Homemade Pasta: The Reckoning

It's been a while, but I finally gave up. With a library at hand, I checked out a book on making pasta and followed some directions. I know, I know, not the usual. Whatever, I wanted something that tasted good, and I wanted it quickly. The short version of my short cutting? Success! And sweat.

Turns out I've been doing many things wrong. One: equal parts egg and flour is a little too dry. Two: half semolina flour is still too rough. Three: all-egg for liquid is a little firm. Four: kneading for a few minutes isn't enough. Five: rolling for a few minutes isn't enough. Six: cutting my noodles all wrong. I wonder how many experiments it would have taken to figure that out? I had already given up on more iterations of homemade pasta as it has been horrible every time. Except now, of course. Cookbooks: pretty rad, actually.

We topped it with a homemade white-wine sauce, made up on the spot. I provide a recipe, but you should understand this as simply what I made, not how one makes sauce. I, honestly, have no clue but guessed together something good. I used home-grown sage - E has started a wonderful garden on the deck. While we eagerly await the first greens from it, I have been using the sage as often as E will let me. I would surely kill the plant without her intervention - we have this great recipe, invented by E and cooked by me, that I'll share some time. It uses a bit of sage.

The pasta was also topped with crispy slices of leek; I'll omit a recipe for that but you can figure it out. It involves a cast iron, salt, and a bit of oil. And about ten minutes of your time.

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Homemade Pasta in White Wine Sauce

Serves.. 3? Whatever

Takes a really long time

Pasta

1 large egg (60g or so)

50g white flour

25g whole-wheat flour

25g semolina flour

2tbsp water, give or take

Mix the flours together in a small bowl. Stir in the egg and water using a fork; the dough should be dry-ish, but smooth on the surface. On a very lightly floured large work surface, begin kneading the dough. Add flour as necessary, but keep to a minimum. Around five minutes, test the dough by gently pulling it - if it rips immediately, wet your hands and work it into the dough. If you get a little stretch, then a rip, maybe add a drop of water. Otherwise, just keep kneading for another five minutes. If it ever begins sticking, add a bit more flour. If it appears dry, add a few drops of water. The surface of the dough will be smooth and it should be pliable and stretchy. Cover and let rest for 30 minutes. You can start the sauce now if you want.

After 30 minutes, prepare your muscles and a large work surface, very lightly dusted in flour. We have a rather large cutting board - at least 24"x18", if not larger - and cut our dough in half before rolling. The little lump of dough will need a rather lot of space. Using your hands, make the dough into something like a rectangle. Then start rolling. Keep rolling, rotating the dough and dusting with hints of flour if it sticks. Use your forearms. E rolled for maybe ten minutes; I took around five. If you are lacking in upper-body strength, I suggest making friends with a climber (great for opening cans - many more uses around the house as well).

The dough is thin enough when you can see through it. Yeah, it is a lot of work. And it is possible by hand. If you cut the dough in two, put the first finished piece between two towels so it doesn't form a crust while you finish the second piece. To cut the pasta into long, straight noodles, use the following magic trick: place the dough flat and roll up the top and bottom edges until they meet in the center. Fold in half. Cut. Magic! Unroll all the noodles and cook in a large pot of salted, boiling water for three minutes. Drain and serve immediately (or, drain, toss in sauce, and serve immediately).

Sauce

1/2 cup white wine of some sort (I don't pretend to know)

1/2 cup water (could probably replace this with more wine or stock of sorts)

1tsp butter

1 italian onion, diced

handful cherry tomatoes, cut in half

can of white beans + liquid

several fresh sage leaves, coarsely chopped

(optionally) a bit of leftover, cooked, thick-cut bacon from a previous meal

In a large sauce pan, heat a splash of oil over medium. Add the diced onion, a bit of salt, and let cook for a while. Stir it every now and then, adding oil as necessary, until it has softened. Add the wine, water, some salt+pepper, whatever dry spices you want, and the bacon if you have it. Reduce to low and let simmer until much of the liquid is gone, tasting and seasoning as you go. Remove the bacon, dice it up, and put aside for crisping and future garnish.

If it is more than give minutes before your past will be ready, shut off the heat. Otherwise, cut the tomatoes in half and add them, along with the entire can of beans+liquid and the sage. Increase heat to medium and stir everything together for five minutes. Toss with noodles and serve immediately, topped with bacon and crisped leek rounds.

