cosmic american blues
suburban tendencies and unhinged pizzas
It rained on Sunday. For less than an hour, but I still went outside so I could appreciate the smell of it, and it did make me feel a bit relieved that we wouldn’t go the entire month of July (as well as the back half of June) with no rain. Living in the lower mainland, I get anxious when we go more than a week without a rainy day, so this seemingly endless summer sunshine, instead of conjuring a cheerful desire to participate in seasonal activities, now feels faintly ominous as I imagine a Mad Max future. In my dream world, it would rain every night between 1 and 5 a.m. all summer long.
This weekend, Jeff got his second dose of the vaccine (mine is booked for this Saturday), and we celebrated by visiting Bulk Barn in person for the first time since March of 2020 and spending $154. Turns out it’s a lot easier to impulse buy snacks in person than it is when you order online, but we’re also now well-stocked in various nuts, beans, and flours. We also made the fried chickpea/zucchini/tzatziki thing again for an easy dinner that is also fun to eat (we got taftoon this time). Have I eaten this basically every week since making it the first time? Yes. Do I expect this to continue? Also yes.
The suburban in me loves to read Real Simple magazine and think about what my life might be like if, say, I lived in upstate New York and owned a home with a garage, or I were a work-from-home mom who had to get dinner ready for my kids while the oldest was at hockey practice and the youngest was taking a nap. Honestly though, it does contain a lot of reasonably helpful organizational and prep tips as well as decent recipes that are straightforward to make or that use pantry ingredients. However, I simply cannot be a person who hoards stacks of old magazines (as I mentioned, I don’t have a garage), so when I’m done reading, I cut out any recipes I think sound good and any tips I want to remember. Then I paste them into a spiral notebook that I keep with my cookbooks and look through every so often for inspiration. If I try a recipe and it turns out to be a dud, I can just tear out the page and recycle it.
I happened upon a recipe for a zucchini and sausage tart, and since from now until September I’ll pretty much always have zucchini to use up, I decided to try it. All it involved was crumbling and lightly frying sausage, and then par-cooking slices of zucchini in the same pan before adding them to a tart base to bake. And here’s a secret-that’s-not-a-secret about puff pastry: with (thawed) pre-made frozen dough, it’s very fast and easy to make something that looks extremely fancy. It’s the food equivalent of throwing on a dress and having everyone tell you how nice you look, when it was actually less work than trying to pick out a shirt and pants to wear. The recipe itself is pretty bare bones— just the pastry, dijon mustard, Italian sausage, and zucchini— so I figured I could dress (sorry) it up a little.
I used half regular and half tarragon dijon, and topped the sausage and zucchini with parmesan and provolone before baking. When it came out of the oven, I added some fresh parsley and a drizzle of hot honey. If I were to make it again I would drain some of the sausage drippings before cooking the zucchini, since it came out a bit oilier than I would have liked. If you’re making a meatless version, a hot Italian veggie sausage would do, and I think any kind with fennel in it would be particularly good. I served it with a salad (making the caper and lemon vinaigrette I used for the niçoise) and while eating this dinner, I wished that I had a second stomach so that I could have eaten more of everything.
After my obsession with the pickled garlic purée pizza from Farina a Legna last week, I wanted to try making something similar. I didn’t have pickled garlic cloves (note to self: make pickled garlic) but I did have some pickled garlic scapes, which blended into, if not a purée, then at least somewhat of a pesto, with some olive oil and a little brine from the jar. I roasted broccoli to put on top, and added parmesan, provolone, and basil leaves. I loved the charred roasty broccoli with the tangy garlic, and while I didn’t intend for the provolone to get quite so browned, it was still a nice match.
If I’m going through the trouble of making pizza dough I usually feel it’s a waste not to make two pizzas, but without any mozza or tomato sauce or other standard toppings, I had to get a little creative. I found the leftover romesco sauce from the other week and used that as a base, and arranged some zucchini on top of it with probably more fussiness than was strictly necessary. Feta, a drizzle of olive oil, and some fresh basil finished it off, making a fresh-tasting pizza with plenty of saltiness and acidity.
Both of these were good but I felt they could have used a little something more. The broccoli garlic one felt like it could benefit from something creamy or slightly sweet (like the mayo on the Farina pizza), and I wish I had thought to crack an egg on the zucchini pizza before putting it in the oven. But I think it’s worthwhile to occasionally make an out-there pizza— it’s kind of fun to put the pan in the oven and have only a vague idea what it might taste like when it comes out.
Since my roommate has cleared her bags of frozen fruits and vegetables, various gluten-free bread products, and containers of stew and soups taken home from set, I keep finding things in the freezer I’d forgotten about. I knew I had two bags of veggie scraps and needed to make stock soon, but I just discovered a THIRD bag (so now I really need to make stock soon). And I knew I’d made seitan fairly recently, but I didn’t know that I still had some, along with the remainder of the green beans I’d blanched for the niçoise I made last month. I pulled them both out to make vegan orange chicken, another Isa Does It recipe I tend to forget about and then re-discover with a little thrill of excitement.
This hits the mark of feeling similar enough to Chinese takeout to satisfy that craving, while having enough vegetables in it that you don’t feel guilty about ignoring the perfectly good food in your produce drawer. I added broccoli because I had a little left to use up after making the pizza (the recipe makes plenty of sauce, so there’s room for more veg than just what’s suggested). I also tweaked the method a little, doing it more the way I might make a fried rice: cooking the seitan and vegetables in separate batches and then putting everything on a plate while I made the sauce in the wok, so the beans and peppers didn’t overcook. Reading the ingredients the sauce might seem like it’d be too sweet, but the zest and vinegar balance out the sugar to make it just the right level of sweet-and-sour. If you can’t eat seitan, I would recommend trying this with the large pre-made tofu puffs, sliced and tossed in at the end so they soak up some sauce without getting too soft.
Also this week I made the Italian apple cake again, because that is simply what you do when your own lack of planning leaves you with more apples than you could possibly eat. It’s a fine cake and you should make it when you also have too many apples, or when you want a cake that isn’t much work to make and can be eaten respectably at any time of day.
Media:
This seemingly anti-beet article was making the rounds, and I at first laughed in disbelief, because why would anyone bother to publish an article stating your dislike of a particular food item as proof that it is bad? But after reading the piece (which it seems not all of the people getting mad about it did), I have to concede that the author’s point has some validity. She argues not that beets are a bad food altogether, but that they, and other whole vegetables, need to stop being treated as a stand-in for protein mains in restaurant settings. While I disagree that
“No amount of dehydrating, rehydrating, salting, charring, juicing, or grilling can make up for what beets lack, which is interest, texture, and flavor.”
because I think beets are lovely and delicious, I do agree that there are many better ways to make vegetable main dishes exciting than just marvelling at how much you can make a slab of beet or cauliflower resemble meat. I feel like we went through a similar thing with the watermelon ham a few years ago, because I don’t think anyone asked for this! You can just give us meatless recipes that taste good instead of trying to show us that vegetables can be meat.
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with someone new! I like providing this to you for free, but it does still involve time and effort, so donations I can use towards cookbooks or future treats are much appreciated. And finally, it may not be funny to everyone, but here is my favourite tweet to come out of the Ben & Jerry’s discourse.