• A salad: ripe nectarines, pitted and cut into wedges + peeled chunked fresh cucumber in equal volume to nectarines + slivered raw sweet onion, as much as you like + shredded fresh mint leaves, a handful or so + fresh lemon juice, plenty + good olive oil, a healthy drizzle + salt to taste + freshly ground black pepper.  Toss, wait 10 minutes or so for the flavors to mingle.  Eat.
• A warm dessert: ripe peaches, peeled and sliced, sauteed in butter (or your favorite non butter substitute that is butteresque in flavour) over moderate heat until they begin to caramelize.  While they are cooking, in another pan, saute rolled oats in a small skosh of butter (or see above) until just beginning to take on color, sprinkle with several tablespoons brown sugar and a little ground cinnamon, stir and saute until sugar is melted.  Pour the oats over the peaches.  Eat.
• A frozen dessert:  Freeze several ripe peeled bananas that you have cut into chunks.  Do the same with several ripe peeled peaches, or several cups of ripe peeled canteloupe or other melon.  When everything is frozen, whiz the bananas in a blender until smooth and slightly fluffy.  Whiz in the peaches or melon.  Serve in a tall glass and eat with a spoon.
• A somewhat more adult version of the above: Freeze the bananas as described above.  Whir them in the blender with a healthy tot of chocolate liqueur.  Stir in a handful of dark chocolate chips.  Fill your glass(es) or bowl(s), then pour another healthy tot of chocolate liqueur over.

Read:

• Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.  One of the best-written biographical histories I have ever read.  A beautiful, seamless, multidisciplinary piece of exemplary historiography on a very interesting and complicated subject.  Colonialism, missionary efforts, culture clash, empire, learning, philosophy, and the massive and critical enigma — in the eyes of the West — that is China.  A book that becomes more relevant every time I read it.
• Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: American Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race.  There are few books that do as well at demonstrating the ways in which categories of “race” are constructed as this one.  For this reason alone, it’s an important book to know, because we live in a racist world and we participate daily in racist systems whether we are conscious of it or not as well as whether we intend it or not.  Because the book deals primarily with how pale-skinned European people of various backgrounds, classes, and social milieux gradually became part of a unified “white American” category, it is particularly useful for how it removes the opportunity to indulge in the common misperception that race is a type of natural or de facto human division based on skin color or facial features.  In reality, what “race” is, who belongs to what “race,” and how those things get decided are changeable social factors whose transformation Jacobson traces over time.
• Jane Shaw, Octavia, Daughter of God: The Story of a Female Messiah and Her Followers.  This is a juicy doozy, somewhere between biography and straight-up archival/documentary history.  The subjects are choice, in the way that only people who seem to halfway occupy a reality we all recognize, and halfway live in their own very special and specific universe that exists at a slightly odd angle, can be.  Shaw does a lovely and fair-minded job of keeping her subjects human and sympathetic despite their concerted strangeness, self-absorption, and, sometimes, downright delusion.  This book only looks like it’s going to be a big heavy academic title.  Trust me, you want a big bowl of popcorn with this one.  I’m only halfway through it myself and I find myself slowing down because I’m enjoying it too much to have it end.

                          

There’s been a fair amount written about “American Chinese food,” which as some of you probably know is its own culinary vernacular with its own history and traditions — see also Jennifer 8. Lee’s book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, among other sources, or the neat little piece in the first issue of Lucky Peach about yatka mein — that centers around how Chinese food adapted to America and Americans adapted to Chinese food.  I don’t have or pretend to any kind of encylopedic knowledge on the subject, though I find it fascinating.

Partly it interests me because it’s relevant to the way I cook.  I cook a lot of Chinese and Chinese-influenced food.  In terms of ingredients, I cook what I can get that’s good and fresh that I enjoy.  And, especially in summer, a lot of what meets those criteria is what grows here and what is native to the landmass that I live on.  Squash.  Beans.  Sweet corn.  Tomatoes.

Which is, in essence, also what a lot of Chinese cooks did when they came to America, and what a lot of Chinese cooks do today when originally American ingredients show up in Chinese markets.  I have never encountered a vegetable that a Chinese cook couldn’t and didn’t happily make use of.  Just because things like tomatoes and sweet corn aren’t native to China doesn’t mean they haven’t become part of the Chinese food culture.  They have, with a vengeance.

