Dinner challenge

The challenge: Shop for and cook a tasty, healthy dish that is filling but easy to digest in 60 minutes or less. Oh, and get home in that time too, cuz you’re still at work when the challenge presents itself.

The strategy: Check epicurious, hope for an attractive and quick noodle dish- with vegetables, please, but without ingredients that will mean a visit to more than two stores (luckily, work is in the middle of Amsterdam’s tiny China town and there’s a well-assorted Chinese grocer just around the corner).

The intermediate result: A recipe for Chinese chicken noodle soup with green onions, all necessary ingredients and arrival at home within 40 minutes.

The next stage: Slice chicken, mix marinade, put chicken in marinade (almost tipping the bowl of soy sauce-sesame oil- Shaoxing wine goodness into the sink in the process, but preventing mishap by lightening quick reflexes- or, you know, sheer luck). Kiss man when he gets in.

Panic, because man is home, but food is not ready. Relax when man trots of to do some repair work on his bicycle.

Slice cabbage, ignoring suspicious black spots on leaves (probably some sort of secret Chinese remedy for health). Slice scallions (are green onions the same as scallions? I assumed). Crush garlic, peel ginger, fall in love all over again with microplane grater when it reduces ginger to a pulp with the teeniest bit of effort). Mix garlic and ginger with yummy stuff.

Help man look for important bicycle part. Fail to locate it. Tell him to go look in the tool shed, four floors down, mostly to get him out of your hair.

Read recipe again, discover you’ve put too much sesame oil in marinade. Shrug shoulders and add more of it to pan to fry scallions and cabbage. Add stock, chop cilantro while waiting for stock to come to a boil. Add chicken. Attempt to take noodles out of package in neat bundles, dump them all over counter instead. Gather up noodles, add to pan. Stir.

Sigh a little sigh of happy relief- it is 65 minutes after the start of the challenge and soup is ready.

Hear man come in. Tell him “perfect timing!”. Scowl at man when he says ever-so-slightly pungent mixture in pan “smells”. Forgive him when he kisses neck.

The result: Lovely, warming, tingle-inducing soup, slurped up companionably with man (who eats three bowls, in spite of smell.)

The recipe is here: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/106192
My modifications: Far less tahini (I think I have superstrength tahini, because I always use way less than recipes tell me to and I still get quite a pronounced flavor), a little less chili-garlic paste (the man's a wuss), less ginger (didn't feel like peeling more), Shaoxing rice wine instead of sherry, unseasoned rice vinegar (that's what I had).

Ah, yes. Soup, you’ve gotten to me. Big time.

Obsessed much?

And a few more, just for the record:

1. Blue cheese, lovely blue cheese
2. Sunflower seeds
3. Sundried tomatoes (I know, I know, so five minutes ago... what can I say? sometimes a girl needs a bit of retro)

Food love

I love food. Love, love, love it. As in, I want to run away to Tahiti with it and live happily ever after on our own private beach. Or in a shack at the end of the world. Or, you know, eat it. And I do, quite a bit of it. I'm not picky- as long as it isn't potato, I'll give it a try. (Yeah, yeah, I know. It's weird not to like potato. That's a story for another day.) I try not to play favourites- no good ticking off good ol' broccoli by systematically choosing chocolate over it. I might need it some day. You know, for health.

But infatuations are liable to strike at any moment. When they do, one particular food (or a set of foods- I'm a bit of a player that way) becomes the favourite, at least for a while. I've learned that the most efficient way to overcome these obsessions is to give in. Try to show as much sense as possible and go for it. It's a hard task, but I have to save my sanity, right?

Wanna now what my current obsessions are?

1. Crunchy white bread rolls with melted goat's cheese and some kind of herb (had dinner the past two days with bread'n'cheese and home-made cilantro pesto... mmmm... mmmm)
2. Cote d'Or chocolate with crushed hazelnut (yup, you guessed it... dessert...)
3. Nacho chips with jalapeno pepper slices and melted cheese.

And I feel a new one coming on. My stove-top espresso pot (usually reserved for the benefit of my coffee-obsessed brother or boyfriend) has been looking mighty attractive. I am having a latte as soon as I get me some milk. Or three.

Cilantro pesto

Leaves from a biggish bunch of cilantro

Small clove of garlic

Toasted pine nuts, about 1,5 tablespoons

Splash of lemon juice

Pinch of salt

Enough olive oil to make a thick sauce

Whizz together first five ingredients in a small food processor. Add olive oil in little portions at a time, blending to incorporate after each portion. Taste and add lemon juice and/or salt to taste.

(I used a mini food-chopper, powered by my immersion blender, to make this. It was a bit difficult to get the texture I wanted, so I'm trying grinding it in a mortar and pestle next time. Might be easier to control the thickness if I'm blending by hand.)

