Hey you guys

We are going on VACATION. Over this vacation I plan to:
- sit in a hot tub
- hike in the rain
- watch my brother get married
- knit many times
- cook and eat lots of delicious things
- turn thirty

I do not necessarily plan to:
- have anything approaching reliable internet service.

So we'll see what happens, but yeah. Damn you, remote cabin in the Canadian wilderness! I mean, wait, no.

Expect some serious birthday week extravaganza when I come back.

Dinnertime really is 8:58 at our house.

The night before last I had a major food disaster. you wouldn't think I could screw up something as easy as refried beans, but I did, largely because I had soaked the beans three days before and didn't notice that they hadn't stood up to the interim. I did the entire cooking process and served things out before we noticed that hey, they smelled funny and had a weird aftertaste and goddamnit!

So I ended up eating rice with yogurt and salsa for dinner. Rice with yogurt and salsa is actually pretty good, but it isn't enough food to keep you from dying of no energy the next day.

End effect: by last night I was starving to death. Dinner had to be serious. It also had to involve using up the stuff we already had, since we're going on vacation next week. I devised a plan.

Serious stuffed delicata squash with serious quinoa.

delicata squash
butter/olive oil
quinoa/other grain
shallot
green beans
walnuts
salt, pepper
optional gouda/other cheese

First, tackle the squash. It's easy but takes a while. Get a big knife and whack a squash (or two; this amount of quinoa will fill two) in half lengthwise. Scoop out the seeds and either discard them or roast them like pumpkin seeds. You can do that with all squashy seeds, can't you? They're in the same family so I think the answer is yes. Anyway, get your squash into a baking pan filled with half an inch of water. Put a little butter or olive oil in each squash half and bake until tender and browning a little, about 45 minutes at 350F. I left mine in about an hour because I was just not paying attention, and it turned out fine.

When the squash is maybe halfway through baking time, it's time for the filling.

For quinoa: measure out a cup and rinse it well in your finest strainer. I put the actual pot underneath so I have some hope of catching any stray bits. Rinse for three or four minutes, mixing to get every bit, then drain and put in a pot. Add two cups of water put the lid on the pan, and bring the pot to a boil. Then turn down the heat and simmer for about twenty minutes.

While the quinoa is cooking, it's time for vegetables. Chop up a big handful of walnuts to whatever texture you like. I like really fine bits so they act more like a flour. Varied texture is fine. Then put a pan over low-medium heat, add the nuts, and toast for about five minutes. Stir and watch to make sure they don't burn. Then take them out and set them aside.

Chop up a shallot and sauté it in olive oil until it softens; chop a bunch of green beans into little half-inch chunks and add them in. Stir it up and cook together for five minutes or until the green beans are a good texture for you. In the meantime, if you want cheese you can be cubing or shredding it up. I had an end of double cream gouda and oh my god I wish we'd had more because it was the best possible choice in these circumstances.

When everything is done, it's time to combine.

Add the quinoa, walnuts, and cubed cheese to the beans and shallot. Mix it all up, seasoning with salt and pepper. Fill each squash half with big scoops of quinoa mix. If you feel the need, you can scatter some extra cheese over the top and set the pan of squash under the broiler. I did not feel the need and was besides out of cheese; this worked fine.

Eat it. Pack the leftover squash and quinoa for lunch. Eat it some more tomorrow.

Delicata squash is quite a lot sweeter than the quinoa mix, which was fine with me. I can think of some good ways to make the quinoa sweeter, though. I would probably leave out the green beans and add some dried cranberries or cherries instead for really sweet fall comfort food. Or you could scoop out the cooked squash flesh and mix that with the quinoa, so it was just a big plate of grain as opposed to a stuffed vegetable.

Tang tanga tang tang

In college, we used to have a sunday night dinner party series. My group of friends included quite a few second-generation immigrants who were all really knowledgeable about heritagenous foods. So one week we had a full Polish festival with homemade pierogies and nalesniki, one week we had a vast pot of Hungarian goulash, one week we had pans of soda bread and pots of Irish stew, and every week we had gigantic bottles of cheap college Gallo Bros wine.

My favorite was the Polish dinner, which is fortunate considering the huge dishes of multiple kielbasas and pickled herring in sour cream at John's family holidays. The best part was the pierogies. I of course have big problems making decent pierogies. Maybe I should email Ursula and get her to tell me her secrets. I can recreate the salatka, though: a salad consisting of cottage cheese mixed with sour cream and chopped radish, served on hot rye toast. Oh my god, you should go try it right now.

So this morning I had a serious craving for this stuff, but had almost zero of the requirements. I did have some drained plain yogurt, though: almost sour cream and almost cheese at the same time. I had bread, even if it wasn't rye. I had radishes. I had the green onions that Michelle always put on her salatka: inauthentic, but clearly delicious. I also had about five minutes.

Not salatka breakfast:

decent bread
yogurt cheese
radish
green onion
pepper

Take a slice or two of decent bread and spread it with yogurt cheese. Slice up a couple radishes and a green onion and scatter them over the top. Add some pepper and eat. Drink tea. Yay breakfast!

Now go to work.

Bad idea

Figs are not always the correct answer.

