Homework

Leftover salad is an unlovely thing.  What was sprightly and crisp, distinct and resilient becomes soft and tired, limp and worn.  If you have dressed the salad, especially, you can expect to find it the next morning in a swamp of its own juices, sodden and dispiriting.

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)

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.

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.

Yesterday being a holiday, it skipped my mind completely that it was also a Monday.   Thus I forgot to take any sort of photo of Monday’s Supper until, er, well… Tuesday.  A little late.

I did eat supper.  More or less the same as this.  A couple more kinds of greens, a slighty different bit of leftover pork dumpling filling, but all in all, pretty darn similar.  And very tasty.

For those of you who are still unconvinced that delicious, home-cooked dinners with local ingredients are out of your reach due to time constraints, let me just tell you that our dinner tonight took me a grand total of 15 minutes start to finish to prepare.  And that includes the time it took to go out to the garden and pick the baby chard.

A classic in the “greens with proteiny things on top” genre is the bowl of greens topped with fried egg.  Egg yolk, with a little salt and pepper, is one of the best salad dressings you can eat.  (Coddled egg, in fact, is the heart of every proper Caesar salad dressing.)  I prefer my eggs over easy.  There are several nearby egg farmers whose eggs I use, these eggs came from Broom’s Bloom Dairy in Bel Air, Maryland, 30 miles door-to-door from my house.  They also sell at my two local farmer’s markets, which is where I buy their eggs.  The baby chard, as I say, came from my kitchen garden.

Just so’s you know, you can top virtually any green vegetable with fried egg and it will be delicious.  Steamed or sauteed kale, raw or stir-fried spinach, steamed or roasted asparagus, raw or wilted chicory or endive, lettuces of whatever kind you like best, lightly-cooked broccoli, pea shoots, sorrel, beet greens, arugula, or my secret love, radish greens… greens love eggs and vice versa and you will love them together.

We also ate these beautiful maple-ginger bison sausages from the wonderful Nathan Stambaugh at Gunpowder Bison.  Gunpowder Bison is 25 miles north of me and their products are truly top-notch.

Delicious.  And so simple and quick.

Gearing up for Sunday’s strawberry brunch, so dinner tonight was a bit of an afterthought.

Still, even an afterthought can be well-thought.

Soy tempeh, cubed, fried, seasoned with Chinese black beans and chile paste and a little soy sauce, over a bowl of fresh spinach.

It was fab.

Right now I’m waiting for my batch of granola to be ready to come out of the oven.  Smells fantastico.  Oats, wheat, barley, rye, triticale, almonds, pecans, agave syrup, maple syrup, a little oil, a little salt, and a blend of cinnamon, clove, allspice, mace, and nutmeg.  Kinda like the topping of an apple crisp.

Oh, look, she’s eating something that’s not a salad.  In addition to the thing that is a salad, anyway.

The unlovely lumpen mass in the bowl on the left is what we around my house call a mess of beans.  It is, you will doubtless concur, aptly named.

A mess of beans can be cooked in any number of ways.  The only constant is beans, and, especially by the time you’re getting toward the end of the batch, a certain messiness.  This particular mess of beans is canary beans with lots of diced canned tomato, sauteed onion and garlic, and a nontrivial quantity of ground cumin and crushed dried piri-piri peppers.  It’s very tasty.  Messes of beans typically are.  But it is ugly.  Messes of beans typically are.

It’s a bit of a challenge, as a food blogger type, to figure out what to do about ugly food.  I could dispense with the photos, but people like the photos and furthermore, the whole point of doing these thrice-weekly rundowns of my dinner is to show off a bit of one person’s culinary life in medias res.  Not primped and fluffed and posed, not with menus carefully chosen for their diversity or luxury or skill of preparation.  This is what I really eat.  And like you, sometimes I eat food that is just plain ugly.

But here’s the thing about ugly food: it can taste fantastic.  Your average lasagna may look lovely on the top, all crusty and bubbly and golden with cheese, but once it’s been cut into, it is not exactly the tower of prettily distinct layers that you see in the food magazines, is it?  Oatmeal, which is hands down my favorite porridge and one of my two or three favorite grains, is gloppy and beige.  Without even getting into the visual horror of many prepackaged foods — we’d be here all night — there are just a lot of foods we eat that aren’t so pretty to look at.  Most stews aren’t so attractive.  Coq au vin, pot roast, any braise is likely to smell fantastic and look…. well, like something that has been cooked with liquid for a long, long time.  Tuna noodle hotdish is one of my beloved comfort foods (Midwesterners represent!) but sexy on the plate it is not.  Not even if you put a pretty garnish on it.  And heaven knows there are few things we commonly eat that look more like a bad sneeze than a raw oyster.

This is, of course, why the food stylists of the world make the big bucks: they know all the tricks to make food, much of which is not actually related to the food it is portraying in the photo shoot (mashed potatoes impersonating ice cream, etc.) look beautiful on the page or on the screen.  I imagine that given sufficient time and no need whatsoever to make the food that was being photographed actually edible, a food stylist could even make a mess of beans look pretty.

But I am no food stylist, and these photos are of real food that I actually eat at my very own kitchen table.  Some of it is not beautiful to look at.  But I guarantee you it all tastes pretty damn fine.  And as my mother used to say to us whenever we would complain about how something we’d been served “didn’t look good” (and you must imagine a curt Ohioan schoolteacher’s voice here): “That’s all right, your tongue hasn’t got eyes.”

Good enough for me.

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.

I’ve been running errands and doing chores since I finished the chapter section I needed to finish today (my equivalent of getting off work) and frankly, my multitasking is not good enough to clean the bathroom, do my laundry, reorganize a supply cabinet, and clean the cat boxes whilst also cooking dinner.  The Belovedary, sadly, is nursing a tummyache and so wasn’t planning to join me for supper tonight anyway.

So dinner was a bitter greens salad.  Purple endive, arugula, pecans, dried Montmorency cherries, and a quick and dirty mustard-balsamic vinaigrette.  I ate it for lunch too, with a different dressing, lemon juice and grapeseed oil and black pepper.

It gets the job done.  I do, too: I’m delighted to announce that I am finally in the position to get rid of an ugly old tiny set of shelves I have loathed looking at for years, because I have solved the storage issue that had been causing me to need to keep the shelves in question.  It was simpler than I had feared it would be.  I love it when that happens.