More Food that Matches My House: Zucchini Michoacan Style

Before I get into this tasty recipe adapted from My Mexico by Diana Kennedy, I have a confession. My name is Leslie and I have a virulent form of Contrary Maryness.

When free of outside influences, I am fairly agnostic about most things, able to see multiple points of view. But put me in close proximity to someone with a strongly-held opinion, or worse, several people strongly holding the same opinion, and I reflexively swing to the opposite side.

It’s so automatic that it almost feels physical, as though trying to pry my mouth open and utter the words, “I agree...” would be like trying to ask my DNA to re-arrange itself on the spot.

It’s annoying and obnoxious and I know it. But at this point, I just have to accept it about myself, and at best, try my damnedest to keep my mouth shut instead of always acting on my contrary impulses.

So right now the contrary impulse I am trying to suppress is Machismo in the Face of Tweeness.

I love Seattle, I love it so much I have two entire sites dedicated to it. But it is a different culture than I am used to. It’s very...gentle. Gentle sensibilities, gentle senses of humor, gentle language. It's like a J.Jill ad in the form of a metropolis.

It’s a town where things are not “good” or “great!” or “delicious” but rather they are “lovely.” Lovely lovely lovely. When you enter the city limits, they make you surrender all other positive adjectives and give you a laminated card that says “LOVELY.” And everyone just waves them around all the livelong day.

Okay, not really, but that’s sometimes what it feels like. And what’s so wrong with that? Nothing. It’s nice. It’s, yes, lovely.What kind of grumpy buzzkill with two thumbs could possibly have a problem with that? This guy. Cuz when you suffer from Contrary Maryness, the gentle loveliness just makes every foul-mouthed stevedore impulse you already have throb like a tension headache.

But then I started noticing that this gentleness was actually not just limited to Seattle. This kind of twee softness seems to be becoming an actual Thing, like a lifestyle that is being marketed to. Example: this Prius ad:

That thing is so goddamn twee I have sprained muscles trying to hit the mute button on my remote to avoid having that cutesy-poo infection of a sound take over my brains.

Once I started noticing it, it seems that in general grown adults are being marketed to as though they are...toddlers. Rounded edges, pastel colors, tweedly-dee music.The ubiquity of it arouses every Contrary Mary impulse and makesme want to get a motorcycle and run over a stuffed animal with it.

Anyway, this big preamble is mainly to establish that I am currently feeling very anti-cutesy-poo. This makes it even more shameful to admit that my entire house is color-coordinated like I’m some sort of six-year old. It's just tremendously not macho. Look at it.

I mean, it looks like the home of the target audience for that Prius ad.

But I just really like green. It reminds me of trees and I like trees. And I happened to be moving in and buying stuff right during the heyday of what this New Yorker article called “wasabi green.”

And so that’s bad enough, twee enough, if it weren’t for the artificial insertion of an extra recipe below, but this would be the third post in a row where the pictures of my food match my house, as though my cutesy-poo little commitment to a color theme continues into my mouth and down into my digestive tract.

But I promise that it’s all just a coincidence. I mainly am posting this zucchini recipe because Saturday is “Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Day”. So it’s really just a public service in case you are on the receiving end of some sneakiness. Or, if you are the sneaker, not the sneakee, why not print out a copy of the recipe and include it. It’s the least you could do.

I made this dish for my Mexican Memorial Day party and it was a big hit. I’ve made it again since then and it continued to satisfy. It’s an excellent way to use up a lot of zucchini, and keeps fairly well for a few days. I eat it over long-grain brown rice, but it's also tasty on its own.

And, as mentioned, just for a little accent color, I’m going to also include a recipe below adapted from the same book: Botana de Papas Locas which translates to “Crazy Potato Snack.” They'd make a good little vegetarian meal together.

Zucchini Michoacan Style via Diana Kennedy

Adapted from My Mexico by Diana Kennedy.

• 2 Tbl olive oil
• 2 lbs zucchini, trimmed and diced
• ½ cup water
• 1 medium white onion, chopped
• 4 garlic cloves, chopped
• 1/3 cup chopped cilantro (stems okay)
• 3 poblano chiles OR 1 jalapeno+1 green bell pepper, charred (can do this under broiled or over flame on as stove), peeled, deveined, seeded and roughly chopped
• 1 cup sour cream
• ½ cup queso anejo OR queso fresco, but queso anejo strongly preferred
• S&P to taste

1. Heat oil in large dutch oven, add zucchini and sprinkle with salt. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally for about five minutes. Should be cooked but not soft.
2. Blend together the water, onion, garlic, cilantro and peppers. Blend until smooth.
3. Add liquid to pan, stirring well. Cover and cook over medium heat for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add more water if it seems dry, but Kennedy cautions it should be “moist, but not too juicy.”
4. Stir in sour cream, simmer for 5 minutes more. Taste/season, sprinkle with queso, serve.

