appetizers | Slow Food Fast

Microwave tricks: 5-Minute Plum Jam for Fall

Posted on October 6, 2014 by DebbieN

These Italian prunes are some of the fresher, better-looking specimens from my greengrocer’s bin this week. But overripe plums work fine too.

Italian blue or prune plums are probably the last round of plums to appear at my local greengrocers for the year (well, until they start getting in carboys of plums and peaches from Chile). Prune plums aren’t much to look at–well, okay, they have a graceful enough elongated shape, but cut into one and you won’t be terribly impressed–the peel is thick and slightly bitter, the flesh is yellow-brownish, not very juicy, and a bit stickier and less brilliantly flavored than the red and black plums of summer, to say nothing of the gorgeous green and mottled dinosaur and Santa Rosa plums we can get here in LA. Many of the fresh prunes end up overripe and still untaken at the end of the day.

Which, I’ve discovered this week, is actually quite a shame. Because if you buy them early and firm, while there’s still a tint of reddish purple about them, they’re closer to regular plums–crisper, juicier and livelier tasting raw. Still not the ideal eating plum, but not bad.

And if you take the ones that are fully ripe and disappointing and bland and not too pretty, cut them up and microwave them, suddenly everything transforms. Italian prune plums make a gorgeous, rose-red, vibrantly flavored low-sugar jam. A lot like cranberry sauce in both color and flavor, but somehow a little mellower, with the bitter edge off, and a hint of spicy perfumed depth.

Five minutes in the microwave, and everything changes.

Many stone fruits react this way to heat–sometimes sugar too, but mostly it’s the heat. Even very bland, mushy pale apricots seem to bloom into vibrant flavor and acidity when baked or simmered, and sour cherries go from slightly bitter and dull raw to world-famous classic pie filling with a strong almond aroma. I’ve rescued bland, spongy supermarket nectarines and peaches by microwaving them into fruit spreads with real flavor, but obviously good fruit makes even better jams and compotes. It’s just that when the fruit is good raw, I’d usually rather eat it raw, because the season is short.

The prune plums I bought this past week don’t provoke that dilemma of choice; they’re definitely better turned into a quick fruit spread, and maybe I’ll freeze a second batch for later. These plums would also make a great pie filling, like the zwetchgenkuchen that Joan Nathan first published as a traditional German Jewish dessert for Rosh Hashanah in The Jewish Holiday Kitchen. Baked conventionally, the quartered prune plums would probably hold their shape somewhat in the crust and look beautiful.

In the microwave, the plums quickly break down to a bubbling mass and gradually take on color from the peel–at first, bronze with a hint of pink, and after a minute or two the color spreads and deepens to cranberry red (as does the flavor). Sugar just to taste, a tiny squeeze of lemon, and a pinch each of clove and ginger balance out the tartness, and after a day in the fridge, the jam has mellowed and integrated beautifully.

The accents of brandy, cinnamon, nutmeg and lemon peel in Nathan’s recipe make me want to run back to the store and try it this instant, but after a week of baking challah for the high holidays and prospects for 100 degree temperatures yet again, I’m not sure today’s the day. Maybe for Sukkot, which starts later this week.

But the combination of plums with aromatic spices is right on, and if you’re adventurous you could always take this fruit spread one step further and add a small spoonful of brandy, a few shakes of cinnamon and an even tinier hint of nutmeg, even a little grated lemon peel. The simple version below is good on toast, delicious with Greek yogurt and plenty complex enough for me before or after the second cup of coffee.

However, the full-on dressed-up version would probably be a wonderful accent for goat cheese tartlets or a baked brie if you were doing swanky appetizers for a dinner party. I’d test-taste a small batch of the jam first just to make sure it wasn’t too rich with the brandy and nutmeg, because a little goes a long way, but otherwise, let ‘er rip. The plum-jam-with-cheese appetizers would also be an unexpectedly good accompaniment to mead, sherry or other apéritifs for fall.

5-Minute Microwave Plum Fruit Spread (makes about a cup)

5-6 ripe Italian blue or prune plums (or any other plums), washed, pitted and cut up
2-3 T sugar (or more to taste–I like mine less sweet, more fruit)
squeeze of lemon juice
pinch of cloves (maybe 1/8 t, probably a little less)
pinch of powdered ginger (a little less than 1/8 t)

Put all ingredients in a microwaveable ceramic bowl big enough to hold them with a couple of inches to spare, because the plum mixture will bubble up as it cooks. Remember to handle the edges of the bowl with a towel or oven mitt or something (folded paper sandwich bags also work okay in a pinch) because this will heat long enough for the bowl itself to get hot.

Microwave 1-2 minutes on HIGH (I have an 1100 W oven, so adjust times to whatever works for you if yours is older and lower power). The plums should be starting to break down and just starting to color pinkish. Stir the mixture and microwave another minute or so, stir again. If it’s not cooked as much as you think it should be, microwave another minute or so but be prepared to hit the stop button if you see it start to boil over. If it’s fully colored and broken down to a fruit spread, take a small spoonful, let it cool, and taste carefully. It will probably taste a lot like not-very-sweetened cranberry sauce. If it’s not sweet enough for you, add a little more sugar to taste, and maybe another squeeze of lemon, then let it cool all the way covered and refrigerate. It will thicken a little further and mellow overnight and taste more like plums, especially with the clove and ginger notes.

You can, obviously, also boil the ingredients a few minutes in a saucepan on the stovetop if you prefer. If you want it completely smooth, cool it and put it through a food mill or food processor.

This isn’t canned, so store it in the fridge for up to a week or freeze it for later. When you thaw it, taste it again–you might need to add another squeeze of lemon and/or reheat in the microwave just a minute or so to refresh it.

Filed under: appetizers, breakfast, Desserts, frugality, fruits, holiday cooking, Microwave tricks, sauces and condiments, shopping | Tagged: breakfast, jams and preserves, Jewish cooking, low-carb cooking, microwave recipes, plums | 3 Comments »

Stuffed cabbage in the microwave

Posted on September 23, 2014 by DebbieN

I was originally going to call this post “Nappa 9-1-1” because it’s about salvaging a cabbage quickly and semi-artfully from the back of my fridge, but realized how bad that would be once I read the recent earthquake damage assessments up in the real city of Napa from the 6.0 earthquake a couple of weeks ago. Things are still kind of rough up there. The Napa Valley Vintners association have donated an impressive amount–$10M–and have instructions on how to donate to the local community disaster relief fund. You can find a number of local funds to donate to online at norcalwine.com.

