Blogwhoring

Just a little note to say that there are two—yes, TWO—new(ish) posts up at AW80D: Yorkshire Gingerbread and Kitsune Udon.

Also, my kitchen REALLY smells like pickles.  But I'm a little afraid to look at them.

Also also, the other night I had pig's blood sauce.  Verdict: salty.

Also also also, here's a shot of the blogging process.  Now you know why I'm as productive as I am.

Pickles and Peaches and Pancakes! Oh My.

Finally got to go to the PHX Farmers' Market yesterday [This was actually several days ago at this point, but bear with me. --Ed.] [Who is this Ed person and why is he commenting on my blog? --Heather], which was one of the things I had missed the most during our extended stay in the TUX (along with sleeping in my own bed and not having to furiously disinfect my hands all the time).  It was a strange sensation to be shopping when the giant industrial air conditioners weren't completely necessary, and the Market is even starting to get interesting again, having moved beyond the point where all greens spontaneously combust and the only things that properly grow are chiles and sadness berries.

I'd been itching for some time now to attempt some pickles.  Not just any pickles:  lacto-fermented pickles.  I've become entranced with the idea of idle wild yeasts being harnessed to make my food for me, even if my last two attempts at employing the lazy buggers (for sauerkraut) failed miserably and less-miserably, though saltier, respectively.  However, while strolling through the misters, I happened upon some absolutely darling little cucumbers—all short and squat and knobbly, they were just crying out to be purchased and experimented upon and changed from humble cucumbers into Herculean specimens of pickled perfection.  (Or explode.  Something.)

The first rule of pickling is that you do not talk about pickling you need the right equipment.  I am fortunate enough to have borrowed (stolen) a small earthenware crock from my parents' attic, because I am also fortunate enough to have a stepfather whose first wife collected things like earthenware crocks.  If you do not have an earthenware crock, I would suggest checking your attic; if you don't have a stepfather whose first wife collected such things, I would suggest asking your mother to get cracking and informing her that there is no dishonor in marrying for pickles.

I rinsed off my cucumbers and popped them into the crock, along with a few dill fronds and some bashed-up cloves of garlic.  Cover with a brine made from 2 T. salt per quart of water, then use a weight to ensure that everything stays submerged.  If you have concerns that small creatures (such as an incredibly dim kitten) will fall in and drown and ruin your pickles, you can tie some cloth around the crock for safety's sake.

Ms. H's home for wayward gherkins.

According to my Lost Art of Real Cooking, these little beauties need to sit for about 25 days to reach their full pickle potential.  They also shouldn't be exposed to temperatures much above 80º for too long, else they will catch pickle Ebola and melt from the inside out.  Hopefully a dark corner of the pantry and a marginally-functioning air-conditioner will keep the wee yeasties in line.

[NOTE: The following peach section is dedicated to The Husband.  I'm pretty sure he'll figure out why.]

Also, on my wanderings through the Market, I kept getting distracted by the abundance of peaches.  One peachmonger told me a tale of a lady from Georgia who doubted the ambrosial qualities of his peaches, but once she sampled his wares, she was so smitten that she promptly bought up a couple dozen.  Of course, I had to purchase some—she was from GEORGIA, people!  Those folks know peaches.

But here's the thing—I don't even like peaches.  I mean, I like them well enough, I suppose, but I'm firmly on Team Nectarine (playing mostly in the underripe division, much to the mocking delight of The Husband).  Anyway, they somehow ended up in my bag, and while I can usually rely on The Husband to deal with things like this, he is still learning how to eat again, which leaves me with millions of six ripe-right-now-I-mean-REALLY-ripe peaches and a total lack of interest in traditional methods of peach consumption (i.e., taking a bite and making an ungodly mess with all the juice going all over the place or having them put into a can by a man in a factory downtown).

Racking my magnificent brain, I came up with a solution (at least until I am tricked into buying the damn things again next week): peach salsa!  I chopped up a couple of peaches, along with several itty-bitty grape tomatoes and half a red onion, then mixed it all up with some salt, lemon juice, and aleppo pepper.

If I had my little way, I'd eat peaches everyday.  (No.)

I think it all would have worked a little better with slightly less-ripe peaches, but it's bright and summery and now I have fewer peaches taunting me (though their voices, I can hear them still), so all is well.

As for Pancakes, he is very happy to have us home and is thoroughly enjoying sleeping on my laptop while I try to do work.  Here he is looking vacant, per usual:

and here he's being a VERY HELPFUL CAT while I'm trying to crochet.

SO. HELPFUL.  Thank goodness he was around, or else that yarn might have caused quite the ruckus.

