Let’s start with the memorably weird: Chinese Takeout Rice Pudding. Yes, that’s right. I’ve discovered what to do with those little white cardboard boxes full of stodgy rice that inevitably accompany delicious takeout.
For years, this was not an issue in our household, as we had no decent Chinese food nearby. Oh, there were Chinese restaurants, but of the sort showcasing sweet and sour pork and General Tso’s chicken. Places where the mixed vegetables consist mainly of chunks of under-cooked carrot.
But as philosophers have pointed out, all is change, nothing remains the same. Sometimes that really works for me, and this was one of those times. Because up sprang a Vietnamese pho restaurant with a pungent and tantalizing smell of garlic, and a secret Chinese menu. Oh, happy days. Happy, happy days.
While it’s not easy to find an adventurous soul to share the pig’s ear salad with me (still looking, in case there’s anyone out there), I have been happily getting food to go to share with the Vegetarian Husband. The gloriously garlicky eggplant. The chow fun with vegetables. The shredded potato with dried red pepper pods (his favorite).
It has been so long, though, since I’ve found and acquired delicious Chinese food to go, that I forgot about that one pesky Chinese takeout problem: how to deal with those ubiquitous cartons of white Chinese restaurant rice. In this case, one carton for each dish. Three dishes, three cartons.
In the long drought of Chinese restaurant food at our house, we’ve got in the delicious habit of preferring brown rice to white. We certainly prefer fresh cooked to packed and delivered. But there I am, hating waste, looking at three cartons. They stare at me reproachfully.
I know what you’re thinking: why not fried rice? I did try that, albeit mixed with leftover brown. But there’s only so much fried rice, especially fried white rice, that I can get away with in my household. Then there’s the dog stodge. I took to freezing the rice in the little cartons, and adding a carton every time I made the dogs’ food. That was okay. The dogs thought so, anyway.
But then, aha! A recipe that not only won over the Husband, but had him asking for it again, even after a big meal, and after we polished off enough (allegedly) for four persons.
It was Easter. Easter had gotten away from me—“isn’t it in two weeks?”—but fortunately I had paella fixings in the freezer (frozen squid, linguiça sausage, rich fish stock), and fresh enough eggs for a good aioli. Cabbage for a salad.
But no dessert. I am, at the best of times, not very ‘dessert’. A few shards of broken chocolate and some dried persimmon is about my speed. But it was Easter. Looking in the shard of chocolate tin, I could see we were rather low on even that. A look at the ‘misc.’ refrigerator drawer revealed a half bag of chocolate chips. And a quarter bag of some ancient sweetened shredded coconut.
I did have sugar. We don’t use much sugar, but we always have it for hummingbird food and roast chicken brine (see p. 202).
I did have eggs. I did have milk. I did have cream. Custard? I wondered to myself. I had a puff pastry shell in the freezer. Jam tart? I had flour. Gingerbread?
But really, I didn’t want any of these things.
Rustling through the pantry staples drawers, I came upon a can of coconut milk, and laughed to myself: what exotic dish had I been thinking of so long ago that made me buy that? Curry, probably. While I was laughing, suddenly a small image flashed through my mind: that one lone, lurking white carton of takeout Chinese rice. Half full. I’d been resisting throwing it out. And then, it dawned:
Rice pudding. Rice pudding with chocolate chips, shredded coconut, and coconut milk. My own variation on an old Joy of Cooking recipe.
This is how:
Chinese Takeout Rice Pudding with Coconut and Chocolate Chips
For two people with hearty appetites, or four people with delicate ones. (For four people with hearty etc. or eight people etc. just double the recipe.)
Half a little white carton of takeout rice (this is about one cup)
2/3 cup of coconut milk (about half a can)
2 to 3 tablespoons of white or brown sugar
1 tablespoon soft butter
pinch of salt
capful of either vanilla or almond extract (I like the almond best)
a scrape of fresh nutmeg
a slug of Irish whiskey, or bourbon, or rum, or brandy, or scotch (your choice)
a handful or as much as you like of shredded coconut
a handful or etc. of chocolate chips
Mix the rice, coconut milk, sugar, butter, salt, vanilla or almond extract, nutmeg, eggs, and whiskey together well. Stir in the shredded coconut and chocolate chips. If your shredded coconut has gotten a bit dried out by being forgotten in the back corner of a fridge drawer just let the whole thing sit for an hour. The soak will revive the coconut. Have faith.
Lavishly butter a casserole big enough to hold the rice pudding to whatever depth you like. I like a lot of gold crust on top, so I usually pour it into a wider casserole than you might.
