Light and Momentary

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.

The dinner request board

"Are you doomscrolling?" Elwood asked me just now.

"No," I assured him. "I'm writing political posts and then abandoning them. Much better."

I cannot finish those posts tonight, which may mean that they remain unfinished. So instead I will answer Colette's question on yesterday's post: what is up with the dinner request section of the whiteboard?

Anyone can put anything in the dinner requests section of the dining room whiteboard. There is no commitment on the grownups' part to work through those requests in any particular order, so writing "lobster thermidor" or "galantine of turkey" is no guarantee that any turkeys will be galantined or any lobsters thermidored. But if you think of something that sounds tasty, you are welcome to write it down for menu-planning consideration. If a new recipe is a success, someone will usually write it on the whiteboard to request a reprise.

Lately I have been polling the kids for food ideas at the start of a week. Stella makes two meal requests, Pete makes two meal requests, and I think of two things I'd like to cook or eat. (Elwood will eat anything. He's like Mikey from the 1970s Life commercials. I've known the man since 1987 and I just learned this fall that he loves deviled eggs. Think of all the deviled eggs I would have made him if I had only known!) This affords me some flexbility -- I can make pizza one night to fulfill a Stella request, but it can be slow pizza or quick pizza (jarred tomato sauce on frozen naan with pre-shredded cheese, very speedy) depending on my level of motivation. And if I don't want to make pizza at all, I just choose another option from the list.

I find that at 4pm decision fatigue often weighs me down. I ought to cook something. It should be appealing to everybody, and nutritious, and it should use the things in the fridge that need using. Somehow it seems like there are too many options and too few options at the very same time, and so...maybe I should just refresh FiveThirtyEight one more time. But if I narrow it down on Sunday to exactly six options that at least one person especially wants to eat, then I have a pleasing mix of structure and flexibility.

Murder Mystery Salad

Tonight I ate an astonishing quantity of something my husband finds very odd, and I am going to tell you how to make it too.

Before we joined a CSA I had a vague idea that lettuce was a spring food; I didn't know that it's also a fall food. It all bolts and turns bitter in the summer, but you can get two cool-season lettuce crops in these parts. Unfortunately I do not love lettuce any more than I did when I wrote this post in 2004. Mostly Elwood eats the lettuce around here.

Tonight, though, I was doing a vegetable inventory, and I realized there were four -- count 'em, FOUR -- heads of lettuce in the fridge.

Elwood is not going to eat four heads of lettuce.

I went scrabbling around in the sticky file cabinets of my brain in search of dinners that might make a dent in such a lettuce backlog. I thought about doing a grain bowl kind of thing with shredded lettuce to go on top, or lettuce wraps with an Asian-flavored filling, but the idea that made me say YES YES COOK THAT was a killed lettuce salad.

Killed lettuce salad is one of those Southern foods, like spoonbread, that makes me nostalgic even though we never ate it in my house when I was growing up. My mother tells me that her sister might have served it to us when we visited, and I have dim memories of people ordering spinach-mushroom versions in restaurants. It's a little weird for me to get nostalgic about killed lettuce salad when I would never have put it in my mouth as a picky kid, but hey-- "a little weird" is practically this blog's tagline.

To make a killed lettuce salad, fry up 5 strips of bacon. When they are crisp, set them aside to drain and brown a finely sliced small onion in the hot fat. When the onion is nicely browned, set it aside. Add a pinch of sugar and 2 T. apple cider vinegar to the hot bacon fat along with a sprinkle of red pepper flakes. Stir it all up and keep it hot.

This is the weird part: put a pile of torn lettuce leaves on a big plate with crumbled bacon and browned onion, and coat them with a generous amount of hot dressing. The lettuce will wilt slightly, and the salty tangy slightly sweet richness of the dressing may cause you to levitate slightly. 

Do not make more of this than you can eat right away, because the bacon fat will congeal as it cools. And even for someone whose love of bacon fat is firmly established, that's kind of gross.

I do not actually know if "Murder Mystery Salad" is a more appealing name than "Killed Lettuce Salad" to people who didn't grow up with hot bacon fat on wilted lettuce, but maybe it is. And maybe I'm not the only person in the Midwest whose veggie drawers are overflowing with lettuce right now.

P.S. Is this weird to you, and where are you from, and do you know it as "killed lettuce" or "wilted lettuce"?

All My Children

Today I hit my work goals, and the smoke alarm did not go off, and no one cried when the technology didn't work properly, and we all took a long pleasant walk with Ziggy when school was over for the day. We'll call it a win.

Remember my grand fermentation plans? My legions of lactobacilli are multiplying. My kombucha is on its second ferment, and my kimchi is delicious in an eye-watering way.

