Food for the week: 2 recipes
In my usual entire-week-cooking-style, I made the CPK split pea and barley soup plus two other recipes I came up with. I guess I was feeling inventive! One of them, Cuban Black Bean Soup with Salsa and Cumin Rice, was a product of necessity, because I was cooking for a surprise dinner guest. It was a spicy dish so it was awesome that she was impervious to spicy food. The other one, Cheesy Mushroom Chard Bake, is not necessarily an exciting meal, but it’s healthy and tasty, and so I’m posting it because I find casseroles awfully handy for healthy whole-week cooking.
The two recipes I’m posting today are from my usual repertoire – meaning I grew up in the ‘burbs of a southern state near Mexico. I am, however, in the process of expanding my comfort zone to food from Morocco/North Africa, Persia and India. For example, I totally screwed up a chickpea recipe the other day!
The spice combinations and cooking styles tend to be similar from those areas – lots of stews with flatbread, the tendency to start a dish by making a chaunk or tadka for example, with whole spices and oil/ghee. Lots of dill, coriander, fennel, and other fun stuff. I have new cookbooks, and I’ve been reading Manjula’s Kitchen (took me a while to know what ingredients she was talking about more than 25% of the time!). It’s funny though, I think that cooking Mexican food is similar, being another flat-bread-and-stew type cuisine, a few different spice combinations change food so much!
Recipes after break …
Continue reading Food for the week: 2 recipes…
Knives and Earthquakes (not together, one hopes)
Whew. What a week. I know I said that on Friday, but I thought I’d elaborate a bit. First up: KNIVES.
A week ago Friday I finally did something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time – I took a knife skills class! I was super excited. After some persuasion I managed to get Jeff to come as well, because I knew he would be willing to be my sous chef if he knew how to be a pro about. I think we’re both getting new knives. He wants the Shun you see on the left, and I want the middle knife. I have a chef’s knife already that I’m quite fond of, but I liked the flat edge of that one. I took the class (3+ hours jam packed with info) at Berkeley’s Kitchen on Fire with chef MikeC. I wish I could pass on every last bit of information to you guys, but um … well, he DOES have a DVD, I suppose. Seriously, it was a great class, the guy’s a great teacher, funny and yet very seriously knowledgeable about his subject.
I will say, after learning the techniques, that I don’t think I know anyone who wields a knife properly. Which is sad, because it’s so much faster and safer!
I spent today helping my brother move out of his apartment. He’s experiencing a few major life changes, both positive and negative, and I’m very happy to be able to be nearby so that I can help. I’m super pleased to report that he is going to graduate school next fall at the University of Nevada Reno to earn his master’s degree in environmental planning and policy, specializing in GIS use. The cherry blossoms in the picture above are from outside his window in Placerville – it’s spring! I will miss going up there to visit him, but I am really happy he’s going in a positive direction in his life, and I’m sure I’ll make it back up there on my own anyway.
I continue to spend time finishing items for the kitchen/dining area. As you can see above, the benches are nearly done, and I have a lot of commentary on building furniture in my head for another post. We have one coat of paint to apply and they’ll be ready for use. I’m sewing with piping for the first time for the bench cushions, which is giving me palpitations. I’m terrified I’m going to do this terribly wrong, but I’m forging ahead anyway. I have a seam ripper, after all. I don’t know how to build furniture either, and that seems to be going well despite all the many things that could go poorly. I’m definitely ready for these projects to be over, though. I’d like to move onto something else.
I, along with many others, have been watching the news from Japan about the earthquakes and tsunamis with horror and sadness. The news just isn’t getting any better. Like many others, I’ve donated to the Red Cross, and it’s really all that I can think to do. I went to bed Thursday night extremely grateful to be living in an earthquake-safe apartment building and working in a retrofitted earthquake-standard office. It’s not everything, but … when you live less than a mile from the not-insignificant Hayward fault, it’s hard to hear about massive earthquakes and not personalize those thoughts just a wee tiny bit.
Flickr user Dr_Speed (via Berkleyside) caught the photo above of the tsunami rolling through San Francisco Bay on Friday. That’s SF in the background and the Bay Bridge crossing the water. The Alameda docks are on the left and Emeryville (just south of Berkeley) is in the foreground. There’s also a video from the same vantage point. Not so big, right? Kinda slow. Now realize that wave has traveled more than 5,000 miles. Unbelievable.
