A note: I have modified the Pineapple Upside-Down-Cake recipe, and would (again) love feedback. The recipe is findable on the left side of this blog.
The other day, I ran in to one of my Spanish students from last semester (she is from Spain; I taught her English), and seeing her reminded me of one of my all-time favorite tomato recipes, one which is imperative to make during tomato season, and is so delicious that I often succumb to the temptation to make it even when the only tomatoes available are barely-pink watery-tasting Romas.
It is a sort of fancy meal, but it is also wonderful because it is made of some of the cheapest ingredients around. The cost comes with the time and care required to prepare it. I personally know people who grow every single one of these ingredients, to eat (except for the salt). I have tried to separate out the recipe from the commentary, so that more experienced cooks don't have as much to wade through the first time through. As usual, I would love feedback.
Spanish Omelette (also, authentically, known as "Spanish tortilla")
Time: up to 45 minutes; can be as short as 20, if you chop stuff small enough and pay attention so that you don't burn things you are cooking on high heat and also if you don't mind using a little extra oil (again, so things don't burn).
One Small Potato
One Small Onion
Olive Oil (Spanish, if you can, just for the sake of authenticity, even though we all know that both tomatoes and potatoes originally came from the New World. But I guess that Ferdinand and Isabella did fund Columbus, so Spain probably has as much right to claim New World agricultural goods as as the next country.)
An egg
A tomato
a little bit of fresh Parmesan, if you have it and have time to use it (this is NOT authentic, as far as I know, but it is very yummy)
Chop the onion first, and then chop the tomato while the onion is frying in some olive oil.
I will not tell you what size to chop your vegetables, but I will tell you that the smaller a piece of produce is, the more quickly it cooks, and the more evenly a bunch of vegetable pieces are chopped, the more evenly they will cook (translation: smaller pieces cook faster, and if your pieces are all the same size, you are less likely to burn the ones that are smaller than all the others, because there WON'T be any that are smaller than all the others).
When I am having an averagely busy day, I chop my onions into approximately 1/8" thick half-rings. I chop the potatoes approximately the same size.
When I am having a very busy day, I'm not so careful about making my slices thin, and then I compensate by chopping the flat slices into smaller pieces. (Please tell me this makes sense. Darn, I really need to get a camera.) The other thing you can do, at least on the potato front, is to either 1) grate your potato, or 2) buy grated potatoes, which are ridiculously cheap at the grocery store (no, really, ridiculous is the word, but here is not the place to go in to U.S. farm subsidy policy). The advantage of grated potatoes is that they quickly achieve our two desired attributes: they are small, and they are evenly sized. The only disadvantages happen if you don't like the texture of grated potatoes, or if you have difficulty (as I sometimes do) in grating potatoes without also grating your fingers.
If you want to broil this at the end, you can either use something that can both be fried and broiled in (like a cast-iron skillet), or else plan to transfer your omelette to something broil-able at the point in the recipe where you broil.
So. Fry your onions until they are (pretty) soft and (pretty) brown-looking. Either one of these things can happen without the other. Soft comes from cooking on low heat and with the lid on; brown comes from cooking with higher heat, with the lid off, and it is also a good idea to stir your onions with something that can scrape the bottom of the pan while you are browning them. I normally go for soft first, then brown, but I'm not too picky about making them completely soft because they get a second chance when I cook them the second time around. If I'm in a hurry, I just go for even a little less soft before browning them.
Scrape the onions out of the skillet on to a plate.
Fry the potatoes. This time, don't worry quite so much about soft, since this seems to come more easily to potatoes than it does to onions. Once the potatoes are mostly cooked, add the onions in again. Cook 'em until they smell so heavenly that you are strongly tempted to just eat the whole mess without finishing the rest of the recipe. If you choose to cave to this temptation, I beg of you to please try again later to finish it-- it really is worth it.
Crack the egg in to a bowl. Whisk it with a wire whisk, if you have one (I don't, and am quite adept at doing this with a fork) until the white and the yolk seem pretty well mixed together. Pour the egg over the sizzling potato-and-onion mixture. Turn the heat down just a little. If you want, swirl the pan a little so that the uncooked part of the egg goes into those parts which are more cooked, thus making the whole thing cook a little more evenly.
Grate some Parmesan on to the cooked omelette. That's right, "some". That is how much. I don't know; pretend it's a really sparse pizza or something. Put the whole thing in the broiler. (Wait. Did I say to use a cast-iron skillet or otherwise oven-proof pan? OK. Now I have.) If I recall correctly, about two minutes will do you. You just want the cheese a bit toasty-golden.
If you don't use the Parmesan, you will want to salt your omelette. Either way, the last step is to slice the tomatoes as thick as you want (both thick (up to a quarter of an inch) and thin (about a sixteenth of an inch) slices taste good in different ways, so try what sounds good and see what happens) and then spread them in a single layer over your omelette.
I eat this with a fork, from a breakable plate, with a cloth napkin on hand if I can.
[Food purists may want to plug their ears for this next sentence.] Occasionally, when I am forced to make this with dreadful, store-bought winter tomatoes, I will eat this meal with ketchup.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Happiness-Inducing Childrens' Books: An Incomplete Annotated Bibliography
I'm sure I'll miss some, but I wanted to share what I can remember, at the moment. These will be approximately in age order, from youngest to oldest (of the person you read them to).
Note on Cornelia's idiolect ("idiolect" is linguistics-ese for the way that you, and you alone, talk): "little people" means "children".
Sandra Boynton used to write Hallmark cards (gaak!) but has gone on to a distinguished career as a writer of some of the most hysterically funny board books you have (n)ever laid hands on. Three of my most favorites at the moment are:
What's Wrong, Little Pookie?
The story is a simple one of a little child (maybe two or three years old) who is upset, as his mother tries to calm him down. For any of my readers who may not interact with small children on a regular basis, I have to say that this book is very, very realistic in its dialogue and resolution. Well, it's pretty close, anyway.
