09.04.08
Posted in american, cooking, food, main dishes, non-casein, non-dairy, original recipes, vegan at 4:12 pm by Hanne Blank
This is a cellphone photo of my lunch yesterday, which, in this case, was, a serving of a dish I first devised in college when I was poor and had to make something hearty for a vegan potluck. My roommate at the time christened it, amusingly if not entirely charitably, “Hungry Hungry Hippie.” (The reference, for those too young to get it, was to the children’s board game Hungry Hungry Hippos, introduced by Hasbro in the late 1970s.)
Hungry Hungry Hippie is one of those dishes for which I will never publish anything like a precise recipe because there really can’t be one.
Nonetheless, I love Hungry Hungry Hippie to this day, and wish to spread the joy.
Hungry Hungry Hippie is, in its most elemental form and as pictured here, a sort of pilaf of cooked seasoned barley tossed with cubed tofu.
It can get plenty fancy if you have the scratch and the interest.
But usually, if you are making Hungry Hungry Hippie, you don’t.
How you make the basic version (and it makes plenty) is like this:
– you take about seven cups of water and you put it in a big heavy-bottomed pot what’s got a lid to it, and you start heating it
– then you flavor the water with a spoonful or two of Vegemite or Marmite, maybe some miso, and some onion powder and garlic powder; the water should end up pretty strongly flavored and a notch or so saltier than you’d want it for soup. You use the Vegemite or Marmite (I prefer the latter) because it has a lovely strong meaty flavor that goes really well with the barley, and also seems to penetrate and soak into the barley better than anything else. Don’t use boullion cubes instead of Vegemite or Marmite, it won’t work, it’ll taste of salt and nothing else.
–then you add a couple-three tablespoons of olive oil or whatever kinda oil you got. Bacon grease is amazing in this, but totally not vegan or vegetarian. You do what turns you on.
– then you pour in 2 cups of pearled barley and you stir it, and you bring it to a boil
– then you reduce the heat to a low simmer, cover it most of the way, and let it simmer until the barley kernels get to swelling appreciably
– whereupon you give it a stir, turn the heat off, put the lid on tight, and ignore it for a couple hours until all the liquid is absorbed
– at which point you drain and cube a pound or so of firm tofu and toss it into the barley, and reheat the whole thing a little (add another half-cup of liquid if you do it on the stovetop, or else put the whole thing (covered) in the oven at 300F for a bit)
And then you eat it! Unless, of course, you’d like to add something yummy to it first.
Many things can be added to Hungry Hungry Hippie along with the tofu. Some combination of sauteed onions, garlic, celery, and mushrooms is good. Thoroughly caramelized onions are super-duper rockin’. So are caramelized tomatoes, or little bits of sun-dried tomato. Sauteed cabbage (sliced thinly) goes into it nicely. So does chopped fresh parsley. And so do chopped up dried tart fruits like unsweetened dried apricots, or cranberries. When I could, I used to eat it with a dollop of sour cream on top.
But it’s also really tasty (and hella easy) on its own. I like it with a healthy wodge of black pepper ground on top.
Its many virtues include keeping well, reheating well, being very nutritious, being very filling, having lots of complex carbs that will handily carry you through the day, being high in fiber, and being extremely economical.
Good for hippies and other living things. Give it a whirl.
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08.03.08
Posted in allergy, cooking, food, food allergies, main dishes, non-casein, non-dairy, original recipes, pasta, salads, vegan at 7:16 pm by Hanne Blank
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m allergic to casein, the protein in milk. So I’ve had to work out some ways to achieve the same culinary effects one can get from milk products without poisoning myself.
This recipe for what I call Not Cheese, But Not Bad, Sauce is one of my favorites, because it is one of the most successful texture and mouth-feel replicas of the comfort-food original that I’ve yet come up with . A sauce based on nutritional yeast will never taste like a cheese sauce, not really. But if it’s creamy, smooth, savory, a little salty, and rich, it definitely pushes all the right buttons. The flavor provided by the yeast and Marmite (a yeast product), plus garlic and onion and plenty of mustard, is perhaps not quite cheeselike but it’s not quite not cheeselike, either.
