Upside-Down Pear

What to do with two smallish lamb shanks and two slightly-aged carrots? Why, make the smallest stew ever — just two servings.

• 2 small lamb shanks, meat cut from the bone & cubed (about 2 handfuls meat)
• 2 carrots, chopped
• 3 shallots, chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 cup red wine
• 1 cup water
• extra-virgin olive oil
• 2 bay leaves
• salt, black pepper, and parsley to taste

Sautee the shallots and garlic in the olive oil until translucent. Add the carrots. Add the lamb and brown well all over. Pour in the wine and water, add the bay leaves. Simmer over low heat until most of the liquid is gone and the lamb is tender (about 2-3 hours). Add salt, pepper, & parsley to taste.

Serve over rice or noodles, or with good crusty bread.

In retrospect, I should’ve put the shank bones in to cook, for the gelatin. Next time!

My fascination with fried eggs should come as no surprise. While looking for something entirely different in my copy of Cradle of Flavor, I found a recipe for Telur Mata Sapi Bumbu — Indonesian Fried Eggs. These eggs are fried in hot oil, then topped with potent aromatics: garlic, shallots, chiles, and ginger.

I aim to try them soon. Until then, here’s the recipe, to tide you over:

• 3 tbsp peanut oil
• 3 eggs
• kosher salt
• 3 cloves garlic, sliced thin
• 2 shallots, sliced thin
• 2-3 fresh chiles (the original recipe calls for Hollands, Fresnos, or cayennes; I don’t see why jalapenos won’t suit just as well
• 1 thumb-sized piece fresh ginger, peeled and cut into matchsticks
• 1 tsp palm, cider, or rice vinegar

Heat the oil in a skillet over medium heat. When hot, crack an egg into it (when I make eggs in hot oil, I crack the eggs into small bowls and then tip them in from the bowls — less chance of splatter or of shell ending up in the oil). Season the top of the egg with salt. When the white turns brown & crispy at the edges, flip gently and cook until the yolk is just set (about 1 min).

Remove fried egg with slotted spatula, set aside, and fry remaining eggs in same manner. (I would probably use a little more oil and a larger skillet and cook all the eggs at once.)

Let the oil cool slightly, then place over medium-low heat. Add the aromatics and stir until garlic and onions are just translucent. Remove aromatics with slotted spatula and place over eggs.

The book suggests serving these with rice or with a number of other recipes found in the book. It also says they work well with a nice salad & crusty bread, or, if you like a spicy breakfast, as breakfast.

Me? I like a spicy breakfast — but I’m currently out of hot peppers. I shall have to remedy that as soon as possible.

Last night, I made broiled head-on chili shrimp, Chinese noodles, and vegetable stir-fry for dinner. The stir-fry was simple — just onions, bok choy, oyster mushrooms, and some seasonings — but delicious. We had noodles and some stir-fry left over, and it occurred to me that it might make a good breakfast, paired with an egg somehow.

Scramble the egg and go frittata-style? Scramble it and fry up like pad thai? Egg on the side? Egg over top?

I settled on a variant of the Greek fried egg: 1/4 c. olive oil in my big skillet, and an egg for each of us in that. It seemed to me that the crisp brown edges and silky-smooth middles of these eggs would compliment the leftovers well.

As for the leftovers themselves, I warmed them in the microwave, then added them to a pan where I’d sauteed some extra onion in chili oil, and tossed to coat. Once they were thoroughly warmed, I divided them into two shallow bowls, popped the fried eggs on top, and dressed them with a sprinkle of soy sauce and a dash of chili oil.

They were hot and crisp and fresh-tasting, with just enough spice to be interesting.

Nat rated it “A+! Would eat again!” — and that’s good enough for me.

One of my pets has been ill, and had to be hospitalized somewhere quite a ways from my home. On the upside, I got to see what it would be like to commute from a suburb every day. On the downside, we ate out a lot.

Which meant that we both ended up craving some decent vegetables — we tend to eat a lot of veggies, and restaurants generally don’t cut it in that area.

So, tonight, I made a nice light salad for dinner.

