I never learn.

About a year ago (when I was still posting regularly) I wrote about my tendency to stuff the fridge with perishable vegetables, blow my food budget in the first week of the month, desperately try to eat pounds of lettuce before it wilts, and live out the last weeks of the month on beans and half a gallon of questionable milk.

Yesterday I got paid and I went to the grocery store – twice. My receipt (the second one) is thirty inches long. Erik asked for salads this month – “I might even want a few vegetarian dinners,” he said – and so I bought a month’s worth of salad ingredients in a day. Sometimes I miss my vegetarian days. I’d bought raw chicken only once in the ten years between the time I left my parents’ house and when I started dating Erik. Now love inspires me to get out the yellow plastic cutting board at least once a month and take a knife to quarter the bird’s grisly pink flesh (because I usually buy whole chickens, since they’re cheaper.) But not this month. Not since he requested otherwise. This is what’s on April’s menu:

Shrimp salad
Seared tuna salad
Brussels sprout salad
Salad Nicoise
Pad Thai
Red curry with tofu
Cauliflower chick-pea curry
Leftover cabbage curry (tonight)
Dal, rice, and roasted broccoli
Black bean soup
Sunbutter-red cabbage soup

And so on.

This morning, for our lunches, I made this:

GRAPES, WILD RICE, AND RICOTTA IN A BOWL

From Mark Bittman’s 101 Salad Ideas, posted in the New York Times in summer 2009

Mix cooked wild rice/rice blend, barley, or other chewy grain with grapes, cut in half. Dress with olive oil and lemon juice. Add thinly-sliced romaine lettuce and crumbled ricotta salata or feta cheese. Be careful, as somehow the ingredients expand to a far bigger salad than two people could eat before it wilts.

Nothing says Christmas like a little red and green, and what better red and green could emerge from the kitchen than tomato soup and Watergate salad?

Nothing, actually. I normally eat organics, whole grains, leafy greens. Bah! Good things come in packages on Christmas, and packaged food is no exception. My mother has made this “salad” every Christmas or New Year’s for as long as I can remember. Here’s the recipe, straight from the pistachio Jell-O pudding box: my holiday gift to you.

WATERGATE SALAD

1 can (20 oz) crushed pineapple in juice, undrained.
1 package (3.4 oz) Jell-O Pistachio Flavor Instant Pudding
1 ½ cups thawed Cool Whip Whipped Topping (My mom and I use 1 8-oz tub)
1 cup (or more!) miniature marshmallows
½ cup chopped pecans.

Combine ingredients. Refrigerate 1 hour. Eat by the tree.

Ever since I met Erik, he’s been talking about France. “The south of France is the most beautiful place in the world,” he’ll say. “It’s one of those very rare places that’s actually as beautiful as they say.”

He continues: “The French keep all the good wines for themselves. Really, you have to go there to drink it.” And then: “I saved myself from dying on a French motorcycle twice.”

It’s true; the back tire blew out twice on a motorcycle Erik rented to tour the south of France. He was riding with a friend. The first time the tire exploded, he steered them safely to the side of the road, and the friend, who’d learned much of his French in Cameroon, called the man who rented it and argued that no, they shouldn’t have to pay extra to replace a defective, dangerous tire. At last the man drove out to replace it; Erik and his friend got on the bike again; and a short time later the new back tire blew out. Erik steered the skidding motorcycle to the shoulder once more, but this time they parked it, called the French man and told him it was his problem. Then they got dinner, I’m guessing with plenty of that good French wine.

I’m glad that Erik saved his own life twice in France, of course: if he hadn’t, where would we be today?  But to his disappointment, my general attitude toward France has been, “Ooh-la-la.” Since we met I’ve been trying to convince him that Latin American shanty towns and chicken buses, travel motifs I’m more familiar with, might rival the south of France’s culture and beauty.

Yet he persists.  Erik emphasizes food. “Did you read this article in Time about French school lunches?” he’ll say. It gives a sample preschool lunch menu: hake in Basque sauce, mashed pumpkin, cracked rice, Edam cheese and organic fruits. But I don’t know what “hake” is.

