Light and Momentary

Tiramisu is so yummy

This year we traveled instead of hosting, but we took food along. We made a version of the lamb and bean braise I told you about last year, and tiramisu.

I was looking for a tiramisu recipe with cooked egg yolks because food safety seemed like a bigger concern if we were transporting food. I was going to share the link but I can't find it, strangely, so I will just tell you about what I did instead.

In a double boiler heat six egg yolks with a half-cup of brown sugar. (It was supposed to be white sugar, but we did not have a half-cup of white sugar.) With an electric mixer, beat them together until they reach 160 degrees. Whip in 8oz. of room temperature mascarpone and a spoonful of vanilla. Beat 3 cups of whipping cream until you are a smidge past the soft peaks stage. Fold it all together gently.

For assembly you will need 24 ladyfingers and about 2 cups of strong black coffee. If you are using a trifle bowl, dip 5 whole ladyfingers quickly in the coffee and lay them in the bottom. Break a sixth ladyfinger into thirds, which you will also dunk briefly in the coffee, and put the pieces in the empty spaces. Spread about a quarter of the cream mixture on top. Repeat this process three more times, until you have used all 24 ladyfingers and all of the cream mixture. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and pop it in the fridge overnight. Before serving, put a spoonful of cocoa in a tea strainer. Tap the tea strainer gently with a spoon to dust the top of the tiramisu with cocoa.

I wondered if it would be too simple -- no rum, no egg whites, commercial ladyfingers. But it was a hit.

My very favorite January salad

In this month of beautiful citrus I have a suggestion for you. 

Halve a ripe avocado and a pink grapefruit. Section the grapefruit and pit the avocado. Run your knife to but not through the skin of the avocado half, cutting lengthwise and then across to make approximately bite-sized pieces.

With a swoop of your spoon, separate the avocado bites from the avocado skin and tip them into a bowl. Dump the grapefruit half into the bowl, using your spoon to coax out any uncooperative sections. Squeeze the empty grapefruit half over the bowl so you get the juice too. Consider a sprinkle of salt or Tajin, or enjoy it naked. 

I cannot even tell you how much I love these contrasts: the colors (fierce pink against pale green), the flavors (astringent against mild), the textures (the tiny pops of the grapefruit vesicles against the creaminess of the avocado). I can eat it every day; I often think happily about my next bowlful as I'm spooning up the last bite. 

Lesson Learned

For many years I have done my Thanksgiving mashed potatoes in exactly the same way. But I started to wonder if perhaps I was being a little rigid about it. I saw all these social media posts about people making their mashed potatoes early and leaving them in a crockpot all day and i thought to myself, "Hmm, am I making avoidable trouble for myself?" 

Also Pete told me that Adam Ragusea disagreed with every single thing I said about making mashed potatoes, and Adam Ragusea is the king of pointing out unnecessary rigidity. 

"Guess what, kids," I said, "I'm branching out. We're trying an Instant Pot version this year. I'm going to do them early and keep them warm"

This was a mistake. They weren't, like, dismal. But they were very far from celestial -- kind of funny-colored, kind of dense. When I was fretting beforehand about whether it was a bad idea to branch out, the kids said, "Mom, it will be fine. Potatoes plus butter -- people will eat that." 

I was sitting next to Pete at dinner and we agreed on the inferiority of the Instant Pot version. I asked him about the Adam Ragusea video and his conviction that I had been needlessly emphatic about my approach to mashed potatoes; we had talked about it before he tried the recipe but not afterward. He said, "Adam Ragusea's conclusion that his mashed potatoes were the same as your mashed potatoes was wrong. All of his points were valid. But your mashed potatoes are better."

We might have to make the One True Mashed Potato Recipe later this weekend.

Chocolate Cloud Cake

This is a Nigella Lawson recipe that I made for a visiting friend today. It comes together in a trice.

Spray a 9-inch springform pan with nonstick spray and preheat your oven to 350.

