Catching Up

Last week was a heavy week in grad school. Tons of student conferences, a twenty-page reading journal I neglected to attend to until the week before it was due, hundreds of pages of reading, and so on. Not much time left over for blogging. Now conferences are over and the journal is off my desk...just in time for me to begin grading 50 papers! It's a good think I got some cooking in on Sunday so I have some things to eat.

For lunch I made chana masala, using a recipe modified from Smitten Kitchen. The internets tell me that "chana" is Hindi for chickpea, while masala just refers to a spice mixture. According to wikipedia, chana masala is popular in the Indian states of Punjab and Gujarat, and is typically a "dry"curry. I don't know how accurate that is, but this is definitely a saucy version, so if you are from India or know a lot about Indian food, this recipe might not produce what you think of when you think of chana masala. Deb of SK writes that her recipe is itself a modification of another she got somewhere else, which may explain why something about this recipe wasn't exactly what I expected. It still turned out fine...quite tasty, in fact. But it's lacking something that I expect from an Indian dish...maybe a certain spice, or maybe the proportions are off, or something, but I may tinker with it. Like Deb, I did not have amchur powder (dried mango), which imparts sourness, so in addition to the lemon juice I splashed in a little white vinegar.

2 onions, minced

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 tsps fresh ginger, peeled and grated

1 serrano pepper, minced

1 Tbsp ground coriander

1 Tbsp amchur powder (or, an equal amount of extra lemon juice or white vinegar)

2 tsps ground cumin

2 tsps paprika

1 tsp turmeric

1 tsp garam masala

1/4 tsp cayenne

2 15-oz cans chickpeas, or 4 cups cooked (if starting with dry)

2 cups finely diced tomatoes, or 2 cups canned crushed tomatoes + juice (I used canned; if you can only find 30-oz cans measure out what you need and freeze the rest)

Juice of 1 lemon

1/2 cup water

salt to taste

Heat about a tablespoon of vegetable oil in a large pot. Add the onions, garlic, ginger, and serrano and cook until the onion is soft and translucent. Add the dry spices except salt (I measure them out into a little dish beforehand so I can just throw them all in at once) and cook for a few minutes. Add the tomatoes and stir well, making sure to scrape up any bits cooked to the bottom of the pan. Add the chickpeas and water and simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. If it seems dry, add a little more water, a tablespoon at a time. Stir in the salt, lemon juice, and vinegar if using. I poured this over cooked rice and ate it with a little plain yogurt on top. You could also have it with an Indian-style bread. Wikipedia also tells me that in Punjab and Pakistan, the dish is often served with a puffy bread called bhatoora (looks kind of like a sopapilla) and is eaten for breakfast. This will yield four to six servings. Vegan! Unless you add yogurt, like I did.

Fast-forward several hours...

For dinner I made what the One Pot Cookbook I bought at a yard sale calls "Asian pork." This seemed kind of...general to me, so I retitled it sweet and sour pork, which may or may not be what it is, but at least it's a little less geographically and racially ambiguous. I was a little skeptical about making this, because the recipes I have made out of this book have been sort of hit and miss (probably why it ended up in the yard sale pile). Some of the things I have made out of it turned out great/just like the picture; other recipes have turned out to have wildly inaccurate measurements and cooking times. In this case, however, it turned out kind of awesome. It did taste pretty much like the sweet and sour pork I have eaten in Chinese restaurants before. The sauce is really good, not overwhelmingly sweet or sour, and not greasy. Yummy.

1 lb boneless pork (I used the remainder of the pork butt I bought for puerco pibil; carefully trimming as much fat as possible off. It worked pretty well), cut into 1" cubes

1 Tbsp flour

1 onion, sliced into thin wedges (like an apple for a pie)

3 garlic cloves, chopped

1-inch chunk of ginger, peeled and grated

1 Tbsp tomato paste

1 1/4 cups chicken stock

1 cup pineapple chunks with juice (half a 15-oz can)