Plenty More Cooking

My schedule returned to normal, my stomach the same, and the arrival of "fall" in SF all lead to one thing: more cooking. The latest edition of Lucky Peach arrived last week and has proved excellent so far. While the recipes are not exactly basic, the lot seem less chef-ified than past issues. For a cooking night with E, we made a modified eggplant, soba, and mango dish from Plenty and a very heavily modified "vegetables stuffed with fish paste" from Lucky Peach - I used chicken sausage instead of fish paste.

The eggplant dish was excellent, as everything else from the book - cilantro, lime, onion, and red pepper provide the base, and the mango livens it up a notch. However: the slight modifications to the eggplant recipe, entirely my own doing, are not ones I would recommend. It asks for fried eggplant; please do so. The chewiness of baked eggplant was not the best. Also, the dish is intended to be cold. We, as hungry diners, ate it warm instead. The leftovers, having marinated in the liquids for some time, had more body.

Later in the week, E requested yams. For some reason, I decided the yam bruschetta would be a grand idea. It, as we discovered, is. We deviated from the bruschetta template by a large margin, so I may offend some with the name. Don't let that stop you from cooking this dish; tomato, yam, and a strong cheese create a winning combo. The yam baked until it is almost creamy and stacked with carmelized onions is a dream to bite into.

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Yam Bruschetta

Serves 2-3 as dinner/4-6 as appetizer (depending on yam size)

1 medium-ish yam, sliced into thin rectangles

bread (we used a home-made pita-ish dough)

2-4 small heirloom tomatoes

1 yellow onion, cut as you would for a sandwich

watercress stems, cut slightly shorter than the bread

a strong, hard cheese (we used a goat gouda)

olive oil

salt/pepper/etc

Preheat oven to 425. Prepare the yam by slicing in, then lightly tossing in olive oil. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, and potentially more seasonings. E was in charge of this part and I only remember cinnamon. Definitely something else. Put on a parchment-lined baking sheet and put in the oven.

Cut the onion into strips and put in a small pan over medium-low - the onion should completely cover the bottom and then some. Sprinkle with a little salt and carmelize slowly while you go about the rest of prep; after 10-15 minutes, stir every 5 minutes so they cook evenly and don't burn.

Slice your bread, tomatoes, cheese, and watercress. When the yams are soft so that a fork could spread them on bread, 40 minutes or so, remove from the oven (but don't shut it off). The onion should also be nice and sweet at this point.

Assemble the bruschetta - brush each piece of bread with a small amount of olive oil, then place a yam slice, a tomato slice, a few strands of onion, and a hint of cheese on top. Finish with 4-6 watercress stems and sprinkle with a bit of salt and pepper.

Cook in the 425 degree oven for 10+ minutes until the tomato has started to give off liquid, the cheese has begun to melt, and some onion/green tips have blackened. Let them cool for at least a few minutes, lest you burn your mouth on the tomato.

Socca That Shouldn't, But Does, Work

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I actually posted. Then, I went to Beijing for a few weeks, got back to a stomach bug for a week, and have generally been busy. I ate really a rather large variety of food in Beijing; E along as my translator made things much easier. We still did guess our way through a few menu items as the characters used for describing food aren't exactly the most descriptive. For instance, my "noodles tomatoes and egg with <unrecognized characters> extra" that we were excited for? <unrecognized characters> just meant "a size bigger". Hrm. But, yes, chuan is delicious (as is all Uyghur food we had), I really like zhōu (congee/rice porrige/jook/etc), and there were some surprisingly good tofu skin/peanut dishes.

And really a lot more to talk about, but this post is not about that. It is about a dinner that, by all accounts, should have been an interesting experiment and nothing more but was, in reality, simply delicious. I have been cooking a lot from Plenty (another reason for the lack of recipes) and have enjoyed everything from it so far. It had a recipe for socca - chickpea flour pancakes - topped with onion and tomato. I took the recipe as an inspiration, ran it through parts of Japan and China, and came up with this.

Socca, with green onion inside, topped with mâche (lamb's lettuce), and a mushroom/tomato saute. The China part is, somewhat obviously, the green onions in the socca - like scallion cakes but much lighter. The Japan part isn't so obvious from a photo, but from a bite it would be obvious. The saute was seasoned with a combination of sake, (fake) wasabi, and brown sugar. Sesame oil could, probably, have helped a great deal. Delicious, though, most definitely delicious. If I see Italian/Japanese fusion places in the future, I won't be quite so stunned.