Highly Modifiable Green Bean Salad

• about 3-4 handfuls fresh green beans, cut up & blanched
• about 1/4 to 1/3 red onion, sliced thin
• some sweet or hot pickled peppers (I used Peppadews), chopped
• salt & pepper, to taste
• extra virgin olive oil, to taste
• red wine vinegar
• 1 regular-size can tuna

Mix together.

It’s one of those recipes easily modified for taste: take out the peppers, add olives. Throw some mustard in there, if you like. Don’t eat fish? Put in hard-boiled egg or white beans or thoroughly cooked French lentils instead. Sliced fennel? Crumbled crisp bacon? Why the heck not? Put some good-quality cheese chunks on the side (I highly recommend this). Hate green beans? Well…once you replace those, it’s just a Highly Modifiable Salad, not a Highly Modifiable Green Bean Salad. But I suppose you could put some lettuce in there, if you’ve got your heart set on it.

There are a million variants of warm spinach dip floating around, but when I was looking for one earlier today, none of them suited what I had in the house. So I made one up.

• about 1/2 cup of grated parmesan cheese
• a big spoonful of sour cream, maybe 1/4 - 1/3 cup or so
• a few tbsp mayonnaise
• some onion, minced
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• maybe a tsp of the Penzey’s Chip & Dip seasoning a friend got me
• maybe a tsp of the Penzey’s Fox Point seasoning the same friend got me
• about 1/2 cup of frozen, thawed, drained, squeezed dry spinach

Mix everything together and put in small oven-proof casserole. This ends up making a bit less than 2 cups of dip, so I put it into my 14 oz Le Creuset Petite Pear (a gift from the same friend who gave me the Chip & Dip and Fox Point…hm).

Bake at 350F for ~45 min, until nice & hot. Serve with crudite.

Nat and I decided, rather spur-of-the-moment, to throw a Halloween Feast. Since we had this idea on October 31st, we actually scheduled it for November 4th, to give us time to execute our cunning plan.

What we ended up serving:

• hummus, baba ganouj, eggplant dip, & pita
• olives, marinated mushrooms, and artichokes
• cookies
• leftover Halloween candy
• sweet potato pie
• cheese board & crackers
• dry sausages
• vegetarian lasagna
• dijon chicken
• cornbread
• roast chicken
• roast salmon
• portobella caps
• roasted potatoes
• asparagus
• roasted butternut squash
• apples
• apple crumble
• beer-boiled shrimp with cocktail sauce
• penne in red sauce

I intended to make my famous spicy spinach, but completely forgot. It’s just as well; there was more than enough food. We’re still making our way through the leftovers. I also made roasted garlic, but forgot to put it out…well, I’m sure I can find a way to use that up, as well.

The cold weather and our new large freezer are what really made this possible — we had enough cold places to store things, so we could do a lot of the preparation beforehand.

Our generous guests brought along desserts and plenty of drinks; I think we ended up with more wine at the end of the party than at the beginning — oh well, it’s an excuse to throw another, isn’t it? Some of the desserts brought were cranberry-walnut bread, caramel apple pie, dark chocolate raspberry truffles, chocolate cake, and probably other items I am forgetting. All in all, it was a lovely spread….

I have a bad habit of making up a dish as I go along, and then forgetting what I did before I write things down. I’m sure I’d have more luck remembering what I did if I got around to the writing before a week or so has elasped.

Tonight, I am eating a soup I made last week to clear up room in my refrigerator. I am not really certain anymore what I put into it. Er.

What I remember: 1 pie pumpkin, roasted and chopped; 1 small squash of some kind, roasted and chopped; a stray tomato that was sitting on my counter, chopped and mostly de-seeded; some chicken broth; some smoked paprika; some cumin; I think some rosemary; a ton of pepper; leeks, chopped; extra-virgin olive oil ; not sure about garlic.

When I served it tonight, I mixed a little cream into each bowl (less than a teaspoon per bowl) and put in some fried cubes of pancetta for a little kick.

It was delicious, warm and comforting on a cold wet day. I just hope I’ll ever be able to replicate it.

