Chickpea Stew

I thought I'd throw together a little stew this week. I haven't made it before, and there wasn't a recipe. So goes cooking, though. Recipes can be tedious if that's all you ever use when you cook.

Part of the inspiration for the stew came from the failure of central Arizona to enter a proper autumnal phase, after the equinox, like all the other states. I guess I thought that if I invoked the power of butternut squash and russet potatoes (autumn) to draw the life out of tomatoes and corn (summer), somehow a new season would float in and we'd all be saved.

Alas. The forecast for tomorrow is 104 and sunny.

My stew, on the other hand, was very good. Eating it almost made me believe that I was warming my bones on a cool September evening.

I only call it "chickpea" stew because I don't know what else to call it. It was supposed to be focused on chickpeas, as the "chunk" factor, but I piled so much other stuff in there that they're just one element now. And I like the word "chickpea." Like, a lot. I always used to call them garbanzo beans, but saying that makes me feel heavy-footed and trollish. "Chickpea" makes me feel like a bird. A bird that perches on things and sings sweetly.


CHICKPEA STEW

1 cup dry chickpeas (or 2 cups cooked)
3 fat cloves garlic
1/2 large onion
2 large celery stalks (leaves are fine)
1 medium butternut squash, cleaned but not peeled
3/4 lb russet potato, or red potatoes
Sea salt
Cooking oil
1 tsp red pepper flakes
2 tbsp dry crumbled oregano
2 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp powdered mustard
2-3 tbsp red wine vinegar
28 oz can diced tomatoes (fire-roasted are best, as always!)
4 oz frozen chopped spinach
4 oz frozen corn kernels
Tabasco sauce
Handful fresh basil leaves, roughly chopped
Handful fresh cilantro leaves, roughly chopped
Smoked cheese for topping
Hard, aged cheese for topping

1. Soak the chickpeas before you cook them. To do this, cover them with water by an inch, and let them sit for 3-10 hours. If you don't have that much time, do what I did. Cover them with water, to start.

Bring to a boil. Let it boil for 5 minutes, and then take the pan off the heat. The chickpeas have already begun to take in water.



Cover it, and let it sit for an hour. It's still an hour, but it beats 10 hours, right? After they've soaked they should have swollen a bit more.



Drain them and re-cover them with water by an inch or two. Bring to a simmer, partially cover the pan, and let them cook for an hour or more, depending on their age. Mine were old and took 3 hours. I didn't eat until 11pm.

2. Meanwhile, though, you may prepare the other ingredients for the stew. Garlic needs to be smashed and roughly chopped. Onions need to be sliced. Celery needs to be cut into bits, and set aside with the onions, but separate from the garlic. You can do this however you see fit, but this is my method.



3. And now you can cube the squash and potatoes. Some people like theirs peeled, but I don't know why. It's not like the peel tastes bad, or gets in the way, or is ugly. It has nutritional value, and adds fiber. And it will take you twice as long to prepare your vegetables if you peel them. But suit yourself.

I tried to cut the squash into 1/2-inch cubes and the potatoes into 3/4-inch chunks. To simplify things, I cooked them together, and potato cooks fast; I didn't want it to cook faster than the squash and then fall apart. Plus, with all the stirring I knew I was going to be doing, I didn't want the potato to completely disappear into mush, so I thought it had ought to start out in larger chunks than did the squash.



4. Once your starchies (read: potatoes and squash) are cubed, you can cook them. You will be cooking them in water - the very water that will become your soup water. I used filtered water, because I want to believe that it makes the tap water of Phoenix taste acceptable. It doesn't, but who can afford that much bottled water? And who wants to waste that much plastic?

Anyway, cover your potatoes and squash with water in a large pot. Maybe a half an inch to spare. Add a fat pinch of sea salt and bring to a gentle boil. A hearty simmer, if you will.



5. Let them simmer for 20-30 minutes, until both squash and potatoes are cooked but not mushy. I believe the term is "fork-tender," but I don't really like it. It seems fleeting and faddish.

The water will look slightly orange and cloudy, and that's OK.



