Sprung At Last

Small Talk

09.22.2014 by J. Doe // Leave a Comment

I avoided this party: I didn’t open the evite, didn’t mark it on my calendar, and looked for some sort of acceptable excuse to stay home. In the end, though, I had no conflicting plans, and Mr. Faraway was available to go with me, and nobody got even marginally sick, so when the text arrives a few days beforehand, from my friend who is turning 50, I reply, of course I’m coming.

Mr. Faraway and I arrive, and it’s a small group. I only know two people other than the hostess, and it turns out the Mr. Faraway also knows a couple of the guests, so he is no longer at my side when the couple rush up to greet me. The three of us chat about how much the kids have grown and what they’re up to and our various home ownership and automotive woes and who we’ve run into lately. The husband – who is a Facebook friend but never actually interacts with me on Facebook – seems to know everything that is going on in my life, and it occurs to me that Facebook has a usefulness I’ve overlooked: Cliff notes for making small talk at parties.

I talk the wife – who isn’t on Facebook – out of buying a Mini.

The wife tells me she ran into The Departed at Trader Joe’s.

Do you remember that weekend we all went camping? And his son was so mean to the other boys?

It was more than ten years ago, but I remember: Kids were all playing nicely, adults were chatting around a picnic table, when suddenly The Departed’s son made a beeline for another boy and pushed him, hard, off a swing.

She continues: I asked him about his kids, and he said, he’s grown up a lot since the last time we went camping.

It’s an odd thing to remember – we’d all seen each other dozens of times in the decade since then – and though I’m not convinced my former stepson made a better impression, I’m sure that the eyerolls he gave in response to questions about school and girlfriends, made a different impression.

You could pass them off as nerves, if you wanted to.

The wife concludes her story: she asked The Departed if he lived nearby. He said yes, but he wasn’t at his apartment most of the time.

His behavior was so strange. Why, she asks, did he insist on both telling her something and making her read between the lines? Why not just say you’re seeing someone?

No reason at all, since he knew it would be repeated back to me, eventually.

Fuchsia Dunlop’s Sichuanese Chopped Celery with Beef

09.10.2014 by J. Doe // Leave a Comment

After I made Big Sur Bakery’s Baked Beans, I had a problem: I had bought a whole head of celery, and used one stalk, leaving me with, well, a lot of celery. I know, I could put peanut butter on it, or even peanut butter and raisins, and try to pass it off as a healthy snack, but since the advent of the vegetable crisper – the thing that forces us to look at all that unused celery and feel guilty for not eating it when we know we should – has anyone, ever, been fooled into actually wanting to eat one?

Fortunately, I ran across a blog post some time ago on The Wednesday Chef, in which she mentioned a recipe that solves the what-to-do-with-the-rest-of-the-celery dilemma, and even more fortunately, I remembered the post and was able to find it after I got tired of feeling Celery Guilt every time I opened the crisper.

It took a while to find a couple of the ingredients on the list (the vinegar and the chili paste) – there were items that seemed to fit the bill at my local grocery, but since the blog post said that these two specialty items were, in fact, quite cheap, I passed on my store’s $12 vinegar and $8 chili paste, and made a special trip to our local Asian market, where I found both items for $3, and, feeling proud of my culinary bargain-hunting prowess, tossed in a package of Matcha Kit-Kats for The Child (which she loved) and then went to the liquor store next door and stocked up on Belgian beer for me (which I loved).

Not only does this recipe use up leftover celery, it used up exactly what remained of my celery head, minus the one stalk I bought it for (for use in the beans). If that weren’t enough, the recipe is startlingly easy to make – startling because each time I’ve tried to make actual Chinese food at home, it either doesn’t taste as good as restaurant Chinese, or it involves complex preparations or obscure ingredients or both, and I generally end the meal wishing I’d simply gone with takeout.

Though the recipe begins with two seemingly involved steps – blanching and de-stringing celery – blanching takes all of 30 seconds, and I learned a handy trick for de-stringing celery: simply run a vegetable peeler on the outside of the stalk. You might have known that one already, but I picked it up from The Kitchen Chick’s post about this recipe. Everything else is pretty straightforward: dice the celery, cook the ground beef, and toss everything else in. Have the rice cooked (or nearly so) when you start the beef, because it all cooks up very quickly.

I’m not sure I need to say it, but just in case you were in doubt: I adored this recipe. It’s quick and simple to prepare, tasty, serves two precisely. The flavors are pure, very authentic Chinese, with a nice spice that you can adjust to your taste.

