Beans and legumes | Slow Food Fast

Persian-ish grill ideas for Purim

Posted on March 16, 2022 by DebbieN

Lentil-stuffed Anaheim chile with zucchini, tomatoes and red onion in a Persian-style vegetarian platter grilled in the toaster oven. — *Microwave-to-toaster-oven version*

Last year our synagogue signed up for a catered Persian grill dinner (served takeout-style for pickup) from a restaurant on the West Side of LA, and this year they’re doing it again from a restaurant with kosher meat options. Last year, we weren’t sure so we went with a vegetarian option that turned out to be a little bleak–just grilled but dry unsauced vegetables, including some very-middle-American-style broccoli and babycut carrots that looked like they’d just been thrown in with the more traditional eggplant, pepper, zucchini, onion and tomato. The trays were filled out with huge heaps of bright-yellow basmati rice and a little tub of fesenjan sauce–toasted ground walnuts cooked down with grated onion and pomegranate molasses. No actual protein, though, so I pan-browned triangles of tofu to go with it. It was still all pretty bland, though, except for the charred tomato and pasilla pepper and onion.

Even though we’re going to have a meat version tonight–presumably better, I hope!–before the Megilla reading, the story of Queen Esther is very specific about one of her virtues. Unlike all the other girls who were hauled up to Ahashverosh’s palace for a year of preparation for a beauty contest (only, as with most, without a desirable prize). Most of the contestants dined on all the delicacies of the palace kitchen, but Esther refused any of the expensive meats and ate chickpeas instead. She didn’t tell anyone she was Jewish, but she didn’t eat the meat, claiming she was in mourning. It may have been a factor in why she was chosen as queen–she wasn’t being a glutton while the getting was good.

In Esther’s time, Ahashverosh had allowed his wicked vizier Haman to convince him to send out a decree allowing anyone to attack the Jews. But once Esther exposed Haman’s plot and her own Jewishness, he couldn’t cancel his own decree, so he sent out a second decree allowing the Jews to arm themselves in their own defense.

The celebration of Purim, while joyous and relieved, maybe a little exaggerated, is always mixed with acknowledgement of poverty and violence around us; this year most notably caused by the horror Putin has committed in Ukraine. The parallels are pretty harsh and very timely; there are always people like Haman and Ahashverosh willing to do harm or make excuses. So I have mixed feelings about meat vs. vegetarian for Purim, and about celebration in the midst of and despite the everpresent harsh realities.

The best I can do is to say that yes, especially now, we need to commemorate and to celebrate the triumph of good over evil–but without losing perspective or forgetting. May we have more people like Esther and Mordechai–be people more like them, people who step up. And in the meantime, remember to give tzedakah and g’milut hasadim–not charity, but the justice of providing for those in need. This is the season for that too.

Back to food and cooking:

One thing I’ve been thinking about since last Purim is how to make a somewhat better-tasting vegetarian Persian grill-style platter at home. I did like the restaurant’s grilled vegetables, just not the broccoli and carrot bits that were completely out of place or the tofu I made as a last-ditch effort.

If you have a microwave and a toaster oven or a nonstick frying pan with a lid, you can do something good and vegetarian fairly quickly and get some of the vibe without a lot of work. And grilling will improve winter tomatoes, onions, zucchini, (full-size, sliced) carrots, cauliflower, whatever you have where you are.

You can make a tray of quick-grilled vegetables as a side dish, or you can take the long, stuffable peppers and put in rice-and-tomato, as for dolmas (stuffed grape leaves), grillable white cheese like panela or queso fresco plus a sprinkle of nigella seed or thyme and some minced onion, or my personal and higher-protein/flavor choice, lentil hashu as for stuffed baby eggplants and mehshi basal (stuffed onions), which are Syrian Jewish, but adaptable and delicious and not too far off. The lentil and rice stuffing is flavored with allspice and cinnamon and it grills up nicely, especially in a nonstick pan with a bit of olive oil to create a light, crispy, char on the surface. It also makes light, delicate felafel-like fritters.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, history, holiday cooking, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, Vegetabalia | Tagged: food, Jewish cooking, Jewish holidays, microwave cooking, Middle Eastern cooking, recipes | Comments Off on Persian-ish grill ideas for Purim

Microwave Tricks: Felafel

Posted on June 19, 2021 by DebbieN

In my last post, around Passover, I made (finally) successful microwave matzah balls more or less the same way I make microwave-to-frying-pan felafel, but then I realized I’ve never actually posted on how to make microwave-assisted felafel or why you might want to. So before getting into what I was hoping would be a nice quick extra, the eggplant pickles you need for a great streetside felafel pita (next post), I decided I should really put in a word for microwave-assisted felafel.

