the two four
the true value of hummus, brownie secrets, and a mountain of cauliflower
Is it Victoria Day? May Long? The Two-Four*? Regardless of what dumb name you call it, people still love to refer to the May long weekend as the “first long weekend of the summer”. That has always felt like a bit of a stretch here, where it often doesn’t warm up to shorts weather until mid-to-late June. This year in particular, with its endless rain and winter-like temperatures stretching well into what should have been spring, it feels particularly mocking. But! It looks like we’ll at least get to enjoy some sun this weekend, even if we aren’t quite at the point of leaving home without a jacket. If only we could blend this with the unseasonable heat my friends in southern Ontario have been experiencing, somehow, so we could all have reasonable weather for once.
We’re hosting a family barbecue on Sunday for Jeff’s birthday, as well as that of our nephew, who has his about a week later. I’m looking forward to making them a birthday cake, though I’m not yet sure how I’m going to combine the tastes of a 42-year-old man with those of a 9-year-old, and also make it vegan… but I accept the challenge! It’ll be nice to be able to have people over without the underlying worry of being in an enclosed space without masks for hours, not to mention enjoy some much-needed time outdoors without being angry at the cold or the wind. I hope you all have something fun going on, and if you aren’t getting a bonus day off this weekend, I hope everyone is extra nice to you and you get some of that sweet time-and-a-half pay.
*I personally had never heard this one until a friend moved here from Ontario and asked what we were gonna do on the two-four and I just stared at her for about 15 seconds trying to figure out what the hell she was talking about.
There are certain things that feel like a personal affront when I have to spend money on them, and I usually have no way of predicting what those things will be. Of course there are the obvious things like gas for the car or dental care, because I get no joy from those and they are so much money. But I don’t know what makes me feel fine about spending $150 on yarn or $6 on a single tall can of beer, while the idea of buying bread or hummus that costs more than $5 will have me clutching my wallet and muttering to myself in the grocery store, even though bread and hummus do, of course, bring me joy. A mystery of the human psyche.
So as a selectively cheap bitch, I am always happy when I periodically remember that I can easily make smooth and delicious hummus at home using the instant pot, and it uses maybe a dollar’s worth of pantry ingredients. Cook a cup of chickpeas as normal, then once the pressure’s released, add two or three whole garlic cloves and pressure cook again for ten minutes. Save some of the cooking liquid and drain, then blend in the food processor with tahini, salt, olive oil, lemon, and whatever other seasonings you feel like, using the aquafaba to thin as needed. I sometimes also add kalamata olives or herbs. You can achieve a similar texture without an instant pot: just cook two 15-oz cans of chickpeas with their liquid and the garlic on the stove for 10-15 minutes.
I’d been meaning to try making pita at home for awhile, and having a fresh batch of hummus was a good excuse. It’s so amazing to me that the majority of breads and flatbreads use basically the same ingredients, but can produce such a variety of results depending on the ratios and how you treat the dough. I didn’t manage to get all the dough circles onto the baking stone perfectly because of how soft and thin they are, so they didn’t all turn out perfectly round, but it was still very fun to watch them puff up in the oven and then deflate as you flip them over.
The success of the portobello mushroom shawarma made me hopeful that this Melissa Clark cauliflower shawarma would be just as good, and it was— roasty, fragrant with spices, and really filling. I used half sweet and half smoked paprika, and added hot sauce & lemon to my own tahini sauce recipe instead of using the included one. Since my pitas weren’t all able to be torn open and filled like I’d hoped, we piled the cauliflower and toppings over them and ate them like tacos (they were equally messy). The recipe is wildly optimistic about how much cauliflower I can eat, though: it claims to serve 2, but I used the same weight of ingredients and it was enough to feed Jeff and me for dinner as well as lunch the next day, still with some left over!
I do love a baking project, but I also love an “I feel like eating a sweet treat in as short a time as possible” baked good. Brownies are great for this— minimal prep and ingredients, and it’s pretty difficult to have anything go wrong. I used the chocolate section of this recipe (one of my favourites) and sprinkled some Skor bar bits I’d got at Bulk Barn over the top.
The one thing that hinders you from eating brownies as soon as they’re out of the oven is that unlike cookies, their soft, fudgy centre requires you to wait for them to cool before cutting so they don’t just fall apart in a goopy mess. You can freeze them for 15 minutes, but if you’re like me and never have extra room in your freezer, my mom has another good trick. When the brownies are out of the oven, take a baking pan that’s larger than the one you’re using (if you’re baking in an 8”x8”, use a 9”x13”) and fill it up with about an inch of ice water, and place the brownie pan inside. This also helps them stop cooking so they remain even more fudgy.
On a disgustingly stormy day, I comforted myself with the knowledge that it was perfect weather for a spicy, hearty soup. I made a red lentil soup with carrots and lots of spices based on a recipe in Smitten Kitchen Every Day. Flavoured much like a basic Indian dal, complete with chhonk, it was so satisfying and delicious. I used a mix of yellow and black mustard seeds and cumin seeds in olive oil for the chhonk, and stirred it in after blending the soup so it was full of tiny crunchy surprises (the good kind), but it would be nice as a garnish, too. To go on the side, I made one of my favourite breakfasts, the chaat masala cheese toasts in Indian-ish (just without the tomatoes). The only bad part of this dinner was having to go outside to get cilantro from the garden in a heavy downpour, but that’s a price I will pay for beautiful soup.
Also this week I made the Indian-ish nachos again, a perfect food. I like using half mint and half cilantro for the chutney, and I make tamarind sauce myself by blending together tamarind paste with a little hot water, sugar, chili paste, and crushed garlic. On the weekend we visited the British Butcher Shoppe, where I stocked up on fancy chips (sorry, crisps) and the most refreshing beverage, and grabbed some of their house-made hot Italian sausages. We made a sheet pan roast with the sausage, some potatoes, carrots, and beets, and a grainy honey mustard. It was good but could have used even more mustard in my opinion— maybe next time I’ll try something more like the sauce from these mustard roast potatoes.
Media:
I read this interesting essay by John Birdsall on the dangers of pinkwashing Julia Child, as in the episode of HBO Max’s (fictional) Julia featuring her visiting a gay bar with James Beard. By many accounts referenced in the piece, her casual homophobia was well-known, and creating an episode like this risks historical revisionism:
“Not only did the real Julia dislike the queerness that, throughout the decade of the 1960s, was becoming more and more manifest in public, but it was exactly the kind of homophobia Julia embraced that made navigating public and private life an almost impossible dilemma for a closeted figure like James, someone even more famous than Julia was in 1963.”
The scene in this episode that uses queerness as the catalyst for Julia in learning to accept her fame is both unrealistic and unfair. Acknowledging the contributions and significance of an influential figure does not require us to believe they were good or likeable people, so why go to the lengths to create such a fiction about a person who, being dead and already famous, doesn’t exactly need the PR? In fact, why create more media about Child in general, whose cultural relevance at this point must surely have been exhausted?
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please smash that like button below, or 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 is the new communist manifesto.
this is full of such great ideas!!!!! doing mushrom shwarma and brownies for dinner now