A vegetarian Lenten challenge

Lent began yesterday with Ash Wednesday. Even though I'm no longer a practicing Catholic, nine years of Catholic school have instilled in me a need to give up something for the forty days before Easter. This year, as I do most years, I've given up meat. (I've also given up eating out, unless someone else is paying. Besides being sacrifices, both are actually ways for me to try and save money.) It just so happens that this first week of Lent coincides with a challenge-within-a-challenge from the Dark Days Challenge, which is to make a SOLE (seasonal, organic, local, ethical) vegetarian meal.

To be honest, cooking vegetarian is sort of a normal occurrence around here. Because it's important for me to eat locally- and ethically-raised meat, which happens to be expensive, I don't often cook a lot of meat. Lately, though, I've been exploring my SOLE meat options and have been buying more meat (and thus increasing my food bill!). Coming back to meatless cooking allows me to fall back on old favorites, as well as to discover new vegetarian options.

Finding new vegetarian recipes can be somewhat of a challenge for me and my tastes. I don't typically like to cook with soy-based meat alternatives — too processed and don't always taste very good. I also think that most vegetarian dishes one finds in magazines or cookbooks are too focused on beans, soy, or other proteins, as if the main point of the meal is to replace the meat that is "missing." For me, eating without meat is an opportunity to put more vegetables in my diet. I'd rather eat a plate of greens over a brick of tempeh any day.

Roots take center stage

As I work my way through the second week of my detox, I can see the end in sight. This is mainly because I'm ending it earlier than as instructed by Whole Living magazine. I'm no longer interested in starving myself in the interest of "getting healthy," and anyway, I've learned the lessons that needed to be learned: I'll be packing the fruits and veggies into every meal with smoothies, salads, soups, and side dishes. And this will get easier as the year goes on and we come into spring and summer — bringing with them, all the amazing produce (asparagus! peas! corn!).

Meanwhile, I made this simple dish of roasted root vegetables, inspired by Whole Living's Roasted Winter Vegetables with Canellini Beans. It's also my next installment of the Dark Days Challenge, since it happens to be made up of farmers' market veggies served over relatively-locally-grown brown rice. It's dead easy: I chopped up carrots and fennel from Capay Farms and celery root from Catalan Farms, sprinkled them with thyme from my garden (as well as a little salt and pepper), and roasted them at 425°F for about 25 minutes. The original recipe calls for garlic, leeks, sweet potato, and brussels sprouts, which I would have thrown into mix if I'd had any. Oh, and beans. I don't know a source for local beans (anyone in the Bay Area who does, please let me know!), and since I hadn't soaked any of the dried beans I do have, I left them out.

I'm looking forward to continuing to eat healthy, while experimenting with new and exciting recipes. One of my new years' resolutions was to actually cook from the food magazines I subscribe to — because it's high time I put Food & Wine, Sunset, and Cook's Illustrated to use. (I also get Cooking Light and Real Simple, but I'm letting those subscriptions lapse, as their recipes don't inspire me and use too many convenience and out-of-season foods.) I also recently discovered the food "community" Food52, which I recommend you check out for the food photography alone. How can you not want to eat every recipe you see when the food looks that gorgeous?

All in one pot

This week for the Dark Days Challenge, we have been challenged further to create a soup or one-pot meal using SOLE ingredients. I find this funny (funny-interesting, not funny-ha ha) because I started this challenge making soups and stews and felt that I was cheating for not doing a meal that was comprised of many dishes. Since I'm detoxing for the next couple weeks, my next entry in the challenge is a very austere beet and roasted garlic soup from Whole Living. It is, to put it simply, a pot of pureed beets with some seasonings thrown in. But it's still mostly beets. After eating this soup two days in a row (for dinner, then lunch the following day) plus a smoothie on the third day which involved beets (as well as apple and berries), I think I've had enough of beets for a little while. At least enough of the ruby-red-stain-everything-it-touches variety. I still want to make some pickled golden beets.

The beets came from Happy Boy Farms, the onions from Borba Farms, the garlic from Catalán Farms (all 40 mi), the thyme from my garden, the bay leaf from one of my families' yards (30 mi), and the Meyer lemon from a friend's yard (11 mi). I roasted the beets in foil for an hour the day before. The next day, I rubbed off the peels (thus dyeing my hands pink) and cut them in quarters. I "sauteed" sliced onions in a little water, then added the herbs and beets to the pot along with more water. Meanwhile, I roasted the garlic cloves, but I neglected to wrap them in foil so they turned out rather crunchy instead of soft. After the soup had been simmering for about ten minutes, I added the garlic and lemon and attempted to use my immersion blender, only to find the beet chunks were too big for the machine to manage. So I had to fish out the beets and cut them smaller. Once blended, I had a vivid magenta soup that would really well as a first course for a slightly heartier main dish (I'm imagining something like this). But I ate it as an entree with a salad and felt virtuous — albiet still a little hungry.

