Resistance

There are 3½ weeks to go until my whole dissertation is due to my committee. I’m through revising three of the six chapters, and embarked on the fourth this morning. Dinners vacillate wildly between complex assemblages of roasted vegetables with ancient grains, comforting cheese-laden casseroles, and baked potatoes with steamed broccoli. My Bittman file (yes, I keep the selections in a manila folder, wouldn’t you?) is buried somewhere under piles of criticism on medieval theology and monographs about poems you’ve never heard of. And the selection I have to share wasn’t my favorite. As usual, these things combine to mean I have all but zero motivation to post. But I’ll do it anyway. For you. Because this project needs completion.

“55. Steam and salt edamame. Whisk soy and honey together in a small saucepan over low heat. Add grated ginger and a bit of cornstarch, stir until slightly thickened and pour over edamame.”

This sounded intriguing, so I decided to pair it with a dish my friend and colleague J. calls “scatter sushi”: all the ingredients you might find in your favorite roll diced small and integrated into a bowl of well vinegared sushi rice. Ours had carrots, green onions, crumbled roasted seaweed, avocado, and crab meat. I’ve also made it with shrimp (when N. was out of town, of course), and it’s delicious.

But anyway, again I’m resisting the heart of the post. Here goes:

16 oz. frozen edamame, blanched in boiling salted water, then drained

½ cup reduced sodium soy sauce

2 TB honey

2 tsp ginger, grated with my microplane

2 tsp cornstarch

As the edamame were blanching, draining, and cooling, I mixed the other ingredients together in a small saucepan and brought them to a slight simmer.  The sauce took a minute or two to thicken, and once it was barely viscous I drizzled it over my bowl of beans and served with a slotted spoon.

This had promise, but in its current form I think it fell a little flat. I didn’t love the slippery slickness the cornstarch imparted to the dressing: it clung to my lips and tongue in an unappealing way. Or maybe there was just too much of it. I think this concept would realize its potential if it became part of a full salad stuffed with brightness and texture: red bell pepper, finely julienned carrots, green onion, maybe even grilled tofu or roasted sweet potato or chunks of firm-fleshed white fish. It needed only a light dressing, not the soupy drenching I gave it. And maybe the sauce didn’t even need the cornstarch. I recognize its thickening purposes, but couldn’t the soy sauce just be reduced a bit instead?

As I work through revisions on the longest, most involved project I’ve ever undertaken, I find myself only rarely wanting to completely start over.  And I think that’s good.  Revisions are one thing, but stubborn resistance and insisting on from-scratch perfection can stay in the kitchen…

 

Off the horse

As you might be able to tell, I’ve been busy.  School starts soon, the weather can’t decide whether to be summer or fall, and it seems like every thoroughfare in our town is under construction, with completion dates uncertain.  Somehow, this state of construction has incorporated itself into my life.  Most of my projects are far from done, and some have yet to be started.  When that happens, blogging goes awry, or at least gets pushed onto a sidewalk somewhere out of the way of the steaming hot asphalt I’m trying to spread evenly across my academic life.

Too much?

Maybe too much.

Anyway, with ground turkey in the freezer and a desire for protein in our hearts, we decided on this Bittman pick last week:

“30. Cook brown rice until just shy of done. Drain and mix with an equal amount of ground turkey and a little chopped fresh sage and chopped dried cherries. Form into patties and sauté or bake, turning once, until crisp and cooked all the way through.”

Sounded easy and filling and delicious.  I amassed:

1 cup brown rice, raw

1.25 pounds ground turkey (mine was frozen, so I defrosted it but it was still SO cold!)

2-3 TB dried cherries, coarsely chopped

10 fresh sage leaves, finely chopped

Salt and pepper

Olive oil, for sautéing

I cooked the brown rice in my rice cooker with two cups of water – a little shy of ideal so it would remain slightly underdone.  Then I let it cool until it was room temperature so it wouldn’t be a.) too hot to touch, and b.) so hot that it started cooking the turkey.

With cool, cooked rice, I just combined all the ingredients in a glass bowl and combined them with my fingers, working to incorporate the rice and turkey, and trying to distribute the cherries and sage evenly throughout the mix.

I formed the mixture into ten patties, each about the right size to fit nicely onto an English muffin (guess how we ate the leftovers!), then deposited them a few at a time into a preheated skillet containing a few tablespoons of olive oil.  Though I could have jammed them all into the skillet at the same time, this would have resulted in a big turkey pancake, which doesn’t sound delicious.  Rather, distribute the patties so they aren’t touching one another, which will give them room to brown.

After about five minutes on each side, I popped the burgers onto a plate so we could pop them into our mouths.  We had them alongside a salad of spinach, arugula, dried cherries, toasted walnuts, and chunks of cheddar, and they were tasty.  The sage added that dusty smokiness that suggests harvest and fall and Thanksgiving, and the cherries were chewy little morsels of brightness with a perfume-y, candy burst.

The only problem with these patties, as is often the issue with turkey, is that they ended up a little dry.  I don’t think I overcooked them, though I suppose that could have been the problem.  Rather, I think leaving the rice slightly underdone caused it to wick up the minimal moisture the turkey had.  The result was quite good, but not as moist as we’d hoped.

However, it was as leftovers that these patties really shined.  I reheated them for lunch sandwiches in a little pool of chicken broth, which I spooned over them as they warmed.  This added some much-needed moisture and prevented them from cooking much more.  We layered them into toasted English muffins along with arugula, cheddar cheese, and just a touch of mayonnaise.  Divine.