Category: Food

I paced in circles in the kitchen this evening, trying to figure out what I wanted for supper. Something over rice seemed appealing. I knew that I needed a heavy dose of garlic to try to fend off the cold I’m afraid I picked up on a trip to town last night. And I had some fresh beets from Whole Foods that needed to be used. So I made something up: beet curry. I didn’t Google for beet curry until after supper. It’s not unheard of, but I don’t think it’s common. But anything will curry.

I used a whole head of garlic. I blanched some almonds and chopped them a little in the blender so they’d soak up more flavor. I added tomato paste to thicken the sauce and deepen the red. I served it over Uncle Ben’s rice. Now, before you go and say something snobbish about Uncle Ben’s, keep in mind that it may have been Julia Child’s favorite rice. She called it “L’oncle Ben’s.” Uncle Ben’s is just parboiled rice. It also has a lower glycemic index than most rices.

Believe it or not, it was delicious. I already knew that beets like spices, and garlic, and tomatoes. You’d be surprised how good beets are when added to spaghetti sauce. Just dice the beets and add them to your regular spaghetti sauce, and simmer until the beets are tender. I realized while eating the beet curry that beets probably would like roasted peanuts. That will be a future experiment: coming up with something that includes beets, tomato sauce, garlic, and roasted peanuts or peanut butter. Some sort of lasagna, maybe?

From the red splatter in the kitchen you’d think I’d murdered a chicken, indoors. But this was a totally vegan dish.

Beets, almonds, minced garlic

Sautéing the almonds with the curry spices

Waiting for the water to boil

One of the grocery stores in Walnut Cove had some very nice, slender asparagus yesterday for $2.29 a pound. It went really well with mushroom quiche. All three eggs in the quiche were laid today. Tomorrow the hens will be rewarded with the asparagus ends.

Fried apples are a Southern standby. The grocery store apples have been good, and cheap, this winter. When the choices are poor in the produce department, those apples start looking more and more like a winter vegetable, which is not how we usually think of them.

Slice them fairly thin and cook them gently in a tablespoon of butter. Some people prefer them plain. I like them with a little raw sugar and cinnamon.

I wonder why quiche is belittled as a food for wimps. Quiche actually is a very rich food. And, like apple pie and pizza, it’s a pie. But quiche can be a huge fat, cholesterol, and sodium bomb.

Even though my chickens have made me egg rich, I had not made a quiche in ages until today. It’s not so much the eggs I fret about, it’s the milk and cheese. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, the milk and cheese that is easily available around here is of very poor quality, from cows pumped full of hormones and antibiotics. I do buy organic butter. I gave up half and half when I quit drinking coffee. And I sometimes buy organic yogurt. But I never buy milk and cheese.

So, how might one make quiche?

Whole Foods carries some imitation cheeses that are based on almonds. The mozzarella version melts, the package promises. And there’s always soy milk. Just be sure to buy the organic soy milk that contains nothing but soybeans and water. The flavored and sweetened soy milk is full of sugar carbs, and of course you wouldn’t want vanilla in a quiche.

I used the same quiche recipe I’ve been using for 30 years. It’s based on 3 eggs and 2 cups of milk. To that I added the grated almond cheese, cooked spinach, and lots of garlic.

I used my trusty old basic crust recipe, which has one and quarter cups of flour, a quarter of a cup of olive oil, and three or four tablespoons of soy milk.

The quiche was delicious.

Let’s compute the cholesterol. Three eggs at 235 milligrams of cholesterol per egg equals 705 milligrams of cholesterol in the quiche. At eight slices, that comes to 88 milligrams a slice. Eat two pieces, and that’s 176 milligrams, well below your daily allowance of 300 milligrams.

That’s a whole clove of chopped garlic on top of the spinach.

Frankly, I’m pretty bad at cooking Chinese food. I often wonder if one doesn’t need to be born Chinese to do it properly. But, if you’ve got a pile of home-grown mung bean sprouts, what are you gonna do?

It’s the noodles that make the chow mein. I have no idea where one might get proper chow mein noodles around here. But whole wheat linguini will do in a pinch. After the linguini has been cooked, brown the noodles lightly in an oiled pan and add some soy sauce, then add the vegetables and stir-fry.

You do make your own sprouts, don’t you?

Mushrooms, onions, garlic, and celery — easy winter vegetables

You know you like ’em fried.

I guess there’s no such thing as truly healthy sweets. But one can at least do what one can to minimize the damage. I did a Google search for “vegan molasses cookies” and modified a recipe I found. The cookies I made this evening were made with olive oil, raw sugar, King Arthur whole wheat flour, and blackstrap molasses. They were very chewy and very good. There was no reason to miss having butter and eggs in the recipe. It took only five minutes to stir them up and get them ready to pop into the oven.

Blackstrap molasses may be hard to find in some places, but not around here. Molasses-making, like making apple butter, was an art often practiced in the Blue Ridge Mountains. They used outdoor vats heated by wood fires.

That English teacup, by the way, came from an antique shop in Walnut Cove. I paid $5 for it. Coffee, it seems to me, is best drunk from a truck driver mug made of heavy china. But tea wants to be drunk from a cup and saucer.