Spaghetti with Garlic, Sage, and Olive Oil

Ruth's steak-loving sister is visiting, but between the Deadline, the Move, and a general lack of time for food shopping, we've been forced to scour our meatless pantry each evening for dinner fixings. The other night we remembered an Italian classic: spaghetti with garlic and oil, which is pretty much just that. It's also simple, delicious, and fast.

Mark Bittman's variation incorporates fried breadcrumbs, which provide wonderful texture to the slithery pasta. We added a handful of whole sage leaves just because we had them.

1/3 cup olive oil

2 T. minced garlic

1/4 cup whole sage leaves

1/2 cup breadcrumbs (either fresh or dried are fine)

salt and pepper

1 pound spaghetti

1. While the spaghetti boils, heat the oil in a saucepan, then fry the garlic over medium heat until it's golden—keeping a watchful eye on it, as just a few seconds can turn mellow deliciousness into scorched nastiness. Remove with a slotted spoon.

2. Add the sage leaves to the hot oil, and let them fry until they are dark and curly. Remove them from the pan.

3. Add the breadcrumbs, and fry until crispy and brown.

Once the pasta is cooked, drain it and pour it into a large bowl. Top with the fried garlic, sage and breadcrumbs, and add more oil if you like your pasta on the slippery side. Season with salt and pepper. Serve proudly to even your staunchest meat-eating guests.

It's Almost Halloween

"Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble."

—Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 1

What's bubbling or burning in your caldron?

Again with the Kale Chips

This will be our last post on this subject, we promise. But last week's CSA box offered up a gigantic, ruffly head of curly kale, so we decided to try making chips again. Our first attempt, with dinosaur kale, resulted in delicious but very fragile chips; we wondered how the tougher leaves would work. So we cut away the stems, tore the leaves into palm-sized pieces, tossed them with about a tablespoon of olive oil and a little salt, and roasted them for about 40 minutes at 250 degrees.

The results were even better than our first batch: the thicker leaves resulted in more-substantial chips, and the longer roasting time made them so addictively crunchy that we ended up consuming the whole batch in about 24 hours.

Usually we split our CSA box with Kevin and Cynthia, but Cynthia had given us the whole bunch of kale, claiming that she didn't like it. But once she tasted the chips, she was astonished and converted.

Guest Blog: Prasad, an Indo-Caribbean Treat

Guest blogger and photographer JP Vellotti thought for sure that prasad would be served at the end of the Diwali parade in Richmond Hill, Queens, NYC last weekend. At least, that was the promise that his wife Ramin made to him in exchange for his photo services at the event. But prasad was not served for a very simple reason -- Diwali this year is actually on Saturday, Oct. 17th and the parade was a week early for traffic control reasons. Luckily, Ramin promised she would make prasad for Diwali, and you can too by following Ramin's recipe.

The recipe is from Ramin Ganeshram's, "Sweet Hands: Island Cooking from Trinidad and Tobago," (Hippocrene Books, 2006). Although the first edition is sold out, a second edition with an updated and expanded recipe section is slated for February 2010.

Prasad

8 servings

When I was a child visiting Trinidad, the only way my father could persuade me to go to the many Hindu prayer meetings was with the promise of prasad, a sweet dessert that is given to guests at the end of a Hindu religious ceremony. The basic “pudding” is garnished with coconut, raisins, and nuts, which are collectively called panjaree. It’s generally accepted that panjaree is only for actual religious functions although plain prasad—called mohan bohg—can be served any time.

2 cups ghee (clarified butter)

1/2 cup raisins

2 cups farina

2 cups whole milk

3 (12-ounce) cans evaporated milk

2 pounds sugar

1 teaspoon peeled and grated fresh ginger

1 teaspoon ground cardamom

Raisins, grated fresh coconut, coarsely chopped almonds, and a few cooked chickpeas, for garnish

1. Heat all but 2 teaspoons of the ghee in a large, deep frying pan. Add the raisins and fry over medium-low heat until they plump. Add the flour 1/4 cup at a time, stirring constantly, until it becomes light brown.

In a separate pan, combine the whole milk, evaporated milk, sugar, ginger, and cardamom. Bring just to a boil, stirring constantly. Remove from the heat and add the milk mixture to the flour mixture, 1/4 cup at a time, until the prasad forms semi moist clumps. Remove from the heat. Garnish with grated coconut, almonds, and raisins. Place a few chickpeas on top.

