January snapshots

I feel a certain loyalty to January because it’s my birth month, but even I have to admit that it’s kind of a drag. It feels even more so than usual this year, probably because today, as my Timehop reminded me, is 2 years since the WHO declared coronavirus a “global health emergency”. 

This is at the top of a long list of reasons to be gloomy; but I know all too well that there’s little benefit to going down that road. So instead I’m digging deep and looking for reasons to be cheerful, or at least grateful, during this season of hibernation. Here are a couple of mine this weekend:

Minneolas - one of the highlights of my winter rotation; I keep an eye out for these and eat one a day as long as they’re in season. Seeing them in the supermarket before the end of January is a bonus.

Opportunistic cooking - I don’t have the discipline or the energy to do any significant prep cooking on the weekend, but I did take advantage of a free hour and some surplus vegetables in the fridge to do some chopping and roasting for use later in the week. And since the oven was already on, I mixed up a snacking cake while I was at it and chucked that in there too. 

Lights - yes, I know it’s almost February, but every weekend since New Year’s I think about taking these down and then I don’t. They turn on automatically at dusk every night and they still give me a little jolt of happiness every time.

Side note: that's all that's left from the small amount of snow we got from the mega-storm that hit the US east coast this weekend. Thinking of all my friends and family digging out up north, and hoping that wherever you are, you've got light, warmth, and good food.

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.)

Australia Day

We’ve just had a holiday weekend in Australia, in celebration of Australia Day. Australia Day, for anyone who doesn’t already know, is kind of a cross between the 4^th of July and Labor Day (US version). The 4^th of July part is that Australia Day commemorates the arrival of the First Fleet on January 26, 1788 – in other words, the arrival of the first European immigrants, convicts and their guards from the British Isles. The Labor Day part is that Australia Day marks the official end of summer holidays in Australia and a return to business as usual; everyone goes back to school over the next week, and people who have been lazing at the coast since mid-December will return to regular office hours and business attire.

(Digression: I don’t really understand why January 26 was chosen as Australia Day, since it has little to do with the establishment of Australia as a political entity – certainly less, for example, than Federation Day (January 1, 1901) when Australia was officially federated as a country. It would be like the US choosing whatever day the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, or some similar event, rather than the day that we declared our intention to establish ourselves as a sovereign nation. And that’s before we even get into the feelings of Indigenous Australians about January 26, which cannot be characterized as positive in any way. So it seems like a lose-lose proposition, and I suspect its timing as the culmination of the summer holidays may weigh more heavily in its selection than its political or cultural significance. But what do I know? I’m just a Yank. 

End digression.)

In the tradition of three-day weekends everywhere I’ve lived, Australia Day provides an excuse for lots of social activity, and ours certainly did its job. We started on Friday night with a dinner party, where we met lots of new people. Miss B came along (babysitters are thin on the ground on holiday weekends) and stayed up scandalously late with a fellow grade schooler whose babysitter was also AWOL. Saturday DP disappeared for most of the day to drop in on some kind of wargaming convention with the male half of a group of family friends; Miss B and I met up with the female half for an extended kaffeeklatsch at Canberra’s most famous (and possibly only) chocolate shop. Sunday we hosted lunch for a group of DP’s colleagues, including a delightful and adorable seven-month-old; I made a variation of my now-standard summer Sunday lunch, throwing in a kale salad to provide sufficient nourishment for a vegetarian guest (and bolstering the tomato-and-avocado salad with some marinated feta).

Yesterday, to round things off, we went to a cookout hosted by friends with a pool who live on the other side of the lake. I packed swim stuff and a bottle of Prosecco, baked a batch of blondies (excuse me, fudgey choc chip slice), and we set off. I think we had all been subconsciously expecting that we would spend the afternoon hanging out with the hosting friends, and maybe one or two other people, and an unspoken ripple of dismay wafted through the car when we turned the corner onto their street and saw at least a dozen cars clustered outside their house, all belonging to people we were unlikely to know.

