Diana's Beans n' Greens

The Lady Food Bloggers got together again and the plate of bounty runneth'ed over:

From top to bottom(left to right)--Emily's baguette with artichoke dip, Cindy's homemade pickles, Cheryl's chickpeas, Patti's mac and cheese, Maggie's wild rice, heart nut and peach salad, Diana's beans n' greens, and Sarah's summer squash and pasta. And not pictured are: our host Shayne's pitcher of minty mojitos and all the fixings for pizzas on the grill, Stephanie's chocolate beet cake, Alex's raspberry mascarpone tart, Cindy's peach pie, and my cucumber feta dip with pita chips. Whew! (I think I got all that in...forgive me ladies if I missed anything, the blurr of good food may have anesthetized my brain!)

I'm proud of my will power because despite the lusciousness of the raspberry tart and its proximity to my side of the table, I didn't scarf it all down and leave none for anyone else. Instead, I ended up stuffing myself silly on Diana's beans 'n greens--one of the healthiest dishes at the potluck! Diana's beans 'n greens uses fennel (both the fresh bulb and the seeds) to boost up the flavor profile of a dish that is a cross between a slaw and a bean salad. And it was refreshing in a way that I don't usually associate with beans or with kale.

Diana has blogged about her versions and variations of the beans n' green here.

This weekend I had fun playing with her recipe and this what I ended up putting together from what I could lay my hands on:
I didn't have the wide variety of beans that Diana had (loved the flageolet beans!), nor the lovely color contrast of the red pepper (I substituted some corn kernels that tasted nice, but weren't quite so photogenic.) But even with my alterations, it tasted really good!

Diana's Beans n' Greens
adapted by Kate

4 cups of chopped fresh kale leaves without stems
1 small yellow onion, diced
1/2 large fennel bulb, small dice
2 ears of sweet corn, cooked, kernels cut off (Diana used red pepper which made a nicer visual contrast)
1 can great northern (or other white beans), rinsed well and drained
1 cups black beans, cooked, drained (1/2 C dried)
1 cup pinto beans, cooked and drained (1/2 C dried)

Dressing
1/3 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
¼ cup water
¼ cup olive oil
1 large clove peeled garlic
1 t salt
1 teaspoon fennel seeds

Toss all vegetables together in a large bowl.
Blend all the dressing ingredients together in a blender.
Add the dressing to the vegetables and toss again.

A return to fiber

Now that there is some cool air moving back in to my surroundings, I'm willing to immerse myself up to my armpits in woolly goodness again. My serving-as-a-cat-bed for the summer Urban Aran Cardigan has been retrieved from the felines in time for the restarting of my son's piano lessons (also known as my guaranteed one-hour of knitting time.)

And I figure I really should get going on it since there are a bevy of new knitting books at the library that I've requested and will be receiving in the near future. Thanks to Ed, who taught me how to create an RSS feed for any new knitting book that my library enters into its catalog, I get first notice on acquisitions and can get my request in at the front of the line. I usually get the books within a month or two of them being added to the collection.

Coming my way in the near future are:

Boutique Knits





Closely Knit





Inspired to Knit





Knit So Fine





Knitted Critters for Kids to Wear





Continuous Cables




and

Alt Fiber





Based on my judgmental perceptions of the covers, I'd say I'm most attracted to Closely Knit because the sleeve on the cover looks like something I'd wear. I'm guessing that Inspired to Knit and Boutique Knits won't be my cup of tea based on the quantity of lipstick that the cover models are wearing (because you know all about that inverse relationship between lipstick quantity and knitwear wear-ability, right?) Knitted Critters looks promising for the smallest member of our household who pretends to be an animal for most of her waking hours, but the photo on the cover looks like the hat doesn't fit well. One of my pet peeves is the number of kids' hats that sacrifice fit for cuteness. If the hat doesn't stay on, no kid will wear it and thus your effort has been wasted. (I learned this the hard way...) And I don't have much of an opinion on Alt Fiber or Continuous Cables since the pictures of their covers are a little too small for me to make out.

Week 1--lovin' it!

The critters are back at school and I have loved this first week of getting to write every morning.

Both kids seem to have embraced school which reduces the amount of worrying energy I expend and allows me to feel really free once I drop them off at 8:06 AM. Fiona, the extrovert, loves Kindergarten and at the end of the first day hid from me because she didn't want to leave. Ian likes his new teacher and the kids in his class seem kind (a big concern for my son) even though his best friend isn't in his class.

I have found that having three uninterrupted hours five days in a row has allowed me to take a much broader view of my book. I was able to develop significantly the back story of my villain and to work out some kinks in the logic of the world I've set up, both things that eluded me when I was only able to write once a week.

The only thing that has made me a wee bit cranky is the excess of construction noise that is currently going on outside my office window. Our neighborhood has been slated for sidewalk repairs (though individual home owners have to pay for it...grrrr) and this appears to be the week that all my neighbors hired the concrete contractors to come and jack-hammer out the slabs and bring in the big churning mixer. It'll make walking in our neighborhood a damn sight nicer in the long run, but right now I'm wishing I had a pair of ear plugs...

