How to Reduce Food Waste, and an Easy Autumn Supper

After reading some good advice on how to reduce food waste, I now wash and/or prepare almost all my vegetables as soon as I get back from the market. Because of this one change,  I waste almost zero fresh food and eat more vegetables. Plus, I find that simple meals like this one come together much more quickly and with less expenditure of my waning end-of-day energy. 

Some people think vegetables will spoil more quickly if you wash them days in advance. Well, I keep all my washed vegetables in airtight plastic or glass snap-ware in the refrigerator, and they don't seem to spoil any more quickly than dirty vegetables. The only vegetables I don't wash in advance are mushrooms because I fear their turning slimy. 

This autumn meal for 2 is very simple, attractive, easy, and quick. Plus it's comfort food!

Meal Components:

1 stone fruit like peach or plum, washed and sliced

1 can vegetarian baked beans, warmed on stove or in microwave

1 recipe of Joy of Cooking's buttermilk cornbread

1 bunch collards, stemmed, torn into bite-sized pieces, and washed

The cornbread mix comes together in about 3 minutes and bakes for 25 minutes. The collards should simmer in salted water for 12 to 25 minutes, depending on your preference. Drain the collards and press out the excess water with the back of a wooden spoon.

On each plate arrange one slice of cornbread, a heap of collards, and a fan of fruit slices. Add a small pretty bowl to the side of each plate with some warm beans.

Enjoy with iced tea or a mug of cider.  Offer seconds of everything.

Quiche with Carmelized Onion and Gouda

I think my camera broke when it realized it was supposed to photograph this wreck of a quiche. George and I laughed when we saw it and so did Sally. Picture this in your mind: a craggy, ragged square brown crust with a flat, thin puddle of bright yellow goo leaking from a crack in the side. Two inches tall of crust empty of any filling. The egg did NOT puff up into the thick, fluffy golden cake that every quiche exhibits.

Where did it all go so wrong? I don't know. I followed the recipe pretty closely except that we didn't have cream so I used soymilk. From Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, I used the onion quiche recipe, but I substituted aged gouda for 1 Cup of carmelized onion. I used his savory pie rust recipe, with half all-purpose flour and half whole-wheat flour. I prebaked the chilled crust for 10 minutes weighted down with buttered foil and dry beans. I carmelized the onions using the recipe in Perfect Vegetables from the Editors of Cooks' Illustrated. The onions tasted divine; they weren't the problem. By the way, carmelize onions this way:

2 lbs. thinly sliced onions (cooks down to about 1 1/4 Cup)
1 Tablespoon unsalted butter
1 Tablespoon canola oil
a few pinches salt
1 teaspoon brown sugar

1. Use an enormous non-stick skillet. On high heat, melt the butter with the oil.
2. Add the spices, stir, and then the onions and cook, stirring, 5 minutes until they start releasing their juices.
3. Turn the heat down to medium and continue to cook another 30-40 minutes until they are as brown, oozy, and sweet as you like them.


Anyway, then I took the prebaked crust from the pan and stuck it on a baking sheet, per Bittman's instructions. Sally thinks I probably shouldn't have done that—then the egg wouldn't have leaked out the crack in the side. I mixed together 6 eggs, 2 Cups soymilk, 1 Cup carmelized onions, 1 Cup grated gouda, and poured it into the prebaked crust. I baked the whole thing for about 40 minutes. It tasted buttery and flavorful after chilling several hours in the refrigerator but  looked absolutely ridiculous. I won't be making that again. Sally told me she despises Bittman—maybe next time I try quiche I'll go with Deborah Madison or Molly Katzen, or better yet, Gil Marks.

Comments and suggestions welcome!

How to Get Your Yeast to Rise When It's Cold

January: because it's winter cold and winter dry in my house, yesterday I found myself struggling with uncooperative challah dough. It would not rise. It wouldn't! And I couldn't find a naturally warm place anywhere in my house to coax that dough into submissiveness. But after combining two different tricks, I finally managed to get that darn dough to rise. True, the challah ended up slightly denser than usual, but it tasted no less delicious.

Trick 1: Use Your Tea Kettle

Not everyone owns a tea kettle. But if you do, this trick is the first thing you should try so that you can both moisten and heat your dough simultaneously. Your dough should be rising in a bowl covered with a damp towel. Fill your tea kettle with water, put it on the stove, and bring it to a shrieking boil. Now lower the heat to low or second-to-lowest. Put your covered bowl of dough next to the tea kettle and drape the damp cloth over BOTH the bowl AND the gently steaming tea kettle spout so that the steam enters the bowl of dough. Make sure nothing flammable is near a flame. Leave kettle and bowl together like that for an hour or more.

