Tasty lentil

I got this idea from certain redfoxes. It was an excellent idea and made plenty of delicious businesses to dip in yogurt. I varied it fairly substantially, though, so here you go:

Lentil kibbeh

red lentils
millet
onion
garlic
bay leaf
lemon or juice
shawarma mix, cayenne, sesame seeds

For dipping sauce/dressing:

plain good yogurt/soy yogurt
black pepper, fresh parsley

First, make the dressing, because it needs to sit. Mix a cup or two of plain yogurt /soy with copious fresh ground black pepper and chopped parsley. If you are short on either of these, you can experiment with other things; I bet fresh oregano and garlic and some lemon would be interesting. Mint and yogurt would also be good, especially for counteracting an overspiced case.

Put it all in a fine mesh strainer over a cup or bowl, put it in the refrigerator, and let it sit and drain while everything cooks. It'll thicken a bit while you make everything else.

Cook a cup of red lentils in two cups of water with a bay leaf and a squeezed chunk of lemon or a little lemon juice. I used a quarter of a very tiny lemon off our friend Joann's tree. Bring pan to a boil, cover, turn down heat, and simmer twenty minutes, or until total blown-out mush.

At the same time, cook half a cup of millet in a cup of water. Bring pan to a boil, cover, turn down heat and simmer for twenty minutes. Isn't the timing convenient?

In the meantime, set about making savory spicy mix with which to flavor these two awesome but admittedly bland on their own ingredients. Get out a sauté pan and warm some olive oil. Chop up an onion and add it to the pan. I used half a red onion and half a yellow onion just because that was lying around; any mix would clearly work. Add a few cloves of chopped garlic and whatever spice mixture you'd like. I had a bunch of a shawarma mixture sitting around being delicious at me, so I used that. I also added some cayenne and sesame seeds. You can use whatever sounds good to you; I plan on experimenting with fresh ginger in the future. I would also overseason this mix a bit since it's going to be the main spicing for an entire pot of lentil and millet. Cook until onions and garlic are soft and delicious.

When everything is done, mix the lentils, millet, and spiced onion together. Also, preheat the oven to 350F. Shape lentil stuff into little elongated meatball shapes. I floured my hands for this, because I wasn't looking at my source recipe, but now I see it would definitely be better to water them. It worked out fine, though.

Put kibbeh balls on cookie sheet and bake ten or fifteen minutes, rotating if necessary. Take out, pile on plate with bowl of dipping sauce, and eat. Or, if you're feeling fancy and/or in need of salad, make a bed of greens, add kibbeh, and drizzle yogurt sauce over.

I experimented a little with making full sandwich-sized patties, but those didn't work out so well as the main kibbeh. I made them too thin, so they crisped too much and got too dry and crumbly. Otherwise they would have been great, though, so you should clearly feel free to experiment as well. I would make them at least as thick as a standard burger, and probably as thick as a really thick burger. An inch would be good. Then I bet you could stack lentil burgers between sheets of waxed paper, and lo! You have your own veggie burgers waiting in the freezer for instant dinner at any time.

Hey vegans! Did you like bacon?

Do you hate buying packets of fake soy meat with stripes painted on them? Feel terrible yet decadent ripping into a fake corn dog with ketchup? Shall we try something the hell different?

Behold! TOFU BACON. Or BACON TOFU. I think that second one has a better ring to it, how about you?

Bacon tofu is easy. All you do it cut good tofu thinly, quickly fry it in sesame oil and ginger, and toss it into a bowl. Then you eat it. It is crispy. It is savory. It is salty and tasty and crispy and BACONY BACONY BACON. And yet it is tofu, and requires no frozen processed product of any kind. I don't know, do you really count tofu as processed? I don't.

I think this stuff is particularly great because it comes close to the crumbly texture of well-cooked bacon.

Bacon tofu!

good nigari tofu
fresh ginger
sesame oil
optional things such as garlic or sesame seeds

Cut tofu into thin slices. You want them to be 1/8 inch thick at the most, and preferably a little thinner. Cut the slices whatever shape you like; we like them in squares or rectangles a couple inches long.

Peel ginger and chop. If you want garlic, chop that too. Use a big piece of ginger the size of your thumb or so.

In a good sauté pan, warm a big slug of sesame oil. Get it pretty hot, then add the tofu pieces in one layer. Fry until golden brown and crispy on one side, then flip and get the other. When the second side is about halfway done crispening, add the ginger and potential garlic. If you want sesame seeds, or maybe some hot pepper sauce like Sriracha, you can add them in here too. Toss things around a bit and continue to cook.

Make sure everything is crispy, then remove from heat. You are done!

What are you going to serve it with? A salad of some sort, to combat the oil with some juicy greens! We used half a head of frisée for ridiculous curly deliciousness. Spinach would also be good, for fake bacon and spinach salad. Torn romaine would be good. I am having trouble thinking of a salad green that would not be good. Just toss the sesame-ginger oil left in the pan over the greens and whack the tofu on top. This way you not only get crispy bacon tofu, but also warm dressing.

You win!

Very cold dairy goodness

John's parents sent us an ice cream maker for collective birthdays. Our next door neighbors, who had received the box and got us to open it as instantly as possible on returning from the airport, pounced on the recipe booklet, looked at one page and announced that we were making fresh strawberry ice cream. Not just strawberry ice cream! FRESH strawberry. They immediately sent a delegation to the store to attain fresh strawberries and cream.

