Gevirts: quick cheap easy good food – Page 7

Thyme or rosemary bread

Riding around in the Abruzzo hills of Italy

I spent one fall with my friend Kay riding motorcycles up in the hills around Rome – well, we rode on the back of the motorcycles like girls, and our Italian friends Paolo and Alberto drove the motorcycles. That’s a lot easier!

When we stopped for lunch, Paolo would often make a small fire, take bread out of his saddlebags, slice it thick and soak it with olive oil, and toast it over the fire. When it was toasted, we sprinkled salt and thyme on it and ate it hot. What a great lunch!

Alberto and I ate thyme bread in the fall, when there’s plenty of thyme growing. Try it also with rosemary, as in this picture.

How to make thyme bread:

Bake or buy a loaf of thick crusty bread. Turn on your broiler in the oven. Cut slices about an inch thick, and put them on a cookie sheet. Use a pastry brush to brush a liberal amount of olive oil on each slice. Sprinkle with kosher salt (coarse salt). Pick fresh thyme or rosemary in your yard or buy some at the store.

Broil these for about ten minutes in the oven, or until they begin to turn brown around the edges. Watch them carefully so they don’t burn! Eat them hot out of the oven.

Vegetarian or vegan

Just naturally vegan! Enjoy!

Can I keep this for later?

Nope. This one you have to eat while it’s still hot. Later, the bread will be soggy and bitter.

Spinach soup

Cold day, warm appetizer or lunch

It hardly ever snows in Portland anymore, thanks to global warming. But when it does, the kids get really excited and rush out to play in it. Coming from the Northeast, I always think it’s funny when the kids are excited about two inches of snow.

How to make spinach soup:

In a large saucepan, boil 4 cups of water with two cups of leftover miso or chicken soup over high heat. While the water’s heating, chop two leeks, first lengthwise and then crossways into 1/2 inch rounds (cut off the roots and the green part of the stem first). Add the leeks to the water. (Or you can just use onions.) Then peel and cut up two potatoes into eighths and put them in the water too.

While the leeks and potatoes are cooking, pull the leaves off a bunch of spinach and compost the stems.

When the leeks and potatoes are soft, after about 20 minutes, add the spinach and stir until it wilts. Take the soup off the heat and puree it with an immersion blender.

In a small bowl, mix two eggs, 1/2 cup of milk, and 1/2 cup of full fat Greek yogurt. Slowly add a little hot soup to the eggs, then slowly add the egg mixture back into the soup, stirring the whole time to keep the eggs from scrambling. Reheat the soup but do not let it boil. Add salt and pepper to taste, and perhaps a tablespoon of chopped mint or basil if you have them. Serve with thick slices of bread, and maybe hummus or cheese.

Vegetarian or vegan

Vegetarian, but not vegan. For a vegan soup, stop after pureeing with the immersion blender, and just add the salt and pepper and herbs then.

Can I keep spinach soup for later?

If you keep it in the refrigerator in a sealed tupperware, spinach soup will be okay to reheat for a couple of days, but not too long.

Salmorejo

Andalucia and morning sickness

The first summer I spent in Andalucia was also the summer I was pregnant with my first child. Even though Andalucia’s a great place to eat, with all kinds of new foods I was eager to check out, practically everything I ate made me feel ill. I wound up sadly eating most of my meals at McDonalds – the only thing I could keep down.

But on later trips, I was able to enjoy Andalucian food. Salmorejo, a soup like gazpacho but with a creamier texture, was one of the best discoveries. This is an ancient soup, going back all the way to Roman times, except for the tomatoes.

How to make salmorejo:

Take half a loaf of stale bread and break it into chunks. Toast the bread on a baking sheet in the oven, and process it into crumbs in the food processor. Add 4 ripe tomatoes, two cloves of garlic, 1/2 cup of olive oil, 1/8 cup of vinegar, and 1 teaspoon salt. Work in batches if necessary. Puree until the mixture is smooth; use the immersion blender or a standard blender if necessary to get the soup really smooth. Salmorejo is different from gazpacho in being a smooth puree. Chill in the refrigerator for at least an hour. Serve with small cubes of Spanish ham and crumbled hard-boiled egg scattered on top of the soup.

