Meals For Squares: A Square Meal Foodologue

[mealsforsquares]

Chickpea Curry and Brown Rice

I used to make a lot of stew-style curries, and somewhere along the way I stopped doing so. Since that’s a nearly-unconscionable shame, I decided to rectify the situation. Also, I was the only person eating it, and I like spicy chickpeas, so it was a no-brainer, really. 

Since I made the decision fairly late in the day, I was stuck with canned chickpeas, but that’s not actually as big a problem as all that. 

I got some ghee melted in a pan. When it was done I added a minced onion, which I let sweat out for a little while. I followed it with a minced sweet pepper, a minced carrot and a couple of ribs of celery (also minced). While all that cooked down I combined coriander, angelica seeds, cinnamon, a couple of juniper berries, some chili flakes and some fennel seeds in a mortar and pestle and smashed them all together into a curry powder, whcih I added to the fat and let bloom.

The chickpeas followed, tossing it around with the spices and vegetables and warming them through. 

I had made some tomato sauce earlier in the week for a failed calzone* - it was pretty basic stuff, just some pureed canned tomatoes simmered with a halved onion, a couple of cloves of garlic and a sprig of basil - which I decided would make a nice base for the curry. I poured it into the pan with the chickpeas. Since that wasn’t quite enough liquid to make it properly stew-ish, I also added a can of coconut milk. And at this point I realized that I’d gotten out a couple of jalapenos, but forgotten to add them, so I put them in now.

I could, of course, have pretended to have remembered them the whole time, but that would have been lying, and nobody lies on the internet. 

While everything got chummy, I bloomed some saffron in some water, salted the water, and poured it over some brown rice in the rice-cooker and let that do its thing. Pretty easy stuff. 

When the curry had come to the consistency I wanted it, I got it off the heat, poured it over the rice, and ate it. I was pretty happy with the result, and when R got home he ate an absurd amount of the rice because, it turns out, he loves saffron. Who would have thought? I mean, I definitely would have thought, because everyone loves saffron. It’s the spice that tastes like metal! It’s more expensive than many metals that taste like metal! It’s for everyone to love and no one to hate and to make your brown rice a weirder, more different shade of brown. 

Anyway, it was all very good. Successful dinner all around. Good job, me. Really pulled through here. 

* no writeup there because the thing that went wrong was super-specific, but should I come looking for it: don’t let the dough sit for too long or it’ll overprove and you’ll have a worthless calzone. 

[mealsforsquares]

“Enchiladas”

This clears the backlog of things that I’ve already written up, but not of things that I should write up but haven’t yet. Basically, note to future me: all of this is completely unmoored from the date it was posted and is no longer useful as a memory jog in that sense. To anyone else that reads this: ignore this headnote.  A was travelling again, and I was to go see a show, so that meant another of those quick-ish dinners you hear so much about. This one had the added wrinkle of having to be reheatable so that R could eat them when he got home from work, which was to be much later than I was eating. 

I decided, as I usually do in such situations, on enchiladas. Many, I love enchiladas. I’m sure that the business that I do with them, being hideously inauthentic, marks them as more of an affront than a thing to be proud of, but they combine everything there is to like about a casserole with everything there is to like about a burrito. I mean, they’re basically perfect, and they’re delicious almost no matter what you do with them. Plus you can fold any old thing in there and it’s tasty because: sauce and cheese. Just a fantastic convenience food, if you don’t mind giving the vapors to the demanders of authenticity.

Since I’m generally pretty fine giving the vapors to the demanders of authenticity, I went in full-bore on some damn enchiladas.

I had some chorizo out of the freezer (chorfreezo!)*, so I uncased it and got it in a pan. While it browned I shredded a largish potato and got that in there also. When that was all nearly mostly-cooked (that is to say I was cooking everything to mostly-cooked so that it didn’t overcook in the actual enchiladas, and it was nearly to that point) I added some minced up beet greens, because vegetables are good for you and also because I’m wrapping potatoes in tortillas and that always makes me feel a passing twinge of carb guilt. 

Delicious carb guilt.

Anyway. The sauce. This is where the faint-of-authenticity are gonna wanna look away. Circumstances have demanded that I have spent the last couple of weeks out of the house**, so I don’t have any fresh tomatoes. So I made a little melange of tomato paste (like a whole little can)*** of tomato paste and a little mound of stock paste. I softened some onions and some garlic, adding some cumin and some chili flakes toward the end, and then got all that into the bowl along with some ancho chili powder and then added enough water to make it a sauce. I then stick-blended it until it was smooth. There, that’s not so bad now, is it?

I wrapped up each tortilla around a little pile of potatoes, kale and chorizo, with a little queso blanco in there for funsies, then nestled them all together in a pan, poured the sauce over them, sprinkled them with some mozzarella and some cheddar cheese, little more sauce there, then socked them in the oven until they were done. 

They were a wild, rollicking success, given by the absurd number of them that R ate while I was gone for the evening, so I’m happy to have the means and method written down here, even if I probably could have gone for something with a little more depth. As easy throw-it-together things go, it was about as good as it could be. 

* I’m still trying to use up the meat in my freezer, after all, and this is a way to do so. Also this is mexican-style chorizo, not the much-better spanish stuff which would be wildly inappropriate for the inside of an enchilada, but the use of which in an enchilada would make for a terrific prank. 

** I spent a week travelling, some of which I will eventually someday document here, and then a week dealing with a family thing that’s presently-ongoing, which you will never hear about because that’s not what I do here. 

*** I’ve started the switch to tubes, but I have a can in there, so I used the can this time because it’s the quantity I needed.

