Mediterranean Pearled Barley Salad

Here I am, trying to make a rice salad (rice salad is one of my favorite summer foods, you know). Right now, I'm out of rice. Perfectly aware of the fact when I got my groceries two days ago, I also reminded myself that I had some emmer farro in the cupboard (a type of ancient wheat berry), and wouldn't that suffice just fine? Besides, I'm on a budget and even as cheap as brown rice is, I should be using what I have.

So come time to make dinner, I'm all excited, getting out my ingredients, because really, this salad practically makes itself. I get out a cup of farro and admire the golden grains, and remember the last time I had it. (Admittedly, that was several months ago. December, as I recall.) It sort of pops as you chew it, and has the taste of wind and sweet water and a little bit of the earth. Happy, no?

Into my saucepan it goes, covered with water. At this point I'm starting to notice something. There were a bunch of little dark seeds in with the farro, and they all floated up to the top. "Well gosh," I thought, "How on Earth did flaxseeds get into my farro?"

Upon closer inspection I realize that this is a very special type of flaxseed known as the flour beetle. I scoop them out and rinse my farro and put it in more water and swoosh it around to make sure they're all gone. They are. I sit there, staring at my farro, for what amounts to probably 45 minutes before I reluctantly admit it's just too creepy to want to cook and eat that grain. So it goes in the garbage (it, and all the rest of my farro supply). I putz around until about 9:30, studying the only live specimen of the flaxseeds flour beetles I can salvage. Kind of cute. Sigh.

No problem, I'll just go to Trader Joe's and see what kind of grain they have. Oh wait, they close at 9. So does Whole Foods, and having already driven the 10 miles to the nearest store that day, did not want to go back anyway. Albertson's up the street it is. They have a natural foods aisle, right??

Yeah, no. The most natural things at Albertson's are poison apples and Horizon milk.

Down to Basha's I go (another grocery chain here, it's like any other nasty grocery store), in the opposite direction. Lucky me, there's an aisle that says, "NATURAL" on the hanging sign. Apparently that means that there's a spot on the shelf for Gorilla Munch cereal. You know, next to the Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Frosted Mini Stupid Grossness.

I give up. By the grace of Whomever, there are three or four selections of Amy's frozen entrees in the freezer aisle. I recommend the Matar Paneer.

--

After a visit to Trader Joe's in the morning I relent to going back to Whole Foods (Trader Joe's has no organic uncooked grain that appeals to this salad), where I scour the bulk bins and pick up some pearled barley. It was that, or Kamut (another ancient form of wheat), which takes 2 hours to cook, or wheat berries - and I figure I get enough of standard wheat anyway. Or rice, which I am determined not to get at this point, because then I would feel silly for not getting it in the first place.

And I make my salad, which is delicious, except I discover that pearled barley (which I've never cooked before) has the bran and germ removed, rendering it NOT a whole grain and not nearly as beneficial to one's gut. Disappointing. But I got my salad, and it was delicious, so neener neener.

This is the ongoing battle I wage with the universe. I can't decide if it's telling me to give up and move on, or daring me to overcome something. Ever a fan of stories of overcoming great obstacles, I usually barge in and see what a mess I can make with what I've been thrown. Take that! See what I did there? Yeah! Somethingorother-power-struggle-taking-charge-of-chaos-mumbojumbo.

Somewhere in the back of my mind at this point is a tiny voice, sounding somewhat like my father, saying, "You're only punishing yourself..."

Wait, was there a lesson here?

