Homework

This is what happens when I take my own advice.  It could be what happens when you take my advice too, if you’re so inclined.  Have some greens along with it.  We had steamed gai lan.  Fantastic.

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.

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.

Goodness, Wednesday dinnertime already?  That was how I felt when I walked into the kitchen tonight, with honestly no idea what to cook.  But I had boiled a batch of chickpeas yesterday, and we had a pound of kale in the fridge.  Beans love greens and greens love beans, but how to make it interesting?

The answer I came up with was to roast the chickpeas in a very hot oven, with lightly smashed whole garlic cloves, olive oil, and some crushed dried Aleppo pepper… and to braise the kale in a bit of water until it was tender… and to make a bit of a ragout that would bridge the two.  The ragout was a quick and dirty one, several onions caramelized with oil, with a handful of oil-packed anchovies, then the leftover half a can of diced tomatoes left over from Monday’s dinner.  Simmered for a while, they made a lovely chunky sauce that went well with both the kale and the chickpeas.

I think I may make it again.  On purpose, next time.

Since what I’m eating for dinner tonight is exactly the same as what I ate for lunch, I figured I’d take y’all on a little tour of the garden instead of subjecting you to yet another photo of my food.

This rose is “Mermaid,” an old, simple rose with a vigorous and sprawling habit, a territorial nature, and exceptionally vicious and numerous thorns.  It blooms prolifically and grows at a gallop… I planted this rose at the back fence just a little over a year ago.  It’s been duking it out with the ornamental grasses I inherited from the previous owners of the house ever since.

Just inside the back gate you can see my Rouge Vif d’Etampes pumpkin vine, beginning to grow, as scheduled, through the bottom of a little tripod built of branches.  Growing up the tripod itself is autumn clematis, a volunteer that appeared when we chopped down some old diseased thujas that were slowly dying on the spot when we bought the house.  The pot holds my “Penelope” rose, past her first bloom already.  She’ll have another in the early fall, though, don’t worry.

In the Forest of Volunteer Herbs, at the corner of the back porch, we have oregano and dill, thyme and lovage and Bavarian sage, purslane, some baby basil that I bunged in down front recently, and a few garlic chives.  I note that this is what happens when you aren’t careful about pinching off the blooms when your herbs start to bolt: the following year you get surprises.  I’m just amazed there isn’t any cilantro.  By rights I should be up to my elbows in it.  Off to the right is some Kentucky Colonel dill I rooted from a bunch some friends gave me, which seems to be doing all right and will doubtless be having turf wars with the sage before summer’s out.

Looking down the side yard, where the raised bed lives.  Most of the day it gets full sun, only after about 5 pm does the back half get shaded.  Down front there are tomatoes — Tula Black, Brandywine, and Green Zebra — and peppers of the “Biscayne,” “Lipstick,” “Chi Chien,” and guajillo varieties.  Further back a bit, Good Mother Stallard beans, Flor di Castilla beans, both of which are shelling varieties, and a couple hills of “Eden” pole beans, a string bean.  Beyond that, there is chard aplenty, a couple varieties of gai lan, some bok choy, broccoli “Belstar,” and Brussels sprouts, along with a few starts of Roma tomatoes tucked into odd corners.  To the right, with the white flower heads, is one of the elderberry bushes.  To the left you can see the rainbarrels.  Yeah, actual barrels.  Actual whiskey barrels, actually.  They still smell of it some.

The baby blueberries are still working on it.  I planted these berries just this year, so any fruit at all is a nice surprise.

Over the fence is my neighbor’s yard.  He likes roses, can you tell?  It’s nice to be able to enjoy all these roses and still have lots of space to concentrate on growing good things to eat.  Speaking of which, do you see my tiger lilies there in the lower right?  Lily buds are good eating… when I can bear to pick them.  I do so love watching them open.

Another view of the raised beds, with chard and broccoli in the foreground, beans and elderberry bushes in the back.

Up front in the mostly-unkempt, once-and-future shade garden, to which I haven’t yet done much, my astilbes are beginning to bloom.  There’s a volunteer black-eyed susan just to the left, too, that I’ve decided to let run riot if it will.

This is a Sea Holly (Eryngium “Blaukappe”) surprise.  I’d started some of these from seed last year, and felt all studly when I planted them out, whereupon they promptly died.  Or seemed to, at least, until a few weeks ago when they reappeared as if nothing had ever happened.  In the background, Echinacea purpura, and more tiger lilies.

