Baked tofu.

I know I said I'm not going to post, but I have to post because I just made baked tofu.

What you do is you take some firm/extra firm tofu, wrap it in paper towels, put it on a plate, set another plate on top of it, and set something really heavy on top of that (cast iron cookware, whatever). I wasn't aware of just how much liquid is in tofu until very recently (read: tonight) when it flooded my countertop. A cast iron dutch oven is quite heavy; heavy enough to make that block of bean curd lose water like Richard Simmons in a plastic sweatsuit.

Anyway, once I wiped up the flood, I figured the bean curd had drained enough, so I dumped a bunch of soy sauce into the bottom of a tupperware, sliced the tofu, and let it sit there at room temperature for... well, a while turning it over and moving things around so all the slices got soy sauced over the course of a while. I can't tell you exact times or amounts, but I put just enough soy sauce to cover the bottom and pool up somewhat. Then, when nearly all the soy sauce was absorbed, I preheated the oven to 400 F. I put the slices on a very lightly greased tray (I used olive oil - obv it doesn't matter what grease you use), and chucked them into the oven. Once they got browned and caramelized, like after roughly 30 minutes, I turned them over. Then I cooked them until when poked, they felt firm and not jello-like. I think the total cooking time - though I can't swear to it - is about 45 minutes to an hour.

During all this time, I cut up a salad and cooked literally 2 lbs of green beans. Trader Joe's had some beautiful 2 lb bags of them, so I bought one. I found out exactly why it never seems like one pound in enough. It's because of Danny. He eats everything, so now that he's traveling for work, I am left with an insane amount of green beans in soy with garlic and ginger. (PS - I am SO not complaining. Along with having the ENTIRE expanse of the bed to all 5 feet 11 inches of myself, I do so love green beans with soy and garlic and ginger.) But now I have to eat them all.

Anyway, when the tofu came out of the oven and was barely cool enough to pick up, I grabbed the slices, cursed a little because they were hot, and cut them into strips. I heaped my plate with salad and green beans, and haphazardly arranged the tofu strips on top. I drizzled some balsamic vinegar on my salad, and that was dinner. Perfect. I guess rice vinegar might have been more congruous, but I didn't care. The soy on both the tofu and green beans was plenty salty, and the balsamic was tangy with a hint of sweet, and I was thrilled with the outcome.

The baked tofu has opened up a world of flavor. I can squeeze out the water and re-inpregnate bean curd with whatever crazy flavors I want! I'm so excited. There is great potential for cubed, marinated, and baked tofu for finger food, salad toppings, in sandwiches, whatever. This is brilliant.

Commitment issues.

I was thinking about saying I'm taking a formal hiatus from blogging (because I know the throngs of humanity that read this are trembling on the edge of their seats for the next entry), but then I figured I'd want to write something the second I posted it, so I did nothing.

But just in case, I figured I'd write that work is like a terrible hemorrhoid that won't go away. Or how I imagine a terrible hemorrhoid that won't go away would be. It's consisting of a lot of writing which on one hand is good because it means I've made meaningful progress, and on the other hand is bad because it's sciencese. I don't think in sciencese, I can't force myself to, and the whole process blows. When I ask how I should set up my figures, no one tells me, and then I have to redo them like 14,987,677 times in like 3 different file formats in multiple separate completely inadequate programs that I have to learn and I suck at computers because dealing with computers is like dealing with passive aggressive people which I hate.

So yeah, I'm eating. I'm eating well. :) But beyond discovering that I can make a spinach/garlic/egg white omelette in one nonstick pan with the tiniest bit of oil, I haven't exactly been making culinary fireworks happen. I have an entry in my head about making red chile sauce a la New Mexican cuisine, but I want to experiment with the chiles I use. I made it once with just Anaheim chiles and it was incredibly flat and disappointingly mild. It does, however, taste good on top of the aforementioned omelette. But I'm going to work it into something that is a good chile sauce, but it lets you know what's what. I'm not going for authenticity with this one. Anyway, we'll see. Man, I hope I graduate before I completely lose my mind...

RatatNEWouille.

So I just redid more ratatouille the way I did it here in this post, sans biscuits, soy sauce, and tempeh bc I'm craving a simple vegetable stew. I haven't eaten this much crap for so long in like forever, and I need to clear my head. Not that the crap was bad per se but the usual proportion of fruit + veg to, well, everything else was heavily skewed toward "everything else" for too long a time. Although somehow my insides continued to function properly, happily enough... :-P

Anyway, I realized a great way to add body and depth to the veggies is the old standby of dumping in a bunch of anchovies. Yeah. Funky fish is the reason Thai food tastes so meaty and awesome, and I'd be willing to bet that much of the pasta sauce bought at various restaurants gets an umami kick from anchovies, too. When you use them this way, several tossed in with the tomatoes, the fishiness is dispelled immediately. Tastes awesome.

