In this case, there were leftover French lentils and quinoa in the fridge–so into the bowl they went with some jarred roasted red peppers, a pear from the season’s end, and a handful of raisins.

Next a quick troll through the garden for a clutch of kale and cabbage leaves and a stalk of immature green garlic that I treated like a scallion. Flip the high heat on under a puddle of water in the cast iron wok. Choppity chop and into the wok. In half a minute the works has wilted nicely, so off goes the heat and into the bowl go the veggies.

Then some olive oil in the work and a bunch of local hazelnuts. Stir-stir while they toast a little, and over the salad they go, oil in tow.

Red wine vinegar, coarse salt, a crack of fresh pepper, and a scatter of red chile flakes.

This baby was done, and boy was it a lip smacker. “Beans and rice” never tasted so fine–just like my new hero Dave Ramsey knows.

Sing it Dave!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

BEANS AND RICE (RICE AND BEANS)
Copyright Scott Dawson Songs 2008

Fannie Mae, GMAC and MasterCard
Had control of me
I was sinking, sinking in a river of debt
When a friend
Shared with me
A radio personality
With a message
That I wouldn’t soon forget

Act your wage, budget the till
Name every dollar bill
Sell the Rolex, the speedboat and SUV’s
The only time you shall haunt
Your neighborhood restaurant
Will be working
As a server for Applebee’s

So I’m squeezing every dime
No fish, no beef, no pork
Now when dinnertime rolls around
I don’t even need a fork

Rice and beans
Beans and rice
Keeps me fed for a modest price
I’m adjusting
To living on beans and rice I got pintos, kidneys, limas too
With a can of spam I got
Poor man’s stew
Thanks Dave Ramsey
For teaching me beans and rice

Rice and beans
Beans and rice
Cayenne pepper and a onion slice
Mighty tasty
I’m cooking up beans and rice

I got long grain, short grain
Wild and brown
This recipe is spreading all over town
I’m making progress
By living on beans and rice Someday soon
You’ll hear me
On the air screaming “I’m debt free”
But until then
I’m living on beans and rice

I think each of these readings is 3 minutes or so. Hope you have time for a listen. Merry Howdy, Jean

if you’re inspired–and I hope you are–you click over to the cookbooks page and take advantage of the December sale–all told with the free domestic shipping it’s a 20 percent savings

Yes, indeed. A good twenty fledgling and not so fledgling pie makers took home creations to bake–and all organic too from the apples to the butter to the 100 percent whole wheat pastry flour used for the crust. Thank you Friends of the Library for helping to make it all possible.

**********************************

Little Aunties (and  a Little Pardner) ushered into the world of homemade pie making by the Big Aunties of the family.

The Little Uncles came too.

And we even did a video!

We call this one: Pie St. Helens.

And the Big Aunties sure weren’t going to miss out the action even.

Thanks all you nice people at Stevenson. Linda and Eldie and me loved coming up to make pies with you. If you get on line to see the pictures let us know how your pies turned out–and especially, if like me, you find pie tastes even better the second day. All best, Jean

These little stovetop cornbreads are quick, warm, crowd pleasers. On tours I make them round, stuffed with cheese or refried beans drawing on gorditas and empanadas as my guide.

In April 2010, though, Justine, a Facebook pal from Southern California, shipped a box of avocadoes from her tree, and inspired these corn crescents.

Details

~Use the usual ratio of one teaspoon leavening to a cup of cornmeal/flour. On the cornmeal/flour ratio, it’s generally three to four parts meal for each part flour. One to two tablespoons of butter for each cup of masa/flour softens the dough nicely.

~Taking time to knead your dough some makes for cakes that puff some when fried.

Laurel Robertson, who wrote Laurel’s Kitchen with Carol Flinders, is some kind of woman. This salad is adapted from their pages where they titled it “Astonishing.” I’ve made it many times over the years, and it’s my privilege to translate it into a measure free format.

What I especially like about this vegetarian and vegan approach to a spinach salad is that it springs from the more traditional approach which relies on hot bacon fat to wilt the greens. So smart of Laurel and Carol to figure out a different approach to a warm dressing—a dressing that not only succeeds in taming your fresh garden spinach but also one that is pretty darn sexy with its polite pour of dry white wine.

We’re expecting it to get scooped by all the society pages–and for book sales to be brisk.

Just remember, you saw it here first!

