Muttar paneer is good too, you guys.

Usually if we're going to have paneer, we have palak paneer. It's one of the two dishes that get ordered every time we go to an Indian restaurant. (The other one is baigan bhartha.) I am perfectly willing to wash, destem, dry, chop, and squeeze an entire bunch of spinach in order to make it. Sometimes we even make naan to go with it.

This time we had paneer, but no spinach. We did have tomatoes and peas. I went and looked in Madhur Jaffrey's World of the East Vegetarian Cooking to see what I should do with them. With slight variation, I should do this:

Muttar paneer

batch of paneer
defrosted frozen peas
crushed/pureed/chopped tomatoes
olive oil
an onion
an inch knob of ginger
a hot red pepper
turmeric, coriander, salt, pepper
water or whey
rice or naan

First, peel the ginger. Use the spoon trick: take a spoon and scrape the ginger with it. The skin will all come off, and you won't lose too much of your precious precious ginger. Chop it up. Peel and chop a yellow onion as well. Destem and chop a small hot pepper.

Now throw it all in the blender. Add a half cup or so of water. Hit blend. Ha ha! Onion shake!

If you don't have a blender, it will clearly be fine to just chop everything pretty finely. Leave it all on the side for a few minutes.

Warm a big nonstick frying pan, chop paneer into small cubes, and fry in a tiny bit of olive oil. Make sure the bits of paneer are all in one layer, and move them around a lot. You want to make sure none of them get stuck together; since you are frying cheese, this is pretty likely. Get them a good golden brown on all sides, then take them out of the pan and put them aside.

Pour the onion business into the pan and start cooking. If you didn't blend, you can add some water along with your onion mix. Cook, stirring, until the business starts to goldenize. Then add some coriander, a little turmeric, and maybe a cup or a cup and a half of crushed tomato. I used half a big can, since it's winter; in summer you should clearly use real skinned diced tomatoes.

Stir it all together and cook for maybe five more minutes, until the tomatoes and onion etc have had a chance to blend a little. Then add maybe a cup of water (or paneer whey, if you made the paneer yourself and have whey lying around), some salt, and a little pepper, and bring the business to a boil.

Simmer for ten minutes, then add paneer and peas. You want a roughly equal proportion of peas to paneer in a thick tomato sauce to coat. Simmer again until everything is done and tasty.

Eat with rice and naan and nice big cups of tea.

Quest successful.

A few days ago I started having gigantic cravings for refried beans. We make refried black beans pretty often. This time, though, I wanted some serious restaurant blitz, and that meant pinto beans.

I was expecting to have to find some trick to making actual restauranty refried beans. My black beans are always super rough, hard to mash, and filled with chunks of onion and hot pepper and corn besides. I was all ready to experiment for a week to find out how to make this totally different style of beans.

Then I soaked some beans, boiled them, and mashed them in a pan with butter. They suddenly became refried beans. That was it.

All right then!

Real refried beans

pinto beans
water
butter/oil
salt

Soak the beans in twice their depth of water overnight. I generally use about a cup and a half of dry beans.

The next day, dump your beans and water into a big pot with a lid. You can add a bay leaf here if you want. Bring the pot to a boil, cover, and simmer for at least an hour. Longer is good. Get your beans falling-down soft.

When the beans are done, drain them. Heat a big frying pan, melt some butter or oil into it, and add your beans. Start mashing them right away with the back of your spoon or a potato masher. If your beans are soft enough, they'll just melt into a big messy puree.

Add a cup or so of water (or spare broth), stir to blend, and cook on medium high, stirring up bits from the bottom of the pan every few minutes. Keep cooking until the beans are a good texture for you. Mix in a couple pinches of salt. Taste. Are they good? Then you are done.

Things to do with pinto beans:

- make tacos with whatever cheese/salsa/vegetables you want
- use as plain chip dip for instant dinner
- make them a layer in a serious advanced seven-layer dip
- eat with rice and salsa in a big bowl
- put in enchiladas

We were STARVING at about ten at night when the beans were ready, but we decided to take the time to make enchiladas anyway. It was a really, really good idea.

We also cooked the enchiladas and the sauce separately, but it clearly would have been awesome to cook everything all together. If you want to cook things separately, start with enchiladas and make sauce while they're in the oven. If you want to bake the enchiladas in sauce, do it the other way around. Bake the enchiladas in sauce.

Enchiladas with mole

enchiladas:
refried beans
flour tortillas
cheese if you want
sauce

mole sauce:
chili powder
cayenne
cinnamon
marjoram
cumin
water
chocolate
sesame seeds

For sauce: Get out a frying pan, heat it up, and start adding spices. We added a couple good shakes of chili powder, cinnamon, and marjoram, plus a bit less cayenne. John says we didn't add any cumin, but we think that would be good. Add a handful of sesame seeds and start warming everything over medium-low heat.

While spices are toasting, break off a couple squares of good dark chocolate from one of your semisweet baking bars. Chop them into little bits with a big knife. When the spices are nice and fragrant, add the chocolate and maybe half a cup of water. Stir it all together to melt the chocolate and start infusing it with all the spice. Cook slowly for maybe ten minutes, stirring often and adding water if necessary.