If you have a 10-ounce bag of good quality dark chocolate chips, you will need 90% of it for this recipe. Precision is not essential. If I don’t want to weigh them I just pinch off ~10% of the bag and shake the rest into a microwavable bowl. Add a stick of butter and melt them together. I use the 80% power setting but my microwave is old. (Full power could scorch your chocolate.) Stir them together until they are smooth and glossy, and set them aside to cool.

Separate four eggs. Beat the 4 whites until they’re foamy, and then gradually beat in 1/3 c. sugar until they are stiff.  Add two whole eggs and 1/3 c. sugar to your 4 yolks. When your chocolate-butter mixture is cool enough that it won’t scramble your eggs, beat in the yolk mixture until well combined.

Add a healthy dollop of beaten whites to the chocolate mixture to lighten it up. Beat it in vigorously, regarding its deflation with insouciance. Scrape the chocolate mixture into the whites, and fold them together gently but thoroughly.

Pour this mixture into the springform pan and bake for 35 minutes. It should be risen all the way to the center; it might need a few more minutes to get there. Pull it out and let it cool. It will deflate dramatically.

Fill the crater with whipped cream and a delicate dusting of cocoa powder if you like. Or just eat it straight out of the pan with a spoon — baker’s choice.

Beauteous Golden Soup

Do you need a quick soup recipe? I have a quick soup recipe.

Coarsely chop an onion and a stalk of celery. Cook them in olive oil over medium-high heat; you want them to get brown. While they are sizzling, peel and seed a small butternut squash, and then cut it into chunks. My chunks were probably in the range of 1.5 inches, and I had about 1.5-2 cups of them. But this is a forgiving recipe, so do what works for you. Toss them in the pot and let them brown while you peel and core and chunk a nice big apple.

Deglaze your pan with a half-glass of white wine. Add the apple and about a pint of stock. Cover and cook on medium heat until you can mash the apples and squash easily with a fork. This won't take a long time; you can check them after 10 minutes, but be advised that they might still need a little more time. Sprinkle in some warm spices -- I added one shake apiece of ginger, allspice, and cardamom, along with some pepper. Add a splash of cream and salt to taste, and hit it with an immersion blender until it is smooth.

If you are feeding this to company, you might want to garnish it with something green, like chives or a sprinkle of parsley.

Novel, simple, fresh, local, frugal, tasty

For a while now I'd been meaning to try a Crescent Dragonwagon recipe from Bean by Bean. It sounded fairly improbable, but she raved about it so enthusiastically that I thought I'd give it a whirl. She calls it couve a mineira, and she says that in Brazil it is served alongside feijoada.

This is the improbable part: her version is mostly made of raw collard greens. The internet will tell you to saute them lightly, but not Crescent Dragonwagon.

Fifteen years ago I thought the idea of eating raw kale on purpose sounded preposterous. I also thought that massaging raw kale in order to render it edible was ridiculous. But what do you know, these days I eat kale salads regularly and sometimes even make them myself. So I was open to the idea that it might be possible to skip the long cooking time I used to think was required for leafy green consumption.

Her recipe is simplicity itself. Stem your collard greens, roll them up like a fat cigar, and use a sharp knife to cut them in fine fine fine ribbons. Dress with olive oil, fresh lemon juice, and salt/pepper.

We had CSA collards in the fridge and tonight they met their destiny. I swapped in a lime because we were out of lemons, and I added some additional olive oil to ensure that the collards were thoroughly dressed. They were so yummy: fresh and zippy and easy to eat. Definitely recommended.

Beauteous Magenta Soup

In the summer I often make a Nigella Lawson recipe: a gorgeous chilled beet soup. It is simple and stunning, just roasted beets, peeled and tossed in the blender with stock, sour cream, cumin, and fresh lime juice.

Yesterday I was trying to decide what to do with a batch of roasted beets. The idea of a nice beefy borscht had some appeal, but I didn't want to do more chopping. So instead I did something experimental that worked splendidly.

