Would You Like Fries With That?

Sometimes all a woman wants is a good burger and some French fries. What's more, she wants her husband, the Hindu, to eat a burger and fries with her. So she makes lentil burgers, oven fries, and salad with Green Goddess dressing, and all is right with the world.

I started this meal excited about the burger and fries, but ended with a passion for the Green Goddess salad dressing. We found it was good on pretty much everything. The five-year-old liked it better than ketchup for her fries, which is saying a lot. Of course, the three-year-old only ate ketchup, no fries. Such is life, I guess.

I used Mark Bittman's recipes for the veggie burger and oven fries, from the encyclopedic How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. (This book truly lives up to its title – it even sports a recipe for seaweed "mayonnaise." I'm curious. Haven't tried it yet, but am curious.) My husband had his lentil burger with rice, while I had mine as a lone patty. But feel free to eat it as a regular old burger in a bun, with all the fixings. Whatever you want to do.

For the general idea of the Green Goddess, I relied on my good old 1964 edition of The Joy of Cooking, which has never steered me wrong, recipe for muskrat notwithstanding. (Muskrat is to be served with creamed celery. Who knew?)

Lentil Burgers (adapted from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian)
2 cups well-cooked brown lentils
1 small onion, quartered
1/2 cup rolled oats
1 tablespoon chili powder or spice mix of your choice (Be creative. I used a tablespoon of leftover extremely garlicky tomato sauce.)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper (Be generous with the pepper.)
1 egg
Lentil cooking liquid if necessary

Combine all ingredients (except cooking liquid) in a food processor and pulse until combined. The mixture should still be chunky, not pureed, and moist, but not wet. Add a little of the cooking liquid if the mixture is too dry. Conversely, if your mixture is too wet, try adding more rolled oats. Let the mixture sit for a few minutes if you have the time. It will solidify a bit and be easier to work with.

Pour a glug of oil into a non-stick skillet on medium heat. Shape the mixture into patties, and add the patties to the skillet once the oil is hot. Cook them until they are nicely browned, then flip carefully and brown the other side.

Serve them as you would a burger. Another idea is to make a veggie gyro, and serve inside pita bread, with lettuce, tomato, sliced onion, and tzatziki sauce.

Oven Fries (adapted from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian)
olive oil
6 or 7 medium sized organic Russet potatoes, sliced into 1/2-inch thick wedges, skin intact
salt and pepper
three cloves of garlic, minced (optional)

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Coat a large rimmed baking sheet with olive oil. The baking sheet needs to be big enough to hold all of the potatoes in a single layer. Toss the potatoes with more olive oil, and salt and pepper. Arrange the potatoes in a single layer on the baking sheet, and bake for approximately 30 minutes, or until the potatoes are nicely browned. Sprinkle the minced garlic (if using) over the potatoes, and bake for about five more minutes. Remove the potatoes with an offset spatula (as they might stick a bit), and serve with ketchup or dipping sauce of your choice.

Green Goddess Dressing (loosely adapted from 1964 edition of The Joy of Cooking)
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup sour cream
1 clove garlic
handful of chives
handful of cilantro
juice of half a lemon
salt and pepper to taste

Add all ingredients to a blender and blend until smooth. Use as a salad dressing on a sturdy lettuce like Romaine. Romaine lettuce mixed with accents of cavolo nero (dinosaur kale) works well. Also great as a dip for French fries and vegetables. The husband liked it slathered atop his lentil patties and rice. The dressing tastes better the next day, but even giving a half hour for the flavors to meld is worthwhile if you have the time.

Spring Tonic Soup

I've been thinking of Clara lately. In case you don't know, I am referring to 94-year-old great grandmother Clara Cannucciari, of "Great Depression Cooking with Clara" fame. Most recently, I was watching her Egg Drop Soup episode when she said something that made me smile: "Have you noticed all the meals I make have the same ingredients – onions, potatoes." Clearly Clara and I operate on the same cooking plane, and there is a reason for that: onions and potatoes are easy to grow, cheap, nutritious, and tasty. In other words, they are "Depression food," or maybe we should update that to "Great Recession food." Or maybe just "hard times" food, to be as inclusive as possible. Though even if I could afford truffles and caviar on a daily basis, I would still probably eat a lot of potatoes and onions, because I like them.

