The Hungry Tiger

Black bean and winter squash stew

Thanksgiving week is upon us, oh my! We aren't traveling this year; instead we'll be eating at the house of our friends M. and F., a mere 10 minutes' walk away. I've been asked to bring a pasta-based vegetarian main dish, as well as pumpkin pie. (The pumpkin pie is going to be wonderfully homespun -- there were plenty of proper pie pumpkins at the market, and so I spent a little time yesterday making pumpkin puree from scratch, a nice opportunity to press my food mill into service.)

I might make a side dish of some sort while I'm at it, if the hosts approve. For whatever reason, I find the idea of pasta at Thanksgiving a little dissonant, but after a lot of thought, I've come up with a baked pasta variation that pleases me for the purpose. The fact that it is called upon to present itself as an entrée, rather than just another meatless dish added a little extra challenge, I thought, as well as the fact that we're trying to avoid too much overlap in flavors from dish to dish.

I'll tell you the whole story of the pasta when it's all made and I have pictures to go with the recipe -- for now I'll just say that it involves both caramelized onions and pistachios. Today's recipe is for one of the meals I made to carry us through to Thursday. I think that cooking for this week is a little bit extra fraught: I don't want to make anything that will wind up being redundant, or near-redundant, with the Big Meal, and yet here we are buying the very sorts of vegetables that lend themselves to that exact kind of treatment.

One answer is to go for a cultural contrast; we'll be having something East Asian tonight, and at least one Indian dinner before the week is out. But there are a few odds and ends of our shopping that didn't inspire me in either of those directions, and this recipe is for them. The cultural provenance of this dish is a little bit this, a little bit that, but mostly, I think, Berkeley Hippie. It's also not particularly schmancy, what with the canned black beans and chili powder. It's still good, though! And leftovers, cooked down a bit further, make an excellent filling for (hippie) burritos or empanadas.

Eggplant and chickpeas

Sorry I've been so delinquent about posting lately. Also sorry not to be able to provide a tantalizing photo. Both my computer and my camera are acting up at the moment. But lest you give up on me altogether, here is a nice thing to do with an eggplant and some chickpeas. It's pretty simple, though the two-step cooking process does take a bit of time and dirties an extra dish. It's worth it, though, to ensure that everything is very thoroughly cooked without being a complete grease bomb. Undercooked eggplant is vile. (Surely you agree!)

Baked eggs

Little black dress lentil salad

Even though I love them, I will admit that lentils can be unromantic and drab. Not so the small, dark, and elegant French lentils (also known as Puy lentils) or the equally petite and glossy black Beluga lentils. These retain their shape and their chic dark color when cooked and are excellent in salads. The visual contrast with red pepper and bright green parsley is lovely as well, but what I like best about this salad is how simple it is to make and how good it tastes.

LITTLE BLACK LENTILS

3/4 cup French lentils or tiny black "Beluga" lentils
1/2 small onion, diced
1 medium carrot, chopped fine or grated
1 small red pepper, diced
a handful of frozen corn
a couple of glugs of good olive oil
a splash or two of sherry vinegar
a fat pinch of salt
lots of freshly ground pepper
some chopped parsley
[Ahem.]

Cook the lentils in at least three cups of salted water until cooked but not mushy. Drain and rinse briefly with cold water. In a large bowl combine the lentils and vegetables. Add the olive oil, vinegar, salt, pepper and parsley. Mix gently but so that everything is nicely coated. The corn will thaw quickly, chilling the salad a bit in the process. This would be good with feta or goat cheese, but it's also excellent just as it is.

Refined eggplant sludge

Here's something nice I made. I suppose it's in the same general family as ratatouille, but it's different enough. It's delicious cold; we had half for dinner last night and half for lunch this morning. Admittedly I am fonder than many people of various sorts of sludgy eggplant (in my view the main thing you can do wrong with an eggplant is to fail to cook it enough), but I think you will like this, too.

Summertime: several ideas, and a recipe for ajvar

It's getting to be that time of year again -- the time when we can go to the farmer's market and get ridiculous quantities of tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, and the other vegetables of high summer for what seems like almost no money at all. Here are a few recipes from the past that make great use of this bounty: Ratatouille.

This is, of course, an obvious one, but this version is -- to my mind, anyway -- particularly good. The vegetables strike the right balance of melding together and keeping their integrity. You do have to turn on the oven and turn on the burners (oof, hot!) but the advantage is that you don't have to spend ages sauteeing each vegetable in turn. This means things move more quickly and you have to spend less time hovering over the hot stove in question, for a net win on the hot-and-sticky axis.