With the exception of the tsunami photo these pictures are from Instagram – three weeks ago I decided to start a 365 project, and those photos are from that series. For those of you unfamiliar with this phenomenon, I watched several people on Flickr do one of these in various ways. Basically you take a picture every day for a year, often of yourself, and post it. Some people do a 52-week version. I’d wanted to do one, but never thought I’d keep up with it until I started using with Instagram on my iPhone. You take a picture and it applies an effect to it (or not), imitating a lomography camera or a 60s or 70s picture, or various other vintage and color filters. Since I usually have my phone with me, it’s simple to remember to find something worth looking at from my daily life and photograph it.
I’m hoping that this project reminds me to keep a sharp eye on what’s amazing and noteworthy around me in my daily life, instead of just letting the increasingly familiar landscape fade into sameness. Moving to a new place opens your eyes in so many ways, and I’d like to keep the magic of that viewpoint with me as long as I can.
Off to bed! I’m sure with the time change the morning is going to see unbearably early for this night owl.
‘Bye to November
And so we come to the last day of November, and the last post. I will probably not get one of the prizes given out, but I will reward myself by not posting again until I actually have an internet connection at home. Your email inboxes and RSS readers have 11 months to recover before I commence next year’s assault (assuming I do this again next year). I have earned the right to add another one of these to some place on my blog. I’m not 100% certain I got a sense of satisfaction out of it, perhaps more of a sense of relief at this stage.
Instead of posting for a while, I’m going to work on doing some actual crafting, putting my house together, finally unpacking items that have been packed since October of last year, and moving into my new crafting space as well. This weekend I’m going to join my cousins and go pick out a tree on a farm, and get some Christmas going around here.
Thanksgiving Dinner: By the way, last Friday I did make Thanksgiving dinner (you didn’t think I’d let that pass, did you?). There weren’t any pictures, but I did make seven items:
- a Field Roast (this is too easy, does this even count?)
- stuffing with sourdough, apples, caramelized onions, chopped walnuts and fried sage (fried sage is totally gratuitous, but yummy)
- mashed taters with roasted garlic
- butternut squash risotto
- green bean casserole with homemade sweet & wild mushroom soup
- cranberry-orange-ginger chutney (a 1/4 cup of ginger = very spicy!)
- Alton Brown’s pumpkin yogurt pie (my very favoritest pie)
Sweet & Wild Green Bean Casserole: Most of these items are things I consider easy, and are on my usual round of dinner fixins. The one that isn’t usual is the green bean casserole. I love this stuff, but a few years ago I got tired of it being the Same Old Too Salty Boring Thing. I tried using garlic mushroom soup, but last year I finally realized I should just start making it from scratch – fresh beans, fresh mushrooms, my own fried onions. Last year I used the Emerilized Green Bean Casserole and Alton Brown’s baked onions. This year I made my own recipe, and since my brother was there for dinner so I made the cream of mushroom soup with almond milk instead. MUCH simpler than Emeril’s version, and tasty!
- Saute wild mushroom mix in butter (my holiday treat to myself) and a dash or so or balsamic vinegar.
- The real trick: I used a technique of steeping the milk with spices/herbs. I chose whole nutmeg, a cinnamon stick, caraway seeds, whole allspice and whole peppercorns. Let it simmer at a very low temperature for a while (15 minutes or so? I wasn’t timing it) and then strain it to remove the spices. After a while you stir in your flour after making a slurry with a bit of the milk and bring to a boil to thicken.
- Mix the mushrooms into the thickened cream base.
- Mix the soup in with fresh green beans and homemade fried onions. Or French’s onions. I’d be happy either way.
The taste is different, almost sweet, and it was lovely!
Oh, and cooking in my new kitchen. WONDERFUL. I LOVE IT. SEVEN DISHES NO PROBLEM. Three things baking at a time! After such a long time of having no counter space and cramped spaces, it’s just heavenly. Then when I was done, there was a dishwasher (not me!). Ah well. After my year of crazy tiny kitchens, I’m now a dab hand at cooking in awkward situations while camping, I’ll tell you that.
Thanks, and toodles: I’m going to go be one with my new apartment and ‘hood now. Thank you to everyone who came by for reading my silliness all through this November. You’re all lovely, even if most of you don’t stop by to say hello in the comments. Which you should.