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Socca (By Way of Asia)

Serves 2

This recipe is an approximation, and not a final product. Consider it a place to get started; much could be improved in the dish. For instance, a sauce, aioli, or dip could be of great benefit. As could some spices.

1 cup chickpea flour

1 cup lukewarm water

1 tbsp olive oil

1/2 tsp salt

2 tbsp minced green onion

1 "box" mushrooms (8oz, I think)

2/3 "box" cherry tomatoes (???oz)

1/4 cup-ish sake

1 tbsp brown sugar

1 tbsp (give or take) wasabi

salt+pepper

a bit of mâche

Mix the socca batter - combine all the ingredients in a bowl and whisk. Clean the mushrooms and dry them, then slice them. Sweat the mushrooms with a dash of salt in a frying pan over medium heat for about five minutes. While the mushrooms are sweating, begin cutting cherry tomatoes in half. When the mushrooms have reduced by a bit and are tasty, prepare to multi-task.

Preheat the oven to 250 degrees and prepare a parchment-lined baking sheet. Heat a non-stick pan over medium-high heat with a bottom the size you would like your socca (think slightly larger than tacos). While doing the rest of the saute prep, you should be cooking socca: put a dash of oil in the pan and add ~1/4 cup of batter, spreading it evenly over the bottom. After 1-2 minutes, it should have bubbles and the top should have begun to set a little. Flip and cook for another minute.

In the downtime of cooking socca, add the sake, brown sugar, and wasabi to the mushrooms and reduce for several minutes. Then add the tomatoes, cook for five minutes, and add salt and pepper to taste. All the while, you should be making socca - I got 6 pancakes from the recipe, which is a good amount to aim for.

The saute should finish before the socca, which is good as you want it to cool slightly. When all the socca are done, put a bed of mâche on each one, then top with saute. Place in the oven for 5-10 minutes to warm. Serve and eat immediately, as they will cool quickly. Warmed plates may help. Eating with your hands may be a good idea, as E thought the dish was close enough to a taco to be eaten like one.

Hell, maybe add some guacamole.

Spicy Rice Cake Soup, Others

An initial attempt at cooking Friday led to rotisserie chicken from the grocer and a Pixar movie. The next night, after a long day of climbing, scrambling, and exploring up the coast, nothing seemed like a better idea than cooking what we didn't the previous night. A recipe from Momofuku was picked, entailing blanching and peeling a pint of cherry tomatoes. Mayhaps a poor idea given the exhaustion from a long day, but the idea we went with. The salad was a take on caprese, with silken tofu providing a base. Served with rye soda bread, miso butter, and soft boiled eggs it made an interesting snack. You can find a photo lower in the post; below this, however, is the title of the post.

I decided, somewhat accidentally, on a new take of a previous dish. This time, the soup would be more of a soup and the cauliflower on the side. The idea was to take a tomato-basil soup, provide the creaminess with silken tofu instead of dairy, and throw in grilled rice cakes for the hell of it. I ate it with two quick side dishes - blanched snow pea with rice vinegar and quick sweet pickles - and the mentioned cauliflower. The sides were, frankly, somewhat conflicting with the soup and I wouldn't recommend them. But the soup itself - yes. To further confuse the reader is a photo of the previous night's dinner of salad and toast.

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Spicy Rice Cake Soup

Serves 2-ish

2/3 cup uncooked sushi rice + water

12 oz silken tofu

1 large heirloom tomato (or maybe 6-12 oz canned tomato)

1/2 cup water

2 tbsp mirin

1 tbsp sesame oil

spiciness to taste (sriracha, dried cayenne, fresh jalapeno, anything really)

several leaves basil

Cook the sushi rice per instructions - rinse thoroughly, heat to boil, cook covered until the water is gone, fluff the rice and let sit covered for 10 minutes. After the rest, put the rice in a bowl to cool. Do some prep-work on sides if you want. When the rice is cooled, use a wet spoon or your fist to mash it into a pulp. With a spoon, use the back to smear sections along the side of the bowl, doing this until you get something like a paste or get tired. With wet hands, form it into a log and set aside.

