Homework

“Kentucky Colonel” mint from the garden.  So sweet and full-bodied, but not sharp.  Phenomenal in salads, gorgeous in mojitos and iced tea.

Cha Thai (Thai tea), brewed strong, served mixed 3:1 with soymilk and stevia to taste.

Standing in the garden eating lipstick peppers pulled straight off the plants.  My reward for weeding and watering.

Cucumber salads of various sorts.  Mostly very simple, salted, drained cukes + herbs + acid + a tiny amount of flavorful oil.

Sweetcorn fritters: cut fresh sweet corn off the cob, combine with 1 egg per 2 ears of corn, a splosh of milk or soymilk, a small sloshette of olive oil, some minced onion, minced herbs if you want them.  Add just enough allpurpose flour to bind it slightly, a scant quarter cup per egg used ought to do it, and a little salt, pepper, and maybe cumin and cayenne depending on the herbs situation.  Fry them up in good oil in a heavy skillet until crispy around the edges.

Socca.  You do need a new addiction, trust me.

Very tiny eggplants from the garden, halved lengthwise and stir-fried with garlic and fermented black beans.

Scrambled eggs with nam pla and sweet chili-garlic paste stirred into the eggs before cooking.  Possibly also incorporating a handful of roughly chopped cilantro, or basil.

The knockout street-food vendor videos from Thailand courtesy of Importfood.com.

What has it got in its bucketses?  Let’s take a look!

Why, it’s a big bucket of scratch-and-dent stone fruits!  Nectarines, white peaches, yellow peaches, and Shiro yellow plums.

I didn’t think to start taking pictures until we were more than halfway done processing the fruit, but the bucket was originally almost full.  The fruit came from a friend who is a local business owner… it’s all locally grown fruit, but due to bruises, mold, and spots of rot, not stuff that our friend can sell.  She offered me a bucket of the stuff that would otherwise go on the compost heap if I thought I had a use for it.  I leapt at the chance.

Why?  Why would I want a huge bucket full of fruit that no one else would buy?  Fruit that lots of people I know would consider rather revolting, honestly, and discard as inedible?

Because even fruit that looks like it’s way over the hill is often well worth your time.  That’s why.  Not only is it frugal to just cut away the bad bits and use what’s still good, not only does it respect the fruit and the people whose effort went into growing it, but if I’m honest, it’s some of the best-tasting, most fully ripe fruit you’ll ever put in your mouth.  The Belovedary and I snuck an awful lot of tastes while we were converting that bucket of fruit into nearly 18 cups of peeled, pared chunks, and oh man was it delicious.

Besides, for a great many cooking applications, there is no need whatsoever that the fruit be cosmetically perfect or even close.  It’s probably my inner Midwesterner showing, but every time I encounter a recipe for jelly, jam, or chutney that begins with the instruction to “choose ripe, firm, unblemished fruit” I want to scream a little.  If you’re chunking the fruit up into small pieces anyway, cooking it into a puree–or even more pertinently, turning it into clarified juice for a jelly–there is not going to be anything left that will tell you whether the fruit was unblemished or not when you began.  It simply does not matter. Same goes if you’re making cobbler, crisp, fool, clafoutis, slump, brown betty, turnovers, strudel, pudding, fruit soup, or pie, for crying out loud.  So give your poor fruit growers a break.  Give yourself a break.  Use up what’s good, regardless of what it looks like or whether you have to cut away some mushy bits or cope with a bit of rot or mold.  It won’t hurt you.

I mean, just look at that gorgeous fruit.  I won’t lie, we were a little tempted to just grab spoons and dive in, but we thought nearly 18 cups of fruit might be a little much even for us, so instead…

It was time for the Old Black Rum.  I added a cup of spiced black rum, and a little bit of water, and put the fruit into my ginormous off-brand slow-cooker (slow cookers are your friend when it’s hot, as it can do low/slow cooking without heating up the house).

In due time, this will all collapse into a puree… and eventually, by dint of cooking it forever with the lid off at a low temperature, into a rich, delicious, lightly spiced, nicely thick fruit butter.  Which at some point later in the week, when the weather (I hope and pray) breaks a little, I will pack into jars and seal in a hot-water bath.

Then, this winter, when memories are all we have of fresh stone fruit, we can bust out the Scratch And Dent Stone Fruit Butter, and eat and be happy.  Not bad, for a bucket of throwaway fruit.

The weather report says that the heat index reached 125F or so today here in Baltimore, which is simply unspeakable.

So I won’t speak of it.  Instead I will show you pictures.

Lilies and hydrangea from the garden.  I’ve been cutting the lilies as they hit their peak, and bringing them into the house so they can stink up the joint with that heady, sweet scent of theirs.

