“Semi-homemade” from scratch

Yuck. I’m sick. (*whine, whine, whine*)

I have some kind of sore throat, stuffy nose, achey sinus thing and I feel gross all over. When I feel this way, there is only one food I want: Tom Yum soup. Lovely clear broth so it’s light on the system, lots of heat to open up those sinuses, enough veggies and tofu that my body has some fuel to keep going. And that lilting, incomparable flavor – lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves and lime juice – like sweet-and-sour refined and taken to the pinnacle of possibility.

Usually when I’m sick I get a big tub of it from the Thai place down the street, but lately their tubs have been shrinking and besides we had take-out from them last night, before I knew I would be sick and require my Tom Yum fix. So I decided to try to make my own version, figuring if I could at least hit the basic notes – acid, heat, sweet – I would get a similar medicinal effect if not the exact flavors. I started surfing the web for ideas and it quickly became clear that I had one major problem: no lemongrass.

You can’t make Tom Yum soup without lemongrass. It would just be some other kind of soup. And you can’t really make lemongrass flavor from something else, either. But then in my web travels I came across an old Slashfood post called “Semi-homemade: Tom Yum” that sang the praises of using prepared Tom Yum paste (that the author buys, coincidentally, at my favorite Asian-foods market here in SF) to whip up a bowl of Tom Yum in minutes. No need to keep lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, galangal, etc., around the house at all times. All very well and good, only I didn’t have any prepared Tom Yum paste, either. Or did I?

I did a search for Tom Yum paste and found the ingredients: Lemongrass, soya bean oil, onion, salt, chili, water, galangal, lime juice, sugar, garlic, msg, kaffir lime leaves, shrimp extract flavor, citric acid. Leaving aside the fillers and the non-veg ingredients, I realized Tom Yum paste was an awful lot like the homemade yellow curry paste I had sitting in my freezer.

See, I love those little jars of red and green curry paste made by Thai Kitchen. I find them perfectly acceptable for making curry at home. But my favorite, above all other Thai dishes, is yellow curry, and I have been unable to find prepared yellow curry paste anywhere. So last summer I found a wonderful recipe from Jugalbandi, bit the bullet, and made my own yellow curry paste (more complicated in the ingredient-gathering than the actual preparation) and ended up with an extra 1/4 cup wrapped in wax paper in my freezer.

The soup itself was a very improvised affair. I’m not going to bother with giving a recipe, because if you have the ingredients around to make curry paste from scratch, which you would have to do in order to reproduce my version of the soup, then you might as well make actual Tom Yum soup from scratch. And if you are using a prepared Tom Yum paste, your flavorings may be completely different and the proportions of lime juice, etc., that I used won’t be very helpful.

I’ll sketch a basic outline, though, in case you happen to have some yellow curry paste around and feel like making Tom Yum soup with it.

Vegetarian Tom Yum Soup from Yellow Curry Paste

Bring 4 cups broth plus 2 cups water to a simmer and add 1/4 cup yellow curry paste. I threw in 3 large kaffir lime leaves I had in my freezer as well. At this point I also added half a pack of firm tofu, cubed. The tofu comes out pretty bland, but that’s part of the Tom Yum experience for me. Simmer everything for 5 or so minutes. Then add half an onion, thinly sliced, 1 carrot, thinly sliced on the diagonal, a few sliced shitake mushrooms (already soaked in hot water for 30 minutes), half a can of sliced water chestnuts, and some frozen peas. If you have canned straw mushrooms, canned baby corn, button mushrooms, and/or baby bok choy, these would all be yummy to add.  Cook for a few minutes, then add a tomato, sliced into thin wedges. Also add lime juice (at least 1 lime’s worth – I use a plastic squeezie lime), and a little mirin or sugar. Season to taste using lime juice, mirin or sugar, and a tiny bit of soy sauce if necessary (I do not like soy sauce in my Tom Yum, but Duck loves it). Serve immediately, plain or over cooked rice noodles, topped with full stalks of cilantro if you have it.

