good directions

Well, I went and said all those mean things about recipes and then I used one last night that totally restored my faith in the medium.  We had tandoori chicken burgers from Dinner: A Love Story and I have no complaints at all, other than the fact that as I cooked them I realized I had forgotten to put the ginger that was called for into the burgers and it was too late to remedy that. I don't think I can blame that on the recipe.  As a bonus, they were plenty tasty regardless.

Yesterday I was hungry all day but couldn't tell what for.  When I stumbled across the recipe for the burgers I felt a little light bulb go on in my appetite, and I trundled out to buy what I needed. Throwing it together took very little time, as promised, and the payback was huge.

On top of said burgers, we glopped a yogurt sauce of my own device that should either send you scurrying to make some lemon pickle, or at least to find a good source to buy some lemon pickle (any Indian grocery, or often your local Gourmet Shoppe), or you could just come over here with an empty jar and raid my fridge.  It was just right on the burgers, but it's another staple sauce, I think: multi-purpose and made in a minute.

With the burgers, and some sliced avocado and tomato to accompany the sauce on top, we ate roasted squash, and a cucumber salad.  Wednesday is generally the first night of the week that we can all assemble and eat in a seated and somewhat normal fashion, so I am predisposed to like Wednesdays, but even allowing for that bias it was a very solid dinner.

super savory yogurt sauce

1 c plain yogurt (if all you have is Greek yogurt, as I did, you may want to thin it a little with something, and what I used was buttermilk because I had it on hand, but I bet water would do the trick)

1 heaping T lemon pickle, very finely chopped 

1-2 T fresh cilantro (or substitute fresh mint), chopped

Mixy mixy mixy.  That's it.  Maybe you want a little more pickle in it. Depending on the saltiness of your pickle and your personal devotion to sodium, maybe you want a pinch of salt.  

My husband licked the bowl, and my son special ordered a new batch to go in his lunchbox for dipping purposes.  

recipe for trouble

Back in the days when we went to a school far, far, away from our house, we used to occasionally give rides to a nice fellow in the 9^th grade who needed to make the same commute.  He had been schooled in manners and conversation and was carefully polite at all times, so he was not exactly relaxed but still a pleasure to have in the car.  He and my oldest nephew were about the same age, and said nephew was looking into a nature/survival camp that I knew this boy had attended, so one morning I asked him about it.  He warmed to the topic, especially when describing the day at camp when they made mustard from scratch.  “That stuff was amazing,” he said, genuinely enthusiastic and energized by the recollection.  “One whiff cleaned the boogers right out of your nose.” 

I thought of him yesterday, when I fell prey to a chic and gourmet-looking recipe for mustard.  You know that old saw about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing repeatedly, but expecting a different result?  This is how I sometimes feel about recipes.  I do love recipes, and thanks to them I have arrived at some lovely places.  I have a handwritten recipe card from a dearly departed friend, and one of the instructions among the sparse few given is “batter will look curdled but this is OK.”  Love that.  Love when a recipe alerts you to the likelihood that you may think you have botched it when it’s going just as it should.  I also like a recipe that warns you of actual pitfalls for disaster, and that gives you remedies to hold in reserve.  I like a loose guideline, like most of Nigel Slater’s breezy “this is how I do it but do it how you like” instructions, that empower you to make things just the way you want to eat them, and I like a schoolmarm to hold me accountable step-by-incremental-step when I am doing something complicated.

It is always possible that someone’s tastes will differ from mine, and that a recipe that causes them to write swooning words of praise will turn out to emphasize or omit the very thing I dislike or rely upon.  But this can generally be spied from a distance and corrections made for personal preferences. 

Here is what I don’t like: recipes that trick you into thinking something will turn out better than it sounds, and recipes that omit either necessary warnings or crucial information.

It seems to be a rule of the universe that I only fall prey to these when they require a significant cash outlay for ingredients I may never find a use for again or which I will waste, or which will produce a monstrous quantity of something inedible.  To wit, the gluten-free version of my revered and cherished Jim Lahey Overnight Bread, not perpetrated upon me by that walking saint but by another (this has to be the triple crown title-holder for Worst Smelling Food, Most Costly and Ultimately Useless Ingredients and Most Haunting Bad Flavor); a very pricey roast pork that was too salty even for the dogs, and the mustard mentioned above. 

About the nostril thing, I can attest that my young passenger of years back was totally on the up and up.  About how good the outcome would be, I cannot say the same about the recipe-writer.  The mustard and I have had 24 hours to recuperate, though and I begin to suspect one of the problems with the recipe is that it forgets to tell you to let it mellow for a spell before you throw it out.  It tastes significantly better today than it did yesterday, which is a low bar but still gives me hope.

