Good Real Food

years ago, when my father was starting to teach me about cooking, he shared with me the single best piece of cooking advice I’ve received:

He said “you have to be patient. The food will get done in the time that it needs to get done. If you’re patient, it will come out well”

And he was totally right. Nothing likes being rushed, but least of all food and I remember that lesson often as I sit there waiting for my onions to get just dark enough or my risotto to be properly tender, or any of the million other things I do in the kitchen that get done in their own time.

Another great piece of advice I’ve had was to start boiling a pot of water when you start cooking - you’ll either need it for your food (thin a sauce, moisten your gravy, etc), or you can make a cup of tea. This has been mostly replaced by my electric kettle, but it still a very very good thing to keep in mind.

What’s the best cooking advice you’ve given or received?

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It is officially grilling season! Our dinners have taken a turn from kitchen cooking to outside-as -much-as-possible meals. D built this amazing little sitting nook in the back of our yard under a tree where the birds like to hustle and flow, and I have been sitting back here in contemplative bliss many evenings this past week. Making a bunch of interesting salads over the weekend to go with our simple grilled meats has been my new strategy for how I can sit under the tree in the evenings as much as possible. The two salads in the photo I made tonight with little hassle. A few potatoes boiled with two eggs and asparagus tossed in the last few moments (all in the same pot), mayo, Dijon mustard, splash of red wine vinegar, spring onions and garlic, parsley, salt and pepper. The other is a ripe mango tossed with fresh mint form the garden.

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Apologies for the totally self-interested posting here. The final few weeks of pregnancy are upon us, hence my lack of posting. While I’ve been busy with work and baby prep, I’ve actually been cooking up a storm, and since our CSA has recently started up, I’m looking forward to a fun filled summer of sleepless nights and abundant fresh produce.

Given that combination, I thought I’d send an appeal to you, dear readers, and ask you for your favorite “almost no cooking” recipes - the ones that you go to time and time again when you’re too tired to cook or when your CSA share drops lovelies in your lap that you just can’t bear to sully with too much cooking. I’m hoping your suggestions can help me feed my family during the first few weeks of our new baby, so don’t hold back - any suggestion goes, and it’s likely that in the next few months, I’ll cook them all.

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I found this recipe for Shitake Mushroom and Koshihikari Rice Cakes in my new cookbook Homegrown Pure and Simple. I loved the idea — kinda like Italian risotto cakes but with a Japanese flare – but did not like the fact that to follow the orders exactly would require three seperate stops: to the grocery store, a specialty Japanese food store and, being in Minnesota, the booze store. So, I am doing the unthinkable and customizing a recipe before even making it properly. I do hope you understand. Life is too darn short to forsake a beautifull idea just because you work a 9-5 and are not a professional chef.

The real recipe called for sake, mushroom soy sauce, Koshihikari suchi rice, home-made mushroom stock, Panco (Japanese style bread crumbs), spreading out the hot rice on a cookie sheet and letting it be in the fridge for UP TO 6 hours, and the use of some tool called “ring molds”. I used rice wine that I already had in the house, regular soy sauce, the closest thing I could find to sushi rice at the coop, ready-made mushroom stock, my hands, and the little bit of bread crumbs I had left over from making fish cakes a while back. The whole thing set in the fridge for 9 hours and was just dandy.

Here is what I did today. With a bit of planning, I worked a full day and was able to serve these special delicious treats along with salmon and left over mustard greens for dinner.

 What you need:

• 3 cups mushroom stock (you can make your own by pouring hot water over dried mushroms and letting sit for 30 minutes then drain.)
• 1 cup rice wine
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 cup rice (arborio or sushi)
• 10-12 fresh (shitake) mushrooms, chopped
• 1 large shallot
• 2 tbsp oil (I used grapeseed oil)
• 1/2 cup bread crumbs
• 1/2 cup black sesame seeds

What to do in the morning before leaving for work: saute the shallots and mushrooms in the oil for 3 minutes. Add the rice and stir for another 3 minutes until toasty. Add the rice wine and stir until dry, add the mushroom stock and stir until rice is cooked. Take off the heat, stir for a few minutes to cool. Leave in the pot and cover. Put in the fridge while you are at work.

What to do When you get home: Take out the rice, form into somewhat flattened balls, roll one half in the bread crumbs, the other in the black sesame seeds. Fry 3 minutes on each side and serve with broiled fish and greens sauted in the same oil with the cakes waiting in the warm oven. I swear it took less than 20 minutes!

