Category: Recipe

Eventually, it happens.

You go straight home without stopping to pick up the makings for supper. You collapse at the end of the week, rheumy eyed and shuffling, and absolutely cannot face the five o’clock crowd at your neighborhood Safeway, Whole Foods, Tesco or Raley’s. When your resistance is lowest, and a couch-coma with a hot drink seems to be a distant mirage, it will strike: that loving, hopeful helpfulness. That dewey-eyed affection. That off-hand offer.

“Oh, I’ll go to the store, hon.”

Oh, it sounds innocent enough. It’s all very loving and sweet. But then he goes to the store. He’s gone for more than an hour. He comes home laden with bags, nine-tenths of what you didn’t need. He protests, “Well, you let me go by myself,” which puts the blame all back on you. And this time, he’s really done it. This time, you’ve ended up with… Vegemite.

(Cue danger music.)

Now, it’s a … food. Of sorts. Wikifolk say it’s made from leftover brewers’ yeast extract, a by-product of beer. In October of 2006, there was some huge internet flap about the U.S. banning it, but no, it’s still stocked quite freely on my grocery store shelf — someone just started that rumor about Customs checking people for fun (The U.S. Customs and Border Protection states on its website that “there is no known prohibition on the importation of Vegemite” and “there is no official policy within CBP targeting Vegemite for interception.”). But now that it’s staring me in the face — something that’s always been available, but never purchased — I don’t really know… yet… what to do with it.

Granted, we routinely use smoked nutritional yeast (which appears to be a by-product of paper production — who knew we ate recycled food?) as a flavoring; (it works well with tofu), and we even grew Shitakes, once, in the kitchen, for fun, so it’s not like we don’t know from fungi. I’m just… okay, it’s in this thick brown jar, and it’s oily and deeply sticky and disturbing. I’m not sure where to take it from here. All the Australians I’ve known like it on… toast. Um, maybe not for me. Soup bases, I can see, but vegemite on toast seems to be the equivalent of eating bouillon on toast, from the look of it. Sodium lovers might enjoy, but I think I need a few more options.

After roaming around fruitlessly on the web, I finally made a foray onto the vegemite recipe site and came up with some options.

Roast Pumpkin And Leek Risotto

Serves: 4

Preparation: 10-15 mins

Cooking: 40 mins

500g butternut pumpkin (by which I assume they mean squash?), cut into cubes

olive oil spray

1 teaspoon butter

1 leek, sliced and washed

125g rashers bacon, rind removed and chopped

(Who knew bacon had rinds!? I’d better improvise…)

1 clove garlic, crushed

11/4 cups short grain rice

1 tablespoon VEGEMITE

1 litre (4 cups) boiling water pepper, to taste

1/4 cup finely chopped parsley

40g butter (Haven’t we already had butter?!)

shredded Parmesan cheese

SPRAY pumpkin with olive oil spray and bake at 200ºC for 25-30 minutes or until golden. Heat butter in a pan and cook the sliced leek, bacon and garlic for 2-3 minutes or until bacon is browned.

ADD rice and stir for 2 minutes or until coated in butter mixture. Stir in combined Vegemite and water. Bring to boil, reduce heat and simmer uncovered for 10-15 minutes, stirring occasionally until water is absorbed and rice is cooked.

REMOVE from heat and stir in pepper, parsley, and butter. Spoon into serving bowls and top with shredded Parmesan. Serve immediately.

I came up with a few more options — they run the gamut from just the bread-and-butter on toast plus Vegemite, to the stripes of Vegemite and melty cheese to Vegemite … milkshakes. Which sound to me like a horrible, terrible mistake. I still can’t force myself to taste the stuff on the edge of a spoon — it just smells too strong for that — but I’m off to the kitchen, and I’ll let you know how it goes.

