Playing with Your Food
We’re still sort of figuring out what we’re doing with the recipe blog (or the Five Heroines are trying to figure out what I’m doing) and we should have been more emphatic about this to begin with, which is to say I should have been. Sorry. But the idea is supposed to be that recipes are still initially posted to the main blog, here, Days in the Life, not the recipe blog, even if you want to respond to or gallop on from an old recipe you found there. If you want to cite an old recipe as inspiration, that’s fine. It’ll send us all back to the old recipe too.* Having them all come here first is chiefly for my convenience, I admit, but the bulk of the work of this blog does still fall on me** and I can use all the convenience I get. And I don’t want to miss anything. It also gives me a (brief) opportunity to use a new recipe as part of a post, although the Five Heroines are so disgracefully on top of this that recipes go up in PWYF while I’m still reading the ingredients list and wondering what the funny noise under the kitchen table is.*** I may indeed go so far as to post any comments I make over there here too, mainly as a time thing again: I don’t have time to write any more comments, unless I get some extra use out of them.† So, anyway, post here, please, and then the Five Heroines will copy it and hang it next door.
And I was going to talk about scrambled eggs, which is a Perfect Food, but I think I’ll save it till tomorrow. I will, however, note: http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/food/recipe/0,,2265305,00.html#article_continue
How is the rest of the world, or anyway the rest of the world as demonstrated by this blog’s readers, on Delia (Smith)? She’s god, over here, or rather the Great Mum Goddess. She taught the UK to cook–several decades ago now, I think, before cooking from scratch turned into the latest fashion accessory.†† If there hadn’t been a Delia there might not have been a Nigella (Lawson), a Jamie (Oliver), a Hugh (Fearnley-Whittingstall: no, really), all of whom are huge over here (and for all of whom I have varying amounts of use). But her latest is called How to Cheat at Cooking, and since I haven’t read it I’m not allowed to have any opinion, but–mmmMMMmmph–I’m not going to read it because I’m not the least interested in cooking from tins. Lazy SlutTM is all about streamlining, sure, but I still go to the greengrocer and the butcher, not the canned goods shelves at the local monstermarket.
And:
http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/food/story/0,,2279712,00.html#article_continue
How to Cook without Recipes by Glynn Christian, which sounds like it might be very interesting–even if I think I could have gone through life quite happily without knowing that pineapple and black pepper have a strong affinity–and which is almost what a lot of us here do already, but he lost me pretty comprehensively with this line: ‘. . . Umami [a perhaps somewhat controversial fifth taste after sweet, sour, bitter and salt] is the rich, stock-like taste that makes it better to be human than bovine or leonine or anything else: it is mankind’s ultimate reward, and perhaps his objective, for getting out of the trees, because umami makes roasted meats more delicious than raw.’ There are so many things wrong with this statement it’s hard to know where to begin. With the ‘mankind’ and ‘his’, perhaps, since I’m way too old and have lived through far too many decades of embattled feminism to put up with this any more: ‘humankind’ and ‘our’ would have worked perfectly well here. And I’d probably let the inaccuracy of ‘getting out of trees’ pass if I weren’t already bristling to twice my size. But one of the standard ways of obtaining the ‘umami’ flavour, from the culture that gave us the word, is miso, which is fermented soybeans (or rice or barley). And even those of us who eat meat may, in fact, like it raw.††† Back before the latest 1,000,000 health scares about one thing or another I used to get through a lot of steak tartare.‡ Which brings me to my culminating condemnation which is, so, as one might say, you meathead, what about vegetarians? Are they still in trees because they haven’t discovered the rapture of dead roast flesh?
* * *
* I’m really cross I forgot to mention, the other night, while gambolling among the apricots, that Susan of Athens’ apple pie recipe contains apricots.
** Well duh. Also, speaking of duh, I will grandly declare that at least a tiny, fractional part of my extreme idiocy concerning computers and the net is because I haven’t got time to settle down and figure it out from first principles. Well, third or fourth principles, helpfully channelled through some soothing filter like Computers for Dummies. Blog entries are words: I can do those.^ I’ve had kind of a bad day doing blog admin, and I’m feeling even more incapable than usual.
^ Speaking of the themes of Days in the Life:
- (a) lack of TIME
- (b) techno moronity
- (c) footnotes
That about covers it. (d) Subgroups are headed with the category Hellhounds. As I sit here I can hear them mulling over new villainies.
