lady eats austin

mostly plants: vegetable goddess salad, fishcake

I have been feeling very very VERY smug about Michael Pollan's new book, particularly the part where it tells us -- in so many words, on the cover even -- to "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants".

By "eat food", Mr. Pollan means that we should not eat anything that our great-grandparents would not recognize as something edible. (Even the peanut butter and bacon sandwich passes this test!) "Not too much", well, I don't like to think about that one too often. But "mostly plants"? I have "mostly plants" DOWN. I love the hell out of some plants. Off the top of my head, I can think of only two edible plants that I do not like: Swiss chard, a shame because it's so beautiful, and guavas, to which I think I have some kind of weird olfactory sensitivity. Other than that? Me and plants, we're like this. I like to eat them, and I feel much better when I've been eating lots of them.

Lately I've been on a bit of a gross starch-and-salt bender -- all that pasta, all that bacon -- and last night, plagued with insomnia, I decided that I should do something about that "mostly plants" thing. A vision sprang to mind: a really enormous pile of spinach and red pepper and green beans. Yum. Casting about for a protein source to go with this, I remembered that I've been reading a lot of that darling Nigel Slater's books, and that he is a fan of fishcakes, and since I was about to go broke buying haricots verts in February I could appreciate the economy of a nice fishcake.

How to tie these things together, I wondered. Then I remembered that I had a giant bunch each of dill, mint and parsley in the fridge, and that green goddess dressing was therefore within my grasp. My version is atypical; green goddess is supposed to contain just parsley and tarragon, but tarragon is not my favorite herb, largely because its strength tends to vary more from bunch to bunch than anything else I can think of except maybe chili peppers. Sometimes it's pleasantly anise-esque and antique-tasting, sometimes it's like getting kicked in the teeth by a donkey wearing licorice booties. So no tarragon for me. But it turns out that if you whiz any old soft-leafed herb or combination of herbs in the processor with a half-and-half mixture of mayo and plain lowfat yogurt (sour cream in the original -- no thanks), and a small shallot and a clove of garlic and a tablespoon of white wine vinegar and some anchovy paste and pepper, you will have a runny celadon substance that is not only absolutely delicious but rivetingly beautiful. Ranch dressing only wishes. And you can use a lot of herbs, which have great nutrient density: more plants.

The fishcake was just a fishcake. One can of tuna, one slice of bread turned into breadcrumbs, and an egg white is enough for two cakes, and two cakes is enough for two people for this purpose. I added some capers and a minced sun-dried tomato, which I was worried would confuse the issue, but it turned out to be very good. I would have added finely chopped celery if there had been any around. Anyway, if you're making this you split whatever mixture you have in two and form it into cakes, which you then carefully dredge in cornmeal and fry in a little oil over medium heat until they are lightly browned. Don't move them around too much or they will break. You could use salmon "for party" if you wanted.

The body of the salad consisted of raw spinach, those haricots (the store turned out to have some nice organic frozen ones, thank Jeebus), red pepper, and a couple of tiny fingerling potatoes, boiled and sliced up. There were also olives, which I will skip when I make this again; they weren't bad at all, but they were superfluous. I threw in a few whole sprigs of the dressing herbs, so they could stand in solitary splendor as well as all mooshed together.

Producing this meal requires some juggling, but nothing too taxing: whiz the breadcrumbs, put the potatoes on to boil, defrost the beans, chop the herbs, assemble the fishcakes, all very regimented. This is the kind of thing that would have left me crumpled in a heap and crying for my mommy before I learned to cook good.

The final trick is the mode of serving. One does not set it up with the fishcake on one side of the plate and the salad on the other. This makes the fishcake look inadequate, because we're used to seeing our plates configured around a giant hunk of protein, with those all-important plants dancing attendance. No, what you do is this: get a big, deep bowl and pile it high with vegetables. Perch your fishcake on top, and dribble that heavenly dressing (not too much) over all. As you eat, the fishcake will slowly let down and disintegrate, and give itself up to enhance the plants. Which is as it should be, and you will fell well-fed and extremely virtuous -- at least until you find yourself in front of the fridge in the dead of night, contemplating eating the rest of the dressing straight up.

