Ol' reliable: seared tempeh salad

We are finally really eating like ourselves again. I feel much better.

This is a salad with seared marinated tempeh. Flatly, it is my favorite way to eat tempeh. Yes, tempeh bacon is wonderful and makes excellent sandwiches. I like tempeh BLTs, but I really like my salad.

(Actually, it's our friend Ryan's salad.)

Ol' reliable

tempeh
soy sauce
olive oil
white wine vinegar
hot sauce
garlic
salad greens
carrots
green onion
mushrooms

First, marinate the tempeh.

For marinade: get a big bowl and in it mix roughly equal amounts of soy sauce and olive oil. Add a slightly lesser amount of vinegar. I had white wine vinegar but red wine, rice wine, or apple cider should work fine. Then add hot sauce to taste. I only have a dinky little bottle of 79 cent hot sauce right now, so I used that instead of the usual sriracha. Crush and mince a couple cloves of garlic, then add them to the marinade. Whisk everything together with a fork.

I don't measure these, since their amounts depend pretty heavily on the amount of tempeh you have. Maybe start with 1/4 cup soy and oil and go from there. It's not that big a deal, honestly, since you can always add in more liquid. I definitely added more halfway through the marinating process, when it became clear that my tempeh had drunk up all the initial liquid like a raging alcoholic.

You can also add anything else you think might be good in a marinade. Fresh chopped ginger is an excellent idea. Ryan always added fresh rosemary, too, which is pretty great. You can't just walk up the street and pick rosemary off the neighbor's hedge in Brooklyn, though. Of course the north has its own distinct foraging opportunities.

Cut your tempeh into pieces maybe 1 inch square, put them into the marinade, and stir it up to get some liquid contact on each piece. I had some exciting new tempeh with flax seeds embedded in it, which was awesome. It's fine if the marinade doesn't cover all your tempeh; in fact, I think it's better, since you won't have to pour anything down the drain later. Just remember to stir things up every twenty minutes or so: that way the marinade can soak in on all sides.

I left my tempeh to marinate for about two hours, but less (or more) is ok. I think you'd be good all the way back to about 45 minutes.

When you're ready to cook, warm a saute pan big enough to fit your tempeh in one layer. Add some olive oil, tip in the tempeh, and sear, shaking and flipping fairly often, until the tempeh is lovely and brown and fragrant and the garlic has turned into chewy caramelized bits. I only had a tiny bit of marinade left, so I added it to the pan. If you have a lot left, you might want to strain and refrigerate it to reuse later.

While things are searing, wash and chop your salad vegetables. I used spinach and frisee for the greens, plus chopped baby carrots, mushrooms, and a tiny bit of green onion. I think this combination works well, especially when you combine sweet carrots with bitter inner leaves of frisee. Almost anything you want in a salad should be fine, though. Radishes, for instance: ++. If you want a particularly springy salad, do radishes, chopped snow peas, lots of sprouts and sunflower seeds. If you want a fally salad, roast some squash or beets and pumpkin seeds and add those. Whatever you have will work.

Arrange the salad business on plates, top with the finished tempeh, and eat.

I had red grapefruit juice.

One of the best things about a dinner like this is that when you eat as much as you want, you feel good.

Spicy mashy sweet potato

Or: one item we will be having for orphans' thanksgiving this year.

Sweet potatoes are generally softer than white potatoes, so they don't need addenda to create the right texture. My addenda are all for taste.

Strangely enough, the taste in question is not "pure sugar". Those horrible marshmallow-covered things! Ugh! I mean, I do like an occasional sweet potato pie, but as a dessert, not a vegetable. "Occasional" here means "I think I last had one when I worked at the Produce Station in Ann Arbor six or seven years ago". One of the local farmer's marketeers had gotten us to carry her homemade hand pies. Those things were so good.

I guess I have to make a sweet potato pie sometime soon. In the meantime, I spiced my sweet potatoes with garlic and ginger and whipped them into a pile of spicy orange deliciousness.


