Homework

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.

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)

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.

‘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.

For cream-style soups, don’t just dump in soy milk willy-nilly.  The texture suffers.  A better bet is to use soymilk that’s diluted by about half with broth, and thicken as desired either with a roux, or with breadcrumbs, a handful of rice, or some peeled potato — with these last three,  just simmer until the starch disintegrates.

For casseroles, the vegan cream-style soup-in-a-boxes are not bad for the most part.  I’m not always keen on the soups as soups, but if you want a nondairy tuna noodle hotdish, vegan cream of mushroom soup is totally the way to go.

You can approximate a “cheese sauce” without dairy by making a “roux” of margarine or oil and nutritional yeast, then adding (unsweetened, unflavored!) soy milk or other milk substitute until it is the thickness you want.  Season with mustard, nutmeg, sauteed or roasted garlic, caramelized onions, black pepper, etc.  It’s not cheese, but it’s not bad, and you can get pretty close to a mac and cheese mouthfeel with it if you tinker around some.  It’s a good thing to have in your hip pocket for those times when comfort food is not optional.

Nutritional yeast is also your answer to cheese-flavored snack foods: mix about a half cup of nutritional yeast with a couple tablespoons of garlic powder and onion powder, some sweet paprika, some ground Aleppo pepper if you like a little heat, a little ground celery seed, and salt to taste.  Sprinkle over popcorn or roasted cauliflower or whatever else you like.  It’s an outstanding popcorn topping and may help you forget cheesey poofs and Smartfood.

News Flash: The Creamy Salad Dressing of your Dreams Has Always Been Dairy-Free.  Hollyhock Dressing is made as follows… 1 cup olive oil + 1/3 cup water + 1/3 cup cider vinegar or balsamic vinegar + 1/3 cup regular soy sauce + 1 cup nutritional yeast + whiz in blender until creamy and smooth = OMGdelicious.  Up the ante by adding as much fresh raw or roasted garlic as you think you might enjoy.  Me, I will often use an entire bulb of garlic for a batch of this stuff, but of course it depends on how hot the garlic is.  This dressing is also outrageously good with potatoes, and other veggies, especially roasted ones.  And it’s orgasmic with fresh tomatoes.

Pizza is still good without cheese.  Adding lots of high-flavor ingredients, like chopped pickled peppers, anchovies (if you eat fish), olives, onions, roasted garlic, and the like makes it work even better.  My favorite pizza, made by my local Egyptian pizzeria, is called the Dahb, and consists of their chewy, wheaty, out-of-this-world crust topped with roasted marinated eggplant slices, chopped red slightly hot pickled peppers, black olives, sliced garlic, and chopped sun-dried tomatoes.  It’s toe-curlingly good.

In Italy, cheese is not sprinkled over every damn pasta dish in the world like we tend to do here.  My advice is to make sure your sauce stands on its own, buy or make really good fresh pasta, and enjoy it like they do in the old country.  We’re almost at pasta puttanesca season…

Pesto without cheese is fantastic.  I make it with pecans, basil, garlic, oil, and salt, and it’s divine.  Also, you can make other pestos.   Pesto di noci — walnuts, parsley, marjoram, garlic — is trad Ligurian voluptuousness and well worth your time.

Oh, and even though I probably didn’t need to mention it: most Southeast Asian cuisines don’t cook with milk, traditionally.  There are occasional exceptions, but for the most part, you can eat your way through Chinese (esp. southern), Japanese, Thai, Malay, Cambodian, Myanmarese, Vietnamese, Hmong, Laotian, Indonesian, and other cuisines of the region without a hitch.  The dairy tends to come in when you get into the steppes and herding territory: Nepal, Tibet, Mongolia, Bhutan.

Indian food is tricky; Indian food that is not Traditional Indian Restaurant Outside Of India menu food is easier and there are vastly more options if you cook it yourself than if you’re depending on a restaurant to do it for you.  Do note that tofu will sub for paneer in most applications, and that coconut milk will do nicely for dairy milk in many cases.  Southern Indian coconut milk payasam — a near relative of the rice pudding called kheer — will make you very happy indeed.

