The Hungry Tiger

I love beans.

I've been spending a lot of time working instead of cooking, lately, and have been doing both (as you can see) far more often than I've been writing about what I've been cooking. I know! What foolishness. What I have been cooking all this time has frequently and prominently featured beans. Lovely, gorgeous Rancho Gordo beans, decadently shipped to me from two-thirds of the way across the country. If you read other food blogs, you've probably already read someone else enthusing about these beans. Now here I am to do more of the same. It turns out that there are many advantages to making beautiful fresh dried heirloom beans.

Of course they are delicious, and it's neat to become attuned to the differences among such a host of different varieties. Because they're fresh, they cook consistently (so you don't have some beans turning mushy while others remain hard). They turn out plump and attractive and whole instead of broken and sad. But there's also an interesting psychological advantage, for me, at least: the fact that the beans are an ingredient that I went to some trouble to get, and that I know were chosen and harvested with real enthusiasm, means that it feels like a treat instead of laziness to put them at the center of a meal.

So that's what I've been doing. I just cooked up the last of our runner cannellini, which sadly are also the last to be had from Rancho Gordo by mail until new supplies appear, presumably after the harvest and drying are done, but you can still get them from Purcell Mountain Farms and Seed Savers--a very cool institution, by the way--and no doubt other places, too. (I've never ordered beans from either of these places; does anyone reading this have experience with their beans?) Runner cannellini are a magnificently gigantic and velvety white bean. Today they cooked perfectly in just one hour flat, after an overnight soak. Then I did this with them, which is exactly what I did with the last batch, because it is very very good. Recommended.

A few of my favorite varieties are sold out for the season (no doubt helped out the door by the publication of Steve Sando's new cookbook). Not yet gone is my very favorite, though, the Eye of the Goat, which is dense and flavorful, and holds its shape beautifully despite having a relatively delicate skin. I love to eat them just in a bowl, topped with chopped red onions, a little cheese, a sliced avocado, a drizzle of oil and a squeeze of lime.

Okra lunch

Brown rice on one side, delicious okra on the other. You know, don't you, that there is a pretty simple trick for preventing okra from getting slimy? The key is that no water (or anything with a high water content) should touch any cut surface of the okra until it has been seared, generally in hot oil and spices. This means that you must dry your okra VERY VERY thoroughly after you wash it. Very! Dry them as well as you can and then let them lie on a fresh dry towel or cooling rack to airdry some more.

Don't use a wet knife, either; even if your knife is just damp from cutting up another, wetter, ingredient, strings of mucilage will begin to multiply. Similarly, if you are pickling okra, do not prick it with a fork! It is also best to ensure that the wet ingredients in your recipe, which you add later, are acidic: use plenty of tomatoes, vinegar, lemon juice.

This new bento/lunch box, made by my favorite purveyors of plastic food storage containers, Lock&Lock, is just right for me. The Lock&Lock lids are easy to open and close and have an excellent seal, thanks to their gasket. I usually don't have it in me to make lunches that combine more than two or three elements, but often like to bring exactly two, so the divider configuration suits me very well, and the amount of food that fits inside is also just about right. I'd also be delighted to have some of these for three-item days, but they're hard to find. In the meantime, of course, I can always bring a second little container when I need one, or nestle two things on one side. In other news, ugh! The most recent photos I've taken have all been horrendously lit and therefore generally horrendous. Hélas.

So tiny. (Okra.)

Tonight we went out for Turkish food and I had a dish that featured the tiniest okra ever. They were very small. Super small. Incredibly small! They were also delicious. And tiny.

UPDATE! I think perhaps they might have been this stuff: dried okra. After all, it's a Turkish ingredient, and that would explain how on earth you could count on getting a reliable source of teensy okra for your Cleveland restaurant. This is very exciting. Apparently dried okra are sold at Kalustyans, so I'll be adding them to my next order, and soon enough I will be able to find out for myself.

Dome! (Cake dome.)

I am a big believer in not refrigerating things that ought not to be refrigerated, which means that I often have a cake or some cheese or a frittata or bread or something that I want to keep on the counter for a day or few as we polish it off. As a result, for a long time I'd been wishing for a glass dome of the right size and shape to plonk over such items.

