Light and Momentary

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!

 

More Fast Food

Have you been wishing for a speedy tasty weeknight chicken idea? I have just the recipe for you. It's Arroz con Pollo, from Coco Morante's Essential Instant Pot Cookbook. (That's an affiliate link, meaning Amazon will pay me a few cents if you click through and wind up buying something.)

First, pile the following items into your food processor and turn them into green and pungent puree: a quartered onion, a seeded red bell pepper cut in strips, 8 cloves of garlic, a bunch of cilantro including the stems, 1/4 c. pimiento-stuffed green olives, 1 T. capers, 2 t. kosher salt, 1 t. black pepper, 1 t. dried oregano, and 1/2 c. olive oil. This is your sofrito.

Fire up your Instant Pot in sauté mode and add a tablespoonful of olive oil. When it shimmers, measure out a half-cup of your sofrito. (Or maybe more. It's such a yummy mix of flavors.) Stir it around in the hot fat for about 5 minutes to tone down the ferocity of the raw onion. Next you'll chuck in more green olives (1/4 c., sliced), more capers (1 T.), and 1.5 lb. boneless skinless chicken thighs, cut into 1-inch pieces. Toss them around in the sofrito. Flatten the chicken into an even-ish layer and pour 1.5 c. white rice on top, spreading it out more or less evenly.

Now you'll stir together 1 c. chicken broth and another cup of tomato sauce. Add them to the pot, and make sure all of your grains of rice are bathed in liquid. Check for wayward grains, perhaps straggling along up the sides of the pot, because surprise mouthfuls of crunchy rice will make this delightful dish much sadder. 

You're almost there: seal 'er up, and switch the cooking mode to Poultry. Give it 10 minutes at high pressure and 10 minutes of natural release. Serve it forth with more cilantro on top, and save some for me.

The nicest thing about this recipe is that it makes a bunch of sofrito, so you can freeze it in recipe-sized portions. Then you have hardly any work to do: slice your chicken roughly along with your olives and you're practically done. It's less than 15 minutes of hands-on time.

Elwood made this recipe last month and I practically burst into song at the dinner table when I tasted it. When I made it again a week later, I thought I'd put the rice on the bottom and the chicken on top -- that way (it seemed to me) the rice would have to be coated in liquid. It was a disaster, though -- a woeful mix of mushy and crunchy. Even the thought of that dish is causing me to make sad disgusted faces as I type. But! Fear not! Follow the recipe and all should be well. Tell me if you try it!

Fast Food

Our dinner is simmering on the stove right now, and while the rice finishes cooking I am going to tell you how to make it. We are having chana masala, chickpeas in a sauce that's slightly tart and slightly spicy. Super-quick, super-tasty, super-cheap, and my kids will all eat it, in welcome contrast to the last meal I cooked for them. (Mother's Day lunch. I was riffing on salade niçoise. They were unenthusiastic.)

I first encountered this recipe in Urvashi Pitre's Indian Instant Pot Cookbook, a slim little volume that is totally worth the shelf space. I have a sour tooth, and so I was immediately intrigued by the description. Her recipe tells you to cook down a bunch of onions before you make the chana masala, but you don't actually have to do it that way unless you want to. The recipe that follows is a hybrid: some of the Urvashi Pitre recipe, some of the recipe from the back of the spice box. No Instant Pot necessary.

Sauté a diced onion in neutral oil. When it begins to brown lightly, add chopped garlic (maybe 3-4 cloves) and minced ginger to taste. You'll add 1/2 t. cumin seeds and 2 T. chana masala spice mix. (Urvashi Pitre says you should not expend a bunch of effort trying to make your own chana masala spice mix. Buy in. The box I linked is not the same one for sale at our Indian grocery, but the ingredients are almost the same and the reviews are good. One box will let you make about half a dozen batches of chana masala.) Toss them around in the fat for a minute, and then add a 15-oz. can of petite diced tomatoes and two cans of chickpeas. Simmer until your rice is cooked. Squeeze the juice of a lemon over it if you, like me, do not keep amchoor in your spice basket. Serve with cilantro.

I made a gelatin salad to go alongside: orange juice, lemon juice, shredded carrots. Will the kids tell me that 1956 called and wants its side dish back? Stay tuned for more riveting updates from Gladlyville.

