Homework

It’s not quite fall yet, but it’s getting closer.  Rosh Hashanah is imminent, Eid is just days away.  It seemed like time for a babka.

Babka is not quite cake and not quite bread.  I make my babka with my standard challah dough.  For each loaf I start a teaspoon and a half of dry yeast in a mixture of 1 cup of warm milk (or unflavored, unsweetened soy or almond milk), 6 Tablespoons of melted butter or (non-olive) oil, and 3 Tablespoons of honey.  Give it 10 minutes or so to come to life, then add two beaten eggs and mix well.  Mix in all-purpose unbleached flour until you have a smooth, elastic, but still fairly wet dough: it should stick to your hands a bit, and to the bowl.  Knead it for about 20 minutes, then form into a ball and put in a covered bowl to double, which will take an hour or two depending on how warm your room is.

When the dough is doubled, punch it down and let it rest for ten minutes or so while you do two things:

• heavily grease and flour your pan, either a large loaf pan or a medium-sized souffle dish, which is what I used for this babka (and when I say “heavily” I do mean heavily, if you think you’re overdoing it you’re just about right)
• and prepare, for each loaf, a double ration of King Arthur Flour’s Baker’s Cinnamon Filling (1/2 cup filling mix, 2 T water).

I do not often recommend prepared ingredients, as regular readers of this blog will know, but KAF’s baker’s helpers are of very high quality and they do exactly what they promise.  In this case, you end up with a cinnamon filling that stays put a lot better than any I have ever made on my own from recipes, I suspect due to the combination of superfine sugar and dried shortening in very very tiny particles.  It gives a good flavor, a good texture, and it doesn’t all ooze out all over the place, as you can see from the closeup above.

On a heavily floured surface, roll out the dough into a rectangle about two feet long and perhaps 10 inches wide.  Spread thinly with the cinnamon mixture and roll it up the long way, so you end up with a two-foot-long rope.  Slice it into rounds about 1 1/2 inches-2 1/2 inches wide with a sharp knife.

At this point you could choose to fit the rounds into a rectangular baking pan on their sides, and bake them as cinnamon rolls, or you can proceed with the babka, which means packing them in several layers into your prepared pan, with the rolls oriented in multiple directions so the spirals of cinnamon go in different directions through the completed loaf.   Leave a fair bit of space between individual chunks of dough so they can rise and moosh into one another.   Half as much space between chunks as the dough chunk is wide seems to be about right.  Make at least two layers of dough chunks in the pan.

Cover loosely and let rise until doubled.  Once doubled, preheat the oven to 350F, and when the oven is at heat, brush the top of the babka with an egg wash (egg scrambled with a tablespoon of cold water) and, if desired, sprinkle with either your favorite streusel or, as I did here, with pearl sugar.

Bake until thoroughly golden brown on top and done throughout, about 45 minutes to 1 hour, depending on how many layers are in your loaf.  Let cool in the pan for 15 minutes, then turn out and finish cooling on a wire rack.

Serve as a coffee cake, for breakfast, for dessert, or just eat several healthy slabs of it with a couple of glasses of milk like my Belovedary just did and call it supper.

I understand why many people don’t care for okra: it’s slimy.  Or at least it has that tendency.  Even while you’re just trimming it, it exhibits an alarming capacity for oozing a clear sticky substance that sort of splits the difference between Superglue, dog drool, and spider silk.  The bits you pare away often stick quite staunchly to the knife blade.  Or your fingers.  Or the cutting board.  Or the scraps bowl.

When you cook okra with moist heat, as when you put it into a gumbo, for instance, this sliminess becomes more pronounced.  In gumbo, it becomes a thickener, part of what gives gumbo its characteristic texture. In other applications, well, it’s just slimy.  Oozy.  Sticky.  It reminds even me — and I like okra — of the rather amazing microbial cavedwelling life forms known as snottites.

What many folks don’t know is that okra can be prepared to be slimeless.  One way is to pickle it.  The acid counteracts the slime.  I don’t pickle okra myself, I buy it in jars made by the good people at Talk o’ Texas, who are not just whistlin’ Dixie when they claim their pickled okra is crisp.  I like the hot kind, but the mild isn’t bad either.

