Eating Dirt

Ratatouille Wins One for Zucchinni, or Maybe Cucumber

  

As I've mentioned before, I don't love eggplant. But this is their season, so mixed with some good tomatoes, peppers, an onion and whatever zucchini you have cluttering up your counter (or fridge or garden), they're really not so bad. Especially when served over saffron rice. With lots of butter and salt. The rice is my favorite part of this dinner. Ratatouille is not hard to make, though its best done in stages, and can be made a day ahead and even served cold if you really don't want to cook. Which makes it especially well suited to the wacky weather we've been having around here. I can heat the house by cooking ratatouille when it is 55˚ outside, then serve it cold with a squeeze of lemon the next day when it is 95˚. 

My kids won't touch the eggplant, but they do love the rice. Of course eating rice in our house always makes for a huge cleanup, but I just try to serve the kids early, then make my husband fix the mess when he gets home. He's always good for that, with only moderate to severe grumbling. After dinner, their plates look about the same as before, but with rice strewn all over the floor and stuck to their clothing. Sometimes they eat the fruit, usually the sausage (if its Aidell's chicken apple) and always the bread (when there is bread). I force them to drink the milk under threat of whatever seems appropriate at the time and occasionally offer dessert for extra good behavior or three clean compartments and two bites of the fourth. 

 

Whoever came up with partition plates for kids should win a Nobel prize for promoting child health. Or better yet, a big statue on the Embarcadero, out in front of the Ferry Building. In addition to royalties from the sale of a new book, Feeding Kids for Dummies. Because that it what the plate does. Even at my most witless and sleep-deprived, I can still come up with a well balanced, unplanned meal at day's end. I simply fill one compartment with whatever my husband and I are having for dinner, then sort through the fridge to fill the rest - one vegetable, one protein, one grain, one fruit. Or whatever else is in there. The variety usually makes it healthy enough.

Similar to the partition plate, my kids' lunchboxes are those bento style boxes that have multiple little compartments. Since the beginning of this school year I have filled one compartment up with raw bits of different vegetables each day - carrots, cauliflower, radishes, snap peas. Sometimes red and yellow pepper, often broccoli, occasionally cucumber and on super special occasions, miniature purple carrots with orange insides. Sometimes I add a little container of dressing, most often a quickie vinaigrette (1/2 teaspoon champagne vinegar, 1/2 teaspoon mustard, 1 teaspoon olive oil, shake it up), or just a little container of salt, especially if radishes are included. 

About half of the veggies go uneaten, but even so, my daughter has been eating things I was certain she didn't like. Last week she ate some cucumber, for the first time ever, and she has tried pepper and snap peas too. Carrots are always a sure bet, with broccoli and radishes placing second and third in her hierarchy of vegetable love. The day she ate the cucumber was also Ratatouille day. After polishing off her berries, rice, sausage and then asking for another, I offered her two bites of ice cream if she would eat two bites of ratatouille. After great deliberation and with much fanfare, she selected a piece of zucchini as her first bite, and then another for her second. 

"I love it!" She announced. "I want this in my lunchbox...cucumber cooked just like this one, plain, with nothing on it. No tomatoes or eggplant or onions," she told me, disdainfully pushing the rejected vegetables around their tiny compartment. And now I plan to steam zucchini for her lunchbox. And call it cucumber. Because with a situation as tenuous and fickle as a Kindergartener eating vegetables, I can't afford to go wrong.

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Ratatouille (adapted from The Joy of Cooking):

1/4 cup olive oil

1 medium eggplant (about 1 pound) peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes

1 pound zucchini, cut into 1-inch cubes

1 large onion, chopped

2 large red bell peppers, cut into 1-inch squares

3 cloves garlic, chopped

2 really big or 3 medium tomatoes, seeded and chopped (slice in half widthwise, then squeeze over the sink to seed)

3 or 4 sprigs fresh thyme

1 bay leaf

1/4 cup chopped basil (or 2 Tablespoons pesto if you don't have fresh basil)

Start by peeling and chopping the eggplant, then liberally cover it with salt and let it sit in a colander in the sink for twenty minutes or longer, if you need to. This step is especially important if your eggplant is on the older side, it will help remove the bitterness. While it sits in salt you can prep the rest of the veggies, and then rinse and dry the eggplant pieces before cooking them. If your eggplant is fresh off the plant, you can skip this step. 

