Some food notes, part one: the oven

I feel like documenting the general way I eat these days. It's making me generally happy. One thing that does not make me happy is the narrowing of foods that I tolerate. A year and a half ago I abruptly lost the ability to eat spinach, beets and chard without pretty serious dysfunction. That was a loss. Oh well: the world is still full of food.

So what I do is once or twice a week I make three to five dishes that form the backbone of my diet until they run out. Some of these are kind of experimental sometimes, but I have a rule that I pretty much have to eat them up all gone unless they are really really unfortunate. A lot of what I eat is vegetable and protein combinations, either casseroles or stirfries: what I don't eat a lot of is rice or pasta. I eat the occasiobnal potato and probably more bread than I should, but the bread I eat is (1)free, and (2), more importantly, all whole wheat with no white flour and no sugar added, so it's not really more glycemic than buckwheat etc.

Here are what I use in lieu of recipes more often than not:

"kookoo-frittata:" The difference between a kookoo and a frittata, as I understand it, is that a kookoo has more vegetables and herbs in it and a frittata has more egg. I usually make one of these every week, usually based on broccoli and parsley because I always have as much of these as I can stand and sometimes more than I can stand. But in the summer I have made it of peppers, zuchinni, and tomatoes: and in the winter I have made it of kale. Also I have made it of peas and green beans, neither of which are excellent for this, and asparagus, which is. Basically: I fill a flat baking pan of whatever shape with chopped (usually lightly cooked)vegetables and herbs and pour enough beaten egg over it to hold it together. I usually put some grating cheese over it but it is totally not necessary, so when I was really broke and wanted to make ingredients stretch, I left the cheese out. I bake this at what my oven claims is 370 degrees, for about an hour, but I never bake unless I fill the oven, so the time may be shorter in other circumstances.

"gratin:" I learned about this in a travelogue/memoir/history/cookbook about the Savoie. You slice whatever root vegetables (or pumpkin, by which I mean whatever winter squash you like)very thin and layer them flat flat into a flat baking pan, dotting with butter if you please, and then moisten it with cream, milk, or broth. Seasoning is up to you, but I like thyme a lot, and I also like dill and savory and oregano, but the only time I put dill and oregano in the same dish is if I am using absolutely everything in tiny amounts. Then you top it off. I top it off with a lot of cheese most often to make it a protein-and-vegetable dish, but if you don't eat cheese you could top it with a thin layer of bread crumbs or almond meal (I'd lean towards the latter myself). I bake it at the same time as the kookoo-frittata, for about the same amount of time.

"macaroni and cheese style:" made with cauliflower, usually. Any time I cook with cauliflower in a casserole it's annoying. The cauliflower wants to hold on to its moisture until the last minute at which time it's released into your casserole and breaks down the bechamel. I'm still struggling with this. Currently I do this: steam the cauliflower. Put it into a colander over a bowl. Squeeze. Put something heavy on the cauliflower. Let it sit for a while. During this time I work on something else I am getting ready for the oven. Squeeze again, hoping to get all the drops out. Then I break it up fine and dry it off and press it into a baking dish. Then I make a by-the-books bechamel and crowd the sauce with a mixture of cheese, and pour that over the cauliflower.

Bechamel is of course a sloppily-applied name, as I do not carefully follow the steps from the French cookbook. Suffice it to say it is a rich white sauce that is cooked very slowly with a bit of bay leaf (a tiny bit because I use native California bay laurel leaves which are many times more pungent and even kind of coarse, compared to the European ones from the store)and clove which are removed. When I am making the bechamel for moussaka or souffle, I also put nutmeg in it.

"moussaka style:" I'm not fond of eggplants. I read somewhere that Mediterraneans of different types use different vegetables sometimes, so I took it as a license to use anything I want. Most likely are caulflower and pumpkin. See macaroni and cheese style for the treatment of cauliflower. This is a more exciting/time-consuming dish because it also includes a tomato sauce and a bechamel. I make the tomato sauce with freh or canned tomatoes, onions, garlic, oregano, thyme, parsley, chile or sweet peppers, and cinnamon (there's the Greek bit for you). The layers go: vegetable, tomato sauce, maybe another vegetable, bechamel with ricotta or sieved cottage cheese added, and finally, some grated cheese. Sometimes sliced potatoes at the bottom of the dish the way the Greeks in town here do, to try to prevent wateriness. It does work. Baked the way everything here is baked.

"lasagne style:" layered vegetables with tomato sauce (basil instead of cinnamon this time out). Thin slices of anything will do here, or tiers of precooked greens (I can't eat spinach anymore, but it was yummy this way, and so was chard, and I can still eat kale this way). I've been doing it with pumpkin (by which I really mean kabocha squash most of the time, no matter what I say elsewhere), but once I did it with a spaghetti squash that I had and that was good, and I have also done it with zuchinni. Layers of ricotta or sieved cottage cheese also alternate. You could do it with ground meat instead of the cheese. Jo Walton has said she does lasagne without tomatoes, and I am curious how she does it.

