Nevertheless, it’s a wonderful winter pie and I’m sure you’ll find some time or other during the next month or two when trotting out a beautiful, tart-sweet, brightly-colored, vitamin-C-rich fruit pie will be precisely the right thing to do.  It hearkens to other pies I love, Shaker and Amish in origin, that use dried fruit when the fresh versions are so out of season as to be almost unimaginable.

To make it, you will need the following

• Pie crust sufficient for a double-crust  pie
• A 9  or 10 inch diameter pie dish
• 4 cups fresh cranberries, washed and picked over
• 2 1/2 cups dried tart cherries (lightly sweetened, which is typically how they’re sold, is fine)
• 1 to 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar (depending on your tastes, and whether your cherries are sweetened)
• juice of 3 medium oranges
• zest of 2 medium oranges
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 3 Tablespoons ginger liqueur, such as creme de gingembre or Domaine de Canton
• 1/2 cup King Arthur Flour Pie Filling Enhancer OR about 1/4 cup powdered arrowroot starch mixed with 1/4 cup sugar

1.  Preheat the oven to 350F Roll out one half of your pie crust and line the pie dish with it.  Blind bake the bottom crust 20-30 minutes, until well set and golden in places.

2. While the bottom crust is blind baking and then cooling, simmer the cranberries, dried cherries, orange juice, orange zest, liqueur, cinnamon, and sugar together in a large saucepan until some of the cranberries have burst and the cherries have begun to plump up and the whole is nice and hot.  Remove from heat and let cool somewhat before adding the Pie Filling Enhancer (or the DIY equivalent), and stir thoroughly to combine and distribute the thickener evenly throughout the mixture.

It will look a bit like this:

3. Pour the pie filling into the prepared pie crust.  Top with a second crust in whatever format floats your boat.  With pies like this one, I like using a cookie cutter to cut out little pie-crust shapes, then laying them on top of the filling.

4.  Bake at 350F for about an hour, or until the filling is thoroughly cooked and set and the top crust is nicely golden.  Cool well before cutting, as a too-hot cranberry behaves, in the mouth, in a manner uncomfortably reminiscent of napalm.

                          

A raspberry sorbet that can be made any time of year, thanks to frozen fruit.  A bit alcoholic.  Not too sweet.  Can be made non-sugared if desired.

12 oz. frozen raspberries

1 cup simple syrup OR unsugar syrup made with 1/4 cup Truvia brand sweetener dissolved in 1 cup water

6 Tablespoons raspberry liqueur (I like Clear Creek‘s)

Juice of 1 lemon, strained

1 egg white

Combine all ingredients in blender and liquefy.  Pour into your ice cream maker’s bowl and freeze/churn until thick enough to hold peaks.  Due to the alcohol, this will not harden completely in the ice cream maker, but will need a stint in the freezer.

If you are fussy about raspberry pips: Liquefy the raspberries with the simple syrup in the blender, then pass through a fine mesh sieve to remove the pips.  Press as much of the pulp through the sieve with the back of a spoon as you can, since the pulp contributes to the body of the sorbet.

This could probably be made with other non-sugar sweeteners as well, but I haven’t played with them.  It’s a simple formula, so do feel free to experiment.  Do bear in mind that the liqueur has some sugar in it, regardless.

                          

There are a couple different ways you can roll with a vegan dumpling filling and still have it be pretty solidly traditional.  You can go the meat-like route, with seitan or pressed tofu for a meaty chew.  You can go the greens route — there are several types of traditional Chinese dumplings whose fillings are mostly greens, including ones with watercress and garlic chives.  Or you can go the mushroom/fungus route.  We chose the fungus/mushroom option.

I am not very fond of vegan cookery where things are presented as being “just like” something that they’re not.  Case in point: vegan cheese.  It isn’t cheese.  Which isn’t to say some of it isn’t tasty.  But it isn’t cheese.  It isn’t even close.  And I would like it better and enjoy it more if I weren’t being encouraged to believe that it’s “just like” cheese when any idiot with two taste buds to rub together can tell that it’s not.

So when I make veg dumpling fillings I’m not trying to mimic meat.  I’m not trying to make a sophistication that’s “just like” a “normal” dumpling filling.  Vegetarian food is normal food, thankyouverymuch.

Anyhow.  I haven’t any photos of last night’s dumplings because we ate them.

But, roughly speaking, I can tell you how to make a lovely savory deeply mushroomy filling for wonton.

