parsnips aplenty

It’s 7:00 on a Saturday evening. I had plans – I was going to go contra dancing, twirling and stomping and grinning for three hours. But they have been thwarted by sunshine.

I was worried that this would happen when I decided that I would spend the afternoon lazing about on a grassy knoll. A few hours of soaking up the Vitamin D really takes it out of you. We walked back in the house, plopped down on the couch, and I asked myself, “Do I really, really feel like dancing?” And I’m still on the couch, two hours later, having not even gotten up to wash the sunscreen off my face. The dance is starting now. I think I might make it to the laundry room, but no farther.

This morning, Zeke came over and we walked over to the farmers’ market to stand in a 3-mile long line for biscuits. I understand that you’re not supposed to be able to find good biscuits north of the Mason-Dixon Line – or west of Tennessee, for that matter – but Pine State Biscuits knows what they’re doing. My friend Luke, who moved to Oregon from North Carolina a few months after I did, went behind the counter to hug all the cooks after ordering the Reggie last weekend. (Also, they have Cheerwine, which I miss, but not enough to pay $2 a bottle.)

So after some sweet biscuit love, Zeke headed to French class and I headed into the kitchen to make some picnic preparations. There was a feeding frenzy at the strawberry stand over at the market, so I grabbed a pint, and I also picked up the last bunch of basil from a neighboring vendor. This and a little drizzle of real balsamic gave me basil-wrapped strawberries. Three ingredients. Welcome to summer.

After that I threw some Puy lentils together with olive oil, the same real balsamic, salt and pepper, red scallions, plenty more basil, herbs de provence, a big pinch of lavender, and a couple of splashes of lemon juice.

Next was a simple, no-frills pasta salad: broccoli, parmesan, basil (what? It was a big bunch), olive oil, red wine vinegar, salt and pepper, and roasted garlic.

Finally, I melted a little Earth Balance in a pan and chopped up about 5 stalks of rhubarb. Cooked it down with more brown sugar than my teeth will forgive me for, a handful of raisins, some cinnamon, allspice, and cloves, and poured some Cointreau over it for good measure. When it got all mushy, I had rhubarb compote. Plus bread and goat cheese? You’ve got yourself a picnic.

We packed it all up, along with some Thai iced tea and blood orange soda, into sexy sexy Tupperware and went up to Washington Park, finding the perfect spot of grass in Hoyt Arboretum. We munched on our riches while watching sun-ecstatic Portlanders engage in such stimulating activities as playing hackey sack and rolling down a giant hill. Urban hikers walked past; children scuttled about, parents in tow; couples meandered by; amateur botanists pontificated within earshot. Zeke and I, meanwhile, raised forks to mouths and chewed in harmony with birdsong. Then we sat, in the sun, and did absolutely nothing. And it was wonderful.

I have decided that in order to appreciate spring, you’ve got to live someplace with a real winter. I remember reading food magazines in Marches and Aprils years ago and wondering if the only vegetarian recipes they’d ever offer in springtime would be baby vegetable sautés. Tiny carrots, radishes, new potatoes – get over it! Spring foods tasted pale, to me. I wanted to jump right into heady peaches and bursting-ripe tomatoes, dripping with that sweet anise tang of billowing basil leaves. The area I grew up in got its fair share of snow dumps in the colder months, but I didn’t truly understand total winter hibernation until I spent it in Bulgaria.

As soon as it got warm enough to leave the house without seven layers on, I spent as much time outside as possible. And I started foraging. Wild garlic, nettles, lemon balm, dandelions – spring gave way to a whole new taste, for me. Instead of underdeveloped flavors, I now associate spring with bright yet pungent, earthy greens. (And they go so well with new potatoes!) I’ll never regret the onset of summer fruit season, but a little part of me now sighs when I see the asparagus at the market start to get thicker, the green garlic reedier. Ah well, next spring will come with just as much relief.