On the menu

If you have been reading here for a while you know I have One True Thanksgiving menu. It consists of the following:

• roasted fresh turkey (I don't fool around with all that thawing / brining / deep-frying business. Buy it fresh and stick it in the oven. Baste.)
• mashed potatoes with All The Butter
• sweet potatoes mashed with Surprise! More Butter, also pineapple tidbits and orange juice and pecans
• cornbread stuffing (veggies sautéed in yet more butter, natch)
• gravy
• Penitential Cranberry Sauce
• some green vegetable
• maybe an autumnal salad but maybe not
• maybe rolls but probably not (if I make bread dough, man, there will be BUTTER in that bread dough)
• pecan pie (moooore butter!)
• pumpkin pie (even more butter!)

We mix it up around here for Christmas and Easter and birthdays. I am not generally rigid about food. But I do exactly one Thanksgiving menu. Three years ago I made a different kind of cranberry sauce and I had to write a whole blog post about it.

I thought it was a quirk of mine, but it has become a shared quirk. The boys are very insistent about keeping the penitential in Penitential Cranberry Sauce. Today I said I was considering a different sweet potato dish, and Joe said, "WHAT?! Noooo!" He thought for a moment. "Maybe you could make two dishes of sweet potatoes."

CSA Year 7, Weeks 3-5

Stella has taken over the morning guinea pig feeding, with the result that the guinea pigs have had more CSA veggies for breakfast than I might have liked. They wound up eating one of our two heads of lettuce from week 3, along with the purslane and the funky Asian greens from week 4. Whoops! We'll try to feed the guinea pigs more frugally in week 5.

In week 3 we were supposed to get garlic scapes and rhubarb, but the boys swapped out the rhubarb for more garlic scapes at the trade table. I ate them ALL ALL ALL in my scrambled eggs. I do love garlic scapes. The mesclun and the other head of lettuce went into taco salad; the sauted radishes and spring onions flavored the taco meat. We've had sugar snaps every week, and every week we've eaten them straight out of the bowl on Tuesday night. I was going to sauté the radish greens, but I am afraid they deliquesced in the fridge instead.

In week 4 I made a big batch of slaw with the new batch of radishes and the salad turnips. I cooked up the broccoli in olive oil with garlic and served it over pasta; Joe ate up the spring onions in his scrambled eggs one day at lunchtime. I should have eaten a little more salad, because there are a few leaves of week 4 lettuce left over as we start week 5. But it turns out that it's much easier to use up one's CSA allotment if the weird stuff disappears into the guinea pigs.

Heading into week 5: sugar snaps have already been devoured. I would like to roast the beets for soup, but I still have no oven. Would it work to roast beets in a toaster oven, do you figure? Perhaps I will try it and report back. Or bite the bullet and buy an oven. One of the two. Hm. It's 11:00 and I am feeling uninspired. This week's list of veggies that need destinies: cabbage, salad turnips, broccoli, beautiful little red onions, and basil. Pesto slaw might be just the thing.

Year 7, Weeks 1 and 2

This is the seventh year that we've participated in a local Community Supported Agriculture program, and it's easier than it used to be to make use of the food we get. I thought I might blog about it this year, on the chance that it might be useful to someone googling "what do I do with this kohlrabi?" (Answer: make kohlrabi slaw; peel, shred, and mix with shredded carrots, mayo, squeeze of lemon, drizzle of maple syrup.)

Week 1: sunchokes, sweet potato, beets and beet greens, rhubarb, sorrel, green garlic, green onions, 

One of the keys to using things up is batch processing. Last week I roasted the overwintered sunchokes at the same time as the overwintered sweet potato and the new season's beets. I also slid the chopped rhubarb into a corner of the oven with a little water and bunch of sugar; there they cooked down into soft stalks basted with cerise syrup. I didn't plan to use the beets or the rhubarb that night, but they were one step closer to being edible.

Rachel-who-needs-a-blog told me a few years ago to try cooking sorrel in cream and using the resulting sauce on fish. It is a dreadful drab color but just close your eyes: it tastes amazing. I also put some of the sorrel into scrambled eggs, where it was tart enough to be pretty penitential.

