Quick Meals from Slow Food
Most people when confronted with a pair of green peppers would probably do something sensible with them. I’m not entirely sure what that would be, because I’m not the most sensible man.
Green bell peppers make me think of one thing, Cuban black beans. Okay, make that two things. I also think Cajun food, since the base aromatics of that cuisine are a blend of green pepper, onion and celery. And Cajun food makes me hungry for red beans and rice.
Like the Tuscans, the Bermans are bean eaters. Little Miss Fussy goes nuts for the legumes, and Albany Jane can attest to the fervor in which she consumed Indian spiced black eyed peas at a local lunch buffet.
Anyhow, last night, because of the mere presence of two green peppers in my CSA share, I made a giant pot of black beans. The whole project took about four hours. It was not a sensible evening project. Beans may be delicious, but they take a long time to make.
So how can busy people like Amy and Kristi incorporate healthful, vegetable based meals like this into their lives? I have an idea, and it doesn’t require a can opener.
September Eats My Lunch
It would be one thing if I were just struggling with the stunning number of tomatoes in my life. I don’t quite know how it happened, but last week was the first time I completely failed to keep up with the CSA produce.
Luckily we have eaten through most of the more perishable items, and the rest are being incorporated into this week’s meals.
I still love that panzanella, although honestly it is no longer feeling much like a special treat. And Mrs. Fussy kind of promised to make her preferred version of raw tomato sauce, which she claims is better than the one I detailed yesterday. But I stubbornly refuse to take these delightful summer treats and freeze them so they can be pulled out in winter. Plus I have too much respect for these sumptuous tomatoes to cook them down into a sauce. I’d rather eat them out of hand, two at a time, and have the memory of this tomato gluttony carry me through in the dreary winter months.
But it’s not just the tomatoes.
Cooking for Amy and Kristi
Never forget, I am here for you. Seriously. Have a wine question, let me know. Trying to decide what to make with ingredients on hand, I’ll come up with something. When I was a kid my grandmother scolded me once by saying, “You always have an answer for everything.”
And to this day, I still can’t see what’s wrong with that.
It just so happened that last week two prominent local twitteresses @amymengel and @kristigustafson had similar but different problems. They both need help cooking. Amy flat out admitted, “I really wish I had any inkling of how to cook. Anything.” Kristi was a little less transparent. Her cry for help came in an otherwise innocent tweet, “I wish I could bottle up the smell of the kitchen when the dishwasher is running. Cascade, you’re so easy on the sniffer.”
And you know what, if they need help, it’s likely other people need help too. So let’s get down to basics. Let’s talk about cooking techniques. Let’s do some simple recipes. Let’s make things that are good for one or two people, but can be made for twenty. Let’s eat healthy, with plenty of vegetables and whole grains. Let’s get cooking.
Ask the Profussor – Chi-poat-a-licious
A lot can happen in 19 days. Heck, a lot can happen in just one. Tomorrow is the official grand opening of the newest Chipotle in Albany County, and dangerously it is walking distance from my house. Maybe its close proximity will silence my complaints about good food not being available at reasonable prices.
Or maybe not.
Actually, I have a lot on tap for the weeks to come. Twitter has recently been a hotbed of inspiration for me, and for the first time in a while, I feel like I really have a lot that I want to write about. There’s been plenty of stuff that I feel I should write about—I have a growing list—but for some reason or another, I just can’t make myself do it.
Anyhow, before we move into the future, I have to address the past. There are questions that have been asked and answered, but there have also been questions that were asked, only to be left hanging around searching for some resolution. Well today, they can finally rest in peace as I cross them off my to-do list and clear my conscience. I may even need to weigh in on a few of your comments from the past two and a half weeks.
You’ll just have to read on to see if something you wrote got under the profussor’s skin.
Bumping Into Bloggers
Sunday is a day for hangovers. I suppose Saturday can be too. But I didn’t drink copious amounts of booze last night. In fact I didn’t even have a drop. What I drank a lot of yesterday was coffee.
In about two hours I had two steaming mugs of Ethiopian (two different kinds), a shot of espresso, and I took a 20 ounce brewed coffee for the road.
This was all down at this amazing café in Scranton, Pennsylvania. For those who are wondering, the Wilkes Barre-Scranton DMA is in the same 51-60 bracket as Albany-Schenectady-Troy. Anyhow, I realized it would probably be a while before I made it back, so I had best try as many things as possible while I was there.
Bad idea.
My heart didn’t explode, but after arriving home I had a total caffeine crash and passed out on the sofa after dinner. When I awoke from my brief post-meal nap, I had a pounding headache, and could not even attempt to sit down in front of the computer to write today’s post.
So instead of something interesting about wine, today is a brief post about local bloggers.
Something New for the FLB
A while back CSN stores sponsored a cast iron pan giveaway on the FUSSYlittleBLOG. Overall, I thought it went pretty well. The promotion was certainly a learning experience. Apparently CSN was quite happy with how it went, and wanted to do something else on the FLB. This time we are going to do something new. Instead of a giveaway, I am going to pick something on cookware.com to review. The online store has a ton of stuff, including Corelle dinnerware, which I had never seen before, but some of their simpler styles have nice clean lines.
No, I’m not going to review plates. Rather I have my eye on something that has to do with coffee. Not espresso, not cappuccino, but simple brewed coffee. And it is part of my master plan to start drinking better coffee at home on a more regular basis.
I’ll give you a hint.
Good Eggs and Bad Eggs
A week ago it was 380 million eggs. Now it’s about 550 million eggs. It’s a mind-boggling figure.
You may be wondering where the additional 170 million eggs came from. Interestingly enough they came from another Iowa producer, Hillandale Farms of New Hampton. It seems like they are getting off easy in the media, since their modest quantity of Salmonella enteritidis-infected eggs is dwarfed by the earlier recall from Wright County Egg of Galt, Iowa.
Another reason why the recall is so large is that the infected eggs go all the back to April and span production through July and August. For those of you without fingers, that is five months of bad eggs.
Last week when the recall was significantly smaller I wondered, “What will it take to get some serious food policy discussions moving?” And I think I have the answer: a very smart lawyer. Meet Bill Marler (again).
He’s the good egg. I’ll get to the bad egg in just a minute.
Hey, I’m Eating That
If you are eating while you read this, I would strongly recommend you stop right now. Click on the RSS feed, add the FUSSYlittleBLOG to whatever blog reader you use, and come back later. Preferably, after you have digested.
Today might get a little disgusting. Maybe more than a little.
You’ve been warned
I could be wrong, but I believe that most non-human living things instinctively know what is food and what is not. That’s not to say they can’t be tricked, or that they will always make the best decisions. But there are some who believe that the first people learned what to eat by watching what foods lower animals ate and noting which berries they avoided.
That said, I watched with horror many years ago when I saw a couple of tourist children trying to feed the pigeons Nerds candy. Their parents were sitting nearby, watching the scene unfold. The birds were curious about these small brightly colored objects. They pecked around them, but refused to eat them.
Let me say that again. Pigeons refused to eat them.
