Recipes

Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Beau – ootiful Soo – oop!
Beau – ootiful Soo – oop!
Soo – oop of the e – e – evening,
Beautiful, beautiful Soup!

Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish,
Game, or any other dish?
Who would not give all else for two
pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
Beau – ootiful Soo – oop!
Beau – ootiful Soo – oop!
Soo – oop of the e – e – evening,
Beautiful, beautiful Soup!

—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

To beguile away the hours while alternately freezing and heating the crippled back, I pulled some of my favorite cookbooks off the bookshelves. Gosh! there are some great recipes in there! Trouble with knowing how to cook is you tend to forget about following recipes.

Cucina Rustica, an alluring book of rustic Italian recipes collected by Viana La Place and Evan Kleiman, has a passel of soup recipes, just what I’ve been craving. Among them is a pretty amazing fennel and tomato soup. Hm.

I was gonna pick up fennel on the last trip to Sprouts, but instead decided to get leeks. I love leeks. But then, I love fennel. Why didn’t I get both? Probably an innate response to the cheap gene.

So decided to substitute leek for fennel and fines herbes for the fresh basil (although basil may go in near the end of this process, possibly in the form of pesto), and add a few carrots (nutrition!!). Here’s how it fell out:

Get yourself…

• an onion, coarsely chopped
• olive oil
• 2 to 5 garlic cloves, coarsely chopped
• a couple of leeks, coarsely chopped
• a stalk or two of celery, chopped
• a couple of carrots, coarsely chopped
• a can of tomatoes (mine is unsalted and only 14.5 oz — the largest I could find in the low-sodium variant)
• a dash of red or white wine (probably  optional)
• some tasty herbs (I used dried fines herbes & probably will add a little fresh basil, thinly sliced, whenever I get around to it)
• chicken broth (preferably low-salt or home-made salt-free); or beef broth; or vegetable broth; or water
• a dash of cumin or home-made curry powder (optional)
• a squeeze of fresh lemon or orange juice (optional)
• a little more wine or sherry (to taste; optional)

Skim the bottom of a nice, big soup pot with a little olive oil. Heat over medium-high heat for a couple of minutes. Add the onion and turn the heat down to a fast “medium” level. Allow the onion to cook, stirring occasionally, until it’s getting transparent. Then add the leeks and the herbs. Stir well. Allow to cook a few more minutes. As the leek turns bright green and starts to soften, add the garlic. Stir well.

Cook gently until the onion starts to brown. You’d like it to just be starting to caramelize. Resist getting carried away.

Right around in here, add some cumin or some home-made (or salt-free) curry powder. Take it easy with this. I used about a teaspoon. You can always add more if cumin lights your gustatory fire.

Stir well and cook until the carrots are tender all the way through.

Now add the liquid: that would be the canned tomatoes and juice and the chicken stock. Add enough to fully cover all the veggies and then some. It’s supposed to be soup, after all. If you have some wine laying around, add a splash of that — I tossed in about 1/4 cup of Rotgut Red.

Turn up the heat until the pot comes to a very slow boil. Promptly turn the heat back down to medium-low and maintain it at a slow simmer.

Go away. Write a blog post or whatever you do to keep yourself amused. After about half an hour or forty-five minutes, return to the kitchen.

Taste the broth. (Don’t be an idiot about this. It’s freaking hot! Blow on a spoonful until you can taste it without inflicting third-degree burns on your tongue). Add whatever you think you would like to round out the flavor: a little wine, some sliced-up basil leaves, a squeeze of lemon juice, more wine or sherry — whatEVER. Soups are amazingly forgiving, so fool with it as you please.

Once you’re done with this magnum opus of the culinary art, run the stuff through a blender (or whack it up with a mini-blender, or use a food press). You should now have an extraordinarily delicious purée that you can advertise as soup.

If you are not on a diet, THE way to serve this amazing concoction is by placing a slice of delicious Italian or French bread (it can be a whisper on the stale side) in the bottom of a bowl and ladling the soup into the bowl, to fill.

