Old Egyptian Boss Lunch!

On the menu for last Thursday: babaghanouj, twofer cucumber quinoa salad, fresh pitas and Old Egyptians! I totally made the last one up, by the way, and their name comes from my old boss at the Phoenix. And like him, they were tough and nutty, with a little bit of honey. (Oh, I slay myself.) We also served “baba” at the restaurant as an appetizer, and I regret never getting the recipe from him. But he would have probably said, “If I told you, I would have to kill you.” So I used the Zionist recipe from the Second Ave. Deli!

Planning a menu and executing it from start to finish every week has been really good practice, though I wish I could do it more. On game day, I have to deal with a lot of mishaps, so improvising is realy important. This time, I had a whole other course set up — black-eyed pea fritters — but they just failed to fritter up so I fed the batter to the cows. At least they enjoyed it.

Dear Reader, enclosed are the recipes for Old Egyptians (improvised) and babaghanouj (from The Second Ave. Deli Cookbook).

Old Egyptians

• ground beef
• minced garlic
• chopped parsley
• ground almonds
• salt and pepper
• honey
• eggs
• white bread (optional; I didn’t use it because Chris has a gluten allergy all of a sudden)

Combine everything in proportions that make sense to your taste. Ball it up and throw them into a 400-degree oven until they become brown on the outside and cooked on the inside. Ta-da!

Baba Ganoush

• 4 eggplants
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1/2 C tahini sauce (basically: tahini, lemon juice, garlic, parsley, salt, water, paprika. You can just add these into the baba without making an extra thing.)
• 1/4 C fresh lemon juice
• 1 tbsp minced garlic
• 1/3 C chopped parsley
• 1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
• 1 tsp salt
• parsley for garnish

1. Wash eggplants and prick them with a fork in about 20 places.

2. Broil eggplants for 50 minutes, turning about every 12 minutes.

3. Slit eggplants on one side and place them slit-side down onto a colander to drain. When they cool, scoop out the flesh into a bowl and combine with the tahini sauce and other ingredients. Puree in a blender or mash with a potato masher, and cool for several hours before serving.

Thoughts on Salad

Salad mix sure is pretty, isn’t it? It’s hard to believe that all of that goes into your run-of-the-mill mesclun. Despite all of the work that goes into cultivating salad, it really gets the shaft at restaurants as a filler food, or even just as a platform for better things.

When I was working as a waiter, I absolutely despised salads because tables of people would always order them as their main entrees, dressing on the side. C’mon, guys! Don’t fall for that race to the bottom! I felt like they were stripping salad (and food at large) of its gustatory properties and just using it as an “I’m not fat look at how little I’m eating” food.

However, one thing I would definitely recommend trying is a Greek salad. At the Phoenix Café, you can also get one with grilled chicken on top, which works well too. In this preparation, the salad can really stand on its own. No shame!

The Phoenix Café’s Greek Salad

• A large plate of mesclun lettuce mix
• 1 tbsp crumbled sheep’s milk feta cheese
• 4 kalamata olives
• 4 anchovies
• 4 tomato wedges
• 8 cucumber slices

Assemble ingredients in a manner that is aesthetically pleasing! Dress with your own top-secret-recipe Parmesan vinaigrette (here’s one).

Garlic in Progress

We’re growing three rows of garlic in our west field, and as you can see they’re coming up very nicely. We tossed some organic nitrogen fertilizer on them this week to help them out, too. Like ramps, garlic belongs to the Allium family, and even the leaves smell pungent. Our boss, Gary, told us that good garlic bulbs are indicated by the thickness of the plant’s stem. Most of these are probably a centimeter wide now. They’re big, too! Most are about a foot-and-a-half tall.

Since these aren’t ready yet, we’ve been buying our own garlic from the grocery store in town. (Do you say “grossry” or “groshry”? Midwesterners talk so weird!) The garlic we’re growing will probably all go out to the CSA shares later this summer, but but BUT I’m hoping that we’ll be able to snag some scapes once those come out. The scapes will kind of snake out from the main joint of the plant in a few weeks.

I use garlic in just about everything, so it’s hard to choose a single recipe for this post. I’ll do a two-fer!

Roasted Garlic

• 1 garlic bulb, with the first third chopped off
• olive oil
• kosher salt

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Place the bulb on some tinfoil and sprinkle the oil and salt over it. Wrap it up and toss into the oven (probably on a baking sheet if you’re not reckless like me) for about 45 minutes to an hour. Eat on everything. You should definitely add it to hummus, pasta sauces, bread and pizza.

