Mmmm bread mmmm.

Post by Jade

I like to bake bread.  I may have an obsession of sorts with baking the perfect “artisan” bread with a crunchy crust, crazy hole differentiation, complex flavors, etc.  In the search for a recipe with good quality bread that’s also skill-appropriate for me, I’ve baked my way through the Cheeseboard Collective Cookbook and dabbled briefly (and warily) in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.

One time, I made Reinhart’s baguettes for a dinner Emily and I were making, and they were good, but not perfect.  They also took hours upon hours, since the starter was basically a smaller batch of baguette dough that had to be made the night before, essentially making it feel like you’re making bread twice.  I also tried to spray the oven doors every 10 minutes or some crap like Reinhart suggests, mainly succeeding in giving myself steam burns.  Peter “I’m A Little Bitch” Reinhart, man.  I spent like 2 days being his little bitch, and I mostly got baguette of decent but not excellent quality.

Anyways.  I’ve made Bittman/Lahey’s no-knead bread twice, now, to also moderate success.  It’s also just almost shamefully easy, but it does take about 24 hours.  I’ll repost the recipe here with modified instructions for not-instant yeast.

No Knead Bread

3 cups bread or all-purpose flour (and more for dusting)
1/4 teaspoon yeast
1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons warm water
1-1/4 teaspoons salt
1 cup warm water
cornmeal

4-6 quart dutch oven or other tall, oven-proof pot with a reasonably well-fitting lid.

Sprinkle yeast in 1/2 cup + 2 T warm water (should be warm, but not hot) and let stand a few minutes until bubbly.

Combine flour, yeast water, salt, and remaining cup of water and stir until combined.  Dough will be wetter and stickier than usual.  Let stand for approximately 18 hours at room temperature.

When surface of dough is dotted with bubbles, it is ready.  Flour a work surface and carefully place dough on flour.  Fold it on itself a few times gently, and cover it with plastic wrap and allow to rest for 15 minutes.

Coat a smooth cotton cloth with a handful of cornmeal.  Cover hands with flour and gently shape dough into a ball by pinching sides in on one side.  Place ball, seam side down, on cloth.  Cover top of dough with another handful of cornmeal and fold cloth over to cover it completely.  Allow to rise for 2 hours.  Dough is ready when doubled in size (or more) and when it will not spring back when poked.

At least 30 minutes before dough is ready, preheat the oven at 450 and place the dutch oven inside.  When dough is ready, carefully remove dutch oven from oven.  Use the towel to deposit the dough into the dutch oven, seam side up.  Shake the dutch oven to distribute evenly (it’s OK if the dough looks unsmooth), cap it, and place it in the oven for 30 minutes.  After 30 minutes, take the lid off and allow to bake for another 15-20 minutes, until the crust is brown.

Allow to cool (somewhat) before eating to maintain STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY.

A really long time ago, I started moving out of Pooh Corner.  At the time, I didn’t know that I would return on a near-weekly basis to “pick up something I forgot,” so I got vaguely emotional and decided to cook One Last Dinner, partially on a whim.

Time was short, so I decided on a simple meal using lots of what we had lying around – summer pasta, cabbage & tofu, roasted broccoli, simple salad.

I had already packed my camera, so this is a phone photo, which mostly explains the weird glow.

This time, I tried to get the roasted broccoli right, and it came out less… caramelized (burned) and didn’t reduce as much.

The pasta, I sort of made up as I went, so I’ll share a “recipe” for that.

Roasted Red Pepper Summer Pasta

1 lb shell pasta
3 red peppers
4 handfuls of frozen green peas
1 bunch basil
5 cloves of garlic
1 small white/yellow onion
3 tomatoes
parmesan cheese
salt, pepper

Bake red peppers on a cookie sheet at 400-450 degrees until skins are wrinkled, at least 20 minutes.  When ready, carefully peel skin off peppers and chop into small, bite-size pieces.  Dice onions, mince garlic, and chiffonade basil.

