I made Pasta with Turnips and Sage from a recent Bittman column in the New York Times (“The Pasta Primavera Remix” 5-15-2011). I used up my box of Rosette Pasta that I recently bought at The Spice Merchant. The pasta was “produced” by Francis Ford Coppola for his line of “Mammarella” foods. I like to try new pasta shapes when I come across them and these were certainly a shape I haven’t tried before. They were shaped like roses and they lent a nice look to the dish. The pasta dish itself was a bit bland looking: pasta and turnips equals a lot of white-on-white; the sage gave the dish a bit of color, but it was still very neutral. It was tasty enough, just not too visually appealing. I made a simple salad of lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers to go with the meal and we put ranch dressing on top of it. I also tried to make a dessert, but my oven has just gone out and it didn’t turn out as planned. I wanted to make an orange an cranberry crisp to use up some of the fruit I have on hand, but my oven wouldn’t get hot enough. At one point, it said it was working fine, but even though the sensor said it was 375 degrees in there, it wasn’t hotter than maybe 150. And turning it up didn’t help. After an hour, I couldn’t quite take out my pyrex baking dish with my hands alone, but I almost could and the fruit wasn’t even warm (the cranberries had been frozen and they were defrosted, but not hot). I put everything into a pan on the stove and cooked until warm, then I put it back in the pan and re-topped it with the extra topping I still had left over (I’d thrown it in the freezer for another crisp in the future). I tried to brown it under the broiler, like a gratin, but it didn’t quite work right and the topping got a bit too dark (“burnt” isn’t quite right). It was still edible, but it wasn’t what it should have been. I’ll have to get the oven fixed soon.
Review: Abuelo's Restuarant (Stand Alone Review)
I've published this same review below in my first post, but I'm reproducing it so it can stand alone.
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.
Review: Gutierrez Restaurant in Salina
We went to Salina for a wedding, visited our friend Susan, and ate out with her at Gutierrez restaurant, one of her favorites. She’s taken us there once before and both times the food has been pretty good. The service, however, can only accurately be described by one word: “evil.”
This is an Americanized Mexican restaurant. The atmosphere is fun and artistic, a nice example of the Amerimexican genre of overly-stylized “phony authenticity.” It’s worth a trip to this restaurant just to see what they’ve done with the place. The walls of the dining room are covered with the same type of hand-painted-mural-depicting-stereotypes-of-quaint-18th / 19th-century-village-life-in –“old Mexico” that you would expect to find in such an establishment—but it’s one of the better ones I’ve seen, with more artistry and less overt racism than you might expect from such a thing. In a few places around the dining room, the stucco is cracked (deliberately) and you can see the bricks underneath. That’s kinda fun. And I liked the ceiling. It’s golden tin. Very shiny. I don’t know if it quite works with the walls, but it’s cool (there’s a missing logic to the décor: the walls are clearly meant to be the outside walls of an outdoor courtyard overgrown with vines and the ceiling is clearly meant to be the view from inside an expensive can of sardines. A skylight would have made more sense, but it wouldn’t have been as glamorous). All of this, I’m sure, is meant to provide a feeling of authenticity and tradition that you won’t exactly get from the food itself. This would make a very good restaurant to take your high-school date to. The set design is impressive in that way.While not “authentic,” the food is very good for what it is: Americanized Mexican. The menu has a good selection of vegetarian dishes, a whole section of the menu is CLEARLY LABELED “Vegetarian Options.” Suzanne ordered off the CLEARLY LABELED vegetarian menu and got a Spinach Quesadilla with Mango and Avocado Salad. I had a bite of her quesadilla and it was cheesy, tasty, and stuffed with lots of mushrooms and onions. She scarfed down the salad before I could try a bite, but I don’t blame her because I had this same salad a year ago when we last visited this restaurant and I knew how good it was. I believe that I also scarfed mine down last year. Susan ordered off the CLEARLY LABELED vegetarian menu too and got something they call the “Scofield Special,” which turned out to be a giant vegetarian burrito. She couldn’t eat it all and took over half of it home. I’d had what I wanted from the CLEARLY LABELED vegetarian menu last year, however, so I ordered off the regular menu and got a dish called a “Compuesta.” Here’s how the dish is described in their menu (which is available online both at their website and as a PDF by clicking here):
CompuestaSautéed fresh vegetables (zucchini, squash, broccoli, red onions and sun‐dried
