Sabbath Meals

Cooking during the week: Miso Soup

In the past few weeks, I haven't had much occasion to cook. I went to a community retreat the weekend before last at which the vegetarian food was provided. This past week I was feverish and sick on Thursday and Friday, so my husband cooked. He made his special aloo saag (Indian-style potatoes and spinach) and this great Julie Sahni zucchini dish, and brown basmati rice.

This weekend it looks like we are going to be out of town again.

I was thinking about what I've been eating during the week. I have been flirting with raw diets and with the pro-probiotics crowd. (I like to read up on the latest nutritional fads on the internet!) So for lunch almost every weekday I have been having green salad and miso soup. My salad isn't 100% raw, I like to thaw frozen green beans or peas and put them on top. I also like canned artichoke hearts.

When I make miso soup I usually make a traditional (ish!) dashi of kombu and dried mushrooms. If I don't have other greens, I'll soak a little wakame while the dashi is cooking and then I can drain it and put it in the soup. But lately I ran out of mushrooms and I'm experimenting. Sandor Katz (in that fun book I reviewed briefly here) says that you should put garlic in your miso broth. I was skeptical, but last week when I was feeling sick I put in both garlic and ginger with my kombu. I put in chopped bok choy and cubed tofu and I used two kinds of miso, and it was wonderful!

If you want your miso soup to be delicious, it's important to mix the miso paste with water before you add it to the soup. The stuff doesn't dissolve, it will stay lumpy if you don't mix it up. We use a suribachi, a Japanese grooved ceramic mortar and wooden pestle. My two year old son likes to mix the miso. He doesn't actually eat the soup most of the time, but he likes to be the mixer.

So here's a method for you:

Miso Soup
one piece kombu
three cups water (appromixately!)
dried mushrooms (2 or 3) --fresh will also work
bokchoy or nappa cabbage (about 1 1/2 cups chopped is enough)
or, soak two tablespoons dried wakame in 2 cups water
1/2 cake water packed firm tofu or 1 cake silken extra firm tofu
3-4 cloves garlic, chopped
slice of fresh ginger the size of a quarter, jullienned
1 1/2 tablespoons each, sweet white and dark miso pastes

If you can remember to do this, it's good to soak the kombu and mushrooms before you cook them. If not, don't worry. Simmer the kombu and the mushrooms, the garlic and the ginger together for 30-45 minutes, or until your broth has an excellent aroma. While you are doing this you can prepare your greens and mix your miso. Add the greens and tofu and cook for about five minutes or until the bok choy is wilted and the tofu slightly firmed up. Mix the miso with water until it is very smooth. Turn off soup and add miso.

Seaweed is cooling and cleansing but I prefer bok choy because the peppery flavor is very pleasant. One great thing about using seaweed is you can keep dried seaweed on hand for a long time and a small quantity makes a lot of greens.

Gosh! Penguin Synchronicity!

I had no idea that National Geographic was about to release a new documentary about penguins! I found out about it from my weekly New Yorker. My son and I immediately found the official website for March of the Penguins, where we watched the trailer. We probably watched it twenty times. Morgan Freeman is the narrator, what could be more awesome!

Sad and hard things might happen in the world, oh and they certainly do,  but my downy Emperor chick
and I are going to the movies!  (The photo below is from Guillaume Dargaud's site, not the movie. I puffy heart Guillaume Dargaud.)

Another reason I like penguins

I forgot to say this in my previous post. One thing I learned about penguins is that their egalitarian child-rearing methods have a lot in common with what my husband and I did in my son's first year. The penguin parents take turns going out to sea and fishing. Then they return and regurgitate the food for their offspring, and the other parent goes out to fish. Okay, we didn't regurgitate much in that first year, but I was working full time and my husband was working in the evenings. Like the penguins on Mrs. Silverman's site, we would nuzzle each other briefly, kibbitz about the way the other one fed the baby (!) and then say goodbye. I guess the bottles of expressed milk I brought home for my husband to use the next day weren't much like regurgitated krill.

Now of course we are both looking for work and our downy chick is a bit older. Who knows which animal parents we resemble now, and which we will resemble in the future? You could do worse than to parent like a penguin.

