Coffee heat rising

Recipes

Happy Thanksgiving!

by

Well, it’s a gray day. I hope you’re not out there driving around or trying to fly around in the snow and ice that seem to have descended on half the country.

Hereabouts, Gerardo, clad in a thick down jacket, is out there shoveling up two months’ worth of mess…he must have noticed at the same time I did yesterday that he didn’t come around last month. He called last night to say he’d be here at 7 a.m.

So. If I were having TG here, the yard would look very nice. 😀

M’hijito and I are going to his buddy’s home for an afternoon of socializing and eating. This has become an annual tradition…getting a bit out of hand, maybe — he says they expect 25 adults and God only knows how many children. So that will be a ton of fun, tho’ how they’re going to fit that crowd into their modest starter house out in the suburbs beats me. But young people have resources and energy that we old folks can only remember vaguely and dream of.

LOL! Some of those dreams are the stuff of nightmares.

Back in the Day, we and the couple who were our best friends each had family to cope with over the holiday, and for both of us it wasn’t all that great an experience.

Barbarella, who was given to even greater crankiness than I — and I’m cranky as a cat under normal circumstances — had to make a vast effort to put up with her hopelessly bourgeois sister-in-law; a brother-in-law who, after, having been thrown out of the state AG’s office for some sort of malfeasance, subsided into quiet sleaziness; a mother-in-law whose life was consumed by supporting the man who married her after she gave birth, illegitimately, to her oldest son (our friend, Barbarella’s husband); and parents who as they aged were slowly sliding into alcoholism.

My then-husband and I had to put up with the woman my father married nine months after my mother died, whom I liked at first but came to loathe for her mind-bending meanness; her proudly ignorant, anti-intellectual, extreme right-wing family and their circle of Ohioan ex-pats; his father, who was simply bat-sh!t rabid; his father’s meek, submissive second wife; and his mother, who was a decent person but whose eccentricities and extreme left-wing opinionation drove me nuts.

Thanksgiving would pass, for each couple, in the company of these worthies. My step-sister, whose idea of cooking involved plenty of boxed items, would prepare what I used to call “flat white food”: a typical feast consisted of steamed turkey with the flavor of sawdust, mashed potatoes, cauliflower…the only color on the table came from the Jell-O salads, usually arsenic green or day-glo orange. Barbarella’s relatives served up similar fare.

Then, after the dust settled and the dishes were washed and the flavorless turkey leftovers were stashed in the freezer (or fed to the dog), we would have our own holiday party:

TGTGIO!

Thank God Thanksgiving Is Over!

Barbarella and I could cook, and I mean really cook. And we liked to work together — we were very good at it. So we would prepare some amazing feast, the centerpiece of which would always be anything but turkey. Leg of lamb, maybe — in those days it was possible to get these marvelous bone-in New Zealand legs of lamb. Haven’t seen them in years…they were so good. But sometimes we might have a real prime rib, or a pork crown roast, or…whatEVER was not turkey. The kids would be fed and relegated to the TV room, which in both houses was far enough from the dining room that the humans could linger forever over their wine and conversation. The dogs would take up residence under the table. And a good time — at last! — would be had by all.

My son’s friends, mercifully, like to cook. So we surely will be served up a meal that does not leave us feeling we need to stage our own to make up for a lost holiday. It’s not easy, though, to turn out enough chow for 25 adults and a passel of children in a tiny modern kitchen with a stupid glass cooktop. So these things are largely a pot-luck kind of thing, with the young people preparing the pièces de résistance and the guests bringing the side dishes and desserts.

We’re bringing fresh cranberry sauce and a carrot dish that I’ve found the young people like a lot.

Whipped Carrots with Apple

You need:

• As many carrots as you figure will feed your guests
• About one fresh apple per package of carrots
• Spices to your taste: a little cinnamon and nutmeg, for sure. If you feel daring, try some cardamom and maybe even some cumin. Take it easy with these — a little goes a long way
• A freaking ton of butter. For one package of raw carrots, about half a cube. Increase according to the size of your carrot output.
• A food processor or blender

Scrub the carrots clean, peeling off any scraped or bruised spots and trimming off the root and the stem ends. Steam or boil the carrots until they’re soft all the way through.

While the carrots cook, peel the apple(s) and cut out the seeds. Cut the carrots coarsely into chunks.