“The French diet uses butter,” he’ll try, buttering his gluten-free toast. “And they have one of the lowest rates of heart disease in the world.”

“Oh!” I say, and here I get excited. I spread an extra pat on my Ezekiel Bread.

“My favorite part about Paris was croissants,” he reminisces. His accent sounds French, a little “w” in place of the “r.” “Chocolate croissants.  I had a doctor tell me that in France I might be able to eat croissants again. Their wheat is better than American wheat.”

Perhaps my hesitation about France has been the product of fear. I’ve believed that most French food is like the aspic from Julie and Julia, that I’ll never be able to order a French dinner until I can pronounce “boeuf” through my nose, that the boeuf drips white with cream and butter and takes full days to prepare, but if I want to be beautiful and willowy, like French women the movies, I can only eat dry salads made of herbs de Provence.

But my stubborn view of France was finally (and fortunately) shaken when my Aunt Marge came to visit last month and lent me a French cookbook: Vegetable Harvest, by Patricia Wells. Erik has been kind; he hasn’t said, “I told you so” to my now-frequent exclamations  that French food is actually good. Simply, he’s been happy with the change: I cook out of the book almost every night.

It’s amazing. The recipes (at least the ones I choose to make) are simple, fast, light, the way summer would taste if its essence were bottled and set on the table next to the salt shaker. And I haven’t used any butter yet. I’ve been working my way through the eggplant recipes; I made the recipe below twice. Erik and I finished it both times before I could take a picture, though it looks lovely. I’m posting a photo of the eggplant plants from my garden instead. You get a sense of our Iowa summer humidity.

STEAMED EGGPLANT WITH BUTTERMILK-THYME DRESSING

2 to 3 small, elongated, Asian-type eggplants (about 1 pound)
4 plump, moist cloves garlic, peeled, halved, green germ removed, minced
Fine sea salt
2 tablespoons Buttermilk-Thyme Dressing (below)

1. Cut the eggplants lengthwise – from stem end to bottom – into very thin slices. Do not peel.
2. Bring 1 quart water to a simmer in the bottom of a steamer. Place the eggplant slices – slightly overlapping – on the steaming rack. Place rack over the simmering water, cover, and steam until the eggplant is soft and cooked through, about 15 minutes. With a slotted spoon, transfer the slices to a large platter. Sprinkle with the garlic, season with salt, and drizzle with the dressing. Toss gently to coat the eggplant. Serve immediately. This dish should be eaten warm!

BUTTERMILK-THYME DRESSING

¼ teaspoon fine sea salt
2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon imported French mustard
1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
½ cup buttermilk, shaken to blend

Combine all the ingredients in a small jar. Cover and shake to blend. Let sit for 1 hour to blend the flavors. Store, covered and refrigerated, for up to one week. At serving time, shake to blend once again.

Bon appétit!

My mother’s voice dropped.

“What the hell kind of food is that supposed to be,” she said. She wasn’t referring to the sandwich loaf pictured above; we were looking through old cookbooks. The main item filling the pot in the photo in the cookbook was obvious: glistening brown beans, possibly canned pork ‘n’ beans. But its ring of garnish was not: five slices of what looked like raw meatloaf, with slits cut on one side to petal them into crowns.

I searched the cookbook for a caption and found none.  Quickly my mother regained her bearings. “Oh, honey, that’s Spam! Spam! We used to eat that all the time. You know what Spam is, don’t you?”

My father shuffled through the kitchen in his workout clothes, getting ready for his nightly NordicTrak 5k. “Mmmm,” he said. “Spiced pork and ham.”

After two nights at my parents’ Wisconsin home, my casual perusal of my mom’s thick vintage cookbooks, printed at the advent of cheap processed foods, had found a purpose. I was going to a friend’s house for a dinner party, and I’d decided to bring an appetizer.