You bet! I'm going to teach you how to make a delicious salad. :-D


MEDITERRANEAN PEARLED BARLEY SALAD

2 1/2 cups water
1 cup pearled barley
1/2 tsp sea salt
Extra virgin olive oil (get one with a delicious aroma and flavor)
1 tsp red pepper flakes
Freshly coarse-ground black pepper
1/4 cup finely diced red/purple onion
8 Kalamata olives, pitted and all chopped up
2-3 tbsp finely chopped sundried tomatoes (either the kind packed in oil, or the kind you have to rehydrate... doesn't matter, but not the paste)
1/2 cup thinly sliced or finely diced celery
1/4 cup - 1/2 cup chopped parsley leaves (curly or Italian flat, either's fine)
Fresh(ish) lemon juice
1/4 cup - 1/3 cup crumbled Feta cheese
Sea salt

1. Start by cooking the barley.

Bring the water to a boil, add the salt and barley, give it a quick stir. Turn it down and cover the pot. Let it simmer for 35 minutes. Check it every so often to make sure it's at a simmer and not a rapid boil. You can always adjust the temperature. After your minutes elapse, test a grain to make sure it's a good texture for eating. If it's not cooked, cook it some more. It's not difficult. If it's done, drain whatever water might still be left, and put the barley in a bowl and into the refrigerator to chill for a couple of hours.

2. When the barley is sufficiently cold, take it out. If you need to, add it to a bigger bowl. It's probably stuck in the shape of whatever it was chilled in, so break it up a little. Fluff it. You want independent grains.



3. Drizzle in some olive oil. I honestly don't know how much I used. I never measure it. I'd say maybe 1/4 cup? I don't know, drizzle it in and mix it until all the grains are coated and when you take a bite you get a hint of whatever delicious olive oil you've selected. Also add the red pepper flakes, ground pepper, and onion at this time. The pepper flakes and pepper because they need to be evenly distributed, and they tend to get confused and stick together if you add them after everything else. The onion because the longer it sits in there, with the oil, with the barley - the more it mellows and the flavors diffuse and become rather happy with one another.



4. You can chop your celery one of two ways. Either thinly slice it (1/8 inch thick, no more) or finely dice it (1/8-1/4 inch). They're both good. I did it both ways so you could see.



Actually, I did it both ways because I changed my mind halfway through cutting it. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that you could chop your celery one or two of two ways.

5. Add the celery, sundried tomatoes, and olives. Mix it all up.



6. Take a bunch of leaves from your parsley and chop them roughly. I like curly parsley for this salad because it doesn't seem as whiney. It's easy to cut it up and it gives a little bounce to your dish. Mix in the parsley, and then some lemon juice. I also don't measure the lemon juice, but I probably use about half as much as I did olive oil.



7. The last step is feta. Add it (crumbled) and taste. Add whatever it might need: pepper, olive oil, lemon juice, or sea salt. (If you're having trouble deciding on a brand of Feta, I like the Valbreso brand in the plastic package with the little sheep face on it. It's quite good. I used the Whole Foods brand that was precrumbled, and it was all dry and uncreamy. But it was also 1/4 the price, so there you go.) Once it's seasoned just right, it's pretty much ready to eat.

It's also good for a few days afterward, cold and delicious. I really like it with brown rice. I'm sure it would be good with wheat berries, spelt berries, farro, kamut, triticale, or maybe even whole oat groats. They all cook differently, so make sure you look into that if you try one of them.

And always check your stored grain. You might make a new friend (or 20). Or however you want to look at it.

Collard-Potato Soup

Because nothing calls for a steaming hot bowl of soup like a 105 degree July evening in Arizona.

Times like this, I think I must be out-of-touch with my environment. I used to love going for ice cream during winter in Seattle. Or does that make me in-touch with my environment? Perhaps I just want to be feeling on the inside what I'm feeling on the outside. Helps with intra-body communication. Or maybe body-to-Earth communication. Either way it gets everyone on the same playing field, and I'm starting to sound like a communist, so I'm going to move on.

It was a stock-up-for-the-week cooking day. Earlier on, I made pinwheel cookies for the first time. I used the recipe from The New Basics Cookbook by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins.



They were crisp and light, but the chocolate flavor was strong. To be fair, I used vanilla extract instead of the bean like they called for, but I don't know if a bean would have mellowed out the chocolate any better. I used Dutch cocoa... maybe next time I'll use natural and see if it helps. Or add some almond extract. Or peppermint. Or orange. But no. Digression.

