Joe Yonan

Michael Pollan Says: Occupy Your Kitchen!

2013-04-23T09:35:00.002-04:00

Why bother cooking? The reasons to skip it are stacked as high as the microwavable meals in a Costco freezer case. You don’t have time, of course (or you think you don’t); that’s the big one. But you also don’t do it as well as the professionals, so it’s tempting to let them handle it for you. Or at least let them give you a head start in the form of meal-assembly shops, cake mixes, and canned, frozen and pre-chopped ingredients.

Michael Pollan thinks you should bother, and not just as a fashionable exercise in hipsterdom. His latest book,“Cooked,” is a powerful argument for a return to home cooking of the sort that doesn’t begin with an attempt to find the perforated opening.

Pollan is not the first person to issue this clarion call. Scores of food writers and editors, myself included, have long bemoaned the increasing influence of corporations on the public’s diet. We have seen the slow retreat from the kitchen — even while interest in TV food shows has grown — as a primary contributor to America’s (and increasingly, the world’s) obesity epidemic and other health and environmental ills. But perhaps only Pollan can so effectively pick up the threads of so many food movements, philosophies and research papers and knit them into a compelling narrative with a crystal-clear message. “My wager in ‘Cooked,’?” he writes, “is that the best way to recover the reality of food, to return it to its proper place in our lives, is by attempting to master the physical processes by which it has traditionally been made.”

Don’t bet against him. Because of the power of his prose and his reasoning, “Cooked” may prove to be just as influential as Pollan’s seminal book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” possibly the single most-cited text by those who profess concern with how our eating choices affect the planet.

Continue reading here.

With Deborah Madison's Help, Working Toward 'Vegetable Literacy'

2013-04-17T08:58:00.000-04:00

Who’s your favorite expert on cooking vegetables? For so many of us, it has long been Deborah Madison, she of “The Greens Cookbook,” “Local Flavors,” the landmark “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone” and more. As a gardener, former farmers market manager and chef (with cooking chops honed at Chez Panisse and Greens), Madison knows her produce and what to do with it. In her latest book, “Vegetable Literacy” (Ten Speed Press; $40), she aims to bring us closer to her level of knowledge by helping us think about the subject in a new way. It’s a must-have book for anyone interested in plant-based cooking.

The book’s subtitle is “Cooking and Gardening With Twelve Families From the Edible Plant Kingdom, With Over 300 Deliciously Simple Recipes.” Indeed, her mission is to illuminate the connections among vegetables from the same family, to show how they can be treated in similar ways in the kitchen, used interchangeably and sometimes together. Mustard and horseradish make natural companions for kale and cabbage because, well, they’re all part of the brassica family — or, using an older term, they’re all crucifers.

Virtually every page of “Vegetable Literacy” contains a nugget of helpful or just plain interesting information. (I’d call it trivia, except in Madison’s lyrical telling, nothing seems trivial.) Examples: Crucifers are called that because of their cross-shaped flowers. Some European brassicas are referred to as cole crops, which helps explain the terms coleslaw, colcannon, collard and kohlrabi. (Kale, too, perhaps?) Birds can’t feel the heat from chili peppers. One reason to scrub, not peel, carrots is that you’ll rob them of some flavor, not to mention nutrition. Gathering places for farmers were called grange halls because farmers originally were known as grangers, or grain growers. Groats are the whole berries of grains, and grits are their cut-up versions, and that includes not just corn grits but even steel-cut oats.

Madison paves the path to literacy with delicious recipes, illustrated by “Canal House” queens Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton and their trademark style of luscious-meets-rustic photography. Plenty of cooks will skip all the botanical and gardening information, as fascinating as it is, and merely get to work envisioning and making their next meal.

Success awaits. To spoon into Peas With Baked Ricotta and Bread Crumbs is to marvel at a match made in heaven. To bite into Carrot Almond Cake is to wonder: Why didn’t I think of that?

Because you’re not vegetable-literate yet, that’s why. But you’re getting there.

Read on for a selection of recipes.

Cauliflower With Saffron, Pepper Flakes, Parsley and Pasta

Rice With Spinach, Lemon, Feta and Pistachios

Peas With Baked Ricotta and Bread Crumbs

Carrot Almond Cake With Ricotta Cream

Kale and Potato Mash With Romesco Sauce

Microwaving Office Mugs on NPR's Morning Edition

2013-02-25T06:00:00.000-05:00

Is there something other than coffee, tea
or cocoa in your office mug?
Share your recipes in the comments.
(iStockPhoto)

When NPR Morning Edition producer Arnie Seipel emailed me recently, I perked up as quickly as if I had just downed a mug of coffee. What cookbook author doesn't fantasize about being interviewed by Steve Inskeep, or Renee Montagne, or David Greene?

It turns out that they had a very specific -- and very fun -- idea in mind. And speaking of coffee mugs, they feature very heavily into the concept. Arnie had recently turned David onto one of his favorite breakfast recipes, scrambled eggs in an office mug, and David had latched onto it with gusto. Given the early hour he has been getting to the office, he needed quick and hearty sustenance. But Arnie wanted to take things further than simple scrambled eggs, so he laid down a challenge: What other recipes could I show them how to make by microwaving a mug?

I don't exactly want to go down in history as the nuke-it-in-a-mug guy, but the fact is, I've had experience "cooking" at work. I wrote a piece about it a few years back, which is what got Arnie's attention in the first place. And I'm certainly no stranger to the microwave. But the office mug? That was new territory, and since I love a challenge -- and am a Morning Edition listener -- I set to work. I pretty much knew I'd do something with pasta, since I already had worked out making angel-hair pasta using water hot from a teakettle. But I quickly turned to mac and cheese, since it has that undeniable comfort-food appeal, and I knew it could come together -- in stages, at least -- in the microwave. And I had seen countless recipes for a brownie-in-a-mug strategy using Swiss Miss, so the dessert idea was pretty obvious.

But I couldn't be satisfied with just any old mac and cheese, nor would I stoop to using a cocoa mix for the "brownie." So I stripped them both down, then tarted them back up. The resulting recipes may not use the contents of just any old office pantry (does anybody really store flour at work?), but the fact is, I'd eat either or both of these any day for lunch and be plenty happy.

I don't want to issue any spoilers, though. You should listen for yourselves to hear what happened when David, Arnie, and producer Rachel Ward let me have my way with their mugs, their microwave, and my ingredients. The segment is planned for 6:50 and 8:50 a.m. today, on Morning Edition. In DC, that's on WAMU, 88.5.

In the meantime, feel free to weigh in and answer: What else should I try nuking in an office mug? Share your recipes in the comments below.

The Next Big Thing: Vegetables!

2013-02-16T07:00:00.000-05:00

My friend Cheryl Tan roped me into something fun. It's a little like a chain letter, except without that creepy don't-break-the-chain hex pressure, and with a much different goal: to give people an excuse to talk about their next project. It's the Next Big Thing Blog Hop. Cheryl answered questions about her next book, tagged me, and now here I go. At the end of the post I'll tag some of my favorite cookbook authors who have projects in various stages, and then soon you can read what they say about them, and so on. Read, rinse, repeat.

What's the title (or working title) of your next book?

It's "Eat Your Vegetables: Bold Recipes for the Single Cook."

Where did the idea for it come from?

When promoting my previous book, "Serve Yourself," one of the most common questions I got at events was a variation on, "How much of it is vegetarian?" I counted up, and the answer was almost two-thirds, which made me realize that I was moving in that direction, particularly in my home cooking. I also realized that vegetarians might be more interested in single-serving recipes even if they don't live alone, because they might be the only vegetarian in the house.

What genre does it fall under?

It's a cookbook, silly! Seriously, within cooking, I'd say the larger genre is quick home cooking, but there has been a mini-genre of cooking-for-one books building over the years, and it certainly falls under that.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition of the book?

The thousands of times I've been asked this question. Sigh. I used to always say Robert Downey Jr. Then my hair turned salt and pepper and his did not (or maybe it did; only his hairdresser knows for sure, as they say). Now, hmm: Anderson Cooper! I know he's not an actor, but that hair! A boy can dream. As for who would play the vegetables, I'd rather not say. That would be mean. Whoever they are, though, they'd have big shoes (er, bowls?) to fill, because photographer Matt Armendariz made those vegetables (and dishes) look incredible.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of the book?

It's strategies, recipes, and inspiration for the single cook who wants to eat interesting, vegetable-centric meals. (I resist saying "vegetarian," because I think too many vegetarian concepts give short shrift to the actual vegetables. Uh-oh. That was four sentences. Sorry. Oops, six.)

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It was sold by the fabulous Sally Ekus at the fabulous Lisa Ekus Group to the fabulous Ten Speed Press, which published the fabulous "Serve Yourself." Fabulousness all around.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

About nine months. I was lucky to be living in southern Maine at the homestead of my sister Rebekah and brother-in-law Peter, where they're trying to grow as much of their food as possible. I had a beautiful perch on the third floor overlooking the lower garden.

What other books would you compare to yours in this genre?

The biggest fish in this pond is Judith Jones, whose "The Pleasures of Cooking for One" set the standard. But I've also loved books in this mini-genre by Deborah Madison ("What We Eat When We Eat Alone"), Joyce Goldstein ("Solo Suppers"), Suzanne Pirret ("The Pleasure is All Mine") and others.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My biggest inspiration, really, is my sister Rebekah. She was the first vegetarian I knew, and as a kid I thought some aspects of that were annoying -- like, why couldn't I bring meat into her house when we visited? And where were the Ho-Hos? -- but when I found my own cooking and, then, eating habits turning in that direction, she was an amazing resource. What she and Peter have done with their land is awe-inspiring already, so getting the chance to work on vegetables from the ground up was the best thing I could have hoped for. I've always loved cooking with her; now, more than ever.

What else about your book might pique readers' interest?

There's a lot more writing in this one than the last. I opine in longish essays on the conundrum of mock meat; my past, present, and hopefully future with vegetarian dining, good and bad; the struggles of a small truck farmer; the death of a community garden; and more. They add a lot of texture and richness to the book, and hopefully will make it appeal even to those who don't plan to cook a thing.

----------------------------------

Now, for The Next Big Thing's next big blog posts, see what's in the works from some of my favorite cookbook authors. It was easy to pick a few, since I saw so many at the Roger Smith Cookbook Conference in New York recently. Hop on over to here what's coming up from:

Dave Joachim, author or coauthor of a million (OK, just a few dozen) great cookbooks, including "A Man, A Can, A Plan" and, most recently, "Rustic Italian" with Marc Vetri.

Rozanne Gold, queen of the stripped-down recipe and author of many books, most recently "Radically Simple."

Jeff Potter, author of the fantastic food-science book "Cooking for Geeks."

Sandra Gutierrez, author of "The (Delectable) New Southern-Latino Table." (Confession: The parenthetical is mine.)

Here's a Honey Cake, Honeys

2012-12-14T16:49:00.000-05:00

Orange Honey Cake. See recipe at the end of the post.

It was a party-on-demand. At Thanksgiving, some of our best friends suggested -- no, make that insisted -- that we have a Hanukkah latke-making get-together. Why not? I'm always game to fry something, and given that I'm really not planning much of a Christmas celebration this year (it will be just two days before I move back to DC, and I can't be bothered with much of a hullabaloo -- can you say "Bah, humbug"?), this would be a fun way to get our holiday entertaining in. After all, I've got much to celebrate: a year in Maine about to end, a new cookbook under my belt, and another I-can't-tell-you-yet project in the works.

As the date neared, I knew I'd make latkes with our own potatoes and onions, but I also had a hankering to use our beets and carrots, and maybe sweet potatoes, for some other versions, too. But I was most excited about the chance to make a honey cake. I know it's usually a Rosh Hashanah thing, but what can I say? We have fantastic honey from the beehives, I was planning to serve some of my own mead, too (more on that another day), and I couldn't get the idea of honey cake out of my head.

I remembered that Bonnie Benwick, my inimitable deputy food editor at the Post (who is handling the section this year in my absence), had put several honey cake recipes through the mill a few years ago. I perused her blog posts to refresh my memory, and the one that stuck out -- literally -- was a molten version that, unlike the cliched chocolate dessert of the 1990s, wasn't really supposed to be molten. This cake, made from a recipe in "Cooking Jewish" by Judy Bart Kancigor, exploded out of the tube pan in a disastrous bit of baking. That, I remembered. What I had forgotten was the fact that despite the snafu, Bonnie salvaged enough of the cake for testers to try -- and we loved it best of all. Light (no surprise there, given the explosion), and tinged with orange flavor, it was a winner.

So I'd make it. In the spirit of giving that this season represents, hopefully I'd fix it, too. And when the Let's Lunchers -- our monthly group of bloggers -- decided to post on celebrations for December, I knew what I'd share.

With six beaten egg whites going in,
surely the cake wouldn't need the other
leaveners, right? I would see.

One read through the recipe gave me an idea as to the culprit. The cake is a separated sponge, one of my favorite styles, meaning that rather than beat whole eggs into the batter, you separate the whites and yolks, make the batter base with the yolks, and beat up the whites to stiff peaks and fold them in. This is how souffles are made, and it's one of my favorite ways to get a puffy omelet. But with six egg whites adding such lift, why would you also need baking soda and baking powder for a total of three leavening agents? You wouldn't, so I didn't. Now, I'm not saying Judy is wrong for putting them all in there -- it probably worked fine for her, perhaps because of differences in oven temp or pan size, but I wasn't going to chance it.

Out went the baking soda or powder. Instead of the spices called for, I put in this intoxicatingly fragrant Persian spice mix (cinnamon, cardamom, black pepper, and more) I bought at Sofra Bakery and Cafe outside Boston. Instead of orange extract, I tipped in a little Fiori di Sicilia, a vanilla-orange elixir I get from King Arthur Flour. The cake bakes slowly, at just 325 degrees, and it didn't start to rise until after 30 minutes had gone by, and then it did so, beautifully. It didn't shoot up and over the pan as in Bonnie's case, but looked pretty perfect by the time an hour and a half had passed and it passed the toothpick test

I simplified the recipe in one other important way, too: The cake is supposed to cool upside down on a wine bottle or the like, just as angel food cakes do, to avoid sinking under its own weight. But I figured that since it wasn't as airy without those two leaveners, I wouldn't need to do that, and I was right. Easy, breezy. I topped it with whipped cream and almonds for serving.

The latkes were scarfed down in a flash -- all three kinds of them -- but it was the honey cake that stole the show.

Success!

Orange Honey Cake

12 to 15 servings

Based on a recipe in "Cooking Jewish" by Judy Bart Kancigor.

1 cup cake flour

1 3/4 cups (all-purpose) flour, plus more for preparing the pan

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon ground allspice

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup sugar

6 large eggs, separated, at room temperature

1 cup vegetable oil

1 cup honey

2 tablespoons orange juice

2 tablespoons orange liqueur

Finely grated zest of 1 orange (3 to 4 teaspoons)

1 teaspoon orange extract

2 cups heavy whipping cream

1 teaspoon confectioners sugar

1 cup sliced almonds

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Butter a 10-inch tube pan (with a removable bottom), cover the bottom with a circle of parchment paper, butter it, and flour the pan.

Sift together the flours, cinnamon, allspice, ginger, and salt on a large sbeet of wax paper or parchment paper.