First, heat a wok or other pan and add a bit of vegetable oil, enough to coat the bottom of the pan.  Then add:

• 1 medium onion, minced

Saute until transparent and add

• About a pound of crimini mushrooms, cleaned and coarsely chopped

Saute over high heat until the mushrooms begin to give up their liquid.  Cook off a bit of the liquid and then add

• a large fistful of garlic chives, minced
• 3-4 cloves garlic, minced
• a teaspoon or two mushroom soy sauce
• a small skosh sesame oil

Continue to saute until the mushrooms are well cooked but not until they have shrunken into nothingness.

Puree this mixture in a food processor with about 2 Tablespoons vegetarian “oyster” sauce (which is also made with mushrooms) and a tablespoon or so of cornstarch or potato starch or some other kind of very fine starch powder.  Let cool to a workable temperature and then use to stuff your dumplings.

Because this is a robustly flavored filling, you can also serve the dumplings with a good vigorous dipping sauce.  Perhaps one with chiles.  Mixing a bit of chili garlic sauce with a bit of soy sauce and a little sesame oil is easy and good.

                          

So to celebrate that we’re now at the end of it, I invented a cocktail, which I share with you all in case you would enjoy replicating it for yourselves.

Government Shutdown Cocktail

2 parts bourbon
1 part maraschino liqueur
1 part simple syrup
1 part fresh strained lemon juice

Shake with ice until well mixed. You can drink this as is, up, in a highball glass.

Or, if you want to stretch it out a bit, given that your week really has been that difficult and you’re afraid of the effects of that concentrated a dose of hooch on your poor enervated system, pour into a tall glass and fill the remainder of the glass with seltzer and ice.

In either case, garnish with a (good, not icky neon-colored) cherry or two, or a bit of lemon if you haven’t got cherries.

                          

Simple.

Simpler than simple, in fact.

Take several nice pink or ruby red grapefruit.  How many is up to you.  I allow one grapefruit per person.

Supreme the fruits, working over a bowl so you catch as much juice as possible.  Squeeze the empty membrane structure out over the bowl, too, before you discard it.  Oh, and save the peels in a container in your fridge. You can candy them later.

Once you have a nice bowl of citrus sections and juice, add several healthy glugs of Campari to the bowl and toss gently to combine.

If you like you can also add some shredded sweetened coconut, but this is not mandatory.

Let this sit and steep for a couple of hours.  Serve in bowls, perhaps with a not-very-sweet, plain cookie on the side.  A brown-butter shortbread would be about the right note to strike, or the Italian cornmeal cookies called crumiri.

If you do not wish to drink the liquid from the bottom of the bowl with a spoon, like soup, pour it into a glass and fill the remainder of the glass with sparkling water or seltzer.  It makes a light cocktail that is, like the dish itself, a beautiful sunset pink.

If you are not a grapefruit fan, you can do the same basic thing with oranges or blood oranges.  You can still use the Campari, or you can switch it up and use a few glugs of something else — light rum, a good tequila, or just a decent and not-overly-dry red wine.  I’d avoid using sweet orange liqueurs like Grand Marnier or Triple Sec, it’ll be too sweet.  Ginger liqueur, however, would be nice.

This is an excellent dessert throughout citrus season.  It makes a lovely entr’acte in the midst of the typical progression of midwinter excesses, and is, not coincidentally, a tonic to the digestion.

                          

At last spring’s Cookie Swap, after considerable work on my part to develop the recipe, I won Most Original Cookie with my Mexican Chocolate Fauxreos.

Last night, I won the coveted Best Cookie award.  Again, it was my own recipe, Honey-Cinnamon Graham Cracker Sandwiches with Lemon-Ginger Cream, if I’m gonna be formal and give it a poncey Capital Letters Title.  You can see them here in this picture taken by Rachel, one of the bookstore owners.  They’re the ones with the fantastic presentation in the big plastic bin, heh.

They don’t look fancy, but they taste great.  I got the idea for them when I was thinking about the cookie swap and it occurred to me that one of my favorite desserts from childhood qualified, nominally, as a cookie.  Occasionally, if my mother was making a cake for some other purpose — usually a birthday — and there was excess frosting, and the existence of excess frosting coincided with good behavior on our parts, my mother would smear the extra frosting onto graham crackers and give them to us as a treat.  There was always something kind of magical about the smooth swoosh of cake frosting and the grainy crunchiness of a graham cracker together.  So I decided to turn that memory, and that sensation, into a cookie.  Like you do.

