Pantry Cleanse II: Quinoa and Kidney Beans

There are two things lurking in my pantry that have become staples in the last two weeks. I always cooked and ate them separately--quinoa as a kind of hot grain salad, and kidney beans as a thick soup. Today I decided to make a meal of combining the two.

This being a "pantry cleanse" (a term I've lifted from "life, in recipes"), all of the ingredients are incidental. Each has a particular history of how it ended up in the kitchen. Because my father has a tendency to buy food as if we are preparing for the end times, we have an entire case of canned kidney beans, and a giant bag of quinoa. There are those things that I habitually buy and see as necessities: onions, cooking oil, salt, chili powder. I bought the green onions because they were on sale and I thought they might encourage me to improvise. My brother and I got a yellow beet and carrots for a salad some time ago. I don’t remember why we had mushrooms and jalapenos--for some other meal. Inexplicably we have what to me is an enormous quantity of saffron. I really don’t know what to do with it. I put it in all sorts of things, thinking that I’ll taste it, but I don’t. Its subtle flavor eludes me. In imitation of some kind of aromatic rice dish, I used it in the quinoa, along with some cloves.

Incidental food is a topic that I have talked too much about, but I think insufficiently. Sure, there are recipes, like this one, that come about incidentally. But what I want to talk about is how it’s a deceiving accident of idiom that one makes food. What I want to say amounts, basically, to an “in Soviet Russia” joke: food makes you! There are several reasons for this. As much as the ingredient lists of some recipes would have us believe supermarkets are infinities of choice, there are in fact items that are not available. Foods are varying levels of affordable in different places. We are habituated to certain kinds of foods and preparation methods. And most importantly, food is woven into our social lives, our families, and our psychology. Maybe your mother tries to dictate what you eat. You may not necessary follow all or even any of her commands, but nonetheless your gustatory life becomes defined by them, by her. Maybe you live with your grandmother, and she only has certain scare items in the kitchen. Maybe your crazy landlord lives and sleeps in the kitchen, and you want to limit your time there as much as possible. Maybe you live at home with your father who impulsively buys an assortment of food that you feel compelled to use before it perishes. And maybe you’re a cheapskate and want to eat as much of the odd items laying around the kitchen as possible, buying only very little.

Nigella Lawson talks about culinary agency with a turn of phrase that I like, “greedy opportunism.” Of course there’s more than a little contrivance in her usage. Greedy opportunism is the process of gadding about in her shining kitchen picking out gourmet goodies that just happened to find their way there, and relishing some new use for them. It is as if she has an infestation of pantry-stocking gremlins. But while it is a class-charged way to frame her show, it’s also one way that improvisation in cooking happens: things you don’t necessarily have a planned use for will end up in your kitchen; use them somehow. At least half of what I cook is through greedy opportunism. Although I must admit that only rarely is it greedy.

Beans

2 12oz cans kidney beans

2/3 cup water

1 onion

4 mushrooms

1/2 carrot

1/4 yellow beet

1 clove garlic

1/2 jalapeno

1 tablespoon cooking oil

1/2 teaspoon chili powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

Chop onion 1cm square. Cut mushrooms in half and then slice finely. Julienne carrot into 1/2 inch long pieces. Chop beet, garlic, and jalapeno half finely. Fry all vegetables in cooking oil in a large saucepan on medium heat. Add salt and chili powder. Sautee for about twenty minutes, stirring every few minutes. Don't stir more often because the mushrooms won't brown. Stir in kidney beans and water. Bring to a boil and then remove from heat.

Please, please give me something
better to do with saffron.

Quinoa

1 cup quinoa

2 cups water
1/4 lemon

1/3 cup chopped green onions

1/4 teaspoon saffron threads

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon powdered cloves or 4 whole cloves

Combine quinoa and water in a medium pot and and bring to a boil, covered. Remove from heat and add lemon quarter, green onions, saffron threads, salt, and cloves. Cover and simmer on medium-low heat until all the quinoa has absorbed all the water. Remove from heat, add salt, and mix to disperse seasonings.

This

I am sugar high on this.  No, there is no photo.  It feels like decadence despite having stood impatiently over the little pan waiting for the honey to burn just so.  It's a Nigellaesque decadence: culinary labour as pleasure in itself.  I'll have to wash the dishes later, of course.  For now I can sit in bed spooning pieces of crushingly sweet pear and licking the spoon of darkened, ginger-perfumed honey.  Who needs crust?  Small pieces.

Thanksgiving is not a Great Art

This being a cooking blog, some sort of Thanksgiving post is probably expected. I was going to do one, actually, as I was planning on making pear-ginger tarte tatin. But the pears weren't ripe yet, so I made sweet potato pies again. The pies were good, but was there really anything to say about them? The scope of this blog has mostly only included deliberate experiments (or trying new recipes), and sometimes brief recipes of particularly good improvisations. But in fact "particularly good" is not at all the criterion for which improvised dishes or meals get written here and which don't. There are no criteria really, I just post when I feel like it. Some of the most well-remembered meals, usually those that were made to feed to my family, I never write down at all.

How are these statements connected?
"I'm very nervous when people talk about it as a great art."
"There's a lot to be said for mindless repetitive activity."
"It does not interest me if I'm not feeding people."
Well, Nigella Lawson said all of them. In the same interview she said she was unfazed "when How to Be a Domestic Goddess came out and I was railed against for being, you know, a traitor to the sisterhood, despite the fact that it was so obviously ironic."  Apparently Nigella expects we all share her level of self-consciousness in the nostalgia for domesticity she purveys.

Her story of how she started: when she was working as a journalist, she found space to think in the repetitive activities of cooking.  Making food, rather than a necessity, was in her story a psychological tool and a lifestyle choice.  Instead of feeding people because she's a housewife, she seems to self-consciously enjoy the fantasies that surrounded housewifery.  But obviously this is not the selfless fantasy of classic femininity.  One cooks for the pleasure of feeding, including the pleasure of feeding oneself.  One returns from an exhausting night of partying to make oneself bread pudding in the semidarkness of one's posh kitchen, and one eats it, alone, in bed.  If one is Nigella Lawson, one stages all this on camera and, I imagine, laughs about it.  What makes her so passionate about food, she is asked?  "I'm greedy."

This blog, on the other hand, is more about curiosity than greed or giving.  Although in trying new techniques and recipes, I often take part in a bit of both these pleasures.