I love bringing home a bag (or more) of produce from my local greengrocer each week–especially in the summer, when Fresno tomatoes are in and brilliant red, green beans are green and snappy, apricots and plums and pluots are spilling ripely out of the bins at under a dollar a pound, and herbs like purple basil and tarragon and mint and za’atar are 75 cents a bunch. You can’t help but feel like you’re going to be a great cook that day, just by cutting up a few vegetables and sprinkling on some oil and vinegar and strewing herbs (and feta or Alfonso olives) on top.

I always mean to use up all my vegetables before they start showing their age, but occasionally I get caught with something unintended at the back of the fridge. This week it was a Nappa cabbage, which is longer and less sulfurous (when lightly cooked) than the more traditional green and Savoy cabbages. A little closer to bok choy. So I peeled back the rusted layers, hoping that some of the inner leaves could be salvaged, at least, and I got fairly lucky.

But what to do with them? Chop and eat raw as a salad? Always an option. But I’d bought the cabbage in the first place to try out a quick microwave version of stuffed cabbage that would fulfill a couple of challenges I’d posed myself:

1. Vegetarian (not a big beef fan, personally)–I’m using the lentil/rice stuffing I developed for stuffed eggplants and onions three years ago (has it already been that long???), because I actually made stuffed onions again last week and had some leftover stuffing in the fridge.

2. Microwaveable in a few minutes (to combat cooked cabbage stench and do it as more fresh-tasting than long-cooked)

3. Non-stinky, and not drowning in cloying sweet-and-sour tomato sauce (my two overwhelming childhood objections to holishkes)

4. Bridges the cultural/culinary gap between European and Syrian Jewish versions of stuffed cabbage by spicing the filling AND adding garlic and onions. It can be done, and should. And yet, I’m not stewing it to death (actually, that means overturning both Euro and Syrian traditional cooking methods in equal measures).

5. Fulfills the Prunes and Lentils Challenge, or at least hints at what’s possible, since today I had (gasp) no prunes left and had to resort to leftover tamarind sauce from the aforementioned batch of stuffed onions… close enough for folk music.

Stuffed cabbage rolls, as I’ve noted before, are popular throughout at least eastern Europe and Syria. Most versions contain meat–beef for Jews, beef or lamb for Arabs, some mixture of pork and beef for European Christians. But I’ve also seen some really beautiful-looking vegetarian ones in Nur Ilkin’s The Turkish Cookbook, and those were stuffed–of all things–with whole cooked chestnuts.

Cabbage lends itself to enveloping stuffings almost as well as grape leaves, and it’s easier to work with, cheaper, and (big bonus) unbrined.

In addition to meat or lentil fillings, you could try something like curry-spiced or Mexican-style beans and/or vegetables, a mu shu or samosa filling, whole cooked grains like brown rice or bulgur with or without dried cranberries or raisins and sunflower seeds or chopped nuts, maybe even fish (though I’m shying away from Joan Nathan’s recommendation for wrapping up gefilte fish and giving them the stuffed cabbage treatment). Perhaps for fish I’d want smoked (fake or real) whitefish salad. Or sausage–real or vegetarian, smoky and spicy.

It seems to me for sauces you could go well beyond sweet-and-sour traditional: a garlicky tomato sauce, a mustard vinaigrette, a smoky salsa with or without tamarind sauce, a chili-paste or z’khug-laden soy/molasses/vinegar/sesame oil dipping sauce with ginger and scallions, a polished herb and wine-type tomato sauce with prunes or mushrooms and onions, even (maybe definitely?) Korean or Thai peanut dipping sauce, especially if you stuffed your Nappa cabbage leaves with a combination of pressed tofu and/or omelet strips, spinach leaves, maybe some sprouts and shiitake mushrooms.

Whatever version you do, this can either be a quick path to dinner (use the big leaves and more filling per leaf) or to a platter of appetizers (using the small inner leaves).

Microwaving doesn’t develop every possible flavor (in the case of cabbage, I’m childish enough to say that’s a good thing), but it’s a quick way to play around with a classic at least on a trial basis. You could always do the huge foil-covered pan in the oven thing if you decide to scale up and go old-school.

Stuffed Vegetarian Cabbage Rolls

1 head Nappa cabbage, washed and with the core cut out
1 lb (2 cups, more or less) of (in this case) allspice/cinnamon-spiced lentil hashu (made w/cooked rice or bulgur, not uncooked) OR peppery lentil mititei-style sausage filling (substituting 1/3 c. cooked rice for the wheat gluten), or your choice of savory/spicy filling, preferably one that includes some garlic….
1/2 c. sauce–in this case, 1/4 c. tamarind sauce plus a tablespoon of chipotle salsa and a few tablespoons of water. OR–just tamarind sauce, or just smoky salsa, or tamarind with a bit of tomato paste and a spoonful of sugar, or peanut dipping sauce, or dim sum dipping sauce, or Asian-type prune sauce, or prune and wine sauce with some tomato paste mixed in. Or mustard/garlic vinaigrette (as a dipping sauce, not necessarily to cook with)…YEESH! too many choices…

Microwaved cabbage leaves, ready for rolling

1. Separate the cabbage leaves, put in a microwave container, drizzle on a quarter-inch of water and put on a lid. Microwave 2-3 minutes until the leaves are just tender enough to roll without snapping the center.

Start the cabbage roll with the filling at the stem end

2. Drain the leaves and lay them out on a plate for stuffing and rolling. Put a tablespoon of fairly stiff filling an inch or so from the stem end of the leaf and pack it into a little sausage shape. Roll the stem end over the filling gently but as tightly as you can manage, then tuck the side frills of the leaf over the ends and continue rolling toward the top of the leaf. Place seam-side down in a microwave container or casserole. Roll up all the leaves and pack them into the container fairly tightly.

3. If the filling is completely cooked already (the rice in the lentil stuffing is not raw or par-cooked), just drizzle a bit of your sauce of choice over the stuffed cabbage rolls, maybe with a tiny drizzle of water in the bottom of the container. Put a lid on and microwave another 2-3 minutes or until just cooked through and steaming hot. If the flavor is still too raw or radishy for you, obviously you can cook it further, going a minute or so at a time, until it smells and tastes right to you.

Drain and serve with a little more sauce on the side.