As a bonus, it’s vegan, so there’s no cholesterol to worry about. And all the yeast means it’s bursting at the seams with B vitamins. It will keep reasonably well, although it doesn’t reheat quite as gracefully, texture-wise, as dairy mac and cheese does. (Still tastes good, though.)
I like to pair Mac and Not Cheese, But Not Bad, Sauce with a particularly bright and somewhat acidic side dish to help cut the richness. Today I made an impromptu cucumber and cilantro salad in a spicy Asian marinade.
Not Cheese, But Not Bad, Sauce
2 small onions, minced
3 cloves of garlic, crushed or minced very fine
10 Tablespoons vegan margarine
1 cup unsweetened, unflavored faux-milk of your choice (I usually use almond), thinned with 1/2 cup hot water
2 Tablespoons prepared mustard
4 Tablespoons creamy-style almond butter, cashew butter, or tahini
1 Tablespoon Marmite
1 1/2 cups nutritional yeast
1 Tablespoon ground dry mustard
Measure out the nutritional yeast and ground dry mustard in a bowl, and stir to combine. Set aside.
Melt the vegan margarine in a saucepan and add the onions. Saute the onions in the margarine until they are transparent, then add the garlic. While the onions are cooking, stir together the faux-milk/water mixture, the prepared mustard, the nut butter or tahini, and the Marmite until thoroughly combined. After you have added the garlic to the hot fat and onions, let it cook for about a minute, then add the liquid and stir everything well. Reduce heat to barely a simmer.
Add yeast/mustard mixture to the liquid slowly, using a whisk to combine. Once all the yeast/mustard mixture is added, whisk over low heat for about 2 minutes, then remove from heat and let stand for 5 minutes, stirring once or twice.
This provides enough sauce for a pound of elbow macaroni. Cook the macaroni until it is quite well done, or it will absorb too much liquid from the sauce and the sauce will lose its texture. Reserve a quarter cup or so of the pasta cooking water when you drain the pasta, and add it back into the dish a tablespoon or so at a time if this begins to happen.
Serve hot with plenty of freshly-ground black pepper.
Note: if you don’t like the slight lumpiness introduced by the onions, feel free to omit them, but they do add some dimension to the taste that I enjoy.
I love a good marinated salad, and I also love the southeastern Chinese (and indeed, pan-southeast-Asian) combination of cucumbers and cilantro and chiles — it is bright and sprightly and summery and delightful. Although, yes, probably not a dish for those people to whom cilantro tastes of perfumed soap. Of whom I am not one. Which is why I like to make a salad that goes a little something like this…
Spicy Cucumber and Cilantro Salad
5 Kirby cucumbers, small Asian cucumbers, or other firm-fleshed variety with few seeds (if you must use another variety, consider removing the seeds so the dish won’t get watery), peeled and sliced about 1/4 inch thick
2 teaspoons kosher salt
3 cups cleaned and dried cilantro (coriander) leaves
3 Tablespoons rice vinegar
2 Tablespoons Asian sesame oil
1 teaspoon Chinese chili paste (in oil) (or less if you do not care for a lot of heat)
Sprinkle sliced cucumbers with the salt and toss with your hands to combine. Let stand 15 minutes, then rinse well in several changes of water, and drain well (use a salad spinner if you have one). Toss the cucumbers with the cilantro leaves and add the vinegar, sesame oil, and chili paste. Toss well to combine, cover, and refrigerate for an hour or so before serving.
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07.31.08
Posted in Uncategorized, chinese, cooking, food, how to, ingredients, non-casein, non-dairy, original recipes at 1:23 pm by Hanne Blank
I did a sort of scary thing last week, namely, I improvised a Chinese dish using a rather non-Chinese primary vegetable, the beet. It turned out well, so today I reenacted it, made a few measurements, and took a few pictures so I could share it.
