Offal!

For someone who makes an effort to eat vegetarian most of the time, I really love playing with meat. When I worked in a restaurant, during prep I'd try to trade with the other line cooks to get the raw-meat handling jobs that no one else wanted to do. Most people seem to be turned off by food that looks like a part of a dead animal. I'm totally cool with it. It is a dead animal, and there's nothing wrong with that.

My first significant culinary memory was when I was 8 and I made a roast chicken with stuffing. I wasn't just helping Mom by stirring the sauce, it was my meal from start to finish. (At least that's how I saw it at the time. I was 8, I'm sure I had a lot of help.) I learned that there were lots of parts of chicken- there were the obvious structural components, and then inside there were these slimy bloody organs. Seriously, that's a heart! That I just pulled out of a chicken! With my hand!

While I was standing on my little stool, gleefully elbows deep in my dissection, my little friend from down the street had ridden his bike over to hang out. I couldn't wait to show him what I found in the chicken. "Look, that's the heart, and that's the...what is it, mom? The liver. you can eat it." And that was enough to send him running out the door.

When I went to France this summer, I was lucky enough to have a very authentic gastronomical experience. Really traditional European cuisine seems to feature more offal, or at least more of the animal that you see in the US. Always inclined to order the thing I haven't had before, I ordered tete de veau (head of veal) at a restaurant, much to the delight of my European travel companion. Our waiter played the roll of arrogant frenchman to a tee- "Do you know what zat eez?" After delivery our meal, he checked back periodically to see if that Americainne knew what she'd gotten herself into. I think tete de veau is primarily the thymus glands, or sweetbreads. They're so soft and savory, the unctuousness that you'd expect from an internal organ is barely there they practically melt in your mouth.

Today I bought a little roaster chicken and I was very excited about it. I forgot that I was going get a handful of organs when I reached into the little guy. I set that aside and put my chicken and veggies together, with the intesnsion of making a stock out of all of it. But while my chicken roasted, that liver was calling my name. I'm not sure I've ever eaten liver. I don't think I know anyone who likes liver. But they look like they'd be kind of amazing, right?

Ok, that might not be a universal reaction. But in spite of never having eaten liver that I or anyone else prepared, I had to fry it up and see what happened. I chopped in up and spread it on crostini with sauteed onions and it was amazing. And, I have all the iron I need for a week.

And like they were reading my mind, Iron Chef America picks offal as the secret ingrediant. Well played.

Soup!

It was unseasonably warm and sunny the past two weeks and I was not feeling it. In mid October, I don't want to have to deal with highs of 80 and constant sunshine. I'm looking longingly at leather boots and big sweaters. I'm so over sundresses.

The weather was throwing off my cooking as well. I have about 10 soup recipes I've been reading longingly at work, refreshing the Weather Channel page trying to see when it turns into fall. French onion soup, butternut squash with cumin and coriander, curried carrot soup, southwest tomato, miso soup, lentil soup.... And a recently bought an adorable little soup tureen-


Earlier this week I made a late-summer soup, an attempt to compromise with the weather. I made a bouillabaisse with tomato and corn. The recipe is intended to use fresh-from-the-farm heirloom tomatoes and sweet corn off the cob, which is lovely, but substituting two 14 0z cans of diced tomatoes and half a bag of frozen corn didn't do any harm. Cooked a little garlic in some olive oil, threw in canned tomatoes, a cup of white wine, a can of chicken broth, and a pinch of saffron. (Yeah, saffron is stupid expensive. I wouldn't recommend running out and spending your week's food budget on it to make this soup. If you have it, awesome.) Throw in a pound of some seafood- I used cod, cut up in chunks. You can use halibut, shrimp, bay scallops, mussels, or a combination there of. After the fish is cooked through, stir in corn.


And now it's nice and cold outside. Kinda rainy too. It seemed like a good day to try out my gorgeous new Wusthof chef's knife to chop up a big pile of vegetables for a minestrone. I diced up a medium onion, two stalks of celery, a big carrot and 3 cloves of garlic to make a standard mirepoix. Nice low and slow heat lets the onions caramelize a little, giving the soup amazing depth. The Fine Cooking recipe I was sort of following called for chopped savoy cabbage, but standing in the supermarket, the kale sitting next to the cabbage looked a lot more appealing. And I didn't have to buy a basketball-sized head of it. (And I freaking love kale.) After the chopped kale cooked down I added a can of diced tomatoes and 3 cups of chicken broth. Instead of pasta, I added some barley. I love whole grains, they have that dense chewy texture and nutty flavor. To pump it up, I threw in the rinds off of a wedge of Parmesan, a really cool way to give it more flavor. After simmering for a while I added in a can of kidney beans.



With vegetable broth, this is a really great well rounded vegetarian meal. Between the barley, the kidney beans, and the kale, this couldn't really be any more nutritious.

