Vegetabalia | Slow Food Fast

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

DASH is US News & World Report’s “Best Overall Diet”

Posted on January 7, 2014 by DebbieN

US News & World Report asked a panel of nationally recognized nutrition, diet, cardiovascular health and diabetes prevention experts to rank 32 popular diets. DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) topped out as the overall best, including for long-term weight loss and maintenance.

The article and rankings online: Best Diets 2014 | US News & World Report

Where the experts complained–sort of–was that following it requires eating more real food and fewer boxed processed meals. So it’s technically “harder” to do than Lean Cuisine, Jenny Craig, and so on. They also said that buying produce is more expensive than eating out at fast food restaurants all the time. I’m not sure where they’re shopping or how they’re counting. But from my experience and checking out current fast food prices for a family of three, shopping relatively smart and unchic and sticking with the cheap nutritious bulk vegetables rather than the fashionable or precut, prebagged ones in the foodie magazines that cost three times as much–I’d have to say no, it really isn’t more expensive for what you get. Especially if you count the extra gasoline per trip to the fast food joints on a daily basis.

And I’m not happy that a nationally acclaimed panel of nutritionists–or the editorial staff, I’m not sure–seem more than a little veg-phobic. Buried somewhere in the blather–I mean, expanded description of the DASH Diet and how they ranked it–is the distinct suggestion that it’s too much work and too unrealistic to expect people to prepare and eat–you know–fresh unprocessed vegetables and fruits themselves. They actually put in the phrase that it’s too much “gruntwork” unless you can hire a private chef to do your cooking for you. Makes you wonder how they were raised–probably on a steady diet of Pop-Tarts.

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Diabetes, Food Politics, nutrition, Vegetabalia | Tagged: Best Diets 2014, DASH Diet, diabetes prevention, dietary guidelines, fast food, nutrition, US News & World Report, vegetables, weight loss | Comments Off on DASH is US News & World Report’s “Best Overall Diet”

Leftover Logic

Posted on January 1, 2014 by DebbieN

Two weeks ago The Guardian‘s business section published the following salvo against glam-food waste: “Food’s latest hot trend: leftovers”. Some of the interviewed chefs, who grew up eating leftovers in the ’70s, have apparently joined forces with the Women’s Institute in York (shades of “Calendar Girls” and Helen Mirren’s shaky attempt at a Yorkshire accent) for a project to reduce food waste as supermarket prices continue to rise and rise.

Some interesting quotes in the article, and interesting questions on frugality–the columnist claims household food waste is down about 13 percent in the UK since last year, which is pretty telling about the economy. She and the people she quotes attribute the current lack of knowledge on how to use leftovers to a sharp decline in cooking skills that coincides with the surging popularity of perfect, coffee-table-worthy food fantasy cookbooks.

Is it really the fault of photo-heavy cookbooks, food magazines, blogs and tv cooking shows that only perfect produce makes the cut, and everything with a blemish on it must automatically be thrown out? Possibly…but the article also cites another trend–the heavy push of boxed microwave-meals-for-one that leads so many people to fear cooking and believe they could never be talented enough to cook from scratch.

Of course, if you never touch an uncooked bulk vegetable or a piece of raw meat, you never risk making a mistake in the kitchen. But the other side of the coin is that the produce in the magazines will never show up on your table. Because the frozen tv dinners really don’t come out looking or tasting as good as the pictures in the magazines.

If you do cook, the idea of using up what you have in the fridge can be nearly as daunting as having to pay for fabulous (and expensive) first-rate pre-sorted extra-polished pre-cut vegetables. In a branded bag. Can you eat less-than-perfect-condition food mag-quality decorator vegetables and still be safe?

Yes, you can. Obviously, when you go to buy vegetables, you want the best and freshest ones you can get for a reasonable price. Nothing you buy should be leaking or moldy or worm-ridden or otherwise clearly spoiled. But short of that, quite a lot of produce can be eaten just fine without having to be picture-perfect.