Nancy Silverton’s graham cracker recipe was the foundation I worked from, though I did modify it to create the less brittle texture that I needed to make sure that the cookies wouldn’t self-destruct when used as the outsides of a sandwich.  Getting the right texture without losing the graham cracker taste took some tinkering but I think I got it right.  (Oh and, as a pro tip for anyone who wants to make graham crackers at home: do not roll them out on a floured surface.  Roll them out on a surface that has been sprinkled with cinnamon sugar.  Boosts flavor and crunch, does not add extra flour that toughens the cracker.)

For the filling, I made a slightly stiff buttercream. Cookie filling buttercreams need to be thicker and stiffer than frostings you’d use on a cake, because you want a little resistance to the inevitable smoosh that happens when the eater bites into the cookie.  I do not care for the “buttercream puck” effect that is familiar to most of us from storebought sandwich cookies, I want cream fillings to be, well, creamy.  So I made a slightly stiff buttercream, and flavored it with lemon sugar, ginger syrup, and a snoodge of homemade limoncello to boost the lemon flavor.  (No vanilla!  I wanted lemon-ginger, not something that was halfway to fiori di Sicilia.)

It made a really damn fine cookie.  Even if I hadn’t won — and I’m terribly chuffed that I did — I would’ve been proud of these cookies.

                          

Still, there’s something about the short days that makes easy, calming cookery appealing.  When I am compelled to start cooking dinner after it is already dark, I always feel as if I am already being pressed up against impending bedtime, and something soothing seems appropriate.

Lately, as a result, the theme of our meals has been Soothing (but not nursery) Food.  We’ve eaten all of these things in the past week or so and they were all good.

Carrot-Coconut-Tangerine Soup

Take the tired carrots from the bottom of the refrigerator bin.  Providing they are not actually soft, you may use them for this soup.  A little bendy is fine.  If you have nicer carrots than this, by all means include them in the reindeer games.  Clean the carrots and grate them on the large holes of a box grater.  How much?  Oh, about 6 carrots.  8 if they are small.  10 to 12 if you want a Large Vat of soup at the end.  Set the grated carrot aside.

Dice a couple of onions.  Dice them on the smallish side.  Do the same with several cloves of garlic.  Peel and grate finely a chunk of fresh ginger root about the size of your thumb. Use a ginger grater if you have one, a fine Microplane grater if you don’t, and the tiniest holes on a box grater if you must.  You should have a tablespoon or two of grated ginger.  (No, this is not A Lot Of Ginger.  A Lot Of Ginger is when we use it as a vegetable.  Which sometimes we do. Such dishes are, however, not Soothing Food, they are Invigorating Food.)

Heat a large pot over a medium flame until it’s good and hot, then add enough neutral oil (grapeseed is the current neutral oil here at the Stone House) to cover the bottom lightly.  Add  your onions and saute until they start to turn translucent.  Add the garlic and the ginger and saute until it gets fragrant.  Add the carrots, sprinkle on a couple of three-fingered pinches of salt, and toss to combine and get the oil distributed evenly throughout the veggies.  Put a lid on the pot and let everything sweat for a few minutes.

While it’s sweating, get out about 1 1/2 quarts of stock.  A light veg stock is great, or a light chicken stock, or you could use water if you didn’t have any stock.  You might want more stock if you decided to make a truly sizeable vat of soup.  Let your conscience be your guide.  Also get out a can of unsweetened coconut milk.

After a little schvitz, the veggies should all be softish but not fully cooked.  Add the stock (or water) and the coconut milk and bring to a simmer.

While you are bringing the soup up to temperature, make a little spice mixture, approximately like this: 1 part ground coriander seed, 2 parts ground cinnamon, 1 part ground black pepper, 2 parts ground cumin.  For my tastes, this would probably work out to 1/2 teaspoon coriander, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon black pepper, 1 teaspoon ground cumin.  Also for my tastes you grind all this fresh, but that is up to you.  If you like, you can add some ground hot chili.  I recommend cayenne, it has the right brightness.  You will briefly cook this spice mixture in a small frying pan, using a small skoshlet of the same oil you used to start the soup, until it is fragrant, whereupon you will stir it into your soup.  (Rinse out the frying pan with a ladleful or so of soup broth, then dump it into the soup pot, so you get all the goodness.  Then clean your frying pan.)

