Archives for category: kitchen times

BRAISED CABBAGE WAIT DONT RUN AWAY

March 15, 10 //
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I can’t tell which branch of old world Europe messed up cabbage for most people, but whoever it was you can be sure it was the ones who just boiled it as if that would do the trick. I’m sorry on behalf of cabbage for its PR problems because there are a lot of good things in its favor, not to be limited to cheapness, the fact that it keeps in your refrigerator for really almost forever, and if you make it right it makes your house smell like an old wise woman loves you a lot. So yeah, this is precisely the wrong time to tell you how to make this since it’s finally warming up in Austin and the snow is melting everywhere else, and if you ever needed a recipe for braised cabbage you needed it last month because February breaks hearts. Which is why I made a bunch of cabbage soup in February and because I don’t know anything about quantities I bought an extra head of cabbage that I didn’t even use, and it’s been sitting at the bottom of my refrigerator since then. I dug it out a few days ago fearing that it had rotted and I would need to “compost” it (I mean, throw it in my back yard) but it looked totally unblemished and I had read this recipe over at amateurgourmet.com (which is also where I got the recipe for Veselka’s cabbage soup, by the way, but I can’t find it now) so I was like, okay, cabbage, I will give you a second chance.

And, officially, holy shit. I had always thought that cabbage on its lonesome needed a lot of butter to taste this good, but it turns out that braising cabbage makes it just taste buttery, and yes, like an old wise woman loves you. I realize that I’m three quarters German and so maybe I have a stronger cabbage affinity than your average camper but cabbages cost like sixty cents and you need to eat more vegetables, no matter what you say to the contrary, narc.

So, here are the ways. Cut up a cabbage in wedges, two carrots in chunks, and one onion in wedges also, put a quarter cup of olive oil all over the top, and kosher salt, and pepper. Cover it, put it in a oven at 350 for an hour, turn over the cabbage wedges and take the lid off, crank the heat to 400 and let it all brown for fifteen more minutes. That’s all. I know this is not a recipe in the typical way and you could just as easily read the version of it linked to above, except I found that the cabbage was already braised all to hell after an hour, and the other recipe says to give it another hour, which sounds scary to me but I’m also okay with my tweaks since they halve the amount of time this would take.

I think the key to most vegetables is 1) olive oil 2) high heat 3) kosher salt. Really. Also, for anybody who doesn’t know what’s up with kosher salt: it is the freaking BEST. Sea salt, whatever. I haven’t exactly figured out what’s so magical about kosher salt, but I suspect that since the grains are flatter (the better to cover the surface of a meat to kasher it) kosher salt dissolves in food faster and gives you a more accurate sense of how salty something is right away–unlike granulated salt, the little cube kind, that takes a little longer to blend in. Or something. Chemicals. Thank you.

IN LIKE A LION, OUT LIKE A LION

March 1, 10 //
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Meet the new lion, same as the old lion.

Lately I want to increase the amount of pickled eggs in my life, especially red pickled eggs with beets. Why is Texas deficient in having big jars of beet pickled eggs in bars or grocery stores, I want to know. Or is it? Maybe I go to the wrong places. Maybe they don’t pickle the eggs with the aid of beets and I can’t ever tell the difference? Maybe the pickled eggs are in some terrifying aisle of the supermarket that I normally avoid? Once I asked my mom to buy us a jar of beet pickled eggs at Bell’s Grocery in Hundred, West Virginia and she said sure even though she knew I hadn’t tried them before and also would turn down my request for other exotic foods like the jars of peanut butter and jelly mixed together in stripes. I think I wanted the eggs because they were pink. I ate one sitting on the floor in front of the cupboard and put the rest back on the furthest shelf, which they shared with a jar of pickled pigs’ feet that had been there as long as I had, as far as I can tell, and which might be there still. Now I want to make them myself since I like beets so much all of a sudden and I miss the strange Western Pennsylvania foods that I didn’t even really care for when I lived there. Like cabbage soup. Every kind of cabbage. Whenever in the future I have a roommate again, they are going to be so puzzled about my foods. I am gonna be a roommate blocking up the refrigerator with big jars of beet pickled eggs and stinking up the house with pan-fried pork chops.

