Day 15

If I didn’t think it was possible to focus more on food than I already do, living in quarantine-lite has taught me differently. Starting with panic buying, which hit my part of Northern Virginia just as we started this episode, I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and watching as other people have too:

• Wondering how people are going to use up all those canned goods they bought (I suspect they are too, judging by articles I’ve been seeing)
• Seeing lots of jokes about “the Covid 19” (this year’s variation on the Freshman 15)
• Getting really annoyed when I realized that my local grocery store had run out of flour, which normally I seem to be the only person buying
• Mentally mulling over the contents of my fridge regularly to make sure there’s enough for every meal (now that everyone's here for every. single. meal), and that everything’s getting used
• Meeting a higher-than-usual demand for goodies, from me as much as anyone else (more on that later)

I’ve written so much about my interest in creatively repurposing leftovers that they have their own tag here. And I wrote a very long time ago about the Soup Spec that I developed to accommodate pretty much any soup-making situation.

Back of the Fridge Soup

This is Miss B’s accurate, if unflattering, name for the meal that is a regular leftover-transformation mechanism in our house. I have learned that if you puree it, mix in a good-sized dollop of sour cream at the end, and serve it with cheese and homemade bread alongside, it is likely to get consumed with gusto. This week’s iteration went as follows:

1. Heat up a good-sized lump (maybe a heaping teaspoon?) of bacon fat and butter (or whatever other fat you’ve got on hand).
2. Throw in a couple of anchovies, if you’ve got them and you eat them. (This is all to add some umami to a mostly veggie soup.)
3. Add a soffrito of carrot, celery, and red onion (probably half a carrot, half an onion and 2 small celery sticks, chopped impatiently in my mini processor, not lovingly by hand) and cook gently for 5-7 minutes.
4. Dump in the leftovers of a large batch (2+ cups) of broccoli that you had steamed for Monday night’s dinner, then mixed with salt, garlic, and olive oil.
5. Add in a few odds and ends that need to be used up: the last of a batch of roasted asparagus, 4 oven fries also left over from Monday night’s dinner, the last tablespoons of a recent batch of rice, a couple of lettuce leaves that were too unstable for lettuce wraps, the hard end of a piece gruyere. (I have mentioned how much I hate to waste food, right?)
6. Ladle in chicken stock made from a recent roast chicken carcass (this makes five meals from one chicken!) until all of the solids are just submerged.
7. Bring everything just to a boil, and let simmer for 15-20 minutes (everything in here is already cooked, so you’re just making sure it’s all hot enough).
8. Puree with your stick blender (or other mechanism of choice), then check to see if the soup is the right consistency for you. If too thick, you can thin with a little more chicken stock (or milk or water). If too thin, you can simmer it a little longer, or up the amount of sour cream that you’re about to add.
9. Stir a hearty dollop (bigger than a golf ball, smaller than a volleyball) of sour cream until fully dissolved.
10. Taste and adjust seasonings - this usually means add a bit more salt. (I also have been known to add things like sriracha, tomato paste, or pesto at this point, both for taste and to adjust the color of the soup if I felt it was looking a little on the sludgy side. This soup, as the photo up top may not show, was just green enough on its own to achieve aesthetic presentability.)

Serve with accompaniments - in my house, this is always homemade rolls and wedges of cheese, as well as homemade croutons if I've got the wherewithal. 

This produced about 6 servings of soup - so, one dinner and a couple of random lunches for this household of 3. (Our fourth member isn't much of a soup eater.)

Recipe tweaking

Nothing really major has happened this month - which in itself is kind of major, because it seems like such a long time since that has been the case. We had our first dinner guests in the new house last weekend, which was the first real cooking I'd done in the new kitchen - marinated goat cheese and pita chips to start, followed by braised short ribs of beef, gratin dauphinois (with a layer of blue cheese and caramelized onion in the middle), and Swiss chard for the main course (plus bread), and finishing up with brownies topped with vanilla ice cream and salted caramel sauce.