Penguins for Toddlers

I have a problem with television. If there is one available, I will watch it. I used to have a great relief in Shabbat when I couldn't turn on the TV. In fact, this might have been one of the factors that led me to greater halachic observance. I fear that the computer and the seductive Internet has taken the place of television for me. It certainly has a special place in my son's life, ever since I made the mistake of showing him that we could find pictures and even video of anything we liked using the Google search engine.

First we looked for peachtrees and appletrees. Then I thought, "Wouldn't it be interesting for him to see photographs of all the animals that appear in Where's Spot?" The first animal we looked for was the penguin. What I didn't realize is that penguins are incredibly fun to watch, beautiful and elegant but cute and funny at the same time. Whenever he sees my computer, my son says "More penguins!"

This is a perfect example about what's right with the Internet. When I was a child, I probably could have told you that penguins were black and white and waddled. Now I know that there are 17 species of penguin living all over the planet, all different sizes. What really surprised me is that they have song! We always saw silent photos or film of them. Plus, you think, it's snowy, it's cold, it's quiet.  Now, with a few clicks of the mouse, you can see and hear a family of  rare yellow-eyed penguins of New Zealand  in photos and video taken by a teacher from New York. (I really want to write to her and thank her, it's such a moving thing to see.) A French photographer and adventure hiker has made available his incredible photographs and sound recordings taken at the South Pole of Adelie and Emperor penguins. There are also several sites with information for children about penguins: this one has a 12 image penguin slideshow with text, which is just the right length for my two year old, and this page has another similar one, with even briefer text.

My son has learned that a penguin baby is called a chick and  that when they want to eat they peck at their mommy or daddy and the parent gives them food in their mouth. ("Chick" is not the easiest word for him to say, it comes out "shick!") He can say the words "waddle!" and "rookery!"  I am getting him some penguin children's books with actual photographs and not drawings, so that we can look at them together on Shabbat. I will let you know which ones I actually get and how they work out. With the long Shabbat afternoons in the summer, it may be a cooling and calming activity for us when we aren't on the swingset in our schul's backyard. I am kind of psyched that it's penguins for now and not trucks or dinosaurs...

Sabbath meals, 6/10/05-6/11/05

It's very hot here. In meal planning terms, it's cold soup weather. In order to bake challah and not sweat buckets in our apartment, I made challah on Thursday evening. I had great success with my yud-beis pull-apart loaf. This time I used a smaller pan, a 9" layer cake pan with lower sides. I used parchment paper and greased the sides. I didn't overbrown the bottom and it looked gorgeous. My son helped me make the dough so there were lots of raisins in every loaf. This even though he also ate the raisins out of the dough as he went along.

For Friday evening (just the family) we had:

challah
Eggplant curry with tamarind
brown rice
green salad (baby arugula, Jerusalem artichokes, cucumber, red pepper, oranges)
mango for dessert + storebought cookies

My husband and my son went out on an errand right before dinner time. My son was pretty hungry when he arrived. He stood up on a kitchen chair in front of the salad bowl and ate most of the orange sections and some of the pepper slices and cucumber pieces out of the salad bowl. I didn't stop him. Should I stop him from eating fruits and vegetables? Are you fainting with envy, my sisters in mothering two-year-olds? In fact I was happy, I don't really like red bell pepper. I only bought the outrageously expensive organically grown thing because I know he likes them.

We had a really great meal together. My son said "Amen!" to the blessing over the wine for the first time we could remember. The eggplant was a little too sour (I made it as written) so I added some sugar to it. Hey, it might be less healthful, but we are Jews. According to my main woman Claudia Roden, sweet-and-sour flavors are a hallmark of Jewish cuisines. That doesn't mean just plain sour, you know? I really liked the website where I got the  recipe. I found it a lot of fun to prepare, very simple. Unfortunately the author hasn't updated since last year, but there are seven years of recipes on there. So perhaps I'll be back to try some more. (I hope that if she comes to visit me here, the original author isn't horrified that I sweetened her recipe.)

