It’s so simple you don’t really need a recipe, but…

Put 1/2 cup jasmine rice and 1 cup water in a small pot. Bring to a boil, then cover and turn heat down low for 20 minutes. Remove cover and stir in at least two tablespoons coconut cream. Drizzle very lightly with tamari and mix in.

I’ve been starting this before meditating in the morning and taking it for lunch in Mr. Bento.

Background info point 1: The association of feeling empty and/or hungry with feeling clean and good is a disturbing vestigial emotional/thought process that lingers long after the eating disorder diagnosis is lifted.

Background info point 2: Until fairly recently I had formidable anxiety about being mindful of and fully present in my body.

What I said last night: As I settle into my body more and more and pay attention to the subtle feelings within, I’m learning that some foods just feel clean and good inside, while others make me feel kind of gross and grimy.

What I just realized this means: Clean/good food-related sensations do not require emptiness and hunger. They just require paying attention. A door has appeared, allowing escape from a bad habit.

What we ate: Salad of field greens, red onion, red bell pepper, tons of avocado, Parmigiano-Reggiano, tomato so ripe it almost looked like a bruise, and toasted walnuts. I made a simple red wine vinaigrette. On the side we had some chips and tomatillo salsa, and a bit of my new creation: Fire Salad.

Fire Salad is so named because it includes only fire-colored ingredients. And because I think it is funny to put “fire” in the name of a raw dish.

Fire Salad
Put the following into a large bowl:

• 1 sweet potato, raw, unpeeled, well-scrubbed, grated
• 1 beet, raw, unpeeled, well-scrubbed, grated
• 3 carrots, raw, unpeeled, well-scrubbed, grated
• pint of grape tomatoes, halved

Add to taste:

• salt
• pepper
• lemon juice
• 1 clove garlic, peeled, minced

Mix well.

It is better after it sits in the fridge for a few hours at least. The salt extracts some of the vegetables’ water, which blends with the simple seasonings to create a light dressing. The acids in the lemon juice work gently on the structure of the vegetable flesh, slightly softening its texture and taste.

Until I ate Fire Salad, I did not know that something could taste like earth and water and light.

• 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.

“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.

• 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.

Tonight was a simple dinner that doesn’t qualify as a mush, but feels much the same. It goes together easily in one pot, feels comforting to eat out of a bowl, and makes lots of servings.

I pre-soak beans of all sorts, drain them, and then freeze them in bags. Then I can pop them out of the freezer, bring them to a boil on the stovetop, and them pop them into the over @ 250°F for 40 minutes or so. This isn’t actually quick, but it requires next to no effort. And I’m now spoiled on home cooked beans and canned ones don’t seem as good.

Drain the chickpeas.
Into the now empty chickpea pot, put olive oil.
Heat oil and then add chopped onion and garlic, sauteeing until softened and starting to become translucent.
Dump in .5 lb of frozen okra. Cook until it mostly thaws out.
Add the chickpeas and a big can of diced tomatoes.
Bring to a simmer.
Crumble in a generous amount of feta.
Eat.

Upon waking, I started the “Fast White Bread” recipe which appears to have turned out wonderfully. It’s not completely cooled yet, so I haven’t tasted it. *taps foot impatiently*

Tonight I’ll use the red beans and rice recipe for dinner. The kidney beans are soaking and Weaver Street Market had andouille sausage.

If I’m very productive today, I might then use the lemon sorbet recipe. But that’s iffy. And I’d have to zest lemons–something I’ve not yet gotten the hang of. I have a zester but either it is of negligible quality, or I don’t have a clue what I’m doing because it is always just an exercise in frustration.

Anyway. As I recently Twittered: “the english muffin is a challenge to those of us who like to spread our butter and jam precisely and evenly.”

But it still tastes good. A lesson? Perhaps.

But recently, my medication dosage was halved and Warner started making coffee at my house occasionally. Strange, coffee smelled and sounded almost good again.

I tried some Warner made using my Mr. Coffee. Blech. Mr. Coffee just can’t make the kind of coffee I actually like, even when set to Brew Strength: Strong. Nope. Mr. Coffee won’t do.