I was really glad that I posted about how to brew kombucha back in 2016, because I wouldn't have remembered otherwise. After a while I got kombucha-ed out and passed my brewing setup along to a young adult of my acquaintance. As sometimes happens with young adults (and older adults too, I suppose), he was enthusiastic for a while and then his enthusiasm waned. When he returned my stuff I found [shudder SHUDDER SHUDDER] a grub living in the threads of the jar. 

Obviously, I set it on fire in the driveway, my preferred method of dealing with unexpected annoyances, and did not even think about brewing kombucha again for years.

So when I wanted to try it again, I needed a new scoby. This one seems to be working fine. If I get aspergillosis I'll be sure to let you know.

I followed this kimchi recipe, with 4 T. of gochujaru, and so far I'm very pleased with the flavors. Doesn't it look tasty?

There wasn't much brine at all, though, so today I mixed up some more and added it to the crock. Pete asked if I'd pull some out and store it in a little jar out for him before it got any funkier.

I have to say, it gives me a my-work-here-is-done feeling that Pete wants his very own kimchi.

Next up: sourdough. MORE lactobacilli! ALL the lactobacilli! 

(Let us disregard the weirdness of calling this post "All My Children" when I am raising all these lactobacilli specifically to eat them. Moving right along!)

BLT-ish Pasta

Cook up about 4 pieces of bacon -- crispy or chewy, as you prefer. Fry a thinly sliced small onion in the fat until it is browned. Chop a bunch of arugula and wilt it in the fat. Deglaze with a tablespoonful of nice balsamic vinegar. Add in a cup of halved cherry tomatoes and cook them until they sag slightly. Sprinkle generously with black pepper.

Boil up the pasta of your choosing. Drain it when it is a still a tiny bit bit too al dente, pulling out a mugful of cooking water before you tip the rest down the sink. Finish cooking the pasta in the skillet, using the cooking water to amalgamate the noodles and sauce. Top with the bacon. Parmesan is nice, too.

Lazy ratatouille is the best ratatouille

I had never made or even eaten ratatouille until Elwood gave me a copy of Nigella Lawson's How To Eat for Christmas in 1998. I found it tasty but also slow-- all that chopping, all that stirring. Today I was doing a quick fridge inventory and I pulled out two baby zucchini and a toddler-sized eggplant. "You know," I said to myself, "I bet the internet will tell you how to make this in the Instant Pot."

AND LO: ratatouille is much easier than it used to be.

I cranked up the Instant Pot in saute mode and poured in a generous glug of olive oil. I put the thin slicer blade in my food processor, and an onion yielded up a pile of translucent half-moon slices. I chucked them into the hot oil, sprinkled them with salt, and turned the eggplant into effortless half-moons. I chucked the eggplant into the hot oil and sliced the zucchini. The zucchini sailed into the pot along with a chopped yellow pepper, a can of petite diced tomatoes, 4 chopped cloves of garlic, and a half-teaspoon of ground coriander. I gave them 8 minutes under high pressure. Once the pressure came down I added a handful of chopped basil, a squeeze of lemon, and salt.

Would a Provençal grandmère approve? Je ne sais pas. But my family approved, which is what counts. If you are looking for a fairly painless way to use up some August bounty, I can recommend this approach. It made a slightly soupier ratatouille than the stovetop versions, so we served it over rice, with sausages. (I have a horror of scorching the contents of my Instant Pot, so I did not drain my tomatoes.)

I also made a cucumber salad with spicy tahini dressing. Once I had the ratatouille underway, I gave the food processor a quick rinse and then turned a handful of small CSA cucumbers into thin-sliced rounds. For the dressing I stirred together a quarter-cup of tahini, a tablespoonful of sambal oelek, a healthy shake of sesame seeds, a bit of lemon juice, a tiny sprinkle of fish sauce, a slightly larger sprinkle of salt, and enough water to make it pourable. It had a pleasant kick and an appealing creaminess. I am thinking happily about what I might do with the leftovers. Maybe they will dress a lunchtime rice bowl, with shredded carrots and cabbage and scrambled egg? I'll figure something out.

A Paean to Pesto

One of the nicest things about summer? Pesto! So many pesto possibilities! It's quick, it's easy, and it's versatile. But I think many people tend to view it as a pasta sauce and nothing more. I was talking to my college roommates yesterday and the conversation reminded me of how many purposes pesto serves in my kitchen in the summer.

Probably my favorite is Pesto + Protein. A smear of pesto on scrambled eggs gives you a lovely color contrast and a flavor bump too. Salmon with pesto! Burgers with pesto! A spoonful of pesto will save your pork tenderloin from its drab and flavorless self.

But there are also a million zillion possibilities that involve Pesto + Starch, other than the obvious pesto with pasta. If you spread pesto on a slice of good bread, cover it with thick-sliced August tomatoes and a good grinding of pepper and then run it through the toaster oven, you will have a speedy and delicious lunch. If you are making grilled cheese sandwiches you can spread the inside of your bread with pesto and proceed as usual. If you stir pesto into mayo you will be all set to make fabulous potato salad. (This probably belongs in the previous protein paragraph but OH pesto deviled eggs are some of the best deviled eggs.) If you ever make yourself a summer side dish of cubed beets and crumbled feta, you must promise me that you will add a big dollop of pesto next time. So yummy.

Since beans lie at the intersection of protein and starch, perhaps it's not surprising that pesto is excellent in legume dishes. Do you ever make yourself a summer lunch of white beans and cubed tomato and marinated red onion and maybe a can of tuna? That salad is CRYING OUT for an invigorating spoonful of pesto. Do you ever make yourself a nice lentil salad, with minced garlic and lemon and olives and maybe some diced cucumber? Pesto FTW! When the weather gets cooler and you are making the soup versions of those meals, you will want to serve a nice dish of pesto on the side and let everyone add some to taste. Kale-sausage-white bean soup is so much better with a little pesto stirred in. Lentil-spinach-Parmesan soup, ditto!

I used to think that making pesto required precision, but I was wrong about that. Here is an approximate recipe, but you should bend it to your will. Put a clove of garlic and one bunch of herbs in the food processor or blender. Don't restrict yourself to basil -- try cilantro pesto, or arugula pesto, or parsley pesto/chimichurri, or I hear that some people like dill pesto even though I personally would rather eat couch cushion pesto. If the stems are tough and woody, rip the leaves off. If the stems are soft, chuck them right in. Add a handful of nuts -- pine nuts if you're feeling flush, walnuts or almonds or pumpkin seeds if not. If you want pesto with kick, add a stemmed hot pepper. If you want pesto with a little extra brightness and zing, add a healthy squeeze of lemon or lime juice. Measure a scant half-teaspoon of salt, even though it will look like too much. Pour in a quarter-cup of oil -- good-quality olive oil if you're making basil pesto, something more neutral (like peanut or sunflower oil) if you're making cilantro pesto. Blend to a magical green paste. Herb bunches vary in size, so you might need to add a little more oil to get a nice spreadable texture. Most basil pesto recipes call for Parmesan cheese, but I don't know that I can reliably detect its presence or absence amid all those other flavors and so I usually leave it out. If you want Parmesan, you should dial back the salt a little bit. If you want a recipe for classic pesto that is not so loosey-goosey, try this one.

When you eat it, sing yourself this little ditty to the tune of I've Got Rhythm: 
I've got pesto
Adds some zest, yo
It's the best-o
Who could ask for anything more?

Sunday Miscellany

Toward the end of my spring break, that strange week that divided before from after, I stopped by the fancypants liquor store and bought a bottle of Ramazzotti. On most of the nights that followed I poured myself a tablespoonful or so. I am not much of a drinker but I do like amari. Somewhere along the way I stopped pouring my nightly tablespoonful, but this afternoon I measured out the last of it. It doesn't taste like licorice and orange peel today; it tastes like March, when my uncertainty and worry about the virus were tempered by the belief that this nation had pulled together in tough times before and would do so again. Today it tastes like dread and dashed hopes. 

I doubt I'll buy another bottle.

But maybe I'll see if the fancypants liquor store can get me a bottle of Cardamaro. It tastes like cardoons, apparently, which are an artichoke cousin. And my very favorite amaro of all the ones I have tasted is Cynar, which is artichoke-flavored.

Probably, if I drink a tablespoonful of Cardamaro every night, it will forevermore be redolent of cynicism and disgust. Whyyyyyy, my friends, why are we in such a preventably stupid place re: this virus? It baffles me. It enrages me. I sent a polite but pointed email to the county yesterday after our outing to a nearby lake. There were hordes of people there yesterday, most of whom did not seem especially fussed about social distancing. Despite the crowding, the only folks wearing masks were the Gladly family, the friends we were meeting for a socially distanced canoeing get-together, and one little cluster of three young adults. I urged the county to require the people staffing the boat rental facility to wear masks. I said, Would you really want county employees to serve as vectors for COVID transmission at the same time that your health department is warning us about a surge in local cases?

Will they listen to me? Who can say?

