vegetarian cooking | Slow Food Fast

The Afikomen Conundrum, plus a quiche for our times

Posted on April 16, 2020 by DebbieN

On the lighter side of Passover, now that it’s the last day for anyone outside Israel, I did catch Terry Gross’s wonderful Fresh Air interview with Adam Sandler and the Safdie brothers on NPR back in December and was delighted to hear that the brothers included the first-ever mention of the afikomen in an English-language film. It’s about time! I mean, bagel and chopped liver references can only take you so far with Jewish culture. Afikomen is the real insider stuff.

Then, of course, Terry realized that all four of them, herself included, were talking inside matzah-ball or at least Aramaic amongst themselves on-air, and the uninitiated radio listenership who had never even been to a Passover seder might need some enlightenment on the subject of afikomen. Yes, it was exactly like having to explain a joke, and no, the great mass of society probably still didn’t get why a broken matzah is more important than a whole one, or why you’d bribe the kids to give the other half back once you’ve hidden it somewhere cleverly during the meal.

But Sandler and the Safdies ran with it and tried not to make it any more like explaining a joke than they had to. At least Terry didn’t pick the Hillel sandwich to riff on. (Partly because no matter what the Haggadah says about it, there really is no good logical or culinary explanation for eating a combination of apples, nuts and horseradish all together on matzah. It just is, you know? Tradition!)

Anyway, the interview was actually enlightening and smart, and the link is still up online, so go listen to it and donate to your local NPR station while you are wondering, as I am, where we go from here.

I look back to where we were only a month ago and realize that I am thankful my daughter is with us, that my mother and sister and their families and my in-laws are all well if a bit frustrated at home, especially the younger generations with young kids. Back then I was starting to wonder if there was actually going to be matzah in the stores by the time we needed it or whether I would have to enlist my daughter for some not-quite-kosher-but-best-we-can-do homemade matzah from the leftover bag of flour that I couldn’t bring myself to throw away this year–it seems like more than a sin to throw away anything you could use later, anything you might need, or that someone else could use now.

I mentioned this to a friend back east when Governor Hogan of Maryland decided to declare a statewide a lockdown a week or so after California’s, and we were comparing notes about having college-age kids stuck at home for the duration. It was about a week before Passover started, and a few days later not only was there finally some matzah available at the store, just in the nick of time, but a big mystery box arrived at our door later the same day. When we opened it, we discovered she’d sent us two boxes of Streit’s matzah, just in case. She’s really something else!

As mentioned above, today is the last day of Pesach (Passover in English) if you live outside Israel. My husband is hoping for pizza tonight but since the stores are closing before sundown, I somehow doubt it’s going to happen tonight. Plus we have two whole boxes of matzah left and a bunch of rice, which I cooked starting with the second night. Turns out many, many American Jews other than us have also decided this year to expand their Passover cooking options to Sefardic traditions that include rice.

I even have most of a packet of quinoa, which is so recent in the Jewish world that rabbis everywhere have declared it kosher for Passover. Somehow that declaration annoys me. Quinoa’s an expensive grain compared to rice and the major importers and cultivators probably paid someone off under the table to get this vegan-trendy chic grain declared ritually different from all other grains, cereals and seeds including rice. Call it Dizengoffia or Beverly Hills Syndrome, and yes, I’m really that much of a cynic, but put it this way–nobody’s bribing anyone about rice as far as I know. Rice is common, inexpensive and traditional, and it’s already approved for Sefardim and most Mizrahi Jews as well.

Small wonder a lot of us have decided to go Sefardi this year, and possibly every year from now on.

Anyway, since this is me, I made some of the quinoa last night in the microwave just to see how it would go–answer, not bad, and pleased my daughter, who along with her college housemates is more conversant with quinoa than I am. I think it’s twice or three times as expensive as rice; they’re still young and excited and into brandname olive oil, gourmet coffee, designer vinegars and and vegan-chic ingredients because they’re all so new to cooking on their own and still a bit gullible.

It takes time, practice and ruining a few expensive buys on your own dime to realize that fancy-label ingredients won’t make you a great cook automatically. You can go online all you want–even here, if you have the patience to read through all my grumbling and occasional bouts of wild enthusiasm. The fact is there’s no substitute for trying it yourself and being willing to eat your mistakes as far as they’re edible and figure out from them how to fix them up now and do better next time.

