As the weather cools, the crockpot starts living on the counter again, instead of down in a cupboard. I love my crockpot. It’s brilliant. I love it so much that I often have two of them going at the same time. Because if you’re going to bother cutting and chopping ingredients, you might as well spend a few more minutes and get twice the payoff. Of course, that’s only worth it if you’re thrilled with the results. And let’s face it, there are some definite crockpot fails out there, and I’ll own several. Dried out chicken, burned sauces stuck to the bottom that are impossible to remove, flavorless mushy carrots floating in a stew. But those fails haven’t deterred me. I have my favorite recipes that never go wrong, and I am always on the lookout for more. I’ve already told you about the easiest ribs in the crockpot (with a dry rub they’re sweet, spicy and smoky all at the same time!), but I have held out on my family’s other favorite recipe: Chipotle Barbecue Pulled Pork in the Crockpot, which I’ve been making for years. My first notes in my binder for it go all the way back to 2007. (The binder that my sister-in-law says is the one thing she would grab from my house in case of a fire. Just sayin’. I promise to write more about that one day.) I’ve got a stained, ripped page that was printed off of AOL a million years ago, covered in 6 different pens with all my changes and comments like AMAZING!!!!, and FIFTH BIRTHDAY 2012, but no source on where the original recipe came from. With a little internet searching, it turns out the base recipe I began with is from Real Simple, but I have adapted it over the years. Since then it’s graced our table for parties, holidays, and filled ziploc bags in my freezer for countless last minute meals and deliveries to friends who need a bit of a boost. It is so easy to put together, makes your house smell amazing, and is always a crowd-pleaser. Freezer-friendly, it is a great make ahead weekend project so that you can have dinner ready on a crazy Thursday night when you get home late from work, kids are starving, and nobody feels like cooking….
Sesame Date Granola (gluten-free, refined sugar-free, vegan, and all around healthy)
A few years ago, my husband decided to cut refined sugar out of his diet. And I’ve got to be honest with you, when he did it, I was mad. And I don’t mean just a little bit annoyed. I mean MAD. Big, angry, cranky, wanted to kick and scream, MAD. Now, I realize that an appropriate response would have been to be impressed, supportive, proud or inspired, but I felt none of those things. It’s not like he was even trying to pressure me into joining him, he just quietly started reading labels and stopped eating any of the desserts I baked and didn’t order treats when we were out. It was all very reasonable, but it didn’t feel that way to me. It took a few months for me to understand my own reactions, but it came down to a feeling of jealousy. He has discipline and will power that I never believed I could possess. Because I doubted my own ability for restraint, I resented that it came so easily to him.
And come on, have you seen this blog? Do you know me at all? Then you probably get how important sweets are in my life, and how a good cookie or cake brings me sheer happiness, and a chewy brownie brings me comfort when all else fails. So the idea of giving that up scared the daylights out of me. Scared maybe isn’t the word…..I was worried that I would feel deprived, and that isn’t something I was willing to entertain. But truth be told, his sugar-free period lasted around 6 months, and he then went back to his normal ways.
But jump ahead to this past spring, and the sugar-free plan resurfaced. But this time, I was finally open to thinking about it. What changed? Me. I changed….
Peach, Ricotta and Basil Pizza
Hello! I know you haven’t seen me here much these last few months, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been in my kitchen. I’ve said it before: it’s my happy place. My oasis. When there’s nonsense going on, I retreat to the place where nothing can go wrong, and where I can get a few minutes of solitude. Okay, maybe you are looking at that last sentence and thinking, “But everything can go wrong in the kitchen!” Sure, flour can be spilled, dough can be too sticky, crust can get burned, but really, is it the end of the world? No. Is it a disaster? Never. Unless you’re slicing a digit and bleeding all over the place, or burning yourself on a hot pan (all things I can proudly say I’ve done, more than once,) mistakes in the kitchen aren’t tragic. So just take a deep breath and embrace the fact that you can be creative, you can feed yourself and people you care about wholesome food, and it’s going to taste damn good in the end. Oh, and that solitude? Sometimes it happens, and pushing dough to the edges of a pan is meditative, and other times I’ve got whining kids cranking out saying they’re hungry, or that their brother was mean. But truthfully, just being in the kitchen calms me down, and my reactions are kinder there.
