when life gives you lemons…

Today, I received an email from my cousin up north:

Hello there! It’s lemon season again. What’s your limoncello recipe?

I was delighted she remembered my limoncello adventure. Last year, while still living in the Bay Area, I had taken Meyer lemons from her father’s tree, and regular lemons from my boss’s tree. And, of course, when life gives you lemons …

Buggah and I got ambitious. We wanted to give away little bottles of limoncello as presents, though mostly we found we hoarded it to ourselves. There’s a million ways to to do it, but this is the very loose way I did it. Thanks to the Sicilian couple who first passed on the recipe.

You’ll need

-A bottle of grain alcohol/vodka (about 40 proof)
-A few quart jars
-Lemons, of course
-Sugar syrup (made by heating 1 cup sugar with 1 cup water and let it cool)
-Bottles to store the goodness in
-Patience

For one quart:

-Peel 2-6 lemons (I used more than less). I preferred peeling with a vegetable peeler than a zester. Put the peels in the jar. Use the lemons however you want.
-Fill jar with booze, leave about an inch at the top. Seal and store in a dark place.
-Leave it there for no less than two weeks, no more than 40 days. Take it out sometimes, and shake, shake, shake.
-When you can’t wait any longer, strain the peels out and add the cold or room temperature sugar syrup to the alcohol (if it’s hot, the drink will turn cloudy)
-You may pour it into decorative bottles, or drink it straight from the jar. We bought the four-pack individual wine bottles to double the fun. Drink the wine, then fill it with limoncello, then drink the limoncello.
-Store in the freezer, it’s a lovely digestivo.

Notes:

-It may be obvious, but I should mention that the number of lemon peels you use and the amount of time will make the flavor weaker or stronger.
-Meyer lemons will be sweeter (and will give the liquor a darker color) than regular lemons, so you can decrease the sugar syrup.
-Also, I’ve seen one recipe where you only need to let the peels steep for a 2-3 days if you shake the jar several times a day.

my favorite salad

Last year, I visited a community garden and was sent home with the most beautiful Pompei roma tomatoes, some Japanese cucumbers and handfuls of flat-leaf parsley. I hadn’t had any luck growing my own cukes and parsley, so at a loss of what to do I turned to World Vegetarian.

This is Madhur Jaffrey’s Simple Palestinian Salad, though it’s so simple you don’t need a recipe. I don’t eat a lot of leaf-salads, but this always pleases my palate, especially in these dog days of summer. It’s perfect for the tomatoes that are ripening by the handful in the garden, and it’s so simple that every ingredient here shines.

Cube some tomatoes and cucumbers, coat lightly with olive oil and some fresh lemon juice. Throw in some chopped parsley (be generous) and salt to taste. This is the tried-and-true, but there’s always room for some twang (onion) and innovation (sumac). See what I mean with Smitten Kitchen’s recipe for Israeli Salad.

are you puerto rican?

“Arroz con gandules?” Buggah asks, peering into the kitchen. “Are you Puerto Rican?”

No, of course I’m not Puerto Rican, but hey, it’s a multicultural household. Buggah eats my Hawaii/Asian inspired dishes like kalbi, kalua pig and an endless assortment of Chinese stir-fries, and I eat rice and beans, rice with beans, and beans, beans, beans. Sometimes he whips up a chicken fricassee, and on very rare occasions, we fry some tostones. It’s always mouth watering and tummy satisfying, as good as home cooking gets.

Arroz con gandules is an even rarer treat for us out here in California. There’s one measly “Central American” shop we found in San Jose that sells the seasonings for Puerto Rican cookery, such as Adobo and Sazon con Culantro y Achiote. And sofrito? Forget it. We have to make it fresh at home. During my last trip to the market, I saw an overpriced can of gandules, or pigeon peas, on the shelf. It sat in our cupboard for months. Buggah wouldn’t touch the can (he’s a purist and worried about the rice:water ratio), but I took a whack at it.

Buggah says its typical Christmas fare to eat Arroz con Gandules alongside pasteles. Even in Hawaii, those are the enduring Puerto Rican dishes. There’s a million ways to make this, but this is how I did it. Not bad for a non-Puerto Rican. Buggah says, “You’re ready to go to Puerto Rico.”

Arroz con Gandules
-Oil
-1-2 T sofrito (see recipe below)
-1/2 8 oz can tomato sauce
-1 packet Sazon con Culantro y Achiote
-1 can gandules, drained
-1 1/2 cups medium grain rice
-1 1/2 cups water
-Half handful green manzanilla olives
-Adobo, to taste (can substitute garlic salt in a pinch)

Make the sofrito base: Heat oil over medium and add sofrito until you smell all that Puerto Rican goodness (more is always better, as far as I’m concerned). Add tomato sauce and sazon and let the flavors meld a minute or two. Some adobo here, too.

