You and fire.

If you think cooking is complicated, it's all because you use recipes to prepare anything.
Here, we learn a couple of techniques, and learn to respect your ingredients.
Respect, as in "do as little as possible to change your ingredients".

If you start with greens, you are starting with the second food your ancestors tasted. Greens, most greens you pick up at the supermarket have been cultivated to be sweet and tender. So, for you, broccoli and cauliflower, even garlic and onions on your plate are the "designer" variety.  They have been modified (yes, genetically so) to travel distances without wilting, to grow fast and to produce a very mild flavor.

So, most vegetables are bland.
They need assistance to pop in your mouth.
There is reason we roast or saute' vegetables instead of eating them fresh.
Fire adds a certain softness to the crunch; it adds a caramel tint too.

To saute' vegetables, you need a bit of fat, a bit of liquid, some accompanying flavors and washed, trimmed vegetables. ( As you trim your vegetables, save those tough stocks, btw, for our soup recipe.)

Fats: oil, butter, bacon bits.
Liquid: water, juices, stock. (We are definitely going to make stocks)
Flavors: onions, garlic, herbs like thyme. You can also use ginger, chili, seeds like fennel, coriander.

Start the fire at medium with a tablespoon or two of fat.
Get these things ready, one chopped small onion,two cloves of mashed garlic and one other item of your choice to get the taste of that item to be identifiable. Later, you can add two items, say ginger and chili, and see how you like that taste.

Start cooking with the onions  until they begin to look transparent, then add garlic and the vegetables. Keep stirring, coating the vegetables until they begin to absorb the oil. Add the extra item, say chili. Stir quickly, then cover and turn off the heat.
If vegetables still too raw for your taste,  add a Tablespoon of liquid and return to the fire until your vegetables appear cooked enough.
Turn off the heat and taste. Now is the time to add salt and pepper to taste. A few grains at a time.

Try to pull your vegetables out before they are total mush. They should taste a lot like fresh vegetables, so keep experimenting with the time and the amount of liquid.

There, a wonderful bunch of vegetables with a different taste than those you made in the microwave! Each time you add a new flavoring, say, toasted fennel seeds at the beginning when you are sweating your onions, you will add new layers of flavors.

Add them to sandwiches, or over pasta with grated cheese and you have a meal.

For beginners: Lesson one

Dear Jasmine
Here are steps/strategies to get you started cooking your own meals.

Week one:

Buy:
1. one small bunch of fresh greens such as chard, spinach, cabbage.
2. one can of beans of your choice
3. a bottle of olive oil/extra virgin
4. a loaf of bread, your choice

A nutritious meal can be had with three ingredients, and good olive oil, using your microwave.
Buy any greens you like, or a combination. Cut them up in bite size, drizzle some olive oil, cover and microwave for sixty seconds.  Pull out and taste. Add just a few grains of salt if needed. If not soft enough for your taste, microwave for another thirty seconds at a time.

Next, open the can of beans. Drain, rinse, and add the beans to the greens. Microwave for another sixty seconds.

There, you have a meal. If you purchased a crusty bread, you have a feast. Double this up and you have two meals!

Try the same thing on another day with a simple change:
1. add rice (read directions on the package for making it in the microwave.)
2. or soy sauce
3. or hot sauce
4. or vinegar
5. or citrus juice
6. or pasta (boil the water in a bowl first and add noodles
7. or a can of stewed tomatoes for minestrone
8. anything you have in the fridge.

If you have made enough for two meals, you can roll the leftovers in a burrito wrap, add salsa, and you have created a burrito! You'll go far on simple greens and beans.

You Do Not Need to be a Chef

Home-made granola, recipe by Alton Brown.

For something you have never done, or a dish you have had in a restaurant and can't wait to try making at home, a recipe and instructions from a chef are just what you need. But, for everyday cooking, you must begin with a sense of adventure. Taste raw vegetables; add them to your snack bag; eat as many raw foods as you can in a day. Then, bake them in the oven with a dash of oil and salt and eat them roasted. Walk the produce aisle and smell anything you have never eaten before.

Try to prepare meals you truly enjoyed as a child by looking up those recipes on line. Among the hundreds of variations you will identify the one that is closest to what you remember. Copy that, and make it with the precise ingredients and measurements and step=by=step instructions. If that went well, then, the next time try to add or subtract, substitute one pinch of this with that.  Now, as you experiment with the original, you can identify the change you brought in.

I had never used kale in my cooking, for instance, and since it was available in my daughter's house when I visited her, I used it instead of cabbage in the minestrone.

Until you prepare two, three main dishes of your knowledge from scratch, you cannot begin to have confidence in building other meals after you have tasted them in a restaurant or seen them prepared on television.

Meals prepared at home can be as simple as eggs on toast. Simple protein, and a grain product. With a salad, you have a full meal.
You will have tons of money this way. More importantly, you will have the opportunity to relax as you rinse and spin your greens, cut up some tomatoes to make your salad. If you begin to make your salad dressings, you have eliminated the extra additives that manufacturers have to add to assure salad dressings can sit on the shelf for months.  By eliminating even one additive, you have clarified your digestive system for that meal.