Simmer your soup for about a half hour.  Not a terribly long time.  When all the veggies are nice and soft and all the flavors have gotten to know one another,  taste and correct for salt.  Then get a half-dozen tangerines and zest one of them so you have a nice little pile of perfumed feathery orange bits.  Then juice all of them and strain the juice to get the pips out.  Add the tangerine juice to the soup.  If the tangerines are sweeter than they are tart, you will also want to add the juice of a lime or, perhaps, a lemon.  Lime is better, but if lemon is what you have, then lemon it shall be.

Stir everything in and, turning the heat off, let it stand for 5-10 minutes.  Serve with a pinch of tangerine zest sprinkled over each bowl.

Soothing Braised Kale

In a large heavy pot with a lid, heat just enough oil to cover the bottom.  Add a few handfuls of chopped or thinly sliced onion, and perhaps a few cloves of roughly chopped garlic if you like.  Once the onion has begun to go soft, add your well cleaned kale, which ought to be chopped but need not be finely so.  If the kale is young and tender, do not worry about the ribs and stems, but if it is old and the stems/ribs are tough or woody, you’ll want to strip the leaves from the ribs.  Toss the greens around a bit to coat them, as much as possible, with the hot oil and to distribute the onions/garlic throughout.

Add stock (whatever kind you like, although perhaps not fish stock…), about 2-3 cups.  You can use water, but stock is nicer.  Put the lid on the pot and let it cook undisturbed for 15 minutes, at which point give everything a healthy stir.  Put the lid back on and cook it for another 15 minutes.

Taste the kale to see how done it is.  It should be yielding but not mushy, and its color should still be green, and not gray.  It may need a bit more cooking, or it may be just about right.  Much depends upon the age of the kale leaves.

Serve with a splash of cider vinegar or sherry vinegar, if you like.  Pepper vinegar is good but not so soothing, so let your mood decide.

Do not discard the liquid in the pot.  Pot liquor, as the place where by legend and popular agreement all the vitamins go, is not only good for you, it is also delicious.  If you wish to be traditional about it, pour it over a piece of broken-up cornbread (bannock, soda bread, etc.) in a bowl and eat as a sort of porridge.  If you wish to be less traditional about it, just pour it into a mug and drink it, perhaps with a sprinkle of celery salt.

This technique works with all varieties of tough-leaved greens: collards, mustard greens, turnip greens, broccoli greens, etc.

Roast Butternut Squash with Garlic Yogurt and Cranberry Chutney

Choose a butternut squash with a long cylindrical neck for this dish.  You may use a purchased cranberry chutney or cranberry sauce for this, or you can make your own.  The yogurt may be dairy or soy, but must be unsweetened (check the ingredients, there are an alarming number of “unsweetened” yogurts that have been sweetened) and fairly tart.

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees F.

Step One:  Put a cup or two of plain unsweetened yogurt into a bowl and mix in one or two cloves of crushed fresh garlic plus a bit of salt and black pepper, to taste.  Set aside so the flavors can do their thing.

Step Two: Cut the stem end off your butternut squash. Peel it — I highly recommend using a vegetable peeler to do this, not a knife.  It is much safer and more effective besides. The Y-shaped peelers that are popular these days are great for this chore.  You have to peel off the outer shell, then keep peeling down until you no longer see the veins of the shell, only beautiful unblemished orange flesh.  Once this is done,  you can lop off the cylindrical “neck” portion, set it aside, then cut the bulbous bottom in half and scoop out the seeds and stringy bits with a sharp-bladed metal spoon (I have a tablespoon from a measuring spoon set that is ideal for this).  If the bottom bulbous bit is large, you should probably cut it into smaller wedges.  If it’s small, you can leave the halves intact.  As for the cylindrical neck bit, cut it into rounds about 1 1/2-2 inches thick.

Step Three: Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper or aluminum foil.  Brush this lightly with olive oil.  Arrange your squash pieces on the sheet and brush them with olive oil as well.  Put them into the hot oven.  Roast for as long as it takes for the slices to become soft, but not mushy-soft.  Yielding.  Fork-tender.  I’d start checking by poking them with a bamboo skewer or a toothpick after about a half an hour.

Step Four: When the squash is done, remove it from the oven and let it stand for a few minutes.  If you are plating food before serving, put two rounds of squash on each plate, and top each one with a largish dollop of the garlic yogurt and a smaller dollop of the cranberry chutney or cranberry sauce. If you are doing things family style, let people top them with yogurt and cranberry-stuff at the table, as they please.

                          

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)

                          

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.