BAGEL!

For the first time in weeks, we've had a whole bag of bagels in the house. This clearly leads to LUNCH PARTY.

I toasted a sesame bagel and ate it with cream cheese, red bell pepper, green onion, leaf lettuce, and black pepper. YEAH!!

Winter is awesome: roasted cauliflower and carrot

Want to cram more delicious winter vegetables in your maw? Me too!

We have been all about the cauliflower lately, so I took one of the two in the refrigerator, cored it, and chopped it into pieces. Yes, we had two cauliflowers--what's wrong with that? There are two of us!

I scrubbed, trimmed, and chunked up three or four carrots before mixing them with the cauliflower. Then I tossed everything with red wine-dijon vinaigrette, spread all the veg evenly in two baking dishes (our regular casserole dish was too small), and threw it all into the 375F oven for about 40 minutes.

Voila: plenty of tasty roasted veg with satisfying crispy brown edges! Eat it with:
- A big vat of stew or soup of your choice.
- A tasty savory sloppy joe-style sandwich, of either a meaty or a lentily variety.
- Baked bbq tofu or tempeh. Bonus: cook everything at once!
- A roast, if you eat, you know, roasts. Double cook everything at once bonus!

YEAH!

5 years

Does everyone have David Bowie firmly in their heads now? Ok then.

Yes! So today is the official 5th anniversary of Ham Pie Sandwiches. TIME FOR CAKE--except I actually didn't make any cake. Instead, gaze in wonder upon my lunch!

I toasted some sourdough bread (baked by the lovely Veronica) with honey mustard, red pepper, cremini mushrooms, green onion, salami (on one of two slices), havarti with dill, and cracked pepper. On the side we have a fuji apple, clearly sliced before I put my sandwich business into the toaster oven, but delicious nonetheless.

I think this is a completely appropriate way to celebrate five years of normal, achievable food, don't you?

Everybody likes gratin

The gratin dish has quickly become our favorite thing ever. The best part is that it's HUGE and thus holds enough content to create actual leftovers. We have been making and eating every gratin in the land, most notably chard and cauliflower.

On this particular occasion, we were making pasta puttanesca--i.e. with a simple tomato and olive sauce--for dinner. This is fine and all, but it's fairly plain. So, to dress it up, we threw the finished & sauced pasta in the gratin dish, scattered a mixture of breadcrumbs, cheese, and herbs over the top, and baked it at 375F for about a half hour.

Clearly, the crispy business on top is the best part of any gratin. In fact, you can use it to transform practically anything reasonably bakeable--such as the aforementioned pasta--into a pan of glorious deliciousness. Go forth!

Crispy crunchy gratin topping

breadcrumbs (or just finely chopped bread)
olive oil
cheese
salt, pepper
various seasonings, herbs, or vegetables

Essentially, we just want to finely chop (or grate, or blitz in ye olde food processor) everything, mix it all together, then spread it over a pan of whatever it is you want to gratinée.

The proportions here are almost totally up to you. I like to start with a more or less equal ratio of breadcrumbs to cheese, but it's also totally fine to go for lots of breadcrumbs and only the tiniest bit of cheese, or a lot of cheese and only a few breadcrumbs. Then you can add a whole lot of different herbs or seasonings, or you can leave them out entirely. It's all about using (or using up) whatever you have on hand.

So. Mix your desired amount of breadcrumbs with your desired amount of grated cheese. I usually make my own breadcrumbs by chopping up any stale (or not stale) ends of bread I have lying around. You can use nearly any kind of cheese you want. Obvious grating cheeses like parmesan and romano work well, but so do gruyere, emmenthaler, white cheddar, and gouda. If you want to crumble in some blue cheese or feta instead of grating anything, go for it. It all depends on what you have and the particular flavor combination you're going for.

Mix a drizzle of olive oil or melted butter with the crumbs and cheese. Use just enough oil to moisten everything slightly. Season with a tiny bit of salt (be careful here, since cheese is salty) and several good grinds of pepper.

At this point, you can chop and add whatever else you like to season the gratin mixture. We decided to add some fresh parsley, a handful of green olives, and a couple cloves of garlic. Other things that might be good: chopped shallot or green onion, any other herbs you like, some paprika or hot pepper flake, a spoonful of pesto or tapenade, or some roasted red pepper or sun-dried tomatoes. You could do a red pepper and shallot crumb for a pan of baked macaroni and cheese, a black olive and basil crumb for cauliflower gratin, a feta and sun-dried tomato crumb for a dish of zucchini and eggplant, or a simple cheddar crumb for a dish of scalloped potatoes. Anything goes as long as it sounds good to you.

Now spread your gratin topping lovingly over your dish of food, stick it in the oven (on a cookie sheet if there's any danger of overflow), and bake it. The temperature and timing will vary depending on what you're making, but it's generally reasonable to start out at 350 or 375F and check for progress after about half an hour.

The completed gratin will be beautifully browned, crispy, and fragrant on top, and hot, bubbling and moist underneath. Hooray! Complementary textures for the win!

Lemon cardamom oat bars--er, loaf.

Last night, after a large and virtuous dinner of an Ol' Reliable and a bowl of vinaigrette-roasted cauliflower and carrots, I made a batch of (never home)maker's lemon cardamom oat bars.

I had been scoping these out for a few days, since they looked so easy and sounded so good. However, I was a little suspicious because they require no oil or butter whatsoever. Of course, I only noticed this after I had already started mixing up ingredients. At that point I said "well, let's see how they turn out," finished mixing, spread my batter into a parchment-papered loaf pan (we have no 8x8 pan and probably never will, considering how long we've managed without one), and threw it into a 350F oven. Verdict: they turned out well, but were just slightly dry. I may try adding a spoonful of applesauce or labneh to the batter next time.

We had whole cardamom pods instead of ground and an actual lemon instead of a bottle of juice, so the first order of business was creating ground cardamom and lemon juice. I bashed the seeds out of four cardamom pods with a mortar & pestle, fished out the husks, and ground the aforementioned seeds coarsely. I tore off a quarter of a lemon and squeezed the juice out through my fingers, catching the seeds in my palm.

Then I mixed those with an egg and half a cup of maple syrup, and added in the dry ingredients. I never mix the dry and wet ingredients separately, so I threw the 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1 tsp salt, 1 cup rolled oats and 1 cup flour straight into the bowl of wet, mixing once after the oats and again after the flour. The resulting batter was a little thick, but still pretty easy to press into the pan with the back of my spatula.

Even with all the cardamom-bashing, this was one of the fastest recipes ever! For once it did indeed take me less than the oven preheating time to completely finish a batter. Usually I end up running all over the kitchen putting ingredients back right after I've used them. This time, even though I did clean a little as I went, I was entirely done by the time the oven beeped. NICE.

Since I was using a loaf pan, I ended up baking these for a little over the required time--more like 35 minutes. The result was a panful of super-fragrant oat business, which was tasty as is but even better with apricot jam. I have a feeling it would be extra super plus good with some labneh or Greek yogurt. Maybe I should actually go and get some of that within the next, uh, day. Otherwise the whole pan of delicious business is going to be gone.