*** A beta version new villainy being tested to failure.
† For example, someone was worrying that her egg white was refusing to beat stiff for the cream-cheese sauce for my Hot Water Gingerbread.^ You don’t need meringue-quality egg white for the cream cheese sauce: the weight of the cream cheese is going to overwhelm all those fragile little air bubbles anyway. You want what lightness and volume you can get, but don’t fret yourself. AJLR, very properly, says that any speck of fat or protein will stop egg whites from beating up well, and recommends applying a slice of lemon on your instruments of destruction before use. Yeep. I’ve only ever used a paper towel–or, if you’re feeling environmentally friendly, a supremely clean^ dish towel–to wipe everything stringently till the varnish^^ starts coming off. Slices of lemon require prior planning: you have to have a lemon on hand. Then you have to cut it: which means washing the knife and the chopping board afterward.^^^ No, no, no, I’m not starting a new trademarked domestic science philosophy called Lazy Slut Ethics for nothing.+
^ Which, if you’re too environmental, you don’t have. I rang the washing machine man a few days ago because I’m tired of tiny flecks of dirt on all my clean clothing, especially the ones that aren’t dirt-coloured to begin with, which is most of them. It would be impractical to have a second washing machine for muddy jeans, All Stars, and dog towels. The washing machine man said there was nothing wrong with my washing machine, that the problem was that I washed at too low a temperature with wimpy detergent. Sigh. Oh yes and when’s the last time I ran it empty on boil? I may have to learn to buy lemons regularly.
^ And if you’re cooking in, on or with anything varnished, I recommend you step slowly away from the Chippendale sideboard, and go sign yourself up for the nearest outreach class in remedial water boiling and essential wooden spoon brandishment.
^^ We are assuming the possession of Basic Knife Skills, and that there will be no blood. Trust me, egg whites don’t like blood at all.
+ http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp?bookid=28705 Hmmm. I wish it gave you a sample recipe in the excerpt. Oh, and I’ve just Lost All Control and ordered an OP copy of Peg Bracken’s seminal I Hate to Cookbook. I’ll let you know.
†† I mean, thank god. Thank the Great Mum Goddess. The UK came to it late enough. As someone who moved over here quite clear in her determination not to live a life of mushy peas and phosphorescent kippers^ I am very grateful that Delia had had her first best seller by then.
^ I like kippers. But not the ones that glow in the dark.
††† Kipling’s story The Mark of the Beast has always seriously scared the begeezus out of me.
‡ The basis of the name is the legend that nomadic Tatar people of the Central Asian steppes did not have time to cook and thus placed meat underneath their horses’ saddles.[citation needed] The meat would be tenderised by the end of the journey. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steak_tartare
EWWWWWW. -Ed.
comments
Please join the discussion at Robin McKinley's Web Forum.
I think Hellhounds (the managing of) should count as a theme, too. I mean, check out the tag cloud on the side there. Hellhouds is bigger than everything else by quite a lot!
I definitely agree on the footnotes. They’re so useful for tangents. Plus, the daggers and thingies are pretty. (What? I also buy books because they have pretty covers. I know I’m shallow.)
And as far as techno moronity… Well, you weren’t posting pictures two months ago. You’ve learned a lot and I’m very impressed. See, this is my impressed face: :D!
There will never be enough time, even if we live forever.
Well I DON’T buy books that have UGLY covers. ANY excuse NOT to buy another book . . . :)
Well, you weren’t posting pictures two months ago. You’ve learned a lot and I’m very impressed.
******** Uh huh. And I *didn’t* post about the whole ‘second photo in the same entry’ thing. ‘Position the cursor where you want the photo to go.’ WRONG. Not with the SECOND photo.
See, this is my impressed face: :D!
********* Oh dear, you poor thing! :)
There will never be enough time, even if we live forever.
********* Yes, sadly. Hey, you’re too YOUNG to know that yet! You’re supposed to be lapped in blithe ignorance for at least another half decade!!!
(Comments won't nest below this level)
Oh definitely. There are too many unread books in the bookcase as it is! And I’ll need *another* bookcase if I’m not careful. (I just *got* another one — a big one that came from the now-closed yarn shop. I’m sure it mutters about the weight of books and remembers how nice and light yarn was…)
Hey, you’re too YOUNG to know that yet! You’re supposed to be lapped in blithe ignorance for at least another half decade!!!
Most of my friends are older than I am! They insist this is How It Is, and I’m inclined to agree when I think of all the things I want to do. (Books to read and write, yarn to spin and knit, and Stuff.) Plus, time keeps going by faster. I’ve been paying attention! A year is at least three times shorter than it was when I was a kid. I think I’d like to write to Management about that.
I think I’d like to write to Management about that.
*********** I think you could get a lot of signatures on that one. :)
************ The basis of the name is the legend that nomadic Tatar people of the Central Asian steppes did not have time to cook and thus placed meat underneath their horses’ saddles.[citation needed] The meat would be tenderised by the end of the journey.
and I thought the Tatar tribes of the Steppes were superb riders – now if you did this at some of the learners lessons I have witnessed over the years, it wouldn’t be minute steak but rather microscopic steak!
