marital edibles

It’s funny how marriage makes you eat differently. What’s suffices as a perfectly adequate meal for one tends to flop as a dinner for two. J’s standard issue pile of beans and canned chicken -- yes, I said CANNED CHICKEN! -- doesn’t go over well with me. And my overcooked scrambled eggs on a soulless corn tortilla from a bag hardly passes the muster with him. But we both end up stretching here and there. He’ll eat the whole wheat blueberry waffles when I make them (even if we have no maple syrup), but he’d rather just grab a fistful of almonds and get to work. I’ll try yet another stir-fry, usually persuaded after a bite or two. We haven’t quite found a rhythm though. It’s unclear who is going to cook what and when and how. And all the while, we have a real dining room mocking us. It’s this dedicated space calling out to us, to eat, to put our work away, to throw Homer out the door, to break bread -- err, kale -- together.

And small town Kentucky certainly prompts one to cook. There’s a semi decent Indian place about ten miles up the road, but you can only eat Indian so many days a week. Instead, we troll the farmer’s markets and pick through the “World Foods” aisle at Meijers. I’ve been working my way through Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Everyday. This is the first cookbook that just absolutely works with my ideas of good, simple food. A couple days ago, faced with the slimmest of slim pickings in the fridge, I flipped through its pages looking for lunch. The micro greens that I haphazardly “planted” (i.e. I tossed seeds on the ground) a couple weeks ago were going crazy in the soil, but I needed a vehicle for them. Swanson answered my call with an open-faced egg salad sandwich that uses plain yogurt instead of mayonnaise. I picked some thyme and threw it all on German whole grain bread. The next day, with even slimmer pickings, I tried her chickpea salad recipe, added a couple slices of local tomatoes, and J and I both swooned. Now if I could only find black mustard seeds and rye flour in the land of Hamburger Helper and Mountain Dew.

somnambulist cooking

I want to start a fan club for recipes with less than four ingredients that are, in their very simplicity, perfect. The first on my list is this one from smittenkitchen that is quickly becoming an old standby here.

Picture it: It’s Monday night and you’re exhausted. You’ve managed to get through the day, but you have absolutely no energy to cook. None. You don’t even, in fact, have enough energy to pick up the phone and order take-out from across the street. Right across the street. You can’t bear the thought of walking out your door.

So instead you convince yourself that you can: a) open a can of tomatoes, b) cut an onion in half, c) peel the wax paper off a stick of butter, d) transfer all of this into a pot and turn it on. Once the aroma of buttery tomatoes perks up your spirits, you further convince yourself that you can manage to: a) put a pot of water on the stove, and b) boil pasta. It’s tough, but you manage it.

Because you’ve discovered a shred of vestigial energy by opening and closing the refrigerator door and wielding your knife for one swift blow through the onion, you manage – for the first time now – to dump a bag of pre-washed spinach into the bowl where you’re going to dump the hot pasta and sauce. You feel momentarily self-righteous because you’ve managed to turn a fatty carbo load into a fatty carbo load with a hint of iron and some fancy minerals.

You’re inspired now and manage to open the fridge once more and pull out the off-brand-and-also-pretty-bland parmesan cheese. You think you can just manage to sprinkle it over the top of the steaming noodles.

You scoop it onto a plate. Open the book for tomorrow's class. Convince yourself that you're reading. But really, you're just letting the carbs take you away to some magic land where hundreds of calories fly off your body just as they enter your mouth.

raw

It’s just been one of those weeks.

J was in town. I was teaching a long novel. All of the stress and exhaustion from Chicago was draining from my pores. And so very little got made or got started. Instead, J and I marveled at how little time we have left in our commuting marriage (53 days or so, but who could be counting?) before he comes back to Philadelphia to help me move to Kentucky. I started thinking about reserving a U-haul and pirating boxes from the library.

There are many things to look forward to in Kentucky --- I say, racking my brain right now --- but perhaps the best is J’s cooking. This week reminded me of the culinary delights to come. They’re usually healthy, bright, and tangy, just the way I like them.

Occasionally I express grave skepticism before I bite, like this last week, when he served up raw zucchini. You can't possibly imagine how good this is, because who really wants to eat raw zucchini? But it's pretty close to perfect: crisp zucchini (from the salting) and a hearty dose of lemon (J says that he boosted the lemon by adding a 4th). He also added the white beans and hard boiled eggs, both of which turn the whole thing from a side dish into a meal.

