Shift of Tow

Melissa has to work all weekend, so tonight needed to be a good, relaxing night. We have season two of Dr. Who on DVD, and I decided to make tacos.

I made corn tortillas, green salsa, tomato salsa, and cooked the chicken. I was just going to do it up with onions and cilantro, but we got our farm share early (tropical storm coming tomorrow morning, which is usually farm share time), and it contained a big pile of tomatilloes and a bunch of tomatoes. I could not resist. For the green salsa I used this recipe, which calls for roasting the tomatilloes. For the chicken, I just dumped a bunch of cumin, paprika, oregano, pepper, salt, lemon juice, and a jalapeño in with the chicken and kind of braised it in the oven. Corn tortillas aren’t that hard, if you have a tortilla press and some masa. Well, unless you insist that they are round. I made one round tortilla tonight, and I was so excited that I brought it into the office to show Melissa. The rest were tasty but ugly. The whole meal was fantastic.

Oh, and also? We have a toaster now. I threw our old one away when we moved and have been using the oven to toast bread in the morning. I forgot how much easier it is to use a toaster, or I would’ve bought one a lot sooner. I have so much love for this toaster right now that I am going to show you a picture.

Poor Melissa and I have been in a bit of a rut when it comes to food, which is bad enough when you find yourself eating stir fry for the third night in a row, but really a problem when you realize you’ve had Cook Out more times in the past week than you’ve had food you cooked yourself, often with milkshakes. In the past we’ve solved this problem by implementing Project Recipe-A-Week*, which means cracking open some cookbooks, looking for an unfamiliar recipe that sounds good, and then making it. The last time we did this, we ended up adding black bean soup to our repertoire. Given the fact that I’m at home these days and Project Recipe-A-Week sounded like a great blog topic, we’re giving it another shot. This means you, dear reader, are going to get pictures and a recipe each week until we tire of it.

This week we settled on corn chowder, and looked through the Foster’s Market cookbook (one of my favorites) and another book I have called 1001 Lowfat Vegetarian Recipes. The Foster’s corn chowder recipe has roasted red pepper, which I do not love, so we used the one we found in 1001 LVR—a book that I’ve used a few times with middling (pasta salad with mozzarella) to excellent (portabella bruschetta!) results. We chose corn chowder because there’s a lot of sweet corn and potatoes right now at the farmer’s market, but much to my shame I ended up using store bought vegetables (and one homegrown herb) to make the entire thing. I couldn’t even use my farm share onion, because it had a rotten spot right in the middle. The ingredients are:

2 cups fresh (or frozen, thawed) whole kernel corn (I used fresh)
1 medium onion, diced
Vegetable oil
2 c. stock (I used vegetable stock)
2 c. cubed potatoes
½ c. sliced celery (what an odd measurement! I used two stalks)
½ tsp dried thyme (I used about a teaspoon of fresh)
2 c. milk (or half and half) (we used skim milk and it was great)
Salt and pepper, and parsley or chives to garnish (I didn’t use garnish)

Here’s a picture of the meez, as a friend calls it:

You can see the fresh thyme from the garden on top of the celery and potatoes.

Here’s how you make it:

1. Sauté corn and onion in a bit of vegetable oil in a large saucepan until the onion is tender.



2. Process half of the corn and onion in a food processor along with all of the stock, and then return it to the saucepan.



3. Add potatoes, celery, and thyme and heat to boiling. Reduce heat and simmer until the potatoes are tender (about 15-20 minutes). Add some salt and pepper, if you want it.



4. Add the milk and cook until it’s hot.

I served it with some smoked mozzarella and tomato salad (mix smoked mozzarella, some tomatoes, salt, pepper, a tiny bit of olive oil, a little wine vinegar, and maybe some basil). We both loved it.

*Poor Melissa absolutely does not think of it this way. I, on the other hand, cannot think of a solution to any problem without sticking a “Project” in front of it and capitalizing the rest of the words. Hyphens give it that extra project punch.

I had a few friends over one night last week and made black bean soup for them.

My black bean soup, which I got from the Foster’s Market cookbook, is one of the most reliably tasty things I make. Foster’s is a restaurant/market here in Durham with a spectacular atmosphere and really good food, and everything I’ve made from this cookbook has been good except the butternut squash soup, with which I think I got a little too creative and substitutey*. This is a great soup for a summer evening—I mean, yeah, you have to stand over a stove for a bit, but the soup has a Caribbean flavor to it that seems very summery to me. A few people have asked me for the recipe in the past, so here you go.

Ingredients

2 c. dried black beans
1/4 c. olive oil
4 stalks celery
1 red onion
2 carrots
2 jalapeños
1 red bell pepper
4 cloves garlic
dried basil
8 c. chicken or veggie broth
bay leaves
salt
pepper
Optional for topping: Yogurt (or sour cream), lime, cilantro, hot sauce, cheese

First, quick cook two cups of dried black beans by boiling them with a lot of extra water for about an hour. You can skip this and use canned beans, but if you do, drain them and rinse them. I think the dried beans give it a better flavor, though.

While the beans are cooking, dice a red bell pepper, two jalapeños, four stalks of celery, and two carrots. These things all go in at the same time, so you can put them in the same bowl.

You also need to dice, and keep separate, four cloves of garlic, a peeled tart apple (I always use Granny Smith), and a red onion. If you don’t want your apple to get brown, put it in lime juice when you dice it.

