“Naw, I don’t need anything,” I said.

Linda and I were in Panini’s Deli, a sandwich shop right in the middle of the Discount Health Foods store. I’d link you but, you know, they’re too cool to have a website. We were eating the best sandwiches you can find in this godforsaken restaurant desert of a town, but that doesn’t do them justice. These sandwiches are the bomb, made with fresh, semi-trendy ingredients like red pepper alioli or basil pesto mayo, with several vegetarian sandwiches that — surprise! — aren’t all variations of “avocado, tomato and bean sprouts.”

Surrounding it is one of the two best health food stores in the region, complete with an awesome bulk foods and bulk spice section. Linda was asking if I wanted to do any shopping.

There had to be something. There is always something I want/need from the health food store. I get all my spices there now. They’re cheaper —less than half the cost usually — and even fresher than you find in the supermarket. But for the life of me, nothing sprung to mind. We finished noshing our awesomewiches and took off, emptyhanded.

That was yesterday.

Today, I go to make some Old Bay seasoning (don’t ask; it’ll bore you to death and I have to get to my point here sometime). It has cardamom in it.

Cardamom.

Oh, yeah, that spice I love. That spice I ran out of a few weeks ago. That spice I made a mental note to buy when I next went to the health food store.

KHAAAAANNNNNN!

muskrat love

They sure look ugly coming out of the oven!

I didn’t even tell you that story in order to tell you this one. I just told it to remind everyone to keep your shopping lists handy. :p

And this story is just about a yummy veggie burger that I love. I like that, even though it has bread crumbs, which I consider filler, it doesn’t go nuts with them and it still is full of wholesome stuff like green pepper, hot sauce, onions, and of course, black beans. I also love that it stays the heck together. Lots of homemade burgers don’t. It’s like, the nearly-unattainable goal of all veggie burgers: stay together. Like muskrats. Muskrats in love.

Yummy Black Bean Burgers

In my search for good veggie burger recipes, the hardest part is finding burgers that actually stick together! This recipe for black bean veggie burgers stays together very well and has a great Mexican kick to it too. Just be sure to make the ingredients as dry as you can before mixing: pat dry the beans, and strain or pat the green pepper and onion. If you don’t have a food processor, mash the beans with a fork or potato masher, and cut up the green pepper, onion and garlic very finely. I actually haven’t tried this without a food processor so if you do, report back, soldier! Adapted from allrecipes.com

Yield: 4 large patties or 6 to 8 smaller patties
Oven: 375°F
Special equipment: A food processor makes it much easier!

1 (15 ounce) can (1½ cups) black beans, drained, rinsed and patted dry.
½ green bell pepper, cut into 2 inch pieces
½ onion, cut into wedges
3 cloves of garlic, peeled
1 egg
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 tablespoon cumin
1 teaspoon Thai chili sauce (can also use any hot sauce)
½ cup bread crumbs

Preheat oven to 375°F and oil a baking sheet or line with parchment or a silicone baking mat (like a Silpat).

Add beans, green pepper, onion, and garlic to your food processor. Pulse until veggies are finely chopped and beans are pasty, but not quite puréed. In a large bowl, whisk together egg, chili powder, cumin, and Thai chili sauce. Add bean and veggie mixture and mix well. Finally, stir in bread crumbs. If mixture is not thick enough to form patties (it should be), add more bread crumbs.

Take a look at your buns and make your patties about the same size. Big, round, luscious buns require bigger patties, of course. Small, firm buns need small patties. There are zero sexual innuendos in this paragraph.

Put the patties on your prepared baking sheet, and bake at 375°F for 20 minutes total: 10 minutes on one side, flip, 10 minutes on the other side.

Ever run into a recipe that is so easy and so tasty that you are dazed under its spell, obeying its command to make it again, and again, and again, until two weeks later you blink and say to yourself, “Damn, that was good.”

This recipe is why I bought the big honkin’ bottle of sesame oil.

Perfect for chlily nights when you have some time to cook, but not a lot of time, this sesame-peanut stir fry puts together pantry and freezer ingredients in about half an hour to create a comforting sweet-and-spicy assortment of veggies and rice. I love it for its…well, its heft. Vegetables and rice are so very light that they threaten to float away without something to anchor them down, and in winter that something is chunky peanut butter and luscious, dark sesame oil, anchored by onion, ginger, garlic, and lots of black pepper.

For a truly comforting experience, mix the rice right into the finished stir fry. We’re all at home here. If it’s late, we’re going to scoop some of this into a bowl and curl up on the couch with it, furtively, because we know we’re not supposed to.

And if we’re lucky, we have Babylon 5 in the DVD player, and it’s a Londo episode, with lots of Vir, because who knew Flounder could act?

Sesame Peanut Stir Fry

Recipe inspired by “Szechuan-style lo mein stir fry with broccoli slaw and peanuts” from The PDQ (Pretty Darn Quick) Vegetarian Cookbook: 240 Healthy and Easy No-Prep Recipes for Busy Cooks. I’ll often make this with a bag of mixed frozen vegetables — broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots. It’s great with basmati rice and the great part is, you can start the rice when you start cooking the stir fry, and they’ll both be done around the same time. P.S. Sesame peanut stir fry doubles easily to feed a crowd or have extra leftovers.

1 tablespoon canola oil
½ cup chopped onion
1-2 minced garlic cloves
¼ tsp black pepper
16-ounce frozen broccoli, thawed
⅓ cup water
⅓ cup reduced-sodium soy sauce
½ teaspoon ground ginger or 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger
½ tablespoon sugar
1 package (approximately 14 ounces) firm or extra-firm tofu, drained and cubed
2 tablespoon chunky peanut butter
1 tablespoon toasted (dark) sesame seed oil
¼ cup unsalted chopped peanuts
cooked rice (I like basmati)

In large skillet, heat oil over medium heat. Add chopped onion and cook until softened, 3 minutes. Add garlic and black pepper and cook 1 minute.

