Side Dishes

The Daily Grain: How to Cook and Freeze Rice

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I'm extremely thrilled about the upcoming publication of my book, "Man with a Pan: Culinary Adventures of Fathers who Cook for their Families," the cover of which I displayed here yesterday, but life as the Stay at Stove Dad isn't just about such enjoyable accomplishments. More often, it's about basic things, like cooking rice.

I've written before about the virtues of putting a pot of water on to boil the minute one comes home from work in the evening. But lately, I've been waking and boiling water for rice. The ancient staple is useful for so many dishes, from black beans and dhal to chicken tikka masala and the new, African-spiced chicken and lentil stew I made the other night.

Shortly, I'll share the recipe for the stew. Like the dish itself, anything I have to say about it will benefit from a day or two of sitting. In the meantime, I'll talk about how I cook rice, and how to freeze it.

Cooking rice is as simple or complicated as you make it. The way I do it probably won't win any awards, but it satisfies me: One part rice to two parts water; cover and bring to a boil, then turn down to a simmer. If I feel like it, I throw a bay leaf or two in the boiling water. If it's my usual brown basmati, it will take about forty-five minutes total. White rice can be done in as little as fifteen minutes.

The rice will last in the refrigerator for a few days. When I want to use it, I warm it, either in the microwave for a few seconds, or, covered, in a cast-iron frying pan. When I use a frying pan, I put the heat on high for a few minutes, then give it a stir, and turn out the flame. The residual energy in the pan is usually sufficient to warm it perfectly.

If the leftovers linger for more than a few days (double check with a quick smell, and err on the side of caution when it comes to using old rice), I pack up small portions of it in sandwich or quart-sized Ziploc bags. I squeeze all the air out of the bags, seal the top, and then spread the rice out in the bag so it is thin and flat. These stack nicely for freezing, and can be defrosted much the same way as the fresh rice.

Give the frozen layer of rice a good whack with a spatula or other implement. It will crumble and defrost faster, giving you more time for other things, such as reading (or writing) a book.

The Truth About Kale Chips

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Given that I have recently written about wild boar stew and sage-and-apple pork roast, I think I can produce one more post about kale chips without this site turning into a kale ghetto. Shortly, I will share my weekend adventures in making flan, but first I have a confession to make.

I never liked the New York Naturals Kale Chips that were Santa Maria's gateway drug to the vegetable, and I wasn't really all that fond of her home-cooked version that she wrote about yesterday. I didn't see this as consequential. An old friend once said that for a couple to be happy, its members should have "sympathetic neuroses," and I think embracing the foibles of one's spouse is the foundation of a good marriage.

It's hard to blame Santa Maria for her kale addiction. I enabled it with the Fly Sky High Kale Salad, which her father said was great because he didn't taste the kale. I wouldn't go that far, but something about toasted pine nuts is incredibly mouth watering. And I'm proud of her for figuring out a way to make her own kale chips.

Kale is an amazing vegetable. It has been cultivated for more than 2,000 years. It grows in almost any kind of weather, and becomes sweeter after a frost. In some regions, folks leave the vegetable in the garden through the winter and pick the frozen leaves to eat as needed. It is rich in vitamins A and C, folic acid, calcium, and iron.

Last night, Santa Maria roasted up yet another batch of her kale chips. Because we were out of Parmesan cheese, she made them with nothing more than salt and lime juice, which leads me to another confession: These I liked, a lot. I would even call them addictive.

Super Simple, Super Addictive Kale Chips

  • 1 head kale, leaves washed and dried; center stalk removed
  • 1 teaspoon olive oil, or from a spritzer
  • 1/2 lime, juiced, or to taste
  • salt, to taste

Preheat oven to 225 degrees.

Lay the kale out on parchment paper on baking sheets, and spritz with olive oil, sprinkle with lime juice, and dust with salt (if you don't have a spritzer, mix oil and kale in a bowl).

Bake in the oven about 20 minutes, or until the leaves are crisp. This may take longer. Be patient.