Refrigerator Pickles: Well, Why Not?

There is an episode of the Simpsons with a relatively brief joke that has become my go-to metaphor for getting blocked by too many things.

Montgomery Burns goes to the Mayo Clinic for his first check-up in ages, where they have some rather alarming news for him.

Here, why don’t I let Wikipedia do the work for me? Crowd-sourcing, it’s what all the writers are doing these days. If it’s good enough for the New York Times, it’s good enough for me.  

"Burns discovers that he not only has all existing diseases (including pneumonia, juvenile diabetes and a little bit of hysterical pregnancy), but thousands of diseases the doctors apparently have just discovered in him. However, the sheer amount of diseases prevents any one disease from actually doing harm to him (a condition the doctors call 'Three Stooges Syndrome)."

My tendency towards excess often runs directly into my separate tendency towards getting confused into immobility by excess.  So I get a lot of mileage out of this imagery.

I am at that point with posts for this site. I have a few posts that just need some editing to be ready, a bunch of dishes I’ve photographed that I could write about, and some new recipes to post that can then be organized into Menu Ideas. I also keep trying to develop a narrative or some kind of structure (salads! eating meals!) and then that doesn’t happen in an orderly fashion and I become even more confused.

So when trapped on the phone today for work I edited some photos and decided to maybe just start sticking some stuff up here regardless of the narrative tidiness.

In this case: Refrigerator Pickles. Mainly: why not?

I mean, pickles are actually kind of expensive for what they are (mainly water).  You have to imagine that what you are really paying for is the cost of transporting heavy glass jars of liquid.

And, it turns out, refrigerator pickles are pretty easy and quite tasty. Summertime is cucumber season, so if you, like me, have never tried making fridge pickles, I say go for it.

The recipe I tried was this one for Dill Chips from Martha Stewart. I didn’t have the dill seed so I skipped that, but think I’ll use them in the future for even more flavor.

The process is simple, salt the cukes for a bit to get rid of some of the excess water and rinse them.

Put them with the dill weed in a jar, boil the other ingredients, and pour it all over the vegetables.  Stick it in the fridge and in a week you have made pickles, my friend.

By using the fridge, you don’t have to deal with the frightening elements of botulism. (Recently went to a canning class where I was terrified out of my Laura Ingalls Wilder dreams of a dark and cool root cellar with walls lined with shelves full of preserves. Any activity that requires your attention to never wander, like neurosurgery, or stunt driving or, apparently, canning, is off the list of options for this space cadet.)

You have to wait a little while for them to be ready, and yes, fishing them out of the dill-filled brine is a bit like navigating a particularly sea-weedy beach.

But delicious, and with a least a mild frisson of Handy Homesteading.

I especially enjoyed these pickles on a sandwich with sharp light Irish cheddar, some avocado, mustard and tomato.  They were also great diced in an egg salad as a more flavorful alternative to the usual celery.

Satisfaction is an Investment

A couple months ago, Sarah was over for a visit while I was cooking.  She had just made some seitan from scratch, and we talked about fake meat and my history of a disappointing experience cooking with it. 

If I buy something that is highly seasoned and processed, the fake meat equivalent of a Dorito, then I enjoy it just fine, as I do all junk food.

But if I took something in its basic form – say, plain tofu – and tried to cook with it, I invariably seemed to end up with that kind of thin-tasting, unsatisfying meal that, until recently, had been the hallmark of cooking for myself.  

Prior to…well, really, the learning experience that has been this blog, most of my cooking experience has resulted in an end product that has been as hearty and satisfying to eat as a stick of celery.

Is it food?  Sure.  It has volume, texture, some kind of flavor.  But on the Hearty Satisfaction Scale, it’s about a 2.

Maybe it is all a question of umami. 

While I do eat seafood now, my cooking life has always been primarily vegetarian and often lo-cal focused.  When you cook primarily vegetarian/lo-cal food, it’s just not…automatic that what you produce will click with the savory/heart/umami receptors in your brain. 

This is what cooking very often seemed to result in for me.  It’s also one of the reasons why – despite my interest – I never stuck with it until I had a blog. At least with a blog, I could write about my failures and feel creatively fulfilled, even if the food was one big vat of celery-stick disappointment.

