Jambalaya; Or, The Inauthenticity Continues ($3 or so, when the okra's out of season, cheaper when it's in; about an hour, including the chopping)

It is not okra season. I confess. I bought okra from Honduras. Bad locavore. BAD.

It was just that I had a sort of craving, or maybe it was that someone else had mentioned okra to me, or maybe it was a longing for high, hot summer, the time when okra is in season. I used to grow okra (it was vegetable of the month at the CDC!) when I lived in Athens, more okra than I knew how to eat.

It's not a lovely plant actually, though its flower is really beautiful, a creamy white with a dark burgundy center and bright yellow stamens. And fresh okra, the kind you cut off the plant, carry inside, wash, cut up, sprinkle with corn meal and pan fry -- say twenty minutes max from plant to teeth -- there is nothing like this.

So homesick was I in Wisconsin that I tried to grow okra there, in the richest soil I think any okra plant has ever seen. It never worked. Okra in Georgia gets chest high, neck high -- in Wisconsin it never came to my knees. I had one blossom, and that was frail and short-lived. I missed okra. It was metonymy for the sun, and warmth, and the green, buzzing, bird-filled outdoors that the wasteland of winter in Wisconsin -- all winter, as far as I'm concerned -- denies the world.

So, yesterday, okra. And with okra: vegetarian jambalaya. Sort of. In a way. If this is jambalaya, it's the okra, the roux and the allspice that make it so. And the hot sauce, I suppose.

Here's how to make it. And thanks to Lucy Curzon for the recipe.

What you need:

1/4 cup salad oil

1/3 c white flour

a little olive oil

1 sm onion, chopped small

2 cloves of garlic, crushed

2 bay leaves

3 med carrots, peeled and chopped

3-5 peppers, all colors, chopped to make about 2-3 cups

2 tsp basil

1/2 tsp thyme

1 can diced tomatoes, undrained

2 c okra (about 1/2 a pound), sliced

3 c vegetable stock

1/4 tsp allspice

hot sauce of your choice

Chop everything up and set aside. This makes up fast, so you want simply to be dumping as you go. Make some rice (go there; do this), since that's what you'll be serving this over.

In a small heavy skillet, mix the flour and salad oil. Put this on medium heat and stir frequently. This is your roux, which will complicate the taste of the jambalaya (Hank. Sigh.) and thickens it, too.

In a large stockpot, heat the oil over medium high heat and saute the onions, garlic, bay and up to about a TBSP of either red pepper flakes or jalapeno paste. When the onions have softened and become transparent (this should take a minute or two), add the carrots, peppers, basil, and thyme. Stirring every once and a while so the vegetables don't burn, cook for 5 minutes.

Add tomatoes, okra, stock, and allspice. Stir to combine.

Cover and cook for twenty minutes.

Meanwhile, turn the heat up on the roux and stir constantly. It should begin to turn very dark brown, sort of burned-looking. Keep it moving in the pan. You want it about the color of nicely tanned leather and to smell almost nutty. When you've achieved this, turn the heat off and go do something until the vegetables are cooked.

After twenty minutes, check that the carrots are soft enough (run a fork into the largest piece you can find). If they are, scrape the roux into the vegetables, stirring the vegetables constantly so they don't cook the flour into dumplings. If this happens, it's not a big deal: you just have something less jambalaya than -- I don't know -- quasi-Caribbean vegetable and dumpling stew. Still edible. Still actually pretty tasty (yes, I've done this; that's how I know).

Drape this over some rice, in bowls. Dump on the hot sauce of your choice (classic is Tabasco, but we're real fond of Cholula ourselves). Eat.

There you go.

Kale and Rice (under $10; 45 mins)

[Chuck says for my student followers especially, I should list cost and time to prepare. I'll start doing this in the title, but so that no one is confused, I preface this with this preface. The feta and pine nuts are the most expensive part of this: prepared this way, you'll spend probably six or seven dollars on the whole thing, which will feed at least four people all the way full (or one Chuck and one Emily and one lunch). If you buy the kale cut and cleaned, the rice takes the longest to prepare at 40 minutes. Assembly is 3 minutes.]

