Drunk and Full

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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!