1 Tbsp soy sauce

3 celery ribs, diagonally sliced

1 bell pepper, chopped

1 Tbsp vinegar (I used white, but sherry or red-wine vinegar would do)

sliced green onions for garnish

Toss the pork chunks in the flour until well coated. Mix together the chicken stock, the tomato paste, and the pineapple juice (reserving the pineapple until later) until well-combined, and keep it at hand. Heat a couple tablespoons of olive oil in a heavy pot. Add the onion, garlic, and ginger and cook over medium heat, stirring often, until the onions soften. Add the pork and cook, stirring constantly, until it is browned on all sides. You may need to add the pork in batches; I found that the pieces wanted to stick together in a big clump when I put them in, which made separating and cooking them evenly a bit tricky. Remove from the heat (I don't know why, but that's what the book says). Pour the chicken-stock mixture gradually into the pan while stirring. Add the soy sauce and return to the heat. Continue stirring and bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer, stirring occasionally, for about an hour. At about forty-five minutes in, add the bell pepper and celery for the last fifteen minutes of cooking. Stir in the pineapple and vinegar and serve garnished with sliced green onions and a side of white rice. Makes about four servings.

Grocery Day!

Happy two-week anniversary to me. The beginning of the Sexy Divorcee's third week of existence happens to coincide with shopping day, and a new two-week plan.

First, maybe I should review last week's cycle. For the detailed menu, see this post. I'll list what I made from my favorite to least favorite, and rank on a scale of 1-5 for convenience, deliciousness, value, and leftover-worthiness, with 1 being least and 5 being most:

1. Puerco pibil

• convenience: 3 (easy, but time-consuming)
• deliciousness: Off the charts
• value: 3 (expensive spices, but good investment; dirt-cheap meat)
• leftover-worthiness: 4 (reheats well, but is best straight out of the oven. Would probably freeze well? I didn't have enough left over to find out.)

2. Louisiana red beans and rice

• convenience: 3 (simple but time consuming)
• deliciousness: 4
• value: 4 (pretty darn inexpensive per serving)
• left-over worthiness: 4 (keeps fairly well; can be frozen)

3. Ratatouille with chicken and rice

• convenience: 3 (simple but time consuming)
• deliciousness: 4
• value: 4
• left-over worthiness: 5 (just as good if not better reheated; also freezes well)

4. Summer succotash with bacon

• convenience: 3 (simple to make, but multi-tasking and different cooking techniques involved)
• deliciousness: 4
• value: 3 (combo of inexpensive and more specialized ingredients)
• left-over worthiness: 4 (good cold, but loses some crispness)

5. Kofta sandwiches

• convenience: 4 (pretty quick and easy)
• deliciousness: 3 (not bad)
• value: 3
• left-over worthiness: 3

6. Angel hair pasta with pesto and chicken

• convenience: 4 (as easy as measuring and boiling water)
• deliciousness: 3
• value: 2 (basil and nuts are a bit pricey)
• leftover-worthiness: 2 (it was great the first night; leftovers, not so much. I think if I were to do it over, I would definitely store the pesto and the pasta separately--not only did it seem to make the pasta soggy, but also, it didn't taste like much after a few days in the fridge except oily garlic. The fresh basil flavor disappeared.)

So here's my new menu (new recipes are italicized, transitional recipes are in green):

Chana masala (chick pea curry) with rice x 4 --this was the last thing on last week's plan, but I never got around to making it.

Sweet and sour pork x 4

Rigatoni with sweet Italian sausage, arugula and sweet potato x 4

Chicken molé enchiladas x 4

Yellow split pea and sweet potato soup x 4

Chicken with roasted vegetable pilaf x 2

Dal nirvana (curried lentils) with rice and homemade naan (Indian flatbread) x 2

And here's my shopping list, with changes and substitutions in green:

Canned pineapple

Tomato paste

Rigatoni

Dried yeast

Dried pasillo peppers

Dry roasted pumpkin seeds

Sesame seeds

unsweetened Mexican chocolate (They do not carry this. Odd, and sad. :( Now I must go to WF for it)

Almonds (bulk)

couscous Bulgar wheat (bulk)

Green lentils (bulk)

Chicken breasts

Sweet Italian sausage (3 links, just over a pound)

queso fresco Monterey Jack--their fresco was muy exspensivo

Wheat bread

Corn tortillas

Plain yogurt

Eggs

Sweet potatoes (technically, jewel yams) x 3

Arugula (5 oz package)

Green onion x 2

Onions x 2

Italian parsley x 1

Zucchini x 1

Lemons x 2

Fresh fruit (bunch of 4 bananas, 2 6-oz cartons of raspberries)

All for just over $70, which was about what I was guessing it would be. I continue to be in love with Sunflower. The employees are so nice there, and not in the creepy forced way that they are at Safeway. I'm just sad they didn't have my chocolate. So, there's at least one unscheduled shopping detour in my future.