Increase heat to medium-high and add broccoli. Cook, stirring occasionally, until warmed, 1 to 3 minutes.

Stir in water, soy sauce, ginger and sugar. Add cubed tofu, if using. Bring to a simmer.

Reduce heat to low and add peanut butter and sesame seed oil, stirring to incorporate; cook until heated through.

Serve on basmati rice. Sprinkle chopped peanuts on top.

Do you ever read something, get entirely the wrong impression, and walk around carrying that impression, like a treasured memento or a nursed wound, for ages before realizing you were mistaken?

For some reason I got Fritos in my head when I first read the recipe for Jeanne Lemlin’s 10 Minute Chilaquiles, from her surprisingly excellent Vegetarian Classics : 300 Essential and Easy Recipes for Every Meal.

Cooking with Junk Food

Neat! I thought. I get to cook with junk food! And I joyfully bought a big bag of Fritos on my next shopping trip. I proudly plopped it onto the conveyor belt at checkout, smug in the knowledge that, HA! I wasn’t going to chomp on them sitting on some hundred-dollar secondhand couch, oh no, not I.

I was going to cook with them. I was going to cook with Fritos.

And I did, and lo, the people ate of it and it was good.

But something always nagged at the back of my mind. I had a dim memory of chilaquiles being a use for stale or broken tortilla chips, not delicious monstrosities like Fritos. The omnipresent and omniscient Elise Bauer confirmed my suspicions.

And I found that my beloved 10 Minute Chilaquiles were actually…

Drum roll please…

Frito pie.

Step 1: Open a Bag of Fritos

I embraced it, the Frito pie. I mean, shit, it tastes good. It’s fairly nutritious, with protein, calcium, and a good deal of veggies from the salsa and tomato sauce. Each of six gigantic servings runs 500 calories. Serve this with salad and you can easily get by with half or two-thirds of a serving.

You really can’t go wrong with a recipe that begins with “open a bag of Fritos,” can you?

Vegetarian Frito Pie

This will be pretty salty if you use regular Fritos, so cut back on the salt where you can in this — a lower-sodium corn chip, perhaps, or no-salt-added tomato sauce. Feel free to mix up the beans or cheese or salsa, or use low-fat sour cream. I’ve made this with black beans as well as pinto and kidney, and with pepper jack and mozzarella instead of plain jack cheese. (I liked the larger beans more than the small black beans in this.)

Sauce:

1 (14– or 15–ounce) can pinto or kidney beans, rinsed, or 1½ cups homemade pinto or kidney beans
1 cup salsa, your choice of hotness
1 (14– or 15– ounce) can tomato sauce, no salt added preferable (the corn chips add quite enough salt, thank you very much)
½ cup water
1 (4-ounce) can chopped green chiles, undrained
½ teaspoon dried oregano
½ teaspoon ground cumin

The rest:

11 ounces of Fritos or other corn chips (a 9-ounce bag is fine, too)
1 cup sour cream
2 cups grated Monterey Jack cheese

Preheat oven to 350°F.

You’re going to be layering the sauce, chips, sour cream, and cheese in a 7 x 12 or 9 x 13 pan. First spread half the bean sauce in the bottom of the pan/dish. Then add half of the corn chips. Dollop half the sour cream on the chips in small spoonfuls. Sprinkle half the cheese over that.

There! Half done. Now spread the rest of the chips atop all of that, pour the rest of the sauce over everything, dollop the rest of the sour cream on top, and sprinkle the remaining cheese on top of everything.

Bake for 35 minutes in a 350-degree oven, until hot. Make happy noises while nomming.

Breakfast in Spain is unsubstantial, to my taste: a toasted and buttered bolillo (a large roll) and café con leche, Spain’s rich and tasty version of the latte. (I don’t like coffee or even lattes particularly, but I’ll take a café con leche any day.) Supper, as well, is fairly insubstantial: fried finger foods or a light platter of leftovers, served at 11 p.m., midnight, or even later, depending on the night-owlishness of your household.

Those are the foods my host mom, when I spent 6 months studying in Seville in college, served for breakfast and supper. She was garrulous and quick with a smile, matronly and recently-grandmotherly as well. Also in the household was my roommate and confidante, Laura; and host mom’s two daughters, one also with a husband and 3-year old daughter of her own. However, due to the 8 a.m. light breakfast and midnight greasy/not-filling supper, I was hungry quite often!

Lunch helped alleviate that. The biggest meal of the day in Mediterranean countries, usually eaten just before taking a siesta. My day went like so: get up and get breakfast around 8 a.m. Walk 45 minutes to classes, attend classes. Walk 45 minutes home around 2 p.m., famished, and have it alleviated by a home-cooked meal often followed by the biggest, juiciest, navel oranges you have ever eaten.

And after siesta, often it was another 45-minute walk back to the city center to hang out until the wee hours of the morning. Oh. That’s me in my feria dress. For Seville’s yearly post-Lent carnival and fair. Yeah. Dancing flamenco in that til 5 a.m. was kinda fun, actually.

Often host mom served fatty pork-based dishes that Laura and I picked at desultorially but tried to eat for sustenance. Occasionally she’d surprise us and make a Spanish or Andalusian classic, stunningly: a transcendent tortilla de patatas — transcendent precisely because the dish is basically eggs and potatoes — or gazpacho. Rich, smooth gazpacho as I like to imagine only the brash, proud Sevillanos would dare make it — with lots of fruity olive oil and soaked bread.

it’s tomato soup, served ice cold!

On the Simpsons, Lisa got laughed out of a party when she proudly presented her contribution, gazpacho. “It’s tomato soup, served ice-cold!”

Gazpacho is tomato soup, true, but in the sense that a Chevette is a car. It sounds really similar to a Corvette, yet they are very different machines.

