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Celeriac & potato mash with watercress salad

Deborah Madison just did a new book, What We Eat When We Eat Alone. The overall conclusion of the book is that when we eat alone, we don’t have to follow the rules – we can eat what and where we want – standing over the sink, in bed, in front of TV, and we don’t have to wait until everyone is seated take a bite. One thing for me that has been changing as I age is that I can wait and eat later now.  I used to get so hungry at 4:00 p.m., that I tended to spoil my dinner appetite with a late afternoon snack, usually sugary – but I’ve gotten better at waiting for something good to cook. The book talks a lot about the differences between men & women eating alone, how men will eat cheeseburgers twice a day, and women are more prone to eating crackers and cheese and wine at cocktail hour and skipping dinner or having a bowl of ice cream or a cup of cocoa. The book points out the exceptions, though, an American man living in England who said his solo meal is cottage cheese on a rice cake with cucumber and tomato – sounds like something my mom would’ve eaten happily.

In some Mollie Katzen book she had an advice for solitary diners section, where she says that cheese is a snack, but melted cheese is a meal.

What We Eat… also points out that women do more cooking for others and so don’t feel like going to a lot of trouble just for themselves. I agree with the woman quoted who said that any meal that takes half a day to prepare should be shared, but I do like slow cooking something just for me – like programming the oven to have rice pudding ready when I get home. I do know I  have been enjoying keeping my kitchen kind of empty recently and cobbling dinner together with whatever I can find – I like the challenge of making something good from random ingredients.  And the sparseness is nice. I also think there’s something about British food that’s comforting – maybe because of the damp climate – they have a lot of foods that seem just right when you come in chilled.

Tuesday I had Brit-inspired, cobbled-together, dinner – mashed celery root (the very last thing from my CSA box, half the knobby root dredged up from the downstairs fridge where it was sitting, lonely in the veg drawer with just an onion to keep it company, wrapped in a plastic bag, and more than half frozen) and potato, with butter and a spoonful of sour cream, with watercress salad on the side. I mixed grainy mustard, rice vinegar, a pinch of sugar, and walnut oil in a bowl then tossed in the washed cress. But maybe it should have been shared, rather than solo – the cress that I didn’t eat wilted and went down the drain; half the celeriac-potato mash is still in a plastic container in the fridge. Hmm, probably be just right, fried up with an egg the next time I come home hungry.

I tried to plan things so that people could be as acetic or extravagant in their food choices as they wished – well, in the confines of a simple soup dinner, anyways. So there was a vegan soup, greens & garlic soup from Anna Thomas newer Vegetarian Epicure – it was definitely the unexpected hit of the night. A whole head of garlic, onions, and greens – I used spinach and curly & lacinto kales – broth (although one of the funny things about Thomas book is a lot of the recipes say “chicken or vegetarian broth), cubed potatoes, white wine, and a dash of rice vinegar to bring the flavor up. I think it was so good because I used several kinds of veggie broth I had frozen, one made with greens, one with lots of herbs, one a kind of standard carrot, celery, onion, garlic broth. Paired with the greens soup was 101 Cookbooks seeded flatbread, also vegan, no eggs or dairy.

The other two soups were from the Ovens of Brittany, a long-ago restaurant chain in Madison WI, where I worked for about 4 years: Cream of vegetable, and Spanish country soup. The cream of vegetable was the rich one, although I used whole milk & half & half, rather than the heavy cream called for. I did use all the butter specified; almost 2 sticks, 14 TBLS, but dispersed through a little over a gallon of soup – at least 15 servings, so not really all that much butter when divided by servings.

The bread to go with the cream soup was buttermilk pull-aparts, from this Saveur recipe. The bread for the Spanish country soup – that I made with bratwurst & bacon instead of ham & chorizio – was long-rise no-knead, a brown loaf and a white sourdough, that I think was the best sourdough I’ve ever made.

And then there were 3 kinds of bar cookies for dessert – Dorie Greenspan’s blondies; brownies – I used a cakier King Arthur recipe, rather than my standard very fudgy ones; and raison bars, filling from an old better Homes & Gardens cookie book, crust from Betty Crocker.

Chicken liver pate with seedy flatbread wedges

But we’ve been eating the leftovers all weekend, such as there was. I took some of the flatbread and a little pate – also a leftover, frozen since the cookie party – over to Steve & Heike’s, where we ate them with smoked oysters and a beer and akmak for a little snack before going to see David Bromberg and Jorma Kaukonen. Watching these two old pickers was great fun – I’d forgotten how funny Bromberg is – someone called out a request and he said:

Look at me. I’m a shlubby overweight Jewish guy, and being up here is the most power I get. You people might know what you want to hear, but you have no idea how to compose a set”.

I think he’s the Daniel Pinkwater of folk. I’d also forgotten his funny lyrics – “Don’t let the glasses fool you” – that should be my motto.

I took the last half of the sourdough loaf, and the last brownies and raison bars to John yesterday. We passed through Milwaukee on the way to a West HS hockey game, and had lunch at Honeypie.

That leaves only the bucket of cream o’ veg left – can’t decide if we should eat it for dinner tonight, or it’s work lunches for me the rest of the week.

