Good Luck Salad

I couldn't think of anything for dinner tonight. I felt like I had to come up with something spectacular for the sake of the blog, but since this is a blog about real life, then those nights when I can't think of damn thing for dinner get included. Even take-out will be included. So there.

By the way, when do you decide what to make? Sometimes I have an idea in my head all day. Sometimes I don't get inspired until 5:00. Other times, like tonight, I got nothing. In which case there is nothing to do but surrender gracefully:

No shame in frozen pizza. And by the way, have you tried Trader Joe's Tarte d'Alsace? Actually, correction, it's not a Trader Joe's branded product, but they sell it there. It's made by Maitre Pierre but it is delicious—flatbread with gruyere cheese, ham and caramelized onions. Pandagirl will eat a whole one herself. So will I.

And speaking of Panda, she came up with the idea of making Good Luck Salad tonight, so we will be joined by my lovely sous-chef.  In her lovely panda hat.

My delicious friend Claudia taught me about Good Luck Salad, which is traditional New Year's fare in the south. We're pretty addicted to it up North here and eat it at any given opportunity, which is why my pantry is always stocked with black-eyed peas and hominy.

Good Luck Salad

Mix all. Serve. Die.

And voila, an excellent accompaniment to your frozen pizza on a night such as tonight, and a perfect dish for your aspiring young cook to put together. 

My mother did this to me...

....Which in the realm of the kitchen, is not a bad thing. There are some things which my kitchen will never lack: Knorr's chicken bouillon cubes because they save your ass in so many ways. Coconut milk because it is essential to my favorite soup and to coconut rice. Beans, because as Laurie Colwin said, a house without canned beans is a house that is not stocked for emergency. And fresh bread crumbs.

Yes, fresh bread crumbs. My mother did this to me. She taught me to make meatloaf and meatballs and breaded this-or-that and indoctrinated me into the importance of fresh bread crumbs. Therefore, once or twice a year, you will see me arrive home from the grocery store with what looks like provisions for a barbecue:

Just regular old hot dog and hamburger buns.  El cheapo.  On sale is ideal.  Into the food processor they go, and after being crumbified, right back into the bags and into the freezer.

Since this is a blog and since this is real life, I timed the entire operation as well as taking pictures. It takes eleven (11) minutes from opening the bags to putting the Cuisinart pieces into the dishwasher. Possibly less because you will not be pausing to take pictures.

Want to see what else my mother did to me? Check it out:

Know what that is? No, it's not pot, ha ha, very cute. That is fresh chopped parsley. My mother taught me to buy bunches of it, wash it, dry it, de-stem it, whirl it up in the Cuisinart, bag it and freeze it. And now, damn it, I can't be without it. I am a parsley whore. I put it in everything. The process takes much longer (it's the de-steming part, you could go crazy) but to me it's just one of those things that's worth it. Mom also taught me to chop and freeze dill but I abandoned that practice after a few years and decided dried dill was good enough for me. But scallions, surprise, freeze really well. Chop them up, throw them in a bag and next time you're making Mexican food or Black Bean Soup or anything else where you think, Damn I wish I had some scallions... You do! Grab the bag and throw them right in. Bam. You're a genius.

(Did I say parsley whore?  Really?)

Ricotta Cheese: How easy was that?

Ina Garten, I love thee. I kiss your bare feet. Maybe not. Anyway I heard you on the radio last month (for Leonard Lopate's interview on WNYC click here) talking about your new book Barefoot Contessa: How Easy Is That? And you started talking about homemade ricotta cheese. Leonard sniffed at the idea, wondering if it were too much trouble, and you gave him a gracious smackdown, distilling the process into three stupidly simple steps. You mentioned you had taught Nora Ephron (I love thee, Nora, I miss you so so much) how to do it and she called you later and said she'd made ricotta cheese four times in one week. I was sold. I had to try this.

Ina Garten's Homemade Ricotta Cheese

  • 4 cups whole milk
  • 2 cups heavy cream
  • 1 teaspoon kosher salt
  • 3 tablespoons good white wine vinegar (I wasn't sure what she meant by good, I assumed that it should cost more than 99 cents. I bought Star because I like the shape of the bottle. We're not going for refined here, folks)
  • Cheesecloth (you don't eat it but you'll need it on your shopping list, unless you are one of those refined kinds who has cheesecloth to hand in your kitchen.)

Did you know that a quart of milk such as pictured above has exactly 4 cups? And that size of heavy cream has exactly 2 cups? I didn't either. Now we know.

Set a large sieve over a deep bowl. Dampen 2 layers of cheesecloth with water and line the sieve with the cheesecloth.

