New Discoveries

 

The 2005 Nigella Lawson recipes have taught me three things:  a) how to make the carrot ginger soup of my dreams via her beet and ginger soup recipe; b) you can’t find pomegranates in June, an unrealized attempt at her fruit salad; and c) I like brown rice in trying her brown rice and seaweed salad.  I’ve always been leery of brown rice due to years of Dojo’s and being doubled over in pain from their brown rice, but maybe I’ve been harsh to judge.  It’s Dojo’s, not brown rice.  A relief, because I really love the nuttiness of brown rice, and the squishy yet unyielding texture.  The salad itself is easy, especially when the rice is made ahead of time.  With the addition of Trader Joe’s Baked Savory Tofu, it’s the perfect healthy meal that doesn’t give me a stomach ache.

Eureka!

Continuing my random recipe try, I pulled out a clipping from a January 2005 New York Times by Nigella Lawson.  An ascetic trio of recipes meant to atone for holiday sins, there was a bracing beet and ginger soup, that was quick, wholesome, and low in calories.  The minimal ingredients – roasted beets, minced ginger, hot vegetable stock and lemon juice – made for a soup in which the ginger popped against the sweetness of the beets.  My father, who happened to be in town, commented on how it would be good with carrots instead.  A surprising observation from a man with the palate of a rhinoceros and who barely eats in his Geritol years.  Maybe this is the path to the carrot ginger soup of my dreams.  

  

I have so often been disappointed by carrot ginger soup because of the delicate balance between the carrot and ginger.  The simplicity of four basic ingredients lets the flavors shine.   A little different from sticking all the ingredients in a pot and pureeing it, the recipe is quick to put together as long as the carrots are roasted ahead of time.

Carrot Ginger Soup

-roast 1/2 lb. carrots in 400 degree oven for 40 minutes.  This can be done ahead of time.

-mince 1/2-inch piece of ginger to get 1T, err towards more than less ginger.

-peel carrots when cool and cut into 1-inch pieces

-heat 2 cups vegetable stock

-blend carrots, ginger, hot stock and juice of 1/2 lemon

Transfixed

TV was my best friend growing up, if not my de facto sibling, so it’s surprising for me not to have one.  I get by with Netflix, the gym, and the generosity of my friends.  It’s plenty.  But little did I know that I was missing the SlapChop.  The Ronco device for the new millennium, the SlapChop is a mini hand chopper, a complex device for the simple task of what a knife can do.  As sold on TV by its Jersey boy spokesman, I’m all the more intrigued by his fast talk and the staccato beats of the SlapChop.  I would normally deride a gadget such as this, but there seems to be a marked improvement – it “pops open like a butterfly” to make it easy to clean.  Be still my beating heart.  The drawback is that you still have to haul out the knife and cutting board to chop everything down to fit the mouth of the chopper, essentially pre-chopping for the SlapChop.  Step aside Cuisinart, it’s time to make room between to the George Foreman Grill and the Sandwich Maker for the SlapChop.  And Graty too.

Temptation

On a recent visit to Costco, I spied the Cuisinart Power Blend Duet, a blender and food processor in one.  I’m of the school of do-one-thing-and-do-it-well, so I’m surprised that this caught my fancy.  In The Littlest Kitchen, multipurpose can be a plus.  I don’t really need a blender since I still have my parent’s vintage one from the 60s which is still kicking, but sometimes I do wish it was smaller like this shorter and squatter jar from Cuisinart.  The food processing bowl is only 3-cups, which isn’t quite big enough for pie crusts, something that I’m hoping do in the future.   Like the 24-packs of toilet paper at Costco, do I really need it?

It got me thinking that what I really need is interchangeable bowls for the many tasks and quantities of food processing – chopped vegetables, pestos, hamburgers, dips, etc.  A little more vetting on Cook’s Illustrated revealed that the Kitchenaid KFP750 would probably suit me best with its 12-cup and 4-cup bowls.  I also like that it only has three buttons – on, off, and pulse. – compared to Cuisinart’s seven.  Practicality gives way to temptation.

Puttanesca Cioppino

 

I have loved cioppino from the the first moment that I had it at Little Joe’s in San Francisco.  Bouillabaisse and chowders don’t endear me as much as the bold flavors of the Italian tomato-garlic fish stew.  For years I’ve used Marian Cunningham’s recipe from The Supper Book, which is quich and simple, if not a paler shade of the real thing.  When I made it recently – held hostage by my wallet and the slim selection at the local fish store – it was a downright disappointment.  Tilapia killed my cioppino.  Bland and flavorless, there was barely any fish flavor, tilapia being the seafood equivalent to styrofoam peanuts.  I had two bites and commenced with a flavor injection.  More garlic sauteed with crushed red pepper.  For more fish flavor, I added anchioves, and for the hell of it, capers, for a puttanesca touch.  In the end, I had a whole new dish – puttanesca cioppino, a vast improvement.