Maybe you can see how this leads us directly to potatoes.  Here is how: my mom gave me a new cookbook and I immediately felt a pull towards a fennel and potato dish.  I thought I had more of the things it required than I turned out to have, by which time it was Sunday afternoon and I was not going back to the store.  I made the necessary adjustments for limitations of ingredients, and a few more for taste and the future health of the arteries.  It was delish.  Now you can see the whole arc of reason, right?  Thought so.

What is brilliant about this recipe is that it saves the harried cook from painstakingly layering potatoes and their seasonings by mixing it all in a bowl first, which custom-coats each slice of tater.  I cut the heavy cream called for with half and half, and lacking the specified onion went with garlic, which seems right.  Onions are always sweeter than I expect them to be, and the fennel is plenty sweet too—garlic kept things on a nice savory track.  Not a speck of it was left over.

fennel and potato gratin

heavily adapted from Lisa Caponigri’s Whatever Happened To Sunday Dinner?

1 large (soft-ball sized) fennel bulb

3 T olive oil

4-6 cloves of garlic, minced

3-4 large russet or baking potatoes

1 c heavy cream, divided

1 c half & half

2 ½ c coarsely grated fontina (about half a pound), divided

1t sea salt

fresh pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 350.  Oil or butter a heavy, shallow baking dish (I used my big enameled cast iron one, which is about 10x14).

Trim any stalks from the fennel bulb, slice off the bottom and remove the outer layer if it is bruised or grubby. Split it in half lengthwise and then slice it into about ½ “ strips.  I ended up with about 3 cups.

In a large skillet, heat the oil over medium heat.  Sauté the garlic for a minute, then add the fennel and cook, stirring regularly, until it is just tender, about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, scrub and thinly slice the potatoes—no more than ¼ “ thick.  In a large bowl, combine ½ c of the cream, the half and half, 2 c of the cheese, and the salt and pepper.  Add the potatoes and toss to combine.

When the fennel is cooked, toss it in with the potatoes.  Dump this mixture into the prepared baking dish and press everything down with a spatula to even it out and submerge as much as possible.  Drizzle the remaining cream and the reserved cheese on top.  Not all the potatoes will be under the level of the sauce, but the top ones should be dressed with a topcoat of cream, between what was clinging to them and what you have just added.  

Bake until browned and tender, about 1 ½ to 1 ¾ hours.  If the top is browning too quickly, reduce the oven heat to 325 for the last half hour of cooking.  Let stand about ten minutes before you serve it.

sandwiched between

 

My son is a big eater.  He is not a very big person, not in any direction, but he can pack away an enormous amount of food.  Though you might expect he would finish a big meal looking like The Little Prince’s boa-constrictor-who-swallowed-an-elephant (that creature, if you recall, resembled a fedora--see drawings #1 and #2, below), in fact he does not.  I am not sure where he keeps the food.

illustrations by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

When he was in kindergarten, his Lunchbox Lament was “never enough.”  I assembled bigger and bigger lunches, and we began to project that when he got to first grade, and required both snack and lunch to be packed for him, that he would need a wheeled suitcase to carry it all.

This has not come to pass.  I sing the Lunchbox Lament now, and it goes a little something like this: “why didn’t you eat your lunch?  Why, oh, why, did you not eat the nice lunch that I packed?” His standard story is that the allotted lunch time is too short.  This defense has been cross-checked with his teacher, and it did not bear up under further investigation.  It is suspected that chatting occupies the jawbone in question more than chewing does.

Recently he has made it known that he has covetous feelings for his seat-mate’s vanilla sandwich cookies, and so I spent some time last week making a cookie that could carry some nutritional firepower and still taste like a cookie.  This is version 2.0, and maybe you will try it out and let me know how you tweak it, and I’ll let you know if they make a round trip in today’s lunchbox.

