It's easier to eat paleo while camping because the store and the place that sells ice cream are far away, and the food is right here. However, if you underpack, or think that maybe a lower number of calories is fine, you'll end up weeping unconsolably on the side of a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, too hungry to make good decisions. Don't short yourself, especially if you're going to hike or climb or paddle. For reference, this is food that I eat while doing field work - hiking 6-10 hours a day with a light pack, and then car camping at night. It would also work for river rafting - although it might not meet the high culinary standards of rafters - or pack animal camping or car camping like a normal person with normal desires vis a vis digging cat holes (no) and sleeping on some sort of mattress (yes).
I do not understand how long distance backpackers feed themselves - I think y'all are basically John Muir, and that you just take two loaves of bread and a pound each of bacon and tea, and then three months later you're back, covered with welts and abscesses and less thirty pounds of muscle. Thus, some of this stuff is heavy, and some of it requires a cooler.
If you say glamping, I will give you the look.
And for my actual regular readers, the lovely people who know me in real life and observe me eating wheat and legumes and pretty much all of the dairy, and of whom there are several who hate the idea of paleo from the depths of their souls, well... this is how I eat when I'm working, because blood sugar crashes are a lot harder to fix out there and weeping is a bad career choice, paleo cooking blogs have the best vegetable recipes, really truly, the best, and one of you told me that acorns were edible. I think that you can take deep breaths and control your impulses to expound on what people in the Paleolithic actually ate (spoiler, in California it was acorns) for the length of this blog post as penance for that indignity.
So, paleo camping: I give instructions for one person because C hates camping for fun, and when we do it I have to promise him bread. Also, I camp for work, so often it is just food that exists to please me and no-one else.
Do not forget to bring
Salt (I use a 50%-50% mixture of potassium salt and regular salt, but I also drink like a million liters of water a day.)
Fat (You might think that olive oil or nut oil is the right choice here, but it's lard or clarified butter. Oils will inevitably spill in transit, somehow. Everything will be covered with oil. You will have to sponge oil off of everything in your kitchen - and possibly some parts of the car, or whatever the kitchen was on top of {put the kitchen on the bottom of the things} with cold water and an improvised rag. Bring solid fats, because even if they melt, they won't go far.)
Sponge, soap. (So that when you don't listen to me and bring oil, you can at least clean it up effectively. Also so you don't die of food poisoning from not washing your plate.)
Cutting board. (It can be tiny, but you want one.)
Knife that is only for food. (I carry a knife that is for cutting rope and branches and taking plant samples and whatever else. You need a knife that is only used for food, because you eat food, and some of the things you cut with your pocket knife are not edible. Also, some of the things you cut with a pocket knife make a pocket knife dull. Also pocket knives are not good for chopping things with.)
Cast iron pan (Frying things in aluminum is an exercise in self-loathing)
Onion, Garlic, Ginger, Lemon (You might hit a point where you desire culinary experimentation. Having these ingredients around will make this possible.)
Salt tabs (It is hot and you are working. Please not to dehydrate, it will ruin your tomorrow.)
Breakfast: I fry nuts and seeds in butter or lard. You could add dried fruit - it's quite good - and a generous sprinkling of salt. I melt the fat, and then add a handful of almonds, stir, wait a minute, add a handful of hazelnuts, stir, wait a minute, add a handful of pumpkin seeds, stir, wait a minute, and then add a handful of sesame and flax seeds - with the dried fruit. I sprinkle it with salt, and there, breakfast. I suggest eating it with a spoon, because using your hands is greasy, and using a mug gives the impression that you're gargling almonds and looks pretty gross.
I also drink three cups of hot liquid that might include caffeine. If you are addicted to caffeine, don't go cold turkey while planning to run around all day. Also don't bring inadequate substitutes for your cherished daily ritual. You can bring different or superior substitutes - but if you drink something handcrafted and beautiful every morning, don't lie to yourself and slam some Via packages. Tea is fine. Also fine; hot water with lemon and glaring. Mint tea. Basil tea. Glaring. Whatever facial expression you have is fine, as long as you are getting a jump on hydration.
