Beet Top and Potato Pie

  

  
This is a somewhat unimaginative picture of a thing I have posted about at least once before, but June is the season for using up random produce, because that is what there is. On the other hand, this pie was very tasty, and I have eaten it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner on several different days and it was equally good for all occasions. (I do wish I had remembered to add cheese. You can top it with some slices of brie if you want. Strongly recommended.)

 You will need:

1 recipe of crust for a 2 crust pie. I like a half whole wheat and half white flour recipe for savory pies. Mine is

1 cup AP flour
1 cup wheat flour
2/3 cup butter, cool but not freezing
3/4 tsp salt, or a bit more if you use unsalted butter
6 tablespoons cold water

Cut the butter together with the flour & salt until the butter is no bigger than peas. Add the water and mix gently just until it forms a raggedy ball, then refrigerate it until you need it.

Filling:

2 russet potatoes, medium sized
the tops off of 4 moderately small beets
a clove of garlic, crushed
a chopped onion
salt and pepper
plenty of butter

Pre-heat the oven to 375.

Cube and boil the potatoes. Drain and set aside.

Meanwhile, prepare the leaves. Start by thoroughly rinsing them. No matter how well the beets have been washed, little gritty things will have gotten stuck down in the stems near the beet crowns. Coarsely chop the leaves, keeping the stems separate from the leafy parts.

Saute the onion in butter until it's transparent. Then add the stems because they take somewhat longer to cook than the leaves. Add the leaves last and cook until tender. Mix everything together with the potatoes. Bash the potatoes up until they are not too big, but not totally obliterated either. Add salt & pepper to taste.

Roll the crust out into an 18" circle. If it's uneven and raggedy that's fine. Pile the filling up in the middle and flatten it out until there's about 5 or 6 inches of crust around the outside. Fold the extra crust loosely up around the filling and bake for 30-40 minutes or until the crust is as brown as you like it. If you can stand to, let it get browner than the picture. The crust is fine if you don't, but I think it's even better if it has more crunch. I was impatient. As usual.

Beets are a twofer. You can think of them as just a variety of chard that you grow because they have this bonus knobby part on the bottom which you can eat later. Possibly the reverse is true- somebody didn't care for the knobs, so they just started growing the kind of leaves that doesn't make any knobs. I didn't know this about beets until I started cooking them regularly, and then the appearance of the leaves tipped me off. Then I started to wonder what made people stop eating the tops as a regular thing- one time a vendor asked me at the farmer's market if I wanted him to cut the tops off my beets and I said no, eating the tops is half the reason to buy them whole, wasn't it? He agreed, but said that some people still didn't want the leaves. Seems to me that if you're going to buy a mess of greens, you might as well just buy beets with tops on them, and get two dishes out of them for the money. At a guess, eating beets at their smaller, newer stage, is a thing that people have started to do again relatively recently. A lot of farmer's market shoppers probably had parents who never looked at a beet before it went into a can, and if you buy a large beet that has been allowed to grow for a full season, the leaves will be pretty tough and unappealing. So, yeah. New beets are tasty, and the tops are good for eating.

 

Agedashi Tofu

  

  
There is a cart at 10th and Alder that does a fantastic job of making this dish. I still haven't got the method right for the crunchy/chewy batter they do, but this is close.

I had to look up what agedashi is, and apparently, 'age' means fried, and 'dashi' is broth or stock. So, fried tofu in broth. Which doesn't explain what it tastes like at all. The brown sauce is indeed based on dashi, but it isn't the watery bland stuff the english word 'broth' leads you to expect. In this case, it is an intensely flavored sweet-salty-savory condiment.

1 lb tofu
glutinous rice flour
oil for deep frying

1 cup dashi
sesame seeds
fresh grated ginger

You may be able to buy dashi ready made, but I don't know. I went to Fubonn and got a box of these things that say they are 'katsuo dashi packs'. What they are is a thing that looks like an extra large tea bag full of dried fish and kelp flakes. The box has instructions for making the broth- in this case you throw a bag into 3 cups of boiling water and leave it for 5 minutes. Take out the bag, add 1/2 cup light soy sauce and a tablespoon of sugar. Simmer it for a couple more minutes and that's it.