One of my favorite Chinese recipes for high summer includes both corn and tomatoes, as it happens.

I first discovered the Cantonese penchant for combining corn and tomato in the form of corn soup with tomato, which is usually made with chicken broth for its base, and seasoned with ginger and a little garlic and some sesame oil and maybe some cilantro.  Sometimes it has minced velveted chicken in it, sometimes egg beaten and swirled into the boiling broth to make “egg flowers” or “egg clouds,” sometimes a little soft tofu cubed and dropped in just long enough to heat all the way through.  You can also make it with a broth made from boiling corn cobs after you’ve sliced off the kernels, which is actually quite nice, sweet and comforting.  Or you can make the corn cob broth, then simmer chicken or pork or dried mushrooms in it.  Or more than one of those things, which takes things from merely nice to quite decadent.

This was very very good.  Then, later, I encountered stir-fried corn and tomatoes, I think in a recipe by Mary Tsui Ping Yee if I’m not mistaken, and I think my heart skipped a beat.  You need roughly equal quantities by volume of sweet corn cut off the cob and tomatoes, chunked into largish but still bite-sized pieces.  Don’t waste your heirloom tomatoes on this unless you are growing them yourself and have a surplus.  You want a reasonably firm tomato for this.  Field tomatoes are fine.  Plum tomatoes are good too.  So long as the tomato has good flavor and a good amount of acid, it will be just fine.  (Don’t use yellow tomatoes.  They are like a certain flavor of Regency heroine, pretty and highly-bred and anemic.)

You’ll want a fairly goodly amount of green onion, diced, about half again as much by volume as either of the other vegetables.  You need a little cooking oil, like peanut or canola.  You need a little brown bean sauce, which is a concentrated semi-fermented salty paste you can get at Chinese markets.  A blob about the size of an egg yolk seems to work out OK most of the time for me. (Or you could use some dark miso, which would be different but still good.)  A skosh of Asian sesame oil.  And you’ll want to have on hand a few tablespoons of cold water in which a couple teaspoons of cornstarch have been mixed.

It’s a simple simple dish.  Heat the wok, swirl in a little cooking oil, add the corn, stir-fry until it’s starting to brown in places, add the tomatoes, toss in the  brown bean sauce (how much depends on how salty it is, and how big a quantity of veg you are cooking — you can figure it out, it’s not rocket science), stirfry as the tomatoes release some water, and to finish the dish, throw in the green onions, stir, and then add about half of the cornstarch/water and stir it well while letting it heat through to activate the thickening power of the cornstarch.  If this doesn’t thicken the dish adquately — it should end up like a thick gravy — add the rest of the cornstarch/water and stir it well and let it cook for another minute or two.

Serve with rice.

If your bean paste is not super salty, you may want to add a little soy sauce or fish sauce, depending on how you roll.  Black soy is nice because it is slightly sweet, which plays well with the sweet corn and sweet tomato.  Fish sauce is funky and salty and a revelation with tomato in any capacity.  Fish sauce with sweet ingredients is definitely a South Seas sort of move.  It’s delicious either way, in Taishan or Iowa or anywhere you have corn and tomatoes and an appetite.

                          

Buy your chickpeas (and all your dried beans) from stores that have a sizeable clientele of folks who buy dried beans, so you don’t end up with ancient dust-shrouded tooth-breaky monsters that will never cook up tender no matter what you do.  Stores with big Latin American and Indian sections are good places to look.  Or just go to Latin American or Indian grocery stores.  I recommend Goya and La Fe for Latin American brands, and Swad for Indian.

So what’re you gonna do with your pound of chickpeas?  Seems like a lot of beans, I know.  But bear with me.

Well, first you’ll soak them.  Just dump ‘em in a big bowl and fill the bowl with water and set it somewhere out of the way overnight.  Cover it with a plate if you have cats.  Just trust me on this.

The next day, you’re gonna cook them.  The thing with dried beans is that you have to cook the beans before you cook the dish in which you’re going to use the beans.  Plan to do this at a time when you’re going to be home for most of the day.  For me, because I’m a writer and I work at home, this is pretty much any day.  You may be more limited in your scheduling.  Or, y’know, not, because you can cook chickpeas in a slow cooker too.

