The Best Raw Flax Cracker Recipe

I have to admit to not being a huge fan of the raw food movement. Now I think we should all eat some raw food, but many nutrients are accessible only through cooking. That being said, I like a few recipes that came out of the raw craze, especially flax crackers. My favorite flax cracker recipe is the onion cracker bread you can find here.

This easy to make recipe requires no pre-soaking or sprouting.  All you do is mix the ingredients (onions, flax seed, sunflower seeds, olive oil and agave syrup) in a bowl and spread it on a tray in your dehydrator.

The problem is that these crackers are so tasty they disappear within a day.

Do you have a favorite raw recipe? Leave a comment with a link!

A Prickly Pear Cocktail

In yesterday's blog post I discussed how to juice prickly pear cactus fruit. Now, what to do with that juice. Thanks to Stephen Rudicel for improvising this recipe:

Prickly Pear Fruit Cocktail
1 part tequilla
2 parts prickly pear fruit juice
1/6 part lime juice
1/6 part Luxardo Maraschino Liqueur
Dash of bitters

Shake with ice and serve.

If you can think of a catchier name for this drink, feel free to comment.

Guilt Free Ice Pops

Orange blossom ice pops from Homestead Survival

This could be the year that the ice pop becomes the new cupcake. I'm sure some Brooklyn hipster is just about to debut an artisinal ice pop cart pulled by heirloom draft dogs.

Cynicism aside, what I like about ice pops is that, unlike other desserts, you can make them with either small amounts of sugar or no sugar at all. All you need is a ice pop mold and a freezer. What follows are a few links to recipes for healthy ice pops, perfect for those hot August days:

• Homestead Survival has a recipe for orange blossom water popsicles. They are just fruit, water, honey, lemon juice and some orange blossom water.
• The Sweet Life has some chocolate dipped peanut banana bars that look amazing.
• I've been making ice pops out of Fany Gerson's book Paletas: Authentic Recipes for Mexican Ice Pops, Shaved Ice and Aguas Frescas. I've made a couple of the recipes with just a small amount of sugar or no sugar at all and they've turned out great. These are ice pops for adults--think spicy ingredients like mezcal and avocado.
• You can, of course, just freeze some fruit juice and keep things simple.

As to how I make them, I've got some old Tupperware type ice pop molds that I've used for years. Pure simplicity. Take note Brooklyn hipsters: the paletas may be the new fixie. Start training those draft dogs.

Dr. Chase, 19th Century Mixologist

And I thought book titles were getting too long. Root Simple reader David Stentiford sent me a link to an online collection of recipe books, Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project, maintained by Michigan State University. David especially wanted to call attention to a book, published in 1864, Dr. Chase's Recipes. The full title of Dr. Chase's book?

Dr. Chase's Recipes; Or, Information for Everybody: An Invaluable Collection of About Eight Hundred Practical Recipes, for Merchants, Grocers, Saloon-Keepers, Harness Makers, Painters, Jewelers, Blacksmiths, Tinners, Gunsmiths, Farriers, Barbers, Bakers, Dyers, Renovaters, Farmers, and Families Generally, To Which Have Been Added A Rational Treatment of Pleurisy, Inflammation of the Lungs, and other Inflammatory Diseases, and also for General Female Debility and Irregularities: All arranged in their Appropriate Departments.

There's certainly many recipes of interest to the modern homesteader, not to mention artisinal mixologists, in this book: rhubarb wine, bitters, spruce beers and "Lemonade--To Carry in the Pocket":

Loaf sugar1lb.; rub it down finely in a mortar, and add citric acid 1/2 oz: tartaric acid will do, and lemon essence 1/2 oz, and continue the trituration until all is intimately mixed, and bottle for use . . . A rounding tablespoon can be done up in a paper and carried convenently in the pocket when persons are going into out-of-the-way places, and added to half pint of cold water."

And, should all the sugar so loved in the 19th century rot out your teeth, Dr. Chase is kind enough to provide instructions on how to extract your own teeth with, "little or no pain."

