Cooking On Sundays

I found a recipe in the New York Times, and thought I’d try it out.  I normally keep an eye out for recipes, but unless I don’t know what I’m doing (which happens more frequently than I care to admit), I usually don’t follow it that closely.  Usually I’ll find a recipe, and I’ll say “what a great idea!  Except I have … instead of …, and I like this better than that”, but in this case, I actually acquired ingredients.  I doubled the recipe, and when I veered, it was because I forgot, not because I was trying to change things.

• Two huge broccolis
• A pound of chick peas (garbanzo beans), soaked overnight (I think I was supposed to use a cup–not the same!)
• A bunch of italian parsley
• Half a large red onion
• Dash of salt

And for the dressing

• The juice of one meyer lemon
• Two spoons of spicy “Chinese” mustard (horseradish based)
• Four spoons of champagne vinegar
• Small garlic clove, minced and mashed
• Eight spoons of olive oil

I soaked the chick peas overnight, and in the morning I realized how many there were…  so I set some aside and stuck them in the freezer with the theory I will use them elsewhere.  I cooked the garbanzos in water with a dash of salt until they were done, and then I chopped up the brocolli, peeling the stems and chopping them up too, and and let them cook.  As per the directions in the NYTimes, I chopped the onion, put it in a bowl, submerged the onion with water, and let sit for five minutes.  I’ve never done that and can only guess the purpose is to remove some of the onion sharpness, but I can’t say I  noticed the difference.  I drained everything, put it in a large bowl, chopped and added the parsely, and stirred it all together!  I forgot to add the dill, which I have some and wanted to use it up, oh well.

For the dressing, I didn’t have mustard, and so my neighbor said she had some, but when she brought it she was almost crying.  “It tastes horrible!  I tried it on a sandwich and it was dreadful!  It’s not normal mustard at all!”  I looked at the label and said “Perfect!”  Dijon is nice, but so is horseradish.  I mixed up the dressing, and kept making more because I was trying to get the proportions right–it went like this:  “too much lemon–add a little olive oil–too much oil–add a little vinegar–not enough mustard–add another spoonful–hm, we are close….”  She was surprised to find that it added a good flavor without making it taste dreadful, and this dish came out incredibly well, in my humble opinion (and I was glad for leftovers!).

I did another curry, because I had no imagination.

• Half a cabbage–the hugest cabbage I found
• A portobella mushroom
• Half a bag of string beans
• Some scallions
• Some of the frozen shrimps from last week
• Two pasilla peppers (poblano)
• One habenero pepper
• One serrano
• One yellow onion
• A can of coconut milk
• A half a brick of “Golden Curry”–a curry “bar”
• And this was served on spaghetti, rather than rice

This is a straight up curry recipe–olive oil, stir fry the onion, peppers, cook cook cook, add half the cabbage and decide the other half won’t fit in the pan, and cook cook cook, I swear the cabbage will get smaller, c’mon now I need room in this pan for other things, cook cook, add coconut milk and curry, cook cook cook, finally the cabbage is small enough to not fill me with fear of overflowing the pan everytime I stir, and add mushrooms and string beans.  At the very end I add a bunch of scallions.

This was very tasty, though the not-so-spicy people thought it was too spicy, but I thought it was just right, but I think it would have been much better on rice than pasta.

The sign said “30lb cabbage, $1.85″. I saw that, I carefully dug through my wallet for $1.85. Yes! Exact change!

So, what to do with 30lbs of cabbage?

Well, of course, first question is, is it really 30lbs of cabbage? All our methods of determining this say that this is a no. It’s much closer to about 5-6 lbs. It is bigger than your head (well, maybe not your head if you have a particularly large head, but I did describe it as a cabbage “bigger than your head”). Our three methods of weighing it (how is it no one has a scale?) were simply lifting it, and guessing “4-5lbs?”, going to the store and weighing similarly sized cabbages (5-6lbs?), and, thank you raven I entirely blame you, making a balance beam (hey let’s not use my diabolo next time, and our planks are substandard), putting books on the opposite end, and looking it the weight of such books on amazon.com. It weighed about as much as “Road to Reality”, by Roger Penrose, 3.4lbs, and “AI Game Programming Wisdom 2″, edited by Steve Rabin, 3.3lbs, combined. Actually the books were heavier, but my army of choppers were impatient, so my attempts at stacking a bunch of small paperbacks with Penrose were aborted.

On to the next question. How do you cook thirty pounds, I mean about six pounds, or at this point more frequently said, a cabbage larger than your head, in such a way that is tasty?