In the fridge I had a container full of leftover filling for stuffed peppers, made from a blend of ground beef and pork cooked together with onions, garlic, and a bunch of kale that I blitzed to smithereens in the food processor. (In my experience, kids (and many grownups) are more willing to eat leafy greens in tiny pieces.) When this was cooked, I tipped in a pile of leftover rice and tucked the mixture inside the last of the CSA peppers. I stashed the remaining filling inside the fridge, where, honestly, I forgot all about it.

Yesterday morning I rediscovered the container full of filling and thought to myself, "What if I heated up the soup that I usually serve chilled...WITH the leftover meat/rice/veggies?" My friends, it was fabulous-- meaty and satisfying and earthy and sweet, with the most gorgeous, soul-satisfying color. 

So if you too like the idea of borscht but don't have the patience for the chopping (does anyone else get frustrated with the way that beets roll around unpredictably when you try to chop them, leaving fuchsia trails on your cutting board and perhaps your clothes?), consider this menu sequence instead: stuffed peppers (make extra filling) with beets roasted alongside them, followed a day or two later by blender beet soup, heated gently with the leftover filling.

I am going to eat another bowl of it for breakfast, feeling happy and frugal. It's like a matryoshka doll of leftover management: the leftover rice went into the leftover filling which went into the soup, which offers a treat for both the belly and the eyes.

Low effort, high reward

During the pandemic my college roommates and I began talking via Zoom every Sunday. As life has returned to normal, there are more interruptions. Sometimes nobody can make it; it's rare for all five of us to be there for the whole hour. But it's so nice to have a regular time to see each other's faces and stay caught up.

For the past few weeks I've been cooking during the calls. (I usually keep myself muted so the kitchen noises don't disrupt the call.) This is the time of year when we have both CSA bounty and CSA fatigue, so it's been hard to stay on top of the veggie situation. But a quiet hour chatting with friends turns out to be a perfect time in which to do some chopping and roasting. It's also been a good time for trying some new things in the kitchen, without the weeknight pressure to get a meal on the table efficiently.

Last week, for the first time, I tried making pickled daikon. I've always enjoyed pickled radish at Korean restaurants, but in the US "pickle" and "cucumber" are practically synonymous and I'd never attempted to make it at home before. We get a lot of daikon from our farmer, and we only eat up some of it in slaws and stir-fries. I decided I'd see how home-pickled daikon turned out.

To my surprise, I've been eating it all week, in everything. If I take leftover stew to work for lunch, I put some pickled daikon in a baggie to sprinkle on top after it's heated up. This morning i made myself a little batch of egg salad, and I added olives and pickled daikon before I scooped it into hollowed-out tomato halves. Like any pickle, it's sweet and sour and salty. Unlike cucumber pickles, it is still deliciously crunchy after a week in the fridge. It's such a nice flavor/texture contrast that my first batch is almost gone.

If you also enjoy pickled radish at Korean restaurants, or if you're seeing beautiful daikon at fall farmer's markets, or if you just prefer your pickles nice and crunchy and want to try something new, it couldn't be any easier. Here's what you do:

Dissolve 1/2 c. sugar and 1 t. salt in 1/2 c. rice vinegar and 1/2 c. hot water. Peel and cube a pound of daikon. The recipe says half-inch cubes; mine vary in size. Combine and leave at room temperature for 24 hours. Refrigerate thereafter. 

Plum cake: easy, tasty, seasonal, beautiful

Stella and I picked up plums at the grocery store, and tonight she asked me if we were actually going to make the plum cake I had mused about when I put them in the cart. "Yes, we are!" I said, and we baked up those plums after dinner. You should bake up some plums too -- this cake is delicious and straightforward.