The other way you can make slimeless okra is to cook it very very fast over very very high heat, with no added liquid at all, in the style of a classic “dry” Chinese stir-fry.  That’s what I usually do.  Sometimes I flavor it in Chinese ways, other times I flavor it in Indian/Bengali/Pakistani ways.  So  I don’t know if this is an actual recipe in Bengali cookery, it may well be. To me, it is the application of a Chinese technique to Bengali flavors and oh, is it tasty. And not the tiniest bit slimy.  It’s all about the intensity of heat and the absence of water.

You must have small, thin okra pods for this to work.  Larger woodier ones will not cook quickly enough and will become slimy from their own internal water being cooked.

About 1 pound cleaned, trimmed small fresh okra pods
2 medium onions, diced
3 Tablespoons or so minced fresh ginger root
about 2 Tablespoons panch phoran
about a half teaspoon ground turmeric
one or two fresh hot chilis, minced (optional)
salt
juice of one very juicy or two not so juicy limes
a couple of handfuls of cilantro, coarsely chopped
neutral cooking oil or ghee

Cook over a high brisk flame at all times. Heat enough oil/ghee to coat the bottom of the pan in a heavy large pan, big enough to accept all the okra in a single layer. WHen it is almost smoking, add the onion and ginger and cook until the onion is thoroughly brown but not burnt. Add the panch phoran, turmeric, and hot chilis if using, and stir-fry until the mustard seeds in the panch phoran begin to pop. Add okra and toss to coat the okra with the oil. Fry, stirring frequently, until okra is just soft, about 5-7 minutes in all. Add the cilantro and toss, stirfry for about a minute, and dump in the lime juice, stirring just enough to deglaze the pan. Salt to taste and serve.

I think everyone should, at least once in a while, harvest their own food.  Even if you don’t grow it yourself, it’s worth getting out there in a field or an orchard somewhere and harvesting what you’ll eat.  Ideally, you should do enough of it to get a little tired, and a little bit wishing you were done already, so that it doesn’t feel entirely like A Pleasant Rustic Playacting Adventure but instead you get inside the work of harvesting enough to get it that this is a job, an absolutely necessary job, and like all jobs, something that you sometimes just have to get done whether the spirit moves you or not.

I also highly recommend going out to pick when it is raining, or when the sun and/or the bugs are ferocious.  A little sunburn and eyes that have been stinging with sweat, a proper selection of insect bites, or a good goose-bumped chilled ride home with your goodies, will help you remember later on that the food does not arrive magically at the store or on your plate.  It’s about gratitude, and remembering that you have a bunch of people to thank for everything you eat that you weren’t personally responsible for growing and harvesting and transporting.

This morning, we went out in the rain to pick blackberries.  It was my Belovedary’s birthday yesterday, and he wanted to go berrying, and since we are neither of us sweet enough to melt and we planned to use the fruit immediately after we got it home, we figured picking in the wet would be okay.  Which it was.  It was quiet and lush and very, very wet, and we picked ten pounds of berries and got soaked to the skin.

We brought our berries home, along with some red raspberries and some peaches from the same you-pick, and set about making blackberry pie and blackberry sorbet.  The day being as warm and wet as it was, the pie crust completely refused to behave, but I’m of the school that says it can be ugly as long as it tastes good, so I persevered.  I even took a photo, because I recall some of you folks were curious about what a pie bird looks like in use.  This is what a pie bird looks like when it’s in an ugly, patchworky, lumpy blackberry pie.

We also ate several bowls of berries plain, between the two of us.  There’ll be no scurvy in this household anytime soon, that much is for sure.

With the rest, we made blackberry sorbet.  Blackberry puree, creme de gingembre, a little lime juice, a little agave syrup, a little slug of vanilla extract, and it’s the most lovely fruity mellow thing, with a great texture and a gorgeous color.

Tomorrow it’s back to work with both of us, but we’ll have sorbet and pie to look forward to when we get home, and that’s no small thing.

Once you’ve got your supply of shelled, washed, cooked beans, what next?

There are so many options it’s honestly hard to know where to begin, but here are two of my favorites.

For beans that will lend themselves readily to Tex-Mex, Cajun, and many Southeastern US style meals, stew your cooked beans with a large quantity of minced onion, sauteed in some plain oil (peanut or canola or whatever) with a somewhat smaller quantity of bell pepper and a similar quantity of celery, a few crushed cloves of garlic, and a little cayenne or other spicy pepper.  Sautee all the veggies first until the onions are transparent and soft, then add the beans and enough water or broth to just barely cover the beans.  Simmer until about half of the water has cooked off.  This will give the flavorings time to penetrate the beans, and vice versa.  Salt, stir, then wait 10 minutes, and taste and add more salt if it needs it. To further Tex-Mexicanize this method, add ground cumin.

