabulous food magazine, to develop notions that you’ll bust a little move at dinner. Sure, everyone likes polenta and at this point you can basically make it with your eyes closed since it happens at least once a week. But White Polenta with Parsley and Gorgonzola--well, that sounds like something brave and new. A novel twist on the same old same old.

This is all well and good, if it is--for example--the weekend. I warmly encourage this kind of thinking in myself and others, on the weekend. But if, back in September, you noticed that for the first time in conscious memory and perhaps the last time while all three children share your roof that you were almost positioned to have one day a week where no one had anything to do after school, and that day is Thursday, and the price you have to pay for that heavenly day of gathering all the nestlings under your wing before the gloaming and making clucking sounds is Byzantine, Olympic, Boolean arrangements of lessons and classes on some of the other days, then I advise you to stick to the old standards on those days. We all gave up a little something to create our one extremely-worth-it day of sanctuary: a potentially broadening dance class here, a previously gratifying string ensemble here, the potential to schedule dentist appointments without a slide rule there, but the main sacrificial beast we roasted was Monday. And every Monday it is as if Monday has never happened before: what time is that class over, again? remind me: who's picking her up? will I have time to change in between? why didn't you bring my bag?

So even if you think to yourself, well, maybe not Gorgonzola--that’s too big of a leap. Let’s use Taleggio instead. Even if you cut yourself a little slack and use the yellow polenta you already have rather than detour to the Gourmet Shoppe to see if they have any white--even if you keep it really simple, Monday (whatever day of the week Monday happens for you) is not the day to try the Novel Twist.

It IS the day to try this, though, if you feel up to it. This can be made ahead, before the carpool hits the fan, and heated slowly while you attend to other matters, and seems to hit the same spot as macaroni and cheese, except it is a whole grain and not pasta AGAIN. If your weekday is such that these steps elude you also, then you can alternatively consider making a pot of quick-cooking soft polenta, dosing it with plenty of grated cheese, and serving it up with an egg fried in olive oil and a shot of tomato sauce or pesto on top and be pretty happy, I think.

In case you do have time for a few more steps, here is Monday Polenta. The herbs are not essential--it’s the absentee-cook oven-finishing of a process that normally demands 30-40 minutes of attentive stirring that’s revolutionary. But the herbs do satisfy the urge to be satisfied, if you know what I mean, without challenging the faint of heart.

baked herb polenta

Adapted from Jerry Traunfeld’s The Herb Farm Cookbook

Serves 4-6

1 T butter, softened

4 ½ c water

1 tsp salt

1 c medium-coarse ground polenta or cornmeal or yellow corn grits (I get this in the bulk bins at our co-op)

2 T finely chopped fresh oregano

1 T finely chopped fresh thyme

1 ½ c grated cheese (I like a combination of parmesan and aged gouda, or medium cheddar, or Parrano. The original called for gruyere, which I do not love, but you might)

Preheat the oven to 350 (if you will be cooking to completion right now). Coat a shallow 1.5 quart baking dish with the butter. Bring the water with the salt to a boil in a medium saucepan. Slowly sprinkle in the cornmeal as you whisk constantly. Continue to stir over medium heat until the mixture thickens, about 5 minutes. Don’t stop stirring or it will spit in your eye. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the herbs and half the cheese.

Spread the polenta evenly in the prepared dish and sprinkle the remaining cheese on top. You can pause here for as long as you need to. When you are about an hour from wanting to eat it, bake the polenta until it is bubbling all over and the edged begin to brown. If extra toastiness on top is desired and you have chosen a pan that will not explode under a broiler (no glass!! NO GLASS!!), then you can broil it a moment, but remember I said to watch it the whole time, not walk away thinking you will remember to come back in time. The polenta can also rest at this stage; it is soft and moundish on the plate when it is first baked, and as it sits it becomes firmer and slice-able.

orange you glad

2012-01-10T09:29:00.000-08:00

Okay, I know I said Italy but we've been re-routed. That’s modern travel for you. I just hope our luggage catches up.

When one of my children was about six, and she had at that point been to some pretty choice dining establishments despite her tender years, I asked her one day where she would like to go for dinner. “Can we go,” she asked hesitantly, “to the place where the golf is?” Since I was thinking about restaurants, at first I didn’t get that she meant the snack bar at the mini-golf park. “You know, the place where you tell them what you want, and then they give it to you through the window. That,” she said in a wistful tone, “is my FAVORITE kind of restaurant.”

