Snow Day Black Bean Dip

Dear Turkey,

That's right -- my husband had a snow day yesterday! And since I don't work on Tuesdays, the baby and I had a snow day, or Sandy Day if you prefer, too. We really enjoyed each other's company by doing wholesome activities like the budget and dumping out plants that are dead. But, really, it was so great just to have an extra day at home that we really did enjoy each other, in spite of chores. Like taking all the dishes out of the cupboards and putting that rubber cupboard lining that can go in the washer under them (which we measured and cut with a box-cutter, of course), and then putting all the dishes back. Romance.

But my husband really made the day delicious (and gassy) with this bean dip. It is so good; it melts in your mouth like butter! (When you see the recipe you will understand why.) It's inspired by this book by Madeleine Kamman. My husband loves her and he takes it seriously when she says to use butter.

Here's what he did:
Microwave one can of black beans (Goya, please), that you drained and rinsed, until very warm to the touch. Add 3-4 T plain yogurt and the same amount of butter. Add 1-2 t kosher salt, 1 T lime juice, one minced shallot, two cloves of pressed garlic and some cumin (optional) and something to make it spicy (optional). Mash it all up and serve with chips and salsa.

I promise you will not be able to stop eating it

I moss you,
Tofu

That Highlighting Had Better Go Away

Dear Turkey,

You said the other day that it seems like everything I post has apples in it. Well, here's one more:

These are baked apples with lingonberries and whipped cream from Kitchen of Light (scroll down). We really love this cookbook, and it's cool because I didn't know much about Scandinavian cooking before we started using it (if you don't either, I'll tell you that lots of things have Aquavit in them). The pictures in the book are beautiful, too.

I cored the apples and put them in a buttered baking dish. Then I put some more butter, lemon juice, and buckwheat honey in the hole where the core was. Then I added some lingonberry preserves on top of all that (the only other time I had had those was eating lunch at Ikea, one of my favorites activities from college) and baked them until they were soft enough to eat with a fork. I served them with some whipped cream that I made and sweetened with sugar (not ultra-pasturized cream, please).

There is another version of this, also from Kitchen of Light, that we make all the time. Instead of the berries, I use a couple of teaspoons of grated fresh ginger, and serve it with low-fat greek yogurt. At the risk of being cliche, this dessert is so good (and it's healthy!) that once you eat it you'll realize that it's more than the sum of its parts.

The classic version

I moss you,
Tofu

One Bowl One Cup Two Spoons Muffins

Dear Turkey,

I've been making a lot of muffins lately (and taking them to work because my HUSBAND is still on a DIET!). If he would only take a little peek at this recipe, he would see how HEALTHY these muffins really are...but he probably would think that I was tricking him, because they are so delicious.

Also, they involve very few dishes that you have to wash at the end (which is good if you don't have a dishwasher like I don't), and you can eat as much batter as you want, if you are the kind of person who doesn't like to eat batter with raw eggs (no comment on which kind of person I am...but it would suck to get salmonella while nursing; that said, my eggs come from a friend with happy chickens, and those kinds of eggs almost never have salmonella). 

This is a recipe that I modified from that classic, The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, which I happened to get as a present from my husband on the very same day that he "surprised" me with the rice cooker. Ahem. 

Just combine:

3 c whole wheat flour

1 t baking soda

4 t baking powder

1 t salt

2 c cornmeal

2 c soymilk

1 c h2o

5 T canola oil

8 T molasses

6 T sugar

and

2 t cinnamon

in a big bowl. stir to combine. makes 24 muffins. use muffin papers. bake at 375 for 15 mins. cool.

I moss you,

Tofu

PS: Dear Blogger: you had better make this annoying highlighting go away. That is your job. I am at work and I need to do my job now instead of wasting time trying to fix it!