If, on the other hand, you’re trying to be saintly about carbs, simply dish up a serving in a bowl.

Either way, sprinkle a little Parmesan or feta over the top.

Very little. Aged cheeses are highly salted. Just take it easy with that stuff and if you use it, don’t add salt to the soup.

Good. Very, very good.

Finishing touches:

Dietetic

• Squeeze of lemon, lime, or orange juice
• Dollop of fat-free yogurt
•  Very small amount of Parmesan or feta cheese

Forget the Dietetic

• Another splash of wine, sherry, or brandy
• Salt to taste
• Swirl of heavy cream
• Real yogurt
• Real sour cream

Mmmmm! Too bad blogs don’t have Smell-O-Vision. I wish you could enjoy the richly exotic, spicy fragrance of the curry powder I just whipped up in the kitchen.

You’ll recall the curry powders residing in the pantry came up wanting because they contain a lot of salt, an ingredient I’m supposed to avoid these days. Just one teaspoon of the Madras curry powder would dump 13% of your RDA into a dish — and a teaspoon is barely a taste in a good stir-fry or curry stew.

So, I wanted to concoct my own, something I’ve done in the past, to excellent effect. Here’s how to make a very fine

Curry Powder

(Click on the images for higher-resolution views.)

You need…

• 3 tsp turmeric
• 3 tsp coriander seeds or 3 or 4 tsp ground coriander
• 1/2 tsp whole cardamom seeds, hulled (i.e., get the ones that are not inside the papery pods, which are a nuisance)
• 2 to 4 tsp cumin seeds
• 1/2 tsp ground fenugreek
• 1/4 tsp whole cloves
• 1/2 stick cinnamon
• 1 tsp dry, ground ginger
• 1/3 tsp yellow or black mustard seeds
• 1/2 tsp whole white peppercorns (black would probably do)
• 1/2 tsp crushed red pepper flakes

Measure the ingredients into a blender jar. When everything is loaded into the blender, turn the machine to high and pulverize the bedoodles out of the stuff. It should be reduced to a fine, fragrant powder, with no chips of seeds left.

Yesterday, as I mentioned in passing, I bought a lot of these spices at Penzey’s, an upscale gourmet store, because I didn’t want to drive all over the city. However, if you have some time on your hands, many of the ingredients can be found much more cheaply at Asian or Mexican ethnic markets. Many, too, are packaged by American companies and retailed at ordinary supermarkets. So, by way of stocking up frugally, take a few days and seek out these goodies at decent prices. Try to get whole seeds, which make a much more fragrant, vibrantly flavored product.

Cumin is the dominant flavor of curry. I used four teaspoons because I happen to like it quite a lot. However, if it’s not your favorite flavor or you’d like to accent one or more of the other flavors, you could cut it back to two teaspoons.

Many US recipes ask for white peppercorns. However, the peppercorns and the red pepper are there only to give the curry a little “hot” kick, which, IMHO, ordinary black pepper will do just fine. Regulate the amount you put in according to your taste for heat. Same for the mustard seeds, which also add zing.

Turmeric is what gives curry its classic yellow color. It stains — don’t wear white clothing when you’re working with it, and be aware that it can stain tile grout. If this is a concern, cover the work counter with wax paper before beginning.

Use your product in any recipe that calls for curry powder. Here’s one brought back from my ten years in Arabia that’s as authentic as curry gets — in fact, curry powder per se is not especially authentic but is an artifact of the British Empire. That notwithstanding, it’s very delicious.

