readers:

at the end of this week i depart for south africa, land of the internet so slow you can get a usb drive’s worth of data faster across the country by messenger pigeon than by download. so i don’t expect to be posting from there unless i can get on the university network in joburg. BUT i will be cooking and photographing things, so around mid-january some of it should be up.

thanks for your patience!

a few weeks ago my friend abby came down from northampton for a last minute visit, and i had to make a quick thing for us all to eat for dinner. i immediately secured plantains and avocados on the way home, and the other thing we ate was a soba noodle fusion dish of sorts.

this was delicious, and the easist part to prepare: 1 california avocado, mashed up with lemon juice and sea salt.

and a better shot of the main dish: zaru soba (buckwheat noodles) boiled, tossed with sesame oil, and served with carrot, onion, mushroom, tofu and spinach which was sauteed with seasame oil, and a lot of ginger and garlic, chili flakes, cumin, etc. also topped with some chopped fresh tomato. you could serve this with a sauce as well, maybe a miso-soy-sauce-ginger type of thing, but i tend to get lazy about sauce once i involve ginger, garlic and sesame oil in the cooking process because those have a lot of flavor on their own.

plantains sauteed in butter and tossed in a few tablespoons of coconut cream. the easiest thing to make. this i actually started first because i wanted the plantains to be nice and soft and i wanted to caramelize a bit of the sugars in the coconut cream right at the end, gotta take your time with that on low heat.

abby folded some paper towels into fancy napkins and we set the table (usually the table never gets set on weeknights, we just eat out of bowls in our hands in front of a book or the computer, i won’t lie).

it was pretty good! this was during my “week of noodles” when i watched martin yan talk about noodles on the computer and didn’t want to eat anything else. i bought a lot of noodles from m2m on third avenue–zaru soba, rice noodles, green tea noodles, udon noodles, chuka soba ramen noodles. so every night i made some kind of noodles with vegetables and tofu and a miso-based or ginger-based flavor profile, or else i would make a spicy vegetarian ramen with homemade broth.

sometimes i would poach an egg and put it on top. poaching an egg and putting it on top of your entree is a key thing for vegetarians to do, because it is instant protein and minerals, and goes with a lot of things. my poached eggs aren’t very photogenic, though they are tasty.

the most unimpressive thanksgiving ever! still good, just not up to my normal fancy homemade holiday food standards.

as you can see we already started eating…we were too hungry to take pretty artistic photos of each dish.

1. whole wheat couscous salad with mint, red seedless grapes, green onion, lemon/olive oil/cayenne, chopped dried apricot, etc. the dish my mother instinctively makes each time she has to feed someone else. “crowd pleaser” vegan dish. really good. gets better the next day. when she’s really into it she gets toasted pine nuts and puts those in there too.

2. some sort of green pears from key food, which i peeled and poached in a brown sugar syrup liberally seasoned with shaved ginger, lemon zest, and cinnamon. i don’t even like poached pears normally, definitely not those nasty canned ones in the corn syrup, but this made my eyes roll back in my head. it was delicious. all i wanted to do with the reserved syrup, which is caramelized and dark and delicious: pour it over vanilla ice cream! can’t right now though.

my mother declared this dish “the only dessert i ever want to eat for thanksgiving,” which is a little extreme, considering all the other desserts i could make her for thanksgiving, or really anytime, but she is extremely into eating fruit. i offered to make a little pie with the syrup-sauteed pears in there as a filling instead of just poaching them, but she preferred the poached version because it was healthier.

3. baked red potatoes, lots of sea salt, freshly ground pepper. i also bought a very cheap can of “chicken gravy,” for the potatoes, which probably involved little to no actual chicken. margarine might have been better. we got a good batch of potatoes this time because they tasted a bit like dubrovnik homegrown ones, which is saying something. on a side note, i wish i had taken pictures of every thing i ever ate while in croatia. all of it remains a vivid taste memory and it’s been years.