But in any case, the quinoa, microwaved or not, is still quinoa, with an earthy, bitter edge similar to buckwheat (kasha). So definitely squeeze on some lemon or mix in some vinaigrette; instant improvement. My kid agrees–there’s vegan chic and then there’s too chic. And if you’re going to buy it and try it anyhow, you need to be willing to work with it and make it good or else. At least not waste it.

More to the point of frugality, I have been trying mostly to practice what I preach and buy and use cheap vegetables plentifully this week instead of reaching for yet more matzah and cheese at every turn, or using up more eggs at once than is wise in a time when you’re limited to two cartons a customer when you can even get them, and where a lot of supermarkets are now stocking medium-sized eggs when they can’t get enough large ones.

My standard Israeli-style spinach and feta flan for Passover (or any other time) calls for 6 large eggs for a pound of squeezed-out spinach, but you can reduce the eggs to 3-4 and increase the milk to 1.5 c and/or add a bit of bread or flour (if you’re not cooking for Passover), rice, matzah meal, grated or mashed cooked potato etc. –the starch absorbs some of the excess liquid and acts as a binder. And you can use a different vegetable as the main ingredient.

Zucchini are some of the common inexpensive fresh vegetables being neglected most often at the Ralph’s (Kroger affiliate here in the west). I bought a bargain bag for a dollar on my last shop (still doing that where possible) and washed them carefully à la COVID-19 precautions (spritz with dilute dish soap along with all the other groceries, rinse well, airdry, hope for the best). Today I decided it was time to use them for the last Pesach lunch and that they were better to use up now for a crustless quiche than the bags of frozen spinach which cost twice to four times as much and can stay in the freezer. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, frugality, holiday cooking, Vegetabalia | Tagged: food, movie reviews, recipes, vegetarian cooking | Comments Off on The Afikomen Conundrum, plus a quiche for our times

Bourekas, Pastry Crust…How Low Can You Go? A Lower-Fat Flake-Off

Posted on November 24, 2019 by DebbieN

I know bourekas aren’t health food, they’re party food, but it doesn’t stop me from wanting to make and eat good ones in (small, sane, occasional) quantities.

Key to the desire for bourekas of worth is my never-ending hunt for a pastry dough with all the right qualities–lighter, tenderer, massively flaky, and oh, while we’re at it, much less heart-stopping than puff pastry or most pie dough, but still capable of flaking and puffing up nicely. I almost had it a couple of years ago with an Armenian dough that calls for a little vegetable oil in with the butter, a bit of cider vinegar for tenderness and an egg to help out the puff. But with butter, there’s automatically a lot of saturated fat, plus it takes more work than I like.

Enter the nondairy, oil-based borekita dough. Israeli (Turkish, Bulgarian, Sephardic…) bourekas, nowadays usually made with commercial puff pastry and sold in characterless boxes or plastic-wrapped trays from the supermarket, are nonetheless wildly popular with almost everyone in The Land whether they voted for Bibi or Benny. The boureka is not in doubt.

Puff pastry is nice enough in most circumstances–after all, it is what I’m aiming toward, or would ideally like to be aiming toward, if I can get away with something lighter. But after a while the packaged versions of puff-pastry bourekas all start to taste the same–salted potatoey stuff, indistinguishable through the mouthful of flakes, and not exactly fresh.

Homestyle boureka dough is much less puffy, more like the dough for sausage rolls. But still–less rich, usually made with oil rather than butter, so it’s both nondairy, to go with meat meals if you keep kosher, and lower in saturated fat (unless you go big on cheese fillings, anyhow) and lower on fat percentage generally. It’s also more economical, more delicate and less oversalted, and it doesn’t overwhelm the fillings.

But the real tests of how low on fat you can go–how well does it flake? How does it taste?–require a head-to-head comparison of different doughs with different fat content. Since it’s down in the 80s I decided to do small batches of each type and see how they worked.

There are two common versions of this home-style boureka dough, a more-oil version and a more-water version.

More oil than water

Al HaShulchan (“On the Table,” the Israeli food magazine) editor Janna Gur‘s recipe on her English-language site is very simple especially if you weigh everything out on a digital food scale (easier and more accurate than trying to juggle dry vs. wet measuring cups and scooping and sweeping and sifting). By weight, it’s about 50% fat to flour–four parts flour, two parts salad oil, one part water, a little but not too much salt. Her recipe makes about 50 borekitas; I decided to quarter that for this test because I’m not stupid and I know myself, and what was I going to do with 50?