Mashed sweet potato with garlic and ginger

sweet potato/yam
olive oil
garlic
fresh ginger
salt, pepper

Put a pot of water on the back burner and bring it to a boil. While it's coming up, peel your sweet potatoes and dice them into bits. I used one big sweet potato for a gargantuan 1-person dinner serving. In the future I think I'd make more, just for leftovers: how awesome would garlic-ginger sweet potato cakes be?

When the water comes to a boil, add your potatoes, lid the pot, and simmer until they're soft. I think mine took about twenty minutes. Dicing, incidentally, makes the potato bits cook faster; big chunks of potato will take a lot longer. Thank you, physics!

While the potatoes are boiling, smash and mince a bunch of garlic. Peel a hunk of ginger with the edge of a spoon , then mince it up too. I used six or seven cloves of garlic and a thumb-sized chunk of ginger. You can use more or less depending on spice tolerance and etc.

Warm several glugs of olive oil in a saute pan. I think you could also get away with using some peanut oil here, if you want a peanut element. Or maybe toasted sesame oil. Anyway. Throw your garlic and ginger into the pan and soften them on medium heat.

When the potatoes are done and the garlic-ginger mix is golden brown and smells so good you have to restrain yourself from a headlong dive into the pan, it's time to mash. Drain the potatoes, dump them into the saute pan, salt and pepper the business, and mash everything together. You can also add a little more oil after you take everything off the heat, especially if you want a specific bit of raw olive/etc oil flavor.

That's it. Eat it.

Clearly you could spice sweet potatoes with a number of other items if you are not into garlic and ginger. On the other hand, how could you possibly not be into garlic and ginger?

- Cayenne and honey, with or without butter: toast cayenne in a pan, then add honey, let it get liquid, and mash it into your potatoes. Butter or oil will give you some barrier against burning your mouth off.
- A ton of fresh chopped uncooked parsley.
- Maybe something in the fennel/star anise category. I think I would do this one with big slices roasted together, though. Oh: a TART.
- Apples and onions, like I wrote about before. You could whack them whole on top of the sweet potatoes, or puree the whole business together.
- For that matter, pear and toasted walnut or pecan, shallot optional: tiny crispy bits on top of the soft potato.
- Or dried cranberries or cherries, soaked in water and then just steamed hot. I would do toasted pecans here too. There's my sweet potato pie.

Pasta fagioli for new apartment

So. On November 1st, we finally got all our things delivered. WE HAVE A FUNCTIONING APARTMENT. We have pans! Knives that can actually cut things! Cupboards in which to place food and other objects!

Here is our first serious cooked dinner in our NEW APARTMENT.

You may notice that this is nearly exactly the same as various other fagiolis I have made, or even the cranberry beans I made a couple weeks ago. To you I say: it is still delicious, and also who cares. Who cares? It was what we wanted to celebrate being in our new apartment where we live. Also, beans and pasta are awesome.

Pasta fagioli with red pepper.

garlic
olive oil
jalapeno/other hot pepper
red pepper
I used a can of white beans but you can use soaked/boiled ones
ditalini/other smallish or tubey pasta
vermouth/wine/cooking alcohol of some type
salt, pepper
fresh parsley

Start some water boiling for the pasta! Put salt and a glob of olive oil in it! Bring it to a boil whilst doing everything else!

Ahem.

Warm some olive oil in a frying pan, then add as much minced smashed garlic as you want. I used something like eight or ten cloves, because I think garlic is awesome and also because we don't have a spice cabinet yet. Garlic!!

Also mince a hot pepper, or as much of it as you can stand, and add it to the garlic and oil. Chop up a red pepper and add it too. Cook everything slowly so it gets soft and caramelized.

Give it about ten minutes before you add your white beans. I had no presoaked/etc beans, due to immediate post-moving status, so I used a drained can of white beans instead. Add your white beans, plus a cup or so of water, and bring the business to a simmer. You can simmer this for as long as the pasta takes to cook. Cook the pasta.

Stir up the bean mix. Keep adding water as needed if your beans get too dry during cooking.

