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.

Roasted Vegetable Stock with Extra Umami a la Mark Bittman

Mark Bittman's original recipe here.  For this recipe without pictures for easier printing, click here.

Yield: 3 quarts

Ingredients

• 2 large or 3-4 medium onions, quartered (don't have to peel)
• 4 carrots, peeled and cut in half
• 2 celery stalks, cut in half
• 2 medium potatoes, peeled or washed well and quartered
• 8 cloves of garlic, unpeeled
• 1 cup of trimmed mushrooms or mushroom bits*
• 1/4 cup reconstituted dried mushrooms with their soaking liquid reserved and strained
• 3 Tbls extra-virgin olive oil
• 15 whole peppercorns
• 1 cup white whine
• Kosher salt to taste
• 2 quarts + 4 cups water

Process

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

2. Place the onions, carrot, celery, potatoes, garlic and not-dried mushrooms in a roasting pan.  Drizzle with oil, sprinkle with a little salt and toss. Put pan in oven.

3. After about 10-15 minutes, shake pan and turn over vegetables, then return to oven.  Repeat after another 10-15 minutes. 

4. Roast until the vegetables are “nicely browned” per Bittman, and, he cautions, “don’t rush it.”  This generally takes about 45 minutes to an hour.

5. Once they are done, remove the pan from the oven and set on a stove burner (or across two if your pan is large).  Scoop the vegetables out with a slotted spoon into a stock pot.

6. Add the reconstituted dried mushroom, their soaking liquid, peppercorns and wine to the stock pot, along with 2 quarts of water. 

7. Turn the heat to high.

8. Turn the heat on the burner(s) under the roasting pan to high.  Add 2-4 cups of water, depending on how deep your pan is.  Bring it to a boil, and scrape the browned bits off the pan. 

BEFORE

AFTER

9. VERY CAREFULLY if you have a million-pound cast iron roasting pan like I do, pour the water with the released brown bits into the stockpot.  If you only used 2 cups of water, add 2 more to the stock pot. 

10. Bring the stock just about to a boil, then "partially cover and adjust the heat so the mixture sends up a few bubbles at a time."

11. Taste and season several times while cooking.

12. Cook until vegetables are very soft, usually about 45 minutes to an hour.

13. Strain, and press the vegetables to squeeze out all liquid. 

14. Taste, season again.

15. Refrigerate and skim off any hardened fat if you like.

Advanced Prep Notes: Can be refrigerated for 4-5 days, or frozen.  If you freeze it, be sure to measure before freezing and label for easiest use.

Threethiopiques #1

(Your songmelier recommends the below tune by the Sensation Band to accompany this post.)

When it comes to food, my cravings are easily triggered.

In the early oughts, when, as the newscasters always says, tensions ran high between India and Pakistan over the disputed region of Kashmir, I once turned on the radio midway through the newcaster saying the name of the region. Upon hearing "-shmir" I immediately thought, "Hmm. I'd like a bagel."

So as you can probably imagine, since I started volunteering at the East African Community Services, I have been thinking about East African food a LOT. Most of the folks there are Somali, but I don't know much about that cuisine, so instead, my appetite drifts a little to the northeast and lands in Ethiopia.

I first had Ethiopian food on a visit to Cleveland, and ate it in the traditional fashion of sitting around the basket table lined with injera. That was several years ago, before I'd really started learning about food and cooking, so I went in with no expectations.

I loved it, though. Of course I did: many of the dishes are spicy heaps of vegetarian mush eaten with a relatively plain starch. What's not to love?

I've had it a few times since then, and since I started volunteering, find myself thinking about it quite frequently.

So with this Ethiopian food obsession on constant simmer, a couple weekends ago I took a trip down to Amy's Merkato to find a pre-made berbere mixture and just poke around. The store shelves are somewhat bare for most products but well-stocked with what you would probably go there for anyway: Ethiopian spices and injera.

I always feel a sort of conflict when I go into Real Deal ethnic market. On the one hand, I find the lack of familiar products exciting and full of possibilities. On the other, I don't know what the heck I'm doing, and generally go into my usual retail-induced ADD fog, forget everything I know about the cuisine, and find myself wandering around in the hopes I can recognize a word on a label somewhere.

And that's why Amy's was a little tricky: nothing was labeled. Now that's some Real Deal. Luckily, the woman working there that day (maybe the actual Amy? dunno) was very helpful, and we overcame our language barrier enough for her to show me which one was berbere and how to use it.

She then described using another spice mixture, and to be honest, I didn't actually catch it, in good part because I'm just a little deaf anyway, and after the second repetition, I was too shy to ask her again what she was saying. I know it is something you sprinkle into a dish at the end. I've since researched it at home and think it might be Wot Kemem? (That is what is now labeled with in my house, question mark and all).

