So, honey, if you watchin’ this, avert yo’ eyes!

*

You’ve been warned!!!

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What you need:

a roasted chicken from the store. (I know, huh? What a slut.)

3 cups shredded jack and cheddar cheese.

A diced onion

A diced green pepper

between one and three or six garlic cloves

you can use a 30 oz can of enchilada sauce or you can make the ten minute stuff below, just as easy.

a dozen corn tortillas

a 13×9 casserole dish

olive oil

salt

pepper

cumin

dried oregeno

dried basil

alumider foil

a oven

knife

spoons

etc.

oh, yeah, a beer or four.

oh, and chopped green onions and sour cream for serving with.

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*

Skip this if you’re using canned, which, seriously, is fine. Unless you roasted your own bird, in which case it is a sin. So, choose accordingly.

Ten minute enchilada sauce

1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 tablespoons flour
1/4 cup chili powder
8 ounce can tomato sauce
1 1/2 cups water
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
2 cloves garlic
half an onion, diced

salt and pepper to taste

oh, yeah, a canned chipotle and some of that good sauce in there.

Heat the oil in a pan, add the garlic and onions and let them go a few minutes. When they are soft, add the flour and chili powder and stir it as it browns. Don’t let it burn. Add the tomato sauce and water and stir. Add the cumin and salt and pepper to taste. Finely dice a canned chipotle or half of one and add a tablespoon or two of the adobo sauce. Stir it all up, let it go on a medium flame for a bout ten mintues.

You can set that aside while you do the rest.

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Take your store-bought roasted bird and disassemble it into shredded chickeney goodness. Leave out the skin and the bones and the gristle. You can give the skin and the gristle to the dog. But not the bones. Also, not to the dog if she is going to just lie around farting the rest of the night. So, you’ve been warned.

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Heat up a skillet with olive oil and when it’s hot throw in your diced onion and bell pepper, saute them until they’re soft. Add some cumin and some oregano and basil, salt and pepper, stir it all up. When it’s all good, take it off the flame and put it in a bowl. It’s okay if it cools, in fact, its easier to handle if you are like me and use your hands instead of utensils.

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Now….

Heat up some olive oil in your cast iron skillet and let it get smoking hot. Do up them tortillas until they look like this, about thirty seconds a side:

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Stack them on a plate with a paper towel to soak up a little bit of that oil. I flip the stack as I add to it, so the hottest tortillas end up in the middle and ends instead of just going from cold at the bottom to blistering hot on top. I got no idea if that matters or not, but I like to do it.

*

Now, set up you station:

Shredded chicken. Check.

Shredded cheese. Check.

Onions and peppers. Check.

Tortillas. Check.

Enchilada sauce. Check.

Lightly grease your 13x 9 pan and ladle a generous half cup of the enchilada sauce in there so it covers the bottom.

Build you your enchiladas:

1. Put a scant 1/4 cup shredded chicken into one of the tortillas.

*

2. Add some of the onions and bell peppers. About a fat tablespoon or so. Or 1/12th of the amount you made, if you’re anal retentive.

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3. Cheese it.

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4. Roll it up, and place it seam side down in your casserole dish.

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5. Repeat until you’ve filled the dish, used up the tortillas, chicken, cheese, onions, and beer.

Oh, better save one or two of the beers.

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6. Cover with the rest of the enchilada sauce, my friend.

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Seriously, I said cover it.

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Es mejor.

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7. Queso.

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8. Cover with alumider foil and put it in a 350 degree oven for about thirty five minutes, until it gets all hot and gooey and melty and yummy.

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Like this here:

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Serve with a dollop of sour cream if you want, and a scattering of the sliced green onions. You might should let it rest for a few minutes after it gets out of the oven so you don’t melt the top of your mouth on the cheese.

Have that other beer now, too.

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Salud!

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Okay, so after last night’s Maui-style short ribs with coconut rice, I had all this coconut rice left over.

And not much else.

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So, I vaguely remembered Mark Bittman doing something with fried rice and ginger and garlic. The main thing I remembered was the egg, topped with crispy fried up garlic and ginger. I looked in the fridge:

leftover coconut rice: check

eggs: check

ginger: no joy. crap.

