The Hungry Tiger

A big pot of vegetarian beans

I may have mentioned that I am fond of beans. Usually when I post bean recipes, I link to Rancho Gordo's instructions for making a basic pot of beans. There is not a thing wrong with those instructions. They are reliable, simple, and good. Lately, though, I've been doing something slightly different for my "basic" beans -- the beans that stand on their own but still feel like just plain beans, in a bowl beside some cornbread or tortillas, or alongside a plate of enchiladas, the ones I bring to a potluck when my friend F. warns, "No fancy stuff, now."

Usually beans of this sort would involve some pork, but they don't need it, which is fortunate for our vegetarian selves. Sometimes I add some Bragg's Liquid Amino, which if F. knew about it, she'd definitely class as "fancy stuff." It just adds a little umami, though, and doesn't make things taste any less traditional, I promise. It is also fully optional.

The secret, crucial ingredient is jalepeño brine. It does a magical delicious something without disrupting the essential Big Pot of Plain Beans quality of the thing. Try it and see!

A good idea: quick fresh vegetable broth

I've just returned from a short trip to visit my mother. She's an excellent cook and, as always, fed us very well. She also passed along a clever new trick she'd learned for making an especially easy, clean tasting vegetable broth.

This broth is so simple and flexible that it doesn't rise to the level of a recipe. But it does have a method, and the method is this:

Take about two pounds of vegetables, mainly ones with a high water content, like lettuce, tomatoes, celery, cucumber, or bell peppers. Carrots are nice. Toss in odds and ends of whatever you have on hand, except for brassicas like broccoli or brussels sprouts, which are a bit too pungent. Skip the potatoes, too. But corn, spinach, summer squash, even a bit of onion -- go for it.

Then wash and chop the vegetables (the handiwork on display in the photo here is fussier than necessary) and put them in the blender with two cups of water. Blitz the hell out of them and strain the results through a fine sieve. The end.

Now you have a nice, fresh, uncomplicated broth with a bit of body to it that you can use for soup, a pilaf, a plate of lentils, breakfast strata, whatever you like.

Buttery green beans in a saffron yogurt sauce

Many recipes for green beans exhort you not to overcook them, lest you lose their lovely crunch and bright green color.

It is true that a lightly cooked green bean is a delightsome thing and that a middlingly cooked green bean is generally less so. A number of delicious recipes from Paula Wolfert, however, have convinced me that cooking green beans for a long time is also a good idea. I suppose that green beans are like squid in this way. Cook them quickly or stew them forever; in between lies sadness.

I have noticed that Wolfert often speaks of long-cooked green beans as "putty colored," perhaps as a scheme to preempt confusion and disappointment. These, inspired heavily by a recipe in her book The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean, are not quite that far gone. Though I have made them several times, I have perhaps not yet ever truly cooked them long enough. Even so, they will not be winning any contests for vividness or crunch. They have other qualities to recommend them. The yogurt (which I add later than the original recipe suggests, because I found that I had trouble with curdling when I made it as written) makes a luscious sauce. Saffron is not commonly paired with the humble green bean. That gives this dish a little thrill of the not-ordinary, and in fact the combination works very well.

These are served at room temperature, which is nice because you can make them ahead and pull them out as an accompaniment to a simple light supper or hot lunch, an omelet for example.

Tarte au Sucre

In Canadian French, "tarte au sucre" means a real sugar pie: flaky pie crust with a sweet filling, along the lines of shoofly pie. In France, though, it's the name of a yeasted cake with sweet topping. To make one, first you make a brioche dough and pat it into a buttered springform pan. Then you spread the top with soft butter, and sprinkle sugar over that. In the oven, the sugar and butter melt into a crunchy sweet crust over a tender but substantial base.

Despite the name, it's not excessively sweet, and it makes an excellent breakfast or teatime snack. After the first day, I like to cut a wedge, then warm it in a toaster oven. (Keep an eye on it lest you burn the topping.) This magically restores it to soft freshness and adds a little bonus toasty flavor. With toasting, the slices we ate on Thursday were as good as the ones we'd had on Sunday.