Dinosaur's Binkit
I bought a copy of this at DI, ended up giving it to my nephew because he liked it so much, and then ended up getting another copy for myself. In the story, the dinosaur has to go to bed, but is upset because he can't find his blanket. I won't tell you the ending, but I will tell you that it's happy. This book has one shiny/mirror part (little people like these a lot-- they like looking at their eyes in the mirror), fuzzy parts, AND flaps.
Fuzzy Fuzzy Fuzzy
Last Christmas I wanted to get my youngest nephew a "feely" book for his present. I saw several options, some of which were eminently acceptable, but when I saw that Sandra Boynton had written one, I knew that my search had ended. ["Feely" books have unusual textures incorporated in to the pages: sponges, faux fur, plastic, sandpaper, etc. I have to admit that these are more enjoyable to read in the presence of the little people they are intended for.]
I cannot leave the topic of Sandra Boynton without mentioning that she is also the lyricist for such classic songs as "Philadelphia Chickens," "Go to Sleep, My Zoodle," and "I Want to Be Your Personal Penguin," which is my just-younger-sister's theme song, because she is (mediumly) obsessed with penguins. You can find a recording of the penguin song here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhKTuLigH9Q
(I hope that is it. I'm at work-- not on the clock, just so you know-- and at work, youtube is blocked, so I don't know for sure that the link is good. But I got it by googling "I want to be your personal penguin".)
Goodnight, Gorilla
by Peggy Rathman
Follows the touching saga (OK, just kidding) of a zookeeper who thinks he is putting all of the animals to bed, but in reality the mouse has stolen his key, and handed it to the gorilla, who lets out all of the animals in turn right after the zookeeper passes their cages. It's just a classic. That's all I have to say. Well, that, and that this book is happiness-inducing because it is so silly.
Warning: age jump. We are now entering the realm of books with rippable pages.
Duck Soup
by Jackie Urbanovic
I ran across this at Borders, one day when I was trying to decide how to spend my Christmas Present/ Gift card. In retrospect, I should have spent it on this book. It's about a duck that is making soup, and he decides to go out for something-- maybe it's another ingredient, I can't remember-- and when his friends wander in, they think he has fallen in the soup. Reading this now, it really doesn't seem that funny at all, but I promise that it was quite-- well-- happiness-inducing. The book even won an award of some kind. Plus, Jackie Urbanovic lives in Maryland, which means that the book has to be good.
Mouse Tails
by Arnold Lobel
This book of short stories is by the same guy that wrote the Frog and Toad series. I'm putting it at this point in the age-sequence because, even though it is more of a chapter book, the stories themselves really appeal more to the five-to-seven-year-old set. But a grownup with a properly developed sense of humor will also find them amusing. Really.
Books that are not so much hapinesss-inducing as just plain cool, and which are mostly pictures:
Tuesday
by David Wiesener
Probably no one reading this blog has not read and loved this book, but if I didn't mention it, someone would be sure to comment and mention it. (Hey, wait a minute...) Brief plot synopsis: one Tuesday night, the frogs in a particular town start floating. This is unexpected to all. Both oddness and hilarity ensue.
Gallop
by Rufus Seder
This is another book that I bought for nephew, and then ended up getting for myself. Through a technique that is hard enough to explain when the book is in front of you (and possibly impossible when it isn't, so I'm not going to try), the black-and-white illustrations in this book really look like they're moving when you turn the pages.
Thought-provoking, but still happy, in a quiet sort of way:
The Gardener
by Sarah Stewart and David Small
My oldest nephew really loved this book when he was about four. It's about a little girl who goes to live with her uncle in the city during the great depression. The story is close to as sad as the premise indicates, but it is also, as its inclusion on this list indicates, happy.
I really like Sarah Stewart and David Small. {Warning: irrelevant story in the rest of the paragraph.} They came and gave a talk at the HBLL a couple of years ago (which I quite enjoyed), and after the talk was over, I happened to overhear Sarah Stewart saying she was hungry, and I just so happened to have a couple of homegrown juliet tomatoes with me, which kind of tomatoes are the most delicious in the world that I have tasted thus far. So I offered them to her, and she accepted, and that's all there is to that story.
They also wrote a book together called The Friend, but that one is far more thought-provoking than happiness-inducing, so it goes on another list.
The Three Questions
by John J. Muth
is based on a short story by Leo Tolstoy. I actually liked the original story better-- OK, what I know of the original story from the note in the back of the book-- but this story is way and definitely wonderful, leaving you feeling like you might be a better person than you thought you were, and that you just might be able to save the world by small acts of kindness after all. Or something like that. It probably depends on your mood. I encountered this one on that same buying trip wherein I found Duck Soup, and no, I didn't buy this one, either. I was determined to buy some music, but was disappointed in the musicality of the musicians on the recording I got. Anyway. I was already familiar with Mr. Muth because I owned Zen Shorts, which is also very, very good. And which I maybe should have put on this list, too, but it is getting to be a very long list.
The Big Little Book of Happy Sadness
by Colin Thompson
This is the book that inspired this whole blog. It's on sale RIGHT NOW at the bookstore (notice that around here, just as "the church," uncapitalized, means "the LDS church," "the bookstore," uncapitalized, means of course the BYU bookstore) and the only reason why I haven't bought it is because of a lack of funds. Which I may just choose to ignore and, as I regularly tell my best friend, eat potatoes for a week (i.e. take it out of the food budget). I have to say that putting staff picks on sale is one of the most brilliant ideas anyone around there has come up with in some time, and if they stole it from someone else, so much the better.
Here's a very brief synopsis: "George lived alone with his grandmother and an empty place where his mother and father should be." (That is from, I think, the first page, and it is on every synopsis I have seen of this book, including the inside front flap.) After this sad beginning, we see that George adopts an unloved puppy.
Think it sounds boring? Think it sounds only mildly happiness-inducing? I dare you. Just read it.
Note on Cornelia's idiolect ("idiolect" is linguistics-ese for the way that you, and you alone, talk): "little people" means "children".
Sandra Boynton used to write Hallmark cards (gaak!) but has gone on to a distinguished career as a writer of some of the most hysterically funny board books you have (n)ever laid hands on. Three of my most favorites at the moment are:
What's Wrong, Little Pookie?