This morning’s farmer’s market was a wonderful orgy of high-summer fruit.  We bought white peaches and yellow, white nectarines (one of my favorites), and the most glorious tiny sweet yellow-orange cherry tomatoes.    It’s a little MStew of me, but I always think fruit looks prettier on Depression-era glass, somehow.  (And to make up for the MStew quotient, you can enjoy my very old, very faded, very seriously worn and stained tablecloth, heh.)

So pretty.  Now if my own tomatoes would just hurry up and ripen…

Good news!  I’m writing a new, improved, wholly rewritten and updated version of my first book, Big Big Love, the first and still the only book about sex for people who are fat and for the people who love and desire them.

(Don’t start with me about how fat people don’t have sex.  Just because you personally don’t like to imagine a particular type of someone having sex doesn’t mean they don’t.  To wit, your grandma. Enough said.)

The original came out in 2000, and has been out of print for a while.  I’m writing the new one for Ten Speed Press, and it’ll be out sometime in 2011.

As I did with the original, I’ve written an extensive survey for this one, in order to collect as much information as I can from the folks who know best about fat and sexuality — namely, the people who deal with it every day.

If you are part of the target demographic for this book, that is, if you identify yourself as being fat, thick, hefty, plump, zaftig, stocky, roly-poly, rotund, Junoesque, amply-proportioned, or whatever… or if you are romantically/sexually interested in folks who are…. get yourself on over to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BBL2010survey and tell me all about it.  Your anonymity is assured, as are my profoundest thanks.

And do feel free to pass it on!
Sorry I’ve been so lacking in blog content.  I’ve needed a little time to grow back after turning in Straight to the publishers and while getting everything up to speed with the Big Big Love project.  There’ll be some garden pics and other goodies soon, I promise.

I turned in my manuscript today.

Now it’s someone else’s problem for a while.  Then it’ll be my problem again, for a bit, then the publishers will carry it off and make it into a book, God willing and the crick don’t rise.

So that’s done.

Now I just have to finish the other book, the one that’s due at the end of September.

My Belovedary and I went out and did the circuit of our favorite Asian markets for lunch today.  I needed some downtime before I went stark raving book-bonkers, and I’ve been missing the Belovedary due to spending so much time lately going stark raving book-bonkers.  He had the day off, so away we went.

The dragonfruit were splendid.  I’ve never seen such beautiful ones for sale in this country.  That’s why I bought three.  What a treat!  The cherimoya is very nearly ripe.  It’s one of the Belovedary’s favorites.

I also got myself these, one of my all-time favorite Sichuanese treats: fried peanuts with chiles, Sichuan pepper, and salt.  I make them at home sometimes, but I have to confess that there’s something to be said for not having to go to the trouble of frying up peanuts when you want a snack.

We bought some other things… red yeast rice, spicy tofu snacks, a big sack of dry Salvadoran red beans, a big bag of dried guajillo chiles, ginger, that sort of thing.  We had a good time.

And so we go back to work.

This is some crazy weather, isn’t it?

Batidas — buy some frozen fruit.  What kind?  What kind do you like?  There’s always frozen guava pulp in my freezer, that much I can tell you.  But strawberries are delicious and easier to find at the grocery store.  Puree the frozen fruit in a blender.  Add cachaca or rum, if you’re a grownup, puree again, and either eat with a spoon or drink with a straw.  If you’re not a grownup, use some ginger ale instead of the hooch.  Technically it’s still mostly fruit, and therefore mostly good for you.

Leaf Roll-Ups — wash and dry a bunch of large leaves — chard, lettuce of whatever sort, spinach.  Probably not kale or broccoli leaves, they’re a little too tough.  But savoy cabbage could work.  Find some savory leftovers lurking in the fridge and nuke them if needed.  Alternatively, julienne or shred some leftover meat, sausage, fish, cheese, etc.  Plop a reasonable quantity of leftovers or shredded/julienned proteiny matter onto the end of one of your leaves and roll it up like a cigar made of yum.  Do not smoke it.  Eat it.  Repeat until hunger is satisfied.  This is particularly grand with egg salad.

Deviled Eggs — I know, I know, you have to cook the eggs.  But really, this will not heat up your kitchen much if you do it the right way.  The Right Way To Hardcook Eggs being to put eggs into a pan of cold water that is deep enough to submerge all the eggs by about an inch and a half.  Put it on the heat with a lid on it.  Bring it to a full rolling boil.  Turn off the heat and let the eggs stand in the water for 18 minutes.  Set a timer.  After 18 minutes, drain the eggs and fill the pot with cold water.  Add some ice or an ice pack.  Let sit for a while, until eggs are completely cool.    When you’re ready, peel the eggs and off you go.  I highly recommend deviled eggs made with a healthy dollop of sweet chili garlic paste stirred into the egg yolks and mayo.  Or go totally old-school and do mayo, mustard, a pinch of celery seed, and some finely chopped bread and butter pickles.