"kugel style:" One of my father's students did a kugel cookbook for a class project and I still have my copy. Some of the kugel recipes are alarming. What I took away from it was that while noodle kugel was the Platonis ideal of kugel, I could totally rock the concept with vegetables in a matrix of egg and milk and cheese or cottage cheese. This is a great place for peas.

Since I came up with a B12 shortage a bit over a year ago and my iron has dropped below the Red Cross limit for donations a couple of times (but not all the way to anemic), I am trying to make sure I eat some meat nearly every day. But I pretty much eat one serving only. Anyway, while those other guys are in the oven, I might be roasting a game hen if they were cheap at Ranch 99 the last time I was there, or I might be baking a meatloaf or a chicken liver terrine (that is to say, a meat loaf made with chicken livers, but it sounds weirder than terrine which is saying something). Or I could put in a pot roast of a small chunk of meat and twice as much vegetables by volume, season the usual way with tomatoes and/or wine, bay leaf, oregano, and so on. Which vegetables depends on what's around.

There's nothing special about my meatloaf. The most recent one had oat bran and experimental homemade ketchup in it (it was not good ketchup for sandwiches and eggs but it was great for making meatloaf), and that was fairly typical.

The chicken liver terrine is just seared chicken livers (and mushrooms if I have some from Grey Bears and no other plans for them), and a big handful of parsley, sage, thyme, onions, garlic,chopped as fine as I have the patience for, pressed into a buttered loaf pan and topped with tiny amounts of grated butter to help it stay together. I'm not super fond of bacon in things, but I was in the past. After I discovered that the judicious use of sage added the flavor note I liked from bacon being in things, I gratefully dropped bacon from the list of things I shop for, keep track of, and take care of as an ingredient. But if you are a bacon lover, this is exactly the kind of dish you are likely to put bacon in.

Lately I've made apple cake for the oven a lot of times too. The apple cake (which you could make with other fruit and I guess also sweet potatoes or pumpkins -- I just make a (usually whole wheat) batter with yogurt as the liquid and a very small amount of both baking powder and baking soda. I usually make too much. I use half the sugar of a reasonable recipe because I'm putting a bit of sugar on the apples. Lately I've been putting a small slice of dried M<eyer lemon in each the batter and the cut fruit. I cut up lots of apples to line a cake pan or (lately) deep casserole dish to at least two inches and sprinkle them with sugar, cinnamon, grated orange peel, almond extract, and vanilla extract. The mor apples the better because those babies shrink a lot in the cooking. Then I put a layer of the batter (similarly seasoned) over the apples and cook them at the same time and the same tmeperature as the other things. I usually use at least partially whole wheat flour and often sub out part of it with almond meal or garbanzo flour. I'm actually about to experiment with this cake using a boiled orange, two old bananas and a bit of frozen apricot bits. That's the oven. It's pretty heavy on the dairy, but both the kookoo-frittata and the gratin can be made without milk products and between them you could use a lot of different vegetables. Well, honestly, these are pretty heavy dishes altogether, but I don't eat just these. I also have a repertory of stovetop and uncooked things I do, which I will talk about later.

Some food notes, part two: the stove top

During my big cooking day, which happens every five to eight days depending, I make a bunch of things and put them in the oven. Then I also make some things on top of the stove. The top of the stove things tend to be lighter and less dairy-oriented.

Most weeks I make a legume dish. My favorite legumes at this time are lentils, giant lima beans ("butter beans" in some venues), and garbanzo beans. A year or two ago on Making Light I was exposed to a new method of preparing lentils and it has made a world of difference. The key revelation was salt in the soaking water, and the next most important new thing was long soaking times. I was reluctant about the salt because I don't like a lot of salt flavor in my food, but I experimented and the method works as well with a tiny pinch of salt that doesn't affect the flavor (modern cookery experts are all about the salt and more salt everywhere all the time and more salt than you can imagine, and I just don't go modern in this instance. Each to his own, my mama said. I say each to their own, myself). I soak them for at least two days. If the weather is muggy I soak them in the fridge.

Once they're nicely cooked, I usually make them into a nice whatever vegetable soup. Now, this soup can lean towards the minestrone side (heavier), or it can lean towards the borscht side(lighter). It can rejoice in seasonings brought in from whichever regional pallette pleases you(r palate, let's pretend I didn't think that litle lame play on words). They can also be made into a dhal or a curry. They can also be marinated with lemon juice or vinegar, olive oil, garlic, and available green herbs, and then plopped into a chopped salad or flung onto a tossed salad or mixed into a "Russian-esque" salad (about which more later). They can also be mashed up and made into an oven dish I forgot about before, a bean and nut loaf. My friend Bonnie makes marvelous bean balls but they are not part of my strategy because I don't know how. Since I don't eat rice hardly ever at home any more, I don't make hoppin'john, but I make something that is flavored like that and lacks rice.