Recession Cooking (or, things I was already doing)

Everybody's seen these tips on how to spend less money on food, and being a poor student, I'll click on it every time. What do they say?

"Cook in your home instead of going to restaurants or ordering in" Check. I might not always cook the cheapest stuff, but for the price of pizza I can have a salmon fillet with roasted potatoes and sauteed spinach and have money left over for wine.

"Don't throw out food" Check. I've developed a complex about throwing out food, to the point where I will go out and buy 4 other ingredients to use up the cilantro or something like that.

"Make a big pot of something on the weekend to eat all week and take for lunches" Check. Almost everything I make.

"Eat less meat" Check. Beans are filling, and a can is like a dollar.

"Buy things like meat, chicken and fish when it's on sale and freeze it" Check for sure. I'm all about that; I'm looking at you, tilapia for $3.99/lb, Buy 1 get 1 free frozen shrimp, half-price organic chicken... This might be a better strategy for families. I have more meat and fish in my freezer than I am likely to eat in a month.

"Buy local produce" Check... but it's tricky. My yuppy heart melts as I walk into a place like Eastern Market in DC, the Ferry Building in San Francisco, Italian Market in Philly or even the Merchant Square Farmer's Market here in Williamsburg. You know, the kind of place with hand made fresh mozzarella and fresh picked lump crabmeat from the Chesapeake and homemade mushroom ravioli. The kind of place with lots of dogs and women in sundresses and heels, and there are children that beg their moms to buy lima beans and eggplants. No, I'm serious. The point is, you pay for this trip to crazy-puppy-baby-sundress-land. Or, you can find the guy selling produce out of his truck. That guy is awesome and he has the best peaches.

"Bring your lunch instead of buying it" Check...90% of the time. This is hard for the same reason quitting smoking is hard (well, almost). I miss taking walks to Wawa for lunch to get out of the lab, out of the air conditioning. Wawa salads are a good deal, but I can't get out of there without the biggest diet coke possible, fruit salad or a pretzel, and I can often be talked into a lunchtime beer. I make better decisions in the morning.

"Instead of buying pre-cut vegetables at the supermarket, buy whole vegetables and cut them yourself" Wait, people actually buy that shit? Why would anyone do that? It'll go bad immediately, if it hasn't already. Also, 4 times the price. That is some bourgeoisie shit.

"Bring coffee to work instead of buying it" ... I try. I just love those paper cups, and having one less thing to wash. And again, I just want an excuse to take an afternoon walk to the coffee shop. How about I just go 3 times a week? And I go to the cheap place? And I get a small coffee instead of large latte?

"Cut out non essentials, like desserts, wine, beer, and cocktails" Eh, I got most of others. Besides, I bought the wine for the soup.

I think my Moroccan Stew and I are going to be very happy together.

SometimesI come across a recipe that sounds like it couldn't possibly go wrong. The ingredient list looks like a compilation of my favorite things, it looks easy, cheap, healthy, delicious, like the Food I Like to Eat. I start getting my hopes up, because this dish has everything I want. For a while, I'm too enticed by the gorgeous picture and the promise of a new favorite that I'm scared to go ahead and risk ruining the illusion. What if it just doesn't work?

One was this Moroccan Vegetable Ragout from Fine Cooking. It has kale (which I love), chickpeas (which I love even more), olives (mmm yay) and sweet potatoes (which is probably one of my top 5 ingrediants. Last time I went to a steakhouse, they had baked sweet potato with honey butter, and I forget about my steak for a while). I had a really ambivalent reaction to this recipe- all the ingredients are so full-flavored, will they work together? On the other hand, there are not a lot of spices or fresh herbs- maybe everything will muddle together?

So I finally worked up the nerve to go for it. The assembly was quick and easy- other than chopping an onion and peeling and dicing two sweet potatoes, there was no prep. Cook onions, dump in everything else, simmer for a while, stir in ripped up kale. The recipe claims to serve 3-4, but it looked like at least 5, maybe 6 generous servings. Fine Cooking says a serving (1/3 - 1/4) is 290 calories, which puts one of my servings at, like, nothing. The recipe is straightforward-

Medium onion, chopped
olive oil
cinnamon and cumin
2 cups diced sweet potatoes (2 potatoes)
can of chickpeas
can of diced tomatoes
1/2 cup pitted green olives
3/4 cup orange juice
1 1/2 tsp honey
1/2 lb kale

I used more like 1 pound of kale, which was a good choice. This was everything I wanted it to be. Those leafy greens, the richness of the sweet potatoes, with the briny olives to offset them, all wrapped in this roasted tomato-caramelized onion-citrusy-smokey sauce. I couldn't ask for more from a first try at a recipe. It had everything I know I want, but so exotic and different and enticing. I mean, what a great vehicle for kale. Being the nutritional rockstar it is, it's sometimes hard to get excited about it. It's at least as deleicious as any other veggie, but all the noise about how healthy it is ecplipses it's other merits, making it seem about as sexy as a multivitamin. The dessert-like undertones of the dish make it feel luxurious- the orange juice, the cinnamon...