Vegetarian or vegan?

Salmorejo’s vegan, if you leave off the egg and ham garnish. Add crushed toasted almonds instead.

And will salmorejo keep?

As with gazpacho, you can eat salmorejo for a week afterwards, if you keep it in the refrigerator. But the garlic flavor will get stronger over time, and you may need to add more water.

Roasted chickpeas

How to roast chickpeas:

At breakfast, put a cup of chickpeas to soak in a large bowl of water. An hour and a half before dinner, rinse the chickpeas and put them in a saucepan over high heat in plenty of fresh water.

Bring to a boil and simmer for half an hour or until the chickpeas are soft all the way through. (Or skip this step and use canned chickpeas, but the dried ones will have more flavor.) Rinse them again.

Preheat the oven to 450 F. Spread out the chickpeas on a dishtowel to dry, and pat them with another dishtowel – get them dry or they’ll be soggy instead of crunchy. Spread the chickpeas out on a baking sheet, and roll them in a mixture of 1/8 cup of olive oil, 1 teaspoon of kosher salt, and 1 teaspoon of chopped thyme or cayenne pepper, if you’d like them spicy. Bake for half an hour, or until the chickpeas are brown and crunchy. Shake or stir the pan from time to time to prevent burning. Be especially careful near the end not to let them burn.

Serve hot, or let them get cold first.

Can I store roasted chickpeas for later?

Roasted chickpeas will be fine the next day or two.

Potato-squash puffs

Delicious, nutitious party treats!

I was running a free store, and somebody brought these and left them on the food table. I’d been working all day and missed lunch, and I was starving, and when I found these they were so good! Sadly, the person who brought them was long gone, and so I had to make up a recipe for myself to make them at home. They came out good, though.

How to make potato puffs:

Preheat the oven to 400. Cut a small butternut squash into several chunks, and take out the seeds.P Put the chunks on a baking sheet and roast for about an hour, until the squash is soft and partly blackened (caramelized). Remove from the oven and let cool, then peel off the skin (this can be done the day before).

Meanwhile, peel three potatoes and slice them about 1/8 inch thick. Pour some olive oil on a baking sheet and spread it around, and lay out the potatoes on the baking sheet in a single layer. Put them in the oven to roast along with the squash. Let them bake about 40 minutes, until they are soft and browned and puff up a little.

In a medium-sized mixing bowl, mash the squash (I used the immersion blender). Add a teaspoon of curry powder, a pinch of cayenne pepper, half a teaspoon each of oregano, thyme, salt and black pepper. Or whatever spices you prefer. Use a small spoon to place a spoonful of squash on top of each potato slice, flatten the squash slightly, and return the tray to the oven for another ten minutes to heat them up and brown the squash a little. You could use the broiler for this last part, if you watched them carefully so they didn’t burn.

Vegetarian or vegan?

This is entirely vegan and gluten-free – great for parties where you don’t know what people will eat.

Can I keep leftover potato puffs for later?

Yes, these are okay reheated the next day, but they’re much better fresh. You can’t freeze them.

Pork rillette

Impressive, delicious, and easy

Pork rillette’s one of those luxury treats you pay a zillion dollars for at the store, but it’s ridiculously easy to make at home, and it keeps for a week in the fridge. And much cheaper to make at home too.

How to make pork rillette:

Set the oven to 275 F. Put half a pound of pork shoulder (also called pork butt or boneless country style ribs) in a roasting pan, sprinkle a handful of dried thyme on top, and pour a half a cup of water into the pan. Cook undisturbed, covered with a cookie sheet, for three hours.

