Everything I Cooked This Weekend, Including Mistakes

I like a clean house, but I don’t like having to clean up after anybody, least of all myself. I like having a lot of homemade food in the fridge, but even more than that, I like having a clean sink. I mean a perfectly clean sink, not just one that happens to be free from dishes. As clean as an old bone in a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, is how clean I like my sink to be.

It’s my sink, even though I live with three other people. Just as they are my clean floors after I have mopped them, instead of our floors, or even merely the floors. All of the surfaces in the house are mine, and every day I fight a losing battle against the objects and creatures which require the shared use of my surfaces.

The kitchen should be full of food, but as clean as if no one ever cooked in it. The bathroom should always be dry. The bed should always be made, even when there are three people sleeping in it. The trash cans should always be empty. Not only the baby but the vacuum cleaner should always be free of dust. (The things you use to clean the house must themselves be regularly cleaned!)

You understand my problem, of course. Enjoying the domestic arts and creating a welcoming, relaxing at-home environment are two very different things. Cleanliness is all well and good, but you’ve got to let things get dirty before you clean them. You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.

I cooked a lot this weekend. On the whole I’m pleased with what I made. Most of it comes from The Vegetarian Epicure and Nourishing Traditions.¹ I can wholeheartedly endorse the former (I think it stands up much better than the roughly contemporaneous Moosewood Cookbook, which I find pretty hit-and-miss) and shamefacedly, half-heartedly recommend pirating the latter, because NT is the product of a real Weston A. Price Foundation nut, and for every terrific recipe has a deranged quote from Little House on the Prairie it uses to extol the importance of giving children raw milk or replacing root canals with cod liver oil.² But many of the recipes really are very good, as is so often the case with food cranks.³

Something that happens to me fairly often is I will try a new recipe that doesn’t come off very well, and try to convince myself I like it more than I do, in order to avoid feeling like I’ve wasted time or ingredients. “I’m very excited to eat seven servings of this over the next three days,” I’ll say to myself, and then for emphasis repeat it to my partners later in the day. “I actually prefer repetition to novelty, when it comes to lunch.”

Here is what I cooked this weekend that actually worked:

Raspberry jam. I don’t like “meal prepping” in the sense of preparing entire meals, but I do like the idea of making two or three staples for the week ahead — a big pot of rice, a jam or fruit preserve, a vinaigrette — that will make cooking meals easier.

Three cups of raspberries, cooked for five minutes over a low heat, then two cups of sugar, cooked for five more minutes, then half a lemon’s worth of juice. I did not bother to sterilize jars or purchase pectin; that is a bridge too far. It is very good. So far I have used it in yogurt, in oatmeal, on top of a pie, and diluted in sparkling water with a touch of cream in an excellent homemade French soda, and will have no problem finishing the jar this week.⁴

Stuffed tomatoes “à la provençale” from The Vegetarian Epicure:

6 tomatoes

1½ Tbs. dried basil or 3 to 4 Tbs. fresh basil

1 small bunch fresh parsley

2 to 3 Tbs. chopped scallion

2 to 3 garlic cloves, minced

¼ tsp. dried thyme

salt and pepper

½ to 1 cup dark breadcrumbs

olive oil

lemon wedges

You cut off the tops, remove the pulp and combine it with the breadcrumbs, herbs, garlic, scallions, and salt and pepper, then pop everything back in the tomato shells (it helps to use otherwise-unremarkable grocery store tomatoes here, since they’re so firm, and any deficiencies in flavor are amended in the baking process, rather than heirloom tomatoes) and place them in an oiled baking dish. Cover and bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees, then take the lid off for 5-10 minutes at 400.

I added a bit more olive oil and some sherry vinegar at the end, being out of lemons, and it was terrific. I had it over rice and gave some to the baby once it had cooled down some. It’s a visually unimpressive dish — the only picture I took of it is completely unremarkable-looking — but it tasted so good I didn’t care. I think “à la provençale” is probably pushing it in terms of regional authenticity, but who cares? It’s hot tomatoes and bread and garlic. That’s always good.

Celery salad

It wasn’t a Waldorf salad. I told Grace about it and she said it sounded like a Waldorf salad, but it isn’t. It’s very good, even though you have to eat it with a spoon, which is a little ridiculous for salad.

After an early stance against it, I’ve really come around on celery in the last few years. But it absolutely has to be peeled. I trim everything but the tenderest core parts, and then run a vegetable peeler over the outside to get rid of the strings, and then slice it as thinly as possible; only under these conditions can I appreciate raw celery. Say two cups of that. Be sure to include the celery leaves.