No one in the professional or amateur food enthusiast world ever talks about how to handle imperfect, wrinkled or slightly old vegetables, but they should. Because no matter how they look when you buy them, if you actually buy enough vegetables and enough variety for a week, some of your produce is going to start drying out or going a little less crisp or whatever in the later days. And you don’t necessarily need to throw it out because of that. Most of it you can probably still use and it will still be fine.

Local corner greengrocers often sell the oversized, undersized, riper or otherwise less-perfect-looking vegetables for a fraction of what they go for in big chain supermarkets. Customers at my local Armenian grocery routinely stagger out with huge bags of red peppers, onions, green beans, cabbages, eggplants, zucchini…all at a dollar a pound or less. Probably most of those vegetables are less than shiny-perfect. It doesn’t matter. The customers who lug them home are going to cook them up in large batches and short of actual spoilage, they’ll use them up.

And I myself did it today–foraged around in the fridge for the eggplants I bought last week. They were just starting to show brown dimples at the flower end. Not lovely but not a disaster. Then I found the less-than-great winter Roma tomatoes, a few of which were already starting to show little smudges of black at the stem ends because I’d had to store them in the fridge–no room on the counter, and I had them in a plastic bag that kept the moisture in more than was really good for them. Damn! I weeded out two that were clearly beyond saving–cracked and leaking slightly, not good–and took the others out to inspect. How bad were they?

Now the eggplants were only a little bruised or dimpled in a few places. Peeling off a little of the skin at those points revealed that the flesh inside was still okay. No worse than a bruised apple. Cut them up, microwave them, drain off the juices and fry them for eggplant-and-chickpea stew, and they’re just fine.

The tomatoes are a little scarier, no question. No one wants mold on their vegetables. But except for showing the tiny beginnings of mold at the stem ends, the six tomatoes I had left seemed fine and firm, dry and uncracked. Throw out six tomatoes at this time of year? I decided not to. I washed them carefully on the theory that the peel, if it’s unbroken, is working hard to seal out dirt and contamination and any mold spores on the surface can therefore be washed off. I sliced off the tops about half an inch below the stem ends–giving them a margin of safety at least in my mind. Then I dared to taste a bit of the tomato below that. Also fine–or as fine as winter tomatoes get, anyhow. No sight, smell or taste of bitterness anywhere, and not mushy or discolored, and they tasted reasonably fresh. So I cut up the tomatoes and put them in the stew.

And everything was fine, and no one got sick or started convulsing (or screeching at the top of their larynxes) like Robert Plant at the height of his Led Zep days. This was fortunate, because we don’t yet have the larynxes back in shape after Losangelitis week, not to mention the stomach muscles, the tight jeans (well, the jeans are a little tight but not on purpose–we’re workin’ on it! hate those sit-ups) or the massive and tossable hairdo. Then again, neither does Robert Plant these days. So I don’t feel that bad about it. And neither should you.

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Food Blogs, Food Magazines, Food Politics, Food TV, frugality, nutrition, Odd food, shopping, unappetizing, Vegetabalia | Tagged: food waste, frugality, greengrocers, leftovers, produce, spoilage, vegetables | Comments Off on Leftover Logic

Celebration Update: “Mashup” Does Not Mean “More Potatoes”

Posted on December 20, 2013 by DebbieN

Two or three Thanksgivings ago I railed (as I often do) at the lack of imaginative and good-looking (both aesthetically and nutritionally) vegetarian offerings for Thanksgiving main dishes. I wasn’t having a whole lot of luck being impressed by what I saw in the newsstand food glam magazines, vegetarian and vegan cookbooks, food blogs, my local newspaper food section, or even the freezer section of my local Whole Foods. So I came up with a list of suggestions for vegetarian centerpiece dishes.

This year, we had the double-double challenge: Thanksgiving fell on the first day (though only the second evening) of Chanukah for the first time in over 100 years (1860s was the last time?) and won’t again for another 77,000 or so (well, some sources say there’ll be another Thanksgivukkah moment in about another 100 years and then the big schlep out to 77K. Either way, for most of us, this is “that moment”).

