weekend update, may 18, 2014

“Common sense is what tells us the earth is flat.” 

― Albert Einstein

Common sense,

and  a few highways in west Texas.

  Greetings from the western half of the great state of Texas, where the major export is  flat. You thought is was oil? Nope, that dried up long ago.

These days, this thing drills for flat.

That prime west Texas flat is pumped into barrels and shipped to construction projects all over the world; dynamite is so Twentieth Century. Modern project managers know that there's no more efficient way to turn a steep path into a level road

Than by soaking it in a few thousand
gallons of Texas flat.

But we weren't there for the scenery, or even the food (though there was plenty of both) We were there to spend a day or three celebrating the achievements of a happy hoard of  bright young things- one in particular. Fortunately, there had been one or two eager conversations about shoes prior to the event, or spotting one solitary girl in a swarm of identically capped and gowned graduates would have been nearly impossible, even for her parents:

As Cinderella was once overheard saying,
Never discount the importance of distinctive footwear.

The trip to Lubbock meant that some of the terrific dinners I was so excited about trying this week had to fall by the proverbial wayside. Some, but not all.  The great thing is, all the dinners that did make it on to the home plates were super easy, inexpensive and worth eating again.

Take for example this Shrimp Cobb Salad:

Simple and satisfying. And shrimpy.
and what's another s word....
Summery.  And speedy. 

But the real standouts in a week of good food started here:

Gnocchi with Shrimp, asparagus and pesto.
just wow.

If you've never played around with gnocchi, this recipe is a great introduction to its comfort-food versatility. Gnocchi is...well, it's like this:

A pasta made with mashed potatoes.
What a perfect concept.

I had only ever tried it topped with red sauce and cheese before my friend Katherine kindly sent me this recipe. As if that wasn't kindness enough, she pointed out a real time saver- any time a recipe asks you to buy basil, pine nuts and Parmesan, you might as well save yourself some time and money and buy some pesto. I did, and it meant that this wonderful dinner came together in about 20 minutes.
 And if you have 2 hours or so and you're craving lasagna, by all means, spend an afternoon with the holy grail of lasagna recipes, America's Test Kitchen Meat Lasagna. But if you're craving lasagna and you have about 25 minutes, try this:

 Skillet Lasagna
faster and tastier that baking a frozen lasagna.
I am not making that up.

It was terrific. But so was this: 

Chickpea and pasta pesto soup.
without the pasta.
Quick and light and perfect for all year round.

A really good soup, even if the ingredient list led to a disturbing observation.

Have you ever noticed how many babies are on the shelves of your local grocery store?

 In this kitchen alone, there are cans of baby corn, and baby carrots, frozen petite peas and baby lima beans.... Really, it was a great soup. Yet I found myself wondering...

Where are the grown ups of all these vegetables,
and why do they allow us to eat so many of their young?

Did you know that baby corn is really baby corn? Although (thank goodness) baby carrots are really just small grown up carrots....It was on the tip of my fingers to ask the internet if the baby lima beans in tonight's soup were really the babies of mature lima beans, when common sense prevailed.

Which is sort of a pity, because  I'm still wondering if there are adult lima beans and what they look like.

What do ya wanna bet that before too long, uncommon curiosity will triumph over common sense?

I hope it's that way for you this week.

I hope that when common sense tells you 

that your earth is flat and you are going over the edge-

 when common sense tells you

to panic or despair,

I hope your uncommon sense prevails.

I hope that your uncommon sense

shows you the way through,

and the way around.

And leads you straight toward

the wonders that lie

at the edge of the known world.

weekend update

We have held the notion that a person that is a little different from us is somehow strange or bizarre, to be distrusted or loathed. Yet an extraterrestrial visitor, 

looking at the differences among human beings, would find those differences trivial

 compared to the similarities.” 

Carl Sagan

While searching through the archived files of my brain box this week, I came upon the yellowed  scraps of this old argument:

Maybe you're the sort or professional or armchair anthropologist or psychologist who's pegged out firm territory on this philosophical scale;  if you are, feel free to offer insight to those of us whose convictions are less certain. My own ideas slide back and forth on this spectrum as energetically as if I were a confused skater on a banana peel covered roller rink.

It's just that I was raised to avoid voicing strong opinions.
No, maybe it's just my nature to be indecisive.
Or maybe both. Or maybe neither.
Oh whatever.