Take about a pound and a half of plums; cut them in half along their meridians and pit them. Preheat your oven to 350 and hit an 8- or 9-inch springform pan with nonstick spray. Cream a stick of butter with three-quarters of a cup of sugar (or a little more if your plums are very tart). Beat in two eggs, followed by a cup of flour, a teaspoon of baking powder, a wee bit of salt, and any suitable flavorings your heart desires. We added a sprinkle of almond extract, because almond goes so nicely with stone fruits, and a sprinkle of orange flower water.

Scrape this speedily assembled batter into your springform pan and nestle the plums into it. Sprinkle with a spoonful of sugar. Add a dusting of cinnamon or cardamom if you like that idea. Bake. Give it an hour in an 8-inch pan. Our 9-inch cake was the tiniest smidgin underbaked at 50 minutes. Adjust accordingly.

The batter will bloom up and over the plum halves, and you will have a glorious assemblage of golden cake and deep deep purple plums. You could serve it with vanilla ice cream but it is fabulous all by itself.

A recipe for when you are drowning in leafy greens

I've told you before that we often make Crescent Dragonwagon's gumbo when we have an abundance of CSA leafy greens, and I've also told you before that it's A Project. So delicious, such a pain. This weekend I used one of its elements in a much more streamlined way.

We were behind on eating CSA greens. It's a total first-world problem to struggle with eating all of our beautiful organic leafy greens -- and yet it's a struggle to eat all of our beautiful organic leafy greens. When I stuffed them into my giant Instant Pot, it was three-quarters full. I poured in a 46-ounce bottle of V-8 and maybe another pint of water. I cooked them under pressure for 12 minutes, because it's easier to get kids (and grownups!) to eat leafy greens if they are thoroughly cooked, and also because you can take the girl out of the South but you can't take the South out of the girl, and I still prefer my greens cooked to tenderness. I let the pressure come down naturally.

I want to stress here that I did pretty much zero prep. I soaked them briefly in cold water because greens do tend to have some dirt hiding in their crevices, but I didn't fuss about removing ribs or stems or chopping or whatever else. I just chucked them in the pot, doused them in liquid, and pressure-cooked them into submission. I got out my immersion blender and briskly turned them into puree.

I also cooked a pound of white beans, adding about 2t. salt once they were soft. At dinnertime I cooked up a package of sweet Italian sausage. I added a head of garlic, slivered, to the cooking fat, and deglazed the pan with about a cup of white wine once I took the cooked sausage out and chopped it up. I found that I wanted to make one flavor adjustment late in the cooking process: the V-8 made the greens puree fairly acidic, so I added a wee little sprinkle (maybe an eighth of a teaspoon) of baking soda to raise the pH. Once the fizzing was over, the flavor balance was better. I combined it all and served it up with some good bread and a plate of raw veggies for crunch.

Honestly, I was not expecting this to be a super-popular dinner, but everybody enthused about it. The greens are pleasingly vegetal but unobtrusive, the beans are mild and tender, and the sausage and garlic offer little bursts of flavor. It's like gumbo's more easygoing cousin.

Let them eat cake

We had friends over for dinner last night, and yesterday afternoon I was mostly thinking about what I wanted to make for dinner. (I settled on this NYT chickpea stew, with added cumin/coriander, served over rice -- tasty and easy). But at the last minute I threw a cake in the oven, and it reminded me that homemade cake is a particularly delicious form of alchemy.

First you preheat your oven to 350, and hit your 8-inch round cake pan(s) with non-stick spray. I always cut out a quick untidy circle of parchment paper to line the bottom of the pan, but this is not essential.

