Category Archives: Cooking

I’ll See Your Rice and Raise You a Lentil: Shannon’s Easy Mujaddara

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Did you know that dishes that combine a grain and a legume (like peanut butter sandwiches or, um, mujaddara) offer your body a complete set of proteins?

Whenever we go to Jason’s parents’ house for a holiday, I can rest assured that lurking somewhere in the refrigerator will be a container of mujaddara for us to “snack on.” The quotation marks are necessary, because the container is approximately the size of a bathtub. I chalk up the mammoth proportions to two factors: 1) Bob, Jason’s dad, is immensely fond of the Bosnian guy who owns a restaurant near his company’s offices, and 2) we are a clan that can polish off a vast quantity of the rice and lentil dish with alarming speed.

As delicious as the Richmond holiday version is, it’s not always within easy reach when a mujaddara craving hits, so I recently went hunting for a recipe. There are approximately a zillion floating around the internet (and yes, I’m about to add one more). Because I loathe soggy rice and was concerned about my own ability to time things correctly, I combined a couple versions that called for the rice and lentils to be prepared separately. Even though that probably makes it less traditional, the final product turned out quite well—aromatic and subtle and earthy, a warmly comforting end to a chilly fall day.

Shannon’s Easy Mujaddara

  • 1 cup lentils (any variety will work, but the baby ones are nice)
  • 1 onion, chopped
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 2 cups water, vegetable stock, white wine, or a combination of these
  • 2 cinnamon sticks
  • 1 tablespoon cumin
  • ½ teaspoon allspice
  • Salt and pepper to taste
  • 1 cup rice
  • 3 small or 2 medium onions, sliced Continue reading →

It’s Raining Vegetables. Make a Casserole.

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vegetable casserole

All layered up and ready to go in the oven.

August is my favorite month for fresh, local veggies. It’s the time when all the fruit (as in seed-bearing) vegetables like tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant and chili peppers hit the table.  But with everything ripening at once, this time of year can leave both gardeners and cooks feeling like they’re drowning in vegetables. Farmer Dwight (of cabbage fame) has been sending me frequent updates about the massive tomato yields that are currently covering every flat surface in his kitchen. Garrison Keillor used to joke that it’s unwise to leave your car windows down at the end of summer lest you discover a squash in the driver’s seat when you come back, deposited by some overwhelmed gardener.

And this week I found myself trying to exhaust our ample CSA shipment before an impending trip out of town. How many vegetables can you fit in a single dish? To find out, I devised this casserole. It’s true that I had to break my own rule about turning on the oven in hot weather, but sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.

It’s Raining Vegetables Casserole

  • 2 eggplants, sliced
  • 6 plum (or other smallish variety) tomatoes, diced
  • Handful of fresh basil, chopped
  • 1 medium onion, chopped
  • 4 to 8 garlic cloves, sliced
  • 1 chili pepper, diced
  • 2 zucchini, cut into half moons
  • Salt and pepper
  • 1 teaspoon dried oregano
  • 6 oz. muenster or mozzarella cheese, sliced
  • Parmesan cheese to taste Continue reading →

Swiss Lentils with Dill and Poached Egg

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The writer Carlynn Houghton dropped this on me the other day.  Her name for the dish is Lentils with Dill & Yumminess.  At its core, it’s a simple lentil recipe taken from The Joy of Cooking, but it veers off the expected course in a kind of funky way.

To start: I’ve never considered adding dill to lentils.  When it comes to these legumes, I’ve always been firmly rooted in the gastronomic headspace of the Indian subcontinent and, thanks to Shannon’s creation of a vegetarian Cincinnati Chili, the American Midwest.  I’ve also never considered adding an egg, let alone a poached egg, which is what Carlynn does in this recipe and is what adds the “Swiss” prefix.

I’m fairly “ehh” on poached eggs, but I think they’re fantastic for this recipe.  I usually think of the unexpected egg as something fairly American, as if it primarily takes the form of a hamburger topping that crowns bacon, fried onions, mushrooms, ketchup, mayo, and cheddar cheese.  The fact that the unexpected egg can come at me out of left field from some place as sensible and subdued as Switzerland makes me happy.  It reminds me not to condescend.

Carlynn wrote: My cousin in Switzerland poached an egg and put it on top. This made a delicious lunch with cheese and bread on a table overlooking Lake Geneva and the French Alps. Sadly, my photos are from NYC.

Here are the goods…

Ingredients:

1/3 C. olive oil
1 large onion, minced
1 1/2 C. lentils
5 C. vegetable stock
salt and pepper
1/3 C. finely chopped fresh dill
1 egg

Sauté the onion in the olive oil until golden brown. Add the lentils and stir to coat in oil. Add vegetable stock and bring to a boil. Simmer 60-90 minutes. Add more boiling water if the pot starts to dry out. Poach an egg.  When lentils are tender, season to taste. Remove from heat and stir in the dill.  Gently place egg on top.