Scrambled Eggs, Tomatoes and Bulgar

I believe we've mentioned Vegetarian Dishes from the Middle East by Arto Der Haroutunian here before. Given our obsession with our local Armenian supermarket it's a must-have reference in our house. Lately we're overwhelmed by eggs. I went to this book looking for something new to do with eggs and whatever basic ingredients I had in the pantry. I tried this recipe and liked it very much. It's not pretty. It's quick and tasty comfort food. I think it will be going on regular rotation.

The description says it was served in taverns throughout Turkey and Armenia early this century. I like to imagine sitting in a shadowy cool tavern eating this with fresh flat bread and drinking a cool beer.

It's basically a simple scramble made substantial with bulgar wheat (aka burghul). See notes below for more on this ingredient.

Havgtov Tzavar (burghul with eggs)

1 onion, finely chopped
About 1 pound of tomatoes, either canned or fresh ones which have been blanched, peeled and chopped
4 ounces of fine bulgar wheat (the package may read #1/fine) (aka burghul)*
6 eggs
Spring/green onions for garnish, chopped
oil and/or butter for frying
salt, pepper, chili pepper

Two frying pans, one with a lid

***

Start by frying the onion in oil until soft. Then add the tomatoes and salt to taste. Simmer for about ten minutes, stirring occassionally, until the mixture thickens some.

Meanwhile put the bulgar in a bowl and rinse it with water until the water runs clear.  When the tomatoes and onions have had their 10 minutes in the pan, add the bulgar and stir it in well. Then put  a lid on the pan and set it aside for 10 minutes or so. (This is all the cooking the bulgar needs.)

Go to your other pan and scramble the eggs-- be sure to add salt, pepper and a little chili pepper or powder for heat, if you want.

Cook the eggs until they're just set, then dump them into the pan with the the tomato mix and toss.

Transfer to the serving dish immediately, garnishing with the green onions. Enjoy



*Regarding bulgar wheat aka burghul: This is whole wheat which has been parboiled, dried and ground. You may be most familiar with bulgar as the grain found in tabbouleh salad. Look for it in health food stores and Middle Eastern grocery stores or in the specialty aisles of some supermarkets. In the U.S. (and maybe elsewhere) it is sold in 4 different grinds, #1 being the finest and #4 the coarsest. These numbers are on the packaging. This recipe calls for the fine grind, which almost looks like Cream of Wheat, but is not quite that fine.

**Regarding substitutions:  I know there will be substitution questions, because there always are. Fine bulgar is really fine and creates a very specific texture, so I don't know of any direct substitution. Couscous is the closest, but not quite the same. So while I'd say you can't recreate this recipe exact to spirit without fine bulgar, I will also say that scrambled eggs tossed with pre-cooked grains of different sorts can be quite good--even if they are not Havgtov Tzavar. Try using cooked leftover rice, for instance, and see what happens. I also like the old Italian trick of scrambling eggs with leftover pasta (and leftover sauce if you've got it), which is something different altogether, but quite good.

Candied Grapefruit Peel

Erik sourced some nice grapefruits from our friend's tree and used the flesh to do some homework for his Master Food Preserver program. This left a big pile of organic, unwaxed grapefruit rind on our counter, so I decided to do something about it, and set off to make candied grapefruit peel. This is the technique I came up with by mashing together a bunch of different internet recipes and making two batches of the stuff. The results are delish if a bit rustic in appearance. I don't think I'd pass muster at French pastry school with my lazy technique, but Erik and I like them a lot.

You must genuinely love grapefruit, the bitterness of it, to appreciate these. If you're not a grapefruit fan, I'm sure this would work with orange rind as well. If you are a grapefruit fan, you'll find yourself sneaking off to the candy jar for a little more that sweet-bitter flavor punch.

We've been snacking on them straight, but I think they'd be really good chopped into small pieces and sprinkled over vanilla ice cream or folded into scones or dipped in chocolate. I like them as straight-up candy because they're so intense they satisfy restless cravings, but for the same reason you can't gorge on them. Actually, I can't eat more than two at a time. The how-to after the break.

