Salsa and Quesadillas

The other night we made two salsas and ate them with quesadillas and salad.

On days I have a big, meat-containing lunch, I often want a very minimal dinner like this. The quesadillas were simple -- cheddar, jack, and a tiny bit of queso anejo inside, sauteed in a pan with a touch of olive oil. Queso anejo is wonderful -- have you tried it? It's the feta of Mexico, all salty and chewy and weird.

Lawson makes a carrot-habanero salsa from Belize that blows my mind and lasts all year in the fridge. The carrots keep it from being unbearably hot, but it's still quite tasty. It is neon orange. He made the first batch of the year the other night.

I made a classic tomatillo salsa: boiled tomatillos, chopped fresh green chiles, lime, salt, garlic, onion, and cilantro. It tasted fresh and well balanced but ultimately not enough better than a can of Herdez salsa verde for me to make it again.

Kris is out of town, by the way, for those of you who are wondering. She and my Dad are visiting family in Massachusetts and will no doubt return with tales of scrod and kelp.

Tomato Paste Ranting

Tomato paste: you can open those little cans, use two tablespoons, and then store them in the refrigerator or the freezer. Then two weeks later, when the next recipe calls for one tablespoon of tomato paste, you can get out the can and find it to be a) moldy, or b) really frozen.

Oh, I've tried those toothpaste-style tubes of tomato paste. I once bought one at a snooty Italian market that was two years past its expiration date, a fact I only noticed much later (note--I really love that British term "expiry" instead of "expiration"). But I find I can't really get along without tomato paste when I'm making Italian things.

I am pretty fanatical about not wasting food. It isn't about money now that I'm middle-class and have enough to buy whatever food I want. It's that someone grew those tomatoes, and other someones then slaved at the tomato-packing plant, and real people trucked the cans to the grocery store. Maybe it's because we're gardeners, and that I come from a wheat-farming background. Being wasteful with food feels so much worse to me than other sins.*

What we really need is freeze-dried tablets of tomato paste, each equaling a tablespoon. Or bubbles of tomato paste in a strip of soluble gel pacs. Surely our society is up to this challenge? Any other ideas?
_____

*This writerly excess made me Google sins, and I find that my Lutheran upbringing didn't really qualify me to rant about cardinal sins as opposed to the more mundane vices. I had it all confused with the Ten Commandments. I can clearly see that some sins are more attractive than others, but I can also see that the finer distinctions are best left to the experts.

Kale, Mushrooms, and Bacon over Polenta Taragna

Last night I made this, which is easily one of the best things I've eaten this year -- much more than the sum of its parts. The lemon zest pulls the dish together in surprising ways.

Some minor modifications: I used much less thyme, because our thyme plant is dry and stunted. I used two cloves of garlic, not one. I poured off all but one tablespoon of the bacon grease before adding the olive oil. And I used polenta taragna, which is a combination of ground buckwheat and corn, instead of regular polenta. I finished the polenta with a small bit of half and half -- cheese seemed too rich.

Best of all, this dinner helped me get over the disaster earlier this week in which I roasted some buttercup squash and made a beautiful soup, only to find that it tasted like feet. It was irremediable. The squash had some sort of moldy rot, invisible to the eye, that had completely saturated the soup with strong funk. We ate grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner.

Kale has redeemed me. I love greens with all my heart.

3.5-Grain Bread

Lawson gets really depressed by whole wheat bread.

He likes the various crusty white European loaves I make, and he likes all those storebought multigrain and honey wheat breads, which are pretty slim on actual whole wheat. True, some whole wheat can be cardboardy. But even the freshest, most wonderfully brown homemade whole wheat makes him kind of sad. Whole wheat tortillas, too. And whole wheat biscuits. So I don't make all-whole-wheat bread very often.

Because I don't want to either eat white bread or make Lawson sad all the time, over the past year I've been making bread out of varying combinations of good white flour and various other grains and seeds. The doughs are still built over several days, like good artisanal bread, with very little yeast or sugar and lots of liquid. But I add various things in hopes of upping their fiber and vitamin content. Wheat berries are fun -- I soak them separately and add them to the dough near the end of the kneading. 1/2 cup of coarse cornmeal or grits gives makes for the perfect amount of extra chewiness -- I use a little in most breads now. A little bit of oatmeal is good. And I play around with flax seeds, poppy seeds, and sunflower seeds. So far I haven't tried amaranth or barley or any of the myriad other grains out there, but I intend to.

Here's a typical recipe:

Mix 1 1/2 cups bread flour, 1/4 teaspoon yeast, and 1 cup water in medium bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and set in fridge for 1 day.

Add 1 1/2 cups bread flour and 1 cup water. Mix and return to fridge for a day.