Sautee diced onion and minced garlic in a large pan until onion is translucent.  Add in diced tomatoes and chopped red peppers at that point and turn heat to low, allowing mixture to get “saucy.”

Boil the pasta in salted water, adding peas in during the last 2 minutes, to just short of al dente.  Add the pasta to the pan and distribute sauce evenly.  Season liberally with salt and pepper and top with basil and grated parmesan cheese.  Serve warm.

I miss you!  And I’m not just saying that because I’m sitting here in lecture, hungry.  (I am currently trying to decide whether I should nap first or eat first when I get out of class.)

This is my public announcement that I will continue to post in the future (made public so I am forced to stick to it).  Moving out of Pooh Corner has made it both easier and harder to cook.  For one, Emily isn’t around to help me refine my cooking ideas and commiserate with about fatkidhood.  The Kairos kitchen (heretofore known as Kitchen) is more equipped with fire and giant containers, but it could be said that Kitchen and I have a lot of baggage.  Dinner has been taken care of by other residents so far, which is a nice break for me.  I have made a few lunches but deemed them generally unpalatable to the food blogosphere, though I and several other people certainly did eat them.  My next lunch, though, will be documented, even if it is a lunch of shame and plebeian taste.  Well, my next lunch after I locate my camera and camera charger.

Happy fooding!

Jade

P.S. My professor keeps talking about nominative phrases, abbreviating them as NOMs, which I parse, without fail, as FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD before I remember what he means.

It ain't easy being $4.

Having already consumed what I had consumed this morning without regard for cost, I decided that it would be fair to make dinner for Blake and myself for under $4.  With that in mind, I figured that we had a lot of pasta, and that pasta makes for a good vehicle for varied other ingredients.  

One thing paramount to the way I planned the meal was good nutrition and fresh produce.  Having been a vegetarian for a while, the issue of getting some protein in for under $4 led me to conclude that beans were the way to go.  I wanted some fresh greens, too, so I purchased a head of broccoli and tomatoes and headed home.  George was wondering about dinner, too, so I added a bit more of everything and got cooking.  Here’s what was for dinner, and how it broke down costwise.

Let them be sauteed!

First, I sauteed chopped fresh tomatoes with garlic and herbs (herbs are, I concede, probably illegal, but in my defense, I culled them directly from our own garden, and there were about 4 sprigs each of thyme and oregano, plus a few basil leaves).  Then I added in small florets of broccoli, 3/4 of the can of white beans I had bought, and some frozen peas, sprinkled on salt and pepper and a light grating of parmesan, then covered the mixture and let it simmer.  Once the broccoli was slightly tender, I added the cooked capellini pasta, stirred it up, and served it.  

Cost of the 3-person meal:
About 8 oz pasta: 88 cents
3 tomatoes: 91 cents
1 head of broccoli: 84 cents
3 cloves garlic: 12 cents
3/4 can white beans: 93 cents
About 5 oz peas: 40 cents
Dash of olive oil for sauteeing: 12 cents
Probably less than 1/8 oz parm:  8 cents
Thyme, oregano, basil: functionally cost-free, but technically cheating
Total: 4.28 for 3 people (and a little leftover), with additional herbs and salt and pepper.  

Blake assures me that Neelam had some, and hence it fed 4 people, which means I successfully pulled it off.  I’ll tell you though, when I was operating under the $4 for 2 people assumption, things got really tight.  I used a tiny fraction of the amount of cheese I normally would have, and when I scaled up the pasta at the last minute, the ratio of pasta to other ingredients got a little skewed, so salt had to make up for taste.  And boys have a fairly large appetite, so this experiment isn’t going to measure too accurately how I could survive on $4/day.  But it certainly is helping to put things into perspective, and to get me cooking  creatively.  

All this food looks scary close up.

Tomorrow, more adventures in $4 cooking.  I’d previously made plans to have breakfast with a friend, so I might attempt the $4 dinner challenge again.