Frittata with zucchini and ricotta. This is so good that I have been known to buy zucchini out of season in order to make it.

Summer squash gratin. For when you have more summer squash than these other recipes can absorb. It's simple and savory, and pleasantly not-soggy. I think it's nice to save yellow squash for this one and use green zucchini for the frittata.

Tomato salad. Well, obviously.

Ajvar. This is a green vegetable concoction in rough puree, not the smooth sludgy red stuff I've seen in jars at the grocery store. It's made with eggplant and green peppers, and lots of olive oil. It's spectacular, and one of the few things that actually makes me eager to buy green peppers (I generally prefer red). I see that I never did give a recipe for it, and I think I've made enough little tweaks to the original Paula Wolfert recipe by now that I feel comfortable writing it up here. I'll put it at the end of this entry.

Meanwhile, I'm eager to make one or the other of these gazpacho recipes from Lobstersquad -- or both! But first I need to buy a pitcher to put it in, which is something I'm long overdue to do anyhow. This skillet corn from my own mama's website looks fantastic, too. What summer vegetable dishes are you making?

Chickpeas with saffron, garlic, tomatoes, and almonds

Chickpeas from a can are not particularly glamorous, but they are a faithful kitchen friend. They taste much better than most things that come from a can, and can be doctored in any number of ways to produce cheap and wholesome dishes suitable to any season of the year: chana masala, pasta e ceci, hummus, minestrone, in a garlicky puree, roasted with cumin, in a salad with olives and feta, in a summer vegetable stew, and on and on as long as tradition and invention do not fail you.

I most often make chickpeas in one of their many delicious Indian preparations. Today's recipe, though it shares several features with those dishes, is definitively Mediterranean--Catalan, specifically--and threatens to elbow batura chole out of its prime place in my kitchen rotation. The saffron, garlic, tomatoes, ground almonds, and lemon combine in a marvelous way.

We had some hot, with chopped blanched turnip greens stirred in to make a one-dish supper, and some cold, with salad, for lunch. Both ways are excellent. This does take a bit of time to make, so it's a good choice for the weekend, and, as promised, the results only get better as the week goes on.

I feel like a bit of a heel about it, but I've rewritten the recipe as I made it, for posterity here, even though my original source is already online and beautifully written, at The Traveler's Lunchbox. I just love it so much that it alarms me to think that I wouldn't have my own record of it, just in case.

My alterations are minor, but I stand behind them. I used arugula instead of parsley, because that's what I had on hand, and its peppery taste was a fine complement to the others. I decided that I wanted a bit more lemon flavor than the lemon juice alone could provide, and didn't want to go on making the sauce thinner by adding more and more juice. If you feel the same way, a touch of lemon zest or lemon oil will do the trick.

Savory porridges: oatmeal upma

Piles of snow means working from home, and working from home means fresh hot lunches! As you can see from the photo, in this case the opportunity for fresh hot lunch meant a heaping bowl of savory oat porridge, once again based on the recipe from Mahanandi that I discussed in my last post. (My own version is written out below.)

It's a lovely combination of hearty, flavorful, and robust with soothing, gentle, and soft -- as Indira says, "a spicy, feed me more kind of mush."

As far as I know, combining the flavorings and methods for upma with oatmeal is her innovation, and S. and I agree that it is a very happy one. I'll surely be glad to make it just this way at the very least until we've used up our current bag of Bob's Red Mill thick rolled oats. But the degree to which I enjoy this dish has got me thinking about savory porridges, and the many that are native to the subcontinent and East Asia -- proper upma, congee, jook, okayu, what have you. I really should investigate these a great deal more than I have to date. Anyone have any favorite vegetarian recipes and flavor combinations in this vein?

PS. My little spam-preventing captcha thingy (the image with a number that the comment form asks you to enter) is broken at the moment, but should be fixed by the weekend. In the meantime (a) I'm getting spam on older posts, which is my own problem, but (b) you won't see any image. As long as that's the case, just leave the field where you would enter then number blank, and everything should go through OK.

You say these are called "nachos"?

First we were planning to eat nothing but guacamole and Tostitos Gold corn chips for dinner, something we are very happy to do periodically, especially with the absurdly perfect out-of-season avocados to be had at Costco. This is not our ecologically finest moment, to be sure, but perhaps we are just spending a bit of seasonal-eating credit that we built up by eating all that celery root? Anyhow, on this occasion I was suddenly seized with the unusual sensation of minding the not particularly supperlike qualities of chips and guacamole alone.

