Category — Food

To be perfectly honest, on any given day I go through about a hundred different emotions. I’m like some five-year-old girl with outfits. Now the pink dress! Now the leggings with the tinselly t-shirt! Now the overalls!

Except for me it’s Melancholy! Melancholy with a slice of nostalgia! Anger! Self-pity! Overwhelming joy!

It’s exhausting. And, in exhaustion, it’s wise to turn to Matzo Ball Farmer’s Market soup. I once blogged about clean out your fridge soup. Tonight I’m going to tell you what was on our table this evening.

I’m not going to lie. The Farmer’s Market can be expensive for us. But to sum up what I feel about food these days, I’m going to quote Alice Waters in the introduction to her book, The Art of Simple Food. (I’ve just started reading it and I love it.)

“Good food can only come from good ingredients. Its proper price includes the cost of preserving the environment and paying fairly for the labor of the people who produce it. Food should never be taken for granted.”

We have a lot of poorly produced food available to us at very low prices. And that is a tempting thing. But one small thing I’ve learned while in India is that self-denial can be a huge key to appreciation. So if we eat less meat and ice cream and more beans and so are able to afford locally grown vegetables, that little bit of self-denial allows us to support small farmers. And take care of our waistlines, which will thank us for less meat and ice cream. And we then appreciate meat day when it comes around, that much more.

Anyhow. One lesson I’ve learned about Farmer’s Market is that there are a wide variety of costs presented. There are exquisite chocolates and divine honey. Those are treats… oh my word, the honey is good. But if you’re going on a budget, well 80 cents a bunch for kale is not a bad price at all. Kale, summer squash, lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes… you can find really good prices from excellent farms.

Tonight I made Matzo ball soup with leftover chicken bones and an armful of farmer’s market summer vegetables. It was divine. I didn’t measure anything or take photos of the process, but here is the general idea:

I started off by simmering the chicken bones in water for a long time. A few hours, and then straining the bones out of the broth.

My players for simple food (food that is perhaps influenced by European cooking but doesn’t necessarily ascribe to any particular country) are:

Onions
Garlic
Salt
Pepper
Olive Oil
Fresh Herbs

No surprises there. What makes soup fantastic, in my mind, is sautéing everything first. Onions, garlic, vegetables, spices. Tonight I started with the onions and sautéed them until they were soft, added the garlic and cooked it for a  minute or so more.  I then added the following vegetables, one by one, stirring and cooking in between:

3 carrots
2 stalks of celery
1 yellow zucchini
1 large fresh tomato
1 stalk of broccoli

and added salt and pepper. When the vegetables were firm but cooked, I added them to the broth and undertook the task of getting the tiny bits of chicken that were still left off of the bones and into the pot. This is really annoying. I hate that part.

I opened the pack of Matzo ball mix and thanked God once again for his People and the gift of Matzo balls. Putting together the mix was super easy, just eggs and oil and the mix, left to stand for fifteen minutes. While it was standing, I chopped a bunch of kale and added it to the soup, as well as making a chiffonade of a few basil leaves (the herb of the day) from my plant. I turned the soup up and let it really boil for dropping the matzo balls in.

Done! Beautiful, delicious, affordable, delicious, and delicious! But these players can be used with any vegetables you find to make a really good soup. Maybe you use green zucchini, maybe you throw purple cabbage in, maybe you use fresh thyme instead of basil.

I can’t wait to make it again.

P.S. Here’s a post that I wrote at around this time last year.

I reached for the simplest of subzhi (vegetable) recipes today, one that I love without limit.  There are two things that I can and will dump into everything I make: spinach and mushrooms.  In fact, I usually add mushrooms to my Aloo Palak, but to keep it simple today I didn’t.  But you can.

Note: another way to make aloo palak is to blend the spinach and make a spinach gravy.  This is probably how it will be served if you order it at a restaurant, but I like it this way, nice and chunky.

So, above, the cast of characters: three bunches of spinach, four or five potatoes (yellow or white ones, not baking potatoes), two tomatoes, two onions, however many chillies you want (my neighbor uses three in her curries, I use half a chili when I cook) and a couple of cloves of garlic and about an inch of ginger. (Not shown in the picture because I was lazy again and used the paste.)

