In Desperate Times

I have a secret weapon against the gloom and doom of endlessly rainy days, the everyday grind, the early mornings, the exhausted evenings—in short, the business of being a grown-up.  It’s not easy, this grown-up schtick.  More often than I’d like to admit, I’m completely overwhelmed by it all—job, bills, cleaning, feeding myself, and trying not to go crazy.  I could really use a housewife to take care of me, someone to put a hot dinner on the table for me and rub my back while making soothing shhh, it’s okay sounds.  Housewives were really a fabulous invention.  If only we could all run over to Target to buy one!

Without a housewife around, the temptation to buy a one-way ticket to Italy, where I could eat my weight in pasta and gelato a la Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love is almost more than I can bear.  But in desperate times, my secret weapon is stashed in the pantry or, rather, a brown paper bag in the corner since my kitchen’s pantry is laughably small.  It’s a stack of lumpy red-skinned potatoes.  It’s no housewife, but it’s awfully nice in its own ugly way.

Potatoes are, for me, one of the ultimate comfort foods.  I love that they are dug straight out of the earth, like a hidden treasure, a gift nurtured by the dirt, the rain, and, on nicer days, the sunshine.  I like their musty smell and the way they feel in my hand, solid and heavy.  When I was a child, I even liked the crunch of raw potato, snatched from my mother’s countertop as she cut potatoes into chunks for boiling or mashing.  Potatoes were a constant of my childhood, and though I rarely eat them now as my mother prepared them, potatoes are deeply, viscerally comforting to me.

I also like that potatoes are not an instant food.  Despite my childhood potato-snatching, I no longer eat them raw.  I like them in soups and stews, and there’s a really wonderful recipe for Golden Cheddar Cheese Soup in Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home that uses potatoes to make a creamy base for a bright but soothing pureed soup.  But my favorite way to eat potatoes these days is roasted.  The dry oven heat creates the perfect combination of textures: crispy-crunchy brown on the outside, creamy and soft on the inside.  Flavor-wise, I find potatoes to be a blank slate.  I like that about them.  They’re so forgiving about seasonings that you can ask yourself what flavors sound good to you right now, and the potato will take happily to just about whatever you throw at it.  If only all things in life were so carefree and accommodating!

On these endlessly rainy winter nights, I’ve returned to a recipe that started me on my potato-roasting path.  The original recipe is from my favorite all-purpose cookbook, Passionate Vegetarian, a book that I think every serious vegetarian cook should own.  The recipe first caught my eye with its clever name: Ned’s Fiery Oven French-Bakes.  What is a French-Bake?, I wondered.  “Spicy, Cajun-style French fries that aren’t fried but baked,” the recipe answered.  It warned me that these fries are addictive, but I paid it no mind and made them anyway.  And you know, I’m really glad I let my belly make decisions in these matters because the belly knows best.  Five years and a few recipe tweaks later, these oven fries still slay me with their incredible depth of flavor and crispy-creamy texture.  The secret is the use of rice vinegar with garlic oil on the fries before they go into the oven.  The finished fries deliver an immediate tang of flavor, followed by something savory and rich, a sort of deep umami that tastes unlike anything I’ve ever eaten before.  They are seriously good—better than a raw potato even.  Now, head into the kitchen because I’m about to give you the recipe.

Oil-and-Vinegar Oven Fries

Adapted from Passionate Vegetarian

Serves 2 (or 1, maybe with leftovers depending on greediness)

2 medium-large red-skinned potatoes (mine are about baseball-sized these days)

1/2 tbsp. garlic-infused olive oil

1 tbsp. rice vinegar

1/8-1/4 tsp. Tabasco sauce (I’d lean toward 1/8 tsp. here, but if you like a lot of heat, go for the 1/4 tsp.)

Salt to taste

Black pepper to taste

1)  Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.  Line a large baking sheet with a Silpat.

