Good Real Food

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 have been trying to work japanese style home cooking into my repertoire. And we have three cabbages from our CSA aging in our fridge. Madhur Jaffrey delivers: 1/2 of a medium cabbage, sliced thin.  1/2 tsp salt, cooked in some oil 3-4 minutes just until the cabbage is starting to wilt.  Add in 4-8 umoboshi plums and 1/2 tsp sugar that you pounded or mashed into a paste. We had it with an egg (scrambled, with scotch bonnet since we’re still working through those) and rice. Easy.

Might give me gas (cabbage seems to do that) but I did just move through a serious amount of brassica.

My next challenge: a monster eggplant. I haven’t decided what to do with it.

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I’ll probably accidentally write this again before summer is over but nothing goes better than fresh zucchini and fresh mint. Good thing since both are more prolific than anyone really wants them to be. Hot iron skillet, onions, garlic, patience, patience, sliced squash, patience, salt and pepper, patience, lots of chopped mint and just a little more patience.

We had it with romano and tortellini this week, but it goes nicely with tofu and rice, too.

We cooked it to softness but you can leave out some of the patience and have a fresher squash and a fresher mint and call it salad. Maybe with bulgur or kasha and a bit of feta.

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Sunday we came home from a camping trip to a fridge with not much in it, save for half cube of tofu and a magical bag of beet greens. That and one lone boca burger. I don’t know how the greens survived the nuclear winter that seems to have decimated the rest of the contents of our fridge. The tofu I understand but fresh greens? Where’d they come from?

This is a pretty conventional recipe. For whatever reason it is almost always a chicken salad. If you don’t eat chicken or don’t have chicken or don’t feel like having chicken tonight, no big thing. Use something else. I have a tofu technique that I’m fond of, that goes something like:

• Iron skillet
• Some oil, (not olive oil: canola or safflower or something higher heat than olive oil)
• a little bit of dark sesame oil
• tofu, in cubes
• soy sauce

Get the tofu going in a little oil on pretty high heat, but not the very highest. Just a little oil, enough to coat the pan. We’re not deep frying here. Leave it. Do other things. Stir it from time to time. When it starts to brown a little, put a cap-full of soy sauce in the pan and prepare to stir madly while the soy sauce caramelizes on the tofu and makes it really crispy. There is probably a better word for the effect than caramelize, but you get the idea.

So Sunday night, the other things I was doing were washing the beet greens and cooking cellophane noodles. I drained the noodles and dumped them, hot, onto the greens.

Then I called my sister who, so far as I can tell, is not on the internet to be found and linked to, and who always knows what to put in dressings. She suggested a dressing of …

• Chili oil (actually, I used some Thai chili paste)
• Sesame oil (dark)
• Soy sauce (I always use Tamari. I don’t know if that matters or not. If you tear open a few old takeout packets the sky will not fall.)
• Rice vinegar
• lime juice
• and a dash of fish sauce

I’m going to file this under vegan because the fish sauce is optional, not because I think fish grown on trees. My sister is a vegetarian: fish sauce was not on her ingredients list, but I like a little fish sauce.

If you’re anything like me, you’re annoyed that there aren’t any portions above. If you call Winnie for recipe advice she’ll only give you “oh a little and then a bit,” and the truth is that learning to cook is about learning to make some sesame dressing, stick your finger in it, taste it and think “hmm. too salty.” and add some more rice vinegar and limes.

So there you are. There we were anyway. Mix it together. Eat. If you have other vegetables: scallions, cucumbers, asparagus … it is a salad. This is the sort of summer salad that should be a staple in my life. I don’t know why it isn’t.

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What the heck is this? Well, it is practically the only local vegetable available (Wisconsin) so I should try it. This is what led me to buy one of these strange things today to take home and test it out.                                                                                                                        I found online a CSA farmer in California who fell in love with these Heirloom roots. “The black Spanish radish is an antique radish, a throwback to a time when people counted on storing roots to survive the winter.” He talks about his journey growing them and also has some interesting Recipes. I was inspired by the Asian influenced one on the site and created this salad using: 1 black spanish radish, two carrots, four scallions, 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes, 1 tbsp olive oil, 1 tbsp lemon juice, 1 tbsp rice wine vinigar, 1 tbsp sugar and 1/ 2 tsp salt. It has a very fresh spicy bite with a really clean finish that tasted amazing with a glass of beer. I brought the mixing bowl over to D right after I tasted it. He gave me a sour look for bothering his reading, but I held up a fork to his mouth. His eyes closed as he chewed and he reached for more with  a boyish grin.                                                                                 

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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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delicious and insane is how I’d describe this beet pesto recipe that I got from the nami-nami blog - delicious because come on, it’s beet pesto - beets, cilantro, garlic, and pine nuts - what’s not to like? Insane because when you toss this with pasta (reserve a bit of cooking water) and some olive oil, the pesto colors your pasta a beautiful, intense lustrous red that has to been seen to be believed. You look at the color and can’t help but wonder what beets were thinking when they decided that that was their color of choice.

We ate this pesto tossed with whole wheat fettuccine and it was lovely.

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currently making sweet potato dal via this recipe from google.

Yesterday, made empanadillas from this recipe filled with leftover cabbage soup from my last post - they were delightful and disappeared much more quickly than the soup had, though with the amount of butter in the dough, it isn’t much surprise.  Unless I did my metric conversion wrong in which case - oh, nevermind.

And finally, my kid has chicken pox and I think that garam masala may be the Indian equivalent of ketchup in that it sneaks into many many dishes and makes everything it appears in taste better.  Maybe.

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I received a cuisinart food processor for xmas this year and it is opening up all kinds of nifty-quick recipe memories. This particular dish was made for me by a Scottish mystic and microbiotic convert on the Isle of Arran in 1997 and I still remember it!

Shred one whole onion, three cloves garlic, three raw whole scrubbed and topped beets and four scrubbed topped carrots into a bowl. Add two to three tbs. oil, two to three tbsp. apple cidar vinegar, two to three tbsp apple cidar, salt and pepper and sunflower seeds.

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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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