I have long had a fondness for the small dishes of many cuisines. I cut my teeth — almost literally –on the American bar & grill appetizers, which to this day I enjoy as meals on their own. Show me a tapas restaurant and I’m there, with bells on. And then there are mezethes, more commonly known in the US by the name of the singular, meze. Just out of college, already a fan of the “meze platter” or “mezza platter” from various Greek and Middle Eastern restaurants around me, I found a few brands of jarred mezethes — “eggplant dip”, “roasted red pepper meze”, “grilled vegetable appetizer”, and so on.

Desperate to use up the bounty of my garden and farm box, I turned to mezethes (or their close relations). A friend had recently made Ina Garten’s Roasted Eggplant Spread, and I had fond memories of roasted red pepper meze, so I decided that’s what I’d make (only I didn’t have red peppers. A small detail). It’s hard to roast in the summertime when you have no air conditioning, but this morning was cool and I was working from home, so could make this in-between projects.

I gathered up all the peppers I had — many! of several varieties, ranging from hot to sweet — and roasted them in a 450F oven for about 20 minutes, turning them after 10 minutes. I put the veggies for the Garten recipe into the oven at that 10 minute mark, then turned it down to 400 for another 20 minutes after the peppers came out.

Meanwhile, I cooked chopped fresh tomatoes and diced onions on the stove until the tomatoes broke down, then added minced garlic. This would be the base of the pepper meze.

When the peppers came out, I set three aside for the Garten recipe — it calls for two red bell peppers, and red bells are pretty large. I figured three of my peppers would be about right; I used one small bell pepper and two of a slightly spicy mystery variety (similar to Hungarian Wax peppers) that came out of my garden.

The rest I peeled, seeded, and chopped. I added them to the pan with the meze base, spooned in a little canned crushed tomato for extra tomato goodness, splashed in maybe a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar, and shoved it all over a low burner for about half an hour.

I then peeled, seeded, and chopped the peppers for the Garten recipe and put them, the roasted eggplant, and some more canned crushed tomatoes (I don’t keep tomato paste around) into my food processor.

Roasted Pepper Meze

• mixed hot & sweet peppers, about 2lbs
• 2-3 medium/large tomatoes (flavorful meaty tomatoes preferred!)
• 1/2 large white onion
• 4 cloves garlic
• extra-virgin olive oil
• a few big spoons of canned crushed tomatoes (or else maybe a small spoon of tomato paste, or some spaghetti sauce if that’s what you have around, but not ketchup because that would taste funny)
• balsamic vinegar
• salt (I use kosher salt) and pepper

Wash peppers and roast, whole, in 450F oven for 20 minutes, turning once. (Peppers should be browned or blackened on the outside.)

While the peppers are roasting, chop tomatoes and squeeze out the gooey bits. Put them in a hot pan with a few tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil and some kosher salt. Chop the onions and add them to the pan, as well. Let cook over low heat until the tomatoes are soft and have broken down a bit (like they are trying to be sauce). Mince the garlic and toss it in the pan at this stage, and turn off the heat.

By now the peppers should be out of the oven. Let them cool down until you can easily handle them. Peel them & remove the seeds (you should be able to just pull off the skins and rip open the pepper and slide the seeds out. Very messy and a bit slimy, but easy). Chop them up and toss them into the pan, along with the canned crushed tomatoes and a splash of balsamic vinegar.

Cook over low heat for about 30 minutes. Taste & adjust salt & pepper until it’s how you like it!

Serve on toast, crackers, pita, eggs….

We ate both of these with toast and pieces of cheese for dinner. They’re like concentrated late summer, hot and smoky-sweet.

I was looking around through my draft posts, the ones that I never published here, and found this:

Recently, I made a delicious dinner: bay scallops in red pepper butter, cooked in ramekins and served up with dry-seared asparagus. I had half of the recipe left over: 4 ramekins full of scallops and shallots, butter and hot pepper and bread crumbs.

In my fridge, I had fresh egg lasagne noodles, twice as wide as the dried versions.

I carefully picked out the large chunks of butter, leaving behind the peppers and shallots, and wrapped the leftovers gently in cooked noodles (2 ramekins to a noodle), topped it all with vodka sauce, and slid it into the oven for about 10 minutes.