Felafel stands were few and far between in most of the US even before the pandemic hit, and most people still don’t make their own felafel at home, even from the available box mixes, because deep fat frying is expensive on oil and frankly kind of a pain.

If you’ve never eaten felafel, they’re kind of a crunchy, spicy fried vegetarian meatball made with chickpeas, favas, or a combination. At Israel’s felafel stands, Jewish or Arab, you get them served in a pita pocket and ask for whichever additions you want from a huge selection: finely chopped tomato/cucumber salad, tehina and hummus, harissa or z’khug, sour/spicy mustardlike sauces like hilbe (fenugreek-based) or amba (mango-based), sour pickles (the aforementioned eggplant pickle is my favorite and therefore obviously the best), sometimes they even squeeze in a couple of french fries, which I really don’t get, but to each their own, which is the point. All that ends up overstuffed precariously into the pita with the three to five felafel. As with a food truck burrito, there’s an art to dealing with it: you try hard to eat it before it falls apart and do your best not to drip all the different simultaneous sauces on your clothes.

The home version is a little easier, once the felafel are cooked, anyhow, but probably a little less exciting.

You might think that with all the toppings, the felafel would somehow get lost in the mix. But the felafel themselves are actually mission-critical. Especially at home, where you’re, as my mother would say, “Not a Restaurant” and not offering every possible permutation and topping ever, so the felafel are going to stand out more. They actually have to be good or it’s not a party.

Box mixes (Near East, Sadaf, etc.) tend to lean heavily on salt instead of more complex flavorings and they’re often pretty dry because people don’t let them hydrate and absorb water well enough before frying, so they’re never going to be great unless you doctor them with some extra fresh ingredients, and by that time you might as well make a really good felafel mix from scratch, which is what we’re doing today. It’s not actually much more work, it tastes a lot better, and the cooking, especially if you take advantage of a microwave, is lighter, easier and less dangerous as well.

GOOD felafel (I’m about to get seriously opinionated here–take it or leave it):

To get the best out of felafel, classic or microwaveable, what you’re aiming for is a crunchy browned ungreasy outside and a fluffy, cooked-through-but-tender-and-moist inside. And preferably flavored with something better and fresher than the usual box mix bare minimum dusting of faded cumin and garlic powder overcome by a ton of salt. And the main thing, which Whole Foods still doesn’t get–felafel must be served hot and crisp. Not refrigerated and thus leaden in the salad bar. And not dried out and tough to swallow–you don’t want to be biting into a golf ball.

So step one is to make your own felafel mix in a food processor or blender with a couple of cups of drained chickpeas plus fresh ingredients to taste.

Israeli chefs insist on raw soaked chickpeas for the classic deepfrying version of felafel–but this may not be so good if you’re microwaving, because they may not cook through well enough. I find that well-drained home-cooked chickpeas (I’m using my updated microwave black bean method these days) or well-rinsed and drained canned chickpeas work fine, and for that matter, so does chickpea flour made up to a thick paste with water and left to sit a while before blending in the other ingredients. I’ve even made pretty decent microwave-to-frying-pan felafel using leftover thick-from-scratch hummus as a base (note: NOT commercial supermarket hummus, which is too thin and too oily, with too little actual chickpea content, plus the taste is kind of shvach).

The all-important other ingredients are spices (cumin and garlic at a minimum) for flavor, a little flour for backbone, a dash of baking soda for fluff, plus–and this is where fresh beats the box–fresh vegetables and herbs for flavor, moisture, body, and general lightness of being. Onions and a good handful of parsley or cilantro–cilantro for preference–are typical but you can also sub in a chunk of cauliflower or zucchini in the food processor for maybe up to a quarter of the chickpeas and it’ll help keep the moisture. Other spices you might not have thought of but which give a more authentic and aromatic touch (in subtle pinch-not-spoonful amounts) include allspice, coriander, and caraway. Any of these in small amounts blends well with the cumin and garlic and elevates felafel above the standard box-mix “salt bomb” style.

When you’re happy with the mixture, process the whole deal until it’s a coarsely ground mixture that holds together with the chickpeas, onion and herbs in bits the size of toast crumbs or so, not too lumpy but also not too smooth or pasty (unless of course you went with chickpea flour or hummus as a base, but the added veg will still give it a little texture).