Here’s an impromptu curry stir-fry I came up with a while back:

Curried Stir-Fry

You need…

• chopped greens, such as Napa cabbage, bok choy, spinach, kale, or a combination thereof. If you’re using kale, cut it up fairly finely; other greens can be coarsely chopped. I use about 1/2 head of Napa cabbage for myself, which provides enough left-overs for a second meal.
• a clove or two of garlic, finely chopped
• about 2 Tbsp curry powder, more or less, according to taste
• two or three green onions with their green tops, cut into 1/2-inch to 1-inch lengths.
• a carrot, chopped into small pieces
• other veggies such as tender asparagus, broccolini, bean sprouts, tiny canned corn-on-the-cob, etc., as desired; cut larger items into pieces
• some sweet mini-peppers or a ripe bell pepper, cut into bite-sized pieces
• fresh ginger, grated (grate maybe 1/4 to 1/2 inch off a piece of fresh ginger) (wash it first; no need to peel)
• a small can of coconut milk or an even smaller can of coconut cream (failing this, some chicken or beef broth will do, or white wine, or sherry)
• tamari or soy sauce
• animal protein as desired (optional): a few nice shrimp or scallops, or some thinly sliced beef, pork, or chicken
• a little olive oil (or a blander oil if you prefer)
• a little sesame oil

This is so easy! And it goes very fast once everything is cut up and assembled. While you’re cutting up the veggies, cook some rice or Asian noodles, so they’ll be ready about the time you start cooking the stir-fry.

Skim the bottom of a big frying pan or wok with the oil. Heat over medium-high heat. Add the ingredients in order, roughly from the longest-cooking to the shortest-cooking. Thus:

Put the carrots in the hot oil first. Stir to get them started cooking.  Add the peppers and any other veggies you have on hand, other than the greens. Stir some more, to coat with oil and get the cooking started.

If you have shrimp, scallops, or meat, add that next, along with the garlic and the ginger. Stir quickly until the meat looks cooked on the outside (this will be very fast with the shellfish, so pay attention). Be sure to keep stirring to avoid letting the garlic scorch. Add the curry powder at this point, too.

If you are not including meat, add the green onions right after the first round of veggies. Stir briefly. As the pieces from the tops turn bright green, add the garlic, ginger, and curry powder, stirring constantly.

Finally, stir in the chopped greens.

As the greens start to wilt, add the coconut milk (or broth or wine) and the tamari (or soy sauce). Continue stirring over a fast simmer  until the greens are nicely wilted and soften, but don’t overcook.

If you’ve prepared Asian noodles (or cooked some angel-hair or fettucine pasta), add these at the last minute. Stir around to saturate well with the sauce and serve it up in bowls.

If you’ve prepared rice, serve the stir-fry over the rice.

Very tasty, and good for you, too. Omitting the tamari (or soy sauce) will produce a dish that resembles Indian food (or at least, what Westerners imagine it to be). If you decide not to use the salty soy product, then season the dish with salt to taste, either before serving or at the table.

A gin rickey is like a gin and tonic, only with club soda: no sugar! No sugar, no sodium…how dietetic can you get?

Unless you squeeze a lot of lime or lemon into a gin rickey, it can be, on the whole, bland. On the other hand, it must be allowed that a large cold glass of plain carbonated water (slightly adulterated with alcohol) is mighty refreshing at the end of a 109-degree day.

To make it even more refreshing — and rather tasty — add a slice of cucumber.

The strategy:

Slice off a piece of Armenian cucumber (the kind that comes sealed in plastic) or peel a length of regular cuke (the kind that comes slathered in wax that you can’t wash off) and cut a peeled slice off that. One or the other — doesn’t matter ; just evade the wax.

Drop the cucumber slice into the bottom of a tall glass. Take a spoon and bash it a bit, within reason.

Add a jigger of gin. Squeeze an eighth or a quarter of a lemon over this (depending on the lemon’s size). Let it sit for a minute or so, maybe, depending on your sense of urgency.

Now add a few ice cubes, as desired. Fill to the top with club soda, preferably cold.

You could, in theory, drop in a sprig of mint.

Absolute, perfect refreshment.

This diet food is pretty darned good. Actually, the scheme to lose 20 pounds in 10 weeks is forcing me to go so far as to cook new things, rather than plodding through my usual mealtime sleepwalk.