My favorite way to eat beans as cooked above is in a bowl, topped with an approximately equal volume of fresh homemade pico de gallo or salsa of whatever kind I happen to have made lately.  Today’s salsa is diced Tula Black and Pink  Brandywine tomatoes from the garden, lots of onion and garlic, two huge bunches of cilantro diced fine, salt, lemon juice, and three fresh ripe guajillo chiles and one fresh ripe tientsin chili from my garden.  It’s awful tasty.   My second favorite way to eat beans cooked like this is with hot cornbread.

For beans that will make your imaginary Italian granddad smile, stew the beans with a moderate quantity of minced onion sauteed until just turning brown in a generous sufficiency of good olive oil, then add a couple of cloves of sliced garlic and several large fresh sage leaves cut into a chiffonade (roll the leaves up like a cigar, then slice across into thin threads).  Or use a slightly smaller amount of dried sage.  Sautee the onion, garlic, and sage until they smell awesome, then add the beans, and again, just enough water/broth to bring the water level up to the top of the beans.  Add a little salt and a little black pepper and simmer it down until the water is halfway gone.  Taste, correct the salt if need be.

If you like, you can toss beans prepared this way with a small shape pasta like farfalle or rotini.  Gild the lily with a little slosh more olive oil, and some chopped parsley, which are also nice even if you don’t have the pasta with it.  I also like sometimes to dribble a tiny bit of good balsamic vinegar (not the $2.99 crap) over the top of the beans.

We had a great big Hollywood-style summer storm early this morning, dark and windy, with plenty of thunder and a truly impressive sudden pounding rain.  After it had cleared I went out into the garden to check on things… and to pick up the windfall.

There were two more large tomatoes, in addition to these, but they didn’t all fit on the plate.  Later today I plan to make some pico de gallo and some salsa.  They’ll go with the mess of kidney beans I cooked up yesterday.  Mmmm, beans and fresh salsa!

Do you recognize the objects in this picture?  They look a little like bean pods, don’t they?  Not the nicest bean pods, perhaps.  A little dried-out looking, a little brown and spotty. Probably not good to eat. Or are they?

The little hints of red you can see in there might be a clue as to what’s really going on here.  These aren’t way over-the-hill green beans, as it happens.  They’re kidney beans.  If you have never encountered shelling beans still in their pods, it can be a little startling to realize that they start their lives looking quite different to what we think of when we think about kidney beans, or black beans or flageolets, or any other kind of shelling bean.

They look so different, in their raw and completely unprocessed state, in fact, that many people won’t buy them, afraid that they won’t know what to do with them.  That’s more or less why I ended up with these: a greengrocer friend gave me heaps of them earlier today because they’d been sitting unloved in her coolers for several weeks.  Ironically, the very customers who had told my greengrocer friend how much they loved beans and how they wished they could buy fresh local beans from her had simply not bought them.

When my friend told me a week or so ago that the beans weren’t getting purchased, I said “I bet customers are freaked out by the way they look.  I bet they don’t know what to do with beans that have to be shelled.”  Seems that I was right.  Which is her loss, but my gain, and as a thank-you, I’m  writing this little shelling bean tutorial, so that next time she sells shelling beans, she can point people to a blog post that explains what to do with these unpromising little podlets.

What you do is quite simple.  You sit down with a bowl, and a bowl or bag to toss the empty shells in, and you pull apart the pods with your fingers.

The pods are pretty sturdy.  If they are on the dry side, they will be leathery or cardboardy in texture.  If they are just off the vines, they will be woody but flexible.  Usually all you have to do is pinch the bean to open the seams up, then split down one seam or the other (or both!) with your finger, taking the beans with you.

Discard any beans that are discolored, moldy, extremely shriveled, or extremely tiny.  Throw the shells into the trash or onto your compost pile.

When you’ve shelled them all, give them a good wash in a colander and let them drain for ten or fifteen minutes.

Shelling beans is a fairly quick process.  I know it sounds tedious, but really it doesn’t take long at all.  I shelled almost five quarts of beans in about 40 minutes today, while hanging out in the kitchen with my Belovedary.  That is a lot of beans.  But still not a lot of work.

It’s worth doing large batches of bean-shelling and bean-cooking when you have the time, so that then you will have the beans available when you want them.  Beans can be frozen directly after shelling and washing, or you can freeze them after you cook them.

