You heard it here first. Straight from Hippie Kitchen, p. 44.

On the Cook Counts Too—

Fussing with cooking vegetables by the singleton is something I do less often than not. That’s because when you’re going for a quick meal, it’s easier to get a bunch of veggies onto the heat to flash cook together, warm salad or soup style. Between that and leftover grain and protein waiting in the fridge, you’re there.

The singleton scene could be that’s why so many of us spend forever in the kitchen—sometimes resenting the time and trouble. We think we have to make picture perfect meals every day with these separate little piles of whatever.

Contrast that with the spirit of one-bowl meals popular around the world. Ethnic cooks from Asia to Latin America to Africa know how to combine an enticing array of vegetables, fruits, grains, and legumes into easy meals. They know that the cook’s happier and the food’s better when they keep things simple.

It’s the same thing on how much of this and that to put into what you’re making. The cook needs to count. The cook does count. It’s the cook’s call.

That’s why one day when journalist, Laura Marble who took to measurefree cooking instantly, asked how many tomatoes I knew to put in some dish or other, I came back with a reply that made us chuckle. “I don’t know?” I said gearing up for a flip but seriously radical remark. “Like when I’m tired of chopping.”

Down to the two daze of signing books at Whole Foods Market Fremont–a half dozen copies of Hippie Kitchen still hoping to get asked to dance plus an ample stack of her older sister (wherein lies the coveted recipe for Thai Slaw and Rolled Ups). If you want a signed book for Christmas and are in Portland, cruise over. I promise to feed you very well–and the store is totally cool, with it’s support of local hipsters firmly in place. Thanks Whole Foods, Fremont. You people are the best.

(Thanks too, to Beth for coming in yesterday and scooping up an armload of books. Here’s to the delicious revolution! Besides that, it was very very excellent to see you.)

PS: Have you found me on Twitter and Facebook yet under HippieCook?

So Mark Bittman’s recent NYT piece on Mexican markets was a nice reminder of my own cruise-arama. Here he’s talking about how Mexican women get fresh veggies on the table pronto–but he apparently hasn’t got the flash cooking thing wired yet.

“Equally interesting to me was the huge variety of pre-chopped, mixed vegetables, carrots mixed with squash and cabbage, or nopales (cactus leaves) with peas, red peppers, mushrooms, and onions, or simply corn and squash. Bags and bags of these, and trays and trays of them, to be bought by the kilo, taken home, and quickly cooked for tortillas or stews or simply, for want of a better term, stir-fries.”

It’s true that when I first started working with the concept I too called this method of cooking stir-fries–hippie stir fries to be exact. That’s because it uses the Asian stir fry idea but without the oil or Asian veggies or flavors. Still stir fries didn’t quite capture it and my friend Laura couldn’t get behind the phrase. All a good thing, since eventually the term flash cooking came along. Here’s what I write in Hippie Kitchen:

On Flash Cooking—

My Dad called me “High Heat Johnson.” He had me pegged and knew I took after my mother. Mom’s friends said she couldn’t even spell the word patience.

So I come to flash cooking honestly. When I cruise into the kitchen I want stuff done now. I want to pull leftover grains and legumes from the icebox and spin them together with a bunch of vegetables pronto. So I turn the heat up full blast and go for it. I used to think this tendency an indolent cop out, but after traveling in other countries, I discovered that I’m not the only one flash cooking and that there’s not a thing in the universe wrong with this approach to food.

To flash cook vegetables, start with a puddle of water, spices if you’re in the mood, and high heat. The idea is to use just enough water to cook your vegetables, adding small pours as you go—making sure to get things that take the longest to cook in the pot first.

My favorite vehicle by far for flash cooking is a cast iron wok because it holds the heat so beautifully and turns the vegetables crisp tender in minutes. But as I’ve discovered cooking in other people’s kitchens, regular woks, heavy bottomed skillets, and generally any pot or pan rattling around in the cupboard will be your friend.

It is true that flash cooking is an Asian stir fry in spirit since there’s lots of vegetables and full blast heat. But that’s where the similarities end. That’s because flash cooking isn’t bound by a particular orchestration of bok choy, soy sauce, and their buddies. Instead flash cooked dishes are free to move about in the world of fusion cuisine.

Flash cooked dishes can also skip the heat entirely and use raw vegetables. So in truth, the idea behind flash cooking is more about the flash and less about the heat. It’s also a way cooks in hippie kitchens get to muster all the soul at their command and sketch out flavors that appeal in a thousand different hues.

So, get all those blues. Must be a thousand hues.
And be just differently used. You just know.
You sit there mesmerized.
By the depth of those eyes that you can’t categorize.
She got soul. She got soul. She got soul!