New year, new diet

This week, I embarked upon what is turning into a yearly event: the post-holidays detox diet. For those of you who don't know me, I never eat as much meat as I did at the end of this past December. The sausages? The fish? The three kinds of meat dishes my mother served at Christmas Eve dinner? That's not my usual dining style. Plus all the sweets and boozy drinks! (Admittedly, that was not all that unusual.) By the time January rolled around, it was time to overhaul my diet and go back to a more healthy way of eating.

This is the second year that I'm following Whole Living's 28-Day Mind + Body Challenge. I don't usually go in for diets or cleanses — it doesn't make sense to me to drink only liquids or deprive myself in any serious way — but I find that the "action plan" is fairly sensible. It basically requires that you cut out certain things (dairy, gluten, meat, sugar, alcohol, caffeine, and processed foods) and eat only fruits and veggies, grains, beans, and eventually fish. It's just for two weeks. Then you start introducing the "banned" foods back into your now-healthy diet in a way that will hopefully be sustainable.

To be honest, I liked last year's plan better. This year, I find that I'm hungry all the time, and it has become clear to me that the plan wasn't designed for someone who has to be on her feet several hours a day. So I've been tweaking the diet plan a little, adding non-wheat grains to what is supposed to be a week of only fruit, vegetables, and seeds, so that I'm not passing out on the classroom floor. But I've been learning a lot, and as I move away from this "detox" and into my usual way of eating, I plan to eat as many fruits and vegetables every day as I am now (somewhere between six and ten servings!). I'm enjoying starting the day with a fruit-kale-flax smoothie, and I like the notion of starting dinner with a salad or pureed vegetable soup. What this detox is also teaching me is to return to reasonable portions, so that I'm not gorging on restaurant-sized platters of food at every meal.

This week, I was chatting with my assistant director, who, after being vegetarian for the last two years, is aiming to go vegan in the next couple months. Her reasoning is that a vegan diet can cure cancer and reverse the signs of aging. I'm not sure about the science behind either of those things, but I do agree that a plant-heavy diet is the way to go, diet-wise. I don't agree, however, that meat, dairy, and other animal products are the root of the health problems of Americans, since humans have eaten those foods for a long time — it's the kind of meat/dairy and how much you're eating and how often that's the problem. Cookiecrumb over at I'm Mad and I Eat wrote a thoughtful commentary on vegan eating that further convinced me that I ought to bring ethically-raised, local animal products (and protein!) back into my diet sooner rather than later.

For one of this week's detox dinners, I made roasted broccoli and butternut squash with peanut sauce over quinoa. It was my own take on the magazine's Steamed Broccoli and Squash with Tahini Dressing. First of all, all vegetables taste better when roasted. And I had to swap butternut for delicata because that's what was available at the farmers' market. And I never stock tahini but I always have peanut butter on hand. Finally, I needed something to serve with the veggie dish because I can't really get used to the idea of eating only vegetables for dinner. The dish was wholesome, and I felt virtuous. Plus I really love peanut sauce.

Thai-style green curry

Once again, I've almost entirely failed at producing a SOLE (seasonal, organic, local, ethical) meal for this week's Dark Days Challenge. I blame it entirely on the absence of my usual farmers' market. I haven't had access to the variety of foods that I normally would be purchasing for the week's meals. I've been relying on Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, and I've been planning my meals around recipes from The Splendid Table, for which I bought entirely non-local ingredients, like pasta, ricotta cheese, and pizza dough.

Okay, and I blame it on post-holiday laziness.

This week, I made a vegetable curry, which used all local ingredients except for the curry sauce itself. I used pumpkin from Capay Farms (120 mi), red bell pepper from Borba Farms (40 mi), and baby bok choy from A. Nagamine Nursery (40 mi), and served the curry over brown rice from Lundberg Farms (195 mi). The curry sauce included Thai green curry paste (a gift from a Thai friend — I fully intend to learn to make my own curry paste one of these days), fish sauce, brown sugar, and coconut milk, all non-local.

I wasn't sure how much curry paste to use. The container called for 50 grams for the cup of coconut milk needed to make the sauce. After looking at a couple recipes in the Thai cookbooks I have, I used three tablespoons and a can of coconut milk — resulting in a curry so white hot that I could barely eat it, even when I mixed in some Strauss plain yogurt (the way they do with Indian curries) to cut the spice. I ended up going out to get another can of coconut milk the next day and mixing that into the leftovers. That helped tremendously, leaving enough heat to get my sinuses going. Next time, I'll use just one tablespoon.

