November 2011 – The Kitchen Illiterate

Squash and Swiss Chard Pasta Bake

We spent Thanksgiving weekend with my family in San Diego, and although I had some kind of notion that I would have something to share with you all here, I slipped firmly into vacation mode when I got down there, and barely even touched my laptop the whole weekend. I was far to busy being entertained by my favorite little person. I did cook Thanksgiving dinner with my brothers, as usual (they smoked a turkey this year!), but I didn’t get as intense about the meal as I have in the past. I didn’t come up with a cooking schedule, I didn’t try to manage every corner of the kitchen, I didn’t even have recipes for some of the side dishes we made. And while things might not have come out to the table as perfect as a Martha Stewart photo shoot, I was considerably more relaxed than usual. And that was definitely something to be grateful for (so was that smoked turkey; it was incredible).

We drove back on Saturday, and the drive was not so much something to be grateful for. I think in the future I’ll be much more willing to fly home for Thanksgiving; the traffic could have been worse, certainly. But my back still hurts from 10 hours in the car. And as soon as we got home, we were thrown into a very busy week. I’m just glad my mom sent me home with leftovers, because otherwise we wouldn’t really have anything to eat.
Continue reading Squash and Swiss Chard Pasta Bake

Sweet Potato Black Bean Enchiladas

I’ve made many enchiladas in my life, but I always make them the same way. There is usually chicken, and definitely refried beans. There is always cheese. And the enchilada sauce comes from a can. These are terrific enchiladas.

I’ve also cooked many sweet potatoes in my life. They are almost always roasted, either whole or cubed, tossed with oil and salt. They get stirred into rice, or baked in gratins, or mixed into soup. They find their way to salads. I love me some roasted sweet potatoes.

I have never thought to combine these things. But last weekend, I did. And I did not regret it. The enchilada became something wholly new, something a little bit healthier, and full of flavors I never thought I would find there. Sweet potatoes love enchiladas. They love beans and chiles. How have I kept them apart for so long?
Continue reading Sweet Potato Black Bean Enchiladas

Chocolate Pudding with a Little Kick

We were driving back from Emeryville on Friday, after eating some extremely delicious sandwiches from the Vesta Flatbread truck. I was torturing poor Sean with my recent fascination with 1970s radio hits (the 60s, 70s, and 80s radio station on Pandora is my new favorite thing). KC and the Sunshine Band came on the radio, and all I could think of were Jell-O commercials. And then, then I wanted pudding. My brain works in mysterious ways.
Continue reading Chocolate Pudding with a Little Kick

‘Tis the Season for Beef Stew

Last weekend, fall finally arrived in the East Bay. It was grey and rainy, but not, at least to me, gloomy. I was delighted: Fall is my favorite season. California may not show off in fall with bright red and gold leaves, like New England, but it has its own charms. And I, in true homebody fashion, love being cozy and warm in our bright little apartment when the skies turn grey and damp. So I welcomed fall in the best way I know: by cooking up a big pot of beef stew.

Beef stew is the perfect food for fall. You can fill it up with all the lovely root vegetables appearing at the markets, and it requires a nice, long cooking time, while your house fills with amazing smells and cooking warmth. If you want to really warm up the house, you can throw it in the oven, although it turns out just as well cooking on the stove. And while it cooks away, you can curl up on the couch and read or knit or watch a movie, or do whatever you like to do when it’s cold out and you are feeling snug and secure inside. Soon enough, you’ll have a hearty and warm dinner to make your wonderful rainy weekend just about perfect.
Continue reading ‘Tis the Season for Beef Stew

An Even Better Chicken Florentine

Over three years ago, I made Chicken Florentine for the first time, and ever since then, it’s been the most frequently viewed recipe on this site. By a landslide. The people, they love Chicken Florentine. But I’ve never been entirely happy with that recipe. And let’s not even talk about the photographs in the post; they make me cringe. In the years since, I’ve made Chicken Florentine a handful of times again, and I’ve tweaked the recipe here and there each time. I just knew it could be even better, and I was right. My friends, I think I finally have my best Chicken Florentine recipe, and I knew I had to share it with all of you.
Continue reading An Even Better Chicken Florentine

