The Oncoming Hope

A couple days ago, the Village Voice published a tale of the "crater-faced old woman," known to you and me as ma po tofu. Well, contrary to what your local greasy Chinese takeaway may offer, real ma po tofu isn't actually an oily mess, but actually a delicate dish that uses sichuan peppercorns to maximum effect.

These little bombshells keep popping up in reviews of New York Chinese food, which is experiencing a little bit of a revolution, as Szechuan cuisine is becoming more readily available. So I made it my Sunday mission to find an authentic Szechuan restaurant as I wandered through Midtown, and at last stumbled upon a place aptly named Mapo Tofu.

Sichuan peppercorns were banned by the FDA until 2005, so don't be surprised if it hasn't shown up in a cuisine near you yet. But try it if you can. It's unlike anything I've ever tasted - neither spicy nor hot, the flavor's more herbal than anything else.

But the flavor's not the point - it's all about the effect. It not only numbs the mouth, it makes everything you eat taste different, more flavorful, more balanced. As food scientist Harold Mcgee wrote in his book "On Food and Cooking", it's like putting a nine-volt battery to the tongue and will "induce sensitivity to touch and cold in nerves that are ordinarily nonsensitive, and so perhaps cause a kind of general neurological confusion."

The classic example is water. If you drink a glass of warm water after eating a peppercorn, your mouth will feel freezing cold, and the water will taste metallic, like drinking a cloud of acid rain. I'm not going to pretend it was a pleasant sensation, but it's definitely one of a kind.

The main dish, on the other hand? Tasted absolutely amazing. And since Mapo Tofu served monstrous-sized portions, I'll be digging in again in just a few minutes :).

Here's something that's long existed in my list of "totally pointless and totally inevitable." But this doesn't just reheat a frozen pizza, it makes it right in front of you! College students worldwide will wonder how they ever survived without this magical machine.

If you think the obesity rates in your town are shrinking too fast, boy has this guy got the product for you.

Now that's what I call Mystic Pizza.

Until Jamie Oliver's show last year, I confess that I'd never given much thought to the healthiness of school lunches. Growing up as a vegetarian in Texas, it was always an issue of "stuff I eat" vs. "stuff other people eat." School lunches were never really an option, unless I was desperate enough to pick the pepperoni off of the pizza. But I still found my way to all sorts of junk food.

And that is probably the most valuable contribution Amy Kalafa makes with Lunch Wars: cafeteria lunches are only part of the picture. The really bad foods are often doled out in the classroom as "rewards," in vending machines, from ice cream salesman. I didn't get fat from my mom's healthy lunches. I got fat from Flamin' Hot Cheetos and Everlasting Gobstoppers (sadly, I seem to have as little resistance to these forms of crack today as I did when I was 15. But I digress).

However, while Kalafa's heart is clearly in the right place, I found the book a little too evangelical in nature. She wants you to feel bad about the choices your children make in school, and seems to suggest that protecting schoolchildren means becoming a nutritional Big Brother, keeping eyes on them at all time in case of trans-fats.

That said, this is an extremely serious issue, and I'm glad to learn a little more about it before (God forbid) I bring my own spawn into this universe.

Be sure and check out the great discussions at BlogHer about the issues raised in this book.

This review was paid for by BlogHer Book Club but the opinions expressed are entirely my own.

The other day, I found myself volunteering to make dinner for a couple of people with about an hour to decide what to make, make it, and clean the flat. No small task. But I had a giant eggplant in the fridge, and a zucchini. A plan was born.

I've experimented with ratatouille before, but this is the closest I've gotten to perfection, which means that the focus is on the flavor of the vegetables, baked into submission.

You won't believe how easy it was.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup tomato sauce
• 1 eggplant
• 1 zucchini
• 1 potato (normally it's red pepper, but I think potato gives a nice texture)
• 1 onion
• 4 cloves garlic
• Salt
• Pepper
• Whatever Seasonings You Want (CHILLI FLAKES, CHILLI FLAKES)

Instructions:

First things first. Prick the potato all over, then cook it in the microwave for 4 minutes. While it's cooking, we'll prep the other ingredients.

First, pour a cup of tomato sauce into your baking dish. (Here's an easy tomato sauce recipe if you don't have your own version).

Then, thinly slice onion and garlic and layer it in the sauce. Don't worry how thin you slice the garlic, I know that can be challenging. Of course, there's a no-fault technique from Goodfellas you might find useful:

Of course, if you choose a cutthroat razor, you must also curse like a sailor for the rest of your cooking experience. And possibly murder someone...but I digress.

By this time, your potato will be cooked, so take it out. Then, score your eggplant and microwave it for 4 minutes. (You can skip the microwaving in theory, but I think it improves the final texture.)

While you're waiting, thinly slice your zucchini and potato. I'd leave the skins on to get the full effect of color. (also known as wash your vegetables, kids).

