runnin' on empty
ants in the house and meals for when the produce drawers have nothing in them
We did it, everyone: we finally made it to spring. I left the house the other morning without a toque on for the first time since October, a sure sign that outdoor temperatures are finally habitable again, but the main reason I know it’s spring for real now is because I and half the people I know have ants in their house. They’re coming up through the floorboards from the foundation here, I think. We got some bait traps and I always feel a bit guilty about it, but c’mon, if you guys would just stay outside where you belong we could live and let live! It didn’t have to be this way! As you might imagine, it’s made things on the cooking front a little out of sorts.
I’ve moved the anti-fatigue mat I stand on while at the cutting board, the rug from in front of the sink— anything that might trap food until this gets sorted out. If a piece of grated cheese falls on the floor while I’m doing prep I know I’ll have to get out the vacuum. It’s frustrating, and understandably has made me feel less enthusiastic about spending time in the kitchen. That, plus the general feeling of the finally-improving weather making me gravitate towards my summer habits of making dinner too late because the days are longer and I’ve spent the afternoon lazing around reading, meant I was kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel this week. And now that I’ve made you thoroughly uninterested in what this newsletter has to offer, let’s get into it.
So, even aside from the ant situation, it was kind of like pulling teeth to get a good meal on the table, because we ran out of a lot of staples and made trips to a few different stores to replenish them over the weekend, but evidently forgot to buy any vegetables while we were at it. So I was looking up various pantry recipes because most of what I tend to make when we’re out of fresh food feels too much like fall and winter, and I just couldn’t do it anymore. And then looking at these so-called ‘pantry’ recipes made me annoyed because so many of them seemed to include ingredients like leeks which are not a staple in my opinion (not when they’re like $6 a pound), or chicken thighs, which again, if you don’t keep meat around usually, isn’t very helpful. And then I’d spent so much time looking through recipes and seething that it was too late to even cook beans.
Luckily I found some burger buns and Beyond patties in the freezer, and we had just enough lettuce left to render them not-sad, so we made it the first grill night of the year. I always expect, when we uncover the barbecue for the first time after the winter, that it’ll be a bit of an ordeal: that we’ll have to spend ages trying to get the pilot light lit before we condemn loads of spiders to a fiery death, but it wasn’t so bad this time, and we got it going right away (we chose not to look under the grill for evidence of spiders). There’s nothing like the smell of char to bring back the memories of outdoor cooking that had been buried by months of cold and grey, and burgers just taste better when they’re grilled, don’t they? We didn’t have any potatoes left to make fries, but we had some spicy chips to fill up the plate, which is almost as good.
Also in the freezer we found a container of gravy from the last time I’d done a whole roast chicken, and pulled it out to make some poutine (how did we remember to buy cheese curds but not like, some eggplant or asparagus? look, it’s not important). I like potatoes cooked using the oven fries method, which works for wedges as well, but even just baked fries are good here, because you’re covering them in gravy and cheese. A decent green salad with the last of our lettuce and a few thinly sliced radishes made this a pretty good dinner to eat in front of the tv, because Jeff spent the day brewing beer and the table was covered in brewing supplies. Aside: generally I feel like the mandoline is a gift from god, but sometimes, I will painstakingly spend three minutes slicing radishes paper-thin with a utility knife rather than spend 20 seconds washing the mandoline when I’m finished with it. The human mind is our planet’s greatest mystery.
I did end up making beans later in the week, too. I’d intended to make this instant pot black bean soup which I’ve made in the past and liked, but it was 12°C and sunny and the very idea of soup felt like a crime. Instead, I made another weeknight favourite, these cheesy black beans with garlic and a bit of tomato paste, to eat with some of the fresh loaf of sourdough from the same morning (at least one thing in my house was fresh this week). We still have a bag of jalapeños from the dollar rack, so I’ve been putting them in basically everything to try to use them before they rot, and they were good here for a bit of a spice boost as well as some texture. I like these a little more saucy and spicy than the recipe makes them, so I usually add close to a full cup of broth rather than the ½ cup of hot water it calls for, and a few splashes of hot sauce.
Keeping on a theme, apparently, I also made a version of this baked pasta with fennel and sausage over the weekend, a recipe I’ve had saved forever but never made because I am not so cruel as to subject Jeff, a lactose-intolerant person, to both ricotta and fresh mozza. But we figured it’d still be good if we skipped the ricotta and just used the one type of cheese instead. I’m always a little leery of one-pot pasta recipes, too, because noodles don’t usually don’t cook correctly in anything that isn’t water— often they’ll be either underdone, or gummy. So I skipped the additional can of crushed tomatoes, assuming this was mostly for the pasta to soak up, and just cooked them in a pot of salted water like normal, adding pasta water to the sauce to keep it from getting too dry in the oven.
The sausage I had was the delicious hot fennel sausage from Two Rivers (we’d opened the package to use one for pizza the night before), and even with the crushed fennel in the recipe, I still think the fennel was still fairly understated. I added fresh basil to the sauce, and a few kale leaves that were also left after making pizza. It was difficult to get everything to fit, even in my largest cast iron, but I made it work. I think if I did this again I’d cook it the same way but let the tomatoes break down more before adding the pasta, so the sauce coats them a little more evenly. And this makes a lot, so now I have some in the freezer for another time when I find myself struggling.
By Wednesday night, I had basically given up. Luckily, we still had fresh bread, and the humble tuna melt was there for me. This sandwich gets an unfair amount of hatred considering how customizable, filling, and tasty it is, but I guess some people can’t get past the idea of hot tuna. I add a fair bit of stuff into the mix when I make it: shallot or green onion, celery if I have it, pickles, kalamata olives, chives or parsley, lots of black pepper. Since there were still jalapeños, alone in the vegetable crisper, I chopped up one of those and threw it in, too. Jeff brought home a green salad with cabbage and green apple and candied nuts from work to eat on the side, which made this feel like a decent diner meal instead of an admission that I couldn’t be bothered to go to the grocery store on a weeknight.
This weekend is the tapas cookoff, and I’m also feeling the draw for something of a baking project, so hopefully next week might be a little more exciting, both for me, the cook, and you, the reader. But, I share these things with you anyway, because even those of us who love doing it don’t cook five-star dinners all the time. I’m a person with ups and downs like everyone else, and there’s no shame in just making a sandwich sometimes.
*Reminder that if you need access to a NYT recipe, reply to this email! I can share up to ten per month, and I’d be happy to help you out.
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. Anyway, here’s something cute.