Trick 2: Use Your Oven

Some cookbooks say to stick your dough in the oven and turn the pilot light on. I have never had an oven with which I could do that. So instead, I braided my challah, placed them on a baking sheet, covered them with a very damp cloth and put them on the stove (above the oven). Then I turned on the oven to about 190ºF. The oven warmed the stove top but not too much. After an hour, the challah had risen quite decently. Then I turned the oven up to 375º, stuck the challah in, and baked it until perfect.

Trick 3: Use Your Bread Machine

I always have too much challah dough to fit into our bread machine, but if you're just making a single loaf pan worth of dough—and you own a bread machine—use your bread machine. Set it on the dough cycle. Not only will the bread machine stir and knead your dough for you, it will warm and rise your dough for you. Even in the cruelest winter months, your dough is guaranteed to rise! When the dough cycle ends, take the dough out, shape it how you like, preheat your oven, and bake the bread the normal way.

Trick 4: Wild Ideas

OK, this is just wild speculation on my part, but what if you stuck your bowl of dough on top of an electric blanket, heating pad, or hot water bottle? Maybe that would work! Or you could get into bed with your family or your pets and stick the dough bowl under the sheets so that your body heat could…

…never mind. Stick to the first three tricks.

Omelette Rice

Zombies walk among us. I know because yesterday I was one of them. But I invited Gavin over for dinner anyway because it was Shabbat and I just wanted to have a calm, civilized dinner at home. After 2 hours of trying to plan a simple dinner that I could make while exhausted, I gave up, called Gavin, and told him I was just going to have to make a frozen pizza. Then I took a short nap.

Twenty minutes later, I sprang up, human again, and remembered the Japanese comfort dish Omu Raisu. I've never eaten Omu Rice because it usually contains chicken, but I've seen it in many pictures plus this great scene from Tampopo, the most delightful meditation on food ever filmed:

In this scene a bum breaks into someone's house and make a little boy some vegetarian Omu Raisu. He cooks the omelette with chopsticks! The Japanese are crazy physical geniuses.

I did not exactly make Omu Raisu, but it served as my inspiration. I cooked some hot fresh rice in my rice cooker. Then I filled small bowls with chopped onion, chopped tomato, chopped bell peppers, some fresh baby spinach, some shredded chedder, and chopped avocado. All of these ingredients remained from previous cooking ventures.

The jewel of my left-overs was a head of roasted garlic from our garden. Roasted garlic works wonders squeezed into savory dishes, mashed potatoes, or on top of fresh-baked pizza. All you do is wrap a head in aluminum foil and bake it at 400º for an hour (you can do this while cooking a sweet potato or something). You can store it in the refrigerator at this point if you want. Then you slice off the very top and squeeze from the bottom; all that golden goodness oozes out.

I didn't bother trying to fold the egg over—an invariably messy and disappointing proposition. Instead, after the eggs had set over the sauteéd vegetables, I sprinkled the avocado and cheese on top and covered the fry pan with a lid for a minute. Once all the cheese and melted and bubbled, I divided the omelette into 4 equal parts like a personal pan pizza. I served each part over a bowl of fresh hot rice and offered taco sauce, hot sauce, Pick-a-Peppa sauce, and sour cream as condiments. 

George didn't like it. Gavin enjoyed his so much he started spooning George's leftovers into his mouth. And I really, really enjoyed it with taco sauce and sour cream. In my mind, I was eating American Sarah's Omu Raisu.

Omelette Rice

1 and 1/2 Cups dry rice, washed and cooked

1/2 Cup chopped onion
1 large steak tomato, chopped
1/2 Cup chopped peppers, broccoli, or vegetable of choice
1 head roasted garlic
several handfuls fresh baby or chopped adult spinach

4 large eggs

1/2 avocado, cubed
1/4 Cup shredded cheese

Optional Condiments: taco sauce, ketchup, sour cream, fresh herbs, hot sauce, etc.

