Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World (8 page)

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Cooking Whole Grains

PREPARATION:
20-60 min

We know we’re supposed to eat more whole grains, but we don’t always know how to go about it. We eat “whole grain” crackers and buy cereal “with whole grains.” All the while, we’re missing the deliciousness of
REAL
whole grains.

Whole grains range from the familiar, like brown rice and oatmeal, to the more exotic, like quinoa and spelt. Find a place for them in your daily meals. Buy a grain that you don’t know anything about and experiment with it. They’re each a little different, but they all have a place at the table.

Think about rice. We know what to do with rice: Pile stuff on top of it, roll it in burritos, make it into a pilaf. Well,
any
whole grain can be used the same way. Grains also can take the place of pasta in hearty salads and soups.

Like dried beans, whole grains have an undeserved reputation as being hard to cook. They’re not. You don’t even need a recipe.

YOU’LL NEED

• Any type of whole grain, such as brown rice, oatmeal, quinoa, spelt, millet, barley, and wheat berries
  
• Salted water or stock
  

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

Put the whole grain into a pot. Cover with 1 inch of salted water or, better yet, stock. (Cooking in stock makes whole grains taste heavenly and increases their nutritional value.) Bring the liquid to a boil, turn down the heat, and simmer uncovered, stirring occasionally, until the grain is tender. All you have to do is keep the grain from drying out and burning. It’s okay if you add too much liquid, because you can drain off any excess at the end. The grains are done when they taste done to you. The fastest-cooking grains are millet and quinoa, which cook in about 15 minutes. Most grains (including brown rice, barley, wheat berries, and spelt) take about 45 minutes. Wheat berries and spelt tend to stay a little chewy no matter how long they’re cooked—that’s just their nature.

If you put a lid on your grains when you turn off the heat and let them steam for a few minutes while you do other things, they’ll absorb the last of their water and finish off nicely. This works particularly well with rice.

Put the cooked grains in a covered container and keep them in the fridge for up to a week. (The exception to this is rice, which doesn’t reheat well, except as fried rice.) If you toss cooked grains with a little oil while they’re still warm, they won’t stick together. For a quick snack or light meal, reheat whole grain in a skillet with a little butter and oil and season with salt and pepper.

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One-Bowl Meals

One of the keys to regular home cooking is leaving recipe books behind. They’re a great source of ideas, but day to day you need to be able to improvise with what you have on hand. And if you cook like we do, you’ll be working with fresh vegetables, precooked beans and grains, stock, and perhaps a little meat, cheese, and eggs. The trick is to learn to combine them into endlessly variable one-bowl meals.

Liberate yourself from the idea that dinner has to consist of several dishes. Sure, sometimes you might want to pull out the stops and do some fancy cooking, but it helps if you have a repertoire of simple meals that can be pulled together fast.

The following recipes are examples of this kind of cooking.

Italian Fried Rice

PREPARATION:
30 min

Fried rice is a comfort food, and making it is a great way to use up leftovers. Fried rice is best when cooked with day-old rice instead of fresh rice, which will tend to clump in the pan. Traditional fried rice is made with Asian-style vegetables, like bok choy or snow peas. We don’t grow these things in our garden—they’re great, but the climate in Los Angeles is similar to the climate in Italy, so we’ve been successful growing more heat-tolerant Italian vegetables. In this recipe, we combine fried-rice technique with Italian-style ingredients and seasonings. Adapt this recipe to whatever vegetables and grains you happen to have on hand. You can’t go wrong.

YOU’LL NEED

• 1 bunch of sturdy greens, like bitter Italian dandelion, kale, or Swiss chard
  
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
  
• ½ onion, chopped
  
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
  
• Big pinch of red pepper flakes
  
• 3 cups precooked spelt (or any other sturdy whole grain)
  
• ¼ cup stock (optional)
  
• Splash of dry white wine (optional)
  
• Handful of chopped pancetta or fried bacon bits (optional)
  
• 1 egg, beaten
  
• Sea salt and black pepper
  
• Parmesan cheese, grated
  

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

Wash and trim the greens, chop them into ribbons, and put them in a steaming basket. Steam until bright green and wilted.

In a large skillet, heat the olive oil. Add the onion and cook until transparent, then add the garlic and pepper flakes and cook another minute. Add the steamed greens and cook them for a minute or so in the hot oil so they pick up flavor. Add the spelt or other grains to the skillet 1 cup at a time, tossing them with the greens and cooked onions. If you have stock on hand, add about ¼ cup to help hydrate the grains and add flavor. This is also a good time to slosh in a little bit of white wine.

If you’re using pancetta or bacon bits, add them now. Then clear a hole in the center of the pan and pour in the egg. Let it cook undisturbed for a minute or so, until opaque. Then toss it with the greens and grains until bits of scrambled egg are distributed throughout the dish.

Take the pan off the heat. Season with salt and pepper. Put the dish into bowls and top with the Parmesan cheese.

Makes 2 servings

Quick Soup

PREPARATION:
30 min

If you have stock, beans, and grains in the fridge, soup is only minutes away. Let minestrone be your inspiration. This classic vegetable and bean soup originated as a way to use up kitchen leftovers. Its flavors would vary from kitchen to kitchen and season to season. A spring minestrone might feature baby peas and carrots and be light and fresh. A summer minestrone would be big and bold, full of chunks of eggplant and zucchini and tomatoes.

Use the following recipe as a loose guideline for constructing your own soups on the fly. Don’t let the lack of a particular ingredient stop you from making soup. Honor both the season and the contents of your pantry. It’s all good.

