Pad Thai, Meatloaf, and Learning to Write

I used to make Pad Thai for dinner. If you've eaten this dish at a Thai restaurant, you probably wouldn't recognize mine. Usually, it's made with wide or medium rice noodles, scrambled eggs, bean sprouts, and chicken, with a sprinkling of chopped peanuts. I use brown rice spaghetti (Tinkyada, if you want specifics), onion, carrot, baked tofu, and a bunch of bok choy from a friend's garden. Not a peanut in sight, although I did use canned sauce.

I learned to make Pad Thai from Sunanta, a Thai exchange student whom we hosted some years back. Her mother, perhaps skeptical about American food in general and those crazy vegetarians in particular, used to send her care packages that included the dry rice noodles and packages of dry seasoning (which were undoubtedly mostly sugar and salt, although as I don't read Thai, I can't say for sure). Sue would cook and I would watch and learn. She made hers with nappa cabbage, carrots, and shrimp. (The packages had sesame seeds to sprinkle on top.)

What I learned was this: Pad Thai is like meatloaf. Every family has their own recipe and the best way to learn is to watch mom and then try it yourself. Chances are, you won't be able to duplicate the exact recipe anyway, and once you've figured out your own taste, you won't want to. You'll make it your own.

Recipe: Vegan Sesame Noodles

This is so good, my omnivorous family loves it! It's also a very flexible recipe, so I will substitute whatever veggies I have on hand (like green beans or zucchini). Plus it doesn't result in a ton of pans to wash. Plus did I mention how yummy it is?

Sesame Noodles (serves 4)

4 oz uncooked spaghetti (I use brown rice, but any kind is fine)

4 c. bean sprouts

2 c. thinly sliced snow peas

2 T toasted sesame oil

¼ c. peanut butter

2 T soy sauce

1 T vinegar

1 T brown sugar

1 green onion, minced

1 T finely minced ginger (or ½ tsp dry)

1 clove finely minced garlic

1 c. grated carrot

• Cook the spaghetti according to the instructions. Just before done, throw in the bean sprouts and snow peas. Cook for 30 seconds, then drain everything well. Return the pasta, sprouts, and snow peas to the pot and toss with sesame oil.
• In a large bowl, whisk the peanut butter, soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, scallion, ginger, garlic with 2 T (or more!) water. It should be thick enough to coat the noodles, but liquid enough to be easy to toss.
• Toss the spaghetti, sprouts, snow peas, and carrots with the peanut butter mixture.

Homemade Pizza Humor

My husband is wheat-intolerant, so I make gluten free crusts from scratch. Recently, the result (although delicious) was way too greasy, so I used a paper towel to blot up the extra fat. My husband insists I have discovered "the face of Cheesus." I think it's a Rorschach ink blot test, subject to many interpretations. What do you see in it?

Tomato Harvest - Two Easy Sauces

We think of autumn as a time to harvest pumpkins, but around here, it’s bonanza time for tomatoes, as well. Our tomatoes don’t get going until midsummer because the night time temperatures are still too low. The plants just sit in the ground and shiver. Long about October, they are in full swing and we’re wondering what we were thinking to have planted so many. A bowl of cherry tomatoes sits on the kitchen counter, ready to grab for snacks, and every dinner is accompanied by a salad that’s mostly fresh tomatoes. What to do with the rest? Make pasta sauce, of course!

The usual instructions call for dipping tomatoes in a bath of simmering water, then peeling the skins, and either scooping out the seeds or running the cooked pulp through a food mill, ricer, or sieve. I’ve tried the water bath technique, and find the prospect of standing over a steaming pot, getting my fingers burned, and sweltering in late summer heat less than appealing. So I’ve devised or adapted a couple of simpler, less painful approaches.

Method 1: One Pot, Food Mill.

Wash your tomatoes (this goes without saying, but is even more import if you, like we, let our tomato plants just sprawl all over the place, of particular merit when growing ginormous varieties like Mortgage Lifter; as the fruits ripen, place a plastic lid of appropriate size to shield them from ground moisture) and chop them into big pieces. Fill up a big pot. Do not add water.

Heat up the pot, stirring to avoid burning as the tomatoes release their juices and to mix up the more- and less-cooked chunks. Once everything is more or less juicy, reduce the heat and simmer on low for hours. And hours. Really. Open the windows and bask in a cool place, stirring every half hour or so. It will thicken as it reduces down to a fraction of its former size. When it’s however thick you like it, let cool a bit.

[food] New Uses For Winter Squash

Tajji guarding squash

I love winter squashes. They're delicious, versatile, and packed with nutrients. Some varieties you can find in markets pretty much all year round -- acorn and butternut, sometimes chunks of banana squash or Hubbard, with specialty or health food markets carrying kabocha and a few others, too. Others are seasonal. Pumpkins are easiest to find in the fall, and I think it's a tragedy that so many end up rotting when their decorative days are over. Delicata doesn't store well, so grab it while you can. Then there are the heirloom varieties, oh my. We've hardly begun our exploration of them.

Favorites so far: buttercup, carnival, blue Hubbard, Tennessee sweet potato squash (with a delicate but distinct sweet potato flavor); pumpkins like Cinderella or Musquee de Provence, small sugar pumpkins. Not so fond of tromboncini, but that could be that it's better as a tender summer squash.

This year, our garden produced about 200 lbs of winter squash. A large fraction of that was the Tennessee sweet potato squash, as the plants are as prolific as they are robust. Then we saw a stand of pumpkins that looked like Musqee de Provence and a similar, smaller white variety, at a local market. They were marked down to $1 each, although many of them weighed 15 lbs or more. I suspect they had been displayed for Halloween and never sold. We bought almost all of them and have been working our way through the enormous pile. The pumpkins had been roughly handled and set on concrete, so we had to scramble to use the damaged ones first. If the skins are intact and you wipe them down with dilute bleach to kill mold spores, they'll happily keep all winter.