Directions:

1. Put on rice to cook. When it's done, keep it warm.
2. Meanwhile, heat up a medium wide fry pan on medium low heat with some oil or butter. Sauté the onion until softened, darkened, and giving off a mellower scent.
3. Add the tomato. Cook one minute. Add peppers or optional vegetables. Sauté 3 minutes or so until they seem mostly cooked.
4. Squeeze in roasted garlic. Mix. Add spinach and cook down.
5. Meanwhile, beat eggs together. You can add a little milk or soymilk. Salt and pepper to taste.
6. Make sure vegetables are evenly distributed in fry pan. Pour egg mixture over. When the eggs start setting, gently lift edges with a rubber scraper/ spatula and tilt the pan so runny egg on top trickles under.
7. When most of the eggs aren't runny any more, sprinkle avocado and cheese evenly on top. Cover with a lid and wait 1 to 2 minutes.
8. Turn off the heat and divide into sections. For each person put a layer of rice in the bowl and top with some omelette. Offer condiments.

Serves 4.

How to Cook Food with Alcohol in it While Pregnant

I was researching whether pregnant women should eat food with alcohol in it. The short answer is absolutely not. Unfortunately, I found website after website full of helpful people assuring pregnant women that it was totally fine because either 1) alcohol cooks away entirely or 2) a little wine is good for the fetus—at least it won't hurt. Yes, I'm looking at you, Yahoo! Answers. You're proof that truth by consensus doesn't work.

Every medical site or book I've read firmly states that after the first two weeks of pregnancy, even the smallest amount of alcohol can give your baby Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. This is because with alcohol, the fetus drinks pretty much what you drink, but its organs haven't developed enough to process the alcohol safely. Plus, the fetus is tiny! Imagine you were a toddler and you drank a full glass of wine. They don't even let toddlers do that in France. Now imagine you're 1/8th the size of a toddler and you drink a full glass of wine! Not only would you pass out from blood poisoning, you'd probably suffer severe brain damage. In the first trimester, the fetus is smaller than an orange. It probably couldn't even handle a grape's worth of alcohol.

And yes, some lucky people drink a little wine during their pregnancy and nothing happens. Same with smoking and other risky behaviors. The point is, it's RISKY.

Keeping the dangers of alcohol in mind, how does cooking change the picture? Does alcohol cook away entirely because it has a lower boiling point than water? No. Here's a handy-dandy chart from the US Department of Agriculture:

Alcohol Burn-off Chart
Preparation Method	Percent Retained
alcohol added to boiling liquid & removed from heat	85%
alcohol flamed	75%
no heat, stored overnight	70%
baked, 25 minutes, alcohol not stirred into mixture	45%
Baked/simmered dishes with alcohol stirred into mixture:
15 minutes cooking time	40%
30 minutes cooking time	35%
1 hour cooking time	25%
1.5 hours cooking time	20%
2 hours cooking time	10%
2.5 hours cooking time	5%

Eggplant Parmesan, or How to Make Bread Crumbs

After harvesting 5 juicy, glossy purple Japanese eggplants, I realized I needed a new eggplant recipe. Last summer I made eggplant dish after eggplant dish, and all firmly failed except for the Patlican. So this summer I abandoned my faithless Japanese cookbooks and decided to go Old School with Mollie Katzen's Eggplant Parmesan recipe. The truth is, I don't adore eggplant parmesan, but when I was in college I slavered over eggplant parmesan subs from my local pizza establishment. So I bought some po' boy bread and got to work.

Katzen's recipe optimistically timed the total cooking time at 1 hour 15 minutes. Yeah, right. That recipe moseyed on for 4 hours and I still faced a clean-up battlefield at the end. The first time snag happened when I decided to make my own bread crumbs. You know, whiz stale bread in your food processor and voìla, homemade cheap bread crumbs. This part took me an entire hour! Months ago I had cubed some multigrain loafs and frozen them. These I poured confidently into the Cuisinart and pressed ON. After a minute, I still had frozen cubes and no bread crumbs. Also the machine was emitting that burning rubber smell that means you've been using it more than you would have to if YOU KNEW WHAT YOU WERE DOING. Which clearly I didn't, because if I had the whirling blade wouldn't have flown upwards like a UFO. That had never happened to me before.

Panicked, my next move was to remove all but a small handful of the cubes and rhythmically pulse the food processor on them, trying to jostle it into a good mood. This worked. Sort of. After 5 minutes I managed to spoon out about 1/8 Cup from the bottom. How many breadcrumbs did I need? Two full cups! My patience was the stuff of legends. I continued on for about a half hour until I had 3/4 Cup. There was no way I was going to return all the way to Kroger for a box of breadcrumbs. But I was running out of energy, and I had the sinking feeling that I was approaching this problem in a dollop-headed manner.

Suddenly I experienced a Brain Storm, a downpour of clarity. Bread crumbs come from hard stale bread, right? So what if I had some dried-out room temperature stale bread instead of cubed frozen bread? I couldn't toast those cubes so I went to the freezer and took out some sliced bread. I toasted it lightly, tore it into chunks, and then food-processed it. In a few seconds, all the bread had transformed into bona fide bread crumbs. Tears of gratitude sprang to my eyes.

