Motley Meals

2009 has been a productive year so far, but in one respect only: food.  I've been making so much of it, I have to cram four different dishes into one blog post.  As for doing ANYTHING that involves going outside (and you'd be surprised by how much of our lives we conduct outside of our homes), there is nothing doing.  The roads are icy, it continues to snow every other day or so, and when it's not snowing, it's raining and leaving a very depressing slush on the ground.  Having hit the bottom of the barrel of my cabin fever yesterday I called a friend to see if she had any snowshoes I could borrow, and happily she did!  I took Cally out to the Post Canyon trail and had a blast-- I'm definitely getting me some snowshoes.  Our trip was cut short when a couple of yahoos started shooting a gun in my general direction, so I came home and made soup (see below).  When stuck or driven indoors by wayward firearms, make soup.  It seems like a good enough answer to the problems of life and winter.

Anyway, here are those shrimp I described in my last post.  The marinade was delicious, but I made the mistake I'm not going to make anymore of buying frozen shrimp.   I can never get frozen seafood to lose its fishy flavor upon cooking.  But here's the marinade.  I'm sure it would be good on any ol' fish or tofu.

1 garlic clove, chopped

1 bird's eye chili, deseeded (if you wish) and chopped

1 Tbsp. tamarind paste/concentrate

1 Tbsp. sesame oil

1 Tbsp. soy sauce

2 Tbsp. lime juice

1 Tbsp. brown sugar

Put the lot into a small saucepan and stir over low heat until the sugar melts.  Cool completely.  Marinate your food item of choice for as long as you can, even overnight.  Recipe from What's Cooking Thai.

Here is a beautiful batch of roasted cauliflower, the idea for which I took from Hilary Kooks.  It's super easy: chop a head of cauliflower into chunks and stir into it several cloves of chopped garlic, some chili powder, dried basil ("or other green herb," says Hil), s&p, a few Tbsp. sesame oil, and a couple Tbsp. tahini.  Spread out in a pyrex dish and roast at 375 for as long as an hour (I cranked it up to 400 for the last ten minutes).  It was good served over quinoa.
This is the best thing I've made recently: Brazilian Black Bean soup.  Inspired by the Moosewood recipe but much tampered with, it goes like this.  And I'm going to be quite general here, because the best soup will contain the ingredients and proportions that YOU like (I know, I know, Hilary is starting to rub off on me here).  

Soak 2 or 3 cups of black beans over night.  When you're ready to start cooking, put the beans (drained) with 4 or 6 cups of clean water to a boil in a big soup pot, then simmer and cover for an hour or hour and a half.  Your life partners will thank you for changing the water-- it reduces gassiness.  

Meanwhile, chop a BUNCH of onions-- three cups or so-- and a BUNCH of garlic-- I used about ten cloves, crushed.  I was weirded out to see the recipe call for that much garlic, but I'm glad I went with it.  Garlic=good.  Then chop a carrot or two.  Toss onions, carrots, and HALF the garlic to saute in evoo over medium heat until carrot is barely tender.  Stir in cumin, salt and pepper.  This'll need to season the whole pot of beans, so don't be shy.

Add the rest of the garlic, and a chopped red pepper and saute for another ten or fifteen minutes.  Scrape all the veggies into the beans.  Add a couple chopped tomatoes if you like.  Add a cup and a half of orange juice.  Simmer for as long as you can stand it.  Stir in some leftover quinoa or rice if you like-- this was my random idea, and an excellent choice if I say so myself.  Garnish with any combination of green onion, cilantro, cheddar, crumbled tortilla chips, hot sauce and/or sour cream.  Oh boy this was good, and it'll be even better today.
And lastly, oatmeal cinnamon waffles.  These were pretty good, but not good enough to share the recipe here.  Email me if you absolutely need the recipe.
Sorry for cramming so much food into so little space.  This blog is starting to look like my fridge.

Cold Day, Hot Food

This is my backyard right now.  Actually, the snow is about twice as deep now as it was when this picture was taken this morning.  Also, that very excellent looking icicle is no longer with us because I discovered today that Adam has somewhat of a compulsion about wrenching off icicles.  As soon as one forms on the eaves of the house, he pulls it off.  The things we learn about the people we love.