People, well-intentioned people, absolutely mangle gazpacho. They make it without bread. They make it without olive oil. They put in a bunch of herbs and spices. They make it chunky. And when they serve a bowl filled with watery chunks of tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers, and ice cubes, people understandably balk.

They make it wrong. Wrong, I say!

gazpacho: the corvette of tomato soups

I’m biased due to my original gazpacho experiences. Inflexible, I am certain that gazpacho must contain, besides tomatoes, bread; it must contain olive oil, and a bit of garlic, cucumber, bell pepper, and onion; and it must be velvety smooth and thick.

I prepared this gazpacho for many reasons. One is to celebrate summer’s end. Though nearly October, the tomatoes still cling to the vines; they are the last ones. The green tomatoes will not ripen before a frost comes. Same goes for peppers; the onions are already pulled a month ago and cured; and cucumbers are long gone. Another reason to make gazpacho was to make use of the Nature’s Pride bread that I got from a coupon they sent me via Foodbuzz. This gazpacho recipe will be entered in a competition to be featured at the Foodbuzz blogging festival in November.

If it’s still warm where you are, or if there are still homegrown tomatoes available, try to make some gazpacho before the cold sets in for good. Having gazpacho today was a warm splash of summer.

gazpacho sevillano

This recipe was inspired by a Spanish-language post deep in some forums on Microsoft’s Spanish version of Bing. It looked close to what I remembered. I accidentally doubled the bread, but found it perfectly matched the gazpacho I knew and loved. For a less thick soup, use only 2 slices of stale bread. I also use less bell pepper and cucumber than most gazpacho recipes call for. Use your own taste buds and add ingredients to suit yourself. It’s easy to toss in a few more pieces of cucumber or green pepper to the food processor if the mixture seems to need them. Be careful with the garlic — a little raw garlic goes a looooong way. Also, I took the advice from Anya von Bremzen’s The New Spanish Table and used a food processor first to mix, then transferred it to a blender to make the gazpacho silky smooth.

time: 60 minutes, if you are slow like me
yield: 5 cups, or 1¼ liters
special equipment: food processor and/or blender

4 slices (7 ounces or 200 grams) of stale Nature’s Pride Country White or any other white bread, crusts removed
2–3 pounds tomatoes — I used bumpy, blemishy heirloom tomatoes that I have to cut away lots of, so I used 3 pounds
2 small cloves garlic or 1 large clove, peeled
½ small red or yellow onion
½ of a medium cucumber, peeled
1 small green bell pepper
½ cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons champagne vinegar — sherry vinegar is often the type called for, but this works fine
salt to taste

Note: You’ll be making half of the recipe at a time. The food processor won’t hold everything at once, if yours is a normal-sized food processor.

First, put on a pot of water to boil. You’ll be slipping the tomatoes in there to loosen their skins.

While waiting for the water to boil, tear the stale bread into small pieces and put them into a bowl. Fill with water and let soak.

Prepare the vegetables. Peel the garlic. Peel the onion and cut it into quarters. Peel the cucumber half and cut into chunks. Core and peel — yep, peel — the green pepper. It’s pretty easy to just hold it in your hand and peel; seems easier than an apple. If you’re sure your food processor and blender can pulverize the skin, skip peeling. Toss 1 clove of garlic, half the cucumber, and half the green pepper into the food processor’s bowl.

Once the water is boiling, drop the tomatoes in for 30 seconds to 1 minute. Remove the tomatoes and plunge into cold water. The peels will slip right off. Remove tomato peels, then core and seed the tomatoes. Add half the tomatoes to the food processor. Add half of the soaked bread, squeezing lightly before putting it in.

Whirl it all together until it appears smooth. Add ¼ cup of the olive oil and 1 tablespoon of the vinegar. Process until all mixed. Transfer to a blender. Make the second half of the gazpacho by putting the rest of the seeded tomatoes, cucumber, onion, garlic (if using), green pepper and bread into the food processor. Mix, then add the remaining ¼ cup olive oil and 1 tablespoon vinegar. Taste and adjust vegetables/seasoning if desired.

Transfer the second half of the gazpacho to the blender. Whirl together until velvety smooth. Add salt to taste. Serve chilled. Garnish with finely diced cucumber; green, red, and yellow bell pepper; and quartered or halved cherry or grape tomatoes. Serve with crusty bread and a quality olive oil.

Helen: Hmm, Pita. Well, I don’t know about food from the Middle East. Isn’t that whole area a little iffy?
Hostess: [laughs] Hey, I’m no geographer. You and I — why don’t we call it pocket bread, huh?
Maude: [reading the ingredients list] Umm, what’s tahini?
Hostess: Flavor sauce.
Edna: And falafel?
Hostess: Crunch patties.

Courtesy The Simpsons Archive.

For this (mostly) vegetarian, the second Project Food Blog challenge actually posed several small challenges. It’s called, “The Classics,” and it asks, “Any food blogger worth their salt can make a classic dish sing, but can they go outside their comfort zone and tackle a foreign cusine?”

One problem was that most cultures’ emblematic dishes are meat-based, and I wanted to remain as faithful to whatever recipe I chose as possible. Also, I live in…the boonies. Flyover country. BFE. While it’s possible to source many unusual ingredients, it can become very time-consuming driving across several counties to charming hole-in-the-wall mom-and-pop shops and whoa, is that a Vietnamese market?

*shakes head* Okay, I’m back now. So anyway, one thing we don’t have in Project Food Blog is time.

how to decide?

I agonized. I researched world cuisines to see what unfamiliar cultures made. It was mainly meat, or used ingredients I wouldn’t be able to source out here on the Prairie Farm.

I toyed with the idea of baking a country’s signature dessert. As much as it appealed to me, it seemed too easy, too comfortable — I really enjoy baking.

I should have just lied and baked something.

Friends and family were helpful. Do empanadas. Remember how we ate empanadas at that little restaurant at Ground Zero on our vacation. Do pasties, a Yooper classic by way of Cornwall. Do gyoza. There was a definite meal-in-a-pocket theme.