One of my colleagues felt so out of place in a small town in the South ("Butt freak!" "Film Buff!" -- nothing like some Canadians to put the South in perspective) -- with its culture of tradition-uber-alles and unhealthy ideas about food, and backwoods backassward politics. When she got the chance to go back west, she went; she now lives where she and her dog and her husband can walk for hours in all directions, or bike, and never have to contend with religious nuts, uncaring writer/students, fried Twinkies on a stick.

She introduced me to our local CSA (community supported agriculture), which I've dropped given its sheer cost and its erratic production and distribution. But while I was in the co-op, the only one around here by the way, I ended up one day in fall with a shitload of something green and leafy. The tag said "kale" (wow! and healthy, too). I'd never heard of it. Really. Seriously. Never heard of it. So I sent an email or something, maybe made some phone calls: "I have this stuff called 'kale.' What the hell do I do with it?"

I didn't check the internet. I still don't trust it easily for recipes. Ironic, that.

My colleague responded. She told me she had the best, easiest, tastiest preparation for kale ever. Her friend in California told her about it. 

We tried it. We discovered that kale is in fact vegetable crack (best drug website there is). One puff and you will sell your children for it.

The trick to this is to eat kale in season, which for here, is right now. I have 30 kale plants in my garden almost ready to harvest. I say almost. They're biggish, and we just had a frost, but I want to wait just a little more; except I don't, and so I bought a bag of kale and made this last night.

Also, this tells me how much you'll need, too, so -- that's good, right?

Anyway, this is fall-winter-early spring ONLY.

What you'll need:

about a pound of washed, trimmed, and coarsely chopped kale. Color is immaterial.

about 6 cups cooked rice (brown is better)

a standard block of feta cheese, crumbled (I think this is 4 oz) -- sometimes I use a little less

1/4-1/2 cup pine nuts

soy sauce, crushed garlic, hot peppers, olive oil

In a lightly oiled pan, toast the pine nuts over medium heat. Be careful: they burn FAST. Keep them moving in the pan until about half of them are golden brown. Take the pan off the heat and let them sit while you fix the rest.

In a very large stockpot with a lid, put about 2 TBSP olive oil and heat until you can smell it. Add about a tsp of crushed garlic, and enough hot pepper stuff to affect your sinuses. Stir for just a minute. Dump in the kale and keep moving it against the bottom until it's half-reduced in size. Turn off the heat and cover to let the kale steam. Stir once or twice. When it's done, it'll release a little water and be about a quarter the volume of the original kale.

Add three medium splashes of soy sauce. Stir.

In a deep bowl, layer the rice, then the kale and its juices, then the pine nuts, then the feta. Often I bake this a little in a 350 oven just to toast some of the edges of the kale and soften the cheese, but that's not strictly necessary. It's ready to go once the layers are done.

My mother, who thinks "vegetarian food" means "nasty shit poor people who can't afford steak eat" downed three bowls of this in a single sitting. It's good stuff.

There you go.

Beans, Beans. They're Good for Your Heart.

My grandfather was a notable flatulent. I knew "pull my finger" (I laughed until I cried at this video) before I knew much of anything else, I think. He used to sing this song all the time. Also, a variation of a song with a drunk pig in it, or a drunk man: I can never remember. Then he'd pop out his dentures, and we'd all shriek and run away.

I didn't know then that in my future were a lot of beans.

As everyone knows, beans are a cheap, reliable source of protein for people who don't eat much meat. In my pantry I have bags of red and brown lentils, limas, pintos, kidney, and black beans (note the gas-free recipe). The enchiladas I describe below use black beans but you could probably substitute anything else that's meaty-tasting and get the same effect. You can substitute canned beans; rinse them very well, until the sliminess is gone, if you do.

To make the beans, I use a crock-pot. It's less labor intensive than soaking, rinsing, and regular cooking. I cover the bottom of the crock-pot with washed unsoaked dry beans, then dump in about six cups of water. Here I've added jalapeno paste, crushed garlic, red pepper flakes, oregano, basil, bay leaves, cumin and a little cinnamon. Set the pot for six hours, and go do something else. If I'm home, I stir every couple of hours and check the water level, if I remember to. If not, not. Beans are not only cheap and proteinous, they're low-maintenance when they're done like this.

