TIME TO MAKE THE DONUTS. or NOTHING IS EVER GOING TO BE THE SAME, EVER.

Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to make donuts and he eats for a lifetime. Or something like that. All proverbs aside, this morning gave witness to a momentous occasion: Papa learned to make donuts his damn-self. The implications are unfathomable. If, in the future you notice that everyone around me is fat and happy, there is good reason. And that reason is donuts.

I have long been a fan, no, an aficionado of the humble donut, and for the first time, donuts have come into existence in my kitchen. The seed as planted when by some strange coincidence, an issue of Better Homes and Gardens which prominently features home-made pumpkin donuts was left laying casually on the coffee table. Moments later the boy shredded and devoured most of the magazine, but it was too late, the idea had taken root.

Off to the internets! I was into the donut idea, but the thought of deep-frying in the skillet first thing in the morning made me a little afraid, so I opted for a baked cake style donut. Maybe a little sissified for you purists, I know, but give a Papa a break, eh? I found a recipe that didn’t require a trip to the store, since I had leftover pumpkin puree from a stuffed shells recipe (Thanks Jody!) and in no time I was a pre-heating, egg beating, glaze-drizzlin’ fool. The end result was DONUTS! Real donuts. That I made. I was overjoyed.

The ‘nuts were very well received, though I think I baked them a little too long, causing them to crack and dry out a bit. This was solved by simply using more glaze. And more, and more and more.

Aside from having one flat side from baking on a regular cookie sheet, these donuts were fantastic, easy to make, and may have inspired a new, fatter lifestyle. Or at least a hobby.

Papa’s (ok, not really, this one was lifted right from an internet recipe) Bad-Ass Baked Punkin’ Donuts

DONUTS

2 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

3/4 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp cloves

1/4 tsp ginger

1/4 tsp nutmeg ( I think you can buy “Pumpkin Pie Spice” that has all of these spices together already, but I don’t have any, and didn’t want to go out in my PJs anyway.)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 cup pureed pumpkin (you could use canned, but nobody will like you anymore, plus there’s a shortage on.)

2 eggs

1/4 cup milk

1/4 cup butter, softened just enough to make it mix up easily

Icing

1 cup powdered sugar, sifted, you will probably need to add a little more to the mix to get a nice glaze consistency

1/4 teaspoon vanilla

4 -5 teaspoons milk

Make the Donuts!!

Stir up the dry ingredients well in the electric mixer bowl (if you have one.)

Add pumpkin, eggs, milk, and butter, or margarine; beat with the electric mixer on low speed till dough is pretty smooth.

Put the mixture in a quart size freezer bag and cut the tip off of one of the bottom corners to use as a pastry bag that you don’t have to wash, or use a pastry bag with a big round tip.

Pipe onto baking sheets, in appx. 3-inch loops. I covered them with parchment paper first, but you could also just grease them.

Bake in a preheated 375 degrees F oven for about 10 minutes, watch for them to brown, but not crack, or they will dry out fast.

Cool doughnuts on a rack. Salivate. Your whole house now smells like angels having sex with the great pumpkin in the alley behind a bakery.

Make the Icing!!

In a small mixing bowl stir together powdered sugar and vanilla.

Stir in enough milk to make a smooth icing of glazing consistency.

Place rack with donuts over waxed paper.

Brush icing over donuts with pastry brush, or spoon over surface. I gave ‘em several coats, and later flipped them over and glazed the other side too. Healthy!

EAT.

THE.

DONUTS.

You like-a-the-sauce?: A Tomato-based saga

As Pheidippides ran from the great battle of Marathon to Athens, so runs the story of the Sauce. Ok, maybe that is a bit of an overstatement, but let me tell you who haven’t done it: making spaghetti sauce out of tomatoes can take a very long time.

There are a few preparatory steps that will not be included in this timeline, like digging the onions out of the ground, and going to the farmers market for a peck of tomatoes. Though those things DID happen, and have a place in the time-space continuum, but even so, it took the better part of two days to get the sauce I wanted from a sack of tomatoes.

One of the great things about spaghetti sauce is that it’s so easily customized, depending on what you and your family like, what ingredients you have available, and how much time you have to put into it.

Since I had access to tons of sweet fresh tomatoes, in several varieties, plus a great selections of peppers and onions and herbs, I opted for a long-simmered sauce, looking for a rich, complex flavor, nice thick consistency and big juicy chunks of veggies. I wanted a big batch so I could freeze some, and enjoy it later in the season.