Over the weekend I took my rhubarb syrup and turned it into a gelatin dessert with a little coconut milk. It was not a hit. The kids don't really like the taste of rhubarb. I like the way it tastes, but you need so much sugar to make it edible that I prefer not to eat it. When I first unmolded the jelly it lay on its plate like a pale pink flower. The kids ate about two-thirds of it, after which it warmed up into a flabby mess the color and consistency of an uncooked chicken breast, left out on the dining room table for any peckish children. I pitched the last third of it.

Some of the green garlic went into scrambled eggs along with the beet greens, but I finished up the week with green garlic and green onions left over.

Week 2: more green garlic and green onions, basil, arugula, mesclun, carrots with tops, sugar snaps, and a big bunch of funky unfamiliar greens

The sugar snaps vanished over dinner, as they always do, straight out of the bag of CSA goodies.

I am going to use the green onions and most of the green garlic in this recipe from the NYT. I probably don't want the baby garlic bulbs in there, since overbrowned garlic gets unpleasantly acrid, and I am going to save out the scapes for my scrambled eggs. But I figure it should work to add in the greens. I'll report back.

The mesclun and some of the arugula will turn into lunch salads, which I will enjoy more if I make myself a batch of carrot-miso dressing. And hey, I have just the carrots for that. Our farmer encouraged us to use our carrot tops in pesto, but probably we will feed ours to the guinea pigs instead. The big bunch of funky unfamiliar greens will go into green potato soup, where they will be joined by the remaining arugula. That leaves only the basil. Caprese salad tomorrow, I suppose, to accompany the...whatever I decide to serve under the garlic-onion sauce, and pesto on Thursday with the remainder.

Top tips for CSA newbies overwhelmed by greens: cook 'em down (spinach soup for one meal rather than spinach salads for six meals), blend 'em up. That bunch of herbs is less likely to turn black and squishy in the fridge if you turn it into pesto than if you dole it out a few leaves at a time.

Nom nom nom

One night a couple of weeks ago I followed a New Yorker link from Twitter to read an article about Urvashi Pitre, the Butter Chicken Lady. The blog version of her internet-famous butter chicken recipe is here.

I love butter chicken with a deep and abiding love, and I have a recipe for it that everybody likes. The trouble is that it tells me to string my cardamom pods on a length of thread so I can fish them out more easily later. Which...no. But biting down on a whole cardamom pod is a rather bracing experience. And 15 cardamom pods is too many cardamom pods to retrieve with confidence. So I've mostly been ordering in the butter chicken I've eaten over the past few years, and my ears pricked right up at the idea of a better option. An Instant Pot option! A speedy option!

I tend to dither over cookbook purchases because I have so little space for cookbook storage. But I read some reviews and snapped this one right up. Tonight I made butter chicken. The cookbook recipe diverges just slightly from the blog recipe: more cayenne (1 t.), more ginger (1 T.). You guys, it was SO yummy, and fast, and easy. I got everything into the IP in approximately the time it would have taken me to string together 15 stupid cardamom pods on a length of thread. I am going to eat some of the leftover sauce on my scrambled eggs tomorrow morning, and the leftover chicken for lunch. Definitely worth a try.

Oven Magic

Bearing asked for my roasted celeriac recipe, and I am posting it even though it is not much of a recipe: fat, salt, heat.

You want a moderately hot oven but you have some flexibility in case you're cooking something else at the same time: 375 or 400 is about right. (I am having a moment of nostalgia for the cookbooks of my grandmother's era, which would often enjoin the reader to put something in a slow oven (or a moderate oven, or a hot oven) rather than specifying a particular temperature. Probably I would not feel nostalgia for those days if I had suffered through fallen cakes or crunchy-in-the-middle baked potatoes after making a faulty guess at the right oven temperature, but oh well.)

Peel yourself as many root veggies as your eaters would like, bearing in mind that leftovers will be a treat. Mix it up: celeriac was especially nice last night mixed in with the potato and sweet potato bites, but rutabaga is a favorite of mine and roasted sunchokes, if you can find them, will make you burst into song. Chunk them up into roughly equal pieces; there's no need for precision measurement here. Spread them in a single layer in a foil-lined jelly roll pan. Drizzle generously with olive oil, making sure each piece gets a light coating. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and slide into the oven.

Peek at them after 20 minutes. You may want to flip them over for even browning. You may think that's too much hassle. Stick a fork experimentally into a fat chunk and see how much resistance it meets. I would estimate that you'll need 40 minutes for pieces on the bigger end of bite-sized, but ovens vary, as do vegetables.