I like the Cento anchovies. I've tried Roland, but they're redolent of dirty underwear IMO. Granted, I've eaten them without dying or getting sick. You can't really tell once they're in whatever you're making, but I like to eat the leftover fillets with salad or on bread for some salty omega 3's, so the whole dirty underwear thing is completely unappealing.

Inquisition Punch/Krunk Jewce

I have achieved the impossible. For this particular thing, I deserve a culinary medal of honor for going where no home cook has gone before. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I have made Manischewitz palatable.

I will pause now so you can pick your jaws off the floor.

Upon divine inspiration - and by divine, I mean I read the NY Times - I came upon a recipe for a single drink made with Manischewitz, bourbon, lemon juice, and seltzer called the Drunken Pharoah. I thought to myself, hey, you can do better than that! And so I did. The Economical Epicurean was holding a holiday party, and this mysterious wine product steeped in so many years of tradition and punchlines came to me. Clocking in at under $8 for 1.5 liters of candied Concord grapey alcoholic bliss, it was certainly cheap. Instead of bourbon, I used Seagram's VO whiskey, a smooth if slightly boring libation that is my fallback whiskey of choice when price and the health of my gut are taken into equal consideration. The night before, I ventured into the local supermarket to get lemons. People, when the weather is supposed to be 1-2 feet of snow in an area where 1-2 inches can cripple a city, do not enter a supermarket. May the good lord help you if you need toilet paper, milk, eggs, or potato chips, because you ain't gittin none. But thankfully, lemons weren't high on the list of survival foods that night, and I got 4 fat, shiny, yellow specimens.

The morning of the party dawned steely grey, a thick cloud cover and swirling snow hiding the sun. I mixed up the punch, using the ratios the NY Times suggested just in much larger quantities:

2 c Manischewitz, the concord grape variety

1.5 c whiskey

0.5 c lemon juice

I tasted it. It had promise. I took a bit on ice and topped it with seltzer. Very promising indeed. Then I doubled the recipe because there were going to be 25 people there, and given the typical food and drink situation, not 2 feet of snow nor sleet nor ice nor rain would keep people from this party. When I doubled the recipe, though, I think I tweaked the ratios. I added the base amount of booze, but messed with the lemon juice. What I was going for was a sweet (but not syrupy), boozey, yet slightly tangy concoction that would benefit from chilling and fizz addition. Then I decided to add some thinly sliced lemon, and I also added a handful of fresh cranberries for decoration (note on fresh cranberries: they are resilient little buggers that you can freeze when you buy them fresh and use whenever you feel like cranberry relish, muffins, bread, etc. - there's a 3 lb bag in our freezer). Then I adjusted the ratio of Manischewitz to whiskey to suit my tastes, and I suggest you do the same! When you do that, just remember you're going to add ice and seltzer. When you chill things, perceived sweetness decreases. So if you're not sure, make yourself a mini cup of it, and see what it needs. The whole thing tasted bright and fruity, but I wanted more depth. So, I broke 3-4 cinnamon sticks in half, added in 4-6 whole cloves, and 4 whole allspice berries for some spice. It sat at room temperature on the counter for several hours, and the total volume was probably a little more than 3 quarts, pre-seltzer.

We packed it off into two nalgenes and an empty spare bottle we had, loaded them, bottles of seltzer, and the bowl into backpacks, put on our winter gear, and trudged out into the blizzard. Along the way we helped one guy free his car from a snowbank. The walk was beautiful. The snow was falling in fine cold flakes, swirling here and there, but the wind wasn't uncomfortably strong. We took pictures of some Xmas lights under the snow and admired the gobs of snow covering everything. Another nice thing about extreme beautiful weather like this is people come out to admire it. We saw more people walking around just looking at things, and there were those like us, walking instead of the usual driving. We walked maybe just over a mile to get to the party, but some of the other attendees' hikes were 2 or more. We all tramped in wearing snowpants, boots, and parkas, shedding clothing like snakes casting off old skin, and making a beeline for the food and drink.

The punchbowl was drained. Literally. Someone, I forget who, actually picked it up and poured the dregs, little bits of spices, lemon pulp, and all, into their glass. I can think of no better praise. We're still stuck on a name, although Inquisition Punch (bc, you know, sangria w/ Manischewitz?) has a good ring to it. The Hebrew Hammer or The Hebrews Get Hammered or Krunk Jewce were also in the running.

Melting onions.

Melted onions are my new favorite food. You thinly slice however many pounds of onions you want. For batches of onion jam, I've been going with 3 pounds. Have three garlic cloves, UNPEELED. That's right, don't peel 'em. Also, you can add whatever herbs you like. I found out that when Julia Child suggests a bouquet garni, it means that then you won't be picking out limp herb leaves from everything, but if you're like me, you'll skip the damn cheesecloth and leave it up to whoever's eating it to pick out the greenery if they so desire. I like a few sprigs of parsley and either some thyme or rosemary or a combination of the two.