Today I met up with a friend that I came to know when I visited Portland years ago. We ran into each other in January or so but haven’t seen much of each other, and our schedules finally collided today, to allow us a few minutes’ wander over to the farmers’ market for lunch. We got some dead-ripe strawberries, $3.50 a pint, and I squealed with delight when I saw… fiddleheads! A recently yuppified foraging treat, $12 a pound but I didn’t care, because I knew that their season is so short and I’ve been wanting to try them for so long. I snapped up a handful of them, along with a recipe for quiche that the vendors had printed out from the Interwebs.

I’ve been easing up on the dairy, lately, and it was a bit of a deep breath to use so much of it for one recipe, but… quiche. And fiddleheads! A couple of adjustments from the original recipe – I used half and half instead of milk (if I’m going to use that much dairy, I’m not going to screw around about it), I threw in the last couple of tablespoons of parmesan I had lying around, and although I used the cheddar that the recipe calls for, I suggest substituting half of that with something a little milder, such as Gruyère. Havarti? Yum. I also threw in some chives. Because a quiche needs chives.

This is also the first blog picture I’m posting with my new camera! I’m leaving it totally unedited, because it’s pretty darn good just the way it is. Also, it’s a wet spring day in Oregon and I’m going to go sit by the fire and eat some eggy fiddlehead pie. Spring has arrived in Portland, and it’s rainy, but golly gee whiz, look at those ferns.

Fiddlehead Quiche
adapted from a recipe from recipeland.com
serves 6-8

2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons sliced leeks
1 cup chopped fiddleheads
pinch salt
4 large eggs
1 cup half and half
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons grated parmesan
1 cup mild cheddar cheese (see notes above)
1 tablespoon chives
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
1 9″ pie crust, par-baked

Preheat to 350F. Heat olive oil in a pan over medium high heat and add leeks, fiddleheads, and a pinch of salt. Cook until softened and fragrant, 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, whisk together eggs and half and half. Add salt, cheeses, chives, and parsley. Remove fiddlehead mixture from the heat and add to egg mixture. Give it a stir and pour the whole shebang into the pie crust. Bake 40 minutes or until barely set in the center. Let rest at least 15 minutes before cutting and serving.

I’m so glad my friend Zeke has started taking French lessons on the weekends, because the language school is a few blocks from my house, and it gives him an excuse to come over on Saturday mornings. Zeke is wonderful at encouraging me to dig in the back of my pantry for the right thing to throw in a basic recipe, these pancakes being a great example. I suggested zesting a lemon into the batter, and, as I was wondering what I should pull out of the spice cabinet to complement it, he said, “Do you have any rosewater?”

Well, of course I have rosewater.

Almond extract, cardamom, and rose petals later, we had some lovely pancakes. The basic recipe I use is from Stephanie Giacoletto, a fellow Bulgaria volunteer. Believe it or not, give the batter a few more whisks than you might think is acceptable for pancakes.

Lemon-Rose Pancakes with Cardamom Syrup

syrup
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
zest of 1/2 lemon
3 cardamom pods, crushed
splash of lemon juice
splash of rosewater

pancakes
2 eggs
2 cups milk
4 tablespoons oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon almond extract
zest of 1/2 lemon
crumbled petals of 5-6 dried rosebuds
2 cups flour
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
oil or butter, for cooking

Make syrup: in a saucepan over medium high heat, combine water, sugar, lemon zest, and cardamom. Bring to a boil and cook until reduced by half. Remove from heat, add lemon juice and rosewater, and set aside.

Make pancakes: In a small mixing bowl combine eggs, milk, oil, vanilla, almond extract, lemon zest, and rose petals. Set aside. In a large bowl combine flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Add wet to dry and stir to mix.

Heat about a tablespoon of oil in a skillet over medium high heat. When pan is hot enough that a drop of water sizzles in the oil, pour in about 1/4 cup of batter. Flip when the edges just start to look dry and bubbles pop to form little holes (instead of melting back into the batter, which means that it’s still too wet). Repeat with remaining batter, putting as many pancakes in the pan as you can without crowding; add more oil to the pan as needed.