Heat about 2" of oil in a pan until you can see the convection currents moving the oil around.

Cube the tofu and roll the pieces in the rice flour until they are thickly coated, then carefully drop them in the oil. Fry them until the outsides are crispy- they won't get very brown. Drain them briefly on paper towel, then serve them on rice  topped with a generous splash of dashi, grated ginger and sesame seeds.

What's about the beans? I just battered some green beans and fried them. I figured that if i was going to have an almighty mess in the kitchen with the frying oil, and the rice flour, and whatnot, I might as well make some tempura to go with my fake Japanese food. Mix about equal parts flour and cornstarch with enough water to make a very light batter, add a dash each of salt and pepper and dunk in the beans. Fry them until the batter is crunchy and as brown as you like.

You know, this turned out all right, and I'll probably make it again to see if I can improve it, but rather than fuss around with my sketchy instructions, you should just go to 10th and Alder get an order of it at the cart called Samurai. It's really quite amazing.

Mexican Wedding Cookies

  

  
I keep thinking that the name for these things is probably apocryphal. I don't have any reason to think that, but I do. I think it about Italian Wedding Soup too, but I don't like Italian Wedding Soup, so I don't care. These cookies are excellent though, so I worry that I am calling my delightful little cookie nubs something that an actual Mexican person might roll their eyes at and think 'Stupid gringos, what do they know from Mexican weddings, anyway?' Never mind.

It is a super easy recipe. I followed it exactly. Unfortunately, I don't remember where I got it.

2/3 cup (65 grams) nuts
1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/4 (30 grams) cup powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups (260 grams) all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt

more powdered sugar for rolling the cookies in

Toast the nuts lightly. Put them in a processor with a couple tablespoons of the flour and process them until they are finely ground, but haven't turned into paste.

Beat the butter and powdered sugar together. Beat in the vanilla and salt, add the nuts and remaining flour and beat until combined. Refrigerate until firm, about an hour.

Pre heat oven to 350. make 1" balls of dough and place them 2" apart on cookie sheets. Bake for 15 minutes. Let the cookies cool for about 5 minutes. While they are still warm, roll the cookies in powdered sugar. Place the sugared cookies on paper towel to cool. Ta da! Cookies.

Things to know:

1. Do use butter that is at room temperature. If it is too cold it will be hard to beat, and if its too warm, it will separate and the texture of the cookies will be hard.
2. Be gentle when rolling the cookies in sugar. They are very delicate and will crumble up if you bash them around.
3. I used walnuts. Some people don't like walnuts, because they have those slightly bitter papery husks, but these cookies are very bland by nature so I wanted the hint of astringency to balance it out. I bet hazelnuts would be good, or pecans and rosemary. Or pine nuts and orange zest. Hmmmm....
4. They will absorb a great deal of powdered sugar. Don't be shy, go ahead and smother them in it.
5. If you have a scale, do use it. The volume of powdered sugar in particular is highly variable, so the most accurate way of measuring it is by weight. 30 grams is 30 grams whether you cram it into a quarter of a cup or fluff it up to occupy a third.
6. The recipe says to use unsalted butter, so I did, because I actually had some. But next time I will probably like salted butter better, because once the cookies cool down, the savory contrast of the dough with the sugar coating flattens out a bit.

These are really lovely things. The dough is only mildly sweet, so the sugar coating isn't overpowering, and they are astonishingly delicate in texture for something that has such a high proportion of butter and nuts, and no leavening. I think this is partly due to the powdered sugar (which contains cornstarch) in the dough, but mostly to the behavior of butter itself. In the U.S., butter is legally required to have something like 83% milk fat in it. Which means that out of 1 cup of butter, a little less that 1/5 of it is actually water and milk protein and whatnot. That isn't enough to toughen the gluten in the flour, but it is enough to create a teensy bit of steam during cooking so that the starches fluff up a tad and the escaping water vapor creates a slight leavening effect. The result is a cookie that holds its shape just until you bite it and then dissolves with a slight crunch.

I think they're superb. I ate them instead of toast for breakfast today.

