Last year, for my birthday, I received Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. It is a big and impressive book, and because of its heft and lack of fancy photographs, I lumped it into the same go-to-first category as Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking and Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. My friend Shelley does go to it for everything, but I have yet to be won over by its recipes. When my Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone was on hiatus, out on loan to a friend, and I had to make black eyed peas for thirty people on New Year’s Day, turning to Bittman’s book only made me nervous.
His Black-Eyed Peas, Southern Style looked similar to Madison’s Southern Style Black-Eyed Peas. But they weren't quite right. For one thing, her recipe is vegetarian and his is not. So I nixed Bittman’s ham hock and went on with the process. A ham hock offers salt, maybe a bit of porky flavor, but not all that much else...leaving me perplexed about what was missing. All I could come up with were a bay leaf, chipotle pepper and some allspice. Which was close, but now that I have VCE back at home again, I see that it is not one but three bay leaves her recipe calls for, celery, thyme and, the real key, garlic. Also missing were the chipotle, allspice and green pepper, which should be left out because the flavor of cooked green pepper overwhelms everything under the sun.
But I do love Mark Bittman for his New York Times articles. His blog is great, not something I’m all that good at keeping up with, but his food section writings are the bomb. That is why I force my family to get dressed early and forgo breakfast most wednesday mornings, so we can walk over to the Irish market around the corner, pick up my paper, head to Arizmendi for pastry and a loaf of bread and then ride the muni to school. Two papers a day is just too much, so we only receive the Times on Sunday, when the kids can fight over the color funnies (luckily they are easy to separate into two pieces) while I attempt to read the important parts at high speed. As for the Chronicle, I pull out the Food and Home & Garden sections to read monday morning, when such slim pickings arrive on our doorstep that we rarely bother to bring them in.
This year, Bittman stole the show with his first Sunday article Chop, Fry, Boil: Eating for One, or 6 Billion. Sensible, informative, insightful and inciting, he included three recipes that can be tweaked to prepare a year of seasonal dinners, trading in and out whichever ingredients are at their peak and choosing the recipes - stir fry, rice and beans or salad - according to your mood. So a few days after his article appeared, and a few days after we’d vowed to try to eat up every bit of produce that darkened our door this year, cabbage was on our mind. I like green cabbage - it is good stuffed with pork and baked, it makes a nice soup with potatoes and chicken stock, it sautes and takes soy sauce well and is excellent with chicken tacos. But we still never seem to eat it all. So a salad of raw cabbage to accompany lentils and rice, with a little bit of roast chicken sounded like just the thing.
And it was - lemon juice is a magical liquid. Tossing your cabbage and other fresh salad items in a tablespoon of it, along with a little garlic and some olive oil can make most anything (especially lentils and rice) into a great meal.
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Cabbage Salad (adapted from Mark Bittman’s Chopped Salad):
1/2 small head green cabbage, cored and shredded or very thinly sliced
1 carrot, shredded
1/2 red or yellow bell pepper, diced
4 radishes, thinly sliced
1 handful parsley leaves, stems removed
2 Tablespoons fresh lemon juice (or red or white vinegar)
7 Tablespoons olive oil
1 garlic clove, minced or pressed
salt and pepper to taste
Put the cabbage, carrot, pepper, radishes and parsley in a big bowl. Then put the garlic and lemon juice into a separate lidded container. Let it sit for 5-10 minutes. Add the olive oil, salt and pepper. Snap down the lid, then pick it up and shake it to mix the dressing. Pour 1/2 the dressing over the salad, then toss it gently with tongs. Taste, and add more dressing if necessary. Serve immediately
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