When the carrots are done, drain them and cut them into chunks, too. Place the hot carrots and apple into the food processor, add a chunk of butter, and toss in whatever spices you’ve selected. Process or blend until the mixture is smoothly, gloriously puréed.

You can make this ahead and reheat for dinner. For pot-lucking, we intend to cook up a large amount of this stuff, place it in a crock pot, and haul it to the friends’ place, where it can heat during the pre-dinner festivities and be kept hot and out of the hosts’ way until the feast is served.

There’s really no need to put sugar in this dish, because the apples contribute just the right amount of sweetness. If you’re concerned that it won’t be sweet enough and you’re boiling instead of steaming, add a tablespoon or so of sugar to the cooking water.

wild turkey

Image: Male wild turkey, re-introduced to California. Yathin S Krishnappa. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Farmer’s Marketing and Good Eating

by

So it was still raining Saturday morning.

Among the vendors in the great estate-sale group here in the Valley is an antiques dealer who lives right around the corner. Once a year at the height of the gift-buying season, he throws a big yard sale at his house — it’s a much-coveted event. Well, naturally, my neighbor The Accountant from Heaven and I planned to descend on this the minute it opened, at 7:30 a.m. Spousal Accountant jumped into his truck (he had to work all day and planned to drive from the Event to his office) and Heavenly Accountant and I climbed into the Dog Chariot, which we figured would have plenty of room for whatever crazy things we purchased.

Alas, no: when we cruised around the corner, we were dismayed to find NO long lines of cars illegally parked up and down the street, NO party atmosphere, and no sign of the promised merchandising frenzy. It was just too wet for a yard sale, and so the proprietor had put it off for a week. Spousal Accountant stumbled off to work, and Heavenly Accountant and I looked at each other and wondered what to do next.

“Let’s go to the farmer’s market down at the church!” suggested she. It being almost 8:00 a.m., we figured the thing would be open soon, if it wasn’t already.

Wrong!

They were still setting up. Open at 9:00 a.m.

Welp, there’s another farmer’s market. It’s all the way downtown, and so neither of us frequents it often, because it’s a pain to drive down there around the stupid lightrail and an even bigger pain to park. However…Heavenly Accountant had been there the previous week and found this incredibly NEAT basket imported by a Ghanaian lady, and she recommended the whole shindig highly. Furthermore, because rain was still threatening, maybe there would be fewer people there. So downtown we went.

Was it great! The choice of produce was far superior to what’s offered at our local corner. They had all sorts of wonderful things, amazing varieties of radishes and incredible chard and marvelous lettuces and veggies of all descriptions. In Arizona, prices at farmer’s markets are very high, and so I’ve never bought much at the one in our neighborhood, which offers nothing you can’t get at Sprouts and sells everything at Whole Foods prices. But this stuff was worth an extra buck or two.

I got some lovely, delicate little eggplants, which I intend to cook today, and some amazing long, long, LONG string beans in two colors (very tender and delicious, as it developed), and some beautiful beets with lovely fresh greens, and some stuff called “baked falafel,” which is a sort of legume paste (ingredients say “split peas,” not chickpeas or garbanzos) spread out thin and baked into delicious, IRRESISTIBLE crackers.

Over at the Ghanaian lady’s booth, we found the spectacular baskets. This woman, her son, and her Washington, DC-born daughter-in-law have a nonprofit that creates work and profits for African women by contracting for and importing their really very pretty basketware. I tried to recruit D-i-L as a member for the Scottsdale Business Association (they would LOVE her!), but with a full-time job as a Pottery Barn designer, two kids, full-time college coursework, a husband, and a mother-in-law who’s drafted her to help run this business, getting herself to the east side of town at 7:15 in the morning was asking a bit much.

That notwithstanding, we decided we needed a new basket for the weekly SBA drawing, and so, since most of our membership is male and we wish to frighten them, we naturally picked one that’s mostly pink.