I don’t think superb horsepersonship would produce TENDERISED steak either!!
I speak as one who was taught in early years to ride bareback, clib up and stand on her pony’s hindquarters (only at halt and walk), jump a line of obstacles while bowing over each one, plus countless hours of lunge lessons without stirrups. I lapped it all up, it made me a balanced klutz so when I forgot to tighten the girth, the saddle fell off and the pony and I continued :) (I was only ten I think)
I must be a masochist, but I loved the balance and horse-feel I earned and I would never have macerated a steak!! LOL
(Comments won't nest below this level)
Gods, I so wanted to go to one of those pretend-to-be-a-circus-rider seminar things–one summer or like that. But I did spend an awful lot of time without stirrups.
I went all nostalgic what with the Sussex/Hampshire flint walls and talk of galloping riders, and put some (very!) old photos on lj.
http://southdowner.livejournal.com/5138.html
(wanders off muttering to self, I need a horse, I need a horse…)
I think balsamic vinegar (or the pursuit of it) is what brought humans into civilized society. Or if that’s not right, it should be.
Spinach Salad with Balsamic Vinaigrette
Base:
(however much you’re hungry for)
Washed and spun spinach
Possible Toppings:
(in whatever proportions you please)
Oranges
Strawberries
Pineapple
Sliced grilled chicken (if you eat meat)
Feta cheese
Pine nuts
Slivered almonds
Most any other nut
Croutons
Whatever else you think would be good
Dressing:
(I know this does not go along with the traditional drown-the-salad-in-oil vinaigrette. Trust me, this dressing is better this way.)
2 parts olive oil
2 parts (GOOD) balsamic vinegar
1 part white sugar (brown might work, but I haven’t tried it)
Whisk until sugar dissolves and oil and vinegar are thoroughly combined.
(This dressing does keep in the refrigerator, but the oil might congeal so you’ll need to set it out to warm it a bit and then whisk it together again before dressing your salad)
Note the almost complete lack of precise measurements. Basically everything is flexible and open to interpretation–the best kind of cooking. I hope I haven’t forgotten anything.
Yes, I remember discovering balsamic. One of those ‘I have wandered into Valhalla’ moments. :)
(Comments won't nest below this level)
The only problem with making this salad is I sit by the newly made bowl of dressing, dipping spinach, croutons, strawberries and whatever else I have (fingers) into the dressing, just to eat the dressing. It’s a terrible habit.
My sister loves her spinach salad and makes one of these analogues with grapefruit and toasted sesame seeds. No sugar – she substitutes honey and mustard. But I love the generality. Does anybody ever weigh salad greens? You always go by how much you fancy to eat. I also agree with you about the dressing. Less is more and you toss to make up for it.
(Comments won't nest below this level)
I love steak tartare and carpaccio and still eat it in a few establishments I trust. I figure I have to die of something and prime steak is far enough away from most nerve tissue that prion diseases are not madly likely (I hope). And with all forms of things, you make your choices as to ingredients and sourcing and then place your trust in your suppliers. Anything else will just drive you insane.
I loved this post. I would, wouldn’t I? It’s about food. I enjoy cooking and eating and reading about both. I have masses (and I mean this literally) of cookbooks and cook magazines and only rarely actually cook from a recipe. I cook by eye and instinct and mood and what’s in the cupboard and fridge when I get to cooking. Except for baking when I stick to a recipe. I love being inventive and am lucky to share a lot of what I cook with my mother, who actually records all my “off the cuff” cooking, because she won’t do anything without detailed instructions!
I still love reading recipes and cookery books. I love learning tips and other people’s experiences with ingredients. I steal creatively and plagiarise synthetically, because I feel that is part of cooking tradition. I love to watch good cooks cooking (though only very rarely on TV) because there is always something new to learn. Some combinations you might not have tried (pineapple and pepper? no but if you like it with ham, why not add some pepper?) some you try once thinking perhaps, and decide that you have to do it that way forever (adding a spritz of soy sauce to hummus – ups that smoky quotient every time) !
As to technical difficulties: we deal with them as we come to them. I had the same problem with my washing machine just last week. The solution is improvise and synthesise: I washed a small load of towels at a higher temperature, and ran the machine on almost boiling (90 degrees is sinful) once. The problem cleared up. You do 30 degrees most of the time and occasionally (once a month maybe for someone washing as often as you do?) do a couple of loads at 60 with added baking soda. Virtue reigns and the wash remains clean.