Doubling Down: Santa Maria Strikes it Rich with a Kale Chip Recipe

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On Sunday afternoon, while I was resting after making a pot of Bolognese and a batch of  black beans, Santa Maria slipped into the kitchen to experiment with kale chips. Here is her report:

I love, love LOVE the Fly Sky High Kale Salad, but alas, the kids don't. Sometimes, Nina will have a bit, but not much more. Pinta, won't even try it.

Because our big girl, Nina, can't eat nuts, I was dismayed when she looked with such interest at my New York Naturals Kale Chips—they're yummy, but quite expensive at $6-9 for a small box — and covered in pulverized cashews (and other stuff).

I looked around and made up my own recipe for kale chips, which she loves. Everyone gobbled them up!  And I am happy to have made a delicious healthy snack. It really takes just ten minutes.

The Deep Fragility of All Existence As Represented in a Vegetable Snack (a.k.a. Santa Maria's Kale Chips)

  • 1 head kale (washed, spun dry, with the stiff spines ripped out)
  • 1 Tablespoon lime juice
  • salt to taste
  • 1/4 cup micro-grated parmesan cheese
  • olive oil (about a teaspoon) or from a spritzer

Preheat oven to 225 degrees

Place the leaves on a piece of parchment paper, spritz with olive oil, then sprinkle with lime juice, salt (not too much!), and cheese (or, if you don't have a spritzer for the olive oil, toss everything in a bowl, and then lay the leaves out on the parchment paper).

Bake about 15 minutes.

Note: Watch them carefully while they are baking. They don't taste great if the edges blacken, and all ovens are different. Other recipes I found on-line said to bake them at 350 degrees. I did, and I burned my first version. Other recipes often simply suggest just the olive oil and salt — but I like them a bit more piquant.

 

 

Easy Weeknight Dinner and a Recipe for Asparagus and Parmesan

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Santa Maria is out of town on a business trip, and Nina and Pinta and I are on our own for a couple of days. Louis Pasteur said “Chance favors the prepared mind,” to which I would add “Dinner favors the prepared cook.” With a little forethought, a fresh homemade dinner can be on the table in minutes.

Last night I came home from work late, had a snack with the kids, read to them, put them in bed, and turned around to see that the clock said 8:30. I hadn’t had dinner yet. The urge to be lazy and order out hung on my arms like a wet sweater—I had a hard time shaking it off.

I knew things might end up this way, so before Santa Maria departed, I had prepared a few things. Part of that mad cooking spree on Sunday involved roasting two chickens; the second bird was for this week. Also, on that Sunday night I made a pot of rice, to eat over the same period. And I always keep some of my black beans in the freezer, so the kids dinner was easy—rice and beans, which their babysitter served them before I got home, along with a couple of quesadillas, and a few stalks of asparagus with a vinaigrette.

After they were in bed, I had a very similar meal ready in no time at all. I substituted roast chicken for the quesidillas, and I topped my asparagus with a few slices of Parmigiano-Reggiano. I wasn’t going to take any chances. I wanted a tasty dinner.

 Asparagus and Parmesan

  • As many stalks of asparagus as one might like, washed with the thick end broken off.
  • Slices of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.

There are two ways to cook the asparagus. If you are in a hurry, they can be steamed on the stove top in a frying pan with a little water. This will take about ten minutes. Just keep an eye on them, and cook them as much as you like.

Roasting is a slightly more tasty way to cook the vegetable. It is a bit more time consuming than steaming them on the stove top, but it is not more work. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Lay the stalks out on a roasting pan and dribble a tiny bit of olive oil on them. Roll them around and salt them a bit. Roast in the oven for about twenty minutes, or until as tender and crispy as you might like.

Slice the Parmesan thinly, and plate the cooked stalks with the slices on top. Enjoy.

How to Cook Collard Greens: A Heretical Recipe

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I have never liked collard greens, but I felt like I needed to serve them on New Year’s Day. I’m superstitious, and I didn’t want to do anything to risk the good luck that a meal of black-eyed peas and collard greens allegedly brings.

