the phantom recipe: thanksgiving edition

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Most of my cookbooks are plastered open to the pages I use the most, and drizzled with some manner of cooking material. I have had some pretty wild-card results when, in the process of cooking a new recipe from an unblemished page that does not, consequently, hold its place, the wind blows, the pages turn, and I don’t actually notice that I am following another recipe than the one I started out with. One time hoisin-peanut sauce from the Lemongrass cookbook got blown away halfway through, morphing into ginger-lime sauce with hoisin sauce, to go on top of noodles. That one was awesome. Lately I have been having the virtual equivalent of getting blown away by the wind, which is losing my place and forgetting to bookmark the thing, and having to reconstruct by memory.

This week, I was trying to come up with a Thanksgiving salad, and found this great-sounding recipe in the New York Times, for Pomegranate Quinoa. I threw in the towel and went to Whole Foods, thinking they would be the only ones around to have such a rarified and fussy item as seeded-pomegranates seeds, but came home empty-handed, at too late an hour to sit down and seed the fruit myself. So, plan B turned up a nice quinoa-lime salad. But I couldn’t for the life of me find it when I went to make it later on in the wee hours of the morning. So, I tweaked the NYT recipe, using tangerines from the yard, and came up with this:

1 teaspoon cumin seeds

3/4 teaspoon coriander seeds

–roast in a pan, and grind in a spice grinder. add to …2 tablespoons +/- olive oil, juice of a lime or 2, and whisk it up

1/2 medium red onion, chopped

–chop the onion, and add it to a can of (drained) chick peas, and a handful of slivered almonds and pine nuts that have been toasted in the pan after the spices…

add all this to…

1 cup quinoa, cooked (4 cups cooked quinoa)

–I cooked it in chicken broth. You can do this in a rice cooker (adding a knuckle’s worth of broth over the quinoa, which you have rinsed like you would rice). Make sure the quinoa is drained (a lot of recipes tell you to parboil it, basically, but the extra liquid will drown the spices if you leave it in)

Fold in

3-4 tangerines, with seeds squeezed out

Drizzle the spice/lime dressing over the quinoa, but only a little at a time–it is super-absorbant.

Cover it and let it sit a bit and let the flavors get used to each other. Maybe it is my cast-iron stomach talking, but I found it was good left to sit in the sun for a couple hours, before being eaten. The warm olive-y lime taste, cut with the tangerines and texture of chick peas was kind of divine. I might even add a bit of mint next time, but this was easy to pull off with on-hand ingredients, and cheap and tasty too.

Quinoa image from NY Times. Tangerine image from www.botany.hawaii.edu/…/images/cit_ret_mid.jpg.

refreshments

In these sultry times near the equinox, a girl’s thoughts naturally turn to…beer and snacks. The heat is bringing back memories of the last extended stint of writing-induced hermitude I had, a hot hot summer in Kyoto in 2005. I lived next to a Korean neighborhood, so I got used to the evening ritual of shuffling out to the beer machine in my slippers (yes, outdoor slippers), dropping in a couple of coins, and having a very refreshing long swig of beer before, or during, the time it took to look and see if any haphazardly parked bikes got cleared out by the cops that day, and get sweaty enough to want to take a shower again. So, the very onset of such heat reminds me of Korean food, and beer, and vinegar, just because it is always tasty to eat vinegar in hot weather.

Fortunately, though I won’t be doing any world tours this summer, I can still do the world tour of the grocery stores of Los Angeles. And the east side is hopping with them. My current fave is the sleeperly-named Super King, an Armenian mega-market on San Fernando. Not for the faint of heart. Good produce and Turkish/Greek/Russian selection of hard liquor, very ecumenical; a lesson for us all. Closer to home, and bike-able, is the HK Market, my Korean market friend (HK for Hankook, no English links, sorry). Not only do they, like in Asia, mark down all the prepared food with about 2 hours to go before closing, but they have all sorts of yummy vegetables, many suitable for pickling.

All these excursions are all just a way of working up to the task at hand, the development of pickling skills during idle moments when I’m not working (as I actually am a lot, with various school mentoring things that, technically, senior faculty other people should be doing). The above illustration shows what “egoma” or “perilla” or “shiso” leaves look like when you treat them all kimchi-like for a day or so, by adding onion, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, red pepper. And enjoying, on a bed of rice, or with a nice cold beer–yum.

If I am cooped up much longer, I will probably run out of Korean produce, and start in on the tofu innovations. If you see me residing out on the lawn in a homemade organic tofu igloo come the dog days of late August, do not be surprised.