Adventures in the Pointless Forest

The snack that beats the 3pm slump

nobody@vox.com(redfox) — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:43:32 -0500

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!

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Taste treat.

nobody@vox.com(redfox) — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 19:44:15 -0400

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.

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Brown sugar glaze

nobody@vox.com(redfox) — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 18:54:35 -0500

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.

Applesauce spice cake

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Avocados all around

nobody@vox.com(redfox) — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 13:31:43 -0500

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).

Avocado dinner

So I took a couple of pasta bowls and put a handful of corn chips at the bottom of each one, and put these in a 200°F oven to warm through while I made a quick batch of black beans -- onions and garlic and peppers in oil, a can of black beans and a shake of ground chipotle, salt, and pepper dumped on top and cooked until thick instead of runny. Meanwhile I also made a little bowl of pickled onions: thinly sliced onions with salt, a little bit of sugar, and plenty of cider vinegar. When the beans were ready, the dishes came out of the oven. The beans were ladled over the chips and topped with the onions, some peeled and sliced avocado, and a crumbling of white cheese (queso blanco). Lemon juice (no limes in the house) over all, and hot sauce passed at the table. Heating the plates and chips was a good idea, as it did a lot to preserve an interesting contrast of temperatures and textures. Sour cream would have been a nice addition for those who like it, too, no doubt.

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.

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Tasty

nobody@vox.com(redfox) — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 21:33:14 -0500

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".

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While I'm at it...

nobody@vox.com(redfox) — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 13:13:04 -0500

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.

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Suck it.

nobody@vox.com(redfox) — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 13:00:45 -0500

My award for the day's most obnoxious characterization of the motivations of one's own supposed constituency goes to Caren Wilcox, executive director of the Organic Trade Association, quoted in an article in today's NY Times food section (emphasis mine):

"All the ingredients being used in items with the organic seal are produced using the organic system," Ms. Wilcox said. "It doesn’t mean they don’t sometimes end up in products some people think other people shouldn’t eat."

Yes! That's absolutely the only reason that anyone might care about the laxity or strictness of regulations governing the use of the USDA organic seal. Those fucking hippies just want to stop you, Joe Citizen, from eating anything insufficiently pure and holy. Ever.

Of course, Ms. Wilcox's actual constituency is, I imagine, mostly composed of companies like Frito-Lay, so, whatever. Good work slipping the knife in, madam.

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Favorite, Finnish cookies

nobody@vox.com(redfox) — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 11:00:28 -0500

The cookies in question are called Lusikkaleivät, via a Celia Barbour recipe in Gourmet magazine. They're made with browned butter, which imparts a mysterious deliciousness of a sort that seems like it must come from the addition of some rare and subtle spice, but does not. They are so good (and also something of a pain to make) that it would be a shame to dilute their wonderfulness by making them too often, so once a year it is. Last year I packaged them individually in little clear drawstring bags before giving them away and I think I will do the same this year, since I still have plenty of the bags. It helps to make them seem like an occasion.

The browning is a bit dicey, I find; perhaps there's a trick to make it easier to see what's going on at the crucial moments, but if so, I don't know it. First you clarify the butter by heating it over a moderate flame, until a cloudy foam covers the top and then eventually (mostly) precipitates out, leaving the milk solids on the bottom of the pan and the clear butter on top. Then it's your job to gently keep on cooking it until the little grains of milk solids go from ecru to pale caramel to a rosy brown but NOT black, or else the butter will be ruined. Unfortunately, just at the stage where this begins to happen, a new thick layer of opaque bubbly foam, like a very tenacious dense bubble bath, appears over the top of the butter. I find it very hard to get it out of the way long enough to keep an eye on the butter below. Though I've done a good job with guessing when to take the pan off the flame so far, this seems a suboptimal method. Let me know if you know something better.

Anyway, then you cool the butter by resting the pan in a sink filled with a couple of inches of cold water and use it to make the very simple dough of butter, sugar, vanilla, flour, and baking soda, which then rests for a couple of hours at room temperature or in the fridge until you're ready to move on. You form the cookies by pressing the dough into the bowl of a pointy-tipped teaspoon and sliding it out, to make little domed bas-relief egg shapes. After they're baked and cooled, you make them into sandwiches with a thin layer of preserves -- I like seedless raspberry. Finally, you must let them age for at least two days before you eat them, as the texture and flavor both change sublimewardly thereby.

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Lunch matters

nobody@vox.com(redfox) — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 10:47:31 -0500

This week we've been breaking in our new Mr. Bento. It is seriously great, and I take back all my doubts about the selection and arrangement of containers. So far it doesn't seem to be at all difficult to fit enough food for two into a single Mr. B. It does, however, require one additional bowl for divvying food up into, and I'm still holding open the possibility of buying a second one for days when we might want to eat less dense foods.

Today we will be having leftover green chickpea curry; a variation on these dal mudda (delicious and a great way for me to make lots of nice handy starchy-something that keeps through the week and is good in a lunch -- I used my own usual dal recipe and quinoa instead of rice, because it's better for S. and tastes lovely); yogurt; and some trail mix from Trader Joe's.

We've also been breaking in a new good routine with doing dishes, where we make sure everything is either washed up and put away or in the dishwasher and ready to go before we leave in the morning, and run it if it is more than half full. Then when we get home from work I can immediately put the lunch containers in a sink of hot soapy water while S. unloads the dishwasher. The key is to refuse to begin preparing dinner until the dishwasher is ready to receive dirty dishes. I realize this is all very far from being a mind-blowingly clever technique, but it's making me happy.

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Roasting on an open fire

nobody@vox.com(redfox) — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 14:34:10 -0500

Today we bought a bag of frozen, peeled roasted chestnuts at Trader Joe's. Now I am wondering what on earth I should do with them. Any excellent (vegetarian) suggestions?

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