Homework

‘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.

This is a dish that falls squarely into the category that my friend Jeannette calls dolce far niente cooking.  Perfect for hot weather, it is light and cooling but has strong, invigorating flavor.  And, as the dolce far niente thing implies, it requires hardly any effort.

You’ll want a couple-few cucumbers, a healthy-sized bunch of cilantro (yes, cilantro is a vegetable, now hush), a couple cloves of garlic, and a hot chile or two of your preferred degree of heat.  Additionally you’ll need some salt, some rice vinegar, a little sesame oil, a colander, a bowl, and a knife.  Proportions may be varied to suit your tastes and the number of mouths you’re feeding.

Peel your cukes if the skins are thick or bitter, or not if they aren’t.  Seed them if they’re the kind with lots of watery seeds, or leave them intact if they don’t.  Cut the cukes into happy bite-sized pieces and strew with a tablespoon of salt, toss, and let sit while you clean and coarsely chop your cilantro and your chiles.  (If you happen to have a jar of salt-fermented chiles in the fridge, this is a good time to use them.  You can also use drained chopped pickled chiles if you like.)

Rinse your cukes in the colander and give them a good few shakes to get the water off.  They shouldn’t be too salty but they should be a little salty.  Rinse out the bowl.  Put the cukes back in the bowl with the cilantro and chopped chile.  Crush a couple cloves of garlic, or mince them, or however you prefer to render a garlic clove into something approaching a fine schmear, and add that to the mix.  Add a glug or two of rice vinegar and a glugette or demi-glug of sesame oil, toss, taste, correct the seasonings if need be, and serve.

If by chance you should recall, as you head to the table, as I did this evening, that you have an avocado that is on the overripe side, or even one that is just becoming ripe I suppose, seize it up immediately, peel it and chop it up and add it to the salad.

This is very fine as a side dish, especially with cold noodle dishes, fried plantains, or with fish or seafood.  It is also a delight as a main dish on a hot evening, particularly if you add the avocado.

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.

Pazi dolmasi is Turkish stuffed chard.  Normally you’d make it with very large chard leaves, and stuff them with a meat or rice filling much as you would if you were making stuffed grape leaves.  Then they’d be baked, probably with a bit of tomatoey or lemony sauce to keep things moist.

The chard leaves in my garden are not very big yet, so I decided to deconstruct my “stuffed chard leaves” into a quicker, easier dish.  The filling, in this case, I made with some ground bison, because I happened to have some on hand.  You could use lamb, which would be more traditional, or a mix of roasted chopped eggplant and cooked rice, which would also be very nice. The chard is cut into ribbons, and then wilted in a hot cast-iron pan.  Because it’s young chard, the stems are no obstacle, and need only a little cooking.

This is a very approximate recipe

• 1 pound ground bison or lamb
• 2 small or one medium onion(s), diced
• 4-6 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
• approximately 1 tablespoon dried or fresh mint
• approximately 1 tablespoon dried or fresh dill weed
• small amount (a little more than 1/4 teaspoon) ground cardamom, or 2 large dried green cardamom pods, crushed
• small amount (about 1/4 teaspoon) ground allspice, or three dried allspice berries, crushed
• 1/2 teaspoon crushed dried red pepper
• freshly ground black pepper
• 1 cup diced fresh or canned tomato
• approximately 1/2 cup dried currants, tart cherries, chopped dried apricots, or other tart *unsweetened* dried fruit
• olive oil
• salt to taste

Heat a heavy pan until it’s extremely hot and add enough oil to put a light film over the bottom of the pan. Add the onion and saute until it is starting to get caramelized, then add the garlic and saute until fragrant.  Add the meat and break it up with a spoon or spatula. As the meat releases its juices and some fat, add the seasonings except for salt (don’t salt until the end), and continue to cook for 5-7 minutes.  Add the tomato and stir well, then add the dried fruit.  Simmer approximately 10 minutes, perhaps a little more; add a small amount of water if the pan begins to get dry.  Before serving, taste, and salt/pepper to taste.

Serve over a bed of chopped wilted or steamed chard.

This is a lovely savory dinner, easily made.  It can be stretched by combining the filling with an equal amount of cooked rice, if you desire. If you want a garnish, toast a handful of pine nuts in a dry heavy pan, and scatter them over the top.

The filling also makes a fantastic sandwich component, which means you need never worry about what to do with leftovers.  I recommend warm, fresh pita stuffed with a healthy handful of fresh lettuce or spinach, some sliced cucumber, and perhaps some thinly sliced radish, then a helping of this filling.  Drizzle your sandwich with plain yogurt or a mint-garlic yogurt, if you like.

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.

What’ve I been up to recently?

Well, I’m still writing a book.  And a second book.  And trying to find time to work, now and then, on a third book.

But I’ve also been making a lot of these little bundles of joy:

Chewy and crunchy, homemade potstickers stuffed with pork, salted cabbage, and water chestnut.

Including for a little event we called Dumplings Take Over The World, where a full sampler plate of the goodies I cooked up looked like this (taken by one of our diners, Rachel Whang):

Make way for dumplings! Photo Rachel Whang.

You can read more about the event in Heather Hulsey’s enthusiastic review in Gutter Magazine, if you like.

And I’ll be cooking up a storm at Mill Valley General Store here in Baltimore (Sisson and 28th St.) this Saturday, February 20, from 10-2, as I demo a bunch of delicious dishes showcasing items available through Mill Valley’s Winter Produce Co-Op.  It’s free, open to the public, and there’ll be samples of things like Moroccan Orange Salad, Mushroom-Celeriac Pecan Pate, and Roasted Beets and Golden Turnips with Mint-Garlic Yogurt if you want to come on over.

But most recently, I’ve been working on these:

Mexican Chocolate "faux-reos" -- pink for Valentine's Day.

I’m sure it had something to do with our having gotten four feet of snow in the space of a week –no small thing for a town where we usually get about 18 inches over the course of a whole winter.  (We’ve been referring to it as “snOMG.”)  I was doing epic amounts of snow shoveling, and what I wanted was a sandwich cookie that was basically an Oreo on steroids.  After a bit of thought I figured out that what that meant was 1) a cookie that was really worth eating, and 2) a complex, rich Mexican chocolate flavor with almonds, cinnamon, and a little bit of chili heat.  This was not a cookie that existed, as far as I could find, so first I looked at a whole mess of recipes for various cookie components and options, then started developing my own.  Following a tasting panel of friends in my kitchen yesterday, I think I’ve got it right… it’ll take one more batch to be sure.

Now, of course, I want a vanilla-based counterpart to the Mexican Chocolate “faux-reo,” something as springlike and refined as the M.C.F.s are hearty and in-your-face.  I’m thinking about flaky palmier-type cookies flavored with vanilla and maybe rose or lavender, with a citrus buttercream.  We’ll see what the winds of spring blow into my kitchen.