Candles on Ice

Our friend JP, who has written here before, snapped a shot of these Dias at the Indo-Caribbean Diwali parade in Brooklyn a couple of weekends ago. They look a bit like clams on the half shell on ice. They're actually candles that the celebrants light and walk around with at the celebration.

Bargain Wine of the Week: 2008 Maipe Malbec

When we first opened the Maipe Malbec, we thought it okay but not spectacular. Certainly not spectacular enough for this $8.99 (retail) bottle to warrant a 90 from Robert Parker and others.

It was near the end of a course of ravioli with Marinara sauce, so the wine worked well. But we just wondered what about it warranted a 90.

We vacuumed it shut for the night and opened it again the next night with another pasta and red sauce meal. That little extra time of breathing in a bit of 2009 air made all of the difference.

"The 2008 Malbec is a glass-coating purple color with a striking perfume of violets, black cherry, and black raspberry," Parker had written. "Exhibiting surprising complexity for its price category, the wine has gobs of fruit, savory flavors, and excellent depth and length. It is an outstanding value for drinking over the next 3-4 years. Alberto Antonini (think Altos Las Hormigas) is a consultant at Maipe which in and of itself is an indicator that the winery is focused on quality."

This is a Malbec you can afford to drink every night. It tastes of chocolate and coffee, with a finish full of ground pepper.

We would easily pay twice as much for this wine from Argentina. You should pick it up at its price of $8.99.

The World Is a Delicious Place

We may not be writing much this week, but we're glad to see that plenty of other people are. Check out this fine essay on home cooking by Jonah Lehrer. Our favorite paragraph:

And then there's the next meal. Who knows what we'll want to eat? Because we cook, we don't just see things as they are, raw and tough and fibrous. We look at what is and we glimpse the possible - that ugly fish can have crispy skin, and that bitter broccoli rabe would be delicious with garlic and oil. The pretty radicchio belongs in a risotto and those leftover scraps of meat will make a perfect stock. The world, it turns out, is a pretty delicious place. All it needs a little attention, and maybe just a pinch of salt.

Rasa: The Essence

The Sanskrit word rasa is sometimes translated as "flavor," but it also means "juice" — the delicious essence of something. The sweet taste of a ripe peach is its rasa, its essence. Applied in a deeper sense, rasa is the juiciness in life, the subtle lusciousness that gives the world its taste. Without rasa, life would feel dry and flavorless.

—from Vegetarian Times and Yoga Journal

Apologies . . . and a Request

We apologize for the scant postings this week. In addition to the Move and the Deadline (both fast approaching!), we also had to contend with the Sick. We'll be better next week, we promise.

In the meantime, if any of you have a delicious cheap recipe or tip to contribute, please do! We're always interested in what other people are cooking.

Favorite Kitchen Utensils: Mesh Strainer

Our plastic mesh strainer, bought years ago in a dollar store, gets used almost every day. It hangs on the wall in our kitchen so that it's always close at hand. We most often use it to sift flour, or wash rice and other bulk grains. We just measure a cup of rice into the strainer and run it under cold water for a minute or two. This washing not only cleans the grain, but also helps with digestion, believe it or not. The strainer makes it easy: pour, rinse, and drain.

Strainers are also great for incorporating a paste into a larger pot of liquid such as soup, sauce, or gravy.

Tonight when we were making Tom Yum Gai, a spicy Thai soup that calls for a couple of tablespoons of hot and sour paste, we heated four cups of stock (veggie or chicken). Then we added some tofu (you can also use shrimp or chicken, or omit the protein altogether), mushrooms, and mung bean sprouts. When those ingredients had softened, we added scallions and then used the strainer, dipping it almost fully into the liquid, to incorporate two tablespoons of the hot and sour paste.

The strainer keeps the paste from getting lost as a blob in the bottom of the pan. You know whether it has been incorporated, because you can see it in the strainer.

Finally, sprinkle chopped cilantro on the top of the soup and serve.

This is not only a wonderful quick dinner but also a good tonic when you feel yourself coming down with a cold.