Meat as Side Dish

I have already mentioned that Frittata is easy to make and quite versatile in my previous post entitled Harrison Ford and Frittata.
But my daughter showed me even another way to make this dish versatile. She asked for eggs and pasta one late evening. I used left-over- cold pasta and warmed it up in a pan, added eggs and a bit of grated cheese, and scrambled everything right in the pan. Delicious.

For more meatless ideas visit my main blog through the link below, where I talk about my visit to my daughter and how I prepared all vegetarian meals.

Returning to my Roots

Easy meals series: Minestrone

With the cost of food and the lack of time, you know that you could use recipes you can make ahead to save you tons of money when you are too tired or too broke to go out to eat.

Easy Soups: Minestrone
My go to soup that can last a whole week in the refrigerator, and can be dressed up or down is minestrone.  You can make minestrone with any beans and any vegetables, by the way.
I prefer great northern beans, freshly cooked, or from a can, rinsed and drained, carrots, celery, cabbage and a can of stewed tomatoes.

I saute' diced carrots, celery, onions and garlic in olive oil. (One cup each to make four servings.)
When soft, I add the stewed tomatoes,  chopped cabbage, and one cup of stock, then turn the heat down so everything softens slowly.  Taste after fifteen minutes, and if the cabbage is cooked, add the beans, warm it all up, season with salt, pepper, a few drops of Tabasco or red pepper flakes.

Serve with a good sprinkle of Parmesan cheese and chunky bread.

The next day, if you have any leftovers, you can add rice, or farro, or pasta. My mother used to add tiny ditalini pasta and potatoes to Minestrone. We never had any leftovers!

A sauce for all seasons.

It's spring. Spring vegetables like peas or fava are abundant.
Here is my version of a light sauce as pasta primavera, or pasta with spring vegetables.

Ingredients:
2 T Olive oil
1T butter
1/2 C chopped onion
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
a small bunch of chopped parsley, or mint
1/2 C of white wine
1/2 C of chicken stock
1/4 C of heavy cream
2 Cs of fresh or frozen peas or fava, shelled, blanched and outer skin removed
salt and pepper to taste
Fettuccine noodles

Start the pot of water for the fettuccine. Add a Tablespoon of salt and prepare the sauce while the water achieves the boiling point.

In a saute pan, saute' the onion with the oil and the butter until soft. Add garlic and stir until opaque. Add wine and stir until most of it is absorbed. Add chicken stock and  heavy cream until warmed up, then salt and pepper to taste, and 2 Cs of peas, fresh or frozen. If you use fresh fava, blanch them in the boiling water before the pasta is added; remove and cool; slip off the outer skin and add the naked fava to the sauce.
Keep warm.
(Both fava and peas will cook by the time the pasta is added.)

Cook the pasta, drain it, and add it to the sauce and stir until everything is coated, and the peas have softened.  To serve, pass some grated cheese, add chopped mint or parsley and  enjoy.

Other variations:
Cubed zucchini
Artichokes, cleaned, blanched, cut in smaller pieces and sauteed with the onions.

Cooking your way back home...

Cooking is like looking back in the mirror and discovering your mother is looking at you!

We had our second cooking sessions with the 5th graders yesterday. It was cool, and beginning to spritz when they arrived. Rain was in full swing when they left. I opened the garage for them to leave their shoes in, and their rain gear before coming inside. Good thing I did!

We made minestrone, a rustic apple tart, and crostini with fava and blue cheese.
We used  tomatoes, potatoes, parsley, zucchini, garlic and onions they brought. I added savoy cabbage, carrots, celery, green beans, sage, rosemary, thyme and basil.

I had to be precise in my measurements: something I do not do naturally. I wanted to explain that you can measure with your eyes and your hands, just the way my mother did. I tried. The children and the adults (the teacher, and two of my friends who came to help) wanted clear measurements.

How much of everything?
It doesn't really matter! If you like a certain vegetable, add it in small amounts and see how it changes things.
What does matter?
Taking time to layer the flavors, I responded, doing the sauteing slowly so the onions and the rest of the vegetables you start with, carrots and celery, are slowly caramelized, becoming sweeter, less sharp.

We went to all the steps. I showed them how I had cooked the white beans in advance, with bay leaves and unpeeled garlic cloves. Before I added the beans to the sauteed vegetables I removed the bay leaves and squeezed out the garlic.
Add salt and pepper to taste at this point, I warned.
Why now?
I didn't really know, except that's when Mother did it.
What's to taste?
It has to please your palate. Start with a small amount, taste and adjust. Do the same with herbs. Start with infusing them, tying them in a sachet and suspending them in the liquid. Add fresh herbs at the end, sprinkled over the soup, with a sprinkle of grated cheese.
How much is a sprinkle?

We added more vegetables, and more liquid, chicken stock from a box. I could have told them that Mother never used canned anything, except what she canned or jarred herself. But Mother didn't have our modern conveniences, and she was a  homemaker most days when she wasn't helping Father in the vineyards. She always had a pot of beans boiling in the corner of the big hearth while she moved through chores.

Yes, I'm conjuring up home with every meal I put on the table. And my original home goes back many, many miles, across continents and oceans, and many many years.
This too is what our cooking is about. Retracing our steps and passing down the results of our journeys.