Supper Time In The Summer

Ah. What a fine dinner. And after seven repeats of the curried vegetables, a welcome change although I have to admit that I enjoyed the seventh meal out of them a great deal at lunch today.

This year I planted a vegetable I'd never planted before. Kathleen turned me onto them. Yard long beans. Also known as Asparagus beans. They are really and truly long. I didn't let mine get to the length of thirty-six inches for tonight's supper, but they were impressive.

I cut off the ends and snapped them into small pieces and cut the corn off of a cob. I cut up onions and garlic and sauteed them in some olive oil and added the beans and corn and a palm-full of pine nuts.

Then I sprinkled crushed red pepper over it and let it all sort of caramelize and cook for a bit.

Earlier, I had made up some foccacia bread dough. I made it with whole wheat and white flours and also chopped black olives and rosemary. It looked like this when it had risen on the baking stone and I'd poked holes in it with a wooden spoon handle:

I had some lovely tomatoes from the garden and I dipped them in a pot of boiling water for a few seconds and then peeled them so that they looked like this with the basil I'd brought in from the kitchen garden:

Ain't that pretty?

I baked the bread, used the tomato-peeling water to boil the whole wheat spaghetti in and chopped the tomatoes and added those to the big skillet of onions, garlic, corn, and Yard-long beans with a tiny spoon of sugar and some balsamic vinegar and salt. I let it simmer for awhile

and when the pasta was done and drained, I added that and some chopped basil and fresh oregano and mixed it all together in a big bowl.

I cut up two cucumbers with some cherry tomatoes and mixed those in with a little bit of Tzatziki sauce and also a bit of balsamic vinegar. It's hard to find anything that balsamic vinegar doesn't improve upon.

Man. That was a good supper. I think Mr. Moon enjoyed it quite a bit. He volunteered to wash the dishes. I let him. I took this picture while he was holding up his hands in surrender to me taking his picture. He's listening to Keith on the iPod.

So yes. Summer is all about heat and sweating and wilting and submitting but it's also about fresh tomatoes and basil and Yard-long beans and cucumbers and onions and so forth.

It's a trade-off and for right now, I'm willing to take it.

Love...Ms. Moon

Soul Food

I love to cook and I love to eat. In fact, if I ever have a gravestone, I've told my family that I wouldn't mind if it read, "She sure could cook". I had my first real epiphany about cooking when I was about fourteen. I was primitive camping with the Girl Scouts on a mountain in North Carolina and I was in charge of supper one night. I built the fire and peeled potatoes and carrots and onions and put them in a pot of water and set them on the fire and when I went to check on them later to see if they were boiling, I realized that this simple act- cooking vegetables in water over an open fire- satisfied something in me that had never been quite satisfied before. I will never forget that moment. I'd been cooking for a long as I could remember, everything from home-made pizza to birthday cakes, cookies, pies, and family dinners when my mother was sick or out of commission somehow. But this iron pot of bubbling vegetables seemed to be something altogether different and real in a way that a tray of chocolate chip cookies never had been.

Going to Europe and tasting the food there when I was eighteen was another eye-opener. "So THIS is soup?" I'd think, after believing that soup was something that came out of a red and white can, poured into a pot and diluted with a can of water. "So THIS is bread," I realized, eating a French baguette fresh out of the bakery, after a lifetime of Wonder Bread. Everything tasted better- the fruit, the vegetables, the meat. And I wasn't eating anything fancy, either. Simple fare, freshly picked, simply cooked and seasoned- this was food the way it was meant to be.

The third big influence on my cooking was a restaurant in Denver, Colorado back in the early seventies. I was living in a dorm at the University of Denver, but whenever I could afford it, I ate at a small restaurant near campus called Hannuman's Conscious Cookery. Okay, I probably spelled that wrong, but it was something very close to that.

Hannuman's was somehow religiously based. All the servers and cooks wore white- long white robes and white turbans. Very exotic. Very vegetarian. And everything I ever ate there made me feel like I was eating something cosmic. Not just cosmically great or cosmically healthy, but cosmic in every since of the word. My favorite thing they made was a mung-bean casserole. Yeah, I know- sounds nasty, but boy it was not! It was thick with beans, rice, shredded carrots, cheese and who knows what all else? It had none of that hippie bean and rice paste consistency, either. Every bean, every grain, was perfectly cooked, perfectly itself.

COSMIC, I tell you!

They made their own bread, their cheeses and yogurts came from a goat farm on some nearby mountain, and their vegetables had to have been grown by totally enlightened beings somewhere not too far away.

I saw Allen Ginsburg eating there one night. I was not surprised.

And those were my influences on how I cook and what I want to eat to this day.

Oh! Wait a minute! I almost forgot Granny Mathews.

Now Granny Mathews was not my actual granny. We just called her that. She was a friend of the family, was at least eighty years old, and was a real character. She wore a lot of nylon negligee outfits and she always had a cigarette in her mouth, but the woman could cook. Just watching her in the kitchen, shuffling from stove to sink, stirring this and cutting that, adding a pinch of this and a pinch of that, mixing it all up in the most casual manner- I think my cooking style borrowed more from her than anyone else. She transmitted the idea to me that if you use the right ingredients and just don't mess 'em up, everything will turn out good, from bread pudding to meatloaf.

That principle holds true for me in my life. After putting thousands of meals in front of my family, I still enjoy cooking. But the older I get, the more I believe that the simpler the better. The more I believe in using the best ingredients and doing the least to them. I've become suspicious of processed foods (even the "organic" ones you find at the New Leaf) and my favorite meals come from our garden and from what my husband catches in the Gulf or brings home from the woods. He's a hunter and a gatherer and I love that about him.

Tonight I'm all by myself and I could just have a nice bowl of cereal with some of the fresh blueberries we've picked, but no, I've been boiling a pot of soybeans all day long. I'm going to marry them in a bowl with brown rice and barley. And I'm going to cut up some okra, tomatoes, squash and peppers and cook them with a little soy sauce. And that'll be my dinner. I'll have my protein, my grains, and my vegetables.
I have a ripe mango that will probably be my dessert.

That sounds about perfect to me.

I'm still cooking in the original iron skillets and pots I've had since I first started house-keeping (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth) and three pots of Revere Ware that were my grandparent's. These are OLD pots, believe me. My grandparents have been dead for over twenty years and I've used at least one of the pots daily myself for far longer than that. I have my knives I love and that my husband keeps sharp, I have my wooden spoons and my favorite bowls. I do use a food processor and I have a powerful Kitchen Aid Mixer that I use all the time.

That's about all I really need. In fact, it's more than I need.

I know in my heart that if I had to, I could cook in a dutch oven over an open fire and I'd be all right.

Hmmm. I'm hungry.
Let's eat!