PEACHES UPDATE: I've apparently decided that right now would be a fantastic time to come down with my first illness since moving to the desert, which is turning out to be a poor decision on my part.  Anyway, given that The Husband is in no position to take care of me, and that actually cooking something for reals seemed way too much effort, I ended up making myself a wee fried egg sandwich to tide me over between bouts of ice cream (which is about the only thing I feel like eating when my head feels like it is chock full of damp sheep).  I toasted up some fancy bread, and while the egg was frying, spread on some goat cheese and smashed avocado and added some arugula.  Next went my horribly-misshapen sunny-side-up egg (I am no good with eggs), a sprinkle of smoked sea salt, a crack or two of fresh black pepper, and a few heaping dollops of peach salsa.  The Husband called me bourgeois, but I was content to control the means of production for this sandwich because at least I was well-fed.

PICKLE UPDATE: My kitchen smells like dill and garlic.  Good sign?

Scroungin', or Cooking While Housesitting and Also Really Tired

Remember how I said I was back?  That might have been a lie.  I am once again in the TUX, spending my days in hospitals and my nights in either hospitals or hotels.

Things hospitals are good for:

• Quasi-experimental surgery
• Drugs on demand
• Socks with the little grippy things on the feet
• Warm blankets
• Attractive surgeons

Things hospitals are not good for:

• Sleeping
• Not contracting diseases
• Eating
• Olympic-caliber bobsledding

So, I've spent the majority of the last couple of weeks subsisting off of the World Class Dining Service (sic) that the hospital provides (though, to be fair, the options for visitors are much better than the options for patients) and essentially catnapping on foldout couches in between vitals checks and overeager resident visits that occur through the wee hours of the morning.  Happily, things are looking good to not be in TUX for much longer and maybe we'll actually get to stick around PHX for more than a night or two and enjoy the double-digit(!) temperatures that are forecasted.

However, before this villainous return visit, I at least was housesitting and actually had the chance to cook for myself on the rare occasions I left the hospital before it was dark.  You know how success is 99% perspiration?  Well, these dishes were 99% desperation, combined with whatever I could loot from the fridge (supplemented with some purchased vegetables once I figured out where the Whole Foods was) and jerry-rigged cooking contraptions (because it wasn't until about a week in that I figured out where the lids were).  And maybe a smidgen of pure terror at what a diet of pop, Sun chips, and mac & cheese was doing to my digestive system.

Dish the first was a vaguely Mediterraneanish salad composed almost entirely of things I managed to steal from the lovely people who were letting me squat in their house.  I fried up some chickpeas and broccoli with some garlic, then added little rings of thinly-sliced sweet peppers, halved cherry tomatoes, and a squeeze of lemon.  Mix this in with some couscous blend and some surprisingly-good feta cheese, and while it won't win you any roses at the county fair, it will soothe a cafeteria-ravaged stomach.

 

The second dish was a bit more exciting, mostly because I got to go real grocery shopping for the first time in weeks and got to spend my evening cooking instead of sitting in the surgical ward AND I saw my first-ever coyote on the drive home.  This time, undoubtedly inspired by the Asian noodle salad that The Husband so kindly wrote up for me, I sauteed up some garlic, broccoli, peppers (notice a food-trend?) and onion in a little oil and soy sauce, then added some bok choy and spinach and let them cook until wilted.  I cheated a little and made some Trader Joe's miso soup mix (about a cup) and poured that in to simmer for a few minutes.  The veg were served over udon noodles and topped with some sliced scallions (you may also note some roasted Brussels sprouts, but they were added to reduce the number of dinner plates and simplify transporting dinner from the main house to the casita, and they were very tasty on their own, just drizzled in olive oil and a generous sprinkling of salt and roasted in a toaster over until tender, then blasted under the broiler to brown up, though some of them did soak up a little of the miso broth, and they were also pretty fantastic, but Brussels sprouts are pretty amazing and maybe one of my favorite vegetables, so they're kind of hard to ruin).  I was endlessly pleased with myself after this one, though I may just be incredibly easily heartened by not-takeout at this point.

 

Hopefully, we will be hitting the long, dusty interstate back to PHX (for good!) tomorrow, which means a resumption of normal life and good food and relaxing days (only briefly interrupted by panic over the manuscript deadlines I have hovering about my head, but at least I've learned that there are four stages to sepsis progression and that you can't be an ethical nurse unless you can explain Kantian deontology).

