This was supposed to be the Roman version of a Burmese tea salad, but then my husband convinced me to add an avocado.

THE first time I tried a Burmese tea salad, I immediately started trying to figure out how to make them at my house all of the time.  They are amazing: you should go to a place that makes them and put said salad into your face at the first possible opportunity.

BUT I could not figure out how to buy high quality fermented tea leaves.  I gave up my hopes and tempered my love for these salads with the quite unreasonably long wait outside of the local Burmese place.  Very small tragedy.

HAPPILY, I started reading Apicus - a cookbook from ancient Rome. (There are a lot of great vegetable recipes. Every recipe marked "for vegetarians" has calf's brains in it. There are no desserts. Salt is always added as a brine.) What if I took some traditional Roman vegetables, and added a Burmese twist?  I could still use the fried shallots (fried shallots are the best) and the chopped romaine (for crunch: a salad is still delightfully crunchy if it is 10% romaine instead of 80%. Pro tip.) I could use kale instead of tea leaves, I could replace peanuts with walnuts, I could use parmesan instead of fish sauce (yes I know garum is very very Roman but it's a salad few people want fermented fish on their salad.) and cucumbers instead of tomatoes: it would be great!

THEN the spouse convinced me to add an avocado. It was an amazing salad entirely because of the avocado. You know what makes it more amazing? Abandoning the Roman thing almost altogether, and using chopped cilantro or mangos or tomatoes, replacing the walnuts with sesame seeds and chopped peanuts, and adding olive oil.  Olive oil makes most things better.

Serves 4
Slice one large shallot thinly, and place over medium heat with a little oil.  Fry until crisp, stirring frequently to prevent burning.  Add a little salt.  This takes about ten minutes.

Tear one bag or one and a half bunches of fresh, crisp kale into bite-sized pieces.  Salt. Microplane about an ounce of parmesan cheese onto the kale; add a tablespoon of olive oil and toss gently so every leaf has a little bit of cheese on it to make up for the fact that it is not a carefully fermented tea leaf. (you could also use soy sauce or Bragg's or nutritional yeast, maybe.)

See how I've divided the ingredients into equal pie-chart slices? Do that, it looks nice, and then you look real smooth mixing it at the table.  You are going to add one or more of each of the following ingredients:

A small romaine heart, chopped (this is enormous; you may need to excavate a small pit in the kale for your lettuce.)
A half cup to full cup of a sweet thing like mangos, apples, pears, peaches, peppers, or tomatoes. 
A chopped avocado
A quarter cup of chopped herbs like cilantro, green onions, or mint (this is optional.)
A quarter cup of crunchy nut-like things such as peanuts, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, or sesame seeds.

Put the fried shallots in the center to disguise how badly the segments connect.

Look how pretty that is!  So pretty!

Now squeeze a lemon over it and stir it up and serve it.

Too many tomatoes problems.

Perhaps you had thoughts about how many amazing tomatoes you wanted in April, and now it is August/September.  Perhaps you were a rational economic actor at the farmer's market. Perhaps someone left a grocery bag full of tomatoes on your doorstep or conned you into taking some at work.  Regardless, you have TOO MANY TOMATOES. 

Here is the general advice: peel your tomatoes, cook them into some sort of sauce, put the sauce in jars, carefully follow the instructions on sealing jars OR put the sauce into tubs and freeze the tubs.  

Sometimes, that is too much work.

SO: let us say your tomatoes are beautiful and perfect, and the only problem is that there are too many of them.  You've had tomato salad and tomato sandwiches and gazpacho.  There are still a lot of tomatoes left.

You could cut out the stems and put them on a cookie sheet in the freezer.  After a couple of hours you can take them off of the baking sheet and put them into plastic bags where they will clink together like billiard balls.  Later, you can put these into sauces as if they were canned tomatoes.  Someday. Maybe it will stave off the tomato madness a bit next April.

Also, salsa.  Chop and/or puree them, add some cilantro and diced onion and lime juice and salt, place adjacent to some chips, watch it evaporate.

IT is also possible that your tomatoes are over the tomato hill. Not gross, exactly, but a little soft, a little wrinkled.  