And who can really complain that he used no less than twelve bowls in its making? I'll happily do the dishes for a dinner like this.

Michael Symon's Zucchini Crudo

2 zucchini (about ¾ pound), thinly sliced
2 yellow summer squash (about 1½ pounds), thinly sliced
1 tablespoon plus ¼ teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1 shallot, finely sliced
Grated zest and juice of 3 lemons, or to taste
½ cup extra-virgin olive oil
1⁄3 cup slivered or sliced almonds, toasted
1⁄3 cup chopped fresh dill

*J's additions:
White beans
Hard boiled eggs

Combine the zucchini and yellow squash in a colander in the sink and sprinkle 1 tablespoon of the salt over it. Toss to coat, and set aside for 10 to 15 minutes, no longer. In a large bowl, combine the garlic and shallot, sprinkle with the remaining ¼ teaspoon salt, and whisk in the lemon zest and juice. Whisk in the olive oil in a steady stream, then the almonds and dill. Taste for seasoning and acidity (it should be nicely acidic). Add the zucchini and squash to the dressing, toss, and serve immediately.

Makes 4 to 6 servings

winterberry

Okay, so they're really called wheatberries, but I much prefer winterberries. After all, I've discovered them in winter and they're hearty and rugged, the kind of grain that can stand up against a blustery January afternoon.



I first happened upon them during one of my jury duty wandering breaks. I found them in a delicious salad with butternut squash and raisins. My palate, of course, is so naive that I couldn't discern if they were tossed with cumin or coriander, curry or cardamom. Okay, that's a lie; I knew I it wasn't cardamom. But you get the idea. I felt immediately drawn to their crunchiness.

I found some in the bulk section of whole foods last Sunday and decided to give them a try. I couldn't find a recipe that represented the other contents of my fridge and pantry and so I just went with what I had and mixed together:

a cup of cooked winterberries (you boil them for about an hour)
a chopped up red onion (next time I'll leave it out or roast it first with the squash)
a smallish roasted butternut squash (cut into cubes)
one can of chick peas (well rinsed)
the juice from one lemon
a couple tablespoons of olive oil
salt and pepper
some curry powder
a desire for cilantro, but alas, it's absence

It's really rather delicious and here it is Thursday and I'm still eating off that salad. I think they may become a staple around these parts.

reversals

I should be working on my job applications, my ACLS letter, my book talk. But alas, I’m thinking about dinner. And it’s before noon! I’m wondering about those two onions, that sack of pinto beans, that can of tomatoes, that bevy of lemons. It’s a very strange feeling, this thinking about making dinner. You see, J is the cook. I’m the dishwasher. He’s the foodie. I’m the rapid eater. In the established order of things, I have two left feet in the kitchen (a convenient reputation when you’re eager for others to cook for you) and he makes magic from canned beans.

But in recent days, all sorts of shifts have been perceptible around here. I’ve been making dinner—red cabbage and lime salad, butternut squash gratin, shrimp tacos (my culinary heart throb), basil ceasar—and J has actually been eating my creations with tremendous relish. It’s gotten me thinking that so much about relationships is about that peculiar mix of well-worn patterns and new flexibility. Last summer, as I gradually lost my mind with too much work, J cooked carefully considered dinners that greeted me when I warily came in from the office. Now I find myself doing the same for him. Instead of feeling like an unpleasant push and pull, it feels wonderfully natural to find these rhythms together.

Four months of marriage have begun to suggest that there may really be something to this commitment thing. Instead of feeling emotionally bent by indecision and second guessing (oh, how I don’t long for my twenties!), I’m loving watching these synchronizations unfold. Now only if I could convince—or rather, not have to convince—J to pick up the sponge after dinner.

A woefully inadequate start

The last few weeks have felt like much of the last few years: quick, really, really quick. When I first met J—he was 33 at the time—he waxed on about wanting to press pause, to slow down. At 30—or was I 31?—I expressed complete bafflement about this notion. Why ever would you want to press pause when the next greatest thing might be just around the bend?

Over the last few weeks, though, all I’ve wanted is a pause button. Everything has happened so quickly, with such a force of energy and emotion that I hardly know what’s happened. J and I decided that it must be a mid-30s kind of thing, that once you reach the middle of that decade everything speeds up to the point of indecipherability.