How to Shop at a Korean Grocery Store

Via Evan Kleiman's always informative radio show Good Food, (available as a free podcast in the iTunes store), an illustrated walk down the aisles of a Korean grocery store with Debbie Lee. Learn how to make your meals more exciting with pepper paste and save some money while you're at it!

The Secret to Japanese Cooking: Dashi

Bonito flakes, available at any Japanese market.

We conclude our Japanese themed week with the sauce that's sort of the unified field theory of Japanese cooking: dashi. It's in everything from noodle dishes to sauces to miso soup and it cooks up in just minutes. Dashi contains two ingredients, kombu (a kind of kelp) and bonito (shaved, fermented fish flakes). It's the backbone of Japanese cooking, but we think it's gentle, savory character could adapt well to Western-style cooking if you use it as a substitute for vegetable stock.

Dashi only keeps a few days in the fridge, so the secret to using it regularly is to freeze half of every batch you make.

Next Friday we'll post a recipe for vegetables simmered in dashi. This is a classic Japanese cooking technique, and we've become very fond of it as an alternative to our usual saute/steam/bake repertoire.

Sonoko Sakai, who taught the soba noodle class we described in an earlier post wrote an article on dashi complete with a detailed recipe.

As an aside, I'm really interested in any of you who have foraged your own edible seaweed--if that's you, please leave a comment.

How to Make Soba Noodles

Last month I took an amazing class with author and chef Sonoko Sakai on how to make soba noodles by hand. She's a great teacher and I managed to make a halfway decent couple of servings of noodles during the class.

Like many Japanese arts, soba making has a series of very precise steps. The recipe itself is simple (just buckwheat flour and water), though you do have to pay close attention to the temperature and humidity in the room. While it takes a soba master years to master the craft, you can make decent soba at home. My first attempt a week after the class wasn''t perfect, but I have a feeling I'll get better with a little more practice. And I plan on making a lot of soba this summer.

Made of buckwheat, soba is gluten free, though beginners start with some all purpose flour added in to make it easier to roll out. Sakai has a couple of soba recipes on her website. There's a basic one here that includes a nice series of photos showing the steps you go through to roll it out and cut it. She also has a beautiful soba recipe using matcha here.

Buckwheat flour for making soba is available in any Japanese market. The authentic Japanese flour we used in class is priced like cocaine and is not sold in the US. The buckwheat flour sold in Japanese markets in the states is grown in the US and will work just fine.

In Japan soba is made with a couple of exotic tools. There's a long and thin rolling pin with no handles. They have a martial arts vibe:

Image from Worldwide-soba--they sell a soba making kit.

I was able to improvise one of these at home with a dowel from Home Depot.

There's also a very expensive soba knife used to slice the folded dough:

And a soba cutting guide:

I substituted a small cutting board in my own kitchen. And my commitment to soba is not at the $1,000 level yet so there's no fancy soba knife in our kitchen. At home I was able to make do with a regular kitchen knife, my improvised rolling pin and my homebrew soba cutting board.

While this is one of those activities best learned in person, yes, there is a series of youtube videos you could use to figure out how to make soba at home:



And, I do urge you to give it a try. The noodles we made in class were may times better than store bought soba. And, once you get the basic moves down, soba is quick to make, healthy and tasty.

If you live here in Los Angeles you can sign up for the Los Angeles Bread Makers Meetup group--we're going to ask Sonoko to repeat the soba class and do an udon class as well. You can also contact her through her website http://commongrains.com/ to find out if she's doing a workshop near you.

Return of Recipe Friday! Spicy Korean Tofu

Ummm...Our food stylist is on vacation! This was lunch today. It would look much better if the tofu sheets were reclining whole on snowy rice and artfully sprinkled with green.

We've been eating a lot of this lately. It's Erik's favorite meal these days, in fact. I make it for him whenever he's grumpy and he perks right up. I like it too, and I especially like that it's fast cooking and I usually have all the ingredients on hand, so it's pretty effortless.