The nice thing about a Victoria sponge cake recipe is that it's easy to remember and to scale. For two 8-inch rounds, take two sticks of softened butter and beat them with 225 grams of sugar (this equals one cup if you prefer volume measurements, but I promise it's worthwhile to get comfortable with measuring by weight). When this mixture is fluffy, add in four eggs, and beat the mixture thoroughly. If you want vanilla, or almond extract, or lemon zest, or whatever else, splash some in. If you keep self-raising flour in your house, add in 225 grams; if you don't, you'll want about 5 grams of salt, about 7 grams of baking powder, and about 210 grams of ordinary flour. (This is approximately a cup and three-quarters, but you probably don't need me to tell you that flour is hard to measure accurately by volume. May I suggest an inexpensive kitchen scale?) You'll want a couple of tablespoons of milk as well, just enough to give you a nice ploppable consistency.

Divide this mixture across two pans, and bake for about 25 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. Let the layers cool in the pans for about 10 minutes, and then turn them out onto a cooling rack and leave them alone until they're cool enough not to melt your filling.

If you're in a hurry, slap some lemon curd or good jam in between the layers and dust the top with confectioner's sugar. If you're not in a hurry, I'm partial to this chocolate sour cream frosting.

You can easily scale the recipe up if you want a majestic three-layer cake, or down if you only need a single layer. It's a super-simple formula: for each layer, you need 4 ounces (113g) each of butter, sugar, and self-raising flour, 2 eggs, and a splash of milk. Speedy, fluffy, golden, and more delicious than it has any right to be. Happy baking!

Can't have Thanksgiving without pecan pie

"You need to write all these recipes down," Pete told me after Thanksgiving dinner, and then the next day a guest requested the pecan pie recipe. So here's a pecan pie post.

I make a pecan pie that is fussier than the ones I grew up with. I think it looks so pretty and festive that I don't mind the once-a-year hassle. You do have to hunch over a hot partially set pie to arrange pecan halves in concentric circles, so keep on scrolling if that's not your cup of tea. (Pecan pie is at approximately 1:00 in this picture of our consolatory 2020 dessert extravaganza. We had no company; we had so much pie.)

Roll out shortcrust pastry to line a 9-inch tart pan with a removable base. Let it rest in the fridge for about an hour so it doesn't shrink in the oven. Preheat your oven to 400, and blind-bake the crust, anchored by pie weights or dried beans, for 20 minutes.

While it's in the oven, cream together 6 T. softened butter and 125g brown sugar. (I will never again pack brown sugar into a measuring cup with a spoon, but we can still be friends if you hate baking by weight: that's about 1/2 c., packed.) When the mixture is light and fluffy, beat in 3 eggs, followed by 100 ml maple syrup and 150 ml corn syrup. Add a pinch of salt and a spoonful of liquor -- bourbon or dark rum, as you prefer.

Put a tablespoon of flour into a baggie, and add 150 g chopped pecans. (My cookbook estimates this as 1.25 cups; pinpoint accuracy is not essential here.) Shake them around to coat them with flour, so they are less likely to sink to the bottom of the pie. Fold them into the filling mixture.

Do not neglect this next step, even if you are feeling lucky: set the tart pan with its parbaked crust in a rimmed baking sheet, on which you have set a foil square that will cup the sides of the pan and contain any oozing pie filling. You are now going to pour most of a pound of sugar into that crust, and if you have even a small crack in the crust you will make a disastrous mess in your oven floor as the filling seeps through the removable bottom of your tart pan. If you are baking the pie while you eat your Thanksgiving dinner, the dining room will be filled with acrid smoke and the shrill voices of angry smoke detectors. (Why, yes, this is the voice of bitter experience! Learn from my mistakes, friends!) Don't overfill the crust, or you'll get overflowing baked-on goo gluing the pie to the pan. If you have extra filling, bake it until it's set in a separate little dish, like the white ramekin in these pie pictures. Turn the oven temperature down to 350 and give it 15 minutes.

Here is the fiddly part: scoot your oven rack out and place pecan halves in concentric circles atop the lightly set filling. Slide it back in and bake until it's completely set. Check it after 30 more minutes; if it's still jiggly in the middle you might need as much as ten more minutes. Cool it on a wire rack until you can slide it out of its pan and onto a pretty plate. Cut it in small slices so you will have leftovers.

