I made two vegan dishes for myself and #2 Daughter (also a vegan, only she’s a good one and I’m a bad one). The first is a green bean salad.
It’s called Lemony Green Bean and Fennel Salad with Walnuts, but I forgot to buy fennel and I didn’t fancy walnuts in it, so I used celery and yellow and orange peppers. Also shallots, which were in the recipe and which I had. You blanch the green beans for a couple of minutes to bring out the color and make them a wee bit tender, mix in your other chopped vegetables, and top them with a dressing of olive oil, rice vinegar, lemon juice, herbs, salt, and pepper. Equal amounts of vinegar and olive oil, and the juice of one lemon. It was a hit!
I got the recipe from the paid subscribers’ newsletter of the Bad Manners website called The Broiler Room. If you don’t mind bad language, go there and get free recipes and I recommend subscribing so you get even MORE goodness! And, by “bad language”, I mean that one of their cookbooks is called FAST AS FUCK.
The other thing was a hot dish, and hot dishes cool quickly on a buffet table, so the people who got it while it was hot liked it better than the people who got it when it was cold.
This is Mushroom and Leek Risotto, and I got it from The Minimalist Baker. Go to the website and give them some eyeballs. I made the recipe just like it appears on the site. No, I tell a lie: I had some asparagus that was about to go to Jesus, so I put those in. I love me some risotto!
It was great to see the fam again. I haven’t seen them since my diagnosis, so many hugs were given and received.
A WRITING PROMPT FROM ME TO YOU: Rice.
MA
Dan Antion
April 19, 2022 at 7:39amThey both look good. I like green beans in a salad.
Michael Hodges
April 19, 2022 at 8:28amI find myself hoping that you still call the salad by its full and proper name AND continue to make it without fennel or walnuts, plus the addition of ingredients not present in the original recipe.
I find myself hoping you call it by that out loud . . . and then serve it to guests proudly, perhaps even beaming.
I hope they’re perplexed, that they look at one another with expressions of puzzlement, or even mild concern.
I hope someone says something, says it hesitantly, as though afraid to broach the matter of the elephant in the room. “Um, Marian? Darling…? This isn’t what you described, you realize that don’t you?”
And then I hope you tell them the story, complete (perhaps even RIFE) with profanity, vulgarity, and balderdash. Yes, BALDERDASH sprinkled throughout like peppercorns in some other salad also not mentioned here.
Some of them will believe you crazy; but others will know that a good story makes food better, and love you for it.
In other news:
“Fast As Fuck.” Delightful in a recipe’s difficulty level, delightful in shenanigans now and then. Sometimes a pair of orgasms can come from a rapid combination of coitus and “my goodness, we just did that right out where we might have gotten caught, wasn’t it deliciously naughty?!?” Moments we never speak of unless to that certain other person, OR unless we’re actually bragging about a bit of derring-did (past tense, less tense than just exciting), but always with a smile of recollection, even a bit of breathiness in the recall.
Nuance and interpretation… and perhaps a lack of shame on my part as I age. I don’t want to become Robert A. Heinlein, but I DO believe folks should unpucker a bit and laugh about the bold and the insouciant.
In other news still:
Rice. The prompt is rice, and instead there’s a train of thought:
Rice, bland, pale, yet incomparable if done right.
Chewing rice. I’ve chewed rice thoughtfully, to an absolute paste. But when I think on that, what springs to mind is how as a child I would take celery sticks served at lunch in school and chew the water out of them until I had a cheek filled with fibrous material which I would then chew for the remainder of the afternoon, like a chaw of tobacco, or a cow with her cud. The former image made me “macho” in my head, a cowboy; the latter, a weirdo, or an idiot.
Celery isn’t rice at all, but sometimes that’s what a prompt begets.
Marian Allen
April 19, 2022 at 9:08amSee, there are so many reasons we’re friends, many of them right here in your comment. The non-fennel and non-walnut fennel and walnut salad is what my grandfather used to call, “Same thing, only different.” I could probably write a cookbook with that title.
acflory
April 20, 2022 at 10:39pmBoth dishes look and sound yummy. So glad you got to see the whole family again. Sometimes this time seems never-ending. -hugs-
Marian Allen
April 21, 2022 at 9:20am-hugs- in return. 🙂