I was cooking during our daily meditation time and Chinua was there, up on the rooftop, meditating, so I took my own pictures. Sometimes with interesting results.

First, peel and cube the potatoes.  No need to be crazy on the cube shapes, because how do you cube a potato?  A potato is round, so naturally you can’t make the whole thing into cubes!  Really, only the middle bits get to be cubed, and the outside bits have to settle for being triangulated, or pie-slice-shaped.

You should put the potatoes into a bowl or pot and cover them with water.  Add about a teaspoon of salt (or just pour a little in your hand and dump it in) and let them soak.  When I first wrote about preparing potatoes this way, I didn’t know why I needed to do this, but Carrien told me that it helps them to absorb flavors.  Which makes sense and makes me happy.

Next you’ll want to wash and prepare your spinach.  Just chop it up roughly.  If you are using baby spinach, (which is fine, most likely, no one I know has anything against baby spinach) you probably don’t even need to chop it.

Next: prepare the players.  Onions.

Tomatoes.

Solo. Playing on the floor.  Eleanor wondered where the kids were, while I was cooking in the last post.  This is where Solo was. Literally underfoot.

Prepare your chillies, garlic, and ginger.  I didn’t get a photo of the chillies.

The spice players. About a tsp of each, or however much you want.

Brown mustard seeds.

Coriander seeds. I rub them between my palms to open them.

Cumin seeds.

And a jaunty bay leaf.

This is where Solo is at this stage in the preparations.  He’s making sure the potatoes are soaking properly.

Cute.

In a wok, cook your spice players in a little oil, until the mustard seeds start to pop, and then add the onions.

Cook them until they’re soft and transparent, and add the chillies, ginger and garlic.  You want to have the heat low enough that it cooks them softly, rather than sizzling the edges.

Add the tomatoes.  I find it helps the tomatoes to cook if the photo I take of them is incredibly blurry. If you’re not taking photos, you can go cross eyed and kind of blur your eyes.

When you add the tomatoes, it’s time to add the other players: salt, turmeric, and kasoori methi. You can also add some masala if you want. Masala is a blend of spices.  Many people use garam masala, which I don’t really like, because it has too much anise for me, but there are other kinds.  My favorite is a kind called Kitchen King, and I add about a tsp. You can totally do without it, though.  Remember to only add about half a tsp of turmeric, and use about a tsp of salt.

Cook the tomatoes until they separate from the oils or something, and then add the aloo.

I mean, the potatoes.  Once the potatoes are in, it’s safe to focus the photography again.  You can refocus your eyes.

Add a little water and cover the pan.  Turn it down low and allow it to cook for ten minutes or so.  You may need to stir it a couple of times.

Then add the spinach.  It also needs to be blurry.

I usually just cover it while it’s on top, and let it cook down a bit, because if I don’t, I try to mix it and spinach flies all over the kitchen.  This time, though, I noticed that it clumped a lot, so it might be good to stir it in while it’s still uncooked.  Just don’t be alarmed if spinach flies all over your kitchen.

After you add the spinach, cover it again and let it cook until the potatoes are soft.  Add salt to taste at the end.

My friends, that recipe is the entry to another world, because with the players, I could have added any vegetable!  Any at all! And it would have been amazing.

So there you go- this time I got a photo of it on the plate, with dahl and rice and raita.

And here are the kids, eating. Leafy is notoriously absent. He has about two seconds of focused eating time before he is off fighting transformers in his mind, and his mother is too busy taking photos to do anything about it!

Okay, a little review:

Veggies:

Potatoes
Spinach

Players:

Onions
Tomatoes
Ginger
Garlic
Chillies
Cumin seeds
Coriander seeds
Mustard seeds
Bay leaf
Turmeric
Salt
Kasoori Methi

Happy cooking!

I’ve had a lot of cooking issues in my life.  I’ve frozen up many times when I’ve tried to decide what to cook, I’ve been prostrate on the kitchen floor, weeping, and I’ve had panic attacks in grocery stores.  All true, unfortunately.

When I came to India, I discovered a way of cooking that slowly started unraveling all those tense, knotted wires in my brain.