I gathered from these cookbooks’ evidence that in the years immediately following World War II, American cuisine occupied a liminal space. It lived in a borderland between farm and manufacture, Old World and the future. Here, veal knuckles and souse – pickled pig’s heads – lived just pages from modern condiment mish-mashes – peanut butter, mayonnaise, chopped Bermuda onions, whipped and on a sandwich. Here, cosmopolitan party dishes married form and function, food and garnish – eggs stuffed with sardine paste or asparagus puree.

“Why don’t you bring an aspic?” my mom asked me, looking over my shoulder. “Eggs in aspic?”

She didn’t have an aspic mold, however. Instead, I chose to make a frosted sandwich loaf! In Square Foods, a stupendous compendium of recipes lost to a not-so-distant culinary past, Jane and Michael Stern describe sandwich loaves as belonging to the “trompe l’oeil school of gastronomy: a club sandwich with delusions of grandeur, impersonating a layer cake.”

The recipe for sandwich loaf is simple enough, so I won’t get too specific. You can find a nice recipe here, though, or follow my loaf step by step on Flickr. Basically, you:

1. Cut the crusts off a loaf of day-old bread.

2. Cut the loaf of bread in four horizontal slices

3. Layer each slice (except the top) with mayonnaise-based fillings: egg salad, ham salad, chicken salad, salmon salad. If you choose to use vegetables instead (iceberg lettuce, tomato), be sure to spread the bread with mayonnaise also.

4. Chill. Frost with softened cream cheese. Garnish as desired. Suggestions: olives, parsley, radish rosettes.

In the end, my sandwich loaf made an impression at the party: two of the guests over sixty whispered in my ear, “It was actually good.” My mom and I thought the sandwich loaf might be plausibly revived  to suit twenty-first century tastes, using whole grain bread with chi-chi fillings like hummus and tapenade.

I am concluding with a recipe, however, that bears little hope for revision:

SAUERKRAUT JUICE COCKTAIL
from The United States Regional Cook Book, edited by Ruth Berolzheimer, Book Production Industries, Inc., 1947

2 cups sauerkraut juice
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon caraway seeds
1/2 cup finely-diced fresh apple

Combine ingredients in the order listed. Serv cold in cocktail glasses. Makes 6 portions.

“I hate to think I know more than God,” my mother said, “but I don’t think that drink they gave Jesus on the cross was as bad as sauerkraut cocktail.”

The South is unashamed of its saturated fats, I concluded on a recent trip to the region, where Erik and I were plied at every turn with pork and biscuits. Erik eats neither, because of his allergy to gluten and aversion to the filthiness of pigs. I ate both, including his share of biscuits.

We traveled through Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina, where for the first time I heard of “Lowcountry” cuisine, or poor people’s food at high prices. We stayed at the Motel 6 to afford meal after meal of expensive starches. In Charleston, I ate shrimp and grits with ham gravy, and more creamy grits the next day with eggs Benedict. Later, at a Nashville honky-tonk, I ate fried pickles. My sister reports that on a trip to Tennessee, she ate bacon five times in two days.

The South’s capacity to charm and appall us might be best exemplified by the two literary sites we visited: Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home in Savannah, Georgia and Mark Twain’s boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri. (Despite its proximity to Iowa, I concur with my mother that “Missouri is a very southern state.”) At its best, the South was gifted with a wild intelligence. The curator of the Flannery O’Connor house lived on its top floor, where, he told us, little Mary Flannery fought with her guardian angel. She had what she described as a condition the Freudians had failed to diagnose: “Anti-Angel Aggression.” The Sisters of Mercy at Mary Flannery’s grade school had instilled in her a fear of her constant companion: she was told, for example, to sit on only half of her desk chair, so that the angel might have room to sit at her side. Away from school, she spent hours in her house’s upper rooms, pummeling and tearing at her guardian angel’s invisible wings, still unable to remove his presence. Pictured below is the O’Connors’ butter dish:

At its worst, though, the South was an un-romantic tour trap. Erik and I wondered what Mark Twain might write about the industry sprung up around his boyhood house. The first two photos were taken at the Mark Twain Dinette. In the third, I am eating huckleberry ice cream.