Yes, and I went to put a load into my fresh clean washing machine and discovered the inside ENAMELLED with caustic soda. ***SIGH.***
I entirely agree about cookery and cooking–although I don’t follow baking recipes either–if anything even less because baking is kind of my speciality–I also agree about not being particularly interested in TV cooks. My mind wanders. But I’m all over you in the kitchen, if you’ll let me. :) And yes, I steal anything I can about cooking because we all have to eat, and that seems to me (copyright aside which is about having enough money to keep eating) part of the global village thing–shouldn’t we WANT to share food/recipes?
I also love sushi, speaking of raw, and it’s the same thing: find someone you trust, and then trust them. We eat non-organic from local people who know what they’re selling.
(Comments won't nest below this level)
I’m not starting a new trademarked domestic science philosophy called Lazy Slut Ethics for nothing.
I’d buy that book. :)
Speaking of apricots…
I’ve been meaning to post this for awhile – my favorite Morning Glory Muffin recipe. It’s been adapted from several various recipes culled from cookbooks and internets and tweaked until I don’t remember the original portions. The nice thing about these is that they are pretty flexible in terms of what you put in them, so they are really great to customize.
Morning Glory Muffins
1C unbleached white flour
1C whole wheat flour
2tsp baking powder
2/3C honey or more to taste (pick something flavorful – I like fireweed honey)
2C carrots, shredded
1 apple, peeled and shredded (pick something firm rather than something soft or mealy. Granny Smiths are good).
1/4 cup golden raisins
1/4 cup dried cranberries (not the Ocean Spray “Craisins” – too much sugar)
1/4 cup chopped apricots
1/2 cup finely chopped pecans
1/2 cup shredded coconut (unsweetened)
3 eggs
1C vege oil (can sub applesauce in same amount, but may need more flour)
2 tsp vanilla
lemon zest to taste ~ 2tsp (just enough to give it some zip)
Spices to taste (I use cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice, about 1/2tsp each)
Mix together dry ingredients, set aside. Beat eggs, add carrots and apple, honey, oil/applesauce, vanilla. Combine with with dry ingredients, then mix in fruit bits and lemon zest. Taste and add more spices or honey if needed.
Grease muffin tins and preheat oven to 350. Fill cups about 2/3rds way full, and bake for about 30 mins or until toothpick comes out clean. Makes about 18 muffins, depending on how far you fill the cups. They also make decent mini-loafs.
Notes:
I’m a no-refined-sugar person, and it can be hard to find shredded coconut (or dried cranberries, for that matter) that’s not slathered in sugar or corn syrupy whatever, but it’s worth it. If you use sweetened coconut, cut the honey a bit (unless you like your muffins sweet).
You can also adjust the carrot/apple-to-flour ratio until you get it to your liking. I like my muffins squidgy and moist, honestly, so it tends towards the heavier carrot/apple side.
I’ve also always thought these would be fabulous with cream cheese filling, but I have yet to try it. They’re such a healthy little muffin if you do them right that it seems a shame to add the unhealthy cream cheese bit. And by shame I mean delicious.
Oh, brilliant! Can’t WAIT to try these. Do you know the Tassajara Bread Cookbook? I’d guess some of the input is from there, whether direct or indirect.
(Comments won't nest below this level)
I don’t have that one – much of this recipe came out of an old Junior League cookbook of my mom’s that’s a family fallback. I’ll have to pick up the Tassajara one. :)
If you try them, let me know how they turn out – they may want more tweaking for moistness ratio (my first batch pre-tweaking were little mushy lumps – delicious, but lumps).
If it tastes good, I won’t care. :)
!? Did I misread? Does that say “one cup oil”? Egad. I have no doubt that these are delicious, I’m just, er, surprised by the proportion of oil to everything else. I come from California, the land of low-fat cookery, yeah? :)
(Comments won't nest below this level)
It calls for 1C, but again, with the tweaking. I often use half cup oil and half cup applesauce, or all applesauce, but the texture suffers. Somtimes the recipe calls for melted butter instead.
See above re: Junior League Cookbook – those are FULL of recipes that Are Bad For You, ™, including my favorite poppy seed tea bread that not only uses unhealthy amounts of shortening, but also Imitation Butter Flavor. No joke…
“With the ‘mankind’ and ‘his’, perhaps, since I’m way too old and have lived through far too many decades of embattled feminism to put up with this any more: ‘humankind’ and ‘our’ would have worked perfectly well here.”
—- Oof, yes. Grr. I can roll my eyes and deal with it in older writing, since I know that it used to be standard, and I can try to judge people by their era and not mine, blah blah blah. But there’s no point to this in current writing. People know better now, or would if they were paying proper attention, and using “mankind” to mean “humankind”, etc., is either laziness or deliberately shutting women out as far as I can tell. I remember hearing someone give a talk a couple of years ago that was meant to be inspirational. I think he may have had some good things to say (I generally respected him otherwise), but after the third or fourth “man” I let my brain turn off until he said something that actually related to me. (The worst example of this, however, was a debate I read in a book set up to share opposing opinions on social issues. The writer of one of the essays, about whether or not the names of rape victims should be published in public, could NOT manage to use non-inclusive language. He actually used sentences like this: “If someone knows that his name will be published in the paper as having accused someone of rape, he will be less likely to make false accusations than someone who knows he will face no consequences because he will remain anonymous.” (That was a summary of this person’s argument rather than a quote from his writing, but that’s exactly the style he used.) I was… speechless.)