There are several other vegetables I like that fall under the hard times food heading. Collard greens happen to be one. They grow quite well here in the South. The important thing about collard greens is they are sturdy enough to survive the winter, and keep growing on into spring. That means we people of limited access to cash have something fresh, local, and green to eat in early spring, and if you are able to grow them yourself, so much the better. Which brings me to something Clara said in another episode: "Everything was terrible, but we ate good food." That pretty much sums up my entire philosophy of life.

Last Wednesday I harvested collard greens, a handful of cilantro, onion greens and chives from my trusty community garden plot. It was also my turn to care for the garden's resident chickens, and they were kind enough to return the favor with eight eggs. Thanks, ladies.

Clara's Egg Drop Soup was fresh in my mind, and I was feeling a bit run-down, so I decided to create a bracing, vitamin-filled, garlicky, spring tonic version of her soup, using the bounty of my harvest. I felt very strong and healthy after eating it, which makes sense because it also tasted strong and healthy, and I mean that in a good way. The collard greens were pleasantly astringent in flavor. The cilantro added a grassy spring boldness to the whole thing. I only used one handful for the soup this time, but next time, will definitely add two.

Spring Green and Garlic Egg Drop Soup (loosely inspired by Clara Cannucciari's Egg Drop Soup)
a few tablespoons of olive oil
3 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
pinch of red pepper flakes
4 thin-skinned potatoes, halved and cut into 1/4 inch thick slices
1 small bunch of onion greens or scallions, thinly chopped
1 bunch of spring collard greens, removed from stems and coarsely chopped
enough water to cover
1 or 2 tablespoons of chopped chives
1 or 2 handfuls of chopped cilantro
4 eggs, lightly beaten
a splash of sherry vinegar or lemon juice
salt and pepper to taste

Heat the olive oil in a large pot, then add the garlic and the red pepper flakes. Add the potatoes when you begin to smell the garlic. Cook the potatoes for several minutes, until they begin to soften. You can add a little salt as the potatoes cook. It's also OK to add a little water to the pot.  Add the onion greens, the collard greens, and a little more salt, and cook for a few minutes until the collard greens begin to wilt. Add enough water to cover the contents of the pot, and a little more salt, and bring to a boil. Once boiling, turn the heat down so that the soup is kept at a steady simmer. Cook until the potatoes and collard greens are tender. The collard greens should still be bright green, unless you have a particularly leathery set of greens, in which case you may have to cook them longer, and their color will dull. Add the chives and cilantro, and then with the heat turned low, add the eggs in a slow stream, turning the contents of the pot in a circular motion as you add them. Add a splash of sherry vinegar (or lemon juice), and more salt and pepper to taste. Serve with a crusty slice of buttered bread.

South by South of the Border: Black-Eyed Pea Burritos

If you’ve been reading here for at least a little while, you might remember my post from a few weeks ago on rice and beans. Actually, the post was a recipe for the almond pasilla chile sauce I concocted to eat with rice and beans. Well, I know rice and beans isn’t exactly the flashiest topic, but I have some information that I feel is worth sharing. If you eat Mexican food at all frequently, and are, like me, challenged in the planning department, meaning you always forget to soak your beans the night before, then try this: Instead of using dried beans, use dried black-eyed peas. You don’t have to soak them, they are as cheap as dried pinto beans, they taste similar to beans, and most importantly, they taste good. I just place a decent amount in a pot (they expand quite a bit, so be careful with quantity, though you could always freeze any extra), rinse them, then cover with a few inches of water, bring to a boil, and let them simmer on medium heat until tender (around 45 minutes).