To cook it, you heat up some olive oil in a pan, but not searingly hot, throw in the onions and a big pinch of salt, the herbs, and the unpeeled garlic cloves. Stir it often. Keep the heat lower than a normal sautee, like medium. When you see the onions go completely limp and translucent, turn the heat down even more because you want to achieve a very slow even caramelization without getting charred bits. The ultimate goal is to, well, melt the onions into a savory, sweet, limp mass of golden brown awesomeosity. This will take a while, like an hour. Do it while you're doing something else in the kitchen, stirring every so often to prevent burning.

Once the onions have achieved savory, sweet, limp, golden brown awesomeosity, it's up to you to decide what you want to do with them. You can leave them as they are and fill a smallish prebaked tart crust, topping it with some good anchovies and oil-cured olives for a pissaladiere nicoise. You can add a bunch of red wine into the onions, reducing it into an onion jam which is amazing with brie on whatever bread/cracker product you have lying around. Or you can dump them into mashed root vegetables to amazing effect. I mashed up a small rutabaga, a couple potatoes, and a few carrots and then dumped the onions in. It is extremely delicious. Melted onions are apparently also the base for onion soup, which I am oddly embarrassed to say I've never made.

The trick of leaving the garlic unpeeled prevents burning. Garlic burns much more easily than onions, and by leaving it in its paper, you get the garlic flavor with none of the burned bitterness. You can peel them after the onions are done and either eat it plain (because by this time, it's sweet and soft) or just give it a light chop and fold it into whatever you're making. Whatever you decide to do, melted onions are a lot of flavor for very little money and there's no cream or bacon involved. As far as flavor vectors go, it's healthy, vegan-friendly, and tastes awesome.

What is up with all that?

One thing I can't get over is why every soup recipe I see has to have cream and/or bacon or some similar greasy pork derivative in it. Does anyone else see soup as winterized salad? Do you glug cream all over your salad every day for lunch? Is the main flavoring in your salad fried bacon or sausage bits? Probably not. Well, ok, at least not in my case. Salad is a glorification of raw vegetables, and when I eat them, I intend to enjoy them as they are, not mask the flavor. Because they actually taste good, and the amount of flavor you can bring with raw produce is really nice if you know what you're doing.

I noticed this month's Bon Appetit was all about the fennel. BA, you are behind MY times. There is a Mark Bittman-esque salad you can make with very thinly sliced raw fennel and matchsticked apples, dressed in a super-simple mustard vinagrette and decorated with a bit of fennel fronds that is fresh, delicious, and can not only be a salad in its own right, but also dress what I consider as The Most Basic Salad. The Most Basic Salad is tomatoes, cukes, peppers, and lettuce. When you have tomatoes, cukes, peppers and lettuce that were grown well, you would be surprised at how amazing this simple mixture can be on its own. When peppers are grown for flavor and not, say, sugar content or wall thickness (wall = the part we eat), you can't believe how genuinely peppery they taste. The same goes for all the above. But seeing that we live in an era when tomatoes are grown for shippability (resulting in pink soggy styrofoam insides that taste nothing like real tomatoes), peppers are grown for size and sugar content, and cukes have morphed into giant, flavorless, oblong vessels of water and seeds, we need to take some other action to get the vegetabley flavor few people really know.

There are veggies that haven't been as tampered with, veggies that retain a greater degree of their true character. They aren't perfect, as anyone who's eaten a homegrown carrot right out of the ground after a brief rinse in the garden hose can tell you. After all, does biting into a raw supermarket carrot give you a slap-your-grandma carrot-y flavor? No. But carrots still manage to taste like carrots. Beets still manage to taste like beets. And red cabbage still tastes like cabbage, but it's purple! Little known fact: raw cabbage has a BUTTLOAD of vitamin C. Orange juice - while very tasty - isn't necessary when you toss a good amount of shredded fresh cabbage into a salad. Then there are the seasonal fruits that can be added and dried ones, too.

So when constructing a good salad, add some diced apples and raw thin-sliced fennel which has a gentle, fresh, anise flavor. If you don't like it, slice the rest of it and sautee it with onions and/or mushrooms to add to your next omelette. Sauteeing drastically ratchets down fennel's anise flavor. Grate some carrots and/or beets into the bowl. What I've been doing is making a giant bowl of salad for the week, scooping some out every day for lunch and adding things as I want them. Toss in some fresh grapefruit segments which are coming into season from Florida or raisins for some sweetness, some chopped fresh herb of your choice, and some balsamic vinegar or lemon juice. A big part of making the salad pop is combining sweet, sour, and salty in a way that you find appealing. You can do it with mostly fruits and veggies. I've been giving my salad more staying power by throwing chunks of roast turkey on top. Hardboiled eggs are a cheap good choice, especially with a high-quality feta.