Prepare the soup. In a saucepan, add the water, mirin, and sesame oil. Heat to a boil and let reduce for a minute - consider adding onions or garlic before, but I didn't. Add the tomato, mushed, to the soup - try and avoid adding skin as it will add texture, but a little bit is fine. Simmer for another minute or so, then add tofu and spiciness. Reduce heat to low. Prepare a cast iron over medium heat with a bit of oil. Slice the rice cake into patties and grill until browned on both sides, about 5 minutes total. Split soup between bowls, add the rice cakes to each, and top with torn basil (or basil chiffonade if you want to be fancy).

Tomato "Cassoulet", Two Preparations of Celery Root, Greens

The weather this weekend has been phenomenal, hitting the mid-60s with mostly-cloudless skies and no winds. Perfect for lounging in a park watching the dogs, getting chided for not having one ourselves, riding the cable car, and... soup? A hearty bean-and-pork concoction heavily influenced by cassoulet on a warm day? You, astute reader, may have forgotten that it is winter. It gets cold when the sun goes down, and it gets cold fast. Not quite cold enough to really complain about, the mid 40s are still enough for bundling up and turning on the heat. And, yes, a hearty dinner.

I had a few goals in mind for the dinner; I wanted to cook something like the titular dish of this post, having seen one on the dinner specials board whilst eating brunch and I wanted to use seasoning very sparingly. For the veggies, I decided on broccolini (because I love it and my grocer had Sovrano cheese) and celery root, which has a strong flavor. Also, you can make, essentially, mashed potatoes with it and call it "celery root puree" and put it on your fancy menu next to things like "fricassee de poulet". If you had a fancy menu, that is. Anyway, celery root puree is nice but I also wanted to try making fries from it or, going with the earlier menu theme, "celery root frites". So I ended up with this:

The seasoning was sparing; I've thrown some herbes de provence on top of the soup and celery root for effect, but when cooking it was simply salt and pepper. Starting with the bowl, we have a tomato-and-bean soup with dry sausage, severely blackened ("frites noir") celery root skinny fries, roasted broccolini dressed with a bit of sovrano, and celery root puree. While dark, the fries didn't taste burnt; they had started to brown, I turned around to shape the puree into balls, and turned back to see the charred-looking mess. Honestly, I would change nothing with the dish except not charring the fries. The prep was simple and the flavors strong.

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Tomato "Cassoulet" Soup, Celery Root Preps, Broccolini

Serves 2-ish

Soup

1 can (15oz) of diced, salted tomatoes

1 can (15oz) of white beans (navy beans/haricot)

1 small (4oz?) dry sausage, sliced thinly into rounds

a bit of strong, hard cheese (sovrano grana recommended, or use pecorino)

dressing herbs (fresh herbes de provence or other hearty herbs, or dried if you don't have fresh)

Heat a cast iron over medium until hot. Add the sausage, cook on one side for a minute, flip, and cook until a decent amount of fat has rendered out and the sausage darkened. Reduce heat to medium-low, add in the beans and tomato, and stir. Stir every now and then while you do the rest, but you are mostly going to leave this alone for the next 45 minutes. Preheat the oven to 400 to make...

Two celery roots, two preps (plus broccolini)
2 celery roots
1 bunch broccolini
white wine vinegar
a bit of strong, hard cheese (sovrano grana recommended, or use pecorino)
high smoke point oil (grapeseed if you have it, or refined canola)
salt and pepper

Chop off the top and bottom of the celery roots, then skin with a knife. You can lose a bit of flesh during this. Chop one of the roots into fry-shaped pieces then soak in a bowl with white wine vinegar. Prepare a foil-lined baking sheet and in a bowl combine enough oil to coat the broccolini, a few turns of salt, and a turn of pepper. Shake out the fries and toss them and the broccolini in the oil mixture. Lay out on baking sheet without crowding, otherwise the broccolini won't crisp properly. Put in oven about 30 minutes before you want to eat.

With the untouched celery root, chop it into cubes and start a small pot of water boiling. Proceed as you would for mashed potatoes, viz. boil until a fork easily pierces, drain, (optionally add some fat like butter or milk), mash with fork, and salt to taste. This will take about 20 minutes and cool quite quickly when mashed, so consider saving it until the fries are frying.

After the cooking sheet has been in the oven for 15 minutes, remove it and take the celery root off. It should have softened and lightly browned. Grate cheese over broccolini, place back in oven, and lower to 350. Given how small the fries will be, prepare the smallest frying prep you can manage; I used my smallest pot with only a few tablespoons of oil. Once the oil is hot, add the fries, shaking intermittently. Prepare a paper-towel lined plate to dry fries on.