Now, I am a big fan of beets, and so is my Belovedary, so I figured that even if it didn’t taste very Chinese it would probably be edible, and pleasant to us. But I spent a little while thinking about it, and doing my best to think through the properties of beetroot from a Chinese culinary perspective, and here is what I decided:
To the qualities sweet, dense, fibrous, and resilient I decided it would be good to add fibrous, bright, and hot in the form of ginger, and slippery, smooth, and pungent in the form of onion. (It’s no accident that these are often paired with beets in non-Chinese cooking, too!) I chose pork for the meat because it was what we had, and pork is also the fallback meat of Chinese cooking so it made sense from that perspective as well. Pork also has an enthusiastic affinity for sweetness that some other meats (seafood and beef especially) can lack. To ground it and bring it all together, I chose brown bean sauce, which is made from the lees of the soybeans fermented to make soy sauce, thinned with Chiankiang vinegar, a dark brown/black rice-based vinegar with a taste a lot like the more familiar grape-based balsamic vinegar.
The lineup of ingredients. Left to right, bottles: chiankiang vinegar, brown bean sauce, rice wine, soy sauce. On cutting board, clockwise from upper left: beets, onion, pork, garlic clove, ginger root.
Wok-cooking beets posed a problem. Because beets are so dense and fibrous, they take a fair amount of cooking, more than most vegetables that are traditionally wok-cooked. But I needed to be able to stir-fry them, with a minimum of needing to leave the beets sitting around for long periods in the wok, and I really didn’t feel like pre-cooking (although blanching small pieces would certainly have been another option, it was one I did not want to take).
Chinese cooks usually solve these kinds of cooking time problems via the expedient of knifework, and so I did the same, and simply peeled and julienned the three beets.
For the ginger, I thought a little trompe l’oeil was in order. Beets stain everything, and since it was obvious from the get-go that everything coming out of my wok tonight was going to be red, I figured it would be an amusing thing to have the ginger be visually indistinguishable from the beets. So I julienned a five-ounce piece of fresh ginger, making sure the pieces were of roughly similar size to the beets. As is probably obvious, ginger, in my house, is sometimes a vegetable, not just an aromatic flavoring. Those with Ginger Fear, be advised.
I wanted to highlight the slippery, smooth, yielding texture of the onions as a contrast to the firmness of the beets. I peeled and halved them, then sliced them pole-to-poleways into slices that were thin but not paper-thin, the better to have the heat of the wok soften them quickly, but so they’d still retain some tooth.
The pork I sliced against the grain into thin slices and marinated in 1 Tablespoon Xiao Xing wine, 2 teaspoons soy sauce, and a crushed garlic clove (this, to the Chinese tastebuds, clarifies the taste of meats, and almost all meats are marinated before cooking in some mixture involving wine/liquor, soy, and either ginger or garlic).
Last, I stirred together two Tablespoons of brown bean sauce and the same amount of Chiankiang vinegar and set it aside.
As the last step before I started cooking, I made sure my mise en place was all ready to roll… and then I fired up the wok and stopped taking pictures, because you can’t stir-fry and hold a camera at the same time.
I stir-fried the beets and ginger together, on the principle that the hardest vegetables go into the wok first. When the beets were getting to the crisp-tender stage and didn’t taste raw any more (this took about 3-4 minutes of cooking, I would guess), I put in the onions and tossed them well. The onions gave off some liquid which helped steam the beets and ginger quickly, and about two or three minutes later I removed the vegetables to a dish and reheated the wok to cook the pork.
Cooking meat separately, then adding it back into cooked (or mostly-cooked) vegetables is another classic Chinese technique. It is usually only with shellfish that the meat is added to the stir-fry wok when the vegetables are still in it. This makes a lot of sense: meat and vegetables require different cooking times, and meat also releases a lot of water when it cooks. Both the difference in cooking time and the additional water can ruin vegetables, so it is quite useful to do them separately.
Many recipes call for pre-cooking the vegetables until they are almost, but not quite, to the point of doneness that is desired, then cooking the meat, then adding the vegetables to the meat when the meat is 95% cooked, briefly stirring the two together to heat everything up evenly and finish the cooking process, then tossing with whatever flavoring or sauce finishes the dish. This allows the meat juices to become part of the dish without adversely affecting the cooking or the condition of the vegetables.
