Food – Page 45 – Into the Woods

Whole-wheat sweet-potato gnocci

Gnocci with toasted walnuts, tempeh, and mushrooms. This is a very meaty dish … hard to believe that it’s vegan.

For those days in which you walk in circles in the kitchen trying to think of something a little different to cook, consider gnocci.

Gnocci, I believe, are considered tricky to make. I don’t think so. Any cook who is experienced working with dough will understand making gnocci. If you Google, you’ll find lots of tips and recipes from the experts, which I am not. However, I do strongly believe that you don’t need egg in the dough. Just two ingredients — potato and flour — work fine.

Gnocci are usually boiled. They also can be browned in oil, which is how I made gnocci today. Sweet potato gnocci particularly like to be browned in oil, I think, because the sugar in the potatoes gives the gnocci skins a nice, chewy texture.

The dough: nothing but sweet potatoes and whole wheat flour

Sliced and forked

Sizzlin’

The coffee of yesteryear

Buffalo china cups, Victor mugs

Those enormous coffee mugs and gigantic paper coffee cups are symbols of the rat race. Once upon a time, it was understood that a cup of coffee was something to relax with and savor. The drinking vessels reflected that.

There is a science, of course, behind the new style and the old style of coffee drinking.

The science of the new style is simple: Get all the coffee you’re going to drink into a single vessel, and chug it fast while on the run. Still, it’s guaranteed that the first third of it will be too hot, and the last third will be too cold.

The science of the old style was much more complex and sophisticated. It required skill and attention from whoever was serving the coffee. The drinking vessels were made of heavy china. The cups absorbed heat from the first pouring of coffee, cooling it to a more drinkable temperature. Thereafter, there was the ritual of “warming up” the coffee, which required pouring more coffee at just the right time, before the cup was empty. This not only refilled the cup, it also brought the coffee back to the ideal temperature. This ritual was repeated until you’d had enough coffee. This is how the English serve — or at least used to serve — tea from a teapot.

To my lights, the ideal coffee mug was the mug made by the Victor Mug Company. This mug holds about 8 ounces when filled to the brim, or about 7 ounces when filled to a drinkable level. The ideal coffee cup was made by the Buffalo Pottery Company. These cups hold about 7 ounces when filled to the brim, and about 6 ounces when filled to a drinkable level. These mugs and cups were sold as restaurant china. They’re now collectable.

When looking for cups in the housewares section of a couple of chain stores, I was not terribly surprised to find that they don’t even carry cups and saucers anymore, and all the mugs are huge. eBay is the answer.

I really feel for the people who have to drink their coffee from huge vessels, on the run. Now that I’m retired, I drink coffee (well, a coffee substitute) the old-fashioned way. I used my large set of Victor mugs during my working years. But now I’ve slowed down to cups and saucers.

Potassium broth

Now that I’m back on the cold and snowy East Coast, I’m remembering how good it is to have an arsenal of warm drinks. How about a bit of old-fashioned broth?

It was from Jethro Kloss, in the hippy handbook Back to Eden, that I first heard about potassium broth. Kloss’ version of potassium broth included oats and bran to give the broth extra body. He frequently prescribed it for people who were sick and couldn’t handle solid food. If you Google for “potassium broth,” you’ll find many versions. They all involve fresh vegetables, peels and all, simmered for four hours or so and strained.

The broth I made today included a beet, a turnip, a couple of potatoes, some celery, onions, turnip leave stems, collard stems, and the outer leaves from a cabbage. It’s still simmering, but I think I will add some tomato paste to the broth after I’ve strained out the vegetables, to make it taste more like vegetable soup.

It seems a waste to strain the broth and discard the vegetables, but I’ll drink the electrolytes, and my chickens will be happy to get the pulp.

Biscuits vs. rolls

Biscuits and rolls are so similar, and yet so different. They’re not interchangeable. Who would want rolls and gravy and scrambled eggs?

There’s one way that rolls win hands down: they’re healthier. The shortening adds a lot of fat to biscuits, and the soda or baking powder is a big hidden source of sodium. Biscuits are quick, though.

Still, I think you can make perfectly decent rolls in 90 minutes or even a little less. Just let them rise once, in the baking pan. I think rolls have a better texture if they have no oil in the dough at all.

A foodified quandary

A Walmart avocado

When I lived in San Francisco, shopping at Walmart was unthinkable. All big box stores (or book stores) were scorned for a number of reasons, not least for what has happened to small, neighborhood merchants. But it also was easy to not shop at Walmart in San Francisco. I’d have had to drive way out into the suburbs to get to one, and there were so many other alternatives in the city. Heck, one day when I was in line at Borders book store on Union Square in San Francisco, Armistead Maupin was in the checkout line in front of me. It’s a fair question, and I don’t claim to have an answer: How far should we go to support local businesses when a big business has something better, for cheaper?

If we pay more for something when we could have gotten the same thing cheaper at Walmart, we’re basically making a donation to a business. Is that the best form of charity? I have my doubts.

In any case, here in the rural South, everything is different. There aren’t so many choices. And we don’t have big-city incomes to spend in better stores, even if there were lots of better stores. So I don’t know.

This winter I’ve bought avocados at Walmart, for $.99 to $1.08 each. Every one of them has been good and has ripened beautifully. Should I pay $2.39 each for avocados at a grocery store, half of which rot before they ripen or are stringy and dry?

I buy at Walmart only those things that seriously beat the competition. For another example, Walmart has the best deal in organic, unsweetened soy milk. That’s the best accommodation I’ve been able to come up with so far.

Beet curry

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

Turnip greens

The grocery store in Walnut Cove had turnip greens this week for $1.29 a bunch. As Michael Pollan says, eat more leaves. Especially at a good price.

By the way, what you see on the countertop is what we around here would call a mess of greens. When I was in elementary school, a teacher once derided one of the children for saying “a mess of greens.” The teacher said that that was not proper. How sad. It is perfectly proper, but it does mark one’s dialect as Appalachian English. I have previously written about stigmatized dialects.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives an example of this usage from 1503: “You have very good strawberies at your gardayne in Holberne. I require you let us have a messe of them.”

Mess means a portion of food sufficient to make a dish. As I understood the term growing up, it particularly meant a portion of food brought from the garden. I never heard anyone talk about a mess of bacon.

Here comes the asparagus

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.

Coffee substitutes

I’m amazed how easy it was to give up coffee. I decided that the caffeine couldn’t possibly be doing me any good. And besides, when one no longer has to go to work each morning, the caffeine kick really isn’t necessary. For years I was very San Francisco-ized in my taste in coffee. I drank it only in the morning, but I liked it rich and strong.

I’ve been using a brand of coffee substitute that I got at Whole Foods. It’s made from roasted barley with chicory. When you drink the first cup of it, you certainly know it isn’t coffee. But by the third cup, adaptation happens.

With coffee, color is everything. The color of the Roma coffee substitute, before cream and after, is the same as coffee. I am unable to achieve the proper color with soybean milk (it produces an awful gray color), so I’ve gone back to buying half and half, which gives that wonderful golden brown.

Another wonderful thing about being retired: There is no longer any temptation to eat and drink on the run, or at a desk, or in front of the TV. I always sit down at the table.

Fried apples

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.