SOLTuesday: Making Up Food

            Years ago I wrote a piece for a little magazine about how I wanted to feel free enough to look in the refrigerator and make dinner with what was there, without having a recipe to guide me. Now that I’m old, I’ve finally managed to do it.

            Tonight I did a mashup of Chinese and Italian cooking, making sort of fried rice, but with farro instead of rice.

            I’d made the farro yesterday with the possibility of subbing the farro for rice in something. Today, I sliced up half an onion, a clove of garlic, half a somewhat dried out jalapen (removing the seeds), 3 ounces of shiitake mushrooms, 5 bok choy stems and leaves, 2 carrots, and 2 slices of deli Virginia ham. In a small pan, I poured in a scrambled egg, tossing in a pinch of dried thyme, and let it set, then flipped it, slid it onto a plate, and sliced it as well.

            In a large skillet, I melted a small pat of butter and a tablespoon or two of olive oil. Added

the onion, sauteed for about a minute, then added the bok choy stems and carrots. Sauteed for another minute or so. Next the mushrooms went in, sauteed until they got a bit brown. Some more dried thyme stirred in a bit here. Added the garlic and jalapeno and stirred around. When the pan seemed to get too dry, I’d add a dollop of white wine. Then the bok choy leaves and a cup of the cooked farro. Lastly,  the ham, the egg, and I almost forgot, a couple of handfuls of sprouts I got at the farmers’ market a few days ago, radish sprouts and some other kind, I forget which. Stirred to heat through.

            I ate half the pot, and there’s another batch for lunch maybe in a couple of days. Easy, and tasty, and I made it up all myself. 

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SOLSC 3: Food

I love to cook. Even after my husband died six years ago, I continued to cook the amounts I’d made before, so  extras into the freezer or lots of leftovers (I love to cook, but not every day).

           
I also used to eat out a lot. I’d eat dishes I didn’t want to cook myself (mussels, lamb shanks) or cuisines I don’t have all the ingredients for (Chinese, Japanese). Since Covid, however, eating out has been limited to weather warm enough to sit outside. So I’ve had to cook more often.

            Like today. I had some shiitake mushrooms from the local farmers’ market and maybe two cups of kasha left over from a meal a couple of days ago. So I sliced maybe three ounces of the mushrooms and a small onion, sauteed them, then added the rest of the kasha to warm it up. Ate that for dinner with the last of baked sole and some sauteed kale. There’s still a few servings of the kasha left, so that will take care of more meals. There’s also lentil stew I made a couple of days ago. But tomorrow I’ll think about what protein to stock up on to go with that kasha.

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I’m participating in the 15th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 3 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

 

#AtoZChallenge: F Is for Food

(I haven’t had any Internet connection for the past few days, so I’m filing F, G, H, I, J, and whatever we’re up to, as fast as I can. Gotta keep up.)

            I love food. Jack, my late husband, loved food. I love to eat. Jack loved to eat. I love to cook. Jack liked to cook—I don’t know if he loved to cook. I love to try new dishes; last week I made a vegetarian chili verde for my writers’ group and had no idea how it would turn out until it was almost done and I tasted it. Jack had his specialties—broiled chicken, black bean soup, tuna casserole, spaghetti sauce, brownies—which were always very good. I often thought of writing down his marinade for the broiled chicken, but never did—and now it’s too late. But it wasn’t really a recipe anyway: juice, olive oil, wine, dried herbs or spices, whatever was handy or he felt like.

            I’m a recipe person myself, wrote about this years ago for a tiny magazine, And/Then. Called “Recipes for Life,” it contrasted two ways of approaching cooking: following a recipe, or sensing what went well together and winging it. At that time in my life I followed recipes. I needed to know quantities: how much juice, how much wine, how much oregano and what if I’d run out of oregano? Then, I was hoping to be more adventurous in cooking, and in life as well. Now I use recipes as guidelines, looking at 1, 2, 3, what ingredients do I know I like, what combos taste interesting in my mind.

