Cirque du Malaise

I have an imaginary spice company called SimpleBasic. Occasionally I feel inspired to make a batch of blended spices or salt/coffee scrub, and thanks to this great book that my brother Elia gave me years ago, I have endless recipes.

For Christmas this year, I made an industrial-sized vat of Sri Lankan curry powder and apportioned it out into shiny glass jars with handmade labels. I’m a low-rent version of Martha Stewart, basically. If you didn’t get one, I either have it in the trunk of my car and just haven’t seen you yet, or I am under the impression you don’t cook.

I think it came out pretty well. However, when I give it to people, I tend to get the awkward blank stare, because, in truth, most people don’t get as excited about spice in a jar as I do. Perhaps I need to open your mind and heart to the amazing potential of a good old fashioned Sri Lankan curry powder. You don’t have to be a culinary wizard. You just have to have an imagination.

Here are some of the ways that I personally use Sri Lankan curry (or any other curry, for that matter):

• On the suggestion of a talented Ayurvedic nutritionist friend, I splurged on some ghee (expensive clarified butter) and have been melting a spoonful or two to mix into basically everything I eat lately. Especially amazing to spruce up leftovers, you can add a splash of curry to the ghee before you pour it on. Spice-tastic.
• In soup. Yup, just stir it in. It’s that easy.
• In oatmeal or breakfast polenta. Crazy, I know.
• In baked things like cookies or muffins. Trust me.
• In sautees — vegetables etcetera.
• On baked root vegetables in conjunction with some sort of oil (ghee again, or coconut oil, or EVOO)
• On broiled fish. Yumsters.

In short, be courageous and adventurous of spirit with the stuff, and you can’t go wrong!

Incidentally, although you can keep spices for a real long time, in theory they are best if you use them within 6 months or something. And when spices are fresh, you can really smell the difference. So, use them.

Happy holidays my darlings.

Although I profess that summer is my favorite season, I secretly love winter. In Northern California, where I live, winter is the season of relentless, romantical rain; it's thus also the season of more napping, less exercising, constant cashmere scarves, cozy down sleeping bags, gratuitous novels, hot toddies, and gloomy days spent in the sanctuary of the library. And it's my favorite season for food.

I know it's technically not winter yet, but the general malaise of Halloween makes winter seem right around the corner. So tonight, I made squasharoni. Mainly because I liked the sound of the word "squasharoni."

This is one of those recipes loosely interpreted from a veggie cookbook from an East Coast hippie retreat center, so there are a lot of obscure condiments involved. If you don't happen to have one of them, or two or three, I think you could safely improvise without doing any major culinary damage.

Winter Squasharoni

• First, cook a bunch of pasta. Like, a whole box of it. Even though this is a "roni" recipe, I cheated and used some tubular pasta that struck my fancy at The Hole.
• While that's happening, laboriously chop up a winter squash. Butternut is nice. I dig kabocha. The thing about kabocha is, you can actually eat the skin, but for this pasta, I took it off anyway. Peeling and dicing a kabocha squash is a sublime form of zen torture. If I wasn't such a picky freak about freshness, I would probably just buy pre-cubed butternut squash like a normal person.
• In a cast-iron skillet, saute red onion in EVOO for a few minutes.
• Add the squash, a half cup of water, some salt, and maybe a handful of garden herbs (oregano, sage, thyme).
• Reduce heat, cover, let simmer until the squash is tender.
• Meanwhile, mix together: 1/3 cup tahini, 1 T miso paste, 1 T vinegar (preferably umeboshi), 1 t tamari.
• Once the squash mixture is ready, add this sauce to it, along with a handful of chopped walnuts and a dollop of really pricey chevre cheese that you splurged on because your life seems hollow and meaningless and cheese always makes that better.
• Drain the pasta and mix it into the rest.
• Sprinkle on top: panko bread crumbs (I have no idea what these are, but they are always enthusiastically and somewhat snobbishly recommended to me by my  grocerial advisor, who I trust implicitly) and shredded parmesan.
• Cook (right in that same cast iron skillet) in the oven at 375 for 20 minutes.

Oh and incidentally, this is another reason I love winter:

It's a pretty lovely little pad for holing up in.

There is no reason that anyone should ever get hung over from 3 glasses of wine. Unless, that is, one is completely allergic to wine and also suffers from a rare form of wine-amnesia that disables one from remembering that it is so every single time the opportunity comes up to drink wine.