The curry also was originally rather yellow, as you can see in the photo. I think the pumpkin contributed to that. When I added the extra coconut milk, it took on more of a greenish hue.

For Christmas, I received three cookbooks: The Elements of Life: A Contemporary Guide to Thai Recipes, Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking, and Beyond the Great Wall: Travel and Recipes in the Other China. I have a lot of Chinese and southeast Asian cooking in my future. Maybe I'll finally get the hang of this green curry.

Looking back at the solstice

Well, this week's Dark Days Challenge was a wash. Between visiting friends and rushing around and eating out, I didn't do very much cooking. With my favorite farmers' market closed for the holidays (two Sundays in a row!), I have gone out of my way to visit other markets, but even then, there were less vendors and therefore less variety. So for the fifth installment, I'm looking back at last week, to the meal I made to celebrate Yule, also known as the winter solstice.

There are eight neo-pagan festival days, called sabbats, which happen throughout the year. I especially love celebrating these days because they mark the changing of the seasons, which allows me to truly appreciate what is happening right now (in nature, with the weather, and with local produce) and gets me excited about what's soon to come. When I cook on these days, I typically turn to a cookbook called Cooking by Moonlight (out of print, unfortunately). Because neo-paganism emphasizes seasonality and taking cues from our natural surroundings, this book really speaks to the way that I like to cook, using seasonal, organic ingredients and putting together ingredients in a mindful way. For the solstice, I decided to make Orange-Marinated Rockfish over Warmed Spinach with Walnuts with Thyme Smashed Potatoes.

The original recipe called for salmon, but H&H Fish at the market was selling Monterey Bay-caught (60 mi) rockfish, also known as rock cod, at a reasonable price. I brought the ziptop bag home and marinated the fish in a mixture of juice from oranges from Rojas Family Farms (190 mi, just outside my foodshed — d'oh!), Meyer lemon juice from a friend's tree (11 mi), and a little sage honey from the Golden Comb (110 mi). Then I baked it in the oven and served it on top of some sauteed spinach from Tomatero Farms (40 mi) with walnuts from a vendor whose name I forget (so I can't look them up right now), with a little more of the citrus sauce drizzled on top. On the side, I made smashed Yukon Gold potatoes from Happy Boy Farm (40 mi), seasoned with Strauss (90 mi) milk and butter and thyme from my garden. The original recipe called for dill, but I don't grow that particular herb and didn't have any locally-grown on hand.

The meal was a really nice way to celebrate the return of the sun and to welcome the longer days ahead. The full recipes are after the jump.

It's a monochromatic German Christmas!

Inspired by a German Christmas Menu on Saveur's site, I had planned to make this meal for Christmas Eve dinner, but it turns out we'll be going to my mom's for dinner tonight. Instead, I made this for Christmas Eve Eve dinner. It also happens to be my fourth installment of the Dark Days Challenge, since it was made entirely of locally-sourced, organic, ethically-grown, and seasonal ingredients.

Saveur's Turkey with Sauerkraut, Riesling, and Pork Sausage became a one-pot dish of sauerkraut, bockwurst, and boiled potatoes. I started by slicing some onions from Borba Farms (40 mi) and sauteing them briefly before adding chopped pasture-raised bacon from Range Brothers Buckin' Pork (120 mi). After a quick stir, I added fermented, organic sauerkraut from Farmhouse Culture Kraut (30 mi) and diced Pink Lady apples from Prevedelli Farms (40 mi). I made a little cheesecloth bag and filled it with thyme from my garden, parsley from Happy Boy Farms (40 mi), and a bay leaf from a house in Portola Valley (26 mi), then added that to the pot. I poured over a little water and left the pot to cook for a while. After about five minutes, I added several small, unpeeled German Butterball potatoes from Happy Boy Farms, rotating them in the sauerkraut mixture occasionally until they were soft, which took about twenty minutes. Then I added two bockwurst sausages from Range Brothers, which were fully cooked and just needed to be reheated. The result was delicious, though lacking in color.

To remedy that, on the side I served a dandelion greens salad with hot bacon dressing. Saveur calls for a spinach salad, but they included a note that "[d]uring the 19th century (and perhaps before), German-Americans used the flavorful dressing to coat dandelion greens." So I picked up some dandelion from Tomatero Farms (40 mi) and coated them with a dressing made from crisped bacon from Range Brothers and sauteed shallots from Borba Farms, mixed with sherry vinegar, dijion mustard, and sugar (none of which were local — because, again, I wasn't thinking). The greens weren't as bitter as I was expecting them to be, which is good because bitter is not my favorite flavor, but the dressing was way too tart next too the tang of the sauerkraut. Next time I'll reduce the amount of vinegar.