Speaking of Claudia Roden, the theme of my Saturday lunch was Claudia Roden:

Cucumber and avocado soup (recipe follows)
Lentil salad (recipe follows)
Mashed Zucchini and Tomatoes (Claudia Roden, New Book of Middle Eastern Food)
Georgian Spinach Salad (Claudia Roden, Book of Jewish Food)
homemade hummus
pineapple and oranges + storebought cookies

The cucumber soup is based on a recipe from the Millenium cookbook, but I made a few changes that I think improve the dish:

Cucumber and Avocado Soup
2 large cucumbers
1 avocado
1 cake firm, water packed tofu
juice of three lemons
1 tablespoon white miso
3/4 teaspoon salt
freshly ground pepper to taste
handful fresh mint leaves (or cut open one mint herbal tea bag and use the innards!)
2 scallions, chopped

Peel or pare and chop all vegetables and put it all into a food processor. Purée until very smooth. Transfer to a bowl that has a good cover. Add enough water to make the right consistency and taste for sourness. It should look and taste like it was made with whole milk yogurt.

Lentil Salad
1 1/4 cups dried green lentils
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 tablepoons raspberry vinegar
1 orange, peeled, sectioned and then chopped
1 teaspoon coriander powder
chopped cilantro
salt and pepper

Boil the lentils in plenty of water until they are soft but not mushy. This could take 20-30 minutes on the boil, depending on the age of the lentils. Drain them and put them into a bowl. Add the oil, garlic, coriander, salt and pepper while the lentils are still warm. Stir and let cool just a little. Then add the vinegar, orange pieces and cilantro.

I didn't have a fresh pomegranate for the spinach salad, and one of my guests is allergic to nuts, so I changed the dressing slightly. I added pomegranate molasses to the oil and vinegar, and also dried pomegranate seeds from the Indian food store. I let the seeds sit in the dressing overnight before I poured it over the salad. It was pretty credible. I didn't wash the spinach enough and it was embarassingly gritty. I haven't made that mistake in many years.

Luckily our only guests were our very close friends, a couple that we have decided should be our son's guardians in our will. We talked about serious health stuff, also about dealing with our moms, but there was also a lot of joking. I am so happy we have them in our lives. She's the person whose picture should illustrate the word "integrity" in the dictionary. I think his word might be "focus" but I'm not sure. Anyway they are coming back tomorrow after yoga class to help us clean our apartment. They have given us a lot of help with this place in the last weeks, it provides me with an excellent pretext to invite them for many meals.

I was going to invite some new people from schul but felt exhausted by the heat. Some excuse! You know you are doing something right when your Jewish communityfaces a problem making a minyan every year on the day of Gay Pride.  Yes! Readers! My toddler eats vegetables and my Jewish community  is welcoming to gay people!  My apartment is not clean but my life is very good!

Wild about Culture

I am finally reading this wonderful book, Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz. Sandor Katz, also known as Sandorkraut, is another Jewish food diva. I am finding so much to love in this book that I want to class him with Claudia Roden, Mollie Katzen, and Lorna Sass. (I need to make a list of links in my sidebar about this.)

On this blog, as I have detailed what I'm cooking for Shabbos, I have been thinking about the meaning of describing the facts of our daily lives. The most crucial things that make up the small universes that are people's lives are very trivial. These really small things are what make everything feel authentic, and they are what we lose when languages die. Sandorkraut has thought these things before I started thinking them! He also lives in multiple overlapping miniature universes: a Jewish man from the Upper West Side of Manhattan who has travelled the world and read widely, a gay man living with AIDS, a health food nut and herbalist, a gourmet taster of exciting flavors, a radical faerie living with other queer people in the woods in Tennesee. By the time I finished the introduction, I was completely in love with him.

I was also excited that even though the book was introduced and endorsed by Sally Fallon, Sandor gives recipes for vegan kefir. (One thing I have found a little weird is the current resurgence in the world of health food of animal protein. Fallon has been a key voice in that. You have to appreciate her dedication to promoting organic farming, but I feel really dubious about her organization's promotion of animal fats and cholesterol. I guess people who love chopped liver who read this blog would want to know more about a group that thinks it's a health food! Sounds like something out of Woody Allen's Sleeper, doesn't it?) Anyway, I love Sandor also for capturing a snapshot of his vegan tranny friend making sunflower seed kefir. Let's link up all of our small worlds like Venn Diagrams until everyone is in the center of several solar systems.