As with the matzah ball mixture from April, when you microwave, you want a little more moisture in the felafel mix to start with because the microwave tends to dehydrate foods. You want the mixture ground fairly fine, capable of Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes | Tagged: cooking, food, Middle Eastern food, vegetarian | Comments Off on Microwave Tricks: Felafel

New Year, New Food: Cabbage Rolls with a Greco-Ottoman Twist

Posted on November 16, 2019 by DebbieN

I always have such good intentions–and end up writing about them much later than I should. Let’s face it, it’s almost Thanksgiving. But not quite yet.

In late September, at the start of the High Holidays, we were finally starting to feel fall weather in Pasadena–one week quite cool, the next hot again, but at least for a while we were generally out of the 90s, so it was time to experiment in the kitchen, doing things I’ve wanted to try out for years.

Only it’s been a surprisingly busy month or two, so I’m just getting back to posting now. We traveled several times this summer visiting family, taking our kid back to college on the east coast, and heading up to Portland for a wedding–very impressive hotel with actual good food (it is Portland, after all) and its own kitchen garden with massive tomato vines.

Then I came home to articles due and a life-changing decision to make: after 25 years with the last of the noncomputerized Corollas, which I loved with or without adequate suspension and shocks, it was finally time to get on it and buy a new(er) and hopefully more fuel-efficient hybrid at a reasonable price if at all possible. (Note to the Resident: who in their right mind would want a new car that gets worse mileage? Get real.) But I’m going to miss the crank windows of my old car something fierce.

But on to new food for the New Year–this is still occasionally a food blog!

I had a 25-oz (1.5 lb or 700 g) bag of giant fava beans, gigantes in Greek, and decided, what the heck, it would be nice to have a large batch I can eat cold or hot during the week for lunch or a casual-elegant side with some salad at dinner. Once my kid was off at school, you know, I could count on supper leftovers to stay uneaten until I took them back out of the fridge. I like to cook but really, it’s been handy doing the “cook once, eat at least twice more” thing.

So I microwaved the whole thing in two batches, switching two snaplid containers in and out of the microwave for a couple of rounds, letting one cook a few minutes in water to cover while the previous one sat to let its beans absorb hot water. Once both were done and the beans were tender, I drained them and started pinching off the loose dark gray skins. Great–well, I had enough for two different recipes. One was going to be the marinated beans with rosemary and rosé. The other batch–well, I could freeze it for later. Or…

And then I thought about two striking recipes I’ve meant to try for years, both for cabbage rolls very different from the sweet-and-sour stuffed cabbage my great-aunts used to make, and which I don’t really like very much even now that I’m a supposed adult.

One version from Rena Salaman’s The Greek Cook: Simple Seasonal Food (Anness, 2001) has a chunky filling of smoked pork and an avgolemono sauce, which I’ve wanted to do a vegetarian or at least kosher riff on for years. Combining lemony sauce with a smoky filling is right in line with my love for Middle Eastern food…and speaking of, the other cabbage rolls, the ones that first stopped me in my tracks, came from The Turkish Cookbook: Regional Recipes and Stories by Nur Ilkin and Sheilah Kaufman (Interlink Books, 2010) and were vegetarian to begin with.

What makes a cookbook worth trying are the foods and flavors you don’t already know. The first photograph I saw the first time I opened The Turkish Cookbook, from somewhere in the middle of the book and the region of Marmara, was a beautiful plate of vegetarian cabbage rolls so translucent you could see the filling–roasted chestnuts and rice. These were flavored with cinnamon and allspice, mint, parsley and dill, stewed in olive oil and served cold, like most dolmas, with lemon wedges. Quite a combination of flavors, and unexpectedly beautiful.

Here was something I’d never seen in another Turkish or Middle Eastern cookbook, but I could tell from the description that the flavors would work. My imagination started running away with me and when I first saw them, I thought…chestnuts? Can I get them? It is fall–maybe they’re in my greengrocer’s this week. If not, is there something a little less expensive that tastes similar–a little potatoey, tinged with sweet–how about those giant dried fava beans? But it took me more than five years to try it. Now (meaning, back in September) seemed a pretty good time.

Bridging the gap between the two versions–Greek and Turkish–I decided to make a fava filling and flavor it more or less as for the Turkish version, but add the lemon and smoke factors of Rena Salaman’s cabbage rolls by saucing mine with tehina and sprinkling with paprika and caraway seed.

And of course, I was going to do most and frankly all of it in the microwave. Except for the rolling–microwaves don’t make that step shorter! But steaming the cabbage leaves, cooking the beans (already done), and stewing the cabbage rolls in sauce–all nicely microwaveable.