One of my favorite things...

...from our trip to the UP were the wonderful wild blueberries we found almost everywhere:
though the waves and beach
and cabin in the woods were wonderful too!
While Ian was reading a stack of old Mad Magazines and Brian and Fiona were searching through the mucky bits for frogs (and found a spectacular mutant frog with 5 legs pictured below):

Count them legs, people.

I was sprawled out in the sun, or curled up in front of the fireplace with an excellent book: A Free Life by Ha Jin. Through a man and his family's immigrant experience, the book addresses how freedom sounds great as an abstract concept, but how freedom also means uncertainty and how it is often very scary. (The political wonk in me thought that universal health care would have relieved a great deal of Nan's employment concerns). Nan's struggles and conflicts with the Chinese immigrant community also show how manipulative nationalism and patriotism, whether of the Chinese or American variety, can be. Reading it after a couple of weeks of Beijing Olympics coverage was particularly timely.

The book starts off slow, and truth be told, it took me a long time to get into it. I started the book last January, but didn't get sucked in, so I put it back on the shelf to try again later. I'm glad I came back, because it isn't a showy book: it contains lots of the small events of everyday American life and you come to understand the main character, Nan, by how he responds to the stresses and pressures. At the beginning of the book, I was a little annoyed with how moody and grouchy Nan was, but by the end, I liked and admired the guy because he didn't settle for easy answers or do what other people thought he should be doing. He ended up embodying freedom in his impractical desire to become a poet and the compromises he had to make to achieve this goal. The book ends with "The Poems of Nan Wu" which are lovely and feel sort of like an intimate peek into a guarded character who you have slowly come to know over the course of the book. You can reference the subjects of the poems back to the novel and they show how Nan used his poetry to find meaning in events that were confusing and chaotic when they happened. It was an excellent book to read in a peaceful place where there was time for contemplation and an ample supply of wild blueberries.

Better

Thank you for all the heartening words about the trials of parenting and how it is kinda normal to want to wring the necks of your progeny. Tonight I am drinking:
Pomegranate Cranberry juice with some Pama pomegranate liqueur, a splash of club soda and a whole squeezed lime on ice.

Though yippie and hurrah I am not drinking it because I need to, but because it is nice and refreshing and why not?

Thank god for camp. In particular the camp the kids are going to this week which is run by real adults, not rah-rah college student counselors. Not that there is anything particularly wrong with the rah-rah type camp, but we are not really rah-rah types. Those kind of people usually scare us. We are more the dweeby type and whoooa boy is this camp run by some lovely caring dweebs. My kids are each taking three "enrichment" classes which include Fencing, Baking, Ooey Gooey Chemistry, Little Ninjas (combo of karate and dodge ball from what I've seen), Self Defense for Kids and a math class that provides ample quantities of candy for math problems completed. They come home tired, they come home happy and they come home with interesting stories to tell me about things they learned. Way better than spending time with a pissy guilty mom (though not as cheap of course...)

While they are gone I am getting a blissful taste of what my writing future holds in the near future (school starts Sept 2nd!). I've been so happy to have the kids go to a place where the people are kind and their brains (and bodies) are kept active while I hunker down and work on my novel. This summer has been hard on the writing front and it is now pretty clear to me that some of my frustration with the kids has been frustration with a lack of opportunity for me to write. This book is stewing about in my head a lot of the time and clearly keeping it cooped up in there is not good for my psychic health.

In other obsessive news, I finished reading a lovely children's novel, The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart. It's an adventure starring four gifted children who together take down an evil genius. While their world is richly imagined and the plot moves quickly, what I particularly liked was how each of the characters demonstrated a different sort of intelligence. If you read any sort of educational theory you come across "multiple intelligences" with "word smart" and "number smart" being the two that are most rewarded in our educational system (just look at any I.Q. test) while "kinesthetic smart" and "interpersonal smart" are less emphasized. This novel shows how none of the children can be successful without the others and thus the acrobatic girl is as valuable a team member as the boy who is a walking dictionary. Even the curious fourth member of the book, Constance, who seems to be grumpy, hungry and tired most of the time, proves to be absolutely key to their team with her intrapersonal intelligence--this is one girl who knows herself! The playful tone of the novel reminded me of Roald Dahl, without as much of his dark side. My kids are a still a bit scared of the cruelty of some of Dahls characters, so this one is a safer bet for a successful read-aloud. And even nicer news for me, there is a sequel!

I don't care what's for dinner...

...because I'm going to eat pie!
The first piece is always messy.

The crust tastes fantastic but is a little fragile. And the peaches (Michigan Red Haven seconds from the farmer's market) slipped down my throat like liquid gold. I don't even remember chewing the first slice which meant I had to have another, right?

The second piece was kinda messy, too.

For once I'm glad my kids don't eat peaches (weirdos!) because that means more pie for me and Brian!

