Sassy Radish

Are you liking the interminable titles yet?

I’ve gotten spoiled by KS lately, who has been making me dinner when I get home from a late night at work or even later after a gym session. I think that when you get home at 8:30pm, I am not very drawn to my kitchen. Instead, I want to eat and be done with it all by 9pm. To make the matters more difficult, we have officially entered the autumn season as now days are shorter than nights (Hello, fall!) and unless I break down and get one of the funky flash attachments, I am going to be looking at pictures of sweaty, glistening food (gross!). And let me tell you, food that has that flash glow is just not appetizing. Not on pictures anyway.

But as much as I am going to lament my camera equipment deficiencies, I’m not going to budge and buy the pricey equipment just yet since purchasing $750 lenses while living on one income is a tad frivolous. I will sigh and swoon every time I look at B&H website, but I’ll hold my ground. Lens, oh beautiful, lovely, stunning lens – wait for me. You are now on my Wish List, and thus you know I have eyes only for you, but be patient, my lovely – we’ll be together soon!

But back to dinner – cooking at 8:30pm just doesn’t entice me, does that make me lazy? Hopefully not, especially, if KS gets to flex his creative muscle in the kitchen for you all to see. He is much more of a practical cook than I am, using what he has at his disposal, whereas I will get ideas from perusing an site after site after site. Not to mention blogs that give constant inspiration!

With the meal KS made last week of basmati rice and stewed beans with vegetables and herbs, we finally completed our white rice supply. No more white rice. The only rice that will cross our threshold now will be brown. Or wild. But not white. Did I mention we no longer stock white sugar either? It’s all either turbinado or demerara at Chez Radish. It’s like we’ve become food racists!

The beans with vegetables and herbs were tremendous – the aroma of cooked cilantro and garlic was so seductive, I resisted the urge to lick my bowl clean. I mean, I already have food hands, I should probably try to maintain some decorum while eating. And it’s always good to take a break from animal-based protein. I often find meat or chicken too heavy for consumption at night. And the beans, I’m certain, can be served over just about any rice, or grain or even couscous, if you want to have some kind of a starch. Alternatively, you could just spread the beans over a toasted piece of rustic garlic-rubbed bread and enjoy a variation on a traditional bruschetta.

Continue reading of no particular consequence whereupon i long for a lens, get rid of white rice and get fed delicious beans.

It’s Yom Kippur today, so why am I writing about food? Well, last night while figuring out our dinner options we were trying to come up with a quick and tasty way to use our carrots, which were hanging out happily in the fridge, but a few more days and Yom Kippur today and my Sunday business trip (Sunday, I know), it was either now or never with these carrots.

Now, I’m pretty weird when it comes to carrots. I love them raw and I love them in things like chicken soup. In fact, as a kid I loved carrots in my soup so much that my mom would always put in extra carrots in my bowl and they would be the first things I would eat. I think I even made up a song about eating carrots in my soup. The blurry memory is lazily rolling around in my head, but luckily I can’t remember the song! And yet, when my mom made stewed carrots (tzimmes), I would refuse to touch the mushy, orange mess on my plate. Boiled soup carrots were fine, but the stewed carrots were not. I’m still fickle with my carrots, not to such an extent, but some cooked carrots I won’t go near.

I’ve got to confess I’ve cooked nary a thing this week. It’s been a confluence of events – my office relocated further uptown and east, and coming from Tribeca has managed to make my work commute 45 minutes door to door. I know, living in Manhattan and spending 45 minutes each day twice a day commuting, is pretty sad. And work has picked up so much. There are meetings and conference calls and business trips and of course work that you do at your desk to add!! So when I would come home at 7:30 or later, my lovely KS had dinner waiting for me – so the next few entries will be about his magical and filling concoctions. We’d eat, and by 8:30, I’d be pretty much a tired, lackluster monkey.

Ah, but the carrots! I thought, at first, to shred them and mix them with a generous serving of freshly chopped garlic, some raisins and olive oil. But then my heart (and stomach) earned for something warm. Since I just told you about my cooked carrot dislike, you understand my conundrum. And then, a little idea appeared in my head and I was all aflutter – I could warm the carrots with some sesame oil and sesame seeds and voila – I’ll have a meal I like. I added some garlic to the carrots along with a little bit of curry mix. Some salt, a couple of minced dates, and the warmed carrots were done. The whole process grating and all took about 15 minutes. How’s that for dinner in a hurry? We ate our carrots with the remnants of the picadillo KS made the night before. While I liked my carrots just fine, KS loved the orangey warmth. The trick is to just warm the carrots and not cook them – this way you preserve the texture and taste of raw carrots, but give it a little more of that fall comfort. Looking back, I would have added a dash of cinnamon. And if we had any cilantro, the dish would have sparkled even more! But in no time, we ate a tasty dish and salvaged the contents of our crisper!

And now that I’m sufficiently hungry, Yom Kippur seems even longer to me. Fasting isn’t a food blogger’s strongest suit. How long will I last? I have low expectations for myself!

Continue reading carrot salad with garlic and dates.

Sally Albright: But I’d like the pie heated and I don’t want the ice cream on top, I want it on the side, and I’d like strawberry instead of vanilla if you have it, if not then no ice cream just whipped cream but only if it’s real; if it’s out of the can then nothing.
Waitress: Not even the pie?
Sally Albright: No, I want the pie, but then not heated.

And this, my friends, is how I often will order food. First off there’s the complete reinvention of the recipe, which undoubtedly annoys both the waiter and the chef. And then adding insult to injury, the instructions I give are so unclear that the waiter will have to ask me the second time to repeat what I said. And this happens over and over to me.