When the peas are fully cooked, I turn them into “refried peas.” I do this the Diana Kennedy way. Until I read her book, The Essential Cuisines of Mexico, I was doing it all wrong. I was trying to make things too fancy, using cumin and lime and chiles and whatnot, and my refried beans just didn’t taste right. Then I read her recipe for frijoles refritos, and realized what a fool I’d been. The recipe called for lard, onion, cooked beans, bean stock, and salt. In other words, “keep it simple,” which is really the solution for many of life's problems, is it not?

So I did as Ms. Kennedy said, and kept it simple. I did not use lard (for my husband's sake), but olive oil worked quite nicely in its stead. You have to use a lot of it to get the nice, creamy texture. I never measure, but just pour about three times the amount of oil that seems reasonable to me (maybe a third of a cup). You add chopped onions (I use only half an onion for about four cups of cooked beans) to the hot oil, and sauté for a few minutes until they are soft, then add your cooked beans, or in this case black-eyed peas, a little of the cooking water as needed, and mash everything (I use a potato masher). Add a little salt if necessary, and cook until everything is quite mushy and creamy. But some lumps are OK, and in my opinion preferable.

If you do this with your black-eyed peas, they will taste a lot like refried pinto beans. And you don’t have to remember to soak anything. Pretty cool, huh? And you also get to be cool, because you are creating fusion food, in this case an alliance between the Southern black-eyed peas, and the Mexican burrito. (And if you are in the South, you get to be even cooler, because black-eyed peas are local.) In this meal’s latest incarnation, I took the fusion concept a step further, and made a Mexican coleslaw to go inside the burrito, along with the black-eyed peas. I also added a smoky sour cream to it, which was not fusing anything, but tasted really good.

Mexican Cole Slaw
This is a light, tangy and spicy version of the usual creamy sweet coleslaw.
One half a green cabbage (or mixture of green and red cabbage) shredded
1/4 cup minced red onion
1 minced jalapeño pepper (or to taste)
1/4 cup chopped cilantro
Juice of one lime
Salt to taste

Toss all ingredients together. Serve as a side dish or inside a burrito, taco or quesadilla.

Smoky Sour Cream (If you want something vegan, try the almond pasilla sauce instead.)
1 cup sour cream
1 teaspoon cumin
1/4 teaspoon smoked paprika
salt to taste

Mix all ingredients. Serve with burritos, tacos, or quesadillas. This would also be good as a dip for tortilla chips, or home fries.

You're in the Game

Just make the dinner. Just do it. Do it now. Just start. Come on, start already! You can do it. I said start!

This is the little pep talk my inner Coach gives to me each night when I have to make dinner. See, my inner Wimp is always coming up with excuses, like “I’m too tired,” or “I don’t have time,” or “There’s nothing to make,” (and there is always something to make). Sometimes the Coach has to open a can of whup ass and scream in my face, “Failure is NOT AN OPTION! Now get out there and WIN!”

“OK, OK, I’m going. Geez,” cowers the Wimp. “Calm down.”

I truly enjoy cooking. I like the manual labor, the creativity and sensuality of it, and the sense of providing for others. Oh yes, and eating – I like that part too. But when you're doing it every day, in addition to everything else you have to do every day, sometimes you need an extra push. Luckily, the Coach is always there for me. Once I get going, the inertia of the task sets in, and I lose myself in it, and everything is fine. And the end result, having a homemade dinner, is worth every bit of the effort put into it. (Really, the effort doesn’t have to be that much. In fact, it is sometimes much harder to go out than it would be to just hunker down and make something. Anyone with small children understands how hard it can be to go out. The issue of "Pants: Why We Need Them" can take up a half hour entirely on its own.)

So, with that said, when faced with the choice between overpriced burritos with too much sour cream all lumped in one spot, and a fast, yet thoughtfully crafted meal of buckwheat noodles with miso-tahini sauce, tofu, and bright green steamed broccoli, guess which one I picked? Not the burritos. It took less than 30 minutes, and my kids even enjoyed the broccoli (with the sweet sauce, naturally). So yeah, I did win the game this time. But the Coach can never let down his guard.