To cook fresh beans, put them into a large heavy pot or a slow-cooker on the high setting with an equal volume of cold water.  Boil until they are nice and soft all the way through, but not mushy.

You can eat them as-is once they are thoroughly cooked, or use them in recipes, just as you would use canned cooked beans.

A note about kidney beans/red beans:  Red and white kidney beans are high in haemagglutins, a class of chemicals that can cause a form of usually nonfatal but highly unpleasant poisoning whose symptoms include vomiting and diarrhea.  The way to avoid it is thorough cooking of the beans.  A minimum of ten minutes in which the entire pot of beans is at or above the boiling point of water — 212F, or 100C — takes care of it.  This is why if you cook them in a slow-cooker, you should cook them on the higher heat setting, not the lower, and ensure that things do boil properly.

Leftover salad is an unlovely thing.  What was sprightly and crisp, distinct and resilient becomes soft and tired, limp and worn.  If you have dressed the salad, especially, you can expect to find it the next morning in a swamp of its own juices, sodden and dispiriting.

The temptation is to just compost the lot of it.  There are some things even a guinea pig won’t eat.  But good fresh veg are expensive, and if you grow them yourself it seems even more insulting to just let the food go to waste.  It’s not spoilt, after all, it’s just… not very nice.

Enter the blender.  Why fight what is obviously the natural tendency of leftover salad to want to liquefy?  While the salad may no longer be very satisfying as salad, it can make a fantastic cold soup, a sort of gazpacho-y concoction that is, to tell the truth, not too dissimilar from eating a salad, except that now the liquid texture and the softness of the components have become an asset.

Last night I made salata horiatiki for a get-together, and having overestimated the number of mouths it might be likely to feed, I came home with a fair quantity of leftovers.  Salata horiatiki, for those now scratching their heads and wondering what fresh hell I’m up to with this fancy-pants foreign salad business, is just a rustic Greek village-style salad, usually composed of onion, tomato, cucumber, sweet peppers, and oregano, with a wine vinegar and olive oil dressing.  Usually it also has feta, sometimes ripe olives, sometimes little pickled hot peppers, peperoncini.  It’s an easy-peasy salad.  Chop everything up, toss it together, sprinkle your oregano over the top — I used the blossoms from my Greek oregano in the Forest of Unruly Herbs in the kitchen garden — a little salt, a little black pepper, and dress it with 1 part wine vinegar to 2 parts olive oil.   Quick and easy and delicious and, as you might expect from peasant food, uses up what’s fresh and abundant this time of year.  Perfect.

Not so perfect the next day, though.  But this need not worry you, as I discovered just this morning.  Put your leftover salad in the blender and press “transmogrify.”  (Or “puree,” if your blender somehow lacks a  “transmogrify” button.)  If it seems too thick, you can add a little water, or throw in another tomato or cucumber, as you like.  It makes a lovely soup, which you may, if you like, drink out of a tall glass as I just did, for your breakfast.

A nice thing to add are a few oil-packed anchovy fillets.  Let your conscience be your guide.  After you give them a whiz, though, you won’t notice anything like a HELLO I’M AN ANCHOVY flavor, but more a mysterious, profound savoriness that, as the good Rev. Sydney Smith wrote “half suspected, animate(s) the whole.”  (Even if he did say it about the onion.  The anchovy sauce, by contrast, he described as magic, and he was correct.  Who doesn’t need more magic in their life?)

Speaking of Rev. Smith, you do know the poem I refer to, don’t you?   Well, you do now.  It’s called “A Recipe For A Salad.”  It does make a very fine salad, too. should you choose to follow his instructions some time.  The recipe is actually for a salad dressing, so choose your greens and so on as you will, then proceed with the Rev. Smith.

To make this condiment, your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two hard-boiled eggs;
Two boiled potatoes,
passed through kitchen sieve,
Smoothness and softness to the salad give.

Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, half suspected, animate the whole.
Of mordant mustard add a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment that bites so soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault,
To add a double quantity of salt.

Four times the spoon with oil from Lucca crown,
And twice with vinegar procured from town;
And, lastly, o’er the flavored compound toss
A magic soupcon of anchovy sauce.

O, green and glorious! O herbaceous treat!
‘T would tempt the dying anchorite to eat:
Back to the world he’d turn his fleeting soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl!
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
“Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day.” –   Rev. Sydney Smith (1771–1845)

For lots of people, hot and sour soup is something that comes from Chinese restaurants, as if it were a magical commodity that could only be generated in those specific and exotic precincts.  (Perhaps from a special faucet, in the back.)