Yogurt bucket of cream o' vegetable soup

WeatherDock on my computer

…. must have been a busy week, since I have not written since last Friday. We’re into the grinding down part of the winter, we had rain and fog, and now it’s really cold, that cheery sun actually indicating that’s it’s clear enough to be cold. And because of the rain, we lost a lot of our pretty snow cover – when I was walking to work this morning I went past a snow drift that’s outside the university bookstore, where the smokers stand. It was a greyish, pockmarked, lump of ice, studded with cigarette butts. Lovely.

Tonight is soup for dinner; stayed up late cooking on both Tuesday – baking breads & bars, cleaning greens, making dressing – and Wednesday, last night – making the soups themselves, and rolls, and the dough for Heidi’s seedy flatbread, that I’ll roll out when I get there, and bake at the last minute, in a really hot oven – warm the place up. I also made some tea/cidar – some cinammon spice tea with a little bit of brown sugar, mixed with cidar. In the summer, I was making tea/juice drinks, like Darjeeling tea with a peach teabag and some peach juice, hibiscus-mint, and so on. Tonight I think I’ll heat the tea/cidar, serve it as hot spice cidar, since it’s so cold out.

Oh, yeah, and when I was done cooking last night and wanted to watch some mindless TV and drink a beer, the wonders of cable provided me with two versions of Johnny Depp as a criminal – George Jung in Blow (John’s easy Halloween costume a few years ago – all it took was a baggie of Wondra and some cheap aviator sunglasses), and Donnie Brasco. I watched Blow, even though I think Donnie’s a far better movie – it had almost and hour and a half to go, and the last 58 minutes of Blow, till midnight, seemed a lot more resonable.

Teeny tiny camera did a good job in Boston, but I forgot to bring it or any other camera for tonight; iPhoneroids are us, I guess.

I did use some of squash in the first thing I made from one of my Christmas books, a sweet potato pound cake from All Cakes Considered.

While walking home tonight I remembered a parsnip souffle recipe in Anne Bramley’s Eat Feed Autumn Winter – a book I did recipe testing for (it’s a nice gig, recipe testing – you do not need to make production quantities of anything, only a small batch, and it’s almost better to be less pro – more like a typical home cook; I’ve done it twice and would love to do more). Anne’s parsnip souffle recipe has a nice trick: you cook the parsnips and then puree them in the food processor with flour and butter while they’re warm, so it’s like making the roux that the souffle needs, without having to make a roux. Anyways, I figured it would work OK with the squash – but it must’ve been a lot wetter than parsnips – the top of the souffle was nicely brown and crusty but the interior was way too wet. It tasted good – We ate what we could and the rest went down the disposal (I don’t like composting prepared food). Despite concentrating on eating only the edible crusts, I now feel like I personally consumed at least 4 of the 6 eggs in the thing, and all of the cheese; I have that “boy was that rich feeling” just a bit too much.

Loose wet interior

Nice brown top

I think the famed Northern light in the paintings of the Dutch masters, Vermeer, Aelbert Cuyp, Pieter de Hooch, is winter light too, mostly.

Winter light is also what I saw when I walked out of work today, still light at 4:58 p.m. on January 12th – even though the predicters say that the climate here in WI is going to get more like Pittsburgh – more rain on top of snow, warmer, cloudier.

These are actually beef; I served the vegetarian, roasted squash & corn, enchiladas from this dish last night

Last night a group of about 14 ate chicken or roasted squash & corn enchiladas, Spanish rice, salad with Cafe Flora ranch dressing, and flan, at the first winter one dish dinner for 2010.

When I headed over to the house my plan was to just take iPhone pictures – but I didn’t even do that. Hence the older shot – last night’s enchiladas were pretty much twins – maybe just a tad less brown around the edges.

I was less-than-pleased with the flan – it could have been creamier. The recipe said bake it for 1 1/2 hours – and the last time I made it, when it came out softer, it was a double batch; more volume, more cooking time. I thought this smaller flan was done at the 1 hour mark, and should have trusted my senses rather than the recipe’s instructions. Still, I don’t think anyone noticed. The enchiladas were just about perfect; the chicken was picked from stock carcasses, so FREE – the sweetness of the squash and corn was just right with the sauce. The dressing was also surprisingly good, and easy: 1/2 cup yogurt, mixed with 1/2 cup mayo, and 1 TBLS each fresh thyme, lemon juice, chopped parsley, and rice vinegar. I think the secret is good yogurt – I used Mountain High Original, which is whole milk – the recipe does allow as how if you’re going to use low-fat, you should drain it to thicken it.

It was a nice group – I think I’m going to try to limit these dinner to 15 – 20, rather than trying to fill the place (33!). It’s easier and quieter for a week day night with a few fewer people.

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I made fried rice for dinner – looks like I posted my recipe a little over a year ago.

Fried rice at the kitchen counter, Nov. 2008

I made it pretty much the same tonight but with tofu instead of chicken – I bought a package of some kind of Asian seasoned tofu because I thought it’d be nice & chewy. Instead it was soft and cooked liver-like in texture. Don’t think I’ll buy that kind again – it was WestSoy – the company doesn’t even list it on their web site.

Instead of eating my fried rice seated at the kitchen counter with a beer, while reading the New Yorker, I sat on the couch and watched Johnny Depp in Public Enemies. I still enjoyed the beer – a Hopalicious, local microbrew, that I usually find a little bitter, but it was good with the rice. My cats were just as desparate as always to get a taste of the rice, too.

posted from my iPhone