Then I thought perhaps I should make fideos, since they look so pretty and sound so good and have the curious advantage of being a genuine meal, but it turns out that I lacked several of the criterial ingredients, so that was out. Then I thought I might make tostadas with black beans and some of those nice fideos toppings, but of course I don't have any corn tortillas in the house, either. However, I do have the aforementioned Tostitos Gold, which are not so classy but are, I think, actually quite tasty. They're nice and thick and taste of corn (and salt, of course).

So I took a couple of pasta bowls and put a handful of corn chips at the bottom of each one, and put these in a 200°F oven to warm through while I made a quick batch of black beans -- onions and garlic and peppers in oil, a can of black beans and a shake of ground chipotle, salt, and pepper dumped on top and cooked until thick instead of runny.

Meanwhile I also made a little bowl of pickled onions: thinly sliced onions with salt, a little bit of sugar, and plenty of cider vinegar. When the beans were ready, the dishes came out of the oven. The beans were ladled over the chips and topped with the onions, some peeled and sliced avocado, and a crumbling of white cheese (queso blanco). Lemon juice (no limes in the house) over all, and hot sauce passed at the table.

Heating the plates and chips was a good idea, as it did a lot to preserve an interesting contrast of temperatures and textures. Sour cream would have been a nice addition for those who like it, too, no doubt.

Now, you might say that what I had there were nachos. I submit that they were not quite nachos, though they did of course bear a passing resemblance. After all, there are several dishes in the California-Texas-Mexico matrix that differ not so much in their ingredients as in the configuration of these ingredients. Whatever it was that I made tonight differed from nachos in that we ate them with forks, in the proportion of chips to other things, and in the lack of both melty cheese and salsa.

The ends are odd.

Made the celery root gratin again, this time skipping the parsnips and using a bit of cheddar cheese on top instead of parmesan. Hazlenuts and everything else from the original recipe still in place. I defy anyone to think that this looks anything but delicious. It smells divine as well.

Clearly we are entering an era of celery root obsession. Also of gratin obsession, I suspect, as I'm feeling that it's time to start making Deborah Madison's superb leek and cabbage gratin again. Unfortunately the market had beautiful leeks but only very sad savoy cabbages, though, so it will have to wait for a bit.

Meanwhile, I bought a young coconut and now have no idea what I'm going to do with it. This goes with my having a weird attraction to messing about not with any kind of actual raw-foods diet but various odds and ends of the recipes that go with it, because they have a certain mud-pie appeal: dump a bunch of stuff into your food processor and whirr it all together like a mad scientist/eight-year-old kid. Then, if you are me, stop about halfway through and cook it.

For example, I wound up making a very nice piping hot corn pudding out of something that was originally intended to end its life as mock tortillas full of this and that kind of lovingly maintained raw enzymes or other. Anyway, I think if one were pursuing the Pure Food and Wine aesthetic, one would be supposed to turn the young coconut flesh into noodles or samosa wrappers or something. What I should actually do with it, who knows? Suggestions more than welcome.

A very nice root vegetable gratin

Long time no see. I'm just writing quickly to make a note of this week's exciting new recipe. We don't generally eat many potatoes here, because they are not good friends with S's pancreas. However! I recently discovered that celery root is absolutely delicious*, and it turns out that it is also S-friendly. It was obvious from the start that it would work nicely in a gratin. Then the works of Deborah Madison soon gave me to know that it is, furthermore, good with hazelnuts and mushrooms, and the recipe below was born. We will be having this again very soon indeed.

*Even though I don't particularly like celery qua celery.

A nice lunch curry: spinach, sweet potato, and paneer

This morning I went down to campus a little late so that I could get a few things done at home, and S. requested that I take a little extra time to try to scare something up for our lunches. I looked in the cupboard and found it not entirely bare, so I cobbled together a curry. It turned out very well, so I thought I ought to make a note of what I did. This won't be in a format designed to be specially user-friendly, I'm afraid, because I'm just going to write down what I did.

1. Heat olive oil in a suitable pan -- it must have a lid. Add about 1 T. mustard seeds, 1 t. cumin seeds, and 1 t. whole coriander seeds. Cook one minute.

2. Add 1 t. ground cumin, 1/2 t. turmeric, and 1/4 t. cayenne. Cook 1 minute more.

3. Add 1 medium onion, diced fine. Cook until golden.

4. Add 1 not-too-large sweet potato, peeled and cut into 1" cubes. Stir-fry a little. Then add 3/4 c. water and 1/2 t. salt. Cover the pan and simmer until the sweet potato is on the firm side of tender.