The leftovers, thus transformed, passed through delicious into sublime: melting on the tongue, the shallots tender, the scallops sweet and delicate against the noodle in a way they had not been standing alone.

Dry-seared asparagus, almost impossible to improve on, again provided the accompaniment. What better?

I had another experience like this just this past week. We’d grilled a white-wine-and-herb marinated half-chicken, and had the tender, smoky leftovers in the fridge, along with leftover grilled cherry tomatoes (three varieties - grape tomatoes from our farm box, and Red Currants and Yellow Pears from our garden). We shredded the chicken from the bone, and reheated it and the tomatoes in our trusty microwave. On the stove, I made penne and heated cream with some salt and pepper.

When the penne was ready, I drained it and put it back in the pot, tossed in the chicken, tomatoes, and cream, and stirred it all about before plating it and topping with some freshly grated Parm. Marvelous! (And enough left over for two lunches, making three meals out of that half-chicken.)

Tonight is rugby practice, and I’m already tired; I didn’t sleep well and today I had too much to think about. All I want to do is stay home and cook things I found in my farm share box.

I’ve got fresh sweet corn, beets, a melon, the first of the winter squashes, a lot of tomatoes. Yesterday, I took the potatoes and dill from last week’s box and made a warm potato salad:

Warm Potato Salad
Boil up some new potatoes. Let them cool slightly, and cube them.

Add diced red onion, chopped fresh dill, and a crumbled strip of crisp bacon. Add some sour cream, some mayo, and some dijon mustard, mix it up, and taste it. Add some salt, some black pepper, and some cayenne pepper to taste.

Eat warm (or cold!)

Right now, I’m making an autumnal dish out of the squash — it’s in the oven, cubed and mixed with butter, maple syrup, raisins, and dried cranberries. I am not much for sweets but this is one of my all-time favorite dishes. I want to roast some of my beets and perhaps pickle the rest; I want to eat up all six ears of my sweet corn RIGHT NOW. Instead, I will tell you what I did with last week’s sweet corn: I grilled it up, ate some right off, and turned the rest into roasted corn salsa.

Roasted Corn Salsa
Scrape the kernels from two leftover ears of grilled or roasted corn. Dice 1/2 a large red onion and 1 or 2 medium tomatoes, discarding the runny bits of the tomatoes. In a bowl with plenty of room for mixing, combine the veggies with the juice of 1 lime and a little olive oil. Taste, and add to taste: salt, black pepper, cilantro leaves (dried or fresh), and cayenne. Let meld at least 1 day in the fridge before eating.

Lately, I’ve had two baking failures. One: I made this zucchini bread recipe. It came out VERY strangely indeed, and tasted strongly of baking soda. Two: I made rhubarb crumble and forgot to turn the timer on, so it burned up dreadfully. I am guessing that is the last rhubarb of the season, too — and one of my favorite easy recipes.

Rhubarb Crumble Pie

• 1 bunch rhubarb
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup lightly packed brown sugar
• 4 oz. (1/2 stick) butter
• 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
• pinch salt

Preheat the oven to 400°F.

Remove any leaves from rhubarb. Wash & cut into 1-inch chunks, and place in a 9″ or 10″ pie pan.

Mix together the flour, sugars, and salt. Melt the butter and stir into the flour/sugar mixture until you get a big crumbly mess.

Cover the rhubarb with the crumble mixture. Bake for 35 minutes, or until the top is brown & crisp and the juices all bubbly.

Serve warm or cold! Keeps a bit over a week, covered, in the fridge.

Now, onto the Greek fried eggs. This morning, I minced a clove of garlic and divided it into our two bowls; I kept it pushed to the side so that I could put the egg next to it & the hot oil would pour directly onto it and sizzle it up.

This resulted in a lovely, garlic-infused breakfast. Highly recommended!

A while ago, someone — either my husband or my mother-in-law — gave me a copy of The Olive and the Caper: Adventures in Greek Cooking, by Susanna Hoffman. I haven’t made a lot from it, but everything I’ve made has been delicious. (The moussaka recipe is meltingly good, and freezes very well.)

