Ted Hafer and The Grit

EDITED: I finally mastered this recipe now, and we eat it often, but due to the circumstances surrounding the initial writing of this entry, I just couldn't bring myself to edit the body of the post.  Please know, though, that if you follow the directions below, it will be scrumptious.

We rarely eat out anymore. Moving out to the country (um, we only moved about 12 miles from our former in-town home, but it seems like another planet) was most of the reason that we stopped hitting restaurants. And of course we now have two young children, which makes leisurely, romantic restaurant meals virtually impossible. Then there’s the fact that I love to cook…

When we do dine out though, we have a few local favorites that we tend to patronize. Agua Linda is our hands-down favorite for Mexican food, and was only a couple of blocks away from our previous residence. On special occasions, I always ask for Farm 255, the local-and-seasonal-foods restaurant associated with Full Moon Farms, the CSA that we joined this past summer. When I want tofu (which I have never quite mastered the art of in my own kitchen), I request The Grit, a crazy-popular local vegetarian restaurant whose cookbook blessed me with my favorite hummus recipe.

The Grit is one of those places that could have fallen victim to its own hip-ness, but itt’s been around for something like 25 years now and has only grown in its popularity. The menu leans toward comfort food, though like I said, it’s a vegetarian place, so its kind of like a Southern meat-and-three (only without the meat). Nearly every musician and artist in town has worked there at some point and though the wait staff is heavily tattooed and far hipper than me, it isn’t unusual to see carnivorous conservatives at the dining tables alongside members of well-known out-of-town bands.

Since we eat out so seldom now, when we do venture out of our hole and actually go to a restaurant, we’re most apt to order something that I would never make at home. I don’t deep-fry, so when we have lunch at The Big Easy, we order po-boys. If we’re at Agua Linda, I’ll get a bean-and-rice chimichanga (again the deep-frying issue). At The Grit I want The Golden Bowl, a luscious rice and tofu dish that is much more addictive and delicious than it sounds.

I have a copy of The Grit Cookbook, which is probably fairly obvious to anyone who knows me at all. I love to support local establishments, and cookbooks are near and dear to my heart to begin with. The Golden Bowl recipe is RIGHT THERE in the cookbook, so you’d think I wouldn’t have to order it at a restaurant. After all, no evil deep-frying is involved. Ingredients are readily accessible at all times of the year. The instructions are easy-to-follow.

But, oh, how I failed at this recipe. When I attempted it for dinner a year or so ago, I found it to be nearly inedible. The husband (one of the many local carnivores who LOVE The Golden Bowl) deemed it “not awful” and actually ate it, but I stared woefully at my plate and schemed to go eat at The Grit as soon as possible so I could order The Golden Bowl and commit its taste and texture to memory so that I could make another stab at the recipe in my own kitchen.

Truly, I want to think it’s my aversion to Teflon that caused my miserable failure with this recipe. Instead of using a non-stick skillet (as the recipe CLEARLY instructs), I pulled out my trusty nearly-non-stick cast iron skillet. The problem I ran into though, was the soy sauce, and then the nutritional yeast rendered my oiled cast iron skillet into the most stickable (sic) surface any scientist has ever seen. The crust never fully developed (because it was too busy sticking to my doggone skillet) and the flavor just never happened. Actually, the end result was precisely what you might have once-upon-a-time expected from any recipe that uses tofu. I ended up with a bland, oddly textured, icky seventies-style vegetarian meal.

The recipe can’t be to blame, because other people I know have mastered it effortlessly. Obviously, I should check in with some of Those People to see what kind of skillet they used, but I’m afraid they will say they used the cast iron skillets as well. And then I will most assuredly have to admit that I’m just no good at this. My technique bites.

The reason I even mention this right now is because Ted Hafer, who owned The Grit, died yesterday. The story is tragic and very depressing and I wouldn’t even link it here except that the now-displaced former Athenians who read this blog will want to know the whole story. Ted was young and well-known around here. He was a musician, an artist, a husband and father, and a local business owner who supported charitable causes.

If you’re a praying person, then pray for Ted’s family and friends. And buy the cookbook. Consider it your contribution to his children’s college fund.

Maybe you’ll have better luck with this recipe than I did.

*****

Grit-Style Tofu (serves two, from The Grit Cookbook)
     - this recipe has been edited to include my tips for getting the tofu perfectly seared

• One 15-oz block firm tofu
• Vegetable oil
• Soy sauce
• Nutritional yeast

1. Cut tofu into cubes slightly smaller than playing dice.
2. Heavily oil a non-stick skillet (you want a good, thick layer of oil - not enough to deep fry, of course, but the oil should be about a 1/4-inch deep) and place over high heat.
3. Allow oil to heat until shimmering, and add tofu.
4. Cook, leaving the tofu in place for a few minutes to develop a nice, lightly golden brown crust on the bottom, and then carefully turn each piece over to achieve the same result on the other side.
5. Sprinkle fairly liberally with soy sauce (about 1-2 tablespoons) and sauté briefly, lightly tossing with a spatula, to further brown tofu.
6. Add a little more oil to keep the bottom of the pan slick, and then a little more soy sauce (another tablespoon or so), and continue to cook, keeping the tofu moving with a spatula until well-browned.
7. Sprinkle with nutritional yeast to coat tofu cubes and, tossing vigorously, saute for another minute or two and remove from heat.

To make it a true Golden Bowl, serve over steamed brown rice drizzled with melted butter, and top with shredded cheese.

Bless That Dishwasher

I've become obsessed with the whole Dishwasher vs. Hand Washing issue. Due to the drought we’re having in North Georgia, this question is rather pressing for us right now. Regardless of the drought though, the complete environmental impact of the dishwasher is causing me stress now that I’ve been forced to look at it to begin with. I’m like a dog with a bone sometimes…

After I mentioned my new hand washing pact in my last blog entry, I got a couple of comments on whether hand washing is, in fact, a more efficient use of water. And while I got my hopes up for a couple of minutes there (because truly, my dream was that someone would show me the numbers proving that the dishwasher is better), after plodding through numerous discussions of this question online, I found that not only does no one seem to agree on the answer, but that the only studies "proving" dishwashers are more water-efficient appear to have been sponsored by the manufacturers.