An option I use sometimes is to parboil the veggies first. There's a simple method I use that comes from Crescent Dragonwagon's Passionate Vegetarian: parboil small but not teeny potatoes for 6 or 8 minutes and carrots for 4-6 minutes depending on size. (For celeriac I'd cut it into potato-sized pieces and treat like potato.) Rub them with olive oil and roast them for about 45-50 minutes, drizzling them with soy sauce in the middle of that cooking time. She calls these Roasty-Toasty Potatoes & Carrots; my copy of Passionate Vegetarian opens to that page.

There's a more complicated Nigella Lawson method that I use for special occasions and dream about in between. I've never made it with celeriac but I expect it would be fabulous. Cut 5 or 6 pounds of medium-sized potatoes in thirds and boil them for four minutes. Drain them and put them back in the pot, where you will sprinkle them with 2 T. flour, clap on the lid, and shake it like fury. This floury coating will give them a fabulous crisp crust. You can leave them at this stage for a while if you are cooking a fancy holiday dinner with multiple moving parts.

When you're ready for your potatoes to fulfill their glorious destiny, get your oven nice and hot. She says to crank it as high as it will go, but I wouldn't exceed 475, personally. I'd be doing battle with my smoke alarm the whole time if I cranked it up all the way. I usually divide them between two pans: a 9 x 13 pan with vegetarian potatoes cooked in olive oil, and an 11 x 15 pan for the meat-eaters (not a jelly roll pan, though; you need taller sides to prevent a conflagration), in which I use duck or goose fat. Heat the fat of your choosing in the pans until it is sizzling hot, and carefully tip in your potatoes. Nigella recommends 640g of goose fat for this recipe, which is a little less fat than you'd find in six sticks of butter. (I'd be cautious about using actual butter at that oven temperature, though. Seems like you could scorch the milk solids.) Cook for 25 minutes; turn and cook for 25 minutes more. The next time I make these I will keep some back to ensure that I have leftovers. You wouldn't think you'd need to worry about leftovers with 6 pounds of potatoes, but people will eat an awful lot of these.

The birthday cake I keep making

Stella continued the "surprise me!" birthday cake tradition we've had going around here, although I asked her to narrow the options a bit. Last year I made her a surprise cake that she didn't love, and even though she was very polite about it I was hoping to spark a little more enthusiasm this year. She went through a couple of my cookbooks, marking possibilities with post-its.

I started with an almond cake that I've probably made a dozen times now. It's easy, as long as you're using machinery to do the whisking, and its list of ingredients is short and gluten-free. It bakes up into a cake that's flavorful and tender. You can take it in a slew of different directions if you're so inclined. So if you're looking for a new birthday cake recipe, here you go:

Preheat your oven to 350 and grease a 9-inch springform pan. If you are going to want to remove it from the base, you'll want to line it beforehand.

Start with six eggs; separate four of them. Beat the whites until you have soft peaks; add 2 T. sugar and keep beating until the peaks stiffen up. Next, beat your four egg yolks and your two whole eggs with a half-cup of sugar until they reach the ribbon stage. Gently fold in 150g ground almonds, the beaten egg whites, and the flavorings of your choice (recommended: 1/4 t. salt, zest of a lemon, tiny dribble of almond extract; I've also used orange zest, vanilla extract, and I know that I once did a coffee version but perhaps I only put coffee in the filling). Scrape it all into your springform and bake for about 50 minutes. Do not peek; it may come crashing down because it's mostly eggs and air. After it's cool, you can split it for filling and frosting.

Today I just filled and frosted with lightly sweetened whipped cream piped into a zillion stars, but I've told you before about various versions of this cake. I've done adventurous gelatin-stabilized sabayons and I don't even know what else in the middle. Whether you go simple or complicated with the filling, this cake is easy to split horizontally because the eggs lend a helpful degree of tensile strength to the layers. 

She loved the poncho and wore it all day, and after she asked for second helpings of cake she ate every last bite. In between I think she had a lovely birthday.

Better living through garlic and saffron

Earlier this evening I tweeted pitifully: 

Me: Hi, Google, what can I do with chicken breasts before the fam gets back from Mass that isn't awful even though boneless skinless breasts are stupid and cottony and the GLOOM, Google, I can't deal with the GLOOM and

Google: You might need some nice SSRI chicken, Jamie.