You may or may not know that I recently started doing volunteer work for an organization that Jade worked for over the summer called Collective Roots.  It’s a nonprofit that works to educate people about sustainability, gardening, and nutrition, as well as helping to implement better access to fresh, local food in EPA.  

While Jade’s work involved a lot of garden research, lesson plans, and getting her hands into the dirt, mine involves trying to raise awareness of and support for the issues and the organization, which currently involves a lot of online time.  I’ve been dealing with the Twitter page recently, and one of the streams we follow retweeted a blog post about the Hunger Challenge, and as I am currently at the library and trying to distract myself, I was intrigued.  

No, it’s not that I’m just lazy and have given up on grocery shopping. …Okay, that might be part of the reason. But this week (October 20-26), the San Francisco Food Bank is encouraging people to participate in the Hunger Challenge. That is, for the week, to survive on $4 of food per day (the average amount that San Franciscans on Food Stamps have to live on).  Considering what a fat kid I am, that’s one hell of a challenge.  

But for all the noms I like to experiment with, I have to say that I believe you can cook well without paying a lot for it.  Obviously, it won’t be fancy food, but the challenge appeals to me for a number of reasons:
Reason #1: My bank account has about $600 in it right now.
Reason #2: In the last few weeks, I’ve spent about one third to one quarter of my day cooking, and it seems a bit much.
Reason #3:  Right now, Pooh Corner’s residents are in flux, and we haven’t implemented a good system of reimbursement.  If I’m going to have to front money for dinner, it might as well be in tiny increments.  
Reason #4: I am always up for a cooking challenge.

I am really sorry I haven’t been posting lately, seeing as my camera died and I can’t find its charger.  I have about 7 posts all lined up with no pictures, and I will post more shortly.  I’ll be back soon with details of how my $4 diet goes.

Approximately 100 dumplings, a gargoyle, a gargoyle, fried rice, and half a watermelon.

On Sunday, I decided that I really, desperately wanted some dumplings.  Well, I had wanted to eat them previously (and, in fact, there are few times when I would refuse to eat a dumpling, I’d imagine), but on Sunday, I had enough time to make a dumpling dinner.

First, I solicited pledges from housemates that they would help in the folding of dumplings because, gah, folding enough for 7 diners not shy about eating – my dumpling prowess is nowhere near sufficient.  I kind of threw in fried rice as a backup, remembering how in Chinese weddings fried rice is the last course as an emergency for particularly hungry guests.  Also, fried rice!  I love it.  It’s kind of my trademark comfort food.  Watermelon for dessert because it was sitting in our refrigerator already cut in half, and I’ll admit it – I thought the color would be a nice addition to the photograph.  Food bloggin’.  It’s become something of an obsession.  I am always that crazy girl that forbids people from eating when the table is first set while I run around calling for my camera.

Someday, I’ll make a post about fried rice with a step-by-step, but for now, I’ll detail the dumpling yum-yums.

You will be in the dumplings. Yum. Also, a study in finely chopping.

I kind of improvised the filling basing it off my mom’s usual dumpling filling and a few recipes.  I think it turned out pretty decently, though I think I added too much vermicelli.  It’s pretty annoying to have a lot of the noodles because they poke through when you’re trying to fold up the dumplings and break the seal, but they’re delicious.  Yum noodles wrapped in dough.  I wrote up a recipe that more or less copies what I made.

Vegetarian Dumpling Filling

1 block of firm tofu
1 cup chives, chopped very finely (I couldn’t find them, used spinach instead)
1 cup napa cabbage, chopped very finely
1-1/2 cups thin rice noodles
1 carrot, shredded finely
1 tablespoon ginger, minced
5 eggs
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup sesame oil

Soak the rice noodles in hot water for 5-10 minutes, until pliable but firm.  Allow them to cool, chop them into 1/2 inch pieces.

Boil water (you can use the same water) and blanch the napa cabbage for 5 minutes, until barely cooked.

