Drunk and Full

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.