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.

Let’s use more tomatoes

My boxes this month have contained many, many tomatoes. And I have finally used them all! It helped that the last two boxes’ worth of tomatoes didn’t start to mold the day after arrival, but I also consider it a great personal triumph that for the first time this summer I didn’t have to compost a single rotten tomato. The secret to my tomato salvation? A chance email from Cook’s Illustrated.

Cook’s Illustrated is a luscious magazine full of little hand-drawn illustrations of how to chop an onion and how to form gnocchi, and beautiful color charts of peppers and mushrooms. The magazine is made by the same people who do a show on PBS called America’s Test Kitchen (or so I’ve read in the magazine – I don’t have a TV so I’ve never seen the show), and both are based on the same principle. They take a dish, French onion soup, maybe, or vanilla sheet cake, and they make it over and over again, testing different ingredients and techniques and equipment, tweaking every variable, until they come up with what they feel is the “master recipe” – the very best way to make that particular dish. Most of their recipes involve either meat or wheat, so I can’t actually make them, but the magazine is, for me, food porn at its very best. I subscribe to their website so I can have access to their very thorough archive of kitchen equipment testing results, and consequently I get emails from them. Called “Notes from the Test Kitchen,” these recipes and tips and menus are also usually centered on meat and wheat, but occasionally I’ll read one that is just exactly right.

Like last week’s “All About Tomatoes” feature, containing a whole passel of recipes designed to help me take care of the pile of heirlooms, Shady Ladies, Romas, and cherry tomatoes crowding my kitchen table. I decided to try the Fresh Tomato Soup with Basil, a soup with a base of pureed roasted tomatoes that then has fresh tomatoes and basil added to it. Interestingly, when I followed the directions exactly (this was a many-times tested “master recipe,” of course) the roasting tomatoes started burning with half an hour of cooking time still to go. But I once I rescued them and scraped them off the (fortunately lined with foil) roasting pan, the rest of the recipe came together with ease, and the end result made for a truly delicious summer meal.

The combination of sweet, concentrated tomato flavor from the roasted tomatoes and bright, clean tomato flavor from the fresh tomatoes was fantastic, and many notches above your average can of Campbell’s. I used heirlooms and Shady Ladies for roasting, and a multicolored assortment of cherry tomatoes for the fresh tomatoes. It was such a relief to use up what was probably my last batch of endless tomatoes for the season (I’m putting my box on hold for a few weeks while I figure things out) that I am celebrating by contributing this post to Croatian food blogger Maninas’ blog event Eating with the Seasons. Soup recipe follows…

Summer soup

Ah, summer in San Francisco.

I arrived home last week after a long visit to New York. (My trip is one reason this blog has gotten hopelessly out of date!) After a couple of weeks of skirts and sandals and other wispy pieces of actual summer clothing, it was a shock to return to a Bay Area August, full of fog and the kind of grim cold that lingers in the corners of the apartment, even when I have the heater going full blast. It was such a nice surprise that my new flannel pajamas had arrived while I away. Flannel pajamas in August. Only in San Francisco.

But this interesting intersection of season and weather does have one terrific silver lining, and that’s Summer Soup. A nice warm bowl containing all the produce bounty of summer, and a nice chilly day to enjoy it on!

When I saw how full of produce the fridge and counter were when I got home, I defrosted my most delicious scrap stock as a base (the delicious batch IV stock that Duck couldn’t stop sipping straight), and put together some summer soup. I tend to have trouble making soup without a recipe, trouble that takes the form of lackluster flavor, but I wanted to make a soup that would use up all the veggies I had already, not the veggies a recipe wanted me to use.

