Not-so-Southern comfort

Among the many events of this week is a much-anticipated visit from my BFfroC, who will be arriving late tonight for a brief stay before she moves on to a family event. I plan to have something warm and homey waiting for her when she arrives this rainy evening: fresh tomato soup with pesto and semolina bread.

I wasn't sure that it would be late enough in the summer for good tomatoes. But when I visited the Greenmarket and a stand proprietor saw me skeptically eyeing the tomatoes, he offered me a taste, gratis. It paid off for him, because the tomatoes were delicious. I bolstered their flavor with a little tomato paste anyway and used some milk left over from the Dutch baby to make the soup light and creamy.

Speaking of milk, the rest of it needed to be used up, and quickly. Solution? Boil up some brown rice pudding while studying (I can't believe there was once a day when I actually enjoyed histology. Yes, fellow med students, I confess: I used to like histo. Don't worry, this final has beaten that out of me.). It tastes like home.

Pity this busy monster

It's the week before an exam, so why do I have so much non-studying activity going on? Mouse training courses, a last PLACE session... and because I'm an idiot, I sort of voluntarily added to my lengthy to-do list "bake for the last Practice of Medicine session." Any high-minded plans I had to make something impressive (macarons!) flew out the window in the face of everything else going on, so I turned to black bean brownies, an ostensibly healthful dessert that is in every way the quickest and easiest baked good I know how to make.

And one of the fudgiest to boot.

This kale salad with blue cheese, blueberries, and Dijon-balsamic vinaigrette is similarly quick (but not all that impressive...). I got the blue cheese/blueberry combination idea from The Flavor Thesaurus; it's helped along by the sweet and tangy dressing.

Brownies for the temporally challenged
1 can black beans (15.5 oz)
3 eggs
3 tbsp canola oil
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 to 2/3 cup turbinado sugar (white is fine, too)
1 tsp instant espresso, if you've got it

Preheat oven to 350. Put all ingredients in a blender and let 'er rip until everything is... blended; alternatively, use your food processor or immersion blender. Pour the batter in a greased 9x9 pan and bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until the edges just start to separate from the edges of the pan.

Ever fickle and changeable

I was all set to make hobak jeon, but an unexpected windfall in the form of friend-going-abroad-who-needs-to-get-rid-of-her-perishables brought me some black bean paste.

As Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka might say, "Strike that; reverse it." It's jajangmyun time!

Forgive the poor photography. I was too excited to cram this
into my gullet to take a good picture. Ardenter, you say?*

Jajangmyun is, as you may have guessed from the name, a Korean dish of noodles, vegetables, and (usually) pork in a black bean paste sauce. I had to use soba instead of sweet potato cellophane noodles, and I omitted the pork, and I didn't have tofu or cabbage or a potato, but other than that, I'd say this was pretty traditional. As a consequence of the fact that I dropped half the ingredients, there was way too much sauce, so here I present an updated version.

Jajangmyun, taken with a grain of salt because this recipe is coming from a white chick
1 onion
1 zucchini
2 carrots
(You should probably use cabbage and potato and cooked pork or tofu)
3 tbsp black bean paste
2 tbsp sesame oil
1 tbsp sugar (or less)
1 tbsp rice wine
1 cup water
a slurry of 1 tbsp cornstarch and 1 tbsp water

Stir-fry the vegetables with the exception of the zucchini and cabbage in the sesame oil. Add the black bean paste, sugar, rice wine, and water, and stir to combine. Mix in the zucchini and cabbage and bring to a boil. When it's boiling, add the cornstarch slurry, return to a boil, and simmer until the sauce is thickened and slightly reduced. Stir in the cooked meat/tofu and heat through. Serve over sweet potato cellophane noodles.

*This is a reference to Thomas Aquinas, who listed six or seven ways to commit gluttony. Ardenter is, simply put, eating too quickly.

Challenges

I generally wake up very early on weekdays to exercise, either with running and calisthenics (I love that word) or bikram yoga. Naturally, the 6:30 a.m. yoga class tends to be populated by a certain cohort of people, plus or minus a few sporadic attendees, who are insane enough to drag themselves into a heated room that early. So lately, when I noticed that one of the instructors had begun coming to the early class and had been a few days consecutively, I asked if he was doing a 30-day challenge, which is exactly what it sounds like: 30 consecutive days of bikram. If a day is skipped, you do a double session the next day (I love the practice, but that sounds hellish). It's sort of an insane time commitment, and I'm sure it gets physically draining, and I'll probably never do one because med school. In any case, the instructor replied that he was doing a 10-day challenge, which he called "intense yoga for people who have trips to go on and birthday parties to attend." And exams to take, I thought to myself. And then I thought, Hey, Hannah. Come on. Ten days. You can hack ten days, right? Ten days is basically a week... a morbidly obese week. So for those of you who call me nuts, please feel free to redouble your admonishments and look so askance at me your eyeballs nearly pop out of their sockets*, because this is happening. I did not practice on Monday, but I did on Tuesday and every day since, which means that I've committed myself to going every day until Thursday. I'm not planning to deliberately avoid class on Friday (last day of class!), so it might be an 11- or 12-day challenge. We'll see.

Speaking of challenges, tonight's dinner was a julienned carrot and zucchini salad (again with the mandoline!) with raisins, walnuts, and a lemon-caraway aioli.

I know that aioli is traditionally considered difficult to make, but (newsflash) all that's required is adherence to two simple tips: use room-temperature egg yolks and add the oil so slowly you can feel your beard growing as the aioli whips up into perfectly emulsified deliciousness.

*Sorry. Graphic happens.

Warning: not above making the obvious Bieber pun

I've got a cast iron skillet now, and I'm not afraid to use it! Dutch babies are these puffy oven-baked pancakes usually served with just some sugar and a spritz of lemon juice for dessert, but in order to make it a full meal, I added blue cheese, walnuts, chopped dried apricots, and caramelized red onion to a buttery cast iron pan, then poured on the batter and baked it.

And I was like, "(Dutch) baby, baby, baby, ohhhh...."

Way too interested in eating this to bother taking pretty pictures.

It tasted much better than it looked.

In addition, I decided to make crepes (a very similar batter) and flambé them. But I didn't have orange juice or any of the other things that one might use to make an actual sauce and, you know, do it right. Instead, I just heated some coffee-orange vodka in a pan, lit it on fire, and poured it over. My friend Jen filmed the sort of lackluster results. But who can say no to coffee-orange vodka-flavored crepes?

Dutch baby, plus!

1 cup flour

4 eggs

1 cup milk, plus a little more if the batter looks too thick

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 red onion, caramelized

1/2 cup dried apricots, chopped

1/3 cup walnuts, chopped

Blue cheese to taste

Black pepper to taste

3 tbsp butter

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Beat the flour, eggs, milk, and salt together at high speed for about one minute, or whisk vigorously for three minutes. Meanwhile, melt the butter over medium heat in a cast iron skillet (or other heavy, oven-safe pan). Sprinkle the walnuts, onion, and apricots evenly along the bottom of the pan, then pour on the batter. Top with cheese and black pepper. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until puffed and golden brown. Eat immediately.

You gotta know...

...all about the avocado, at least according to quizbowl organization NAQT.I have to say, culinarily speaking, I agree.

This is an avocado dip made with a worth-fifteen-points-if-you-buzz-here Fuerte avocado (as opposed to the more common, ten-point Hass variety) and chickpeas. I hesitate to call it hummus--no tahini--or guacamole--no cilantro or onion or tomato--so perhaps guacammus? That sounds like some obscure holiday, though. Merry Guacammus! Good tidings to you on Guacammus! Chag Guacammus sameach!

Whatever it is, it tastes really good spread on crusty whole-wheat bread (Jim Lahey, I love you) and topped with chopped tomato and cucumber tossed in a light, vinegary za'atar dressing. This is made eminently evident by the fact that I was too gluttonous in the face of a plateful of it to take a photo before chowing down. Neg five.

Guacammus
1 medium-sized avocado
10 to 12 ounces chickpeas
juice and zest of 1 lime
1/4 cup chopped scallions
1 Thai chili pepper, diced
1 tsp rice wine vinegar
2 tsp sesame oil
cumin, salt, and pepper to taste

Puree all the ingredients except for the scallions. Mix those in at the end.

Those darn Europeans

Strange cravings strike more than the gravid among us. Lately, all I've wanted is garlic, lots of it, and fast. My first thought was to make ajo blanco, which I figured was a more summer-appropriate variant of the 44-clove garlic soup I've written lovingly about before. But then I actually checked out some recipes for ajo blanco, and holy bejeesus is it shockingly caloric. When I think ajo blanco, I think about long, lean, perfectly tanned Spanish women sipping it on a Mediterranean beach while drinking albarino and eating grapes and melon slices. Now I see that the reason they remain long and lean is that ajo blanco is often served in small, small portions as an accompaniment to a roasted potato or fish dish. So while I try to figure out a way to a. make recipes like this one somewhat easier on the waistline or b. create the perfect accompaniment to a tiny little shooter of ajo blanco, I will accept substitutes... like this one!

This is a green grape, roasted garlic, and zucchini gazpacho with chopped raw almonds and scallions on top. I'm getting my garlic fix (and my raw almond fix, because boy, are those puppies delicious) and retaining the ability to drink more than a few tablespoons of soup without pondering pasty, plump Americans hunkered down like grubs on that aforementioned beach in Spain. Plus, it pairs nicely with the rest of those gram flour crackers from yesterday, although I think a slice of sourdough or some rosemary and olive oil crackers would be preferable.

Green and garlicky gazpacho

(N.b.: "Green garlic" is an actual thing, so calling this "green garlic gazpacho" would have been misleading.)

1 1/2 cups green grapes

1 cucumber, peeled

1/2 cup jicama (or substitute a couple stalks of celery with those annoying stringy bits removed)

1 zucchini

1/4 to 1/3 cup chopped red onion (more to taste)

1/3 cup breadcrumbs, fresh or packaged

2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

5 large cloves roasted garlic (my cloves were very large, so you might use more if yours aren't so substantial)

sherry vinegar to taste (I used about 3 tablespoons)

1 cup liquid (I used water; I suppose you could use vegetable broth, but the saltiness concerns me)

salt and pepper to taste (make sure to season after the soup is cold!)

chopped scallions and chopped raw almonds for garnish (lots of almonds!)

Soak the breadcrumbs in the liquid while you prepare the vegetables. Food process everything but the garnish items into oblivion. Chill for at least an hour. Sprinkle with garnish items. Eat.