The week of 5-23 to 5-29 was a full week off from work with lots of cooking filling up the extra time. Generally, we’d be out of town this time of year, but this year we are taking a “staycation” since we are both tired out from a difficult semester. I have been relaxing by cooking and we are eating well.
Monday marked the start of my focaccia frenzy. I plan to master the focaccia this summer. I made two sandwich focaccias this week. The first was Monday’s rosemary focaccia made from Deborah Madison’s recipe in Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (page 671). The recipe called for a combination of wheat and white flour, but I used all white. This bread became a sandwich with white-bean hummus and zucchini. The hummus recipe was very lemony and flecked with rosemary; it came from a recipe selected at random from my stack of Mark Bittman’s New York Times columns that I printed out before the paper became a subscription service (“A Quick, Bright Bean Puree, Born to Play many Roles” April 29, 1998). I’d provide a link to the recipe, but I’ve already used up my 20 free views this month and I don’t want to give in and subscribe if I don’t have to (I am determined not to give them any of my money!). I made the beans from dry because I have lots of time right now (since I also made the bread from scratch, I was jokingly referring to this as a 20-hour sandwich). I brushed some zucchini slices with olive oil and fried them on my griddle, seasoning them with salt and pepper so that each part of the sandwich had lots of flavor. Tomato and a mix of lettuces from the last gleanings of the season’s lettuce garden finished the sandwich. I needed a side dish, so I tried to make potato chips. This didn’t turn out too well, but that’s a relative evaluation because even a bad homemade potato chip is still one of the best things on the planet. At their best, they were crisp and sorta burnt, but even then they weren’t as crispy as those things out of the bag (of course); at their worst they were a bit soggy and greasy and warm and salty and potato-ishly delicious. Either way, they were still some of the best things on the planet! But they could have been better. I used the Yukon Gold potatoes I had in the cupboard and I don’t think they were the best choice. They had too much moisture. I think something drier, like a baking potato, would have been better. I also need a mandolin. Or maybe I could use the slicing disk on my food processor. I’m pretty good with a knife, but I couldn’t slice them to all the same thickness and I think that’s important. I’ll do things differently if I decide to try this again. These weren’t too bad for a whim.
Tuesday marked the start of my plan to master the crepe. I made a savory crepe first. I used the recipe from Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian (page 196) substituting about ¼ cup of rye flour for some of the white flour because I learned that the crepe itself has to be part of the flavor package (and because I still have a ton of rye flour to use up). I made the batter on Monday and let it sit overnight. They were easy enough to cook, nothing too hard. I used about 1/3 cup batter for each crepe and I think I’ve correctly intuited the swirling motions necessary to get a thin layer to coat the pan before the crepe sets up. I filled each crepe with a mix of sautéed mushrooms and cheese. The mushrooms were shitakes and enokis seasoned with white wine and salt and pepper; the cheese was grated Manchengo. Together, this was all pretty darn savory. I served these with a basic green salad topped with store-bought ranch dressing.
Wednesday I made Quinoa Pulao from Show Me the Curry. I have a ton of quinoa to use up too (maybe ten boxes) and more quinoa recipes are already slated for this summer. The pulao was a bit of work and even though it was my only new recipe of the day, it still took a bit of time. Indian food is always this way it seems--but that’s part of the fun. I don’t mind spending a lot of time working on cooking. My sense of things is that this is not the usual American take on the time required to make a meal. Suzanne’s mother was over while I was prepping everything and she seemed impressed by the number of ingredients. Again, par for the course with Indian food. The pulao was tasty enough, but I think I had more fun cooking it than eating it. I haven’t had the time to make anything Indian in months and it was good to get back in touch with the spices. To go with it, I made Toovar Dal from Vasantha Prasad’s Indian Vegetarian Cooking from an American Kitchen (pages 161-2). I also made a blueberry-walnut granola for our breakfast supplies and I made a batch of stock for the freezer. I ended up with six quarts. Of stock. Suzanne and I ate a good portion of the granola before bed. There were only a few cups left of it.
Thursday I made a pasta primavera variation from Bittman’s recent work in the NYT (this recipe was one of the 20 articles I read last month . . .). This recipe put mint and peas and red chili peppers and Pecorino Romano cheese together with pasta and it was very tasty. The recipe called for tagliatella pasta, but I used some Maffaldine that I’d had in the cupboard that had been waiting for a good home. When I was shopping for the ingredients, I forget to get two Thai bird chilis, so Suzanne and I walked to the Asian grocery store down the street, taking in a park along the way. The going price for two Thai bird chilis at my local Asian market is 4 cents. Of course, we bought a couple of other things while we were there which meant that we ended up spending just under 5 dollars for the two chilis we’d set out for. I served a salad with the pasta (with store-bought ranch again because we really enjoy the store-bought ranch) and I made us each a steamed artichoke with a saffron-almond dipping sauce I found on the food channel’s website.
