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Pssst. It’s a Secret Recipe.

by susannahm on 15. Aug, 2010 in Susannah Michaels

You come across people who hold on tightly to a secret recipe. Coca Cola. Your Aunt Linda. Your coworker Cindy. Those people are annoying. But not me. I’m going to share a family recipe with you and I’m fine with that. First of all, I don’t think you’re going to try it. Chopped string beans, after all, sounds pretty weird. So I challenge you — make it!

The recipe for chopped string beans comes to the Michaels family from our matriarch, Bubbi, aka Anna Michaels. Most of Bubbi’s recipes come from the Old Country. But this recipe contains peanut butter, not exactly an old-world ingredient. So I once asked her what they used instead of peanut butter in Poland. That’s when I learned that she’d gotten the recipe in this country. They served chopped string beans at a certain deli in the neighborhood. She was friends with the wife, who shared the recipe with the other women.

So here you go, Chopped String Beans from the Lower East Side (of Manhattan):

1 can garbanzo beans
1 can string beans, French-cut or whatever is fine
1 onion, chopped
4-5 hard-boiled eggs
A few tablespoons of peanut butter
Salt and pepper

Get your chopped onions good and caramelized in more vegetable oil than you’re really comfortable with. Meanwhile, de-hull your garbanzos by squeezing each one. In a wooden bowl, chop together your de-hulled garbanzos, your string beans, and your eggs with a chopper (fancily called a mezzaluna these days, not so fancily called a hackmesser by Bubbi). Add in your browned onions. Season with salt and pepper. When it’s good and chopped, add your peanut butter, chop it in and taste. Might need more salt or more peanut butter.

The chopping is really important and it’s a workout. Bubbi once grabbed the bowl away from me because in my New World sissy way, I wasn’t chopping vigorously enough. At ninety, she could still chop better than me.

A note of warning: you need to eat your chopped string beans within about four days, otherwise it starts to ferment. The above recipe makes quite a lot. On this particular day, I made a half-batch. I had garden green beans, so I just steamed a few. And with the other half-can of garbanzos, I made some hummus.

Chopped string beans is delicious served with challah bread, but any kind of bread or cracker will do.

When chopped string beans is mentioned in my family, we all go crazy with nostalgic food lust. I’d be curious to know if it becomes a tradition in yours. My nine-year-old granddaughter tasted it the other day and said, “Bubbi! I like it!”

“Good,” I replied. “It’s my Bubbi’s recipe and someday it’ll be yours.”

Chopped string beans is a great vegetarian alternative to chopped liver, and can be substituted in any way in which chopped liver is normally used, as in the following: “So what am I? Chopped string beans?”

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It’s Pesto Time

by susannahm on 19. Jul, 2010 in Susannah Michaels

Thousands of years ago, Romans took ingredients they had readily to hand – basil, garlic, pine nuts, olive oil, salt, and hard cheese – and ground them together. I owe them a gigantic debt of gratitude. Pesto is a staple in my house. Every summer, we make a vat of it, freeze it, and use it all year long. You probably do the same. But if not, here is a recipe to get you started.

Basil

This is what I call "pesto on the hoof," aka basil

Ingredients:

Basil leaves, about 3 cups
1/2 tsp salt
2 large cloves garlic
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
2 tsp lemon juice
Olive oil
1/3 cup pine nuts or pecans or mixed

Wash and spin

Wash and spin, sort of like laundry but without the soap

Ingredients

It's this simple

Wash and spin dry your basil. Put it in a food processor with the salt and pressed garlic and grind it up. Add cheese. Add lemon juice. While it’s spinning, add the olive oil through the top and listen for it to sound a little sloppy. Add the nuts. I like the nuts to still have some recognizable bits, so I don’t grind it that much after adding them. Throughout the process, scrape the sides down so all the leaves grind up and so all the ingredients get mixed together. Taste!

Add olive oil

I don't measure the olive oil, I listen to it

Taste the pesto

Yum. But does it need more garlic?

We make pesto on a nearly industrial scale. It takes several hours (which is an improvement from the early days, when it took a full day). For this particular batch, we harvested three or four basil bushes (of the size pictured above), used two heads of garlic, over a block of cheese, over half a pound of nuts, and about a liter of oil. Ben picked and washed the leaves. I mixed batch after batch, mixing each batch together in a large mixing bowl. Pine nuts were very expensive this year ($32/pound), so I used all pecans. I tried one batch with walnuts and when we did a taste test, Ben thought the pecans were better.

Bowl of pesto

Vat o' pesto

We let that bowl sit in the fridge for a day, so the ingredients have time to come into their flavors before we freeze it.

The final step is to top each container off with olive oil, after it has set in the freezer, to protect the product from freezer burn.

Pesto in freezer containers

Top off the frozen pesto with a protective layer of olive oil

This is about 7 pounds of pesto, and will get us through to next summer. I use a large, sharp knife to hack off a portion from the frozen block. You need surprisingly little to be plenty for spaghetti for two. Use it on pasta, pizza, lasagna, soups. Just dip crackers or bread into it!

I said the final step was to top it off with olive oil, but of course, the final step is to enjoy the fruits of your labor and your garden. Buon appetito.

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Everyone Needs Peanut Noodles

by susannahm on 02. Jun, 2010 in Susannah Michaels

A billion years ago, about seventeen, some weekend house guests left a little tub of leftovers – spicy peanut noodles with little pieces of carrot and cucumber – in my fridge. Since that time, I’ve kept it in the back of my mind that I had to learn to make peanut noodles, without resorting to buying a bottled sauce. My guess is that you could throw together a very simple peanut sauce, like my friends did, by just tossing in a few ingredients. But never one for simple, I found a lengthy recipe in a book with odd measurements (half a teaspoon of molasses? One-third cup plus one tablespoon peanut butter?!). It’s good, and I’m sure that if you were so inclined, you could omit a few ingredients and it would still be good.

Peanut Sauce

1/3 cup plus one tablespoon natural peanut butter
2 Tbl tamari
2 Tbl rice vinegar
2 1/2 tsp honey
1/2 tsp molasses
1 Tbl minced fresh ginger
1 clove garlic, minced
Red pepper flakes to taste (about 1/2 tsp)
Cilantro, if convenient
Chopped roasted peanuts, to add later

For this amount of sauce, cook up 1/2 pound of spaghetti. When it’s drained, stir in 2.5 Tbl of sesame oil, then add your sauce and chopped peanuts and cilantro. If you don’t have time or inclination to add many vegetables, just add some grated carrot. But if you can, make this dish more substantial and well-rounded by adding whatever vegetables you have, steamed or sauted. Carrot rounds, broccoli, asparagus, zucchini – add them in. The original recipe had this served as a cold salad (in which case, make 3/4 pound pasta, to spread the sauce out more). I make it as a hot dinner.