I found an elegant little eggplant at Sprouts the other day. Determined to eat it before it turned to mildew in the fridge, I broke it out yesterday. Check out the result:

It turned out amazingly delicious, with a rich, tangy flavor that I didn’t expect. Here’s how to make it, or something like it:

Get your hands on the following ingredients, more or less:

• 1 eggplant
• 1 yellow onion
• 2 cloves garlic
• a few edible fresh tomatoes (I use Campari tomatoes, the only ones in our markets that have a flavor)
• some fresh whole mushrooms
• bell pepper (the “sweet mini” variety that comes in bags is perfect)
• fresh or dried herbs, or a combination (I had marjoram, parsley, & rosemary in the garden; added some fines herbes)
• small handful of pine nuts, if you have some
• small can low-salt tomato sauce
• feta or Parmesan cheese
• olive oil
• wine (I used red, but think white wine would be good and sherry or Madeira might also be very nice)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Slice the eggplant lengthwise into thick slices. If necessary to fit your baking dish, cut these into smaller pieces.

If you’re not trying to avoid salt, you can sprinkle the slices with salt and set them on an oven rack placed over the sink. Let them sit about an hour and then wipe off the exuded moisture and salt with a paper towel. The slices should be dry before proceeding.

This salting procedure leaches out the bitterness you sometimes find in eggplant, particularly older, tougher eggplants. It’s unnecessary with younger fruits, so if you’re doing a low-salt diet, you should avoid older eggplants and leave out this step. No harm was done when I declined to salt the pieces of my small, tender aubergine.

Next, coarsely chop some onion. I used about half of a large onion — estimate how much you need according to taste and amount of eggplant.

Skim the bottom of a frying pan with a little olive oil and sauté the onion gently, over medium heat, until it’s translucent and just starting to brown. Add the pine nuts, if you’re using them.

Meanwhile, wash the ’shrooms and trim off the bottom of the stem (leave the mushrooms themselves whole); chop the garlic, and cut the fresh tomatoes into about 1-inch chunks. Slice the bell pepper into attractive, bite-size pieces. Chop any fresh herbs you intend to use.

As the onion cooks, add remaining items one at a time. First put in the mushrooms — if they soak up too much of the olive oil, add a little more, but if you wait for a few minutes after starting the onions, they should be OK without added oil. Stir these around and go on about your business for a few more minutes. Then add the garlic and herbs.

Stir the simmering ingredients around and let cook for another couple of minutes. Shortly, add the pepper slices. Stir; allow to cook until the pepper softens a bit. As this is happening, add the wine.

Now let this simmer for at least eight or ten minutes. The idea is to get the ’shrooms to soak up wine, which makes them amazingly good to eat.

While the mixture is simmering, spread the eggplant slices on the bottom of an oven-proof baking dish. Ideally, they should be one layer, but you can fish-scale them as necessary. You’ll want the sauce to completely cover the eggplant.

Eventually, stir the can of tomato sauce into the simmered veggie/wine mixture. Spoon the resulting sauce over the eggplant slices and, if desired, sprinkle feta or Parmesan over the top. If you’re really serious about low sodium or you’re a strict vegan, skip the topping! But…I find it impossible to contemplate eggplant, onions, garlic, and tomato without some sort of cheese over it. So, yes: the serpent tempted me and I did eat.

Place this lovely concoction into a 350-degree oven and cook, uncovered, about 40 minutes, give or take.

With a little salad on the side, it makes a yummy dinner that will fill you up.

¡Buen provecho!

🙂

So last Wednesday at choir rehearsal I was reminded that, today being the end of our season, we have our annual choir send-off party and pot-luck. This was a bit of an embarrassment, since I’ve pretty much spent the grocery budget and, if Cassie and I are to survive until the end of the month without going in the hole, I can’t make a run on Costco or Safeway to buy a bunch of stuff to make a fancy pot-luck dish. We’re already cleaning out the freezer one bite at a time.

I scribbled down “some kind of pasta” on the sign-up list and ran away.

Hot dishes are problematic, because it’s hard for a single person to get the stuff to the church without having it spill all over the car or be stone cold by the time we’re ready to eat. So I decided the “some kind of pasta” would have to be a package of Costco penne (thank God for Costco’s lifetime supplies of everything!) into which I would dump a little of anything in the house that even faintly resembled salad makings and then would chill until dinnertime. Thus:

It actually turned out looking kinda pretty — well, at least not revolting — and tasting pretty good.