I cooked my Hoppin’ John early in the day, but I procrastinated on the greens. Shortly before the party, I did a quick Google search to learn how to cook them, and I panicked. Paula Deen’s recipe was one of the first hits—it called for cooking them two hours. So did a bunch of other recipes. I didn’t have that kind of time, and besides, what were these people thinking? Two hours? How can any vegetable cooked that long taste good?

As you may know, my Fly Sky High Kale Salad has been a huge hit lately, and I’m sure that part of the success of that recipe comes from cutting the green into a chiffonade. The leaf of the collard green appeared similar to that of the kale, so I figured that long thin strips would be a good place to start. Also, I was sure it would help them cook faster.

I’ve found that with the kale, the less it is cooked, the better it tastes, and I suspected this might be true of the collards, too. But I had never previously prepared collards, and I became concerned that there might be a reason they needed to be cooked two hours. Maybe there was a naturally occurring chemical compound that had to be sweated out (the way manioc must be soaked then cooked to make a delicious farofa to garnish feijoada). Maybe they were indigestible unless stewed for an ungodly amount of time. Maybe they were poisonous unless prepared properly, like blowfish, I thought. So I Googled “raw collard green salad,” saw a bunch of recipes, and concluded that I didn’t need to worry. A quick sauté was the answer.

In a nod to the South, though, I cooked the greens in bacon. And it was just my luck that they turned out delicious. Santa Maria called them “a revelation.”

Heretical Collard Greens

  • 1 strip of smoked bacon, diced
  • 1 head collard greens, washed and cut into a chiffonade

Heat a large frying pan and render the bacon until it is crispy.

Toss in the greens and stir around a bit on high heat until they taste good. Not long, just a few minutes.

What a Difference a Day Makes

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The night before last, I let Santa Maria know that I was leaving work and she texted me the following:

"yay!!! girls cutting kale! eating artichokes"

I came home and found Nina and Pinta satiated and amused. It was a pleasure to join them, but I didn't quite realize how much of a treat it was.

Last night, I called Santa Maria on my way home. "Nina has a fever of 102.5," she said. There's nothing like a sick child to make me miss the common joy of the everyday.

 

Too Tired to Cook Dinner? Liven Up Pasta with a Quick Kale Salad Recipe

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Santa Maria may laugh (or cry) when she reads this, but I was more tired than usual last night. It’s not because I was operating on five hours of caffeine-addled sleep after staying up to 1 a.m. the day before, to catch up on work after the Thanksgiving weekend—that’s nothing out of the ordinary.

No, yesterday, I left work early today to pick up Nina from school. Santa Maria had an important work meeting and our fill-in babysitter was out of town. After Nina and her sister ran circles around the playground behind her classroom, I took them over to the Park Slope Food Coop for our weekly shop.

They were a great help, but as much as I love that place at times it can feel like the seventh circle of hell. It gets crowded, and the lines can be longer than the Great Wall of China. I escaped relatively unscathed (no old ladies cursed at me), but I was exhausted after carrying four huge bags of groceries up four flights of stairs.

The kids were hungry by this point, so I had to break down and do something I despise—serve the same thing for dinner that we had the night before. In this case, it was Bolognese sauce with pasta.

Nina, who was the hungriest of all, was on the verge of tears at this idea. God bless her, I thought, I’ve really raised her right. I told her that I hated to do it, but I was too tired to cook anything ambitious. I offered to switch from spaghetti to penne, and this mollified her.

Then she asked me to make “that dish with the green things and olives in it.” The only thing green I could think of was pesto, but that wasn’t it. A couple of guesses later, and thinking of capers, I blurted out “Puttanesca?” “Yes, that’s it,” she said. “Oh, I said, I can make that tonight,” I replied, knowing that I could whip it up in the time it takes to boil water for the pasta. Then I realized that I was out of peeled plum tomatoes—I had forgotten to put them on the shopping list. That was the end of that.

Speaking of green things, Santa Maria has recently developed an insatiable craving for green vegetables. I bought kale on my shopping trip and knew that if I worked fast enough I could make my new “Fly Sky High Kale Salad” for her before she got home.

