Two Carrots, a Fennel Bulb, and Half a Red Cabbage

Orphan vegetables, forgotten in the crisper, need a happy ending. I had leftover cabbage and a lone fennel bulb, and I rescued them with the help of heavy cream, Gruyere cheese, and four eggs.

This is a crust less quiche. I could have provided a pie shell, but I was too tired and wanted something quick. I baked this at 375 degrees for 35 minutes on the advice of Julia Child, though this combination of vegetables was my own. And how good it tastes! How useful for a brunch.


1/2 small head of red cabbage.

1 fennel bulb

2 carrots

4 eggs

Sea salt to taste

1/4 cup heavy cream

1/2 stick butter

1 teaspoon Herbs de Provence

2-3 tablespoons olive oil

6-8 ounces Gruyere cheese

4 cloves of garlic

1/4 cup water

Shred the peeled carrots, the fennel, and the cabbage through the shredder disc of your food processor.

Melt half a stick of butter in a skillet, then add the vegetables and the diced garlic. Add the olive oil, then toss the vegetables to coat them. Now is the time to flavor with the salt to taste. Add the water, cover the skillet, and cook over medium heat for 20-30 minutes until the vegetables are tender. Add the Herbs de Provence and any more salt you think you need. Now add the cream and the grated cheese. Mix well and take the mixture off the heat. Let it cool down a bit so it will not prematurely set the eggs. When it has cooled add the eggs and beat them in . Then pour the mixture into a 12 inch tart dish or a casserole dish. Bake at 375 for 35 minutes. If you have a skewer you can test the quiche by poking it into the center to make sure it comes out clean, which insures the quiche is ready.

Green Lentil Stew with Unexpected Flavors- From Miss Betsy's Experimental Kitchen

The inspiration for this recipe came from "The Sultan"s Kitchen", a cookbook by Ozcan Ozan. The kitchen is not the palace kitchen of a Turkish Sultan. It is a Boston restaurant. I saw the recipe for Green Lentil Salad-"Mercimek Piyazi"-,, and though I lacked several ingredients of this recipe, I added some of my own. I cooked the lentils in water flavored with chicken bouillon.. When they were al dente I added fire roasted diced tomatoes, garlic, red onion and shallots, olive oil, cider vinegar, pomegranate molasses, and orange juice. And lots of cumin. I stirred and the warm lentils mixed with the cold tomatoes and the raw onions. This is great cold or warm. It is sweet, sour, salty, and crunchy.I think bread would enjoy being dipped in it.


1 1/2 cup dried green lentils.

2 1/2 cups of water flavored with 2 chicken bouillon cubes.

Bring the lentils and the broth to a boil, then cover , and simmer for 25 minutes.

When the lentils are done they will have absorbed most of the broth.


Then add:

1 1/2 cup of fire roasted diced tomatoes

4 garlic cloves sent through a press or finely diced.

1/4 of a red onion- chopped.

2 shallots, chopped.

1/2 teaspoon of ground red pepper.

1/4 cup of olive oil.

2 teaspoons (at least!) of cumin

2 teaspoons of cider vinegar.

2 teaspoons of pomegranate molasses.

The juice from half an orange.

Sea salt to taste.


Let the stew cool and treat this like gazpacho, or eat it warm.

A Rainy Day in Nashville

A tough commute home this morning. There was much traffic, and all of it was wet. I do not love city driving, and I dread it in snow and rain. There was also a great clot of cars stuck behind a school bus out here in Bellevue. We sat behind the bus for ten minutes as stragglers from the apartment these children lived in raced down the hill and stood in line in the rain. By the time the bus turned off its red warning lights, at least two dozen kids were on board. From one bank of hillside apartments.

I remember when children lived in houses with yards. I did. My father had his vegetable garden, as did our neighbors, whose Polish grandmother grew corn and squash. My neighborhood gang roamed the woods and the swamps. There were children everywhere, the girls competing to see who had the most colorful tights, and everyone playing with their Hula Hoops. This was the Fifties, a happy time to be a child. In my bedroom in our old salt box house someone had stenciled stars and moons on the ceiling. I kept turtles in a pen in our back yard.

How sad to see all these children with no back yard. Where did their houses go? Back to the bank? Or perhaps they never have lived in a house. They get to play in the apartment parking lot while their father tries to find a new job. Their mother works as a waitress at the Cracker Barrel. I do not see the optimism of the Fifties. We are all living on fiscal ice only an inch thick.

And lest anyone think this was just one apartment , I drove past another as I turned onto my street. And there they were again. More kids, their mothers with umbrellas, the kids with their backpacks.

The kids without a yard.

Stories

I have been thinking about writing, and about the people who sit in their rooms alone, putting pen to paper or finger to keyboard. We are a solitary lot, and for every flamboyant Hemingway or Mailer, there are hundreds of quiet and unobtrusive people who spend their hours watching. Observing. No one notices us. Perhaps we were the plainest girl in the room. Perhaps we live to tell stories at the expense of living life itself. We sit in the corner and try to be a person" on whom nothing is lost".

Many years ago I worked in a U.S. Veterans Hospital. I cared for a man who was a low level wiseguy. He liked me, and he told me that if anyone ever bothered me he could make them pay. "I can get you anything short of murder", he said. I worked with a nurse practitioner who served in Vietnam. She told me of caring for soldiers left for dead in a ditch who saw their comrades dragged away by tigers. When we nurses had a meeting one night at her home, we backed over her cannabis patch, trying to park.

Writers pay attention. No detail is missed. Others ask us how we can remember. We know it is because we cannot forget.

The Salt Cod Experiment

George Mallory said he climbed Everest because "It was there". I could say the same thing, albeit on a smaller and fishy scale, about why I spent fourteen dollars on a box of salt cod. I could not resist it after seeing Mario Batali extol it on "Molto Mario". Perhaps it has the appeal of a grandmother's beloved dish, but to open its wooden box leads to dismay. Even after soaking it for two days, and changing the water five times, a smell persisted that I can only compare to an unwashed body. Once baked as fish cakes, the smell diminished. They were edible. But the question remains, now that we have refrigerators, why we would eat fish that has to sit in a bowl of water for 48 hours. I remember the wonderful scene in "Babette's Feast" when the elderly sister shows Babette how to prepare dried fish. "Babette can cook" Auguste Pepin ,the famous singer ,tells the sisters in a letter asking them to give asylum to this great French chef. But Babette, cooking her feast for her benefactors ,did not serve salt cod.

Perhaps it is an acquired taste, and my apologies to any one who considers it sacred. And the expiration date was 2013, so it was not spoiled.

Revenge

Shakespeare pleased the crowds. So did Dickens. He serialized his tales, and people waited. Nothing is so pleasing as a good story.

But we live now in a visual world. Our stories are on a screen, for as much as we would like to pretend that we read Virginia Woolf every day, we do not. We wait for Wednesday night, hoping not for a rerun, but to discover what the Japanese gentleman will do to save Emily Thorne on "Revenge". Betrayal, revenge, retribution. There is no Dickens today. No "Bleak House". I talk to people who say they do not watch TV. I think they lie. Nothing captivates like a good story.

Newt Gingrich- To the Women of the World

He told his wife he was leaving her when she was in the hospital being treated for cancer. What more needs to be said. I try to avoid politics but in this case I cannot refrain.