| Email Edition | ContactReflections in a rib eye.
Fig. 1.
- 16 oz whole milk
- 1 banana
- 1 tablespoon peanut butter
- 1 egg (if the Force is strong with you)
- 1 drop blue food coloring
Put ingredients in blender. Blend at high speed for 1 minute. Pour into white plastic tumbler and serve.
FAMILY’S WHO YOU EAT WITH. (Conclusion drawn after viewing the final scene of “Safe.” Those who know, know.)
Fig. 1.
At the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, I inhabited a world peopled (in part) by a cast-off group of fannish folk who sometimes chant together after consuming a quasi-alchemic formula during their quasi-religious rituals. “Trolle Sweate!” they chant, in inebriated consequence of quant suff. “Trolle Sweate!”
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TUCKED INTO MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER’S BIBLE is a yellowed sheet of paper containing the flavor of living tradition.
In short, it’s my mom’s recipe for knubel borscht (pronounced “k’nubble”): beef simmered in beet soup and garlic. That’s it: three ingredients, plus heat and time. Perhaps in part due to its simplicity, or that I’ve been eating it for most of my childhood Pesachs, knubel borscht is satisfying on a soul level. It fills the house with a scent at once sweet and savory, fruity and meaty, and which may in fact prove to be the smell of Gan Eden should the requisite air-sampling technology be designed and utilized.
The recipe originally comes from “the old country” (in our case, my Polish g’g'father or his Romanian wife); the original calls for a large pot, 5 quarts of borscht, 7-1/2 pounds of bone-in chuck roast with a packet of soup bones, and a large head of peeled garlic. Add everything together, simmer three hours or more, skimming off the foam; serve on plate and in bowl.
For our Seder Monday night, I created a lower-portion variant which is just as pleasing in all the essentials and doesn’t really suffer for the lack of soup bones. Four ingredients counting the pan:
9″ Pyrex baking pan
1 pound brisket
Quart of borscht
Head of garlic
Heat oven to 375 degrees. Peel and chop garlic. Put brisket in pan fat side up (trim excess fat first). Sprinkle garlic on top, pour over borscht, seal with aluminum foil. Three hours later, you’ll need a knife to cut through the aroma and open the oven. Put the meat on a plate, the soup in a bowl, and revel in the small blessings by which G?d or the quantum membranes thereof sustain and nurture the world.
REMEMBER: FRUIT JUICE IS SIMPLY filtered water. (I like mine run through a tangerine tree, or pear, or cherry.)
YOU’RE BETTER OFF THAN MOST if your dinner worries concern what, rather than whether, to eat.
WE WERE DISCUSSING SYNAGOGUE FUNDRAISERS, and I suggested an egg toss.
E. G., who knows who he is but may not want you to, looked at me with the sad seriousness of the ex-military and first responder. “Eggs aren’t for tossing,” he said. “They’re for eating. It debases us to play with something that half the world is starving for.”
That was ten years ago. To this day, the sight of someone playing with or otherwise wasting their food still makes me itchy inside.
One conversation was all it took to change my mind about something I had never seriously thought through. What will it take to change yours?
“MAY OUR LIVES BE NO sadder than necessary.”
IN ANOTHER LIFE, THIS DISH is what saved Prosatio Silban from being the main ingredient in someone else’s meal(1); in this life, it’s what ballasts me at table long enough to read the Sunday morning papers. Random Eggs assumes that the cook knows how to simultaneously brown a variety of different ingredients in a single pan; i.e., the denser the longer. (If you don’t know how, this is a good way to learn.)
Leisurely Eggs (Serves at least two, or one who won’t eat again until dinner)
First, arrange some nice background audio (Django Reinhart, say, or NPR’s “Weekend Edition”). Then add to a large medium-hot pan in the following order, and as art and experience dictates to balance facility with substance:
- Olive oil and/or butter (one keeps the other from smoking)
- Potato (diced)
- Onion (likewise)
- Sausage (sliced. I like chicken-apple and chicken-artichoke. Add this first to forego the olive oil/butter)
- Mushrooms (sliced or quartered)
- Capers
- Olives (kalamata or pimentoed, sliced or quartered. Stuffed with garlic is also good)
- Artichoke hearts
- Spinach
- Green onions (chopped)
- Garlic
- Black pepper
- Anything else as palate and physics suggests.
Meanwhile, scramble at least two eggs with a complementary cheese or cheeses (I prefer either sharp cheddar or the “Italian blend” of fontina, asiago, mozzarella and Parmesan).
