Cakes cakes pasta cakes

So you know how we eat all kinds of pasta fagioli, so much that I generally don't even bother to write about it, because seriously, how many times can you repeat yourself? Yeah. I made a batch with kale the other day, and we ate it in big bowls, and it was good.

Then the next day we had leftovers. I fried them into pasta cakes.

Don't look like that! It's a well-established fact that frying starchy concoctions into cakes is delicious. We eat potato cakes and rice cakes and risotto cakes when the leftover risotto lasts long enough to get into the frying pan. Why can't we have pasta cakes?

We ate them and they were good.

Pasta cakes

olive oil
leftover fagioli with chunky pasta
anything you want for addenda

Warm a nonstick frying pan to a little about medium. When hot, throw in a little olive oil and tilt to get everything slicked up. Then whack in a few big spoonfuls of leftover fagioli, flattening them slightly with the back of the spoon.

Flip after a few minutes, when the bottom of each cake is golden brown. I had the heat too high at first, so my first batch were more like dark brown. Whatever; it was ok. Cook until the second side is golden brown, flip onto a plate, and eat.

Addenda:
- If you want some parmesan, mix it into the fagioli before frying, or sprinkle some on top of each cake.
- I guess you could also make an actual cheese sauce and pour it over the cakes, but that seems like overkill.
- Mix pieces of roasted red pepper, corn, zucchini, or whatever other vegetable sounds good into the fagioli before you fry it.
- Put chopped parsley or other obvious herbs on top.
- Stack up the cakes with huge slices of grilled eggplant or raw tomato between them. Or pesto. Something.

Instead of doing any of these things, I washed out the pan, stuck the cakes in the oven to keep warm for a few minutes, and made garlic chard.

Garlic chard is easy.

garlic
olive oil
chard
salt

Chop several cloves of garlic in slices while you heat a nonstick pan on medium. Cook the garlic slices in a little oil. The slower you cook them, the more caramelized they'll be; I wanted pretty intact, chewy garlic, so I cooked them on medium.

Separate the chard leaves from the stems and chop each into small pieces. When your garlic is starting to brown, add the stems to the pan with a pinch of salt and cook for a few minutes, letting the juices leach out and keep the garlic from burning. When the stems are just about cooked, add the leaves and stir until wilted.

There you go: garlic chard.

Tofu and veg

I love nigari tofu so much.

Desultory internet research reveals that nigari is mostly magnesium chloride, and is derived from evaporated seawater. How did anyone come up with this? Who said "I bet the minerals in seawater, not all of them, but only a couple, would be good for coagulating tofu!"? Humans and food: so awesome and so weird.

I took my awesome, weird tofu and seared it with soy and sriracha. I also roasted some cauliflower in olive oil. Then we only had to chop up some green onion and dinner was ready.

Seared tofu

nigari tofu
tasteless or peanut oil
soy sauce
sriracha sauce
rice wine vinegar
other seasonings if you want them

This will take about five to ten minutes, so if you want roasted cauliflower, definitely make that first.

Cut your tofu into small cubes or triangles, then pat them with a towel to soak up any excess dampness. Get a nonstick frying pan medium-hot, dribble a bit of oil into it, tilt the pan to spread out the oil, and put in your tofu in one layer. It should sizzle.

Mix up some soy sauce, sriracha sauce, and a little bit of rice wine vinegar in a measuring cup, and pour it over your tofu. You could also add things like minced garlic or shredded ginger if you want. I used maybe 3/4 cup for two servings of tofu. Shake up the pan to get sauce on every piece of tofu, then continue to sear, turning occasionally, until the tofu is browned and a little crispy on all sides.

That is it. Delicious seared tofu! Eat it with snipped green onion and roasted cauliflower.

Roasted cauliflower

a head of cauliflower
olive oil
salt, pepper

Heat the oven to 425 or 450F.

Chop a cauliflower into reasonably small florets. Toss the florets with some olive oil and season with salt (lightly) and pepper (more heavily). Spread the florets on a cookie sheet in one layer and put them into the oven. Roast, checking every five or ten minutes to flip pieces and rotate the pan, until the cauliflower florets have attained crispy dark golden brown bits all over them. This should take something like twenty or 25 minutes.

Then put them in bowls and eat them with your tofu.