Filed under: appetizers, Beans and legumes, DASH Diet, frugality, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: Jewish cooking, lentils, microwave recipes, stuffed cabbage, tamarind sauce, vegetarian cooking | 1 Comment »

An Appreciation of Lox

Posted on June 12, 2014 by DebbieN

Homemade bagel with nova from a local Los Angeles smoked fish company

For its annual Mother’s Day brunch, the Men’s Club at our synagogue always serves a surprisingly lavish spread with the woiks–lox, bagels, fruit salad, eggs and mimosas. Although I’m not a huge fan of big and slightly-kitschy gatherings featuring big and slightly-kitschy piano acts, I really deserved someone else making me a lox-and-eggs Sunday brunch right about then. But at the last minute I had to miss it in order to hock my kid about her last oversized ridiculous semester projects for 8th grade (due the next day, naturally). Better mothers complained to the principal, who just smiled nicely but did nothing useful. I just figured we’d get through it all so my daughter never had to be an 8th grader again. It worked–salutatorian, even–so, moving on but not required to give a speech: win/win.

But the lost lox! and the not having to cook or do dishes for Mother’s Day! Then I agreed to chaperone a school science camping trip the last week before graduation and ended up with sand, grime, KP duty, outdoor showers, iffy Boy Scout Camp-style food, and not just one but 32 whole teenagers preoccupied with their hair and late to class.

So now that it’s all over I’m in serious need of payback.

My local Armenian greengrocer has locally-smoked nova lox (they have sable, too–I was tempted) and I had a bowl of dough in the fridge just sitting there waiting to be used up–so I made a few impromptu bagels the last Sunday morning of the school year, as soon as I’d gotten all the sand back out of everything and my kid was done with classes for the year. The bagels weren’t quite as dense as they ought to be because I used my standard pizza/pita/calzone dough instead of the genuine classic, but they did well enough because the dough was several days old, cold-proofed and straight from the fridge, and I boiled them before baking. And there was lox. Throw in a few once-over-medium eggs and some shmear and some fruit and hot coffee and you’ve got the ideal late-spring/early-summer breakfast, even if you have to make it yourself.

Now I know lox is a high-salt item–even the Nova. I anticipate it not for the salt, which I always think we could do with a little less of, but because it’s lox. A delicacy. Something to enjoy on the rare occasion when you get to celebrate. Something to treat with respect.

I’m not going to apologize for enjoying it, either. In the modern world of food publishing, people are forgetting how to do that. Even Jews. Maybe especially Jews, some of whom act as though our traditional deli and “appetizing” (bagels, cream cheese and smoked fish of all kinds) is suddenly something to shove under a rug or apologize for liking on the grounds that it’s not organic or locally sourced or Whole Foods or food-mag-trendy enough, and because it doesn’t include bacon or pancetta. Or kale.

The idea that enjoying lox simply because it’s lox isn’t cool enough anymore has gained a lot of traction in the past few years of foodieism. A couple of years ago, Martha Rose Shulman committed a serious travesty in the New York Times with “Lavash Pizza with Smoked Salmon” (she didn’t even call it lox). Toasted lavash is perfectly good for other things, but not for lox. Too fragile, and frankly too flavorless. I mean, why not rice cakes, as long as you’re being tasteless? But it wasn’t just the bread choice.

Somehow Shulman had abandoned the Joy of Lox. Shulman actually called her lox on lavash “a great way to work more salmon, rich in omega-3 fats, into your diet.” I have to ask, are most of us really having that much trouble “working in” more salmon? More to the point, does any lox fanatic really want to be thinking about fatty acids of any kind while eating it?

But at least she wasn’t agonizing over it as too Jewish. Mark Bittman pulled this inexplicable self-flagellation-in-print a few weeks ago in the New York Times, apologizing publicly for eating lox and bagels on a Sunday morning. In New York, yet. (Maybe it’s because he moved to Connecticut?) He’s kvetching about skipping his morning run, his usually-so-virtuous-but-betrayed-just-this-once-by-shameful-genetic-temptation stance on (gasp) farm-raised salmon, his devouring of shmear, which he says is too bland for the calories to like officially. He even had the nerve to blame his decision to eat it all on a sudden mental breakdown. And then he went further and called bagels and lox “comfort food.” As though it were in the same low-grade category as mac and cheese or mashed potatoes from a box.

Vey ist mir! I mean, come on. I’m pretty sure Woody Allen still eats lox without apologizing for it.

Bittman should be apologizing for being ashamed of enjoying lox (all the while glupping it). Along with apologizing for promoting pancetta and guanciale while professing a greener and more affordable diet. And for forgetting to add garlic to his recipes. That’s almost worse than deprecating lox.

More recently, Melissa Clark met with one of the scions of Russ & Daughters, which by now you’d think was the only serious lox and whitefish emporium left–it’s the subject of a documentary I just missed at the last LA Jewish film festival. The two laid out a spread for at least thirty or forty very lucky people, by my standards, but I think they were doing it mostly for a few family and friends–maybe 10-15 people–and posing it all on the table for the camera. It was beautiful but way too much. At least, though, she was both thrilled and nostalgic, the right way to be when faced with a complete beauty pageant of smoked fish.

Altogether, I could only think Shulman, Bittman and Clark all grew up in big cities with too much lox around. Because when I was a kid in the small-town South, we could only get lox twice a year when one or another set of grandparents came down from New York.

Other people’s grandparents bring toys. Ours brought pastrami, corned beef, half-sour kosher dills, pickled green tomatoes, real bagels, serious breads you just couldn’t get down South, and lox. All of them were special, not just to us but to our grandparents–real deli was part nostalgia, part roots, part pride, part simply great eats.

Pastrami and corned beef to go with the pickles and the tough, chewy pumpernickel and rye with the union label pasted on the end (you were supposed to fight for it)–these were the working people’s foods of their youth on the Lower East Side and the Bronx, and they still loved them. And so did we.

My mother’s parents, born in the shtetls of Poland and Ukraine, came to America as children and, thank G-d [only instance of poverty being worthwhile], couldn’t afford to go back when their parents got homesick.

Fast forward to the ’70s: My Grandma Thel, short, plump but ladylike, coiffed, and wearing those pale oxford pumps I used to think of as librarian shoes, would step off the little regional plane in Charlottesville loaded down with huge grocery bags full of chewy, crackle-crusted bagels, Jewish kornbroyt or “corn bread” (a heavy European wholegrain sourdough; no actual cornmeal except what’s dusted on the baking sheets to keep the loaves from sticking), rye bread laced with bitter caraway seeds, sometimes a babka, and always, a huge half-wheel of her own light chocolate-flecked sponge cake (for which I’ve inherited the recipe but haven’t tried it yet–will post when I get it right). I hope the other passengers were smart enough to be jealous. The aromas alone should have clued them in. Grandpa Abe, of vishniak fame, was a lucky man.