[mealsforsquares]

Cod with herbed brown rice and green ragout

I had another complete write-up in there! What the hell have I been doing? I deffo don’t want to lose this one, as it made everybody super-happy. So here it is.

So occasionally the fish I make for dinner comes in the form of little individually-frozen fillets. These are extremely wasteful from a packaging standpoint! This is not great and I probably should not do it!

However, they make it easier not to waste the food itself, and the little individual-freezing package thingies are super-great for sous-vide as is, which would have used a bag anyway*. So I got them in the water bath with the circulator for awhile. My initial intention was to brown them up at the end. That didn’t quite work out, but I’ll get to it.

I toasted some brown rice in the bottom of the rice cooker, and steeped some saffron in some hot water to infuse, which I then added to the rice as the cooking liquid. When the brown rice has cooked through, I added some minced tarragon, mint, chives and parsley to it and stirred it all in there.

I decided that instead of a sauce I would make a sort of ragout-type thing out of greens. I got the oil down in the pan with some chili flakes, then some sliced onions that I wanted to cook through. I let them cook like, forever (actually I started them cooking and then did all the rice stuff and then came back for them). I added some ribbons of chard, then kale, then some adult spinach, waiting for it to basically cook down between batches. I then deglazed the whole thing with a little red wine, then stirred in a squeeze of honey and covered it to slow-cook the rest of the way. When it was done I stirred in some red wine vinegar to brighten it up.

The cod came out of the water bath, and my immediate intention was to brown it or crust it or something, but it became clear that it was, in fact, too delicate for that sort of thing, and I was going to have to just serve it as-was, which was fine. I was a little worried about the lack of exterior flavor - it was just cooked fish, after all - but I trusted that I had built enough into the rest of the dish that it wouldn’t be a major problem.

Turns out I was right! R is especially responsive to saffron, which is a thing that we’re all learning along the way here, and it’s just as good with brown rice as it is with white rice. The greens came out fantastic, sweet and hot and green, and acted as all the sauce one would need, especially with the particularly flavorful rice studded with herbs. A likes tarragon about as much as R likes saffron, so basiclaly I got to feel like a hero for the evening.  

* In other news, there are silicone multi-use sous-vide bags which I think I should probably invest in getting some of, because jesus this process uses a lot of plastic no matter how you slice it.

[mealsforsquares]

Grilled Half Chickens

Hey I had this all written up in the little doc thing that I use for this and it wasn’t even posted! Score!

More grilling of the chicken! This time I had also inadvertently gotten out an entire bird*, and was going to make sure that this time I got the fuel right. I mean, I got it right last time also, but this was a different thing and would require some attention to get right. 

I cut the bird in half by first cutting its spine out (which I saved for someday stock, which has not in fact happened yet), and then smooshing it down and cutting through the breastbone so that it was in two equal pieces. I then dumped it into a giant zipper bag and poured the remains of a thing of buttermilk over them, followed by the end of a thing of yogurt, which I then shook up with some salt, lemon zest, rosemary and thyme. I think I also threw a couple of garlics in there, but I don’t specifically remember doing it. It seems like something I’d do, anyway. Probably I did it. 

So I did the thing with the charcoal, then pulled the chicken out of the marinade and ran a couple of skewers through each half so that it didn’t do any additional separating as it cooked, then laid it out flesh-side down on the cool part of the grill. I flipped it after awhile then when it was up to temperature I laid it over the hot side to brown up on both sides. I added new coals after about forty-five minutes to keep the fire alive. Not much to it, really. 

While all that was going on I peeled a butternut squash, scooped the seeds out of the bottom, then cut it into dice, and got it in the microwave to par-cook. I blanched some peas, then got a pan heating with some oil in it. The oil definitely got garlic in it, then some chili flakes, then a minced onion. I added the parcooked squash to it, then the peas jus tto warm them all through and combine them. 

Because this was a lot of soft, hot food, I thought it would need a bit of freshness, so I made a quick salad out of some lettuce. This was for R and I, since A was travelling, so I grated a carrot over it, then tossed it with sunflower seeds and dried cranberries. I was going to bang together a ranch-style dressing, but I used all the buttermilk on the chicken because I’m dumb, so I dressed it with olive oil, black pepper and some lemon juice. 

The chicken came out well - buttermilk is as good a marinating liquid as is advertised, and the people that go on about it are absolutely right to do so. It came out juicy and browned up very well. It also held back some of its flavor and resisted being overwhelmed by the smoke, which was nice, as chicken can be easily overwhelmed by the smoke of the grill. Tasted good, though. THe peas and squash were as good as fresh peas can be - the squash was nice, but not entirely necessary probably. The salad was welcome, and everyone was happy. 

Or, at least, R and I were happy. I don’t know about everyone. 

* that’s not the correct phrasing. I had completely intentionally gotten out an entire bird, I just didn’t end up using it when I thought I would. 

[mealsforsquares]

Shrimp Tacos

Boy howdy does life get in the damn way! So anyway, taco night. The first taco night in quite awhile. R was going to be home for dinner, and nobody was in the hospital slash travelling slash having a birthday, so we were all set to actually get to eat food in the house. Nothing short of a miracle, I tell you.

I was, however, extremely burnt out on the heap of things that were going on prior to this day, so the idea was to make something crowd-pleasing and whatnot without it being a huge problem to make and maintain - I wasn’t into spending all day doing it. 

The first thing to put up was the salsa, since the rest of this was going to cook so fast that it wouldn’t have any time to really get in there and mingle if I did it otherwise. So I cut up a peach, then a mango, then a couple of tomatillos, a jalepeno and a small fresh shallot, salted them, lime juiced them liberally and let them hang out together to meld a bit before it was time to eat them. 

