In the Kitchen Today

It's been an at-home kind of weekend, mainly because we're reorganizing the house post-separation of bedrooms and pre-refinishing of floors in a week.  This includes distributing toys (and their shelves) in the basement to the relevant kid's room as well as putting aside toys for giveaway; we also sorted through all the books upstairs (again) and purged 100s of children's books which will go to Read to Grow CT.  It will also mean moving the futon to the basement.  Then and only then can the Junk Luggers take all the furniture off the first floor next Saturday!  Whew.

So while Mama was doing that with the kids, I made a breakfast of Miss B's (of PA) Oatmeal Scones.  Yum!  We especially like these with orange marmalade.  For lunch, for me, I tried to replicate Trader Joe's Balela Salad, the one with the chickpeas, black beans, and parsley; the results weren't exact but definitely good enough.

It's going to be hot all week, in the mid-90s, so I imagine there won't be too much oven/stove work going on.  Too bad the kids won't eat bean salads!

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Miss B's Oatmeal Scones

1 ½ cups flour

1 ¼ cups quick cooking rolled oats

¼ cup sugar

1 tablespoon baking powder (slightly less than)

1 teaspoon cream of tartar (slightly less than)

½ teaspoon salt (slightly less than)

2/3 cup butter, melted (1 stick butter also works well)

1/3 cup milk                                    

1 egg, slightly beaten (Eggbeaters also work)

½ cup raisins (or other dried fruit)

            In large bowl, combine dry ingredients.  Add butter, milk, and egg, stirring until just moistened.  Shape into a ball, flatten into 8” circle, score into wedges.  Place on cookie sheet.  Bake at 425°F for 12-15 minutes.

Note:  we have also made chocolate chip scones, which are very good.

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Balela Salad

2 (15 ounce) cans garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
 2 (15 ounce) cans black beans, drained and rinsed
 1/2 cup (packed) chopped fresh parsley
 1/2 cup chopped onion

 1 clove garlic, minced
 1/4 cup olive oil
 3 tablespoons lemon juice
 5 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
 salt and ground black pepper to taste

In a salad bowl, lightly mix together the garbanzo beans, black beans, parsley, and onion.


Place the garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, and apple cider vinegar in a jar and shake vigorously until thoroughly combined. Pour the dressing over the salad, and toss to mix; sprinkle with salt and black pepper to serve.

adapted from AllRecipes.com (originally has 1 pint grape tomatoes and 1/2 cup mint chopped)

Reading in the Kitchen

"As long as you taste curiously, and watch and feel and listen, and prick your way toward food you like, you will find that you become someone about whom people will say that cooking seems to come naturally, like walking.  They will say it and it will be true."

Tamar Adler's An Everlasting Meal:  Cooking with Economy and Grace is that rare cookbook--more prose than prosaic instruction, more musings than exact measurements.  And while I usually prefer to follow exact recipes from standard cookbooks (and I do that a lot, from the many books I have), this book inspires me to want to cook, giving me the confidence and the ideas how to do it, without really giving me too many recipes.  Take the chapter "How to Stride Ahead."  Adler describes cooking all your vegetables as soon as you get home from the market so that you have the not-quite-raw ingredients for meals the rest of the week---they can be turned into delicious dishes with little work, which means you are much less likely to let them rot in your fridge. "By the end of the week, you will have eaten vegetables a dozen ways a dozen times, having begun with good raw materials only once." Her description of her dance from roasted vegetables to sauteed greens is beautiful.  And easy looking. Her first chapter, "How to Boil Water," similarly suggests how easily a meal comes together with a pot and water, as it has for 10,000 years. (See articles in NYTimes here.)

Adler was an editor at Harper's before she ever stepped foot in a professional kitchen.  But a stint at Prune (with chef-cum-writer Gabrielle Hamilton) and then at other restaurants turned Adler into an accomplished cook.  Thankfully, following in the footsteps of M.F.K. Fisher, she has written about it both at Salon and in this her first book.  I'm only a few chapters into it because I read a bit and then muse upon it.  And cook!  Yesterday, between chapters, I made black bean soup for my lunch and broccoli noodle soup for our dinner.  And I'm ready to be back in the kitchen for dinner again today.  Where I'll be cooking a meal based on Adler's dictum to use what you have between reading such enticing sections as "How to Make Peace," "How to Weather a Storm," and "How to Drink to Saints."