Short Cuts

Hello, blog readers. I apologize for my absence, but it has been a busy week in grad school land. But now that I'm more or less caught up with my work, I can more or less catch up with my blog, too.

This week I made two meals that are each very classic in their own way--Louisiana red beans and rice, and Kofta sandwiches (an ubiquitous Middle Eastern fast food). For convenience's sake, I did not prepare them in the classic way, however. I'm not going to pretend for a minute that taking a short cut with a venerable recipe is going to result in something that tastes as good as the traditional version. But sometimes a tasty approximation is good enough, and I think I achieved tasty approximations with my simplified recipes this week.

No-Soak Louisiana Red Beans and Rice with Andouille Sausage

A traditional recipe would use dried beans soaked overnight. Dried beans yield more flavor and better texture than canned, and they're not difficult to prepare. They just require advanced planning. Sometimes I end up changing my plans at the last minute, so I didn't want to take the chance of leaving beans to soak overnight only to not use them--they don't keep well uncooked (which takes additional time) after they have been soaked. One time I soaked a pot of beans and ended up not using them when I planned to, and they started to ferment and I had to throw them away. Ew. Traditional versions of this recipe often call for a ham hock or other stew meat to be added to the cooking beans to add more flavor and richness. I didn't have that, so I didn't do that, but I did add some chicken broth to the cooking liquid.

1/2 pound to 1 pound andouille or smoked sausage, 1/4-inch slice (I bought fresh andouille from Sunflower Market's meat counter, and the grind of the meat was not as fine as I think you will probably find with a commercially produced sausage. In my case it was necessary to remove the casings, which resulted in chunkier bits than the sausage "coins" you might expect in this dish...just FYI)

1 medium onion, diced

4 cloves garlic, minced

1 green bell pepper, diced

3 celery ribs, leaves removed, diced

2 cans red kidney beans, drained and rinsed

1 bay leaf

1 tsp oregano

1 tsp thyme

1/4 tsp cayenne (I'm serious about this! Any more and you will not be able to taste the different flavors, but only the hotness of the cayenne. I speak from personal experience. If you like your food spicy, add hot sauce to the finished dish. Over spicing in the pot will ruin the taste, in my opinion.)

salt and pepper to taste

Fully cook the sausage in a large pot over medium heat. Remove from the pot and keep refrigerated until ready to add back in. Add the onion and garlic to the pot and cook until they begin to soften in the sausage drippings. It may be necessary to add a splash of vegetable oil to the pot to prevent sticking. Add the bell pepper and celery to the pot and cook until crisp-tender; add the beans and spices and stir well to combine. Pour in 6 cups of water, or a mixture of water and chicken stock. Bring the liquid to a boil and then reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, for about an hour, stirring occasionally, until the mixture has cooked down to the consistency you want. It may be necessary to add more water. After about half an hour of cooking, use your spoon to mash the beans against the side of the pan. This will add a pleasing thickness. Throw the sausage back in the pot for the last fifteen minutes of cooking. Remove the bay leaf and serve in a bowl topped with a scoop of hot white rice. Season with hot sauce and garnish with chopped green onion if you desire. Yields 4-6 servings.

Kofta* sandwiches with tahini sauce

Middle Eastern kofta (as opposed to Indian and central Asian versions) is a highly spiced grilled meatball, made either of ground beef or lamb. The typical way to prepare it is as a kebab; the meat is formed in a long sausage shape around a skewer and grilled. In Egypt, along with taamayya (aka falafel), shish tawook (chicken kebab), shwarma (thinly sliced marinated beef or lamb, similar to gyro meat), and koshary (lentils, rice, and macaroni topped with fried onions and spicy tomato sauce), kofta is one of the more readily available and cheap fast food options. When I lived in Alexandria, I would buy kofta kebabs as a platter with a side of rice pilaf, or in pita-style sandwiches. Not having skewers or grilling capabilities, I improvised and made baked meatballs with kofta-style seasoning, which I put into pita sandwiches and topped with homemade tahini sauce.