My final tip for eating tasty salad is not refrigerating it all day. I know it sounds weird, but letting it come to room temperature at work makes it much more likely that I'll eat it because when it's chilly and wet out, eating chilly wet things is completely unappealing. But room temperature wet things? Fine. Anyway, I will soon add to the several soups on this blog that do not contain cream and/or bacony things.

Vegetable soup saves.

So, I made this root veggie soup. It started with a sweat of carrots, onion, garlic, and parsnip in olive oil, and then went on to include wine, balsamic, worcestershire sauce, and soy to add flavor and salt to the cooking water; bay leaves, thyme, sage, and pepper for more flavor, and turnips, roasted beets, potatoes, and finally, cabbage only at the end so the apartment wouldn't smell. If you boil large amounts of cabbage for long periods of time, your space will smell like some animal walked in, defecated, and then lay down and died. So, unless you like smelling that stank, don't add cabbage at the beginning unless it's surrounded by lots of other ingredients (like stuffed cabbage which is delicious and generally awesome). It was enough veggies to require 6 cups of water, which was just enough to have some liquid at the end. Oh, and I also used a scant 1/4 cup of corn flour to thicken it right before I turned off the heat. The remaining liquid wasn't thick per se, but it had a slightly increased mouthfeel. Anyway, it was sweet and vegetabley. Lots of flavor, light, and warming. It made a very nice lunch this last week.

Today, Danny and I were cleaning out the fridge and freezer, and we found an ancient frozen tupperware of beef stew. I have NO RECOLLECTION AT ALL of when we made it. I don't even know what, if any, recipe we followed. It's just always been in the freezer. Literally forever. But we decided to liberate the tupperware, so against Danny's wishes, I thawed it. He wanted to just toss it, but hey, it was in the freezer! It can't be spoiled! My mom would have been so proud of me.

I thawed it gently in the microwave on medium heat and cautiously tasted it. Delicious. It was mostly gravy with a few hefty meat chunks, so I just dumped it into our veggie soup. The two mixed together was AWESOME. The veggie soup saved the meaty gravy from certain death, and everyone is happy. Danny announced his intention is to take it for lunch this week with noodles.

The moral of the story? Don't throw out frozen food! It never goes bad in there! I mean, sure, it had some awesome ice crystals, but it didn't even taste really freezer burned. It was slightly freezer flavoured by itself, but when I integrated the thick meaty essence into the veggie soup, it became completely delicious without a hint of funk.

Bourekas

What with some madness from grad school, I just haven't been making a lot of food. I've definitely been eating, though. It's been a lot of salad, eggs, (fill in the blank) on bread, some chicken soup, the chicken from said soup, the remaining soup integrated into an amazing gingery pumpkin soup (pumpkin, broth, ginger, honey, nutmeg, salt, pepper), etc. Very basic.

It was Danny's birthday on Friday, so I made him - as per his request - felalfel with hummus, salad, hot stuff, and bourekas w/ spinach and cheese filling. Bourekas are made - I think - typically with puff pastry, but I grew up making them out of filo dough. They're spanikopitas from a different Mediterranean region. They can be filled with potato, cheese, spinach, meat, or whatever you feel like. I took a pound of frozen spinach, just barely thawed it (4 minutes in a covered bowl in my microwave) and squeezed it out, and put it in a bowl with mayyybe 2/3-3/4 of a 1 pound block of feta. I highly, highly recommend Pastures of Eden feta that you can get from Trader Joe's. It's not as aggressively salty as a lot of other fetas, it's creamier, and you can really taste the sheep milk. If I were to set up a spectrum for fetas from mellow to sharp, this would fall more towards mellow. Usually that's a losing position for my tastes, but the creamy/crumbly texture, not overwhelming saltiness, and the pronounced (but not stanky) sheep flavor make it my favorite.

Anyway, I crumbled the cheese, stirred it in, cracked in one egg, some pepper, and mixed it up. You can add parsley if you like, play with cheese combinations if you want cheese ones (grated muenster, mozzarella, and cottage cheese, for example). I didn't go crazy with the flavors in the bourekas because the other food I made was very aggressive (lots of lemon, garlic, onion, spices), and I wanted something to contrast.

To do bourekas the way I learned from my dad, you need some thawed filo dough. The amount of filling is enough for an entire box (40 sheets). Lay the dough out, and cover it with a barely moist dishtowel. Have ~ half a stick of completely melted butter and a pastry brush next to you. Take a single sheet of dough, lay it flat horizontally (longer sideways than it is tall; i.e., the landscape option on your printer). Paint a single stripe of butter horizontally at the bottom, and fold up 1/3 of the way. Paint another stripe of butter along what is now the bottom, and fold it to the edge. You should have a long strip of dough folded in thirds, held together with butter. Don't skimp on the butter, but at the same time, don't go crazy with the butter; just a bit is enough.