But this is in the spirit of leftovers, so, no trip to the Cookie Crock for me. That would be cheating. Instead, I quick fry up some leftover green onions and my last two shallots.

*

In my egg pan, I crisp up some garlic.

When the garlic browns and gets crisp, I take it off the heat, put it in a little dish

and set it aside.

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When the shallots and green onions are soft, I add in the leftover coconut rice and fry that up for a few minutes, letting the rice brown on the bottom of the pan and scraping up bits of that as I stir, until it’s all heated through.

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Quick fry up some eggs.

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Now just fill a big bowl with the rice. Some salt and pepper is nice. A big splash of soy sauce, a drizzle of sesame oil. Top with the egg, and then sprinkle the crispy garlic on top.

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It were pretty damn good.

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Here’s the thing. I could have made a peanut butter sandwich. Or a grilled cheese. Or heated up a frozen burrito.

But instead I got this creamy, crunchy, salty, pungent, sweet, gooey meal of goodness.

In about the same time.

Do what you can with what you’ve got. It doesn’t always work out, but shit, then you can have you your damn peanut butter sandwich anyway.

What have you got to lose?

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Namaste.

***

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Quick and easy weeknight meal.

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Delicioso!

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Start a pan with olive oil, get it hot, throw in a half of a diced onion and a diced red pepper and a couple of cloves of garlic, minced or put through your garlic press. When the onions and peppers are soft, dice a canned chipotle pepper and throw it in, along with a couple of tablespoons of the adobo sauce the chipotles come in. Add a package of Trader Joe’s lentils, break them up and stir everything together. Let it simmer a while.

Slice some green onions, crumble up some feta cheese, chop some cilantro. Slice a red onion and put the onion in a bowl or a jar and cover with red wine vinegar, or white balsalmic, or whatever you have on hand. Fill a small bowl with sour cream or greek yogurt and add the juice of a lime and some salt and pepper to that and stir.

After a few minutes, add some white wine to the lentils, salt and pepper, some cumin. Squeeze in the juice of a lime or two. If the heat is too intense, add a tablespoon or so of honey and stir it up. There’s no right or wrong. Put in whatever you want. I like heat and richness and depth. I probably go overboard with pepper and garlic.

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You should have a beer with, and some slices of lime. Avocado if you’ve got it. You could add thinly chopped cabbage of any varitety. Tomatoes. Shredded carrots. Whatever you got lying around doing nothing, chop it up and throw it on.

*

Your tortillas you can either do up in a cast iron skillet with a little oil. Smoking hot, thirty seconds a side, blister them. Or you can just plop them over the open flame of the burner, twenty seconds or less per side, let them char and blister.

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Set everything out, including the cold beers, and have at ‘em.

Takes, like, twelve minutes.

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Namaste.

***

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This is where it all begins.

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Leftovers.

Last night’s cabbage soup.

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Remember all that tomatoey goodness? That rich, unctuous sauce?

Well, that’s where we begin.

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There, and also farther back. Back with an itch for lasagne, for something rich and gooey and thick and layered and authentic, something that tastes like a home you never had, one you’ve somehow forgotten how to get back to. Home and mother and comfort and goodness.

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Without the gritty taste of ricotta. Without the chewy blandness of mozzarella.

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With beschamel sauce instead.

With butter, and flour, and milk.

With garlic and salt and pepper.

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That’s what I’m talking about.

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Now for some freshly ground nutmeg.

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Pure heaven. If you nursed from angels, this is what comes out.

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Once you make the beschamel sauce, you just spread a layer of it into your baking dish.

Don’t be shy with it.

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Look, I am not a madman.

You don’t have to make your pasta fresh. You can use some Barilla no boil lasagna sheets.

‘

Perfectly legitimate.

We’re here to fucking eat, man, not to die making shit. Put them dry noodles on there. It’s gonna be perfectly fine.

Trust me.

*

This is where it gets weird, man.

This is where you just cross the fucking line and don’t look back.

Have the courage of your convictions, like Julia says.

Take that leftover cabbage soup from yesterday and just spread it all over them noodles. Go ahead. Slather that shit. Get it on.

