Quick Hits: Herb Garlic Parmesan Potato Wedges

A sure sign of fall: potatoes are back! Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew! Perhaps the biggest source of the potato's meteoric rise to culinary ubiquity in Europe has to do with how little need be added to reach being comfort food: little more than heat, salt and maybe butter. You can definitely add more (see last fall's breakdown of Potato Gnocchi with Leek, Kale & Sage Butter), but, as demonstrated by the recent excitement about Waffle-Iron Hashbrowns, the spud requires little help past heat.

Here, cheese and garlic help play up the warm, toasty potato goodness, adding a flavorful crustiness to a simple roasted spud.

Herb Garlic Parmesan Potato Wedges

vegetarian, gluten/grain-free
serves 4-5, about 30 minutes, start to finish

• 3 lbs potatoes (red ones are nice, but not essential)
• 2 T olive oil
• 1 tsp salt

Topping:

• 4-5 cloves garlic, minced
• 6-10 sprigs thyme (or about 3-4 T)
• fresh ground black pepper
• ¼ c. grated parmesan cheese

Preheat oven to 450°F.

Cut potatoes into wedges (6-8 per spud) and toss with olive oil. Spread on sheet pan and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake wedges for 10-15 min.

While wedges are roasting, mince garlic and mix with other topping ingredients. Turn potato wedges, sprinkle with topping, and return to oven for about 5 minutes.

Mole Gringo, with only a dozen(ish) ingredients

Reading about traditional moles makes me feel like a total poser, but it also makes me hungry. My students are currently reading What the Moon Saw, a thinly veiled ethnography of a rural village in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, for another one of their classes. I snagged it to read one day last week in the name of integrated curriculum and devoured it more or less in one sitting, give or take snacks. Oh, YF books, you go down so smooth. It is also a fairly good coming-of-age story about a teenage girl from the burbs of DC meeting her Mexican grandparents for the first time, finding out her grandmother is a curandera (shamanistic healer), and falling for a local boy who sings revolutionary songs real pretty. Moles, though never mentioned by that name are, along with hot chocolate and corn tortillas, essential to the story. In one of her grandmother's stories, a friend recalls a situation in which she planned on killing herself, but decided to make chicken with chocolate-chile sauce as a final meal and decided life was worth it after all. Mole proved to be her reason to keep living.

The word mole comes from a Nahuatl word, molli, which simply means "sauce," though it lines up interestingly with the direct-from-Latin Spanish verb moler, "to grind," an essential process in making mole. Nahuatl, a group of

languages from across southern Mexico, is the source for a surprising number of English words: chocolate, avocado, guacamole, tamale, chili, coyote, and tomato are all of Nahuatl origin, filtered through Spanish. Seeing as the term of origin is as broad as it is, it's unsurprising that there are a wide variety of moles across southern Mexico. They vary in complexity and focus, but have a few things in common: all begin with a variety of chiles, and from there are built out of spices and ingredients that make it sweet, like dried fruit; sour, like tomato or tomatillo; and thick, like nuts, seeds and starch. Oaxaca, where the book takes place, is known in some circles as the "Land of Seven Moles" but it's much broader than that - think of the seven moles a little like the five classic French mother sauces. They're more like guidelines. The most complex of these moles have nearly 40 different ingredients and can take days to make, so it's easy to see where folks might be overwhelmed by the idea of making it on their own for anything short of something very special, and miss out on the joys still available from a simplified mole.

Chocolate Magic Cookies (gluten & dairy-free)

One of my early jobs in education was as a paraprofessional in an intensive special needs program. A number of the students with autism were on the gluten- and dairy-free Autism Diet, which purportedly ameliorated some of the regressive behaviors associated with the Autism Spectrum. I had—and continue to have—reservations about the effectiveness of this approach, but I'm neither an autism specialist nor a nutritionist, so it's not really up to me, and I don't think it's going to exacerbate the issue. However, I had one co-worker who insisted on calling it

the "fun-free" diet in a way that I found aggravating. The "fun-free" description seemed to riff on the infuriating, pervasive illusion that if something is good for you, there's no way it will taste good and its equally problematic corollary that if food tastes good, then there's no way it's good for you.