Beat the egg yolks in the bowl of a stand mixer or an electric hand-held mixer on medium-high speed, gradually adding 3/4 cup of the sugar until the mixture is thick and lemon-colored; this will take about 3 minutes.

Reduce the speed to medium and add the oil and honey, then the orange juice and zest, liqueur and extract. Reduce the speed to low and add the flour mixture in several additions, mixing to incorporate after each one.

Beat the egg whites in a separate clean bowl (with clean beaters, using a stand mixer or an electric hand-held mixer) until soft peaks form. Add the remaining 1/4 cup of sugar 1 tablespoon at a time, beating 10 seconds after each addition. Then increase the speed to high and beat for 4 minutes, until stiff peaks form.

Gently fold in one-quarter of the beaten egg whites to the cake batter to lighten it, then fold in the remaining three-quarters of the egg whites. The cake batter should be light and almost foamy. Transfer to the prepared tube pan and place the pan on a baking sheet; bake for 30 minutes, then reduce the oven temperature to 300 degrees and bake for about 45 to 60 minutes more, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out with just a few crumbs (but no liquid).

Let the cake rest in the pan for about a minute, then invert onto a rack to cool completely.

When it is cool, beat the cream and confectioners sugar together until soft peaks form. Spoon the cream on the cake and sprinkle the almonds on top. Cut the cake into slices and serve.

My Next Book: A Cover Preview!

2012-12-10T17:24:00.004-05:00

The new cover! See after the jump for a bigger
version, if you dare...

Some of you know that I've been at work on another cookbook this year, focused on vegetables this time, but again aimed at the cooking-for-one crowd -- and anybody else who appreciates smaller-serving recipes. (Couples, I'm thinking more about you this time...)

Through social media, email, and good old-fashioned face-to-face communications, I've made some other announcements, such as the name ("Eat Your Vegetables: Bold ~~Fresh~~ Recipes for the Single Cook") the photographer (the inimitable Matt Armendariz, of Matt Bites fame), and the pub date (August 2013). But it's time for me to tell you a little bit more about what I'm up to this time, and how it's all going to play out. I'm working with the fabulous Jenny Wapner at Ten Speed Press, who came in for the last phase of editing on my last book, and we're working to make this next one stand out.

For one thing, it'll be hardcover, and slightly bigger in size, with a POB (paper-over-board) cover. For those who like me had no idea what that latter term meant (at least before a conference call with the team a few months back), that's the term for a jacket-less hardback cover, with full-color printing directly on the cover paper. Matt's taken some truly stunning photos -- clean but warm and very textured, never stark or fussy -- and there are more photos this time around, some 25 plated dishes and at least a half-dozen shots of ingredients. But the expansions this time are not all stylistic. The book also has much more Writing (with a capital W) in it: essays on such topics as mock meats, the evolution of the vegetarian restaurant as I see (and have eaten in) it, the politics of cooking, gardening and farming, and recipe timing. Plus, of course, recipes: A little more than 80, including a central conceit that I hope readers love as much as I do: Instructions for making a big batch of something on, say, the weekend, with recipes for using it in different single-serving dishes throughout the week.

This is a long warmup for what I really wanted to talk about, which is the cover, which we've settled on. See after the jump for a bigger version.

I love the graphic nature of the photo, the rustic background, the bold chunky typography, and of course the dish: It's charred asparagus with a sauce on the side I'm calling romesco blanco, because it's like a white version of the Spanish romesco sauce, using a little salsa verde instead of tomatoes, plus a little mint for a bracing accent. The message I think the cover sends is this: I'm going to give you ideas for making vegetables interesting, but not super complicated. What do you think?

What am I Thankful For? Focus.

2012-11-13T14:49:00.000-05:00

An oyster mushroom. This year's sabbatical has enabled
me to focus on things in a new way.

Years ago, when I was a night-desk copy editor at The Boston Globe, we had a perk that took me a little getting used to. It was the union-negotiated "eye break," a twice-nightly time when we were supposed to get up from our seats at the computer and look away, so that we reduced eye strain. It didn't matter if we were in the midst of a tough edit, trying to think of a catchy headline, or verifying some obscure fact; when the copy desk chief called "eye break!", we broke. But I soon learned to appreciate the benefits. Because one of the causes of computer-related eye strain is the unchanged visual focus, I would always make a point of looking across the newsroom as far as I could for a few minutes, then looking at various middle distances, before the break was over and the editing resumed.

This year, when we go around the Thanksgiving table and answer the question, "What are you grateful for?" my answer will be obvious. I'm grateful for my Maine sabbatical, which has felt like one giant eye break. That is, it has represented the chance for me to undertake a profound change in focus -- not just visually, of course, but in every way I can imagine. Rather than being bombarded with communication that forces me to multitask, I can spend hours upon hours each day engaged in one task at a time. And whether it's a project like transporting a huge pile of manure onto gardening beds by shovel and wheelbarrow or a DIY cooking exercise like making tofu or sauerkraut or almond milk, the result has been nothing short of invigorating.

When our Let's Lunch crowd decided we would talk about gratitude in our posts this month, I knew what I'd write. There are so many layers to my thankfulness about this year, but primarily I thank the Post for letting me have the time off, and I thank my sister and brother-in-law for letting me live with them. It's been an exercise in patience for my sister and BIL, I'm sure. Peter wanted a dedicated full-time farmhand/student, no doubt, but what he got was a bumbling part-timer -- and one with no shortage of morning grouchiness. He is a fount of knowledge about building and growing, and is amazingly patient with me. Among other things, Rebekah has had to put up with an overcrowded-to-bursting refrigerator and pantry, as I have brought in countless spices and condiments and then forgot to use half of them. They've gotten some things out of it, I realize -- I've been cooking my heart out, for example -- but even that comes with a downside, such as Rebekah's extra nine pounds.

I think it's clear that generally, though, they've given more than they've gotten.

Take the DIY food projects as an example. Rebekah has been doing some of this stuff for dozens of years, and she is putting up with my questions about food safety and pH levels and botulism risks without judgment or defensiveness. Most of all, though, she has helped me indulge in the luxury of exploring all sorts of things I've never explored in and out of the kitchen. Most recently, she has been sharing her growing knowledge of mushroom foraging; she has an obvious aptitude, and is pursuing more education, but in the meantime she's telling me all she knows, and we're going foraging whenever time permits. In keeping with the change-of-focus theme, our forays have been exercises in awareness and concentration. If I look too hard, I can't see a thing, but once I relax, things start to become obvious. Kind of like life, don't you think?

Lately, the most common edible mushroom we've found is the oyster, which happens to be one of our favorites for its meaty texture and mild earthy flavor. I've made autumn-in-a-bowl pasta dishes, she has made soups, and we've both sauteed and roasted them, using the induction stove, the wood cookstove, the outdoor brick bread oven. But perhaps my favorite use of them is pickling, which I learned from her. She has used a recipe for the last few years from "Outstanding in the Field," and this year she let me try my hand at it after we found some particularly beautiful oyster mushrooms. I made two versions -- the original, and then this one in which I swapped in some Asian ingredients for a different take.

We won't know what we think until we pop the jars open, probably at Thanksgiving. But no matter what they taste like, I'll be grateful I had the time, the focus, and the support to make them -- and so much else.

Asian-Style Pickled Oyster Mushrooms

Adapted from "Outstanding in the Field," by Jim Denevan. Makes 4 pints.

2 pounds oyster mushrooms

2 medium carrots, thinly sliced

3 cups white wine vinegar of at least 5 percent acidity (check the label)

1 cup water

1 cup Shaoxing (Chinese cooking) wine

1/3 cup sugar

2 tablespoons pickling salt

1 teaspoon Szechuan peppercorns

1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

4 whole star anise

4 short stalks lemongrass, cut in half lengthwise

4-inch piece thick ginger root, peeled and cut into ?-inch slices

Wash four 1-pint glass canning jars, their rings and lids in a dishwasher or with hot, soapy water and rinse them thoroughly. Place the jars in the canner (or in a large pot fitted with a metal rack) and cover with hot water. Bring the water to a boil and boil vigorously for 10 minutes. You may leave the jars in the hot water while you prepare the mushrooms.

A few minutes before you are ready to transfer the mushrooms to the jars, pour simmering -- not boiling -- water over the lids to soften the seal, or follow the manufacturer's instructions.

Use a damp cloth to wipe any dirt or sand from the mushrooms. Cut any larger mushrooms into halves or quarters; leave them whole if they are a manageable size. Set the mushrooms aside.

Combine the carrots, vinegar, water, wine, sugar, pickling salt, peppercorns, red pepper flakes, star anise, lemongrass, and ginger in a large pot. Bring the mixture to a boil and then add the mushrooms. Bring the mixture back to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for 5 minutes.

Drain the jars and pack the mushrooms into the hot, sterilized jars, leaving 1/2 inch headspace at the top of each jar. Pour the hot pickling liquid into the jars to cover the mushrooms. Thoroughly wipe the rims and threads of the jars with a clean, damp cloth. Set the lids in place and screw on the rings. Any jar that has more than 1/2 inch headspace should be refrigerated, not processed, and eaten within a couple of weeks.

Fill the canner with hot water and add the jars; the jars should be covered by 1 to 2 inches. Cover the canner and bring the water to a boil. Start timing once the water reaches a boil and process for 10 minutes. Using a jar lifter, remover the jars from the pot and let cool for at least 12 hours in a location without any drafts. To test the seal after this time, press down on the lid; it should not move when pressed.

Set aside in a cool, dry and dark place for at least 2 weeks before using. The pickled wild mushrooms will keep for up to 1 year. Discard if at any time the mixture looks moldy, foamy or murky, or if it does not smell right when opened.

My Quibbles With Quinoa

2012-10-24T20:48:00.003-04:00

Black Bean, Quinoa and Spinach Stew.
(Photo by Deb Lindsey for The Washington Post)

I’m a grain lover: wild about wheat berries, fanatical about farro. But keen on quinoa? Not so much.

In some ways, it hasn’t been easy to resist — not in the face of all the publicity this South American staple has gotten over the past several years for its nutritional benefits. But in other ways it has been a breeze, because from the first time I tasted it, I thought, “Meh.” Or worse.

Let’s just get all the negative stuff out of the way. It’s too small. I can’t sink my teeth into it. Instead, the first time I tried eating quinoa as a couscous-style base for a stir-fry, it seemed to slip away in my mouth, only to work itself into the spaces between my teeth. Even after I learned to rinse away some of its bitter coating (which the plant produces to ward off insects, warding off some of us humans in the process), the most generous adjective I could muster to describe it was “fine.”

My favorite grains, on the other hand, are substantive. A little chewy, a little nutty. I would never accuse barley of disappearing when I bite into it, which is just what I love about it.

The thing is, quinoa (KEEN-wah) does have a lot going for it. Besides being quick and easy to cook, its tendency to vanish in a dish, the very quality I complain most vehemently about, is also what makes it versatile. Perhaps most important, now that I’m eating a close-to-vegetarian diet, the fact that it’s a complete protein — a single source of all the amino acids a body needs — makes it worth reconsidering.

I needed some inspiration, and some help, preferably from someone who has unlocked quinoa’s secrets. It was pretty easy to land on Wendy Polisi, the homeschooling mom behind CookingQuinoa.net and author of “The Quintessential Quinoa Cookbook” (Skyhorse Publishing, 2011). I had barely downloaded a copy of the latter to my iPad and started swiping through the pages when it became clear to me that, well, I didn’t know from quinoa. Polisi suggested cooking times and methods different from what I’ve seen on any package.

When I called her at home in Colorado, I was relieved to discover she’s not a zealot. When I admitted that I haven’t been quinoa’s biggest fan, she didn’t miss a beat.

“It’s a texture thing, isn’t it?”

Yep, I replied.

“My mother feels the same way.”

And she was quick to acknowledge quinoa’s other drawbacks. “Quinoa by itself is terrible,” she said. “You cook quinoa, and you smell it, and you’re like, well, that doesn’t smell good. It’s no more exciting than plain rice, and probably even less so.”

That smell is from the saponin, the coating I mentioned earlier, but if you do as Polisi and other quinoa experts suggest and soak the quinoa rather than merely rinse it, you’ve solved that problem. But what about my bigger issue?

“Well, since texture is a big part of your problem with quinoa, you will probably never like a quinoa salad,” she replied, which was true enough. “Instead, think about a dish that you really like and see if there’s a way to adapt it to include quinoa.”

As it happens, I was already moving in that direction. After seeing the cooking method she advocates in her cookbook, I decided the first step was to make plain quinoa her way. I bought white quinoa and red quinoa from the bulk section of a natural foods store, soaked them separately, rinsed, then cooked each for about 30 minutes — twice as long as I’d been cooking quinoa when following package directions. (Some manufacturers scrub and rinse the quinoa to remove the saponin, so in those cases soaking isn’t as crucial, but I soak and rinse if I’m not sure.)

The result was a minor revelation: This quinoa was fluffier and slightly clumpier, which made it seem less flyaway. I ate some topped with leftover vegetables, and it wasn’t half bad.

Then I noticed a few soup recipes, and had a larger discovery. Because I wouldn’t really be chewing the soup, the fact that quinoa is so delicate surely wouldn’t bother me. I soaked and rinsed more quinoa and tossed it into a black bean and spinach soup, letting it swell and cook in the vegetable broth. The mixture thickened into something of a stew, and thanks to a healthy dose of a favorite spice (smoked paprika), it hit the spot. The quinoa wasn’t all that noticeable, and that was fine by me.

Finally, I started to have a sneaking feeling that one of the keys to learning to love — or at least like — quinoa was in defining what it is and what it isn’t: a seed, not a grain. So perhaps I needed to treat it as such. To that end, I followed Polisi’s instructions for toasting the raw quinoa in a little oil, just the way you might toast sesame seeds, which are about the same size. I was left with a half cup or so of nutty-tasting, crunchy seeds, which I kept in a jar on the countertop and started sprinkling onto various things: salads, soups and, possibly best of all, my breakfast of yogurt with granola. This was quinoa I could sink my teeth into, literally.

Curried Quinoa and Barley Cakes.
(Photo by Deb Lindsey for The Washington Post)

Polisi suggested I try pureeing quinoa into soups and smoothies, and baking with it, both of which are on my to-do list. In the meantime, she had one more idea for me: Had I tried quinoa patties?

As it turns out, I have. Up until my most recent explorations, this was the only quinoa recipe I could say I liked; my sister regularly makes a version from Heidi Swanson’s “Super Natural Every Day” cookbook. Polisi and I have adapted that recipe ourselves, with one big difference: I cut the quinoa with an equal amount of barley. You know, to give the cakes a little more substance and to use a grain I’ve always loved -- rather than merely one I’m still getting to know.

Who's Afraid of Mock Meat?

2012-10-12T16:46:00.000-04:00

This is NOT what the Beyond Meat
"chicken" looks like. (Istockphoto)

If Tim Burton is interested in making a followup to his hit movie, “Frankenweenie,” about a family who decides to resurrect the family dog, I’ve got an idea for him. It’s about a scientist who spends years and years in a lab trying to create a substance that will seem, in as many ways as possible, like a boneless, skinless breast of white meat. The movie would be called, naturally, “Frankenchickie.”