This is a recipe from Barbara Maher's Ultimate Cake, the book behind many of our celebratory desserts over the years.

Alas

I was going to make a nice cozy pot of turkey-barley soup tonight. Just the thing for a cold night, I thought to myself, with the added benefit of getting rid of some of the stock taking up space in the fridge. A few days before Thanksgiving I like to serve roast chicken for dinner and make stock with the carcass, so there's plenty on hand for moistening stuffing and making gravy. But I often make more than I need, which means the extra stock is competing with the Thanksgiving leftovers for fridge space.

I minced an onion and a stalk of celery and set them to browning in a mix of olive oil and butter. I cubed up a few small carrots and added them too, and once everything was turning golden I added some slivered garlic and sprinkled the veggies with salt. I poured in stock and added a couple of handfuls of chopped leftover turkey, and then I grabbed the quick barley. We had an open box in the pantry, left over from last soup season, and I tipped it all in. It seemed a little clumpy, but I told myself it looked fine. If you are reading this post in hopes of finding an actual recipe for turkey-barley soup, you're almost done: simmer until the barley is tender and check the seasoning. Easy, cozy, golden, frugal -- who could ask for anything more? But this is not primarily a recipe post, because the story takes a sad turn:

Fifteen minutes later I peeked in and discovered an armada of little cream-colored crescent-shaped items afloat in my soup. 

For a moment I thought optimistically that all the broken bits of barley must have been crescent-shaped. And then my heart sank, and I pulled up the magnifier app on my phone to survey a few ships from the fleet, kind of like Gulliver in Lilliput if Gulliver had been an iPhone user preparing to eat the Lilliputians.

It turns out that boiling one's specimens in chicken stock does not assist in the process of accurate entomological identification, but the miniature navy in my soup pot looked an awful lot like these little guys. (Don't click that link if you're an easy-queasy person.)

"Hm," said Elwood, when I asked him for a second opinion, "that doesn't look right." 

He was less grossed out by the weevil picture than I was, pronouncing our visitors "free protein." "We didn't even have to pay for it," he added cheerfully. "Joe's always trying to eat more protein. And you! You want gains too, don't you?"

I don't want gains enough to eat larva soup, I assured him.

I need to find out who the patron saint of pantry infestations is, so I can pray earnestly: deliver us from weevils.

Easy, happy, fresh, local

I always forget how much I like potato-leek soup until I am actually eating potato-leek soup. We get CSA leeks regularly in the late fall, and tonight I made a pot of soup that we all enjoyed. You can make this soup with any quantity of leeks or potatoes, really, but I had four medium leeks and two medium potatoes.

Chop up the white and pale green parts of your leeks into bite-sized pieces, and soak them briefly in cold water to get rid of any lingering dirt. Toss them into a heavy pot in which you have melted a half-stick of butter. Season them with salt and pepper and let them stew on medium-low heat for about 15 minutes.

Sprinkle a quarter-cup of flour over your softened leeks and stir it around for a few minutes. Once it's nice and hot, whisk in about 3 cups of stock, starting slowly to avoid sad lumpy soup. Chuck in your peeled and cubed potatoes at this point, and about a cup of milk or cream or a combination thereof. You are the only person who knows where you like your soups to fall on the soup-stew spectrum, and the only person who knows how much butterfat is the right amount of butterfat for your palate, so do what works for you. You'll probably need more salt. Tonight I chopped up some leftover sausage that was lurking in the fridge and added it to the pot, but it also makes a nice meatless meal.

When your potatoes are tender, taste again for salt and serve it forth. 

I love the squeak of a leek between my teeth-- don't you?

In which we summon the Gains Fairy

If you want to get stronger, you might benefit from eating more protein. People argue about the exact amount you need, but the recommendation has been pretty well studied and the findings seem to be fairly consistent: protein intake makes a difference in a person's response to resistance training. I aim for about 120 grams per day. 

