Homework

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.

A couple folks have asked, so here’s the approximate method for DIY salt-fermented chiles.

You need about a pound of chiles of your desired degree of hottitude.  Wash them, remove the stems, and chop them coarsely.  I often bung them in the food processor and whir them until they are mostly coarsely chopped with a few bigger and a few smaller bits.  It saves a lot of time.

Put your chopped chiles in a large bowl. Add about 2 Tablespoons kosher salt for a pound of chiles, and combine thoroughly.  Feel free to knead the salt and the chiles together if you like.  Pack salt and chiles into a clean glass jar or jars and put lids on them loosely.

Leave the chiles out on the counter at room temperature for about 2-4 days depending on how warm your kitchen is.  Less if it’s warmer, more if it’s cooler.  They’ll give off some liquid and you’ll see some little bubbles starting to form in the liquid.  Stir things around some with a chopstick, put the lid(s) back on (still loosely) and put your jar(s) in the fridge.  Every day or two, stir things around some more with a chopstick.  In about a week to ten days your chiles will be sufficiently transformed that you can start using them.

They will continue to improve over the space of a couple of months.  If you use them at a steady clip you’ll figure out eventually how much you have to make in your initial batch so that you will not run out until after they’ve had a chance to reach their peak.  What their peak is, of course, is subjective.

If things get fuzzy, remove the fuzzy bits and carry on.  If things start getting blue or grey, though, or it smells like a horrible dead thing that has died horribly, throw it away and start over.

And if you are even more adventurous than this, you can use Andrea Nguyen’s amazing recipe for homemade fermented Sriracha sauce.

Whooboy, it’s been a time around here, chickens.  I’m deep, deep in the crunch, though not yet in the weeds thank God, with a book deadline July 15.  So if postings get a little catch-as-catch can, fear not, it’s just that the book has eaten my head, my hands, and probably my cooking time, as well as pretty much everything else.

I did get to cook yesterday, though, as a celebration of both my finally finishing a complete draft of the whole book (cue vuvuzelas!) and a dear friend’s birthday (cue birthday cake!).  I made a Mexican feast: carnitas, frijoles, pico de gallo, veggies from the garden, sliced avocado, and bought a kilo of fine, fine tortillas from Tortilleria Sinaloa across town in Fell’s Point.  (I never want to live in a town without a good tortilleria again.)

So tonight I’m having leftovers.  Chopped chard and purslane from the garden topped with a bunch of carnitas and several large spoonfuls of pico de gallo.  In the little dish, some Korean-style pickled daikon.  And in the big quart Mason jar, a big ol’ vat of iced tea with plenty of lemon juice.  Just think of the pickled daikon as Korean curtido.  Muy rico no matter what.

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.

The shrimp at the Asian supermarket this morning were nice, and the price was good, so I bought some.  I had been hoping for mussels, but the mussels were not happy.  So shrimp it was, a foundation for what ended up being a shrimp-centric meal.  I shelled the shrimp and stir-fried them, in a riff on a Barbara Tropp recipe, with handfuls of minced ginger and loads of chopped scallion, a little double black soy, and not much else.

For veg, there were a mix of green pea and snow pea sprouts chased through the wok with a fair whack of grated ginger and some minced dried shrimp.  The brownish-red bits are shrimp.  I added a little black vinegar as well.

And there was soup.  It’s one of our favorite Chinese soups, and one that reminds my Belovedary of childhood.  It’s intensely savory and good, though not much to look at.  It can be made with almost any kind of stock, providing that the stock has been made with Chinese seasonings and not, say, thyme and parsley and carrots and bay leaves.

This one was made with a shrimp stock I’d made some while ago.  I pulled it from the freezer earlier today after coming home with the shrimp. To the stock, I added pickled mustard greens and stir-fried ground pork seasoned with garlic and wine, and let it simmer while I fussed with the rest.

Now, because when I have both paid for shrimp and done the work of shelling them I don’t want to waste any of the money or effort or goodness, I have the shrimp shells in a pot on the stove, simmering into another batch of shrimp stock.  Shell stocks are quick, and need to simmer for only about a half an hour, so it’s no big deal to do one after supper.  Particularly if you are, as I am, doing it in small quantity.  I’ll end up with about a quart of stock… exactly the amount I used to make the soup.

Today was hard.  Our seventeen-year-old cat, Mrs. Calabash, was diagnosed with a sizeable abdominal tumor.  Because she’s seventeen, and diabetic, and there’s not a whole lot to be done for her except keep her happy for as long as possible, that’s exactly what we’re doing.  Fortunately she doesn’t seem to know or care that she has anything wrong with her, and I hope that she remains oblivious to it for a long time to come.

So little did she care about her diagnosis, in fact, that she came into the kitchen to beg for scraps as I prepared a cheer-myself-up supper.

Yeah, I know, it’s just another salad, but isn’t it pretty?  I thought I’d liven it up with a nice shot of color, and since colorful veggies are not yet on the scene, I added pickled red onions and bits of gravlax.  Both, in this case, homemade, but you could use store-bought.

Mrs. Calabash got to snarf several bits of that lovely gravlax while I was cutting it.  Afterward, the dog came in to make sure no stray molecules of fishy goodness remained on the floor.  Then Mrs. Calabash came back later while I was eating to demand more, but I informed her that I had put pickled onions and their vinegar and lots of black pepper all over it and besides it was mine.  She gave me a filthy look.  I’m sure I deserved it.

The cat wanted nothing to do with my dessert, however.  No surprise there.  I have never met a cat that had much truck with grapefruit.

These are the last of a bag of end-of-the-season organic grapefruit I bought last week out of the sheer shock of seeing any available in May.  I supremed them all so that I could reserve the skins in nice long strips… all the better to make candied grapefruit peel with, my pretties.  I plan to make some as a gift for a friend (sssh, don’t tell her!).

The fruit itself looks better than it tastes.  It’s sweet, and definitely juicy, but hasn’t got a lot of grapefruit about it.  Rather the grapefruit equivalent of the navel orange.  The rinds, however, smell fantastic.  I have high hopes.  After a day like today, high hopes are a good thing to have.

Mixed green salad of mesclun, ox-heart beet leaves, arugula, and indigo frisee endive, with Hollyhock dressing, plus a bowl of radish kimchi.  What can I say, I’m busy tonight and more to the point, it’s what I was craving.

I might have some almonds later, or a bowl of muesli and soy milk, if I get hungry again.  Which I might, since mostly this is a big bowl of leaves and some radish and there’s not a lot of stick-to-the-ribs going on here.

Yes, those are chopsticks on my salad bowl.  Chopsticks, I have discovered, are the ultimate tool for eating salads.  Well, greens in general.  I find that greens are easier to eat if you can lift them without having to spear them first, as anyone who has ever chased a thin flimsy leaf around the bottom of a bowl whilst trying desperately to impale it on fork tines should be able to appreciate.