Set the pot aside and bring out a frying pan. Or, if you have more than one large burner, as I do not, you can bring out the frying pan while the stockpot is cooking the starchies. It's all up to you.

Add some oil to your pan, over medium heat. When it heats up properly, add the celery and onion that you set aside earlier.



Stir it up good, and continue to do so for about 3 minutes. Maybe 5. Definitely not 4.



6. Stir until the celery is popping and the onion is limp and threatening to brown if you stop stirring. (If it does brown, I don't see what the big deal is. Mine always does when I stop stirring to take a picture, and I haven't suffered from it yet.)



Toss in the garlic, spices, and oregano. Stir that up and keep at it. The moment you see the spices stick to the pan and start to smell amazing on the cusp of burnt, douse it with some red wine vinegar. Or maybe wine; I haven't tried that. It'll hiss at you something fierce. Respond by dumping the entire can of fire-roasted diced tomatoes into the pan and mixing the whole shebang together. That oughta hush things up.





7. Now everything will be coming together. Take the frying pan off the burner and return the stockpot with the starchies. Keep the heat on it - medium is fine - while you add things. You can add spinach and corn now. Stir it gently to distribute everything, but try not to pulverize the potatoes in the process.



You can also drain, rinse, and add the chickpeas to the stockpot, assuming they've cooked by this point. Add the tomato mixture.

This would be where a wand blender comes in very handy. To thicken the stew so it's not just chunky seasoned water, I used the wand blender to blend just a little bit of the contents of the stockpot. Most things were left intact, but enough squash and potatoes and onions and spinach got pureed that the stew developed a really hearty base. Desirable in a stew.

Season it with sea salt - and really, you need a fair amount for it to not be bland and tasteless. Just keep adding a little bit and tasting until you get the right amount. If the stew tastes like hot water, add more salt! And Tabasco sauce, of course. Just ploonk a bunch in until you get the right amount of zip.



8. You can take the (hopefully simmering) stew off of the heat, now, and stir in the chopped fresh herbs.



Bowl it up, grate on some cheese, and eat your heart out.

Despite the lengthy ingredient list, this is not an expensive stew. It uses no broth, no cream or butter, and I had at least 75% of the contents in my pantry/refrigerator already. It is a great way to use things you don't know what to do with.

Let me tell you right now, the stew was really good. It may be a temptation (at least, it was for me) to serve it over rice or some other kind of grain, but I would advise resistance to this particular hankering. Most of the calories (although they are few) that come from this stew are carbohydrate calories; you don't need more added from a grain, even a whole one. I would be intrigued, however, to try this stew ladled on a piece of sturdy white fish (cod or halibut, perhaps). It may compliment nicely.

Of course, you are welcome to do what I did and simply enjoy a bowl by itself, as 11pm is rather late to be eating a large meal.




(Oh, and I'm still on the fence about this whole video thing. My arms are really beefy. And it took me 8 hours to edit all this stuff and make an entry.)

West Coast Grits

You may be wondering what the bloody hell I think I'm doing, going up on YouTube like this. It's a grand experiment. An experiment to find out a) whether video additions to blog posts make any sort of useful contribution; b) whether it's worth the extra trouble; and c) how much can I possibly detract from my content with my grating personality? You decide.

Except that ultimately, I decide.

Phase 1 of this experiment has shown me that I talk funny, have extremely beefy arms, and a really wicked farmer's tan (which, by the way, is not entirely my fault; it's a product of the Arizona desert sun, the fact that I spent the whole month of August under it raking hoofstock poop, and the t-shirts supplied to us by the zoo). I think it might work.

Anyway, grits. I love 'em. Nobody else I know eats them (or has even tried them, for all I know). What I call "grits" could also be considered polenta. Actually, I prepare polenta in the style of grits, if that makes sense. Polenta and grits are technically the same product, only grits are made with corn treated with lye (aka "hominy"), and polenta is just plain corn. It's basically a very coarse cornmeal. I like Bob's Red Mill brand.

Why call them "west coast" grits? Because people on the west coast like untreated food (no lye) and vegetables more than they like purified fat and starch. And people on the west coast generally don't eat traditional grits. I guess there's not a lot of creativity that went into that name.