When our Let’s Lunch group – a virtual lunch date – decided to write on the topic of scary food this month, for the good old Halloween connection, I knew I’d weigh in on a subject that has fascinated me for so, so long. I’m talking about mock meat. Meat analogs. “Vegetarian meat,” if you don’t mind the oxymoron. Not as scary, perhaps, as the possibility that one day scientists will "grow" actual chicken breasts from cells in the lab, but sometimes it seems pretty close.

The thing is, the stuff isn’t new, just in case you were wondering. It has roots in the Buddhist traditions of ancient China, in the “mien ching” they created by rinsing and kneading wheat – what became known in Japan as seitan. (Could it be?) In grocery stores these days, you’ll see a crowded lineup of such products, much of them made from wheat and soy, and most of them, unfortunately, also full of unpronounceable ingredients and processed beyond recognition, or processed into disguise, I suppose.

I’ve never been that into mock meat, certainly not as a meat eater. But over the last few years as I’ve moved closer and closer to a vegetarian diet (I’m not 100 percent there), I’ve been more and more fascinated by them, and have even grown to like some of them. I particularly gravitate toward the mock meats that have connections to seitan, such as products made by my two favorite such companies, Field Roast and Upton’s Naturals. Honestly, there's nothing horrifying about these products in the least, as one look at their very minimal ingredient list will tell you.

But just the thought of mock meats comes with so many issues for vegetarians, doesn't it? I think it does. So when researching an essay on the topic for my upcoming book, “Eat Your Vegetables: Fresh Recipes for the Single Cook” (due out by Ten Speed Press in summer 2013), I talked to the men behind those companies. I also talked to the founder of one of the newer products, one that’s been getting a lot of press because of its backing by founders of Twitter and because high-profile writers such as Mark Bittman have said it was so close to meat that it fooled them in a blind taste test.

It’s pretty close to the aforementioned “Frankenchickie,” at least in the sense that it took many years of research to come up with the processing method that leads to this eerily chicken-like product. But that’s not what it’s called, of course. No, the company is Beyond Meat. It is primarily available in some regions’ Whole Foods Markets, in the prepared-foods sections, as ingredients in wraps, veggie chicken salads, and the like. As soon as I read about it, I had to get some samples from the company so I could do my own little taste test.

Before I put some of it out at a dinner party for guest opinions, I took it out of the package and noted some of my own thoughts: Besides that texture similarity, the flavor was very mild, with a slight, mysterious nuttiness to it. And then I heated it up with a little water in a saucepan, and things got a little weird: The stuff got softer, even gummy and doughy, until I let it cool to room temperature again. And even then the texture seemed much softer than it should be.

I served it simply, just lightly salted and on a platter. We were having a chicken-roasting party, trying to get rid of the last of the frozen chicken that my sister and brother-in-law, newly vegan, had raised and slaughtered themselves the year before. And I didn’t think it would be fair to compare the two head to head. So I just passed around the platter and told people I was trying to gauge opinions on this particular chicken, and took note of their reactions. This was a pretty food-sophisticated group, and yet several of them merely pronounced it “pretty good” or “fine,” until some qualifications started to seep in. “This tastes starchy somehow,” said one man, a local cheesemaker. “Did you poach it in noodles?” Another said, “What breed of chicken is this?” And when I refused to say, she answered, “It tastes almost like the meat eater’s version of tofu.” Others picked up on the situation more quickly: “The texture isn’t bad, but that’s not chicken,” one friend said after one bite.

The next day, though, I took it out of the refrigerator stone-cold and tossed it with some mayo and salt. Guess what? Even knowing that it wasn’t chicken, it was hard for me to accept the fact that it wasn’t chicken. The texture was similar. Since we've got a Halloween vibe going on here, I'll go ahead and say it: It was freakishly similar.

When I mentioned that difference to company founder Ethan Brown in a phone interview, he knew exactly what I was talking about. Turns out his team is working on that very issue of how to make the product as good when it’s warmed as it is when it’s cold. Given his commitment and financial backing, I have little doubt that they’ll figure it out before the product gets wider distribution. This was a couple of months ago; they might have solved the problem already.

I write much more about my conversation with Brown and others in the book. I ask them all a version of the question: Shouldn’t vegetarians be eating vegetables rather than highly processed foods like this? Their answers are pretty fascinating, and I don’t want to scoop myself by repeating them here. Suffice it to say that I have a lot of respect for anybody who is offering well-made, natural, delicious products that will help people who want to eat less meat do just that.

In thinking about all the issues brought up in researching the essay, I of course wanted to attach a recipe. It’s a cookbook, after all. The thing is, I don’t really cook with these products very much, for two reasons. First, I prefer to make food from scratch. Second, for the most part these products – even the ones I like -- are already spiced and/or sauced, so that leaves a little less room (or perhaps need, depending on how you look at it) for creativity on the part of the home cook. Besides, it seems obvious that a product spiced to taste like, say, Italian sausage could probably be effectively used in recipes that use Italian sausage. And there's no shortage of those recipes.

Nonetheless, I did happen upon an idea for a dish while I was testing recipes for the book. It was very off the cuff, an impulse to use up some of the mock meat products I had bought. It’s something I haven’t made in a long time, a dish I first resisted because of the name -- sloppy Joe – which I found almost as scary as the poured-from-a-package spice mix so many of my friends’ moms used when I was growing up in the 1970s. I reclaimed it by making everything from scratch, of course – well, everything but the chorizo-style seitan that goes into it. I use brands whose ingredient label I can read without fear.

I know some people still find the whole idea of mock meat frightening enough, but consider this: I could be making it with supermarket ground beef instead. You know, the stuff of pink slime? Now that scares the hell out of me.

Sloppy Vegan Joe

Makes 1 sandwich

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

1 small onion, chopped

1 garlic clove, chopped

1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes (optional)

1/2 cup chorizo-spiced seitan or other vegan meat (my favorites are Upton’s Naturals and Field Roast), crumbled or cut into 1/4-inch pieces

8 large cherry tomatoes, quartered

1 small yellow squash, cut into 1/2-inch pieces

Sea salt

1 hamburger bun or soft pita, warmed

1 medium sour pickle, thinly sliced

Pour the olive oil into a skillet over medium heat. When it shimmers, add the onion and garlic and saute until they soften. Stir in the red pepper, if using, and the seitan, and cook until it’s warmed through. Add the cherry tomatoes and squash and cook until the tomatoes collapse. Taste, and add salt as needed. Reduce the heat to medium-low, cover, and continue cooking until the squash are tender but not mushy.

Pile the mixture onto the bun or in the pocket of the pita, top with the pickle slices, and eat.

Jamming With Lemon Basil

2012-08-10T15:03:00.000-04:00

Peach Jam With Lemon Basil. Read on for recipe.

Anybody who has made jam with farmers market produce knows one dirty little secret: It can be an expensive proposition. The best farmers market fruit, at least at the markets where I tend to shop, can cost upward of $3 or more a pound, meaning that a batch of jam that starts with, say, 6 or 7 pounds of fruit to make, say, 8 or so half-pints results in a product that costs -- well, you can do the math.

Of course, I think it's worth it. There's nothing better than opening up a jar of peak-season produce in the winter and transporting yourself right back to those sunny days of August. But it is easy to be reminded of the fact that putting up is connected to growing your own. That is, it does make a little more economic sense to can produce that you have in abundance, a prospect that costs you little more than sweat equity. (Not that there's anything cheap about sweat equity, as I can attest.)

Anyway, when our Let's Lunch blogging crew tossed around the idea of focusing on a farmers market find for this month's post, I was immediately on board. This year, even though I'm living with my sister and brother-in-law on the Maine homestead, where we're trying to grow as much of our food as possible, I'm also hitting plenty of farmers markets to supplement here and there. For one thing, I've got recipes of my own to test for my next cookbook, and I don't want to use up more than my share of the garden's bounty. For another thing, my sister founded the North Berwick Farmers Market and manages it every week, I usually to help her with setup or breakdown, and I love supporting the farmers there.

Lemon basil from Moondance Gardens.

I've been cooking up plenty of farmers market finds over the months, but this week I found my favorite use for something I got there. We grow plenty of herbs on the homestead -- three kinds of basil, cilantro, parsley, rosemary, sage, thyme, oregano, and more -- but there's one that we don't grow, and I couldn't resist it when I saw it, or rather smelled it, among the display of Rae Avery of Moondance Gardens in South Berwick. I was helping her load her truck after the market, caught a whiff of that lemon basil, pretty much gasped out loud, and she insisted I take it. She wouldn't take a penny, either. Then, after Peter and Rebekah came home with a bushel of peaches they picked from a friend's property, also gratis, and I was noodling ideas for making jam, the combination seemed like it a natural.

I consulted Rachel Saunders' stunning guide, "The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook," and, specifically, her late-summer peach jam recipe. I took a couple of liberties. Out went the use of the peach pits and the peach branches. We didn't have the latter, and I was too lazy to deal with the former. In went the lemon basil. I dispensed with the step of mashing half the fruit, because I wanted to see as many whole peach slices as possible. My sister has made this jam before, and I've tasted and loved it, and figured that the lemon basil would be a nice addition. At the risk of overstating the connections, peaches go well with lemons, peaches go well with basil, lemons go well with basil, lemon basil tastes like lemon and basil, and ... what more do I need to say?

Saunders uses more sugar than I have in my own playing with peach jam, but I have to say, I've come around to her way of thinking, because the result is so jewel-like and perfect. In this case, the lemon basil provides a slightly sharp, herbal-tart counterpoint to the sweetness, and it gives layered complexity to the jam. Immediately, I knew I'd be as likely to pair this with goat cheese on crostini (and other savory applications) as I would to stir it into homemade yogurt.

The jam distinguishes itself from the yogurt and the goat cheese in one very important way, besides its outstanding flavor: It cost me nothing more than my time.

Lemon basil steeping in the jam.

Peach Jam With Lemon Basil

Makes 8 to 10 half-pints

6 1/2 pounds large ripe yellow freestone peaches

3 pounds sugar

1/2 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice

4 large branches (12 sprigs) lemon basil

Directions:

Bring a large pot of water to a boil, reduce to a high simmer, and drop the peaches into the water for a minute or two. Drain and let them cool, then carefully slip the peels off with your hands or, if the peaches aren't quite ripe, with a paring knife. Halve and pit the peaches and cut them into 1/2-inch slices.

Put the slices into a mixing bowl and stir in the sugar and lemon juice. Cover with plastic wrap or parchment, pushing it directly onto the surface of the peaches, and macerate for at least 8 hours or overnight, either in the refrigerator or at room temperature.

When you're ready to make the jam, preheat the oven to 250 degrees and put five metal teaspoons into the freezer for testing the jam later. Sterilize your canning jars, rings, and lids by washing them in hot soapy water and rinsing them. Transfer the jars and lids to a baking sheet and put them in the oven, baking them until you're ready to make the jam.

Transfer the peaches to a large, wide pot set over high heat. Stir well to incorporate any undissolved sugar. Bring the mixture to a boil and let it boil for 5 minutes. Turn off the heat and skim off all the foam.

Return the mixture to medium-high heat and cook until thickened, stirring with a heat-proof spatula and scraping the bottom of the pot to prevent sticking or scorching, 25 to 40 minutes. (Lower the heat as the mixture thickens to also prevent scorching.) Test for doneness by turning off the heat and placing a small amount of jam onto one of the teaspoons in your freezer. Return to the freezer for 3 to 4 minutes and check the consistency. If it’s too runny, continue cooking for a few more minutes and test again. While you're testing the consistency and the jam is off the heat, skim off any remaining foam. When the jam is as thick as you'd like, add the lemon basil sprigs or branches, pushing them under the surface of the jam.

Remove the jars and lids from the oven.

Allow the lemon basil to steep for about 5 minutes, then taste the jam to make sure enough of the herbal flavor has come through, leaving it for longer if desired. Remove the lemon basil with tongs, shaking off excess jam, and discard.

Pour the jam into the sterilized jars, leaving 1/4 inch of head room. Run a chopstick around the inside edge of the jars to break up any air bubbles, wipe the rims clean with a paper towel, and add the lids and screw on the rings until they are just barely tightened. Process by returning the jars to the 250-degree oven for 15 minutes. Transfer the jars to a cooling rack to sit overnight undisturbed. They will seal as they cool. The next day, transfer any jars that didn't seal to the refrigerator, where they can be stored for up to 3 months. The sealed jars can be stored at room temperature for up to 1 year.

***

This post is part of Let's Lunch, a virtual lunch date of food bloggers who coordinate our topics and posts once a month. Here are some of the other posts on the topic today. To join Let's Lunch, post a message on Twitter with the hashtag #LetsLunch.

Cheryl's Summery Mexican Chicken Stew at A Tiger in the Kitchen

Annabelle's Mixed Berry Shortcakes at Glass of Fancy

Charissa's Curried Roasted Cheddar Cheese Cauliflower Soup, Gluten-Free at Zest Bakery

Juliana's View from Les Halles Farmers Market at Chicken Scrawlings

Linda's Farmers’ Market Fruit Galette at Spicebox Travels

Linda's Zucchini or Cucumber Quick Pickles at Free Range Cookies

Lisa's Eveleigh Farmers’ Market Winter Salad at Monday Morning Cooking Club

The Glory of Grilled Cabbage

2012-07-13T07:00:00.000-04:00

Napa cabbage from the garden, on the grill.

One of the best things about learning how to cook is realizing that there are very few bad foods -- just bad ways of preparing them. For instance, when I was a kid growing up in West Texas, one of the vegetables I hated most was cabbage. My mom would boil the bejeesus out of it, and I guess I must like the taste of bejeesus, because when it was done (actually, long before it was done) the cabbage was all slimy and, worse, all stinky, and I couldn't go near the stuff. She would make stuffed cabbage leaves from time to time, and since I loved the filling and the sauce, I would beg her to make stuffed peppers instead.

These days, cabbage -- and its brassica relatives Brussels sprouts (what I call single-person's cabbage), broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi -- are among my absolutely favorites. But that's because I don't cook them the way my mother did in, in her Midwestern, pressure-cooker-loving ways. Pressure cook broccoli? Yes, that's what I said.

Cabbage gets a workout during grilling season, usually as slaw, and I have my own ways of preparing that, too. Rather than letting it get all watery once the dressing its on, I like to salt it, let it sit, then squeeze the extra water out before tossing it with dressing and other ingredients. It's a technique I learned from Anthony Rosenfeld and his vinegar-based Montreal-style slaw, and I've used it ever since.

But it wasn't until I was developing recipes for the Post's pre-Memorial Day grilling spread that I thought about putting cabbage right over a fire. I had seen a recipe in Martha Stewart Living for roasted cabbage wedges, and it got me to thinking: What about grilling them? It was a revelation, really. I cut them into thick steaks, leaving the core intact, tossed them with olive oil and salt, and threw them onto the grate of my little Aussie Walk-About grill. They went quickly. I pulled off leaves with my tongs when they started getting too black, turned them a couple of times, and done. Grilling brings out the sweetness and the nuttiness of the vegetable, adding a little smoke in the process.

And the texture! With some pieces charred, some still crisp, and some tender, this would be a one-dish wonder once I chopped them up and added a little more salt to taste, maybe some vinegar and a little more (or different) oil.

I couldn't quite stop there, though. I thought the slices would take well to an Asian-style slaw, but I wanted to make it a meal rather than a side dish, so I cooked up some udon noodles and combined them with the cabbage, scallions, carrots, and more, to serve just moi. I reprised it a couple of months later for a July Fourth pot luck, using gorgeous Napa cabbage from the garden here on the Maine homestead.