The dish I make the most often is the Greek fried egg. Hoffman says that fried eggs are not so much a breakfast food in Greece, though they are occasionally served to tourists. The fried egg method she outlines is different and surprising, but produces an egg like nothing I’ve ever tasted: crispy-brown on the bottom, tender on top, olive-scented and amazing.

Greek Fried Egg

• 1/4 cup good extra-virgin olive oil (yes, really)
• 1 large or extra-large egg
• 1 piece good bread (optional)
• a few kalamata or spicy green olives (optional)

Heat the olive oil in a small, heavy skillet until drops of water sizzle off immediately. Break the egg into a small bowl (so you don’t have to worry about picking shell out of hot oil!) and then tip it gently into the oil. After about 20 seconds, use a spatula to dislodge the egg from the bottom of the pan and push it to the side; spoon hot oil over the top of the egg repeatedly, staying well back so as not to get splashed!

Timing: about 1 min. 15 sec. total cooking time for your yolk to be just at the edge of gelatinous; about 2 min. for it to be jelly-solid; about 3 min. for it to be burned! (Note: 3 min. not really recommended.)

Lift the egg out of the hot oil and put it in a shallow bowl, like a soup plate. Pour the rest of the oil over top of it, let sit a few minutes to cool, and eat with bread and/or olives. Soak up the oil! It’s delicious, and good for you.

Hoffman says these can be eaten at room temperature as well as warm, but I can’t imagine having the self-control to just let them sit there that long!

You could probably also put garlic into this recipe — I’d put it in the bowl before pouring the hot oil over, so it doesn’t burn — but I haven’t tried it. If you do, let me know how it works out!

Tonight for dinner, I had a light couscous salad as the main dish, and baked asparagus with cheese as the side. The two could hardly have been more different — the couscous salad was cold and bright and springy, with just enough tuna to anchor the flavor; the veggies in it were crisp and fresh. The asparagus with cheese was rich and creamy and warm, the asparagus soft and melting, the only brightness a touch of cayenne and dill.

Yet the two played well together, the salad a light melody to the asparagus’s harmonic line; all the taste of spring with an echo of warm winter comfort.

I’ve been trying hard not to buy too many vegetables in addition to my CSA box, but this week I needed some hot peppers for a dinner I had planned: asparagus curry with chickpea pancakes. I decided at the last minute to make a nice thick curry sauce to go with it all, so my hot peppers ended up stretched a little thin — one each in the asparagus curry, the pancakes, and the sauce.

The asparagus curry, to my taste, needed a bit of black pepper — Nat is always accusing me of thinking everything needs more black pepper — so I added some and it was perfect.

For the sauce, I flipped through my copy of 1000 Indian Recipes until a recipe caught my eye — chickpeas in “traditional curry sauce”. I stole the sauce from that recipe; it cooks up warm and thick, creamy and cuminy.

I also found my chickpea pancake recipe in that book – Crispy Chickpea Crepes – and mixed the batter a little thick, so that they were less crispy and crepelike, more chewy and pancakey.

To serve, we put a spoon of asparagus curry and a spoon of sauce in the pancake and sprinkled it with sliced green onion, then folded the pancake up around it.

I keep remaking this meal in my head, with different components: a mustardy green bean curry and vindaloo sauce; a dry meat curry and raita…it seems endlessly flexible, one of the million million cross-cultural variants of “flavored foody mess wrapped in bready goodness”. It’s a formula that has always served me well.

(In other news, my awesome teammate Katy done got herself married today! Congratulations to Katy & Corey!)

The past week it’s been warm enough that we actually turned our AC on for a few days, and being in the kitchen was miserable; turning on the oven unimaginable. Today, though, it was cool enough that I decided to make two pies featuring produce from our farm share box: rhubarb and ramps.

Ramps are wild leeks, and they’re quite strong-flavored. I had earlier used some in pasta sauce and been very happy with their flavor, so I thought I’d substitute them into my favorite quiche. I’m not sure where the quiche recipe I have comes from; it is the one my mom makes, and I have it scribbled on a post-it note. It’s a fairly basic recipe, with cheese, bacon, and carmelized onion in it, so I just substituted the ramps for the onion and went my merry way.