Also, did someone rufie me last night? Seriously.

At any rate, I was fortunate enough today to stumble across the best hangover cure in the world. It worked like a charm, and all it required was a simple 3-step process:

1. Take one of every single kind of medicine you have in the house, including any pills, fizzy tablets, essential oils, herbal teas, coconut products, and unlabeled homemade tinctures.
2. Make the following soup.
3. After you eat the soup, sleep for the entire rest of the day.

Voila! You are guaranteed to feel better by at least the next day. Maybe the day after, in some extreme cases.

By the way, this recipe was altered from one I took from an old Moosewood cookbook I have lying around. So, I'm not really that much of a soup genius. But it sure was good.

Hangover Cure Soup

Put all of this stuff in a pot and bring it to a boil:

• 6-8 cups of homemade chicken stock, or you can use veggie stock or bouillon or even water is just fine, cuz I recognize that not everyone in the world has time to make chicken stock from scratch once a week like I do.
• A cup of dried lentils (I used black, recipe called for red, probably doesn't matter at all)
• A chopped up onion
• Nine, count them NINE, peeled but whole garlic cloves
• A few chopped potatoes (I used this psychedelic purple whirly ones I picked up at the farmers market last week)

Cover, turn it down to a simmer, and cook until the potatoes are soft, which takes like 10-15.

In the meanwhile, heat up some vegetable oil in a small saucepan, and when it's hot (but not smoking) stir in a T of cumin, 1/2 tsp of turmeric, and a tsp of salt. Stir if for about 3 minutes, until it smells real nice. Let it cool down a bit, then stir it into the soup, along with a handful of cilantro (that's optional of course for all you cilantro haters).

Very last thing: puree it with your immersion blender (best kitchen utensil ever, especially if you're into soup and peanut butter cookies) or in your regular blender.

Sip up! A nice accompaniment to alka seltzer.

I was a vegetarian for many years and then went even longer without eating chicken. If pressed, I would say that chicken is "disgusting" and that mine wasn't necessarily an ethical choice, although once one knows anything about the factory farming situation in this country it's tough to rationalize sticking a Chicken McNugget down one's throat. (I love you Tom!)

On the other hand, I've always been a big fan of acupuncture and have no less than three amazing acupuncturists that I see for various reasons. (Caylie See is super talented and like a dose of mom; Rebecca Rapaport Ness is one of the most nurturing people I've ever met and knows her yucky Chinese herbs; Andrew Castellanos is a true healer and gives an amazing massage.) One of the things that acupuncturists consistently seem to recommend is chicken broth for whatever ails you. I once asked Caylie if I could use vegetable broth instead, and she said, quite poetically, "No."

Luckily, a few months ago I discovered a new, summer-only farmers market in my neighborhood in Mill Valley. It's tiny—like ten vendors—but that's pretty much all you need at a local farmers market. One of the consistent vendors is a rotisserie chicken truck. The first time I walked by it, the smell was intoxicating. I cautiously approached.

Turns out, this chicken vendor uses happy chickens. Not just "free range," which means basically nothing in chicken industry parlance, but chickens that actually run around on a farm in nearby Sonoma and live out their lives in relative liberation from suffering. Now, I can't be absolutely sure of this without having seen it with my own eyes, but I grilled him quite extensively and I'm pretty confident that, if I'm going to eat chicken, this is the chicken to eat.

So now I have a new ritual. Every Tuesday night, I walk to the farmers market and buy a half a rotisserie chicken and a side of rosemary potatoes. (They sit in the tray at the bottom of the rotisserie with chicken fat dripping on them all day. Holy hell yum.) Then, I come home and strip the chicken for dinner. The scrap—-the "carcass," if you will—goes in a big pot... and I make a broth.