For me, mashing up Thanksgiving and Chanukah just this once gives us some ideas for rethinking the kneejerk popular way of celebrating the big important holidays in general. Maybe even exploring what’s so vital about holidays and family and clearing away some of the thoughtless excesses.

Chanukah came so early this year that we had nearly no chance at buying or making tons of presents before having to schlep ourselves up the I5 to my in-laws’, so none of us was expecting anything but silly socks, a paperback or so, and maybe a stop in Solvang for Danish marzipan-based sweets on the way back home. That’s all to the good–Chanukah was never really meant to be a “more presents all the time” kind of holiday, it’s about freedom of religion, freedom from outside oppression, and gratitude for the miracle of having enough resources to go around. Thanksgiving is about those things too.

Unlike most years, I didn’t find a two-page checklist that Martin Luther would be jealous of, listing all the acceptable giftees our daughter wanted, posted on the fridge. Partly that’s because we wouldn’t be home to see it, and partly because she already had her bat mitzvah in June and she’s old enough now to feel like it’s more than plenty in the way of gifts. Plus by now she knows me–I have a strong tendency to roll my eyes and cross most of the stuff off the list with the familiar yearly litany of:

“Library…library…library…library…not wearable at school or synagogue, so what’s left, the mirror?…we have an unusually skilled cat and I don’t really want to think about hamsters in that context, do you?…library…library…not until you practice piano…I know I promised you could get your ears pierced eventually…maybe next month…”

It’s just a matter of practice. And a willingness to channel Sylvia (one of my favorite cartoon characters, by the great Nicole Hollander).

Anyway, I have no idea if any of my ideas the last time I riffed on vegetarian centerpiece dishes gave someone else ideas–I hope so–but recently I ran across a vegan cookbook with dishes that look like they’d be just right for a celebration. It’s too late to recommend for Thanksgiving or Chanukah, but maybe for Christmas and onward? Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, DASH Diet, Food Blogs, holiday cooking, nuts, Revised recipes, shopping, Vegetabalia | Tagged: book reviews, cookbook reviews, Food Blogs, holiday cooking, Miriam Sorrell, Mouthwatering Vegan, Thanksgivukkah, vegan recipes, vegetarian cooking, vegetarian main dishes | 3 Comments »

The “other” moussaka–eggplant and chickpea stew

Posted on December 10, 2013 by DebbieN

It’s been a fuller month than I expected, with a lot of travel and the unlooked-for complications of Thanksgiving and Chanukah falling on the same week. Supposedly we don’t get to do that again for another 77,000 years or so.

Most of the food features about the “Thanksgivukkah” mashup this year have been bemused, amused, and imaginative only in the sense of suggesting (always) latkes and sufganiyot (doughnuts) for the Thanksgiving menu. Not in replacement of any other starches or desserts, you understand. They mean in addition to. Forgive me if I can’t dig it, but I don’t think either holiday really benefits from the “double your starches, double your fun” idea.

We had a great long weekend up with my in-laws and family in San Jose; and what was on the table? A pretty decent meal by any standards, traditional or California modern.

Thanksgiving 2013-Northern California style

At my in-laws’, 5 minutes before showtime. A lot more green on this table than I remember as a kid. It could only be an improvement, and believe it or not, most of the broccoli got snapped up with the fabulous mustard garlic dressing (not yet on the table)

Turkey (kosher, and cooked by accident upside down because my in-laws stuck it in three entire shopping bags and couldn’t tell which end was up–but it came out better than most of their other attempts, so they’re doing it again next year on purpose–I highly recommend it). A little stuffing and mashed potatoes and gravy for those who insisted, which wasn’t us; cranberry orange sauce, a stellar Georgia pecan pie among the desserts. But the rest of it was California-conscious; farro salad with chestnuts and mushrooms, a roasted red-squash-and-onion platter with whole cloves of roasted garlic strewn around, a big green spinach and fennel salad with endive and pomegranate seeds, and my contribution, an impressively large platter of very green, just-steamed broccoli with a spicy mustard garlic dressing that, and I may say so, rocked the Casbah and provided the necessary Jewish influence.