I call it Kate's Coping Strategy

After a day of a lot of effort for zero gratitude, I mixed myself one of these:
vodka, lemon sorbet, splash of orange juice, club soda, lime and a little pomegranate liqueur poured over some ice. Or basically whatever I could lay my hands on that didn't sound disgusting when mixed together.

Then I took it outside and sat on the front step and watched cars go by on Summit St.

The worst thing about being this fed up with the small people inside the house was that I was also too tired to do anything more restorative than have a big old drink. Too tired to go for a walk on a beautiful evening, too tired to call up a friend and go out for some fun/relief, too tired even to listen to the radio, which is pretty pathetic on the tiredness scale.

I think the worst thing about how I feel is the guilt--I feel incredibly guilt that I am not treasuring every moment with my kids, even when they are being little shits. Sometimes I look at my daughter's hand in mine and think "It'll never be this small again--her hand will get bigger and she will get sick of me and I won't have appreciated the moments that she adored me enough." It doesn't help that I have a really sucky memory for reality. I can recount the plot of a book I read ten years ago, I can recite lines from my favorite poem from senior year of high school (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock) but for the life of me, I can't remember a lot of significant stuff about my kids' lives, stuff that Brian or my mom will sometimes refer to and I only dimly know what the hell they are talking about.

So while my kids are being ungrateful little wretches and sucking the energy from the marrow of my bones, I feel guilty. Maybe I'd have more energy if I just felt mad.

Though I must say, I do not feel so guilty that I won't spend the damn money to send them to camp next week so that people who are getting paid will deal with them and I will get some time to write.

Meat-fests

We are lucky to be friends with someone who is intent on reproducing Southern barbecue up here in the northern climes. Thanks to his Southern wife, our friend Brian (yep, my husband Brian's best friend which makes life a wee bit confusing when we get the families together. Luckily my Brian is happy to be called "Crazy Brian" so we can be a little clearer in our conversations) has had ample oportunity to sample the real deal and it is our good fortune that he recently invested in this beauty:
The first meat-fest we were invited to was to try out his smoked pulled pork:

Brian transforming the smoked pork shoulder into "pulled" pork.

Sarah made some luscious Southern slow-cooked green beans with ham hocks, black-eyed peas and a peppy vinegar-hot pepper sauce to go with it. I brought the biscuits which were fine, but we all agreed that a slice of squishy Wonder bread would have been better since that is what you'd get with pulled pork in the South.

The meat was fantastic--smokey, tender, moist. There was not a scrap left at the end of the evening and I felt bad that after sweating over the smoker all day, Brian didn't get to look forward to left-over pulled pork sandwiches the next day. (On a related note, there's a wonderful blog entry about "smork"--smoked pulled pork--here.)

Between meat-fests Sarah, the non-crazy Brian and I did a little research in the form of the "blue plate special" on Thursday nights at Zingerman's Roadhouse:
Starting at the left and going clockwise are: pulled pork, brisket, wings, greens and cheese grits (the plate usually comes with mashed potatoes, but I much prefer grits with this line up). It was pretty decent--I liked their brisket best of the meats, but maybe it was just the fact that it had a nice kicky sauce. Their pork was nowhere near as tender and moist and smokey as Brian's. What I really enjoyed were the sides: excellent greens and grits. But then before trying Brian's pork, I never really understood why meat was everyone's focus--a big plate of Southern side dishes is my idea of (artery clogging) bliss.

The second meat-fest we were invited to was to try the Texas-style brisket:
From the left: black eyed peas, the glorious brisket, napa cabbage buttermilk slaw, and broccoli slaw. Not pictured is the slice of Wonder bread (yup, I brought a loaf this time) that I used for brisket eating.

Can you see the pink-ish smoke ring on that brisket? Yum. If forced to choose, I'd say I liked the pork marginally better than the brisket, but I think I might just be a bit more of a pork person than a beef person (cue Jewish grandparents rolling over in their graves...). And I certainly am happy to eat brisket when pork isn't on the menu!

So now the question is what meat product we should pester Brian to smoke next? Suggestions anyone?

ahhhhhh

The kids have been subdued, this is what my sangria pitcher looks like and I feel much better now that the malondialdehyde and hydroperoxide in my system have been neutralized by the polyphenols in the wine. And I also feel better because of the ALCOHOL!

I made it with a bottle of La Vieille Ferme red--super cheap this month at $5.47 a bottle at Plum Market--a lemon, a lime, some sugar, and what was left in the triple sec bottle. The swig of wine I took before dumping it in the pitcher made me think it would be fine without the (ahem) fortifications, no bells and whistles, but perfectly drinkable which is more than I can say for most wine at this price.

uggggggg

The kids have no camp, no plans, no nothing this week and they are driving me nuts. Fiona, at the tender age of 5, has learned to whine "I'm bored" like a droopy teenager. Due to this pleasant state of the homestead, I have come to two realizations: 1) I better find some kind of camp for the other week we have nothing planned or else I'll throttle them and 2) I am not drinking enough wine, especially considering that Slashfood reported on research that red wine increases longevity. It looks like a pitcher of sangria is going to be made and consumed tonight.