As usual, we ate out on Friday. We went to Abuleos. This is a Mexican restaurant and you can tell that it would very much like for you to think that it’s the classiest place in town. It’s not, of course, but it was pretty good for Pricey Americanized Mexican (and we’ve had some really bad stuff in this category). It was one of our anniversaries and we’d been saving this place for a special occasion (we’re also learning Spanish now so we figured it was about time we went). I wasn’t too impressed with the food, but then I’m a tough customer what with all the cooking and the eating and everything. The décor was almost identical to a few other Pricey Americanized Mexican joints we’ve been to where the tables and chairs are all on the outside of a stucco-columned indoor courtyard. The difference was that here the mural on the wall and the faux-old-timey portraits on the wall and the big brown plastirock statue in the middle of everything were all of old men (Abuleo is Spanish for Grandfather) and some of the old men seemed to be busily leading young boys into the warm embrace of manhood. It took me a while to realize that the portrait in the bar area wasn’t another creepy grandfather: it was the Dos Equiis guy. Our waiter was a kid who seemed to be very upset that his parents had made him go out and get a stupid summer job. He kept coming around overly conscious of how he could work us toward a big tip that would get him closer to that new xbox game he desperately wanted. I grouched at him once and he pouted away and left us alone until the end of the meal when he again came on too strong as he worked us for the tip. We couldn’t find much on the menu for vegetarians, so Suzanne ended up with the fish tacos. Her platter included pinto beans with bacon. I got a bean tostada and chili relleno platter that had refried beans and spicy mashed potatoes. These potatoes were the best part of the meal—but I’m pretty sure they were laced with bacon grease. If I had to reproduce them, I imagine that the recipe would go something like this: cook a bit of jalapeno and red bell pepper in bacon grease, stir into mashed potatoes, add a big handful of cheese. This was good enough, but of course I think I can do better and I’ll be trying a bacon-free version of these sometime. We also got a dip sampler appetizer and this came with three dips (but no extra chips until I informed our waiter kid that maybe he ought to bring us some): a standard restaurant queso dip, an avocado dip that seemed to be an equal mix of guacamole and sour cream (this was all blended into one green mass that was pretty tasty) and a third dip that we called dead-cow-in-cheese. While we are officially “flexitarians” and aren’t going to go too mad at the occasional bit of cow, this dip had a very “dead” quality to it and it left a really bad taste in our mouths. These dips are probably a way for the restaurant to “repurpose” some of the leftovers from the previous day. It worked well with leftover guacamole but it might have been two or three days on whatever had gone into the cow dip. We didn’t eat very much of it. I don’t really recommend this restaurant (my highest compliment was: “at least they used real cheese”). However, it was kinda fun for our anniversary and we did manage to get that “special occasion feel” out of it.
Saturday was another focaccia. This time I made a sage focaccia (we have an herb garden) from the same recipe I used Monday (the only difference was the herbage). We dipped this bread in a porcini mushroom puree from my stack of old Bittman columns (“New Condiment Without Work.” Feb. 25, 1998). I also made cranberry beans and “Braised Spring Carrots and Leeks with Tarragon” from Martha Rose Shulman’s NYT column (May 17, 2011). The tarragon came from our garden and was a new herb for us. It went nicely with carrots and leeks. The cranberry beans are part of the 10 pound box I ordered from Amazon a few months back. I cooked about a pound and a half on Saturday. I cooked them until they were creamy following my usual procedure for creamy beans with aromatics (see Madison’s recipe on page 315). We topped each bowl of beans with a bit of fresh garlic and oregano, both from our garden. I put two quarts of beans into the freezer for lunches later this summer. I have at least 5 or 6 pounds of beans still to cook.
Sunday was the day for sweet crepes so I made breakfast. I followed the Bittman recipe for crepes again, making the sweet variation this time (the difference is that you only use white flour and add sugar). I filled each crepe with papaya jam (jarred = Goya) and topped each with powdered sugar before I served them. To balance out all this sugar, I made hash browns and scrambled eggs with onions, diced red peppers, and cheese. Later in the day, I made Thai food. I cooked up some forbidden rice that I’d had in the pantry for a while that had been waiting for a good home (I still have another cup left waiting) and topped it with a green curry. The curry was a standard mix of green curry paste and coconut milk over fried tofu, mixed vegetables, and straw mushrooms. I made salad rolls out of the leftover salad in the fridge and some rice paper wrappers I had sitting in the cupboard. I tossed in a little leftover mint, too. These were just lettuce and mint and cucumber, but the wrapper made them feel special. I made a peanut dipping sauce for them from Robin Robertson’s 1000 Vegan Recipes (page 557) and a thai tea from Giada De Luarentiis on the food network dotcom.
I don’t know how many hours I put into cooking this week. I didn’t keep track. It was relaxing.