Not just because of the olive oil-at-Chanukah factor–which would have been enough for me and was plenty symbolic–but for the balance of a big blob of sharp spicy brown mustard with a big fat clove of garlic. Plus red wine vinegar, olive oil, and a little white wine. . . whisk and taste, whisk and taste. When it’s just sharp enough, still thick but can be drizzled, tastes good and has just the right degree of excessive garlic without going to Gilroy (which, btw, is only about half an hour outside of San Jose and holds a surprisingly popular garlic festival every summer), you know it’s done.

The broccoli itself was a little undercooked for me but others insisted it had to be still crunchy to avoid killing the little green vitamins–a new trend in Califoodian philosophy, at least northern Califoodia. It was in the San Jose Mercury News that week or something. But the garlic mustard dressing made up for all that nutritional selfrighteousness and helped the turkey no end as well. Cranberries are well and good and I love them, but they’re no substitute. I maintain [talmudically, in question form]: if there’s no garlic, is it really food?

But with a week of too much food and travel and lectures on nutritional trendiness aside, I find myself thinking, do I really need to be thinking so much about food? Southern California makes it easy to eat well with very little effort–even with very little money, as long as you shop at the local Armenian or Latino markets for vegetables and stick to the unbranded or store-brand and whole foods only.

However…although it was about 85 degrees out when we came home to Pasadena, the temps quickly dropped and have been in the 50s all week, with and without drizzle (yes, you can pity us sarcastically if you want to. They don’t sell coats of any worth better than a sweatshirt here, so to us it’s cold). I realized it was time for a stew. With, obviously, garlic.

Most people think of moussaka as the Greek eggplant-lamb casserole with béchamel topping. But a much simpler vegetarian eggplant stew with chickpeas, onion and tomatoes is also called moussaka (also found on the web as “musakk’ah”). It stems from Lebanon and is popular throughout the Middle East. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, DASH Diet, frugality, holiday cooking, soup, Vegetabalia | Tagged: eggplant, food, Middle Eastern cooking, recipes, vegetarian cooking | Comments Off on The “other” moussaka–eggplant and chickpea stew

Advertising Vegetables–is it really so hard?

Posted on November 3, 2013 by DebbieN

Michael Moss of the New York Times tells what happened when he challenged a prominent ad agency to come up with a campaign for broccoli. Fresh actual broccoli, no brand name. Which I’ve been hoping for years someone would do, but as I read his article, my heart sank. All the veg-phobia and all the typical slanders against broccoli raised by the vegetable-avoidant generation (now adults) quickly rose to the surface in the ad agency focus groups. Turning a corner on that would be an extreme makeover indeed.

So a little help on how to deal with the great green broccomonster:

cutting up broccoli
microwaving vegetables in general
decent homemade salad dressings that go as well with lightly-nuked broccoli, or green beans, or brussels sprouts, or cauliflower…as they do with red cabbage and other salads

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Food Politics, nutrition, shopping, Vegetabalia | Tagged: advertising, broccoli, food ads, Michael Moss, shopping for vegetables | Comments Off on Advertising Vegetables–is it really so hard?

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

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

Giant favas

Posted on October 28, 2012 by DebbieN

Fresh fava beans are the province of spring. Dried ones–the ultra-large size favas–are pale gigantic beans with a flavor like roast chestnuts, only without the sweet. These are the ones for Greek-style winter stews (gigantes plaki) or, as a friend in Jerusalem makes on cold and rainy December weekends, a very slow-braised stew of giant favas with chicken and vegetables.