That problem solved, I began dipping eggplant slices into soymilk and then tossing them with the bread crumbs. Katzen did not ask for egg as part of the dip, and I wondered how the crumbs would stick to the eggplant slices. It turned out, they wouldn't. Not unless I personally pressed the crumbs onto both sides of each slice with my fingers. Did that take 5 times longer than it should have? As Sarah Palin would say, You betcha.

Once that ordeal was over, I slid the eggplant slices into the oven. They turned out fine. While they were cooking, I should have washed dishes and begun making the Tomato Sauce to go over them. But I was dead exhausted. So instead I sat down and rested. And wished I had bought premade bread crumbs and prepared marinara sauce instead of going the from-scratch route.

After the eggplant came out, I returned to my self-imposed slavery. You won't believe this, but I actually gave myself more than double the work the recipe called for, first by making my own bread crumbs, and second by using fresh tomatoes instead of canned tomatoes. To prepare the fresh tomatoes, first I blanched them in boiling water. You do this by cutting an X in the bottom of each tomato and sticking the whole thing in boiling water for 30 seconds. Immediately remove the tomato, let it cool a little, and easily peel off the skin. Then cut the tomato in half and squeeze out the juice and seeds into a cup. That last is the hard part, because the peeled tomatoes are slippery as minnows and the juice often squirts out the back instead of the cut side. But I managed.

The directions for the sauce weren't difficult, and I managed to follow them without trouble. The final part of eggplant parmesan is just like lasagna: layer, layer, layer. A layer of tomato sauce. A layer of eggplant. Another layer of tomato sauce. A layer of grated mozzarella. Another layer of eggplant... uh-oh. I had only enough eggplant for 1 1/2 layers! And it turned out, I only had enough tomato sauce for 2 1/4 layers. Cheese? I had enough for about 5 layers. So my eggplant parmesan looked really weird. But it baked up just fine and tasted good, as if someone had slaved in a kitchen for 4 hours. And no one can tell how ugly it is when it's in a sandwich.

The following version is easier.

Eggplant Parmesan Sub Sandwich

3 large juicy eggplants, sliced into 1/2 inch rounds

2 Cups bread crumbs

2 tsp. basil

1 tsp. oregano

1 tsp. thyme

1 Cup soymilk

1 egg, beaten

2 jars prepared marinara sauce. Or make your own tomato sauce. It's your funeral.

some tomatoes, blanched, peeled, juice squeezed out, and chopped

1 lb. grated mozzarella

1/2 Cup grated Parmesan cheese

sub sandwich bread

lettuce

mayo

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
2. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Also spray oil to grease a 9x13 glass baking pan.
3. Mix bread crumbs with dried herbs. In another bowl, mix soymilk and egg.
4. Dip eggplant slices into wet bowl, then the bread crumb bowl. Lay on baking sheet and in baking pan.
5. Bake 20-25 minutes, until tender. Keep the oven on.
6. Meanwhile, wash your dishes, prepare those tomatoes, and grate the cheese.
7. Mix the tomatoes into your sauce for that pseudo homemade touch.
8. Take the eggplant out of the baking pan and layer them onto the baking sheet. Without washing the pan, spoon in a layer of sauce. Add a layer of eggplant. Spoon on another layer of sauce. Sprinkle on a layer of mozzarella cheese. Repeat until you get to the top of the pan or run out of something. Generously sprinkle parmesan over the top.
9. Bake at 375º for 40 minutes, uncovered.
10. Toast some sub bread. Lather on a little mayo (or mustard), and several crisp, juicy slices of lettuce. Transfer some eggplant parmesan into that. Get a thick napkin. Yum de yum yum.

Sad Food News, or How to Fail at Everyday Tasks

1. Deer ate all 30 of our lettuce heads in one night.
2. Deer ate most of our cucumber leaves that night too.
3. Dear ate a lot of our bean leaves as well. Yup, same night.
   
4. I saw rabbits in the yard yesterday. Adorable little munching machines.
5. Although central NC has seen a lot of frightening lightning or wind storms lately, it has not rained in forever. It is quite hot.
6. The only vegetable producing its heart out in our garden is summer squash, which is the sole vegetable I hate.
   
7. I failed to make an appetizing pasta sauce with a tomato sauce base, even though I used a recipe that always works when George makes it.
8. I have a dentist appointment in a few days, the fear of which inhibits me from drowning my sorrows in chocolate chocolate chip ice cream.
   