Once the fries go in, add some cheese to the cassoulet (to taste) as well as any salt or pepper you think it may need; the sausage should have seen to this, but you never know. Mash the celery root as described above, remove the fries to paper towel and drain. Toss with a bit of salt and pepper. Remove broccolini from oven. Garnish with any herbs. Eat.

Tomato-Radish Lentil 'lenta

In a shocking turn of events, the weather turned cold for the weekend. The (relative) heat of last week made cooking difficult, as did a rather packed schedule. I managed a round of bagels, on which the yeast did not activate. To follow that up, I cooked a dinner of which none of my photographs turned out. Cell phone camera, combined with low light, strikes again. But, I'll still provide the recipe because it was highly edible and a great foil for the cold weather. The dish was partially influenced by a brunch item at Gather - the lentil and polenta. It was a great breakfast food that I wanted to fashion as a dinner. I mostly failed, because I don't season things enough. More following of recipes may be in my future. So, yes, the flavor could stand to be improved but everything else about the dish was good. Have at it (or don't).

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Lentil 'lenta

Serves 2

1 standard size can of lentils or lentil soup

2/3 cup dry polenta

2 cups water

bunch of radishes (15 or so)

2 flavorful tomatoes

1 shallot

1 tbsp olive oil

spices other than what I used (cumin, dill, and cayenne) or in larger quantities

salt

(optionally) butter or cheese

So, lots of things going on at once with this recipe. Take 5 radishes and dice them, reserve a single radish, then slice the rest in half. Toss the halved radishes in the olive oil and salt, then place in a 350 degree oven for 20 minutes. Once they are in the oven, dice the shallot and sautee it over medium until it has yellowed and lost some flavor. Cut the tomatoes into 6-8 slices each. Put one of them, as well as the diced radish, in with the shallot. Place the other tomato in a pot with the water and bring to boil while making sure the pan doesn't burn. You can, if you want, add some butter or cheese to the pot of water.

Once the water is boiling, add the polenta, reduce heat, and stir. Add the can of lentils to the frying pan, season it, then alternate between stirring the polenta and lentil mixture. You are aiming for a runny polenta mixture, which takes 5-10 minutes of cooking. This should be timed for the radishes coming out of the oven. Serve in a bowl with polenta put in first, the lentil mixture spooned into the center, and top with the baked radish. Slice the single, reserved radish for garnish.

Commissioning a Supper in C

I got a cold, which sucks. Though, in my search for non-orange sources of vitamin C, interesting facts were learned. Such as: a single red bell pepper has 2-3 times as much vitamin C as a single orange. A good fact to know; bell peppers can have hummus on them, oranges not so much. Bell peppers easily go in most cooked dinners, oranges not so much. Bell peppers taste good, oranges not so much. So; a dinner. It should contain red bell peppers and be warm, those being my only constraints. I went with a slightly-modified standard of my college days - Spanish rice. It defied all earthly descriptions.

Too many times I've burned my Spanish rice due to poor pots and improper heat; I finally found a way around that. I cooked everything in a pan, stirring constantly, instead of in a pot with the lid in. I used arborio rice, which you can probably find at your local upscale grocery store or any place with a wide grain selection. It's the rice you would use for risotto. You can also substitute other beans in this recipe for garbanzo, or leave them out entirely - if so, use some vegetable or chicken broth in place of the bean liquid. A perfect dish for a cold, much better than the canned soup I had for lunch; warm and golden, like an oven that's wide open.

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Spanish Rice and Beans

Serves 1

1/3 cup arborio rice

1 small (8 oz) can garbanzo beans

1 cup liquid consisting of all the bean juice + water to top it off

1 red pepper, diced

1 flavorful and soft (heirloom) tomato, chopped into 8+ pieces

dash cinnamon

dash cumin

dash ground ginger

rosemary for garnish

In a pan, heat a bit of olive oil over medium-low. Add in the diced bell pepper and cook for 5 minutes. While that is cooking, separate out the bean liquid from the beans themselves and add enough water to get a cup of liquid. Add rice to the pan and sautee for a minute before adding 1/4 or 1/3 of the liquid, the tomato, and all the seasoning but the rosemary. Stir constantly; don't let it boil, though it should be hot enough that if you were to stop stirring it would boil. Once all the liquid is absorbed, pour in half the remaining liquid. Continue stirring; once all of that liquid has been absorbed, add in the beans and the rest of the liquid, cooking until all is absorbed. Top with rosemary and serve; to your nephew you can give it as a present.

