cabbage gratin

I feel like side dishes are for a different demographic. Like for people with a spouse. Or for people with regular potlucks. Or for professional chefs. People who use menu planning apps. Mothers. I don't know: somebody that is not me. These last few months I have amassed a hat collection so that I can stop showering, for chrissakes.



Is this just a function of grad school? A function of grad school-cum-secret-life-as-an-artist? Am I going into slob remission? Being on top of things is hard.


(hat tip to Hyperbole and a Half for nailing this phenomenon so hilariously)

So it's not really fair that I fault this technique for braised cabbage/bokchoy/fennel for being a side dish: I've started eating it over pasta for lunch and it's delicious, even if it doesn't have that gold star casserole-y "take this to school every night to eat at rehearsal" goodness. Every time I don't know what to do with a green thing and I braise it I surprise myself with my culinary savvy. Especially given that cabbage is mega-cheap, this tastes surprisingly sophisticated.

+Chop a head of cabbage (or bok choy or fennel or a combo) thin and saute it in some butter with some chopped scallions or leeks, something oniony without the hassle and time of onions. For maybe 10 minutes, until the cabbage is wilty and maybe a little brown.

+Add a cup or two of good stock-- you know, that you made from the peels in your freezer.

OPTION 1: Simmer until the cabbage is soft and the liquid is mostly gone. 15-20 minutes?

OPTION 2 (via Orangette): Simmer for just a minute, then cover the pan with tin foil and bake in the oven at 350 for about half an hour. When it seems like the cabbage is soft and the liquid is mostly gone, take off the tinfoil and sprinkle the top with breadcrumbs and a soft cheese. Increase the temp to 375 and bake until the crust is toasty.

pickles

I do this thing where I am a total baby-- whatever emotion I am experiencing I assume this is how it's always been and how it will always be. So now the term ends and I am a mess of emotions, cloudy memories are fuzzing around my head with nary a brilliant idea to be seen, my desk is covered with dishes that remind me that not only do I sit and eat at my desk, but I have been putting the most remarkable crap into my body-- white russians, premade sandwiches, stuffing. And I try to remind myself that I haven't been this hollow for the last ten weeks.

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

--Rumi

In between the scribbled affirmations, naps, old seasons of Parks and Recreation, stolen cigarettes, crumpled to-do lists, and stacks of library books, there have been moments of real joy... more of them than I even let myself remember. Like starting to make pickles. They're easy!

PICKLES
(so far I have pickled parsnips, carrots, and cucumbers: all delicious)

--1 lb produce
--1 cup water
--1 cup (apple cider) vinegar
--a couple tablespoons each of sugar, salt, dill, and garlic, to taste. Here is a good starting ratio
... 1/4 c sugar
... 1.5 T salt
... 1.5 T dill or dill seed or mustard seed or fennel seed
... 2 cloves garlic

+ Boil all that stuff into a brine. Try not to get a whiff of the boiling vinegar unless you want to feel really awake.
+ Throw in the vegetables (cut into sticks or chips, I should add) if you aren't using cucumbers, cook for about 5 minutes.
+ Arrange your pickles-to-be in clean jars, cover with brine and throw in the fridge. They will be pickled after a day and stay good for about a month, as far as I can tell from the internet. Mine haven't made it that long.


PS my camera died again hence blog death PPS sepia for vintage hipster homemaker appeal!

no duh zucchini

I don't know why, but the zucchini I just made was a freakin revelation. I swear if this was on the side of my plate at a bougie farm-to-table restaurant I wouldn't raise an eyebrow. You know how their side vegetables are always just unreal? These were like that. Here is what I did differently than normal, maybe you can recreate the magic that just happened. Or maybe you know how to make zucchini taste like this normally, in which case, hat tip!

CUBES, not slices. Pretty big chunks.
SALT IT. for like half an hour, then drain out the water and rinse and dry
BARELY ANY OIL. i just used what was left in the pan after cooking some other veggies
FIRST LOW HEAT, then HOT. i didn't start out with a super-hot pan, but after it hadn't browned after a few minutes i pumped it up and let them get kind of brown/charred/grilled tasting.

Over & out,
America's Test Kitchen

possibly the best, possibly the most disgusting dinner

a steamed artichoke and homemade mayonnaise


Why don't I make more artichokes for myself? I had this bias like "artichokes are too much work" "they are too expensive" "I don't know how to steam them." Let me tell you, f that noise. If you want to have the best dinner in the world. Go buy an artichoke. Yeah. Now stick it in a pot with a few inches of water, slap a lid on and let it steam for like half an hour. Now eat it. Yeah. Delicious. Maybe some melted butter. Or. You know what is better than butter? Mayonnaise.