And then there was the try-something-crazy theme. Do lutefisk, natto, garum.

Well, they tried.

I made a spreadsheet. I listed the candidates. I scored them on originality, authenticity, photogenic-ness. Shush. I know I’m a geek.

I wanted a good story. All my food stories seemed so pedestrian, boring, common.

ding ding ding

Throughout it all, I kept telling my friends and family about Middle Eastern food. How, in Chicago, I had literally six Middle Eastern restaurants and three Middle Eastern bakeries within a two-block radius of my apartment. A light supper on the way home from work was stopping at one of the bakeries after getting off the el and picking up a few spinach-and-feta pies or a falafel sandwich.

Whenever people came to visit, I took them to the Middle Eastern restaurants, especially Andie’s after it expanded and remodeled, because they could eat meat to their heart’s content and I could get falafel, eggplant mousaka, couscous, and more.

In some restaurants, the owners greeted us by name. One had a traditional seating area with pillows on the floor and hookahs you could try. Friends and I would stumble to one or another restaurant after an evening out for an appetizer and a nightcap, or make it the start of an evening.

Falafel was so ubiquitous, so cheap, and so readily available that I had no need or reason to learn how to make it. I lived in falafel heaven.

Then, of course, I moved to BFE. The nearest falafel was 30 miles away. Sadface.

In the end, after all this agonizing, falafel was the clear choice. My pedestrian, boring, common meal wasn’t so common for me any longer, so might not others find it unique as well? What’s normal to me would surely be new to…someone at least.

Besides, it was incredibly daunting. Grinding chickpeas? Deep-frying? I don’t deep fry! How the hell was I going to make those little balls stick together? Definitely out of my comfort zone.

the falafel recipes

Things I quickly learned in my search for falafel recipes:

1. Falafel is made from uncooked, soaked chickpeas. Canned beans will not do. It’s possible to make a facsimile of falafel with canned beans, but they are so wet that one has to add a lot of binder (flour or potato) to get them to stick together, rendering falafel-style hush puppies.

2. Egyptians make falafel with a combination of chickpeas and fava beans, or sometimes with all fava beans. I made mine with chickpeas only.

3. There are as many recipes for falafel as there are falafel shops in Chicago.

In the name of science, I tried two falafel recipes. One by Mark Bittman, who admittedly I often have trouble with, and one by a charming crazy Iraqi named Moti.

The nice thing about falafel is, it can all be mixed up in a food processor. The traditional, and preferred method is to use a meat grinder, but who has one of those lying around?

Oh, me. I do. No, I used a food processor instead. That thing up there? It weighs a ton!

They were both good recipes. The recipe here is my mishmash between the two.

can you quick soak beans for falafel?

One forum post said you could get away with quick soaking the beans (Bring to a boil, then remove from heat, cover and sit for an hour).

Two other sites said the slow soak was the only way and quick soaking would ruin the beans/falafel.

What’s the verdict? I made the Mark Bittman falafel using quick-soaked beans. Moti falafel was made using overnight-soaked beans. Both came out great.

So, yes, Virginia, you can quick soak garbanzo beans for falafel. Yay!

In the end, falafel is quite easy, as long as you have a deep fryer and plan to make it a day ahead of time (or are prepared to spend the time doing a quick soak). The worst part is making the balls themselves. They’re very messy and crumbly and you worry they will fall apart. Every other part of the recipe, though, is a breeze. I hope you try them sometime!

I’ve also included a recipe for flavor tahini sauce for the sandwich. Tahini itself is just a nut butter — it’s like peanut butter, but with sesame seeds. If you add some lemon juice, garlic, salt and pepper, and yogurt if you like to tahini, and thin it with some water, you have a great dip or nutty mayonnaise substitute.

falafel (crunch patties)

prep: 12–24 hours (5 minutes active time)
active time: 1 hour
special equipment: food processor

1 cup dry chickpeas
1 small onion or ½ large onion, quartered
5 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
⅛ teaspoon ground cayenne (hot) pepper, or to taste (both recipes had more than this)
¼ cup chopped fresh parsley
¼ cup chopped fresh cilantro
1½ teaspoons lemon juice
¼ teaspoon baking soda
¼ cup flour, either garbanzo flour or all-purpose flour (optional; use garbanzo for gluten-free)
oil for frying

A day ahead:

Put chickpeas in a bowl and cover with 2–3 inches of water. Let soak overnight, the longer the better, up to 24 hours. Check periodically to see if you need to add more water.

Now to mix up the falafel!

Heat oil in a deep pot or deep fryer to 375°. While the oil is heating, mix up the falafel.

Drain the soaked chickpeas. You’ll have about 2 cups.

Put them in the bowl of the food processor, along with the onion, garlic, cumin, coriander, salt, pepper, cayenne, parsley, cilantro, lemon juice and soda. I tried one version without lemon juice and the boy thought something was missing. Grind and mix by pulsing, stopping once in a while to scrape down the sides. You don’t have to stop very often; I found that everything was mixing pretty uniformly on its own. Just make sure not to mush everything up completely. The beans should be in small niblety chunks, like sprinkles. Mmm, sprinkles.

Now, you could stop right here if you wanted to for the most pure falafel. If you’d like a little bit of help binding things together, add the flour and stir or pulse it all together. To be honest, I didn’t find the flour to help all that much to make the raw falafel feel like it held together better, but it did allow me to make bigger balls that held together, so I do suppose it helps.

If you don’t want to make the falafel right away, you could refrigerate the mixture for up to a day. Moti says that refrigerating at least 2 hours helps the falafel stick together better. I tried this and found it to behave the same whether fresh-mixed or whether chilled.

Now for the messy part!