The thing is of course, that we can never (without doing  long term and illegal-in-most-countries studies on small children) really know the exact proportions of recipe that resulted in each us, can we?
 All we can know for sure is that
1. There are a lot of different kinds of weird in this world

and eventually, most of them
will show up for dinner.

and
2. Somehow, the where of you and the when of you shape, in a profound way, the who of you.
This is perhaps why people who are well-aged and well-traveled are so very interesting: maybe the where of you expands with travel, while the when of you expands with time, causing the who of you to expand too.
 In a good way.
And maybe sometimes in a not so good way: I have begun to notice that aging, and visiting places that specialize in great food, also has a way of expanding the, er...what of me:

Me, last Wednesday:
"Wow! Yes! I think I need to try that pastry! and that
warming sugary caffeinated beverage! and that lovely desserty thing!
and that  beautiful fried looking thing!"

Yep, that's how it was. And I didn't even have to hop a plane. I only had to hop in my car and drive 20 minutes from my home to a suburban Asian market. Which happened to be next to a Korean bakery. Where I bought almost every previously untasted item that the boy behind the bakery counter told me I'd like.
 But it was a quest for kimchi that had prompted this trip, so after a shrimp spring roll and a sesame ball and half a rice cake and a bite of pork pastry, I headed to the grocery shop.
Where I felt a little,well, foreign:

"excuse me, um, I'm looking for, um, kimchi?"

Note this, kimchi seekers: If you're lucky enough to have an Asian grocery near you, be prepared for an aisle of pickled everything. Picked tofu, pickled quail eggs, pickled lotus root, pickled peppers, pickled freaky things you never heard of.

The pickled cabbage also known as kimchi is not on that aisle.

Me, reading labels up and down the aisle for twenty minutes
without spotting anything kimchi.
I eventually had to (gulp) ask.

As it turned out, the pickled stuff of other cultures is unnervingly like the pickled stuff in my own culture- sometimes it's on the shelves of an aisle, and sometimes, for no discernible reason,

the pickled stuff is in the fridge. Go figure.

This, when kimchi allows itself to be bagged as well as hunted, is what it looks like:

And this is what it looks like when it's stirfried into what would've been Shrimp and kimchi fried rice, except somehow I left an Asian grocery store without remembering to buy a bag of rice, so dinner became Shrimp and kimchi fried rice noodles:

Absolutely, totally worth the hunt!
plus, baby bok choy for less than $1 a pound!!!
(Beaut new Japanese china plate too, isn't it? Thanks mom!)

No kidding! Kimchi is amazing! What a find! It's fantastic flavor makes any other saucing or seasoning welcome, but unnecessary. There's a possibility, according to the internet, that kimchi may be in the refrigerated produce or deli section of major chain grocers. That would be great, because a jar of kimchi in the fridge means that dinner is only a bowl of leftover rice, some protein pieces and a few vegetable bits away.

The Thai coconut ribs were a plateful of pros and cons:
con: one has to remember to do the hard work(cutting apart the ribs, steaming them, blending the marinade) the day before serving.
pro: the hard work all happens the day before serving.
con: the marinade is a little fiddly and time consuming
pro: the marinade is fantastic
con: the ribs have to be steamed before they overnight in the marinade.
pro: the ribs are pre-steamed, so there's no guesswork about doneness once they're on the grill.
Here's what they look like:

Honestly, all the cons were forgotten at  first bite.
This is a seriously wonderful recipe.

Bobby Flay's shrimp and grits was a wonderful cheesy indulgence:

But it just seemed so....complicated. Any of you native shrimp and grit-o-philes, is this down home country comfort food really supposed to be this complex, or did I get it all wrong? 

Funny, I've lived in the South for nearly half my life, yet there are times when the customs and cooking of Southern America still seem foreign to me.

But that's okay. 

That icky fish-out-of-water feeling is one

that every human knows.

Still, I hope this week, you find it easy to embrace the unfamiliar-

that new classroom, the new job, those new people,

with the sort of curiosity that cancels fear;

 the sort of compassion

that draws you near

to the out-of-place others around you, 

and the sort of courageous grace that helps you say, "It's alright,

I'm a bit of a stranger here myself."

Menus, August 20, 2013

All things are strange which are worth knowing.” 

 Catherynne Valente

My friend Marsha's favorite son (who is coincidentally her only son) has, at the request of the United States Navy, taken leave of his Texas home and moved to Japan. You may already know this, but all children are born equipped with a powerful gravitational force field, and when they move across the planet the world's axis tips irresistibly toward them. This is why we parents of far-away adult-type children count ourselves lucky to live in a time when we can so easily share the far-off experiences of the peeps we love.