Lettuce Wrap or How to Use Garlic Scapes

Tangy, savory, springy, and fresh. As I bit into my hastily thrown-together lettuce wrap, I blinked in surprise. I didn't expect something so delicious. I paused and wondered where I had gone right.

George tried to grow maybe 30 garlic plants in our vegetable garden this summer. It turns out that garlic is a sturdy plant that is easy to grow and matures quite late in the season. Our garden now brims with garden plants, taking up space once occupied by vegetables you could eat sooner. That's why I was super relieved when George discovered that garlic plants make garlic scapes, which we can harvest and eat now.

Garlic scapes are like chives or green onions married to garlic. Raw, they offer a fresh tanginess with a bit of a burn at the back of your throat. My previous experience with garlic scapes was at Motorino, a fancy pizza place in NYC. I ordered a seasonal pizza with garlic scapes and just figured garlic scapes were some chic little-known herb-of-the-month for hipsters. Little did I know that garlic scapes are simply a by-product of garlic farming. Everyone should know about them! But I looked at them every day without a thought in my mind until George brought some into the kitchen and told me what they were.

Well, we didn't know what to do with them at first, except cook them on pizza. So we went and bought a frozen pizza, sprinkled chopped garlic scapes and sliced mushrooms on top, and baked. They were good that way. Real good. After that we had a bunch of leftover chopped scapes. So I mixed some with grated daikon radish and wasabi and put them in our somen noodle dipping sauce. They tasted fine in that, but kind of too hard for a dipping sauce.

Yesterday I felt a gaping abyss of Hungry open in my stomach so I ran to the refrigerator and made a quick snack. This is the recipe, and let me say, it was REAL GOOD. Garlic scapes and lime mayonnaise should get married and have lime-garlic-mayo babies.

Lettuce Wrap

1 flatbread or whole wheat wrap, microwaved or toasted until warm and flexible

1/2 tsp. McCormick's lime mayonesa or mayo whipped with a little fresh lime juice

a handful of garlic scapes, chopped

2 handfuls fresh springy lettuce

On the flatbread, spread the mayonnaise. Sprinkle with garlic scapes, top with lettuce, roll up tightly, and take a big bite. Chew.

Peanut Butter My Way

Suddenly I realized that I no longer enjoyed commercial brand peanut butter: too sweet, too salty, too oily. I switched over to natural peanut butter, the kind where the oil separates and floats to the top. That oil didn't look too tasty, did it? I didn't want to eat it. I didn't want to put it into my body.

So for years I tried to pour the oil off the top. This method was absurdly messy and inevitably lost some real peanutty goodness as well. Frustrated, last year I hit on the method of simply storing the peanut butter jar upside-down. That way the oil floats to the bottom, and I can scoop off the butter from the top, no problem.

Except there is a problem. That peanut butter is STIFF, no question. How are you supposed to spread peanut butter rocks? I've finally solved this last hurdle, and because you are my faithful readers, I will share my genius with you:

Scoop out the peanut butter with a spoon, and put it into a little bowl. Heat it up in the microwave on high for 15 seconds. Suddenly it's spreadable and oozy, just the way you like it, but not oily.

I take my bow.

Fresh Summer Corn

In North Carolina, sweet white corn has come into season!

I think it was Miss Manners who informed me how rude it is to open corn at the store to check if it's a decent speciment. Other customers don't want pre-opened corn, so by checking invasively you cause the store to lose money. Instead, you can just carefully squeeze the top of the corn to make sure it isn't mushy, and buy 2 extra corn in case anything goes wrong.

Make sure you cook or eat the corn on the same day that you purchase it because just-picked corn tastes the most like juicy summer. Shuck the corn and pick out the corn silk, bring a large pot of salted water to boil, and cook with the lid on for exactly 5 minutes. Serve hot with optional butter.

To make a meal of it, add sides of watermelon or strawberries, fresh cooked beans, and a leafy salad.

White Bean and Garlic Herb Sauce

Our kitchen is whole once more! To take full advantage of its gleaming white counters and capacious sink, The Irreverent Cook visited for a week, and we had a memorable time cooking difficult recipes from The Voluptuous Vegan, my favorite cookbook. The Irreverent Cook first made my favorite cake for my birthday, a chocolate vegan cake with hazelnut mousse. Afterwards we went to a nearby farm and picked two elephantine baskets of organic strawberries…for a total of $11. That's about 10 times cheaper than the farmers market! Strawberry picking is fun, easy, and cheap, and it's STRAWBERRY SEASON. Go go go! Just remember that the strawberries should be red all over, especially the bottoms. If they're white on the bottom they're not ripe.