4. salad of: chopped iceberg, chopped italian green peppers, lots chopped parsley, some freshly & finely shredded asiago, a few chopped white mushrooms, capers, olive oil, touch of balsalmic, ground black pepper.  delicious, refreshing, some kind of adapted tabbouleh situation, there was a lot of parsley in there, and a liberal amount of nice bertolli extra virgin olive oil. i would not mind eating this salad again soon.

5. what i didn’t eat any of, but my mom and brother did: a quarter of a bone-in ham from d’agostino, which we baked and honey-glazed in my apartment. they report this was a “pretty good ham” even though it was a cheap one. so if you are craving a smallish holiday ham that is mess-free to bake and prepare (just wrap it in foil and let is hang out in the oven for a couple of hours) go get one of these suckers for christmas. i would estimate it would have served about 6 people with normal appetites. my brother eats for three because he can just eat a lot, and we still have some left over.

i can’t eat good things right now due to this illness, so i’m compensating by looking at photos of fancy dishes. check out this (now old) review of ubuntu in napa: http://www.davidlebovitz.com/archives/2008/10/ubuntu.html#more

as liz lemon might say: i want to go to there.

how can i not like david lebovitz when he goes to vegetarian places like ubuntu, and ORDERS EVERYTHING? and takes photos? and raves on the internet? go follow him on twitter and read his blog. david is a pastry chef by trade, i think, but he shares the same kind of compulsive love of food that a lot of my favorite bloggers have, whether or not they’re formally trained in cooking or baking. plus he spends quite a great deal of time in paris, and it’s a nice change of pace to read about french things — all my other bookmarked food websites are based in the states.

there are not going to be any posts for a while until i recover from this weird stomach illness that landed me in the hospital over the weekend. it may have been caused by meat, so obviously i am disinclined to that, and i am not allowed to eat any dairy for a while so i’m a kind of involuntary low-fat vegan right now. with no appetite. taking pills four times a day.

i’ll get back to you when i fall in love with good food again!!

this just happened at 10pm** tonight:

what is this vegetable situation: 1/2 of a massive, massive avocado. (yes that is a dinner plate and yes that is only half of an avocado piled up and covering most of it) plantains sauteed in butter and coconut cream (SO GOOD). spinach chopped and sauteed with habanero, onion, garlic, cumin, lemon, and agave. a little bit of crappy cheddar cheese from costco. a heap of super-quickly cooked quinoa, also drizzled with lemon and agave. and the whole thing is sprinkled with black pepper.

i felt like a new woman after eating that. seriously! eat your vegetables.

tomorrow it’s more avocado for breakfast! i might make a shake, or just stand in front of my kitchen window eating that sucker with a spoon, looking out at the expressway.

**note that i left the house this morning at 830am and had no homemade food all day, so this was extra delicious for that reason.

it’s fall! finally!

1. in the mornings, the house smells like ‘beginning of the season radiator heat’ (this is a very particular sense memory i only associate with new york, having lived in other places where the heat was either electric or gas and not steam-powered.)

2. i’m baking bread again.

3. it’s time to take our sweatshirts out of storage (ie shoved in suitcases above the closet).

4. running outside makes my lungs ache, and not because i’m tired.

and now, a recipe for pumpkin with sage that i have eaten four times this week (it was a big pumpkin.)

slice open a pumpkin, clean out the insides, and roast wedges of it on baking sheet at 400 degrees in the oven with the skin on. it’s done when it is pierced easily by a fork and is a nice dark orange color. or you can buy those premade chunks from the store; boil them if they’re raw or just heat them up if they’re frozen and cooked. in a saucepan, melt a bunch of butter and infuse it with dried sage on very, very low heat; let the butter simmer but not bubble until you smell the sage getting in there, and when it’s strong enough (taste it and see) you should carefully remove the sage leaves and cook with the butter (alternatively you can used sage-infused olive oil, which infuses at room temp over time). careful not to let the sage leaves burn. you can burn the butter a little AFTER you’ve removed the sage to get a nice nutty, dark brown butter flavor, but burned leaves don’t taste nearly as good as burned milk solids.