          That vegetarian chili verde? I had a chili verde a friend had made, but it was full of pork. One of the writers in my group is vegetarian, so I had to improvise. (I used the basic pork version but substituted beans for meat and added bell peppers and about half as much green chilis.)

            I love to cook, but not every day. Even the few years I was a full-time parent, I didn’t cook every day. We ate out a fair amount, and our school-age daughter had her favorite restaurants: Symposium (Greek), 107 West (new American), Japonica (she liked sushi at age 8). When Jack was the full-time parent, he’d go to the farmers market late in the day and buy a quantity of tomatoes and sale price. Then he’d make a quantity of tomato sauce and freeze most of it. We even had a free-standing freezer, which felt very suburban in our New York apartment.

            My mother didn’t teach me to cook, though she was a pretty good cook. She didn’t have enough patience, she said. She’d been a home-ec major in college (a compromise with her immigrant parents; she wanted to major in biology) and relished modern technology: frozen vegetables, TV dinners. We did have a garden for a few years when I was a child, and I learned the luscious taste of sun-warmed tomatoes and crisp peas right out of the pod. I also read my mother’s cookbooks from college and started clipping my own recipes as a teenager. Perhaps the first one was a tuna melt from Seventeen.

            And I wanted my daughter to learn the fun of mixing ingredients into some new concoction that tasted good. So when she was 4, 5, 6 and had to stand on a stool to reach the counter, I’d have her take a turn mixing the cake batter and frosting, rolling out the pizza dough, filling the dumplings. When she was a teenager, she wanted to make her own meals and start experimenting. I suggested she master some recipes first and improvise once she’d learned the basics. Now in her 40s, she still cooks, makes leftovers to take for lunch, and has found a partner who likes to cook as much as she does.

Slice of Life, #20

            When we first moved to our neighborhood years ago, there was a hole-in-the-wall eatery called Amir’s Falafel, run by a Lebanese family. Over the years it expanded into a little restaurant, but it was still mostly a take-out place. The falafel was terrific, and you could get a platter of falafel, hummus, and baba ghanhoush, with a small salad and of course pita.

            One of my favorite dishes was moujadarah: lentils on rice, topped with caramelized onions. The onions were the best part. Then new ownership came in, the moujadarah was gone, and even the fattoush salad acquired sour pickles, an unwelcome taste among the brightness of fresh tomato, cucumber, red onion, lettuce, and toasted pita chips.

           

            In one of my other lives I have been a journalism professor. One of my former students, Annia Ciezadlo, went to the Middle East to cover the Iraq war as a free-lance and ended up married to a Lebanese journalist. When they came back to the U.S., she wrote a book, Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War, complete with recipes. Heaven. The book has a recipe for Mjadara Hamra (transliterations can vary so widely), and I finally tried it tonight.

            Well, I adapted it quite a bit. What I really wanted to do was reproduce Amir’s dish, and Annia’s was somewhat different. First of all, Amir’s had rice, Annia’s had bulghur. Secondly, Amir’s onions were sliced, and Annia’s were finely diced. Finally, one of Annia’s instructions seemed dangerous to me: pour two cups of cold water on onions that have been cooking in one cup of oil? Just thinking about the splatters scares me.

            So I improvised. Cooked a cup of lentils in two and a half cups of water, with Annia’s spices (ground coriander, cumin, white pepper, cinnamon, ground cloves instead of allspice, cayenne instead of Aleppo pepper). Cooked a cup of rice. Sliced up two good-sized onions thin, heated maybe half a cup of olive oil and canola oil, and when it was hot, added the onions. Stirred frequently to keep some slices from getting too brown while others were still softening. Annia’s signal for when the onion is done was when they smell “bacony, almost burnt,” so I waited for that moment – and did not add any cold water. Mixed everything together, and had my Lebanese dinner. (I know, I should have taken a picture, but I haven't been Instragramed yet.)

P.S. It's the first day of spring and it snowed... what a bummer.