Someone give that girl a sammich

No, I dont' think it's quite over. The Mayhem that is. This is one hell of a long month.

Taneasha is still on the road, still plagued by the strangest weather. Srsly, the woman is like some kind of tornado magnet. Me, I've decided that working full time over the summer isn't enough. I have to do school too. Evening calculus, here I come. Well, I do school full time and work part time the rest of the year, I should be able to pull this off, right? Right??

Feeding myself in the 45 minutes I'll be home between work and school three nights a week for the next 8 weeks is gonna be fun. I'm going to do a bunch of cooking ahead, have actually started with that and no, Taneasha, I didn't remember to take pictures /hangs head in shame/. I do however have pictures of a meal that commonly goes unappreciated.

The sammich.

Humble, yet satisfying, and creators of very few dirty dishes, these things have for some reason become some kind of good-enough meal, something we sigh and resign ourselves to. But really, what beats a couple slices of bakery fresh bread made with locally grown organic whole grains with a crusty exterior and tender inside carefully cuddling an infinitely variable collection of delectible meats, savoury cheeses, perfect veggies and just the right amount of condiment. Ha. Who says purple prose is dead?

Fresh bread is an absolute requirement for me and sammiches. I'll give it two days and then the rest of the loaf is relegated to toast (now there's a meal to sigh about). Besides, when you're craving egg salad, you really need fresh soft bread. It's squishy and gooey and way too likely to ooze all over your palms if it's not on the right kind of bread.

And I was craving egg salad. And I am completely unable to control cravings. And because of that I sometimes don't take anywhere near enough pics. But, I mean, it's a freaking sammich, I think you can figure it out without the visual aids.

Egg Salad Sammich

What you need:

• 2 slices of the freshest bread ever
• 1 egg, boiled for about 10 minutes
• 1-2 tbsp mayo
• salt & pepper & butter
• Optional, at your discretion, to your taste, and depending what you happen to have in the fridge at the time:

• minced chives or green onion
• red onion
• pickled onions
• pickled asparagus
• hot pickled beans
• picked pickles
• olives, black or green
• dill, thyme, basil, tarragon, marjoram
• chili powder, cumin, caraway, paprika
• bacon
• horseradish
• ham
• capers
• sundried tomatoes
• jalapenos, pepperoncinis, banana peppers
• what else is in your fridge?

What you gotta do:

Peel and mash the boiled egg. Mash it first. Don't add the mayo yet, you don't know how much you need!

Add the other stuff to the bowl. I had some cipollini onions in balsamic vinegar (if you've never had them, find them, they're fabulous),

bacon of course, and some dill that I'd dried and jarred last summer.

Once you've got all your goodies in the bowl with the egg, start adding the mayo. And by mayo I mean real mayonaisse, not some kind of weird whipped salad dressing. And by start, I don't mean plop it all in there. Too much mayo will totally kill an otherwise awesome egg salad. And once it's in there, there's no getting it out. Start with a teaspoon or two and mix it in completely before you add the next one. For once I'm going to say that wetter is not better. You don't want the creamy goodness on your hands as you're trying to eat.

Shred yourself some lettuce. Shred. Don't try to lay a whole leaf of iceburg on top of egg salad and expect it to work. For one, iceburg is useless and flavourless. At least use romaine. And shred it as finely as you can. Stack them, roll them, and slice them into tiny hairs of lettuce. Egg salad is actually one of the more delicate things you can put between sliced bread; you don't want to go overpowering it with huge crunchy chunks of leaf.

The matter of butter on bread is one of great debate. Some need it, some hate it, some want it on one side only, some only need it if there's no mayo... holy crap. Do what you want. Me, I need butter on sammiches and on toast. Regardless of what else is on there, I need the butter. You, you do whatever your little heart desires. This is your sammich.

Start assembling your masterpiece. Butter, mayo, whatever you want on the bread. Next, the egg salad. I don't spread mine all the way to the edge because I know it's going to squish a bit. Now, the delicately sliced (and apparently very shiny) leaves.

Cut the sammich any way you want. Or don't. This is a very personal thing and everyone seems to like them done differently. Who am I to tell you how best to arrange your meal.

The only thing I will insist on is a pickle. Every great sammich needs a pickle. Yes, you could have a few potato chips, maybe some carrot sticks, but even with those on the side, you need a pickle.

Okay, I'll admit it, that is definitely not the best looking sammich I've ever made. That was a muffaletta, which I promise to make for you some day. This though, this is dinner. No, not lunch. Sammiches are dinner too.

