Nothing funny about feldspar

Original recipe from here:

4 cups firmly-packed kale
1 Tbsp extra virgin Olive Oil
1 tsp sea salt

Preheat oven to 375°F. Wash, dry and stem the kale. Coat with oil. (A big baggie works well for this.) Roast for 5 minutes. Turn and roast 7-10 minutes more, until it becomes crispy. Remove from oven, sprinkle with salt & serve immediately. (2 servings)

I made this a couple of weeks ago, and Plagioclase has been asking for it ever since. (The only reason I’m posting it is because I don’t want to lose it, and I want to be sure I get the time/temp right.)

I don’t have sea salt — kosher seems to work ok. The kale seems limp when you turn it, but it does crisp right up. Very tasty. Sometime I’m going to try it with some other sturdy greens, like maybe beet or turnip.

Tonight’s update: the first time I made this with bagged/washed kale. Tonight I used farmer’s market kale. I had better luck with the bagged stuff — I don’t think I dried it well enough so some just ended up steamed and not crunchy. It still tasted ok, but it just didn’t have the crispiness that we loved the first time around.

I consider myself a fairly good cook with an eclectic, though limited repertoire. I like looking at cookbooks — especially the ones that focus on the recipes and the techniques and not so much on the photographs. I’m usually looking for sparks of inspiration for my own forays into weeknight dinners.

The public library is an excellent source for recent cookbooks, which helps with my space and monetary budgets — I just can’t afford to buy and store every one that looks interesting. However, once I find one that I keep for a whole month, or check out a couple of times, then I will buy it.

Bake until Bubbly: The Ultimate Casserole Cookbook, by Clifford A. Wright (Wiley, 2008) is one of those cookbooks that I’m thinking of getting for my permanent collection. I’ve had it from the library for a couple of weeks now, and I haven’t put it in the “go back” pile yet. It has a couple of hundred recipes for stuff that goes into a dish to be baked in the oven. (Wright’s definition of casserole includes Meatloaf and Apple Pandowdy.) Many of the recipes sound familiar (Green Bean casserole, anyone?) but Wright makes an attempt to chichify these old standbys by deconstructing Bac-Os, Catalina dressing, and cream of celery soup. It makes for an interesting tension between wanting to eat fresh (local?) food and wanting comfort food (which I think most casseroles are).

I haven’t yet tried any of the recipes specifically, but I expect to in the coming week. My first foray is likely to be one of the hominy casseroles,¹ but some of the eggy ones look interesting too.

I have a few quibbles: Very few of the recipes use leftovers (although there are suggestions on what to do with leftover casserole). Several of the recipes seem to be simple variations on each other. There’s way too much cheese. These are minor, because I can probably adapt quite a bit (I likely would, anyway) and still meet the goal of feeding my family something other than meat and 2 veg.

1. By the way, Mr Wright, hominy doesn’t need dairy to be good, yet each of the three hominy casserole recipes have 1/2 pound! of dairy in them in the form of cheese, sour cream or crème fraîche.↩

This is a “I have it in the fridge, now what do I do with it, and I need a salad!” kind of recipe.

Kernels from one ear of corn
3 Tomatillos
One lime
1 Tablespoon Mint Chutney

Cut the corn from the cob, and roast in a dry pan until the kernels get a bit singed and are easy to break apart. Put into bowl.

Broil the tomatillos for as long as you can stand. The longer, more charred, the better. Chop up into corn-sized pieces and put into the bowl with corn in it.

Juice the lime in a separate bowl, and blend in the mint chutney. Pour over the corn + tomatillos and mix well.

Serve at whatever temperature it ends up being. Ours was warmer than room temperature, but not hot.

Next Week’s Challenge

From a 19th century trade card advertising Bassetts Horehound Troches, a remedy for coughs and colds: A man buys 20 pencils for 20 cents and gets three kinds of pencils in return. Some of the pencils cost 4 cents each, some are two for a penny and the rest are four for a penny. How many pencils of each type does the man get?

Ok, I admit it. I set up an Excel Solver model to do this one for me, mostly because I wanted to remind myself how to use Solver. I do this every so often now that I don’t use Excel on a daily basis, just to stay familiar with the program.

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A few years ago I remember reading (or maybe I heard someone talking about it) about a woman giving a lecture on stuff that’s “OK” or not. One of her examples involved thinking about your saliva, how it feels pretty good when you swish it around your mouth, it’s natural and ought to be there, but once you remove the saliva to a cup, it’s suddenly gross and you don’t want to have anything to do with it. All you did was move a teaspoon of liquid from your mouth to a cup and it became yucky and somehow unsanitary.

I’m reminded of this by a small pitcher of milk that is now in our fridge. Plagioclase’s mother has difficulty lifting gallon milk jugs, so I put some milk in a pitcher for her breakfast. This morning she didn’t use all of the milk, so I put the pitcher in the fridge.

Is the milk in the pitcher still acceptable? What if I added some milk from the jug which has been open in the fridge for 4 days, the jug which originally filled her pitcher?

Frankly, I don’t have my own answer for this. Part of me wants to throw out the leftover milk because it was on the table. Another part of me says “It was on the table for all of 5 minutes; it was out of refrigeration longer when I brought it home from the store.” A third part (which tends to agree with the second) says that milk is getting too expensive to just wash down the sink. However, the first part is really really strong, almost a half part!

But not quite half. Frugality wins today.