Chipotle Salsa

• A bunch of tomatoes, chopped roughly
• 1/2 an onion, chopped roughly
• A can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce
• 3-4 cloves of garlic, chopped
• cilantro
• salt and pepper
• olive oil

Saute the onion and garlic with the olive oil over medium heat. Once they’re nice and browned, add the tomatoes and chipotles. Stir and let the mixture simmer for about 10 minutes. Let it cool off, and put the whole mix into a blender and puree with cilantro, salt, pepper and additional chipotles if you want it spicier. (I usually do.) Also eat on everything.

Vegan Enchiladas, Hooray!

Spring break is over and it’s still kind of cold in Grinnell. What a crock of shit! Springtime in the Midwest is such a tease — February tantalizes you with 70-degree days and snowstorms, while March delivers much of the same. Why am I moving to Minnesota, again? Christ. As you can see in the above photo, even my tablecloth is pissed.

Well, as you’ve probably heard, I’m a tortilla-making monster. What’s better medicine for a cold bitch of a day than Tex-Mex? With the help of my manservant Tim, whose twin allergies to milk and eggs are legendary in these parts, I whipped together a kind of something that resembled the image of enchiladas I have in my head: a bunch of rolled up tortillas containing some kind of thing in some kind of red sauce.

I’ve actually never made them before, let alone eaten them in any great quantity. Chris’ mom makes a version with shredded cheese, cream cheese and chicken, which is pretty good. Unfortunately, I couldn’t use any sort of cheese, and Chris has been on a vegetarian kick for the past week. Another caveat was that I wanted to make everything from scratch, at least within reason.

I made the usual tortilla mix, but as I was resting it (and myself) I had a sudden idea: what if I put spices in the tortillas to start? They’d be so sexy and orange! I leapt out of bed and threw in generous quantaties of cumin and mild chili powder. Mixing it all in was a bitch, so I’d recommend doing it before you add oil and water to the mixture. Despite that last-minute half-assing, they turned out really nicely. Genius!!

To fill the tortillas, I made some refried beans with chipotle and cooked up some wild rice for that distinctly Midwestern touch. (PROTIP: Most American wild rice is from Minnesota!) I fried up the tortillas, filled them up and put them in a pyrex baking thing on top of a thin layer of homemade salsa. Then I topped them with more salsa and some chopped up green onions.

They turned out great! My dudes loved them and we finished dinner off with Chris’ date-studded focaccia and a strawberry-and-lime compote.

Vegan Enchiladas

• One batch of tortillas, rolled out extra large with extra cumin and mild chili powder in the mix
• 1 C raw wild rice
• 1 15-oz can of beans, black or pinto
• 5-6 chipotle peppers with adobo sauce, chopped roughly
• 1 28-oz can of whole tomatoes, chopped (do it in the can with scissors)
• 1 onion, diced
• 5 cloves of garlic, minced
• a handful of cilantro
• salt and sugar, to taste
• cumin
• cayenne pepper
• green onions, diced for garnish

Cook the wild rice in a rice cooker or pot. While that’s going, throw half of the onion into a pot with some olive oil over medium heat. When the onion becomes transparent, put in the can of beans, followed by a canful of water. Let it all simmer for a while over a low flame.

In the meantime, heat the rest of the onion in a saute pan with olive oil over medium heat. After a few minutes, add the garlic and cook til aromatic. Then add the tomatoes with their water and the chipotle peppers. Use the sugar to cut the acidity and add salt to taste. Let the mixture simmer for 10 minutes, then take it off the heat. Once cooled, throw it all into a blender and blend with the cilantro. Tweak the seasoning to your taste and put aside.

Once the beans and rice are done, preheat the oven to 350. Fry the tortillas. Layer a baking dish with a thin layer of salsa. Fill the tortillas with beans and rice and lay them seam-down in the baking dish until it’s full. Cover with a ladleful of salsa and top with green onions. Throw into the oven for 10-15 minutes.

What Dreams Are Made of

Flour, vegetable oil, water and salt. Well, shit.

During her time at Grinnell last semester, my anarchofreegan doom metal friend Emily instituted Tortilla Tuesdays, nights when she would make mounds of tortillas by hand in exchange for attendees’ fixins. Before then, I had never even contemplated making tortillas. It seemed like something that should be left solely to the specialists.

But it’s so simple! It’s like trying really hard to figure out what to get your mother for Christmas and settling for a generic candle that’s she’s kind of OK with when you could have just asked her in the first place. In the end your mother thinks you don’t love her. This is the same thing.

