The Zest

I’m going to be preoccupied with basil for a while. Take a peak:

Allow me to introduce you, dear friends, to my buddy, my kitchen cohort-du-jour, Basil. It’s that time of year again, when Trader Joe’s is the proprietor of fresh, potted basil, a plant that will feed my culinary imaginings for weeks to come. Brian picked it up for me on Mother’s Day, rather than flowers (does this man know me or what?) and I’ve been admiring it all week. I’m enamored of its gracious leafiness, of its silky sheen that convinces any who look upon it that I more or less know what I’m doing.

Fresh herbs are my ace in the hole, my sure thing. My raison d’être, even, because if it weren’t for fresh herbs, I may not be here at all, culinarily speaking. My cooking got a whole lot better once I learned that if you throw in some chopped of this and a few leaves of that – at the right times and in all the right places – you effect that sensation we know as flavor.

One of the items on my life list is to grow an herb garden, and I swear I’ll do it, some future day (just trying to keep it real, to project myself through a dreamy portal just east of pragmatic – an herb garden being a far more realistic goal for me to achieve than, say, growing summer squash or green beans). I’ve made a number of efforts to sprout things in pots, and it always comes down to a severe talent deficit, an almost unjust lack of intuition. That, and I’m hard pressed to find appropriate light in my house, and the poor shoots, when I get any, whither and fade if I place them outside in our miserable heat, even in the early morning. But as I understand it, basil is supposed to enjoy heat, leaving me to conclude, then, that the problem can only be me.

If anyone out there (anyone? anyone?) would care to enlighten me, to instruct me somewhat in the care and growing of herbs, I’d be grateful. And in the meantime, I’ll share my favorite hot weather things to do with basil. What are yours?

• Chopped and mixed in a cold salad of just-tender peas, crumbled chèvre and mint

• Scattered over a pasta salad with lemon zest and shrimp

• Stirred into couscous just before serving

• Whole leaves in panini with fat slices of tomato and buffalo mozzarella

• Sprinkled into a frittata

• Boiled in a simple syrup and swirled into lemonade

• Sliced, chiffonade-style, and then spread over a grilled pizza topped with roasted corn and tomatoes

• In a vinaigrette with orange zest, orange and lemon juices and walnut oil (this was last night’s concoction, drizzled over sautéed scallops atop baby greens, avocado and orange segments)

Recipe: Banana Oat Nut Bread

I recently brought my radio into my kitchen. It was part experiment, part research for a magazine story assignment: Cook while listening to public radio (could I accomplish the dual mental exercise of actively listening and following a recipe?). Does anyone else do that?

I’m an ardent fan of public radio programming, and I often listen to snatches of mostly National Public Radio shows in the car. But working on my article, I found what a pleasant, productive pairing listening and cooking can be.

As part of my research, I got to have a conversation with Nikki Silva of NPR’s The Kitchen Sisters, to get her take on the confluence of cooking and listening. “When I’m cooking I just love to listen,” she says. “I feel a little like I’m on a vacation anyway with either of those activities. It’s very relaxing to me, it’s being transported.”

Silva shared her dad’s banana bread recipe with me, which is found in the pages of “Hidden Kitchens: Stories, Recipes and More from NPR’s The Kitchen Sisters.” It’s not listed in the table of contents or even the index. Instead it’s almost buried as an illustrative element, so you might miss it if you don’t know what to look for: a photocopy of a scratched out by hand recipe, with instructions that are casual and implied, the way handed-down recipes usually are. I’m running that one in the magazine, but it made me want to rifle through my files for my own banana bread recipe, because it’s been way too long.

I made Silva’s father’s version the same afternoon I made mine, and the two contain roughly the same amounts of banana and sugar, but diverge there. I’m partial to banana bread (or any bread for that matter) that’s nutty and hearty with whole wheat and flax. Silva’s is not quite so self-conscious. It’s the kind you’d bake and then walk over to the neighbors’, cradled in the loose wrapping of a tea towel, still hot and moist, a prime afternoon snack.

Banana Oat Nut Bread

I decided this would be the perfect banana bread recipe for Not Quite Nigella’s Banana Bread Bake-Off! It’s a great breakfast banana bread, sweet but with staying power. We enjoy it the day after baking lightly toasted with a smear of peanut butter.