Need an example? Just look at this!!! A picture Marsha's son sent her from his recent trip to a grocery store in Japan:

Octopus tentacles!!!

Release the Kraken?!?  Helheim no!
 We're gonna cut that big boy into chunks
and shrink-wrap him onto styrofoam!

The absolute ordinariness of that grocery store cephaloshelf  blows my mind.  I mean, what if the people who frequent that shop don't even know how weird it is to have styro trays of tentacles lying about!!! Because it is absolutely, alien from another planet weird!!!  In fact, (and if your brain explodes easily, you may want to ensure that no one is close enough to catch any mind spatter) a traditional Japanese diet includes very little dairy, so what if to those in that distant grocery store, the sight of this grocery cheese counter-

is the weird, foreign, gross and smelly
equivalent of octopus arms?
(mind officially blown.)
 

What's alien here, is somewhere else's normal. And vice versa. All of one's concepts of what's weird and foreign and strange are so....relative. Which is not to suggest that one's relatives are weird, or foreign, or even that they're relatively strange.

Although someone's related to these guys,
and it may be you. Or even me.
Hmmm. I should call my mother....

All of this thinking about how many different normals exist around the world and how weird they all are to each other has made me hungry. It's also left me chagrined by how little I know of the diverse food that's available right here in this city. The Indian and Asian markets that are a half an hour's drive from me are intriguing, but I wander them in bewildered fascination, way too shy to the staff any of a hundred questions I have about how to use (or even pronounce!) all that amazing food. Thankfully the internet, friend of shy persons everywhere, has come to the rescue with a few definitions and a wealth of recipes! A little knowledge, I've heard, is a dangerous thing, and now that I have a little knowledge, let's see what kitchen havoc I can wreak this week, shall we?

Wednesday: Rice noodles with kale and broccoli

This will be a one dish meal around here, but if you have a couple of chicken breasts wandering aimlessly about, by all means catch them, cube  them up, saute them in a little olive oil (add a bit of sesame oil if you have it) and toss them in the bowl.

I'm learning that half a bag or half a bunch of kale is plenty for the two of us, so there's a half-bunch of kale salad scheduled for Friday.

Thursday: Thai coconut ribs and avocado and mango salad 

 This salad was one of last summer's favorite finds, and the ribs look wonderful even though Thai curry's pretty new around this house. There's no use planning for leftovers of this combo- I have a strong hunch there won't be any.

Friday:Shrimp and grits and Life altering kale salad 

Believe it or not, shrimp and grits, that staple of the South, is a dish this southern transplant has yet to either prepare or taste. I'm going with the Bobby Flay version, because he's from the South. So, you know, it's bound to be authentic.

And yes, the restaurant that originated this salad really named it that. I'm skeptical, naturally. How exactly can a salad alter one's life? I suppose if one were quite hungry, or in dire need of leafy greens.....still, Bon Appetit named it one of the best dishes of 2012, so it's worth a try.

Saturday: Pork Adobado and   black bean avocado and corn salad

Our eldest son, currently in New Mexico, told me weeks ago about Adobado, a method of slow cooking meat in a paste of dried chilies (he had to sound it out for me one syllable at a time and I still misspelled it in the search bar). The department of learn-from-my-mistakes issues the following side dish warning: this is one of those salads that can multiply itself in the bowl until there's enough for a marauding horde, or at least three teenagers. If you're not cooking for teenagers or any other sort of marauder, be careful about winging it with the quantities. For the two of us, I'll be reducing the quantities by half. 

Sunday: Shrimp and kimchi fried rice 

Kimchi. Now that is one foreign sounding, strange looking thing. Which I would not have the courage to try, if not for our youngest son and his fiance, who like it so much that she's even learned how to make kimchi from scratch! I'm going to just dip my toes in the kimchi pool by picking up a jar at Trader Joe's. 

I know so little about so many things! The difference between Thai curry and Indian curry, the differences between Thai, Korean, Japanese and Chinese food- and I haven't even begun to explore what I don't know about Africa! There are foods of my own homeland that are still foreign to me! It's a little scary!

But maybe a little less scary after this week. 

Because, well, I want you to know that I think it matters.

I think maybe it matters every time you open your life, even in small ways,

to something (and especially someone),

new and different.

I think it matters every time you welcome a stranger

with all the grace and curiosity and courage

your extraordinary soul has to offer.

Because maybe, just maybe,

when we embrace the differences that divide some of us,

 this world is a little less of lonely planet

for all of us.

