Raise This Glass!

Pinch turns 5 tomorrow!

[Release confetti and streamers]

I've learned a lot in 5 years. I learned HTML so that I could customize my page layout and formatting. I've learned about what friends-of-Pinch like to cook, eat, and drink. I've learned to keep fresh ginger, limes, and jalapeños stocked in my fridge; not to give up on anything that hasn't yet born fruit (I'm talking about my lemon tree, which was at death's door in October but has since flowered and has a few teeny-tiny lemons growing on it); and that "the money shot" doesn't mean what I thought it meant (it means something entirely different from "a very good photo").

I've learned several new recipes from a few talented and generous cooks. Here's a quick favorite five:

1. Chicken Vesuvio: Best weeknight family meal;
2. Ragu Bolognese: Best weeknight family meal when you have an spare hour in the morning to prep for dinner;
3. Classic Chicken Curry: Best weeknight family meal when you've got enough time to also make fresh Naan OR if you only have time to serve with steamed rice. Also: honorable mention for being AWESOME left over the next day;
4. Cilantro-Ginger Steak Salad: Honorable mention for being a surprisingly scrumptious dinner;
5. Poblano Beef: Best weeknight family meal when you've got poblanos and lean sirloin steak in the fridge.

To celebrate Pinch's birthday I had some mugs made: the etched glass one pictured above. I can't tell you how many of you have confessed your fondess for glass mugs over the years! To win a Pinch mug, please send me your most Pinch-worthy recipe. The winning recipe will be healthy, family friendly, delicious, and it should be new to me. If it's not a real recipe, just something you make by heart, that's fine, just describe it for me. The winning recipe will be posted on Pinch and added to the Recipes page and the author will receive a Pinch mug and a package of Pinch granola (made with nuts in a nuthouse). 

Email your submissions to Pinchfood[at]gmail[dot]com by 11:59PM Pacific tomorrow, March 1 and I'll announce the winner on March 2.  Good luck!

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The Thing I'd Be Most Embarrassed to Serve You

I've been making these silly things once or twice a year for like 10 years. It's basically a food-based rice crispy treat, made with peanut butter (the food part), sugar (the treat part) and a combination of crispy rice and corn flakes (the crispy part). Essentially, it's like making your own chewy cereal bar, with enough peanut butter to hold you over until your next meal. I'm sort of surprised we haven't outgrown them.

Quick sidebar:  sometimes when I type C-R-I-S-P-Y there's a typo and it comes out C-R-I-P-S-Y, which sounds  like the sort of like a disease you might hear about on Downton Abbey:

COUSIN ISOBEL
The Cripsy will surely kill him if we don't act soon.

DOWAGER COUNTESS
Cripsy? From the look of things, the gentleman has broken his neck and is already dead.

Anyhoo, I don't make these sweet little snacks unless we're going somewhere. I used to make them for our spring thaw camping trips to Moab. We'd go every year for a few days when the ground in Telluride still had a couple of feet of snow and the temps in Moab were a pleasant 70 to 80. Peanut Butter Smackerels are totally pedestrian, but make for an excellent little hold-over snack. Here they are:

Peanut Butter Smackerels
Print recipe only here

Makes 4-5 dozen one-inch square pieces

INGREDIENTS
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup corn syrup
1 1/2 cups unprocessed peanut butter*
2 cups crisp rice cereal
4 cups corn flakes
2 t vanilla
pinch salt

METHOD
In a medium-large mixing bowl, combine cereals and salt. Crunch and smash with your hands so the flakes are broken down into smaller pieces.

In a a medium saucepan, combine sugar and corn syrup. Stir over medium heat until the sugar is dissolved. Turn off heat and add peanut butter and vanilla. Stir well to combine. Pour over cereals and stir.

Transfer to the prepared baking pan and press down, using a piece of waxed or parchment paper, to distribute evenly. Refrigerate or let cool at room temperature for an hour or so. Turn out onto a cutting board and cut into 1-inch wide strips. Cut into one-inch squares. Can be stored in a ziploc bag or covered container at room temperature, or in the fridge, but they're really hard to chew when cold.