The fine print:

• I used a combination of shortening and butter in the cookies, because that makes them taste (to me, anyway) more bakery-ish, and makes them crisper, but you could use all butter. 
• In my quest to boost nutrition, I replaced the standard powdered sugar in the filling with nonfat dry milk powder, which is quite sweet and hardly required any additional sweetener to make them feel dessertish.  I reckon you could use powdered other kinds of milk, too. Just be sure it is entirely free of lumps.
• The fillings may look too runny when you mix them up, but once they are in the cookie sandwich, they set up more firmly. 
• I used the no-stir kind of peanut butter for the peanut version (I have a secret passion for Skippy--do not tell anyone); if you use all-natural peanut butter, you may want a slightly higher proportion of shortening to PB for the sake of texture.
• My brilliant friend Alana (who has a dandy recipe for the straight-up dessert version of the classic tooth-blackening chocolate sandwich cookie in her wonderful book) taught me to slit open a paper towel tube lengthwise and roll the dough log in it to create round cookies, but all my empty paper towel tubes get turned into telescopes or marble runs almost immediately and are probably under the couch.  Lacking that high-tech tool to mold with, I punted and made square-ish cookies: 

sandwich cookies

makes about 36 sandwiches

8 T butter

4T shortening

½ c sugar

1 egg, room temperature

1/2 t vanilla

pinch salt

1 ¾ c flour (all purpose, or a mixture of ww pastry flour and all purpose)

½ c almond meal

¼ c golden flax meal

Cream the butter, shortening and sugar until quite smooth.   Beat in the egg and vanilla.  Combine the dry ingredients, and mix these in to make a smooth dough.  Don't over-beat.  Scrape the dough into a fat snake onto a long sheet of wax paper, and roll it up, either using a slit-open tube to create a smooth round log, or using the counter to form a smooth square.  Chill for at least one hour in the fridge.

When you are ready to bake, line two baking sheets with parchment and preheat the oven to 350.  Use a sharp knife to cut the chilled dough into 1/4" slices (thicker cookies create an unsatisfactory cookie-to-filling ratio, and lower your yield) and lay these on the parchment. They will not rise or spread much in baking so they can be pretty near each other.  Bake 8-10 minutes, reversing the sheets halfway through to ensure even baking, until the centers are firm and the edges barely golden.  Remove to a rack to cool.

When they are completely cool, fill them with one of these things:

peanut butter filling

4T creamy (not chunky) PB

3T shortening

1T honey

¼ c milk powder

Cream everything together well and try not to eat it all.

vanilla filling

3T butter

4T shortening

¼ c milk powder

1T honey

¼ t vanilla, or 1/2 t finely-grated lemon zest and a teaspoon of lemon juice

Cream everything together really well.

a bit of a lemon

Five straight days of sauce posts did not cure me.  I think we may need to gather weekly to talk sauce. The Condiment of The Week is....lemon pickle.  I have a knack for selecting items that have singular and God-given recipes in the minds of many, and surely this is another of these, for which, as usual, I offer one dopey and personal version not meant to stand as the be-all, end-all and ideal in the eyes of entire nations.

I started with my trusted source Madhur Jaffrey, and then veered.  The point of lemon pickle is not a mild and mellow experience; it is a powerful and pungent kick for anything involving (traditionally) dals or other bean dishes and rice, but which I like (shocking) to put on my grilled cheese, my eggs, and the end of the fork heading for my mouth.  Like all fermented foods, it is considered a digestive.  I think there are a berjillion different ways (of course I am estimating here) to make it.

The essential ingredient, other than the lemons, of course, is a very sharp knife.  A dull knife will turn five minutes of pleasantly aromatic slicing and dicing into a misery.  The weirder ingredients proposed here are mostly optional; if you make something with just lemons and salt and red pepper, you will still be pretty happy.  I used cayenne, but I saw some shredded red pepper in the Asian market a few weeks ago that I have my eye on for next time.   If you can get hold of the weirder ingredients, even better.  Of time, you will need perhaps a half hour of the hands-on variety.  Then you switch over to patience.

  

lemon pickle of no particular region of any known country,

yet with an unmistakable Indian flair

4 average size lemons

3 T sea salt

1/2 t sugar

2t cayenne pepper

1/4 t ground turmeric

2" fresh ginger root

2-4 fresh kaffir lime leaves (optional)

1/4 c canola oil

1 pinch ground asafoetida or hing powder (optional)

1 t urad dal or dried split yellow peas (also optional)

1 t brown mustard seed

Have ready a quart mason (or similar) jar, with a non-corrosive and tight-fitting lid.  Fill the jar with boiling water, and dump the boiling water out over the lid.

Using your sharp, sharp knife, slice the lemons into thin (1/4 inch or so) slices, and use the knife tip to poke out any seeds as you go along.  Stack the slices three or four deep, and cut into a fine dice.