Similarly, there's this illusion about teachers that they can either be nice or demanding, and that only one of these qualities is effective. I remember reading one article which contrasted "the kind of teacher who brings in brownies" with "the kind of teacher that demands results." Seriously, who comes up with this festering load of flapdoodle? I bet it's the same people that think tasty and healthy are mutually exclusive. This isn't to say that there aren't teachers who mistake being liked for being respected, and end up foregoing academic rigor for fear of not being liked, but let me tell you this: brownies—or any other kind of food—have nothing to do with it. On the other side of it, there are also teachers who mistake being disliked for being respected, and brownies have nothing to do with that either.

Any time you share food with someone, it's an acknowledgement of your shared humanity. Even if it's just passing around a tin of Altoids, as a couple teachers I've had were fond of doing, you are demonstrating a simple need and enjoyment that you have in common. Beyond demonstrating that you're not a robot who sleeps standing up in the broom closet, you are breaking down the perceived otherness that keeps students from becoming invested in a subject. Even in a fairly concrete, objective topic like math, a student's ability to invest themselves in a topic, to work hard and internalize it is linked to their sense of being seen as a person. So yes, I am one of those teachers who brings edible treats in for my students on occasion. I am also one of those teachers who demands a lot of hard work. I see no conflict between these.

This year, I have several students with dietary restrictions, so most of my go-to treats leave someone out. Enter these mouthwatering, crackly-topped, fudgy cookies, which happen, by my old co-worker's definition, to be totally "fun-free." No dairy, no gluten, no flour at all in fact. No need: the sugar, cocoa and egg whites around which they're built contain none of those things.

My sister's been making this one where she works, and scrawled down the recipe for me. As long as I leave the nuts out, this addresses all of the dietary restrictions I face at school, without any weird ingredient replacements. Even better, it is an incredibly simple recipe. A little Googling tracks this recipe back to one by François Payard in Gourmet's April 2002 issue, as digitized by Molly Wizenburg at Orangette, though I'm not sure where specifically my sister got hold of it. Wizenburg calls them "Featherweight Cookies"; a very similar recipe circulates as "Chocolate Puddle Cookies." I'm going with "Magic Cookies" because they are pretty damn magical. Besides, who needs "fun" when you have magic?

Chocolate Magic Cookies

gluten-free, dairy-free, nuts optional
25 minutes, start to finish, makes about 32 three-inch cookies


Dry Mix:

• 3 cups (12 oz) confectioner's sugar
• ¾ c. cocoa powder
• ¼ tsp. salt
• 2 c. mix-ins (toasted nuts, chocolate chips, cacao nibs, etc)



Wet mix

• 4 large egg whites (~1/2 cup), preferably at room temperature
• 1 tsp. vanilla

Preheat oven to 350°. Mix dry ingredients together until well blended. Separate eggs and add vanilla. Add egg and vanilla to dry mix and stir until well-blended. Scoop about a tablespoon at a time onto parchment-lined sheet pans with plenty of room to spread (which they will start to do immediately) and bake for 12-15 minutes, or until cookies are puffed up and cracked on top. It possibly goes without saying that to keep these gluten and dairy free, your mix-ins must also be, and that label reading is up to you (especially on chocolate chips!). You also may not care. I actually wonder how salted pretzel bits would work in here.

The Co-op's Korean Spinach

I'm pretty sure that the reason I would happily down this entire bowl of spinach has more to do with it being tasty than about it tasting like good memories, but it can be hard to tell the difference sometimes.

This is a great spinach dish for people who think they don't like spinach: it has a mild, savory flavor that enchants all kinds of palates. It's also, starting with frozen spinach and adding very little, highly nutritious and cheap as chaff.

Spicy Tomato Peach Jam: Convergent Evolution?

One of my favorite writers, magical realist godfather Jorge Luis Borges, has a short story, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (in Spanish; in English), which describes the efforts of a writer to rewrite the classic Don Quixote. Menard wishes not simply to reinterpret the story in his own words, but to cause himself to produce Cervantes' exact text, even if only a few pages thereof. He rejects his initial approach, "[to] know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes," as too simple, and decides instead, "to go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard." For additional absurdity, the story is presented as an obituary of sorts for Menard, who never actually existed.

I was put in mind of this yesterday when I spontaneously recreated a recipe I had merely skimmed during initial research for a tomato jam I decided to make after coming home from the farm with an entire flat of tomatoes. Given, this is a much less onerous task than recreating Quixote; there's a reason you can't copyright a list of ingredients. And, in truth, a list of ingredients is not a recipe.