I had a running joke with my babysitter when I was little that I was hiding a tub of mayonnaise in my bed that I would eat after she left me alone. I wasn't even really a particularly fat kid either, so I don't know how she intuited my love of mayo, but there you go. The past two times I have made mayonnaise it has been emulsified (i.e. not a total disaster) but ends up kind of blob-like, so maybe you should look elsewhere for your mayo guidance if you want something peaky-perfect. This worked totally fine for dipping vegetables in, and it tastes... delicious... so who's counting.

+2 egg yolks
+1 cup neutral oil or a mix of neutral & olive oil if you want your mayo to taste very pronounced
+1 or 2 T vingear or lemon juice
+1/2 t or so salt
+a little mustard

Whisk/beat the yolks, acidic thing, mustard, and salt until the yolks look sticky. Then add the oil a drop at a time, literally, keeping it emulsified and not letting it break up or get all nasty. Go slow. If it breaks up, you are screwed, so don't let that happen. If it does, beat another yolk in a separate bowl and then add your oily, un-creamy mess a spoonful at a time, keeping it carefully emulsified the whole time. Store in the fridge (or your bed) for the next few days.

brussel sprouts with balsamic glaze

!!!!!!!!!!!!

mushroom and boursin tart

On a "success" note, this is one of the most delicious things I have ever made. A vast improvement over the already sophisticated, crowd favorite, mentioned in the first ever post on this here blog mushroom-goatcheese-pizza.


1 sheet puff pastry (or pizza dough, I suppose, although I have totally started going steady with puff pastry. It has my class ring and everything)
1 container white mushrooms
container of Boursin cheese (or goat cheese, or gruyere)
rosemary
thyme

--Let the puff pastry thaw while you heat a pan with some olive oil. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees, while you're at it.
--Slice the mushrooms. Button mushrooms are so amazing; they always look so forlorn and 1950s next to the fancy mushrooms at the grocery store, but once they're cooked I swear no one will complain. Don't be fooled: white button mushrooms are the little, cheap mushroom that could.
--Throw the mushrooms in a saucepan over medium heat and add salt, pepper, and thyme. Three pinches, let's say. Be patient. The mushrooms will brown and then start to cook down. If they start to dry out before shrinking, add some more oil. or wine.
--When the mushrooms have started to make their own gravy, add a few teaspoons of chopped rosemary. DOES THIS OR DOES THIS NOT SMELL LIKE HEAVEN?
--Cook a few more minutes until the mushrooms are juicy and soft. Patience + white button mushrooms = restaurant quality (honest!) sauce. Not only for this tart, but polenta or chicken too.
--Roll out the puff pastry so it's a little thinner and place in a baking pan/ sheet. Put the mushrooms and little crumbles of Boursin on top.
--Bake for 15-20 minutes until the pastry is puffed and golden brown. Slice and serve. It's delicious cold, too, but... it won't last that long.

"Fortune favors the bold" potato salad

Holy overdue post, batman!

This NYTimes article shamed me back to you... but actually, I've been waiting for my NEW DIGITAL CAMERA to come in the mail so that I can be a real food blogger again and not some washed-up old hack who eats ice cream for lunch and picks the cookie crumbs out of her hair on her way to work, wishing that she could eat shit without winding up in the hospital like the other carefree girls and boys. Where were we?

Last night I made some kick-ass potato salad. Thought of y'all because it's summertime and all I want to eat is picnic food. This is healthier, maybe, than the kind you get from the grocery store, plus it's cheaper, plus I winged it so just imagine what will happen when you use your imagination, too! Potato salad for president.

Potato salad

1 bag of waxy red potatoes, about 10
mayonnaise
mustard
a small red onion
olive oil
vinegar (classy wine vinegars probably superior, I used white vinegar I had bought to clean the sink).


Boil the potatoes until they're tender, should take about 15 minutes. While you're waiting, chop up that red onion. I only used half.

Now drain them and let them cool in the fridge while you drink a cold one and contemplate your dwindling work ethic.

Cold-ish? Mash 'em up with a fork and glop in three heaping forkfuls of mayonnaise. Pardon me sir, do you have any Grey Poupon? If so, a spoonful or two is delicious. Stir. Grab the olive oil and vinegar and drizzle them on top for a few counts, like you are a flair bartender with only a very small amount of flair.