This generated quite a lot of leftovers; I used the leftover short ribs as the basis for a thick bolognese-type tomato sauce, and we had that on Tuesday night with gnocchi and shredded kale. On Thursday, I tossed the leftover gratin and chard into the slow cooker along with some leftover short-rib sauce and stock, and blended them into a thick soup for dinner. I wanted a little something to top it, so I rooted around in the fridge, pulled out some odds and ends, and made pangrattato with a twist:

Pangrattato, in case you don't already know, means "grated bread", and it's an Italian invention - basically fried bread crumbs, most often used to top pasta. For this version, I threw a leftover (cooked) Italian sausage into the food processor along with the bread; then toward the end of cooking in the frying pan, I threw over a handful of grated pecorino romano cheese. Both tweaks highly recommended.

On the sweet side of things, I've finally found most of my baking equipment, not least of which is the abovementioned food processor. Miss B has fallen in love with jam drops this year, and asked if we could make a batch not long after we moved in. I had to improvise to put a batch of dough together, including using a pastry cutter to blend the butter and sugar. This made for a very warm batch of dough which, when shaped, filled, and put into the oven to bake, spread like crazy. The cookies were delicious, but not neat or easy to eat out of hand.

She asked for another batch to take to a school party last week, and this time I thought I would do things a bit differently: I made the dough in the food processor, then rolled into a cylinder and chilled in the fridge overnight. The morning of the party, I scooped mounds of dough off the cylinder with my cookie scoop and arranged them on a baking tray. I made a thumbprint in each mound and filled with jam; then I chilled them again for 30 minutes or so. Then I baked them and voila!

Not quite magazine-ready, but definitely an improvement over the first batch. I'll be carrying on with the chilling from now on. I used this recipe, which as you'll note doesn't suggest any of that - odd when you consider how perfect the ones in their picture look!

That's all the exciting news from here - more to follow shortly, I hope!

Teapot people

In the 11 days since DP’s been home, we’ve had two sets of houseguests (the first was here for five days, and the second for three), plus Sunday lunch guests in the gap in between. All invited by my husband (who continues to claim that he’s shy and introverted), and all primarily, or originally, professional connections of his. And all, therefore, people to whom I privately refer as ‘teapot people’.

I don’t know if this is a distinction only I make. I’m not a serious tea drinker, but when I do make myself a cup of tea, I make it with a teabag straight in the mug. I do the same for any friends who happen to be hanging around who are in the mood for a cuppa. Breaking out the teapot is serious business, reserved for more formal circumstances: usually people that I don’t yet know very well or, if I do, with whom I still have the kind of relationship where I stand on ceremony, even if we’ve spent a lot of time together. Respected elders, that kind of thing. People in front of whom I sit up straight at the table, and try not to swear.

But I will still feed them Italian peasant food for dinner. Sometimes you just have to let the real you shine through.

Ratatouille minestrone

I think this is really more what my ancestors would call giambotta, but more people are familiar with minestrone, so let’s go with that. I was inspired to make this because it solved two conundrums: 1. what to do with a vat of leftover ratatouille from Sunday lunch; and 2. what to feed houseguests for a late, light dinner that could mostly be prepped ahead of time?

Since this is a creative re-purposing of leftovers, I’m going to give you the sequence of events, rather than a recipe per se.

On Sunday, I chopped:

1 large red bell pepper/capsicum

1 large red onion

5 medium zucchini/courgettes

1 medium eggplant

1 dozen large cherry tomatoes

I tossed the chunks with olive oil, stuck them in the oven, and roasted them for about 45 minutes until they looked ready to eat. When they came out, I tossed them with lemon juice, salt, and black pepper and served them.

