Socca! + 2 Grain Salads

As someone who deeply appreciates the vast array of edible flavors and textures that abound on this planet, I've learned to pay attention when someone gets really excited about a particular food. Especially when it's vegan and gluten-free. So when I was innocently searching the 'net for a way to (finally) finish off my years-old bag of chickpea flour and ran across a highly enthusiastic blogpost about "socca" on http://chezpim.com/uncategorized/socca_nice, I immediately cleared off the counter and got down to making it.

Never mind that I had never even heard of socca before, despite having spent quality time in the area where it originates. How did I miss this on the streets of Nice, given that its scent while cooking is like melted butter wafting through the air. My oldest daughter described it as the smell of "that unhealthy popcorn that comes in a box at the movies and has fake orange stuff on it but tastes really really good!" - a major compliment. (Clearly, she has picked up my sometime ambivalence about eating healthy, natural food vs. food that has been engineered to appeal to our most basic tastebuds...if you don't believe me just put a peanut butter snickers in front of me and see how long it lasts.)

Our whole family loved socca from the start. We loved it hot and crispy out of the oven. We loved it soft and slightly chewy after it had cooled. We loved it the next day reheated in the toaster oven and even in the microwave. It was good dipped into garlicky yogurt (Greek tzatziki), it was great dipped into salsa, and it was an excellent wrapper for tabbouleh. The taste is like the most delicious buttered corn tortilla fresh off the griddle, but with more protein and no need to use a tortilla press.



Socca - doesn't look like much but is highly, highly yum.



Guess who got the last piece!

If you're still not motivated enough to try making it yourself, just consider how simple the ingredients are: chickpea flour, salt, water, olive oil. All you need is a whisk and a round cake pan. So go ahead, check out the website I mentioned above and give it a try (sorry for no direct link to the page, but I'm trying to clean up a spam issue on the blog - way too many visitors coming from an adult dating site in Russia!). Anyway, you can make a few socca, refrigerate the batter, and make some more another day. Or make a bunch at once and keep them in the fridge for later in the week. Oh, and if you're wondering where the heck to buy chickpea flour, Bob's Red Mill may have it alongside their other specialty flours at the grocery store. But chickpea flour is sure to be even cheaper at Indian food stores, where it's called besan. It stays fresh for a looooong time in the pantry, if my experience is anything to go on.

On the other hand, if you absolutely cannot force yourself to remain in the hot kitchen long enough to cook a batch of socca (and believe me, I understand), here are two lovely cold grain salads that might appeal. One is a tabbouleh recipe from Ina Garten (http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/tabbouleh-recipe/index.html). It makes a lot so I usually cut it in half or plan to serve it to a crowd. Love that she includes mint and cucumber - they really brighten up what can otherwise be a dense salad.

Tzatziki, tabbouleh, socca - I think we pretty much covered the Mediterranean on this plate.

The other salad involves quinoa and edamame beans. Quinoa is that high-protein Aztec grain from Peru that became trendy a couple years ago. When cooked, white quinoa always reminds me of embryos but I try not to think about it too much. This salad is loosely based on a popular deli item we have at the store. It's interesting: our customers may be fairly well-heeled and I would presume, well-educated, but obviously no one has ever dared tell them how to say quinoa properly - (keen-wah). I do my best to clear up the matter without making anybody feel embarrassed. They seem to be grateful and order it by the pound.

The way I make this salad is to cook the quinoa early in the morning while I'm making breakfast, then it goes into the fridge until evening. Five minutes to steam the edamame, a quick whisk of the dressing, and a few downstrokes of the knife pulled over whatever greens, herbs and flowers I've harvested from the garden. Voila!



Quinoa and Edamame Salad with nasturtiums, chard, basil

  Quinoa and Edamame Salad

• 1 cup quinoa, well-rinsed in a sieve
• 2 cups water

Bring the water to a boil, add the quinoa and turn down to simmer with the lid on. Cook 13 minutes, then dump the cooked grains into a covered glass dish and refrigerate.