Add that red onion and mix it up. Yum. Put on your thinking cap: how good would this be with capers, or dill, or pickles, or.... let me know! Anyway, bring it to work with your sandwich, to the picnic with your slacker friends, to the yacht club with your yacht. It's summer, natch.

no duh beets

The Minimalist this week has roasted beets! I ate these at least every other day last year-- it is the only way to make beets. I thought that it was so "the only way to make beets" that this was a no-duh recipe, but the Times published it so. There. Maybe these aren't part of your life yet, and you will thank me forever.

At the (farmer's) market, look for a bunch of beets that are about the same size.

Take yer beets and cut off the greens. Don't throw them away! Wash and boil/steam them for 10 minutes or so, then fry them up with some garlic. Delicious!

Preheat the oven to 400. Hot!

Rinse the beets, then wrap them up in tinfoil.

Stick them on a baking sheet and put them in the oven.

Do your homework, putter, whatever for about an hour. The beets should be soft. Are they soft?

Yum. Stick tomorrow's beets in the fridge as is. Quel convenience! For dinner: rub off the skin, then serve with goat cheese or (if like Mark Bittman you are sick of the beet&goat cheese monopoly) a squeeze of lemon and some rosemary.

Guest post: Boston baked beans

I have a highly fairweather legume aversion-- chickpeas are wrong on all counts, but burritos need refritos and far be it from me to refuse lentil stew. So this isn't my recipe for baked beans...these come from my good folks up north, watching out for the fate of this dear blog. If you want to write a guest post, please do! I'll post it. I actually really like the idea of having all my friends' recipes, like one of those old postcard recipe rolodexes but online.


Steve's Baked Beans


This is a recipe for the kind of people who like to cook things overnight. I know, not a category you even knew existed. Aside from a peculiar desire for nocturnal baking, you will need a piece of oven-proof crockery that can hold a little over half a gallon. With a cover. It's gotta have a cover.

My crockery is official: it says "Boston Baked Beans" on the side, and came with a little tag with a recipe. We got it at a hardware store in Boston's North End. (It don't get more authentic.) This is that recipe, altered somewhat.

You'll also need to set your alarm for something like 4 am. I hope you're good at two things: getting back to sleep in the middle of the night, and functioning with oven mitts and hot things in the middle of the night. If you fail on either count, this ain't the recipe for you. This is serious business, bean cookery. Muffins it ain't.

So, you've got your crockery, and you've got your one pound bag of dried beans. Didn't I mention the beans? Soldier beans or Jacob's cattle beans if you like your bean to bite back. Pea beans if you like the canned kind from B&M that you could chew without teeth. If you can get beans from the State Of Maine company, or Kennebec Bean company, then you're advanced-intermediate, and well on your way to achieving my life's ambition of at least once cooking Bean-Hole-Beans.

Recipe:
1 lb bag of beans
1 onion, quartered
1/2 cup blackstrap molasses
1 tbsp coarse mustard
1-2 tbsp butter
1/2 tsp salt
water

Sort out the beans. This is important, because once in a while there is a rock about the size of a bean that escaped the eagle-eyed ladies at the State of Maine bean company, and though this is serious business and I like a bean that bites back, a rock is something else again. Pull out the measly looking beans, too.

Put the beans in a big steel pot, cover with two inches of water, and bring to a boil. Boil for 5 minutes or so on high. Remove from heat and drain. Rinse. (If you're the kind of person who likes a recipe that lasts almost 24 hours, you could do the long method: set beans to soak at sunrise, under two inches of water. At 10pm, drain and rinse. I like multi-day cooking, myself, but I rarely have the forethought.) Draining the water and rinsing gets rid of most of the gas-producing stuff.

Turn the oven to a hair below 250. Peel and quarter the onion, and put it in the crockery along with the mustard, butter, salt, and molasses. Pour in the boiled (or soaked) beans. Fill up the crockery with water, two inches or so above the beans, or to just below the rim.

Put the whole mess in the oven. Go to bed, or whatever else it is you do at night other than baking beans. Wake up at 4 am or so, or whatever time is about 6 hours after you tucked in the beans. Pull out the crockery (careful!), uncover, and give the beans a bit of a stir with a big spoon. They should be a little dry on top, but with liquid just under the first layer of beans. Taste a bean. It should be creamy & smooth, not grainy. If it's grainy, add boiling water to cover, crank the oven up to 350, and put the crockery back in. Wait until the oven hits 350, turn it off, and go back to bed. If the beans are creamy & smooth, turn off the oven, splash just a little water in, put the crockery back in the oven, and go back to bed. In either case, they'll be perfect at breakfast.