I had some shrimp, so I used some shrimp. It was prepared fairly simply - finished quickly in a grill pan (I wasn’t going to futz around with skewers and everything to grill one ingredient for two minutes, that’s how not into this I actually was), with some cayenne pepper, salt and a squeeze of lime. Boom done.

Black beans followed, regular old out of a can not-special ones*. I drained and rinsed them. I got an oiled pan hot on the stove, and cut up a fresh white onion** and got it in there. I cut up a red bell pepper that I had laying around, and added it when the onion was soft. When the red bell pepper itself was soft I added the ends of a couple of tomatoes - I had cut the middle parts out to make sandwiches, and the ends were there, so I used them. I let that get friendly for awhile, then added some chili flakes, cumin, coriander and oregano, then let that get fragrant, then added the beans and let them warm through, then turned the heat off while I finished everything else. 

“Everything else” turned out to be shredding a little lettuce for green and crunch, getting out some sour cream, and warming the tortillas. I have still been working on making my taco nights less grandiose seventeen-thousand-dish affairs, and I managed it pretty well this time. Everyone ate well and was happy, and everything came in with minimal leftovers to manage and minimal mess to clean up at the end of it all. Yay for me!

* there was a fancy from-dried preparation back there in the murky past that I’ll probably get around to writing up here because I don’t want ot forget how I did it, and it’ll make me feel much better about the canned-ness of this particular bean preparation. 

**access to heirloom onions has been restored! The world is good again!

[mealsforsquares]

Boiled Egg Sandwiches

So as previously written about, when A travels I make her travellin’ sandwiches, so that she isn’t just stuck with whatever she can find out there on the road in the middle of nowhere. This week was very slightly different, because it was also an opportunity to use up some fridge things in a way that didn’t have the unavoidable taste of fridge-using-up-stuff. 

I had a loaf of asiago cheese bread from the grocery store* that I cut in half and decided to make a not-actually-a-hunter’s-sandwich out of it. I hollowed it out and prepared to fill it. 

I loaded some cream cheese into the food processor with some goat cheese and some diced chives and whipped the whole thing around to incorporate some air into it. That was the layer of insulation between the toppings and the bread, to slow absorption of the vegetable liquid. 

I sliced some early-season yellow tomatoes thinly, and salted them to get some of the moisture out. Vegetable sandwiches tend toward the wet, obviously, and that was what I was trying to avoid. I cut a cucumber into slices and did the same thing. I cut a red onion into thin slices, but didn’t salt it. Way to hold onto your liquid, mr. onion. I’m very proud of you.

I blotted the salted tomatoes and laid them along the bottom of the bread-hole, then followed it up with the cucumbers. I had some hard-boiled eggs, and I peeled those and cut them into rough slices (I mean, they kind of ended up half-crumbled slabs, but I did what I could) and laid them over the cucumbers. I followed those up with the onion slices, then some leaf lettuce that I laid in a little mosaic over the mound of vegetables, then some mayonnaise that I had made previously that was useful to cement the top of the bread to the lettuce. 

I then wrapped the whole thing up in plastic and got it in the fridge under a weight (I think a glass milk jug full of water and two cans of kimchi to keep the weight balanced). The next day I unwrapped it (the whole thing having pressed down into one sort of sandwich-esque melange), sliced it into little triangles, and sent half of it with A to places far-flung, and then ate the rest of it myself over the course of the week.

I really should do this sort of thing more often, although the jury is still out on whether it was particularly fantastic because I got the flavors right or whether the first sandwich you make out of any early-season tomato is the best thing ever eaten by a human being. 

Either way, it was a terrific sandwich, even if the bread was kind of weird. 

* I had the idea to use it in a panzanella at some point in the week previous, but did not do so for reasons that I no longer remember, because all of this was forever ago (like two weeks? Something like that. I’m old.) and I can’t remember back that far. 

[mealsforsquares]

Chicken Breasts and Beets

So I think I’ve previously detailed that I’m relatively-new to the whole “keeping and grilling over a charcoal fire” thing. I’ve done it a bit here and there, but I’ve only just now decided to be at all serious about it. I’ve just about got the hang of it*, but I still have some trouble managing fuel, especially for long-cooking things (basically I forget to do it unless I’m explicitly out here doing stuff that cooks forever, in which case I’m better-off. Ah, well). 

So I had some bone-in skin-on chicken breasts out of the freezer, and I was going to take some more swings at it. I salted them that morning and let them sit uncovered for awhile in the fridge as a brining measure, then built the fire in the starter chimney and banked it all on the side of grill. 

I made a little foil bag, into which I placed some quartered beets, some fancy radishes** and a big Spanish onion that I cut into pole-to-pole slices so they wouldn’t shrink as much. I wanted big textured boyos in there. I wrapped them up with some garlic cloves, a couple of sprigs of thyme, and some olive oil and got them on as soon as I cleaned and oiled the grill grates, and then got to work getting the asparagus ready. 

Actually, “preparing” asparagus that’s fresh and in-season is basically a matter of cutting off the very end of the bottom and possibly peeling the bottom half of the thicker ones. I like asparagus, I don’t mind vegetables that aren’t soft like baby food, I don’t do much else to them. I put them in a little plastic thing, got some oil and some salt on them and loaded them onto the grill when the time came. 

I moved the foil bag of root stuff to above the fire directly, then got the chicken breasts over there next to the asparagus, and let them come up more-or-less to temp. I flipped the bag of roots every once in a while, and when the asparagus was done I moved it off the heat, which, since the asparagus were between the chicken breasts and the fire, meant that the chicken started to cook a bit faster and needed more scooching around. So I scooched them around more often.