If you throw a peeled yellow onion and five-six tomatoes into a blender, and then put add some curry paste, a teasppon of salt, and either half a dozen chicken thighs or a couple of drained cans of garbanzos and simmer the whole thing over low heat for 45 minutes, you will have a passable masala-type dish, which you can eat with rice or spoon into your face alone.  

Or take the tomatoes, cut out the stiff stem bits, slice them in half unless they are cherry tomatoes, toss them with a little bit of oil, sprinkle them with salt and sugar, and put them in a low oven (350 degrees and down) for 2+ hours and you will get caramelized super tomato concentrate which can be added to your other tomato dishes to up the umami component.  This also freezes well, though I usually cover the top with oil so it doesn't dry out.  Downside: two plus hours with the oven on during summer.  

Bad Idea Friday: Pumpkin Tarte Tatin

I've been making Choire's excellent tarte tatin at least once a week: it's absurdly easy, and a half recipe is basically the perfect size dessert for four.  I've been trying to think of other things that would adapt well to being cooked in caramel and then baked.  Pomegranates and raspberries are too fragile, plums and peaches are not friends with caramel, quince and pears are not distinguishable from the traditional apple tarte tatin.  Then yesterday I paused, pipette in hand: pumpkin.  Pumpkin tarte tatin. Pumpkin tarte tatin, in time for the Thanksgiving blog resurrection. The idea glowed before me: it was even a Thursday.  Bad Idea Fridays are BACK, baby.

I told the spouse.  He said "let's not do that?" and ":(   I disapprove of this plan"  Miffed, I turned to another friend in gchat, a friend likely to encourage me in my experimentation.  He said "as someone who is not terribly fond of the taste of pumpkin, but who IS terribly fond of the taste of your tarte tatins, I view this as a commander might view rumors of a planned enemy invasion."

Philistines.  Why are my enablers never online when I need them.

SO.  Peel and slice a winter squash/ buy a bag of peeled and sliced winter squash.  You'll need about three cups.  (This recipe is already better than the apple version: THEY SELL SLICED SQUASH IN A BAG: no incessant peeling and coring and chopping for me!)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Mix 1 1/2 cups flour, 1 pinch salt, and 1 tablespoon sugar.  Slice half a stick of butter into 9- 16 cubes: smash the cubes into the flour mixture.  (Here the goal is to turn the butter into a butter-flour paste, but leave some of the flour in a non-butter paste state, so that later it will form a water paste and make amazing cracker-like layers in your pastry, because flaky pastry is cracker layers.  What I mean is "Don't do a great job mixing in the butter: half-ass it.  Or three-quarters-ass it.)  Add water a teaspoon at a time until you have a fairly reliable dough - not too dry.  Drop it onto a piece of saran wrap, cover it with another piece, roll it into a disc about the size of your pan.  (See step below.)

Because I make a lot of tarte tatin, I do the following step at the same time I make the dough.  Put the other half of the stick of butter in a 7-9 inch oven-safe frying pan. (This is the pan your dough should be about the size of.) Add half a cup of sugar: cook over moderate heat, stirring, as the sugar browns and melts.  When it looks like you've put a handful of Werther's Originals in the pan, add the squash.  You could also add half a teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice: it's better for being simmered in butter.  Cook, stirring frequently, until the squash produces some liquid: about five minutes.  Take the top piece of saran wrap off the dough disc, flip the dough disc into the pan, take the saran wrap off the other side of the dough, tuck the dough neatly into the pan.  Cover up holes with bits you steal from the parts that flop out of the pan, flip bits that hang out into the pan along the dough; do not fret if the crust is not remotely even.

Bake in the oven for about 30-40 minutes: until the crust is golden-brown.  Take it out: while it is warm, put a plate over the top of the pan: invert the entire thing.  Flick the bits of squash that are sticking to the pan onto the tart.  Be shocked at how easy the pan is to wash.

How is it?

That is a sad face, right?  A definite "no" vote is apparent in that expression.  But guys, this is his second piece.  I am REALLY good at that pastry.  (Crackers.  Remember the crackers rule of thumb.  Or pull out half of the flour mixture, and stir it back in after you've squooshed in the butter.  Now you are a pastry maven.)