Strain syrup to remove cardamom seeds and pour over pancakes. Powdered sugar, too? Yes.

I left the country for the first time when I was 16, on a three-week school trip to Paris. I haven’t much looked back. Five continents visited, three foreign countries lived in, four languages studied, and I’m starting to wonder if I’ll never feel well-rounded or satisfactorily traveled.

The more I cook, the more I pay attention to food in the places I’ve been. It’s been Italy that keeps coming back to me, though, for recipeless cooking – I spent four months there and learned a ton about throwing stuff in a pan, more by osmosis than by any study of cuisine. My favorite trick, by far, is the risotto cake.

I learned this in Venice. I spent a few days there near the beginning of my time in Italy, and when I was trying to decide how I should finish up the two empty weeks I had before getting on my flight back to the U.S., Venice kept pulling me back. I know the arguments against it – it’s an open sewer filled with rotting buildings, topped off by pickpockets and souvenir stalls. I was wary of all of these things before I went, and dubious at any chance of a positive experience as my train from Verona rolled through the marsh in February drizzle. We left the land, though, and barbershop poles poking up through the water tugged at the corners of my mouth. I stepped off the train and out of the station and there I was, on the Grand Canal, and I immediately loved Venice. I have never left. I stayed with a friend of a friend who fed me simple, perfect food, and when she made risotto cakes, my 20-year-old’s pride hid my enthusiastic surprise at the ingenious idea. I won’t give you a recipe, because she didn’t give me one either.

Take some leftover risotto. Add an egg. Mix it up, make into patties (about 3-4 tablespoons’ worth), fry in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. The only trick is to wait long enough before flipping them – if you do it too soon, they’ll fall apart. Wait until you see a healthy brown crust forming on the bottom, then turn them.

This is a great post-dinner-party brunch. At least, that’s how I made it this week.

I travel light.

After doing the requisite college European backpacking trip with a giant black pack that necessitated very few stops for laundry but a grumble every time I tried to lift it, I came home and stuffed the cumbersome luggage into the bowels of my parents’ basement, never to be seen again. Now I’ve got an oversized daypck that I use for everything from weekend trips to month-long round-the-world jaunts. (Yes, I did that once. Not recommended.) It’s always been important for me to be able to pick up and leave at a moment’s notice, because you never know when you’ll get a last-minute deal on tickets to Greece or an acquaintance whose parents’ friends’ cousins have a summer house on the Red Sea coast that they won’t use next weekend. Underwear, three shirts, toothbrush, go.

Since moving to Portland, I have discovered that I may travel light but I don’t necessarily live light. I find myself nesting. Acquiring things. This is a struggle for me, because while I realize that I am still aware enough to avoid buying non-useful things, every blanket, set of candles, pack of clothes hangers that I get roots me further in this apartment, this city, this country. The bookshelf I bought when I moved here is slowly being filled – thanks to living within walking distance of Powell’s – and my space is starting to look more and more inhabited.

In cultivating a relationship to Things, and finding a balance between materialism and simplicity, I spend time thinking about how I came to acquire them. If you’re going to own something, I feel you should remember the handing-over, have a story – a word, at the very least – to mark the moment they passed into your space. I was looking through my food photos this morning, saw this one, and thought about what went into it.

I made this for breakfast the day that my friend Ravi and I drove out to the coast – to Seaside, full of charming tackiness and home to the worst sandwich I’ve ever eaten, and to Astoria, a town I’d love to live in if I had a car and a tolerance for months on end of gray skies.

Of the objects in the picture, the cloth came from Istanbul. Everywhere I travel I buy scarves and earrings – they pack easily (travel light!) and are beautiful but useful. (I have a very firm no-knickknack policy, especially when it comes to souvenirs.) I’m up to about 35 scarves at this point, so I always have a backdrop for food styling!