Bring to room temperature. Add the following, mix, and knead thoroughly:

- 1/2 cup coarse cornmeal or grits
- 1 cup whole wheat flour
- 1/4 teaspoon yeast
- 1 tablespoon honey
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 2 teaspoons salt
- Water. Start with 3/4 cup and add more. I like very wet doughs.

You shouldn't have to knead all that much -- plenty of gluten should have developed over the first several days in the fridge.

Work in 1/4 cup flax seeds at end of kneading.

Refrigerate for one more day. Bring to room temperature again, gently shape into loaf, let rise, score, sprinkle with kosher salt, and bake at 450-500 degrees for 30 to 45 minutes. Baking stones are good. Baking in a preheated cast iron Dutch oven a
la Jeffrey Steingarten's explanation of Mark Bittman's explanation of Jim Lahey's technique is good. The important thing is to bake it as long as you can stand without burning it. It'll come out of the oven rock hard but will soften as it cools.

I have procured some white whole wheat flour; I'll report on my experiments and their reception.

Tomatoes and A Cold Dinner

A moment of silence, please, for the last garden tomatoes of the year.

They were so good that we just ate them plain, with salt, accompanied only by bread, butter, cheese, and grapes. Sometimes that's all the dinner I need.

The cheeses weren't overwhelmingly fancy, but they were better than what I usually eat and went well together. We had a Maytag blue, a gouda, and a cheddar. I've read that good cheese shouldn't be eaten cold, and I found that leaving the cheeses out of the fridge for an hour before dinner really did make them taste better.

October Recital Food

I usually have my first piano party of the year in October before Halloween. This year we had music ranging from Haydn to Muczynski, and food from pumpkin candies to Raspberry Tart II.

I found a fabulous pumpkin cake recipe in the October 2007 Bon Appetit. It has raisins, coconut, and lots of grated orange peel for flavor. The recipe calls for cream cheese frosting, but the cake is great on its own. I'll be keeping this one.

Pictured above is another raspberry tart. As you know, a 12-inch tart is the very easiest way to serve dessert to a large group--this one yields twelve to sixteen servings. Have we recorded this recipe for posterity yet?

Fruit Tart

Crust
1 cup butter, softened
4 tablespoons powdered sugar
2 cups flour
1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Combine ingredients (I use the food processor) and press into a 9x13-inch baking pan or 12-inch tart pan. Chill for 30 minutes. Bake at 350º for 30 minutes. Cool.

Cream Cheese Layer

8 ounces cream cheese, softened

3/4 cup powdered sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup whipping cream, whipped

Mix cream cheese, sugar, and vanilla; fold in whipped cream. Spread over cooled tart crust.

Fruit Topping

The original recipe calls for a can of blueberry pie filling! I use a layer of jam topped with plain fruit, or a layer of sugared fruit. For instance, I might stir some strawberry jam until it's spreadable and apply a thin layer, then arrange whole strawberries on top. In this case, I used some raspberry fruit spread topped with plain fresh raspberries.

I got this recipe from Barbara in Hawaii--do you remember her? She was (and is, though I haven't seen her for 20 years) really something: a wonderful soprano; an avid sports fan--she knew everything about football and sumo wrestling--never play Trivial Pursuit with her; a cat lover; and a librarian.

Spinach Rice Thing

Our subject tonight is in the back of this picture, behind the beets and the chicken.

It's hard for me to name this dish because I can't decide whether the rice or the spinach is the base ingredient. It's originally from Mireille Johnston's Cuisine of the Sun, with some modifications...she calls it Fada Riquet. But around here, Spinach Rice Thing it is.

Fill a large saucepan or small Dutch oven 1/2 full with water and bring to a boil.

Add 1/2 cup dry rice and simmer uncovered for 15 minutes.

Add 1/2 pound of fresh spinach -- or 1 large (9 oz) bag -- and boil for 10 more minutes. Drain everything thoroughly.

Return to pan and heat over medium-low until hot (pretty much just to make the eggs safe):

-2 eggs
-1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg (or more if, unlike me, you did not somehow acquire a container of nuclear nutmeg. The stuff is intense.)
-4 tablespoons Parmesan cheese
-salt
-pepper
-1 tablespoon olive oil (stir in at end)

This is so warm and comforting and awesome. And it's great left over.

I contributed a large batch to a recent potluck at work. For a crowd, I quadrupled the recipe, but for spinach I used 1 big bag of fresh spinach and 3 10-oz packages of frozen spinach. I only used 6 eggs. It was tasty.

Bread Wrestling

I really wrestled with this loaf of multi-grain bread--much messier than mud wrestling! I used 1 cup of mixed coarse corn meal, rolled oats, and whole rye flour; 2 cups of whole wheat flour; and 1 or 2 tablespoons gluten flour. The dough was so flabby after the first rise that I had to work in 1/2 cup white flour, and then knead twice more just to get it to stand up enough to form a sticky loaf.