tomatoes) tossed with a cream sauce and served over a bed of rice. $12.95
This sounded very good to me. I waited half an hour or so to get it from the kitchen and all the while I was looking forward to the creamy sauce, the succulent veggies. I tried not to fill up on chips and salsa (lots of sugar in the salsa and not too many spicy things) just so I could fully enjoy the dish I’d ordered. When I got it, I was surprised to see that the dish was full of chicken parts. What seemed to be two full breasts of grilled chicken had been folded into the dish (not just piled on top but folded in). I expressed my surprise to the waitress. She revealed that she was new and didn’t know what the dish should be. I told her that I had read the menu and the description didn’t say anything about chicken. She excused herself and disappeared for at least five full minutes. When she returned, she had clearly been put up to trying a ploy on me. She explained that I had not ordered from the CLEARLY LABELED vegetarian menu and that the dish I had ordered did contain chicken. Ahh. . . . It was my fault. I had not correctly read the menu. The only problem with a ploy like this is that I’m not an idiot and that trying something like this is only going to piss me off. I, of course, responded: “let me see that menu.” My waitress disappeared for another five minutes and returned with the manager / owner guy in tow. He took over at this point and opened the menu to the page I had ordered from and, believe it or not, pointed to a different dish on the page and said that the dish I had ordered clearly contained chicken. The dish he was pointing to did clearly contain chicken. I called his bluff, explained that I understood that he was referencing the wrong dish, and read him the correct entry just in case he thought I could not read (maybe his usual clientele really is high school kids). He then explained to me that since I had not ordered from the CLEARLY LABELED vegetarian menu, there wasn’t much he could do. “Everyone who comes here,” he explained, “knows the menu and knows that this is just a typo and that the dish does contain chicken." This was infuriating and slimy. Was this restaurant really that desperate to make 12.95? Apparently, they were. After I shot down the logic of trying to blame me for not understanding the menu, the manager / owner guy offered to take the dish back to the kitchen and take out the chicken. Now I’ve worked in restaurants and I know that all they will do is to pick out the chicken and zap my food and send it back out. If I’m really, really lucky, I’ll get it back without somebody’s spit in it—but I kinda got the feeling I wasn’t going to be that lucky this time so I decided to keep the dish. I picked out the chicken myself and set it aside and ate the rest. The sauce was creamy enough and flecked with pepper. The vegetables were nicely cooked in a way that left the summer squashes tender yet still slightly firm. I couldn’t find the sun-dried tomatoes, but I sensed that they might be in there somewhere. Susan took the chicken home in her to-go box.
The food was better than it should have been; the décor was muy fantastico; the service was infected with greed. I don’t blame our waitress for any of what happened with my order. She was just trying to do her job and was clearly operating under the guidance of the cheap-ass she worked for. My guess is that she probably won’t work there for long. She’ll move on to a better place, one with a bit more class, just as all the waitresses before her have probably done.
Two other notes not really related to the restaurant: First, as a vegetarian and someone interested in losing weight (I’ve lost 55 pounds as a vegetarian), I was impressed by how much chicken I didn’t eat. The dish included at least two grilled chicken breasts worth of chicken. That’s several hundred calories I set aside. And the dish was plenty filling enough without the meat. I’m not such a strict vegetarian that I am grossed out about the chicken (I even ate a small bit of chicken at Easter when my mother-in-law cooked chicken for the family), but it was interesting that I actually had to fight about whether or not the dish should have chicken in it. The meat-oriented cultural assumptions at play are interesting to observe. And fights and experiences like this are just part of what it is to be mostly vegetarian in a meaty state like Kansas.The second note concerns other foodstuffs of the day. I made us a hearty breakfast to fuel our road trip (Salina is about an hour and a half away from Wichita). I made a creamy gravy for my leftover biscuits and cooked us up two omelets with chives and mozzarella cheese. Later in the day, after the restaurant, Susan gave us a treat. Susan is herself an excellent cook and made us a nice dessert. She’d baked a homemade pound cake and when she served it up, she topped it with strawberries and blueberries and whipped cream. It was exquisite. She got her pound-cake recipe from the Fannie Farmer Book of Baking.
