Light and Momentary

The annual post about using up CSA vegetables

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

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

And so:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'll let you know how it works out.

A birthday cake

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

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

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

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

Take two vegetarian shepherds

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

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

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

"Vegetarian shepherds," I said.

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

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

An easy meatless dinner

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

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

"I want to put that in my MOUTH."

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

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

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

Soup Season

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

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

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

We all liked it; maybe you will too.

An improvisational apple upside-down cake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tasty, frugal, quick, filling, reasonably nutritious

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

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

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

Strawberry-rhubarb crumble

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

Desperation Soup

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

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

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

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

Recommended

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

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

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

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

Speedy speedy key lime pie

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

I am holding out hope for a spectacular Easter.

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

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

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

Gumbo Time

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

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

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

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

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?