Menus, July 31, 2013

 "Wisdom is knowing when to have rest, when to have activity, and how much of each to have. 

Finding them in each other - activity in rest and rest in activity - is the ultimate freedom.” 

Ravi Shankar

The thing was, I was a little tired. And I had too much cilantro.
What to do? (or what to not do?)
Firmly on the prongs of this dilemmic duo, I did what any expert decision maker would do:

I slept on it.

When I'd recovered from my nap, It struck me for the kabillionth time that waiting until 4:30 to figure out what's for dinner is even more tiresome than meal planning. Then it hit me that if I wanted to give myself a rest, I had better get to work.

Not to worry-
These little epiphanies strike so often,
they hardly even leave a mark anymore.

The cookbooks of the internet fell open at the words "easy" and "cilantro", releasing a week's worth of recipes that may provide a little rest to both a post-vacation body and a post-vacation bank account. The pics of these dinners may raise reasonable doubt about their ease, but have no fear, the bright colors of summer produce in these simple salads prove the axiom that my friend Carol taught me decades ago:
 Presentation is everything.
No, not this sort of presentation:

THIS sort of presentation:

look closely-
this is really just fruit stuck with vanilla yogurt to a slice of fruit.
With a drizzling of pretension on the side.
Impressive. 

Let's chop up those lovely summer veggies, cook some chicken in a lovely sauce, throw it all on a plate and call it midsummer awesome, shall we?

Wednesday:  Rodrigo style fish  and zucchini slaw

Here's where the cilantro comes in. Or, more precisely, goes out. There's  a real surplus of the stuff in the fridge right now- all because last Saturday at Farmer's Markey, cilantro was unbelievably cheap, so two bunches joined in the effort to restock our produce drawers. I had forgotten though, that our produce drawers weren't entirely empty.  Lurking in those lonely spaces were a half bag of carrots, a few fossilizing limes, an apple- and two bunches of cilantro.
I'm going to make a really big batch of this fantastic sauce, freeze some, and use spoonfuls of it in the dressing of Thursday's salad, and on Saturday's avocados.

Thursday: Shrimp, tomato, and avocado salad

Sorry, no link for this one- just cooked shrimp, halved grape tomatoes and chunks of avocados tossed in a dressing of plain yogurt, olive oil, and the Rodrigo sauce. There are innumerable great dressing options here: lime+ honey+ olive oil,  yogurt + mayo+ chili powder+ cumin, or olive oil+ sugar+white wine vinegar+cilantro.  I'll be going with a cilantro-y option, because, well, there's a field of it dying in the fridge....




Friday: Maple bourbon chicken and Kale and apple slaw

I'll be grilling enough chicken for tonight, tomorrow night, and some spur of the moment chicken salad for Saturday or Sunday lunch. The bourbon in the recipe forms a combination marinade/grilling sauce but if you prefer not to cook with bourbon, or don't want to buy a whole bottle for one recipe, consider buying a mini bourbon at a liquor shop, or leaving it out altogether. The internet will try to tell you that vanilla is an acceptable substitute, but that's probably only true in the bourbon dessert case.

Saturday: Chicken stuffed avocados and black bean and corn salad

I'll be using leftover chicken instead of the beautiful pulled chicken in the recipe, though it's possible that the chopped up leftovers will get a coating of this recipe's spice mix.  The Rodrigo sauce, or at least a handful or two of cilantro, will make an appearance tonight too. Isn't that salad pretty? Deconstruct it, and you'll see it's only a can of black beans, some corn (let's use frozen, shall we?) and some peppers. Since dinner is floating in an avocado boat, I'll be leaving them out of the salad. The avocado boats are, for those of you who are in the know, paleo. I am not in the know, but I am curious. I intend to find out how  the word paleo has extended itself out of anthropology labs and into the kitchen, and what it's doing there.

Sunday: cucumbers with ginger and asian noodle salad

I'm wonder what would happen if instead of standing at the chopping board slicing fresh ginger, I used the rest of that jar of sushi ginger that's in the back of the fridge... worth a try, maybe. Rice noodles are easy to find in this metropolis of ours, so we'll make this a gluten free week by using them.


Time will tell, if these ideas are indeed the easy, inexpensive things I hope they are.
I hope too, that whether you're feeding yourself
or a crowd of people you love-  in a restaurant, in a kitchen, or in a car,
that this week brings you the rest you need,
and the work you wish for.
I hope that whether you're busy or quiet, travelling or still,
alone or in company
that once or twice
you'll pause, and realize with a smile that even though things aren't anywhere near easy,
you are, remarkably, unbelievably,

completely at ease.