Along with kimchi and a simple slaw, it's become my new favorite way to turn a mountain of cabbage into the makings of a meal. With apologies to Mom, it's neither stinky nor slimy. Thank goodness.

Deb Lindsey for The Washington Post.

Grilled Cabbage

Besides adding smoke flavor, grilling cabbage brings out the vegetable's natural sweetness. The result makes for an easy accompaniment to grilled meats, particularly pork. Or it can be the basis for a twist on your favorite coleslaw recipe. This will go easier if you have a grill basket, but it’s doable without it. Use 1 cup for a single serving of the Grilled Cabbage and Udon Slaw, below. The cabbage can be grilled, cooled and refrigerated in an airtight container for up to 1 week.

Makes about 6 cups

3 to 4 tablespoons olive oil, plus more to prepare the grill basket
1 medium green or red cabbage (about 2 1/2 pounds)
Sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper

Prepare the grill for direct heat. If using a gas grill, preheat to medium-high (450 degrees) and add soaked wood chips in a foil packet or in a smoker box. If using a charcoal grill, light the charcoal or wood briquettes; when the briquettes are ready, distribute them under the cooking area for direct heat. For a medium-hot fire, you should be able to hold your hand about 6 inches above the coals for 4 or 5 seconds. Have ready a spray water bottle for taming any flames.

Lightly coat the grill rack with oil and place it on the grill.

Cut the cabbage in half. Cut each half into 1-inch-thick slabs, leaving the core intact. Brush both sides of each slab with the oil and sprinkle generously with salt.

Using a grill basket if you have one, grill the cabbage slabs until they are charred in spots on the outside and starting to wilt (but are not soft) on the inside, about 5 to 10 minutes per side. (If some of the leaves come loose and start to burn, use tongs to pull them off and transfer them to a plate while you cook the remaining cabbage.)

Transfer the cooked slabs to a cutting board; cut out and discard the core. Cut the grilled leaves into thin slices.

If serving as a side dish, season with salt and pepper to taste.

Smoky Cabbage
and Udon Slaw

This is the antithesis of the watery summer slaw: a bowl-in-one warm-weather meal that gives an Asian treatment to the smoky-sweetness of Grilled Cabbage (above). If you'd rather have it as a side dish, leave out the tempeh. Omnivores, feel free to sub in grilled chicken, shrimp or pork chunks.

1 serving

2 ounces udon noodles
1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil
2 teaspoons vegetable oil
3 ounces tempeh, cut into 1/4-inch slices
1 1/2 teaspoons low-sodium soy sauce, plus more to taste
1 cup Grilled Cabbage (see above)
1/4 cup mixed salad greens, chopped
1 scallion, white and green parts, thinly sliced crosswise
1 small carrot, shaved into strips with a vegetable peeler
2 teaspoons rice vinegar, preferably unseasoned
1 tablespoon chopped cilantro leaves
2 tablespoons roasted unsalted peanuts, chopped, for garnish

Cook the udon noodles according to the package directions, drain, and toss in a medium bowl with the sesame oil.

Pour the vegetable oil into a medium skillet over medium-high heat; when the oil starts to shimmer, add the tempeh slices and cook until golden brown, about 3 minutes per side. Turn off the heat, pour in the soy sauce, and toss to glaze the tempeh. Transfer to a plate to cool, and chop into bite-size pieces.

Add the Grilled Cabbage, salad greens, scallion and carrot to the udon noodles, sprinkle the vinegar over, and toss to combine. Taste, and add soy sauce if desired. Transfer to a serving bowl, sprinkle with the cilantro leaves and peanuts, if using, and eat.

Introducing: The Grilled Kimcheese

2012-05-04T07:00:00.000-04:00

Grilled Kimcheese Sandwich.
(Recipe at the end of this post.)

We're all purists about some things. I think so, anyway. Perhaps I should speak for myself: I am definitely a purist about some things. Some food things. Particularly -- and I don't think I'm alone here -- some food things with which I grew up.

Case in point: chili. I've been vocal about this before, but to reiterate, I'm a Texan, and in Texas, chili doesn't have beans, it doesn't even have tomatoes. It has chile peppers, beef, and seasonings. Its full name is chile con carne for a reason, people.

I've always felt the same way about chicken-fried steak, honestly.

Then I took part in the fantastic UNH Gourmet Dinner recently, along with guest chef Ben Hasty of When Pigs Fly Pizzeria. While he was busy teaching the students how to make their own charcuterie and the like, I was mostly tasting and advising. The theme was regional American food, and so I suggested that CFS be part of the dinner. Ben suggested that they do a twist on it, chicken-fried short rib. The short rib was cured beforehand, so it stayed super moist, something that worked really well when it came to 200-person banquet service. And I had suggested incorporating miso into the gravy.

On night two of the dinner (they repeat the event on Friday and Saturday, to give the students a chance to improve from one to the next), more than one guest at my table confessed to never having had CFS before. I had just read an essay from my cookbook on the subject, and I couldn't help but say, "I love this dish and everything, absolutely, but dare I say that, sir, you still have not really had chicken-fried steak."

But there are paper-thin limits to my purist streak, especially when it comes to cuisines I didn't grow up eating. Last year, when I was testing pizza recipes for “Serve Yourself,” an Israeli friend who grew up in Norway took great offense at one pie I concocted that included smoked trout, potato and fennel among the toppings, declaring it “wrong, just wrong” – before even tasting it. I couldn’t understand the umbrage, because I’m neither Norwegian nor Italian, so the world is my oyster. Or pizza is. Or my oyster is pizza. Or something. Why did I start talking about oysters all of a sudden? You know what I’m getting at.

Anyway, like lots of members of the "foodoisie," as Peter Kaminsky refers to us in his new book, "Culinary Intelligence," I've been on a kimchi kick for several years now, and it’s something I can't stop fusing to other cuisines. When our Let's Lunch group -- we coordinate posts on the same topic monthly -- decided to focus on fusion cooking, it was the first thing that came to mind. It's two LLs in a row that feature kimchi for me, because I can't get enough of it, and once I opened the door with kimchi tacos, I couldn't close it. That gateway food led to kimchi, ham and eggs on pizza and then to kimchi deviled eggs. When NancieMcDermott commented on last month's post that it was the perfect way to combine her loves for Asian and Southern cooking, I jokingly said that pimento kimcheese was next, and then soon enough, I was on it, pulsing together kimchi and cheese to make a Korean version of what is jokingly referred to as the pate of the South, and then realizing that perhaps the purest, if not the purist's, take on this combination would be a grilled kimcheese sandwich. It's not suitable for my "vague-an" sister and brother-in-law, but whaddayagonnado?

It didn't take too long to perfect, because, well, these ingredients love one another so much they were just looking for an excuse to get together. You know what I'm going to do next, don't you? Mac and kimcheese, here we come. In fact, I think I might be discovering the limitations of purism. I'm not quite ready to put kimchi in my chili, but it doesn't sound half bad. And that's something I never thought I would see myself write.

Grilled Kimcheese Sandwich

My recipe for Cabbage and Asian Pear Kimchi in "Serve Yourself" prompted me to add the sweetness of that fruit to this sandwich whenever I use a store-bought kimchi, but but if you're using that recipe here, you can obviously leave it out. Similarly, the sandwich takes nicely to the addition of ham, but it's simply gorgeous without it.

2 slices multigrain sandwich bread

2 ounces sharp cheddar cheese, grated

1/4 cup spicy kimchi, drained

1/2 small Asian pear, cored and thinly sliced

1 ounce smoked ham slices (optional)

2 tablespoons canola oil

Layer one slice of the bread with cheese, kimchi, pear slices and ham, if using. Top with the other bread slice and press with your hand to flatten.

Pour the oil into a medium skillet over medium-high heat. When it start to shimmer, lay the sandwich in the pan and cook, pressing with a spatula from time to time, until the underside is golden brown, 2 minutes. Repeat on the other side, transfer to a plate, and eat.

This post is part of Let's Lunch, a virtual lunchdate with food bloggers around the globe. Want to join us in the kitchen? Comment on this post or tweet using the hashtag #LetsLunch.

Check back here later in the day to find links to more posts on the theme from the Let's Lunch crew.

Anastasia's Miso Salmon with Mango Salsa at In Foodie Fashion

Cathy's Bacon-Studded Polenta With Tomato Gravy at ShowFood Chef

Cheryl's Goan Pork Curry Tacos at A Tiger in the Kitchen

Charissa's Gluten-Free Azuki Bean Bundt Cake at Zest Bakery

Eleanor's Wok Picadillo at Wok Star

Ellise's Salty Lime Sablés (Margarita Cookies) at Cowgirl Chef

Emma's Kimchi Bulgogi Nachos at Dreaming of Pots And Pans

Felicia's Mexican-Lebanese Hummus at Burnt-Out Baker

Grace's Taiwanese Fried Chicken at HapaMama

Jill's Southern Pimento-Stuffed Knishes at Eating My Words

Juliana's Fusion Chicken Casserole at Food, Fun & Life

Karen's Ukrainian-German Cabbage Rolls at GeoFooding

Leigh's Venezuelan-Italian Cachapas Con Queso at Leigh Nannini

Linda's Project Runway Pelau: Rice & Beans Trinidad-Style at Spicebox Travels

Linda's Edible Salad Totes at Free Range Cookies

Lisa's Sunday Night Jewish-Chinese Brisket at Monday Morning Cooking Club

Lucy's Coconut Rice Pudding with Mango at A Cook And Her Books

Maria's Spanish Shrimp with Bacon, Cheddar & Chive Grits at Maria’s Good Things

Nancie's Chili-Cheese Biscuits with Avocado Butter at Nancie McDermott

Patricia's Buttery Tofu, Pasta & Peas at The Asian Grandmother’s Cookbook

Patrick's Kimchi Jigae and British Mash at Patrick G. Lee

Rashda's Mango Cobbler at Hot Curries & Cold Beer

Renee's Asian-Spiced Quick Pickles at My Kitchen And I

Steff's Chicken Fried Steak at The Kitchen Trials

Vivian's Funky Fusion Linguini at Vivian Pei

The New Homesteading: Turning Vague-an

2012-04-20T07:00:00.000-04:00

Rebekah says goodbye to one
of the chickens, a Barred Rock.

When I arrived at the homestead in January, I was surprised by how much milk my sister and brother-in-law were going through: a gallon a week of the delicious raw stuff, half of it from cows and half from goats. Rebekah was making a couple quarts of yogurt a week, and the rest was going onto Peter's oatmeal, in their coffee, and into various breads and other baked goods. (Among other things, my sister happens to make the best English muffins I've ever had.)

Rebekah hasn't typically been a huge milk lover. In fact, many years after her long run of vegetarianism ended decades ago, I remember her being fairly horrified by the fact that I would sometimes drink an entire glass, with or without a cookie. But in the dozen years of living with Peter here in southern Maine, she has adapted to a diet that includes plenty of animal products -- and animals themselves, of course. They've raised chickens and turkeys for meat, and have traded for, bought and otherwise been the recipients of various cuts of pork, lamb and venison, too.

Meanwhile, I've been wondering how I'd manage to reconcile my own diet, which has become vegetable-focused at home (partly to make up for the heavy meat eating I sometimes do at restaurants), with the more than 200 pounds of meat (more than 160 pounds of it chicken) that was packed into the freezers when I arrived. And then there's the fact that I'm testing recipes for my next cookbook, which I plan to make a celebration of vegetables: not vegetarian per se, and with dairy, eggs and even fish and meat accents here and there. But certainly not enough chicken to make a dent in that freezer stash. It's a good thing it's another cooking-for-one book, I thought, because I might need to eat drastically differently from the other two members of the household, especially once we slaughtered the two pigs we had ordered up and were expecting to get this spring.

Then things started to shift.

The runner ducks, aka The Unit.

Just as in DC, where over the last year or two I found myself cooking less and less meat at home, we discovered we weren't turning too often to those frozen packages of chicken sausage, whole broilers, thighs, breasts and wings, not to mention the pork, lamb and venison from friends. It's going to be awhile before we have access to all the bounty the gardens and fields here will yield, but after a winter crop failure in the coldhouse the spinach, arugula, claytonia, sorrel, baby kale and collards have been supplying us with the makings of beautiful salads. And there have been plenty of potatoes and beans to keep us satisfied, not to mention the veggies we'd buy at winter farmers markets in the area, and the frozen packages of green beans and other vegetables in the freezer.

More importantly, as Peter and Rebekah have been more interested in providing for themselves as much as possible without bringing in much from the outside, budgeting money for organic feed for the ducks, the chickens and then two piglets that we put on order was starting to make less and less sense.

But the real shift came when Peter opened a box from Amazon one day a couple months ago, and pulled out "The China Study." Do you know it? It has its detractors, for sure, but also plenty of people who have read it and decided to stop eating animal products. Rebekah was visiting family in Texas when Peter made his way through it, and coincidentally, I was testing hamburger recipes for a freelance project, meaning we were eating beef, beef and more beef. It put a strain on the both of us, frankly. And it might have helped push Peter over the edge. By about page 70 or 80 he was declaring those burgers the last meat he would eat, another few chapters had him giving up milk and eggs, and pretty soon he was talking about selling off the meat in the freezer.

Initially, he mispronounced the word, leading us both to immediately see the humor in the idea of going "vague-an," or vaguely vegan. I'm glad they're not being too extreme about the whole thing, and excited to be here when they're making this transition, because it involves so much more than what they're eating. Given that it's planting season, they're reconsidering the garden strategies, with a whole year's worth of meal planning in mind. They were already trying to be more systematic; I helped them draw up a much more ambitious spreadsheet than they have used in past years, detailing planting dates inside and out, varieties and locations. But now more vegetables need to be planted, to take the place of the meat, particularly since next winter they will be leaning so heavily on frozen, canned and dried vegetables. The new growing plan includes many more beans, peas, greens and grains, among other crops.

But there are also fewer animals to take care of, so there's more time and resources for such changes. The first animals to go were eight runner ducks, whom Rebekah had nicknamed The Unit because of their tendency to move everywhere as one. The ducks were brought in last year primarily to eat bugs in the garden, but after a hawk got two of the initial 10 earlier this year, Peter enclosed the remaining eight, protecting them -- but also rendering them useless (except for the fact that they started laying luscious eggs as spring arrived).

Next to go: the chickens. Not all of them, thankfully, but nine of the 12 were sold to a family who drove a couple hours to get them. Three, Peter figured, could probably live on the kitchen scraps, alleviating the need to buy organic feed, and we could still handle the three eggs a day they'd lay at their peak (i.e. now). That's a far cry from the dozen a day we had been getting -- we traded most of those with a friend in return for his delivery after a milk run -- but it's still almost two dozen a week, a lot for a household with only one non-vegan. As much as I love eggs (I'm writing about them in the Washington Post Food section next week), even I can't keep up with that pace, so I've been using the opportunity of dinner parties here and there to make Kimchi Deviled Eggs and other such dishes to get through them.

The pig house Pete designed and built. What will become of it?