On the drive home from the airport, Grandma Thel would tell me and my sister how she just managed to argue another customer at Andell’s or Goodman’s out of the last loaf of kornbroyt with seeds because she was bringing it down to her very special grandchildren so we would grow up knowing the real thing, and that the other lady Continue reading →

Filed under: appetizers, breads, Dairy, fish, frugality, haute cuisine, history, shopping | Tagged: bagels, Jewish food, lox, Mark Bittman, Martha Rose Shulman, Melissa Clark, Russ & Daughters | Comments Off on An Appreciation of Lox

Purim options

Posted on March 15, 2014 by DebbieN

Regular hamantaschen with prune lekvar

Almond meal-based low-carb hamantaschen

Purim is here tonight, a little late thanks to the “leap month” this year (drawbacks to a lunar holiday calendar) but none the worse for it–it’s over 80 degrees here, which means it’s almost time for Purim. Los Angeles is the only place I’ve ever been, including Israel, where people were slathering sunblock on their kids and gasping for water bottles at a Purim carnival well ahead of lining up for hamantaschen and games. It was 94 degrees that year. Fifteen years of this and I’m still not used to it.

Purim, of course, means manic baking, heat wave or no, because the adults’ reading of the Megillah (the Book of Esther) had…ummmm….last-minute planning and no one thought about hamantaschen as part of the refreshments until midweek. I think I’m the only one left in our shul who still doesn’t care about having a fabulously original themed cocktail party for the adults afterward. Any kind of cocktail party is more drinking than I want to do, and I’m damned if I wanna dress up in full office battle array again after so many years sidestepping all the suits in my closet, just so I can fit in with the Mad Men theme. I’ve never even seen the show.

But I actually make hamantaschen at home once in a blue moon instead of schlepping over to the Valley to buy them from a kosher bakery.

So I did the stupid, crazy thing and volunteered. How many people? I asked–maybe 60. So I have SIX batches of dough sitting in my freezer relaxing. It took about half an hour, about 5 minutes apiece, to do all the batches in the food processor, one after another and weighing out the ingredients so they’d be consistent. And yet…after all the excitement from two weeks ago, I’m just not all that geared up to roll it all out and bake it just this minute. Maybe when things cool down slightly–half an hour? Maybe?

Friday happens to have been Pi Day as well–and to my daughter, who was supposed to be my second-in-command for this delicate operation, and to her algebra teacher this morning, that meant Pie Day. They had about four different kinds of pie for all the math classes, and none of them had to calculate the areas or volumes of the wedges they sampled. My daughter, of course, was so elated that she ate two entire meals’ worth of carbohydrate in about fifteen minutes, and still came out with a pretty good blood glucose number an hour later–good on the calculated guesses, there–but at the cost of running through insulin that could have lasted her three or four more hours if she’d eaten an ordinary lunch. Teenagers! Mothers of teenagers!

Still, not to lose the spirit of things too much. It occurs to me that hamantaschen qualify as very small pies, only triangular. So we eventually started the process of inscribing a triangle inside a circle–240 times, if we can get through all the batches before showtime. Me, I’d settle for 3 or 4 batches and call it a week.

The raspberry jam filling–all that hard work for the first batch of rolling and filling–leaked all over the place. Too bad there isn’t still a vogue for vampire-everything; the first batch would have qualified! Too thin. You need a thick serious filling to stay in place during the baking.

So–time to nuke the prunes for lekvar and the figs for the heck of it (plus toast a small sampling of the poppyseeds in my freezer to see if they’re still okay to use for a filling, and to make sure I don’t pour in the bag of nigella seeds instead by mistake!). I rarely see these anymore, but I still believe in doing traditional fillings alongside the modern, newfangled apricot-jam-and-chocolate-chip ones. It’s true that if we keep skipping the prune filling, we might not turn into our own grandparents, and if we miss out on the poppy seed filling (known in Yiddish as mohn) we might pass the all-critical drug tests (à la Seinfeld) with no interferences, but then again we’d miss the ta’am, and what’s the joy of hamantaschen without a taste of the past?

Hamantaschen Recipes

Low-Carb Almond Meal-Based Hamantaschen

My version of Joan Nathan’s Hamantaschen, with four fillings: poppyseed, prune, apricot/chocolate, labaneh/cheesecake

Microwaveable dried fig and dried apricot fillings (originally for fillo pastries, but still good for this, and a lot less drippy than jam)

However–if you are feeling “Mad Men”, you might think of reconfiguring the hamantaschen motif for cocktail party fare instead. I was thinking about this Thursday but figured it would be too weird. Then I saw an article about it yesterday in one of the big three newspaper cooking sections–dammit! scooped again! In any case, if you’re feeling a little avantgarde, you could do a batch of savory hamantaschen if you feel like it. Use rugelach, bureka or olive oil tart dough instead of the standard sweet dough. Roll it out fairly thin, and fill with feta or bleu cheese mixed with labne or very thick sour cream, plus a little onion and some thyme, maybe a pecan or two. Or something with very cooked-down mushrooms and onions (so they don’t get soggy). Or pesto and cheese. Or spinach with cheese and nutmeg and lemon rind. Or tapenade. Etc.

Chickpeas of all sorts and descriptions

Since Esther supposedly refused meat and ate only chickpeas, chickpea recipes are also more or less relevant to Purim. Mine are not particularly traditional–look up Iranian Jewish recipes elsewhere on the web.

Chickpea crêpes These can be savory or sweet, and they don’t require eggs or milk

The “other” moussaka–eggplant and chickpea stew

Hummus from scratch (aka how to nuke dried chickpeas)

Fast Hummus made with chickpea flour (microwaved)

There’s also the possible “nahit”–fry chickpeas in olive oil, drain and sprinkle with salt and pepper.

Or a cold chickpea salad with mint, scallion, garlic, olive oil and lemon juice or vinegar.

Or channa masala dal, something like the red lentil dal but with chickpeas (and not mashed)

Filed under: appetizers, baking, Beans and legumes, cooking, Desserts, fruits, haute cuisine, history, holiday cooking, kid food, nuts, Revised recipes | Tagged: almonds, apricot filling, chickpea flour, chickpeas, crepes, eggplant, feta, figs, Hamantaschen, hummus, Jewish cooking, prune filling, Purim recipes | Comments Off on Purim options

Post-Kiddush: our leftovers are better than yours

Posted on March 6, 2014 by DebbieN

Round spare spanakopita just for us after the big kiddush

Round spare pinwheel-style spanakopita just for us at home. The big ones for the brunch had three pounds of spinach apiece (and were cut in small diamonds), but they still went together pretty fast–except for squeezing all that spinach dry…

This weekend I did it again–I made the kiddush, or in common speech a lunch buffet, for my congregation’s Saturday morning service. My husband kind of volunteered us for this week and because he doesn’t cook, most or all of the cooking, shopping, chopping and schlepping landed on my shoulders.