— Jamie (@mostgladly) November 19, 2017

And then I stiffened my socks and pulled up my upper lip (or something along those lines) and got to work. I heated about two glasses of wine to boiling, and pinched in saffron so it could steep. (I have almost emptied the little box of saffron I bought at the Indian grocery store two or three years ago. It's a much less pricy way to buy saffron.) I cranked the heat under a skillet in which I had put generous quantities of fat, a mix of butter and olive oil. When it was sizzling hot I threw in three fat chicken breasts, seasoned them with salt, pepper, and paprika, and let them get nicely seared on both sides. (Bonus points if you set off the smoke alarm. Our smoke alarm goes off if someone dreams of cooking bacon, I'm telling you.) When the second side was almost done I tipped eight cloves' worth of slivered garlic into the chicken-free spaces, and shortly afterward I poured in the wine and saffron.

Once it boiled I covered the pan and turned the heat way down, in hopes that nice gentle poaching would ward off dryness. After 10 minutes or so I added the juice of one lemon. When the chicken was done I pulled it out to scrape up the fond and reduce the sauce. After I sliced up the meat I plopped it back into the sauce and kept it warm. Later Pete mentioned that artichoke hearts would have been a great addition. He is not wrong.

Usually the evening Mass is quicker than average, but this weekend's homily was a long one. I wasn't sure when the gang would be home, so I decided to keep cooking until they arrived. I made a root vegetable puree that was not a success and a carrot-radish slaw that was. I boiled up a pot of edamame to serve with the Smitten Kitchen carrot-ginger dressing, and cooked up some orzo to soak up the chicken sauce.

This year I am having more trouble than usual with the November blues-- so much so that I was thinking about requesting an SSRI prescription when I go in tomorrow to get my beta blocker prescription updated. But at this point I don't think the advantages outweigh the side effects, so I'll probably just keep plugging for a while longer. Sunshine helps. Sunshine-colored food helps too. It's only four months until spring, right?

Rites of Fall

Let Stravinsky keep spring: if I were a composer I would create a work in honor of fall and gumbo. Today Elwood and I made Crescent Dragonwagon's Gumbo Zeb together. We do this about once a year, because it's a hassle. But we do it every year, because it's delicious. Late fall, when we are awash in lovely CSA greens, is the natural time for it. The recipe I linked to is the one from Dairy Hollow House Soup and Bread. She cut it in half when she put it into Passionate Vegetarian. We made an intermediate-sized batch today, with 4.5 bunches of greens, and it's a lot of gumbo. But if you're in the mood for a kitchen Project that will keep you happily fed all week long (and maybe longer), I can recommend this one enthusiastically.

A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump

I used to think self-rising flour -- flour with added salt and baking powder -- was an old-lady kind of purchase. My mother only ever bought it by mistake. But moving to Scotland changed my mind about flour. (And healthcare too, but that's another post entirely). There's a much stronger home baking culture in Britain, and self-raising* flour, as they call it there, lowers the bar between a busy home baker and a pan of biscuits. True, it doesn't take very long to measure out salt and baking powder, but it's quicker still just to weigh up** one ingredient and pitch it in.***

Earlier this week soul cake recipes were flitting across my feeds, and all of the ones I saw were unleavened. Blech, I thought to myself, that sounds pretty hockey-puck-y. Last night a Twitter pal and I agreed to test this recipe in the morning. I split my butter-sugar-egg mixture in half, and put self-raising flour in one bowl and plain flour in the other. It wasn't a perfect test -- I didn't divide quite evenly and needed a splash of milk to moisten the leavened batch.

So I can't say if it was the milk or the leavening, but the cakes with self-raising flour were browner as well as airier and less crumbly. They were the hands-down winners among the kids, although Elwood insisted the unleavened ones were all right. (He has a contrarian streak, does Elwood. He also thought I was telling him to get out of bed in order to try my "tuna soul cakes," so perhaps the warm dried-cherry-scented hockey pucks were delicious in comparison to his fish-flavored imaginings.)

Kids prefer the leavened version. pic.twitter.com/937Zp1XmUg

— Jamie (@mostgladly) November 4, 2017

If you decide to whip up some soul cakes here in the month of the dead, I suggest a little leavening. Unless, of course, penitential baked goods are part of your prayer and sacrifice plan.