You could make cassoulet, or Boston baked beans, but I don't usually. Cassoulet is too complicated in the classical version even though back in its proper time and place it was kind of a convenience food, and anyway I don't usually feel I can afford the cost or the nutritional cost of sausages and duck confit and all that. Boston baked beans tend to be too sweet and it would take an investment of experimentation to get a version that isn't. Also, salt pork is the same situation for me as sausage.

Sometimes on cooking day I just make the legumes and stick them in a jar in the fridge and hope I incorporate them into dishes as I go along before they give up the tastiness ghost, but the whole point of cooking day is that I don't trust myself to do reliable ad hoc cooking. I recently lost a small batch of pinto beans due to forgetfullness, which I would not have done if I had put them into a composed dish from the beginning.

Another frequent dish is the giant stir-fry. This is pretty much the only way I use tofu, which makes it pretty much the only way I use soy products (except for a tiny bit of soy sauce). Soybeans and soy milk are solidly on the list fo things I can't eat without serious consequnces, and I'm sort of giving up on the tofu noodles because they have next to no nutritive value and I haven't been able to coak stellar results from them so why bother? I also make the giant stir-fry with sliced meat sometimes, or even with mushrooms only as the protein source. I use at least twice as much vegetables as protein source, or sometimes with no protein source at all. Being a true American, I especially like any kind of broccoli in this (Italian Broccoli, Chinese Broccoli, whatever broccoli). But green beans, snow peas, snap peas, kale, bok choy, baby bok choy, asparagus, green onions, celery, celery root, turnip, any kind of large radish (or small, but trust me, cutting up that many little radishes is something I do not want to repeat), zuchinni, carrots, chiles or sweet peppers -- really, whatever -- will do very nicely. Combinations are good too, though it's not as nice when you combine too many many things. A few is good.

Pot roast or stew or soup (and that is just a continuum, if you ask me) are also places where I can combine protein that is rich in B-12 and iron with a lot of vegetables and end up with something I can just eat on for days afterwards. I mentioned pot roast in the oven section but it can be done on top of the stove too. So the flesh of any animal can go into these, or legumes as I described above, and even tofu, but I can't talk about that because I haven't mastered it. Another thing I haven't mastered is poaching eggs in vegetable stew, which I read about in a MIddle Eastern cookobook.

It's also nice to occasionally stew vegetables without a protein source. One version of that I was calling summer sauce this year because it was a reaction to a superabundance of tomatoes and peppers. I threw into the pot tomatoes, peppers, onions, and whatever vegetables (often zuchinni and mixed fresh beans), and cooked them till they were pretty soft, and then ladled it over whatever I was eating until if was all gone.

When I was taking a night class that had a potluck supper as part of it, I noticed that the Mexican students often brought a tuna, potato, or macaroni salad that had those frozen mixed vegetables added to it. It was dressed with mayonaise flavored with Tapatio sauce. I don't know what this sounds like to you, but it appealed to me in a way that is almost guilty. One day when I was surfing through food blogs as you do, and I happened to surf from a couple fo Persian blogs to some Russian ones, I noticed Salat Olivier, also sometimes called Russian Salad, which I remembered being briefly enamored of in my early twenties in some form or another. At its base it's a potato salad with other vegetables added and usually some protein source (either/or: chopped cooked meat or fish, chopped egg, or chopped cheese), dressed with mayonnaise with or without chopped pickles. So that has congealed in my mind and I make a chopped salad with barely enough diluted mayonnaise to hold it together. Sometimes I do use frozen mixed veegtables I have allowed to thaw, other times I use a variety of fresh vegies either blanched or raw. I might add a chopped hardboiled egg, or a handful of chopped meat, or some cooked legumes. I'll dilute the mayonnaise with vinegar and/or lemon juice and a splash of oil, and flavor it with Tapatio in the Mexican way but also add a handful or three of chopped fresh parsley and dill. I rarely actually use potatoes: I prefer turnips, and I rationalise this by saying that Russians probably made that with turnips before they did it with potatoes.

Sometimes I'll just steam or sautee some plain vegies to have around the house to add to things, but for me with my weak powers of concentration that is a little dangerous.

I also do make meals at the time of consumption now and then, but that's usually fried or poached eggs with vegetables piled under them and usually some warmed bread: or a big salad: or a sandwich. A favorite thing I don't do much anymore because I usually just bake the pumpkin into a thing is to take a large chunk of pumpkin and cook it in the microwave till it's tender, and then put a shamefully large slab of cheese and a big glob of salsa or a generous dollop of Tapatio on it and cook it till the cheese melts. Or I'll make a sandwich, which in practical terms means a cheese or peanut butter sandwich more often than not, though I might make a meat or summer sauce sandwich. Or I'll load up a bowl of plain yogurt or cottage cheese with fruit and/or (homemade) jam. See, if I don't cook in advance? I get unbalanced on the dairy side. My tummy is happier with a more varied diet like I get when I cook in advance.

Now I'm going to go cook, and also eat a salad. Some other time I will go into tedious detail about my replacement philosophies.