When the pasta has been boiling for at least five minutes, add a splash of any cooking alcohol you want to the bean mix, stir it, and let it cook off. We only had Jameson's, so that's what I used. I know. No one should use Jameson's for cooking, only for sipping. It made some really good fagioli, though. Oh man.

While everything is on the stove, rip as many parsley leaves as you can stand off their stems. Chop them up and have them ready.

When everything is done, drain the pasta and take the beans and etc off the heat. You want the beans to be at least a little liquid, but it'll depend on your preferences. Add a bunch of chopped parsley to your beans and mix them up. I put about 2/3 of mine in to get pureed, then added the rest for garnish.

I like fagioli with pureed beans, so I attack everything with my stick blender. You can do that, or you can roughly mash the beans with the back of a spoon or fork. Then add your drained pasta, salt and pepper, mix it all up, and eat.

Lots of pepper is really good with these. We had ours with spinach salad, i.e. washed, chopped raw spinach with no dressing, eaten from a bowl with our fingers. Oh man, nutrients! We've been living off restaurant food and halfass fake kitchen concoctions! FOOD.

WIN

It seems a little sacrelicious to talk about ANYTHING but election results today, but I just have to also say: WE HAVE A KITCHEN.

What's that thing over there?

IT'S A GAS STOVE.

SO many reasons never to move back to gas-line-breaking earthquake country. Well, only a couple, really. 1. earthquakes 2. no gas stoves.

Oh, my precious gas stove. My pots and pans. MY KNIVES.

I think very few people who don't cook understand about knives. It has been torment to use the crappy temp housing knives for the past month and a week.

My things. My ability to cook.

Also my precious, precious civil liberties.

Last night we ate a full bag of smartfood popcorn waiting for the results. We blew the champagne cork into the ceiling at eleven. We had a phenomenal amount of jumping around in the street, high-fiving strangers driving past, screaming and crying and screaming and eventually singing the national anthem at the top of our lungs at one in the morning.

Fried rice for a nonexistent kitchen

You guys, I'm sorry. I haven't been cooking anything. We are now in our second bout of corporate housing, with our second woefully underequipped kitchen. Tomorrow the movers are Finally supposed to bring our things, so we can Finally start doing things like "rebuying an entire spice cabinet". I need to look for a place to get bulk spices in NYC, yes I do.

In the meantime we've been eating takeout pizza. We've been eating free food from John's work. We've been eating a whole lot of Sabra hummus, the best kind of storebought hummus on the planet, and carrots and pita.

Also, my camera batteries are dead.

The last thing I cooked was a couple days ago. I had a pot of brown rice to go through, and some chard starting to wilt in the crisper, and two eggs and butter. So I made myself a bowl of fried rice for lunch. It was actually really good, but as mentioned, no camera. It was one of the first things I made in several days that actually was good. Of course this meant that I spilled a good chunk of it on the floor before I could eat any of it, but I had the rest, and that was good.

Emergency spiceless fried rice

cooked brown rice
eggs
chard/other wiltable greens
butter
water
salt

First chop a big handful of chard leaves into little pieces. Use as much as you want to eat. I recommend lots of chard since it is delicious, full of iron, and liable to shrink in the pan like spinach. If you want to use the stems, chop them into little pieces too, and cook them before you add the leaves. I just used the greens.

Stick the chard in a frying pan with a couple big splashes of water. Put the lid on, turn the heat to medium-low, and steam that chard. This should take two or three minutes for leaves, and maybe five for stems.

When the chard is pretty wilty, add your rice and a chunk of butter and stir. I used a couple big spoonfuls of rice; you can do as much or as little as you want. Cook for a few minutes, until the rice is hot.

Crack your eggs into a bowl, whisk them, and pour them into the pan. I used my two eggs for me. Cook until the egg is set, stirring throughout. This should take another three minutes or so.

When everything is cooked, add a sprinkle of salt, then eat.

Be happy that you are eating real food containing iron instead of a warmed up slice of pizza with canned mushrooms on it.