The canoeing was very pleasant, once we were away from the crowded rental shack/boat ramp. While we were waiting for our friends Stella whimpered, "This is like one of my nightmares." It is still very odd to me, the number of people who did not even attempt to give us a 6-foot berth. Anyway.

This afternoon I made a batch of tapenade, and I am finding it very delicious. Do you need a five-minute recipe for a very delicious spread? Here you go: chuck a can of oil-packed tuna into the food processor with a couple of cloves of garlic. Add two heaping handfuls of pitted olives, a scant handful of drained capers, and a healthy squeeze of anchovy paste. Blitz to a flavorful puree. If you are feeling non-traditional, stir in a spoonful of harissa and another of preserved lemon paste. Eat on crackers.

May 25

Yesterday I was talking to one of my college roommates about bread, and she asked me if I'd share a favorite recipe. She'd been trying to use a recipe from the red-checked Better Homes & Gardens cookbook, but it told her to add the yeast to water that was 120-130 degrees*. She thought she had done something wrong when the dough failed to rise. But really, I don't think Paul Hollywood himself could bake bread with yeast that went for a swim in too-hot water. If, however, you have live yeast and some time to let it work, baking bread is pretty straightforward.

Step one: keep your yeast happy. Since I don't bake bread very often I usually check on the yeast first, combining it with warm water and a little sweetener. Five or ten minutes later it should be foaming busily, which tells me that it is up to the task of raising my loaf. If it doesn't feel hot and doesn't feel cold, the actual water temperature doesn't matter much. Would I bathe a baby in it on a warm May day? If so, it will work for my yeast. (If you prefer cold hard numbers, aim for 100-110 degrees.) Today I stirred 2 teaspoons of yeast and 2 teaspoons of honey into a cup and two-thirds of warm water. 

Step two: mix your dough. I used a King Arthur recipe as a starting point, so I used 5 cups of flour and 2 teaspoons of table salt as instructed. But I also chucked in 2 tablespoons of soft butter. A little fat makes for a moister, tastier bread. I added some gluten to the flour because we keep it in the pantry, but I am not really sure I can detect the difference. You have a TON of latitude in this stage if you would like it, or you can stick to the script if you'd prefer that. Throw in some whole-grain flour or some rolled oats in place of some of the white flour. Add some sesame seeds or some chopped herbs if that sounds good. If you want, you can proof the yeast in a smaller amount of liquid in step 1, and add an equal volume of egg to make a richer dough. But again: you can make delicious bread with just flour, water, salt, and yeast. No need to get fancy.

Step three: develop your gluten by kneading your dough (usually) and leaving it to rise. For a long time I thought you had to kick off the process of gluten development by kneading your dough. That's what I did today. If I'm in a hurry or if I'm making a wetter dough, I might use machinery for this. You can whizz it in the food processor until it forms a cohesive ball. You can smack it around with a mixer's dough hook until it looks like bread dough and not glop. But if you're in the mood for it, kneading is pleasantly contemplative. This morning Stella and I chatted about the birds at the feeder until I had a nice springy non-sticky ball of dough. I covered the bowl with a clean dish towel and left the dough to rise.

Step three, the alternate plan: It turns out that you don't have to knead your bread dough if you are willing to be patient and let it rise for a long time. This NYT recipe blew my mind when I first read it back in 2005 or so -- no need to knead? Who knew?? It's fun to try occasionally, but I generally prefer to work the dough and eat my bread sooner. 

Step three takes a while. Your yeast will be busy-busy-busy, eating and burping and tastifying your dough, and you are free to do your own thing while it works its magic. You have a lot of latitude in step three. Are you in a hurry? Put it in a warm place. Or don't, if you're not in a hurry -- a slower rise makes for a more complex flavor. Do you need to step away from your work email before you say something rude to that annoying coworker? Go punch your dough -- you will not hurt its feelings; you will only encourage it to do more eating and burping and tastifying. 

Most recipes will tell you to move to step four, shaping, after your dough has doubled in bulk. The easiest version of step 4 is just to plunk your dough into a greased loaf pan and cover it with a clean dish towel. If you're working with a recipe that calls for about five cups of flour, you'll want to divide it across two 4x8 loaf pans. The internet will offer you a zillion shaping options, and maybe an eight-strand braid brings you joy rather than frustration. But simple is A-OK. Do what pleases you. Today I shaped five buns for our Memorial Day brats, and turned the rest into a single freeform loaf.