So, here’s the thing. I’m not a scientist. And I can never be totally sure that anything I've read online is completely true. But I do love a challenge.

What I found so far is that the average dishwasher uses between 9 and 15 gallons of water in a cycle. Half of the things I’ve read online claim that even the most conservative hand washer will use more than that washing a load of dishes. For the most part, I initially begged to differ. When I hand wash the dishes, I turn on the faucet to rinse the dishes in the beginning, then I turn off the water entirely while I scrub everything with soap on a sponge, and I turn the faucet back on to rinse everything at the same time. Total time to do this whole process on a typical day, when I’m washing three sets of dishes along with the pots and pans and everything else used to cook an entrée and one or two side dishes takes less than 10 minutes. And obviously I’m not running the water during that entire time.

When I was still using the dishwasher (sigh), I ran it an average of once every two days, working out to about 7.5 gallons of water usage per day. So clearly, the question is whether I’m using less than 7.5 gallons of water when I hand wash the dishes each evening now, and I thought the answer was patently unclear. But how on earth was I supposed to figure this out for sure? And why was it that I couldn't find an answer to this conundrum online? Could it really be possible that I’m the first fool to try and compute this number? Say it ain’t so…

Well obviously I’m not the FIRST person to think of this. A little bit more googling yielded the following answer: a typical kitchen faucet uses 4 to 7 gallons of water per minute. Hmmm. Now the variance seems large with that answer, but even if my faucet uses the low end of that number (4 gallons of water per minute) and even if I’m only running the water for 4 minutes, then I’ve already used more than the dishwasher would have used on a full load. And I would have only been hand-washing HALF of what would fit in my dishwasher (on the basis that it took me two days to fill a dishwasher load).

Here’s the rub though: if you use the sink to pre-rinse each dish before putting it in the dishwasher, then you would still have to add that kitchen faucet usage to the dishwasher usage in order to see your total usage, and that final number would probably get ugly. However, I’ve read in countless places that pre-rinsing dishes before putting them in the dishwasher is a complete waste of time and water, and that there is no compelling reason to do so.

Of course, there’s still the caveat of not trusting everything you read online, but suffice to say, I’m shocked that the dishwasher APPEARS to be the winner here. And I’m relieved. SO VERY RELIEVED. Actually, I’m so doggone happy that I would do a jig if only I knew how. I’m definitely making dessert tonight.

Note: I’m not taking energy usage into account for now. It is obvious that dishwashers use more electricity than hand washing, and I’m nowhere near smart enough to figure out what happens when one weighs the water savings against the added energy usage to get the best environmental answer. Truly though, in a time of water crisis, I would rather err on the side of using more energy in order to use less water. So for now...

The Drought-Tolerant Kitchen

Strangely, life with a preschooler and a newborn is much easier than I had expected it to be. When my first child was born, I was shocked by how hard everything became, so naturally I was sure that life with two kids would be twice as difficult. It’s nice to be wrong.

We’ve settled comfortably into a new way of life around here. Baby Girl sleeps most of the time, and Big Boy relishes his job as Mama’s Little Helper. And since The Husband starts his work day around 6 or 7am, he is usually home by 4pm, ready for his Daddy Duty of holding the Baby Girl and reading the newspaper while I cook dinner. So while I was a wee bit nervous that adding a new child to our family would render my cooking time obsolete, I’m finding I have just as much time to prepare dinner as I always had. And like I said, Big Boy likes being the helper, so he pulls up his stepladder and joins in wholeheartedly with helping get supper ready.

Of course, Big Boy prefers to spend most of his time unclothed (hey, he’s a three-year-old, what do you do, right?) so the bigger arguments generally center around why I make him put some pants on before he helps me in the kitchen. “But I want to cook naked!” he protested yesterday afternoon, with his hands planted firmly on his hips.

Actually, since cooking is such a relaxing hobby for me, I only took a week off from the kitchen when Baby Girl was born. My Sunday School class, my friends and my family provided delicious meals, and oodles of desserts (true nectar for breastfeeding moms) while I spent that first week snuggling on the sofa with my sweet children, but after six or seven days had gone by, I felt like my muscles were beginning to atrophy, and I quickly learned that there was very little I couldn’t do while wearing the baby in a sling and just going about my business. Well, except for that whole sleep-deprivation thing, but I’m trying not to focus on that…

More interesting than anything, I think, is that the extreme drought we’re in the throes of has had much more of an effect on my cooking than the addition of an infant to our family. I mean, sure, I have less energy and time to devote to cooking than I did before Baby Girl was born. But here’s the thing about the drought: the dishwasher uses far more water than hand-washing, and I want to do my part to help the natural environment. So naturally, while we’re needing to conserve water, we’re flushing our toilets less often (disgusting, but true), I’m taking fewer showers (easy, since it’s hard enough to find time to take a shower with a new baby in the house), we’re wearing pants and shirts until they’re good and dirty before we run the washing machine, and (here’s the real kicker) I’m washing all the dishes by hand.

Now, it should be noted that up until three and a half years ago, I had never used a dishwasher before. There was a dishwasher in my first two apartments (1991 and 1992), but I neither ate much nor cooked at all in those days, so I never used them. Truthfully, I wasn’t even sure how they worked, and since I only drank coffee and ate cereal at home, it would have been a bit silly to put my three dishes in the dishwasher every day. In all the other places I lived, there weren’t dishwashers and I didn’t know what I was missing. But then we built this house, and The Husband put in a dishwasher, and I started cooking all the time. And yeah, it hasn’t escaped my notice that I didn’t take up cooking as a hobby until I had a dishwasher. And pretty much every time I cleaned up after dinner for the past three and a half years, I have voiced my love for, and gratitude to, my blessed dishwasher.

So I’m sure everyone can understand my consternation surrounding the decision to not USE the dishwasher until this water situation has improved (which the media predicts could take another year). As if a new baby in the house hasn’t provided enough extra work to my day, now I’m choosing to wash all the dishes by hand. I am a foolish, foolish girl.