On the positive side, it had excellent oven spring and good flavor, although it hadn't really cooled enough by dinner time. I'm curious to see whether it will have good texture tomorrow. Hey, life is full of drama!

***

This is the big benefit of being empty-nesters: We can selfishly cook and eat whatever we want. Nobody is waiting at the table requiring thousands of calories and carbohydrates; there are no vegetable-haters; no vegetarians (I love my vegetarian friends, and I enjoyed your vegetarian phases, but I also like flexibility); and if I decide to skip making a meal, Dad will do something about it.

Increasingly we like spicy, sort of ethnic food, with lots of fish and fresh fruits and vegetables. We like anchovies, capers, jalapenos, fresh ginger. We eat less meat each year. Lately we can't live without Medjool dates once a day.

Baseball and Cold Supper

Last weekend we went to Grandma's to watch the final first-round playoff game between the Diamondbacks and the Cubs (we won). We collaborated on a perfect, mostly cold, supper for the occasion: Buttermilk Chicken; Italian scalloped potatoes with tomatoes and onions; homemade whole wheat bread; cold asparagus with curry mayonnaise; and chocolate cake.

I made the chocolate cake from a Gourmet recipe I found on the internet. I was specifically looking for a small, cocoa-based recipe because that's what I had on hand. It was pretty good fresh that night, but the next day I found it to be dry and tasting of baking powder.

Everything else was good, though. Here's the chicken recipe, which I used to make when you were living at home. It's from a heart-healthy cookbook, so the chicken is skinned.

Buttermilk Chicken

2 cups buttermilk

1 clove garlic, minced

1 teaspoon mixed Italian herbs

1/2 teaspoon pepper

salt, optional

6 half chicken breasts or thighs, skinned

Combine buttermilk, garlic, herbs, and pepper. Marinate chicken in buttermilk mixture about 8 hours. Drain and discard marinade.

1 cup bread crumbs

1/4 cup Parmesan cheese

Combine bread crumbs and Parmesan. Dredge chicken in crumbs. Bake on baking sheet covered with foil for about 45 minutes at 350°. (Thighs make take a little longer than breasts.)

French Lentil Soup

I usually buy the cheap, grayish-green lentils from the grocery store, but last week I went to the bulk section at Earth Fare and picked up some other kinds: red lentils, which actually look coral to me, and French lentils, which are a wonderful dark green.

I baked some crusty bread last night and decided French peasant bread deserved French lentils, which deserved a French soup, so I made this, which is part Julia Child and part me. It's got very simple, big lentil flavor. The French lentils cooked up so glossy and round and wonderful -- they're really something.

Cut two strips of bacon into small pieces; heat in pan with 2 tablespoons olive oil.
Saute 1 chopped onion and 2 chopped carrots in the oil. Add 2 cups dry lentils and saute for a few more minutes.

Add and bring to a simmer:
- 2 cloves garlic
- 3 twigs fresh thyme
- 3 sprigs fresh oregano
- 2 bay leaves
- 1 cup white wine
- water

Add a cubed potato after half an hour and cook for half an hour more or until potato is tender. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve with bread and butter and a small salad.

Tortilla Española

Or frittata. Or omelet. Or kuku. It's pretty much the same thing around here: the best way to use up random vegetables and have a light dinner. I make Spanish omelets pretty regularly, often when we are recovering from something meat-laden the night before.

Most vegetables work well. Here are some of my favorite combinations:

- Swiss chard (leaves and stems) and potatoes
- young eggplant and basil
- spinach and assorted fresh herbs
- rosemary, garlic, potatoes, and onions

Really, though, anything goes. Zucchini is great. Asparagus is great. I almost always use an onion. I would probably stay away from the winter squashes and the lighter lettuces, but heck, I could be persuaded.

I use a nonstick 12" skillet for this, because it sticks horribly to non-nonstick cookware, especially if it contains potatoes. The skillet needs to have an oven-safe handle, because it spends a minute or two under the broiler.

First, cut up the vegetables. I cut onions into rings here because it looks pretty and adds texture. Most other big vegetables I cut into roughly 1" cubes. Asparagus is in 2" lengths. Leafy things are chopped. Garlic is minced.

Saute the vegetables in olive oil in the proper order and at the proper temperatures. I'm sorry I can't be more help than that, but it's going to matter whether you use potatoes (cook them first using medium-high heat so they form a skin, then remove from the pan and cook the onions) or garlic (add it last so it doesn't burn) or zucchini (saute for just a minute or two, and don't crowd the pan or it'll get watery).

Preheat the broiler.

Now, here's the key, I'm convinced: salt the vegetables to taste before you add the eggs.