The only thing I didn’t do was add rice or currants and pine nuts to the bean filling. The rice might have held the cabbage rolls together a bit better when trying to eat them. But they were pretty delicious hot or cold and lasted me a couple of days.

Cabbage Rolls with Giant Favas and Tehina

Loosely adapted from The Turkish Cookbook and The Greek Cook Simple, Seasonal Food as noted above. You might want to stir in a bit of cooked plain rice to help keep the rolls together.

Filling (flexible on amounts here, but let’s say for a couple of cups of cooked beans):

cooked, peeled giant fava beans
chopped onion
Allspice, cinnamon, coriander, fennel seed, black peppercorns, (salt)
Mint, dill–chopped fresh if possible, about a small handful each, 2-3 sprigs
Garlic–minced/mashed/grated, 1 fairly sizeable clove or to taste
Olive oil
Lemon juice

Heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a nonstick pan with about half a chopped onion, a teaspoon each of ground allspice and cinnamon, half a teaspoon each of coriander and fennel seed and a good grinding of fresh-ground black pepper. Stir occasionally until the onion starts to brown. If needed, add a quarter-cup of water, stir, and let cook down to keep things from sticking and to get the onion cooked so it can start browning. Squeeze on a bit of lemon juice, then add the cooked, peeled favas and more juice and more olive oil. Add the garlic and the chopped fresh herbs and continue to stir/toss in the frying pan until the beans are coated but not swimming in liquid, and they’re quite tender–you can add bits of water once or twice and let it all cook down. Taste for salt before adding any. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, books, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: food, recipes, vegetarian cooking | Comments Off on New Year, New Food: Cabbage Rolls with a Greco-Ottoman Twist

Microwave Tricks: Black Beans

Posted on September 12, 2017 by DebbieN

Cooking seasonally is a tricky thing–especially if your season currently includes hurricanes or extreme heat. Pasadena has finally cooled down to 80s/90s with a bit of cloud cover, but last week’s 105-degree afternoons were a serious challenge. It was so bad the only time to go out for a walk was about 5:30 in the morning. Hard to think school has been in session for a month, it’s already September, and Rosh Hashanah is a week and a half away. Running the oven is, to put it bluntly, not an option, and the stove top isn’t much better in my small and easily overheated galley kitchen.

Microwaving is a powerful way to cut the time and pain (and airconditioning bills) for bulk cooking of things like vegetables, rice, pasta…and dried beans, which are much cheaper and more versatile (and much lower in sodium) than canned. Make a bean stew or chili and you can zap a portion of it at will later in the week. Plus bean salads can be served cold–a plus for weeks like the ones we’ve had recently.

But for microwaving, you usually have to adjust whatever method is spelled out in a recipe to your oven, your containers, your food quantities. Microwave times are sensitive to all of those factors, plus how much water you have (water’s the main molecule microwave radiation acts on) and whether or not you’ve got a lid.

Most people don’t try to make changes based on their first-run results and most cookbooks never really explain how to make useful adjustments. Predictably, most microwave cookbooks end up in the Last Chance bin at your local Friends of the Library booksale.

It’s a shame, because once you’ve got your timing and so on down, you can repeat it with reliable results.

Over the years I’ve posted basic heat-to-simmer-and-let-sit-to-absorb microwave methods for cooking split peas, chickpeas, lentils and other bulk dried beans. Lentils and split peas always did work out well without needing to soak them first–they tend to be easier to cook quickly by standard stovetop boiling too. Chickpeas work okay if you presoak them or hot-soak in the microwave (heat briefly in water just to cover, let stand 15 minutes or so and let them swell up) before the main cooking, and adding a dash of baking soda to the soak water really helps. Same with gigantes (giant favas)–which I’ve now decided cook better with the skins left on, same as if you were boiling them, and they’re certainly a lot quicker and easier to peel afterward–also more fun.

But some beans just seem to toughen if you don’t presoak overnight or if you microwave them too long. Black beans and kidney beans have given me more trouble than they seem to be worth–and I’m a bit reluctant to post this because it’s fussier than I like to admit even after adjusting the method successfully. Microwaving isn’t supposed to take more time and fuss than straight boiling on a stove, or working with a pressure cooker, if you have and trust yourself with one.

But this is a good illustration of how to use a microwave as a workaround when you don’t, and it shows you how you might think about making adjustments based on what the food is doing or not doing.

