Quarantine Kitchen, Episode #1

Isn't food beautiful?

Life has changed all over the world in only a few short weeks. Those of us not under quarantine or self-quarantine are under directions to “shelter in place,” to keep to our homes and practice “social distancing.” The global coronavirus pandemic has brought us this new vocabulary. Its consequences have people trading bread recipes on Facebook and getting together for a glass of wine via Zoom (rather than in person) and leads all of us to thinking more and more about what is essential and what is not.

The last time I went grocery shopping, however, I admit I bought an inessential item: it was a small pot of succulents, $4.99, that I did not even try to resist. Several of my neighbors here in the ghost town of Dos Cabezas, Arizona, have gardens, and therefore while secluded at home they have the comforts of gardening, along with the comforts of cooking. We have no fence or wall around the grounds of our rented cabin and have never been here past the end of April (who knows what this year will require of us?), so I have no garden, except this small, round clay planter. The piece of rusty metal is something I picked up in the desert. Of stones the desert offers a wealth. This is my garden for what I have taken to call “the duration.” It feeds my soul.

Can't eat it, but I needed it

Books also feed my soul, of course, as they have all my life, but food is essential, and the comfort of meals feeds the soul, as well. The tantalizing aroma of banana bread is one I suspect fills many American houses these days. Our dinner last night was comfort food, too — meat loaf, potato, sweet potato, and the last of a broccoli salad as the green vegetable. 

Broccoli salad is something we have enjoyed for many years. It is basically chopped raw broccoli, chopped onion, chopped green olives, and mayonnaise. The original recipe included chopped hard-cooked egg, but I am conserving eggs these days; in the past I have substituted cubed tofu for the eggs to good effect, and most recently the pale, crisp stalks of bok choy filled the bill. I omitted the white this time around, but you don’t want to leave out something red. If you have pimiento-stuffed green olives, as called for in the original recipe (and where did that come from, anyway? I don’t recall), those will do. I did not, but diced red sweet pepper was fine instead.

Yum!

Broccoli salad is good all by itself, but you can stretch it out by serving it as a sandwich filling in pita bread. Warm the pita pockets before you fill them with the cold broccoli salad. It’s a nice, quick, and refreshingly different lunch.

[Note: Root vegetables and crucifers keep well — potatoes and sweet potatoes and yams; cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts. “No lettuce for the duration!” one friend of mine writes in e-mail, concerned about germs. I have long relied on bok choy for versatility, as the stalks substitute easily for celery and the leaves for lettuce or spinach.)

Here are my meat loaf ingredients: ground beef, Worcestershire sauce, chopped onion, rolled oats, eggs, catsup. Tomato paste would be more refined than catsup, but sometimes I prefer the sweeter condiment. Even in chili, I find the addition of catsup pleasing, however heretical the thought may be to chili purists. 

Double-yum!

Like the broccoli salad, leftover meat loaf too will go further if sliced thin and used as a sandwich filling. Because we’re all baking bread these days, aren’t we? Or about to start....

One of my kitchen essentials, as you already know, is Better than Bouillon. Another is a brand of tomato paste that comes in a tube rather than a can, because before I discovered that (thanks to a friend who included it in a gift basket once), there was always the problem of opening a can of tomato paste and not needing to use it all, but having what was left go moldy in the refrigerator or forgotten in the freezer. No such problem with the tube: take it out of the package, use what you need, keep the closed tube in the fridge until you need more. While I did resort to catsup in my meat loaf, our chicken entree the previous night simmered in a rich sauce of onions, garlic, olive oil, and tomato paste.

What else is essential in your quarantine kitchen? We would be hard pressed in our household to live without onions. Doesn’t almost every good recipe (other than banana bread, of course) begin with an onion?

And on the subject of bananas, now if ever is the time to buy green bananas. They will keep longer, in the first place, and in the second place you never throw away brown-skinned bananas, do you? Doesn’t they always go into the freezer until you’re ready to make banana bread?

Fresh fruit is important, too, if you have access to it, and citrus with its good, thick, protective rind is another good-keeping food. Berries are trickier, but I learned from one of my sisters years ago how to stretch out my blueberry supply. Wash the berries well and spread them out on a cookie sheet. Put the sheet in the freezer, and when the berries are frozen, remove them from the sheet with a spatula and transfer them to freezer bags. A handful at a time can be shaken from the bag (in all their nice, individual, original round form) to add to pancakes, cereal, smoothies, or salads. A couple of weeks ago I bought fresh raspberries and froze them the same way, so we’ll see how that experiment turns out.

Friends back in downstate Michigan report that skunk cabbage has made its spring appearance, so can rhubarb be far behind? Here in the high desert, we have “wild rhubarb,” or “desert rhubarb,” or “miners lettuce” (it has many other common names), which is not rhubarb at all but a species of dock, Rumex hymenosepalus. Leaves and stalks are edible, in salad when young or, later in their development, cooked like spinach. Roots, I read, were also used in the old days to tan leather or dye cloth. 