Puttanesca Cioppino

-heat 1/4 cup olive oil over medium in a large frying pan

-add 6 minced garlic cloves and 1/4t crushed red pepper for 1 minute until golden, do not brown

-add 1/2 cup white fish filet, 1 cup wine, 2-15 oz. cans diced tomatoes, 1t oregano, 1t sugar, and 2 bay leaves, simmer, cover and cook for 10 minutes

-add 1 1/2 cups fish, 1/2 tin minced anchioves, and 1T capers, cook another 5 minutes covered until fish is cooked through

-serve with 1 cup chopped parsley

Budget Bummer

The withdrawals have finally hit me.  I’ve been really good with the budget and breaking my addiction to spending, but I’m having a rough patch right now.  All I want to do is spend money.  I want to buy crap at the flea market.  I want to buy crap at Ikea.  I want to buy cacti at the Farmer’s Market.  But I can’t because I’m on a budget and $150 a week is just not enough.  Call it a moment of weakness.  I have to remind myself that buying crap is what got me into trouble to begin with.  So I shall go crapless for now.

Maybe I need to devise a new game to distract myself from spending.  Think of my $150 a week as a $20 a day with a $10 bonus cushion.  Better to obsess over numbers than things?

I Like Meatballs

   

On the same ragged page as the ill-fated Black Bean and Hominy Stew, is a recipe for Smothered Meatballs in Red Chile Sauce from the 2003 issue of Food and Wine.  Pitched as fast and easy, it was hardly the former.  A 40 minute recipe became a 2 1/2 hour ordeal.  Granted, I took the liberty to make my own breadcrumbs from frozen bread cubes, minced the garlic and scallions by hand, and added minced cilantro.  What took the longest time was seeding the reconstituted ancho chiles.  A quick swish in water couldn’t remove the seeds stuck to the tacky interior, so they had to be picked out by hand.  There must be an easier way.  

Once the prep was done – clocking in at an hour – it was easy enough to make the meatballs and the blender blended sauce.  The recipe requires cooking the peppers with the meatballs, but my largest skillet couldn’t accommodate both, adding more time by cooking the two separately.  Two and a half hours later, it was worth the effort.  Two days later, they made even better meatball sandwiches.

 

Follow the Bell

 

Some people listen for the lilting jingle of the Mr. Softee truck, I listen for the deep clang of Mike’s Knife Sharpening truck.  Roaming the streets of Brooklyn with his dogs Princess and Baby, Mike provides a service that is ultimately more valuable than soft serve.  For $5, my 8-inch chef’s knife was as good as new in less than two minutes.  All I had to do was walk down the street, and the chore/errand/task that I’ve put off for so long, was done.  Mike is serendipity on wheels.

I Should Have Known Better

  

The best way to weed through my bloated recipe file is to randomly choose and cook.  I plucked this 2003 recipe from Food and Wine for Black Beans and Hominy Stew, which reminds me of the stew that I made from the Momofuku pork butt leftovers.  A faster from-the-ground-up version, this recipes uses smoked ham cut in cubes instead of shredded pork, something that I was a bit skeptical about.  The best thing about a stew like this is the way that shredded tender pork falls apart and gives itself to the stew in flavor and texture.  My doubts were confirmed, the cubes of ham floated around like spongy little life rafts in a sea of thick black beans and hominy, there was no integration, only isolation.  It’s a small detail, but it makes all the difference.  Disappointed, I realize that it’s okay not to like a recipe that I’ve hung on to for six years.  That’s what editing is all about.

Dead: One Credit Card

The budget works.  I’ve been on the budget for ten months and I’ve finally killed off one credit card.  I’m ecstatic.  I feel like I’ve gone from a size 22 to a size 4, the weight of my financial burden reduced by a diet of good spending habits and restraint.

My only disappointment is seeing the total difference in balances from August to May, about $5000.  That doesn’t seem like a lot for all the penny pinching that I’ve done.  The sad reality is that much of that money is finance charges.  Stupid tax that gets tagged on every month, keeping the balances up, because there certainly aren’t any new purchases.  In my elation, I briefly considered easing up on the debt in order to have more of a weekly allowance, but I realize that the sooner I pay off the balances, the less stupid tax I’ll have to pay.  The payments will also go much faster with the dwindling balances.  I should be able to kill off another card by the end of the summer, leaving one to die a slow death by 2010.