The story is a simple one of a little child (maybe two or three years old) who is upset, as his mother tries to calm him down. For any of my readers who may not interact with small children on a regular basis, I have to say that this book is very, very realistic in its dialogue and resolution. Well, it's pretty close, anyway.
Dinosaur's Binkit
I bought a copy of this at DI, ended up giving it to my nephew because he liked it so much, and then ended up getting another copy for myself. In the story, the dinosaur has to go to bed, but is upset because he can't find his blanket. I won't tell you the ending, but I will tell you that it's happy. This book has one shiny/mirror part (little people like these a lot-- they like looking at their eyes in the mirror), fuzzy parts, AND flaps.
Fuzzy Fuzzy Fuzzy
Last Christmas I wanted to get my youngest nephew a "feely" book for his present. I saw several options, some of which were eminently acceptable, but when I saw that Sandra Boynton had written one, I knew that my search had ended. ["Feely" books have unusual textures incorporated in to the pages: sponges, faux fur, plastic, sandpaper, etc. I have to admit that these are more enjoyable to read in the presence of the little people they are intended for.]
I cannot leave the topic of Sandra Boynton without mentioning that she is also the lyricist for such classic songs as "Philadelphia Chickens," "Go to Sleep, My Zoodle," and "I Want to Be Your Personal Penguin," which is my just-younger-sister's theme song, because she is (mediumly) obsessed with penguins. You can find a recording of the penguin song here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhKTuLigH9Q
(I hope that is it. I'm at work-- not on the clock, just so you know-- and at work, youtube is blocked, so I don't know for sure that the link is good. But I got it by googling "I want to be your personal penguin".)
Goodnight, Gorilla
by Peggy Rathman
Follows the touching saga (OK, just kidding) of a zookeeper who thinks he is putting all of the animals to bed, but in reality the mouse has stolen his key, and handed it to the gorilla, who lets out all of the animals in turn right after the zookeeper passes their cages. It's just a classic. That's all I have to say. Well, that, and that this book is happiness-inducing because it is so silly.
Warning: age jump. We are now entering the realm of books with rippable pages.
Duck Soup
by Jackie Urbanovic
I ran across this at Borders, one day when I was trying to decide how to spend my Christmas Present/ Gift card. In retrospect, I should have spent it on this book. It's about a duck that is making soup, and he decides to go out for something-- maybe it's another ingredient, I can't remember-- and when his friends wander in, they think he has fallen in the soup. Reading this now, it really doesn't seem that funny at all, but I promise that it was quite-- well-- happiness-inducing. The book even won an award of some kind. Plus, Jackie Urbanovic lives in Maryland, which means that the book has to be good.
Mouse Tails
by Arnold Lobel
This book of short stories is by the same guy that wrote the Frog and Toad series. I'm putting it at this point in the age-sequence because, even though it is more of a chapter book, the stories themselves really appeal more to the five-to-seven-year-old set. But a grownup with a properly developed sense of humor will also find them amusing. Really.
Books that are not so much hapinesss-inducing as just plain cool, and which are mostly pictures:
Tuesday
by David Wiesener
Probably no one reading this blog has not read and loved this book, but if I didn't mention it, someone would be sure to comment and mention it. (Hey, wait a minute...) Brief plot synopsis: one Tuesday night, the frogs in a particular town start floating. This is unexpected to all. Both oddness and hilarity ensue.
Gallop
by Rufus Seder
This is another book that I bought for nephew, and then ended up getting for myself. Through a technique that is hard enough to explain when the book is in front of you (and possibly impossible when it isn't, so I'm not going to try), the black-and-white illustrations in this book really look like they're moving when you turn the pages.
Thought-provoking, but still happy, in a quiet sort of way:
The Gardener
by Sarah Stewart and David Small
My oldest nephew really loved this book when he was about four. It's about a little girl who goes to live with her uncle in the city during the great depression. The story is close to as sad as the premise indicates, but it is also, as its inclusion on this list indicates, happy.
I really like Sarah Stewart and David Small. {Warning: irrelevant story in the rest of the paragraph.} They came and gave a talk at the HBLL a couple of years ago (which I quite enjoyed), and after the talk was over, I happened to overhear Sarah Stewart saying she was hungry, and I just so happened to have a couple of homegrown juliet tomatoes with me, which kind of tomatoes are the most delicious in the world that I have tasted thus far. So I offered them to her, and she accepted, and that's all there is to that story.
They also wrote a book together called The Friend, but that one is far more thought-provoking than happiness-inducing, so it goes on another list.
The Three Questions
by John J. Muth
is based on a short story by Leo Tolstoy. I actually liked the original story better-- OK, what I know of the original story from the note in the back of the book-- but this story is way and definitely wonderful, leaving you feeling like you might be a better person than you thought you were, and that you just might be able to save the world by small acts of kindness after all. Or something like that. It probably depends on your mood. I encountered this one on that same buying trip wherein I found Duck Soup, and no, I didn't buy this one, either. I was determined to buy some music, but was disappointed in the musicality of the musicians on the recording I got. Anyway. I was already familiar with Mr. Muth because I owned Zen Shorts, which is also very, very good. And which I maybe should have put on this list, too, but it is getting to be a very long list.
The Big Little Book of Happy Sadness
by Colin Thompson
This is the book that inspired this whole blog. It's on sale RIGHT NOW at the bookstore (notice that around here, just as "the church," uncapitalized, means "the LDS church," "the bookstore," uncapitalized, means of course the BYU bookstore) and the only reason why I haven't bought it is because of a lack of funds. Which I may just choose to ignore and, as I regularly tell my best friend, eat potatoes for a week (i.e. take it out of the food budget). I have to say that putting staff picks on sale is one of the most brilliant ideas anyone around there has come up with in some time, and if they stole it from someone else, so much the better.
Here's a very brief synopsis: "George lived alone with his grandmother and an empty place where his mother and father should be." (That is from, I think, the first page, and it is on every synopsis I have seen of this book, including the inside front flap.) After this sad beginning, we see that George adopts an unloved puppy.