Pour the milk and cream into a saucepan, stir in the salt. Bring to a full boil over medium heat, stirring occasionally.

Turn off the heat and stir in the vinegar. Allow the mixture to stand for 1 minute until it curdles. It will separate into the thick parts (the curds) and the milky parts (the whey)

Pour the mixture into the cheesecloth-lined sieve and allow it to drain into the bowl at room temperature for 20 to 25 minutes, occasionally discarding the liquid that collects in the bowl (and occasionally jiggling the cheesecloth so you can see that yes, you really really have made cheese!). The longer you let it stand, the thicker the ricotta. Transfer the cheese to a bowl. Taste it immediately because you won't believe how good it is. Use immediately or cover and refrigerate up to 5 days.

So? (Or as my friend Debbie would say, Nu?)

DELICIOUS!!!!

Easy? Totally. Worth it?  Oh yeah. Complaints? Well, in regards to "occasionally discarding the liquid in the bowl", you really do end up pouring a lot of your milk and cream down the sink which seems like such a waste. I'm sure there's something you can do with whey although I'm forever biased by Laura Ingalls Wilder, who tasted the whey in Little House in the Big Woods and didn't like it.

So what do you do with this stunning bit of dairy deliciousness? Ina's idea was to mix the ricotta with herbs and make little bruschettas. So I did just that.  Ina's recipe was to blend in minced scallions, fresh dill and fresh chives.  I only had scallions, dried dill, and chopped parsley so I mixed that up. I toasted my bread, drizzled with olive oil, spread the cheese on......and ate three of them. Myself. Without sharing.

Besides the bruschetta, I have been sneaking spoonfuls of this out of the fridge, my daughter eats it on any available cracker, and tonight we put it in panzarella. Totally totally delicious and yes, stupid easy. Who knows, maybe I'll become one of those refined types who has cheesecloth to hand in my kitchen.

Coconut Rice

Long time ago, in a kitchen far away, Martha Stewart Living had an article about Jamaican jerk chicken, which I'm not a huge fan of. The article also featured Jamaican rice and peas, and that looked very very interesting because it was made with coconut milk. She was going for a sweeter, milder version of the dish to counter the spiciness of the jerk.

We love rice and beans as a side dish at my house, so I tried her version. It was delicious—the coconut milk really made it something special—but a little labor intensive for a weekday (click here for the recipe).

The next time I reached for a bag of Vigo black rice and beans, I decided to apply Martha's twist. Rice and bean mixes usually call for 3 1/4 cups of water. I used a can of lite coconut milk which is right about 2 cups, and then topped off with water. Instead of butter or olive oil, I used coconut oil. A huge success and now I make packaged rice and beans no other way.

One night as I was making this, our Horizon Meat delivery man Tony showed up at the door. It was cold and it was late and he's a great guy so while he was chatting up Jeeps I put a couple spoonfuls of rice and beans into a ramekin and brought it over to him. His eyes lit up, he took a bite and then his eyes got even bigger.  

"There's coconut milk in here! How do you know to use coconut in rice and beans?"  

I was shocked that he'd picked that up right away and he told us his ex-wife was West Indian. This was the only way he knew rice and beans to taste, he was just shocked that, pardon him, a white girl would know. It was a good laugh and some nice validation.

I'll use coconut milk to make plain rice as well. After a lot of trial and error, I find that it's best to use more liquid than you typically would when making regular rice, more of a 3 parts liquid/1 part rice ratio. I also add a tablespoon of coconut oil because it's just so damn good. The rice will be very creamy, almost sticky. If you wish, grate in some lime zest before serving.

If you have leftover coconut rice, or any kind of rice for that matter, try mixing it with an egg and some chopped scallions, parsley or cilantro. Form into patties and fry in olive oil until golden on both sides.   Quick and delicious with a salad or soup.

How do you have time to read? Read a little book.

I don't watch TV. Yeah, I said it. TV doesn't appeal to me much so most nights you can find me with my nose in a book.

I often think I'd like to be held hostage in a library. Most of the books you'll find here are not the latest best-sellers. I figure everyone is reading those.  I do check the "new fiction" section of the library but what I really love to do is trawl the stacks looking for treasure. Plus, a stack book can be checked out for three weeks instead of just one. My library late fine rap sheet is something to be discussed on another post.

Today, I give you a list of little books. By "little" I mean at my last trip to North Salem Library, I searched the stacks looking for books that were little.  Short in stature. Diminutive. I think it's an interesting publishing decision to print and bind a book that's small (and maybe somebody in the business can comment on that?). Their smallness gives them presence on the shelf. They are charming before you open a page. They fit well in a purse. They are not intimidating. They make you think, "I have time for this."