P1020700

Yesterday after some running around, I was starved by mid-day and so broke out a piece of steak and raided the fridge, therein to find those nice beets and exotic beans. Had planned to bake the beets, but really didn’t want to wait an hour or so to eat, and so decided to cook the things on the grill, exactly as I roast potatoes over the grill, only maybe with a little more flavoring. Here’s the trick…

You need:

• A pan for cooking veggies and small foods over the grill (holes or mesh on the bottom)
• A few nice, fresh beets, cleaned, with the coarsest part of the skin peeled off (you don’t have to peel the whole beet)
• Some spices or herbs (I used fennel seeds and cumin seeds in a ratio of 3:1)
• Salt and pepper (easy on the salt!)
• A little olive oil
• Dash or two of lemon juice, lime juice, or wine vinegar

Cut the beets into quarters; if they’re very large, you may want to cut them into smaller chunks. They should be an inch or two across.

Go outside and turn on the grill. Place your grilling pan over the heat, close the lid, and allow the whole lash-up to preheat.

Meanwhile, pour some olive oil into the bottom of a plate. Dry the beets nicely on some paper towels (beet juice stains, so don’t use your kitchen towels unless they’re already red). If your spices aren’t already ground, place the seeds (fennel and cumin were very nice) in a mini-food processor or coffee grinder dedicated to pulverizing spices and whap them into near-powder. Stir this into the olive oil, along with some cracked black pepper and a small amount of salt.

Place the beet pieces into the spiced oil. Turn them over so all sides are coated with oil and spices. Carry this out to the grill, along with a tool that will allow you to touch hot surfaces. Using said tool, push the hot ban over so it’s not directly over a burner. Set the beet pieces, one at a time, onto the pan.

Allow these to cook about six minutes to a side. Go out and turn them over at about that interval 0r sooner, so you can see that they’re not burning and to cook and brown each surface.

While they’re cooking, place a little lemon or lime juice, or if you prefer, a good quality salad vinegar, into the olive oil. Mix these together with a fork just before you take the beets off the heat.

While the beets are cooking, you can use the grill to cook a steak (or other meat) and heat other veggies wrapped in tinfoil.

As soon as you take the beets off the grill, set them back into the olive oil, which you’ve now spiked with juice or vinegar. Roll them around in the oil to coat again, and serve them up. DE-licious!

P1020702

 

 

Tomato Soup with Wonderful Low-Salt Product

by

The other day at Sprouts I came across a new-to-me tomato product that turns out to be totally wonderful. Every time I hit Sprouts, Trader Joe’s, or Whole Foods, I search for low-sodium canned tomato products, which are nonexistent in regular supermarkets. Although occasionally one or the other of these purveyors will stock a few cans of no-salt-added tomatoes, most days the pickings are slim. However, last week I came across this stuff:

Pomi strained tomatoes

The contents are billed as “strained tomatoes,” but the package copy natters on about how you can use it as pizza sauce. And, more to the point, it boasts NO ADDED SALT. It has nothing else added to it, either.

Grab!

Well, after I’d brought this little box home, I decided nothing would do but what I should try to make these “strained tomatoes” into some kind of soup. After having tasted the product, expecting to find it saltlessly bland, I was astonished at the rich, zingy, full-bodied tomatoey flavor. This, I figured, could work.

Here’s how to go about this…

First get your hands on the following:

Pomì brand strained or chopped or peeled tomatoes
A fresh tomato, if you happen to have one that tastes like anything (otherwise, ignore)
About half an onion — more, if desired
A stick of celery, if you have some on hand.
One or two cloves of garlic
Dried herbs of your choosing (I used some herbes de Provence, but just about anything would do nicely)
A little water
Wine, if you happen to have some laying around (I used cheap red; white would do; sherry could be good)
Olive oil
Yogurt, sour cream, milk, or real cream, if desired

P1020642Coarsely chop the onion and the garlic. Skim the bottom of a deep frying pan or everyday pan with some olive oil. Gently cook the onion over medium or medium-low heat until it’s well softened and starting to brown. If you’re using celery, cook it along with the onion.

Add the garlic. Continue cooking, stirring now and again, until it releases its lovely aroma and softens a bit.

Add the box of Pomì tomatoes. If you’re using the strained tomato variety, you may want to thin a little with wine or water. Allow to cook for twenty minutes or so, until the flavors blend nicely. Remove the pan from the heat.

You can let this cool for awhile or, if you’re daring, proceed with care to the next step.

P1020644Ladle the cooked mixture into a blender jar. Don’t fill the jar more than about half full. Cover tightly and purée like mad. If the result seems too thick, add a little water or, if you want a creamed tomato soup, you can add some milk at this point. You also could thin it with chicken or beef broth, if you wished.