Peanut Noodles

I usually try to set up a nice picture for this blog, but on this night, I decided, “What the hell, real life is me eating at a junk mail-strewn kitchen table.” So here you go, reality. The important thing is that this meal is yummy and satisfying. Everyone needs peanut noodles.

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Please tell me you’re not making brownies from a box

by susannahm on 10. Feb, 2010 in Susannah Michaels

I’m sort of aggressive about my brownies. I’ll walk up to people at work functions and parties and say, “Those are the best brownies, aren’t they?” The thing about brownies is that they are so simple. And it’s my pet peeve (well, one of them), that people do crazy things around brownies. They frost them or use a mix or buy gigantic ones at coffee shops. The best brownie, I will maintain until my dying day or until someone proves otherwise, is a simple, homemade, normal-sized brownie.

Homemade brownies:
4 oz unsweetened chocolate
1 stick butter
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup flour
2 tsp vanilla
1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Melt the unsweetened chocolate in the microwave; about 1.5 minutes. Add one the butter and continue melting for another 40 seconds or so. Meanwhile, put the sugar in a bowl. When the chocolate and butter are melted (and they don’t have to be completely melted. Give them a mix and they will finish melting from their own heat), pour over the sugar and mix with a whisk. Add the eggs, whisking after each and being snappy about it so that the hot ingredients don’t cook them. Add the salt. Add the flour. Add the vanilla. Add the walnuts if you want. Pour into a greased 9 x 13 inch pan and bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

Cut them as soon as they come out, so the top doesn’t have time to crust over and crumble as you cut. If you just need a few, this recipe halves very well; bake in a 9 x 9 inch pan. They are best eaten fresh, within about 2 days. Sometimes I freeze a few and then I look like a genius for pulling a homemade dessert out of my hat. If dinner isn’t too successful, it’s always nice to be able to follow it up with a freezer-brownie.

The reason brownie mixes are my pet peeve is that making them from scratch takes just 5 minutes and the flavor is more chocolaty and delicious. Eaten with a glass of milk … mmmm, nothing better or more fundamental. Yes, that’s it, call me a fundamentalist … when it comes to brownies. Please tell me you’re not using a box.

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High Five for Vegetarian Chicken Biryani

by susannahm on 27. Jan, 2010 in Susannah Michaels

My office-mate raved about Quorn and my parents used it when I visited them in Florida; it was time for me to try it myself. Quorn is a fungus-based meat substitute. The “chik’n tenders” version of it looks, tastes and feels remarkably like chicken.

Quorn

I picked up an Easy Chicken Biryani recipe from my store, the Willy Street Co-op in Madison, WI. I followed the recipe to the t, just replacing the chicken with Quorn chik’n tenders.

Willy St. Co-op Easy Chicken Biryani
2 T ghee or vegetable oil
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
1/4 t ground cumin
1/4 t ground cardamom
1/4 t black pepper
1/8 t ground cloves
1/4 t cinnamon
2 bay leaves
1 t fresh ginger, minced
1 t minced garlic
1/4 t turmeric
12 oz. chicken pieces, bite-sized, OR Quorn
1 c brown or white basmati rice
2 c water
1 t salt
1 c frozen peas
1/2 c plain yogurt

Saute your onions for about 5 minutes. Add ginger, garlic, and spices and saute for another 1-2 minutes. Add chicken and cook until it’s opaque (or just throw in your Quorn and continue immediately). Add water and salt and bring to a boil. Stir in rice. Cover and reduce heat. Simmer 15 minutes for white rice, 35 for brown. When rice is done, add peas and cook for a few more minutes. Stir in yogurt and serve.

Biryani and naan

I served it with a salad and naan. I got the naan at the Indian grocery next to the Maharaja restaurant, out by East Towne. We got a pack of 10 and keep it in the freezer for just such occasions. If you toast a frozen piece of it in a toaster-oven, it gets nice and crispy. If you like if soft and chewy, just nuke it. Either way, it’s yummy and a nice thing to have in the freezer.

This meal was everything I look for in a meal: it was delicious, it was quick and easy, it has protein, it has vegetables, and it has little or no dairy (you can use the yogurt, but you don’t have to).  Having been cooked for so long, the Quorn was just as soft and tender as pieces of chicken. And the spices are heavenly. Not only does the mixture taste delicious (the subtlety and exoticness of the cloves, cardamom, and turmeric; the sudden pleasure of a piece of ginger), but spices have medicinal qualities and it’s healthy to eat a variety of them.

“This one’s a keeper,” I said to Ben. “High five on the dinner.” He paused to the point that I thought I wasn’t going to get my high five. “It’s a high five if you make it with chicken sometimes,” he said and then he held up his hand. Poor Ben, I don’t think I’ll make it with chicken. But you can if you want to and no matter what, it will be quick and delicious and nutritious.

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Beer Exchange

by susannahm on 20. Dec, 2009 in Susannah Michaels

I think we’ve all heard of cookie exchanges at this time of year. Call me a scrooge, I deserve it, but I live in a two-person household and I can’t imagine what I’d do with a few dozen cookies. So I’ve always weaseled out of the cookie exchange invites. I’m not much into sweets and I have a cookie limit of about three a day, max. And I don’t necessarily want to bring them to work or give them to friends because there are just so many sweets around at this time of year, it’s ridiculous. “Stop the madness!” I say.

But beer, that’s a different story. I drink less beer than I eat cookies, but it doesn’t get stale as fast as a cookie and Ben is sure to drink it within a fraction of that time. So a beer exchange at Christmas-time, that makes sense to me. Amy and Peter Callies, hosts extraordinaire, held their second annual beer exchange recently, and this time, I didn’t weasel out.

How does it work? Let me tell you. Each person arrives with two sixpacks and perhaps an hors d’oevre. We tried to get interesting beers — a chocolate stout, local stuff, stuff we’d never heard of but that looked nice. Everyone’s beers were collected on the dining table. Wow, that was a lot of beer.

