Middle Shelf & Door

The fridge project continues! One girl. One chaotic refrigerator. One New Year’s project. Watch her take on unidentifiable sauces in tiny tupperware, three plastic bags full of raisins, ziplocs full of things we think we’re going to eat but never get around to, and seven-year-old apple butter!

Who knows what secrets lurk in the heart of the middle shelf?

The top shelf called mostly for organization and patience. The middle shelf, however, would bring its own unique challenges. Almost two separate worlds in one shelf, the middle shelf’s front half is the home to snack material like bread and cheese and tortillas and baba ganoush. It has its share, too, of little bits of leftover sauce and dressing put into tiny containers and left to leak quietly onto the shelf below. But the back half of the middle shelf is more like a pantry – loose floppy plastic baggies of raisins, nutritional yeast, rice, and flax seeds are crammed into the back and make periodic surges forward, tangling their plastic tails in amongst the mochi and miso trying to live a quiet life up front.

Pulling out the contents of the middle shelf was like a revelation. It was as though a veil of crinkly plastic was lifted from my eyes. Hiding there I found several beets, fuzzed with mold around their tops but still firm and ready to go. I found a white onion that came in my CSA box – putting it at an August 27th, 2008 arrival date at the most recent. A box of tofu was just barely holding on, and several pomegranates had begun to wither in on themselves.

Baked Beets and Onions with Horseradish Sauce from the middle shelf

The real source of chaos on the middle shelf was the aforementioned bags of dry goods, and luckily all these found happy new homes. Some went into the actual pantry, some into the freezer, and the rest were sorted into labeled jars and tucked back into the fridge where their plastic effluvium would bother us no more. Ever since the advent of our wonderful portable dishwasher I’ve been much more diligent about washing and saving food jars rather than recycling them away (no matter how much you wash it by hand, a pickle jar still smells like pickles!) so I had a great collection of multi-sized options to choose from.

The fridge door was a relatively easy affair, mostly a question of moving things I use more often into better positions. I’ve known for a while that I’m a mustard addict, but organizing the door forced me to confront my addiction. (Or do “normal” people keep 8 different kinds of mustard in their refrigerators?)

I ended up with quite a tasty meal from the middle shelf: Chili-glazed tofu (nothing like a tangy chili glaze to cover the tangy taste of near-spoilage!). A tubful of pomegranate seeds, great for snacking, especially when the house gets so dehydrating with the heater on. And a new recipe: Baked Beets and Onions with Horseradish Sauce (recipe follows below), with the door contributing a jar of grated horseradish that hadn’t made an appearance since Passover of ‘05.

The plastic bag menace has been transformed!

Top Shelf
Bottom Shelf & Crisper Drawers

Baked Beets and Onions with Horseradish Sauce (inspiration taken from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone)

Beets
Onions
Olive Oil
Salt & pepper

Yogurt
Grated horseradish
Sugar to taste
Salt to taste
White wine or sherry vinegar to taste

Preheat oven to 375 or 400 degrees. Scrub beets but leave the peels on and cut into large pieces. Remove peels from onions and cut into thick slices, sprinkle with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper. Line a baking dish with parchment paper (optional – makes clean-up much easier!) and spread out beets and onions in pan. Put about 1/4 inch water in the bottom of the pan and cover pan with foil. Bake until beets are tender, about 30-40 minutes.

Mix yogurt and horseradish to taste. (You want to make sure it isn’t too spicy or bitter for your palate.) Add a little sugar, a little salt, a little vinegar, but make sure to save the final seasoning for when your veggies are done, because the sauce tastes very different against the sweetness of the baked beets.

Stocking up, part I

Making ingredients is a funny thing. You put a lot of energy into preparing something, but you can’t eat it on its own. All that energy gets expended in the service of expending less energy in the future. (Or, sometimes, in order to have a version of some particular ingredient that you can actually eat, because dietary restrictions mean it’s not possible to buy it already prepared.)

The past few weeks I’ve prepped a lot of ingredients. Not because I’ve had extra energy (I almost never have extra energy) but because I’ve had a ton of produce that was just not getting eaten in time. And this is the other function of making ingredients, also known as “preserving,” because it gets your food into forms that don’t rot, or freeze easily, or will actually get eaten.