Until the past couple of months.  Something has happened with my cooking.  I think it started right after the Thanksgiving Thanksgiving Dessertaganza.

The President of the Debate Club and her hubs were here right after the New Year.  She’d last been here at the end of September.  I cooked for her then and I cooked for her this trip and she could taste a difference.  

The story of Mama Cass getting hit on the head with a pipe and expanding her vocal range is most likely apocryphal.  But I feel like the story, even if it’s untrue, is an illustration of a truth, which is that sometimes you toil and toil and make no progress, then suddenly experience tremendous progress that just feels like it happened TO you as opposed to being the result of any work on your part.

I think this maybe has happened with my cooking, some kind of development that, like most things in my life, I unthinkingly stumbled into, got it to work and then retroactively articulated it to myself. 

The epiphany: to a person with my sorts of taste buds, (ta da!) satisfaction is an investment.

What does that mean?  Basically that if, like me, in order to feel satisfied you’re going to need some richness, some umami action, some depth and body to your food, it isn’t going to come cheap.

It could require fat: butter or oil.  And so, if calories are a concern, this means you are spending them on satisfaction and ergo won’t have as much currency left over for quantity. 

This is an important distinction for me, because, as I wrote about recently, sometimes the main thing I do want is quantity.  I want a big bowl of something, not a little sliver of savory or a ramekin of richness.  I am hungry in such a way that only an actually large physical volume of food will make me feel satisfied.  So I need a bunch of vegetables with a little bit of something on top of it, or something else.

But if what I’m looking for is that complex umami action, then that I could eat my way through that bowl of vegetables and feel like I missed the boat.  So if that’s what my hankering is for, maybe it is the time to spend the calories on butter.

At other times, the investment is time, as in the case of making stock.

I have the patience of a cranky toddler.  In my cooking world of days past, making stock – 45 minutes for ONE ingredient in something else??? – seemed beyond the pale.  God just buy a box of it.  Then I found Mark Bittman's Roasted Vegetable Stock.   (His version is here, my go-to version with a couple of tweaks is below.)

It’s actually even more time-consuming than a regular stock in that one must roast the veggies for around 45 minutes.  But for some reason, Bittman’s description convinced me to try it once, and after that, I was convinced to continue making it all the time.

Where previous all-veggie soups or stews started out with the highest of hopes, only to end up watery-tasting and being eaten out of sheer duty only, things I made with this stock were satisfying in a way I previously associated only with eating out. 

Ergo, now it’s a staple in the Three-Bowls kitchen.  I make and freeze it on a regular basis. 

One of my tweaks from Bittman’s original to double the mushrooms.  I don’t feel like it makes it particularly mushroomy, just that it adds to the overall savoryness.  I use it as a base for almost every vegetarian soup or stew that I make, cook grains in it if there isn’t a lot of flavoring in the recipes, etc. 

If you cook a lot of vegetarian food and also find yourself slightly underwhelmed by your home-cooked stuff compared to processed food or what you eat out, try this and see if it might make a little difference.  While it is a time commitment, this cranky toddler finds it worth it.  

Tofu photo via Flickr user Rick.

Scallion Pancake Dipping Sauce aka Condiment Crank

From a recent episode of A&E's Intervention.  This is a woman named Dawn.  She is high on meth and talking about voodoo and bad things that happen in jars.

I watched this episode right as I started on my third batch of Scallion Pancake Dipping Sauce, the previous batch having been compulsively and quickly eaten, and I looked at the sauce in alarm:

Scallion Pancake Dipping Sauce is also made in a jar.

(The darkness of the sauce gives you a clue as to the abyss into which you are about to be sunk)

Well, okay, that's just some narrative tidiness, actually I make it in a bowl or a big measuring cup and STORE it in a jar, but you know, me and Dawn, we're really just taking some poetic license to communicate something about some substances we have some strong feelings about.  What we're just trying to say is IT WILL OWN YOUR SOUL.

Or maybe not.  Maybe the combo of pungent soy sauce and rice vinegar, the pingy tang of the scallions, the kick of the red pepper flakes, the brightness of the ginger and the subtle nuttiness of the toasted sesame seed won't be perceived, by your brain, to be a heady and addictive elixir.  

I mean, to each his own, but I'll just say this: most of the time, I'm writing about ice cream or dessert here.  Does it seem in character for someone like me to be saying regularly: "Hey, let's have some brown rice and broccoli for breakfast?"  Or, how about that on one of the rare opportunities I have to cook for people, the thing I always want to do, I'm glad my friend has to leave early because that means more Dipping Sauce for me?