1 cup packed brown sugar

6 tbsp canola oil

¼ cup whole ground flaxseed meal

3 eggs

1 ½ cups mashed ripe banana (about 3 large)

1 cup regular oats

½ cup plain yogurt

1 tsp vanilla

1 cup white whole wheat flour

1 cup stone ground whole wheat flour

1 tbsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

½ tsp cinnamon

¼ cup chopped walnuts

Cooking spray

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Combine the first 4 ingredients in a large bowl; beat well with a mixer at medium speed. Add banana, oats, yogurt and vanilla to sugar mixture; beat well. Lightly spoon flour into measuring cups and level with a knife. In a medium bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon; stir with a whisk. Add flour mixture to sugar and banana mixture; beat just until moist. Spoon batter into a large loaf pan coated with cooking spray. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes to 1 hour or until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool 10 minutes in pan on a wire rack; remove from pan and cool completely.

Recipe: Chickpea and Tomato Sauce

Cooks (and particularly cooks who blog – you know who you are) are lousy with confessions, and here is one of mine: I’m horrible at sharing my kitchen. If you’re one of those chummy folk who consider the kitchen a communal space, a little oasis of gathering and working together, well, I’m sure there’s a musical out there for you somewhere.

My kitchen does fit the particular cliché that says it’s the room where everyone tends to congregate, even though the really comfy seats are just steps away. But it’s not having other people close by that gets in the way; it’s people cooking with me when I’m trying to cook. When it comes to divvying up kitchen responsibilities, I’m kind of stingy.

It’s enough for me to attempt to wrap my head around a recipe, to figure out what it is I’m supposed to be doing to the salmon, let alone to try and delegate. I’m a little too accomplished at grumbling at Brian when he shows up and tries, graciously, to help get dinner on the table (imagine grumbling at your husband under those circumstances! What kind of ingrate am I? I’m trying to mend my ways).

I have my excuses. For one, my kitchen isn’t exactly designed for more than a single cook at work. It’s not galley small, it’s suburban moderate, but the layout isn’t really conducive to two people standing side by side snapping the ends off the asparagus. And then I suppose my aversion stems also from the kitchen-as-sanctuary concept I hold so dear. But, I’m trying to do better at handing off the chopping knife to other, willing individuals, because, honestly, I’m not that sacrificial, and besides, cooking with another person is supposed to be a bonding experience, right?

Case in point: My sister came to visit last week – my sister who loves cooking every bit as much as I and who is therefore worthy to hold court in the kitchen right alongside me. So I had to let her in the kitchen, just had to. I couldn’t very well keep her out, couldn’t pretend to be cleaning the tile grout or some such thing when all over my very counters was evidence that I was indeed engaging in the act of preparing food.

So I decided I would suck it up and share, the way sisters are supposed to do. I’ve never had a problem sharing with her in other areas. Skirts and flip flops and my 90s music collection have all been fair game, and she has reciprocated, letting me borrow a hoodie when I visited her and forgot to pack a sweater, or making me countless copies of mp3s. Not to mention that she always cedes her bedroom to me and Brian and our overwhelming suitcases.

Gracious attitude at the ready, I planned a menu of recipes we could prepare together: handmade pasta (our first time! See? Bonding at work here!) with chickpea sauce (which we both found absurdly tasty – more bonding!); an improvised black bean spread with cilantro and lime for a Southwestern-style pizza; chicken and chutney lettuce wraps. And then there were the cookies we threw together from our elementary school cookbook. All told, she was here for a week, offering me a week’s worth of meals in reform. I don’t think I elbowed her once.

Chickpea and Tomato Sauce

Adapted from Gourmet

This sauce is hearty and versatile. We ate it with homemade orechiette, which cradled the chickpeas perfectly. There were tons of leftovers, which I tossed with some cooked bulgur and a handful of torn basil leaves a couple of nights later.

1 15-oz can chickpeas

¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

4 garlic cloves, chopped

1 medium onion, finely chopped

3 medium carrots, finely chopped

¼ to ½ teaspoon dried red pepper flakes

Kosher salt

1 28-ounce can chopped or diced tomatoes

1 cup water

1/3 cup finely chopped flat-leaf (Italian) parsley

Heat oil in a large, heavy saucepan over medium heat. Add onion, garlic, carrots and red pepper flakes (red pepper can be omitted and added later at the table if you are feeding heat-sensitive people) and ½ teaspoon salt and cook until softened, stirring occasionally. Add chickpeas, tomatoes, water and ½ teaspoon and simmer, uncovered, until carrots are tender and sauce is slightly thickened, about five minutes. Stir in parsley and salt to taste.

Serve over small pasta, such as shells or orechiette, or stir into cooked grains.