2)  Rinse the potatoes thoroughly and pat dry with a paper towel.  Use a vegetable peeler to remove any eyes or other really funky spots.  With a knife, slice the potatoes into French fry-shaped pieces about 1/2-inch thick.  In a bowl, toss the potatoes with the garlic oil, then add the vinegar and toss again.  Dribble the Tabasco over them, add some salt and pepper, and toss again.

3)  Spread the potatoes in a single layer on the Silpat-covered baking sheet.  Pop them in the oven and bake for 30-40 minutes, turning them every 10 minutes or so.  These fries don’t turn spectacularly brown and crisp, but if you are so inclined, you could try baking them longer to get a browner, crispier oven fry.  I like them a little crispy with a nice, creamy interior.  And that flavor!  Amazing.

Thank You Times Two, Plus a Winner

After the cookware.com giveaway this week, I’ve got a new wish list for my kitchen.  There are so many useful, pretty items in that store!  I’m saving my pennies for some shopping because a well-loved and smartly equipped kitchen is a happy place to be.

Before I announce the winner, I want to say thank you to the generous folks at CSN Stores for sponsoring this contest.  I also want to thank those of you who entered the contest!  I loved reading about your weekend plans—it was a little like tagging along with you on your adventures.  Thank you for sharing and for spending time with me here at Life, Love, and Food.

According to The Random Integer Generator, the winner is…

DAINE!

*** The official data:

Here are your random numbers:

1

Timestamp: 2010-02-06 16:47:28 UTC)

Daine’s comment made me smile because I miss Chicago, its food and its people.  Daine wrote,

“I'm going to India town with Amanda and Erin (she got good news from UIC, if you haven't heard). When you come back to Chicago, you have to go to Uru Swati. The ambiance leaves much to be desired, but the food there is heavenly. They also have the best Bhindi masala (okra) that I've ever eaten.

I'm actually glad that you put up that advertisement. I'm not in the market for any bar stools right now, but they do have a sugar bowl that I will probably order. I have distinct conceptions of products I'd like to own, but then spend years searching in vain for what I'd like (a square glass pitcher, for example). They almost have what I was imagining for a sugar bowl. It's probably worth buying, since the exact thing I'm envisioning probably doesn't exist.”

Happy shopping, Daine!  The rest of us will have to keep saving our pennies for a kitchen treat.  Where’s my piggy bank?

A Declaration of Weekend

I believe in weekends.

Recently, all of the students working in my lab have been obsessed with the question of working weekends.  Every single one of them has asked me if I work weekends.  My answer is ambiguous: no and yes.  During my graduate student days, I struggled with this issue.  Sometimes I enjoyed working weekends.  The lab was quiet and peaceful, I could sit and ponder my data, I could think about which experiments I wanted to do next, and I could leave whenever I felt ready to go home.  There was a certain freedom to it that I liked.  But I also found that the more I worked weekends, the less I pushed myself to get my work done Monday to Friday.  Tasks stretched themselves to fill the time I allowed them to occupy.  I was less efficient, even though I was spending more time in the lab.  And over time, I wanted to spend fewer weekends in the lab and more time having fun.  I wanted to be more efficient so I could have a life—and be a successful scientist.  For my happiness, I needed to believe that I could do both.

My answer now to the working weekend is this: if I work on the weekends, I work from home.  I try NOT to be in the lab on the weekends unless it’s essential (and sometimes it is).  As a postdoc, I feel it is more important than ever to make time to read scientific papers, so that is my weekend work.  I love to read on my blue couch.  I’ve even made myself a little star chart to track the number of papers I’m reading each week.  My goal is to read three papers; most weeks I read two.  That’s a big improvement over zero!  I didn’t read enough as a graduate student, and it’s a habit that I want to remedy.

The most important thing that I do to keep up my momentum in the lab is that one day a week, I don’t do any work at all.  Perhaps it sounds lazy, but for me it’s the perfect balance.  It encourages me to push myself hard because I know that I will give myself time to rest.  I need the fire under my bottom to keep me moving, but without a day to relax, I’ll just burn to a crisp.  I really want this postdoc to be my steppingstone to a faculty position, which means I’m in it for the long haul—probably a minimum of four years.  I’ve got to make it work for me.