Add a cup of black grapes, halved or quartered (I quarter mine since I feed them to the baby and don’t want him to choke)

A quarter cup of scallions, chopped

A half cup of red walnuts, lightly toasted. Very lightly toasted, because either I can toast them too little, or let them burn and get furious with myself for wasting eight dollars’ worth of red walnuts. Just take them off the heat too soon, because there’s no such thing as getting it right, and you might as well err on the side of unburnt. I don’t know how different they taste from regular walnuts, but they’re so much prettier, I think there’s no comparison.

Chopped parsley, chives, tarragon, basil, as much as you can stand of each. But if you don’t have all of those herbs lying around, a lot of parsley is very good.

Make a vinaigrette with a little mustard, salt and pepper, two parts sherry vinegar, and three or four parts olive oil. If you want to add a crushed garlic clove here, you can, but then I think you ought to ditch the scallions.

Add Pt. Reyes bleu cheese, if you like bleu cheese.

And be sure to eat it with a slice of good bread, very thickly buttered. I’ve started having a slice of good bread, very thickly buttered, with most of my meals lately, and it’s really improved my quality of life. I feel like a humble, honest, hardworking farmer, in touch with the earth, as wholesome as his grandfather’s teeth, as placid as he is unrushed, a simple man with a simple bean to tend.

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What will do:

Rice pudding, also from TVE.

I followed the instructions pretty carefully (although I omitted the raisins), but I’m sorry to say it turned out mushy and a little bland. I’ve had better luck with stovetop rice pudding in the past, and while I’m willing to see this one through (I imagine the raspberry jam will improve it on future eatings), I wouldn’t make it again.

Sweet potato custard, ibid.

This one was entirely my own fault. I committed the classic error of barely following the recipe and then wondering why it didn’t turn out right. I nearly doubled the amount of sweet potato called for, because I wanted to use the whole can, and instead of baking it in a single pie crust, I poured the batter into little muffin tins. Wouldn’t you know it, they turned out slightly overdone and a little rubbery. But they’re certainly edible, and the baby loves them — so I didn’t fail to improvise a good dessert, I simply innovated some baby food.

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What didn’t work at all:

French beans, from Nourishing Traditions.

This looked terrific. White beans, olive oil, tomato paste, garlic, thyme, and shallots. You can’t miss with a combination like that! And yet I missed.

This was even more my fault. The idea here is that you cook dried beans in oil, rather than in water or stock, and the recipe explicitly calls for soaking the beans for twenty-four hours in advance as “a long soaking is therefore essential or the beans will be too hard.” But I knew better! You can just cook your beans a little longer and it will all even out in the end!

If you want to cook your beans in oil, however, you really do need to soak them the whole 24 hours first. Mine have been cooking for going on twelve hours now (I left them in a slack oven overnight) and they’re still as hard as rocks. I’m going to give up soon, but I’m not yet ready to admit defeat.

Usually when a recipe fails to impress, the baby will eat it. In really desperate cases where he turns up his nose, the dogs will eat it. But I’m going to have to bury these beans in the backyard or something.

I’ve already got another bag of beans soaking on the counter in penance that will be ready to try again tomorrow. No more treating recipes with contempt in advance, even if the author is a crank who thinks you can train your eyes not to need glasses by eating more liver and looking directly at the sun. She still knows her beans, which is more than I can say of myself right now.

1. I like reading older cookbooks (“older” meaning published at least thirty-five years ago) for the same reason I like reading a lot of older fiction: It helps me to escape contemporary ideas that are so ubiquitous I’m scarcely aware of them. If you’re eager for an alternative to “brothy miso beans” it helps to look to the past! They had their own inescapable, ubiquitous ideas about food, of course, but then you can just go to another era to find ideas that are new-to-you.

2. Which you should not, in fact, do. My copy of Nourishing Traditions is secondhand, so I’m not directly enriching the raw-milkers of the world.

3. From Jeeves and the Old School Chum: “‘Laura Pyke,’ said young Bingo with intense bitterness, ‘is a food crank, curse her. She says we all eat too much and eat it too quickly and, anyway, ought not to be eating it at all but living on parsnips and similar muck. And Rosie, instead of telling the woman not to be a fathead, gazes at her in wide-eyed admiration, taking it in through the pores.’”

4. I got into French sodas when I worked at a local cafe in high school that permitted one free drink per shift, because I could endlessly top it up with elements from the condiments station without having to go through the barista gatekeeper. A few pumps of Torani syrup, a hit of seltzer, and a homeopathic amount of half-and-half, endlessly reiterated over the course of seven or eight hours, until I could go home with a free ham-and-cheese croissant, and I wanted for nothing on God’s earth.