Then, each participant took turns tossing an origami ring onto the table and whatever beer it collared, that was then his or hers. Around and around we went.  “Everyone’s a winner,” someone kept shouting, like a barker on a carnival midway. Because this was a non-competitive event. If your toss didn’t land on a beer, you simply tossed again. You tossed twelve times, if that’s what it took (and sometimes it did). And you got a ruling from one of the two judges if your toss was ambiguous. A cheer erupted every time someone collared two beers on one throw. Some people tried to aim for certain brews (rarely worked), and then there was the 32-ounce Miller Lite that fell to some poor soul. But you always came away with something, interesting or not. Swaps happened on the sidelines. Those chocolate stouts were in high demand, especially among the ladies (lovers of women, take note).

What do you wear to a beer exchange. Why a beer hat, of course.

After a few hours of drinking, nibbling, conversation, ring tossing, and good cheer, the second annual beer exchange had run its course.

Girlfriends, don’t bother inviting me to your cookie exchange, it’s just not for me. But almost anything else will do. Perhaps next year we can exchange cheese along with the beer — now that would be my style.

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The Fajita Casserole

by susannahm on 14. Dec, 2009 in Susannah Michaels

When they write up my entry in Wikipedia, I’ll go down as the inventor of the fajita casserole.

As you may know by now, I’m a recipe follower. I don’t want to be, but I am. I wish I could be one of those people who just “throw something together.” It’s going to take some practise. My office-mate told me about some neighbors who just “throw something together” every night. She did that with them one night and the results were delicious, she said. They sautéed onions and garlic, added coconut milk, curry powder, and a ton of spinach. They ate it over quinoa. Sounds good and I might try it some night. But tonight, inspired by that story that made throwing together sound so simple and fun, it was time for me to try my own invention; to take a baby step toward becoming a thrower together.

I started with the loose idea of fajitas. These would be veggie fajitas and I bought some fajita-fu, a baked tofu product made in Wisconsin by the Simple Soyman. I also wanted to use some corn tortillas that had been  in the freezer for awhile — that’s why I couldn’t just make fajitas, I needed to hide the old tortillas in a casserole.

I started by sautéeing onions and red pepper for about ten minutes, then added a small zucchini and cooked another ten minutes. Finally, I added my chopped up fajita-fu. Meanwhile, I made some rice. I had a random packet of Ortega fajita seasoning that I’d accidentally bought when I meant to buy taco seasoning. I put half of it and some water in my onions/pepper/zucchini/tofu. I mixed in the cooked rice. Then I assembled my casserole by layering tortillas, rice mixture, tortillas, rice mixture. Finally, I had some sour cream I wanted to use up. I mixed it with some salsa and spread it over the top. Then I sprinkled on a little cheddar and put it in the oven for twenty or so minutes.

And there you have it: veggie fajita casserole.

fajitacasserole

Yeah for me, I finally threw something together! Ben said I was beaming. And the tofu was hidden in enough stuff that he actually ate it. It wasn’t haute cuisine, but it was easy and fun and edible. I think this dish is worth throwing together again. But wait, would that being following a recipe? Ach, I’ll just throw it together a little differently.

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The Big Pot

by susannahm on 04. Dec, 2009 in Susannah Michaels

Recently, my father has been making no-knead bread, à la Mark Bittman. Do a search on youtube to see a video of how it’s done.  The idea is that you a) don’t have to knead the bread, and b) let the flavor develop over a very long rising time (18 hours, I think).  Anyway, you need to bake the bread in a large cast-iron pot with a lid. My father doesn’t have one of those, so he’s been baking it in a lidded Pyrex dish. At Thanksgiving, he mentioned to us that he was contemplating buying a cast-iron pot and had seen one at TJ Maxx.

On Black Friday, my older sister and my aunt ran out to TJ Maxx while my father was out of the house on an errand. “Where are Rebekah and Carol?” he asked when he got home. “They went shopping,” we dissembled. “Why? Where? Kohl’s? Penney’s? TJ Maxx??”  he asked, horrified. We dissembled again.

Alas, they had to call and speak to him. They couldn’t find the pot he’d mentioned seeing — a Cuisinart knock-off of a Le Creuset. Reluctantly, he told them where to find it.

It’s a big pot. In fact, I’m afraid that my father will hurt his back lifting it or that  he’ll drop it on his foot. And then our present won’t seem like such a great gift.

bigpot

He made his no-knead bread in it:

bread

And then we made a turkey soup:

turkeysoup

We started by sautéeing onions, carrots, and green pepper. Then we added the leftover turkey and gravy, water, a can of kidney beans, and some spices. My father made dumplings for it, which gave it a nice focus.

I joked to my father that he’d have to keep the pot in constant use. Because who has room to store a brand new gigantic pot at this point? None of us, I hazard to assume. For the few days that I was there, he was able to do so. We stored the leftover soup out on the deck, since it was cold out and there’s no way a raccoon could tip over that heavy lid. Well, if the raccoon did tip the lid, he carefully replaced it and left us enough soup for the next day and beyond.

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Yogurt Day

by susannahm on 18. Nov, 2009 in Susannah Michaels

A few years ago, I began eating yogurt and granola for breakfast. After a few months, those 32 ounce yogurt containers were really stacking up. If there’s anything I hate, it’s plastic waste. I reuse the containers for buying grains and nuts in bulk at the Co-op. But there’s only so many containers I can use, so I decided to stop buying yogurt and start making it.

Step one was finding a yogurt maker. I finally found one at Orange Tree Imports, a chichi kitchen store here in Madison. But you can just get one on Amazon too. It should cost about $25 and paying more will not necessarily get you a better appliance (I know because I got my sister a $50 one and I don’t think it works and it’s hard for her to tell me that).

After step one is accomplished, it’s pretty easy. Just follow the directions, which will probably tell you to heat 4 cups of milk (I do that in my big glass measuring cup in the microwave: 3 minutes, stir, 2 minutes, stir, 2 minutes, stir and remove), let it cool to 110-115 degrees, add two spoons of starter yogurt, put it in the machine overnight, which will keep it heated for those starter bacteria to work their magic, then refrigerate for a few hours before enjoying.

yogurttemp

yogovernight

My cousin Hortense has a yogurt each night after dinner and adds some dates to make it sweet, like a healthy dessert. Boy is that yummy.

yogwdates

The consistency of the homemade yogurt is lovely – silky and drippy, not gelatinous like store bought. Of course you can add all kinds of things to it. Add a little jam and you have fruit yogurt.