Savuer's menu called for mulled wine to drink with the meal. Instead, we had a delicious Mourvedre from Bonny Doon Vineyards, made with grapes from Contra Costa County (60 mi). This was paired with Christmas cookies made by families in my classroom (which, while probably not made with local ingredients, were cooked locally and made with love).

Merry Christmas, everyone, and happy eating!

Tapping my German roots

For the third installment of the Dark Days Challenge, I figured it was time to get serious and take the time to plan and make a full SOLE (seasonal, organic, local, ethical) meal. Inspired while looking at some other blogs, I decided to try my hand at German food. My father's maternal grandparents were from Germany, and I liked the idea of getting in touch with my German roots. The meal ended up being of German-Jewish origin (and we're Catholic), but I imagine my forebears ate foods that were similar — I mean, doesn't everyone in Germany eat cabbage and potatoes?

Dinner was spinach latkes with applesauce and cabbage stuffed with mushrooms. I bought nearly all the ingredients at the farmers' market: Bloomsdale spinach and savoy cabbage from Tomatero Farms (40 mi), Yukon Gold potatoes and parsley from Happy Boy Farms (45 mi), shallots and tomatoes from Borba Farms (40 mi), and mushrooms from J&M Ibarra Farms (167 mi — I didn't realize they were outside my foodshed and will avoid using them for a Dark Days Challenge in the future!). The apples for the applesauce came from my aunt's backyard (30 mi), Meyer lemon juice was from a friend's yard (11 mi), and thyme came from my container garden.

Doing this challenge has made me think about the sources of my food even more so than before. Eating locally has always seemed like a breeze, because I do go to the farmers' market every weekend and buy many of my groceries there. Still, there are so many ingredients I use that I knowingly can't get locally but that I don't think twice about buying: spices, oils, and grains, for example. Xan of Not Dabbling in Normal wrote a post about eating locally, in which she points out that the Dark Days Challenge is meant to be an intellectual challenge, not a practical one. That is, it is supposed to make us stop and think when it comes to things like salt, cinnamon, and bananas. It does seem a little silly (though you can try if you like) to give up all non-local foods forever, because we happen to live in a world where goods from other parts of the state, country, and world are available at our very fingertips without a moment's notice — so if you want a fair-trade, organic bar of chocolate, why not? If I love ginger and put it in everything during the wintertime, from soups to stir-fries to cookies, why give it up just because it's imported (even though that's the only way I'll get it)? For the challenges, I know why we have to do that: to get us to understand how to get by with what we have within our foodshed. It brings both an appreciation for the local food we have, as well as foods that we must get from further away.

Not my grandmother's tuna casserole

I'm definitely a fan of tuna casserole. I had it for the first time in college, using a recipe from Clueless in the Kitchen. (Which happens to be one of my all-time favorite cookbooks. It's meant to be for the young, novice cook, which I was when I got it oh-so many years ago, and it's got some classic, reliable recipes that I continue to turn to even now.) I know it's a cliche, but there is something truly comforting about pasta smothered in warm, creamy mushroom sauce with crunchy potato chips on top.

In the years since I've become more particular about where my food comes from, I've tried to find ways to make tuna casserole a local, sustainable, and organic meal. I switched from crushed Ruffles potato chips to whole wheat breadcrumbs made from stale Beckmann's bread and from Campbell's condensed cream of mushroom soup to Annie's Organic cream of mushroom. The problem with the Annie's soup, though, is that it's too watery, being that it's not condensed. This all but eliminated the creamy sauce that makes a really great tuna casserole. But recently, I figured out how to solve that problem, thanks to your good friend and mine, Alton Brown.

Mr. Brown has a recipe for a green bean casserole, which he calls Not Your Mama's Green Bean Casserole. My friend Jessica brought it to Thanksgiving dinner, and I loved the mushroom sauce that enveloped the green beans. So I used that sauce in my tuna casserole — and you know what? It was the perfect sauce for that casserole, too.

The bumpy road to local

With all the gloating I do about being so lucky to be living in California, it was only a matter of time before I was forced to admit that it's not always easy to come up with entirely SOLE (seasonal, organic, local, and ethical) meals. While I do get nearly all my produce and eggs from the farmers market, there are many other foods that I don't go the full nine yards to make sure they're local. Organic, yes, Sustainable... as much as possible. Local? Well, I try. My second entry into the Dark Days Challenge is a cream of greens soup. It was inspired by Tyler Florence's corn chowder recipe, which I use all the time during the summer, and the cream of spinach soup from Simply Recipes. It also has no cream to speak of — because I had no local cream in my fridge.