And I totally regretted this decision when I cooked ALL DAY on Saturday and had to hand wash something like six loads of dishes. Most of the time, this hand washing pact isn’t really that big of a deal. But on Saturday, when I decided to bake a Santa Fe Dip recipe (which turned out to be relatively pedestrian) for Sunday afternoon snacking, and Peanut Butter – Dark/White Chocolate Brownies (truly delicious) for a Sunday potluck lunch, Peanut Butter Truffle Cookies (with which I didn’t manage to achieve the proper texture due to my long-standing inability to bake a decent cookie) for my sweet tooth, along with Spinach Lasagna (yum!) for Saturday’s dinner, I got REALLY grumpy about the dishes by the time it was all said and done. And I’m afraid something is gonna have to give here. Like maybe I’ll have to run the dishwasher one day a week after the marathon Saturday cooking sessions, or I’ll have to give up the marathon cooking days themselves. Which do you think is more likely?

PEANUT BUTTER BROWNIES WITH DARK CHOCOLATE CHUNKS & WHITE CHOCOLATE CHIPS

• Cooking spray


• 2 cups all-purpose flour


• 3.5-oz bar of dark chocolate (60% cacao is a good choice), chopped into chunks


• 1/2 cup white chocolate chips


• 1/2 tsp baking soda


• 1/4 tsp salt


• 1-1/2 cups granulated sugar


• 1/2 cup packed light brown sugar


• 1/2 cup crunchy peanut butter


• 2 Tbs vegetable oil


• 2 tsp vanilla extract


• 2 eggs


• 2 egg whites
  

1. Combine flour, chocolate chunks, chocolate chips, baking soda and salt in a bowl.


2. Combine granulated sugar, brown sugar, peanut butter, oil, vanilla, eggs and egg whites in a large bowl; stir until well-blended.


3. Add flour mixture to sugar mixture; stir just until blended.


4. Spread batter in a 9x13 baking pan that has been coated with cooking spray.


5. Bake at 350 degrees for 20-30 minutes, or until a knife inserted into the center comes out almost clean. (Note: convection ovens do a great job with brownies, cooking the outside nice and crispy while keeping the center moist).

UPDATE: To see where I later realized the error of my ways (and ate my words) regarding the use of the water-efficiency of dishwashers, see the next post.

Creamy Coffee Pie (aka I love my life)

Sometimes I think we’ve all gone mad in our household. After the utterly painful uncertainty, anxiety and single-minded focus involved in renovating our house, followed within minutes (and slightly overlapped) by the exhaustion and complete lifestyle change brought on by the addition of a newborn baby, we have finally reached a comfortable and easy stage in the life of our family.

The house is finished (with the exception of all those projects that go on until the end of time, and a new major renovation that I'm planning), and The Carnivore has moved on to fun yard work during the weekends. Odd Toddler, who spent the first year of his life waking up all night every night, and was seemingly permanently attached to the breast, is now potty-trained, eager to hang out with his papa, and can usually even be reasoned with. The Carnivore and Odd Toddler often run errands together early on Saturdays, freeing me up to go to the farmer’s market (all by myself), and then they’ll often spend the afternoon together outside. It’s almost like having my old carefree life back – only better.

I think all mothers fall into this trap (how do you think my mother ended up with 39 children?). We wean the first kid, forget how bad labor was, finally get to sleep all night again, do the potty-training thing, and then decide life has gotten too easy. So we get pregnant and start all over again. Like I said, I think we’ve all gone mad.

I’m in my seventh month of pregnancy now, with 18 extra pounds of abdominal insulation in 90-degree heat, and feeling more like a hippopotamus than ever before. And my sweet tooth has decided that now is the time to come back. With a vengeance.

I got hooked on white chocolate Chips Ahoy when I was pregnant with Odd Toddler. And things would quickly turn ugly when the grocery store ran out of them. I’m sure it was that particular craving that at least partially explains why I gained twice as much weight during that pregnancy as I appear to be gaining in this one. Since that time, I’ve become much more adept at making my own desserts, and it’s a rare day indeed when I will even be tempted to eat a store-bought dessert (with the notable exception of chocolate truffles, of course).

I’ve recently gotten back into baking desserts on Saturday afternoons while The Carnivore and Odd Toddler are off somewhere in the yard, piddling and playing around. The house is strangely quiet at those times, so I’ll often listen to an NPR podcast in the kitchen and sift through my cookbooks looking for a new brownie recipe to surprise the boys with. Actually, ‘surprise’ is probably the wrong word these days, as Odd Toddler can hear the mixer from two acres away and he’s been known to come barreling into the house to grab his metal stepstool and scrape it maddeningly across the floor so that he can reach the counter and see what’s going on. “Mom!” he’ll shout, “Can I have a taste?” (Which he’ll repeat, growing ever louder, in staccato-like sequence until I give in and turn the mixer off so that he can grab a glob of batter and stuff it into his mouth and across his face with glee).

Last weekend, not sure if I would need to bring a dessert or a vegetable for a potluck that we’d waited until the last minute to respond to, I cut out a recipe for a Café au Lait pie from the AJC Food section, salivating at the thought of the flavor combinations and delighted at how, well, easy as pie the recipe sounded. When I found out only moments later that the hostess had plenty of desserts and was only in need of a side dish, I had already worked my pregnant self into a frenzy over the pie. Mildly disappointed, I tossed together a Black-Eyed Pea salad. And promptly decided that my little family would greatly benefit from the pie anyway.

The original recipe called for Cool Whip (blech) and a store-bought pie crust (argh) along with a mocha-flavored instant coffee that I didn’t have on hand, but the idea of a creamy, cold, coffee-flavored pie filling was too much to resist. With a little bit of tinkering and a whole lot of holding-my-mouth-just-right, I came up with my own version and waited nervously for it to chill.

We’re in love. The pie was elegant enough for a dinner party (not that we would have felt like sharing) and was rich and delightful. The crunchy, crumbly chocolate graham cracker pie crust was the perfect foil to the luscious creaminess of the filling, and the flavor was unique without being weird. It was a little rich for Big Mama’s taste (as she puts it, “The first three bites were great, but then it was just too much), but The Carnivore and I were huge fans. Granted, Big Mama did have a point – the pie was so rich that it ended up lasting us four or five days, but we were willing to make the sacrifice nonetheless. I can’t wait to make this again.