Collect the puréed soup in a bowl large enough to hold it all.

At this point, what you have is quite delicious. You now can add any number of goodies to it.

If you like creamed soup, mix in some milk, sour cream, yogurt, or actual real cream. I used yogurt and think I would not do so again — personally, I’m just not nuts about most creamed soups and thought the deeply flavored tomato broth was fine the way it came out of the pan. But it did provide a nice kick of calcium.

Other possible additions: cooked rice, pasta, quinoa, cooked beans. You can return the puréed tomato broth to the pan and add any number of veggies to it. Reheat and simmer until the vegetables are cooked to your taste. Chopped-up carrot is very good, as are sliced zucchini or other summer squash, corn, bell pepper, wilted spinach or other greens…it’s extremely versatile. Another nice addition is shrimp, which if raw you can simply cook through in the hot broth.

This turned out amazingly good, and I was vastly impressed by the salt-free, weird chemical-free, flavor-filled Pomì tomatoes. Selection at Sprouts is minuscule, but Amazon sells them by the 12-pack. I intend to buy some of those!

How to Make Your Own Yogurt

by

P1020618It worked! Yesterday, in a great flashback to my hippy-dippy days, I took it into my shaggy little head to try to make some yogurt. This was very popular among the back-to-the-earth set in the 60s and 70s, mostly because home-made yogurt allegedly would contain fewer contaminants than what you could buy in a store, and also because store-bought yogurt wasn’t the greatest. Nevvermind that you couldn’t get organic, antibiotic-free milk unless you had a cow in the backyard. As a practical matter, homemade yogurt tasted a great deal better than what you could get in a supermarket, where the best of a mediocre lot was Mountain High.

Today the yogurt you can buy is much, much better. However, the rage for Greek-style yogurt has taken over the world, and now you can’t easily buy plain ordinary boring yogurt. Sometimes you’d like the thinner product, though, to make soups like xergis and for blended drinks. Also, organic yogurt isn’t cheap, whether or not it’s been strained to resemble Greek yogurt.

Out came my old Laurel’s Kitchen, the standby of hippy-dippy vegetarian chefs. Laurel’s recipe for yogurt involved adding powdered milk — and not the instant kind. Not having any of that and having no idea even where to buy it, I moved on to the Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Cookbook, another back-to-the-earther standby. They would allow you to use instant powdered milk.

I have no use for the stuff and am not going to go out and buy it.

Those folks with the yaks on the high steppes, I figured, did not have powdered milk hanging around the yurt. It simply had to be possible to make yogurt without recourse to an industrial foodoid.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I picked up a half-gallon of hormone-free milk and a package of Green Mountain Creamery’s finest organic Greek-style yogurt. And here’s how the caper came down:

You need

• ½ gallon milk
• ½ cup good-quality commercial yogurt

Read the ingredients on the yogurt container. Be sure the product contains “live culture,” meaning the critters that turn milk into yogurt — and benefit your innards — are still bouncing around in there.

Gather Your Gear

• a large saucepan or small dutch oven, with lid
• a spatula or wooden spoon
• a candy thermometer or some decent common sense
• a wire whisk
• an oven that will heat to a very low temperature and that has a working light, or a heating pad, or a refrigerator that exhausts warm air in a place where you can place a stoneware bowl (in which case you will need a stoneware bowl large enough to hold ½ gallon of milk
oven thermometer, if you’re using the oven
• a sink or large clean pail
• ice
• cold tap water
• optional (see below): clean bath towel and large stoneware bowl
• clean containers to store the finished yogurt

•  Step 1: Heat the Milk

In your saucepan or Dutch oven, heat the milk over medium heat to right below boiling. On  a candy thermometer, this is 200° Fahrenheit. You really don’t need a thermometer, though. The milk has reached the right temperature when it begins to show a skiff of light foam on the top, especially around the edges of the pan — tiny bubbles form on the surface at this stage. Gently stir the milk as it heats to make sure the bottom doesn’t scorch and the milk doesn’t boil over. This step is necessary to prevent the yogurt from separating later on. (As usual, click on the image to see the details.)