Of course yeast doughs take a little extra planning, but this one is pretty straightforward, with its long cool overnight rise. I plan it like so: Start the dough on Friday or Saturday evening, then pop it into the fridge. The next morning, take it out first thing and go about your business showering, having breakfast, and so on while it comes to room temperature, or take it out after breakfast and go run a few errands. Then you can bake it up around lunchtime and have your first taste as an afternoon snack. Instructions below assume a stand mixer.

Breakfast lentils

From the archives. These are tasty, absurdly easy, and low on the glycemic index, so you won't be ravenous again at ten. I always think that they'll be too weird to appeal to other people, since most of us are not at our most adventuresome at breakfast time, but history has proved me wrong. Maybe you will like them too. Originally posted in September 2004.

We like savory breakfasts in these parts, but are not remotely capable of making a hot breakfast on weekdays. Omelettes and the like are lovely on Saturday mornings, but require too much coordination for Tuesdays. So there are a couple of dishes I've developed that I can make very easily in bulk, and which dress up quickly and appetizingly in the morning. One of them is what we call "breakfast lentils." Here you see them with yogurt, red onion, and lightly pickled cucumber.

Links: Things to make

Bottled Fruit: Belgian Pears.

A truly delectable sounding recipe for special (but not complicated) poached pears, from The Cottage Smallholder.

Dutch Apple Cheese muffins.

"I make these once or twice a week. Lord help me, but when I'm pregnant I make them every other day or so." 

"Red espresso".

Rooibos tea ground to be used in an espresso machine or moka pot. Via Ask Metafilter. I have no idea if this is any good, but it's intriguing.

Miso, tahini, and nut paste.

A toasty topping for roast vegetables or a vegan filling for onigiri, from Just Bento.

Onion jam: like bacon jam, but not bacon

This past year, there was an explosion of enthusiasm over the "bacon jam" produced by Skillet, a West Coast gourmet food cart company, because the Internet loves bacon. (Also because Skillet isn't stupid, and put jars of the stuff in the hands of any number of Internet bacon lovers. Indeed, the jam has its very own Twitter account!) Bacon, you may have noticed, in addition to being a classic beloved foodstuff, is a Thing, has been a Thing, goes on being a Thing, and shows no signs of stopping being a Thing.

Onions aren't a Thing, but onion jam is very good. It's also vastly cheaper to produce eight ounces of it, or twenty-four ounces for that matter, than it is to order a $10 jar of bacon jam. And it's (at least potentially) kosher! How can you resist?

I've written about it before, but it never hurts to mention it again. A jar of onion jam, or onion confit, if you prefer, is an uncommonly useful thing to have in the refrigerator. Use in or on scrambled eggs, spread on toast, slip into a sandwich or burger, include in a savory tart, stir into your soup, mix with soft cheese, toss with pasta, add to simple fried rice, whatever your little heart desires. 

This is the recipe I've settled on over the years, cobbled together from what other people do, what I like in the final product, and what I find least fussy to put together in the kitchen.

Black bean and butternut squash stew

Butternut squash may not be the most exotic or rarefied of squashes, but it is easy to find, easy to prepare, and easy to like. This year the local ones seem specially dense and flavorful, but I'd find their combination of simplicity and pleasant texture and taste difficult to resist even in an ordinary season.

Cubed roast squash is lovely in the kasha and preserved lemon dish I wrote about in my last post, and in the roast vegetable gratin I wrote about in the post before that. It's also excellent with black beans.

Some time ago, I learned that roast squash is an unexpected but very good addition to black bean burritos (roast sweet potatoes are, too). More recently, we've been enjoying it in this simple bean and vegetable stew. If you use canned beans or have some cooked up ahead of time -- they freeze well, incidentally -- you can make it without blinking an eye even on the most exhausting and irritating of work nights.

For this kind of thing, I cut a thin slice off the stem end and the bulbous blossom end of the squash to make them both flat, then stand it on the larger end (now stable) and cut the whole thing in half vertically, then scoop out the seed. There are two options at this point: I can peel and cube both the bulb and the neck, or I can cut off the bulb and bake it separately, unpeeled and unchopped, for a separate dish. Either way, for my usual roast vegetable extravaganza, what I want is peeled chunks of squash cut into rough cubes of about 1" or a little larger, tossed in olive oil, sprinkled with salt, and roasted at about 400 degrees F until toasty on the outside and tender all the way through. The result can then be set aside to use as an ingredient in any number of tasty main course dishes, including this one.