Food nattering

[magid]

A couple of weeks ago I kept on thinking of things I'd like to cook that involved rice, which I took as a sign to buy more, since I was out. Years ago, I learned to bake chicken slowly, covered, with rice, and it's pretty much always yummy. It was only recently that it occurred to me that the chicken was not a necessary ingredient for this method, so the last couple of weeks have included a lot of rice casseroles, a mixture with whatever vegetables were around, spices, and liquid for the rice to absorb. I've been trying to use up the things in my fridge before Passover, and realized I had a lot of pickled radishes* that I hadn't been eating much of. But they were a vegetable, and I experimented, dicing them for a casserole (also the dill, garlic, and garlic scapes)... and using the brine as at least some of the cooking liquid. I'm not sure it would suit most people's palates, that kind of sourness, but it made me very happy, especially combined with a texture that was not only starchy, but crisp at the edges as well. And I managed to use up all those pickles (freeing a couple of canning jars along the way). There was something particularly satisfying about using it all, too. (Other sometimes ingredients included oven-roasted tomatoes, mustard, spinach powder, diced carrots, and lemon pepper.)

* I discovered this year that the only way I reliably like radishes, especially fridge pickles, since they retain more crunch. Since the farm share included a lot of cucumbers earlier in the season that I'd partly turned to fridge pickles, as I ate the cucumbers, I added radishes to the jars of dilly brine; the red ones and the watermelon ones turned the brine more pink.

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I'm out of most proteins, lacking dairy, egg, fish, fowl, or red meat. Except that I found in a corner of the freezer a roast labeled "Moc Tenderloin" (sic), and wanted to cook it (it's been months since I've eaten non-poultry meat). I wasn't sure how to cook it well; Chef Google had a number of suggestions. As I looked 'round, it seemed that the best approach would depend on the leanness of the meat. If fatty, a low and slow baking would tenderize the meat, but if it were lean, a hotter oven would be more appropriate. It was lean enough that I tried a method from Cook's Illustrated: bring the meat to room temperature, put on some salt and pepper, then roast in a 500 F oven for 6 minutes per pound. Last step: turn the oven off and leave it with the door shut for 2 hours. I failed on that last; it smelled so good that I took it out after 90 minutes, and it was amazing, perfectly done for my taste. (Plus, I like using the residual heat, similar to a method for cooking chicken I read about in a Chinese recipe, bringing a pot of water with the chicken submerged to the boil, covering, then turning off the heat and letting it cook in the residual heat).

Some of it I've eaten just straight, every mouthful making me happy. I had a lot of salad greens from last week's farm share pickup, and realized I'd never had beef in a green salad before. So some of it as been cut up and put into salad with mesclun and alfalfa sprouts, dressed with strawberry vinegar, olive oil, and vinegared strawberries (figuring that the strawberry vinegar should be fine outside the fridge for Pesach, but the actual strawberries might not be, so it would be good to eat them now). It's an odd combination, I suppose, but fine with me.

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I'd brought some ginger liqueur with me last week to my Artisan's Asylum shift, and a bunch of people liked it. In fact, one bartender friend said he'd like a liter of it, and someone else would like some too. So last night I quested for organic ginger (found at Harvest; the small Whole Foods nearest me doesn't carry organic ginger root, and I was on foot), and today I started quite a lot of ginger liqueur, so much so that I'm almost out of vodka. Last time the batch of ginger booze took twice as long as others due to there being so much less liquid in the rhizome to macerate out. The timing should work with Pesach prep, anyway.

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And today I finally dealt with the citrus left over from making three batches of liqueur in January: orange-coffee, tangelo-coffee-cocoa nib, and orange-coffee cherry (the fruit of the coffee plant). I chopped the fruit up, taking most of the coffee beans out, but leaving the cocoa nibs and coffee cherry bits. I also chopped up a few fresh oranges, to dilute the booziness of the batch. I slowly cooked with with more sugar, turning it into a mocha marmalade. Luckily I've been trying to eat down the canned goods; there were enough half-pint jars (I find that for jam and marmalade, half pints and quarter pints are more useful than pints, unlike for pickles, salsa, or chutney). The end result: nine half-pints and two quarter-pints.

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I checked last year's list of Passover foods put away for this year, and realized I'm quite looking forward to trying the lemon-lime chutney from last year; I've never made it before, and hopefully it will be quite nice after a year's curing.

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Sign of vegetable fanaticism: finding oneself singing "I've got green beans, I've got green beans, I've got green beans, who could ask for anything more?"