And for that matter, how do we know that eating roasted meat puts us in a better place than cows and lions? My (Christian) theory is that God created each animal to find joy in the food it eats (those who believe in a strictly evolutionary origin of the world can parse that out however it best makes sense to them; but somehow, we [people and animals] have that food joy). I have seen animals of all sorts take obvious pleasure in eating whatever food was natural for their bodies, including things that I would never dream of touching (and for good reason; even if I could get over the ick factor, it would make a human sick). Perhaps cows watch us with pity, thinking to themselves, “I don’t get why the poor things never take a mouthful of grass now and then… They are seriously missing out!”
If you think gendered comments are hard in English, which is a non-gendered language to a great extent, you should try French or German or Greek. In French any group of multiples with one male in it is male.
In Greek the word for human is “anthropos” is male and has to be used as such. The joy spreads throughout the language, and the consciousness of feminist issues is so low, that you have no point to make. There is also the rare joy of translating from a gendered language (where even “that” or “which” has a gender) into a non-gendered language, where references have to be cleared up. I am often forced to convert sentences into plurals in order create non-offensive sentences in English – then have to explain to my clients why what they wrote would be highly offensive to half the people who would read it, if it weren’t changed! Aargh!
(Comments won't nest below this level)
All the more reason to stomp careless arrogant males in English when they don’t HAVE to be genderist jerks. :)
It is bad news to miss a day checking in–LOTS to catch up on, and additional posts/comments on previous days . . .
Loved the garden pictures. and I’m glad to hear you escaped the frost. We had possible temps in the 30s last night but I crashed before it had gone below 45 or so. After missing our warm dry weather over the weekend, we came back to cold damp conditions. Spring (more or less) in Minnesota is fickle and chancy.
You asked if I had replaced my wretched camera–no, not yet, I just asked hopefully at the camera store about trade-ins and was told that the technology changes so fast there is no real trade-in value on point-and-shoot type digitals. Damn. At the moment I have no unaccounted-for disposable income, but I will have to get a digital SLR this summer. It will probably have way too many unmarked buttons and uninterpretable icons denoting various settings, warnings, etc., but I gather that the only FAST digital cameras are SLRs. Even if my current wretched camera weren’t wretched, it is so slow that taking pictures of the critters doesn’t work.
We were “Best of Opposite Sex to Best of Breed” on Sunday–better than being completely dumped, but not by a lot. I don’t want to sound like a bad sport, but the A.B. should have had the breed win–in addition to showing perfectly and being gorgeous, she moved properly and the BOB dog didn’t–but that’s how it goes. I couldn’t have asked her to do anything better than she did, so it’s not her fault she lost. Ah well.
Southdowner asked about the puppy situation. We should know Friday whether or not the A.B.’s sister is pregnant. Meanwhile, her breeder told me today that the A.B.’s brother has puppies coming next month; it’s a repeat breeding of one that was done last year with very nice results, and the bitch is definitely pregnant, so that is a fallback. We are keeping our fingers and toes crossed.
I think I saw Robin post that the hellhounds are back in diarrhea mode–so sorry to read that, and I hope your vet has some answers. ::Sends good thoughts to all::
Well I now have TWO blasted digital cameras, and yes, the fast one is a NIGHTMARE of buttons and dials . . . and then there’s the Photo Wizard on my various computers, which exists to torture me, as is the mission statement of so much of computers. Sigh. Every time I turn it on it’s working to a new set of rules. A new set *per computer.*
Yes: this is why I gave up showing, although in my case it was horses.
Why do you want Alpha’s sister’s puppies instead of Alpha’s brother’s?
(Comments won't nest below this level)
I committed to the sister’s litter first!
I have never seen the bitch that the brother was bred to, but I’m told she is pretty. I need to look up her pedigree, but I know what kennel she came from and it’s fine. If I had heard about this breeding first, I would have been very interested.
You know about conformation showing–there’s a standard, but the interpretation is subjective. Just one of those things you have to live with if you’re going to do it. But it can be frustrating!
Too frustrating for me. And the judges tend to be a little too pleased with themselves.
