Recipes are Merely a Suggestion

My kids love tortilla soup. I love not wasting food. This soup is our solution to the problem of 10,000 partially used packages of corn tortillas that regularly wind up in the back of our fridge.

Yesterday I pulled a turkey breast carcass from the freezer and popped it in the slow cooker with a couple of handfuls of pinto beans, covered with water, added some bay leaves and let it cook on low for 4-5 hours. When the beans were almost tender I removed the bones and picked off the last bits of meat for the soup. You could also skip this whole process and just start with broth, any variety and canned beans if you want. You can leave the beans out too if you don’t groove on the frijoles.

Then I sauteed up some carrots, onion and green pepper in a bit of olive oil. Once soft I added some cumin and chili powder to the pan. Heating the dried spices helps the flavor come alive. Then I added a ladleful of stock to the pan and swirled it around to help dislodge all of the yumminess and added it to the broth in the slow cooker. Tasted it and added some salt (if using pre-made broth, you won’t likely need to add any more salt).

Here’s where the magic happens: I tore up a bunch of forgotten corn tortillas and put them in my blender, added some of the stock to cover along with a crushed clove of garlic and let it sit there for a while to soften. Then I whizzed it all together and added it to the soup. This helps thicken the soup and give it an awesome, corny flavor and depth. Served it with avocado, chopped red onion, clilantro, cotija cheese, corn chips and hot sauce (of course!) on the side. Easy to make vegetarian or vegan, just leave that meaty stuff out and use vegetable stock.

Erase from your mind all of the images you have of cloyingly sweet, frothy, fruit flavoured daquiris and hear me out on this one.

A REAL daquiri is beyond simple. And incredibly delicious. Dangerously so in my experience, but I’m the first to admit that I can’t drink the way I used to in my younger years. Oy vey.

A real daquiri is sophisticated and classy. Never served in a foot long plastic souvenir glass and/or from a smoothie machine.

A real daquiri is white rum, simple syrup and lime juice (plus lime zest if you are like me and can’t have it limey enough) shaken with ice and served straight up. Roughly 2:1 on the rum to lime juice ratio. Titrate simple syrup to your taste, but I like mine tart, so i didn’t put in much at all. That’s it. No fuss, no muss, just a refreshing and enjoyable preventative for scurvy. See? Its medicinal.

I was first introduced to dry fried green beans several years ago by my dear friend SBG who is a vegetarian (but I love her anyway. JK – I actually eat vegetarian much of the time, I just like to poke fun at her non-existent flaws). I immediately fell in love. With the beans, not SBG, although she is pretty awesome…

A slightly tatty bunch of green beans in my fridge quickly losing their youthful splendor inspired me to attempt a recreation of the dish. Taking my own liberties though, of course. I googled several recipes and then cobbled together my own thing. Here’s what I did:

Washed and trimmed ends and yucky spots from a bunch of fresh-ish green beans. I don’t see how this dish would work with frozen or, shudder, canned, but I guess you could try it. Dried them off and cut them into ~2-inch-long pieces. Heated some light oil in a wok, but a sautee pan would work too. I’m even tempted to try broiling these in the oven, but then I guess the name would be false advertising as they would no longer be technically “fried”. But anyway, then I cooked the beans in the oil over high heat until they started to look crispy and brown in spots. That’s flavor baby! Then I added in some chopped garlic, ginger, green onions and a spoonful of sambal olek (chili sauce, great condiment, get it). Stirred that around for a couple of minutes until everything smelled amazing and then finished it off with some soy sauce and a dash of mirin (sweet cooking wine; I don’t usually stock this condiment, the bottle was bought on accident when I was trying to get some rice vinegar, but I have come to like it. Great way to add a touch of sweetness to a dish to balance flavours). Not too much on the liquids, you don’t want mushy beans, just a little sauce to coat everything. Done!

My sweetie and I gobbled this up straight from the serving bowl as an appetizer before our tofu and vegetable fried rice. As we snacked, we dreamed of other veg we could cook with this same technique – broccoli, asparagus, snow peas, who knows what else! Plenty of opportunity for improvisation.

I’ve always been sort of intrigued by the concepts of Ayurveda. Loosely speaking, in my own words, it is the idea that a healthy body is one that is in balance. One part of ensuring that balance or restoring that balance if/when it is lost, is through feeding it the proper food. That just sounds…right.