Think it sounds boring? Think it sounds only mildly happiness-inducing? I dare you. Just read it.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Jeremiah 10:4
Sorry. Decided not to put this one up after all. I may choose to email it to you if you ask me to; I just realized that it was not something I wanted in this public place.
Monday, September 1, 2008
A few good tomato recipes (for one hungry or two not as hungry people)
Garlic toast [time: 5 minutes, sometimes including eating]
Bread
1 clove garlic
olive oil
yummiferous tomato
Toast your bread, in the skillet if you want something really yummy. Rub it with a piece of cut garlic. Dribble on some olive oil. Put on slices of the yummiest tomato you can find.
Pasta Salad [time: 20 minutes, including pasta boiling time, and then half an hour for chilling]
(All measurements are approximate, since I never measure for this recipe anymore, and I don't remember where I got the original. Please comment with corrections, if you find that different proportions work better.)
2 c. cooked pasta
1 T olive oil
1 clove of garlic, minced
1/8 t. salt
1 or 2 as-delicious-as-you-can-find ripe tomatoes, diced in to 1/4-inch pieces (approximately)
1 1/2 T snipped parsley
juice from half a lime
Combine the ingredients and chill. It is important to use fresh lime, fresh garlic, and fresh parsley. Adjust seasonings to taste. (In particular, you might want more salt and/or lime juice; I didn't want to over-guess on those.)
Notes on the ingredients:
These days I use spaghetti for the pasta, but the original recipe called for shell. I also use whole wheat pasta, these days, to make it more healthy.
I snip the parsley with scissors. Books always say to use kitchen scissors (which are specially made for use in the kitchen) but I don't have any, so I use regular scissors and call them kitchen scissors because I use them in the kitchen. Remember that the stems have more flavor, and snip accordingly. I think that I snip it off about a quarter of an inch at a time. I have also substituted cilantro for parsley in this recipe, with success.
Of course you can use a lemon instead of a lime, but limes are always a little cheaper, and sometimes a lot cheapter than lemons, so I have taken to using limes. I also find that if I let them sit on the counter and get a bit hard before I squeeze them, the juice comes right out, which is most handy. If you can't get decent tomatoes and you are really craving this salad, you can add extra salt and extra lime juice to make up for the cardboard-type taste of bad tomatoes.
Stuffed Tomatoes
[time: five minutes, then two hours (or overnight), then 10 minutes]
The excuse for this recipe's lack of exactness is that the cookbook is in a storage unit at the moment, but I must admit that I had stopped measuring for this recipe before I sent the book off to boarding school, anyway.
some ripe, delicious tomatoes, big enough to hold stuffing
salt
good bread (a little stale is OK) (maybe a slice, wonderbread-size, for every two tomatoes, which is of course four tomato halves)
garlic
herbs, like parsley or basil or dill or rosemary (1 t of dried or 1 T of fresh, cut up, per slice of bread)
Cut the tomatoes in half. Score each cut side with a knife (i.e. make little teeny cuts, like paper cuts, on them). Salt them and then put them in a colander with the cut side down, then leave them to drain for at least a couple of hours.
Also, put some garlic and olive oil on the bread and leave it to-- er-- marinate, while the tomatoes are draining. It's fine if the bread somewhat dries out during this process. (Use the instructions for the garlic bread up at the top, to figure out how to put the olive oil and garlic on the bread.)
When the tomatoes are all drained, scrape their guts out with a spoon (a-la Halloween pumpkins). Save the guts to use in Ratatoullie (recipe below).
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, cut the bread in to small cubes-- small enough to be spooned in to the tomatoes at the proper time. I think that 1/4 inch is pretty good, but if you are in need of something finer-- like, you decided to try this with cherry tomatoes or something-- then make sure your bread is nice and dry and toasty (this can be accomplished with a skillet) and then grate it on a cheese grater. If the bread isn't toast when you try to grate it, then you will get some crumbs, but you will also get larger, rolled-up bits of bread that aren't good for much, so remember to toast them first. Not that I know this from experience.
Mix the olive-oil-and-garlicky bread bits with a teaspoon of dried herb or tablespoon of fresh, per slice of bread. Add a little more olive oil to make it nice and shiny, and then spoon it in to the tomatoes.
Broil the tomatoes for a slightly shorter period of time than I always do. Try a minute and a half with a preheated broiler. I always forget them and have to take off the burned bits on the top.
I suspect that this recipe would be pretty good with cheese on top, but I have yet to confirm this suspicion.
Ratatoullie [time: 20 minutes. I think.]
Just for the record, I loved this and was in the habit of making it some time before the movie was made. I'm just thankful that the movie made everyone aware of at least the name of this delicious food. I never had a recipe for this. I just made it after my sister did.
tomatoes (sure, let's say two of them), diced or sliced
zucchini (one medium. Meaning less than 8 inches long.), sliced to maybe 1/8 inch thick
olive oil
salt
Other potential ingredients:
onions
minced garlic (bottled is fine)
yellow squash
eggplant
mushrooms (button, rehydrated shiitake, whatever)
spinach
lima beans
other summer vegetables that look promising
mediterranean stir fry mix (frozen. Yes, I know it's a travesty, but it does taste OK, and it brings vegetables in to my diet.)
Preheat the olive oil. Oh, yeah, you want amounts. Cover half of the bottom of your skillet, and don't add more than a layer of vegetables at a time. Add zucchini slices, and depending on how meticulous you are feeling that day, brown them to perfection, or else just take the edge off that summer-squashy taste. Remove them to a plate. Heat a little more oil. Start frying the tomatoes. It is important that the oil be hot before the tomatoes go in, or they won't brown properly and it won't taste half as good. Once the tomatoes are a bit brown (you do have to look closely to ascertain this-- it isn't very obvious), add back the zucchini and whatever else you want (I definitely recommend separate cooking of mushrooms, if you want to add them) and cook until-- mm-- done. I mean, until the zuchhini isn't crunchy whatsoever, and the tomatoes are most delicious. If you were feeling meticulous at the beginning of this recipe, the combining stage will take anywhere from ten to thirty seconds, depending on how fast you are at scraping zucchini from a plate in to a skillet and then stirring things together.
