The good news is that I haven’t been completely disengaged. I’ve been cooking and occasionally taking pictures.

The bad news is that I can’t really remember when I made the dish in this post, so the details about cooking this meal are hazy. The recipe is from my Jamie Oliver cookbook. I’ve actually made this once before, but I don’t have much of a memory of cooking it that time, either. Wait, what was I talking about? Maybe that story about when I fought in WWII? Hey you damn kids, get off my lawn!

Jamie Oliver calls this “Grilled fillet steak with the creamiest white beans and leeks,” which I think it is a little wordy. Also, in this case, it’s inaccurate because the cut of beef I used was rib eye. The beef was the impetus behind this meal. I went to the Green City Market, which is known as the best farmers’ market in Chicago, I guess mainly because it’s probably the biggest. Also, the atmosphere is festive, with live music and chef demonstrations, and it’s located right in Lincoln Park. It was a beautiful day, so my girlfriend and I made our way over there.

We got there a little late so the stands were picked over or out of stock, but there was great looking meat from Heartland Meats. Heartland Meats is located in Mendota, Illinois, which is centrally located in the vast cornfield that is the rest of Illinois.

Their beef is from Piedmontese cows, which, as everyone knows, is the end result of breeding between the Aurochs and Zebu breeds. Apparently it’s lower in fat content, which Heartland used a selling point. But doesn’t fattier meat mean more taste?

I bought some anyways because, of all kinds of food, I like the idea of buying meat locally the best. Heartland feeds their cattle corn and not grass, but they grow the corn themselves, which is probably as close as I can realistically hope to get to buying meat from a farm that practices polyculture (that is, growing more than one kind of crop). I recently found out that one consequence of the industrialization of agriculture and the spread of monoculture, specifically when it comes to meat production,  is that manure becomes a waste product rather than something to be cherished as God intended. This has led to vast poop lagoons, which are exactly what they sound like.

So, I bought two five ounce rib eyes. Here they are, frozen and vacuum-sealed:

It’d hard to get too excited about beef when it’s been packaged like that, but I guess it’s good for it.

BEANS!

Now, if memory serves me correctly, I made the “creamiest white beans and leeks” first.

First, take a couple leeks. I think the recipe called for two, but I demanded three.

Then I cut them up. Those are my arms, so I have to assume I took the picture with my foot. That’s a glass of wine in the lower left part of the photo. I drink while I cook so I bleed faster when I cut myself.

Um, I guess I then added thyme and two garlic cloves.

Hypothetical question: If you could only have butter or olive oil for the rest of your life, which would you choose?

Thank God I don’t have to choose. Looking at that photo, I have the uncontrollable desire to put butter and olive oil in my water bottle. I won’t though, because you’re not supposed to refill your plastic bottles because of the chemicals the plastic releases.

Then I threw the leeks in. Jamie Oliver’s instructions were to “sweat” them, which at first I thought was some stupid British saying that we chose to abandon after we won the war, but which I later found out actually means to cook on very low heat for a long time so the vegetable cooks in its own moisture. They literally sweat.

Before:

After a period of time which I forget the length of:

The recipe didn’t call for wine. I was trying to refill my glass, but I was drunk and my aim was off.

The good news is that the wine was an excellent addition.

Beans!

I used cannellini beans, because that’s what I had. The recipe calls for lima beans, which I remember being an issue the first time I made this. I couldn’t find lima beans anywhere. Doesn’t that seem weird? I used frozen fava beans that time.

Here I added parsley and crème fraîche. I definitely didn’t use crème fraîche last time. I can’t remember what I used instead, but I regret it. That’s right, crème fraîche made these beans taste so good that it made me regret something I have no memory of.

That was the end of the beans. They just hung out while I cooked the meat.

MEAT!

Here are the stages the beef went through:

In packaging

Raw, room temperature beef

Seasoned with salt, pepper, and olive oil

Oh sweet Jesus no! Zombie cow! It’s back from the dead to avenge its murder! Everyone panic!

Just kidding. It put up very little fight in the pan. Here the steaks are, resting.

And here’s the final plate.

The steaks were terrific, although just a touch overcooked. My girlfriend is my meat-cooking conscience, and she’s the only reason these steaks didn’t end up rubbery and charred. Really, they could’ve used about 30-60 seconds less on the grill. Although I don’t remember the total time they were on there, so that’s completely unhelpful to both you and me.

Those beans, though. Whoa boy. Those are some good beans.