This space, this modest little space, helps slow things down. Even now, as I sit on the morning train thinking about the 46 things on my To-Do List, I find myself slowing down just enough to reflect and remember, to stretch out all that’s happened into sentences and paragraphs. As my deadlines loom large at the moment, I’m hoping that my commute might be a kind of pause button, an iron horse trotting only so fast that I might have time to reflect inside its belly.

In any case, I have a lot to say and show from the wedding. The images are starting to trickle in and I’m hoping to post the readings and perhaps even our vows here over the next couple weeks. For now, though, I thought I’d begin with a more mundane kind of celebration.

On Sunday we celebrated my mom’s birthday (which is, coincidentally, the birthday of my ex-boyfriend turned close friend, his father, his friend Karen, and the mother of my high school boyfriend) with a perfect mid-summer dinner on the porch in Michigan. J and I made grilled salmon with lime butter sauce. We served iceberg wedges with homemade bleu cheese dressing and we drank mojitos with limes left over from the wedding. The fish was cooked just right, but the real cause for celebration—at least for me—was that wedge of lettuce.

Oh how I missed the humble lettuces of old! The perfectly watery crunch of iceberg lettuce, with its nearly flavorless modesty, reminds me that for all the nutritional bravado of baby spinach or spring greens or bibb lettuce or even romaine, they just can’t compete with that crunch. We chilled the iceberg in a bath of ice water and then let it drip dry in the fridge for two hours so that the crunch was a serious crunch, a loud and mandiblely satisfying crunch.

We ended the evening's celebration with a trip to Moomers, Josh's favorite ice cream spot, with my delightfully quirky aunt and cousin.

thin

I remember that during graduate school I often felt like I didn't have enough time. In retrospect, nothing could have been further from the truth. In graduate school, you have years -- years to read and to think and to write. You have time to take up a new hobby and you have years to become embroiled in deeply unhealthy emotional entanglements. When I first met J, he talked about wanting to "press pause" on the world, to stop everything and do all of things he that wanted to. I thought that this was absolutely absurd because graduate school felt to me like seven years on pause. It felt like a kind of suspended animation in which I could recognize change in others -- and certainly in the world around me -- but I always felt myself on pause.

Somehow I have skipped play and am now stuck on fast-forward; everything is speeding by and I can hardly catch my breath. J says I'm spread to thin. I race from one class to the office, to a meeting, to another meeting, to my computer. I'm trying to edit a book that is due at the end of June, plan and facilitate a major international conference on women's education, teach an upper-level college seminar, get out my own writing, keep up a long-distance relationship, plan a wedding, and stay sane. Sometimes it feels like just too much. This is when I want to hop a train to Kentucky and hide out from the world with J.

I know that all this complaining is really rather unbecoming. Instead, I should delight in a weekend with my little sis. After all, we sewed together:

It's another project -- a baby burrito wrap -- from the Lotta Jansdotter book. This was my first experience with her patterns. They sort of crack me up. When I was in high school, I first experimented with making clothes for myself. I used to measure my body and then freehand sketch patterns on old newspapers. They were pretty wonky, but I made a bunch of skirts that way, ones that I wore for years and to tatters. My grandmother made the button holes and I'm sure that she was horrified by my slightly uneven hems and sloppy waist bands. In any case, Jansdotter's published patterns are a bit like my high school versions -- freehand, sloppy, maintaining only a casual relationship to accuracy. But I took it in stride and this little number will hopefully calm a new baby due in May.

We also cooked a treat -- an especially rare treat for someone on a sugar elimination diet -- cinnamon rolls. The recipe is from Smitten Kitchen by way of Orangette. Of course they failed to rise properly, but we nevertheless gobbled them up with the help of a friend. Yeast seems sooo stubborn to me. I can never seem to coax it into action, even as I propped the dough bowl on a steam heater. Steam heat I tell you! It should have been quadrupling in size. But alas, no such luck.


While we were still panicking that the cinnamon rolls weren't going to rise at all, we scurried to make a dutch pancake to serve my friend as a first course. I guess you could say that we were raised right: we knew to panic when we invited a friend over for a sweet treat, she was set to arrive in 15 minutes, and we had stubborn dough on our hands. This is where the dutch pancake never fails to delight. Get the oven hot enough and you're golden...and so is it.

non-fat (yogurt) cheese = tasty

I know you must be skeptical. Non-fat cheese is awful. But I made non-fat yogurt cheese overnight and it is delicious. Next, I will try making it with low-fat vanilla yogurt as a dessert (but according to the blogs I have read, you need to make sure it doesn't contain gelatin). I had some of the cheese today for lunch in an egg white and mushroom omelet. I think it will be a good substitute for ricotta and cream cheese too. I am thinking about making olive dip out of the yogurt cheese for a Super Bowl party on Sunday (yes A, I am admitting that I do things like go to Super Bowl parties).