PS–If you’re wondering why the frog stuff on a cooking blog, it’s about lightening up and having fun. About leaving our measuring cups behind and taking back our kitchens for our health and our wealth. So you decide. Are you up for a subversive hurrah?!?

Cooking Beyond Measure, p. 72.
On Roasting Vegetables—

Vegetables roast marvelously well from low to high temperatures. On highs around 450 F, colors are preserved but you have to watch things like a hawk. Medium ovens of 350 work well too, and depending on what you’re roasting, munchies will be yours in a half hour. Then again if you’re going out for a walk you can turn the oven to 250. When you return, you’ll have the sweetest caramelized morsels a soul could ever ask for.

My preferred roasting vehicle is—or was—Jessie Branom’s extra large cast iron skillet. The iron and the sides of the pan cradle the vegetables in a cocoon of heat that caramelizes, and the veggies y turn out sweet and golden. Baking trays work too, but as you’ll discover if you use both vehicles like I usually do, the results cast iron produces are decidedly superior. Yet at this writing, a new over-sized cast iron skillet is on my shopping list. Here’s why.

Jessie Branom and my mother were close friends in Phoenix during the early 1960s where they raised their families. Jessie had two children; Mom had four. So the women reasoned that my mother should have the big frying pan Jessie owned, and Jessie should have my mother’s medium sized skillet. The swap was made, and much later after Mom passed away Jesse’s skillet came to me. I used it for years but as a historian who thinks in terms of centuries, I’m aware of how numbered our days are—and how things can get lost in the shuffle at the end of life.

So it was that Thanksgiving of 2007 when Jessie’s first granddaughter married, I posted the skillet swathed in wedding wrap. As I wrote to the young bride, Jenny Branom Patberg, “Great scratch cooks have used this skillet for a half century. May its journey go on.”

Postscript: I have by this time, 3 years after the above was written, purchased a new skillet which has definitely earned its keep and love as a new member of the kitchen family.

Here’s a bit of my own story that I included in Hippie Kitchen (page 81) so people just coming to the world of real food might know that most of us have been newbies in our time. So here’s the vid, or if you’d rather just read the page, scroll on down.

It was a spring day at Spaceway—Safeway if you must—back in the 1980s in Flagstaff, Arizona. There was this nice looking couple on the taller side, quiet as they waited in the checkout line, carrying themselves with a comportment that caught my eye. The fresh garlic and lemons they held in their hands looked like sedate jewels that only the
privileged got to enjoy.

I felt chagrined over the garlic powder and plastic bottle of faux lemon juice back in my kitchen. Worse, I fretted that someone like me not only wouldn’t take the time to use fresh ingredients, they probably wouldn’t taste the difference if they did. I turned away from the well-heeled couple and tossed a couple candy bars in my basket.

Yet I wasn’t a complete stranger to the world of real garlic and well remembered my mother making her own garlic oil for her Caesar salads. She had a bottle just the right size to contain some oil, and she’d put several cloves of peeled garlic in before letting it steep in the cool safety of the refrigerator.

So it was that somewhere along the line after my epiphany at Spaceway, I started buying fresh garlic to make garlic butter for sourdough bread. These days, I think nothing of mincing up a clove of garlic for soups and salads. There’s almost always a bulb or two sitting out handy where I slice and dice. That plus some braids hanging about from the winter crop.

Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos, and follow me on Twitter.

On Former Husbands—

McKee, my ex, loves his pizza. He and I consumed our share through the years, snugged into a booth over a pitcher of beer at Alpine Pizza, a joint that’s become institution on Leroux Street in Flagstaff. Yet, MacSpee—as I have taken to calling him most recently—has been so co-opted by the white dough clan that it would take a leap across the Grand Canyon for him to first run some whole wheat rapids never mind scaling the heights of pink hummus and millet. Too bad the turkey always had such little faith in my hippie cooking. Then again, I guess I wasn’t the best either. Here’s how I got a clue on that score.

It was a few years ago when I was in Northern Arizona and stopped out to see him. Some of the old gang happened by, and we were shooting the breeze when McKee tosses out this remark about how in 1969 a year after we were married, I announced we were becoming vegetarians.

“What?” I thought, stunned at his implication that I issued some sort of edict. “He wasn’t into that? He never said a word.”