My Two Best Friends

 Dear Turkey,

I would like to introduce you to my two best friends...at least in the world of lunch and dinner (oh, were you expecting to see your picture?). In fact, you already know them. I have pages and pages of my cookbook devoted to different kinds of rice and beans, but yesterday I was inspired to try something new.

rice and beans

a match made in heaven

Mexican Fried Rice from Weelicious. I love this blog. Although her recipe calls for cheese, I made it without cheese, because I didn't have any. I really like that this is a satisfying beans and rice dish that really doesn't need cheese (and I can testify to its satisfying-ness, since I had just run ten miles while pushing a giant baby in the baby jogger). And there are all kinds of ways to dress it up (or down) that I won't insult you by describing here (I will say that tonight I'm going to fry some shallots first and add some cilantro at the end).

I love cooking rice in my rice cooker (Dear Cuisinart: when we are rich and famous bloggers you will regret not capitalizing on this shameless product endorsement opportunity!). Perhaps I should embarrass you now by explaining to the world how the rice cooker is responsible for the only time I've lied to my husband, since you let slip that he had gotten it for me before he actually gave it to me...oops...maybe I already did.

I moss you,
Tofu

Things My Hus...Boyfriend Doesn't Like

Dear Tofurkey,

Your crab cakes look delicious, as does your salad (which seems to follow my Simple Steps to Super Salads, coming soon).

My boyfriend (no, he is not my husband) also has things he does not like. His dislikes tend toward the categorical instead of obsessive perfectionism (that's my department). Unlike your husband, whose reluctance to immortalize the inferior I share, mine (again, boyfriend, not husband, really) just does not like certain foods. I've taken the liberty of making a list for you and our blog public should it be important for blog challenges and such:

1. Peanut butter
2. Gelatin
3. Peanut butter flavored gelatin
4. Raw fish (although this is pretty much a texture dislike related to gelatin)
5. Raw fish with peanut butter on them
6. Chocolate combined with mint (or peanut butter, and these are how you know he's really crazy)
7. Mushrooms (but only sometimes; this one's really vexing)
8. Middle Eastern food, nuts besides peanuts, and cilantro (or so he thought until I educated him against his will)
9. Cats covered in peanut butter (OK so it's not a food, but if you hated peanut butter, wouldn't that be hell for you? I mean, just think of things you hate most in the world, then strap it to cats. Now, isn't that worse?)

So these are limits more or less. There is some wiggle room (you can sneak mushrooms by in some things and Philadelphia rolls are A.O.K.), but for guaranteed success, stick to these guidelines. In fact, if you do this, I promise that success is easy. I can't tell you (and you our tiny but ever-growing blog public) how many times I've looked up from my food across our dinner table to ask whether my boyfriend thinks the food is too this or too that only to find that his food is all gone and he's licking his plate on his way back for seconds.

That is, unless the food is sushi.

As you know, I love sushi. In fact, we called ahead to Japan to alert them that they might suffer a food shortage shortly after we arrived (we haven't heard anything official, but there was talk on the plane back of relief expressed in the newspapers at our departure).

Not so much my boyfriend. On his first day at work, the group in Japan insisted on taking him to a traditional Japanese dinner. The first course was sashimi. The second course was peanut butter sashimi. Just kidding. It was almost worse. The second course was a jiggly-bowl of mushroom tapioca. He came back raving about the shrimp tempura they'd gotten. I asked if that was his favorite course. He said it wasn't a course; it was one, lonely oasis of shrimp tempura. The rest of the seven or so course dinner he had to choke back. Poor guy.

Poor guy indeed if he couldn't appreciate sushi in Japan. I've thought a lot since we got back about whether to say it's better or not and I think the answer is no; they're just too different and there are things to like about both. To be sure, the fish in Japan is unreal. It's fresh and flavorful; it almost melts on your tongue like butter (read: buttah if you're into the NY Jewish thing). But you almost never find rolls in Japan, and certainly none with the mixture of 20 ingredients you regularly find in the U.S. And why would you? The fish has so much to offer that anything more than rice, wasabi, and soy sauce takes away from the flavor, and those are pushing it.