When the ratatoullie is on your plate, add some salt. I recommend eating this with the best bread you can muster.
Bread
1 clove garlic
olive oil
yummiferous tomato
Toast your bread, in the skillet if you want something really yummy. Rub it with a piece of cut garlic. Dribble on some olive oil. Put on slices of the yummiest tomato you can find.
Pasta Salad [time: 20 minutes, including pasta boiling time, and then half an hour for chilling]
(All measurements are approximate, since I never measure for this recipe anymore, and I don't remember where I got the original. Please comment with corrections, if you find that different proportions work better.)
2 c. cooked pasta
1 T olive oil
1 clove of garlic, minced
1/8 t. salt
1 or 2 as-delicious-as-you-can-find ripe tomatoes, diced in to 1/4-inch pieces (approximately)
1 1/2 T snipped parsley
juice from half a lime
Combine the ingredients and chill. It is important to use fresh lime, fresh garlic, and fresh parsley. Adjust seasonings to taste. (In particular, you might want more salt and/or lime juice; I didn't want to over-guess on those.)
Notes on the ingredients:
These days I use spaghetti for the pasta, but the original recipe called for shell. I also use whole wheat pasta, these days, to make it more healthy.
I snip the parsley with scissors. Books always say to use kitchen scissors (which are specially made for use in the kitchen) but I don't have any, so I use regular scissors and call them kitchen scissors because I use them in the kitchen. Remember that the stems have more flavor, and snip accordingly. I think that I snip it off about a quarter of an inch at a time. I have also substituted cilantro for parsley in this recipe, with success.
Of course you can use a lemon instead of a lime, but limes are always a little cheaper, and sometimes a lot cheapter than lemons, so I have taken to using limes. I also find that if I let them sit on the counter and get a bit hard before I squeeze them, the juice comes right out, which is most handy. If you can't get decent tomatoes and you are really craving this salad, you can add extra salt and extra lime juice to make up for the cardboard-type taste of bad tomatoes.
Stuffed Tomatoes
[time: five minutes, then two hours (or overnight), then 10 minutes]
The excuse for this recipe's lack of exactness is that the cookbook is in a storage unit at the moment, but I must admit that I had stopped measuring for this recipe before I sent the book off to boarding school, anyway.
some ripe, delicious tomatoes, big enough to hold stuffing
salt
good bread (a little stale is OK) (maybe a slice, wonderbread-size, for every two tomatoes, which is of course four tomato halves)
garlic
herbs, like parsley or basil or dill or rosemary (1 t of dried or 1 T of fresh, cut up, per slice of bread)
Cut the tomatoes in half. Score each cut side with a knife (i.e. make little teeny cuts, like paper cuts, on them). Salt them and then put them in a colander with the cut side down, then leave them to drain for at least a couple of hours.
Also, put some garlic and olive oil on the bread and leave it to-- er-- marinate, while the tomatoes are draining. It's fine if the bread somewhat dries out during this process. (Use the instructions for the garlic bread up at the top, to figure out how to put the olive oil and garlic on the bread.)
When the tomatoes are all drained, scrape their guts out with a spoon (a-la Halloween pumpkins). Save the guts to use in Ratatoullie (recipe below).
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, cut the bread in to small cubes-- small enough to be spooned in to the tomatoes at the proper time. I think that 1/4 inch is pretty good, but if you are in need of something finer-- like, you decided to try this with cherry tomatoes or something-- then make sure your bread is nice and dry and toasty (this can be accomplished with a skillet) and then grate it on a cheese grater. If the bread isn't toast when you try to grate it, then you will get some crumbs, but you will also get larger, rolled-up bits of bread that aren't good for much, so remember to toast them first. Not that I know this from experience.
Mix the olive-oil-and-garlicky bread bits with a teaspoon of dried herb or tablespoon of fresh, per slice of bread. Add a little more olive oil to make it nice and shiny, and then spoon it in to the tomatoes.
Broil the tomatoes for a slightly shorter period of time than I always do. Try a minute and a half with a preheated broiler. I always forget them and have to take off the burned bits on the top.
I suspect that this recipe would be pretty good with cheese on top, but I have yet to confirm this suspicion.
Ratatoullie [time: 20 minutes. I think.]
Just for the record, I loved this and was in the habit of making it some time before the movie was made. I'm just thankful that the movie made everyone aware of at least the name of this delicious food. I never had a recipe for this. I just made it after my sister did.
tomatoes (sure, let's say two of them), diced or sliced
zucchini (one medium. Meaning less than 8 inches long.), sliced to maybe 1/8 inch thick
olive oil
salt
Other potential ingredients:
onions
minced garlic (bottled is fine)
yellow squash
eggplant
mushrooms (button, rehydrated shiitake, whatever)
spinach
lima beans
other summer vegetables that look promising
mediterranean stir fry mix (frozen. Yes, I know it's a travesty, but it does taste OK, and it brings vegetables in to my diet.)
Preheat the olive oil. Oh, yeah, you want amounts. Cover half of the bottom of your skillet, and don't add more than a layer of vegetables at a time. Add zucchini slices, and depending on how meticulous you are feeling that day, brown them to perfection, or else just take the edge off that summer-squashy taste. Remove them to a plate. Heat a little more oil. Start frying the tomatoes. It is important that the oil be hot before the tomatoes go in, or they won't brown properly and it won't taste half as good. Once the tomatoes are a bit brown (you do have to look closely to ascertain this-- it isn't very obvious), add back the zucchini and whatever else you want (I definitely recommend separate cooking of mushrooms, if you want to add them) and cook until-- mm-- done. I mean, until the zuchhini isn't crunchy whatsoever, and the tomatoes are most delicious. If you were feeling meticulous at the beginning of this recipe, the combining stage will take anywhere from ten to thirty seconds, depending on how fast you are at scraping zucchini from a plate in to a skillet and then stirring things together.
When the ratatoullie is on your plate, add some salt. I recommend eating this with the best bread you can muster.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
My favorite child quotations (OK, and a couple of grownups, too)
I hope I get these right. Please post corrections, if your memory serves better than mine.