In homage to Robin, the Five Heronies and to the noble Tartars, whose horsemanship and steak preferences have me in a vegetarian mood today, I offer the following recipe. It originally appears in Hope’s Edge by Frances Moore and Anna Lappe, and was inspired by recipes from Professor Muhammad Yunus and the women of Naripokkho, a women’s group the Lappés met in Bangladesh. I’ve made personal taste adjustments in blue.*
The soup will take you less than a half hour to make, and it’s extraordinarily yummy and healthy. Enjoy!
Jeanne Marie
*well, I tried to…the color didn’t translate when I cut and pasted…hopefully, you’ll be able to figure it out!)
Bengali Lentil Soup
1 cup red lentils (or whatever color…mix it up!)
4 cups water
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1 cup canned tomatoes (or fresh, should you be the tomato growing type, like me!)
1 1/2 teaspoons salt (I reduce the salt to 1 tsp)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil (I use olive oil, specifically, but then I always do…)
1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds
1/2 teaspoon yellow or black mustard seeds
2 teaspoons jalapeño pepper (1/2 small), seeded (I’ve been known to leave the jalapeno out, depending on my mood and whether or not I remembered to grab one when I was at the grocery store)
4 cups onions (2 large), finely sliced (I generally go with only medium onions, not large, and I don’t bother actually measuring the chopped onions – and, it still tastes lovely! I also sometimes mix these up – using one yellow and one red, for example)
5 teaspoons garlic (3 to 4 cloves), sliced
1/2 cup fresh cilantro leaves, chopped (or more…I’m a fan of cilantro, and will usually just chop the whole bunch I get from the grocery store)
Add lentils to water in a large saucepan. Add turmeric and stir. Bring to a boil and then
simmer for 20 minutes until the lentils are soft. Add tomatoes and salt, and cook for a few
minutes longer. Reduce heat.
Meanwhile, heat oil in a skillet. Add the cumin seeds and mustard seeds and sauté until
fragrant, for just a few minutes. Cook at a low heat and be careful not to burn the seeds.
Add jalapeño, onions, and garlic, and cook until golden brown (about 10 minutes).
Add onion mixture to lentils and cook for a few minutes longer, stirring occasionally.
Remove from heat. Add fresh cilantro leaves to the lentil soup and cover to steep for a
minute. (this is important – don’t overcook your cilantro! If you plan on having leftovers, as I do, I recommend not adding the cilantro to your individual containers, but adding it after you re-heat the soup. Better flavor that way, though if you forget and add it before freezing and reheating, I won’t tell)) Serve while hot.
For a final touch, scoop a dollop of fresh yogurt on top. (I don’t usually do this, but then, I’m a little strange that way…I think it’s fine without. For those who like, you could also use sour cream for dolloping)
Serves 6
Yes, I’m another big cilantro fan. Thanks!
(Comments won't nest below this level)
I’m conflicted on Delia. I discovered her on PBS when I was a young teenager in Michigan and my sister and I were probably the only American teenagers who used Delia Smith as a reference for all our cooking. Every once in a while I actually found her recipes needed to be simplified rather than the other way around. Buying all the ingredients for a tomato risotto (which sounds perfectly normal in American accent, and really silly in an English one – try it) cost $80 which I found a bit excessive.
Then I came to England and moved to Norwich, of all places, where Delia Smith is really best known (and a bit ridiculed) for her obsession with Norwich Football Club. As a former worshiper, however, I bought and enjoyed her cookbooks and defended her to her detractors. And enjoyed cooking her recipes.
Now, however, I am conflicted. In an age when obesity is becoming as big a problem in Great Britain as it is in America and at the same time people are becoming much more conscious about their food and where it comes from, she seems to have hit on a really bad marketing ploy. Jamie Oliver’s school dinners campaign and Gordon Ramsay’s recent comment that restaurants should only serve locally sourced in season food seem to jar very badly with Delia’s eat out of tins because we’re too busy to cook (and it doesn’t matter if a chicken is free range) attitude. I think Nigella Lawson, for all the criticism of her fatty recipes, seemed to do a much better job of keeping things simple in Nigella Express without sacrificing the essence of good cooking. I really am quite disappointed in Delia – she taught the ordinary British person to cook and to enjoy cooking well and it now seems as though she’s trying to undo all the leaps that British cuisine has made over the years.
Sorry for the rant. One thing I miss about America is the comfort of the Food Network at any time of day. If there’s a cooking programme on English television – I watch it!
Yes, I don’t know either. But the result of Oliver’s school dinners is that kids are refusing to eat them and bringing white bread and crisps from home, and Delia’s new book is a monster best seller. That doesn’t make me want to buy it any more and I do feel we’ve lost one of the good guys. Nigella’s stuff is at least, I don’t know, *honest*. And I do cook that way, I just eat a lot of salad too.