*Self-raising is a better name than self-rising, IMHO. The flour raises itself. It can't rise itself, since rise is an intransitive verb.

**Have you taken the kitchen scale plunge? Do it! A few batches' worth of uncertainty and you'll never go back, I predict.

***Does it seem a little inconsistent that I am pro-SR flour and anti-Bisquick? The difference is the fat. In order to make Bisquick cheap and shelf-stable, they use shortening + additives. Butter forever, that's my motto. Love might make the world go round, but butter greases the axis****.

****Light & Momentary: come for the mom chat, stay for the alternative geophysics.

Colossus of Roasts. And Cheesecake.

Remember when Col, my giant Instant Pot, arrived in July? He and I have slowly been getting acquainted. I signed up to review the occasional book here, and the first one that arrived in my mail was Coco Morante's The Essential Instant Pot Cookbook.

I have Thoughts about cookbooks. I want them to have a distinctive voice and to be carefully edited. I want them to tell me some things I wouldn't have figured out on my own, and to push my boundaries a little bit but not too much. I have exactly 2.5 feet of cookbook space, which means I am choosy about which cookbooks get to stay.

The short version of this review is that this book makes the cut.

There's an accessible introduction to using the Instant Pot, and there are reliable step-by-step instructions in all of the recipes. My husband is very skeptical about the Instant Pot. "It beeps," he says. (He has fond memories of a world in which appliances didn't beep.) Even so, he was able to follow Morante's directions with no fuss.

For the most part, the recipes are interesting but also straightforward. I read an Amazon review complaining about her reliance on weird ingredients, but that's (literally) a de gustibus kind of thing. I am excited, not annoyed, about the idea of mail-order sumac and ras el hanout. There are some funky recipes (honey-turmeric tonic, anyone?) and some plain-vanilla recipes (macaroni and cheese), but mostly they inhabit the space in between. In a few cases, I think she was stretching to demonstrate that a recipe could be adapted for the IP when really it would have been easier to fire up the stove already.

Instant Pot cooking works best with foods that should be nice and tender. My husband likes his green beans still firm enough to be used as bludgeons (very small bludgeons. elf bludgeons), but I am a child of the South. I thought Morante's recipe for Italian stewed green bean recipe was perfect, as was her kale with apple and onion. (I was less enthusiastic about the Indian-spiced okra, but in fairness I should add that I was missing two of the spices.)

After I made a couple of the meat recipes, I felt ready to riff on them. She has no recipe for tongue, but I dove in and made tacos de lengua in the Instant Pot because I felt comfortable with the settings and the beeping. Making broth isn't complicated, but it was nice to have clear instructions for how to do it in a pressure cooker.

I was most curious about the desserts. Poached pears, sure (thumbs up from the kids on that one), but cheesecake? in a pressure cooker? for real? I was so intrigued that I bought a 7-inch springform. Turns out that pressure cooker cheesecake works really nicely. I made her New York cheesecake, to which you add a topping of sweetened sour cream after it emerges from the steam. Adding a topping is probably a good idea, because condensation from the top of the IP can mar the top of the finished cheesecake. Well worth the hassle for cheesecake with a 30-minute cooking time and no need to rig up a bain-marie. After this success with steaming a dessert I am going to see if I can manage a steamed suet pudding in the Instant Pot. That's not a recipe anyone sensible would include in a book for an American audience, but I bet you can get around that crazy 4-hour cooking time and wind up with the same lovely texture.

In addition to the experiments I want to try, there are a number of recipes I still want to cook as written. That's a little unusual for me. The FTC wants me to spell out for you that I received a complimentary copy of this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for writing a review, but I assure you I'd let you know if I didn't like it. If you have an Instant Pot that's a little dustier than you might like, or a little more intimidating than you expected, this book is a fun way to figure it out.

Receipts

About 20 years ago I organized all of my recipe clippings. There were dividers and topic headings and sub-categories. And then followed 20 years of reading about food and cooking for a family. Oh, and stashing kitchen equipment manuals, because I might need a refresher on how to adjust the peeler thickness on the apple peeler-corer-slicer. Or how to make jiu niang in my Instant Pot. Wouldn't want to forget that, would we?

It was a MESS, is what I'm saying.