CAFE AU LAIT PIE

• 1 1/2 cups chocolate graham crackers, crushed
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1/3 cup unsalted butter, melted
• 1 (8-ounce) package cream cheese, room temperature
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 3 Tbs instant coffee granules (I used General Foods International Hazelnut Belgian Cafe)
• 8 oz heavy cream

1. Stir together the first three ingredients, and press into a 9-inch pie plate.
2. Bake crust at 375 degrees for 8-10 minutes.
3. Cool crust completely.
4. Meanwhile, whip the cream at high speed in a mixer until stiff peaks are formed. Do not overbeat. Set aside.
5. In a clean bowl, beat together the cream cheese and 1 cup of sugar in a mixer until creamy. Beat in the coffee, then fold in the whipped cream.
6. Pour the mixture into the pie crust and smooth the top.
7. Freeze for at least two hours before serving.

But now I'm curious. At what point can I call a recipe my own? I mean, I took someone else's recipe and switched out a couple of things, and whipped my own cream and made my own crust, but does that mean I can call this MY recipe? Or did I just ADAPT someone else's recipe? I need some help here...

Grilled Potato Salad

My grill pan is my new best friend. Until maybe a year or two ago, I had never even tried grilling, and to this day, the only grilling I’ve done has been on a stove rather than an outdoor grill. Maybe it comes from not eating hamburgers or hot dogs, or the fact that neither my mother nor any of my roommates ever had a grill.

We have this really great stove with a grill attachment, and I slowly learned to use it for tuna steaks, but I got really irritated with it when I tried to grill sliced vegetables. Inevitably, a few would fall through the grates and into the fire, and I would mourn each casualty. But then (and this shows how little I know), I saw someone using a solid-bottomed grill pan on a cooking show and I was completely blown away. Here was a way to grill inside, without having to switch out my burners for the grill attachment AND without losing any poor little pieces to the flames.

As with most purchases though, I sat on the idea for a good three or four months before I actually took the plunge. I looked around online, browsed a couple of kitchen stores, read a few articles, and held tightly to our money until it began to bleed. And then, as much as I wanted to use all my Christmas money to, say, pay down the mortgage early or add to the meager retirement account, The Carnivore (bless him) gently coaxed me into going shopping and spending a little bit of money on some things I had been wanting. I’m so grateful.

Grill pans are beautiful inventions. And I have a crush on mine. Now that summer is here and we’re eating so many fresh vegetables from the farm, the grill pan is getting used nearly every day. One of The Carnivore’s new favorite side dishes is grilled zucchini, summer squash, Vidalia onions and bell peppers. Since its such a quick and easy way to cook, I’m freed up to work on other dishes, and its now a rare day that we don’t have two or three side dishes along with our entrée.

The CSA has opened us up to a world of new possibilities though, and where I used to do fairly predictable things with some vegetables, our weekly shares are so fresh and so flavorful that I have tried to focus on more minimal techniques, ones in which the vegetable is allowed to shine on its own or with only a little decoration, rather than getting overcooked or drowned in a sauce. But even when I use these farm-fresh veggies in some of my tried-and-true, slower-cooking recipes, we’re still often shocked at the difference in flavor and texture. I recently cooked the Italian Vegetable Soup with just-picked, organic zucchini and leeks, and the improvement was obvious. The local, seasonal cooking concept isn’t just another political/environmental/feels-good-to-be-a-martyr cultish kind of thing. Nor is it even too far out of the mainstream. I mean, the raw foods or the macrobiotic diets tend to just sound weird to most people (for more than obvious reasons), but since we’re only a few decades past when there was no alternative to eating locally and seasonally, and since those few decades have seen a marked decrease in healthfulness and an increase in obesity, well, its just not that hard to see why we need to embrace a better way of doing things.

Oops. And I had sworn to myself that I wouldn’t even step onto the soapbox in this humble potato post…

In my quest for new recipes for all these summer vegetables, I’ve strayed from my usual sources and have been perusing some different cookbooks, notably Chez Panisse Vegetables (recommended by the farmer who supplies us with these delicious vegetables) and The Joy of Gardening Cookbook (which my mother had picked up for me at a yard sale a few years back). But I have found the best source has been cooking magazines. Two of my favorites, Cooking Light and Fine Cooking, are very timely and tend to focus on the season at hand. While that irritates the tar out of me during Thanksgiving (because I don’t care to read any new variations on sweet potato casserole), it means great things during the summer months.

A month or so ago, I dug out my Spring/Summer 2006 issue of The Best of Fine Cooking Fresh and I found numerous recipes that I couldn’t wait to try. The most intriguing sounding of them though was the one for a Grilled Potato Salad. And while the concept sounded counter-intuitive to me, I love-love-love potatoes and so I was game to try it. Plus, since I loathe the usual cold, mayonnaise-based, family reunion-style potato salads, the fact that this one used a vinaigrette instead really piqued my interest. Allen’s Bar and Grill, a revered institution in Athens which closed down a couple of years ago (yeah - the place in that B-52's song), had a great warm, vinegar-based potato salad that I used to devour. Allen’s may have been best known for its hamburgers, but for obvious reasons, I never tried one of those.

I’ve taken stabs at a couple of other warm potato salad recipes, and I’ve never had much luck as they’ve either been too bland or the texture has come out all wrong, so I was a bit nervous the first time I tried this Grilled Potato Salad recipe. The potatoes ended up taking longer to cook than I had hoped, and I didn’t cut them small enough the first time I made them, but WOW, we loved the recipe. Actually, I loved it so much that I’ve been making it twice a week for the past three weeks or so now. And I covet leftovers so that I can eat them for lunch during the week as well. The herbs add such a fresh flavor, and the vinegar and mustard add just enough tartness. I hope to never be parted from my beloved grill pan.

