Butternut Squash Stew with Black Beans

This definitely has a nice little Indian vibe going what with the curry, cinnamon, and cumin.  More than that, it's tremendously filling and otherwise delicious (says I as I eat some).  I sure wish soup photographed better...I feel like they all look the same, but they're not!  The original recipe (from Bon Appetit) is with chicken which is super tasty, but lacking chicken, I threw in a can of black beans.  A note on the butternut squash...seriously--be careful when you crack it open.  You need a really sharp knife to get through that skin.  If you're lacking such a knife (shoot, I have one and cutting these things scare me), peel it first--it'll be easier to cut through).

Winter Squash stew with Indian Spices (adapted from Bon Appetit)
Olive oil
1/2 large onion, chopped
3 cloves of garlic
1 1/2 tsp each of ground cumin and curry powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1 small butternut squash, peeled, seeded, and diced into 3/4" chunks
1 big Russet or Yukon Gold potato, peeled and diced in 3/4" chunks (you can leave the peel on if you want an earthier flavor and provided that you're using a non-scary organic potato)
3 roma tomatoes diced in 3/4" chunks
2 cups of chicken stock
salt
1 can black beans, drained and rinsed
Leafy green herbs of your choice (today I used a combo of parsley, spearmint, and cilantro--really anything is fine though)

Heat a 4 qt pot over medium heat.  Add enough oil to slightly film the bottom and add the onion and garlic.  Saute until the onion is translucent.  Add the spices and stir.  Allow the spices to toast for about a minute.  Add the rest of the ingredients and bring to a boil.  While the liquid is heating, taste for salt.  You'll want the liquid to be just a little saltier than you think prudent as the squash and the potato will absorb some.  When the liquid is at a boil, reduce the heat to medium low and cook until the potatoes and the squash are tender--probably 15-20 minutes.  Add the beans and heat through.  Your lunch sure was fast to make today!

Feel Better Soup

The past couple of days Nathan and I have been trying to get a wee sinus infection out of our systems.  I love having chicken soup around for when we do get sick, but I get tired of plain chicken noodle soup.  A couple of weeks ago on a whim, I decided to give the Greek variation a go.  What I discovered was a soup that was creamy, rich, deeply satisfying, and makes you feel better almost instantly--sick or not. 

Avgolemeno--Greek Chicken and Rice Soup

3 T olive oil
3 carrots, diced
3 stalks of celery, diced
1 small onion, diced
2 green onions, chopped
2 bay leaves
6 T rice
6 cups chicken stock
1 cup chopped leftover chicken
3 eggs
6 T of fresh lemon juice (a little more or less is fine)
fresh dill and/or parsley--as much as you like
salt and pepper

Heat a 8 qt pot over medium heat.  Add the oil and saute the carrots, celery, onions, and bay leaves, stirring occasionally until softened--about 10 minutes.  Add the rice and stir until the rice is coated with the oil from the pot.  Add the stock.  Bring the stock to a boil and reduce to medium low heat until the rice is al dente--15 to 20 minutes.  Add the chicken towards the end of cooking.  Meanwhile, break up the eggs in a glass measuring cup and whisk in the lemon juice until combined.  When the rice is cooked to your liking, ladle out about 1 cup of stock and incorporate it quickly into the egg mixture to warm it up.  Pour the egg mixture back into the pot and continue heating until the eggs just begin to thicken.  This will only take a minute or two.  The soup will be glassy and creamy looking.  Do NOT let it come to a boil or you'll end up with custard (this is true if you reheat the leftovers later too).  Roughly chop the herbs and throw them on top as the soup finishes, stirring to incorporate.  Season with salt and pepper.

White Bean Dip--so much more exciting than it sounds

What with my husband finishing the dissertation and all, I hate to admit how little cooking has been going on.  So yesterday was a wonderful break and return to things.  The art teacher that I've worked with sells jewelry on the side, and I hosted a party for her which gave me a good excuse to do a little cooking.

I'll post the pumpkin flan that I did (I need to picture it before I eat it all), but for now, here's the white bean dip I improvised which ended up being totally yummy.  The key to this was the Meyer lemon, which I didn't realize was a Meyer lemon until I got it home as I was just plowing through Whole Foods as fast as I could.  They have such an unusual flavor...kind of like an orange, kind of like a lemon, and kind of their own thing too.  Ah, but the smell--like a bucket full of flowers, those Meyer lemons.  Maybe I should shop when my blood sugar is low more often. 

