I have been a little behind lately, unmotivated to cook or clear off my dresser or follow up with the stupid painting company whose owner talks such a good game but whose crews are perennially incompetent. One result is a pileup of CSA veggies in the crisper drawers. One would think that a crisper drawer should make things crisper, but our veggies have mostly been soggier than when I put them in there. Today we cooked three batches of greens and a cake, and they were all reasonably successful. (The cake was a roaring success, actually.)
For Sunday brunch Elwood cooked slivers of garlic in bacon fat until they were lightly browned. He tossed in a chopped bunch of some funky Japanese green (can't remember the name, but anything in the kale/chard family would work) and coated it in the fat. At this point he added soy sauce, and I assume he clapped the lid on the pan to let it steam. I, however, was too busy stealing pieces of bacon in the dining room to observe his maneuvers in the kitchen. I'll update tomorrow if there's some missing step like "add fairy dust and secret sauce," because they were awesome. They were better than the bacon. We finished the whole bunch.
Not to worry, though, there were plenty of greens left for dinner. I cooked a bunch of beautiful kale with one of my go-to kale strategies: brown half an onion in butter, add a couple of cloves of garlic, toss the ribboned leaves in the hot fat, throw in a glass of white wine and a handful of raisins, and simmer for about 7 minutes on medium-low heat. Add salt and pepper. You might need to add a little more liquid.
Because I had not served my children quite enough greens in one day to assure my impeachment for Failure to Cook Anything Resembling Items Meant for Human Consumption, I kept going. I rescued the bunch of rapini from the soggier drawer, and cut its stalks into pieces small enough to be bite-sized but large enough to preserve my sanity given the number of dishes somebody was going to have to wash later. I cooked it slowly in olive oil with more garlic, and when it started to soften I added the leaves. I was thinking about how nicely a little sweetness goes with bitter greens (see above re: white wine/raisins) and about how loudly my daughter would protest a dinner consisting of kale, rapini, and green tomato casserole, and I threw in some apple cider. I also added some red pepper flakes, because I wanted some bite.
Hmm, now that I type it up it sounds a little dodgy. But it worked beautifully. While the rapini cooked slowly I browned some breadcrumbs in butter. I cooked up a pound of pasta and tossed it in the skillet with most of the rapini and a mug of pasta cooking water. At the end I stirred in the buttery breadcrumbs. I would have doused it liberally with Parmesan if we'd had any Parmesan, but instead I passed feta at the table. This is sounding weirder and weirder as I type, but -- get this -- the kids snarfed it up. Stella did flip out initially, as predicted, but once she tried it she kept eating more and more. When Pete was in the kitchen later, waiting for cake, he was snitching more pieces of pasta to eat while he waited.
So: the cake. Typepad seems to think you should tip your head 90 degrees to the left to appreciate our cake, and I cannot persuade it otherwise in the time remaining to me tonight. Joe and I watched an episode of Great British Bake-Off this afternoon, and predictably he said, "We should bake something." He pulled out our copy of Ultimate Cake to browse through while he watched, and we settled on a biscuit de Savoie, filled with whipped cream and raspberries and strawberries. It was a perfect Sunday project -- pleasantly but not preposterously involved, and Joe's pretty competent in the kitchen for a 13-year-old. Ours is more ramshackle than the one in the book, but nobody at my house complained.
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