*****

GRILLED POTATO SALAD (from Fine Cooking magazine, serves 4 as a side dish)

• 1 lb red onions, cut into 1/2-inch rounds
• 8 Tbs olive oil, divided
• 1 1/2 lb baby new red potatoes, halved or quartered depending on size (aim for roughly 1-inch cubes)
• 2 tsp fresh thyme leaves
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
• 1 tsp Dijon mustard
• 3 Tbs white wine vinegar
• 1/4 cup mixed chopped fresh herbs (choose from parsley, tarragon, dill, chervil, basil and chives)

1. Heat a grill pan over medium heat. If using open grill grates, skewer the onions and potatoes so as to not lose any through the grates.
2. Brush the onions with a little olive oil.
3. Toss the potatoes with about 2 Tbs olive oil. Add the thyme, salt and pepper, and toss.
4. Grill the potatoes and onions over medium heat until tender and browned (20-30 minutes for the potatoes, 10-15 minutes for the onions).
5. In a large bowl, whisk together the mustard and vinegar and season with salt and pepper. Slowly whisk in 6 Tbs of olive oil.
6. Coarsely chop the onions and toss them and the potatoes with the vinaigrette until coated, and then toss with the herbs. Add more salt and pepper, if needed.
7. Serve warm.

Obsessiveness

You know how it goes, right? You have five minutes to read a quick article online, but of course you find something fascinating and then it snowballs. Hours pass. And you're still in front of the computer.

I sat down for a minute to eat a salad yesterday afternoon and, like I often do, I went to the New York Times Dining Section online to see what was new, and I happened upon this really cool article on farmer-writers and the consumers who are increasingly becoming intrigued by where their food comes from. Clearly, this was right up my alley. I read half of the article out loud to my mother, and then emailed her the link, which she has already included in her blog.

Of course, as these things go, there were a few organizations and authors mentioned in the article that I wanted to know more about, and so I began yet another day in the life of The Great Online Quest that didn't end until I had about 15 different windows open in my browser and I was beginning to bemoan that there wasn't enough time in the day.

The coolest find of the day was Edible Communities, a collection of regional publications regarding local food. Once I landed on the Edible Atlanta site, I was already pulling out my debit card to subscribe. And then, lo and behold, I dug around in Edible Nation, the most fascinating blog I've found in a while.

So if you need me, that's where I'll be. I have an entire year of posts to catch up on.

The Unlikeliest of Vegetables

You might think a vegetarian would know everything there is to know about vegetables, but you would be wrong. For the past three years, I’ve been fairly fascinated by cooking. I’ve learned all sorts of cooking skills, read countless foodie books, and tried numerous new recipes. But I’d never played with a fresh beet until a couple of weeks ago. I’m not even sure I’ve ever noticed a fresh beet in the grocery store.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against beets. They’ve just not been registering too high on my radar. I remember my grandmother growing and pickling them when I was a kid, and I was a fan of the sweet and slightly tart, chilled pickled beet slices when she would serve them alongside a light summer dinner, but then I’d forget all about them. They just weren’t the kind of thing I went around with a craving for.

Until now, that is.

Three weeks ago, when I happily unloaded my bag of vegetables from the farm, I was completely stumped when I pulled out a small handful of beets with the greens attached. I didn’t have a clue what to do with them. Beets recipes don’t show up that commonly in the magazines I read regularly, and I couldn’t find anything appetizing (if I found anything at all) in the cookbooks that I pull down from the shelf most often.

So I did what any self-respecting independent woman of the new millennium would do. I called my mom. “Boil them,” she said. “Humph,” I replied. Because truly, what kind of culinary challenge comes from boiling a vegetable? The only thing that gets boiled in my house is pasta. Big Mama got a little defensive. “I like my vegetables to be cooked simply,” she sniffed.

After a little Googling, I came upon a recipe for pickled beets that sounded easy enough, and appeared much less sweet than the other recipes I’d stumbled upon so far in my search. It was more of a sliced-beets-in-vinaigrette kind of thing, really, but I thought I would give it a shot. After all, I had zero other options so far.

First step was to boil the beets (maybe Big Mama was onto something here). Then you peel them, slice them, dunk them in the “pickling” juice, and refrigerate them for at least a few hours. I got all stressed out about the boiling part – I always have this big fear that all the nutrients and flavor will go down the drain with the discarded water at the end, but I gave it my best shot. After fighting with the peeling, which didn’t “slip right off” like the recipe claimed it would, I got busy slicing. I managed to slice maybe two beets before my curiosity got the better of me. I mean, what kind of a person would pickle a vegetable without first tasting it plain to see what the blank canvas offered by itself?

It was an epiphany. Plain boiled beets are absolutely delicious. So delicious, in fact, that I was sorely disappointed with the pickled beets when they were ready. I repeated the whole procedure again with my next batch of beets from the farm, and got the same results. Pickled beets just aren’t as good as plain old beets.

So yeah, I should have listened to my mother to begin with. But don’t tell her I said that.

THE PROPER WAY TO TREAT ONE POUND OF BEETS (makes a great lunch for one pregnant vegetarian)

• One pound of beets, greens still attached
• 1 Tbs olive oil
• 1-2 cloves of garlic
• Pinch kosher salt or sea salt
• Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
• Balsamic vinegar or hot sauce, to taste

1. Cut the greens off of the beets and reserve (you'll need them in step 4).
2. If all beets aren't the same size, cut the larger ones into chunks roughly the same size of the smallest ones.
3. Put beets in pan, and cover with water. Bring to a boil. Continue boiling for 20-30 minutes, until beets are easily pierced with a fork. Drain. Quickly peel beets under cold running water and discard the peeling.
4. While the beets are boiling, cook the greens: roughly chop the greens; finely chop the stems.
5. Heat olive oil over medium heat in a large skillet.
6. Add greens and toss with the oil until the greens have begun to wilt.
7. Add garlic, salt and pepper on top of the greens; cook until the greens are wilted and shiny.
8. Toss with either balsamic vinegar (if you're partial to sweet/tart flavors) or the hot sauce (if you're the spicy type).
9. Serve greens alongside the beets for a seriously yummy and light summer lunch.

It should be noted that both The Carnivore and Odd Toddler have decided to eschew beets season entirely. I'm the only one in the house who enjoys them at all, but the pleasure I'm getting from them is more than enough to make up for the reluctance of the rest of my family.