The scarf in this photo was bought at the spice bazaar in Sultanahmet, sold for tourists but stunning nonetheless, ocean blues and strands of silver. A few minutes after I bought it, my friends and I turned a corner and found an entire street full of scarf shops – and one of them turned to another and said, “Uh oh, we’re about to lose Lauren.” I restrained myself and left the alley with only… 7 scarves. Maybe 8.

The plate is from Ikea, in a shopping trip I took thanks to some extra money in my paycheck. The food – the most important part – is from the first farmers’ market of the season! Signaling the end of a weary gray winter, I woke up on Saturday and walked the seven blocks from my house, canvas bag in hand, to a comfortably crowded, energetic collection of foodies and farmers where I picked up sunchokes, parsnips, apples, eggs, and a beautiful loaf of flour-dusted whole wheat bread. What better way to start the farmers’ market season than with a little fry-up in a cast iron pan?

Spiced Friend Apples with Apricot Butter
serves 2

2 tablespoons butter or Earth Balance
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
3 winesap apples, peeled, cored, and sliced
2 heaping tablespoons apricot butter (or any fruit butter of your choosing)
2 slices good bread
maple syrup

In a pan over medium-high heat, melt butter. Add cinnamon and cloves and cook, stirring, for about 15 seconds. Add apples, stir until coated with butter, and cover. Let cook for 3-4 minutes or until easily split with a fork. Uncover and brown for 1 minute. Stir in apricot butter, empty mixture into a bowl, and set aside.

Put more butter in the pan if necessary and fry bread on both sides until browned, 2-3 minutes per side. Serve apples over bread and top with maple syrup.

What do you do when skies are gray and the days aren’t yet long enough?

You open the freezer to find the sour cherries you picked and put away last summer! And then you make a cake.

I made this last February, when a bunch of other volunteers crammed into my little apartment for a weekend of winter food lovin’. Then we rolled back the Turkish rug and initiated a hoe-down. Bonus: it’s vegan. But don’t say that too loudly.

Chocolate Cherry Upside Down Cake
adapted from a recipe from allrecipes.com

2 cups frozen pitted sour cherries, thawed and drained
3 tablespoons butter or Earth Balance
3 tablespoons sugar

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups white sugar
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups water
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup distilled white vinegar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350F. In an 8″ metal cake pan, combine cherries, butter, and sugar and put over medium-high heat, stirring until butter and sugar have melted. Set aside.

In a large bowl sift together flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt. In another bowl combine water, oil, vinegar, and vanilla. Pour wet into dry and mix until just barely combined. Pour over cherry mixture in cake pan. Bake 30-35 minutes and let cool for 10 minutes in pan before turning out.

I grew up in a wonderful progressive community in southern Appalachia, where vegetarianism was never a confusing concept. I don’t remember ever learning about tofu – it was something people ate, and the bean curd patty was never a revelation for me. Any sense of “you mean you don’t eat meat/dairy/wheat/Doritos – what can I feed you?” never really stuck around for very long, because, although I attended a lot of tabbouleh-intensive potlucks, someone always had a new recipe for something intriguingly healthy. Many of my parents’ friends would say, “Oh yeah, I was a vegetarian… in college.”

So on the first day of college, I went to the cafeteria, grabbed a tray, looked at the chicken fingers on the hot bar, and said, “Well, I’m in college, so I might as well be a vegetarian.”

It was not so simple, of course. I was never a huge fan of meat, but I still weaned myself off of it slowly. I’ve done enough traveling, though, to know that most of the world is vegetarian only for reasons of economics. I’m very aware that for me to say that I choose not to eat meat is an ability that comes only with a great deal of privilege, so when someone goes out of their way to go to the butcher for my visit, I’m going to eat what they serve me and be grateful for every bite. People ask me why I’m vegetarian, and I say, “really, every reason.” It’s better for my cholesterol, my wallet, my environment, my friendly neighborhood cows. I’m one of those pissy ranting liberals who goes on about American overconsumption, and I’m thankful daily that I don’t live in a place that expects me to drive my large belching car to a strip-mall supermarket so I can stock up on my weekly supply of Jimmy Dean.