I’ve wanted a Bialetti Moka Express since Will and I went to Paris and there was one in the apartment we rented. Here’s me using it for the first time in the tiny kitchen:

A Southern Season sells them for some ridiculous price (as per usual), but every time I saw them there I was reminded that I wanted one.

Then, I recently saw a 6-cup model for sale at Target for $25. I almost impulse-purchased it, but came home and did comparative shopping online instead. That seemed to be the going price, so I ordered one at CutleryAndMore.com because I also needed a decent springform pan, which Target didn’t have and A Southern Season would over-charge me for. I was pleased with CutleryAndMore as far as shopping and shipping go.

Somehow I avoided spending more money than I have on a nice knife on sale to replace my Chef’s knife with the cracking handle. (Henckels Professional S 8-inch Chef Knife on sale for $89.95 from $129.95 — drool) I reasoned that I needed to handle a knife before I bought one (logical, true), so I should go to A Southern Season or elsewhere and spend a while fondling and taking notes on knives to shop for them online later.

Anyway, yes, coffee.

My Moka Express arrived yesterday and I made coffee in it. The only coffee we had in the house was some Decaf Espresso Roast that Warner got on Ocracoke (and then asked “Why did I get this decaf?”) and the coffee was still satisfyingly thick and good.

So I am happy. Tea in the morning, coffee in the afternoon.

No more chicken noodle soup for me.

Gainesville is a 45 minute – 1 hour drive from Athens, GA. For various reasons I ended up spending a fair amount of time in Athens, though I never did learn to find my way around the town.

One of my favorite things in Athens was The Grit. The “indie-rock Moosewood.” One of my favorite things at The Grit was The Golden Bowl: browned tofu cubes sauteed with soy sauce and nutritional yeast served over brown rice. Now, you can get vegetables and in your Golden Bowl, but I always preferred them on the side, leaving a perfectly beige, perfectly delicious mix of the best tofu you have ever eaten, brown rice, and cheese. Umami and yet just bland enough without being boring. A perfect comfort food.

After I moved outside of easy driving distance to Athens, I was compelled to figure out how to make a Golden Bowl at home because the meal is an addiction. I succeeded. My home-made Golden Bowl hit the spot.

A couple of years later, The Grit published their cookbook. Sure enough, I had nailed the recipe and technique except for that second frying of the tofu that creates a little extra crispiness.

I make mine with tamari instead of soy sauce, and with mozzarella cheese. It is what I’ve been eating for the past couple of days. With veggies on the side, of course.

Here is the recipe:
The Golden Bowl

• 15 oz. extra-firm tofu
• Vegetable oil for sautéing the tofu
• Tamari, to taste
• Nutritional yeast, to taste
• 2 cups cooked short-grain brown rice
• Butter, to taste

• Cut the tofu into cubes smaller than playing dice. Lightly oil a nonstick skillet and place over high heat. Allow the oil to heat slightly, then add the tofu. Sauté, tossing with a nonmetal spatula, until evenly and lightly golden brown, about 10 to 15 minutes.
• Sprinkle lightly with tamari (I use about a tablespoon here) and sauté briefly to further brown the tofu. Remove from the skillet, draining and discarding any excess fluid. Wipe the skillet dry.
• Add a tiny bit of new vegetable oil to the same pan and place over high heat. Once the oil is very hot, add the tofu again.
• Sauté, tossing with a nonmetal spatula almost constantly, until the tofu is nicely browned. Sprinkle with tamari to taste (another tablespoon for me). Sauté, tossing until the tofu and pan are pretty much dry.
• Sprinkle liberally with nutritional yeast, coating the tofu cubes and all the vegetables. Tossing vigorously, sauté for a few seconds. Repeat this step once and remove from the heat.
• Place 1 cup of hot cooked short-grain brown rice in each of two bowls. Add some butter to taste and stir into the rice to melt. Top each bowl of rice with 1/2 of the tofu. Sprinkle liberally with shredded mozzarella cheese, stir well to mix and melt the cheese.
• Devour.