Winter Salad

This salad was originally going to be named something that cast all sorts of aspersions on people who don't have winter produce. I changed my mind because my evil laugh didn't carry over to text. Instead, we have a friendly, accessible title.

I love frisee (death to accents) but I have trouble finding recipes for it. (Yes, there is the salad where bacon fat replaces olive oil. It's January. We don't eat like that anymore.) I also love other winter fruits- and C eats mandarins like other people eat Cadbury cream eggs. Clearly, all of these things need to become a salad.

Tear one head of frisee into bite sized pieces and put in a medium sized bowl. Add seeds from 1 small pomegranate. Peel two small mandarin oranges and add the segments. Slice in one avocado.

Make a dressing from the juice of one Meyer lemon, a teaspoon of chopped shallot, 1/4 cup olive oil, and a little bit of salt. Dress the salad. Eat. Cackle.

Onigiri II

This time of year is confusing for me- it's split between January asceticism and Christmas indulgence. I have no idea what most people eat this time of year, other than throwing rum balls at each other. My parents- displaced Midwesterners in California- would pack us up for the annual four hour drive two hour hike to a place that might possibly have skatable ice. I don't think you'll let me get away with family recipes for instant cocoa and camp stove ramen.

C and I are working out of our apartment, like good little third wave employees. I have been shoveling a steady supply of onigiri into his maw. As such, I have tips and refinements on the original recipe.

I still use seasoned vinegar, even though it is not correct. I am adding an extra half teaspoon of salt for every 3/4 cup of uncooked rice. I'm also garnishing each rice ball with 1/4 sheet nori and a pinch of sesame seeds. I cannot figure out how to make adorable triangle shapes without a mold.

I've found two excellent fillings. One is sweet potato, steamed above the cooking rice and mashed with a little salt. The other is chopped and fried button mushrooms with a little soy sauce. Three mushrooms are perfect for five onigiri.

And yes, I fried them in bacon fat.

Mushroom Wine Brandy Sauce.

Sorry, no crappy uncropped picture today- first, because this recipe is not pretty, and second because my camera is 254 miles away. This is a nearly perfect gravy substitute: it's excellent on mashed potatoes or the inevitable platter of roasted root vegetables that shows up this time of year. (If current trends hold, I will be posting the very dish I mock within a month.) It's also good on steamed vegetables.

Stem and dice two cups of mushrooms. Dice 1/2 onion. Saute until soft in 1 tbs oil. Add one cup of red wine, one cup of broth, and one half cup of brandy and simmer until reduced by half. Add 1 clove minced garlic, 1/2 tsp fresh thyme, and salt to taste. Serve over other foods. If you eat it straight, you will feel ill.

Simmering the likker makes the alcohol evaporate- you know that. You probably also know the brilliant cooking tip C's mother shared with me: "If you use good wine, the food will taste better." Forget using good brandy unless you already have some in the house. What else is brandy good for?

Then End of Beet Week. Beet and Orange Salad.

Man, someday you guys might catch on to my "put fresh vegetables on a plate and call it a salad" trick. Until that fateful day...

This is a recipe where roasted beets would be best- roasting caramelizes things within the beets and makes them taste like something my ancestors ate for five thousand years. Beets can be baked whole in a 350 degree oven for about an hour to an hour and a half. One can use boiled beets. One probably will, if one is not baking ridiculous Christmas foods.

Take two cooked beets, peel them, and slice them. Section two oranges- or just cut them into rounds and remove the peel. The membranes may be bitter, but so is life. Keep the juice from slicing for the dressing.

Arrange the beets and oranges on a plate. Drizzle olive oil about. Squeeze half a lemon over the plates- and then sprinkle on the orange juice. Season with salt and pepper.

Bad Idea Fridays: Mochi

Today is my birthday. This proffered Bad Idea Friday post from the incomparable A (or ---, as her friends call her) is a perfect birthday gift- I don't have to destroy the kitchen or post today, suckers. Hurrah for guest posts.