The broth is the real goal of this operation. It's just about the most wholesome-tasting concoction ever, and so good for you too. Not just because of its actual nutritional components, but because there is something really satisfying about making stock from scratch. It makes me feel like I'm on the Maggie B. and I'm taking supreme holy care of myself (and my imaginary little brother James). Also, it makes the house smell amazing, and is a great way to get rid of wilting vegetables and the surplus of herbs from my garden. So, here's how it goes, more or less:

Chicken Broth, from scratch:

• Throw ALL the scraps of chicken—skin, bones, all the gnarly parts-into a pot.
• Some assortment of the following vegetables, cut into big chunks: onion, potato, carrot, other root veggies. You don't have to peel them or clean them up; just rinse them.
• Heavy on the garlic and/or ginger root (the latter is particularly healthy for ya)
• An entire bunch of parsley or cilantro
• A handful of peppercorns (or ground pepper if that's what you have)
• A hunk of sea salt
• Whatever fresh herbs you have handy, or dried will do too—rosemary, thyme, oregano and sage are my usual suspects.
• Fill it up with water.
• Bring it to a boil.
• Turn it down to medium-ish flame and let it simmer for the rest of the evening.

The exact amount of time doesn't really matter, but the longer you simmer it for, the stronger the broth gets and the less of it you'll end up with. I usually keep it on the flame until the vegetables have lost all their luster and the broth has a nice fatty sheen to it.

Then, you simply drain away the broth into a bowl, compost the solid parts, and let it cool. You can freeze it for soups later on, or what I love to do is transfer the stock back into a pot and put it in the fridge for tomorrow, when I take it back out and cook up some arborio rice, and have it with the leftover chicken. SO healthy!

The beforemath

The cake batter

Praying and hoping and hoping and praying

Emergency cool-down in the fridge

Lemon curd (better than it sounds)

Cream cheese and butter frosting

My mother, Judith, is an amazing cook. Not just in the way that most people's moms are amazing cooks, but in the way that she has been in the restaurant business her entire adult life and knows how to make at least 300 kinds of cheesecake without a recipe, for starters.

I am really good at cooking soup, cheesetoast, and reheated tamales. That's pretty much my whole kitchen repertoire. Baking terrifies me. It's so scientific and it seems like there is some magic to it that you have to be born knowing about. I didn't get that gene.

In fact, one of my first memories is of experimenting with my Holly Hobbie oven in an attempt to emulate Judith and bake yummy things. After one particularly revolting incident, I stopped eating eggs for about twenty-five years. If I use my imagination, I can still summon up the taste of those horrifying "muffins", and the bile threatens to rise in my throat.

So for Anna Hughes's birthday, I got this idea in my head that I would bake her a cake. I thought I would take "an hour or two" out of my busy work day and whip up something incredibly delicious and beautiful and perfect, something Tartine-esque. I asked Judith to email me a recipe for lemon cake.

Judith doesn't write her recipes down. She doesn't need to, because she's one of those laidback cooks that uses confidence and intuition as her main skillsets when baking incredibly complicated things. It was a pain for her to try to translate her genius onto paper, but she acquiesced.

After critiquing all of her typos and asking her if she had been having a stroke when she typed that out, I had to call her about a brillion times with questions. For us Virgo artists, little details like WHAT TEMPERATURE DOES THE OVEN NEED TO BE ON are sticking points that can really derail us. Judith was definitely beginning to regret the whole "sure, I'll help you bake a cake" attitude on about the fifth call, when I started crying because I couldn't find lemons for less than a dollar each—and I needed about twenty. Apparently there is some sort of lemon drought going on in the world, according to Judith. Tell that to my neighbors, who have 400 on their tree next door.

Judith suggested that I simply buy faux lemon juice at Safeway. I reacted like she had told me to make out with a leper. Luckily, the third store I visited was having a sale on lemons. They must have gotten them from my neighbor.

So here's how long it took me to shop for and cook this cake: SIX HOURS. Guess how long it took us to eat it? About ten minutes. It was worth it. It was the most delicious, endearing, so-ugly-only-a-mother-could-love-it cake the world has ever seen (for a brief ten minutes).

And it didn't even taste like panic.

Here's a PDF of the recipe, if you are brave. It's not for the faint of heart!

By request, the recipe for the soup I made this weekend. Originally from one of my old veggie Moosewood cookbooks I've had forever, they call it East African Groundnut Stew. I altered it and call it Mill Valley Sequester Stew.

This picture has nothing to do with this soup. But I happened to take a lovely walk to Tennessee Beach today and climbed up into this crag on the hill. It was kind of a thrilling adventure and I got nice and dirty.

This weekend was all about the sequester. Since I have been dating myself (regarding The Artist's Way), I've been finding myself spending more and more time alone. It would be worrying me, if I wasn't secretly enjoying it so much.