Stay tuned for some potato salad…

Things got pretty busy for me so I didn’t get around to doing anything with them until last night. They were incredibly ripe - maybe too ripe! - but that craving hadn’t gone away. What’s a guy to do?

Answer: Make a tomato salad.

What I did was pretty simple. Here are the ingredients:

• 3 TBS red wine vinegar
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 2 TSP sea salt
• 1 TSP fresh ground pepper
• 8 pounds of red round, red plum, and red Roma tomatoes

I was so eager to chow down on this salad that I even forgot to wash the tomatoes! That’s fine, because I think not washing them imparts a rustic, more organic flavor to the salad.

This salad was delicious and so incredibly easy to make, I urge each one of you to run out, buy all the tomatoes you can, and make this for yourself tonight!

I probably could’ve finished it all last night, but I was interrupted by the handyman who came by to look at my toilet, which has completely stopped working. And of course he wasn’t able to fix it! No matter, though: Tonight’ll be leftovers and then a nice quiet movie night at home. A perfect evening!

Anyhow, since the person who was responsible for this mouth-watering Passover meal also considers Barefoot Contessa Family Style one of her favorite cookbooks, I was eager to delve into it. Luckily, also planned for my day off was a trip to the grocery store, which I was going to squeeze in between inventing grunge rock and lighting my guitar on fire on stage.

For a while I’ve been lamenting the boring lunch I bring to work, which is inevitably a turkey or ham sandwich. I just couldn’t think of something new to do. Flipping through the cookbook, I noticed a number of recipes that could be prepared ahead of time and would be good for lunch. At the top of the list was a curry chicken salad.

Step one was to buy a boatload of chicken breasts with the skin still on and on the bone. I love eating chicken skin - that came out sounding gross for some reason - but cutting meat off bones stresses me out. The combination of a lack of knife skills and being completely clueless about chicken anatomy have much to do with this, but I also have some difficulty whenever meat becomes too animal-like, something that often happens when dealing with bones, tendons, and the like. I recently made a lamb shank recipe that involved pushing herb butter as far up between the bone and the flesh as my little fingers could carry it. When you’re palm-deep in a lamb’s shoulder, there’s really no way to pretend you’re doing something that’s not disgusting. So even though I was worried about cutting up the chicken, I pressed forward. The good news is that I had to cut the meat off the bone only after I cooked it.

I bought a lot of chicken - six breasts, to be exact, although I think that’s actually three breasts that have been split. Given my attentive study of breasts throughout the years, I thought I’d at least know how to count them, but apparently it works differently with chickens.

Next, I covered them with olive oil, salt, and pepper.

After throwing the breasts into the oven, I started working on the dressing. I don’t want to violate any copyright this or thats by giving all the details of the recipe, but I will say that it involves a cup and a half of mayonnaise. I bring this up because I consider a cup and a half of mayo to be the culinary equivalent of steroids. Your recipe may be average, but this much mayonnaise will go a long way to making it extremely good. And if you don’t notice that a recipe is significantly better because of the mayo, well, you’re just seeing what you want to see. Also, you will die much earlier than you would have otherwise. By the way, I’m reading a book about Barry Bonds right now.

Besides the shocking amount of mayonnaise, the dressing also has white wine, curry powder, and Major Grey’s chutney, which I’m sure belonged to the 19th century British Army officer in much the same way India belonged to Great Britain at the time. Also, there was salt, with which I may or may not have had an accident while pouring.

Here’s the before picture:

And here’s the after:

I also cut up some celery and green onions, and then threw in some raisins.

You know, I never know when to stop cutting green onions. I know the white part is delicious, and maybe some of the green part tastes good, too, but I don’t know the line of demarcation. I generally just cut the green onions until I feel guilty about throwing in too much of the green part. Since this method relies heavily upon nebulous insecurities, at some point I should figure out a more scientific way of cutting these things.

By now, the chicken breasts were done.

I cooked these breasts exactly right. They were cooked all the way through, but not too much longer. I wrote a poem about how juicy they were, but I haven’t finished the final draft so I haven’t included it here. While the breasts were cooling off, I agonized over whether to proceed with the recipe or not. I really, really wanted to eat these.

I was also reluctant to proceed because the next step was to remove the meat from the bones. I did an alright job, though I never really developed a system. Sadly, none of the four knives in the photograph below were added props.

Then I cut the chicken into large bite-size chunks.

Then I poured the dressing in.

To keep from destroying the chicken bits, I used my hand to mix it up.