Bargain Wine of the Week: 2008 Coteaux du Languedoc Hugues de Beauvignac Picpoul de Pinet

As we've said all too often, the wines of Languedoc are a two-edged dilemma: they can be great wine bargains — or they can be really lousy imports.

When they are great, these wines from the part of southern France that is hard against Spain and Catalonia are the last real bargains from France. When they are bad, they are an unmitigated waste of money. Often the only way to know is to "buy and try."

Unless, of course, a particular $8 wine from Languedoc has been rated 89 by Wine Advocate. That is the case with this wine, which we found at our local wine warehouse. It didn't seem like much of a risk with that endorsement.

This dry white would work with chicken, seafood, and pasta. Tonight it stood up incredibly well to the spicy Thai soup called Tom Yum Gai. It has the aroma of melons and granny smith apples and grapefruit, which also comes through in the citrus-forward flavor.

This wine is crisp, light, and a bargain at $7.99

Florentine-Style Baked White Beans: Fagioli all Fiorentina

Our absolute favorite thing to do with baked white beans is to make Florentine-Style White Baked Beans. It's a casserole that we much prefer these to the sweet pork and beans served at summer picnics throughout America. Serve these once and you'll have people asking you to bring them to the next outing or dinner.

The complexity of the flavors in this pot go with fish, pork, hamburger, beef ... you name it.

Start with the cooked white beans we made a couple of days ago. Put half of the beans (probably three cups) in an oven-proof casserole, along with enough of the cooking liquid to make them slightly wet but not drowning. (Do NOT discard the cooking water. We'll deal with that in a future post.)

Pre-heat oven to 375-degrees F. Add 1-2 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil, a 15 oz. can of tomatoes, preferably fire roasted. (We use the kind with green chilis added because we like just a touch of heat, but the chili part is certainly optional.) Add 5 oz. of prosciutto cut into short strips (optional; we don't add this, given Ruth's vegetarianism), 2 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed, along with 3-5 fresh sage leaves. Season to taste with salt and pepper. If the liquid isn't up to the top of the beans—don't drown them—add enough liquid to just reach the top of the beans.

Put in the oven uncovered and bake for 30-45 minutes. Serve with any fish, chicken, pork or beef. Or just about anything vegetarian.

This pot of white baked beans can also stand up to a crisp chardonnay or a hearty red wine.

(You can make this with canned Cannellini beans if you're in a hurry or just don't want to make the dried beans.)

Bargain Wine of the Week: 2007 Oak Grove Chardonnay Reserve

We buy a lot of wine under $10, much of it rated highly by someone or other in the wine trade. Our mantra is: High rating, low price. We also buy a fair amount of wine that costs more than $10, which we don't write about here.

Every now and then we forget which is which, and sometimes when that happens we open a bottle we've had around for a while but never tasted and exclaim what a great bottle of wine it is. Usually we just assume that it's one of the more expensive bottles.

But the other night we opened a bottle of a little known (at least to us) chardonnay that had been in the cellar for a bit. It was oaky and toasty and was not unlike the chardonnays from Carneros that we love so much. The fruit forward taste, followed by a pleasant aftertaste of vanilla, was glorious. It even stood up against the very hot Indian food on the evening's menu.

We checked our wine store receipts and were shocked to find that this better-than-pleasant wine was not only $7.99 a bottle, but it was also available in 1.5 liter bottles for $13.99. Now that's a bargain.

We had it again the next evening with more subtle vegetarian fare, and again it was superb.

The wine was 2007 Oak Grove Chardonnay Reserve from California. The people at Beverage Dynamics, whatever that is, rated it 87. We think it's too low.

Good Fast Food: Pseudo-Tabbouli

Between the Deadline and the Move, we haven't had much time to shop or cook. Fortunately, our share of a CSA box keeps us in produce, but the other day we found ourselves with little to eat beyond carrots, garlic, and potatoes. Though we could have devised a meal from those humble ingredients, we didn't have time to prepare one.

Looking through the pantry, we found a jar of bulgur that had been ignored for a long time, waiting to

be made into tabbouli. We had no time for that, but we remembered that bulgur can be cooked in just a few minutes by covering it with boiling water. So we did that.