I decided to wing it, using red onions, fresh corn, heirloom tomatoes, zucchini, pink potatoes, green cabbage, carrots, and some roasted garlic, and the results were very good. I’m not going to post the recipe here because it was so basic and pretty much all the flavor came from the stock, so this would have been a pretty dull pot of soup if I’d been using canned broth, or even one of my milder scrap stocks. Duck also used some CSA basil and some basil he’s been growing on our front porch to make a puree of basil, garlic, olive oil, and pine nuts (basically, vegan pesto) which we swirled into the bowls of soup individually. As a final touch we served the soup over heaps of steamed quinoa, and had our protein for the day as well.

And though we sat in our chilly kitchen, wrapping our frostbitten fingers around our steaming bowls, at least we could taste the warmth of summer’s goodness on our spoons.

Splendid

I would not cook so joyfully, nor clean half so willingly, without a public radio program called The Splendid Table. I download podcasts of this show from iTunes (a subscription is free, and all the archived shows are free as well – you can set yourself up with a Splendid Table bonanza and work your way through them, as I did) and listen to them in my kitchen as I clean and cook. A sinkful of dishes flies by, as does the prep for a three-course meal.

Now that I’ve worked my way through the archives and the show seems to be heavily in reruns, I have been experimenting with other radio shows to keep me company in the kitchen. KCRW’s Good Food is good, but doesn’t hold my interest so completely as Lynne Rosetto Kasper and her Splendid Table gang. This American Life is always absorbing, but there’s something about listening to food programming in the kitchen that just makes me really happy.

Last night I listened my way through a series of short podcasts made to herald the show’s new book: The Splendid Table’s How To Eat Supper while I gave the kitchen a much needed cleaning following a long weekend of friends and food. By the time I was done I didn’t have an ounce of energy left to make my own supper, but luckily that is the whole point of the book and these short podcasts – how to make your weeknight supper delicious and varied yet simple and not time-consuming. So I made my very first Splendid Table recipe, “Refried Beans with Cinnamon and Clove,” and then used those in tacos with the rest of the roasted tomatillo salsa, some of my new cherry tomatoes and some parsley.

Now the beans didn’t knock my socks off, but that wasn’t the point. They were tasty and filling and more creative than I would have come up with on my own at that point, and, best of all, I made them in a kind of mindless stupor and they still turned out exactly as they were meant to. I’m posting the recipe below, but what I truly want to share is the joy of this program, this absolutely free (I have donated money to American Public Media out of gratitude), absolutely addicting hour you can spend with someone who loves food and knows how to talk about it. Recipe follows…

Zucchini

Well, I was all set to write a lovely post, waxing rhapsodical as usual about how much I love radicchio, and the fun things I did with my first zucchini of summer. But on our way home from the airport today, Duck and I got in a pretty serious car accident on the Bay Bridge. Everyone’s fine, but my beloved car is totaled (and I only have liability insurance, so I’m pretty much on my own there), and my body hurts a lot and is stiff and queasy and well, I just don’t have it in me to be lyrical about food.

But zucchini season is here, and I really do want to share with you my very most favorite, super simple and super awesome way to prepare it. So forgive me if I sound flatter than usual, but please enjoy this recipe which is going to taste a million times better than I’ll be able to make it sound.

I ate my yummy, garlicky zucchini with a radicchio and potato gratin from Deborah Madison’s great simple-foods cookbook Vegetarian Suppers. The gratin had radicchio and little red and yellow potatoes and baby red onions and Laura Chenel aged goat cheese and olive oil and salt and pepper. It was a bit bland the first night, but after sitting for a day it was delicious.

Taverna Zucchini (from the San Francisco Chronicle, a million years ago)

Zucchini
Fresh lemon juice
Olive oil
Crushed garlic
Salt
Pepper
Herbes de Provence

Slice each zucchini (I always feel weird not calling it a zucchino – I wonder why we changed that?) in half lengthwise. Using a knife, gently score the cut face of the zucchini in a large cross-hatch pattern. That is, make a few shallow, diagonal cuts across the zucchini, and then make a few more in the opposite direction.