Supposedly I'm blogging about soup today, so here goes. This soup is so... bistro. Every time I make it, I plan my future as the owner and sole employee of a small cafe, where I serve a soup of the day, which is usually this (I think I'd sell a bowl for $4.5, and maybe a cup for $2.5), because none of my other soups are very trendy. Fortunately, this is a soup that bends as easily as your whim, so to speak. If you don't want to use collard greens, you can use broccoli. Or asparagus. Or kale. You could probably even use celery. Or carrots. Maybe even eggplant. Hmm, that would be interesting.

I have to give Robert credit for this soup, really, as it was originally mostly his idea.

Mostly.


COLLARD-POTATO SOUP

Olive oil
Sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 bunch (1/2 to 1 lb) collard greens, washed and stems separated
2 cups sliced yellow onion
4 medium red potatoes, sliced thinly (4 cups, maybe?)
2 fat cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
Water
1/2 cup heavy cream
Fresh chives for garnish

1. One thing I really like to do with making a pureed soup like this is to roast at least part of the star vegetable ahead of time. It adds a hint of a charred flavor to the soup, which I like. So the first thing you should do is preheat the oven to 375°F. Cut the collard stems into sticks a few inches long and toss them with some olive oil and salt and pepper. Spread them in the bottom of a glass baking dish, which you will then put in the oven when it's preheated. Keep it there for 30 minutes while you do the rest of the soup.

2. Start your pot. You'll need a relatively large pot - not because you're making a lot of soup, but because greens start out large and get small after they cook, and you need to give them space. I used a big honkin' stockpot. Anyway, the long and short of it is that you need to slice your onions - however you want is fine - and chuck them in the pot with a little olive oil over medium heat.



You should then slice your collard leaves. This might seem like a pain, but it doesn't have to be! I stack a bunch of them together, roll them tightly, cut them once hot-dog-style right down the middle of the roll, and then slice the roll the fat way in about 1/2-inch slices. So you get a bunch of leaf pieces. It should take less than a minute to do the whole bunch. Toss them with the onions.



3. Let the onions and collards cook for several minutes so the greens can reduce, but stir them a lot so the onions don't burn on the bottom of the pot. In the meantime, you can smash your garlic and slice your potatoes!! This is so exciting. To smash garlic, keep the skin on and whack it hard coming straight down with a mostly-full bottle of olive oil. Then cut off the ends, peel (quite easily, I might add), and roughly chop. It will be simmering in water for awhile, so you don't want it too fine lest the garlic flavor cook out.



Ooh, potatoes. So all you do is slice each potato in half the long way (so you get two elongated flattish halves) and then lay the flat side down and slice thinly from the end. It goes pretty fast. The thinner you slice, the less time it takes to cook. I would go anywhere from super-duper thin to maybe 3/16 of an inch. Or just eyeball it. Or use one of those mandolin slicers. But mind your fingertips if you do use one, as they may slice off and will subsequently get lost in the potatoes and then become rubbery with cooking and ruin the texture of the soup. At this point, your greens and onions should look something like this, and start to be leaving a residue on the bottom of the pot despite your efforts.



4. This means it's time to add water. Add potatoes, add garlic, a hefty pinch of sea salt, and add enough water to just cover everything. Probably more water than I did, because I had to add more later.



Turn the heat up a bit to bring it to a simmer, and then turn it back down to keep it simmering gently and cover the pot partially with a lid on cockeyed.

5. Let the pot cook like that for 15 minutes or so, stirring every few minutes to make sure everything's getting cooked evenly. If ever you notice a lot of things poking out of the water, either add more water or push them back under. Your roasting collard stems will probably be ready around this time, so take them out of the oven. They should have gotten some nice browned edges.



Take the most even-looking half of them and cut them into very short pieces and set aside to use as garnish. The rest of them you should cut into 1-inch segments and toss into the simmering water.

6. When the potatoes are tender (take a piece out and eat it and decide if they're cooked or not), then you're in the home stretch. Everything should have mellowed out together in the pot, like so.



