Wine PhD

A few days ago this is what I made for lunch

What is it, you ask?

1. A monterey jack quesadilla with salsa verde on the inside of the quesadilla;

2. Onions and mushrooms, sauteed with paprika and cumin;

3. Two poached eggs;

4. Topped with more salsa verde.

I'm still thinking about this.

In the spirit of "Eat for Eight Bucks" on Serious Eats, I am going to start a new series here called "Cheap and Tasty". I'm going to take my freest of free days (Sunday) and cook for the week. Using affordable, healthy, and fresh ingredients, I will figure out how much a serving costs and use that as a basis for (maybe) discussing food culture.

Today I am cooking:

Stuffed Cabbage (Holishkes), Celery Soup, and Kreplach. I guess Eastern Europe came through strong this week. Recipes and photos coming up soon...

Two eggs, poached
Truffled mustard vinaigrette
parsley

Making this soup is easy - it's basically an exercise in assembly. I decided to make it a bit harder on myself, although harder is not really the right word. It wasn't hard, it was time consuming.

I made both the chicken broth and tofu by hand.

The soup tasted so light and flavorful - it was both simple and complete.

So here is the recipe, in the style of the glossies:

Mushroom Tofu Soup

6 button mushrooms, chopped

1 recipe chicken broth (see below)

1 recipe tofu (see below)

1 tbsp green onion, sliced.

1 clove garlic, sliced in half.

Heat up broth. Add tofu, mushroom, onions, and garlic. Simmer to soften mushrooms. Add salt if desired. Do not serve garlic clove.

So short. So simple. Read on.

Chicken Broth

1 recipe of chicken stock (see below)

2 egg whites per 4 cups

Bring chicken stock to a simmer. Beat egg whites to a foam. Add egg whites to the stock. Stir for a few minutes, then leave to simmer for 20 minutes. When the egg whites are pushed aside and the stock is clear, it's done. Strain through a cheesecloth to remove egg whites.

Chicken Stock

1 carcass of a roasted chicken

1 onion, quartered

2 carrots, roughly chopped

10-20 peppercorns

a few springs of parsley

salt

water

All of the ingredients in a stock pot. Add the water to cover. Simmer for 4-8 hours. Add more salt until it tastes right. Strain, cool, then refrigerate overnight.

Skim off as much fat as possible. Use or freeze.

Tofu

adapted from wikiHow and Just Hungry

1 lb (450-500 g) dried soy beans

cheesecloth

water

a coagulant (I used magnesium sulfate a.k.a. Epsom Salt, but I think calcium sulfate, or gypsum, is recommended)

Soak soy beans in water overnight as if cooking dried beans. Drain beans, rinse. Add 16 cups of water to a large stockpot and set to simmer. In batches, process in a food processor until they form a whitish paste (See photos in the Just Hungry recipe). If necessary, add some water to thin out beans so they can form the creamy paste. Add paste to the stockpot. Cook the paste at ~ 190-200ºF (just sub-boiling) for about 20 minutes. Using cheesecloth, strain out the fibrous solids from the white liquid into a bowl.

You have now made soy milk.

Put the soy milk back on the stove in the stockpot, which is newly cleaned. Bring to ~145-155ºF and hold. Add 4 teaspoons of your coagulant to a cup of water and mix to dissolve. Slowly, in about 5 parts, add the coagulant solution to the soy milk, stirring. Once it starts to coagulate, let it just sit at temperature for about 15 minutes to complete coagulation.

Now that the curds have separated, its time to press them. I did it the (very) hard way: I punched too small holes in tuperware container and used that as a form. I would next time just line a colander with cheesecloth and press it in the colander. In any event, line a holey vessel with cheesecloth. Ladle in the curds. Fold the cheesecloth over the top, and press. I pressed, but I think you can probably let gravity to 80% of the work before doing the manual pressing.

Now you have tofu!

Assemble the soup as above.

Quick and easy, right?