(Note: at its real worst, the South was a series of Confederate memorials and tours of “working plantations.” At its other best, the South was biscuits at Nashville’s Loveless Cafe, the source of the picture at the top of this blog, and this picture with Toby Keith in Nashville:)

The real reason Erik and I traveled to the South, though, was to visit his family. Before we embarked on our literary, culinary, and musical tour, we met up with his mother at his uncle’s small-scale ranch in Tennessee. The house looked over acres of woodlands and a river, and the ranch was fitting for a “gentleman farmer:” it had as many farm dogs as cattle and nearly as many motorized vehicles (including a Mercedes SUV and an RV the size of a tour bus with leather upholstery). Fittingly, we enjoyed several days of steak and eggs and bacon for breakfast.

Just when we thought our hearts might stop, we went on to visit Erik’s father in Atlanta. His sweet Brazilian wife, Serise, restored several months to our lives with her daily salads. They consisted of two parts salad greens to one part fresh herbs, plus large chunks of fruit and four or five other vegetables. I made my own “Serise Salad” last night. The version pictured below has endive, arugula, and radishes from my garden, which shot up 18 inches in the two weeks we were gone. It also has spearmint the neighbors planted last year; hard boiled eggs; leftover salmon; nectarines; green beans; and a dressing made with an 18-year-old balsamic, a gift from Erik’s mom. Yum.

I live in a big apartment with a very small kitchen. The apartment is something like 900 square feet, and the kitchen feels something like ten. The other day I found a light bulb lying in the back of my oven and wondered how I hadn’t noticed it in the three years I’ve lived here. Erik said that I should remove it before it exploded in my face, and when I did I found out it was already broken.

Erik’s kitchen is a little bigger, and his oven is fantastic. First of all, it’s gas, and it’s very big. You could bake a turkey in his oven. In mine, you might roast a chicken if you only used the bottom rack. His oven has a timer and a clock.

“Why don’t you ever use the timer?” he asked me once while I read a novel at his kitchen table, lost in novel-time, as if I were just waiting, in real-time, for the roasting potatoes to catch fire.

“Because I’ve never had one before,” I said, which wasn’t true, exactly. I think my mom has a timer on her stove, but I’ve never really cooked on her stove, and she’s never used the timer, as far as I know.

Erik laughs at my silverware, since none of it matches. That’s what he says. A few pieces match, I tell him. I bought the silverware at Goodwill when I first moved here, and I have four matching forks, moderately heavy forks with a nice sort of geometric-floral engraving. It gives me great joy to use my favorite spoon, too, the one with floral etchings. I feel like it’s a treasure, the only spoon like it in the whole world.

Only a few of my plates match, and I love them, big heavy plates in harvest gold with pseudo-Mexican flowers. Erik’s plates are soothing, though I wonder if the colors are warm enough. They’re powder blue and pure white. He bought them at Target, with matching bowls and mugs.

Erik loves the ocean. I love dirt. He loves blue, and I love brown. I love orange and pink and have pink and orange cloths tacked to my walls. Erik’s walls are covered with shelves of hundreds of books. His bedroom walls are painted a light ocean blue, and his white down bedspread seems to float in the middle of the room like a cloud.

When we were just getting to know each other, Erik told me that the birds woke him up every morning. It was nearly spring, and a flock of them had settled outside his bedroom window, chirping with the frosty sunrise.

“I want birds to wake me up,” I said. I had, at that time, spent many lonely hours by the window at my desk, using my grandma’s Field Guide to the Birds of North America to identify the same birds over and over: song sparrow, rock dove, Northern cardinal, American crow.

I can sleep through any kind of noise, though. Only sunlight wakes me up, and the thought of breakfast. Last week I asked Erik to buy more cinnamon. “You’re running out,” I said. He didn’t know I’d used it up cooking for him; he hadn’t bought new spices since he moved into his house. He’d never bought onions or garlic before I put them in his shopping cart.