Kofta balls

1/2 lb lean ground beef or lamb (I used very lean beef)

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 tbsps onion, grated

2 tbsps chopped fresh Italian parsley, or 1 tbsp dried parsley

2 tsps ground coriander

2 tsps kosher salt

1/2 tsp cumin

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp cardamom

a pinch of black pepper and a dash of cayenne

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Mix the garlic, onion, and spices into a paste. Using your hands, work the paste into the ground meat until well combined. Shape the meat into balls, about an inch in diameter. You should have about eight of them. Place the meatballs on a foil lined baking sheet and bake for 20 minutes. While the meat balls are baking, you can prepare the tahini sauce. Serve with rice and a salad, or in a pita with lettuce, tomato, and cucumber. Makes 2 servings.

Tahini sauce

In addition to use as a condiment, this tahini sauce can be used as a salad dressing (with the addition of more lemon juice and water), or as a marinade for chicken or fish. It will keep in the refrigerator for a couple of weeks.

1/4 cup tahini paste (Tahini paste is made of ground sesame seeds. It is a key ingredient of dips hummus and babaganoush. Mixed with a little honey, it is yummy spread on bread. You can find this in the Middle Eastern or Kosher foods section of your grocery store. A common brand is Joyva, and it comes in a 15 oz. tub.)

1/4 cup lemon juice

1 garlic clove, minced

1/4 tsp salt, or to taste

Combine all ingredients together until smooth. Tahini paste should be a little thinner than mustard; if it is too thick, add a few teaspoons of water until the desired consistency is reached.

*Arabic word borrowed from Persian meaning ground meat. It is also transliterated "kufta," "kafta," "kefta," or "kofteh," depending on the dialect.

Sexy Sunday Science

I heard this bit on Weekend Edition Sunday this morning about new studies about the science behind willpower. According to a new book, called Willpower, by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney, willpower is more than just a state of mind; it's an actual function of the brain. And interestingly enough, it's a function that depends on having enough glucose circulating in your blood stream.

In the interview, Tierney said a couple of interesting things about how willpower works that stood out to me. He described how it's much easier to exert willpower to resist the temptation to eat a cookie if the cookie is out of sight. You're more likely to eat some Oreos if they're sitting in front of you than if they are hidden away in a drawer across the room. When asked about willpower and dieting, Tierney explained that one reason dieting is so hard is because it usually involves taking in less food than one is used to eating, and less food means lower levels of glucose, which means willpower can't function the way it's supposed to. "In order to diet you need willpower," Tierney said, "but in order to have willpower, you need to eat."

These two points of Tierney's speak exactly to principles underlying my whole system of shopping and menu planning. To start with, don't buy things that you know you wouldn't be able to resist if they were in your house. Sometimes I crave ice cream, or something like that, but that craving is pretty easy to resist when I don't have it around. More importantly, though, you need to eat. Eating healthfully doesn't mean eating less. In my case, I've found it actually means eating more, but eating better. More protein, veggies, and fruit. Changing my diet turned out to be surprisingly easy, at least in terms of my enjoyment of food. When I have good food in the fridge that's ready to eat, I don't find myself wishing I had a quesadilla or a slice of pizza instead. The somewhat more challenging part was learning to plan ahead, and to get used to making time to cook things more complicated than burritos or tuna melts. I suspect that this is really the hardest part for most people. It's not the idea of changing what you eat, it's changing how you eat--that is, how you tend to shop during the week and what you usually do about making dinner after a long day--that's hard. Planning makes all the difference.

So how do you come up with a plan? Well, I think you have to let food be the motivating factor. You should think about the meals that you really enjoy, and that you know how to make. (Maybe you don't know how to make many things; that's a problem unto itself that I will need to address in a different post. I always say, however, that if you can read, you can cook. I think that a lot of cooking failures, my own included, are the result of not reading a recipe attentively. Just following the directions carefully is usually all good cooking takes.) Think about it this way, if it helps: if you were going to go out to eat all week, what kind of restaurants would you like to go to? Thai? Italian? Mexican? OK. So, is there anything you get at that kind of place you could make on your own? The answer is often "yes." A simple example is your basic taco, that you can get from any taqueria, which is just a corn tortilla, some spiced meat filling, topped with chopped onion, cilantro, salsa, and lime juice. This is one tasty meal that is about as easy to make at home as it is to go to a restaurant and order it. And you can dress it up or down as much as you want. Anyway. Can you come up with three or four things you wouldn't mind eating throughout the week? Alright, then, you've got a menu.