This is what I did tonight, adding the beet mixture back in when the pork had all become opaque and whitish. Then I poured in the brown bean sauce that I had prepared earlier, tossed it to combine everything properly, and we were done. To finish the dish off, I tossed in a small handful of cilantro leaves. You could use very finely diced green onion, if you prefer. The point of these little last-minute additions, in Chinese cookery, is to add color, a little bit of textural contrast, and brightness of flavor.
It was very tasty. The ginger masquerading as beets is very successful, both surprising (hey, that’s not a beet!) and a good partner with the beets, the heat of the ginger making the beets more exciting and the sweet earthiness of the beets standing up just fine to that amount of ginger. The onions were voluptuous. The sauce was tangy and salty and savory.
A plus: it turns the rice in your bowl BRIGHT RED! Which is exciting, and in a Chinese context, meaningful, as red is the color of happiness and prosperity and success.
Ingredients for Ruby Pork with Three Roots
- 3 medium beets
- 1 largish onion
- about 5 ounces by weight fresh ginger root
- about 4 ounces boneless pork (I used pork loin because that’s what I had, use a lean cut)
- 1 clove garlic
- marinade for pork: 1 crushed garlic clove, 1 T Xiao Xing wine or sherry, 2 t soy sauce
- sauce for dish: 2 T brown bean sauce, 2 T Chiankiang vinegar
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07.21.08
Posted in american, cooking, desserts, food, fruit, how to, ingredients, kitchen learning, original recipes at 8:08 am by Hanne Blank
I can’t be the first person who has wondered why the “forbidden fruit” of the Garden of Eden has always been assumed to have been an apple. I mean, apples aren’t exactly native to the Fertile Crescent. But more to the point, I think that if one takes as writ that the no-no-berry was an apple, it may mean that one has never properly reveled in the seductive virtues of cherries. Not that apples aren’t wondrous things. They are (and believe you me you’ll hear about them plenty when apple season rolls around). But really good fresh cherries, well… they’re just a whole different mouthgasm.
It may be that I inherited my love of cherries from my maternal grandmother. She is, in fact, the reason I started canning cherries every summer. She loves cherries, and especially sour or “pie” cherries, enormously, and eats them with huge enthusiasm in virtually any form: fresh, frozen, dried, canned, in syrup, as jam, as ice cream, whatever she can get her paws on. When she was younger and I was quite a bit younger still, she always seemed to have home-canned cherries on hand because she put some up every summer during the brief window when they were at their best. But by and by we both got older, and she eventually stopped canning as her house got emptier and her kids’ and grandkids’ lives got busier, and, I suspect, as she got to feeling less willing and able to haul around big pots of bubbling fruit and spend hours ministering to huge steaming cauldrons, glass jars, and a thousand and one jar lids.
Knowing how much she loved cherries, my mother and I would always try to remember to take her a big jar of Greek cherry preserves when we visited her — the Greeks use tart enough cherries, and not too much sugar, the way my grandmother prefers her cherries. But really, boughten is never quite the same as home-canned, and you can’t get the people at the factory to tailor the amount of sugar in the syrup to be precisely the way you like it. So I took it upon myself to become my grandmother’s canned pie cherry connection. Every summer but one since then, a year when the cherry harvest was very poor due to drought, I have canned cherries and given about half of what I can to her.
A few years ago, she acknowledged my cherry-canning role in her life by giving me her old, well-used cherry pitter, a 1950s-era piece of German engineering that does an admirable if not completely comprehensive job of knocking the stones out of pound upon pound of cherries. It’s a lot quicker than stoning them with a hairpin, which is what I do when I’m pitting only a pie’s worth of cherries, and having a pitter saves me untold repetitive stress injury when I’m stoning more than the five cups required for a pie. As it did this weekend, when my Belovedary and I went out to Larriland Farm, our favorite of the regional you-pick farms, and picked close to 35 pounds of pie cherries for the annual cherry jubilee.
This, I should note, is not even the whole of it. This plastic container will house an entire bundt cake with room to spare, but it’ll only hold about 25 pounds of pitted cherries and their juice. We had to put the rest in a separate container.
The first thing I did with my cherries, however, was not to can them. Instead I heeded nature’s call and made a pie.