Take a tablespoonfull of the falafel mix and make a ball of falafel in your hand. It will not want to stick together. I’m warning you right now. Just keep squeezing and pressing and molding for a few seconds and quickly you’ll have a ball that’s just holding together. Set this in the pan or in the deep fry basket. I used a Fry Baby and it made things so much easier. You will get lots of falafel bits sticking to your hands. Make several ping pong- to golf-sized balls, and fry for 2–3 minutes. Remove from oil and set on cutting board or paper towels.

tahini sauce (flavor sauce)

½ cup tahini
½ cup plain yogurt (omit for vegan sauce; it’s still wonderful)
juice of 1 lemon
1 clove garlic, mashed
salt and pepper to taste
water

Whisk together tahini, yogurt, lemon juice, and garlic. This mixture will be quite thick. Thin with water to desired consistency, or don’t thin at all if you don’t want to! Add salt and pepper to taste. Use as a dipping sauce, or in place of mayonnaise, or as a spread in falafel sandwiches.

To make a falafel sandwich from a thick pita, spread the inside of a pita with tahini sauce. Place 3 or however many balls you want of falafel in the pocket. Add sliced or diced tomato, cucumber, pickled turnip or pickled vegetables, lettuce, sliced sweet red pepper, and/or whatever sandwich fixins you enjoy. With thin pitas, roll like a burrito.

a vote for shiny cooking is a vote for kitten power

If you enjoyed this post, please vote for Shiny Cooking to continue onward in the Project Food Blog competition! Out of 400 competitors, 200 move on to round 3, and everyone gets 200 votes to cast! If you can spare a vote for me, I will truly appreciate it.

Sis and Mom were thrilled with the dinner party. “You can do this anytime,” they cooed conspiratorially, and they began plotting holiday schedules. “Thanksgiving, Christmas…no, Mom will still do Christmas…Easter….”

I hadn’t hosted an event of this magnitude before. A bit over a month ago my sponsor, Foodbuzz, contacted me with the offer to host a pasta and wine-pairing dinner party using free coupons supplied by Buitoni Riserva. That shit’s expensive, so I jumped at the chance.

the asparagus mistake

I picked up 5 packages each of fresh pasta agnolotti, which is is a jumbo half-moon shaped ravioli. One was wild mushroom, and I planned to toss it with roasted asparagus and chives, drizzle it with olive oil, and top it with freshly ground black pepper and goat cheese. Unfortunately, I didn’t consult my sister the asparagus roasting expert, and left it in the oven about 20 minutes instead of the 5 she said was correct, and the asparagus came out limp and mushy.

My aunt, Linda, brought over a bunch of chives she snipped from her patch, some blooming with crunchy-oniony flowers atop them. They were too pretty to ignore, so they got put out on the table.

The guest list: Mom and Dad, Jennifer and Dale Javier (he said he wanted to be called Javier), Mom’s best friend Leeann and her daughter (and my friend) Angie, and Linda. I asked Leeann which wine she wanted to drink. “Oh, I love all white wine,” she said, so I poured her the La Noble chardonnay I’d picked up and a teeny glass of fino. Fino is very dry sherry that I drank a lot in Spain and it always makes me think of briny olives, tapas, dancing sevillanas, and walking home through the Parque de María Luisa at seven in the morning.

Not everyone was into the wine thing, though. Dad and Javier mixed themselves up some massive bloody marys.

Check out this spread! Angie made that vibrant salad, Mom brought the relish tray, and there’s the wild mushroom agnolotti along with the four cheese (Quattro Formaggi) agnolotti, and the red sauce I mixed up for the latter.

where’s my two dollars?

There’s Linda and the view from the other side of the tablecloth. That’s right, tablecloth. Cloth napkins. Frawnch fries. Frawnch bread. Kwissssmassss. Pardon me, I’m channeling Better Off Dead.

The top is the wild mushroom agnolotti with the asparagus/chives/black pepper/olive oil/goat cheese topping I mentioned. The left/bottom is the four cheese agnolotti with a roasted red pepper and kalamata olive sauce, topped with fresh basil. And supposed to have grated parmesan on top, but I forgot to get it on there for the pic. That sauce was the bomb.

Jennifer posed for an action shot! You can see a glass of red wine, which would be the shiraz Angie brought. I’d originally planned on cabernet to pair with the wild mushroom agnolotti, but we ended up breaking that out later. The red paired really well with the four cheese as well. Personally, I drank a little of the chardonnay and the shiraz and liked them both with both pastas. Maybe I’m just easy. Don’t answer that.

Dad warned Javier early on, “You’re not going to be getting any meat here tonight.” Of course they were going through that theater to tease me, but their little plan backfired. They chowed down and made happy noises just as much as everyone else did.

Notice how I ran out of serving dishes and dug into the storage containers. I’m so not prepared for this big party thing.

bring out your desserts

Linda made the coolest. Dessert. Evar. Think peanut butter pound cake. Slice it. Spread with peanut buttercream and blackberry jam. Top with another slice of pound cake.

That’s right. Linda made pound cake pb&j. Awesome.

Jennifer dipped strawberries in chocolate and served them on an appropriately-themed playing cards plate. Did I mention this was dinner and games night?

Mom and Leeann have been best friends for like 40 years, since Leeann moved in next door to Mom and Dad. <suckup>Did I say 40? I meant 20, because they couldn’t be a day over 40 themselves.</suckup>

euchre tournament!

Time to get our game on. With 8 of us present, and everyone liking euchre, we drew numbers, paired up, and had a little euchre tournament. To my chagrin, I was paired with Dale Javier, but he only fucked up once so I didn’t get to yell at him.

Jennifer and Mom were the winning team (never put people with shared DNA on the same team) and suddenly when it was over people began joking, “Where are the prizes?”

“Prizes?” I said, and a light bulb went on. An opportunity to divest myself of some excess goods! I got out some packaged rice/pasta sides I’d been planning to hand off to Linda, some product samples I’d received randomly in the mail, and some decks of playing cards from an estate sale I went to last week. Jennifer chose this lovely rice side dish to take home with her.