The pumpkin is... look, this is when you make peace with your feelings about pumpkin.  It's nicely roasted (I was worried it wouldn't cook through, but it did), and tossed in caramel: this is pumpkin at its peak.  If you keep eating it because it is a beautiful tart with amazing pastry, but are saddened with each non-apple bite, you must acknowledge that you do not really like pumpkin very much.  Sometimes you just finished sharing thirty pumpkin facts with the world, and it's a difficult thing to face.  Sometimes, you've been opposed to pumpkin as a foodstuff from the beginning, and it is easy.

Make it with apples.  Impress your friends.

Gluten Free Brownies

Last night was movie night at some friends' house.  There were gluten intolerant people there; they made Trader Joe's gluten-free brownies.  The batter needed to be patted into the pan instead of being poured.  It smelled like rice instead of chocolate.  The result was not completely inedible - we ate occasional spoonfuls in a meditative way and said "This isn't terrible?" and "You can really taste the rice.  Yes." while waiting for the movie to be less horrifying.  Then we went out for ice cream.

I looked up the mix on the internet: the reviews are "not great and I wish I could eat gluten" and "pretty good if you replace the oil with applesauce - no pictures included." Well.

So today I made gluten free brownies because I was certain I could do better.  You guys know about me feeling certain - you usually hear about it under the heading "Bad Idea Fridays".  (Spoilers: look up at the title.  This turned out to not be a bad idea.)

You should make these!  Gluten intolerant people are nice, and if you're going to trick them into becoming your friends you'll need something other than creme anglaise and fruit for dessert.  Also they are damn good brownies, thank you, I am a genius, make the brownies.  Look at the recipe and say "no, actually, that looks pretty good" and then make them and serve them with whipped cream.  If people are allergic to something besides gluten, well, there are eggs and milk and tree nuts in here, so be careful.  I'm sure you could replace the milk products - and maybe the tree nuts, somehow - but the eggs are essential.

So!
Melt 5 ounces of good dark chocolate - I use the microwave in ten second bursts punctuated by brisk stirring.  If you don't stir, it may burn.  There is no recovering from burned chocolate.

Once it's 75% melted and very very stirred, add a stick of butter and continue brief microwaving punctuated by lots of stirring.  You'll end up with a bowl full of glossy chocolate.  It's beautiful.  It's worth eating on its own.

If you don't have almond flour or other nut flours on hand, dump about a cup and a half of almonds or hazelnuts into a food processor and reduce them to cous-cous sized bits or smaller.  You'll need one cup of nut flour, loosely packed.

Break four cold eggs into a big bowl and add a generous pinch of salt.  Whip these eggs without mercy for A MILLION YEARS.  Whip them until they are foamy and pale - at least a full five minutes of staring into space, holding a whisking machine or whisking madly.

Add one and a half cups of sugar - whisk until combined.  Add the now cool-enough-to-not-cook-the-eggs butter and chocolate mixture - and a teaspoon of vanilla - whisk, damn you, whisk like the wind! Add one cup of nut flour.  Whisk until combined.  Pour into a 9x9 buttered pan.  Sprinkle the surface with kosher salt.

Throw that into a 350 degree oven for 45 minutes.  Is the center still liquid?  Does it rock when you tilt the pan?  Give it another ten minutes.  Foam from the eggs and chocolate form a high pale crust - don't listen to that when it says the brownies are done, pay attention to how the weight shifts in the pan - you're waiting for the moment when the weight doesn't shift. When that moment comes, take it out of the oven.  If it turns out to still be liquid, put it back in for a while.  It's fine.

If you let it cool, you'll be able to slice it neatly.  I did not let it cool because I wanted to know if it was terrible.  It was not.  It was quite good.  The high pale crust? It's brittle and crunchy and amazing, and the brownies are dense and fudgey and amazing, and I am brilliant.  Yes.

Parsley

I've been eating a lot of parsley.

"Oh" you say, "Parsley is technically a food, I guess.  Parsley, huh?"

I have!  It's good!  You get a great crisp bunch and pick off about a cup of the best leaves.  You mix those leaves with your best oils and some very finely chopped onion or shallot and maybe a bit of orange or pear or sugar pea or artichoke heart and a dash of lemon juice and some salt and pepper and probably some cilantro or mint or shiso leaves: parsley salad.  Absurdly good.