Meanwhile, I’ve stopped eating granola and yogurt at breakfast, and just eat my oats uncooked with milk, like muesli. But the granola was good in its day. Here’s a recipe:

Maple Nut Granola:
Mix: 4 cups thick rolled oats, 1/4 cup almonds, 1/8 cup sesame seeds, 1/8 sunflower seeds.
In a mixing cup mix: 1/4 cup maple syrup, 1/8 cup oil, 1/4 cup honey.
Add the liquid to the oats and mix to coat well.
Spread it on a baking sheet. Bake at 350 for 15 minutes, stir it up. Bake for another 10 minutes or so. Be careful not to burn it. Once it’s brown, it’s already burnt, so err on the side of very very light brown.

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Galettes Bretonnes

by susannahm on 11. Nov, 2009 in Susannah Michaels

As you may know, my French cousin, Hortense, is living with me for three months, to improve her English. After two months, mission accomplished! Her English has gotten really good! She has one more month to learn a few more esoteric vocabulary words and continue sorting out her tenses.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch house in the suburbs, there has been some cooking going on. Mostly I do the cooking. Because it’s my house, because it’s my country, because I like to cook, because Hortense is busy learning English, because I love my own cooking, because I’m a control freak, I don’t know, I just do. But about once a week, Hortense cooks. After two months, I’d noticed a pattern. Just yesterday, I observed to my coworkers, “There seem to be four major ingredients in French cooking: potatoes, ham, eggs, and gruyère.” That night, as Hortense was using ham, eggs, and gruyère to make Galettes Bretonnes, she commented, “I think we use a lot of ham, eggs, and gruyère!” Oh my gosh! Did she overhear me in the lunch room earlier that day!? If we’d had some leftover cooked potatoes, they would have fit in perfectly with this dish, and then we would have been using all four major ingredients.

Let me start by saying, the galettes bretonnes were delicious and I will add them to my own repertoire and think of Hortense each time I make them.

In France, they buy the galettes, which are buckwheat crêpes, ready-made. I can see how this would be easier and faster. But we don’t have galettes in our stores, so Hortense made them from scratch. I didn’t have buckwheat flour on hand, so she used whole wheat. The recipe consists of flour, butter, eggs, milk, water, and salt. As she made the galettes, she caramelized some onions.

Hortense making Galettes Bretonnes

When the galettes were ready, she began assembling. Put a galette in a pan, sprinkle with grated gruyère, crack two eggs onto it, lay down some ham, if you want, add caramelized onions and some wedges of tomato. Now here’s the tricky part: you have to cook the thing, folding the large galette over, flipping it a few times so the eggs break and cook, shoving ingredients back in as they inevitably spill out. Don’t worry if it looks messy, that won’t affect the taste. The eggs shouldn’t be completely cooked, they should be moist and runny. Serve with a salad, and you have a really lovely meal. Now that I think of it, it’s basically a French version of the breakfast burrito or quesadilla. But I think the whole wheat, or buckwheat, element of the galette makes it all the more interesting.

The tricky business of cooking a galette

But wait! There’s more! With the leftover galettes, maybe the first ones you made which weren’t so perfect, you can make yourself some dessert. Put a galette in a pan, spread half of it with nutella. Add sliced almonds, banana, whatever you want. Fold the empty side onto the half with the goodies. Fold it again so it makes a triangle, serve and eat. Yum. Delicious. And you’ll feel like you’re on the streets of Paris at a crêpe stand.

Nutella and almond dessert galette

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Cooking for the Masses

by susannahm on 25. Oct, 2009 in Susannah Michaels

This summer, I had the pleasure to go to France for a cousin’s wedding. Like my last trip to France, two years ago for another cousin’s wedding, I enjoyed the typical nutella crepes and pain au chocolat, and cheese, and the general goodness of food there. But this time what struck me most was the large family meals I ate with my cousins.

After the wedding, many of us went to my mother’s cousin’s villa on the Cap Ferret. Cap Ferret is like a French Cape Cod. Like Cape Cod, it has one road going the length of it that can get congested with vacation traffic. Like Cape Cod, prices are high. And like Cape Cod, it has a wonderful maritime feel and is a pleasant place to spend a vacation.

With a mind to giving his large family a place where they could all gather, my mother’s cousin, Jacques, outfitted his villa with numerous beds so that his three daughters, who each have four to six children, could all come and stay at once. As a result, the family, despite being spread out over France, is tight-knit and the cousins all know each other well. I was privileged to be able to partake in that dynamic for several days last summer.

We all arrived for the Bordeaux wedding on a Friday. The big party was on Saturday, and Sunday found us driving, late in the day, to the villa. In France, stores are closed on Sunday. And since we’d been staying in temporary lodgings since Friday, we hadn’t been able to provision ourselves. Twelve people with almost no food were about to arrive at the villa at dinnertime. On the way, we stopped at a pizzeria, but my cousin, Catherine, emerged from there saying the woman was unpleasant and the prices were way too high. And so we continued on, to see if the recent renters had left us any food.

When we arrived, my young cousins set to work pulling linens out and getting the place set up for us to live in. Catherine, the default matriarch of the brood, set to work in the kitchen. She found some rice and sent the two youngest girls to a neighbors to borrow a glass of oil. Meanwhile, my cousin Christel, had brought some zucchini and tomatoes from her garden. And Catherine had taken six eggs from her father’s refrigerator in Bordeaux. She cooked up a bunch of rice, sauteed the vegetables, and added the eggs. When we sat down at the table, what we had was a lot of rice and enough omelet for six people, which would have to do for twelve. We all took a large helping of rice and a spoonful of eggs. If we were still hungry after that, we had rice with soy sauce. Christel had also brought a hunk of maroilles, a cheese from her husband’s region of northern France, and we had that for dessert. It’s a slightly soft cheese, with a washed orangish rind and a strong smell. I loved it.

family dinner in France

family dinner in France

My point with this story is, my cousin Catherine was my hero that night, for making a dinner out of almost nothing and feeding twelve people with it.

The next day, Catherine, Ondine, and I went to the grocery store. We bought hundreds of dollars of groceries and entirely filled the back of the car. The crazy thing was, with 12-15 people eating three meals a day, it would only last for a few days.