I know, I know--there's a lot of tofu haters out there, but this is really good--if you like spicy food.

The key to this is Korean chili powder, called Gochutgaru. You just can't substitute other pepper flakes. We always have this spice on hand because it's critical for making kim chi. (If you like kim chi you'll love this dish!)  If you have access to an Asian market, you'll find Gochutgaru there. It's sold in big bags and is pretty cheap. Look for bags full of fine red flakes with pictures of red peppers on the front.

Credit where credit is due: I'd eaten this style of tofu somewhere before and went looking for a recipe--and found one on the Blazing Hot Wok blog. This is an adaption of that, which was an adaptation from a cookbook, as I recall.

Ingredients:

• 1 package of firm tofu (Silken tofu works too, see instructions at the end)
• A few scallions/green onions, maybe 5 or more, depending how much you like them, chopped into 2 inch pieces.
• This is not cannon, but you could also throw in another veggie along with the green onions for variety. Lately I've been adding in a few chopped asparagus spears into the mix.

       Sauce:

• 3 Tablespoons of soy sauce
• 3 Tablespoons water (equal amount to the soy sauce, however much you use)
• 2 Tablespoons of Korean chili powder (This is a whole lot of spice, but we like it that way. You could use much less.)
• 2-3 garlic cloves minced or pressed
• 1 teaspoon of sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon of sesame oil
• Maybe some wine if you have a bottle open. See instructions.

      Optional:

• Toasted sesame seeds or peanuts for topping. Sesame is more traditional, but we really like peanuts with this.

Prep:

1) Cut the tofu block in 1/4-1/3" slices. Press some of the water out of it by laying the slices out on a fresh kitchen towel or paper towels, putting more toweling on top and pressing gently with your hands--or by leaving it there under a weighted plate while you do the rest of the prep. This is not absolutely necessary, but the dish will come out better if you do it.

2) Chop up your green onions.

3) Combine the sauce ingredients above in a bowl. Since I use so much chili powder, the sauce can be pretty thick. For that reason I like to dilute it with a splash of wine (of any color) or water.

Cook:

Get out a big skillet. Heat a couple tablespoons of cooking oil in it and lay down the tofu slices. Cook them about 3 minutes each side over medium high heat, just so they're nice and hot. Then add the green onions and cook a minute or two longer to soften them a bit.

Then add the sauce and cook it all together until the sauce simmers, tuning the tofu pieces so they get sauced on both sides. At that point it's up to you to decide whether you want to cook the sauce down for a fairly dry presentation, or serve it right away while the texture is still "wet." Either way it will be good.

Serve this over short-grained rice. Top with sesame seeds or peanuts if you've got 'em.

Silken Variation:

Silken Variation? Is that some sort of feminine product or a Kama Sutra position?

Anyway, if you're a fan of silken tofu, as I am, you use that, too. You just do things in a different order. Heat up your skillet and add your green onion pieces and cook for a minute or so, then add the sauce and bring it to a simmer. Then add your silken tofu. Toss to cover with sauce then put a lid over the skillet, turn the heat down and let the tofu sort of steam/heat through gently. Takes about 5 minutes.

Return of Recipe Friday! Carrot Soup

We had a party at our house last week and lots of people brought baby carrots. And no one took their baby carrots home with them when they left. So I took the pile of baby carrots and made a pureed carrot soup with them--one of my all-time favorite soups, in fact. Working with baby carrots was kind of fantastic. No chopping! No peeling!

Doing this reminded me that I haven't shared this recipe on the blog, so I dug up the original recipe card. This is one of the oldest recipes I have. It sort of taught me the basics of soup making. I no longer refer to the recipe when I cook, but it was good to go back and see the original instructions. This soup is just about an ideal soup. It's fast and flexible, doesn't require many ingredients and seems to please everyone. At heart it's vegan, but can be made more decadent by adding dairy. I wish I could credit it properly, but it's something I copied from a magazine onto a card fifteen years ago or so.