In other news, waiting for everything to happen feels more dignified in March, even though nothing happens and it seems like everybody in the world has heard back something one way or the other from PhD programs except for me. And the book contests, I especially don’t want to think about them. Two hours from now I won’t be down about it, and then the feeling of doom will come back briefly while I’m doing something innocuous like looking at my bookshelf or getting mail that is only cable bills and alumni newsletters. But March feels better already, even if it’s for no reason, or if the reason is a future of beets and vinegar. I’ll take it.

KITCHEN TIMES: MUSSELS IN WINE SAUCE

October 5, 09 //
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Guess what is cheaper than a pair of Forever 21 leggings? A bag of frozen mussels. Seriously, they cost $1.99. Frozen mussels are also way better than a pair of Forever 21 leggings, for almost innumerable reasons. For one thing, they don’t pill where your inner thighs rub together, they don’t come from a secretly Christian company that has “John 3:16″ printed on the bottom of its shopping bags, and you don’t have to buy them from a dead-eyed girl wearing a denim corset over a polo shirt. So far, so good.

But they also taste really good and take very little time. I know, fresh shellfish is better and not that much more expensive, but I think my cooking has a secret trashy throw-together-things-from-the-pantry streak. Linguine and clam sauce has this same effect. Dashing budget gourmet or what have you. You can be like me, or not be like me. I care not at all.

SO. This is what you need:
A bag of frozen mussels
A can of chopped tomatoes
A chopped yellow onion
A glass of white wine (I used Vinho Verde but I think something more buttery would go better)
Olive oil
Fresh thyme (dried if you are a scrub)
A piece of bread

SO. This is what you do.

You pour yourself a glass of wine, because it is fun to cook with a glass of wine around, even if you are like me and get so busy cooking that you forget to drink it.

Put some bread in the oven at 350 to heat through while you do the rest of the stuff. I used ciabatta because it’s spongier and the whole point of bread here is to soak up sauce.

Heat up some olive oil and cook the onions and until they’re browned a little, but not completely carmelized. Add some fresh thyme a few minutes before they reach this state, and some salt. Dump a glass of wine in there. It will give you a wine facial. That might be a bad thing. Antioxidants? Shit, I don’t know. Anyway, wait for the alcohol to burn off–you’ll be able to see that the liquid in the pan has reduced by half and the raging alcohol smell will be gone. At that point, add the chopped tomatoes. You might want to add only half a can if you don’t want the sauce to be too chunky. Bring the pan to boil and add the frozen mussels right away. The mussels will start popping open pretty much right away, but keep cooking them until they heat through a little more. Shellfish is serious business. Take out any mussels that didn’t open. They are the bad guys and you do not want to eat them.

Hey, you’re done! Take out the bread and ladle the mussels and sauce into fancy shallow bowls. You can put out a bowl for the shells, or you can throw them into your yard like I do. But then later when you complain about possums in your yard you will know it’s your fault.

BRUSSELS O’ SLAW

July 1, 09 //
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Oh shit, it’s been triple digits in Austin for the last few weeks. Do you know what this means? It means it’s really hot, the kind of hot that flattens you against the couch and makes you read two perhaps “chick lit” esque books in one twelve hour period because the act of contemplating anything else makes your eyelids sweat. Usually I’m kind of a hoss at dealing with extreme temperatures and go about my regular life as if my skin isn’t melting, meaning that I walk around and go running in the morning and check things off the to-do list and sit outside with a hot coffee during writing hours and cook the stuff I normally cook for myself, like roast summer squash and pan-fried steaks and stuff. Lately, I’ve been doing okay at keeping up the normal activity level, except for that last one. I’ve been eating some ridiculous meals. Like, cantaloupe and cottage cheese with a handful of cocktail peanuts on the side. Or some pieces of jerky, an apple, and some frozen green beans. That are still frozen. A favorite treat from childhood: for some reason I would only eat my green beans frozen, even though I really liked vegetables fine otherwise and wasn’t much of a picky eater.