For some reason, I believed that this would be impossibly difficult to find, or very expensive, or at the very least always sold with a pedestal cake stand. But this weekend I was re-inspired to look into it (because I baked a WONDERFUL, glorious cake, and I say this as someone who is distinctly cake impaired, and I'll tell all three of you remaining readers about it shortly), and lo! I found just the thing. Yes, it's a Nigella Lawson product, which seems a little bit silly, but it's just what I had in mind: simple, twelve inches across, suitable for putting directly on the counter or on its own nice low ceramic plate base, and with straight sides high enough to accommodate a decently sized cake. I find this very satisfying.

Conspicuous consumption: cheese and bags

Not cooking, but generally food related. I've been stimulating the economy again, both directly and by proxy. My lovely mother sent us a box of delicious cheeses as a prize for my having filed my dissertation. Mm. I know Zingerman's is expensive, and people I know who have lived in Ann Arbor tend to feel that they're overhyped as well as overpriced, but they really do make great presents. And I'll tell you, the cheese is great.

In anticipation of the weeks when the farmer's market is bursting with so much fresh produce that we can hardly carry everything we buy, I've ordered a few more of my favorite reusable bags. These are exactly what I want in a shopping bag. I love that they stuff into their own attached stuff sack. You can never lose the sack, and you don't fuss around with rolling the bag up just so -- just quickly stuff it in. When stuffed, they are small enough to toss into any old corner, so that you always have one or more on hand. The bags themselves are strong and lightweight. They hold a lot and conveniently fit the metal frames that hold plastic shopping bags open, found at the end of many supermarket checkout lines. They hold up well to being used ungently, week after week. The only trouble is that I've lost a couple in the few years since I bought my last batch, while also finding more places where I'd like to stow one or two (my suitcase, for example). So I'm replenishing the stocks.

While I was at it, I also ordered this collapsible market basket, because I'm quite terrible at managing my purchases without one. I don't do a good job of shopping in descending order of sturdy denseness, so I'm always having to try to shuffle things around in my bags in the middle of the market, while also trying not to get in anyone's way, and then accidentally dropping my eight plums directly on top of my tiny lettuces anyhow. We'll see how the basket works. Do you have any favorite sacks, baskets, carts, or other useful reusable containers for food shopping?

New toy

Okay, gang, I have obtained a food mill, one with three interchangeable disks, which also means that it comes apart for easier cleaning. It is shiny. I am excited. Do you have any tips and tricks I should know about? What should I be sure to make? Tomato sauce, obviously, and applesauce come fall -- but what else?

Sharpening knives, buying tea, stinging nettles

(1) Dorie Greenspan apparently likes this zany knife-sharpening system, which is exciting because I could certainly use a better way of sharpening my knives, and I just don't have the knack of using a proper stone. This version is a three-part tabletop system with an interchangeable "restorer" that gets an out of whack edge into shape, a "sharpener" that, well, sharpens, and a "honer" than smooths out the little micro-serrations left from sharpening. There's also a smaller, foldable version for much less. I might actually just buy that, although it sounds like it doesn't have three separate components -- but it takes up less space and is less of an investment. I'm wavering, though.

(2) My shipment from Le Palais des Thés arrived, after some postal screw-up that sent it back to France before its final, successful trip to me. My favorite to date is their "Fruits Rouge" Oolong (or Wu Long), but we'll see if any of the new varieties knock it off its perch. Right now we're having some of the "Thé des Enfants," which is sort of like the world's very, very nicest Red Zinger, with a bit of actual tea in the mix -- excellent, but not better than my trusty old favorite. But the "Thé des Songes" or "Songes des Nuits d'Eté" still wait in the wings. I'm excited.

(3) Stinging nettles are back! This is at the farmer's market; too bad we don't have a nearby patch of our own to plunder for free.

Our favorite chocolate bar

A little note here on something we have been eating regularly that I have no part in preparing whatsoever.

I am sure there are some among you who will hate me at least a little bit when I tell you this, but what S. and I really like to do with chocolate bars is to buy just one and eat it very slowly, over the course of a week or two between the two of us, just doling out a square apiece here and there.