Two days later it's too limp for salads, so you chop it finely with onion and lemon and oil and salt and pepper and actual peppers, perhaps, and probably whatever other herbs you used two days ago and you have a gremolata which is a nice thing to put on your avocado salad, your avocados on toast, your poached eggs on toast, or your poached eggs on lentils.  All of them are things I eat when I'm too tired to really cook - but this is a fancy dinner, don't you see the gremolata?

At the end of the parsley lifespan, you have several choices.  You can make more pesto, if your husband didn't ask you to stop making pesto, please, let's just eat all the pesto in the freezer first.  You can chop it and flick it over things to give them visual appeal.  You can substitute parsley for celery in mire poix because you aren't buying celery for a while since the time you found five rotting heads of celery in your fridge.  You can chop it up and make tabouli and then forget to photograph it until you're almost done eating because tabouli is delicious.  Parsley is delicious.  It tastes great.

Or you could throw it out.  Parsley is like a dollar.

2:4:1 Soup

We accidentally joined a CSA because the salesperson was very polite - and it isn't like I'm going to go to fewer farmers' markets - so there is a surfeit of produce around.  Produce is like colostrum - you end up using the freshest stuff first - so the old stuff was starting to get disreputable.

But then I found this blog post!  One takes two cups of broth, four cups of chopped raw vegetable, and one cup of dairy.  One simmers the vegetable in the broth, purees it, and then stirs in the dairy product.  It sounds good, right?  And it's technically a lunch if it's soup.

So I made my first soup - something I like to call "Ahahaha, hahahaha, mwahahaha, Vitamin A!" soup.  I like vitamin A.  Vitamin A makes you pretty: science agrees. (PLOS ONE, I know, I know, how the mighty have sunk.)

I used;
Two cups of chicken broth
One cup of roasted bell peppers that were hanging around the fridge
One cup of carrots, also mouldering in the fridge
One and a half cups of sweet potato - both orange and purple, because that is what was in the fridge.
One half cup of roasted garlic, because it was adjacent to the roasted peppers.

I cooked the carrots and sweet potatoes until soft first, and then added the garlic and peppers.  I threw the resulting mess into a food processor with some vandouvan - about a teaspoon - and pureed it.  (I think an immersion blender or a potato ricer would have been a better idea.)  I threw it back into the pan and added 2/3 cup milk and 1/3 cup yogurt, because I realized I had some yogurt that had not yet gone bad.

See how slapdash that is?  It's ridiculous.  AND IT'S AMAZING.  I have been eating it for every reasonable meal since.

Being that the first soup worked out so well, I sauteed two cups of chopped onion until a bit caramelized, and then added broth and two cups of broccoli.  I cooked that until the broccoli was tender - which honestly would be a lot easier had the broccoli not been sad, dessicated and wilted broccoli, contemplating its salad days in the bottom of the badly-named crisper.  I also added a half cup of cooked brown rice in a generous "this needs eating" spirit.  Puree with a generous spoonful of mustard - because I like mustard - and add basically all yogurt, where was all this yogurt hiding?

And that is also very good.  It could be sourer.

My next plans are tomato and onion, leek and parsley, maybe kale and potato - I will be eating soups until it is completely unseasonable.

Paleo car-camping

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Salt and Sugar Pickles for Rice Bowl

The photo of these pickles looked far too similar to my mirin pickles. As 40% of what I actually cook is a bowl of rice with things on top of it, I figure it's time you realize that I eat a.) chicken and b.) not all that many pickles at once. It's also time that I realize that I can buy less than five pounds of any sort of produce.

Thinly slice about half a cup of cucumbers (wash if waxed) or watermelon radishes or daikon. Mix with a tablespoon of sugar and a tablespoon of kosher salt. Let sit for ten minutes. Serve.

Rice Cooker Hummus

Hummus intimidates me. My lovely former roommate (Hi A! I'm totally going to talk shit about your hummus!) used to make hummus. It was... not great? And somehow, no matter how few garbanzo beans she'd start soaking, there would always be a half gallon of hummus when she finished making it. It would eventually go bad. We'd eat it until it was obviously obviously bad, and then she'd make more. (Spoiled hummus tastes sparkley. Or it has blue fuzz.)