 

Yardlong Beans

 

 
I went to Fubonn on Memorial Day in spite of the weather. It makes a very nice bicycle adventure in good weather, and a slightly chancy but still enjoyable one in less nice weather. I got some of the usual stuff, but I also got a jar of powdered ginger drink, a box of dashi sachets, a very ordinary orange soda pop with the most remarkable Japanese packaging, a box of preserved plums that are too icky to eat, and because I am trying to branch out from the tofu and broccoli rut, I got a can of braised gluten and a pack of yardlong beans.

I was skeptical about the beans being actual beans. Once I cooked them and the beans popped out of the pods it became apparent that they really are just that, albeit a tad spooky looking. I like green beans in any case, but these are somehow particularly good. They are more tender than any western style of green bean I've eaten so far, and they have a more subtle bean flavor.

a handful of yardlong beans
half an onion, sliced quite thin
teaspoon minced fresh ginger
sesame oil
salt

can of gluten tidbits

oil for cooking

Remove any little stems left in the beans, then cut the beans into manageable lengths. Put a skillet on medium hot with some oil and a pinch of salt. When the oil starts shimmying in the pan, throw in the beans and stir them around to coat them with oil and get them good and hot. Add about 1/4 cup of water to the pan and cover it to trap the steam. When the water is evaporated, add the onions and ginger, and a little more oil if needed. Stir until the onions are brown, then add the tidbits. Stir until heated through, serve with rice, and hot sauce if you like it.

Nothing special going on here as far as technique, but the ingredients are a change of pace for me. The beans are one thing, the gluten thingummies are another. Dad used to call them vegetarian abalone, and they are also called seitan. Whatever you call them, I called them disgusting when I was a kid. I'm not sure about them now. They are squishy and chewy, and I don't know if they actually have a taste of their own, because if you buy them in a can they are packed in broth and oil.They aren't precisely fibrous, or sticky, and they are a little spongy, hence their ability to absorb flavoring agents. But they do go very well with yardlong beans, so there's that.

Manly Mittens

 

 
I got a great big sack of yarn at goodwill. David needed some new mittens. He always pokes the fingers out of those cheap gloves he uses anyway, so I didn't put any fingers on his mitts. This used up one whole ball of very thick yarn, and a little bit of something else.

The blue yarn worked up to about 4 st/inch, the gray, about 5 st/inch. Fiber content unknown. They look like dryer lint. After my epic scarf project, I needed some instant gratification, these took only a few days of knitting on the bus during my commute.

I was really trying to not acquire even more stuff, but it's so rare to see any yarn at goodwill that isn't 100% acrylic Vanna's Choice or Red Heart or novelty Fun Fur yarn that no adult would want to wear that I snatched it up. There are a bunch of nice wools and a pair of lovely balls of lace weight yarn that might be alpaca. And about 8 balls of Fun Fur, but I'm going to knit Jej a vest out of those. She will never wear it, but her kids might.

David said something like "I want you to knit me a pair of underwear out of dryer lint" and I said really? and he said "No, I meant gloves." So there you have it.

Garlicky Cheezy Taters

 

 
I actually looked at my blog the other day and I thought jeezus do I ever eat anything except tofu, broccoli, and noodles?

Yes, sometimes I eat cheese. Melty cheese is the best, and if you put it on potatoes, it is even better.

2 medium russet potatoes

2 T butter
2 T flour
1 clove crushed garlic

1 1/3 cup milk
1/2 lb grated cheese, maybe a little more
tsp Dijon mustard
dash of nutmeg
a pinch of lavender
pepper & salt

Pre heat your oven to 375.

Cut the potatoes into 1/8" slices. Butter a heavy, oven safe skillet and arrange the potato slices evenly in it. Set them on a medium low burner, and once you can hear them start to sizzle add 1/3 cup water, cover, and let them continue to cook while you make the sauce. No stirring.

In a smallish saucepan using medium heat, saute the garlic in butter until it is just barely starting to brown, then remove from heat. Mix the flour into the butter, wait a few seconds for the oil to soak into the flour, then add the milk. Put it back on the burner, and start stirring. When it starts to thicken, add the cheese. Stir until the cheese is completely melted, remove from heat, and season to taste.