This is how almost all sushi in Japan is prepared, what I've always called nigiri sushi. Watching it get prepared made me think all I've heard about so-called sushi "chefs" is hype because it essentially involves taking a slab of admittedly delicious fish and shaping it to a chunk of sticky rice with wasabi on top. But it is exquisite. And it's much cheaper. These plates of nigiri probably cost about $2, and they're fancy salmon and tuna. Yes, not only are fish different, but there are several kinds of tuna or salmon you might order which have different flavors (and associated costs).

As you can see, it's not impossible to find rolls in Japan, but this is tuna with some scallions and maybe a bit of dressing. It's well short of the concoctions I normally find in sushi places around here. Since I've been back, I've eaten some of those concoctions and I find that I really like them. It's almost like two different kinds of food.

All of my observations must be taken with some salt. In part due to my boyfriend's dislike and the fact that there were so many awesome places to eat, we never went to a really fancy sushi restaurant. At the very high end, maybe things are different. But we ate at some nice places that served sushi, and my conclusions are therefore based on experience in a variety of sushi-eating contexts. But I do have a favorite: the conveyor-belt sushi place.

As with most things in Japan, they have there shit together on this. The top picture shows what you sit down to at one of these places. not only do you have soy sauce and chopsticks (in the drawer), but you get green tea powder. What this picture doesn't show is the faucet to the right where you can get hot water to make your own tea. And you would love these places if only because you get a whole bucket of pickled ginger you can take from for free.

Basically, you go in, they sit you down, you take care of everything yourself (although you can order something particular from the chefs behind the counter) and when you're done, at least at one place, they come over with some kind of electronic wand that they wave over your plates. This calculates what you ate and how much you owe. You pay, leave, and smile at a seamless and tasty experience.

Here are some other things you might see on this conveyor belt. As with many things in Japan, I can't always tell you what they are:

Wish you could have been there.

Love,

Turkey

Broiled Leek Salad

Dear Turkey,

Speaking of sections of the blog, I would like to propose another section called "Tofu Classics" (fancy link forthcoming). No, these will not be classic types of tofu (although this is the world's best tofu in case you were wondering). Instead, "Tofu Classics" will be recipes that my family makes all the time (or whenever they're in season).

Broiled Leek Salad:
- One big leek broiled with lots of salt and olive oil until crispy
- Gorgonzola cheese
- Pears (not for you)
- Grated carrots
- Lettuce, cilantro, green onions, black pepper,whatever else

Dressing: this is the world's best olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Since I have been all over the world I can tell you for sure. This riesling vinegar is also delicious.

NB: These plates are from Target.
Dear Target: do you want to do some free giveaways on our blog now that I shot you that cool and completely free shameless product endorsement?

I moss you,
Tofu
                                     

Things My Husband Doesn't Like

Dear Turkey,
You know how other blogs have groups of related posts, where you can click on a fancy link and all of the posts like that will appear? Well, I propose a section called "Things My Husband Doesn't Like" (fancy link forthcoming). Luckily, there are lots of things that we make that my husband does like, and when we have a mutually-agreed-upon winner we write it in our cookbook (which is a big leather book with all of our recipes and hand-drawn pictures to go with them; we're on volume two already). But sometimes one of us makes something and I say, "can we write this in the book," and he says, "I think I need to fine-tune it a little more," which is code for "no."
So here is something that my husband wants to fine-tune a little more. In defiance of his misgivings, I'm going to immortalize it forever here, so that at least I can find it somewhere when I want to recreate it (when he's not home).
Crab Cakes with Tomato Jam from the Gourmet Cookbook
We love the Gourmet Cookbook. The only thing that we changed was that we used canned crab (because I was at Wegmans and I'm cheap, plus fresh crab was $22.99/lb. On a $100/week grocery budget, that seemed a little much).

We used the last of our homegrown tomatoes in the jam

At the end you add cilantro, which really makes it



Sorry, honey, what's not to love?

