Weblog Entry - 02/14/2002: "whirlwind days"

02/14/2002 Entry: whirlwind days

Somehow, I'm still finding time to cook.

I'm finding it in between driving the coast with Z and taking on new responsibilties at work. I'm finding it in between reorganizing the kitchen and doing laundry.

I'm finding it's a time to relax and revel in the smells of the kitchen.

Last night's dish wasn't an immediate success on all fronts. Cumin, garlic, and onion went into the wok with some olive oil, and there they sat and filled the house with their pungence as I chopped the season's last braising mix into reasonably small pieces. The braising mix (added along with a quarter-cup water, some fresh ginger, ground coriander, curry powder, and just a breath of chili powder) nearly filled the wok until the greens (and purples!) wilted. I poured in a can of garbanzo beans...and then found myself gazing upon a tomato. I'm somewhat allergic, but not so much that I have to avoid them entirely, and a single small tomato in a wokful of greens is unlikely to bother me much. I want to use what little I eat wisely, though. So, I thought, I could roast it. The smoky flavor makes me happy, and I have to get the skin off anyway.

How to roast a tomato, when all we have is an electric stove? I finally end up dropping three tealights into a bowl, skewering the tomato, and setting the skewer across the bowl so the flames licked up at the tomato. I turned it periodically, but mostly just watched the skin darken in places, and turn translucent in other places, and watched the juices boiling under the skin, until the pressure became overwhelming and the tomato skin cracked. This, I'm told, is a sign that the roasting is sufficiently completed and that when the tomato is cooled, the skin will just peel off. I found this to be mostly true for the middle-half, but for the top and bottom quarters, where the skewer went through, the skin wasn't roasted enough. Next time, I'll rotate the skewer ninety degrees halfway through. Anyway, I tasted the tomato and didn't notice a smoky flavor, but it was so beautiful to watch, I didn't begrudge the time.

When all was finally warmed through, I tasted the dish and found, to my dismay, that the flavors were jarring and over-spicy. Z & I both agreed that we expected it to mellow and blend with a night in the refrigerator, so we're giving it forty-eight hours in the 'fridge and we're eating it tomorrow. Probably with rice.

So last night, instead of the braising mix, we ate leftover cabbage soup and leftover not-exactly-Gratin-Dauphinois (I didn't have any cream, so I used a mixture of milk and sour cream. Mistake; something curdled. I also didn't have Gruyere (which I need to keep on hand if I'm going to keep making gratins); I had a small amount of parmesean and a big chunk of provelone. I used all of the former, and some of the latter. The taste was exquisite but the texture left much to be desired). The cabbage soup was a fun "throw things into the pot and simmer" experiment -- as usual, heating olive oil and adding onions made for a good start. Then cubed potatoes, shredded cabbage, and a delicate vegetable broth (from the not-exactly-bullion I have, that comes in a jar and wants to be refrigerated). Finally, after a long simmer, I added sliced zuchinni, not because I thought the soup really needed it, but because if I hadn't, we were unlikely to eat it before it went bad. This soup, unlike most I've made, was not in fact better on the second day -- the flavor had leached out of the cabbage into the broth, and the broth was no longer delicate. A hearty soup is good, but this was overwhelming. Diluting the soup helped a great deal, and by the time we had it for dinner last night, it was a hearty winter soup with the correct balance of flavors.

The deal I've made with myself is to not buy anything I don't have a place to put. This means, among other things, that I've got to stop buying books for awhile, until I can get my shelves in order and figure out where else I can shelve books, so I have more room. It's also meant that I got my closet cleaned out, and now have room for new clothes, and I got my kitchen cleaned out, so I can get the various appliances I need -- a juicer, to handle the scads of fruit showing up along with the organic vegetable delivery, and a salad spinner to handle the greens, for instance.

It also means I found the ingredients-list for the tapenade I made last year that I loved so much. I don't have measurements, since I just kept adding more of this and that until I was satisfied, but it contained:
olives
sun-dried tomatoes
garlic
capers
lime juice
thyme
salt
pepper
red onion
red wine

all this went into the cuisinart and got chopped coarsely. The day I made it, I was sure I'd ruined it, because it tasted far too strongly of onion...but the next day, the flavor had mellowed and it was perfect.

Posted by sev @ 12:12 AM PST |

insert witty comment here