I microwave because I want something relatively safe, that doesn’t heat up the kitchen, and that turns itself off when done because, let’s face it, I’d rather be reading or writing than waiting for a pot of water to boil or jumping up at the whistle to avert an explosion. And I want the beans properly cooked and tender in less total microwave time at the least and without having to boil them afterward on the stove. I’ve done that before and I’ll probably do again if it ever cools down enough, but I’d rather not have to. The prior microwaving steps still shorten the stovetop time to maybe half an hour, but really, I’d rather it were all microwave, no fuss (I can dream, can’t I?)

So after a rethink of my previous methods, I’ve made some changes to the way I cook black beans from scratch by microwave. It also works for things like brown rice, steelcut oats, and other tough, uncut, unpeeled whole grains like farro or pearl barley when you’ve forgotten to put them up for soaking overnight, and at least for the rice it’s quicker than the 45 minutes or so of my previous brown rice method–maybe 20-30 minutes for a pound or two of brown rice. For the beans, maybe an hour of time total, with sitting and rechecking. Maybe less if your beans are fresh enough and/or you remembered to soak them overnight first.

Cracking the method

It starts with the water. I had been covering a pound of dried beans (or brown rice) with more than an inch of water and heating it all, or else heating that much water by itself (more than a quart) and then tipping in the rinsed beans to soak for a bit. But since the water molecules are what the microwave heats up first for preference, the more water you have, the longer it takes for the Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, DASH Diet, frugality, Grains, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes | Tagged: food, microwave cooking, recipes, vegetarian cooking | 2 Comments »

Hot Air

Posted on June 24, 2016 by DebbieN

The last two or three months of school seems to be getting more and more fraught every year–for parents, certainly. I’ve just woken up to the fact that I’ve been offline for something like three months now–March! yeesh! Not because I had nothing new to say about food, exactly, but because I had three or four competing ideas and no time to figure out pictures for the posts. And as everybody knows, if you didn’t take a picture of it, it practically didn’t happen. Just like all those tourists who used go to the Grand Canyon and (back in the day of actual film) had to wait for their pictures to be developed to see what it looked like…

And now that school’s out, it’s hot. 107 degrees twice this week in Pasadena, smoke in the air from the San Gabriel fire not too far away, and no desire to cook, walk during the day, or listen to anything resembling hot air.

Because the recent spate of presidential campaigning has become poised to take away almost any American’s appetite for a while. Just read a newspaper online and look at the prominent photos and bombastic quotations and examples of rank cowardice.

I mean, yeah, I voted in the California primary two weeks ago, and I even researched all the local judges and assemblypeople for my district this time, hoping to make something count or at least not to commit any hideous mistakes.

Contrary to what you might think, reading the candidates’ own statements will actually give you a feel for what kind of people they are, whether they give a flying leap about their prospective constituents and whether they know how to tie their own shoes. Reading through about fifteen last-minute write-in candidate statements for various assembly-and-county-supervisor-type posts was pretty entertaining, actually–most of the hopefuls (you could guess which parties) stated their qualifications as “I believe in God.” Seriously. Sum total.

Nationalistic and bigoted fervor seem to be going around, though. To wit, “Brexit”, which actually won the vote today. Not that I don’t understand Britain’s–and everyone else’s–frustration with the EU administration, but the vote results and the resulting–utterly predictable–mess announced this morning are really disheartening.

Some are calling it a shot in the dark; to me it looks like a solid a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-why-don’t-you move. It’ll take at least two years to execute, cost an immediate fortune in lost business and one-downmanship, and probably cost a lot more time, money and headache than previously suspected to resolve with the EU countries. Let’s face it; if Trump (king of the gold-tone hot air vent) thinks that it’s a great idea, you know you’ve gone wrong somewhere. Scotland, where his fabled floundering golf courses are located, went solidly for “remain,” by the way…

So is it any wonder I feel like taking a major break from my computer, my kitchen, and possibly your kitchen as well? If only to soothe your eyeballs and your rapidly developing ulcer, for which I apologize profoundly. Oy.

Now that that’s over, I guess I have no more excuses. What was I going to post all this time, anyway?

Harking back to early April, it looks like I made a couple of tries at something about microwaveable side dishes for Passover seders. Yes, it’s now too late to care where I hid the afikoman, but I maintain that the ability to microwave greens like asparagus or broccoli to perfection in a couple of minutes at the drop of a hat can save a meal–Passover or not–and some heat in the kitchen. If you’re vegetarian or leaning toward it, some of the not-chicken microwaveable soups can also be kind of handy and quick to nuke and store in those big snaplock containers in the fridge and free up your stove.