To make this feasible, I supplement with whey protein powder. Yes, the person who used to grow her own lentil sprouts has turned into a person with a subscribe-and-save order set up for 5-pound tubs of artificially sweetened protein powder (affiliate link). I keep thinking I'll investigate a less processed option, but no dice so far.

Usually I include a scoop of whey in my breakfast, which might be a smoothie with Greek yogurt and frozen bananas, or maybe some steel-cut oats with walnuts or chia seeds or a spoonful of flax meal. I am the queen of unfinished cups of coffee, and in recent weeks I have been pouring my leftover tepid coffee into my shaker cup and mixing it up with whey and creatine and ice. These combinations get me 30-40 grams of protein at breakfast, depending on the details. 

I aim for 40g at lunch, which is usually a sandwich or a salad. If I'm making the lunch, I will pile on more protein-rich toppings or fillings than I used to: cubed leftover meat, garbanzos, hard-boiled egg, walnuts, feta, etc. I used to think a can of tuna yielded enough tuna salad for two sandwiches, but these days I stuff it into one (not very often, though, because mercury, PCBs, etc.). 

Our dinners usually include some meat, which makes it easier to get to 30-40 grams of protein. Tonight, for instance, was leftover night, and I chose leftover ham and beans (a Gladly family standby for more than 20 years now) in part because of its protein content. 

Somewhere in there I will probably eat a snack, which could be yogurt or cheese cubes if my meals have included less protein, or apple slices with nut butter if I'm already pretty close to the target number. Or if I want something sweet after dinner, I might have a little yogurt with some frozen fruit and protein powder and maybe a little drizzle of peanut butter.

I feel intermittent uneasiness about relying so heavily on animal products, but this is where I am right now. Casey Johnston has some helpful posts on protein, including this one on protein targets and this one on protein choices.

This post was prompted by a comment from NGS, who is also doing NaBloPoMo. If you miss blogs and blogging, check out the NaBloPoMo links!

Breakfast in October

Do you like steel-cut oats, except that they take too long to cook? I like to make a big batch over the weekend and then reheat them during the week, using milk or water to thin them out again.

Apple-Cinnamon Instant Pot Steel-Cut Oats

Melt 2 T. of butter in your Instant Pot on sauté mode, and let it get brown and nutty-smelling. (Don't go too far while it is browning; burned butter is considerably less appealing than browned butter.) Chuck in 1.5 c. steel-cut oats and toast them, stirring occasionally, until they smell like popcorn. Add a cup of cider, 3.5 cups of water, a chopped apple, a heaping half-teaspoon of cinnamon, and a scant half-teaspoon of salt. Switch to Porridge mode and cook under pressure for 12 minutes. Let the pressure come down naturally for 10 minutes and then release the valve. Stir it well and serve it forth.

This is mostly Coco Morante's recipe from her Essential Instant Pot Cookbook, which is cheap and useful.

Lentil bowls for dinner

I decided to make lentil bowls for dinner tonight, and the kids liked them more than I expected they would.

I put a cup and a half of little French lentils in the Instant Pot with two cloves of garlic and 3 cups of water. I gave them 18 minutes and let the pressure come down naturally.

While they were cooking I cut up the sad remains of a bag of Brussels sprouts (halved vertically, browned slowly in olive oil, tossed with salt and lemon juice and a spoonful of preserved lemon paste). I wanted something crunchy and tangy to go on top, so I steeped a grated carrot and a cucumber that I had peeled and seeded and cut into spears in a speedy mix of rice vinegar, lime juice, sambal oelek, and honey. 

When the lentils were ready I added some Middle Eastern flavors to the pot along with salt and the juice of half a lemon: ground coriander, za'atar, a spoonful of NY Shuk's olive matbucha and another of preserved lemon paste. I also added a shake of Kafe Hawaij but I'd probably leave it out next time -- I didn't love the cinnamon.