Eventually, the roots were soft, so I removed them and moved the chicken breasts over the fire to brown up. By that point, the fat had pretty-well rendered out of them (not that there is much to speak of on the breast of a regular grocery-store bird). While that was happening I made a sort of dressing/sauce of olive oil, pomegranate molasses, balsamic vinegar and a little hot sauce and tossed the roots in that. I also reserved some to drizzle over the bird and the asparaguse.

The little pile of red and pinkish roots with onions in them went down on the plate (I really should start taking pictures of this stuff, right? I mean, it would make more sense of what’s going on when I plate things. Maybe I will.), then the asparagus on the other side, which then got teh chicken on top of it, and was given a drizzle (as previously threatened) of the sauce. 

I tasted great. The roasted radishes took on a lot of sweetness, and because they were rubbing against the beets they were also covered in a not-inconsiderable amount of beet juice. The result more than mitigated the fact that roasting also pretty much erases any of the radish character from them. The chicken was great, although it did get dried out a bit***. Still tasted good, salt and smoke and all that. 

* I mean, it’s more-or-less the direct-line descendant of the first way we cooked anything, so it’s necessarily fairly simple. 

** cooked radishes aren’t my favorite thing in the world, but I had radishes to use up and didn’t have that many beets, so I got them in there anyway. They took on a lot of the beets’ characteristics, honestly. More on this in a moment. 

*** I mean, it was a previously-frozen bird that had been cooked slowly then quickly, the opportunities for moisture loss were there, and it clearly took some of those opportunities. Can’t blame the dead bird, you know? 

[mealsforsquares]

Sausage and Asparagus Risotto

I had a taste for risotto. The plan was to make pasta with sausage in it, as I was recording a podcast that night and needed to get dinner into everybody quickly and then not worry about it. The problem is that I have a streaky and largely-unreliable attitude toward keeping stock around.

Sometimes I dilligently keep mushrooms and bones and scraps around and turn them all into stock and am happy all the time, and this is one of those times where I’m….not doing that. Now, risotto forgives many things*, but I still had to improvise. 

Since I had some sausage anyway I decided to poach it and use the liquid to cook the rice. I got it in the pan with a whole onion cut into thick slices, a few smashed garlic cloves, a lemon cut into slices, some peppercorns, some allspice and a couple of bay leaves. To make it more stock-ish, I also added a carrot cut into big pieces, some celery done likewise, and a handful of dried mushrooms. 

I added them later because I wasn’t entirely certain about what I was doing, and I didn’t want the sausage to come out all weird and vegetal. As it was, I figured the sausage would stay sausage and I could blame any rogue vegetality on the stock itself. That seemed like a good plan. As it happened, there was no rogue vegetality anyway, but it’s always nice to have a plan. 

I simmered the sausage in there for awhile, then pulled them when they were cookd through and let the stuff simmer while I did the rest of the prep for the meal. That way it was already kept warm, so it wouldn’t need to change temperature when it hit the rice, and also would continue to extract some business from the vegetables and spices. 

The rest of the prep, then, involved dicing an onion, then sweating it in some butter. I chopped some celery fine to get those in there as well, then added some crushed garlic to the pan. I got the rice in there and toasted it, and this is all just regular risotto stuff right here. Deglazed with some white wine, then added the “stock” a ladelful at a time, stirring it a bit to get it all in there and then finishing it right before it was the correct texture so that carryover would get it the rest of the way**. Then I added some cheese to it, because I wanted cheese in there. 

While all that was happening, I also heated up the grill pan (I love this thing, man. I seriously am going to marry it). While it was heating, I dunked some asparagus in the boiling poaching liquid (I brought it to a boil for this purpose, and also emptied the sausage out of it), and then I threw the blanced asparagus onto the hot grill pan until it had a nice charred flavor. When the asparagus came off, I also used the same grill pan to brown up the sausage, which I then laid aside to rest. When the cheese melted, I chopped the asparagus into little inch long lengths and then stirred them into the risotto. 

I plated the risotto, then cut the sausages into thin slices and laid them over the top, followed by a thin chopping of parsley. It was fantastic, and did all the risotto work I wanted it to do, and I would happily make it every day, except that I’m trying to curb my meat consumption***, and won’t be doing that. 

It was good tho. Good job, sausage risotto.

* the lie that is perpetuated that risotto is a finicky, unforgiving, hidebound format that will punish people for doing even one thing wrong is super weird to me - bad risotto can be pretty bad, but it’s also extremely rare. Most risotto bottoms out at “pretty good, actually”. 

** the fn previous to this talks about how people make risotto in too fussy and too concerned a manner, and this is none of the more modern ways - no pressure cooker, no not-stirring a la Cooks Illustrated, none of that. I suppose it’s because I wasn’t thinking and was making it on the fly, and just made it the way I was taught and have made for most of my life. Mea culpa. I know I should be more rebellious about these things. 

*** this is a paradox, given that I’ve only written about meat things for the last, like, several entries. Here’s why: I have a bunch of meat in a freezer, and I want to use it up rather than throw it up.

[mealsforsquares]

Harissa-grilled Soft-Shell Crab

Forever ago, there were soft-shell crabs, and I did things with them. I don’t have any other jokes, I’m just typing this again.

Having convinced the world that grilling soft-shell crabs was the way to go with them, I decided to do it again the next day, because it made me happy to do so. I once again did not get the actual charcoal out like I should have, because I was high on the hubris of having correctly surmised that this was the way to go. Also I had even less time on this day than I did the day before.

I got some water boiling for some hard vegetables, and par-boiled some carrots and some broccolini, in preparation for an eventual panzanella. 

I cut some bread up into thick slices, to grill them because: panzanella. I lit the grill to get it ready.