The other pie is called “rhubarb cream pie”, but has no cream in it — something apparently common to many rhubarb cream pie recipes, because I found about 7023948234 written that way.  It’s just an egg/sugar/flour filling; I figure that if there are that many recipes without a dairy custard, there is possibly a reason.  It might not be a good reason, but I’m not very familiar with rhubarb, so I thought I’d play it safe.

And after almost 2 hours of running the oven, the kitchen was still a reasonable temperature.

I’ve had a cup and a half of mashed bourbon sweet potatoes sitting in my fridge since Monday-ish, and today I got around to using them.  There are lots of options for using up mashed sweet potatoes — you can usually sub them one-for-one in recipes calling for mashed pumpkin, butternut squash, or bananas, for example.

I found a recipe for molasses pumpkin bread, changed it around to suit myself, and made it.  Mmmmm.

Ingredients
Dry
* 1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
* 1 tablespoon cinnamon (true cinnamon, if you have it)
* 1 1/2 teaspoon ginger
* 1 tsp five-spice powder
* 3/4 teaspoon nutmeg
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 3/4 teaspoon salt
* 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
* 1/8 teaspoon black pepper

Wet
* 6 tablespoons softened unsalted butter
* 2/3 cup blackstrap molasses
* 2 eggs
* 1 1/2 cup mashed sweet potatoes (leftover is fine, even if pretty heavily spiced)
* 1/4 cup milk
* 3/4 teaspoon vanilla

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350F, and grease a 9×5 loaf pan.

Whisk together the first 8 ingredients.

In a separate bowl (preferably in a stand mixer), beat the butter for a minute or so, then gradually beat in the molasses.  Because blackstrap molasses is so dark, it won’t lighten like brown sugar or lighter molasses does, so keep an eye on it and beat in the eggs, one at a time, when the butter and molasses look well-blended.

Beat in the sweet potatoes, milk, and vanilla.

Add in the flour mixture and stir until just combined (by hand is better than in the mixer).

Pour batter into prepared loaf pan and bake for about 1 hour.  (Always check center with a skewer or clean knife before removing from oven!)

Cool 5 minutes in pan, then run a knife blade around the edges and unmold.  Place on wire rack to cool the rest of the way.

Nat claims that this combines the best aspects of pumpkin pie with the best aspects of gingerbread.  I think it’s not quite right, yet.  I’m toying with the idea of upping the spice levels next time, or possibly modifying Ray’s Wicked Gingerbread into a sweet potato recipe. Just in case I end up with leftover sweet potatoes again, you know?

This summer, what with one thing and another, I neglected Eduardo.  This past Sunday, I pulled him out of the fridge to prepare for Thanksgiving baking, and discovered that he was dead.

Fortunately, it was Sunday — so I had plenty of time to prepare another starter.  Nat and I floated a few names for it, including “Edgar Allen Dough”, but in the end, we went with “Fernando”.  (Nat knew a llama by this name as a child, so Fernando the Starter is named after Fernando the Llama.)

Eduardo had a rich sourdough flavor, gathered over the years, that Fernando — young as yet — cannot match.  But the first loaves from Fernando are tender and delicious, sweet with promise.

We spent a good while this morning whining about how we didn’t want any of the breakfasts we could make, and then it was 11:30, and finally, we made brunch sandwiches.

1 long or 2 short ciabatta rolls, or other good sandwich bread

4 strips bacon

6 spears asparagus, tough end snapped off, cut lengthwise in half

2 eggs

1 clove garlic, peeled & cut in half

1 pat butterYou will need two pans for this - one for the bacon and eggs, and one for the bread and asparagus.

Because it’s too hot to bake, we bought our rolls at Whole Foods.  Their rolls are longish, so we cut them in half and use each half for one sandwich.  Whatever bread you use, you want 2 sandwiches worth.

Toast the bread lightly, then rub the sides that will be inside the sandwich with garlic.

While the bread is toasting, fry bacon strips until crisp over medium heat. Pour off most of the fat.

In the other pan,  melt the butter and put the garlic-rubbed bread garlic-side down in pan.

Cook eggs in bacon grease. Nat had his over-easy; I had mine fried hard.

