Moon Rice

If you feed your children this rice at every meal, they will be the healthiest and prettiest children. They will also weep all day when you run out of rice. Adults will also become healthy and pretty, and will probably manage to restrain their tears. Recipe serves 2, but you can dodecuple the dry ingredients and store them in a jar for weeks.

Take 1 cup dry short grained brown rice. Add one tablespoon forbidden rice. (Forbidden rice is purple, and smells like heaven.) If you know that the rice will be consumed soon after cooking, add a teaspoon of green lentils.

Put in a rice cooker, add the suggested amount of water, and press the magic button. Wait until the rice is done. Eat your rice.

No rice cooker? Buy a rice cooker. The rice is always perfect.

Fine, yes. You can boil the rice like pasta in 12 cups of water, strain it, and then steam it briefly in a smaller pan. The rice will be almost as good as rice cooker rice.

Fine, yes, basic brown rice stovetop instructions. Bring 1.08333 cups of rice mixture and 2 cups of water to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer until rice is tender- about 25 minutes. Or perhaps your rice is old- in which case you will have to simmer it longer and possibly add additional water.

What if you already know how to make rice? Does this article serve no purpose? Well. Take a cup of cooked Moon rice, add a tablespoon of sugar, 4 oz. of coconut milk, and possibly a dash of vanilla. Simmer together for five minutes, and blammo! Awesome rice pudding.

Salsa Cruda

This is the kind of recipe I post when I have committed to posting every day all month, and I am suddenly switched from a 40 hour week to a 50 hour week. I was going to try to provide a secular contrast to the holy beans, but I can barely keep my eyes open.

Serves 4.

Dice 1/2 onion- I am absolutely mystified why so many recipes specify onion color. Dice the onion finely, because large chunks of onion are not palatable to most people- I learned this through trial and error, no reason you should have to.

Coarsely chop three tomatoes. I'm ambivalent about using tomatoes this time of year. If I had slightly more energy, I'd use something seasonal. Persimmon and pomegranate salsa- Cuervito might forgive me eventually.

Chop a handful of cilantro. If you don't like cilantro, you could use Mexican oregano, or espazote, or rent a kitten and get in some solid positive associations with cilantro so that you can eat it like an adult. Please use significantly less of the dried herbs than a handful- something in the 1/2 tsp. range.

Stir the chopped ingredients together. Add the juice of one lime. Sprinkle on some salt, maybe a little olive oil, maybe a chopped jalapeño, maybe some grated garlic. If you wanted to throw in an avocado or some corn, I would understand. In fact, I'll be milking the "chop some sweet vegetable product, add onion and lime and some herbs, call it salsa" recipe cow extensively in the future- but probably not during the persimmon season.

Savory Pumpkin Pie

This is not vegan. It does not contain pumpkin. It is not technically a pie.

Now that your expectations are low, allow me to state that I served this dish to my avowed carnivore parents as part of a plant-based dinner, and they ate it up and did not complain about the lack of giant carbon hoofprints on the table. It's a vegetarian meal you can serve to Midwesterners.

Bacon's a vegetable, right?

My mother states that this first bit is unnecessarily finicky and without benefit. I'm willing to accept that it's coincidence that every squash I've roasted turned out to be delicious while those cooked near liquids turned into insipid yellow things, so leave this out if you're pressed for time. And hate rainbows. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Cut a winter squash in half and scrape out the seeds. Brush with oil, if you're fancy. Bake for 30 minutes- 1 hour, until the squash is soft. (I used a Delicata, but acorn, Hubbard, or even a pumpkin would also work. If you're leaving out the pre-roasting, use the frozen bagged kind, since you're clearly in some sort of rush. Also because the amount of effort it takes to peel a raw acorn squash is greater than the amount of effort it takes to abandon your standards.)

Obtain a pie crust. There will be no veiled snark if you obtain one from a store, with money. Once your skill with pastry making is great enough so that it's not a huge pain, you will make pie at all times and have moderately elevated cholesterol at an unusually young age. (Quick recipe: 10 parts flour, 5 parts shortening, pinch of salt, one part cold water, one part vodka. Mix half the flour with the shortening, then blitz in the other half (and the salt). Add the liquids, chill briefly, and then smash the Play-doh like substance with a rolling pin until it resembles a crust. It's sticky, so do this on saran wrap. Oh, and use about 20 tbs of flour for one crust.)

Dice an onion. Saute in oil, or perhaps the rendered fat of a solitary strip of bacon. Crumble said bacon into tiny bits.

Peel the squash. Cut into bite sized chunks. Place within crust. Dot with onion and possible bacon.

Make a roux with 1 tbs. white flour and 1 tsp. oil. (Look, the shortening's already out, and we can't pretend this recipe is healthy, so...) Add about 1/2 cup vegetable broth or milk. Stir vigorously, until there are no more lumps. Add 1/4 cup grated jack cheese and 1/2 tsp thyme. (I'll bet it would be entirely edible with just a white sauce, no cheese. However, I was aiming for something my father would eat.) Pour the sauce over the squash. There won't be quite enough, and you will feel virtuous about not being decadent.