Add the drained gandules and rice (olives, if you’re using them) and coat with the sofrito base. Add water and some adobo. Boil until the water nears the rice, cover firmly with a lid and let cook on low-medium for about 20-30 minutes.

We ate this with pasteles from Buggah’s-auntie’s-boyfriend’s illegal backyard catering operation. Like all our Puerto Rican dishes, we served it with fresh slices of avocado, tomato and lemon.

Note: Make as much rice as you want, just keep the water ratio 1:1 if using medium grain rice

Sofrito

Again, there’s a million ways to make this. We don’t have culantro or aji dulce out here so this is the bare bones version for a small processor. We typically make a ton and freeze it in pint-size bags a few times a year.

1 green pepper, stemmed and seeded
Half an onion, peeled
1-2 cloves garlic, peeled
A few T cilantro

Whir it up in the food processor. If it’s too chunky, add some water so the mixture becomes a puree.

working the magic

My stepdad bought a buy-one-get-one-free Magic Bullet, so I got to lug one of those bad boys home with me. I’ve been waking up early to juice the oranges and have been dreaming of banana lassis and hummus. Most recently, I put on the blender attachment to whip up Romesco sauce, which has become a table fave. We ate it beside Buggah’s barbecued burgers and vine-picked tomatoes from my garden.

This is another World Vegetarian find, and Madhur Jaffrey describes it as “a sauce that I cannot live without.” Goes well with grilled vegetables and meats, and I imagine would work well as a sandwich spread.

In the book, there’s a classic recipe and a simple version of this Spanish sauce. Here’s the pared-down Alicia version. It’s a delicious way to clear the pantry.

Romesco Sauce

-1 dried ancho chile, stemmed, seeded and soaked in hot water for 15 minutes
-3 large bell peppers, roasted (also stemmed and seeded, jarred OK)
-1/4 c olive oil
-2 T red wine vinegar
-1/8 t cayenne
-2 peeled garlic cloves
-1 t salt

Place chile and 2 T soaking liquid with everything else in the blender/food processor. Blend until sauce is thick (mine turns out a bit lumpy). Makes about 1 1/2 cups, and can be frozen.

a taste of home

My other home, that is. The one where I pay the rent and cook my own meals. For days, we’ve been eating leftovers from the funeral reception, not to mention the luncheon following the burial. I’m a homebody, and likewise my body warms to homemade food. So I couldn’t take another bite of microwaved pork guisantes or greasy cake noodle. I wanted to take the reigns in the kitchen for once in many days. I wanted comfort and balance and control. I wanted tofu.

Tofu may not be the most revered of culinary delights in America. I’m not so sure it’s the lack of flavor as much as the absence of meat on the plate. I eat a lot of tofu because it’s easier to cook than meat. No defrosting. No skinning and deboning and risking salmonella poisoning or strange cow madness. Tofu’s silky and, when fresh, stunning in its simplicity. It absorbs flavor, takes on different forms, and stands in for its heavier protein counterparts gracefully. It’s like that shipshape girl on Heroes, but forgiving.

So here’s what I cooked in my childhood kitchen. It’s a dish that never fails to satisfy my palate, so good that I’ve committed it to memory. Inspired by Jack Bishop’s wonderful A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen.

Hoisin Glazed Tofu

1 block firm-ish tofu
Oil
2 T Hoisin
1-2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2-1 T ginger, minced
2/3 cup chicken/veg broth
Sesame seeds (optional, I just like the way they look)
1 stalk green onion, white and green parts, chopped

-Press tofu (I balance a few heavy bowls on the drained tofu in its container for about 15 min), drain excess water. Cut into eighths width-wise.
-Fry tofu 5 min on each side or until golden brown and crisp.
-Mix hoisin, garlic, ginger and broth together. Add to pan, and let it reduce until the tofu has absorbed the flavor and a thick sauce remains. Should take just a few minutes.
-Sprinkle with sesame seeds and green onion.

Serve with rice and green stuff. Broccoli would be nice, or some gailan with dried shiitake mushrooms would add some bitterness and earthiness to the sweet flavor of the hoisin.

something smells fishy

Cooking for one is rarely fun. It’s either too much effort for a single meal, or the leftovers are overwhelming. However, when the person you want to lavish all your homemade love onto is picky about your favorite eats, eating alone can be liberating.

Seafood is my typical restaurant fare since it’s a no-no at home. My vacation was proof: I had shrimp dim sum in L.A., my auntie’s delicious salmon in Long Beach, and lobster and ceviche in Puerto Nuevo. In San Diego, I ate fish tacos again and again. I tend to be picky about fish (unless it’s deep fried, me loves deep fried anything), but I generally love the texture and lightness compared to other meats.

