Grown Up Rice

Confession. I love white rice with ketchup mixed into it. It's a dirty secret from my childhood. It's comfort in a bowl--slightly chewy, soft, hot, a bit sweet. I eat with a spoon. It's even better topped with a fried egg. Nutritional value of said dish without the egg? Yeesh. I won't even try to quantify it. 

I grew up eating grains and have always loved them as a food group. But when I try to conjure up a more grown up rice dish that I really love, nothing rises to the top of the pack. I know that brown and wild rices are great for me and can be delicious, but when I look at my jars of grains and pulses on the shelf I almost always pass over the rice in favor of quinoa, millet, amaranth, lentils.

Last week I had my nose in Yottam Ottolenghi's great cookbooks, Plenty and Ottolenghi. I spent a week making his recipes--green gazpacho, sesame and harissa marinated chicken thighs, burnt eggplant with pomegranate molasses. In Plenty, I came across a recipe for rice with herbs, which he describes as "actually, herbs with rice".

His cooking method is pretty intricate and involves things like making "chimneys" in the rice to allow for proper steaming and what seemed like constant "drizzling" with water and different oils. Steaming chimneys seemed more labor-intensive than necessary for a working night's dinner but I loved the idea of a heavily herbed rice dish. I chose red Wehani rice over Ottolenghi's call for white, ** and decided--at least this time--not to add his called-for yogurt and sour cream. To make it a one-dish meal I sauteed shallots and delicata squash, stirred it into the cooked rice, and added some sriracha hot sauce. It was hot, easy to eat with a spoon, toothsome, intensely flavorful. It would be great with an egg on top. And this time, no ketchup necessary.

** White rice is the whole grain stripped of its hull whereas brown rice (and Wehani rice) is the grain with its hull in tact. The hull contains most of the B vitamins, minerals, fiber and fat and 10% of the protein. While white rice is not completely devoid of nutrition, it doesn't provide as many nutrients as its brown or wild counterparts. Think of it as white bread versus some kind of seedy whole grain bread--it's not evil, it's just doing less good.

Grown Up Rice

serves 4 as a side dish
adapted from Yottam Ottolenghi's book Plenty

1 cup red (or brown or wild) rice

2 1/4 cups water

salt

1-2 cups finely chopped herbs (dill, parsley, cilantro, basil, mint, oregano)

1 shallot

olive oil

1 small delicata squash

sriracha or hot sauce of choice

egg (optional)

Put the rice in a sieve and rinse under cold water. Put it in a pot and cover with the water. Bring to a boil, uncovered, over medium-high heat. Once water boils, throw in a pinch or two of salt, cover the pot and reduce heat to low. Set time for 20 minutes.

While the rice is cooking, halve the delicata lengthwise and use a spoon to remove the seeds. Halve each piece again, lengthwise, and slice crosswise into slices about a 1/4 inch thick. Set aside.

Peel the shallot and chop. Set aside.

Choose the herbs you like in the amounts you like (I go heaviest on mint, basil and dill, personally) and chop finely.

When the timer on the rice goes off, remove the top, add the herbs in one big pile and replace the lid. Se the timer for another 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat a tablespoon or two of olive oil in a small pan. When glistening, add the shallot and stir. Cook for a couple of minutes then add the delicata and a pinch of salt. Cook over medium high heat until the squash is tender and browning at the edges. About 10 minutes. 

When the rice is finished, remove the lid and fluff the rice with a fork, stirring the herbs into the grain. Add the delicata and shallot to the pot and mix well or spoon the rice onto a plate and top with the squash. Top it all with an egg (fried or poached recommended) and a generous amount of hot sauce. Salt and pepper to taste as always. 

Roasted Pumpkin Soup with Pepitas

There is no stillness here. The wind is in the trees and the leaves are on the ground and all day I walk with a stirring inside. I imagine under my skin, in the dark hollow beneath my rib cage, no organs but an echoing chamber and a pile of dried leaves lifted by a wind and spun and swirled around and around and around. My heart beats like a hummingbird and even my thoughts seem somehow vaporous. Nothing lasts. That which goes unwritten is rootless.