Last time he volunteered us, it was for our anniversary, and I was ready to skip ahead to the divorce until I got over it, because it’s a lot of work to cook for 60 or so people who like to eat. And kibbitz. Especially when the 60 suddenly turns into 80-plus and having to use the synagogue kitchen with the more complicated and confusing rules on only a week’s notice. As they did this time…..

Soooo….a two-day hell of shopping and then marathon cooking-and-juggling in my little galley kitchen. The microwave got a serious workout. So did the food processor and the oven. Sometimes all at once. And it was raining hard for three days, so bringing things over to the synagogue kitchen as I went got a little tricky. I triple-wrapped the chocolate cake and stuck it in a USPS Priority Mail box so it wouldn’t get left out in the rain. Same idea for the spanakopita trays.

A few hints about cooking big and real for a synagogue brunch, learned the hard way by moi and passed on for your edification and safety (and sanity):

1. You can buy a 6-lb can of chickpeas for massive half-gallon batches of hummus (Mid-East brand, maybe Goya as well). Cost? about $5. But–as I found out, and I’m glad no one was filming the process–industrial-sized can equals industrial-strength steel. A dinky hand-operated can opener is no match for such an item. I got just far enough to be able to pry open a kind of spout but there were tears and long-fluent-repetitive-all-throughout-the-house swearing sessions involved.

Still….

2. If you have a good corner greengrocer, you can buy quantities of eggplant for cheap–eleven or twelve eggplants made for a large tray of roast eggplant and onion slices (with garlic slivers and za’atar sprigs and olive oil) plus a large vat of baba ghanouj. Only the five eggplants I nuked for the baba ghanouj didn’t feel like cooperating fully when it was time to peel them. Might have been easier to peel first, then nuke, since it was all going into the food processor eventually. Next time…

3. Whole smoked whitefish for whitefish salad comes two ways–cold-smoked or hot-smoked. What’s the difference? I asked the counter guy at my favorite Armenian grocery. “Cold-smoked is a little less hard,” he said. So I bought it, thinking he meant the hot-smoked was tough as shoeleather and twice as chewy. I was wrong. Cold-smoked actually means the fish is smoked raw, like lox, only a little drier and tougher. But you don’t necessarily want to put it in whitefish salad that way. Man, it still had the scales on too. I couldn’t get it off the bones for love or money, and there were a lot of bones.

However, the microwave came to the rescue. I cut the fish in half and Continue reading →

Filed under: appetizers, baking, Beans and legumes, breads, breakfast, cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, Desserts, Dips, fish, frugality, Grains, haute cuisine, holiday cooking, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, shopping, Vegetabalia | Tagged: baba ghanouj, buffet cooking, chocolate ganache, dolmas, fillo dough, hummus, Jewish cooking, Jewish deli, kiddush, microwave cooking, smoked whitefish, spanakopita, stuffed grape leaves | Comments Off on Post-Kiddush: our leftovers are better than yours

Instant Pickles, Hold the Salt

Posted on February 5, 2014 by DebbieN

One of the things that kept me motivated for blogging SlowFoodFast after the first fine careless rapture was my indignation at how popular over-the-top salting was becoming in popular food magazines, cookbooks, blogs and TV shows as chefs became celebrities, and how dangerous I knew it was for most people to eat that way regularly. A large part of my career a couple of decades ago was exploring the history of dietary sodium in cardiovascular research and writing about the DASH Diet.

What I’ve missed the past few years is just how many people, particularly younger ones, are starting to take up the challenge of cooking low-sodium and blog about their trials and successes. There’s a whole community out there, and they’re cooking pretty well. It is definitely possible, and generally easy once you get past the “how do I read a label and cook from scratch” aspect.

I just ran into Sodium Girl (aka Jessica Goldman Foung)’s blog-based cookbook, “Sodium Girl’s Limitless Low-Sodium Cookbook”. Diagnosed with lupus and kidney failure in her early 20s, she turned around her diet by dropping her sodium intake drastically to give her kidneys a rest in the hope they’d regenerate, and it worked. She’s been innovating with low- and near-to-no-sodium versions of favorite foods ever since, working with the National Kidney Foundation and other organizations. Her book, like her blog, is attractively photographed, full of cheerful writing and surprise takes on favorite foods.

One of the substitutions she makes that I have to approve of is a molasses-and-vinegar-based “faux soy sauce”. So I wasn’t the only one!

Another of her successful experiments is pickles. She goes for sugar-and-vinegar-style pickles, which makes sense, since they have no added salt in them, but I can’t help it–I have always cringed at sweet pickled anything. If it’s supposed to be a pickle, for my money, it’s gotta be a half-sour kosher dill and nothing but (or else an Indian lime or mango achaar pickle, or Moroccan preserved lemons, but that’s another story and still pretty high-salt at this writing. I’m working on it, but not yet holding out a lot of hope…)

Anyway, looking through Foung’s book reminded me of a simple, hearty and low-to-very low sodium version of my favorite pickles in the world. Continue reading →

Filed under: appetizers, books, cooking, DASH Diet, Food Blogs, Food Politics, Food TV, frugality, history, nutrition, Revised recipes, Vegetabalia | Tagged: book reviews, cookbooks, cucumbers, DASH Diet, heart disease, high blood pressure, kidney disease, low-sodium cooking, National Kidney Foundation, pickles, Sodium Girl, vegetarian cooking | Comments Off on Instant Pickles, Hold the Salt

The Carmen Maura special

Posted on August 31, 2013 by DebbieN

(The gazpacho edition)

My gazpacho has some extra ingredients like herbs and chile flakes–but nothing from the medicine cabinet!

So okay, five or six posts in a row–all summer long, in fact–with no recipes. Oy. I’m sure that says something about my summer between my daughter’s bat mitzvah in late June and the day she started back to school.

Contrary to the impression of no cooking, no cooking, especially in 100 degree heat (a sane approach to life if ever there were one) I have actually done some cooking, just not a lot of new dishes. So this post is just to catch up in summary form…

The bat mitzvah Saturday night dance party for instance–I made the cake for it, a huge monster of a Sacher torte. And yes, it was Duncan Hines devil’s food cake made with applesauce instead of oil for the layers, because it’s still better than from scratch, and a lot faster. None of my friends cook at all, I’m sorry to discover, and they were all bizarrely impressed that I didn’t get my cake from Costco, so despite how dismayed and embarrassed I was that they were fawning over a box mix cake, I took it as graciously as I could and didn’t tell them. It was actually a good cake, but huge. Four, count ’em four, boxes worth of DH for a very large 4-layer cake. Way too much. Apricot fruit spread between layers, killer chocolate ganache–from scratch, but easy–on top (another post will be dedicated to the shocking true story of ganache and its many creative uses, but it’ll have to wait until it cools down out here), plus a little creative decorating with strawberries and grapes by two friends when the upper layer split on the way to the forum, right before I could frost it, and I didn’t have the brains to just flip the whole thing over.

