Good Real Food

We just got back from a wonderfully lovely week in Vermont where we didn’t actually eat as many greens as I’m used to, or as many whole grains. And before that I was at a conference in Cambridge, which added up to nearly two weeks away for me. Neighbor Onion not only picked up our CSA share last week but actually brought it upstairs for us.  Seriously a wonderous thing to come home from vacation to find fresh greens (and strawberries and radishes) in your refrigerator.

I’m stuck on the worlds most simple cabbage recipe because usually when I have cabbage (which, thankfully, I won’t for months to come!) I just want some way to eat it already. So we did this:

I made some red quinoa by heating up a few tablespoons of olive oil (I’d say just one but I know I used more than that) with two cloves of garlic and then adding the quinoa (rinsed many times over, which gets rid of the bitterness) and stirring that around in the hot oil until I got bored, added water and slammed the lid down. I managed to get both the water to grain ratio and the timing just right, which is the kind of scary miracle that will turn me into a grandmother tout-de-suite (the kind of grandmother who will give you a pie crust recipe that she’s used for decades and never mention that in fact she always uses half butter and half crisco and no where near as much water as the recipe calls for, which is why your crusts won’t turn out. Secretly, though, now that I think about it, neither of my own grandmothers ever gave me a single recipe.)

I did the vitamin greens orangette style: greens, sambal olek (from Tracie’s pantry, which she emptied into my care in exchange for J-ro picking up her mail and watering her plants. A great arrangement in my book. Not sure how J-ro feels.) some soy sauce in a frying pan. Just to keep things classy I garnished it with toasted slivered almonds (because we had them) and one sliced hard boiled egg (same logic).

It was super simple, and vitamin greens might be too bitter to swap out for cabbage but it made me really happy to be home, cooking whatever I want.

PS. We did buy a shiny new camera but I haven’t worked out any habits about actually using it before dinner is over. Sorry.  I’ll get there

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I don’t eat chicken (except when I do; we can talk about that, if you insist, some other time.) so you can cross the obvious back off your list of suggestions. I read someplace a recipe that called for preserved lemons. It sounded delicious, so I made a note on our chalkboard. Preserved lemons. A few weeks later I actually made my way to a place where a person might buy preserved lemons. Though not “preserved lemons,” I gather.

I’d like to know how you use preserved lemons. Hilary said something about lentils and spinach, which I almost invented tonight but I was too lazy to wait for lentils (yes, that lazy) so I had fried plantains with cinnamon, sugar, salt and powdered habenero. And I had onions, chard and one preserved lemon, rinsed and chopped. It was pretty good. Or good enough for “I’m hongry, what’m I going to eat??” I mean, the plaintains were great. the chard was just decent in that nice comfortable gently cooked vegetables kind of way.

So I’m wondering about how you use preserved lemons?

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I’m trying to eat more beans. To cook dry beans once a week at least.

This week t’was black eyed peas, soaked for 24 hours because I didn’t think it’d take me that long to get to them. Cooked this morning in chicken stock (it was open), dried red peppers (sweet, and getting old, bought in Syria), and one bay leaf from Montenegro, courtesy of our friend Indira. I realize that most people don’t get up hours before they go to work but I do, and if I’m good I get up and do a wee bit of yoga and my neck doesn’t hurt. And then my neck stops hurting and I stop doing yoga. But I still get up hours before I leave the house. So it works for me to put a pot of beans on in the morning, do yoga, take a shower, make breakfast, eat breakfast, turn the beans off, get dressed, put the beans in the fridge, leave the house. Maybe other people can’t do this. Either way, I did.  And I put a box of frozen spinach out to thaw.

I had it with fried polenta and parmesean when I got home from capieora. Super simple, but super good.

Do you have strategies for starting dinner in the morning? Or just generally ahead of time?

Fried polenta is great when I think of it. I actually bought and roasted some green chiles and made a loaf (Is that the right word? the idea of molded  food is gnarly enough that I have trouble even talking about it, even when it is polenta, which is excellent.)  of polenta last week and have been slowly working my way through it, fried with a fried egg for breakfast on egg mornings. It is good comfort food and goes pretty well with just salad if we’re lazy.

PS. I’m defensive about the chicken stock. I’m not a vegetarian, but I still think it is kind of silly to cook a whole vegetarian meal in meat broth. But I had it, see. And it was open. So I used it. I’ve actually gone a few rounds with DIY stock — one onion, one carrot, a lot of rosemary — which works well, too.

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well. I’ve been absent from this blog for quite some time.

I’d forgotten just how much life changes in the first year of a baby’s life - hour to hour, day to day, week to week. And in addition to the new addition, I’ve recently taken on a new role at work which has me working a lot more.