I stayed in the kitchen eating olives and giving my opinion on figs in caramel sauce. My opinion: not very good, since the caramel was thin and the fig skins got really tough. Also the figs get BOILING HOT and coated with molten sugar such that eating one is very much like having a bomb go off in your mouth. Besides, I think figs are better with a counterpoint, like pepper or goat cheese. So let's not go any further into that.

Ice cream is good though!

This is definitely the kind of recipe that puts CREAM CREAM OH SWEET MOTHER OF GOD CREAM in ice cream.

Strawberry ice cream

lots of strawberries
juice of a lemon
sugar
milk
heavy cream
vanilla

Destem and chop the berries. Put them in a bowl with lemon juice and a couple spoonfuls of sugar. Stir it up and leave it to macerate for an hour or two, or however long you can stand. The ice cream unit probably needs time to freeze anyway. Then you can mash some of the berries if you want. The recipe wants you to mash half, but I for one want smooth ice cream with no big ice--I mean fruit--chunks, so I would mash them all.

Put a cup of sugar and a cup and a half of milk in a bowl. Mix them together until the sugar has dissolved. This might take a while; you might want to gently warm the milk to help things along. If you do that, cool it down again before you keep going. Add in TWO AND THREE FOURTHS cups of heavy cream. Jesus! I would almost definitely sub some milk for part of this in future. Also add in the mashed strawberries and a couple shakes of vanilla.

Mix it all up and process in your ice cream machine appropriately. If you had any unmashed strawberries, add them after about 15 minutes. Keep processing until everything is thick and creamy and delicious.

If you don't have an ice cream machine, you can do one of the physical effort methods.

Method 1: Get two sturdy ziploc bags: a large one and a small one. Put ice cream mix into the small bag and seal it securely. Put a mix of ice and rock salt into the large bag, then put the little bag in the middle. Make sure the ice and salt surround the little bag. Seal the big bag securely too, then shake and shake and shake and shake and shake oh my god keep shaking until the mix turns into ice cream.

Method 2: as above, except using a big coffee can and a little coffee can. This way you can kick the can to roll it back and forth between people, making method 2 at least a little less arduous than method 1.

Both of these are handy on camping trips, or if you just don't want an ice cream machine. Neither of them will hold the entire recipe from up there, but it halves easily.

Now have ice cream for dessert. Or have it for dinner. Whatever.

I like my ice cream with hot tea for maximum contrast.

Nonion soupses

Here's one result of going to Victoria: Nigel Slater, half off!

At this point we were no longer in a place with a kitchen, and had been away from our own equipment for nearly two weeks, so we'd started to spend a lot of time fantasizing about what to make when we got home. So we spent almost the entire day of flights home going over and over the book, salivating and making mental ingredient lists.

Then we came home and got the ingredients and made delicious onion soup.

The trick with this one is that you roast the onions first for super-deep caramelization and roasty taste. Then you add wine. John was especially excited because the whole process makes a serious French onion-style soup that does not require beef broth and is thus vegetarian, but also is extremely intensely flavored and delicious.

Roasty onion soup for two peoples

a big yellow onion or 2 medium ones
butter/olive oil
white wine/dry vermouth
veg broth
decent bread, in our case a baguette
gruyere/alternate cheese
salt and pepper

First, roast the onions. Chop them in half, peel them, and stick them in a baking pan with butter or oil and some salt and pepper. Stick it all in the oven. The book was all in metric, indicating that we need to get a kitchen scale if we want to make anything baked. So it said to roast at 200C. Ok, that's about 350F, right? No, more like 400F. It's roasting vegetable temperature, or really making most things temperature. Have you noticed my measuring is a bit slapdash in everything but baking? Sure, and it's fine. So roast at an appropriate roasting temperature.

While they're roasting, consider your broth situation. If you don't have any, make some from your stockpile and whatever decent fresh vegetables are lying around. Five or ten minutes of simmering will get you a decent quick broth. Keep it on the heat, so as to be hot and ready when you need it.

When the onions are all dark, soft, and clearly delicious, take them out of the oven, chop them into big chunks, and stick them into a saucepan. Add the wine, or vermouth if you don't feel like drinking a bottle of wine, heat to a boil, and cook together until the wine has absorbed into the onion/evaporated. You'll be able to tell it's absorbed when the bubbling starts to sound different. Or you could, you know, look into the pot and see. Then add the broth (avoiding the boiled vegetables) and simmer everything together for fifteen or twenty minutes.

During the simmer, it's time to start on bread, or croûtes if you want to be fancy. See, they're bigger than croutons, so they have to be croûtes! Ok, I'm done. Anyway, cut your bread into slices maybe a half-inch thick. They can be a little thicker if you like more squishy bread absorption later. Get enough slices to cover your servings of soup, put them on a cookie sheet, and stick them under the broiler for a few minutes. Keep a close eye out and pull out the tray as soon as they get toasty. Then turn them all over and top them with grated gruyere.

When the soup is done boiling, scoop it into bowls. Cover the bowls with the toast and cheese. Put them on a cookie sheet and get the whole shebang under the broiler. This step works best if the cookie sheet is already on the oven rack: just put on the bowls and slide the rack back. Broil until the cheese is melty and delicious, then remove (using reverse method: slide rack and out and remove bowls with oven mitts) and eat as swiftly as possible.

Try not to burn off the roof of your mouth too hard.

Last glimpse of birthday week

I picked these at the side of the road.

At first we thought "jam!" Ok, actually first we thought "BLACKBERRY EAT BLACKBERRY" and then we thought "jam!"

Guess how much jam got made.

If you guessed "ZERO" you get a gold star.