So here is yogurt cheese making in photographs:

beans and greens

I met J (whose code name here I’m considering changing to The Big Guth) when I was 31 and at my wit’s end with graduate school and it’s impoverished living. A couple walks together later, I made a list of the reasons why I liked him. I did this because I had a long history of meeting someone, really liking him, enjoying a lovely six or eight or even thirteen months together, and then promptly forgetting why it was I ever decided to date him. I figured that 31 was as good a time as any to change my ways and so I’d write it all down, keep a spreadsheet of love (okay, so that’s an exaggeration), and then have the proof months later when he was driving me crazy and I had decided I was better off alone. And yes, I pulled that list out six months after we met, and again at nine months, and even again at twenty-two months. I haven’t looked at it in awhile, but when I came home from work last night, #2 on the list was being enacted before my eyes: the man can make miracles happen with a can of beans.

Indeed! At 31 and after scores of failed relationships, I knew what was most important: the ability to turn a $.99 can of black beans into a little taste of heaven. He called it “beans and greens,” and it had been a staple of his diet for the countless years that he, too, spent in the throes of graduate school hell. I had never known anyone who could make a delicious meal out of three simple ingredients: a can of beans, a bag of spinach, and some hot sauce. Oh and I guess a bit of olive oil to coat the pan. It was perfect: lots of protein, little fat, a green leafy vegetable that you don’t really want to eat but that tastes yummy all warmed up and spicy, and best of all, it was cheap, super cheap. Last night we had the post-graduate version, i.e. it had chicken. Imagine the decadence. It might not look like anything, but trust me, it tastes like love.

p.s. Beans and greens a la Smitten Kitchen. Combining my love of risotto and beans and greens....think I might give it a try

brussel sprouts and breakfast

I'm on a huge brussel sprout kick. I've had them for dinner -- or as part of dinner -- every night for the last four nights. With another pound in the fridge, I'm thinking I might as well make it five nights in a row. When I was a kid, I loved brussel sprouts, much to the horror of my friends. I'd methodically peel back each paper-thin skin, drop it in my mouth, and hurry to peel back another layer, eager to discover the heart of the sprout. Artichokes held the same allure, and in our house, they were a special, late summer treat. We'd all share a single choke, ripping off its dense leaves and dunking them into melted margarine (I didn't know butter existed until I was twelve). Once it was stripped bare, with the choke exposed, my father would take his knife and with surgical precision, flay the heart. Not a hair of choke remained as he delicately cut the heart into six small pieces and drowned them in the remaining fat. Ever since, I've loved foods that need to be disassembled, though now I'm more inclined to pop an entire brussel sprout in my mouth, steaming and salty, and enjoy it as an intact whole.



And on this 7 degree morning, why not make a batch of popovers? After years of frustration at my popovers not popping, I solved the problem yesterday when I purchased a little $5 oven thermometer. I also used a new recipe that called for putting the melted butter directly into the pan, instead of mixing it in with the batter. Perfection. And J even let me eat four to his modest 2.

But tomorrow it's back to the grind. With new teaching, this semester promises to exhaust me, so I guess I'd better get back to that syllabus.

a cold

Wouldn't you know that I'd start the new year with a new cold. I went to sleep with great plans for Saturday -- an early visit to the gym, recipe planning for a dinner tonight, finishing the revisions for an article. Instead, I woke up with a nasty cold and so I canceled my gym plans and am having a quiet, if unproductive, morning.



My friend recommended that I take Molly Wizenberg's lovely book off my shelf -- a gift from another graduate school pal -- and snuggle up with it. It's wonderfully confessional and culinarily intimate. I'm in a cooking phase, an unexpected phase for me, and so her inclination toward marrying food with family narrative (a perennial interest) intrigues me. When I asked J if he thought we were in a cooking phase, he grumbled something about my need to always diagnose the present. Diagnosis or not, I think we're in a cooking phase.

As you can see here, I'm also in a winter knitting phase. I decide to tackle the entrelac scarf. It's easier than it looks, and doesn't it look cool? This is my second scarf with Noro Silk Garden and it certainly won't be my last. Bring on the chill, I'll be prepared.

And on to that damned article...