Step five: prove. Allow your shaped dough to double in bulk again. If you've ever watched a Great British Bake Off bread episode, there's always a lot of proving drama. Will Colum use the proving drawer?? Will Paul pronounce Ethel's ciabatta 'overproved'?? Unless you are having Paul Hollywood over for dinner, don't sweat it. If you let your bread rise more than once in step 3, it will prove more quickly than the recipe suggests. It works best if your oven is hot when you reach the doubled-in-bulk stage, but let me say one more time: bread is flexible.

Step six: bake. You can fall down a deep, deep rabbit hole if you ask the internet for advice on how to bake your bread. Add steam! Buy a stone! Build a medieval cob oven in your back yard for the authentic bread-baking experience! (Which, dude. If I wanted an authentic medieval experience I would just go land myself in the middle of a plague or something. (Hey, wait a minute...)) All you have to do is apply heat to your dough until it turns into bread. A higher temperature gives you a better crust, but bread can bake happily at a lower temperature if you need to have something else in the oven at the same time. If you want, before baking you can brush it with egg wash for a shiny crust or milk for a browner crust. At the end of the baking time you can check the temperature with a probe thermometer if you'd like (interior temperature should be ≥190), but you don't have to. I dislike gummy bread, so I tend to bake it on the longer side of the recommended range and discourage people from slicing into it right away. Today I baked the buns for 20 minutes at 400, and the loaf for a further 20 minutes. I left the loaf in the turned-off oven for five minutes, and let it cool a bit before slicing.

Step seven: eat! Here is the most important bread-baking secret of all: people love warm starch with butter! I repeat, don't sweat it! If you combine yeast with flour and water and salt, you will wind up with a food that almost everybody likes even in its more imperfect incarnations. You will learn some things that will set you up to make a less imperfect incarnation next time. Happy baking!

*It turns out that one specific product called "instant yeast" will allow you to add water that's 120-130 degrees. A lot of American bread recipes are designed for efficiency, because the importance of speedy gratification is practically one of those truths we hold to be self-evident. But lockdown is a good time to embrace the slow, and you will never kill any yeast if you wake it up in 100 degree water.

May 14

We have been cooking up a storm here in lockdown. Dinner is a little bright spot: pleasure, variety, and, for me, capsaicin. I think maybe I'm chasing the endorphin buzz. A couple of nights ago Elwood made beef stroganoff, and I spooned a pile of chili crisp on top. That combination of flavors might strike some of you as very odd, but I'm here to tell you it was scrumptious.

A month ago I had never heard of chili crisp. But Sam Sifton wrote a chili crisp paean for the NYT Magazine, and I knew right away I needed some chili crisp to spice up my bland and mealy lockdown life. Amazon delivered the jar on April 25, and I have eaten it all. (Well, my 20yo ate one spoonful, and there is still a tiny puddle on the bottom of the jar. But I will eat that last little bit with my dinner.)

I have also been going to town on harissa. There was a Smitten Kitchen post about pantry staples that mentioned preserved lemon paste from New York Shuk. You guys, would it be insensitive for me to tell you how much happiness I derived from opening that box when it arrived? (I am conscious of the privilege inherent in having two portable jobs and, consequently, the room in our grocery budget to buy some goodies from NYC.) I ordered a jar of za'atar and a jar of harissa along with the preserved lemon paste, and OH it was a delight to unwrap them. I am using them all regularly, but the harissa most of all -- I've eaten about two-thirds of it.

We have also used up all of the chipotles in adobo (they went into the food processor to make a marinade for fajitas) and the last of a jar of sambal oelek (I mixed it with yogurt to coat chicken thighs). Happily we had a second jar of sambal oelek waiting in the pantry. 

Alex could not really know that I have been mainlining chili-pepper-based condiments lately, so it's a little surprising that his Mother's Day gift, when it arrives, will be four different jars of spicy goodness. I don't even know what they are going to be, but I am keeping an eye out for the delivery vans every day.

As usual, all of the Amazon links in this post are affiliate links. If you click through and buy some chili crisp of your very own, they will give me a few cents toward my next endorphin-buzz-inducing purchase.

If egg salad is not your fave

If you have a bunch of hard-boiled eggs lurking in your fridge awaiting their destiny, I have a recipe approximation for you. This is an adaptation of a Madhur Jaffrey recipe in the cookbook that was my go-to* before I bought an Instant Pot.

In the original recipe, you cook onion, garlic, ginger, a chili pepper, cumin, cayenne, lemon juice, and garam masala together with tomato paste, cream, and chicken stock. Then you simmer halved hard-boiled eggs in the sauce until they are heated through, and serve over rice with cilantro or parsley on top. But as I told you recently, these days I am in the habit of keeping onion masala on hand, and onion masala does most of the heavy lifting if you would like to make a version of that meal.

