Braised Cabbage and Garbanzos

Super cheap vegan budget meal for all your friends. Take out the butter and you've practically got spa food on your hands. Low grocery bill. Oh yes.

Serves 4 hongry people.

Ingredients:

5 cloves garlic, minced
1 medium head of cabbage
2 carrots
2 cans garbanzos
black pepper
salt
cumin
paprika
olive oil
butter (okay, that's not vegan, but you can just substitute more oil if you want it vegan).

Make some brown rice.

You could just buy shredded cabbage, but this way of cutting the cabbage makes the dish seem special, for some reason. And the cabbage cooks in a really delicate way:

Wash the outer leaves of cabbage. Lay several leaves at a time one on top of the other, kind of like a wad of money or measuring cups that sit inside each other. Now roll them together like a cigar. Cut the cabbage into one centimeter strips. Cabbage ribbons. You can keep the thick white middle part of the leaf. Use the whole head. You can chop the heart, just not that really tough stem.

Put this cabbage aside.

Scrape two carrots. Then, take a knife and flick off slivers of carrot in the Italian fashion, i.e. as if you are whittling the carrot into a pencil, except you keep whittling until there is no carrot left. (Sorry, no youtube). Or you can also just julienne them, but that is bow-ring. Not to mention it's supposedly attracts good qi to your food to have irregular shaped pieces. Hey, I said your hippie friends were coming over. Put the carrot slivers aside in their own bowl or dish.

1. Put a Dutch oven on high heat until it's pretty hot, then put half a stick of butter (*whistling*) and about 2T of olive oil. Put in the carrot and saute until a bit soft. Put in two cans of garbanzos, drained-ish*. Sprinkle on about 2t of cumin and a generous sprinkle of paprika. Let this cook on almost high for about 3-4 minutes.

2. Add half the minced garlic and toss the garbanzos until the garlic is fragrant. Pour this out into a bowl.

3. In the same Dutch oven (don't wash it), put in about 2T butter and 2T olive oil (or less if you are worried about these things -- I think less would work just as well). Put in the cabbage and turn it until it is really coated. Let this cook for about 3-4 minutes on high while you stir every so often. Don't go anywhere.

4. Season the cabbage the way you did the garbanzos: lots of black pepper that you've ground further with your fingers, salt, cumin and paprika. Throw in the garlic. Let the cabbage get a little brown here and there.

5. Pour 1/4 cup water into the pan, cover and let the cabbage braise on medium high for about 5 minutes. You should really actually go away and forget about the cabbage for like, 8-10 minutes. Stir once in between there, if you can. The cabbage should have wilted, gone whitish, and gotten browned and started to look caramel colored along some edges. It should not be soft and mushy, just wilted and easy to cut with a fork.

6. Pour in the garbanzos. Check seasoning. Serve on brown rice.

Mmm.

*it'll be good if some of that juice from the can gets into the dish, but get most of it drained off...

Achiote Hot Sauce

Mr. Svalina says this will work. I can't even find the peppers though.

1 cup achiote peppers
1 head of garlic, cloves skinned and cut in two lengthwise
1 head of garlic, cloves skinned and chopped roughly
White vinegar
A bowl
A mortar and pestle
A bottle that closes well, about the size of a hot sauce bottle, or a jar, very clean.

Take about a cup of achiote peppers.
Clean a head of garlic so you have cloves, uncrushed, but cut in two.
Soak the peppers and the garlic in white vinegar for a week.

(Time passes).

Saute a chopped, cleaned head of garlic in olive oil.

Put the achiote peppers, vinegar, and raw garlic plus the sauteed garlic in a blender or mortar and pestle. Grind. Bottle.

Autumn Fruit Salad

I first saw this on Cookbook , a twitterer who posts teeny tiny recipes. I thought it would look beautiful as a painting, but never knew what persimmon and pomegranate taste like. Now I know. And now I am hellbent.

It comes in two tweets:

1.