P1020620

Step 2: Cool the Milk

Dump a bunch of ice into a clean kitchen sink or clean bucket large enough to hold your pan. Pour in enough water to reach almost up to the top of the pan. Set the pan directly into this cold water. Stirring steadily with the wire whip, let the milk cool until it is just hot to the touch, 112°F – 115°F. It should feel more than lukewarm, but not scalding hot.

P1020624

Step 3: Inoculate the Milk 

Drop ½ cup of  yogurt into the warm milk. Whisk it in well using the wire whip. Blend the two ingredients smoothly, leaving no lumps of yogurt behind.

P1020625

Step 4: Incubate the Yogurt

Now you simply keep the  mixture warm until it sets up into yogurt. The trick is keeping the milk around 110°F until it has set, usually four to eight hours. You can do this easily in a commercial yogurt maker, but it’s not at all necessary.

If you have an oven whose temperature will stay low enough, by all means use that.

If your oven maker’s idea of “warm” is somewhere around 200 to 250 degrees, you can still use it but you’ll need an oven thermometer. Once the yogurt is cool, put the lid on the pan and wrap the pan with a clean towel to insulate it. Place the oven thermometer inside the oven and turn the oven to the lowest heat offered. When the temperature reaches 115 degrees, turn the oven off and turn on the oven light. Place the yogurt into the oven, close the door, and go away. If the temperature in the house is fairly cool, you may need to turn the oven back on briefly to maintain the temperature — but be sure to keep an eye on that thermometer.

Alternatively, you can get a large stoneware bowl and pour hot tap water into it, to warm it through. Then transfer the milk into the bowl. Wrap it in a clean bath towel and then set it in the oven with the oven light turned on, or set it in the warm exhaust of a refrigerator, or set it on a heating pad set to “low” or “medium.”

My oven, however, will hold at about 100 to 115 degrees. So, if you have an oven with a “warming” feature like this, heat it to about 100 to 110 degrees. Place the pan in the oven, close the door, and go away. An oven thermometer is useful to help you keep an eye on the heat, but if you don’t have one and you don’t trust the oven, simply prop the door open slightly during the incubation. If the pan is very full and you have any concern at all about spilling milk in the oven, place a cookie sheet under the pan. I’ve found this is unnecessary, but just in case, it could avoid a clean-up.

Be careful not to jostle the milk too much as it’s incubating, so that it will set properly. This process will take from four to eight hours, depending on how tangy you like your yogurt.

The longer the yogurt sits, the thicker and more tangy it gets. After about four hours, open the pan and taste the yogurt. It should be creamy, like a barely-set custard, and the flavor will be tart yet milky. If you like it at this stage, pull it out and refrigerate it. If you’d like it tangier, leave it for another hour or two. I left it in the oven for about six or eight hours, producing a thick, zingy yogurt.

Step 5: Cool and Store the Yogurt

Leaving the yogurt in the pan or bowl you used for incubation, place it into the refrigerator. Once it’s completely chilled, transfer it into air-tight containers and store it in the refrigerator, where it will keep about two weeks. Sometimes you’ll find a layer of watery whey on top of the yogurt, just as you may find with organic grocery-store yogurt. Stir it back into the yogurt or, if you prefer, strain it off.

Et voilà! That’s it. The five-step process makes this sound time-consuming, but in fact it’s not, because most of the time the live culture does the work while  you go off and entertain yourself with something else.

Since yogurt is getting kind of pricey these days, making your own has become quite cost-effective. After you’ve made it once, you can use your own to start future batches, meaning you never have to buy another expensive container of yogurt again. All you’ll ever have to buy is the milk.

Filling the Day: Good Stuff to Eat, College Classes, Universities

by

So by the beginning of next week the mythology class — students and new instructor — should be caught up with the week and a half they missed when the full-time faculty member who usually teaches the course fell ill. Yesterday I spent the whole day reading their papers and their textbook. Then it was off to choir.

And at the crack of dawn, off to the east side for a meeting, and then a race to the campus to meet the class. Then back to the Funny Farm via Whole Paycheck, there to grab some tomatoes that allegedly have some flavor. Wanna make some gazpacho, something I’ve been craving for awhile.

