Light and Momentary

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.

Happiness Awaits

The Slaw of Happiness varies in its veggies but its dressing is pretty consistent. The recipe I got from my internet pal Jodie more than 20 years ago is this: to a cup of mayo, add 1 T. apple cider vinegar and 1 T. sugar. You can vary it to suit your own tastes: make it a yogurt-mayo blend, use lemon or lime juice in quantities that suit you instead of the vinegar, and change the amount and/or type of sweetener. You want a dressing that's mostly creamy, with some tang and some sweetness.

To this dressing, add a big pile of small pieces of cruciferous veggies and their friends. Shredded cabbage is fine. Finely (finely finely) minced broccoli is also good. Grated salad turnips are scrumptious. (I never use the ordinary purple-shouldered ones; salad turnips are solid ivory, sometimes called Japanese turnips. They are milder and sweeter.) You could probably use just about anything in the brassica family. Radishes that you have manhandled through the food processor and coated in slaw dressing become more pleasant, less pungent versions of themselves. If you get kohlrabi in your CSA share and you have no idea what to do with it, peel it and shred it and cover it with slaw dressing. No one at the dinner table will have any idea that you're feeding them something unfamiliar and kinda weird-looking in its natural state. It's just another bowl of slaw. 

When I said "and their friends" in that previous paragraph I especially meant shredded carrots, which are sweet, colorful, familiar, and cheap. From there you can go in a variety of directions. Do you want some minced red onion? Maybe some chopped scallions? Maybe something with a little crunch, like sesame seeds or walnuts? If I am using broccoli, I will probably go with wee small bits of red onion (a habit left over from when my kids were small: strongly-flavored foods are often less objectionable if they're cut into teeny pieces), a handful of raisins, another of sunflower seeds, and some crumbled bacon. If I'm using cabbage, I might also toss in some grated apple.

Basic formula: dressing, shredded something-or-other from the brassica family, shredded carrots, plus a couple of additional ingredients that please your palate. Here's to happy microbiomes!

Too Many Cooks

My husband filled the pot while I peeled potatoes. I was planning to make green potato soup to use up another bunch of CSA greens, so I sliced potatoes and stemmed greens and chucked them into boiling water with half of an onion. I've done this enough times to feel comfortable eyeballing proportions: a healthy shake of salt, a spoonful of Marmite for umami. Once the potatoes were soft I added sour cream and pureed it all with the immersion blender.

Except-- something was wrong. I tasted it: horribly salty. Painfully salty. I took a deep breath and added thin slices of raw potato, hoping they would soak up some of the salt. But it was STILL too salty, so I tossed in some leftover white rice from the fridge. BLAND, I was thinking to myself, I NEED MORE BLAND.

"I wondered when I saw you add the salt," said Elwood, and I did not take it well. IT WAS A REASONABLE AMOUNT OF SALT, was my all-caps inner response. MY SAD SALTY SOUP DOES NOT NEED YOUR MONDAY MORNING QUARTERBACKING.

"I added a fair amount of salt when I filled the pot," he added, and the light dawned.

Pro tip: If two people each add the right amount of salt to the pot, the soup will be too salty.

We did eat it for dinner and it was only a little penitential. I think over the weekend I will cook up a couple of potatoes in unsalted water and blend them into the leftovers, and the result should be about right. But the soup is in timeout for now.

The annual post about using up CSA vegetables

This is the eleventh year, I think, that we've been part of our CSA, and the kids all smile wanly when they hear me talk about it. They agree that it's a good thing, in the abstract -- good to know the person who grows your food, good to buy local, good to support sustainable agriculture and small family businesses. And yet they sometimes yearn for a life with a little less chard.

Last night was the first CSA pickup of the year and I had an idea: what if instead of a whiteboard list of veggies glowering at me, I made a loosey-goosey whiteboard menu plan with the kids' input? 

And so:

"You do not have to eat any lettuce," I told them. "I'll be in charge of eating the lettuce when I have lunch." They approved of this plan.

"But there's rhubarb," they sighed. "You like rhubarb some of the time," I answered briskly. "Tell me what you want me to do with it, and when you want to eat it."