To reproduce (more or less), spin off this general theory:

Cook up a bunch of whatever kind of pasta you have in the house. Ain’t got no pasta? You can substitute cooked beans, hominy, or cut-up pieces of bread, or any combination thereof. Dress the starchy stuff with a good vinaigrette (recipe follows) and start adding whatever you can find in the fridge, freezer, and garden.

Vinaigrette dressing:

Squeeze a juicy lemon. If your lemons are not very juicy, squeeze two of them. Pick out the seeds and toss those. If you don’t have lemons, use about 1/8 cup of vinegar (any kind; use more if you’re making something vast). Add olive oil: about three parts oil to one part lemon or vinegar. Whisk together with a fork. Taste. Add oil or more lemon/vinegar to taste. Add salt and pepper to taste. Add dried herbs (such as tarragon, thyme, fines herbes, herbes de provence, parsley, summer savory, or whatever you have around) to taste.

Addenda for the pasta:

• frozen peas (if this is going to sit in the fridge for a while, no need to defrost them —  just toss in a handful or two or three)
• carrots, diced or chopped in small pieces
• green onions, sliced or minced
• garlic, finely minced
• bell pepper, chopped (I used those tiny new sweet peppers that come in bags)
• olives, pitted
• cucumber (I had about a third of a cuke left)
• walnuts, chopped
• basil, chopped (or whatever else is in the garden…parsley would be nice)
• tomato, chopped
• feta cheese (parmesan would work, too

Toss these things (or whatever you happen to have on hand) into the dressed pasta, stirring between additions. Top the salad with another sprinkling of cheese, and chill until ready to eat. This is one of those dishes that improve with time, so have no fear about preparing it hours or even a day ahead.

A friend in choir picked up on the speculation, which has been around for a while, that regular consumption of curry, the Indian spice, may stave off Alzheimer’s, or even correct it to some degree. Research has focused on one of the spice mix’s common ingredients, turmeric, which contains a supposedly brain-healthy compound called curcumin.

Personally, I’m skeptical — this rings of woo-woo. IMHO, a balanced diet and regular exercise stave off whatever ails you, not this herb or that vegetable. But what the heck? Curry is delicious and a great way to get veggies, fruits, fish, and meat down.

So, I offer recipes from the edge of the Persian Gulf, where we American colonists hired Pakistani and Goanese cooks and houseboys. These were the specialties of a man named Pedro, who cooked for a couple who were friends of my parents.

Pedro’s Curry

1 to 1½ pounds beef stew meat
½ package string beans
½ package canned peas
1 onion, chopped
1 large can tomatoes
3 or more teaspoons curry powder
salt and pepper to taste
1½ cups water or beef broth or chicken broth

Note that this original recipe, true to its 1950s origins, contains mostly canned ingredients. In those days, people ate more canned products because refrigerators were small and freezers were tiny, frost-choked compartments inside the small refrigerators. Also, in Arabia we didn’t get much fresh produce; what we could buy had to be soaked in dilute Clorox water before it could be consumed, a tedious process, indeed. Today I would substitute fresh or frozen beans, peas, and whatever else came to hand. Adding a little fresh spinach or chard at the last minute, so it cooks just long enough to blanch and wilt, would be nice.

Lamb or pork could be used in place of or in combination with the beef. We did not have access to lamb in Arabia, and it’s highly doubtful that our Moslem workers would have prepared anything with pork in it, even if they had no intention of eating it themselves.

Brown meat and chopped onions in a small amount of oil in a Dutch oven. Add salt, pepper, and curry after the meat and onions are brown. Stir well. Turn off the heat and let this stand for a while — anywhere from one to three hours.

Add water or broth. Bring the combination to a low boil, then turn the heat to “low” and allow to simmer about 1½ hours or until the meat is tender. Add the rest of the ingredients.  Let mixture stand for about another hour to assimilate the curry. Then heat to boiling point and serve over rice.