Lunch: Possibly because I eat oil fried in fat for breakfast, I don't eat a lot of lunch. I keep snacks on me - more seeds! Dried fruit! Jerky! Food bars! - both because I've gotten lost and because eating a little food breaks bad decision trees and helps encourage me to do difficult things. (Difficult: accepting that the car is not down the road I've been walking on for 45 minutes, and I have to go limp back to where I started and find it from there. Going and checking out that meadow even though the day is almost over and I'm tired. Explaining how the GPS works again.) I also carry a lot of water and some iodine tablets in case I get very lost.
Here are some suggestions, though: Sardines in olive oil with onions and mustard - make lettuce wraps or spoon into your face. Wrap the can in plastic when you're done because it is candy for raccoons and bears. (Are "sardines in olive oil" packed in real olive oil? I don't know. Hazelnut oil is a common substitute, so tell yourself it's that.) Sometimes I make a trail mix that is basically two squares of very dark chocolate, almonds, hazelnuts, dates, and dried cherries and dried coconut. Dates are amazing - they are the food God gave us so we could walk up hills at 5pm. Lastly, hard boiled eggs are nice - bring salt - and so are apples and peach slices and carrots and baby tomatoes and I'm sure you can figure out how to make a lovely picnic lunch.
Supper: I eat eggs. I eat the eggs from my egg dude that aren't pressure-washed, so they're fine at non-ideal temperatures for a few days. Find someone who has backyard chickens, and then buy enough eggs so that you'll have 3-4 a day. I fry them, and then I put them on pre-cooked lentils because I love lentils. You could eat a little rice that you cook before you go - egg fried rice with garlic and ginger and a little shiitake mushroom is amazing - or roast some sweet potatoes in advance and then fry them up and put eggs on them. I also have kale or collards - fried, yes, of course - with lemon, and sometimes tomatoes, either salted and popped directly into my mouth or sliced in half and fried. I've also done hash browns, for those of you who eat white potatoes. This is super good with a quick salsa - tomato, onion, cilantro - and a half an avocado and some sort of hot sauce.
Things you could do, but I don't do for various reasons (because I'm tired. I've been walking all day.)
Make stew at home, freeze it, and then eat it on the second day because it helps keep everything else cold: an excellent idea if you happened to make stew before going out. You could cook sausage or bacon in advance and then make stir fries (SO MUCH CHOPPING) - but be careful to use enough ice, because things chopped into stir-fry sizes go bad quickly, and chopping things for stir-fries while starving is awful. You could also do this with other meats - you could bring steaks for all I care, and then fry some asparagus in fat and maybe make OH MY GOD, IT'S BEEN LIKE TWENTY MINUTES, I WILL EAT THE STEAK RAW.
Bring something to sip in the evenings - for me it's more mint or tulsi tea, because hydration is essential! - and maybe something to nibble on - dried figs are good, and I can't upsell dried Bing cherries enough, and of course very dark chocolate and maybe some nuts - macadamia nuts? Or even a small slice of Parmesan cheese. The idea being that you eat very small servings of delicious things, and if you start not savoring them but instead shoveling them into your mouth, you should have another sweet potato or an egg; you are still hungry. You may have not been hungry earlier because you were still dehydrated. For very bad days, I always have a can of broth that I drink - sometimes with an egg, sometimes not - as I baby myself back to being a functional human.
Wash your dishes before you go to bed: there are bears and raccoons, and I doubt having them lick your bowl clean is sanitary. Also once they are at your campsite, they'll find something to eat.
S'mores: S'mores are disgusting, but it takes a while to figure that out. I forget about once every three years. What you want - and lord, it's not strictly paleo compliant, but you can see I don't really care - is plain mochi, cut into marshmallow-sized pieces and boiled for five minutes, and then neatly wrapped with raw bacon. You can fry it in your pan - look, I'm not crazy about campfires either - or hold it on a stick over a campfire. It's gooey and melty and generally amazing.