Soup: one of those dishes that seems so easy… and can be so good. And then it can totally, fully, thoroughly screw up on you. It’s the alchemical thing, methinks. Some of us want to just throw everything and the kitchen sink in there. Consider mi papí, with his penchant for flinging fleshy huge mushrooms in EVERYTHING, or mi mama, with that unholy Creole trinity of green bell peppers, onions and celery — and I loathe bitter green bells and celery cooked. Shudder. Those were the soups of my childhood — limp, overcooked vegetables in a watery broth; or horrible broccoli soups with garish flavors all competing; soups layered with some floaty unidentifiable green stuff with a green bitterness undergirding it all. Long ago I determined that these are not the soups I will spend my adult life eating.

One of the best things I’ve discovered with soups is that it’s not too hard to tell what things go together, and what things don’t. Summer soups are easy — chuck fresh veggies in a clear broth, and serve with tortilla strips and a sprinkling of cheese or croûtons, and you’re good to go. Corn soup, fresh tomato gazpacho — yum. In the autumn, it becomes only slightly more complex: beans generally go with other beans, and tomatoes. (The Italians do that well with minestrone, or Pasta y fagioli.) Root vegetables go with root vegetables — carrots and potatoes go nicely with onions, and the Germans have even been known to add apples to that mix. (Or sweet potatoes and chestnuts! Mmmm!) It may not be to your particular taste, but they go well together, or well enough, anyway. Winter squashes make great creamy soups into which you can add pears or apples, and dried tomatoes make a great creamy soup all alone. It’s just when you start mixing things like broccoli, cabbage, tomatoes, mushrooms and beans that you run into trouble. Just add huge mushrooms, and you’re living my father’s dream, and my personal culinary nightmare

You know, the best fix for a bad soup? The stick blender, that model of culinary helpfulness, and a block of plain, pale, creamy, silken tofu. Theoretically you could fix a blended soup with mashed potatoes, but the consistency wouldn’t be quite as velvety. Ditto white cheeses or rice. The glutinous nature of these things means that eventually your soup would either break, and you’d have watery/creamy divisions, or it’d clump into something truly vile looking, or after blending it, you could be left with a grainy consistency like you get when you blend certain kinds of lentils (and note to the universe? Lentils? NOT meant to be pulverize-blended, okay? Let’s just all — stop that. Unless you’re going to add crème fraîche or curry powder, please don’t fully blend lentils into some hideous paste. Just. Don’t. Lentil soups deserve some chunks.). Tofu and a stick blender has turned out to be the ultimate soup saver for me. Too many veggies and hideously vying tastes? No worries. Just add plain tofu and blend. Funny colors, weird consistencies, and odd textures from limp, overcooked veg vanish magically when blended. I add a pinch of salt, a little wine, a dash of curry, and all is well. Because it’s not dairy based, the acid doesn’t curdle the tofu, and really, the soy protein in your soups means your meal will just stick with you a bit longer.

Since it really and truly is freezing for this part of the world — it was 22°F this morning (5.5°C for those Fahrenheit impaired), I am inspired to make a soup a day as the cold weather ramps up. I have a monster head of Nappa Cabbage in the fridge, so this is what I will try this afternoon:

Baechu Gook, As Adapted from Dok Suni, A Korean Cookbook

• Ingredients:
• 12 ounces Nappa cabbage
• 4 ounces white radish
• 4 ounces beef short ribs – or some vegetarian equivalent
• 4 ounces scallions
• 2 tablespoons soybean paste
• 6 cups water
• 1 teaspoon red pepper sauce
• 2 teaspoons crushed garlic

Instructions:

Clean the cabbage and shred with hands as desired, but in a wringing motion that will help soften the cabbage. Thinly slice the radish. Thinly slice the beef (or for me, it will be Quorn Naked Cutlets, which hold up well, and have scared some vegetarians into thinking I was feeing them chicken. Hee!) Cut the scallions (or leeks or onions, what have you) into 1-inch lengths. In a pot, dissolve soybean paste in the water (I think just adding a little silken tofu for smoothness will also work). For a smooth consistency, use a fine-mesh strainer with handle to remove the chunks of soybean paste floating in the soup and discard. Add the red pepper paste (Which I actually have! I knew I bought that for some reason), cabbage, beef, radish, scallion, and garlic and cook for 7 minutes over a high flame, then for 3 more minutes over a medium flame. Serve hot with white rice, kimchi, and sautéed anchovy (Um, again – an adaptation… no anchovies for me! And I’m amused at serving cabbage soup with kimchi, which is yet more cabbage, but… hey – this way I’ll use it up, right?).