That first night, sitting on the back deck after dinner, Catherine hatched a plan for accomplishing the cooking. She knew that if she did nothing, organization of each dinner would fall to her, as the de facto matriarch of the group. She was on vacation and didn’t want that. She suggested that each person take on a night of cooking. As we sat there, I and my other cousins came up with a meal we could make and we each wrote the ingredients out on a list for the next day’s shopping expedition.

Wanting to get my night done with, I volunteered to cook first. Cooking in a foreign country is always dicey, but I figured I could manage some quiches, gazpacho, and a green salad. At home, I make a single quiche for me and Ben. Here, I quadrupled the quantities.

Cousins helping me make quiches
Cousins helping me make quiches

They thought quiche with broccoli was a freak of nature. So I made some with pork bits for them. And the store didn’t have the kind of pepper I use for gazpacho, so it came out a bit strange. And maybe I used a little too much garlic when I quadrupled my gazpacho recipe. And maybe I forgot to quadruple the salt for the quiches. And I didn’t realize the oven didn’t work and we’d have to use a smaller unit on top of the dishwasher – one that could only bake two quiches at a time. And I didn’t realize I should turn that little oven on to its highest heat, rather than medium as I do at home. So dinner wasn’t served until 9 pm, which was a tad late, even on vacation. But we were starving by then, so nothing really mattered anymore – not the lack of the right pepper for the gazpacho, not the undersalting of the quiches.

The next night, Christel made a delicous and filling gratin with potatoes, zucchini, and the ubiquitous pork bits.

The night after that, Arthur made spare ribs and grilled vegetables.

For lunch, someone always whipped up something. A rice salad with the leftover rice from the first night (rice, veggies, vinaigrette – delicious), a pasta salad, a bunch of hard-boiled eggs, and all 12-15 of us sat down to a meal. Dinner, we were once again all together around the big table, indoors or out.

My final family supper in France

My final family supper in France

When I came back to the U.S., what stuck with me from the trip were these big family meals. I made a little rice salad to try to get the feeling back, but it wasn’t as good (or I wasn’t as hungry), and I was eating alone and it just wasn’t the same.

Rice salad and homemade bread with cambozola
Rice salad and homemade bread with cambozola
The food in France was good. But we have good food here too. The trick, I can see, is to make occasions where I can eat a home-cooked meal with a large group of people. I’ll see what I can do about that.

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Comfort Food – Dal

by susannahm on 22. Jun, 2009 in Susannah Michaels

We’ve all got a few dishes that feed our soul and make us feel safe, happy, and taken care of. These are our comfort foods. One of mine is dal. I love dal because it’s protein, curry, soupy, eaten over rice, and easy to make.

Tonight I made dal from a recipe in A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen: Easy, Seasonal Dishes for Family and Friendsby Jack Bishop. One of the nice things about this recipe is it’s topped by carmelized onions. Caramelized onions are one of my favorite things. I have never yet had too many caramelized onions.

Although I love dal, I don’t want to eat it for days. I halved all of the below recipes.

Dal:
2 Tbl canola oil
4 medium cloves garlic, minced
1 Tbl minced ginger root, minced
2 tsp curry powder
3.5 cups water
1 cup coconut milk
1.5 cups red lentils, well-rinsed
Salt
1/4 cup chopped cilantro (as always, if you don’t have it, that’s OK)

Heat the oil, add the garlic, ginger, and curry and stir for a minute. Add the lentils, water, coconut milk, and 1/2 tsp salt. Bring to a boil, then cover and simmer for about 20 minutes. Take the lid off to boil off extra liquid at the end. Add the cilantro and check for salt.

Meanwhile, caramelize 1 pound of sliced onions (about 3 medium), by melting 2 Tbl unsalted butter in a pan, add onions, 1/2 tsp salt, and 1/2 tsp sugar, and stir them occasionally, also for about 15 minutes.

Also meanwhile, make some basmati rice as follows: Rinse 1.5 cups of basmati. Melt 2 Tbl of canola oil in your rice pot, add the rice. Stir it around until the rice becomes fragrant. Stir constantly, otherwise it will burn. After about 3 minutes, add 2.25 cups water and 1 tsp salt. Simmer on very low for about 15 minutes.

cooking

Everything needs to cook for about 15-20 minutes and even though you can’t start everything simultaneously, unless you have 4 arms and are super-organized, that’s OK. In addition to its other qualities, dal is forgiving and an extra minute here or there on one or the other thing is fine.

When each element is done, assemble your meal in a bowl – rice, dal, onions.

dal

When you need a sure thing, that will be done in half an hour, that will feed your soul and your stomach, have yourself some dal.

If this post seems uninspired, it’s because I’m wickedly hot and excessively humid.  That’s why dal was such a good dish for me today (even though it’s in the winter section of the cookbook), because I needed a real meal, after several days of un-real meals, but I couldn’t make too much of an effort. And there you have it.

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Diner Sur L’Herbe (pronounce this in French)

by susannahm on 31. May, 2009 in Susannah Michaels

I knew there’d be a lot of spinach at my farmers’ market this morning, and I wanted a dish to take advantage of that. Spinach borek it was. It’s a dish you’d normally get at a Mediterranean restaurant, but there’s a recipe for it in Mollie Katzen’s The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, so I planned on making it.

Sure enough, there was a ton of spinach at the market. Literally, a ton. I only lightened one farmer’s load of it by about two pounds. For $3, I got a big bag of large, dark green, densely packed leaves. Following Mollie’s recipe, I sautéd some onions and garlic, added salt, chopped walnuts, spinach, nutmeg, dill, pepper, raisins, and finally cheddar cheese.

Spinach never ceases to amaze me. You put an insane quantity of it into a pan and soon enough, it wilts down to almost not enough. I think the rule of thumb must be to use three times more than you think you could possibly need, and it’ll be just right.

Earlier in the day, I’d defrosted a sleeve of fillo dough. Now, with my pastry brush, I slathered melted butter onto two layers, folded it over, and added a blob of spinach filling.

prep

I rolled that all up, slathered some butter across the top, set it on a cookie sheet, and continued until all my filling was gone. Since it had to bake at 375 for 30 minutes, I took the opportunity to roast some potato and sweet potato. Meanwhile, I made a little salad from the green and red lettuce in our garden.

le diner

It was a perfect evening to eat “sur l’herbe.” The breeze made it such that the mosquitoes were nowhere to be seen. “What do they do when it’s windy out?” I asked Ben. “I don’t know. Hunker down, I guess,” he answered.