For her parting gift, Angie selected “stars of country music” playing cards and some instant coffee samples.

Then we played Perudo, or Liar’s Dice, and after that midnight was approaching, so the parent types and Jennifer and Javier left before they all turned into pumpkins. This left Linda, Angie, Bill, and me, and we broke out the Pictionary.

how to draw siamese twins in pictionary

how not to win at ingenious

Even with the adults gone, the wine kept flowing. We finished the La Noble and the Oak Leaf shiraz. Then we finished the Red Truck varietal red, and broke into the Clos du Bois chardonnay and Ravenswood cabernet, and Linda finished her Funky Llama chardonnay.

Wits and Wagers made an appearance, and then we closed out the night with Ingenious. Angie couldn’t remember if she’d played before and Bill was new to Ingenious, so I played with a handicap — I picked my tiles to play randomly. I got trounced as the newbies quickly picked up on the strategy and scored one Ingenious after another. I’m never believing Cranky Angie again! (Cranky Angie: I don’t think I like this. I don’t know if I want to play this. I know and understand Cranky Angie, because Cranky Amy always makes an appearance with new games too.)

what did i learn from all this?

I can put on a grownup party.

I can sip wine without getting too drunk.

Having smokers around leads to more smoking.

The Buitoni Riserva pastas are really good. The Quattro Formaggi Agnolotti was the hands-down favorite.

Good wine goes with anything.

Euchre needs to be more than a regional game.

roasted red pepper and kalamata olive pasta sauce

This sauce was the hit of the party. Salty, piquant, and complex, it goes well with simple pastas like cheese ravioli or agnolotti. I hesitate to post it as a recipe because it’s so simple, but it’s so good that it must be shared.

1 (28 ounce) jar red pasta sauce, like marinara
1 small (7 ounce) jar roasted red peppers
¼ cup kalamata olives

Purée the roasted red peppers and kalamata olives in a blender. Pour sauce and pepper/olive purée into a 2-quart pan and warm over medium heat. Serve over pasta.

Rhubarb with caramelized onions? Rhubarb salsa? Rhubarb and lentil potage? I can hear you now, the ornery ones of you that is: What the hell, woman…rhubarb’s for pie. Crisps. Crunches.

For April’s Foodbuzz 24, 24, 24 event, I decided to explore the savory side of rhubarb, since there’s a ton of it growing about 50 feet from my front door. As rhubarb is technically a vegetable/herb, why not try some recipes that utilize rhubarb as a vegetable?

Hey, salsa has a tangy bite. I bet rhubarb could work in salsa. So I tracked down a viable candidate in The Joy of Rhubarb: The Versatile Summer Delight. It’s a classic Mexican salsa, with fresh cilantro, green onion (which made me happy; I can’t stand regular onions raw), lime juice, jalapeño for a bit of bite, barely-blanched rhubarb, and lots of sweet peppers and more sugar than salsa normally would have, to counteract the rhubarb’s bite.

Dad’s verdict? “It would be great on hamburgers. By the way, we’re having hamburgers tonight….” Subtle hint there, Dad. Yeah, he went home with some rhubarb salsa. Linda thought it had a bit of a bitter rhubarb taste to it and suggested more sweetener. I loved it. Fresh, crisp, clean salsa taste with the rhubarb adding uniqueness without overpowering it.

Overall verdict for rhubarb salsa: Two snaps up.

Jump to the rhubarb salsa recipe now or continue reading.

balsamic-rhubarb reduction

I swear, this was some fancy-pants shit I made. Asparagus with balsamic-rhubarb reduction (recipe here). It was dead easy, too. You cook down some balsamic vinegar and chopped rhubarb — along with a good little heap of sugar — until most of the liquid has evaporated and you get a thickish sauce. In this preparation, it’s served with roasted asparagus. You could really impress some guests with this stuff.

Dad’s verdict: Tasty, but the roasted asparagus was too soft. He grabbed a stalk of raw asparagus from the 10-pound bag I’d just picked and dipped that in the reduction instead. Linda’s verdict: “Too strong for asparagus. Would be really good with pork or something.” I liked the contrast between the tangy, balsamic-flavored reduction and the mild roasted asparagus, but I see her point. Comme-ci, comme ça.

Overall verdict for rhubarb-balsamic reduction: Two snaps sideways.

lentil and rhubarb potage

The original title of this Mark Bittman recipe is “Lentil and rhubarb stew with Indian spices,” but it’s too thick for a stew. So I did some Google-fu and discovered it was more of a potage, which also sounds fancier.

And man, it may be one ugly mofo of a dish, but damn, lentil and rhubarb potage is tasty. I was shocked. It had no added sugar. I was certain it would be inedible. But I had to try it, because it has cardamom in it, which is my new favorite spice ever.

Linda’s verdict: Really good and interesting. Nice balance of complex flavors. I’m transling from “Mmm” here, by the way.

Overall verdict for rhubarb and lentil potage: Two snaps up.

caramelized onion and rhubarb compote on herbed yogurt cheese

Hey Aunt Geri, I finally broke in the yogurt cheese maker! And all was good. This recipe, heavily adapted from one for caramelized onion, beet, and rhubarb compote, made me nervous. For one, it was another fancy-pants recipe. For another, I was adapting the living hell out of it. I’m not good at that sort of thing. Usually my adaptations tend to turn out more like the rhubarb mistake below. And for yet another thing, I was winging the whole herbed yogurt cheese thing. Entirely.

If you want to adapt the recipe like I did, simply make it without the beet purée, and add more maple syrup when you add the rhubarb, about 2 tablespoons worth. Trust me, you’ll need it. For the herbed cheese the easy way, go with a slightly sweet prepared cheese spread like Aloutte…because that was what I was shooting for. I put them in baked wonton cups, but they’d be better on small squares of puff pastry.

