without as many mushrooms as that would imply

Here’s a favorite thing I make. It is:

• Cheap
• Easy
• Quick, in the sense that it requires almost no hands-on time
• comfort food
• Voluminous. Yay for not having to cook for a few days when I’m trying to write my dissertation proposal.

I just ate a bowl almost as big as my head full of it. Here are the steps:

• Make a pot of brown rice. Let it cool off a bit and put it in the fridge.

This takes about a minute to throw rice and water in a pot, and a few minutes waiting for boilage. Those few minutes may be spent doing some dishes or wiping off the counters or something else useful. And then you turn the heat down and leave it alone for 45 min to an hour. It’s forgiving. Then there’s nothing else to do to it.

Then, make a pot of pinto beans. I guess other beans would work too, but I like pintos best. My recipe is as follows:

• Before going to bed one night, dump the beans in a big bowl and cover them by a couple of inches with water. Put a plate on top so the cats don’t drink the water. (1-2 minutes)
• The next morning, dump out the water, rinse off the beans, and do a cursory look for any rocks. They will not have expanded any in the water, so they will be easy to see. (1-2 minutes)
• Preheat oven to 250°F.
• Put the beans in a pot that can go in the oven at low temperatures and cover them by an inch or so with water. Put on the stove and bring to a boil.
• While it is coming to a boil, I usually add a few things: salt, a pinch of asafetida, a generous teaspoon of ground cumin. If I’m feeling ambitious I peel two or three garlic cloves and toss them in whole. And plop in some dried whole Indian chilli peppers. (5 or so minutes, depending on bean and water temp)
• I usually also dice half an onion while waiting for the beans to boil. Put the cut up onion in a small container in the fridge.
• When the pot boils, put on the lid and pop it in the oven. In an hour, check a few beans. If they aren’t soft, put back in the oven for another half hour. Again, forgiving. It doesn’t matter if the beans get quite soft. Try not to drop the pot when returning it to the oven, splattering your cat with bean juice. (2-4 minutes hands on time)
• When done, let the beans cool a bit, fish out the dried peppers if you have used them, and then put the beans and cooking liquid in a container in the fridge

Now you have a bunch of rice and a bunch of beans. Yawn. But! The beauty comes at each time you need a meal for the next few days.

First, put rice and beans in your favored proportions in a microwave safe bowl.

Then, dress them up and heat them up.

I don’t know what you keep on hand, so these might not work for you, but with my general staples, I choose from the following options or make something new up on the fly.

• Probably my favorite, and what I just finished eating: Dump in a generous amount of frozen collard or turnip greens. After you heat the whole thing up in the microwave, stir in some of those diced onions and a good dollop of mango pickle.
• Heat up with some salsa, cheese, and diced onions. If you are being extravagant and have an extra few minutes, cut up an avocado and stir it in after heating. If you dip your beans out with a slotted spoon on this one, you can then wrap this mush up in some tortillas.
• Add a splash of balsamic vinegar, some sun-dried tomato slivers, and some sliced kalamatas. Some feta cheese makes it even better.

You now have a hearty, yummy, not unhealthy meal.

This usually takes me 5-6 minutes to put together and heat. Almost as good: the dirty dish count is (in my house anyway): a bowl, a spoon, a fork, and a serving spoon.

Now get back to work.

Notes:

• After soaking, you can put the beans in the fridge if you want to cook them later that day. You can freeze the soaked beans so that you won’t need so much lead time to make beans at some point in the future. You can dump the frozen beans in a pot, cover with water and cook as usual. It just takes a little longer for them to come to an initial boil.
• YES, put salt in your beans! You are cooking them in the oven where they are getting heat from all sides, instead of on the top of the stove where the beans near the bottom are really hot and the ones at the top are not. You will find the unevenly cooked, hard beans are not the salt’s fault. And the beans soak up the salt as they are cooking and taste better than they ever could if you just added salt after.

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• comfort. (0)

The 20 Healthiest Foods for Under $1

Given that:
it is summer and I’m a grad student
my car might be dead dead dead
my shot tomorrow might not be covered by insurance
i just bought a plane ticket to Denver for a cousin’s wedding…

…The above link is just my speed about now…

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I’m sure someone has thought of this before, but I didn’t know about it before I came up with it.

So, I’m the queen of multitasking in the kitchen. I turn around to stir something in the middle of measuring out ingredients for something else, and…. oh crap, was I on the third or the fourth half cup of flour?? Argh.

My solution:

• Get a very small container. I use a stainless steel dipping bowl.
• Put some popcorn kernels (unpopped!!) in it. Beans or many other things could also work. I just spied popcorn first.
• Put it in a convenient place.
• When you get to one of these repeated measuring tasks, figure out how many times you are going to need to do the measuring to get to the full amount. For example, the Joy of Cooking Fast White Bread recipe I make calls for 1.25 cups of flour added in .25 cup increments, so I lay out 5 kernels.
• Every time you measure, move a kernel back into the container.