Pour the cheese over the potatoes in the skillet. Top with additional cheese if you feel like it, and bake for 30-40 minutes, or until it's as brown as you want it.

Notes-

1. Yep, it's exactly like making mac and cheese. Plus garlic.
2. I used cheddar mainly, but I always think it tastes better with more than one kind of cheese. Be aware that cheap Swiss will be kinda stringy though.
3. This is very fatty. I like to put it on top of some arugula to eat it. It's like salad dressing.
4. Roux. I think the reason you melt the butter and then mix in the flour is to coat the flour particles with oil, which prevents them from clumping together when you add milk. Instead, the flour is distributed evenly throughout the liquid so that as the temperature rises you get a smooth sauce.
5. Remember not to toast the flour in the butter. If you do, the starches will have a reduced capacity to thicken the liquid, and the sauce may break, or separate into a bunch of little particles in a thin liquid. Tastes just as good, but it doesn't look very appealing.

Rush job

  

  
Lately, dinner has been an un-photogenic, ad hoc sort of affair. There have been a lot of nachos. There was a pretty tasty chicken and chick pea pottage, but pottage does not look as good as it tastes. Lots of fried tofu. One time we ate grilled cheese and carrot sticks. It was delicious.

But! I did make a noodle salad the other night which I got a photo of before we ate it.

1 lb tofu
1 T dark soy sauce
1 T fish sauce
dash of sesame oil

1/2 cup peanut butter
1/3 cup light soy sauce
1/3 cup rice vinegar
1T sesame oil
1T sesame paste
dash of cayenne

chinese noodles
2 cups broccoli florets
salt

sesame seeds
cilantro
yellow bell pepper slices

Cut the tofu into 1" cubes and press it firmly to squeeze as much water out as possible.  Toss the tofu in a bowl with the next 3 ingredients and let it sit.

Combine the next 6 ingredients. This is the dressing. Mix well.

Boil the noodles in salted water. When they are about 30 seconds from being done, toss the broccoli florets into the pot with them to blanch. When the water comes back to a boil, drain the noodles and broccoli together. Run cold water over them to stop the cooking and remove extra starch from the noodles.

Toss the nooles, broccoli and tofu together with the dressing, then decorate each serving with sesame seeds, pepper slices, and cilantro if you like it. I like it a lot.

"It works perfectly!" he said.

So, what the heck have I been doing all this time? I made a scarf. An epic scarf. 2 months and 55,000 stitches of knitted scarf for my brother's 40th birthday. After I dropped it off, I thought maybe I should have gotten a picture of it, but I was basically sick of looking at it.

He sent me this picture of himself modeling it. Pete's One Scarf rules them All.

Tamales!

  

  
I have a powerful love for Trader Joe's green chili tamales. I love the fatty, puddingy, cheesey texture. I love how pillowy the dumpling part is. They're rich and fatty, and they aren't chewy at all, unless you microwave them until the cheese oozes out and gets stuck to the plate, but I like those parts too, so it's all good. But they cost 3 bucks for 2 tamales, so they aren't actually cheap.

I finally made some of my own. They aren't identical to TJ's, but the key factor, the fluffiness of the dough, is very close. Pete & Cynthia were out of town, so I went over to their house and borrowed their Kitchenaid mixer. It was awesome. I am so geeked. This  recipe made 19 tamales for me.

a bag of corn husks

Fill them like this

1 lb masa for tamales
2 1/2 cups hot water

1 1/4 cup shortening or lard or butter
2 cups broth or stock, cold or at room temperature

1/2 lb cheese, cut into matchsticks
roasted green chilis

Put at least 24 corn husks in a large pot of hot water to soak over night. They float, so you'll need to put a heavy bowl or something on them to keep them submerged.

Mix the masa with the hot water until it forms a thick paste. Cover it and set it aside for at least 30 minutes. I left mine over night.