I had been eying a meal in The Voluptuous Vegan for 11 years without making the entire thing at once. So for Shabbat, George, The Irreverent Cook and I decided to finally cook it in our new fancy kitchen.

The Meal:
pumpkin, pecan, and sage ravioli with red chile pasta dough
white bean, garlic, and herb sauce
sautéed arugula with pickled plum vinegar
frizzled leeks

We dug our ravioli machine out of the attic for the first time (although you don't need a ravioli machine to make this recipe). I generously allowed George and The Irreverent Cook to wrestle with the ravioli—I faintly overheard them crying "@$%^&!" in the distance—while I serenely cooked the white bean sauce, the frizzled leeks, and my homemade Jewifiable challah recipe. I've discovered that the challah tastes best when allowed to rise outside in humid weather, kneaded quite thoroughly, and using as little flour as possible. Everyone agreed that I had just birthed an ideal challah, "challah the way it's supposed to be" according to one delighted eater. We washed down the whole delicious meal with high-quality champagne to celebrate my successful completion of qualifying exams. Rubbing my stomach in lazy satiety, I reflected that I had just inhaled the best homemade meal I could remember having in the U.S. To follow this culinary triumph, for dessert we shared sliced strawberries, chocolate hazelnut cake, and delicious Indian spiced loose-leaf chai.

That night The Irreverent Cook went online and ordered a copy of The Voluptuous Vegan so as to recreate these wonders at his/her/its own home. You can read about this eye-opening cookbook and order your own copy here, if you wish.

And I am going to share my version of the white bean sauce with you. This was my second attempt on the sauce—Ms. Kornfeld's version didn't quite work for me—and this time I got it right. The sauce is delightfully mild and gently echoes the sage in the ravioli.

White Bean and Garlic Herb Sauce

2 15-ounce cans of navy or other white beans, drained and rinsed
salt
2 Tablespoons cooking oil
2 Cups of chopped onion (1-2 onions)
8 garlic cloves, smashed, peeled, and minced
1 branch or 5-7 leaves of fresh sage, washed
1 bay leaf
dried thyme
juice from 1/2 lemon
1 Cup broth (No Chicken Broth from Imagine)
fresh ground pepper
salt

1. In a medium pot, heat the oil. Add the onions. Cook 7 minutes, then add the garlic.
   
2. After a few more minutes add the beans, 1 and 1/2 Cups water, and the broth. Also add the sage, bay leaf, and several shakes of dried thyme (to taste).
3. Cover, bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer partially covered for 15 minutes. Turn off the heat, take out the sage and bay leaf, and add lemon juice, salt, and pepper to taste.
   
4. Take a hand-held potato masher or a heavy wooden spoon and mash the beans in the pot until the liquid thickens somewhat. Stir again and serve.
   

Strawberry Salad and Unsafe Strawberries

Still living and cooking without a kitchen sink, or counters, or a dishwasher, or a washing machine, or a kitchen pantry. Hence the disturbingly simple recipes, posted few and far between. Fear not, Goofy Fans! My posting will improve soon, when the Irreverent Cook visits me.

Lately we've been eating strawberry salad. In case you didn't know the latest news about strawberries, rumour goes that both California and the Federal Government have recently allowed a dangerous toxic fumigant, methyl iodide, to protect all their strawberries from fungus in the night. Here are some links covering the story. So far, only six states allow the use of methyl iodide on their strawberries, but soon everyone will. Methyl iodide has been proven to cause cancer, both to lab mice and to the male farm workers exposed to it.

To protect yourself and your family AND still enjoy delicious strawberries, follow these simple steps:

1) If you go strawberry picking at a farm, first ask the farm what sort of pest control it uses. Specifically mention methyl iodide.

2) Ask the farmer at your farmer's market the same question.

3) Do not EVER buy non-organic strawberries in the supermarket. If the strawberries don't say they are organic, they aren't.

4) Face the fact that you are going to have to spend more cash on safe strawberries than you would on non-organic. After all, the whole reason people use this nasty stuff is so they can grow more strawberries with less labor and less land.

5) Grow your own strawberries! You can even grow them in a pot on your front step, and they will taste and look divine. Try seeds from here, here, or here.

Whew! After going through all that angst, you're probably ready for some organic strawberry salad!