This meal was nice, but I don’t think it will stick to our ribs for the long haul (even though we each ate two boreks). It’s a bit light on protein. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s waking up at 3 AM because my stomach is growling. So I’m planning a delayed cheese course. I have a piece of cambozola, which combines the wonderful creamy texture of brie and the yumminess of blue. When I was in France, my relatives ate a cheese course at the end of every dinner. I was often too full to partake. But I love cheese and I think delaying the cheese course until two hours after the meal might be just the ticket.

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Kid Food

by susannahm on 27. May, 2009 in Susannah Michaels

I haven’t eaten or made anything particularly interesting recently — nothing to write home about, or blog about, as we might say these days. And yet food – the cooking and procurement of it – is a constant in my life. Even when there’s nothing going on, there has to be something going on. And I realized that today’s topic is kid food. I just had my granddaughter, Mabion, here for the Memorial Day weekend. She’s going on 9 years old and she must be having a growth spurt, because food was a constant theme this visit.

The first morning she’s here, we invariably make pancakes. At bedtime, she’ll ask if we can make pancakes the next morning, and in the morning, she’ll wake up with a rallying cry: ”Pancakes!!” Mabion loves my pancakes and like any Bubbi, I love it when she loves my food. A few years ago, I started slipping a half cup of whole wheat pastry flour into the blend and she didn’t complain. We also put in raspberries, picked from our own bushes and frozen each year.  A close second to pancakes is oatmeal. We make it ourselves and add brown sugar and raisins. Amazingly, she’ll polish off an adult-sized portion of oatmeal.

pancakes

Another sure thing is homemade pizza. She has always loved homemade pizza, even when she’s been in a non-eating phase or a lactose intolerance phase. This time, she ate 3 slices before I’d finished two. I was amazed to see that Mabion had made a leap in her kitchen skills — not quite 9 and she’s well on her way to being able to make a pizza entirely on her own. Rolling out the dough used to be an unmanageable challenge. “I hope you like cooking when you grow up,” I said to her recently. “I do,” she said firmly. “I want to be a cooker like you when I grow up.”

pizzaparty

The first time I had Mabion here for summer camp, two years ago, I guess I gave her a lot of peanut butter sandwiches, because the next year, her mother said she wasn’t sure she wanted her to go to camp because all I’d given her were peanut butter sandwiches. Yikes! I recall eating a peanut butter sandwich every day for twelve years as a kid. But I guess kids need variety these days. The second year, I gave her a different thing each day – peanut butter, cashew butter, cream cheese, bacon, egg salad. I could go through a whole week of camp without her having the same thing twice.

Dinners are tricky. I’ve developed a list of things she’ll eat. Tacos, pizza, of course, spaghetti, ravioli, hot dogs, hamburgers, veggie burgers. If I want to make something for me and Ben that’s not on this list, Mabion can have scrambled eggs. If we want to get dinner outside the house, she’ll eat Chinese food. She’ll eat chicken if it doesn’t look like chicken. And she’ll eat McDonalds any time, although for me, that will always be the very last resort, when I am done in, am completely frazzled by childcare, and have given up.

And finally, there are snacks. This visit was heavy on the snacks — an hour didn’t pass without one. They were mostly good – apples, grapes, bananas, dried figs, homemade cookies. Ice cream, of course, is welcome at any time.

apple snack

Mabion comes shopping with me at the Co-op. She flips the switch on the peanut butter machine and jiggles the container so the fresh peanut butter settles. She knows the apples taste good at my house because they’re organic. She picks the eggs out from the bulk bin and puts them in the carton I brought with me.

At home, Mabion lives in poverty. They get food stamps and use food pantries and she gets free school lunches. When Mabion and I shop and cook together, and when the three of us sit down at the table together for dinner and discuss our days, it’s no small thing. It’s a building block in her life, a stepping stone to her becoming a self-possessed young woman with choices. To me, food isn’t trivial, it can change a life.

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Gonzo for Gazpacho

by susannahm on 14. May, 2009 in Susannah Michaels

In my house, we loooove gazpacho. In fact, Ben loves it even more than I do, which is odd, because he’s often lukewarm about some of the stuff I make. But he begs me to make gazpacho. When I told him we were having it tonight, his eyebrows raised in a “what did I do to deserve this luck” kind of way.

What’s gazpacho? Cold tomato soup. Sound gross? Yes. But trust me, it’s wonderful. There’s something about the garlic and the vinegar … mmmm, garlic and vinegar, two of my favorite things.

So I’ve established that gazpacho is delicious. The beauty of it is that it’s also incredibly simple. I learned to make it from a Basque woman in Madrid in the summer of 1991. That summer, I took classes at an institute in Madrid and lived in the apartment of Begoña and her son Iñigo. Early on, Begoña served me gazpacho. I told her I liked it so much, I could eat it every day. And so, I think I did eat it most days as an appetizer to dinner. I have seen and read other variations on gazpacho (ones that include cucumbers or zucchinis), but I stick to Begoña’s recipe, which is downright elemental.

The ingredients are as follows:

gazpacho

a large can of whole, peeled tomatoes, a piece of aging baguette, two cloves of garlic, about half an anaheim or banana pepper, a few tablespoons of red wine vinegar, about half that of olive oil, salt, and pepper.

I keep a baguette, cut into quarters, in my freezer. Whenever I want to make garlic bread or gazpacho, I just defrost a quarter in the microwave. Bread that has sat around for a day or two or otherwise dried out, is perfect for this purpose. Soak it in water in the jar of your blender for 15-30 minutes. When it’s good and waterlogged, hit the puree button. What you have now is bread and water. Again, it may seem gross, but dump it into a big bowl and forge on.

Next, put the rest of your ingredients (the big can of tomatoes, the chopped pepper, the crushed garlic, salt, pepper, and about 2 tablespoons of vinegar and one of olive oil) in the blender and blend them up good. Add them into the bread mixture and stir. Taste. Is there enough salt? Vinegar? Garlic? Is there enough heat from the pepper? It should have a slight bite to it. It’s easy to tinker with the ingredients by adding them straight to the bowl or putting some soup back in the blender and reblending.

Now put it in the fridge and let it chill. A few hours is good. If you don’t have that kind of time, add a few ice cubes to the bowl. Since the soup is water-based, having a little more water in it won’t hurt.

I’m at a loss to describe why gazpacho is so good. So you’ll have to try it. I love when I get a little lump of bread that didn’t completely blend. Eat your gazpacho within two days, otherwise those luscious bits of bread will begin to ferment.