My cabinets are full of grains and beans I’ve meant to cook for months or years: amaranth, yellow lentils, bulgur, barley, split peas. But I’m hesitant to cook things I don’t know much about. Anything I cook now should be good enough for two. Half of my Tupperware is gone, and half of the Tupperware in my kitchen doesn’t belong to me.

My mother has made a stuffed pumpkin for my birthday twice, and one of those times was when Erik came with me to visit them in Wisconsin last fall. Despite my advanced age it was the first time I ever brought a boy (man?) home, and my mother provided a gluten-free spread of desserts. As a result I have to make Erik a gluten-free apple pie ever so often.

I don’t like to think of autumn during the spring: that all these little leaves on the trees, nearly chartreuse in their newness, will fall and brown, that once again I’ll be waddling through the snow in my fat down jacket whose little feathers poke through the lining and stick to my sweaters. Our autumn trip was lovely, though, and worth repeating. In two days we hiked through three state parks, found Halloween pumpkins for our porches, bought unpasteurized cider at an old farm, and witnessed the lengths to which the Spirit can inspire architecture at Holy Ghost Park.

My parents had dug up their garden by the time we visited, of course. It was past the first frost. Their garden in the summer, though, is something to behold. My dad grows beans up the garage wall, makes potatoes grow vertically somehow. My mom secretly waters her tomatoes with Miracle-Gro twice a day and warns me not to say a word to my father.

“How’d you get so many tomatoes, Patti?” he’ll say, mid-July when I visit. We’re in the kitchen, eating cereal, while my mom washes the coffee pot. “Janet, go out and look at that plant. It’s amazing.”

“I don’t know,” my mom says, and shrugs. “I guess I’m just a good gardener.” She leans over the sink and smirks.

My mom liked Erik enough to send him home with half of my German chocolate gluten-free birthday cake. “You can share with Janet if you want,” she told him, wrapping the chunk of cake in an extra layer of tinfoil. He did share, kind soul. I was sent home with a squ-umpkin: the squash-pumpkin hybrid that sprung out of the garden from a Halloween pumpkin my father buried in the backyard to compost the year before.

The squ-umpkin was a centerpiece on my kitchen table for six months, and then I cooked it last night. I wished I’d buried the squ-umpkin myself to harvest more of them this year, or maybe bred and sold this miraculously durable squash.  I combined my mother’s stuffed pumpkin recipe, which uses beef and dry mustard, with one I found on this health food blog. In the spirit of clashing cultures and Marilynne Robinson, last night I called this recipe “Middle East Meets Middle West.” Erik called it, more simply, “Fall Meets Spring.”

STUFFED PUMPKIN MOROCCO

Medium sugar pumpkin (Note from my mom: “BE SURE the pumpkin does not touch a heating element in the oven or you will start a fire.”)
1 t salt
1 ½ onions, chopped
2 sticks celery, chopped
2 T olive oil
1 ½ pounds ground lamb
1 T ground cinnamon
½ t cardamom seeds, lightly crushed with mortar and pestle
2 ½ t ground coriander
¼ t ground cloves
¼ – ½ t ground nutmeg
1 ½ c cooked brown rice
1 egg, lightly beaten
2 t salt
½ – 1 c slivered almonds, toasted
½ – 1 c dried currants, chopped dates, or raisins

Cut the lid off of the pumpkin; trim the stem if necessary. Remove seeds and prick the inside of the pumpkin with a fork. Rub inside with 1 t salt.

Sauté onion and celery in olive oil over medium heat until soft. Turn up the heat to medium high and add the lamb and spices.  Brown, and make sure it’s cooked all the way through. Strangely, the lamb only heats inside the pumpkin and doesn’t cook any further.