YOU’LL NEED

• 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
  
• 1 medium onion, chopped
  
• 1-2 cloves garlic, peeled (optional)
  
• 1 cup mixed vegetables, like carrots, celery, potatoes, and hard squash, chopped into spoon-size pieces
  
• 6 cups stock
  
• 1 cup tomatoes, canned or fresh, diced
  
• 1 cup leafy greens, cut into thin ribbons
  
• 1 cup precooked beans, such as white beans, kidney beans, cranberry beans, or garbanzos
  
• 1 cup precooked grain, any sort
  
• Handful of chopped fresh herbs, like parsley or basil
  
• Sea salt and black pepper
  

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

In the bottom of a soup pot, heat the olive oil and cook the onion for about 5 minutes, until it softens. Add the garlic, if using, and any firm vegetables and cook for a couple of minutes. Add all the stock, throw in the tomatoes, and bring to a simmer. Simmer for about 15 minutes, until the hardest vegetables soften. (If you’re not using vegetables that require long cooking, proceed to the next step as soon as the stock is simmering.)

Add the leafy greens, beans, and grains. If the soup seems a little thick, add boiling water by the cupful to thin it to the consistency you prefer. Simmer about 10 minutes more, just until the greens are tender and the beans and grains are hot. Ideally, at this point the tomatoes should be broken up, the firm veggies like potatoes spoon-ready, and the greens and other tender vegetables still bright. Finish by adding the fresh herbs to the pot; salt and pepper to taste.

Serve drizzled with olive oil.

Makes 4 servings

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The Dog’s Pot

PREPARATION:
30 min

Our dog is undeniably spoiled, so part of our weekly cooking time is devoted to him. He eats premium-brand kibble, but supplementing that with matching canned food is more than we can afford. In a period of madness, we tried cooking all of his food, but he’s so large it was like cooking for another person—another person who required a special diet. The logistics were too complicated. (If he were a Chihuahua, the story might be different.) Yet a diet of 100 percent dry kibble seems equivalent to living on nothing but energy bars and soda crackers. We found a compromise solution in soup.

Every week we make a batch of soup and feed it to the dog as a kibble topping. He loves his soup, and it gives him access to the vitamins found in fresh vegetables and a protein boost from meat scraps, as well as adding more moisture into what would otherwise be a dry, kidney-straining sort of diet.

A friend told us that his Egyptian grandmother always had two pots stewing on the back of the stove. One was a stockpot for people, and the other a pot for the dogs. This recipe honors that waste-not, want-not sensibility.

The great thing about cooking for dogs is that they’ll love whatever you give them. There’s no need to worry about seasoning the dog’s pot or getting the ingredients right. It might look disgusting, but that will only make it more appealing to dog sensibilities. Moreover, because this is a supplement to kibble, not the whole diet, you don’t have to worry about trying to balance the nutrients in a scientific manner. The soup will change from week to week, depending on the scraps you have available, and that’s okay.

While it’s fine for a bit of cooked food to find its way into the soup, plate scrapings aren’t good for dogs. It’s far better to use unprocessed foods, like trimmings.

YOU’LL NEED

FRESH VEGETABLES, SCRAPS, AND PEELINGS.
Save them up all week in a bag in the fridge or freezer. Dogs are omnivorous scavengers, not carnivores, and they really do like vegetables. If you’ve ever found your dog nibbling grass, you know they crave the vitamins in greens. They don’t digest raw vegetables well, so precooking vegetables helps dogs get the most out of their food. Dogs love sweet veggies like carrots and squash but also seem to appreciate green stuff like spinach and broccoli. Potatoes, sweet and regular, are good for this, too, and our dog adores tomatoes. The only vegetables you should withhold are onions and onion family members, like leeks and garlic. These are toxic for dogs in quantity.

PROTEINS AND FATS.
Dogs need more protein than we do. High-quality protein helps them recover from injuries, surgeries, and chronic illnesses. So you should save your meat trimmings, scraps, and bones for the dog’s pot. Animal fat is also an excellent—and much appreciated—soup addition, in small quantities. Unless your vet directs otherwise, you don’t have to withhold animal fat from dogs for the sake of their health—their weight, yes, their health, no. In other words, the calories in fat won’t help an obese dog slim down, but it won’t make your dog keel over from a heart attack, either. They crave fat, and fat is good for their skin and coats. Far better they get the fat in their soup, in a relatively unprocessed form, than in junk food treats. If you strip skin from chicken, save a piece of the skin for the soup. If you keep bacon grease in a can, add a spoonful to the pot. If you don’t eat meat, or you eat so little you never have scraps, you might consider buying a little meat for the dog. A couple of chicken thighs go a long way in a soup.

WHOLE GRAINS.
Dog kibble is grain heavy, so the soup doesn’t need to include grains. However, a bit of grain makes the soup thicker and easier to serve. If you have leftover cooked grains, like rice, toss them in. Some dogs are allergic to wheat and corn, but they’ll likely do well with any other type of grain.

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

Throw everything you have in a soup pot, fill the pot with water, and bring to a boil. Don’t add any salt or seasoning. And don’t worry about quantities. It might end up a thin soup or a thick stew. Anything you cook up will result in a broth that dogs will like and will do them some good. Simmer until the vegetables are soft and the meat cooked through. When it’s all done, fish out any bones. Cooked bones are dangerous because they splinter and can perforate a dog’s throat or intestines.

If you wish, you can blend the soup with a stick blender or in a countertop blender to make the soup more homogenous and easier to digest, but this isn’t strictly necessary. Transfer the soup to a covered container, refrigerate, and dole it out by the scoopful over kibble. It only keeps about a week, so adjust the quantity you make to the size of your dog.