Now, as long as I’m sure I remember to move a kernel every time, I cannot lose count while measuring.

I make myself move a kernel before I’m allowed to put down the measuring implement. Otherwise, I’d just have another problem on my hands.

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This sounds so good!

And a new way to try doing popcorn in the microwave.

Tamarind Popcorn

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I am so not good with titles.

Here is the recipe. I constructed this whole thing on a foil-lined pan, so clean up of the baked on cheese was nothing.

I cooked it in my toaster oven.

• cut thick slices of eggplant
• drizzled then with olive oil
• broil in toaster oven on one side, then the other, until each side just starts to brown a little
• top each eggplant slice with several fresh basil leaves
• top those with thick tomato slices
• broil until the tomatoes start to look like they are actually cooking (not too long)
• sprinkle with shredded mozzarella and or other good cheese. Feta would be nice, too.
• broil until the cheese is all melty, bubbling, and brown.

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• simple but not mush. (0)

The predicted thunderstorm has finally arrived, and will hopefully cool things off a bit.

God knows I didn’t this evening. I was very busy in the kitchen. I made:

• coconut-cabbage curry with paneer (I made it up as I went along. It’s a bit spicier than I prefer. It’s ok, but I don’t think I’ll make it again.)
• another made up thing, this one rather divine: a broiled-in-multiple layers eggplant, basil, tomato thingy. Recipe to follow in another post.
• bread (Joy of Cooking Fast White Bread, made with part whole wheat flour)
• pizza dough, 2 to freeze
• pesto with walnuts instead of pinenuts
• yogurt

Whew. I just time out to eat some of the eggplant/tomato stuff and some curry. And now… the dreaded cleanup.

The temperature in the house is finally starting to drop. Just in time to preheat the oven to 450°F!

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So, when it gets hot, I tend to lose my appetite. By late July I only want to eat plain yogurt and sliced cucumbers. Maybe some cold applesauce, or a tomato.

Strangely, since last summer, I haven’t really stopped with the yogurt. I crave it. Dipping into a bowl of Brown Cow whole milk cream-on-top yogurt is like heaven.

But it gets expensive. And I ran out of room for the quart sized plastic tubs.

So I decided it was time to start making my own yogurt.

We will not discuss my first attempt. Apparently maintaining the proper temperature is harder than I thought.

I broke down and bought a yogurt maker. The one I wanted was out of stock at the factory and all vendors. So I got this one, which is a bit more expensive than the other. But I got super saver free shipping and they happened to be running a $10 off promotion (valid through June 30, 2008).

Because I am a big old nerd and more and more of a tightwad, I made a spreadsheet to track my progress on recouping the yogurt maker expense with money saved by making yogurt at home.

And because I am an even bigger nerd, I published it on Google Docs for the world to watch my progress.

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“From food all creatures are produced. And all creatures that dwell on earth, by food they live and into food they finally pass. Food is the chief among being. Verily he obtains all good who worships the Divine as food.” -from Upanishads

Ran across this on a post at Mahanandi, which is probably my favorite food blog right now. I’m back on a bit of an Indian food kick, when I’m cooking at all.

More often than not lately it’s peanut butter on crackers, or ramen noodle/tofu soup, or Warner whipping up some scrambled eggs with some sort of vegetable, etc. in them.

It has been the end of the semester, and I have a very big paper to turn in next Monday. So it has been a little busy/crazy. Plus, we’ve had several +80°F days already, and the heat always makes me lose my appetite for anything but plain yogurt, popsicles, and cucumbers.

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Yesterday I made:

• a big pot of brown rice
• a pot full of chole
• a stir fry full of carrots, green beans, celery, cabbage, and chewy twice-fried tofu
• Strawberry passionfruit banana lime sorbet
• New York style cheesecake

I also did a lot of dishes.

So the cheesecake is for Warner’s birthday, which is today. I used the basic New York style cheesecake recipe from Joy of Cooking. It is truly a monstrous, formidable concoction, calling for 2.5 pounds of cream cheese (of course I used full fat), 5 whole eggs and two yolks, and half a cup of heavy cream for good measure. It was nearly too much to fit into the springform pan. The top got too dark on one side, but it is nonetheless delicious. I think I like Ken’s recipe better, though.

The sorbet was because Warner got a bag of passionfruits on quick-sale reduced price, and something needed to be done with them. So I made up the recipe and it worked and is delicious.

It is such a good feeling when you know you have learned the skeleton of a certain type of food, so you can start being creative with the recipe.

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Item!

Sous-vide now has an Library of Congress Classification number:

Home economics
- Cookery
– Cooking processes
— TX690.7 Sous-vide

One day I want a vacuum sealer and an immersion circulator. And then I make the perfect eggs. Yes.

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