Autumn Fruit Salad: toss c grn+rd+blk grape/¾pomegranate/2kiwi&pear&fuyu persimmon/1-3T VanillaSyrup&lem. Chill; top w ¼pomegranate. Yld~8c.

2.

Vanilla Syrup: speckly magic for desserts/drinks. Scrape½vanilbean in c h2o/2c sug; +pod. Stir@med to dissolve. Rmv pod. Yld2c; refrigerate.

Let me know what you think if you try it.

Addendum:

I made this for Thanksgiving in Los Angeles at my friend's house. People appreciated having fruit to eat, I think, after three kinds of pie. Here's the long-winded version:

The vanilla syrup really doesn't need to be explained more. I just boiled it until it had really big bubbles, then waited about five minutes until it started to get faintly yellow. It's a simple syrup.

The fruit salad of course can be varied according to what you find. Because I knew that if I bought a big sack each of green, red and black grapes it would be hard to get them all eaten, I just bought black thinking they would look good with the rest. Here's how I got them on the platter, 12 by 9 inches oval, and it didn't look bad. Tossing everything together is an option, followed by putting the reserved 1/4 pomegranate on top.

I had to get artsy, see above photo, and directions below. Have fun figuring out your own way.

Open the pomegranate and loosen all the arils, put them in a bowl. Pick out the membrane.
Peel and slice two kiwi.
Peel and slice four Fuyu persimmons like you would an apple for apple pie.
Wash peel and halve 2-3 cups of black grapes and put them in a bowl.
Peel and slice up 2-3 pears. Keep them together in a row if you want, like a little deck of cards.

Plate it this way if you like: persimmon fanned out around the edge of the platter, points out. Kiwi circles on top of that. Rest of persimmon over the center. Pomegranate, most of it, over the middle, and a little on the perimeter. Pear slices along one end of the oval's center, pears on the other end of the central oval too, with a little space in the middle for black grapes. The reserved 1/4 of the pomegratate on top.

The syrup can be passed since some people don't like super sweet things.

Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies: Variation

Usually I think of perfection as a sickness, except when it came to these cookies.

This is the New York Times recipe for the perfect chocolate chip cookie. Thems good cookies. No denying it. But they started my dreaming about something a little more to my taste. So I've been tweaking the recipe progressively with each new batch. Here's todays:

Instead of 20 oz. of dark chocolate, I put in:

2 3.5 ounce bars of dark dark chocolate, chopped with a cleaver to half centimeter chunks
2 3.5 ounce bars of dark chocolate with toffee (Ghiradelli brand) (also chopped)
6 ounces of pecans chopped to small bits

I put in about 1 cup and a smidge of white sugar instead of 1 2/3 cup.

Splash of Jim Beam. This will probably not even be detectable. But why not.

7+7+6=20, right?

Homemade Thin Mints

Thin Mints made from scratch. I think they're really chocolatey and best frozen.

Fruit Cake Cookie

via Jesseca Cornelson:

This is a recipe that makes a truckload. I halved it and got only a million: filled two and a half huge freezer bags full. I use real butter. They were a hit with Jesseca's family, the people at my Writing Center and friends thought they'd like the chocolate thin mints best, but no, it's the fruit cake cookie. It doesn't taste the way you think it would. I left out the milk and when it says "can of coconut flakes" (and I couldn't find a can at three stores) I think about a cup and change works fine for the halved recipe, about two and a half for the full recipe. Also, yes, you have to mince the candied fruit which is a little labor intensive. You can also substitute dried pineapple for the candied.

I dare you to let this dough refrigerate for 24 hours before you make them. I bet something sort of awesome happens.

Honestly, I wish I'd made the whole recipe. They make a good present.

coconut macaroons

From Emari!

Ingredients:

3 cups shredded coconut
1 cup sweetened condensed milk
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon almond extract

Preparation:

Generously grease baking sheets. Combine all ingredients, stir until well-blended. Drop by teaspoonfuls, 1 inch apart, on prepared baking sheets. Press down with back of spoon to even thickness. Bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes or until macaroons are golden brown. Cool for 5 minutes. Remove.