At one end of your dough strip (let's say the right side), place a glob of filling... er, like 1-1.5 tablespoons? Don't overstuff them or they'll explode in the oven. Fold one corner over to the side, covering the filling, so it makes a triangle. It doesn't have to be tight. Fold the triangle's new corner over to the left. Instead of a point on the right side, it should be a flat edge now. Continue to flip the small triangle down the length of the dough strip. Seal it with a dab of butter if it needs it, and put it on a baking sheet. Before baking, paint the tops with a little beaten egg, and if you like, sprinkle with sesame seeds. Put them in at 350 F until they're golden brown. It doesn't take super long.

This isn't exactly healthy, but eh. It was a birthday definitely worth celebrating. :)

Ratatouille is Rad.

I would like to draw everyone's attention to this recipe from the NY Times.  It is a recipe for dumpling-topped ratatouille.  Is it technically 100% authentic ratatouille?  Nope.  Do I care?  Nope.  

I tried it tonight with hacked up tempeh subbed in for the sausage (sauteed with a pinch of fennel seeds because to me that's the dominant flavor in Italian sausages (besides meat), and it's cooking in the oven and holy crap lions, it smells so good.  On the healthy scale, the unhealthy bit is obviously the dumplings because they have 6 tbsp of butter in them.  I subbed out full fat yogurt for fat free because that's what was in the fridge.  Another thing I did was slosh in some soy sauce when the tomatoes, garlic, peppers, thyme (I used dried), and onion was simmering to add some - ok, bear with me while I totally food-geek out on you here - umami.  Just dump some in a little bit at a time while the tomatoes, etc. are simmering until it tastes slightly saltier w/ more body, but not so much that you can actually taste the soy sauce.  It'll compensate for the lack of meatiness because tempeh doesn't bring much of that to the party.  

It's cooling off.  If Danny doesn't get out of the shower really soon, I'm eating without him...

A Warm-up

I am getting my writing part of the brain in gear because I have to write an Independent Proposal, which is graduate school speak for "stupid fucking piece of shit waste of time." However, in my infinite wisdom, I will actually make it work for me by sending it to people who give a damn and might be able to get me a job after I graduate. So HAH. NYEAH. I WIN.

Anyway, about the food...

Inspired by the amount of random vegetable salads in Israel, I decided to construct a random veggie shred. I had in my fridge the following: half a head of cabbage, 1 zucchini, and 1 apple. So I shredded everything w/ my food processor into a bowl. It was crunchy, green, and slightly sweet (thank you, apple bits). Then Danny added zested rind of an entire lemon. He used the juice of the lemon to make a vinagrette (I think he added oil, salt, and pepper until it tasted good... maybe mustard too... I don't know...), and we topped it all off with poppy seeds. I guess it was kind of a slaw? It tasted good, whatever it was. We made this for a party of 10 people, and it went over very well.

Then, we also tried an apple fennel salad, as per a Mark Bittman recipe. Recipe is as follows: very thinly slice a bulb of fennel, cut up a few apples (I did matchstick-like pieces, toss together with a few chopped fennel fronds for greenery, and dress with a basic mustard vinagrette (oil, vinegar, mustard, salt if needed, pepper). We added some tarragon, which was pretty good. As for the apples to fennel ratio, just go with whatever tastes good. It should be a balance between the anise-y flavor of the fennel and the sweetness of the fruit. Do whatever works for you. It's a very autumnal salad. As apples come into season, it'll only get better.

Israel

So, I'm sure everyone knows someone who's gone on Birthright, the free trip for Jewish people to Israel. (I just came back from it.) They all take the same photos of a dusty, rocky, hilly landscape; everyone has a picture of the Western Wall; you usually see people either smeared in mud or bobbing unnaturally high in the Dead Sea. And that's all well and good, because you should have pictures of those things. They're unique, unlike anything you'll ever see anywhere else in the world.

Unfortunately, I'm a shit photographer. Mostly I just forget I have a camera (probably because up until I commandeered Danny's old one specifically for this trip, I never had one of my own, and to tell the truth it still feels like this one technically isn't mine and it's only on loan - a camera is a luxury I will buy when I have a real salary). The rest of the time, I'm not even thinking about artificially preserving what I see beyond my memory. Thinking about it messes it up, because then it's all about the composition, and the lighting, and the color, and the forms, and is there balance between vertical elements and horizontal elements, and why can't I turn off the damn auto-focus because I WANT the foreground to be blurry dammit, and how can I make this look interesting - like something someone would remember. And then, when I go home, I don't even really remember what I was looking at in the first place.

The bottom line is I suck at snapping pictures.

So I didn't take that many which makes me sad.

I especially didn't take very many of the things I personally enjoy - like the food - although I do have one of my and several of my tripmates' lunches. However, despite the lack of visual evidence, I can still verbally rave about the food.