Well, let’s start with the soup. Not cabbage soup, let’s start with the huge bag of mushrooms I got at the farmers market.

Three varieties of mushrooms: shiitake (in front), maitake (on right), and oyster mushrooms (on left).

The mushrooms came with several recipes. I decided a mushroom soup recipe, and then decided it was too much a cream-and-flour recipe, so I added potatoes and leeks to that recipe. And forgot to put in paprika. And pretty much everything else it suggested. And it’s soup, so I added everything not nailed down.

• 3 large baking potatoes
• 6 leeks
• Half a thing of orzo
• Some chicken bouillon
• Some salt
• Little bit of garlic (only because it was getting so late before it went in, it would have been more)
• Half an onion (again it went late, but it was tasty, there were still identifiable bits of onion in it)
• One apple (what else am I going to do with that apple?)
• Plate full of mushrooms sauteed in butter
• Lots of water

I chopped up the leeks and potatoes, and put them in boiling water. Really, everything should have gone in except the orzo and mushrooms, but it took me so long to get everything going that this went over a long period of time. I saved some of the green ends of the leeks towards the end so there were visible green bits in the soup, but let everything else dissolve into white mush soup. Then the orzo and the leeks went in. The mushrooms were sauteed in butter, but that’s about it.

For the next dish, I tried to follow this carrot kinpira recipe and failed miserably. It was an interesting experiment, though. I forgot to get sesame seeds.  I almost forgot to add soy sauce. I added cabbage core and bok choy stems.

• Carrots, cut thin
• Cabbage core, cut thin
• Bok choy stems, cut thin
• Sesame seed oil
• Ginger
• A pinch of Three arbol peppers, ground
• Way too much parsley (reconsider buying when you see bunches that big)
• Soy sauce

Well, it was tasty, but not quite kinpira. I heated the ground peppers in sesame seed oil, and stir fried the veggies and ginger almost as fast as my assistants could chop them, and grumbled about my lack of sesame seeds, while chopping and adding parsley.  At the very end, only because someone mentioned it, I added the soy sauce.  Not bad, but not what I was expecting, and due to the quantity I was making, not very well cooked, but not bad for a salad.

The bulk of the cabbage was basically a stir-friedish-thing.  One assistant was mostly charged with it.

• As much cabbage as could fit in the pan
• A bunch of bok choy
• Some ground beef
• The other half of the onion
• Garlic
• One habanero
• Mustard

I’m not entirely certain what else, because on occasion my back was turned, and odder things were put in there.

I started by sauteeing garlic, onion, and habanero.  Then all the cabbage and bok choy was thrown in (about 3/4ths of the cabbage).  It was continually stirred, with odd things mixed in, the only one I’m certain of is the mustard, which I could taste (it gave a very sweet taste) and pretty much else no one noticed.  Some commented the flavour of the habanero stood out, some commented the spiciness of the habanero stood out. I’m going to revisit this, because I need to ask what else went in while back was turned.

Ah yes and I also made rice with some cumin thrown in the pot on the side.  I use a little rice cooker, and this I did not know–I really should have made two pots of rice.

The clear winner here was the soup.  Everyone loved the soup.  The rice was devoured in seconds–I made another pot, but the time the second pot was done, no one was hungry anymore.

The cabbage went over well–I think most people’s reactions were “um…  interesting” but it was well devoured.

The “almost kinpira” was also devoured–those who don’t do spicy said it was way too spicy, but that really was only one person, whereas everyone else said it needed more “something”, with the something suggested ginger, or sesame seeds, or…  well, something.  Funny, as my new technique with ginger is to make sure it is fresh, chop it fine, and use a ton, otherwise the flavor doesn’t come across as well.  I thought I did use tons, but it didn’t quite come through.

This fed eight, with barely-almost-some left over. I felt like I succeeded–the leftovers weren’t there because people were still hungry, but there was something left over. There wasn’t any soup left over, but that’s because people kept eating it, even if they weren’t hungry anymore, because it was tasty. There was barely one bowl full of cabbage left. There was half a bowl of kinpira left over, and it would have been eaten had there been room left. There was a pot of rice left over, but when it was done, no one was hungry anymore.

Seriously, for the soup, while doing dishes, I saw there were about five spoonfuls left, went to find a spoon, and when I got back to it they were gone. The other dishwashers beat me to the last five spoonfuls. I will repeat that recipe sometime soon.

Edit: typos fixed throughout.  And lists given bullets.