The recipe is so easy that I’m going to write it down from memory right here:

Flour Tortillas

• 2 C flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/4 C vegetable oil
• 3/4 C boiling water

Combine the first three ingredients in a bowl and mix them together while the water boils. Make an indent in the mixture and pour the water in. Mix it with a spatula for the first 30 seconds or so until it cools down, then use your fingers.

Once it gets to be the consistency of dough, roll it into little balls with a 1-inch diameter. Set them down in a baking tray or something and cover with a cloth for 45 minutes. Once their time is up, roll out each one to your desired thickness and toss ‘em onto a hot skillet. I believe the cooking time is 20 seconds, flip, 10 seconds, flip, 10 seconds and you’re done. [Edit: Actually, Emily corrected me on this one. It's 10/20/10 seconds.]

They come out really nice and chewy, just how I like them. And you can top them with pretty much whatever — Emily likes them with peanut butter and jelly, or you can go for more Mexican-inspired things.

This guy over here has homemade refried beans, guacamole and salsa. Fuck yeaaaahhhh these are so good when you’re drunk!

Sweet Potato and Butternut Squash Soup

Hey guys! Yeah, I’m still alive.

It’s snowy and cold and all sorts of unpleasant here in Iowa, and that spells soup season! I tried this badass recipe from the New York Times that was under the ambivalent header of “Recipes for Health.” It turned out awesome, and made my friend Tim like butternut squash and sweet potatoes! Yay! I’m all for teaching kids how to eat new things.

Thanksgiving was sweet, too. Chris and I made two pies: sweet potato and apple. For both, we used the Cook’s Illustrated pie crust recipe (with vodka!). And, inevitably, there were plenty of beers and bonfires the whole weekend.

I’ll try to update this post with photos soon, but for now, here’s the recipe for the soup, excerpted from the New York Times’ website.

Sweet Potato and Butternut Squash Soup

• 1 tablespoon canola oil
• 1 small onion, chopped
• 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger
• 1 pound butternut squash, peeled and diced
• 1 pound sweet potatoes, peeled and diced
• 1 medium-size Yukon gold or russet potato, peeled and diced
• 6 cups water, chicken stock, or vegetable stock
• Salt to taste

1. Heat the oil in a heavy soup pot or Dutch oven over medium heat. Add the onion and cook, stirring, until tender, about 5 minutes. Add the ginger and stir together until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add the squash, sweet potatoes, regular potato, and water or stock, and bring to a simmer. Add salt to taste, reduce the heat, cover and simmer 45 minutes, or until all of the ingredients are thoroughly tender.

2. Using an immersion blender, puree the soup (or you can put it through the fine blade of a food mill or use a regular blender, working in batches and placing a kitchen towel over the top to avoid splashing). Return to the pot and stir with a whisk to even out the texture. Heat through, adjust salt and add pepper to taste.

Shrimp Potstickers

I’ve been so busy lately — organizing Wimbletube, trying to get John Waters to come to campus, managing the college’s radio station — that all of the food I’ve been making has come from the freezer. I don’t mean TV dinners or anything like that, it’s just that I throw all of the ingredients I buy at the grocery store into the freezer to cook later, though usually I forget about it until the easier options (oh, refried beans <3) run out. At the moment, there are two Cornish hens, a pound of gourmet Italian sausage, artisanal bacon, three giant bags of sliced apples, a bag of pate chaud filling, three bags of animal parts for stock and two containers of pho broth in there. Hmm. It didn’t seem so bad until I actually wrote it all down.

To that end, these potstickers are mostly made of invincible ingredients: frozen shrimp, wonton wrappers, soy sauce, month-old ginger… which is great for my wallet. It’s also really easy to get into The Zone while filling and sealing them. For some reason I’m really into the idea of filling things lately; something just clicks whenever I plop something onto a wrapper. Maybe I have a dumpling fetish? I can live with that.

Shrimp Potstickers

• wonton wrappers
• frozen shrimp, shelled
• 1 egg
• 1-inch of ginger, grated
• scallions, diced
• Napa cabbage, diced, salted and strained
• a few dashes of soy sauce
• black pepper
• vegetable oil

1. Blend the shrimp in a food processor with the egg, and transfer to a bowl. Add the ginger, scallions, cabbage, soy sauce and pepper. Cover it with saran wrap and let it sit in the fridge for a half hour.

2. Fill the wonton wrappers and seal edges by dampening them with water. Arrange the potstickers in a pan with a thin layer of oil over medium-high heat. Once the bottoms are golden brown, pour a little bit of water into the pan and immediately cover it. Lower the heat and let them steam until the water is absorbed. Then uncover the pan, crank up the heat and let them cook for a couple minutes longer. Transfer cooked potstickers to a plate with a paper towel to absorb the oil.