When you're ready to make tamales, put the shortening in the bowl of the mixer, and beat it at high speed using the wire whisk attachment until it gets light and fluffy. Begin to drop 1" bits of the masa mix into the fat, allowing each piece to get somewhat broken up before adding more. Once half the masa is in the bowl, start alternating masa and broth or stock. When all the ingredients have been added, mix for a few more minutes to make sure there are no lumps.

At this point, the masa should look and feel like a rather light but stiff cake batter. Check to see if it's done by dropping a small dab of it into a cup of cold water. If it floats, it's got enough air beaten into it. If not, keep mixing. If it's too stiff, it won't hold air bubbles, so add a few spoons more water or broth.

They are a little messy

Drain the corn husks. Spread about 1/3 cup of masa on a husk, add a stick of cheese and a couple chilis, then roll the husk up. Fold the tail end of the husk up to keep the filling in, and tie a string around it. If you're freezing them, set them on a tray in a single layer until they get hard or the filling will ooze out. If you're going to steam them right away, make sure they sit upright in the steamer the whole time or again, the filling will ooze out. Fresh, they take about 25 minutes to steam.

Notes:

1. I would never even try this without a mixer. The ability to get the dough full of tiny air bubbles is all-important to get the fluffy texture.
2. Whatever kind of fat you use, it should be solid at room temperature, or it won't be able to keep air trapped in the dough. I used Crisco, because I was scared of the packages of lard sitting on the shelf. Not rational, but there you go.
3. Don't worry about rolling them up tightly. As they cook, the masa expands a lot. A bit loose is better than a bit tight, because you don't want the husks exploding.
4. The recipe calls for 1 1/4 cups shortening, but I think just one cup would be enough. I'm going to try the smaller amount next time. I think a slightly stiffer dough would keep its shape better during cooking.
5. The tamales will taste like whatever broth you use, so make sure it is a kind you like. I used concentrated chicken bouillon, which is fine, but next time I may use plain stock.

These are most satisfying. I'm not sure they're good for you, but I don't care. I even cooked a few in the microwave, which was a little sloppy, but it still worked. And it made those crunchy chewy cheese gloops on the plate. I admit that one of the things I like best about the TJ's tamales is the convenience of being able to throw one in the microwave at the end of the day like the lazy-ass I am. Eat them with salsa. You need something to balance out the grease. Unless you take them with you on a 7 mile hike, in which case just eat them like a barbarian with your fingers and lick the husks when you're done. And don't throw the corn husks into the gorge, that's crass.

Lo Mien

  

  
Like chow mien, lo mien in its original form doesn't look much like what you're likely to get at a restaurant. If you order lo mien, you'll probably get a messy stir fry with boiled noodles mixed in. Depending on the particular formula, it can be pretty good, in a comfort-food kinda way. It is another one of those things that dad made reasonably often, but that it took me years and years to figure out that when you ordered lo mien for carry out, once upon a time, somebody was trying to make what dad just called 'fried noodles'. That's what lo mien actually means, anyway.

It's all about the fried noodle cake. Once you have that, you can throw pretty much any stir-fry on top. I put broccoli and tofu on it here. Honestly, I don't remember if there was a typical thing dad put on his. I was probably too fixated on the fried noodles to care in any case.

about 8 oz noodles
salted water
oil

Noodle cake!

Boil the noodles in salty water until they're al dente. Drain them and oil them pretty heavily, then put them in a heavy skillet on medium-high heat. Don't stir, just let them sit in the covered pan for about 6 or 7 minutes, or until the noodles in the bottom have fused into a nice brown crust. Flip the noodle cake over and fry uncovered until the other side has formed a crust, then slide the cake out onto a serving plate. Top with stir fry.

If you want to have what is in the picture, you need

1 lb extra firm tofu
2 bunches green onion, chopped
a teaspoon chopped fresh ginger
2 cups broccoli tops, cut small

half a cup water, maybe a little more
3 tablespoons oyster sauce
a splash of soy sauce
a splash of sesame oil
about half a teaspoon cornstarch
pepper

oil for frying

Cube and drain the tofu, and brown the cubes on medium heat until you are happy with how they look. Add a dab of oil to the pan if needed, then put in the onions and ginger. Stir until the onions are looking a little brown, then add the broccoli. Stir until everything is hot through. Mix all the rest of the ingredients in a small bowl until the cornstarch isn't lumpy any more, then dump it in the pan. Stir until the sauce is thickened and translucent.