It’s gonna be okay.

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Now get that beschamel going. Layer that goodness on there.

You making something now, ain’t you?

Hell yes, you are.

*

Add you a layer of shredded parmigiano.

Add more noodles.

Add more cabbage soup.

Add more beschamel.

Add more cheese.

Keep going.

Keep going.

When you run out of room, stop.

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Now, put it in your preheated 400 degree oven for forty-five minutes.

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Go have a couple of glasses of wine and some goddamn cheese and olives.

Go make out with your spouse.

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when the whole house is redolent with the crazy-making scent of it, drag it out of the oven and let it rest for ten minutes before you attack it.

bring reinforcements.

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Look the fuck out.

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Probably someone has made lasagne with leftover cabbage soup before me.

But I feel like a goddamn wizard of food for doing it, is what.

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This was goddamn astounding.

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Namaste.

***

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Perhaps I believe that I am staving off death itself by cooking good food.

Perhaps I do.

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Of course, I am deluded in this belief.

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Namaste.

***

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So, what you should know about me, about how I cook, is that I am a predatory browser of recipes and cook books and food blogs. I have some vague unease in my mind, a hint of an unknown taste haunting my imagination, and I have the intertubes. So, off I go.

Yesterday, I stumbled on The Wednesday Chef  and saw her recipe for Bess Feigenbaum’s cabbage soup and was immediately hit with this sense of wild intrigue. Plus, my tongue started speaking to me, telling me I should make this meal at all costs. My tongue is pretty smart about these things, so when it talks to me, I generally listen. What I liked about this dish was that it was vegetarian, which appeals to the Woman on The Verge. Which appeals to me.

Normally, what appeals to my tongue is something with animals in it, burned animals, and rendered animal fats and proteins. And garlic. And heat. And sour. Pungent. Aromatic. Greasy. Rich. Heady.

Does tofu do this? Not so much. Ditto tempeh. I start looking at the traditional vegan meal and my tongue stomps off to the living room and sits down in the easy chair and begins loudly leafing through the New York Times, snapping the pages in irritation and refusing to look over at me.

But here was something, here was something….my brain, my love, and my tongue were all in harmonious alignment.

So, I gave it a shot.

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Here’s what you do:

Put your big pot on the stove under a medium flame, get the bottom wet with olive oil. When the oil is hot, but not too, throw in a few cloves of garlic, minced, and let them get golden for a minute, but don’t let them edge toward brown at all. No bitterness allowed. Now add a large diced onion, stir, and let them go translucent. About five minutes but for me it was closer to ten. A lot closer.

When the onions are sweet and see-through, add four or three or five peeled and chopped carrots. Add a 28 oz. can of whole, peeled tomatoes. Add a cup of tomato paste. (Yes!)

Add three cups of water. Add a half cup of ketchup. Yes, that’s right. Ketchup.

Go ahead, I’ll wait.

See? That wasn’t so bad, was it?

Okay, now add a cup of brown sugar. Put a couple of bay leaves on top. Let that simmer about fifteen minutes, then mash up the tomatoes with a fork or a potato masher or whatever. Your hands if you are a real chef and have already burned all your nerve endings out of your hands. (Okay, don’t really do that.)

Discard the bay leaves. When the carrots are tender, stick your immersion blender into the pot o’ tomato goodness and blend until coarse.

Now, I tasted this here and it was a little unbalanced toward the sweet side. It was all down the middle, with no top or bottom to it. I knew there was going to be some lemon juice coming, which would give me the top, but there was nothing on the way to give it some more low notes, so I added some cumin and some smoked paprika and a big pinch of red pepper flakes. Salt and pepper, too. All of which helped a lot.

I let this blended base go for about twenty minutes on a low flame to get incorporated and friendly with itself. Then I juiced a couple of big lemons and added the juice to the mix. Chopped a medium head of cabbage into quarter-inch strips and threw them in. Added a couple of cups of water, stirred it up, and then left it pretty much alone the rest of the day. Two or three hours later you could smell the tomatoes change over from that bright, acidic, fresh tomatoey smell to that deep, rich, umami unctuousness of a good tomato sauce. The ribbons of cabbage turn pale and soft and limpid. Now all you gotta do is leave her go until you can’t stand it any more. Ten minutes before serving, toss in a generous handful of golden raisins. When you serve, add a dollop of sour cream or greek yogurt. That part is vital, so don’t skip it.

