Quinoa with Tomato-Bacon-Beet-Spinach Sauce

What's most notable about this sauce is that it is red. Not tomato red or beet red, it's more fake blood red. The color seems wrong to me; bacony tomato sauce should not hurt the eyes to look at. To me it's a color that on the whole doesn't fall into the category of edible. Eating it is a very disjunctive experience: what I taste is not what I see. This is probably because I have learned throughout life to anticipate taste from appearance, along with a number of other cues. Foods "look tasty." This sauce, rather than looking tasty, or even looking like sauce, looks like raw meat, blood, candy, or some kind of overzealous berry. Looking at the food while eating it, rather than creating a suturing movement like this paragraph, creates more confusion than the following metaphor: the sewing machine sticks and the needle breaks.

I might even say, in one of the more postmodern gustatory aesthetics, that good food causes such renewing sensory rupture. Of course, ideally it does so more subtly than by blaring a neon red siren in your face and then handing you a plate of tomato sauce. Comfort food, on the other hand, strives toward a mimetic reproduction of your preconceptions. There can never really be, but comfort food may accomodate. What we have in this opposition of comfort and "good" is an appallingly bad account of what makes food good. Food full of the unexpected and disjunctive may still be bad, mediocre, nauseating, or even inedible. And comfort food also may be all of these things. This is not a way of evaluating the goodness of food, but a way of defining differing aesthetic modes. "Good" and "comfort" might be better termed "high" and "low."

What brought me here? Beets. The color of one of the oldest vegetables jars me into having to convince myself that tomatoes and bacon in fact taste like tomatoes and bacon. It has such an effect, I think, because it reminds me of blood--fake blood, and therefore of the permeability of bodily boundaries. We have become used to putting substances in our mouths and swallowing them. In fact, depending on the account of childhood psychological development you subscribe to, there may never have been a time when we were not used to it. Nonetheless we generally have come to think of the process of eating as not at all at odds with being contained within our bodies. Voiding waste is only slightly more threatening to this sealed bodily conception. But as much as straight male psychology at some unconscious level depends on rejecting it entirely, there is no avoiding it: things enter us and exit us through multiple orifices, including us. And blood, although generally this only exits. But from the plate in front of me deep red sauce enters.

1/2 large onion
1 small red beet
2 cloves garlic
7 medium frozen tomatoes
3 strips bacon
handful or two baby spinach
juice of 1/4 lemon

3 teaspoons dried basil

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1/4 teaspoon black pepper
salt to taste (1/2 teaspoon?)

Fill a large saucepan 1/2in up the rim with water, add frozen tomatoes, and put on medium-high heat. In another large saucepan begin frying bacon on medium heat. Peel and finely chop onion, beet, and garlic. When bacon is browned on both sides (but not crispy), remove onto a cutting board or plate. Scrape blackened bits from bottom of pan with spatula. Reduce heat to medium-low and add onion, beet, garlic, black pepper, and a pinch of salt. Tomatoes should be about thawed at this point. Remove from heat, drain water, remove skins, and chop tomatoes into large chunks. Put tomatoes back on medium-low heat to begin reducing. Stir frying onion mixture every few minutes. When onions are very soft (maybe 25 minutes), transfer tomatoes to frying saucepan and add basil, oregano, and lemon juice. Stir. Continue reducing sauce. When it's the right consistency, add baby spinach. Allow it to wilt for a few minutes and then stir it into the sauce. Salt to taste. Serve over pasta or quinoa.

Biscuits & Kidney Beans

Yesterday, in an attempt to entertain myself by imposing arbitrary lifestyle contraints, I decided not to use my computer. Yes, it's true, I composed this with pen and paper. Laugh it up at my affectation. The point is that instead of looking to the internet for proportions of flour, butter, and milk, I followed The Joy of Cooking (1972 edition) recipe for biscuits. It calls for kneading the dough "a scant 1/2 minute." (I do love this book's diction. It has so many instructions it creates its own semantic universe in which every term has precise meaning.) I had never realized kneading might be an important part of making biscuits; I thought one was supposed to handle the dough as little as possible. It turns out kneading is how they're made flaky.

I may have rolled the dough too thin. The recipe says to roll "until the dough has the desired thickness." That was a quarter of an inch in my case. They only rose to about half an inch. My brother commented that they looked English. They do look more like I imagine scones should look than they do biscuits. But they're too thin to be cut in half. So they aren't even scones really. But I like them. There's something really nice about the way they get stale. They get stiff and just a bit chewy. In this stale state they're perfectly suited to eating with hot liquids such as tea or soup. And they're the sort of thing you would put in your knapsack before setting off into the forest.

I made these to go with a pot of kidney beans seasoned with sambar powder. This came about because I couldn't find the cayenne chili powder I wanted to use. (The sambar powder consists mostly of chilis.) I'm not sure it's the greatest combination, but it was an improvement over kidney beans without the seasoning.