Highly Dietetic Amazingly Delicious Gringo Gazpacho

You need…

a small red onion (about 3/4 cup chopped)
1 or 2 cloves garlic, minced
2½ cups diced tomatoes (peel if you feel fastidious — I don’t, though)
1½ cups finely chopped bell pepper
salt & pepper to taste
1 tsp paprika or chili pepper flakes
1 Tbs. chopped chives (or use a scallion)
1/3 cup olive oil
½ cup lemon juice
2 cups tomato juice
1/2 cup shredded, pared cucumber
about 1/8 cup chopped cilantro or parsley
1 Tbsp dry sherry (or a splash of white or red wine)

The original recipe calls for 2½ teaspoons of salt and ½ teaspoon of sugar. IMHO, there’s no need for sugar. And almost a tablespoon of salt(!) is a little much, especially since canned or bottled tomato juice has more salt than you need — just one cup of the fancy organic juice I bought this afternoon contains 16 percent of your RDA. So…hold the salt until the soup is concocted, and then add some to taste, if necessary.

Otherwise, it’s pretty self-evident: cut up the veggies, mix all the ingredients in a nice, large bowl, and chill for a couple of hours. Serve cold.

It looks like the college will officially get me hired on as the mythology course’s instructor along about next Monday. That would be good…so far because they don’t have me as the official instructor, I haven’t been able to get a Canvas shell or get into the District’s grade records. This weekend I’ll have to create an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of grades and attendance, since it’s beginning to look unclear whether I’ll ever be able to get into Canvas.

The class has 27 students, but it looks like a bunch of them have given up. Only about half that many showed up today. Pretty typical of a community college, where students often are trying to support themselves with full-time jobs or with two or three part-time jobs and may have to deal with children, too. When something has to go, the class is the easiest one to drop.

From the classroom it was over to the Honors Department with a kid who had only a few hours left before the deadline to get himself enrolled for honors credit. Then to the library, there to try to track down — with no luck — the videos mentioned in the syllabus. We figure the exiting instructor must own the videos. The humanities librarian unearthed some great links and clues to other videos, which I’ll also have to track down this weekend and then work into…well, I guess, a new syllabus, eventually.

The chair suggests we drop the two fairly lengthy papers called for in the syllabus, since it has classmates turning in an amazing seventeen short squibs. I’d like them to do some kind of sourced paper, though…for crying out loud, it is supposed to be a college course, after all. What seems reasonable is to drop the first one, which in theory is due in the next week or 10 days, and then turn the other one into a take-home final exam. That will make the course fairly simple to handle.

I was entertained to discover that said chair, who also is teaching a section of the mythology course (it must fill some requirement…), also is puzzled at the out-of-date textbook that promulgates its own myth, disguised as fact. He also is telling his students to take that stuff with a grain of salt.

The stoont papers are significantly easier to grade than freshman comp horrors, mostly because you have fewer characteristics to have to assess. Really, all I’m going here is checking to see if they did the assignment with some degree of competence.

The instructor seems to have the students doing presentations almost every day. It’s unclear whether she planned to lecture at all. If she did, she must have kept the lecture time mercifully brief. The class sessions are almost an hour and a half long, so it wouldn’t be wise to try to fill that much time with instructor yakking. Make them yak, instead. 😀

In other precincts, SDXB is headed to Colorado, there to rejoin New Girlfriend, who has a home in Boulder. Mercifully, NG’s place is out of the flood zone. He says that despite the unholy amount of rain, she hasn’t had any water damage.

The weather is cooling here after two days of steady rain in the low desert. I expect we’ll have one more blast of hot weather — selfishly I hope so, since the pool is already cooling to the point of being a bit chilly. That pool is what’s keeping me mobile these days. And no, I can’t afford to install a heater and I don’t want to install a big ugly rolling cover (something else for me to take care of!).

Our honored chair at the Heavenly Gardens Department of English is a graduate of Grand Canyon University. Since his time there, the place was purchased by a corporation whose business is building proprietary schools. Interestingly, GCU’s development officer has surfaced at the Scottsdale Business Association, and he’s a very interesting fellow.

Among several things that came up at today’s meeting was the observation that since Arizona State has raised its tuition beyond reason, Grand Canyon is now competitive with said third-rate public school, where students get beat up by fraternity brothers emulating gangs of thugs and every time you turn around you hear about another murder or rape out there. Engaged in a mammoth building campaign, Grand Canyon now can provide dormitory space for its students, and because it’s a religious school the administration actually rides herd on the students and tries to take some responsibility for their safety and behavior. Quaint, huh?