I typically buy my milk, butter, and cream from Strauss, which is carried by Whole Foods. They are about 100 miles away, so they fall within my local foodshed. But sometimes Strauss cream and butter, while delicious, are too expensive. In which case, I buy Clover, which is also located about 100 miles away, and I don't always get the organic cream and butter. Sometimes I'll get the Trader Joe's brand of organic cream or butter, and who knows where that comes from? Either way, though, I feel like I'm cheating when I buy from the grocery store, instead of from the vendor directly, like I do at the farmers' market. I don't necessarily feel like I'm buying locally when I go through the middle man that is a non-local chain grocery store. The market I go to does have a raw milk vendor, but it is far too out of my price range to buy on a regular basis. In fact, I've never purchased raw milk simply because it's too expensive. I could get four times as much Strauss whole milk for the price of a quart of locally-produced (at 146 miles, it's just inside my foodshed) Organic Pastures raw milk.

And this is a problem. It should not cost so much to get good, honest milk and dairy products — or any food that is produced locally, organically, and sustainably. It's not right that only the well-off can eat ethical, organic meat and dairy. Someday, I will have a goat, and then my milk (as well as my eggs, fruits, and veggies) will only come as far as my back yard. In the meantime, though, I would like to be able to eat a "normal" American diet from SOLE ingredients that don't break the bank. I want to be able to show non-believers that it is possible to eat delicious whole foods and not have to give up your whole paycheck. I struggle with this, though, because sometimes it's not possible to avoid the cost. This doesn't mean I'll go back to conventional foods, because I'm enough of a snob about it now that it seems gross to purchase and eat cheaply-grown, cheaply-made foodstuffs. I do give up eating meat if it's too expensive. How do I convince others to do this, too?

Moving slowly away from the light

My first entry into the Dark Days Challenge is my locally-inspired take on pinakbet. It's a Filipino vegetable stew that has been compared to ratatouille (which I think is an erroneous comparison — because they're nothing alike, apart from being a mix of several vegetables). Typically, it contains winter squash, bitter melon, long beans, okra, eggplant, and onions, as well as some pork or shrimp. I based mine entirely on the local produce I had available in my kitchen this past weekend: tomatoes, onions, Fairy Tale eggplant, and chayote.

As I noted in a previous post, I'm pretty lucky to be living in California, where there are still tomatoes and eggplants being sold at the farmers' market. So to be honest, I'm not feeling the "dark days" quite yet. I probably won't really feel it until January, when it's just citrus and apples, root veggies and greens at the market. Meanwhile, I'm taking advantage of the dwindling supply of summer's bounty. The eggplant came from Route 1 Farms (45 mi), the tomatoes and onions from Happy Boy Farms (45 mi), and the chayote from the garden of my mother's neighbor (30 mi).

For the actual dish itself, I drew from a recipe in the December 2008 issue of Saveur (which soothed my homesickness when I visited the Anthropologist during his field work in New Delhi), as well as from a post by the blogger Burnt Lumpia. Pinakbet calls for bagoong, a fermented fish paste, which I don't keep in stock (and wouldn't use for a Dark Days meal anyhow). In keeping with the "authentic" flavor of this dish, though, I did use patis, or fish sauce, which I considered to be a kind of salt — one of my non-local exceptions. Okay, fine, I cheated a little. But I didn't think plain salt would do the trick.

To make this pinakbet, cut the vegetables into large chunks and place into a pot that is just large enough to hold everything. Add about a quarter cup of water and a tablespoon or two of patis. Simmer until the vegetables have gone soft, stirring occasionally and gently so as not to break down the veggies.

In the end, the pinakbet was just okay. It didn't have a lot of flavor — and I like things to really have a big punch of flavor. It was a quiet, mild vegetable stew, the sort of thing I could see myself eating if I were feeling flu-ish. I'd like to try this again and include long beans, okra, and kabocha squash, which should improve the flavor of the broth and which I can get from a vendor at the market that sells Asian vegetables.

A final note: The brown rice is another of my non-local exceptions (because I eat so much rice). I buy it from the bulk bins at Whole Foods, where it stocks rice from Lundberg Family Farms. This farm is located 195 miles from where I live, so it's definitely outside my locavore foodshed. Relatively speaking, though, it's not terribly far away. I mean, I could be living in Idaho and getting my rice trucked in from Louisiana, where it might not even be organically- or sustainably-grown. So my rice isn't perfect, but it's a pretty darn good choice for rice.

Chili con veggies

Tip of the day: Keep the price down on a meaty dish by adding a lot of vegetables.

Starting this week, I'll be once again embarking on the journey that is full-time employment, which will mean coming home to make dinner at the end of a long day of work. I'll also be faced —for a little while, anyway — with the challenge of being between paychecks, which happens to follow a non-paid vacation. Will this drive me in the direction of cheap, boxed convenience food for the next couple of weeks? Not a chance.