My youngest brother, who was (I think) about four at the time, was playing "three little pigs" with my youngest sister, who I believe was eight; he was making cushion houses with couch cushions, which she would then "blow" over. I was only sort of paying attention as I worked in the kitchen. All of a sudden, I heard a wail from my brother. My sister had just knocked over one of the cushion houses; my brother's protest was, "But [sister], that was a BRICK house!"
It's all a matter of perspective.
My oldest niece was over at my house for a visit one day. I think she was about three at the time. I needed to wash dishes, so I let her have a cloth and stand on a chair next to me at the sink. Again, I was somewhat absorbed in the task at hand, so I caught by surprise when I heard her say, "I'm scrubbing myself, with a scrubby-scrub-scrub."
I looked at her in alarm. I didn't really want to return her to her mother with soapy water all down her front. "You're scrubbing yourself?"
She returned my look with one of scorn. "The spoon." THAT should have been self-evident.
When I told this story to her mother (my sister), she pointed out that since this child was both an oldest and an extremely social child, she had learned to make inanimate objects talk for themselves.
One of my nephews was over at my house one evening, and told my roommate that he liked how her outfit looked. (Since I have stated ages thus far, this nephew was five when this happened.)
She thanked him for the compliment, and said, "You are such an angel."
He said, "Does that mean that I'm good? Because the other thing that it could mean is that I'm dead. Because angels are dead people. Vampires are dead people, too. Maybe I'm an angel vampire," and he went on like this for a while. Five-year-old logic is perfectly sound, but at times difficult to follow, so I don't really remember the rest of his commentary.
My mother visited London on a work trip, and of course one of the MUST see attractions is the London Eye, which is an enormous ferris wheel with these enclosed, see-through cars which take half an hour to go up to the top-- where you get this spectacular view of London-- and another half hour to come down again. One thing you must know about my mother to understand this story is that she gets seasick very easily. I mean, if she is reading on the living room couch and you are doing some sort of movement (other than walking past) which falls in her peripheral vision, she will ask you to stop doing whatever it is. So I guess that the London Eye, slow and stately though it is, does have some rocking motion to it, and sure enough Mom started feeling a bit ill by the end. She ended her report of the experience by saying, "So, I guess that it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me."
My sister just younger than me teaches her 5-year-old in his Primary (church) class. The lesson last week was on laws. She handed out play-dough to the children so that they could make animals; the idea was, they could talk about how laws keep you safe, just like a fence around an animal can keep it safe. One child refused to touch the play-dough. Her son made a fairly respectable (though flatter than average, for real life) turtle. Another child struggled to make a cat. He finally gave up and went with the prevailing trend, though on a smaller scale than the others (see below).
The three remaining children came up to her one at a time. The first handed her a small, thick, tube-shaped creation.
"This is a worm," he announced.
She thought to herself: "Uh-oh. No one can make this play-dough work. We are going to have a mostly-worm menagerie."
Sure enough, the next child came up and handed her a piece of play-dough which looked remarkably like the first one she had gotten. "This is a snake."
The third child also handed her a thick, rolled piece of play-dough. "This is an eel."
Ta-da! Live with your limitations.
The other difficulty with this lesson was that one child kept insisting on talking about Scooby-Doo and scary monsters. After a number of frustrating exchanges, in which she tried to get him back on topic, she finally figured out that this child had misheard the topic; he thought that they were talking about "claws".
Finally, the story I shoud pull out every time people ask for an embarrassing moment, because it isn't THAT embarrassing, and it is pretty funny.
My office is on the third floor of the building where I work. During finals week (for me, as a student) I am expected to turn in grades and grade final tests for my students, on top of any finals I need to do for the classes I am taking. It is a fairly stress-filled, sleep-deprived week, and on top of that, I started feeling under the weather on Sunday, before all this started coming due.
So. I was doing grading stuff on the ground floor, and needed to go to my office, and since I was feeling sick, I took the elevator. When I am well, I can usually beat the elevator by taking the stairs two at a time (when I don't beat it, it's because I have stopped to talk to someone). This day, however, I decided that I didn't care how slow I went, and with how cruddy I felt, the elevator might well be the fastest way anyway.
I was pleased, as I walked towards the elevator, to see that one of the custodial crew was just getting on, which means that he held the door for me and I didn't have to wait for the elevator to make its slow way to the gound floor. He pushed the two, and I pushed the three. Just to be melodramatic, let's say that I leaned against the elevator wall as it crept its slow way upward. (I might really have, but I don't know for sure.)
I got off. I walked down the hall. I punched in the code for the door of my office. It didn't turn green as it usually does. I tried the code again. Again it didn't open. I looked at the nameplate.
AAAAAAH! What are they doing, changing everyone in the office, in the middle of finals week?! Where is my office now? Why didn't they tell me?
I looked around me, searching for answers, and sure enough I found one. It was the custodian. The one who had gotten off at level two. The same level that I had gotten off at.
I walked up to the third floor at that point. Elevators are just too tricky, sometimes.
My youngest brother, who was (I think) about four at the time, was playing "three little pigs" with my youngest sister, who I believe was eight; he was making cushion houses with couch cushions, which she would then "blow" over. I was only sort of paying attention as I worked in the kitchen. All of a sudden, I heard a wail from my brother. My sister had just knocked over one of the cushion houses; my brother's protest was, "But [sister], that was a BRICK house!"
It's all a matter of perspective.
My oldest niece was over at my house for a visit one day. I think she was about three at the time. I needed to wash dishes, so I let her have a cloth and stand on a chair next to me at the sink. Again, I was somewhat absorbed in the task at hand, so I caught by surprise when I heard her say, "I'm scrubbing myself, with a scrubby-scrub-scrub."
I looked at her in alarm. I didn't really want to return her to her mother with soapy water all down her front. "You're scrubbing yourself?"
She returned my look with one of scorn. "The spoon." THAT should have been self-evident.
When I told this story to her mother (my sister), she pointed out that since this child was both an oldest and an extremely social child, she had learned to make inanimate objects talk for themselves.