It was very very hot and humid, near a hundred degrees, and so of course my pie crust refused categorically to behave despite having been chilled in the refrigerator for a bit. It kept going to pieces the instant I tried to move it to put it in the pan, so I decided to fall back to the eternal piemaker’s default position: slapping the broken pieces of rolled out crust into the pan as it was possible, pressing the overlapping edges together so it wouldn’t leak too much, and generally doing a yeomanly job of working with what you have to work with. I have had to learn to call the results of such pie crust shenanigans “rustic,” you see, for despite the inherent untruth in claiming that any farmwife worth her salt wouldn’t laugh her nipples off at the idea that she’d ever lower herself to serving (let alone photographing and putting on the internet!) a pie whose crust looked like it had had an interaction with the business end of an outboard motor, lots of people seem to have been decieved into thinking that “rustic” necessarily means that things are a bit unfinished, rough around the edges, or downright ragged, and furthermore that this represents an added bonus of “authenticity” and “realness.” I have in point of fact been in bakeries where a “rustic” apple galette cost twice what the presumably urban apple pie did, despite the fact that they were basically the same damn dessert and the “rustic” version took less skill and expertise to create, what with not having to trim or crimp the piecrust and all.
I have, as may be obvious, some issues with this. On the other hand it lets me smile when I serve a pie that is rather less pretty than I would ideally prefer, and have my guests ooh and ah over it, so I suck it up and claim rusticity.
If you would also like to claim rusticity — although honest, it usually doesn’t behave so badly, and won’t if your kitchen is cooler and less humid than mine was — my basic recipe for a slightly sweet double-crust pie crust (for a 9 or 10 inch pie plate), which I use for fruit pies where the fruit is slightly tart, is as follows:
Sweet Pie Crust (double crust for 9-10 inch pie)
2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
4 Tablespoons sugar
10 Tablespoons butter or vegan margarine (I like Earth Balance, do not use tub margarines, though, as they have too high a liquid content), diced and very cold
10 Tablespoons solid vegetable shortening (e.g. Crisco), diced and very cold
5 Tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons ice water
Stir the dry ingredients together. Cut in the two fats with two knives (if you are seriously old-school, which I am not), or a pastry blender until the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal. Add the water a tablespoon at a time, incorporating it with a fork and using a folding motion. Since the water content of flour varies, it may come together before you have added all the water. When it comes together, keep working the dough with your fork to incorporate as much of the rest of the dryish mixture as you can that way without using your hands (the heat from your hands liquifies the butter, which impairs the texture). Only if you absolutely have to should you use your hands to press/knead in the remaining bits of fat/flour mixture.
Cut it in slightly uneven halves (one “half” should be a little bigger than the other), shape into discs about 5 inches diameter, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for 20 minutes or so to let the dough hydrate evenly and to re-chill the butter. When you go to roll it out, the bigger half is for the bottom crust and the smaller is for the top crust. If you have left it in the fridge for more than about a half an hour you will need to let it warm up for 5-10 minutes before you roll it or it will just crumble and you will be sad.
Of course, now that you’ve got the crust made, you might as well fill the pie, right? Fortunately fresh fruit fillings go together quickly, assuming you’ve already prepped the fruit. Since we’d already done our pitting, making the filling was (if you’ll pardon my saying this) easy as pie. There are plenty of ways to make cherry pie filling, but this is mine, a slight variation on my grandmother’s version.
Filling for Cherry Pie
5 slightly heaped cups fresh pitted tart cherries, juice drained off
1 cup sugar
5 Tablespoons Minute Tapioca
1/4 teaspoon almond extract
1/4 teaspoon (or so) nutmeg, freshly ground preferred
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Toss fruit with sugar, tapioca, and flavorings/spices. Let stand about 10 minutes before filling pie crust. Stir again to thoroughly distribute sugar etc. before filling the pie crust.
Note: if you do not have Minute Tapioca, but do have regular pearl tapioca, just put 6 T of pearls in your blender jar or (clean!) coffee grinder and whiz until it is mostly powder with only a small percentage of tiny pieces. That’s all Minute Tapioca is anyway, really, is tinier pieces of regular tapioca.