Now armed with one key spice component, I set out to make another, the clarified spiced butter called Niter Kibbeh that is the base for many dishes.

My cooking has been improving a lot lately. I had one big improvement that came with the Taste-and-Season epiphany of a while back. But the next bump has come from a mental shift that I am calling Investing in Flavor.

My impatience used to make it impossible to consider the idea of infusing butter with spices for an hour before I even got to cooking the dish.

But my beloved Mark Bittman Roasted Vegetable Stock has made so many previously watery and unsatisfying vegetable soups and stews so much richer and more delectable that I no longer balk at spending two hours to make it before I can even start the dish it's going to go into.

And what underscored my own direct experience was reading the stock section of Michael Ruhlman's The Elements of Cooking. His impassioned argument that the home cook use veal stock, "one of the most powerful tools in professional kitchens, one of the biggest guns in the professional chef's entire arsenal" made me feel all...wrapped on the knuckles with a ruler for my frequent kitchen laziness (which usually results in culinary dissatisfaction).

I'm not about to start making/using veal stock, but after reading all that, now when I read a recipe that says "6 cups of vegetable stock or water" where I used to feel a sense of relief that I could just use water, now I'm dragging out my roasting pan and pulling my saved up bag of mushrooms stems out of the freezer to make some stock.

So with this new frame of mind, I was happy to make the clarified butter, hoping this would give me a shot at getting a little closer to the delicious I'd had in restaurants. Itwould also allow me to achieve some Cooking Resolution #2: Resourcefulness by using up some underutilized spices like fenugreek and tumeric.

Other than the time, the niter kibbeh process is simple as could be, simply simmer the spices in the butter over the lowest possible heat for an hour or so. Pour through cheesecloth and you are done.

The finished product can be frozen, so you can make a big batch all at once. The recipe can be loosey-goosey with the spices. I saw some with onion, some without, so I opted to not use it. Some include nutmeg, some don't, There is a vegan version using soy margarine.  Basically, don't get too worried if you don't have them all or don't like a spice or two.

Once that was done, I used it to make Yemiser Wat/We't, a lentil dish with brown lentils, tomatoes and peas that are cooked in the flavorful butter, with onions, garlic, ginger and that berbere.

Cooking the onions, ginger, garlic and berbere in the niter kibbeh

There were a couple less-than-ideal issues with this particular version of it that I made. Not enough tomatoes, so it did not have quite the tang I was looking for. But the overall flavor profile was definitely a departure from what I usually cook, and I am looking forward to trying this again with more tomatoes. It was still tasty over some basmati rice.

I just made another batch of the butter today and hope to attempt either it or a spicy red lentil dish called Mesir Wat.

If you are also a fan of Spicy Heaps and haven't ever tried Ethiopian, I'd highly recommend giving some of these recipes a shot. If you don't have access to an Ethiopian market at which to buy some berbere, the pretty-available company India Tree makes a blend, or you could attempt your own.

Recipe: Red Lentil Soup with Harissa Paste and Smoked Hot Paprika

I’ve been under the weather lately, and between that and all the sugar I’ve been forced to ingest just through tasting what I’m baking for the holidays, I am – for once – craving the savory and the spicy instead my usual sweet.

This Red Lentil Soup with Harissa Paste and Smoked Hot Paprika has become my latest favorite thing and replacement for chicken soup whilst sick.

It’s based on this recipe from Epicurious, but I decided to up the spices by finally putting to use the harissa paste I got at PFI quite some time ago.

Harissa is a North African spice paste or sauce that is made from chili peppers and can be spiced with cumin, caraway, coriander and/or garlic.

Between that and some lovely smoked hot Spanish paprika...

...this is a delicious spicy soup without having so much heat as to be unpleasant. I haven’t had much use for either of these ingredients prior to this (can’t remember what I bought them for in the first place), but now that I’ve used them successfully, it’s like it gives me some context for what they can do, and I think they can both be very useful for adding a tolerable amount of heat with some complexity of flavor.

As noted, the recipe calls for Roasted Vegetable Stock, specifically the Mark Bittman kind (scroll down about halfway through the page in that link for the recipe). If you are not into making stock, this might seem an excessive extra step, one that takes this soup from relatively quick to an all-afternoon endeavor.

But I must insist! I’ve found the combo of the umami of the mushrooms and the carmelization of the roasted vegetables in the stock gives a depth and body to this all veggie-soup that could otherwise be a bit watery-tasting.