Now here's the fun part. Once you've sliced your eggplant, you get to start layering, like so:

Keep going round and round, then come into the center. You'll find, as I did, that the veg will stand up once the pan becomes more full. When you're done, it'll look like this:

Pretty, no? The tomato sauce displaced itself to the top. As you can see, I sprinkled chilli flakes all over, but you can season it how you like. Salt and black pepper is standard, then go nuts. Don't forget to drizzle a little olive oil.

That's it! Stick it in your oven. It'll be done after 30 minutes, but if you can wait for a full 45, the veggies will reach the height of their flavor power. I threw breadcrumbs on top halfway through the baking, but that's optional (and totally non-standard).

Et voila! With minimal effort, you too will get top ratings from Mr. Ego.

Remember Recession Busting Tip #2? Repeat after me: eat in season. Eat in season. It's good for the environment, it's good for farmers, and it's great for your taste-buds.

So today we feature the ever-humble tomato in one of my favorite summer dishes. It's light, it's tasty, and it fills your belly.

If you wanna use a store-bought pie crust, the prep for this dish will take about five minutes. But where's the fun in that?

Pie Crust

We're gonna keep it simple here. You need flour, cold butter (or butter substitute) and ice-cold water. The colder everything is, the better. If it helps, you can take off your shirt and pretend to be this guy:

Now get your flour into a large mixing bowl. You can use 3 1/2 cups of plain flour, but we have to pretend to be healthy these days, so I used 1.25 cups of wheat flour and 2.25 cups of plain flour.

Then, in a gesture swiftly undoing any attempt at healthiness, chop up 250 grams of butter (or butter substitute) and add it to the mix.

Massage it in until it becomes like this:

Then add half a cup of ice-cold water and mould into a ball of dough.

Now here's a neat trick you probably didn't expect. Cut the dough in half, and freeze one half of it. Why? It's extra. Save it for another pie. Through it at your husband or hated adversary if you like. But we don't need it now.

Refrigerate remaining dough for 30 minutes.

Use 30 minutes to:

• Make homemade mustard, it's easy.
• Read a chapter of The Great Gatsby and marvel at Fitzgerald's beautiful prose.
• Get your dumbbells out and do a quick workout so you can look more like Val Kilmer, Ice-Man.

THE PIE ITSELF

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit (220 C)

Right here's the fun part. Roll out the dough.

You can either lay it into a pie tin or you can keep things loose (we're going with the latter here. Apparently this is often referred to as a galette, when you free-style the crust). Take the rolled out crust and lie it on a baking tin.

Blind bake for 5 minutes or so. Remove.

Take 2 tablespoons of dijon mustard and spread it over the crust, leaving a 2-inch border.

As you can see, I don't have enough mustard (oops!) so I whipped up a quick bechamel sauce, but normally mustard would be more than enough.

Take 2 large tomatoes and slice them thickly. Layer the slices over the mustard in a single layer, like so

Drizzle olive oil over the tomatoes, then sprinkle with feta cheese (or whatever you cheese you fancy, but if you use cheddar, don't use too much or it takes over the flavor).

French onion soup is one of my very, very favorite things and always has been. But most recipes have beef stock, and the alternatives are vegan, and vegan recipes always want to add textured soy proteins to dishes, even when totally inappropriate. So after some experimentation, I'm bringing you the perfect vegetarian French Onion Soup, complex and delish.

So let's get started. We need to caramelize the onions first, and I'm gonna share with you a much quicker way, which takes about 15 minutes instead of the usual 45.

First, heat up a saucepan with a table-spoon of sugar in it. Keep an eye for when the sugar starts to caramelize, cause then you have to...

Well folks, there's no way around it, but French Onion Soup involves a ton of, you guessed it, onions. You're gonna have to thinly slice three large onions, so get ready to cry like you haven't cried since the ending of Sophie's Choice. I recommend taking the opportunity to perfect your James Van Der Beek impression:

"Mommy, why can't I make my forehead shrink?"

As soon as they're chopped, toss them in the pan and stir them until they're coated evenly by the melted sugar, then add 2 glugs of oil.

Now here's the secret trick to make it go faster: add 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda and stir. Turn the heat up to medium-high.

Now just let it cook for 15 minutes, while stirring occasionally. Recommended activity for your 15 minutes of idleness:

• 1st 10 Minutes: Read a long-form journalism piece. My favorite this week is this piece that tells of murder and mayhem in 19th century Austin, Texas.
• Alternate: Get down on your knees and pray for your eyes to stop watering and your nose to stop running.
• Last 5 minutes: Mince 2 cloves of garlic.

Keep an eye on the onions though, you should add a few drops of water every time it starts to stick (the water also helps distribute the flavor!)