* If you use a processed PB (Jif, Skippy, etc) make sure to cut the amount of sugar in half, down to 1/4 cup.

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Sanctimonious Paper Products

Whole Foods no longer carries the waxed paper sandwich bags I've been using for the past few years. They switched to the "If You Care" line which doesn't produce a waxed bag. I can't even say the brand name without rolling my eyes. Anyway, the IYC product is a greaseproof paper sandwich bag, not waxed paper. It does the job, but I don't care. I liked the the old waxed paper bags, pictured at the end of the post.

Natural Value waxed bags (the ones I prefer but can no longer source locally) are much lighter weight (used less paper) so you could fold over the top and a few times and the crease - and the sandwich or cookies therein - would stay put. I liked that there were more to a box (60 in the Natural Value box, and 48 in the If You Care). It's important to care about unit price, and it's important to care about paper weight and it's important to care about costs of transport - the one thing giving me pause about ordering a case of the Natural Value bags from Amazon at $2.99 a box.  But if I placed that order I'd have to reconcile the true cost of the shipping box, tape, the fuel needed for the airplane and big, brown truck to deliver  it (while idling, curbside) to my front door. Too many caveats for this emptor! How does one make responsible shopping selections with so many factors to consider?

I learned this some time ago: shopping at Whole Foods doesn't make me particularly environmentally-friendly.  In fact, WF tries to impart the false sense that I'm doing my part just by being there and that is just plain sneaky. The WF produce section is stocked with items sourced around the world. Its carbon footprint dwarfs the Jolly Green Giant's.  A produce-run to my local WF leaves me with fossil-fuels all over my hands (and possibly norovirus, to boot, given my disease-ridden reusable grocery sacks).

[Interlude - with apologies to WS] 

Scene 1 - Pinch kitchen
Lady Pinch is unpacking a Whole Foods grocery bag when the doorbell rings.

LADY PINCH  
Tomatoes and bell peppers from Mexico,
farmed salmon from Norway,  avocados from Chile.
Lo! There's the door. Who goes there?

UPS Guy
(shouts)
UPS!

LADY PINCH   
(shouts, cheerfully)
Coming!

Opens door.

UPS Guy 
You gotta sign for this.

Hands over a case of waxed paper bags and a Delivery Information Acquisition Device. 

LADY PINCH  
(signs pad, whimpering)

More freight from lands afar!
Here's the smell of the gasoline still: all the
perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little
hand. Oh, oh, oh!

UPS Guy 
(muttering, shaking his head)
Get a grip, lady.

LADY PINCH
(returns the handheld device)
Thanks, Tom!

Slams door, and skips merrily back to the pantry to unpack the case of sandwich bags.

UPS Guy
(to the door)
My name is Roger.

Scene ends.

The thing is, I do consider the toxicity of my consumables, but usually cut to the purchase following a fairly cursory review. I can be a horrible consumer. I like my old waxed paper bags. That doesn't make me more-environmentally-friendly-than-thou, just opinionated and overly concerned with the minutiae of lunch-packing.

Click here to view the purchase I'm contemplating.

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What's in Your Grocery Bag?

This was sent to me today.

I had heard some rumblings about the unsanitary conditions of most reusable grocery bags. Every so often (yearly?), I slosh a Chlorox wipe haphazardly around the interior of my insulated grocery bag. The rest of my maintenance routine involves (quarterly? biannually?) recycling of the stacks of paper receipts that accumulate in my reusable bags.

Identifying the bacteria present on the inside of my grocery bags sounds like a great science fair experiment, except that it's likely too dangerous, given the risk of illness from contact with coliform bacteria.

How then shall we bring home our groceries? Well, those stretchy cotton net bags would be a better alternative, as would cotton totes, since you can very easily stick them in the wash each week. But what are we trying for? To reduce waste or to appear sufficiently compliant with socially-mandated RRR practices? Personally, I really like recycling paper grocery sacks for gardening waste and as kitchen trash bags. I miss using them for student book covers.