We also had a sad little bag of wilting parsley in the crisper drawer, which I turned into a speedy dressing by chucking it in the blender with a clove of garlic, the juice of half a lemon, a handful of walnuts, salt, and enough olive oil to make it pourable. 

I put everything on the table along with a dish of reheated leftover rice, some sliced avocado, and plain yogurt. I love meals where everybody can choose whatever combinations look tasty to them. Of the four kids at dinner, three were very enthusiastic. "It would be easy for lentils and rice to be really boring," said my most carnivorous kid, "but there are so many pleasant flavors here."

They ate up every bite, which probably means they thought it was delicious. But it might also mean that I'm out of practice cooking the right amount of dinner for 6 people.

Delicious

Elwood made something new for dinner tonight and I think it will stay in the rotation: pasta alla Brontese. I am sharing an approximate version for anyone who gets paywalled.

Cook up a box of fettuccini, and sauce it like so: first, take toasted pistachios and blitz them to rubble with Parmesan. Crisp up some nice fatty pork (we rarely have pancetta on hand, which is what the recipe calls for, but always have bacon, which works just fine) and cook some onion in the fat. Cook down some wine in the oniony fat and add heavy cream. Combine, and eat while making happy noises.

Would a cardiologist approve? Perhaps not. Am I going to keep it in the rotation anyway, because "moderation in all things" also applies to bacon and heavy cream? Yes indeed I am.

Soul cakes: tasty, easy, seasonally appropriate

All Souls' Day is today and Stella requested soul cakes. If you're in the mood for some seasonal baking, soul cakes might be just the thing.

Preheat your oven to 400.

To two cups of flour, add 1/2 t. salt, 1/2 t. baking soda, 1.5 t. baking powder, 1 T. sugar, and approximately a heaping teaspoon of fall-flavored spices. I used Kafe Hawaij with extra cinnamon. Stir your dry ingredients together and sprinkle in a handful of raisins or currants. Cut a stick of butter into small cubes and rub them briskly into your flour mixture. Add about 2/3 c. buttermilk, or ordinary milk to which you've added a splash of vinegar. Stir gently and tip onto a floured surface. Knead gently until it coheres (don't overdo it or you'll have tough soul cakes). Pat it out to about a half-inch thickness and cut out circles with an upside-down glass. It's traditional to cut a cross into the tops of your cakes. Brush with egg wash, if you like, and bake for 20 minutes.

For reasons that are opaque to me, all the soul cake recipes that come up for me in Google are unleavened, yielding a "cake" that I find unpleasantly brick-like. Sure, they would have been unleavened six hundred years ago. Also six hundred years ago people were serving up roast peacock for festive occasions. I do not wish to eat a peacock; I do not wish to eat a pile of unleavened flour. Modern cooking, I embrace it. 

These are speedy enough to serve for breakfast; they also make a welcome afternoon snack.

Apples Galore

We went apple-picking over the weekend and came home with a peck of tasty local apples. Elwood has been making a delicious salad of grated apple and raw beet with a honey-lemon vinaigrette and toasted walnuts, and he also made an apple-fennel salad that caused me so much happiness I thought I might levitate above my chair. 

Tonight Pete asked if I'd help him make an apple upside-down cake, so I went back to this recipe that I shared last year.

Our apples are very juicy. This makes sense to me, the idea that store-bought apples might have lost moisture during their time in transit and on shelves, but I didn't put it together until after the apples went into the hot spiced butter and started throwing off a bunch of liquid. Even though we cooked it down for a while, we still had more syrup than planned and a damp cake as a result. I think if I were to make that recipe again with local apples, I might toss them in a baggie of flour first, as if I were making an apple crisp.

The cake was really delicious but not beautiful, because the syrupy apples stuck to the skillet and needed to be coaxed onto the former-bottom-now-top of our cake. But you know, if you have to choose between delicious and beautiful, delicious is the one you want.