Orange hair, red tomatoes, green rhubarb

Life, early August, 2016:

Wake up, coffee, read headlines to catch up on Donald Trump news that erupted overnight, check Talking Points Memo to see what they have to say on the Donald Trump news, then Politico, then Slate, then the National Review, then Twitter. After this, it’s time for Facebook to see which friend chose today to post an impassioned call for everyone to come together and vote for Hillary, no matter how we feel about her, because the alternative is unthinkable. A fight in the comments inevitably ensues, ignited by either a representative of the small number of Trump supporters in my universe or a progressive who announces that he/she will under no circumstances vote for Hillary to prevent Trump, that’s like choosing between Pol Pot and Hitler, he/she is voting for Jill Stein. These fights go on for dozens, even scores, of comments. By the time I’m done reading them, Trump has almost surely said or tweeted something new and amazing so I go back to the headlines and the circuit begins again. Round and round it goes. Soon it is time to start making dinner and I feel like I have just wasted a whole day because I have.

Sometimes I can successfully avoid the vortex, but this only happens if I go cold turkey, zero internet starting from the moment I get up. A productive, peaceful day is then possible unless, mid-afternoon, I decide to go to Whole Foods and there’s a line at the check-out counter. After I’ve studied what the person in front of me is buying and concluded yet again that I really can’t afford the 200 calories in an Ocho chocolate-coconut bar, I remember my phone is in my bag and . . .  he said what?

The rest of the day is lost.

The other salient feature of my life, early August, 2016: cherry tomatoes. We struggle to grow big tomatoes, but the cherry tomatoes are flooding the kitchen. I can’t keep up with the buggers. This week I made two dishes that employed cherry tomatoes to excellent, very different effect, and yet there are still several pounds of cherry tomatoes attracting fruit flies in a bowl on the counter and hanging off the bushes out back. Those bushes show no signs of knocking off. Hardly something to complain about, too much food. I’ll stop.

Here are the cherry tomato dishes, both of which I recommend. As it happens, both also contain kale. 

*Toasted bulgur bowl from Lukas Volger’s Bowl. I don’t hate or even dislike tabbouleh, but I could happily give it up for the rest of my life. Not quite salad, not quite starch. Watery. Insipid. Not Volger’s version! It’s a robust meal. Nutty, toasted bulgur fortified with kale and chickpeas and enriched with toasted almonds and garlicky tahini sauce. I made it even heartier with some feta. Try it. You’ll be pleased. It keeps, too, so you have healthy lunches for the next couple days. Recipe here.

*One-pot tomato and kale pasta. Many thanks to the publicist who sent me A Modern Way to Cook by Anna Jones. What a lovely surprise, coming home to find this handsome book full of vegetarian bowl recipes on my doorstep. Last night I tried Jones’s version of that one-pot pasta you’ve probably heard about. I’m talking about the pasta you make by putting uncooked spaghetti, sauce ingredients, and water in single pan and boiling for 8 minutes or so.

Cool, no? 

I may have actually tried this before, but I can’t remember. Too much cooking, getting old. It was easy and worked beautifully. The pasta and lemony tomato sauce marry in a wonderful way when they’re cooked together and the kale, which you add at the end, eliminated the need for a salad. Not that I would have made one anyway. I loved this and Mark did too. Recipe here.

The final noteworthy event in my August so far: I baked the ugliest cake ever. Our rhubarb patch is almost as fecund as our cherry tomato plants, but, alas, the rhubarb variety we grow is green. It tastes exactly the same as pink rhubarb but if it is true that we eat first with our eyes. . .

I think it is true.

The recipe comes from the irresistible Vintage Cakes and consists of a rich, yogurt batter that you top with hot rhubarb compote and bake.

This soft, tangy cake tasted fine, but not as fine as the Food52 rhubarb cake of a few weeks ago, which had the added advantage of hiding the color of the rhubarb. I will never dig up our rhubarb patch, which has been going strong for about 8 years now (I started with seeds), but I might have to plant some red rhubarb next year.

Who are you and what have you done with Jennifer?

Nigella would call this "temple food."

Had I carefully read and considered the recipe for the dish pictured above I would never have made it.  I would have thought: vegan, steamed vegetables, grains, “clean,” no one will like it. 

But I didn’t carefully read or consider the recipe, made it, and as clever readers have already surmised from this set-up, we loved the dish. Mark finished and said, “Wow, what a great dinner.” 

To put that in context, the night before last Mark finished the dinner I had served, a Thai beef stir fry, and loutishly announced, “I give that a B.”

The recipe for this bowl comes from Bowl by Lukas Volger. Given my recent enthusiasm for bowls, the book caught my eye when I was at the library. 

Given my longtime enthusiasm for Laurie Colwin, this recipe caught my eye when I was idly flipping through the book:

The dish is simple: mixed grains topped by steamed vegetables, quick-pickled radishes, toasted walnuts, and a sauce that consists primarily of leaves.