Remove buttery-toasted rolls; put garlic and asparagus in pan and cook until asparagus is bright green and slightly soft.

Arrange bacon, eggs, and asparagus on bread.  (Discard garlic.)

Eat. Yum.

I’ve been accused in the past of having too much weird food lying about my kitchen. I don’t, really; mostly it’s normal foods that I happen to keep around regularly, while most folks buy them especially for particular recipes. While this has advantages, such as my “there’s nothing in the house” meals being rather less “nothing in the house”-like, it has disadvantages, such as realizing that you have a collection of oddments around that need to be combined into a meal, and soon, or they’ll go off.

Last night, for example, I had some defrosted chorizo sausages, five bananas just past perfect, and two jalapenos that were threatening to get fuzzy around the tops. I thought about this for a bit, and figured - well, I’ve had Peruvian cooking, and other South American cooking, and they use a lot of chorizo and a lot of bananas, so there has to be something out there with both….

Google found me an Ecuadorian recipe for bean & banana dip, and I used that as my starting point.

Chorizo Banana Dip

• 2 chorizo sausages, skinned and chopped, or 1/2 lb ground beef or pork, seasoned with 1 1/2 tsp chili powder [1]
• 1/2 medium white onion, finely chopped
• 2 green onions, chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 1-2 jalapenos, seeded and minced
• 1/2 cup crushed tomatoes
• 2 cups cooked kidney beans or 1 can kidney beans, slightly mashed [2]
• 4 bananas, ripe but firm
• 1 tbsp water, if needed
• tortilla chips [3]
• sour cream

  1. Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat. Brown the chorizo, stirring occasionally.

  2. Add onion & the pale/white parts of the green onions and cook until onion is soft and translucent, stirring occasionally.

  3. Reduce heat to medium and add the garlic, jalapenos, and crushed tomatoes. Mix well and cook for a few minutes, stirring occasionally.

  4. Mash beans and bananas together in a large bowl. Add water if needed to make a thick, dip-like consistency.

  5. Add bean and banana mixture to skillet and mix well.

  6. When everything is mixed up and heated through, scoop into a bowl and top with the darker green parts of the green onion.

  7. Serve warm with tortilla chips and sour cream.

  [1] Mild Italian sausage? Was the original recipe kidding me?
  [2] The liquid in canned beans makes me ill, so I always rinse it all off. I wasn’t about to reserve some of it like the original recipe asked for.
  [3] Some brands are way too salty for me. Herr’s chips have 30mg sodium less per serving than Tostito’s, for the same serving size.

This recipe makes quite a lot of dip - about 4 cups. We ate some of the leftovers this morning, in tortillas with scrambled eggs and sour cream.

On Sundays, Nat and I often sleep in, then fix ourselves a nice brunch. Our brunches cover a wide range - from crepes to brik to muffins - and are sometimes large, and sometimes small.

Today’s was a true brunch meal - large enough to cover both breakfast and lunch. To gear ourselves up for the task of cooking, Nat made Cafe de Olla, and then we settled down to the serious business of tuna cakes.

Tuna Cakes with Eggs

This recipe is for two people, for a large brunch. It would also easily serve 4 as a small brunch.

• 2 cans chunk light tuna in water, drained (or about 340 g. tuna, cooked & flaked)
• 1/2 medium red onion, chopped fine
• a couple handfuls breadcrumbs
• a handful of fresh parsley, chopped fine (or about 1 tsp dried parsley)
• 5 eggs
• 1 heaping tablespoon Dijon mustard
• 1 tablespoon mayonnaise
• about 10 grinds black pepper (er, about a tsp?)
• 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
• salt (if your canned tuna has salt, you can omit this; ours is unsalted)

Mix together all of the ingredients except the eggs, then add one egg to the mix, stir in, and form mix into flat cakes. Pan-fry cakes in butter or olive oil until nicely browned on both sides. At the same time, make the remaining 4 eggs how you like ‘em (Nat had his poached; I had mine fried hard).

Serve tuna cakes topped with the eggs and whatever condiments you desire (we put sour cream on ours).

Now, if I can only work up the will to move the rest of the day….