Goodness, Wednesday dinnertime already?  That was how I felt when I walked into the kitchen tonight, with honestly no idea what to cook.  But I had boiled a batch of chickpeas yesterday, and we had a pound of kale in the fridge.  Beans love greens and greens love beans, but how to make it interesting?

The answer I came up with was to roast the chickpeas in a very hot oven, with lightly smashed whole garlic cloves, olive oil, and some crushed dried Aleppo pepper… and to braise the kale in a bit of water until it was tender… and to make a bit of a ragout that would bridge the two.  The ragout was a quick and dirty one, several onions caramelized with oil, with a handful of oil-packed anchovies, then the leftover half a can of diced tomatoes left over from Monday’s dinner.  Simmered for a while, they made a lovely chunky sauce that went well with both the kale and the chickpeas.

I think I may make it again.  On purpose, next time.

Doubtless you are all too upstanding to know where the phrase “stems and seeds” comes from. Suffice to say that it means to be scraping the bottom of one’s, er, stash.  Of comestibles, that is.  Bare-larder syndrome.  Lots of wide open spaces in the fridge.  You get the idea.

But a lot of good things can come of not having a lot of food in the house.

For one thing, you can go shopping in your cupboards and your freezer and such.  You should review what you have on hand regularly anyway, of course, but even the most diligent of us sometimes lose track of things.  I found two blocks of frozen tofu in the freezer earlier today while doing Things That Need Eating Up reconaissance.  I thawed them out, not having any idea what I’d do with them, but knowing that they’d be available later.

Freezing tofu is a fabulous process.  When you thaw it out later, you find that the tofu has toughened and become spongy, and you can squeeze out nearly all the water.  This makes tofu that is perfect for deep-frying or pan-frying.  With only the slightest dusting of cornstarch or potato flour or tapioca starch, you can make addictive crunchy tofu nuggets that can then be combined with lots of other things.

Like celery.  Stir-fried celery is a joy and a delight with a fantastic texture, assertive but not aggressive, capable of standing up to things like fermented black beans with no problem.  Among the few things left in the veggie drawer  — farmer’s market day is tomorrow — was a bunch of celery, so I sliced up half a dozen large stalks, stir-fried it in a dry wok with a little splash of water until it was bright green, and proceeded from there.

I also had some ground pork on hand.  It put me in mind of the other green vegetable I had in the bin, garlic chives.  It also put me in mind of the big bucket of kimchi I picked up the other day.  Kimchi  may be Korean but Chinese make pickled vegetable stirfries all the time. Including pickled spicy cabbage.  Fair’s fair, and besides, I figured the leftovers would be useful as a basis for a fried rice for tomorrow’s lunch.

I put some juju in it in the form of the half-bulb of garlic that didn’t go into the tofu and celery, and the last few tablespoonsful of my homemade sweet chili and garlic paste, of which more will need to be made soon.  Not too shabby, considering.

I admit, my idea of a mostly-empty fridge is not so empty as all that.  Things rarely get to that sorrowful stage where all that exists in the icebox is a half a lemon, some ketchup, some superannuated takeout now about three days from sentience, and a single pickle bobbing all alone in its jar.   If I were willing to go without fresh veg — which is about as likely as my being willing to go without oxygen — I could probably live off of what’s in the fridge for another week, though the meals would get odder and odder and I would eventually end up experimenting with almond butter and pickled okra canapes, which no one wants.  Throw in the contents of my pantry cupboard and things would get even weirder (there’s a lot of odd stuff in there, and a lot of coconut milk, which seems to reproduce on its own) but I could probably hold out against the zombies for a month.

I find it reassuring.  Too, there’s a certain frugal satisfaction in having no idea what to make for dinner, being at the end of the fresh veg supply, and nevertheless being able to root around in your own kitchen and come up with a meal that is filling and reasonably healthy, high on the vegetable quotient, and honestly pretty delicious.  I love my wok for many reasons, but one of the big ones is how easy it makes pulling together meals like this one.

I’m a mostly improvisational cook. I read cookbooks like other people read novels, as a leisure activity, but rarely refer to them while I’m cooking. Now and then I cook someone else’s recipe precisely as written, but I mostly use other folks’ ideas and methods as platforms upon which to build.