If I were changing the seasonings here, I might sear the tofu with a bunch of fresh-squeezed lemon, grapefruit, or orange juice, and wilt some spinach in the pan after the tofu was done. Then I'd squirt what was left of the lemon over the roasted cauliflower. Salt for the spinach. It would be awesome.

Better idea

Use the last bits of the season's first asparagus in scrambled eggs with leftover couscous. Saute asparagus pieces quickly in butter; pour in beaten egg, a little salt, pepper, and couscous; stir frequently over medium-low heat until eggs are cooked through. Eat with assam tea.

The asparagus was perfect. Other vegetables would be good here too, though. I remember making a huge mass of scrambled eggs last summer at Chrissy's in Santa Cruz. The addendum for that one was fresh farmer's market tomato. So you can use vegetables that disintegrate into their juice as well as vegetables that remain stationary. Oh, tomato. Now I suddenly wish the summer veg were out. All the spring stuff will be here soon. It was seventy freaking degrees fahrenheit today, for instance.

I need to remember the grain-in-eggs trick more often. (Not that couscous is actually a grain.) It's a very good idea when your refrigerator otherwise looks like a poorly stocked condiment aisle.

Mixed genre egg rolls

Yeah, you know how I had the season's first asparagus? If you have some, you should just steam it and eat it with butter or olive oil, like I did with the stroganoff. You should not use it as part of a filling for baked egg rolls.

These sound like a good idea at first, and to be honest, they weren't actually that bad. They're just not the Best idea. This mix would have just been much better in straight up stirfry form, and the asparagus would have been much better being just plain asparagus.

Mixed genre egg rolls

nigari tofu
tasteless oil (sunflower)
garlic
red pepper
asparagus
green cabbage
mushrooms
green onion
soy sauce
rice wine vinegar
egg roll wrappers

Sear tofu; quickly cook vegetables; fill and bake rolls.

Tofu: since I had nigari tofu, it was totally firm and in need of no pressing whatsoever. Yay! Cut it into cubes and sear it on all sides in a medium-hot nonstick pan. I may have put a little oil in here to help it along, but no seasoning otherwise. When your tofu is golden brown and has formed a clearly delicious crust, tip it out of the pan and leave it to the side.

Vegetables: basically we're going to stir-fry the veg. I was a little skeptical that this was necessary, so I made one roll with raw veg to compare. It turned out fine and edible, but I think the lightly cooked filling was a little better. It was certainly easier to work with, since cooked vegetables are flexible. Either way should work, though.

Mince garlic and soften on medium-high heat with flavorless oil (or peanut/sesame oil, if you have those around). Chop up your other vegetables and add them to the pan with a splash of soy sauce and a dribble of rice wine vinegar. You could also use teriyaki sauce, or really any sauce you think would work. It's all good. For veg, I had asparagus, red pepper, cabbage, mushrooms, and green onion, but a more traditional cabbage-carrot-etc mix would also clearly be good.

Cook for a few minutes, stirring often, on medium-high heat. You just want the vegetables to wilt a little. This should take less than five minutes. When done, whip the pan off the heat and tip the vegetables into a cool bowl so they won't keep cooking.

Rolls: I totally used a package of Nasoya wrappers. They were pretty easy to work with, and turned out fine. I think next time I would go to an actual Asian market and find a better kind, though. Or, you know, make them myself. Whichever.

For each roll, turn a wrapper so a corner points to you. Arrange a line of tofu and vegetables horizontally across the wrapper, about 2/3 of the way down toward the point. Lift the bottom corner over the filling, then fold in each side and continue to roll. Put your finished roll seam side down on a baking sheet. Keep going until either your filling or your wrappers are used up. I got about eight or nine rolls out of my batch. I also took zero pictures of this process, which is clearly helpful.

Apparently you're supposed to brush baked rolls with some oil before they go into the oven. I forgot, and so ended up eating rolls with dry, powdery skins. The oil would obviously make the finished product better; brush your rolls with oil before baking.

Bake at 350F until crispy and turning golden brown. I turned mine over about ten minutes into the bake. Clearly, you could also deep fry these. Whatever floats your boat.

Eat!

