A little foreplay goes a long way

Last week, I started my summer evening math class.

Calculus. Advanced calculus. On lovely summer evenings. As a matter of fact, yes, I am a masochist who enjoys having no life. Strangely enough though, having no life requires a lot of planning and forethought. I’ve got a tight bit of time between work and school to cook, eat, and do a bit of homework. Cause it’s not like I’m going to be doing homework at 10:30 at night after class. Yes, 10:30 at night. I love my life.

Believe it or not, I was actually smart enough to do a bit of cooking ahead on the weekend.

I made and froze a spaghetti sauce (with a few variations) that Recipe Guy likes. Some day I’ll make it again and show you the variations, not the least of which minimizes the number of dishes required (holy crap it’s tasty, but holy crap the dishes!).

The day I ate it, Wednesday, I boiled water, cooked pasta, and dumped the thawed-in-the-fridge-all-day sauce into the pot. I added a little extra cream to encourage the delicious sauciness of this dish. (wine would work too, but I’d somehow managed to run out)

I also prepared a vegan lentil and eggplant stew that requires variations of its own before I post it. On the day I ate it, Thursday, I let it thaw in the fridge, heated it in a bowl, and served it with a warmed pita bread and a couple olives.

And was running late and didn't take a pic. Dammit.

So, that was two dinners down. Friday, I don’t have class so I’m not going to worry about it, but I still had two days of cooking and eating dinner in about an hour.

One way to minimize cook time is with a crock pot. You can do all the preparation the night before, stash it in the fridge, and put it on to cook in the morning before you leave for work. The trick to this is remembering to actually turn the crock pot on.

Red beans are an awesome crock pot recipe. Yes, I made them on the stove in that version, but I’ve done them in the crock pot more than a couple times. Works just fine. And, if you make the rice on the weekend, dinner is waiting for you when you get home. Just add parsley. Yes, I like parsley.

Precooking rice also works if you’re planning a stir fry.

Stir fries are superfast cooking meals. But they are a little heavy on preparation time with all those fresh veggies to chop. But, since I was chopping the veggies for Monday’s Red Beans on Sunday, I also chopped the veggies for Tuesday’s stir fry.

Stir Fry In Advance

What you need:

In advance:

• Half an onion
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 small head of bok choy
• 8 mushrooms
• A handful of beansprouts
• 1-2 tsp cornstarch
• ½ c water
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tbsp fresh chopped ginger
• ½ tsp sriracha (aka cock sauce) (optional)
• ½ tsp sugar

Um, that pic includes the red bean stuff... you'll just have to ignore those parts.

On the day you eat it:

• Peanut and sesame oils
• 1 small lean steak, like inside round or flank
• Rice that you cooked a couple days ago

What you gotta do:

In Advance:

Rinse, and chop all the veggies to the size you prefer. I like things a little smaller than bite sized. That way, I can eat a few pieces at a time, and they cook a little faster.

The beansprouts can just stay in their bag until the day you cook.

Store the chopped veggies in an air tight container or large ziplock bag.

Combine the cornstarch, water, soy, sugar and ginger in a small container or bag, and store it next to the veggies.

On the day you eat it:

Don’t forget to take the steak out of the freezer in the morning or the night before. Let it thaw in the fridge and don’t worry if it’s still a little frozen when you start cooking, it’s easier to slice steak thinly when it’s a little frozen.

When you get home from work, put a large pan or wok on the stove with a bit of peanut oil and sesame oil in it. While the oils heat over medium high, slice the steak thinly against the grain.

Takes about 2-3 minutes to slice the steak and heat the pan.

Drop the steak in the hot hot pan, the cutting board in the sink, and grab the veggies and sauce from the fridge.

The steak should only take a few minutes if the pan is big enough and hot enough, and if the steak is sliced thin enough.

So, we're at about 6 or 7 minutes now.

When it’s started to lose its pink, open the veggie container and upend the contents into the pan.

If you want these to cook a little faster, throw a tablespoon of water in with them and cover the pan.

That takes about 3 or 4 minutes.

Once the veggies are softened and the meat has lost its pink, give the sauce one last shake and dump it into the pan. Give it a stir to spread it around, add more water if necessary.

Stir in the beansprouts and put the lid on.

One minute to add and stir.

Turn off the heat and nuke your rice.

3 minutes for the rice.

You should be at about the 13-15 minute mark here.

Once the rice is warm, top it with the fast, healthy dinner that you just cooked in 15 minutes.