Bake at 325° for about fifty minutes to an hour, until the pudding is set and the top starting to gild.
Serve cold, warm, or hot. I like it best warm, with a dollop of strawberry jam on top.
I bet you guessed: we had a little strawberry jam in the fridge. And I discovered I liked that almond extract because we had exactly enough left in the little bottle for one more go.
A total Easter success. Creamy, light gold, delicately sweet, scrape-the-plate delicious—we finished it off, and the Husband asked if there was more.
There wasn’t. But there will be. I know this for a fact, since there’s a Chinese meal in our future, and, right now, half a can of leftover coconut milk in the freezer, too.
So that’s not the only recipe inspired by weird stuff hidden in my freezer. In point of fact, my freezer is the sly receptacle for all sorts of foods that have caught my attention one way or the other, waiting for the happy day when I can meld them into something I hope will be delicious. So one winter, I’d taken a happy inventory, and sitting there was a carefully wrapped package of pigs’ feet, which my dear friend Cindy had saved from being tossed out after a barbeque, on the principle that I would enjoy doing something or other with them (she was right about that). Pigs’ feet and . . . a package of tripe.
Now what is tripe? This was the first thing my friend Teri said when I enthusiastically told her about my plans for a Boxing Day soup fest, to which she and Cindy, and their husbands, were bidden.
Tripe, I explained, is the lining of a cow’s stomach. Now that does not sound in the least appetizing, and indeed, Teri’s expression showed she did not consider it in the least appetizing. Quite the contrary. I explained that tripe is a bit of the cow that cooks up with a velvety, unctuous consistency, long honored for its hangover cure potential. This is where menudo comes in, I said. Menudo, the Mexican hangover cure par excellence, being what I planned on turning the tripe and the pigs’ feet into as one of the options for our soup dinner. For I had also discovered, in the recesses of a back cupboard, another necessary ingredient: a hoarded can of hominy.
Teri still looked doubtful. Don’t worry, I said reassuringly. I’m making a huge pot of vegetarian split pea soup as well.
But it was the menudo that had my heart. I mean, I love split pea soup, but it was the tripe and pigs’ feet and hominy that grabbed my attention when I was spending happy hours cooking in my Oregon winter kitchen.
The thing about tripe, as about so many other wonderfully worthwhile things, is that it needs patience. Patience and flavor. The broth that you make from it is key. I had a big bunch of organic cilantro, for example, and usually the stems go into the dogs’ stodge. Not this time, though. This time I cut them off, twined them around with string to hold them together in a nice neat cilantro log, and used them in the soup. I love stuff like that. It’s what makes cooking the pleasure that it is for me. And it was a pleasure to make that soup.
So here is what I did to make Menudo for Boxing Day, for People Wary of Tripe.
For the broth:
A pound of tripe
Two roasted pigs’ feet
A dried chili pepper (I used two, which most would regard as excessive. Use your own judgment.)
A head of garlic
An onion, cut in half and stuck with a couple of cloves
The stems from a bunch of cilantro, washed and tied together
A teaspoon of dried oregano
A half teaspoon of crushed coriander seed
I put all of these into a big soup pot, and covered with water. Brought it to a boil, skimmed the scum off the top, and then put it on to simmer on the upper shelf of our woodstove, which kept it at a nice murmur while the stove heated our house. Left it there all day, then let it cool off and popped it in the refrigerator to await final additions.
The next day, for the soup:
I strained the broth, discarding everything but the tripe and the pigs’ feet. Cut the tripe into little squares, about one inch; shredded what meat there was from the pigs’ feet and threw away the bones.
Added the broth, the tripe, and the pigs’ feet meat into a cleaned-out soup pot. Then added:
One drained can of hominy
Salt to taste
I set this at a simmer for about an hour on the woodstove. Let it cool again. And then, before the guests arrived, put it back on to heat, while I chopped the fixings to be put out in small bowls. That’s part of the charm of menudo: guests choose for themselves what to add to their own personal dish.
Fixings for menudo:
Thinly sliced chili pepper
Chunked limes for squeezing
Chopped fresh cilantro
Sliced scallions
Dried oregano
The menudo smelled heavenly. Really, I thought I would be the only one who ate it, so I made a lot of split pea soup, but then everyone but the Vegetarian Husband wanted a spoonful “just to see what it tastes like,” and then everyone but the Vegetarian Husband had a big happy bowl of the stuff.
Next morning when I woke, there was a covered plate of what was left of the fixings, and an ample serving in a pot. I heated the latter up, covered it with what I wanted of the former, and sighed with pleasure as I ate it for breakfast.