Anyway, I call these meals “meals of sadness” for the obvious reason that it’s pretty sad to be a forager in your own house for something to eat that mostly fulfills the functional demands of nutrition but also makes you feel like a sad wretch stuck overnight in a Greyhound station. It’s not only in catastrophe weather that I end up eating meals of sadness; it seems to come in waves every two or three months, and during that time I just cannot be bothered with aesthetics. Sometimes it’s because I’m sad and lurgy, but it’s just as often the result of being happy, overstimulated, and kind of manic. Or in this case right now, having sweaty eyelids, which is really kind of so gross it turns off all other aesthetic ambitions until 10 PM. So I’m trying to come up with some successful new recipes, such as this one, which involves pretty minimal labor and no cooking at all, unless you want to be extra fancy. Also, for what it’s worth, the recipe is a slight elaboration of one I read about in Women’s Health magazine at some point. But renamed my own kooky name because it’s my blog so shut up now.

BRUSSELS O’ SLAW

16-20 brussels sprouts*
1/4 cup shelled walnuts
1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese
1 1/2 tsp. dijon mustard
2 T white wine vinegar
1 tsp. walnut oil**
1 T olive oil
salt, pepper
mustard or caraway seeds (optional)

1) Chop the walnuts and toast them in a small pan over low-medium heat for 2-3 minutes or until they’re fragrant and slightly browned (AKA “toasted”). You can skip this step if you’re lazy, but believe me that it makes a difference in the flavor. Actually toasting nuts or sesame seeds or whatever before you cook with them seems like a lame time waster, but it’s one of those things that makes such a tangible difference you’ll feel like a fool if you don’t do it.

2) Mix the mustard, oil, and vinegar in your serving dish or intended container of choice. Don’t season it yet. You have to be sensitive about these things. And also I’m transcribing into steps a recipe that I normally just season by ear. I mean, tongue. But I’m also a good listener. And I don’t want you to oversalt anything and then still try to eat it anyway.

3) Wash the brussels sprouts and discard any bruised or rotty-looking outer leaves. Next, shred them. Don’t worry, this is easy: the interior architecture of the brussels sprout is just a bunch of densely-packed leaves, meaning that when you slice them crosswise they instantly unpack into fluffy mounds of, what did you expect, shredded brussels sprouts. If you’re one of those people who doesn’t like broccoli stalks, you’ll probably want to toss the little white discs of sliced brussels sprout stem but then you’ll also have to cry because you’re so wasteful. Also, sometimes the brussels sprouts are so tightly packed that you’ll have to separate them by hand. Which would probably happen naturally when you toss them with the vinaigrette, but why take chances?

4) Toss the shredded brussels sprouts with all of the other stuff. I use tongs because I find two forks a depressing substitute, and also because tongs are great, they really are. Now you can season with the salt and pepper and maybe some mustard or caraway seeds, and probably a squeeze of lemon would be nice too. If you’re the garnishing type, well, you should have thought of that earlier and saved some toasted walnuts and parmesan for that, because I’m not about to help you garnish anything around here except unless you maybe garnish it with something totally extraneous like a cellophane toothpick or a plastic dino or a jewel case. All of which I encourage strongly.

*I know they’re not in season right now, but when they’re in season it’s cold and I’d rather steam them and then cover them in lemon juice and call it a day. Plus, this is kind of a nice warm-up for people who think they hate brussels sprouts, which usually just means that they hate overcooked brussels sprouts, which I must agree have a weird perfumey taste.

**Maybe you don’t have walnut oil? That’s okay. But I recommend it, even though it’s expensive, because it will last you for a long time and make people take you seriously.