I am all abuzz mentally writing a blog post of Big Important Feminist Thoughts, a state brought on by my attending a conference on how to cultivate diversity in bar leadership. (Yeah, in real life, I’m a lawyer, and I go to that kind of thing from time to time.)
But I promised you recipes. And heaven knows that a woman honestly sharing her own experience (in this case, kitchen experience) with other women is a feminist act -- think consciousness raising. (I am not quite old enough to have done it. But I’ve heard of it; probably you have too.)
So, this is a food post, one I first started thinking about, um, four and a half months ago, when I first started thinking about starting a blog. (You’ll notice I’m a bit less than current in general: a mere year and a half after Cooked came out, I managed to write up a response to the book and the publicity for it.) Now that I live in California, and have my own garden, my cooking is somewhat seasonal -- if yours is, too, some of the recipe part may be more useful to you come around next summer. (Tomatoes, arugula. Even here in California, where you can harvest tomatoes well into October, tomato season is now over. I do have hopes for fall/winter arugula.) But bear with me, use what you can, mentally file away the rest. I’ll figure out how to tag it (“tomato recipes”) and you can pull it up next summer.
Without further ado (because really that was quite a lot of ado already), here is a picture of What I Had For Lunch on June 28, 2014:
This is a lunch made of leftovers, which is generally what I eat for lunch, particularly on weekends. This one happened to come at the end a week where I had a good run of cooking, and, as I’ve said, when I was starting to think about writing this blog, so I’ve dubbed it “The Michael Pollan Can Bite Me Memorial Lunch.” No, I don’t know what it memorializes.
Let’s go around the plate, and I’ll give recipes as I go:
Upper left corner: This is leftover baguette with tomato-artichoke bruschetta spread from a jar. Not cooking by anyone’s definition. It did use up some bread, bought to go with dinner the night before, that would otherwise have gone to waste. (I like to use things up. I also keep ends of loaves of bread and leftover bits of baguette or other bakery bread in a plastic bag in the freezer, and make bread pudding when I’ve got enough.) The bruschetta spread is something I bought on impulse at the grocery store that day. It’s a processed food product (and keeps surprisingly well, in the fridge, after you open it) but a pretty healthy one: it’s basically a jar of tomato-vegetable sauce. In recent years, I have been known to make my own tomato sauce or salsa from time to time -- but most of my life, and even now, most of the time, I use store bought. It’s a good example of a processed food and time-saver that often is nutritionally similar to what you might make at home.
Top of the plate: Arugula tomato salad. In June we had an arugula-gone-wild thing going on in our garden. Like girls-gone-wild, this involved an exuberant sexual display, albeit of the botanical kind: flowers. There was no getting them to keep their shirts on, either, much as I would have liked to -- once an arugula plant flowers (a.k.a. bolts), it puts out fewer leaves and the leaves that are left are more bitter. At first I tried to pinch back the buds and blossoms, but every bud I snipped was replaced by two more, seemingly overnight. (Now I know what gave rise to the legend of the Hydra, the monster that grows two heads every time Hercules cuts one off.) So I gave up on the Herculean bud pinching and began pulling out whole plants to harvest their remaining leaves. (I intended to plant more every few weeks through the summer, but didn’t manage to get seeds in until just last weekend. See above: less than current.)
The tomatoes in that salad, at that point, were not yet ones from my own garden; just storebought (always, always, kept on the counter and not in the fridge). The arugula-tomato mixture is one I make a lot, especially (but not only) in summer, and use for many different purposes, so let me stop and give what is really more instructions than a recipe. I’m going to go all Julia Child on you and give a sub-recipe first, because it’s useful for other things:
Chopped tomato sauce: Chop tomatoes. I’m not going to tell you how many/how much, because I just use what I have. If I’m using full-size tomatoes, I like to use my salsa maker for chopping (like this one). (I recommend this cheap and handy device in general -- easy to use, easy to clean, saves a lot of time on chopping not only tomatoes but onions, carrots, peppers, garlic, etc. I buy a new one about every two years when the blades get dull. If anyone knows of a source for replacement blades that can be bought without replacing the whole thing, please let me know.) If I’m using cherry tomatoes, I just cut each one in half.