This is what happens when a family of introverts hits its collective wall of social engagement at the same time. But since we are all (reasonably) well behaved, we braced ourselves, went inside, and joined in. Miss B went swimming with a crowd of kids, we ate some tasty food, DP and I each had a couple of conversations with friends of our hosts (as well as some dedicated time with the hosts themselves, happily). After about 3 hours, we said our goodbyes and headed home. Once there, we scattered ourselves to the far corners of the house, and everyone fell asleep for an hour or so.

After all that, no one felt like an elaborate dinner last night, so I took the opportunity to combine creative re-purposing of leftovers with a DIY January project. We had roast beef sandwiches with aioli and mustard on toasted (homemade) white bread; leftover kale salad; and homemade potato chips. (Note: Miss B was having none of any of this, and ate leftover pizza and chopped cucumbers instead.)

DIY salt and pepper potato chips

I used the cold oil method for these, and they are as kick-ass as the fries I made a couple of weeks ago. They are just enough work to make you appreciate how much better homemade potato chips are than storebought ones, without being a total PITA.

2 small potatoes per person (probably one regular-sized per person would be enough, but those in my current bag are not much bigger than golf balls)

canola or other neutrally flavored oil for frying

salt and pepper

Scrub the potatoes, remove any sprouts, eyes, or other unsightly bits, and cut into very thin slices using a mandolin. (As usual, I did not peel my potatoes, but whether or not you do is up to you. Also, of course you can use a knife, but the mandolin makes the slices all the same thickness, so they cook at the same rate – a desirable feature when frying.)

Line a baking sheet with brown paper and set aside.

Place potatoes in cooking vessel of choice (see here for information about choosing an appropriate vessel for this recipe) and cover with oil.

Put the pan over low-medium heat and cover pan with a splatter screen if you have one (or about halfway with the pot lid if you don’t). Keep an eye on the pan as the oil heats, stirring the chips occasionally to make sure they’re not sticking.

When the oil starts to boil, stir the chips again and check the heat setting to make sure the boil is maintained consistently without a) dying off or b) overflowing and starting a fire. Continue stirring chips every few minutes as they cook; once they start boiling, they should take 10-15 minutes to fry. Once they are consistently a light-golden brown, they are done.

Turn off the heat. Once the oil settles down, use a slotted spoon or similar to scoop cooked chips out of the oil and onto the paper-lined baking tray.

Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Consume immediately.

Beach house

Apologies for my unexplained absence - we disappeared to Jervis Bay for our annual beach holiday, and this year I did not take my computer, making for my first unplugged vacation in a frighteningly long time. I had hoped to put a post up before we left, but between frantically trying to finish up work projects and making sure that I packed enough (but not too much) in the way of kid, reading, and food supplies, I ran out of time.

I also hadn't factored my upcoming vacation into my plans for DIY January, so that sort of went out the window for a week or so. When you're trying to figure out how to work the tiny oven in a strange (and slightly mildewy) kitchen, you can't also start trying to make your own yogurt and expect to have an actual relaxing vacation. Or at least I can't, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. So I shamelessly ate supermarket potato chips and hummus and pickles. (I also brought along supplies to make homemade bread, waffles, popcorn, and salad dressing, so there was still a fair amount of DIY going on.)

And in the spirit of DIY January, I concocted a salad to bring to a friend's bbq on our last night of holiday - using up stuff we still had in the fridge and working around what we had run out of.

Beach house salad
I concocted this salad based around knowing that I had a fair amount of vegetables left in the fridge, but had run out of olive oil to make dressing. The rendered fat from the bacon cooked in the first step stands in for the olive oil.

1. Chop 2 pieces bacon into small pieces and put in a skillet over low-medium heat to cook.

2. Chop half a red onion into small pieces and add to skillet with bacon.

3. Once bacon and onions are more or less cooked, add 2-3 cups chopped greens (I used kale and a mystery green I bought at the greengrocer last week, and promptly forgot the name of. It was kind of spinach-esque) to the skillet to wilt. (At this stage, I also added about a quarter cup of white wine to deglaze the pan and keep the ingredients from sticking.)