This was a good dinner.

peanut butter and bacon sandwich

I kept hearing that peanut butter and bacon sandwiches are startlingly delicious. First from my friend Lauren, whose opinions on food tend to cleave very closely to mine except for her loathing of bell peppers, which I do not understand one bit; second from a coworker, who is the pickiest eater I've ever met. (Not the same guy as in the last entry. Now that I think about it, my place of employment seems to attract people with weird food issues; we also have two supertasters and a vegetarian with a phobia of both eggs and eggplant.)

Peanut butter and bacon sandwiches being thus recommended by representatives of both ends of the eating spectrum, I decided that I'd have to try one sometime. The time came yesterday, when I was feeling low-energy and in need of something to eat that was unapologetically trashy, but that still had some genuine food value. The peanut butter and bacon sandwich came through for me. Et comment. It's perfect drunk food and perfect survival food, and I salute the brave soul who first concocted it. The downside is that now I have peanut butter and bacon sandwiches installed in my sense memory, poised to startle me with very intense and specific cravings at intervals.

I know I'm never going to convince everybody that this is a good idea, but having made this sandwich twice now (I also made one for Ceej after we got back from drinking a lot of beer at his coworkers' house last night) I think I have a handle on how to pull it off. The following tips are presented strictly in the interest of facilitating informed decisions.

1. I used a really burly sprouted-wheat bread, lightly toasted, and I think I'm going to stick with it. You need something with significant tensile strength to stand up to the filling. A PBB on white bread would be nauseating, I'm pretty sure. Whole-wheat bread might be OK, but I'd toast it more than lightly.

2. Ordinarily I would never advise microwaving bacon; the results just aren't reliable. However, for the PBB nuked bacon seems to work just fine, and since you're probably going to be making this when you're compromised in some way, you won't want to mess with the potential for grease fires. You also don't want to spend very long thinking about what you're about to do, and you can get the job done about 75% faster in the microwave. Zap the bacon on high, two minutes at a shot until it is mostly done but not dry, and blot well.

3. I used "natural" hippie peanut butter, but I may actually buy a small jar of real, evil, trans fat-laden Jif and keep it around for PBB purposes. The hippie peanut butter isn't quite sweet enough and is a tad too sticky. One wants unctuousness here.

4. You only need a couple of strips of bacon, cut in half so they fit, and two tablespoons of peanut butter, to make a good sandwich. Any more bacon and it chafes against itself, sliding out of the sandwich in unappetizing chunks; any more peanut butter and you'll feel like Mr. Ed. A little of this sandwich goes a long, long way. And you won't be hungry again for days.

redundant pasta salad

I have a coworker who doesn't eat food. Well, I guess he must, but he really, really doesn't care about it. He's one of those guys who would tote around an IV drip of glucose and essential nutrients for the rest of his life, just so he doesn't have to waste his time eating. He has had a peanut-butter sandwich and a small bag of baby carrots for lunch every day for the last ten years.

I like to taunt him about this, though I don't know why I bother; it never really takes. He is a vegan (of course), so lately I have taken to describing delicious vegan foods in mouthwatering detail, in the hopes of provoking some kind of a response. Today I spent about ten minutes of compromised productivity describing what happens when you roast cauliflower at a gazillion degrees for longer than you think you should. In a nutshell, it becomes delicious. This sounds really dumb, but it attains an almost meatlike state of caramelization and mineral goodness. I outdid myself with the description; my coworker said "Huh," in a slightly-less-bored-than-usual way.

I got to thinking about what I would do with this cauliflower (which you can make yourself, and you should: cut up a head of cauli, toss with some olive oil and salt, spread on one layer on a cookie sheet, and roast at 450 for about half an hour, stirring a couple of times) if I had some. And I was already on the vegan thing, from taunting my coworker, so I thought about that, and about how I sometimes make a pasta salad with kidney beans and that it is good, but would be delicious with the addition of roasted cauliflower. And parsley -- lots -- and mint, and shallot in the dressing. And after awhile I got to craving this pasta salad so extremely that I went to the store on my lunch break and bought a can of beans and a cauli, and I went home and threw it all together and it was good -- SO GOOD -- but something was bothering me about it.

