Summer officially arrives with the first batch of ratatouille

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Ratatouille ingredients

Add bell peppers and parsley and you have a fine meal.

Tonight, my dinner is so completely local that every ingredient except the olive oil and onion came from within 3 miles of my desk at work. My friend and Mother Earth News editor Cheryl Long plucked the tomatoes and eggplant from her garden; the garlic and zucchini came from our community garden in front of the office; and the peppers came from my own little plot.

Since almost all the vegetables were free (I think the onion cost a whopping 69 cents), its most expensive ingredient is the olive oil, which happens to come from a small farm in Tuscany that a group of us at work buy from.

It’s ratatouille season, and I’m well ready for it. The savory vegetable stew is another dish that’s good hot, at room temperature or straight from the fridge, and on hot nights, its brief stay in the oven isn’t especially burdensome. The rendition I like springs from Julia Child’s classic version in Mastering the Art of French Cooking; in Child’s original, the dish is cooked atop the stove in an earthenware casserole. But the hand-thrown casserole I like to use for ratatouille has an ominous crack in its bottom, so I thought I’d better not challenge it with the heat of a direct gas flame.

My mother was a great lover of ratatouille and, in her later years when I’d visit her at her Washtenaw County, Michigan, cottage, I often prepared it to please her. Like clockwork, in the middle of the night, I’d hear the rustling that told me she was pulling back the foil to help herself to a few bites or a small bowl from the leftovers in the refrigerator.

These days, I like ratatouille for its fresh flavors and its infinite adaptability. It’s a congenial dish, at home for lunch or dinner, and I can carry a portion to work for a satisfying lunch without worrying whether there’s room in the chronically-jammed refrigerator. Like gazpacho, it’s even good for breakfast, when the weather is already sultry by 7 am.

So without further ado, here ’tis: Julia’s ratatouille. Eat it in good health.

(By the way: do you notice that this recipe looks different from others I’ve posted? I’ve changed the formatting to make my posts more “visible” to Google’s new recipe searches. I hope it will make the recipes I post here easier for you to use as well.)

Julia Child’s Ratatouille, with a Slightly Modified Method

Julia Child’s classic French ratatouille recipe, with a slightly modified method using the oven instead of the stove top.

5 of 5 stars

Prep time: 15 minutes

Cook time: 30 minutes

Total time: 45 minutes

Yield: 6 to 8 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 pound
    eggplant
  • 1 pound
    zucchini
  • 1 teaspoon
    salt
  • 1/4 cup + 2 to 3 tablespoons
    olive oil
  • 1/2 pound
    yellow onion, thinly sliced (about 1 1/2 cups)
  • 2
    green peppers, sliced (about 1 cup)
  • 2
    cloves garlic, mashed
  • Salt, to taste
  • Pepper, to taste
  • 1 pound
    red, ripe tomatoes, peeled, seeded and juiced
  • 3 tablespoons
    minced fresh parsley

Cooking Directions

  1. Peel the eggplant and cut into lengthwise slices 3/8 inch thick, about 3 inches long and 1 inch wide. Cut the zucchini into slices about the same size as the eggplant slices. Place the vegetables into a bowl and toss with 1 teaspoon salt. Let stand for 30 minutes. Drain. Pat slices dry with a towel.
  2. In a 10 to 12-inch skillet, heat the olive oil over medium-high heat. One layer at a time, cook the eggplant, then the zucchini, on each side to brown lightly. Remove to a side dish.
  3. In the same skillet, reduce heat to medium-low and cook the onions and peppers for about 10 minutes or until tender but not browned. Stir in the garlic and season with salt and pepper.
  4. Slice the tomato pulp into 3/8-inch strips. Lay them over the onions and peppers. Season with salt and pepper. Cover the skillet and cook over low heat for 5 minutes, or until the tomatoes have begin to render their juice. Uncover, baste the tomatoes with the juices, raise the heat and boil for several minutes, until juice has almost entirely evaporated.
  5. Heat the oven to 300 degrees. Place a third of the tomato mixture in the bottom of a 2 1/2-quart casserole and sprinkle it with 1 tablespoon of minced parsley. Arrange half of the eggplant and zucchini on top, then half the remaining tomatoes and parsley. Put in the rest of the eggplant and zucchini, and finish with the remaining tomatoes and parsley.
  6. Cover the casserole and bake for 10 to 15 minutes. Uncover the casserole and tip it; baste the contents with the rendered juices. Return the casserole to the oven uncovered and cook, basting several more times, until juices have evaporated, leaving a spoonful or two of flavored olive oil.
  7. Serve hot, allow to cool to room temperature and serve, or refrigerate and serve cold.