Take it off the heat and whip out your immersion/wand blender (that's the hand blender on a stick which is so handy in situations such as these). If you don't have one, you can use a normal blender and do it in batches, but that's a pain. Or you can use a food mill, which is also a pain. A food processor probably works too, but I have never used one for this purpose, so I don't know. An immersion blender is a good tool to have around. Put it in your pot of soup and start whirring it around. In a few minutes it should look like a comic book swamp.



This is good. Taste for seasoning, and add salt and pepper as needed.

7. The final steps are thus. Add your cream, in a drizzle (why? I don't know. because it's fun.). I didn't measure how much I put in, but it was probably about half a cup. Blend it some more, until it gets evenly pale green. Taste again, adjust as necessary. If it's really thick, don't add more cream, add more water.

8. So now you can put it in a bowl. Add some of your chopped roasted collard stems. And some chives. And then eat it. OM NOM NOM this is a really awesome soup. I mean it, it's really good. You should try it.

So, if I were changing anything about this recipe, I'd make it more often. That is all. I mean, really - it's an organic soup that contains probably 8 servings for under $10 for the whole pot. Good. Deal.


I also want to dedicate this soup, and the blog post, and the recipe, to my late great uncle Bym. I always associated this particular shade of green with him, and I thought of him when I made it. And I think maybe he would have liked it.

Lasagna

This post is long overdue. I make lasagna all the time. It's one thing I feel comfortable doing start-to-finish with no guidance, experimenting with, and it nearly always turns out quite perfectly. To my tastes, anyway. I'm not sure if I should even call it lasagna, actually, because like most things on this blog, it's a bastardization of whatever the original dish is supposed to be. Oh well. Any cook should be able to tell you there's no "one way" for a dish to be. They always evolve. Tradition be damned.

I'm not a big fan of lasagnas that are oozing with copious amounts of completely pureed marinara or indecent levels of gooey cheeses. I like flavor in my lasagna. Mushrooms, eggplant, basil, olive. I like lasagna textured. Each layer should offer something new to the palate. There should be some chewiness/crunch to the very top layer, lightly topped with flavorful, aged Italian cheese. Slight al dente *fwood* when you slice into a noodle. Each vegetable should dance and sing its own number together in a medley of garden-fresh tastes. You should run across a whole basil leaf now and then. Tomatoes brighten the whole face of lasagna, but doesn't smother it. And the white layers... should be quiet. Mellow... and dear.

Speaking of the white layers. I follow in my mom's footsteps here, and use cottage cheese and sour cream instead of ricotta or a bechamel sauce. I imagine this is probably because it's cheaper to buy cottage cheese, but I've prefer the taste of it. Associations, you know.

One thing I always try to do nowadays with my lasagna is make my own noodles. I think the texture and taste is superior to boxed dry noodles, although it tacks on about an hour extra to prep time (I'll include my recipe for this, although of course you can buy noodles if you wish). It would have been much easier had I remembered to bring my pasta machine (essentially a dough roller) with me when I moved. I made do with a rolling pin, and felt like a real cook. You really get to know your food this way. You can feel what it feels. Understand what brought it to you. It's a little bit surreal. That said, I didn't grow the wheat or grind the flour or raise the chickens that laid the eggs. Some day, maybe, but not in a small apartment in a desert city.

Oh yeah, and I use bread flour for the pasta. Bread flour is like all-purpose, but with a higher protein and gluten content. You can probably use all-purpose flour, but you'd have to work it longer to develop the gluten, and maybe add less flour to make up for the extra working. Maybe it would perform pretty similarly. Try it and let me know.


