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I am having a very hard time getting back into the swing of things after a great weekend at Lake Sinclair in Milledgeville, Georgia. By all accounts, Hurricane Hanna is bearing down towards Savannah, which has not been hit by a hurricane in a very long time. If we are not under siege on Thursday, my friend is due to have her wisdom teeth out and I promised her I would make her a very smooth soup, no chunks. This is one of my favorites, and is so easy to make (I will probably use sweet potatoes instead, since I have heaps of them from my CSA box).

In a soup pot, saute the following on medium heat:

• 2 Tablespoon Olive Oil
• 1/2 med onion processed with 1 Tablespoon  fresh gingerroot (if you don’t have a processor, chop them together very finely)
• 1-2 Tablespoon red curry paste (Thai)

Stir frequently, do not let it brown, but rather the onion paste should be translucent. Expect it to pop a bit. After 4-7 minutes, add the following:

• 29 oz can pumpkin puree (the unsweetened kind)
• 14 oz can of coconut milk (not coco lopez)
• 14 oz of veggie stock (swish this about in coconut milk can to get all the good bits from the sides)

Simmer for about 20 minutes or so. Add the following to taste:

• 1-2 Tablespoon of fish sauce
• 1-2 Tablespoon of soy sauce
• 1-2 Tablespoon of sugar

Fish sauce and soy sauce differ enormously from brand to brand, so it is important to add a little at a time and keep tasting. When ready to serve, garnish with

• chopped roasted peanuts
• chopped cilantro

let me know how you like it…

But first, a photo of how they serve the pickled veg at Bardsley’s fish and chips in Brighton, England.

Move over film and nailpolish, you got nothing on me.  Here is a sample of some of the stranger things I have had to store in my refridgerators over the course of my career:

• breast milk (not mine)
• cooked whale (from Bequia–where it is legal to hunt whales old school style) (never ate it)
• TDS life caulk (black)
• Catalyzed Awlgrip (with brush, covered with rubber glove)
• West System Epoxy (active)
• Paper pulp with glitter and Indonesian spices
• Birth Control Pills (not mine)
• Birth control ring (not mine)
• Bait

Fiji, an island country in the Southern Pacific Ocean, is best known for its pearl and water exports. We had the fortune of spending over a month in Nadi (prounounced Nan-di), before heading off for a quick jaunt to the Yasawas, a Fijian island chain geared towards inexpensive tropical travel. My favorite Fijian food is kokoda (pronounced Ko-kon-da), an uncooked fish dish with lime juice and coconut milk. These pictures are from the Market in Nadi–I am pretty sure we lived on tomato salads…

My very first cookbook, a gift from my parents after a trip to visit me on Block Island, was the Moosewood Cookbook. A classic, and a perfect introduction on how to feed myself without meat. I quickly saved my money and gobbled up the Enchanted Broccoli Forest, also by Molly Katzen and published by Ten Speed Press. Originally published in 1977, Molly Katzen re-edited the Moosewood to reflect heathier eating practices and it was rereleased in 1999.
When she wrote them, Molly Katzen ran the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York. It quickly became mecca for vegetarians all over America, (I haven’t made it there yet).  She has since moved on, but Moosewood still exists as a collective and they  still pump out great cookbooks regularly, but nothing stands up to the original, which was inducted into the  James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame (kind of like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for cookbooks) .

    
Each hand lettered recipe is accompanied with equally charming  drawings. The book begins with a discussion demystifying vegetable soup stock (many great vegetable soups are rendered unvegetarian by the addition of flavorless chicken stock) by saving certain veggie scraps (carrot peels, onion ends, and yes, apple cores) but not others (peas, broccoli) in a bag in the freezer and dumping them into a stock pot with water  a few other additions. This is still the method I employ today–after 16 years of professional cooking, I haven’t found a better way! The soup recipes span the globe as well as the palate–offering everything from creamy winter purees to light chilled summer soups. This book turned me into a soup lover and a great soup maker. (There will be more on soup when the weather is less than 95F all the time.)