Here is something my husband did like: Korean Barbecue Lettuce Cups from Gourmet

I linked you to the recipe online because I bet you will like to make it the "real" way, with steak (but maybe with fruit you're not allergic to). We just mixed up the marinade, diced some tofu and soaked it in there for 30 mins, and cut up the fruit and squeezed lime all over it (we just put the Sriracha on the tofu). Delicious:

Beautiful romaine

So tasty

I moss you,
Tofu

Figs: What Did I Miss?

Dear Turkey,
I loved your last post; good thing I'm not the jealous type. And congratualtions on eating Nato. I have been told that I am one of a select few white people who actually like(s?) it.
Now I would like to tell you a sad story:
My husband has been working a lot. He often leaves the house before seven and, if he doesn't get back until seven or eight, he has almost missed baby bedtime. Sometimes when he comes home late I have meltdowns. You are now leaving the "poor me" section of this post. Thank you for visiting.
Anyway, the other day I saw that there were fresh figs at the store. We had never had them before and I figured they were good because they were expensive (3 for $2). I thought they would make a romantic little mid-week dinner for my stressed-out little family (complete with sick baby). So I brought them home and served them up with some delicious gorgonzola cheese, two kinds of homemade bread, marmalade, and cider:

Beautiful, right? But not tasty. In fact, they weren't even as good as dried figs (which I love). I did my research and I know that they don't ripen off the tree, that they're soft when ripe and fermented when overripe, and some people eat the skin and some don't (I highly recommend this book). But they just tasted kind of...eh...and a little bitter.
You are now entering the part of this post where I challenge the readers to help me solve my problem in the comments section of our blog. Okay...go!...have at it, readers...I expect at least 100 comments by lunchtime!
I moss you,
Tofu
 

Tofu Or Not Tofu...That Is The Question

Tofurkey,

Well, we're almost at the end of our trip here in Japan and I'm finally getting time to blog. It has been an unbelievable (and unbelievably busy) journey, but I have thought about you at every delicious meal (and then some).

While there is so much good food to blog about (and I hope to get to all of it in my next few posts), our last major included a few meals that stood out. You see, right now we're staying in Mt. Koya, the home of Japanese Shingon Bhuddism. In fact, we're staying in a Shukubo, a Bhuddist temple where monks permit visitors to stay. Not only that, but you can pray with them, learn from them, and eat breakfast and dinner that they bring you. But since Bhuddists believe that it is wrong to kill another sentient being, we have only eaten vegetarian food since arriving (shhh...don't tell but I snuck some sushi for lunch from a shop in the village).

So of course the culinary experience here especially reminds me of you and how much you'd enjoy it. We have too. The food is delicious, which isn't a big surprise. These guys have had over 1000 years to get tofu down.




From left to right, top to bottom: goma-dofu (sesame tofu)
with wasabi and soy sauce, vegetable tempura with wasabi
salt,seawead salad, pickled radish, and some kind of clear soup
with colorful croutons and cilantro.

Not only was the food delicious, but it was also beautiful, as you can see. The Bhuddist vegetarian cuisine here, which came from China, is called the Shojin Ryori and has been perfected by the monks here in Koyasan. It is actually vegan and is based on the number five: five flavors, five cooking methods, and five colors (which I think stretches it because there are way more than five colors there). A good meal includes a grilled dish, a deep-fried dish, a pickled dish, a tofu dish, and a soup dish.

 

The goma-dofu was especially interesting. It's made of roasted and ground white sesame seeds boiled together with powdered arrowroot starch. And it's crazy smooth. I mean like butter (even like buttah). Here's the rest of the first night's dinner:

 

From left to right, top to bottom: devil's tongue noodles with
broth and vegetables, koya-dofu (freeze-dried tofu), and some
kind of fragrant melon.