Lightly sautee the carrots until no longer hard.  Scramble the eggs and chop them into small pieces.

Combine all the ingredients, taking care to break the tofu up into small pieces.

RALLY FOR THE FOODS! RALLY!

Marco and Emily kindly and diligently helped me fold 120 dumplings.  The skin they had at the normal American supermarket was more like wonton wrappers than dumpling wrappers, so the folding was pretty tricky.  I tried to impart wisdom on how to make pretty crimped dumplings that sit up, but I wished that my mom were there to lend her expertise.

I froze the dumplings so they could sit for a little before I was ready to boil them.

Yum.  I boiled them until they floated and the skins were translucent-y.  We had a few casualties, ie, dumplings that burst in the water, but most of them survived, only to be eaten.  They were delicious.  I believe the 6 of us pounded through all 120 of them.

Watermelon lemonade, tea eggs, soy ginger salad, garlicky bok choy, mee goreng.

I had been really craving some Asiany street-food-style deliciousness recently, and with some encouragement from Emily, I decided to indulge this week.  Yum.  I just want to soak everything in soy sauce and sautee it with garlic in plentiful sesame oil.

Tea eggs YES.

Probably the pinnacle of my craving was for tea eggs.  Yum.  I referenced this recipe as a basic starting point, but I mostly just felt it out as I went.  We didn’t have a few of the spices, so I mixed different types of tea to try and mimic the complexity of flavor.  The basic process to making tea eggs is to hard boil them in plain water, then crack them gently, and simmer them for at least 2 hours in a tea/soy sauce/spices mixture.

Asian-inspired salad.

Housemates and friends of mine often have to listen to me complain about how I think salads are boring, so it was slightly out of character for me to make one.  Since the other parts of this meal were on the heavier side, I decided a salad might be nice.  I used a soy-ginger recipe that I made up onc day when I wanted a dressing that wasn’t balsamic, my usual lazy standby.

Soy-Ginger Salad Dressing
1 tablespoon minced ginger
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon lemon juice or rice vinegar
1 tablespoon honey

Combine ingredients.  Let sit for as long as possible for flavors to meld.  Drizzle over salad immediately prior to serving.

Mee goreng, but it mostly turned out like chow mein.

I also desperately wanted to eat mee goreng, which is a Southeast Asian dish of stir-fried noodles that’s simultaneously salty, spicy, and sweet.  It’s delicious.  The noodle dish I made turned out tasty but not exactly what I had in mind.  I based my efforts off of this recipe.  Authentic mee goreng is a bit elusive for me, as I’ve tried once before to similar results.  I’m not sure how to fix it – but I’m sure I’ll try again at some point.

I forgot to take a photograph of the bok choy, but it’s just simple garlic-sauteed greens.  I add a little vegetable stock in the middle of cooking to soften up the greens and waited for it to reduce off mostly before serving.  I also add only half the garlic in the beginning and then some in the middle of the stock phase to strengthen the garlic flavor.

Watermelon lemonade.

I made this lemonade on a whim when I remembered that we had a watermelon (on which we drew a face, obviously) lying around.  I got the idea from this recipe, but I basically just made it to taste.  It was really nice and refreshing, though it does take a little more time than I usually spend on a beverage.  I think it added a good light, fresh note to a meal that was a little heavier on the oil.

We had the cut up leftover watermelon for dessert.  Also, that peanut butter brownie that I made yesterday, and our new ice cream.  Oh dear.

Peanut butter brownie bottom, chocolate ganache topping.

Sometimes, I decide not to venture out of the house in the afternoons and instead make desserts with two kinds of butter in them (peanut, and normal).  I didn’t feel much like experimenting yesterday, so I opted to make Smitten Kitchen’s peanut butter brownies, with a few changes.

These peanut butter brownies are great, tasting like a richer, chewier version of a peanut butter cookie.  The ganache topping looks great and adds a smoothness and richness to an already rich dessert.  Decadence.