Gazpacho makes a great appetizer in the summer, when you want something cool and something that doesn’t create a lot of heat in the kitchen. It goes well with things that aren’t an entire meal in and of themselves, like an omelet. Tonight, I served my gazpacho with some quinoa patties (from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, the well to which I return again and again) and a salad.

meal

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Veggie Kebabs

by susannahm on 03. May, 2009 in Susannah Michaels

Today was the first Northside farmers’ market of the season. Boy was I happy to ride my bike over to the neighborhood shindig. “Isn’t this exciting?” I said to the teenager I bought spinach and scallions from. I moved on to buy cheese, some lettuce seedlings, and … some meat. It was an impulse buy. When I saw the meat stand, I thought “Cook out.” I got Ben a hunk of sirloin; I got both of us a pound of bacon.

Ben would be having sirloin for dinner and I’d be having veggie kebabs. I made another trip out to do the week’s grocery shopping at the Co-op. When I got home, I mixed a half cup each of olive oil and red wine vinegar, tossed in some salt, pepper, basil, oregano, and a few cloves crushed garlic. Then I chopped up my veggies – red pepper, onion, zucchini, sweet potato (nuked for two minutes) – and put them in the marinade. I also put in 8 ounces of baked tofu. Cherry tomatoes would have been a good addition, but I forgot about them.

marinade

A few hours and several stirrings later, I skewered them up and Ben put them on the grill, on the veggie half of course. I ate them over brown rice, sprinkled with a little tamari.

grill

The lovely thing about veggie kebabs is that they’re beautiful, nutritious, delicious, and easy. We ate outside tonight. The mosquitoes aren’t out yet and we have to enjoy the outdoors while we can. Happy grilling season!

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Eating my Vegetables

by susannahm on 25. Apr, 2009 in Susannah Michaels

Every so often, I get sick of the things I normally eat. There’s too much dairy, too much dough. Quiche and homemade pizza are two examples that combine both. If I make pasta, that has cheese on it. If I made BLTs, that’s more bread. When I need a break from dairy and dough, I seek out the basics – vegetables and whole grains.

Whenever I visit my parents, that is exactly what we eat. My stepmother, due to health reasons, has all kinds of taboos – dairy, wheat, soy, and sugar. Every night at dinnertime, they simply take out a bunch of vegetables and stir-fry them up. My father is always making rice in his microwave rice cooker. No one else can work that thing as well as he does.

Alas, as you know, I’m not one to just throw things together. I wish I were, but I’m not. I need a recipe. The few times I’ve tried to just throw things together in a stir-fry, they’ve turned out un-yummy, bordering on not worth eating.

So here’s a recipe that gets me back to the basics: Chickpea and Vegetable Stew from Mollie Katzen’s The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. This meal will take about half an hour, start to finish. And it calls for millet, another of those whole grains the nutritionist recommended to me. Millet is a really nice change from the usual rice. And it cooks up quickly and flawlessly.

You’ll need:

1 cup millet
2 Tbl olive oil
2 Tbl butter
1 cup chopped onions
1 tsp salt
1 lb chopped mushrooms
3 Tbl lemon juice
1 lb chopped broccoli
1 can chickpeas, drained, rinsed
1/2 cup currants (I use raisins)
black pepper and cayenne to taste
1/2 tsp paprika
1 1/2 cup chopped toasted cashews (I put raw cashew bits on a pan in my toaster oven and turn it on to 350 degrees. It only takes a few minutes to brown them – keep an eye and a nose on them.)

Prepare the millet by boiling 1.5 cups of water and then adding the millet and turning it down to low. It’ll take a mere 20 minutes to cook.

Meanwhile, sauté your onions and salt in your oil and butter, until soft. Add the lemon juice, mushrooms, and broccoli. Cover and cook over medium-low heat for about 8 minutes, till the broccoli is bright green.

Add all the other ingredients and continue cooking a few minutes until everything is heated through.

broccoli

And as I always say on these quick and easy recipes, “voilà, that’s it.” Yes, you have a healthy and yummy meal! The toasted cashews and raisins make this dish a treat. It never turns out stewy for me, so if I want a little more liquid, I add a sprinkle of tamari.

And now, on to dessert. After eating such a healthy meal, you deserve one. I don’t have a huge sweet-tooth, but sometimes I want a little something. And at those times, I jump off the couch and get into the kitchen and in 5 minutes, I’ve mixed up a batch of brownies or chocolate chip cookies. I’ve recently discovered the wonder of freezing. If I make brownies, I freeze a few of them, to pull out as a nice treat in the middle of the week. And if I make cookies, I freeze half the dough. That way, in a few days I can defrost the other half and have a new batch of fresh cookies. Cookies are so much better when they’re fresh!

cookies

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The First Farmers’ Market of the Season

by susannahm on 18. Apr, 2009 in Susannah Michaels

It was as if thousands of people were waiting like runners at a starting line. And when the cosmos got everything aligned, the starting gun went off, and they began to run … counter-clockwise around the capitol square. Today was the first farmers’ market of the Madison season and it was spectacular – a beautiful day and throngs of people.

farmersmarket

Ben and I decided to buck the flow, to walk clockwise, all the better to run into acquaintances face to face. The sidewalks were so packed, it was actually stressful and unpleasant. And we only saw two people from my work. Who are all those other people? We wonder that each time.

The crowds were so thick, it was hard to see the merchandise. But I sensed there were cheeses, meats, baked goods, potatoes, maple syrup, honey, jams, and herb and flower seedlings. I came away with strawberry jam … and a pain au chocolat from L’etoile. The pastry wasn’t quite as good as the originals in France, but not bad.

painauchocolat

Ben is frustrated with the downtown farmers’ market. It should be in the street, he says, not confined to the sidewalk. “You should stand on the corner and yell about that each Saturday,” I told him. “Then you’d be fulfilling your potential as a crazy old man.” We laugh, but he’s completely right. Downtown Madison has one of the biggest farmers’ markets in the country and it needs more space. I told him to email our alderperson, and this time I wasn’t kidding. “We don’t need this one though,” I continued. “We have our Northside one. And that one has tofu squash curry.” I have come to love the Northside farmers’ market. It’s stress-free, the few vendors and I have come to recognize each other, which is nice, and I often see people I know from the neighborhood. Alas, it’s a shorter season and it’s not as glamorous as downtown.