also add some minced garlic and mexican chili powder, and the cooked pumpkin, and saute until hot and buttery. i also like to add a little honey or brown sugar and salt and pepper at the end. serve with pasta, salad, quinoa, or alone.

if the pumpkin isn’t too mushy, you can make ridiculous fusion food with it too. put some into taco shells and garnish with caramelized onion, grated asiago, greens (like argula) and chopped tomato.

quinoa, the grain, is basically a magical substance. not only is it a delicious, it’s also a hardy plant that humans have grown for thousands of years (since the incans) way up at 4000m above sea level in the andes, flourishing despite the altitude and sort of poor soil. and it offers us a gluten-free source of complete protein that we can use like just like we use rice or barley or any other grain.

it has such a tasty nutty/herbal flavor that i love, which is fun to experiment with by cooking it in broth or with teabags, or toasting it in a dry pan first, or cooking it with other ingredients in the mix, as with risotto or paella. i crave it now, so it’s easy for me to incorporate it into meals, in fact we just started buy white quinoa in bulk (there are also red varieties). but i realize most people are a little bewildered about how to cook or use it if it’s something new. weird health food is always like that. but persistence with the ingredients pays off.  i made a kind of last-minute recipeless quinoa pilaf thing on sunday which turned out pretty well and might be a good place to start.

how to: rinse a cup of quinoa well, until the water runs clear. then combine it with two cups of water or broth in a saucepan and bring it to a boil and simmer for 15 or 20 minutes or until the grains have opened (they will look like there are little circles attached to them, that’s how you know they’re done.) sit it aside. in a frying pan, carmelize some finely diced onion or shallot with some minced garlic and toasted ground cumin. if you want to put beans in, this is where you would add them (chickpeas or blackeyed peas would work). while that part is cooking, add salt and pepper and a drizzle of olive oil to the quinoa and toss. when the onions are done let them cool a bit, and chop up some more ingredients. a lot of things will work. on sunday i used green pepper, fresh parsley, capers, grated asiago, and a jalapeno, but here are some other ideas:

finely chopped red and/or green peppers, grated asiago or parmesan, diced black or kalamata olives, fresh basil or parsley (kind of a Mediterranean thing?)

shredded carrots, raisins or dried cranberries, a drizzle of honey, and toasted walnuts or almonds (moroccan salad variation)

chopped tomato, chopped basil, shredded mozzarella and chopped cucumber (caprese variation)

mix everything together and finish off the seasoning with a little more olive oil or a touch of red wine vinegar, or salt and pepper.

quinoa can also be used as an ingredient with bulger and beans to make homemade veggie burgers, it can be formed into fritters and fried, it can be a base for a super healthy curry, it can be served as a side dish with grilled meat or entrees, it’s pretty versatile.

it can also be cooked with a couple of herbal fruit tea bags in the water, and turned into a delicious breakfast, superior to oatmeal nutritionally and in terms of flavor. just cook the quinoa in water spiked with something sweet-ish, like orange, peach, strawberry, blueberry, blackberry or rosehip tea, remove the tea bags at the end of cooking, and serve it warm topped with toasted chopped nuts, shredded coconut, chopped dried fruit, and honey/agave/maple syrup. oh, that sounds good. in fact i think i’m going to bust out my mom’s box of rosehip tea and make myself a bowl of that right now.

last night i found myself run down, full of headaches, looking at a long list of things to do and a fridge full of wilting vegetables, so i made a cure soup, which is vegetable soup spiked with all kinds of healthy bits and pieces and cooked down into the most rich, fragrant, concentrated form. depending on what you use, it can either look very pretty or like a mess, but it is always delicious.