Into the bowl that would eventually hold bread and whatnot, I got some torn bibb lettuce, some more of the yellow early-season greenhouse tomatoes, and then minced the leaves of a little bunch of chervil and some lovage. I made a dressing out of olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper and pomegranate molasses.

I got the bread on the grill, along with the parboiled carrots and broccolini. While it was cooking, I brushed the crabs with some harissa, since I didn’t have time to make a fancy glaze this time. I needed to work fast, you know? So just harissa, then. When they were cooked on the one side, I flipped them over and did it again on the other side. You know, as one does. 

When the bread was light brown, I got it out and cut it up into big chunks, which I tossed into the bowl with all the other stuff. I did the same thign with the carrots and then the borccolini, tossing everything in the dressing until it was coated, and trying to act quickly so that the bread didn’t sog.

It’s a real heartbreaker, to get the soggy bread in the panzanella, you know? Real heartbreaker.

So I plopped some panzanella onto the plates, then topped each salad with a harissa crab and ate them all and praised the sun. 

And then crab season ended here in Ohio, and everything was sad again forever.

[mealsforsquares]

Grilled soft-shell crab teriyaki

Forever ago, there were soft-shell crabs, and I did things with them. This is their story*. Every time soft-shell crabs happen across my transom from someone else’s kitchen, they’ve been fried. A fried soft-shell crab is fine - I love them! It’s how the vast majority of the soft-shelled crabs I’ve ever eaten have been prepared! - but they deserve more. They’re a lovely ingredient, all the benefits of crab with none of the non-benefits of crab. They’re briny little heroes, and I love them and want them to be at their most delicious.

And that almost never means frying them, which makes just about anything taste good, but isn’t the best expression of just about anything. Except maybe potatoes, but even then, I’m not willing to call it for frying things. Fried things are great, but everything that is good fried is better when it’s prepared some other way. I will not be moved from this point.

Anyway, the crabs. Ideally, to make the most delicious soft-shell crab possible, I really should have lit some coals. So already I’m a big fat liar, and a hypocrite, and probably don’t deserve to be alive. But I cooked them on the gas grill because this was a Monday** and I didn’t want to wait for a chimney to light and all that stuff. So I lit the grill, the end.

I was going to glaze the crabs, so I put together a glaze of soy sauce, Shaoxing wine, some palm sugar, the juice of a couple of oranges, a big piece of ginger that I microplaned, some ground szechuan peppercorns, and some chili flakes. I stirred that all together and let it reduce a bit, then got it into a bowl by the grill.

I prepared some asparagus for grilling by cutting the very end off and peeling off the bottom parts of the some of the thicker ones. I laid some thinly-sliced cucumbers and red onion into some vinegar and salt to sort of semi-pickle, and I also thinly-sliced and salted some yellow tomatoes. They’re greenhouse tomatoes, this was, after all, in the dim and distant past, but they were fine, and they took the salt well.

Those sat and waited while I got the asparagus on the grill, then the crabs. The crabs were on the grill fairly briefly - brushed with the glaze, given a couple of minutes, flipped, brushed, flipped again, brushed again, flipped one more time, brushed for a final time, then removed to a plate. The asparagus took about the same amount of time, or at least that’s what I gave them.

I made little beds on the plate of cucumbers, tomatoes and onions, then laid the asparagus on top of their, drizzling that whole thing with a little bit of sesame oil. I chopped each crab into chunks and laid them on top of the asparagus.

It was terrific, and I loved it, and I was very pleased with how I treated the crabs. Everyone else seemed pretty happy with it, although I did agree with R that it would have been nice to have some rice or something underneath it. Ah, well. Sometimes I don’t make the rice.

* DUH-dun

** It was like 10000000 Mondays ago

[mealsforsquares]

Chicken Soup with Compromise Bread

So it came to pass that it was a food preservation day and I also needed to make dinner, and I was also tired of going out (which I’ve been doing an awful lot lately, which annoys me to basically no end.

Earlier in the week I had gotten out some chicken leg quarters to deal with, and had, in fact, not dealt with them, so it was time to make a fridge-clearing preservation-day soup.

I got the quarters out and covered them with water, and to the water added a squeeze of tomato paste*, some peppercorns, a bay leaf, a carrot, two ribs of celery and an onion that I cut into big chunks. I let it simmer while I did the rest of the stuff.

(The rest of the stuff, since I missed a bunch of entries, including a preservation notes one: a three quarts of applesauce, a quart of pickled asparagus, and a quart of pickled whole small radishes. I didn’t do anything in particular with them other than brine them, and I’ll deal with flavoring them more when I actually use them, which will happen sometime during the long, boring Ohio winter).

While the leg quarters were poaching (and, in the process, putting together the stock), I started some bread. This was going to be a kind of breadstick material that I’ve made before, and comes from blooming some yeast in warm water in the bottom of the mixer. I combined a pile of bread flour with about twice as much AP, then mixed in some salt and some sugar, then mixed that with the yeast/water for a good long mix, until it was combined and kneaded all at once. I set it in a bowl and laid it aside to rise. After about ninety or so minutes, I pulled it out of the bowl (this is the point at which I did all the pickling/applesauce-making) and stretched it out on a sheet pan, then covered it with a towel to rise some more.

At that point the chicken-poaching liquid was stock, so I pulled the chicken out of it, discarded the discardables, and laid the chicken aside to cool. Into the bottom of a dutch oven I got some oil, then a couple of small onions, diced, a couple of carrots, also diced, and a couple more ribs of celery, also (you guessed it) diced. I let them soften, then I added the stalks of some asparagus (I reserved the tips for the end), a bunch (I think six) of garlic scapes, and a whole bag of adult spinach from the farmer’s market. I seasoned the whole thing down and let it all cook until it was soft. I deglazed it with a little bourbon (I was, at the time, also deglazing my tummy with a little bourbon), and then poured the stock over the top of it. When it had fully softened, I pureed the vegetables in the stock, then added whole shelled peas and the asparagus tips.