I believe I’ll rummage around in the freezer and see if we have any frozen egg rolls left, steam a basket of rice, and voilá… dinner. I’ll let you know how it all goes.

It’s ridiculous, the lengths some people will go to, to be holiday-esque.

The thought was: “Ooh! Chestnuts! Let’s roast them on our Thanksgiving beach bonfire!” The reality was: “The coast in November is bloody cold, and the windchill is making it below forty, and what were we thinking, bring a post-surgical child out here in the dark, not to mention trying to lug firewood and marshmallows out here while keeping track of irresponsible teen-aged pyromaniacs?!” So, no chestnuts roasted on an open fire (but marshmallows roasted over candles: good fun. Except for that bit with the sooty wax. And the skewers on fire. Look, I said pyromaniacs…) At any rate, post-holiday, we were left with a great bag of beautifully smooth nuts which look gorgeous, but which are just too …something for my taste. Sweet? Starchy? Something. Really, I’m just not that big on nuts, and I don’t care for even things like pecans and macadamia nuts, which most people are wild about, but I try to eat some nuts every once in a bit, because they’re supposed to be full of copper and trace elements Americans don’t get, unless they’re combined with sports and beer — which aren’t two of my big interests either. But I digress. Me, with bag of glossy brown nuts, rapidly rotting (NEVER have I run across any nut that decomposes so fast. Ugh!). So, my idea was an autumnal soup. I came up with one that combined a chestnut soup from a Vegan Lunchbox recipe with leftover roasted butternut squash and pureéd the whole thing. That cut the cloying sweetness/richness of the chestnuts, to good effect, but the fact is that peeling/shelling the rotten things was a huge pain in the neck — and in the thumbs. Tasty though it was, I am not surprisingly more fond of soups that take less work.

Now that the cool, wet weather has come in to stay for a bit, the farm is churning out those cool, wet weather veggies, most notably leeks and carrots, broccoli, cauli, and soon, peas. Apparently myriad other cultures have long regarded the whole carrot — as well as the tops of radishes, beets, and other greens part of the usual culinary circus, but most Californians I know don’t know what to do with any part of a carrot that isn’t orange. Admittedly, I used to put carrot tops in a vase and admire them for the fifteen seconds they would stay pretty, and my chiropop chick juices them — but then, she juices everything. (She also gives her sweater-wearing dog filtered water and B vitamins, so I’m going to reserve judgment on her input here.) I decided, since I have an abundance of carrots and leeks from the farm box this week, to see if they’d make a decent soup. I tasted a piece of the top, and determined that it was a flavor close enough to celery to work well.

I began by sauteéing onions and leeks, adding dry-leaf sage and then the chopped and cleaned carrot tops and six cups of stock. I finished with some mung bean noodles, just for fun, and it was really tasty. Mac suggested quinoa for next time, and I think carrot tops might also go well with barley. This is what I’m going to try next for my Carrot Top Soup:

• 1 ½ cup chopped carrot tops – and any carrots that go with them, diced *You can make this without adding the carrots; I did.
• 2 tblspns olive oil
• ½ cup short grain rice or quinoa
• 2 large leeks, white part only
• a clove of garlic, smashed, or 1 tsp. garlic paste
• one stalk of celery, diced
• 2 pinches of rubbed sage
• 2 tblspns chopped dill or parsley
• 6 cups vegetable stock, plus ½c. white wine
• Salt and pepper to taste

After sauteèing the leeks, garlic, carrots and celery in your olive oil for about five minutes, pour on the white wine, give it another minute or so, then add your broth and bring to bubbling stage. Once your broth and veggies are boiling, add in your rice or quinoa, and your sage, then simmer for fifteen minutes until tender. Add the chopped carrot tops and cook for 5 more minutes, mixing well. The Italians serve a soup much like this over garlic-rubbed bread and sprinkled with parmesan. You could also add cubed potatoes in lieu of quinoa or rice. One of the best things about soup is that you can hardly mess it up, so I always enjoy making whatever variations on a theme I can come up with. It combats the rain and fog fug, makes the house smell wonderful, and fills me up so I don’t overdose on the lovely cranberry muffins being churned out of the oven.