how to:

brown a finely diced clove of garlic, diced red onion, and a chopped few carrots in a generous amount of olive oil. add a finely chopped hot pepper and ground cumin, salt and pepper, brown sugar, and chili powder. when that whole mixture gets soft, add some chopped green or colored bell peppers, chopped celery, chopped cooked potato, some cooked pasta or barley (i used barley, but pasta, noodles, or rice would work just fine), and some kind of tough green, such as collard or kale (without the stems) chopped into thick shreds. cover all of this with a high quality pre made vegetable or chicken broth and let it simmer. i also put a chopped head of kholrabi in mine, a dash of lemon juice, and some toasted wheat germ and some tomato puree for color and flavor.

chickpeas or black eyed peas or well-rinsed black beans would also be a nice addition to this soup though i didn’t have any on hand last night. some walnuts or sliced almonds might also be a nice addition. you could also add chopped mushrooms or some kind of chopped cooked squash (butternut, acorn, pumpkin) if you have them. this is an everything clean out the fridge kind of soup, just keep tasting as you go and don’t overdo any of the seasonings–you can always add more after the fact. mix it all up and simmer it on low for a while, or until your toughest vegetables like kohlrabi and carrots are nice and tender.

i serve this soup with a dollop of sour cream stirred in (it turned out very spicy, i guess i had a serious hot pepper, so the sour cream helps ease that spiciness), a sprinkle of cheddar or queso fresco, and a generous amount of fresh chopped cilantro. because i am a cumin addict, i also usually sprinkle yet another half teaspoon of ground cumin on my serving (we have a 16 oz container of it in the freezer for a reason!)

in fact i felt much better after eating it, which make sense since it’s basically pure nutrition, warm & filling to boot. and chopping all those ingredients seemed to take my mind off of law school, which is always a plus.

i think most women who cook aspire to make certain things like our moms made them. i tried to make my mom’s farina dumplings for a dinner party, using vegetable broth instead of chicken soup, and although both parts were homemade they came out much more glutinous than what i remembered eating as a kid, which displeased me, though the guests didn’t know the difference (well, my brother did…)

there are no recipes in our family’s key dishes, unlike things from magazines sometimes made for a holiday dinner; it’s all intuitive. alas, flour does not belong in farina dumplings. learn by doing! i’ll try again next time i have a nice batch of homemade broth on the stove, which should be soon if this weather gets nice and cold. in addition to adding flour, which was a mistake, i also let the dough sit while i did something else in preparation for the party, during which time the gluten was building up in there, getting ready to sabotage the finished texture. the only dough that should “sit” is bread dough because it must rise and pie dough in the fridge or freezer because it must be cold to bake properly. or cookie dough if you’re storing it i guess. everything else, if you let it sit and it has flour, gluten forms and messes with the chemistry and texture of the finished product.

here’s the troubleshooted, new and improved version of farina dumplings, and yes, they DO taste better in chicken soup, homemade if you can get it, but a high quality vegetable broth will also work.

heat up the broth or soup while you make dough. combine four eggs, teaspoon of salt, and half a stick of melted butter in a bowl, whisk until well incorporated. add the butter slowly, try not to let it curdle. use room temperature eggs for this reason. add about a quarter of a cup of milk–preferably whole milk and not too cold. then mix in farina cereal, adding enough so that it comes together to form a wet dough. if you do the whole mixing process with an electric mixer, and not a spoon (another shortcut i took), the dumplings will be lighter because air gets whipped into the egg mixture. when the broth is boiling, carefully drop rounded teaspoonfulls of the dough into the pot. nudge them with a wooden spoon if they stick to the bottom. add new ones slowly so the temperature of the liquid doesn’t drop too sharply–it should keep simmering.

lots of smaller dumplings is better than fewer bigger ones here- they’ll cook more quickly. let them simmer until they float to the top, then give it another few minutes, and then turn off the stove. serve them plain if you’re in a rush, or if you’re classing it up they go nicely with a sprinkle of parmesan and some finely chopped fresh parlsey.