For if there is one thing better than menudo, it is day-old menudo. The unctuousness of the former melds into the luxury velvety richness of the latter. And this is the final prize for the canny cook, that leftover, final bowl.
I love tripe. And I count it as a personal success that Teri says she looks forward to eating it again soon.
I don’t know about you, but stress makes me yearn for full fat foodstuffs. Butter. Cheese. Bacon. That sort of thing. I do wonder how my vegan friends handle being at the end of their rope, or how they feed loved ones at the end of theirs. The strategy must involve some comfort other than food. I can’t help feeling that a lentil, while a noble and upright denizen of the food world, cannot, in hard times, substitute for a sausage.
Anyway, I had invited two women over for dinner one night, a kind of winter huddling together, for one of those friends was about to lose her mother. My friend was almost at the end of her personal rope, what with dealing with the end of life care, and the many visitors that the end of a life entails . . . or should, if the life has been a lucky and good one.
So I said, come over to my house and I’ll feed you. Because that is always about the only thing I can figure out to do, when helplessly surveying the unfixable situation of life and of death. We’re all part of that tapestry, which is, I’m sure, a beautiful one if only I could step back far enough to get a proper view. But in this life, we can’t step back, tangled as we are in the threads, of loss and grief and sadness. And in the need to feed ourselves.
So Karen escaped from feeding the mourners at her house, and joined me and Teri in helping her take a little time for nourishing herself. This involved a walk in the woods first, where to all our delight, the bolete mushrooms had popped. We stuffed our pockets and headed back to the house for wine. Which was next, of course. Red, beefy, and plenty of it, especially for Karen. Though I don’t recall Teri and me stinting ourselves either.
This whole dinner was very impromptu, since I live—we all live—half an hour from the nearest store. I had to think of something that would taste good to a woman stressed by mortality, something already in my kitchen. So there were those boletes. And over the wine, I mentioned an odd recipe I’d found in an old cookbook: hot dogs filled with sautéed onions and cheese, then wrapped in bacon and grilled. “Ooooohhhh,” Karen and Teri said, eyes wide. So that was a satisfying response. I had sausages in my freezer—Italian and andouille. I had onions. I had bacon. The sheer over-the-topness of the recipe appealed to all of us, and I set to work, including, of course, the mushrooms we had just gathered.
This was how:
For three people, I took six sausages of the precooked kind out of the freezer: four Italian sausages and two andouille.
I sautéed a large chopped onion in butter until soft. Then I split the thawed sausages lengthwise, being careful not to cut all the way through. Spreading them open, I added a spoonful of chopped onion to each, and a couple of fingers of cheese (jack cheese for the Italian, cheddar for the andouille). I wrapped each sausage spiral-fashion with a bacon strip. (I didn’t have any toothpicks to fasten the ends, as the original recipe suggested, but it turns out the bacon cooks in a spiral so fast you don’t really need them.) Then I set a ridged cast iron pan on the highest shelf of the oven, turned the broiler on to high, and let it heat up.
While that was going on, I added the sliced bolete mushrooms to the onions, continuing to sauté them all together. I sliced half a cabbage and sautéed that in my wok, in a little olive oil and salt, adding a glop or two of soy sauce at the end.
Then I put the sausages on the heated griddle pan. Sizzle. I left them under the broiler for about five minutes, then turned them with some tongs. About another five minutes till the bacon was cooked, and the cheese was runny.
I served these on top of a bed of the onion/mushroom mixture, with the cabbage on the side. A lot more red wine was also consumed. There were a lot of satisfied noises, and a lot of laughter after, and all three of us agreed it was one of the nicest nights we’d ever spent. Karen because she was lifted up over her sorrow and care for the moment, and Teri and me because we’d been able to help her lift.
Well. That and the bacon. If you’re not a vegetarian, I do find that bacon always helps.
But then, now I think of it, there’s Brewer’s Yeast and Popcorn.
Doesn’t that sound ghastly? Just the words ‘brewer’s’ and ‘yeast’ immediately repel. Which is another example of how you should never judge by anything but experience, because friends had been telling me for years about how much they love brewer’s yeast on popcorn. I politely responded, but internally rejected. My penance for that is the memory of how many occasions for eating brewer’s yeast on popcorn passed me by.
I make up for it now, though. Because it’s the most delicious popcorn topping ever. With lots of butter. And garlic salt.
Like this:
Popcorn—as much as you like.
Melted butter—more than you think you’ll need.
Garlic salt—have at it.
Brewer’s yeast—sprinkle on after buttering and salting the popcorn, to taste.
Oh my.
Yum.