Once we had the hot bulgur, we improvised: a drizzle of olive oil, a few squirts of lemon juice, salt, pepper. We still had some mint, basil, and parsley in the garden, so we chopped a few leaves and tossed them in, along with some crumbled feta cheese.

We loved the result. Though it didn't have the pungent greenness of real tabbouli, which normally includes a hefty dose of minced garlic and scallions, it did have the basic flavors, and the higher proportion of bulgur resulted in a heavier, chewy salad that went well with the sudden influx of fall weather.

We'll make this again, even after the Deadline and the Move.

Incredibly Versatile White Beans

The Tuscan version of a pot on the stove could be ribollita, a thick twice-cooked bread soup that has a foundation of white beans.

White beans are very easy to make and very versatile, for everything from appetizers to main courses.

We see a lot of people on the cooking shows using canned white cannellini beans, but although they work OK in a pinch , but generally they taste too, well, canned. Our favorite recipe comes from Saveur, a food magazine that we loved to read, but admittedly rarely used for actual cooking.

Here's the recipe:

1 lb. dried cannellini or navy beans

4 T. extra-virgin olive oil

2 cloves garlic, crushed

4 or 5 fresh sage leaves

3 to 5 whole black peppercorns

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

1. Sort through the beans, discarding any small stones; then rinse the beans under cold running water. Place them in a large casserole, cover with at least two inches with cold water, and set aside to soak for four hours or overnight. (You can also use the quick-soak method on the dried-bean bag.)

2. Drain beans; then add 12 cups cold water, two tablespoons olive oil, garlic, sage, and peppercorns. Cover the casserole, bring to a boil, then simmer over medium heat for about one hour. Season to taste with salt, reduce heat to medium low, and gently simmer, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon, until the skins are tender and the beans are soft, about one more hour.

3. Remove from heat, set aside, and let beans cool in the cooking liquid. To serve, reheat beans in the liquid over medium-low heat, drain them, and season to taste with salt and pepper. Add the remaining olive oil.

You can eat these right out of the pot, drizzled with a bit more olive oil. Add a piece of sourdough toast and a roaring fire, and you have a simple but wonderful winter dinner.

Bargain Wine of the Week: Château de Nages Costieres de Nîmes Red Rhone

We've just about given up on finding good French wines under $20, let alone for less than $10. The southern regions of the country known as Langeudoc-Roussillion or Corbieres, just north of the Pyrenees Mountains and Spain, offer some inexpensive wines. But you have to know what you're doing or else test a lot of wines to find the bargains that are worth drinking.

Wines from the more famous regions are getting out of reach when it comes to price. Most of us looking for bargains have moved on to Spain, Chile, and Argentina. The great wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy seem to be regularly reaching the $100+ range. Too green for our palates and pockets.

We were trying out a new warehouse wine store in an unfamiliar city the other day, looking for some wine to take to a dinner party. In the Côte du Rhône section, with the Chateauneufs and other expensive burgundies, we spotted a $12 bottle that was highly rated—along with a $7.99 bottle of Côte du Rhône that was also rated in the mid-80s by somebody or other.

Well, the $7.99 bottle was certainly worth a try. And what a surprise. The first thing that hits you is that the wine is dark as night. Not what you expect from what should be a lighter red. The next sensation is the smell of berries, followed by the taste of dark, black berries. Then the taste of licorice. Just a bit of sweet and dark and licorice.

But the wine—a 2007 Château de Nages Costieres de Nîmes red Rhône wine—was not heavy. It went very well with pork tenderloin, white-bean casserole and fresh tomatoes.

When you find a rated Côte du Rhône for less than $8 and it tastes like at least a $20 bottle of wine, it's time to go back to the store and stock up.

Easy Pork Tenderloin in the Oven

We recently put up a guest post from our friend Kevin, who wrote about foolproof pork tenderloin on the gas grill, using the 7-6-5 method.

Last week we added pork tenderloin to a menu, but did not have a gas or charcoal grill handy, so we decided to see how simply we could make a pork tenderloin (two actually, because they always come two to a package) in the oven. Turns out, it's fairly easy.

Here's how we did it:

We heated about a quarter cup of olive oil and 1 Tablespoon of butter over medium-high heat in an ovenproof sauté pan, and rubbed a small amount of kosher or sea salt (1 teaspoon) on the tenderloins, along with about 2 teaspoons of ground pepper from a grinder that included all colors of peppercorns.