From there you travel a wholesome journey through great veggie pastas, stir fries, casseroles, dips, side dishes, breads, and desserts.
Even non-vegetarians could gain a lot from their own dog-eared Moosewood; especially in our current food climate when even the pit bulls of carnivorism know the dirty secrets and devastating impacts of our current meat industry and economy.

Yes, it is possible to feed yourself quite heartily on vegetables and pasta, rice or potatoes. No, you don’t have to be a hairy-legged, tie-dye wearing, patchouli scented counter-cultural hippie to do it. No, you don’t have to resort to fermented soybean in the form of tempeh (unless you want to). Yes, you can learn how to make delicious meals with simple ingredients like vegetables, cheese, eggs, milk, and starches. No, you won’t need a can opener. You just need a Moosewood. (Watch out, Moosewood Cookbooks are addicting, before you know it, you might have all of them…)

Yay tomato season!

I am a tomato purist and would rather eat no tomato than a crappy pink tomato that will rot before it ripens. I am trying to grow tomatoes on my back deck, but they are not so fond of the Savannah summers. In my CSA* box last week I found some big beautiful swollen ripe tomatoes.

There are a million things to do with summer tomatoes, beyond eating them sliced with salt and pepper. My friend Jim Duhamel invented what I call a “Duhamwich.” Toasted bread, mayo, sliced tomato, crunchy peanut butter, toasted bread. I know this may sound weird, but it is good, very good. I suppose you could substitute creamy peanut butter.

Tonnato Sauce

This is so easy to make, especially if you have an immersion blender with mini processor. If you don’t, you should get one, it will make you a very good cook. I like this sauce slathered over sliced meaty tomato** on fresh bakery bread. It is also delicious on blanched/steamed green beans.

Process together the following:

• 1/4 cup x.v. olive oil
• 2 Tablespoon fresh parsley or rosemary
• 6 oz ITALIAN TUNA IN OLIVE OIL***
• 1/4 cup mayo
• 1/4 cup water
• 1 1/2 teaspoon capers
• 2 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
• 4 anchovy filets
• 1 clove garlic
• salt and pepper to taste after you’ve processed

*CSA is Community Supported Agriculture. A way for produce consumers (all of us) to connect directly to the producer, for fresher, organic fruits and veggies, to find one near you, please visit Local Harvest.

** NEVER EVER EVER EVER put your tomatoes in the refrigerator. Temperatures below 55F will destroy the starches, and you will lose valuable flavor and texture in your tomatoes. This is why most tomatoes are crappy, they are picked while still green, sent halfway around the world and refrigerated until they get to you. Yuck!

*** Please do not confuse this with regular canned tuna. This tuna does come in a can, but is generally imported from Italy and a wee bit more expensive, but well worth it. You will find it in the tuna section of your local grocery store.

Congratulations, again to Courtenay Bouvier for her winning moniker entry for the art project also known as 8*1*8. The creme filled golden sponge cake is Pammy, after Pamela Anderson, an equally synthetic pop culture phenom. As you can see, neither Patty nor Pammy has changed much. These pics were taken on Aug 21. Patty the cheeseburger was purchased on July 29, Pammy the creme filled golden sponge cake was purchased on August 1. They have been stored at room temperature in an organic granola bar box, Patty is wrapped in her original orange paper, Pammy is naked (shocker!).

It is nearing the end of the term and I am stitching and painting like a demon, which involves listening to endless podcasts–I think Ira Glass is going to send me a bill when I am done with my MFA. Sometimes Hurricane/ sometimes Tropical storm Flo is whirling around us right now with a powerful warm wind and a near biblical amount of rain. I can’t begin to describe my bliss at experiencing this weather  in a  brick house  on a continent as opposed to previous encounters with similar weather in the middle of the Atlantic, hundreds of miles from shore.

This is part of a new project I haven’t named yet. You’ll get to watch it unfold.

I am also looking for old cloth napkins, the ones too stained to use, or who lost their mates. If you have some to send me, please leave me a note in comments and I will email you my address. All donations will be reimbursed with Wacky Packages.

Cherry flavoured dried sweetened cranberries?