I was moved to finally buy this book when we had a radical faerie over for Shabbat lunch who knows Sandorkraut. Shabbat meals can lead you in exciting directions. I have been fascinated with sourdoughs for ages, and have managed to kill off several starts at my own culture before I got them alive enough to bake. I also adore the sour pickles and sauerkrauts that Sandor does, and want to learn to make them from him. I will let you know if I actually make any of these recipes and how they come out.

Shabbat meals, 6/3 and 6/4/05

I didn't post any meals for last week. We went out of town to my mother-in-law's house. I did bake a challah to bring to her, but I didn't do any cooking. I didn't even make a salad! My mother-in-law is a great cook, she makes plain but tasty vegetarian food. She always makes the salad in the mode of Adele Davis, dressing the greens with oil and lemon and putting some spice blend on them.

This week, my parents came to visit. For Friday evening, I made:

Challah
spinach with chickpeas (Claudia Roden, New Book of Middle Eastern Food)
tomato rice (ditto)
roasted brussel sprouts with olive oil and garlic
roasted beets in mustard vinaigrette
baked tofu with lemon and sesame

for Saturday lunch:
challah
Potato-leek-carrot cold puréed soup
green salad with romaine, arugula, walnuts, oranges and dried cherries
(and lemon-sesame dressing)
Israeli cous-cous with French lentils (Moosewood New Basics)
leftover beets and brussel sprouts

One thing that was super about this meal was the challah. I made two batches by hand simultaneously--meaning I had two bowls going. I let my son put raisins in one of the doughs. He measured out a full cup of yellow raisins and then added some more! When I made the loaves, I decided that one should be a "yud-beis" challah--a pull-apart challah with 12 sections. I made each section out of a knotted roll. It looked like a crown.

Another thing that was good was providing beets for my mom and brussel sprouts for my dad. They were both really happy to have a vegetable they each like but don't each much at home. The beets recipe is one my mother-in-law makes that my son liked a lot. My dad is a big fan of puréed potato soups, this one was just very slightly golden from the carrots. It was very creamy and I didn't need to add any soy or rice milk to make it flow.

It's very hard to cook for my mom, because 1) she's always on a diet and 2) she likes to express her disapproval frequently, and this extends to not liking food I've made. But I am most grateful to say, it does not extend to my son, who is the apple of her eye. Both of my parents are completely wonderful grandparents. They are generous with gifts and with time and with love. My son figured out that they would each read to him if he asked, and kept walking books over to them.

I tried to make sorbet in my ice cream maker, and wound up sticking the whole bowl of the ice cream maker back in the freezer full of slush. I didn't have to mix anything together, I just took a relatively sweet bottled mango juice and poured three cups of it into the device. So it wasn't like I lost much effort there. The slush finally froze and we are eating it slowly now that Shabbat is over.

Cholent and the slow cooker

I know that I need to write a post here about using the crockpot to make cholent. One of my readers asked in the comments if I know how to make the crockpot or slow cooker actually work! The only tips I have so far are:

1. Make sure your lid fits tightly so that the water doesn't escape. If it doesn't, use some foil. I believe that in many Jewish cultures it was traditional to use dough to seal the pot lid.

2. Presoak or even precook your beans to be on the safe side!

3. If you are using onions (and you probably are!) make sure to precook those. Preferrably sauté them in oil, but if you are trying to eat very low fat, sauté in wine or stock before you put them in the pot.

I am taking additional suggestions. I have heard good things about Robin Robertson's book Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker, but I have not cooked from it yet!

I have researched the history of cholent, or hamin, in the past. This is the traditional stew that observant Jews set up to heat and finish cooking on Friday in order to have something hot for Saturday lunch. (Is that an accurate definition?)  I am lucky though: instead of having to dig up my old notes, my friend and fellow anonymous Jewish blogger Kaspit has put up a very interesting post on the origins of cholent and their relationship to environmental regulations. This blog is a lot of fun! If you are reading and thinking, "I don't know if he's being silly and joking, or if he's saying something so brilliant that I can't understand it"--he's just like that in real life, and it's probably both. I am a bit jealous that there is a ready-made comic book superhero to fit his web personna. I couldn't find one for mine. Maybe this one:

This is from The Jewish Superhero Corps--this is Sabbath Queen. Looks just like me, kind of.