Noodles and Company
6-17-11
This week, we went to Noodles on Rock Road in Wichita. This is a new restaurant in town, but it isn’t a new restaurant for us: it’s a chain, a franchise. We’ve been to the one in downtown Portland, so we were experienced enough to breeze through the line (the people in front of us were in awe of the menu and let us go ahead as they stared and pondered and drooled so much that they became embarrassed that they were holding up the line; I made a point as I accepted their offer of cutting in line to smugly tell them that we had been to the Noodles in Portland).
The place was hoppin. Lots of different types of people had come to slurp up the noodles. It seemed to be quite the trendy thing to do. I understood as I looked around at all the diners that this restaurant chain was pretty successful at appealing to everybody. We ate in the same room with hipster 20 somethings, jocks fresh from some sweaty ball game, families with tots in tow, and a bunch of businessmen in shirtsleeves. The concept is this: you can get basically any noodle dish you want from a selection of the world’s great noodle dishes. If you want Spaghetti and Meatballs, they’ve got it. If you want a Pesto Cavatappi topped with a chicken breast, they’ve got that. If your kid wants Mac and Cheese piled with extra cheese, they’ve got that, too. They let you select the type of “protein” you want and almost everything comes first as a vegetarian dish that you have to pay extra to turn into a meat-laden perversion. I had Pad Thai with Tofu (you can get tofu as one of the “proteins”) and Suzanne had Penne with Sun-Dried Tomatoes in Cream Sauce (with no additional protein). She also got a Spinach Salad with Strawberries and Walnuts and Feta topped with a Balsamic Vinaigrette. These are pretty fancy dishes for Wichita—and getting them at the same place was fun. And even though it was cheap, it didn’t seem like fast food. The meal had that “real food” quality to it that you don’t usually get at a fast-food joint. All-in-all, we were satisfied and impressed. It’s not fancy (aside from the trendy-fast-food thing that’s the same basic vibe that makes a Chipotle seem like a swingin scene), but it’s tasty and cool. We had fun and felt like we’d eaten well. My only complaint was that the tofu wasn’t as good as it was in Portland. You could tell that the guy in the kitchen didn’t really know his way around a block of bean curd. The stuff I had in Portland was REALLY good. Memorable, even. Whoever the cook in Portland was, he or she knew what to do with tofu, knew what tofu was, knew what tofu should be. The Noodles in Portland was downtown, in the heart of the action, next to a Sushi joint that was too expensive for us to eat at. The Noodles in Wichita is next door to Herb Snow and Son’s Maytag Dealership. Few cooks around here really grok tofu. Oh well. It’s a small complaint.
Later, for our dinner at home, I made Swiss Cheese and Roasted Red-Pepper Quesadillas.
6-16-2011
I made an improvised lentil soup with Swiss chard. To go with the soup, I made buttermilk biscuits.
I have been busy this week and this meal was pretty easy to put together after a full day of work. I had to swing by the Checker’s on the way home because I was out of onions—and while I was hurriedly shopping, I saw some Swiss chard that looked like a perfect addition to the soup I was planning. These two ingredients were the only items I didn’t already have on hand. The rest of the ingredients were things I’m trying to use up. I had carrots and celery left over from all the salads I made for the Summer Birthday-Party Picnic. Olive oil and canned tomatoes and garlic are usually on hand. There’s thyme growing in the garden. I bought 5 bags of lentils recently when they were on sale for 45 cents a bag and my soup used up maybe half a bag. I recently made three full batches of stock from the saved components stuffed into one of my freezers, so now I’ve got a lot to work through (15 quarts are waiting on ice in my chest freezer; add this to the lentils and we might be looking at the summer of improvised lentil soup; maybe I could just throw in a variety ingredient to each batch and call each one a new creation: lentil soup with red bell pepper and green onion sounds good). The Swiss chard was very tasty after a long simmering and I think it lent the soup a richness it might not have had otherwise. This was all very “Mediterranean,” this combination of greens and beans. After I made the soup, I flipped through my copy of Shulman’s Mediterranean Harvest to see if I could find a similar soup and I found one very much like it just sitting there in the soup section. Shulman added a bay leaf. I always forget the bay leaves when I make stuff up. I’m not sure why.
The buttermilk biscuits were another use-it-up recipe. I’ve got a bunch of buttermilk leftover from the potato salad I made for the picnic. When I was last in this position, I made a big batch of waffles (which is what I often do with left-over buttermilk). We’ve still got a lot of those left, so I had to do something different. I used Madison’s recipe from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.
5-23 to 5-29
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.
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