First of all, can I just say that the simple fact that there IS agriculture on land that's alternately desert and swamp is just unbelievable? I'm not talking a plot here or there, I'm talking bananas, dates, litchis, cucumbers, prickly pears, tomatoes, grapes (for eating out of hand and really good wine), mangoes, olives, plums, all kinds of citrus, pears, and I'm sure plenty of other things I'm not aware of, all from someplace half the size of New Jersey... that is, as I said, half desert and half swamp.

If you put in a minute bit of effort, it seems like it's impossible to eat badly here because all the fruits and veggies are so fresh and tasty, there's hardly any reason to eat anything else, which brings me to the rest stop options. I have a lot of experience with Israeli rest stops because the only way to get a large group of people all over the country is by bus. Our bus didn't have a bathroom which was both good and bad. Good: the bus didn't smell like a bathroom. Bad: we had to stop for bathroom breaks.

Israeli rest stops:

- The actual toilets can make the ones in NJ rest stops look like the Four Seasons. Carry your own toilet paper, ladies and gentlemen.

- The food is - roughly speaking, of course - 9 million billion gazillion times better than US rest stops. You do have McDonald's and pizza, but why would you even bother when there's falafel in pita with everything and tons of complimentary salads to round it out??? I mean, really. one place we stopped had a random guy selling baklava and other syrupy delicious confections off a table. They were awesome. There's also Aroma, a coffee shop that sells borekas (crispy flaky dough with a vaariety of fillings) with egg, tomato, eggplant, and pickles inside along with sandwiches and really, really good coffee. It's no wonder Starbucks failed miserably in Israel.

Honestly, if every Pizza Hut or Wendy's or whatever was replaced with a falafel joint, think of (a) how much more awesome everything would be, (b) how much tastier everything would be, and (c) how much more vegetables the entire US population would eat.

I also had a chance to try some of the best shwarma I've ever had in Jerusalem, thanks to one of the Israelis who stayed with our group throughout the trip. Shwarma is slabs of meat (the best is lamb) skwered through the middle and layered on a spike. Then the whole thing is slowly rotated so everything is exposed to a vertically placed heat source. They shave off the outer cooked layers, leaving the raw meat exposed. Another concept I was hugely appreciative of - the half pita if you're only sort of hungry. Brilliant. You could order a half pita, a whole pita, or a laffa (large Iraqi variation on the pita). And there were all sorts of complimentary salads on the side you could help yourself to, roasted eggplant chunks (sooooooo good), carrot salad, various pickles, sauteed onions, roasted peppers, etc.

Another gastronomical high point is the dairy. I got a little pot of full fat yogurt, and I was full after two spoonfuls. It was like eating sour cream, super flavorful and rich. It tasted so good. True, I ate simply. Lots of fresh things very simply prepared. I didn't have a chance to go looking for developed cuisine beyond stop-and-eat joints, but I think taking it down to basics really shows off superior ingredients (or points to inferior ones). The bottom line? Everything was spectacular, from fresh squeezed orange juice after a sunrise hike up and down Masada, to the salads, falafel, and shwarma I ate everywhere. Israel is one country in which I highly recommend eating as much as possible.

Milk and Honey

Just got back from Israel, land of milk and honey.  More like land of awesome produce and hummus.

  

Oh man, jetlag.

The Sidecar.

A classic cocktail if ever there was one.  Typically, I associate it with winter because one of the main ingredients is brandy, which for whatever reason - right or wrong - for me brandy = something to drink to warm you up in the winter.  

However, I have never been one to limit my alcohol consumption based on something as silly as the seasons, so here's the recipe:

1 to 1 to 1 of brandy, an orange liqueur (such as Cointreau, Gran Gala, etc.), and lemon juice.  Shake it up till cold, or if you're like me and don't own a cocktail shaker, just stir with a lot of ice until chilly.  Easy enough.  

It reminds me of a citrusy Manhattan, sans woodiness from the whiskey and medicinal quality from the vermouth and bitters.  And I thought, "Hey, sidecar + fizz = a totally summer-acceptable libation!"  

So, try it.  Make a small one to try, and then add some seltzer water.  It's refreshing, very lemony (if you don't do tangy, cut back on the lemon juice, obv., but don't cut back too much), boozy, and now I have to think up a good name.  Best enjoyed near a pool while wearing huge sunglasses and an even larger hat.  

I'll get back to you on the name when something strikes me...  :)

CSA, again.

So, our CSA is in full swing, which is nice.  We're getting a nice amount of veggies and fruit, and while I've been too busy to really think about how much we're buying vs how much we buy when we don't have a CSA, it's been interesting.  I can say with complete certainty we eat a buttload more fresh fruit than it actually provides for us, but I'm not sure if that's just us and our insane appetites or how it usually ends up for most people.  I don't know how people with families would do it.