Russian Eggplant "Caviar"

I recently lost my main Russian grocery hookup when the last of my stepmother's family pulled up roots from their largely Russian Northeast Philly neighborhood. Our shared background in Russian Studies has been a major bonding point for us. I first met her shortly before I started studying Russian towards the end of high school and she was a big part of my reassuring my parents that it was perfectly fine to send me off to Central Asian parts of the former USSR back in 2002, based on her own experiences in the USSR in the late 70s/early 80s (my parents have never leaned towards being overprotectively alarmist, but anywhere ending in -stan raised a high eyebrow that close to 9/11 and the beginning of US involvement in Afghanistan). A couple times a year, she'd call to say, "Hey, I'm going to visit my mom for a few days. You want anything from Bell's?" (referring Bell's Market, the go-to Russian store in Philly). We'd go on for a few minutes about all the different kinds of frozen dumplings, smoked fish, cold salads and baked goods available there, which inevitably turned into reminiscences of particular meals and dishes from our travels. Every culture has its notable culinary adventures, but Russian culture in particular seems to keep the kitchen table at its heart. I'm reminded of a toast in honor of the kitchen table from Dennis Danvers's novel, The Watch:

"The Kitchen Table...is the site of all that's best in Man—his sociability, his intellect, his good humor, and his generosity—not a monument to death but a celebration of living, not the theft of life but its sharing, not the jingoistic cant that generally passes for history but here and now, together in solidarity, this very moment! I give you: The Kitchen Table!"

This toast is delivered by none less than Peter Kropotkin, or at least a fictional, time-traveling version of him, though I could imagine a similar proclamation coming from the man himself.

In any event, one of the Russian specialties that we always lingered over was баклажанная икра (bak⋅la⋅zhan'na⋅ya i⋅kra'), which literally translates as, "eggplant caviar." For all that it's called "caviar," baklazhannaya ikra is a totally vegan "salad" (Russian salads rarely involve leaves) made of eggplant, tomato, pepper, onion and carrot slow-cooked together to savory perfection and seasoned with the only two herbs that really matter in Russian cuisine, dill and parsley

Quick Hits: Lentil, Herb & Feta Stuffed Tomatoes

The months of drooling, rhapsodic fantasies about perfectly-ripened field tomatoes have finally given way to a flood of them. It's not an overabundance; that would imply too much. The simple joy of slicing a tomato, sprinkling it with salt and maybe drizzling a little olive oil over it hasn't gotten old yet, but there's so much more to do with tomatoes before you even get to cooking them. I tossed together this fresh-stuffed tomato using some left over odds and ends recently and was so excited about it that I had to recreate it and write it down to share.

The dish is built around a protein-rich lentil and grain stuffing, simply flavored with a healthy handful of fresh herbs, a little feta, and the guts of the scooped-out tomato. It may look like a salad, but it eats like a meal.

Quick Hits: Pickled Radishes

When I teach square roots and other math involving radicals, I take great pleasure in putting little radishes on all of my handouts. It's a place where my odd sense of humor can bring together my nerdy loves of language, math and food. The point of connection is this: both radish and radical derive from the same Latin word, radix, meaning "root."

For all of my love of the linguistic spin-out of radishes, though, I'm a little lukewarm on eating them, at least the red European varieties. It's a little puzzling to me, because all of the words I put together to describe the flavor of such radishes are usually words common to foods I really like: spicy, peppery, mustardy, crisp. I like daikon radish fairly well, but it's almost more of a texture than a taste. What would the Fraggles think?

Earlier in the summer, I ended up with several bunches of radishes from my farm share and while dragging my feet and feeling bad about not using them, decided to look up pickled radish recipes. After reading a number of recipes, I put together a radish refrigerator pickle and hoped for the best. After letting them sit for a few days, I pulled them out. The bright color of the radish skin had leached out into the brine, giving it the vivid red tone of generic fruit punch. I tasted them and was initially disappointed: the radishy taste was still there, thinly veiled with salty vinegar. I put them back in the fridge, hoping, as with the fresh radishes, that they would magically transform into something I liked.