You'll know it's done when everything's a deep purple-brown color and the pan stops steaming. And there you have caramelized onions, so take a moment to congratulate yourself!

And On to the Soup!

You already minced that garlic, right? Chuck it in the pan with the onions and sauté for a minute or so.

Meanwhile, get your other ingredients ready: 1 bay leaf, thyme (or italian seasoning), 4 cups of stock, and 1/2 cup of vermouth. Now guys? Seriously? If you don't have stock in the freezer, DO NOT use OXO cubes, or any other stock cube. Just use water. I mean it. The cubes totally ruin any and all flavor, and make me go a bit like this:

What would you call that: mild disapproval?

Anyway, toss it all in with salt/pepper to taste, cover, and let simmer for about half an hour.

Recommended activity for 30 minutes:

• Visit www.jamesvandermemes.com. You won't even notice the time going by as you get lost in his many ridiculous faces.

FINAL THING TO DO

Turn on your broiler. Ladle the soup into ramekins, or bowls, or however you wanna do it (as long as it's oven safe, it doesn't matter too much, but I like the pretty ramekins, as in the intro photo). I tore bread slices in half, and twisted the bread into the top of the bowl. Try to keep the bottom wet (that's what she said) and the top dry.

Grate some cheese of your choosing on the top (yeah, yeah, I know gruyere is traditional, but it can be expensive. Parmesan is fine, and if you so desire it, so's cheddar). I have to be honest though, I think it tastes plenty good without any cheese at all (ducks and hides from French cooking purists).

Stick it in the broiler for a few minutes. Take it out when the cheese is bubbling or the bread starts to darken.

Et voila! Lovely warm, bubbly, crusty French Onion Soup!

Recession-Busting Tip #2: Eat Seasonally

This is the double-whammy of tips: seasonal vegetables are considerably cheaper AND they taste better. It's not like you need to memorize a chart, either. If you go to any market, the cheaper stuff is what's in season. You know, the stuff you can get in quantities so large you feel like you'll never finish them (but don't worry, if you choose right, they'll be so tasty you'll never let them go to waste).

I've never come home with a fridge full of randomly ridiculous things like broccoli sprouts, no sirree...

But I digress. When vegetables are in season, they are at the height of their flavor power. So as we're in the midst of what English people refer to as summer (and I have yet to see supporting evidence for their statement), we've got an overload of zucchini (courgettes) and tomatoes.

Grilled Zucchini Pizza

Basically you take a couple of zucchinis, slice them into thick coins like and brush both sides with a little olive oil, like so:

Stick it in your broiler for 8-10 minutes just like that, however long it takes for the top to brown a little.

Now here's the fun part. Throw a tablespoon of your favorite tomato sauce on each slice. Canned stuff is fine if you want, but I recommend the perfect tomato sauce. Then add whatever you want, with a little cheese on top. I had a jar of roasted peppers handy, so I used those, but just use whatever you want. Seriously. Have fun. Have a party and let people put their own toppings (FYI, I used one large zucchini to get the quantity shown above, which easily fed two people).

And end with this:

Yum. Low-carb pizza.

While the internet is a great resource for all things fancy, sometimes it fails to provide easy, simple recipes for basic needs like tomato sauce. There are plenty of recipes for varieties of tomato sauce that take about 2 hours to make and like a billion steps, but not a simple, versatile one that's good for pasta, pizza, baked eggs, or anything else that may require tomato sauce.

So, just for you, I've got a 2 minute version that never fails.

Ingredient List:

• 2 cloves of garlic
• Can of chopped tomatoes (peeled/diced is fine if that's what you have)
• Olive oil, preferably, but any oil will do
• 2 tbsp. tomato paste
• 1 tsp. of salt
• 1 tsp. of italian seasoning
• Black pepper to taste
• Red chili flakes (trust me, even if you don't like spicy food, use a pinch, it gives the sauce a nice round flavor when it thickens)

Instruction Manual:

Throw garlic and chopped tomatoes into the blender. Press blend.

Heat a little olive oil in a pan. Pour stuff in from the blender. Add two tablespoons of tomato paste. Throw in spices, the more dramatically the better (it helps to pretend you're a wizard making a witch's brew. Random shouts of "Eureka!" and "Abracadabra!" definitely improve the flavor.

Give it a good stir, and add half a cup of water. Turn the heat to low and let it simmer for about 20-30 minutes, or until it becomes nice and thick (that's what she said).

Use that 20-30 minutes to

1. Do the washing up (my husband would prefer that I chose this option).
2. Watch an episode of Parks and Recreation.
3. Write a blog post.
4. Dance around the kitchen.
5. Do something unmentionable with a consenting partner, or alone. If you choose this option, please remember to wash your hands afterwards.

And voila! This makes about 4 cups of sauce.