I shredded the chicken off the bones and add them to the pot, then let it simmer and reduce for awhile.

The bread was done with its second rise eventually, so I brushed it with egg and slid it into the hot oven to bake off. Not much to it there.

I fixed the soup with limes, fish sauce, and worcestershire sauce, then sliced the bread into little breadsticks and had at it.

The problem with fridge-clearing soups is that they rather taste like fridge-clearing soups, and this one wasn’t any different. It was fine - the scapes gave it a nice green quality, and the asparagus ends bittered it up just a little bit, but it still sort of tasted like something I made up out of pieces rather than something that was a finished, composed idea from the get-go. The bread, similarly, wasn’t quite like bread, but rather more like some kind of not-quite bread, a “compromise” bread between an actual loaf and a quick bread**. The individual components were pretty good, but the whole thing wasn’t much to write home about. It got dinner inside me, though, and that’s what’s important.

* I’ve finally made the switch to the tomato paste in the tube. This is long overdue. I feel very special to be up here in the future. Very special.

** or the microwave-abetted bread foam that A sometimes likes with her soup.

[mealsforsquares]

Leftover Chicken Leg Meat Enchiladas

Having a bunch of leftover chicken thigh meat meant A’s favorite: enchiladas. I don’t make enchiladas often enough, which is a real shame, because they’re delicious. As it happens when I made this* we were going through an unseasonable cold snap, so it was ok to use the oven.

I started out by taking the thigh meat off the bone and combining it with some cream cheese, goat cheese and chives. I rolled that up in tortillas with some mozzarella, then nestled them all in a pan.

I made an enchilada sauce by blooming some smoked paprika, some cayenne, cumin, coriander and mustard seeds in a pan of vegetable oil, then adding an onion and a few cloves of garlic that I had minced and letting that cook until it was soft. I dumped a can of whole tomatoes over the top of them, smashed them around a little bit, and let it all cook together. I then added it to the standing blender and pureed it, then poured it over the enchiladas through a strainer so that it was as smooth a sauce as it could be.

I covered the whole thing with queso blanco, then baked it off until the cheese were bubbly and the sauce had thickend. I sprinkled the result with parsley and some shredded leaf lettuce.

Into the pressure cooker while all this happened, I heated some oil. I cubed up some of the homemade pancetta, letting it brown up and render out, then added an onion, some garlic, some chili flakes, and a red pepper, letting those all cook up on the saute setting. I covered the vegetables with some molasses, then added a pound or so of pinto beans, and covered the whole thing with water, covering it and cooking it under pressure. When it came out I corrected the seasoning with salt and lemon juice.

The enchiladas were terrific. One of the things that I need to teach myself to do is not worry about making things out of so many ingredients, and this is especially true for enchiladas, which I am always overcomplicating, which is just silly. The beans were good, and were more than adequate as a side dish - another thing I’m always tempted to do is add a bunch of side shit to my enchiladas and not trust the dish to be good enough for the people that are eating it. This one was, and everyone had plenty, and everyone was excited to eat tasty enchiladas. Hurray for me.

* these are being finished and posted weeks after I actually made them, or at least this one is. Some of them aren’t. I dunno, man.

[mealsforsquares]

Chicken Leg Quarters with Panzanella

I had some whole entire chicken leg quarters, and while I’m a big fan of the way they taste and behave, they can be kind of a pain in the neck to use up. Luckily, I have ingenuity, and was prepared to figure out how to use them all over the course of a couple of days.

I started them off in sous vide bags with salt, olive oil and a healthy coating of za’atar. I sous vided them to the point where they were cooked and juicy, and then (because it was stupid and rainy outside) got them on the grill pan* to brown off and crisp up, and that was just about that for the chicken.

To go alongside it I made a panzanella. I cut some whole-grain bread very thick and got it brown on the grill pan, then cut it into cubes. I then blanched some asparagus to keep it crunchy and green and chopped it up int the salad. I added the leaves of a bunch of parsley and some torn basil. I chopped up a handful of dried figs for sweetness, and then realized that I would also need to balance that out with something that was saltier, so I decided to fry some chickpeas.

I don’t think it’s come up before, but in addition to being an absolute magic wand for potatoes, the air fryer is a boon - a veritable boon - for fried chickpeas. Instead of not quite coming out right, or being inconsistently-fried and unsatisfying, the air fryer starts with cooked chickpeas and ends with crunchy, salty, delightful little balls of snappy deliciousness. So I strained, rinsed and dried some regular old canned chickpeas**, then sprinkled them with salt and sumac, sprayed them with spray oil, and air fried them (I think 370 for sixteen minutes, shaking the basket halfway through) until they were done, and then tossed the chickpeas with the panzanella.

I made the same exact vinaigrette that I make all the time - some olive oil, salt, black pepper, mustard, rice vinegar, balsamic vinegar and pomegranate molasses, shaken in a mason jar - and then poured it over the salad.

The chicken came out perfectly - as sous vide allows for - and the panzanella, which I’ve been making a bunch of, was an absolutely delightful way to soak up some of the chicken juices and whatnot. It was a huge success with everybody, and there was plenty of bread salad to act as leftovers for the rest of the week.

* seriously, I love this thing. I’m so happy I found it. Grill pans, man. They’re the business. The actual business.