White Bean Dip

1 shallot, finely diced
1 clove garlic, minced
as much of your favorite chile powder as you like and according to hotness--ancho would be good, I used aji amarillo which isn't super hot, so I used about 1 tsp
3 T olive oil
1 can cannellini beans
juice from 1/2 Meyer lemon or 1 T orange juice and 1 T lemon juice
2 big handfuls cilantro chopped finely
salt and pepper

Heat a little bit of the olive oil in a small pan.  Saute the shallot and the garlic until the shallot is translucent.  Add the chile powder and continue to cook for one minute.  Remove the mixture to a small bowl.  Drain and rinse the beans and put half of them in a small food processor with the lemon juice, the rest of the olive oil and whizz away until they're nice and creamy and totally smooth.  You might need to add a wee bit of water to facilitate this.  Scrape the beans into the bowl.  Add the rest of the beans and mash them coarsely with a wooden spoon.  Add the cilantro and salt and pepper to taste.

Serve with rice crackers

Red Lentil Soup

I got all geeky about writing about my theories of making soup that I forgot to put up a recipe for the one that was making me wax poetic in the first place.

Red Lentil Soup--originally inspired by a Mollie Katzen book--(would that I could remember which one)

1 large onion, diced
1 carrot, diced
1 stalk of celery, diced
olive oil
3 cloves garlic, chopped roughly
1 T ground cumin
1 T sweet paprika
1 T chile powder or as much cayenne as you can stomach--for me that would be about 1/2 tsp
1 can stewed tomatoes with juice, rough chopped or broken up with your hands
1 cup red lentils, rinsed
4 cups of water
salt and pepper to taste

Heat a large pot (8 qts gives you a lot of good wiggle room) over medium heat.  In a smaller pot, heat up the water over high heat (if it comes to a boil before the veg is done, just put it on low to keep it warm).  Film the bottom of the large pot thinly with olive oil.  Add the onion, carrot, and celery.  Using a fork, a mortar & pestle, or a small food processor, smash the garlic into the spices...you will probably have to add a little water to make this easier--1 T should do the trick.  Saute the veg for about 10 minutes, at which point the carrots and the celery should be fairly tender...they won't get much more tender, so if, after 10 minutes, you feel like they are not as tender as you would like, continue to saute them to your liking.  Then add the garlic/spice paste.  Saute this for 1-2 minutes until you can smell everything and the paste has darkened in color slightly.  Add the tomatoes and scrape the bottom of the pot to deglaze everything.  Add the lentils and finally the water.  Bring everything to a boil, reduce to low to simmer and cook until the lentils are tender but still have a little bit of bite to them: this should take 30-45 minutes.  When things are done, add salt and pepper until it tastes delicious (you could do this before, but salt can make legumes tough if you add it while they are cooking...lentils aren't as sensitive as bigger beans like black beans, for instance, but I wait to add salt just to be on the safe side).

For garnish/a little herby brightness, I threw on some fresh oregano, parsley, and cilantro, that somehow, through the miracle of a plug-in appliance I have not managed to kill with my black thumbs.

Principles of Soup

Soup is one of those things I will never get bored of, can eat every day, and love to cook perhaps more than anything else.  It's cheap to make, you can feed yourself and your family for days off a pot, and it will warm your toes when it's nasty outside.  As much as I love soup, though, I'm often disappointed by soup when I order it elsewhere (with the exception of Pho--it's perfection in a bowl), not because the ingredients are bad, typically, but the execution leaves something to be desired.  In my effort to make the world a better place one pot at a time, here are the principles that I follow for a little bowl of joy.

1.  Don't put a mouse in your soup--it won't taste good...I'm kidding....but DO read Mouse Soup.  Arnold Lobel is my hero.

1 (for real). Soup does not need to be cooked forever:  Soup is so delicious because the liquid eeks out all of the flavor from whatever it is that you put in the soup.  That being said, soup ingredients only have so much to give before in the words of Crescent Dragonwagon, "...all that is left is tasteless fiber, to be strained out and discarded."**  So can you cook your soup on a back burner for hours upon hours--sure, but be warned that the chicken won't taste like chicken and your veg will be a big pile of unappealing mush.  You know the kind--it just looks sad and anemic and lifeless. Soup should be exciting!

2.  Layer your ingredients as you cook:  Soup is a conglomeration of a lot of different ingredients, so you would think, well, if I throw it all in at the same time, it will all magically happen.  Not so, dear reader.  Everything cooks at a different rate.  If you stagger the addition of your ingredients in relation to how long they cook, the end result will be much better than if you throw everything in the pot at the beginning.  The more you cook, the more you will come to understand the optimum cooking times of various things and how they will relate to each other (like how overcooked broccoli will stink up your house for days or how an undercooked carrot will make you feel like a rabbit, and not in a good way).

3.  Get thee some knife skills:  First, get yourself a good knife--you need maybe two--a good paring knife, and a chef's knife.  Keep them sharper than you think prudent and maintain them that way.  I use Wusthof because they fit my hand well.  Shun makes fantastically light knives that are a joy to work with.  It'll set you back $80-100 to get a decent chef's knife, but it is a true investement.  Back to soup: soup is a texture goldmine, and learning to chop vegetables of the same size and similar shape is worth the practice.  Your soup...all your cooking will taste better and you'll find yourself enjoying cooking a lot more.