Just an FYI. Upon re-evaluating my food budget this last month, I have come to the realization that I am spending about three times more on groceries since I moved down to Arizona. Granted, there were two-three days per week that someone else was buying my food back in Washington, but that's not even half a week. Three times more money is insanity. So I've reduced my budget (again), which means just one thing, people. I'm going to have to get creative with cheap food. Be prepared for a lot of variations on... well, rice, and beans. And cornmeal. Ideas are welcome.

(By the way, did you know that a dozen large organic eggs are like, $5-6 here? They're $3.50 in Washington. Anyone in the Phoenix area have chickens that produce more eggs than you can use? I'll pay you $3.50 a dozen for them.)


WEST COAST GRITS

3/4 - 1 cup water
1/8 - 1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup frozen chopped spinach
1/4 cup frozen corn kernels and/or frozen peas
1/4 cup grits or polenta (not pre-prepared. the stuff that looks like coarse cornmeal)
1 large egg
Freshly ground black pepper
Lime crème fraîche (optional)

1. Put the water in a pan, with the salt, over high heat, and cover to bring to a simmer. I know, this is difficult.

When the water simmers, you can turn down the heat to medium-low or low, and add the vegetables. Wait for it to simmer again, if it stops (because frozen vegetables are cold, believe it or not), then add the grits and stir.





2. Stir it every few minutes for about 5-7 minutes, until the grits swell up and take up a lot of space in the pan, and you don't see much water. If you don't stir it, the water comes up to the top and the rest of the stuff in the pan sticks to the bottom.



When most of the water is absorbed, you can add the egg. You don't have to pre-beat it, just crack it into the pan and stir it around. When you see the gelatinous clear part (the "white" of the egg) make lots of white streaks in the grits, and it takes on a smoother, more creamy consistency, it's probably ready! It depends on the amount of heat you have on it. Add your pepper, and you're done.



Unless you have lime crème fraîche to drizzle on the top. That makes it even better. A stroke of genius, that was.

So, I'm undecided on the video. It is a little unnecessary, right? I suppose this might not be the best recipe on which to try the video, as there is no real "technique" to show. I mean, boil water and put stuff in a pan and stir it. There's really nothing easier. Opinions are welcome...

Oh, and this is super cheap, super easy eats. Breakfast, lunch, or dinner. One of my fallbacks when I can't decide what to make, or if I hardly have anything to fix. I always have some grits around (I keep grits in a jar in the freezer, so they don't spoil). You can make it with cheese instead of eggs, but it has fewer nutrients and more fat, so... depends on what you're looking for.


Aaand.... discuss.

Oaxaca Tacos

I think it's time to add something new to my repertoire. Enter the Cafe Flora Cookbook and one of the restaurant's most popular dishes. Cute, aren't they? Sitting there all propped up on black beans? Tasty, too, crispy and oven-fried. I will be filing this away in the "usable recipes" section of my brain. The techniques I learned are applicable in... oh, billions of ways. Oaxaca tacos will be back, in one form or another. Just you wait.

Reading the ingredients, I didn't find it to look all that... nutritionally balanced. A corn tortilla (starch) filled with potato (starch) and cheese (fat). Mmm, fatty starch. But then I read on and noticed that it is typically served with a black bean "stew" (enter fiber and protein, albeit carried by more starch) and pico de gallo (YAY! color!). Well. If it has fiber and protein and fatty starch, and is naturally colorful, sign me up. Especially when the fat includes smoked mozzarella.

Dear sweet son of a biscuit-eating bulldog, try some smoked mozarella if you haven't had it before.

Unfortunately for those who might want to make this, I feel obligated to refrain from posting the exact recipe. You can buy the book. If you live in Seattle, go eat at Cafe Flora and order the Oaxaca tacos.

I don't feel guilty enough to refrain from posting my progression through cooking, however. I am confident that if you follow along and experiment a little, you can recreate them. Or at least something similar.