Once you've got a menu, it's fairly easy to come up with a shopping list to get the things you need. Even if you have a menu that's kind of complicated and disparate, and requires a weird mix of items, don't let this intimidate you. It's far better, I think, to spend more money in one go, knowing where that money is going, than to shop frequently and randomly--buying fruits or vegetables you have no clear plan for that end up going bad, buying bread that languishes until it's moldy or stale, buying staples haphazardly so you end up with dozens of cans of something you use infrequently while you never seem to have enough pasta or rice on hand, etc. Make a shopping list, get everything that is on it, and don't get anything that isn't on it.

Getting motivated to cook is the hardest part. You need to think of cooking as a necessary task that needs to be done regularly, just like laundry, or cleaning the bathroom. And just like laundry and cleaning the bathroom, cooking need not be something you do every day. If you want to make something complicated, make it on your day off, and on the nights when you have no energy for cooking you don't have to do anything but reheat it. In addition, having an arsenal of simple, quick, tasty recipes at your disposal, like the pesto pasta I made the other night, or the succotash, or those tacos I mentioned earlier, is great, because you can throw them together anytime without a lot of effort. The key is to make things in the proper quantity. Make enough of something that you can get some leftovers out of it, but not so much that it will go bad before you finish it. Most of the recipes you'll see on this blog will make about four servings, or enough for a person living alone to feed themselves four times throughout the week. If you live with someone, doubling the recipes for two may cost you a little more money, but the increase in time and effort will be negligible. I actually think shopping for two (assuming that you have two incomes) can be more economical, because buying things in bulk often means you pay less for something per ounce. That's why they call big packages of things "economy-sized."

So back to the willpower thing. A final thing John Tierney said about willpower is that you can build it up and train it, like muscle. With practice, you can develop stronger willpower over time. I have found this to be the case with me and cooking. It used to make me tired to even think about, but now I'm used to it and it doesn't seem like such a chore any more. In fact, I really enjoy it, to the extent that for me it can be a way of procrastinating from working on something else that needs to get done. Well, maybe it's not procrastinating. Maybe it's just my brain craving the food it needs in order to focus on my other work. Right?

Friday Nuttiness

I don't know about you, but I'm glad it's Friday.

I'm not going to get all fancy with this post, which is appropriate, because I didn't get all fancy with dinner, either. Sometimes, though, you can make a really simple meal that seems fancy. Pasta with pesto sauce is one of those things.

The basil pesto you're probably familiar with--garlicky, silky, rich, and bright green--is usually made with pine nuts. Unfortunately, thanks to climate change, there is currently a pine-nut shortage, which means they are craaaaazy expensive. I saw them selling for almost $30 a pound at the store. The good news is you can substitute other nuts. I've seen recipes that substitute cashews, which in my opinion are kind of bland. I decided to go with walnuts. That...walnutty...flavor (I'm at a loss to describe it...if you have a suggestion, I'd love to hear it), I think, meshes well with the other flavors, and you still get that same sense of nuttiness you get from pine nuts.

If you eat at my house, you'll always come away with a sense of nuttiness.

Walnut Basil Pesto

When I threw this together, my measurements were a little fast and loose. These are just my estimates. Play around with the amounts until you get the combination of flavors and consistency you like.

2 cups (neither packed too tightly nor too loosely) fresh basil, chopped

4 large cloves garlic

1/3 cup walnut pieces, lightly toasted

1/3 cup olive oil

1/4 cup grated parmesan or similar hard cheese

1 tsp kosher or sea salt

1 tsp black pepper

Throw it all in a food processor and pulse until it's a paste. Alternatively, if you don't have a food processor, but do have a broad, sharp knife, you can do it the way nonna did back in the old country and rock your blade back and forth over the pile of basil leaves, garlic, and walnuts until it's very finely minced, and then just mix it up with the other ingredients. By the way, simply omit the cheese for vegan goodness.

This should make enough for 4-5 cups pasta. I just tossed it with some angel hair and some cooked chicken. Fast, easy, delicious.