** just regular old canned chickpeas! The thing is a wonderment.

[mealsforsquares]

Chicken Breasts and Quinoa Salad

So A was travelling and R had to work, and that meant that dinner was my own affair. Aaaaaaaall for me. Things are pretty busy, as there’s people coming up this weekend and that means getting around to the stuff around the house that I need to get around to, and not having a lot of time for other stuff, which meant it was also in my best interest to make something that had ample leftovers.

So I got out the sous vide machine and decided on some chicken breasts. I got them into vacuum bags with olive oil and a chicken-focused pre-bought rub* and got them in the water at 145 for 2 hours, which is kind of a bastardization of the two different things you’re told about it.

I cooked some quinoa by toasting it briefly in the pan, then salting it and covering it with water and letting it simmer until it was time to eat.

The quinoa was to be part of a salad, so I got the rest of that together also. I minced a shallot, then cut an apple into small dice, then cut a bunch of little japanese radishes into bits about the same size as the apple, and set all that aside. I also cooked some asparagus on the grill pan** to chop up and add in later.

It needed a sauce for the chicken. Even sous-vide boneless skinless chicken breast is still just boneless, skinless chicken breast. It’s not very exciting, no matter what you put in the bag with it. So I decided to make braised peppers, which amount to a sort of unformed pepper jam. I cut two green and four red peppers into dice, and started them cooking in some olive oil in a pan. When they were well softened, I added a cup of reconstituted stock and let them simmer while I did basically everything else (I actually started this part first, but for whatever reason I’m constitutionally unsuited to writing the parts of the damn thing in order, and I guess I’m certainly not going to go back up to the beginning and paste this up there). Eventually the liquid was basically gone, at which point I added a healthy glug of cane vinegar and some brown sugar, letting it cook down into a glaze, but stopping short of any step where the peppers would break down structurally.

When the quinoa was done and the asparagus had cooled, I added both to the salad, then dressed it with some more olive oil, the juice of a whole lemon and half of an orange (it was a lot of salad), and then tore some basil and stirred that in as well.

The chicken came out of the bags and got a quick trip across the grill pan again to get some color on the outside, and then was cut into slices.

I dolloped the quinoa salad into a deep plate, then followed it with the chicken, then topped the whole thing with the peppers. The peppers were there for the chicken, but they also informed the quinoa, occasionally dropping down into them, which was great. The chicken came out as well and reliably as all sous vide chicken breasts do - that’s the advantage to using such an industrialized process. The quinoa salad was fantastic, and although it didn’t need the chicken (it would have been just fine with some lentils or some walnuts, which is probably how it will live its life as leftovers).

* I don’t mind continuing to mention that Penzey’s is the source of these things, and that it’s because they keep giving things away, but in the future it could be anything, so why get hung up on it now.

** I wanted to use the grill. True story: I just bought a new gas grill. But one of the reasons that I needed a new gas grill is that the old one wasn’t closing the propane line fully, so it was bleeding off propane, which is awful and cannot be allowed to stand. It also means I have an empty propane tank, and my car is in the shop, and has been for two days, so I can’t go out and get more propane. I have a charcoal grill, but it’s cold, and it didn’t seem worth it to cook for one person.

[mealsforsquares]

Breakfast Sandwiches for Travelling

So one of the things I don’t generally write up here, because it’s not worth it usually, is my regular tradition of making breakfast sandwiches for travel days for A. Because A has to travel for work (driving eight or so hours this week each way), and because food on the interstate is liable to be gross and underwhelming, I send her on her way with a breakfast sandwich so that it feels more like food, and also more like a treat.

In this case, the breakfast sandwich was worth memorializing, so I wrote this up so I don’t forget about it. It started, as they so often do, with a glish muff. I split english muffins and got them under the broiler to toast*.

I poured some oil into a pan and got to work on some more fried green tomatoes. I dunked them in buttermilk, then in corn meal, this time seasoned with salt, cayenne pepper and fenugreek, then fried each side for a couple of minutes until they were golden-brown and removed them to a paper towel to drain.

Separately, I heated some oil in a pan and cracked eggs into it, one per sandwich. When they were cooked through** I slid them out onto paper towels also. They don’t require nearly as much oil to cook as the tomatoes do, but they still keep that oil in their li’l crannies, which is troublesome, so I like to blot them out a little so that they dry and don’t slip around on the sandwich as badly.

When the english muffins were toasted, I spread some goat cheese on the bottom bit of each one, then followed it up with some spicy microgreens of a variety I have since forgotten***, but which were super tasy. The egg went down on that, followed by a little bit of hot sauce (to glue the egg and the tomato together) and then the top of the english muffin. They were fantastic, and one of the best uses of a fried green tomato heretofore known to man.

Next time I’ll try the exact same thing, but I’ll also use an avocado.

* I do have a toaster oven, and it’s great, but in this case when I’m making four breakfast sandwiches at once (two for A along the road, and two for me because, well, they’re relatively small and I eat two of them) it’s easiest to lay them out on a sheet pan and toast them all at once.

** A is going to be eating these in a car, so a soft, runny yolk is a liability, not a joy.

*** their purchase was occasioned by the lady that ran the farmers market stall insisting I try them and telling me they’re good on sandwiches, which I chose to believe, and which turned out to be true.

[mealsforsquares]

Asparagus Frittata

So this past weekend there were gatherings with both sets of family members. The first one was a huge, heavy dinner at a huge, heavy restaurant, and was difficult to recover from. The second one was less stressful, and earlier in the day, and also less huge.

Nevertheless, the challenge here presented was how to feed us with something reasonable and not super-dense, while also being tasty. It happens that this was Sunday night, so I had some asparagus that I had bought only the day before (it’s asparagus season, y’all!), and that seemed like the perfect foundation for a frittata.