I know that some people like to thicken their pies with flour or cornstarch, but I have never found them as reliable or as clear-tasting as tapioca. Do be aware that tapioca thickens, in part, as it cools, so pies will still bubble over sometimes, and will also still be runnier/juicier when they are warm than when they are cool. If you like a firmer pie filling, then by all means wait until the pie is completely cool.
Because we’d also gotten blueberries at the farm, and I was heating up the oven for cherry pie anyway, I decided also to make a blueberry pie. It was a little rustic, too.
My blueberry pie filling is slightly different to my cherry pie filling.
Filling for Blueberry Pie
6 cups fresh blueberries, washed, cleaned, and dried
1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar, depending on sweetness of the blueberries
5 Tablespoons MInute Tapioca
1 teaspoon ground dried lemon peel or the zest of 1/2 fresh lemon, minced fine
1 teapoon ground cinnamon
juice of 1/2 fresh lemon, strained
Toss berries with sugar, tapioca, and spices/zest. Add lemon juice and toss again. Pour directly into pie crust (does not need to stand).
These pies, with tall glasses of iced tea, served as a truly decadent lunch for us and for our friends who came over in the afternoon to share in some canning. They’d made a sour cherry compote that they wanted to put up, and we, of course, had a fairly large quantity of cherries to process. (And for anyone clucking their tongues at the thought of people eating pie for lunch, I’m just sorry for you that you’ve evidently never had the chance to eat fresh warm homemade fresh fruit pie as a meal, because if you had, you wouldn’t be making that face. Which you should probably stop doing before it freezes that way and you have to go through the entire rest of your life looking like someone just took a shit on your carpet. I’m just sayin’.)
And so we did. The large jars are quarts, the small jars with the white caps are twelve-ounce jars, and the small jars with the gold caps are pint jars. My grandmother gets all the small jars of cherries. The darker jars at the right end of the counter are the cherry compote jars. Plus there were almost three quarts of cherry juice left over, but I didn’t bother canning that, just poured it into refrigerator jars… and into me, and my Belovedary, and our guests, over ice.
Come February or so, when I am going a little insane because there just isn’t any fresh fruit in the market worth eating that hasn’t been shipped 10,000 miles (and I’m sorry but I just have problems eating supposedly “fresh” food that is better-traveled than I am), I will be able to head down to the cellar and come up with a couple of jars of cherries and, if I so choose, make myself a pie in the middle of the winter. Or possibly I will do exactly the same thing that my grandmother does with the jars I give to her, and just sit down, pop off the lid, and eat them with a spoon.
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07.11.07
Posted in arrrrgh, cats, cooking, domesticity, food, housekeeping, humor, original recipes at 9:43 am by Hanne Blank
First, buy a hunk of beef. A piece of round roast, eye in this case rather than bottom, because it was super-duper cheap because its sell-by date was today and I bought it yesterday when they were doing their darndest to clear it out and I knew I’d be cooking it today.
Next, put the hunk of beef in the freezer. It’s a lot easier to cut meat into small uniform pieces if it’s partially frozen, so leave it in there for an hour and a half or so. Not long enough to freeze all the way hard, but definitely long enough to firm it up thoroughly.
Remove the beef from the freezer. Unwrap, and place on cutting board. Get out your favorite butcher’s knife or cleaver and slice meat across the grain into finger-thick slices. Then take each slice and cut into four or five crosswise strips, and then cut the strips into 1/2-inch dice.
Pile the chopped meat at one end of the cutting board while you get out a large heavy cast-iron pan and put a small but workable quantity of oil in the bottom, and put it on a highish heat.
Turn around to find that your kitten has soundlessly levitated up onto the cutting board and is standing with one paw half on the blade of the knife, half off — the sharp side, too — and the other paw smack in the middle of your pile of meat while he does his level best to eat as much as he possibly can. Realize that shouting may result in a cat with a sliced paw due to cat’s foot placement.
Carefully, use right hand to grasp knife handle and press sharp edge of blade firmly against cutting board while grasping scruff of cat’s neck with left hand. Lift cat from cutting board, ignoring the chunk of meat dangling from his claw and the one hanging out of his mouth. Deposit cat on kitchen floor, where he will look offended and continue to eat the beef he managed to take with him.
