The Hungry Tiger

Spicy happy healthy bok choi and broth

When it is cold and dark outside, my insides want something warm. Traditionally, this means thick soups and sturdy stews and substantial braises. But sometimes, I find the pendulum swings the other way. On those days, I have been making a concoction recommended to me by my genius friend C.

Eating this makes me both warm and full. But it also makes me feel quick and light and keen, rather than like a cozy fat hamster ready to hibernate (which is a fine sensation in its place, just not always what I want).

Like this avocado and quinoa bowl, it is a magic medicinal food that tastes good, feels good while you eat it, and makes you feel good for hours afterward. Steve and I are both besotted. It is in heavy rotation. It is also practically instant to make, which I appreciate on the particularly cold, dark nights when I get home from teaching at eight-thirty or nine.

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.

Pozole verde

This is one of the things you can do with all that salsa verde you just made. (Didn't you?) It's unfussy, lively-tasting but substantial, texturally pleasing, and most likely not something you can get just as easily at a nearby restaurant.

Posole or pozole is, I have been given to understand, the name of both dried, slaked corn (aka hominy, the same stuff that is ground up to make hominy grits) and of soup or stew made of that corn. You can get hominy ready-cooked in a can, or buy it dried and simmer it yourself, which takes some time but hardly any work, and the results are more delightfully toothsome and less can-tasting than the canned kind.

This recipe will make six servings of pozole verde on the more soup-ish end of the spectrum. As you can see from the picture, I opted for fewer servings of something more towards the stew end of the spectrum--easily achievable by the simple method of adding less broth--with plenty of cheese on top. I also threw in some chopped leftover kale, because we had it around. This was a success.

If you already have some cooked hominy and a batch of salsa verde, you can wing it, like so: Use about a cup of salsa for every four to six ounces (in weight, that is) of cooked hominy. You'll also want a splash or two of olive oil; some quantity of additional hot pepper, minced; broth; salt and pepper; and garnishes, which is to say cheese. Then it's all very simple: heat the oil and add the salsa, plus the extra minced pepper. Cook for about ten minutes, then thin with broth. Add the hominy and simmer at least until heated through. You can add leftover greens, or shredded leftover chicken, at this point, too. Add more broth if you want it soupier, cook longer if you want it to be thicker. Add salt and pepper to taste. See, simple!

Terrible lies: On make-ahead dinners, pizza and soup

I have two particular favorite make-ahead dinners that I haven't written about here before. Both of them work by dividing the prep into two parts. In step one, you make the basis for four (!) meals for two or three people at once and pop them into the freezer. Later, you can make each meal-serving into one of several different variations on a theme. There's some real cooking time on the final end in both cases, so you can't just walk in the door and have dinner on the table in fifteen minutes, but surprisingly little fuss or muss. This is especially true because I have my prep down to a science.

So -- here's my plan. I'm going to make at least two posts about each one in the coming week or weeks. Post one will show you how to do the make-ahead bit. Post two will show you what to do with the base once you have it, and I'll try to be as explicit as I can about the approach I use that leaves me with clean counters and few dirty dishes.

The first of these (though not necessarily the first I'll post about! we'll see) is my favorite thin-crust pizza. This pizza comes almost directly from the Figs Restaurant recipe, which you can find online here, though I'll talk in more detail about my process and how it works with my own methods for cooking ahead. I was first alerted to this pizza by this inspiring post at the Grub Report. If you don't want to wait around for my take on it, follow those links and you can get started all on your own!

The second set of dinners is a suite of soups made using Lidia Bastianich's clever method of creating a rich vegetarian base ahead of time, then combining it with any number of delicious and varied star ingredients to create several quite distinctive final dishes. In particular, I like the Savory Potato Broth from Lidia's Family Table. This basic recipe is also available online (as part of this recipe for vegetable soup with rice) if you want to get started without me. But do check back here for the full unabridged story of exactly how we do it in these parts!

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!)