The reason I am calling it a "recipe approximation" and not a recipe is that we had leftover tomato soup from Good Friday in the fridge (to make tomato soup: brown onion, celery, carrot; add garlic, tomatoes, stock, cream; cook until tender and apply immersion blender; serve with grilled cheese sandwiches, natch). I used a pint of soup leftovers and a half-cup of onion masala, and added about eight halved hard-boiled eggs, arranged cut side up in a single layer. 

I just went digging in my archives for a post I wrote years ago that reminds me of this one -- look, I made something yummy with the leftovers from my specific fridge on this specific day. Maybe it's unlikely that you also have leftover tomato soup in your fridge, but maybe you would rather improvise your own version of leftover hard-boiled eggs in creamy Indian-spiced tomato sauce than goldenrod eggs** or whatever else.

*That's an affiliate link; if you click through and make a purchase, Amazon will give me a few cents toward the purchase of my next Indian cookbook.

**My grade-school Girl Scout leader taught us to make goldenrod eggs along with creamed chipped beef, billing them as dishes every girl should know how to prepare. But you know, if I could only pick one thing to do with hard-boiled eggs for the rest of my life, it would NOT be goldenrod eggs. Such a pretty name, such a sad gloopy reality. There is not enough hot sauce in the world to redeem goldenrod eggs. And creamed chipped beef! I guess my Girl Scout leader was old enough to be nostalgic about reconstituted dried beef, but I? Am not.

Lazy Cooking for the Apocalypse

This is a version of a recipe from a site called My Heart Beets. At some point you should visit the site, but I have to warn you: the annoying level is high. Like, if I wanted random videos to start playing on my computer screen, I would just invite a hamster to scamper across the keyboard while I am on my YouTube landing page. (This comparison is brought to you by the German class hamster, Kartoffel, who was invited to stay with us for spring break. Now he might be a long-term guest. The kids made cardboard mazes for him today and he is currently causing much hilarity as he navigates them.) 

But anyway-- this site is the source of a Very Useful Instant Pot Recipe for onion masala, which I have made a bunch of times now and have appreciated every time. If you like Indian food, you should make it too. Here's what you do: first, put your IP in sauté mode. Heat 1/3 c. neutral oil, and add 6 medium onions, chopped coarsely. Cook them down for 15 or 20 minutes, until they are pleasingly brown. Next up, add about 12 cloves of garlic, chopped coarsely, and 2 inches of ginger, chopped finely. Stir them around for a couple of minutes, and then add in 2 14.5-ounce cans of diced tomatoes. Sauté everything together for about another 5 minutes, stirring so it doesn't scorch. Now add your spices. I suggest about 3 T. each of ground cumin and coriander, about 1 T. of paprika, about 1 t. of cayenne and a shake of turmeric. Stir it all together, and then seal up your Instant Pot. Cook it at high pressure on the Manual setting for 5 minutes, let the pressure come down naturally, and then smooth it out with an immersion blender.

The reason this recipe is so useful is that you can use it to make a bunch of different speedy Indian meals. The one we make most often is what the kids call Yellow Carpet of Deliciousness. Once you have onion masala on hand, it comes together in a flash. If you wander into the kitchen on a Friday afternoon in Lent, all you have to do is turn your Instant Pot on in sauté mode and heat a little oil in the bottom. Briefly sizzle 1/2 t. cumin seeds and a sliced hot pepper. Add 2 cups of either yellow split peas or red lentils and a cup of onion masala. Pour in 6 cups of water and 2 t. salt. (Don't neglect the salt.) Cook under pressure for 8 minutes, and let the pressure come down naturally for 15. Stir in a teaspoon of garam masala and serve over rice, with cilantro. It's a single-digit number of hands-on minutes, for a cheap easy meal that everybody here eats happily.

My Heart Beets has a ton of recipes that call for onion masala -- it's probably worth poking around a bit despite the auto-play videos. I store mine in the fridge, but you can also portion it out and stash it in the freezer if you don't cook Indian food very often.

Do we need a picture of Kartoffel in his cardboard maze? I think we might need a picture. He's in the upper left-hand corner of the maze, surrounded by laughing Gladly kids.

Pancakes of Power

I used to cook out of La Leche League's Whole Foods for the Whole Family all the time. One of the most spattered pages in the book is full of pancake recipes, including a recipe for cottage cheese pancakes. A Twitter pal mentioned those pancakes earlier today, and I was swamped by a surge of nostalgia. I used to feed these to my two oldest children all the time: quick, easy, tasty, cheap, filling, full of protein. Who could ask for anything more? They are not actually called Pancakes of Power in the Whole Foods for the Whole Family index, but that book is overdue for a reboot anyway. Here's all you have to do:

Chuck 4 eggs, a cup of cottage cheese, and a half-cup of whole wheat flour into the blender. Add about a third of a cup of milk, depending on your preferred pancake consistency. If you'd like, you can add other ingredients: a bit of salt, a little vanilla, or a tiny pinch of baking soda if your cottage cheese is very tangy. You don't need any of that other stuff, though; you can just blend those first four ingredients and fry up your pancakes in butter. Serve to hungry children along with your preferred pancake toppings.