To cook the beans, drain off the soaking water and give the chickpeas a quick visual inspection.  Throw away any that look weird or discolored.  Also look out for little rocks, which sometimes make their way into dried beans bags.  Throw those away too.

Put your soaked beans in a big pot, and then add plenty of water.  You want to cover your beans to a depth of about 4 inches.  Put this on the heat and bring it to a simmer, then cover, leaving the cover with just a little vent space to help prevent boilover.  (If you cook in a slow cooker, you will not leave the cover ajar.)  Check them periodically.  Add some boiling water to the pot if the water level in the pot begins to get below the top of the beans. DO NOT ADD SALT or anything else.  Just plain old water.  Simmer the beans for as long as it takes for them to become pleasantly soft when you test one.  You should be able to mash the bean easily with the tines of a fork.  You should not cook the beans so long that they begin to fall apart in the cooking water although some of them may split a little.

When they’re done, drain them.

Then divide them into four parts.  Four small batches of four different things, a quarter pound of chickpeas in each, is enough things to give you some variety and not overwhelm you with the need to eat through a batch of something that will last you 3 weeks.

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Balela

While the chickpeas are still warm, you want to marinate one batch of them in a dressing that will later enable them to become a version of the Mediterranean salad called balela.  Make the dressing by whisking together:

1/3 cup olive oil

1/4 cup fresh lemon juice

2 cloves garlic, minced or crushed to a paste

1 Tablespoon za’atar (you can buy a good za’atar premixed from Penzey’s if you don’t want to make your own)

a three-fingered pinch of coarse salt (use less if you’re using finely ground salt)

a goodly amount of freshly ground black pepper

Pour this over your warm chickpeas and let them sit in it, covered, at room temperature, until you’re ready to make the rest of the salad.  There are no real rules about how this must be done, but it is traditional for balela to include some or all of the following ingredients:

chopped seeded cucumber

chopped parsley (use whatever kind you like best)

chopped fresh mint

chopped seeded ripe tomatoes (oil-packed dried tomatoes can also work)

minced raw onion

chopped seeded bell pepper, red or green

chopped romaine lettuce

You simply take what of these you like, and mix them up with the marinated chickpeas.  You adjust the seasoning to taste — maybe a little more lemon juice, a little more salt and pepper — and you eat.

What you don’t eat will keep several days if you don’t add lettuce (lettuce gets slimy if it sits after it’s dressed).

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Algerian Ginger Chickpeas

With the second quarter of your cooked chickpeas, you maybe want something to eat hot.  Easy-(chick)peasy.

Take your second batch of chickpeas and put them in a saucepan.  Add either a largish can or jar of diced peeled tomatoes, or else take a couple-few nice big fat juicy ripe tomatoes and grate them into the pan using the large holes of a box grater — this will more or less puree the tomatoes, while leaving you with the skin, which you can discard.  (You may never peel a tomato again now that you know this trick.)  Simmer this to thicken it up a little.

Mince a goodly amount of fresh peeled ginger root.  How much?  Well, depends on how much you like ginger, but I usually use a piece about the size of my thumb.  Mince a garlic clove or two as well.  Maybe a small chili pepper if you have one and you like them (or you can use dried chili flakes if you prefer).  Saute all these in a small frying pan in a little bit of olive oil until everything smells fantastic and the garlic has begun to brown but is certainly not charred or burnt.  Stir this into the chickpeas and tomatoes and let it all simmer a little while longer, maybe 10 minutes, then turn off the heat and let it stand for 20 minutes, uncovered.

My favorite way to eat this I learned from chef <a href=”http://www.chefzadi.com/2007/09/basic-chickpea-.html”>Farid Zadi</a>, whose blog introduced me to the idea of these ginger/tomato chickpeas, and that is to put some in a bowl and slide a fried egg on top.  It’s a fantastic breakfast.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

Chickpea Fritters

The third quarter of your cooked chickpeas you’ll make into some nice hearty little fritters.  You can eat these in a sandwich sort of format, like you would falafel, or you can eat them straight on a plate with some salad and maybe some plain yogurt with a little garlic and black pepper stirred in as a sauce.  Or you can dollop harissa on them and eat them that way.  Really up to you.  You can even make these into little “meatballs” if you like.