Rebekah and Peter have started eating some eggs again here and there (they don't want to be purists), but they both have drawn the line at cheese and milk. Rebekah has dusted off her copy of "A Good Cook ... Ten Talents," a Seventh-Day Adventist cookbook originally published in the 1960s (and reissued in 2008 as "Ten Talents Cookbook"), and has been revisiting some of her favorite recipes from back in the day, including non-dairy milks. She's been on something of a tear, really, experimenting with various recipes for almond milk, almond-coconut milk (my favorite), oat milk, and more. In the fridge on any given day are some pretty great soy milk from Elizabeth Andoh's "Kansha" (using the homestead's own soybeans, dried from last year's harvest), quinoa patties from Heidi Swanson's "Super Natural Every Day" and cashew cream from Tal Ronnen's "The Conscious Cook."

Meanwhile, I've taken up the yogurt-making, seeking out raw milk from Brookford Farm and inoculating it with a culture I started from Cultures for Health, recommended by the great and powerful fermentation guru Sandor Ellix Katz.

If things had gone differently, we would be expecting the arrival of a couple of piglets any day now, but instead we canceled our order, sold virtually all the pork and lamb in the freezer (but not the chicken quite yet) and put our energies to other use. It wasn't too late to get our money back for those pigs, but it was too late for a project Peter had already spent a few days on: building a cute little pig house. I helped him with it here and there, including the chore of moving it (with the help of a tractor and some ingenious leverage) to the lower garden, where it now sits, awaiting a decision on its reuse.

More than one person has suggested we turn it into a sauna. I like the idea, but as the days get longer, the weather starts to heat up, and the soil-preparation and planting projects come fast and furious, that's going to have to wait. Preferably until winter.

Almond Coconut Milk, homemade.

Almond-Coconut Milk

Of all the non-dairy milks my sister, Rebekah, has been making, this has been my favorite for its touch of coconut and hint of sweetness. It's excellent on granola. The nut pulp that you're left with can be added to rice or veggie patties, or mixed with honey, nuts, dried fruit and coconut and rolled in chocolate for quick dessert truffles. Note that this is best made with a high-powered blender such as a Vita-Mix; if you use a conventional blender, it won't be as silky smooth. Adapted from "A Good Cook ... Ten Talents" (College Press, 1968).

Makes about 5 cups

1/2 cup whole blanched almonds

1/2 cup unsweetened finely shredded coconut

2 tablespoons sesame seeds

1 tablespoon honey

1/8 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon safflower or other neutral oil

1 quart cold filtered water

Combine the almonds, coconut, sesame seeds, honey, salt and oil in a blender (preferably a high-powered model such as Vita-Mix), add half the water, and pulse a few times until blended. Turn the machine on high and gradually pour in the rest of the water and blend for a full 3 minutes, turning the machine down if the mixture starts to froth up so much it comes out of the top.

Strain through a very fine-mesh strainer lined with several layers of cheesecloth. Gather the cloth up around the milk, twist, and gently squeeze the liquid out of it until you are left with dry, somewhat chalky pulp inside. Transfer the milk to a glass jar, seal, and refrigerate for up to 5 days.

Fuse It Or Lose It: Kimchi Deviled Eggs

2012-04-06T09:04:00.000-04:00

Kimchi Deviled Eggs.
See the recipe at the end of this post.

When we put this month's topic up for a Twitter vote by the Let's Lunch crowd, our informal assortment of bloggers who get together for a virtual meal, I shot my hand up in the air and practically shouted: Eggs!

Why wouldn't I? My love for them is boundless. I've often extolled the beauty of eggs as the perfect single-serving food: They're portion-controlled, long-lasting in the fridge, and outright delicious, especially if you've got any hens laying around. (There's a sly little joke in there for the grammatically obsessed.)

Which we do here on the Maine homestead. In fact, when the other two-thirds of the house told me a few weeks ago they had decided to go -- brace yourself -- vegan, the first thing I thought was, "What about the chickens? Don't give up the chickens. Let me have the chickens." I'm writing more about this soon, but suffice it to say, they let me have a few of the chickens and gave away the rest, so I'm able to have my supply.

Each one of the chicks lays an egg a day at her peak, and they're peaking now, so you can see that even for an egg-loving guy like me, that's a lot of eggs: 21 a week. We give them away here and there, though we don't have enough to trade to our friend Dave Plante anymore -- the man's family vacuums them up, and in return he was bringing us exquisite goat milk. But since I promised that I'd keep eating them, that's what I've been doing.

In a couple of weeks, my column in the Washington Post Food section will be devoted to my love of eggs for single-serving purposes, and will include recipes for two dinnertime favorites: Egg in Puttanesca With Kale and Mushrooms, and Spaghetti With Fried Egg and Sardines, the latter brightened with preserved lemon, walnuts and spinach. But today, for Let's Lunch, I thought I'd offer something a little more communal -- and appropriate for a springtime lunch.

The key to tender whites and creamy yolks?
Just-simmering water and 9 minutes.
Note the absence of a greenish ring,
the surest sign of overcooked eggs.

I came up with these when I was looking for a snack to take to a panel discussion at the Smithsonian Craft Show last year, on Food as Craft. I'd be there with such food luminaries as Joan Nathan, Fabio Trabocchi, and Najmieh Batmanglij, and moderated by my friend Sally Swift. The other three authors would also be bringing food, and they're amazing cooks to a one, so I needed something flashy but relatively easy to put together.

Deviled eggs, of course, right? But not just any deviled egg. I needed something that would show how the right few ingredients together can make magic. I don't remember exactly how I stumbled onto the idea of kimchi, but it's probably the most organic way possible: I opened my fridge and there it was, staring at me.

I do love the combination -- I put it on a pizza (with a little ham) in "Serve Yourself," and I love nothing better than a kimchi fried rice with a fried egg on top. Honestly, it was one of the easiest and most successful recipes I've ever developed. I hard-cooked the eggs, put the yolks in a food processor, added kimchi and cream cheese and a little dash of Sriracha, and boom! Perfect. Well, not exactly perfect. They needed a little texture and maybe even a little more heat, so when I served them at the event, I chopped up more kimchi to sprinkle on top of each egg, and squirted a little dot of Sriracha on top.

I don't even need to tell you what happened when I took them to the event, do I? Nah. I didn't think so.

Kimchi Deviled Eggs

You've probably read that it's best not to use the freshest eggs for hard-cooking, because they're harder to peel, but if you dissolve baking soda in a bowl of water before you add ice, and use this to cool the eggs, the shells practically slip off. (Especially if you prick the rounded shell before you cook the eggs, creating an air pocket.)

Makes 1 dozen

6 eggs

3/4 cup kimchi, preferably spicy

1/4 cup cream cheese

Sriracha, to taste

Prick each egg just barely through the shell on the rounded end, using an egg pricker or a thumbtack.

Bring a medium saucepan full of water to the boil. Reduce heat so that the water is at a simmer. Use a slotted spoon to carefully lower each egg into the water, and to stir them frequently for the first minute or so of cooking. (This helps set the yolks in the center.)

Cook them for 9 minutes, then transfer them to a bowl of ice water into which you have dissolved 2 tablespoons of baking soda. As soon as you can handle the eggs, reach into the water and crack them all over, keeping them in the water. Remove them one at a time and remove a large piece of the shell at the rounded end, where an air pocket should be, and return them to the water. (This helps water get between the egg and the shell for easier peeling.) Remove one egg at a time, slip off the rest of the shell, and return it to the water as you continue peeling.

Transfer the peeled eggs to a countertop, and slice each one neatly in half. Pop out each yolk half with your fingers into the bowl of a food processor or blender.

Add 1/2 cup of the kimchi and all the cream cheese to the food processor or blender and purée until smooth. Taste, and add a little at a time if you want it to be spicier.

Use a teaspoon to carefully fill each egg white half with the kimchi mixture, mounding it on top. Finely chop the remaining 1/4 cup kimchi and sprinkle it on top of the eggs. If desired, squirt a few drops of Sriracha on each egg.

Refrigerate the stuffed eggs for at least 1 hour, covered, so the cream cheese firms up. They can be refrigerated in an airtight container for up to 2 days.

This post is part of Let's Lunch, a virtual lunchdate with food bloggers around the globe. Want to join us in the kitchen? Comment on this post or tweet using the hashtag #LetsLunch.

Here are more posts on the theme from the Let's Lunch crew:

Ana’s Breakfast Pizza at In Foodie Fashion
Charissa’s Gluten-Free Leek, Ham & Pecorino Souffles at Zest Bakery
Denise’s Beet Dye & Pink Deviled Eggs at Chez Us
Eleanor’s Medley of Eggs at Wok Star
Emma’s Eggs In A Hole at Dreaming of Pots & Pans
Felicia’s Perfect Sandwich at Burnt-Out Baker
Grace’s Scrambled Eggs & Tomatoes at HapaMama
Karen’s Molecular Gastronomy "Eggs" at GeoFooding
Leigh’s Baked Vegetable Egg Rolls at Leigh Nannini
Linda’s Home-made Cadbury Eggs (Maple Chocolate Eggs) at Free Range Cookies
Linda’s Taiwanese Tomato Eggs at Spicebox Travels
Lisa’s Legendary Egg & Onion at Monday Morning Cooking Club
Lucy’s Old-Fashioned Boiled Dressing (& Chicken Salad) at A Cook And Her Books
Nancie’s Son-In-Law Eggs at Nancie McDermott
Rashda’s Bombay Toasts (Spicy French Toasts) at HotCurries And Cold Beer
Rebecca’s Mini Meringue Buttons at Grongar Blog
Vivian's Oeuf Chaud Froid at Vivian Pei

One Sunday With Dorie

2012-04-05T22:58:00.001-04:00

Dorie works her magic.

I should have known. I was crashing at Dorie Greenspan's pad during last weekend's IACP conference in New York, and when I asked if I might use her kitchen to bake some cookies, she didn't just say yes. She chirped, "Of course! Let's bake them together!"

I had a little moment of intimidation. Correction: I had more than just a little moment. I mean, as sweet as she is -- and, if you've never met her, I honestly can't think of anyone in the food world I find more delightful -- she still is Dorie Greenspan. As in, multiple award winner for such cookbooks as "Around My French Table," "Baking From My Home to Yours," "Baking With Julia," "Desserts by Pierre Herme," and more. As in, founder of CookieBar, an online boutique that pops up in the real-live world from time to time -- and causes a sensation whenever it does.

So you can imagine why, as I gathered ingredients and prepared to bake cookies with her, the following question might pop into my head: Why are we working with one of my recipes, and not one of hers?

Well, it's because I had a book expo to participate in, and I know that nothing will get people to stop and look at your book more effectively than food, particularly a good cookie. But it needs to be from the book you're hawking, right? Of course. My Cardamom Brown Sugar Snickerdoodles have helped me sell "Serve Yourself" many times before, so I figured they wouldn't let me down this time, either.

Dorie and I love chatting, so I worried that there was a slight chance we would be slow in the kitchen as we distracted one another with questions and stories and tangents from stories into other stories. But it turns out, Dorie doesn't really get all that easily distracted, as much as she might beg to differ. She kept right on baking as we talked, never missing a beat.

One of the most fascinating things about the experience was how I immediately took a much more critical look at my recipe. I had cobbled it together after being inspired by many sources and then deciding to put my own spin -- the cardamom, particularly -- on this childhood favorite of mine. My mom had made them with shortening, white sugar and cinnamon, and I loved them, but the first time I tried them with this particular combination, I was hooked. Cardamom has that haunting, mysterious flavor that makes it one of my favorite spices, and using it brought these squarely into adulthood.

But why did I use cream of tartar and baking soda, when I could have just used baking powder? Hmm. Not sure. I just do! Why do I cream the sugar and butter on high speed, and for such a long time? Well, I want to get it nice and fluffy before putting in the eggs, the vanilla, then the dry ingredients. Dorie knew the answers to these questions. As for the cream of tartar, she theorized, I must have been basing the cookie on an old recipe (and it is indeed an old cookie), one that preceded wide availability of baking powder. When it came to the fluffy creaming, she answers that question on her blog, in her own take on our baking session: It's because snickerdoodles need to puff up and then deflate and crackle in order to become, well, a snickerdoodle. As soon as I saw that answer, I recalled much cakier versions of this cookie, and I recalled how I didn't like those so much.

Should you try this
at home?

I picked up lots of other little tips from Dorie, just by watching her do what she does without even thinking about it. At one point, while the butter and sugar were creaming in her circa 1973 white KitchenAid stand mixer (one of six she keeps in her three homes), she popped one side of the bowl off its little seating (you certainly won't find this in the manual), and lifted it up a quarter-inch or so, just enough to get the beaters to hit the bottom of the bowl. She grabbed a chopstick and showed me how she wedges it in to keep the thing stable. She says she does something similar when beating egg whites: She doesn't fully seat the wire whisk, and it drags the bottom a little more. "You'll wear out the whisk more quickly this way, but it's worth it, because you'll get much better egg whites," she said.

When I was combining the dry ingredients, Dorie showed me another favorite tip. With a mound of flour in the bowl, she likes to dump each ingredient in a separate little mound along the edge of the bowl, so she can see them distinctly as she goes, and can tell if she's missing anything. "Plus, it looks pretty," she said.

My favorite tip, though, was something I probably should have been able to figure out on my own, because it makes so much common sense. When we had made the batter, which needed an hour in the fridge (or a shorter run in the freezer, of course), she had me scrape it out onto a baking sheet instead, smoothing it to about an inch thick, and covering it in plastic, so that -- naturally -- it would firm up so much more quickly.

Dorie sprinkles Dorie dust --
OK, it's really cardamom sugar.

When all was said and done (or said and baked, dusted and cooled), Dorie took a bite of one of the cookies and smiled. "That's a really nice cookie," she said. "I love the cardamom, of course, and I love how they're crispy on the edges and soft on the inside."

I couldn't think of a better compliment. And when I took them to the book expo, and sat each one of them on a business card for better marketing, more than one person who came by remembered that Dorie and I had each Tweeted about the baking session. "Are those the Dorie cookies?" they would ask.

"Well, it's my recipe, but I baked them with Dorie," I replied. "And she sprinkled her Dorie dust all over them, so you know that helped." Indeed, it had.

Back at the homestead in Maine, on Tuesday night over dinner, my sister asked me what my favorite part of the conference weekend had been, and I didn't have to think too hard. Sure, there were stimulating panel discussions (Dan Barber on farm-to-table, Nathalie Dupree & Co. on mentoring, Kim Severson quizzing Neal Barnard on veganism); delectable meals (arroz a la plancha at Tertulia, raw vegan Philly roll at Pure Food & Wine, braised fennel in pea soup at Kajitsu, asparagus with ramp vinaigrette at Dovetail); and fun networking (I accosted Tamar Adler, Francis Lam, Mo Rocca and more at the awards reception).

But the answer was none of the above.

"Baking with Dorie," I said.

Cardamom Brown Sugar Snickerdoodles

From “Serve Yourself: Nightly Adventures in Cooking for One” (Ten Speed Press, 2011).

Makes about 84 cookies

2 3/4 cups flour

2 teaspoons cream of tartar

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 teaspoons ground cardamom

1/4 teaspoon salt

16 tablespoons (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 1/2 cups packed light brown sugar

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 cup granulated sugar, for rolling

Sift together the flour, cream of tartar, baking soda, 1 teaspoon of the cardamom and the salt in a large bowl.