My mother-in-law gave me that copy of Whole Foods for the Whole Family for Christmas in 1996. Alex's due date was December 24, and all of my in-laws were at our house the next day to open presents and eat dinner. (My suggestion that perhaps Elwood and I could have a quiet Christmas on our own had been met with snorts of derision. OF COURSE we would all spend Christmas together! If I couldn't come to them, they would come to me! I had been firmly instructed that I WAS NOT to wait too long to have the baby. Alex and I failed to heed that particular part of their instructions, though; his birthday is December 30.)

I pored over those pages as if they contained the Secret to Good Mothering. In the process I learned how to make homemade whole grain bread, and how to grow my own sprouts, and how to eyeball a batch of white sauce so I didn't need canned cream-of-whatever soup in my pantry. I learned that when you make multigrain pancakes, you should thin out the batter a little bit and turn down the heat a little bit. I learned that carob brownies are not actually very brownie-esque, but I took them to potlucks anyway.

Somewhere along the way I moved on to other cookbooks. But the phrase "cottage cheese pancakes" can take me right back. I can see myself at 27 with toddler Alex on my left hip, pouring pancake batter out of the blender jar into sizzling butter.

Speaking of anchovies

Yesterday the NYT published a recipe for caramelized shallot pasta, and I said to myself, "I am cooking this for dinner tonight." It is not hard: in a nice heavy-bottomed pan, caramelize six thinly sliced fat shallots by cooking them in olive oil for 15-20 minutes. The author wants you to put in 5 cloves of sliced garlic at the beginning of the cooking time, but I added mine midway through. I prefer browned shallots to browned garlic. Take a teaspoon of red pepper flakes and A WHOLE CAN of savory umami goodness (a.k.a. anchovies); drain and stir through the hot fat until they dissolve into a golden cloud of flavor enhancement. You don't even have to chop them. Have your anchovies mostly disappeared into the fat? Scrape a 6-ounce can of tomato paste into the pan and cook it for a couple of minutes. (The author cautioned me to stir it constantly so it wouldn't scorch, but things caramelize more readily if you're not stirring them constantly, and caramelized tomato paste is a blessing from the Lord. I did not stir constantly.)

Leave half of this mixture in your nice heavy-bottomed pan and save the other half for another use, such as smearing it on your face so you can bathe in that aroma of JOY and DELIGHT and did I mention UMAMI? (Or putting it on your eggs, one of the two.) While your salted water comes to a boil and your pasta starts cooking*, chop the heck out of a small bunch of parsley and another clove of garlic and put them on the table in a small bowl. When the pasta is a notch more al dente than your preferred degree of al dente, scoop up a generous mugful of the cooking water and stir it into the remaining shallot/anchovy/tomato paste mixture. Drain the pasta and let it finish cooking in the sauce. Sprinkle with garlic-parsley at the table.

Serve with a nice capacious utensil, such as a shovel, because you will want to get a lot of it into your mouth very quickly.

*The recipe calls for 10 ounces of pasta. If you are making a pound, scale up the sauce/pasta water quantities -- only scoop out a quarter of the sauce to save for later, and toss in another half-mugful of water.

How to make beef stew

Yesterday morning I was thinking about the warmest coziest dinner I could possibly make, and I knew I wanted beef stew over mashed potatoes. Would you like a recipe for the warmest coziest dinner? Here you go.

Coat the bottom of your Instant Pot with olive oil and turn it to sauté mode. While the oil heats, put about 3 tablespoons of flour into a plastic bag, along with a pinch of salt, a half-dozen grinds of black pepper, and a bunch of smoked paprika. Shake it all together and chuck your beef cubes into the bag. (For last night's batch of beef stew, I used 1.3 lbs of cubed stew beef.) Shake the bag some more, making sure that the flour gets into all the places where the beef cubes are stuck together. 

If you're using about the same amount of beef I was, tip half of the floury cubes into the hot fat. You need the beef cubes to fit in an uncrowded single layer so they brown instead of steaming; you'll want to work in batches. Chop your veggies while the beef is browning: mince a large onion and two ribs of celery, cut 3 fat carrots into skinny batons about the length of your pinkie finger, and slice up five cloves of garlic. I found that the time required for chopping (with a little help from Joe, who said, "Would you like me to chop the onion so it doesn't irritate your eyes?") allowed me to get both batches of beef cubes browned up and removed to a bowl.