It was at this point a memory from the previous night came back to me. Since I was taking the following day off work, I grabbed several drinks with a friend of mine. Until the salt and curry powder seeped into the many small scratches that covered my hand, I had forgotten that when I got home I decided to fight with Gus, my 11-month-old cat. Although this eventually was playful fighting, I also remember waking him up from his peaceful slumber atop the cat tree. This incident probably serves as yet another sign that I should hold off on having children for the moment.

Anyhow, the pain I’m experiencing in this picture was indescribable.

When it came time to throw in the celery, green onions, and raisins, I decided to use my other hand instead.

It was at this point that I realized I had used both hands to fight Gus.

Here’s what the almost-final product looked like, sort of. This photograph is too dark:

And this one is too bright:

To know what it really looked like, step back from the computer monitor and cross your eyes until the two images meet.

The final step was to toast some raw cashews.

The toasting process was just throwing the cashews into a dry pan and tossing them around for five minutes or so.

You’re supposed to only throw the cashews in the chicken salad right before you serve it, but I didn’t do that because I didn’t read that part of the recipe until I had already mixed them in (with a spoon).

Gee, how did good chicken covered in mayonnaise taste?

Now that BALCO has been raided by the Feds, is it really all that surprising that Barry Bonds was able to hit 73 home runs in one season? Yeah, this chicken salad is good.

I’ve had chicken salad doused in mayonnaise before, and what I actually think made the biggest difference was using good quality chicken. It’s been enjoyable eating chicken salad without the fear of biting into something unidentifiable.

Further, I think cooking the chicken with the skin on makes a big difference. I know it’s bad for you, but the fat that cooks down onto the chicken makes it taste great. I also suspect the fact the bones were still in made a difference, too. Meat near the bone tastes better, right?

This recipe is one that’ll be repeated. I’m looking forward to seeing what else Ima Cook the Barefoot Contessa has to offer. Thanks so much, Erin from Black Coffee and a Donut!

Here’s the other half of my block of tofu marinating:

I baked it for twenty minutes:

And then I put it on a plate with some leftover peas, as well as some newly cooked green beans:

I feel like I’m looking at swatches to pick out green carpet.

SAUCE V. MARINADE

In short, I liked both. Cooking the chimichurri took some of the edge off the vinegar-y zing. The main problem concerning judgment is that I used tofu as the vehicle. Next time I’ll try it with something that’ll soak up flavors better.

GREEN BEANS

More interestingly (for me) was preparing the green beans by boiling, rather than my normal method of steaming. Steaming green beans always sucks because they never seem to get tender. Boiling left them with a very nice texture.

By the way, I don’t particularly like the way green beans smell and taste, but I love the smell and taste of green beans because it reminds me of spring and summer, or of being in a garden. I’m not really sure what to make of that.

This is now my fifth post without one morsel of flesh involved, and I’d like to assure everyone that this website isn’t the first step in a process that includes such things as leaving informational pamphlets around and prompting “philosophical talks” that are thinly-veiled conversion attempts, and which ends in an inevitably doomed confrontation with stronger, meat-fed federal employees.

In the meantime, here’s some more frigging tofu.

The origin of this meal was an Internet search for “marinade parsley garlic.” Previously, I had only known parsley as my least favorite part of the Passover Seder, and I recently bought a ton of it in order to expand my conception of it beyond merely a tool to taste my ancestors’ tears. When it’s not dipped in salt water and eaten raw, I like it.

The first result of my search for a marinade involving parsley was a recipe for chimichurri, which is Argentinian pesto, more or less. The sauce is usually served over meat (especially beef), either as a sauce or a marinade. According to Wikipedia and lazily cross-referenced elsewhere, chimichurri was an invention of an Irishman named Jimmy McCurry who helped fight for Argentinian independence. The natives loved his dish but of course couldn’t pronounce his name. Therefore, chimichurri. There’s really no part of this story I’m not skeptical about.

I looked at a bunch of recipes, and they varied. The common denominators, though, were parsley, garlic, and olive oil. I chose a recipe from Epicurious. I picked this one because I’ve heard of Epicurious.com and because it was the first website that came up besides the previously cited Wikipedia page.

First, though, I had to press the tofu.

This time I got Mu Tofu, which is made right here in Chicago.

Don’t believe me? Here, let me bring my camera closer:

Sweet, it’s kosher, too. I can put it on matzah and be completely miserable.