Take tonight's chili, for instance. Most people will tell you that chili is either beans or meat and beans. And that's it, they'll say: anything else is sacrilege. But when you're broke — or don't really feel like just eating a big bowl of meat — adding veggies can really give you more bang for your buck, both nutritionally and wallet-wise. You'll still get your spiced ground beef, but you'll also be able to make a larger amount of the dish with less of it. The added vegetables will also add a lot of flavor.

I often feel like I'm preaching to the choir with tips like this. My readers (all four of you) are either vegetarian or understand and embrace the value of fresh produce. You are not the target audience of V8's most recent ad campaign, which promises two servings of fruits and vegetables in their juice to those who "just don't like the taste of vegetables." But I want to continue to emphasize the value of vegetables in a healthy, frugal, seasonal and organic, not-from-a-box diet — in case it's not already obvious that it's the cornerstone of the way I eat and the way I would like to see everyone eat! And in case you happen to be a reader who hasn't been won over quite yet.

One of the highlights of this chili is that it's a fairly quick and easy dish to throw together. After doing the prep work of chopping the veggies and browning the meat, it cooks mostly unattended. It's also cheap — and that's even if, like me, you're using some grass-fed meat from happy cows, which can sometimes be pricey. Furthermore, it lends itself nicely to doubling or even tripling, to use as lunches later in the week or to freeze for future occasions.



Chili con veggies
serves 2

1/2 lb ground beef, preferably grass-fed
1/2 onion, diced
1/2 red bell pepper, diced
1 or 2 carrots, diced
1 large clove garlic (about 1 tbsp), minced
1 tomato (about 1/2 c), chopped
1 (14 oz) can kidney beans
1/2 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tbsp chili powder
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
salt and pepper, to taste

In a large pot or skillet, brown the ground beef. In a separate pan with a little olive oil, saute the onion, bell pepper, carrots, and garlic. When the beef is done, add the vegetables, along with the tomato, beans (and liquid), and the spices. Stir and bring to a simmer over medium-low heat. Cover and cook, stirring occasionally, for 15-25 minutes. (The longer it cooks, the more the flavors develop.) Serve with lime wedges, plain yogurt or sour cream, or your favorite chili toppings.

And vegetarians, it goes without saying that you can swap out the meat for more beans. Try pinto or black.


cost:
grass-fed ground beef - $3.00
organic onion - $0.50
organic bell pepper - $0.55
organic carrots - $0.25
organic garlic and tomato - from the garden
can of organic beans - $1.09
spices - I buy in bulk, so the small amounts needed for this recipe are very inexpensive, as well as difficult to calculate

total: $5.39 (without spices)
per serving: $2.70

Easy as pizza pie

Those of you on Facebook saw me post this photo the week I made it: a Valentine's heart-shaped pizza. Made with pizza dough from the refrigerated section at Trader Joe's, it took a little work to convince the yeasty mass into the form of a heart — which it vaguely held onto as it puffed up during baking. Hidden under a generous layer of cheese were mushrooms, anchovies, and a thin layer of homemade tomato sauce.

That Valentine's Day was the first time in ages that I'd made a pizza. The Anthropologist loves pizza (who doesn't?), and we'd had our fair share in India, as well as in sports bars and from delivery before and after the trip. But since making it myself last month, I never want to call for take-out ever again. Pizza made with Trader Joe's dough is really that good. It has become by go-to dish when I don't have anything else planned for dinner, especially since I now keep canned tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, and pizza dough as staples in the kitchen.

I'm not opposed, of course, to making my own dough. I suppose I'll eventually start making large batches to keep in the fridge or freezer. Maybe I ought to start making my own mozzarella, too, so that I can have pizza made entirely from scratch. Once in a while, that might be fun, but I enjoy the ease of cutting open the plastic pouch that holds the dough, throwing some tasty toppings on, and sticking the whole thing in the oven for ten minutes. It's faster than delivery — and at $1.29 for a ball of dough, it's much cheaper.

As with anything homemade, one of the best things is that you get to control what you put into a dish. You can top your pizza with veggies straight out of your garden or from the farmers' market, pepperoni or sausage without nitrates, and maybe even some cheese made by a local dairy. I love that I can open up my fridge and invent some creative and tasty toppings — like the above slice, which has asparagus and cheese with a pesto bechamel sauce. At this very moment, I've got a pizza in the oven with some frozen corn under sliced (rather than shredded because I was feeling lazy) mozzarella, since I'm out of fresh veggies right now.

I don't think I need to convince you any further to take on the task of making your own pizza. Just do it! You can thank me later.