The kitchen is my anchor. My hands stay busy. My mind moves freely from place to place and the wonders of muscle memory set in: peeling, chopping, stirring, salting. The cucumbers and tomatoes in my garden suddenly hold little appeal--fleeting sun fruits of a passing season. I am drawn to the golden orbs of pumpkin hunkered under canopies of vine. Even raw the flesh is substantial, absorbent. The pumpkin is earthly, lasting. It is designed to store in a cellar or on a shelf for months after it has been harvested. It lies in wait, steady, sustaining.

The deep smells of roasting--garlic, pumpkin, sizzling oil--level me. Then again the routine motions: scrape, stir, blend, stir. As night falls I ladle myself a bowl. Each velvety bite is a dropping in, a slowing down. I can feel my feet against the rag rug and the ground against my feet. If only for a moment, the quiet comes. I am still.

Roasted Pumpkin Soup with Pepitas

serves 4

About 3 lbs pumpkin or winter squash of choice

4 cloves garlic, peeled

4-6 cups chicken or vegetable stock

1/2 a sweet onion, chopped

1 jalapeno or other hot pepper, chopped with seeds

3 cardamom pods (or 1/2 t ground cardamom) 

dash of nutmeg

1 T coconut oil

1/4 cup raw pumpkin seeds

olive oil

salt & pepper

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Quarter or halve your pumpkin(s) depending on the size and place skin side down on a baking sheet. Place each garlic clove in the hollow of each piece of pumpkin. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Roast until a fork goes easily through the flesh of the pumpkin, about an hour. Once the squash is cool enough to handle, scoop the flesh away from the skin with a spoon. Discard the skins.

Leave the oven and on and keep the baking sheet handy.

In a heavy-bottomed sauce pan, heat the coconut oil over medium-high heat. Add the onion, hot pepper and the nutmeg and stir. Gently crush the cardamom pods with the flat side of a large knife and add to the pot. Once the onion is wilted, add the squash and stock. Bring to a boil then reduce heat and simmer for about 20 more minutes. 

While the soup is cooking, drizzle about 1T of olive oil on the baking sheet and pour the pumpkin seeds on top. Sprinkle generously with salt and pop the tray in the oven until the seeds get brown and plump, about 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool.

Turn the soup off, remove the cardamom pods with a slotted spoon, and let the remainder cool enough to put into a blender. Working in batches, blend the soup until smooth and return to the pot. Heat when ready to serve, topping each bowl with a drizzle of olive oil and a spoonfull of pepitas.

This is extra delicious with buttery rye toast.

Slow Roasted Gigante Beans with Tomato and Artichoke

There are few things I love more than a summer garden bounty. A unique excitement comes over me when I step out of my door and walk a few feet into the garden to determine what I will eat for my next meal. The part of my brain that requires tangible results, proof of patience or of hard work or of quantifiable value, really loves gardening. The carrot patch is full of weeds? Hours later it can be picked clean, thinned out and tidy, leaving only the cheerful froth of carrot tops, breathing more easily in their newly spacious soil. The thinnings become a snack or pesto or compost. When it all goes well, nothing is wasted. But bounty is not without its challenges. I remember Sandor Katz saying in an interview that no one told him when he first started gardening that everything would ripen at the same time. What do you do with all that produce? Katz's solution was fermenting and preserving.

As you know, this is not the first time I've confronted the issue of overabundance in the backyard. After swearing off zucchinis, the problem is easier to deal with. The plants that won't stop producing this year are the Sungold tomatoes. We harvest them daily and still, within hours of picking the vines clean, I look outside and see the sweet, orange little orbs that I missed or that have suddenly ripened, taunting me, reminding me that there is work yet to do. Luckily, the fruit is delicious raw, right off the vine. But when the counter is covered in overflowing bowls of tomatoes, some processing is required. 

Slow-roasting tomatoes is a great way to preserve. The flavors get concentrated, richer, full of that ever elusive umami quality. They are delicious spread on sandwiches, made into a dip, or added to pasta sauces and stews. Roasted tomatoes easily last a week in the fridge. It's also nice to throw them in the freezer and pull them out in the winter when grocery store tomatoes are nothing more than hard and tasteless imposters.

A happy accident brought me to this next recipe. I wasn't long into roasting a pan of tomatoes when I realized my timing was off and I needed to leave the house before the roasting was complete. I pulled the tomatoes out after about an hour and left them to cool on the stove top. They were soft, bursting out of their skins, full of the bright, sweet flavors of the raw fruit, but with an added complexity and a slight richness to them.

