Homework

Once you’ve got your supply of shelled, washed, cooked beans, what next?

There are so many options it’s honestly hard to know where to begin, but here are two of my favorites.

For beans that will lend themselves readily to Tex-Mex, Cajun, and many Southeastern US style meals, stew your cooked beans with a large quantity of minced onion, sauteed in some plain oil (peanut or canola or whatever) with a somewhat smaller quantity of bell pepper and a similar quantity of celery, a few crushed cloves of garlic, and a little cayenne or other spicy pepper.  Sautee all the veggies first until the onions are transparent and soft, then add the beans and enough water or broth to just barely cover the beans.  Simmer until about half of the water has cooked off.  This will give the flavorings time to penetrate the beans, and vice versa.  Salt, stir, then wait 10 minutes, and taste and add more salt if it needs it. To further Tex-Mexicanize this method, add ground cumin.

My favorite way to eat beans as cooked above is in a bowl, topped with an approximately equal volume of fresh homemade pico de gallo or salsa of whatever kind I happen to have made lately.  Today’s salsa is diced Tula Black and Pink  Brandywine tomatoes from the garden, lots of onion and garlic, two huge bunches of cilantro diced fine, salt, lemon juice, and three fresh ripe guajillo chiles and one fresh ripe tientsin chili from my garden.  It’s awful tasty.   My second favorite way to eat beans cooked like this is with hot cornbread.

For beans that will make your imaginary Italian granddad smile, stew the beans with a moderate quantity of minced onion sauteed until just turning brown in a generous sufficiency of good olive oil, then add a couple of cloves of sliced garlic and several large fresh sage leaves cut into a chiffonade (roll the leaves up like a cigar, then slice across into thin threads).  Or use a slightly smaller amount of dried sage.  Sautee the onion, garlic, and sage until they smell awesome, then add the beans, and again, just enough water/broth to bring the water level up to the top of the beans.  Add a little salt and a little black pepper and simmer it down until the water is halfway gone.  Taste, correct the salt if need be.

If you like, you can toss beans prepared this way with a small shape pasta like farfalle or rotini.  Gild the lily with a little slosh more olive oil, and some chopped parsley, which are also nice even if you don’t have the pasta with it.  I also like sometimes to dribble a tiny bit of good balsamic vinegar (not the $2.99 crap) over the top of the beans.

This is one of those dinners that is not for the kind of person who is afraid of mixing things on the plate.  I caramelized zucchini in a tablespoon of olive oil with whole cloves of garlic — a medium heat, with infrequent stirring and a good stout pan, will get it done in a reasonable amount of time — and then fried two eggs over easy in the residual oil left in the pan.  After breaking the yolks, I ate the garlic and zucchini with yolk and bits of eggwhite and some black pepper.  Sublime, especially because I made a nice cucumber salad to chase it with.  The salad is a riff on the cucumber salad from Friday last, only since I had no cilantro left I used some onions pickled in rice vinegar that were lingering in the back of the fridge.  Salt-fermented chiles add a little dimension and floral heat.  A fine contrast to rich eggyolk and unctuous-yet-nicely-crusted zucchini and garlic.

These tomato babies were hanging out in their fetching green hats, soaking up the sun when I went out in the garden a little while ago.

Ushi likes to watch over the garden and supervise me while I work.

Oh, I took photos.  But would they really express the satisfaction, a long day of writing behind me, an evening’s worth still to go, of spending a half an hour in the kitchen with the cool crispness of bok choy and cucumbers and scallions?  Would they convey the sizzle of the tofu hitting the hot oil in the wok, so loud it made me flinch even though I expected it?  I’m fairly sure they wouldn’t give the remotest impression of how mud-luscious (oh e.e.!) the sensation of mashing soaked fermented black beans with your fingertips can be, or how tantalizing the pungency that rises to the nose when you do it.  And as for the visceral gratification of whacking a peeled whole cucumber with the flat of a cleaver blade until it cracks into chunks, well, I think we can agree that no photograph could do that justice.

We ate a shrimp-broth based egg flower soup, black bean sauce tofu with bok choy, and smacked garlic cucumbers.  No rice, we usually don’t unless company’s in the offing, the better to spare my temperamental metabolic system.  Thumb-thick, winey-ripe blackberries for dessert.  Salutary indeed.