A lot of times, it turns into a "Oh, dammit, those stupid peas/summer squash we forgot about is/are going to rot if I don't do something with them RIGHT NOW!  What should I do???"  There've been some stirfries, rice dishes, and random salads that have been quite lovely.  We tried a corn souffle thingy from the NY Times that used a zucchini along with 4 small ears of corn and some roasted and peeled poblano chiles (any pepper would work; I think they actually call for a fresh red pepper) we had in the freezer from last year.  You mix ~ half the corn kernels with 3 eggs, and some milk, I think, in the blender.  Slice and sautee the zuke with an onion (and the pepper if you're using fresh) until transluscent, wait till it cools, dump with whole kernels, roasted pepper shred, and egg-corn-milk mixture into a greased pyrex with some cumin, and bake till set.  Then there was the time Danny didn't realize he had to shell the peas, and that stirfry had an interactive edamame-like dimension to it.  But again, it was tasty.

Overall, the whole CSA thing is nice, and if nothing else, we're certainly eating more organic food for whatever that's worth.  But to tell the truth, I've been feeling very put-upon and in a rut, with no desire to be creative or anything.  It's an odd way to feel in the summer.  I'm not used to it.  I miss my half-day Fridays from when I worked at Pepsi, and Sal's amazing BBQ every other Thursday.  I don't like working twice as hard for less than half the salary, and feeling guilty when I don't.  

I sincerely hope academia overhauls itself or else it's going to die, because I can't say its collapse wouldn't be deserved.

Saved the celeriac

From the previous post, you may have read that I attempted a rosti with celeriac

(Rosti: peel 1.5 pounds of potatoes, 6 cloves of garlic, herb of choice (rosemary, parsley, whatever), shoestring the potatoes, throw into olive oil in hot pan with peeled whole garlic and herbs, add salt and pepper, sautee until potato starts to get tender, roast for 25 minutes in the oven, smush down with aluminum foil and oven mits into a flat cake, roast another 25 minutes. Obviously, I did it with celeriac, which took far less time.)

However, the celeriac rosti did not stick together due to a lack of starch I believe, and nor did it end up with a pleasingly crisp/soft texture. No, friends, it more closely resembled extremely fragrant flavorful shreds of shoe leather. I know a lost cause when I see one, and it didn't take much to reach the conclsuion that this was one of those dishes that would forever languish in the back of the fridge until succumbing to mold. So I figured, hey, this needs to soften up, and it tasted great with sour cream, so why not gently simmer it in milk?

I did. And it worked. And I added a pinch of herbes de Provence mixture thingy. Very tasty and insanely flavorful. So, then I had a stroke of genius. What better way to achieve the impossible (make Danny full) than to add 6 eggs, a can of chickpeas, and turn it into a protein loaded Spanish-style tortilla? Due to the presence of all that somewhat caramelized celeriac, parsley, garlic and random herbs, it needed nothing else. I beat the eggs in a bowl until they were combined, dumped in the now-soft celeriac, the can of chickpeas, and stirred it up. Then I poured it into a pan and let it cook. We ate it with yogurt on top, and drank a very young gruner veltliner. We each had a glass.

It was totally awesome. And we were both stuffed, despite having leftovers! I think we tallied it up, and Danny ate the equivalent of 3 eggs, half a can of chickpeas, and half the celeriac. Hells yeah. I'm going to add up the cost of this meal, in a very rough approximation:

- 1/2 dozen eggs - $1
- 1 can chickpeas - $1
- 1 celeriac - $1.50, maybe. generously. It was maybe $0.59 per pound, and it was ~ 1.5 lbs.
- The whole large container of yogurt was probably around $2? We each had a few spoonfuls. You do the math because I don't feel like it.
- Bottle of wine - $10, unless it was $9. I forget.

Not bad, not bad at all. Sans alcohol, the whole thing cost slightly more than $3. McDonald's can seriously KISS MY ASS.

CSA

Danny and I got a subscription to a CSA for a present (and a very nice present it was, as opposed to simply being more shite we have to find a place for), and it just started last week.  I was uber excited as I made my way down to the pick-up.  The produce looked great; tender new salad greens in a bag, a bunch of small radishes, asparagus (the most resilient strong-looking asparagus I've seen in forever), some green onions, garlic chives, 3 leftover apples from the winter, 3 leftover potatoes, strawberries (2 large containers), and rhubarb.  

So, I gotta be honest... I was expecting more.  The amount of veggies is roughly enough to fill our cavities because we eat like professionals, and man, we love our veggies.  We did try (and failed) to make rosti with celeriac.  By failed, I mean we generated a kind of garlicky celeriac hash which doesn't taste bad at all, but it's a little dry and doesn't stay together in a neat little cake of moist and crispy matchsticks.  It is, however, totally off the chain with a dollop of sour cream on top.  