I find that I always need a way to think about something. A philosophy or vision, I guess. So, the way I’ve started to look at food, and Indian cooking in particular, is as a combination of fresh ingredients, rocking the beans, and understanding the players.

So, today I’m going to start introducing you to the players, and to rocking the beans.

Seriously, you need to rock the beans. Look at these beans.  They’re so dry!  So cheap!  So healthy!  Indian mamas know how to cook beans, and I’ve been fortunate enough to learn from a couple of them.

This is a recipe for Rajma.  Meet Rajma.  Rajma, meet the readers.

Rajma is a type of small kidney bean.  I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I think you could also use pinto beans for this recipe. (I’ll test it when I’m back in the U.S. this summer.)

So: preparation of dried beans.  You need to soak them overnight, the day before you cook them, and then rinse them completely before boiling them.  I can’t recommend a pressure cooker enough.  I cook beans with a pressure cooker by allowing three blasts of the cooker on high, then turning them off completely.  It takes way less time.  If you are simply boiling them, give yourself a couple of hours and make sure they’re really soft.  They won’t be good if they’re crunchy. You can fill the water up to an inch about the beans, in the pressure cooker.

(In the following dish I used 500 g of rajma and boy did we have a lot of beans. If you make as much as I did, you will be able to freeze some, which could be a good idea.  Or you can cut the recipe in half.)

Okay. The players! The players are a special combination of vegetables and spices that you can add to or take away from, to make a base for almost any vegetable that you want to cook.  I often opted not to cook Indian food in the past because the long list of ingredients made my eyes cross.  Now that I know them as the players, I don’t even think about that long list.

This dish is a little different from some of the others that I’ll write about, because I take some of the players and cook them ahead of time so that I can blend them to make a gravy.

I’ll give you some basic amounts, but the beauty of learning to cook this way is that you can change any recipe to your taste. You like more onions?  Add more.  Hate garlic? Only add a little.  (I can’t in good conscience tell you not to add any.)

These are the vegetable players:

Onions: (for 250 g of beans, use two small onions or one large onion. Chop them into small pieces, not too small, because you’re going to blend them anyways.)

Tomatoes: (Use two small tomatoes or one big one. Chop them into small diced pieces.)

This is me with my tomatoes.

Garlic and ginger: I use this awesome paste which makes my life wonderful. I use two teaspoons or so of the paste, or about an inch of grated ginger and three cloves of grated garlic. (But no measuring!)

And a small green chili. This is entirely to taste. Use as much or as little as you want, and you can add red chili powder for more spice, which can be more controllable, because you know how some chillies are so much spicier than others and there is just no way of knowing which ones! Slit the chili lengthwise and then chop it into teeny tiny pieces.

Begin by heating about four tablespoons of oil in a wok (Woks are best because you’ll need to cook the spices in the oil, later) and adding the onions. You want to cook on a medium or low heat.

When the onions look like this (you know, all soft and see through, yum!) add the garlic and ginger and chili. Cook them for about two minutes, and then add the tomatoes.

Then you want to cook them all until they look like this:

There is this thing that happens where the oils start to separate from the tomatoes or something something blah blah blah, I don’t know what I’m talking about but watch for it!  This is when they’re ready, when they are soft and oily see through liquid comes out of them.  Okay? Technical enough?

Put the veggie players aside to cool.

Now, there are spice and herb players too. These are the Indian ones, and a lot of countries have their own spice players. Some have almost none.  India has a heck of a lot.  I’ve omitted a couple that seem really hard to find, but here are the ones I think you’ll manage to locate. (Many big cities have Indian supermarkets, and you can search around online for distributors.)

Introducing: Jeera.  Or, in English, cumin seeds.  The single best spice in all of the world. Seriously, with all that stuff about spice routes and everything- I get it!  Jewels? Bleh. Silks?  Okay, yeah, they’re nice.  But just imagine that all you’ve ever had is pease porridge in the pot, nine days old, and then you discover cumin! Wow. This is about how much I use.

Mustard seeds: These are brown mustard seeds; you can use brown or black. With both of these I use about a tsp, or maybe a little more. Once again, measuring is not important.