You may need to (or choose to) add more liquid; this will make it more of a risotto. If you go this route, you will want to add more flavor; either in the form of butter, more tomato, or stock of some sort.

Raw "Pasta", Al Dente

I finally got around to cooking a meal now that I'm back; there was a bit of eating out and lazy nights to get the beans and rice diet out of my system. But now I'm back in the kitchen and my non-existent slave-driving domestic partner couldn't be happier. And, actually, my coworkers are happy too - bread has resumed. The bread won't get much space; it was roughly this recipe without the potato or walnuts, and 10% of the flour weight replaced with polenta. Very chewy, very runny dough, with a bit of a crunch and sweetness from the polenta.

For my first cooked dinner, I wanted to take advantage of the bounty of fresh, delicious vegetables one gets in the Bay Area. I also didn't want to cook. So I compromised - I would prep something, but it would be raw. I've had (and made) raw "pasta" consisting of shredded carrots and zucchini a few times. The prep time is minimal, unless you are an idiot like me and decided to slice the veggies with a knife instead of using a cheese grater. Don't do that, unless you have a lot of patience, a very sharp knife, and like things crunchy. Just, you know, use a cheese greater. Hell of a lot easier to eat, as well. You also want to make sure you use a very flavorful tomato - something big and heirloomy; the tomato is a lot of the flavor in this dish and a weak-ass roma really won't cut it. I also want to draw special attention to the cheese I used - wasabi chevre. With real wasabi, not a horse radish base. This stuff is divine and you should go buy some and put it on everything you could imagine putting chevre on.

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Raw "Pasta" Al Dente

Serves 1 (not all by itself, mind you)

1 good sized carrot, grated or sliced very thinly

1 good sized zucchini, grated or sliced very thinly

1 giant (or 2 normal) heirloom tomatoes, the more flavor the better

wasabi chevre (or really any very soft cheese)

grated parmesan

~1 tbsp olive oil

~2 tsp rice vinegar

freshly ground salt and pepper

In a bowl, combine the carrot and zucchini. Slice the tomato into wedges and squeeze them very lightly over the bowl, then throw them in as well. Add the olive oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper and toss to coat everything evenly. Add more of ingredients if needed for taste. Serve on plate, sprinkled with parmesan and topped with a dollop of chevre.

Buckwheat Scallion Pancake and Miso Stir Fry

I've, roughly, made this exact meal before, but that won't stop me from making it again. I changed up some ratios a bit, and swapped out many of the ingredients in the stir fry. Still, a quick meal with a sauce that doesn't quite come together, ever. One of these days I may need to make a sauce all proper-like, with a boil and reduce with cornstarch by itself before tossing it onto the stir fry proper. However, due to the liquid nature of the sauce I made I did get a very nice texture to my tofu. I used high-protein firm tofu, browned on all sides in oil. It then sat it liquid and, roughly, steamed. The outside was very firm and tough, but the inside was almost spongy; I think there is promise in the fry-->steam/boil method.

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Miso Tofu Stir Fry

Serves 2

12 oz high-protein firm tofu, cubed

enough bok choi for two

1 large heirloom tomato

1 red pepper, diced

1 tbsp soy sauce

2 tbsp red miso paste

1 tsp oil

6 tbsp hot water

1 sprig green onion, chopped

spicy seasoning of your choice

In a large frying pan over medium high, heat some oil. Toss in the cubed tofu and brown it on all sides. While browning, combine the oil, soy sauce, miso paste, hot water, green onion, and spicy thing in a bowl and mix until the miso has dissolved. Once the tofu has browned on all sides, add the pepper and bok choi to the pan, reduce heat to medium low, and cook for a minute or two before adding the sauce and the tomato, chopped into a few pieces. Cook for ten more minutes, stirring intermittently. The tomato should disintegrate somewhat in the sauce; you can try adding flour or corn starch to thicken it up.

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Buckwheat Scallion Cakes

Serves 2

2 tbsp buckwheat flour

6 tbsp all-purpose flour

1/4 cup hot water (boiling if you want)

2 tsp ground ginger

3 springs green onion, diced

Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and mix with a spoon for a few minutes. Knead gently a few times, then let rest, covered, for thirty minutes. After letting it rest, form into 2-3 cakes and cook each in a bit of oil over medium-high.