But the CSA stuff... the radishes and lettuce made their way into a massive salad that we've had for diner, lunch, and lunch again tomorrow.  I took the rhubarb and followed this recipe for curried duck legs with rhubarb, but I subbed in chicken because it's cheaper.  I tell you, it was kind of a lot of steps and all, with the food processor and the extra sauteeing, but it's quite tasty.  It's like a thicker, sweeter, tangier version of my curried chicken.  Definitely richer than mine, too.  I like it a lot, but I think I prefer mine because (a) it's a bit lighter, (b) I really like potatoes, (c) less dirty dishes at the end, and (d) fewer steps.  

We plan on a quick broil of the asparagus, after rubbing them in a olive oil and garlic, and we're just eating the strawberries because they are really, really small, flavorful, and amazing.  The green onions made their way into a block of cream cheese (very awesome under lox on bread), and I'm not sure what the garlic chives are going to be a part of yet, but stay tuned.  

This sounds like a lot of food, but for us, it isn't.  We don't buy lunch or anything, and we seriously eat like gluttons.  Very happy, vegetable-centric gluttons.  

today's breakfast smoothie

Today I peeled and sliced a whole mango, half an avocado, and some vanilla soy milk and blended. I am going to edit my suggestion to using only a quarter of an avocado if the avocado in question is not small. The smoothie was tasty, despite having too little mango flavor, IMO - which should be remedied by using only a quarter avocado in the future - and I stayed full until now!

Usually I have to eat lunch at 11-11:30. By me, mangoes are miraculously $0.50 each. Hells to the yeah.

Iron powerhouse chili

I am experimenting with making chili the same way I make cholent; throw everything in the crockpot, turn it on low, and walk away. I did one whole bag of black beans soaked for 24 hours, 1.5 pounds of stew beef, an onion, a buttload of garlic, 6 chiles (3 anchos, 2 guajillos, 1 pasilla, or something like that; all snipped into bits with kitchen shears), a bunch of whole cumin seeds because I couldn't be bothered to root through our ENTIRE haphazardly thrown together spice closet and find the ground variety, a couple bay leaves, some Mexican oregano, a can of choppped tomatoes, and salt and pepper. This qualifies as a Vat-o-Chili.

I hope I don't burn the apartment complex down.

This chili is going to be the iron powerhouse chili. Black beans - very high in iron for plant material. Beef - high in very bioavailable heme-bound iron. I've heard the combining your plant iron sourcecs with your animal iron sources results in more overall bioavailability of plant iron. Sounds good to me, people. Stay tuned for results...

Another smoothie

I have stepped into interesting territory with my smoothie-making skillz. I have entered the throwing-weirdass-things-into-a-blender-and-seeing-what-comes-out phase. The weird ingredient of choice today was half of a very ripe Haas avocado.

I started with a bunch of (maybe 6?) medium sized strawberries, washed, with the leaves removed, threw in half an avocado, and then poured chocolate soy milk over the whole deal. Then I blended.

Holy crap, you guys.

The flavor was light, fruity, and chocolatey, with that very subtle green tang from the avocado, and it was somehow both light yet extremely filling. The texture was unbelievable. It was thick and creamy with a silky mouthfeel, like a milkshake. And yet... it was oddly light. I highly, highly recommend half an avocado if your smoothie seems thin. It's better than yogurt because it doesn't add a lot of sour to the party. I want to experiment with other fruits, regular milk, and maybe some sweetened condensed milk (like a tablespoon) and vanilla as sweetener and added flavor. Or maybe oranges, avocado, orange juice, and a tiny bit of sweetened condensed milk to get a creamsicle thing going on...

Ok, that sounds a little wacky, but it just might work... And the possibilities! They're endless!

Cheese blintzes

Danny and I made cheese blintzes!  They are crepes wrapped around a non-measured mush of ricotta, farmer's cheese, one egg, a dusting of cinnamon, a bunch of lemon zest, a couple spoonfuls of sugar, some vanilla, and a bit of sour cream.  It should be creamy and flavorful but not too sweet.  Then you fry the filled crepes, and eat them with a little fruit if you like.  

I ate 3, and I feel like I weigh roughly 7 gazillion pounds, but I'm liking it.  We tried this white wine I picked from the $10 and less cart in the store, the Terrai 2008 macabeo, which was actually very nice.  The price was right, the acidity cut through the creamy blintzes really well, and there was this nice grapefruity zing going on too.  I loved the whole combination.  I'm busy feeling fat and happy... :)

Actually, speaking of fat and happy, I had this realization.  Currently, I weigh ~10 pounds more than I did when I was competitively fencing as an undergrad.  You'd think that would be bad, right?  It's not.  I feel stronger, 5 miles on various pieces of gym equipment don't leave me anywhere near as achy as they used to, and I find that I can workout longer for more days in a row without feeling as fatigued as I used to.  This is an interesting data point in the ongoing experiment that is me as an active person.  Hmm...