A hundred or so years before that, I was in my 20’s and living in New York. I worked at a community organization in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and right in the middle of my route between that building and the elevated platform of the M train was a little diner with a short-order window that opened on the sidewalk. You could stop there and order a fried egg sandwich, or some chicken and rice, from the fellow on the other side of it. According to a hand-lettered sign on the window, you could also order a drink called a Morir Soñando, which roughly translates to “a dreamy death.” This was off-putting, to a degree, until a co-worker walking past with me persuaded me to try one. Reader, I married it. Lots of ice, orange juice, something milky and something from a little brown bottle that looked suspiciously like poison. The drink was delicious--kind of like a creamsicle, which I hesitate to say because I don’t even like those.

I lost touch with the Dreamy Death when I stopped working in Brooklyn, but every so often I would think about it and wonder if the little diner was still open. I was sure it was a secret recipe that belonged to the big, smiling man on the other side of the window, and was lost to me and to history by now. Then, about a year ago, it occurred to me to employ the internet on this matter. Morir Soñando turns out to be the national treat of the Dominican Republic, where it is apparently common to name foods after things you might not want to do or eat.

When you are walking from an un-air-conditioned building to an un-air-conditioned subway on a sidewalk spongy with summer heat, this is what you want. Alternatively, if it is winter and all you crave is citrus to rehydrate your body, dessicated from too much indoor air, or if you live in a citrus grove and are trying to think of just one more thing to do with the gusher of fresh orange juice spouting outside your window, you might be barking up the right tree here as well.

There are as many recipes for it as there are stars in the sky, it seems. Some of these recipes will instruct you to make a smoothie out of the ingredients. Some of them may suggest you add a truckload of sugar, and a good number of them will tell you it doesn’t matter if the orange juice is fresh or not. We all know an internet scam when we see one, right? Some people will tell you to wire a lot of money to Uganda immediately, but you don’t do that, either.

morir soñando

Per serving, you will need:

1c fresh squeezed OJ (you can buy it, just fork it over for the fresh stuff and refuse the carton's siren call)

a drop or two of bitters or vanilla
2-3 t of agave or simple syrup

enough ice to fill your designated serving cup

¼ c evaporated milk (NOT condensed milk)

In a jar with a secure lid, put the OJ and the the sweetener and the bitters or vanilla, along with the ice. Secure that lid and shake vigorously. Divide the ice and icy-cold juice among the serving glasses. Pour the shot of evaporated milk over top and insert a straw (absolutely essential) and serve immediately. Don't mix it. For the full creamsicle effect, let the slurping take care of that.

The fine print: Don't make it in advance, or the milk will go funny from the acid in the juice. I made a dairy-free version for a hot pal last summer using soy creamer, and I bet coconut milk would have some merit for that application as well.

Cheers.

she'll be waiting in Istanbul

2012-01-09T12:39:00.001-08:00

Without meaning to, I’ve taken you to Turkey two days running. It’s good to get out and about, I guess. Tomorrow, depending on how tonight’s dinner pans out, I think we’ll be in Italy so pack accordingly.

In yoga this morning the instruction as we stretched (or lurched, in my case) was “melt your heart.” The hamstring area was impacted directly, as well as the psyche. If your Monday calls for comfort food--something I always associate with a spoon--then this may be the heart-melting ticket to heaven you are after.

A few caveats are in order here. First, the recipes I looked at called for blanched almonds, which I didn’t have and was unwilling to make. What I had in abundance was unsalted, toasted almonds with their skins on, and having used those once I don’t think I would try anything else. The flavor was stupendous. Second, the amount of sugar indicated was too much, so I reduced it. If you like things very sweet, try 2/3c. The suggested garnish was chopped pistachios, and I can see the merits there. I just didn't have any. If you do, and possibly also have access to a handful of pink rose petals gathered in the dew, I think that would be the right way to go. Almond extract was suggested as an ingredient, but I like the pure flavor of the food here so I skipped it. You might want to steep some cardamom pods in the milk along with the almonds, if you aren't in the mood for the straight, mild flavor of almonds. If dairy is a concern, I can’t see any particular reason why you couldn’t make this with soy milk. Finally, a recipe or two that I consulted instructed me to knead the ground almonds before steeping them in the milk, and as near as I can tell that may help you feel more Turkish, which could be a goal of yours, but won’t really affect the flavor of the final product.

turkish almond pudding

keskul

½ c almonds

1 quart of milk, divided

1/3 c basmati rice, or 1/3 c + 1T rice flour

½ c sugar

a pinch of salt

Grind the rice in a blender or food processor until it is quite fine. Remove 1/3 c of the rice powder and put it in a 4-cup glass measuring cup or a medium bowl. Pour ¼ c of cold milk over the rice powder, stirring to make a paste.