One of my nephews was over at my house one evening, and told my roommate that he liked how her outfit looked. (Since I have stated ages thus far, this nephew was five when this happened.)
She thanked him for the compliment, and said, "You are such an angel."
He said, "Does that mean that I'm good? Because the other thing that it could mean is that I'm dead. Because angels are dead people. Vampires are dead people, too. Maybe I'm an angel vampire," and he went on like this for a while. Five-year-old logic is perfectly sound, but at times difficult to follow, so I don't really remember the rest of his commentary.
My mother visited London on a work trip, and of course one of the MUST see attractions is the London Eye, which is an enormous ferris wheel with these enclosed, see-through cars which take half an hour to go up to the top-- where you get this spectacular view of London-- and another half hour to come down again. One thing you must know about my mother to understand this story is that she gets seasick very easily. I mean, if she is reading on the living room couch and you are doing some sort of movement (other than walking past) which falls in her peripheral vision, she will ask you to stop doing whatever it is. So I guess that the London Eye, slow and stately though it is, does have some rocking motion to it, and sure enough Mom started feeling a bit ill by the end. She ended her report of the experience by saying, "So, I guess that it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me."
My sister just younger than me teaches her 5-year-old in his Primary (church) class. The lesson last week was on laws. She handed out play-dough to the children so that they could make animals; the idea was, they could talk about how laws keep you safe, just like a fence around an animal can keep it safe. One child refused to touch the play-dough. Her son made a fairly respectable (though flatter than average, for real life) turtle. Another child struggled to make a cat. He finally gave up and went with the prevailing trend, though on a smaller scale than the others (see below).
The three remaining children came up to her one at a time. The first handed her a small, thick, tube-shaped creation.
"This is a worm," he announced.
She thought to herself: "Uh-oh. No one can make this play-dough work. We are going to have a mostly-worm menagerie."
Sure enough, the next child came up and handed her a piece of play-dough which looked remarkably like the first one she had gotten. "This is a snake."
The third child also handed her a thick, rolled piece of play-dough. "This is an eel."
Ta-da! Live with your limitations.
The other difficulty with this lesson was that one child kept insisting on talking about Scooby-Doo and scary monsters. After a number of frustrating exchanges, in which she tried to get him back on topic, she finally figured out that this child had misheard the topic; he thought that they were talking about "claws".
Finally, the story I shoud pull out every time people ask for an embarrassing moment, because it isn't THAT embarrassing, and it is pretty funny.
My office is on the third floor of the building where I work. During finals week (for me, as a student) I am expected to turn in grades and grade final tests for my students, on top of any finals I need to do for the classes I am taking. It is a fairly stress-filled, sleep-deprived week, and on top of that, I started feeling under the weather on Sunday, before all this started coming due.
So. I was doing grading stuff on the ground floor, and needed to go to my office, and since I was feeling sick, I took the elevator. When I am well, I can usually beat the elevator by taking the stairs two at a time (when I don't beat it, it's because I have stopped to talk to someone). This day, however, I decided that I didn't care how slow I went, and with how cruddy I felt, the elevator might well be the fastest way anyway.
I was pleased, as I walked towards the elevator, to see that one of the custodial crew was just getting on, which means that he held the door for me and I didn't have to wait for the elevator to make its slow way to the gound floor. He pushed the two, and I pushed the three. Just to be melodramatic, let's say that I leaned against the elevator wall as it crept its slow way upward. (I might really have, but I don't know for sure.)
I got off. I walked down the hall. I punched in the code for the door of my office. It didn't turn green as it usually does. I tried the code again. Again it didn't open. I looked at the nameplate.
AAAAAAH! What are they doing, changing everyone in the office, in the middle of finals week?! Where is my office now? Why didn't they tell me?
I looked around me, searching for answers, and sure enough I found one. It was the custodian. The one who had gotten off at level two. The same level that I had gotten off at.
I walked up to the third floor at that point. Elevators are just too tricky, sometimes.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Foods I am a snob about
I try my hardest to keep this list short, because being a food snob is expensive, on top of being annoying. However, the list does grow year by year.
Whole wheat flour-- there is absolutely no comparison between the stuff you (usually) buy at the store and fresh-ground. Only lack of money, storage space, and willingness to loose my hearing keeps me from buying a wheat grinder at this very moment.
Lemon and lime juice-- almost nothing does not taste better with fresh juice. I do find, however, that the lemons or limes in question are much easier to squeeze efficiently when I let them sit long enough that their skins get thin. So, juice from a lemon which has recently been whole, but which is not, itself, fresh fresh. (Actually, truth be told, I tend to eat more limes than lemons. This is because they are cheaper, and after my Mexican roommate told me that they don't differentiate them, lingistically or culinarily, where she comes from, I decided that I didn't care either.)
Oatmeal-- no, I do not prefer fresh. I prefer organic. I started buying it a couple of years ago at The Good Earth (local health food store) because there, even the organic stuff costs less than what you would find in a regular grocery store, so I thought: why not? I ate this stuff for months and months. We have a running joke at my house about how if you looked in my ear, the stuff inside would be gray not because it is my brain, but because it is oatmeal. I often eat it every night. One night, when I ran out of the organic stuff and had to use my roommate's "regular," I discovered, to my chagrin, that I had developed yet another food snobbery. The regular stuff really does taste like cardboard, now. But I don't think I would know if I didn't eat it as often as I do.
Tomatoes-- these are hardly worth mentioning, since any human being who does not hate tomatoes and has normally functioning taste buds is perfectly capable of figuring out that store-bought tomatoes tend to be pink-to-red-colored solidish water, and home-grown are the real thing. The only thing to add is, my father grew some Juliets (it's a variety) in the garden one year, and I still fantasize about eating such delicious tomatoes again.
Butter-- OK, so first thing, I eat butter and not margarine. After all my talk about trying to save money, there is the plain and honest and naked truth. But I will say that I go through it VERY slowly, unless young relatives who are reckless with the butter knife have been visiting. The second part of this confession is that I buy the kind of butter which has a very high fat content. I mean, if I am going to buy fat, I want to buy fat. I can skimp on it in my own kitchen; why pay someone else to do it for me?