So like I said, I believe in weekends.  Especially weekends that come on the heels of a difficult week in the lab.  I deserve a good weekend.  This one feels wide open to me, big enough for me to stretch my legs and wiggle my toes.  Big enough for a good yawn and a catnap on the couch, before or after reading Matt’s book or Nigel Slater’s the kitchen diaries or even the section about making grits in Passionate Vegetarian.  All of these things sound good to me!

Here’s a happy list of other items from my weekend plans:

* I have a phone date with my lovely friend Nicole, whom I miss very much and with whom I didn’t get to visit much last time we saw each other.  She’s a gem and I’m excited to catch up with her.

* Pancakes!  I’ve been thinking about making pancakes for weeks now.  I love the sound of this recipe from 3191 Miles Apart.  Spelt flour and whole oat flour!  Yum!  Plus I’ve got almost a cup of homemade citrus syrup left over from making Daine’s Yogurt Cake a few weeks ago, and I have a feeling the syrup will make a stellar pancake sauce.

* I yielded to temptation and slipped a copy of February’s Bon Appetit into my grocery cart last weekend.  There are easily ten recipes I want to trot into my kitchen from this issue, but I’m intrigued by one in particular, Easy Chicken Masala.  In this recipe, the chicken is marinated in a whole-milk yogurt sauce spiked with cilantro and garam masala, then it’s roasted over a bed of onion slices.  I’m so curious to see if the same technique will work with chickpeas that I’m ready to draw up my grocery list for tomorrow night’s dinner.

Happy weekend to you, dear readers!  I hope it’s a good one.

Split Pea Soup for a Texas Winter

Without a doubt, I would call myself a planner.  But hidden between the lines of all my planning is a rather mercurial spirit, one that likes to twiddle the plans as she sees fit.  I often make cooking plans that turn out to be too ambitious to execute during the work week.  The cake I wanted to bake on a Monday night a few weeks ago?  I baked it the following Saturday.  And the split pea soup I was going to cook on a Wednesday?  It turned into a red lentil soup on Thursday, and the split peas sat, soaked and plump, until Saturday, at which point they turned into the most delightful pea soup I’ve had in recent memory.

The wonderful thing about my fickle cooking plans is that occasionally they lead to surprising recipe finds.  Although green split peas are cheap as dirt, I didn’t want to waste them.  Once I’d starting soaking them, I knew I would have to cook them one way or another, so I started searching for recipes on Epicurious, a site that makes me deliriously happy every time I hop on it.  I could spend hours on it, searching for recipes, reading reviews, bookmarking delicious things to make.  It’s almost as addictive to me as Amazon or, my newest favorite site, The Happiness Project.  Nothing thrills me more than learning, and my computer makes it a little too easy to pursue endless hours of new stuff.

But about those split peas: I think they have a reputation for being stodgy, heavy, stick-to-your-ribs fare, like the classic, thick-as-sludge split pea soup flavored with a salty, fatty hunk of pork.  Split peas are a wintertime ingredient, their heartiness providing a solid defense against shivering and snowy landscapes.  But I live in Texas, where wintertime is laughably mild, where a few weeks ago I sunbathed out by the pool while reading a paper.  I do love it here, but I also love my wintertime cooking and the coziness of a busy stove.  When I came across a split pea soup made with green peas and fresh dill, I thought, Ah-ha!  A cozy soup made light and fresh with a few key selections from the garden—now this is a soup for a Texas winter.

Here I must admit that I’m not the biggest fan of dill, so I decided to swap the dill for fresh mint.  I blame Nigel Slater, who is always throwing mint around the kitchen in his book the kitchen diaries.  I wanted some mint of my own.  But the combination of green peas and mint is a pretty classic one, a pairing that showed up in another soup on this blog, Kiki’s Mint Pea Soup, a recipe shared by my friend Anne.  Matt and I loved that soup.  We made it one night while vacationing in Tucson, Arizona.  I remember making the soup in the open, airy kitchen of his family’s ranch house, using a retro, 1950s-ish blender.  There was a fantastic lightning storm that night, with rain and a sky illuminated by streaks of lightning.  The power kept going off, cutting off the stereo.  We ate by candlelight, and after the storm receded, the frogs sang us a lullaby.  It was such a good night—one of my favorites of that whole summer.