I'm not sure how to keep my bacterial footprint smaller than my carbon one, or which is more beneficial to my fellow man and our shared environment. Until I do, I'm going to have to roll up my sleeves, run a (half-full) tub of bleachy water, and wash my grocery bags. I'm not looking forward to it.

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How I'm Going to Drink Winter's Milkshake

I'm not going to let Winter push me around. I'm not going to let Winter know how I don't like walking the dog in Winter. I'm going to laugh in Winter's face when Winter tries to smack me upside the head with it's 2-degree days. I'm going to hot yoga. I'm not going to feel shame tromping around in my puffy coat, tall boots, mittens and ski hat. I might even pull out my fleecy poncho and furry boots!  I'm going to cook really warm foods with lots of sides. Last night it was Tacos with Mexican Rice, Guacamole and Black Beans on the side. Only I forgot to pull out my little bottle of hot sauce from De Cero, which Angela, the owner, gave me when I was there last week. I used to buy bottles of hot sauce every time I ate there - it's great on scrambled eggs.

I'm going to eat soup for lunch and have afternoon tea every day.

I'm going to pass out calorie-packed granola bars to all the homeless and hungry people who are getting pushed around by Mister Ten Below (a/k/a Mister Icicle, Mister White Christmas, Mister Snow, Snow Miser), along with info about the City warming centers.

I'm going to be careful about countdowns to spring because my cross country coach always advised against counting down miles on a long run because it was a negative approach, and because life is too short to count down. Instead, I'm going to make sure that every week I have something really super fun planned, even if it's just a low-key lunch with a friend. This week I'm meeting three dear friends at Little Goat and I couldn't be more excited. I popped in last week, emerging with a gorgeous crusty loaf of country sourdough from the bread bakery and an avowal to return for lunch, and possibly one of the Bloody Marys all the hipsters were drinking. While there, I'm going to see if they'll explain their decision to brew Stumptown Coffee (which heralds from Portland, Oregon) and see if it's because they agree with me that Intelligentsia ain't all that.

I'm going to get sucked back into Downton and the Blackhawks. I'm going to play piano and make some progress on Code Academy, and see Lincoln and Argo (Zero Dark and Silver Linings were great). Before I know it, it's going to be March, and I'll unplug my twinkle lights from the tree outside (I'm totally leaving those up until March 1), and tell Winter not to let the door hit it on its way to the Southern Hemisphere.

In the meanwhile, Winter needs to make itself useful and throw down some snow. These flurries are not cutting it.

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Hearty Winter Soup: Pasta e Fagioli

Pasta e Fagioli translates to Pasta and Beans. I haven't had this soup in ages. It was a staple when I was a child but owing to the dictates of the bean-averse in my household I hadn't considered making it myself. Until today. There were two contributing factors. One, I had to do something with the Great Northern Beans I bought last spring. I was planning to make confit but it never got off the ground. Two, my sister fed me some seriously yummy white beans when I was in New York in November and I've had a hankering for white beans ever since.

I consulted three cookbooks before settling on a recipe, ultimately choosing Dean & DeLuca as my guides. I've mentioned this cookbook before. It's a fantastic resource. It has a lot of classics but will also inspire you to try something new, though I have no intention of ever trying the recipe that precedes Pasta e Fagioli: Cabbage Soup with Paprika, Kielbasa, and Raisins. Blechk.

The Dean & DeLuca Cookbook is also good for a little recipe backstory. Of Pasta e Fagioli they say,

"Pasta Fazool, with its bizarre Brooklyn pronunciation, sounds like the ultimate Italian-American dish. And it was a staple for years of Little Italy's checkered-tablecloth restaurants - until the 'upscaling' of the eighties did away with such dishes. Today, of course, a new wave of rustic Italian restaurants in the United States is showing Americans that "pasta fazool" was based on something authentic; pasta e fagioli, or a steaming, satisfying soup of beans and pasta."