It's amazing how such a simple soup can have so much flavor. The sweet-spicy flavor and bright orange color also make it an ideal dish for this time of year. Each time I eat it I feel like I'm doing something really good for my body.

One way to salvage stale bread

Mrs. Homegrown here:

So I bought a baguette this week, which caused Mr. Homegrown to grumble with hurt indignation. His homemade bread is better than any store bought, it's true--but he hadn't baked in a few days, and I wanted to make caprese sandwiches. However, my plans went awry and the baguette went stale.  Oh, the shame on my head! Just where did we put out our supply of sackcloth and ashes?

However, tonight I salvaged the bread by making it into Melba toast (?) or rusks, maybe (?).  I have a fondness for hard, blandish cracker breads like this. You can pile an amazing amount of dip-like-substances on them, and as I've said, I could live on chips and dips.

I have to admit that for anyone who's ever made croutons, this recipe is a little "Well, duh"-- but, nonetheless:

Cornmeal Zucchini Pancakes

 

  

More things to do with zucchini!

Many of you know Rosalind Creasy, Queen of the Edible Landscape. If you don't, look her up. She wrote Edible Landscaping, among others. It turns out that she's not only an amazing gardener, one who makes colors and textures sing, who makes edible gardens more beautiful than any ornamental garden I've ever seen, but she cooks, too.  Darn her and her...her...competence!!!

Erik found her Recipes from the Garden at the library and brought it home. This is the first thing we've cooked from it, but we liked it a lot. These are savory pancakes that suit for breakfast, brunch, or even dinner. I imagine if you made them without the onions they could be served sweet, with syrup or jam, as a veggie-infused breakfast pancake. 

Note: She calls for yellow zucchini or summer squash, but we used green zucchini.

Cornmeal Zucchini Pancakes

1 1/4 cup cornmeal

3/4 cup all purpose flour

2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 tablespoon of sugar

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 egg

1 cup of milk

2 tablespoons of vegetable oil

1 cup of grated zucchini, yellow or green, or yellow summer squash

3 tablespoons yellow bell pepper, diced fine (we skipped this)

3 tablespoons finely chopped onion

Salsa for serving, homemade or store-bought, optional. 

(We just chopped up some red onion and cherry tomatoes and called it salsa, but I think a fruity salsa (e.g. mango) would be really good with this.)

In a big bowl fork together the dry ingredients (the first list). In a smaller bowl mix the wet ingredients (the second list). Dump wet ingredients on top of the dry and mix just until incorporated--Creasy says "until barely moist."

Cook these like any pancake: in a greased skillet over medium heat until they're golden brown and the sides are firm. Keep the finished ones warm in the oven while you cook the rest.

They keep well in the fridge. I just ate one for breakfast after rewarming it in frying pan. Still tasty after 3 days!

Our favorite way to cook zucchini

It's that time of year again.

Put aside those zucchini bread recipes and try this instead.

This recipe--or technique, rather-- sounds too simple to be good, but it really works. As one friend said of the dish, "It tastes like there's a lot going on, but there's not."

All you've got to do is shred your zucchini up on the large holes of your kitchen grater. Saute the shreds in an uncovered skillet with lots of olive oil and some chopped up garlic, until there's no water in the pan, and the volume of the zucchini is reduced by about half.

This transforms the zukes into a savory, glossy, succulent mush. Maybe that's not the most elegant way to phrase it, but it's the best I can do. Yes, it does have a baby food texture, but it's really, really good, so you don't care.

I can't begin to tell you quantities--we've never measured. Just guesstimate. It will work. The one rule of thumb I can offer you is that you will lose about half the volume of the zucchini through cooking, so grate up more than you think you can eat.

The central idea here is to cook off all that water. This can't be emphasized enough. That's what makes this dish taste good. The zucchini will release a lot of water as it cooks--at least ours does, because it's very fresh. Older zucchini may be more dry. So keep it simmering at a good clip, stirring occasionally, until the water bubbles off.

Saute until there's no water pooling at the bottom of the pan. Until you start to run the risk of browning the zucchini. Then take it off the stove. Add salt and pepper to taste.