Combine the butter and brown sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer or hand-held electric mixer. Beat on medium speed for 1 minute. Increase the speed to high and beat until very light and fluffy, 2 or 3 minutes, stopping a couple of times to scrape down the sides of the bowl as needed. Reduce the speed to medium and beat in the eggs, one at a time, and the vanilla extract. Stop to scrape down the sides of the bowl.

Add about one-third of the dry ingredients; beat on low speed until fully incorporated. Repeat two more times, stopping to scrape down the sides of the bowl as needed, until the dry ingredients are incorporated.

Cover and refrigerate for about an hour, until firm.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, positioning the racks in the upper and lower thirds of the oven. Line several baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone liners.

Stir together the granulated sugar and remaining 1 teaspoon of cardamom in a medium bowl. Use a #100 disher (a 3/4-tablespoon scoop) or a tablespoon to scoop small balls of dough, a few at a time, into the sugar-cardamom mixture, then roll the pieces to coat them and lightly roll them into balls between your palms, pressing the sugar mixture into the dough. Arrange the cookies 2 inches apart on each baking sheet.

Bake two sheets at a time for 5 minutes, then rotate the baking sheets top to bottom and front to back. Bake for 4 to 6 minutes, until the tops of the cookies are crackled and the edges are just barely browned. Transfer to a wire rack to cool before serving or storing. Use a strainer to sift any extra cardamom-sugar mixture onto the cookies (this will keep separate any clumps of dough that might be left in the sugar).

Nailing the Homemade Veggie Burger

2012-03-28T14:20:00.000-04:00

The BGR Veggie Burger.
(Deb Lindsey for The Washington Post)

It’s easy to take issue with veggie burgers. They have gotten better as demand for meatless options has increased, but in the freezer aisles of supermarkets and on the menus of restaurants, you still find dry, bland or mushy disks that not even a staunch vegetarian can embrace. And many seem to contain precious little evidence of what makes them what they are: vegetables.

That’s frustrating for someone like me who has been moving away from meat eating for a year or two, primarily because of health and environmental concerns (and long before I heard the term “pink slime”). I occasionally crave a good burger — not for the beef so much anymore, but because at its best, a burger can be the perfect iteration of a sandwich, which itself can be the perfect meal for a single cook. As I soldiered on in my hunt for a good veggie burger, I decided at last to bring it all home. If I want to control what’s in it — no long list of unpronounceable ingredients — I figured I’ve got to make it myself.

It turns out that good veggie burgers aren’t all that easy to master. Start with some ingredients you think might do the trick: hearty vegetables such as beans and mushrooms; spices and herbs; maybe some nuts and grains (although not too much of the latter, or it seems too carb-heavy to eat on a bun). But if you don’t also include the right stuff to bind it all, patties can fall apart as soon as they hit the pan. When you put in plenty of sticky binder — sweet potato, say, plus some flour and maybe, if you’re not vegan, an egg or two — you realize only after you’ve cooked one that the inside has about as much texture as bean dip.

Continue reading here.

The New Homesteading: Winter = Wood

2012-03-09T09:15:00.004-05:00

The farthest-flung woodpile on the homestead.

When I told people I was moving to Maine for a year, starting Jan. 1, the first reaction tended to be about the perceived folly of picking that particular time of year to make that particular move. I wasn't worried. I had spent 17 years in Boston, after all, so I know the drill of the New England winter.

Of course, two months in, I know there was another reason I needn't worry about the winter here. We've hardly had one. It has snowed just a handful of times, and a couple of those were so light as to barely count. Take the gorgeous fluff that sprinkled down a few weeks ago; I barely had time to take a photo of it because by the time the sun was up for more than a couple of hours, the flakes had evaporated from the trees, the ground, anywhere they had touched. Ephemera. More recently, on March 1, the morning I needed to get to Dover for a bus to Logan Airport in Boston for a flight to Charleston, we got walloped, but not before I made it out, just barely. I figured that by the time I got back, the warmer weather -- and some rain -- would erase all memory of the snow, but 14 inches don't go away all that easily.

The other thing I now know is this: There's a world of difference between the winters I spent living in apartments and condos in the South End and Jamaica Plain and the one I'm spending here on the homestead.

Here, winter has been mostly occupied by one thing: wood. It's slowed down lately, but for awhile there when I wasn't sawing, I was stacking, and when I wasn't stacking I was hauling. And I'm not particularly good at any of it, although I'm getting better. I spent several hours one afternoon helping my brother-in-law, Peter, clear the path around one side of the 5-acre property of extra limbs; he used the chain saw and I armed myself with a huge set of heavy clippers, big enough to snap off anything 3 inches in diameter or smaller, and a bucksaw. Afterward, my task was to gather any pieces that were big enough to burn and stack them on a wooden toboggan, the perfect thing, really, for sliding loads on ice and snow without too much effort.

I tried doing it without tying any of them down, but guess how that went? Logs roll, of course. Then I had the bright idea to tie them to the sled. I imagined it was a giant roast that I was tying up before putting it in the oven, and I looped the rope around, crossed it, looped again, repeated a few times, and tied it off. So proud of myself -- until I tried to drag the toboggan and realized what many of you savvier folks than I have realized already, that the ropes underneath the sled would compromise its ability to be dragged. A sled can't slide unless it's smooth, or it can't slide easily. I was determined to make it work, so I trudged along, now dragging what felt like 200 pounds instead of 50, until I realized the second problem, which many of you savvier folks have also realized already, which is that the ropes would of course slide off in the dragging.

Sigh. This is what it's like to learn something new, to learn by doing, and while I've never been good at admitting what I'm not good at (except for just now, in this sentence, right?), this was the whole point in moving here. I want to try to experience, as much as possible, what it takes to live the way Peter and my sister, Rebekah, do. In the process, I'm using a different part of my brain -- my body, too -- and it's invigorating.

The cookstove.

Winter equals wood on the homestead for one simple reason: The house is heated that way, through two stoves in the kitchen. One is a stunning, forest-green Stanley cookstove, and the other a soapstone heating stove. On particularly cold days and nights, both are fired up and blazing. When it's less so, we rely on just the cookstove, for both heating and cooking -- well, most of the cooking, anyway.

Pete, with his eye always on the electrical usage, figures that in winter, when the cook stove is going, it makes little sense to use the fancy new GE Profile electric induction stove. This has been the source of some tension, since Rebekah has wanted to fall in love with the induction stove after buying it a couple months ago as a replacement for her beloved gas-fired, vintage O'Keeffe & Merritt, which they sold to make room for something that could be powered by the solar panels. Besides being one of the best home cooks I know, Rebekah is an accomplished bread baker, and there is a beautiful wood-fired bread oven outside that we are both itching to get going. Until then, baking in the Stanley can be somewhat of a dicey -- or, I should say, variable -- proposition. Talk about hot spots. The thing cranks out some heat, and I've learned to regulate it (I even managed to hold it at 350 degrees for several hours one evening), but it's nothing compared to the convection heat of the GE or the intense dry heat from the bread oven, at least inside. On top, depending on how hot the fire is, of course, the flat iron burners can range from barely producing a simmer to something that seems to approach nuclear. And the whole thing throbs with heat; I have the burns to prove it, from the times when I have remembered to keep it stoked with wood whenever Pete is otherwise occupied.

You can cook anything in it that you cook in a conventional stove, provided you know what you're doing, but I have to say that those hot spots can make it difficult for sensitive baked goods. And the oven is too small to fit a full-sized cookie sheet or half-sheet pan. When the heat is on the low side, though, it's particularly good -- as is the outside bread oven -- for one of Peter's favorite winter dishes, New England baked beans. I like their combination of sweet, salty and smoky, too, but Rebekah and I aren't quite as enamored of them as Peter, who would just as soon eat them for every meal throughout the winter -- and probably much of the spring, summer and fall, too. When I casually tossed off the idea just today that some of us believe that there are indeed good bean recipes that don't call for sweetener of any kind, Pete had one quick response: "Flatlander."

Before you can bake the beans, the oven needs firing up, and for that you need wood. There is a process to the wood, a rhythm, as there is with everything here. The homestead goes through about 4 cords a year, and it's stacked in multiple places, all of them covered. Outside, one shed is on the far side of the new patch, along the edge of the woods, and the other is closer to the house, on just the other side of the driveway from the car shed, sharing space with the tractor. Inside, in the kitchen, a large wooden box against one wall holds about two wheelbarrows full of shorter pieces that fit into the cookstove and longer pieces that fit into the heating stove, all of it hardwood: mostly red oak and red maple but a little birch and cherry, too. Some softwood (pine and hemlock) gets burned in the brick oven outside or in the stove Peter recently built to boil down maple sap (a blog post for another day). Anyway, the idea is to keep another two wheelbarrows full of wood waiting in the car shed, so that when the inside box gets low, the path to more wood is relatively short -- and dry. Those wheelbarrows are refilled with wood from the woodsheds. Stack, haul, repeat.

The property line.

Peter cuts some of the wood down himself, and buys some occasionally, three years in advance so it has time to dry. And winter is not just a good time to burn wood, it's also a good time to cut wood, because, as Peter taught me, when it's cold the sap goes down to a tree's roots, meaning the wood will dry more quickly. Frozen wood is also easier to split. So when we clear wood around the property-line path, for easier walking, or when we clear the path around maple trees, for easier tapping to make syrup, or when we clear out a stand of evergreens from the south side of the house to allow more sunlight (and therefore natural heat), the bigger pieces get cut for burning.

Peter could probably cut all the wood with the chainsaw, but in an effort to use less gas and also give him -- and now me -- some exercise, I'm assigned to cut the smaller pieces with the bucksaw. And that will definitely get the heart pumping -- perhaps not as much as splitting wood, which I haven't exactly mastered (nor tried that hard to, admittedly), but still. When Pete gave me a tutorial on using the saw, the instructions sounded an awful lot like the chef's-knife lecture on Day 1 of culinary school. Don't push the saw through the wood. Let the weight of the saw do the work. Relax the shoulder. With my workout regimen in mind, I alternated arms, moving around to the different side of the sawhorse each time the wood fell. I would cut about an hour at a time, working my way through this pile and that for days on end. I thought I was getting pretty good at it until some particularly hearty friends visited from West Texas. Don and Norma are in their 60s; he's a businessman-turned-landscape worker, and she's a schoolteacher who grew up on a farm. Workhorses, both. I think they sawed through in a single day what it took me a week to do. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that they didn't stop after an hour, like I did -- which maybe had something to do with the fact that they were on vacation, while I had hours of research, writing and cooking to do every day.

Back to the wood and the toboggan. I ended up leaving the sled in the woods and taking a break for lunch. I figured I'd ask Peter for advice, and when I told him what I was trying to do, he smiled. "First, you're probably trying to carry too much at once," he said. True enough, I'm sure. "Second, you don't need to tie anything all around the sled -- that's what the rims are for." Oh, right. The rims: On each side of the sled, they allow someone to attach straps or rope and stretch it across the top, holding on the cargo while allowing the sled to keep its slide-ability. Again, you savvy readers have probably figured out the third suggestion Peter made. Bungees. Why didn't I think of that? Well, because I've never done this before. But now I can say I have, and the next time we need to haul wood out of the woods on a sled, I'll know just how to do it.

That day will probably not come until next winter, from the looks of things. Last night, we passed a seasonal milestone. It was so warm yesterday -- in the 60s -- and wasn't set to freeze last night, so we let the fire in the cookstove burn out, leaving just the residual warmth in the house to keep us through the night before Pete fired it up again in the early morning. I don't know how Pete and Rebekah fared on the ground floor, but up on the third, things were plenty cozy without it.

Pete's Baked Beans.

Pete's Baked Beans

The homestead's copy of "Woodstove Cookery: At Home on the Range" by Jane Cooper (1977, Garden Way Associates) isn't just dog-eared; it's cleaved in two, broken apart at page 144 because of Pete's regular use of the baked beans recipe. Cooper credits this to Leila MacGregor of Tunbridge, Vt., who in turn calls it "an old Vermont family recipe." Besides preferring to use home-grown beans (Jacob's Cattle are particularly good for this treatment), Pete's only deviation is in the sweetener: He uses slightly less molasses than the original recipe calls for, and uses maple syrup (of course) instead of sugar.

2 cups dried Jacob's Cattle or other plump heirloom beans, soaked overnight
Small piece of salt pork
1 small onion, sliced
1/4 cup molasses
1/2 cup maple syrup
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons dry mustard
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
Dash of pepper

Adjust the fire and dampers on your cookstove to hold a temperature of about 300 degrees in the oven. (Or preheat a conventional oven.)

Drain the beans. Transfer them to a Dutch oven or large soup pot, cover with water, and boil over medium heat on the cooktop until they are tender, an hour or more (depending on the age of the beans). Pour the cooked beans and their liquid into a bean pot, preferably stoneware, add the salt pork, onion, molasses, maple syrup, salt, dry mustard, ground ginger and pepper, and stir to combine.

Bake for eight hours, adding water as needed to keep the beans moist.

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This post is part of Let’s Lunch – a virtual lunchdate with food bloggers around the globe. Want to join us in the kitchen? Comment on this post or tweet using the hashtag #LetsLunch.

Here are more posts on this month's Green theme from the Let's Lunch crew. Check back later for more links:

Zest Bakery: Pandan Tapioca Pudding With Coconut Cream
Hapa Mama: How to Brew a Better Pot of Tea
A Cook and Her Book: Green Bean and Vidalia Spring Onion Soup
ShowFood Chef: Matcha Green Tea Cupcakes
Burnt-Out Baker: Green Chorizo
Monday Morning Cooking Club: Natanya’s Guacamole
Cowgirl Chef: Notos Pesto
Geofooding: Asparagus with Poached Egg

The New Homesteading: A Year in Maine

2012-03-01T06:30:00.000-05:00

The homestead in January, before the first snowfall.

If I had any doubt about how much work this year was going to be, here is the proof, two months in: It has taken me this long to write my first blog post about life in southern Maine on the homestead.

It's not that I've been actually writing this post that whole time. It's that I've been so busy, outside and in, and adjusting to such a different daily routine (not to mention traveling) that "Write blog post" keeps getting moved from to-do list to to-do list without ever getting do'd. Er, done.

You know the procrastination mentality, right? In part, it has something to do with feeling paralyzed by the size of a project -- in this case, the concept and practice and philosophy of homesteading. What's homesteading, you ask? Well, that's part of the problem, too. I'm not sure I have the best definition, not yet, anyway. Ask me again at the end of the year.

It's tempting to define it as the act of growing or raising all your own food. But that's not quite it, really. Take out that "all" that is so tempting to put in when you speak the phrase, and you're getting closer. Especially since my brother-in-law, Peter, who built this house, philosophizes quite eloquently about the folly of total self-sufficiency. What about community? Why should each individual try to do absolutely everything himself when it's more energy-efficient (in more ways than one) to concentrate on a few things you can become proficient in, and then share them with neighbors or friends (hopefully, they're one and the same) who are proficient in others? That is, you raise laying hens for eggs, some of which you trade for milk. Makes sense.

Anyway, so far, I'm thinking of homesteading as farming that's not about profit. Homesteaders are small-scale farmers or gardeners who are using their land to provide for themselves. Not exclusively for themselves, necessarily, but they're not setting out to grow enough to sell significant quantities, though they may do some of that here and there to supplement their income. Makes sense. Doesn't it? Here's how Peter puts it: "The farmer grows for what sells and must make a living doing it," he says. "The homesteader grows for what the family wants and needs and how they want that to happen."