If you are with very small campers who are not sold on this whole paleo thing, you can avoid the campfire on tough nights by putting the ingredients inside a tortilla and toasting it quickly.
There. That is how I camp, unless I am with my spouse. On these occasions, there is a lot more bread.
Monday, March 10, 2014
Sunday, November 24, 2013
Thanksgiving Sides.
Two years ago, we were making Thanksgiving dinner when we discovered that one of my cousins didn't eat pork. We had to do a last minute menu overhaul because other than the salad and the cranberry sauce, there was precious little that was pork-free.
And that was while I was writing things here! This year, my mother invited two chicken-broth vegans, and we looked at the menu, shrugged, and left it as it was. There are going to be like five vegan dishes, seven if I get to count each kind of cranberry sauce and the turkey-basted stuffing. I don't know what happened to us.
I hear this pie is not terrible, by the way. And seriously, cranberry sauce is two cups of cranberries (that is how big the packages are), like a quarter cup of sugar, and then like half a cup of port or orange juice or white wine or water or cranberry juice and maybe some cloves or lemon peel, your choice. Either you cook it together on the stove top for fifteen minutes - until all the berries burst - or you whirl it around in the food processor until it's a relish. Test the sugar, because I'm not good at remembering how much sugar goes in - it's totally fine to add more sugar at the end. Don't use the cloves if it's going in the food processor.
I am going to give you three quick vegetable sides, because I'm Californian and vegetable sides are the things that give you strength to eat more of the starches. None of them require oven time at the last minute, which is good, because otherwise I'd tell you to make this. They're all fine cold, or reheated in a microwave, or whatever.
Green Beans with Pesto. Buy one and a half pounds of green beans. Good ones, mind you. Beautiful beans. Start a pot of water boiling - like a liter. I always hate boiling too much or too little water. A liter of water. Snap the stems and ends off of the beans, slice or snap them into 1 inch pieces, and throw them into the boiling water. Stare at them for about one minute, and then start fishing them out with a fork and tasting them to see if they're done enough. C likes things basically boiled yellow (a full minute in hot water), while I like them a reasonable amount of done (raw), so figure out what other people you are feeding also want to eat. The savages. When they are still bright green - look, like two minutes - dump the whole thing into a strainer and then run cold water over them. Take one half cup pesto - cilantro would be best, and kale would be worst. I've been making a lot of broccoli pesto lately; do not put broccoli pesto on green beans. Basil or parsley is good though. Take the pesto and juice from one half lemon and stir with the green beans in a mixing bowl. Taste. Did I lie about the amount of pesto? Does it need salt? Adjust. Put in the fridge.
Broccoli Rabe with Red Bell Peppers and Garlic
I finally got Laurie Colwin's cookbook, and reading it after reading many other cookbooks is like reading Shakespeare after reading the rest of western literature. So many weird hang-ups and quirks make sense now! The fried chicken that makes people sing, the black cake, the low-key tea party for forty - all these weird tropes have a root! Anyway, the cookbook is lovely to read, if not particularly well tested. She does make the point that if someone does not like broccoli rabe, this recipe will not change that. She also suggests it be served hot. She is wrong. C does not like broccoli rabe much, and the entire dish is vastly superior when eaten cold off his plate. You can skip the spouse step and just let it sit out while you carve things and fuss.
Right. Take two red bell peppers and five cloves of garlic - get rid of the seeds and stems and garlic skins. Mince the garlic and dice the pepper. Saute both in half a cup of olive oil until the garlic is a little soft. Add a bit of salt. Take two pounds broccoli rabe, chop into bite-sized pieces, and blanch in boiling water - for like four minutes, until bright green. Drain the rabe and throw into the garlic/pepper pan. Continue to heat gently for two-odd minutes - until you've stirred the garlicky oild into basically everything. Let sit for at least half an hour, and maybe add a little lemon juice. It's better cold. It's no-leftovers-because-I-eat-it-out-of-the-pan-while-doing-dishes better. It's usually-I-leave-dishes-to-the-next-day,-but-this-is-worth-being-prompt better.