Honey-- this only makes sense, since my very own great-great uncle was the owner of Cox's Honey in Shelley, Idaho, and that means that the current owners are probably something like my third cousins once or twice removed. I have tried the Cox's Honeyland honey from Utah, and I must say that it just isn't the same.
Gotta go. More later, I hope.
Whole wheat flour-- there is absolutely no comparison between the stuff you (usually) buy at the store and fresh-ground. Only lack of money, storage space, and willingness to loose my hearing keeps me from buying a wheat grinder at this very moment.
Lemon and lime juice-- almost nothing does not taste better with fresh juice. I do find, however, that the lemons or limes in question are much easier to squeeze efficiently when I let them sit long enough that their skins get thin. So, juice from a lemon which has recently been whole, but which is not, itself, fresh fresh. (Actually, truth be told, I tend to eat more limes than lemons. This is because they are cheaper, and after my Mexican roommate told me that they don't differentiate them, lingistically or culinarily, where she comes from, I decided that I didn't care either.)
Oatmeal-- no, I do not prefer fresh. I prefer organic. I started buying it a couple of years ago at The Good Earth (local health food store) because there, even the organic stuff costs less than what you would find in a regular grocery store, so I thought: why not? I ate this stuff for months and months. We have a running joke at my house about how if you looked in my ear, the stuff inside would be gray not because it is my brain, but because it is oatmeal. I often eat it every night. One night, when I ran out of the organic stuff and had to use my roommate's "regular," I discovered, to my chagrin, that I had developed yet another food snobbery. The regular stuff really does taste like cardboard, now. But I don't think I would know if I didn't eat it as often as I do.
Tomatoes-- these are hardly worth mentioning, since any human being who does not hate tomatoes and has normally functioning taste buds is perfectly capable of figuring out that store-bought tomatoes tend to be pink-to-red-colored solidish water, and home-grown are the real thing. The only thing to add is, my father grew some Juliets (it's a variety) in the garden one year, and I still fantasize about eating such delicious tomatoes again.
Butter-- OK, so first thing, I eat butter and not margarine. After all my talk about trying to save money, there is the plain and honest and naked truth. But I will say that I go through it VERY slowly, unless young relatives who are reckless with the butter knife have been visiting. The second part of this confession is that I buy the kind of butter which has a very high fat content. I mean, if I am going to buy fat, I want to buy fat. I can skimp on it in my own kitchen; why pay someone else to do it for me?
Honey-- this only makes sense, since my very own great-great uncle was the owner of Cox's Honey in Shelley, Idaho, and that means that the current owners are probably something like my third cousins once or twice removed. I have tried the Cox's Honeyland honey from Utah, and I must say that it just isn't the same.
Gotta go. More later, I hope.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Princess Nice Girl Has Just Become a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Story
This is because it is largely the creation of my nephew, EE, who has first rights over the story. During a recent visit to my home, he spent most of the time telling me the further adventures of his princess-- and he took the story in a completely different direction than I had envisioned (see below). I, for my part, was sort of attached to the way I was taking things, so I decided that a choose-your-own- adventure might be the best route.
Turns out that Princess Nice Girl's parents are really aliens who are trying to take over the earth; Princess Nice Girl is actually the only one who (with one of her superpowers, which is hidden from her parents) can shoot down their little henchmen-robots. I am unclear on whether this superpower came from a beam, or is a (laser) beam, or both. She also has a superpower of hearing anyone who is screaming for a house.
She is in the book The Only Superhero Who Can Save The World.
She has a magical axe, which can cut down mountains just by touching them, and the mountains turn in to wood, which she can then build houses with. I commented that they must make an awful lot of wood. He said that yes, it was enough to build a whole city, and that it was even enough to build a tower to Mars.
He drew illustrations of all this for me while I was taking a nap-- I have but to get the pictures, a scanner, and a computer-with-working-internet all in one place, now. He also decided that Princess Nice Girl's hair was yellow. I have seen the picture (I promise to scan it in for you, very, very soon), and I can personally report that it is indeed yellow, and not anything like blonde.
Actually, truth be told, the pictures are how this whole thing started-- I desperately needed a nap, so I sat him down at the kitchen table with drawing supplies and instructions to wake me up only if he really needed me. Let it be a warning to you: crazy things can happen when you let a five-year-old loose with colored pencils and blank paper.
In related news, EE's cousin, T, read the original story and liked it, but decided that Princess Nice Girl was not quite the right name. She will be letting me know of acceptable alternatives any time now-- I'll be sure to keep you posted.
Turns out that Princess Nice Girl's parents are really aliens who are trying to take over the earth; Princess Nice Girl is actually the only one who (with one of her superpowers, which is hidden from her parents) can shoot down their little henchmen-robots. I am unclear on whether this superpower came from a beam, or is a (laser) beam, or both. She also has a superpower of hearing anyone who is screaming for a house.
She is in the book The Only Superhero Who Can Save The World.
She has a magical axe, which can cut down mountains just by touching them, and the mountains turn in to wood, which she can then build houses with. I commented that they must make an awful lot of wood. He said that yes, it was enough to build a whole city, and that it was even enough to build a tower to Mars.
He drew illustrations of all this for me while I was taking a nap-- I have but to get the pictures, a scanner, and a computer-with-working-internet all in one place, now. He also decided that Princess Nice Girl's hair was yellow. I have seen the picture (I promise to scan it in for you, very, very soon), and I can personally report that it is indeed yellow, and not anything like blonde.
Actually, truth be told, the pictures are how this whole thing started-- I desperately needed a nap, so I sat him down at the kitchen table with drawing supplies and instructions to wake me up only if he really needed me. Let it be a warning to you: crazy things can happen when you let a five-year-old loose with colored pencils and blank paper.
In related news, EE's cousin, T, read the original story and liked it, but decided that Princess Nice Girl was not quite the right name. She will be letting me know of acceptable alternatives any time now-- I'll be sure to keep you posted.
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