"Not rhubarb ice cream," said one with a shudder. "Or rhubarb GELATIN," said the other, with a subtle revulsion convulsion. "How about crumble?" I asked, and they agreed that rhubarb crumble would work. I used this recipe, and it was a hit. If I make it again I'll add a spoonful of flour or cornstarch to the apple-rhubarb mixture, which threw off a fair amount of liquid.

Pete volunteered to turn both bags of spinach into palak paneer tonight, and I made a beet-walnut-feta salad to serve alongside. 

We have agreed that the cooked-down beet greens will go into a nice cheesy soufflé, and the lambs' quarters will get blended into potato soup and served with fresh bread. 

"Onions aren't hard to use up," Pete said, and I agreed. 

These are all ideas I would have considered if I hadn't consulted the kids, but I'm hopeful that they will say, "Oh, potato soup with greens; we talked about that," and not "WHY OH WHY are there so many green things on the menu this week?" 

I'll let you know how it works out.

A birthday cake

Joe is 20 today, which means I will never again be the mother of three teenagers. I was so worried about having three teens at once but I did not need to be worried. (<- The Jamie Story -- same song, different verse)

I made an almond cake that is a particular favorite of his: moist and fluffy, flavorful and easy. I used a slightly different recipe and I will stick with it going forward, because it requires a smidge less butter and sugar than the one I had made in the past. You can knock it together in the food processor with lightning speed. This is all you do:

Preheat the oven to 325 and hit a 9-inch springform pan with nonstick spray. Take a 7- or 8-ounce package of almond paste (we can find this brand at Gladlyville grocery stores) and process it with 1.25 c. sugar. (This will prevent chunks of almond paste in your finished cake.) Blend in 2 sticks of softened butter with 1/8 t. almond extract and 1 t. vanilla. Next, add in 6 eggs. Finally, add 1/4 t. salt, 1.5 t. baking powder, and 1 c. flour. Pulse just until combined. It will be a fairly liquid batter. Bake for an hour and peek at it; it might need as much as 75 minutes. You want it to be risen all the way to the center, and a skewer should come out clean.

It will be delicious plain, or you can dress it up. I made a speedy berry fool and piled it on top with some pretty shards from a failed caramel cage.

Take two vegetarian shepherds

Once when we lived in Edinburgh a friend had us over for dinner and served us vegetarian shepherd's pie. A few weeks later I decided to try my own version. Elwood came home and sniffed appreciatively. "What are you making?" he asked me.

"Vegetarian shepherd's pie," I told him.

"What's in it?" he asked me.

"Vegetarian shepherds," I said.

This has become a family joke, but the actual answer is usually red lentils. Usually I dice an onion and a carrot and sometimes a stalk of celery, and let them get brown in hot fat. I throw in a few cloves of garlic, and once they have had a minute to soften I stir in a cup or so of red lentils. I add a can of petite diced tomatoes with their juice along with some stock, and cook the lentils until they are tender. Once they're cooked I season the mixture (it will take a fair amount of salt) and plop leftover mashed potatoes on top. If you dot it with butter, sprinkle it with Parmesan, and run it under the broiler, you'll have a tasty frugal reasonably quick vegetarian meal. It's a pretty standard way for us to move leftover mashed potatoes out of the fridge and into people's bellies.

But last night I made an even quicker version: I tossed in two cans of chickpeas in lieu of the lentils, and hey presto! It was a lightning-fast tasty frugal vegetarian meal. If you try it, you'll probably want to add something for umami -- I went with a spoonful of Marmite. And if you are feeding hungry teens, you might think about adding a little extra fat for satiety and staying power -- I put in a dab of tahini to boost flavor and creaminess, just as I might add a spoonful of peanut butter to a pot of vegetarian chili.

An easy meatless dinner

On Friday night I made a streamlined version of this lentil-chickpea salad from Smitten Kitchen. (Tangent: I started typing Smitten Chicken and had to fix it. When Marie was 2 she used to say "chicken" when she meant "kitchen." Can't you just imagine a starry-eyed chicken, dreaming of her true love?) Modifications: I did not toast or grind my own spices, I did not use any sage in my lentils, I swapped in preserved lemon paste for the chopped rind, and I steeped thin-sliced shallot in salt and lemon juice.