Dad’s verdict: “I really like the cheese and compote filling, but those wontons are like chewing on glass.” Linda’s verdict: “I love that filling!” Me? Shocked. And happy it worked. :p Cue the Smiths.

Overall verdict for caramelized onion and rhubarb compote: Two snaps way up.

rhubarb mistake

Since I had Mexican, Indian, and vaguely Italian (in the form of the caramelized onion and rhubarb compote), I decided to try incorporating rhubarb into a Thai curry. I’m not even going to link to the recipe I worked from, because the experiment was an utter disaster, and I didn’t follow the recipe exactly, so I don’t want to impugn the blogger who posted it.

Suffice it to say: disaster. Coconut milk wasn’t enough sweetness to balance rhubarb’s astringency, the rhubarb became gloopy, and it tasted awful. Oh well.

The experience did cement my dedication to you, the reader: You will never be subjected to a recipe I don’t absolutely love. I want everything you try to be something well-tested and well-liked before it ever hits this page.

Overall verdict for rhubarb mistake: Two snaps way down. Let’s forget all about it and move on to the rhubarb salsa recipe.

rhubarb salsa

Adapted from The Joy of Rhubarb: The Versatile Summer Delight by Theresa Millang.

2 cups finely diced fresh rhubarb
½ cup sweet red pepper, chopped
½ cup sweet yellow pepper, chopped
½ cup fresh cilantro, chopped
3 green onions, tops only, chopped
1 jalapeño pepper, finely chopped
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
2 tablespoons brown sugar, or to taste
salt and ground black pepper to taste

Blanch rhubarb in a saucepan of boiling water for 10 seconds. Seriously. Ten seconds. No more. Remove rhubarb promptly from heat, dump into a strainer, and rinse under cold water until rhubarb is lukewarm or cool. This is to stop the blanching process.

Place rhubarb in a glass bowl.  Add remaining ingredients, and mix well. Refrigerate at least an hour before serving to allow flavors to develop.

This baked penne recipe is entirely vegetarian, yet it’ll keep carnivores happy with its fennel-scented tomato sauce and meatless Italian sausage crumbles.

And it’s “baked penne” because I’ve never been able to replicate Italian restaurants’ baked ziti. I suspect their secret is oil and cheese in much more copious amounts than one can bear to consider under home kitchen conditions. Maybe it’s a hotter oven, or a shove under the broiler when it’s done. You know, if anybody knows the reason, inform me. I’m mostly pretty bumbling when it comes to reverse engineering.

But I’m zen about it, because the approximations to restaurant baked ziti are pretty good on their own. They might be missing the goat dandruff secret ingredient or whatever, but it’s hard to go wrong with pasta, mozzarella, a rich tomato sauce, mushrooms, and fake Italian sausage crumbles.

We don’t have ziti. We have penne. I’ve never seen a package of ziti. I suspect it doesn’t really exist.

While I was Googling to see if ziti pasta really existed (trust me: it doesn’t), I came across another baked ziti/penne recipe that used half provolone and added sour cream. Damn. Think I should try that next? I could make variations on this recipe forever.

I just wanted to show you some more mozzarella. Who doesn’t love cheese? The lactose-intolerant, that’s who. Ship them out onto ice floes.

There’s two ways to go about this dish. The time way and the dishes way. The time way, you cook the pasta al dente first, then drain it and use the same pot to sauté your celery and mushrooms, dump in (or make) the tomato sauce, and drop in the fake Italian sausage crumbles. The dishes way, you have two pots going and maybe even a sauté pan too, saving time but making more dishes.

So you got your pasta, your bulked-up sauce thanks to the fake sausage, and your grated cheese. Then you layer them in ze dish.

Repeat layering three times, and sprinkle parmesan on top, because who doesn’t want more cheese? I do not know why I’m affecting a French accent. This is Italian-themed food.

cheesy baked penne with fake italian sausage

I prefer to grate my own cheeses when possible. The coating on pre-shredded cheese seems to inhibit its melting properties. You’ll notice the difference in taste and gooeyness if you try grating your own. Meatless Italian sausage crumbles are found in 12-ounce packages in the freezer section. Morningstar Farms is one brand.

servings: 6–8
oven: 350°F
prep: 45 minutes
total time: 90 minutes

1-2 teaspoons olive oil (not extra-virgin)
8 ounces mushrooms, sliced or chopped into chunks
½ cup chopped celery
1 recipe i-can’t-believe-it’s-meatless tomato sauce or 1 (26 ounce) jar prepared pasta sauce
1 (12 ounce) package of frozen meatless Italian sausage crumbles
12 ounces whole wheat penne pasta, boiled al dente and drained (about 8 to 10 minutes)
12 ounces whole-milk or part-skim mozzarella cheese, grated
¼ cup Parmesan cheese, grated

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Heat olive oil in a 2-quart or larger pan over medium heat. Add mushrooms and celery and cook until mushrooms have released their juices, about 5 to 10 minutes (translation: until the mushrooms are cooked).

Add i-can’t-believe-it’s-meatless tomato sauce or the jar of prepared pasta sauce to the cooked celery and mushrooms. Add the meatless Italian sausage crumbles. Heat through, stirring occasionally, about 10 minutes.

In a 3-quart baking dish, layer ⅓ of the penne, ⅓ of the sauce mixture, and ⅓ of the mozzarella cheese. Repeat layering two more times, and top with the grated Parmesan.

Bake for 45 minutes at 350°F, until cheese is lightly browned and bubbly.

How about a nice bowl of cheery orange-colored soup to warm your tummy on a cold winter night? I only recently began to appreciate soup, having been too lazy to properly appreciate it in the past — soup isn’t often stick-to-your-ribs fare and I’m pretty side-dish impaired, as far as getting out bread or making a salad to go with the soup.