I got a grill pan good and hot*, and rubbed some asparagus down with some olive oil, salt and pepper. I had to cut some of the asparaguses in half, and I peeled the ends of them a bit, but these were good, in-season fresh asparagus, and they really needed only the most minimal handling. That said, asparagus take a lot longer to cook than eggs, so they needed to be pre-cooked. This entire paragraph is basically backwards, and the sentences should be in almost exactly reverse order. Way to go, me.

Anyway. I also had some early greenhouse farmers-market grape tomatoes, which I bought because I’m so goddamn excited to see tomatoes I could squeal. They aren’t as good as they will be when the actual tomato season starts, but they’re significantly better than nothing, so I cut a bunch of them in half. I also cut some basil into chiffonade.

I cracked six eggs into a bowl and whipped them together with some buttermilk, pouring the resultant mixture into a warmed cast-iron pan, trying to keep the heat low enough that I wouldn’t scorch the bottom of the frittata. When it had started to set, I grated some parmesan cheese over the top of it, ground a bunch of black pepper over that, and then ran it under the broiler until the top set and the thing just started to brown.

I served a salad alongside it, because I also had green tomatoes, and fried green tomatoes make the best croutons. I cut a fried green tomato into cubes, and dipped them first in buttermilk and then in corn meal that I mixed with smoked paprika, garlic powder, and salt. I dropped this into oil that I had heated previously, while other stuff in this writeup was going on, and let it fry to golden brown before removing it and draining it over a paper towel.

I made the rest of the salad with a beautiful head of butter lettuce (it was so good, you guys), apple slices, a red onion that I sliced very thinly, and a small cucumber that I cut into thin slices also. I made a variation on the same vinaigrette that I make all the time, this time with avocado oil, rice vinegar, whole grain mustard, salt, and pomegranate molasses. I tossed the fried green tomato croutons in at the end so they wouldn’t sog out and be sad and disappointing.

The frittata was good**, the asparagus was incredible. The tomatoes were necessary to brighten the whole thing up, and if they weren’t as good as tomatoes will be later in the season, well, I’m not going to hold that against them. They did their job admirably. The basil was great becuase it was basil. The parmesan was great because it was parmesan. The salad worked well, and I was very happy to be eating it at the time. All told it was a great light meal with lots of vegetables in it, which is what it was meant to be.

* the grill pan is a new addition to the kitchen. Jacques Pepin uses one all the time, and they seem like a good compromise when you live in the north, so when I was out at a thrift store and found a perfectly good if under-loved Lodge jobber for a couple of dollars, I knew what I had to do. I rehabbed it and now have used it to cook asparagus. Good job, grill pan.

**it would have been better had I not, in fact, scorched the bottom of it. Boo hoo.

[mealsforsquares]

Curry Coconut Soft-Shell Crab Stew

So fried soft-shell crabs are absolutely delicious. Nobody is here to question that. It’s a fantastic way to eat a fantastic food, and I love them every single time. But what if….not fried soft shell crabs? Truly, the mind reels at the possibility.

Actually, it doesn’t, because people do non-fried stuff with soft-shell crabs all the time. But be with me here. Let’s be drama queens about it.

So I decided on a kind of stew/braise of them, because that would be tasty. I started a sauce of a can of coconut milk, some reconstituted stock, some gochujang paste and some peanut-butter powder to thicken and add some peanut notes. I also added a couple of lime leaves, a sprig of basil, a beaten-up (with the back of a knife) piece of lemongrass, a smashed chunk of ginger and four smashed bird chillies. I let this simmer while I put the rest of the thing together.

I brushed the crabs with tom yum paste and corn starch, and dropped them in oil in a hot pan to brown up a little on the outside*. When it was brown I added whole ramp bulbs and let them caramelize a little on the outside. I strained the solids out of the sauce and poured it over the crab, and let it simmer for awhile. When it was near done, I chiffonaded the ramp fronds and the leaves of a head of tatsoi and got those in at the end, letting them cook in the sauce.

I decided it should be a two-part stew, served over shredded tofu. So I got a block of tofu out of the refrigerator, and ran it over the box grater until it was a pile of shreds, which I squeezed out and then pressed between a couple of sheet pans to get the liquid out. While this was happening, I started the wok heating. That takes forever. It’s fun to wait!

While the wok was heating, I cut a carrot into slanty coins, some celery into slanty uh...half-moon slice things, and a head of broccoli into florets, and the stalks into more slanty coins. One at a time, I stir-fried the vegetables in basically reverse order of sweetness (carrots first, then celery, then broccoli heads, then broccoli stalk slices), tossing them all the while with shaoxing wine and soy sauce.

When that was all done I re-oiled the pan and got the tofu shreds in there, stir-frying them with fish sauce and szechuan pepper oil. I combined the shredded tofu and the vegetables in a bowl and tossed them with the juice of a lemon (I didn’t have a lime) and a little bit of sesame oil.

I pulled the braised crab out of the sauce and chopped it into chunks. I plated the shredded tofu/vegetables, and then poured the sauce/greens mixture over the top. I added the chunks of crab back to the top of the stew.

It was pretty great - the whole thing sort of slurred together more than I thought it would, but that was nice; the tofu especially sucked up flavor from the sauce and that mixed with the things it had been fried with in a way that was very pleasant. I don’t usually make food that’s so mingled, but every bite being a different textural/flavor combination was pretty cool, and it ended up being a heck of a meal. I’ll definitely be doing it again.

* I mean, this is very much a frying-step, especially with the corn starch, but you know. It’s not a breaded thing I guess? It’s only just now that I realize that I am wrong and a hypocrite. Woe is me.