Stolen!

Great rustic food and desert camp cooking skills are a part of Israeli life I fervently hope won’t disappear with all the new software companies and car dealerships and cappuccino joints that have popped up recently. As for the Wall Street Journal’s use of “Slow Food Fast” for a food column, I’m thinking I should take the attitude Monty Python did when Margaret Thatcher made free with their Dead Parrot Sketch in a speech.

Cooking (and other important) Resolutions

For myself, I’ve come up with about 11 new resolutions for 2011 (but as usual for me, it will definitely run longer, since I’m terrible about following directions, even my own, whether cooking or resolving). All this and a 5-minute smoked whitefish salad that’s a complete fake but tastes pretty good.

The Hummus Debate

You can use canned chickpeas for hummus that your friends will like, but the taste is not very fresh compared with hummus cooked from scratch. The trouble with making fully homemade hummus is that the chickpeas have to be VERY SOFT or the hummus will be grainy. After this weekend’s experience with the cans, I went back and tried out a homemade hummus with dried chickpeas and used a few tricks from other bean dishes to improve my usual microwave methods.

Prunes and Lentils II: Prune Sauces for Savory Dishes

NOWHERE in Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg’s The Flavor Bible can a mention be found of prunes paired in any way, shape, or form with lentils. Don’t have the faintest why not. The benefit to considering prune sauces for savories, especially in my How to Cook a Wolf Challenge, is that you can serve them with a lentil dish if you’re ready for that or to lift a more familiar savory dish with meat, fish or poultry. Here, a couple of great prune sauces that can be made in minutes in the microwave, or a rival French prune sauce that takes overnight. Your choice.

Prunes, Lentils, and “Cookin’ Cheap”

I loved the PBS show “Cookin’ Cheap” for its sense of down-home adventure and schadenfreude–whose dish would come off worse? But in reconsidering the episode on Lentils ‘n’ Prunes, I’ve decided it would make a great challenge to find some good-tasting and attractive variations, as opposed to the hideous gray mash they tried to serve. Is there any way on earth that prunes and lentils could really go together? Well…yes, as a matter of fact. You don’t run across prune and lentil recipes everyday, but they do exist in a number of respected cuisines around the globe. Even French. For very little more than it cost the Cookin’ Cheap guys, you could have something both appetizing and reasonably attractive. Even considering that the featured ingredients are still lentils and prunes.–Do we need to examine the theoretical basis for this claim? I think we do.

Technique: How to Squeeze an Eggplant

If you like baba ghanouj enough to make a lot, you don’t want to be peeling eggplants bit by bit with a spoon or fork. Instead, if you’re a hands-on, brave kind of soul in the kitchen, you can learn to squeeze the cooked pulp out as though you’re piping dough from a pastry bag. Not for the faint of heart, but a lot faster and more efficient and really impressive when it goes right. Which it did this time–I’ve got step-by-step pics for a change! And I didn’t even have to wipe eggplant off the camera lens!

For recipe sodium counts, better do your own math

Another Martha Rose Shulman recipe for a peanut sauce to go with soba and other noodles appears in today’s NY Times “Recipes for Health” column. Which would be fine but the nutrition counts below it don’t add up–at least for sodium. She’s specified unsalted peanut butter–but has 1 or 2 tablespoons of regular, not low-sodium, [...]

Another Reason to Make Your Own Salad Dressings

Make your own salad dressings or you could be dousing your lettuce with a lot of salt and some mighty strange ingredients.

Yogurt in the microwave

You can make very good yogurt in the microwave without any special equipment, and it works beautifully. The microwave heats the milk in 5 minutes with no stirring or scorching, and once the yogurt’s in and the power’s off, it doubles as a great insulator for the bowl with no need for a jury-rigged towel-and-blanket assembly. It’s a perfect thing to set up after supper and revisit in the morning.

How to Eat Vegetables and Lose Weight and Save the Planet (Without Really Trying)

“Food Matters” is Mark Bittman’s argument for getting the lard out and the greens in, for the sake of health, looks, and planet. And it’s not bad. But he’s doing an awful lot of cooking just to get some vegetables in.