(Comments won't nest below this level)
I could swear that you mentioned a walnut-parsley pesto somewhere, but I couldn’t find a recipe for it, so I thought I’d share the one I made last night with you. The measurements are mostly approximate, but I guessed based on other recipes I found online and it came out really well.
Walnut-Parsley Pesto with Pasta
1/4 cup walnut halves
1 bunch italian, flat-leaf parsley (about 1-1.5 cups packed)
3 cloves of garlic
1/4 cup good olive oil
1/8 cup Parmesan cheese, finely shredded (I microplaned, but you could grate too)
Kosher salt and fresh black pepper to taste
1 lb. of pasta
1. In a dry skillet, toast the walnut halves over medium heat. This should only take a minute or two, and it’s important to keep them moving, as they will burn easily. As soon as they look done, take them off the heat and out of the pan. If you come across one or two burnt ones, just pick them out and dispose of them.
2. Wash parsley and cut off stems with a kitchen scissor. Pat dry.
3. Peel cloves of garlic and cut off the inedible ends of them.
4. Boil a decently salted pot of water for the pasta. I used linguine last night, but any pasta should do decently. While the pasta is cooking, prepare the pesto, as in step five.
5. Place the clean parsley, the toasted walnuts, the grated cheese, and the cloves of garlic in a food processor. Run the processor for about thirty seconds to a minute to finely chop everything (you want it VERY fine), and then, while the food processor is running, start to drizzle in olive oil through the feed tube. Add as much oil as you like, until it gets to the desired thickness. I used about a quarter cup of oil, since the pesto will be thinned out next.
6. By this point, the pasta should have finished cooking. Reserve one cup of the liquid that the pasta has cooked in, since it’ll be used to thin the sauce out. It’s very important that you use the pasta water instead of regular hot water, as the pasta water has released starch in it. Anyway, drain the pasta and return to the pot. Add in the pesto, which should be thick, and then dump the pasta water in the pot too. Stir liberally to mix and thin out the pesto enough that it’ll coat all the pasta. Add as much salt and pepper to taste, at this point, as you like.
7. Serve with some more fresh Parmesan cheese on top, either grated or shredded.
It’s a very fresh and green dinner; it made me feel like spring. =)
Didn’t Susan of Athens talk about parsley and walnut pesto? And yes, I make one, but I haven’t posted it yet. I haven’t made it in a while though–I forget if it looks like yours or not!!!
(Comments won't nest below this level)
I think Susan of Athens did mention the parsley and walnut pesto, but I’m not sure she ever posted a recipe for it.
Susan of Athens, I want your recipe for comparison! =)
I did, but didn’t actually post a recipe. I was talking variations. Because I eat / think about food / look at recipes so much, I often talk about food as variations on themes and assume that the other person will already have a basic grasp of the basic ability. This was why it took me so long to write the long recipes for baclava and dolmadakia, as I had to think along the lines of how to describe absolutely everything.
I blitz my pestos too. I have once in my life made pesto the very traditional way: with pine nuts and entirely by hand. It was divine, the best pesto I have ever eaten, bar none, and it took over an hour and my arm took a week to recover, so I’ve never repeated it. I do think about it though…
Yes. This is why I still haven’t posted my basic bread recipe. Or Sunshine’s cinnamon rolls.
Okay, I finally got the time to look over Playing With Your Food, and was inspired to post a recipe here that I invented for brownies*. I call them Democratic Brownies because I took 5 different recipes and averaged some of them out, or took the ingredients that I particularly liked, figured out basic proportions, and then kind of made things up from that. If anyone has a better name I’m more than willing to hear it; I’m not super happy with it but couldn’t think of anything better. My best metric equivalents are in parentheses after each ingredient; I have actually cooked in metric-based countries and these generally worked for me.
Democratic Brownies
1/2 c. cocoa (120 mL)
small (or “small”) handful of chocolate chips**
1 c. butter (240 mL)
1 1/2 c. sugar (360 mL)
1 tsp baking powder (5 mL)
a bit of salt (up to 1 tsp/5 mL)
1 1/2 c. flour (360 mL)
2 tsp vanilla (10 mL)
3 eggs (3 :) )
1 c walnuts (240 mL)
raspberry liqueur to taste
raspberry preserves (a few spoonfuls)
The last bit is where I sort of change things each time. I always start by melting the butter a bit, then mixing in the chocolate chips and cocoa and stirring them until everything is melted. After this I take it off the heat and stir in everything else but the raspberry preserves, generally starting with dry ingredients. Spoon it into greased baking dish(es) of choice, and then plop a few spoonfuls of preserves on the top. Swirl them in with a knife, but not too well; you want to have little clumps of preserves and clumps of preserveless brownie batter. Bake it for 25-30 min in an oven at a temperature of 350-375 degrees (175-190 degrees Celcius). If you want you can glaze them with raspberry preserves after they have cooled slightly.