For the Love of Arugula

As hard as it may be for me to admit, sometimes convenience and efficiency are the name of the game. I’m a work-at-home mother of a three-year-old little boy, I’m 22 weeks pregnant, I’m obsessive about a clean house, and I have a large family which comes with its own set of demands. Occasionally, this will mean that it’s a tad bit difficult to pull together a complete gourmet dinner in time for our uncommonly-early dinner hour. But it would kill me to just open up a box of Tuna Helper, or to stop by the store and pick up something pre-made from the deli. That would be like losing my religion. Publicly, no less, since I tend to flog myself in open forums when I feel I’m falling down on the job.

Normally, this isn’t much of an issue for us anymore. I’ve cut back even more on my client-load, and since The Carnivore tends to come home around 4pm and is thus available to hang out and play with Odd Toddler, I’m freed up for an hour or so to get dinner together. Plus, now that we’re participating in the CSA and are getting weekly share boxes of amazingly flavorful, just-picked produce, I’ve been leaning towards slightly simpler meals in order to let the freshness shine through. After all, it would seem a shame to overcook a beautiful piece of zucchini into limp submission when a quick toss in olive oil and sea salt over a grill pan for 3 minutes is all that’s needed to bring out the best texture and the sweetest flavor.

Last week though, The Carnivore pulled twelve hour days for five days in a row, which meant Odd Toddler was out of sorts from missing Papa, I was a little bedraggled from tending to Odd Toddler’s every demand from morning to night, and it was difficult to even find time to cook, much less make a dinner in which Odd Toddler and I could eat early, and which The Carnivore could easily re-heat when he straggled in the door, late and exhausted. I have a few go-to, quick-and-easy, ingredients-always-on-hand recipes in my repertoire anyway, for those days when everything goes wrong and time is of the essence, but they are the kinds of things that work in any season and don’t take advantage of fresh ingredients (like French toast and cheese grits or linguine with clam sauce). The quantity of produce we receive in our weekly CSA share boxes demands that I find creative ways to use at least one item in each meal, so it can be a bit challenging to not only use the fresh vegetables but to also do so in a quick-cook, satisfying, easily reheated meal.

And I love a challenge.

At some point late in the week, I got a later than anticipated start on dinner and realized at the last minute that the pasta dish I had planned wasn’t going to work out after all since I was out of tomato sauce (and tomatoes aren't yet in season around here). I thought about a pesto sauce, but was also out of basil. And when I leaned towards clam sauce, I saw that I was out of parsley. I had a few options still left to me when I remembered a recipe I had seen in Giada de Laurentiis’ Everday Italian cookbook for an arugula pesto. I love arugula, a spicy, peppery type of lettuce that is delicious in Mediterranean-style dishes, and lo and behold, I had received a large bag of it in the last share box.

Eureka.

All the other ingredients in the recipe were things I keep in the pantry at all times, and in the kind of heat we’ve had here for the past few days, a light pasta dish with some crusty bread and a fresh green salad tossed with a homemade vinaigrette sounded perfect for dinner. Since the food processor could be used, Odd Toddler was conscripted into service (since he has ruled that he is now the only person in the household allowed to push the buttons) and together, he and I whipped the pesto together in no time flat. Honestly, it took as long to make the sauce as it would have to open a jar of store-bought pesto and stir it up.

And it was utterly delicious. The pesto was more assertive than the usual variety made with basil, and the spiciness of the arugula really shined through. And I know I’ve said it countless times before, but I’ll say it again: whole-wheat pasta is the way to go. The nutritional value is light years ahead of white pasta, much less slimy, and far more filling (especially with a sauce as light as this one).

ARUGULA PESTO (adapted from Everyday Italian, serves four as an entree)

• 2 cups packed fresh arugula
• 1 garlic clove
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese (freshly grated is best, but the canned variety will certainly do)
• 1/2 tsp course salt, plus more to taste
• 1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper, plus more to taste
• 12-16 ounces whole wheat spaghetti noodles

1. In a food processor, blend the arugula and garlic until finely chopped.
2. With machine running, gradually add the oil, processing until well-blended.
3. Transfer to serving bowl, and stir in the Parmesan, salt and pepper (add more salt & pepper to taste).
4. Meanwhile, cook the pasta in heavily-salted boiling water until al dente.
5. Scoop the pasta with a slotted spoon or a small strainer directly from the water into the pesto, tossing as you go. (A little of the pasta water will undoubtedly drip into the pesto, but don't panic. The tiny amount of starchy, salty water that will get in will help the pesto adhere better to the noodles). Add more pasta until desired consistency and sauce-to-pasta ratio is reached.

Rethinking the Virtuous Shopping Cart

I’m having to undergo a complete brain flip to switch my ways of thinking about food. I’ve long been obsessed with having a Virtuous Shopping Cart, which for many years centered around shopping the perimeter of the grocery store. I would focus on fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains and dairy products, doing my best to completely avoid the middle aisles of the store, where all the over-processed foods lurk. Doing without canned soups, or boxed macaroni & cheese, or even cookies isn't that hard to do.

When we decided to start having children, I made the choice to step it up a little by buying organically as often as possible. This was a slight change over my previous shopping habits, but didn’t require all that much thought. If an item, such as milk, was available in conventional and organic, I would pick the organic and try not to obsess too much over the difference in cost (because of course, my background in finance had to go through its own little brain flip in order for me to justify paying more for these items). If conventional tomatoes were on the only ones on the shelf, I would still buy them. It was only when the choice was there, did I actually make the effort. I wouldn't give up an ingredient solely because it wasn't available organically.

Now, however, my new focus on buying locally-grown or produced food items is requiring a sea change in my ways of thinking. For so long, it didn’t occur to me to think twice about buying bell peppers in January, or apples in March, or spinach in October. Health was my only consideration, and so I mindlessly consumed any and all produce at any old time of the year. The environmental impact of my purchasing habits was the furthest thing from my mind. As a matter of fact, with the rampant growth of foodie culture and the obsession with international cuisine over the past 10 years or so, I can recall countless times when I would be proud that my shopping cart included Italian olive oil and vinegar, Greek olives, Jamaican coffee, Central American mangoes, and French cheeses. Though it appeared to make me a cosmopolitan consumer, somehow I was blind to the irony that I was driving one of the most fuel-efficient vehicles available (I had a Honda CRX at the time), yet I was contributing quite detrimentally to an oil-dependent economy in my grocery shopping habits.