This turned out to be way more than enough vegetables for four adults and one child (along with peposo alla notturno, garlic mashed potatoes, and rolls), and at least 50% of it went into the fridge as leftovers. So, on Tuesday, I did the following:

-       chopped up and briefly sautéed 4 slices of Italian salami, 1 carrot, 1 celery stalk, and 2 cloves of garlic in olive oil with 2 anchovies

-       dumped this mixture into my slow cooker

-       deglazed the frying pan with about half a glass of red wine and added that to the slow cooker as well

-       added the leftover ratatouille

-       poured in about half of a bottle of tomato passata and the same amount of water

-       drained, rinsed, and added a can of chick peas

I stirred this all together, clapped the lid on the slow cooker, and left it to stew for about 3 hours on high while we were all out attending to various commitments. Then, just before serving, I seasoned with salt and a generous sprinkle of cayenne pepper, as well as a drizzle of balsamic vinegar.

I served it topped with grated pecorino romano cheese and accompanied by pesto cheese crostini – thin slices of bread brushed with oil, topped with pesto and grated parmigiano reggiano cheese, and grilled briefly in the oven.

I’m still eating the leftovers. They get better every day.

Wednesday digest

Sydney, May 2013 - nearly-winter here not quite the same as nearly-winter in Canberra!

 

Here I am again, getting caught up with the latest happenings around casa RL.

Work/school Pleased to report that DP worked from home one day last week! I can’t remember the last time that happened. He did school drop-off and pick-up, and we went out to lunch alone together for possibly the first time since before we left Missouri last May. Miss B is immersed in Term 2, and the other day ran in the school-wide cross-country event. Each senior student (years 3-6) in her school is assigned to one of four houses, which compete against each other in various events, so on cross-country day they divvied up the entire school into houses, who sat on the junior oval, cheering on their housemates and generally making a ruckus when it wasn’t their turn to run an event. With the rest of the kids born in 2004, Miss B ran two circuits of the grounds, for a distance totaling 2 km. Given that a) Miss B is the smallest kid in Year 3 and b) kids who were born in 2005 who tower over her only had to run one circuit, I was thoroughly impressed with her perseverance and spirit in finishing the course. As for me, I am already up to my ears in preparations for my .org’s next major meeting, which happens in mid-September. Even though I know rationally that this is four months away, it feels as though it’s just around the corner because there’s so much stuff we’ve got to put in place now, before people start booking their travel arrangements.

Recreation This kind of overlaps with work, but I was thrilled to discover another member of my .org who is based in Canberra. (This brings the total, as far as I know, to three of us.) She brought her two little ones over for tea (adults), slab scones (everyone), and a play (children) the other day. Between bouts of wrangling three children among two adults, we managed to have some grownup conversation about work stuff that we’re both interested in and might collaborate on – very nerdy and enjoyable. Makes me realize how much I miss having people around who understand what the heck I’m talking about most of the time. In other news, we took the new car out for its first road trip and went to Sydney for the weekend. DP not only voluntarily went shopping on George Street (Sydney’s main shopping district) on Saturday afternoon, it was his idea. (This is ‘what have you done with my real husband?’ territory.) He took Miss B to a hobby shop so that could look at trains and planes and so on, and I got to browse in Dymock’s by myself. For a whole hour. It was blissful.

Food Nothing revolutionary to report on the cooking front; I’ve been trying out some other people’s recipes, and revisiting some of my own favorites:

• gnocchi with bacon, spinach, and cream (roughly based on this recipe)
• roasted pork belly (I sat this on top of a bed of chopped carrot, celery, fennel, and red onion, and roasted some potatoes for Italian potatoes with oil alongside)
• a variation on the chicken soup with orzo recipe from the Dinner a Love Story cookbook (you can see a picture of it here)
• and more soup – a fridge-clearing vegetable soup using my soup spec
• and a batch of sweet and spicy nuts, just to have something around to nibble on

Weather All the soup is because it’s suddenly cold for real in Canberra – as in, time-to-break-out-the-winter-coats cold. And getting dark at 5pm. Still weird to have that happening in May.

How about you?

Comfort food

This past week has not been one I will look back on fondly - as a native Bostonian, as an American, or, frankly, as a human being. By the time Friday night dinnertime rolled around, the hunt for the second Boston Marathon bombing suspect was entering its seventh hour. Updates were coming in by the minute (and sometimes by the second) in real time on Twitter, and I was following along from the other side of the world. The temperature in Canberra was dropping steadily. I was ready for something hot and comforting for dinner, grateful that all my loved ones in Boston were safe and well, and thinking of all those – in Boston and beyond – who are not so fortunate.

