Homework

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.

This is one of those dinners that is not for the kind of person who is afraid of mixing things on the plate.  I caramelized zucchini in a tablespoon of olive oil with whole cloves of garlic — a medium heat, with infrequent stirring and a good stout pan, will get it done in a reasonable amount of time — and then fried two eggs over easy in the residual oil left in the pan.  After breaking the yolks, I ate the garlic and zucchini with yolk and bits of eggwhite and some black pepper.  Sublime, especially because I made a nice cucumber salad to chase it with.  The salad is a riff on the cucumber salad from Friday last, only since I had no cilantro left I used some onions pickled in rice vinegar that were lingering in the back of the fridge.  Salt-fermented chiles add a little dimension and floral heat.  A fine contrast to rich eggyolk and unctuous-yet-nicely-crusted zucchini and garlic.

These tomato babies were hanging out in their fetching green hats, soaking up the sun when I went out in the garden a little while ago.

Ushi likes to watch over the garden and supervise me while I work.

I’m dining alone tonight, my Belovedary down at Camden Yards watching the Orioles lose.  It’s a nice night for it.

Dining alone can be a challenge.  Even I sometimes get tempted not to bother cooking if it’s just me, especially when I am, as I am tonight, working late on a deadline.

I try, though, to do it anyway.  Gently, as a kindness, and not grumpily and rushed as if it were an insult to have to get some food into edible condition for my own continued upkeep.

The summer’s first slim zucchini, gently sauteed in olive oil with plenty of garlic and a pinch or so of dried crushed marjoram and oregano.  That’s the secret of zucchini that is meltingly tender but not disintegrating: slow, gentle sauteeing, not too much movement in the pan, use enough oil, and let things brown just a little to bring out the sweetness and provide a tiny bit of structurally crucial crust.

Eggs scrambled over a low heat with a couple handfuls of thinly chopped fat ends of sweet new green onions mixed in.

Salt, pepper, a glass of cold, smooth, friendly Vouvray that’s almost too sweet for this meal.

Here’s to solitude.

To serve one very hungry person or two less-hungry people (perhaps with the addition of some other dish), prepare the following as mise-en-place:

• about a cup of cold leftover rice, broken up with a fork
• about a cup to a cup and a half of kimchi, very well drained, and cut into reasonably uniform bite-size pieces
• one egg, thoroughly beaten
• one half of an onion, diced
• 1-2 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
• 1 teaspoon each oyster sauce and sesame oil, combined
• additional egg
• neutral cooking oil

To make the dish, heat a little bit of neutral oil in a wok or a largish frying pan until it is almost smoking.  Cook the scrambled egg and remove it from the pan, then shred it or cut it into strips.  Set aside.

Reheat the pan and add another small bit of oil if it seems to need it.  Add the onion and garlic and stirfry until fragrant and very slightly browned, then add the rice.  Toss well and continue to stir-fry until the rice begins to color in a few places.  Remove the rice/onion/garlic mixture from the pan and set aside.

Add kimchi to the hot pan and stir-fry several minutes until hot.  While it is cooking, heat a small frying pan on another burner over a medium flame, add a little oil, just enough to put a film over the bottom of the pan, and begin frying the additional egg.

Add the rice mixture and scrambled egg shreds to the kimchi, toss, add the oyster sauce and sesame oil, and stir-fry, mixing thoroughly.  When everything is thoroughly combined and hot — this should take only a minute or two — remove it and put it in a serving bowl.

The fried egg should be just about done by now.  If you want it over easy, flip it for a couple seconds, whatever moves you.  Place the egg on top of your fried rice.

Eat and be happy.  This is a fine and easy dinner that is very good if you are feeling somewhat dented and want comforting.

For those of you who are still unconvinced that delicious, home-cooked dinners with local ingredients are out of your reach due to time constraints, let me just tell you that our dinner tonight took me a grand total of 15 minutes start to finish to prepare.  And that includes the time it took to go out to the garden and pick the baby chard.

A classic in the “greens with proteiny things on top” genre is the bowl of greens topped with fried egg.  Egg yolk, with a little salt and pepper, is one of the best salad dressings you can eat.  (Coddled egg, in fact, is the heart of every proper Caesar salad dressing.)  I prefer my eggs over easy.  There are several nearby egg farmers whose eggs I use, these eggs came from Broom’s Bloom Dairy in Bel Air, Maryland, 30 miles door-to-door from my house.  They also sell at my two local farmer’s markets, which is where I buy their eggs.  The baby chard, as I say, came from my kitchen garden.

Just so’s you know, you can top virtually any green vegetable with fried egg and it will be delicious.  Steamed or sauteed kale, raw or stir-fried spinach, steamed or roasted asparagus, raw or wilted chicory or endive, lettuces of whatever kind you like best, lightly-cooked broccoli, pea shoots, sorrel, beet greens, arugula, or my secret love, radish greens… greens love eggs and vice versa and you will love them together.

We also ate these beautiful maple-ginger bison sausages from the wonderful Nathan Stambaugh at Gunpowder Bison.  Gunpowder Bison is 25 miles north of me and their products are truly top-notch.

Delicious.  And so simple and quick.