It’s a simple dish really, one I first ate at Prune a few weeks ago. I was there catching up with an old friend and I wanted to balance a burger with something healthy. Their kale salad appetizer pairs a chiffonade of the vegetable with toasted pine nuts, olive oil, and Parmigiano-Reggiano. It was delicious, so much so that I had to try it at home.

I first made it a week or so ago, and at that time I didn’t have any pine nuts. I substituted cashews (toasted in a cast iron skillet), and that made for a slightly heartier version of the dish. Whether or not you use cashews or pine nuts is really up to you.

The first time I made it, Santa Maria liked it so much that she said after eating it, “I feel like I can fly.” My girls didn’t have the same reaction, but I was shocked that they ate more than two bites. It’s that good. Pinta even paired hers with a bit of the plain penne, which would turn this salad into a main dish. I never thought I’d get my kids to eat kale, but I did last night. No wonder I was exhausted.

 

Fly Sky High Kale Salad

 

  • 1 bunch Lacinato kale
  • 1 Tablespoon pine nuts, or more, to taste
  • Grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, to taste
  • ½ lemon, juiced
  •  1 t. Olive Oil

 

Wash the kale and strip out the thick center rib.

Roll a few of the leaves tightly together, like a cigar, and cut it into little circles, which will unravel into a perfect chiffonade.

Sauté the strips of kale in a little olive oil, for just a few minutes, until they change to a brighter green and soften a bit.

Toast the pine nuts in a cast-iron frying pan until slightly brown.

Combine the kale, the pine nuts, and the cheese in a bowl.

Dress with lemon, being careful to taste as you go and not to make it too tart, and more olive oil if you wish.

 

Welcoming Santa Maria’s Mother Home: A Steamed Cauliflower Recipe

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Santa Maria’s mother was released from the hospital on Sunday, and after enduring a long cab ride home and facing the mountainous climb up our four flights of stairs and across the Hillary Step to our landing, she made it home. I cooked up a fish dinner to welcome her back. It wasn’t the Rose Revived Flounder extravaganza that Santa Maria had planned, but it was pretty tasty all the same—I sautéed the fish, roasted red potatoes, and steamed fresh cauliflower, which I topped with melted sharp cheddar cheese.

When I was growing up, my mother convinced her children to eat broccoli and cauliflower by putting cheddar cheese on them. This side dish was a favorite of my childhood. I still love it, but I don’t often make it, and I don’t know why. Possibly because my roasted cauliflower is so delicious. Or possibly because I have some misguided notion about what it means to grow up. Is it really necessary to leave behind the tastes of childhood? Depends on the childhood, I suppose.

As it turns out, cauliflower is a near-perfect vegetable to serve to an eight-six-year old who just got out of surgery. It is loaded with vitamin C; one cup has 91.5% of an adult’s daily recommend value. And, according to the World’s Healthiest Foods website, cauliflower is:

an excellent source of vitamin K and a very good source of omega-3 fatty acids (in the form of alpha-linolenic acid, or ALA), cauliflower provides us with two hallmark anti-inflammatory nutrients. Vitamin K acts as a direct regulator of our inflammatory response, and ALA is the building block for several of the body's most widely-used families of anti-inflammatory messaging molecules. In addition to these two anti-inflammatory components, one of the glucosinolates found in cauliflower-glucobrassicin-can be readily converted into an isothiocyanate molecule called ITC, or indole-3-carbinol. I3C is an anti-inflammatory compound that can actually operate at the genetic level, and by doing so, prevent the initiation of inflammatory responses at a very early stage.

Cauliflower’s health benefits aside, the best part of the dinner came when Santa Maria’s mother asked for seconds of everything. The whole time she was in the hospital, she ate virtually nothing. Not any more.

Steamed Cauliflower with Ceddar Cheese

  • 1 head of cauliflower, rinsed and cut into small florets
  • slices of cheddar cheese, to taste

Steam the cauliflower until slightly softened.

Toss the florets in a bowl and drape with slices of cheddar cheese.

Cover the dish, and by the time you get everything else to the table, the cheese will be melted.