Bring a pot of water to a boil. Boil the zucchini until it is your desired texture (I hate undercooked zucchini, but I hate mushy, overcooked zucchini, too!).

While the zucchini is boiling, combine the lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper, and herbs. When the zucchini is cooked, drain it and spread some of the mixture over the face of each half. Eat warm, or enjoy as a cold appetizer.

Scrap stock, round two

I was so nervous making this week’s scrap stock! I think I was worried that last week’s good results were sheer random luck and that it was statistically unlikely I would succeed again if I just did a repeat of last week’s method of simply cooking up all my veggie scraps from the past week, without regard to composition. But I gave it another shot. This week’s stock came out quite rich and quite assertive, which is unsurprising given that there were many asparagus stalks, fennel tops, and even two heads of roasted garlic that had been emptied of their yummy gooey cloves. I think it would make a delicious soup base, but I wouldn’t use it for something like risotto, because it would just take over the dish.

In this week’s scrap stock:
Leek tops
Green onion tops
Carrot tops
Roast garlic bulbs (no cloves)
Red cabbage trim
Red kale trim
Fennel stalks and leaves
Asparagus bottoms
Carrot trim
Shallot peels and trim
Spinach crowns
Thyme stalks
Sugar snap pea trim
Garlic peels and trim
Mushroom stems

Turnips, Three Ways

Tonight it was time to tackle the turnips. I still had the white “Tokyo” turnips from Week 4 and the “Red Scarlet” turnips from Week 6.

I was especially curious about the unusual red scarlet turnips, although I’m pretty unfamiliar with turnips in general. I googled about and checked out turnip recipes, and ended up with a kind of turnip souffle, which was basically mashed turnips mixed with roux, soymilk, a little sugar, and egg yolks, with beaten egg whites folded in. I left the skins on the turnips, so my (unfortunately not very photogenic) souffle/cassrole thingie ended up with lovely little pink flecks as well as an allover rosy glow. The flavor was light, savory, eggy, and a little sweet from the turnips.

I also wanted to see what the turnips were like roasted, since roasted roots in the form of beets, parsnips, and carrots are already one of my staple foods. I ended up making a kind of “refrigerator roast,” roasting an unlikely combination of everything in my fridge that looked remotely roastable. I put together a concoction of scarlet turnips, white turnips, carrots, onion, garlic, broccoli, and a green apple I found abandoned at the back of the middle shelf, all seasoned with some of the sage left over from the Quinoa Butternut Pie. I followed Deborah Madison’s instructions for roasting turnips from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, which is usually my veggie prep bible. In this instance, though, Debbie let me down. She had me boil the turnips for 3 minutes before roasting, and they ended up more soggy than delightfully caramelized. (Probably because my turnips were much smaller and more tender than the typical huge lavender-tipped turnip of the traditional root cellar.) They were lovely to look at, though, and quite tasty to eat in any case.

The more discerning reader may notice I seem to be drawing to a close on this post, here. “What’s the third way?,” you may be asking yourself. Why, raw, of course! My CSA newsletter explained that the scarlet turnips were “Japanese salad turnips.” Unsure if this was a merely honorary title, I was curious to try them raw. I found them spicy and peppery, and a bit solid for straight raw consumption. They’d make fantastic pickles, though: I’m already plotting Turnips, Way Number Four…

Carrots and Carrots and Carrots

I finally made good use of my serious stockpile of carrots. This afternoon I cooked up a delicious carrot soup that, in addition to two bunches of carrots, used a bunch of leeks and an onion as well as the carrot tops and trimmings in the stock I made for the soup. It’s so interesting to me that I can stare for weeks at an uninspiring collection of carrots getting progressively floppier in my fridge, but I’ve probably eaten at least a full bunch today alone in soup form.

I think I’ve cracked the Salad Code, as well, although I don’t want to get too cocky just yet. I bought a deep, pleasing wooden salad bowl the other day, with these great bamboo hand-shaped salad servers. They are kind of like these, only shaped even better to make them super fun to use tossing the salad about.