In this case we take figs and combine them with unsalted red cabbage. The unsalted was a mistake here, I think, because if you were to apply salt to the cabbage and macerate it as in the self-dressing salad, then said cabbage would get slightly limp and chewy as opposed to crisp. This would work much better with the other main ingredient: figs. On the other hand it doesn't seem like salt and figs are friends. There was just something off about the whole thing. I'm going to have to experiment.

Anyway, here's what I did. It wasn't really terrible, but it wasn't a success.

red cabbage
black fig
orange zest and juice
pepper

I chopped up the cabbage and the fig, then tossed them with fine bits of orange zest. Actually it was tangerine zest, since that's what we had. The tangerines incidentally are the best tangerines I've ever had. They're apparently called murcotts. They're also unfortunately an import, but are so good I keep buying them anyway. Well, it won't be much longer until the actual california citrus season. Anyway. So I added zest and squeezed some orange juice over the whole business as well. then I peppered. Ordinarily the pepper works really well with figs, but in this combination it just was not the correct idea.

Then I ate it, and was fine but nonplussed. I mean, everything was individually good. They just didn't play well together.

Solve:
- salt the cabbage
- take out the pepper
- lemon juice instead of the orange
- freaking nut and seed element
- maybe actually wilting the cabbage in a pan?

That's interesting. Making this warm might definitely have some good effects. Then I could do things like make a honey-lemon dressing in the pan, and get the cabbage and fig to absorb it there. It would make the texture of the whole business way more collapsedy as well. The whole cabbage braised in red wine thing would be interesting to try as well.

There's also always the "take out the damn cabbage" idea. It might be better to do something with wilted spinach or another sweeter green instead. One of the big problems with my version was that you could taste the cabbage backbite, and it clashed with the fig, so using another green would probably help a lot. It would just end up being a really different result.

It's still fall; the right way to eat meat

I went to the store and there was kale! It was thick juicy substantial ironmongering dinosaur kale. Plant breeders really need to start naming their new strains things like "ironmonger". The kale must come home with me! Even though there is no more room in my bag, I MUST HAVE KALE.

I bet you start out all your conversations this way!

No, but it's fall! It even still feels like fall after three days of nice weather. It's windy and cool and there are actually a bunch of big fluffy white clouds in the sky, as opposed to morning haze that gets burnt off by ten to reveal an excruciating blue sky. Real clouds!

I bought the kale and brought it home and made these.

Mashed potatoes sesame and kale!

redskin/other smallish boiling potatoes
half bunch of kale
some garlic
butter/olive oil/vegan alts
milk if you have/want it
sesame seeds
salt and pepper

First you make mashed potatoes. Put a pot of water on to boil. Chop up some potatoes so they'll cook faster. Don't peel them; the peels are great. I used about four or five potatoes for two people. When the water is boiling, add the chopped potatoes. Bring it back to a boil, then simmer with lid on until the potatoes are tender and starting to fall apart. Probably twenty minutes to a half hour should do it for small chunks. Drain and mash roughly with butter/etc, salt, and pepper.

While the potatoes are simmering, cook the kale. Start by chopping up several cloves of garlic. Warm a frying pan and sauté the garlic in olive oil and/or butter. While it's softening, wash, de-spine, and chop the kale. Cutting out the central leaf spines is really necessary if you don't want big chunks of tough, watery stalk in your finished product. You can chop the leaves into whatever size pieces you want; I made mine pretty small so they'd blend well with the potatoes. When the garlic is golden, add the kale and stir it all up. Salt and pepper a little, then cook until the kale is bright green, tender, and wilted. This should only take about five minutes.

Now it is time to mix! Dump the potatoes into the kale and stir it all up.

You can clearly stop and eat things here. Toasted sesame, however, makes things awesome and takes maybe a minute total.

Put a handful of sesame seeds in a little frying pan. Toast over medium-low for a couple minutes, tossing occasionally. When the seeds start to look the tiniest bit browned, take them off the heat and throw them into the kale and potatoes. Mix again, smoothing out potato lumps if you want.

Eat it! It is fall!

What will you eat it with?

I ate mine with the tiniest bit of veal ever: .07 of a pound. This is the way to eat meat: a big plate of vegetables with one tiny sliver of meat. I just heated my sesame seed pan up, threw in the meat, salted and peppered it, then flipped it over. Everything got barely, perfectly browned, mostly because I wasn't trying to do things like "wash dishes" in between sides. When it was done, I flipped it onto my plate of kale and potatoes, deglazed the pan with dry vermouth, and poured it over the whole business. So I had meat flavor and a little texture without actually eating very much meat at all. Yay! Delicious!

I also was like "THIS MEAL DEMANDS AN APERITIF," and poured myself a slug from the bottle of Campari. We've gotten so acclimatized to Campari that I could take a big pre-meal gulp with no effect at all besides general deliciousness. I am really glad my taste buds continue to adult-ize. Adulterate. Something.

However, having an aperitif (and calling it that, jeez!) was not really necessary. The meat also was not necessary. What else could you have with kale and potatoes for tasty fall dinner?

- squash soup, probably acorn or butternut with some sage
- some thick, dense bread such as walnut, with butter or hard cheese
- more figs ha ha
- a raw chopped salad such as the cabbage and apple one from the other day
- or say homemade apple or pear sauce
- or just apples and pears and walnuts, all mixed up.