Roasted Summer Squash and Cherry Tomatoes

On my way back from buying random bottles of beer with interesting labels, I stumbled upon a produce store I didn't know existed. Everything looked delicious, it wasn't too expensive, and their plums where ready to eat. I picked up some cherry tomatoes, avocado, and summer squash with the intention of making a sandwich out of it for dinner. Then I lost track of time playing Dungeons of Dredmor and just ended up eating a sausage. No loss, but it did mean I had more time to contemplate what I would do with the veggies for lunch the next day. Polenta seemed like a good call - roast the roastables, eat it with polenta and beans.

Turns out, it was a pretty good meal. I used paprika and cumin, with a hint of cinnamon, on the squash and just salt and dash of cheese on the tomatoes. The polenta really needed some more flavor - more cheese, onion, garlic, something. I used 2 cups of water, 1/2 cup of dry polenta, and maybe 1/8 a cup of cheese. Double that amount of cheese, at least. I would also recommend slicing the tomatoes in half before baking, as 425 degrees for 15 minutes was not enough to char them. Maybe I was just impatient and hungry, but recipes I looked up said it would only take 10 minutes at that heat. Also be very careful biting into them; the embarrassing outcome of squirting tomato juice? Much more painful when they are fresh from the oven. Seriously, it hurt.

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Roasted Squash and Cherry Tomatoes

Summer squash for N people

Cherry tomatoes for N people

Olive oil

Sea salt

Cumin

Paprika

Cinnamon

Preheat oven to 350 and prepare a baking sheet lined with foil. Slice the squash into circles. In a small bowl, combine olive oil and sea salt. Put in a slice of squash, rub both sides, then rub it against a fresh piece of squash to evenly distribute the oil and cut down on how thickly coated the squash will be. Place on foil; repeat for all slices (rubbing half in the oil and rubbing the other half against an oiled slice). Afterwards, put an equal amount cumin and paprika in a bowl and sprinkle it (or rub it) over the tops of the slices.

Put in the oven for 15 minutes, then remove it, flip over the slices, and season the other side. Add a little cinnamon if you wish, then put it back in the oven. While the squash is baking, in the olive oil and salt bowl, toss the tomatoes. After the squash has been in the oven for 25 minutes, up the temperature to 425 and put the tomatoes in the oven. Cook for at least 10 minutes longer; the squash should brown and hopefully the tomatoes will as well. Sprinkle some grated cheese (like Parmigiano-Reggiano) over the tomatoes and it will melt in.

Lazy Spanish Rice

Spanish rice is one of those dishes I grew up with that I don't like cooking due to time involvement, but would love to eat every day. And the few times I've tried it recently have ended in scorched rice, or worse. The proper way, or at least the way I learned, is to replace 1/2 cup of water with 1 cup of tomato paste when cooking rice, and to cook it very slowly. Think an hour or more. Plus seasonings, etc, but the important part is cooking it covered for an hour. Stirring - that is the hard part for me to remember.

I was feeling a little lazy about my dinner plans; I had wanted to do an oven-bake involving butter beans, tomato paste, and cauliflower, but work interfered and I had about 30 minutes to cook dinner before I began gnawing off my arm. So, lazy dinner. I ended up creating a very hearty thing - it was somewhere in the spanish rice/jambalaya family, but could have easily moved in the direction of a soup. And it was pretty damn tasty.

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Lazy Spanish Rice

Feeds 2 (great for leftovers)

~40 minutes

2/3 cup uncooked rice

1 can butter beans

1 red onion, chopped

Enough water for the rice + 2/3 cup additional

8 oz can of tomato paste (not sauce, paste)

2 tsp white wine vinegar

1 tsp + splash olive oil

Dash of cumin

Dash of dill weed

Dash of chili flakes (optional)

Start cooking the rice, adding 1 tsp of olive oil and 1 tsp of white wine vinegar to the water. Assuming your rice takes 30 minutes to cook, 15 minutes after starting it place the red onion in a large frying pan with a splash of olive oil and cook for 5 minutes. At this point, I added the 2/3 cup water and steamed cauliflower in the pot (which I removed before adding the rest). If you don't want to steam a veggie, you can add the water and let simmer over low.