People's behavior changes when they get into the hard stuff.

And it's not like there weren't signs of trouble before.  Here's my quick history with the stuff, a la Intervention's usual montage:

When I lived in NYC, I was a casual Scallion Pancake and Dipping Sauce user.  They were cheap, they were vegan or so the restaurant staff liked to reassure me.  

I think one of my first attempts to figure out how to reverse engineer a recipe was that sauce.  I am baffled now by what I must have done to try to figure it out.  There were no foodies around then, no google searching.  I probably attempted to ask and got no info from the staff and back then, it never would have occurred to me to endlessly pester random cooking people info like I have no shame about now.  But I tried, I failed, and it added to my underlying belief that irresistible tastiness is something you leave the house for.

Then I moved back to Phoenix, which was not only a geographic desert, but also a Scallion Pancake desert! None to be seen anywhere that I could find.  Maybe not enough Mandarin-cooking folk had yet settled there to start a restaurant.   So my desire went dormant.

Moved to Seattle, found Snappy Dragon, I returned to being a casual user.  The expense and logistical challenges of getting it kept it from turning into a big habit.

Then we had a Chinese-themed book club, and while we were ordering from SD, I figured, hey, why not attempt my own Scallion Pancakes and Dipping Sauce while we wait for it to get here.

My pancakes, not so good, but my sauce I was pretty pleased with.  Some of the gals mentioned they liked it better than Judy Fu's, but I thought, well, you know, they might have just been being polite.

I wanted to try the pancakes again, so I did, realizing SD has a Scallion Pancake recipe on their website (and here's my version below with pics of the method). This second batch of pancakes were more successful.  

I tweaked the Dipping Sauce just a bit, and had a bunch left over after the pancakes were done, and so I tried some on brown rice.

And that's where the trouble started.  Now I can't stop. I can't stop.  I mean, I guess all it does is encourage me to eat a simple meal of steamed broccoli, brown rice and a generous glug of the Dipping Sauce.  

And, I guess it's better than eating fried dough, which, I've realized, isn't even the best part of the Scallion Pancake and Dipping Sauce.  Nevertheless, I must caution you strongly.

Please note: part of its addictive quality for me is the perfect amount of burn of the red pepper flakes.  If you are not wired to feel a happy glow when you eat spicy stuff, go with the lower end of the range for that ingredient.

Scallion Pancake Dipping Sauce

• 8 tbls soy sauce
  
• 3 tbls Chiangking black rice vinegar (I've seen a couple recommendations to select this specific brand for this ingredient, so I am sticking with it)
  
• 1 tbl white rice vinegar
  
• 1 tbls finely grated ginger
  
• ¼ cup scallions
  
• ½ to 2 tsp red pepper flakes
  
• ½ tbl sesame oil
  
• 1 tbls mirin 

1. Whisk all the ingredients together.  Blammo, you’re done.  Store it, and your soul, in a jar in the fridge.  If it goes bad before you use it up, well, I don't know what to say.   Count your blessings, I guess, for your admirable restraint.

A Spicy Heap of Vegetarian Mush

Last year, I managed to land an interview at a Well-Known Food Site. A second interview, even. Check me out.  I didn’t get a job (which wound up probably being for the best), and, in the usual not-getting-a-job process, I got no feedback and have no idea why.

But I have to imagine that my space alien way of relating to food probably doesn’t translate well to the standard job interview process.

For example, they asked me what I was most into cooking at that time, and since I was just in the midst of attempting some higher-level stuff (for me), I of course responded “Fancy times.” Because in my brains, that somehow makes sense.

Not Italian, not Seasonal and Local, not New American. Not anything that one would normally see as a tag or category on a Well-Known Food Site. (Except maybe Chow.  I could see Chow.com having that and that's one of the reasons I like Chow.com.  So, there's a clue.  It wasn't Chow.) 

No, I had to say "Fancy Times." Like I’m some sort of poorly-programmed robot whose speaking module includes a down-market translator from Mandarin to English or something.

And now I have a new poorly-programmed robot answer to the perennial favorite food-and-cooking question: what is your favorite kind of food?

You guessed it: a Spicy Heap of Vegetarian Mush.

It’s all I think about. I have to dedicate at least one half day a month to stocking my freezer with the Red Lentil Soup with Harissa Paste and Smoked Hot Paprika.

At any given moment of the day, I am wanting spicy Ethiopian lentils. Call me in the middle of night, ask me what I’m dreaming about and I will sleepily reply “I think it’s called Yemiser W’et.”