Bay leaves. Easy peasy. I use one large bay leaf, or two if I feel a little crazy.

Cinnamon: My friends, I have no idea how easy it is to get cinnamon like this in the Western world. People just pull it out of the jungle here, so it’s easy. But you can use the powder if you ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO! Be careful how much you use, if you use powder. Half a tsp would be enough. The thing is, which it’s a stick like this, only the essence comes out.  It’s nicer.

This is where I admit that it would have been a lot nicer for photos if I had just clean the pot that I’d cooked the tomatoes and onions in.  But my habit is to just reuse it, because I like the crunchy flavorful parts on the sides. And I’m lazy.  I have six kids!!  I mean, four.

Once again, use some oil, about four tbs, and heat it up a little.  Add the cumin seeds, bay leaf, cinnamon stick, and mustard seeds.  Cook them until they start popping.

Then you need to add the beans. (The cooked beans) Include some of the water that the beans cooked in.

Here are a couple more players that you should add, once you’ve added the beans and stirred:

Turmeric: The trick to turmeric is that you should only use a little. Stick to half a tsp.

This is something call Kasoori Methi.  It’s Fenugreek leaves.  Let me know if you can find these.  They make everything taste so much more Indian, somehow.  I love them. I can’t get enough of them.

And I didn’t include a picture of the salt, but add a tsp of salt.

Now the veggie players should be warmish. Blend them up until they look like this:

And add them to the beans.  That’s the good stuff.  Then stir everything really well and allow it all to cook together for about twenty minutes. We eat this with rice and one other Indian cooked dish, usually vegetables, or maybe with just a salad.

Salt it to taste, at the end.  You really want to have enough salt, friends, but don’t oversalt it or you’ll be kicking yourself.

You know what would be really nice at the end of this post? A photo of the rajma, on a plate, with rice and salad, just the way it would look if you were ready to eat it.  Unfortunately I forgot to ask Chinua to take one.

But let’s cover the basics again:

The vegetable players:

Onions
Tomatoes
Ginger
Garlic
Chili

The spice players:

Cumin seeds
Mustard seeds
A bay leaf
Cinnamon
Turmeric
Salt
Fenugreek Leaves (Kasoori Methi)

If you learn to cook the players, you will be able to make a base that you can add use any vegetables to, at any time.  I’ll do another post, next week, about vegetables and the players, now that we’ve covering one of the many fine beans that we share our earth with.

Thanks to Chinua, for the sweet and artsy photos.  I’ll answer questions in the comments if you have any!  Bon Appetit!

1. Yesterday I went to a cooking class with my neighbor.  She was meeting me there, so I walked down the hill alone.  We live on the side of a wide ravine.  On our side is one village, and on the other side is another.  The light as I was coming down the hill made the houses on the other side of the ravine glow enough that I had to stop and catch my breath.  The sun was out for the first time in days and it was that late afternoon light.  My feet were almost too light to hold me down.

Chinua took the kids out this afternoon for a rousing game of backgammon, so that I could write. Of course, he can keep the kids here while I write, but he probably had a bit of cabin fever.  You have to have cabin fever, to want to take Solo to a nearby café while you attempt to play backgammon.  Solo’s presence is not conducive to the playing of backgammon.  Or any other board game or card game for that matter. Which is why the kids are always asking me to do something about his habit of crawling over the chess board or eating the jack of hearts.

“What do you want me to do?” I ask them.  I’m helpless. “Play your games on the table,” I say. I mean, I tell him not to eat the cards, but he turns a deaf ear.

But I am chipping away, over here, just chipping away.  And you’ll hear all about it. I finished Chapter Nine today.

Googled:

popular songs in 1937

history of sign language

humboldt county established

nubian goat milk

*

That’s a bit of a spoiler.  Let’s just say the book is not about India.  Okay, I totally need to go cook dinner now.

Last night for dinner we had:

Paneer Butter Masala

Zucchini and Carrot Subzhi

Rice

Chapatti

and Cate’s wonderful sprout salad (with sprouts, tomatoes, olive oil, paneer, honey, and lemon)

It was delicious.

Tonight?  What can I rustle up?