Brussels Sprouts with bread crumbs
This was the winner of the birthday dinner for mother-in-law eight vegetable dish round robin; I still get carried away about in-law meal prep. But it's good! It's "pretend it's an old family recipe" good!
Take two pounds of Brussels sprouts and remove the tough outer leaves and bases. Cut into thin slices lengthwise- the recipe that this is very loosely based on suggested a mandoline, but those things are death traps. Like four slices per sprout. If you cut them in half crossways too, it works better. Blanch them! In boiling water! For two minutes! It's a trend! Dress with 1/4 cup olive oil, juice from one lemon, and a tablespoon, tablespoon and a half of soy sauce. Garnish generously with bread crumbs fried in duck fat or olive oil - it's good how or cold.
Did you know the best way I've found to get bread crumbs from stale French bread is to put the bread in a plastic bag and hit is with a hammer? People say "food processor" or "chop it roughly", but when bread is not so stale that puny mortal engines and knives repel it, C eats it. C likes bread. Hammer, guys. It's relaxing, and if you're seen doing it, people treat you with more respect, somehow.
So there: three solid side dishes which involve blanching, and lemon juice, and olive oil, if you count the stuff in the pesto. I am a little set in my ways. My delicious, oily ways.
And that was while I was writing things here! This year, my mother invited two chicken-broth vegans, and we looked at the menu, shrugged, and left it as it was. There are going to be like five vegan dishes, seven if I get to count each kind of cranberry sauce and the turkey-basted stuffing. I don't know what happened to us.
I hear this pie is not terrible, by the way. And seriously, cranberry sauce is two cups of cranberries (that is how big the packages are), like a quarter cup of sugar, and then like half a cup of port or orange juice or white wine or water or cranberry juice and maybe some cloves or lemon peel, your choice. Either you cook it together on the stove top for fifteen minutes - until all the berries burst - or you whirl it around in the food processor until it's a relish. Test the sugar, because I'm not good at remembering how much sugar goes in - it's totally fine to add more sugar at the end. Don't use the cloves if it's going in the food processor.
I am going to give you three quick vegetable sides, because I'm Californian and vegetable sides are the things that give you strength to eat more of the starches. None of them require oven time at the last minute, which is good, because otherwise I'd tell you to make this. They're all fine cold, or reheated in a microwave, or whatever.
Green Beans with Pesto. Buy one and a half pounds of green beans. Good ones, mind you. Beautiful beans. Start a pot of water boiling - like a liter. I always hate boiling too much or too little water. A liter of water. Snap the stems and ends off of the beans, slice or snap them into 1 inch pieces, and throw them into the boiling water. Stare at them for about one minute, and then start fishing them out with a fork and tasting them to see if they're done enough. C likes things basically boiled yellow (a full minute in hot water), while I like them a reasonable amount of done (raw), so figure out what other people you are feeding also want to eat. The savages. When they are still bright green - look, like two minutes - dump the whole thing into a strainer and then run cold water over them. Take one half cup pesto - cilantro would be best, and kale would be worst. I've been making a lot of broccoli pesto lately; do not put broccoli pesto on green beans. Basil or parsley is good though. Take the pesto and juice from one half lemon and stir with the green beans in a mixing bowl. Taste. Did I lie about the amount of pesto? Does it need salt? Adjust. Put in the fridge.
Broccoli Rabe with Red Bell Peppers and Garlic
I finally got Laurie Colwin's cookbook, and reading it after reading many other cookbooks is like reading Shakespeare after reading the rest of western literature. So many weird hang-ups and quirks make sense now! The fried chicken that makes people sing, the black cake, the low-key tea party for forty - all these weird tropes have a root! Anyway, the cookbook is lovely to read, if not particularly well tested. She does make the point that if someone does not like broccoli rabe, this recipe will not change that. She also suggests it be served hot. She is wrong. C does not like broccoli rabe much, and the entire dish is vastly superior when eaten cold off his plate. You can skip the spouse step and just let it sit out while you carve things and fuss.