Kiki’s Mint Pea Soup left me so full I thought I might burst—rich with butter and creme fraiche, it is greens peas and mint dressed up in silk and pearls.  The split pea soup I want to share with you today is an earthier, dressed-down version of Kiki’s.  It gets its creaminess from the split peas and a whirl in the blender, but it isn’t blended to utter smoothness.  Instead, only a few ladles of the soup are blended with the mint and green peas, producing a creamy-bodied soup with some soft texture from a leek and the split peas.  Its flavor is light and fresh with mint, but the split peas lend a deep, earthy-nutty flavor that makes this soup a good main course.  Tonight I ate it hot with a platter of spicy, oven-baked French fries and found it to be a perfect Sunday night meal.  It also makes a great deskbound lunch at room temperature, especially when accompanied by some cheese and crackers and a piece of fruit.  It’s so good that I may have to make it again before this Texas winter dissipates into a string of 70-degree days.

Split Pea Soup with Green Peas and Fresh Mint

Adapted from this Bon Appetit recipe found on Epicurious

Makes 3-4 main-dish servings

I like to soak my split green peas ahead of time to speed things up on soup-making day, but according to the original recipe, it’s not necessary.  Just check the cooking progress of your split peas by tasting them before taking the soup off the heat—they should have a nice creamy texture, not dry or chalky in any way.  If they aren’t creamy, give them a few more minutes’ cooking time and check again.

A word about the vegetable stock: if you use stock cubes, as I often do, you might want to use half as much stock cube so that this soup doesn’t become too salty or too heavily flavored.  For example, normally I would use two stock cubes for four cups of water, but in this recipe I like to use just one stock cube for four cups of water.  Then I add a few pinches of sea salt to get just the right amount of salt to make the flavors sing.

1 cup split green peas, rinsed, sorted, and soaked in a few inches of cold water overnight

3 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil

1 leek, ends trimmed, the rest chopped and rinsed to remove dirt and silt

1 bay leaf

4 cups vegetable stock

1 cup frozen petite green peas, thawed (or partially thawed—I don’t think it matters much)

1/4 cup fresh mint leaves, plus a few pretty leaves for garnish

Sea salt, to taste

Black pepper to taste, optional

1)  Prep the green split peas for overnight soaking.

2)  Heat the olive oil over medium-high heat in a soup pot.  Add the leek and bay leaf and cook for about 5 minutes, until the leek softens and grows fragrant.  Drain the split peas and add them to the soup pot, stirring to coat them with oil.

3)  Add the vegetable stock (or water plus stock cube) and bring to a boil.  Clamp a lid on the pot, turn the heat down, and simmer for 25-35 minutes or until the split peas are tender and creamy.  Remove the bay leaf.

4)  Pour 2-3 ladles of the split pea mixture into a blender.  Add the petite green peas and mint.  Blend to smoothness.  Add the smooth mixture to the soup pot and stir it all together.  Taste and add a pinch or two of sea salt if you like.  Also, if you’d like to season with black pepper, be my guest.  I don’t think this soup needs black pepper, but you might.

5)  Serve hot, in deep bowls, garnished with a leaf or two of fresh mint.

Weekend, with Cleaning, Roasting, and Baking

My balmy Texas January is on vacation this weekend.  The temperatures plummeted yesterday and the wind blustered with frigid swirls of air.  In the evening, before running out for a loaf of bread and some frozen peas (more about those tomorrow!), I had to fetch my pink scarf and hat from the closet.  It was comforting to wear my old winter clothes, cozy warm things I would not have dreamed of leaving the house without when I was living in Chicago.