We were quite broke, and some of her relatives had given us ten pounds of dry garbanzo beans. Also, we had all of this disgusting bread.

So hummus intimidates me. However, I got my darling brother a rice cooker for holidays, and he expressed interest in cooking beans for hummus. I said I'd figure it out for him and then he could visit this blog and wish I had a copy editor.

Remember how I insulted A's hummus like two paragraphs ago? Did you think that I'd follow up by using a different hummus recipe? That's what the weak do, readers. I went ahead and used the exact same recipe and it was delicious. I have theories as to why.

1.) There was something wrong with the free garbanzos. It's unlikely that ordinary garbanzos octuple in size during the cooking process.
2.) My decade-old memory is fallible. The hummus was always delightful.
3.) An endlessly replenishing half gallon of any sandwich spread will eventually become disgusting.
4.) I'd always pressure her into including tahini. Tahini is possibly disgusting.
5.) Using a cheap and terrible blender is a bad idea. Food processors are better.
6.) I've learned to sneer at Laurel's suggestions about salt and seasonings.
7.) Look, the beans, the oil, and the garlic were scavenged. It's likely that at least one of them had spoiled.

Keep all of that in mind.

Take one cup of dry garbanzo beans, and soak them in cold water for at least five hours. (Or overnight) Discard the water, rinse the beans, and fill the rice cooker with five cups of water and the beans. Cook for about three hours, replenishing water as needed. Cook until beans are tender. (The beans may be old. Then, they will not become tender, even after four hours of cooking. Throw them away. Cry. Harangue your grocer.)

Peel three cloves of garlic (I don't actually know how much garlic is a good idea. I know six cloves is too much. Use less than six.) Throw them into the food processor with 1 tsp salt and 1/4 cup vegetable oil. (If you used canned beans instead of playing with the rice cooker, don't add the salt. If you used the rice cooker, you might have to add a lot more salt. Also, I used to be obsessive about using olive oil here. I made it with safflower oil because I was pretty sure this was a test run, and it was good. Go ahead, be cheap.) Puree that stuff. (Oh my, more notes. If you want to add 1/2 cup tahini, do it here. Or use a half cup of peanut butter! Or almond butter! Increase the rib sticking properties!)

Drain the garbanzos and add to the food processor. Puree the heck out of it. Make it as smooth as possible. Squeeze in the juice of 1/2 lemon. Taste. Add pepper, salt, and lemon to taste. You might have to add a lot of salt.

Makes about 3 cups, or about... six pitas? Enough. Don't go doubling this for no reason, guys. Make it once first.

Shiitake Soy Sauce Pickles

It's the tiniest bowl of shiitake pickles! I should have taken the extra ten seconds to mess with the zoom instead of dropping the camera and stuffing them into my face.

C bought me the Momofuku cookbook for Christmas (yay!) and it's seriously damaged my interest in vegan food. It's full of recipes that could convert vegans via smell alone. Those recipes generate a great deal of pork fat, and C allows me to have only two jars of fat hiding in the fridge at one time. Guys, it's hard! Hard!

But I'm made some pretty decent vegan dishes purely by chance. I guess I'll share them with you.

Right. I love the flavor and texture of shiitakes, but they are a.) expensive and b.) fussy to prepare properly. What I really want is a tough little bite of super-flavored shitake to roll around in my mouth for minutes.

This is probably not a goal a lot of other people have.

Anyway. When one is making ramen broth, there are many incidental ingredients. One is dried shiitake mushrooms- surprisingly affordable dried mushrooms! One boils them in kombu broth for about half an hour, and then pulls them out and starts boiling other things in kombu-shiitake broth. (It's a prolonged process.) The author then suggests that one make shiitake pickles with the reserved mushrooms.

So. Either use 2 cups of dried shiitakes to make broth, or soak them in boiling water for about 15 minutes.

Drizzle about 1/4 cup of soy sauce over them. Let them steep for about half an hour in the fridge (or overnight). Slice into strips, and serve with rice bowls, ramen, on pickle plates, or just chew on them like vegetarian jerky while blogging.