Right. Take two red bell peppers and five cloves of garlic - get rid of the seeds and stems and garlic skins. Mince the garlic and dice the pepper. Saute both in half a cup of olive oil until the garlic is a little soft. Add a bit of salt. Take two pounds broccoli rabe, chop into bite-sized pieces, and blanch in boiling water - for like four minutes, until bright green. Drain the rabe and throw into the garlic/pepper pan. Continue to heat gently for two-odd minutes - until you've stirred the garlicky oild into basically everything. Let sit for at least half an hour, and maybe add a little lemon juice. It's better cold. It's no-leftovers-because-I-eat-it-out-of-the-pan-while-doing-dishes better. It's usually-I-leave-dishes-to-the-next-day,-but-this-is-worth-being-prompt better.
Brussels Sprouts with bread crumbs
This was the winner of the birthday dinner for mother-in-law eight vegetable dish round robin; I still get carried away about in-law meal prep. But it's good! It's "pretend it's an old family recipe" good!
Take two pounds of Brussels sprouts and remove the tough outer leaves and bases. Cut into thin slices lengthwise- the recipe that this is very loosely based on suggested a mandoline, but those things are death traps. Like four slices per sprout. If you cut them in half crossways too, it works better. Blanch them! In boiling water! For two minutes! It's a trend! Dress with 1/4 cup olive oil, juice from one lemon, and a tablespoon, tablespoon and a half of soy sauce. Garnish generously with bread crumbs fried in duck fat or olive oil - it's good how or cold.
Did you know the best way I've found to get bread crumbs from stale French bread is to put the bread in a plastic bag and hit is with a hammer? People say "food processor" or "chop it roughly", but when bread is not so stale that puny mortal engines and knives repel it, C eats it. C likes bread. Hammer, guys. It's relaxing, and if you're seen doing it, people treat you with more respect, somehow.
So there: three solid side dishes which involve blanching, and lemon juice, and olive oil, if you count the stuff in the pesto. I am a little set in my ways. My delicious, oily ways.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Maddeningly Simple Panna Cotta
This recipe goes out to my loyal readers who have just regained the ability to refrigerate things and spent today paddling boats further than I drove.
Put one cup heavy cream and 1/4 cup white sugar in a saucepan. Heat gently while stirring to dissolve the sugar. Once sugar is dissolved, boil for five minutes. Do not let boil over. Remove from heat.
Add 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract or 1 tsp grated ginger with 1/2 tsp vanilla extract or 3 tbs. lemon juice or nothing at all. Stir to combine. Pour into 3 ramekins. Chill for two hours.
Serve with fruit.
It's a perfect creamy dessert! C has allowed me several spoonfuls while eating them all.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Regaining Balance after the Momofuku Pork Belly
So you take a couple of pounds of pork belly, you rub it all over with a mixture of even parts salt and sugar, and you throw it into a 500 degree oven for an hour, followed by an hour at 200 degrees. Then you slice it, slap it into a steamed bun, and serve it with quick pickles and hoisin sauce. You have guests, because this is a lot of pork, but by then end of the night you feel... you feel like you just ate all of the saturated fat in the world. All of it. Even your thoughts feel greasy.
So you eat nothing but lentils and greens for a week, and do not even feel deprived.
Now you have the last few slices of belly, and about four cups of beautiful rendered fat. You may have even saved a half cup of soy sauce colored drippings. What are you going to do with this bounty?
Use it to make vegetables wonderful. Obviously.
Why yes, you could skip the beautiful greasy belly part and just use bacon and bacon fat.
So! Take the tough outer leaves and dry base off of about twelve brussels sprouts, and then quarter them lengthwise. Microwave them for a minute. Chop up a bacon slice sized piece of pork belly. Heat a cast iron pan so that it's quite hot. Add a teaspoon of pork fat. Let melt. Add the belly. Stir. Add the sprouts. Stir. Cook for about three minutes, tasting occasionally. Season with salt, Sriracha, or lemon juice. (Oh, or kimchi! That would be awesome!)