The stock is a great investment of time and worth doing and then storing in the freezer just so you can whip up a soup like this.

Speaking of the freezer, this soup makes up a big old batch and the soup freezes well, so make one pot and eat off it for a while. Just note: freezing can make the heat of spices increase, so you might want to take it to about 80% of where you like spicy-wise it if you plan to freeze so as to avoid losing the subtlety of the other flavors.

(Note: this was a half batch so your raw ingredient qty will look larger based on the below recipe.)

Red Lentil Soup with Harissa Paste and Smoked Hot Paprika

(Makes about 10-12 servings)

• 2 Tbl olive oil
• 2 large or 3 medium onions, chopped
• 4 carrots, diced
• 3 celery stalks, diced
• 1 28-oz can diced tomatoes, drained and liquid reserved
• 6-8 garlic cloves, chopped (depending on how big the garlic cloves are and/or how much you like garlic)
• 2-3 Tbl tomato paste (start low and add more to make a richer flavor if needed)
• 2-3 tsp harissa paste (start low and add more depending on your tolerance/preference for spice)
• 2 tsp cumin (my brand of Harissa paste did not have cumin in it; if yours does, you might want to cut back a little until you have the chance to taste it)
• ½ tsp hot Spanish paprika
• 2 cups red lentils
• 4 cups Roasted Veggie Stock
• 4 cups water
• Kosher salt to taste
• Lemon wedges (optional)

1. Heat the olive oil in a 4-5 quart pot over medium-high heat. Add the onions and cook until the onions are soft and have lost the raw smell (about 5 minutes or so).
2. Add the carrots, celery, diced tomato solids, garlic, cumin, paprika, tomato and harissa pastes and a hearty pinch of kosher salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables have softened a bit (about 7 minutes).
3. Add the lentils, stock, water and reserved tomato liquid. Bring to a simmer and simmer uncovered for about 20 minutes. Stir and taste every five minutes or so, adding more salt, spice, harissa paste and/or tomato paste if needed to taste. Cook until lentils are tender and serve.
4. If desired, squeeze a bit of lemon juice onto soup just before serving (if freezing, do not add lemon juice until serving).

Recipe Results: Sunburst Squash and Mushroom Soup

There's no suspense to this entry.  I've already made my feelings about sunburst squash clear: I'm no fan.  So ultimately this recipe for Sunburst Squash and Mushroom Soup didn't work for me, but I think it does still have potential. (Since Pioneer Organics was bought, that link doesn't work, so I have posted that recipe here on this site.)

The mushroom flavor with the potato is delish.  But as I ate it, I kept noticing this weird final note of grapefruit that I did not enjoy, though. I actually forgot to add the lemon juice or vinegar, so I couldn't figure out where the acidic tang was coming from.  Later, when I ate the sunburst squash solo for the first time, I realized that was the off-note in the soup.

I think if I could find another squash without that tang, or another vegetable that could bulk this up in a similar way (maybe add more potato?), I think the other flavors are great.  So recommended for sunburst squash fans as is, or with a replacement vegetable for those who, like me, are not.

Peasant Food

One of the biggest disappointments about going to film school was the new-to-me concept of the intellectual justification for liking a movie.  My love of film was created in a vacuum of sorts, so it was a very naïve and self-contained thing: I liked what I liked because of how the film made me feel when I watched it.  It was usually pretty visceral or sentimental, but rarely – if ever – intellectual.

Then I got to film school and suddenly there was some kind of intellectual litmus test for what made a film good that did not necessarily seem intuitive to me.  Soooo…whether or not I had a good time watching it didn’t matter anymore?  Or wasn’t enough?  At eighteen, I felt stupid for not “liking the right things” or for having an unreasonable affection for something that others found simple or sentimental.

At some point, of course, you either have to outgrow caring about this kind of thing or turn into a ridiculous adult, so I thought I was past being affected by other people’s ideas regarding the legitimacy of my opinion.

Then someone in my life got a bit put out that I have a food blog – feeling that food is more their domain, but moreover, they protested, “You don’t even cook!”

And for a little while, I felt that exact same kind of early film school stupidity...

Click to read more ...

Soup Swappin'

In case you were inspired by the Soup Link Round-Up but don't have time to try them all, farm the recipes out to some friends!  Grinder today has a post about the Soup Swap. 

The concept is simple: Make six quarts of soup and package them in six containers of equal size. Invite all your friends—along with their six quarts of soup—over to swap with you. Go home with enough varieties of soup to see you through the worst of a long winter. On a blustery evening, you’ll be glad you did.

Official Soup Swap Day is Jan 23, which gives you plenty of time to recover from the holidays before undertaking the swap.