And so, back to work.

I’m dining alone tonight, my Belovedary down at Camden Yards watching the Orioles lose.  It’s a nice night for it.

Dining alone can be a challenge.  Even I sometimes get tempted not to bother cooking if it’s just me, especially when I am, as I am tonight, working late on a deadline.

I try, though, to do it anyway.  Gently, as a kindness, and not grumpily and rushed as if it were an insult to have to get some food into edible condition for my own continued upkeep.

The summer’s first slim zucchini, gently sauteed in olive oil with plenty of garlic and a pinch or so of dried crushed marjoram and oregano.  That’s the secret of zucchini that is meltingly tender but not disintegrating: slow, gentle sauteeing, not too much movement in the pan, use enough oil, and let things brown just a little to bring out the sweetness and provide a tiny bit of structurally crucial crust.

Eggs scrambled over a low heat with a couple handfuls of thinly chopped fat ends of sweet new green onions mixed in.

Salt, pepper, a glass of cold, smooth, friendly Vouvray that’s almost too sweet for this meal.

Here’s to solitude.

Doubtless you are all too upstanding to know where the phrase “stems and seeds” comes from. Suffice to say that it means to be scraping the bottom of one’s, er, stash.  Of comestibles, that is.  Bare-larder syndrome.  Lots of wide open spaces in the fridge.  You get the idea.

But a lot of good things can come of not having a lot of food in the house.

For one thing, you can go shopping in your cupboards and your freezer and such.  You should review what you have on hand regularly anyway, of course, but even the most diligent of us sometimes lose track of things.  I found two blocks of frozen tofu in the freezer earlier today while doing Things That Need Eating Up reconaissance.  I thawed them out, not having any idea what I’d do with them, but knowing that they’d be available later.

Freezing tofu is a fabulous process.  When you thaw it out later, you find that the tofu has toughened and become spongy, and you can squeeze out nearly all the water.  This makes tofu that is perfect for deep-frying or pan-frying.  With only the slightest dusting of cornstarch or potato flour or tapioca starch, you can make addictive crunchy tofu nuggets that can then be combined with lots of other things.

Like celery.  Stir-fried celery is a joy and a delight with a fantastic texture, assertive but not aggressive, capable of standing up to things like fermented black beans with no problem.  Among the few things left in the veggie drawer  — farmer’s market day is tomorrow — was a bunch of celery, so I sliced up half a dozen large stalks, stir-fried it in a dry wok with a little splash of water until it was bright green, and proceeded from there.

I also had some ground pork on hand.  It put me in mind of the other green vegetable I had in the bin, garlic chives.  It also put me in mind of the big bucket of kimchi I picked up the other day.  Kimchi  may be Korean but Chinese make pickled vegetable stirfries all the time. Including pickled spicy cabbage.  Fair’s fair, and besides, I figured the leftovers would be useful as a basis for a fried rice for tomorrow’s lunch.

I put some juju in it in the form of the half-bulb of garlic that didn’t go into the tofu and celery, and the last few tablespoonsful of my homemade sweet chili and garlic paste, of which more will need to be made soon.  Not too shabby, considering.

I admit, my idea of a mostly-empty fridge is not so empty as all that.  Things rarely get to that sorrowful stage where all that exists in the icebox is a half a lemon, some ketchup, some superannuated takeout now about three days from sentience, and a single pickle bobbing all alone in its jar.   If I were willing to go without fresh veg — which is about as likely as my being willing to go without oxygen — I could probably live off of what’s in the fridge for another week, though the meals would get odder and odder and I would eventually end up experimenting with almond butter and pickled okra canapes, which no one wants.  Throw in the contents of my pantry cupboard and things would get even weirder (there’s a lot of odd stuff in there, and a lot of coconut milk, which seems to reproduce on its own) but I could probably hold out against the zombies for a month.

I find it reassuring.  Too, there’s a certain frugal satisfaction in having no idea what to make for dinner, being at the end of the fresh veg supply, and nevertheless being able to root around in your own kitchen and come up with a meal that is filling and reasonably healthy, high on the vegetable quotient, and honestly pretty delicious.  I love my wok for many reasons, but one of the big ones is how easy it makes pulling together meals like this one.