The Vosges Naga bar is excellent for this, but not readily available in our usual shopping circuit, so we often purchase something by Ritter Sport instead. There are many fine flavors of Ritter Sport, but none compares to the Rum Trauben Nuss.

While I am not particularly a fan of rum raisin ice cream, I am passionately dedicated to these Ritter Sport bars of milk chocolate with rum, raisins, and hazelnuts. I love the smell as you snap off a square: a literally intoxicating mixture of the chocolate, hazelnuts, and LOTS of lovely rum.

The ingredients list indicates that these bars are flavored with a healthy dose of real rum, rather than feeble old rum flavoring. The raisins have an excellent texture (unlike, in my view, what happens to them in rum raisin ice cream) and taste as if they've been soaked in the rum for a week. The hazelnuts crunch nicely and seem to be toasted. The proportion of nuts and raisins to chocolate is quite high. Come to think of it, Rum Trauben Nuss is sort of like a vastly improved and more slender Chunky bar.

With so much actual booze inside, these seem like the sort of thing you wouldn't be able to find in the US, but here they are, though unfortunately not at Trader Joe's, which offers a smaller selection of less delectable Ritter Sports instead. I think we've found them at World Market and a number of smaller shops with a decent selection of European imports. For example, the Mediterranean shop at Cleveland's West Side Market has them, as does the candy shop on Forbes Avenue in Squirrel Hill, in Pittsburgh. And of course, they are also available online, including from Indian Gift Portal, which I mention because they so accurately describe them as "extremely pleasing." Many other chocolates may be "delectable" or "tasty," but only Rum Trauben Nuss pleases in the extreme. Just so!

My highly refined tastes

I have a fondness for those little packets of dehydrated soup that you dump into a mug and then reconstitute with hot water. In my non-vegetarian childhood my favorite was Lipton's Ring Noodle. I liked to drink off the salty broth and then eat the drained noodle rings with a spoon. Recently I got attached to the Spring Vegetable flavor, which came with little bits of dried carrots and things, and short little noodles, which I consumed in the selfsame way. I have an electric kettle in my office and found a nice mug of Salty Noodly Liquid to be just the thing around three or four o'clock.

Too soon, alas, it disappeared from the shelves. I think these days almost everyone else has switched over to the soups that come in paper cups, but I find them an unsatisfactory substitute. They're much bulkier to store, and are generally more food and less salty beverage. I want my dubious instant soup to come out of a packet and that's that.

I searched the internet for a new source or an alternative, but had no luck. Fortunately S. was cleverer than I, and discovered that the Commonwealth term for this kind of thing seems to be "soup for a cup". What's more, Amazon was selling some fairly promising looking vegetarian ones produced by a company with the supremely unappetizing name of ORGRAN. It's your organic grandma's orgasmic organ! Mmmmm, don't you wish you had some right now?

Anyhow, I promptly ordered two cases, one mixed vegetable and one sweetcorn. No noodles, alas, as ORGRAN seems to specialize in being all things to all vegan, gluten-free, lipidless people, but I tried a packet of the corn and chive variety today and found it good. Well, "good," anyway -- this sort of thing only bears a passing resemblance to actual food, I realize -- but I liked it.

I wouldn't mind finding other brands and varieties, though. Know of any?

Thank you, Dave Regan!

...because I did indeed* order a box of cherimoyas from Calimoya Orchards, and we ate our first one today. Sweet merciful Jesus, the delicious delicious fruit. I was a little worried when I cut it open -- was it going to be mealy or slimy or overripe (as papayas almost always seem to me)? But no, it was going to be very very very very delicious. And also, as Cal mentioned, uncannily like custard. My only regret is that we seem to have only caught the very tail end of the season. At least we still have five more before they're all gone.

*This is all in reference to the discussion in the comments on the lychee post.

Convenience foods

This time of year -- supposedly spring, but so very far from the time when anything edible will come from the ground anywhere nearby -- good frozen vegetables are my friend. We are fortunate to have a Trader Joe's here, and while it 's pretty feeble as a supplier of fresh fruits and vegetables at the best of times, the frozen stuff is excellent. Their frozen whole-leaf spinach is great, as are their French green beans, both unquestionably better than anything I can find fresh these days.