I didn’t go so far as to try any microwave matzah balls. No idea whether that would be a great idea or a terrible one, I was too not-chicken to try it. What can I say–be relieved. Be very relieved.

However, a crustless Israeli-style spinach and feta casserole, basically a quiche but more rustic in texture, was a hit both conventionally baked and browned for a Saturday congregation lunch during Passover and later for us at home via the quickie microwave method (minus the crust, so you don’t need the oven at all). It’s less glamorous-looking, more get-it-on-the-table-and-don’t-heat-up-the-house.

Unfortunately for the spinach and feta thing, it turns out there are a gazillion of these posts all over the web, especially on low-carber fitness sites. Which takes away some of the charm of posting about it. But it’s still a good and very simple dish.

Israeli Spinach and Feta Crustless Quiche

Per casserole dish:

6 eggs
1 c. milk (skim is fine)
1 lb. thawed and squeezed-out frozen spinach
1 lg clove garlic, minced/mashed/grated
2-3 chopped scallions
handful of chopped dill or 1-2 T dried
6-8 oz. crumbled feta

Toss the spinach, herbs and feta lightly in the casserole dish so there are visible clumps of cheese (i.e., don’t blend it too fine), mix the eggs and milk together and pour them over. Optional–grate or sprinkle a pinch of nutmeg on top. Either bake about 35-45 minutes at 350F, which makes it all pretty, puffed and browned on top, or (as I see it, the better option for Pasadena weather), just nuke it covered in a microwaveable stoneware casserole for about 7-8 minutes until puffed and cooked through to keep your kitchen from sweltering.

…Are we sensing a theme here? I hope so–because yes, it’s actually been 107 degrees this week in Pasadena. I’m not that good at keeping my cool or not cooking at all (don’t ask about the sourdough I “rescued” by baking around midnight with all the doors and windows open when the temperature dropped below 90…) But I’m trying hard not to cook.

When it’s this hot, dinner becomes a pastiche of sort-of-niçoise salads with beans or canned tuna added, maybe some cold hard-boiled or medium-boiled eggs. I’m also not above making a dinner of wedges of leftover cauliflower omelet reheated (or not) in the microwave, and either tomato-cucumber salad or some sliced tomatoes with vinegar, olive oil, maybe basil flowers from the struggling plant outside.

The big box of grab-and-go salad vegetables is still looking like a good strategy too–veg that doesn’t wilt in an instant is as valuable in summer as in winter. As is shredded Greek cabbage salad. Cold raw or microwave-blanched green beans, romano beans, cauliflower or broccoli with mustard dressing, Italian-type vinaigrette, or a yogurt-based dip is also a relief.

Here are a few other hot weather ideas dragged from the depths of my blank-book cookbooks, which I now realize I’ve been keeping more than half my life.

Cold marinated tofu

Tofu is actually pretty handy to have in hot weather–either nuked with vegetables instead of stir-frying if you can stand to eat it hot, or else sliced cold and marinated for ~ half an hour with jao tze dipping sauce ingredients poured over it. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, Dairy, Dips, frugality, fruits, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, salads | Tagged: food, hot-weather cooking, recipes | Comments Off on Hot Air

Chickpea Crêpes, Masala Dosa style

Posted on March 25, 2015 by DebbieN

instant dosas with chickpea flour, ground rice and yogurt

Project 1 of Panic Week: “instant” dosas made with chickpea flour, rice and yogurt. The heavy dose of mustard seed and black pepper is surprisingly good.

Planning the cooking for Passover usually means thinking about the week itself, buying matzah and gefilte fish and horseradish and so on. But for me, it also means using up the open bags of flour, beans, rice and pasta, plus whatever yogurt, cheese and milk I have left, and yet not overdosing on starches. And I’ve just gotten the taxes done, so it’s time to look in the fridge and panic.

We’ve got just over a week to go before Passover, and there’s still a lot of chametz in the house…a pack of fillo (luckily only one), a pound each of dried chickpeas and red lentils, a bag of mung beans I don’t really know how to use, some rice, a bowl of dough…wonton wrappers. Chickpea flour! Rye flour! Why did I leave it all this long [breaks down and bangs head against wall for a second]?

I don’t usually want to cook or serve that much starch in a single week, but at least most of it is legumes with some fiber and protein. So I’ve been thinking about foods–both chametz and not-chametz–that don’t have to be devastating dietwise or empty your wallet or take forever and a half to cook.