Last night, as I walked home with my groceries, I thought about homesickness.  I’m surprised I haven’t been more homesick since I moved to Texas.  I do miss Chicago and Michigan, and I have moments when I long to be in my old apartment, with its familiar kitchen and smooth wooden floors, big windows and trees waving to me outside.  But most of all I miss the people in those places and the moments of our daily lives that we used to share.  I will be the first to admit that I have not been doing a good job keeping in touch with people, and I’m working to remedy that problem now.  It’s hard trying to hold together all the strings of my life—work, friends, family, health, money, home.  I comfort myself by telling myself that a balanced life is an ongoing project and balance is a long-term goal.  With some effort, a few months of topsy-turvy imbalance can be nudged into place gently with phone calls, lunch dates, and, when the spring comes, a trip to Chicago.

This weekend I’m looking forward to some peaceful domestic work.  Feeling inspired, I’m going to clean out the fridge.  I don’t really enjoy cleaning out the fridge, but I’m feeling motivated by Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, for which I signed up earlier this week.  Self-improvement reading is a guilty pleasure of mine; usually I just read it and continue on with my life without missing a beat.  I like letting other people do the hard work of improving themselves; I’m just a voyeur.  But The Happiness Project caught my eye because it seems focused on taking a good thing (my life) and making it even better.  I feel warm and fuzzy inside just thinking about it.

Every week, Gretchen is posting a video on her website with a small goal for the week.  This week’s goal is to tackle a nagging task.  The fridge is my nagging task.  I love the way I feel after completing a long-standing cleaning chore.  While I work on the fridge, I’m going to put the oven to work roasting carrots and fennel for Jess’s Roasted Carrot and Fennel Soup.  Shannon first told me about Sweet Amandine, the lovely blog that Jess writes, and I’m totally smitten with it.  Jess’s artsy photos and mouthwatering prose have sent me into the kitchen more than once, and I urge you not to read her site if you are the least bit hungry.  You may regret it, especially if you have a sweet tooth.

Speaking of a sweet tooth, I’m toying with the idea of making these crazy hippie Smart Cookies from everybody likes sandwiches.  They sound like such a delightful hodgepodge of ingredients, just the thing for my afternoon snacks.  What’s your favorite afternoon snack?

My cheeks are flushed with embarrassment at my reaction to this trailer of Jamie Oliver’s new show on ABC.  I got a little teary-eyed, just like Jamie did!  But it’s hard to imagine something more important to our health and happiness than food that nourishes and energizes our bodies.  I’ll be curious to watch the show when it airs in March.

Have a cozy delicious weekend, friends!

On Your Behalf

I like to think of this blog as a mellow little space where we can gather to chat about food and cooking, cheese and vegetables, tofu and chocolate.  It’s the closest I can get to having you all gathered round my kitchen table, with mugs of coffee and a platter of cookies in front of you.  I really like this space we share, and because it is like a part of my home, there isn’t much in the way of advertisements or commercials.  If I had you over for tea, I certainly wouldn’t be trying to sell you things.  It’s just not my style.  But tonight, I had an opportunity that I just could not pass up, and it involves one teeny tiny little ad.  So here we go:

stool

There!  That wasn’t so bad, right?  And if you click on the link, you’ll see that “stool” does not refer to the kind of stool that you make, unless you are a carpenter.  It’s a furniture ad!  And the furniture on allbarstools.com is really quite nice, the kind of thing that would look right at home underneath my kitchen bar.  But tonight, I’d like to focus on your kitchens because I’ve got something really amazing to offer one lucky reader: your choice of merchandise from cookware.com, one item, up to $70 in value.  The generous folks at CSN stores (the family of stores to which allbarstools.com belongs and the sponsor of that little ad up there) contacted me about hosting a contest for them, and on your behalf, I accepted.  One peek at cookware.com told me I couldn’t turn down a chance for one of you to win something fun, useful, pretty, or groovy from that site.  Take a look and you’ll see what I mean.  I love these pretty loaf pans from Le Creuset or these adorable soup bowls.  (Oh, how I love soup.  One can never have too much soup or too many bowls.)  Or how about this intriguing skillet from EarthPan whose nonstick coating is made from sand?  (Anyone know how the SandFlow coating compares to ceramic nonstick coatings?)  I like this lovely bowl from Culinary Herbs or, because many salads appear on my dinner table, this nice salad bowl set, with its big mama bowl and four baby bowls.  I’m actually a little bummed now that I can’t enter my own contest!  (I have only myself to blame, because I’m making up the rules for this contest.)