I like this tofu a lot, actually, because it’s cheaper, because it’s gratifying to buy local, because it’s even more gratifying to tell people I buy local, and because it has a harder consistency than other tofu I’ve eaten, making the tofu-pressing process much, much quicker.

After the tofu was pressed, I rubbed it with olive oil, salt, and pepper and baked it in the oven at 375 degrees for twenty minutes (a new tofu-cooking technique recommended by Vegan Melanie).

While the tofu was cooking, I made a Jamie Oliver recipe he calls Minted Peas Under Oil, a name which leaves nothing to the imagination.

Here are the (frozen) peas with mint leaves strewn about:

Here’s the above with boiled water poured on them:

That photograph is easily the greatest photograph I’ve ever taken. Let’s look once more:

It’s peaceful, isn’t it? It just makes you think. Hold on, I’m going to zone out for a bit.

Anyhow, here are the cooked peas and mint, which I then covered in olive oil. Oliver’s instructions weren’t to cover them in olive oil, but to COVER THEM IN OLIVE OIL. It’s really not a fine distinction. You can’t see here, but trust me, I’m almost out of olive oil now.

Did you find yourself looking at that photo and wishing you were closer? I have good news for you:

The peas are supposed to sit for at least thirty minutes so you have time to figure out exactly how many dollars of olive oil you just dumped on frozen peas, so I set them aside and made the chimichurri.

Here are the ingredients for the chimichurri:

1 cup (packed) fresh Italian parsley
1/2 cup olive oil
1/3 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 cup (packed) fresh cilantro
2 garlic cloves, peeled
3/4 teaspoon dried crushed red pepper
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon salt

Here’s the after picture:

And here’s the final plate, with the chimichurri spooned over the cooked tofu:

Whoa, that’s a lotta green.

CHIMICHURRI - IT WAS LIKE I WAS ACTUALLY IN IRELAND

The Indian who Jimmy McCurry stole the chimichurri recipe from was onto something, that’s for sure. This version was quite zingy, owing to all the vinegar and the cumin. It was good, just a more intense taste than I was expecting. I think it’ll mellow out as it sits in my fridge, or as it looks at my picture of the peas under water:

I’m going to experiment with different versions, since not all the recipes I saw called for vinegar, although I imagine this version would be good over beef. I also suspect it might be good with salmon.

Since chimichurri can be used as a marinade instead of as a sauce like I used it here, I’m going to try it in that capacity later this week.

THE PEAS - THE OIL…THE OIL…

These were very good. The mint flavor was extremely subtle. Instead, I believe the mint just gave the dish some sweetness. Next time I’ll try it with some more mint, just to see how it tastes if the minty flavor is more overt.

As far as the amount of oil I used, I’m fairly certain it was a power trip by Jamie Oliver to see if he could get nunces to blindly follow his directions and do something ridiculous like turning their bottle of olive oil upside down and losing half their supply.

DID THESE TWO DISHES EVEN GO TOGETHER?

I’m not sure. The chimichurri sauce was sweet and sour, and peas were sweet, too. Those flavors seem to hit at the front of the mouth, and because of that they actually seemed sort of nice together.

On the other hand, ideally there’d be something to balance it out. Also, the amount of oil consumed tonight turned me temporarily blind. Beware.

I’m at the point now where, with many things, I’ll have a vague notion of whether a combination will be good. I made a red wine reduction sauce - something I bring up frequently because it makes me sound more accomplished that I actually am - that called for red wine, butter, shallots, and thyme. I didn’t know exactly how it would taste, but I did know that if it didn’t taste good, it was my fault.

Sometimes, though, I won’t have the foggiest notion of what two ingredients will taste like together, which usually results in a reckless exuberance for experimentation that I haven’t felt since mixing drinks my freshman year in college. Orange Slice and whiskey? Let’s do it!

That’s how I felt when I came across this recipe for a salad of grapefruit and avocado, although, to be fair, I can’t think of a scenario where I wouldn’t want to eat an avocado. In this way, I guess it’s much like whiskey. Sorry, grapefruit, you’re Orange Slice.

Also to be fair, this recipe came from my Alice Waters cookbook, The Art of Simple Food. I’ve made a number of dishes from this book (including my entire last post), and she hasn’t steered me wrong yet. Grapefruit and avocado? If you say so, Ms. Waters.

The recipe is, well, simple. First, you remove the rind and membranes. Alice Waters also taught me how to do this. Basically, you cut off the top and bottom so that you can just barely see the flesh, and then cut in downward strokes around the fruit, ideally leaving all the meat and none of the white membrane. Here’s my result; it’s not that I couldn’t see the remaining membrane, I just kept it to show that I, just like you, am a flawed human being:

Then you cut along the internal membrane to divide it into slices. Then you cut up an avocado, and put it all on a plate, alternating slices.