Finally I realized: this is essentially the same thing as I made last night. Singed crucifers and whole-wheat pasta and a protein source. Go me; I guess I must have a deficiency of some sort.

I'm saving some for my coworker. I hope he appreciates everything I do for him.

brussels sprout and pine nut pasta (and bacon)

Cold. Cold and hungover and exhausted. It's a heinously dreary day; yellowish-gray with intermittent squalls of sharp, pounding, sideways rain, a couple of degrees off from sleet. The spouse is working a double shift; he won't be home tonight. It is a night for both self-indulgence and virtue.

So: this. Except with the crucifers browned in bacon grease, and with the bacon crumbled in at the end. If the spouse were home, there would be a hunk of plain salmon on the side, and no bacon, but he is not. There will be lots and lots of sprouts, though; almost more sprouts than pasta, and the pasta is whole wheat.

This is a deliberate process. The bacon renders slowly; if it scorches at all it'll ruin everything. Figure the sprouts will need exactly as long as it takes to boil the water and cook the pasta, to achieve the proper pan-catching, savory brownness. Toast the pine nuts in a dry pan, not in the toaster oven, to facilitate keeping an eye on the whole dance on the stovetop -- and that smell.

It all goes together, slithery and crispy and faintly sulfurous. It's the one thing that went right today. Let the rain blow.

back

    Once upon a time, a man loved a picky eater.

    She had the kind of face you’d expect to see emerging from the smoke of a mysterious junk-shop lamp, and a shisha-ish voice. When she talked about us, either the us that was the man and the picky eater, or, much more frequently, the us that was all the people in the world who meant tribe and kinship to her, including the man, it felt like all the bells of Christendom rang in his breast at once. The man could not make love to her the way he wanted to, for fear that his depth of sentiment would show, and afterwards they lay in the dark, her great black eyes mirroring the ceiling, the man smoking a cigarette, for once neither of them saying anything at all.

    She ate like a convict, hastily, with her arm crooked around the outside of her dish. She disdained most green things, flavorings more adventuresome than Worcestershire sauce, fish unless deep-fried. She lived on coffee and pot noodles and whiskey. Her eating, or not eating, seemed to represent a challenge to the world: look at me, I’m a pretty little girl, but you won’t catch me ordering sushi or salad-with-dressing-on-the-side, counting points like the other pretty little girls. Watch me; I’ll order my steak well-done and herd my peas onto my bread plate and shove them off to the farthest reaches of the table, I’ll pick the chives off my baked potato; I like the meat and starch of things, I have no truck with the minutiae.

    And yet she contained multitudes. When the man twitted her about her steam-table eating habits, she confessed, with some measure of defiance, that it was all down to her childhood summers in Emilia-Romagna, the ancient Roman via where the Moors and the Celts and the Byzantines all mixed, sometimes bloodily, and whose genetic contributions appeared in her as coloring and cheekbones and that thing about talking with the hands. And it was down to her beloved nonni, whose soup pot nobody before or since was fit to touch, and since nonni had died before the picky eater could learn her tricks, the picky eater had given up on ever achieving that kind of gastronomic nirvana again. Since then, food was fuel and fuel only, and the picky eater refused to grant it more significance than that, except when she wrinkled her nose over the oddnesses at the tapas bar…

    The man found the bit in his teeth. Here, maybe, was the trick to pinning the picky eater down. He would study. He would learn those tricks, and buy a soup pot which maybe, someday – sweet hope! – would find a spot in the picky eater’s heart alongside her nonni’s. Then he could let it all show, and it would be all right, and the picky eater would uncurl her slim arm from the edge of her plate, and sit up straight, and be quiet, eating, and maybe thank him.

    The man bought books. All of Marcella Hazan’s books for starters, and The Splendid Table and The Silver Spoon, and some weird tattered old pamphlets he found at junk stores. He scoured the Internet and read up on the history of the region, learning that there were crucial differences between Piedmontese and Lombardy and Neapolitan and Sicilian cuisines, and that the picky eater would likely have vituperative nationalistic objections to the latter two. No cuttlefish or eggplant for his Northern princess. (He knew she would eat pizza, but only with the toppings scraped off.) And so it went.