The noodles in this dish are made from a vegetable called Devil's Tongue. It is banned in the U.S. because people have been known to die from eating it, at least according to my boyfriend's colleague. It is often served in cubes which have a very stiff gelatinous texture and so, if not chewed properly, they can become lodged in a person's throat causing him to choke to death. This dish, however, was delicious and death-free. Double win.

 

Not so the koya-dofu. I'd have been very interested to see if you and your husband liked this dish. As you know, it has proven impossible thesee days to find something I will not eat, and almost as difficult to find something I can't appreciate. This certainly fits the latter category and was the only thing I've been served in Japan (since the first night; more to follow in another post) that I abstained from eating. This dish is like a sponge of tofu soaking in water. No seriously. It is literally a sponge. It is so bizarre that I was not surprised to learn that it has many explanations for how it came to be. One is that almost a millenium ago, some tofu froze by accident and when thawed turned out to be delicious. This explanation neglects to mention that the meal was eaten by starving monks in some kind of drug-induced nirvana. This is not delicious. Still, it was interesting.

 

Here was our breakfast the next morning:

 

From left to right, top to bottom: koya-dofu (but with
vegetables in it; this was not bad), nori, some kind of stewed
vegetable salad, pickles, white rice, black tea, and miso soup.



First of all, the miso in Japan has been delicious without exception. This was especially good. The same has been true of the rice. I've never cared much for white rice. It's seemed unremarkable. Like a lot of pasta, it's a vehicle for bigger and better things. But also like pasta, there is such a good thing as white rice worth savoring apparently. Our Japanese friend Akiko told us that we were right in rice harvest season so now is the time for "good rice." She said that Japanese people look forward to this because the rice is more flavorful, more tender. Well I believe it. I have eaten this stuff plain at every meal.

 

Here was tonight's dinner:

From left to right, top to bottom: goma-dofu, grilled eggplant
and pepper with plum sauce, seaweed salad, pickles, white rice,
black tea, and the same clear soup from before.

From left to right, top to bottom: purple grapes, boiled
vegetables and koya-dofu squares, udon noodles with seaweed
and tofu.



So I don't think you can tell from this picture, but Japanese grapes are huge. They're probably twice the size of the grapes we get at home, and they have a strange cooked or fermented taste to them I think. They're good but different.

 

So is fast food. The Udon noodles for dinner reminded me of some we had in Kyoto before we left. I'll tell you about them as a preview to my next posts on some city food.

 

Akiko kept telling us about "business men's lunches," which seemed to us like Japanese fast food. It's served in little shops where you eat at the counter. Like everything in Japan, it's efficient. The stations at the counter have jars of pickles, soy sauce, and other seasoning, as well as chopsticks ready for you when you sit down. But first, you order...

 

A Japanese food-ordering device

Basically, you pick out what you want on a menu, go up to this machine, put money in, and press the button for what you want. Out pops a ticket. Meanwhile, the computer in the back shouts out what you want to the poor girl working her butt off (who stops to help you if you're obviously a white kid in a strange land). She takes your ticket with a smile and brings your food back in a few minutes with another smile. It's as plentiful as American fast food, but tasty in a not-going-to-turn-you-into-a-chemical-ridden-death-timer. We ate there twice.

More to follow. I love you,
Turkey

Beautiful Applesa -- I Mean: Nope, Still Not Jealous of You

Dear Turkey,

Like you, I am experiencing an exotic adventure for the first time: staying home with a sick baby. So I'm not at work, I'm wearing a hoodie, and I'm not even starting the laundry or cleaning the house since I don't know what time we'll have to leave to go to the pediatrician (because sick babies wake up way earlier than doctors' offices). 

So I'm going to tell you about my adventure from Saturday: making applesauce. I make applesauce every year, usually twice. Once I use one kind of apples only and add a bunch of brown sugar and cinnamon. The other time I use four or five different varieties of apples and don't use any sugar (family secret, don't tell). That's what I did this time; I try to hit all the colors of skin and flesh (white and yellow). 