The vinaigrette is simple, too. First, there’s grapefruit juice “squeezed from the membranes.” I’m still unsure about this process, but luckily my knifework was sloppy enough that I took some flesh off too, leaving me with more than enough juice for the dressing. Then you add white wine vinegar.

Quick word about white wine vinegar: I didn’t own any, so I figured I’d go to the store and pick some up. That should’ve beeen pretty straightforward, right? Except that I went to Olivia’s, my neighborhood’s snooty market. Picture Whole Foods, but with condos on top.

I actually like the store a lot, aside from the price tags. The good news is that I knew they’d have white wine vinegar. The bad news is that it turns out they have a pretty large selection, which paralyzed me. Taster Number One was with me and urged me to buy the cheapest stuff. This was out of the question because it’s the cheapest for a reason, right? I suppose it would’ve been helpful to remember our dispute from the carrots, but I didn’t, so there I stood, agonizing over how I was going to spend $10 than I had to. I said I wanted to ask an employee which one was the best, but Taster Number One pointed out they probably wouldn’t know and would just make up which one was “the best.” This made sense to me, so I randomly picked one. How did I do?

In the end, I only used about a teaspoon of vinegar. So, time well spent.

Other ingredients in the vinaigrette were salt, pepper, and oil. In other words, it was a vinaigrette.

RESULTS

Not as bad as Orange Slice and whiskey, but not as good as my favorite combination, ice and whiskey. My main complaint was that the tartness of the grapefruit overpowered the flavor of the avocado. In my previous post about tofu with Thai curry sauce, I speculated adding salt might lead to the biggest improvement, and I think that might be the case here, too. More salt, either directly on the avocado or in the vinaigrette, might bring out the avocado’s flavor. Other than that, I’m sort of at a loss as to how to mellow out the acid of the grapefruit.

In any case, here’s the final result. I don’t think I’ll make this specific salad again, although I’d try some variation of it. Alice Waters has a few different versions, including this one (which is technically an adaptation by the linked website) that has a more interesting vinaigrette.

In my previous life as a lazy cook, I would have grilled cheese and soup somewhere in the neighborhood of once every couple weeks. Generally, this was my fallback meal if I was low on supplies or needed to eat a quick dinner. The grilled cheese would be Brownberry whole wheat bread with muenster and cheddar cheese, and the soup would be canned. It’s not a bad meal, but certainly not one I looked forward to.

This winter has been the worst Chicago has seen in almost thirty years, so if you know how bad Chicago weather normally is, maybe you can imagine the soul-devouring frozen hellscape I’ve been dealing with for the past five months.

If you can’t picture it, here’s a photo I took out my front door earlier today:

The good news about this excrutiating cold - aside from the solace that since this winter was so unusually bad, it probably won’t be worse next year - is it that gave me an excuse to appropriately make a more thoughtful version of my fallback meal in mid-April.

Enter Alice Waters and her cookbook I love so much, The Art of Simple Food. I was fairly nervous about trying her minestrone recipe because 1.) I’ve never made soup before, and 2.) the recipe only calls for three cups of liquid, which seemed wrong. But I put my trust in Ms. Waters, took her hand, and she made my first soup experience more enjoyable than I’d even hoped it’d be. Coo coo ca-choo, Mrs. Robinso- er, yikes. Sorry, I was somewhere else.

Anyhow, the recipe involves the following intricate steps:

Put the vegetables in the pot according to how long they take to cook.

Usually, when I cook, I get bogged down in the details, especially if I’m making more than one dish. Before I even open the fridge, I pour over the recipes and figure out how I’m going to coordinate the various cooking times. This involves some advanced mathematics and an obsession with detail that tends to throw me into a blind panic.

However, I’m able to tell (more or less) when a vegetable is cooked without having to consult a stopwatch. As a result, I was able to pay less attention to the directions and more attention to the food. I had the new experience of feeling more like I was cooking rather than, say, putting together Ikea furniture.

The other promising change concerned my vegetable chopping. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I tend to cut things up however I damn well feel like cutting them up at the time, which usually means the pieces of diced vegetables end up as unique as snowflakes. This anarchic approach towards food prep is how I believe James Dean or maybe a young Marlon Brando would’ve operated in the kitchen and probably lends to me a devil-may-care aura that women who grew up in the ’50s and ’60s find irresistibly sexy (Alice Waters, I’m looking at you).

