Bean and Green Tacos

Only rarely do I let a day go by without planning my meals. I can’t even remember the last time it happened, really. I wake up and think about what I’ll have for breakfast, then what kind of lunch supplements that, and what kind of dinner I’ll have ingredients and time for. Some days start out with a grand plan that turns out even grander in its realization, and on those rare shining days, I feel like I have this life thing figured out.

Most days start with a grand plan that I whittle down to essentials over the course of the day, and maybe instead of the crackly-skinned roast chicken, kale soufflés, and plum clafoutis dinner I’d imagined, I’ll just braise one piece of chicken with some kale and garlic and eat a fresh plum for dessert. But some days, more often than I’d like, I get home too late and too tired to really cook, but hungry. I have such an effective mental block against ordering delivery food that I always fix my meals at home. So even though all I want to do is watch one of my neglected Netflix dvds while dinner miraculously appears, I end up digging through the cupboards and refrigerator for a leftover pita, some wilted chives, cheese, and whatever else needs to be used up. Fortunately, I’ve taken to preparing some quick dinner staples ahead of time so my future self won’t look so pathetic trying to make a pita-za with floppy herbs and a nub of old brie (not that I’ve ever done that).

Today was a perfect example of that tired but hungry but too stubborn to order takeout quick meal. I got in at 6:30 after walking around all day (in heels - what was I thinking?) I needed to start dinner pretty much immediately as I’d long since burned through my hearty breakfast, and I was too tired to shop for the elaborate meal I’d been planning all day. So I put on some Dexy’s Midnight Runners for energy, opened the refrigerator and took out the leftover black beans, sautéed greens, corn tortillas, and salsa, and made some bean & green tacos. Because I’d prepared all of the components a few days ago, I had a nice warm dinner ready in about 10 minutes, which is as close to miraculous as it gets.

They’re vegan and full of vegetables, which makes me feel virtuous after a breakfast of bacon-laced migas, and they’re tasty enough to qualify for a grand-plan dinner sometime. Now if you’ll excuse me, that Netflix isn’t going to watch itself.

Bean & Green Tacos (makes 2, serves 1, easily multiplied)

• 2 corn tortillas
• 2 tsp olive oil
• 6 Tbs black beans (see recipe below)
• 4 Tbs sautéed greens (see recipe below)
• 2 Tbs salsa (I used peach & tomato salsa from a jar)

Heat a small skillet on high. When hot, add 1 tsp olive oil and swirl to distribute. Place a tortilla in the skillet and cook without moving until slightly puffed, about 2 minutes. Turn over and spread half with 3 Tbs black beans, 2 Tbs greens, and 1 Tbs salsa. Cook 2 minutes, remove to plate and fold the bare half over the filling. Repeat with remaining ingredients. Eat carefully.

Black Bean Filling

• 1/2 pound dry black beans
• water
• 1 Tbs olive oil
• 1/4 medium onion, diced
• 2 tsp ground cumin
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/2 cup cilantro, finely chopped
• 1 lime’s juice
• salt to taste

Put the beans in a pot, cover with water by 1 inch. Bring to a boil, cook 1 minute, then turn off heat and soak 1 hour. Add enough water to cover by 1 inch, then return to a boil, reduce to a simmer and cook until tender, 1-2 more hours. In another pot, heat olive oil on medium, add onion and cook, stirring frequently, until lightly browned. Add cumin and garlic and cook about 2 minutes. Stir in black beans and simmer 10 minutes. Stir in cilantro and lime juice and salt to taste. Makes about 4 cups of beans, can be made ahead, keeps about 1 week.

Sautéed Greens with Garlic

• 1 Tbs olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tsp red pepper flakes
• salt to taste
• 4 cups lightly packed washed greens (I used a mixture of mustard, dandelion, and collard)
• 1/4 cup water

Heat the oil on low, add garlic and red pepper and cook gently a few minutes, just until garlic starts turning transparent. Turn heat to medium, sprinkle garlic with a little salt and begin stirring in greens a handful at a time. The heat will wilt the greens and make room for each addition. When all the greens are added, pour in the water, cover the pot, and let steam for 3 minutes, then turn off the heat.