• 1cup frozen edamame (green soybeans)

Steam the edamame according to the package directions. Add to the cooked quinoa.

Optional add-ins, as you like:

• a few large chard or lacinato kale or spinach leaves
• a few green or purple basil leaves or watercress or cilantro
• nasturtium flowers

Sliver and toss with the rest of the salad.

Dressing:

• 1 lime, juiced
• however much lime juice you get, the equivalent amount of extra virgin olive oil
• 1/2 tsp salt, more to taste
• fresh ground pepper, or red chili flakes

Whisk together and pour over salad, then toss well before serving cold or at room temperature.

Happy Eating! Socca! (I just love saying it. I think it's going to be my new "Cheers!" when we toast.)



Gratuitious picture of the big birthday girl! (yes, we had to use matches for candles this time - not recommended)



Choco Pudding + Muumuu Mishmash

Still not a whole lotta cooking going on in these parts... this happens to me every summer. It's ironic - all this fresh produce piling up in the fridge and I simply can't be bothered to spend much time in the kitchen. Instead we've been swimming in our local pond, attending the many free cultural events here in the Berkshires, reading long books and just generally hanging out. Oh yeah, plus there's that little triathalon thing I've been trying to get ready for. Thank goodness for the exta long days of summer!

View from the Kripalu footpath to the Stockbridge Bowl



Relaxing in front of Norman Rockwell's studio



With little cooking going on, it seems that one thing we've been eating fairly regularly is cold chocolate pudding. Which I don't feel toooo bad about, considering the only ingredients are tofu and chocolate chips. Yes, you read right: 2 ingredients. And it's so easy to make: first you dump one of those boxes of silken tofu (Mori-Nu is the brand I usually see at most grocery stores) into a food processor. Puree it until creamy, then add 3/4 cup melted chocolate chips and puree some more. Yum, yum - layered with whipped cream, or fresh berries, bananas, peanut butter, fresh mint, or in a pie crust... This recipe is not my invention and honestly, I don't even remember who first told me about it, but show up at any vegan potluck and I guarantee you there will be tofu chocolate pudding. It's just one of those axioms of life.



About 15 lbs of berries. Every year, we vow to pick even more - they are so good!



Well, as I said I haven't been in the kitchen much, but I have been spending plenty of time in the cool basement of our house since we don't have air conditioning. The basement has become our family's all-purpose creative space - it's where we've set up the workshop, craft table, painting easel, sewing machine, etc. So after a few days of staring at all the sewing projects I've had piled up since wintertime, I finally got up the courage to tackle The Muumuu.

Originally, I picked up this vintage dress because of its huge, Georgia O'Keefe-like flowers on a neon orange background. Wowie zowie!!! Also, it's 100% cotton, is from my favorite decade ('60s) and was made in Hawaii! But as much as I loved its potential, I'd been avoiding The Muumuu because I was afraid I'd make something dumb out of it and waste that lovely fabric.



The Muumuu:
Business in the front...



Party in the back.
Seriously, what's with the extra fabric layer??







It was at the point where I thought I would just to open it up and make big throw pillows, but thankfully at the last minute I had another inspiration instead. With just a little creativity, a lot of time spent communing with my seam ripper, and the patience to conquer two of my long-time sewing fears (installing garment zippers and gathering), I managed to transform one problematic dress into three cute ones! So the girls and I now have matching outfits. Cheesy, I know, but they are thrilled to be matchy matchy and I am (mostly) able to swallow my embarrassment at attracting extra attention in public.

Next time I promise to have more to offer in the way of summer recipes. Somebody's got to use up all these vegetables! Hope you're enjoying these hot days and taking advantage of all that summer has to offer.

A Little Healthy Color: Kale + Beet Salads

Feeling oh-so-grateful this week for an abundance of sunshine and time with my family. Especially since I just finished watching the film Wit, in which Emma Thompson portrays an isolated poetry professor being treated for advanced stage ovarian cancer. Pretty heavy stuff for a Friday night, but the house was quiet and it was just what I needed after a busy week of frolicking and refereeing children. My takeaway from the movie is that in the end, it all boils down to the human connections in our lives helping to prepare us for our ultimate connection with the Creator. Something to consider when we are struggling with the people around us, you know?