4. Thinly slice 1 large carrot (I do this with a vegetable peeler) and add to skillet. (Keep the cores to nibble on while you finish the salad.) Toss with the other ingredients to wilt a bit, then remove the skillet from the heat.

5. Peel and chop a small cucumber, then chop a handful of grape tomatoes, and add to the skillet. Toss with the other ingredients until mixed thoroughly.

6. Season to taste with salt and pepper, and add a teaspoon or so of balsamic vinegar. (I also added a handful of shredded parmigiano reggiano.)

Serve warm or at room temperature. Serves 4+ as a side, or a large group (we had 10 in ours) as part of a bbq spread.

Instant salad

As a parent of a school-age child, I seem to spend a fair amount of time dodging activities that cut into the dinner hour. I consider family dinner more important than most other things, so I prioritize accordingly. Recently, I have been making one exception, though, for a kung-fu class. Miss B really likes it, it ticks a lot of boxes for her physical and skills development, and it's a 2-minute walk from our house. That last part mitigates the fact that it starts at 6:30 pm, since it means I can still cram in a family dinner beforehand. I've been using it as a challenge to myself to see if I can get dinner on the table with 30 minutes or less of prep beforehand; as a result, this is now my go-to kung-fu-night salad. It's delicious, it's nutritious, and it takes even less time to prep this than it does to walk to class. (Cutting an actual salad is enough to send me over the edge in a 30-minute prep window.) And every time I do this, I think fondly of my friend J., who first introduced me to this ridiculously simple concoction.


Retro cool avocado halves
Cut one avocado in half and remove the pit. Place each half on a small plate, and sprinkle with salt and freshly ground pepper. Fill the pit cavities with balsamic vinegar. Serve as a starter or side.
Serves 2.

(Miss B is not into the avocado, so I chop her up a carrot or cucumber instead.)

Pasta bake

When you’re halfway through a bout of solo parenting (as I currently am), nothing breaks up the monotony like a mum-and-kid playdate. Bonus points if it’s another solo-parenting mum who is also craving social interaction, a change of scene, and some quality adult conversation.

Yesterday Miss B and I met up with our pals LB and Mr W for an afternoon outing to see Despicable Me 2 (even more minions!). When we made the plan, I’d invited them back here afterwards for some playtime and dinner afterwards. Knowing I’d want to be able to concentrate on the conversation, I opted to get most of the prep out of the way before we left for the movies, and made a pasta bake.

Creamy pasta bake

For this concoction, I used a combination of ingredients that I frequently make as a pasta dish, with some adaptations to make it work in baked form (mainly a roux sauce rather than a pan sauce).

Pasta

1 lb/450 g short pasta of your choice (I used gemelli)

1 Tbsp/.5 oz/15g butter

Mix-ins

4 slices bacon, chopped,

1 shallot, peeled and chopped

¼ cup/2 oz/60 ml white wine

1 bunch spinach, washed and roughly chopped

Sauce

2 Tbsp/1 oz/30 g butter

4 Tbsp/1 oz/30 g flour

¼ cup/2 oz/60 ml white wine

1 cup/8 oz/240 ml stock or similar (I was out, so used the pasta cooking water)

1 cup/8oz/240 ml pouring cream

2 oz/60 g cheddar cheese

pinch cayenne pepper

salt

Topping

2-3 handfuls of shredded parmigiano reggiano cheese

2-3 Tbsp of grated pecorino romano cheese

Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil, then add pasta and cook until just edible and still very al dente (8-10 minutes). Drain, reserving 1-2 cups of the pasta water. Return to the pasta pot (minimizing washing up!) and mix in 1 Tbsp of butter to keep from sticking. Set aside.

While the pasta cooks, you can get on with the mix-ins and sauce.