So what have I been cooking? I’ve made 9 pizzas in the last seven days. Yes, nine. Four had peach, basil and homemade ricotta, two were avocado, corn and basil, a pesto pepperoni and a standard pepperoni, and then one with garlic oil, figs, mozzarella, Maldon sea salt and a splash of balsamic. I just got on a kick, and I can’t seem to stop. Here’s the thing: pizza is really easy. It’s one of those tricks, that once you learn how to do it, you wonder why you never did it before. And you can throw anything you want on top, and most of the time it works. This week, they all worked. And they worked so well that I just kept repeating them.
I’ve been making my own dough for a few years now. I’ve tried tons of recipes, but my all time favorite is from the cookbook and blog, Dinner: A Love Story, by Jenny Rosenstrach. Her recipe is pretty much Jim Lahey’s no-knead dough recipe, and it’s a winner….
Summer Fruits Tea Cake (and 10 Books to Go With It)
I love the feeling of falling into somebody else’s world, temporarily leaving my own reality to find a place in another. In some ways, I experience that in my work. It’s my privilege as an interpreter that I’m allowed into the most private moments of other people’s lives, or simply that I have the opportunity to walk into situations that I would never otherwise have access to. Although that’s not at the foundation of why I became a sign language interpreter, and certainly not a main reason why I continue to be one, it is a part of what keeps me balanced.
Being in the hospital room as a child is born, in the court room when a divorce is granted, on the course as someone learns to ride a motorcycle, in the classroom where they study to be a priest, a rabbi, a teacher, a lawyer, an historian or an artist, in the office when someone is fired, on the phone for a fight between a mother and her son, or on a stage in front of tens of thousands of people, it’s my honor to gain perspective from other people’s lives.
While my professional access to these experiences might be unique, I know I’m not alone in the desire to immerse myself in other’s stories. And for as long as I can remember, I’ve done that with books. I was the little girl hiding with the flashlight under the covers, escaping into The Secret Garden. I was the teenager devouring trashy novels and Wuthering Heights with equal abandon (which I guess might have been trashy in its day.) In my twenties I called the New York Public Library my second home, and missed my subway stop time and again as Barbara Kingsolver, Isabelle Allende, J. K. Rowling and David Sedaris wove their tales around me. And in my thirties I fell in love with audio books and cookbooks, returned to children’s literature, and began a habit of reading electronically.
I read so much that I can’t keep track of it all without maintaining a list, and so for years…
Fuchsia Dunlop’s Sour and Hot Mushroom Tofu Soup
It’s been a while since I updated you on the cooking club I participate in. I wrote a general “how-to” guide for cooking clubs, I told you about our inaugural Israeli night, I shared the Apple Cider Rum Punch from the Caribbean dinner, and I filled you in on Indonesia by way of an Avocado Shake with Kahlua and Godiva Liqueur. But there have been three others that I’ve kept you waiting on! While Mexico and Greece are on standby, I’d like to catch you up on our incredible Chinese meal and let you know about one of my new favorite cookbooks.
In order to expand my options in the kitchen lately, I keep ordering new cookbooks at the library and actually (shockingly!) cook out of them. But after years of collecting cookbooks for the sake of collecting, I have become much more selective. If I find one I really like, that I am willing to make a permanent space for on my bookshelf, I go ahead and buy it. This is one of those books. Fuchsia Dunlop was the first Westerner to study at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in central China, and while not a native Chinese cook, she has become a prominent cookbook author. Her latest book, Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking is easy to follow, filled with healthy recipes and beautiful photographs that show food you’ll want to cook on a regular weeknight basis. Experimenting with Chinese cooking was on my to-do list, but this book pushed me to finally do it. It’s a perfect introductory book, and I can’t recommend it enough. (Full disclosure, the link is an affiliate link. It doesn’t mean you’ll be charged any extra, it’s just that I’ll get a few pennies to buy an extra mushroom or two if you purchase anything after clicking through.)