I hope youall enjoy. As I mentioned***, I’m not a brownie fan, but I actually enjoyed these (perhaps because of the raspberries and walnuts).
* Which is odd, because I generally don’t LIKE brownies, but for some reason I really enjoy making them for other people. I think it’s because I had a friend who was crazy about them, and always got so happy when I would make them.
** I usually do about two handfuls, actually, but it depends on how much chocolate one wants.
*** You ARE reading the footnotes, right?
*** You ARE reading the footnotes, right?
************* People who don’t read the footnotes are banned. I have a special spyware thingy that checks. . . . :)
(Comments won't nest below this level)
I find the Delia thing bizarre. I don’t particularly object to using tins and stuff, but when I picked up the book in a shop to look at it, all the “short cut” ingredients were branded. You don’t use any old tinned oninions, you have to use X particular make of tinned onions. If it wasn’t Saint Delia, I’d ask who was paying her.
The thing that hits me is that some of this convenience-food fixation makes what you’re doing MORE difficult and MORE complicated than just doing it from scratch.
(Comments won't nest below this level)
<>
I thought his recipe-construction guidelines were interesting but completely foreign to my personal cooking style. This may be a culinary school thing, if Glynn Christian has been formally trained.* I’m sure it’s helpful to think about the subtleties of food affinities while standing in a white coat in a stainless steel kitchen outside the walk-in as you deliberate over the new spring menu, but down here in the trenches new recipes are born from those implacable progenitors, Mother Necessity and Father Opportunity.
When I’m concocting something new in the kitchen, I’m almost always starting with something that we have that’s on the “Gotta Go” list (the bounty of broccoli I bought on sale, the last of the yellow onions, the rest of that ham that should be eaten soon ….) and then matching the “Gotta Go” item(s) up with What We Have On Hand (some really nice parmesan, just enough brown basmati, some cream cheese): hey, sounds like a broccoli rice casserole, eh?
Of course, if I’m honest, food affinities are at work here, too. Notice I’m not tempted to add the last of the apricot jam to the incipient casserole, although it, too, is on the “Gotta Go” list. Perhaps, if I found the perfect bridging item as Christian advises, apricot jam would be brilliant in this casserole. It would certainly be memorable.
But I’m not looking to make something brilliant, I’m fixin’ to make something GOOD. To be honest (again), I’m not really all that interested in eating spectacular food, just in making real food spectacularly.
Do real people actually rustle up a home-cooked dinner of sweetbreads with roasted beets and porcini mushrooms? I might make a beef stew with both beets and porcini mushrooms — in fact, I do — but strangely, I’ve yet to be faced with what to do with all those sweetbreads I bought on sale …. :)
Beef Stew
(makes a big pot-full (8qt?)– freezes beautifully)
3# beef (stew meat is okay, though I prefer to use a sirloin or chuck roast), cut into 1″ cubes)
1/4 c. flour (whole wheat okay), seasoned with salt and pepper
3 carrots, medium, sliced into 1/4″ rounds (peel ‘em if you like — I do, Stef doesn’t)
1 onion, large, peeled and chopped into 1″ pieces
5 potatoes, medium (red or yellow), chopped into 1″ pieces
1 beet, large, peeled and chopped into 1″ pieces
3-6 cloves garlic, minced (pick your own garlic comfort level)
(optional) 1/3 c dried porcini mushrooms, ground to dust in a food processor or spice grinder
3 bay leaves
2 rosemary sprigs, about 7″
2 qts. beef broth (I like Pacific or Swanson’s Organic)
1 bottle red wine (a nice Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot)(may omit — replace with 3 c. water or broth)
Place seasoned flour in a big pot. Add beef and stir well to coat. Add the vegetables, optional mushroom dust, herbs , broth and wine to the pot. Stir. Bring to a boil on medium-high heat. Reduce heat to low and simmer, uncovered, for as long as you can stand it or about 2 hours, stirring occasionally.
Remove the bay leaves and rosemary sprigs (which are most likely just sticks now) before serving.
This keeps really well in the fridge, right in the pot (lidded). Reheat leftovers on med-low heat with the lid on, stirring occasionally.
* as I have not. Interestingly, Stef the Chef says that about half the chefs she’s worked with have come up through culinary schools and the rest have derived their knowledge through hands-on training, usually through formal or informal mentorship. Should you wonder, Stef’s training was hands-on, though she had the enormous advantage of springing from a long line of passionate Southern cooks.
Growing up, my Mother had Peg Bracken’s “I Hate to Cook Cookbook”. If was fun to read, but we never used any of the recipes except for the WONDERFUL recipe for Gingersnaps. Be sure to try that recipe–it is YUMMY!