Scrape the lemon bits and any juices on the board into a mixing bowl.  Peel the ginger root (remember how you can peel it with a teaspoon?  I love that trick.  It never gets old). Slice it thinly lengthwise and then cross-wise into fine shreds (or you can just mince it).  Add this to the bowl.  Stack the lime leaves and slice them into thin ribbons, or use scissors to cut them into shreds, and into the bowl they go, along with the salt, sugar and cayenne.  Stir to combine.

Heat the oil in a small, heavy skillet and drop in the asafoetida, then the mustard seeds and dried peas.  As soon as they begin to sizzle, dump the entire contents into the mixing bowl.  Stir again to fully mix, and scrape everything into the waiting jar.

Set the jar in a sunny window and leave it there for 7 days, shaking gently every day to move the contents around.  After a week, you can move it to the fridge.  It's ready to eat in about two weeks, and just gets better with more time, provided it lasts long enough to establish that.

I once made a dolled-up version of it by adding some thickly shredded carrots and green mango, and you can, too--or you can leave it as is.

Have a great weekend!

strong to the finach

Here is the B-side to yesterday's wild greens paté, especially if taking your yard greens neat is a little too daunting a prospect.  I know it's kind of the same thing two days running, but nettle season is brief.  If you live a life without nettles, as a plus this version is more usefully adapted to polite, cultivated greens than the straight-up paté is.

Once you have created a garlicky, savory, emerald green paste from your wild or more refined greens, whip it into some mashed potatoes.  You know how mashed potatoes are kind of synonymous with background noise and naps?  This is their life-of-the-party cousin.

green taters

one batch of greens paté, minus the tamari & nutritional yeast

the reserved water from cooking the greens

3-4 large russet potatoes (about 2#)

1/2 cup sour cream (or buttermilk, for a less sinful version)

1/2 cup finely-grated parmesan

3T butter

salt and fresh pepper to taste

Peel and chunk the potatoes and cook them in the greens water, or regular water with a nice pinch of salt, until they are entirely tender.  Drain them (you can reserve that water and use it to make a helluva nice loaf of bread, if that's the kind of thing you are into) and let them rest, covered, on the stove for a few minutes.  Mash them well, adding the remaining ingredients, until you achieve your preferred degree of smoothness, and adjust the seasonings to your liking.  If you won't be eating them right away, smooth them into a buttered casserole dish, and do the top with additional butter and a sprinkling of parmesan, and reheat in a nice hot oven when you are ready for them.

the old man is snoring

 

Buckets of rain today.  No complaining is allowed, because we have been so dry here that valid fears were harbored for the growing season.  I rely on the growing season for sanity as well as sustenance, and round about May 1 my fatigue with the purchase of well-traveled produce is reaching its peak.  My version of the general strike?  I will eat from my yard today, and let our seriously unstable commercial food system grind on without my Tuesday participation.  It may tumble.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

The first green shoots to poke up here see my smiling face, and my scissors, right above them.  My dearly beloved once saw me quietly rejecting the frisée in a fancy salad and expressed confusion.  A green that I didn't like?  "But you'll eat anything the mower kicks up!" he exclaimed.  Trying to eat frisée, in my opinion, is like chewing the top of a pineapple.  It's pretty and all, but best admired from a distance.  The yard has plenty to offer in its place.

In its purest form, with all the weeds in it, this is not a terribly practical, everyday kind of recipe.  Though substituting more refined, cultivated greens for the wild will still give you a very tasty result, it's the wildness and fleeting season that make it special to me.  

The recipe has mysterious roots, appropriately enough.  When the farmer's market first opened in our town about ten years ago, there was a group of (I say this lovingly) long-haired freaky people who came each week in the spring with little hand-lettered tubs of this stuff, or something like it, and they gave away enough free samples that soon their table was cleared off within moments of the market opening each week.  Then they vanished.  The next year they turned up at a different market, and then I never saw them again.  Using their label, which listed the ingredients, I came up with this version. It is mighty stuff.  The effect of eating what grows right near you is potent, and after a long winter off, it courses through the veins with a noticeable lilt.

If you wonder what lamb's quarters are like, here you go.  They have a distinctively pebbly white dust on the undersides of their leaves, and often a purplish color to the stems.  They are a tender and delicious substitute for spinach and have a nice long season.  They like recently-dug up patches of earth; we have a nice crop around our compost pile.