Gazpacho: smooth, cold, and salmon-pink

Oof, it's hot here. At least we've been able to cool our wretched insides with wonderful gazpacho. As promised, I made very happy use of the series of posts on the subject at Lobstersquad.

In the end I went for a sort of bastard cross of Ximena's basic recipe and her "final and best" version. I blush to admit that I followed her suggestion for those who are both chicken-hearted and undeserving, and substituted commercial mayonnaise for the single raw egg of the "very unorthodox, very delicious, by now quite famous gazpacho as served at the old ancestral home" -- but I quailed at the prospect of making the batch three days ahead and then serving it to guests, which is what we did.

Bastardized and cowardly though it may have been, this version was a major hit. The guests positively clamored for a copy of the recipe, always a gratifying response to a new dish. I don't think I've ever had proper, smooth gazpacho of this sort before. The kind we usually get around these parts is chunky, more along the lines of fresh uncooked tomato sauce or salsa in a bowl. That sort of thing can be tasty and refreshing, to be sure, but this was a revelation.

Mine wasn't nearly as glossy smooth and gorgeous as this little cup of soup (isn't that just gorgeous?), but I blended and strained it until it was as smooth as I could possibly get it, and it was worth every bit of the effort, which really wasn't all that considerable, in any case. (I'm thinking that a food mill would come in very handy for this and a number of other things in my kitchen -- I'd love your thoughts about what I should consider when choosing which kind to buy.) We had four little bowls of garnishes to add at the table: tiny cubes of cucumber, minced red onion, chopped hardboiled egg, and little crispy homemade croutons. Lovely in every way. Here's what I did:

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.

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.

My favorite spinach soup

This recipe is adapted from my friend F's adaptation of a recipe that appears in a nice little book called The 125 Best Meatless Pasta Dishes. From the name of this book you will be able to intuit that the soup originally called for some sort of pasta. In fact, it is very pleasant with a handful of pasta stars tossed in near the end. (Do it before you add the milk and then proceed once the stars are cooked through.) But it is also very good without.

To my mind, this approaches the ideal for cream of spinach soup, so if you like that sort of thing at all, give it a try. It is flavorful and fragrant, but also delicate and soothing. A fantastic scent springs up the moment you add the cumin and sherry to the pan. I have in my mind the notion that this combination of flavors would also make a superb creamed spinach dish; maybe I'll give that a try when I restock my supply of ingredients.

I will say that the original recipe calls for fresh spinach, and that I always use frozen. Normally I am not really the type to urge you to substitute something less fresh, but (a) cleaning and de-stemming fresh spinach can be a pain, and if you skip that part this recipe is super quick and easy for a worknight, (b) good-quality frozen spinach that comes in a bag, rather than a frozen block, is really perfectly good for many uses, is perfectly full of nutrients, and can be kept around for weeks on end, until you need it, and (c) you will, after all, be pureeing it to smithereens.

Under the circumstances, I think frozen is just fine. Better than tough old fresh spinach, in fact, I suspect. If you happen to have fresh on hand, of course, feel free to use it.

Oaty: Soup mix-in

Just a little tip, from me to you: a handful of thick rolled oats (not instant!) is an excellent addition to soups involving lentils. Lately I have been making many pots of soup that combine many lentils -- brown lentils, little tiny dark green lentils, masoor dal (aka red lentils), toor dal, and urad dal -- with oatmeal. (Also with the usual other things: onions, garlic, carrots, cumin, tomato, and a splash of vinegar.) The oatmeal adds body, of course, and retains just enough integrity to provide the tiniest bit of chew. Very nice.

By the way, you should really poke around the site that my "urad dal" links to, because it is full of such fabulous gems of prose as:

For us at Laxmi Toor dal, Picking up each grain is akin to picking up a diamond from a mine. Only the best Toor produce is acquired through our in-house international trading house. It is subsequently checked at our laboratory before the processing stage. It is the sheer expertise to identify and consistently procure the best grains from around the world, which leads us to offer an unmatched assurance of superior taste and nourishment in each grain that we produce.

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?

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.

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.

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.