Peanut noodles: A dish that’s good for breakfast, lunch and dinner

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Years ago, a college friend spent time in Taiwan, and when he came back, he told me about a delicious dish he had encountered there: dan-dan mian, a classic Szechuan dish of noodles in peanut sauce. He made it for me once, but alas, I was so callow that I spurned it without tasting. Peanut butter on noodles, I said. Who eats that?

What a dope I was.

These days, some version or another of peanut noodles is in my kitchen’s regular rota, and with good reason: It’s a healthy dish that costs little, tastes wonderful, and “eats well” at any meal, as my mother used to say. Here, 8 ounces of ground pork gets spread out over 10 servings — certainly a good use of a little meat as a seasoning rather than as the center of the plate.

This particular incarnation is the way I made a batch on Sunday night, slavering at the thought of having it for dinner then and for lunches for much of the rest of the week. It’s kind of a mash-up of Ken Hom’s classic version and one I encountered when I worked at Cooking Light. Like Hom’s version, it incorporates a great deal of garlic and ginger, and gains heat from the chili-garlic sauce. Like the Cooking Light rendition, it includes a lot of vegetables that aren’t authentic but are good nonetheless.

Like all Chinese dishes, it requires a fair amount of fiddly prep before you even start cooking, and also like all Chinese cooking, it comes together all at once in the end. You will be happiest, I think, if you’ll prep all the vegetables and measure all the ingredients for the sauce before you begin.

As I was eating a portion of this for lunch today, one of my colleagues remarked that she smelled something yummy, “something garlicky and gingery.” I smiled and, holding up my bowl, pointed at it to indicate that it might be my lunch she was sniffing. I couldn’t talk, you see.

Because my mouth was full of these good noodles.

Peanut noodles

Makes about 10 1-cup servings

8 ounces ground pork
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon chili garlic sauce, such as Lee Kum Kee
1 crown broccoli, cut into florets, stems peeled and cut into 1/2-inch discs
2 carrots, peeled
1 medium red onion, peeled and cut into 1/8-inch half moons
1 tablespoon neutral oil (I used walnut)
2 inches fresh ginger, peeled and grated
6 to 8 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 large yellow bell pepper, julienned
1 large red bell pepper, julienned
1 bunch green onions, cleaned and sliced thinly
1 cup low sodium chicken broth
3/4 cup chunky peanut butter
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup rice vinegar
2 to 3 tablespoons chili garlic sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 pound spaghetti, cooked and drained
1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro

Chopped dry-roasted peanuts, for garnish, optional

In a small bowl, combine the ground pork, soy sauce, salt and 1 teaspoon of chili garlic sauce. Heat a 10-inch cast iron or non-stick skillet over medium heat and, when it is hot, add the pork mixture. Cook, stirring, until the pork is browned and has no trace of pink, stirring frequently to crumble the pork into small bits, about 3 minutes. Remove pork to several layers of paper towels to drain; set aside.
Wipe out the skillet with paper towels. Set aside while you steam the broccoli in a saucepan with a vegetable steamer. While the broccoli steams, use a vegetable peeler to shave the carrots into thin strips. Place the carrot strips in a large bowl. When the broccoli has steamed to tender-crisp, about 3 minutes, remove it from the saucepan and add it to the bowl with carrots.
Return the steamer to the saucepan and steam the red onion very briefly, a minute or less, just to soften it slightly. Add the onion to the large bowl.
In the heavy skillet over medium-low heat, heat the oil. Add to it the ginger and garlic; cook, stirring, until the mixture is fragrant, about a minute. Add the julienned peppers; cook, stirring, until the peppers are bright and tender-crisp, 2 to 3 minutes. Transfer the peppers to the bowl with the other vegetables. Add the sliced green onions.
Without wiping out the skillet, heat the chicken broth in the skillet over medium-low heat, scraping up any browned bits. Stir in the peanut butter, soy sauce, rice vinegar, 2 to 3 tablespoons chili garlic sauce and sesame oil; cook, stirring, until the mixture is well blended and bubbly, about 5 minutes.
Add the cooked spaghetti to the vegetables in the large bowl. Add the cooked ground pork. Pour the sauce over the mixture and toss (a pair of tongs seems to work best) to blend. Add the cilantro and toss again. Garnish each serving with a sprinkling of chopped roasted peanuts if you wish.
Serve at room temperature or reheat by adding a little water and microwaving. Or eat cold, which is how I like it, although it is a little “clumpy.”