Well, moving on to food... lately I haven't done much inspired cooking - more like a bunch of thrown-together meals - but I haven't heard any complaints. No complaints from the big guy, anyway; the girls' nightly dinner complaints are pro forma and I would be highly suspicious if they suddenly began eating their dinner vegetables with a smile. Although there is the exception of kale salad, a favorite of the big girl. And beet salad, a favorite of the little girl. Since both of these vegetables are so exceptionally good for us and seriously delicious, this week I wanted to share our favorite methods for preparing them. Perhaps these dishes might help balance the creamy potato salad and hot dogs that tend to dominate summer meals...

The kale salad below is an adaptation of a recipe Mollie Katzen has on her website. It's kind of a funny story how I ended up on that website in the first place. I'd had a Moosewood cookbook for years (the low-fat one, a giveaway from my mom who said she hated the cookbook, ha!) and I had made nearly everything in it, but somehow I just never heard of Mollie Katzen, one of the founders of the Moosewood collective and a popular vegetarian cookbook author. Then one day I was taking a walk during my lunch hour on the campus of Harvard University, and saw a bunch of people going to this lecture about food so I joined them, and there was Mollie! She had flown in from California to talk with the University community about how to use fresh herbs, and was preparing dishes up on stage, and there was this whole catered lunch that used her recipes...Harvard spends its money in interesting ways sometimes. So I got all pumped up about frying sage and growing lovage, and spent the rest of the afternoon back at my desk, covertly surfing Mollie's website for more recipes.

Sorry no food pics today - just one of those weeks where we were too busy living life to document it much. With the exception of this fellow I recently noticed near one of my favorite kayaking spots:

Old dude of the forest

And this one, taken by big girl:



Lovely surprise perennials at our new house



Tuscan Kale Salad

Take a bunch of kale, any type, and stack the leaves on the cutting board. Slice the leaves into 1/4" shreds, then place in a salad spinner, rinse with water and give them a whirl to dry off. Place in a large bowl.

Take a small piece of bread and toast it, then puree in the processor until you have coarse crumbs. Place the crumbs in a small bowl along with 1/2 cup fresh grated parmesan cheese, 1 pressed garlic clove, 1/4 tsp salt, the juice of 1 lemon, and about 4 T extra virgin olive oil. Mix it all together and using your clean hands (or gloves), massage the crumb-cheese mixture into the kale shreds, making sure they are evenly coated. Taste and add more oil, lemon, cheese or salt if needed. The salad can be eaten at room temp or chilled.

The beet salad is more of a treatment than an actual recipe. At the specialty food store where I work occasionally, we have a salad like this in the deli case and it is seriously popular. I used to bring it home for me and the little girl to devour, then one day I realized it really wasn't such a big deal to cook beets myself. So now anytime I'm in the kitchen making something, I just stick a pot of water on to boil and set the timer for about 40 minutes so a few beets can simmer on the back fo the stove. I find that if I have a container of already cooked beets hanging out in the fridge, I'm much more likely to serve them than if I have to start from scratch.

Beet Salad
Wash several beets and trim their stem to 1 inch. Place beets in a medium-sized pot and fill it with enough water to cover them. Cover the pot, bring water to a boil, then turn heat to low so that it simmers gently. After about 30 minutes, use a fork to stab the largest beet. If it goes all the way through, drain the water and place the beets in a covered glass dish in the refrigerator. Cook for about 10 minutes longer if the beets need more time, then check again.

The salad can be prepared while beets are still hot, in fact the dressing will be absorbed nicely that way, but you can also just take them from the fridge whenever you are ready to make the salad. Either way, you can use your fingers or a vegetable peeler to remove the outer skin. Dishwashing gloves are nice if you don't want pink fingernails. Cut the beets in half, then into slices. Thinly slice a Vidalia onion or half of a yellow onion and place in the bowl with the beets. If you have it, chop up some parsely for a little color.