Mustardy Kale with Bacon

Aaaah, back from the most recent stop on my "weekend socialization" campaign. It has been rocking my world to visit old roommates and eat my favorite foods-- apparently my fondest memories of college are all completely food-centric. Maybe someday soon Shira will guest-blog about how to make her amazing pasta with onions I was so thrilled to have again this weekend. Those leftovers saved my stressed-out, veggie-corn-dog munching ass from total uselessness about a thousand times.

Anyways...D.C! The only bummer was that on the last day, I ordered a coconut rice pudding and what should have been a delicious mid-morning snack was covered in almonds. Serves me right. Double drama: my recreation in which I tried to be a top chef and make up my own recipe is HIDEOUS. The milk separated and I am ashamed. It was actually very tasty, but no recipe, because I don't want something up here that you have to eat with your eyes closed.

But my mom made something delicious! Behold:



Mustardy Kale with Bacon
from Gourmet

3 lbs kale, chop roughly and toss the tough bits
4 bacon slices
1 bunch scallions, chopped
2 tbsp grainy mustard

Cook the kale in a big pot of water until it is tender (12 minutes or so)
Fry up the bacon! Oh bacon, you are so beautiful to me. Also, my new hobby is prostheletizing for this candy bar:



If you eat meat, eat one of these asap. Maybe someday I will make my own... or maybe it will just end up looking exactly like the rice pudding, so eerily similar to barf that I wish I had tried it before halloween so that I could serve it as a spoooooky dessert.

Oh yeah, now put the bacon on some paper towels, pour off the fat, and cook the scallions. Now put the kale and mustard in there too.

Sautee until the greens are very tender, another 10 mintues or so, then crumble the bacon on top. Hooooweee.


PS: VOTE. Obviously you will, but, you know, just vote. Also Starbucks will give you a free coffee if you do!

ratatouille

A special request!

Roasted vegetables that you can eat with couscous and bring to work the next day. Sounds like ratatouille... which for whatever reason I have never eaten. What? Didn't I even get a little hungry for it after watching the adorable movie? Don't I eat more zucchini than anyone else I know? Can't everyone cook?



Yeah, but it always seemed like kind of a hassle.

Well, here's the scoop. Ratatouille is a hassle. Start cooking this bastard yesterday. Ratatouille is not a 30 minute meal, or even a 1 hour meal. BUT if you've got time on your hands or want to practice your knife skills (???) or you just got the movie again on netflix and it made you feel culinary or want to feed yourself for like a week on a few dollars worth of veggies, hell yeah.I should note that this is a fake-o version, which my mother says in no way resembles Julia Child's ratatouille. But it is delicious and does look like the one in the movie. Disney knows what's up.



ratatouille!

1 zucchini
1 yellow squash
1 eggplant
1 red pepper, if you're not red pepper averse like me
4 tomatoes (canned or not, whatever, even tomato sauce will work)
a head of garlic, broken into cloves and peeled
1/2 cup olive oil
herbes de provence (what? you don't know what herbes de provence are, you philistine? ok. rosemary, fennel, savory, thyme, basil, tarragon, dill weed, oregano, lavender, chervil and marjoram. or a mix from the grocery store, obviously.)

Preheat the oven to 400

Get married and put a classy Williams Sonoma mandoline on your registry. Or chop the eggplant into "paper-thin" slices. If you hate eggplant like me, you should salt it: rub the slices with lots of salt and let it hang out in a colander until you need them. They will release a lot of water and taste less nasty.

Now chop the squashes. Paper-thin, right? Hahahaha.

If you are using whole tomatoes, cut them into slices. Otherwise, put a sturdy layer of tomato at the bottom of an oven-proof dish. Scatter the garlic cloves in there. Throw in some olive oil and herbes de provence.

Then wash the salt off the eggplant and wring out (hands-on!) and make a nice arrangement of all your rondeles. Pour a serious glug of olive oil on top and sprinkle some more herbes de provence.



Pop that baby in the oven and set a timer for ONE FULL HOUR.

Microwave yourself some fake chicken patties to tide yourself over. Quorn! Soy-free!

Serve with some kind of grain/ cheese. Polenta + mozzarella = not French, but delicious. Recipe for polenta to follow!

Over at the real cooking blog smittenkitchen, Deb has some good ideas for what to do with the leftovers (uh, besides eating them).