Lily and Looking After Lily by Cindy Bonner

The cover illustration drew me in to this wild west love story, and I confess I'm a sucker for cowboys. Based on true events surrounding a vigilante posse that went after a band of outlaw brothers in post Civil War Texas, Lily introduces us to the motherless Lily DeLony. Living on her father's farm and raising her younger brothers and sisters, she herself has been raised to be god-fearing and good. But she is inexplicably and irrevocably drawn to Marion "Shot" Beatty, one of the infamous Beatty brothers whose misdeeds of robbery and even murder are well-known but never proven. Lily tells her side of the story at a Christmas Eve shoot-out that sends her running from her family and into Shot's world with a pistol in her skirt pocket, never looking back. 

Looking After Lily continues the story, this time from the point of view of Shot's younger brother Haywood. Just twenty years old, Haywood is charged with looking after the now-pregnant Lily while Shot serves hard time in jail. The two make an unlikely but resilient pair of survivors as time after time Haywood tries to settle Lily and go out on his own adventure, but his misadventures bring him time after time back to Lily and the promise he made to Shot. In the end the brother- and sister-in-law find a place to settle together and wait for Shot and it's then that Haywood faces the fact that he has grown to love the courageous Lily.

Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice, and The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye: Five Fairy Stories, by A. S. Byatt

I got hooked on A.S. Byatt with her novel The Children's Book, but fell in love with these two little books of her short stories. Or rather, I should say they are intelligent fairy tales for adults. They are full of her gorgeous language and imagery.  "Cold" in Elementals was by far my favorite: a tale of an ice princess who falls in love with a prince of the desert, an inventor and genius glass-blower. She leaves the environment in which she flourishes and travels to her husband's land where she wilts in despair. But her husband designs a new palace for her, in essence creating ice with the power of fire. 

The title story in Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye gives a modern look at the three wishes bestowed on a British woman by a genie (djinn) in a bottle of Turkish nightingale glass.

 

The Holy Man by Susan Trott

Insomnia can take credit for this little book by Susan Trott which Kirkus Reviews calls "gently profound." Instead of counting sheep, Trott counted pilgrims on their way to visit a renowned Holy Man who lives in a hermitage in a place never really identified although the Tibetan mountains come to mind. It hardly matters. In thirty-four lovely chapters we meet the Holy Man, his fellow monks at the hermitage, and the pilgrims who line up every day for a chance to see him. Each interaction between pilgrim and Holy Man is witty, human, charming and yes, gently profound. And I was happy to find out that this is actually the first book in a trilogy, to be followed by The Holy Man's Journey and The Holy Woman.

 

The Mirror by Lynn Freed

Agnes LaGrange gives today's modern woman a run for her money. In 1920 she flees an unpromising future and arrives in Durban, South Africa to be housekeeper to a gentleman she refers to as "the Old Jew." He presents her with a mirror, along with his advances, and regarding their reflections in the mirror she falls in love with the power of her own beauty. Armed with ambition and no thought for social mores of the day, she rises from housekeeper to hotel owner, acquiring property and wealth and a string of lovers. Freed paints a portrait of a not exactly likable character, but as a woman of her day refusing to be dependent on a man for her happiness and self-worth, Agnes deserves admiration.

I'm going home with a what?!

Friends of ours have a month-old baby and regularly post pictures to their website. Jeeps and I were looking at them last night and among them was that classic picture of mom and dad leaving the hospital with the newborn in the carseat. Remember that?

This is a universal moment of new parenthood which only happens with your first child. You remember it. You dressed the baby, which took half an hour. You put the baby in the carseat, which took another half hour. You signed miscellaneous papers and got your shit together and made your way down to the lobby. All the while thinking:

They're not really letting us go home with a newborn, are they?

But maybe some nurses accompanied you down, and they smiled and cooed and waved. And you smiled and cooed and waved back, all the while thinking there was no WAY they were REALLY going to let you leave...with a newborn baby. You were sure that the minute you put a toe outside the automatic sliding doors, a cacophony of security alarms would sound and a steel cage would slam down, trapping you within. The nurses would release the cage in hysterics, high-fiving each other in the glee of having caught another sucker. Then you'd be off for vigorous training and certification before you'd be allowed to take custody again.

But no, they let you go home. With a baby.