However, apparently there’s a functional reason to have your vegetables cut to the same size - so they all cook uniformly - so I allowed my mojo to take a hit and reluctantly researched online how to properly dice stuff. Let’s take a moment and admire my soffritto:

Yeah, I just said ”soffritto.” At least I didn’t say “mirepoix.” I’m not ready to be a person who uses that word. And not just because I don’t know how to pronounce it.

Dicing an onion is my new favorite thing to do. Instead of describing the process, follow this link to a clear, concise video on Chow.com. There are a lot of videos on this site, including a series of videos on a range of topics called “Chow Tips,” most of which are pretty useful and none of which are longer than thirty seconds. I recommend checking them out. Fair warning, though: If you watch more than three, you’ll be saying “Chowww tips” for the rest of the day. Chowww tips. Chowww tips. Watch and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Anyhow, here’s the next step, when I added garlic, thyme, salt, and a bay leaf:

Then I added some water and brought it to a boil:

Then green beans and leeks:

Okay, here’s where I panicked a bit because I had to seed and peel a tomato. I got the seeds out, but I still have no idea how to take the peel off. I also put in zucchini, which I fortunately didn’t have to peel.

This next step confused me a little, too. The recipe called for a pound of spinach. Do you know how much spinach is in a pound? A crapload, that’s how much. I used a half pound instead. I also put in cannellini beans.

The soup was basically done at this point. Notice all the liquid. Miraculous, huh? Trust Alice Waters.

A step or two back, I started getting ready to cook the grilled cheeses. Taster Number One cut up a loaf of bread, sliced the gruyere, and buttered the bread slices. I would punch a child to get to eat what’s in the following picture right now:

A few grocery trips back, Whole Foods was sampling Kerrygold Pure Irish Butter. In a surprising show of restraint, I didn’t buy any that day, but I wanted some for these grilled cheese sandwiches. My God, this is good butter. Eat this butter and you’ll feel like a stupid idiot for thinking the butter you currently have in your fridge is good. The cows that make this butter are apparently raised on grass, get daily udder massages, and sleep on memory foam mattresses.

Anyhow, Waters also recommends putting sage leaves on the bread before frying. Here it all is in the pan. I made a third sandwich, you know, just in case two wasn’t enough for Taster Number One and me.

After the sandwiches were done frying, I rubbed the bread with garlic, which is a nice technique to add to my repertoire. I now rub the rim of my drinking glasses with garlic, too.

Here’s the final meal:

Ah, the perfect meal for the middle of April! Tell me again why I moved to Chicago?

I almost always have tofu in my fridge for three main reasons:

1. It’s inexpensive.

2. I’ve been brainwashed by Big Protein.

3. I don’t have to take it out to thaw, thereby making it a contingency plan of sorts if I forget to take meat out during my pre-caffeinated haze before work.

Also, I kind of like it, and by “it” I’m referring to the texture, since other than sight, touch is the only sense it stimulates. Har, har, tofu is bland. But seriously, it is.

I usually get tofu recipes from my vegan friend, Melanie. She is, after all, vegan, although I’ve gotten recipes from her that aren’t based around soybeans, including a very simple, very good marinade for portobello caps that I just remembered.

This time, though, I consulted The Food Network’s website, which I like because of the search engine that refines the results by a number of categories, including ingredient, type of dish (main, side, etc.), and, most importantly, difficulty.

The reason I chose this dish is because it calls for coconut milk and curry paste, a combination that is not only binge-eatingly delicious, but that also makes me dreamily reminiscent of my former life as a resident of Cleveland, Ohio. I went to college there for two years, and then took a year off so I could soak up all that the city had to offer. Even though my year off consisted of working twenty hours a week at a coffee stand inside a grocery store and gigging once a month with various regional orchestras in northeast Ohio, I was able to squeeze in a dinner with my friends Chester and Rachel (now Mr. and Mrs. Chester). They brought me to a restaurant called Siam Cafe.

There are three things that I recall about the place:

1. It was located in a Beirut-like section of Cleveland. I’m not sure if that’s an apt analogy. Is Beirut still a war-torn hell hole? Well, the last time I was in Cleveland, it certainly looked like a war-torn hell hole. My theory about Cleveland is that if you drive in any one direction, you will sooner or later find yourself in a poverty-stricken, run-down, and quite probably dangerous area of town. For accuracy’s sake, I suppose I should update my measuring stick. Siam Cafe is located in a Cleveland-like section of Cleveland.