LASAGNA

9 5/8 oz (about 1 3/4 cups plus 2 tbsp) bread flour
3 large eggs
1 large eggplant, chopped into 1/2-inch cubes
Extra-virgin olive oil
salt
freshly ground black pepper
1 medium onion, diced
bunch of cremini or button mushrooms... maybe 10? 15?, sliced
red pepper flakes
fennel seeds
oregano, dried or fresh
thyme, dried or fresh
pinch salt
freshly ground black pepper
3 cloves garlic, pressed
handful of pitted, drained Kalamata olives, chopped coarsely
28-oz can diced tomatoes (fire-roasted are lovely)
16 oz cottage cheese (the highest fat you can find)
8 oz sour cream (full-fat)
1 egg
1/2 cup or so frozen chopped spinach, thawed
bunch of fresh basil leaves
chunk of some aged Italian cheese, such as parmesan, asiago, romano, or a blend (I used Pecorino Romano)

1. Preheat the oven to 375°F. Make your pasta dough. It's actually pretty easy, especially if you have a food processor. Put your flour and 3 eggs into the food processor, like so.

I know you can only see two eggs in the picture. Trust me, I used three. One made a break for it and went to the other side of the bowl. Turn on the processor and let it whirl until the dough forms a big clump (you can mix it with your hands if you don't have a FP).



And then take it out and knead it forcefully until it gets smooth and not at all sticky. This could take anywhere from 2-8 minutes. When it looks like this:



wrap it up (or put in a close-fitting bowl and cover) and put it in the fridge to rest for an hour. You have to let it rest. The gluten strands relax during this time. If you try and use it now, the gluten will tighten so much that you won't be able to roll it out thinly because it will keep contracting and you'll get really weird, lumpy, thick noodles.

2. Prepare the eggplant. Toss it in a bowl with a little oil and salt and pepper (just a sprinkle of each, enough oil to barely coat). Spread them on a cookie sheet like so:



Put it in the oven and keep it there for 45 minutes to roast.

3. Time to make the sauce, which is probably the messiest part of the whole process. Start by heating a stainless skillet over medium heat and putting in a few tablespoons of olive oil. Dump in the onions and mushrooms right away and toss a bit to coat. Keep an eye on it, stir every minute or two. It will go through a "wet stage" where the mushrooms let out a bunch of liquid. Don't worry about this, just keep it cooking and let it evaporate.



In the meantime, put a bit of red pepper flakes (tsp, probably), fennel seeds (maybe 2 tsp), oregano (tbsp or so if dried and crumbled, more if fresh), thyme (2 tsp if dried leaves, more if fresh), a wee pinch of salt, and some pepper all in a mortar and grind it with the pestle until the fennel seeds are a little crushed. To have it ready to add, put it in a little bowl with the pressed garlic. It all goes in at once, after all.



Dump it into the onion-mushroom mixture (when the liquid has evaporated) and stir it around. Let it cook for a minute (stirring frequently) while you chop up your olives.



When it smells amazing, and looks like this:



dump in the olives and give it a toss. If there's a little bit stuck to the bottom of the pan (there should be some residue, but not too much else unless you're cooking at too high a heat), don't be tempted to add more oil, because you really don't need it. Dump in all the tomatoes and listen to it hiss. That's the sound of all the residue coming off the pan. Mm, browned stuff. Give it a good stir, turn down the heat and let it simmer.



4. At this point, you can probably take your eggplant out of the oven.



Run a spatula under it at this point so it doesn't adhere to the pan while it cools. You can leave the oven on, if you hurry up with the rest of the process, or turn it off and remember to turn it back on later when you're getting ready to bake the lasagna.

5. While your sauce is cooking and your eggplant is cooling, it is probably time for your pasta dough. Take it on out of the fridge, divide it in two, and re-cover one half and save it. With the half you took out, make it into a ball, flatten it slightly, and dust it with flour. You should also dust your counter with flour, as you don't want the dough to stick.



OK, so you have to roll out this little ball of dough. It sounds easy. Hahaha. HAHAHA I laugh at your ignorance. Anyway, you have to get it to approximately 1.5cm thick evenly throughout. Put some muscle into it. You'll have to add flour as it spreads out. The key is not to stretch the dough, because it will just elasticize back into shape again. You want to spread the dough, which is difficult and requires lots of downward pressing of the rolling pin as you roll. Or pasta roller, which is so much easier. After some sweat and tears, you should arrive at this stage.