Last but not least, here on the front porch, my $2 begonias.  They started out, a month or so ago, as dinky little three-inch pots of completely rootbound begonia for sale cheap at Trader Joe’s.  I purchased their freedom and brought them home and installed them somewhere with a little breathing room, namely a porch planter, and promptly enrolled them in the patented regime of benign neglect to which I treat all my plants.

They seem to like it fine.

I fervently believe that someday researchers will discover that brassica-family vegetables are a natural antidepressant.  They work for me, anyway.

Vegan “beef” (pressed, salted tofu) and broccoli with garlic “oyster” sauce (mushroom-based) for dinner tonight as a saving throw against a day made of grumpy.  Coupled with sesame cabbage, using up the last of a head of savoy cabbage that has been kicking around the crisper bin.

I do love me some green beans.  I love them so much I eat them out of season, which I don’t do with most high-summer vegetables for the simple reason that I know full well they just won’t ever be as good as the ones you get when it’s high summer and the vines are pumping out beans like mad.  These were fairly tough, as is typical for out-0f-season beans, and they weren’t very sweet at all, but there are ways to make out-of-season green beans bend to your will.  Blanching them helps a lot.  That’s what I did with these, before I stir-fried them in a little grapeseed oil.  I finished the dish with a nice rich almond, chili, and garlic sauce.

For those of you familiar with Chinese peanut or sesame sauces, this is along those lines, just made with almond butter instead of ground peanuts (I have learned not to say “peanut butter” or my fellow Americans try to make it with Jif or something else that is hydrogenated and sweetened, which results in a repulsive sauce if you ask me).  Nut butter plus a little ground fermented brown bean sauce plus minced garlic plus chili paste plus some hot water to thin it to the right consistency… and the last few minutes it gets in the hot wok with the hot vegetables takes care of making sure it clings nicely to the veggies.  Pistachio butter works well too, but cashew butter and macadamia nut butter are too sweet and too oily, in case you were wondering.

For our second dish, we had a variation on torn cabbage with black vinegar.  Cabbage loves vinegar; there’s a reason it shows up in so many different cuisines. I happened to have a savoy cabbage in the vegetable bin, so I peeled about half the leaves off it and tore them into bite-size bits.  I cut some smoked tofu into batons and sauteed them until they were getting crispy, and while that was going on I blanched the cabbage briefly just to get excess water out of it and do the pre-cooking so that it would finish quickly in the wok.  Once the tofu was ready, I pulled it out of the wok and tossed the cabbage in, stir-frying it for a minute or two before adding the tofu and a good swack of black vinegar and the tiniest skosh of sesame oil.

A very tasty and satisfying supper, this. It’ll be even nicer when I have fresh green beans from the garden.  All my beans are up and healthy and growing well, both the pole beans and the bush beans, so it’s just a matter of time and sunlight, really.

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.

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.

We like chiles around here.  We don’t actually like heat for heat’s sake, and couldn’t begin to give one tiny little mouse dropping for the whole “anything you can eat I can eat hotter” routine.  But we do like chiles.  We feel similarly about ginger and garlic.  I find, in fact, that if I don’t get enough chiles, ginger, and garlic in my regular diet, along with green vegetables and especially brassica-family veggies, I soon feel out of sorts.

Tonight’s dinner was all about trying to meet that quota.

Above, green beans first dry-fried (no oil) to blister them thoroughly, then stir-fried with oil and  a salty, spicy, delectable mixture of minced dried shrimp, minced garlic, minced ginger, minced salted Tientsin cabbage, and chili paste. A slosh of black vinegar and a demi-slosh of soy sauce and that was that.

Below, stem lettuce, blanched and squeezed dry, stir-fried with ginger, garlic, pressed spiced tofu, Sichuan pepper, and dried whole chiles, with a little bit of sesame oil.

I’m afraid the descriptions of the dishes are as close to actual recipes as I’m going to get.  If you are adventurous, I’m sure you could approximate.

I will note, for the curious, that yes, this meal was very nearly vegan but for the dried shrimp in the beans, which could have been left out without undue harm.  I’ve had a few people write to me since I posted my “They’re Called Vegetables. Get Over It.” inquiring, sometimes rudely and sometimes just out of curiosity, about my own eating habits.  So I thought I’d point out that I eat what I feel like eating, for the most part. Sometimes that means meat.  Sometimes not.  It almost always means lots of vegetables.

And, as I say, plenty of ginger, garlic, and chiles.