Sometimes I think I should take things to the next level and go vegan. This thought usually lasts until the spoonful of yogurt in my hand makes it to my mouth. I’ve never asked a vegan, “So… what do you eat, anyway?” but I have always been secretly impressed by cooks who can give vegan food that rich-and-creamy mouthfeel that we all crave from time to time. It’s a very particular aesthetic of mastication*, to me, a way of looking at food that is hearty, satisfying, and – most importantly – not just full of weirdo substitutes. (For example, Coconut Bliss is good. Tofurkey is frightening.)

Enter rice milk. You can make soup with it! Who knew? I got a lovely bunch of kale in my produce box last week, and I had a ton of tiny potatoes that were all about to get sprouty, and I really wanted to make a good soup with them. I was thinking about making a nice wintery, creamy soup, but I get bites of super rich food at work all day, so when I come home, I do not want to go into a dairy coma. I also do not want my cream soup to taste like soy. So rice milk it is! This is the vegan potage I’ve been craving – deeply-flavored, savory, but not a cream bomb. My friend ET and I had this for lunch today with a nice carrot salad, bread, and a little plate of Bulgarian sheep’s-milk cheese. (Oops, that’s not vegan.)

Kale-Potato Soup with Balsamic-Roasted Garlic
serves 4-6

2 heads garlic
salt and pepper
olive oil
good balsamic vinegar. The thick stuff.

1 small yellow onion, diced
1 stalk celery, finely diced
1/2 teaspoon chopped dried rosemary
1 bunch kale, center stems removed, roughly chopped
1 1/2 pounds potatoes, skins on, roughly chopped
1 quart + 1 cup vegetable broth
2 cups rice milk

Roast garlic: preheat oven to 375F. Chop off the top of each head of garlic, exposing the cloves. Put the heads down on a piece of aluminum foil and sprinkle with salt and pepper, then drizzle with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Wrap them up in the foil to make a little packet, and put in the oven for 30 minutes or until the garlic is soft and drop-dead-gorgeous brown.

Meanwhile, make soup: In a pot over medium heat, cook onions, celery, rosemary, and 1/2 teaspoon salt in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil until softened, about 5 minutes. Add kale, potatoes, and vegetable broth, cover, and turn the heat up to high. When soup comes to a boil, turn heat to medium low and simmer, uncovered, until potatoes are soft and kale is cooked, about 30 minutes.

By this point, the garlic should be done. When it’s cool enough to handle, squeeze out the cloves into the soup. Give it a stir, and get out your blender. Use a slotted spoon to put the veggies in the blender – a little broth is OK, but don’t overdo it. Puree it in batches, adding enough rice milk to get it to a cream-soup consistency. Discard vegetable broth (or save it to make another soup!) and put your pureed mixture in the pot; heat until warm and serve.

Note The red garnish in the picture is just some red pepper puree. Empty a jar of roasted red peppers into the blender, add a little rosemary and a drizzle of olive oil. Buzz. Done.

*Yes, I just said, “aesthetic of mastication.”

When I first started cooking with any intention, I wasted a tremendous amount of money. One day, years ago, I was home from college for the summer and a few friends came to visit for the weekend, and we decided to make a curry for dinner. The recipe we picked was, of course, one with thirty ingredients, most of which were spices. My parents tossed me their debit card and we went to the store.