--- --- ---

So, I started the day prior to cooking, really (two days ago, to be exact). I prepared some "crème fraîche" by mixing just a smidge of buttermilk into heavy cream and letting it sit out at room temperature for a day. I cooked my black beans. For goodness sake, if you don't know how to cook black beans, learn. It's terribly easy and far cheaper and more ecological than buying them canned.

This made cooking day rather easy. Into the cultured crème fraîche I added some fresh lime juice and zest and stuck it in the fridge. Nobody wants to use room temperature crème fraîche. I then boiled and drained some russet potatoes, and mashed them up good with a little butter and salt. This time, I had a potato masher. Why, you ask? I didn't have one last time, right? Well, it's because partway through cooking the potatoes I realized I had no toothpicks. And I need toothpicks to hold the tacos together when they cook. So, naturally I had to huff and puff over to the store and get some. I figured I'd be clever and also pick up a potato masher. See what I did there? That's called breaking the cycle.



Following the potato mashing, I preheated my oven to 400. Back onto the stove went my cooked black beans, into which I tossed some frozen corn, chopped cilantro, garlic, and a few spices and an herb. Which ones? Oh, figure it out. Learn to season your black beans.



I simmered that for a little while (not that long) to let it make itself happy, and prepped my other taco ingredients. My favorite part was a 50/50 mix of shredded cheddar and smoked mozarella, with some red pepper flakes added for interest. I also briefly fried (a few seconds on both sides) 8 corn tortillas in vegetable oil. The goal was to get them to get hot, and soak up some oil. They need to be pliable so you can roll them (hence the heat), but you want them to get crispy and delicious and hold their shape after baking in the oven (hence the oil). You need to keep them warm while you're working, so stick something like foil over them. Not pictured is some minced up red bell pepper. Next time I'll use green and yellow, or green and red.



If you make these, shred a little more cheese than I did. And, prior to filling your tacos, divide your fillings (potato, pepper, and cheese) each into 8 equal piles. None left over, none run out. Fill in that order: potato, pepper, then cheese. Actually, fill in whatever order you want. I guess it doesn't matter. I'd probably put the potato on the bottom either way, though. And it helps to spread it out in a strip from one side of the tortilla to the other, so you don't get a really fat tortilla that splits open in the oven and has tough edges from lack of filling on the sides.



Put little toothpicks in them to hold them closed. Line them up on a baking sheet. You don't need to grease it, as the tortillas should be oily enough all by themselves.



Bake them in the oven for... I don't know if that's copyrighted. Bake them in the oven until they get crispy and melty. It should take roughly the amount of time that a sitcom episode without commercials takes.



You can take out the toothpicks now; they will hold their shape. Righteous, no? Serve with a ladle of your black beans, drizzle of your lime crème fraîche, some salsa or pico de gallo on the side, and a wee bit of cilantro.



--- --- ---

I wonder what I'd change? I'd use more cheese, for one, I think. I'd like to try it with a mix of sweet potato and yucca, with some kind of braised bitter greens and some kind of smokey cheese.

Seriously. Get some of that mozzarella.

Neatloaf, Mashed Potatoes, and Gravy

For some reason, since I stopped eating terrestrial vertebrates, excuses to consume mashed potatoes have been few and far between. You'd think that an unassuming dish of smushed up roots would give little offense to my sensibilities. And it's true - I love mashed potatoes. I wish I could eat them every day. But I don't - I hardly ever do. What would I eat them with? You can't just sit down with a plate of mashed potatoes and a pile of beans and call it a meal. You can't really eat them with fish (the fish would slink off into the abyss of undetectability and viola, you've wasted $10). They're pretty good with meatloaf, though. Now, to remove the meat part...

...Not that hard, as it turns out. Instead, use a bunch of eggs and vegetables. Neat, right?

Oh, and I made gravy, too. It's something that I didn't care for too much while growing up, but have learned to cherish in very recent years. Or is it gravy? That thing I've been making? Maybe it's just a mushroom sauce. You tell me. I've never been that good at cramming content into an existing definition.

I should mention that although the recipe is not identical to anyone else's, and it was my idea to make it, I gathered a lot of ideas and ingredient/method inspiration from a blog post from Diets, Dessert, and Dogs.