I bought a peck of fresh tomatoes at the farmers market, and added a handful 6 or 7 Romas from my own garden. I would have done all Roma tomatoes because of their sweet, mellow flavor, but they are much smaller and harder to peel and seed than the bigger varieties, making it even more of a pain in the butt. Cleaning the fruit is really the only labor-intensive part of the whole process. The tomatoes must be skinned, and the only good way to do that is by dropping them in boiling water for about a minute, till the skins burst, then plunge them into ice water. This makes the skins slide right off once they are cool enough to handle, and also makes the tomatoes very slippery and easy to drop on the floor where they may well explode all over your feet and legs. You know, if that were to happen. Once the tomatoes lose their shirts, they must be cored, cut in half or quarters, and all the seeds and juice and guts squeezed out. This is tricky and messy. You should do it over a very big bowl so as to save the juice for later. The cleaned tomato corpses then go into the food processor and mashed up all nice and chunky and saucy. Strain the juice and save to add later. If you’re really plucky, save the seeds to plant next season.

Next comes my favorite part, preparing all of the OTHER stuff that goes in. Peppers, carrots, onions, spices and herbs, YUM!

The wonderful flavors in this recipe are unlocked by sautéing the ingredients before putting it all together to simmer. Do this in your stock-pot so none of the good stuff is lost. Start with the usual suspects, oil, garlic, onions… then add in the interesting stuff, multiple varieties of bell pepper, orange, red, yellow, chop some carrots and celery. I was lucky enough to have plenty of fresh basil and oregano on hand from the herb patch. Pick or buy your own, chop them up just a little, and toss them in. If you’re feeling kinky, add a little ground mustard seed. I had to resort to a dried bay leaf (gasp!) but as usual, the fresher the better for all ingredients.

I’m not entirely certain why, but one of the recipes I consulted tells me to add some chopped (non-mushed peeled and seeded per the earlier process) tomatoes at this point, so I hacked up a few more sweet Romas and tossed them in as well. A little splash of wine, let it all stew for a few minutes, then pile in all of the processed tomatoes and simmer it forrr-ev-errrrr. I added the juice from processing the tomatoes, this might have made it unnecessarily wet, but whatever. Some recipes say simmer 2 hours, but at that point, my sauce smelled wonderful, but looked watery and just not quite done. 2 more hours—better, but still not right. I really wanted that thick awesome chunkiness, but I just wasn’t getting it. I could have just added some tomato paste or flour or something, but I felt like that was cheating the whole concept. I ended up running out of Tuesday for this project, took it off the stove, let it sit for a bit, then stuck the whole works in the fridge and picked up simmering the next day. All in all it simmered a bit over 6 hours, then sat and congealed a couple more, but I got my sauce. And it was worth it. Sweet, tangy, chunky and satisfying. I was very pleased.

My original intention was to make a big batch, eat a meal out of it and freeze the rest, but the sauce turned out so well that we ended up eating more than half of it the first couple days with only 3 portions going in the freezer. Oh well, I’ll just go whip up some more!

Papa’s Slow Burn Spaghetti Sauce

10-14 ripe tomatoes, depending on size

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons butter

3 small onions, or one huge grocery store one, chopped

1 red, 1 orange, 1 yellow bell pepper, chopped

2 carrots, chopped

4-5 cloves garlic, minced

1/4 cup chopped fresh basil

1/4 chopped fresh oregano

1 tablespoon ground mustard seed

1 tablespoon salt

1/4 cup Burgundy wine, or a nice deep red of your choice

1 bay leaf

2 stalks celery, chopped

Bring a pot of water to a boil. Have ready a large bowl of iced water. Plunge whole tomatoes in boiling water until skin starts to peel, aboute 1 minute. Remove with slotted spoon and place in ice bath. Let rest until cool enough to handle, then remove peel, cut in half and squeeze out seeds. Chop the squeezed tomatoes and puree in blender or food processor. Chop one or two more tomatoes and set aside.

In your stock-pot, over medium heat, sauté onion, bell pepper, carrot and garlic in oil and butter until onion starts to soften, usually about 5 minutes. Stir in chopped tomato, basil, oregano, salt and wine. Place bay leaf and celery stalks in pot. Dump in the pureed tomato. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low, cover and simmer AT LEAST 2 hours. After that point, check on it occasionally, sniff, stir, taste, until it’s just the way you like it. Good luck not eating all of it at once, over your favorite pasta.

Save the beans! Won’t someone please think of the beans?

In the great bursting forth of the summer growing season, the last thing anyone wants to think about is winter. But winter will come this year, people, just like it always does. “So, Mr. Smarty Vegetable man…” you may say to yourself, “what am I supposed to do about eating local fresh produce during the other 8 months of the year when the only vegetables around come from a can, the freezer isle, or some hot, scary, South American country?”

Well, that’s a tricky one. Obviously, unless you or a friend operate a hydroponic system in the basement or have a huge greenhouse, you can’t reeeeaaally get fresh local vegetables when they are long out of season in the dead of winter. That means if you want the best stuff, you’ll have to get it now, and figure out a good way to preserve it.

Get thee to the farmers market. Our local-est market (one of two that run all summer in Wheeling) always has a great selection of stuff, though I find great joy in the seasonality of the foods available there. One stand I always visit is the East Wheeling Community Garden vegetable booth. It is a well-run community garden, in an otherwise kind of desolate part of town, an unassuming collection of raised beds on a barren hillside under the overpass of Route 250 that raises some of the finest produce you’ll ever have. I have the greatest respect for the volunteers—largely young people—who work the garden, run the stand, bring the neighborhood together and generally kick ass in the name of providing a better food choices for their community. They are also raising money to build a greenhouse, to extend their growing season (see paragraph 1 for information on why one would want to do so) and as a nursery for seedlings which the organization can sell for fundraising purposes in the community. All in all, these are stand-up people, doing great work and all of us could learn a thing or two about what a community really is from them.

Find more about the EWCG, it’s mission, and how you can help: www.eastwheelingcommunitygardens.org

Anyway, once you go and procure your veg, how to go about preserving it? Most people immediately think of canning. Canning is a great option because once canned, food requires zero energy to preserve, and massive quantities can be prepared at once, making it a pretty efficient process. But for some, eating canned vegetables is just a sad reminder of how far off summer is. Canned veg is sometimes soft and mushy, less flavorful, and boiling can undo some of the great nutritional benefits of eating fresh vegetables. Much of this has to do with PROPER canning, and knowing how to get good results. There is an art to canning, and though I’ve tried it, it still escapes me. I will try again, but it does take a little finesse. It’s also a pretty labor-intensive business. Not that I mind working hard at something, it’s just that sometimes I don’t want to.

If you’ve got the resources (a big-ass freezer and some bags) freezing fresh veg is an option. Freezing is thought to cause less damage to the food, preserving it’s nutritional value and making it taste better than canned. Freezing vegetables usually involves blanching, a process in which the veg is plunged briefly into boiling water, then into an ice bath, and then frozen. I’m not sure what this process does exactly—something to do with killing enzymes— but everybody on the internets seems to do endorse this principle, so I figured I would give it a try.

First I needed a batch of veggies to experiment with. On our weekly trip to the Wheeling Farmer’s market, we noticed that EVERYONE seemed to have a ton of green beans. Since beans are only ready for a relatively short time, they seemed like a perfect candidate for preservation. We bought several quarts of roman, wax and regular old green beans, from a few different stands, along with our other regular market booty.

Once home, I thought I would engage in some warm and fuzzy memory-making by inviting Alice to sit on the porch and snap beans with me—which she did for about 3 minutes before something urgent, likely princess-related, required her attention inside—to get them ready for processing. One thing I hate is how little finished product you seem to have after cleaning 3 bazillion beans, or peas, or whatever. What I imagined would be an entire winter’s worth of green beans fit into one big pink bowl when all was said and done. Oh, well, I guess it depends on how many times we eat green beans, eh?

Anyway, here’s the procedure for freezing green beans. I’ve read that it also works pretty well for asparagus, cauliflower, carrots and broccoli, and I intend to try it with cut up bell peppers as well, once they start pouring into the markets.

Save the Beans: Papa’s guide to Green Bean Preservation

Step 1. Get some beans. We bought an interesting mix, because so many varieties are available. Get what you like. Preserved food is only useful if you actually eat it later.

Step 2. Clean the beans. Snap the ends off, or snap off bad spots, bug-bitten areas, etc., then wash gently in cold water.

Step 3. Blanch the beans. I did some research, and there seem to be a range of recommended boiling times, but the consensus is about 3 minutes. It apparently (hopefully) can also be done with a steamer, which is what I opted for, since it reduced the risk of spilling boiling water in the kitchen, where I’m largely wearing flip flops. While the steamer did its thing, I prepared my big bowl of ice water for the plunge. The ice bath stops the beans from cooking too much, just enough to get the job done. After steaming or boiling for 3 minutes, strain the beans and dunk into the cold water for a while, until they are nice and cool to the touch. Put them back into the strainer and let them dry a bit.

Step 4. Freeze the beans. Spread a piece of wax paper over a cookie sheet, and arrange the beans in a single layer. It may take more than one sheet. Put them in the freezer. Once they were frozen, I bagged them in small portions, just enough for a side dish, or to add in a recipe. I keep the bags small because you can always open more bags, I would rather have too few than waste any precious beans.

Step 5. Wait for winter. Then eat the beans. Smile and remember how awesome summer was.

It’s CHOWDA!

Thanks to the bounty of the season, it’s time again for a perennial favorite in our house, the storied Potato Corn Chowder! (Heretofore known as PCC) It’s Beth’s favorite soup, maybe one of her favorite foods period. She had me send the recipe to the caterer for her baby shower. When she’s eating it, nobody ought to talk to her (well, you COULD talk to her, but there is no guaranteed response or cognition). She describes the act of eating it as “having a relationship” with it. What I’m getting at is that she likes it… with good reason.

PCC was born of the excess garden product we were trying to make use of last summer before it went to waste. By this time of the summer zucchini, most other summer squashes, corn, onions, and carrots are going nuts, and this is one recipe that takes full advantage. It’s bursting with fresh flavors, it’s creamy, it’s chunky, it’s a little spicy, and it’s very satisfying. Even Alice (known soup-hater, and general vegetable detractor) will eat a few spoonfuls with the promise of impending dessert.

This chunky chowda is also one of my first cooking creations, and may well be responsible for my climb to the lofty position of head cooker in charge at our house.

PCC is by no means a light dish (it uses almost an entire stick of butter and half a sack of potatoes) but it is packed with lots of nutritious vegetables, which makes you feel a little better about eating a second bowl. As for the grilled cheese that went with the first bowl... can’t help you there. (More on the grilled cheeses at the end of the post)

This is also not a quick supper solution for you busy, worky types. There is a lot of chopping and dicing, a lot of cleaning veggies, a lot of boiling and waiting and boiling and preheating and boiling and stirring and boiling, so forth and so on. From the first scrubbed spud to ass-in-seat suppertime, we’re talking about roughly 2.5 hours, especially if you don’t have any pre-cooked spaghetti squash just lying around like I did when I made the recipe.

So it’s fattening, it’s a ton of work, and it takes forever. What DOES this soup have going for it? Flavor. It tastes like the whole garden crammed itself into your mouth and kicked your tongue’s sorry ass. Fresh sweet corn, garlic, onion, rosemary and squash? Come on, awesome.

The key to the flavor overload is, of course, the fresh veg. Try to use ingredients that were in the dirt as recently as possible. Personally, I will cheat the cooking times a little to add a little more veggie crunch to the mix. Boil it only as long as it takes to get the potatoes and other big chunks soft enough to blend up without ruining any appliances. And while frozen food has its place, The Green Giant bag isn’t gonna cut it here, so don’t do it.

All things considered, this is one of my favorite things to make. It’s delicious, always well-received, and it makes me feel like a culinary badass because it requires me to spend all afternoon sweating in the kitchen. But like most things that take a little sweat, it is sooooo worth it.

Papa’s Garden Orgy Potato Corn Chowder

6 cups diced red potatoes (with skin is ok)

1 Large Chopped Onion

2-3 medium stalks fresh diced celery

2-3 medium carrots, chopped

3 ears fresh sweet corn from someplace you trust (the importance of the quality and freshness of the corn cannot be overstated)

2 Cups cooked and shredded (with fork) spaghetti squash (appx 1 small squash)

1 Small zucchini, cubed (about 2 cups)

About a quart of veggie stock

6 tbsp Butter

2 Cups Organic Whole Milk

3-5 cloves crushed and diced fresh garlic (depending on your relationship with garlic)

1 tbsp onion powder

1 tbsp Sea Salt

1 tsp fresh ground black pepper

1 tbsp thyme

1 tbsp fresh rosemary (adds a great summery flavor, and looks nice floating around in there)

In a large soup pot, melt butter and sautee onions garlic and celery until they get soft. Add diced potatoes and carrots and turn to coat with the butter/onion/celery/crack mixture. Cover the potatoes with veggie stock or plain old cold water and reduce heat to medium/high. Add seasonings and let cook for 20 minutes. Stir often so it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pot.

Add zucchini, cut corn from the cob, add to pot and cook for an additional 20 minutes. Keep stirring.

After corn is in for 20 mins, check potatoes. If they are soft enough, blend soup with a handheld mixer or egg beater, or do what I do and spoon the big chunks into the food processor, blend them up and return to pot until you have about 50/50 smooth goodness and chunky awesomeness.

Add milk and cooked squash. Cook for an additional 10 minutes. Never ever stop stirring. Take a couple of tastes to test the seasoning, then take it off the heat and let it sit for a while. It will thicken up a bit, and give the flavors some time to meld. Not to mention, if you eat it now it burn the inside of your mouth into to those weird little gross shreds, because it has been boiling for over an hour.

Sometimes I garnish with some shredded cheddar and parsley, but mostly not.

Ladle it up, devour, repeat.

Sidebar: How to Cook Spaghetti Squash

Preheat your oven to 375. Put about an inch of water in a glass baking dish. Using a big, sharp knife, split the squash in half, lengthwise. Scoop out all of the guts and place the halves rind up in the dish of water. Bake for about 30 minutes. Take it out and let it cool off, you will need to handle it, and nobody likes squash burns. When it’s cool enough, take a fork and scrape the insides lengthwise into a bowl. It should shred into long spaghetti-like stands. If you like the added texture in the soup, leave them long and toss it in. If you get freaked out by weird, crunchy noodle-y things in your soup, chop it all up before adding to the pot.

Sidebar 2: Making and saving veggie stock from your scrap stuff

We live by a “use the whole buffalo” kind of code around here, so instead of just heaving all of the scrap from this meal into the compost pile, I like to make veggie stock with it, which I can then freeze, and use again in another soup. The circle of life! Well, the circle of soup, at least.

Keep all of the onion bits, carrot ends, squash rinds, celery greens, etc. in a bowl while you prepare the chowder. After all of the veg is in the pot, get another pot, put your scraps in, add some salt, and fill with water. Bring it to a boil, then reduce the heat and let is simmer the whole time you are cooking and eating the rest of the meal. After you guilt your guests or beat your children into clearing and doing the dishes, strain off the fluid and freeze it in quart Tupperware containers. Thaw it out on the next soup day, and there you go!

Thanks to my Mama for this bit of wisom, she looked horrified last time she was up and saw me crack open a can of stock when I started a soup. She then quickly whisked about the kitchen and threw this together, making me look like a schmuck with my fancy organic-eat-fresh-don’t-buy-stuff-from-the-store ass.

Sidebar 3: Grilled Cheese!

No soup is complete without a gooey grilled cheese sandwich cut in half and wedged jauntily under the bowl. After the milk goes in the soup, I fired up the griddle (because I was making 5 sandwiches for extended family supper) and started the sandwiches. I used some nice wide cracked whole wheat bread — buttered, of course— and filled with swiss, provalone, sliced tomato and onion. Grill 'em up golden brown on each side ( I set my electric griddle to 350, it only takes a few minutes per side) cut and serve. Regular American slices on white bread works too, just ask Alice.

Sidebar 4: Enough with the sidebars!

I apologize for all of the sidebars, and upon proofreading, for the somewhat more frequent than usual use of swear words in this post.

The Emergency Quiche — OR — Don't Let The Fridge Door Hit You Where the Good Lord Split You

Let’s be clear, I didn’t intend to make a quiche this morning. But sometimes a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. I got up with the kids after a particularly rough night for the baby (and therefore rough for Mama) and went downstairs for a couple of bowls of cereal and some cartoons. It is Saturday, after all. After breakfast, I was shoving things around in the fridge (and grumbling about the hundreds of containers of leftover stuff) to make room for the milk when out falls the carton of eggs. Now I’m holding the baby on my left arm, holding the fridge door open and fending Alice off with the right, and watching the eggs balance precariously on the little ledge in front of the crisper, teetering on the edge of disaster.

“Didn’t fall that far, can’t be more then a couple broken” I thought to myself. I persuaded A.P. to be my helper and hold the door so I could lean in and grab the carton. As soon as I began to do so, she promptly abandoned her post and let swing the door. It hit my butt and jostled the fridge just enough to move the egg carton. I watched helplessly as the carton rolled over, opened up, and one by one—seemingly in slow motion—the eggs dropped to the floor.

Luckily most of them didn’t burst, but rather cracked slightly and rolled under the island. I gathered them up and wondered what the hell to do with 5 cracked eggs. Well first I had to clean the 3 that exploded on the floor, but then what? Make a quiche, of course.

I had a ready made Kroger pie crust in the freezer from a while ago, some leftover broccoli, wax beans, and always plenty of onions and garlic on hand, so why not? The crust was a little busted up, but it could be somewhat repaired by wetting the broken edges and smooshing them back together. The rest went together in about 5 minutes. Simple! Now I have something already made for lunch, and only 3 out of 8 eggs wasted. Papa win!

Saturday morning egg-drop disaster: Yet another addition to the long list of problems that can be solved with quiche.

Papa's Emergency Quiche

A little lump of butter

1 small onion, chopped (left over from tacos last night)

2 cloves of minced garlic

2 cups chopped fresh broccoli (left over from Asia Feast- blog pending)

1 cup chopped wax beans (ditto)

1 (9 inch) unbaked pie crust

1 1/2 cups shredded cheddar cheese

5 eggs, well beaten (you can also drop them on the floor first, but this is not absolutely necessary)

1 1/2 cups milk

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

pinch of dried rosemary

In a medium bowl, beat the eggs and stir in the milk. Season the mix with salt and pepper. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. While the oven heats up, sautee onions, garlic in a pan over medium heat. Once the onions start to soften, add the broccoli and beans. Cook for a few minutes to soften everything up a bit.

Dump the veggies into the crust. Mix in the cheese, then pour the egg and milk mixture over it, filling up the crust. Sprinkle the top with some more cheese, rosemary, and some more black pepper.

Bake 35-45 minutes, or until it sets up in the middle.

Muy fresca, muy badass.

The middle of July finds us in the throes of fresh produce season

in the Ohio Valley. The farmers markets are busting with bounty and fruit and veggie stands seem to pop up at every bend in the road. It is the easiest and best time to "eat local" in these parts. This week my Mother in Law stopped at Ebbert’s, a wonderful farmstand in St.Clairsville, OH. Ebbert’s operates off and on throughout the year —with a copious spread of home-grown veggies in the summer, a pumpkin patch in the fall, Christmas trees in the winter, etc. They have only just opened with the first wave of summer crops, and the M in L stopped to get first crack at the new sweet corn, the market’s specialty. While there she also picked up a bunch of little yellow onions, some huge, gorgeous tomatoes, a smooth, compact little cabbage, some hot peppers and yes, some of the famous sweet corn. When I opened the bag, I immediately thought TACO NIGHT.

Taco night has long been a tradition at our house. We started making our own when we realized that around here, good vegetarian tacos are extremely hard to come by. Usually we make a bean and canned salsa plus seasoning packet concoction, wrapped in flour tortillas with lettuce, tomato, onion etc. With the addition of the fantastic fresh produce to my arsenal of ingredients, I decided to step up this week’s taco night with a salsa fresca, and in the spirit of creative cooking I went packet-less with my black bean taco filling. I held the cabbage in my hands, looked at it, thought on it a moment. Then I heard something. I leaned down and listened to the cabbage. It whispered "cuuuuuuut meeee uuuuuup…. puuuuuuut me in a fish taaaaacooooo… maaaaan. The cabbage was right. It was the only thing to do.

I had become hopelessly hooked * snort * on fish tacos during my brief stint as a resident alien in Southern California. I’d had Mexican food before living in San Diego, but not REALLY. And I’m not talking about fancy gourmet 25-dollar grilled tilapia tacos with radicchio and passion fruit reduction or some such lot. I mean fish tacos like actual Mexican people eat. Fried fish. Cabbage. Salsa. White sauce. Little Mom & Pop taco stands are EVERYWHERE in San Diego County, and I had the pleasure of visiting some of the very best, under the guidance of my buddies and co-workers at the moving company for which I was employed.

In Escondido, right down the street from my apartment (and incidentally only 2 blocks from Stone Brewing Co.) was the stand where I most often indulged in fish taco bliss. It was also where I was introduced to the shrimp taco. Shrimp tacos are just as popular in San Diego, and just as tasty. Maybe a little more so, as a handful of fried shrimp —being individually battered and cooked— has more fried and breaded surface area per volume than does a piece of fried fish.

I decided on shrimp for this meal because 1) they cook faster, and B) they are cheaper. So I was looking at 2 types of tacos, bean and shrimp, salsa fresca and some of those big white corn tortilla chips. Easy.

Preparing tacos is so ridiculously simple that I felt very confident in my ability to rock this meal. The new food processor makes it even easier. My biggest challenge this time was getting the seasoning just right in the bean filling, as too much of any of the traditional Mexican seasonings (I’m lookin’ at you, CUMIN) can be bad news.

Tacos are also a great way to eat fresh and local and cheap. In this simple meal, I was able to use local tomatoes, corn, onions, cabbage and peppers from the farmstand; lettuce, dill, oregano, chives and garlic from my own garden; only a few supermarket items like tortillas and black beans, and feed 3 people for under 15 bucks. Not too bad, eh?

So take a look around. In most small towns, ‘burbs, and big cities these days fresh, local produce can be had. Even if it’s not organic, chances are it’s fresher, healthier, tastier and required less energy dirt-to-table than food from the supermarket. Viva la vegetables, yo como fresca!

Salsa Fresca

3 large, ripe tomatoes

2 medium yellow onions

(sweeter varieties are nice with all of the acid and spice in the salsa)

1/4 cup chopped cilantro

1 hot pepper, with seeds removed (whatever pepper you like, depending on your hotness threshold, I used a medium hot banana pepper)

1 lime, halved or quartered for juicing

4 cloves fresh garlic, chopped up a little bit so it will break up in the processor

Salt and black pepper to taste

This is the easiest thing ever to make. Cut up the big stuff into quarters, throw everything into the food processor but the limes. Pulse the processor a few times to start chopping stuff up, then squeeze the lime juice into the mix. Hit it again a few times, add spices, then pulse until everything is chopped up into small bits. I like to let it sit a little while. Refrigerate for a few hours to let it all mingle. It’ll be very wet, so scoop the salsa into another bowl with a slotted spoon so that it drains and doesn’t get too soggy. Done.

Shrimp Tacos

Quantities of all ingredients depend on how many people you intend to feed.

Frozen breaded popcorn shrimp, cook in the oven, follow the directions

1/4 head of cabbage, shredded

Shredded cheese (chihuahua if you can get it, I used mild cheddar this time)

Small corn tortillas

Stack each taco with shrimp, cheese, your fresh salsa and drizzle with the white sauce. Gorge.

Shrimp Taco White Sauce

1/2 Cup Mayo

1/2 Cup Fat Free Sour Cream

1 Lime, Cut in half

1/2 Tsp. Cumin

1/4 Tsp. Chili Powder

1/2 Tsp. Garlic Powder

Appx a tablespoon of each of the following fresh herbs, chopped finely:

Oregano

Dill

Chives

Cilantro

Whip mayo and sour cream until blended, squeeze half of the lime, mix. Add lime juice until sauce gets to the consistency of creamy salad dressing: pourable, but not too runny. Add spices and herbs one at a time, mixing well after each.

Whip it up well and let it set up in the fridge. It was really tasty after sitting for 2 hours, but I tried some the morning after on my huevos rancheros, and it was so flavorful it nearly blew my face off.

　

Bean Tacos

Bean filling

1 can (15oz) of black beans, drained and rinsed

1/2 cup or so of salsa

1 ear of fresh sweet corn

A tablespoon or so of flour

2 cloves of finely chopped fresh garlic

A bunch of the following spices, added in a "pinch and taste" kind of method:

Cumin

Onion Powder

Salt

Black Pepper

Chili powder

Paprika

In a small pot, over low to medium heat, dump beans into the pot. Add the salsa, and if necessary a little water to get a good, soupy consistency. This will help it all cook together better. Cut corn from the cob and add. Add garlic. Mix together frequently to keep it from sticking to the bottom of the pan. Add the spices, one by one, tasting as you go so as not to overdo any one of them. When it tastes good to you, add a little flour as you mix, to thicken it up. It won’t take much. Reduce heat to low and let simmer while you prepare other stuff. It’s ready now, but It will only help to simmer it a bit before go time. I like it to get really nice and thick, so I simmer for about 10 minutes while I set the table, usually.

Spoon the beany mix into a tortilla, then top with onions, salsa, cheese, lettuce and a little sour cream. Eat.

Many thanks to my lovely and talented photographer/wife/breadwinner/babymama for making this stuff look so beautiful and delicious.

Hummus is Yummus.

This week Beth spotted some big ripe mangoes at our local produce market. She loves mangoes, and while she talked herself out of going into the back of the store to see if she could buy a case, she DID come home with a few. I've never been a huge fan, but I do like the little packets of mango chutney that comes with the boxed Indian dinners from Target. Tasty, but there is never quite enough of it in the kit. Then it dawned on me, I could make my own chutney, as much as I wanted, and build an Indian or maybe Middle Eastern dinner around it!

A recent trip to Chicago had re-acquainted the family with an old favorite from the neighborhood. Salaam on Kedzie (right by the brown line stop) use

d to be just a small middle eastern food shop, a counter and a displ

ay case wedged between a bakery and a gyros shop. We discovered on this trip that it had expanded to a full sit-down restaurant, with wait staff and piped-in music , beige paint, drop ceiling and giant prints of sites from the holy land on the walls. Actually it was a very pleasant dining experience. In the old days, Salaam seemed much more authentic. It was cramped and hot, with barely enough room to walk through the stacks of pots and pans for sale and the counter. It always smelled kind of funny—the air seemed greasy, spiced and heavy— and faintly smelled like something might have gotten killed in the back. The old Salaam was home to a few grumpy looking Lebanese dudes who huddled over a small table near the door and would suddenly quit arguing in arabic to stare at you when you stepped in. But OH MAN, the hummus. Smooth and creamy, oily-but just oily enough- and so flavorful that it could be eaten all alone with a spoon when nobody was watching. If I could recreate hummus half as good as this, I would be very impressed with myself and probably run out and write a blog about it.

So mango chutney and hummus... what else? Well, I would leave the pita to the Lebanese bakery downtown, for sure. That left just maybe one more dish to fill out the meal. I decided to take another cue from the Target instant Indian meal and try a curried lentil dish. I knew there was a massive stash of lentils in my cupboard, transported back here from Seattle, where once Beth and I discovered the bulk section of a local whole foods type store, and had gotten a little carried away.