If you just want beans and rice, when the beans look done -- they're soft and you can break some up by stirring -- make rice. White rice cooks at a roughly 2:1 ratio -- 2 parts water to one part rice (though this post describes another way of measuring). Probably three cups of water to 1 1/2 c rice will make plenty for two or three people. Boil the water with a little salt. When it's boiling, add the rice, stir once, bring to a boil at medium high heat. Lower the temp, cover, and cook for about 20 minutes or until all the water is absorbed. Let stand off the heat for five minutes with the cover on before you eat. Note: I dislike rice that falls into separate grains. If you like that, this is not how to get that.

If you use brown rice, which I prefer, the ratio is more like 3:1 (3 parts water to 1 part rice). Brown rice cooks longer too: more like 40 minutes. But it's really better tasting.

However, if you're going to make enchiladas with your beans as I am about to do here, you want:

cooked black beans
cooked rice
cream cheese
tortillas
grated cheddar
enchilada sauce
salsa

I use bottled sauces this time of year because the tomatoes are SO bad, but feel free to use whatever you like. I also use prepared tortillas, since I have an electric stove and they just don't work right for me here. In India, I did good ones; here? Nope. Maybe when we change over to gas.

Here's how totally inauthentically Mexican black bean enchiladas work.

Preheat the oven to 350. Mix the beans and the rice together. You can, and I often do, saute diced onions and peppers until they're soft and mix them in as well.

Set out a tortilla. In the middle, plop a hefty spoonful of the beans and rice, top with a spoon of cream cheese (I use neufchatel or yogurt cheese, but you can use cottage cheese, ricotta, sour cream, any of them). Fold the left and right sides of the tortilla over the filling and roll the tortilla up to make a black bean envelope (starting at 2:31 in this video). To do this, take the bottom part of the tortilla, fold it over the filling away from you, and roll the body of the tortilla away from you until it forms a tube, like a burrito.

Set each of these in a lasagna pan whose bottom you've coated in salsa, which will sort of prevent them from sticking. The enchiladas can touch each other. When the pan is full, drizzle the enchiladas with enchilada sauce. Don't worry about using too much. You won't.

Top with grated cheddar. Try not to put so much on that you can't see where the edges are, since you'll have to try to lift these out separately. Bake until the cheese is melted and a little browned and the sauce is bubbly (maybe 20 minutes). These are better even the second day, and they freeze, unbaked, pretty well too.

There you go.

Curried Rice

This recipe is modified from one I found in an old cookbook called, scandalously enough, Vegetarian Pleasures, which makes me think about the line in Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”: “My vegetable love should grow/ Vaster than empires and more slow.” Try to tell students that that’s not about using food to masturbate. Go ahead. I have.

Here are the ingredients as I use them, though you should substitute as you please: this is tofu (cut in cubes and pressed dry), spices (coriander, salt, paprika, turmeric), peas, soy sauce, cooked and chilled rice, carrots, and peppers.

The first thing you want to do is heat just a little oil in a wok and sauté the tofu until it’s golden; you’ll do this in batches. Remove and drain on paper towels.

Pre-cook the carrots in the microwave for a minute, then finish them in the residual oil in the wok. Add the peppers, cook for just a minute, then add the spices, and cook for another minute until the vegetables are well coated. Remove them from the wok and set aside. You can mix them with the tofu if you like, since everything’s going together eventually anyway.

In the residue of oil and spices, heat the rice, adding water to keep it from sticking. You may need up to two cups of water for this so keep some nearby. The rice will turn yellow from the turmeric.

Smash the clumps with your spoon so the rice separates and heats through. This is fun, particularly if you’re feeling anxious or frustrated. When the rice is heated, add the tofu, peas, carrots, and peppers. Heat until peas are cooked, stirring gently to keep the rice from sticking. Add soy sauce. Serve with Indian pickle (we’re partial to Vimal chilli pickle or mango pickle [or you could make your own: we get our pickle at the Dekalb Farmers' Market], but that might be because it’s the only kind we can get here, I don’t know). We eat this with tortillas, but if you have naan or roti, it’s probably better that way.

I’ve experimented with using other vegetables (basically because I was too lazy to go to the store). Virtually everything works. Also: add some jalapeno paste when you add the spices. It’s even better that way.

There you go.