Things On Bread — Open-faced sandwiches in the Scandinavian manner are highly agreeable when the weather is evil.  I adore smoked kippers, sardines, and other delicious oily little fish, particularly with onion and greens.  If you don’t, try dry-style large curd cottage cheese with lots of black pepper, some salt, and a little thinly-sliced onion.  Use sturdy, dense bread.  Oh, and you might also save out a hard-cooked egg or two, and slice them, and eat them on bread with good mustard and maybe some lettuce.  This is also a good time of year to just get an interesting chunk of cheese, a piece of good bread, and pour yourself a beer.  With maybe a little green salad, it’s enough dinner for a heat wave.

Cold Cream of Pea Soup –  Frozen peas. Blender.  Thin with half veg or chicken stock, half milk/soymilk/half-and-half.  Dill.  Lemon zest.  A small amount of onion.  Blender blender blender. Black pepper.  Salt.  Sip.  More filling than you’d think, and so pretty.

Grown-Up Ice Cream Float, Butch Version — If you’re going to do this, do it right.  Pour a glass about 2/3 full of cold Guinness, or if you prefer, an Imperial stout.  Add 1-2 scoops of extremely high quality vanilla or dulce de leche ice cream.  Gild the lily with a few shreds of candied ginger if you like.

Grown-Up Ice Cream Float, High Femme Version — Again, if you’re going to do this, do it right.  Pour a glass about 2/3 full of fruit lambic–peach or raspberry are best.  Add 1-2 scoops of lemon or raspberry sorbet.  Again with the shreds of candied ginger if the spirit moves you.

Grown-Up Ice Cream Float, Non-Alcoholic Version — Get some real ginger beer, not namby-pamby ginger ale like you drink when you have a tummyache.  You want something with a bite, like Gosling’s or Reed’s.  One scoop lemon sorbet, one scoop vanilla ice cream.  Good enough for anyone.

One week until my book is due.  I picked us some liles and sea holly from the garden and put them in an old mustard jar on the kitchen windowsill so we’d have something pretty to look at.

‘Cause dayyum, it’s hot out there.

1. Flavored Waters — I see them for sale in the shops and I think “I may really be incapable of understanding how far people will go to avoid doing something that is nearly effortless to begin with.”  Because $1.49 for 20 ounces of water with a little mint in it?  It’s not highway robbery if you voluntarily part with your money, my friends.  Get yourself some sort of reasonably wide-mouthed jug (a recycled glass juice bottle is tops) and fill it 7/8 of the way with water.  Plunk in something that tastes nice: cucumber slices, citrus zest, borage flowers, mint leaves, sliced fruit of any kind, a couple chunks of watermelon plus a few chunks of rind (white part only), a quartered tomato, basil leaves, a clove or two, orange flower water, rosewater, kewra water, knotted strips of lemongrass, a pinch of fennel seed. Play with the combinations and mix it up.  Try mint plus orange flower water, cucumber plus rosewater, watermelon plus basil, borage flowers plus halved green grapes, tomato plus fennel seed, citrus zest and a dill blossom.  Refrigerate your water and its add-ins and let infuse for an hour or two before drinking.

2. Cucumber-Almond Granita — Puree two large peeled seeded cucumbers in a blender.  Add a couple of handfuls of almonds and a couple handfuls of green seedless grapes or honeydew melon.  Add a tiny splash of orange flower water and just a touch of honey or agave nectar.  Pour into an ice cube tray and freeze.  To serve, pop out as many cubes as you want and turn them into slush in your blender or food processor.

3.  DIY Creamsicles — 2 parts freshly squeezed orange juice to 1 part buttermilk (or soymilk plus a little extra lime juice), about a half a lime’s worth of lime juice, and a little agave syrup.  Pour into popsicle molds or paper cups, freeze, and eat.