Notes-

1. I've been over the stir-fry territory a few times already, so instead of boring on about it again I'll direct you here, for techniques.

2. The noodles can be any kind you like. Chinese, Japanese, white, buckwheat, fetuccini, angel hair spaghetti. It's all good. For visual interest, use a 50/50 mix of white and buckwheat soba. It'll be neato.

3. Keep an eye on the temperature during frying. Too low, and the noodles will never brown, too high and they'll burn before they fuse into a crust. You can keep it at medium heat for about 5 minutes, and if the noodles look like they're fused but pale, crank the heat just long enough to add color. Conversely, if they're browning fast, turn the heat down and just let it coast.

4. "Flip the noodles over" you say. The hell you say. Actually, it's not difficult. First, make sure the noodles aren't stuck to the pan anywhere. Work a spatula under them and all around the edges of the pan. Then hold the lid firmly closed and quickly invert the pan. The noodles will fall into the lid, and then you can scoot them back into the pan. Ta da!

Adventurous eating

Natto is a thing I'd heard about, but I'd never seen it until I went to Uwajimaya in Beaverton last weekend. I thought it sounded like a pretty strange thing, and even though I like trying all sorts of strange things, I was a little scared of it.

It came in a 3 pack in the frozen section. I think the gist of the little cartoon is that you warm it up then stir it around with your chopsticks. The cartoon was baffling until I opened up the package. I thought for sure it was a picture of a large pot, indicating that the natto should be stirred into a pile of boiled eggs. Which made no sense at all when I looked up eating instructions online. Yes, I did need to look up instructions for how to eat this. Even so, that cartoon... Once I opened the package the meaning of the drawing became apparent. The orange blob is a little dab of seasoning, and the round things that I mistook for a bunch of boiled eggs are, in fact, the fermented soybeans.

If you've never eaten natto before, I have 2 recommendations:

1. Unless you enjoy slimy goopy foods, don't.
2.Wait until you are very hungry to try it.

I realize these are very ominous provisos, but really, don't get scared off yet. I mean, I ate it, and I'm still fine. In the first place, if you don't like slippery gooey foods, there's no point in trying this stuff. There ain't nothing slipperier nor gooey-er, except maybe a mudpuppy dipped in Elmer's glue. I don't inherently dislike slimy food, so that, per se, didn't creep me out. Why wait until you are extremely hungry to try it? Because it is so profoundly unlike any other thing I have ever eaten.

Here's what you do: You microwave the little packet until it's hot through. You realize that the room now smells powerfully like stale beer. As you stir the dab of sauce into the beans, and watch the gravy turn into a filamentous mass of glue strings that are persistent enough to suspend a couple beans several inches below your chopsticks, you think better of consuming them neat, as it were. So you stir them into rice, with some hot sauce and furikake, as recommended by some people online who are either actual Asians or are mocking Asian-English syntax errors. And then you aren't sure if you like it, or you are actually horrified but ravenously hungry. The beans are just beans, they are like smaller ones of the things you find in a can of Busch's baked beans. But instead of that ketchupy red sauce, there is this stuff that acts a lot like rubber cement and smells like flat beer, and whiffy french cheese, and maybe feet, or maybe something floral and herby. It isn't sweet, it isn't very salty. Sriracha and furikake really help jazz it up. Minced green onion is tradidional too, but I was out of those. What can I say? It made quite an impression on me.

They say that it takes about 10 tries to determine if you actually like or dislike a new food, because we are designed to be slightly averse to novelty. It's an evolutionary safety feature. Novelty = increased risk, taking increased risks = (in nature) increased risk of DEATH! Having a preference for familiar foods cuts down on the likelihood of eating something that will kill you.

But come on people! We live in the 21st century! Live a little! If a slimy soybean didn't kill all those Japanese folks, it isn't going to kill you. In fact, natto is comfort food to lots of Japanese. They eat it for breakfast, but I think I need to try it at other times of day several more times before I do that.