For bare-bones enchiladas: Fill tortillas with big spoonfuls of beans. Roll them up and put them in a casserole dish. If you want cheese, put shreds of cheese on top. We had mozzarella, which is not the optimal choice but tasted fine. If you want to cook the enchiladas in sauce, cover them with sauce and handfuls of extra sesame seeds, then bake at around 325 or 350F; otherwise just bake, then top with sauce and seeds afterward. They are done when everything is hot through and smells so good you can't stand to leave it in the oven for one more minute.

Eat voraciously.

Oh hey, we have an ice cream maker.

This weekend our friend Chrissy came up to hang out. Usually in this situation we go out to Cafe Yulong and eat delicious hand-pulled spinach noodles, ma po tofu, many potstickers, and copious tea. During or around dinner we get an idea for the best dessert ever. Then, on the way home, we go to the store to acquire dessert ingredients and wine. In this case, the dessert of choice was grapefruit sorbet.

Fruit sorbets are so easy it's unbelievable: they're essentially made from sweetened juice. You don't even necessarily need an ice cream machine, as long as you're ok with a slightly different texture in the finished product. That was good, since our machine bowl turned out not to have been in the freezer long enough to work. So instead we finished freezing the sorbet business in a plain container, then used a fork to tear it into a pile of snow-coney crumbles. We used grapefruit, but you could clearly do this with practically any fruit for which you have a reasonable fresh or juice supply. Just adjust any necessary acid content with some lemon or lime, and you're set.

You really want this stuff in August, but February in California is close enough.

Grapefruit sorbet

water
sugar
good grapefruit juice
a good grapefruit (or several)

First, make a simple syrup. Put maybe half a cup of water in a pot, set it over high heat, and bring it to a simmer. Then start throwing in spoonfuls of sugar, stirring well to dissolve. You can make the syrup as saturated as you want; we used around 1/3 to 1/2 cup of brown sugar, which produced a dark brown highly fragrant syrup. It worked well to sweeten the sorbet, but didn't add any undue molasses flavor. I would probably use a honey-based syrup for grapefruit in the future.

When the sugar is all dissolved, the syrup is done; set it aside to cool.

Cut and juice as many grapefruits as you want, straining out the seeds and any unwanted pulp. We used one. I had originally thought to get all the juice from fruit, which would probably have required at least six or so grapefruit. Using good straight uncut juice works just fine. I would still add juice from at least one fresh grapefruit (or another citrus, if you want to add other flavors) to get the sorbet as intense as possible.

Mix your squeezed juice and pulp with standard juice to make about six cups of liquid. Then add simple syrup to sweeten as much as you like. We didn't measure at all; just taste the mix to see if it's good to your palate.

Cool the liquid completely.

Now you have a choice. You can put the business in an ice cream machine and process it until done, or you can pour it into containers and freeze it as-is, occasionally stirring the freezing contents with a fork. The machine will clearly produce a more standard smooth sorbet, while the container method will make an icier end product. Both will taste great. Actually, I seem to remember a third freezer method that John Thorne wrote about: you can freeze it in a ziplock bag, then take the bag out the the freezer and mush it about every once in a while.

When it's frozen, eat it for dessert. Maybe throw some crushed and minced mint leaves over it, or half a cup of dry white wine. Or drizzle some melted chocolate over it and eat it like that. Or have it as a palate cleanser between course seven and eight of your grand ridiculous 12-course dinner party.

We ended up leaving our business in the freezer overnight and eating it for brunch dessert the next morning. It's pretty much frozen juice anyway. A good brunch requires citrus.

Things I am willing to show you during bad food week

- Black bean and millet burgers with homemade barbecue sauce baked into them; half a head of butter lettuce.

- Artichoke hearts sautéed in olive oil with garlic, to be mixed with vermicelli and zucchini and eaten two days straight with asiago cheese.

- Oatmeal made with oats, salt, and water; chopped apples; the spider plant I potted that morning.

Nothing, nothing

OK, one thing: apparently "spring" also means "some form of edible tomato is available". Bizarre! But when I went over to the Milk Pail the other day, there was a huge vat of historically good grape tomatoes. I took them home, where they proved actually good and I had a hard time not just standing there stuffing my face until the bag was empty.

We also needed dinner, though, so I controlled myself. I made cheater pizza, aka "the pita trick", this one made even more cheater by the lack of sauce.

Cheater pizza

pita bread
olive oil
garlic
decent tomatoes
various vegetables
parsley/basil/etc
cheese if you want it

Arrange your crustal devices. If you want thin crust, gently separate the two halves of each pita. If you want medium crust, do nothing. Spread your pita bits out on appropriate baking sheets and brush with some olive oil. Thinly slice some garlic cloves and distribute them around each pita. Then thinly slice your tomatoes. Mine turned into tiny wedgy bits. Arrange them as well.

Everything else on the pita is totally up to you. I made a couple different kinds: one layered with all the mushrooms in the refrigerator, one entirely covered with wide rings of red pepper, and one with a lot of very thin slices of jalapeño. Then I added torn parsley and some crumbly slices of asiago cheese. You can put on anything you like.

Stick everything in a 375 or 400F oven for ten or fifteen minutes. Check occasionally against burning or other issues; rotate the pan if you need to.

When everything is crisp and crunchy, and the cheese (if any) is golden brown, you are done. Take them out and eat them. Be happy you had the energy to make any dinner at all, even sad snacky dinner. Then spend the rest of the night reading books and being cozy.