You know how that goes: you’ve rushed over to get there before the guests arrive, you’re wearing your grubbiest can-get-chocolate-frosting-on-and-no-one-notices black teeshirt and brown pants, you’ve forgotten your party clothes and your camera. Your friends see you looking harried and sweaty in the back kitchen, wielding a tub of ganache at a cracked cake and the chocolate fumes just get to them. They rush around sticking fruit on top like it’s kindergarten craft time again. They’re hard to stop once they get going, to tell you the truth. People really liked the cake anyway, and we had leftovers for the next 10 DAYS…still working it off.

TIP: don’t stick green grapes on top of chocolate ganache, they really don’t go all that well tastewise even if they looked fun at the time.

What else in the way of summer cooking? A bowl of dough in the fridge, turned into pitas and calzones (once the sun went down far enough that I could stand to turn the oven on for 20 minutes at a hop). Did that several times.

Frittatas–omelets for the three of us with mushrooms, onions, marinated artichoke hearts and feta, or spinach and feta, or just feta and feta…a lot of those, this summer, with about half the yolks removed and not missed at all. Makes a 10-minute supper, and you get your Julia Child mojo on when you go to flip it. You get to tell everybody to give you some room and keep the cat out of egg flippin’ range. Very impressive.

What else? Hummus–yet again, I know. Although I’ve made two batches this summer using chickpea flour instead of actual cooked chickpeas. Chickpea flour is raw, so you have to mix it up with water to a thick batter and then microwave it a couple of minutes, until it’s cooked through–it’ll be pretty thick, maybe even solid, but it’ll have lost the raw-bean taste when it’s done. Then I blended it in a food processor with water, garlic, lemon juice, cumin and tehina–which was fine, actually, and very smooth…until I packed it into the fridge and took it out the next day. It had set up like tofu, sliceable and slightly gelatinous! A little weird, no doubt about it. But still edible! and quick, dammit, very quick.

Other things–eggplant parmigiana, twice or three times, and really good. No apologies necessary.

Extra eggplant slices with a surprisingly good low-sodium chipotle salsa from Trader Joe’s and some low-fat mozzarella, microwaved and slid onto toasted ciabatta or fingerbread. Worth doing again, maybe even in casserole form–half salsa, half marinara, kind of a smoky parmigiana? Could be all right.

But it’s summer, you say. Where is all the fruit? You’re not wrong. Nectarines, plums of all shapes and colors, a few apricots, a few cherries, strawberries, and figs…all of them, eaten raw. But in the way of cooking (minimally, anyhow) I made a fantastic “raw blueberry pie” a week ago, cutting back a little on the sugar in the recipe I had from the San Jose Mercury News from years back, and using the microwave to cook the “jam” part (water, potato or cornstarch, sugar, 1 cup of blueberries, stirring madly every 30 seconds to avoid the starch turning into a rubber lump, and lime juice after the fact, once it thickened) before mixing in the other 3-4 cups of blueberries raw and sticking the whole thing in a graham cracker crust and chilling it.

But summer is mostly about tomatoes. Even in California, it is really, really HARD to get good tomatoes at the supermarkets, even in summertime (don’t even ask about corn, the prices are a disgrace to the nation). Unless you go to the Armenian corner grocery (where I’m headed yet again in about 5 minutes) to pick up bags and bags of huge, ripe Fresno tomatoes for salads. For about six or seven dollars, I can get ten or even more large beefsteak-style tomatoes…and these actually taste like something. They’re not the ones that go to the supermarket, because they just don’t last. They go to the small ethnic markets because they’re too ripe, and everyone knows that the regulars don’t shop small when it comes to tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and so on. They’ll get snatched up, no problem.

So what do you do when you get a couple of tomatoes that were pretty seriously ripe to begin with and are starting to split or get poked by the stems of the other tomatoes only a couple of days later?

I make gazpacho, because it’s a 5-second soup, it’s cold, it only takes what I have in the fridge, and I know I can eat half a cup at lunch every day this coming week and feel full for hours, especially in this heat. It’s the perfect diet food.

Well that, plus the fact that it makes me feel (momentarily, anyhow) like Carmen Maura in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. It’s probably the most famous (mis-)use of gazpacho at the movies, and very funny. Continue reading →

Filed under: appetizers, cooking, DASH Diet, frugality, high-speed soup, movies, soup, Vegetabalia | Tagged: Carmen Maura, food, gazpacho, soups, tomatoes | Comments Off on The Carmen Maura special

Little Green Footballs

Posted on May 26, 2013 by DebbieN

…and Other Lessons from the Fillo Stratum

Two or three weeks ago I got a frantic email from the assistant at my daughter’s Hebrew school: could I lead a cooking session for the 8th graders for an hour that Sunday?

Teens and preteens are not my specialty–I have a friend who’s really terrific with them; she’s an 8th grade and high school teacher and would rather deal with kids than write. I’m the other way around, and my own kid’s turning 13 very soon. Very soon.

Suffice it to say, my answer probably should have been, “Who me? Are you off your nut? Cook with preteens in only an hour?”

And then I thought–but wait. Fillo. It’s inexpensive (a big plus), it’s easy enough to fold, it’s almost (if you squint) kind of a craft. Like origami. Make some tasty and quick fillings for it (though no nuts–schools have gotten annoyingly leary of anything with nuts. How are you supposed to teach baklava? Eh? Eh???) and let the kids go to town, a couple of sheets of fillo apiece in the synagogue kitchen. An hour should do it, and it’s a cool, sophisticated food to know how to make–very different from the standard summer camp challah with blue or green food coloring.

So…I bought a couple of packets of fillo (about $2.69 for a roll of 20-24 sheets), a couple of pounds of loose-frozen spinach, an onion, some garlic, a bottle of olive oil and another bottle of canola oil (for the sweet fillings), a packet of dried apricots, a packet of dried figs, some farmer cheese (mistake, doesn’t taste that good; stick with ricotta) and some feta. And some dill and scallions I had at home. Also a lemon or two. I left the fillo in the fridge overnight to thaw slowly the way you’re supposed to, and not the way I usually do (i.e., take the thing out of the wrapper and let it sit an hour on the counter and then wonder why it cracks when I rush to unroll it).