I don't peel the apples. I use one of those apple slicers, and then I use a paring knife to make sure I got all the hard parts from the core that sometimes sneak through.

I put the apples in pots with an inch or two of water at the bottom and brought them to a simmer on low heat -- be careful or they will stick and burn:

 I kept stirring them as they got soft, about 30 mins:

 Meanwhile I sterilized the jars; I used quart size:

 This is almost done; there are still some crunchy bits:

 After it was as cooked as I like (which is totally arbitrary), I packed the jars, leaving 1/8-1/4 inch headspace, and processed them for 30 mins. They all sealed within an hour:

The whole thing took about three hours from start to finish, thanks to the people who held my baby while I worked!

I moss you,

Tofu

Still Not Jealous of You

Dear Turkey,
While you are busy travelling the world, I was busy writing some Mo Willems fan fiction. No, I have never written fan fiction before (although I did just read 50 Shades of Grey...so if that fan fiction can get published, we should definitely be able to write a cookbook from this blog and get rich someday...), but Mo Willems is just so awesome. I currently have all of his books checked out from the library (I'm serious -- it's a big pile).
You will see why this is relevant to our blog, and you can guess who all the characters are, especially if you're familiar with the originals [hint: the pigeon doesn't usually have long hair]:
(Sadly the pictures are showing up a little light so I'm going to retype the captions.)



Don't Let My Wife Bake Anything...Pigeon Fan Fiction by Your Wife



"Hey honey, I think I'm going to go on a diet. So don't bake anything, okay?" ... "Never."

"Just one banana bread...Bananas are healthy you know!...Fat free!..Fine."

"?!?"..."I won't tell."

I moss you,
Tofu

I'm Not Jealous of You

Dear Turkey,
I hope you're having fun in Japan. I'm just writing to say that I'm not jealous of you. Not one little bit. I won't be jealous of you when you go to Italy or Costa Rica either.
I have a lot of places on my bucket list, and I'd still like to join the PeaceCorps someday, but I'm kind of surprised that I don't wake up every morning burning with envy about all of your cool experiences. I'm just that good at repressing it.
Seriously, though, I think it's a good sign that right now I don't want to be anywhere else besides my 800-square-foot house with my adorable little family (and plants).
Since I am doing my world travelling via palate only, I wanted to present our latest awesome Carribean Rotis (beta version 1.3). We first made something like this after eating Rotis at the Moosewood, when I was living in Ithaca (it was the day that I punctured my leg in a sledding accident, but that's another story).
Here's what we did this time:
1. Grated cheese.
2. Beans: two cans of Goya black beans drained and rinsed (or one big can, or soak some dried ones). First, sautee two shallots, two cloves of garlic, some oil, salt, lime juice, cumin, and a few T honey, then add the beans and cook five minutes.
3. Squash: roast 1/2 of a small butternut squash until tender. Mash with two boiled red potatoes (skin on, please), 4T butter, salt, and 6 oz cream cheese (why do you think this was so good?).
4. Onion and pepper sauce: sautee half of an onion and one half of a yellow pepper, diced, (you might want to double or triple this part for leftovers to warm up along with the leftover other stuff) in some oil, add enough molasses to coat, a few T brown sugar and lime juice, salt, pepper, cumin, chipotle powder, allspice, cloves, tumeric, maybe some curry powder (Dear Husband, if you ever read my blog, you can make a comment below about what you actually did, but I think I was something like that).
5. Mango salsa: dice one mango, add some red wine vinegar that you brought to a boil and dissolved some sugar in (then cooled), salt, lime juice, minced red onion, green onion, and serrano.
6. Cilantro (optional).
We usually put everything inside of a whole wheat tortilla (except the salsa) and bake it until the tortilla is nice and crispy, and then top with salsa and cilantro.
It's not Japan, but pretty exotic for a Sunday night after a nice ten mile run and with the sound of rain on the metal roof and a beautiful baby for entertainment:

the insides

the pots

the whole deal

 I moss you,
Tofu