Cut two heads of broccoli into florets. Repeat the chopped slice of belly, hot pan, dab of pork fat plan from the above recipe. Stir fry the broccoli until just tender. Drizzle about a tablespoon of the pork pan drippings and eat. (Hunched over the dish, on the sofa, ignoring the rest of the meal.)
Microwave about half a pound of potatoes for three minutes. Place three tablespoons of pork fat into a cast iron pan. Quarter the potatoes and put them in the pan cut side down. Cook in a 450 degree oven for fifteen-twenty minutes. Prepare a decoy starch to distract your spouse. Laugh maniacally.
The pan will always be very hot. At no point should you remove the pan from a heat source with a potholder and then transfer the still hot pan to your unprotected hand. I just thought I should mention this. In case.
So you eat nothing but lentils and greens for a week, and do not even feel deprived.
Now you have the last few slices of belly, and about four cups of beautiful rendered fat. You may have even saved a half cup of soy sauce colored drippings. What are you going to do with this bounty?
Use it to make vegetables wonderful. Obviously.
Why yes, you could skip the beautiful greasy belly part and just use bacon and bacon fat.
So! Take the tough outer leaves and dry base off of about twelve brussels sprouts, and then quarter them lengthwise. Microwave them for a minute. Chop up a bacon slice sized piece of pork belly. Heat a cast iron pan so that it's quite hot. Add a teaspoon of pork fat. Let melt. Add the belly. Stir. Add the sprouts. Stir. Cook for about three minutes, tasting occasionally. Season with salt, Sriracha, or lemon juice. (Oh, or kimchi! That would be awesome!)
Cut two heads of broccoli into florets. Repeat the chopped slice of belly, hot pan, dab of pork fat plan from the above recipe. Stir fry the broccoli until just tender. Drizzle about a tablespoon of the pork pan drippings and eat. (Hunched over the dish, on the sofa, ignoring the rest of the meal.)
Microwave about half a pound of potatoes for three minutes. Place three tablespoons of pork fat into a cast iron pan. Quarter the potatoes and put them in the pan cut side down. Cook in a 450 degree oven for fifteen-twenty minutes. Prepare a decoy starch to distract your spouse. Laugh maniacally.
The pan will always be very hot. At no point should you remove the pan from a heat source with a potholder and then transfer the still hot pan to your unprotected hand. I just thought I should mention this. In case.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Rice Cooker Adaptations for Other Recipes
Rice cookers are wonderful appliances. The fuzzy logic switches stop things from cooking whenever the temperature goes over boiling- so it's nearly impossible to burn things. Since I've burned dry beans approximately seven million times this is wonderful. They're also safe to leave running alone and use a fraction of the power or gas that a burner does. I often leave the bean cooking part of a recipe cooking in the morning, and then return to add the final touches to the recipe. It's easy! It's cheap! It makes beans a reliable last minute meal! It's magical!
I should be getting paid to shill these.
The Moros and Cristianos recipe- black beans and rice cooked together- can be modified thusly: Cook one cup of black beans in the rice cooker with four cups of water for about an hour. (It might be more like an hour and a half.) When the beans are tender, add 1 cup of short grain brown rice and 1 and 3/4 cups water and cook again. (If you're using other rice, add a cup of that and as much water as your rice cooker recommends.) When it switches off, taste it. If something's not done, add another half cup of water and run the cooker again. The original recipe involved a mire poix and hours of simmering- now I usually garnish this with some kind of salsa cruda and an egg and call it dinner. (Serves two adults with a leftover breakfast. Adjust recipe accordingly.)