All of which is to say that I have unfortunately been spending far less time in the kitchen, and that we’ve reverted to the quick and easy staples of pasta, rice, beans, lentils, and anything that you can cook in a crockpot.

But, while our eating isn’t all that exciting all the time, we’re still eating home cooked meals, and the time we don’t spend in the kitchen is spent with each other and with people we love, which is the point, isn’t it?

I hope to make a return to this blog with increasing frequency as the baby gets older and my time is a bit less taxed, but it is likely to be a while before that happens.

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I could tell you about an excellent jullienned salad with habenero powder, parsley, carrots and celleriac (not necessarily in that order) I made to go with father Agnew’s steaks (everyone should have an upstairs neighbor with a cattle ranching father) but I’m most excited about the volume of butter we’ve been going through lately. I don’t usually get into holiday baking, maybe because my mother’s fruit cake is a production that my galley kitchen is not even remotely fit for and comes out way better when my mother makes it anyhow. Or maybe because I’m lazy (shh. don’t tell) or worried about my waist-line but it just doesn’t happen. This year, though, I’ve been on a roll.

First, for a holiday party I experimented with greek butter cookies, which didn’t make it to the party since the whole part about chilling the dough for an hour sounded optional and was decidedly not so. I made them with plain brandy and they came out a little plain, but I took another batch upstairs with my celeriac and habenero salad and for those I stuck to 1 inch balls and grated lemon zest into the dough. Lovely, though a bit fragile. Especially with Seth’s Sambuca. As with so many cookies, the really nice thing is that you can make a batch at a time and always be pulling cookies out of the oven. Something I never noticed was impressive until I realized recently that other people’s mothers don’t keep cookie dough in the fridge unless they bought the dough in a tube.

And then, for no particular reason at all I took a stab at Lena Corwin’s mother’s pumkin bread with pecans and whole cranberries which I’ve been studying for the last year since the photos all look so very pretty.  It is crazy dense and rich, but I think it could take twice as many cranberries and pecans. Maybe I’m just hankering for my mother’s boiled fruit cake, which does have approximately twice as much in the way of fruits and nuts.

Gingerbread men may or may not be next up. Holiday baking recipes?

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It’s winter again, or near enough, which means that I’m back in the kitchen after a summer and fall of making quick and easy foods so I could spend my time gallivanting around. Oh, and we had a kid. Anyway.

This dish of celeriac and carrots was influenced by other recipes and accompanied a pork roast that was also inspired by other recipes. I might write about the roast later, but the veggies really stole the show.

What you need:

• one or more celeriac
• about the same amount of carrots
• garlic and ginger, minced - go for about 1 Tbsp of per celeriac
• cumin seeds - 1 tsp
• cumin powder again, around a tsp, maybe a bit more
• cayenne powder - 1/2 tsp
• stock of some sort, or water
• chopped cilantro

What to do:

Cut your celeriac and carrots into roughly 1/2 inch cubes - no need to be precise. Heat oil in a pan big enough to hold your veggies. When it’s hot, add your cumin seeds, and reduce heat to medium if it wasn’t there already. When the cumin seeds begin to get aromatic, add your garlic and ginger. Toss that around a bit, and when it starts to take on a bit of color and smell lovely, add in your cut up carrots and celeriac. Stir that around for a bit till the veggies take on a bit of color - 5 to 7 minutes or so and add some salt and pepper while you’re doing that. Add in about 1/4 cup of your stock or water, cover, and reduce heat to low. After about another 7-10 minutes, you veggies should be pretty much tender. If they are, remove lid, and add the cumin powder, maybe a bit of cayenne if you want it, and stir to mix. Cook for a few more minutes, stirring a bit to let the flavors meld and to let the cumin powder flavor mellow. Toward the end of the cooking time, mush up some (but not all - maybe 1/4 to 1/3) of the celeriac and carrots. Top with chopped cilantro. Enjoy.

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I had such a craving for a nice hot bowl of clam chowder last week! It really does not have to be the thick mass of cream and potato that can give it a bad rap for being unhealthy. Just a cup of half and half will do you for 6 servings. Clam chowder is also a great “pantry recipe” meaning that almost all of the ingredients can be picked up on sale and used weeks later when you feel like making chowder. It is also fairly quick to make, so it can be a last minute lunch or light supper.

What you need:
2-3 cans minced clams
1-2 bottles clam juice
2 strips bacon (optional)
1 onion, chopped fine
2 cloves garlic, chopped fine
1/4 cup all purpose flour
3-5 medium potatoes, scrubbed and cut into 1/2 inch chunks
1 can of corn
2 bay leaves
1/4 tsp dried thyme
1 cup heavy cream or half and half
2 tbsp minced fresh parsley
salt and pepper

1. cook the bacon until crisp in a large dutch oven or sturdy soup pot. Add onions and cook 5 minutes.
2. stir in garlic, then add flour to coat. Gradually add the clam juice plus the juice from the canned clams. Stir in the potatoes, bay leaves and thyme. Bring to a simmer until potatoes are tender.
3. Stir in the clams, corn, cream, and parsley. Simmer briefly, remove from heat, and season with salt and pepper.