I wanted protein, and I got it.

Smoked tofu, crisped up by stir-frying it in smoking hot oil, then stir-fried with broccoli and seasoned with black bean-chili sauce.  We ate every scrap.

One of our standbys, eggs with chives.  I had a bunch of leftover egg whites to use up, so I made this with mostly whites plus one whole egg.  I added some oyster sauce to the beaten eggs.  The two ingredients have a remarkable affinity.

The theme for this evening’s cookery turned out to be Dishes That Require Four Ingredients. I didn’t plan it this way, it just turned out like that. Still, it’s nice to have simple good things up your sleeve, isn’t it?

For my actual supper, I was jonesing for greens so I ate a huge bowl of one of the most addictive kale dishes I’ve ever come across. I learned it from a good friend of mine who is, in addition to being a brilliant anthropologist, a phenomenal cook. She in turn cribbed it from a Thai restaurant, because she’s smart like that. Since learning this dish I have become kind of obnoxious about it and push it on everyone I know. They don’t mind, though, because it’s really that good.

Lemon-Sesame Kale

1 pound kale, cleaned, stripped from the stems, and torn into bite-size pieces
julienned or grated zest and juice of 2 lemons
2 Tablespoons Asian sesame oil
2 Tablespoons soy sauce

Steam the kale until it is just tender. Remove from the steamer, giving it a good shake as you do to remove any excess water. Toss with the lemon zest and juice, sesame oil, and soy sauce. Taste and correct the seasonings if needed. Eat.

For most people, this is probably not a complete dinner in and of itself, but then again, most people are unlikely to eat the entire thing in one go. I, on the other hand, am a kaleoholic, and am more than happy, upon occasion, to eat a pound of kale and call it supper.

I also did a little recipe testing tonight that sufficed for a very fine dessert. For the Mother’s Day brunch I’m cooking, I’ll be serving lemon and lime bars, so I wanted to remind myself of the go-to recipes I’ve used in the past for both citrus curd and shortbread, in case I want to change anything between now and the brunch. I may not — these taste pretty good.

Basic Citrus Curd

1 cup strained fresh lemon, lime, or other citrus juice
1 cup granulated sugar
8 egg yolks + 4 whole eggs
8 Tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into chunks

In a double boiler over simmering, but not boiling, water, whisk together the juice, sugar, egg yolks, and eggs until smooth, then stir gently until the mixture thickens to about the consistency of mayonnaise. This will take about 10 minutes.

If the mixture starts to form lumps, whisk ferociously and reduce the heat, and you should be able to save it. These are eggs you’re working with here. Too high a heat and you will have sweet lemon-flavored scrambled eggs. So just relax and take your time and do it over a simmer and you’ll be fine.

When the mixture has thickened, remove the inner part of the double boiler from the outer and place it on a bed of ice cubes. Add several chunks of butter and stir in until melted, at which point add more butter and repeat until all butter is incorporated and the mixture is smooth. Pour out into a scrupulously clean container, cover with plastic wrap (press the plastic wrap down onto the surface of the curd to prevent a skin forming), and refrigerate until thoroughly chilled.

Extra Credit: Strain the curd through a fine sieve before refrigerating. This will remove any of the small bits of chalazae — the membranes that serve as tethers for the yolk, holding it in place inside the shell — that might present as little chewy lumps in your citrus curd. Alternately, pour the uncooked eggs through a sieve before you start, which will do the same thing preemptively.

Simple Shortbread

The ratio for a simple shortbread is this: for each 8 Tablespoons of salted slightly softened butter, use one cup all-purpose flour and one half cup powdered sugar, plus one teaspoon vanilla extract.

The method, and let me tell you up front that you want an electric mixer for this, is to beat the butter until it is reasonably pliable, then add the flour, sugar, and vanilla and beat hell out of it until it comes together as a stiff dough. Trust me, it will happen, even though it doesn’t seem like it will at first. Do not yield to the temptation to add water, we are not making pie crust here.

Turn the dough out onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper (or if you have Silpat liners, this is the time to use them) and roll 1/4 inch thick. Prick all over with a fork, which will release steam as the shortbread bakes.

Bake in a preheated 300F oven until the shortbread is golden brown and lovely. How long this takes will depend on how large a batch of shortbread you have made. Half an hour is probably the minimum, though, and it may take longer if you have made a large batch.

Remove from the oven, let stand 5 minutes, and cut while still warm into pieces of the desired size. Shortbread does not cut gracefully once it has cooled completely so strike while the iron is hot.

To make lemon bars, lime bars, blood orange bars, kumquat bars, grapefruit bars, or whatever other kind of citrus bars you fancy, simply cut the shortbread into bars, let it cool completely, then top each one with a layer of curd made with the relevant sort of juice. Sprinkle with powdered sugar if you like, though it isn’t really necessary.

If you want to get fancy-schmancy, convert your citrus curd into citrus mousse by folding a cup of it into a cup of heavy cream that has been whipped to stiff peaks, and make a lovely plated dessert with a slab of shortbread topped with a heavenly billow of mousse. A sprinkling of berries and perhaps a curl or two of citrus zest would be lovely, no?