The gang just got home.  Time to cook for sure.  Here’s a photo of YaYa with her babies. In the makeshift baby wrap that I tied for her.

She asked me to wrap a scarf around her hair, so that she could look more like “a mama.” It always surprises me that to her, a mama looks like me.

I have a new post on Burkina Faso up at LJUrban. And I haven’t been making it known here everytime I post, so you can see the archives here if you’ve missed some.

Can I just say that I have scrambled eggs in my head instead of brains? Packing scramble. Today I waved goodbye to a bookshelf, which made me feel like I am getting somewhere. It was one of those weird full circle things that happens sometimes, with those of us who have lived at the Land. The bookshelf was in Elena’s cabin, until she gave it to some people who lived in another cabin, and then the next people who moved into that cabin inherited it, and then they gave it to me. I brought it here when I moved, because it is a good little bookshelf, and then today, I called my friend Elena, and asked her if she wanted a bookshelf. Turns out that she and the bookshelf have been friends before.

See what I’m saying? Scrambled eggs.

Throw three young children into the packing mix and it is not always that pretty. Add the fact that I’m practically comatose by 9:00 PM, and you have an impossibility. (And a rhyme!) I’m also ordering things like backpacks and sleeping bags online, while deciding which books to ship, and which ones to store.

However, I had some high points today. Sitting on the floor singing alphabet phonics songs with Leafy and YaYa. The little cuddles I snuck in with all three kids today. The kids painting on paper with their shirts off. And THE BOMB Spanish rice that I made tonight.

When I was pregnant with Kid A, I had a thing for Spanish rice. I traveled from Taqueria to Taqueria, looking for the perfect rice. If only I had the recipe then that I have now.

I have no fancy pictures for you, but if you love rice, and you love Spain, you might just love this recipe.

Ingredients: 1/4 cup cooking oil
2 cups long grain rice (I used white)
1 onion, diced
1 bell pepper, diced (I used red)
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 3/4 cups chicken broth (no msg)
3/4 cup tomato sauce
2 tsp salt

In a skillet that has a lid that fits, sauté the rice in the oil at medium high heat until it is golden brown. You’ll need to stir it quite a lot. Throw the onion and the bell pepper in when the rice is golden brown, that’s golden brown, and sauté them for a few minutes, then throw the garlic in too and sauté it for a few minutes.

(The garlic will burn if you leave it too long, I know this to be true.)

Now pour (don’t throw) the chicken broth, tomato sauce, and salt in (you can throw the salt if you want) and turn the burner up to high. Bring the soupy ricey stuff to a rolling boil, and let it boil for a couple of minutes, then turn it down and simmer with the lid for twenty minutes.

That’s it. Oh gosh, it’s sitting in my fridge right now. What do you think, should I fold laundry? Or eat more Spanish riczzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Snore.

I never did follow up much on my food troubles. The advice my dear friendly commenters gave me encouraged me, partly because I realized that figuring out what to make for dinner is not some magic potion that I don’t know the ingredients to. It’s just one part planning, one part your family’s taste, one part grocery shopping with a brain and a list, and one part being willing to try new things.

I come up with a bunch of meals that I’m going to make in a week or so, and write them into my planner (my dear, beautiful Moleskine planner that I bought myself for Christmas because I am a book-o-phile, and who am I kidding, I am such a nerd!) and then over the week I cross them out and move them around about twenty-million times because something came up or we ate at someone’s house or we were in a rush and I needed to come up with something a bit easier for that evening. You all know that structure enables you to be flexible. But I should probably start writing my menus in pencil.

Anyways. This past week and a half was crazy because we had a lot of guests over around the time of the funeral, and I helped to cook a bit for the family, and we were so busy that I didn’t really follow much of a plan. And then a friend came over the other night, and I still hadn’t shopped, so I decided to make “Clean out the Fridge” soup. Also known as “Rainbow Stew” because it’s similar to what you might be served at a Rainbow Gathering. And then I took pictures of the process. Really I think this post is an excuse to take photos of vegetables, because I think they are so lovely.

Of course, I started with the minimum requirement for a pot of soup. An onion and a few cloves of garlic.

