An incredibly satisfying yet deceptively simple soup that is perfect for a cold, wet, fall day, it gets even better with a side of old school garlic bread like my mom used to make. Warms you right up!
Back in 2013, Liza Shaw joined me at Food Lit to discuss Charlotte Druckman's Skirt Steak: Women Chefs on Standing the Heat and Staying in the Kitchen. Since then Liza has taken on more heat by opening Merigan Sub Shop and was recently featured in the Chronicle's food section. My family loves beans and greens are often in our CSA box, so I had to try her recipe.
We all love pesto at my house, though it is usually made with basil and pinenuts. This one is made with arugula and parsley instead. Both have parmesan cheese, olive oil, garlic and salt. I used the blender tonight, instead of the food processor, and I think the latter is better: the blender makes it too smooth.
Most of Marcus Samuelson's recipes are not particularly fast and easy, but this one is! I made it with leftover chicken from a day or two ago and beans cooked in the crockpot yesterday.
This time of year there is usually an influx of turnips from our CSA, which my family tires of eating quickly. Tonight, with a little help from Twitter (where there are always plenty of people willing to tweet about food) I discovered a new dish that everyone in my family will eat!
Dried beans are ridiculously easy to cook. Here are three things I've learned in my many years of cooking beans:
1) The fresher the beans, the faster they cook - buy them from stores with a high turnover.
2) The more gentle the simmer the more whole the beans remain - boiling hard breaks them apart.
3) Salt prevents softening - add salt after the beans are soft.
This is my favorite recent trifecta (or triple win): Mexican Green Rice, Lazy Chiles Rellenos, Yellow Indian Woman beans. I only wish my kids loved it as much as I do. They routinely ask for the beans by name and always manage to choke down a bite each of the rice and rellenos, so I'll call it good.
More tomatillos in the CSA box this week, so more pork chili. This time, a double batch. We've been using this reicipe since it ran in the San Francisco Chronicle, back in the fall of 2002. Pork, tomatillos and beans are the main ingredients. We like to eat it with Deborah Madison's Buttermilk Skillet Cornbread, from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, p. 647.
Our crockpot is going to get a lot of use this week. We're back from vacation, the fridge is empty and the produce box doesn't come until Thursday. Plus, I'm much too busy to deal with anything complicated or time consuming.
I've been wanting to practice my charcoal lighting skills, so tonight I'm grilling flank steak with a new marinade recipe from Saveur mag: a spicy, chinese inspired mixture reinterpreted from Mei Chin's 1980s childhood.
I love rosemary because it is so ubiquitous. In San Francisco it grows, honestly, like a weed. It is a perennial, so you only need to plant it once and year after year it just keeps getting bigger and woodier, constantly producing fresh growth for cooking and reliably flowering with miniature blooms, some pink, some white, some a vibrant blue. It lives in my garden right between the lavender and the sage, and like the lavender, it needs no care at all - no water in our dry summers, no fertilizer in our sandy soil, no protection from our tenacious slugs.
I had another positive experience with the slow cooker today - Mexican Bean Soup from The Gourmet Vegetarian Slow Cooker. In the past year or two I would say there has been an absolute explosion in slow cooker cook books, and I am attempting to be a proud consumer of them. But, as my friend Shelley reminded me today, I haven't found that many great recipes. I love the idea of loading up the slow cooker in the morning, going out and about to attend to things during the day and returning home to the illusion that someone has cooked me a fabulous meal. But, really, most of those meals have not been so fabulous.