Soba* with Tofu, Broccoli, and Miso-Tahini Sauce
broccoli (enough to feed everyone)
1 package of firm or extra-firm tofu
1 package of soba
Water
Salt
Miso-tahini sauce (see recipe for sauce below)

First set a large pot of salted water on the stove to boil (for the soba). Cut the broccoli into florets, and the tofu into 1-inch cubes. Steam them together in a steamer basket for approximately 7 minutes, or until the broccoli is crisp tender. (Alternatively, if you'd like a bit more fattiness to the dish, you can pan fry the tofu cubes separately.)

While all this is going on, make the sauce (see below). You won't use all of it on the noodles, but that's good, because then you will have leftover sauce to use creatively the next day, like in your kid's lunch.

When the large pot of water begins to boil, add the buckwheat noodles and cook according to the package directions. It should only take about three minutes or less. Drain the noodles and rinse with cold water.

Toss broccoli, tofu, and desired amount of sauce with the noodles and serve. (If you have chopped scallions, or parsley or cilantro, these would be great additions. Grated carrot or daikon radish would also be good. But if you don't have them, no worries.) The sauce is also very good by itself as a dip for blanched or steamed broccoli. It's slightly sweet, so it helps kids like mine eat broccoli when they otherwise would not. This dish would also work with rice or even spaghetti in place of the buckwheat noodles.


Miso-Tahini Sauce
1/4 cup tahini
1/4 cup white miso (darker is OK)
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 teaspoons toasted sesame oil
2 scant tablespoons rice vinegar
1 firmly packed tablespoon brown sugar
2 shallots, minced
salt to taste
water to reach desired consistency

The easiest way to make this is to add all the ingredients except the water to a glass jar, screw the lid on tightly, and shake to combine, adding the water a little bit at a time. Otherwise, whisking everything together in a bowl will also work. Add the water a little bit at a time, whisking after each addition, to prevent lumps. The sauce should be thin, about the consistency of milk.

*Soba are traditional Japanese noodles, made with buckwheat.  You might find them in the grocery store, and definitely will find them in an Asian market. Or if you're near Decatur, DeKalb Farmer's Market has them.

Pearls Before Swine (and Picky Eaters)

The three-year-old’s eyes lit up upon learning of the task at hand. We had fresh chickpeas, and we were going to shell them. The process was much more meditative than simply dumping them from a can. I sat and shelled, my mind pleasantly empty, while the three-year-old helped the little babies “nibble their way out.” Most were singletons, though we found several "twins." We cooked them (by boiling for a few minutes, then draining, and adding salt, olive oil, lemon juice and crumbled feta), and we ate them.

The three-year-old brought the chickpeas to share with her sister after school. Running toward the little group, she cried, “Look! We made green chickpeas!” The girls stopped and gave a cursory look. Then one declared with utter certainty, “Those are disgusting!” There was a chorus of agreement as they ran off to play, the matter instantly forgotten. The crestfallen three-year-old walked back to me, handed me the dish, and joined them.

Fresh chickpeas have the nutty flavor of cooked dried chickpeas, but are also sweet, a bit like peas or edamame. You can use them as you would regular chickpeas. I think a fresh chickpea hummus would be really nice. But I also like to make a simple chickpea salad, as described above. Just toss cooked chickpeas with olive oil, salt, lemon juice, and feta. If I don't have lemon juice, I use red wine vinegar. Sometimes I add a little finely chopped red onion (make sure it's really very little). I almost never see fresh chickpeas anywhere, but if you ever find any, snap them up. They are a real treat – just be careful to whom you offer them.

Update: This recipe has been entered in this month's "No Croutons Required" contest. Thanks for the suggestion, Lisa!

Crackers Worth a Fortune

My kids can put away a lot of crackers. It chagrins me to say I may have spent more money on crackers than any other food in the past four years. It chagrins me to say this because making crackers is so easy, and so much cheaper than buying them. They are just ridiculously cheap when you make them yourself. You can even add fancy stuff to them, and make them into sophisticated adult snacks, like the $6 bag of highfalutin crackers you see at the gourmet food store, but never buy because you don’t want to pay $6 for crackers. And might I add, they taste far better than any lowfalutin crackers you can find.

