White Bean salad, spread, or dip

Sometimes you have to admit that, no matter how hard you try to prove otherwise, you are wrong. Right on the heels of my last post about how great dried beans are, I have to take it back – at least partially. Dried beans can be great. Just not if you’re as absent-minded as me. And not if you need them right now.

I was going to write this whole post about how, now that you’ve got your pantry stocked with dried beans, you should try to enjoy them in something summery instead of the usual types of heavy bean dishes one thinks of. Well, there’s a reason you don’t see a lot of summer bean recipes that use dried beans. They are really winter ingredients, for when you don’t have as much fresh anything around. They take a long time to cook and, if you’re me, they burn if you aren’t paying close enough attention.

But however you get your white beans into a soft enough state for this dish, do it. It is delightful. It’s a great lunch or side, or even dinner for one or two. I make it when I want something quiet. The flavors are nothing to write home about, but this dish can be perfectly satisfying to snack on while doing something else. I also make this when I find it hard to rustle up an appetite for a full meal, or anything too rich. And hey, if you do repeatedly burn them (like me), you get a nice smoky flavor on the non-burnt beans.

This dish is simple, though it requires some advance planning to be able to use dried beans. The beans will need to soak, be cooked, and then the mixture should marinate so that the flavors permeate the beans.  In a pinch, a can of small white beans will also do – just rinse and add the rest of the ingredients (see step 4 and on, below). The dried beans have a much better texture and flavor, but make the dish much more complicated, so it is a trade-off.

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Tangy Bulgur Salad and New Foods

We were recently invited to a potluck lunch with an ingenious theme: “New Foods.” The host wanted guests to bring foods that would most likely be new to him, and hopefully the other guests. I gave the challenge a lot of thought. I eat a lot of weird things, so I had plenty of options. But I wanted the food to be new to me as well, at least in preparation if not in flavor. So my thoughts immediately turned to Syrian food, which contains many familiar elements of other Middle Eastern cooking, but often goes a little more savory and tangy than sweet.

While most people are familiar with some Middle Eastern flavors, I often find that Syrian food, especially the cuisine originating in Aleppo, is really unknown outside of that ethnicity. That probably has to do with the fact that most Jewish Syrians live in the New York area, and there are very few Syrian restaurants. In my family, all the best cooks cook for family functions and their homes are like exclusive restaurants, though none of them cook professionally. I think this has to do with the way that cooking for people you love might be different than cooking for customers. What it amounts to though, is that unless you have a Syrian friend, you probably won’t get to taste a lot of the more unique Syrian dishes.

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Whole Wheat Pocket Pita

I’ve clearly been on a bit of baking kick lately. I think it’s been because by the end of the week I’m out of fresh goods but I always have basic baking ingredients in my pantry.

A lot of people bake bread to be frugal. And I’d like to say that I made these pita because they were cheaper than store bought ones, but I’m not entirely sure that’s the case. They are better than store bought ones though. And really not that hard. If you like excuses to whip out the ol’ rolling pin, and want a bread that’s really hard to mess up and not too much trouble, give these a try. I have fun every time I make them. You’ll also end up with enough that you can probably freeze half for when you aren’t feeling as motivated to bake.

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Pumpkin Hummus

Between the CSA we joined this fall and all the great prices on squash at the markets, we ended up with a cache of winter squash to figure out what to do with this year. We ran through the basics pretty quickly, with pumpkin pie, butternut squash soup, and stuffed acorn squash; even a few out there experiments like curried butternut squash and an unfortunate black bean and pumpkin soup. But I find that I can only handle having squash as a main dish once or twice a week at most before I get sick of it, no matter how good the dish.

To remedy this issue, I thought it was high time to figure out how to use pumpkin as an appetizer instead of the main course. I did all kinds of googling to see how other people use pumpkin as an appetizer and found that it is much more commonly used as a dessert, which shouldn’t have been surprising. And as appetizers go, I’m pretty lazy, and I’d rather not have to make dozens of bite-sized anything if I can avoid it.

And then I stumbled upon a great idea: pumpkin hummus! I didn’t want to have to shop and get tahini though. And pumpkins aren’t really known for their protein content, so I didn’t think it fair to make a hummus without chickpeas. Either way, pumpkin as a dip is a great way to get that pumpkin flavor in before dessert without it taking over the whole meal. The flavor is bright and exciting and is a great addition to any holiday party.

As long as I have winter squashes in the house, I will also probably have pumpkin hummus.

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Lemon Berry Sorbet

Earlier this year, I got an ice cream maker attachment for our stand mixer and I’ve been having fun making different frozen desserts with it. I find that it is more fun to experiment with sorbet rather than ice cream as the results are more reliably edible, due to the simplicity of sorbet chemistry: adding together sugar, fruit and water creates a freezable mixture with a velvety smooth texture.

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Zesty Avocado Quinoa Salad

Now that warmer weather has finally come our way, I find myself craving fresh bright salads for dinner. I don’t know about you, but I can’t often satisfy myself with just greens. I’d have to eat a mountain to be full and it wouldn’t really be a nutritionally complete meal. That’s why I’ve been toying with mixing grains into my salads.

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Roasted Red Pepper Risotto, or The Importance of Being Creative in the Kitchen

I know you probably think I’ve posted the same dish twice in a row. And honestly, considering the month I’ve had, I wouldn’t be surprised if I had done that. But no, I’m not that absent-minded (yet). This risotto has an even more winding origin than the last one I posted. If you are actually craving something like Roasted Red Pepper Risotto, I assure you there are far easier ways to come by it. One day I’ll probably try to figure one out. That day was not today.

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Veggie Bonanza: Oven-Roasted Ratatouille

While on a recent grocery trip, I noticed that the outdoor produce section of our favorite market was currently undergoing some major reorganization. Every stand was being cleared off, and at first I was sad that we wouldn’t have an opportunity to peruse what is usually a very diverse selection — that is, until I spotted an assemblage of shopping carts labeled “Bargain of the Day : $1.50 a bag” hiding out in a quiet alcove. What I discovered were weighty bags featuring a plethora of random fruits and/or veggies, and ignoring my auto-responsive dose of New Yorker cynicism  for a moment came to discover something more than sub-perfect specimens.

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Brine-less vacuum pickles

After all these pickle experiments, I’ve noticed that there’s only so many pickles I can eat. When I started this summer, I only had a few jars, so in order to try a new recipe I had to hurry up and finish one of the jars I already had. Now, after I’ve collected jars for months, I’ve found a way to get around the jars completely.

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Flexible Bean and Barley Soup

Weeknights have become busy around here, between new year’s resolutions, birthdays, and the usual. This is the time of year when I know I need food to function but I can’t always bring myself to whip up something new each night. The lack of fresh produce in the house doesn’t help either.

It would be really easy to succumb to take out and pre-made frozen foods, but I know my stomach, wallet, and conscience wouldn’t be happy with me if I did.  To combat winter food fatigue, I’ve been making larger batches of things to take for lunch with me throughout the week. I’ve stocked the freezer so that when I’m at wits end I don’t end up ordering pizza (at least not again anyway).

This week, the savior dish was a bean and barley soup I’ve been playing with all winter. Basically, I choose two types of dried beans, throw in a cup of barley, onions, carrots, celery, a bay leaf and bouillon and we eat like kings for a week. This kind of soup is filling, incredibly healthy, cheap, and can last for days and days. I bet you could even feed it to an avid meat-eater and they wouldn’t even realize it is vegan.

Here’s my latest recipe, but this soup is flexible enough that you could substitute just about any ingredient for another similar one (except the barley which is needed for its magical thickening powers).

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