How long will this take? It varies by how much zucchini you're cooking, and how wet it is, how deep the pan is, etc., but for a general guideline, when we shred up one big boy, enough to fill a 11" skillet, it takes 20-30 minutes to cook it down.

Starting out...

Reducing...

Done.

Note: This year we're growing a type of zucchini called Albarello di Sarzana (Little Tree of Sarzana) from...as usual...Franchi. We're really liking it. It's a pretty, light green, spotted squash, and the leaves have silver patterning on them. But more important that looks, it's tasty, and seems to be resistant to powdery mildew.


ETA: Love all the recipe suggestions we're getting in the comments! Please do tell us how you like to cook zucchini.

Nasturtium Flower and Pistachio Pesto: a story in pictures

Sorry, we don't have a recipe for this, because we always wing it when it comes to pesto--even Erik, who is recipe dependent. You too can make it without a recipe.

Pesto is simply a blending of 5 main ingredients, which can vary widely according to season, availability and taste:

1) an aromatic herb, or blend of herbs (traditionally basil, but we use chives, parsley, mint, arugula and here, nasturtium flower--basically anything with a strong flavor. This can be stretched with some spinach or nettles for a milder flavor.)
2) a nut of some sort, toasted preferably
3) good quality shredded Parmesan cheese
4) good quality olive oil
5) raw or roasted garlic

You throw all these things in a blender, or go old school and mash them with a mortar and pestle. The proportions are intuitive. It's hard to make bad pesto as long as your ingredients are good. Less cheese and nuts yields a lighter pesto. Less herb and more cheese and nuts makes a richer pesto. Less garlic yields a milder pesto. We use maybe 2 raw cloves per batch. It's all good. Process the dry ingredients first, then add oil bit by bit to make a paste. Some people make a smooth paste, we leave nut chunks in. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Serve pesto over hot pasta, or spoon it into soup for flavor, or dip veggies in it, or thin it down and drizzle it over cooked veggies, or spread it on toasted bread, or eat it off the spoon...

Homemade Teeccino

A carob tree heavy with pods

Mrs. Homegrown here:

A while back I kicked coffee, and reduced my caffeine intake down to maybe one cup of green tea a day, and it's been a really good thing. At that time, Root Simple readers wrote in to suggest all sorts of coffee alternatives for me, and I tried a bunch of them. One of them was Teeccino, with which I quickly developed a love-hate relationship.

Teeccino is a line of coffee substitutes based on carob, chicory, various nuts and flavors. It's not one of those instant beverages like Pero: you prepare it by brewing it or steeping it in water. I found it at Whole Foods and tried a bag. I liked it, not because it tastes like coffee--it doesn't--but it behaved in soothing, coffee-like ways. You can put milk in it. It looks like coffee and has a coffee-like body.

It comes in a ton of flavors, like hazelnut and French vanilla, which I avoided because I don't like dessert  coffees, and besides, those flavors remind me of my days working in unpleasant office jobs, where you live for the bad coffee, just to stay awake, and all they have in the office kitchenette is that godawful Irish Cream or Hazelnut flavored artificial creamer, and you actually kind of get used to the stuff, because you're so starved for stimulation...

But I digress.

You've probably never met a soup like this

Mushroom and Fruit Soup. Yep. I don't know if you're going to like this recipe. I did. Erik made it, which shocked me, because he has a general prejudice against savory fruit preparations. In fact, he has a general prejudice against soup, seeing it somehow as being a substandard food form. Nonetheless, he cooked this soup. 

I smelled it first, as it was cooking, and it smelled really good. Then I saw it in the pot, and said, "What the...?" (Imagine an onion and mushroom broth with wrinkly black things floating around in it.)  Then I tasted it. My first impression was that I'd never tasted anything like it, and I needed to adjust to the newness of the flavor combination. It's an Armenian recipe, from Vegetarian Dishes from Across the Middle East by Arto der Haroutunian, but it made me think of Russia. Which makes sense, I guess. There's a lot of cross-pollination between Russia and Armenia. Strangeness aside, the soup was undeniably tasty, and I went back for seconds.