When everything smells and looks right, pour in the egg/cheese scramble and lower the heat. Stir briskly for less than a minute (to coat; you don’t want a frittata, although those are also tasty); just before the eggs are cooked to your liking, turn all onto a plate and garnish with rye toast (or sourdough or whole-wheat or English muffins) and coffee. Lots and lots of coffee(2) — tea or milk won’t stand up to the flavors — and don’t forget the newspaper!
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(1) From the yet-unpublished “Light Breakfast”:
The dish could be thrown together in any fashion, and indeed looked that way on the plate no matter how talented its maker, but was also a time-honored test of skill. A bad cook would toss everything into the pan and hope for the best (including a forgiving palate); a good cook could use as many ingredients as obtainable in such order as to bring out the purest and most complementary flavor of each. So well-known was this principle and so beloved its application that Uulians frequently cited it as suitorial standard (“She’s beautiful, son, but how Leisurely are her Eggs?”).
(20 Actually, seltzer will clear the palate and aerate the esophagus. I like to have both, with sometimes maybe a glass tomato juice to honor the practice of the grandparents who taught me the importance of a leisurely Sunday breakfast. (But I have no idea why they were into the tomato juice.)
SMOOTHIES ARE A DAILY FEATURE of life at Beit Attinson, not least as a reliable way to keep calories and nutrients flowing despite a lack of appetite. I also like them on a philosophical level: a mystical soup of primordial elements, each ingredient partaking of the other’s essence, all ego-distinctions and identities lost amid the mad swirling chaos at the center; and though I’ve developed something of a basic repertoire over the past two years (bouncing among bananas, orange juice, yogurt, egg, peanut butter, mango, spirulina tablets, milk) I like to alternate with whatever’s in reach. Here’s what that was today:
Unbelievable Smoothie
Banana-and-a-half[1], chunked
1-1/2 cups plain whole-milk yogurt
Six or seven frozen cherries, defrosted (nuke for 30 seconds)Blend for about a minute or so. Sit down before drinking, lest thy knees buckle and chin divot. (I like to use a straw.)
[1] The wife eats the other half with her cereal. We’re a team.
[2] We unsolicitedly endorse the Magic Bullet blender; it’s inexpensive, durable, versatile and clean up really is a breeze.
THE GENESIS OF THIS PIE lay in my reluctance to buy retail by way of an unintentional misreading of the directions in Betty Crocker’s Orange Tome. (I left out the flour and cinnamon, thinking the blueberries would make their own sauce like cranberries do. They didn’t, and while the results are rather a bit more runny than expected still it’s not too bad — worth a blog post, at least.
Fig. 1
I used:
- Two 12 oz. bags frozen blueberries from the whole-lifestyle store[1]
- Two 9-inch frozen organic pie shells from same (they come two to a package, complete with tin)
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 cup water
0. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.
1. Put the blueberries in a big pot with water and sugar. Bring to boil, then reduce heat to a fast simmer.
2. When you realize they’re not exactly cooking like cranberries (about 10 minutes), be grateful that they’re at least nicely defrosted and ladle with a slotted spoon into one of the pie shells. (Reserve liquid for making deLICious blueberry sodas — just add seltzer!)
3. Invert the other pie shell atop the fragrant steaming blue mass; crimp edges and deflate, then poke a few holes in the top to vent. Wrap edge with a 2-3″ strip of cooking foil so it doesn’t brown horribly.
4. Bake for 30 minutes. Remove foil strip and bake another 15 minutes.
5. Set for an hour, preferably on a window sill to tempt passing scamps and hobos. Slice and serve with ice-cold, unskimmed milk. (Live a little. You’re worth it.)
_____
[1] That’s how it seems when I shop there. I feel simultaneously out of place and catered to in my 48-year-old-punk duds.
SOUNDS LIKE A CONTRADICTION IN terms, especially if you live here in Recently Discovered Paradise. But travel blogger Lisa Mann’s Sonoma On The Cheap goes a long way toward resolving it. The site is frequently updated and covers the entire county, not just the city, of Sonoma (minor quibble: WHEN will people LEARN the %$#@!ing DIFFERENCE?!?). Well organized and bite-sized articles detail cheap-to-free food, events, lodging and more. Check it out at http://sonomaonthecheap.com/.
Note: This is an unsolicited review resulting from chance discovery. Hope you enjoy it!
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