~Bluebird, Buffalo Springfield, 1966

You got soul?

Mesmerized?

Far out…

Lenore’s not two yet, and she’s already in the groove. Angela, her mom and next door neighbor, sent these images and says they weren’t posed. Rather Lenore loves to page through Hippie Kitchen, pausing particularly at page 159 where Iris (same-same from the Cat in the Cheese blog post here) is once again checking the scene out.

~~~~Meow, Lenore. Iris finds you rather fascinating too.~~~~

Beans in your morning cereal bowl are cool. A few garbs rolling around with the hazelnuts. Some blackies and a spike of red chile and lime to go with chunks of fresh pears. A pink hummus spread on apples. (Cooking Beyond Measure, p. 32) And now even a nod from the New York Times.

Bizarre that Big Food has convinced us things like Cocoa Krispies aren’t weird and beans in your cereal bowl are. Maybe that’s because the marketers at Kellogg are now sending not so subtle messages that Cocal Krispies help with immunity too. For more on how the good people in San Francisco are asking a few questions about that, see Marion Nestle’s Oct 28 post at Food Politics.

Nov 5 Update: The green watch doggies were vocal enough that Kellogg’s has had a change of heart. Shucks, just when I thought I had it. An NPR piece yesterday reminded us that laughter improves our immunity. So I thought Kellogg’s figured we’d laugh so hard over the Cocoa Krispies box claim that our immune levels actually would rise.

Kitchen gardens aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, of course. So Bion Bartning, who also thinks farmers markets price many of us out, has come up with a new model. He runs a little store in Manhatten, Basis Market, that carries local produce, dairy, and meat products–all at prices substantially lower than farmers markets and all labeled by the farm from which they came.

This is what he told Food and Wine: “We’re finding producers who are willing to be fair in their pricing, and we’re being fair in what we charge.”

“What he likes about cooking is its relative imprecision and lack of discipline–a release from the demands of the [operating] theatre. In the kitchen, the consequences of failure are mild: disappointment, a wisp of disgrace, rarely voiced. No one actually dies.

He strips and chops eight fat cloves of garlic and adds them to the onions. From recipes he draws only the broadest principles. The cookery writers he admires speak of handfuls and a sprinkling, of chucking in this or that. They list alternative ingredients and encourage experimentation.

Henry accepts that he’ll never make a decent cook, that he belongs to what Rosalind calls the hearty school. Into his palm he empties several dried red chillies from a pot and crushes them between his hands and lets the flakes fall into the onions and garlic….Onto the softened onions and garlic–pinches of saffron, some bay leaves, orange-peel gratings, oregano, five anchovy fillets, two tins of peeled tomatoes.”

Thanks much Mr. McEwan. Would love to try some of Henry’s charmed bouillabaisse.

My stuff has been pretty charmed lately too. “This is the best sample I’ve ever had here,” said one enthusiastic taster recently. I, of course, modestly beamed. She was talking about Thai Slaw. Clearly in Rosalind’s hearty school.

After all, what’s to measure when you’re tossing fresh vegetables together, dressing them with garlic, ginger, lime, salt, chile, and sugar, and topping the works off with peanuts and coconut?

That’s why I’ve been smiling since watching Meryl Streep bring Julia Child alive once again on the big screen. Ah, yes. Wasn’t our Julia a grand dame.

And the Sole Meuniere scene. No way but that writer-director, Nora Ephron, would include Julia Child’s epiphany. That moment, when seated across from her debonair husband in Rouen, France, Julia Child tasted her first morsels of Sole Meuniere:  dover sole boned tableside and decked out in a buttery wine sauce.

It wasn’t more than two days after I saw the movie that I queued up at the fish counter. No dover in sight so I bought some cheap little Rex sole fillets. A quick dredge in flour (whole wheat of course, since the white stuff is sooo paste-y) and a quick pan fry. Then the sauce, which was the real reason for all this business. And I made so much of it that there was plenty leftover the next day to spoon on some zucchini.

Tak, Julia. Tak. Beurre Blanc made my eyes roll, too, right here at my own table.

You were right. We Americans do need to splash the wine about more in our kitchens–and get the butter out, too.

Olive oil’s good, definitely. But butter and wine? Mais oui!

At least that was the take home message I got from this latest film dedicated to your refined, magnanimous, brilliance.

Tak, Julia. Tak.

Aside from this soup tasting great and being so healthy I was able to make it to a book signing, it’s a pleasure to make as well. Your chopping board starts looking like a still life. It helps, of course, to have a menagerie of wooden animals hanging about in your kitchen. As you can see, on this occasion the resident bird, Persia, was overseeing operations even as her flat back made for a handy place to put the garlic.