Hours later, hungry and out of patience for a slow roast, I turned to improvisation for inspiration. I had gigante beans in the fridge from earlier in the week and a couple of cans of artichoke hearts. I threw the artichoke hearts, tomatoes, a few cloves of garlic and the white beans into a roasting pan, covered it all with some chicken stock and threw it in the oven for an hour. The result, topped with pecorino and basil, was a hot dish of comforting, savory beans, hearty enough to be a meal alone and with all the lightness of summer time food. I have recreated this with slight tweaks, every week since the first try. Fingers crossed, this bounty lasts a few more weeks.

Gigante Beans with Roasted Artichokes & Sungolds

1.5 cups gigante beans, rinsed and soaked overnight

2 cans artichoke hearts, rinsed & halved

2 cups sungold tomatoes (halved if very large)

1/2 cup chicken stock

6 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed

olive oil

handful purple basil

fresh grated Pecorino Romano to garnish

salt and pepper to taste

To cook the gigante beans pour the beans and soaking water into a large pot. Add more water to cover if needed. Bring the beans to a boil then reduce to a simmer and cook until a fork goes easily through. You want them to still have a bit of firmness. This takes 45 minutes to an hour. This step can be done the day before.

Preheat the oven to 250 degrees. On a rimmed sheet tray spread the tomatoes in a single layer. Drizzle with olive oil and toss gently to evenly coat. Roast about 45 minutes and remove the tray and increase the temperature on the oven to 400 degrees.

Combine the beans, garlic, tomatoes and artichoke hearts in a roasting pan. Add the chicken broth, a generous dash of salt and lots of cracked black pepper. Stir everything together well and return to the oven. Let bake for 45 minutes to an hour, stirring occasionally. If the pan dries out, add more chicken broth. The longer you can let the pan go, the softer the beans become. 

Once everything is cooked to your liking, remove the baking dish and let cool for 5 minutes. Serve alone or as a side, topped with chopped basil, fresh grated Pecorino Romano, more pepper and maybe some lemon zest too.

Gluten Free Nut Butter and Jam Sandwich Cookies

Rarely do I feel the urge to bake, and much to my annoyance, when the mood strikes it is usually late at night, or in the middle of a blizzard, or when I am just downright too lazy to go back into town to the store. What this means is that I often find myself ill-equipped for following a recipe as it's written. I'll have baking powder but no baking soda, brown sugar but no powdered sugar. A 1/4 bag of chocolate chips will be wallowing in the cupboard along with 2 tablespoons of oatmeal and more shredded coconut than I can ever remember buying but I won't have enough of any one thing to make even a half batch of a single recipe. So I improvise. Often the substitutions and tweaks end up being delicious but there have been some real train wrecks too. I remember one particularly abysmal carrot cake cooked in a tiny cottage at the end of a dead end road during a snow storm in Maine with my best friend after too many bottles of wine. I confess, we ate half of it anyway. Maine in winter can call for desperate measures.

On an unusually peaceful Sunday afternoon last week I suddenly wanted nothing more than to make cookies. I knew I had the basics for something as simple as a sugar cookie, and then I remembered all the half eaten jars of jam in the fridge. With no toaster in the house and bread only making a rare appearance in the kitchen, we suddenly have a glut of jam and no vehicle. I started searching the web for simple, gluten free, thumb print cookies. Instead, I stumbled upon a recipe for peanut butter and jam sandwich cookies. Of course! What goes better with jam than good, old PB?

True to form I had barely a quarter of the peanut butter I needed and it was of the chunky variety, not the called-for smooth type. But when has something as silly as having the necessary ingredients stopped me from trying a new recipe? I mixed the chunky stuff with smooth almond butter and followed the rest of the recipe to the letter (though I did add twice as much salt as suggested and cut out a little of the sugar).

These were by far, the easiest, fastest, yummiest peanut butter cookies I have ever made and they are definitely going to be a staple now. I slathered a few with raspberry jam, a few with Lingonberry jam, and the last with fig preserves. The cookie is light and airy and not to sweet and it actually gets softer a day later making it even more like the best PB&J sandwich--chewy, and with the perfect ratio of PB to J. You can easily swap the peanut butter for another kind of nut butter, though if you use cashew or walnut butter I would add even more salt to the recipe. This would also be a great cookie for making ice cream sandwiches. Just saying.