A delicious, easy Indian chickpea stew

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I came across a recipe for a Punjabi chickpea stew in Food & Wine magazine last week and knew immediately that it would go into my regular recipe rotation.

As I prepared it, I realized a couple of things that point up some differences between us American cooks and cooks in other kitchens around the world. One  is that the amounts of herbs and spices in this dish seem outlandish to the American mental palate: 8 cloves of garlic? 2 inches of fresh ginger? 2 tablespoons of ground cumin? I can still remember my Gram Mather fretting about whether 1/2 teaspoon of her no-doubt-long-past-its-prime curry powder was just too much — in a chicken curry to serve 8.

Another thing is how dumbed-down we have made a lot of our ingredients. The jalapenos I fetched home from the market were as bland as bell peppers, albeit with a different flavor. I remember reading years ago that most Americans found jalapenos too hot, so plant breeders created a variety that is milder, and that’s the one that’s almost universally planted these days. Clearly, this dish is meant to be warmly pungent. The next time I prepare it, I’ll reach for serranos instead.

(This, by the way, is the reason I don’t put much stock in the results of taste-testing panels offered in many places, touting “the best” of something. What taste-testing panels tell you is not what’s best, but rather what appealed to the most tasters. Democracy may work for government, but it doesn’t work in food.)

But no matter. I made up for the insipid jalapenos by doubling the cayenne pepper, and the resulting stew was still nowhere near fierce. Its flavors were complex, and its warmth was soothing. I wish I could offer you a photo, but the camera cable seems to have disappeared in my recent move.

My version is adapted from the one in Food & Wine. Here’s how I’ll make it next time — which will be soon.

Punjabi Chickpea Stew

(Makes 6 to 8 servings as a side dish, 4 to 6 servings as a main dish)

2 serrano chile peppers, split and deseeded

2 inches of fresh ginger, peeled and cut into chunks

8 to 10 cloves of garlic, peeled

2 tablespoons neutral oil (I used grapeseed)

3 large onions, cut into 1/4-inch dice

2 15-ounce cans chickpeas, drained and rinsed

1 14.5-ounce can fire-roasted diced tomatoes

2 tablespoons ground cumin

1 tablespoon ground coriander seed

3/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

2 cups water

For serving:

chopped cilantro

yogurt

Combine the peppers, ginger and garlic in a mortar and pestle with a pinch of salt and work them into a smooth paste (or use a food processor). Set aside.

In a large Dutch oven or saute pan (This won’t fit into a 10-inch skillet; you’ll need something bigger), heat the oil over medium-high heat. When it shimmers, add the onions and cook, stirring, until the onions’ juices have cooked away and the onions begin to sizzle in the oil, about 5 minutes.

Stir in the chile-ginger-garlic paste and cook, stirring, until the mixture is fragrant, 1 to 2 minutes. Add the chickpeas, tomatoes, cumin, coriander and cayenne; stir to mix and then add the water. Give it one more generous stir, cover and reduce the heat to a simmer and cook 15 to 30 minutes.

Serve in bowls with a dollop of thick yogurt and a scattering of chopped cilantro.

Note: If you have leftovers, the chickpeas will drink up the broth. Add a little water to reheat them to regain the stew-y consistency.

The ingredients you eat without knowing it

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It’s Thursday evening, which means the morrow will bring me a fresh-baked baguette from Karen Keb Will‘s Local Loaf. I look forward to her good breads all week. On the labels for her breads, the ingredients list flour, water, yeast and salt.

One thing they don’t list is human hair.