Please note: the actual chef suggests marinating the mushrooms in 1/2 cup light soy sauce, 1/2 cup sugar, and 1/2 cup sherry vinegar. He also adds a knob of ginger. I like them better without all this frippery- so add a little bit of soy sauce, taste it, and ask yourself if adding sour and sweet would make it tastier. Then act according to your whim.

Chilean Lentil End-of-the-Pay-Period Soup

I like the concept of meat as seasoning, but my world is short on recipes that make it work. I also like the concept of affordable, stick-to-your-ribs meals that use pantry staples, because every trip to the grocery store reminds me of all the things I want to cook. I like this recipe because C gets all nostalgic about it, most of it gets made in the rice cooker, and it's absolutely delightful.

I say 1/8 pound of lean ground beef, but really... I pinch off about a quarter cup and freeze it when I'm making some other ground beef rich recipe. I have also used a frozen hamburger patty, ground pork, chopped chicken thigh, and a slice of bacon. Versatility! End of the pay period meals!

Take a cup and a half of French lentils, and put them in the rice cooker with four cups of water until they are tender. (Or cook them on the stove, fine.)

Meanwhile, chop one onion, one peeled carrot, maybe a tomato if there's one in the fridge, and maybe a little cilantro. Saute in vegetable oil until the onion is translucent and salt vigorously. Add 1/8 cup ground beef (frozen is OK)and increase the temperature. Cook, stirring constantly, until the beef is cooked through. (This might involve stabbing frozen ground beef with a spoon. It helps with the aggression.) Add the vegetables and meat to the lentils and stir. Thin soup to desired consistency and simmer for 5-10 minutes to get a magnificent beefy flavor throughout.

I like it with a Chilean cabbage salad (I've been known to put the wonderfully sour salad into the soup), or just steamed broccoli or sliced tomatoes. It's also good for breakfast with a poached egg.

Serves 4.

Bad Idea Friday: Zambian Squash

I got this recipe over at Miser Mom, which is so awesome you guys, why aren't you reading it right now? I read the list of ingredients, and then tilted my head as if changing my perspective would make the unlikely ingredients make sense together. Then I demanded clarification. Then I made it- that's what bad idea Fridays are for.

Take one winter squash, halve it, remove the seeds, and bake it in a medium oven until soft, about 45 minutes. (Whenever I'm baking, I start loading the oven down with sweet potatoes and squash and baked beans. Sometimes there's no room for the baked goods.)

Yes, you can use frozen winter squash. Just heat it up a little first.

Let the squash cool a little and scoop out the flesh. If necessary, cut into bite-sized chunks.

Add one cup of fresh salsa, salsa cruda, or chopped tomatoes and onions. Stir.

Thin 1/2 cup peanut butter with a couple of tablespoons of water. Add to squash mixture. Stir.

Peanut butter, winter squash, and salsa- it's a little weird, right? We thoughtfully nibbled at it for some time, trying to figure out if we liked it. Then we realized we'd eaten the entire bowl. It's... good? The flavor combination is unexpected, but pleasant?

Look, it takes five minutes. Make it yourself.

Bad Idea Friday: Homemade Udon

Every time my father-in-law gets to dictate a menu, he requests homemade ravioli stuffed with osso bucco. He dictates a menu fairly frequently, and I am still at the stage in the daughter-in-law relationship where I sometimes do trial runs of dishes before feeding them to my in-laws. (I'm not totally cowed, I am proud.)

Long story short, fresh egg pasta from scratch is excellent, but it's also a terrible pain to make.

So let's take out all of that irritating protein and fat, and make pasta with flour and water! How could this go wrong?

We invited Gyozilla over for dinner, because he's pretty understanding about catastrophic cooking failures and terribly late meals. We made plans for a takeout based fallback.

Recipe from lafujimama. They probably also have better pictures and instructions.

Mix 4 cups white flour with one tablespoon salt. Add 1 cup water and mix into a shaggy ball. Knead for 3-5 minutes. (If you were making egg noodles, you'd just keep kneading and kneading- for about 10 minutes. If you want to skip the next step- you shouldn't, it's brilliant- just keep kneading for 10-15 minutes. After everything is a smooth shiny ball, just keep kneading and kneading for eternity.)