Anyway, when weather like this hits, making soup is pretty much required and as luck would have it, I didn't even have to set foot in the snow for it.  If you don't already know it by now, discovering that I just by chance have the ingredients for a cool dish without having to shop is one of the GREATEST things EVER.  So, the presence of a two-pound bag of carrots in the fridge dictated what kind of soup it would be...  
If you should find your backyard full of snow and your fridge full of carrots any time soon, here's what to do.  Wash and roughly chop the carrots (a recipe I was taking inspiration from suggested that I peel them, but I was not about to waste my time with that).  Throw them in a pot with 3 or 5 cups of water, and a quartered potato if you've got it.  Set it boiling, then simmer, covered, till the veggies are tender.
Meanwhile, roughly chop up a cup's worth of onion and/or shallots and saute them in some olive oil.  In a few minutes, add a few cloves of crushed garlic and saute a little longer.  Don't get fancy with your chopping-- it's all going in the blender in a few minutes.  When they're soft, add a few teaspoons salt, and the herbs and seasonings of your choice.  I added cumin, oregano and a little curry powder.  

Transfer the carrots, potato, water and the onion/garlic/herb mixture to a blender and puree.  Unless your blender is industrial-sized, you will need to do this in batches.  Return the lot to the pot and taste.  Adjust seasonings as needed.  Garnish with any fresh herbs you have lying around-- I happened to have my favorite, cilantro.  If no herbs, try some pumpkin or sesame seeds.  If no seeds, good old fashioned salt and pepper will also do the trick.
According to the weather forecast we are due for a blizzard this weekend, so Adam and I stocked up on other comfort foods to enjoy once the soup is gone: homemade tamales from a co-worker, good old spaghetti with tomato sauce and garlic bread, breakfast burritos, pancakes... maybe we'll fit a few carbs in there somewhere too.  Kidding.  More to come from the winter weekend kitchen...

Tuck in Thyme

At last!  The season for justified vegetating on the couch all day is here!  And thank god, because I've got some serious reading and movie-watching to catch up on.  I must say, I'm a bit relieved too that the spectacular, but let's admit it, rather fragile produce of the spring and summer is no longer around for us to exalt and make a fuss over.  (Full disclosure: I'll be exalting with the best of them come May.)  But now is the time for hardy fruits and veggies, like tubers and apples and pumpkins.  Good, wholesome, blue-collar vegetables that can sit in the produce bowl or in the crisper for a few weeks until you rediscover them.  And when you do discover them and cut off a few brown spots, you can throw them all in a pot and their flavors all come together unpretentiously to make a delicious soup.  Like so: 

This yummy concoction was born of no recipe at all, which is the great thing about veggie soup.  It's spontaneous, and it's a fabulous way to clean out the fridge.  This particular batch contains a russet potato (bought a couple weeks ago for breakfast burritos that never came to be), celery (purchased by Adam for some reason but never used), carrots (which are always sitting around), half an onion, a leek (the only ingredient bought special for the soup, for its flavor), garlic, a yam (not sure where that came from) and spinach (bought on sale a few days ago because it was old and ready to meet it's maker).  

The hardest part about it all is the cleaning, peeling, and chopping.  Luckily you don't need to be pretty about it.  Saute all the hard, dense veggies (in my case, everything but the spinach) for five or eight minutes in a big soup pot with some olive oil.  By the way, I'm noticing lately that recipes are telling me to wait a few minutes before adding the garlic to a saute.  I've tried it a couple times, and I think I like this new method-- it seems to prevent the garlic from burning.  While you're stirring the saute, mortar and pestle a few herbs that you like, such as thyme, oregano, salt, pepper, and toss in.

Pour stock, water, bouillion, or any combination thereof to cover.  Put a lid on the pot and just leave it alone for an hour or so.  Stir once in a while.  When the veggies were tender, I turned off the heat and stirred in the chopped spinach.  Season to taste with more s&p, a sprinkling of parmesan, or if you really want to get fancy, a dollop of pesto.

Instead of messing with pesto, I decided to focus on the other integral part of soup: the bread.  If all you've got in the house is sliced, storebought wheat and some oyster crackers then it's time to roll up your sleeves and fish out a packet of yeast from the fridge, where you have wisely stored it.  Then you can make some of this utterly delicious focaccia, whose recipe you can find here.  In the recipe, it tells you to make one "loaf" with thyme kneaded into it, and the other with parmesan sprinkled on top, which to me is sort of like eating a peanut butter sandwich one day and a jelly sandwich the next.  So I made BOTH loaves with thyme and parmesan and threw some sliced tomatoes on (before baking) to boot.

The hot soup and warm crusty/chewy focaccia were pure comfort, so delicious and homey that after dinner Adam and I immediately retreated to the couch to snuggle.  Not long after, the kids followed suit: