I really love chard. I really love kale, too, come to think of it, and broccoli rabe, and endive and . . . well, I really love greens. Which is just as well, because greens are what the gardens around here produce in abundance. We’re at 3500 feet, and already in the early spring the Beloved Vegetarian Husband’s garden is burgeoning with mizuna and daikon greens, arugula and I don’t know what all. The Indigo Ray’s garden, even though it’s at 4000 feet, is always ahead of everyone else’s, mainly because she’s a witch. (“Don’t SAY that,” I can hear her yelping. “They burned me at the stake in a past life, and I’m very sensitive about it!” In any case, her way with vegetables has to involve some kind of hocus pocus.) In her garden, there’s always early chard. Huge, exuberant, green leaves of chard on fleshy thick ivory stems. Chard as wide as palm fronds.
One particularly lovely May evening, Alex went over to Indigo’s to collect some starts she’d grown for him, and I went too, just to admire the beginnings of her garden and sit in the low, gold sun by her pond, watching the real heron stand next to a bronze one she has planted there. And I came away with a huge armload of chard.
This is what I did with it.
If you have a pot with a steamer basket that fits into it, put water in the pot, salt, and bring to a boil.
Meanwhile, separate the chard stems from the leaves. Slice the stems. When the water boils, throw them into the pot. Cook till tender, about 5 to 7 minutes, depending.
Put the leaves in the steamer basket, fit on top of the pot, cover. Cook till leaves are done—about three minutes, depending. Take out. (You see the point of this? You only need one pot for both, and after you drain the stems, SAVE THE WATER FOR SOUP. If you don’t have a pot of this kind, just gently boil the stems in any pan, saving the water after, and put the washed leaves with the water still clinging to them in a skillet and cook till done . . . they’ll wilt pretty efficiently that way.)
Squeeze extra moisture out of the leaves and chop.
Now, in a shallow casserole dish, toss the sliced stems and the chopped greens with a tablespoon or so of olive oil . . . enough to lubricate it, but not enough to make a greasy mess. Salt and pepper. ALSO (very important), scrape a bit of nutmeg over. (You can use already grated nutmeg if that’s all you have, but I won’t be happy about it. A whole nutmeg lasts forever, is easy to grate over a dish, and tastes so far superior to the stuff already prepped in jars that I don’t think you should even consider the latter.)
If you have cream in the fridge, dribble some on top. Otherwise, don’t worry and don’t bother.
Grate some Parmesan over the whole thing. I like a lot, personally.
Fifteen minutes in a 450° oven, till brown on top.
We had this with mashed potato pancakes made with leftover garlic/olive oil mashed potatoes, and with steamed carrots tossed with chervil from the garden. I love that chervil, too. And there was something especially lovely about the fact that the chervil in the garden wouldn’t last, because summer was already coming, we could feel it . . . and we hadn’t had a fire in the woodstove in days . . .
I did used to make spaghetti carbonara with bacon, and it was the easiest, most comfortable, getting-home-late-dog-tired-and-hungry meal. Then I married a vegetarian. And, unwilling to give up such an easy and delicious recipe, I adapted.
Mushrooms instead of bacon, of course.
For two people (if you’re Italian, or even ½ Italian, ½ Irish, this is only enough for one person):
½ pound of pasta (fettuccine, spaghetti, linguine, penne, or spirals are best for this. Whole wheat is good).
Put water onto boil. Turn oven on to lowest setting.
Slice an onion, put it in a skillet with a tablespoon or two of olive oil.
Slice a half pound of mushrooms (old ones are really good for this . . . they don’t look so great, which doesn’t matter for this dish, and they taste better. I use the just-about-to-go-off, marked-down ones from the market when I can get them).
Add them to the skillet with two crushed cloves of garlic.
Put the pasta in the boiling salted water. Cook till done.
Meanwhile, whisk a couple of eggs in a heatproof bowl large enough to hold the pasta. Grate in an ounce or two of Parmesan or Romano cheese. Pepper heavily with freshly ground pepper. Add a little salt. Put in the warmed oven and turn off the heat (the purpose is to keep the mixture warm . . . liquid, but warm—DO NOT COOK THE EGGS).
As the pasta nears being done, throw a handful or two of frozen peas onto the mushrooms. No need to defrost. Petit pois are great for this, but regular peas are fine. Heat till cooked through—it doesn’t need much time.
Salt and grind pepper atop.
Drain the done pasta and immediately throw it into the warmed bowl with the eggs and cheese. Toss everything. Toss the mushroom mixture in and mix thoroughly.
Serve in warm bowls or dishes, with dried red pepper.
This has all the basic comfort food values: Carbohydrates. Cheese. Deep flavors. Easy to cook, easy to eat. Perfect for unexpected company, especially if any of that unexpected company includes men, or children of either sex . . .
Then there are beans. Beans are great. They’re delicious. They’re notoriously nutritious. And they’re cheap, even the organic ones. You can do about a hundred thousand things with them, all loved by women, men, and children. And they’re easy to cook. Everybody groans about how long they take, but all you need is a little planning.
(It’s an odd fact that you have more time if you JUST SLOW DOWN. This looks counter intuitive, but try it. Give yourself an hour—even a half hour—every day where you just sit and stare. You’re saying to me—I can hear the chorus all the way here—“but I don’t HAVE an hour a day to spare!” This is my point. If you do what I’m telling you, you’ll have even more time than that. Because what will happen is in that hour where you’re just sitting and staring, things will rearrange in your insides, and stuff like this will pop into your head: “Why was I going to drive to the dry cleaners today when I can do it Thursday on my way to little Morgan’s soccer game?” Or similar. You have to give your unconscious a chance to work for you instead of against you. It wants you to be happy. It wants you to slow down. Really.)
Make a lot of beans at once. I mean, just cook them through, then freeze most of them. You’ve got them where you want them, then.
We eat a lot of beans in our house. Especially pinto beans and black beans, which are pretty much interchangeable—though each has its own mysterious little ways. We eat them plain in broth flavored with a lot of garlic and cilantro. We eat them layered on whole wheat or corn tortillas with shredded lettuce, grated carrot and cheese, chopped green onion, sliced avocado, and a little sour cream. (That’s what we do most days, in fact.) We eat them rolled up in tortillas with cheese and raw onion. We eat them in quesadillas, next to Chile Relleno casserole, alongside baked brown rice with sour cream and chopped chile peppers. We eat them in soups, we eat them in chilies.
Probably the way we eat them the most is what I call Refried Beans (Not).
Buy two pounds of organic pinto beans. (Needless to say, this can be any amount you feel like—I’m suggesting two pounds because it’s a nice even number, and you probably have a pot big enough.)
The night before you want to eat them:
Pour the beans carefully through your fingers into a colander, checking for stones, debris, etc. that probably got included in the packing of them. Rinse. Put beans into large bowl, cover with water by a couple of inches, leave to soak for up to 24 hours. (They can go longer, though not if it’s hot—if the temperature’s too high and you leave them too long, they’ll start to ferment and taste sour.)
Next day, in the afternoon before you want to have them for dinner:
Rinse again in a colander. Put them in a big soup pot, large enough to hold them and liquid to an inch above. Fill with water. Throw in a bay leaf, some peppercorns, some unpeeled garlic cloves. No salt yet, please; that toughens them at this stage. Bring to a boil, then turn down to a simmer. [See ‘On Brining’, p. 199, for news on salt and beans.]
Leave them alone for an hour. Then taste. Probably not done, even if they’re new harvest. But you’ll start being able to tell how long they take if you taste one every so often along the way.
The easiest way to tell if they’re done (but you should still taste so you really know) is to put a couple of beans on a spoon and blow on them. If the skin on the bean wrinkles up as you blow, they’re ready.
They might take another half hour, or even another hour. Don’t worry too much if you overcook them, though it’s more useful if you don’t. They’ll still be fine.
When they’re done, turn off the heat. You can go right to making them for dinner, or not. I’ve usually done all this early enough so I can let them cool on the stove.
Then, when I’m cooking dinner:
In a smaller pot, heat up some oil or fat of some kind (I use olive oil when cooking for vegetarians, and bacon or duck fat when cooking for carnivores). Fry a diced onion, a few minced garlic cloves, and a minced green chile (if you like spicy beans, add some of the chile’s seeds, too). At the last minute, add about a teaspoon of cumin seeds and a teaspoon of oregano, just to make the flavors bloom.
Then, from the bean pot, add half of the beans and their liquid—what was about 1 pound dried. Mash them into the fat. Salt. Make sure you add enough.
If you’ve got something else going in the oven, you can bake these for as long as you like. About a half hour is good. An hour’s fine, if they’re very soupy to start with. Just watch them now and then. Make sure they don’t dry out (if they do, don’t panic . . . just add some more liquid and stir it in). Or you can just cook them gently on top of the stove till they soak up their liquid and have a texture that you like. I go for creamy and mashed, myself.
These are even better for lunch the next day, reheated with a little veggie stock or flat beer, plopped on top of a heated tortilla with various fixings. They’ll keep in the refrigerator for at least a week.
As for the other half of the beans left in the bean pot, ladle them into freezer containers with their liquid (I use big yogurt containers). Label with a sharpie pen. Freeze for later. You can just turn them out into the pot without defrosting. Very timesaving.
(Use the time you saved for that hour of just sitting.)
Strictly speaking, these are not actually Refried Beans, which need to be mashed into a lot of fat, and are absolutely delectable, but not something I like to eat a lot. This lighter version is much more to my own taste . . . more digestible.
Speaking of digestion, if you have trouble with beans (and you won’t if you get used to eating them, but there’s always that first time), try adding to the first cooking either a tablespoon of epazote, or a strip of kombu seaweed. If your market doesn’t have either, try a health food store. Or you can, when you put them in the pot for the first time, bring them to a boil, let them sit an hour, pour out the water and then put them with fresh water back on to cook. This is supposed to get rid of the indigestible bits.
That’s Refried Beans (Not). And what they are really best with, best of all, is Chile Relleno Casserole. That’s what we like them with best. Beans on top of shredded lettuce, Chile Relleno Casserole, and Avocado/Cilantro/Chile/Green Onion/Lime salad. Salsa and extra cheese on the side. Alex usually drinks dark beer. Divine.
And speaking of Chile Relleno Casserole . . . see recipe on page 35.
Then there’s Gazpacho. Really. It is. Even if I don’t make it in a blender . . .
So I was talking to my depressed friend, and she said again that she hated to cook, and why did I like it, anyway? I began an enthusiastic description of what I’d done that morning:
Gotten a big handful of herbs from the garden (thyme, marjoram, parsley, oregano). Put the herbs in a mortar with a couple of garlic cloves, some peppercorns, some salt, and mashed away with the pestle till they were a sludge. Then added a diced tomato, mashed that in, then squeezed in a lemon, then trickled in about a cup of olive oil.
I dumped all of that into a big bowl, rinsed out the mortar with a glass of water, added that, then added two cups of tomato juice and one more cup of water to the tomato/herb mixture. Sliced some scallions, added them. Diced three more tomatoes, added them.
Put the whole thing in the fridge to ripen till dinner.
“You didn’t EAT that?” my depressed friend said in a horrified voice.
“Well, yes, I did,” I said. “And actually, I remember, you used to eat it, too. It’s gazpacho.”
There was a pause.
“That’s gazpacho?”
“That’s gazpacho.”
“Oh.” Another pause. “I usually make mine in a blender.”
It’s a good thing to remember: it doesn’t really matter how you get there, as long as it’s fun, and it tastes good at the end.
The night before the Beloved Vegetarian Husband was supposed to leave on a fairly stressful business trip, I’d put extra care into a dinner I knew: a.) he would really, really like, and b.) would nourish him through the following days of warm white wine, crummy Indian food, and the trail mix he carries in his bag in case of emergencies.
He really likes vegetables, and his favorite dinners are when I make a lot of different little veggie dishes and arrange them appealingly on the plate [still true, that]. This particular night I’d done a good job, if I do say so myself, with the stuff I had in the refrigerator. Sliced potatoes baked in an earthenware casserole with cream and garlic and nutmeg, served on a bed of mesclun lettuce leaves. Asparagus roasted with butter with a wedge of lemon on the side. Roasted beets diced and tossed with walnut oil, lemon juice, and parsley. A big roasted Portobello mushroom with garlic and balsamic vinegar.
Now the advantages of this dinner are obvious. If you get the timings right, all you have to do once everything’s ready for the oven is pop each dish in at the right time. So while it all cooks gently, you can sit and have a glass of something and talk with your loved one.
That’s first.
Then second, like I said, it all looked terrific on the plate. I just about always use plain white plates for this reason. I like food to look like food, not like little architectural triumphs, and I like the plates to help it look as much like itself as possible. White is the best for this, in my experience.
So when we came to the table, the plates looked lovely. The white and gold of the potatoes and cream, the dark burnished green of the asparagus, the bright yellow of the lemon wedge, the ruby colored beets, and the mahogany mushrooms.
And Alex said, “Want me to take a picture?”
He knew I was thinking about this book, and he quite rightly and generously thought it would be a good thing if he took a good load of pictures to go with the text.
“Oh, sure, thanks,” I said in an unhappy sort of way. So he took the pictures and showed them to me, and they didn’t look anything like the way the table looked and felt to me just then. Though they were fine pictures. I mean, he’s a very good photographer. That wasn’t the problem.
When we sat down to eat, we talked about why I wasn’t happy with the picture taking. “I think,” I said, “that it’s because what I’m trying to do in writing about the food that we eat isn’t to give recipes, or tell someone else how to cook.”
“What is it then?”
“I think . . .” I said thoughtfully, nibbling on the end of a roasted asparagus, “I think I’m trying to support the idea that everyone should cook and eat what they have and what they like, and that the only thing they need to remember when they do is that, just like in everything else, you have to pay attention. And how on earth can you pay attention to what it is you feel like eating and feel like cooking, if there’s some picture there telling you what it all should be like? How do I tell someone how to recreate this dinner: which was made with concern that you won’t be eating anything pleasant with anyone pleasant for the next few days, and with a certain amount of anxious love and hope that it’ll nourish you through those days? Why would anyone want to make that dinner, anyway? They’ll have their own reasons for making dinner, and their own ingredients, and their own likes and dislikes. I don’t see why I should pin our dinner down as if all that wasn’t true. What this dinner is about is this moment in time. How could it be anything else?”
“Oh,” he said laughing. “Well, if THAT’S it, of course you don’t want photographs. I don’t know how I’d be able to photograph that.”
And then he gave another laugh. I asked what was funny, and he said, “I was just thinking that the photographs would look much better if I had time to light the food right. And I had this picture in my head of your expression if dinner was all ready and waiting to be eaten, and I had to set up lights to get the perfect shot.”
I laughed at that, too. Because a choice between the perfect, immortal picture of my cuisine, and just sitting down to another ephemeral, good tasting dinner when it’s hot and ready to eat? Not even a choice at all. And I can’t help thinking that anyone who would choose immortality over the pleasures involved in small everyday happiness is some kind of fool. And that unfortunately, it seems to be the fools who have their say generally. Maybe because the rest of us are all at home having a nice meal. At least, I am, and I hope you are, too[still double true, triple true].
(Roasting different vegetables in the same oven, by the way, is a terrific technique for pleasing your dinner guests while keeping your brow relatively serene and your temper relatively unfrazzled. No matter what you read about the temperatures needed for the different dishes, all you really have to do is be sensible about choosing one temperature, and then adjust the times accordingly. One really, really, really easy way to make a great dinner this way is to cut up an assortment of vegetables or leave them whole, depending on their size—chunked carrots and potatoes, celery, whole mushrooms, whole garlic cloves, whole shallots, halved tomatoes, halved fennel bulbs, etc., you get the idea—coat them in a little oil, strew some thyme branches around them, salt and pepper, cover with foil, and bake until they’re all a little browned around the edges and tender and smell great. Say, 375° for an hour or so. Serve with a garlic mayonnaise and a salad, and something chocolatey for dessert. Never fails to please. And I don’t need to give you a picture, because for THAT one, I’ll bet you’ve already got the picture clear in your head . . .)