NEATLOAF

2 slices fresh bread, the less refined the better (I used whole wheat, and also found that 2 slices made it taste too bready - I would use 1 slice next time)
about that volume in nuts of various kinds (I used walnuts and Brazil nuts)
2 medium carrots, shredded
1 onion, diced (about the same volume as carrots)
2-3 ribs celery, diced (about the same volume as onions)
Cooking oil
1 lb mushrooms
3 fat cloves garlic
few sprigs some fresh resinous herb (I used rosemary)
handful cilantro leaves (or parsley, you could use that)
Sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup vegetable broth
1/4 cup dry red wine (note: I detest drinking wine, and wine drinking culture. I love it in food. Now I have a mostly full bottle that I don't want. If you also dislike drinking wine, I recommend going to Trader Joe's and getting three buck Chuck. At least you won't be wasting lots of money. And let me know if you have some ideas for me to finish this without having to drink it)
Ketchup
5 eggs

If you're making all three, make the neatloaf first. It takes awhile in the oven and then has to cool a little, so you can do other things while that's going on. And this is a time-consuming recipe, even with a food processor, though it's actually really simple and extremely forgiving. If you don't have a food processor, I'm sure it can be done, but... good luck. Try chopping really finely? Blending in small batches? I've never tried it. *clutches her Cuisinart*

1. OK. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Whip out the Cuisinart (have I mentioned how much I love my Cuisinart and am glad that my mom doesn't use it anymore, thus my inheritance of it? The thing's like, 30 years old and still amazing). Tear the bread up, and stick it in with the nuts. Use a bunch of nuts. Give it a whir until the nuts and the bread crumbs are all the same size, and all a bit crumby. Set them aside in a bowl, and use the grating attachment to put through the carrots. You could do this by hand, but it would take you 10 minutes instead of 20 seconds. Heat up a pan on the stove over medium heat, with some oil. Mix up all your carrots, onion, and celery together (it should be a huge heap) and cook it. Stir it every so often to make sure it's all getting heat, until everything starts to turn orange and the onions get a bit translucent. Then you can take it off the heat. And put it in a bowl.

2. Put the normal blade back in the food processor and process together the mushrooms, garlic, and herbs. You can actually do this while the other stuff is still on the stove. It doesn't take long. Just make a bunch of tiny bits, like the mushrooms in vegetarian burgers. Add this mixture to the emptied pan (again, over medium heat) with some more cooking oil. Stir every so often. It will let out liquid. (Hopefully you won't have to stop it halfway through cooking when you realize that you've made it to 25 without owning a corkscrew and you have an unopened bottle of red wine that you need to open so you can use the wine in your cooking, so you have to run to the nearest grocery store to supply your need. If you have a corkscrew, carry on.) When it's done letting out liquid, it should smell good. Add the vegetable broth and the red wine to the pan and stir it up. (Hopefully you won't have to stop the cooking again when you realize that you've also made it to 25 without ever using a corkscrew and as easy as it may appear, things look rough when the cork breaks off in the bottle and you have to run to the computer to Google, "how to remove broken cork from wine bottle," before discovering that the little wings on the corkscrew should go up when you're screwing in, not down, and you actually push them down to lift out the cork, and presto! you have two halves of a cork and an open bottle of wine. If you know how to use a corkscrew, carry on.)



3. Chuck a bunch of the carrot mixture into the food processor (at least half of it) and process it to be in teeny bits like the mushrooms. Then combine all the mushroom, all the carrot/onion/celery, and all the nut/bread crumb mixture together in the pan. Squirt some ketchup in there. I don't know how much. 3 tablespoons? Whatever seems right. Stir it all up and season to taste with salt and pepper.



4. Beat the eggs vigorously in a large bowl until they're foamy. With a whisk, it'll take a minute or two. Longer with a fork, less time with egg beaters. In any case, they should look like this:



You may now dump the whole mixture from the pan into the bowl with the eggs, and stir it until it makes a very, very thick batter.