My sister and brother-in-law, the happy homesteaders.

The philosophy was popularized by Helen and Scott Nearing and their "Living the Good Life" (1954) and related books, which inspired countless others to attempt the same in the 1960s and beyond. Peter lived with the Nearings in Maine in 1964, for two months, and he tells tales of rosehip tea for breakfast, simple vegetarian soups with bread for lunch, rigorous work, the most beautiful, stone-walled garden he has ever seen, and a determination to, above all else, never go into debt. While Peter says the Nearings had pre-existing wealth that allowed them access to this idyll, they were also generous, selling off some of their land for just $33 an acre to acolytes such as Eliot Coleman, who with his wife, Barbara Damrosch, has become a guru in his own right. (Coleman and Damrosch, in turn, are also selling some of their land at that same price to worthy apprentices.) But if you're not one of the lucky few, or didn't get in on the movement when land was cheap, getting in on homesteading requires a significant investment of money, not to mention time.

Peter bought his five acres in North Berwick from his sister, Wendy, for just $1,500 in 1976. When I first saw the property, a dozen years ago, it was nothing if not a compound: main house, garden, chicken coop, woodshed, back shed, back back shed. (The place was, and is, shed heavy.) Pete cleared the land, even built all the structures himself. Rebekah has her own back-to-the-land history, at least in spirit: In the 1970s, with her first husband and best friends Diane and Reggie, she foraged, made her own tofu, sewed dashikis, and devotedly shopped at a food coop.

When she moved to North Berwick so many years (and cities) later, after falling in love with the charming Mainer who gave a visiting lecture to her class at Lesley University, the main house was about the size of a trailer, but expansion plans began soon enough. Now, the garden space alone is 2500 square feet, the main house is about 1200, and there are more sheds, a cold house, a greenhouse, a duck coop. Not to mention enough solar panels, installed a few years ago, to provide electricity.

Those panels are on the building that encompasses the greenhouse and duck coop, and Peter has been finishing part of the interior space to provide more sleeping quarters. The original plan was for me to bunk out there, but I've been so cozy on the third floor of the main house, in one room big enough for a desk, shelves, dresser and bed tucked in between one set of windows and a landing dedicated to indoor plants. My views from bed are 100 percent treetops. I've resisted moving outside for another reason, too: The runner ducks (eight of them, down from 10 after a hawk attack a few weeks ago) get up at 5 a.m. or so, whenever Peter lets them out, and I like to sleep a smidge later than that.

I've been getting up at about 6:30, so I have time to make coffee and oatmeal and wake up while I read newspapers on my iPad. Then we've usually been going outside to work for a few hours (sawing wood, hauling bricks, collecting maple sap, feeding chicks, or undertaking new projects such as insulating the new room) or first doing an hour of what Pete, who is retired, calls "smart work." That entails sitting around the kitchen table with Rebekah on the days she's not teaching high school Spanish, and, as the wood cookstove blazes, putting together plans for getting pigs (what breed, how much feed, when to get, when to slaughter) and tracking the planting by date and location (onions into seed trays 2/9, plant outside 5/1, etc.). I'm a spreadsheet junkie, so I feel useful with such projects, although so much of homesteading work is variable that I'm tempted to just put "It depends" in every one of the fields.

The rest of the time, I'm helping Rebekah cook (for awhile there, I kept the house supplied in freshly made corn tortillas, but my pace has fallen off) and working on my own recipe development, research and writing projects.

This is why I'm here. My yearlong leave from the Post is about having the space to work on two book projects: a second cookbook for Ten Speed Press focused on vegetable-centered dishes suitable for the single cook, and a longer-term project on the new homesteading.

What's new about homesteading? To be blunt, I am. I'm hoping to bring the new to homesteading, to bring an urban perspective to a rural (or suburban, depending on how you view southern Maine) undertaking. That's going to show up in a myriad of ways, I think, as it already has.

Here's just one example: We're talking about making soap, using the pork fat that came with the meat that Rebekah and Peter bought from the JED Collective and is sitting in the freezer (with, I can tell you exactly, 168 pounds of chicken, and so much more). Peter wants to make our own lye from wood ash, since we have so much of that around, and shouldn't be putting much of it in the garden after getting the latest soil-test results. And I can see the point of that. But in reading about the process, there's a good reason modern home soapmakers buy commercially made lye: Its strength is consistent, making the result easier to control. The new homesteading, in my mind, must mean something akin to caring partly about using up your wood ash -- and partly about the softness of your skin.

Of course, I'm the same person who asked my sister to help me decide between two jackets made by Carhartt, that working-man's brand, by telling me which was "cuter." (And I was ecstatic to read of the collaboration between Carhartt and designer Adam Kimmel.) Maybe I should coin the phrase "metrohomesteader."

Metro mindsets aside, decades after the Nearings, there's another wave of back-to-the-landers, and I want to write about this life because I think it has profound implications for much of what ails us. Not that everyone has to move to Maine and build a shed and back shed and back back shed in order to become healthy, or make the planet healthy, but aspects of this life -- respecting the environment, producing very little waste, fostering nutrition on the plate, working hard to provide for yourself -- can filter into the urban, suburban, ex-urban and rural existences. I hope through this blog I can illuminate the realities of such an undertaking, show the new ways of approaching it alongside the old, and maybe entertain or even inspire, here and there.

When the year is over, I have no doubt my own outlook will be forever changed, in ways I don't even realize.

Use It or Lose It, With a New Attitude

2012-02-17T17:26:00.000-05:00

Chickpea pasta. (Photo by Bill Leary/The Washington Post)

I’m as guilty as anyone. I would come home from the farmers market each week loaded down with greens, root vegetables, apples, sometimes some meat. The last went in the freezer, and the rest went in what I like to call the refrigerator’s “rotter” drawer. Inevitably, some of those veggies helped the drawer live up to its nickname by wrinkling, blackening, molding and otherwise going off before I got a chance to cook them.

The use-it-or-lose-it challenge is particularly tough for us single folks. Even if you manage to buy in smaller quantities, you have to shop every day or two to keep on top of fresh produce before it goes to waste. If you’re a farmers market devotee and it’s wintertime, that’s simply not doable.

Tamar Adler has the answer: Instead of trying to keep everything fresh and raw until the clock is counting down toward mealtime and then fitting it into a predetermined recipe, cook everything as soon as you get home from the market. Not all in a jumble or stew, but separately and in ways that maximize each item’s potential.

Continue reading here.

Vegetable Shopping, in the Freezer

2012-01-17T15:11:00.001-05:00

Brussels Sprouts, Rice and Corn Soup.

For those of us accustomed to shopping at farmers markets and/or growing our own, it’s tempting to lament the onset of winter. Sure, year-round markets are selling winter greens and crunchy radishes, cold-storage apples and turnips galore. But what about those beloved snappy green beans, dripping-ripe tomatoes and sweet, sweet corn?

Savvy cooks preserve them, you say. It’s true: I’ve done more than my fair share of pickling (beans and cucumbers) and freezing (slow-roasted tomatoes). But until I emptied it out last month, the jam-packed little freezer atop the fridge in my Dupont Circle co-op was occupied mostly by meats, pizza crusts, make-ahead soup bases and leftover stews, leaving little room for the plain and simple vegetables I start to miss so desperately this time of year.

Now that I’m staying with my sister and brother-in-law in southern Maine on an extended book leave, I have a new, firsthand appreciation for veggies quickly blanched and frozen at their peak. My sister, Rebekah, is a devoted user of the FoodSaver vacuum-sealing system, and stacked in their three — three! — freezers are neat packages of green beans, in-the-pod edamame, peas and garlic scapes (not to mention all manner of stocks, fruits and meats).

Continue reading here.

Let's Lunch: A Texas Bowl o' Red

2012-01-06T20:39:00.004-05:00

Dried ancho chile peppers: one of two main ingredients
in a real Texas chili. (IStockphoto)

Whenever I think of chili, I think of my older brother, Michael.

He's my only brother. And he's the one who taught me the secrets to a real Texas version, and how to distinguish it from imitators -- of which there are many. Most importantly, he said, whenever anyone tells you they make a good chili, you should ask two questions: 1) What kind of beans do you use? 2) What sort of tomatoes go in? If their response is anything other than "None and none," then you are supposed to sound a loud buzzer (or make the noise of one yourself) and let out a scream, "Wrong!" Or I suppose you could politely say, "Hmm. Well, that sounds nice and all, but it's not chili. Let's just call it a stew."

In Texas, you see, the dish's full name is chili con carne, which pretty much sums up everything that's in it: chile peppers and meat. And the version Michael taught me to make uses very little of anything else -- some garlic and onions, beef stock (although water, beer and/or tequila are acceptable in place of some or all the stock), and maybe a bit of herbs such as oregano, perhaps some cumin. Beans on the side, if at all. Right, Mike?

So several years ago, when my Washington Post colleague Bonnie Benwick and I took on chili for our annual Super Bowl recipe smackdown, I naturally played the purist, and I even persuaded Michael (quite easily, it turns out) to come up with a recipe that we could use for publication. He went at it with his natural sense of obsessiveness -- something important for any chili cook -- and the result was delicious. The only thing I would tease him about later was his use of a shake of the wrist rather than a flick of the knife when it came to some of the aromatics. Really, bro: Onion powder?

I put a version of the recipe in my cookbook, "Serve Yourself: Nightly Adventures in Cooking for One," and this time I adjusted that onion powder misstep and added a couple more flourishes: dark beer and pimenton (smoked Spanish paprika, one of my favorite ingredients). And of course, I use cubes of chuck roast or other beef stew meat, not ground beef. What happens is that the chili cooks so slowly, the beef eventually melts into the broth. Actually, Mike, I've been thinking we should add the ground-beef thing as trick question No. 3 when divining the authenticity claims of OPC, or other people's chili. Agreed?

I have to talk to Mike in parentheticals here, you see, because, well, we don't talk otherwise anymore. He decided a few years ago, for various reasons, that he didn't want to have further contact with any of his family members, actually. It's a tale too complicated to explain in a mere blog post -- especially one about chili -- but suffice it to say that depression takes its toll in many different ways, and it's not only the depressed person who suffers.

If I could give you one snapshot that might encapsulate a bit of the effect that it has, it would be the picture of myself and three of my four sisters, outside Mike's little house in Ballinger, Texas, a couple of Christmases ago, trying to get him to answer the door. We had called from my mother's home in nearby San Angelo, where we were visiting, and we had left voicemails. We had emailed messages that went unanswered, we had baked, and we had shopped -- for barbecue, one of his other favorite foods. We were carrying some powerful lures. We knocked. We waited. We called out. We knew he was inside. We even broke into song: "If Ever I Would Leave You," from the Camelot soundtrack, a favorite of Mike's, although none of us sounded nearly as good as he did singing it, especially as we started to break into tears as we sung.

It all came to naught. Now we keep up with Mike from time to time by ringing up the Ballinger police chief, who keeps tabs on every little thing that happens in town, and he assures us that he sees Mike out and about here and there.

So we know that, at least for now, he's OK. But we don't know much more than that. Despite all the conflicts I've had with my brother over the years -- or perhaps because of them -- the fact that we don't know much more than that pretty much tears at my heart whenever I allow myself to think about it for very long.

I haven't given up, as tempting as that may be. I'm hoping, of course, that he might be reading these very words and will decide to reach out and let me know how he's doing. If he doesn't, I suppose I'll have little choice but to bang on his door again the next time I'm in that neck of the woods. And I suppose this time, I'll have to be carrying a Texas bowl o' red with me.

No beans, no tomatoes, no ground beef. Right, Mike?

Texas Bowl O'Red
Makes 2 servings

This recipe doubles easily, if you'd like more of a payoff for your time. You can also make this in a small slow cooker: Cook on Low for 6 to 8 hours, then uncover, turn to High, and cook for another hour to thicken the chili. Besides eating with chopped shallots (or onions), cheese, and saltines, you can spoon this on a hot dog, burger, or over cheese enchiladas. From "Serve Yourself: Nightly Adventures in Cooking for One" (Ten Speed Press, 2011).

3 dried ancho chiles
2 cups dark beer, beef stock, or water, plus more as needed
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 pound beef stew meat or chuck roast (trimmed of excess fat), cut into 1/2-inch pieces (not ground)
Kosher or sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 large shallot lobes, finely chopped
2 tablespoons dried oregano (preferably Mexican)
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon pimenton (smoked Spanish paprika)
Ground cayenne pepper (optional)
1 to 2 ounces Cheddar cheese, grated
Saltine crackers

Cut or tear apart the ancho chiles, discarding the seeds and stems. Toss them into a dry skillet over medium heat and toast for 5 minutes, just until fragrant, without allowing them to char. Transfer them to a blender, pour in 1/2 cup of the beer, and blend until smooth.

Heat the oil in a small Dutch oven or other heavy saucepan fitted with a lid over medium-high heat until it shimmers. Season the beef generously with salt and pepper. When the oil shimmers, add just enough meat to the pot to avoid overcrowding. Cook in batches, stirring frequently, until the beef starts to brown, 3 to 4 minutes per batch.

Return all the meat to the pot, add the garlic and half the chopped shallots (reserving the rest for serving), and cook for a few minutes, stirring constantly, until the beef is browned all over and the garlic and shallots are soft. Stir in the oregano, cumin, pimenton, and ancho puree. Add enough of the remaining 1 1/2 cups beer to cover the meat by 1 inch. Bring to a boil, decrease the heat to low so that the mixture is at a bare simmer, and cover.

Cook for 6 hours, stirring occasionally if desired. Uncover and use a spatula to mash and break up the meat. Cook, uncovered, for another hour or two, until the chili has become quite thick and the meat has almost melted into the liquid. Taste and adjust the seasoning with salt and cayenne pepper.

Spoon half the chili into a bowl, sprinkle with the remaining chopped shallots and the cheese, and eat with saltines. Refrigerate the remaining half in an airtight container for up to 1 week, or freeze for several months.

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This post is part of Let’s Lunch – a virtual lunchdate with food bloggers around the globe. Want to join us in the kitchen? Comment on this post or tweet using the hashtag #LetsLunch.

Here are more posts on the theme from the Let's Lunch crew:

Cathy's Chunky-Style Cowboy Chili at Showfood Chef

Charissa's Clean Out Refrigerator Night Cassoulet, A “Frenchified” Chili at Zest Bakery

Ellise's Chicken Tinga Chili at Cowgirl Chef

Emma's Dave’s Chili at Dreaming of Pots and Pans

Felicia's Low-Concept Vegetarian Chili at Burnt-Out Baker

Grace's Chinese New Year Chili at HapaMama

Cheryl's Keema Chili at A Tiger in the Kitchen

Karen's Hawaiian Chili at GeoFooding

Linda's Smokin’ Hot Vegan Vaquero Chili at Spicebox Travels

Lucy's “Full of Beans” Chili at A Cook And Her Books

Pat's Miso Chili Con Carne y Wasabi Sour Cream at The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook

Holiday Dishes at the Maine Homestead

2011-12-09T10:30:00.000-05:00

Every year at Thanksgiving, I tend to use fewer and fewer recipes. That's because I've spent the last decade or so going every November to my sister and brother-in-law's place in North Berwick, Maine, where we mostly cook what they've grown. (And where they grow almost all of what they eat.) More and more, I want to see, smell and touch what they've picked -- or pick it myself -- before I decide what to do with it.