Mash the chickpeas with a fork until they make a slightly chunky paste.  Stir in a beaten egg if you are not vegan or otherwise disinclined to eggs.  Also mix in a moderate amount of minced raw onion, a minced/crushed garlic clove or two, maybe a little minced parsley if you have some.  Some salt does not go amiss, nor a small glugette (a teaspoon or two) of olive oil.  The texture should be stiff enough to form into patties or small balls.

Troubleshooting: If it is too loose and won’t hold a shape, add a small amount of one of the following: fine breadcrumbs/chickpea flour/wheat flour/cornstarch.  Add a tablespoon or so at a time, mix it in thoroughly, and give it a minute or two to absorb some liquid before adding any more.

You can spice these if the mood strikes you.  For an Indian vibe, garam masala works well here.  If you’d prefer a North African slant, try some ras el hanout (this page has a promising recipe for mixing your own if you want to try, or shop around for a pre-mixed version you like).  Or leave it relatively plain.

Form the mixture into patties or small balls and fry them at a moderate heat in a pan well-coated with olive oil.  You want to fry them until the exterior is golden brown and nicely crisp.  Flip them when it seems like that’d be a good idea.  I expect you could brush them with oil and bake them, too, but I’ve never done that so I don’t know specifics.  You can figure it out, you know how.

Eat these hot or at room temperature.  They’re not so nice cold, but they do reheat pretty well.

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Roasted Chickpeas

Roasted chickpeas are one of the darlings of the foodie blogosphere right now, and have been for a while, so instead of reinventing the wheel here I’ll simply leave you in the capable hands of Mr. Mark Bittman.  Don’t worry about precise quantities, just work with the concept.  Dry your chickpeas well, oil them, roast them, season them, eat them.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

So there you go.  Four reasonably healthy, definitely tasty, things you can make out of a pound of dried chickpeas.  You want bigger batches, cook 2 pounds of chickpeas.  Or only make one or two of these recipes out of your pound of chickpeas.  Up to you.

If you had to, you could use drained and well rinsed canned cooked chickpeas.  But then it wouldn’t cost less than $2 for the chickpeas any more.  Consult with your inner exchequer and your calendar and decide what makes the most sense for you.  I will say that for my money, the chickpeas you cook from dry always taste better and nuttier than the canned ones, which you may want to factor into your decisionmaking as well.

                          

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.

                          

This morning’s haul from the 32nd St. Farmer’s Market.  I’ve been waiting and waiting for local asparagus.

                          

Soak about 2-3 cups of small dried fava beans in water overnight.  When you are ready to cook them, leave them unpeeled.  Drain the soaking water, place the beans in a pot, cover them to a depth of about 3 inches with water, and simmer until the beans are soft, usually about 2-3 hours.  Add more water if it starts to get lower than the surface of the beans.  (If you have a pressure cooker, your bean-cooking can be made much faster.  If you have a pressure cooker, you probably know how.)

When the beans are soft, let the cooking water reduce until it comes only about halfway up the level of the beans.  Remove a cup or so of beans from the pot and mash them coarsely before stirring them back into the pot.

In a separate pot, heat a quarter cup of good olive oil.  When it is hot, add 5 (or more) cloves finely chopped garlic, several handfuls of chopped parsley, a half teaspoon to a teaspoon of ground cumin, and stir them all together in the oil.   If you have fresh tomatoes on hand, chop up a couple of small-to-medium ones and chuck them in too.  If not, you can use canned peeled tomatoes or canned chopped tomatoes.  Heat all of this together with the oil, then combine the oil mixture into the beans and stir.

Finish with plenty of fresh lemon juice (to taste) and some salt if needed.  Serve with fresh hot pita bread, with or without a fried egg on top.  Some chunks of cucumber alongside are a frequent addition, as are olives and ripe tomato (in season).

You can use other beans if you dislike favas or can’t find them.  Plain green lentils actually work very well and cook up much more quickly than fava beans.  It is also very tasty made with red kidney beans.

