Late Summer's Signature Dish

For those of you who saw the movie Ratatouille ages ago, but have never really had the Provençal dish, I want to let you know one thing:  traditional ratatouille doesn’t look anything like the dish in the movie.  A picture of perfectly mandolined and shingled vegetables does not resemble what I first tasted in France.  (There is, of course, a recipe out there from a fancy chef, from which the movie took its visual representation. Kids who saw the movie begged their mothers to make something so extraordinarily delicious, and were quite disappointed that it didn’t actually look like that.  My guess is that it doesn’t taste nearly as good as the real thing).  My first ratatouille experience came from a roommate’s mother; one weekend she brought home three or four jars of what looked like spaghetti sauce, but what tasted like the sun in the south of France.  Since then, I’ve been on a quest to recreate that ratatouille each and every summer.

This is the best time of year to make ratatouille.  All of the basic ingredients are in season:  eggplant (aubergine), zucchini (courgette), tomato (tomate), garlic (ail), onion (oignons), bell pepper (poivron), herbes de provence.  Some ratatouilles add different ingredients or make substitutions.  The basic recipe is wonderful, however, as long as all ingredients are fresh.  The little secrets I’ve learned throughout the years?  Grill or roast the eggplant chunks before adding them to the rest; you will avoid the bitterness and strange texture of sautéed eggplant.  Also, this is a stew, but don’t cook it too long.  After the ingredients are all sautéed, mix them together (without completely destroying the tomato chunks) and simmer for only about five minutes or so.  Third, take the thing off the stove, let it cool, put it in the fridge, and wait until tomorrow to re-heat and eat it.  The flavors meld together perfectly overnight.  Finally, don’t make the mistake I’ve made for years and make army-sized batches.  Like jam or preserves, for some unknown reason the flavor is superior in small batches.  It’s delicious by itself or over couscous or rice.

My jar of summer deliciousness

So, my loose attempt at a recipe:

One medium-sized eggplant or 2-3 small Japanese eggplant, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes

One large onion, chopped

Three cloves of garlic, chopped

Two small or one large bell pepper (I prefer yellow, orange, red or purple, but green is OK too), cut into 1-inch pieces

One medium-sized zucchini, cut into ½ inch quarter rounds

Two 14-oz cans of whole tomatoes, cut into large chunks, and the juice of one can OR 3 large/5 roma tomatoes, cut into large chunks

Herbes de provence (1 T. or to taste); alternately, use a combination of any of: fresh rosemary, thyme, basil, marjoram, savory

Salt and drain cubes of eggplant on paper towels for a few minutes, then toss in a tablespoon of olive oil.  Roast under broiler or at 400 degrees until lightly browned on all sides.  Meanwhile, sauté onion in another tablespoon of olive oil until starting to brown, add garlic for a minute, then pepper and zucchini.  Saute for a few minutes, then add in roasted eggplant, tomatoes and herbes de provence.  After it’s brought to a boil, turn down and simmer for 5-10 minutes (no lid) or until the very soupy tomato liquid is reduced and you could eat the stew with a fork.  Serve over couscous, rice, or pasta, or as a side dish of vegetables.

It might even taste good while watching an animated movie about a rat who’s a chef.

Harmony in the Home

Yesterday I made a soup, and I have no idea what many of the ingredients are.  I bought the soup mix from a local Amish bulk store, and the only thing on the label was “Harmony Soup” and how to make it.  I could see dried split peas, kidney beans, red beans, navy beans, wheatberries, and a few other things I couldn’t immediately recognize.  I can only think that they shoved together the leftovers from other bulk items and called it soup mix.  I thought I’d try my luck.

The instructions said to soak the mixture overnight.  I took my time and soaked it a couple of overnights in the fridge, as Monday night became too busy to do the prep.  Tuesday morning I threw some leg quarters of chicken from my sweet Triple S folks into the slow cooker with some water and cooked it until I got home from an appointment early afternoon.  Then I removed the cooked chicken, leaving the stock.  I sautéed a huge bunch of baby celery (with a lot of leaves) and some garlic ramps from my last winter order with Claybank Farms, a large onion, and 4 carrots.  (Carrots were on sale at my Co-op, not local, but organic).  I dumped the sautéed mixture into the stock with the soaked and rinsed harmony soup mix and cooked on high, setting it for four hours.  I de-boned and minced the chicken when it cooled, and added to the mixture, filling the slow cooker to the brim! I added a teaspoon of salt, and let the flavors meld together all afternoon.