We quick-fried about a dozen sage leaves and drained them on paper towels. This is optional, but you'll like it if you do it.

Next, we browned the two tenderloins on all sides in the fat, about 5 to 7 minutes.

We put the pan in an oven preheated to 375 degrees, in the middle of the oven. We roasted them for exactly 15 minutes (until a thermometer in the loin read about 140 degrees). Then we put the loins on a plate or cutting board and covered them with foil; they continued cooking while we made a sauce.

Kevin marinated his tenderloins in a mustard vinaigrette, which we think is a great idea. But we decided to make a mustard-wine sauce to pour over the meat.

First we poured the fat out of the pan and returned it to the stovetop over medium-high heat. We deglazed the pan with about a cup of red wine and reduced it by half. Then we added salt and pepper.

During the reduction process, we whisked in a few tablespoons of mustard. One T of mustard makes a great, mellow sauce; 3 T makes a spicier sauce.

Then we cut the loins on the diagonal, about 5/8-inch thick, and finished them with a fried sage leaves and a drizzle the wine-mustard reduction.

Serve with a Pinot Noir or a Côte du Rhône.

Vegetable Hash

With an influx of vegetables every week, thanks to our CSA membership, we've had to develop a triage system for avoiding waste.

First, we eat the lettuce and greens. If we can't get to things like chard and kale, we cook them and freeze them to use later in soups or polenta. Then we move on to the broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, and leeks, which can last a week or more in the fridge. This system means that the vegetables with staying power, such as potatoes, onions, garlic, and carrots, tend to pile up.

So last night we made a big vegetable hash, and it turned out great. You know how sometimes you throw something together without a recipe, and it's so good that even as you eat it, you're worried that you will never be able to re-create it? This hash was like that.

And it couldn't have been simpler. We cut five small potatoes into tiny dice, for fast cooking, then tossed them into a couple of tablespoons of hot olive oil. Next we sliced four small onions and added those.

A small cauliflower had spent a lonely week on the refrigerator shelf, so we chopped that into small pieces and added them to the pan. Finally, we had a couple of cups' worth of green beans that were a bit past their prime but tasted wonderful cut into small pieces and added to the mix. We sauteed everything until it was brown and a little crispy, salted and peppered it, then served it with a generous dollop of ketchup.

Poached eggs would be really good on top of a pile of this hash. If you had leftover meat, chicken or cooked tofu, those would be fine additions.

Kale Chips Part II

Because we know you just can't get enough of them! 

We want to try this version from ValleyWriter's blog, partly because they take less time to bake than the Bon Appetit version, partly because her other recipes sound so good that we trust her. Check them out! 

Last night, faced with a big bunch of Swiss chard from the CSA box, we tried to make chard chips. The oven was already running at 400 degrees for a batch of crispy smashed potatoes, so we figured we'd just keep a close eye on the chips. We don't know if the hotter oven was the problem or just that a wet veggie like chard wasn't up to the job, but the resulting chips, though edible, were much less tasty than their kale predecessors.

Most Unpopular Post Ever?

We debated putting this one up because, let's face it, kale is not high on most people's favorite-food list. But last week's CSA box delivered a fat bunch of dinosaur kale, just as Bon Appetit serendipidously posted an intriguing-sounding recipe for kale chips. We're suckers for any kind of chips and, by this point in a summer of heavy CSA boxes, desperate for any new vegetable recipes, so we tried it.

The result was very crisp, very delicate, with a concentrated kale flavor and nice salty crunch. The chips resemble very thin nori. 

The whole recipe uses only one tablespoon of olive oil, so you can indulge guiltlessly. 

If you love kale, you should definitely try this, but save a few for your kale-resistant friends. You may make some converts! 

These would be good with cocktails or crumbled on cheesy or garlicky pasta.

Grilled Pork Tenderloin

[Note: Here's another contribution from guest blogger and grill king Kevin Ireton:]

I’m one of those guys who uses a grill more often than a stove, and I grill all year around, even though it frequently means brushing snow off the grill in the winter. Among my favorite things to grill are pork tenderloins. They come two to a package, so I have one for now and one for leftovers. And the meat is tender and tasty. But best of all, I don’t agonize over whether the darned things are done or not because I use a foolproof technique that I learned years ago from an article in Fine Cooking.