Put ball of dough into a heavy duty ziploc and seal. Wrap in dishtowel or grocery bags, and stand on it. Squoosh that dough out into the far reaches of the bag. Open the bag, roll the dough into a ball, and repeat- do a total of 4 times.

Oh goodness, you guys, this is delightful! All of us enjoyed squashing dough with our feet, and believe you me, it's like six times more fun than kneading for eternity.

Let the dough rest for at least 30 minutes. (You see how they say 3-4 hours in the other place? They weren't hungry. Half an hour is fine.) This is a great time to prepare the things that will be served with the udon. We made wonderful tamago, chopped cucumbers and tomatoes, steamed some sweet potatoes and chicken, pulled some kimchi out of the fridge, and made a peanut sauce.

Now, take out your pasta maker. (Of course you have a pasta maker. It justifies its shelf space each and every Christmas, saint's day, Fathers' day, and C's dad's birthday. If you don't, I'm sure you have a recently married friend who has like five.*) Dust the dough with flour and roll it through the thickest setting. Slice into thick noodles. Boil in ample water until translucent and firm- bite through a noodle to make sure it's cooked in the center. Serve- either in broth, or with all sorts of exciting vegetables and sauces.

*Fine, you don't have a pasta maker. Get a inch thick dowel, about 2-3 feet long. Roll out the dough until it's about 1/8 inch thick, you poor unlucky sod, and then follow the rest of the instructions.

So, how does this stack up as a bad idea? For a recipe where you throw something on the ground and stomp on it, it's pretty good. The udon is not ground shaking. It's pretty good- better than store-bought udon, but not by the order of magnitude that homemade ravioli is better than store-bought ravioli. The dough is much easier to work with. It's worth a try, especially if you don't live two blocks from an excellent noodle house.

Bad Idea Fridays - Rice cooker banana bread.

This is a guest posting from Mike- we've been chatting about rice cooker cuisine. He decided to take it to the next level.

Why rice cooker banana bread? Well, I like banana bread, and my current living arrangements have a communal kitchen, so we buy bananas in bulk - often resulting in extra bananas. I imagine you're probably more curious about the rice-cooker bit, though.

The reason is simple enough - I'm living in Japan, and western normal ovens are a rarity in kitchens here. I'd read of rice cookers being repurposed for non-rice dishes, however, and went looking to see if this extended to banana bread. Happily enough, it did.

The recipe I used is from here.

I've made banana bread a few times before, and this recipe is pretty standard; no complications there. Well, that would be the case except for the whole `in Japan' bit. Baking soda and baking powder are not common here (or I don't know the kanji for them). Fortunately, I know of a western-style supermarket that has them. Unfortunately, it's only halfway across Tokyo.

A friend wanted to visit the supermarket though, which was enough additional reason to go. Of course, at this point, the 'bad idea' has already began creeping in, as I've spent a couple hours and several times the worth of the bananas in other ingredients.

Still, part of it is for the challenge, so I proceed to the next step. After assembling all the ingredients (and having to purchase a measuring cup & spoons, and then look up conversions from imperial to metric), actually making the dough is simple enough. The ingredients combine fine, and the end result is within normal parameters. By this time, it's the middle of the evening, perhaps around 8:00. Now for the actual rice cooker part.

I added a thin layer of grease, dropped the dough in the cooker, turned it on and wandered off - no problem. I check back after an appropriate time later - not cooked. No worries, the recipe warned it might take another cycle. Reset the rice cooker, wander off again. When I came back, it's still warm dough. Rinse and repeat several times, until I finally had to go to bed, dough still uncooked.

After leaving it sitting in the fridge all day, the next evening I gave up on the rice cooker. Half a dozen cooking attempts had turned the dough it into bread pudding, from its original state, but it wasn't safe to eat. With nothing to lose, I took a last attempt and put it on tin foil in the toaster oven. After turning it on every fifteen minutes for an hour, it was finally done. Blacked, yes, but edible. After all it went through, I took what I could get.

I'm still not sure if the rice cooker wasn't strong enough, or if the electronics were too sophisticated, and calibrated for rice. What I do know is that I'll be getting a proper oven before I'll be using up any more extra bananas in bread.