Then turn the stove heat down to medium low and add:

- 6 to 8 eggs, beaten with 1 teaspoon salt
- any herbs you may be using

Stir to distribute the eggs and arrange the vegetables evenly. Top with:

- 1/4 cup grated Parmesan, if you like, or some other cheese (Swiss? As with the vegetables, anything goes.)
- grated black pepper

Cook for 3 to 6 minutes on the stove, until the middle is mostly set when you jiggle the pan. Then put it under the broiler for a minute or two until slightly brown.

I prefer my tortilla española at room temperature.

Crab Cakes and Miscellany

I was so excited to get Molly O'Neill's American Food Writing: An Anthology with Classis Recipes from the library, and I did use one good recipe from it, but overall it was so disappointing. Where did she find 500+ pages of such boring writing about food? I am especially bummed out because I was thinking of sending it to you for your birthday, but it was a dud.

***

Once we were with Uncle George buying fried clams or something similar and I asked whether he wanted to get cocktail sauce. "Oh no!" He was firm. "That has to be homemade." Well, homemade cocktail sauce to George was ketchup, horseradish, Worcestershire sauce, and lemon juice. And very good it is, too. Last night I made some to go with our Crab Cakes.

Sections of King crab were on sale at our favorite store. The 4-inch lengths were so easy to deal with. A few minutes with kitchen shears and I had a big pile of crab meat (it cost about $7.50). I used the Joy of Cooking recipe which adds just a few seasonings, a little mayonnaise and bread crumbs; then you coat each cake in bread crumbs and chill. Fry about 4 minutes per side.

I served sweet potato fries (baked, really) and asparagus. We felt lucky.

Well, maybe Dad didn't feel all that lucky. I made a really big pile of dirty dishes in the process of making this meal!

Chiles Rellenos

I want to document this, because I don't know that I'll be spending another evening fidgeting with our tiny garden chiles in quite this way, wonderful as they were. I love chiles rellenos -- love them. Lawson grew some beautiful poblanos and Anaheims this year, and for the first time they were big and thick enough to stuff. But they weren't big enough to work with comfortably.

First I roasted, peeled, and deseeded them. I remember when Russell and I had to help you peel and deseed a giant batch of roasted green chiles every fall, Mom. Nothing sticks to the hands like chile seeds.

Then I stuffed each with little twigs of Monterey Jack cheese and prettied them up a bit.

The batter was just eggs, with the whites and yolks beaten separately and folded together, and salt. Following James Peyton's suggestion, I sauteed them in a little olive oil, then baked them for just a few minutes to finish them off.

They were phenomenal. I made tortillas, too, and a big pot of Anasazi beans, and Lawson cut up some fresh tomatoes. Oh, man. But it was a lot of work.

My new favorite drink helped me through: bourbon, soda, and a mint sprig. It's the good parts of a mint julep without the oppressive sweetness of a sugar syrup.

Spice Pastes and Gravy Enhancers

Is this cheating? We had a lovely tofu curry last night (red curry paste, coconut milk, onions, carrots, cashews, and baked tofu squares.) I use Thai curry paste, both red and green, for some curries, although I have also made many curries from scratch.

The same goes for Mexican mole dishes. I have laboriously made the traditional chocolate-and chile sauce for turkey Mole Poblano, and I have also used the spice paste pictured here.

In a slightly different category, my extended family frequently uses chicken bouillon granules to beef up (ha!) a soup or sauce. Grammy used something called Gravy Master, and I know we used to have some dark, evil bottle of Kitchen Bouquet at one time. Many people can't cook without a bottle of Maggi seasoning around.

Do you have a dirty secret--Tomato soup? Worcestershire Sauce?

Pancakes

I made buckwheat pancakes on Sunday morning. Lawson and I so seldom eat breakfast together (we both rush to get to work on time, I don't often get hungry before lunchtime, and he has a cereal habit) that it all seemed particularly special. The preparation was nothing fancy: I used the Joy of Cooking recipe for basic pancakes, but substituted toasted soba flour for half of the all-purpose flour. Because soba flour doesn't contain gluten, the pancakes were super tender. The nutty, weird buckwheat flavor went really well with the sourness and sweetness of yogurt and preserved figs. Lawson ate his with butter and syrup and seemed equally happy, so whatever.

I'll certainly make buckwheat pancakes again -- homemade soba noodles were fun, but perfecting them would be hilariously complicated, and I have to use up this soba flour somehow. But my favorite, favorite pancakes are sourdough. I'll have to get to work on a sourdough post. Cooking Habit doesn't really lend itself to long academic treatments of the sort I feel bread and yeast deserve, which is why I seldom post about bread here. But autumn means I can pull my starter from the fridge without the jar exploding within 30 hot, humid minutes, so I'll get to testing and writing.