2. The building clearly used to be a fast food restaurant. Seriously - check out this image from Google Maps Street View:

You should see what it looked like inside. I think they still had the trashcans with the swinging doors.

3. The food was pretty good, particularly the Massaman curry. The Internet just told me Massaman curry is of Muslim origin, which makes sense: Massaman is close to Mussaman, which is an old way of saying Muslim. Massaman curry has all sorts of stuff in it - usually a meat, veggies, potatoes, peanuts. But most importantly, it combines the magical powers of coconut milk and curry.

My trip to Siam Cafe kindled a love affair with this coupling that continues with fiery passion to this day, so when I happened upon the recipe, I knew it was the one I had to make. That, and the website said it required five minutes of prep and fifteen minutes of cooking. Even taking into account the mathematical formula I’ve come up with to estimate cooking time -

Cooking time = Professionally estimated cooking time x 2, maybe 3

- I could still whip it up pretty quick.

Here’s the link to the recipe: Tofu with Thai Curry Sauce

Here are the ingredients called for:

Sauce:
1 cup “lite” coconut milk
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
1 teaspoon red curry paste, or to taste (see Ingredient notes)
1/2 teaspoon brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt, or to taste

Tofu & vegetables:
14 ounces extra-firm tofu, preferably water-packed
2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil
4 cups baby spinach (6 ounces)
1 medium red bell pepper, sliced (1 1/2 cups)

I bought regular coconut milk instead of “lite” stuff because there’s no quicker way to ruin a food memory than to substitute crappy lo-cal, lo-fat ingredients.

Hmm, I wonder if Vegan Melanie is even allowed to eat coconut milk? I used to ponder such unanswerable questions after my year off from college, when I transferred and became a philosophy major.

Speaking of which, the nice thing about making tofu dishes is that I get to put my degree to good use:

As you can see, I also studied music.

When I first began preparing tofu, I wasn’t aware that you had to squeeze the water out of it to keep it from disintegrating in the pan. I now remove the water, but I think there are two places with room for improvement.

First, I use a lot of paper towels. An unconscionable amount. I suppose I could use regular towels, but I’d still need quite a few of those, right? I have no solution for this.

Second, I could probably use fewer textbooks to squeeze the tofu. Tofu is pretty delicate, and I think less weight could get the water out without altering the integrity (which the above picture method did slightly, puffing out the sides and cracking).

Before I cooked the tofu, though, I threw the sauce together. This was about the time I realized this recipe is incredibly easy. See the ingredients I listed above? Well, put them in a bowl. Since the sauce was the whole reason I made this recipe, I took a picture:

 Mmm…Cleveland…

The rest of the recipe was just as easy. I fried the tofu until it was brown and very crispy, threw in the spinach, pepper, and sauce, and then I ate it. Here’s what it looked like in the pot:

And here’s the dish’s last moment, right before I doomed it and some jasmine rice to death by chewing:

RESULTS

Pretty good overall, though I wanted more sauce, as well as more flavor from the sauce. There was about a half cup of coconut milk leftover from the can, which I would use all of in the future. Also, I’d up both the brown sugar and the curry paste, although I’d do that while adding a little more salt since salt has some sort of hocus pocus in it that amplifies flavor.

The most successful parts of this meal were the bell peppers and the rice. Usually I chop vegetables at random, but I actually took some time to figure out how to cut and gut a pepper. The result was uniform strips of pepper. I felt like I was eating in a restaurant instead of in the kitchen of a child with ADD.

The rice turned out really well, too. I don’t know, I guess I used the right amount of water and cooked it for the right amount of time, not that I took any measurements of either. Oh well. I’m about to read the chapter on rice in my Alice Waters cookbook, so I’ll probably soon learn that I’ve been doing it all wrong. For tonight, at least, I made rice like a champ.

Most importantly, I got to eat coconut milk and curry and spend a lovely evening being whisked away to Cleveland, Ohio.

I only wrote that last sentence because I wanted to see if my website was the only one that has the phrase “lovely evening being whisked away to Cleveland, Ohio.”

I made a cannellini bean dish last week that required 1/4 cup worth of diced carrots. I went to a different Whole Foods than I normally do, the Gold Coast location. Here’s the charming little market below. Obviously I didn’t take the picture because the day I went, the sun was hidden behind a thick swath of cloudy Chicago “springtime” misery. Looks like a nice store, though, right?