Recipe for Peanut Butter Brownies + Chocolate Ganache

1/2 pound salted butter, room temperature
1-1/2 cups sugar
1 cup creamy peanut butter
2 eggs and 1 egg yolk
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
1-1/2 cups chocolate chips
1/2 teaspoon salt

2 cups chocolate chips
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon butter

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Place parchment paper down on a 9×12 baking pan and grease the sides.

Cream together butter and sugar until light and fluffy.  Add in peanut butter and mix until combined.  Add in eggs and vanilla, and mix again.

Add in flour and salt and mix until combined.  Incorporate chocolate chips.  Pat down the mixture (it will resemble the consistency of cookie dough) into the pan and bake for about 35 minutes, until an inserted knife comes out clean.

Allow the brownies to cool for about 10 minutes, then start the ganache.

Set up a double boiler by placing a metal bowl over a pot of boiling water.  Place the chocolate chips, heavy cream, and butter in the bowl and allow the chocolate to melt, stirring occasionally to combine.  When the brownies are cool enough to touch and the ganache is combined, spread the ganache over the brownies.

Allow ganache to harden slightly before slicing and eating.

Let's celebrate Amuhrca

It was my turn to cook again today, and in following my usual routine of looking through the kitchen to see what I should use up, I discovered we didn’t have substantial amounts of anything that I had to use, so I was a little stumped.  Back at square one, I pondered on summer things that I like eating.  Corn came to mind, and I found a recipe for beans that I wanted to try, but I didn’t get much further than that.  Jade was around, so I asked her what I could make that would go with corn on the cob and beans.  In one of those brilliant fatkid moments we sometimes have when we play off each other, we came up with the idea of using ingredients that are native American crops.  This is what ensued.  

Corn. It's what's for dinner.

Since Jade’s working at Collective Roots this summer, she knows about seasonal and indigenous crops, and told me about these great trios of beans, corn, and squash that you can grow in a certain configuration so that the corn provides support for the beans and squash to grow on.  Corn.  It’s a wonderful, prolific crop, and I often forget how satisfying it can be on its own.  I went out and got a few ears and put them in a pot of boiling, salted water for ten minutes (I was using the oven a fair amount today, hence the decision to boil instead of roast), and voila, one dish down.  Well, almost.  The second part was just as quick: I just took a hunk of butter from the fridge (it was around 4 tablespoons’ worth), put it in a bowl, then de-stemmed and chopped some thyme and put it in the bowl with the butter.  After a minute in the microwave, I had thyme-infused butter than played off the sweetness of the corn delightfully.  George approved.  

Cajun-style buttah bains.

Then I moved on to some beans.  I have a Moosewood cookbook that has produced hit-and-miss results for me in the past, which is why I haven’t cooked from it in a while, but I was starting to plan my meal in my room, and there the cookbook was on my shelf, so I took a gander to see if I’d find any interesting ideas in there.  I found a Cajun-style skillet bean recipe that sounded feasible, and decided to give the book another try.  The recipe called for black-eyed peas or butter beans, which is strange because those seem like pretty different beans, but our Safeway is weird and doesn’t stock plain black-eyed peas, so my decision was made for me.  I would like to say for the record that butter beans are way larger than beans ought to be, which worried me because, as you know, Jade and I like our ingredients in small pieces for optimal flavor diversity in each bite.  The dish turned out to be quite a success, though.  It was fairly simple, with just a little onion and garlic, some bell peppers and celery for flavor and color, then oregano, thyme, basil, cayenne, salt, and pepper for flavor depth, and chopped tomatoes, honey, and beans to bring it to a simmering finish.  Beans are sometimes hard to cook tastily, but the red peppers and honey added some sweetness to the tomato base, which complemented the beans nicely.

What was supposed to be the squash part of the meal.