4.  Water hot, water cold:  Cold water will leach out more flavor from ingredients than hot water.  Cold water is therefore good to use on a soup whose flavor is largely dependent on the stock--like chicken soup or pho.  On the other hand, adding hot liquid (and by hot, I mean, you've heated it up, not just taken hot water from the tap) to ingredients or ingredients to hot liquid will allow the ingredients to keep a lot more of their individual texture and flavor because they simply cook faster than if started in cold water.  Using hot liquid is good for soups that rely on texture like chili or minestrone.

5.  Simmer yes, boil, no:  Boiling a soup makes the stock get cloudy.  While it's important to bring things to a boil to kill any nasties in the stock itself, it needs to be turned down ASAP so it doesn't get all cloudy on you.  Boiling also makes things tough, I think.

6.  Let your spoon be your recipe:  Soup relies on ratios much more than any specific recipe.  Michael Ruhlman recently wrote a book on ratios and cooking.  I'm not a Michael Ruhlman fan, what with his snobby I'm-better-than-you tone, but the art of ratios in cooking is interesting.  What I mean is instead of saying--use 1 T of onion, 1/2 cup diced carrot, etc.  look at your ingredients and imagine what it will be like when you pull your spoon out of your bowl.  It's my personal opinion that you should get a little bit of everything...if it all looks in balance to you on your imaginary spoon, it probably will be when you get to the end.  If your soup looks like it needs more liquid as you're cooking, you're probably right.  Trust your instincts--you have more than you might give yourself credit for.

7.  Flavor principles:  I like my soup as a balance between hot-salty-sour-and-sweet. 
hot:  Chiles, chile paste, chile powder (as in chili or in pure forms like ancho or cayenne), chile flakes, or chile sauce or tabasco etc can all add a nice zing.  You know your personal heat tolerance, so follow it.  Be aware that heat will be absorbed by the other ingredients, so if the soup tastes hot initially, it will not be as spicy after sitting for a few hours.             
salty: Salt can turn everything around--learn to use it well...it can be your biggest ally or your biggest enemy.  How much and what kind is personal--you just have to taste it. As fanatical as I am about making your own stock, I like to have some good quality bouillon like this one on hand to add towards the end of cooking if the soup tastes like it needs more body and a different kind of salt. 
sour: A little acid (in the form of citrus, wine, vinegar or tomatoes) at the end of cooking can add a depth to your soup. 
sweet:  A little sugar (or honey, agave nectar, maple syrup, or molasses)can soften the raw edges of a soup with a lot of acid like a tomato soup.

8.  Don't forget the garnish:  Parsley isn't just for prettying up a plate--it and other herbs can add a brightness and some good fresh flavor to a bowl of soup that you can't get from simmering it as it's cooking (you should do that too though for a different kind of flavor).  The same holds true for a drizzle of oil, vinegar, chile sauce, yogurt or anything else you can think of putting on top of soup.    

More later...I'm eating some red lentil soup.

Coconut Milk part 2 and a confession

I don't really have to live dairy free.  I was allergy tested this week and I found out that I'm not actually allergic to milk--I just feel like a million times better not eating it.  And of all weird things my skin is clear from not eating it for the first time since I was seriously like 11.  I think dairy messes with my blood sugar.  All that being said, I'm so darn happy that I can have a little butter and cheese now and then.  Life without manchego, murcia al vino, and lasagna is a little sad for me.  So perhaps the blog should be MOSTLY dairy free.

So after thinking about making my own coconut milk, I thought I'd give it a go.  Bittman is right--it is terribly simple to make your own, but there is a trick...

Fresh Coconut Milk from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman

2 cups water
2 cups dried unsweetened coconut (I'll throw in without preservatives)

Bring the water to a boil and put in a blender jar.  Add the coconut on top (if you put the coconut in first, good luck trying to get it to blend) and whizz away for a few minutes.  Pour the mixture through a fine mesh strainer into a bowl or glass measure, pressing down on the solids.  This will yield almost 2 cups of coconut milk.  Bittman says to use immediately or freeze indefinitely.  In reality, I think it can stay in the fridge for a couple of days.  Be aware that it will get a layer of thick cream on top that you'll have to whisk back into everything when you use it from the fridge. 

Bittman swears up and down that this is cheaper than buying coconut milk in cans...I need to investigate this thoroughly.  One thing I'm not thrilled about is the coconut particulates that you're left with at the end.  It feels wasteful to me to just chuck them, even though I know that they've given all of their flavor to the milk.  I've been eating the leftover coconut in my oatmeal and it tastes pretty decent.  I'm thinking about making a cookie with it too...maybe a meringue...I will experiment.