Because even with snow on the ground all over the east coast, where my mom and my sister and most of my old friends are still shoveling it out of their driveways this late in March, Pesach is coming. And then maybe an actual spring with shorts weather? We can only hope! Time to lighten up in anticipation.

This week I’ve decided to post the chametz countdown (aka, “Panic Week”), and the next week or so, a couple of attempts at a Pesach week with mostly fresh, simple foods and a lot more vegetables, and without the usual total matzah-on-eggs-on-more-starch-and-potatoes-and-choke-cake-and-too-many-canned-macaroons kind of meal plan…can it be done? I think so. As long as I don’t let my husband do the shopping. Can it be done in a microwave? I’m counting on it.

Anyway–back to the Panic Week Project. First up, the chickpea flour and rice…as a batter for on-the-spot masala dosas. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, Dairy, Food Blogs, Grains, Revised recipes | Tagged: chickpea flour, crepes, food, Indian cooking, masala dosa | Comments Off on Chickpea Crêpes, Masala Dosa style

Microwave Tricks: 10-Minute Tofu

Posted on October 19, 2014 by DebbieN

Microwaved platter of low-sodium tofu with snow peas

Microwaved tofu platter in minutes, minus the big oil and salt overload of takeout. I’ve used snow peas and shiitake mushrooms this time, but you could use any greens you like and mix them up–bok choy, broccoli, green beans. Frozen snow or sugar snap peas work too.

This is the recipe I meant to put in the last post about reducing sodium in Chinese food.

Tofu is, as everyone knows by now, extremely versatile. It’s vegetarian, it’s shapeable, it’s mild but satisfying in flavor, it comes in a variety of textures and thicknesses, and it’s quick to cook–fried, steamed, stuffed, crumbled–or to eat cold. It’s also low-fat, low-sodium, nearly carb-free, and relatively high in protein, with some iron and calcium too. And it’s very inexpensive–less than $2 for a 14-oz. pad of tofu at the supermarket, about three or four servings’ worth.

When it’s hideously hot out, as it was much of September here in Pasadena, you can marinate a sliced cold block of silken tofu by pouring a jao tze-style dipping sauce over it maybe half an hour, garnish with scallion shreds or crushed toasted nuts, and serve it as an appetizer. Or eat firm tofu plain and cold, if you like it. Or throw some tofu cubes into a salad with cabbage, lightly-steamed (or microwaved) fresh brussels sprouts, scallions and halved hard-boiled eggs, and drizzle peanut sauce over it.

Or you can decide there’s no way you’re going to stand over a stove with a frying pan, but you’d like a proper cooked dinner that resembles kung pao or ma po tofu with some greens, just not doused in heavy greasy oversalted sauce or requiring a run to your local takeout, and it would be nice if it were very quick. Very quick. Like five minutes tops. And that it didn’t involve the stove at all.

When my daughter decided she wanted to be vegetarian a couple of years ago, I discovered that you can “quick-press” tofu for Hunan tofu in about 4-5 minutes for a standard 14-19 oz. pad by cutting it up, standing the pieces on a microwaveable dinner plate, and microwaving, then draining off the liquid. Then it’s ready to stir-fry and it’ll brown decently. But I’ve done it so often in the past two years that my daughter’s kind of tired of it now (and has also gone back to eating fish and chicken once in a while). But we still like tofu. And with 100-degree days filling so much of September, there was just no way I was going to stand at the stove. So….

The entirely microwaveable tofu dish below is my daughter’s current preference, because the tofu cubes are softer, steamed in the microwave in a thin sauce rather than browned, and the scallions never scorch. And it’s not bad at all, and it takes, if not a literal 5 minutes, maybe about 10, start to finish.

This is more of a technique than a recipe, really, because you can use whatever cookable greens you have and like–fresh broccoli with the stalks, green beans, bok choy, etc. are pretty classic and generally not expensive per pound, but I’m not against using frozen unsalted (store brand; I’m cheap) sugar snap peas or green beans if the fresh ones are out of season. You’re microwaving; it’ll work out, and you won’t overcook the tofu. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, DASH Diet, kitchen safety, Microwave tricks, nuts, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: Chinese cooking, low-sodium cooking, tofu, vegetarian cooking | Comments Off on Microwave Tricks: 10-Minute Tofu

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 »

Taking the chaos out of batch cooking

Posted on March 28, 2014 by DebbieN

When my husband and I were much younger, we stayed a week with the children of some friends who wanted to go off skiing on spring break. In preparation, the mother batch-cooked a huge dutch oven each of chicken breasts and brisket for the week–just for their two young children and us. She left elaborate instructions about how to reheat it (I’m not sure she trusted us to know how to cook anything). I can tell you that even in my 20s I thought that was an awful lot of meat, and by the end of the week we were really, really tired of it. Even the kids.