And then…a family argument.  About something rather trivial that got blown up because everyone was hungry and could smell the soup wafting through the house.  When my husband finally asked what was for dinner, I couldn’t help but express the irony.  “Harmony Soup, as luck would have it,” I said.  He paused, and then filled a bowl.  I stormed about for a few more minutes, then filled a bowl for myself and took it to the table.  By the time we were done, he was complimenting my soup, and I was calmed down enough to enjoy a bit of seconds.

Harmony Soup, after all. 

Leftover Pizza

No, I’m not talking about that nasty pizza that’s been left out overnight. I know your hungover self doesn’t care about the grease that’s congealed on the top or the fact that you aren’t sure if you just swallowed the bit of cardboard that’s missing under the piece you just shoved into your mouth.  

No.  

When I say “leftover pizza” I’m referring to pizza made home fresh with leftovers you can find in your [relatively] healthy collection.  I’ll leave the other kind of leftover pizza to be the weekend breakfast of college students everywhere.

I just found a couple of flatbread pizza crusts on sale at my co-op.  Tonight is the night before Easter, so I don’t want to burden myself with something elaborate, nor do I want to stuff my people so they aren’t hungry for that amazing feast I’m going to dream up for tomorrow.  The problem is, do I really have the ingredients for a pizza?  My mind goes through the classic list:  pepperoni?  Sausage?  Mushrooms? Onions?  Nope.  Neither do I have some of the more “exotic” flavors:  ham and pineapple, barbecued chicken.  [Ick.]  I always have some pizza sauce and some frozen shredded Italian cheese blend, so I could stick with a classic cheese pizza, but I open my fridge and gaze in, looking for inspiration.  I see a partially-used bag of wilting arugula (Blue Moon Farms), a swiss cheeseburger (Triple S Farms) left over from last night, a sad unfinished jar of marinated artichoke hearts I had used for a quiche.  I just bought some dried oregano in bulk, and I can smell it as I sweep the fridge door closed.  I spread some pizza sauce on the crust, then wash and throw on the arugula. Amazingly, my leftover cheeseburger patty cut into little pieces is enough for a whole pizza topping.  I cut up a few artichoke hearts, and then throw on the Italian blend cheese.  I add more oregano, because it just smells so good I can’t resist.  Fifteen minutes in the oven, and I’ve got a “gourmet” pizza, and I’ve cleaned out the fridge.  Now, if only my Easter menu would come together so easily…

Pardon my French

I’m suspicious of anything that calls itself  “French”.  French fries are, as everybody knows, Belgian.  A salad in France would spontaneously wilt if adorned with what we call French dressing.  I have seen more French doors in homes in the U.S. than in France.  When a person says, “Pardon my French,” well, let’s just say that nothing that follows sounds like French to me.  And the kisses one experiences most often in France—on both cheeks—are definitely not French kisses.  When bread is toasted in France, it doesn’t magically become French toast.  What we think of as French toast is known as le pain perdu, “lost bread”, or more aptly, bread that is past its prime.

Whenever I think of "French" anything, I'm reminded from this scene from "Better Off Dead...."

So it was with much hesitation that I chose a recipe for potato salad called “French potato salad” in my America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook.  I skimmed through the ingredients, though, and was cheered by finally finding something that actually could have come from a kitchen in France.  The alternate recipe version includes some of my favorites:  radishes, cornichons, and capers.

French potato salad 

The recipe starts with three pounds of red potatoes, sliced into ¼ inch rounds, but not peeled.  The cooked potatoes are tossed in white wine vinegar, salt, and pepper, then chilled.  When at room temperature, they are tossed again with a vinaigrette (Dijon mustard, white wine vinegar, olive oil), a small red onion, sliced radishes, sliced cornichons (no dill  or sweet pickles!  The little French cornichons are required in this recipe), and drained capers.  The potato salad is served at room temperature.

The potato salad came together really quickly. Triple S pork steaks, sprinkled with sea salt and white pepper, went under the broiler, and I quickly sautéed a shredded head of cabbage in a bit of butter, and served it with a dollop of sour cream, to round out this lovely meal.  This is a meal that could actually be served at a country table in France.  A French dinner, if you will.

The finished product

Now, what do the French call “French green beans”, you might ask?

They call them haricots verts, I’d respond.  

Green beans.

Local and Exotic

Since my trip in 1997 to Bangkok, I’ve been in love with Thai food.  Some of the meals we had during my ten days there came from hilariously translated menus, one was eaten literally in a dark alley with stray animals wandering around, some breakfast items with that ubiquitous red pepper paste threatened to blow the top of my head off before I’d even had coffee, and for many of them I didn’t recognize whether it was animal or vegetable on my plate; but all of them were utterly fantastic.  Fresh seafood, fresh ginger, coconut milk, lemongrass, green curry, red curry, coriander, peanuts, fresh vegetables, exotic fruits, puddings, iced coffees….pure gastronomic bliss.  I’ve only tried to cook Thai food once or twice, though, intimidated by being able to correctly balance the flavors.  Even pad thai from a box gives me pause.