My stockpile has included:

* Scrap Stock, batch V, my first successful batch since May (I had a failed attempt in late June). Because I canceled several box deliveries this summer, and have been away a lot, my scrap stock production has really slowed down. Additionally, tomato and zucchini trimmings don’t work for scrap stock because they rot before I can collect a large enough batch of scraps, so the scrap box I keep in the fridge hasn’t been getting full as fast as it did in the winter and spring. But at last I produced 4 cups of lovely pink stock (due to the beet trimmings from the turnip pickles, see below). And just in the nick of time! I am now cooking with my stock faster than I am making it.

* Turnip pickles, which employed beets and vinegar solution to turn my four large bunches of uneaten turnips into yummy pink, Middle Eastern pickles. Now, of course, I have 5 jars of pickles. They’re refrigerator pickles, which means they’ll get too strong if I don’t eat them soon. What am I going to do with five jars of turnip pickles? Have a pickle party? If you live in SF, let me know if you want a jar of really tasty turnip pickles. The texture of these little guys is incredible! They go amazingly well with falafel, but are also a yummy snack all on their own.

Turnip pickles with grilled eggplant and quinoa pilaf

* Mushroom gravy, following a vegan recipe from Veganomicon. I bought a big bag of mushrooms at the farmer’s market a while back, intending to make mushroom-walnut pate with them. (YUM!) But then our Cuisinart died, and I had to quickly figure out a new use for them before they turned to sludge in the fridge. Mushroom gravy is the kind of thing that always balks me. If I see a recipe, like the delicious Another Sheperd’s Pie from Moosewood Low-Fat Favorites, that has a whole separate gravy-making component on top of the actual making of the dish, I will always skip it. (In previous, more energetic times I did occasionally take on these all-day projects, which is why I know how good that recipe tastes!) But now with several cups of delicious vegan, gluten-free mushroom gravy tucked away in my freezer, I have a leg up on all those hearty but time-consuming vegetarian classics.

There’s plenty more stocking up in this pile (including our new downstairs freezer finally getting put to use with all kind of grains and seeds and GF flours, courtesy of Rainbow Grocery and their 20% off coupons from the Yellow Pages). It does give me a secure feeling to have a little backstock of ingredients, and it gives me a happy feeling to know that they came from my own hands!

Raw raw raw!

Farm Princess has left for the East, and only the farms gods know when we’ll meet again. She left us the best possible gift to remember her by, however – a huge bag full of farm-fresh produce. Tiny sweet peppers, heirloom tomatoes, and enormous amounts of curly kale. Duck and I spent the day with her before she boarded her train and we all decided to check out the Grand Lake farmer’s market for the first time. That impressive market, which is quite a party with live music, slides for the kids, and stands with prepared food of all kinds, yielded up Japanese eggplants, dry-farmed tomatoes, mountain blueberries, and perfectly ripe avocados, among other treasures.

We may still be mourning the loss of our favorite farm girl, but a body’s got to eat, right? It’s been robust at mealtimes for the past couple days, with my Cafe Gratitude-style rice bowl and Duck’s buckwheat soba with portobella mushrooms and zucchini, so I wanted something very light tonight. I wanted kale salad.

Specifically, I wanted a kale salad someone brought to a potluck I went to a few months ago, but with my brain fog I can now no longer remember who made it or what it tasted like, just that it was heavenly and I was so surprised and delighted at how tender and wonderful raw kale could be.

So I used the awesome-pants search feature over at Food Blog Search to seek out some kale salad recipes. I found a few different ones, but several of them involved lightly sauteeing the kale, and this quest had become, for me, all about the raw. I found one totally raw salad (with some variation) in three different places. I first read about it on the I Am Gluten Free blog, and then found another version on the Diet, Dessert, and Dogs blog, and finally watched a YouTube video of it being made! By this time I was sold. This isn’t the salad I went looking for, but it fit perfectly with the ingredients I had on hand, sounded delicious, and I was apparently going to get to do something called “massaging the kale.”

I decided to accompany it with a raw beet salad (I used a New York Times recipe as my starting point) and finish it up with a slice of green melon for dessert. (I know, the food combiners, who taught me about eating raw, are rolling over in their wheatgrass patches at my eating melon after a meal…) All in all, a delicious and incredibly colorful dinner.