What's the fastest dinner you've ever made?

Cooking Green

Okay, so we totally dropped the ball on the St. Patrick's Day green beer and soda bread thing. Me, I'm not Irish anymore. I thought I was until last year when I found out that my paternal grandfather wasn't an Irish osteopath, but an American conman who did time in Ohio State Pen then went on to have a less than glamourous career as an amateur boxer before moving to Canada and wooing my grandmother with various and assorted tales, none of which were true.

And though I did grow up in a household that served boiled potatoes and soda bread on a regular basis, I never managed to develop a taste for them. Besides, neither of them are green.

The green in this recipe comes mainly from cilantro. It's a bright leafy herb with a flavour that is either loved or hated. Me, I love it. It's crisp, sharp, and just tastes... fresh. Apparently something like 30% of the population thinks it tastes like soap. Those people need to look away. They can check out Taneasha's mac and cheese (contains green onion and served with asparagus), or try my lime (green!) and ginger scones.

Green leafy things are super healthy; they contain fibre, iron, magnesuim, anti-oxidants, and most importantly for this recipe: things that lower cholesterol. Which is good, because coconut milk contains yummy saturated fats.

Green Thai Curry

This recipe makes enough for two, maybe three, or two and a bit for lunch the next day, but the pics are of a double recipe, which I made and froze (so that I'd have food on hand during finals next month)

What you need:

(note to self: you need to remember to take pics of all the ingredients!!)

• 3 Thai chiles (um, or more if you like things really spicy. I like things really spicy)
• ¼ C red onion
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1 inch chunk of ginger
• 1 stalk lemongrass
• ½ tsp ground coriander
• ½ tsp ground cumin
• ½ tsp ground black pepper
• 1 C cilantro (with stems)
• 3 ½ T fish sauce
• 1 T sugar
• 3 T lime juice

***

• 2 chicken breasts
• 1 tin (~15 oz) coconut milk
• 1 red bell chile
• 1 zucchini
• 1 chinese eggplant (the long, skinny, light purple ones)

What you gotta do: 

Remove the tougher outer leaves of the lemon grass, and slice the tender inner ones into rounds. Remove the stems from the little chiles, and coarsly chop the onion. You don't need to bother pre-chopping the garlic, or the cilantro.

Yes, that's more than three chiles. I said I like it very spicy.

Combine all of these, with the cilantro (pics! moar pics!) in the food processor.

Add the corriander, cumin, pepper, sugar, lime juice and fish sauce, and then whiz until it's a nice green paste.

If you're not familiar with fish sauce, here's a pic (yay pic!):

Fish sauce is a salty extract made mosty from anchovies. It contains no squid (as noted in the pic). It's a common seasoning in Thai and Vietnamese cuisines, and if it's not in the import foods section of your grocery, you can easily find it in Chinatown. And it's fragrant. Whatever you do, don't spill it. You'll spend days trying to figure out what that strange smell is, and then once you figure it out, you'll spend more days cleaning the freaking kitchen top to bottom because you missed wiping up a single freaking drop of fish sauce somewhere in there...

Um. Or maybe it's just me.

Dice the chicken, red chile, zucchini, and eggplant.

Heat a pan over medium with a small amount of oil. Add the paste and and fry it for a few minutes until it's fragrant.

Stir in the coconut milk. Bring to a simmer.

Add the chicken and veggies, and simmmer for about 20 minutes, until the chicken is cooked through, and the veggies are tender.

Now, since I was treating this as a make ahead meal, I filled medium sized freezer bags with enough for a dinner and lunch the next day in each one.

Then, I laid them flat in the freezer until they were solid, then stood them up like books on a shelf to save space. A double recipe gave me 4 dinners and 4 lunches in 4 bags.

A quick pot of rice, and a freezer bag of curry makes a delicious quick dinner.

Serve it with a bit of prik-nam-pla (a Thai condiment made from 2 parts water, 2 parts fish sauce, 1 part lime juice, 1 part sugar, a bit of garlic, and a bit of hot chile sauce), and if you've got fresh basil handy, it makes a great final topping.

Oh, and lemongrass from the grocery will root if you put it in water. Look for stalks with as much of the root intact as possible, put it in a jar of water with a drop of plant food, and in a few weeks, you'll be able to put it into the dirt and have fresh green lemon grass any time you want.

Yay for green food!

What's your favourite green food or grow at home food?