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I’m heading out of town for a few days next week and I’m starting to plan the menu for my family while I’m away. My wife is a good cook, but being pregnant takes the wind out of her sails in the evening.  So, I’m trying to figure out a combination of foods that either I can cook this weekend, or that are very easy for her to prepare after work. Also, though our daughter is helpful, she isn’t quite big enough to fill in as sous-chef yet, so the meals need to pretty much be a one person show.

And so I turn to you, dear readers: what are your favorite make-ahead or super-quick recipes to keep your family fed while you’re away?

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This Beet Risotto is a homage to Arif’s rant against hiding veggies.

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The New York Times reports on a fuss over two books that look awfully similar in content:

The basic concepts for several of Ms. Lapine’s recipes — spinach in brownies, avocado in chocolate pudding and sweet potato in grilled cheese sandwiches — also appear in recipes offered by Ms. Seinfeld.

Silly ruffled feathers aside, why don’t people learn how to cook GOOD REAL FOOD instead of devising insane strategies to “hide” “healthy” food. Forgive the quotation marks there, but there is nothing “healthy” about stuffing cooked to death squash in mac and cheese, and putting spinach in brownies? Whatever.

Not that my experience is necessarily anything to extrapolate from, but I’ve found that good quality food cooked appropriately, with love (and a little skill) has presented no problem for my daughter.

She, at just about four years old, routinely eats and enjoys the following:

• brussels sprouts
• stinky cheeses
• any meat she can get her hands on
• tofu
• seitan
• hummus
• bean sprouts
• all manner of indian food, to varying levels of spice (heat)
• every kind of cuisine she’s tried

In other words, she’s enjoyed everything we’ve given her - and from what I can remember, always has. Generally, the first few times she’s introduced to a new food, she’s uncertain, but after the second time she generally digs in without a second thought. No hiding, no cajoling, no subterfuge, no nothing.

So my two cents? Skip the cookbook. Send us, your loyal authors, the money so we can pay for this site, and as my friend M. said over IM the other day, use
“the right ingredients, and the heart, and the creativity and palate”

to make food that your family will love.

And please, stop hiding squash in the chocolate cake.

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I’m sure you’ve all got some variant of this sitting in the back of your cooking brain. Still, I’d forgotten it for a while, but the “too much eating out/hotel food/etc.” of last week has made me crave simple, healthy, somewhat detoxifying food, and at the market today, I saw the sprouts and the recipe came flooding back.

Just in case you haven’t thought this one up before, here you go.

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D and I have spent the last two weekends harvesting the last of the garden veggies and getting the beds ready for winter. Here are two ideas I had for how to use yummy things from the garden.

1. Fried Green Tomatoes

Slice a few large slabs of green tomatoes. Dredge in salted flour, dip in egg, pat with cornmeal, and fry in oil on both sides for about 2 minutes each. Serve with hot sauce.

2. Butternut squash soup with apples and leeks.

Peel, gut, and cut into cubes one butternut squash. Cook pieces laying flat on a cookie sheet sprayed with oil and sprinkled with salt until soft. In the mean time, saute leeks, apples, garlic and sage in olive oil and butter until soft. Let all things cool. Add in batches to a blender with chicken stock or veggie stock. Put back in a pan and heat through. Serve with good bread.

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Do you have a box grater?  Good bread?  Some good tomatoes?  Garlic?  Good tasting olive oil?  Sea salt?  Pepper?

Good.  Try this:

Slice your bread and throw it in the over or under the broiler to toast a bit.  Whilst that’s getting toasty:
Put box grater in a bowl.  Using the big holes, shred as many tomatoes as you’d like.  Discard whatever larger bits of tomato skin you find hanging out on the side of the grater.  Using the smaller holes, shred your garlic - one clove per tomato seems to be just right, but if you like garlic like I do, add more.

Check your bread.  Does it need to be turned over?  Is it done?

Scrape all the good stuff off the inside/outside of your box grater.  Sprinkle some sea salt into the tomato and garlic mixture.  Add a bit of pepper if you want.  Then add in as much olive oil as you like - I think about 2-3 tablespoons per tomato is a good start, but it is up to you.

Stir well, then spoon and spread on your toasty bread.

If you mixed right, you’ll find yourself in an blissful state, maybe with a hankering for a nice glass of wine, some cheese, and maybe a few olives or a little slice of tortilla. If you don’t find yourself in that sort of mind, add more garlic or olive oil as you see fit.

This is also lovely spooned over eggs.

I suspect that most of you reading this have made something like this, but I find that I often forget these sort of simple and delicious ways of highlighting the taste of fresh produce - something I find myself savoring as summer ends here in Minnesota.

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