Mango Sorbet

It’s the beginning of mango season, and the grocery stores in my neighborhood are stocking both the familiar red-green-yellow Haitian mangoes and the pale yellow Mexican ones.  There’s not a drastic difference between the two varieties in taste or texture, but I think the ones from Mexico are a little firmer and less fibrous.  I ended up buying those simply because they were the ripest mangoes in the store and I wanted to slice one up immediately rather than in two days.

Though my favorite way to eat a mango is just plain sliced, I wanted to make a few of them into a sorbet to fortify myself against the upcoming hot weather.  This one-ingredient sorbet is easy and fresh, and the little sunshine-colored quenelles glow out of their dish even on the dimmest New York days.

Ripe mangoes are so flavorful and sweet that they need no other ingredients to make a perfectly silky sorbet (though lackluster mangoes can be woken up with a squeeze of fresh lime juice).  I just prepped and puréed four mangoes with a handheld immersion blender and ran the purée through my ice cream machine.  To prepare the mangoes, I sliced off the “cheeks,” the oval lobes of flesh on each side of the flat seed, then scraped the remaining pulp from the seed with my knife.  I skinned the cheeks by cutting each in half lengthwise, placing them skin side down, and sliding my knife between the skin and flesh while gently pressing against the cutting board.  When you’re preparing the mangoes, make sure not to get too many fibers in.  They can clog the blade of your blender and catch against the ice cream machine dasher.  If you see any clumps forming either place, turn off the machine (unplug it too, just to be safe) and pull the cottony fibers out.

Bacon Cornbread

Today for a special Sunday brunch, Ian suggested we make bacon cornbread.

The man is a font of good ideas.

I dug up my old standby cornbread recipe, made a few alterations in the name of bacon, and we had our bacon cornbread cooling on the windowsill in a little over an hour. The loaf gets a thick golden bottom crust from bacon-greasing the pan. It’s surprisingly light in texture, as Ian noted while cutting our second helpings, and the fluffy slices are flecked with smoky pink bits of bacon that offer a pleasant chew every few bites.

I think this would also be good with 3 or 4 Tbs minced chives or scallions stirred in with the bacon. Some smoked paprika would also be a good addition, probably about 1/2 tsp. Cornbread keeps well up to a week when wrapped and refrigerated, but it dries out quickly after the first day and is best toasted. I’m very tempted to toast a slice and spread it with peanut butter, perhaps in honor of the king. (Understandably so, since I’m still reading Mystery Train.) This cornbread is pretty rich, so maybe I’ll just wait until next January and make that my toast to Elvis’ birthday.

Bacon Cornbread

• 5 slices bacon
• 1 cup flour
• 3/4 cup fine cornmeal (we used stone-ground white cornmeal)
• 2 Tbs dark brown sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 3/4c milk
• 2 eggs
• 6 Tbs bacon grease/olive oil (Your bacon might not render this much fat, so supplement it with some olive oil if you don’t save bacon grease.)

Preheat the oven to 350. On a foil-lined baking sheet, lay out the five slices of bacon and bake for 15 minutes, or until crisp. In the meantime, measure dry ingredients into a large bowl and stir to combine. In a smaller bowl, beat the eggs. Measure the milk and have it at hand.

Remove the bacon from the oven when it’s crisp and let cool. When the foil is cool enough to touch, use it to pour the bacon fat into a loaf pan. Swirl the fat around and use a brush or your hand to lightly grease the whole pan. Measure the fat by pouring it from the pan into a tablespoon and add each tablespoon of fat to the beaten eggs. Make up the difference in olive oil (we used about 2 Tbs olive oil). Whisk the oil into the eggs, then whisk in the milk.

Dice the bacon and stir into the dry ingredients. Stir the wet ingredients into the dry and spread resulting batter into loaf pan. Bake about 45 minutes, until a knife poked into the loaf comes out clean. (Check it after 30 minutes, by which time it should have risen and the crust will have cracked. Overcooked cornbread is dry cornbread, and dry cornbread is disappointing.)