The dressing is a simple viniagrette. I like to use either apple cider or white wine vinegar (1 part) with extra virgin olive oil (3 parts). A shake of salt and pepper and you are good to go. They are best served at room temp so the oil isn't congealed.

Summer Feasting, Greek-style

I always love an excuse to cook up a storm. Maybe it’s someone’s birthday, or we have an out-of-town visitor, or maybe I just scored a huge bunch of beets at the farmer’s market and feel compelled to create a whole meal around them. It’s funny to me that people sometimes seem overwhelmed by my efforts, almost guilty even, when they see me busy in the kitchen. I wouldn’t go to the trouble if I didn’t love doing it, I say, but still they seem rather uncomfortable. Maybe it’s just that people don’t want to expend so much energy in the kitchen anymore? Personally, I love the challenge of getting five dishes going at once, making substitutions and adaptations on the fly, rotating burner and oven rack space, orchestrating it all to be ready at the same time.

Anyway, yesterday we had a couple of our favorite people over for lunch and to celebrate, I decided to channel my inner Greek village mama. You know, the one that puts out way too much food and then exhorts you over and over again to Eat! Eat! Well, eat we all did, and somehow still managed to find space for an impromptu dessert (no, I didn’t think that far ahead in my meal planning). Below is a picture of the savories: Kale spanikopita, squash patties (kolokithokefthedes – say that 3 times fast!), fava beans in tomato sauce (gigantes), lemon-garlic-dill green beans, roasted beet/Vidalia onion salad, plus liberal helpings of feta cheese, kalamata olives, and bread. Scrounging for dessert, we came up with French vanilla ice cream with dark chocolate shavings, thawed strawberries and their juice, plus a sprinkling of Amaretto liqueur on top. Yep, we pretty much rolled away from the table after the meal.

Greek feast!

I’ve posted the kale spanikopita recipe before – I call it kalepita – but wanted to share how to make gigantes and kolokithokefthedes, as they are both super-easy and high on the yum scale. These are classic Greek bar appetizers – vegetarians visiting Greece fare best by ordering mostly appetizers, in my experience – and the fresh herbs in both dishes, plus a little squeeze of lemon juice, really shout summer.

Gigantes (Fava Beans in Tomato Sauce)

• 1 15 oz can crushed tomatoes
• 3 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 2 15 oz cans fava beans, drained and rinsed
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh dill
• salt and pepper to taste 

Combine all ingredients in a medium-sized pot, bring to a boil and then turn down to a low simmer for about 20 minutes. Serve at room temp alongside brown bread for mopping up the sauce, or with rice pilaf.

Kolokithokefthedes (Squash Patties)

Note: Any stage of making the batter can be done beforehand and refrigerated overnight, since it needs to be refrigerated at least an hour anyway.

• 4 medium zucchini squash, cut into 3 chunks each. Place in a medium pot with several inches of water in the bottom. Bring to a boil and then cook until tender (about 10 min). Drain, mash with a fork and set aside.
• 1 large yellow onion, chopped. Saute in 2 T butter until soft (about 5 min).
• ½ cup grated parmesan cheese
• 1 handful of fresh mint, chopped
• ¼ cup fresh parsley, chopped
• ½ tsp salt
• pepper
• 2 eggs, beaten lightly
• 1 cup bread crumbs (1 piece fresh bread, toasted and whirled in processor) 

Combine all ingredients to make batter. Cover and refrigerate at least 1 hour.

Place ½ cup flour into a bowl. Heat ¼ cup olive oil in a wide bottomed pan until it’s hot enough that a little bit of the batter sizzles when you drop it in. 
 
Scoop up about ¼ cup batter at a time, loosely forming it into a flat circle and then dredge it in the flour before sliding into the oil. Cook until light brown on each side.

Squeeze a bit of lemon juice over the patties before serving.

And just for fun, a few of my other favorite summer things...

Adirondack chairs



Straw sunhats



Waterfall hikes

Painted toenails

Happy Summer!