Beer Cheese Soup

It was kind of a surprise to me when I realized how much I care about tradition. As a rebellious teenager (is there any other kind?) I saw myself as completely unconventional, someone who wanted to break with the past completely. But lurking under those attempts to figure out who I might be was the real me: the one who appreciates routine and sameness, the one who thrives on rules and order. The one who relies on the careful acting out of family traditions, and of personal traditions, year after year, in order to maintain the continuity that makes me feel safe and protected in what can be a fairly chaotic world.

One of those traditions is one I’ve written about here before: Every Christmas Eve, for as long as I can remember, my family has gathered to eat beer cheese soup. There are other key components to this tradition: the oyster soup that my Dad prefers, the beef stew that my Aunt Penny brings every year, and the tiny summer sausage sandwiches that accompany whichever soup you decide (or all three, as is more often the case). But for me, the beer cheese soup has always been the centerpiece. Over the years, the recipe has changed slightly, but the presence of the soup never does. And the soup held such a sacred place in my mind that I would not deign to make it any other time of year.
Continue reading Beer Cheese Soup

Reflections on October Unprocessed

October is over, and so is my quest to eat Unprocessed for an entire month. My quest, it was unsuccessful. Eating an entirely unprocessed diet is so much harder than I expected. I talked about some of these challenges earlier in the month: take out, snacks in the office kitchen, basic kitchen staples like chicken stock and chocolate. And these challenges didn’t get easier. We are surrounded by processed food, in places we might not even consider. And I wasn’t being as strict as some of my fellow Challenge Participants.

The hardest part was simply paying attention. Remembering. Being aware, and thoughtful. It is so easy to move through life without attention, focusing on work and relationships and family and even play, and taking in meals as mere sustenance, without care. It is so easy to put food in our bodies because we’re busy and stressed, without thinking about that food in a greater context, and not just the context of our own diets, but in the context of our communities, of the planet, of all those other things that are, inextricably, connected to what we eat. Eating well, in ways that are healthful for our bodies and our environment, requires planning and care, energy and time. And sometimes, these are the things we feel we do not have to spare.

I’m trying not to think of my October challenge as a failure, but as a starting point. Despite the many moments I slipped into thoughtless patterns of shopping, cooking, and eating, this experiment made me more aware. It’s experiments like this, and like the juice cleanse I did in September, and like reading and re-reading Michael Pollan or Eric Schlosser, that bring me back to awareness, and help me learn things about the kind of cook and eater I want to be. Changing habits doesn’t happen overnight, or even in one month. Real, life long change happens incrementally, and sometimes over and over again.

So, for me, October Unprocessed isn’t really over. The challenge to eat a diet that is sustainable, not just for the planet but for myself, is one that lasts far longer than a month. I won’t always succeed, but if I continue to try, it’s really impossible to fail.

Squash and Broccoli Pasta

I’m a recipe person. I love to read cookbooks and cooking magazines, and I love to read recipes. I like the lists of ingredients, the step-by-step instructions, and the implicit promise that if you follow the directions, you’ll have something to show for it. Of course, I rarely follow recipes exactly as written, but more often than not, when I’m cooking there is a magazine (or a laptop) open on the kitchen table for reference. Some people are not like this: They make things up as they go along, working largely from instinct, and they aren’t interested in collecting page upon page of cooking instruction. I’d like to think the process of learning to cook, at least for me, is largely about working toward some place in the middle.

As I learn, and gather experience under my apron strings (if I ever remembered to wear an apron), I get more comfortable leaving the recipes on the shelf. And I find some of my favorite times in the kitchen come when I read a handful of recipes and use them as inspiration, cobbling them together in my mind into a single, successful dish. Unfortunately, sometimes the results of these attempts are something less than successful. Sometimes improvisation results in stress, in burned things, under-seasoned things, uninteresting things. I try to remind myself that these flops are just part of the learning process.
Continue reading Squash and Broccoli Pasta