Put the almonds in the blender with the remaining T of rice powder, and pulse, pause, pulse, pause, until they are ground up too. (Running the machine consistently will create almond butter). Pour and scrape the almond meal into a small bowl or measuring cup.

In a medium saucepan, scald 1 c of the milk (heat until there are bubbles at the edge of the pot, but don’t boil). Pour this over the almonds and stir to combine. Set aside to steep.

Scald the remaining 2 ¾ c milk in the same pot, and pour this into the rice slurry, stirring constantly. Return this mixture to the pot and heat over low to medium heat, stirring all the while, until a strong simmer is reached. Add the pinch of salt and continue to stir and simmer for about ten minutes, until you have something like cream of wheat. Turn off the heat a moment.

Pour the almond/milk mixture through a fine mesh strainer into the cup you had the rice slurry in. Press with the back of the spoon to extract the liquid, and discard the solids. Add the strained almond milk to the pot, along with the sugar, and bring back to a simmer. Stir and simmer about another 8 minutes, until the cream of wheat consistency is restored. Pour into small dishes, garnish as you like, and maybe get a raspberry involved if you can get hold of a few.

super savor

2012-01-08T19:56:00.000-08:00

Today I met a stupendous baby in the grocery store: about a year old, all smiles, and shopping for pals as her mother shopped for food. The baby had a little jar of snacks with her that she proudly held up for me to admire. Her mom opened the jar and handed her one of whatever was in there (goldfish crackers, from the look of things), and when she put it in her mouth the taste of it thrilled her so that a jolt of pleasure seemed to pass from her rosebud mouth all the way down her round little legs to her toes. A small squeal of happiness followed.

When was the last time you tasted something so completely, and felt (or allowed) the pleasure of it to reverberate through your whole self?

In these early days of a new year, I am ferreting out all the restorative pleasures I can, looking for any little moment in the day to connect doing and being, inner life and physical body. Cooking and eating are so grounding in that way, for me: driven by appetite, using my hands, my brain, and the fruits of the earth and air and water, taking this food in to make it possible to keep on keeping on. Alleluia.

Of course I sometimes eat a frozen waffle, or burn the soup, or even burn the frozen waffle. Not every calorie is forged in the furnace of the gods. But it feels right to be making a little room, here in the January grace period for Big New Ideas, to appreciate that feeding ourselves has the potential to be more than merely fueling the flesh-and-bone taxi that our brains ride around in. I don’t know if we are what we eat, but I do know that we aren’t if we don’t.

New ingredients can wake up your senses, but so can novel ways of combining or deploying things that are very familiar. In the first offering here, dill--usually a garnish or accent--becomes an actual vegetable, its intensity mellowed by the mild taste and melting texture of cooked spinach. It comes from Madhur Jaffrey, who is reassuring to cook with because she very confidently tells you exactly what to do. “You may serve this with this, or this. It is all you need.” There are days when it is relaxing to be instructed in this way. The yogurt sauce may seem like too much to bother with, but it takes about a minute to assemble and rocks your 2011 tastebuds into the new year nicely.

The second recipe is for the emergency salad I concocted when I noticed that spinach cooks WAY DOWN, farther than a person expects--even when, every time he sees a leaf of it, that person’s husband likes to say “never underestimate the power of spinach to cook down.” There were 7 of us for dinner and I had hardly enough of anything to constitute a whole salad with which to supplement the small and very flavorful bowl of spinach, but when what little of each thing I had got together in the bowl it worked out fine--so fine that I thought I would tell you about it.

sautéed spinach with dill and onion

(zeytin yagli ispanak)

adapted from Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian

serves 4 (do not underestimate the power of spinach to cook down, my friends)

3/4 pound baby spinach leaves, or 10 oz frozen spinach, thawed, or a combination

2 T olive oil

1 T butter

1 large onion, finely chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

1/3 c finely chopped fresh dill

1/2 c water

salt to taste

yogurt sauce

1/2 c plain yogurt

1/4 t salt

1 small garlic clove, mashed to a pulp

optionally, a grating of lemon zest

1/4 t paprika

Put the oil and butter in a large pan (spinach may cook down--see above--but it starts out demanding lots of space), and heat it up. Add the onion and garlic and sauté over a low to medium flame for about 5 minutes, until the onion is soft and translucent. It should not brown. Add the spinach, dill and water and simmer gently, uncovered, for about ten minutes.