So here I am now, after recently reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (my vote for book of the year), and currently reading the less-accessible Coming Home to Eat by Gary Paul Nabhan, trying to set some new boundaries for myself without becoming an utter freak. I’ve always tried to refrain from being too strict on myself because martyrdom truly isn’t my strong suit. After all, when I first made the decision to avoid processed, packaged foods, I didn’t give up pasta. I mean, sure, I could have insisted that I make my own pasta by hand, but more likely than not, I would have starved to death. There were (and still are) only so many hours in the day, and spending six to seven hours on making dinner seemed a little excessive when balanced against my then work schedule, school schedule, and need for sleep.

And certainly I would have starved to death when I decided to eat organically four or five years ago. Only so many items were even available organically around here for a while, and I probably could not have lived on that handful of ingredients alone. Of course, I could have moved further south, joined a commune and given up all earthly pleasures in order to grow all my own foodstuffs, but I’m sure that would have been rife with its own set of problems.

For obvious and absurd reasons then, I will not subscribe too rigidly to a local foods-only diet at this point. After all, I would miss so many things (coffee, olive oil, tuna, flour, etc) and would end up shriveled and cranky, with a pounding headache, in my badly-managed martyrdom. But I am coming up with some rules that I will attempt (not force myself, mind you, but attempt) to adhere to.

Most important of these new, yet still-evolving rules, is that I will try to feed myself, where possible, within some newly-drawn political lines. I’m aiming East of the Mississippi and South of the Mason-Dixon line (you can surely see why I often amuse my mother and sometimes confound my husband). So, since I know good and darn well that strawberries grow within those boundaries, then I will refrain from buying packages marked California-grown. And since I’m also aiming to eat seasonally, when strawberries are available in Georgia in May and early-June, I will eat them to the point of gluttony. After all, I will miss them in August.

My CSA membership has made much of this possible for me right now, along with Saturday morning visits to the local farmer’s market, so that this whole exercise doesn’t yet seem futile. This summer will be mostly easy, even fun, but I’m a little wary of the coming fall and winter, especially with a newborn around the house to throw things completely out of whack. So I keep reminding myself: the point here is be mindful, to eat locally and seasonally as much as possible, but not to kill myself doing it to the point where all the challenge and the fun has been leached out.

And, in the interest of full disclosure, I have already fallen hard from my newly-established and still-precarious pedestal. Cherries are in season in California right now. After piously walking by the beautiful bags of plump, bright red cherries for a solid four days, I completely caved in last week (twice) and have now gone through around five pounds of these luscious fruits over the past week. And I might cave again. Cherry season is so painfully short. So sweet, so juicy, yet so very short.

The three-week Spring Greens session of the CSA is now over, though I still found some vibrant and tender bunches of kale and chard in my first share box of the summer session. Even though I was thrilled to death by the appearance of broccoli and zucchini in last week’s box as well as the aforementioned chard & kale, I focused most of my recipe-sleuthing efforts on the end of the greens harvest so that I wouldn’t miss out on one of my last opportunities to cook with these wonderful greens this year (unless the farm continues to plant and harvest them all summer).

So far, I’ve been stingy with the chard, and have mostly used it in sautees, with crushed red pepper flakes, olive oil and garlic, but I was ready to do something different this week, and I lucked into a recipe for Swiss chard calzones (never would have thought of it myself, even though I've made spinach calzones for years) in Vegetarian Planet. Calzones are easy to make, either with homemade pizza dough, or even with (shudder to think) the convenient little refrigerated packages of pizza dough from the grocery store. I prefer to grill mine, but they can be baked in the oven with similar, though somewhat slightly soggier, results.

This particular recipe called for tomatoes, which would have been delicious, but I substituted some mushrooms and bell peppers that were already waiting patiently in my crisper drawer. The ricotta was fabulous – I usually use mozzarella or feta in my calzones and this was a welcome change.

*****

SWISS CHARD AND RICOTTA CALZONES (serves 2 as an entree, or 4 as a side dish; adapted from Vegetarian Planet)

• 2 Tbs olive oil
• 2 cups sliced red onions
• 2 large garlic cloves, minced
• 2 cups chopped vegetables (such as tomatoes, bell peppers, mushrooms)
• 1 bunch Swiss chard, leaves chopped, stems diced
• 3/4 cup Ricotta cheese
• 1/2 tsp salt
• fresh-ground black pepper
• crushed red pepper flakes
• 1 batch pizza dough (or, in times of utter desperation, when you don't have two hours to make dough, one refrigerated package of pre-made pizza dough)
• 1-2 more Tbs olive oil, if grilling
• 2 Tbs cornmeal, if baking

1. Heat the olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add the onions and cook for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the garlic and the other vegetables, and cook for 5 minutes more, stirring frequently. Add the chard and cook for another 5 minutes or so (until tender, but not mushy), stirring often. Drain remaining liquid.
2. Add ricotta cheese, and season well with salt and pepper and red pepper flakes.
3. Roll dough out flat, and cut into either 2 large equal-sized pieces, or 4 smaller equal pieces.
4. Divide mixture between portions of dough, but only cover half of each piece. Fold empty side of dough over to make a pocket around the filling and crimp the edges with a fork to seal.
5. If grilling, brush both sides of the calzones with olive oil, and cook on grill or grill pan over medium heat for about 3-5 minutes per side. If baking, skip the oil and sprinkle a baking sheet with the cornmeal. Top with the calzones and bake at 450 degrees for about 15 minutes.
6. Serve hot with marinara sauce for dipping, if desired.

A Fool for Kale

Odd Toddler and I picked up our second weekly CSA share on Friday, and I practically swooned when I saw the size of the box and the generous quantities of greens we received. Again, we had one unrecognizable item that I had to email the guy at the farm about, clearly reminding me (yet again) of just how little I actually know. This week’s harvest: tiny arugula, spring shallots, green garlic, radicchio, juntar cilantro, red Russian kale, Swiss chard, romaine, and a leaf lettuce.