You know the thing about there being two types of people: energy givers and energy suckers? The idea is that you want to spend your time with energy givers, people who have the ability to make you feel revitalized, enthusiastic about life (those energy suckers, on the other hand, sometimes just have to get kicked to the curb).

That’s more or less my approach to cooking. I’m all about the recipes that are energy givers, not the ones that make you feel like a stove slave. And I mean this on a couple of levels. For one thing, I’m into recipes that provide energy because they’re nutritionally solid. But I’m also into preparing dishes where the very preparation makes me feel refreshed and rejuvenated. This dish I made the other night – Pearled Barley with Peas & Mint, Risotto Style – fits that bill exactly.

I haven’t had the chance here yet to wax lovingly about risotto, to tell you how very much I adore the dish. I think it just might be my favorite food in all the world. At the very least, it’s way up there on the list. And it just might be my favorite food in the world to make.

It’s a soothing, comforting preparation that makes me feel like a real cook, and like I’m tending to my family at the same time I’m doing something for me. It’s standing, feet planted firmly in front of the stove, deliberately but gently coaxing hot broth into smooth grains of Arborio, urging them toward their creamy potential with soft, counter-clockwise strokes of the spoon. It’s giving those grains your undivided attention, knowing they’ll reward you for your vigilance (a little like raising kids, don’t you think?).

I know, it sounds like an energy sucker, but, for me at least, it’s the other way around. Making risotto is a cinch, but it does require almost constant tending of the pot. There’s something about the process, about being required to focus on the rice, that dials it all back for me, puts my cares into perspective, allows reflection on the day. And the whole time I’m making dinner.

But while making it does wonders for my mental health, risotto is otherwise not the healthiest of choices. I’m kind of a stickler for whole grains, and those Arborio grains are pretty little things, shiny and pearl-like – which means they’ve been pretty well stripped of all their good-for-you properties.

So, inspired by a long-ago post from Heidi on pearled barley “risotto,” and using one of my favorite risotto recipes from Giada De Laurentiis, I came up with this version. The grains I used still had a brown mottled look to them, meaning they hadn’t been polished too much, and so perhaps retain more nutritional qualities. I also just discovered First Blush juices, and wanted to try them as a wine substitute (I know, I’m breaking rules all over the place here). I was impressed by their nuanced, dry taste. And the resulting risotto-style dish was, while not as creamy and indulgent as the traditional stuff, extremely satisfying in its own right – both in the making, and the eating.

Pearled Barley with Peas & Mint, Risotto Style

Serves 4

6 cups low-sodium chicken stock

1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1 medium finely chopped onion

1 ½ cups pearled barley

½ cup First Blush Cabernet juice or dry red wine

1 cup frozen peas, thawed

½ cup freshly grated parmesan

¼ cup each chopped fresh mint and Italian parsley

Salt and freshly ground pepper

Bring the broth to a simmer over medium-high heat; don’t allow it to boil. Keep warm and softly simmering at just under medium heat.

Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Saute the onion until soft and translucent, about 5 to 8 minutes. Add barley to pan and stir, toasting until fragrant, about 2 minutes. Add juice or wine, stirring until liquid is absorbed. Add two ladlefuls of hot stock, stirring continually until absorbed (it’s ok to step away momentarily step away to pour your kid a glass of milk or something — just not too long or the barley will stick and potentially burn). Add another ladleful of stock, stirring continually until liquid is absorbed. Repeat this process two or three more times, then check barley for doneness. Add peas, then continue to add stock until barley is just tender, but not mushy (you may have leftover broth).

Stir in parmesan, mint, parsley, salt and pepper to taste. Add more parmesan for a creamier consistency. Serve immediately.

I’m a fan of kitchen time – this you know. And, like many of you other fantastic cooks out there, I also love to read about cooking, about who’s cooking what and how they’re doing it.

That’s part of why I started writing here, because I’m an ardent reader of other people’s cooking blogs. They’re my favorite kind of blog to read (other than that of my friend, Tiff, because she’s so super smart). So, naturally, I get all excited when I find my very own little blog is included in lists of blogs other people read and enjoy. And that, my readers, of course leads to my discovery of even more cooking blogs I want to catch up with on a regular basis. And so the circle continues.

Anyway, I just wanted to share a new resource I found with a list of blogs that are great reads (and I’m on it!). It’s called Great Cooks. Jill McKeever, who’s in charge over there, told me in an e-mail, “Your blog is absolutely entertaining and informative. I’m thrilled to have it on the Great Cooks Blogroll.” What a day-maker, that Jill! Pop on over to her site and find a new recipe, make a new friend. That’s what this whole thing’s all about, right? Enjoy.