One Fund Boston

American Red Cross of Central Texas

Tomato-rice soup

Growing up, we always called this “rice and potatoes”, and we ate it like clockwork every other Friday night (alternating with pasta e fagioli) during the colder months, accompanied by crackers and cheese and grilled cheese toast. I’ve never found anything exactly like it, so I don’t know if my grandmother invented it or if it’s just never made its way into a cookbook. It’s full of starch, topped with cheese, and very comforting. I’ve tinkered with the recipe a little bit (mainly the soffrito at the beginning) to give it a little more flavor complexity, without diverging from its cucina povera origins.

2 Tbsp/30 ml olive oil

half a medium red onion

half a medium carrot

half a medium celery stick

1 clove garlic

2 slices spicy salami

1 bottle (700g) tomato passata or equivalent fresh or canned tomatoes

1 medium-sized white potato

1 cup long-grain white rice

water

salt

grated pecorino romano cheese, for serving

Heat olive oil over low heat in a medium soup pot. Chop the onion, carrot, celery, garlic, and salami finely into a soffrito (I use my mini chopper for this), and add to the pan. Cook for 3-5 minutes until the vegetables begin to soften.

Pour passata into pot; fill container ¾ full with water. Swirl around to get all traces of tomato, then add to pot. Stir thoroughly and leave to heat to a simmer.

While soup is heating, wash and peel potato, then cut into dice. (Size is up to you; the smaller they are, the faster they cook.) Add potato dice to soup, stir again, and leave to cook for 20-30 minutes, until beginning to be tender.

When potatoes are on their way to being cooked but not quite there, stir in rice and leave to cook again, 10-15 minutes, until rice is cooked but still somewhat firm.

When rice is cooked, stir soup and check consistency; thin with water if necessary. Add salt to taste and serve hot, topped with grated cheese.

Serves 6 as a main course accompanied by bread/crackers and cheese, with probably some left over.

Note: the rice continues to absorb the liquid, so as this cools it looks less and less like soup and more like risotto. If you have enough to reheat later, add some water to the mixture to get it back to souplike consistency.

Celery root

Celery root could be the poster child for the maxim, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” It’s hard to find anything new to say about its appearance: it’s hairy, it’s brown, it looks unappetizing, and it’s easy to pass over in the produce aisle. I always have. But at this time of year in Missouri, pickings are slim if you’re trying to eat seasonally. Faced with a choice between a hairy, brown but reasonably priced lump or some jet-set produce worth a considerable chunk of my weekly grocery budget, I decided to be adventurous. I bought a celery root, took it home, let it languish in the crisper drawer for two weeks, and then went looking for a way to cook it.

And finished off my food adventure, as usual, by kicking myself over how much of my life I’ve wasted not eating this.

Celery root soup
Loosely based upon a recipe from bluestem: the cookbook

Following my usual soup spec, I peeled and chopped up the celery root (and the attached celery stalks and leaves), plus some red onion. I threw these into the pan to sauté briefly, then added in a couple of cloves of roasted garlic that I had in the fridge. After a few minutes, I poured in about half a cup of prosecco (the last of a bottle sitting on the counter), then put in just enough vegetable stock to cover the chopped vegetables. I brought this to a simmer and let it do its thing for about 15-20 minutes, then went at it with my trusty stick blender. After puréeing it, I may have added a bit more stock to thin it a bit, and then stirred in a healthy dollop of crème fraiche. I finished it off with some salt and freshly ground pepper. In keeping with its origins, it was not the most attractive color—kind of beige—but full of flavor.

Orange soup

In one of countless conversations about food during our Dallas visit, C. described a soup that her French mother used to make, known in her family only as “orange soup” and consisting of three ingredients: leeks, potatoes, and lots of carrots. I don’t remember what we were talking about that raised this memory, but that brief description lodged in my brain and was waiting for me when I cast around yesterday for something simple and hearty to make for dinner.