I also took about a cup of Greek yogurt and stirred in another spoonful of preserved lemon paste. I spread the mixture across a plate, for communal dipping, and sprinkled za'atar on top. We ate it with toasted pita, sliced yellow peppers, and steamed broccoli. Yummy, easy, frugal, and the leftovers vanished in a trice.

"I want to put that in my MOUTH."

Back in the spring of 2020 I ordered goodies from New York Shuk for the first time, and I continue to shiver with delight every time I lick the spoon I've used to add preserved lemon paste to something. I feel about it like Miracle Max felt about his MLTs-- so perky.

Recently I bought a bottle of kafe hawaij, and I find that I am using it all the time this fall. It's nice for chai, it's delicious on roasted squash, and I used it for soul cakes on Tuesday. Just tonight I mashed together sweet potatoes and squash with butter and a healthy shake of kafe hawaij. Pete smelled the result and his eyes went wide. "I want to put that in my MOUTH," he said, and proceeded to gobble it down. Maybe you already have the individual spices in your cupboard, but the proportions in this blend are just right.

If you find yourself in need of some fun fall treats for your own household or some fun fall gifts for someone else's, I've been pleased with everything I've ordered from NY Shuk. This is not a sponsored post, just an appreciative one.

Soup Season

Do you like beef-barley soup? I am very fond of beef-barley soup.

We had a little bit of leftover stew beef in the fridge tonight, and I browned it in oil with the Instant Pot in sauté mode. I minced an onion and two ribs of celery, and diced two fat carrots into small cubes. When I pulled the browned beef cubes out of the pot, I tossed in the veggies, salted them, and let them get brown. We had a couple of sad little deliquescing leeks in the veggie drawer, so I chopped them up as well and added them to the pot. In other circumstances I would have thrown in a few cloves of garlic instead.

To the browned veggies I added a glass of wine, about 6 cups of stock, a small can of crushed tomatoes, a cup or so of quick barley, and the resting beef cubes along with their liquid. I cooked it under pressure for 12 minutes and let it rest for a little longer after the timer went off. It needed a bit more umami, so I added some Worcestershire sauce. If I were a mushroom eater, I might have chucked in some mushrooms along with the other vegetables to provide a little umami boost. 

We all liked it; maybe you will too.

An improvisational apple upside-down cake

Tonight at the CSA pickup I decided to buy the last half-bushel of organic apples. As I was leaving I ran into the friend who was planning to come over a little later and play games. "Maybe I'll make you an apple cake," I told him, and I went home and did just that. It turned out really well, so I am writing down what I did.

I preheated the oven to 350 and melted a stick of butter in my 9-inch (I think it's 9 inches) cast-iron skillet. We were out of brown sugar, so I poured in a quarter-cup of the dark corn syrup lurking in our pantry. We have an apple peeler-corer-slicer that gives us thin-sliced apples in a trice. I ran two apples through it and cut the resulting rounds into quarters, which I tossed into the butter. I sprinkled salt over them, along with cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, and a wee pinch of cloves. I tossed the apple slices in the liquid for a few minutes and turned off the heat. 

Next I melted another stick of butter in a mixing bowl and added a cup of sugar. When it was cool enough not to scramble my eggs, I added two eggs and a quarter-teaspoon of salt. I was riffing on a recipe that called for 175 grams of flour, but my quick search for upside-down cake recipes had turned up complaints about soggy cake. In hopes of avoiding soggy cake, I used 50 grams of almond meal and 125 grams of flour, to which I added a teaspoon of baking powder along with cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, cloves, and allspice.

Once I had stirred this together, I poured it over the apples and popped it into the oven. It tested done after 35 minutes. I pulled it out and let it cool for five minutes, whereupon I turned it out onto a pretty plate. I served it forth to enthusiastic eaters, almost all of whom asked for seconds. If you are looking for a quick and easy dessert as we head into apple season, here you go.