If I had a cat, and it died, somehow I think I'd feel less bad

Gourmet is closing up shop.  I don't know what to say.  I'm totally stunned.  I can't even be articulate enough to say how much Gourmet has meant to me.  I've been a subscriber since I was a freshman in high school in 1996.  There have been many terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days that I've had only to come home to this happy little magazine in my mailbox--the end result, after a pot of tea and my feet up on the couch was a not so bad after all kind of day.  I've been inspired by its recipes, sent on crazy adventures via its restaurant reviews, had my very soul touched by its food writing, and just generally learned to be a better cook.  Shoot--I've painted rooms with the covers as my color inspiration.  I will dearly miss everything about it, perhaps Ruth Reichl's letters from the editor most of all.  I wish Conde Nast had canned some other magazine instead.  I for one will NOT be switching to Bon Appetit--its just not as good of a magazine.

If anyone has any back issues, they'd like to get rid of, I'd be glad to take them off your hands.  So sad...

Tools of the Trade: "milk"

Everyone cooking without dairy has their favorite substitutions for dairy products.  Every cookbook I've read on the subject so far seems to rely heavily on soy based products.  Soy is for sure useful, especially because it has a decent amount of protein in it that is generally lacking or greatly less in other non dairy products, but I don't like to use it in general.

My personal favorite is coconut milk.  It is rich and fatty (the good for you kind) and neutral enough in taste that you can use it in place of milk.  It's fat content is high enough that you can use it in place of cream without sacrificing mouthfeel.  It bakes up well and makes some pretty rockin oatmeal.

When you're looking for coconut milk, find one that does not contain sodium metabisulfite (used to keep the milk white) which I think makes it taste like the can.  My favorite brand by far is Whole Foods 365.  It's organic and usually cheaper than every other coconut milk except the stuff I can buy at the Vietnamese grocery that's like $.79 but tastes ONLY like the can.  When I'm not near a WF, the Thai brand is also quite good.  I use both lite and regular--lite for everyday cooking and regular for when I want extra creaminess.

Mark Bittman has a recipe for your own coconut milk in his most excellent book, How to Cook Everything.  In his typical gentle cynicism, he writes, "You can buy coconut milk in cans, but it's relatively expensive and, for me at least, more trouble than it's worth.  On the othe hand, a pound of dried coconut costs about $2...and will make gallons of coconut milk, thick or thin, with little effort."  To be honest, I haven't really had much success with this, though I own an awesome blender, but then I was trying to make less than the recipe makes, which usually isn't a good idea in a blender.  Seriously, I really need to try this again...

Speaking of oatmeal:

~E's Morning Oatmeal

1/2 cup old fashioned rolled oats
pinch of salt
1/2 cup coconut milk--lite or regular
1/2 cup water
1/4 tsp allspice
a good does of honey or agave nectar (maybe 1 T)
1/2 cup fruit--fresh or frozen (I used peaches this morning)

Combine everything except the fruit in a small pot over medium low heat.  Consume a few cups of tea and read something interestingwhile it cooks--it needs to cook maybe 10 minutes or so.  You can poke it with a spoon once in a while if it makes you feel better.  When the liquid has been absorbed and it's all thickening up, at the fruit and stir.  Voila!  Tasty oatmeal.
 

Hello Blogosphere

I'm E.

I make a lot of stuff. I'm not new to blogging, but I am new here. My other blog, E Made This is mostly about sewing, but being the cook that I am, I decided to create this space to write about food.

I love food! I love to cook. I love to feed people what I cook. About a year ago, I figured out that I was not able to eat dairy. I won't go into the details of all of that, but I will boil down the drama by saying that eating all forms of dairy, be it butter, milk, cheese, or cream makes me feel really ill.

Living dairy free, unfortunately is rather annoying and difficult at times. I dearly miss butter and I weep for the loss of delicious cheeses. I've also thought about enshrining my copies of The Art of French Cooking as a token of remembrance.

While I was still the only guest at my little pity party, I remembered: Hey--I can cook! This isn't so bad. I'm going to figure this thing out.

Here's my beef:

I hate things that are _____ (fill in the blank) free. All these weird fake cheeses and chemistry created "butters" don't taste like dairy and the fakeness of them really defeats the purpose of eating more healthfully. I don't want some ersatz version of a cookie...I'd rather just not eat it.

Furthermore, _______(fill in the blank) free cookbooks are pretty depressing. Along with a lot of unappealing recipes, you get a good side of gloom and doom about whatever ____(fill in the blank) you happen to be eliminating from your diet.

What I hope to accomplish here is to write about good food. To write about delicious food that my family loves that just happens to be dairy free. I hope to throw some good cooking technique your way. I don't want to rant about how evil dairy is or how people who cook with it are out to get me.

So welcome. May you learn to eat delicious things because of this blog.