28 posts tagged “food”
Some bean salad is mushy*, weird, bland, and yucky, but not the bean salad we will be eating for dinner tonight**. It consists of:
Vallarta beans (small, dense, rich)
Chopped broccolini (steamed)
Chopped butter lettuce
Red onion
Toasted pine nuts
Preserved lemon
Garlic
Olive oil
Vinegar
Salt
Lots and lots of pepper
My regret of the evening is that we don't have some good bread in the house to go with it.
*Sometimes, if there are kidney beans involved, it can be both mushy and all too toothsome, at the same time. This is a most regrettable state of affairs.
**No doubt it is our good luck that we are not trying to feed this to a child, as then the smooth expanse of our enjoyment would be wrinkled by dissent on at least one of these points.
Tonight we ate broccoli with caramelized onions* and toasted pine nuts, over kasha. Last week we had kasha with greens and spiced yogurt**. Both were great. I love kasha. Snark loves kasha. Kasha is delicious and easy and toothsome. It pleases both the part of me that wants to feel that I am eating something wholesome and spa-like, and the part of me that wants to feel that I am eating something savory and lavish. So why did I forget about it entirely for at least a year, maybe two? Because I am a dink, I think.
*This seems like a dumb thing to call plain old sauteed onions, and I'm a bit ashamed of myself for doing it. The point is that there are lots of them, they're cooked slowly and gently until they're very deep gold and meltingly soft, and they deserve to be called something that sounds appetizing.
**Basically, raita with no vegetables in it. Yogurt + a little salt + whole spices tempered in oil. I could eat this by itself by the bowlful, and have, but it's also great with many different wintery vegetable dishes. It's especially good and easy as an accompaniment to sweet potatoes cut into cubes or sticks and roasted with olive oil and salt.
The rice pudding this became is sadly quite, quite gone. I am sleep-deprived and alone in the house, a state of affairs that would lend itself very well to eating rice pudding, but which is more likely to result in suddenly falling asleep than in making a fresh batch.
I often think that a certain kind of falling asleep is like eating a big, thick slice of cake. I must have gotten that image from something I read -- Updike, maybe? -- a long time ago, but I don't remember where. Do you?
Two scenes from class last week:
1. One student has dashed off to try to find water before class starts.
Another student [to me]: Oh, you have a mug.
Me: Yes, my office is just two doors away, so I just brewed up some tea and ambled over. Maybe next time I'll just bring in my electric tea kettle.
Student [clasps hands together in delight]: OH! I *love* tea.
2. In my next class, as it's wrapping up.
Yet a different student: How do you feel about cake on Wednesdays?
Me: Would you bring it?
Student: Oh, yes.
Me: Well, in that case, I feel just fine about cake on Wednesdays.
Never have I known such a prevailingly cozy-minded group.
I can hardly tell you how happy I am that Lipton "Cup-a-Noodle" Spring Vegetable soup (with little noodles! and buckets of sodium!) is back in my life. For a long time I couldn't find it anywhere, and I tried various other kinds of vegetarian soups of the variety where you dump some powder in your mug and add hot water, but none satisfied me the way that my good old Lipton friend used to do. Then, just the other day, Snark found an online source for it. I don't know if it's new or I just missed it before, but either way, here it is now. I ordered a case of the stuff, and now my office is truly properly equipped once more.
I'm in the revision phase of my dissertation (the relatively big, relatively overhaul-y part, not the kind of revision where you're just tweaking a phrase here and there and fine-tuning the formatting, but still: end in sight) and I've therefore finally cycled around to the very first chapter I wrote, oh so long ago. It's TERRIBLE, oh my heavens, just appalling. Fortunately I am not at a loss as to how to make it un-terrible, but jesus! Past me! What were you thinking!
You know what's good? Plantains cut on the diagonal and fried in olive oil, then drained on paper towels and sprinkled with salt. That's what's good. And they turn such an obligingly gorgeous shade of golden brown, too. Black beans a very fine accompaniment.
Applesauce spice bars, I think these are called, from the newest Dorie Greenspan cookbook. Pretty good looking at this size, even better at 400 x 300 pixels, without the extra unsharp mask or whatever happens in the resizing process, which has a way of making the cake look a bit dry. It isn't! I thought these were fi-yeene. We left about a third of the batch at someone else's house, to share the wealth and avoid scarfing down every last one. I hope they aren't all "Christ, these suck." That would be a pity.
This was an experiment with importing a post from a MT blog -- it worked beautifully. Then I felt compelled to futz with it, which was also fine. Now, on to my blather about tonight's supper:
First we were planning to eat nothing but guacamole and Tostitos Gold corn chips for dinner, something we are very happy to do periodically, especially with the absurdly perfect out-of-season avocados to be had at Costco. This is not our ecologically finest moment, to be sure, but perhaps we are just spending a bit of seasonal-eating credit that we built up by eating all that celery root? Anyhow, on this occasion I was suddenly seized with the unusual sensation of minding the not particularly supperlike qualities of chips and guacamole alone.
Then I thought perhaps I should make fideos, since they look so pretty and sound so good and have the curious advantage of being a genuine meal, but it turns out that I lacked several of the criterial ingredients, so that was out. Then I thought I might make tostadas with black beans and some of those nice fideos toppings, but of course I don't have any corn tortillas in the house, either. However, I do have the aforementioned Tostitos Gold, which are not so classy but are, I think, actually quite tasty. They're nice and thick and taste of corn (and salt, of course).
Now, you might say that what I had there were nachos. I submit that they were not quite nachos, though they did of course bear a passing resemblance. After all, there are several dishes in the California-Texas-Mexico matrix that differ not so much in their ingredients as in the configuration of these ingredients. Whatever it was that I made tonight differed from nachos in that we ate them with forks, in the proportion of chips to other things, and in the lack of both melty cheese and salsa.
So I made that nut-pesto pasta recipe tonight (I like that the Times now lets you get at permalinks through their own site, via that little "share" link -- thanks, Khoi Vinh! I bet you're responsible for that) and it really was delicious. And to be fair, I've never had anything quite like it before, but it is really, really far from "crazy".
Elsewhere in the NY Times food section, I find this:
A basic tomato sauce is mixed with a pesto of four kinds of raw nuts, which makes a creamless pink sauce with real body, enlivened by the kick of black and red peppers, a generous grating of pecorino and a few ribbons of fresh mint.
It’s a crazy combination of bar food — nuts and cheese — with noodles, and while it’s hard to figure out why it works, it’s easy to eat a bowlful as you think about it (though not exactly cheap: $12 as an appetizer, $20 as an entree).
Okay, no. The combination of pasta, nuts, and cheese is NOT CRAZY IN ANY WAY. Nor is it hard to figure out why it tastes good. Fuck you, Alex Witchel.
