The Hungry Tiger

Kasha and roast vegetables with lemon and spices

I wouldn't roast vegetables ahead of time week after week if I only had one meal I liked to make with them them. Here is another favorite, again good for using up leftovers or the sort of intentional "leftovers" I often produce on the weekends.

This warm sort-of-salad combines the cozy autumnal browns of roast vegetables and nutty kasha with bright flavors that ensure that you don't wind up with a plate of stodgy dullness. Even if you make it with the exact same set of vegetables you've used in the gratin I wrote about last week, I promise that it will taste very different; I would (and do!) happily eat both in the same week without feeling monotonous.

It has one specialty ingredient, preserved lemons. They are crucial to the lively, zingy effect. I recognize that not everyone has them in the house, but they're easy to make and not like anything else. That said, I suspect you could make a different, but equally distinctive, dish by using chopped green olives and plenty of lemon juice instead.

Roasted vegetable and grain gratin

Roast vegetables are good in themselves, and a surprising number of vegetables respond pleasingly to the treatment. Broccoli, cauliflower, parsnips, peppers, sweet potatoes, fennel, asparagus, carrots, green beans, onions, summer or winter squash, mushrooms -- any and all are delicious hot out of the oven, dressed only in olive oil, salt, and pepper. Roasted garlic scapes are outrageously good, and next spring you should be sure to make them in vast quantities. Roast eggplant is so delicious that I have pretty much given up on cooking it any other way; when I make dishes that call for fried or sauteed eggplant, I roast it instead (with plenty of oil - it's still usually less than it would soak up in a hot pan) and am never disappointed.



This last point raises the question: yes, what about roast vegetables as ingredients in more complicated dishes? When it is seven in the evening on a Wednesday, who wants to peel, cut, and roast several vegetables first, and then assemble them into something else? Not I. I do, however, very much like to reach into the refrigerator and mix and match from containers of several different vegetables that I thoughtfully roasted on the previous Sunday.

This gratin is good with nearly any combination of grains and vegetables that suit your fancy, though I would strongly urge you to include roast onions among them. What pleases your tastes and looks good to you at the market should be your guide otherwise. Add some greens, too, if you like, as I did in the batch shown in the photo. Cheese on top is good as well, though for some reason I seem to have skipped it in the photographed batch (foolish me), and it was still delicious.

Leftover grains work nicely here, and go with the theme of assembling pre-cooked elements into something else, though of course you can make something fresh for the occasion. I like using quinoa -- especially since I've started cooking it in the rice cooker -- or brown rice, or a mix of the two. Aside from the white sauce, which is the same one I use for baked pasta, quantities are very flexible.

Beans, baked

Nearly all my bean cookery takes place entirely on the stovetop and at the counter. Soup, stew, chili, refritos, salad, a plate of just-plain beans, and even my "baked beans," which I hope to write about soon, never see the inside of an oven.

However, every once in a while I do things the other way. Half an hour of baking, bathed in tomato sauce and plenty of olive oil, produces a bean dish I like very much. It's not quite the same as what you would get if you simmered the same beans in the same tomatoes for the same amount of time on top of the stove; the undisturbed gentle, dry heating in a shallow dish ensures that every bean retains its integrity, while the sauce cooks down into a lovely dense evenly clinging coat for each one.

I recently received a fresh order of beans from Rancho Gordo, including two bags of the pretty-in-pink Flor de Junio. They are a medium-sized pink bean with a somewhat pinto-ish shape and a lovely smooth, creamy texture. Steve Sando, the owner of Rancho Gordo, warns that they don't age well, which makes this fresh supply feels like a special treat. These were harvested less than two months ago, sometime in July, and should be cooked before next summer--but I'm sure they won't last the month. Being so fresh, they cooked up quickly, from their overnight soaking to tender in about half an hour flat.

Dinner reports

This is just a quick note in between proper posts to say that if you are (for some reason) interested in the daily minutiae of what we eat for dinner at our house, you can check in at the sidebar of my other weblog. That site is more an unfocused melange of this and that than this one is, but there is a bit of food-related overlap, as in the little "dinner reports" section. It's on the right, about halfway down the page, between the Twitter feed and the list of categories.