If your pie crust is very generous around the edges, fold it in for a nice tart appearance. Otherwise, fine. It is actually a pie. Bake for 15 minutes at 350 degrees.

Sweet Sweet Failure

I found this recipe while bumping around other, better food blogs. I was about two thirds done with the process when I realized that it was my cowboy caviar, mixed 50/50 with quinoa. Quinoa is more expensive than all the other ingredients, no healthier, and less tasty. Fie! Fie!

Still, needs must post. Cook one cup quinoa until the cotyledons unspool and look like toenail clippings. Stir in one cup cooked black beans- let's not lie here, you're going to put in 12 or 16 oz, because who wants to have half a can of black beans hanging around? Add one cup frozen corn- possibly toast it in the oven for five minutes- and a chopped bell pepper and a handful of chopped cilantro and a diced onion. Sprinkle with salt. Lots of salt. Grab like four limes, and squeeze them onto the salad until it's appropriately sour. Add a dash of olive oil. Stir. Hey, it tastes like cowboy caviar and quinoa! Delightful. That is what you were hoping for.

Really, I think of lettuce as an herb I don't particularly care for. And avocados get sad in backpacks, and sad avocados are a sin.

Sick Person Soup

I further desecrate Japanese cuisine.

One of the best things about miso is the ability to make a single serving of soup in five minutes. You might say that's one of the nice things about canned soup, but I affirm that miso is slightly cheaper, slightly lower in sodium, and has never been consumed cold out of the can while standing outside in a downpour. That is to say, miso does not taste like sadness and poor career decisions.

As I stated earlier, I am currently ill. This soup contains several ingredients that holistic medicine proscribes for colds, and three that evidence based science suggests have merit. Why yes, I did go to the health food store in a small town with an obvious cold. Why yes, I did get advice. The pseudoscience will be scattered throughout, the evidence will be at the end. Think of it as a treasure hunt.

Take two cups of water. Simmer over medium heat and add the following ingredients.
Two sliced shiitake mushrooms. Chinese medicine suggests this as a remedy for upper respiratory disease.
One tbs cilantro leaves- used as a cold remedy in India.
(The goal is for the mushrooms to get cooked through, as twelve units of mycology have made me terrified of uncooked mushrooms. Prepare the following ingredients, and then add them just before removing the broth from heat.)
Three cloves garlic, smashed and chopped. The Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans suggest this as an antibiotic and as a gentle way to lay waste to disobedient bacteria and virii colonizing your body. And it's supposed to sooth sore throats.
1/2 inch grated ginger The entire western world and China suggests ginger for colds and coughing.
Juice of 1/2 lemon. Vitamin C, need I say more?
Blend in 2 tbs. red miso. I'm kinda reaching here- it's supposed to rebalance the hormones and suchlike. Reduces the risk for breast cancer- always a good plan. Salty, so my reduced tasting ability is sated.
Drink very hot. If you feel less abraded and lazy than I do, you might consider adding some red pepper flakes- also a holy rain on your internal fauna- or black pepper, or a grated chile.

What does science suggest reduces the duration and severity of a cold? Drinking lots of water, drinking hot liquids, and getting adequate electrolytes. Which is lame, and does not allow me to imaging thousands of viruses writhing in terror. "No, no, increased hydration! Aiiiiii, soothed mucus membrane tissue! Anything but that!

Bad Idea Saturday: Acorn Bread.

Sarlah dared me to do this, and I am apparently seven years old.

So some time ago, Sarlah sent me an article about eating acorns. The article had no recipes, a few tips, and a general message that I should cook with acorns, because I deserved it!

"Goodness," I thought, "Have I been unusually unpleasant lately?"

I have long suspected that acorns simply aren't very tasty. If they were, we would have domesticated them like almonds and walnuts. If they were, some of the hundreds of cultures that used to eat them wouldn't have happily turned to wheat in all of its beautiful forms at the very first opportunity. If acorns were tasty, hogs would eat the ones that fall into their pens before they ate hog food.

But because I can't resist a dare, I shelled a whole bunch of acorns, poured them into a cloth bag, and suspended them in the toilet tank. This is the sole practical tip in that article: replace the endless rinsing that used to be found in streams with the sterile toilet tank. Every time you flush, the acorns leech out a little bit of their bitterness. (The acorns will stain the water in the bowl a weak-tea brown. If you leave part of the bag outside of the tank, water will drip all over the floor. You will then have to explain that there are acorns in the toilet. It will go about as well as you might expect.)

I started looking for acorn bread recipes. An ethnobotany guide explained that 3/4 of the calories consumed in Pre-Columbian California were from acorns. It noted that the indigenous peoples of California were blessed with the ability to gather most of their food for the coming year in four or five days. It notes that preparing enough acorn gruel for the daily meals took at most one or two hours a day, leaving the people of California with copious free time. It also notes that they spent most of this free time searching for foods that were not acorns. Because acorns suck.