Fortunately for you — especially if you live somewhere that is not rich in good Chinese restaurants, or you have to avoid the MSG that is often added to stocks in inexpensive Chinese joints to make economically-made stocks taste richer, or you want a vegetarian version — it’s actually an easy soup to make at home.  Unlike a lot of other more delicate Chinese soups, it’s one that has the same fabulous keeping quality of Eastern European chicken soups: it’s good on the first day but best on the third.  Also unlike many Chinese soups, this one freezes beautifully.

It does require a few unusual ingredients, but none of them are expensive and all can be had at any Chinese market.   The “exotics” for this recipe are:

• dried lily buds — these are tigerlily buds, which you can pick and dry yourself if you have access to plants that are grown in areas that aren’t sprayed with pesticides and such.  You can also stir-fry fresh tigerlily buds if you have them.  They’re delicate and lovely.
• dried wood ear or cloud ear fungus, pre-shredded — cloud ear is more delicate in flavor than wood ear, but more expensive, as well.  I use wood ear more often than I use cloud ear so it’s what I usually have in the house.  Buy it in the shredded format, as it is something of a pain in the butt to slice up.  If you can’t get either one, any dried mushroom shredded into thin strips could go into this, but better something milder like oyster mushroom than something more intense like shiitake/black mushroom.  Ceps would be fine.
• toasted sesame oil
• black soy sauce or mushroom-flavored soy sauce, or, if you prefer, tamari  — I grab whichever bottle piques my fancy when I make it, since I usually have at least this many options in my condiments stash
• ground hot chiles in oil or other plain chili paste (optional)

Aside from these, everything you need is fairly ordinary.

• fresh ginger — friends don’t let friends cook with pre-minced ginger, right?  right.
• fresh garlic — see above
• firm tofu
• some pork, virtually any cut will do, but make sure it is flavorful
• eggs
• cider vinegar
• sugar
• scallions/green onions
• cornstarch or potato starch
• plain (or Chinese style) chicken or vegetable stock

A word about the chicken stock: do not use canned broth, even if it is labeled as “culinary stock,” or any convenience product designed to produce Western-style chicken broth.  These are all seasoned with things that are not part of a Chinese stock’s flavor profile, like carrot, celery, sage, bay leaf, marjoram, and so on.  You need to either buy or make a stock that consists either of plain  chicken and water, or make a Chinese-style stock.

A very simple, four-ingredient version of a Chinese-style stock is this:  put the bones and scraps from a couple of plain roasted chickens (which you save in a plastic container in the freezer for just such uses because you are sensible like that), into a large pot, along with at least another pound or two of healthy, uncooked, raw chicken parts.  Legs/thighs/backs/necks are best.  Cover with about 4 inches of cold water.  Add a couple handfuls of trimmed raw green onions/scallions, and a thumb-size piece of fresh ginger, peeled and whacked a few times with the back of a cleaver.  Bring this to a boil and immediately reduce the heat to a gentle simmer.  Simmer uncovered for about an hour, maybe a bit more.  Remove the solids.  If desired, pour the stock through a sieve lined with a clean wet (not dry) kitchen towel to strain and clarify it.  Given that hot-and-sour soup isn’t a clear soup anyway, I don’t bother if this is the only recipe for which the stock will be used.  Shred the meat and save it, either for the soup or for some other purpose.

This is a perfectly suitable stock for Hot and Sour soup, chicken and corn soup, or other soups where substantial quantities of other ingredients will be combining with the liquid.  If you were making stock for use in clear soups, or in egg flower soup, you would want to make a somewhat less primitive stock, more carefully seasoned, possibly with a mix of pork and chicken, and definitely clarified.

If you wish a vegetarian stock: The best vegetarian stock for this soup, in my opinion, is leftover water from soaking dried mushrooms, lily buds, and other savory but not salted dried produce.  Conveniently enough you will have a fair bit of this just from preparing the ingredients for this soup.  But if you are clever you will also regularly save your soaking waters in a container in the freezer.  You can also add pot liquors — if they are plain — from boiling or steaming many kinds of veg.  I recommend against pot liquors from cabbage-family things including broccoli, since these can get sulphurous, but others, very much including bean waters, are fine.  Strain the soaking water/pot liquors through a sieve lined with a wet clean tea towel or, if you have them around, through a paper coffee filter, to remove grit.  Bring to a simmer with a handful of cleaned, pared scallions and a goodish chunk of fresh ginger root, peeled and whacked with the back of a cleaver to loosen it up a little, then remove the solids, and you are ready to rock and roll.