Ponder what to do now that a cat has been dancing in your raw meat. Cat will now look up at you with wide pitiable eyes and meow at you in as plaintive a starving-orphan-kittycat fashion as he can manage. Vent frustration with cat by stomping, hissing, yelling, waving arms, and flapping your skirts at him until he runs and hides in the basement.
Return to kitchen, asking self the question “WWJD?” In this case that means “What Would Julia Do?” (Despite the fact that Julia Child never actually <i>did</i> drop a roast on the air (see Snopes for details), nor yet had a cat marching about in her ingredients, I feel sanguine that she would’ve figured out a good solution if she had.)
Resolve that
a) this meat will be first seared at a high heat, then boiled in and subsequently simmered all day in an acidic (tomato) liquid, so
b) it is unlikely to successfully breed any nasty bacteria despite having been partially trodden by my horrible kitten.
Wash the meat in plenty of cold running water anyhow, for the purpose of rinsing off any yuk or cat hairs introduced in the feline snacking process. Be sure to turn down the heat under your pan, or the oil will start to smoke. Note that at this point, your ankles are being made ardent love to, and that an insistent chorus of chirps and trills is emanating from under your skirt. (Yes, I have a singing pussy. He’s quiet when he wants to be, though, quod erat very much previously demonstrandum.)
Ignore Feline Aria of Loving Adoration And Hopeful Petition For More Beefy Goodness. Similarly ignore equally loving and similarly hopeful looks from the dog, who has come to see what’s going on because if the kitten is getting some of that meat, he wants a cut of the action.
Sear beef cubes heavily on all sides, then remove them to the stockpot.
Roughly dice four onions and saute until transparent in the oil and rendered fat from the beef, in the same pan.
While onions are cooking, open one large can crushed tomatoes and one large can diced tomatoes. Go to dump can of diced tomatoes into stockpot. Stumble badly due to treading on the tail of the aforementioned kitten, who until that instant had been operating on the assumption that if singing to me didn’t get me to give him anything, the least he could do was sprawl across the middle of the kitchen floor to keep an eye on things in case some meat magically flew out of the pot and landed on the floorboards. In attempt to not fall, lose grip on open can of tomatoes.
Chase tomato-splashed kitten in an attempt to grab him before he can get tomato on the couch (cream-coloured), upstairs carpet (light tan), or bedspread (light blue). Get an escort from the dog, who wants to know what’s going on, but really doesn’t care because he thinks this thing where we both chase the kitten up the stairs is a fantastic game.
Catch tomato-splashed kitten despite canine assistance. Without heed to how much tomato gets all over one’s own person, deposit kitten in bathtub and rinse clean, ignoring heart-rending yowls and pleas for someone, anyone, for the love of God, to contact Kitty Amnesty International.
Towel-dry and release kitten, who jets off into the bedroom to lick himself the rest of the way dry. Wonder why you didn’t think of just dousing him with water earlier, as the task of licking himself dry seems likely to keep him occupied for some time.
Return to kitchen. Open reserve can of diced tomatoes, add to stockpot, along with can of crushed tomatoes. Fill both cans with water and add that to the stockpot, too. Turn heat on under stock pot to a medium flame.
Clean tomato and/or tomato juice off of more kitchen surfaces than you thought possible. Scoop up as much from the floor as you can, and discard. Sop up the liquid with sponge and paper towel. Then mop the floor, which has now been mopped twice in two days, thank you very much.
Add chili powder, oregano, a handful of peeled garlic cloves (whole), and some epazote to the stockpot and stir. Notice as you are doing this that you missed several little spots of tomato juice on the cupboard-fronts.
Sponge clean the affected cupboard-fronts.
Look despondently at the other ingredients you’ve set out in order to do the other cooking you planned to do this morning, and instead of embarking immediately upon making tabbouleh or cha siu, go sit down with the computer for a bit instead while the meat and onions have a chance to simmer. You’ll put beans in later, as per usual. Do not under any circumstances think about the fact that eating raw meat tends to give the kitten an upset stomach.
No, really. Do not think about it. It’s not going to help, anyway. That train has left the station. There is nothing in the world you can do.
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