So I guess we need all the markets – the local Sunday ones, and the mob-scene Saturday downtown ones. Yippee! It’s market season again.

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A Meal out of Parts

by susannahm on 14. Apr, 2009 in Susannah Michaels

I have two tasty dishes, neither of which make a meal on their own. So tonight, I combined them. They are … drum roll please … BLTs and noodles in Thai curry sauce. A strange combination? Yes. A disaster? No.

I’m going to admit up front that I love bacon. I have a passion for bacon that only a half-Jewish vegetarian who gave up pork above all other meats 24 years ago out of a misplaced zealotry for cultural identification and a well-placed belief that people should eat vegetable matter directly, instead of growing vegetable matter and feeding it to the animals, can have. There, I’ve said it. I rediscovered bacon at my cousin Louisa’s wedding last year. The New York relatives and I were sharing a house in Pt. Reyes Station in Marin County. Bacon was purchased, I ate bacon. Ever since then, I’ve been eating bacon (sheesh, don’t make me feel guilty; at least it’s organic bacon) about once a month. Needless to say, Ben (my carnivorous significant other) is very, very happy with this development.

As good as they are, BLTs do not a dinner make. And so I’m always adding a substantial side dish. Last time it was soup. This time, noodles in Thai curry sauce. I haven’t made these noodles in a while because they too do not a dinner make and I can never think of what to serve them with.

I’m not necessarily going to recommend making these two things together, but if you do, start everything at the same time. Start to finish, the whole thing will only take half an hour. Put a pot of water on to boil, start your bacon, start your sauce. It makes for a busy stove.

 Stove top

Noodles in Thai Curry Sauce, from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison:

8 oz fresh or dried Chinese noodles or linguine (I used udon)
1.5 Tbl roasted peanut oil (I used regular peanut oil; can’t for the life of me find roasted)
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp ginger, minced
2 shallots or 1/2 onion, thinly sliced
1 15-ounce can coconut milk
Thai red curry paste (I used 1/2 tsp; you may want more)
2 Tbl soy sauce
2 scallions
Fresh basil if you have it, or cilantro, or nothing, for garnish

Heat oil till very hot, add garlic, ginger, and onions and stir-fry for 2 minutes. Add coconut milk, curry paste, and soy sauce. Stir to break up the paste. Simmer for 3-4 minutes. Meanwhile, you should have cooked your noodles. Udon cooks in as little as a few minutes. Drain your noodles and put them into your sauce. Garnish with scallions and basil or cilantro.

 BLT and noodles

The meal was good. But let’s just put it this way, I made sure that the last bite I took was BLT. Yum, I loooove bacon.

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The Soup of Life

by susannahm on 01. Apr, 2009 in Susannah Michaels

Ignore this recipe at your own peril. There, you’ve been warned.

In November 2007 I had a consultation with a nutritionist. These consultations were being offered at my food co-op, at a cost of just $5. I was suffering from chronic hungriness, a condition that was becoming bothersome, and I was eager to find out some strategies for eating things that would stick to my ribs a bit longer.

I walked into the meeting confident that I ate a pretty good diet. The nutritionist wasted no time in taking me down a peg. In fact, I wasn’t eating that well at all, apparently. I was eating too much dairy, too much pasta, not enough vegetables, not enough whole grains, and I wasn’t paying attention to the art and science of “food combining.” I also wasn’t paying attention to the needs of my digestive tract, which needs acids like lemon juice and vinegar, and fermented things like kim chee, sauerkraut, and kombucha (which contain probiotics) to aid digestion. Yikes!

I was probably suffering from a low blood sugar crisis right then and there, and so I felt myself panicking when she said my afternoon snack of pecans mixed with chocolate chips was a terrible idea. “Get rid of the chips!” she ordered. “But it’s no big deal, there aren’t that many,” I wheedled. “So it won’t be hard to get rid of them, will it?” she countered. And as much as I felt like a child and wanted to dig in my heels on this one, I have to admit, it wasn’t hard getting rid of the chocolate chips.

She recommended lots of expensive products (which is why I think the Co-op subsidized these consultations) like Lara bars, whey powder, and green powder. I bought them all. The whey eventually got thrown out and I’m still working on the green powder. The Lara bars have mostly gone to my boss. I’ve also been drinking about $6 worth of kombucha a week for the past 1.5 years. I can’t tell if it aids my digestion, but I just enjoy it.

Anyway, long story slightly shortened, the nutritionist recommended that I eat more whole grains than just the standard brown rice and wheat flour. She recommended buckwheat, millet, and quinoa. And so, I looked for recipes containing those grains. The one that has really stuck is the quinoa (pronounced keen-wa). I hated this woman who pushed me around and made me feel bad, but I have to admit, she gave me a couple of tips that I can actually live with.

And finally to my recipe, which you shouldn’t ignore. Also known as “quinoa chowder with spinach, feta, and scallions,” I call it the soup of life because it is so delicious and has a wonderful buttery texture, although it has no butter in it. The recipe comes from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.

You’ll need:
3/4 cup quinoa, rinsed well (to remove the bitter saponin coating)
2 Tbl olive oil
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 jalapeño chile, seeded and diced
1 tsp ground cumin
Salt and pepper
1/2 lb potatoes, peeled and cubed
1 bunch scallions, sliced thinly
3 cups finely chopped spinach
1/4 lb feta, diced
1/3 cup cilantro

Put the quinoa in 2 quarts of water, bring to a boil, lower heat and simmer for 10 minutes.

After that’s been going for about 6 minutes, heat the oil in a big soup pot. Add the garlic and chile and cook for about 30 seconds. Add cumin and 1 tsp salt, and the potatoes. Cook for several minutes, stirring frequently. Don’t let the garlic brown.

potatoes

After a few minutes, add the scallions and pour in the excess water from your boiled quinoa. You may need to add some water. Simmer for 15 minutes, until the potatoes are soft. Add in the quinoa and spinach.  Simmer for 3 minutes to wilt the spinach. Turn the heat off. Stir in the feta and the cilantro. Season with pepper. Taste for salt.

quinoa chowder

Mostly, the jalapeño just adds a nice flavor to this soup. But in the last batch I made, it added an almost unpleasant kick. So just be aware of whether your jalapeño is mild or hot. And round out the meal with something else. For us, it’s usually bread and cheese. Enjoy! This soup is delicious, nutritious, and fast, which, as far as I’m concerned, is the triumvirate of goodness in a dish.

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