1) Purchase a small box of glutinous rice flour on a whim.
2) Decide that you have too many clean dishes in your house
3) Read rice flour box for a recipe because you are Irish and only recently mastered cooking brown rice in a rice maker.
4) Note that the only recipes on box are for chocolate mochi (all out of cocoa) and white sauce (I can make roux with cheap flour).
5) Google.
6) Opt for a stove top recipe due to a distressing lack of microwave safe containers
7) Combine 1 part rice flour, 1 part sugar, and 2 parts water, heat without boiling until quite thick. (I may have erred here.)
8) Place mochi in a very well oiled pan to cool. (13x9 would be better than 8x8.)
9) Wait several hours for mochi to set. When it does not, place in 250F oven for two hours. (When in doubt, bake, there is no recipe anywhere which advises this because...)
10) Remove mochi from oven. Notice a distressing texture on surface, somewhat like the patchwork of dessicated moss and pond scum from the bottom of a dry reservoir.
11) Leave mochi out all night, partly in disgust, partly to cool
12) Cut gummy blocks the next morning. Dust one with flour. Find it inedible and decide to dust the rest with confectioner's sugar. (bad idea because...)
13) Hydroscopic properties of the sugar cause mochi to become [more] digusting, sticky, sweaty globs of novel-textured bland starch.
14) Relegate to the back of the fridge for a week, then compost. Perhaps soil bacteria and saprophytic fungi will relish this pure energy source.

I'm fairly certain rabbits are better confectioners than I am.

-A

Beet Week Continues: Vinegar Pickled Beets

I think that is an oak leaf in the background. This time of year, our sunroom gets treated like a large walk in fridge with chairs. The rest of the year, the sunroom gets treated like a lovely bit of outside with shade and screens. Even C approves of this sort of outside. That is how leaves end up on our tables.

Boil a bunch of beets- using the instructions in the last post. (Here a "bunch" is about a pound of beets.) Peel and slice the beets and place in a bowl. Warm 1/2 cup apple cider or wine vinegar in a small pan. Add 1/2 cup water, 1 tbsp sugar, 2 tsp salt, and any spices you might feel are necessary. I think less is more in this case- but I am not always right. Stir.

Pour the vinegar mixture over the beets. Let sit for at least an hour- and up to a week. Or, if you have a room that doubles as cold storage for food, throw them out when they start to get fuzzy. One pound of pickled beets is a lot of beets, after all. You'd better hope for secret beet lovers.

Beet and Avocado Salad

Beets and avocados are friends.

My parents will not eat this dish. They have reasons, but for the sake of narrative flow I decree that they think of avocados as part of their cool California adulthood and beets as part of their homey Midwestern childhoods. I think of it as a way to integrate the two; most often when I've done something like trying to make tuna noodle casserole- with only a few modifications- and failing. (No tuna, whole wheat penne, vegetable broth instead of cream of mushroom soup. I don't know why I thought it would work.)

If such a rationalization doesn't make you feel all self-actualizing, you can sooth your palate with the dish's Cuban ancestry. Serves two.

Halve two beets, just cover with water, and simmer until tender. (20 minutes) It's awfully pretty when one of the beets is golden.

Mix 1/2 tsp chopped shallot, 1 pinch sugar, 1/4 cup olive oil, and the juice of 1 lemon. (Or the juice of 1/2 orange and 1/2 lemon. Or the juice of a Seville lemon please tell me where you found Seville lemons thank you. I suppose you could substitute garlic if you don't have shallots.) Add salt and pepper to taste, and muddle the shallot within the dressing.

Cool the cooked beets and peel. If they are a little overcooked, the skins will slip right off. Otherwise, a sharp knife or a vegetable peeler is necessary. (Beets have onion-shaped layers that are tightly stuck together. Excessive cooking makes it possible to slide these layers off easily. Proper cooking has no such advantage.)

Slice the peeled beets. Arrange slices on two plates. Slice a perfect avocado into nice thick pieces. Add to the plates. Mix the dressing and dress the salads- add more salt if necessary.

I might follow through on beet week- I have two more recipes in the hopper, and y'all need to get your beet water from somewhere.

Tom Robbins has a four page rant on how we should emulate beet pigments- but I'll abbreviate if for you: beets will retain their color even in your biological waste products. Do not be alarmed. Art like "Another Brick in the Wall" would be unnecessary if we all ate more beets.