2 cans cooked kidney beans
1/2 cup water
2 tablespoons cooking oil
1 large onion
2 cloves garlic
3 teaspoons sambar powder
1 teaspoon dried oregano
salt to taste

Chop onion into medium pieces roughly 1/2in square. Chop garlic as finely as possible. In a medium pot on medium-low heat, fry garlic in oil. When it is just browning, add sambar powder, dried oregano, and onions. Fry onion until well softened, maybe 20 minutes, stirring and scraping bottom every minute or two with a rubber spatula. Add kidney beans and water. Simmer for ten minutes and then serve.

Inadvisable Meal II: Beets & Sausage

Red beets are not just colorful; they have an excess of color.  They stain everything around them bright red and still their color remains incorruptably deep.  They taste like they look.  They're too much.  It is as if cane sugar is a weak imitation, and red beet is the true flavor of sweet.  We learn from the beet that sweet is in fact not entirely pleasant; it turns the mouth in on itself and pounds the tongue with sticky rocks.

In short, beets should be tempered with other things.  Do not eat a pile of beets with beet sauce.  A pile of beets with sausage covered in beet sauce is not much of an improvement.

In elementary school I knew this Jehovah's Witness who loved beets.  In the cafeteria he would sit down with a huge helping of ruffle-cut beets on his tray, lustily spearing them with his fork and turning his bulging lips red by slurping them into his clumsy mouth.  "Oh, I love beets," he would say.  We would all grimace in disgust.  Some would try to make fun of him, but he would just laugh and flash back an evil, self-contented smile between chomps.  Somehow I always liked him.  No harm could touch him.  He had become a beet, staining everything and impossible to stain.  The dye of beets is the only true substance.  A beet may be eaten, but its color persists and travels through you, eventually ending up in the ocean.  How the oceans are not a deep magenta is beyond me.

I had planned to write this in the morning, but tonight beets have kept me up writing about beets.  The beet has disrupted my plans and it smirks.  Pastry may be sorcery, but the beet is something much older, purer, and more insidious.  Root vegetables are coming into vogue like never before.  It is the age of roots, and the beet is rising.

I am sick of beets.  Perhaps I should make a beet cake, or a beet pie.

3 medium beets: 1 red, 1 yellow, 1 white & pink
1/4 of a lemon
4 peppercorns
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon olive oil
3 teaspoons flour

Peel beets and chop into bite-sized pieces ~1cm thick.  In a large saucepan bring 2 cups of water to boil, and add beets  Squeeze juice from lemon quarter and drop the whole thing in the pan.  Add peppercorns and salt.  Lower heat to medium-high and cover.  Boil for about 50 minutes, adding more water if necessary and stirring beets every fifteen minutes or so.  When beets are soft, remove them with a slotted spoon to a large bowl.  Lower heat to medium-low.  Add olive oil to liquid.  Sprinkle flour gradually while whisking liquid.  Remove from heat.  Pour sauce over meat accompaniment.

Baked Sweet Potatoes With Nutmeg-Paprika Sauce, Leftover Roast Chicken, and Bok Choy

For once I'm writing a recipe (with pictures!) for one of my dinner improvisations.  The idea for the sauce came from my friend who likes sweet potatoes with olive oil, paprika, nutmeg, and salt.  The lemon in the sauce--used mostly because I had excess lemon juice from making a pear tart--is a bit intense, but seems to mellow over time and with bland sweet potato.  At first I thought it was a mistake using lemon juice, but it quickly grew on me.

The paprika didn't really taste like parika, and considering
that it didn't turn the oil bright red either, it probably wasn't.
Maybe it was mace.

For two:

2 sweet potatoes (I used "Japanese yams" which have dark purple skin and light yellow flesh)

1 largish bok choy plant

some leftover roast chicken

sauce:

juice of 1/2 a lemon

1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil

1 egg yolk

1/3 cup chicken stock 

1 teaspoon paprika

1 teaspoon nutmeg

~1/2 teaspoon salt

for bok choy:

1 tablespoon cooking oil

2 teaspoons tamari

2 teaspoons mirin

Put sweet potatoes in oven, and heat to 375 F.  When sweet potatoes are soft all the way through (maybe 45 minutes), take them out.

Heat a large saucepan to medium-high heat.  Chop bok choy into biggish pieces, separating the leafy pieces from the stemmy pieces.  Coat saucepan with cooking oil, and fry the stemmy pieces for a few minutes, browning them a little.  Add leafy pieces, tamari, and mirin, and cover for another few minutes.  Uncover, stir, and reduce liquid (on the same medium high heat) for a minute or two so it begins to coat the bok choy.  Transfer bok choy into a bowl.  Remove from heat.

Whisk together egg yolk, lemon juice, and chicken stock.  When the saucepan has cooled down a bit, put on medium-low heat and add olive oil and paprika and nutmeg.  Stir a bit while the spices temper for a minute.  Add liquid mixture, whisking as you do so.  Take a tablespoon or so size piece of baked sweet potato, remove the skin, and mash it into the sauce with a fork.  Continue whisking.  Reduce the sauce for a few minutes.  If it's too thin add some more sweet potato, or flour, but it shouldn't bee too thick--more of a gravy consistency.  Remove from heat.

On a plate open a sweet potato up with a fork, and pour sauce over it and heated leftover chicken (microwave or bake on low heat in a covered container).  Serve with bok choy.