About a week later I was making some tuna salad and, on a whim, pulled out the radish pickles again, chopped some up, and added them to the salad, where they ended up being the star. Suddenly, I was looking for things to include them in. That was really the key: they go in things, not on their own. Since then, they have improved burritos, falafel, and a variety of cold salads. I'm almost out, and I may even go out and buy more radishes to make more pickles.

Refrigerator Radish Pickles

raw, vegan, gluten/grain-free
• 1½-2 c. sliced red radishes (8-12 radishes, depending on size)
• 5 cloves garlic, sliced or smashed
• 1 c. cider vinegar

• ½ tsp whole black peppercorns
• ½ tsp. kosher salt
• ½ tsp. sugar

Put the vinegar, salt and sugar in a pint jar, put the lid on and shake vigorously until salt and sugar are dissolved. Add sliced radishes, garlic and peppercorns. Replace the lid and put the jar in the fridge. Allow pickles to sit for at least 5 days before using.

Serve in a sandwich, falafel, or burrito or add to tuna salad.

Can I Call it Kimchi? vol. 2

Do you ever get the impression that the contents of your fridge are judging you? That the longer an item has been there, the harsher its critique? Or is that just me?

A surprisingly high proportion of my cooking and eating habits are based around trying to make it up to that half cabbage languishing in the vegetable drawer or that barely-scooped pint of rice that came with the take-out food and has outlasted its compatriots, or whatever else is languishing forlornly in there, in the cold and the dark. Okay, so maybe I'm overdramatizing things, but I'm also making myself feel guilty digging into that overanalysis of why I hate wasting food.

But I digress. Pickling is a great solution to this important moral dilemma on just about every front. Not only is a great direction for leftovers, namely those tragic survivors of the vegetable drawer, but, once pickled they stay good for far longer, meaning you can take them off the fridge worry list. You might even be more inclined to use them.


My first adventure with kimchi late last summer really opened it up as a flexible, accessible, exciting framework, both in research and in practice.

Raw-Pack Canning Blueberries in Juice

Yesterday marked the 6th annual Boston Skillshare, and the third that I have been involved with. The last two years, I facilitated workshops on reclaiming yarn, basic auto maintenance, and beginning ukulele. Apparently, I can't stop teaching, even on weekends and vacations. This year, I facilitated a workshop on canning and pickling, by request. I had originally wanted to walk through canning tomatoes, but we have not quite reached the deluge of tomatoes that will be here in a week or two, so I went with blueberries instead. Blueberries are a particularly easy food to can: they don't need to be cooked or cut up ahead of time, and are sufficiently acidic that they don't need to be processed under pressure. I also had the privilege of being introduced to the League of Urban Canners, a group operating in the Boston area (primarily Somerville and Cambridge) to make the most of backyard fruit. If you invite them, they will come to your house, pick the fruit before it falls all over your yard, can it, and give you 10% of what they can. It's a really interesting model that I would love to be involved with if they weren't 2 hours away.

Before we start in with the blueberries, a few words about the role of heat and acidity in safe canning. The whole deal with preserving is to arrest, avoid or carefully control the bacterial and enzymatic breakdown of fresh food. These include such options as freezing, drying, fermenting and canning. Canning preserves food by sealing it away from the air under vacuum and killing any bacteria trapped inside through heat, which works for the vast majority of bacterial species. Clostridium botulinum is a more complicated story. While live C. botulinum are killed at boiling water temperatures, they produce spores which aren't. The spores remain active at that temperature and thrive in an oxygen-deprived environment at between 40°-140°F, (like, say, a can at room temperature) happily producing deadly neurotoxins. The spores can be destroyed at temperatures of 240°F. However, an acidic environment with a pH of <4.6 inhibits these spores, so that the live-bacteria killing 212°F is sufficient. This pH of 4.6 marks the dividing line between high-acid foods, which can be safely processed in a 212°F boiling water bath and low-acid foods, which must be processed using a pressure canner, which can reach temperatures of 240°F.

Blueberries, along with all other berries and the majority of fruits (by the common rather than botanical definition) are classified as high-acid foods, and can be processed in a boiling water bath. The general process for canning berries is as follows:

1. Obtain berries.
2. Wash berries.
3. Load berries into sterilized jars.
4. Cover with hot juice, syrup or water.
5. Seal with lid.
6. Process in a hot water bath for 15-20 minutes.