It is easy to get into ruts and mindlessly feed myself without paying much attention to how that food makes me feel.  I do stuff like keep eating all the cheese because it just tastes so darn gooooood! But when I stop to think about it, cheese (in large, soul satisfying quantities) doesn’t really make me feel very good. Dang it!

So anyway, back to kitchari (kit-chur-ee): I was reading up on this Ayurveda concept and one of the main dishes is called kitchari which is a stew that comes in different varieties. At its heart, it is a combination of grains and legumes (often mung beans and basmati rice) cooked in broth or water with tons of lovely spices. It’s supposed to be easy to digest, cleansing and rebalancing. Sounded good, so I made it. And then I made some more. And then I introduced it to my husband and now we are eating it almost every day. It is nourishing satisfaction in a big warm bowl. I don’t mean to get all mystical on you, but it really does make me feel good when I eat it! And the house smells amazing.

I’ve made a bunch of different varieties, it lends itself very well to improv, probably another reason why I love it so much! Here’s the description of my basic method: I use my Crock-Pot for this, but an ordinary pot would work. I don’t know about those new-fangled Insta-Pots, I don’t have one, but it is probably possible in that thing too. Put in a handful of split mung beans (I know these sound kinda gross, but they are delicious little devils that look like lentils and come in different colors) and a handful of basamati rice (I use brown because that’s what I have in my larder). Next comes all of the delicious spices. You need to cook them a bit in oil or ghee til aromatic. Most of the time I use some combination of cumin, cardamom, cayenne (careful!), black pepper and chopped garlic. I’ve also tried cinnamon, allspice, dill and fennel – all of them work and experimenting with new combinations is fun. You can warm the spices in the oil in a pan or I actually do it in a glass measuring cup in my microwave. You just have to be careful not to burn them. Then add these to the beans and rice and cover with a couple of inches of broth. Cook until everything is soft and thick soupy. You can thin it out with more broth or water along the way if it is too thick. Near the end of the cooking process I add chopped fresh ginger and a squeeze of lemon. I serve mine with hot sauce and chopped red onion. Fresh cilantro might be nice too.

I had a craving for el cheapo style tacos last night. You know the ones – crunchy yellow tortilla shells,  spiced ground meat mix, grated yellow cheese, diced white onion, shredded lettuce and maybe some chopped tomatoes on top if you’re feeling fancy. With “taco sauce” of course! No, not salsa, not guacamole and don’t even think about sour cream. Just your basic trashy taco, nothing complicated. I love tacos in general, fancy types too, but sometimes nothing satisfies like the kind I grew up eating way back when. Nostalgia eating I guess.

The meat mix is really the only moving part here that requires any real “cooking”. The other stuff just needs cleaning and prepping. You can use any type of ground meat or meat-like item here, or even beans. Beef, chicken, turkey, veggie meat crumbles or chopped up burger patties, tofu, lentils all would work. I used some TVP I had in the pantry. For those not in the know, TVP (Texturized Vegetable Protein – sounds like a lab experiment and conjures images of soylent green wafers for me, but I digress) is a dried, crumbly substance made from soybeans. When you add water, it fluffs up and behaves like ground meat. It is highly processed though, so I personally don’t eat it a lot. But when making Trashy Tacos and avoiding real meat, it is just the ticket!

I dislike prepackaged spice mixes, so I make my own. Oh come on, its not that hard! I keep a well-stocked spice cabinet though and that makes it easy. And fun. So back to the meat – in a skillet I browned up some onion in oil and then added cumin, chili powder, garlic pepper, allspice (optional but awesome), a pinch of oregano and celery seed (also optional, but yum). Toasted the spices for a little and then added the dry TVP right to the pan and got it all coated in the oily spices. Then I added a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste (I get it in the tube so is easy to use small amounts here and there), some V8 juice and water. Let it all simmer to get the flavors melding.  In the meantime, I prepped the cold stuff and toasted the shells.

Proper assembly in my book: Warm shell (don’t skimp on warming it up), meat, cheese, onion, lettuce and then taco sauce. Have a fork handy to scoop up all of the inevitable but delicious taco detritus. My kids mock me (about this and many other things), but this is a great meal to put to use all of the leftover Taco Bell sauce packets you have stored in a baggie in the pantry. What? You don’t have one of those?? Well you should start, because it is ridiculous when you order one taco and they give you 10 sauce packets, but that shit is gold and should not be left to waste! Also perfect to have a condiment baggie when travelling to combat the perfect storm of bland while far away from your well-stocked home fridge condiment selection. What? You don’t have one of those either?? Tsk…