The dough for this version has the texture of shortbread or playdoh, very short, and oil will definitely coat your hands when you pinch off walnut-sized balls to roll out for the borekitas, but at least it’s polyunsaturated, not solid fats. Because it’s so oily and you handle it so lightly, there’s no gluten built up. The dough is a bit fragile and rolls out a little ragged as you can see above, but you can roll, fill and bake right away.

Less oil, more water

Bureka Boy, whose Is-that-my-bureka blog, with its wealth of Sephardic and other Jewish recipes, paused for posterity in 2009 (though recently it looks like he may have shifted to Facebook or Instagram or both), has a smoother dough with the proportions of oil and water reversed, so about 25% oil to flour by weight. The water is added very hot when you stir it in (much like jao tze dough), so the dough develops gluten and needs an hour’s rest after mixing and kneading. It’s still quite oily when you go to pinch off individual balls for the borekitas, but it’s more elastic, with a smooth surface and better strength to roll it thin without breaking. You can handle it more and get neater pinched edges on the seal.

So…on to the Flake-Off! Continue reading →

Filed under: appetizers, Food Blogs, Food Magazines, frugality, holiday cooking, Revised recipes | Tagged: baking, food, recipes, vegetarian cooking | Comments Off on Bourekas, Pastry Crust…How Low Can You Go? A Lower-Fat Flake-Off

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

Color and Taste

Posted on March 21, 2018 by DebbieN

We have a week and a half before Passover, and I’ve been experimenting a little with the foods I have to use up before then–flours, beans, lentils and spices.

I also–help! got “gifted” an awful lot of leftover vegetabalia from my daughter’s youth group director after last week’s major fundraiser, a huge Harry Potter-themed congregational dinner (Fantastic Feasts and Where to Find Them, still quite a popular title) that brought in nearly 200 diners and was frankly amazing.

This is just the smaller bag of onions, along with way too much celery…

I managed to donate an entire 25-pound sack of onions to a local food pantry, but got another 10 pounds as a reward, along with two caterer’s packs of organic celery–that’s six full-sized heads–a huge box of organic mesclun that leaked horrible brown liquid in the shopping bag, so I composted it rather than trying to use any.

Worst of all….a 5-pound box of peeled garlic cloves. Which looked well-sealed and fine if ridiculous.

I looked squint-eyed at the youth director, who had such a hopeful wheedling expression on her face: You like vegetables, you believe in garlic, could you please, please take it? Please?

Oy. By the end of a 10-minute ride home it was definitely reeking up my car. Why? Because the garlic cloves themselves were prepeeled, which always seems like such a bright idea to caterers and those who aspire to buy big. They were also machine-peeled, so some were cut into, hence the reek. And I mean, 5 pounds? I grabbed a modest handful of uncut cloves, rinsed them carefully, stuck them in a baggie and froze them. I had to toss out the rest of the box immediately. In the outside trash bin. Well wrapped.

In using the few cloves I kept, I’ve discovered I’m not wrong–looks really aren’t everything. The garlic itself, fresh or frozen, is impressive in size but very different from the usual small tight heads of garlic I buy for myself–harsher and yet less intense, lacking the warm flavors that make garlic garlic to me. So I’m going back to the real thing, peels and all.

In the meantime, I’ve been practicing my microwave not-chicken soup skills, along with testing the microwaveability of matzah balls–yes, you kind of can, they just won’t be spherical–which means we may all be sick of soup by the actual seder. Oh, no!

And while distracting myself from doing taxes, I’ve been looking for inspiration on another library cookbook binge. I drift by the New Books section and get caught by the new cookbooks with all the pretty colors–purple soup? red and yellow nasturtium blossoms on a salad? Bright green or pink or charcoal-gray (literally, as it turns out, using bamboo charcoal powder) shu mei wrappers?

As with the caterer’s box of garlic, though, looks can be deceiving.

I snatch up the books; I check them out, I lug them home and marvel at all the photographic bravura on my desk. Most of them are unexecutable in my kitchen because I don’t have a stick blender or enough counter space to do the fancy dim sum wraps justice. And some of them feature pork belly or crabmeat or other unkosher items.

Mostly, I look through the ingredients list and wonder mightily if they actually taste as impressive as the colors suggest, or if it’s all just for Instagram-worthy photos.