    The man read and read and was dazzled, despite signora Hazan’s forbidding tone. He accumulated equipment and hung around supermarket meat counters, trying to parse the differences between the cuts of meat in his books and the ones available at Albertson’s. He read his books while eating, and his Kraft Dinner would slowly recede into the background, eclipsed by the graceful names that sounded like characters in operas: gramigna, anguilla, pisarei e fasò.
Dazzled, but baffled as well, the lover thought ruefully, after still another frolic through the many crudely-translated tourist Web sites where, he had discovered, interesting recipes sometimes lurked. This food was so far beyond his ken that he had trouble conjuring even a vague impression of what it must taste like. Freshwater eels in a casserole with tomato sauce? A thousand kinds of cured pork, from the familiar prosciutto all the way down to zamponi, Modenese pig’s trotters? Chicken-liver ragu, baked with béchamel? The man knew for a near-fact that the picky eater’s idea of ragu began and ended with the eponymous jarred sauce, which she ate over limp spaghetti with the Parmesan from the green can. Parmigiano-reggiano! Lord!

    Looking over a recipe for passatelli – soup dumplings made from mashed bone marrow and grana de Padano and breadcrumbs -- the man found himself playing host to an uncomfortable and growing suspicion, like a tapeworm in his gut. There was no way in hell that this weird food would ever fly with the picky eater. It wasn’t possible. Here honey, have some eels! Or would you rather a swiss-chard pie? I guess it’s kind of like a quiche… no? How about a nice plate of zucchini-flower ravioli? Or try this soup. Bone marrow. They’re made of bone marrow… He couldn’t bear to have his internal monologue become a dialogue, even in theory.

    He wondered about his picky eater. For the first time, he wondered whether he was at all correct about her, in any sense. Was she just making it up, the business about her nonni, the way less-imaginative picky eaters invent allergies? Or was her palate really so rare and fine that it would only sing when fed eels from the Comacchio? Or was nonni the only person in the picky eater’s sprawling family who would dare slip her bowls of pasta with butter or grilled-cheese sandwiches, delivering without rebuke the plain, thoughtless food that gave the child’s mind room to wander unencumbered with concerns of taste?

    Who knew? Not the man. And he was in no position to ask the picky eater herself. But he was possessed by the food. One day he bought a lot of veal shanks, and a hunk of grana and some other things, which caused his checking account no small measure of angst. He got home and spent some time scraping the marrow out of the smooth scratchy bones, using an assortment of implements and invective; then he poached the shanks for awhile, hoping to produce a worthy broth, but the result was thin and pale. He added red wine and some fancy French soup base he’d picked up just in case. It was fine after that.

    The man mixed the marrow with microscopically milled breadcrumbs and the cheese, grated to a powder with his new Microplane grater, and some of the man’s blood, because the grater was new and sharp and he wasn’t used to it, but he learned to respect the new tool in a hurry, and that was something. He brought the broth to a simmer and squashed the passatelli dough through the big holes in a colander into the broth, and the first batch disintegrated and had to be skimmed away. Then the man remembered that he was supposed to have added an egg to the dough, so he did that, and the passatelli held together like they ought to.

    The man ate his soup out of a soup plate, with a glass of Pinot Grigio at his elbow. For once he didn’t have a book in front of him, and the TV was silent.

    He thought that the food he had made tasted like sex and tears. Briny and funky and deep. He drank most of the rest of the wine, too quickly, and then sat there and stared at the bottom of his empty plate.

    The picky eater would never gaze gratefully at him through the steam off the top of a plate of soup. The man had been thinking of her as if she were something to claim, like a prize at a carnival, when she was hers all along; and whether she’d fibbed about that nonni, whether there was an us at all, and how she made the man feel with the ringing in the breast, all these things seemed very pale and distant. It didn’t matter whether she ate her damn peas, not to the man, because he would never be in a position to ask her if she wanted them or not. But he had a new power. He’d bled into his dinner and eaten it alone, and had realized certain home truths; and though he felt rather hollowed-out, he knew that the world would not cease to be interesting, as long as there was bone marrow and eels, and the picky eater’s bright black eyes.

    He sat at the table for a long time, thinking. And the next day he went back to the store and bought the ingredients for Marcella Hazan’s polpette with porcini mushrooms and white wine.