 

Nettles are sawtooth-edged plants with a pronounced sting when you touch them, and are best picked with scissors into a basket or bag.  Take the tender tops only, and steer clear of roadsides.  Their season (for eating, not stinging) is pretty short.  By the time the weather warms up, they are too tough to eat.  But grab them while you can--nothing else tastes quite like them.

wild greens paté

1 bunch ramps, or substitute a couple of cloves of garlic and some chives or green onions

1 fat bouquet (not that I recommend you clutch it) of nettles, tender tops only

1 fat bouquet of lamb’s quarters, or substitute two big handfuls of baby spinach

2t nutritional yeast

2t tamari or light soy

Wash the nettles very, very, very well (they love to harbor grit), and carefully (consoling yourself that nettle stings are reported to cure joint pain, if it comes to that). Wash the lamb's quarters or spinach. Clean the ramps and chop the bulbs and leaves separately.

Bring a 2 quart pot of water to boil and give it a fat pinch of salt. Drop in the nettles and cook for a minute, then drop in the lamb's quarters and/or spinach. Stir a few times and then drain, rinsing under cool water to refresh. Coarsely chop and reserve. The cooking water is full of nutrients and is tasty in stock or soup, if you roll that way.

Heat the olive oil in a medium skillet and sauté the ramp bulbs until they soften. Add the ramp greens, and a few stirs later, the reserved cooked greens. Add a tablespoon or so of water to smooth it out and simmer over low heat until everything is quite tender and still bright green and not terribly wet. Remove to a food processor and add the nutritional yeast (I know it smells weird, but trust me) and tamari, and pulse until you have a thick purée. Taste and adjust for salt and pepper, to your taste.

pot of gold

We have a chicken making a weird, wheezy snorking noise today, and while I am not broadcasting an open plea for advice, I will share a little wisdom: if you happen to suspect that a chicken of your acquaintance may have an impacted crop, do NOT do any internet research while eating lunch at your desk.  Just take me at my word on that.

I was going to write you a nice little story about the beans in my lunch, but barnyarding and other Monday managerial tasks have absorbed all the time I had for that.  So no story.  Just beans.

That is what these are--just beans.  I've said before (more than once, in fact) that in my opinion, a person who starts the week with a giant pot of beans in the fridge strides boldly forward with a spring in their step.  Beans are my pals for many reasons: they can be bought without packaging, can be made ahead in quantity, improve on standing, are nutritionally dense, easy on the wallet, will usefully marry a myriad of flavors, can be employed in numerous ways and are very appealing to my children.

And there, I just said it again.

These beans are known, in my head, as "Dominican Beans," but when I tried to reconnect to the recipe that made me call them that in the first place, it was gone, and any other recipe I have found for Dominican beans is totally different.  They employ one stupendous trick--slow cooking in the oven in a covered pot-- that has the power to influence all your future bean projects.  But beyond that, they are unassuming, slipping happily into burritos, on to nachos, into baked dinners, mashing up nicely into refritos, sliding into a bowl with cheese on top and tortillas for dipping, etc. I make more than I might need for the week, and then I freeze one-cup portions of them for my future lunchbox- or snack-panicked self, and am always glad I did.

If you don't have a stove-worthy casserole dish, you can do the initial boil of the beans in a  pot and transfer them to a covered baking dish. The kombu helps to make the beans especially tender and digestible, but is entirely optional.

basic beans

2 cups dried pinto beans, picked over and soaked either overnight or by the quick soak method

2-3 cloves garlic, peeled & whole

2 t ground cumin

1T mild pure chile powder (ancho is nice; beware of "chili powder," which often contains salt and other spices, and thanks to the salt will toughen your beans)

optionally, a strip of dried kombu seaweed 

1/2 c finely chopped cilantro

1/2 c tomato puree, or 2T tomato paste 

 salt to taste

Preheat the oven to 350.  Drain the beans, and place them in a heavy casserole.  Add the cumin and chile, the cloves of garlic, the kombu if you are using it, and enough fresh water to cover by an inch.  Bring this mixture to a boil over medium to high heat, then turn off the heat, cover, and place the pot in the oven. Turn the oven down to 275, and go on about your day.  If you are bored or concerned, check the beans in an hour and see if they need a stir or some additional water.  They probably don't.  Check them again in another hour or so.  Are they almost tender?  You want to keep them in there until they are totally tender, and undercooking is more of a cause for concern than overcooking is.  I generally forget they are in the oven until I suddenly have to dash out somewhere, and then I just leave them in the switched-off oven until I get home.  Cooking time will vary based on the age of the beans, which is unknowable.  Life lessons abound in the kitchen.  

If you are using the kombu, you can remove it after an hour or so, while it is still intact, or just let it dissolve into the beans. 

Anyway, once the beans are tender, remove them from the oven and stir in the remaining ingredients.  These are tasty right away, but they vastly improve the next day and so forth.