The recipe calls for brining the tenderloins for 45 minutes ahead of time, but I seldom bother with this step. I do it with pork chops, which have a tendency to dry out, but the tenderloins stay pretty moist. The article also calls for the tenderloins to be rubbed with a fruit glaze. But my wife and I prefer a simple mustard vinaigrette instead.

2 T. olive oil
2 T. red wine vinegar
1 T. Grey Poupon mustard
1 t. tarragon

I usually mix up a double batch, pour on some before grilling and some more when I’m serving.

The grilling technique is called the 7-6-5 method, and that’s pretty much all you need to remember. With the gas grill turned up to high and preheated for 15 minutes, you cook the tenderloins for 7 minutes on one side, flip them over and cook them for 6 minutes on the second side, and then turn off the gas (keep the lid closed) letting them cook for another 5 minutes. I usually let them sit a final 5 minutes on the cutting board before I slice them.

Dhal: A Pot on the Stove for Most Occasions

It seems that every culture has some version of a pot on the stove. In our younger days, we all had friends whose mothers or grandmothers always had a pot of sustenance on the burner, simmering away for dinners all week.

In Mexico, it seems that every house has a pot of refried beans welcoming all into the home. In Tim's family home when he was young, the default pot was goulash, frequently ready for a hungry bunch of children. In some of his friends' homes in the summer, it was pork and beans.

Our current favorite is a pot of Indian dhal. It's basically an Indian version of beans. Some Indians cook and serve them very soupy to make them stretch farther, and others serve them very dry. Either way, they're often served over rice.

Dhal looks very much like yellow split peas, which can be substituted for actually dhal. Dhal comes in bags of pink or yellow or light brown dhal. Our favorite is something called Channa Dhal, and we like it finished with enough liquid to be absorbed by the rice underneath it when served.

Our favorite recipe is from The Little Book of Vegetarian Indian Cooking, one of a series of skinny 6-inch by 6-inch books that include little books on chicken, Thai, barbeque, Mexican, dessert, and Chinese recipes.

There's just a hint of heat because of dried red peppers, and a hint of sweetness due to shredded coconut and cinnamon.

Here's the recipe for Spicy Channa Dahl:

1 cup dhal or yellow split peas

3 T butter or clarified butter, called ghee

1 large onion, finely sliced

2 innamon sticks, broken

6 green cardamom pods, split open at the top

2-4 dried red chiles, coarsely chopped (or 1 teaspoon of dried chile flakes)

1/2 t. ground turmeric

1/4-1/2 t. chili powder

1-1/4 t. salt or more to taste

2-1/2 cups warm water

2 bay leaves, crumbled

1/2 cup shredded coconut

2 ripe tomatoes, skinned and chopped (or large can of diced tomatoes, drained)

2 T. chopped cilantro garnish

1. Clean and wash the dhal and soak for at least two hours. Drain well.

2. Melt the butter over a medium heat and fry the onion, cinnamon, cardamom, and red chiles for 6-7 minutes or until the onion is lightly browned.

3. Add the dhal, turmeric, chili powder, and salt. Stir-fry for 2-3 minutes. Reduce the heat to low and frythe dhal for a further 3-4 minutes, stirring frequently.

4. Add the water, bay leaves, coconut, and tomatoes. Bring to a boil, cover the pan, and simmer for 35-40 minutes (we let it go longer, and add water if necessary).

5. Stir in the chopped clantro, remove from the heat, and serve with rice.

The dhal can be frozen, so make a big pot and save some for later. The longer it cooks, the better it becomes.

Hello Avocado, My Old Friend

Here is another guest post from JP Vellotti. His last post was about Rice Wine Vinegar salad dressing:

In my last post, I thought Tim was overly generous labeling me as a cook; I simply make food hot. Sometimes, I can actually make food edible, as was the case during my lunch today.

I was painting the garage and didn't want to take too long a break, so I thought the Green Chile Verde burritos from Trader Joe's would hit the spot. While I was waiting for them to come out of the microwave (oh, the horror), I thought a little guacamole would complement them nicely. But we've been pretty light in the produce department these past few weeks, and no avocados were in the fruit basket. And then I remembered seeing one the other day in the fridge.

