Vive la casserole!

These recipes are both a tribute to my mother and a departure.

Tonight at Trader Joe's, I had the rare fortune of witnessing a small boy interacting with the bag of frozen peas that he'd just made his boon companion. This child was entertaining himself and his slightly older brother (while their mother blithely shopped on) by ecstatically smothering his face with the bag of frozen peas, alternated with giggling uproariously because who ever has thought of that and done it, really? He knew he was brilliant. I wish I had a photo of this hilarious event because words do not suffice. I was not thinking of tuna casserole (I swear) until I saw that boy with his frozen peas. Here's my mom's classic WCW recipe (I bet some of you dear readers will recognize it):

1 can Cream of Mushroom soup
1 1/3 cups water
1 1/3 cups uncooked Minute Rice
1 1/2 cups frozen peas
7 oz. tuna (1 tiny can only?)
salt and pepper and paprika
cheddar cheese

The instructions are undeveloped which is to say unembroidered: mix together ingredients in a casserole dish. Bake covered 20-25 minutes at 375 degrees. Stir half way through and top with Ruffles Potato Chips. YES!


But wait! What are those green things doing obscuring the picture of this otherwise gorgeous casserole? Well, those are "Not Your Mother's Green Beans," recipe courtesy of some Moosewood cookbook or another. My version is as follows...

In a recycled jar (with lid) mix one part olive oil and one part vinegar--red wine and Balsamic make a nice combo--with 2 Tbsp minced shallot, random "Italian" herbs, salt-n-pepa to taste (really, has anyone ever gotten enough of Salt-n-Pepa?). Secure lid; shake it like a polaroid picture. Meanwhile boil 1/2 lb. green beans in salted water. When beans are "al dente," drain and soak in dressing. Top with pine nuts. Well, toast them first, if you're not toasted already by the sheer joy of the recipe, the toddler with his peas, and the bottle of 2-buck Chuck you opened a little too early.

nota bene: the only thing to drink with this fine meal is 2-buck Chuck, obviously.

n.b. #2 When I was the age of that pea-faced boy, or a little older perhaps, I loathed peas and spent a long time delicately picking each and every one of them out of every single forkful of this otherwise tasty casserole. My parents just let me be picky, God bless them, for a while... until the lima bean incident that is. But we won't discuss that.

n.b. #3 Some of you are thinking as you view the photo, WHAT are those frozen corn tidbits doing there? or WHERE (the hell) did the potato chips go??? Well, this is the two-thousand-zeros, friends, and it's time for a little health to hit the tuna casserole recipe, n'est pas? Hence I use brown Minute Rice, lowfat Cream of Mushroom soup, three cans of tuna, frozen corn, and the "reach-for-the Epicurious-stars-in-the-'Burbs" homemade bread crumbs. I know you are all very impressed with me right now.

In the immortal words of Mom, Just Eat It, Or Else!


Bonus post...
Random kitchen utensil No. 1
"tuna can drainer"
REALLY! check this out: my mom said I could not live without it, and she was right, as usual.

Apple Bottom Jeans

Nelly clearly had something gustatory on his mind when he penned the luscious tune "Apple Bottom Jeans." This recipe is definitely dedicated to those fine gals who wear the boots with the fur. (Who is this Shorty, anyway? "Could we all be Shorty?" she asks hopefully.)

Apple Bread

1 cup flour
1/2 cup oat flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp powder
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1 beaten egg
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups peeled, shredded apple
1/4 cup cooking oil
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

First you grind your own oat flour. I put oatmeal into my beloved Krups coffee grinder, of course. Works like a charm.


Next you shred the apples. I used organic Washington State apples purloined from housemate #1.






In one bowl, combine dry ingredients, including walnuts. In another bowl, combine oil, sugar, egg, and apples. Combine wet and dry ingredients: stir until just moistened. Scrape batter into bread pan (which you've of course already sprayed with Pam or Pam-like substitute). Bake in a 350 degree oven for 50 minutes or so, until wood toothpick inserted near center comes out clean. Cool in pan for a short while; remove from pan onto wire rack. Slice off a chunk when you can no longer stand it.


One final note. Housemate #2 found this gem online.

Rachel Got Married and I was there, albeit late

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Like the gals at GoFugYourself.com, I find Anne Hathaway intriguing. She went from princess to topless and then recovered by Becoming Jane and Agent 99 almost in the same breath. Of course I was going to see Rachel Getting Married, the film in which Hathaway plays an "anti-princess" according to the screenwriter Jenny Lumet's NPR interview. And I finally have seen it, and I have three things to discuss.

1. The film elaborates on a family's stunning failure to set boundaries. Mother Buchman (Debra Winger) permits her drug-addled daughter Kym (played by Hathaway) to be younger baby brother's primary caretaker. Baby dies. Rachel Buchman’s groom sings an a cappella rendition of Neil Young’s song "Unknown Legend" as part of his wedding vows. Guests weep. Even the way the film came to be made shows the scarcity of boundaries in Hollywood. Jenny Lumet has been charmingly public about how she had her father, famous director Sidney Lumet, phone up and personally ask Jonathan Demme to read the screenplay. And a film was born. Ironically, the film features several scenes of 12-step meetings. For those of you who don't know, 12-step programs notoriously promote detachment and other forms of interpersonal boundary-setting even while encouraging participants to reveal their darkest secrets repeatedly to a room full of strangers, narrating and re-narrating their crises to such a point of prolificacy that the lines between human lives grow indistinguishable.