Here’s the deal: leave me a comment on this post and tell me something lovely about your weekend.  What will you eat?  Where will you go?  Which book or magazine will you read?  Who will be with you?  One entry per person, please.  The contest will be open until midnight on Friday, February 6, a week from today.  I’ll announce the randomly chosen winner on Saturday, February 7 and ask that the winner send me an e-mail address so that the prize can be chosen and delivered.

I can’t wait to read your entries.  Good luck!  I’ll see you back here in the morning.

PS  The contest is open to US and Canadian residents.  My apologies to anyone who is excluded.  I’m still glad you are here with me!

Dinner, a Chance for Civility

It’s been an unfortunate week and I am very glad that it’s almost over.

Every week has the chance to be great, but this one missed the boat.  Time and success slipped away from me, so I focused on reducing the collateral damage.  Damage control is hard work.  It left me feeling breathless and anxious, running hard with no destination in site.  Today was bad enough that I wrote the following haiku in an e-mail to Matt.  (I love haiku.)

I want some good news
To announce itself loudly
If not, tears may flow.

I wasn’t reduced to tears, but there was a moment when I thought I might be.  I powered through the rest of the day, eyes dry and head held high, and when I arrived home, I ran off my frustration in a springy new pair of running shoes with a storm brewing overhead.  The sky’s angry energy mirrored my own, but I made it back to my front door dampened by just a drop or two of rain.

Buoyed by my apparent good luck (and so grateful I didn’t have to spend a single minute in a gym tonight!), I decided that dinner ought to be a calming affair tonight, a chance to reclaim my sense of civility and decency.  Admittedly, the dinner menu was a little odd, but it comforted and nourished me as a good dinner should.  I started with a flour tortilla, slicked on one side with olive oil.  The other side was piled with a spicy tofu scramble and juicy roasted tomato halves.  I grilled the tortilla over high heat in the new skillet that Matt gave me.  While the heat was on, I tossed together a big salad of baby lettuce and ever-so-thinly sliced fennel, dressing them with olive oil and fresh lemon juice.

I dolled up the dinner table with a burning candle and one of my fancy water glasses.  The salad bowl was placed off to my right, a tub of sour cream to my left.  I brought my tostada to the table, poured cold water into my glass, and sat down.  I even took a moment to say a little blessing in my head, knowing that gratitude is the best seasoning of all.

Then I ate.  I dabbed a spoonful of sour cream on the tostada.  Every mouthful was surprisingly delicious—the crispy flour tortilla, the spicy, slightly chewy tofu, the toothsome richness of the tomatoes.  Though it was a “make do with what’s in the kitchen” supper, it certainly made for a pleasant meal.  The salad was refreshing, even though I thought that I’d added too much oil to the salad bowl.  It tasted just right to me, and the fennel was a delight with its faintly exotic licorice notes.  Fennel is such a wonderful palate cleanser that it’s becoming a regular in my vegetable crisper.

For dessert, I turned to what is for me the ultimate comfort food: cold cereal.  I’d already had two desserts today (a square of shortbread and a slice of Daine’s yogurt cake, both of which were excellent), and though I wanted something sweet, I wasn’t in the mood for a proper dessert.  Instead, I dug into the pantry and pulled out a box of Nature’s Path Optimum Blueberry Cinnamon cereal and a half-empty bag of Arrowhead Mills Puffed Corn cereal.  Into a too-small mug I poured equal parts blueberry cinnamon and puffed corn cereal and gave the whole thing a good pour of milk.  Then, because I was so greedy, I proceeded to get cereal all over my table and myself trying to dig my spoon into the bottom of the mug.  The whole thing, including the mess I made, pushed all the right buttons and I ended dinner feeling like something had at last been made right in my world.