On the other hand, a friend out here who has something in the range of adult ADD has a hard time cooking anything that takes longer than about 5 minutes because she’s so easily distracted she forgets to eat. Keeping track of multiple cooking steps is genuinely daunting to her, as it is for many people with ADD and ADHD. She’s taken the expensive brown-rice-bowls and organic-microwaveable-freezer-meals-for-one route (keeping brand names out of it for the moment) but wishes she could find a better and cheaper way to deal with dinner. I suspect she wishes my east coast friend could supply her with a couple of dutch ovens’ worth of meals…

I bring up these two friends because lately I’ve started running across Meals-for-a-Month how-to books. They pop up every once in a while in the cookbook aisles of your favorite bookstore (or the 641 section of your local library). They’ve been reappearing since at least the early 1970s, when a major recession under Nixon led people to rethink their household budgets. Now these books are back in “For Dummies” and “Everything” versions, complete with tie-ins to About.com and other popular web portals.

The basic premise sounds ideal: shop and cook just once a month, the books promise, and you get a month of frozen real-food reheat-and-serve meals at your convenience, and you still save money. I keep hoping there’s some kind of solution in them for people short on time, cash and kitchen tolerance, but so far I’ve been disappointed.

Read one of these books and you quickly realize why almost no one follows them for long. First, if you hate to cook, you’re going to hate cooking marathons even more. Especially if they look like all-kitchen circus-style nightmares of boiling chicken and roasting AND stewing beef and slicing ham and cheese while also cutting vegetables while mixing sauces while separately packaging just enough gingersnaps for each package of the sauerbraten (assuming you even like sauerbraten or know what it is anymore) and finding the right sized bags and labels and and and and….

If you batch-cook the way these books suggest (in the intro section “game plan” complete with NFL-style charts), your once-a-month cooking scheme will probably take you all weekend (shopping alone is a full day) and wear you out from dawn til dusk. One weekend a month. I bet this is where most people flipping through to see if it’s the solution to their dilemma quietly shut the book, put it back on the shelf and edge away as quickly as possible.

These books also seem to replicate the worse aspects of frozen tv dinners, only without the convenience. The food’s too elaborate and long-cooking–mostly heavy meat stews and casseroles taken straight out of the 1950s Americana repertoire, and the scale-ups still only stretch to two or three meals for a family of four. If you go that route, you’d need ten recipes, and a huge freezer.

Also, there are no, and I mean no, shortcuts. I’ve looked. Each main dish is an hour or more by conventional methods. The reheats alone typically take at least half an hour and some extra cooking steps–and this is after having thawed the packages overnight in the fridge. Have the authors never heard of a microwave? Wasn’t avoiding repetitive, excessive cooking the whole point of once-a-month cooking? Do you really want to have to plan so much and follow so many steps–especially if you’re on the ADD end of things? Or even if you aren’t.

It would make so much more sense to simply buy a big resealable bag of frozen chicken parts and some bags of frozen vegetables and large cans of beans and tomatoes and boxes of spaghetti and relearn some cheap, easy and fast-cooking techniques from your college student repertoire. Wouldn’t it?

Needless to say, this is not the way people who traditionally have to cook big on a tight budget cook. Most people don’t have as much money at any one time as they’d need to pay for a month’s worth of food in a lump sum, nor do they generally have a dedicated extra freezer to fit it all in.

But batch cooking itself can work out and still treat you gently on a more modest scale. You just need to choose what makes sense to cook in multi-meal batches, and not do every possible big job all at once.

Unless you hunt and dress venison for the winter or have a garden with enough produce that you need to harvest and put up in bulk at the end of summer to keep it from spoiling, you don’t really need to do marathon-style cooking. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, books, cooking, frugality, Grains, Microwave tricks, Pasta, shopping | Tagged: ADD, ADHD, batch cooking, brown rice, cookbooks, frugal living, home economics, meals-for-a-month, rice cookers | Comments Off on Taking the chaos out of batch cooking

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

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Persian-ish grill ideas for Purim

Microwave Tricks: Felafel

New Year, New Food: Cabbage Rolls with a Greco-Ottoman Twist

Microwave Tricks: Black Beans

Hot Air

Chickpea Crêpes, Masala Dosa style

Microwave Tricks: 10-Minute Tofu

Stuffed cabbage in the microwave

Taking the chaos out of batch cooking

Purim options

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