One of our members just sent her son off to the Great Desert University (which, if you haven’t figured it out, is my sobriquet for Arizona State). She said that between the tuition and the room & board, it’s costing twenty grand a year to put the kid in school at that zoo. He’s enrolled in the honors college, which has its own special, elite dormitory and classrooms, so those kids in effect go to a sequestered, semi-private school in the midst of the vast, chaotic campus, pretty much sheltered from the rowdy hoi polloi.

Given all the things that have happened at ASU over the past several years, from the apparently deliberate driving of faculty morale into the sub-sub-basement to the out-of-control student body, I’d be darned if I’d put a kid of mine out there, even if they cloistered him inside a concertina-wire fence. If he or she couldn’t get into a decent school like U.C. Berkeley, Michigan, or Stanford with scholarship funding, or if sending him out of state was financially impossible, I’d send the kid to the University of Arizona in Tucson or Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. Neither is what you’d call a great school (although the U of A has some highly ranked departments and colleges), but at least they’re relatively quiet.

And just now it’s getting pretty late at night, i yam totally done. Bye!

One Good Thing to Eat: Gorgeous Mujadara Lentils

by

Having fallen off the Diet Wagon three times today and never managed to climb onto the Exercise Wagon at all, I’m feeling generally fat and cranky again. However, the day was partially saved by a bowl of a wonderful veggie dish I stumbled upon, by recipe and by improv.

A week or so ago, I came across a New York Times recipe for something called mujadara, a kind of Lebanese comfort food made with lentils dosed copiously with cumin and oniony stuff. Times food writer Melissa Clark describes the dish as made with leeks and flavored with (among other things) allspice and bay leaf. Having none of these things on hand, I made a few substitutions. She also calls for 2¼ teaspoons of salt, about twice as much as anyone should be adding to their food. There’s a reason for that: lentils and rice call out, piteously, for salt. But lo! there’s a very tasty fix for that, too.

Check it out:

You need:

• 1 cup green or brown lentils (not the orangey ones)
• 1 large onion, sliced thin
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• dash of salt
• 2 large garlic cloves, minced
• 1/2 to 3/4 cup rice
• 1½ to 2 tsp ground cumin
• 1/8 tsp ground cloves (more, if desired)
• leaves of a small sprig of rosemary, finely chopped
• dash of cayenne or red pepper flakes, to taste
• 1 cinnamon stick
• a couple of fistfuls of spring greens (chard, kale, spinach, mustard, or combination), chopped
• water
• 13.5-ounce can of coconut milk
• fresh lemon (optional)

Place the lentils in a large bowl and cover generously with warm tap water. Allow to soak while you prepare other ingredients.

Heat the oil in a Dutch oven or large, deep skillet over medium-high heat. Add the onion and cook, stirring, until they turn deep golden brown, about 10 or 15 minutes. You want these to get pretty dark, with a few strands maybe even turning black. To accomplish this without burning the onion, the heat should be on the high side of medium but not too hot.

When you decide these are done, lift about half of the onions out of the pan to a plate or bowl and set aside.

Stir the garlic into the pot with the remaining onion and cook briefly, until fragrant. Then stir in the raw rice and sauté for a few minutes, until the grains turn opaque and begin to toast. Stir in the cumin, clove, and cayenne; sauté for another few seconds.

Drain the lentils and stir them into the pot. Add 4¼ cups water, the rosemary, and the cinnamon stick, and bring the liquid to a simmer. Cover and cook over low heat for 15 minutes.

At this point, take a taste. Add about half the can of coconut milk; gently mix this in and taste again. Add a dash or two of salt, if desired, and then add a little more coconut milk to taste. For a little more zing, squeeze the juice of half a fresh lemon into the pot and stir. Cover and allow to cook another couple of minutes.

Rinse the greens and chop them finely. Spread the greens over the top of the rice and lentils. Cover and cook another five minutes. Remove from the heat and let stand, covered, for another five minutes.

Serve the mujadara sprinkled with the reserved toasted onions.

Incredibly good to eat. The coconut milk adds a lovely mellow flavor that, especially with a spritz of lemon juice, obviates the need for a lot of salt.