Orange soup
I think of this as basically a potato-leek soup with carrots added in, which to my mind makes it a more nutritious option—potato-leek soup, as delicious as it is, always seems too, I dunno, beige to be a convincing source of vegetables. This, on the other hand, is bursting with beta carotene and clearly good for you. I don’t know how much resemblance it bears to C.’s mother’s standby, but it was very well received here.

2 Tbsp olive oil
4 medium leeks
8 carrots
4 medium potatoes
4-6 cups water or stock
salt & pepper

Pour the olive oil into a large soup pot and warm over medium-low heat. Scrub, roughly chop, and add the vegetables in the order specified. Sauté briefly in the olive oil, then add water or stock to cover. Bring just to a boil and then simmer until all the vegetables are soft, 45-60 minutes.

Remove pot from heat and purée soup using an immersion blender; return to heat and season to taste with salt & pepper. Serve with good bread and lots of cheese for a lunch or light dinner.

Makes about 2 quarts of soup.

Tomato soup

I don’t really have anything clever to say about this soup, but that’s kind of appropriate. Because this soup is a great recipe to have on hand when you’re out of clever ideas, or energy, or patience, or time, or fresh vegetables.

All of these are excellent reasons why this is a staple in my Friday-night dinner rotation.

Soup specs

Once upon a time, I used to be flummoxed by food writers who said things like, “No one really needs a recipe for soup, but….” Huh? I thought. I need a recipe for soup. What, am I supposed to just throw a bunch of stuff into a pan and hope it turns into soup?

Inventing dinner

I cannot think of a way to write this post without trotting out the following food writing clichés:

1. The weather is getting cooler, which makes us think about heartier, more filling cold-weather food.
2. Soup is a great way to use up leftovers.

Just so we all know where we stand.

Musical fruit

I’ve already written about a couple of my food prejudices, deeply entrenched from childhood. The red pepper one disappeared of its own accord, and I’m still working on the whitefish one.

Here’s another one I’m still working on: beans. As in, legumes/pulses. (Not green beans. I love those.)

I’m always kind of fascinated that other people go out of their way to eat beans: that they actually like them. In England, baked beans on toast was everyone’s favorite storecupboard meal, from tiny children on up; and since I’ve moved here, every cookout I’ve attended has included a huge, enthusiastically consumed dish of baked beans on the buffet table. I know people who eat beans and rice as part of their regular dinner repertoire, and they’re not even vegetarians. And don’t even get me started on chili.

Plan B

(Or really, at this point, Plan D, but who’s counting?)

Things have started to look up on the housing front. We are still no closer to knowing when—or if—we’ll be able to buy this house, but the owners, exasperated on our behalf at how long all the bureaucracy is taking (and perhaps on their own, since the house is sitting empty and costing them money), have offered to rent it to us as an interim measure, and then cancel the lease if and when there is a mortgage to replace it. So, barring any further unforeseen hitches, we should be in the house in the next 10 days.

Week two

I had hoped that Week Two would be a bit more relaxing than Week One, but this did not turn out to be the case. In fact, if I factor in the three early-morning teleconferences for work and the frantic rush to assemble paperwork from three continents for 1) attempting to qualify for a mortgage and 2) enrolling Miss B in preschool, it might actually have been worse.

There was one improvement, and that was that we ate dinner at home almost every night. Even in the midst of total uproar, disruption, chaos, or other kerfuffle, knowing that I have food in the fridge and a plan for dinner soothes me. I may not be able to get my hands on the paperwork for the student loans DP took out 11 years ago, but I can put something filling on the table. And the knowledge that Miss B is going to get something other than pizza or mac'n'cheese from a box (at $6 a pop, no less) on her plate, plus some actual vegetables, is also comforting.

As long as whatever I'm making doesn't require too much equipment, that is. Because this temporary kitchen's is, to put it kindly, basic. Three saucepans, one flimsy frying pan, and a couple of plastic bowls and utensils. That's it. No machines, of course, other than a coffee maker. So no way to puree soup, which is something I do to nearly every soup I make regularly. Time for a little creative adaptation.