Strawberry Salad

sliced organic strawberries

crumbles of goat cheese or blue cheese or…blue goat cheese like Humboldt Fog

fresh lettuce or spinach

chopped toasted nuts like almonds or walnuts or pecans

optional: poppyseeds!

Dressing Options:

citrus juice (orange, lemon, or lime, or a mixture) mixed with extra virgin olive oil to taste

or

let fresh sliced strawberries sit for a while in good balsamic vinegar--when fruity and diluted with sweetness, drizzle it over

Raw Pea Shoots

Last year I posted about my first experience sautéeing pea shoots (the part of the pea plant that isn't the pea pod). This year my kitchen barely exists at the moment but we have more pea shoots than ever before. Because our front yard is full of dense clay soil, it's difficult for tender plants to grow in it. So that we could eventually grow something nice, George planted peas and red clover and alfalfa in the clay soil. They shot up happily. Peas, like beans, put nitrogen into the soil. They are great for soil. After all the plants all done growing, George is going to till all the plants back into the soil, loosening it up and providing nutritious organic material for grass or flowers or whatever we want.

Therefore, LOTS of pea shoots right now. I read somewhere that you could eat them raw, so after picking a bunch of lettuce from the garden, I snipped several pea shoots too. I washed everything together and served it with fresh squeezed lemon juice. The pea shoots tasted quite mildly of pea, with soft leaves and crispy little stalks. They're quite attractive so we're looking forwards to eating them in salad again.

How to Write a Food Blog, or Why Don't You Put More Pictures on Your Blog?

Ovaries of steel. That's what I have. Yes, my reproductive system is invulnerable and a choice metaphor for my blazing courage. I write a food blog nearly bereft of photos, without tell-all stories about my life, without delving into my philosophy of life, and even without a background in food production (I'm not even the best cook in my family). What's more, I have the huevos to boast about it.

Frequently I receive this comment: "I love your blog! You need more pictures though."

No I don't! You need more imagination. I love reading cookbooks, especially those classics without many photographs, like Simple Food, the Tassajara Bread Book, the Voluptuous Vegan, and How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. It entices me to imagine for myself how the food looks, smells, and tastes.

I'm one of those nerds who prefers computer games with basic graphics (Super Mario forever!) because they give me the space to invent the majority of the details about the world and characters. I also prefer to play the board game Agricola with cubes of different colors representing cattle (brown cube), wild boar (black cube), and sheep (white cube). I've had the option to upgrade to animal-shaped pieces and firmly refused.

I prefer books to movies. I prefer naps to movies. And I prefer a movie that implies rather than shows every graphic detail about its protagonist's private life. Tell, not show.

Which brings me to the point of this blog. You may scavenge some useful recipes from it but mostly I just want you to enjoy the writing. I am an award-winning writer; in fact, I won two writing awards in junior high and don't you forget it. I write this blog because I wish to practice good writing, although I admit I've always had a soft spot for food—in the latest Serious Eats poll "Food—Yes or No?" I voted yes.

So how do you write a blog? Any way you damn well please. That's my attitude, the attitude of someone with not one, but two ovaries of steel.

Leftover Jam

I've been considering how to eject the three mostly-used jars of leftover jam, jelly, and preserves from my refrigerator so's I can replace them with my new jar of lingonberry preserves from IKEA. Some of the Eurekas I've produced:

1. Jam Muffins
2. Mix them with plain yogurt.
3. For grad student hors d'oeuvres, spread saltines or crackers with different jams. Serve with iced tea and a snooty look.
   
4. Spread all 3 of them on pancakes or omelettes and roll them up. This technique I learned from my Disney cookbook when I was in elementary school.
5. Mix them into the peanut butter.
6. Taking a cue from Stoner Food, slather them indiscriminately on jelly doughnuts, then chop up the doughnuts into chunks and cook those chunks in pancake batter. Voìla, jelly doughnut pancakes, a.k.a. Health Food. (By the way, Stoner Food, your Post Comments function doesn't work anymore or I would have contributed this idea directly. The same happened to me and I had to change my settings.)
   

Vegetable Stew, or How Many Ingredients Can You Leave Out?

This weekend I tried to recreate a stew that George cooked right after Thanksgiving with 3 pounds of random leftover vegetables. The recipe, "Vegetable Curry," came from a cookbook by British chef Rose Elliot called Complete Vegetarian. When George made the stew, he left out the fenugreek because who has fenugreek lying around? Not us! (To me it sounds like a swampy Hellenic herb.) I believe, although I could be wrong, that George also left out the fresh cilantro.