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This was a bowl of wonder. Rich, warm, sweet, garlicky, with a nice, deep base of cumin and black pepper and wow was it good. It made enough to feed us and put a quart in the fridge and another quart in the freezer.

Oh, yeah. Get you the thickest, stoutest, chewiest, crunchiest loaf of bread to go with. Something dark and menacing. And sweet butter to spread on before you dunk it into the red mess.

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That is all.

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Namaste.

***

Valentine’s day 2012

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New Brunswick beau soliel oysters on the half shell with kimchi consommé

Paired with Stolichnaya vodka & tonic cocktail

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Watercress, frisee, & grapefruit salad with warm curry vinaigrette

Paired with trader Joe’s grand reserve 2009 meritage blend

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Alaskan cod with sweet parsnips, arrowleaf spinach, & saffron-vanilla sauce

Paired with 2010 Comique Revolution blanc

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Warm chocolate soufflés with pistachio ice cream

Dark chocolate pistachio toffees

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so, this was my precise and compricated pran to win the heart of my beloved.

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She is mine, of course.

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Here’s a sneak peek.

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the rest you’ll just have to imagine for now…..

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I love me my woman!

***

Namaste.

***

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The woman on the verge got these for us at  the farmer’s market.

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And I had these squids from Pier 46 just laying around.

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Sundays are my day for sharpening my knives.

So I was good to go.

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Wash the carrots. Scrub them.

Scrub them.

Lip them. Lip my Stockings!

*

Are they beautiful?

Hell yes, they are.

*

Oven at 425, slathering in oil, salted, peppered, cumined.

half hour or so.

*

Meanwhile, back at the ranch:

Cleaned and drained calamari.

Check.

2 cups flour, salt, pepper, thyme, cumin.

Check.

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Bread them bitches.

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Fry ‘em up.

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Drain them on a paper shopping bag.

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Serve on a bed of greens, drizzled with lemon. Put out a bowl of garlic aioli and a bowl of sweet chili dipping sauce.

Have at it.

*

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It makes a hell of a mess in a small kitchen.

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But it tastes like angels fucking.

*

Namaste.

***

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Feeling decadent this morning.

*

Start with farm fresh eggs and rosemary and thyme from the garden.

Put the coffee on.

Preheat the oven to 375.

*

Pour your first cup of joe and drink it while you dice a shallot and heat a pan. Toss in some butter, saute the shallots, chopped rosemary & thyme, salt. Give it enough time to soften the shallots.

*

*

*

Get you a couple of ramekins. Add 2 tbs heavy cream and a pat of butter to each. Don’t measure the damn cream, just pour a little bit in. Crack some pepper over it.

Put them in the oven for a few minutes to warm the cream and melt the butta.

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Take the ramekins out of the oven now and crack a couple of those good farm eggs into each one.

*

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Oh, hell yeah.

Grate you some parmigiano over top of them bitches. If you have a little bit of those fresh chopped herbs left over, sprinkle some of them over top, too.

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Get them in the oven for about twelve minutes. If you want the tops kinda toasty, switch them over to  the broiler for the last couple of minutes.

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Slice up your crusty bread and butter the slices and toast them under  the broiler.

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When the eggs are done, plate the hot ramekins on another plate so nobody burns their sleepy little morning fingers.

Serve with hot coffee, as much as you can stand.

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Et voila!

*

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The pictures can’t convey the delicious warmth and creaminess of these eggs, the crunch of the toast, the utter contentment this meal engenders in the eater.

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Now go get your Sunday New York Times and get back in bed!

*

Naaaahmaste.

***

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I know, I know.

Pasta two nights in a row!

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This, though, was so freakin’ awesome. Mussels in white whine with garlic and shallots, some chopped tomatoes and red peppers, served over fresh linguini. Pain rustique with garlic and butter. Good bottle of chilled white wine to go with.

To.

Die.

For.

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We had to go out into the night air and walk this one off.

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Namaste.

***