What kind of sammich do you eat for dinner?

Mayhem, the Musical!

Beans are not a fruit.

It is officially the end of Mayhem. Taneasha is almost home, and I’ve almost remembered to get stuff for dinners each day this week. Srsly, I eat way too much cereal.

I’ve got one more recipe from my time in the south, and it’s a true southern dish that starts with "the trinity". Now, of course with anything this quintessentially part of a cuisine, there will the various and assorted variations on ingredients, methods, and opinions on how to make it properly.

I think with a dish like this, there will also always be variations based on the ingredients at hand. I mean, this is not some kind of haute cuisine concoction that requires specifically harvested delicacies that only grow in one part of the world. This is budget food at its finest. Most recipes I’ve seen also call for a small amount of precooked meat added at the end. That there is called using up the leftovers folks. Basically it’s a vegetable protein and carb that were advertised as healthy in afterschool public service announcements.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heKYNWFBkW8

(nope, I don't know how to make html tags to insert a video, deal with it)

The Schoolhouse Rock Gang were right! It’s damn tasty.

And cheap. And freezable. And infinitely variable.

(As usual, since I cook for one 90% of the year, the recipe I have written down is for as small a batch as possible. I‘ve found that  it’s much easier to double a recipe than to cut one in half. What you see us make is a quadruple batch!)

Red Beans and Rice

What you need

• ½ lb small red kidney beans, washed
• 6 oz pork sausage, diced (or, leftover ham, as you'll see)
• 4 C water or stock
• 1 med onion, chopped fine
• 1 stalk celery, chopped fine
• 1 bell pepper, chopped fine
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 bay leaf
• ½ tsp cayenne pepper
• ½ tsp thyme, dried, or a bunch of fresh from the garden (what? me measure?)
• ¼ tsp salt
• black pepper, pinch
• curly parsley, fresh

What you gotta do

Do not soak beans.  That’s right, I said “do not.” I realize that some people are having hairy conniption fits right now but I’ve never understood this whole bean soaking thing. I mean, you’re going to cook them anyway. Besides, soaking beans requires way too much forethought. They take hours to cook as it is, which is more planning than I put into most meals (see reference to cereal, above). To soak them would require that I know a whole day ahead of time that I’m going to want beans for dinner.

Really the rest of the procedure can be summed up in the following sentence:  Put everything but the parsley in the pot and cook it all until the beans are done.

But I have a bunch of pictures and I figure you should have something to read in between them.

So, you start by chopping stuff. And checking through the beans to make sure everything in the package really was beans.

You put the beans in the pot and add the liquid.

We used 8 cups of chicken broth and 8 cups of water (quadruple batch remember) and... the Easter ham bone. Water alone will make a tasty batch of beans, but if you can get your hands on a ham bone… holy crap, these were some freaking awesome beans.

Put the bone in the pot and chop more stuff.

A nice glass of iced tea (or just tea as they apparently call it in the South where no one drinks "tea," or hot tea as they call tea) is handy to have during all the strenuous chopping.

Add the herbs and keep chopping. There really are benefits to cooking for only one person.

Add the spices and stir it all up.

You see that lovely deep burgundy bean colour? You’d totally lose that if you soaked them first.  Now, instead of throwing away that colour, it’s going to end up in your food and give the resulting broth a rich beany colour.

So really, all you have to do now is put it on the stove and walk away.

If you check after 45 minutes or so you’ll see that the beans are already starting to give up their colour.

After an hour and a half, maybe 2 hours, they’ve definitely changed colour.

After a few hours any meat left on that bone will be either in the pot already or perfectly willing to come off it.

And there was so much meat left on the ham bone that we decided to save the sausage for the next day and just use the ham. Look at us stretch the family food budget. ;)

So while I was picking the meat off the bones

which, for some reason, I find strangely soothing and will offer to do after every holiday dinner, Recipe Guy was mashing a few cups of beans and putting them back in the pot. Mashed beans are a fabulous way to thicken any gravy.

We added the ham back in,

chucked the bone, and added a little more salt. It’s really best to start this dish with as little salt as possible and correct at the end.

A scoop of rice, a scoop of beans, a handful of parsley and a dash of hot sauce. Or, if you’re me, 8 dashes of hot sauce.

And if you find a crawdad (aka land shrimp) hanging around on the property, make sure you cook them before you try to eat them.

They fight back.

Man, the amount of wild (aka free) food down there is just awesome for the family food budget. What’s your favourite budget meal?