The third part of the meal was supposed to be squash-based, but Safeway didn’t have summer squash, so I turned it into a zucchini gratin instead.  We just harvested a beautiful, really large zucchini from our garden, too, so I took the liberty of throwing that in.  I took a few ideas from my copy of The Art of Simple Food, but mostly improvised this dish.  Alice Waters uses basil in her gratin, which I thought would add a nice flavor, but after yesterday’s pesto binge and using some basil in the beans, I couldn’t take much more from the basil plants, so I opted for alternating between basil and parmesan layers.  I was supposed to pepper and salt each layer, too, but because this was the last dish I made and it was getting late, I forgot to season the layers, and the dish came out a little bit bland.  It could be good, though, and I’m going to try it again at some point with a few small tweaks: more basil and parmesan, salt and pepper on each layer, and a higher ratio of cream to milk, but less liquid overall (I was weirded out by the amount of cream and half and half the recipe called for, so I improvised the mixture).  

Moroccan sweet pertaters.

I figured the meal needed a little more starch, so I threw in a sweet potato recipe, since that’s a native crop, too.  This is a Moroccan sweet potato salad, though, which I picked out from The Art of Simple Food.  You’re starting to notice a trend in the source of my recipes, no?  I’ve had a good amount of success lately with Alice Waters, and she has a good variety of vegetarian food in her books, so I’ve been trying out the ones that strike my fancy.  This one was easy and pretty satisfying.  It simply called for peeling and cubing some sweet potatoes before tossing them in olive oil and salt and then baking them until they softened.  The dressing consisted of paprika, cumin, olive oil, lemon juice, parsley, cilantro, and salt, and I tweaked it to taste with less olive oil and a little honey because I thought it would complement the lemon nicely.  I took a small amount of parsley and a few little sprigs of cilantro from our garden because those plants are a little small right now, and I was worried that it wouldn’t be enough, but it turned out to be just enough to add a little flavor and yet not overpower the dish.  I think if I do this one again, I’ll add a few other ingredients like fresh onions, corn, and maybe chickpeas, to add a little texture and flavor, but all in all this dish came out quite nicely.

Apple pah.

Lastly, because there is always room for dessert, I made an apple pie out of the apples that Karen brought back from her home.  Since I had had such success with Alice Waters’ basic crust in the onion tart, and since I don’t like shortening, I opted to make a Magnolia apple pie with an Alice Waters crust instead of the shortening-based one in the recipe.  There was tweakage, as always: since I was improvising with sweet apples instead of Granny Smiths, I cut out about 3 to 4 tablespoons of sugar (dessert is served best in a non-cloyingly sweet form); I also added a little bit less nutmeg than called for because I didn’t want it to overpower the flavor of the apples.  The pie came out incredibly well.  The filling had a nice, full apple flavor and the crust was flaky and flavorful enough to complement the apples.  

I had a revelation about making crust dough, though, and I’m excited about it.  I’ve made pies before to moderate success, and often I wasn’t entirely happy with the crust – either it wasn’t flaky or tasty enough, or it stuck to everything and fell apart when I tried to roll it out and place it in the pan.  There is a combination of things contributing to my success with my current choice of crust dough, but at least one key factor is this: in the past, I’ve impulsively decided that I want pie and that I want it as soon as possible, so instead of refrigerating the dough for at least an hour, I put it in the freezer for ten to twenty minutes.  I’m not sure exactly what effect that has in changing the dough, but I suspect that part of it is uneven chilling of the dough and perhaps chilling the butter in the dough too much before it has to be rolled out, but it often results in dough that falls apart too easily and doesn’t have as nice of a texture.  Alice Waters’ book talks about letting the dough warm up a little bit before working with it, so that it is chilled and fairly firm, but not solid, and that makes for a malleable consistency that’s easy to work with and won’t fall apart when you’re trying to roll it out or transfer it.  We finished the entire pie at dinner, so either Alice Waters has shed light on my life in the kitchen once again, or I’m psyching myself into thinking that and reaping the benefits.  Either way, I’m happy.

A garden dinner of mostly French, kinda mushy food.