Now that's the stuff that moments like these are made of (I wanted to show the prison scene from Goodfellas, but youtube won't let me):

Recession Busting Tip #1: Keep the Ingredients to A Minimum.

When I first started cooking, it was really easy to be suckered into thinking the more ingredients a recipe involved, the better the result.

But lately, I've been obsessed with main dishes that focus on one ingredient. Not only do you get to take full advantage of the full flavor of the star vegetable, you don't end up with ingredients rotting in the fridge because you need a handful of this, a teaspoon of that.

Now that I have a basic, inexpensive spice collection, it's never been easier to whip up simple and tasty dishes.

Today's feature is the ever-delightful sweet potato. Now this vegetable is tasty no matter what you do to it: grill it, roast it, stir fry it, fry it, caramelize it, dance on it, and so on and so forth (maybe not the last one, but hey).

The main thing you need to be mindful of when cooking with the sweet potato is balancing out the sweetness. (I may be Texan, but that Thanksgiving concoction with sugar and marshmallow and pureed sweet potato is a crime against humanity. BLECH!)

(this, altogether, SERVES 2)

GRILLED SWEET POTATO WITH CARROT-ONION SALAD

Sweet potato ingredients:

• 150 gm. sweet potato, basically one large sweet potato, peeled and sliced into approximately 1/4 inch slices
• 2 tbsp. yogurt
• 1 tbsp. cumin powder
• 1 tsp. coriander powder
• 1 tsp. red chilli powder (more if you like it spicy)
• 2 garlic cloves, minced finely
• 1/2 inch piece of ginger, minced finely
• 1 spoon of olive oil
• salt to taste (1/2 tsp is usually about right)

Instructions:

• Mix all ingredients apart from sweet potato in a bowl. If you don't have yogurt, use sour cream.
• Add in sweet potato and let marinade soak in for about an hour.
• Now here's where things become optional. You can shallow fry the marinated pieces for a more intense flavor, but the healthier option is to grill/broil them. Either way, flip after about 5 minutes and cook both sides until dark brown.

Salad Ingredients:

• 3 carrots, grated
• 1 onion, thinly sliced
• Juice of 1/2 lime or lemon
• 1 minced green chili
• 1 tsp. salt.
• IF IT'S ON HAND: a bit of chopped cilantro
• OPTIONAL: handful of peanuts

Instructions:

• Mix it all together. For those of you who are afraid of raw onions, the lime/lemon juice softens the bite and takes away the edge.

That's all! Serve the grilled sweet potatoes with salad on the side and enjoy!

It wasn't until I moved to London that I ever had Jose Cuervo. You don't wanna sip Jose Cuervo. You want to shoot it and then kill it. But courtesy of a Texas university education, I was exposed to many better (and usually cheaper!) tequilas, so I was lucky not to be put off tequila for life.

However, I never really learned anything about tequila until I attended a talk by Wahaca's Thomasina Myers at the British Museum. She gave a short introduction to the differences between mixto (tequilas like Jose Cuervo which are 51% blue agave and 49% blech) and tequilas that are 100% blue agave. From then, I became curious about these better tequilas, and Wahaca was the only place you could get high quality tequila at a reasonable price.

It's probably thanks to that commitment to quality that the Mexican government sent over about 30 exclusive tequilas to Wahaca, which are being rotated through different tastings to determine which to stock as guest tequilas. Wednesday night's tasting was comprised of ten tequilas, all 100% blue agave. Our tasting was guided by the expert palate of Henry Besant, tequila guide extraordinaire.

We began with the blancos. The first, Don Vallente, was unmemorable. The second, Don Cosme, was impossibly sweet. Henry informed us that this is based on the original recipe for tequila, and is probably closest to what Mexicans drank in the old days. (I for one, was disappointed that badasses like Zorro apparently drank the tequila equivalent of a pink martini.) But the third was my favorite, the Gran Orendain. It was smooth all the way through, and lacked the rubbery finish the others had.

Orendain won the reposado category as well, with Orendaino Itas. But I got the impression that no one was particularly impressed with the reposados on offer, one of which had a chemical taste, and the other tasted watered down.

We had to race through the anejo category, which was unfortunate as we didn't have enough time to fully appreciate their flavors. These are the cadillacs, the tequilas that have a roundness and depth of flavor to rival the best of single malt Scotch.

Finally, Mark from Wahaca was kind enough to bring around a bottle of Don Julio's El Tosoro (their current stock) to compare to the new offerings. Fortunately or unfortunately, it easily bested the upstart competition. We also got to sample Mezcal in authentic terracotta shot glasses (the Mezcal was my personal favorite of everything we tasted).

All in all, it was a good time, and it was great to meet some of the minds that make Wahaca such a great place. My liver has yet to forgive me my indulgence, but hey, at least we had fun. And I look forward to reliving the experience over a nice pipian mole sometime in the near future.