5. Prepare a standard-sized loaf pan by greasing it. And flouring it, while you're at it. I just greased with olive oil (should have used a saturated fat) and skipped the flour, and... well, you'll see later what happened when I unmolded it. Anyway, when your pan is ready, put the mixture into it, smooth out the top, and pop it in the oven.



Cook it on the middle oven rack for about an hour, give or take (mine was an hour and 10, but the loaf pan was also sitting in a glass dish, which may or may not have slowed the heat), or until it gets to 160°F in the middle (find out using a meat thermometer or instant-read thermometer), which is the proper "cooked" temperature for eggs. If you don't have a thermometer, an hour should be OK.

MASHED POTATOES

3 lbs red potatoes
few sprigs rosemary leaves, minced
1-2 cloves garlic, pressed (a really fat one will suffice)
~1 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup vegetable broth
2-4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil, or butter (which I didn't have much of and wanted to save it for the gravy, so I used oil)
Sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper

If you're smart about life, you'll have more than 4 tbsp of butter on hand when you make a huge batch of mashed potatoes and gravy. That is all.

1. Slice your potatoes (I make 1/2-inch thick slices). Bring a huge pot of water to a boil, add a really fat pinch of salt, add the potatoes, return to a simmer, and cook for 10-15 minutes. You know, until they're done. Drain them and return them to the pot. While they're still hot, add the minced up rosemary and pressed garlic.

2. Mix it up a little, then add the buttermilk and vegetable broth, and oil or butter. (Hopefully, when you ran to the store earlier you'll have also picked up a potato masher. But because you didn't, and dag nabbit, you've got something in the oven and can't go again, you will make this work and you will use the slotted spoon as awkwardly as it takes with enough elbow grease to KILL a man! If you have a potato masher, carry on.) I've never used vegetable broth before in my potatoes, or olive oil, but let me tell you this: I was really pleasantly surprised. It was almost better than butter. (I was able to serve it with a little butter, and that kind of toppled it over the hill of splendid and into the valley of amazing graze. You know, where the happy cows live.) Mix it up some more, and add salt and pepper to taste. It should taste pretty spectacular.

MUSHROOM GRAVY

2-3 tbsp butter or a mixture of butter and cooking oil (as long as butter is at least half of the mixture, which it was for me. All butter is ideal, if you have it)
2 cups sliced mushrooms
2-3 tbsp flour
~2 cups vegetable broth
~1/2 cup heavy cream
no more than 1/4 cup dry red wine

I love making mushroom gravy with wine. It has the most alluring fragrance. But once I used too much wine and it tasted then like too much wine. I didn't like that nearly as much. So don't go overboard.

1. Heat up your butter/oil in a skillet over medium heat until the butter foams, like so.

Add the mushrooms and coat them. Like so.



Let them cook in there for several minutes, turning them every so often, until they let out their liquid and then start to brown. Let them brown. Let them brown until you smell the teeniest, faintest hint of charcoal. You will also see a golden brown color developing on your pan. The French call it "fond." I call it flavor. In any case, it'll come off the pan and go into the gravy, which is what we want.



2. Then add the flour and toss it together to coat all the mushrooms. Try not to have flour clumps. As soon as you smell toasting flour (which should be very soon), slowly pour in the vegetable broth and whisk as you do. You don't want flour clumps at this point, but if you get a few, don't worry too much. You probably won't notice later and now you can be more vigilant when you make gravy in the future. It'll start to bubble, which is good. Turn down the heat to medium-low.



3. Carefully pour in the cream, whisking as you go. Do the same with the wine. The contents of the pan should have a very slightly musky purplish hue.



Bring it back up to a gentle simmer, and let it cook for about 10 minutes, stirring every so often. It'll thicken a little, and don't worry if it seems a little thin in the pan, when it cools ever so slightly it will thicken up a good deal.

4. Finish up by bringing the neatloaf out of the oven, because, miraculously, it happens to be time. It should be browned on top, and a bit cracked. Let it cool in the pan for 10-20 minutes.