It may not be exactly ‘holiday-esque,’ but it’s seasonal, which lasts longer.

A note about the booze, Julia… After another email to my collegiate friend in Spain, I realized I have a habit of coming up with all of these great recipes where one can just drop in a bit of white wine or rum, and all will be well… This is to disprove the Booze As Food thing I seem to have going: For the under 21 set, lemon juice, vinegar, vegetable stock or possibly even V8 will work as well as the other libations I’ve suggested. Don’t let me get you into trouble, Julia… it would be a shame to get kicked out of your university just for cooking, after everything else…

Cheers!

At the chiropop’s office the other day, I ran across this months issue of Real Simple, and found — well, a lot of aggravation, for one thing, since ‘real’ in the title should be adverbial, as in Really Simple, but aside from that, in the November issue I also found a recipe for what’s called Indian Pudding.

Hmm. Indian pudding. It seems like I have a faraway, foggy memory of something like this pudding from a 4th grade study unit on Plymouth Rock, Puritans, Pilgrims and First Nations peoples… but that can’t be right, since I very much doubt that First Nations people went around popping things in the oven and topping them with whipped cream. A little research informs me that in reality, this dish is called “Indian” pudding because the early settlers referred to the main ingredient as “Indian meal” – the meal used by the First Nation peoples. Generally, John and Mary Puritan weren’t all that creative, so any recipe using Indian meal as the main ingredient was called Indian… . Over time, the plant became known as corn, and the meal made from it as corn meal.

History lesson aside, the Americanized version of this British steamed ‘hasty’ pudding thing (sans myself and classmates grinding the cornmeal ourselves on indented rocks ) sounds fabulous. These are the ingredients I’m dragging on our Thanksgiving Odyssey:

Indian Meal Pudding

• 4 cups whole milk (Oy! 2% or skim makes it too thin, I suppose.)
• 2/3 cup finely ground cornmeal
• 1/2 cup molasses
• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus more for the dish
• 1/4 cup light or dark brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg, plus more for garnishing
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (I’m going to go for vanilla beans, I think.)
• 2 cups (1 pint) heavy cream, whipped to firm peaks (Whoa! Not a lowfat dish.)

Heat oven to 350° F.

In a large saucepan, over medium-high heat, bring 3 cups of the milk to a boil.

In a small bowl, whisk together the remaining milk and the cornmeal. Whisking constantly, slowly add the mixture to the boiling milk. Reduce heat and simmer gently, stirring frequently, for 15 minutes. Remove from heat. Stir in the molasses, butter, brown sugar, salt, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla. Transfer to a buttered 1 1/2-quart casserole dish. Set the casserole in a roasting pan, pull the oven rack out halfway, and place the pan on it. Carefully add enough hot water to the pan to reach halfway up the casserole. Cover both pans with a single large sheet of foil. Bake for 1 hour.

Remove foil. Bake until the pudding is almost set but still wobbly, 1 1/2 hours more. Transfer casserole to a wire rack for at least 30 minutes. Spoon onto plates. Serve with the whipped cream and sprinkle with nutmeg.

Makes 8 to 12 servings

This sounds very simple… a slow-cooked cornmeal dish that probably made its way from New England to the South in some version or other. The Pilgrims, I’m afraid, were everywhere. Dare I say this dish sounds like sweetened grits? I can’t wait to try it out, and I’ll tell you how it goes after I figure out how to substitute all of the dairy ingredients so that it’s something I want to eat.

It’s been a funny month. I’ve got so much going on, what with NaNo Month, the Cybils, and the crazy Thanksgiving thing this weekend, not to mention substitute teaching and sibling-sitting while my sister is in recovery — I’m busy! Yet all I want to do is cook and putter and completely ignore actual WORK. It feels like my psyche is slowly but surely unraveling, and the downtime that cooking brings is essential to my sanity. I don’t wanna work… but just banging on the drum all day is overrated. Bring on the baking!