I guess at some level I thought that since he mainly controlled our lives outside the kitchen—and yes dear, in your unassuming way, your hiking boots were planted firmly in the patriarchy—our food decisions were pretty much mine. Also I think I might have concluded that turning vegetarian was such a cool move, that he was as into it as I was.
Besides, as I noted, this then-husband of mine didn’t give me an inkling that he wasn’t a happy hippie veggie. Sigh. Sometimes I don’t know why I’ve stayed friends with him all these years. Maybe it’s because just when I think I’ve had it, he sends me a letter like the one I got this past May.

It starts with him saying how he was just sitting around spacing out, reading a little nineteenth century history, and listening to
Bob Dylan. Turns out that “Tangled Up in Blue” was on—the piece Dylan wrote in 1974 that came out on Blood on the Tracks.

“A line from Dylan’s song reminds me of you,” McKee penned in his old familiar backhand. “‘We always did feel the same. We just saw it from a different point of view. ’”

On Pink Hummus—

Hummus made of smashed garbanzo beans and tahini (sesame seed butter) is traditional from the Middle East. But what happened in my hippie kitchen is that I only had pinto beans cooked up and also wanted a lean version of hummus.

What to do but toss the pintos the blender with enough water to rock & roll. Salt, vinegar, and I was there. Pink hummus for crackers, to thicken soups and sauces, as a dip for carrots and apples—and to add to brownie batter.

On Yeast Dough—

Take this section seriously and you could save some real dough. That’s because yeast dough, whether you turn it into loaves, flat focaccia, or pizza pie, is just an affordable mix of flour, water, salt, and yeast—way cheaper than bakery bread. Besides, it’s serious play-play.

Play-play on how long you knead it, if in fact you do at all. Play-play on whether you add sugar to the yeast or pink hummus or little crunchy bits of millet or use oil in the dough and for painting the tops. Play-play on how long to let it rise, including overnight if you decide to stir some up on a winter evening before going to bed. Even playing around on whether or not to oil the bowl in which you let the dough rise.

The only critical thing with yeast dough is that the water needs to be baby bottle warm so it can dissolve the yeast but not kill it like hot water will. So test your water with a drop on the inside of your wrist. That way you can make sure your yeasty microorganisms will be able to feed on the natural sugars in the flour and release lots of carbon dioxide to make the dough rise.

What Really Happened—

Someone polished off the last of the pink hummus so I whizzed up some garbanzo beans thawed from a tub I’d frozen the week before (page 74). No tahini around either, so I called it good and named the beanpaste blonde hummus.

Also, I painted the pizza with oil but left the focaccia plain. The former was soft; the latter was crusty.

On the millet it was a different story, since there was a bag from the bulk bins up in the cupboard. But when I poured a handful into the bowl, I realized I’d nabbed the quinoa, not the millet.

The quinoa wasn’t quite as crunchy as the millet after the bread was baked, but its seedy nature (technically quinoa is seed not a grain) was uptown and had a pleasing visual
presence. Cool when serendipitous mistakes take you in directions you might otherwise not have gone.

Also cool when you make focaccia in the spring, split a wedge for the toaster, layer on ultra thin slices of caramelized goat cheese from Norway (gjetost) and a few local berries, grate on fresh nutmeg, and pour a cup of very dark espresso from just-ground beans.

A moment of silence. My brows arched.

“Is he a boy?”

That’s where it started and since then it’s been a few of us old biddies hatching plans and match-making in the best of traditions.

Why? Just a goof really. But also more about lightening up and not taking the kitchen so friggin’ (or froggin’) seriously.

That’s why even though Celeste insisted on the back cover of Hippie Kitchen as her exclusive preserve, she did allow HH to appear within its pages. Also, why after a year, she finally said yes to HH’s overtures.

We had their engagement party on Valentines Day and even made a video. Sort of a first try, but it was a good time–and many ideas generated on how to make the upcoming wedding more of a blow out. So stay tuned. Wedding’s scheduled for apple blossom time.

In the mean time, here are some photos from the engagement party in case you didn’t watch the vid.

The happy couple.

Celeste sporting HH’s engagement gift of a diamond heart necklace. You can see that Celeste is not a spring chicken–and even has a bad eye. Also that she makes no bones about her commodious belly. We think that’s partly what attracted HH–Celeste’s quiet dignity in the face of what life has brought.

Lastly, the “cross my heart and hope to love” polenta waffles we made for the engagement party. A play-play adaptation of Bob’s Polenta Waffles and Cashew Cilantro Pesto from Cooking Beyond Measure, pages 42 and 75. There are also vids of me making these posted here on the blog.