Love Italian Food (Maddalena Caruso, 2014) is a good case in point. Gorgeous photo of three technicolor puréed soups–cauliflower, broccoli, red cabbage with purple potato. I’m stunned by the purple velouté. But reading through I get cautious and skeptical. I want cream of red cabbage soup to taste amazing if it’s going to be that color and topped with a pale-jade romanesco floret. Caruso says it tastes peppery from the red cabbage; she adds purple potatoes for body and further color, some chicken broth, salt and pepper. She simmers the cabbage only 10 minutes or so before blending–hopefully that keeps it from going sulfurous. It might be good. It might be too subtle for me. I might have expected some lemon for the mild acidity that will keep the cabbage pigments from turning blueish-green. Or basil and garlic pesto. Maybe something smoky–smoked paprika? Or hot peppers and toasted sesame oil? Something.

I nuked a wedge of chopped red cabbage one recent afternoon to test the concept. It wouldn’t really blend smoothly in my food processor, and on its own, the purple mash smelled distinctly sour and a bit dank, lightly cooked as it was. It might combine well with other ingredients, but it wasn’t obvious that it would. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Grains, Microwave tricks, Pasta, Vegetabalia | Tagged: food, Pasta, recipes, vegetarian cooking | Comments Off on Color and Taste

And one more…

Posted on November 8, 2017 by DebbieN

Butternut, kabocha, red kuri, Hubbard, turban, pumpkin (and acorn, and delicata, and all the rest)–if you’re microwaving a large red squash, you may as well have another easy recipe in your back pocket.

This is one from my gourmet cousin up north, something she served us as a Friday-after lunch a couple of Thanksgivings ago, and it’s both beautiful and surprising with almost no effort.

Red Squash Slices on Arugula with Tehina

I know, I know. I’ll never get that chichi cookbook deal giving it away that fast. You wanted suspense. Obviously.

But really. If you have a couple of big chunks of leftover roast or preferably microwaved butternut squash, peel and slice it up–cold or hot, either is fine. Put down a bed of arugula or other salad greens, fan out the slices of butternut, mix up a little tehina (sesame paste) with lemon juice, a small clove of garlic and an optional pinch of salt, add just enough water to get it pourable and drizzle it over the squash.

[Note: if you’re making tehina sauce yourself, put a large dollop of the sesame paste in the bowl first, then add the juice of a lemon and stir slowly with a fork, then the garlic and salt, then water by spoonfuls. If you try to add tehina paste to water, you get murky, milky thin stuff that never really emulsifies and you waste your expensive ingredients. I learned this the hard way in a kibbutz kitchen while the two crazy ladies I worked for cackled at me and smoked inches of ash over the food, so take my advice to heart. I’d never want to put you through that humiliation.]

If you want color and glamour, go for the Trader Joe’s or similar smoked paprika and sprinkle it lightly over the platter. Roasted sunflower seeds (shelled, obviously) are nice too. As are hot pepper flakes if you like heat. Sumac (the purplish red sour spice, not the irritating weed) is also pretty if you can get it where you are, but smoked paprika really hits the spot.

If you’re being impressive at short notice and you have an organic kabocha squash, scrub it well, cut off the cap carefully with a very sharp knife and dig out all the seeds, put the cap back on, then stick it on a microwaveable plate (Corelle is probably the best) or in a microwave-safe casserole dish, with either Saran wrap or a big microwaveable bowl as a cover. Drizzle a quarter-inch or so of water around it on the plate, hit it for 8 minutes and see if it’s cooked through (depends on the size of the squash). Give it another 3-4 minutes if it’s not quite there, until you can poke a sharp knife through it easily at a thick point. Let it sit 10-15 more to steam further and/or cool a bit. The kabocha is thin-skinned enough to slice through and eat the skin if you want, and it’s a pretty contrast between the dryish, nutty orange flesh and the thin green skin. Drain and bring the whole thing to slice at the table if you feel like it, and pass the tehina sauce.

Filed under: cooking, holiday cooking, Microwave tricks, salads, Vegetabalia | Tagged: food, recipes, Thanksgiving recipes, vegetarian cooking | Comments Off on And one more…

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 »

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 »

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

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 »

Slow Food Fast

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The Afikomen Conundrum, plus a quiche for our times

Bourekas, Pastry Crust…How Low Can You Go? A Lower-Fat Flake-Off

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

Color and Taste

And one more…

Microwave Tricks: Black Beans

Microwave Tricks: 10-Minute Tofu

Stuffed cabbage in the microwave

Instant Pickles, Hold the Salt

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

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