Hi, Future Jamie, this is where you put the sloppy joe recipe that Joe liked

Do you ever do that thing where you improvise a dish, it turns out really well, and then you can't remember quite what you did? I made sloppy joes tonight and Joe loved them. I am recording the recipe here instead of scratching my head the next time I'm in the mood for sloppy joes.

I browned an onion with 1.5 lbs of ground turkey. I also threw in 4 cloves of chopped garlic and a handful of grated carrots. The carrots are not traditional, but I like the sweet earthiness they add. (I would have put in a diced rib of celery if we'd had any in the fridge, but we're out. (At least I think we're out. Elwood is the person in this marriage who finds things in the bowels of the fridge. It's possible that there's an entire celery farm in there, but if so it was invisible to me.)) 

When the meat was no longer pink, I added a 14.5-oz. can of crushed tomatoes, a little can of green chiles, a spoonful of brown sugar, and a healthy shake of Worcestershire sauce. I had every intention of adding black pepper before I left it to simmer, but I did not. I did not let it simmer for very long, because we were hungry. But I did toast the buns, which amps up their flavor and their texture enough to be worth doing even when people are hungry.

Joe was not delighted when I announced that I was making sloppy joes, but then he ate three of them and declared them awesome. He prefers my less-sweet version to run-of-the-mill sloppy joes, some of which could be renamed "ground beef with caramel sauce." So if perhaps you're looking for a dinner recipe that's quick, tasty, frugal, and filling, here you go.

Tasty, frugal, quick, filling, reasonably nutritious

Tonight I pulled out my battered copy of Whole Foods for the Whole Family and made groundnut stew. I don't make it often because Elwood doesn't love it, but he wasn't here this evening.

Dice 2 onions and brown them up with a pound of ground meat. Add in a couple of cloves of minced garlic. When they've softened, chuck in two cans of petite diced tomatoes, a cup of peanut butter, and four cups of brown rice, along with a good grinding of black pepper and enough water to make it saucy instead of gloppy. Simmer it all together for 10 minutes or so. Sprinkle with chopped parsley if you have any on hand, and serve it forth with plenty of hot sauce and an easy steamed vegetable.

(I suppose it's much less quick if you don't have cooked brown rice in the fridge awaiting its destiny. But it's still tasty, frugal, filling, and reasonably nutritious.)

Strawberry-rhubarb crumble

If you happen to have rhubarb awaiting your ministrations, I can recommend this strawberry-rhubarb crumble recipe. I dialed back the sugar and swapped in some rolled oats for part of the flour. Easy, popular, tastes like June.

Desperation Soup

We've had four kids here for a week, and HOO BOY the grocery consumption is something to behold. Last night the cupboards were looking pretty bare, so I made this quick and easy soup. I've posted similar recipes before, but if you need something fast and cheap this post is just for you.

Coarsely chop an onion and cook it in a big pot in hot fat. Once it has begun to brown, add a couple of smashed garlic cloves. Add coarsely chopped peeled potatoes to your pot (say 6 medium-sized potatoes if you are feeding a crowd the size of mine) and all of the stray greens lying in your crisper drawer, facing an uncertain future. I used a generous bunch of beet greens, the radish greens, and a handful of spinach. They must be very clean (grit in soup = THE VERY WORST) but you don't have to chop them. Add stock to cover. If you're out of stock, add water and a spoonful of something to give it some oomph and umami (oomphmami?), like miso or Marmite. Season, remembering that potatoes take a lot of salt. 

When the potatoes are tender, add sour cream and attack the pot with an immersion blender. (I had less sour cream than expected, so I pitched in some cream cheese instead and it had the same effect.) Beet greens turned this a striking bronzy-green color, so be advised if you are feeding people with strong preferences about food colors.

We served it with popovers and I think everybody had seconds.

Recommended

Thanks, everybody, for your kindness in response to my post from yesterday. Much appreciated.

Completely changing the subject: tonight we tried a new recipe that caught my eye last week, and you might want to try it too. If chimichurri and guacamole had a baby, it would be something like guasacaca sauce. We had some sad wilting pork chops left over from a meal last week, and I suspected that this sauce would dress them up enough to get them out of the fridge's Pre-Garbage Zone -- those leftovers you know are unlikely to make it into anyone's belly.