The TLT: Summer Between Two Slices of Bread

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The TLTBoy, do people love their bacon. Rarely have I come across a food that inspires such raw passion in people. Just this week, while a co-worker, Devin, and I were discussing the Powerball jackpot having reached astronomical sums, he said that if he won, he would throw me a cool couple million if I, a longtime vegetarian, would eat an entire pig. I’m not sure if this was meant to be some kind of gladiatorial entertainment or if he merely wanted to share his love of pork with the world. Devin did not win Powerball, so I guess we will never find out.

But that does not mean that I am immune to bacon’s charms. I have very happy memories of childhood summer dinners that consisted entirely of big BLTs and fresh ears of boiled sweet corn. To me, bacon is the taste of summer, and a curious package that my mom sent me while I was living in Cambodia helped me to recreate that taste in vegetarian form. Along with other comforts of home, like American magazines, was a shaker of something called Bacon Salt, completely vegetarian but very bacon-y. Bribing the postman to get that package out of hock might have been some of the best money I ever spent. I sliced some tofu from the market very thinly, sprinkled it with bacon salt, popped it in the oven, and boom…it was like I was back in Ohio. The Tofu, Lettuce and Tomato sandwich was born.

Over the years I have perfected the recipe, and I think it’s much tastier than the substitute bacon that you can buy at the grocery store. I will share it below for any bacon-loving vegetarians or anyone who is craving something a little lighter than pork on a hot summer evening. Make one soon while the sweet corn is plentiful and the tomatoes are at their juiciest.

Tofu Bacon Continue reading →

Mysteries of the Aloe Vera

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aloe plant

The beast in its lair

Sometime last year, our next door neighbor gave us a nice, unassuming-looking aloe plant, which took its place among the potted plants in our bedroom. Jason happens to be very good with plants, but the voracity with which this guy grew was surprising, almost alarming in a “Feed me, Seymour!” kind of way. It pushed against other plants, snaking its way under their pots like it was some crazy octopus-shaped professional wrestler trying to trip its opponents with a showy move. Soon, I was hovering over all of our guests, trying to foist pieces of the plant on them for any touch of sunburn, any tiny insect bite.

But still, the thing grew. Noticing the Technicolor aloe beverages in supermarkets, I began to think, “Why not?” and started to poke around on the Internet to find out more about drinking aloe. What I found was a raging aloe controversy, with some people saying that it cures everything from diabetes to bed sores and other people saying that it causes cancer in mice. The truth, of course, probably lies somewhere in between. As best as I can discern, the more controversial component of aloe is the yellowish latex part, which is right under the skin of the plant and, in addition to possibly blocking your intake of potassium, is apparently a powerful laxative. Leaving bodily harm aside, that sounds somewhat unpleasant.

But the aloe gel that is in the center of the leaves sounded fairly innocuous and possibly even healthy. And what the heck? Maybe it would make me feel like a million bucks. So I decided to give it a go last night. Continue reading →

Farmer Dwight’s Blue Ribbon Cabbages

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cabbage manOnce farming gets into a family’s blood, it sticks there obstinately. My great-grandparents owned a farm in southern Ohio. My grandfather, the original urban gardener, inspired new city ordinances in Cleveland with his tendency to grow corn in his small front lawn. And my father, though he worked as a financial consultant for most of my lifetime, was always nipping over to the empty lot next to our house to coax something out of the ground and to wage epic battles against the deer that were huge fans of his work.

That’s why I wasn’t really surprised to receive this photo last week, of my father proudly displaying one of his largest cabbages to date. (The photo, by the way, is no optical illusion; these suckers really are larger than his head.)

When I asked Farmer Dwight to share his cabbage wisdom with the world, here are the tips he gave me:

  1. Pick a variety that will grow large heads. (You don’t want to be out of the game before you even start, people.)
  2. Plant early, in April, before it gets too warm. (Frost? Bah! He spits in the face of frost.)
  3. Pray that the varmints don’t eat the plants before they get a good start. (If your prayers go unanswered, you can also see Jason’s post from last week about warding off cabbage worms.) Continue reading →

Food for the End-of-Weekend Blues

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wagon wheels!Weekends are supposed to be relaxing, so the rumor goes. But come Sunday night, after the hiking, carousing, drinking, sunbathing, running, picnicking, sweating and entertaining with which many of us fill our summer weekends (several times over on long weekends), I don’t think it’s unusual to feel exhausted. That is how I found myself at my local Mr. Melon store on Sunday afternoon, staring into space and trailing zombie-like through the aisles, loath to cook anything, but feeling sharp pains in my stomach and wallet at the thought of eating takeout food one more time.

I had walked in with a vague plan of making a pasta dish that I like, but the asparagus was looking limp, the only walnuts I could find were in enormous tubs and neither Jason nor I could remember if there was any pesto left in the freezer. So I gave up on that one. I think, really, the only thing to do when you find yourself in this situation is to grab the items that kindle a tiny joy in your tired heart, which is how I ended up walking to the register with 1) Brussels sprouts and 2) rotelle pasta (or if you prefer—and believe me, I prefer—wagon wheels). Seriously, try to find a more cheerful pasta shape. That’s right. You can’t.