Yep, I found it, and when I cut it open, found a lot of oxidation in the flesh of the fruit. Instead of chucking it out, I was able to revive it into somewhat decent guacamole by adding the juice of 1/2 lemon and some tamarind hot sauce I brought back from Trinidad (I'm sure any hot sauce will do).

Given that avocados are fetching between $1.00 to $1.50 each, I thought it was a pretty good save.

As an aside, as I was eating lunch, I thought of this little ditty sung (with extreme apologies) to Simon and Garfunkel's, "Sound of Silence."

Hello Hass my old friend,
I've come to look for you again,
Because my belly's hungry,
I know you are the one for me,
But where can you be?
My avocado...

Behind those old salad greens,
or the wilted fava beans,
I remember when you were green,
But all I see now is something slightly brown,
and I turn away.
From what once was, my avocado...

When I saw you at Trader Joe's,
Behind the $7.99 heirloom tomatoes,
You were organic and that was OK with me that day,
and the Oregon Tilth and the USDA.
Oh, you had such promise, but I failed you,
My avocado...

If you weren't one of three,
Things different they may be,
The other two, well they made off with a lime,
In record time,
But I ask,
Who makes guacamole, with a trio?
And so my family bowed and prayed,
to the Organic Gods that day,
if you could just last one more week,
That would be really, really neat,
And we promised to correct all the wrongs in the Frigidaire,
But they didn't care.
And alas, I'm left with, a brown avocado...

How to Get Invited to Parties

[NOTE: We enthusiastically testify to the deliciousness of this recipe from guest blogger Kevin Ireton — R&T]

My mother started making ice cream pie 40 years ago. I don’t know what prompted it. We didn’t have the Food Network back then to show us how easy things are. And ice cream pie probably wasn’t covered in her well-worn copy of The Joy of Cooking. But in any case, she started making it and eventually taught me how. It is nearly as easy as opening a carton of ice cream, but you’d think you'd labored over a soufflé from the raves it invariably draws. And I’m convinced that it’s my habit of bringing an ice cream pie that gets me invited to parties.

The problem with most ice cream pies served in restaurants is that the proportions are wrong: too much ice cream, too little crust, and too little topping. When you make your own, this problem is easily avoided. Obviously, you can alter the ingredients to suit your taste, but here’s my mom’s traditional recipe.

Start by making a graham-cracker crust. This is the only real baking involved—if you can call mixing crumbs, sugar, and butter baking. You can buy a premade crust, but it won’t taste as good. Once the crust cools, fill it with Breyers butter-pecan ice cream that’s been sitting out on the counter long enough to soften. I generally get most of a half-gallon carton into the pie crust, leaving only a scoop or two for me to eat directly out of the carton. (I’m certain my mother never did this.)

Next, smooth the ice cream with a knife and cover it with Mrs. Richardson’s Hot Fudge, the whole 16-ounce jar. This is the trickiest part of the operation because the ice cream has to be just firm enough and the fudge just soft enough; otherwise the congealed topping slides off like a bad toupee. To temper the mating parts properly, I often use some combination of sticking the pie crust with ice cream back in the freezer and heating the fudge in a microwave (but not too much).

Once the topping is in place, cover it with pecan halves, resisting the temptation to create a decorative pattern or spell out something. Then put the whole thing  back in the freezer, and you’re done. Remember to let the pie sit out for ten minutes or so before serving.

I have tried making the whole thing with a chocolate-cookie-crumb crust and coffee ice cream, which was good, too. But it’s the recipe above that gets me the party invites. 

Bargain Wine of the Week: Mont Gras Carmenére

We got an eLetter from an online wine dealer the other day touting a Chilean Carmenére that scored 90 points (Wine Advocate) and cost only $14.80. It was a Vina Perez Cruz Carmenére Reserva Limited Edition 2006.

It reminded me that one of our favorite wines in the wine cellar (the cool area under the basement stairs) was a very inexpensive Carmenére.

You might not have heard of the grape. We certainly hadn't until we read an ad in the New York Times. It's mostly grown in Chile these days, but it was originally one of the grapes grown to make world-class Bordeaux wine in France.