Oatmeal Brittle in Brown Sugar Ice Cream

I’ve had a few requests for an oatmeal cookie dough ice cream and since I love oatmeal in all forms, I was only too happy to comply. I noticed a recipe for Oatmeal Praline as I was flipping through David Lebovitz’s gorgeous book, The Perfect Scoop. Oatmeal Praline is such a good idea, bringing out the best parts of an oatmeal cookie without any flour or egg or whatever to detract from the caramelized oatmeal crunch. But I know my ice cream audience, and I know they’d prefer something with a slightly lighter crunch (so it can be eaten alone) and maybe some cinnamon tossed in, too.

So I turned back a few pages to study the Peanut Brittle recipe and altered the Oatmeal Praline accordingly. A little baking soda to make the caramel base bubbly, maple syrup and fresh-ground cinnamon for that cookie flavor. Once the brittle was cooled, I crumbled it into a batch of brown sugar and cinnamon ice cream. The official taste test is this afternoon, but I should mention that I had an un-official test of the oatmeal brittle both on its own and in the ice cream. I wouldn’t want to compromise the integrity of the judging, but I have to say, confidentially, It’s good.

Oatmeal Brittle (adapted from The Perfect Scoop)

• 3/4 c rolled oats
• 1/2c sugar
• 2 Tbs water
• 2 Tbs maple syrup
• 1/4 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• pinch of sea salt

Toast the oats in the oven about 10 minutes at 350, stirring halfway through. Remove from oven, set aside.

Put the sugar, water, and maple syrup in a heavy saucepan. Measure the baking soda, cinnamon, and salt into a small bowl and keep nearby. Lightly oil a baking sheet and transfer the oats to a bowl, keep these at hand, too.

Cook the sugar over medium heat until the sugar melts, stirring occasionally with a silicone spatula to break up lumps. The edges will darken first, so swirl the pan to prevent burning. if the edges start coloring before the rest of the sugar has dissolved, reduce the heat to low and stir until the syrup is clear and all the lumps are broken up. Then turn the heat back up to medium. Very quickly the whole batch of caramel will turn dark amber and smell rich and dark. Turn off the heat and immediately stir in the baking soda mixture (it will foam), then stir in the oats. Pour onto the prepared baking sheet and spread with the spatula. The mixture will thicken and cool rapidly, so if it doesn’t want to pour, use the spatula to press it into a thin layer. When the brittle is completely cool, break it into very small pieces with your hands or crush it with a rolling pin. Reserve about a quarter of the batch for the top of your ice cream, and mix the rest into the ice cream in its last minute of churning.

For the ice cream, I thinned 1c butterscotch pudding with 1c milk, stirred in 1/4c dark brown sugar and 1 tsp cinnamon, and ran the results through my ice cream maker, but you could buy David’s book for countless wonderful ice cream recipes in which to use your oatmeal brittle.

Sesame Rice Balls

Anyone who’s known me long enough to engage in a discussion of favorite foods (on average 10 minutes) has heard me wax evangelical about my favorite dessert: sesame rice balls in warm rice wine soup. They’re a sleek rice skin expertly stretched around a ball of sweet black sesame paste, bobbing with grains of sweet rice in a sweated rice wine broth. To someone who hasn’t grown up with these, a description of the flavors and textures might not make sense. I’ve found it easier to just introduce friends to this dessert in person. The little dumplings are sweet, nutty, liquid, chewy, and earthy; the broth is sweet, sour, floral, fruity. Even people who think they don’t like sesame are pleased to meet them.

There’s a long story about my love for these dumplings: our first meeting, a tragic restaurant closing, loss, despair, rediscovery, redemption, renewal. But really, all that matters is that I know where to get them again after a few frantic months of searching. Now all I want is to introduce as many people as I can to the sesame rice ball experience, if only to have company while I eat mine.

Sesame rice ball in soup (wine flavor)

Shanghai Cafe
100 Mott Street (bt Canal and Hester, New York NY 10013, (212)966-3988