You guys, it was so yummy. Fresh and zippy, creamier than chimichurri and zingier than guacamole. "I might dab this behind my ears," I said. "Or perhaps bathe in it." Pete does not like cilantro and was a little more cautious about trying it, but wound up liking it despite the cilantro. He says he wouldn't eat it with a spoon, but I most certainly did.

Elwood and I agreed that zesting a lime was a little much for a weeknight recipe with a lot of other intense flavors in it and so he skipped the lime zest, but then I found that I did want a little more lime flavor. I'll probably try it with the zest the next time I make it. I'm certain there will be a next time.

Speedy speedy key lime pie

Four of my five children are home this week and Alex assures me that I do not have to send him mashed potatoes in the mail. I know, objectively, that he is in Manhattan, able to obtain any quantity of any type of food his heart desires. But I cannot shake the certainty that he will be pining for MY mashed potatoes.

I am holding out hope for a spectacular Easter.

Stella is suggesting that we mix it up a little this year, since this will be the smallest Thanksgiving dinner of her entire life. She wonders: is pumpkin pie truly necessary? She suggests that key lime pie would be a better alternative.

We will of course be eating pumpkin pie on Thursday. (Side note: in another year I would have ended that sentence with "because we are not heretics." But this year I am so troubled by the conflation of heresy with political affiliation that I can't make that little joke any more. Serve pumpkin pie, or don't serve pumpkin pie. No skin off my nose. In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.) But this key lime pie is so easy and our Thanksgiving is so much smaller than usual that I am perfectly happy to make a pre-Thanksgiving pie.

Here's what you do: make or buy a graham cracker crust. If you make it, let it cool. Combine a can of sweetened condensed milk, 1.25 cups of heavy cream, and key lime juice to taste. It should be tart enough to make you wince a little bit. Whip with an electric mixer until it holds its shape. Plop into the crust and chill. I think most key lime pie recipes require eggs and baking, but we love this no-bake version at our house. If you are looking for low-stress alternatives to more conventional Thanksgiving dessert recipes here in this most unconventional November, Stella thinks you can't go wrong with this one.

Gumbo Time

The CSA fall greens were getting out of control again, so we made Crescent Dragonwagon's gumbo tonight. I think it's our third batch of gumbo this fall. It's labor-intensive enough that we usually only make it once, and never on a weeknight. I can't decide if we're getting better at doing all the chopping cheerfully, or if we just have an extraordinary quantity of greens this fall and no other ideas for using them up. You can halve the recipe easily, but it freezes nicely if you want to make a big batch. (The link has the big original recipe, from Soup & Bread; she cut it in half for Passionate Vegetarian.)

One thing that the linked recipe does not make clear enough: it is really easy to burn your roux. This is not the quick and easy roux that a person would use to make a speedy white sauce. This is the Louisiana version of roux, in which you are slow-toasting flour in hot oil for flavor instead of thickening. If you accidentally skip from slow-toasted to scorched, you have to start all over, even if you have already given your roux 50 minutes of your life. I am generally pretty comfortable with kitchen multi-tasking, but I have to keep a roux on the front burner of my brain as well as my stove. I don't stand there for an hour and do nothing else but stir the roux, but I have learned that it works better if I have very modest expectations for getting other gumbo steps done.

Also, it is really easy to burn your tongue if you are tasting to see whether the roux is scorched. I am often surprised by how much hotter oil gets than liquids get if they are mostly water, even though I should know better by now. The very worst thing is when you suspect you have burned the roux, and you taste it hopefully only to discover that you have burned roux and burned tongue. Talk about leaving a bad taste in your mouth!

I have now made this recipe sound like a total pain in the butt. Which is appropriate, because it is definitely a pain in the butt. SO yummy, though. If you have greens threatening to deliquesce in your crisper drawer, and a loved one who is willing to chop veggies and stir slow-toasting flour with you on a weekend afternoon, I encourage you to give it a whirl. I'm planning to eat the leftovers for breakfast and lunch tomorrow; that's how much I love this recipe.