4. Beans Love Greens, Hot Weather Version — Drain and rinse a can of good quality cooked white beans like cannellini.  Get a bunch of the nicest, tenderest, most voluptuous greens you can find.  For me, it’s almost always chard straight from the garden but you can have what you like.  Just don’t buy the “prewashed” crap in the cellophane bags please, it’s all ‘prewashed’ in the same gigantic sink, effectively, and people get sick from it.  Also it is neither nice nor tender nor voluptuous and really, what is the point of eating any green vegetable that does not look up at you from the plate, flutter its undulating curves at you, and whisper “I’m lovely, I’m delicious, eat me”?   Anyway, wash and dry your greens and tear them into pieces of a comfortable size.  Make a nest of leaves on your plate.  Top with beans, cherry tomatoes or wedges of larger ones, seeded chunked cucumber, torn basil leaves, some good pitted olives, and, if you like, some kind of salty cheese like feta.  Dress with the best olive oil you can lay hands on, and either good wine or sherry vinegar or lemon juice.

5. The Essence of Fruit Crisp — Prepare and layer on a plate or in a shallow bowl bite-sized pieces of whatever sort of fruit appeals to you.  Stone fruits and berries work best, but you could do this with summer apples and with pears, too.  In a small frying pan, melt a tablespoon or three of salted butter (depending on how many people you plan to feed) and then cook, in the butter, three tablespoons of Grape Nuts to each tablespoon of butter.  As they start to get fragrant, sprinkle with brown sugar and maybe a little cinnamon.  Stir and keep cooking until the sugar is all melted, just a moment or so.  Drizzle the butter/sugar/Grape Nuts over the fruit.  Perfect for when just plain sliced fruit doesn’t seem desserty enough.  If you want to bump it up another notch, sprinkle a pinch of really good sea salt over the whole shebang.

6. Water Chestnuts with Coconut Milk and Shrimp — Use FRESH water chestnuts only for this, or in a pinch, jicama.  Peel and julienne the water chestnuts, keeping them submerged in cold water before and after cutting so they don’t discolor.  Roughly chop some shelled, deveined shrimp — cooked or raw, it’s up to you.  If you can get good raw ones, it’s nice that way.  Make a mixture of 4 parts lime juice, 3 parts coconut milk, and as much fresh minced chili and onion as you want.   Mix the lime/coconut mixture with the shrimp.  Drain the water chestnuts well and add.  Refrigerate for an hour.  Salt to taste.  Vegheads, just sub nice fresh firm tofu.

7.  Vietnamese rice-paper “salad” rolls, aka gai cuon — Oishii Eats will show you how, and her mom is hilarious.

8.  The Best Peanut Butter Sandwich Ever — You want some good, crusty French-style bread.  Baguette is great.  Slice a hank of it the long way like a sub sandwich roll, and remove some but not all of the crumb.  You can also do this on a really dense seedy wholegrain but try it with the French loaf first.  OK.  Get you some peanut butter, whatever kind you like.  A little sweet is OK.  Spread a thin — and I am not funning with you, I mean thin! — layer on both halves of the bread.  Next, you want a little chili paste.  Sambal oelek, the Indonesian spice paste, is fantastic and is what they use at Chicago’s Cafe Lula where they call this the tineka sandwich, but you know, it will work with many different kinds.  Sriracha, sweet chili-garlic paste, toban jian, what you got.  Schmear that right on up into  your peanut butter.  Then you wanna make a nice friendly haystack of shredded carrot, cucumber slices, sprouts, lettuce, definitely some tomato and a little bit of paper-thin sliced onion.  Drizzle just a snoodge of soy sauce on your veggies.  Sweet black soy if you have it.  The Indonesian kind is particularly choice in this, but the Chinese will do fine.  Slap the whole thing together and eat.

9.  Tuna Salad in a Tomato — So maybe the savory peanut butter-chili-veg bomb is too adventuresome for your palate.  That’s okay.  Get a fantastic tomato and slice off the top so you can scoop out the gooey bit in the middle (put the gooey bit in some water and let it infuse, you can pour it through a sieve later, and the water will taste wonderful).  Fill your tomato up with tuna salad instead.  Or egg salad.  Or chicken salad.  Or tofu salad.  Or… you get the idea.

10.  Banana Cream — Peel, then toss in a plastic bag and freeze, a few very ripe bananas.  Cut them into chunks, put them in the blender, and puree to a soft-serve ice cream  sort of texture. Add a little bit of vanilla extract.  Stir in chocolate chips if you like, or shredded sweetened coconut, or toasted nuts.

Here is a list of 20 things to make and eat when it is too hot to cook.

1. Balela — drain and rinse some canned cooked chickpeas and some black beans, mince half an onion or so and a couple cloves of garlic, roughly chop a big bunch of parsley, dice a few ripe tomatoes if you have them, combine all this in a large bowl with plenty of lemon juice/olive oil vinaigrette, salt and pepper to taste, and if you like it and have it, some za’atar.  Let stand in the fridge for an hour or two before serving.