So I was searching for a soup or stew recipe, something to warm me on a chilly January evening, and found The Best Thai Coconut Soup.  The reviews on Allrecipes concurred:  it really was the best.  Ha! you say.  Thai food is definitely not local!  Let me remind you that I’m in central Illinois in mid-January, and there’s not a whole lot of local fare to be found, unless it comes from my freezer.  But, sticking to my philosophy, I had to have at least one local ingredient.  Lemongrass?  Coconut milk?  Fish sauce?  Nope, not only not local, but not always easy to find.  But what I did find is a miracle:  local shitake mushrooms.  Grown right next to my beloved Triple S farm, the shitakes almost lured me to them in the refrigerated case at the co-op, Common Ground.  Solid, beautiful, and delightfully pungent, and the perfect reason to make this soup.

Another part of being a locavore is extending that philosophy a bit to buy local.  Lemongrass, coconut milk, fish sauce and red curry paste are all available at my supermarket, but I went instead to a local store called World Harvest.  The place is a crowded maze of every kind of ethnic food you could think of.  The people who work there will lead to you what you ask for, (not just point in the vague direction of aisle 7) and have amazing expertise.  I described my soup, and one woman helped me find all the ingredients in a matter of minutes, even telling me that the jar of preserved lemongrass was probably not as strong as the fresh, but many people seemed to like it.  Leaving the store, I smiled, happy to have in some small part helped our local economy.

So, click here for the recipe, straight from Allrecipes.com.  I followed the recipe to the letter otherwise, but substituted extra firm tofu (much cheaper and more environmentally responsible) for the shrimp.  (The recipe could in fact be made vegetarian, as I spotted “vegetarian fish sauce” at World Harvest.  If, indeed, fish sauce can be made vegetarian.  Hmmm.  Vegetable broth could be used in place of the chicken broth, but not sure how it would change the flavor.)  I rounded out the soup with a scoop of jasmine white rice on the side and doubled the chopped cilantro.  Local + global =delicious!

Enjoying Vegetables 101

Exhibit A:  Creative presentation of the minimum RDA of green beans

Getting nine year olds to eat vegetables should be acclaimed as a skill akin to brokering accords between Middle East nations or getting the first HeLa human cells to reproduce outside the body.  It is so difficult I have started to wonder if I’m fighting against some invisible force of nature, some deeply ingrained evolutionary response.  Perhaps vegetables aren’t really necessary at the age of nine.  Perhaps a teaspoon of healthy soup or two green beans smothered in ketchup is the RDA of vegetables for a nine-year-old boy.  Perhaps I am forcing something into him that his body is rejecting because it is poisonous or harmful to him in some way.  What other reason could there be for making the taste of cooked cabbage so repugnant?  To his credit, he gobbles up raw veggies, so I usually set aside a portion of whatever I’m cooking for him to eat raw.  The minute it touches heat, however, it is an instant candidate for the compost pile as far as he’s concerned.  Only certain raw vegetables pass muster as well, nothing mixed together in a salad or grated or in a sauce or dressing.  Cole slaw is out. Potato salad is out.  Mixed green salad is out.  Anything with vinegar, oil, mayo, lemon juice, mustard, or ranch dressing is out.  Meanwhile, I attempt to ratchet up the creative presentation of vegetables, the sneaking in of vegetables, the humor and tactile enjoyment of vegetables.

They say that to learn a new vocabulary item you must be exposed to it in context seven to nine times before you retain it.  I’ve taken this principle and applied it to teaching Enjoying Vegetables 101.  I figure that after my child has fully rejected a certain food nine times, he is entitled to say he doesn’t like it, and ban it forever from his plate.  Until that time, however, he must continue to try eating it in new ways.  And, generally speaking, very few foods have gone the way of sauerkraut (which passed nine times very quickly during my German craze).  And occasionally I have some success in making him accept a new food without too much fuss.