Touched by his Noodley Appendage

(So, my little trip is over, and I do have some glorious food stories, but need to dig out the photos and actually get around to writing things up.  What can I say: being home is distracting.  Until then, enjoy another guest post from The Husband—Asian noodle salad, served cold, which seems terribly appropriate given the recent multiple days of excessive heat warnings in the PHX.)

Here’s another one for y’all as you battle the frightening heat…

Once the summer hits here in Phoenix, it’s sometimes hard to convince oneself that turning on the stove or using the oven could possibly be a good idea. When you’re already living in an oven, turning up the heat is a recipe for sadness.

Yet your options at dinner can seem rather limited when you decide to completely eschew the stove/oven. Unless you’re a raw foodist, after all, finding true sustenance without cooking is a challenge. And while my Indian roots sometimes tell me I should go for hot (temperature) and hot (spiciness) food, in order to sweat and cool myself down, my better judgment sometimes jumps in and contradicts that logic, instead suggesting that consuming cold things can be cooling and refreshing. Well, it doesn’t have to be either/or. In these hyper-partisan, divisive times, you can instead choose to be a uniter, not a divider, to take the middle road between raw and cooked, and between hot and cold.

I speak, my friends, of salad. No, not a wimpy substance-free side salad. Rather, a salad with a variety of vegetables, with protein, with cooked elements, with fire and kick and oomph and pizzazz. And most importantly, the ability to cool you down on a hot day.

Wifey has written before on the gloriousness of salad, so there’s no need to repeat her wise words here. Instead, I give you a how-to guide to making a wonderfully delicious, (mostly southeast and east) Asian-inspired salad — a hybrid of sorts that achieves our two goals of minimizing use of heat-producing devices and also cools you upon eating it.

Now, before we continue, I must admit that I’m not so good with recipes — be it following them (Ravi Shankar never gets guff for improvising, so stop sippin’ on the Haterade, you recipe-obsessed fools; live it up a little) or providing others with instructions for making something I’ve put together in my own kitchen. This post falls a bit into the first category and a bit into the second. I think I probably pulled inspiration from three or four different Asian noodle salad recipes I perused at some point or another, and then I just decided to wing it from there and make some (many?) additions of my own. And now that it falls upon me to recount precisely what I did, I’m going to leave you instead with some generic instructions that pretty much ensure you’ll only get vaguely close to my original creation. Though that’s the fun of cooking, right? You get to experiment and do things your own way and come up with something that you want to eat.

With those caveats aside, let’s discuss making a delicious salad. Really, there are three crucial parts: some starchy noodle or carbohydrate-rich base accompanied by a protein to provide substance, a plethora of fresh vegetables to provide crunch and texture and a nice mélange of flavors, and finally a dressing which offers a way to tie everything together with a nice acidic bite and spicy finish.

For this salad, I started with some rice noodles — Trader Joe’s Thai rice sticks, to be specific, though really any Asian rice or bean thread noodles would suffice. Fortunately, cooking up noodles in boiling water doesn’t take too long, nor are you required to stand by the hot stove and observe as they cook, which is an important consideration if you’re trying to stay cool. Once the noodles have cooked, immediately run cold water over them as they drain, both to keep them from cooking further and also to get them to a cooler temperature. (I actually kept the cooked noodles in a bowl with ice, to make sure they were chilled and didn’t dry out.) While the noodles cook, sauté (in a small amount of grapeseed oil, along with a dash of teriyaki sauce, minced garlic, and some pepper flakes) some thinly sliced tofu. Again, not too much supervision required here — just flip the tofu over when it has browned. And once you’ve done that, you’re done with the cooking element. Set aside the tofu, and we’re ready to move on to the cooling and the crunching.

For the veggies, I went a bit crazy and threw together whatever we happened to have in the fridge; in this case, the list included: purslane, amaranth, cucumber, broccolini, a broccoli/cabbage/carrot slaw mix, and jalapeno.

The dressing was originally supposed to be a relatively simply mix of rice vinegar, sugar and lime juice, but quickly got out of control once I realized all the different bottles and jars we had in the pantry and on the fridge door. So I ended up trying to find a tasty balance between rice vinegar, brown sugar, and freshly squeezed lime juice, along with tamari soy sauce, mirin, sweet chili sauce, ground chili paste, teriyaki sauce, minced garlic, thinly-sliced shallots, and a nice bit of ginger. After some very precise kitchen science, I came up with the perfect ratio between those various items.

And finally, for garnish, I used a lot of basil and mint leaves, along with a couple slices of lime, and also a sprinkling of thinly sliced green onions and chives.

When all was said and done, it looked something like this.

A nice balance of cooling and spiciness, and some definite deliciousness was achieved.