My "Food Studio"

As I've mentioned, I'm participating in the 30 Day Vegan Workshop via Beauty That Moves. It officially starts Monday but there was some prep work for us to do, from downloading recipes and shopping lists to watching an intro video. And there was a post about setting up a whole-foods and cooking friendly kitchen.

I already have my utensils in big containers and my beans in recycled jelly jars and my oils and S&P on the counter.And I'd gotten rid of most of the plastic awhile back. Though, my mostly Penzey's spices are spread out in two different places, being too numerous to put in my little cabinet (and the basement entrance, with shelving, gets too much sun to store spices there).

But I still had work to do. Well, that "I" is rhetorical. I still had work for Mama to do. Namely, relocating the contents of many of my cabinets (yes, I think of the kitchen as mine) so that I could reach everything I might need to do the little bit of stovetop and crockpot cooking I can manage--collander, Corning ware, mixing bowls. I couldn't reach them where I used to store them anymore so we fiddled with our organization and found an easy-to-reach shelf for everything I would need regularly. Sure that means it's a rather odd collection all on one shelf, but it works for me now. And that's the point of a "food studio," to borrow Heather Bruggeman's words: a place where I can comfortably create food.

That was last night. Today I put a few finishing touches on things. I washed down the giant magnetic chalkboard that takes up one wall of my kitchen, sorting and saving artwork from the end of kindergarten; it's now ready for the new school year in two weeks. I cleared off some of the clutter on the refrigerator door, moving papers and moving magnets to the chalkboard. Then I rearranged the windowsill above my sink. I've put one of our homemade candles in its little Old Sturbridge Village candleholder there, along with my blue "hopes and dreams" bank decorated with an orange cat and a gray cat. Finally, I hung up a prism because I love to see rainbows dancing around the room, which faces not quite due-west, which means rainbows while I prepare dinner. Lastly, I'm thinking of painting three rocks or shells with the words "big mind," "joyful mind," and "mom mind" a la How to Cook Your Life about Edward Espe Brown.

Actually, I'm inspired to paint the whole room, the one room in the house we never painted; it's just plain white. But that will have to wait some.

The kitchen, indeed the whole house, is unusually quiet and still this afternoon, with the kids at the beach with Mama. But it's ready for action. And our first kitchen activity will be making a meal of baked spaghetti pie and strawberry "risotto" for our friend who is struggling with adapting to her daughter's new Type 1 diabetes diagnosis.

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Spaghetti Pie

4 cups cooked spaghetti (about 1/2 pound uncooked)--I'm using whole wheat

1-10 oz package frozen chopped broccoli, thaed and squeezed dry

1 cup shredded smoked mozzarella cheese

1/2 cup part-skim ricotta cheese

1/4 cup finely grated Parmesan cheese

1 large egg, beaten

1 teaspoon Italian seasoning

1 1/2 cups marinara sauce, warmed in the microwave

chopped parsley leaves

Preheat oven to 350F and coat 9" springform pan (I'm using a foil pie plate) with nonstick spray.

Stir the spaghetti, broccoli, cheeses, egg, and Italian seasonings together in large bowl. Scrape in pan and level the top.

Bake 30 minutes or until golden. Cool about 5 minutes and then remove sides of springform pan. Cut into 6 wedges. Serve with marinara and parsley.

Weight Watchers Eat! Play! Move!

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Strawberry Risotto

1/2 cup low or non-fat strawberry yogurt (not the fruit-on-the-bottom kind)--make into yogurt cheese by straining in a sieve lined with wet paper towel/cheesecloth/paper coffee filter set over a jar for about 6 hours

2 1/2 cups low or non-fat milk

zest of 1 lemon

2 tablespoons sugar

1/2 cup arborio rice

1 cup sliced fresh strawberries

Warm milk in saucepan and steep lemon zest in it for about 10 minutes, keeping the milk below a simmer.

Dissolve sugar in milk, then strain to remove zest.

Put rice in heavy saucepan and pour enough of hot milk to cover the rice. Stir over low heat until milk is absorbed. Keep adding hot milk and stirring until you've used all the milk and rice is plump and chewy, about 40 minutes.

Take risotto off heat and let cool a bit, stirring oven, for about 5 minutes. Stir in yogurt cheese and let cool completely. Stir in fresh strawberries

Refrigerate for at least 3 hours, covered, until chilled through. Stir well before serving.

Diana Shaw, Almost Vegetarian