Once the rice is about to finish, add the tomato paste, spices, and second tsp of vinegar to the onion and water mixture, stirring to mix it all together. Add the rice and beans and cook on medium-low until you either think it is done, or get too hungry and just call it done. This varies, but should take about 5-10 minutes.

Tofu Bake Bruschetta and Artichoke

I declared this a night for trying something new - namely, baking tofu. But that sounded pretty disgusting by itself as I didn't want to marinate it. I had the grandiose idea of baking tofu into something you could put on a pizza, but I quickly pared this down to simply making bruschetta.

With baked tofu.

Yes, it turned out fine. No, I don't have much of a recipe, simply an ingredient list and how I prepped everything. No, you probably don't want to cook this (but I might be wrong).

The baked tofu bruchetta

Tofu Bruschetta:

• Small block of tofu
• Bread
• Tomato (I used grape, leftover from a past dish)
• Poblano pepper
• Grated cheese that melts (I forgot that important qualifier)
• Spices

I thinly sliced the tofu into strips that were about the same size as my bread, seasoned them with some random spices, and threw them in the oven with a little olive oil at 400 for 20 minutes. I let them cool a bit, assembled the bruschetta (the order is, bottom-to-top: some cheese, dry things, things with juices, some cheese), and cooked until they looked done. Again, you can probably guess the recipe but it wasn't exactly a normal dish and came out quite dry, so you may want to hold off on making these.

Boiled-then-baked artichoke

Artichoke using leftover ingredients:

• 1 pile of leftover poblano/tomato slices from above recipe
• 1 medium artichoke

In a big pan, bring water to boil. Slice off the very tip of the artichoke. Once at a boil, place the artichoke in and cover with a lid, letting cook in the boiling water for 15-20 minutes. Remove from heat and strip off the outer leaves. Every few layers, try eating one of them - stop when the flesh doesn't really come off the leaf. Take all the removed leaves, lay them out on a baking sheet, and cover with the leftovers pile from previous recipe. Bake for 15 minutes in the 400 degree oven from previous recipe.

Breaks Over, Soup's On!

Thanksgiving break is over and I'm back to my own kitchen. I did bake the bread for my Thanksgiving dinner, but it was nothing new - I made a full batch of rosemary sea-salt rolls and everyone enjoyed them. No photos of that, sorry.

Looking for cooking inspiration, I noticed it has been cold for a while now and the rain is ever-looming (and sometimes even falling, although thankfully not on my bicycle commute). My usual reaction to this is to drink hot chocolate and Irish Cream. That, however, fails as a nutritional dinner. I was going to make the next best thing, but Kahlua doesn't really add any nutritional value over Irish Cream, so I went further down the list until I hit the "soup" section. A while back, I had homemade bread and soup from a can; what would be better to try than homemade soup and bread from a bakery?

(The pictured carrots did not cook for long enough to brown because I forgot to preheat the oven)

Weirdly Seasoned Tomato Soup and Roasted Carrot (serves 4?)

For the soup:

• 1 shallot, chopped
• 1 carrot, sliced
• 2 boiling onions, quartered
• 1 stalk lemon grass, chopped into a few pieces
• 1 bunch savory
• 3 cups water
• 1.5 to 2 cups diced tomatoes (a decent sized can, roughly)
• 1.5 to 2 cups navy beans (a decent sized can, roughly)
• olive oil
• salt

For the carrots:

• enough carrots for as many people as will be dining (1.5 or 2 carrots each), quartered
• olive oil
• salt

In a soup-sized pot, put in a bit of olive oil and sautee the shallot for a minute or two. Take the dice carrot and the onions and add, sauteeing for another two minutes. Add in the water, lemon grass, and savory, and simmer, salting to taste. Let the stock simmer for 15 minutes.

On a cookie sheet, spread some olive oil and rub the carrots in it. Sprinkle salt on top of the carrots, and put into a 425 degree oven. Keep track of when you put it in - they should get about 45 minutes, which will be timed to when the soup is done.

Let the stock simmer for another 15 minutes, then add in the tomatoes. Raise the heat a little, but still don't let it boil, and cook for another 20 minutes. Add in the beans, and cook for 10 more minutes.

Both the carrots and the soup should be done now (although do keep an eye on the carrots and make sure they aren't in the oven too long).

When serving the soup, you can add some cheese on top. Also remember to not eat the lemongrass or the savory stalk - although you can, they are both very strong and can be removed from the soup.