And you drove home at 20 mph, frequently checking the rearview mirror, or probably one of you rode in the backseat, who are we kidding. And you arrived home and brought in your precious bundle in the carseat (thinking damn this thing is heavy and klutzy).

And you looked at your spouse. And looked at the baby. And looked at your house. And you said:

"So now what?"

I remember saying "I guess I'll go upstairs and unpack." And then I looked down and picked up the carseat with Panda and added, "And I guess I'll take you with me..."

In Case of Emergency: Add Water

Redman was pitching a fit tonight about dessert. Or lack thereof. Whatever. You ever just reach the limit? The well of patience is dry? The tank of tolerance is empty? The needle on the Give-a-Fuckometer barely moving? I walked by where he was sprawled on the stairs, with, it so happens, my bottle of water in hand. I made a last polite request for him to go get into pajamas and brush teeth. He gave me a double-lungful of grief.

So I dumped the bottle out onto his head.

Wow, was he mad.  He howled, "Hey that's not nice!"  I didn't say anything because I was biting the inside of my cheek hard to keep from laughing.  But hey, he got up off the stairs and got moving and a minute later he was laughing through the tears and in another minute it was all laughing.  And he brushed his teeth and I told him to get three books and meet me in my bed, and he got three books and met me in my bed and we read and he's asleep up there now. So all's well.

But tell me honestly....do I suck?

All I Want for Christmas

"So I've been thinking about what to ask Santa Claus for," says Panda as I'm washing her hair. "Let's hear it."

"Well, I want a Calico Critters house," is her opening bid ($99). "And a bedroom set for Julie."  Julie being Julie Allbright, her American Girl doll ($118).  "And some pajamas for her ($22) and the matching ones for me." ($40)  "Oh, and I really want an iPod!" (Whew, done deal, she's getting mine when Santa Hubby brings me an iPhone)

"What else?" I ask.

"Well, I have some questions. Y'know. Things I want to know..."

"Like?" I prompt

"Well, just if he could tell me if Heaven is real. And what it's like. And if I get to be a mermaid. But mostly what it's like and if I'll go there because then if I know, I won't be so scared."

"Ah," says I, "those are excellent questions." I'm just trying to actively listen, not take over the conversation and see where she's going with this.

"Oh, and if he can tell me what happened to Mr. Bierman, I really want to know."  This is my great-grandfather who abandoned the family and was ne'er heard from again so that branch of the family tree just ends cold. Panda is very bothered by this.

"So do I," I said, "I don't know why I never thought of asking Santa, I wonder if he knows..."

"He knows everything.  Oh and one more thing, I want to ask him to let me fly."

"Fly? You mean in an airplane?"

"No. Fly. For real. In the sky. It's my dream. I want to ask him if he'll let me and my cousins fly when they come visit us."

"...Rinse off, now," I say, and close the shower door so I can just sit down on the bathmat and think all this through.  Jeeps and I always leave a note from Santa on the dining room table, next to the plate of cookie crumbs and half-drunk glass of milk.  I'm blogging this half to preserve the moment and half to take notes on what Santa needs to cover in his yearly missive.

By the way, Redman wants a snowmobile for Christmas.

Redmanisms

I've got to write some of these down, they are just too funny....

Scene—driving to daycare

Redman: Hey, look at the car over there, Mom

Me: Oh...yeah, that's a blue car

Redman (with disgust): No, it's a Honda...

Scene—breakfast, talking about Lindsey coming to sleep over and there will be pizza and root beer floats

Redman: Oh yeah, root beer, I love root beer, you don't love root beer, Dad, do you, no, you don't because it has too much sugar, right, but I love root beer, I love root beer more than I love chocolate malted milkshakes that Nino makes... (Sometimes he has these stream of consciousness monologues)

Scene—driving to daycare, I have forgotten to bring my Ipod so he is bereft of his Backyardigan songs

Redman: But I WANT them

Me: I'm sorry, honey, I don't have my Ipod

Redman: I WANT THEM (clenching fists, kicking the back of my seat) Me: I know you want them but I'm sorry, I don't have them

Redman: Sorry is for bad things!

Me: What?

Redman: "I'm sorry" is for bad things like punching people! When I ask for music you say YES!

Scene—long time ago, dinner table, among other things we are having mixed veg and biscuits for dinner. Redman is listing and demonstrating all his good behavior skills.

Redman: ...and then I sit at the table. And then I eat my vegetables (eats spoonful of veg). And then I eat my...(has biscuit in his hand but clearly does not know what it is called)...I eat my crunch.

Since then, from time to time, you'll hear one of us sing-songing "...And then I eat my VEG-tables....and then I eat my CRUNCH...."