Curry dinners are traditionally served over rice and accompanied by many condiment-like side dishes, such as

Rice with raisins and almonds
Shredded coconut, browned gently under the broiler
Chutney
Papadoums, or, if you can’t find them in the grocer’s, Wheat Thins
Naan, or  you could substitute warmed pita bread
Waldorf salad, or sliced apples
Sliced cucumbers marinated with vinaigrette and sour cream or yoghurt

Rice with Raisins and Almonds

1 cup Uncle Ben’s converted rice
2½ cups water
About ¼ cup raisins (may be soaked in sherry for upwards of an hour)
About ¼ cup almonds

Spread the almonds on a cookie sheet and run under the broiler just long enough to brown.  Watch carefully—they scorch easily.

Place the water in medium-sized saucepan. Bring to a boil over “high” heat.  Turn heat to “medium” or “medium-low” and pour in 1 cup rice. Add the raisins and browned almonds.  Cover tightly and allow to simmer for about 20–25 minutes, until the water is fully absorbed.

Total cooking time for curry and rice: about three to five hours

Curry Puffs

Frozen puff pastry or phyllo dough
Ground meat (lean ground sirloin, or if you have it, ground lamb or pork)
Onions, finely chopped
Garlic, minced
A little vegetable oil (I happen to like olive oil, but anything will do)
A lot of curry powder
A dash of salt & pepper

These savory treats are incredibly delicious. When I was a little girl, the instant I got wind of a rumor that Pedro was going to cook curry puffs, I would show up at the neighbors’ back door, invade his kitchen, and hang around underfoot until he would give me snacks. Pedro used to make puff pastry from scratch, a two-day process. Fortunately, you and I can find it in the freezer compartment of a well-stocked grocery store.

Sauté the onions in oil until translucent.  Pour the cooked onions onto a plate.  Brown the meat in the remaining oil. If a lot of water cooks out of the meat and still resides in the frying pan when the meat looks cooked, drain the meat in a colander or sieve.  Place the meat and onion back in the pan; stir in the garlic. Sauté a couple of minutes to start the garlic cooking.  Then add a bunch of curry powder. Like, a LOT of curry powder.  We are talking THE JOY OF CURRY POWDER here.  Get enthusiastic.  Toss in as much curry powder as you can stomach.  In other words, “Add curry to taste.”  Season some more with a bit of salt and pepper.

Preheat oven to about 400 degrees.

If you’re using puff pastry:

Defrost the pastry overnight in the refrigerator or (carefully!) in the microwave. Flour a board and roll the pastry out fairly thin. Each “puff” is about 2 inches x 3 inches or thereabouts and is formed like a turnover. In cutting out pieces of pastry to form the puff, keep the math in mind. Thus for a 2 x 3 puff you should cut a piece 3 inches wide by 4 inches long, so that when you fold the 4-inch length over the filling, you end up with a rectangular turnover about 2 inches wide.

Place a spoonful of curried meat in the center of a piece of puff pastry and turn the top over it.  Press the edges together with a fork. Place puffs on a cookie sheet, far enough apart so that they won’t bash each other when they puff up in cooking.

If you’re using phyllo dough:

Defrost the dough in the refrigerator. Dampen and wring out a couple of clean tea towels.  Open the package and unfold the phyllo dough. Place a tea towel over the unfolded package of phyllo layers.

Work quickly.

Pick up a couple of leaves of phyllo and place it on your lightly floured pastry board.  Cut phyllo into pieces, as above. Lay the other damp tea towel over the pieces that you’re not working with. Form curry puffs with phyllo dough as described for puff pastry and place on cookie sheet. You may also want to cover the completed, unbaked puffs with a damp towel, especially if it looks like it will take you a while to finish forming enough to fill an entire cookie sheet.

In either event…

Bake about 15 or 20 minutes in a fast oven, until cheerfully browned and tasty-looking.  Keep an eye on the things as they’re cooking.