There appears to be no photo of the garlic. Rest assured, I wouldn’t skip it. We love garlic around here.

Then, I looked in my fridge. I found some carrots that were pretty much begging to be eaten. They look a little rough.

But they chopped up nicely.

Next up. Some limp celery. Not limp enough to be tied into knots, but limp enough that it needed to be cooked! Pronto!

Alright. Carrots. Celery. What else can we find? Here’s a lovely zucchini. Also needing a good chopping.

Oh, leeks. Leeks are one of the amazing foods of the earth. However, if you are a wandering tribe in the desert, and God happens to be feeding you with food from the sky that you simply have to gather off the ground every day, don’t complain about not having any leeks. It’s just plain ungrateful.

But, if not, use leeks at any good opportunity!

Partly because they are so pretty. Tasting good is almost a bonus.

The next vegetable that I found in my fridge would probably win a plant beauty contest, if there was such a thing. I didn’t get a photo of the cross section of a purple cabbage, but go ahead and slice one open. So. Lovely.

At this point, this is what my pot of vegetables looked like.

Nice, but missing something. A color? Some red. Thankfully I found half of a red pepper in a little baggie in my fridge. I don’t call this clean out your fridge soup for nothing.

See? Now it’s stunning.

At this point, I found a couple of sad potatoes. I chopped them up and added them to a big ol’ pot of water, salted it, and set it to boil.

Here is a secret that I first learned from an Israeli chef friend of mine, and then had reinforced by the book, “The Enchanted Broccoli Forest,” a book totally worth buying. Sauté everything! I sauté almost everything I put into soup, including the spices, which brings the flavor out until you are crying from the deliciousness.

First I sautéed the onions and garlic, until they looked like this. (I cooked this on medium high with a dash of olive oil.)

See how they’re kind of soft and happy looking? When they got to this point, I added the rest of the veggies. This is the point when I burn the onions and garlic, if I haven’t cut everything ahead of time. It’s a good technique for me. CUT EVERYTHING AHEAD OF TIME. Don’t chop and fry, chop and fry, you will regret it.

I cooked these veggies until they were soft and happy looking also, and then I started to add handfuls of spices. Well, maybe not handfuls. But I added salt. Lots of salt. And pepper, lots of pepper. And cumin, really, I probably did add a handful of cumin. I also added a generous snowfall of basil, and a little bit of thyme. I stirred this all around, and added the whole pan to the boiling water with the potatoes in it.

Which I then neglected to photograph.

My soup at this point was very colorful, but it needed some stick to it. Some bulk. Some ruumpf. So I went to the cupboard and found some red lentils. This is what my jar of lentils looked like after I added a bunch to the soup. I’d guess that I added a cup and a half, maybe? I wasn’t really measuring, just shaking. Rainbow Stew is not a precise art.

Red lentils are not red, they are orange. And when they cook, they turn yellow. So, hey. Liars. They sure are delicious, though. And hard to find. You can find them at natural food stores and at Indian food stores pretty easily, though.

I also added some pasta. I really wanted alphabet letters, but I haven’t been able to find any recently, so I used small shell pasta.

And I realized, jeez, I had added too much water to the pot. It was going to need some flavor help, so I added a can of veggie broth (with no msg). I don’t usually add canned broth to my soup, but like I said– whoops. And the soup at this point was ready to be turned down to medium and simmered for a while.

I added more salt before serving it. At the point when I had the right amount of salt, all of the flavors in the soup jumped out at me and danced on my tongue. And I knew it was ready to be served.

This is the point when my wise-cracking friend Joy started in. “What,” she said, “your mom doesn’t take photos of her soup bowl?” I think she was implying that I’m some kind of strange mother. But then, the father of my children juggles fire for fun, so… whatever.

Don’t judge me because there is writing on my table. My son is not only a flusher, he is a writer. It’s like all of the foibles of toddlerhood that my other two missed are rolled up in this one, which he makes up for with a ridiculously sunny and hilarious personality. The table needs to be painted anyways.

The soup was awesome. We ate it and ate it. And then I ate it for lunch the next day. Three bowls. Also I cleaned out my fridge! (Did I mention that already?)