Is the taste of dried sweetened cranberries so awful it needs to be masked with the flavour of cherries? Oh–wait–my bad, there isn’t any actual cherry flavouring in these, it comes from elderberry juice, which I suppose taste like cherries.

In case you can’t read it, the list of ingredients is as follows: cranberries, sugar, citric acid, natural flavors, elderberry juice concentrate, color. 

October 2007

Ken and I had about 90 minutes to provision the boat for the next leg. We had no Euros and neither of us spoke Italian (shameful). Carloforte is a beautiful town, on a beautiful island just south of Sardinia (also a beautiful island, but much larger, off of the western coast of Italy). Our first stop was a bakery to fill our pie-holes with fresh hot tomato bread and onion bread while briskly walking in search of food. We found this fish monger  parked on a side street. The fish was something crazy like 35 Euros a kilo.

Luckily we didn’t have to walk to far to find this small market, the fish was weighing us down. Those are the most gorgeous artichokes I have ever seen,  they sacrificed their brazen purpleness for a floral display.

I have just wrapped up reading Michael Pollen’s latest tome on what we are putting in our bodies. The good news: I still have an appetite. The bad news: we are screwed, really screwed, overweight and unhealthy. But wait, there is more good news: we don’t have to be fat unhealthy slobs, we can counteract everything we are inflicting on our poor bodies by eating actual food and not the crap being packaged as edible “products” the food industry is selling us. The bad news: most of us can’t afford it.

Pollen explores how nutritionism and food science has replaced actual food with a series of vitamins, minerals and compounds. We have evolved from the industrialization of wheat, which removed all of the oil and protein to create a perfectly white, soft flour completely devoid of nutritional value, and enriched it with synthetic compounds to attempt to increase its health value. Now, we have a fruit flavored drink which has been enriched with vitamin C. It is cheaper to produce than regular juice, since  it is water and high fructose corn syrup with added flavors and colors. Shelf stable, it requires no refrigeration, and can be shipped anywhere.

He dissects fat in dieting trends and explains the bad science behind margarine and trans fat. Just when the book turns into a whirlwind of what we thought we knew and how bad it was for us, he posits some rules for eating. Here they are in brief:

1. “Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”
2. “Avoid foods with ingredients you can’t pronounce.”
3. “Don’t eat anything that won’t eventually rot.”
4. “Avoid food products that carry health claims.”
5. “Shop the peripheries of the supermarket; stay out of the middle.”
6. “Better yet, buy food elsewhere, like a farmers market.”
7. “Pay more, eat less.”
8. “Eat a wide variety of species.”
9. “Eat food from animals that eat grass.”
10. “Cook, and grow your own food (if you can.)”
11. “Eat meals and eat them only at tables.”
12. “Eat deliberately, communally, and with pleasure.”

I am adding this book to the list of required reading for people who eat. Best digested in small chunks, you can find the NYTimes article version here.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

I even heart green beans from a can, ( a recipe I will share with you in the deep heart of winter when there aren’t any lovely fresh ones flying or sailing in).

Recipe backstory: last Friday night, in an attempt to  circumvent the traditional “where should we eat?” debate that surely follows a few beers out, I decided we should just head back to my house, which I would feverishly clean by sweeping up drywall dust and moving paintbrushes. I grated carrots and tossed them with sesame ginger dressing, made a quick curried lentil salad and threw chicken in a marinade. Prep time: about an hour, would have been less but pantry cabinet is currently behind a 12 drawer tool chest.

I have been accused of being prescient, but was shocked to find all of downtown Savannah under emergency lockdown after a transformer explosion/fire. No power, no bars open, nowhere to go, but back to my house (without the aforementioned beers).

My friend had brought some green beans to have with our dinner, we topped and tailed them over a glass of wine while the grill heated up and a pot of salted water came to boil. I dropped the green beans in the water for about 3 minutes, rinsed them under cool water. I let them cool for a few minutes, tossed with balsamic viniagrette, toasted pecans and bleu cheese.

Yes, i know this is like the recipe I  gave you last week, the toasted nuts and sharp cheese combo. It doesn’t just work on salads, it works on everything.

Now, go forth with toasted nuts and sharpened cheese and make a large flavor!