On my way out of work today I stumbled across a recipe on Serious Eats for a noodle dish flavored with sesame oil. It sounded nice, so I decided that would be good for dinner. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I did not have all of the ingredients at home and their were some changes I wanted to make.

First - it has to be hot. It is so cold outside now that I can't imagine eating cold noodles for dinner. Also, I like mushrooms. Mushrooms are going in. And no tahini here - peanut butter instead.

Here is my version.

Cold Noodles (greg's way)

1 lb whole wheat thin spaghetti
1/4 onion sliced thin
4 white mushrooms, sliced thick
1 tsp olive oil
5 ribs of Napa cabbage
2 scallions
2 cloves of garlic
1 tbsp chopped ginger
1 tbsp peanut butter
1 tbsp rice wine vinegar
1 tsp garlic-chili sauce
sesame oil, to taste
salt, pepper

Bring water to boil. Add salt to water. Cook pasta.

While the pasta is cooking, heat up a dry skillet on high. Add the mushrooms with no oil. When they start to sizzle and squeak, add a tsp of oil oil and the onions, turn the pan down to medium-high. Cook until soft and lightly golden, about 7 minutes. Add garlic and and ginger and cook a few minutes.

In a mixing bowl, whisk together the peanut butter and vinegar. Add enough water to make consistency of half-and-half. Add a bit of sesame oil, to taste.

When the pasta is done, add the Napa cabbage and scallions to the skillet for 1 minute. Add the sauce. Use tongs to place the pasta on top of the vegetables, allowing some pasta water to come along for the ride.

Drizzle the pasta with some more sesame oil before tossing with the sauce.

Toss with sauce, add salt and pepper.

It it only takes 15 minutes, start to finish.

I have a new favorite food: Dal. Dal, as far as I can tell from Wikipedia, is a stew prepared from pulses (such as lentils).

Though I cannot remember where we got the book or who gave it to us (To the gift giver: I'm truly sorry!), Indian Home Cooking by Suvir Saran and Stephanie Lyness winked at me last night from our cookbook shelf as I stared hungrily at the books, wondering what to eat. A quick look through the French Chef inspired some buttery green beans - great for an appetizer (which I ate, happily), but the rest of the recipes were too heavy for my mood. Another wink from the Indian cookbook, and I was sold.

Next was a consideration of ingredients on hand: Rice, yellow split peas, spices. These looked compatible with the recipe for rice (rice and water - easy!) and a dal called Masoor dal baghaar waali. The only missing ingredient was fresh green chiles, which a quick trip to the supermarket fixed.

While cooking the dal, I had a moment of clarity - both rice and lentils are way overcooked if the cooking times on the back of the packages are followed. 20 minutes for rice? 50 minutes for lentils? Both turn to mush with that kind of cooking. I now give basmati rice 11-12 minutes in excess water, then drain, and lentils 30 minutes in 4:1 flavored water (4 cups of water to 1 cup of dry lentils). Also, I realized that lentils get their flavor from spices cooked in neutral oil and then mixed into the lentils near the end of cooking. So many revelations!

If I remember, I will add the recipe to this post when I get home tonight. If not, borrow/check out/buy this book. I haven't done thorough research on good Indian cookbooks, but so far I like this one. Has anyone had luck with other books?

On our trip to North Carolina, we stayed with family friends Friderun and Elwyn Simons (the man with the bees). One of our meals there, a simple lunch of salad, bread, salami, and cheese was both mundane and other-worldly at the same time. All of the components were simple. Bread. Meat. Cheese. Salad. But the meal was perfect, none the less.

We have come to call these meals "Friderun Lunches" and they have become our regular Saturday noontime meal. This week our lunch came (mostly) from the Farmer's Market and our garden: Village Bakery bread, peaches, Persian cucumbers, salami, tomatoes, celery, and spicy hummus. Sometimes we have cheese, sometimes we don't.

I never finish a "Friderun Lunch" anything less than happily content. Maybe one day soon Friderun can come to our house in Davis for a "Friderun Lunch."