The best tomato sauce ever

I'm not the biggest fan of tomato sauce. Even on pizza. I think it goes back to college, when practically everyone I knew ate pasta with jarred tomato sauce like it was going out of style. I realize that it's a cheap and easy dish for poor and not necessarily culinary-savvy students to prepare — but I wish someone could have told them there's more to life than penne with Classico marinara.

When given a choice, I'd rather eat my pasta with cream, Parmesan, and lots of vegetables. An open jar of tomato sauce in my refrigerator is almost guaranteed to grow moldy before I'd used even half of it.

Last month, I read about a recipe for tomato sauce on one of my favorite blogs, Smitten Kitchen. This sauce was apparently so good that other Big Names in the food blogging world had been raving about it for years. So were Smitten Kitchen's readers: while typically her posts get around 150 comments, the tomato sauce post generated 500+ comments.

Then, inexplicably, I found myself craving this sauce. Driving home from work one day, I began to daydream about how the sweetness of an onion really could vastly improve a mess of tomatoes. So I went home and threw it together. It's ridiculously easy to make, considering that all that goes into it is canned tomatoes, halved onions, and butter. Open a can, peel and cut an onion, unwrap a stick of butter. Dump it all in a pot.

I really wish someone had told my friends about this recipe when we were in college.

It is surprisingly good, perhaps even the best pasta sauce I've ever had. For dinner, I threw in some peas and topped it off with Parmesan. But for lunch, it was just the sauce over rigatoni — it's delicious even without cheese. I never thought I'd like a red sauce that much. It must be the butter.

To be honest, I'd never made tomato sauce from scratch before. But now that I've made this, I definitely don't plan to buy jarred ever again.

Marcela Hazan's Tomato Sauce with Onions and Butter
(courtesy of Smitten Kitchen)

28 ounces canned tomatoes (SK used whole, but I use diced)
5 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 medium-sized yellow onion, peeled and halved
Salt to taste

Put the tomatoes, onion and butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a simmer then lower the heat to keep the sauce at a slow, steady simmer for about 45 minutes. Stir occasionally. Remove the onion*, add salt to taste.

*You can toss this out, but why waste perfectly good food? Eat it with crusty bread or in a scramble. Or straight out of the container you've put it in after removing it from the sauce.

Bring on the casserole

There has been little cooking happening in the Not From a Box household in the past couple weeks. This is due to a combination of two factors: As a result of tightening my money belt, I've been eating at work a lot more (read: free food). I also started a new medication recently which has almost entirely eliminated my appetite.

Despite that, I still managed to whip up a vegetable noodle casserole last weekend — because when I'm not at work, I have to eat something, right? It has all the elements of a traditional tuna noodle casserole, which is one of my favorite comfort foods, with broccoli in place of the tuna.

I don't know when I started to make tuna noodle casserole. It wasn't something I grew up with, though I have a vague memory of maybe eating it for dinner as a child. The recipe is included in one of my favorite cookbooks from my college years: Clueless in the Kitchen, and I think that when I discovered how easy and how good this casserole was, I added it my repertoire of go-to dinner entrees. It's very similar to a meal I would whip up for kids when I was doing in-home child care: macaroni and cheese (from a box) with tuna and peas. Also a good go-to meal.

Tip: If you want to buy organic and by-pass the Campbell's condensed soup for this recipe, make sure you get an organic soup brand that's thick enough for the casserole so as not to make it too watery. I opted for the Whole Food's 365 brand, which is lovely because it's full of chunky pieces of mushrooms and carrots, but it's not condensed, so my casserole had a lot more liquid in it than I would have liked. I should have sprung for the Amy's brand (at a whole $1.50 more per can!).



Vegetable noodle casserole

2 c whole wheat noodles, like penne or rigatoni
1 head broccoli, cut into bite-sized pieces
1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup
1/2 c frozen peas
1 c French fried onions (yes, from a can — you can also use 1 c bread crumbs mixed with a little olive oil)

Preheat oven to 350°F.

In a large pot of salted boiling water, cook noodles until just done. Add broccoli in the last couple minutes to parboil. Drain.

In a casserole dish, combine noodles, broccoli, soup, and peas. Sprinkle fried onions or breadcrumbs over the top. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until bubbly. (If the topping starts to burn, put a piece of aluminum foil over the top.)

Serves 2 or 3.

For the love of shrimp

After writing about delicious Goan shrimp the other day, I decided it was high time I defrosted the shrimp I was saving in the freezer. I had gone to the farmers' market the day after I got back from India, with shrimp as a high priority on my grocery list. It was the wrong time of year to get shrimp caught off the Pacific coast, so instead, the shrimp available was caught off the coast Texas. Which was fine with me. It was still fresher and more beautifully ocean-scented than anything farmed in Thailand (which is where most frozen shrimp available in the States comes from — plus the farming practices are destroying the ecosystems there).