Remove from the oven, uncover, and let the meat cool until it’s easy to handle, about ten minutes. Lift the meat out into a bowl and shred it with two forks. Pour 2/3 of the liquid (fat and water) from the pan into the shredded meat. Add a large pinch of salt, 1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg or allspice, and a teaspoon of lemon juice, mix, and pack the meat into a ramekin or tupperware. Pour the rest of the fat on top to seal it, cover, and put in the refrigerator for at least two hours. Serve with a knife, to spread on crackers.

Vegetarian or vegan

Pork rillette is not at all vegan or vegetarian, sorry.

Can I keep rillette for later?

Yes, you can keep it in the refrigerator, well sealed up in a tupperware, for a week. It won’t freeze well though.

Pistachio soup

Again with Ottolenghi:

This is a radical simplification of a recipe from Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem, which was delicious the way I did it, though I’m sure it would be better the way he did it. Only more expensive and harder. I left out saffron, and substituted an onion for leeks and shallots, among other things.

How to make Pistachio Soup:

(This serves three or four as an appetizer) Preheat the oven to 350. Shell half a pound of pistachios; you should have about a cup of pistachio nuts after they’re shelled. Boil the nuts for one minute and then while they’re still hot use your thumbs to rub off the skins. You won’t get all of them, but the soup will be a prettier color if you get most of them. Roast the pistachios on a cookie sheet in the oven for 8 minutes.

While the pistachios are roasting, melt half a stick of butter in a medium-size saucepan and slowly saute one chopped onion in it until it’s soft. While it’s cooking, add some salt and pepper, a heaping teaspoon of cumin, half a teaspoon of turmeric (for color) and a teaspoon of grated ginger. When the onions are soft, add two cups of water and a chicken bouillon cube (or leftover chicken soup). Stir and simmer for about ten minutes.

While the soup is simmering, use a good immersion blender (better than mine), the food processor, or a mortar and pestle to grind the roasted pistachios into powder. Add them to the soup and use the immersion blender to puree the whole soup. Add the juice of one large orange and half a lemon, stir, and reheat before serving with a garnish of chopped parsley.

Vegetarian or Vegan?

If you want to make a vegan soup instead, make the soup the same way except instead of the chicken bouillon cube, put in a spoonful of Japanese miso.

Will it keep?

I think this would be better fresh. We didn’t have any left, but the juice flavors wouldn’t last well.

Parsley boniet

Early spring fresh food!

Here in Portland, parsley grows like a weed in my yard, and it’s one of the few things that grows in February and March. But it turns out parsley’s way more than a garnish. Instead of using parsley in little sprinkles, try recipes that involve a cup or two of parsley – delicious! This recipe is Italian.

But anchovies? I don’t like anchovies!

Everybody says that, but in this recipe you don’t taste the anchovies the same way you do on pizza. (Though I confess I actually like anchovies on pizza too). Anchovies are super good for you, so give it a try. But you could substitute canned tuna if you really have to.

My food processor – click to buy!

How to make parsley boniet:

Pick or buy two bunches of fresh Italian parsley (the flat not the curly kind). It should fill a large bowl. Pull off the leaves, and throw away the stems. Add 1 2 ounce can of anchovy fillets, 3 cloves of garlic, 1 1/2 tablespoons of tomato paste (about half of one of those small cans), 4 tablespoons of red wine vinegar, and 1/2 cup of olive oil, and chop it all together in the food processor. You’ll probably have to do two or three batches, unless you have a bigger food processor than I do.

This dip tastes terrific, but I have to say it’s not as beautiful as it might be. I don’t know what you could do about that.

Serve right away, with crackers or on sliced toasted French bread. You can make this ahead and refrigerate it for a few hours and it will be even better.

Vegetarian or vegan

To make a vegan version, just leave out the anchovies and use more parsley, and add some capers. You could also add some cooked chickpeas, mashed.

Can I keep this for later?

Yes – this dip is actually better the next day, after it sits in the refrigerator and the flavors blend more. But if you’re going to keep it, use a little less garlic, because the garlic flavor will become stronger. You can keep it for about a week in the fridge.