I made the fillings the Sunday morning in a microwaver’s frenzy of immense efficiency:

Nuke a stick of unsalted butter in a bowl, pour it into a snaplock container.
Thaw the spinach on a plate–4 minutes on HIGH. Take it out.
Dump the dried apricots in a bowl with water to cover and a saucer on top–3 minutes. Meanwhile, start squeezing the spinach dry, and I mean dry, in handfuls over the sink. Nothing worse than soggy spanakopita. Except maybe soggy pizza.
Take the apricots out, put in the bowl of figs with the stems cut off, some water and a lid, 3 minutes for them.
Blend the apricots with a little sugar and water and lemon juice to make a thick paste. Get it out of the food processor and pack it in a disposable container with a lid.
Do the same thing for the figs, only no sugar necessary.
Rinse out the food processor, stick the scallions, wild thyme, fresh dill and basil in and chop them fine, drop in the spinach, a fat clove of minced garlic, and the feta. Pack that too.
Grab all the bags with the goods and don’t forget the oils and the butter and the fillings and the extra feta and farmer’s cheese just in case there’s time to make some cheese-only filling there and somebody wants it. …

I hustled, I got to the synagogue kitchen on time, I set up stations around a stainless steel work table–foil sheets at each place, paper bowls with a dab of melted butter and a pour of oil, plastic baggies to go over everyone’s hands instead of pastry brushes, the carefully unrolled fillo under plastic wrap. The oven–on. The fillings–ready to rock. And then I waited. And waited.

An hour really would have been enough time for that class. But none of the kids showed up for the first 20 minutes because it was also the day the photographers were herding all the classes out into the basketball court area for graduation photos. So when they finally straggled in, all eight–and surprisingly, three of them were boys–I made them wash their hands and then set them to work.

The first thing I did was hand out individual sheets of fillo and pointed out that they were nearly as thin and tearable as tissue paper. They were all surprised when they saw it. None of the kids, who’d been cooking all year and who had attended a lot of bar and bat mitzvah celebrations, had seen fillo “in the raw”.

I got them started on spanakopita triangles–also known sometimes as bulemas (Greek root found here; you’ve heard of bulimia, right? Didn’t mention that connection, of course. You would never want to get into that with a batch of preteens. Don’t get too disturbed, though. The rough translation as used in Hebrew is “appetizers” or “things to gobble”. Of course, in Israel “bulmus” is also what they call anything like the American after-Thanksgiving shoppers’ frenzy or otherwise a run on the stock market…so much for appetites gone hog wild…)

I naturally thought fillo triangles would be a cinch for the boys especially–you do it the same way you fold a paper football and try not to get caught in class. Only with a little more butter and olive oil involved, and hopefully no punting in the kitchen, because I wasn’t gonna clean it up for them when the spanakopita went flying.

Here came the second generational surprise, though: none of the kids, not even the boys, had any idea how to fold a basic paper football! They’d never done it. Paper airplane? I asked desperately. Continue reading →

Filed under: appetizers, baking, cooking, Desserts, frugality, fruits, haute cuisine, holiday cooking, kid food, Microwave tricks | Tagged: appetizers, apricots, bulemas, cooking with kids, Desserts, feta cheese, figs, fillo, Greek food, Jewish cooking, mezze, phyllo, spanakopita | Comments Off on Little Green Footballs

Frankenbeanies: Gigantes, take II

Posted on November 1, 2012 by DebbieN

Giant favas or gigantes are really as big as they look

Giant favas or gigantes really are as big as they look.

No kidding. That’s a soup spoon on the right, up there in the photo. These giant fava beans are huge–which is part of the fun of cooking them.

Because I had so much trouble getting the nice-looking pre-peeled dried giant favas to cook last week (and the time before), I went and got the bulk giant favas with the brownish-greenish-pinkish peels left on this time. And I was right. Buying the ones with the peels still on means that the dried beans stay relatively fresh and cook up a lot better–and faster–than the pre-peeled ones.

To peel them, dump the washed and sorted beans into a big bowl of very hot-to-boiling water and let them sit about an hour. The peels will start to wrinkle around the edges and turn leathery-soft. A sharp little paring knife makes it easy to crack into them and pop them off. Then soak them overnight in cold water. (Or soak the beans first and then take the peels off. Whatever’s easier.)

These beans were clearly fresher than the pre-peeled ones–in the morning, the bean water smelled almost like fresh apple juice. Bizarre. Anyway.

Rinse and cover with fresh cold water. And then you can actually microwave them 10 minutes (for a pound of peeled gigantes in a bowl with water to cover by about an inch and a lid on top) and let sit half an hour and they’ll be about halfway there, then nuke again for 5-7 minutes once or maybe twice, with 20 minutes in between. Or you could simmer them on the stove about an hour.

Or of course you could buy them in cans, but where’s the fun in that?

Filed under: appetizers, Beans and legumes, cooking, DASH Diet, frugality, shopping, Vegetabalia, wine | Tagged: beans, favas, gigantes, Greek food, Mediterranean cooking | Comments Off on Frankenbeanies: Gigantes, take II

Microwave Tricks: Stripped-Down Chiles Rellenos

Posted on August 1, 2011 by DebbieN

I know, Diana Kennedy (The Cuisines of Mexico, 1971, and onward) probably wouldn’t do it this way–or maybe she would, at home, for herself? Naaah. She’s still pretty particular. Eighty-seven years old, and doesn’t seem to have slowed down noticeably in her quest to rescue the disappearing dishes of Mexico. Her latest, Oaxaca al Gusto (2010) is a huge coffee table cookbook, beautiful and unfortunately for me, so full of rare Mexico-only ingredients, not to mention pork and lard, that I don’t know if there’s much I can really cook from it. I’m scouring it now for possibilities, but in the meantime…

Friday afternoon was vegetable-shopping day again, because we go through good tomatoes like a pack of sharks after a swimmer’s leg, and unfortunately our own backyard gardening adventure is turning out to be more like the $50 tomato kind of thing. To make up for packing our daughter out with my husband on his errands all afternoon instead of on mine (because I desperately needed some time off for bad behavior), I decided to do a little better than the usual dinner. Of course, they had a decent time, and so did I. Gotta do that more often.

So while they were gone I stopped at my greengrocer and bought a ton of ripe tomatoes that actually have flavor at 99 cents a pound (we have one left), a couple of eggplants for 65 cents apiece, some tart green plums, and these Anaheim chiles, which were beautiful and at $1.19 a pound, cheaper than the bell peppers this time. If you’re not completely clued into eating with the seasons, sometimes the pricetag gives a gentle hint of how the growers are thinking about any given vegetable that week.