What's the word for when you don't like people?

Oh yeah, misanthrope.

Anyway, I made this soup last night. It was the perfect mix of grounding (hmm, maybe that's why they call it GROUNDnut), slightly sweet, slightly spicy, and full of peanut butter.

I live for peanut butter. Sorry snobby haters; it's better than almond butter. It just is. And machine-smooshing your own peanut butter at The Hole is a rather satisfying experience.

Sequester Stew:

• Sauté a bunch of chopped onions (I used local organic white onions) and a few chopped up stalks of celery in EVOO for about 10 minutes so they are nice and loose.
• Add a chopped white potato and sauté some more.
• Stir in 2 TBL of garam masala (it's a sweet and spicy Indian mix you can get at Boulettes Larder in the Ferry Building, or substitute it with any curry you have around).
• Add a pinch of cayenne powder.
• Add a cup of raw brown rice, 6 cups of boiling water, a healthy pinch of salt, and a can of whole tomatoes (without any added seasoning).
• Cover, boil, then turn it down and let it simmer for about 45, until the rice is done.
• Towards the end, throw in a bunch of chopped up dino kale.
• Stir in a half cup of peanut butter, a dash of maple syrup (of course), and the juice of a lime.

So good.

My Friday night ritual is to go to Urban Dharma for my Buddhist sangha and meditation fix.

In reality, this actually happens about 3 out of every 4 Fridays. And each time I go, no matter how much I don't feel like getting on that bus and making it happen, I am always glad I rallied, and I always walk away with a slice of insight that makes some sort of an impact on me.

The exceptional 4th Friday is the one I really enjoy though. That's when I blow off Urban Dharma just because I don't feel like it. Maybe because I had to get up early, and it's been raining all day, and I'm hungry, and the house is cozy, and hell, I'm not the boss of me.

On those nights, I willfully absolve myself of guilt, decide that I'm probably way too lazy to be a Buddhist anyway, and I stay home.

I stay home, and I cook myself some soup (from scratch, with fresh organic ingredients—is there really anything more soulful than fresh homemade soup?). Maybe I indulge in some contraband ice cream (my home is vegan, but I'm not), and I crawl into bed at about 8 in the pm with my laptop and some really bad internet television.

Last night was such a night. I made the soup of all hearty, comforting winter soups. I can't take credit for this one. My friend Anna gave me the recipe. I hope she doesn't mind me sharing it. Just to give her due props, I'm talking about Anna Hughes, yoga teacher extraordinaire, mom to beautiful Juniper, all around lovely person, and gifted cook. Thank you, Anna!

Soulful Winter Squash & Bean Soup

• Sauté a diced onion in some EVOO until soft
• Add a dose of chopped garlic and ginger (you're going to add more in a bit) and sauté for a few more moments (you have to stir constantly when you're cooking garlic because it's fussy and likes to burn)
• Add 8 cups of stock (I use veggie bouillon or sometimes I make stock from scratch)
• Add 1 butternut squash, peeled and diced small (Incidentally, nothing makes you feel present like cutting up a butternut squash. You have to really pay attention or you will lose a finger.)
• Bring to a boil and then lower slightly to simmer and cook for a bit
• Add some more chopped garlic and ginger, 2 cans of black eyed peas, juice from a half a squeezed lemon, a teeny tiny dash of apple cider vinegar, a half teaspoon of a nice warm spice (I use a sweet curry I made, but cinnamon is a nice choice too), fresh ground pepper and perhaps some salt to taste (or, if you have it around, Bragg's liquid aminos are even better)
• Let it all simmer until the squash is soft
• Stir in a healthy dose of chopped organic spinach
• Once you've got it in a bowl, stir in a dollop of white miso paste (This is optional because miso isn't something everyone has lying around, but if you do have it, it makes any soup better. The trick is to not cook it, so it always gets added after to keep the good stuff in it alive.)
• A pinch of chopped cilantro to garnish (Incidentally, the word "garnish" to me is the same thing as saying "don't bother, it's just for decoration", but in this case, the cilantro makes the flavor.)

If creating and eating this soup does not make you a better person, I don't know what will!

Thanks Anna!

(For those of you that aren't up on your latest DSM manual, S.A.D. stands for 'Seasonal Affective Disorder'. I have that, for sure. Most seasons.)