These want sauce. I wanted to have them with Chinese hot mustard so badly. We didn't have any, though, so I had to go for some more soy sauce mixed with sriracha. One of the Thai honey-vinegar sauces, or a peanut sauce, would clearly be good. Maybe it's mixing genres there too, but whatever. As long as it tastes good, I'm happy.

I'm better now.

So I was sick, but not so sick that I couldn't get up and cook at all. John was in Pittsburgh, too, so the ability to stand was necessary and fortunate.

I usually plan some kind of ridiculous cooking while John's gone, if only because I need a project. Usually the food will involve things John hates but I love. This time it was mushrooms and sour cream, in the form of stroganoff.

I guess I could've made beef stroganoff, especially considering the half a pound of ground beef sitting in our freezer patiently waiting for me to have any impulse toward eating it ever again, but no. For one thing, beef stroganoff definitely wants a specific cut: stew beef. That way you can shred it with your fork and get a bunch of chewy strands mixed up with the mushrooms and noodles. I wasn't going to go out and buy stew beef when I already had meat in the freezer. I also wasn't going to make the stuff with ground beef a la my 1972 Betty Crocker that I haven't chucked for some reason.

The real reason, though, is that I've been gradually losing my taste for meat. I certainly haven't lost my taste for mushrooms, though. There.

Mushroom stroganoff

lots of good mushrooms
butter/olive oil
paprika
a couple shallots
veg broth
sour cream/vegan equiv
salt, pepper
fresh parsley if you have it
egg noodles or rice

We're going to sear mushrooms, make an extreme dairy sauce, and serve the whole mix over rice or noodles. Egg noodles are the classic set for stroganoff, so that's what I made. Mine were whole wheat, for elimination of gross processed white flour. If you make noodles, start them about 2/3 of the way through sauce reduction. If you make rice, start it in the rice cooker before anything else.

Ok. Get out your mushrooms. Mine were serious, bulky mushrooms from the farmer's market. I wish I'd had more. I don't know what kind they were, but not portabella: they were tall and pretty uniformly thick from stem to cap, with a huge encrustation of dirt still stuck to the ends. It was clearly necessary to wash them. I ended up cutting off the end of each stem too; there was still a little vermiculite from the cultured mushroom bed stuck in one of them. I thought it was pretty funny. Also, can I just say: how awesome would it be to grow mushrooms at home in a bed of peat and vermiculite? So awesome. I'm going to have to give it some serious thought when I start the this year's batch of vegetables.

Anyway. Wash mushrooms in cool water; rub with your fingers to get all the dirt off. Cut off any seriously encrusted bits. Dry the mushrooms, then cut them into thin slices. Since I had such huge ones, I cut off the stems and sliced them and the caps separately. This was fine. I think I used six big mushrooms; I'd use at least ten or twelve button ones. More is better. I love mushrooms.

Melt some butter in a wide frying pan with reasonably high sides. You could also use a straight up 3-quart pot if your frying pans are all super shallow. Toss in the mushrooms, stir to coat in butter, and lay on the paprika. Since paprika is the main seasoning in stroganoff, use a lot. Get your mushrooms good and coated. Sear, flipping the mushrooms around every once in a while, until they've reduced out their liquid, shrunk down, and gotten a bit of golden brown crust on both sides. Flip the mushrooms out of the pan and set them aside for a few minutes.

Add a little more butter to the pan and let it melt while you chop up a couple shallots. Soften the shallots slowly, over medium-low heat. Maybe season them with a little thyme as well. When they're soft, add a cup or so of sour cream. Stir it up and increase the heat a little. When the sauce begins to simmer, add a couple cups of vegetable broth. Simmer it down for ten minutes or so, letting it thicken gradually. Add the mushrooms, stir it up, and continue to simmer for another five minutes, or until the sauce is as thick as you want it. I left mine a little thin since I was hungry and wanted to eat it. Salt sparingly and pepper voluminously.

Now eat it! Egg noodles, big spoonfuls of stroganoff, lots of snipped parsley if you have it. I didn't have any, but that was fine.

I also had the season's first asparagus, steamed over the noodle pan and buttered. So tiny! So awesome to eat with my hands, using the flower end to scrounge up the stroganoff sauce! I actually ate a bunch of it raw later, with some also raw red pepper and I think hummus. That was an excellent plan. Do it! Tiny tender spring asparagus for the win!