2. Anyway, such a thematic—-the no-boundaries thematic—-appears to be most fertile in the deliberately low-budget mode of handheld camerawork, verité if you will. With hopes of making certain people cringe, I hereby nominate Rachel Getting Married as a wildly successful American example of Dogme 95. My evidence? The close-up purity of Kym's black eye suggests the absence of filters. The constant strumming on various musical instruments is not merely gratuitous background soundtrack but actually rather irritating and intrusive noise, as witnessed when one of the characters finally begs the wedding band to stop their incessant rehearsing in the next room so that the family can have another one of their painfully honest discussions about their shared personal tragedies and sustained bitter resentments. One recalls Thomas Vinterberg's amazing film Festen (Denmark 1998), in which another family gathering turns into a series of grainy, grimey catastrophes. One wishes to revisit Vinterberg's amazing film, in fact. One might do so this weekend.

3. Finally, I have to ask, what was up with all the cultural appropriation? Since when does a wedding between a white woman and a black man necessitate exotic wedding garb in the form of poorly tied saris? Isn't such a union already sufficiently "multicultural"? If one boundary was going to be set in this film, it should have been this one: if an Indian is not getting married, the bride should not be wearing a sari and eating "aloo gaabi."

Oh well... at least now we all know where Robyn Hitchcock has been hiding all these years.

Bella vs. Eli, or Why Angsty Vampire Movies Suck, and Why Sucking Could Be Cool

SPOILER ALERT!!
"Lat den ratte komma in" is the latest vampire film offering from Sweden, land of the really immortal Ingmar Bergman whose death in July 2007 we ought all to still be mourning (note to self: watch Bille August's "The Best Intentions" again soon). A bold move on director Thomas Alfredson's part, to release a tweenybopper fang flick only one month prior to the launch of the "Twilight" franchise. Given the "Twilight" mania that has hit all the malls in North America, I feel a burning need to delineate the contrasts between a good vampire movie and a bad vampire movie, or rather, between one that Sucks Thrillingly and with Sheer Brilliance and one that just sucks.

"Let the Right One In" features Eli, 12-years-old for eternity. She gets B.O. when she's hungry; she has an unsettling tendency to scramble up trees and drop down on her prey unannounced; she can solve the Rubik's Cube faster than mortals; she seeps blood from her pores if she enters where she's not invited. And yet she still manages to be quite an attractive little sprite. She's also scrappy, by which I mean she's adept at finding folks who will take care of her. Specifically menfolks. The film begins with her ageing partner--don't mistake him for a father figure--driving her to their new pad, getting her happily settled in, and going out to kill a young boy so she can feed. The film progresses with Eli meeting Oscar, a 12-year-old boy who lives in the same industrial apartment complex. The grooming of the new life partner begins soon afterward, as Eli empowers wimpy, scrawny Oscar to begin a weight-lifting course and fight back against the cruel bullies at school. Oscar saves Eli's non-life, when an angry villager with a torch goes vampire hunting. And then Eli saves Oscar's life in what must be one of the most memorable swimming pool scenes ever committed to celluloid. I won't give anything else away, but I will remind my readers that they don't call this genre romantic for nothing.

"Twilight" (yawn) as you probably know already, features Bella, a clutzy bookish every-girl, who moves to Forks, WA where she meets and falls in love with Edward Cullen, member of a "family" of beautifully pale and incestuous siblings who have the numbers to form their own clique at the high school. The romance of Bella and Edward, which draws on every trope in the book of fairy-tales-that-buttress-patriarchy, has even sparked a group on Facebook called "Because of Edward Cullen, human boys have lost their charm." Bella cannot do anything for herself; Edward is continually rescuing her from peril--when he's not stalking her or using his magical vampire powers to carry her up tall trees to enjoy the view. Given how the story seems to be going in the direction of rape fantasies realized, if Bella's darkest wish comes true Edward will be eternally rescuing Bella from peril.

Interlude in the form of commentary on the leading men:
Granted, Oscar wears a string of snot on his upper lip for most of the Swedish film, but that Edward Cullen wears too much make-up, and Robert Pattinson is no Johnny Depp.

In conclusion, Eli kicks Bella's booty. Eli is tragic, sweet, winsome even, and yet grotesquely terrifying. Importantly, Eli is a powerful girl. In contrast, Stephenie Meyer, Melissa Rosenburg, and Catherine Hardwicke appear to have colluded in disempowering Bella. And unfortunately for all of us, Bella is the character that impressionable young girls--not to mention, sadly, some impressionable women in their 30s--long to be. As one of my coworkers said to me, "If you've ever been a teenage girl, you'll love this movie."