I am certain that you, dear reader, are just as capable of this sort of improvisation as I am, but I’ll post the recipe I came up with, just in case it comes in handy some muggy Sunday evening. The veggies make it fresh and light enough for summer, but the bleu cheese gives it a creamy decadence that will send you into a deep end-of-weekend slumber.

Bleu Wagon Wheels Continue reading →

Crunchy Spring Feast

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About six weeks ago we visited Shannon’s parents in Ohio.  Dwight, her dad, has a garden, and the green onions had just come up.  He eagerly informed me of the existence of Onion and Butter Sandwiches.

Neither Shannon nor her mom were interested in enjoying one of these sandwiches, but one was made for my benefit.  I don’t know what I was expecting.  Something in which the whole transcended the individual parts, I guess.  It pretty much just tasted like onion and butter on a piece of bread.  I suppose it tasted like Spring, crunchy and green and all with the smooth glide of butter to add a farmhouse touch.  It was good.  That’s all I’ve got.

Raw Food Surprises and a Journey to Bliss

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journey to bliss logoEvery year, Bonnaroo has a tent called The Academy, where you can learn vital skills like hula hoop making and spoken word poetry. Though I searched in vain this year for my favorite primitive skills guru, I did stumble upon a mother-daughter team giving a workshop about raw food called “Living Cuisine.” Okay, I know what you’re thinking, especially given what I just said about hula hoops, but I found Laura Button and Journey Button-Hale of Journey to Bliss Raw Foods really down-to-earth and engaging, and there were some surprises in the presentation that I thought were worth sharing.

Ditch the Labels—Laura still bristles at the idea of labeling someone according to their eating habits. “I’ll be a raw foodist when people stop brewing delicious beer,” she said. She made the point that you can have a vegan who eats a lot of processed crap every day or you can have an omnivore who eats mostly fresh vegetables and, occasionally, a grass-fed hamburger at a party; which one is healthier and eating more mindfully? Her point was that labels like raw foodist or vegetarian aren’t as meaningful as the day-to-day choices that lead people to eat food that makes them feel good. That (to a longtime vegetarian who occasionally and somewhat guiltily eats seafood) sounded refreshingly logical.

journey to bliss

Laura on the Whole Foods blog

Rethink that Multigrain Chip on Your Shoulder—Whole Foods is a big, big corporation, which, to some folks, earns them an automatic Darth Vader rating on the Scale of Villainy. While I can’t speak to all of WF’s business practices, Laura did point out a pretty grand one, which is that they regionally stock small, local producers, giving them far greater reach. So if you’re at a Whole Foods in Tennessee or Georgia, you might see the Intentional Foods line that Laura and Journey produce. It definitely made me want to hunt around in my own Whole Foods for some small suppliers doing their best in my neck of the woods.

It Might Be a Good Idea to Eat like a Toddler—Little kids are weird, and they’ll do things like decide they’re not eating anything but watermelon for an entire day. While those “mono-meals” might be frustrating to parents, Laura pointed out that they’re probably much more in line with the way our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate, who found a food resource and exhausted it. Continue reading →

Batten Down the Hatches, Eatbox: Shannon’s Brief Return to Food Service

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Jonathan, posing with his food truck empire

When Jonathan Coffman took over command of the Eatbox food truck and moved it to Jackson, Tennessee, nothing could have fully prepared him for the Sisyphean effort it would take to feed twenty thousand hungry Bonnaroovians at the Food Truck Oasis. First of all, festival organizers threw him a bit of a curve ball by asking him to fill the gourmet meatball niche at the festival, when he was more used to serving kebabs and burritos at much smaller events around Jackson.  Undaunted, Coffman built a trailer filled with chest freezers. He rallied a small army of friends and family to staff the truck. He rolled thousands upon thousands of meatballs. And then he allowed me, a food truck novice, to wander into the middle of all of it, just because I asked.

My previous experiences in food service are dark-night-of-the-soul kind of material; I was truly one of the worst waitresses to ever spill a drink or drop a dessert at the Big Boy and TGIFridays of Mansfield, Ohio, and my tips usually reflected it. But Bonnaroo is all about new experiences, and I thought that working behind the scenes of one of the food trucks, preparing the food itself, might help to erase the memories of those old disasters.

Elbow room in a food truck is limited, but even so, there are a number of people working behind the scene at any given moment to get your food to you. I by-passed the grill and assembly positions (though, bless their sweet Southern hospitality, I think the Eatbox workers were prepared to let me do whatever I wanted in there) and apprenticed myself to Maria (non-Bonnaroo job: fourth grade teacher; favorite summer hobby: teasing Zeke, who was working next to her) at the topping station, where I figured I would do the least damage. Continue reading →