Nut Butter & Jam Sandwich Cookies

adapted from Haut Appetit

makes about 10 sandwiches

1 cup natural peanut or other nut butter (smooth or chunky or mix of the two)

1 large egg

1/2 cup sugar

1 T almond or other dairy free milk

1 T brown rice or other gluten free flour

1 t baking soda

1 t salt (or more if using a sweeter nut butter)

favorite jam or jams

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line two cookie sheets with parchment paper

In a large mixing bowl beat the egg and sugar together until creamy and frothy. Stir in the almond milk. Add the nut butter and stir with a wooden spoon until well combined.

Mix in the flour, baking soda and salt until well combined. Taste a little bit and adjust salt as needed.

Using a tablespoon, scoop the batter onto the cookie sheets. Dampen a fork in water and use the back of it to flatten each ball of dough, leaving a criss-cross mark on each one.

Bake 15 minutes or a little longer. You want the edges to be just slightly golden.

Let the cookies cool slightly. Spread a generous layer of your favorite jam onto the flat side of one cookie and place the flat side of another cookie on top of it, pressing gently to seal the sandwich. Repeat until you run out of cookies.

These cookies will keep really well in an airtight container for several days, if you can keep your hands off them.

Potage Santé aka Green Soup

When you are used to cooking for two and are suddenly left to your own devices, funny things start to happen. Namely, your meals suffer. I inherited from my mother the proclivity to--when left to eat alone--combine leftovers of different and discordant flavors in the same bowl, at odd times of the day or night, and to eat them while doing a crossword puzzle. It's not a lack of interest in the preparation, or in the flavor of the food, but rather a tendency to fall into a time warp of concentration and work from which we suddenly awaken, and, ravenous, go for ease of access and the simple need to fuel. The crossword puzzle is a way to somewhat absentmindedly reboot the brain. It's that or solitaire. So while my sweetheart is scaling cliffs in Yosemite I have found myself, at 5pm or late at night, eating a "dinner" comprised of things in my fridge that can only be summed up by calling them "orts." Yup. It's been that good.

Yesterday we had the first rainy day in Sonoma in months. The sky was a smudge against the bleached hills, and while it never poured, a steady drizzle made it just cold enough to let it settle in the bones. In that damp afternoon, I went to the garden, picked a bunch of kale and uncovered startlingly red potatoes, gleaming like garnets in the black loam.

I was going to cook. I would not eat popcorn and pieces of turkey rolled around mustard and slices of avocado then dipped in hummus. I was going to prepare a delicious, nourishing meal and eat it at dinner time. I was going to make green soup.

Green soup is something my dad makes, and it is something his mother made. She called it Potage Santé, which means Health Soup. Hers always included sorrel, which is a delicious, lemony weed that grows wild and is a great detoxifier and general tonic. It's hard to find in groceries stores or markets so dad and I have both adapted the recipe, using whatever greens we can get. This is a soup for all seasons though I associate it with inclement weather: a rainy summer night, blizzards, sunless spring days and the first frosts of autumn. Each green soup is slightly different from the last--depending on the season, the mood, the vegetables at hand--but it is always green, always with the backbone of some kind of allium and a potato to thicken, and best accompanied by crusty bread warmed in the oven, and a couple of good cheeses.

Our sorrel hasn't emerged yet so I used kale from the garden, some cauliflower that needed a home, and, just to make it extra green, the last of a bag of frozen peas. I had no onion but young garlic worked just as well.

While this soup is a great home for the ends of vegetables it is also one which is vastly improved by the quality of the ingredients you put into it. It's a great neutral pallet for any array of herbs and spices but if your vegetables have come straight out of healthy ground or fresh from a farmer's market, you won't need more than salt and pepper.

The soup took me about an hour and a half to prep, cook, puree and reheat. At 7pm I closed my computer, poured a glass of wine, turned on some music, and sat down to a real meal by myself. It truly was health soup. Never underestimate the joy of cooking for one.