Here in Pasadena it’s still hovering in the 90s midday, long after Yom Kippur has come and gone. So there’s no incentive to cook anything for more than 15 minutes at a time if you can possibly help it. And gigantes or giant favas (I’m not absolutely sure they’re the same bean, so for reference–what I’m using are the peeled giant favas, about an inch across) take a very long time to cook through to tenderness, even after soaking overnight. The challenge, actually, is to cook them enough without having them fall apart like overcooked potatoes. Oven-baking or crockpotting would probably work, but it’s hours of time.

So most of the dried-fava recipes I can find are for favas that have crumbled and been puréed for soup or hummus or paté. But the stewed favas–that’s what I wanted. Only I wanted them on their own, meatless, tomato-less, pure, as it were, because I had an idea of marinating them a little for a side dish and serving them room-temperature. Something like marinated artichoke hearts, but subtler.

There are few “slow food fast” shortcuts for this, unless a pressure cooker would work well enough without blasting them to bits. I might have to get one and try it–when everyone’s out of the house, just in case my purple thumb tendencies kick in.

You still need to soak them very thoroughly overnight, a minimum of 12 hours and maybe better, 24 hours (in the fridge) before starting to cook them, because at least two batches of Sadaf peeled giant favas have shown a distinct reluctance to take up water the way most reasonably fresh dried beans do, even though a lot of the beans were split in half. Were these two bags of favas just incredibly old and dried out? Are giant favas just naturally tough? I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe I have to go with the bags of unpeeled favas instead?–maybe those dry out a little less inside and cook up more tender once you get the peels off (after cold-soaking and before boiling). One can only hope.

And substituting giant lima beans that a lot of Greek cookbooks recommend as a substitute in plaki would obviously give more tender results, plus they don’t require laborious peeling, but the flavor would be pretty different. The giant favas are what I want, and no other.

Nevertheless–once the favas were soaked as best possible and rinsed again, I cooked them partially by microwaving 10 minutes in water to cover by an inch and letting them sit. I didn’t want to do it a second round, as I would for chickpeas, because they had the kind of tough obstinacy that reminded me that microwaving can actually make some cooked beans tougher–black beans in particular. At least the raw bean taste was gone, but they still required 2 hours of simmering gently and partially covered on the stovetop, to become something approaching tender. Frustrating.

Some of them broke up. I think it’s practically inevitable. But some of them were huge and very impressive. Once they were as done as they were going to be, I drained them most of the way.

The marinade I use for microwaved artichoke hearts is just lemon juice, garlic, salt and olive oil–the artichoke hearts donate enough juice as they cook to mellow out everything else a little. Favas–no. Plus I wanted something richer and less strident for the flavoring.

So I pulled a bottle of cheap but dry rosé (for want of chardonnay or the like, and rejecting the ever-present reds so as not to stain the beans) out of the fridge and poured some of it into a frying pan to boil off a little of the alcohol and pick up some of the other marinade flavors: a fat clove of garlic, the juice of a lemon, olive oil and a couple of sprigs of rosemary off the bush I’ve managed not to kill this year. I let this simmer together a few minutes to take the edge off the raw garlic and wine flavors and steep the rosemary a little, and then poured in the boiled-up fava beans and just a little of their broth to simmer a few more minutes before pouring the whole thing out to cool.

A little more olive oil would have been good if I’d had it (the bottle ran out after about a tablespoon)–I was actually hoping it would help soften the beans further but I didn’t really have enough for oil-stewing (the Greek cookbooks I have all recommend about half a cup in a batch of about a pound of dried beans) and I’d have had to stew the thing a lot longer to get anything resembling a silky texture, I suspect. But the flavors permeated the beans very nicely–rosemary has an irreplaceable perfume that even wild thyme doesn’t reach even though that would be pretty good too. Together, the rosemary and wine balance the surface brashness of garlic and lemon and bring out the unusual flavor of the giant favas without the need for salt. It’s good hot, but it’s even better the second day, hot or cooled.