Anyway, we were out of crackers. My girl wanted some. I happened to come across the olive oil crackers on Rachel Eats, and showed my girl the pictures. She calmly stated that we were going to make them “right now.” I agreed. I measured, and she added the ingredients, we took turns stirring, and then I gave her her own small piece of dough to knead, and make into “little tiny baby crackers.” Yes, flour was spilled, yes, oil was smeared, and yes, we had differences of opinion regarding the merits of letting the dough rest while we retrieved her older sister from school. We fortunately overcame our differences, managed to pick up her sister from school, and came back and rolled the crackers out using my pasta maker, which had been collecting dust in my cabinet above the fridge for several years. I honestly hadn’t used it since before my kids were born. I don’t know why – they loved turning the crank on that thing. It's the real version of a Play-Doh toy. We’re definitely keeping it out, and pasta will happen soon. (The pasta maker was an indulgence from my pre-kid, pre-husband-in-graduate-school, pre-socioeconomic-collapse years. If you don’t have one, that’s OK. A regular old rolling pin will work just fine. Just try to roll the dough out as thin as you can – your crackers will be more crisp. A pasta maker makes this a little easier, I think. I can't take credit for this brilliant idea, however. The credit goes to Heidi Swanson of 101 Cookbooks, whose recipe for olive oil crackers I also consulted.)

Rachel’s recipe for olive oil crackers is based in the metric system. I was too lazy to convert it, so I looked to Heidi's recipe for guidance. I think either recipe would be perfect, though I followed neither one of them perfectly. But our crackers turned out perfect in their own way, and as proof, were completely gone within 24 hours. It might be good to make a double batch, so you have some to store for a little while at least.

This is a good recipe for making with children. It’s so simple, you don’t have to think too much, thus it’s hard to screw up because you got distracted. We made plain, “kid” crackers, and fancier “adult” crackers, which were simply kid crackers removed from the oven, brushed lightly with olive oil, and sprinkled with zatar. I know that sounds like the name of an alien in a cheesy B-grade sci-fi movie, but it’s actually the name of a condiment. It’s a Middle Eastern mixture of thyme, sesame seeds, sumac (for tartness), and salt. It’s really, really good. You can make your own if you can’t find it. Or just brush the crackers with a little garlic-infused olive oil, or sprinkle rosemary, or bake with a little grated cheese on top, or whatever.

Olive Oil Crackers
(adapted from Rachel Eats and 101 Cookbooks)

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon fine-grain sea salt
1 cup warm water
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
(more olive oil and zatar, optional)

In a large bowl, fully combine the flours and salt. Add the warm water and olive oil, and stir until combined as much as possible, then use your hands to bring everything together into one large mass of dough. Place dough on a floured work surface, and knead for approximately 7 minutes. Divide dough into 12 pieces rolled into balls. Coat each ball of dough lightly with olive oil, and set aside to rest under a clean dish towel for 30 minutes to 1 hour. (We let ours rest for 2.5 hours due to a side journey to the park, and everything was fine.)

While the dough is resting, preheat your oven to 450 degrees. Flatten each ball of dough and, using a pasta maker, roll out each piece into a long, rectangular-ish shape, very thin. We rolled ours out to the number 5 thickness on the pasta maker. Next time, I might see if the dough could stand the number 6 setting, though that might be pushing it a little too far. Or, use a rolling pin and roll the dough as thin as possible. Set the rolled out dough on a floured baking sheet, and use a fork to poke several little holes into it, to prevent large air bubbles. (My three-year-old was a little over-zealous with the hole poking, but it did not seem to affect the final product.) Bake in small batches, until crackers are golden, but not brown. Mine took about 10 minutes, but the time will vary depending on your oven, and the thickness of your dough. Watch them carefully, as there's a fine line here between being done and being burnt.

If you are also making "tiny little baby crackers," you may want to bake them separately, since they will take less time to bake.

After removing the crackers from the oven, brush with more olive oil and sprinkle with zatar if you wish. You can also shatter them into smaller pieces so you aren't eating one giant cracker. Serve with hummus, or herbed cream cheese, or anything good.