When your eggplant has been salted long enough, rinse it off and pat it dry. Warm most of the olive oil (but not all, reserve two or three Tablespoons) in a skillet over medium high heat, then saute the eggplant and zucchini for about 10 minutes, until it is tender. Remove it from the pan. Add the remaining olive oil and the onions, garlic, and peppers. Saute those vegetables until the onions are translucent and the other veggies tender and fragrant. 

Add the tomatoes, thyme and bay leaf, then reduce the heat to low and simmer for about 20 minutes, until the vegetables are as squishy as you want them to be. Taste and season with salt and pepper, and stir in the basil or pesto. 

To make saffron rice, add a large pinch of saffron threads to your rice cooker, then add butter and salt to taste after it is cooked. Serve it with the ratatouille, hot or cold with a squeeze of lemon.

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Quick Eggplant Chicken Curry and How to Cut an Onion

We came home late from school, again today. I started Sesame Street at 5:00, wanting the kids to be eating before 6:00, hopefully finished by 6:30, which is easy enough, since they either gobble dinner down or don't eat it at all. Today's scheduled recipe was eggplant curry with the leftover chicken from tuesday's paella. But, I hadn't salted the eggplant beforehand, and now twenty minutes of letting salty eggplant sit and drain into the sink seemed like a bad idea.

I have never understood the need for salting eggplant. In nearly every cookbook written before 2000, it says that one needs to salt eggplant and let it sit for twenty minutes, in order to get the bitterness out. But here's the thing - whether I salt and sit the eggplant or not, it doesn't taste bitter. Maybe the bitterness gene has been bred out of modern eggplant, or eggplant from our CSA is too fresh to be bitter, or perhaps I just don't have the capacity to taste the bitter in eggplant. 

Don't get me wrong - I don't love eggplant and have some special tolerance for bitterness. In fact, in years past, I've been perfectly happy to get only one or two from the CSA box per summer. That is really quite enough for me. But this year, we've had at least ten eggplant so far, and the season is just gearing up. Last week I roasted four of the ten, letting them collapse into a mushy brown paste, then mixed it with roasted garlic, salt, olive oil, and brought it to the preschool picnic. On crackers, the mush was very good. Even for someone who doesn't like eggplant.

Earlier in the week we ate something with chickpeas and tomatoes and basil and eggplant, from The Kitchen Diaries, but it was merely OK. Tonight I used one more for the curry, which was pretty tasty. Then four new ones arrived, glistening and globular, in today's produce box. What to do?

But back to the curry. It tasted good and was ready to eat in about 45 minutes, required no prep ahead or special ingredients. I served the kids' dinner up on a four partition plate: rice in the large section, three pieces of chicken extracted from the curry and half a banana on the two medium ones, a dollop of curried vegetables in the smallest space. Plus a cup of milk and their own access to the salt shaker, with my observation. All of it was eaten, except the veggies. My daughter ate one bite in exchange for a second helping of rice. To me, that's success.

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Quick Eggplant Chicken Curry (adapted from Camellia Panjabi's 50 Great Curries of India):

For the rice:

2-3 cups basmati rice, depending on how much your family will eat

1 cinnamon stick, broken into 2 pieces

3 whole cloves

2 cardamon pods

pinch saffron

2 Tablespoons butter

salt (if you use unsalted butter)

For the curry:

4 tablespoons canola oil (or some other mildly flavored variety)

1 onion, finely chopped

2 garlic cloves

1 half inch piece of ginger, peeled and finely chopped (or 1 teaspoon powdered ginger, if thats what you have)

1 teaspoon ground coriander (or substitute 2 Tablespoons curry powder for this and the next 3 spices)

1/2 teaspoon turmeric

1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

1/2 teaspoon paprika

1 eggplant

2 poblano peppers (or other mildly spicy variety)

1 or 2 zucchini or other summer squash

2 tomaotes

leftover raw chicken, white or dark meat (as much as you want, 1 chicken breast's worth is plenty)

cilantro to garnish

salt

First of all, start your rice. The easiest thing to do is use a rice cooker. Add as much rice as your family will eat, 2-3 cups or so, add the required amount of water for your cooker, and drop in the cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, and saffron. Then turn it on. When the rice is finished, add the butter and a little salt (if the butter is unsalted). With a little sugar this could probably be dessert, but my kids love it with dinner. You can use plain old basmati if you'd rather.