Two weeks into this little project, the radicchio is still kicking my butt. It’s a beautiful head of greens, but extremely bitter and therefore slightly difficult to work with. The first week, I followed the advice of Jason from the farm, and sautéed it lightly with a little bit of olive oil, and served it with lemon juice and sea salt. Still too bitter. This week I tried a Giada de Laurentiis recipe in which the radicchio was cooked with cannelini beans in a little bit of broth, and then topped with a pan-fried fillet of tilapia and drizzled with lemon vinaigrette. Not a good idea.

I had tried the Giada recipe previously, but since I’d been unable to find radicchio at the time, I had substituted spinach and The Carnivore and I loved the recipe. This time, since I actually had radicchio on hand, grown locally and organically, I was excited to try the recipe again, this time in its entirety. But a number of things went wrong with the whole plan. First, and I’m feeling a little ignorant for not realizing this sooner, but tilapia is brought in from WAY afar. This isn’t the kind of fish that is being caught off the coast of Georgia, or even Florida. Ecuador and Chile were the locations listed on the labels, thus seemingly negating the positive effects of my very fuel-efficient radicchio. And then of course, we can’t overlook the fact that neither the Carnivore nor I even enjoyed the final product (which I thought tasted a little like dirt).

Current score: radicchio 2, Sarah 0. I’m gonna really have to put some muscle into this next week if we get more of this mean green in our next share box.

With the notable exception of the evil, scheming radicchio, we’ve found it relatively easy to work our entire share box into our weekly meals. Nothing has turned bad in the crisper before we’ve had a chance to eat it, and we haven’t run out of greens before the next box was ready to be picked up. Truly, it’s the best possible scenario. And the surprise hit of the greens season has been the kale. Using the lettuces is easy – I eat salads nearly every day; if not for lunch, then as a side dish with dinner. Fresh herbs and aromatics are always easy to work into whatever we’re already having, and easy greens like Swiss chard can be lightly steamed or sautéed and go well with any entrée.

But the kale had me slightly stumped at first since I was striving hard to not serve different greens, each cooked the same way as the one before it, every night for the three weeks of this particular harvest. I wanted variety in our menu, while working within the constraints of what was in season at the time (and doing my best to also eat within some fairly arbitrary geographical limits that I’ve set upon myself). We enjoyed the Kale and White Bean Soup last week, but I certainly didn’t want to serve the same thing again this week with our new bag of kale. So I cocked my head just so and stared at my cookbook shelves for a few minutes, finally noticing my copy of Mollie Katzen’s Vegetable Heaven.

See, I have a LOT of cookbooks, although I’m of the mind that one can never have too many, and it can actually get a bit daunting to find just the right one when I’m trying to find just the right recipe for a given ingredient (in this case, kale). I’m not sure when or from where the Vegetable Heaven cookbook came into my life, but I think I’ve had it for at least a fair number of years, and I do know this was the first time I’d even used it. A little shameful, to be sure, and I can’t believe this was the first time I’d really spent some time reading it. It’s fascinating. And I’ve now marked a few recipes that I want to try as soon as some other vegetable seasons begin. For now though, after doing an index search for kale, I ran across a recipe for Bitter Greens with Sweet Onions and Tart Cheese.

That’s just singing my song. I love onions. I love greens. And pregnancy rules be scorned loudly, I love feta cheese and refuse to completely give it up. Since the feta would be heated in this recipe, it seemed logical that any errant scary bacteria would be killed anyhow. And besides, for pregnancy books to say its okay to have an alcoholic drink every now and then, but that you can NEVER have feta seems like a bit of sacrilege. That’s for another blog though. I have some rather vehement opinions on this. As a matter of fact, if you’ll pardon a tangent here, I have a lot of siblings, some of whom have obviously suffered from fetal alcohol effects. None of them are suffering from the overuse of feta by their birth mothers.

Regardless of where I stand on the liquor versus cheese issue, the recipe seemed like a winner. Vidalia onions are obviously local enough for me (same state) and are in season right now, along with the kale. So I threw all caution to the wind on Saturday night and served the Bitter Greens with Sweet Onions and Tart Cheese for dinner, atop brown rice cooked in vegetable broth, with a wee bit of butter and a little bit of salt. Let’s face it, brown rice doesn’t have a lot of taste to begin with, and could use the added boost. I planned the greens dish for my entrée, but was a little concerned about the meal being too, um, vegetarian for The Carnivore (and I wanted to hedge my bets in case the recipe was disappointing in any way) so I surreptitiously suggested it would be a good night for him to fix a small piece of meat to go with his dinner. Just in case, you know.

As it turned out, the recipe, along with the rice, was filling enough to be the main dish for two, and was incredibly, wonderfully delicious. As a matter of fact, even the leftovers were fabulous for lunch for the next day. And The Carnivore, from whom I had hidden the title of the cookbook I was using, loved the dish as much as I did. I think kale will be supplanting collards as our favorite green.

•••••

BITTER GREENS WITH SWEET ONIONS AND TART CHEESE (from Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven, serves two as a main dish or four to six as a side dish)

• 2 Tbs olive oil
• 4 cups sliced Vidalia onion (or other sweet onion)
• Salt to taste
• 12 cups (approx. 12 oz.) fresh greens, coarsely chopped, large stems removed (this sounds like a lot, but it cooks down considerably)
• 1/2 lb feta cheese, crumbled
• Freshly ground black pepper

1. Heat the oil in a large Dutch oven. Add the onion and salt lightly. Saute over high heat for about 5 minutes, then turn the heat to medium, cover, and let the onion cook until tender and caramelized (about 10 more minutes).
2. Add the greens in batches, sprinkling lightly with salt after each addition. If the pan fills up before all the greens have been used, cover the pot and allow the greens to wilt for a minute or two before adding more.
3. When all the greens have wilted, stir in the feta, and cook for another couple of minutes. Add pepper and additional salt to taste.
4. Serve over brown rice cooked in vegetable broth.