You have to be careful buying Carmenére. You can pay a lot, but our thinking is that if you're going to spend $70 for a bottle of wine (we don't), why not buy a really good bottle of something else? And if you buy a cheap Carmenére, you can get burned.

We discovered it because a couple of years ago when the New York Times reviewed Carmenéres, its winner cost $70, but the second-best was a $10 bottle from the Colchagua Valley in Chile, which just happens to be one of our can't-miss wine valleys.

We actually found the wine, MontGras 2007 Carmenére online for less than $8, so we bought a case. It scored 90 points in Wine Enthusiast and 89 points in Wine Advocate. And the 2008 version scored even better at $10-$12 a bottle.

Rice Wine Vinegar: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

We asked another friend, JP Vellotti, to write a guest blog. He's a food lover and cook, and his wife is a professional food writer.

When Tim asked if I could guest blogsit while he and Ruth get settled into their new digs, of course I said sure. In fact, I enjoyed writing my last guest post and I thought it would help me relieve some stress.

Why am I stressed, you ask? Oh, just because I have no job, I'm closing on a house in another state, my house hasn't yet sold, and did I mention that I'm buying a house while on unemployment?

But enough about me . . . seriously. Let's get down to eating well, cheaply.

When Tim, guest blogger Kevin Ireton, and I were a team at our former place of employment, we had a standing meeting on Monday mornings; I thought of it as my therapy session. In fact, these little tête-à-têtes may just have been the highlight of my week.

Although the "conversations" eventually focused on business, often the first item discussed were our great food finds on the previous weekend. Since my wife, Ramin Ganeshram, is a chef and culinary writer, my stories most often revolved around what great dishes she cooked, or what cool ethnic market we visited, or what chef invited us to dinner. I'm spoiled like that.

But since this whole moving thing, we haven't been anywhere notable, as she's cooking the pantry in an effort to avoid packing foodstuffs. I've attempted this myself a few times, but would refer to my endeavors as "massacring the pantry."

For example, yesterday at lunchtime, I found a half-dozen soy nuggets from Trader Joe's deep in the freezer. The best way to eat these, in my opinion, is to heat them in the microwave for a minute so until they get soft, then give them a quick fry in a dash of canola oil.

Which I'm pretty good at, but yesterday my dash of canola oil was actually sesame oil, followed by an expletive. Not one to leave things alone, I thought that my mixup would be corrected by a dash of rice wine vinegar and everything would have that "taste of the Orient."

Wrong.

It seems that rice wine vinegar prevents anything from browning. I ended up with six little sponges that tasted anything but pleasant. (I have a secret weapon for situations like this called "Sweet Baby Ray's" and will write about it in another post.)

So after a long day of packing, followed by a visit to the Goodwill drop-off center, I was starving and needed some real Asian comfort food. In my case, that's Drunken Noodles from the most unassuming Thai restaurant in the most run-down shopping center in my area.

As usual on a Friday night, the place was packed. While waiting for our dishes, we had a Thai salad which seemed little more than cucumbers in a tasty, clear dressing.

I'm sure Ramin could see my brain trying to figure out the flavor profile. She blurted out, "It's just rice wine vinegar and sugar."

I had to chuckle inside, having abused my palate with this same ingredient earlier in the day. Now that it was used correctly, I couldn't get enough.

Here's the salad recipe. It's been vetted by Ramin, so you can useoy it with confidence.

Thai Salad with Rice Wine Vinegar Dressing:

4 Kirby or Persian, or 1 large traditional cucumber, diced

1 T. each, carrots, onions, tomato, julienned (optional)

1/4 cup rice wine vinegar

1/2 t. white sugar (or less, as desired)

Salt and freshly ground pepper

Combine cucumbers and other vegetables in small bowl and set aside.

Wisk together vinegar and sugar, and add salt and pepper to taste.

Pour over vegetable mixture and allow to marinate from half an hour up to 2 hours.

Looks can be deceiving. My "Golden Rule" of judging ethnic restaurants is not by their exteriors or decors, but their cleanliness and clientele. At this nearly abandoned shopping center on Long Island, the Thai restaurant is mobbed every day for lunch and dinner. Next door, the sit-down Chinese-Japanese place is perpetually empty. Coincidence? I think not.