Mix-ins In a large skillet, cook the bacon over medium heat until it begins to brown and crisp, 5-7 minutes. Once you start to see signs of browning, add the shallot and continue to sauté, stirring frequently. When the bacon is looking crisp and the shallots have softened, add the wine and stir briskly to scrape up all the good stuff that will be stuck to the bottom of the skillet. Add the spinach and leave to wilt for another 5-7 minutes, stirring regularly.

Sauce Melt butter in a medium saucepan over medium-low heat, then add flour and stir together with a whisk to make a roux.* When the roux has cooked sufficiently, add wine and continue stirring. Add remaining ingredients in the order listed, stirring frequently to bring everything together. Bring just to boiling point and let simmer for a bit to thicken the sauce up. Make sure the cheese melts and finish off by salting to taste.

Assembly Lightly grease the inside of a casserole dish (I used an oval 2.8-liter which held this amount of food perfectly). Empty skillet of mix-ins into the waiting pasta and mix together, then pour over half the sauce and mix again. Pour the whole mixture into the prepared casserole dish and spread out to even depth. Pour in the rest of the sauce.

This is the point where I covered the dish with foil and put it in the refrigerator for 3 hours. When we got back from the cinema, I cooked it as follows.

Preheat oven to 180C/350F. Remove casserole dish from fridge, but leave covered. When oven is preheated, put in casserole and leave to cook for 30-40 minutes, until beginning to brown and bubble on the edges. At this point, remove foil, add topping cheeses, and return to oven for 10-15 minutes.

Let stand for 10 minutes before serving if possible. Generously served 2 adults and 2 children, with probably another 4 servings left over.

* See here for an in-depth discussion of making roux-based sauces and gravies.

Beach food

How can it be January 31^st already? I’m so in the weeds. My vacation at the beach already seems like it was months ago, and yet I still haven’t managed to post about it.

When I go to the beach on Cape Cod with my sisters and the kids, there are anywhere from six to twenty of us sharing a house, depending on which combination of brothers-in-law, parents, and passing friends is in residence. Hardly a day passes that someone doesn’t have to make a run to the grocery store, usually involving at least 2 bags of food. Since there were only going to be three of us on our recent beach vacation, I decided to plan ahead and try and avoid grocery store trips if I could. The area where we are staying has one very small and expensive grocery store/café, and the closest supermarket is a 15-minute drive. I knew we’d be heading into town for dinner at least once, and I could tack a quick grocery run onto that if need be; but for the most part I attempted to go prepared.

I brought staples and condiments from home, and mixed up batches of dry ingredients for bread, pancakes, and cake at home, so I could minimize the amount of packages and equipment I was transporting. I did a pre-trip grocery shop for things I knew we would need. I made a basic meal plan. And on the way out of Canberra on Saturday morning, we stopped at the farmers’ market so I could stock up on fresh meat and produce, which we piled into a cool bag already filled with ice and stuff from the fridge.

And it worked! I only had to use the beach café for sliced bread and milk, pretty much. And we got some pretty yummy, seasonal dishes out of the farmers’ market haul, including the following (please excuse photo quality; phone camera alert!):

  

Corn salad: the last of my first corn purchase of the summer. We ate it on the cob the first night; on the second night, I cut the remaining corn off the cobs, warmed it in some olive oil, and mixed through some chopped tomatoes and basil. Summer in a bowl.

  

Fridge-Clearing Frittata: we had a beach picnic dinner on Friday night, and I took the opportunity to mix up a bunch of leftover bits and pieces into a tasty, chunky frittata (this one includes chunks of grilled sausage, roasted potato cubes, the end of a batch of ratatouille, and some feta cheese). We ate it with a tomato and roasted green bean salad and some rolls, and shared it with any wildlife that happened to be passing (a friendly lizard and some relatively polite seagulls).

Cake!: because, for the first time ever, I got to spend my January birthday at the beach. Baking my own cake in a cottage kitchen was totally worth it. (I did get taken out for Thai food for dinner, also.)