When the lamb is thoroughly cooked, drain excess fat and return to the pan. Add the brown rice, egg, and salt, and sauté for 3-4 minutes more until the egg is cooked.  Add almonds and currants. Fill pumpkin with the stuffing (Mom’s note: “do not overstuff or it won’t cook properly”) and replace the lid, if it fits in the oven. Otherwise cover with tinfoil. Place stuffed pumpkin in shallow pan with ½ to 1 c of water at the bottom. Bake at 350 degrees for 1 ½ – 2 hours, or until pumpkin is tender.

I’ll let my mom take over from here: “You may wish to take off lid partially thru cooking if it seems that the stuffing is getting too watery from the pumpkin. Sometimes that happens and the problem can be avoided if you take the pumpkin lid off and back the pumpkin with the opening exposed to let the steam out for at least 30 minutes before done cooking. At other times, it is best to leave the lid on (covered). The only way you will know is after about an hour or so, take the pumpkin out of the oven, remove cover, stir stuffing. If lots of water in it, cook uncovered till done. If not real watery, put lid back on so stuffing doesn’t dry out.  Add more water to pan if necessary.  Makes 6 servings.”

The last line of acknowledgement prefacing my completed (!!!) thesis gives thanks “to Erik, who loved me enough to go to Nicaragua.” He loved me enough to go to a country he didn’t end up liking very much this January, and we love each other more because of it. My thesis is a memoir about Nicaragua.

In two weeks, by bus, boat, plane, and taxi, we saw more of Nicaragua than its poor infrastructure would normally permit. We ate bad French fries in colonial Granada; in Matagalpa we watched the sky turn peach at sunset over coffee-growing mountains from a taxi that was speeding to escape armed bandits. We visited the beaches of San Juan del Sur in a windstorm and swam underwater to escape the stinging sand. Erik danced three reggae songs with me in Bluefields, the Caribbean city where I used to live.  He got up in a dark dance hall and danced them, one, two, three, just so I could remember the number that he danced: three.

But we started our trip on the Islands of Solentiname, where, in the 1970s, the revolutionary poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal taught the islands’ campesino residents primitive art and led Marxist discussions of the Gospels.We were looking for some residual revolutionary or religious spirit. One of Cardenal’s sculptures – it looked like a red and black paper airplane, tipped toward the sky – served as a monument to the campesino soldiers killed by the dictator’s guardia. The sculpture stood in the main island’s park, a small, littered patch of land with a swing set and uncut grass.

Erik and I visited a few of the campesino artists at work. Their art hadn’t changed much since Cardenal left: landscape paintings peopled with egrets and tiny, inexpressive farmers; birds, turtles and fish carved from balsa wood and painted bright.  The paintings were pretty but most artists seemed strangely to care little about them. They rarely hung paintings in their own homes. Instead they decorated with posters of Tweety Bird and waterfalls printed with Psalm 23. We were disappointed. We’re both writers, and I thought, anyway, that aesthetics should somehow permeate their whole lives. But they’re making identical products to sell, we told ourselves. They have to make a living, I said, and Erik said he didn’t like being seen as only a potential customer.

The main island, where we stayed, had two small hotels but no restaurants, so we ate in the home of a woman named Lydia. She wore a pastry chef’s hat every time she cooked for us – it was adorable – and molded our rice and beans in teacups. I think Erik learned to love rice and beans on her patio, where we ate dinner by candlelight, since the islands had no electricity. The Nicaraguan recipe – gallo pinto, or spotted rooster – is simple and I can never quite replicate it: fried onion, small red beans, white rice. It’s best served with fresh, runny sour cream and salty cuajada, day-old farmer’s cheese.

I made my own version of gallo pinto to celebrate passing my thesis defense this week. Erik and I accompanied the meal with sautéed kale and mustard greens and a bottle of Spanish champagne he gave me for Christmas, which wasn’t very Nicaraguan, but was very good. Colonizer meets colonized, we called it.