Scapes, Strawberries, Stories

Whenever I'm visiting with an old friend or getting to know a new one, I usually find that it's in the old-fashioned sharing of stories that our real connections are forged. And in other people's stories I sometimes recognize my own joys and struggles in life, giving me the wonderful feeling that not only do we have something in common but - huge relief! - I'm not alone in it all. Recently I've begun to realize something else about story-telling: when I tell my own story to someone, I'm also telling the story to myself.

It might be assumed that I would already know what my story was, and it's true I've met a number of people who are blessedly conscious in that way, but sadly I am not one of them. Not yet, anyway. For many years, I have told my stories to others but never truly listened to them myself. This habit is to my detriment, for sure. Lately though, my ears have perked up, perhaps because for a while now I've been telling the same story about my life to everyone I talk with. It's not a particularly uplifting story as stories go, and once I finally started hearing myself, really hearing the negative story that I always seem to tell, I decided that certain things have got to change.

Most of the changes won't happen right away, but the first thing I can change is my attitude about where I am now. Giving thanks is a big part of that. So is trying to take the long view, the high-altitude view, or any view but the one I usually have - the down-in-the-trenches view. Better to not take the rear view, either - looking backward hasn't done me much good, that's for sure. So there's a change in perspective that I want to effect. And then there will be changes in situation, actual changes in my reality. Of course changes inevitably happen, whether we do anything or not, but I hope to find the energy, creativity and strength to ensure that those changes will be the ones to help me have a better story to tell. More on that to come.



Need to be like the beaver and get busy



For now, it's officially the start of summer! And that is a change I've been waiting for all year. Welcome strawberries, welcome beans, welcome squash (hot East Coast temps lately, yikes). Best of all, welcome garlic scapes! Scapes are the tops of garlic when it flowers, and growers cut them off this time of year to help the bulbs develop fully beneath the ground. Besides my huge love of garlic flavor in general, it's the aesthetic beauty of curly, unruly scapes that speaks to my heart. Their very short season - usually just a couple of weeks overlapping strawberry season - forces me to wait patiently each year. I'll always remember the farmstand we stopped at a few years ago on the way home from a windy day at Crane Beach, MA. They were selling little bundles of scapes and offering samples of two dips made with them. I took the scapes and the dip recipes home with me and promptly fell in love.  



Sculptural garlic scapes



White Bean Dip

I like to serve this dip with whole wheat pita bread, toasted whole

in the toaster oven and then broken into rough pieces.

• In a food processor, blend: 1/3 cup sliced scapes, 1 T lemon juice, 1/2 t sea salt, 1/8 t pepper
• Add and pulse 1 can cannelini beans, drained and rinsed
• Add and pulse 1/4 c extra virgin olive oil
• Add and pulse 2 T water
• Add a little more lemon juice or salt if it needs it. Process until the dip is smooth, but not runny. If you leave it in the fridge overnight it will thicken up a bit.

White Bean Dip w/Pita Crisps

Garlic Top Pesto

This is not only great over pasta, but also on crackers and as a dip for crudites.

• Pulse until smooth: 1/4 c extra virgin olive oil, 1/4 c unsalted peanuts
• Add and pulse 1/3 lb coarsely chopped scapes
• Add and pulse 1/4 c finely grated parmesan, adding a little extra olive oil if needed. Check for salt.

And now on to what most people think is the star of the early summer season, strawberries! This shortcake made a brief appearance before disappearing into our tummies...the recipe came from here.

We ate nearly the entire shortcake - 2 weeks later, I think I still feel full.

And what would a warm summer day be without refreshments? Ever since we picked nearly 20 pounds of strawberries at a local organic farm a few weeks ago, I've been eyeing the bags of them stacked up in our freezer and contemplating the possibilities. Strawberry shortcake, yes. Strawberry waffles, yes. Strawberry daiquiries, now we're talking! No official recipe for these, I just filled the blender about halfway up with frozen berries, added a couple jiggers of rum, a few spoonfuls of sugar, and enough water to make it all blend up nicely. So, so good...



Summer Strawberry Bliss!!!