Another option is koushary, a less-well-known but no less widespread and popular Egyptian standard, quite similar in some ways to ful medames but combining rice, pasta, and beans together with a savory tomatoey sauce.  The Grand International has a fine recipe here, though in the spirit of independence, I highly recommend reading their recipe, then putting together your own variation.

                          

I started to explain to her all the reasons that I don’t have anything to do with “baby” carrots, nor do I wish to have anything to do with “baby” carrots, but stopped myself short.  People in the grocery store offering unsolicited advice did not sign up for an auditory blogpost.  They are just making conversation.  So I curbed my tongue and said something along the lines of “oh, I like to use the greens when I make stock,” which is true enough.

But y’all aren’t going to get off so easy.

This is roughly what I wanted to say to that woman in the supermarket.

“Baby” carrots, by which I mean the little finger-shaped nubbins one can acquire in plastic bags in seemingly every grocery store in North America, are not baby anythings, although they are admittedly nominally carrots.

Actual baby carrots are delightful.  They are tender and shatteringly crisp, flavorful and sweet, and often very cute as well.  They tend, for obvious reasons, to be very seasonal, and have to be harvested carefully because they are delicate.  They usually cost quite a bit, for all these reasons and because a carrot harvested as a thumb-sized morsel is never going to grow to be big and strong and be sold in a five-pound sack.

What are properly known as “baby-cut” carrots are chunks of larger carrots that have been cut, then tumbled, in giant industrial machines in order to make them into appealingly snack-sized bits.  They originated  as a bid to reduce waste in the carrot packing industry, as a way of taking gnarled, broken, or damaged carrots and converting them into something saleable at premium prices rather than having to either dump them or sell them off at a loss for use in other products. An enterprising Californian carrot farmer named Mike Yurosek (according to the World Carrot Museum), having perhaps heard of Alice Waters’ famous baby vegetable salads, had the bright idea of putting his cosmetically challenged or lightly damaged carrots first through a green been cutter, to get them all to a pleasing and uniform length, then through an industrial potato peeler, to peel them and clean them up.  This was in the late 1980s.

There is, I suppose, nothing inherently wrong with this.

In practice, however, there are several rather big problems.

First, it means you end up eating carrots that are often overgrown and woody and fairly tasteless.  Most cooks prefer to buy and use and eat carrots that are still fairly slender, though different varieties have different characteristics and there are some that will grow large and still be tasty.  Very large carrots often have poor taste.  Either they get bitter or else they lose their sweetness and taste of not much at all.  The larger the carrot the more likely it is to have a woody central core, as well.

Because of the way “baby” carrots are made, this woody core is precisely what you’re likely to be eating when you eat a “baby” carrot.  Look closely at a cross-section the next time you bite into one.  Chances are good that you are eating mostly or completely carrot core.  There’s nothing really wrong with carrot core, it won’t hurt you or anything.  But it’s the first part of the carrot to get tough and woody.  And if all you’re getting is the core of the carrot, it means that the remainder of the carrot — which is sometimes the better-tasting part — has been ground away.

Second, there is the problem of their texture and quality.  Because they are tumbled to peel and shape them, “baby” carrots lack the protective outer skin of a whole unprocessed carrot.  They are rough and porous and can either lose water or soak up water very easily.  If you’ve ever opened a bag of “baby” carrots to find them either slimy, or else dry and kind of cork-like to the touch, now you know why.  Those roughed-up exteriors are open to the elements, or whatever else they may be exposed to, and the elements are not often kind to organic materials like carrots.

Third, there is the One Giant Sink problem.  By now we’ve all heard about, if not been affected by, the various contamination issues that have happened with regard to the bagged mass produced salad greens and spinach and such that are so popular.  E. coli is not in fact a fun hors d’oeuvre.  This is the type of contamination that can and does happen when consumers let producers and packers take the responsibility for “cleaning” the produce that they eat.  A big sink is a big problem.  It’s hard to make sure that everything gets cleaned properly, and if things do get contaminated, a lot of people get hurt.  Worse, no matter how conscientious the packers and shippers are, it’s impossible to make sure that there is not additional contamination introduced somewhere between the Giant Sink and the consumer’s mouth.

Given that “baby” carrots are considered finger food, and they come conveniently already “peeled,” it is very rare in my experience that people wash them, let alone peel them at home.  They just rip open the bag and start munching… and people like me think “oh my God, don’t put that in your mouth, you don’t know where that’s been.”