Since I’ve completely switched gears from summer into fall, I’m done with the summer fruit (berry crumbles – I’ll see you later); I’ve been thinking apples, apples, apples. It donned on me two weeks ago that Rosh Hashana was right around the corner and an apple dessert would be in order. But what? The apple pie, as much as I love it, would be the expected apple treat, but my heart longed for something new, something different. I attribute this fickle mind of mine to living in New York. We get so spoiled here, and develop the attention span of a goldfish – four seconds and we forget the “traditional” or we get tired of it. Like spoiled children we look to new, shiny recipes like the new, shiny toys of our childhood. And those of us with food blogs take the cake (pardon the pun) for our demand of the new, shiny recipes. The recipe we haven’t yet written about, the recipe with stunning new photos, the recipe with a new take. This is where I found myself at the beginning of last week. Apple pie? Apple eh…

Enter ever-so-creative Deb with her apple yogurt cake from her new, shiny book “The New Spanish Table”. Deb, I’ve been given a cook-book buying moratorium by KS, so I will have to mooch off of you and other bloggers with sexier cook books. The cake in Deb’s pictures looked stunning, as usual, but as soon as I saw the words like “licorice” and “anise” and “Sambucca”, I paused, for while there are folks out there whose taste buds have morphed to like the dreaded substances above, mine have never adjusted and I don’t foresee that changing. Say the words “pastis” and “pernod” and you’ll see me recoil in horror.

So I took Sambucca out and added Calvados instead. I also mixed my own lemon yogurt by combining plain yogurt with fresh-squeezed lemon juice. The only time-consuming task was finely chopping the apples. But the rest of the process was a snap. And I think that in the future, I’ll play with yogurt flavors and various liqueurs. I just might, as a sick joke on my self, try it with Sambucca one day, but honestly, I don’t see myself enjoying it. I’ve experimented plenty in that flavor department and all I could find in the end was a taste that deeply displeased my palate. The appliness of this cake (why no, appliness is not an actual word, I just made it up – so?) pleased me and KS – making it a perfectly timed treat for Rosh Hashana, now a week behind us. Sigh – time flies so fast.

So Sally Albright or not, I like things just the way I like them. Even if I have to repeat my order a few more times, so long as I get a cake I like!

Continue reading calling out to sally albright.

I’ve given my two cents over at AH on kitchen tools I absolutely need in my kitchen in order to enjoy the cooking process. I think that I’ve gotten spoiled with my appliances – really.

Nonetheless, check it out, and do share those kitchen essentials without which you’d be lost and frustrated. I’m looking to beef up my “essentials” collection!

Sometimes I have this elaborate story to tell you about how this or that recipe came to me. And at other times, I don’t. I have cravings I cannot quite rationalize, I then will literally dream about the dish and the next day I must make it or hell will freeze over.

KS has by now learned not to argue with my cravings. Even at times when we have other food in the fridge practically going to waste – if I get that look in my eyes, all bets are off. It’s on occasions like these that I develop what he calls “food hands”. I’d be shoving a forkful of food in my mouth and hear him say under his breath, “Foodhands!!” For the readers scratching their heads over the term, imagine, if you will, preternatural hand speed made popular in the Matrix series, but focused on food consumption as opposed to hacking your enemy to bits. Food hands seem to say, “Come near me and my food, and scary things might happen to you.” Apparently, my diminutive stature is very deceiving when it comes to feeding myself.

After our SC sojourn, I’ve been craving large lima beans, the kind you soak over night and cook for over an hour the next day. The kind that when expand are as big as well-sized almonds. They’re also often called butter beans, and in my lexicon they’re called “edible bliss”. They are indeed very buttery, earthy, filling and definitely satisfying. They’re my favorite bean in the whole wide world and I could probably eat them if not every day, then very often indeed.

And that’s about all on these beans. With the abundant and sinfully good tomatoes we have in season right now, these beans are simply heavenly. And with fall creeping up on us, they’re somewhat of a good segue into the season. A little earthy and yet when eaten cold the next day (that is if you have leftovers) – a little summery. Or if you want to puree them in a food processor and serve warm, drizzled with some good olive oil, they’re heavenly on crostini.

Of course, with a dish this good – you too could develop food hands. And then your loved ones might be in danger.

Continue reading food hands.

I’ve been a bit distracted lately with all kinds of work-related stuff. It’s also been harder to shoot food with the light being less abundant nowadays, and by the time dinner is ready, I have no other choice but to use the flash that’s built into my camera. I know, I know, I should just go ahead and buy one of those awesome separate flashes that make my food look natural and more appetizing than the glare of the built-in, but why do they have to be so expensive? Someday soon, I hope.

Aside from being spoiled with take-out last week (because long hours make me want to spend zero minutes in the kitchen), and being away this weekend in Atlantic City (I gambled, I lost, oh well), a few housekeeping items before I forget.

Check out what I think would make a great food holiday I would have if I had my druthers – I gave it a long, hard think before settling on my food holiday of choice. And I’m very grateful to Chew On That Blog for letting me opine!

My weekly post on Accidental Hedonist, finally reviews our SC trip to Charleston. I review a few restaurants and share some photos from the trip. Don’t miss the goat photo!

The zucchini photo makes it to Taste Spotting!

Finally, a little bit of shameless self-congratulatory material. Two of the photos I took last year while in Austin were selected to be included in the Schmap Online Austin guide. I’m delighted that these pictures, taken with a non-SLR Olympus got to be in the running. And of course, it’s always nice to have your pictures admired (I’d be lying to you if I didn’t admit that).

And that is about all from me. I’m sorry I’ve been less-than-dedicated to cooking and writing as of late, but there are other things in life to be done – and last week was more about preserving sanity between work, gym and then more work (at home after gym and dinner). I promise to be better in the future!