We spent eighty-four dollars. To make one pot of curry. And you know why? Because we bought a jar of every spice on that list. All of which were, of course, organic. And at least five bucks a pop. I have learned since that the most wonderful thing about health food stores is the bulk section, specifically the bulk herbs and spices. Heed this!: Never buy a jar of spices, because you can buy them by the teaspoon (or tablespoon, or whatever) at your local co-op for fifty cents, which saves you tons of money – and, since you’re not buying a whole jarful at a time, you don’t have to worry about it going stale. I think this is one of the biggest mistakes we make when stocking our pantry: spices, especially pre-ground spices, lose their potency quickly, and when you leave a jar of curry powder in the cabinet for a year before you finally get around to making that great vindaloo recipe you’ve been hanging on to, I can promise you it will hardly taste like anything except the twenty chilies you had to put in.

So there’s tip number one for the day. Tip number two, which I try to emphasize often in this blog: substitute whenever and wherever you can. When I was first getting the hang of cooking for myself, I made sure to follow new recipes to the letter the first time I made them, and then allowed myself to adapt them as needed. I think this is important for a beginning cook, but now that I’ve got a better sense of things, I do it less often, and have become more of a recipe-as-guide person, as opposed to a recipe-as-law. I love reading a recipe that has notes for variation, because it means that whoever developed it played around with it a lot before releasing it to the wind, and it also gives more of a springboard for ideas of different directions that I can take with it.

This second tip is the main reason I’ve never made spaghetti squash – well, at least not until this afternoon. It feels like such a… unitasker. If I’m going to make something with winter squash, I grab one arbitrarily from the pile at the grocery store. (Or farmers’ market. Of course.) Spaghetti squash seemed almost gimmicky to me – it’s squash, and it can be made into ribbons? Who cares?

I picked one up last week. I caved.

Okay, okay, the pastasquash is fun. I admit it. You can wrap it around your fork, suck a piece down like a noodle, and pile it up into a lovely orange tower of angel hair. But it’s squash, which everyone in their right mind loves, and so it goes terrifically with simple, earthy flavors. I’m using only two – sarsaparilla and sage. One trendy, one classic, both delicious.

You know how you make broth with a bundle of aromatic herbs? I followed the same idea here. When I split the squash down the middle to bake, I put sarsaparilla in the pan, underneath the cavity of the squash. This helped the flavor really permeate, without that annoying texture of, well, wood. No one likes eating bits of wood.

Spaghetti Squash with Sarsaparilla and Sage
serves 2-3

1 spaghetti squash
olive oil
2 teaspoons sarsaparilla
2 dried sage leaves, crushed
salt to taste

Preheat to 350. Halve spaghetti squash lengthwise, and scrape out seeds and goop. Put 1/4″ of water in the bottom of a pan large enough to hold both squash halves, and put a teaspoon of sarsaparilla in the place of where you’ll put each half. Drizzle a bit of olive oil in there, too, then put each squash half over the little piles of sarsaparilla. Cover tightly with aluminum foil or a good lid, then put in the oven and bake until soft, 30-45 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool for a few minutes.

Take a look at which way the strands are going. You meat-eaters will know that it’s best to cut meat to make the fibers as short as possible – the opposite is true here. With a fork, gently loosen the strands of squash – with the grain, not against it. Pile onto a plate and top with sage and some good salt.

When I arrived here in Portland at the end of the summer, the long-time transplants warned me about winter.  Not so much the weather, but the reaction to it.

“This city shuts down under an inch of snow,” warned native midwesterners, suppressing groans.

I understood – both the fact of the matter, and the annoyance with it.  Asheville does the same thing, since it’s full of tiny mountain roads that turn to ice faster than a moonshine hangover, but as soon as a flake of snow hits the air, everyone runs over to the supermarket to stock up on milk, water, and toilet paper, since they’re expecting a return of the Blizzard of ’93.  (You still see t-shirts at the Goodwill announcing “I survived the Blizzard of ’93!”)  I had a handful of days off from school when my northeastern-born parents looked out the window, said, “You’ve got to be kidding,” and took me out for breakfast.

