recipes – Page 3 – The Kitchen Illiterate

Shakshuka!

When I was growing up, eggs for dinner were usually a sign that money was tight. Maybe my brothers and I needed dental work that month, or we’d just had to go shopping for new clothes and school supplies, or the car has broken down. As a child, I wasn’t completely aware of my parents’ financial situation, but I could usually read the dinner table to to get a sense for how comfortable we were at any given point. And even more so by whether my parents were joking about it, or serving us pancakes at night with grim faces. We weren’t by any means poor, but my parents were young, and just getting started out in life. There were times when eggs for dinner were a necessity.
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Cauliflower Puttanesca

I may have mentioned this before, but I used to be a very picky eater. And I’m not just talking about my childhood. I mean, throughout most of my adolescent and adult life I had very strict rules about what I would not eat. I didn’t eat much. Some of those verboten items were onions, raw tomatoes, mushrooms, peppers (green or red), olives, mustard, mayonnaise, avocados, sour cream, and anything spicy.
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Glazed Delicata Squash with Lentils

I usually start making dinner before Sean gets home. I stand in our u-shaped kitchen, and dig around in the refrigerator and the cupboards, pulling out this and that. Tonight’s dinner will be easy: only a few ingredients, and plenty of time to cook, no need to rush. I fill a saucepan with water to boil, measure out lentils, rinse squash. The knife makes its thwack-scrape sound across the cutting board as I slice. I’m calmed by these things, more than I was by my hour of post-work yoga.
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Five-Spice Beet Soup

I have a hard time putting beets on the menu. I love them, but I feel limited in how to prepare them. It can be difficult to introduce them into a meal because of their overly exuberant tendency to tinge everything pink. They’re delicious roasted, but they can dominate when roasted with other vegetables. I learned long ago they aren’t necessarily a great addition to pasta. I love them in a salad, but the beet and goat cheese combination, while admittedly perfect, sometimes feels a little dull. And most beet soup recipes look a lot alike. Sometimes it’s like the whole recipe-writing world has a case of beet boredom.
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Pumpkin Seed Cilantro Pesto

I’m not alone in finding myself trying to eat better in January. I read a lot of food blogs, and I think at least half of them are talking about embracing the vegetable (the other half are valiantly clinging to their chocolate and bacon, shouting a battle cry against dieting). I’m not a dieter, I wholeheartedly disagree with the idea of limiting your food intake for a specified period of time in the hopes of losing weight. First, it’s not healthy, and “losing weight” is a dubious goal. And second, I don’t have that much willpower. But even I have to admit that after the holidays, I was feeling a little sugared out. I needed to get back to the healthy eating habits I’d more or less adopted over the last two years. I knew a lengthy visit to the produce department was in order, but I was having a hard time planning meals that didn’t involve butter. It was like I’d forgotten how.

If you know me, you know I’m a huge fan of plans. I love lists and schedules and charts. And as much as I hate to admit it, I like those detailed features in fitness magazines that tell you what to eat and when (and by the way, how do those magazines get away with calling themselves fitness magazines?). When I saw the Bon Appetit Food Lover’s Cleanse for 2012, I was instantly drawn to it.
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Chicken and Chard Burritos

Sometimes on Sundays I peruse cookbooks and I start getting excited. I start making up grocery lists and weekly menu plans, and I have it all figured out. I know that Thursday, I’m going to make Chicken Escabeche with Carrots and Jalapenos, and wild rice. Then things happen. The market doesn’t have any acceptable carrots, though the shelves are overflowing with beautiful leafy greens. Thursday, which seemed like a perfectly lovely day earlier in the week, turns out to be kind of exhausting, and when work is over and I’m standing in the kitchen, I know I don’t have the patience for wild rice. I have to re-think my plans, so that I can get back on the couch for a little restorative bad television. Sometimes when this happens, I turn to pizza, or bread and cheese. But sometimes when this happens, I get lucky, and something wonderful manages to happen in my own kitchen anyway. This was one of those times.
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Mushroom and Cipollini Onion Pasta

For Christmas, my partner’s sister gave me a copy of the Bi-Rite Market’s Eat Good Food: A Grocer’s Guide to Shopping, Cooking & Creating Community Through Food. Bi-Rite Market is a former convenience store turned gourmet grocery in the heart of the Mission, in San Francisco. I’ve been hearing great things about this place since before we moved to the Bay Area, but we hadn’t taken the time to check it out…until I got this book. This is a beautifully produced book about food: not just cooking it, but sourcing it and growing it and buying it and, well, loving it. The book is broken down into chapters roughly by grocery department (butcher, produce, bakery), and while the author highlights lots of excellent local producers (I love living in the Bay!), he also talks about how to find excellent goods if you live outside of this glorious little foodshed.

After one day of flipping through the book, I knew I had to go check it out, so on our final day off before heading back to work, Sean and I jumped on BART and headed into the Mission for lunch and general food perusal. I am a complete sucker for lovely little markets. Grocery shopping is actually one of my favorite things to do. So this place was kind of like heaven to me, even though it was awfully cramped and crowded. The shelves are stuffed full of lovely goodies like locally produced olive oil, fresh baked bread, crisp cellophane packages of delicate cookies and candies, round tubs of housemade salads, tins of Spanish sardines and bottles of unusual sauces and ketchups. The produce is gorgeous (I couldn’t stay away from the blood oranges), the meats are all thick and deep red and beautiful…the whole place had me swooning.
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Trying New Things: Easy Thick-Cut Pork Chops

I can hardly believe it’s 2012 already, and the holidays are over. We roasted a goose, which was very exciting. We had a full-on multiple course Christmas dinner, which was challenging with two-year-olds at the table. But it was a total success, hot goose fat and all. We had a lovely time in San Diego, with all that great weather, and a less-than-awesome eleven-hour drive back to Oakland. And then we had a quiet New Years Eve at home, with cheese and bread and bubbly. The next morning I made Hoppin’ John for good luck, and we ate more cheese and drank more bubbly. And I was so grateful for another day before work started again.

That extra day gave me a chance to try something new in the kitchen: pork chops. I know pork chops are not new to most normal human beings. But they are new to me, or at least mostly. I did try to cook them once, back in the early days of this blog. I brined them, but they were very thin pork chops and ended up so salty they were inedible. After that, I shied away from pork chops, but it’s a New Year, and it’s time to try new things.
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Chicken and Dumplings

While a California winter isn’t as wintry as New England, or even Walla Walla, we’ve been getting our fair share of damp chill lately. But unlike the onset of winter in Boston, the Bay Area winter doesn’t fill me with dread. I’m actually loving it: the damp and the fog, the drizzly rain, and the grey chill that suggests a coat, but doesn’t require ankle-length wool overcoats, scarves, and hats. I think it’s just perfect. The best part is that it’s just cool enough to make me crazy cozy winter foods, like chicken and dumplings.
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Vegan Chocolate Cinnamon Rolls

The holiday season hectic-ness has set in around here. On top of the standard holiday stress of present-buying and event-attending, we’re pressing ever onward toward a critical deadline at work. Then I decided to spend two days at an intensive leadership workshop, and Sean and I thought it would be fun to throw a holiday chili party. And as usual when I get busy, this blog has been a little neglected. I did, though, find time to make these awesome vegan cinnamon rolls, and they were so good I knew I had to find time to share them with you.
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