In Sicily, they haven’t always had much to eat.  But one thing they’ve always had a pretty steady supply of is sardines.  Another is garlic.   A third, mirabile dictu, is pasta.  A fourth is olive oil.  Put these things together, with whatever other interesting things you have lying around the place, and believe it or not, you have the sturdy skeleton of a very fine meal.

Many Americans I know have an essentially religious aversion to sardines.  They don’t like anchovies either, or herring, or mackerel, or other fishy-tasting, fishy-smelling, oily little delicious fish. Occasionally they’ve never even tasted any of them, but they’re sure they don’t like them anyway.

Well, too bad for the ‘fraidy-cats, because not only are all these small fish tremendously good for you (hello, vitamins A and D! nice to see you, omega oils!) but they are tasty and versatile and will make your belly, your pantry, your conscience, and your pocketbook all pretty darn happy.  Your pocketbook will be happy because they are cheap.  Your conscience will appreciate that these are reasonably plentiful fish, and easy to find in sustainably harvested versions.  Your pantry will be happy because sardines (and anchovies, and kippered herring, and many other things of this ilk) are available in high quality tinned versions, you can buy a half dozen tins when you’re feeling flush and then sock them away, just like you do with dried pasta, to use them at your leisure.

Buy sardines packed in oil for this.  (Buy anchovies packed in oil, and in glass, always.  It’s like a whole different fish from the tinned kind.)  I like the Portuguese Lusa brand sardines, or Vital Choice brand packed in extra virgin olive oil.

The method is pretty simple.  Put some pasta water on to boil.  While you’re waiting, chop some parsley.  How much?  Oh, a couple handfuls.  Maybe you’ll chop up a few ripe olives too, if you have them.

When the water’s ready, you cook yourself some pasta.  What kind?  What kind have you got?  Things like farfalle work well, but so does spaghetti.

While the pasta is cooking, saute up some sliced garlic, probably with a thinly sliced onion or two.  Throw in some shredded fennel if you have some, or shredded chard, or a couplefew handfuls of kale or what you’ve got in the way of greens with personality.  Don’t burn the garlic, capisce?  Just soften everything up, maybe get a little brown on the garlic.   Maybe you add a small glass of white wine, maybe you don’t.  (Depends on what you have, and whether the bottle’s already open.)  If you do, cook most but not all of the liquid off.  When you’re done cooking it, take it off the heat and set it aside.

Drain the oil off of two cans of nice sardines.  Break the sardines up into large chunks with a fork.  Don’t mash them, just chunk ‘em up a little.

When the pasta’s done, drain the pasta, toss with the sauteed garlic and other veg, then add the sardines and the parsley and toss gently.  If you want a real Siciliano feel to this, a handful of raisins (scoff if you like but the Sicilians know a thing or two about raisins that you might wanna learn), a handful or two toasted pine nuts, and a handful or two of coarse bread crumbs browned in olive oil.  Maybe a scattering of fennel seeds.

Or instead you can throw in a handful of capers, and some lemon zest, a little extra-virgin olive oil, and a good squeeze of fresh lemon juice.

Or a bit of Aleppo pepper and some spicy Greek oregano if you want to keep it real simple.

Toss gently.  Serve with a salad or some plain steamed or grilled dark greens.  Partners well also with egg, and asparagus, with ricotta salata, and with cucumber salads. Do not be afraid to drink red wine with this, if the spirit moves you.  Or perhaps a Sicilian insolia for a white (yes, there are white Sicilian wines).

Takes about as long as it does to boil the water and boil the pasta.

No fear.  And no excuses.

                          

It came to me this morning while I was rolling out dough for Nancy Silverton’s awesomesauce graham cracker recipe (make them with whole wheat pastry flour!) that I had a sizeable two year old bottle of homemade limoncello in the cupboard and that at the rate we drink, it was likely to continue being there until it was old enough to vote.

It further occurred to me that I had a box of empty, clean small blue glass bottles, with screwtop lids, in the cellar, from some bygone experiment in bottling my own seasoning oils (verdict: need different lids, sesame oil and mixtures containing it “travel” as if by magic and get absolutely everywhere).

I put the first and second together and now we have 16 small blue glass bottles full of what turns out to be a nice mellow not overly sweet two year old homemade limoncello.  A little more effort and rummaging around the house and they all had labels and little scraps of ribbon around the necks.

What this means is that my Belovedary has wee gifties for all his work people, and we have wee gifties for the kinds of frequently-encountered people for whom one ends up needing to produce wee gifties.  Effectively for free.

As a result of this round of successful impromptu householderly resourcefulness, I shall purchase quite a bit of vodka tomorrow and use it to turn the syrup left over from the weekend’s candying of five pounds of ginger into a ginger liqueur that perhaps we can pass out next year.

Why have I been candying five pounds of ginger?  Because when you candy your own, you can cook it down so that the sugar caramelizes just the slightest bit, and the heat of the ginger mellows a little, and it’s so, so, so much more nuanced and interesting than the sometimes harsh, all-in-front sugar bomb of the commercial kind.  It’s an involved project and takes a substantial amount of time, though mostly you can ignore it as it simmers; my batches usually take most of two days of cooking time.  I usually end up doing it only every other year, partly for this reason.  Because it does take so long, you might as well not bother unless you’re going to do enough to make it worth the while.  Go big or go home, as they say.

Should you wish to candy your own ginger, you will require peeled fresh ginger root, cut into whatever sorts of chunks or slices you favor, and a sufficient quantity of sugar syrup that the ginger can swim about freely in its hot sticky bath.  Make a syrup at a ratio of 6 cups sugar to 2 cups water.  Simmer the syrup, stirring regularly, until it clarifies, and add the ginger.  Bring back to a low simmer and cook until the ginger is how you like it.  I like it cooked enough so that the thickest slices (about as thick as my pinkie finger) are translucent and the syrup has turned a clear golden brown, roughly orange-blossom honey color.  The syrup will cook down somewhat and become thicker as the process goes along; if it becomes too thick too quickly, add some boiling water and turn your heat down under the pot.

If you find you have more cooking to do than day to do it in, just cover the pot, turn off the heat, and let the ginger sit in the syrup.  Heat it up again the next day (low flame please) and you’re back in business.

Dry the candied ginger on wire racks over some sort of drip-catcher for 12-24 hours, then toss with granulated sugar to “sand.”  Alternately, pack the candied ginger in its syrup in clean, nonreactive jars or pots and cover tightly.

Whatever syrup you have left over you may combine to your tastes with vodka or other neutral spirits, to make ginger liqueur.  Pour it into clean bottles and let it age for a few months, then strain through a cloth, correct the sugar if needed, pour it back into (clean) bottles, and let it sit a little longer.   The longer it sits, the smoother it gets.  You can make liqueurs using the syrup left over from candying any fruit.

Do we think ginger liqueur wants to be acquainted with lemon zest, tangerine zest, a little cinnamon, and perhaps a clove or two?  I think I kinda do.

                          

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.

                          

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.

                          

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)

                          

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.

                          

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.

                          

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 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.