Make the yogurt sauce: combine the yogurt with the garlic, salt and optional lemon zest, and sprinkle the paprika on top. Serve the greens with a dollop of this on top.

emergency salad

1 heart of romaine lettuce

1/2 head of napa cabbage

1/2 an English or hothouse cucumber

1/2 c toasted almonds, chopped

2T toasted sesame oil

1T flax oil (you could use olive oil instead)

2 t tamari or shoyu

juice of half a lime (HA! you thought I was going to say lemon, but that would make a fine substitute)

red pepper flakes, if a little heat is desired, to taste

Slice the lettuce crosswise into 1/2" or so pieces, and cabbage similarly, maybe a little thinner. Quarter the cucumber lengthwise and slice it up into 1/4" pieces or thereabouts. Toss this in a salad bowl with the remaining ingredients, taste for any needed corrections in seasoning, and there you go.

stock response

2012-01-05T19:12:00.000-08:00

In January it's so nice
While slipping on the sliding ice
To sip hot chicken soup with rice
Sipping once, sipping twice
Sipping chicken soup with rice

-Maurice Sendak

A tip from the very divine mastermind of Glutton For Life sent me scurrying over to Michael Ruhlman’s website the other day, and once I had thoroughly alarmed myself about the possibilities of committing involuntary manslaughter with homemade chicken broth and taken a Solemn Vow Of Immediate Refrigeration, I stumbled into the embrace of Ruhlman’s essay on reviving Americans' interest in cooking for ourselves. It was a perfect antidote to the Alarming Broth Report, as well as a welcome encouragement to keep yabbering on in this space about what I make for dinner. Here is a snippet:

Americans are being taught that we’re too stupid to cook. That cooking is so hard we need to let other people do it for us. The messages are everywhere. Boxed cake mix. Why is it there? Because a real cake is too hard! You can’t bake a cake! Takes too long, you can’t do it, you’re gonna fail!

Look at all those rotisserie chickens stacked in the warming bin at the grocery store. Why? Because roasting a chicken is too hard, takes FOREVER. An hour. I don’t have an hour to watch a chicken cook!

Mindset, mindset! Exactly! Once more I found myself nodding vigorously enough to dislodge a molar. Life is full of drains on our time and distractions and pressing commitments, it’s true. But we have to eat, and often. All five senses are involved, whether they are rewarded for it or not. You don’t have to make trouble for yourself in order to excite them, although there is certainly infinite room to do so. We get several opportunities each day to thank our bodies with a good taste, pleasing fragrance, satisfying texture--maybe with no grander a gesture than a squeeze of lemon (okay, I am a little bit obsessed with lemons) in our water or, heaven, over the soup.

chicken soup with barley

1 whole boneless chicken breast

to season the chicken:

2t finely chopped or smashed preserved lemon, or substitute 1T of lemon juice, a scratch of lemon zest and a pinch of coarse salt

1 clove garlic, finely minced or pressed in a garlic press or run through a microplane grater

about a half inch of fresh ginger, grated on the microplane or other fine grater (about a teaspoon)

1T good olive oil

a few twists of the pepper mill

for the soup:

1-2 carrots, peeled and diced small

1-2 stalks celery, diced small

1 medium potato (Yukon or bliss) diced small

1 T olive oil

2.5 quarts of chicken broth

1 c pearled barley

optional garnish:

1-2 T finely chopped fresh dill

lemon wedges

Pound the chicken breast to about half an inch thick (I did this in the plastic bag the chicken breast came in, with the base of the olive oil bottle that was on the counter, just by way of indicating how refined a process pounding a paillard de poulet can be for those of us in street clothing)

Season the flattened chicken with the lemon, garlic, ginger, pepper and olive oil (I threw them into the bag and mashed it around).

Plop the chicken onto some broiler-proof apparatus and broil it until it's lightly browned and cooked through. Let it cool enough to handle, and chop it up.

In a large pot, sauté the vegetables in the olive oil until they begin to soften at the edges a little, about three minutes. Add the broth to the pot, and the barley, and bring to a steady simmer. Throw in the chopped chicken, and simmer it all until the barley is tender, about 30 minutes.