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, DASH Diet, Vegetabalia, wine | Tagged: bean salads, beans, cooking with wine, favas, gigantes, Greek food, mezze, Middle Eastern food, rosemary, vegetarian recipes | Comments Off on Giant favas

Montreal

Posted on July 19, 2012 by DebbieN

We are back from Montreal, a city which reportedly has more restaurants per capita than anywhere else in the world–does this include Paris? Most of the food we had was very good. Even the dreary-looking and overpriced breakfast bar in the convention center where my husband was attending the IEEE conference had excellent, crisp croissants and thick serious coffee to go with the boring-standard scrambled eggs and dry cereals. I never got a chance to try out the Montreal bagels because we found such good food within walking distance downtown.

The Vieux Port area of downtown has streets full of bistros and is lively to walk through, admiring the art galleries, tchotchke shops, accents (French with a distinctive Western Hemisphere twang) and people (a lot of younger women were sporting platform wedgies in improbable colors like Day-glo orange or pink, and almost all the natives were more fashion-conscious than we were).

On one of the piers we discovered the Centre du Science had a special exhibition of costumes, ship and creature models, and the original concept drawings from the Star Wars movies. We had to see it, even though it meant paying extra and wearing a rubber bracelet with an RFID chip in it so we could pick our species, planet, job description and personality traits as we walked through the stations with film clips illustrative of influences and stages of personal development. I mean, Luke’s upbringing contrasted with Anakin’s? Did I need to see the blame laid on Anakin’s mother’s permissive parenting style for Anakin’s tendency to be drawn to the Dark Side? Mothers get blamed for everything. As for the Dark Side, well, they get all the cool costumes–red leather, black leather, horns, masks, capes, shiny streamlined samurai helmets, wrestler belts with electronic gizmos built in…compare that with the monklike dun-colored burlap and linen outfits for Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon. Of COURSE Anakin would get with the Dark Side. Proof? Darth Vader ends up with the coolest costume of all…apart from that pesky touch of asthma.

On a brighter note, did you know Yoda was originally supposed to look something closer to a European-style elf or garden gnome? Glad they went Japanese.

Another pier–the entire pier–housed the blue and gold striped tents where Cirque du Soleil holds its home court performances nearly every afternoon.

But the weather was unusually hot, in the 90s, and so humid that we didn’t feel like eating much until sundown, when it was finally cool enough to venture out and explore all the sights within walking distance.

I was also under a time sentence–start statins as soon as I got home, test again in six weeks and see if they’re working. So I was doubly uncomfortable eating out all the time, thinking twice about eggs or butter or cheese in anything that was served, wondering if this was the last grapefruit I was going to be able to eat and maybe I’d better have only one small serving of that in the Indian restaurant we went to with our friends, because it was cooked with ghee (there were 25 Indian restaurants in town! crowed our friend’s 9-year-old daughter. She wanted to try them all.)

And why were the only vegetables in the other restaurants buttered (which I’ve never liked; my cholesterol-packin’ genes are more to blame than my actual diet and the doctor’s office pamphlets nearly always say to “cut down” to more saturated fat than I actually eat) or else a tiny salad? Just like the French. Just like the Americans.

And yet…the best place we ate–we went back twice that week–was a small undecorated restaurant in Chinatown around the corner from our hotel, which was across the street from the convention center. When we arrived from the airport at 11 pm, Restaurant Beijing was the only place still open for dinner, and we weren’t expecting much when the concierge recommended it. We trudged around the corner anyway, past the hotel’s dumpsters, around to rue Gauchetière, and took a peek through the window.

Plain cafeteria-style tables, brightly-lit but plain strip-mall sort of space, chalkboard specials on each wall, no decorations at all other than a few bamboo plants in the window, not even old-style kitsch, and…absolutely packed at that hour of the night. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, Eating out, haute cuisine, Vegetabalia | Tagged: Chinese food, Montreal restaurants, Restaurant Beijing, travel, vegetarian food | Comments Off on Montreal

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Montreal

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