This soup seemed blog-worthy for a couple reasons. The first is that it is really simple, and I like that. Second, those ingredients almost seem like it could be a pantry soup. It calls for fresh mushrooms, but I'm wondering if it wasn't made with dried mushrooms back in the day. It also calls for green onions but we used regular onions to good effect. The other primary ingredient is dried fruit. Dried mushrooms, dried fruit, stored onions: I can imagine this soup being conjured out the pantry on a cold night in the dead of winter.

We used a nice mix of fresh mushrooms. Since there are so few ingredients in this soup, mushrooms are the stars. I'm not sure if it would be as good if it were only made with, say, white salad mushrooms because they aren't super-flavorful. Maybe it would work, though. Anything is worth a try.

If you make it, let us know what you think. Recipe after jump:

Return of Bean Friday: Spicy Mayocoba Beans

Mrs. Homegrown here:

Our neighbor Teresa of Tularosa Farms gave us this recipe. She not only gave us this recipe, but a bag of beans to go with it, and a loaner dutch oven.  How's that for neighborly? I made it a while back and really liked the results. Erik proclaimed it to be the best of all the Bean Friday dishes, though I remain partial to the Bastardized Puerto Rican beans. I'm happy to finally get a moment to share this with you.

Mayocoba beans are pretty yellow beans, the color of old ivory. We'd never had them before, but are glad to have met them, because they are mild in flavor and have a smooth, buttery texture. They're used extensively in Latin American cooking, so you might have to visit a Latin American-flavored grocery store to find them.

The recipe after the break:

Poached eggs and greens on toast with wildflowers

 Mrs. Homegrown here:

This is a fancy iteration of one of our springtime go-to dishes: eggs and greens on toast. Today, Erik was inspired (perhaps by the spirit of Spring?) to sprinkle nasturtium blossoms and little arugula flowers over the plate.

It was dee-lish--so much so I had to blog it. I sincerely hope we haven't blogged this before, but it seems like we would have, because we make this dish so often.

Anyway, it's easy to make:

A Fast Bean Friday: Khichdi

Lame, lame, lame. I can't even get it together to put up a picture. I'm just too crazy getting things together for the holidays. I suspect many of you are in a similar state. But I did want to post this, because I think you might want something wholesome and mild to eat over the next week, during your HRD (Holiday Recovery Period).

I learned about khichdi, a lentil and rice dish, very recently. Our friend Ari sent me a link to a basic recipe. It was nothing more than lentils, rice and cumin. I could not help but add some minced onion, but otherwise I followed this simple recipe and came out with something sort of bland but somehow extremely comforting and pleasant.

So I looked up khichdi, and discovered that it is an Indian comfort food--perhaps the Indian comfort food, if I can trust what I've read. Plain khichdi is baby's first solid food. It's also good for people with delicate stomachs. But it doesn't have to be plain--it can be spiced up and elaborated with vegetables and toppings of ghee and yogurt. It's the kind of food that college kids learn to cook when they first go off on their own. It's the kind of food that each mom cooks a little different.

I've been playing with the basic formula, and it's becoming one of our go-to "fast foods" around here. It cooks up in about a half hour, and you don't even have to stand by the stove for that half hour. You just saute up the spices, add the rice, lentils chopped veggies and water, put a lid on the skillet and walk away. It's also a great way to use up vegetable odds-and-ends. You can throw just about anything in there, and the great khichdi magic will make it all work, somehow or another.

I'm going to send you to this excellent post at One Hot Stove for the technique. It's the best I found in all my research, and I'd just be copying them if I wrote it up here.

(ETA: I've been thinking about this over the holidays, and have decided to post the outline of the recipe here, just in case One Hot Stove ever closes up shop. I hate it when posts end up with dead links. I'd encourage you to read the One Hot Stove post if you have the option, because there's more detail there, and a recipe for another dish called kahdi.  My recipe after the break --> )