Warm the oil in a really big pan. You can use a wok if you don't have one. When you cut the onion, follow the directions my good pal Chris taught me, after he spent a month learning to cook somewhere in Italy with his Mother: cut the onion in half horizontally. Slice a bit off the round end of each half, so you can get under the skin easily, then peel the papery skin off. For each half, lay it cut side down on your cutting board. Slice the onion, as thin as you want (thicker for chopped, thinner for finely chopped and minced) in one direction, holding it together as you go. Then turn the onion 90 degrees, and slice it again, the same thickness as before. Now, because of the layers of the onion, you are done. Pick it up and throw it into the pot of hot oil.

Give the onion a stir or two, set the heat to medium low, and let it cook while you prep the rest of the ingredients. Be careful not to let it burn, just let it get golden brown. If it gets that color before you are done prepping, just turn the heat off. 

Cut the eggplant into 1/2 inch or so pieces, put it in a colander in the sink and toss it with about 2 tablespoons of salt. Or don't, if you're not worried about the bitterness. Core and remove the membranes of the peppers, then chop them into 1/2 inch pieces. Chop the zucchini into 1/2 inch pieces. Chop the chicken into 1/2 inch pieces. Cut the tomatoes in half horizontally, then squeeze them over the sink to remove seeds and juice. You might need to squeeze them fairly hard, depending on ripeness, but don't squash the flesh. Then chop them into 1/2 inch pieces. Finely chop the garlic, then peel and finely chop the ginger. 

When the onions are golden brown, add the garlic, ginger, tomato, pepper, spices and a cup of water. Rinse the eggplant in the sink, shake the colander to get off the excess water and add it to the pan. Turn the heat to medium and let it simmer for a while, about 10 minutes or so. When the eggplant is soft, add the chicken and zucchini. If the pan is getting dry, add another cup of water or so and stir. Taste and add some salt. When the vegetables are as soft as you'd like them to be, and the flavors are as blended as you'd like them to be, it is done. Feel free to add more water and salt along the way. 

Serve over rice with chopped cilantro as a garnish.

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Strawberry Pocky Sticks

This was one I just could not pass up today. I guess it says a lot, that I backpedaled halfway down the block after the "Giant" part of the Pocky package I'd seen in a window of Sakura made it into the active regions of my brain. Larger than normal food strikes me as an unusually American passion, I can't imagine people in Japan would want to trade their delicate packs of pocky for one of these huge curling iron sized items. But who knows. Maybe its the next big thing.

For those of you not familiar with Pocky, it is a sort of long, thin, dry biscuit of the type that come in long tubular shaped packages from the U.K., coated with chocolate or a strawberry stuff similar to the "yogurt" that sometimes covers American pretzels. Being Japanese, Pocky has a convenient handle that is free of chocolate or strawberry coating, so that your fingers do not get smudged. 

I first discovered Pocky back in the nineties, during my time working at a tech company affectionately called "The Rocketship" by our CEO, who was later jailed for investor fraud. Or maybe it was his right hand man who went to prison, I don't remember. But that detail is not important. What is important is the glitter and sparkle of the dot-com days. Everyone was rich back then, and we were all high on life, along with a variety of other things. 

My desk butted up against that of Ms. Pinky Weitzman, a woman who I believe is now playing electric fiddle for a band somewhere in New York City. She was long and lean, terrifically stylish with platinum blonde hair and pale creamy skin. "Daahhling..." she would croon, "You just cannot put your code in my database. It wheel not work..." Careening wildly about with a pocky stick dangling like Cruella Deville's cigarette, she would offer me one with a flick of her wrist and disappear back behind the screen of her monitor. Later in the day we would all head out to the incredibly sketchy bar next door for a gin and tonic, and months down the road she and another pal introduced me to my future husband.