When I wrote the recipe for Annapurna dal, I complained that I took terrible photos. I haven't improved. Some things have changed: I'm now convinced that mung beans make the best dal- the very best- although lentils are fine too. I put a cup of legume into the rice cooker, I add several cups of water, and I wait about half an hour. While waiting, I chop an onion and saute it over low heat with half a teaspoon of salt and a good glug of oil. Near the end, I add half a teaspoon of curry powder and half a teaspoon of cumin. (One could caramelize five or six onions, and then keep them in the fridge for super simple- rice cooker only meals.) I mix everything together. There's no need to puree it, because things will handily reduce themselves to sludge. I eat it with leftover brown rice, yogurt, or lime pickles. (I have yet to learn to make these lime pickles) I often throw frozen or fresh broccoli into the steamer basket for five of the minutes that the beans are cooking. (Not the last five, because then I miscalculate and the broccoli turns to mush.)
Here are other rice cooker bean recipes that don't require adaptation: Chilean lentil soup and hummus.
I should be getting paid to shill these.
The Moros and Cristianos recipe- black beans and rice cooked together- can be modified thusly: Cook one cup of black beans in the rice cooker with four cups of water for about an hour. (It might be more like an hour and a half.) When the beans are tender, add 1 cup of short grain brown rice and 1 and 3/4 cups water and cook again. (If you're using other rice, add a cup of that and as much water as your rice cooker recommends.) When it switches off, taste it. If something's not done, add another half cup of water and run the cooker again. The original recipe involved a mire poix and hours of simmering- now I usually garnish this with some kind of salsa cruda and an egg and call it dinner. (Serves two adults with a leftover breakfast. Adjust recipe accordingly.)
When I wrote the recipe for Annapurna dal, I complained that I took terrible photos. I haven't improved. Some things have changed: I'm now convinced that mung beans make the best dal- the very best- although lentils are fine too. I put a cup of legume into the rice cooker, I add several cups of water, and I wait about half an hour. While waiting, I chop an onion and saute it over low heat with half a teaspoon of salt and a good glug of oil. Near the end, I add half a teaspoon of curry powder and half a teaspoon of cumin. (One could caramelize five or six onions, and then keep them in the fridge for super simple- rice cooker only meals.) I mix everything together. There's no need to puree it, because things will handily reduce themselves to sludge. I eat it with leftover brown rice, yogurt, or lime pickles. (I have yet to learn to make these lime pickles) I often throw frozen or fresh broccoli into the steamer basket for five of the minutes that the beans are cooking. (Not the last five, because then I miscalculate and the broccoli turns to mush.)
Here are other rice cooker bean recipes that don't require adaptation: Chilean lentil soup and hummus.
Tidbit: Miso Butter
Mix equal parts white miso and soft butter. Add it to all of the things. (About a tablespoon of each should be fine for a pound of produce. You know I believe that animal fats are fine in pursuit of eating leaves.)
Roast brussels sprouts are particularly good. So is fresh corn. Broccoli. Blanched kale. Sweet potatoes Or if you want to thicken a sauce, whisk this in at the end.
Roast brussels sprouts are particularly good. So is fresh corn. Broccoli. Blanched kale. Sweet potatoes Or if you want to thicken a sauce, whisk this in at the end.
Bad Idea Fridays: Wasabi Peas
The wasabi pea snack is gross. I don't know why I had high hopes for a dish based on the snack- but I did! Look how washed out the photo is- washed out like my failed dreams.
Note the quick watermelon radish pickles from the last post.
Basically, one tosses a pound of snap peas in a cup of hot broth and a tablespoon each of soy sauce and butter. When the peas are warm through, they are done.
This part of the dish is fantastic. It could use a little bit more salt, but if you deploy the radish pickles, you have litle salt bombs spread throughout. Do that. Serve that.
Do not invest a lot of time in hunting down horseradish. (Because the wasabi on peas is actually horseradish, and it's basically a clever conceit dish.) When you do hunt down horseradish, and the smallest root weights a pound and a half, don't buy it. When you buy it, wash and peel it before grating it over the dish. If you grate it, don't keep grating until the flavor is obvious.
Next up, I find things to do with my seventeen pounds of fresh horseradish.
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