Before deciding to defrost my ziptop bag of shrimp, I had actually been craving Chinese take-out. Once I determined that I ought to spend my hard-earned money on groceries instead of grease, I decided to make two of my favorite Vietnamese shrimp dishes: cabbage and shrimp soup, and shrimp simmered in a caramel sauce.

I've posted about the soup before, though this time for the broth, I used half water and half chicken broth (which was about to go bad). It was fine, though it didn't do any favors for the cabbage-shrimp flavor that makes this soup so good. It also smelled a little funny, but I realized that the intermingling scents of the shrimp and the cabbage were just playing off each other in an odd way. I happily ate it up despite that.



The other dish is one of my all-time favorite shrimp recipes — other than this one, of course. The very first time I ever made shrimp in caramel sauce, it was so good that I couldn't put my chopsticks down. Besides being delicious, it's ridiculously easy to make, once you've got the caramel sauce prepared. The recipe for caramel sauce makes quite a bit, and it's shelf-stable, so it keeps practically forever in a jar with a tight-fitting lid.

Truth be told, I haven't eaten a whole lot of Vietnamese food. When I was in grad school, there was a great Vietnamese restaurant around the corner, where I would order the "clay pot" (which contained chicken, shrimp, onions, and green beans in an amazing slightly sweet sauce, all over rice) and a Vietnamese coffee (which kept me awake and jittery for the rest of the day). I've also had the charcuterie that a Vietnamese friend brought to a dinner party — the soft pâté-like spread on slices of baguette was completely addictive. I guess my point is that when I make things from my Vietnamese cookbook, I don't have many taste experiences I can compare it to. Which isn't a problem, really. More of an observation.

I also want to add a small note here: Do not fear fish sauce. Fish sauce, the dark brown, salty, and yes, fishy condiment used in southeast Asia and the Philippines, adds a unique flavor that you can't get from adding, say, salt. It appears in both the soup and the caramel shrimp recipe. When I add to the pan while cooking, the fragrant smell of fermented fish always puts a smile on my face — because I've learned to appreciate what this sauce brings to the food I eat. Like salt, only a small amount is ever used to season any dish, so I'm not asking you to drown your meal in fish sauce. But do give fish sauce a chance. You'll be glad you did.


Shrimp simmered in caramel sauce (tôm kho)
(from Into the Vietnamese Kitchen by Andrea Nguyen)

1-1/2 pounds shrimp, peeled and deveined
1-1/2 tbsp fish sauce
2 tbsp caramel sauce (recipe follows)
1 small yellow onion, thinly sliced
1/2 tsp pepper
1-1/2 tbsp canola or other neutral oil
1 green onion, chopped

In a shallow pan, combine shrimp, fish sauce, caramel sauce, and 1/8 tsp salt and bring to a simmer over high heat. Add the onion and pepper and stir to distribute ingredients evenly. Continue cooking over high heat for another 10 to 14 minutes, or until the shrimp have turned an orange-brown.


As they cook, the shrimp will release their juices to combine with the other ingredients. Expect a strong boil throughout and turn shrimp occasionally with a spoon. If the pan appears dry, add a little water. The juices eventually concentrate into a mahogany-colored sauce. When the shrimp are done, there should only be a few tablespoons of sauce left. (When I make this recipe, the sauce often evaporates away, even though I only make two servings and use all two tablespoons of caramel sauce. I often add a little extra caramel sauce as well as water when this happens.)

Turn off the heat, add the oil, and stir to coat. Add pepper to taste. Transfer to a serving bowl and sprinkle with chopped green onion.

Serves 4.


Caramel sauce (nuoc mau)

3/4 c water
1 c sugar

Fill a large bowl with water so that it comes partway up the side of a small, heavy saucepan.

In the saucepan, put 1/4 c water and all the sugar and place over medium-low heat. Stir to ensure the sugar dissolves. After about 2 minutes, stop stirring and let the mixture cook undisturbed. About 7 minutes into cooking, bubbles with cover the entire surface and the mixture will be at a vigorous simmer.

After about 15 minutes, the sugar will begin to caramelize and deepen in color. When smoke starts rising, around 20 minutes, remove the pan from the heat and slowly swirl it. The sauce will turn darker. When it is the color of black coffee or molasses, put the put into the bowl of water to stop the cooking. Add the remaining 1/2 cup water. After the dramatic bubble reaction ceases, return the pan to the stove over medium heat.

Heat the caramel, stirring until it dissolves into the water. Remove from heat and let cool for 10 minutes before puring into a small heatproof glass jar. Set aside to cool completely. Cover and store indefinitely in your kitchen cupboard.

Makes 1 cup.