Sounds dreadful, at least to me, but that sauce is improbably magical. Four ounces watercress, 1/2 cup leafy herbs (basil, cilantro, parsley), 1/3 cup olive oil, 1 clove garlic, the green part of a few scallions, and a pinch of salt go into a food processor or blender. Puree until satiny. I used arugula as I couldn’t find any watercress and added a little extra olive to make the sauce smoother. You could serve this powerhouse sauce on plain steamed vegetables and be very happy, but if you aren’t on a low-carb diet, I would go for the full-carb package. I’d never made mixed grains before, but I will be making them again: 2/3 cup medium grain white rice, 2/3 cup millet, 2/3 cup quinoa. Rinse, put in a pot with  3 1/2 cups water and a big pinch salt, bring to a boil, cover, lower heat to bare minimum, and cook for another 15 to 20 minutes. It’s fluffier than quinoa or millet and has more protein and character than white rice. 

This is an early version of the recipe that appears on Volger’s blog. It’s a bit different from what you’ll find in the book, but not in any important way. (The sauce recipe I gave above reflects the changes in the book.) For topping I went with steamed broccoli, steamed yellow squash, and steamed sliced sweet potato, along with some quick-pickled radishes Volger provides a recipe for. I loved the sliced sweet potato, liked the broccoli, was indifferent to the squash and the radishes. Avocado would work well as would some zestier pickle. Good stuff.

so depressing

Are we a melting pot -- or a bowl?

hippie food

Lord, I love a bowl. Rice bowl, quinoa bowl, ahi bowl, teriyaki zen bowl, any kind of nauseatingly trendy bowl, bring it on. I feel like a twit every time I use the term “bowl,” but the thing itself -- an assemblage of raw/cooked/pickled/creamy/crunchy/spicy/leafy ingredients with some kind of starch and unifying sauce in a single vessel -- I love unreservedly. I know Asians have been eating one-bowl meals forever, but when did bowls become a thing (to use another term that makes me feel like a twit), in the United States? 

I like to eat bowls in restaurants because they often feature the Asian flavors I most love. Just yesterday, Mark and I stopped for lunch at KoJa Kitchen on Clement Street in San Francisco, a windswept counter-service Korean-Japanese restaurant with a lot of delectable bowls full of rich meats and zesty sauces on the menu. I ended up ordering a so-called KoJa, which was a warm sandwich between crispy-crusted rice cakes, but I thought about getting a bowl.

All the dishes at KoJa Kitchen look like bowls even when they're not. The waffle fries at right are topped with barbecued beef, kimchi, mayonnaise, red sauce, and scallions -- totally a bowl!

But while I love restaurant bowls, the most exciting application of the bowl concept, I think, is at home.  What brought all this to mind was the roasted carrot and grain bowl I made last night from the new and very pretty vegetarian cookbook Love & Lemons.  

That's not a bowl on the cover, it's a salad.

This recipe was healthy, moderately easy, cheap, and damned good. Into a bowl (obviously) you put cooked millet, roasted carrots, roasted tofu, avocado, chopped almonds, and lettuce. Now, toss some chunked raw carrots, garlic, oil, tahini, lemon juice, and orange juice into a blender, pulverize, pour over your bowl, and go watch Broadchurch.

Did I mention that bowls are ideal for eating in front of the TV? 

It wasn’t the best bowl I’ve ever made. The best bowls I’ve ever made were from Ed Lee’s Smoke & Pickles, but then of course they were. Ed Lee is a restaurant chef and his bowls contain elaborate remoulade sauces and ingredients like salmon and pork belly. They are super-fattening and take forever to make, unlike that nice roasted carrot bowl.

I fell asleep last night inventing bowl recipes and spent a half hour this morning looking up bowl recipes online. Some of those recipes don’t meet my exacting definition of a bowl. What is my definition of a bowl? A bowl must contain some warm ingredients, and some cool. It needs a variety of textures, and some crunch is absolutely essential. Starches (rice, farro, quinoa) seem standard, though I could imagine a bowl without one. There should be a fatty treat in the bowl; if it’s a vegetarian bowl, that probably means cheese and/or nuts. There has to be a fantastically delicious sauce to bind everything together, of course, and a bowl must contain at least one vegetable. The vegetable is the whole point. There’s so much happening in a bowl, you don’t even realize you’re eating vegetables. If there’s no vegetable in the bowl, you might as well go have a burger. 

Speaking of burgers, happy 4th of July! Everyone is pretty grumpy about this country right now, including me, but what do I really have to complain about? Nothing. We’re not having bowls for dinner tonight. Two middle-aged people eating bowls in front of the TV on Independence Day seemed sad. We’re not having burgers either, though. Two middle-aged people grilling burgers on a deck in the fog all by themselves also seemed sad. So we’re having roasted marrow bones and peach ice cream in front of the TV, which seemed weird and fun. Now I have to go make it happen.

I'm on a quest for a great peach pie recipe. This wasn't it.