Don’t let the name “Gold Coast” fool you: This store sucked. Cramped, small selection, and dirty; as a yuppie, I was offended. The only carrots this wolf in sheep’s clothing had were two pound bags, so I had plenty left over after making the beans.

Normally I don’t have a problem with wasting food, particularly if I get to toss it at the children who attend the school across the street from my apartment. I’m not cold-hearted, by the way. That hobby is less about my stance towards children and more an attempt to bring back the days when people dumped trash out their window. I live on the top floor of a three story walk-up.

However, Taster Number One loves carrots, and she loves having me cook for her on Sundays, so I decided to put the veggies to use as food. We picked a carrot recipe from my Jamie Oliver cookbook (Cook with Jamie) that I could make using ingredients I had around the house (garlic, thyme, red wine vinegar, and olive oil). Oliver calls the dish The Best Whole-Baked Carrots, so expectations were elevated. The recipe is essentially just throwing everything together and tossing it into the oven for a while. Simple, huh?

Taster Number One’s job when I cook is to open wine, pour wine, and to help me out when I get too stressed, either by doing various prep and cooking duties or by taking my wine glass and putting whiskey in it. Tonight her task was scrubbing the carrots. Oliver recommends trying this instead of peeling, because the skin “keeps you regular.” Who knew? Perhaps that’s why rabbits always look so tense, ready to bound away at any moment, presumably to find an unspoken-for place in the shrubs and some reading material.

“Crap, where did I put The New Yorker?”

Speaking of which, the carrots in the cookbook photograph look different than the ones I purchased. Oliver’s look like carrots a cartoon bunny would eat. Mine look like weapons. Actually, in honor of the recent passing of Charlton Heston - who I think all of us, regardless of political views, can agree was one of the oldest gun rights advocates - I shall call them weapons. Want my carrots, Government? Come pry them out of my cold, dead hands.

Anyhow, Taster Number One and I had a minor dispute because she cut the carrots up. Look at what she did!

She said she cut them in half lengthwise because of their size, and that cutting them this way would allow them to cook in a time closer to what Oliver intended. I pointed out that he made NO mention of cutting the carrots and might well have avoided doing so for good reason. The unbroken carrot skin probably traps the delicious carrot flavor, allowing the dish to attain a robust carrotness while baking. In these carrots’ final moments, my love’s wanton dissection cruelly robbed these innocent vegetables of all they had lived for.

Now that I’m writing this, I suppose I can see one of these opinions was grounded in reality, and the other was perhaps associated more with speculation, or maybe stupidity. I bring this up now to publicly apologize, to show the humility often required in a relationship. The carrots - those poor, gigantic bastards - were undercooked, and it was I, inadequately anticipating the required baking time, who doomed them to the cruel abyss between crunchy and tender.

Here’s a picture of the final result, minus what I’d already put on our plates, because I’m not used to the whole website thing and forgot to take a picture of them all together in the dish:

They don’t look too bad, right? The taste was underwhelming, though. The biggest failing was that they were undercooked. Besides having an unsatisfying texture, I imagine they also lacked some of the mythic caramelization that I keep hearing about. If there is a next time, I’ll use different carrots or adjust the cooking time accordingly, or maybe allow Taster Number One to cut them up even more.

The second problem was that the delicious goop I tossed the carrots in dripped to the bottom. And it’s a shame because the goop was delicious. The best tasting carrot I ate was one I grabbed from the bottom of the dish as I was cleaning up. I need to figure out how to reverse the effects of gravity. Cooking is hard.

LESSON LEARNED, OR WHATEVER: COOKING IS NOT ARITHMETIC.

I learned tonight that not all carrots are the same. Not all ovens are the same, too. There are lots of other factors in cooking that vary. I need to be Zen, sit back and observe the big picture, blah blah blah. I need to be flexible, though that’s not my strong suit.

Related to this, I’d like to point out that Taster Number One bears the burden of carrying the sum total of common sense in our relationship. This isn’t anything new to me, nor is it, perhaps frustratingly, new to her either. Point is, in the future I should allow her to hold sway over a picture in a cookbook.

Here’s the final plate. Those beans are really amazing, maybe I’ll write about them someday. They’re just cannellini beans, rosemary, garlic, and oil. O.K., there - I just wrote about them. The brown item on the plate is a steak, which was a little chewy.

So, the carrots were a little disappointing though they have potential. There is one great thing about them, which I’ll be glad to tell you about, but first: Have you seen my New Yorker?