There are two kinds of soups that tickle my fancy. If they meet one of these two criteria and are vegetarian, I’ll likely try them, no matter what the ingredients. One is the all-day kind. Prep everything in the morning or the night before, and the whole lovely melange of vegetables and broth putters away in a crock pot or on a stovetop all day. The other is the quick kind. From cookbook to table in an hour or less, the quick soup earns its flavor not from slow simmering infusing the vegetables with flavor, but more from shots of spice that deliver a quick punch.

This winter soup is of the latter variety; a thick purée resembling nothing other than a carrot or sweet potato baby food, it’s chock full of grown-up flavors like ginger and cumin that blend together in silken bliss. You’ll certainly get a perk-up of summery beta carotene from this soup, whose vegetables straddle an epicurean line between apples picked from autumn trees and carrots pulled from warm late-summer soil, and hearty ingredients pulled from winter storage.

It satisfies winter’s comfort-food cravings while delivering a whisper of the autumn just lost.

winter soup of carrots, lentils, apple, and sweet potato

I use an immersion blender for in-the-pot puréeing. It’s a zillion times more convenient than the conventional method of pouring the soup into a blender in batches and puréeing that way. However, If you don’t have an immersion blender, feel free to purée it in a blender or try it chunky. Recipe adapted from Allrecipes.com

prep: 20 minutes
to table: 60 minutes
servings: 6
special equipment: immersion blender

1/4 cup (4 tablespoons) salted butter
2 large sweet potatoes
3 large carrots
1 apple
1 onion
1/2 cup lentils, any variety
1/2 teaspoon minced fresh ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon chili powder
1/2 teaspoon paprika
4 cups vegetable broth
plain yogurt, for garnish (optional: destroys the vegan-ness, of course)

Peel and chop sweet potatoes, carrots, and apple. Chop the onion. You’ll be puréeing this later, so it’s not necessary to be super-precise.

In a large saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the onion and cook five minutes, until translucent or nearly so. Add chopped sweet potatoes, carrots, and apple and cook another five minutes.

Now dump in everything else (except the yogurt, of course): Stir in the lentils, ginger, black pepper, salt, cumin, chili powder, paprika and vegetable broth. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat, cover, and simmer about 30 minutes, until the lentils and vegetables are soft.

With an immersion blender, purée the soup until smooth. Serve garnished with a healthy dollop of plain yogurt. You may garnish with sour cream if you like, but I’ve tried both and the yogurt tastes better and melts into the soup better when stirred in.

Neat, this made Foodie Views of the day! They gave me a pretty button to go with it:

Have I ever mentioned that the last thing I gave up when going vegetarian was bacon? Beef: I never liked it anyway. Nearly the same with chicken. Fish: next to last. I like me some canned tuna.

I’m not going to wax poetic about bacon, though. That’s so 2008. Are you as tired as I am of candied bacon, bacon smoothies, bacon popcorn, and bacon ice cream? I’m sure they’re wonderful, but all of the swooning over bacon is becoming a tad unseemly. Let’s be seemly, shall we?

Suffice to say bacon tastes good and its namesake sandwich, the BLT, is too. The salty bacon, the pretty ruffles of leaf lettuce, the earthy, full flavor of heirloom tomato slices — slap them between a few slices of toast slathered with a condment of your choice, usually mayonnaise, and you have one mother of a sandwich.

Everyone knows how to make a BLT.

But have you ever had one with basil-garlic mayonnaise?

It elevates the humble BLT to a thing of beauty. The fresh basil complements the tomato, the garlic enhances the bacon, and a few drops of hot pepper sauce add little heat but a lot of flavor.

Now, the nice people at Nature’s Pride sent me a couple loaves of bread: 12-grain and 100% whole wheat. Since they sent me free stuff, I’m likely to say nice things about it, so be forewarned. They make their bread with all natural ingredients and no HFCS, which is a big plus for me. When my cousin and I were making the sandwiches, he asked what kind of bread I had, and stipulated, “No whole wheat.” I gacked, because I don’t keep anything but whole wheat around. He had to get whole grains anyway, in the form of the 12-grain loaf.

He survived, and said the 12-grain was really good. Whether he was being polite or not I’m not sure. Either way, I don’t care. My sandwich got validation.

Mine was on whole wheat. It was quite tasty as well. We used Black Krim heirloom tomatoes from my garden, and some really lovely curly generic leaf lettuce from the store. It was quite tasty as well. I have to say that overall, I prefer the bread I make myself, but if I had to buy some, I would choose this Nature’s Pride stuff. Again, remember, I’m predisposed to being nice about the bread though.

basil-garlic mayonnaise

1 cup fresh basil, coarsely chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1/4 teaspoon salt
dash or two of tabasco or other hot pepper sauce
3/4 cup mayonnaise

In a food processor, whirl the basil leaves and garlic until the basil is finely chopped. Add salt, hot pepper sauce, and mayonnaise. Pulse until mixed together. Chill 30 minutes to allow flavors to meld.

basil-garlic mayonnaise BLT

Black Krim is a Russian heirloom variety tomato. It’s considered a beefsteak, but the tomatoes are smallish, about 2-1/2 to 3 inches in diameter. They have a rich flavor, not quite as “smoky” as some of the other black varieties, but more robust-tasting than most reds. I love growing them; like Stupice, they’re the perfect size for a sandwich, and they grow perfectly round and nearly blemish-free. They grow well in cooler climates like we have here in Michigan — it’s one of the few varieties I got a good number of tomatoes off of this cold summer.

4 slices whole grain bread, toasted
4 slices of cooked bacon
2 Black Krim tomatoes
2 large leaves curly leaf lettuce
basil-garlic mayonnaise (recipe above)

Slice the Black Krims. You should get 4 slices from each tomato, about 3/8″ thick. Slather basil-garlic mayonnaise on the toast. Build the BLT in layers: first, break the bacon into halves, laying out 4 halves on the bread. Then add the tomato slices, and the leaf lettuce on top of that. This ought to provide some decent protection for the bread from the tomato’s juices.

Top with the other slice of bread, cut sandwich in half, and serve.