I know that for many people it seems onerous indeed that many fruits and vegetables require a little bit of labor before they are eaten.  Having to peel an orange or cut up a cauliflower or God forbid, process a pineapple or something that is actually slightly challenging seems like the world is asking much too much of us when all we want to do is cram some nourishment in our mouths. (Nothing seems to gall Americans like having to actually perform labor in order to feed themselves.  But this is another rant for another time.)

Fact is, one of the reasons people started peeling and processing food in the first place is that it makes it nicer, tastier, and often a bit safer to eat.

When you peel a carrot, what is removed is that little bit of the vegetable that has been in contact with the world, with the dirt, with the hands of the people who picked and packed it, with the grocery store shelves, with the plastic bag, with the vegetable bin.  None of these things may be or have been particularly dirty, let alone actively toxic.  But here’s the thing: you don’t know whether they are/were or not.  So washing and peeling the carrot lets you strip away the bit that is most likely to carry the risk of any contamination.

And as you cut away that outside veneer, you reveal the glistening fresh carrot within.  If you’ve never tasted a freshly peeled carrot alongside a washed but unpeeled carrot, you should try it sometime.  The peeled carrot tastes better.  It is juicier, has more vibrant flavor, and is often sweeter.  That’s because you’ve taken off the protective and dry outer layer that was the carrot’s own defense against the world.

When you go to eat a “baby” carrot, you are eating a chunk of carrot that has had its defenses stripped away a long time ago.  It had its protective skin ground off before its final trip through the One Big Sink, before it hurtled down factory conveyor belts and into bins, before it encountered the bagging equipment, the boxes, the trucks, the supermarket walk-in coolers, the display shelves in the produce department, the grocery cart, and all the rest.

No matter how consistent and correct the cold storage, no matter how robust the bag, this is a carrot that has been cut and peeled and then left to sit around for quite a while.  If you cut and peeled your own carrots and shoved them into a plastic bag and had them sit in your fridge for a week or two, how eager would you be to eat a bag of carrot sticks that you knew full well were nowhere close to fresh, and had been sitting in the fridge getting dry or rubbery or corky or mushy for ten days?

Now tell me, how is it that you’re actively eager to rip into that bag of “baby” carrots and start bunging them into your craw?

(I won’t even start with the question of why so many people think that this is the ideal vegetable with which to ply their children.)

Also, they have no greens for you to put in your soup stocks.

Grocery store lady, on the very off chance that you are reading this, now you know why I made that face when you suggested I buy baby carrots.  And so do the rest of you.

                          

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.

                          

I’ve never had problems getting people to like these dishes.  They are all eminently lovable.  I’ve only had problems getting people to try them, to warm up to the idea that sweet and savory can not only be friends, but be greater than the sum of their parts.

Which is why I am coming to you now with this very simple, very satisfying, delicious winter soup.  There are lots of recipes for this basic soup floating around.   There are different ways to spice it, and different ways to finish it, but the basic soup itself is simple, cheap, and delicious and it takes advantage of winter produce. You can make it for a weeknight dinner, because it is quick and the prep work is pretty minimal.  It also keeps well and freezes beautifully.

Basic Cauliflower-Apple Soup

2 small or 1 large onion, minced

3-4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

1 small head cauliflower, diced fine

4-5 medium cooking apples (I like Winesaps or Northern Spy), peeled and diced fine

2 quarts stock (this works well with either chicken stock or an onion/celery/carrot veg stock)

olive oil

salt

Heat a large heavy-bottomed pot and add just enough olive oil to coat the bottom.  Add the onions and sweat them for several minutes until they begin to get translucent, then add the garlic and give it a minute or two to become fragrant.  Add the cauliflower, toss to coat, and then do the same with the apples.  Now add the stock — the stock should at least be equal in volume to the cauliflower and apples, if not slightly more.  You can add a little water if you need to.  Simmer until the veggies and apple are soft, about 15-20 minutes.

Using an immersion blender OR in small batches in a blender (you do not want boiling soup to spurt out the top of your blender, trust me on this), puree the soup.  You can puree it completely so it is silky smooth, or you can puree it partially so it is slightly chunky, up to you. Return it to the pot and simmer another 15 minutes or so.