Sour 'n sweet

The scene: me, my new man and a full pan of good-for-you caponata. The first time I'm cooking him something and I'm prepared. No last-minute searing of meat, no souffle to collapse at the moment supreme, not even pasta to be boiled to al dente perfection. Just a pan full of eggplant, capers, garlic, good stuff. Some bread on the side and an awesome dessert. Nothing can go wrong. Unless, you know, someone added way -WAY- too much vinegar to the pan of vegetable mush... Chemistry's not my thing, but I'm sure the pH value of my romantic caponata was well below 7. Or above 7. You know, whichever is the sour bit of the pH universe.

Lovely.

It's a good thing I had dessert ready, or I might not have someone to build me shelves. Or re-wire my electrical system. Or buy me turtle-magnets to clip to my oven. (Can't for the life of me remember what dessert was. Could it have been... me...? Ooooh, behave.) You would think I'd have learned to go easy on the acid, but not a week later I went and added garlic vinaigrette to a batch of mangetouts. As in, oil with vinegar. Vinegar. And I like my vinaigrette on the refreshing side. Let's just say my man's salivary ducts were well clean by the end of the week.

And still I haven't learned. Tonight I cooked my little brother dinner. Chicken tagine with mangetouts on the side. And out came the vinaigrette again. Not a winner this time around either, although he did heroically crunch his way through quite a few of them before insisting he was " full" and pushing the green buggers aside. Followed by an enthusiastic dive into the bread basket to reach for more bread to mop up the tagine juices.

Well, at least the tagine was a hit. A recipe from Claudia Roden's Arabesque (only I have the Dutch version and it's called "A thousand-and-one flavours"- doesn't nearly evoke the same sense of mystery, does it?), it tasted exotic but familiar, refreshing but comforting and oh-so-summery. A pinch of saffron, some powdered ginger and a healthy dose of onion and garlic bubbled away together to form a fragrant bath for the legs and thighs of a formerly-happy (though now dead) chicken. Two chopped up preserved mini-lemons, a generous handful of parsley and cilantro and some wrinkly, aromatic olives rounded out the sauce to something lovely, lovely, lovely for us to spoon up with the chicken and dunk our Moroccan-style bread in. The only thing I forgot to add to the sauce? Lemon juice... The kitchen gods must have been smiling down on me to prevent another pH-mishap.

June at Bread, Water, Salt, Oil has the recipe: http://bread-water-salt-oil.blogspot.com/2006/06/tagine-of-chicken-with-preserved.html

(Incidentally, my man is hurtling himself down a mountain somewhere in France this week, the week of V-day. Scared I will do a re-run of the first meal I cooked him? He had better bring me back some good stuff, or I might just be tempted...)

More soup

Ha. I sit down to post my third message, only to find I want to talk about soup again. Two out of three posts on soup, and I don't even like the stuff that much. Or should I say I don't like the version of soup I usually get? Salty, a bit gloopy, with no discernible taste of fresh ingredients. Not ones I know, anyway. Yup, that's what they serve at the cafeteria at work.

I like my mom's soup, even if I didn't growing up. (Might be something to do with those bits of leek that hit my lip with a sting of heat every bite I took, no matter how diligently I blew on it.) But there's not much around of that, in my Amsterdam kitchen, so soup is not usually a priority.

Acquiring my own kitchen has inspired all sorts of domesticity in me (a cancerian, who's already up to her eyeballs in a love for baking cookies and lounging on my couch, surrounded by blankets, books and cups of hot drinks... just what I needed, more domesticity...), though, and a new-found attraction to soup is one of them. Far less upsetting than a new love of, say, cleaning things (before you know it you spend precious couch-and-blanket time scrubbing floors or polishing shower tiles), but still. A bit of a revolution.

Since I don't tend to make soup, I don't have any tried-and-trusted recipes lying around for soupy moments. So when the urge struck this morning, I had to make it up as I went. And it couldn't be just any soup either. It had to be healthy, fortifying soup to help me get over the last vestiges of a mild flu-attack. Plus, it had to taste good to celebrate the fact that I can taste things again. (If only by making snorting sounds with every bite to allow enough air to pass my taste buds. No matter. Silent eating is for whimps.)

A quick trip to the supermarket yielded a head of broccoli and some leek. Combined with the turkey stock in my freezer (and, you know, bouillon cubes...) and a good pinch of rosemary, I made me quite a nice pot of green water. A bit of yoghurt for creaminess and a bit of mustard and garlic for oomph and my system was fortified with all the vitamins and fibres it could want. Or so I hope.

Now for a glass of orange juice. And where did I put that bottle of Cif?