Necessarily chunky tomato soup
Perfect for making any kitchen feel cozy on a frosty winter night--and the only equipment you need is a knife and a good-sized pot.

2 Tbsp olive oil
2 medium carrots
2 sticks celery
1 medium onion
1 (28 oz) or 2 (400 g) can(s) tomatoes*
1 qt/900+ ml stock of your choice**
4 oz/125 g spaghetti, broken into small pieces
salt & pepper

Heat the olive oil gently on medium heat while cutting the vegetables into small dice; add these to the pot in the order listed and saute for a few minutes, until they are starting to soften and color.

Pour in tomatoes and stir to distribute vegetables evenly. Pour stock into empty tomato can(s) and swish around to get all tomato residue out, then pour into soup pot. Stir to combine; cover partway, bring to a boil and simmer. Cook for about 15 minutes, then add spaghetti. Cook for another 10-15 minutes, or until spaghetti is al dente. Season to taste with salt and pepper, and add a bit more liquid if the soup is too thick for you.

Top with grated cheese and serve immediately, with warm bread and a cheese plate alongside.

Serves 4, with leftovers.

* You can use any kind of tomatoes you prefer--whole, chopped, or pureed. I went for pureed because I wanted a fairly smooth consistency.
** You may not need this amount of stock, depending upon how thick you want your soup to be. I usually reserve some of it, in case I want to thin the soup at the end.

EDF practice

There's another Eating Down the Fridge Challenge running this week. I really would have liked to participate again; I had a lot of fun with the one I did in March, and surprised myself with some of the things I came up with. But I'm in the opposite mode this week: I'm going to Singapore for a work conference on Saturday, so I'm focusing on Stocking Up the Fridge with stuff for DP and Miss B to eat next week while the chief cook is out of the kitchen. I did an impromptu mini-EDF exercise on Sunday though, after our plans for the day changed for the third time and I found myself with a) an afternoon at home alone to get through a mountain of chores and work, and b) nothing planned for dinner, since I had been expecting that we'd be out.

I didn't want to waste any of my precious afternoon going to the supermarket, so I resolved to work with what I had in the house. Running true to form, I started off thinking that the cupboard was bare, but when I made a list of "proteins," "starches," and "vegetables," I found that I had six or seven items on hand. In each category. After fantasizing about several ridiculously elaborate, seasonally inappropriate, or ultimately unappetizing possibilities, I settled on a meal that was nutritionally complete*, appealing on yet another chilly, rainy day (unlike the all-salad meal I flirted with briefly), likely to be consumed by everyone present (ditto), and doable within the hour of prep time I had allotted.

Creamy broccoli soup
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 medium carrot
1 medium red onion
2 heads broccoli
4-6 cups water
1-2 tsp salt
¼-½ tsp cayenne pepper**
½-1 cup Greek yogurt***

Heat oil in a large stockpot. Chop all vegetables and add to the pot as you chop them in the order listed. Saute briefly. Add just enough water to cover the vegetables. Bring to the boil and simmer for 30-40 minutes or until all vegetables are completely softened.

Remove pan from heat and puree soup using a stick blender**** (or in batches using a regular blender*****). When soup is pureed to your satisfaction, return to low heat and season to desired taste and consistency with salt, cayenne pepper, and yogurt.

Probably enough to serve 4-6 people as a main course.

* We had this with a cheese plate and homemade bread. I also topped the soup with croutons and pieces of fried prosciutto.
** This is really according to taste. I didn't want it spicy, but with just enough cayenne to give it some depth of flavor.
*** You could probably substitute any other kind of dairy, but you'll probably need more of anything else as Greek yogurt is so thick.
**** At this stage, you could remove some of the cooking liquid, and then add it back in if the puree is too thick. (I always forget to do this, and then scramble to thicken up the soup.)
***** Be careful not to burn yourself doing this, as I always do—yet another reason I love my stick blender.