Food Prep Miscellany

Wutt?? How did I forget about my cookin' jones/this blog? Uh. I went away to Seattle for Thanksgiving, and after being hosted for a great meal/macking on the leftovers for the rest of the weekend, I have just sorta coasted on a tryptophan coma (MYTH) ever since.

Still, I have made a few things & can report on them.

For one thing, I advised my rat sitter that she could make quick & easy popcorn in the microwave without using microwave popcorn. This is true. My old housemate Keri discovered this as a neglected & hungry youth after school, and experimented till she got it right for the benefit of all of us. Her formula:
-lunch bag
-3T popcorn
-2:30 minutes on high in the microwave. (I sometimes go 2:45)
Ta daa. And you can reuse the bag--the cleaner your microwave is, and by the way, clean out your microwave (gross), the more you can reuse it before the old food stains make it spotty.

Now you can butter your popcorn with less guilt, right, because so far this is a fat-free food (and we can't have that). The marketers of coconut have successfully reached my local natural food stores, so now their shelves are stocked with coconut water drinks and coconut oil. "Why are you talking about this now? We were just getting to the good butter part!" Because they got to me, too: "Better for you [less bad for you] than butter." So I scoop out a Tb or 2 out of the jar, put it into a li'l microwave dish, maybe with some garam masala spice or Chinese five-spice, because I am that gourmet, or, for you spice babies, cinnamon, and melt it 30 seconds on high for over the popcorn.

Or try:
-olive oil heated with dried oregano
-butter heated with crushed garlic
(same thing, 30 seconds on high)
-brown sage butter (see the soup recipe a couple posts back)

Also, I live in Hippytown USA, so I am obliged to sprinkle nutritional yeast flakes over the popcorn too. Fortunately it is very damn tasty, so I can recommend it to you.

I make popcorn for myself a few times a week for watching Netflix on my laptop in bed.
I am not a single sad sack
I am not a single sad sack
I am not a single sad sack
excuse me.

Also, for Make Good Thanksgiving with my Mom, who does not live in Seattle, I contributed the following Roasted Beet Salad:

Get together two bunches of fresh beets on their greens. About 6 beets total. If you are feeling fancy, get a red beet bunch and a golden/striped beet bunch. You won't use the greens till later in the week for yourself, but look who is a smart shopper? You are! (You can slow-cook sliced leeks over med-low heat in olive oil, then add chopped beet greens & cover till they are the wiltiest. Meanwhile, heat oven to 300 and dry roast some shelled pumpkin seeds for 10-15 minutes on a baking sheet till hear you hear them pop. Remove & observed their puffed-up light & crispy goodness. Once the beet greens are respectably limp, turn off the heat & kill the pan with some splooshes of balsamic vinegar & s&p to taste. Stir in crumbled goat cheese or feta, sprinkle in the pumpkin seeds, and serve warm or room temp. Our beet dish will incorporate these same ingredients.)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

-Peel the beets, & chop into 3/4-to-1-inch chunks. Toss in a bowl with a little bit of olive oil & salt & pepper, and set aside.
-Slice a couple leeks and a fennel bulb , and spread out along the bottom of an olive-oiled baking pan. I used a 9x9, it was plenty big.
-put the shiny beet chunks on top, and bake for mmm, 30 minutes or so before checking on them and tossing every ten minutes till a fork goes easily through a beet chunk.
-while beets are still hot, sprinkle in balsamic vinegar to taste, and if you have the feathery parts of the fennel, mince some of that up & toss it in, too.
-while beets are cooling, roast some pumpkin seeds (see parenthetical, above). When they have cooled and the beets are room temp, toss them in with some crumbled goat cheese or feta. Then go wow your mom.

Also:
My rat sitter left some zucchini in the fridge, so tonight I sliced them into centimeter-thick chunks on the bias, drizzled a TB of olive oil into the bottom of that 9x9, and spread the slices out in a single layer. Then I turned them all over so there was olive oil on both sides, salted & peppered them, and put them in a 375 degree oven for 10-15 minutes. Then I turned the slices over again, sprinkled with shredded Parmesan cheese, and returned to the oven for 10 more minutes or so. If all goes well, as it did for me, you will have savory zucchini chips that are chewy-crisp golden on the outside, melty on the inside. I put them into sammiches or over quinoa with some kind of goopus.

Goopus like mole negro. Get one of those jars of the stuff in the "Hispanic Foods" aisle*, a quart of broth, an extra Tb of powdered unsweetened chocolate, and half a banana. Heat the jar contents in the broth and smoosh it around till you have a smooth consistency, then blender with the extra chocolate & half banana. Serve over roasted veg, nopales, or the traditional chicken.

*don't make it from scratch--at least, don't start the project when you are already hungry. A college pal & I tried to make it from Diane Kennedy's recipe in advance of our post-graduation trip to Oaxaca. We were confounded by the 30 ingredients (half a slice of french bread? Five almonds? Really? WTF?) and neglected to properly secure the blender lid, so instead of eating in 15 minutes like we thought we were going to, we were swabbing brown shloop off the walls 90 minutes later and still hadn't eaten UGH. Treat yourself better!