The one thing to know is that you will need to pick up a few specialty ingredients for your pantry, but once you have them you’ll be prepared to throw together quick and easy meals that will beat Chinese take-out ten times over. It will be healthier, more flavorful, cheaper, and can be made in less time than it takes to place an order and get it. That’s definitely true of her Spicy Buckwheat Noodles, her Sweet and Spicy Cold Noodles (which I’ve already made at least half a dozen times!,) and her Spicy Sesame Noodles, which all can be made in the same amount of time it takes to make boxed mac and cheese. Seriously. They’re incredible. But admittedly, for a girl who’s definition of soy sauce was the low sodium bottle from Trader Joe’s, I had some shopping to do to stock my pantry. I was lucky though to have a Taiwanese friend take me on a tour of our local new Asian grocery store, and after 90 minutes of wandering the aisles, I was ready to go. If you don’t have the same resources near you, remember you can always find ingredients online. Don’t let your location stop you!
If you can’t find ingredients locally, Amazon carries them! Just click on the photo.
Which brings me back to the recipe that I chose for cooking club: Fuchsia Dunlop’s Hot and Sour Mushroom Tofu Soup….
Quick Tip: Roasting Green Beans
I just wanted to pop in with another quick tip that might be obvious to some, but a revelation to others. Roast your green beans! I know, everything on this site seems to be about roasting: Roasted Broccoli, Roasted Honeynut Squash with Za’atar and Pomegranate Molasses, Roasted Peaches with Basil and Ricotta, Spice-Crusted Roasted Salmon.) But it’s only because roasting is one of the easiest ways to cook delicious food, and it’s healthy. So it’s time for roasting green beans!
It seems ridiculous to even write a recipe for this, because as with all vegetables you’re pretty safe if you just spread them out on a baking sheet, with lots of space between them, and toss with extra virgin olive oil, kosher salt and freshly ground pepper, and stick them in a hot oven, tossing occasionally. 425 degrees Fahrenheit for 25 minutes, and you are good to go.
*Oh, and the bear up top? My big kid got to take Paddington home over the weekend and document his adventures. He helped with these green beans, so he got to have his own photo shoot with the results….
Cardamom Almond Matzoh Brei
On Friday night, the first night of Passover, I sat at the kitchen table reading two children’s books to my little guys about the holiday. The stories tell of traditions that have been passed down from one generation to the next, and reflect what my world looked like growing up, but not what it is now. I’m very aware that the families in these books don’t look like my family, and I wonder about the message my own kids take from these illustrations. It’s a conversation I could probably have with my 8 year old at some level, but I haven’t yet. It makes me think about writing a new book.
This is what the cardamom seeds look like from the pod, before they are ground.
Instead, while they nibbled on crumbling pieces of matzoh slathered in salted butter, I read them the story of …
Quick Tip: Freezing Ginger
Just a quick tip for you all today, because my brain and time has been otherwise occupied, and lately my kitchen has been the scene of studying more than anything else. Which means I have been all about easy meals and shortcuts, and I thought some of my tricks might be worth sharing. And I realized that while this might seem obvious to some, maybe it hasn’t crossed your radar yet: You can freeze ginger!
I don’t know about you, but I always seem to buy fresh ginger for a recipe, or to throw into a stir-fry, and I tend to have more than I need. And it ends up shriveling in my crisper drawer into a freakish looking fuzzy mess, and I have to toss all the extra that I wasted. And of course, I then need it for something else, and I’m mad. So the solution is simple: when you buy your ginger, simply peel it all at once, chop it into different size pieces (some big, some small) and toss it in a Ziploc freezer bag and store it in the freezer. Obvious, right? (Except that for years it wasn’t obvious to me at all.)
And you can then use that frozen ginger straight from the freezer. Just grate it using a microplane, or let it thaw for a bit in some room temperature water, or throw it in your Green Smoothie as is. (Which is what I did this morning in the picture below. My smoothie turned a bit darker because I added some blackberries and carrots to it, but the shining star was the cube of frozen ginger that got blended up with the spinach, banana and yogurt. It was ridiculously good. Trust me: add ginger to your smoothies.)
And when I take a break from studying, I’ll put together a post on how else to use your ginger. I’ve got a hot and sour mushroom soup recipe that I made for our cooking club a couple of weeks ago that is going to make you look at what you get from Chinese take-out in a whole new way. In the meantime, back to the books…..
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