So, back from vacation solo, out came the salmon from the freezer. I hadn’t made a grocery run yet, so I had to rely on pantry and garden to whip this together. The recipes are adapted as noted, and it was a good way to use up my fennel and favas, which I never know what to do with. I tend to just look at them with gratitude for growing. They’re such beautiful plants, one all feather and licorice, the other all earth and texture.

Salmon with Roasted Fennel
(saw this on PBS a few months back)

Enough salmon for two (a little more than half a pound)
1 small fennel bulb, cut into wedges
1 small onion, cut into wedges
2 cloves garlic, smashed
1 diced tomato (I used a frozen one from last year’s harvest)
Some olive oil
Several sprigs of fresh thyme (I included some lemon thyme for kicks)
Salt and pepper
Half a lemon

-Preheat oven to 400.
-Throw fennel, onion, garlic, tomato and thyme into roasting pan. Coat lightly with oil, salt and pepper. Roast for 20 min.
-Add salmon to the pan, squeeze lemon juice on fillets, add salt and pepper. Roast for another 15 min. or so.

Note: If I cook this again, I’ll just throw everything in at the same time. I ate this with brown rice.

Shredded Favas with Lemon Zest
I recently discovered that young fava beans can be eaten with its pod. Yay! Less work for the cook. The stunning Super Natural Cooking has a recipe for shredded green beans. In the spirit of the Pantry Project, I made do with what I had.

3/4 lb. young-ish favas, shredded in the nifty food processor (thanks, Dad)
2 stalks green onion or green garlic, minced
Zest of a lemon, minced
1 T lime juice, 1 T water
Olive oil, salt and pepper

-Saute the favas in some olive oil until covered.
-Steam/fry with lime juice and water for a few minutes, until liquid evaporates and the beans are tender but still bright green. Turn off heat.
-Add green onion/garlic and zest, salt and pepper to taste.

Buen Provecho.

the pantry project

I’m cheap. I rarely buy anything at full price, or even new. I refuse to pay for cable, and will scour the web for days hunting down bargain air fare. I sell my read books on Amazon and I’ve been trying to hawk a pair of Pumas on eBay.

Yet when it comes to food, I don’t skimp. When I began to teach myself to cook, I believed that a well-stocked kitchen made the difference between dinner at home and pizza delivery. Match that with my cookbook obsession, and I was trolling the aisles to find the pantry ingredients that would transform my cooking from bland to scrumptious.

Sure, you can make a meal with olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper. But I came home with garam masala, rice vinegar, and macadamia nut oil. There are countless dried noodles in my cupboards — udon, soba, pasta, egg-flavored Chinese noodles, and the cellophane noodles for the Chicken Long Rice that’s yet to be made. There’s an array of beans and grains, a freezer full of sofrito for Buggah’s Puerto Rican dishes, tomato sauce from last year’s harvest, coconut milk formed into ice cubes, and every weird veggie meat I could find at the Asian market.

These could languish there for a while, wait until I noticed them. But time is running out. I’m moving, and it seems silly to pack the teff flour with the television, the raw honey with the radio. I remembered this article in the San Francisco Chronicle in which a staffer takes a spin on Spring Cleaning. Instead of throwing out the old food stuffs, she concocted dishes from her pantry.

Last month, the Chronicle ran a story about people who were eating locally on the cheap. These folks did really well, supplementing local produce with goods from the freezer, and foraged from plants. With no (real) foreseeable source of income, using what I’ve already got sounded like a good plan. I’ve got a garden, and as anyone who knows me from childhood, I’m not above stealing fruit.

Thus, The Pantry Project was born. I use the word “pantry” liberally here, meaning anything I would have to throw out. And to start things off, here’s something I whipped up last week, inspired by Jamie’s Dinners. The mix of fish and olives reminds me of Sicily.

Puttanesca

Pantry: Penne, dried basil, red pepper flakes, canned tomatoes, black olives and tuna

Pasta for two
1 can tuna
Juice and zest of half lemon
Generous pinch dried basil
14 oz canned tomatoes
Olive oil
1 garlic clove
Pinch red pepper flakes
Handful black olives
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

-Boil pasta in salty water.
-Drain tuna, marinate with lemon juice and zest, some basil, olive oil, and black pepper.
-Heat some olive oil in a pan, add garlic until it smells good, add pepper flakes. Add in tomatoes, olives (I just mashed them with the side of my knife), and tuna, simmer until the pasta’s done.
-Drain pasta and add to sauce. Add salt if needed, though I find the tuna and olives give it enough flavor.

Note: This is really good with fresh basil and capers, neither of which Buggah will touch. Also, a nice swig of white wine would do well with the sauce, but we were drinking red that night.