Portland got a couple of inches of snow on Sunday, which all melted on Tuesday, and I’ve barely been able to get anything done.  Except go to work, that is – no snow days for me, since I live 20 blocks away.  Heaven forbid I try to make any doctor or massage appointments, though – I’ve been getting answering machines all week.

Today, though, is the start of a 3-day weekend for me, and I was excited to wake up to giant snowflakes falling outside my window.  This, I thought, is a day for tea and some good greens.

Deborah Madison taught me about bok choy.  Her recipe for stir-fried bok choy with peanuts, from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, is the one that I apply to just about everything I feel like coating in soy sauce.  Having grown up in the south, I can’t help but feel that every green thicker than spinach should be cooked to within an inch of its life, and I think that this new business of stir-frying collard greens is just about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.  Bok choy, however, does really well in this application, and is very well-rounded by peanuts, cooked in a rich-tasting roasted peanut oil, with a bit of heat at the end from ginger and red pepper flakes.  This time, I used some baked tofu instead of peanuts, but I’ll post the original recipe and let you find your own variations.  It’s an excellent introduction to throwing some veggies in a pan.

Stir-Fried Bok Choy with Roasted Peanuts
serves 2-4
recipe by Deborah Madison

3 tablespooons raw peanuts
2 teaspoons roasted peanut oil
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
salt
1 1/2 pounds bok choy
2 tablespoons peanut oil
4 garlic cloves, minced
4 teaspoons minced ginger
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon cornstarch stirred with 3 tablespoons water or vegetable stock

Fry peanuts in 2 teaspoons roasted peanut oil until they’re golden. Chop with red pepper flakes and a few pinches salt and set aside.

Slice off bok choy stems and cut them into 1″ pieces. Leave the leaves whole. Set a wok over high heat. Add 2 tablespoons peanut oil and roll it around the wok. When hot, add garlic and ginger and stir-fry for 1 minute. Add bok choy and a few pinches salt and stir-fry until wilted and glossy. Add soy sauce and cornstarch mixture and stir-fry 1-2 minutes more until leaves are shiny and glazed. Add crushed peanuts, toss, and serve.

This weekend, my goals have been:

1. Above all, do as little as possible.
2.  Spend many happy minutes looking at Mt St Helens and Mt Adams from my window, as it’s often too cloudy to see them.
3.  Listen to NPR in live form, not podcast.
4.  Make the rutabaga bisque whose recipe has been sitting in my inbox for weeks.
5.  Change out of my bathrobe only when absolutely necessary.

I’d like to report that I have done all of these with great aplomb.

This bisque is perfect.  Just perfect.  I don’t like anything that tastes like a radish, and rutabaga falls in that category, but smoked paprika takes that bitter sourness and turns it into something pristine and hearty all at once.  The original recipe called for celery, as so many soup recipes do, but I can’t stand celery, plus I didn’t have any, so I left it out.  If you want to keep it in, it’s 2 stalks, diced.  But if you ask me, Enemy Extraordinaire of Celery, it doesn’t need it.

I could go on about this soup, but that would take too much time away from your marching to the kitchen to make it.  And I’ve really got to get back to working on goal #1.

Smoked Paprika and Rutabaga Bisque
adapted from a recipe by Kate Ramos for chow.com
serves 6-8

3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 medium onion, diced
1 1/2 pounds rutabaga, peeled and cubed (about 4 1/4 cups)
4 cups (1 quart) low-sodium vegetable broth
2 cups half-and-half
2 1/2 teaspoons good quality smoked paprika
1 teaspoon ground black or white pepper

Melt butter in a large pot over medium heat. Once butter foams, add onion, and season generously with salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, until onion is tender but not browned, about 5 minutes.

Add rutabaga and broth, bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low and simmer until rutabaga is tender when pierced with a fork, about 30 minutes. Add half-and-half, paprika, and pepper and stir to combine. Allow soup to cool slightly, then purée in a blender until smooth. (You will have to do this in batches.) Taste and season with more salt and pepper as needed.