When I made it I further left out a knob of fresh ginger because we didn't have any and we were all too tired to go buy some. Somehow George's version was homey and comforting, while mine tasted strange with a thin texture. Probably he did some other special Cookery Magicke that he forgot to mention.

Anyway, now I am stuck alone with this stew for lunch for a week because cookers keepers, eaters weepers.

How Not to Make Miso Soup

Yesterday, while studying for my exams, I suddenly craved soup. I wanted it immediately. In my The Student Vegetarian Cookbook, which has many quick recipes with common ingredients, I found a miso soup recipe that the author promised would be ready in 6 minutes. Ha! Even in my soup-crazed state I knew that a 6-minute miso soup would taste mostly like salty thick water. But, I wondered to myself if a 15-minute miso soup could be passable.

The problem with this recipe is that it assumes that miso paste is just like a bouillon cube, but the two serve completely different functions. A bouillon cube makes a broth, a base for the soup, while miso turns broth into soup. Don't ask me the mechanics of this; I'm no Harold McGee.

So this recipe asked me to boil 2 Cups of water with 1/4 cup of carrot matchsticks and 1/4 Cup of sliced onion for 3 to 5 minutes, then turn off the heat and add cubed tofu and 1 Tablespoon "broth"-dissolved miso paste. And serve. Yeah, right. I may be a student, but I still have standards.

Although my parched innards urged me to cook this faster, I managed to restrain myself. While the water heated up, I tried to make a quick-and-dirty dashi by adding a little bit of rinsed kombu kelp and 1 dried shiitake mushroom. Then when the water boiled I added the carrots and onions and simmered for 5 minutes. I added the 1/4 Cup drained and cubed tofu, turned off the heat, let the soup sit for a minute, and removed the mushroom and kelp. I took some of the hot broth and mixed it with the miso in a little bowl until the miso had dissolved, then I poured the miso sludge into the soup and stirred.

I served this in proper miso soup bowls with chopsticks, hoping for the best, but it turned out As I Feared. The soup tasted pretty bland; without a good broth, it had no depth of flavor. Although the carrots tasted nice, the onion needed to cook more.

Next time what would I do? I would make my usual Miso Soup, even though it takes over an hour instead of 15 minutes (for 8 servings). Or I could try making the broth with bouillon!

Hot Tip: Cara Cara Oranges

I just finished the first sixteen hours of my comprehensive exams, and I am beat.

But just to let you know I am still alive, here a Hot Tip.

Cara Cara oranges are in season, and they are a rare treat! Cara Caras look something like blood oranges and they are sold in markets from the West Coast to the East. Get your greedy little hands on them while you can.

My exams finish in a week; possibly I will start cooking again after that, if I survive. Until then, stay goofy!

Vegetarian Thanksgivings by the NYTimes/ How to Prepare Fresh Chestnuts

Oh my Goodness Gracious, there must be a vegetarian deity after all!

Check out the luscious gluten-free, vegetarian, and/or vegan Thanksgiving recipes at the New York Times. The Well blog posts a new recipe by a different chef every day, and the food appears several levels tastier than the usual vegetarian Thanksgiving fare you can find online. Of particular interest to me are:

Brioche stuffing with chestnuts and figs
Chestnuts, Onions and Prunes (by Jewish cooking empress Joan Nathan!)
Roasted Vegetable Galette with Olives
vegan Chocolate-Pumpkin Bread Pudding
Baked Kataifi-Wrapped Goat Cheese (I think I ate kataifi today in a Lebanese restaurant?! If so, it's exactly like shredded wheat.)
Skillet Macaroni and Cheese with Broccoli and Mushrooms (really? for Thanksgiving?)
Celery Root and Chestnut Soup
Tunisian Winter Squash Salad with Coriander and Harissa (Nathan again)

Joan Nathan suggests a very easy way of preparing fresh chestnuts, one I've never heard of:
To prepare fresh chestnuts, freeze them for 24 hours. Pour boiling water over them and let sit for 5 minutes. Using a sharp knife, shell and skin them.

A very vegetarian Hallowe'en

Hallowe'en is the most vegetarian-friendly holiday—not so much for vegans, unless they own Moskowitz's seminal Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. This year I'm hosting a pot luck Hallowe'en costume party. I'm providing homemade gingersnap cookies (by George, for those of you who remember his cookie-making triumph at the IrreverentCook's senior recital). Also I'm making hot fresh popcorn with salt no butter. For drinks, I'm mulling real, unfiltered apple cider with cinnamon sticks and whole cloves. Not much fuss to throw it all together, but graduate students always seem quite gratified by homemade anything.

And you?