A quick grocery getting run netted me a few loose items I would need to create my Papa-ghanoush (i know that's eggplant not hummus, indulge my funny!) and now the clock was ticking. The boy child took a well-timed afternoon nap that allowed me to get started on the hummus and give it a little time to set up and meld. I'd had homemade hummus a few times before, and while it was always good, it never had that smooth, velvety texture and rich flavor of the restaurant style. There were always little chunks of chickpea and it was usually comparatively bland. I did some research on the internets and found a consensus: to get smooth hummus, you must first shell the chickpeas. Shell the chickpeas? All of them? Jesus, that would take forever! Well, more like 2 hours. I shelled chickpeas through and episode of American Pickers, through a longer than usual phone rant from my Dad, and through the Boy destroying a bowl of peaches an cereal. But finally I had the base for my masterpiece. I was ecstatic. I consulted a few recipes online, combined my ingredients in my fancy new Giada De Laurentis food processor, set it to high, hit the button and... nothing. I hadn't used it yet, nor had I tested it before loading it up with 4 cups of chickpeas and half a gallon of freakin' olive oil. Food processor, despite a bit of pleading, swearing and weeping was a no-go. Frustrated, I transferred the stuff to the blender and gave that a whirl. It was laborious, the blender would only do a little at a time, which I then had to spoon into a waiting bowl to make room for the next load. Ugh, messy and dumb. At this point I tasted it. not bad, but still full of little bits of chickpeas! after I shelled every last goddamned one of them? I was pissed. I blended the whole batch AGAIN, mixing in more olive oil and more tahini, hoping to fluff it up and give it a little more of that rich flavor. It helped a little, but it still wasn't right. Regardless, at this point it was time to put on the chauffeur hat and pick up the girls.

When I returned to the kitchen, the heat was really on. I spent so much time effing with the hummus that I had prepared virtually nothing else. I furiously peeled and sliced 6 huge mangoes, dumped them in a big skillet and started adding spices to be cooked down with the chutney. You know what's hard to slice? Mangoes. Once that skin comes off i had a hell of a time holding on to them and not cutting my fingers off as I sliced them into little pieces to be cooked. Not a drop of blood lost, I crushed garlic, chopped onion, peeled and sliced ginger, then... a whole tablespoon of cayenne? Dang, that's alot of hotness, but what do I know, right? in she goes.

On to the lentils. Luckily, lentils cook relatively fast, and I had a pan of bubbling curried goodness in no time. I did overlook a pretty important ingredient while shopping, one can of pureed tomato, which I thought I might have in stock at the back of the cupboard. No dice. I did, however, have a handful of plum tomatoes that were almost too ripe for anything else, so diced and mushed all to hell, into the pan they went. While the lentils cooked I started a pot of rice, and now all systems were go, and it was just a matter of finishing up in time to eat, clear, bathe the children and execute bedtime before their good will ran out.

After a brief food processor tutorial by my wife (who simply put the bowl on the base correctly and started it right up) I was back into the hummus, striving for that golden Salaam standard. I blended and oiled and spiced and blended and blended and blended. Still hard chunks, though they were very small. It was not working. Plus now the spice balance was off a bit. Curses. And very little time to do anything about it! I dumped a Hail Mary final glump of olive oil into the bowl, tossed in another hit of garlic, beat it up a few more seconds and decided to call it. It was dinnertime.

The mango chutney cooked down beautifully and filled the house with a glorious sweet/spicy smell. But even after it cooked down for nearly 45 minutes there was still and enormous amount of it. Oh well, hopefully it's good, eh? The lentils came off pretty well, good consistency, though they did suffer a bit without the added moisture of the tomato puree. The curry really came out nicely, particularly when mixed with a bite of rice and chutney. The chutney turned out to be very good, but HOT. I don't know who uses that much cayenne, but let me tell you, It ain't me. Next time I'll cut it in half. What am I talking about, I have like 4 containers of the stuff in the freezer, there needn't be a next time for chutney.

Then I put out the hummus. Beth knew the high standard I was shooting for with this dish, and she reserved comment. It was decent, but I knew this hummus was not going to dethrone Salaam as the best. (It actually used to say "Salaam is the Best" on their oil-soaked receipts.)

The meal on the whole was pretty successful. Beth and I had our fill, Alice asked for Mac & Cheese, and then did what I took to be an impression of me, tearing up bits of pita, throwing them in her bowl and chanting, "Don't for get the garlic, you got to put in some more garlic" and I made an incredible mess of the kitchen. All of the dishes I prepared were new to me, and all of them were at least edible, which I take as a personal victory. Therefore I say, even when it isn't perfect, hummus is yummus.