Flying around the internet today was this story, which points out that one of the dough conditioners added to commercial loaves is made from human hair.  The hair is “harvested,” for the most part, from Chinese barbershops and hair salons. The dough conditioner, which shows up on the label as “L-cysteine,” can also be derived from chicken and duck feathers,  cow horns or petroleum byproducts. I don’t know anything about how L-cysteine is gleaned from human hair or feathers or the other things, but I’m betting it involves a lot of irreplaceable energy and some fairly nasty chemical solvents.

It strikes me that it wouldn’t occur to Karen to add L-cysteine to her bread doughs, because she doesn’t need to — and, I’m sure, wouldn’t want to even if she did need to. Nope, her good, honest breads are just flour, water, yeast and salt. I could walk into her kitchen and recognize every one of them at a glance. They’re real, genuine foods, the kind that show up in my kitchen, too.

Dunno about you, but I’m really not interested in eating hair and feathers — or even anything derived from them.

Here’s one more reason (the list is towering now, higher than the second floor of the house where I now write) to eat locally: You know what you’re eating when you buy from someone you know. Local food is transparent. Industrial food is not.

Which kind of food do you prefer to eat?

An easy sauce for pasta

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After knocking around doing chores all day Saturday, I wasn’t in much of a mood to cook — and in even less of a mood to drive into town for groceries. I’ll bet you know the feeling.

So I noodled around in the kitchen, opening cupboards and refrigerator, looking here and there, considering my options. The little glass pint of heavy cream from Iwig Family Dairy not far away called my name most sweetly.

My supper pleased me so much that I had to tell you about it. To begin, a big, big salad of leafy lettuces from the garden, simply dressed with a sharp vinaigrette and graced with a few croutons made from the loaf of kalamata olive bread I picked up last week at Wheatfields bakery in Lawrence. Simple enough.

Then on to the main course: A dish of whole-wheat rotini clad in herb-infused cream with shards of Parmigianno-Reggiano. I tried something I’d never done before, infusing the cream with herbs, and I have to say I felt clever to think of it.

Here’s how I made the sauce for the pasta. Remember, I’m cooking for one person; you will need to multiply this basic method as needed to be sure you have enough sauce. But do, please, keep portions small; it is very rich.

You will want a fistful of mixed herbs; I used sage, oregano, parsley, thyme and garlic chives, because that is what I had on hand in the garden. Pluck out a few leaves of each herb and reserve for finishing the dish. Mince the herbs for finishing and set them aside, but leave the rest whole.

First, I smashed and minced a fat clove of garlic. After melting a tablespoon of butter in a small skillet over medium-low heat, I added the garlic and sauteed until it was fragrant but not browned.

Next into the skillet was about a half cup of cream. I raised the heat to a boil and reduced the cream by about a third. Then, after turning off the heat under the cream, I added the whole herbs to let them steep like tea leaves in the cream while I prepared and ate the salad.

After about 30 minutes, I strained the herbs out of the cream by pouring the stuff in the skillet through a sieve. I discarded the herbs and returned the cream to the skillet to warm over a very gentle flame as I cooked the rotini. When the water boiled for the rotini, I stirred a couple of tablespoons of Parmesan into the cream, and let it continue to stand, unattended, until the rotini was cooked and drained.

Then I tossed the hot rotini with the warmed cream sauce, the finishing herbs, a few grinds of fresh pepper and added a few more grainy shards of Parmesan on top.

Gosh, it was good. The thing is, I think each time you make this, it will taste slightly different, because the herbs you use will vary in amount and blend.

It was a very simple, very easy and delightful dinner for an early summer evening — lush and delicious, leaving me happy and satisfied.

I hope you’ll try it soon. When you do, please let me know if it pleased you.

To Kansas, and new beginnings

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I feel like Dorothy Gale, only in reverse.

In late April, I left my lakeside cottage in southwestern Michigan for new horizons: A post with Mother Earth News magazine in Topeka, Kansas, the venerable sustainability and green living bible, as a senior associate editor.

It has been a whirlwind, to be sure. The editors at Mother received early copies of The Feast Nearby and, having an opening, invited me to visit. When they offered me a place on staff, I was thrilled.