I guess I never was a teenage girl. Can someone please confirm that for me?

Homemade for the Holidays

Check out this insightful old post on getcrafty.com ("home of the craftistas") on feminism and domesticity! I agree with much written therein, except unlike the author I love to iron.

Then there's this oldie-but-goodie on "New Domesticity," questioning whether it's just another form of patriarchal captivity...

Turkey-free Soups

After the annual Turkey Trot around Greenlake to raise money for Farm Sanctuary yesterday morning, I hosted the annual Seattle Fam turkey-free Thanksgiving at my house. When folks discover we're having a vegetarian Thanksgiving the common response is an incredulous "But what do you eat?" My response to that inanity is, "What do we not eat!" "Let me be quite clear: this holiday is not "difficult" or "challenging" for those of us who eschew bird flesh. In fact the Seattle Fam and I agree it's the best holiday ever, and none of us are emaciated. (Some of us are rather willowy, yes, but none of us belong on a poster for WFP.)

I was the soupier (oh why is that term not in Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire?). I started with a roasted cauliflower soup inspired by a recipe in Joanne Weir's Wine Country Cooking. The recipe is simple and the results, divine.

Coarsely chop two heads of cauliflower. Toss together with 2-3 T olive oil, salt, and freshly ground pepper. Throw in 2-3 whole (peeled) garlic cloves as well. Arrange in shallow layers in a roasting pan and bake in a 350-degree oven for 15 minutes (stir once halfway through) or until golden brown and smelling nutty. Set roasted cauliflower aside; try not to snack on it throughout the remainder of your prep.

In a large soup pot toast 1 heaping T of coriander seeds for about 1 minute on low heat (watch these carefully so they don't burn; when they're slightly darker brown and the smell wafts out of the pan, they're done). Let them cool and then grind them. I have tried grinding them in various mortar-and-pestles, and I have to say that my old Krups coffee grinder dedicated to spices, nuts, and grains remains the best method of grinding ever.

Heat up the soup pot again, this time with 1-2 T olive oil and 1 T butter. Saute 1 large yellow diced onion and 1 shallot for a while. Then throw in the ground coriander. After about 5-10 minutes, add the roasted cauliflower and 4 cups of vegetable stock. I also added 1 peeled, sliced potato this time, since I'm feeding an army of 12 starving vegetarians. Let this simmer for 20-30 minutes, or whenever the vegetables are cooked down enough to zap them with your immersion blender (a.k.a. "magic wand" or "kitchen dildo"--whatever you call it, you have to admit it's an essential tool for soup-making). While zapping, add 1/2 - 1 cup of half-n-half. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Next I found a surplus of organic carrots in our fridge, thanks to a housemate's honey who works the weekly Ballard Farmers' Market. I peeled them and meditated on their beauty. What could I do to translate their luminous orange glow to a comparably lovely soup?

Curried Carrot Soup (vegan) was the result. I hope I can recreate the recipe here, for Jules's sake.

2 lbs carrots, peeled and chopped
1/2 large onion, coarsely chopped
1 T canola oil
1 t brown mustard seeds
1/2 t ground cumin
1/2 t ground coriander
dash of curry powder if you have it on hand, or garam masala
dash of turmeric
dash of chili powder
dash of ginger
1 t salt
4 cups water
1/4 cup grapefruit juice

Saute onion in oil with all spices and salt on med-low until onions wilt. Sprinkle water into pot when spices stick. Add carrots and water. Simmer until carrots are soft (20-30 minutes). Zap with immersion blender. Add grapefruit juice and adjust salt accordingly.

NAVSA and Chunky Winter Soup

I had the pleasure of visiting New Haven, CT and Yale University for the North American Victorian Studies (NAVSA) conference last week.
While I was there, my housemate, who occasionally fancies she's my husband, panicked and demanded I come home to make dinner. Rather smugly, I told her she'd find chunky winter vegetable soup in the freezer. It's amazing with toasted pumpernickel bread. She apparently found it, because there's none left!

This recipe comes from the rebar: modern food cookbook associated with the fantastic restaurant in Victoria, B.C. I picked up this goodie last year, October 2007, in Victoria when I was attending (what else?) the annual NAVSA conference.

I started with some golden nugget squash from Trapold Farms in Portland, OR. I chopped up four of these gorgeous creatures, and bagged half of it in 2-cup quantities to freeze for future use.

The soup starts out with a basic saute of olive oil, 1 chopped leek, 1 yellow onion, a few bay leaves, some red chile flakes, 1T salt, 8 minced garlic cloves, and some dried sage and thyme.



Then I stirred in the salt and the squash, along with 1 cubed rutabaga, some kale and a couple carrots. I added 8 cups of vegetable stock and brought this to a boil, and then let it simmer for 10 minutes. When the vegetables were tender, I added 1 can of white beans, 4 heaping T of nutritional yeast, 1 12-oz. bottle of dark beer, a lot of freshly ground pepper, and 4T of apple cider vinegar. Next time I make this, I won't add quite so much apple cider vinegar. This simmered a long while, and this is how it turned out:



Yep.