FANCY GALLO PINTO

2-3 T vegetable oil
½ chopped small onion
2 cloves minced garlic
1 fresh red chile, chopped, or 1-2 dried small chiles, crumbled
1 can black beans
2-3 T cilantro, chopped
1 ½ c cooked rice
Salt to taste
½ lime

Sauté onion in vegetable oil until soft. Add onion and pepper, stir for one minute, pour in undrained can of black beans. Let simmer until most of the liquid evaporates. About halfway through the simmering process, add cilantro. When most of the liquid has evaporated, add the rice and stir everything around for a couple of minutes. Salt as needed and squeeze lime juice over the top. Serve with avocado and queso fresco.

Allora!!! The tree outside my window is graced with little buds and the daffodils have already wilted, but it’s still winter for Iowa produce. Mushy apples, dry oranges, green strawberries – that’s what Iowa is made of until June.

This weekend I might plant some basil, but as it sadly takes weeks to grow, I’ve found a relatively cheap way to sort of satisfy my pesto craving. Let’s call it:

PARSLEY PESTO INVERNO

2 bunches parsley
4 oz parmesan cheese
3 cloves garlic
½ c walnuts
1 chile de arbol or red pepper flakes
1 c olive oil
salt to taste

Chop parsley. Break parmesan cheese into chunks. Blend everything. Adjust everything to taste.

If you have a food processor, you might be able to use less olive oil. If you have a blender like mine (the cheapest one at K-mart), you might need to pour in the oil first and then add the solid ingredients, a little at a time.

(Forecast in my scratched blender: cloudy with a chance of clouds.)

(Looks like Australia!)

Since it’s been unusually warm, I tossed the pesto with the following ingredients to make a cold chicken pasta salad – pasta primavera! – making sure to get an array of colors in my vegetables:

1 whole cooked chicken, torn into chunks
8 oz penne pasta, cooked and drained
1 pint cherry tomatoes, halved
1 yellow pepper, chopped
1 bunch spinach, chopped
4 oz parmesan cheese, grated
salt and pepper to taste

Yesterday I bought a chicken, the cooked, rotisserie kind, since I don’t have time to contend with a whole raw bird while I finish my thesis. I bought parsley, lettuce, spinach, asparagus, a yellow pepper, cherry tomatoes, carrots, Brussels sprouts, bananas, and two bags of frozen blueberries.  This perishable feast seems too optimistic. I hope I can stomach this sudden burst of fiber; I hope that Erik and I can eat all the greens before they wilt. I’ll start cooking in earnest next Tuesday when my thesis is turned in.

My April food budget is now one-third depleted, as happens near the first of each month when my vitamin cravings override considerations of income. By the end of each month, though, the costly rainbow of produce fades to white: rice, pasta, potatoes, grey multivitamins. Here’s a recipe for the cheap times, which I heard on NPR’s The Splendid Table. You can call it White Beans and Pasta (use rice pasta for a complete protein), or you can call it:

WHITE ON WHITE ON WHITE (ON WHITE ON WHITE)

White or beige ingredients:
White beans, cooked or canned
Pasta, spiral or bowtie
Onion
Garlic
Salt

Colors:
Oregano
Basil
Thyme
Crushed red pepper
Extra virgin olive oil

Quantities depend on the amount you want to eat, of course.

1. Boil pasta with a HANDFUL of salt. The salt is the key to this recipe. Be generous! Pour it in your hand! A minute or two before the pasta would be ready, drain it, reserving 1 – 3 cups of the salted liquid.

2. While the pasta is boiling, grate an onion. I use a whole small-medium onion for a 13-inch skillet’s worth of whites on whites. Mince 2 cloves of garlic. I crumbled a chile de arbol in place of red pepper flakes.

3. Heat a tablespoon or two of olive oil, no more. Sautee the grated onion, garlic, and red pepper for a minute or two, stirring.

4. Add pasta. Add 1 – 2 cups beans. Add reserved water from the pasta. Add a generous amount of oregano and other herbs.

5. The salt in the reserved water adds flavor and the starch from the boiled pasta thickens the sauce. THE WATER IS THE SECRET. Let the pasta finish cooking in the skillet.

6. Eat!! Pictured frugally above with water, an apple, and a used book.