I’ve been a reader of the magazine since its earliest days; in the early ’70s, when the magazine was founded, I was kicked out of high school for a few days after bringing my own copy to school because school administrators thought the magazine was subversive. Their objection to the magazine and its content persuaded me that the topics it covered were things I wanted to learn more about.

Leaving the Michigan cottage behind was its own painful moment. My good dog Boon’s bones are buried there; I lost him at Thanksgiving, 2010, at age 15. No longer would summer sunrises mean coffee on the deck overlooking still, quiet Stewart Lake, with birdsong providing music for the morning. Leave-takings are never easy, and rarely dry-eyed.

But any trip from there to here brings its own new joys. Boon’s successor, Callebaut, was just 11 weeks old when we loaded Pippin the parrot and Guffy the cat into the car and set out for our new digs in Kansas. We’ve all settled in nicely, over the last month, in our small renovated farmhouse on 6 acres about 15 miles from the office.

The garden was ready when we arrived, already tilled and composted and manured. My tomatoes are in — Juliets for paste, Sungold for snacking, Black Prince for slicing and my much-beloved Rutgers for those acidic drippy tomato sandwiches — and so are my peppers. The recent rains have sent the Straight Eight cucumbers plants sprawling, and the straight-neck yellow summer squash grows like Topsy. Lettuces, mesclun, mustard, kale, and herbs like my very favorite basil, Genovese, relax into the rich prairie soil.

My new colleagues are warm and generous. The beautiful black-and-white orca beans now poking their heads above the alfalfa mulch came from the seed stash of the leader of the office’s gardening group, which tends a community plot in front of the building.

I’m already finding my way with local food, too.  Hank Will, editor-in-chief of one of our sister publications, Grit magazine, sits less than 20 feet from me; he and his wife, Karen Keb Will, offer not only Karen’s uncommonly good artisan breads for sale, but also eggs, grassfed beef, pastured heritage pork, lamb, and later this year, pastured poultry. Mother Earth News’ publisher and author of the excellent book Beautiful and Abundant, Bryan Welch, also offers locally-raised meats from his ranch’s pastures. I’m hoping that this weekend will see the end of unpacking, which means I’ll be able to visit the farmers market on Saturday.

It’s an interesting synchronicity in my life. As a child, I adored the Oz books, all of them, seeing in Dorothy’s pragmatic, brave, kind and adventurous self qualities I wanted, even then, to cultivate in myself. One of my first acts in my new place was to hang a print of a John R. Neill illustration from Ozma of Oz — of Dorothy and a little yellow hen named Billina — in my kitchen. Nearly a half-century later, I find myself in my own Oz — one that L. Frank Baum’s courageous Kansas farmgirl would recognize immediately.

Home is where the heart is, they say. My heart’s now in Kansas, fewer than 50 miles from the museum in Wamego, KS, which honors the literary works that so profoundly shaped me as a child.

Please join Dorothy and me in saying: There’s no place like home.

Good news as Feast arrives

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Nice to see the following from the Publishers Weekly, the publishing industry’s bible:
The Feast Nearby: How I Lost My Job, Buried a Marriage, and Found My Way by Keeping Chickens, Foraging, Preserving, Bartering, and Eating Locally (All on Forty Dollars a Week)
Robin Mather. Ten Speed, $24 (272p) ISBN 978-1-58008-558-8

This certainly isn’t the first memoir about living la vida locavore, and while its subtitle might inspire a little eye-rolling, the first page lets readers know that the author’s scenario is decidedly not contrived. She’s middle-aged, suddenly alone and unemployed, and endearing in her frankness about her plight and her financial fears. Though she’s not a professionally trained cook, Mather is a longtime food writer and she knows her way around the kitchen. The recipes that accompany her earnest prose are lovely, simple, and just-gourmet-enough. Entries such as whole strawberries in balsamic-black pepper syrup; butternut squash with honey, cherry vinegar, and chipotle; and cardamom-coffee toffee bars are intriguing yet approachable, and they all have a reason, seasonal or otherwise, for being in the book. She shares kitchen wisdom, from the anecdotal (“Get the water on to boil before you pick the corn, and then sprint back to the house with it, shucking as you run”) to the practical, such as instructions for making fromage blanc and fresh chevre. (July)

Reviewed on: 05/16/2011

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In case you’re interested, here’s the link:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-58008-558-8