Normally I wouldn’t buy Anaheim chiles–they’re pretty mild, but still hotter than bell peppers, which we usually eat raw, and the chiles are really better cooked. But when I saw them, all I could think about was stuffing them with feta for a quick pick-me-up side dish to go with mahi mahi and rice.

Some stuffed chiles are authentically made with Anaheims, I was encouraged to find (thumbing through one of my two, count ’em, two copies of Kennedy’s first book). But the ones that make good-looking cookbook photos are made with pasilla or poblano chiles–darker green, plumper to hold more stuffing, and with thinner walls. Also a little hotter, and often soaked up from their dried form. Baked in tomato broth or else stuffed with meat picadillo, coated in egg, baked, and dressed with a walnut/sour cream sauce (chiles en nogado) with pomegranate seeds sprinkled on top–a Moroccan-origin dish, maybe, with that egg cloak and the pomegranate seeds?

The other thing Kennedy specifies is to char, bag-steam and peel the peppers before using them, which makes the egg cling a lot better and probably makes them a bit more digestible. Very classic, but let’s face it, with all this stuff, including the sauces: I’m not that good, and I’m kind of impatient. What I really wanted for supper was quick stuffed peppers, gooey on the inside but not so messy outside– so as to avoid wearing it. (A girl’s gotta know her limitations. Maybe next time, if I can find an oilcloth bib my size?)

I’m not so interested in long baking in tomato broth or soaking fresh walnuts in milk for the moment–maybe sometime when I want to get the whole dish together, because I’m sure it’s delicious, especially if someone else is making it and heating up their own kitchen in July. But right now, time is ticking, it’s nearly supper, and Beauty and the Beast are about to show up in the driveway (my husband is beautiful for taking on the Beast, even if he grumbles while doing it.)

So I’m definitely not about to char and peel the peppers–what a pain, plus to me it makes them kind of slimy and slithery and not what I want to eat. Unlike Tom Colicchio, who consistently makes a fuss about it on Top Chef, I don’t mind the fact that pepper skins have a little bitter alkaloid edge to them. It’s part of what makes them peppers, and it helps them keep their crunch.

And, of course, I’ve had the experience of walking into someone’s house when they’d just been charring peppers on the gas burner, and it smelled an awful lot like dope. Not lovely, and not at all like them.

So anyway, these are not proper chiles rellenos by any normal standard. They just taste good, they’re not slimy, and they don’t take more than 15 minutes tops. My kind of dish.

In addition to the usual feta and mozzarella, I still had a few half ears of leftover corn on the cob from my daughter’s birthday party last weekend. They were still good, but there weren’t enough to share out for supper, unless–well, corn and peppers also go together (usually as a soup, but why not here too?)

Aside: That was surprisingly one of the easiest celebration dinners I have ever put together in my life — pan-grilled salmon fillets, tomato/basil salad, raw vegetables with bleu cheese dip, and microwaved corn on the cob. I was going to make a cheesecake but decided at the last to buy a Trader Joe’s frozen one for expedience and served it with strawberries and blueberries. It was surprisingly good, inexpensive, and quite moderate on carbs and calories for commercial cheesecake. Of course, because my daughter’s friends are all about 11-13 years old, at least one couldn’t eat the corn due to braces but didn’t know how to shuck the kernels off with a knife, one immediately declared she wasn’t into vegetables (I was mellow enough to shrug and say it was fine), and one couldn’t hack cheesecake so I scrounged her up an impromptu dessert of chocolate bar and cinnamon grahams because we had literally nothing else in the house dessertwise. Oy. And they all stayed up till 4 am, but at least they were quiet and sneaky about it. My goals for a good sleepover.

So anyway, I had made 6 or 7 ears of corn, broken in halves, and steamed them in the microwave in a big pyrex bowl for about 8 minutes. The leftovers were fine reheated during the week with a drizzle of water on a plate in the microwave for 30 seconds or so. But I still had a couple and decided to use the kernels for the chile stuffing, and they were delicious.

Stuffed Anaheim Chiles with Cheese (specific amounts given for 3 chiles, because that’s what I made for us Friday and again on Sunday with new corn, so this actually works out, but you can and should scale up, obviously, and I wish I had made enough to serve them a second time without starting all over.)

Anaheim chiles, 1 or 2 per person
corn kernels (1 ear or about 1 c. kernels made enough for 3 chiles, generously stuffed)
feta cheese, crumbled (1-2 oz)
low-fat mozzarella, chopped fine (1 oz/stick)
finely chopped onion (1/4 med yellow onion)
garlic clove(s), grated/minced/mashed (1 med clove)
za’atar (wild thyme), thyme, oregano or sage, chopped or crumbled in if dry (to taste; I used 1 t. or so chopped fresh za’atar–do what looks and tastes right for your quantities)

Wash the chiles, cut off the cap and remove the seed core as best possible without splitting the flesh (rinse with water to get out the seeds way down inside). It’s not really a disaster if the pepper splits–just wrap it around the stuffing and press it together, more or less, but it looks prettier and handles better if you keep the pepper whole.

Microwave the peppers on an open plate 3-4 minutes to start them cooking. Mix all the other ingredients together well with your hands–it’ll be pretty moist and crumbly, but you want the garlic and onion well distributed. Cool the chiles just enough to handle. Stuff the chiles with the mixture by hand, pressing it in with your thumbs as you go to make sure some filling reaches the tip end. Microwave again on HIGH on an open plate 3-4 minutes for 3 chiles, arranged with the tips toward the middle of the plate and the wide stem end toward the outside, or maybe 5-6 minutes for 6, or until the peppers are getting tender and the cheese has melted.

Don’t forget to wash your hands well with soap after handling the chiles–I find that even though the Anaheims are mild-tasting, my fingers still get a little of the classic burning sensation as an aftereffect when I handle them.

Filed under: appetizers, books, cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, frugality, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, Vegetabalia | Tagged: Anaheim chiles, chiles rellenos, corn, Diana Kennedy, feta cheese, Mexican cooking, microwave cooking, stuffed peppers, vegetarian recipes | Comments Off on Microwave Tricks: Stripped-Down Chiles Rellenos

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Microwave tricks: 5-Minute Plum Jam for Fall

Stuffed cabbage in the microwave

An Appreciation of Lox

Purim options

Post-Kiddush: our leftovers are better than yours

Instant Pickles, Hold the Salt

The Carmen Maura special

(The gazpacho edition)

Little Green Footballs

…and Other Lessons from the Fillo Stratum

Frankenbeanies: Gigantes, take II

Microwave Tricks: Stripped-Down Chiles Rellenos

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…and Other Lessons from the Fillo Stratum

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