Carefully run a thin knife around the sides to separate it from the pan. Invert it onto a cutting board or similar surface. If you used a thin oil and didn't flour your pan, you might see this on the cutting board after inverting it:



and something that is undoubtedly the missing piece still in the pan, but if you're as clever and industrious as I am, it won't really matter. Very much.



You see? Nobody will know.

5. Slice off a piece and serve yourself, with some potatoes, and gravy over both. And if you're feeling spunky, you'll have made some braised collards or something (spinach would have been nice) to go on the side.

There we have it. The moral of the story, as far as I'm concerned, is not to get worked up about things that happen to go wrong when you're cooking. Or itty bitty oversights you may have made prior to engaging in your own personal cooking competition. What would an Iron Chef do? Use it to your advantage. Learn from it. Make a Hyperbole and a Half-esque comic strip, if you will. You will still have a good dinner.

Spinach Hot Toss

Right now, you may be internally questioning the legitimacy of the term "hot toss." Conversely, it's possible you have assumed that "hot toss" is, indeed, a legitimate name for some type of dish, and you just don't know what it is. I suppose it mightn't have crossed everyone's mind to read the title of the post, either, and thus many of you are unsure of the nature of my monologue. I'm going to clear the air, so to speak.

Perhaps nobody has used the term "hot toss" before, and that's okay. But it's about time we do. If we can give ridiculously descriptive names to recipes such as "Ground Beef, Onion, and Garlic Casserole Layered with Peas, Carrots, and Rosemary-Mashed Potatoes Seasoned with Sea Salt and Freshly Ground Black Pepper, Topped with 18-month Hand-Grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and Baked in a 10-inch Round Earthenware Dish," or absolutely not even a little descriptive monikers like "Dutch Baby," surely I can, in good conscience, coin a concise yet slightly descriptive handle along the lines of "Spinach Hot Toss" (it's hot, contains spinach, and you toss it together). And we should all feel at liberty to use it. Legitimate? I think so.

I am a simple woman. I enjoy instant gratification, small pleasures, and justifiably unpretentious living. This is a simple meal. Filling, nutritious, but simple. And it costs under $5 to make 2 servings. It's no $.99-cent 12-pack of instant ramen noodles, either. (I say that with both pride and conviction.)

I am not pretentious.


SPINACH HOT TOSS

Extra-virgin olive oil or other cooking oil
chopped onion
sea salt
freshly ground black pepper
some kind of herbs/spices (I used a little oregano and a bit of smoked paprika)
whole lotta frozen chopped spinach
few garlic cloves, pressed
some finely chopped nuts (walnuts or pecans are best)
small handful of cooked black beans (or other cooked legumes)
about as much frozen corn as you had beans
again as much cooked rice, barley, quinoa, or other starchy bits
bunch of grated cheddar cheese
fresh tomato, chopped up
fresh basil (or cilantro, depending on your spice palette)

1. Chuck your onions in a pan with some olive oil, over medium heat.

2. Stir them a bit and cook them until they get yellow and start to crisp. Or brown them. It doesn't really matter, just don't burn them.



3. Add a little bit of seasoning and stir it around, and then dump in the spinach, nuts, garlic, beans, and corn. Mix that up good (I forgot the nuts).



I used more beans than I wanted to (I really wanted to use up what I had leftover in my fridge, which was more than I should have), and not nearly as much spinach as I wanted to (I ran out), but it's not like the dish is ruined or anything. Anyway, it should look greener than mine.

4. Keep cooking that, and stir it every so often, until the spinach and corn is all thawed out and everything's nice and hot in the pan. Then mix in your grain/seed/starchy bit. I used pearled barley, since I had some on hand. I did have to cook it first, but that's kind of a non-involved process so I didn't care. Again, I used a little more than I intended. Oh well.



5. Take it out of the pan, put it in a few bowls, and mix in a whole bunch of grated cheddar. And then chop up some fresh tomato, and a little bit of basil, and put it on top.

Looks good, no? Except my dish ended up being more about grains and legumes, and less about spinach and cheese. I like the version with more spinach and cheese better. But it's kind of hard to mess this one up. And it takes like, 10 minutes. And why the heck wouldn't you want to make it?

I mean, Hot Toss. Come on.