I ate through four boxes of Trader Joe’s Pav Bhaji in one 24-hour period. Dinner, breakfast, lunch, dinner.

I only stopped because I ran out of Pav Bhaji. And once I ran out, I started looking up recipes online.

It turns out that the Pav in Pav Bhaji actually refers to the bread usually served with the bhaji – the vegetable curry – but I guess one shouldn’t expect to learn Indian cooking traditions from a box.

The dish is considered a kind of street snack food, and contains enough butter to be of concern to healthy eaters. Which is appropriate: what is snack food without the frisson of sin?

It’s made on a tava. The vegetables are cooked with spices and continually mashed until they form a thick paste. A delicious thick paste.

I researched it and came up with a recipe that I thought would most approximate the stuff in the box (recipe in entry below). I tried it this past weekend, and while it doesn’t taste quite like the stuff in a pouch, it still tastes pretty darn good. This version could have used a few more tomatoes so the recipe posted has a higher quantity of those than this, so expect that to look a little looser than this.

I said it's a spicy heap, not necessarily a pretty one.

As mentioned, this is usually eaten with bread, AND there is an additional pat of butter added when served. But my goodness! I like a frisson of sin, not a whole cartload of guilt, so I swap out the carbs for the slightly less anxiety-producing brown basmati or some cross-cultural whole wheat couscous and skip the extra pat altogether.

I have no idea how this stacks up against the real Pav Bhaji, but until I taste that and learn better, I’m happy to have this stocked up in my freezer.

Next up: I attempt Yemiser W’et.

Your Right to Eat Beets Could Be Under Attack

There’s a lot of chatter lately in the news about the run on guns since Obama was elected.

But maybe Obama represents an entirely different threat! A threat to your beets! Apparently, he can’t stand them.

So I've decided to start my own unfounded internet rumor.

Maybe there is a crazy dystopian future ahead of us, but rather than Second Amendment rights being stripped, or wealth being redistributed, the real terror will come when they come to burn down your beet fields!

Oh wait.  Can you burn down a crop of root vegetables? Hmm. Maybe he has a team already working on the logistics.

(Of course, as a card-carrying beet-disliker, this is all fine by me. If the fundamental beet-related fabric of our nation is torn asunder, I, for one, would welcome it.)

Garde Manger

The Prez and I ate out a lot during her visit, but I also forced her to endure a few of my cook-a-thons...

(The Prez by hour two or so of a cook-a-thon.)

...and therefore my cooking.

At the end of the visit, we were reviewing our eating out and the Prez also gave me some constructive feedback on my cooking.

The one area, she felt, where I do best is in my salad making. She said my dressing of salads is the culinary equivalent of a “sexy negligee.” She said she and her husband can’t seem to get it together with salads. Her hub’s style is more “ratty overcoat” and hers is “naked.” But I apparently hit the sweet spot with my dressing amount and the actual construction of the salad.

What is odd is she is the third separate person to say this in my lifetime, and considering how few opportunities I’ve actually had, cumulatively, to cook for people, this is not an insignificant proportion. So maybe there is something to it.

I think what happens is that I tend to always want MORE of everything. But I REALLY hate over-dressed salad. So that tension between my natural tendency towards excess and the one time I genuinely desire restraint seems to actually work.

Also: tongs. Not salad tossers. Regular metal tongs and really TURN those suckers over and over. If there’s extra dressing in the bottom of the bowl, I use those tongs to hold the salad in place while I pour out the extra dressing into the sink.

The weekend after the Prez left, I went to the West Seattle Farmers Market with Carolyn and Will, and then we cooked a late lunch back at their house. I was put in charge of making the bread salad.

I didn’t create it, just followed Will’s direction, but after the Prez’s comments, I felt a great deal of pressure.

The Italian name for this dish, Panzanella, comes from a word meaning “little swamp.” Meaning – the desired texture and…sogginess of this dish takes it to the very edge of the thing I fear most: overdressing. Could I achieve an appropriate texture without taking it too far?

I followed my usual fearful and cautious dressing process (described in the recipe post below), but in deference to the intentions of the dish, I did add one small glug of olive oil and balsamic more than I would have normally.  Despite this wild abandon, I was pleased with how the dish ultimately turned out, and Will and Carolyn, unbidden, commented that they both enjoyed my execution.

Phew! Since baking is iffy and protein is a mystery, it’s nice to know there is one station in the kitchen where I might have some consistent success.

I made one salad I liked a lot while the Prez was here, and I am posting the recipe for Sorrel Salad below.