Menus, June 19, 2013

“My father taught me to work, but not to love it. I never did like to work, and I don't deny it. I'd rather read, tell stories, crack jokes, talk, laugh -- anything but work.” 

― Abraham Lincoln

It's no secret that some of the men I find most interesting aren't especially... lively. Yeats, Eliot, Carroll, Lincoln, Churchill, Lewis...in a vernacular past, I could've called them gone, man, real gone, and been correctly assessing both their coolness and their state of aliveness.

Though sometimes, a great mind ages well
even after it's dead.

One of the things I find most fascinating about these guys, besides the fact that they all walked around with their pockets full of pretty words, is that they all accomplished so much stuff- even when there wasn't much stuff they felt like accomplishing.

The ability to work hard when you don't want to. It's a quality that I'm a little in awe of, whether it's possessor is dead or alive.

 Because I am not (often) like that.

You know the amount of intense effort required to inhale a really thick milkshake through a straw?

I think that should count as exercise.

And I spent this morning mentally inventing a teeny teeninesie set of weights

no, even tinier than that.

small enough to connect  to the back and forth muscles of my eyes, so that I could get in a good workout by curling up and reading a novel.

No, darling, nothing's wrong.
That's just my eyeballs working up a sweat.

 Summer in Texas kicked  into high gear just as our air-conditioner temporarily conked out, causing all my natural laid-back lassitude to ratchet up, er, down a notch or two. One result has been inevitable- a sort of heat induced langor.....

"Well, let's see.... No, I haven't moved much...
But from 9 til 12, I was fabulous. For lunch I was awesome,
Then from 1 til 4 I was mildly amazing.
And of course all day I've been super hot.
Golly, it's exhausting being me. I need a rest."

Another result of addition of swelter to sluggish? The arrival of summer salad days- a few weeks earlier than I'd planned, true, but it's the thermometer, not the calendar, that dictates these things. From now till the temperature returns to the friendly side of ninety, salads and grilled goodies will dominate our weekly dinner line up.

Wednesday: Grilled Chicken breast and  sweet potato salad

I'll be use the old reliable honey salt chicken brine here and pound them to an even thickness before throwing them on the grill. The salad shares this virtue with most salads: it can be prepped in little bits throughout the day or even stirred together in the morning, while everything's cooler-ish.

Thursday: Salmon and summer squash in parchment 
I'm absolutely smitten with these fun little cooking parcels, and there are more combinations of parchment wrapped goodness clicking through my mind than I can count. Williams-Sonoma was kind enough to include  a whole page of ideas in their summer magazine. (Don't be put off by the words 'en papillotte', ok? Sometimes I think recipe writers memorized the Red Queen's advice in 'Through the Looking Glass': "Speak in French if you can't think of the English for a thing".) I think I may spoon on a little of this amazing seasoned butter too-

Friday: Asian Salmon cakes and Tomato and Basil Salad

The leftover salmon will turn into these lovely little morsels, and I'm hoping to find a farmer's market and score some tomatoes deserving of a starring role. The orzo in the salad recipe is rice shaped pasta, so in the interest of gluten consciousness, I'll be using actual rice shaped brown rice. Tortellini would be great too, or couscous or quinoa.

Saturday: Shrimp and Avocado salad and Gazpacho
If I buy avocados on Wednesday, they should be ripe in time for this cool and delicious salad. Both the soup and the salad will be prepped first thing in the morning and tucked in the fridge- though I'll keep the avocados pretty by waiting til the last minute to peel and dice them. That way, dinner's waiting for us in case we decide to check out some cool Summer Saturday thing.

Sunday: Steak Gyros and Greek Salad

I've some leftover grilled steak in the freezer, and the salad is a snap, so I might use up some creative energy and the week's wheat allowance by seeing whether or not the legendary no-knead bread will make the sort of knock out pita wraps I think it will. Hey! I wonder what will happen if I bake those glorious little dough circles on the grill? This is an idea worthy of experimentation! Who knows? I may even give a gluten free batch another go.

As I gear up to get groceries, I want you to know-
That I hope by some summer alchemy
the things you must do this week become
things you want to do.
And that whether you're lost in the woods
or lost in wonder-
Whether you're chasing fires or chasing fireflies,
Whether you're busy mending or busy making,
I hope that once or twice this week this week you'll realize
(with a happy surprise!)
that the work engaging you is exactly everything

you'd rather be doing.