Miners lettuce in former mining town

With all the free-ranging cattle here in Dos Cabezas, I would hesitate to gather the desert rhubarb unless I were very, very hungry. And you’d certainly want to wash it well! But it’s always good to take note of emergency food supplies, should the kitchen run low, though I don’t think we will come to that in the current so-far manageable crisis.

Start With a Blood Orange

Blood oranges are not unique to Spain, but I always think of them as Spanish, from my first encountering them in Paris, and then I think also of strawberries and the protests from French farmers and agricultural workers one year over strawberries imported from Spain in what I thought of “The War of the Strawberries.” Oranges, of course, need a warmer climate than strawberries (and so we have Michigan strawberries but not Michigan oranges), but let’s stick to oranges today. Strawberries will come in good time.

Les sanguines. Blood oranges. The name is strong and yet poetic, evocative, calling up associations and mysteries far beyond citrus.

Blood orange fruit segments are a deep garnet in color (darker than Ruby Red grapefruit), and the thick orange rind surrounding the juicy pulp usually bears a deep red blush, too. They are delicious as well as beautiful, but it was the beauty and the magic of the name that first drew me to them. Some objects, like some places, simply have irresistible names, and if the objects are beautiful, too, why try to resist?

Now, to my amazement, blood oranges have come to Northport, where they are at present no more expensive than the more ordinary oranges. A dollar apiece for either kind! Cheaper than a candy bar! Too special, though, I can’t help thinking, to be merely sliced into sections for a snack. And a single blood orange goes a long way when used in a salad, half of one sufficient for two people’s salad. It dresses up mundane Romaine remarkably, along with some crumbled goat cheese and works well with a raspberry vinaigrette. 

But a blood orange inspires me to go beyond lettuce and cheese, and so my salad the next evening began with cubed cold tofu and sections of blood orange cut into thirds, which would probably have been good enough; however, I had a bit of leftover fruit salad – orange and mango and grated coconut – so I tossed that in, too, along with freshly sprouted mung beans, finally dressing the whole and tossing with a light application of sesame oil.

Done?

That would have been the end of it, except that I also found the tiniest dab of chopped cabbage and kale to sprinkle over the top for bright green contrast and added crunch. Perfect!

NOW it's done!

What inspires you in the kitchen as spring comes on? Or do you find it too hard to stay indoors?

(Bring outdoors in)

Des Fruits et des Légumes en Hiver (Of Oranges and Green Beans)

On the rue des Martyrs, Paris, France

Well, we are not in Paris, France, but still here in northern Michigan, and we have now entered the long, glistening white tunnel of winter. We will be in the tunnel for many weeks to come, barring another stretch of unseasonably warm weather, so on a cold, wild Sunday of blowing and drifting snow it’s a great comfort to have the luxury of staying snugly home, with pot after pot of hot tea and fresh-cut sections of juicy oranges. I tell David we must eat citrus fruit while we can, since depredations of alien insects in the Florida and California groves, not only spoiling crops but actually killing trees, may put the price of oranges and grapefruit and lemons beyond our reach before too long. I hope not. Anyway, for now we have oranges in winter -- oranges in the snow, as it were. A princely delight!

On a cozy day at home in winter my food thoughts yearn toward the foods of Africa. Quite honestly, though? I’d prepared well in advance for today’s kitchen adventure. For one thing, I had to make a trip to the specialty spice shop in Suttons Bay for fenugreek seed, and then it took several visits to the grocery store before Tom’s Market had green beans nice enough to satisfy me.

Here is the inspiring cookbook: The Africa News Cookbook: African Cooking for Western Kitchens, published by Penguin in 1985. The recipe that caught my eye over a week ago is called green bean atjar, or green bean pickles, but these are not at all like pickles my mother and grandmother made. No vinegar. They are, rather, spiced green beans, packed in oil and refrigerated before serving. According to the book, they will last up to a month in the refrigerator without processing, and so I imagine my beans as one dish in an African dinner sometime in the near future.

Two notes from my kitchen: 

(1) You might think I would want to make this dish in summer with fresh beans from garden or farm market. But why sacrifice the freshness of summer vegetables to oil and spices? No, to my mind this is a perfect winter dish. 

(2) The recipe does not specify what kind of oil to use. I decided on peanut oil, because it is used all over Africa and, also, the oil in this recipe is brought to a boil – not a happy fate for olive oil, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Here is an odd kitchen tool. I have no idea what it is called or where this one came from, but I use it all the time. It is so much easier than a pot lid when water is to be drained off vegetables and quite handy on occasions when a big colander would be overkill.

Sometimes, of necessity, kitchen activities expand beyond the confines of the tiny kitchen. This is another reason for making certain dishes ahead and not trying to do everything on the evening a dinner is to be served. The dining table, tablecloth whisked away, becomes a staging area, especially important as Sunday is bread day, too.

The proof of my South African spiced green beans will be in the eating, a story for some future post. Meanwhile, “Bundle up, campers! It’s cold out there!” Now who recognizes that movie quote?