As I tried to sort it out I realized that there were at least three different kinds of recipes in there. There are the ones I like and want to make again, like pan bagnat. (But I don't want to look it up on the NYT website, because that yellowing clip from August 2007 reminds me powerfully of picnics past. It stays.) Then there are the aspirational recipes, like Sri Lankan Dal and Stuck-Pot Rice and Lentils. I would like to be the kind of cook who knows exactly where to buy curry leaves and exactly how to coax a perfectly browned rice crust out of the bottom of the pan in one piece. Someday I would like to host a traditional New Orleans brunch, with Eggs Sardou and Crêpes Suzette.

Finally, abundantly, a little absurdly, there are the sentimental journey recipes. 

In the summer of 2011 my husband and oldest son went together to Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. In theory, I was 100% on board with this trip. But they were gone for almost three weeks at a time when Stella was sleeping like a feral little batlet. Which is to say, hardly at all. Near the end of that time my mother-in-law drove to Gladlyville and we took the other four kids south to my aunt's farm. We met up with my mother, and I spent a few days surrounded by grown-ups who loved me and cooked for me. My aunt made this bean dish and it tasted so ambrosial in the moment that I asked her for the recipe. Her handwriting is like and yet not like my mother's. And when I hold this recipe in my hands I remember the fierce heat of that day, the noise of the cows cooling off around their pond, the blessed relief of being tended after two weeks of relentless tending. I can't recycle that, even if I will never make this bean bake.

"What's a can of real celery?" asked Elwood, who did not grow up reading the Riley sisters' handwriting. "It's red kidney," I told him.

When Joe was 6 or 7, judging by the spelling, he wrote up a recipe for Goo. It calls for 31 cups of marshmallows and 12 inches of chocolate, which you must mirowave for 20 seconds. "Well," said Elwood, "we'd have to find a mirowave if we wanted to make that one." But I will never recycle that recipe either.

Most precious of all, I found a cake recipe in my grandmother's handwriting. She's the person who taught me to bake as we turned out pound cakes together, Saturday after Saturday. It's the only thing I have in her handwriting in this house, though there may be some old letters lurking at my parents'. It is jotted on the back of a school lunch menu; a quick search of the day-month-year alignment suggests that it dates from either 1970 or 1964. I am never going to make a prune-spice cake that calls for 1 C. Wesson oil; it's just never going to happen. But when I brush my hand across those words, gently and with a full heart, it is a form of connection with my long-dead grandmother, who wrote those words on this paper when she was still strong and capable.

It's not only the recipes from people I know and love that have sentimental value for me. Back in 2002-3, Nigella Lawson wrote a column every other week for the NYT. That was the year we were living outside NYC, the year when I was so lonely and miserable. Every other Wednesday I would thump down the stairs happily, eager to read her column over a cup of coffee. I look at those clippings and I remember: there are always bright spots. Hard times do get better.

I suppose that a person who keeps blogging about how BAKING = LOVE is destined to have a hard time trimming down her recipe collection. And organization is just not my defining trait. (Can you imagine if organization were your defining trait? I'll pass on that one, thanks.) I do not know quite what I will do with this pile of potential and remembrance and useless old Vegetarian Times recipes taped to the back of recipes that I do actually want to keep. For tonight, I will pat my grandmother's recipe one more time, tenderly, and tuck the loose odds and ends back into the binder pockets.

People used to call them "receipts" instead of recipes, and there's something fitting about that name: receipts are confirmations that something has been given and received. I can't flip through these pages without remembering all the gifts I have been given.

Poll

What's the most uncomfortable place you've ever spent the night? 

Deeply delicious salsa verde

Half a pound of tomatillos in this week's CSA pile, and they dove bravely into the food processor to meet their fate. They were joined there by a clove of garlic, and a baby onion (maybe the equivalent of an eighth-sized wedge of an ordinary onion), and the leaves from a small bunch of basil, and a hot pepper, and a quarter-teaspoon or so of salt. This is based on a Crescent Dragonwagon recipe that called for cilantro instead of basil, but all of my cilantro has bolted and I had basil sitting wistfully in the crisper drawer.

Verdict: yes, please. I made it as a relish-y thing to serve atop calamari, but after dinner one of the boys said, "Could you just leave the salsa out so I can keep eating it, maybe with chips?" Yes indeed, I said, because I'm pretty sure the organic tomatillo part cancels out the pile of chips part.