So those go along way towards making salad time more fun. I was fretting about making a salad today, even though it was clearly the perfect accompaniment to my carrot soup, because I’m out of olive oil. And that is when, necessity ever being the mother of invention, I rediscovered a magical, secret ingredient I haven’t used in a long, long time.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… Toasted Walnut Grapeseed Oil. It’s so sweet, so incredibly flavored I can’t even describe the taste but my mouth is watering remembering it and I’m kinda wondering what would happen if I tried wearing it as perfume. I mixed the lovely pink leftover vinegar-sesame seed liquid from the radish salad with a touch of the walnut oil, threw together some lettuce, arugula, and a nice ripe persimmon, and voila! Salad I went back for seconds on!

Because I had a request for it, the carrot soup recipe is behind this cut…

Escarole!

There was a huge bag of escarole in my box this week, but I wasn’t exactly sure which bag it was. Last time there was an unusual item, there was a note in the newsletter to help us all figure out which thing was which. It’s new to me, but maybe escarole is more prosaic than I realized, because this time there was no hint. I did take a test nibble of raw leaves to check which of the greens was most bitter, but I still consulted a Google image search just to make sure I wasn’t about to cook up a big bag of lettuce, which, in contrast to every other bitter green I’ve cooked, is exactly what escarole looks like. (And oh, how the lettuce still plagues me. What will I do with it all?)

Photo from Potomac Vegetable Farms

(See how much I look like lettuce?)

So, after consulting my field guide, I finally felt confident enough to cook up the escarole. I love bitter greens, so I was really looking forward to my escarole, but with no expectation of how it might taste once cooked. I sauteed it with my radish greens in olive oil and then sat down to put the first bite in my mouth.

Oh. My. God. It tastes. Like. Italy.

Apparently, according to my taste buds and the nostalgic, eye-rolling ecstasy that was immediately induced, I ate a lot of escarole when my mom and I were eating our way across Venice a few years ago. There, during a miserably rainy March, I ate mountains of radicchio and every other bitter leaf I could get my hands on, reveling in this, my favorite flavor, generally ignored here in the states or reduced to a pathetic accent note that does nothing to satisfy my cravings. I’d either forgotten or had never realized that a lot of what I was eating – in pasta, on pizzas, or alone on heaping platters as a contorni – was in fact escarole. Until I magically cooked it, on this magic night, in this magic, stumbled-upon fashion, and managed to recreate perfectly Venice in my mouth. (It didn’t hurt that I coincidentally made porcini mushroom risotto last night as well, using my final onion and the last of the dried porcinis I brought back from Venice.)

Here, preserved for posterity, is how I prepared the escarole and radish greens:

“Venice in Your Mouth” Escarole

1 large bag escarole, washed thoroughly and chopped into 1 1/2 inch strips
2 or 3 T. extra-virgin olive oil
1 T. Earth Balance (or butter)
4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
A sprinkle of red pepper flakes
1 t. sugar
Salt and Pepper to taste

Heat oil and butter together in a wok over medium heat. Add the garlic and red pepper flakes and cook until the garlic begins to brown. Pile on the greens, tossing and stirring until they begin to deflate. Sprinkle the sugar, salt, and pepper. Continue to cook, tossing and stirring as needed, until the greens are cooked through. (20 minutes? I did it by feel, so I’m not sure…)

Incidentally, I don’t think I’ll be cooking radish greens again. Perhaps I didn’t cook them long enough, but they still had that prickly texture that so frightened me in the raw turnip greens. Not pleasant on the tongue! Above and beyond that, I had an allergic reaction to something in this meal, and, since I’ve eaten all the other parts of it many times, instinct tells me the radish greens are the culprit behind the rampant itchiness. Too bad, I was really digging the no-waste principal of it all, but I guess next time they will just have to spice up my compost bucket.