For years I was told that while this was a reasonable approach to take to savory cooking, it was the precisely wrong approach to take to baking. Cooking is an art, as the saying goes, baking is a science. Dozens of cookbooks, and dozens of cooks, told me that baking was too finicky, relied too much on precise chemistry and physics, for it to be played by ear.

In some cases this is completely true. I strongly suspect that the more formal and Continental the baking, the truer it is. It’s unlikely that you’ll get good results out of laminated doughs without carefully measuring the ratio of fat to flour, and I can attest from personal experience that tweaking a genoise recipe the wrong way can mean that the batter will go straight from liquidy glop to shaggy hunks without passing, even for a moment, through the desired state known as au ruban.

But not all baking is this way. What’s more, as an historian it is plain to me that baking hasn’t always been an exact science because technologically it could not have been. There was a rather long time that delicious baked goods coexisted with a complete lack of things we now take for granted like thermometers, ovens with thermostat-regulated heat, calibrated measuring cups and spoons, and industry-standardized ingredients.  Recipes for baked goods, like all recipes, had instructions like “add butter the size of an egg with four egg yolks and a glass of sugar, beat for three paternosters.”  If our ancestors could turn out tasty results whilst measuring by eye and beating for the length of time it took them to say a particular prayer a few times, well, let’s just say there’s more leeway in baking than some people want you to think.

Armed with this insight, I’ve let myself do a fair bit of improvisatory baking in the past few years. I wouldn’t have dared if I didn’t already have a lot of experience with baking from recipes, and a fairly solid knowledge of what many different kinds of batters and doughs are supposed to look, taste, and feel like. Knowing what you’re going for and roughly what will get you there is the backbone of any improvisatory cooking.  That’s why there are some kinds of baked goods–tuiles, croissants, panettone–I would never try to improvise even though I do not doubt for a second that there are more skilled bakers than I who could improvise them successfully. I play fast and loose only with ones I know from experience are likely to be forgiving of my wayward instinctive “throw stuff in until it looks and tastes right” cooking methodology. Quick breads, sheet cakes, yeast breads, and drop cookies are the sorts of baked goods I improvise the most, with the best and most consistent luck.

One of the doughs I love to improvise on is brioche. Sweet, eggy, buttery, it’s a cousin of challah and all the eggy Eastertide breads. Brioche properly has its own method and its own proportions, but I think of it as also being a family of doughs. You can use versions of a “brioche” dough for lots of things. One of which is a crowd-pleasing faux-braid filled with a mixture of neufchatel (or cream cheese, if you prefer it even richer) and preserves. It’s sort of the cherry-cheese danish principle, applied to a loaf of bread.

This one does actually have cherry preserves folded up inside it, mixed with the neufchatel.  I made the dough with a combination of wheat, barley, and oat flours, with some maple syrup and of course eggs and butter and yeast and salt.

Like most fruits, cherries darken when they’re cooked. The bright neon red you see in cherry danishes and commercial cherry pies is Red Dye No. 3, not anything that comes from actual fruit.  If I’d wanted a more vibrant and truer color in this,  I probably would’ve gone with tangerine marmalade or perhaps blueberry or elderberry preserves.

Another dough that bears up well under experimental conditions is a basic tea bread. Most sweet fruit and vegetable tea breads have a similar basis, and they can be tweaked easily into multiple formats with almost any flavorings or additions you like. Sometimes, when I end up with leftover bananas, I make something that is more or less a cross between banana bread, banana cake, and a fruit slump or pan dowdy: banana-bread batter thinned slightly with milk or soy milk and an extra egg, poured into a flat pan rather than a loaf pan and topped with liberal quantities of fresh or frozen berries or sliced fruit.

I call it Banana Situation, as in “oh geez, I really have got to do something about the banana situation before they rot.” Depending on what other fruit you use, it can be hyphenated accordingly.   Banana-Peach Situation is particularly nice.  This right here is Banana-Blueberry Situation.

No recipes were consulted and no measuring cups dirtied in the making of these baked goods. And they came out just fine in spite of it.