My only hesitation is that it's almost too smooth. I'd certainly leave out the honey next time. And as I predicted, there could be more spice. Next time I'll read up on a traditional ras al hanout, something I know nothing about (not even the spelling) but it sounds cool and edgey. This dish is almost too smooth and sweet, and as I'm eating it, I keep expecting a little more heat. But I took it slow for now- I've ruined many a dish by dumping in a pile of cayenne or sriarcha on the first bite. I'll take it slow with my new Moroccan paramour.

But I don't like mushrooms.

As I think I've mentioned before, I have very little patience with people who say things like "I don't like (some ingredient)". If you're older than 15 you should be over the whole petulant power struggle. But I had a few things myself that I didn't care for.

I hated olives. They always seemed to sneak up on me in a pizza or a pasta and punch me in the palette. (I hated pickles for a similar reason- my most notable experiences with pickles was when I forgot to take them out of Happy Meal burgers and they would suddenly pop up, the slimy sour little fuckers.) Because I knew I didn't like olives, I only encountered them by accident, like in the Everything Pizza. I picked off the ones on the top, but I really liked the Everything Pizza, it just had more taste than the cheese or peperoni we ordered with it. I think it was the olives.

A little over a year ago, I had a summer internship in DC and my friends from home came to visit me. We did museums and sightseeing all day, and I was starving by the time we decided to get dinner. We went to an Italian place in Dupont Circle that was probably out of our price range, and if it hadn't been 5 pm we would have had a hard time getting a table, cause we looked like raggedy college students. they brought us some beautiful rustic chew bread and a plate of kalamata olive tapenade. Now, I don't like olives, you see, but this just looked so exotic and sophisticated and kind of subversive, this unctuous, subterranean purple spread. My vegetarian friend to my left dug right in, and, surprising myself, I followed her. My picky-eater friend to my right spread a monolayer on her bread, took a tiny bite, made a disgusted face and spit it out. No really. But this stuff was amazing- it didn't hurt that I was starving, but I couldn't believe the depth of taste in this simple stuff. Now that I know what I'm getting into, I'm always looking out for recipes with olives- my favorite Greek salad just got so much better. And a week ago, I made a pasta dish from Fine cooking with canned tomato, artichoke hearts, and kalamata olives. This is in my top 5 pasta dishes. I'm not sure I've ever been so satiated by the recommended serving size of pasta (2 oz).

Next came eggplant. When I was younger, I think I was put off by the texture and the beigey-ness. Even the undeniable delicious baba ganough has a weird sounding name and a weirder appearance. My newfound love for eggplant grew over time, but I think again I was seduced by the color. I liked buying them at the farmer's market, I liked having them in my fruit and veggie bowl on the counter. That gleaming dark purple is hard to say no to. I want a sweater dress in Eggplant. I'm always a little sad when I have to peel away that skin. Some of my favorite eggplant recipes include, of course, baba ganough. One of my favorite (and pretty!) eggplant dishes is Eggplant Cannelloni. Slice eggplant lengthwise, broil both sides for 5-10 minutes per side. Spread with cheese (mixture of goat cheese and mozzarella and basil is great), roll up and bake till warmed through (10 minutes). Eat with tomato sauce. Or tomatoes.

But I never thought I'd learn to love mushrooms. I didn't mean to, and I still haven't quite accepted it. It's like that timed I hooked up with this really fratty cool kid from Penn State thinking there was no way we'd get along, and ended up totally falling for him? It's kind of like that. I want to tell my mom about this pad thai with mushrooms I made this weekend, or this amazing potato mushroom gratin I made for dinner tonight, she, or anyone else, will ask "But I thought you didn't like mushrooms?" Dude, I know right! I'm almost afraid to admit it. I'm not sure how this happened, this mushroom business. They snuck up on me, and suddenly I'm searching them out. Two weeks ago, I went to the melting pot with my family and friends (I know, I know, Melting Pot? But between the Picky Eater Friend, the Vegetarian Friend, and the Even Pickier 16 year old brother, this was a good choice) and I found myself sneaking mushrooms off of my friend's plate. They weren't even exotic enough to make me feel cool, just plain old white button mushrooms, but cooked in that coq au vin bouillon, they were amazing.

I couldn't get into the idea of a beige food. But now that it's almost kind of feeling like fall, and as the economy continues to suck at life, creamy beige comfort food is increasingly attractive.

Cauliflower is the only thing I can think of that I have yet to develop an appreciation for. I think it was their mashed potato impersonation that turned me off. But give it time. In a few months I might be making every version of cauliflower I can come up with.