2. Hummus — cooked chickpeas (skinned please) whirred in the food processor with tahini, olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and a small sufficiency of fresh raw garlic.  Should not be as thick as mashed potatoes… thin with some water or bean liquid so it just barely holds peaks.

3. Gazpacho — do it the Spanish way.  David Rosengarten tells you how.

4. Ceviche — impeccably fresh fish or crustaceans in a largish dice with a liberal amount of lemon/lime juice, some salt, some onion, and some hot chili.  Cilantro if you like it, or not.  Marinate an hour or so.  The fish will firm up and become opaque, the result of acid at work.  Be sure to drink a cup of the liquor, called leche de tigre — tiger’s milk — reportedly a great hangover cure, and powerful stuff regardless, good for what ails you.

5. Tabbouleh — cooking the bulgur is the only cooking you have to do and it’s nothing more than pouring boiling water into uncooked bulgur (2 parts boiling water to 1 part bulgur, by volume), stirring, and waiting until the water is absorbed.  Parsley parsley parsley forever.  Chopped tomato, perhaps diced cucumber, some minced garlic, maybe some minced onion.  Lemon juice and olive oil, salt and pepper.  C’est tout.

6. Cucumber-Cilantro Salad

7. Fruit and Herb Salad — You can improvise this depending on what you’ve got.  Blueberries, chiffonade of sage, apple, and pecans.  Watermelon, basil, tomato, and ricotta salata.  Peaches, diced prosciutto, lemon balm.  Canteloupe, thyme, fresh ginger juice, and soft fresh goat cheese.  You don’t need to dress these, but a little salt and black pepper go a long way.

8. Carrot-Jicama Slaw — Shred, combine with a dressing of plain yogurt loosened with a little olive oil and lemon juice.  Add some cumin, cardamom, ground coriander, black pepper, tart dried cherries or cranberries, pecans or walnuts, salt.  Stir it all up, let it stand an hour or so, eat.

9. Cold Spicy Celery and Smoked Tofu — slice celery on the bias as thinly as possible, toss with julienned smoked tofu, dress with lime juice, soy sauce, sesame oil, and a little bit of hot chili paste.  Marinate for a half hour or so before eating.

10. Fattoush — This is what you do with stale pita, or any storebought pita since it’s already stale.  Pita torn into bite-sized pieces, tossed with whatever summer veg you have, including leafy ones: purslane is excellent, so is romaine, but chard is nice too.  Tomatoes are de rigeur, and so are cukes and sweet peppers.  Some raw onion, a vinaigrette (red wine vinegar or lemon juice), a healthy sprinkle of za’atar.  Toss, salt/pepper, eat.

11. Caprese salad — dead ripe tomatoes, beautiful leaves of basil, fresh mozzarella, olive oil, salt, pepper, done.

12. Panzanella — Italian for “fattoush.”  Add some mozzarella or ricotta salata to your day-old-bread/veg/vinaigrette, or perhaps some drained oil-packed tuna.

13. Cold Stone Fruit Soup — peel and chunk up whatever kind of stone fruits are best.  Peaches, plums, cherries, apricots.  Puree in the blender with plain unsweetened yogurt.  Add some cream or buttermilk if you like.  Or prosecco, Champagne, Sauternes, or some other lightly sweet white wine.  A little cinnamon, cardamom, or nutmeg can be nice.  Or a little ginger juice.  Or freshly ground black pepper.  There are a billion variations.  Fold in whipped cream, if you’re nasty.

14. Cold Ginger-Carrot-Orange Soup — quick and dirty.  Carrot juice + orange juice, both fresh squeezed, in approximately equal parts.  A little salt, a little black pepper, and plenty of fresh ginger and its juice grated into the soup.  Let it stand a wee while for the flavors to marry.

15. Quick-pickled Daikon (with or without carrot)

16. Guacamole — Restrain your impulse to overthink this.  Avocado, lots of lime juice, a small amount of crushed garlic, salt.  Puree, eat, repeat.

17. Prosciutto and Fruit — Melon’s nice but it’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Plums, tart cherries, apricots, peaches?  Oh yeah.

18. Salsa — You have tomatoes, tomatilloes, peppers, cilantro, onion, garlic.  You know what to do.

19. Sweet Corn Salads — Cut the corn off the cob.  Combine with whatever sounds good.  Salsa, for instance.  Or chopped tomato, a little onion, some basil or parsley or both, and some feta.

20. Tofu — Perfect fresh soft tofu, in a dish, with a liberal splosh of the best soy sauce you can lay hands on.  Sprinkle on finely chopped green onion, fried shallot, dried shaved bonito, toasted sesame seeds, or whatever else piques your fancy.  Scoff if you like but I know what I know.