I found several recipes online, but they all seem to suffer from the "lotta butter, lotta eggs, lotta flour" problem. Those things taste good on their own! There's no reason to add acorns except as some bizarre ecological cachet! What's the point?

Huh. While I was complaining about that last bit, my mother wandered by and shared anecdotes. Apparently, my opinions about cooking with acorns have not changed much over the last twenty years, and are the long lost reason that I was... mutually agreed to not be the best fit with the local Girl Scout troop. I must have been really obnoxious about native peoples and their access to sugar, wheat, and baking soda. And they say we mature as we age.

The Internet recipes also rely heavily on common names for oaks. Several sites (and Cuervito) suggest eating only the seeds of the white oaks. The ethnobotany guide suggests that the preferred species were black oaks. There is a local species known as the Oregon White Oak (Quercus garryana) which is closely related to the California Black Oak (Q. kelloggii). Both species are technically classified as red oaks. There's a sister clade known as the white oaks, and it contains the Blue Oak, (Q. douglasii) the Golden Oak (Q. chrysolepis) and a whole bunch of other oaks that do not have color related names. All the records I can find are iffy, because anthropologists are terrible botanists. This is a pet peeve of mine; I had to take a quick break from researching this article to spam my anthropologist cousin with information on oak identification.

I ultimately went with the Q. kelloggii growing in my back yard. Lazy...

But what of those acorns, sitting patiently in my toilet tank for... about a month now? I tasted them every week or so, and they never got less bitter. Today, I took them out, rinsed them off, and nibbled on one for a while. Then I spat it out and drank three glasses of water. Then I tried another: still bitter. Then I shelled a fresh acorn and tasted it: less bitter than the prepared ones.

But what is this? One of my friends just returned from a reskilling fair, where there was a workshop on acorn cuisine. She suggests boiling acorns for 90 minutes to remove bitterness. The part of me that objects to using quickbread ingredients objects to boiling things in a pot for a very long time. At the very least, the energy going into making the nuts edible is probably greater than what is strictly reasonable. But still- I now have a viable plan to make an acorn food product, it's already Saturday afternoon, and my cold leads to poor decisions.

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(Makes like four tiny biscuits, because why would you want more?)

Take two handfuls of acorns. Crack them with a meat tenderizer or a nutcracker, and remove the shells. At this point my father will wander into the room, shake his head, and say "Somehow I thought that you would have outgrown doing inexplicable things in the kitchen by now." He will then go outside so that he doesn't have to observe the devastation being wreaked.

Take said acorns and boil for one and a half hours. Change the water three times. Peel off as much of the skin over the acorns as possible- Internet sites say that it's richer in tannins, though my tongue cannot detect a difference.*

*I do have a cold, and it was cook things with tannins in them day, (quince, unripe persimmons) so I may be absolutely wrong.

Remove acorns from heat and drain water. Pulse in food processor (sorry Cuervito!) until it resembles some sort of meal. Frequent scraping of sides will be necessary. (I suppose food processors technically violate the reskilling/native foods part of this exercise, but I purposely cooked without appliances for three years, and am confident I could do so again in a pinch. I could also live on oranges and potatoes and dumpster olive oil again. Part of some experiences is proving that it was a bad idea. Like eating acorns.)

Mix with a bit of water and notice that the dough is not at all cohesive. Grudgingly add a couple tablespoons of wheat flour to harness the glory of gluten. Perhaps a dash of salt? Does that offend delicate sensibilities? And a clove of minced garlic- interesting choice. Form into small oblong biscuits, attempt to wrap in oak leaves, fail, wrap in chestnut leaves, succeed, but only until the biscuits have gone into the oven. Bake for twenty minutes. Remove. Clean the kitchen to make future Bad Idea Fridays possible.

Okay guys. Guys. Everything tasty about this is based on wheat and garlic and salt, but I would totally eat these to survive. It's got a little bitter aftertaste, and I ate only one, and that one was eaten with about an equal volume of bad idea jam- but they aren't awful. They just aren't very good.

Too Sick For Bad Ideas

Instead, here's some almonds.

Almonds made up an absurd percentage of my total calories consumed in the two month rare plant/wedding sprint. It is only now that they sound at all appealing again. Of course, before I'd just poke them into my mouth until I could concentrate again, whereas now there must be preparation.

Take 1/4 cup almonds. Toast over medium heat in 1/2 tsp olive oil for about one minute. Stir frequently. Add 1/4 cup good raisins, a dash of salt and 1/2 tsp thyme. Cook, stirring all the freaking time, for 2-3 more minutes until the almonds are toasted. Serve warm.

Is pretty good, and if you've badly misjudged how long it takes to make mujadarah you can whip this up to distract your guests. Also, I have such strong associations between thyme and beef flavors that I am convinced this contains steak.

(Bad ideas return tomorrow.)