Once the beans are done, drain and rinse them. In a big soup pot, sweat the onions in the olive oil over medium to medium-high heat. If you brown the onions, your soup will be a little funky in the bad way, so take it slow–it’ll be about ten minutes.

Add the pepper, jalapeño, carrot, and celery and cook for another ten minutes or so. Towards the end, add the garlic.

Once everything is nice and softened, add the beans, broth, apple, four bay leaves, a tablespoon of dried basil, and some salt and pepper. Bring it to a boil, then turn it down and simmer it for an hour or two. When it’s close to ready, start some rice and cut up some cilantro and a lime.

Serve the soup over rice, and top with cheese, cilantro, a little lime juice, yogurt or sour cream, and hot sauce. I think the tartness of yogurt works better on this soup, but sour cream will do. I usually serve it with chips or spicy cornbread**.

If I make it for just me and Poor M., the leftovers last for days, and I never get sick of it.

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*This was the only thing I’ve ever made which Poor M. could not finish. It was dire.

**I use Jiffy cornbread mix and add diced jalapeño and maybe some cheese.

I have started using the compost for the appropriate household waste. I am awash in virtue. My next target in my ongoing attempt to waste less money and send less stuff to the landfill is to not let food go to waste in our house. We have let a shameful amount of farm share greens end up in the trash this year, and I am on a mission to keep that from happening again*. To that end, I looked up “storing cabbage,” since cabbage was what we had the most of in the fridge.

It’s embarrassingly easy to store greens these days, it turns out. You cut them up, you blanch them:

Then you freeze them. So that’s what I did.

I also froze some pesto this week, since I made a huge batch from the basil we got last week.

I won’t show you the banana bread I made to use up the bananas that were going bad, though. You would think that after making quick bread as many times as I have I wouldn’t do something like overfill the pan and have it spill all over the bottom of the oven. And that would be awfully generous of you. I will say no more.

*It’s a whole lot easier now that we’re getting less greens, though, let me be honest.

Popcorn is one of my favorite snacks, and has been since I was about eight and went through a phase where I only wanted snacks that began with P. I’m not a big fan of microwave popcorn–I’d actually rather have the bagged, stale stuff from the store than microwave popcorn–but I love popcorn made fresh. I only mastered making it without burning it last year after Alton Brown suggested making popcorn in a big metal bowl on Good Eats. Thus was begun a new popcorn-eating period of my life. My popcorn never turns out burnt anymore. Here’s how I do it:

For ingredients, you need some kind of vegetable oil (don’t waste olive oil on this, though), salt, and popcorn. Put about a fourth of a cup of oil in a big metal bowl:

You could probably use less oil; I’m pretty liberal with it. Oh, and see how burned up my bowl has gotten from making popcorn like this? I guess you should know about that.

I usually cook between a third and a half of a cup’s worth of popcorn:

Then I add a whole lot of salt. It diffuses a lot during the cooking, so you can be pretty free with it, though I have been accused of loving salt too much. You can also add some cayenne or other seasoning at this point, but I highly recommend not adding a lot, because you’ll breathe it in while the popcorn’s cooking. I didn’t add any this time.

After everything’s in the bowl, cover it with tin foil and poke little holes in the foil with a fork.

Turn your stove on to high (if it’s electric, you might want to heat it up way earlier), and don oven mitts.

Yours can be more (likely) or less (unlikely) attractive than mine and your popcorn will be mostly unaffected. Once you have the gloves on and you hear the oil sizzling in the bowl, start shaking it. Be super careful about your gloves if you have a gas stove; I caught an oven mitt on fire doing this once.

The bowl is going to get very hot, and eventually the popcorn will start popping. Keep shaking it and letting it pop until it slows down almost to nothing. When that happens, take the bowl off the fire and pull up the tinfoil.

A bunch of really hot steam is going to come out, so be careful. Really, just keep the oven mits on until you dump the popcorn into another bowl. You don’t have to put it in another bowl, but the cooking bowl is very hot and the popcorn might start to singe if it stays in there while everything cools off. Plus, this way you don’t have to wait to eat it.

I almost always add hot sauce and a little more salt to mine, but parmesan is also super tasty.

Tonight I made flour tortillas for the second time. This was also the second time I got to use my pastry cutter.

I originally bought it to use to make biscuits, but I found that my hands work better for biscuits. Happily, the pastry cutter is perfect for this.

I followed the tutorial here, though if you look at the pictures over there you will be less able to appreciate the misshapen things I made. Both times, my tortillas have turned out very, very tasty, but not at all round. Take a look:

See? It’s kind of… oblong, though you can see the cool bubbles in this shot. We made quesadillas with the tortillas tonight, and with each quesadilla I had to go through the pile to find matching shapes. I am completely spoiled for store-bought tortillas now; these are really easy. Here are my tips to add to the tutorial I linked above:

• My first tortilla didn’t turn out right either time. There weren’t any bubbles. I’m not sure if that’s because of the thickness, or the pan just not being warm enough yet.
• If I put my stove on “medium,” it would take five minutes a side for each tortilla. You’ll have to figure out what works for you; mine has to be on medium-high.
• You really do have to use a lot of flour to keep everything from getting sticky while you’re rolling out the tortillas.
• They need to be rolled out pretty thin; I do it until I can see my blue counter through the tortilla.

I still haven’t mastered the shape, and when I cook them I don’t end up with many pliable tortillas, but I don’t mind them being crunchy since I’m not wrapping them around anything.

Even my weird tortillas are totally worth the effort, though.