… But mushy in a mostly pleasant and intentional way.  It was my day to cook, and following Jade’s Japanesey extravaganza and a week-long hiatus from cooking while I was in New York, I felt the need to cook a good, hearty dinner.  And I suppose there’s no hearty food I enjoy more than French food.  (Plus, I have an inordinate number of French cookbooks, and cookbooks that have French-inspired recipes in them.)

So I started planning the meal around 2pm, with my only criteria being that it used up some ingredients in the house and minimized additional purchases.  With that in mind, I followed my usual route in meal planning (thank you, Kairos kitchen managing): start with some starch, find some way to work protein in, make sure there are vegetables, and preferably something greeny or leafy, and, of course, dessert.

Garlic-thyme mashed potato yum-yums

Following the oven fry delight that was last weekend, I was craving more potatoes, so I decided on garlicky mashed potatoes with butter and some fresh thyme for a nice, comforting carb dish.  I blended the potatoes and garlic in the cuisinart because there were too many potatoes and we didn’t have a large mashing utensil, which made the potatoes a little sticky, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a little butter and milk.  Lastly, I mixed in the thyme for a little extra herby flavor.

Lentils that think they're white beans.

For protein, I decided on lentils, since I was jazzed out on tofu and eggs.  And also because I missed the lentils my host mom used to make for me in Paris.  So I broke out my Balthazar book and looked up a recipe, but was also enticed by a white bean recipe, so I ended up partially cooking the lentils and then preparing them in the way specified in the white bean recipe.  We also didn’t have green lentils, but we had an abundance of red lentils, so I just used red.  It came out quite well, except for the fact that I had to fish out stray garlic cloves and large carrot, celery, and onion pieces because the French like dumping ingredients mostly whole into their stewing pots.  Slow cooking stew-y things with whole heads of garlic and many sprigs of thyme certainly imparts a good amount of flavor, though.

Mostly candy cabbage.

Next for the greens.  We had cabbage left over in the fridge from Jade’s cook, so I decided to make something with it.  The problem with cabbage is that its leaves are so densely packed that when you chop them up, they become a large mound that seems substantial, yet when you cook them they reduce.  I had such a pile of cabbage after chopping half a head that I didn’t bother to chop up another half, but halfway through cooking, it looked a little skimpy.  I followed Alice Waters’ advice on just cooking the cabbage with a little butter and salt and water, planning to add some ground sage in for flavor, but even that wasn’t enough, so I added more sage, cinnamon, and a fair amount of honey.  I may have overdone it – the dish tasted a little like dessert, but it didn’t taste bad.  Weirdly enough, it was also just about enough cabbage, since there weren’t many of us at dinner that night.  I suppose my perception that I’ve underestimated is a sign that my portions will be normal-sized, given my tendency to overestimate

Oniony goodness.

And then came the piéce de résistance: The Onion Tart.  I know what you’re thinking – onions and tart, how hard can it be?  Here’s the thing: there are a lot of onions (6 to be exact), and you need to cook them until they caramelize but don’t burn.  Then you need an appropriate tart crust that’s flavorful and flaky.  I gave Alice Waters’ recipe from The Art of Simple Food a shot, and it turned out beautifully.  The crust was flaky and golden, the onions were slow cooked to sweet goodness, and there was thyme involved, which you know I love to use.  I was actually so surprised at how good it was when I took my first bite that I made a noise and prompted everyone else to try it.  Mmm.

Lemon pudding-mousse.

And finally, for dessert, I decided to use some of out many lemons in what my famously beloved Magnolia cookbook calls a pudding, but which was really more like a mousse.  It was sugar, cornstarch, lemon juice and zest, and egg yolks heated into a custard and then folded into some whipped cream, and it turned into a deceptively light-tasting, fluffy, lemony treat, even though its ingredients will probably take a few days, or at least hours, off your total life span.  

Overall, I’d give this meal a thumbs up, despite its unintentional mushiness.  And seriously, if you own or know anyone who owns The Art of Simple Food, make that tart.  It will make your life complete.