Did I mention The Child loved it? To my amazement, she did, even though I followed the recipe precisely and it was fairly spicy as a result. The spiciness didn’t bother her at all: She declared it was a nice spicy, not a burning spicy.

The recipe is originally from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice, which is on hold for me at the library as I sit here typing. I used the directions from The Kitchen Chick’s blog post.

Sichuanese Chopped Celery with Beef

Author: Fuchsia Dunlop, Every Grain of Rice

Serves: 2

Ingredients

11 oz celery
3 tbsp neutral cooking oil
4 oz ground beef
1½ tbsp Sichuan chili bean paste
1½ tbsp finely chopped ginger
light soy sauce to taste
1 tsp Chinkiang vinegar (brown rice vinegar)

Instructions

Boil a pot of water for blanching the celery.
De-string the celery by running a vegetable peeler along the outer side. Dice celery into ⅜ pieces. Blanch celery in boiling water for about 30 seconds; drain.
Heat oil in a large pan or seasoned wok over high flame. Add ground meat and stir-fry until cooked. Break up pieces as needed.
Add chili bean paste and stir-fry a bit more until fragrant and the oil is red. Add ginger and stir-fry for a few seconds. Add celery.
Stir-fry until celery is hot but still crunchy. As you cook, season with a bit of soy sauce to taste. Stir in vinegar.
Serve with rice.

Notes

This dish cooks quickly, so don't begin stir-frying until your rice has finished cooking.

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Big Sur Bakery’s Baked Beans

09.05.2014 by J. Doe // Leave a Comment

Earlier in the year, I spent some time with some of my older cookbooks, in particular The New Basics Cookbook, which was once a favorite of mine – as evidenced by its spattered pages and cracked binding – but in recent years, hasn’t really inspired me. I still use the Mac and Cheese recipe (which uses penne and gruyere), but that’s about it.

In the chapter on beans, I found a fairly simple recipe for red beans with rice, so I made it, in hopes that it might meet The Child’s approval. She adores beans, and as a result I’ve learned to appreciate – if not love – them, but we’ve gotten tired of many of my standby bean recipes.

In the New Basics recipe, the beans are supposed to bake for 90 minutes, but at the end of that time, they were still disagreeably watery. I cooked the beans for another hour, then another, and finally the texture was just right. The Child loved them.

After three and a half hours of baking, I had enough beans for one dinner (for two) and one lunch of leftovers (for one).

In my universe, that’s not enough food to warrant that kind of oven time, so I doubled the recipe and cooked it in the slow cooker, where it cooked fine, but there was still the problem of too much liquid. I made the recipe several more times, and finally got the liquid balance right. The Child adored each of my efforts.

I found it all rather bland, though I was happy enough to keep making it, since she happily continued to eat it.

I didn’t go looking for another bean recipe; in fact, I was looking for a blackberry scone recipe when I checked The Big Sur Bakery Cookbook out of the library. But on flipping through the pages, I found a baked bean recipe that promised to be a “fresher, cleaner” version of traditional baked beans – which I love but, you will not be surprised to learn, The Child does not.

The Big Sur Bakery does not lie. These beans are everything baked beans should be – lightly sweet, lightly smoky, lightly spiced, robustly flavorful. The sweetness is not overbearing, there is no overly assertive vinegar or tomato or anything as I’ve found in some recipes. The seasoning was so perfect I found myself eating it straight from the pan, and though the beans would be great alongside pork, I made rice, something I could make quickly, so that I wouldn’t have to wait to eat those beans.

I might have had a few spoonfuls while the rice was cooking.

The recipe needs a bit of advanced planning. You won’t get the same result using canned beans, which won’t stand up to the long cooking time needed to infuse the beans with flavor. But most of the time is untended, and none of the ingredients are hard to find.

I made a couple of minor substitutions: First, I used vegetable broth instead of chicken stock, which I thought I had on hand and, well, didn’t. I substituted 1 tsp of dried herbs for the fresh oregano and thyme, same reason. And I omitted the parsley because I just don’t like it.

Also, I didn’t use freshly ground coffee – I use Folgers, so that’s what went in. Yes, I live in Seattle and I use Folgers. (I run it through a fancy French press, if that makes the idea more palatable. It makes all coffee wonderful. Really.)

I was pleased to have an ample supply of leftovers the next day. Sadly, though, I made this recipe on the first day of school, so The Child disappeared into her bedroom with her dinner, so she could continue analyzing the day via skype with her friends). Her jury, at least, is still out.

Big Sur Bakery's Baked Beans

Author: Wojtowicz/Gilson, from The Big Sur Bakery Cookbook