You can get 4 approximately 12"x2" noodles out of this, with scraps. I like to cut the sides using my little zigzaggy pastry cutter tool. I don't know how to make them curly like the ones in the box, but that is a reasonable enough approximation. You don't even have to do that. A knife works just fine. Just set the noodles aside as you cut. Ball up the scraps and roll it out again, trying to make it a foot long and a few inches wide.



You can get two more noodles out of this. Whatever scraps you have can be cooked as weird pasta shapes, discarded, or put into the next half of the dough to be rolled. I may or may not have eaten mine.

Put on a large pot of water to boil. Repeat the rolling and cutting process with the second half of dough, so you have 12 noodles.



Don't you feel amazing??

If your water is boiling, add a tbsp or so of salt and your noodles, carefully, one-by-one. Cook for 3-4 minutes and remove to a plate, layering with a little olive oil so they don't stick together.

6. When your sauce has reduced and no longer looks watery, mix in all your eggplant pieces and take it off the heat.



Also, mix in a bowl your cottage cheese, sour cream, egg, and spinach. This is the constituent of your white layers.



7. Assembly time is always fun. You can make it look pretty. This generally goes in a 9x13-inch glass baking dish, but I don't have one right now, so I had to squeeze it into a 8x11-inch glass baking dish. I had to cut my noodles so they fit (if your noodles don't fit the long way, do trim them, as they will otherwise hamper the ease of assembly and final deliciousness of the lasagna by running up the sides).

Anyway, put just a little bit of your sauce in the bottom of your baking dish, along with a sploosh of water and a splish of olive oil, and mix it around to coat the bottom as evenly as possible. Then you can put your first four noodles in, overlapping each other slightly if necessary.



In your pan, divide your sauce into three heaps (it should be reduced enough that it doesn't run back together when you smoosh it apart). Put one heap over the noodles and spread it evenly. Top with a layer of fresh basil leaves.



Put half of your white sauce mixture over the basil leaves in small dollops (trust me on this, you want it evenly dolloped or you will just be mushing around a mixture of red and white sauce and it will no longer be pretty, or quite as tasty). Spread it very carefully so it covers the entire thing.



Repeat, with another layer of noodles, red sauce (you can decide whether or not you want another basil layer, I usually just have one), remaining white sauce, remaining noodles. Before you put the last bit of sauce on top, add a bit of water (1/4 cup, maybe?) and a little olive oil, to thin it out a smidge. Mix it all up in the pan, then put it on top and spread to cover the noodles the best you can. Any noodle that sticks out is going to get impossibly chewy when it cooks. Grate your cheese on top.



8. Cover the dish very loosely with foil and bake 20 minutes (still at 375). Remove the foil, and bake it another 20 minutes. When it comes out, it should be bubbly, a little melty, aromatic, and cooked-looking. And the noodles will have warped and wiggled and will look really neat.



Now you're done, and you can slice and eat it. I usually have one portion and then cut the rest into portions and wrap them in waxed paper and then foil and freeze them. Then I can have them at my leisure.

So, that's how I make lasagna. You can use different vegetables. You can take shortcuts. You can ignore it and make something else entirely. Lasagna doesn't mind. It will still be here. It will be here after you're dead and gone. It doesn't need you. Lasagna is one of those people that is perfectly content with herself, regardless of what everyone else is thinking or doing. If you are nice, she will be nice. If you make time for her, she will make time for you. Or at least a nice dinner.

Would I change anything? Yes... I only used 4oz of sour cream, but I should have used all 8 (like I said in the recipe). I also should have used Organic Valley cottage cheese instead of Nancy's. I dearly love Nancy's cottage cheese, but its cultured, lightly soured taste is not right for a dish with so many tomatoes. Plus, that's what the sour cream is for. I would have used more basil. A bigger dish. A little more seasoning. I probably should have sang and danced as I cooked. Oh well. I am building character.