There is nothing as comforting as making soup on a gloomy Fall day. I think I'm the only person I've ever met whose least favorite season is Autumn. Days getting shorter and chillier, flip flop season over, and the looming threat of depressing holidays.... never quite got what there is to love about this time of year. I worship hot tea and cozy scarves as much as the next person, but living in San Francisco, they are a year-round thing.

Here's what's not depressing: walking to the farmers market, buying fresh, local, organic veggies and seasonal heirloom beans, and cooking up a big ol' vat of hot, nutritious soup.

My favorite things about soup:

1. You can eat it out of a bowl.
2. It lasts for days on the stovetop.
3. It's pretty hard to fuck up.
4. It reminds me of one of my favorite children's books, The Maggie B. (About a girl and her little brother who live on a boat and have their own garden, toucan and everything else they could possibly need. When I was growing up, I used to pretend that my trundle bed was the Maggie B. and refuse to get out of it.)

Today I went to the San Rafael farmers market with Bria, Joseph and Anna and got the ingredients for minestrone soup. Here's a really basic, pretty-much-made-up recipe that I want to share. You can, of course, substitute anything you want for these things.

Directions and Ingredients:

• Sauté fresh red onion bulbs, chopped really fine, in EVOO until they're clear.
• Add minced garlic and a jalapeno for about another 30 seconds.
• Add chopped carrots and potatoes.
• Add chopped plum tomatoes.
• Add some spices. I used salt, thyme and basil.
• A can of crushed tomatoes (or you can use whole tomatoes and crush them).
• A whole lotta stock. I used beef-flavored Better Than Bouillon dissolved in boiling water. You can also get fresh stock, make your own stock or just use regular bouillon.
• Fresh-shelled cranberry beans. These are in season (at least in California) right now and are a specialty heirloom bean. Much more nutritive value than canned beans. And you're supporting your local farmer!
• Boil it, then turn it down and let it simmer for a long time. Like, maybe an hour.
• At some point during this time, add chopped zucchini and small pieces of kale.
• At the very end, sauté some beef sausage and add it to the soup.

My mom is a chef, so she is probably cringing reading my hack directions. Judith, feel free to chime in here and correct me!

I made the most delicious, savory soup in the universe tonight. From scratch, without a recipe, while operating on a few wee hours of what barely passed for sleep. And a lot of crankiness. Let's just say that today has not been my favorite day. This soup redeemed it, in the end.

Let me just pause for a moment and say that I am not a good cook. My parents are both chefs; I guess it's a recessive gene. Ordinarily, I have to focus in sublime silence for hours on end in an otherwise human-free kitchen in order to follow even the simplest recipe. I make cooking look more complicated than brain surgery: everything has to be prepped beforehand, in tidy little bowls and spoonfuls, and then I start cooking. one. thing. at. a. time.

Before I discovered the revelation of vegan cooking and organic vegetable box delivery (stay tuned for my to-be-award-winning maple syrup cookbook, coming soon), my culinary claim to fame was that I could make a mean toast.

Lately though, I've gained a little confidence in the old kitchen. Dare I say, I'm developing a skill. I like to think of it as a skill that will make me a really good housewife someday, god willing.

And if I can do it, you can do it too. This one took me about a half hour and seriously cured my self-pity blues.

• In a big soup pot, sauté finely chopped onion, garlic and a daunting amount of ginger in olive oil for a few minutes
• Add some chopped celery and a few handfuls of quinoa
• Stir the whole mix for 5 minutes or so to let the quinoa lightly toast
• Add about a half a pot of water (helps if the water is boiling in a kettle beforehand so you don't lose your momentum)
• A spoonful of bouillon. I use "Better Than Bouillion". Sounds gay, tastes salty. Salty is good, in my book.
• Let it boil, then turn it down to simmer for a while. Let's say twenty minutes.
• Somewhere during this time, add a bunch of chopped kale. If you use organic kale straight from the farm, like me, you can obsessively search and destroy all unwelcome critters for a sociopathically long time before actually adding the kale to the soup. And, if you do find any of those creepy little bastards, you can then decide, as I often do (but not tonight, thank god) that you really weren't in the mood for kale anyway.
• Cook it a little longer.
• Once the quinoa is done (it kind of floats to the surface, fattens up and splits apart), take it off the heat and stir in a big whopping spoonful of miso.

Freaking yum. I feel better.