5. Uncover the pan and let the liquid cook down. Add a handful or two of spinach (I used the very nice Trader Joe's whole-leaf frozen spinach), and some cubed paneer or queso fresco. When the spinach is wilted and the cheese is heated through, add the juice of 1/2 lemon. Adjust salt and spiciness.

PS. I know that many lovely people think that sweet potatoes are the work of the devil. And, you know, that's cool with me. But if you don't feel that way or even are on the fence about them, I think that you'll find that spiciness and curry spices go very well with them. And once again I feel compelled to point out that this whole combination is also quite good for you, though it would be well worth eating even if it weren't.

Sino-Indian Delight (Manchurian Cauliflower)

I'm sorry I've been too scattered to write much. Fortunately you have all probably gotten good and bored and wandered off to greener pastures by now.

Just quickly, for the record, I want to note our household's great delight with my experiments with Indian-Chinese food -- that is, Chinese food as it's made in India, or at least as it's made in the happily-assimilated way of a lot of "Chinese" food you can find in the U.S. In particular I am now in love with Gobi Manchurian.

I have become addicted to the dining model in which I make a ton of things on the weekend and then reheat (in the oven, which works remarkably well for many of my favorite wintery dishes) and assemble for the occasion. This dish is no exception, even though it has a fried element. For frying I finally broke out a bottle of crazy high-tech Enova oil I bought a while ago. Apparently it is the most popular cooking oil in Japan. I don't really understand it and have no idea if it is truly healthy in any real way, but it is neutral-tasting and worked fine for my purposes. The recipe I used is below. It is probably not authentic anything at all, but we both loved it.

Ratatouille redux

As I mentioned earlier, there is nothing like receiving boxes full of what is in season in August to explain the invention of ratatouille. Ratatouille keeps well, freezes well, and indeed is at its best when it has had a chance to sit around a bit before you eat it cold or reheat it.

One of our favorite dinners of late has been to dump some ratatouille into a baking dish and make two little hollows. Into each hollow an egg is cracked, and then the whole thing goes in to bake until the egg whites are allllllmost completely opaque. Out it comes again to have some grated cheese dumped over top, and then back into the oven until the cheese is bubbly. This is not a beautiful dish, but it is satisfying and delicious. I am looking forward to breaking out the frozen ratatouille come January or so and enjoying it again then.

The recipe I've been using lately is an adaption of the one at Ruth's Kitchen. This is a variation on the Julia Child method in which each vegetable is sauteed separately; here, the eggplant and squash are roasted in the oven, which both involves less oil (a minor concern in my view, but still good to know) and lets you cook things simultaneously instead of sequentially so that it doesn't all take three thousand years to get done. It also tastes lovely.

Easy to eat: red pepper sludge

Along with the other cooking ahead I do during the week, I have gotten into the habit of cutting up a few red peppers and an onion and sauteeing them slowly while I'm doing something else. The results keep nicely in a plastic container in the refrigerator, and then I can scoop some out to use in a frittata, to mix in with some sauteed greens, or to use in one of the laziest and most satisfying jumbled-up lunch or light dinner dishes of all time.

It does not begin to deserve to be dignified by anything so elaborate as a recipe; it is just a thing that happens in your bowl, and then you eat it.

I have written before about eating alone, and my tendency to indulge my weirder cravings on the days when I am working at home. It has been a while since I have had any of my old favorites, most particularly the infinite variations on potato soup cooked down to the consistency of mashed potatoes -- which is not exactly the same thing as mashed potatoes, you'll note -- with all sorts of green oddiments tossed in, though now that I am gardening, it occurs to me that tasty green odds and ends are goingt to be in plentiful supply.

But occasionally what I think is one of my weird lunches turns out to be a crossover hit. "It probably sounds disgusting," I confessed to mixed company, "but sometimes I eat a hard-boiled egg broken up and mixed with sauteed red pepper and onions, with feta cheese crumbled on top."

"Uh, no," said S. and everyone else, too, "that sounds very good." It is, too. It is suitable to consume in pyjamas, when you are feeling fragile, or in party clothes when you need to eat something good and quick before you dash off to the club. Some Aleppo pepper does not go amiss, either, if you're the kind of person who likes that sort of thing.

Another thing that is good: Break a cauliflower into chunks. Toss in olive oil and bake at 375° F. until toasty and soft. Meanwhile, slowly fry up some onion and garlic until they are dark gold. Put these, some ricotta cheese, some milk, and salt into your food processor and render into a puree. Put this into a baking dish and put it back into the oven to get hot again. This does not taste like mashed potatoes, no matter what some people may tell you. But it does taste nutty and creamy and worth your while.