Dinner tonight was uneventful - grilled seabass, corn and tomato relish on toast and a sort of zucchini salad. When I complained that the zucchini was too oily, my husband told me "that's because its Greek. Did you know that in Greece almost forty percent of their calories come from olives?" He liked the zucchini quite a bit. The kids loved the fish, toast and grilled corn, but wouldn't touch the rest. 

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Smoky Corn and Tomato Relish (adapted from Tori Ritchie's Tuesday Recipe):

2 ears of fresh corn

1 lb tomatoes

1 garlic clove, minced

1 small red onion (or white or yellow if thats all you have)

1/8 teaspoon pimenton (smoked paprika)

1 semi-spicy pepper, an anaheim chile is a good candidate

2 Tablespoons olive oil, plus more for grilling

1 Tablespoon fresh lime juice

salt and pepper

Shuck the corn, then oil the outside lightly and lay the ears on a hot grill. Also put the tomatoes and pepper on the grill, slice the onion in half, oil the cut side of each half and lay them on the grill too.. You can leave the tomatoes there for five to ten minutes, or until they get nice charred grill marks, and the other veggies for longer, until they are a bit charred on all sides (you'll have to rotate them every now and then). If you're making fish to serve alongside this, it is a good idea to put the fish on the grill when you remove the tomatoes, leaving the corn, onion and pepper on the grill while the fish cooks.

After removing the veggies, let them cool for a bit, then cut the kernels off the corn into a big bowl, slice each tomato in half and squeeze each half gently over the sink to remove the seeds. Next chop the tomatoes into 1/2 inch chunks and add them to the corn. Remove the skin from the onion and chop it into 1/4 inch pieces. Peel the skin off the pepper, slice it in half, remove the seeds and membrane, and cut it into 1/4 inch pieces as well. Mix the veggies together and sprinkle with a little salt.

In a small bowl, mix the olive oil, lime juice and minced garlic. Stir it into the vegetables, add some freshly grated pepper and taste for salt.  This should be served on toast, either while still warm or at room temperature.

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Zucchini with Harissa, Olives and Feta (adapted from Canal House Cooking Volume 1):

4 zucchini, sliced into thick rounds

a handful of cured olives

1/2 cup coarsely crumbled feta

a small handful of parsley leaves, chopped

rind of 1/4 preserved lemon, chopped

1/4 teaspoon caraway seeds (or a combo of fennel and cumin seeds)

1 clove garlic

juice of 1 lemon

2 Tablespoons harissa paste (you'll find it at mediterranean markets and Rainbow Grocery)

5 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil (the best you have)

salt

Bring a salted pot of water to boil, then add the zucchini and boil for about five minutes, until it is soft but not squishy. Drain the zucchini in a colander in the sink. Toast the caraway seeds in a frying pan over high heat, until they are fragrant, but before they start to color. Remove them from the pan and crush them in a mortar. Add the clove garlic and about 1/2 teaspoon salt and crush it all together with the pestle. If you don't have a mortar and pestle just chop it all finely. Stir in the lemon juice, harissa and oil. Season to taste with salt. 

Put the zucchini in a bowl, then add the dressing and toss to coat. Scatter the feta, olives, parsley and preserved lemon over the top and serve.

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Grilled Fish:

2 steaks (or the fillet with skin) of any white fish (about 1 pound)

1 lemon, sliced in half

olive oil

salt & pepper

Lay out your fish in a glass dish, then cut the lemon in half and squeeze half of it over the fish. Sprinkle a Tablespoon or so of olive oil over the fish, then salt and pepper it - about 1/8 teaspoon of each. Flip the fish over and do the same to the other side. Let the fish marinate while you prepare the grill and whatever else you have to make for dinner (I like rice and arugala salad with this). Cooking the fish should be the last step, aside from dressing the salad.

Heat up the grill to whatever temperature you use for fish - our grill is particularly wimpy, so I blast it up to high.  

Lay your fish on the grill.  Close the lid and leave it for five minutes or so, then check to see if there are nice grill marks on the fish. If so, flip it over onto the skin side. If not, let it cook longer and keep checking until the grill marks are there.  After flipping, shut the lid again and come back in five minutes to check for doneness.  I think the easiest way is to take a sharp knife and slice into the thickest part of the fish. When it is opaque inside, it is done. Serve the fish right away.

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