While it is simmering, taste the soup and salt it, adding salt gradually and tasting after each addition.  How much salt you need will depend both on whether or not the stock you used was salted, and on how salty you like your soup.  Remember that you can always add more salt, but its a real bitch to remove it once it’s in there, so do be careful.

This makes a good basic soup that is nutritious, reassuring, and satisfyingly substantial.

There are Many Happy Variations you can also try:

Creamy Cauliflower-Apple Soup: Substitute a quart of milk or unsweetened faux-milk of your choice for a quart of the stock.  Be careful not to let it boil, especially if you use dairy milk.

Protein-Enhanced Cauliflower-Apple Soup: Puree 12 oz. soft silken tofu into the soup.

Coconut Cauliflower-Apple Soup: Substitute two cups unsweetened coconut milk for two cups of stock.  Phenomenal if you also do one of the spice variations along with the coconut milk.

Curried Cauliflower-Apple Soup:  Add your favorite curry powder to taste during the second simmering period.  This need not contain hot chili, although it certainly can.

Masala Cauliflower-Apple Soup:  Instead of curry powder as above, use your favorite ground garam masala blend.

(You can try many other spice mixtures in this soup, too, as it is a great canvas for that sort of thing.  Ras el hanout is great, so is Chinese five-spice mixture.)

Try strewing the soup with roasted crispy salted pumpkin seeds, as a garnish.  Or make some nice crunchy garlicky croutons with olive oil and garlic-rubbed stale bread and scatter those on top.  Or fry some cubed tempeh until it’s crispy and brown and use that.

And so on.

It’s good, I promise.

                          

I am thinking about fall, my favorite season of the year, and how grateful I am that I will be spending all of October enjoying an Upper Midwestern autumn for the first time in way, way too long.  I’ll be cooking in a strange kitchen all month, too, which I confess is giving me a bit of pause–should I pack my own knives?  should I take more than one wok? what about a steamer? will there be a decent selection of bakeware?–but which I counter with the knowledge that I will be within striking distance of the Dane County Farmer’s Market and all the glories of Midwestern agriculture in the autumn, and oh yes you bet I am talking about apples and pears and squashes and greens.  (We get those here too.  But the fall fruits just aren’t as good here as they are further north.  It’s all about the chill hours.)  In short I think I’ll be okay.

I’ve been experimenting with eggplants.  They can be challenging to cook without much in the way of fat or oil, yet I much prefer their taste and texture with less oil.  So I have been taking whole small eggplants and cooking them in a very hot dry heavy skillet, turning them periodically until the skins blister and the insides collapse.  They are then ready to be turned into other things–baba ghanoush, among others–or simply eaten hot with lemon juice and a little parsley and a little drizzle of olive oil.  They can also be chunked up and stir-fried, or chunked up and dropped into a pan of sauteeing onions for use in a frittata, or I suppose chunked and plunked into pasta toppings of various sorts.  Having a container of eggplant chunks prepared thusly sitting in my fridge has certainly increased the number of ways I have considered eating eggplant, this week.  I think the best was taking a few handfuls of chunks of charred, soft eggplant (it gets soft but not too mushy inside) and stir-frying it in seriously hot oil, then adding a big dollop of homemade sweet chili garlic sauce and letting that make a little glaze on the eggplant.  Recommended.

I’m also thinking about yeast breads again, now that it’s cool enough that the thought of having an oven running inside the house doesn’t make me want to burst into tears.  I’m reading The Bread Builders, and reacquainting myself with Kiko Denzer’s work on building earth ovens, and beginning to think about whether and how I might build a wood-fired oven of my own at some point in the future.  For now I am contenting myself with bread baked in the normal old conventional oven, though.  I just wish it got a little hotter.  I can make fairly good bread in my oven, but I can’t make exceptional bread in my oven.  There just isn’t enough firepower.

And yet even now I have a bowl of a part-wheat, part-rye pre-ferment sitting on the counter doing its autolyse thing.  We’ll have fresh whole-grain bread for dinner, along with a half-dozen small sweet-looking just-coming-into-season artichokes.  It won’t be great bread, but it’ll still be plenty good.