Green Soup

serves 4-6

4-5 cups chicken or vegetable stock or water

1 medium sized leek, sliced & washed

about 2 cups chopped celery and/or carrots

12-16 oz potatoes, peeled and cubed

4 cups dark leafy greens of choice, roughly chopped

2 T olive oil

1 T unsalted butter

salt and pepper to taste

optional add-ins
fresh or frozen peas
dandelion greens
spinach
collard greens or swiss chard
broccoli or cauliflower

sour cream, heavy cream or plain yogurt to top
chopped fresh herbs to top
red pepper flakes to top
edible flowers to top

In a large, heavy-bottomed pot, heat the olive oil and melt the butter over medium-high heat. Add the leek and sauté, stirring, for about one minute. Reduce heat to medium and add the celery and carrots. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are soft and the leek is translucent. 

Add the potatoes (and broccoli if you are using it), stir, and then pour in the stock. The liquid should cover the vegetables. If it doesn't, add more stock or water to cover. Bring to a boil then reduce to a simmer, cooking until a fork goes easily through the potatoes. About 10-15 minutes. When the potatoes are cooked but not too soft, stir in the greens. You may need to add a bit more liquid at this point. Once the greens are wilted, remove the pot from heat and let cool about 10 minutes.

Working in batches, ladle the soup into a blender or food processor and blend until smooth. Pour the pureed soup into a bowl. If you are serving right away, pour the pureed soup back into the pot and heat at medium-low heat. Taste and adjust salt and pepper as needed. You may want to thin the soup with more stock or water at this point as well. If you plan to eat the soup later, let it cool after pureeing and then store in the refrigerator until ready to eat.

When the soup is hot, ladle into bowls and top however you choose. This time I used wild mustard flowers from the bed in front of our house. Crusty bread for dredging the empty bowl is highly recommended.

Coconut Rose Pudding

For the past three days I have been craving something that I have never made and never even tasted. Coconut pudding. Where the notion for such a thing came from I have no idea. But here I am, craving something sweet and cold, refreshing but creamy, the kind of dessert that takes two bites to get off the spoon. Comfort food.

With the ever growing popularity of coconut water it has become pretty easy to get access to the stuff. As with most trends, once it catches on there are people who become purists, which, as far as I can tell, in the case of coconut water, means getting it raw, or better yet, straight out of a green coconut. In this case, the purists are right. Many of the boxed and canned coconut waters taste too sweet, too processed, like the flavor of coconut instead of the thing itself. If you live somewhere with a good Asian market or close to a Whole Foods, you can easily get your hands on a young Thai coconut. It's worth the dicey work with a cleaver just to get at that fresh, almost effervescent, incomparable water.

Once you've refreshed yourself with the water you're left with silky coconut meat which bears little resemblance to the chalky flesh you find in the drier, brown-husked variety. This is slippery and almost gelatinous to the touch but dense when you sink your teeth in and delicate in taste.

Traditional pudding involves cream and milk and actual cooking. Maybe it's the hot weather, maybe it's the past weeks of a sprint-paced life, maybe it's as simple as missing someone I love who now is gone. Whatever the reason, I really needed this pudding to be simple, no-frills, easy to make and comforting to eat. I recently read that the Sanskrit word for coconut palm means "tree that gives all that is necessary for living." Eating this, barefoot in my dusty backyard, a thin slice of moon rising in the twilight, and not a sound but the crickets and my spoon against the bowl, I just might have to agree.

Coconut Rose Pudding

serves 4

2 young Thai green coconuts

1/2 cup coconut water reserved from the coconuts

1 t raw honey or other sweetener

2 t rose water

Lie one of the coconuts on its side. Carefully and with confidence, use a cleaver or other very sharp butcher knife to cut off the top of the shell. Do your best not to lose too much of the coconut water inside. 

Once you've cracked the nut, pour the water into a cup or jar and repeat with the second coconut. Drink some of the water. It's delicious.

Wielding the cleaver again, split the coconut in half from top to bottom so you may more easily access the meat. Using a spoon, scoop the meat from the shell and place it in a high speed blender. 

Add the honey, rose water, and about 1/2 a cup of the reserved coconut water and blend until smooth. Chill in the fridge for at least a couple hours so the pudding thickens.*

Top with a sprinkle of cinnamon, cocoa powder, some chopped pistachios or just enjoy as is. 

*I put one small bowl in the freezer just for fun and ended up with a sorbet-like consistency which was very nice.

Note: This can be made vegan by replacing the honey with stevia or coconut nectar. Stevia will also make this a cleanse-friendly sweet.