The recipes are so simple, but I’ll write them out anyways. The part I’ve expanded on is the kale salad directions; every time I massaged the kale my hands would get oily and slippery and then I’d go to pick up a knife to cut open the avocado, etc. and it would be a bad scene. (Somehow the Raw Coach in the video doesn’t seem to have this problem!) So I thought a little guide to what order things should be done in would be helpful.

The fourth way

Back when I still thought my problem with turnips was not having found the right way to cook them (as opposed to simply disliking them in general), I tried them three different ways in one night. Of course I ended up not very satisfied with any of those (because I don’t like turnips). But after trying some raw turnip that evening, I thought they might make good pickles. This, I suggested while the turnip project still had appeal, would be the fourth way to try turnips.

Fast forward many months. A new round of turnip delivery begins. Duck and I eat the yummy greens very happily (and for all the people who find this site by googling “turnip greens” or “how to cook turnip greens” I recommend preparing them, alone or with other greens, steamed and then topped with kale sauce or sauteed “Venice” style or Asian style with ginger and garlic). But the turnips themselves sit in the fridge, unloved.

Then I remembered a favorite culinary memory. In New York, all the falafel places give you these yummy pink pickles with your food. They always seemed like radishes to me, but with a more rubbery rather than crunchy texture. Finally I asked a falafel cook what they were, and he told me they were pickled turnips. As far as I know, these pickles were my main contact with turnips before the advent of the CSA, but I completely forgot about them. The memory returned in my time of need as I stood staring at several bags of turnips nestled amidst the lettuce graveyard in my fridge.

But what turns white turnips into pink pickles? It turns out sliced beets do, and a bunch of beets arrived fortuitously in the next box. Google led me to a recipe on the madKnews blog, and I put my turnips in to pickle before leaving on my big Midwestern adventure. (These are “refrigerator pickles” so they don’t get canned, just stuck in the fridge to sit in a vinegar solution.)

Tonight the pickles had their grand unveiling. They’d been hanging out in their vinegar baths for thirteen days, several days more than the recipe recommended, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Duck and I wanted to showcase them in their optimal setting, so we made homemade falafel to put on fresh lavash bread with heirloom tomatoes, tender red leaf lettuce, a squeeze of meyer lemon and a generous spread of Haig’s baba ganoush, a local delicacy and one of my favorite things.

We tried the pickles straight first, and then rolled them into sandwiches with all the other goodies. The first pickle-only bite was so spicy, I felt like I’d licked the maror dish at Passover (that would be a bowl of horseradish for those of you who are seder-uninitiated). And Duck made a face when he tried his that made me certain I was going to be eating two jars of turnip pickles by my lonesome. But then his fingers kept sneaking back into the jar.

“You like them!,” I exclaimed.

“I don’t know if I like them,” he replied, “but I seem to be addicted to them.” At least that’s what I think he said – his mouth was full of turnip pickle at the time.

Subsequent bites proved a little more mellow. And the little guys were absolutely phenomenal in our falafel wraps. I’m having a hard time finding words to describe their flavor. Zesty, certainly. And so yummy I was stuffing another little slice into each bite of my wrap. It looks like, after what ended up being considerably more than four tries, I have at last found a way to enjoy my turnips!

Scrap Stock IV – Mega-edition

Another consequence of being too tired to cook or blog or generally do anything was that my veggie scraps really started piling up. By early this week most of my fridge’s top shelf seemed to be devoted to scraps, waiting like pining lovers for the transformative kiss of the stock pot. So when I finally started to have a bit more energy, it was time to brew up some stock and get that shelf cleared.

I ended up having enough material to make two pots of stock, ending up with 13 cups of rich, savory broth, tinged a beautiful pink from the beet scraps. My freezer is truly well stocked now, which saves me from treating the stock like it is a scarce commodity.

In this mega-edition of scrap stock:

Spinach crowns
Garlic peels and trim
Carrot trim and tops
Chard stem
Kale stem
Asparagus trim
Red cabbage trim
Fennel stalks
Apple cores
Radish trim
Leek trim
Green garlic trim
Arugula trim
Sugar snap pea trim
Thyme stalks
Red onion peels and trim
Shallot peels and trim
Mustard green trim
Beet trim
Bay leaves