Next I poured in a half-glass of red wine, scraped up the delicious fond, and added a little more oil in which to brown the veggies. Into the pot went the onions, celery, and carrots, but not the garlic. You'll have better stew if your veggies get browned and not just softened, but garlic will burn in the time it takes the other veggies to brown. Once they're most of the way to brown, pitch in the garlic slices.

Okay, this is the weird part. Nigella Lawson's How To Eat, the cookbook that taught me to be confident when I wing it with a stew, has a recipe for a beef stew with anchovies. I came across this recipe in early 1999, when I thought anchovies were nothing more than acts of violence against innocent pizzas, so it was a leap of faith for me to try the recipe. But she's right: if you sauté a finely chopped anchovy or three, the bits disappear into the hot fat, leaving only a subtle and pleasing bass note that goes beautifully with beef. Anchovies are the reason why people like Worcestershire sauce. Anchovies are OUR FRIENDS (I mean, okay, I know we don't usually eat our friends but there's a first time for everything), and I have kept them in my kitchen ever since. If you have whole anchovies, chop a few of them very finely and add them with the onions. If you have anchovy paste (worth keeping on hand), add a squeeze after the vegetables are browned. 

But last night I couldn't find any anchovies, and I was bummed until it dawned on me that fish sauce would probably work, since anchovies are also the reason that Thai food tastes like Thai food. I tipped in about a tablespoonful and immediately regretted it. "YOU BROKE THE BEEF STEW," exclaimed my inner worrywart as she smelled the steaming fish sauce. I reminded myself that fish sauce always smells like Rancid Death Potion to my unsophisticated nose, but also it always seems to work out in the end.

This is also where I poured in a generous glass of wine, and about 3 tablespoons of tomato paste, and a little bit of water (like maybe a half-cup, or maybe a little more). If I'd had good beef broth on hand I would have used a cup or two of that instead of a bit of water, but (a) I did not have any, and (b) stews are flexible, so flexible, and (c) anchovies are a powerful but subtle flavor booster so I wasn't worried about having a bland stew. I dumped the beef cubes back into the pot along with the liquid that had accumulated in their dish while they waited for me. 

At this point all you have to do is seal up your Instant Pot and put it on the Meat/Stew setting for 30 minutes.

While the Instant Pot magic is happening, choose your starch and set your table. I wound up serving the stew over buttered egg noodles because I didn't really want to make mashed potatoes at that point. I served this meal to joyous shouts of acclaim, so I recommend it for your consideration the next time you are searching for a cozy winter dinner.

Be sure to tell me whether you like the anchovies!

Quick, Easy, Frugal, Tasty

When I wanted to make a quick and easy Christmas gift for some guests, I went to the bookshelf in search of Tightwad Gazette. Alas, I had given it away. I don't expect to miss it very much aside from this one recipe, so I'm recording the recipe here for the future. If you too need a quick easy tasty frugal gift (perhaps a hostess gift for New Year's Eve?), give it a whirl.

Line an 8-inch square pan with foil and hit it with non-stick spray. Sprinkle about a cup of chopped walnuts over the bottom. Boil together a stick of butter and three-quarters of a cup of dark brown sugar (packed, although it pains me to be advising people to pack down brown sugar with a spoon here in the year of Our Lord 2019-almost-2020, when kitchen scales are cheap and easy to obtain). Stir faithfully. Do not use a plastic spoon, no matter how sturdy it may seem; I once melted a seemingly durable long-handled plastic spoon making this recipe. Stir carefully, recalling that there is a reason boiling fat was once used to deter besieging armies at the castle gates. Allow it to boil briskly until it darkens and just barely starts to smoke. Tightwad Gazette says to boil it for seven minutes, but my stove seems to have a little more oomph than hers and I would have burned it if I'd left it boiling for seven minutes.

Once it's ready, pour it over the nuts. As soon as it is slightly firm (we're talking minutes, not longer -- it's going to get really hard), lift the foil out of the pan, set it on a heatproof surface, and score it into 16 pieces with a heavy knife. Plunk back into the pan for the next step. Pour a half-cup of good quality chocolate chips over the toffee, and cover with a dinner plate for a few minutes to let them soften. Spread the melted chocolate into pretty swirls. If you want to, you can sprinkle finely minced nuts over the top of the soft chocolate. Once the chocolate has solidified, go back over your score marks with that same heavy knife. Enjoy!