METHOD

For each quart (or scant liter) of stock, you will require the following, on the understanding that all amounts are approximate and you can tweak them depending on your tastes:

1/4 cup shredded dried wood or cloud ear

1/4 cup dried lily buds

Because these are dried items, and a volume measurement (don’t get me started), there’s not a convenient way to convert these to metric measure.  A volume about equal to a large egg is what is wanted here, perhaps a little more.

3-4 cloves fresh garlic, crushed or minced fine

an equal amount by volume to the garlic of minced fresh ginger root

1/3 pound / 151 g pork, cut into medium dice or matchsticks, as you prefer

1/2 pound / 225 g firm tofu, cut into medium dice or matchsticks, as you prefer

1/2 cup/118 ml dry sherry

1/4 cup/ 60 ml apple cider vinegar (or white vinegar)

2 T  / 30 ml black soy or mushroom soy or tamari

3 T / 45 ml toasted sesame oil

2 T /28 g sugar

2 eggs

2 T / 28 g cornstarch or potato starch, mixed with about 1/3 cup / 79 ml cold water

a bit of cooking oil (not olive)

chili oil or paste (optional)

Step One:
Reconstitute the lily buds and the cloud/wood ears.  You need about 1/4 cup of shredded fungus per quart of stock.  Reconstitute them in separate bowls by pouring boiling water over them, waiting 20 minutes, draining them, and repeating the process.  Some recipes tell you to do this three times but I find twice is usually enough since you’ll be putting them into a liquid later.

Step Two:
Have your broth at a simmer, but not a boil.

Step Three:
While the dried ingredients soak, get your mise en place together.  Mince your garlic and ginger, cut your pork and tofu, chop your green onions/scallions.  Combine the sherry, vinegar, soy, and sesame oil with the sugar in a bowl, stirring until sugar is completely dissolved.  In a separate bowl, mix the cornstarch or potato starch with water until smooth and set aside.

Step Four:
Once the lily buds and the cloud/wood ears are reconstituted and drained and set aside, heat a large heavy frying pan or a wok until it begins to smoke.  Add a small amount of oil, just enough to film the bottom of the pan, and add the garlic and ginger.  Stir-fry until fragrant, then add the pork.  (If you are using the chicken meat from your stock-making, as I did tonight, add this as well.)  After about a minute, or when the pork is mostly opaque, add the lily buds and cloud ear and stir fry another minute or two.

Step Five:
Remove the stir-fried ingredients from the heat and add to the stock.  Add the tofu to the stock.  Add the mixture of seasonings to the stock.  Raise the heat under the soup and bring it just to the edge of the boil.

Step Six:
While you are bringing the soup up to a near boil, crack the eggs into a small bowl and beat them well.  As the soup hits the boil, begin to stir the soup so that you get all the contents of the pot moving in a smooth fashion.  Slowly pour in the egg while you stir.  The motion of the liquid will help create tender strands of egg.

Step Seven:
Once the egg is incorporated, check the thickness of the soup.  For some people, the egg is sufficient thickening and they do not wish a thicker soup.  For those of us who are used to American and Anglo-Chinese restaurant versions of the soup, further thickening may be desired.  Re-stir the cornstarch and water mixture, then repeat the same procedure you did with the egg, only using the cornstarch liquid instead.  This will avoid any clumping or uneven thickening.

Step Eight:
Allow to simmer an additional 4-5 minutes, then reduce heat or remove the flame entirely if you like.

You may serve the soup now, or you may add the chili paste or chili oil if you wish.  Remember that  you can always add more but once it’s in there, it’s in there for good, so proceed cautiously.  You may also add ground black or white pepper at this point if you like, to taste.

This produces a flavorful but pretty well-balanced soup.  Some people like it saltier or more sour, in which case I recommend adding soy/tamari or vinegar at the table rather than increasing the amount of soy/tamari or vinegar in the pot.

Note To Vegetarians: Obviously you will omit the pork.  I like to add additional wood/cloud ear when I am making a vegetarian version of this soup.  Also good is some shredded Napa cabbage.  Feel free to experiment.  I like it with cubes of steamed sweet potato in the bottom of the bowl; the sweetness is nice with the vinegar.

“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.