When you dish it up, sprinkle a few teaspoons of dill and a squeeze a little lemon on each bowl.

key chain

2012-01-03T18:57:00.000-08:00

When I was pregnant with my second child and nearing the baby’s launch date, a friend asked me an odd question. It was not odd because it was intrusive--for one thing, I have been asked so many intrusive questions in all of my pregnancies that it would hardly have been worth getting my knickers in a twist over another one at that late date, and for another it was not intrusive. Or, it didn’t seem like it was. What she asked was “who’s doing your food?”

From time to time, when chatting with another person in one’s native tongue, one can encounter a sentence made up of words that are entirely recognizable, but whose overall meaning remains elusive. This was just such a time. When she perceived the mental echo on my part that her question had set off, she re-phrased it. “Your meals, I mean. Who is in charge of your meals?” We edged a hair closer to a shared understanding, but only a hair. These, too, were all words I knew well, but I still couldn’t make the gist of the question out.

Eventually, using a combination of patience and semaphore and monosyllables comprehensible even to my gestational brain, I was introduced to the concept of the food chain. When our first baby arrived four years before this, we stumbled along eating what we could throw together quickly with one eye open and one arm free, and when our families came around, we ate better. Baby: The Sequel opened the door to a whole new world. Kind Feeding Friend set up a schedule, and every few days, hot food prepared by other pals came to the door right at the time the baby and the preschooler and the parents began warming up for the evening sonata of crabbiness. It was heaven. When we had our third baby, his sisters were in two different schools, and we had TWO chains. "Is it only for babies that we get this?" asked my husband, briefly considering a fourth.

Since that initiation we have been links and we have been recipients many times over, for times of joyful arrivals and sad departures and lingering maladies. I think it is one of the proudest accomplishments of civilization, this simple act of putting nourishment together in one home and taking it to another. When you are unable to easily feed yourself, you get fed; when you are fluttering around unsure of how to be of use to others in need, you have an action plan.

Some friends of ours had a baby right before the holidays, and it’s a good-looking baby. I had a look at it the other day, when I brought them this food. I put some of the food, the part I am telling you about in detail, on a stick, because there are toddlers in the house, and even toddlers who aren’t adjusting to a new sibling like food on a stick--as do parents grabbing food with one hand as they blow by the kitchen en route to the changing table or the washing machine. It was all food that could be eaten at its arrival temperature, or chilled now to heat up later, or just eaten standing up in front of the fridge. You don’t need a new baby to look favorably on a meal like that.

Don’t be alarmed by the lemongrass. It is not hard to find or to deal with. Mindset, mindset. Or the sticks, because you can just skip them entirely, which is how we roll around here when it’s not for company.

sort of satay

In the jar of your blender or in a cup that your hand-blender fits into, put:

½ c coconut milk (about a third of the can; I used light because that was all I had, but regular would work just fine, too)

a quick scrape of a lime’s zest over a microplane

the juice of that lime

1 ½ T fish sauce

a handful of fresh cilantro, leaves and stems, chopped

1 stalk of lemongrass, outer husky bits removed and tender core finely minced

Blend all these things for a half a minute or so.

If you are using them, put 12 bamboo skewers to soak in a dish of warm water. Really. Otherwise you will set them on fire.

Get a bowl or baking dish ready to marinate things in, and put into it one of these things:

A sirloin steak, sliced across the grain into ½ “ slices and fat trimmed off
A chicken breast, treated the same
A pork tenderloin, as above
1# firm tofu, drained, cut into 2” cubes and pressed in a towel to get it dry

All of the animal options slice much more cooperatively if your knife is very sharp or if they are partially frozen.

Pour about half the coconut milk mixture over the protein, toss to coat, and let it all sit for a half hour or so. Reserve the remaining sauce.

Thread the meat onto the sticks in whatever arts-and-crafts way appeals to you. Set the sticks on a broiling pan (if you have no grilling apparatus, like me) in a single layer, tucking exposed sticks under an opposite-facing row of skewered meat to help prevent forest fires. Broil the first side until browned to your liking, then flip. The slices are thin so it all cooks in a snap. You can also grill it, if you have the technology. Serve with the reserved sauce for dipping.

I packed these in a basket with a big pot of fried rice, made with brown rice (which is good for you) and plenty of nourishing but not alarming nubbins mixed in, like baby spinach and corn and peas. In related news, I made Mollie Katzen’s baked custard with the remainder of the coconut milk, but that has to get through the 2.0 version before I foist it on an unsuspecting public. Watch this space.

in a parallel universe

2012-01-03T04:58:00.000-08:00

look what someone else is doing in their fruit bowl!