Put the chopped tomatoes in a bowl or storage container. Add kosher salt -- sprinkle a little bit, mix it up, taste, and adjust to your own taste. I kind of love this salty, but, up to you. Grind some pepper on there. Add a glug or two of olive oil. Mix it all up.
And there you go. If you have time to let it sit, let it sit for fifteen minutes or so and the tomatoes will release some of their juice and it’s saucier. You can keep this in your fridge for a week or so -- it’s a great way to keep tomatoes if they are cracked when you pick them and can’t be left out on your counter.
So that's the subrecipe (which, like Julia's, can be eaten just as is). Here are some dishes I use this for:
Arugula tomato salad: Wash arugula (or if you buy it at the store, it might already be washed). Chop it roughly. (Roughly is about the best I do with chopping, ever.) Toss with the chopped tomato sauce. Add a bit of balsamic or wine vinegar. I see in the lunch photo that I also added some avocado that day -- but just the tomatoes and arugula is a pretty wonderful salad all on its own.
(You don’t think that counts as a recipe? I told you this blog was all about quick and easy.)
Pasta salad: Take the arugula tomato salad and add two or three basil leaves, ideally cut into slivers but any way you want to cut/tear them will be fine. Add cold cooked pasta. Cubes of mozzarella make an excellent addition, if you’re not feeding a vegan. My kids used to like it if I put the pasta in while it was still hot and added shredded mozzarella right away, serving it hot. (That’s a decent dinner right there, and packs well for lunch the next day.)
Bean salad: To the chopped tomato sauce (sans arugula), add some lemon juice, two or three cloves of minced garlic, and some chopped fresh parsley to the chopped tomato sauce. Trim and steam green beans, toss with the chopped tomatoes. This is excellent if you can let it cool in the fridge for a while, allowing the flavors to blend, but it’s pretty good if you eat it right away. Also good with washed and drained canned beans added (I like to use white beans for this). Actually, if you don’t have the green beans or don’t have time to cook them, you can also do this with just canned beans. (And now I’ve gone back and changed the title from “Green Bean Salad” to “Bean Salad.”)
Rice Salad: I’m going to jump down to the bottom of my lunch plate (remember the Michael Pollan Can Bite Me Memorial Lunch? stay with me, people) because that’s a rice salad made with the arugula tomato salad. That particular rice salad was made with what my grocery calls “Wild Rice Blend” (although it’s mostly some kind of brown rice), but you could use any kind of rice. Just take your cooked rice and mix it with the arugula tomato salad. Or just with the chopped tomato sauce. (A shoutout here to The Fanny Farmer Cookbook which introduced me to the idea of a rice salad. This is basically just 1) cold rice plus 2) whatever you want and some 3) simple vinaigrette. Handy side dish, and can be used as a vehicle for getting vegetables into reluctant children.)
Moving on. One more dish on that plate: crushed beets with lemon vinaigrette. Note: this recipe is not something I would take on on a workday evening. (Also: until the recipe told me, I did not know what labneh was. I just used Greek yogurt. Regular yogurt would also be fine.) That said, it’s not hard, and it is tasty. I left out the dill because I didn’t have dill. If you just skipped the herbs altogether, it would still be good. What I learned the second time I tried this: do not leave your roasted beets around to get fully cool and then come back to peel and crush them -- they will not peel properly, leading to a big mess when you have to use a peeler. They will also be difficult to crush, although if you have a pissed off teenager around she might enjoy whacking away at them with whatever implement of destruction you provide.
And that brings us full circle, if you will. Because if me telling the story of my teenage daughter pounding on overcooled beets isn’t a kind of consciousness raising, sharing an experience of oppression in everyday life, I don’t know what is. (I’m not sure whose oppression. Mine? My daughter’s? The beets’? Possibly all three.) Enjoy. (The food, not the oppression.)
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