What the soup reminds me of most is Ribollita, another rustic Italian soup. Ribollita, which means twice-boiled, could also be called Pane e Fagioli, since it's basically a bean soup with stale bread cooked in. I'm making it sound gross but it's really good. If you want to try that recipe, I recommend going with the recipe in Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray's River Cafe Cookbook, which is sadly out of print, but a version of their recipe is accessible here.

My Pasta e Fagioli was fan-tastic. So perfect for a cold, wintry day. But, at 5pm this evening it was noticeably less dark and dreary. We're on the up and up, people. We have many soups days ahead but fortunately those days are starting to get noticeably longer. And here's that recipe:

Pasta e Fagioli
Print recipe only here

Serves 4 as an entree

INGREDIENTS
1/4 pound (about 1 cup) dried beans - Great Northern or Cannelini
1 T olive oil
1 stalk celery, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
Dried herbs: basil, thyme, rosemary, bay leaf
1 quart chicken broth
1 cup water
1 14-ounce can whole peeled tomatoes
1 rind Parmesan (just trim the rind off of whatever size chunk of Parm you have on hand)
1/2 cup dried pasta (2 ounces) - use a small shape like ditali, orzo, elbows, or small shells

METHOD
Pour olive oil into a soup pot and set over medium heat. Add the celery, onion and garlic and saute gently until softened, about 3-5 minutes.

Add broth, water, tomatoes, herbs, Parmesan rind, and beans and bring to a boil. Simmer gently until beans are cooked and soft, about 1-2 hours.

Remove cheese rind and bay leaf and taste for seasoning, adding salt and fresh ground pepper to taste.

Add dried pasta to soup. Boil gently until pasta is cooked thru.

Serve, garnished with fresh basil.

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My Low-Fat Greek Fries

We've long been fans of British chips and vinegar. I bake fry-shaped potatoes on smoking hot sheet pans (preheated in a 450-degree oven), then salt them generously once they're blistered and golden. We slosh Heinz malt vinegar all oven them, once served.

And we're big fans of the super yummy potatoes served up at the nearby Athenian Room. They do the thicker-cut steak fry, and if you get the Chicken Pita Plate, the dressing from the salad swoops on over to puddle around the fries making for a taste sensation. Only, sometimes there's not enough dressing so we always ask for extra. You might recall the terrifying event of 2010 when Tina Fey mentioned the Athenian Room on a web clip. Fear set into the neighborhood, prompting some neighbors to take their dinner at 5pm to avoid the hoards. We just avoided the place for about a month, until the excitement died down. And it did - they're back to drawing their regular crowd.

Lamb and Greek Salads are staples in the Pinch kitchen. It dawned on me a couple of months ago that I could totally reproduce a basic dressing and serve up some Greek fries (baked, natch) alongside our lamb burger. Whoa, baby! These things are good. We had them again tonight, which reminded me to write up the recipe Here it is:.

Pinched Greek Fries
Print recipe only here

INGREDIENTS
1-2 Russet potatoes per person, cut in half lengthwise, then cut into 1/2-cm thick wedges
Canola oil
Salt
Pepper
one small garlic clove
1/4 cup red wine vinegar (they're not created equal - I ony use Colavita)
1 teaspoon extra virgin olive oil
Generous pinch dried oregano

METHOD
Put 2 sheet pans in the oven and preheat to 450.

Trim potatoes into steak wedges. Toss in a bowl with 1-2 T canola oil.

Divide potatoes between sheet pans, spreading evenly.

Roast for about 25 minutes, turning and shaking the pan halfway thru baking time to ensure they're cooking evenly. Meanwhile, make dressing. Combine oil, vinegar, salt, pepper and oregano in a small measuring cup or serving bowl (I use a small ceramic pitcher). Use a garlic press to press clove into dressing. Stir to combine. Reserve.

Potatoes are done when slightly blistered, golden, and delicious. Toss with salt and serve on a platter with dressing on the side.

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