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I don’t know about you, but I have been trying to think of ways to cut down our food budget as things are tight and all the current events are causing me to draw on my Dutch genes that tell me to plan for the worst. So, I have been finding ways to cook with what is in the house and garden and waiting way longer than I usually would to restore the food supplies. Apples are abundant and if you save the one expensive honey crisp for a raw sliced dessert and use the other less expensive ones for cooking, you can make a $7 bag of apples go a long way. When I was a kid we had four apple trees in our back yard. Every year we made apple cider, dried apples, and my favorite, apple sauce. We were not allowed store bought sweets in our house, so I made up snacks for myself using plain yogurt and apple sauce that is still one of my favorite things to eat, though my family thinks it looks gross. Apple sauce is perhaps one of the easiest things you will ever make, and it freezes really well so you can enjoy hot apple sauce in the dead of winter.

Slice and core (but do not peel) as many apples as you have around and put them in a large pot. Cover with water and simmer until soft. Place cooked apples in a food processor or food mill and make the consistency you want. Chunky-fine. Return mixture to the pot, add sugar and cinnamon to taste. Freeze in air tight containers.

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I can’t tell you how glad I am to be back! You all missed roast vegetables, more roast vegetables and, oh, roast root vegetables. With and without garlic. Before I go pitch my cold frame (think warming thoughts about my turnips, folks. Please. Thank you.) and harvest my beets (instead of sitting right here with a blanket and hot cider, which is so much more appealing than midnight beet harvesting) I want to ask for pickling recipes. I have a ton of green tomatoes, salvaged from plants I pulled out this weekend.

I need fridge pickles. I’m way too lazy to sterilize. Eh? Scott?

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anyone who tells you that two kids more than doubles the work is totally correct. Wow.

Anyway, in addition to being up to my eyeballs in kids, this site’s software lost it’s marbles for a bit and none of our intrepid authors could login to share their culinary adventures. Apologies that it has taken me so long to get things sorted out.

And being back, I thought I should share something food-ish. In fact, I have two things to share: squash stuffings, and a nifty thing to do with soup.

Squash Stuffings:

I don’t know what’s happening where you live, but we are well into fall here, and that means squash.

In the past weeks, our CSA share has provided a few butternuts, a couple of acorn, a kombucha and some truly amazing delicata. I’ve been kind of down on the peel, roast, eat practice recently - maybe since that was all I ever did with squash so lately, I’ve been stuffing it. Below are two suggestions for stuff squash - the sausage one filled out the roasted delicata, while the bean and greens stuffing filled out roasted acorn squash. The butternuts and kombucha are likely to find themselves in a soup or pie in the not too distant future.

Sausage stuffing for squash: This couldn’t be simpler. Get some good bulk italian sausage. Cook it. Make a simple tomato sauce - I put fennel and peppers and garlic and onions and capers in mine. Halve, scoop, lightly oil and roast your squash (cut side down) - I did ours at 400 and tucked a sprig of thyme under each half of squash. When cooked, spoon sausage into squash and top with tomato sauce and some grated pecorino or parmesan.

Beans and Greens stuffing for squash: Another simple one. Cook some great northern beans. Chop some bacon, cook until it’s mostly done, then add diced onion, garlic, carrots, and peppers assuming you’ve got some from your market or CSA. Cook down, adding some salt and pepper and some crushed red chili along the way. Add your greens. I used some lovely “saute greens” from our CSA - a mix of all kinds of little greens. You could use any greens you like. I think dino kale, chard, spinach, or arugula would all be lovely. Beet greens would be fantastic, and you’d have beets too! Once the greens are wilted, add your cooked beans without the liquid they cooked in, and reduce heat and let it hang out for a bit, stirring occasionally and maybe adding a bit of water if it looks like it needs it. Once again, roast your squash, stuff it with this mixture, and enjoy.

Really, these are shared not because there’s anything terribly interesting about them - you likely already do stuff like this all the time - I just find that sharing and hearing about what others do with their veggies inspires me to get a bit more creative with my cooking from time to time.

Nifty soup trick: Yes, I was rather proud of myself when I thought of this one. Does that make me a food nerd? Fine, then I’m a food nerd.

Anyway, I was making some celeriac, carrot, and beet soup, and I thought it would be swell with a poached egg in each bowl. So, instead of poaching them separately, I just broke the eggs directly into the simmering soup and waited till they were cooked to my liking. Just don’t forget how many eggs you put in!

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