This weekend was a success in that department.  I bought all the ingredients for a falafel sandwich:  grape tomatoes and mixed greens to chop; lemon juice, Greek yogurt, garlic, fresh dill, and cucumbers for the raita/tzaziki/cacik (cucumber dip); falafel mix (from a box, sorry); and, finally, pitas.  This time of year the only local ingredients were the mixed greens, the dill, and the pitas.  My usual store was out of pitas, so I went to Strawberry Fields, a local grocery and health food market.  They have a fantastic bakery there, and I often buy bread and rolls there.  Lucky for me, they had whole-wheat pitas, which felt fresh to the touch through the bag.  I passed up the other bakery items, happy they were out of seeded bread, which tempts me beyond all others.

I baked my falafel, which was in retrospect why my family liked them and I was “meh.”  You see, as much as a health nut as I am, I still love fried food.  Falafel, like anything else, should have a crunchy outside, but a tender, steamy inside, insulated by a lovely layer of olive oil.  Nevertheless, I baked the falafel, then lightly toasted the perfect pitas, then showed my son how to stuff them with all the ingredients.  Food in a “pocket” that you have to “construct?”  Ding-ding!  I win!  He ate all the baked-but-should-have-been-fried chickpea “cake” with all the veggies, including the cucumber sauce!!  He didn’t even ask what was in it!!  AND (be still, my heart), while we were eating it, he chatted with me about….FOOD!  He was comparing the quality of the pitas to ones we had bought before, he was asking about what falafel was, exactly, and how he had first thought we were having giant cookies for dinner before he tasted it.  I had a brief moment of hope, of what the future could look like, of when he’s older and we’ll go to fancy vegetarian restaurants together and critique their hummus and rave over their black bean roasted vegetable burritos and slurp up their carrot soup and gobble up their salads…

And then he started talking about Minecraft.  And all was normal in the world again.  And I will go back to my Battle of the Vegetables.

Tomorrow night, shepherd’s pie.  Thank goodness he likes mashed potatoes.

Happy New Year and the Glorious B.L.T.

When I was a wee girl, my maiden aunt visited us from Washington, D.C.  She was the glamorous aunt, who went to fine parties, who hobnobbed with government officials, and who always sent me the best birthday and Christmas presents.  I remember in particular a pair of silver strappy high heels and a “diamond” tiara; what little girl wouldn’t love feeding her princess obsession with that?  So when she came to visit, I was thrilled when she suggested taking me shopping.  We went to one of the last living real department stores and looked at everything from ladies' brassieres to luggage to dishes and crystal.  Then we went to the lunch counter, and I had my very first Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato.  I had to know and experience what the sandwich with the mysterious letters was.  I have been enamored of the BLT ever since.  The bacon was slightly crunchy but not burnt; the tomatoes were sliced thinly and fit perfectly inside the borders of the toasted white bread.  The lettuce was not iceberg, but a big, beefy leaf straight from somebody’s garden.  The mayo glistened, squirting out when I flattened the sandwich to better grasp it.  The sandwich was cut diagonally, something I would pester my mother to do for me from then on.  And, best of all, I was a big girl, sitting on a high stool at the counter with my aunt, having lunch at a real restaurant with real plates and little tiny glasses of ice water and coffee cups with saucers.  There were old men drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, and I was sitting right up there with them.  God, how I loved that sandwich.

Never mind that the years have made me aware that it was a little run-down greasy spoon in a little run-down antiquated department store; never mind that the bread was Wonder Bread and that it seemed like a fancy place because I was there with my aunt, and because it wasn’t McDonalds.  Never mind that my tastes have become more sophisticated, and my aunt has become much more, well…human.  I still love a good BLT, and it never fails to bring back memories of a happy time in a little girl’s life when she felt important and grand.

So, it is with a certain amount of forward thinking paired with a healthy dose of nostalgia that I ring in 2013 with something new and something old.  For breakfast I invented “Eggs Prud’homme”:  a small slice of Hubby’s whole grain bread, toasted, spread with my herbed goat cheese spread, then smoked salmon, topped with a poached egg (all accompanied by a fantastic fruit salad that I got up ridiculously early to prepare).  

I finished the day with my version of the classic BLT. In preparation of New Year's Day I had thawed some steak, and even had some foie gras and lovely salad fixings, but it just didn’t happen.  Instead, I cut up some organic grape tomatoes—the only tomatoes with any flavor this time of year—and washed a healthy head of leaf lettuce.  I sliced a few slices of Hubby’s bread, then opened a new jar of fancy organic mayonnaise, and then fried some thick slices of Triple S nitrate-free (a.k.a., headache-free) bacon.  We each partook of our own version:  Hubby’s was open-faced, no mayo; son’s was a lettuce roll-up, also no mayo; mine was a chopped salad with a dollop (official measure) of mayo.  It was filling and satisfying for my family, my present-day self, and the little girl within.  Happy New Year to all of us.