Wood-roasted, honey-glazed root vegetables.

In case you haven't gathered this already, my sister Rebekah spoils me at Thanksgiving. By the time I got there this year, on Wednesday afternoon, she had made several pies' worth of her perfect butter-lard dough; foraged a couple pounds of oyster mushrooms; picked, trimmed and cleaned celery root, carrots, parsnips and kale and other greens; defrosted their own chicken sausage; ground their own corn into meal; slaughtered, plucked a neighboring farmer's turkey; and stocked the fridge with farm-fresh milk, cream, yogurt and cheese. The garlic and onion braids hung in the mudroom, ready for me to twist off whatever I needed. The potatoes were hanging out in a tiny cold storage room nestled against the side of the house.

Celeriac soup.

All I had to do, really, was cook. So you see what I mean about being spoiled.

Mashed potatoes with butter, buttermilk and goat's milk.

When the group of us that call ourselves Let's Lunch (and coordinate blog posts on a theme every month) decided we'd write on the topic of holiday side dishes from our family, I wasn't exactly sure what I'd do, because this year we didn't really use a recipe for any of the side dishes -- except for, I suppose, the standard sausage cornbread stuffing she's been making for years from a Saveur recipe. The pies are a mix of her crust plus recipes for apple and pumpkin ginger from Rose Levy Beranbaum's "The Pie and Pastry Bible" and pecan from Virginia Willis's "Bon Appetit, Y'all."And I love making James Beard's sweet potato rolls from "Beard on Bread" or Lisa Yockelson's soft buttermilk rolls (this year, I made the latter).

Everything else? We kinda winged it. That, of course, doesn't mean it's not worth writing about. On the contrary, I suppose. So here goes:

I always like a soup for Thanksgiving, because it forces everyone to pause a little bit and talk at the table before the build-your-plate-mountain craziness ensues. I took those beautiful celeriac bulbs, peeled and cut most of them into big chunks -- but held out a cup or so that I finely diced. I chopped up about 1/2 cup of the leaves, too. I cooked the celeriac chunks in chicken stock, pureed with an immersion blender (after adding some celery seed and salt), then stirred in a little cream before serving. I garnished each bowl of soup with the celery leaves and the crispy celeriac pieces that I had pan-fried.

Meanwhile, Rebekah sauteed that beautiful Tuscan kale in Maine-grown canola oil (not their own -- yet!) with crushed red pepper flakes, and splashed in a little vinegar at the end. I boiled the smallest of their Yukon gold and red potatoes until tender, then put them through a food mill -- a way to rice them while leaving the peels behind -- and folded in fresh butter, buttermilk, goat's milk and a palmful of salt.

Most of the other cooking happened in their wood-fired brick bread oven, which is truly a magical thing. It's an intense heat that seems to sear the outside of foods quickly and leaves them juicy inside (not to mention tinged with smoke flavor). So the turkey was simply butterflied -- something I do every year -- and then I stuffed a paste of bacon, garlic and sage under the skin and roasted it at probably 550 degrees until it was caramel-colored and done. I didn't time it, because I hadn't weighed it. Instead, I just kept an eye on it, tented it with foil when it got brown, and pulled it when the instant-read thermometer said it had reached 165 at the thickest part of the thigh. The drippings made for fabulous gravy when combined with more evidence that my sister spoils me: beautifully gelled homemade turkey stock.

The mushrooms were meant for the wood oven, of course -- just simply tossed in olive oil and coarse salt. But my favorite side dish was probably the roasted root veggies: a combination of parsnips and carrots with a few turnips thrown in. I drizzled them with oil, dusted them with cumin and pimenton and roasted them until they had brown spots here and there, then took them out and gave them another drizzle, this time with raw honey. The earthy spices layered with the sweet, sticky honey pulled them into special-occasion territory, if I do say so myself.

It wasn't as many different dishes as we had done in years past, and that was on purpose. There were 10 of us, and my sister and I wanted to make sure people got to really taste everything. Those plate mountains were tall, but each dish got its due. The pies awaited, and we served them with freshly whipped cream. Amazing cream, actually.

This is not a tradition I plan on breaking anytime soon. In fact, next year there will be even more of the same, because as of the New Year I will be living with them in North Berwick while I take a yearlong leave to work on a couple of book projects -- including one, you guessed it, on the art of homesteading. My brother-in-law is installing the insulation, putting up siding and investigating Murphy bed kits for the little studio they're building, just past the chicken coop.

That means that, among other things, next Thanksgiving I won't be nearly as spoiled, reaping the fruits of the harvest without sowing any of the seeds. Next year, in fact, my elbow grease will have gone into every dish, too.

I have a feeling that things will taste even better.

This post is part of Let’s Lunch – a virtual lunchdate with food bloggers around the globe. Want to join us in the kitchen? Comment on this post or tweet using the hashtag #LetsLunch.

Here are more posts on the theme from the Let's Lunch crew:

Patrick Glee: Baby Pecan Pies

A Cook and Her Books: Not My Mama's Black-Eyed Peas & Greens

Cowgirl Chef: Lime-Chipotle Carrots

Burnt-Out Baker: Eating Butterflies: Festive Treats for Ordinary Days

Spice Box Travels: Trinidadian Baked Pastelles

HapaMama: Of Loaves and Fruitcakes

Zest Bakery: Coconut Date Balls and a Gluten-Free Dinner on Vashon Island

Free Range Cookies: Bake Me a Salad

Monday Morning Cooking Club: Potato Latkes

Maria's Good Things: Grandma Dorothy's Deviled Eggs

The Kitchen Trials: Sweet Potato Casserole with Pecan Crumble

A Tiger in the Kitchen: Auntie Jane's Potato Gratin

Wok Star: Easy Festive Side

The Taste of Oregon: Roasted Parsnips, Carrots and Delicata Squash

Thanksgiving Leftovers for a Lighter Day

2011-11-21T07:53:00.001-05:00


Fresh Fall Rolls With Cranberry Dipping Sauce. (Photo by Deb Lindsey for The Washington Post)

Don’t worry: I’m not here to suggest that you concoct a Thanksgiving feast sized to serve one — and that you then eat it alone, in the dark, in shame. This Thursday is nothing if not community-oriented, and single folks who are able to should be enjoying it in the company of family, friends or both.

But when you leave the party, no doubt stuffed more than sated, you may very well find yourself loaded down with something beyond an expanded waistline: as many containers of leftovers as your host can persuade you to carry. Well-meaning families tend to take pity on us solo cooks, assuming that we can’t possibly have the wherewithal to provide for ourselves and foisting off even more on us than on other guests; wouldn’t we like this turkey, and that cranberry sauce, and wouldn’t we get a lot of good mileage out of some mashed potatoes and gravy and dressing and pie?

I don’t know about you, but after carb-loading for 24 to 48 hours, the last thing I feel like eating a couple of days after Thanksgiving is a big plate of the same meal I had around the groaning table. Or, heaven forbid, some of the more indulgent, over-the-top suggestions for leftovers that start flying around this time of year (pumpkin pie smoothie, anyone?). So I’ve laid out a plan for turning that take-home bounty into lighter, tangier, crunchier meals that can awaken my palate after all the beige, cream-laden stuff I had on turkey day.

Continue reading here.

Let's Lunch: A Stew for Seduction

2011-11-11T11:00:00.000-05:00

When I joined the crew of bloggers that calls themselves Let's Lunch (we coordinate monthly posts) and heard that my first assignment would be on the topic of seduction food, my immediate response was relief, because I might, shock of all shocks, actually have an upcoming date -- and therefore an opportunity to seduce.

The thing is, as I write in the coda to my cookbook, "Serve Yourself: Nightly Adventures in Cooking for One," most of my attempts at seduction cooking over the years haven't gone anything like the way they do in the movies or novels. Remember when the heroine in "Like Water for Chocolate" literally ignites the fires of passion with her cooking? For me, not so much.

Sure, there was that time in college when the shrimp something or other I was making for a date with a bank-teller coworker went south 20 minutes before he arrived because the two kittens who ruled the group house in Austin chewed up the shrimp when I wasn't looking. I rushed out to get more, and threw the rest of the dish together, but honestly I needn't have sweated it all that much, because my date and I were twentysomething men. At that age, seduction happens in a heartbeat. We didn't even make it to the main course.

And there was that time that a Latino guy I had seen a few times came over, announced he had already eaten, and chuckled at the chaotic kitchen -- particularly the stain-splattered copy of the "Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook" I had propped open. "Oh, how cute," he said in his thick accent. "You have to use the cooking book!" We didn't make it to the main course, either -- because I threw him out.

And, finally, there was the time an Italian guy in Boston with whom I had a, well, contentious relationship tried to turn the tables on me, telling me I should take my dog out for an hour or so while he cooked dinner for us in my kitchen. When I returned, I heard no clanging of pots, and no rich smells wafted through the air. He brought me a romaine salad with thick rings of red onions and pepperoncini, then a stuffed beef roulade, with slightly wrinkled green beans (or maybe it was slightly wrinkled new potatoes) on the side. He grinned the whole time, and I suspected something was amiss, especially since he never cooked (he had his mother to do that for him). And then it dawned on me that, true to form, he was probably trying to prove a point.

"So," he asked. "What did you think? I did a pretty good job, didn't I? Maybe I can make something that's good enough even for you, right? And in only an hour!"

"I think you did an excellent job," I said. "Of buying and reheating prepared food you got at Costco."

Things were already shaky, and they went quickly downhill.

Here in DC, my connections with men over a home-cooked meal have been strained, at best. One announced, "This is way too much food!" before I even put it on his plate, and another proclaimed that he simply doesn't "do" dessert, even though I had made it from scratch. Deal breakers, both.

Recently, I met a very sweet man at my gym. My trainer introduced us, and we had a couple of fun dates at restaurants: the new Pearl Dive Oyster Palace on 14th Street, and Bibiana downtown. I wondered how much we might be able to bond over food, since he is focused on healthy eating after a large weight loss. (He eats seafood and poultry but no red meat or pork, and doesn't drink alcohol.) But he enjoys good food, and I try to eat on the lighter side, too, so I knew I'd make that a focus of a dinner I'd make for him. The complicating factor: I had a packed day of cooking samples and preparing for a stage demonstration and then book signing at the Metropolitan Cooking and Entertaining Show, so I'd have only a couple hours after getting home to whip something up.

I knew immediately what it would be: Domenica Marchetti's overnight-marinated swordfish stew, a recipe from her book "The Glorious Soups and Stews of Italy" (Chronicle, 2006) that I've made so many times I don't even have to look at the recipe anymore. (No "cooking book" required!) It could hardly be easier, and it's hearty without being too filling -- a prime consideration when romance is in the offing. Nobody wants to make out with a bloated stomach, right? Anyway, I put the swordfish in my trusty Le Creuset pot, seasoned it with salt, chopped up some onions and cherry tomatoes, threw in olives, bay leaves and oregano, drizzled over a good dose of olive oil, and put the thing in the fridge on Friday night.

When I got home from the show at about 6 on Saturday, I took it out to come to room temperature, cleaned up the place, and then put it over very low heat on the stovetop by 7. Then I roasted some romanesco cauliflower (you know, that variety that looks like another planet) and thick broccoli pieces for a side dish. The stew was a hit, as it always is: The juices from the fish and the tomatoes combine with the olive oil to make a shallow, light broth, and the olives and onions and herbs and garlic season the whole shebang perfectly. It projects that casual vibe I was going for: Oh, this old thing? Just threw it together, you know. My date was just as impressed by the vegetables: crisp and browned on the outside, creamy within. I believe his words were something like, "I never thought broccoli could taste like this." Score.

In keeping with the lightness theme, I skipped dessert entirely but had some farmers market apples and Greek-style yogurt on hand, just in case we made it that far.

We didn't.

Overnight-Marinated Swordfish Stew

Serve with bread, if desired. Adapted from Domenica Marchetti's "The Glorious Soups and Stews of Italy" (Chronicle Books, 2006).

Makes 4 servings

2 pounds swordfish steak, preferably in one piece

Kosher or sea salt

Freshly ground black pepper

1 large yellow onion, halved and thinly sliced

1 pint (12 ounces) cherry tomatoes, cut in half

5 medium cloves garlic, lightly crushed

1 cup pitted Gaeta or kalamata olives

5 fresh bay leaves

1 tablespoon minced oregano

1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Place the swordfish in a Dutch oven or other heavy-bottomed pot with a lid; it should fit comfortably but snugly. Season the fish generously on all sides with salt and pepper to taste. Cover the fish with the onion, tomatoes, garlic, olives, bay leaves and oregano. Drizzle the olive oil over everything; cover and refrigerate for 24 to 48 hours.

Remove the pot from the refrigerator and let it stand at room temperature for 45 minutes to 1 hour. Place the pot on the stovetop over low heat and cook, covered, without stirring, for about 1 hour or slightly longer, until the fish is just cooked through. Check by inserting a knife into the fish and looking at the interior flesh.

Remove the pot from the heat and let it sit for about 30 minutes. It should be warm but not piping hot at serving time. Discard the bay leaves.

This post is part of Let’s Lunch – a virtual lunchdate with food bloggers around the globe. Want to join us in the kitchen? Comment on this post or tweet using the hashtag #LetsLunch.

Read more posts on the seduction theme from the Let's Lunch Crew:

Linda Shiue (Spicebox Travels)'s West African Groundnut Stew.

Leigh Nannini Rivas (His With Hers)'s Baked Apple Cider Doughnuts.

Grace Hwang Lynch (HapaMama)'s Pasta Puttanesca.

Rashda Khan (Hot Curries and Cold Beer)'s Seafood Soup.

(More links to come, so check back.)

Microwave for One? Yes, Without Shame.

2011-10-20T14:58:00.001-04:00

Pasta With Miso Squash
(Photo by Matt McClain for The Washington Post)

In spring 2010, images of a book began flying around Twitter, accompanied by the comment “Most depressing cookbook ever.” The title? “Microwave Cooking for One.” On the cover, author Marie T. Smith smiles next to an open microwave, out of which spills, cornucopia-style, no fewer than 20 fully plated dishes: a stack of pancakes, sausage and eggs, a birthday cake, what looks like a half-chicken.

I giggled when I saw it (the retro-cheesiness factor is high), but my heart also sank a little, because Smith and I obviously have one thing in common: an interest in recipes for solo cooks. (Smith died in 1987, two years after she published her book, which was a decade in the making.)

When I gently objected on Twitter to the idea of cooking for one being nothing more than a punch line, one friend responded that the “most depressing” label was, of course, about something more: “Do you have any microwave recipes in your book?”

No, I don’t. But the truth is, I do use my microwave for more than just melting butter, reheating leftovers and making popcorn — and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

I don’t crank out apple streusel cake or shrimp omelets or escarole soup the way Smith did, but I do appreciate the microwave’s efficiency at one particular function: steaming vegetables.

Perhaps par-cooking is a better way to think of it, because I don’t tend to eat my vegetables steamed; it’s just the first of a two-step process. I prefer most of my foods to have some crunch to them, caramelization of the type that you don’t typically get in the microwave without special equipment. So I use the microwave to give cauliflower, eggplant, sweet potatoes, Brussels sprouts and the like a head start before finishing them in other ways.

Continue reading here.