What I'm really digging right now, though, are the Dorot frozen herbs. These products of an Israeli kibbutz come in adorable little plastic trays that make it easy to pop out one or two of the adorable little cubes of frozen basil, or whatever, on demand. If I were a better person, I would have put this stuff up myself last August, but I did not. I hope TJ's starts selling the cilantro as well as the basil and the parsley.

Also good in this vein is the freeze-dried lemon zest I bought on a whim from Penzey's. You reconstitute it by adding water in a 3:1 ratio. I've been plumping up about a tablespoon of the dried stuff at a time and keeping it in a little covered bowl in the fridge to use whenever I want it. This works out very well -- it doesn't dry out before I use it up, there's no denuded lemon to worry about, et cetera. It tastes bright and fresh, as well. You'd think this one would be a weird and unneeded indulgence, for sure, but it turns out that I find it a fine thing to have on hand even when there are whole lemons lying around. Something about the ability to have exactly the amount I want, in combination with not needing to juice the lemon it came from instantly or let it dry up forever, is very relaxing.

Avocado, I love you.

Because we are decadent, we like to have guacamole for dinner whenever we can. I want to share with you our happiest discovery in this vein, namely: Costco's avocados rock the house. As far as I know there is nothing sustainable, ecologically sound, or labor-friendly about them, and certainly nothing local (Costco's own labor policies are very good, however!), but they are damn tasty. I imagine this is mainly the outcome of two factors: (a) they're Hass, and (b) you can get them when they are completely and totally unripe, meaning that they spend their entire stressful time of ripening in the comfort of your home. The result is entirely unblemished, flavorful avocados. Every single freaking time, people! And I've lived in California, so it's not that I have no acquaintance with good avocados, nor with sad, tasteless ones, either.

Help my lunch!

I would very, very much like to find a little plastic caddy for taking some small number of deviled-egg halves (ideally two) in my lunch with me. My lunch goes in a box, so the caddy would not have to protect the halves from the consequences of going upside-down. Can anyone help me find such a thing?

Abba's Market and Grill

Yesterday S. and I had doctor's appointments, the initial consultations to get us set up with our new family practice. Along with the transportation logistics and everything else, there was a gap between the appointments just brief enough that it didn't seem worthwhile to go back to work, so we scouted around the area for lunch. It's not the most attractive part of the world -- shopping centers and strip malls predominate, and we figured we would be settling for Chipotle. But lo and behold, we found Abba's Market instead. It's a Glatt kosher restaurant serving traditional European Jewish foods like matzo ball soup and plenty of Israeli dishes, too. It has an attached deli and an adjunct Chinese (!) food kitchen that serves the same dining area, and the Orthodox community nearby clearly knows and appreciates it.

I don't know why I can't find any fuller profiles of it online -- is it actually that obscure? I can't imagine that it would be, especially because of what took our breath away: the pita bread. They bake their own, and it is fluffy, slightly tangy, and hands down the best I have ever had. In the middle of the day, it seems that the baker just bakes and bakes and bakes and bakes them, tossing them onto the counter until they are three deep all the way along. You can buy them by the sack, I believe. Alas, no camera and so no picture this time; I'll try to take one when I go back for my full physical in May. (I'm afraid I might be too shy, though, to do it until I've been there a few more times.)
Abba's Market & Grill
13937 Cedar Rd
(That is, in Cedar Center)
South Euclid, OH

New age chocolate

Today I purchased a bar of chocolate in a moment of severe weakness. It was an Aveda salon, of all places. It contains essential oils of various things and wonderfully chewy pieces of citrus peel. It promises to provide me with "intelligent nutrition deliciously delivered through organic chocolate" and instructs me to "enjoy entire bar for personal inner calmness." The chocolate itself is quite good though not fantastic, and the combination of flavors and textures is definitely a success.

They charge a steep premium for the inner peace, though, so I am feeling compelled to consume it in very small portions over several days. I am like Charlie of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory fame, only without the grandparents and with micronutrient aromatherapy.