Bread – no kneading

Greek bread

On an archaeological dig in central Greece (the same one where our cook Vasiliki made us that wonderful string bean stew), we also ate a lot of the Greek bread baked by the local bakeries in our village. Well, not really our village – Proskyna was too small to have a bakery, but the next village over, Theologos, had a bakery.

They baked this bread in round two-kilo loaves. The loaves had so much yeast in them that the area around the bakery smelled like a brewery. The bread was fantastic fresh, and hard as a rock three hours later. This bread is not as good, but you can make it yourself at home, and it will keep for a couple of days.

How to make no-knead bread:

Start at breakfast-time. In a medium-sized mixing bowl, mix three cups of flour, 1 1/4 teaspoons of salt, and 1 teaspoon of instant yeast. Then add 1 1/2 cups of warm water and mix with a wooden spoon. The dough will be shaggy and sticky and seem like it might have too much water in it. Cover the bowl with a plate and leave it to sit in a warm room while you’re at work all day. If you keep your house cold in winter like mine, put a pot of hot water in the oven and put the bread dough in the oven with it, and that will be warm enough.

When you get home from work, the surface of your dough should be dotted with bubbles from the yeast working and producing carbon dioxide. Turn out your dough on to a floured counter. Sprinkle the dough with flour pretty generously and fold it over once or twice. Grease a bread-pan and put the dough in the bread-pan. Cover the bread-pan with a dish-towel. Let the dough rise for two more hours.

Preheat the oven to 400 F. Put the bread in and bake for about 45 minutes, or until the top is browned and the loaf sounds hollow when you tap it. Take it out of the oven and turn it out of the bread-pan to cool.

Vegetarian or vegan

This bread is entirely vegan, and so is the hummus you can spread on it. Or eat no-knead bread with spinach soup, or onion soup, or use it to make grilled cheese sandwiches.

Can I keep no-knead bread for later?

If you keep it wrapped in plastic, no-knead bread will last a couple of days before getting stale. You can freeze the loaves fresh, and thaw them out at room temperature.

Homemade mayonnaise

A French Habit

Americans don’t usually eat hard-boiled eggs with mayonnaise on them. My partner says it seems wrong, redundant because the mayonnaise is also largely made of eggs. But in France oeufs mayonnaise is a very common appetizer.

I think the main difference is that American mayonnaise has no flavor, and the French mayonnaise is delicious. So for this recipe, make your own mayonnaise. Maybe you don’t want to eat it on hard-boiled eggs? (My kids’ dad says it is like cannibalism, to eat mayonnaise on eggs.) Then it will also be good on sandwiches or macaroni salad.

Raw Eggs

Homemade mayonnaise has raw eggs in it, so don’t leave it out for too long. Babies and anyone whose immune system is weak shouldn’t eat homemade mayonnaise.

How to make mayonnaise:

(takes about half an hour, but you can do it ahead of when you want it)

Separate one egg, keeping the white to make a meringue later if you like, and put the yolk in a small bowl. With a fork, stir the yolk until it turns light yellow. Mix in a pinch of kosher salt, a teaspoon of regular mustard, and a teaspoon of vinegar. Keep the vinegar bottle handy.

Pour a cup measure full of olive oil (or it’s really easier to pour a two cup measure half full of olive oil). Very very slowly, add a few drops of oil at a time to the egg, whisking the egg constantly with a fork. If you start to see puddles of oil, you’re going too fast. Let the egg absorb each few drops of oil before you add any more. After about a quarter of a cup, the mayonnaise will get a little thicker and lighter in color, and you can relax a little.

Now add the oil in a constant stream, but a very thin stream, still slowly and still stirring constantly. Stir back-and-forth, keeping the fork in the liquid. When you have added half the oil, stop and slowly add another two tablespoons of vinegar and mix that in well.

Now go back to adding oil until all of the oil is mixed in. Taste and add more salt or mustard as needed. You can eat your mayonnaise as a sauce on your hard-boiled eggs right away with lettuce on the side, or let it sit on the counter for one or two hours to thicken, then refrigerate. In any case, you should eat your mayonnaise within a few days.